4 A vacancy

We slept another night in the bushes, and when we woke up the next morning Wolfman was gone and the tree was ours.

It was what an middle class home buyer would you would call a fixer upper. The place itself was amazing. An old tree. A very big tree. And for all the drunken booze hounds and drug addicts that had made camp underneath it's generous limbs, they hadn't damaged a thing.

(* Senators office was just down the street)

In the open clearing underneath the limbs was a fire ring.

In short this campsite was probably one of the most rustic and charming places in to lay one's head in all of downtown Tuscon.

But having been the favored camping spot of hobos just off the highway or the rail, it was a complete fucking mess. Samuel would see to that. He was nearer to obsessive compulsive than neat freak.We went to work.

There were beer bottles every where. Hundreds of them. I asked Sam if we could return them for a deposit, but Arizona in its deep commitment to being a backwards state didn't have a refund system.

I stacked about 300 into a wall that I thought might keep out the wind and look pretty when the light shone through it in the morning. It didn't keep out the wind and it didn't look pretty, but it did get the bottles out of our way and did much to improve the appearance of the place.

Sam went to work too. He wasn't worried about beer bottles.  There were needles and worse, and he took care of it.

"Even cats, bury their waste," he complained,  "What kind of person doesn't bury their shit?"

I agreed, though until then I was more of a flusher than a buryer.
 Our little campsite had quickly gone from looking like a junky's shack to a national park.

It was beautiful.

The previous campers had browned the trunk with their fire, so Sam and I hauled a big piece of concrete to set against the tree trunk and reflect heat back at us.

We tidied up the fire ring, took half scorched plastic out of the ashes and gather some wood for a fire.

It was good.

I bought a case of beer and we enjoyed the afternoon.

It was getting colder and a fire would be essential to warm up in the mornings.

My sleeping bag was a joke.
(*Write a 

The nice thing about that fire was how it would always be glowing in the morning.  That gnarly old wood scavenged around the lot burned long. And in the morning the embers were still glowing and putting out a little heat. It was nice not to have to light the fire from scratch.

There is this idea that sleeping by a fire can keep you warm at night. But unless you are bodily a part of the fire, it really doesn't do a bit of good.

I like drinking with friends. Sam was a friend now.

I like drinking. I like drinking with friends. Drinking around the fire with Sam behind a god forsaken gas station in a great wasteland of an american city was, in a strange way, kind of like being home.

There was a Conan O'Doyle book with no covers, puffed up to look as thick as War and Peace because it had been left out in the damp, so we talked about books and words.

Samuel just did not understand the word motivation. He was really concerned about it. It doesn't make any sense, he cried drunkenly.

I agreed with him, though in my heart, I thought it was a stupid idea.
 It should be motorvation..



Life in our little area was nice.