Billy Ray's Farm by Larry Brown

Author:Larry Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2001-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Whore in Me

AFTER WHAT SEEMS like a few minutes, the phone rings in your darkened room. You answer it. It’s Craig. He works for your publisher. He wants you to meet him in the lobby in ten minutes.

There’s no time to shower, no time to do anything but brush your teeth and pull on the clothes you took off last night. As you dress in groaning misery you remember walking around looking for your room after you left the lounge, thinking you were in room 116, when actually you are in 216, but that didn’t stop you from trying to get in 116 with your little card, over and over. You might have terrified some innocent person. Finally you went back to the front desk and got the night manager to take you to your room personally. You hated to do it, but that’s what they get paid for. She found it for you, and got you in there, and then you slept the sleep of the long dead. There were no dreams of any kind.

You know you probably present a very sorry spectacle walking up to Craig and Janet. You know your eyes are red and you’ve lost your Visine somewhere on the road. The road eats up a lot of things but that is the nature of the road. Craig and Janet are nice and they get you into the car and you’re glad somebody is there to take care of you since it seems you aren’t capable of taking care of yourself.

At the convention center you get coffee, a few cigarettes, and begin to wake up. The breakfast doesn’t start until eight so you wander next door to the gun show and check out some 1850 flintlock rifles, some black-powder pistols even older than that. They’ve got some really cool shit. Old knives. Swords. You think about hiding out there for a while, posing as somebody else. But after a while you have to go back to the book business and get your scrambled rubbery eggs, some juice, a biscuit, more coffee. You eat quickly, then go back to the lobby for that last cigarette. You are barely able to move, yet you have to give a reading. It feels like the beginning of a very bad day.

You read. You talk to people. You sign books. You hang out in the booth. About noon, Janet, an angel of mercy, gives you the keys to her car and you go out there in the hot parking lot, roll the windows down, take off your murderous boots and your wool coat and try to sleep in the backseat, but it’s cramped and small and impossible. After a while you get back up.

In another hour or so they take you back to the airport. You stand outside and smoke a cigarette. You won’t get another one until you leave the Los Angeles airport some six hours from now. But you’ll be in Mark’s Cadillac at that point, and everything should be an extremity of cool.

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