The great thing — or I should say one of the many great things — about being unemployed is that I am never bored. I had never quite realized just how boring work is. Oh, sure, I know that I performed a useful service all those many years, doing my bit in facilitating the lightning-fast hurtling of great steel cars groaning with cargo and people safely and efficiently hither and yon all over the eastern seaboard, but, save for my pitiful two weeks’ vacation each year — vacations that themselves were a form of work, as I tried somehow to cram a year’s worth of recreation into fourteen days and invariably achieved only an excruciating state of anxiety that was mercifully quieted only by my return to the grind of work — I had never known real, open-ended freedom.
I wonder now if it was not work itself which caused me to go insane, and not (depending on which of my doctors was speaking, and his mood of the day) repressed sexuality (either of the hetero or homo kind), or excessive religiosity, or alcoholism, or genetic pre-disposition. Perhaps it was only that eternal five-day-a-week prison sentence of honest labor that had driven me around the bend.

The boringness, the sameness, the inescapability of it all.

But then if work was the cause of my insanity, one would think that the absence of work (and an absence at half-pay, thanks to the Reading) might lead to a return to sanity.

And it is true that I do feel saner.

Except for the Jesus thing.

Let’s face it, I know what my erstwhile doctors would think if I were to tell them that Jesus has appeared to me not less than three times recently, and smoking Pall Malls no less.

So either I am still slightly nuts, or Jesus smokes Pall Malls, there can be no other explanation.

Perhaps all those years of servitude formed a sort of pustule of aggregated tedium in my brain which one day simply burst.

The pus may have drained all away by now but the hole in my brain where the boil had been remains.

Or, Jesus has indeed been visiting me in person, and therefore I am not a madman but, ipso facto, a living saint.

But would a saint have extra-marital intercourse with a Jewish beatnik girl?

Speaking of Elektra, I decided to heed her advice, and to leave her alone for a day or two.

The next day I did my usual things. I went to Sunday mass, for whatever that was worth. I read comic books on the porch with Kevin. I ate. I napped. I read my cheap paperback thriller in the afternoon, took my long swim in the evening.

But I thought about Elektra often. I wondered if maybe it weren’t best just to let matters stay the way they were, each of us living lives devoid of the physical presence of the other.

I had already told her anything of possible interest I had to tell.

She already knew me like a book, and a not very exciting book at that.

It was all downhill from here, and she would soon weary of me and my shenanigans.

I didn’t go to see her the next day, nor the day after that.

I wrote one poem in this period but added nothing to these memoirs, as nothing seemed particularly demanding to be added.

On the evening of the third day I went for a particularly long swim. It was quite dark when I got back home. As I walked down the street I could see that the lights were out on the ground front floor, where my aunts and mother and Kevin all live. But as I got closer I saw that apparently one of the boarders was sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette. The street lamp voluptuously bathed its light in the merry garden that lapped in the breeze up against the rails of the dark porch — dark but for that pulsing red pinpoint. I went through the wobbly old gate, determined to get by with only a polite “good evening” to whoever it was, as I had no desire to be drawn into idle chitchat. I had bought this poem The Waste Land and I was anxious to dive into its mysteries.

“Just ‘good evening’?” she said.

I stopped at the side of the porch. There, above an expansive rhododendron, was Elektra.

I came around the front, and up the steps. She was sitting in the rocker that I usually sit in. I sat down in the other rocker, the one Kevin treats as his own.

I lit a cigarette.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

“Why didn’t you come visit me?” she said.

“Well, I was thinking of stopping by tomorrow, actually.”

“Why wait so long?”

“I didn’t want to bore you,” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“So, you did want to see me?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

Indeed even in this darkness she was beautiful to look at. Bathed in the odor of gently stirring chrysanthemums and tiger lilies, of rhododendrons and forsythia.

“I’ve never met a man who chose to forgo my company out of fear of boring me.”

“Men are very selfish,” I said.

“As are women,” she said.

“But not as much as men,” I said.

“True,” she said.

She put her cigarette out in the standing ashtray.

“I think we should go to the Ugly Mug and have a beer,” she said. “Then we should go to bed together. What do you think?”

I was thinking that Jesus was going to show up at any second, cigarette in hand, but instead the screen door opened and Kevin came out onto the porch. He was wearing a t-shirt and his BVDs.

“Hi, Cousin Arnold. Hi, lady.”

“Hello, man,” said Elektra.

“I’m not a man,” said Kevin, staring at her. “I’m a boy.”

“Cool,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Kevin Armstrong.”

“My name’s Elektra.”

He came closer to her, so that he was standing in front of, but ignoring, me.

“Are you Cousin Arnold’s girlfriend?”

“No. I’m his friend.”

“Oh. I saw you kiss him.”

“Friends can kiss.”

“Oh.”

“Kevin,” I said. “Go to bed.”

“I don’t want to go to bed. I want to talk to her.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because she’s pretty.”

“Kevin?” This was my mother’s voice, from inside the house.

“Uh-oh,” said Kevin.

My mother opened the screen door. She was in her nightgown.

“Arnold?” she said.

“This is Arnold’s girlfriend,” said Kevin. “Her name’s Electric.”

“Kevin, get in here and go to bed, or you can’t buy comic books tomorrow,” said my mother.

You can believe Kevin went in through that door double-quick.

My mother stood there in the doorway, holding the door open.

“Mom,” I said. “This is my friend Elektra.”

“Hello,” she said. “I”m Mrs. Schnabel.”

“Hi, Mrs. Schnabel.” Elektra waved her hand.

“Well, I’ll leave you two,” said my mother.

“I love your garden, Mrs. Schnabel,” said Elektra.

“Oh, thank you. But it’s mostly my sisters’ accomplishment. I do like to work in it though.”

“It’s lovely,” said Elektra. “I want to come by and look at it in the daytime.”

“Come by any time, dear.”

“See, Arnold,” said Jesus, who was sitting on the porch rail, a lit cigarette in his fingers, “they’re completely hitting it off. Your mother’s not even gonna care that Elektra’s a Jew. Hey, and ya know what, if it does bother her, the hell with her.”

I glared at him. He really was determined to drive me back to Byberry permanently. Or so it would seem.