Orange Suitcase Read Online Free

on the festival poster. His had a spelling error.
    3
    When the party ended a designated-driving intern from the journal dropped us off at our hotel. It was a little before four in the morning, and our first readings were beginning at noon. We thanked the exhausted intern, and I crossed a highway to buy beer while the poet went in search of the room. When I found the room there was a haze of weed.
    I get fucking nervous before readings, man, he said when I walked in.
    I get fucking drunk before readings, I answered. I cracked a beer and threw the rest in the fridge.
    We offered each other our vices and mutually declined. I told him I gave up smoking a couple years ago. I’d cheated a few times but thought it was healthier in the long run to stick to beer. The poet told me he didn’t drink anymore; he had gone to LSU, gotten his MFA there. But he moved back to the Midwest six months ago. He’s been in treatment and off booze since. He’s been smoking a lot more.
    4
    The poet told me: I was drinking a lot, man. It got bad. I was having DTs in the liquor store. Like a movie or something. I almost had a stroke.
    I sipped my beer quietly and promised myself I would cut back. Writers drink and smoke, we both knew that. It was part of the fun of trying to be a writer. I’d given up smoking for a few years, he’d given up drinking for a few months. We each thought the other had an amazing will power to do what he did, and we both knew the reality of the natural balance found in trying to live well—that giving up one vice means you start doing more of another. We lay on our separate beds silently, neither turning on the television. We tried to ignore how much the other was enjoying their smoke or drink. I drank more and faster; he put down the pipe and lit cigarette after cigarette. We talked about writing and journals and how hard it was to get published, how hard it was to sit down and just fucking write. We talked about how Raymond Carver said he never wrote a line worth a nickel when he was drinking, and how it was kind of funny that it was the cigarettes that got him in the end anyhow. We talked about how Richard Hugo said the only good advice he ever got from other poets was to stop drinking, and we laughed at how all our favorite poems of his were about bars.
    5
    Eventually the sky purpled.
    The sun’s coming up, the poet said. We gotta read in five hours.
    I walked to the bathroom. I gotta quit drinking, I said.
    I gotta quit smoking, he said. He rose, too, to close the curtains.
    I’d probably just start smoking again, I called out.
    We all gotta do something, he said.
    I finished and he was back in bed. He lit a cigarette. I stopped and looked at him.
    Fuck it all, he said on the exhale.
    I opened the door to put out the do not disturb for the morning. There was a no smoking symbol pasted to the center of the door. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. I laughed.
    It says this is a non-smoking room, I told the poet.
    I know, he said, laughing. I called to complain about the smell when you were getting the beer. One of your maids’s been fucking smoking in this room! The night lady manager person said she didn’t know if she could move us to a new room till morning.
    I started laughing with him and climbed into my bed.
    We kept laughing for a long time, very drunk and very high. The room reeked of beer and smoke. The bed was soft and comfortable. Everything felt fantastic. It was too dark to see anything except the red light on the smoke alarm. I wondered how much smoke it would take to set it off.
    The poet called out, What are you reading tomorrow?
    Shitty story, I muttered. About a music critic and medication. You?
    Shitty poems. Most of them have to do with medication.
    I always enjoyed Paxil, I said.
    I always enjoyed Percocet, he said.
    We forced small laughs, and then everything was silent. Light spread from behind the curtains like matting for a frame. The refrigerator coughed