Four bad days in 1982

I do not remember what inspired this.

1. The room was littered with coffee cups, cigarette butts, glasses, clothes. The phone, buried under mountains of clothing and books inside the refrigerator, rang steadily the whole time I was in the room. I did not answer it. On one wall, next to what looked like the bed, the words "Beautify Death" and "Hooray Planet America" were carefully written in block letters. The other walls had nothing on them except chipping chocolate-brown paint. When I went over to the taped-up window, a tiny well-fed-looking kittne looked up at me from the windowsill and asked "Prowl?" I stroked its back while it writhed and squirmed the way kittens do. There was a poster on the door that said "Free Alaska" in sloppy white letters on a flat black background - nothing else. I took the poster and left.

2. Simon and I were in the car, listening to a terrible popular music radio station from Kenosha, Wisconsin, on our way from Kennebunk, Maine, where he lived, to Portland, Oregon, where I did. We had not spoken to each other since crossing the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Only 1/2 hour ago it has been snowing intensely, and now the bright afternoon sun made the unbelievably thick white blanket on everything sparkle and shine. We saw (or thought we saw) a very psychotic-looking man wildly attempting to flag cars down, but there were no footsteps leading away from the place where he was standing. Simon and I looked at each other, back at the man and the snow, and returned our respective gazes to the road straight ahead. We did not stop.

3. One, while on a jet from Little Rock, where I worked at a small weekly newspaper, on my way to New York to cover something newsworthy (I don't remember what) I sat next to a little girl, 3 or 4 years old, who looked out the window, talked to her teddy bear, and ordered ginger ale from the stewardess. I asked the little girl her name, and she told me it was Homo. I said "Oh." I asked her who had named her that, and she said her mother had. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn't know. Father? "I don't know". Where are you going? "New York." What are you gong to do there? "Buy a new teddy bear."
When I asked her how old she was, she said "Nineteen."

4. There is a building on 29th Street in Manhattan with the words "Tour America by Train" on it. When I lived on 28th St., I walked past this building every morning and almost every evening. But although it was clean, obviously less than 10 or 15 years old, and sometimes had lights on inside, I was quite disturbed by it because not a soul ever went in or came out. Sort of like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. I asked my neighbors, some of whom had lived in the area for years - what is it? What happens there? No one ever had an answer, except "Bo-Bee", the wino who lived on the steam grate in front of my building. He said that building was Headquarters. I asked him what he meant. He said "That's where they run it all from".