diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt | 5 |
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt b/veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt index a7ab223..c2e6068 100644 --- a/veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt +++ b/veryold/Paranoid City/paranoid city.txt @@ -19,8 +19,11 @@ The city is made of concrete, the sidewalk is made of concrete a half mile south But the truth is that she is only going for a walk. She is not really think9ing of parties which none of us have ever been to. She is only walking under the cool evening of spring. But it is Los Angeles and yet it is not, it is only Costa Mesa, a sad suburb, the tail end of dream. Not a beach resort not a thriving metropolis, just a little nowhere block, just a quiet street, just a small house or two. And inside maybe she dreams of big cities and maybe she is walking on cobblestones in Paris or maybe it is only Tribeca. Maybe she dreams of eating at a Tapas restaurant on Canal where the flamenco guitar player flicks his strings like kissing cigarette ash and maybe she is dancing in a swirling dress head filled with sangria and after midnight fantasies of Spanish men. Maybe but she is on the small street in the small town. Everything is beautiful here. She is here her head is nowhere but here, but she id deeply confused. She is feeling too many things all at once. The paper the essay the words about the words about the wordsÉ that was the echo loop into which she had lost herself for the majority of the day that was the endless feedback lope of prerecorded tape in which she found however temporarily a way to get her mind off it. So to speak. Or perhaps so you donÕt speak as the case may be. DonÕt think. Just walk. DonÕt think. No thinking. No think. No shirt no shoes no think. No shirt. No shoes. No think. No think. We do not serve that here senorita. A little boy with bags over his shoulder is walking in slow motion up a flight of stairs. Several weeks ago downtown where Vignes crosses over the railroad tracks. It is Ned's house it is backed up against the railyards in shadow of the Vignes bridge. It is not a house at all it is a loft, it is subdivision of an old immense meatpacking plant. She does not know that never need to, she knows that Ned lives here. She knows that she is here to see Ned, but she is drunk and standing outside the front door watching the crazy boy with two large sacks counterbalanced over his left shoulder. He is climbing the concrete stairs that lead up the side of the Vignes St. bridge. He does not seem aware of her. She is standing fifty yards away in the flooding yellow light of the sodium doorway. The boy is singing a song to himself as he climbs the steps. ItÕs a Spanish song, very rhythmic and soothing, but she does not speak Spanish. Little boy with bags slung over his shoulders slowly marches up the water stained stairs, his hair flutters in the backwash of diesel busses roaring over head; the bags sway with each step. His head is bowed intently studying the various oblique shapes of black that were once gum in somebodyÕs mouth. One hand balancing him on the green wrought iron railing, he stops, briefly his head bobs lightly left to right, and then one foot in front of the other until he reaches the top. The boy stops at the top of the concrete steps and laughs out loud. Laughs at nothing she thinks. Laughs at something only he can see. She does not see anything funny. He laughs because he can. After looking both ways his shape disappears across the bridge. He is gone. He will never be seen again and she is laughing now. Laughing because she can, laughing because she does not know what else to do. And then there is the flood of music washing out the door as it open and John emerges from the party. What are doing out here he asks? She doesnÕt know she says. I really donÕt know. She tries to kiss him, but he wants to bring her back inside. Fuck me she says, fuck me right here in the middle of street. Fuck me under the warm sodium lights. Fuck me where the boy with balanced sacks can see us. Fuck me under the glow of moonlight. Fuck me right here on the concrete steps with concrete sidewalk under our feet. Fuck me standing up so I can feel the solid ground underneath me. Fuck me so that I can feel the concrete lightposts splitting me in two. Fuck me so that the telephone pole crucifixes can cry warm tears of blood from the conversations of saints and martyrs flying through the wires. Fuck me so that we can laugh. Fuck me because I canÕt stop laughing. + But he wants to go inside. He only snickers at the suggestion. He thinks she is kidding. He wonÕt fuck her here on the street, the concrete is dirty, there are no trees, there is not life everything is paved over there is nothing fecund and warm to make him think of sex; everything is cool, smooth, but rough and causing rashes when rubbed against and there is the screaming teeth of trains grinding to halt in the rail yard behind the building and this is not a sexy place he thinks. This girl is out of her head he thinks. This is not where I want to make love to her; this is not where I want to fuck. There is no love here there is only hard, painful surfaces. This is not a place for sex. This light is so mineral and harsh and full of hate like Indian killing prospectors, murders fighting over pyrite. This light is criminal. This light is not warm, it does not bath us, it scraps at our skin, it does not want to see us naked, it wants to sear our flesh and serve us on a bed of nails with a side dish of fetish and snuff salad. + But there is beauty in this hard cold world she says. Can you not see it? Can you not see the way men have fought battles here and shed blood and sweat tears and given their lives to create this hard metallurgic light and much thought and hope and prayer has gone to create the concrete wonderland for us to play in and everything that is here is a work of glorious art. Everything here is pleasure. Everything here is begging to fuck. The telephone poles are fucking the sidewalk and pylons of the bridge are fucking secretly, fingering the ground between tracks, and the wires are licking the whipping the air with cat-o-nine tails and everything here is fucking but us. We are outside. We are free. Please she begs why wonÕt you fuck me? + But he didnÕt fuck her and it made her think. It swam in among other drunken thoughts. Thoughts that one only has when one is drunk and now as she crosses Irvine Ave and heads down toward the bluffs where there is park that overlooks the upper Newport bay ecological reserve, she is wondering if drunken thoughts are her true thoughts, her true feeling freed by alcohol or if they are some kind of demon thoughts conjured out of a narcotic haze? But is alcohol narcotic? If its not, are they true thoughts? She smoked a bit of marijuana before she left the house and so she is in the sort of trance state that forces one to think endlessly in unanswerable questions, annoying loops of thought that always return back exactly where they started. Why are we here? What does it mean? This sort of nonsense but she is older and does not ask questions like that anymore. She has moved on to personal introspective questions. She is a twenty something struggling to define herself and her place in the world. She is prone to aimless walks. She sees a figure approaching on the opposite side of the street. She quickens her pace slightly and does not look over as they pass each other on opposite sides of the street. Out of the corner of her eye she sees that it is a boy about her own age, but she can not tell if he cute or not. @@ -36,7 +39,9 @@ We run into each other walking and use the thing where leah and I fucked in the John is sitting on the 405 freeway somewhere near the Laguna Canyon Road off ramp, cursing the gridlocked evening traffic and wishing that he could be anywhere but here. All day the line Ōshe had custom colored eyes/ and smiles when she sighsĶ has been running through his head. This sort of thing happens to him a lot, line pop out of know where and circle about his mind until he finds somewhere to put them. This allows him to think of himself as a writer. That the line Ōspreads her thighsĶ also fits his rhyme scheme has not occurred to him and very likely never will. + He desperately wants a cigarette, but possesses a strange self flagellating mind that gives him overwhelming (though, as Claire would say, non denominational) guilt that overrides his brains pleasure centers which, as we said, are desperately craving a cigarette. Cigarettes make him feel dirty and he hates the fact that he is addicted to them. John likes to pride himself on his fierce sense of independence and anything that makes him feel dependent is to be avoided. + Of course John does not actually think of things this way. Like the rest of us, he covers these underlying motivators and concerns with carefully constructed veneers, which allow him to look in the mirror at four in the morning and smile. He is wise to do so. These are trying times and we all like to smile at ourselves in the mirror; he thinks what he has to think. Right now, as we are so brazenly deconstructing him, John is lost in the rearview mirror, watching a beautiful Persian girl touching up her makeup in the car behind him. She makes him think about a website that he visits every Tuesday and Thursday while April is at night school: persiankitty.com. Persian women have the most beautiful, pristine skin, he thinks absently, wondering as he does what it would be like to nibble at her earlobes and bite the tender flesh of her delicately carved neck. He thinks that perhaps he has a fetish for Persian women, but this thought causes that non denominational guilt to kick in again, because he does not see himself as the sort of man that judges women solely on their appearance. That is he does not want to be the sort of man who judges women on their appearance. John likes to think of himself as sincere and understands, able to relate to women on a deep emotional level. He was not raised to think of women as sexual beings, and culture has only taught him how to see them as sexual objects. Thus with these conflicting emotions he completely rejects the sexuality, seeing as he does all sexuality as objectifying, and chooses instead to relate to them emotionally. Typically in high school this earned him the moniker: pussy. Fucking jocks. |