RAMONA PEARL
Saturday, June 14th, 2008The only way I’m ever able to get to San Francisco is hitchhiking. I hadn’t seen Ramona Pearl in years. The last time I had been in San Francisco it was with Ramona Pearl the plumber. Now she was Ramona Pearl the plumber/agent. After I took Dust, Rainbows and Dirty Sox back from Acheron and the professors I sent the manuscript to Ramona. One of the rejections she forwarded to me was that it was the worst piece of self-serving clap trap they had ever read and the characters were completely unbelievable. Ramona thought this was funny since she was one of the characters in the book. Even though I still liked what I had written this made more sense to me than what Doctor Jorn had said about better than Herman Hesse. Ramona and her gay husband were living in the Castro district. Plumbing had been good to her. I still never met her husband.
“Still truckin’ ay, mate.”
“Still trying, Ramona.”
Ramona picked up dinner and a movie. We saw The Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and River Phoenix. When Ramona noticed I had slept through most of the movie we returned to her flat threw my clothes in the wash and went right to sleep in her comfortable water bed. At the time I didn’t realize it would be the last comfortable night’s sleep for quite a while.
The next morning, Sunday, we had breakfast and Ramona gave me a lift to San Mateo on Coastal Highway 1.