What a summer noir afternoon it had been! A hick hustler offered her services as consort and literary inspiration for $50, a six pack of Bud Light, and a carton of Marlboro Light 100s for each coupling. She peeled down her yoga pants in the dunes, bent over, showed me the goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The offer was under consideration. How could it not with a woman whose favorite phrase was much obliged<\/em>, spoke bad French, blackmailed for a partial living, and who rapped filthy lines about scoring free meth from the Newport fishermen she fucked and threw away. She was a novel I had to write!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I turned the pickup into the gravel driveway of my cabin that stood 872 feet from the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her pickup was there. She was three days early for a weekend job of window washing paying $500 because she was broke and on break from nursing school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cabin was empty. I called out to the back yard. Nothing. Maybe she was meandering the beach. The sound of knocking overhead made me look up. She was scrubbing the 4′ by 4′ bubble skylight wearing a purple bikini. She waved, went back to work. I watched. She stopped working, unfastened her top. She draped her body over the skylight and wriggled. Grime had no chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching her whisked my mind to the time we stood in the opposite ends of a culvert under a logging road that led to a recovering watershed. Water from a salmon-bearing stream trickled beneath our shoes. She told me she loved me. I told her I loved her. When you say something like that to each other at opposite ends of a culvert conveying salmon to the ocean and back, the words should mean something eternal. (They did.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n She motioned for me to join her on the roof. I went outside, climbed the ladder, and stood upon the flat roof for the first time. The ocean was in view. I could hear its dull roar. Why had I never been up there before? She was now naked, scrubbing the skylight with a brush. She turned around to face me. I took off all my clothes. The skylight held.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eight years later, I wrote and published the novel about the consort. She never read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What a summer noir afternoon it had been! A hick hustler offered her services as consort and literary inspiration for $50, a six pack of Bud Light, and a carton of Marlboro Light 100s for each coupling. She peeled down her yoga pants in the dunes, bent over, showed me the goods. The offer was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9873,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-poetry","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9872"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9875,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872\/revisions\/9875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}