A Pimp's Notes Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought worries me; on the other hand, it gives me a slight sense of relief. If I play my cards right and if that guy can be taken at his word the way I think he can, it could work out just fine. At last, an extra little crumb of good luck would really help me out.
    I walk out of the bathroom and into my bedroom. When I wake up, I’ll have a lot of things to do. I finish undressing. I take a Valium and wash it down with a gulp of water from the bottle I always keep on my night table.
    I stretch out, pull the covers up, turn out the light, and wait for my body and the sleeping pill to drag me down for a few hours into the darkness where Lucio spends all his time.

 
    3
    I open my eyes.
    I switch on the light on my night table and look at the time. The angle of the hands on my clock tells me it’s five thirty. The sheets are almost as taut as if I hadn’t slept at all. I slept without dreaming, and waking up was a painless birth back into the world.
    It’s strange how sometimes, when your mind is in cahoots with the dark, it’s capable of catalyzing ugly memories and turning them into nightmares.
    The things I’ve carried with me over the years are archived in a part of my brain, hidden behind the conscious screen of acts and words. When I’m asleep, if those things come back to me, there’s no escaping them. I lie there, helpless, nailed to the spot, a prisoner of what my mind spits out. Today, however, the keeper of bad dreams seems to have forgotten that I exist, and I’ve emerged intact.
    I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit up, just long enough to let my life swim back into coherence and my thoughts return to the present. I stand up and walk across the wall-to-wall carpeting and make my way to my galley kitchen where, unlike Lucio, I can see what’s in the cabinets. Strangely, I sometimes bump my head against them; Lucio never does.
    From outside, the daylight of a late spring afternoon filters through the blinds.
    My shirt and jacket aren’t lying on the couch anymore. The dirty plates and glasses are no longer in the kitchen sink. The ashtrays have been emptied and washed and are drying on the counter. Signora Argenti, my diminutive cleaning woman, came in to take care of the apartment and its occupant as I slept.
    I rummage around in the kitchen assembling a loaded espresso pot. While I wait for the Moka Express and the gas burner to work their magic, I go over and turn on the radio. As if by tacit agreement with my neighbor, I also prefer it to television. With him, it’s because he can’t see it; with me, it’s because as often as not I prefer not to. The voice of the newscaster fills the room.
    … referring to the Red Brigades’ communiqué number six, delivered two days ago to the newspaper La Repubblica , and announcing that after a lengthy interrogation the prisoner Aldo Moro has been sentenced to death, President Giovanni Leone urged, with words of …
    I switch to another radio station. I’ll never know the words that followed. The voice is replaced by a piece of rock music that I can’t quite recognize but that I’m happy to take in place of the other. There are times when I can’t stand hearing about loneliness, and the story of that man is full of it. The photographs of his detention, his forlorn face, his death sentence, all make me think that, when you live with the suspicion that you’re surrounded by nothingness, there’s almost always something or someone ready and willing to convert that suspicion to certainty. I wonder if he thought the same thing while the vast world that he once had at his fingertips shrank to the few dozen square feet of a tiny cubicle.
    I go back to the stove, where only the confidential burbling of an espresso pot awaits me, along with the occasional puff of steam, signifying nothing. I pour out the coffee and take a sip. The pager sitting on the hall chest emits a sound that we can quantify onomatopoeically as a beep. For my own convenience, I