Poe Ballantine

My Pink Tombstone

In spring of 1988 I became the caretaker of a twenty-acre plot my sister and her husband had bought as a prospective retirement location in the Black Forest of Colorado: elevation 8,200 feet. It was a great opportunity for me to write and reflect and rest up from the roaring hellfire on earth.

The Irving

In the small Nebraska town where I live, I am known as “the cook.” People I don’t know will often stare at me fuzzily for a moment before a flash of recognition lights their face: “Hey, I know you. You’re the cook.” Which is reasonable enough, I suppose, since I am the cook at the Olde Main Street Inn, the chief dinner house in town. It isn’t exactly what I’ve dreamed of being all my life, however. To be honest, being the cook is an unwanted byproduct of my efforts to be “the writer.”

501 Minutes To Christ

Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago (I stuck his head into a snowbank until he promised to leave me alone) and a middle-aged fellow who drives around town shouting obscenities from a riding mower, there is not much happening here in Middlebury, Vermont.

Realism

For about ten months I worked at a radio-antenna factory in the tiny town of Hays, Kansas. The factory workforce was comprised mainly of the inexperienced, the handicapped, the socially discarded, the desperate, the just-out-of-jail, and the fallen-to-the-bottom-of-the-ladder, with a handful of cheerful, non-English-speaking Mexicans thrown in.

Where The Rain Belongs

After three nights at the Broadway Motel out on the highway ($12.95 a night, color TV), seven nights in a forty-dollar-a-week First Street flophouse with free running roaches and dying winos, and two rumpled and freezing nights listening to the rain clatter against the roof of my car, I took to the streets of Eureka, California, on foot in search of an apartment and a job.

Estrellita

As I closed my front door and began to walk up the street, someone called to me. I turned and saw a young girl approach out of the darkness. She appeared neat and studentlike, slightly stooped by the weight of a backpack, a brand-new notebook under her arm. Her long, shiny hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She spoke to me in rapid Spanish, in a pipsqueak voice.

An Unfamiliar Form Of Solitaire

When I first came to this mountain town in central Mexico a year ago — bored and dissatisfied with myself and my American surroundings — I was eager to learn about a group of thirty or so imigrantes, American expatriates, who gathered daily in the lobby of the Hotel Jardin.

Things I Like About America

When I got bored with myself in Kansas, I decided I would move to a place that ended in the letter o. After ruling out Idaho, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Trinidad and Tobago, I narrowed the list down to Ohio and Mexico. Then I asked all my friends — and even some people I didn’t know — whether I should go to Mexico or Ohio. They all agreed it should be Ohio.

egyptian jewel grasshopper

Advice To William Somebody

I can’t count the number of times I have officially assembled the equipment to take my life: a knife, a handgun, a plastic bag, a bottle of codeine and a fifth of vodka.

La Calidad De La Vida

Every year my back goes out. It’s like a special anniversary, which I celebrate by groaning a lot and walking around like Groucho Marx with his tie caught in his zipper. This year it happens to me in Mexico, where I rent a large, brand-new, slightly leaky, four-bedroom house for sixty dollars a month in the medium-sized town of Jerez de Garcia Salinas, about eight hundred miles due south of El Paso, Texas.

Dreams Of The Old Green Man

I was hiding in the bushes one Sunday afternoon when Sucker Boy came running through our courtyard holding up a giant bag of multicolored suckers. This was at the Bellview Apartments, a massive low-income complex that took up half a mile along University Avenue in San Diego, California. Sucker Boy had a long, twisting, whip-snapping line of admirers trotting after him, glossy-lipped Pied Piper children with suckers in their eyes. He was a damp, plump boy with a pinched pastry face and a treacherous smile. He was two years older than me, a second-grader. I never learned his real name. This was about eight minutes before he died.