Date Unspecified
Joanne from the perfume store said I looked pitiful standing under the rain while waiting for the bus. She asked why I wasn’t standing under the roof and I told her it’s because I like getting wet. She thought I was joking, and while I wasn’t joking I was definitely lying. There was a homeless man asleep on the bench, although you couldn’t see him from a distance since he had made himself a fortress out of cardboard. I felt it would be rude to stand around in his space, so I stood on the other side of the divider underneath the rain. Yeah, I got soaked, but there was an apartment waiting for me at the end of the bus ride.
She got me a car. Joanne. Paul said it was a junker that wasn’t worth the $200 she probably spent on it, if she even did. He thinks it might have belonged to her son and she was just desperate to get rid of it. Cheaper to give it to someone rather than pay a junkyard to take it. Anyway, Paul isn’t a mechanic, but he looked into it and said it would take about a grand to get it fixed. A grand neither of us have.
I feel guilty about getting rid of it since it was technically a gift. I think. I can’t tell. Some of these people are weird and I’m trying my best to fit in, but I also don’t want to offend a middle aged lady with hair big enough to look like she’s getting beamed up by a spaceship.
I don’t mind taking the bus. It fills my head with chatter that isn’t my own inside (internal?) monologue. I like my job because I get to watch people from behind a screen. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while (by? when?) moving here is that watching people on the bus will make them angry. Back home that was usually an invitation for conversation. Americans are weird, but I already knew that. —D.M.
I'm not sure when this takes place aside from "maybe early on", but it was one of the few pages from this "era" that is written completely in English. The corrections are his own, too, so it felt necessary to include them.