Today’s Words:
tyke
speckled
ambassador
diamond
shadow
schmecky
real

Schmecky isn’t in my little wordweb dictionary, so what do I do, go off and find it? Can’t. Only have a few minutes to write.

Diamonds. That necklace I wrote about the other night, the one that Manny gave me, had a little diamond in the middle. I think all the stones were real. I should have wanted to destroy that necklace. It should have reminded me of a creepy old man who came on to girls in high school. I shouldn’t have had some fond memories of the old tiger. He was quite dashing, actually. He owned a construction business, and smoked pot all day long. He had long black hair that he wore in a pony tail. There was something poetic about everything that he said, the way he mixed English and Spanish. He also had this brightness in his eyes.

A wierd thing happened about 15 years after I hung out with Manny smoking pot. I was on a motorcycle ride with this guy I knew from Computer Science school — Tom. Tom might be something like a serial killer about now. I mean he was certainly the profile. Bachelor, lived alone, reserved, trouble with women. Hence the hanging out with the lesbian who had no interest in him. One time, Tom wrote this amazing stack routine in Fortran. This was Fortran without pointers. He did this elaborate thing to simulate pointers, and thus built this stack. I would look at the code for the stack and it was so elegant. Tiny little pop(), push() routines. And cute comments like, “just for housekeeping.” Tom lived in an old palce in the South Valley, he called it the dead lady’s house. I only went there once. We stopped to pick something up. Indeed, an elderly woman had lived in the house before Tom occupied it. Her relatives, in a hurry to get rental income from the house, hadn’t bothered to clear out her things before they found Tom. There were wierd things, like one of those caddies for bills, that you put envelopes in, with cute labels like “Electric”, “Gas”, “insurance.” I was kind of intrigued, and asked Tom what it was like to live there. He said it didn’t matter to him, he didn’t think about the dead lady. How oculd that be? He then walked me to the back of the house, and opened a door which it looked like he rarely opened. Inside, the room was full of her stuff. Boxes everywhere, of clothes, china, knick-knacks.

Not sure why I was hanging out with a would-be serial killer, but we wrote wierd code together, and there we were. We went on a aride one day that took us all the way to Corrales. Corrales is where I grew up, and it’s where Manny still lived. We went down this road called “Old Church Road”–because, guess what, the Old Church is there. And the old graveyard. Kinda creepy, with the tumbleweeds blowing through. So as we round the bend where the Old Church is, there’s Manny, sitting on an old car, surrounded by a bunch of friends, partying. He looks right at me, and I look right at him. He doesn’t recognize me at first, and I’m kind of relieved. Tom was going very slowly on the bike, almost stopped but didn’t. At the last moment of looking at Manny, I saw that recognition in his eyes. Ah! That high school girl I wanted to bang, so long ago. Nothing about his look betrayed the slightest bit of anxiety or guilt; if anything, what I saw was an excited, even older dirty old man, wondering if he might somehow, 10 years later, get lucky.

Then my morose & geeky chauffeur hit the gas and we were gone.