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diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a110e5e --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ + It turned out that Dean and Betty were in Denver too. We all crashed with Mike and Halley. Mike and Halley had come about because of me at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship. The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying. Mike and I were ancient friends (though not as ancient as Clay Mike did know him) we went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away. Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer. Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer. There was never any money or food other than noodles. The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter. We were all just finding drugs. We were late bloomers. I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room. Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back. They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike. Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile like creeping behind his eyes —necessity. Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck. + Denver was a crash landing for all of us, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word. I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months. Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them. It was bliss while it lasted. I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C. Throughout it all the television reigned. Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura. Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both. Otherwise he did not really exist. Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible. Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all. A mad kind of humming that was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. +Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones. He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening! + And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment. We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back! The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god. Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor. Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages. The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss. They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin. But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses. It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut. Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision. + Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels. I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick. Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right? Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head. +You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are. Funny logic. Fuzzy math. Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly. Keep it, I’m outta here me. So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé. +Outside is America. The sound is deafening. It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity. Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains. Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all. Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side. And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer. The insidious beat of death. Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science. +Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears. “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane. Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies. + The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant. On the table is a bong. Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl. Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him. I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex. The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her. It made me laugh. Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace. And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room. I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it makes me laugh which earns me the finger, and the bong. I take a big lazy hit. + Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase. He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back. +Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here…. +And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit. Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen. He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?” +Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you… Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through? You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons. And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room. You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear. You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time. You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history. You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me. +There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again. The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering? +Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid. This isn't you. This isn’t me. + + + Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap. She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon. For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials. The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation. Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night. And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants. Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us. I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon? I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…? + But I don’t. Obviously. If I had a gun I might have. Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned. Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it. If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough. Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them. Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it. I left the camera running. + In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night. And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful. Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen? Or am I just thinking that it’s happening? Or is it happening because I think its happening? Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming? Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream? Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words. Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret. Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts. No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying. Same old stinking shit. No Good. No Bueno. Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass? Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors. Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good. Can’t use those, too strong. No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean. + The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served. The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind. Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed. So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit…. The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!! But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch. Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like? But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent. Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear. The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear? Her breath. The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now. But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face… Ban those words tear them right out snip snip. Can’t say that, its disgusting. War is a snuff film for the rich. The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting. “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect: I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times.... Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately. That's it gentlemen were going to war! The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia. + You like? You like, no? Too bad. You can’t have those words, too strong. I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it. I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh? She comes and lights a cigarette. The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave. Her name was Maya. + +By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other + “Fucking slut….” + “You’re an asshole…!” + “Fuck you! I love you!” + “You don’t know what love is! You’re a little child!” + “You’re cold bitch! Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?” + “Do not call me a cunt! + “I didn’t call you a cunt! I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!! + “Fuck you! You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!” +At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming. There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus. Then silence. Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall. + “I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!” + “Then how the fuck did you HIT ME! How can you not mean to hit someone? There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)” + “Oh that’s FUCKING great! You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other. We are too fucked up for this….) + By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown. Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics. Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door. Dean and I are frozen. + “She fuck some guy.” + I try not to move or show any signs. + “The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer. “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death. I hope his cock keeps you warm out there! I hope you know where he lives! I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT! Jesus Christ….” He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw. Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest. I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley. She didn’t go far. She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch. She is shaking like a leaf. + “What’s wrong with him Sil? Why is he doing this? I am good to him aren’t I? I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands) What the fuck is wrong with him? What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face) There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes) Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY! FUCK! (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why? Why? Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck! (arms up exasperated) Do you know what this is doing to me? I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” +And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs. I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down. He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch. Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle. Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again. Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want. +And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV. And Mike starts in. + “Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.) What did you do? Did you do this? I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do? How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer) Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room…. The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought) But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again…. You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written…. (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it? I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again) Oh god! How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed? How many times can you do this? Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM! And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory) Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me? She really hates me now doesn’t she? Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her… then I feel hate. I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…” +And he broke down into pure honest crying. Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought. Run. + + + + + +Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air. The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside. I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean. Halley and Mike were at each other all the time. The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks. It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign. Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes? Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes. I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply. And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all. Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Signs of the apocalypse. This is hardly the first collective suicide. It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air. But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat. +The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them. I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet. Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers. Marching marching marching. Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction…. Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life. His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed. Christ all the way. Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself. Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that? +By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt.... We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes. Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours. We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley? As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves. One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire. I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head. The couch was no longer safe. I kicked Dean and we darted out. We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver. We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use. If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away. +It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets. We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon. Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis. And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt. Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere. It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them. The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees. Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach. We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well. Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone. Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window. A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin. You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it? You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana. Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened. Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting. We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee. I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past. Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown. Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression. The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere. + Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses. All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants. The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation. The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing. Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs. Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new. The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all. + + “What do you want from me? I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again.... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? + “I want you… I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet… why can’t we just be happy? Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on? What are these things what the fuck is going on around here? When did this start?” + “What do you mean? What are you talk” + WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN? You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…” + “Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this? Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody? (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me) I got new for you they don’t embody shit! The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!” + “Why does this have to be about my friends? Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?” + “It has nothing to do with them…. Its you that I’m talking about. You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it. Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start? When they showed up! And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you. Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…” + Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… + “What the fuck are you talking about?” + “This indecision this fucking shit” + “My indecision? (Derisive laughter) My fucking indecision? And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else! Who is indecisive? It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling? Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!” +“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage…. Fuck me! Fuck you! I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack. No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….” + “No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something. Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it! (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel. Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….” + Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer… +“Oh great! Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!” + “Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed…. Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then? + “You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night. I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…” + And the door slammed. +Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future. He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow. He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk. He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting. He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend. Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle. He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks. I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time. I got up and went to take a leak around noon. There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable. I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise. So I asked her if she was all right. Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs. “Fine, is there anything I can get you?” A coat hanger…. She smiled weakly and I just started laughing. Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity. “You must be a friend of Michael’s?” Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature? He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do. Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now…. He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out…. +Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world. What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others. In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity. +He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp. This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…? +(clutching a glass) “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up. What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want? Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.” +“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.” Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further. Mike is menacing tonight too. I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep… +“You think so? Ya fuck you! You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all. I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm. Damn that hairy fucking little cunt. She’s too sexy. I get swallowed up.” +Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him. The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse. Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it. It is black and plugged into the wall. Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up. Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. . He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames. The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch. Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch. You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away. Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.... A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged. In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens. She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head. He smiles weakly at her. Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate. And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board. He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table. He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor. He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene. Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt. When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it. She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock. Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms. She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples. All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls… Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind. He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts. He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail. + “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you? How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light? Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?” Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over. +“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….” Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike. I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp. I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons. I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence. So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it…. +“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing. That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.” +And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds. And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go. +Dean beat the crap out of him. We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car. In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms. + |