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May, 2008

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The courts, the tires, the pipe wrench, the face cards; the poster child, the kick, the syndrome, the hack; the loner, the sheet, the dogs, the moon rays, the front page, the blouse hounds, the parade; the timer, the blue dress, the dinner guests, the Plague, the attendee, the horse trainer, the gravestone etcher, the painters, the cab drivers, the failures, the good mother, the bankers; the bakery, the celebrity, the wedge, the fixed income, the Left, the Crow Nation, the coward, the self-restraint, the scoundrel, the invention; the condom, the shoe, the howl, the truth, the border, the door, the Framed, the pronoun game, the Governor, the stage, the monster, the boat deck, the long arm, the Sept; the brain, the property owner, the wet nurse, the huge layover, the broom handle, the muscle, the quadruped, the muse, the pusher, the juror, the fed, the bed, the lampshade, the independent, the tavern, the paper tray, the October Monday, the stimulant, the co-commissioner, the poor; the basket retailer, the farmer, the assembly, the orchard, the electric car, the Cougar, the mystery machine; the somebody, the nobody, the anybody; the last to know.

Before you even consider moving on, know the above, and know them well.  Neither ambiguous nor vague.  Not even an idea of them.  Let each one into your bone marrow.  I’m twenty-five today.  A quarter of my natural life.  Sitting in the same chair.  Ain’t going anyfuckingwhere.

I start with a girl pointing to me.  These algebraic ruminations in that glare, a pitiable stone amongst other pitiable stones of unremarkable weight and color.  She points at my chest and asks if I hurt there, and if I do, would I hurt there ever again?  Just some alabaster pixie out and about.

For the police sketch artist in all of us:

She’s 5 feet 11.  She has sea green eyes.  Wearing a pink-red top with shoelace shoulder straps, and a pair of faded jeans tight in the hips, can’t tell you if they’re tight anywhere else, wearing these high-heeled Jimmy Choos that look like they’re molded out of Laffy Taffy.

Then tells me that she’s Asian but she’s American.  She likes to eat out of cellophane packages.  She says she’s in a hurry.  She’s an anatomical sequence of Boolean conditions that reconfigure by layer, she’s a constant and voluminous array of obeli engendering until all she inhabits diffuses.

If you see this person, then or before or, better yet, now—tell her I’m bored.  Tell this strange girl that I’m home when I’m not out and since I’m out all I am is going home.

When I smoke I get tired.  But.  I want to smoke.  The brand I buy come with these thick filters, like corks.  They suck.  I take the scissors from a Swiss army knife and cut the tips of each filter down.  Sure.  My stomach feels like a dried clump of cabbage.  Probably because I hadn’t smoked.

They’re telling the people of America that a gallon of gasoline might cost $5.00 a gallon but only sometime in the near future; these same people who say it’s more historically accurate thus more probable that Christ was nailed to a pole.  People at the bar, at the café.

Rather than talk about a barrel of oil costing $100 or the near future in general, have Carmen Electra hug 78% of the US population.  Everyone needs a sense of comfiture and solidarity.  These people give me blank stares.  Apologies.

I don’t engage in conversation with anyone all that much after that.

I think about what it means to be a public school cog and all I get back are memories of Elmer’s glue, of popsicle sticks turning into churches, of newspaper articles plastered onto construction paper, bound together with yarn.  I remember the Newsweek and Time articles before cutting them out and pasting them.

Articles about assassinations attempts in nations that I never visit, that I cannot for the life of me pronounce, yet are the bane of our nation’s existence, about off-shore drilling rigs breaking apart spilling olive-black tendrils into the ocean.  Two opposing gang members fistfight at the doorway, kicking over desks, before class can even get underway.

I go back to cutting and pasting considering I’m 0.4 below the required 2.75 GPA to complete 9^th grade and each finished scrapbook is worth 0.5 and I’ve only done one since the term had started.

Sometimes you inhale a little late so the fumes don’t matter.

At the bar:

Where a glass of light beer costs four dollars.  The tabletop cold until you keep your arm there a while.  I miss the times folks could smoke in bars.  Who the fuck made that happen?  No one here, that’s for sure.  Things occur and we let it.  I see the place as half-empty.  We’re the flying fucks no one gives.  We’re the well-earned losses in a world of ill-gotten gains.  That ex-deputy who can’t stop drawing Superman on white napkins, that nonagenarian boat maker who shakes everyone’s hand before leaving.  This isn’t heaven.  This is a place to sit down.

At the café:

Dick Cheney looks like a porcelain monstrosity forced to join the human race once in a while.  Someone points at the TV and a barista named Kristanna rolls up presses button, off…Cheney gone.  Kristanna’s smile like coming across a sawbuck on the sidewalk, ten pounds overweight, two kids at home.  She looks like a Mary but her mom named her after an aunt who died twelve years before she could ever have been theorized yet born.  Kristanna remembers when I had a job.  She says something about the racial tension that’s happening at another place she works.  Her lips electroplated [C₅H₅NO₃S (1885)] with a smile five times the expanse of the sky.  A sky witnessing a frigate alone on topaz waves, vessels once rendered by hands now too old to do anything but shake hands one his way out at the end, inebriated, gregarious, final.

6:21 AM.  The sun is out.  What else?

The roads head west.  I stay here.

Look in the mirror.  All weight on my feet.  None of my fingers can move.  My joints are polymer.  Sometimes when I concentrate on growing my hair out, well, damn, I forgot to run it under some water the last time I showered.  One of these days I’ll remember the last time I cleaned up, and on one of those days before or after I’ll learn how to cook a medium porterhouse steak for myself.

Smoke another cigarette.  Doze off.

When I’m up again it will be eleven o’ clock.  If there’s a job I’m qualified for out there it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Dalí went mad.”  I concur but also: not sure.

“So did longshoremen,” this guy says.

“Right.”

I spend the day at the casino and I don’t have a red cent or currency of any color.  Instead I watch the people who do have money lose it.

So, I call my dad up saying I need money for food and he says he got forty bucks.  I tell him that I won’t have money in time for the electric company and he says what else.  I tell him that I need some cash for smokes.  He says forty bucks is all she wrote.

There’s a place in town that sells 3 burritos for a dollar.  At the café a bottomless cup of drip coffee costs me $1.25.  “Van Gogh went mad,” I tell the face in the mirror.  “Dalí, I’m not so sure.”

All great artists die of syphilis.

My arms don’t work as good as they should.

I’m living by the week the way cats and cockroaches do and wasps are making a home outside my window.

Just keep telling yourself that all great artists wind up the same way.

Orange Van Eijiks, check.  Senseless oppression, maybe next year.  A $12 box of white zinfandel, check.  Tawdry and mellow at the same time, not for sale anywhere.  Copy of Sen. Jesse Ventura’s Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!, check.  For whom are these items intended?  For the girl across the hall, of course—Whisper Pageant, twenty-three, who spends her days working at a juice bar slash fitness center but her nights are a considerable mystery.  And today is Valentine’s Day.

I knock thrice.  Pause.  Knock twice.

She answers the door but before she allows me passage: “Say it.”

Without looking a second time, “Teal blue Hollister Henley, American Eagle low-cut jet stream jeans.”

“And the shoes?”

“Size 6 chocolate DKNY mid-heels.”  She steps aside and allows me passage.

Her abode isn’t an evergreen forest of your dreams but a strawberry patch of your nightmares.  Nothing invokes the stalwart shape of pears, nothing invokes the phallic concept of a stamen.

All the paintings on her walls are hers.  She’s listening to Diana Krall.  There’s this plutonium glow about her I wouldn’t call wisdom.  Nascence-deficient.

“Why do you come over,” she says, “when you know our conversations are never real?  You sit there, you say—yeah—you say, Sure, um.”

“You lay claim to this holy day, only one in the entire tenement.”

“See?  That isn’t real.  Regale me with your tales of economic woe, fiendish one.”

“I’ll get by, but I’m going to ask if I can jack into your box so I can keep the homefront going.”

“You’re a goddamn half-romantic twig of a man.  You have any idea how much that’ll cost me?”

“I’m going to pay dearly.  What’re you even going to do?”

“What?” she says.  “Tonight?  I’m staying in.”  Hoists the box of wine.  “Obviously.  Last year I was forced to use my mace can.  So then, well, there.”  She looks at the tulips.  “Besides, I have all the time in the world to coerce some understanding from the writings of Jesse Ventura, get drunk.”

I make for the door.  “Next year I’m going to take the door off my hinges and replace it with chicken wire.  No escape at all.”

“Wait,” she says.

I stop.

“I can make something in fifteen minutes.  Just Add Water, trust me.  Trust me.  I wanna make something…spectacular…right?”

“All right.”

She’s right to say that our conversations aren’t real.  A few insights, however, are unveiled in the processes between.  I learn she’s a banjo in a family of harps.  That she can be punctual but only when she forgets all concept of time existing whatsoever.

I learn at some point she’s going to have to stop sitting with her fingers curled around the wires of a cage.  I learn she’s a cloud stuck in a sky dominated by paranoid flight attendants.  I learn she’s nothing like me.

Already it’s a Magnavox type of day.  The type of day where the sun is flashing in the sky like a cop’s flashlight waking you up in the driver’s seat of your car at four in the morning.  There’s an 18-wheeler at the front of the tenement some guy had abandoned, its driver’s side door is open, and a CB radio is blaring inside with the motor running.  A supine Brontosaurus with its heart thumping.  Step into the seat.  It’s firm without any give whatsoever.  I take the CB receiver and speak my name into the ether, tell him the driver has peaced out and everyone has been gawking at this truck for an hour.  The voice on the CB says that the cargo needs to be at Burke Meat Company.  Crosstown.  Twenty-one minutes.  He doesn’t care who or what but the shit has to get there, and I look around, and ask, but no one has a trucking license.  Neither do I.  Whisper gives me this look and smiles and I jump in, shut the door, do my best.  This voice on the CB tries to instruct me on how to shift.  Across town I’m jouncing over curbs and screeching to a halt at the stoplights.  It’s the kind of day where people can smell a disaster waiting.  Meanwhile I notice that the cab of this monstrosity reeks of beef jerky, Old Spice and coffee grounds.  There are scotch tape fragments left on the dash where the driver had taken his photos and other personal items off the dash and hauled ass.  A mixtape in the stereo consisting of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard warbles while I’m trying not to kill pedestrians or attract attention from the law.  Reminder: I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and the guy on the CB ain’t helping.  Minutes on the highway and I nearly run two sedans off the side of the road and come within inches of rear-ending a Dodge Dakota.  Soon but not soon enough I pull off on Exit 27 and start on a small road towards the hills and going uphill we’re slithering through the cinnamon mounds until the pine and brush recede and I’m driving up to an open gate and onto a paved, asphalted allotment like an areola atop the summit of this mammary hill, with Burke Meat Company as this huge nipple protruding, a gargantuan breast designed only to satiate our collective need for a variety of red meats.  They tell me to pull up to a place marked Door 11, and when I get there a man with nothing but white hair and mallets for hands wearing overalls and rubber boots awaits.  The truck is making all sorts of noises.  He tells me the gears are shot but not dead and tells me to come in; their office used to have walls, for now there are boxes, file cabinets, a water cooler, and a secretary that looks like Madam Tussaud’s version of Hedy Lamarr if it’d been left out in the scorching Nevada heat a bit too long.  It’s a kingdom of malnourished scapegoats; eggshells properly developed on only one side; shoes with laces that are too long; a handful of rice in a nation overstocked with apples.  One of them takes out a metal box, opens it, signs a sheet, and fills a manila envelope with some cash.  No one says anything.  They give me the envelope and I leave.  They call a man to back the 18-wheeler into the loading zone.  Grey and blue smoke curl up from underneath its chassis.  Twenty men in long coats, some with cameras, observe, before going back indoors to begin unloading the cargo.  I don’t join them.  Whisper picks me up and takes me home.  Sixteen hundred dollars.  That’s what they put in the envelope.  A Magnavox type of day.  A day that I could have dreamt.

My teeth are so decrepit I don’t know how I’ve escaped brain damage.  Too little too late and I owe no apologies for the things I’ve never claimed.  Pain is cheaper than emotion.  People fear emotion, fear makes them weak.  Create pain; some sense of power.  To care is to be labeled vacant…so this is the world.  And just like that, the weekend is gone.

Surrender isn’t enough for people.

More often than not, more of it is required to satisfy that which will forever be unsatisfiable.

A car needs to be taken into the shop.

There are a few more groceries needed in the kitchen.

Everyone around you become lampreys that evolved wings.

The week consists of a fifth of Bushmills, a case of Michelob Ultra, Slim Jims, and bills zeroed out one after the other.

I no longer dream.

Things to ask someone who’s lived for 106 years:

Do you ever go out?

What’s the point?

Do you hurt there?

Will you ever hurt there again?

That’s pretty much what I’d ask.

At the bar:

There’s only so much you can inspire yourself to do on a full stomach and lately, with the amount of time I’d spent as an incoherent reprobate, I felt the blood in my body dry up.  The sodium lamps tuck me in at night.  I walk all over the place, outdoors, indoors, strangers making adverse glances to the strangers around them but their eyes never find me.  They never teach you the fundamental aspects should a student ever grow up to become a ghost.  Thousands of pixels vaporizing, saturating into the walls, and into the tarmac: imagery of a fear that none of them will ever reclaim emotions they’ve lost ages ago.  Recoil, disrupt, agitate, then apply; this contracts a low and unfluctuating experience none bother to learn from, being that nothing else will occur from it.  No higher stance gained, just the thought that having had that one special element slip through the gaps in your ribcage has made you no different from everyone else.  An occult gesture, a repulsive ceremony bonding a person to a defiant and deviant end, an eagle spreading out to cast its shadow upon your life source and homestead before it picks you up and conveys you elsewhere to be devoured in privacy away from scavengers with equivalent avarices.

At the café:

“When the dead visit you,” this glucose scarecrow says into a receiver plugged into a Peavey speaker slung over one shoulder, “when death welcomes you, be prepared to become its solitary recipient.  Put down your gun.  Raise up your heart.  Alight like a candle but never burn out like the meteor struggling to fight her way through the obstinate membrane of our celestial limitations.”

I take his receiver and yank it out of the speaker and toss it across the room.

These ersatz prophets, these candy-colored martyrs.  His face could only be this fluorochrome frog on a slab ready for dissection, serving no better purpose than to instruct via its absolute destruction, and he’s just stalling the inevitable.  I get the notion my actions have aroused something in the crowd around us.  Those who would never hurt ducklings crossing the freeway now have the audacity to take matters into their own hands and attack the both of us.  Kristanna stays behind the counter while people shove me out, one of whom is her boss, telling me I’m not longer welcome in their establishment.  You wonder about your effect on some people.  You feel glad hatred gives you some false, selfish sense that at one point in time people recognize that you may have once been corporeal, alive.  

This is probably how Democrats feel.

Theatrical projections embodied by performative aberrations where hands dive into clockworks, yanking loose wet strands, followed by confusion: night.

What am I praying for?  That these images resolve themselves as dispatches from majestic occurrences yet to be realized?  Will I one day be sitting at a large table with a couple dozen strange yet gregarious faces before a festive dinner laughing about these times of which I recollect nothing at all?

Memories abscised from your body like a vital organ.  It’s been ages before I was able to recall the face of a girl I’d loved or the wrongs I’ve done and never atoned.

Name a couple of reasons why nothing is done today:

Seven thousand eyes that can’t talk.

Of the hundreds of bus terminals none allow my escape.

Vociferous voices echoing through mall corridors.

Someone leaves a bucket of horse blood at the gates of city hall.

Numerous eyes on the collapse of social security.

A nation of car bombs invades through a crack in the door and the duct tape don’t keep it out.

When the windows go up there is this growing figure.

There are all types of reasons not to do a thing.

I name them somewhat out loud, to no one, wondering.

Wondering…when is she ever coming home?

Spotlight wavers until it condemns you like a fist meeting the wall.

Should have sent her Red Emperors, left no name.

The apartment that Whisper had made hers over the years now lies empty.

One day her door is left open.  Beyond it there’s nothing left inside.  All the walls bare.

Please.  Someone needs to hear this.  Someone needs to receive my words because I don’t have a lot of time left—20% is blue while the rest is cold.  There are parts of me that ache.  For the moment I remember the one that got me talking.  She’s about five-feet-eleven.  She’s Asian but she’s American.  I’d seen her in the city but have never spotted her again.  I wonder if they’re both there.  Her and Whisper.

I’m looking out my window at another 18-wheeler abandoned in front of our tenement and I listen to the anguish on the CB radio and I tell the voice that I am the hydraulic bubonic and after all these years I’d found out the hard way, between being cured and being otherwise, that I’ve failed at defending my existence.  Later, I’m looking through the truck window.  I’ve driven the truck off the country road and through a vast beet field, trying to crash into the trees five hundred yards from the road.  A week of boxed white zinfandel, now this.  Cobblestone madness, the floors of houses of fallen priests, and the lacerated flanks of malnourished gladiators.  Half an hour later the engine dies, now I’m sitting here.  Once in a while the CB talks to me asking about it, about the cargo, but they’re not angry.  Then the battery dies.  I’m sitting in a junked heap.  Nothing in the freight trailer moves.  Burke Meat Company.  Finally I get out.  The truck has left a laceration across the field all the way to the country road; think about soft tissue, all the songs I could’ve sang to her…and it’s that thought that keeps me from opening the back of the truck. For a while, but I notice zip tie seal has broken, so I swing a door open.  They hang there, wrapped in the canvas material, by the hundreds, each with a number and a propensity to love; each had once a voice of its own.  I can’t tell if they’re animal or man, they’re too large or too small to be either …a hot needle punctures the blank morsel at the back of my brain that asks me, sternly, to shut the door, they don’t want me to see them like this, so I shut the door and I start walking towards the country road.  Cop cars slow down nearby but don’t stop, they just speed away…then I’m at the road, it’s a frosty morning, I light a cigarette, no more or less sober than I’d been just an hour ago, and another cop car patrols by but this one stops to talk to me and he asks me, “When’s that getting there, buddy?” and I tell him that it’s stuck.  The cop looks away from me, shaking his head, for shame; talks on his radio as his window rolls up and he speeds away…I recognize the land, I recognize the odor of agricultural munificence and see that I’d been driving anywhere but Burke Meat Company.  I’ll start walking, and as I get further and further from the truck I look back at it, cursing the fucking thing for never having saved me, for letting me down, for leaving me at my most weakest, for never caring.

My dad picks me up and asks me all the painful questions.  When am I getting a job, am I ever going to go back to school, why haven’t I talked to my sister, have I thought about moving back in with her.  The simple things to remind me that all I’ll ever be until I’m thirty-eight or dead is alone.  Same clothes, same mode of transportation.  Sometimes you’re so poor you do your best to keep yourself from setting fire to all the things you have left and taking an entire nation with it.  For the first time since my mom’s funeral I cry in front of him, telling him I’m lost, that I lost her, that nothing matters much, not even living any fucking more.  He tells me to dry my goddamn eyes, go up to my apartment and start gathering my things.  I’m going back to the recovery center.

They won’t let me out for walks unless I sleep and if I don’t they’ll resort to medication.  There are people in other rooms stirring echoes but in close proximity issue almost no sound at all, not even a heartbeat.  Nothing here matches, being that the white turns to gray and your skin goes north while your mind is inert.  I tell them about this.  They tell me that’s how it works.

Finally, since I’m making progress, they’re walking me past these other rooms with these bodies in them, different, but the same.  Since they are nameless phantoms, I name them like the sun names them:

The castrated, the humid, the decline, the colorless, the refined; the pastoral, the bright, the flesh, the wire, the trespasser, the angel, the doorman; the Kill, the bottle cap, the torment, the rain dancer, the rage, the fusillade, the clay patch, the coated; the Princess, the tide, the gasoline dream, the watch, the short order, the reptile, the labor, the tame; the pocket mouse, the dirt bike, the mailbox, the point setter, the urchin, the lavender palms, the dragon, the price, the locksmith, the unusual, the Bare, the daydreamer, the Pain; the everywhere, the somewhere; the only one; the last to know.