T-R-O-U-B-L-E

I've drunk eight Modelos and three Pacificos and should like to continue in Spanish but, pleased to have remembered the past participle of ‘"drink" and the weird Fowlersian will/shall - would/should shibboleth, have decided to relate a brief tale in my native tongue about my stay in a Holiday Inn. It is noteworthy that, in the Texas panhandle, the hierarchy so clearly established by early rappers between hotels, motels, and Holiday Inns is inapposite; the landscape there, excepting the canyon itself, lacks peaks and valleys, and each inn is as good as the next. It ought to be noted, too, that not enough attention is paid to the ossified forms of emphatic prepositions: "Inn" is the same word as "in", "bye" the same as "by", "too"’ the same as "to", for instance. There are also innings and outings, and why not? The h/motel was as fine as any other, but lay in a dry Texan county, and was no place to revisit after having spent ten hours peddling myself to a hiringcommittee in search of an Anglo-Saxonist-Chaucer-scholar-Classisist-German-teacher with interest inilliterate students and university drudgery. Things were hopeless (can a medieval Germanist speak to a remedial summer English class aboutnineteenth-century English medievalism and to deaf faculty ears about theArmenian Physiologus in northern Texas with success?) and my host, the chair, knew it. After dinner he drove me to a liquor store in another county, which had just closed. I returned, lachrymose but well-dressed, to his hail-beaten pick-up, only to be driven across the street to another store, still open, and bought drinks with his Quebecois wife. "Yoooou're stayin at the hotel, aren't you?" a teenage blonde, who stood with three others in line and whom I recognized as the receptionist, yelled at me. "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" spelled out a well-tattooed man behind her, to me. The chair laughed; what a player, I thought he must have thought. My hosts deposited my back at the h/motel, where I drank my cross-county booze in solitude, aroused myself with the thought of liquor store check-out-line girls, and went to sleep watching sportshighlights. Great plays at second base, but no job offer.

-V. Pakis of Minneapolis, MN