Thanks for the care package.  I'm sorry I didn't respond then but then was a time that absorbed all my attention (and it still wasn't enough) just getting through it.  Since has been, too (I could tell you stories); soon will be, I suspect, and later for sure--but now is a lull.  Not that we're breathing any easier here, but we're still breathing and we haven't missed a meal though some of them have been rabbit out of a hat and the phone still works and by the skin of our teeth we made rent.

So it could be worse, but not without disintegrating and its been that way since we got our notice from the not funny after all brother.  We picked up on it just after we got into the house in Minneapolis:  time after time we had enough money to survive but (this became a refrain) "not a penny more."  It's like being pre served, but bound and (since contacting someone, anyone, is still uppermost in my mind) gagged.

"The Lord provides," more than some people would say in response to all that--but then God's a zookeeper with a sick sense of humor, given how provision appeared.  The Hertz clerk in Minnesota fucked up, subtracted our deposit from what we owed but wrote the receipt so it seemed to say if you didn't look close like we'd deposited $100.  When we dropped the truck off the till was closed so I had to take the subway to Brooklyn the next day on the off chance they'd fuck up and they did.  Pa called a couple of weeks ago and when I described our plight he said, "I guess things are rough all over"--and the next time he called he loaned us $100.

I had a catering job one night on the Intrepid, a battleship bigger than most things and anchored off West 46th.  Ninety bucks (fifteen an hour for scraping and stacking plates)--and in midair almost, on its way to the dumpster, I snatched fiftysome pounds of lamb, ham, beef, turkey, salami and five kinds of cheese, most of it unsliced, even, and all of it top drawer.  On the other hand, we had to toss most of the chicken, duck, quail and sausage Little Billy (a black guy Amy and I met up on some abandoned Penn Central tracks one day; he'd been watching us scrounging for some wheels to make a grocery/laundry wagon; kind of a cross between B-- and M--) loaded in a shopping cart and pushed here--fifteen blocks, I think.  He meant well but the stuff was too far gone.  The $10 he gave us was good, but he didn't show up the next day to take us to the jobs he said he could get us.  Little Billy won't compute.

Today Julie sold her piggy bank for ten bucks and I got twenty-five for the Alice figures at an antique shop--enough to finish the phone bill just in time and buy bread, butter, eggs and cigarettes.  I could go on, but most of it is long stories.