Dear phil,

I spent the last few days inside with a cold. I couldn’t handle a margarita but some warmth would be nice. It’s still raining.

Sal, haven’t heard from her in a while. Funny that you should mention her when you did, though, I saw a copy of On the Road recently and thought about her. I went on one of her little hobo trips with her. She had that book with her, kept reading little bits and pieces out loud. I was into tsh’eliot and all that back then, had the Golden Bough up my ass, & wished that she would stay quiet long enough for me to think a complete sentence. If we had been alone at the time i would have listened more, but Darren was with us. I was too childish to share my friends back then.

I been thinking, phil. I must have a fever, right? Why I keep playing with the same band in the same bars. John Coltrane, you know the picture off Blues Train with him real young and holding a reed in his mouth, such an amazing picture up there on my wall, and I wonder what it is that turns the picture into a study in distant music, some kind of holy concentration. And then I realize that even if I wrote something like A Perfect Love it wouldn’t be enough.

And I want to write it now, dammit, not after the heroin and the near death and all that. Surf in twenty years, ha! You’ve got the patience of a geologist if that’s the case, and I don’t believe a word of it. Tell me again why you’re staying on that godforsaken island? Aside from the beautiful natives, of course. You’d be better off in California. One of those southern coastal towns, and on weekends you could drive up here and meet women who don’t swim naked when they think you’re watching and then turn out to have extraordinarily rich boyfriends.

Well, we have our share of that type, so perhaps you should just stay put. The whole thing, mind you, stinks of intrigue. Rich boyfriends, naked women, tourist-addled waters, a beach with no surf. Best watch out for trained sharks when you swim. And burn this letter after you’ve read it, 007.

best, johnny