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Mistakes happen.
I left the heater on. It was my fault. I admit it. No one was hurt. At least I have that on my side. So, while
the cops and judges and whoever sort the details, I'm forced to live out here in Arizona with my Uncle Proosteau.
None of my friends or family in California wanted to offer me temporary refuge, and like fuck I'm gonna stay in
a public shelter, so it's Arizona for me, if only for a few weeks.
Some friends, some family.
If it goes to court, maybe I can blame my roommate. I never used the fucking heater. It was always him. The one
night I use the thing...
But Uncle Proosteau's all right. Kinda weird, but aren't we all. He's obsessed with the desert. Keeps cacti and
guns and jars of dirt and coyote bones and everything else. Not quite my gig, but interesting. I've been out here
three days and about every other hour I've been awake he's shown me something else.
"Oh! Here's a canteen from the days of the Conquistadores!"
We ate turkey feet today (not bad, surprisingly) and now I'm just sitting out here on the porch in an itchy wool
jacket and I'm smoking a joint of bad marijuana and thinking about the big red storm on Jupiter when Uncle Proosteau
swings open the screen door and sits in the chair next to me. He's wearing a red-and-black plaid jacket and he
has a shiny bald head and a long white beard.
"Don't bogart that thing," he says.
"You can have the rest." I hand the thing over, and already I miss California if only because of the
quality of grass they've got out there. This shit's just headache bud, nothing more, nothing less.
I light a cigarette, watching the far horizon as the sun descends. "You know Jupiter's got a storm on it that
could destroy our entire planet?"
"I've heard that," he says. "Beats the hell outta Katrina, eh? That little hurricane's nothin but
a drop in the bucket when compared to such..." he takes a rip, "...things."
He takes another, and, once again, while still holding in the smoke, speaks. "Oh yes, there's something else
I wanted to show you." His voice sounds froggy.
"Oh yeah?" I say, thinking it's probably a goddamn human skull or some shit. I visualize, if only for
a second, the idea of filling such a thing up with gun powder and blasting it off somewhere out in the desert.
"Yup," he says, exhaling. "Nothin big, but you might get a kick outta it."
Back inside, we go upstairs and he leads me to a small space near my bedroom. We go in and take a peak around.
Some picture frames, he's got stuffed parakeets. He's got cattle prods in here and matchbook collections and all
kinds of fucked-up shit. I'm wondering if there's some secret fetishist chamber hidden in this house somewhere,
then I'm wondering how often my uncle gets laid, or if he gets laid at all. Now I watch as he goes through the
closet, pulling out linens and hammers and sheets of paper and casting them aside.
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