when i first moved to san francisco, one of my many roomates was a girl named maryjane...we used to lay on her bed and sing for hours... she knew all of the same broadway tunes as i did...i still remember her doing a great rendition of "consider yourself at 'ome"...we were broke at the time, but we didn't need much money...rent was 80 bucks, so once you made your rent, the rest was fun time...still, you had to do some work to get by...one of our roomates got a job at the "mitchell brothers" porn movie house as a cashier...eventually he got maryjane a job there too, (also a cashier)...they worked at night and would come home in the morning with wild stories...
eventually i discovered "island" restaurant and a whole bunch of new friends, and moved out of 650 castro... maryjane and i didn't have much contact after that...i did hear that she moved in with jim mitchell, the theater's owner, and eventually married him. one time she called me and asked if i'd come over to keep her company. she lived way across town and i didn't feel like getting on the bus...so she paid for me to take a taxi...when i saw the fancy house, i realized her economic situation had changed in a big way...anyway, when i arrived she was vacuuming...and she continued cleaning while talking to me...in fact she cleaned the whole time i was there...it didn't take much to figure out that she was on something, most likely cocaine...she looked different too, thin and model like...so i hung out for a little while and left as soon as i could find an excuse...after that, we lost contact.
when jim mitchell shot his brother arte and it was all over the news, i took notice...later there was a movie about them, starring charlie sheen and his brother...i watched intently wondering if maryjane would be portrayed...and then last night there was a story on the news about a man who murdered his girlfriend and kidnapped his own child...his name is james mitchell, son of jim mitchell and maryjane...wow...who could ever know what story our lives would tell...
just as i was finishing writing this, a friend of mine called (who must remain nameless)...this friend is in the legal profession and had cause to meet the son of maryjane a few months ago...it was obvious to my friend that he was completely creepy...as we commiserated about it, my friend said, "san francisco is about as big as a dime"...it does seem like everything comes around again...
and speaking about the size of a dime...a short message about the cancer:
one step forward one step back... the achin back...the lesion has grown by 0.5 cm...how big is that exactly...tomorrow we see the oncologist and i've got my questions all written down. the rest of the spine is stable, which is good, which is great...but this one, this already radiated, refusing to go away, pain in the butt one... is a problem...
Comments