L.A. HOUSEWIFE

   She has just finished pushing the chrome basket in the rat maze of food and packaging known as the supermarket. Now she's doing eighty in her car and the vegetables in the back seat are complaining. "We're wilting. We wanna go to the refrigerator. Take us home." "Shut up," she yells. Her knuckles and her lips are an odd sort of yellowish white. "I won't be obligated to a head of lettuce, do you hear me? 'Wash me off. Pat me dry. Now put me in the crisper,' she mimics the lettuce in a high pitched snarl, as she careens into the parking lot of the Town House Bar on Sunset. "Get it through your head you're nothing but a God damn little ball of green shit, and I'm not carrying you to happy refrigerator land." She slams the car door. "You can all just die in those plastic body bags. In this heat it won't take more than an hour."

   In the bar it is cool and dark. Men brush by her like great white sharks trying to sense the smallest hint of a come-on. She feels naked, vulnerable, like a lobster without its shell, and starts frantically digging in her purse like she wants to climb into it. When the bartender asks her if anything is wrong, she orders a Bloody Mary and sits perfectly still at the bottom of the bar, so the other fish will leave her alone. But it isn't any good, she can still hear the raspberries sobbing softly in the back seat of her car. "Fuck them, they're only two dollars a box," she says to the stranger next to her. "Do you know the Motel 6 down the road?"