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diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/gone1-7.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/gone1-7.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..39ada1a --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/gone1-7.txt @@ -0,0 +1,915 @@ + “I’m here to go…! I am ready damnit! Lets get the fuck out of here! + Andy is shouting at the talking head on the television screen who just reminded us that this is the space age. Andy has (wittingly or not) just echoed words written more than thirty years ago; I think something is wrong. I have always thought something is wrong. The entire potential of so called reality so outweighs the aajjjjjflk as to make the whole damn circus show seem as worthless as a used tampon, but in spite of that pessimism that lurks behind every thought, if you take Andy’s enthusiasm and mine and combine them you have something bigger you have created the only thing that has ever gotten anyone anywhere, the only energy that the mind feeds on is hope. I hope that I can see space, I hope that I can set foot everywhere at least once, I hope that I can reach out to my fellow humans in love, I hope that I can suck down all the wine of Europe, I hope that I can eat something latter tonight because I have eaten nothing all day long. I am man. that is all I know for sure, I have no future, there is nothing behind me, I am. I’ll leave it at that because I don’t know for sure that I am a man or a woman or a child or a walrus. Lets go. + “Let’s go to dinner.” + “Yes.” + “don’t worry Sil, I’ll take care of ya, I don’t mind I got money right now and there’s nothing I’d rather do than use it to keep you around a while longer… well maybe I might get rid of you later and go see if I can get a little cunt, but you got your writing to do anyhow…. Whutter u writing these days? More of that peculiar science-magic-realism stuff like you showed me last night? “ + “No. Actually I’m just writing down everything that happens to me.” And not change a damn word of it either I am thinking. If the story isn’t working than I’ll change myself, but not the words, the words must lie as they fall. They aren’t coming from me there coming through me and I finally understand that. The book will be one narrow slice from the book of man, my slice of man, the reckless, passionate, obscene, perverted, boisterous, obtuse human slice. I am no longer thinking of who will read it or even what it is about I am thinking only that it has become me, that all of it carries me on its back because I could not move without it, because I am happy to stay inert, because I want only to record that which I have seen and those whom I have known. No apologies given. + +Morning. Cold. Blanket. Cigarette. +I am staying in Andy’s closet. The rest of the rooms in the house are full. Andy lives in the master bedroom, which is really not much larger than the closet; down the hall on the left, in what used to be a sun room (back in the day when people had sun rooms) is Sara, who uses her masters degree in philosophy to wait tables in spiritual peace. Off the bathroom is Kobyoshi, the last true holy man. The first day I met him I knew it would be years before I could say anything true about him, if ever. He is a strange frail lad from Thailand with a mind that far outstretches the meager sphere that his body implies; last night Kobyoshi informed me that he is quitting his position as a research assistant at a nuclear fission lab to pursue a career in ballet. Fine. It’s a cheery little household. None of us are really doing anything. Outside a purple asylum of fog is retreating across the bay, dragging it’s feet and sulking all the way back to a potato patch near Stinson beach where its said to originate from. Inside the ringing telephone is a signal of something to do. +It’s cold still, morning is undercooked. I can feel the raw drafts that leak through the crack in Andy’s window. They come in waves wafting in and sinking down to the hardwood floors, swirling about, propelled like a drunken countess’s foul smelling fart. They seek me out, countesses, farts, drafts; they find me wherever I go. It creeps in and wraps me up in a dank smoky clamshell. I take another drag off my cigarette and crush it out in the ceramic bowl by my head. Lying back on the pillow I stare up at the frayed pant cuffs and the hastily tucked shirts that would probably be in better shape if we just threw them on the floor. I can hear Andy saying yes to something and I hear the phrase “ya I’ll get him up.” + +The phone will be Brent; he will want to meet us for breakfast; he knows it’s my favorite meal and he makes it a point to buy me one once or twice a week. He gets upset if I don’t show because for some reason he is convinced that I am the only one who understands him. I don’t understand him at all, but I love breakfast; eggs, waffles, bacon, pancakes, fruit platters, home fries, lox on bagels, ham, grits, huevos rancheros, bloody mary’s, mimosas, orange juice, french toast, cereal, count chocula, lucky charms, mangos, papayas, omelets… that’s all I need to understand Brent. I eat and listen, which in these thin hollow days passes for understanding. +Andy works at the 23 Bar on the top floor of the building real swanky joint. He get in about five or six in the morning and he is up again now at nine. He seems inhuman at times. There are times when I think he is genius and times when I think he is fool, in either case he is loud and alive. +Andy is going to dupe them he has told me a thousand times. It always ends in Costa Rica. Jungle laced beaches and vermilion palms, coconut milk for lunch in the ocean breezes, warm tropical breezes that blow in from the spice islands, Mandalay; maddening lush nations of hyperspacial teleological reality. Everything ends in Costa Rica where all time stops and we just stare with absolute certainty on cresting white caps of ocean surf peeling orange in the twilight and burning like outpost camps on the final frontier. Costa Rica —where we wake up from the nightmare of everything that isn’t, spliced clamshell blades glistening in the chirping twilight of cricket dreams—Costa Rica. +The door opens and I am besieged by a crazy bearded man with spinning clown eyes attached to the ends of stalks. Breakfast is served. Andy is the last living human among us and he is only here for a limited time —like various fast food specials, but more nourishing. Andy is the only one alive; he holds the drunken enthusiasm of those without hope. To be without hope means that there is no despairing, hope and despair are the same thing at different points in time —they exist only in tomorrowland. Without Hope everything proceeds in splendor and glory, one is left free to contemplate the details and minutia. +“So what did you think of Charlize?” +“Is that the one you were with last night?” +“Ya ya, come on man get up,” Andy kicks half hearted at my ribs and steps into the closet. “I mean she was no supermodel I realize that, but did you see that kind of vacant peaceful stare in her eyes? I was on top of her and I just got lost staring at her eyes; they were like obelisks —arabic mosques… temples or something —like you’re always running on about. Did you notice that twinge of religiosity about her? I think she was from Kansas, something weird about those people… so flat… so much sky… they always have an air of wonder that hangs in their eyes…. Have you seen my jacket? The one with fur lining?” + Andy is right over my head looking around the other side of the closet for his jacket. He’s hopping about trying not to step on me, rattling on about Charlize. She is going to come into his work again tonight, but that is not so good he informs me, it will blow his chances with the randomness that guides his sexual appetite. + “It’s a Friday see and I didn’t think about that when she said she was coming in. Fridays you don’t want anyone hanging around because all the cunts that only come out on weekends are there and they’re only there to get a little. They’d rather it be with the bartender in the backroom… saves them the trouble of going anywhere. They’re a special kind those girls that work hard all week they go a little bit farther in there spare time… Of course see maybe its good she’s coming in because I really do like her and this way I won’t go off chasing something pointless….. Do you remember that one a couple of weeks ago; Michelle I think her name was…? Turns out she had the herps —Ya how do like that, she calls me up and says she tested positive so I went and got tested before work last night… hey,” He stops looking for his jacket and stares down at me. He has a wistful look on his face, but his head is upside down and reminds me a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips; eyes that look out of order, screwed up and glinting earnestly at me. He has a T-shirt wrapped around his head like a turban; "you wouldn’t want to go with me to the clinic would you? I mean its one of those things… I know it doesn’t kill you or anything, and I don’t have any symptoms… I went mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t accuse me of giving it to her… you know how women get on things like that these days, but still would you mind? I’d rather have someone there if it does turn out bad for me….” + “Sure Andy, we’ll go after breakfast.” I am mildly touched that he is dragging me into the sordid affairs of his life, that he thinks so highly of me, but they are nevertheless his own sordid affairs. The shower is weak and barely wets your hair, but it’s hot and it washes off the sticky dampness of morning. By the time I get out my skin is pink and flushed, aboriginal corpse flesh. + +It just warming up as we climb the hill to the BART station. We walk up backwards so we can look off at the bay and watch the transformation near the top where for a moment we are above standing in a sea of cloud warmed by the crystal light of morning. The houses lining the street have window eyes that watch us and doors that yawn at the street. I nearly trip on the same can of beer that Andy tripped on yesterday, this time I kick it out in the middle of the street. We’re dizzy and getting vertigo from walking backwards, a freebie Andy calls it. Charlize is on his brain this morning, he hasn’t stopped talking about her yet. It a barrage of words and phrases and questions and twirls of logic and flight of fancy and then descending into the station the roar of the train drowns him out, but he never stops. He has caught some sort of virus, some sort of mad soul disease that has to get itself out in words, in panic because if he stops it might all disappear. “I know you don’t like the book or any of that, but there will be beautiful women, actresses and hangers on, it like a Hollywood type of thing only right here in the city. It’ll be fun man Charlize can bring a friend for you if you want, man you should see this girls friends… its catered and everything, open bar, you can smoke on the rooftop and look out at the whole city, its worth it just for that” +Food! Now that’s worth any amount of hell, I would trudge across stygian mountains of insipid shallowness, fly low over enemy territory, flak batteries firing pointless banal conversations if only there be a sandwich at the end of the line. It is wonderful thing to go to bed with a full belly. Last night I fell asleep with my arms clenched against my stomach to stop the gnawing pain. +I went upside down six month ago and in the time since I have distilled myself down to the core of existence; the primal urges, which turned out to be food, drink and sex. On top of that I plan to liberally heap some ideas and live them out too until I am living sex and living food and living ideas with the guttural hunger of the malnourished bloated belly of the victims of famine, victims of loss, of hunger, of pain, of cold gnawing lunacy clasping ice fingers around the Aqualung hearts of modern man. +And now a view too, I started to get curious to the point of asking what it was, but we jostled our way through the gates and joined the crowd. It’s just after ten when we climb the stairs to Embarcadero Street. Downtown San Francisco has a cold electrical buzz to it, a peculiar conglomeration of sounds that phase-cancel each other and bounce around in the echo chamber of buildings to create a hoarse faintly bucolic noise. It rattles your teeth if you focus on it —the combination of a millions of computers humming, ovens cooking, stoves frying, refrigerators opening, cars starting, neon open signs lighting up, and all the other cryptic roaring noises from fires of the human den. It assails you like the smog in Mexico City or the ocean of cabs in New York. Too many window-eyes in downtown peering in on you, you lose track of whose watching who or what. +I remember as a kid wanting to live here; I thought it was the greatest city in the world. Last night I decided that it’s like any other city in the world. Last night I decided to stop trying to write a book and instead to live one and in doing so shove all existence back up its own ass and set it off, a deafening roar, burning words blasting the whole thing to shreds. I decided to bring back Rabelias via the interstellar radio channel of the word behind which all is chaos and unintelligible gibberish, the rattling mouths of saints would fall open aghast and men would tear there succulent eyes from their sockets and feed on them, devouring the insanity that had created. There would be great golden orgies in the ancient temples of Atlantis and the fires at Almont would re-light after centuries of pitch black silence and out of the warm glow would come the hum of the word. I will set it all down with the Castagraf, not change a word of it because to blow creation it will have to rough hewn and wind blown like the world it will destroy and create and destroy again. Rabelias will drink imported beer and belch a million ideas to every one of mine and still hold still for one moment or we will seize upon you we will give in to the voices that besiege us to tear out the eyes and live forever in caves. But yes Rabelias will be there and he will smoke cigarettes with the angels as golden goblets of blood are served to the practitioners of the ancient faiths.… +So I decided not to write a book; I decided to write an abomination, all the false propositions held up by the teetering insanity of slander, bias, joy, awareness, idea, thought, faith, death and love can not contain one single shred of life. Words are only the beginning. Words make things, this is not a book this is a creation of things. I am working backward to catch one single moment unawares and hold it up to light and admire its reflection. To pull out of it the timelessness of eternal nows and stop the shivering voice of collective humanity groping pathetically in darkness. The entire country is in a state of rabble; the people moved through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Waterloo. Everywhere the lines are falling back, but it is not real war it’s a ghost war, there is no enemy, nothing to run from, only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forces us all to shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and ticket for money and money for food… and all the grand dreams, the Horatio Alger myths are nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill there own bellies. And everywhere the retreat continues, men racing in shadows hiding from everything from everyone who might steal their bread their wine their wives. They squirm like little bugs fearing heal boot of the old men who are themselves only slightly bigger and therefore more grotesque bugs. The scene could have come from Dante but it didn’t it came from life itself. I used to wait for it to change, for the orders to come in to halt the retreat, but one day I got tired of waiting and so I stopped. I stopped hoping things would be better tomorrow and realized that it didn’t matter one way or another. Rabelias did his smug ‘now you know’ lip curl that everyone hated him for, but life itself holds out nothing, asks nothing and gives nothing. Hitherto I had been waiting. Waiting for something to happen, but now I saw clearly that nothing was ever going to happen, nothing had ever happened and all of history was but the meandering account of sad little creatures burrowing there way through the earth searching for death. The waiting had driven me mad, I had clutched onto any straw of hope that came my way and they had all turned to dust in my hands. All imitations of life are false to it, all reflections cast back by art or art under any other name are only broken dreams, hope dashed on the rocks of failure careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home. And then as it faded out I found myself hovering over the sewage mess of the earth I saw little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who had given up the ghostly illusion of hope were congregating. I drifted down out of the clouds and settled myself near a camp where I could observe and record. + +Brent is waiting for us outside Café Claude, nervously smoking cigarettes and looking more like spectral ghost of machinery than a human being. He looks worse every time we see him, yet every time we see him he is doing better and better. The better his life gets the worse his body gets; today I can’t smell him, I can’t smell anything around him, he has sucked smell out of the room into a mysterious cavern. His hands have started shaking with excitement. His eyes glow piss yellow. His voice is pureed smooth with cool collectivity. Today he announces, opening the door as he says it, that he just landed a new ad campaign that’s going to earn him three thousand a week. +Nine hundred of that is addicted to heroin, an additional two thousand will go to pay rent on his swanky downtown loft that he insists of keeping. Brent would rather starve than live in the slum joints up the hill; his way of staying afloat in the all-consuming ocean of heroin is to elevate addiction to a form of art. He shoots with an old metal syringe won’t do it with a common ‘junky pick’ as he calls plastic syringes. He keeps it neatly in a cedarwood box with a hand carved mandala on the front. He ties off with a leather strap that he claims was tanned by an old Indian expressively for the purpose. When he shoots up its like watching a magician going through well rehearsed but cryptic methods, the spoon is real silver, the water distilled and filtered, the arm band tight and then bang, in it goes, and the needle is always removed and carefully placed back in the cedarwood box before he allows himself to nod off. +But then once he comes round again all is cut loose and he turns to a manic clawing about the room scrapping his fingernails down the rough edges of ideas, he has an enthusiasm and energy such as I have never seen in another junky. He paints like he shoots, everything is methodically laid out and then without warning the frenzy begins, he leaps about in front of the canvas chaotically stabbing out with a passion borne more of frustration than inspiration. It’s the passion of one who strives for something and no longer knows why. Brent is the sergeant giving orders who can’t understand why it is that he has to take the hill. For Brent everything is suspect, life is a paranoid adventure where everyone moves their heads on cake turners, swiveling and scheming for each others mutual demise without know why, without having motivation for anything other than sheer existence. His only recourse is the ritual it’s the only thing over which he can assert any control and he does it in such a way that gives him total control and then he steps back from himself and lets go. He claims he wasn’t raised Catholic. +The drinks are hardly on the table when Brent launches into how, despite his recent successes as the art director for an advertising firm, everything is more or less going to hell in a hand basket. I for the most part agree with him, but for wholly different reasons. Brent only invites us in order to have an audience for his misery, meanwhile breakfast brews like an oceanic storm. The tempest starts slowing, small lapping boat wakes at first, orange juice, a plate of fruit and cheese, I try not to woof it down because I am not accustomed to rich foods —richness, Brent claims, is merely ritualized discontent. Breakers roll into the jetty brings basil and tomato stuffed crepes oozing jack cheese. The walls swim in light, floating textures of papaya and palpate with sleek smooth fruit flesh. The other patrons begin to veer and swerve about, their food passes by rousing a selfish hunger, dessert carts cloud up the sky and signal the coming danger, and then finally the tsunami. A beautiful girl named Holly serves me french toast dusted with sugar and swimming in syrup. On a separate plate she dishes out scrambled eggs with dark crispy strips of bacon; a feast fit for kings and yet it is only me so I decide that I am king. I decree that all should eat and all shall eat with gusto and fever like hungry animals snarling in the blood soaked guts of sweat and sex; the animal appetites so long in slumber shall be woken afresh to stretch there muscles and devour the world in a single gulp, skewering art, chewing up delicacy and putting it back where it belongs in the churning stomach of slime and guts. I decree that Holly is lascivious and shall be rewarded for wanting the flesh, the warmth. The restaurant turns to a saturnalia and patrons falls into unadulterated orgies of stinking flesh smeared with sweat and cum; they regress into hair covered hunchbacks slobbering and drooling, crawling all over each other with snarling lust, all the hidden stresses of their lives turn them backward, relics of DNA that reek of perfumes, jewels, and other masks to cover the organic septic tank of their origins. By the end of the meal I am in pain again clutching my stomach and loosing my belt, the richness of the food swells on contemplation and we float, whisked by vaporous entrails back out into the street. +Because Brent bought breakfast I talk Andy into buying us a cup of coffee. We catch a cab to North Beach because Brent refuses to use public transportation —another method of rising out of the cesspool, the crème of the junky crop. +“I’m gonna check into a clinic as soon as I get this job finished because I’m tired of struggling to get junk when I should be enjoying my life. You know this is the first time I’ve left the house in three days? If I do go out its only over to Oakland to get some shit and then straight back, I’m sick of it, sick to death, but you can’t just quit you know… or at least I can’t. I need to be forced off the shit, weaned slowly…” +“You serious?” Andy retains great faith in Brent; I retain great faith in heroin. +“Ya. And I know I’ve said it before but this time I mean it, I gotta get off of this roller coaster and do something with my life.” +I laugh in his face, I just couldn’t help it, but he ignores me and continues on. “I want to travel see the world, see my painting hang in a gallery; I went to an opening about a week and half ago and it was terrible. Fucking terrible! Lacquered checks that was one of the pieces, just lacquered ordinary bank checks! What the fuck is that about?” +Brent has given me this very same spiel about quitting several times before. He has heroin and painting tied to the same hitching post of intervention. He is convinced that he only needs to find the right person to represent him, give him money or at the very least just believe in him and he will sell paintings or quit heroin or fly to the fucking moon if that strikes his fancy. He needs this mythological character to help him because he doesn’t believe in himself and he never has from what I can gather. He is always putting the final touches on the perfect piece, but it’s never done, we can’t see it until it is exactly as he wants it, as if the thing had no life beyond what he was capable of vesting it with, and indeed for that very reason his painting don’t have any life beyond him. Some of them are very good, but he won’t let them out of his sight. They aren’t even paintings anymore they were representations of his entire enormous bloated cosmology distilled into crystalline existence by mysterious forces of his own will. Brent should have been a priest, he was better suited for a life where nothing can ever possibly be experienced, where hope keeps you outside life, everything is constantly elsewhere, unreachable, only to be shouted at and begged for. He was a cur dog lapping at the crumbs fate had dealt him when all the while everything he ever wanted was sitting right on the other side of the door. It was torturous to listen to; the minute the cab stopped I slipped out like a neutrino. +We stop in at La Boheme, THE place for an artist to be seen in San Francisco. Brent loves the place because it's full of college students that look up to him and give him the feeling of having an audience, having a group of disciples. The kids are still all right, and years after the Who weighed in the appraisal, but they talk too much. They are drunk on their own voices and they don’t have anything to say yet, they haven’t lived yet to know one thing from the next they only dance like hopped up caffeine chipmunks or deranged marsupials lifting their hind legs to mark intellectual territories. In the corner back against the way is Satre and depression, up by the window looking out on the tables that line the sidewalk are the poets of divine light sucking up every lyric word of Ginsberg and Yeats; the only ones I can stand are the ones that work behind the counter and know the value of human kindness. Little groups divided and conquered before they knew there was a war going on; La Boheme is a trough urinal at a baseball stadium, people sit at booths and stand by tables peeing out their mouths. The neo-bohemian set is pissing all over themselves with extravagant warm streams of urine out of one and into the mouth of another where the recipient will swill it around for a day, maybe two, and then piss the same thing into the mouth of another. Recycling at its finest, but I only hate it because I outgrew it. There was a time when I pissed with the best of them, but now I just order a cup of coffee and head outside where the tourists sit. Walking to the door I smile at the sound of piss splashing, great Niagara’s cascading from the mouths of privilege, children of tomorrowland who mortgage the future for a bit of today. Children who can’t stop pissing out inane theories and ideas, principles and mottoes, quoting dead authors like their words where written solely for them to drink down. Drink rich and deep and then piss it out like a bulimic myna bird mimicking everything it hears, the voice is hollow detached, devoid of feeling. I find a corner table and wait for nothing. The kids are all right. +Out in the fields… the sun, the moon and the stars to keep shining, Brent will kick junk, the bohemian children will be flash pasteurize in the blinding white light of creation. The world will curdle like sour milk, buttermilk, sweet and sour strange beautiful new fungus will grow a slick slime on top of the curdle. Nothing and everything will join forces in celestial alchemy and produce —something. The world will escape the nightmare of history. James Joyce will come waltzing down the street with great crowd of children gathering behind him. Bugs Bunny, Rabelias, Harvey Milk, and Anwar Sadat will be sitting at the head of great float, bespeckled with roses and bearing a banner that reads: Come As You Are. Forget life; forget everything only come as you are. When there is no hope there is no despair, there is only now, no plans, no future, just now. And that is utterly more valuable than the despair of misguided hope. Despair exists only for those who are unhappy in the moment, those who live future bound or those that choke to death on the weighted words of the past. + Andy and Brent swing through the door bearing enormous cups of coffee and Faith, one of girls that works mornings at La Boheme and whom I am in love with. Her head curls back in slow rippling laughter with the jerkiness of stop-motion film, her nuclear blue eyes dance in sunshine when there is none, she breaths different air than the rest of us. She is missing nothing. She belongs to a hidden race of seekers, of living people dead to the world, those who take the body and eat. The rest of us do not know what she knows; we are looking still like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitches lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg. She is dancing in a netherworld dream with Joyce and the rest, ripe like a pomegranate, bursting forth pure cleansing light that washes over us, cleansing the urine out of our minds, the poisons from our bodies until all is love. Because all is love and it only takes Faith to show it. Love should never have been a verb, it is object of love, the noun, that initiates its action, that mysterious thing that is not an action at all but a moment, a fleeting feeling that draws us out of ourselves, beyond this world and the next. It is not Faith at all, it is me, everything is radiating out of me…. The Eucharist of flesh will lead the way out of the valley of the shadow of death to borrow from the ancients, and we will lie beside the oracle as Van Winkle beside his river and together we dream eternal. No more waiting, we are here to go… Faith… Sky…. Dizzying leaf patterns chaotically thrown up by Maples, Oaks, Birch…. An Italian family with a stroller…. Circling swooping gulls… the dull hum of the city… inorganic and intoxicating… without human passion it becomes all too metallic and dull… shimmering like a mirage in the heat of existence… Faith… breasts heaving with laughter… Faith… hair dancing on the strings of the ninth…. + +Later, after Brent leaves, Andy draws me aside and asks if I am still going with him to the clinic. I had forgotten entirely, we have to get rid of Faith; we make false excuses and head off in opposite directions and rendezvous on the other side of the block, all of which was Andy’s clever plan for giving Faith the slip. He’s in love with her too. Everyone is in love with Faith. It so happens that we meet in front of the American Express Travel Agency; the lush photograph of New York from the sky that hangs in the window temporarily freezes us both. The tag below it reads: only 399 roundtrip! +“Damn it man if I don’t have the herps lets head down to LA for the weekend, Kobyoshi’s got enough money to buy gas and my bus is running quite well. I bet you could talk him into going to see his family and then we’ll tag along…look up Dean and Ed? See what’s changed down there?” +“Absolutely nothing I would imagine…” +“Alright then lets go somewhere, anywhere, lets just get out of the damn city for while… doesn’t it bear down on you? Man I think I’m going to go mad sometimes when I look up and I can only see a tiny little sliver of sky. I get claustrophobic in these buildings, with all these damn people scurrying about like ants.” He pauses because we’re walking uphill and out of breath. “The thing is you have to have money to travel, you have to have leisure time, you have to get up and catch flights at hours of the day that I don’t see… you have to do all these things and then you go somewhere for like a week and then to top it all off the whole time you’re there wherever you go… it doesn’t really matter… every time you see a clock it reminds you that you have to leave. Do you get that? Man when I see a clock when I’m on vacation I get furious I remember throwing one out the window when I was in Mexico, it’s like they put ‘em there to make sure you won’t stay, to remind you that this is there paradise and you can enjoy it for a time but then… you gotta go gringo! Then home again back to the grind, only its worse then because you know that everything you loved about your vacation is still there going on the same as always without you being able to enjoy it.” We stare in silence at the picture of New York. “Of course if I do have the herpes I’m going to get monumentally depressed and jump out the window tomorrow night….” +“Isn’t it hard for a man to get herpes?” +“How the hell should I know, I mean they told us all that in health class I think, but when you’re seventeen you don’t listen to that crap —that’s what happens to adults, its not going to happen to us you know? Shit even if it did I wouldn’t have believed it back then, I mean here we are trying to discover this wonderful sweaty world of sex and they march right in the door and tell us its going to kill us? That shit used to piss me off, just one more way of still reinforcing the old Christian idea that sex is dirty. And then I have to sleep with the people who did listen and they have all these terrible neurotic beliefs about love and sex and they can’t understand how I might possibly want to just fuck because it feels good and I don’t need much motivation beyond that… how do you do it man you always seem to sleep with these wonderful liberated women that actually enjoy sex… you’re always getting the kinky ones, I envy you on that…. I might get laid more, but you’re record speaks of quality, real quality not drunken bravado or pointless casual sex. Sara and I were talking about that the other day… I think she’d like to get a piece of you; I think she’s tired of hearing the moaning and wondering what you do to provoke it. You should give her a lay man, she’s practically dying for it.” +We were at the door of the free clinic on Hyde. It was quite a scene —all the effeminate fags from the Castro district decked out in loud colors, a riot of magentas, oranges, sapphires, rainbows of happy homos getting free condoms marching out the door with a badge of -I Get Laid-plastered on there foreheads and accompanied by the sublime look that only the face of a horny male can radiate. I waited outside observing the gay community while Andy went in and got his results. Gays are like the Jews, they have been relegated to history's ghettos. They have found themselves in the dungheaps of humanity and carefully painstakingly rearranged the dung to form beautiful living communities. Fragile rickety alliances, one borne of blood the other of sexual preference, and both cultures have the ghetto sensibilities and lust for life that is lacking in the stuffed bellies of their oppressors. I wonder how long it will be before we have a gay president? I wonder if we have already had one and didn’t know it? I pity the first openly gay president; his lot will be a rough one, along with the first woman, the first black, the first Hispanic. In America if you aren’t a straight white male you are a freak from the get go, the whole thing is set up, even the ones who aren’t persecuting you want to know about “your people” or what its like to be gay or black… are your friends gay? Are your friends black? The Jews have been here for long enough that the daft ignorant Martha’s vineyard set that seems to be running things have about figured them out —its not tres chic to be Jewish anymore, sorry. But just about anything else… especially lesbians. From the scene around LA you would think that the vast majority of the population had just realized that lesbians existed. As the new creations, the cultural left turns begin to leave the pond and gain the notice of the so-called mainstream they are greeted on one side by hatred and on the other by incredulous fascination. Either way you turn you are no longer human, you’re lesbian, you’re black, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, you’re fat, you’re a vegesexual, and then if we can wrap our feeble minded idiocy around that…. Then in a hundred years or so we just might remember that you are first and foremost a human. Its enough to make one want to die or crawl back into the uterus and go for a second take… only a trial run you see… never realized we were on trial…. +Nietzsche talked and wrote a lot about the dead, the inhuman, the new philosophers he called them. A strange breed this those that turned there back on the so-called human values and proudly declared themselves in human. He believed that as time went on more and more would turn there backs and let the false pretense of the world die its horrid stinking death, and he was right, but he didn’t take into account the mutual growth of humanity. Humanity this loose leafed term through which all the pages of history are turned like that dream of idiots, humanity sprints through time in a straight line, the arrow launched by cupid that hit the apple in eve’s hand and sent it whirling to the far reaches of the galaxy. Beside, running parallel, but on a different set of track, the track of individuals, run the stream engines of Nietzsche's beliefs. All these artist of the future to which he spoke are dead to the world. The world won’t give them so much as a hasty acknowledgement, the world is still trying to figure out why some people like boys and some like girls, the world can not look itself in the mirror it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his own dead mothers bosom. The world rots on top of the dead god’s cunt. Head stuck to the primordial womb like imbeciles or children that suck their thumbs. Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do! Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories and sleep tight at night! Never never dare to question the underlying fundamentals shake up your field if you must but leave the essential framework of shithouse alone. And yet every real change, every real improvement to the lot of the uncommon common man has come from the mind of the marginalized minority; we crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly like industrious beavers we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built. The house that world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day, the beavers, the termites, the wood fungi, the decay always wins in the end. Children of the true warmth know that, they watch it, they live it, first they eat themselves out and then they turn their back and sinking out of sight, but they are not gone, no they are here —invisible. + +Andy did not have the herps. Faith came by the house around seven to take me to dinner. I was more than happy to ditch Andy’s party which it turned out was a wrap party for Francis Coppola’s new film On The Road. I always hated Kerouac’s Jock/Buddhist inanity and I definitely didn’t care to hang out with bloated egos dedicated to recreating that inanity. Faith was wearing tight black leather pants and a thin strapped sleeveless shirt that barely contained her breasts. I would have followed her gladly right across the Styx, but she only wanted Italian food and patio seating so we went to Luna and sat under the soft glow of heat lamps. It was an eerie little patio; the heat lamps burned the pea soup fog off so that the air was damp, but clear. About twenty feet up it dissolved into a misty whiteness that acted as a kind of raised outdoor ceiling. Bread and salad arrived without a word from either of us —the mark of great restaurant. When food is served without being requested there is a hint of what lies at your finger tips, it whets the appetite and opens up a world of edible delights that seems more enigmatic and inviting than the simple words of the menu. It wasn’t just bread either, it was flatbread fried and delicately coated with fine strips of lox and sprinkled with capers and sprigs of parsley. Nina insisted on a bottle of cabernet before anything else. I studied her face as she prattled on about the various wines her then boyfriend had introduced to her. She had a nose for wine, Faith, she hardly needed her boyfriends help, in fact it was Faith that had gotten me on the endless wine kick that left me in terrible standing with the average red-blooded, beer drinking males that I tend to have as friends. I remember the first night I met Faith or re-met her, since really I have known her forever. The first night I met her was in a bar down the street from my old place in LA; she was leaving for Paris the next morning —I have a history of meeting people just in time for them to disappear, but Faith didn’t disappear she came back and we became good friends. One night she showed up again, same bar, different night. It turned out she had been back for some time and was seeing a clothing designer who lived somewhere in a loft downtown, he was coming she wanted me to meet him. But then he stood her up and Faith started to stew. We sat at the bar and drank for a while and then she hatched this crazy plan to get back at the designer boyfriend… we ended up breaking into his loft and stealing two bottles of Merlot, Louis Felipe Edwards private reserve. We drove down the coast and up a hill overlooking the ocean where we sat in moonlight and looked at the twinkling lights of Laguna Beach. There was a little kissing maybe even some groping but it has faded into memory. I introduced her to Andy and they too became the best of friends so much so that when she found out we were all in San Francisco she came up herself. And now as she prattled about Cabernet and Merlot and Pinots and whatnot all the kissing and groping is definitely gone and there is only this strange lovable girl Faith, that is more beautiful than anyone I have ever gone to bed with, but I have no desire to go to bed with her. It sets me in a weird mood to spend time with Faith. She makes me question my value system and what I want… that is to say that I want her and yet I don’t want her and this leaves a sort of tension in the air that makes everything prickly and more alive than when I am with most others. That’s why I love her. +“What are you going to do with yourself Sil?” She has that look of concern in her eyes, it a look that says far more than the question itself. Faith knows me well enough to know that I can take care of myself, but she likes to know my plans. +“Dunno, no plan yet…” +“At least you left that awful ogre…” she laughs. She is referring to my ex-wife, Amy. It was only six months ago but already I have trouble remembering her face. Amy hated Faith. Women always hate women that they know are more attractive than them, so I stopped seeing Faith, but Faith had quietly waited in wings while Amy ran her course and now that she was gone Faith could finally gloat. It was a healthy gloat, “I told you… you run off with these girls and don’t talk to me for practically years… but you always come back to me.” Her face lit up with a kind of pride. “That’s why we don’t have sex… I love you too much to let you go getting possessive and jealous and whatever it is that you men turn into when you stick your little things into us….” She laughed again. +“We could always give it a shot… you know maybe test the theory…?” +“No.” She popped a stray caper in her mouth and smiled sarcastically. +“Okay. But I still think we could have some great sex….” +“I don’t doubt that, but I don’t need great sex as much as I need great friends. Besides,” she cracked that mischievous smile again; “your cock doesn’t have dual speed settings and a clit massager….” +“You don’t know that for sure….” +“Uh huh… call it an educated guess… what do you think of the wine” +“Yes the wine… its good…” +“Stop it… I am wearing clothes you know… +“Yes it’s a true tragedy…” +“Sil you’re starting to annoy me… haven’t you had any sex lately?” +“Ya friend of Andy’s… she wasn’t very good though.” +“What do you mean?” +“I don’t know… some people have an enthusiasm for sex and others don’t you know? Well she didn’t” +“Too bad.” +“Ya” +Dinner swings through, Linguini with clams, more bread, more wine, and more wine more wine. Faith won’t stop talking about this new guy, though I never caught his name. It doesn’t bother me though I am swimming in wine, dark crimson waves, coasting down to the tough where I lean my chair back and slouch into a comfortable relaxed position. The sea splendor lies at my feet, the candles, the little crystal salt and pepper shakers; the lupines in the rusted water can vase on the rock patio wall. Everything is exactly as it should be, Faith’s voice is a canary flitting gaily from branch to branch every thing unfolds with a peculiar splendor that comes from a kind of hyperawareness as if time itself slowed down to let us catch a glimpse of the timeless point toward which we strive. It would not surprise me if Faith took off her clothing and lay back on the table for me to ravish and ravish it I would with preternatural desires frog-leaping off the spring boards of clamshells which are circled on her naked smooth stomach. +Instead Faith orders another bottle of wine; “Can I ask you a question?” +“Sure.” +“Umm well this might sound kind of weird but I need some help here…. Have you ever not been able to, you know, get a boner?” +The way she said boner made me laugh, such a strange way of putting it, a bone in my prick, a skeletal pile driver, “A boner huh?” +“Well, whatever a hard on, you know what I mean.” +“He he he, yes I do, as a matter of fact… nevermind… Umm, well that’s depends how you define things…. There have been times when I was so drunk I had the good sense not to try having sex….” +“No I mean not drunk or anything… you just couldn’t get it up….” +“Faith I’m only twenty seven… ask me again in twenty years… why?” +“I dunno the other night we were fooling around and I tried to go down on him and it wouldn’t get hard… I mean I didn’t want to have sex or anything, I just wanted to go down on him. I don’t know if it’s me? Or it’s just something that happens sometimes to guys. Am I doing something wrong?” +“I wouldn’t know obviously… um how old is this guy?” +“Thirty eight.” +“Oh shit. God please let me be able to get it up… That’s gotta be nightmare… I mean what if it just stopped working one day? I wonder about that sometimes. I mean I hear these sorts of stories or read about them in magazines and such, but it’s a problem I can’t relate to… yet. It must be weird I mean if you were to just whisper a few words in my ear I could fuck you right here on this table… they tell me that I am well past my sexual peak, but I don’t see it. I think it mainly happens to men whose wives get fat, whose jobs are stressful you know factors I don’t have in my life….” +“But what if it’s me?” +“Ya so? What do you do when you’re down there?” +“Uh I don’t know the usual I guess…” +“The usual what the fuck is the usual? Does he just march up and say ‘I’ll have the usual?’” +(Laughing) “No…. you know I lick …and nibble …and suck and… I don’t know….” +“The secret is all in the hands.” +“The hands?” +“Yes the right combination of hands and mouth and saliva, saliva is key… you have to be messy about it. There's a little licking a little sucking then the hands… and don’t forget we have balls… women seem to forget that we have balls. Give em a lick or two… real gentle there though otherwise it hurts…. Jesus I’m turning myself on.” +“I do all that stuff… that’s the usual isn’t it, I mean I’ve seen a few pornos and girls are always talking about that shit…” +“Right, well, then its him… maybe he had an off night….” +After dinner we caught a cab over to Sausalito and walked around for a while. For some reason Faith got it into her head that we had to go into a paint your own pottery store and, well, paint some pottery. Some sort of artifact to remind us of this moment. She was very into that sort of thing, always saving wine bottles, picking up rocks at the beach, chopsticks from Chinese food we shared during the black out two months ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if she saved condoms from her ex boyfriends. We went to Color Me Mine because Ed’s father owns it. I chose a giant ashtray and swabbed it dully in mottled gray paint. Faith went in for a rice bowl and was adorning it with fairly intricate patterns of astrological symbols and such. +“I got a tarot reading the other day… the woman told me all about my relationship with Garret; it was kind of creepy… she was pretty accurate. She also said I would get a role in a film soon and the next day my friend Brian called and wants me to do his student film….” +“You think all that happened because of the astrologer?” +“I am a very religious person, you know that.’ +“Ya I know, its just refreshing, I forgot about it. Everyone I know is so cynical about things like that, we’ve all chased down the mystery for so long its not a mystery anymore. Its good the hear someone speak with a little Faith in their voice. No pun there." +“None taken. But thank you.” +“It was telling Andy the other day that I think intelligence has become synonymous with cynical… some sort of legacy of Freud and Nietschze. It might be that all these new fangled explanations of the world, like psychology or science in general are easier to understand than something that requires faith, but they loose something… you know? I think to be completely convinced of something —even if you find yourself in disbelief years later— is one of life supreme joys. I love to fall. Love to be taken in…it doesn’t matter if it’s the latest theory of physics or the ornate world of new girlfriend... the thing is never that important it’s the feeling I get from falling in completely and being immersed and saturated with belief. Fantastic!” +“I know. That’s why I didn’t get mad at you for ignoring me for two years... when you were with Amy, I knew that you didn’t love her you loved the idea of her… I knew you would be back someday.” She smiled at me. It was a smile of supreme happiness of one who was falling… it was beautiful to look at, floated there in the air, not teeth not gums not flesh and blood, but some understanding of the universe that came from the fall. The fall of man. The redemption of being human. I painted a whale on the bottom of the ashtray as an after thought. +Walking home we debated whether or not modeling made one stupid and whether or not Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie would produce the ultimate manifestation of DNA or whether the forces of nature would intervene and create a monster. And of course the tragedy inherent in the fact that we would never get to know. Faith kissed me at her steps and went inside. I sat down to smoke a cigarette, but her new beau pulled up so I slipped off. I didn’t want him to get any wrong ideas about the situation. As I left I tried to throw a little sexual energy his way, to maybe send it across invisible wires that run between all of us. I stayed up for while smoking under the cover of inky still darkness watching the blue gray rings of smoke drift about in the still air. + + + + +2 +The hard working faceless men assemble morning to perfection. The work feverishly all night long hauling in raw materials from the future and set about building now. Now they are hard at work on now they are hard at work on now they are hard at work on. Strange Loop. A new manicure of rain adorns the streets and houses everything is freshly washed. Brent doesn’t call for breakfast anymore, he is in jail. This morning, before he went to go see him, Andy told me to be on edge, be aware he said… Sara is getting tired of teasing, she want to know if she can cash in her chips he says… make me into some sort of sexual servant +Sara is standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the kitchen onto the patch of yard behind the house. She is wearing a purple satin robe with ochre trim, her leg is propped up on a chair and she sways with the stereo, with Mile’s screaming horn. Her flesh is milky white against the dark robe and, as she turns back around toward me, the light catches the vee of her legs and frames it in purple majesty. I can see momentarily through the robe, the finest silhouette in which hides the delicate forest of gnarled hair sparkling purple light right in my eye. She walks back to the stove and scraps at the eggs; she swings her ass to the music, but only for my benefit. Do not worry Sara. I have decided that I must have you, but it must be the right moment. Be on edge; be aware! I am letting you grow inside me Sara I am incubating you for a little while longer so that when you hatch it will be like stepping into a cage with lions, no club, no gun, only fear and throbbing. +She looks nubile standing at the stove, one hand on the frying pan, the other scratching absently at her thigh. She is naked unaware. She turns around with the skillet and gently piles over-cooked eggs onto my plate. Smiling at me, “what?” she says. Nothing Sara, nothing at all. I am eating you while you sit there and smile. I am watching you watch me. I am seeing what you see. I feeling your own touch against your own skin when you masturbate in the afternoons. When you think that I am hard at work on this book. When I sit at the machine I can hear you stirring awake. I can see you smile to yourself as you stroke your cunt slow and soft. The rain swept wind that comes in the window and circles your room is watching you too. We are both watching you, we are both running our hands over your body as you pull, tweak and tug at your clit. We are the warmth of your cunt, the slick coating of desire that you rinse off in the shower. +There is daytime drama playing out in this house. Kobyoshi deserted us for New York, but he told me I was welcome whenever I wanted. I smiled and took his room. I have been working hard at the book that is not a book; it is bloated with telegraphs from faraway lands. I sit in my room all day receiving and dispatching cryptic telegrams. A monumental structure begins to take shape. I have nearly constructed the sponge that will absorb everything, the sponge that will erase the world and scrub it free of vermin and lice. Soon San Francisco will be gone it will be absorbed into infinity and the three of us will stand on the skeletal shores of napalm seas and light our cigarettes with simmering coals that line the charcoal beach. +Andy and Sara both work nights and sleep all day so I have peace and quiet in which to work, but I hear Sara moaning every afternoon about three and then I know to wrap up whatever I am doing because that new drama that is Sara and me will begin again. Andy mostly just watches; he is happily dating Charlize and for the first time in his life seems to have lost interest in pointless numerical sex, the sex of notches. I gave Charlize a copy of 100 days of Sodom behind his back and told her that Andy wanted to explore domination and submission but didn’t have the courage to bring it up for fear she would leave him. He hasn’t said anything, but I notice that he never takes off his shirt in front of us anymore. +Every afternoon the three of us crack a bottle of wine and sit in the kitchen, eat breakfast, drink and talk. Sara is like me; everything anyone says only reminds her of something she has read. She makes me glad that I was able to drop out of college before I got in as deep as she did. There is no green sapling life in her, it’s buried under the words of the past before it ever has a chance to come out and live in the sun. She will get herself out of it eventually, the branches break through in the end for most everyone; her obsession with getting me in bed is already making her cheeks glow a little. As much as she hates her overly analytical self she is an artist with it. Her words tear out and rip the room to shreds. +“Why do you think differently when you drink? And more importantly how do we know that what comes out when you’re drunk isn’t the real you? And if it is then why aren’t we drunk all the time?” she would ask. How is one to answer such a question? It rhetorical of course, she knows Andy and I aren’t going to respond, its just a launch pad and then off she goes, rocketing into the space of her own carefully constructed latticework of belief. It’s a strange little world she wants to build; everything is constantly subject to the harshest of criticisms and the most obsessive of critiques. She could talk for hours if we didn’t add our two cents worth of nonsense designed to quite things down a bit, to bring her down for minute or two. Sometimes she will catch herself and stop; she will smile and apologize as if she had offended someone unseen by carrying on. It was terrible to listen to sometimes, but I loved it, it was fascinating to watch. The wine and the fact that she was too brilliant to match wits with and get out alive quaffed any criticisms I might have had. I gave up on philosophy for the simple reason that it failed to accurately resonate with the world of existence. For me the chaotic registers of the poets and novelists captured the illusive passion of reality far better in the garbled code of metaphor and analytic insights of the philosopher. I would write her silently while she talked; her body spoke its own language when she was lost out there in the ephemeral universe of ideas and words. Sara awakened in me some crude and primordial translator that read body language as if it were words. I learned how to interact with her by responding to various unspoken body movements and discovered to my amazement that it is easy to convey information without opening your mouth. Sara Sara come down I would sing… come down from your heights… the body is electric… come down… +man leaning on fence…terra cotta… firma…smell of perfume… egg and bacon grease on her hands… floral shampoo lingering in the hair… a leg shifts… the card house crumbles…sing humans… Sara come down…. + +As I started to say, this morning everything is freshly constructed and virgin. I leave Sara to incubate for a while longer and go for a walk. One of my oldest memories is of walking down a trail in a forest somewhere. I am singing a song as I walk, but I am not really walking, I am on my dad’s shoulders and I am singing a song with him and my mother. We are hiking down a mountain somewhere, but I can’t see the forest; I can’t hear the song or see my parents. I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all. The song is right there on the edge of the memory, it has been all morning, but I can’t bring it in and hold it for long enough to catch it. +Not having anywhere particular to go, I head for the one thing that is visible everywhere on this side of town —Coit Tower. Coit Tower is a beautiful spot, from the proud phallic heights I can see all of the city teeming with people, food, desire, dreams, music, sex. San Francisco is full of sex. It marches down the street in great parades, it sneaks into the back stalls of bar bathrooms, it tugs at its clothes in alleys, it gives discreet blowjobs in movie theatres; fitting then that it should have a giant concrete cock looking over it. +The trip across town from Ashbury where the house is through the mission district, across Little Italy and up Coit Hill is a sociological tour. The Mission District has many of the landmark houses that you have seen of San Francisco, the fronts are colorful and happy, but is artificial and only looks colorful and happy in postcards. In reality they are at the catacombs of the city, the doldrums south of the equator. They are home to the middle class city dweller, an aging variety of Consumerus Americanus, usually grouped with the yuppies but wrongly so. These peculiar neighborhoods are the breeding ground of the suburbs. These are in fact why there are suburbs. The Mission is set back from downtown and is a primarily residential neighborhood steeped in the lukewarm water of mediocrity. It is here that librarians, office managers, public officials and otherwise uneventful people arise from, and it is here that the whole suburban utopia of better newer shinier gadgets was born. But this is the first wave, here the old gadgets stick out and show the datedness of their owners. Here you can tell a residents age by the color and type material that covers their windows. The first wave is reaching their fifties, they were overrun, can no longer keep up, they were the ones trampled down on the battlefield of progress, they did not win, they failed even to retreat, they lie where they fall waiting for stretcher bearers to carry them off to the morgue. They have cellular when they should have digital, they had beta when they should have waited for VHS, and they got the eighttrack player installed in their car about a month before the advent of the cassette. This post war generation turns around in profound confusion, they are assaulted on all sides by constant change, they have felt out of control ever since the first greaser put a comb in his pocket and took one of their wives behind the college stadium and showed her what sex should be like. The wanted to discover the world and instead they discovered the world of gadgets. Now they wander about like zombies, preoccupied with the future, but too cautious to gamble on it; their children are gone, there is no laughter in their houses anymore. They are always going somewhere, doing something when all the while a little voice is driving them mad whispering sweet perfumed fables in their ear like: it is all nothing…. They never say hi or wave like gays do further down in Castro, they don’t try to hustle you like the Hispanics and blacks downtown. There are no homeless people in this neighborhood, better to lie in a rat infested dumpster downtown than to lie here. Makes you nervous, a neighborhood where people won’t sleep on the streets, whether its for fear of the cops or the thugs makes no difference they’re both in the same league. The denizens of the Mission District all walk with there eyes glued to the ground if they are alone or glued to the person they are with, the world slips by unnoticed by them, they are creatures of habit, serial killers never plague them, they are too easy. +Little Italy by contrast is bursting with life and hidden treasures. Shop fronts are still in the neighborhood instead of relegated to a separate block. There is the common bond of blood flowing in the streets, the area is shrinking but it needs to. It needs to regroup itself because it was in danger of becoming just more suburbia. Suburbia is isolation; here everything is thrown together in a big messy smelly, beautiful shit sty. The streets are littered and the children play with garbage, but it has vitality, even the trash is used. Here people smile at me, nod, even say hello. Many of them are recent immigrants transplanted from Italy and many from new York where Little Italy is all but gone, overrun as is happening here, by Chinatown. Down here the world is still moving and changing, what is now covered in green white and red may next year be adorned with dragons and Chinese scripts. Nothing is certain and you see it in the faces of the people, they are aware, alive because they have to be, because if they lull themselves they will be over run. But they are not paranoid they are acceptant of their fate, they are in fact consigned to it, its part of there culture to be overrun and yet still find ways to carry on. Europe has overrun and survived itself more times the we will ever likely get, it has added extra chromosomes to the souls of its people, they have a resilient spirit that pulls up beauty even in the midst of death. +I continue up the side of Coit Hill into the million dollar homes that have views all the way out to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean. Here are the successes of consumerism, commercial artists, computer experts, actors, old money houses, not the super elite, but elite anyway. This is the neighborhood of forbidden pleasures, behind drawn curtains there is sex and drugs, cocaine and beautiful women, scholars of the occult, witches, politicians, starlets, limousines. At the end of the street I start up the steps that lead to Coit tower. Here and there are little cottage homes tucked in the corners where artists and shop owners still live an unfettered existence. About half way up I stop to admire a Japanese garden of carefully manicured bonsai trees, there is a bubbling fountain at the far end. It has a peaceful midday stillness to it. I turn around to head up again, but I stop and listen. I hear the muted grunting of what sounds like a television set playing pornography. I snap my head to the side and listen because sex sounds move at a frequency to which I am hyperaware, it moves in waves like any other, but sex has another more primordial quality, just beyond the edge of conscious hearing. It makes you turn your head involuntarily, like a traffic accident or a machine gun at the family reunion in Kansas. +I follow the sound climbing up the hill instead of using the path, about half way from where I left the steps to the top, I turn around and see a couple fucking doggie style in there couch in plain view of all the world, except that all the world is hidden by trees. I light a cigarette and watch them go at with wild animal abandon. She is not like most rich women I have been with whom are so disinclined toward any sort of dirtiness be it on the linens or during sex. These two have taken Woody Allen to heart; sex is only dirty when you do it right. She comes before I am halfway through my cigarette and sits down on the couch to suck him off. It comes as electrostatic charge this feeling of peeking into the lives others, of watching them harmlessly. Her warm mouth is drawing him out and I am leaving, not wanting to see the end of the show, preferring to leave it eternally occurring in memory like a loop of film flapping in an empty theatre. +Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and toned the past with palate of the present. Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory. The images overlay each other like a photomontage. I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces … lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper… years ago you would understand… she was standing right next to me and then...a warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken.” It though me out in the middle of foreign chaos; it threw me into a different world, in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor … the shock of fried chicken. Everything became focused up into the sun; it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid. Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities. +It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move. It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you. I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there. She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid. + But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.” He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth. He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there. +I crush out the cigarette and decide to head downtown and catch the subway rather than walk all the way back. Its already dark and a lazy nighttime storm is drifting in from the ocean. Jostling through the crowds of Jackson street brings back tapeloops of Boston —Harvard square—fall—the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street. Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm. Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue. Her flesh is hard and metallurgic turning brittle under my hands, the life is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers of life up celestial heights of orgasm, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, the German philosophers sitting like a nineteen ten bankers awaiting the thief. The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired associations to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life. Cool hard water distilled in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a limp rag and I am cast down a tube a tunnel endlessly falling, clattering of the walls building speed, a vacuum with no terminal velocity I want to reach out for limbs for human hands to catch me…. I scream and there is no sound save the rush of air passing my ears and finally I settle in the twinkling light still shining from above and I relax to the falling sensation no longer concerned surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim… the taxi’s in times square… Truman Capote… An auburn haired girl I liked in seventh grade… tumbling off great vistas. + + +I ran out of money some time ago and I have been spending most of the days wandering around trying to make friends and bum a meal or two. I was downtown panhandling and then trying to talk my way into free meal with a girl from the 23 Club, Sabrina. She was beautiful and I hated asking her for anything. I stared out the window into space when a familiar blur walked through my field of vision. She was thinner, had straight blond hair rather than curly red, and she had been in the sun too much, but she was definitely my high school love. You never forget the first, you never get another like that and Audrey was the one. At least for while and then I met another, the one and even then only until I met the next the one. I watched her for a minute, looked back across the table at Sabrina, Andy’s waitress friend, her lips were moist, and I bolted. I ran out the door and chased Audrey up the steps. I slowed for a minute to watch her, I caught her at the door and spun her around and kissed her and jumped back. She screamed. And then we had lunch. She told me about her job, she was swimming with brine, she had gotten married. I fought back all my urges to follow her to the bathroom…. She quizzed me on my job, uh don’t have one, where are you staying? Andy Driesen’s closet. Oh my god. What? You live in a closet? Ya kind of ironic huh? San Francisco too? Did you finish school? Nope. Are you going back? Nope. So what are you doing with yourself? Are you still writing a book? Still? No. +As I ate I ran my eyes around her, over her down her and I tried to go right through, but that takes proximity and I was far far away. When I knew her Audrey was a teenager, swarming and slightly naïve, her family made fun of her because she thought islands floated… until she was thirteen. She had her own internal rhythm that produced its own sort of logic, but from the looks of things she had learned the truth about it all. Islands are pushed up from the sea Audrey, but I always liked your vision better than reality, reality being as it is… flexible. But I could tell from her questions that I had bent a little more, a little farther than Audrey, but we always knew that’s how it would be. “We had a good time didn’t we?” +For one strange timeless moment crossing the Golden Gate Bridge when she said that and then stared into my eyes I dropped through the rabbit whole and went back to wonderland. Orisis was there, he was in the car, the third part, where ever two or more are gathered in my name… which is what is never… There was this sycamore tree in the back of their yard, Audrey’s bedroom was on the second floor and in the afternoons on the weekdays, before her parents came home from work we used to lie naked and I would stare up out her window at the orange glow and those leaves, the way those gentle spiked leaves moved like fluttering octopus arms clawing at the sky. I remembered lying there remembering… that I would be here now. I remember the brown wood slated patio cover and the debris of dead leaves that gathered on it and blew all over the yard in windstorms of fall. I remember the curtain blowing in the hot dry afternoon in August. We had just come back from the beach; we arrived ahead of her family and went at it before they came home. And I silence you shall hear every thing, and the wind blew, the hot dry Santa Ana wind coming down out of the desert and pushing the salt breezes far out to sea. We dried up and chapped. Cracked and bled. +Her father was quite a man too. Probably as much responsible for my current world as she was. He was a minister, but I never held it against him that sort of thing can happen to the best of us. Like so many in the neighborhood of my youth I was sent off the church at a young age. The church was undergoing renovations so I spent a good portion of my time there ditching Sunday school class and running through the debris and catacombs of the construction site. It was heaven for fifth grader…. Eventually the dark underground tunnels became cinderblock hallways with red velvet carpeting and contained things like choir rehearsal rooms or storage closets for chairs and bibles. Heaven was remodeled into gaudy ugly hell. But by the time the new chapel was done and the once mysterious tunnels were reduced to a bad parody of the pentagon I was in Jr. high and I had a new interest in church —girls. If all it took to get the girls was a little praying, singing some goofy songs and enduring the mindless chattering of uninspired thirty-something yuppies on a do-good trip (ministers they called themselves), then so be it. By high school we were all more anxious to get off in the woods at summer camp than we were in any strange white-haired old man and his inane set of rules. God and his rules sounded as stupid then as they do today. As for philosophies on life you could read them in the library if you really wanted to know what some dead guys thought about life. I was a strange child and for some reason I did want to know so I read them, but they meant nothing to me. My only enjoyment out of them was the response their names got at church on Sunday’s. Say “Nietzsche” or “Leary” to the ministers and you were in bigger trouble than playing Judas Priest in your room at summer camp. Nietzsche worked them into more a frenzied state then the Bible ever did and of course that only served to make me more curious. In a contrarian way the church educated me. +By the end of high school I had my first real girlfriend —Audrey. We met at church camp; she was from a church nearby and had come up to the mountain camp the same week I did. I met her because she was dating my best friend, but that is a whole other narrative. It lasted until I dropped out of college and moved away. + All too predictably I had fallen for a preacher’s daughter. Yes…the rebellious boy seduces the preacher’s daughter and leads her into a life of sin, it wasn’t until later that I felt robbed, like I had been living out a tired cultural myth, suburban legend, but contrary to the way the story usually runs, her father liked me. Her father, Steven, was a different sort of man than the ministers at my church; Steven made me realize that there is a difference between ministers and saints. In my experience ministers were more like lawyers, intermediaries between you and god; they argued god’s case and you decided for yourself —gotta have faith my boy! This coming from men who had obviously never given a thought to much more than their paycheck and the eventual reward of a shining happy afterlife. Their nasal whining and paunch cheeks reeked of comfort and boredom; they were as lifeless as the chalk dust that floated down from the black board where they listed the things we were not to do. Ministers are somnambulists stumbling dully and quietly through life doing the bidding of words written two thousand years ago, their souls were putrid like rotten milk, coagulated like dried blood and mummified while still alive. +Steven was nothing of the sort; he had the title of minister, but he wasn’t one, he was a saint. Steven glowed like a sunset when he spoke of god. He had enthusiasm for life and wanted to live drunkenly serenely aware. Steven was alive; there was enthusiasm coursing though his veins leaking out when he spoke, it was mist in air that held stillness and serenity like the spray beneath a waterfall. He had the sensibilities of a man with an inquisitive and alert mind —an aware mind. A mind that that was aware of the ambiguities and subtleties of life, a mind that did not insist on taking a rigid, brittle grid of belief and forcing it to fit over a convoluted serpentine existence. +Steven never spoke of god as an anthropomorphic figurehead with a long index finger extended toward the earth, he spoke of god as ‘the other.’ “The part of life, which we cannot understand, is god, ” he said. God the unnamable one writer called it; god of chaos, of the burnished virile thing called life —now that is something a twenty-year-old with a sex drive can relate to. And Stevenell didn’t just quote the Bible, he could move from the Dhammapada to Tolstoy, to Emerson, to Job, and back around through Nietzsche, Kirkagaard, Lewis, Joyce…. Steven was a scholar in the oldest, most living sense of the word, but he didn’t just talk philosophies he sang them, great hymns dropped out of his mouth like transmorphing deities bathed in iridescence (to borrow Terence’s imagery). He lived and breathed a rhythm full of vitality, understanding, and above all else —openness. He had all the markings of a saint… that is, one who knows god. +Steven and I only actually had a couple of conversation on the subject of life, but I always watched and listened when he was around because you learn far more that way than to just ask questions and get answers. I was an inquisitive youth and spent much of my time in the world of books, but not just any books; I read the ones that you weren’t supposed to read, heretical texts, pornographic treatises, transcendental meditations, books that called into question not just God or values but the very nature of the universe and struggle to understand the human experience. By the time my senior prom rolled around I was done with the trite simplistic world of Christianity. Part of it was due to a book I read on brainwashing, which made me, realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding me was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told. The US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson, and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world use the same tactics. I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology. I mentioned that to Steven once and he mentioned a strange system of belief that he alternately called transcendentalism and gnosis. Steven inadvertently sent down a path that led here, to the steps, to the very diner I sit in waiting for Dean. He introduced me to the convoluted world of the unknown. There are two types of things, those known and those unknown (to paraphrase); once I got a taste of the unknown I lost all interest in the known. +Steven never had any answers, only more questions. Had I read Emerson? Whitman? Steven defined gnosis as direct personal confrontation with god or the unnamable or the Logos or subconscious or whatever you wanted to call it. The important thing was not what you named it but rather what you got from it —your interaction, the way you lived. This philosophy, unlike most I had heard, held that the self —the individual— already had the answers to all your questions… it was only a matter of confronting them. He dropped some names I knew as the so-called transcendentalists who had occupied a scant afternoon in my senior English class. +I remember standing uncomfortably in the doorway while Mrs. Williams read in her nightgown and Steven dug through his desk drawers looking for this tape. I remember him ranting on in that slightly wild-eyed fashion of his about how brilliant Terence McKenna was; “he has a clarity to his mind that is just unbelievable. It’s in the very way he speaks his voice carries you off into your imagination…” Steven paused to stare into space for a moment. “And then you start to hear what he is saying… and it’s this incredible message of hope and inspiration. You see he is mainly interest in brain transformation and exploring altered state of consciousness….” The poetics of his praise sticks out in contrast to the discomfort I felt at invading their personal space. Eventually he found the tape and handed it to me; he smiled and said for me to listen to it for a few days and then give it back. +Then he closed the door and went to bed. I remember driving home down the 405 listening to a magical leprechaun voice warbling excitedly and then rhythmically as if drumming; it would rise to a crescendo, a flourish and then back to the gentle elf that seemed in control of the whole thing. It was better than most music I had heard. That was Steven. That was Audrey. This was once just a thought in an architect’s head. Suspension wires, wink and smile. +And then Audrey smiled and we pulled off the bridge and then nothing more was said, but she went too, I could see it in her eyes, we use that phrase a lot and most of the time we don’t even know what we mean by it, but it happens. She had insisted on putting me up at her house, so I could write she said. She failed to realize that in order to write you have to be able to live, but I figured free food was nothing to scoff at. I went along for the ride. Audrey had gone and married a Canadian farmboy who used to play hockey and now plays golf and he talked a lot about being a sports newscaster. It was a different life than what I had in the city, they were in the rather ritzy suburbs of Marin, a nice house tucked back in the near forest of the hills. It was the suburbs to be sure, but a suburb that was not artificially planted which made it livable even attractive sometimes. They ate three square meals a day and went work like the good little citizens that they were. I sat around all day smoking cigarette and typing in their garage because neither of them could stand smoking. It was a blissful week of insanity, I invited Andy out for dinner one night, he and Audrey knew each other and I thought it would be fun, but Andy and I together proved not to be compatible. +That night on the way back into the city Andy told me there was a letter from Dean. When we got home we opened it and I read it out loud to him. It was more the ranting of a madman than a letter proper. Dean was in the throws of an existentialist dilemma, he had no enthusiasm left in him. He was coming up he said for a little R and R, to take his mind off it. He was arriving at the Oakland station in six hours and expected us to meet him at the all night diner on Telegraph and Broadway. He sounded like he had finally lost his marbles completely living alone in LA. We got up the next morning and talked it over on the way across the bay. Andy figured he had met someone; I put five on genuine insanity. +Dean shows up at the corner of telegraph and Broadway, two o’clock, just like he said he would. He is wearing his trademark pin striped suit and slightly goofy fedora. I appreciated what he was trying do, but a man can’t where a fedora until he’s over thirty —it just doesn’t work. His hair is greased back like it’s 1956 and he is slightly ahead of his time. Enemy of the people. We did a round of hugs and dove in the car. None of us had any desire to be in Berkeley, it was just a landmark we all knew. Dean had never been to San Fran so we take him in on the Oakland and then through town, over the Golden Gate and back. In the car Andy starts telling Dean the same story he told me on the subway ride this morning: he is going to Costa Rica. He’s got job all lined up working on a cruise ship, free room and board two weeks a month, the rest he spends in hotels, which are cheap he says. He does the same thing to Dean, he wants the two of us to head down and look him up, but what he fails to realize is that for us to get there we would have to walk. +And now to make it more of a build up, Andy is dragging out Costa Rica, the jungles, and the smell of napalm. Finally I couldn’t take it. “Shut up Andy, we’re not going to Costa Rica, have a good time, send a postcard, now the real question is what the hell is wrong with Dean here that he should send a letter quoting Sartre….” I clapped him on the shoulder, “So what’s her name?” +“No it’s not that….” +“Pay up….” Andy gives me the five bucks we wagered. +“What was your call Sil?” Dean smiled as the money changed hands. +“Genuine, certifiable insanity.” +“I don’t know about that…. Don’t you ever just sit around a wonder what the fucking point is? I mean from a strictly clinical point of view we know that none of this is really here… so why it here? I don’t know I get in these moods, I’ll wake up at work and realize that I am work and I don’t even remember getting there…. Its like I have some robot driving my body around. See and that started to bother or at least it got me thinking… I started to wonder what other robots were lurking around. I started doing these self-experiments; you know weird shit just to see what people would do. Every morning I let one cockroach go in the copy editors office and then I’d leave. Two weeks later he got them to spend four thousand dollars getting the whole building fumigated. So I did other stuff, you know went door to door preaching the word of god, just to see how people reacted… then I started thinking shit I could use this to get laid a lot more and see what the life of the cold hearted average bastard American male is like. It was simple I just acted like one and sure enough I got laid. I don’t mean just one or two on the weekends. I had them coming at me like flies and then I started to freak out and I got paranoid that they would figure out the game and get pissed you know… I mean they weren’t the brightest girls in the world you understand, they weren’t the type of girls that would think my method acting was funny, they were the type that will smash the windows of your house and boil your cat. +“You don’t have a cat.” +“That’s not the point… the point is that I sort of lost track of myself, I mean I found that when I just got up the nuts to be whatever the fuck I wanted to be that day… I could. So if that’s true than what are we? See now that’s one of those questions that you’re not supposed to be able to answer right? If you figure out that then you have sold your soul to the devil right?” +He stops suddenly and car is silent for moment. Andy had started to take the five bucks back, but he stopped and pushed my hand away. Dean has done these sorts of things before, he reminds me of Dr. Lilly who argued that one shouldn’t do anything to his patients that he hadn’t done or wouldn't do to himself, except that Dean didn’t have patients, he just had himself. But taking acting off of the movie screen and putting it in real life was a bit extreme even for Dean. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Andy cocked his head sideways for a minute and then blurted out, “Ya man, everyone knows that.” +“Ya but no one takes advantage of it.” +“That’s cause they have other things they would rather do. I mean you like to do that, so it’s not like that is the secret to life, its just the secret to your life, personally it sounds like hell to me.” +It sounded like hell to me too, but Dean gets obsessive about things. I actually did figure this stemmed from a new love, but I knew Dean wouldn’t cop to it yet, it was early in the game.... Dean has this strange addiction to women, he only goes to bed with ones he doesn’t like because every time he goes to bed with one he does like he is devoured by this all consuming burning passion that eats him alive. For those of us that have know him for a long time now it’s easy to see coming. The philosophical smoke screen of mercenary behavior is the first clue that something is rumbling just beyond the event horizon. By the time we came back across the bridge after stopping for a cigarette at the scenic outlook, we were all ready for a drink. Andy had Dean all riled up over the promise of free drinks and beautiful waitresses at the Sky Bar. I tried to talk him out of it, but Andy insisted, he said it would be a night to remember. He knew something we didn’t. + +It’s just past nine when the elevator doors open into the obnoxiously bright lobby of the Sky Bar. Andy greets the doormen and we are ushered inside. It was only the third time I had been there; the place was overwhelming in my opinion, like a strange blue parallel universe. All the walls are covered with shimmery hanging strips of blue foil, back lit with blue light and rustled with fans that blow out the ceiling and give the walls the appearance of movement. The booths are along the back wall and covered in faux white fur and lit with black lights so that when you laugh your teeth glow. It was demented, insane, beautiful and frightening. The ceiling is laced with blue icicle Christmas light and the whole room is one giant swarming sea of female flesh, you have to swim to get to the bar, undulating eels and serpentine cocktail waitresses. Andy swore up and down that they were not for sale, but I refused to believe him. There were just too many of them; beautiful women are not herd animals, they travel alone or with a pack of males. If you ever see to many in one place something is up, something polymorphously perverse is going on. Lecherousness was in the architecture, the place was a harem den in spirit if not practice, sitting there I got the feeling I was on the set of porno circa 1977 with no expense spared. The last days of disco… a peculiar intangible decorating term —art deco— which used to mean Miami Vice and now means feng shui. + We grab a seat in the corner booth and Andy gestures to a waitress. Drinks appeared. Things teetered along like they would have any night anywhere and then something strange happened that had never happened to me before. After we had been there about an hour Sara showed up. She was with a group of girls from the university and they all crowded into the booth with us. Conversations swirled around overlapped ideas, volume, and meaning. Dean hunkered down with a short dark haired girl; they got lost in a conversation about time travel and sleep. I listened to the morphing voices clatter about the table, snippets of conversation darted in my ears from five different directions and then one singled itself out. It was a booming loud voice of a man and it came from the vicinity of the bar; it was overwhelming and spoke with authority and conviction. Th music stopped and the place fell silent. The man jumped up on a rickety table just adjacent the main bar and offered up a round of drinks for the house. By now the bar held well over a hundred people and a round would certainly cost a pretty penny, but it happens every now and again. Without the music the magical sound of conversation died and everyone sort of milled about as if lost or waiting, waiting for something more, the entire place was incomplete, you would feel it in the air. The pregnancy lasted until everyone who wanted a drink had one and then the man started in. He asked if everyone had their drink and then announced that he was the owner of the joint and he was closing the door and making the place into a private party. At that point people groaned and started yelling but he silenced them simply by raising his hand. He said he had bought us the drinks so that we could drink with him; all of us were guests at his party now. He said that he had just asked his girlfriend to marry him and that she had said yes and he was very happy and wanted us to share in his happiness. He said that he wanted us to toast his new and he pulled her up onto the table next to him and we all clapped and he said that he had met her three years ago in this very bar and that she was the most important thing in his life now. He said that people always told him that you don’t meet ‘ that someone special’ in bars and that had built the Sky Bar to prove them wrong. He said that he had found exactly what he was looking for and he had found it by following his heart. He said that wherever your heart leads you, you will find happiness. +It was quite a speech. What amazed me was the silence that he achieved, its no easy feat to shut up a hundred drunken revelers, he might have owned the building but he sold them with his heart. He carried on like that for almost ten minutes and then finally he sat back down and the music went on again, but everything was different; people were talking across tables and they were moving across the room and strangers could be seen shaking hands all around us. The man had opened some sort of floodgate; even Dean said he felt better. It felt better know that someone had succeeded in making sense out of the world, that he had created his life and looked around at it and said this good, I will rest now… rest? Drink! Drunken debauchery is the highest form of worship. Someone had turned the mysterious other, the beloved unknown, into the known and we all wanted to celebrate that. + Suddenly instead of a bar the place gained some intimacy, it was a private party and we were all invited, we were alone together so to speak, much like being trapped in burning airplane, we all had something in common suddenly. Dean said that it reminded him of how he pictured an Italian wedding like the one in Deerhunter an enormous party that could go on for days if it wanted to. He was right, the place had an air of electricity to it as if now that there was a reason to be happy it could spread and affect all of us even though it really meant nothing to any of us. Same sort of thing the evangelists have always been doing from Christ on down to a Baptist revival in the rural south. What the man did was conquer that last human demon and he did it with simple heartfelt honesty and generosity. He succeeded in making all of us together, all of us suddenly human and frail, but not alone in our humanity, not alone in our frailty. It was a rare moment in modern American, a moment of unity. +For a time we were no longer isolated from each other, the cold scientific belief in the individual as an isolated universe was conquered and all the mythology of the tribe, the community came into the room with a flourish, borne on the wings of alcohol no doubt, but wedded to something bigger, something that perhaps without the alcohol would still have been there. We were drunk, but not of spirits, we were drunk on the words of a man in love. For a moment all the private despair around with us that wiggles around under our skin when we sleep at night, disappeared. We came undone the little creatures under our skin popped out and ran away unable to live in the boiling cauldron of happiness. They were forced extinct by the change in environment, like the dinosaurs, unable to adapt to joy, sorrow dies. + In its place came an air of enthusiasm a sense of shared adventure that was hitherto not present. The movement of bodies about seemed to stir it up in the air and soon it was fever pitched. Couples were dancing in the isles between tables, in corners shadows could be seen groping at each other and men clapped each other on the back while women cuckold in circles. Everywhere stories spun out, true ones, false ones, exaggerated ones, downplayed one, stories that rang out and were delightful no matter what they said. None of us were actually aware of what we were saying we just knew that it felt good to talk felt good to pour out our innards to strangers. Commiseration and celebration wrapped each other up like packages and dropped down the chimney from the grip of an invisible hand with red sleeve. + Even Sara and her graduate student friends who were all getting their MA’s in philosophy and generally had seemed quite cynical, were lifted up and tossed about like cotton cAndy. We were at the circus and no matter if Plato or Plutarch were on the ferriswheel because it was still a carnival and everything is welcome at a carnival. +Things kept up well past two when the alcohol stopped flowing. No one waned to leave, we all felt like it would fall apart if we left the room. Finally around three, large groups started to head off to various impromptu parties; we went with the girls back over to Berkeley where they had an enormous old house that they all lived in or at least most of them did. By that time we were all a little sketchy on the details of the situation. On the subway we all careened back and forth into each other with the sway of the train. Sara pushed me down into a bench and climbed on top of me. We were deep into a tongue battle when catcalls and whistles were heard from the other end of the car. Everyone gathered around to watch us and we gave them a show. It seemed like the right thing to do at that moment some way of pulling everybody in together simultaneously intimate and yet encompassing all. We finally broke it off to breathe and there was a round of applause. Some one from the train had joined into the party; we swept up him and his friend, and they came all the way back to house. There was music and dancing and Andy climbed up on the roof with their dog and tried to get him to howl at the moon, but he was too domesticated to understand the meaning of it all. Dean and a girl named Monique disappeared into the back room and then others drifted off until it was only Sara and I on the couch. She kissed me for while and then without much warning passed out. I tucked her in with a blanket I found in the hall and went up on the roof with Andy. He was standing up there staring at the sky with his mouth open and a cigarette in his hand. Neither of us said a word for while. +“You gonna go down to LA with Dean?” +“Ya I guess… Sara’s said she’s going to get two of those girls and take over the lease and I don’t really want to stick around for that… trouble that one….” +“Ya you better watch out, I think she’s in love with you.” He stopped and stared at me for a minute. “You know Sil, you ought to get out of this country. You don’t exactly fit in with Americans… you’re different, you don’t give a fuck….” +“Neither do you… neither does Dean.” +“Ya I know that’s why I’m leaving and you and Dean ought to too… I mean whether you get down to see me or not doesn’t really matter… you just ought to get out. Forget loose ends for get all that you think you have to do and just go. Just go and keep going because you’re the only one of us that has half a chance of making it.” +“What do you mean?” +“Look man where do you see me I five years? I’ll tell you where I see myself, I see myself being well off, with a family that I love and job that’s decent, I see myself shifting gears, I can smell it coming, its involuntary and you have no idea what I’m talking about do you? You can’t fathom me doing any of that can you? No you can’t and I used to not believe you when you said you were going to take over the world and all that sort of nonsense… and I still don’t, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot and I realized that you are going to do something, something big. Maybe its that book, maybe its taking over the world…. People respect you and people will follow you, people are impressed by you… I don’t know man, I thought about it the other night when we were at Audrey’s house. I thought about back in high school how everyone followed you and I around and thought we were so crazy or whatever dumb shit they were thinking and I realized that while I was the nutball full of antics; you were the one they looked up to. And I have no idea why I am saying this… probably because you’ll be leaving and who knows when I’ll have another chance. Whatever, I said my piece… I’m drunk as fuck, I gotta pass out before things start spinning.” And he walked down the stairs and went inside. + + + +“Come on man lets get some breakfast and go for a drive.” I woke Dean up at nine. + He got up out of bed without waking the girl and put his clothes back on. He brushed the hair back from her eyes and we stared at her sleeping face. Her skin was young and smooth. She stirred and smiled. We left. +We went down Telegraph and all had huge omelets at the all night diner. Afterward we worked our way back to Andy’s stopping off for a drink at an Irish pub and some chocolate from Ghirardelli Square. It was early in the morning on a Thursday and no one was around the Ghirardelli area. It was pleasant; everything glowed. Back at the house I threw my clothes in trash bag, backed up my manuscripts and laptop, and we headed out. Dean needed some help at the newspaper and offered me a place to stay. +We took the 101 south through the dry brown grassy hills of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley where the high tech industry has grown like a cancer on the land. From there we cut down across the coastal range. It cooled down and pine trees replaced barren hills. From the final crest in the road all the way down into Santa Cruz the view o the ocean was magnificent. It was one of those clear warm days that make California what it is; a wild crazy kind of energy is in that air. It’s the vast sea that brings it in, air that has traveled ten thousand miles of churning ocean to deliver itself fresh to our noses. We had lunch in downtown Santa Cruz and went swimming at the beach just north of there. Seagulls circled low over the kelp beds and the sun was bright and warm without being hot. +From Santa Cruz down to Nepenthe Dean explained his mind experiments to me again in more detail. He still said nothing about anyone other than himself. +“Have you written anything of interest lately?” +“You mean anything other than for the newspaper?” +“Ya” +“No.” + In Nepenthe we had dinner and walked along the bluffs watching the sea otters out in the kelp beds. The sunset was beautiful, gilded light that slowly worked its way through the color spectrum from the first rays of orange then to fiery red and finally gentle purple hues that gave way to the blue green cover of darkness. Just south of Monterey we cut back over to the 101. +“Hey. Guess who I ran into last week?” +“Who?” +“Rick. Remember Rick?” +To say Rick was a friend would have been hyperbole; to say he was an enemy wouldn’t be accurate either. Rick was just there. And then one day he wasn’t. He was one of those people that just kind of shows up without warning, without rhyme or reason, but he was there. He became the butt of most of our jokes; the biggest and best of which was supplied by his own so-called girlfriend. Her name was never worth committing to memory, but I do remember that night at the bar when she let it slip that Rick had a misshapen penis. Actually she didn’t just let it slip; she seemed to get a perverse little pleasure out of telling us that. +“Ya once you know something like that there is no way of making it go away; you just can’t look at them that same —ever.” +“It was weird, we had a drink and he told me all about his business plans and how he’s going back to school and whatnot… and the whole time I just kept picturing it. This is that best part though… when I was leaving he went to take a piss and so I’m standing there at the urinal next to him and… well don’t take this the wrong way, but I wanted to see it you know… maybe she lied and there’s nothing wrong with it at all… so I glance over and by god I tell you it was crooked even though it wasn’t hard.” Dean burst out laughing. Dean had no respect for Rick; I couldn’t blame him. Rick was nice enough, but there was something about his ignorant spoiled approach to the world that had grown increasingly repulsive over the years. + I started laughing too, “that has got to suck, I mean what can you do? Of all the things….” + “Well, if I were in his spot I would at least stop wearing those tighty whities, I mean come on? That certainly isn’t going to help things you know?” + “Are you serious? He wears briefs? God I hate briefs. Is he still with her?” + “No, and he was hitting on everything in sight, it was embarrassing. But I guess nothing at all would be an improvement on that woman…. She was one ugly girl.” Dean mused. +We lapsed into a silence that only an ugly woman could inspire. And it wasn’t that she was all that unattractive, she was, but you compound that with the fact that she fucked Rick’s cockeyed penis and told all his friends about it… you came up with an image that would silence the most gregarious of poets.... + “Which way do you think it curves?” Dean and I have one common trait, when we find something truly horrifying we have to follow it through to the end. + “You know its thoughts like that that I wish weren’t forced into my brain. I have this thing where if you say it I see it and there I am now its right there, his cock is in my brain, you put the guy’s cock in my brain… I would guess it’s to the left.” + “Really I was thinking right, you know cause of the tighty-whiteys…” + “No well I don’t know maybe but most guys hang to the left. In my experience” + “I know, but I’m assuming he was a freak of nature all the way around you know?” + “I can see your point, but I mean have you ever met a righty? I mean I suppose there are righty's out there but I believe they are the minority. I’m not sure why I believe that; I think I read it somewhere.” + “What do you read?” Dean was sitting up wide-eyed. + “Oh you know The Lefty Times, it the official journal of the Lefty Alliance, a loosely organized federation of men dedicated to service of Lefty Cause.” + “The left Nut Cause?” + “Ya we take stands of issues that are important to the lefty voters and represent their interests in Congress. We’re actually going to have a table at Woodstock this year and MTV is putting out spot on right after total request live.” + Dean picked it up too and soon we had constructed our own plans for world domination based somehow on the fact that if your cock hangs to the right there is something fundamentally wrong with you. I reeled it out like a politician or political consultant —a door to door whore in another universe. We switched it up after conquest, we instituted a new means of government, instead of voting for politicians they were forced to go door to door and perform for voters. Whatever sexually act the voter desired they had to go through with to get the vote. Then the voters picked their favorite and who became THE MOST EXAULTED COCKSUCKER as we renamed the office of president. It fell apart there and Dean went back to sleep. + I drove all the way in from Santa Barbara alone. It gave me time to settle internal accounts and ready myself for LA. I had an ex wife that was sure to get wind of me, but there were also some friends of mine still hanging around. I had no plans to stay. I just needed to finish a few things and then I would be on my way. At Dean’s place I flopped on the couch and fell asleep. It was a long dreamless void. + + +3 + +The first week I did nothing but work. It was strange work. The lifestyle editor employed us as contributing freelancers, which was the paper’s clever way of screwing us out of medical insurance. Mostly we reviewed concerts, movies, occasionally art openings or museums, sometimes we even went to them. Dean had set things up so that we were opposite reviews right next to each other on the page. That way whether one of us took one view or the other, it didn’t matter because we put in the same details and it sounded like we were really there. The details were lifted from the press releases or magazine articles we had read. It wasn’t plagiarism per se since the details were in the movie and we were no more stealing them than the first reviewer, but it did walk in some interesting gray areas. It was easy work, but it was still work. +In the world of reviews there are only two possible positions to take. One it was bad and two it was good. With the details in hand we would write them out weeks before the thing happened and never have to go. We had an expense allowance that provided us with dinner every time we had to go somewhere so usually we just ran up a bar tab at whatever restaurant was nearby and then split. Sometimes when we could find nothing better to do we actually went to the things. We would go to the show or the movie or whatever it happened to be that we were reviewing and about halfway through, when we felt like we had the gist of it we left. Getting the gist of it actually consisted of deciding what more people wanted to hear, it frightened me somewhat to notice that reviewers generally put no thought into the actual art or music or whatever. Everything is in terms of numbers. Are this bands numbers going up or down? Is this exhibit fresh and new with the brightest most of the moment people or is it the washed up nobodies that were huge stars in the past? If the numbers are rising good review, unless of course you're writing for something with an alternative target audience in which case the rising numbers mean bad review —sell out talk. If the numbers are falling it can go two ways, one the artist or art is washed up and past tense or two it is the artist staying true to his roots and allowing the culture to pass him by. In the end none of it really mattered and if you were a performer, an actor, a musician, or a writer or a director there was always one camp set up to support you and another to ridicule you. In some way the two functioned to keep the whole thing and perhaps even the person or art being reviewed in a weird violent balance like a tight rope walker at the circus. Occasionally if one of us were irritated we would shoot the tightrope walker for fun without even bothering to find out what they were doing. We spent an entire afternoon slaughtering Infinite Jest though neither of us had read more than twenty pages. Too much tennis. No one cares about tennis. But we praised the Thin Red Line because it was written and directed by Terence Malik and we liked his last movie. +Such are whims which journalists bounce around in, it was fun for while, but then it started to depress me. Day in and day out we got letters from pissed off readers and occasionally even ones saying how right we were, but the point was that we got letters and that depressed me. We did nothing and yet we did something, we thought for other people and that’s a responsiblity no one should have, it weighs on you like a heavy sedative until you start to really believe that what you’re saying is right and matters when really it is only a matter of taste all the way around that board. +The editor was a nice enough guy, he never said much, he saw our gig for what it was and didn’t care. He took the respectable position, so long as we had edited copy in his hands at the appointed moment everything beyond that was none of his affair. It could have gone on forever I suppose, the money allowed me to save and help Dean with rent, but one day I woke up and felt like going to breakfast instead of work. By the time I got to work it was after eleven and the editor was pissed with my review of the latest boy band concert, it was actually canceled so he ran a review of a show that didn’t happen. He was yelling up and down pacing his office. I felt bad for him. I had been smart enough to use a fake name in the byline; the editors had no such escape route. He stormed on and on and then he turned and stared out the window. I got up quietly and tip toed out of the office. Dean decided to catch a cold and he went home with me. It was going to be a three-day weekend for Dean and a perpetual one for me. With a couple of days off we decide to head up the Ed’s place in LA. +Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color. There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive. He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host. +Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity. He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new. Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I. He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return. Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days. Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint. Ed of Ark I call him in letters. +I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night. It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself. +It started Thursday. I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty. It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values. I was bored. My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to-be-back —on the other side of the room. +I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets. The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigidly asexual. The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum. The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing. Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them. You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence. Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants. The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know. +They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not. It reeks of textbook Freudian repression. They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob. I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties…. The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of. You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you? Without you whom the hell would they spank? The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that we showed up at all. Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work. A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational walk through. +I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road. I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t. I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism…. It was a morning steeped in boredom. I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert. +Make the courtroom fun? That had seemingly never occurred to anyone. Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials? It would be huge. You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government. Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle. And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons. From there, as word spread, it would become a full-fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!! +Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now. The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me. I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning, a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point? +They released me at noon. I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach. I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works. +When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore…. +“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill. This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?” +Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job, I hate the people, rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or stoned. The monotony of it is numbing, it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if something were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit. All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if I cared to join him. I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim. +“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me. He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way. I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him. So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question. Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about...’um.... a guy living in tangier’.... week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time… Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself. This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized. Their stories are fucking INTENSE. He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper. I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled. Not by what he was saying but by him. He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom.” +The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he was stepping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true. +“I had a fucked dream the other night. Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside. I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog. When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot. I saw my skin move. REALLY move. I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over. The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body. It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown. I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples. I could feel them crawling under the epidermis. I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany. I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin. My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face. When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay. I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death. I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.” + + +Ed had apparently been expecting us as the door is unlocked and there’s a note explained that he is at the store getting beer. On top of the fridge we find a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we are well on our way through them before Ed gets back. By the time he shows up with the beer it’s nearly midnight and things are getting fuzzy. +I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel. I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind. I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt. Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are. The world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy. You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender. The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand. I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sank me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still. I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burroughs' pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness. + When I wake up I am wearing pants and had somehow or other spent the night in a Christmas tree. My head hurts before I move, not good sign. As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hangover. In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around. Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle. It’s then that he notices me and shakes his head. +It turns out that I did not passed out, I blacked out, a first for me. It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me. Who was this other me? Where did he come from and what did he want? Why did he break things and set them on fire? Was it even a he? Perhaps it was a she? The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him. From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body. +It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew; I lounged about all day watching television with Betty. She is Dean’s sister, she moved in last week. We could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture. Friday rolled around, Dean and Betty headed up to Ed’s again, but I stayed behind. I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life. +I started writing. I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were. I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature. It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling… the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer. I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean. I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock. +It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour. I stared at it until the machine picked it up. +“Hello? Sil are you there?” There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call. Okay? Goodbye.” +I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me. The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior. I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie (his own little nightmare) who would have been sent by Amy to find me. Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… "Dean, tell me where he is or I’m leaving." Oh well I’d have done the same. +Besides all that was irrelevant. Why not give the ex a good poke? One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair. And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy… she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more. Not that she was outright lying; the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there. The poor woman had ended up in the barrio after I split. I would be little more than psychological comfort, both she and I knew that I would be out the window before anyone could get through the front door. I was at a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised. I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot…. I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end. The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown. The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion. It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt. +It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point. Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold. When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which to draw all hope, dream and fantasy, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become. Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die. I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more. I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it. My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning. +You’re a bedtime story Amy, the kind that wet nurses read to princes and princesses in fairy tales, a story within a story. It was all there on the surface. Amy you’re standing on the edge of moonlit road wearing a nightgown of embroidered lacy, thin strands of moonlight twitch in your hair. You are the night, I hope you’re waiting for me. +I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this. I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by. What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride. I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer. + Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones. Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck. Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door. +I accepted a glass of wine and took a seat on the couch. It was a Chilean wine, a pinot, light and sweet. We talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans? + Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well. I had done it before and I was destined to do it again. She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology. +First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist. Then silence, my favorite stage —denial. And her we were in surrender, where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance. In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy. The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance. We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view. How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view. I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now… +What a view! She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not, the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same? That was the mystery which created the inclination, keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite parted them with hunger and our tongues met. She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure. My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth. The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress. Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt. She was gushing; I stroked her cunt and probed my fingers gently in until they were up to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. +I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch. I slid onto the floor. She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt. The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can. Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm. Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair. She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers. She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post. I guided her down on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to fuck me. I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready. +I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it. I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips. I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole. She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth. I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum. +She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch. I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to stimulate or destroy. Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting. I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me. +“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass” +This was a new idea, not one I was all that keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I knew what she wanted and that she was going to get it however she pleased. I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg. She got up and ran to the bathroom, returning with jar of Vaseline. She lay down on her stomach and smeared Vaseline on her ass, working it in with her fingers. +“Ughuuuuuhhuhuhhhhh… you know you want my ass…. I was masturbating the other day and I started fucking myself in the ass with that dildo you gave me [I couldn’t just leave her you understand] and I’ve been wanting to feel your cock ever since.” She smiled slyly at me. +The veins in my cock were bulging like I had never seen them before. I climbed on top of her and slowly, gently as I could ease myself into her ass while she spread her cheeks. I watched her face wince at first and then relax. Soon I had a good rhythm going and Amy came again twitching violently and screaming. I exploded in her ass and collapsed onto her back. After a while I propped myself up and pushed at her asshole; I was fascinated by the squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass and the way it refused to mix with Vaseline. +I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room. I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again. I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. + Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette. I was fucked out, but I couldn’t help commenting on the candles. The place was lit up like a Catholic Church, a voodoo ceremony; candles on the coffee table, the end table, the wall, even some hanging from the ceiling suspended in gnarled balls of wire that Amy had bent and twisted for the purpose. +“Why is it that whenever we have sex candles appear and everything gets soft lighting and feels like a hallmark greeting card?” +She laughed. “Was I trying to hard?” +“Absolutely.” +“Well thanks for humoring me….” She got up and more cum slipped out her ass and landed on the floor. “Oh my god! Elsa will kill me if we stain this carpet,” and she ran off to get a towel and clean herself up. I heard running water and her yelling form the bathroom, “Jesus you haven’t gotten laid in a while…. There's a ton of cum up my ass.” +After a minute I walked in, “let me know what it feels like next time you take a shit.” She was sitting on the toilet wiping the Vaseline off, cum was dribbling slowing into the toilet. I went into the kitchen to clean myself. I had the water running and I was studying my cock intently noticing that it was darker in tone after sex than before sex, but it didn’t wash off so I knew it wasn’t shit. I chalked it up to blood circulation. As I was turning it around and twisting it in knots Elsa, Amy’s roommate walked in the kitchen behind me. Apparently she had been here the whole time in her room. I naturally assumed that she had been gone otherwise Amy wouldn’t have fucked me in the living room, but as I turned off the sink and went to grab the dishtowel I saw her. Her face had a wide-eyed look of wonder and I froze like a deer. We stood there staring at each other in absolute silence for a full minute and then Amy came charging around the corner with a wineglass in each hand and sent Elsa sprawling on the floor. They both yelped and screamed and then Amy started laughing uncontrollably rolling on the floor still holding the glasses up off the ground. It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh in spite of myself. The last time I had been over, Amy had tried to get me to seduce Elsa with her. I forget why we never went through with it that night, but I do know that this was not exactly how we had planned it. The absurdity of it made me burst out laughing; Amy and I were rolling on the floor and Elsa just stood there in shock for a while. And then non-plused as a kitten she strode over grabbed the wine and a glass and poured it and walked off to her bedroom. Amy and I looked at each other thinking perhaps she was genuinely offended. +“Great, now you freaked her out…” Amy knocked on her bedroom door softly and then slipped inside. I hunted through their refrigerator looking for something to eat. I found an apple and hunk of Gouda cheese, which I took out to the patio, along with the bottle of wine and a glass. The patio was small and choked full of plants. Most of them were mine or had been mine before I split for San Francisco; it seemed like ages ago that Amy and I had split up and we weren’t even divorced yet. The ivy was wilting; she had it in direct sunlight. I fondled the brittle leaves. The flowering plants were doing much better, the snapdragons were getting so tall they could be seen from the other side of the fence. They were slender explosions of red and purple jutting out of the moss lined baskets I had built. I sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. I had to admit that this patio was better than our other one and for some reason that irked me. There were more plants more candles; it was more…. I gave up. I thought I heard the sound of running water and I figured that someone was in the shower. It seemed fairly obvious to me that we were all going to have sex at some point; it hung in the air like stale smoke. It was inevitable. I propped my feet up on the table and sat back to enjoy. I left the details of the scenario to Amy; it was after all her house. I was a guest, little more than a friendly cock at this point. I heard a murmuring sound and looked up, there was Amy dripping wet standing in the frame of the sliding door, “would you like to join us in the shower?” +“Sure.” This is where the trouble starts I thought to myself, but I went anyway and there was Elsa standing under the warm water. She was shorter than Amy and thinner, her breasts were bigger though and she had shiny black hair that clung to her neck in strands. I got in and Amy followed, Amy and I kissed for a while and then she pulled away and pushed me toward Elsa who kissed me hesitantly at first and then as if giving in to something unseen she reached both arms around my neck and tried to chew my lips off. Then the girls kissed and fondled each other softly while I stood under the water. +“Stop hogging the water come here…” Amy pulled me over to them and the three of us kissed at the same time as best we could, but by then the water was running cold and we got out to dry off. I wrapped a towel around my waist and went back to the kitchen to see about more food. Once I start eating late at night its hard to stop, this time I set about to make a fruit shake out of frozen packaged peaches and blueberries. Elsa came in to see what I was up to, she was wearing only a silk bathrobe and looked at my coyly. +“Would you like to dance?” She walked over casually and took the towel off my waist. I was already half hard and she just stood there for a moment fondling my prick. +Elsa turned up the stereo and went outside onto the patio dragging me by the cock. The fenced enclosure was small but we didn’t really dance we just kind of turned to the soft tones of a mysterious violin. It warped out the screen and wrapped our arms lazily about as we explored each other’s bodies. She pulled me into her smashing her breasts against my chest, grinding her pubic hair into mine and nibbling at my neck. I circled around sliding a finger down the crack of her ass and stroking her cunt from behind. Amy came outside and sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. She exhaled and smiled at me. She twisted her mouth up into a sly grin and spread her legs and began stroking her cunt and watching us. Every time my back was to her Elsa would fondle my ass, then she went to my cock. She seemed to be testing Amy to see how far she could go. My cock was ridged again by now and stabbing her in the stomach. She reached down and pointed it under her, rubbing it along her cunt and rolling it over her clit. Without a word she dropped on her knees and popped it in her mouth. I was standing sideways to Amy and I saw that she was fucking her pussy with two fingers and gently patting her clit with her other hand while staring intently at Elsa’s head bobbing up and down on my cock. I reached down and stroked Elsa’s head, gently pushing my cock further into her mouth. +“Ya, fuck her in the mouth,” Amy purred and Elsa’s murmured tickled at the hair on my balls. I was feeling a bit too good and eased out of her mouth. +“Why don’t you two dance for a minute? I need a cigarette.” I sat down on the couch and lit one. They never even danced. Amy walked up and Elsa fairly seized her head and started tearing at her lips. Amy pulled herself away. +“You want me bad don’t you?” +“Yessss….” +She pushed her down to her knees and lifted one leg over her shoulder bearing her cunt down on her face. I had sat on that same couch a million times when we were married and never had a cigarette tasted so good. An incongruous thought came to me as I leaned forward for the ashtray, why hadn’t we done this more often? In fact why didn’t everyone do this more often? I leaned back and glanced around; the place was a jungle. Plants in pots on the walls on the table, and even in metal stands on either side of the couch. I stared laughing because it was just like the candles. Amy came over leading Elsa by the hand. When I laughed she bent over and reached between her legs spreading her swollen red cunt lips and wiggling her ass at me. I pulled her down on me and entered her as she wiggled about on my cock. +Elsa stood next to us on the couch and I stroked her fur with one hand while fondling Amy’s breast with the other. Elsa was moaning low and she started to move around until she was in front of us half straddling the coffee table. I leaned Amy to the side and pressed my tongue into Elsa’s cunt. Pulled back savoring the taste of her cunt. It was bittersweet, more like wine to Amy’s nectarine fruit flavor. Amy’s was better, but Elsa’s was foreign. There was something about Amy’s cunt and the way it tasted that made the back of my throat salivate. She was wiggling on my fingers and now I felt Amy’s hand furrowing through her bush. I moved my hand away to allow her to continue and I began to slowly lift Amy up and down on my cock. Amy leaned back onto of me so that I was pressed up against the couch. Everywhere I put my hand there were tits and nipples and hungry mouths laughing and biting playfully at my finger. Then Amy began to rub at her clit and occasionally my balls kissing Elsa frantically and then she came. She went off like a bomb tensing and jerking as if invisible forces kicked her. She used to scare me when she came jerking and thrashing about like that. She hung on the Elsa’s lip and never stopped fingering her. +“I need to be fucked,” she moaned to Amy. Amy nodded and stood up. +Elsa straddled me facing me and Amy fed my cock into her cunt, coated her fingers in juice and then stepped back and licked them clean. Elsa wasted no time and fucked me like a hellion, digging her nails in and snarling at me. I pounded upwards to meet her frantic rhythm. He cunt was long and hotter than Amy’s; I could feel my balls slapping up and down out of control. +“You like that don’t you? You like getting fucked hard don’t you.” Amy pulled Elsa’s hair and snarled at her ear. Elsa grabbed widely at Amy and came with little muffled cries; I could feel her cunt tightening in silken spasms. By now Amy was worked up and again and I still hadn’t cum so we moved back into the living room and they spread out a bedspread and some pillows. +“Let’s do something together,” I suggested and they went about arranging themselves in a sixty-nine position. After some debate with myself I decided I wanted to cum in Elsa. I maneuvered myself behind her on my knees straddling Amy’s head. Amy licked at Elsa’s clit and my balls and I rammed her in deep slow strokes while she leaned over and ate Amy out. After a minute Elsa announced that she was cumming and I actually felt the juice pouring out of her cunt down my balls and onto Amy’s face. Amy must have seen my balls tighten because she grabbed me buy the base of the cock and pushed Elsa forward off of me. She sat up and urged me to lean back. I did and the two of them went to work on me. Amy kissed me for while; her face was covered in Elsa’s cream and was more of a cunt than a mouth. Elsa was licking my balls, which by now were on the verge of pain, if I didn’t cum soon I was worried that I might never be able to cum again. Amy leaned into my ear and whispered, “I want you to cum on her face, on both our face’s.” And she went down with Elsa and began sucking on me. The licked and sucked and nibbled and kissed each other with my cock between there lips. Finally I came. I came so hard I got tunnel vision and arched my back off the ground. I stayed like that forever it seemed. It felt natural, I wasn’t even aware I had arched off the ground until my leg threatened to cramp and I collapsed down. I lifted my head in time to see them licking my cum off each other’s face’s giggling like schoolgirls. +We all lay around completely fucked out. We had some more wine, and some cigarettes. I laid them both out on the couch and inspected the differences between their cunts. Amy’s cunt had thick lips that sealed it up like a sea anemone while Elsa’s was wider with little lips that stuck out like flaps. They were same little flaps of skin that stuck apart with her cum and gave a slutty well-fucked honest look to her cunt. I told her it was beautiful. Amy leaned over to look at her with me and it wasn’t long before we were both eating her out and she came again and then she watched exhausted, as Amy bounced up and down on my cock until she came. +Around four we all climbed into Amy’s bed and I lay between them feigning sleep. Jut after I heard the familiar breathing of Amy in deep sleep, Elsa grabbed at my cock and whispered that she wanted me to fuck her again nice and slowly from behind. I tried to protest. I was tired, but my cock was hard in no time and she feed it into her cunt. It was still wet from earlier. We swayed gently fucking for a long time and then I heard her gasping she came again and rolled her head around to face me. +“Oh cum in me, please cum in me I wanna feel it squirting…” +I pulled out of her cunt and nudged at her ass. +“Oh yes fuck my ass… oh my god…ouch…uuugh....yes… god…” And somewhere in the middle I came. +We lay in silence for a while and then out of nowhere Else blurted out in whispers and gasps, “oh god that was amazing! I saw stars and right then you came and I felt stars shooting into my ass…I want you to fuck me again sometime… just you… “ She stopped and stroked my face, “you will won’t you? How about tomorrow? Amy will be gone… god I must fuck you again…” +“Yes yes, okay we will fuck again.” I started giggling. She was so adamant about it. She rolled over and I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. Elsa kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest. The clock read 6:23 and I still wasn’t asleep. They were both purring softly and had been for some time. I was bursting with energy and honesty; I felt expansive, like I was floating, orbiting the moon. I had been lying there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling, it’s texture seemed to resemble the surface of the moon. I lay there a minute more orbiting the lunar surface and then gently without waking her, I eased myself out from under Elsa and climbed over Amy. I went in the living room and got dressed. The house smelled warm and organic. The windows were fogged over and condensation was forming on them. The sun was not yet up but the sky was already glowing a soft pale blue color. I went in and kissed both of them. I slipped out and locked the door behind me +I smoked a cigarette walking towards Dean’s house, but a donut shop seduced me and I sat in the silent morning air outside eating a blueberry filled donut covered in powdered sugar and dripping filling. I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest. I collapsed on the couch that doubled as my bed and fell into a deep coma like sleep. +I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pulling down the multiverse’s own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static, pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now. Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling. White washed ceilings hanging so ominous.... Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires. Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon. Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality —that something is real. Point at the autistic manwomanchild. Autistic man pointing at you, laughing, unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality. Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room. You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring. Rebirth mythology. Mythology of reality. We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity. Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter. Its a wonder …that they aren’t transparent by now ...that your brain retarded in its development …that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb …the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies …darning needles, sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky. Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing Personal just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auzwich on down the line. Didn’t make the rules. Perfected them. There are no innocents in a world of free will. You don’t have to survive at the expense of others. You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities. You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free, not all the communists have been shot yet. You mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman, Hitler killed everybody's body the poetess said… only taking orders you understand, just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind. Only taking orders you understand. Didn’t have a CHOICE. Got a family to feed. Radio crackle. Pop. Hiss. Silence. End transmission. + + + + + +4 + + +Deconstruct, reassemble and manufacture…. Information superhighway economy crashed the other day I paid it nevermind. If you are going to loose your mind do it with grand style, do it with eloquence, do it over the most grandiose of phenomenon —the path of a water droplet down rain slick window panes, the curvature at the bottom of the female breast, the eccentricities of the LSD spider web experiments. Go west young man! So advised Horatio and a thousand other ephemeral goblins of the human spirit who had not the courage to add, because everything here is all fucked up. I was born west. As far west as you can get without going east, which only serves to illuminate the point —that there is no west, no east. Go shoot yourself young man, because you are fucked! Straight up and down fucked. The whore snuck out the bathroom window with your wad of cash fucked. What say you to the youth? Do you give them promise and dreams? No you give them battlefields on which their fathers’ bodies lie, kitchens in which there mothers’ souls bake in the heat of hell’s ovens, and offices in which their own souls may one day putrefy. Hard work! you preach. Hard work! There is nothing hard about your work, only theirs. Anyone can destroy a planet, a race, a species; you proved that with ease, you passed the test with flying colors. You stand back on the edge of charred plains surveying, why yes Jim, it worked…. Supposing it hadn’t? You would have found another way, you are very serious and studious about your havoc. Dean is writing you a letter, whomever you may be, be you governments, be you lawmakers, be you law enforcers, be you corporate heads, be you the almighty goddevil himself, Dean is writing you a letter. He arrived home this evening bursting with laughter because he saw you naked in the shower. The water was hot and your skin was flush with words, he read them at a mighty distance, unscrambled all the riddles and mysteries that you think you have sealed so safely behind boardroom doors. You did not catch him, you will not, you can not, he does not exist to you any more. He exists in what is to come, what architecture has yet to embody, where paint has not yet been put, where chains are made of human limbs, where words can not follow, he is walking there tonight. He is bursting with energy; it flows inward so that he glows like a backlit screen at a silhouette puppet show. Imagination has cut itself loose from him and he is free to dream what can not be dreamed. His syntax is broken and useless in such a world; he can not yet bring it back for us. I have gone with him to provide moral support. I have been here before, I have been everywhere before and every time I return everything is different. The cat is an orange tabby in this one, the sidewalk below is cracked and the sliding door behind us is closed. The porch is cool in the January air of Costa Mesa, California. We were born west in the toxic waste of modern dreams. We are not going to go east, nor north, nor south, we are going up. We are sky bound. Ed is painting in the middle of the room behind us. On the table between us there are two drinks. One, gin and tonic, is Dean’s and the other, scotch and soda, is mine. +And I too am in a kind of place tonight, having recently stumbled out of the air conditioned nightmare of Decartes mechanical swiss watch house of ideas and fallen into the warm fertile earth that is alive, has intelligence and is trying to say something articulate over the droning insanity of the human voice, the human machine, the adding machine, the washing machine, the bleach that stole the pigment from your soul…. The unhealthy texture of pale skin crawls about on the floor, you see it there beside your own will to live in the mechanical relativistic house of chaotic dreams. I didn’t wake up until five in the evening. I was just sitting up and lighting a cigarette when Dean burst through the door laughing. +I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean was gone, but once I got beyond saying I had sex with Amy and Elsa, it all seemed pointless. Dean poured the drinks and Ed set up his easel and canvas right there in front of the television. He took white paint and wrote on the screen: DEAD. Dean dragged me outside and we sat together on the porch, “I want to take the universe apart tonight Sil,” He started. “I managed it last night for while with Ed, we were soaring, but there are no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as I wrestled with it; there is of course a story, the physical account you might say, but there is no way to wrap up the emotional/mental account, the underlying thing that I was trying to reach out to, it remains mysteriously buried under the heavy noise of silence. Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes, in the grips of eternity, a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication. I felt as if life itself… whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me… like Shaterack Meshak and Abandego…. I stood in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it. See, the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the world’s problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically… really, vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words even now…. what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me. It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad. Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile… this is something entirely separate… this is art that has to be lived to understand it….” Dean is swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness, a new fecundity from which new life will spring, new wells will be drawn upon, new myths created, new words invented, new dreams, new ideas, new art forms and they will blend seamlessly with old, taking its place in the long infinite line of creation. “What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories. We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do. They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore. I am bursting I am alive, I am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot. And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you? You know better than to go showing up at some job every day —like it matters in the grand scheme of things! We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant… to serve a queen? What we ought to be; what we ought to be concerned with is something real… something of value that extends beyond this barren womb… this business capital of humanity. Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab —except by the coast. What is the rest of this place? Mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year…. The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck….” +Yes Dean, this place —these people—all of them— are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior type…. we look out for ourselves and those that are near us, but we don’t go looking for help, it comes to us —don’t you see? Its coming to us right now, it came to you last night, it came to me one night almost a year ago, it’s drawing us away from here away away away! We will embark on something so beautiful… and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this. This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust. It will start here though in torn desolate, used up fabric of reality. It will start in ugliness and squalor it will dredge up every avarice and horror man had ever know, it will start right here…. +Inside I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the scotch was the only thing keeping me in line. We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there. We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the porch like a rocket ship. +You have the flavor. The taste, the smell, the texture of… what is happening here can not be found in the simplistic quadradimensional world of ordinary being. It is not here. You can stop hunting it. There is nothing to understand, there is nothing to know, it is all the arbitrary inventions of scientists and artists constructed for your amusement. You know your philosophers, you know your painters, you know your ancient and heretical texts, but you do not know what it is to feel the living breathing pulse of the universe beaming through your chest. You do not want to know. Dean did not want to know. I did not want to know, but we do, and we are no longer afraid. Fear is felt and manufactured by a complicated chemical response system that deals with new information. Just turn it off —like you turn off all your machines, turn it off like the flick of switch— you built the damn thing you figure out how to get out of it. See your shrink, see your counselor, see your favorite dead author, see you favorite dead philosophers, check the newspaper, ask a politician, ask the pope, ask the scientist who manipulated anthrax for the purpose of subduing the population. Have a drink and smoke joint, sit on your porch and don’t worry about it. Its there whether you see it or not, that’s why were not sending anymore telegrams. Here to go! It was reference to the space age, to the collective desire of the human being to travel where no others have gone, into the vast empty reach of space, as the nova voiceover always puts it. This night I hold up before you as a kind of proof dementia. The twentieth century disillusioned, paranoid space cadets called children are two Americas now, it is no longer, as William Burroughs said… the space age. The space age is over. The second coming came and left without you dear reader… well no of course not you, but everyone else…. + + + +The next day I woke up and Dean was packing up his room. He had the entire thing down to a box of books, a suitcase of clothes and trash bag of miscellania. +“So what’s the story again? We’re going to Vegas I take it?” +“Ya,” Dean set his things by the door and lit a cigarette. “You still up for it?” +“The question is more ‘is your mom up for me?’” +“You know Rachel; she loves rounding up the strays and setting them on the path to righteousness…” We laughed. And I figured what the hell. +“You already packed up? That couldn’t have taken more than five minutes what the hell’d you do if for at eleven in the morning on your day off?” +“I have less than twenty four hours to seduce Kim, finally give into Kala, and then fuck the shit out of Monique and finish it off with Corey because she doesn’t care if I’m fucked out… she’d fuck my lifeless corpse I think.” +“Yes she probably would.” I felt bad for Corey though because while she wasn’t in love with him she did care about him in that strange concerned abstract way that only women can care. It may not bother her that he fucked everything he could get his hands on, but I think it did bother her that to think that he thought of her more as a fuck than a friend. “They got any friends you can set me up with?” +“There is this one girl… Jen… friend of Monique's… she’s been wanting to get in with me…maybe Monique too… anyway she’d go for you. You can have her…she’s got great tits, but I can’t talk to her long enough to get her naked.” +“Give her a call…” +Dean went off to try and seduce Kim over lunch, but he called and told Monique that he and I were coming over and that Jen should join us all. With a few hours to myself I figured to go see a movie and get some breakfast. I wandered down to the coffeehouse where all the hipster art kids hang out. The place was a refurbished storage cellar with yellow-gray walls and a scattering of benches and tables. It was windowless and stale like most of the people it held captive. I tried to get a plant to grow down here a few years ago before but it didn't work; I forgot about heliotropism-nothing grows in darkness. A botany student who watched me try in vain to keep the poor ivy plant alive explained it to me in graphic detail; he was condescending like a scientists. Everything needs sunlight in one way or another. The kids that hung out in the cellar were bleached souls, burned by magic. Burned by money, by law, by a culture designed to seductively lull them into a sleep state of pacified stupidity where they could be exploited as a labor source of the robber barons of Washington. I don't think most of them were aware of that though which gave me comfort because knowledge is paralyzing and without it maybe a few of them would stumble blindly out of the cave and into the sunlight. + I got a cup and sat in the corner for while smoking a cigarette and watching a genetic reproduction of Ginsberg scrutinize the art on the walls. I wished I had on three-piece suit or a football jersey so we could have played beat generation dress-up, but I didn’t and he would never have seen the humor in it anyway. I contented myself to a cup of rich dark coffee and apiece oil saturated and extra gooey coffeecake. It was wonderful but I needed more. I approached the Ginsberg guy cold and laid it on him about selling my art to support myself hoping to his a sympathetic nerve that led to mommy and daddy’s money. He made we tell him all about what it was that I did and I thrust some tattered napkins under his nose and pulled them away before he could get too much into the meaning of the scribbles I talked circles around him once I realized that all it would take would be for him to feel inferior. Charity is always an inferiority complex —here you take this you need it more than I do… if I thought he had earned the money I might have felt bad, but i still would have taken it, and I did. Leaving with his five spot I went to get a sandwich at the donut shop on Newport Boulevard. It was an enormous sandwich coated in sweet vinegar and oil, dripping mayonnaise the constancy of slightly thinned-paint off the long strands of lettuce and delicately coated wafer-thin turkey breast that curled up and seemed to leap down my throat. I washed the whole operation down with a glass of ice water. When you're hungry the whole world is edible. And the minute I had the stomach taken care of I lapsed back into reverie trying to piece together why it was that I was going to Vegas. The main thing seemed to be that Dean was going. I thought I ought to pay a visit to the folks since they still thought I was married and just working in San Fran for a while. They were suitably alarmed when I laid it out honestly but I did with the firm conviction of one who knows he is right, but not why. For now I said I was winging it and nothing more. They gave me a hundred when left said to eat with it. They were always worried that I lived by not eating, but the reality was closer to my grandfather who was fond of saying after a meal so we eat… we eat again… we may not do much, but boy can we eat…. + Dean was pacing by the time I walked up the steps. "Come on Sil I’m trying to do you a favor here pass one you’re way and you have the gall to be late?” I told him I didn’t give a shit one way or the other, that he should have gone without me, but he wouldn’t hear of it, he was one some Herculean mission and had to have a guide for this little part of the test. He wasn’t just fucking these girls he was lining out some Greek sized life for a day. He had succeeded with both of the ones that morning; Kim had been to drunk for much but when he finally gave it Kala she was wildcat. We got to Monique’s house in time for dinner, but there was no talk of food; in fact there was really no talk at all. We walked in on them sitting watching television and then snap off went the TV Monique jumped up and grabbed Dean by the hand dragging him to the bedroom. The door slammed behind them and was left still standing in the entryway front door open behind me, staring at Jen. Jen was medium height with dark hair and huge tits. She smiled at me and I closed the door. After a few line of talk she reached calmly into my pants and pulled out my cock. She sucked and licked and bit at it until I was hard and then she stood up tore off her shirt and pants and sat on my lap. I mauled at her nipples for while squeezing her breasts in my hand. They were giant and weighty, things that demanded proper handling they sloshed in my hands. + She pulled my shirt over my head and then pushed me back and pulled off my pants. I was expecting her to crawl up on top of me, most women go straight to the top when there’s no emotion around, but Jen didn’t she climbed on the couch doggie style and said, “hurry and fuck me… I have to go soon.” + It was an odd way to put it. I felt like I was mounting a dead horse in bad western porno, it was a job at that point, a duty that I had been asked to serve. But of course once I had it in I forgot all about her and she forgot about me and the situation was no longer there. We were just fucking. We went at it like animals and suddenly I understood why she wanted it that way. I could feel the heat of her cunt but I couldn’t see her face, it was less like we were fucking than we were masturbating together. My hands were on her hips pumping her back and forth; I could feel the leaden texture of her skin. My hips moved like pistons, cold mechanical. My own body was strange foreign as if it were, a shell containing something much messier, more out of control; she rolled around on my cock so that she was tits up with her legs over my shoulders and I rammed her like that for a good while before she exhibited unusual hand gestures and undulations that I took to be an orgasm. And then the automaton turned off and my prick came alive again. Her tits were rolling in great ellipses as I pounded into her with abandon, I reached down and teased her clit with my finger until she came again and pulled out and shot a load on her chest. She lay there for a bit and I got up to clean myself off. When I came back she was gone which relieved me somewhat. I went outside and lit a cigarette. It was a warm night. One of the rare humid times when LA feels tropical, the kind of night when I enjoyed going down to the ocean and walking along the shore trying to see Hawaii. The glow of the sun had not yet disappeared entirely, but already the eastern sky was twinkling with stars. When I took a drag I could smell Jen on my fingers. I licked them to see what she tasted like. Electric. It mixed well with cigarette smoke. + + + + + + +4 + + + + + +“You are my angel/come from way above/to bring me love….” +I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow. I awoke outside of LA, outside of Barstow, outside of civilization, outside of intention, outside of desire, outside of myself. I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat. It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare that I had to escape by waking up. I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis. Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors. I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace. Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner. Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together. I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response. I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely. Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico. I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills. In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz. Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground. I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself. I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest. In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise. +Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire. Oh to be cold… The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep. Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat. It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning. There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life. I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness. +There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace. I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god. The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire). I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure. The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth. +Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away. I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity. I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek. I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you. God it was hot. And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas. +Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea. He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure. There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla. Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world. The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it. We humans can move what! I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever. Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour. The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing. You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again. +The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books. A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity. Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels. I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives. The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard. We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it. Bastards. The idea was to go and keep going, but it didn’t quite work out that way. + Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up. We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura. Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom. The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life. The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures. The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions. To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow. Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars. I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow. Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe. + Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year. I jumped down and we headed back out on the road. I lit a cigarette. Life was going bang! The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut. Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast. +The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex. I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life. True what! +I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me. “How ya doin’?” he asked. +“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.” +“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…” he smiled mischievously. I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer… +“Ah, so you knew?” +He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.” +With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable. Heat radiates out from within. I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food. Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond. Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency. +Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there. My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California. When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips. My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate. I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car. I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes. In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a Palo Verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe. Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain. (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you). There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday. The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do. That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do. There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died. I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice. But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is. There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams. What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere? Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life? Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea? My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned lysoled suburbs. +Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing. She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck… I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’ I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply. Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums. It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go. If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun. Stay clear of me. +Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down. In and out. Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder. + You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain. The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture. You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say. Lust for what? It’s all gone from now. Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves. +I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint... The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion. The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond. Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin. Smooth blue skin. + I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion. Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind. Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time. +Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges. Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers. Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film. Scar tissue that languishes eternally. + + + + +We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas; things are amuck amuck as the man said. First there is Rachel. Rachel is a cool-mom. In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom. Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own. Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle. She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more. Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures. The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs. Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty. Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up. +Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of all right guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes. These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking. Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash. Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot. Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him. Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice. I thought about it every time I see him. I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the Alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile…. +True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally. I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them. From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes. He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knew how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished. There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb. There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime. +I avoid him like the plague, but its difficult to avoid someone when you live with them. Bob was a constant nuisance, he was always knocking on the door to Dean’s room where I was also staying for the time being and after a while he realized that we weren’t always asleep so he took it upon himself to barge in and offer us ‘a cold one.’ Now that doesn’t sound like such a bad man, but the problem lay in the fact that a cold one was rarely anything better than Pabst blue ribbon and he never just had one. He would perch there on the end of Dean’s bed with his bog construction boot on my pillow; it was his unsubtle way of reminding me that I was not welcome in his book. He would sit there and out of the blue launch into his troubles; work was working him to hard, alcohol was no longer solving all his problems (ya think? Dean and I would say), and worst of all was when he told a story. Bob had no sense of timing or point to his stories, they were uninteresting, delivered in a chaotic disjointed way that made no sense and they never had a point or an end they just kind of tapered off or led to a completely separate story with no relation to the one preceding it. My favorite were the ones that went… “I went down to the strip last night….” The middle parts changed according to the night but the end result was always the same, bob sitting somewhere too drunk to know where and trying to remember if a taxi was on its way or if he just thought it was on its way. Then there was the tapered ending in which he tried to remember where he lived and his voice would train off and he might say something like “did you ever meet my sister Bonnie?” Or what’s the score anybody know what the score to the game is?” Dean and I never even knew what game he was referring to let alone what the score was. The score was that Bob drove us out of the house to saner pastures where no one bothered us. +Dean had a nice little racket writing for the Vegas Gazette which was owned by one of his schoolmate’s father or something like that. He wrote inane little articles about the various society happenings of Las Vegas it was inane, but it came with perks such as the pretentious parties we had to attend; Dean as the writer and me as the photographer. We were the press. Or at least we were supposed to be, but we spent more time at the open bars than we did interviewing and photographing people. + + + +Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean. Day’s pass like strolls through airport lounges, arrival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, the interim’s are spent waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. Typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away. The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock. The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight. We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar. In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care. This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas. It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, and the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core. +Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert. The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned. Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime. But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. +Th puritan preachers of the four-headed beast abstinence are the only humans that don’t like Vegas, but they don’t like anything except God so that should come as no surprise. These are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the Moral Minority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have. I only bring this up because another old casino was razed this afternoon, another shoddy rundown beautiful den of corruption and vice. What will replace it will no doubt sparkle and have a romper room for kids to play in while there conservative sort of middle class sort of middle of the road sort of white family fantasy parents gamble and “cut loose.” The very same people that vote republican and unconsciously model their morals after Alex P Keaton. They may not be religious but they are damn sure they no what is right and wrong —gambling and drink is right; whores and drugs is wrong. Therein they support the further degradation of the human animal that has been propagated by the Moral Minority for what seems like eternity. The American west was humanity’s final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of belief and repression, but its lost, all is lost… you know the story… odd isn’t it that the land of liberty has more citizens in prison than any other country on earth? Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas. Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up. The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations. Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts. Who the fuck wants to see tigers, even if they are white? We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight. To live more or less the way god intended —happy. +This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanine of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore. It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much? In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots. What goes through you mind when you do that all day long? Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there? Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving. They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something. More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide. It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of iridescent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows. Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars. The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity. The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger! By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?! He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want? Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more... He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob. We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?! I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?! And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more! We want new! The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny! We want clean! The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter! We want to be happier! The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky. Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine. Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show. The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something. He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him. He locks the door and starts sketching…. +Boredom. I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth. Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore; I can see it in her eyes. The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination. She’s right, but it’s only half the story —her half. The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and depravity. I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color cauterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure. There is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland. Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins. The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs. +They want to eat. New needs, hierarchies, sex after food. Leaving there is whirlpool of words like white and dark chocolate swirled together atop a brownie of callous confusion. Words can not hurt me… but have you heard the words? Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience? Me no way I'm outta here. Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air. Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides. Outside is America; a cop lights a whore’s cigarette near the corner. I laugh realizing that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous. The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity. The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself. The end of time leaves space and word alone together. Information potential exists —it’s an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then? Where does the word go? In the beginning to be sure… but what about at the end…. In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea. The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd. The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention an awful stench. Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks. The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind…? Outside is Las Vegas. Everywhere the neon glows; the giggling Hyenas tourists are dressed in black and high on somatic stasis —looking to turn you inside out. Tongue-tied whores scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..." + + +Chloe knows a diner, just a short drive… drunkenly Dean careens side streets and alleys while Chloe and I discuss the finer points of her profession. The oldest profession in the world fascinates me and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to get the inside dope. +“For the most part I fuck who I want… I have my regulars… guys that come into town every month or two for recreation….” +She takes a drag off her cigarette and whips her nose; it’s a gesture of annoyance. I know that she doesn’t want to talk about work, but I press on because I have to, I have no shame, no bloody words reach me. +“Most of them are married, nice guys… I don’t work the streets… that’s where it’s dangerous… I used to work at a brothel but everyone treats you like a whore when you work in brothel. I got tired of it and when I left it turned out I was popular…” she laughed a hearty little chuckle. “So I just got a pager and now I go to them instead of them coming to me…. But why do you want to know all this stuff?” +Sharp words bloody words. “Uh I don’t know… isn’t that what you do when you talk to strangers.... Ask them about there work?” She laughs. +“I guess its just that when your job is sex most people tend to not ask… its impolite maybe I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to stop you I was just curious… so what do you guys do?” +“Umm… drink? Nothing I guess.” +“Hmm how do you afford it?” +“A carefully constructed world of lowered expectations….” Dean speaks. +“Hmm. But you have goals? You don’t seem like the types that would just hang around, you know barflies or are you on some kind Bukowski trip.” +Entirely inaccurate synopsis; I must defend us, but what is there to say? What is there to do? “Well I actually haven’t read any Bukowski, but yes I guess you could say that… I mean this is Vegas what the hell is there to do? ‘We’re writers’ sounds stupid because neither of us had actually published anything. I mean I guess it depends…” +“No I don’t think it does. You don’t have to published to be a writer, just like you don’t have to charge money to be a whore.” +And there the conversation reached a philosophical point that required further thought on all our parts, but the diner appeared and we parked and it was lost for the time being. Dean went in to get a table and Chloe and I finished out cigarettes in silence. I was marveling at the edifice of the place. I am a connoisseur of diners. Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind; in order to qualify as a true diner the outside must be painted white and in a state of decay. This place fit the bill admirably; it looked like the last coat of paint probably still had lead in it, which would put it pre 1980 at least. Lead is what produces those strange patterned of flaking that leaves the look of weathered desert rock on stucco walls. Dean leaned out and yelled at us, “we can smoke inside you morons….” Inside it still lived up to the diner images; hard formica counters rose out of cold concrete floors scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes. It calling up visions of lost highways long gone past; dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete. We sat down in a booth by the side window. Dean went to go spin a few tracks on the jukebox; Chloe looked even more ravishing sitting in the red vinyl cushions her hair was auburn and looked best in the state of confused disarray she wore it. I fell in love with her the way every man falls in love with whores, a totally false way in the eyes of the cynical world and a totally real way in the eyes of the endlessly recreating universe. Music floated across the room burying the concrete +highway traces of noise, the freeway semi trailers flinging themselves through the night headlights dragging the past into the future and we sat, Chloe and I, here, now. +I was at piece by the time Dean came back; lazy houseflies crawled up the wall behind him and Chloe which set the diner off in league with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken. I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left. About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate. There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn. I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted. After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table. I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at. Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be. I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town. Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one. I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about. One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life. I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts. We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep. + I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean and Chloe over double cheeseburgers. I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs? They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there. Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken. Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Flagstaff and often went to Vegas for the weekends, but it’s a big city and then even in Vegas how many diners? How many nights? What are the odds? All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken? I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me. + I watched Clay for moment without him seeing me. Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years. I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him. I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him. I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise. We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth. + “My god what are you doing here?” + “I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?” + “Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living in Wrightwood, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Vegas? Last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!” + I racked my brain. Where would he have gotten such foolish ideas? Who was behind this? “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?” + “I forget maybe Robert.” Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago. Which, it dawned on me now was one of the many things I had given away by leaving LA. + “How is Bob?” + “Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.” Clay and I both laughed. +Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it. Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes. The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship. That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish. When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept. It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition. We were a lot smarter back then. I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood. I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him. He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word. He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say. And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm. He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence. When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up. +Clay had left LA years ago living in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school. Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him. Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it. Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory. We all came from adventurous sort of families. +Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here. And then there and now back here. Now we just crisscrossed paths occasionally with each of us making plans for trips we knew we would never go on. The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead. I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay. + “What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?” + “Ya I’m with some friends of mine,” I motioned to Dean and Chloe that they should come over. Dean didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA. I introduce them and Dean went back to our booth, retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner. I introduced Chloe, but she had turned suddenly quiet and I wasn’t interested in her anymore. She and Dean fell into a conversation separate from Clay and I. I wasn’t sure but I thought that they were discussing sex and money in that nonplussed way that only a whore can do… so much for a handjob, so much of a blowjob, so much for what ever you want…. Clay was telling me about Anna, his girlfriend and asking what had become of my marriage. I was sober by the end of the burger and I had a sudden urge to run. Run away from everyone and everything that had ever been familiar to me and start over by reinventing my personality. It occurred to me that my initial nostalgia was misplaced, that Clay and I would not always be friends, that I was not who I used to be, that one day Dean would be a stranger as well. I was feeling quite lonely and wholesome when I came to. + “A rave? Hey Sil! Are you listening to me?” Dean was staring at me as if I was ill. + “What?” + “A rave. Chloe knows where a desert rave is… you up for it?” + I glanced at Clay and he nodded “just gotta go pick up my girlfriend.” Damn. I wanted them all to disappear; I wanted a director to yell cut, to take a break from this strange role I found myself cast into. “Uh ya sure… you drive and I’ll be there.” +The four of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around). I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one now would care about. And Clay filled me in because I didn’t hear stories or if I did I never remembered them anyway. It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the impending move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing. +Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle). I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told. The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world. I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology. I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things. Subtle reminders were dropped here and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation. At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within. I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed. I was the propaganda of hedonism. I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong. In fact Clay working at the Christian summer camp that we went to in high school. + I got lost in myself again as he talked. As I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed. He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor. He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments. He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else? I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited. I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing. This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation. Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I knew Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do. I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people. The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man —now there is an odd one. Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it? Who would have made such a thing? I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs. + When I snapped out of it they were talking about books. Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be. This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs. I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates. He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack. I could never do it. He had lent me some books and then wham! in I went to the world of the totally bizarre. Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then I found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying. I have always read that way —being more interest in the whole scope of author’s life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do. Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way, total consumption and digestion followed by a big healthy brown shit. + When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up. I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me. He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again. She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets. She could have been a model, but she wasn’t, she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten. I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone. I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang. I went up and introduced myself. Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.” If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna. She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know. I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn. + Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry at once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else. When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music. Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). + Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea. The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the others will swoop in and feed on your weakness. Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it. Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she knew it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and go with us to the rave. +But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight. She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom, as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs. Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves. Chloe said we were deranged. We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, “how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add “and how she loved it.” As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again. You will understand from experience. The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess. We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew —wouldn’t you? + I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this rave. Chloe and Dean were already groping at each other in the car and Clay and Anna seemed to be having a bit of a spat in the front seat; I watched Anna’s face in the reflection of the side rearview mirror. She had a elegant sort of beauty that was all in the sharp line of her jaw and the way her chin met with the smooth luster of her neck; she felt to city born and refined to be with Clay. She wore a thin spaghetti strapped tank top shirt that made no effort to hide the silky black straps of her bra and a long flowing shiny skirt that danced across her ravishing legs when she walked. We were all walking and had been for some time the rave was in a campground outside of Vegas; to add to the irony of the evening the campground was a place called Red Rocks which during the day was a popular rock climbing spot, one that I had last visited with Clay. We talked about that as we walked toward the sound of pulsing techno beats and the smells of perfume and marijuana. Dean, Chloe and Anna walked in silence. + The rave was set up in a barren sandy expanse that served as a dance floor and was ringed with canvas tents serving alcohol and herbal ecstasy. It looked like a Bedouin settlement around an oasis in the desert. The largest tent was elaborately decorated to play up the North African vibe the walls were covered in Moroccan tapestries and the floor was scattered with pillows and people. The only light was from old oil lanterns that hung in the back corner. It cost ten bucks to get into the tent. Dean and I paid and the girls dragged Clay off to dance. Dean and I were more interested in getting drinks and whatever else might be lurking like cockroaches in the pillows. The tent was enormous and looked like it had been borrowed from the circus. In the rave culture of Las Vegas this was the grandest of all raves and one of the only that bothered to get permits and whatever else it takes to be able to dance legally in the desert. On the way in we passed limousines and Rolls Royce’s; this was not an underground affair. To the side of the tent, backlit by purple Christmas lights was the makeshift bar, actually a few tables pushed together and manned by a blond haired kid who never stopped bobbing his head to the beat. Dean and I secured drinks and found a space back in the darkened corner to relax and be anonymous. + We were half way through our drinks before I noticed Crowes. Not more than ten feet from us was a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes. In either case he crawled over to us with what appeared to be a great amount of effort and sat cross-legged facing us without uttering a word. Dean greeted him coldly and then we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint. We graciously accepted and Dean got up thinking we were to follow him outside but Crowes lit it right there in the middle of the tent and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it. +“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.” + I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing. Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo. But from the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here. My toes got tingly and my hands heavy. Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it. Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one. + “You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.” + “I hate it when that happens.” Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply. “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms. I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs. I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me. Then my sister through her out of the house.” +Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn. Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else had or maybe that was the entire story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. +“What was that like man, I mean being married.” +“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.” + “Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person. I mean what does that feel like?” He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response. +Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands. “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head. It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control. She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom. It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.” + This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch. Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid. + Still nothing. Hmmmm. + “You want to get something from the bar?” + “Ya that would probably be good.” I got up and went to the bar tent. I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma + Eventually Clay and girls find us; they are tired from dancing and welcome Crowes’ offering except for Clay who didn’t smoke pot. I thought maybe we should warn them, but I was already lost seeing not a tent but an underground bar in France. I am underground. Anna’s face blurs into Nina’s, into Amy’s into a thousand different hybrids of herself like a shape-shifting shaman. I smile at her and she smiles back. Step aside and let the man go through. I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable. My mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest. And resting only with the throb of the music that drags us up and down over sand dunes and through thick stands of palms to water. Dean and Chloe go off to dance. Clay is gone too though I had not noticed it. I am lying on my back in a delicious see of cloth, sound and touch. +“How are you doing?” Anna attempts to drill through the ice. + “Just lovely how are you?” + (laughing) “Lovely I guess… So how long have you known Clay?” + “I dunno a decade or so, maybe more… it all runs together… how long have you two been dating?” + “Six months.” + Dead-end. Conversations that are substituting for sex are never any fun, nor are they easy to maintain— its best to get the sex out of the way before you start talking. Anna came to the rescue. + “Would you like to dance?” + “We could do that….” + “I’m a little stoned to go outside… why don’t we dance right here?” + I propped up on my elbows and stared right into her eyes searching for some hint of double entendre but she only stared back like a somnambulist. But she kept getting closer and closer and closer like a slow motion film of the casino collapsing and then we kissed. Her lips were warm and soft; they were full pouting lips and then they left. I opened my eyes slowly. Crowes walked by laughed and dropped a bag beside us. Inside was a gooey gray substance known to most as opium. Anna and I fumbled around through Chloe’s purse and found a pipe, which we filled with the roach and heaped on a healthy amount of opium. + The taste of opium is sweet like Nag Champa incense; it perfumes your lungs and wraps them it its warm hand, a delicious felling and then I exhaled it into her mouth. This is not Clay’s girlfriend nor do petty questions of loyalty or moral clouds of right and wrong concern me; this is simply life and it is beautiful. All the opium dreams I have ever had come back in desert windstorms, monsoons of the coast of Mandalay and this is no longer Nevada this is everywhere and the music is undulating in time with her body dancing lightly swaying on her knees hovering over my chest. It was a house beat the kind of palpitating serpentine rhythm that you can not help but move to; over in corner a young boy no more than eighteen is standing with his back to the wall watching, a non participant I am thinking and then I notice that he too is swaying almost imperceptible to the music, the virus of movement. His movement is both awkward and unconscious, but it has a naturalness to it that belies the sense that he is insecure, I am watching him, but in my own perhaps distracted way I too am awkward and in my distraction honesty has taken the reigns… my hands roam her body. I look up suddenly with what must be a face of horror as I realize that I am groping at Anna’s flesh, but her head is thrown back and she seems not to care so I continue my explorations. Her stomach is soft, tightly stretched skin like a drum, a jimbe with her breasts like two percussive bongos, her nipples are hard and feel like raisins sunk into the sink. And the music switches beats, this one exhaustive, tribal, jungle pulsation’s in juxtaposition to the Hindu décor it attacks like a jaguar tearing at me. I am exhausted. My head collapses back between and pillows and with the last bit of reason, last bit of will I pull her up and over my face. Her dress envelopes me in a sea of darkness and smell her musty and sweet like pungent orange blossoms sprinkled over seas of future dreams. The music sways in time with her body and all sense of place and time vanish. There are only temporal dreams lived out in paint in slick tempura of desiring swimming under her dress. I blow softly onto her cunt through the barrier of satin; as my eyes adjust to darkness a damp circle of humid desire becomes visible and tactile in its stickiness. Her juices flow freely and she moans softly over the music; she shifts slightly and her hand reaches down caressing my face and pulling her panties to the side. It leaves and she sinks down on me until her cunt covers my mouth and breathing through my nose I begin to worm my tongue up in her. Slowly probing and then when the flow of juices is too much I lift her ass in my hands forming a stool out of my hands and painting her clit with slow glazing strokes. I am lost for what seems eternity, not thinking about Anna, or the rave or any of it, but simply becoming cunt. Shape shifting as the shaman can I feel it from the inside coming out in waves pulsing waves so different than my own orgasms, waves that very in size and strength, waves that crest and break and other that I let roll by undisturbed. There is no tsunami, no end point, no differentiation no beginning no ending only fleeting twinkles of a glittering amaranthine orgasm. I am drawn back by her stillness and the sharp pain of her nails digging into arms. + She rolls off me and lies down beside me kissing and licking her come off my face. She is smiling, but does not speak. Minutes pass like hours. Clay returns and they go off to dance, as she leaves her hand moves behind her motioning at me to follow but I don’t yet. I lay there with out moving just feeling tangential mix of sex and opium. Sex. The feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed sweating breasts stuck to my skin, kissing, chasing her tongue around her mouth…. There is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it. They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from us, but it is not. It is in us —we are sex. Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it. I want to celebrate it; I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world. I want men I want Women I want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy. No words for it. + Dean and Chloe return. They found the opium and pack themselves a bowl. Anna seemed slightly embarrassed and excused herself to look for Clay. Dean Chloe and I are lying like pictures out of the room of some Chinese Laundry joint; blank faceless bodies reveling in the glory of our own nervous systems and in the elastic beauty of each other. +Chloe roles on her side facing me and kisses me. She tastes it. I put my finger to her lips and she smiles. “Hey Dean… Sil saved you the trouble….” + Dean sits up “You fucked her?!” + “Not exactly” Chloe kisses me again this time plunging her tongue down my throat and then grabs Dean and kisses him. + “Oh I see. Wow that’s really odd… that right there I mean… you ate Anna… Chloe kisses you… and then me… so I taste Anna… I’m not sure how I feel about that… should that gross me out?” + Chloe laughs, “why would it gross you out, because it originated in Sil’s mouth? But it didn’t… what is with you men? You all want to be with two women and yet you can’t even stand to be hard around each other….” + It’s not that….” + “Yes it is, trust me if there is one thing I know it’s the sex habits of men. I can’t tell you how many guys freak out at the thought that I might have just had a cock other than theirs in me… it makes no sense at because that’s what I do, but even if I wasn’t it still wouldn’t make any sense. What is so revolting about men? What is so revolting about cocks? If you ask me I don’t think any of our hang up are from women…. Its men that can’t stand the sight of themselves. + “It’s not that….” Dean is at a loss for words. + “What do you mean its not that? What is it then? I mean if your so comfortable with you body why didn’t you want to fuck me in the middle of all those people? What is your hang up then?” + Dean is silent. I feel the need to defend him, but I can’t the girl is right. +“Down at the bottom of all the strange America hang ups about sex lies the sad truth that men are not comfortable in their own skins. Maybe a hand full here and there.... Freud would say its penis envy or a modified version of it that deals with size, but its more than that. Men have inherited genetic memory or past life memory or something handed across more than cultural boundaries that carries with it guilt. I have no idea why, but it’s there you can hear it in between that words when men talk about sex. There is a different language employed by men. Men always talk about sex in terms of women or a woman… like ‘we had sex’ or ‘she was sexy’ or whatever, but there is no talk of the self —everything sexual is transferred to the woman. She is the one that made him cum, she is the one that bent over, and she is bearer of all things wanton... Men dream of a wanton sexual woman, but they don’t want to be a wanton sexual person themselves. Everything that is desire is always ‘aroused’ that’s why they come to me because I am wanton or at least that’s how they see it. I don’t exist for them and that is the most wanton thing you seem to be able to imagine this abstract fantasy girl that is everything all rolled into one and doesn’t have to be dissected and pulled apart… just put the money on the dresser when you leave….” +“Does that bother you?” Dean lights a cigarette and props up on his elbows. He raises his eyebrows at me when he notices that I have been fondling Chloe while she talked. +“No it doesn’t bother me… but it doesn’t turn me on either…. I mean men like to think that whores don’t feel anything, like because money is involved we suddenly can’t experience pleasure of something, but that’s a load of shit…. If anything I have had better sex since I have been doing this… some of the guys I fuck are gorgeous, I would be intimidated to talk to them in a bar… but most of them still seem to think that being a whore is an odious task… that I must be faking because I couldn’t possible cum if money is involved…. Like this one guy who likes me to masturbate while he watches and then he’ll start masturbating too sitting in this chair. (her eyes close) at first it kind of crewed me out but then I started getting really turned on by it and he was telling me what to do and how fast and it was weird like I was masturbating, but he was in control… that turned me on big time, but he will not believe that. He still tells me that I can fake an orgasm better that anyone… but the thing is that usually I’m not faking it…. I mean I don’t want to get into it... its probably boring but….” +“No I’d be interested to know what strange things you have done… what’s the weirdest thing somebody has asked you to do?” I am intrigued. +“The weirdest? Wow um, probably the guy that wanted me to rape his wife, but refused to do that… the weirdest thing I have done….” Chloe’s face seemed refracted; split apart as if she were tapping some memory far removed from now, from this self. I wanted to attribute that to some reflex of her profession, some need to detach, but it seemed untrue in her case. Chloe had that relaxed ease of one who can change personality at will not simply out of necessity, but on whim, anything arbitrary that might have set her thinking. She was far too intelligent to do anything she didn’t want to do, at least to do it for money. “I guess the weirdest was this guy who liked me to take a shit in front of him. He had this warehouse/loft thing downtown and there was nothing in it except for a little bar on wheels that he kept against the wall by the door. The elevator opened right into the place which always reminds me of the forts my brother used to build in his room… he would stack pillows up so the when you opened the door and went inside you were automatically in the fort. But anyway this guy would send a limo for me and then I would go up to the loft in a French maid getup completely with the little feather duster and I would clean the place while he sat in the chair and watched. He would get furious if I acknowledged his presence… the place was clean to begin with so would just kind of wander around and bend over here and there and pretend that I was doing something. And then after about ten minutes of that I would get a silver platter from behind the bar and lay it in the middle of floor in front of his chair and take a shit on it. Then I left.” +Dean shook his head, “what did he do with it?” +“I have no idea; I don’t really want to know, but he paid me a thousand dollars to do it once a week for about six months and then he just disappeared. Probably found someone new… I dunno one day I was all dressed up waiting for the limo and it just never showed.” Throughout her story Chloe had her back to me and I was absently stoking her ass at first and then I moved in on her cunt, it was warm and soon wet and I was fingering her without reserve by the end of it. She still did nothing to acknowledge it. Dean told a story about his ex wife who had been stripper for some time. +“She did some er extra curricular stuff, but it used to bother me for some reason. There was this one guy though that liked her to come over… same kind of set up she showed up in a French maid outfit and made him a sandwich, it was even on a silver platter if I remember right… then she served it to him and she set in on his lap and straddled him and pissed on the sandwich. Then she left. What a weird fucking thing to want…. I mean most fantasies I have heard I could if not relate to at least understand, but that one is just lost on me….” +“It used to be lost on me too until I realized that it had nothing to do with me or with sex or anything, I think it was a way of touching some part of him that was sealed off in memory, something too painful to access everyday and he needed that intimacy to remind him….” +“But what’s intimate about watching someone take shit?” +“Well think about it Dean… I mean how many people have you seen taking a shit?” +“Not many.” +“Exactly, so if you saw me doing it it would likely remind you of someone you knew well, well enough to watch them going to the bathroom. At least that’s what I think… who knows though maybe there is some Freudian explanation… maybe they were hung up in the anal stage….” Silence drifts on reflection of the idea. +“Do you enjoy sex outside of work?” I had to know does making sex your job make sex into work?” +“Sil, what kind of question is that? Of course I enjoy sex even when I’m not getting paid… I mean its sex… just because you make money at it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun when you're not… am I making sense?” +“Sort of. I think the opium might be crossing a few wires.” I smiled at her and she lay back down. The three of us stared at the top of the tent. +Chloe started off talking again slowly at first. “The thing about me is that I have been exposed to some rather extreme forms of sex in my professional life and I keep trying to drag what I like out of them into my personal life, but it freaks men out. They can’t handle women who know what they want. I scared the living shit out of my last boyfriend. We had been dating about two months, having sort of vanilla sex, you know missionary, me on top, doggy, run of the mill stuff, so I thought maybe I should expose him to something more…. (laughing fits over took her and she paused for a minute) I’ll never forget the look on his face when I walked into the room wearing skin tight rubber boots that go all the way up my legs… I had on nipple clamps I was holding a dog collar and a chain. I told him ‘get on your knees and lick my asshole.’ He wouldn’t do it, he left me standing there... he just took off and I never talked to him again….” +“That’s a travesty….” Dean clearly would have stayed. So would I. +“Ya men are good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when it’s your perversion and you degrading them. That is why I prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you….” +“How long have you been bi?” Lesbian chic fascinates me, one day it just became perfectly acceptable for women to have sex with each other. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just seemed to have happened one day. Odd. +“I’ve been sexual since I was born that’s that thing I don’t like about saying I’m bi, it like one day I woke up and liked women? No it doesn’t work like that… sex is this thing inside us that has to come out. Some people let more of it out than others that’s all…. I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men. I know women's bodies; they are my own body. By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other. There is no Other. And women are adventurous than with men.” +I was about to ask if she had a girlfriend when out of nowhere Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled my fingers out of her cunt with such ferocity that I thought I had offended her; she didn’t even look at me. Then I saw Anna and Clay approaching and I understood. +They were leaving; Anna looked disappointed, but I didn’t trust my instincts just then. It was around four and Clay had to drive back to Wrightwood. We all walked back to his car and headed for the diner. The ride was in an awkward silence. By the time we reached Dean’s car I was on the brink of madness from the silence from the unquenched longing and more than anything from the wan of opium. I hugged Clay and then Anna automatically like they were statues. And then they were gone. +I had a forlorn look on my face to which Dean made a point of saying, “poor Sil. That’ll teach you to let’em cum first.” +“Oh and you did any different?” Chloe raised an eyebrow at him. +Dean shrugged and replied, “I must have done something right you’re still here….” +“You are both morons of the highest degree… luckily for you I took the liberty of taking care of you… you seemed like you needed it…. Come on we need to go get a room at the kldjlkj hotel….” +“A room? What for?” +“Because that’s where Anna is meeting us after she gets rid of that Clay guy… what was with him anyway?” +“I dunno he’s an old friend… not his scene I don’t think….” +“Well come on I need to smoke some more of this opium.” + + +The room was small, two double beds crammed in between a closet and a window, the mattresses sagged and looked like they had been fucked to extinction. I called down to the lobby and ordered extra sheets which we laid over the bedspreads and only then did Dean feel comfortable enough to lie down on the bed. Chloe was on him in seconds and I was left to sit and wait. Waiting as I have said before is something I gave up on so I decided to go for a walk. We were on the outskirts of Las Vegas the budget travelers’ paradise where the rooms are cheaper than the cover charge at the clubs downtown. The area was artificial from the get go, no thought had been put into it, no planning councils, no zoning arguments, it wasn’t even within the city limits. Outside the familiar dry desert heat washed over me like a napalm bath. It was acrid air; it stunk with the worthlessness of lower middle class mediocrity, not rich, not poor, not anything at all —stale. The moon was just disappearing behind the White Mountains somewhere off near the horizon with its glow being the only thing visible from this side of the overpass. I walked up the embankment and watched cars on the freeway screaming past. The rush of the wind as the semis passed at ninety was strong enough to lean into. Lighting a cigarette proved impossible so I headed back. When I turned around I saw them. Or I saw it, which was a freight train at near crawl as it came around the bend and headed east out of Vegas. I was transfixed for moment and then a passing semi sent a blast of air and dust that sent me down the embankment and back to the hotel. +Anna bless her heart was not there when I got back. There was only Chloe sitting in bed smoking a cigarette. It seemed natural that she should be doing so and sat down next to her and smoked a cigarette too, neither of us spoke. About half way through mine, she crushed hers out and still without saying a word unzipped my pants and fished out my still flaccid prick. She pulled the covers over her head and I felt her warm mouth on my stomach. Her hands worked at my belt and she pulled down my pants and I kicked them off unto the floor, then she swallowed my cock whole. Or at least that’s what it felt like. I relaxed and smoked. + + + + + +5 + + + + + I tried to sneak out of the stockyards in Cedar Rapids, but a rent-a-cop caught me. I worked my way out of it eventually, but that says nothing about right now. I am right now. Right now night feels torn apart by the clutching, broken-china voice of the wheels grinding uphill wailing the ancient Indian woman’s song. Song of what I am not sure, she speaks, they speak a different language something more primal, more guttural and I can not understand what they mean, but I feel it rattling its way up through my dangling feet, feel it in the vibration of the boxcar floor as it rattles and lurches across the uneven tracks. My head lists involuntarily, pulled downward by the inescapable gravity of the desert. Utah is laid bare in moonlight, harsh and forlornly beautiful it lulls the mind, spreads out ones thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled twisted trunks of the mosquite; vast open tracks of sand and rock inhabit the empty spaces like waves of light in space, they exist but only as a vacuum as a reminder of emptiness. The moon is full tonight reflecting its pale solar continace across the land in imitation daylight, the mosquite lowlands are beginning to be usurped by once more by grasslands and Junipers of the high desert. +This train is slow, a plodding freighter loaded with something that is apparently in no great rush to get anywhere, it’s a better ride than the first on I hopped… that one was fast, blinding fast and I suffered from velocity sickness which is my name for the strange restless queasy feeling I had the entire time I was in that car. This train is slow lazy and I managed to befriend the brakeman; I am not hiding anymore I am not slinking about in the shadows. I am stretched out on a flatbed; an open car that the brakeman says will be filled with logs at some point through the Rockies. I haven’t decided yet if I will go that far, in the mean time, because we have to stop a lot for faster trains to pass, the brakeman will wait for me to get coffee and food provided I bring him some which I do without hesitation, I even buy it for him despite his protests. His name is Joe and originally he was supposed to drive me from the railyard in Cedar Rapids down to the sheriff’s station where I was to be book on several counts of trespassing, vagrancy (a fancy name for existence, which sadly is illegal in most places), and several others I am not sure of, but I talked him out of it. We reached a more amicable solution, one of mutual aid; I wanted to ride the rails and Joe wanted someone to talk to on his lonely ride from here to Denver. So today I sat up with him in the engine room where the whirling lights and strange computer guidance systems dragged us out of the pine forests of Cedar Rapids and across the windswept high country where for more than five hours we did not see a tree or any shrub save the endless seas of grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta. +Joe +Joe hails from the lexicon of true Americanism —individuality. He is a rustic grisly type of man, the kind that inhabit the backwater towns of the west, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery he is simply inhuman like me. Which is to say that humanity or ‘syphilization,’ as one misanthropic author referred to it, has no hold on Joe, false modesty, false politeness and false pretense have been shed here like dry useless lizard skin. Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier his ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn’t write books, who hold court with the mysteries of the universe and don’t attend church, who know what life has taught them and who have there own ideas about morality, reality and humanity. Joe represents a rare breed one that should have flourished on this continent, but as in the case with a seed that never gets water, their lot is small and dwindling. +Joe could well be me in thirty years, he looks about sixty maybe younger but the years he has walked through have taken their toll. He has a salt and pepper scruff beard and piercing blue eyes; he told me about the war by which I think he meant the second world war; he hates Steven Spielberg, says it wasn’t like that movie at all; he has a wife in Moab and two daughters both married and living back east. His stories are endless and my patience is too so we drifted, undulating with the sway of the train, his words came out in growling whispers just loud enough to here over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice. He talked with the rhythm of the train, we went around a bend and Joe went in on the beach at Normandy, we started uphill and Joe moved out west after the war, we went through a tunnel and Joe fell silent mid sentence. That kind of creeped me out, but when we emerged back into the blinding midday sun he started into his courtship and marriage without missing a beat and I learned that for Joe, when you are underground it is best not to talk. +Lying on my back trying to piece his life together I get lost, lost in the stars. The moon is to my back but in front down near the horizon the stars are visible, scant few tonight but they are there; the invisible the inky blackness that is between them is the pure white void of space. It is the void, the spaces in between them, the vast open empty tracks of sky, the darkness that is the platinum setting into which little diamonds, rubies, amethysts, and emeralds are laid… it is there that life exists in between the arbitrary line of reality and phantasmal yawning mouth of imagination. Look at the stones, the setting, the band, but none of it is so beautiful as the empty space between her finger in which all life hides. The space that allows it to pass through your hair, to fit your fingers, to stroke your chest, kneed your back and for the space and the space alone you should be grateful. Grateful that there is emptiness for without there would be nothing. I am grateful for you, I am grateful to all the spaces in between so that you can ignore them so that you can continue to fill them with jealousy, with fear, without understanding, but do not be afraid everything is okay…. +The night sky was thrown into being by the great god badger who in an effort to steal it from the last world accidentally pulled to hard and it went soaring up over his head where it stuck to the ceiling of life. No Hopi mythology there, just my educated opinion, just how it looks from here... But I am not thinking about the sky right now I am just looking at it; I am thinking about the Indian town back on the reservation where I bought us dinner. I bought cornmeal cakes and beans from a wizened old Navaho woman who inhabited an abode hut that glowed orange in the setting sun. The store was closed but the woman approached me asked if I wanted to buy dinner, I did and she took me to her hut; in the middle there was a fire and a pot of food on it along with too smudge faced Indian girls maybe four or five years old. They watched me intently in silence with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding far beyond the physical age of their bodies. As the old woman wrapped the corn cakes and beans in foil I got lost in a strange hobbit-like land where the true secrets of the universe were about to be revealed as beans and corn bread seen through the eyes of a child, it was a pregnant moment. Then she brought me to by insisting that I take one of her chocolate Jesus statues for desert. I thought about a Tom Waits’ song, about a minister I knew once who wouldn’t allow his parishioners to sell donuts at church and about the good Jesus himself; what must he think if he really was the son of god and really is watching, what must he think of being molded in wax, filled with chocolate and wrapped in colored foil? +I thought that Joe, being a Mormon by conversion might be offended, he struck me as a serious guy when it came to religion, but he just laughed and laughed said “what will they think of next?” or words to the effect and he devoured Christ’s chocolate body. Finally I thought as I watched Joe eat, someone is enjoying the body of Christ. And even now I think, in arrogantly retelling history, that if Christ was indeed the son of god he will come down here tonight in fire and brimstone and he will extend a hand out to the two men, the only two men who ever took of his body and ate with lust, with vigor with the true enjoyment of being alive, for if there is one thing undeniable out here it is that we are alive. We may not being doing anything, we may be talking or staring at the passing scenery through the dirty cockpit window or we may be climbing on the roof of a boxcar, but whatever we are doing we fundamentally alive. I say this because there is no reason for humans to exist out here at all. We lack the specialization of desert evolution, we are not covered with barbs and spikes, we do not have thick skin which can hold water seemingly indefinitely, we are pulpy fragile creatures we ought to be dead, but somehow we are not and we are more alive because of it, we are aware. We are here by an act of will —our own. It takes an act of will to realize that you are alive that is my revelation for tonight. +I light a cigarette and throw back the sleeping bag, it is September and the night is cool, I throw on my jacket and walk to edge of the car and let my feet dangle off the side. We are doing about forty I would guess, fast enough to do some serious damage if I fall, but slow enough to study individual plants as they pass by at about ten yards away. I have never been to Coney Island, but for me this is an amusement park the landscape itself is so alien as to remain forever fascinating. It illuminates a part of my personality that is as esoteric as this desert. We are picking up speed and heading downhill into the canyon country. I know this because Joe showed me the maps, pointed out scenic spots when I ought to sleep and when I ought to be awake and amazed, but I like it all. Sometimes the less scenic things are the more beautiful they become, that quite ineffable sense of beauty which require the careful turning of the eye to detect; such as a trash strew alley that you find yourself staring at after waking up in a gutter behind a bar in SoHo. Or the way the smog lifts slightly almost imperceptibly off the mountains surrounding Mexico City everyday around seven o’clock. +Or the way this juniper tree is sitting alone clinging to the side of the canyon wall able to exist in the slightest most overlooked fissure surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone which yields nothing, there is only the one tree here. That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but in end explainable, what is not explainable is me, that I should be here, that is should be right here on this train, at this moment, staring at this tree is truly miraculous. I was not scattered to the wind with thousands of my fellow seeds, I did not lodge in a crevasse, I was not carried by wind, I did not get just the right amount of sunlight and water. I was planned from the beginning, I nice addition to a nice couple who were themselves nice additions to an already nice town that was part of nice and highly advanced civilization almost at the end of its second thousand years of existence. All my life is orchestrated by something, pushed and pulled about by forces which can be explained with, goddesses, DNA, evolution, badgers, crows, old women, trickster poets, visionary superbeings of alpha centaur, but the end conclusion by all humanity it seems is that something is controlling things. There is no freedom for me, no wind to carry me, no water or soil to nourish and no light by which I can grow. There is no visible thing gravity that pulls on me, there is nothing tangible about DNA, I live in between all mythology sandwiched like a chucalwalla in a sandstone crevasse. I have learned infinite things, made them finite, knowable. I have built great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people and torn them all down again to start over. I have lived a thousand lonely huddled nights from bearskin to tapestries to the silk sheets of Manhattan nights; I have climbed every mountain peak slide down the scree and talus slopes of meeting with pharaohs, Voudans, with Moses and god; I have held a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all history's wombs from Sarah to Satan all filled themselves with my nourishment. But I still do not know who I am or why I am here. I am Everyone and I am driving myself mad. + + + +Today at dawn this is the most beautiful place on earth. I get up not having slept much, not that that is out of the ordinary these days, balancing myself and reorienting to the sense of movement that has not left my head for almost 36 hours now, I stretch and yawn greedily like an insomniac does. The sky is green yet, not long till dawn by when I must be in the engine compartment because today the tracks run beside US highway 60 and I can not be seen. I am secret; I must be hard to find. My precarious journey over four boxcars to the engine is rewarded with the smell of frying bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits. Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellowed and stained with coffee and cigarettes, but rather than being grotesque the seem only to add character. +“I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served.” He hands me a cup of coffee. “Beautiful night wasn’t it?” Joe seems to now sleep at all. +“Yes it was,” I mumble as I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot. +“Here….” He hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched precariously on either side. “Let's eat on the roof, we’re not by the road yet.” The way he says road gets me, his voice has a hatred in it, a bitterness towards this thing the road. We go up on the roof and eat in silence. All around us the sky is a color show. The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds. The first direct rays of the sun find me chewing on the last piece of bacon, I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety three million-mile void. +I open to a squint and turn around, behind us lies the akdjflkd, endless grass and somewhere in the middle the kdjlkadkj; to the north there is the escalanted wilderness, the green river and the largest uninhabited area in north America; to the south and east there is the maze, Canyonlands and Natural bridges National parks, the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere a tiny speck of a town called Moab where we will be putting in for two days to load rock and other assorted things. +“Quartz and sand mostly, which we’ll be dumping in Denver, but whatever the case I wanted to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I. She’s a real looker and great cook too.” He laughs and nudges me in the ribs. “She was a beauty queen in high school, she was miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn’t decided to give the whole thing up and go to college… course I’m glad she did ‘cause that’s where I got her….” +I hem and haw non commitally thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet. I head back down to do the dishes and then I splash cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror. Things look good; a little haggard here and there, weathered a bit by the years perhaps, but still young still enthusiastic. I spot a gray hair sprouting out of my closely cropped scalp, but the skin is still soft and smooth; I need a shave, but that is of no concern out here. Back on the roof I smoke a cigarette while Joe calls into the Moab station. After a while he yells up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive, today is Sunday he informs me, and this is Mormon country —nothing happens on Sunday. +“You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting and they was downright pissed when we got hitched in the Tabernacle, but I tell ya… Mormons may have some strange ideas and beliefs but on the whole they are some of the best people I’ve ever met. Sure it’s a little ridiculous there bible and all what with zebra’s running around here —imagine that! Zebras here!— and I don’t think the ol Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm, and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea…. But in spite of all that ridiculousness which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic’s eating wafers of gods body or the Jew’s giving things up for no real reason at all once or twice a year… it all ridiculous when you think about it objectively. But what I have noticed having a Mormon wife and a lot of Mormon friends is that they build real communities… they are good people at a level that is very basic and seemingly below the more refined religions…. Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal and offer them a shower and of course a little counselling on the true church of God, but when a man’s belly is full and his hair clean he can listen to that sort of nonsense. I don’t believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smiling….” +Joe smiled at me and said that I could stay on the roof of the engine so long as he was down below, that way anyone watching would think that I was him. So I sat up there letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons —for now. One day I suspect the Tabernacal will fall, the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other civilization, but for now they reign over god’s last piece of land. And what a land this is here. The tracks have climbed back out of the canyon country and we are on the mesa tops cruising at thirty five toward the Big Switch as Joe called it. The Big Switch is apparently the only non computerized part of the journey where Joe will have to stop the train and get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab. Once he drives the train past it he has to stop again and walk back and switch it again so that the next train can pass on by. It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been driven up or just don’t even slow at all. + It was Dean who pointed out the curve in the tracks behind his mother apartment complex, which he really only did for one reason —so that I could catch a train. I had never ridden on a train be it hoping a boxcar or buying a ticket. I didn’t have enough for the ticket that much was certain and I knew that there were some lingering stiff vagrancy laws and such penalties as to keep people from riding for free, but I had never been on a train. The chief reason that I had never been on a train though was that I had never been near a train. Never lived near a station or had a track pass through the neighborhood. As child the best part about going to my grandmother’s house was that in the course of the hour long drive we crossed a train track and occasionally we would even get there just as a train was passing. Something about them always got to me, the way they roared along, not fast, but roaring a primal movement that harkens back to more primitive days. You could see the past in them when travel was something worth doing. Airplanes had power and thrill, but trains have something bigger something all together more massive about them, they do not roar they lumber and lurch they are more human than the smooth sterility of the car or the powerful speed of the plane +I stare off at the distant looming La Salle Mountians where first frosts are melting in the morning sun, Dean my old friend who set all this in motion, whose life existed as a catalyist for my own just as mine existed as a catalyst for his; so it is with brothers be they of blood or not. When I think of Dean I think of him as he was a year ago when we touched down in Paris, his hair jet black and greased back in a fashion that was at once greaser and not, he looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin. We both had on suits, not expensive once like we wanted, but ones that we handed down or bought at thrist stores, we were highly incongruous with the international image of what an American ought to be. Or I think of a photograph I took at the Little Knight so many years ago or was that only months? Dean is in the a pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline pure black and illuminating his face framing it in the luminesnce of empty space, the eyes are laughing, but the lips barely curl, womething intangible is lurking under the skin and bones. Another from the same night caught Dean unawares as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd. His arm is blurred lifting the everpresent cigarette to his lips and all around his swirling women’s hair and exited arm waving men fade into a faceless blur, in the middle there is Dean, standing still like the hummingbird. +Dean is right now probably just getting off the internet where he was undoubtedly chatting with bilixa66 the girl whom he is in love with, but tries to deny it. Right now his weary bones are preparing for rest and I am gliding along through Elysian fields. So it goes. Everyone everywhere is doing something different than me right now, I know this because I am alone. I am playing mental solitare then infinite game which doesn’t pay anymind to rulles like time or space. Time is an inconsequential and inconvenian human invention which the traveler learns to disregard and ignore. There are two games going on one is the time game in which all society and interaction with humanity, ones culture, ones beliefs, once hopes and goals all thing bounded by time, in the other game there is the infinte self which has no time no dreams, no humanity, no space no thing. It is the seemless interaction of the two that create what we formally call the ego, the self, the thing that is perceivable, identifiable, and recognizable. One can see or be seen depending on which game you want to play. The train is slowing, the turn off to Moab is nearing, from the Big Switch it is only about half an hour down into the canyon carved long ago by the green river. I am wandering back to my flatbed to gather up my things and hide out in the cabin of the engine; I am thinking about how to ditch Joe without offending him, I need to get off the train andout into the desert, Everything is falling away like great sheets of burn skin sliding off the greasy shiny red flesh that lies beneath the surface. That was how it went this morning. + + + +It was four in the afternoon when I said goodbye to Joe and headed off down Moab’s main drag toward the mountaineering shop to see about a ride up into canyonlands. I left it open with Joe so that if the urge struck to go back to the train into denver I could, but I was intent only on getting to Canyonlands for now. One thing at a time, evverything one at a time, nothing in pieces everything all at once fell to pieces. I got a ride from two hippies rock climbers clad in the fashion of the earth first and other environemtnal activitists who share aside from a love of the wilderness apparently the same love of Kakhi’s, Tevas, Tofu and flat tasteless foodstuffs that originate in the same facotires that make oreos. Funny folks the country culture these days, like ldemocrats and republicans they are differential from there enemies primarily by custom and fashion. The radical tree camping, pottery making, hemp weaving, Dave Foreman worshipping, mushroom eating, toms of maine consuming hippie-enviromental-social consciousness raising-guitar playing radical of the outback is no different than the BMW driving, Starbucks drinking, software writing, technology worshipping, juice drinking, spa loving, health club hopping, slandes wearing dog walking, family rasing white picket fence building, church attending drug abstaining yuppie eviel consumer destroying the world capitalist pig set that the so-called radical crowd hates with such superior disdaim. One uses Tom’s of Maine and the other crest, beyond that they are the same. My hippie climber friends bought trail mix and candles at the super market while I opted for steak, beans and potatos with a bag of chemically enhanced brickets that would light from my cigarette butt. Its all a matter of taste. I requested paper bags and rolled them up so they wouldn’t abandon me for not being one of there own. I rode in the back of there bus which turned the hourlong drive from Moab to the Est entrance of Canyonlands into a three hour long crawl. As we switchbacked up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country Dave and Tom grilled me on my beliefs, they were both college student on a semester long vacation so I could forgive them for still being tangeled up in ideas but it wore on me after a while. They were astonished that I did not vote, that I never had, but was not disillusioned with the political system, I just don’t give shit one way or the other. +“Man if you don’t vote you give up your say in what goes on in the world man, come on how are we going to change things if everybody has that attitude? Why are you going to be giving up your power to change things man? Some people would die for a chance to vote…?” +Its better those people go right a head and die I am think but aloud I try to formulate something less offensive to their tender idealist hearts. “Perhaps Tom I don’t want to change anything… perhaps I coulld if a itried, but what if I don’t want too?” +I figured to let them do the talking and they did all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground, I learned the Toms of Maine was better because it was natural, Teva was better because it did not use child slave labor and that one acre of farmland can support a faimly of ten with vegetables of two hamburgers worth of cow if it is grazed. I don’t personally give a shit either way. Is fast as I could I said my thanks to the Dave and Tom and wandered down the road to an open campsite where I proceeded to build a fire in the light of the fading sun with its crimson glow licking across the thunderheads to my back. It was the still about eighty degrees and I was sweating in the heat of the fire, but I wanted a steak. I was staring at the sizzling fat dripping from the enormous side of beef I had bought thinking of a woman I had never seen staring at a well in the French countryside. I felt an effluence of enthusiasm; the taproot broke through dry soil and was swamped by underground water. The sizzled meat melted down to the flavor of sweet salt, the mixture of spices and blood. My plate was stained a greasy pink Moroccan-color with each carving slice of the knife and the potato swam about in the bloody grease tailing is own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean. +I was fucking famished. With the tired wise-consumer guru advise I had endured all the way up the mountain made the dripping animal fat like a tonic elixer cleansing my artieries of stale plache of idealism realism. Nothing is ever seems so real as fiction. The world I exist in is finite, bounded and ruled by certain inescapable laws, here a house, there a job, and everywhere by the transient people and events that make up so called life. Existence takes place in the world of not I’s, the mysterious other, but that is not where I do my living. Nor does any one else. We live in the spaces in between the temporal world, the infinitude of the imagination, next to which our terrestrial existence looks flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire cracked and torn in the sun. In these moments where the internal merges flawlessly with the external I go roaring back through memories of childhood, of selves that I was truly, but am no longer today, through all the marauding personalities which have governed this thing called I. Pregnant moments are these, usually catching me unawares and throwing down a track of thought I had not expected; moments when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road. It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet it is real, the fluid transmission of emotion that can be tasted on the back of your tongue as well as felt beaming into your chest. The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, the imagination leaks into the real world. You catch it when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across you face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her organic body, fecund and warm. You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain sending chills down your spine. Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment. Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the room, the sky or the music. The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of imagination. How long must ancient man have wondered where do these thoughts come from? What am I to do with them? +Looking backwards with clever red sunglasses I could trace the history for you; the first thing the human species got out of these encounters was a loose clumsy word: spirituality. One day caveman Thak felt with authority that there was something beyond the simple organic, fertile, pussing matter of his body, there must be a realm august to this temporal one. Thak ruminated over this for time and finally invented language in order to describe how he felt to other prehensile monkeys. With language Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom. Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals knows that they communicate, but rather what Thak gave us was a means of creating memories —severing us from time. Out of memory came dissention as other monkeys did not buy into Thak’s explanations and as time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized. Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their “gods” and they were the only gods, the contrarians on the other side of the proverbial river lacked THE TRUTH. Not much changed from then until now, there are more gods and even less comprehension of the godliness, but other than that we still behave in much the same manner as our ancient ancestors, some would same we have actually gotten worse not better. +And all of this reasoning has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question —where are thoughts coming from? All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I ? Where is this vitality teeming from? What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why? Why can one person be moved to tears by a quartet and another put to sleep? +Much of the wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear’s is lost for us. We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it. Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that can be understood and ignore all the rest saying in essence that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist. But it does and she knows what I am thinking before I say it and the light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles and the back porch of an antique house in the south where I am forced once more to stand face to face with the unknowable. Miniaturization is for small minds I say. Science is the culprit here they wrecked the whole show shrank it down and claimed to understand how it all worked. I hope they all choke on those miniaturized hors' dorve corns or get mauled by a tiny, shrunken Doberman pincer. It would give them back the humility they have tried to shed. +For a long time this miniature world was all I could see and it threw me into a depression every time it crossed my mind, but I studied it with great enthusiasm because I was looking for way out of it. The more I looked at all the evidence the farther I felt from the truth. The truth is that sometimes the light is magic and being able to explain why it has the tones and hues, how the electrons spin, says nothing about the experience of it. What good is knowing without feeling? Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and perhaps even yours, all of ours, all life, are not something that can be taken apart. I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with. +If we stop taking apart things for a minute and just breathe in slowly one breath at a time it will flood the hatches and bouyantly draw us up to the surface of things. It is time we stopped this nonsense of science and floated our way back up to the surface of the pond. Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than know, to live rather than abstract…. +But back to our brief history of LOVE… +Unfortunately by the time you and I got on the scene it resembled uncooked spaghetti, thin strands of information imparted over the years, scattered clumsily about the kitchen, there is no pot, no water, nothing to cook it with just dry hard idea that crunches when you bite into it and sticks between your teeth long after. We externalized the internal, brought all out, the good with the bad, so that we could take it apart and understand it. We live amid the rubble of Decarte and the mechanized universe. We dissect, we want answers, but we ask questions that can’t be answered by the narrow methods of research that are considered valid. Joseph Kellar ought to be our patron saint, to preside over every convening moment to remind us that we are looking for our tail while it is in our mouths, right below our noses where we can’t see it… we can taste it though and it drives us with even greater fury, mouths watering and ravenous fangs dripping the saliva of untold desire. But we want to see it with these eyes, these imperfect eyes that we know are not even used for seeing. We want answers to appear, to be made real. We want Christ to appear, we want spacemen to appear, we want something to appear, but we are not by god going to accept anything that we haven’t had tested up and down with all the rigorous insanity of a mathematician trying to write out equations for her emotions. +What is science doing if not that? Making the world better? For whom? Scientsists? I don’t want to live in a Cartesian nightmare where history is mechanically plodding along with the cold calculated precision of a steam engine. No many people do, consciously speaking and so came religions, sects, and politics… but none of that comes close to pulling the sense of wonder that science threw out the window. None of it brings back the endless nature of grainy experience. Have become more enthralled with the human created side of life and in doing so sacrafized the intertwining of the individual with the universal. We have found a distraction which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us —our selves. Don’t think the church/state/priest/politician/scientist/special action committee on the overexertion of gray matter will take care of it for you. We wrote a lullaby called god and put ourselves to sleep. Until today we find ourselves at a crossroads in human evolution. +As we come to understand the ineffable world around us in increasingly greater minutia, we are reaching the end of the external line. We can measure and measure search and search the world for new discoveries in a world that we once thought was infinite and impossible to wrap our minds around we are in danger of knowing the limits of knowing. + The scientific community has been the first to realize that such a day is coming and true to the morbid and yet curious nature of scientists the future is being drawn with great caution and precision. And yet if one were to delve into the that world with the skepticism of a mystic looking at a computer code one would eventually notice that the experience of science is really not much different in that of the eastern philosophers of millennia past. + It is very popular these days to write books about the connections between the physics of indeterminacy and the constant contradictions of the Tao Te Ching. (One of the best is actually called the Tao of Physics.) And what has this endless search given us? + Nothing. Nothing more than a system of belief, which in the end says that no system, can describe anything that is outside of the system. What that fancy phrase means to anyone who is not absolutely enthralled by making things a lot more complicated than they need to be, is that we don’t anything about anything and we never will. +But Lao-Tzu already said that: The farther you go the less you know. So what’s the big deal? What has the “cutting edge of science to report back? That it can’t describe anything that can’t be measured. You can’t measure the emotion that light hitting a church steeple evokes, you can’t measure they way you feel propped up in bed watching the sleeping form of the one you love. You can’t measure them because they are encoded in you, they are uniquely yours and there is no way to translate them to others. + Science’s end will be when it achieves what art has been doing for most of recorded history —trying to give the uniqueness of experience a form which allows it to transcend the individual and share it. Science is but a new language and nothing more. +Perhaps with virtual reality we will one day be able to exactly encode everything that another has experienced and feed it all into our own nervous system, but the response will still be different. In order for emotions to be communicated everyone would have to have the exact same history, exact same thoughts, and exact same experience felt be all at once. Even supposing the absurdity of this to be possible what would be gained? + Fuck science; fuck it along with religion, society and culture, fuck them all because they say nothing other than what any two year old could tell you is obvious. It is obvious because we have all felt it. All the records of how we felt pall in the face of the question of what? What is it that sends the chill down our spines, the warmth out of our heart or the goosebumped hair up on our arms? + No one knows and I think that it would be safe bet to assume that as long as we all have different brains we never will. The technology fanatics will burn themselves up the same way the drug gurus of the sixties did, they will fall prey to the one thing that makes them human —ego. It killed the belief in god, it killed the belief in the cultural reformers and it will always kill any attempt to transcend because it is the point at which belief originates. + Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone they vastness of all existence. Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was. +Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself. But we being the tragic creatures we are doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things. Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence. At our best we celebrate the by-products such as art of music. At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives. + Very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history. Oh to be sure there were lots of them, but we haven’t paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew. We have created a cult of worship to our egos to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things which we have in common. + Its built into our culture and if we Americans seem particularly arrogant to the rest of the world it is only because we house the temples in which the worship of the ego if held. We play host to humanity’s darkest hour, an experiment that has fallen off track and yet it is so ingrained in our minds that it forms an unbroken circle which steadily contracts into smaller and smaller rings the closer we come to the zero hour. + We will do anything to draw the attention away from ourselves and as Freud hinted and Reich out right said we do it by manifesting our fear into the real world. The only things that happen are ones that someone wants to happen. The problem is that none of us really know for sure what we want. The subconscious mind is in the act of creating… always and forever…. It is creating even the conscious mind. Everything that you think you are is dream that some other part of your brain is having; to explain this we had to invent something called chaos which says that you are, in mathmatical terms living in an endless noisy feedback loop called non-causality and non causality is merely causality that is too complicated to trace, but there is a cause nonetheless. + Their will always be a cause without it the world could not exist, without a beginning then there can be know end and we all know there is an end, an end to ourselves and from all appearances an end to the whole damn show. The end has in fact already happened because time like everything in the universe is something that someone wanted to exist. + Where does this terrible looping logic take us? Right back where we started. It’s a loop remember —really nothing to marvel at. You can travel the whole distance or just stay where you are and let it come back around. In the end even those are no different. So here we are again, perhaps there it is another person next to me in bed when I watch them sleep, perhaps it is a techno song that sends the chills down my spine, and perhaps the next time the sun breaks through the clouds it will be illuminating a mountain instead of a church. + At the end of the line the breakdown of the word I realized there was no hope for communication to take place I was too isolated in experience to hope to relate it to anyone other than myself. I was not close enough to anyone so close was I to god. It is not near the bottom in the sewers of cities that humanities hope lies but out here in the great heights, closer to god and only then to we seem so much alike. Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud. Only then do you see every man as your ally every woman your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, color of skin do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other. No hope for a cure is on earth, no hope save death. No cure but death and then Quien Sabe? +With the bleakness of snow and the blanketed certainty of disillusionment I cast off all doubts. I was ready. Ready for what I did not know —a thousand faces before the day is half over passing like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray. Each pair of eyes radiant unto itself delicately in the corners of a stray glance I caught the recognition of understanding though only tragedy brings them any closer. Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces here the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid souls and fuse combinations of liquor and lips, souls to the experiment of which we are all part. + The medieval alchemists searched in the stone, the modern physicist searches the heavens, and perhaps the future shaman will try to fuse man with machine. All have missed the most obvious of truths with the dedication to illusion that had carried the Catholic Church on its back for so long. We want ourselves to so make or form each other into the god that we were fashioned after that we forget that such is already true. The wisdoms of heaven are in the DNA strand yes, but what are we to do with them? Copper may be turned to steel, but what are we to do with it? Everything may be taken apart and put back together differently, but what will have changed? + She waited by a fountain in a park just outside of Paris where I have never been. I watched her sit silently for hours staring at nothing or so it looked to me her eyes were fixed on the pump handle of the well. She sat motionless and never without the quite smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in the private mysterious world of orgasm. I see it on the face of the ones I have loved in that indeterminable second after where everything is. + Which brings you right back to the steak, but now there was a woman or there was the sheading of a woman, an inescapable need to be at once masculine and feminine, cunt and cock, both sides of the coin as it were, but tonight the blood of the cow is burning away the feminine scorching it like so many glowing crimson embers that glow and warm, but which fade in the spectacular face of flame. Meat sizzling over a campfire gets rid of girlfriends and wives, gets rid of lots of entrapments, like a cure for the plague. It’s a proven fact. +With the final rays of sun went the final heat; as the gentle coolness of night settled in the humidity of the rain began to evaporate and the desert returned to it’s dry self again. Eating the salty and sweet steak with a baked potato and a pot of baked beans I wandered off on a walk. At first it was just my mind bouncing lightly among the juniper trees that were behind my campsite, but then when the food was gone, my body grabbed me a beer and a pack of cigarettes and carried me down to the edge of the canyon. I sat with my legs dangling off a rock that was perched on the rim and extended out into space. All around me there was nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we called air. + We call it air. But it used to be called ether, before that it was liquid, now it’s mostly dirt in some places. Here it is air. +I thought about Dante, about God, about steak and about women. It was beautiful just to be alive and to able to think. I thought about that for along time. There came an utter silence in which I watched myself think in the way that you might listen to another talk. It detached but remained aware that it must return back and live with those thoughts that it could only then recognize. It was a spiraling double helix of a logic that corkscrewed all about my mind drilling little holes hear and there opening wine thoughts and pouring glasses for the self that continues to stream in the door. It was to watch a feast of thoughts or personalities come together for one sort time and dine like old friends. A reunion to catch-up on where each had been what had happened and what they had done. It turned to a smorgasbord of philosophy and love and there was endless debate, dissention and rising voices. A circus dine roared around the room slap happy train car attendants moved about taking ticket and slapping the men in the faces for not having the right change. +And then the wave crested at cacophony and confusion and broke leaving only silence in the room. Silence that carried on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future. I touched for a moment the void that Buddha preached, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to understand. Riddles that seemed ridiculous to me before where solved with simplest of maneuvers truth gleamed with the caustic light of florescent light posts on an asphalt road. In the blinking blank look of the deer just before impact is the look of understanding the look of recognition that it is all nothing. No thing. What do I want out of this life? Nothing. Nothing at all. +I understood with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is. I came to see that even the void of understanding was not the end but only a means to something else which would also be yet another means until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever and weds them together. +And the two shall be joined as one. I have acted that out with others; I have joined souls with several men and women in my life but I had never had the sensation of meeting myself on that plane until that moment. A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl a giant net through the waters of the past which played out in slide show fashion, a game show in which I had to meet myself + Endless images of my own arrogance played themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment and I went to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up. All love flowed through me and made everything hyperreal and tactile as if thoughts were the rock and the trees and the silence was the minds way of answering the endless question of the universe. The transitory nature of my own existence was illuminated and I was washed with feeling of warm and celebration of the embarrassment and I felt the sheer hilarious joy of my own folly fall along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter. Coiled up tight like yarn and batted about by the kitten of the universe the ball dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children endlessly. A cat. A cat in the hat. The trick top hat. + As the moon rose up from the east I watched in silence as my life unfolded behind my eyes I watched memories I had no conscious knowledge of the way a father watches his sun playing in the yard. They started off recent memories of Amy, of Dean, of Ed, of moments shared with each and then it kept racing backward to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends…. Until I went back in utero to a point of no consciousness at all and then other stories unfolded as if out of some kind of genetic memory. I saw the light of the fifteen-century break through the night hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples. Wild and uncharted regions played out scenes from Arabian Nights with silken tapestries women’s arms entwined with gold bands; and then sagas of Templars, all the wisdom seekers of the fertile crescent and the girl in France by the well came up near the end like a phantom as if to introduce herself but only disappeared again into a background of Egyptian palaces and the fragrance of silk and spices from the orient. There was a warm glow of light in the room that slowly as the eyes adjusted revealed itself as a temple of splendors. The walls were adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that acted out the living myths of the sun gods. The floor was blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh; in the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which a beautiful and naked goddess lay, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask. She was a goddess and in her silence I swam the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid caressing waters that even now three years later come back with absolute lucidity as if I were returning to the vision at will just by writing it again. + And then the moment itself swelled beyond its proportions and burst leaving me only in awe of it, but dancing on to new lines, new tap roots burrowing intensity turned up by the alchemal union of soul and steak, god and potato, desert and breast, me and my self. The minute I became conscious of the fact that I was having a thought all sense of it was lost. I saw in this the futility of my own quest to know. I saw the source of my unhappiness that I could not live here now but only came looking and in being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself. Everything was laid unequivocally bare to the opulent austerity of the truth the contradiction when contradiction finally fades and all things are true and not true all at the same moment. A place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words. It is too raw to be said or explained it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey + I felt it for what seemed like an eternity. I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see. My spine trembled and doubt slowly crept in. What if this stops? I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape whole world be damned and with these thoughts so went the vision. + I awoke feeling an eternal peace settled into my chest and the words of Terence McKenna came to my mind. “If you have seen the end you take your place in the drama and you live without anxiety.” I don’t know what he meant by those words what space he went to what he felt, but they mean something to me. They mean something as if I myself had said them. I did not see an end or anything so literal as that at best I can saw that I felt everything as it really was beautiful and unbounded and I felt the release of anxiety that he attempts to approximate with words. + I made breakfast in the morning heat. The desert was waking up and it wouldn’t be long before I could have cooked the eggs right on the rocks. I drank the last beer to wash down the eggs and I asked around the campground for a ride back into Moab finally at the last sight right by the entrance I found a young couple who let me ride in the camper shell of their truck crouched between my gear and theirs, it was a long bumpy ride into Moab, but I didn’t have to suffer lectures on political duties. Instead I thought about Joe, he was expecting me at the yard around five which gave me a hour to kill in Moab. The bulk of the hour I spent trying to figure out why some people meet someone and they share there live and other meet people they share there ideas. I like to think that my life is an idea and every idea a life, but then again I have a fondness for wordplay, deceit, double entandre. delibrete acting and outright lying when it comes to talking to strangers. I just try to stay one step ahead of my brain as if I were writing myself into existence all the time. + + + +At the end of the street there was a group of surly looking Indians who were probably surly +about the fact that this is Utah and beer is 3.2 which makes it awfully hard to get drunk. I could probably have got a ride with them, it’s a common custom among the people of third world nations to help each other and the Hopi are certainly a third world nation. I toyed with the idea of trying to stay with them, but the winds blew the other way and they left before I could finish my cigarette. I decided to go back to the train. In the middle of my reverie when the reflections of my life played out I was quite moved by the portrait of Mark Pledger I decided to visit him in New Orleans. There is naturally no reason for hurry so I might as well take the slowest mode of travel. If there had been a river I would’ve strapped together some sticks and headed off. +But there was no river running that direction so I called the number Joe had given me when we parted and crossed my fingers. Sure enough I heard Joe yelling “who is it?” Before his wife even said hello. I explained myself hoping that perhaps a story had preceded me and then she handed the phone to Joe who just said “where you at?” +That how it goes with some people they take care of the important stuff first. Joe was there in ten minutes and in another ten we were at “the homestead” as Joe referred to it. It was About five miles outside of Moab near the entrance to a box canyon, a nice house that had an added onto appears such that it sprawled about with rooms attached to the sides of what had once been a simple miners shack. The bulk of it was adobe —use what’s on hand. Joe told me it was built by a prospector during the Uranium rush of the fifties the man, so went Joe’s story had come out west trying to strike it rich and was then double crossed by his partner and lost his wife, his son and eventually his own life to the greedy partner. +“You can imagine the times… everybody was hungry for uranium and cash, but the truth of the matter was that the government had all the good claims and the majority of what was left never got anymore rich. The best way to get rich in Moab back then was to swindle the newcomers. The guy that built this place was from Michigan —easy pickin’s…. Anyway some other guy meets him in the bar… the west is full of these stories, but this one ended up with everybody dead except the cheating wife and she wanted to clear out of town afterwards… it just so happened that we arrived at the right time… I bought this place for three hundred bucks and as it turns out I have claim to that whole canyon you see up there….” +He gestured to the rock walls that towered over our heads and then kicked at the gravel in the driveway. Cottonwood trees dropped behind the house and I guessed that there must have been a tributary stream running behind the place. It was beautiful spread, we stood by the truck in silence for a minute or two just staring at the tops of the cliffs watching the setting sun climb up them. Finally Joe suggested I “meet the little woman” and have some dinner. Jean was every bit the Mormon matriarch, she greeted me with a smile and hug and made me feel like one of the family, but there was an element of mischief about her something mysterious and wise that danced in the corner of her eyes. After introductions and such we sat down to big home cooked spread of ham, mashed sweet potatoes, collared greens, fresh rolls, and corn on the cob; throughout the meal the smell of cherry pie drifting in from the kitchen. The meal was spent in near silence all of us eating it should have been awkward but it wasn’t. With the food in ruins Joe pushed back his chair and lit a cigarette which I am pretty sure is against Mormon policy, but his wife said nothing. Then the stories started rolling out and Joe turned our two day trip across Arizona into an odyssey of Olympic proportions we were all laughing and then Joe shocked me by getting up and going over by the stereo where after rummaging for a while he returned with a joint and lit it up and passed it to his wife. The image of this fifty-year-old Mormon woman toking a joint as if it were ancient habit threw me out of myself and before I knew it we were all rolling in our chairs clutching out stomachs in fits of laughter. She had a high pitched rippling laughter a free honest curl to it that seemed impossible for the Mormons to have allowed. When we settled down and silence overtook us I ventured to ask what the Mormon religion thought of dope smoking. +God it seems does not care about what Mormons do with the plants he has bequeathed upon the earth, “besides,” she said, “once you understand what it is telling you, you realize that it is the right thing to do.” +I agreed with her and I am quite familiar with Marijuana and what it has to say, but as I pointed out the argument against it makes sense if your goal is to maintain the status quo. It undermines any desire for consumption or working hard to get somewhere all of which are infinitely necessary in our little American nightmare… marijuana says ‘enjoy yourself and don’t worry…. This little stoned thought struck a nerve in Jean and she launched into a political diatribe. +“That’s the trouble with all these laws they were written by people who don’t know what marijuana is saying because they have never smoked it. And I don’t mean smoked it every now and then I mean smoked it every moment of everyday to see what the world would be like if it were part of our diet….” She dragged off a cigarette and eyed me suspiciously for moment before continuing. “I’m a Mormon, this is hardly the first thing that I have believed that has been contrary to the government and I’ll tell you when I lost the church was when they said god had changed his mind on the issue of polygamy. I still believe in god and I still believe in love, but I don’t believe in governments or churches. I am listening I am aware I am in control of my life and I can make decisions for myself. Government is obsolete we no longer need someone to tell us what to do in order to assure the survival of the species, as individuals we know this, but at the collective level we are still acting out old games. Some people think its that not enough people know how to take care of themselves and that is the myth that gets perpetuated by the machinery of government. But stop for a minute and think. What does the government do for you on a daily basis that is beneficial to your quality of life? How is it helping you? Stoplights come to mind and then after that a big blank space where you try and search for something else and you think to yourself what does the government do again? Exactly. +“I’m sorry I rant when I get high, I didn’t mean to bring up taxes and the government and stupid things that don’t matter… you must think I’m a lunatic Ted Kazinyski follower or something out here in the middle of nowhere and lecturing you on the evils of government….” +“Not at all.” I assured her that I couldn’t care less about the government for the very reason she had stated. No one does when you really get down to it. The chief function of the government is to give you a topic of conversation with stranger whether in bars or subways or in a house in the middle of Utah. It’s a linguistic litmus test for the compatibility of the future. It’s a dead dog on a long car drive, it gives you something to say that does not reveal anything about you a way of rotating the air by venting words and spinning to the sound of each others voice, a verbal ballet that circled us about the room waltzing entourne. +Joe and his wife talked like giant friendly clowns billowing stories and cackling at nothing the way people do when they have been married for twenty years and are still in love. It was bit odd to watch; I couldn’t shake visions of symphonies and the jerky movement of violin bows jerking about mixed with the slower warble of cellos. There laughter sang and I was dragged into living room for a family tour… children in goofy clothes, grandchildren in baby baskets, great hordes standing in front of Niagara Falls, the Washington Monument, Delicate Arch, lakes, rivers, mountains, Joe holding up a trout, Jean at the rim of the grand canyon it all swirled and danced before my eyes. Then came the cherry pie made more delicious by chemically induced longing, sweeter, redder, and flakier… Marijuana could be an advertisers greatest tool if only we let ourselves go. And then Vavaldi, the four seasons suite tearing the walls apart, then the Ninth, then Rockmonanoff and on and on until Jean dropped off to bed and Joe and I fell into silence moved in waves by the churning hip thrusting glory of Elvis’s 1972 karate kicking, orchestra backed concert in Madison Square Gardens +“So you want to go on to Denver I take it?” +“Yes I do… from there I think I’m going to take the bus down to new Orleans and look up a friend I haven’t seen in a few years….” +“New Orleans… I’ve never been there.” +“It’s a different world… a foreign country right here in America….” +I told him a bit about it tried to cast the spell of the place in the room. There were railings around the windows and gas lamps in the corner and we both had accents by the end of it, but later when I was alone in my room staring about the ceiling with its little glow in the dark constellations, I couldn’t help but think the I really didn’t know New Orleans at all, I was only there a week, I had the merest gloss. I wanted to know the city to crawl under its insidious belly and render it swallowed, digested and crapped out my ass in great putrid heap of shit…. +I slept fitfully under the moonless starscape ceiling dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horseman riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell. The headless horseman swerved and bore down on the I that is you with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality. The horseman dismounted and walks in to the bar. He caught us all unawares, I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing just inside the mosquito netting that covers the tropical doorway. The bar is on the corner of dusty street in a barrio of Lima, the patrons are frozen in time nothing moves save the horseman reaching behind the counter and filling his glass with whiskey; he sat on the stool next to me and turned so he was facing me. I turned my stool toward him somewhat surprised that I could move, in light of my freedom I turned full circle surveying the statues arranged at the tables, not a breath stirs, no wind, we are in a vacuum. Turning my attention back to the headless man I stared at the empty space where his head ought to have been but wasn’t; I searched for something on him which I could address myself to ought since there is no face by which I can gain his attention… closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the necktie should have been. A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily off of my barstool and followed him out into the middle of the jungle night. The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a buttonhole in his chest. I sat down on the log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head he was beautiful. + Time passes by in jerky motions not unlike the first motion pictures uneven and without regard for continuity. Maybe moments maybe hours maybe at the same time, an old man with a sickly gray beard and a ridiculous suit is sitting where the horseman had been. One hand is out of sight down his pants and the other wags a long finger at you and he begins to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU! +There were opulent scenes passing by as if played on blue screens real but not. I saw great Persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions. Cities where the sun stood still in the sky and monstrous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time. Like ancient Tibetan art there was no distinction between the province of the mind and the province of the body. Women swam in south china seas of ambient warmth moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins. Creatures of all forms walked streets of near ancient origin, cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies. Tapestries hung out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind. The scene was overwhelming and indescribable; beautiful and horrifying in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to the same observed phenomena. +I woke up with unshakable thought that the only thing better than solitude is society. The other game was looking like a hot roulette wheel from the steel illusions of self-certainty. I mean of course the society of friends or even a friend…. By breakfast I was in a chatty mood and wanted to stay and talk to Jean for a while, but Joe insisted that we had to moving before noon. I thanked Jean and said goodbye to her at the railyard. I went for a quick swim in the Green River while Joe signed out for the train and went through his checklist of the computer guidance systems. The water was cool and yes green, so green I couldn’t see past my dick; I started wondering about leeches and quickly got out. Sunning myself on a rock I noticed that my belly button was itching and burning slightly, I sat up and discovered a tick burrowed into my skin, swollen fat with my blood. The parasitic little bastard was stealing my lifeblood. Try as I might I could not get him loose, I held a cigarette as close as I could stand for as long as I could stand but he refused to let go. Finally I just tore him out ripping a chunk of flesh off with him. I dug around for a while with a knife making sure that I had got the head. Damn little bastard better not have given me Lyme Disease I thought as I popped his fat blood laden belly between my fingers. The purpose of the tick is like government entirely unclear to me, but the tick did serve as a healthy reminder that I too am organic, subject to disease and vermin, something you forget when you have lived the vast majority of your life in the confines of the Lysoled suburban dreamland. +I heard the groan of the engine moving and Joe’s voice yelling over it, I threw my shirt back on and ran over to the nearest flat car and we were off. I hung back on the car alone munching some cheese and fruit that I bought at the store in Moab and consuming the better part of bottle of wine. Wine is the only alcohol legal in Utah that can actually get you drunk. +It was five in the evening by the time we got back to the big switch where we once again headed east and by then I was good and drunk. Drunk enough that walking on a moving train seemed like thoroughly stupid idea so I just lay on my back all even and stared at the sky. Somewhere in the midst of my looping jagged butterfly thoughts I hit upon a memory of having read that a thousand years ago Venus was visible with naked eye in the day time. It got me to thinking why it wasn’t now… which got me to thinking about selective attention. There is a myrid of information assaulting our sense ever moment ninety nine percent of which we do not see, that is it is not seable being that it is beyond the visual spectrum everything from radio to ultraviolet or nuclear radiation is dombarding us and we ignore it because we have never need to know about it to survive, but what I was thinking about was beyond mere survival. The human brain is the most powerful information processor in the known universe and yet it is unable to see venus and at one point it could. Indeed people in some cultures still can. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a decline in visual skills but ratherit has to do with need. Two thousand years ago your brain needed to be able to see venus and there it was clearly visible in the middle of the day. Chances are that anyone able to see Venus would not however be able to drive a car on the freeway. Such a skill requires intense amounts of complex organization of brain signals and body responses and yet we do it automatically without having to think at all. But we do no see venus in the day time. It got me to thinking about cultural brainwashing. Cultural brainwashing is theprocess by which the indivdual is integrated into his or her society and world that surounds them; it is the fancy way of explaining why you do not see venus and with the self reflexive glory of its inescapablity it is a product of my brainwashing. Only in westernized nations with notions like science and psychiatry do you find people talking about cultural brainwashing. Those people who noticed it like to think they have escaped it, that they have transcended it, but they haven’t they are indeed the most brainwashed among us. Just as you only find Zombi’s in Haiti and you only find death at end of a pointed bone Aborigonal Australia so you only find cultural brainwashing among westerners. You can not escape brainwashing without losing all context of who you as an individual are; worldwide the most common method of transcending oneself is psychoactive compounds whether it be peyote, ayahuasca, hashish, or aminita Muscarathe common element is brain alteration. Only when we are in this or other brain changing states can one escape one’s self and through that ones culture. These brain alterations are also possible with LSD. +The thing that wanted to say to Jean when she was talking about the govenent was that they know what she knows even better than most of us who feel oppresed by them. They know how useless and futile there positions are because thy have to defend them on a daily basis. Increasingly the politician and reformer is shown to be in the game only for personal gain and the common cry of the people is that everyone is corrupt, but this is not true. More and more “leaders” are greedily enhancing their own lot at the expensive of others for a very good reason… they know the end is near we no longer need them and they no it, like squirrils cacheing nuts or polar bears retaining extra fat for the winter they are storing up for the lean times ahead. They also sensed that if the general public was to get ahold of LSD or anything like it their time would come to an end a whole lot sooner so they have kept it away for now, but it will never really go away. It was not the acid dropping hippies that worried them they were never going to get far they smelled which make a bad impression on anyone in almost any culture; no what they feared were the men in suits the men from their own ranks who were touting the benefits of LSD. Men that the public at large looked up to artists, actors, psychiatists, chemists, anthropolgists, celebrites, even politicians, men like Tim Leary, Cary Grant, John Lilly, Harvey Milk; men with influence. +In every culture there is a shaman figure sometimes it’s a weird guy in the hut down the roade who talks to himself as walks about and sometimes it’s the weird guy in thirtyith floor office of a Manhattan highrise who walks around talking to himself. When the psychologists and psychiatrists got a hold of LSD the threat to the then reigning shamans, the politicians, was real and they got rid of it. There was no conspiracy that put Tim Leary in prison for a twenty five year term for possession of marijuana, it was a calculated move to shut him up and certainly he knew it. He did what any reasonable man would do, he shut up. He stopped talking about LSD and chemical methods of emacipation from the self and started talking about the one other thing that seems to work… meditation and yogaic excersizes. +It’s 1999 right now and try as I might I can’t do Yoga on a moving train. Nor do I have any LSD which means that I am fucked, trapped here in this culturally brainwashed condition and unable to see Venus. Venus —godess of Love. Makes you wonder. +The air is nipping at my arms like darning needles and faint traces of our breath is visible in the glow of the gas lantern. Jow and I ware roasting marshmellows on a coleman latern in the back of a box car. It almost works. Right now though as night finds us creeping through the mountains a warm marshmellow is exactly what we need to plug the worm holes. The worms are eating us alive, Joe and I. They’re eating you too whereever you are whenever you are. They tell you that worms invade your body afterdeath and they go to great lengths to keep them out of the coffin with formaldahyde and by draining the blood out of your body, but the worms are there already, they have been eating us up all along. They pierce like invisible bullets fired at birth across aphrodites enteral dancing forever and piercing Apollo’s languishing nowflesh rotten to the core eat up and leaking like sieves we stuff ourselves with air injected sugar balls to stop the vaporous bleeding. The marshmellows do the trick tonigh hold it all intact no leaking of vaporous lifeblood al is well. I stretch out the sleeping bag on the floor of the box car and joe heads toward the engine compartment with the lantern. I am alone in the dark, with the holes, the leaking, the LSD, the cultural brainwashing, Zombis, shamans, Tim Leary and a small spider that I named steve after a fish I had along time ago. Everything is okay. We are moving east, slowly. + + + + +6 + + + Denver is a clicking noise, a perfect symphany of flying fingers, words and shoes. The collision of bodies results in equal and opposite repultion into free form voids of their own peruvian designs, fre form abstracts of temples and vines, jungle book black cats. The mayan caper recast north of the equator. But as is started to say it was a clicking noise… It came in with wheels slowing west of the main station and it continued in the cab ride to mikes house as I sat mexmerized by the meter, and it finally collided when I opened the door to his house and I saw Dean typing on a laptop on the couch. I said Mike, I should have said Mike and Halley which is whole different sort of beast. +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 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-olike creeping behind his eyes —necessity. Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck. + Denver was a crash landing, 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. The mad clicking that brought me into Denver 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 all makes me laugh which earns me the finger. 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. + + + +7 + + + + +You need the random violence, you need the super bowl, you need the microwave dinners, you need a drug that makes you dream, you need the cast iron kettle, you need the coupons from the Sunday paper. You need the salt water, you need the mountain air, you need a bicycle, you need sturdy shoes, you need a washing machine, you need freedom, but car insurance will do. You need air fresheners in you car, you need a faster computer, you need a genetically engineered future food from the twenty third cosmic outrage of viral man. You need a tampon, you need to shave your legs, you need to work out more, you need a new house, you need pickled pigs feet, you need zinc, you need to be saved from yourself, you need to stop smoking, life is precious. You need dinner company, you need a conversation, you need a street address, you need new friends, you need a good scotch, you need a tailored suit, you need sex. +You’ve been living underground eating from a can running away from what you don't understand —love. It moves you out of bed in the morning, it moves you out the door, it gives you courage in moments of weakness and it attacks you in shop windows, in quiet evening picnics you walk under Alder trees in the warm of autumn... it scratches at the door like a lost cat, it begs at the table like forlorn hound, it pulls your shirt tails like a child…. + Tonight the air is a harem dancer bejeweled in sequins and dripping opium honey from her succulent breasts. She slides slippery wet through eternal gardens of night orchids, between baskets of pomegranates, and under heavy limbs of peach trees; she hands out mosquitoes at a roadside elixir show, the queen bee, the minstrel’s daughter, she is dancing in ancient barns of rotten timber spinning us slowly, seductively down Louisiana. +Dean is asleep; I am at the wheel. + The wheel turns memory… some years ago… I passed through this area once before… chasing the Mississippi from St Louis down into New Orleans. I stopped for gas just over the Louisiana border, the station ended up being some distance from the interstate and I never made it back —not ‘til Baton Rouge. I have always had a healthy disdain for thoroughfares and the rest of time I was in the south I avoided them whenever possible. I wandered down the back roads of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia where it is possible to loose ones’ grasp of reality as quickly and severely as with anything the good doctor might have given you in prison. Time has stood still in the south, absolutely motionless since nineteen ten in some places. I ran across areas where everything seemed just as I would have imagined it in the quiet calm of America before the first world war. The paved two lane roads that weave through Louisiana were laid under order of the Works Project in the thirties and from the looks of it they have never been tended to since. Red clay gapes open mouthed from the embankments like a carp. A soft muddy red-brown, the color of shit after a steady diet of freeze dried astronaut food, it never dries even in the summer heat. And the air itself is palpable. It comes through the window at forty five miles an hour but even when it moves past you there is something motionless about it. You move through it, it never stirs. Everything in the south is permeated with that motionless veneer that makes it glow like the soft red light of a whorehouse Algiers LS, 1934. It was hell of a land from a hell of time; I never could put my finger on it. It was a menagerie of the hundred years previous and it lodged in me like the pond did for Thoreau or the Utah desert for Abbey. The south bounded about resonating for months hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean and lingering like the eternal fart that got the whole showing going. +Somewhere along the way in the time since I left I had forgotten about it this mind expanding drug that goes in my memory by the unassuming and FDA approved name of The South —like The Edge or The Metropolitan Opera, but infinitely less tangible. And now is Dean asleep in the passenger seat and the warm summer night air is hitting me in the face and I am remembering quite vividly that that first trip, it is folding into the present so that I am driving through all Louisiana, all time and all space. Again I have ditched the interstate and am picking my way through the backroads heading down the ones that feel like they lead to New Orleans, sometime Dean will wake up and be rather upset at our lack of progress; I will laugh. I do that a lot in the south, laughing. I hang my arm lazily out the window and let the wind blow it where it wants. Something about it is cathartic, post orgasmic. It leads my mind back through tumbling libraries of monolith memories, the spanish moss dripping from swamp cypress, sagging porches, the sticky oil of the skin drawn out into the something that is not sweat and not grease— something new, something unknown is coming to the surface here. +The first day out of Denver I remember nothing save a speeding ticket in some flat desolate farm country which might have been Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Ontario, Siberia, the Gobi desert or anywhere. I slept mostly, leaving Dean and Betty to drive the wastelands. I do remember something about an airport and three hours ago I noticed Betty was gone, I believe the two are connected, but its fuzzy. Fuzzy. The world was fuzzy all the way through the plains; the world looked like it does in the censored television images —fuzzing out nipples, buttocks, and the faces of the guilty. But now at three thirty in the morning it has become crystalline; I am aware. +Everywhere there is foliage, enormous live oaks, magnolias still white in bloom, cypress trees, bamboo, dense thickets of woody vines so tangled that the light of the moon can no longer see through them. The road seems overly artificial snaking its way through the groves of trees, around old houses, and it’s elevated unnaturally as it tears across swamps, always swamps. The edges are lined with the cypress and then clinging to the dryer land are the live oak and then the canopy envelopes and we glide along; I leaned my head out the window like a dog to feel the gentle heavy rush of humid air and to watch the gentle sway of the dripping Spanish moss. There is no way to capture it but from below, it is the dancing bush on fire hanging from the branches of the oaks and cypress —the peach fuzz of the great mothercunt. +Here and there I pass an ancient downtown of false storefronts. It is impossible to tell if their inhabitants are asleep or if it was deserted long ago in favor of the strip mall development over by the freeway. People go where the food is; it’s a universal migration. Got get ourselves to water, to where the food is. Fifty thousand years, eight hundred generations —six hundred and fifty thousand of them in caves, wombs, incubators, hydroponicly fed emotion and beauty from underground wellsprings. +It is nearly fall, September 14th if I am not mistaken. +And we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin. Rubber dust holds the impending tragedy of fall in the air behind me, I can feel it look in over my shoulder, offering backseat driving tips whispered softly in my ear like a barroom parrot hissing the mimic of the voice-box smoker ordering another scotch on the rockssssss. Fall is the most tragic of seasons —midnight blue and bruised purple shadows crawling across the scarlet chill of orange leaves in the evening. A piano lines bounces trance melodies of bittersweet celebration and the normally abject world of man seems dressed in medieval splendor a —I am sharpened to a heightened awareness. The skin has started shedding off the bottoms of my feet again. It happens every year just prior to fall; I molt. Some people perk up from their slouched lives and look around at the coming of spring, for me it happens in fall. The change of the leaves, the reprieve from summer heat… the melancholy air of fall always pulls me out of the flow of the rest of the year and causes me to shed the old skin. Literally it seems. And underneath are the older hardened callused pads that tread antediluvian paths. +The warm night air is electric, it wraps you up in a blanket of itself and the only thing to do is enjoy. I leer jealously at the empty porches passing me by. My porch is moving and not as relaxing perhaps, but it is a porch nevertheless. It is right here in the middle of the street, not tucked away in back of some cubic structure called a house, but out here in front of god and distance thunderheads collecting off in the gulf coast —far on the horizon. +I remember flashes of faces, without names, without places; they could be friends, could be a book or magazine, a movie, an image produced by words, they all spread out across the night, flocks of swans, gaggles of geese, an endless thundering of wings and thought bobbing on the turbulent surfaces of sanity. Bobbing aimlessly to place, to name, to arrange, to rearrange, and the cicada songs catch my ear. They are beautiful, echoing about in rich azure tones, beep baritone guttural vices punctuated by chirping crickets —sirens tempting from the rocks. Even at fifty miles an hour the roar of cicadas melting with other insects is symphonic, but its true melody lingers just beyond the audible horizon. The sound washes over the car, cleansing it and leaving only lighthearted little echoes. The songs are before to Christ, before Pan, before Demeter, before to all the words, the ideas, before the virus. They are a reminder that no matter how you define it life is fun, all that is really required of you is that you become aware of that, that you know joy and sorrow and love and pain as all one indivisible and unspeakably thin reality. You do not need technology or science or religion or drugs or pompous ceremony; you need nothing save awareness. +Down the road the labeling clinic is undergoing massive overhauls to the system, the server is down, no further information can be handled right now… we will get to this later…this can wait! And the men white lab coats are singing glory glory hallelujah around a glowing metallurgic alter. The hospital sirens are wailing as they round the corner… all the men’s’ faces fade into the road, beaten, bruised and lacking any humor. Their daughter watch from distant buttes as they are spattered in blood, endless endless blood, rivers of blood running down the chopping block as the butcher frantically dices ever smaller… roasts, into filets, into steaks, into shish-a-bobs, into hors d’oeuvres, into mashed paste, pate, and finally only watery blood, running off the block and out into the street gathering speed as it moves over hills, lifted up, pooling in the great valleys and lapping at the butte shores as the women dance naked around bonfires…. Geysers of blood sprout from a ground that can no longer contain itself; blood banks employees hang hoses into the street and collect a year’s worth before they drown in it. Towns and cities are swallowed whole, the bloods oozes down from the north, from the land of the bleached-skin cave dwellers, trickling over the Mediterranean drowning the Elysian dream and then the Nile runs red. Africa is laid waste and the oceans swell and wash down over Canada and American. A tidal waves of blood a thousand feet high and moving 200 miles an hour fueled by the energy of the comet called now that lands in the midst of riparian blood world and blows it all back out into space, powders all life into a fine dust that settles over everything, over the mountains and valleys and oceans, and the remaining rivers of blood until what is left is absorbed into the heart core of history leaving behind fresh cool water that pools and settles into the Mississippi delta. It surges down into Lake Pontchartain where it slows to gentle meander out into the sea and all life is saturated with pure spring waters and bears itself up as an offering —the fresh unmade world. Chaotically stagnant and fecund with life, teeming with shiny brown bodies glistening from the humidity from the endless sweat that pours off their body’s and so they go about. Time is a record of blood moving over the earth +But what are we to make of this travesty this spectacle of human lives plundered and destroyed by robber barons, by men called kings, by vampires called Popes? It is soaked into the ground; it permeates the air of Europe and the United States with spectral genetic memories of atrocity and death. We have records elaborate and detailed records of the dead and many of our brightest minds are obsessed with this problem this thing called oppression they run hugging the nearest Buddha marching down the road embracing foreign cultures in blinded headlong attempt to avoid their own heritage. I remember early in my own guilty childhood running across the Rev Steven T Murray a man for whom the western guilt complex loomed large and figured across his face. He had a wild face, the sort of face that could get itself thrown out of seminary school for heresy and he paraded it around with a constant beatific smile set in ruddy skin and balanced by spectacles. Above all the guilt and baggage that lurked in his Anglo Saxon DNA was something shining, something not transcendent but enlarged as if the wrinkles of gray matter had extended their folds a bit farther out. Steve was hunting through the east when I knew him, looking to Buddhism, Hinduism, meditation, yoga... anything that might extend that circle farther. I am indebted to him for expanding my own circle for my knowledge of east, but none of that helped either of us. The stink remains in our genes; the blood of our ancestors leads not to temples, but slaughterhouses, gallows and charnel ovens. Walk through it with grace and dignity Steve, see it all just as it was and keep going, do not ignore but do not dwell either because farther back before the cattle before the crops there is something else. Something wilder even than what is dreamed by those that seek to repress these memories of drunken orgies and cloven hoofed Gods who sought only to give pleasure. +You don’t even need the ceremonies to hear the distant memory of laughter peeling across the savanna, memories drawn on cave walls before the cave was home, when it was a museum. You don’t even need to go to Africa to hear it. I heard it once in California high in the Sierra Nevada. Steve was there perhaps he heard it too, but if he did he kept quiet like me, never mentioned it to anyone else on the trip, nor to anyone when I returned. I heard it clearly enough to not need validation. It’s a distinct memory, that first time I ever spent a night outside the sheltered walls of civilization, miles from the nearest road, not a trapping of man in sight, only a painted purple sky the glow of the long gone sun bouncing off unseen plateaus reflected back as broad lavender brush strokes on the clouds. The alpen glow was just fading off the peaks on the other side of the lake from where I was sitting. +My friends and fellow travelers are just down this small rise behind me they are eating quesadillas and drinking icy water from the stream the runs through camp. I remember the sense of utter calm I felt relaxing against that rock and just watching the world unfold. I was famished but I couldn’t stop watching the light. It faded through the whole spectrum turning green and then the dark cold purple of night. I was absolutely silent and did not move for a long time. I remember quiet clearly the thoughts that passed through my head at the time. I was sitting there reflecting on a moment two weeks earlier when I had Steve what we were going to do about water. I knew that we were going to be camping next to a lake, but what I wanted to know was whether or not water filters were being provided or if I should buy one of my own. He looked at me with that trickster grin and said "don’t worry about it, we’re going to bring freeze dried water." Well now all I heard was don’t worry about it and so I stopped listening there and when he looked at me and I only nodded and said okay, he was forced to crack a smile and ask me if I had heard him. I said that I had and that was fine. He burst out laughing and then it clicked that there could be no such thing as freeze dried water. I remember it was like a lightning bolt that blasted me right out of my body and I heard the whole conversation over again from a third person point of view and then I understood suddenly that I hadn’t actually listened to anything more than what I wanted to hear. It was a sort of Joycian epiphany for me. I think that Steve laughed not so much at his stupid joke but because he saw me wake up for a minute, and sitting there against the rock watching the sky and filled with a sense of sharpened peace I wondered if I had in fact not been listening to anyone or even anything except myself for my entire life. The sky was screaming, crying like a lonely woman, but rising in volume above that was a different sound, a cerulean sound. It was the sound of the beating drum, of the dancing men, women and children naked and baffled but living through it with divine grace and respect borne out of wonder and lacking fear — a primordial grassland celebration in the pre-fear epoch of man. A calm settled over me and I floated down to enjoy my own fried quesadilla and drink a belly full of clear icy mountain water. +I caught that same sense of heightened calm driving through Louisiana the first time and I was feeling it again now; every time it was the unmistakable feeling that I had been subtly roused from a long and indistinct but alarming dream. Waking up in the sudden and yet not jarring way as one does after a long sound well earned sleep and then there is the fresh new day to be greeted and danced through. Why the South triggers that feeling for me remains a mystery, maybe something about the profound sense of otherness that it retains in this increasingly homogeneous world of ours. Maybe is the humidity, maybe it’s the magnetic pull of the earth, maybe it’s the ghosts floating out from the swamps and forests in the relative cool of the evening, perhaps it the electric charges brought in by the afternoon thunder showers, maybe it’s the food, maybe it’s the people. Maybe it’s all of those things thrown in a gumbo and slow roasted over a wood fire to perfection. Whatever it is it remains buried at the level Korzybski so unpoetically called the non-elementalistic level. It is my world and if I could put it precisely into words you would, by reading them, actually become me. Perhaps such powerful sweeps of magic are possible —perhaps you are me. Still some things are better left unsaid, there are those things which lie too far beyond the bounds of collective experience to ever firmly plant your finger on, things too tangled up in intimacy and individual experience to capture on the broad scale, it is enough simply to be aware of them, they are themselves the tangible expressions of something we do not fully understand. To feel them running through you is to know them, if only for that fleeting moment and never at such times does it occur to me to speak, to speak would burst the moment, instead I smile involuntarily. It is only later after the feeling has passed through that I am even aware that I have been smiling. +I stop for gas at the only all night station I have seen thus far. The attendant is woken from his nap by the clang of the station bell; he shifts slightly to take my money and promptly falls back asleep. I start the pump and go for a walk. In the window of the Ace Appliance store with it’s faded worn paint falling off the brick innards in giant sheets like lizard skin shedding, like the bottoms of my feet; in the window I saw myself for the first time in days. I stepped back and admired the structure as I lit a cigarette. Old advertisements hang at crazy maddening angles, sheets of torn paper long since illegible, but adverts no doubt, black eyed peas, crawfish, Cajun spicing, habanero sauce, faded and whitewashed by years in the sun, but the windows are shiny clear. I see televisions, radios, automobiles, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens, convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, home furnishings, bicycles, video games, tennis shoes, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos, and every accessory you can conceive of and millions more you couldn't. Gadgets for the mutilation of genitals, clamps, douches, toilets, condoms, meat grinders, books, pornography, nakeed girls you like no? In the aisle there is little boy selling Chiclets on the streets of Mexico City. Advise from his father given like a department head to the agent in the field, bide your time, wait and when you strike make sure to blow the whole bridge bring it all crashing down on your head. +It crashed when my eyes screwed completely out of their sockets and I focused back on my own reflection. There was the thing called me, called Sil, called human, called living, called now. I lost myself in the reflection until I could not longer distinguish what side of the reflection I was really on. It suddenly seemed not at all real, more like a virtual apparition I could have been any face, any century; a peasant in rags, Hassan at Almont, a soldier in a trench, a mother in birth, a genetic telegram ape man reflected across ten million eons of the birthing contracting universe. I felt less myself than ever. I felt myself dissolving into the very fabric of existence, I was dancing through a long night of endless coursing energy that was not here and not now at all but everywhere always and I no more a man no more anything, but everything. + + + + + +I am upstairs constructing a vaudoux doll when Scratch yells that dinner is ready. When most of my friends announce dinner it is because they need money to pay for the pizza, I do not seem to fall into circles of those who love food as much as I do, but Scratch is the exception. In fact Scratch one-ups me, for he is professional chef at Arnaud's, a swanky coat required joint downtown. I haven’t stopped eating since we got here two days ago. Tonight it is a French meal something that Scratch is thinking of doing at the restaurant to celebrate the French heritage of New Orleans which according to the John who shared a swig of whiskey with me on the steps of a coffeeshop in the French Quarter this morning is actually more Spanish influence…. For the sake of the tourists that flock to Arnaud's Scratch is sticking to the standard French Vibes. Tonight it is Magret de Canard baies de Cassis, which Scratch informs me is long for duck in currant sauce, but its not alone, ducks never travel alone they move in flocks across the table bringing pommes de Terre Mousseline and artichauts braises farcis a la barigoule. Potatoes and artichokes roughly, with a French Merlot, chocolate truffles for desert and then coffee and large hand-rolled blunts. Scratch augments his chef income by growing and selling cannabis that he generously hands out every night after dinner. We don’t share them either, Scratch rolls everyone there own blunt and we sit down on the wrap around couch in the living room and puff away on them as if they were after dinner cigars. I made this observation one night and Scratch just kind of laughed to himself and then two days later he started drinking cognac with them. Perfect… perfect. + This alone made Dean stick around and ought to explain why I am in New Orleans as opposed to anywhere else in the damnedable ugliness of America. Scratch is well read, he spent a year in traction for a skydiving accident; we have endless pointless discussions about books, conversations that exist primarily as testing grounds for our own theories, conversations that drift aimlessly through the heavens, all of us knowing full well the sheer and utter hopelessness of ever changing anything. +I met Scratch through Mike originally, way back when he and I were sharing the one room trailer of infamy. They worked together at the YMCA. Mike was a swimming instructor/lifeguard (although mainly he sat in the office and smoked cigarettes with me) and Scratch was a personal trainer/fitness guru. The first time Scratch told me he was a fitness coach I burst out laughing because the deadpan sincerity of his voice was the give away that he was kidding, but he wasn’t. Despite the fact that he had been crippled in a skydiving accident and hadn’t really worked out in the last five or six years (excepting physical therapy) he had a degree in sports medicine and he was in fact guiding many people to healthier lives. He was almost twice our age, but he and mike were the only obtuse elements at the Y so they gravitated to each other as naturally has hydrogen and oxygen make water. +It was of course Mike who had set in motion the reunion of Scratch and I, he mentioned once over some beers in Denver that Scratch was in New Orleans. He apparently had dumped the fitness gig and gone back to his pre-thump occupation —five star chef. The story stands out over the din of Denver as a kind of eject button that Mike had provided by which I could escape the nightmare world of his personal paranoid idiosyncratic reality. +“Free the dogs! Chain the humans!” Eject! Scratch’s battle cry rang through the muddy thought waters of the heavy afternoon heat like a tricycle crashing on a preschool playground. He was teetering on the edge of the couch knees pointed in either direction and holding up his arms. His wizened eyes balance in his hand and are surround by a face, but it is not a face that can be clearly seen at first glance it retreats over the next ridge every time you approach like a heat mirage leading you out on the scorching desert sand. Scratch wipes his face repeatedly and then sighs or words to that affect. Yes I remember meeting Scratch. +Scratch was a self inflicted nickname, but sometimes you have to do that to avoid something much worse coming your way, dodge it with a preemptive strike. Harm reduction the Pentagon calls it. So it was Scratch; I figured it was for the way he would often itch at his head when he was trying to find the words… or the way his hands would wipe over his face when he sat back on couch, it was like he was making sure he still had skin. Scratch was fortyish though I couldn’t say high or low, or side to side for that matter; he was a relic from the now infamous trailer residence in sunny Costa Mesa. Scratch sat on the orange couch, a brutal abomination of furniture that boldly languished in the corner waiting for victims. It sucked old scratch in like a tractor beam; mike and I were wise to it by then, but new ones got sucked in. And so it happened that I came to know all the extraordinary people I do know —too many nights unable to escape it clutches. +“Free the dogs! Chain the humans!” Those were the first words he ever said; he just laid them out like tomatoes or hush puppies on an ottoman. It wasn’t until he sighed heavily shrugging his shoulders and palming his hand across his face that I understood. Everything you need is right there, but I am fresh out of calculators so let me lay it all out for you. Scratch did have a real name; he just never bothered to use it. After that day on the couch when Scratch sat for five maybe six hours and talked and drank beer and smoked cigarettes. He came back. And he kept coming back. One day when he didn’t come back Mike and I were forced to go find him and ended up never leaving his place. While I only lived with Scratch for a month he has always welcomed me when I needed a place to crash. + Tonight Scratch is telling what I call the ‘thump story’ which is his account of the time his parachute didn’t function properly. I’m to full to talk its all I can do to sit up straight. Sitting up straight is something you have to do around Scratch otherwise you have to endure a lecture on the benefits of correct posture. But Scratch is rolling the thump story out of the hanger for Dean’s benefit. They know each other from LA but Dean knows him mainly as the guy you get pot from and with Scratch that’s just the beginning. + “It opened fine actually just like it was supposed to at first… everything was great. I was supposed to land in this guy’s backyard. They were giving me a party because Debra Winger had just hired me as her personal chef… and so I’m supposed to come down into the backyard for the big whoopla right? Well about a hundred feet off the landing I start to drift and I try to correct it but something in the way I moved and the way the wind was blowing… one in a million kind of thing… one of those variables that you don’t get to control…. Anyway ya… basically the ‘chute twisted and the gust caught me about twenty feet off the ground and threw me into the roof extension…. It was one of those metal roofs, like a barn kind of thing where it hangs over a bit and the tops of my feet hit it square on at about forty miles an hour. It cut almost all the way through to the Achilles tendon, smashed the joint and the whole bit; understand of course that I don’t actually have any memory of this…. It’s just what people have told me, people who were there…. They’re not sure if that’s what did the knee too or if the knee was from the truck I landed on, because after I got dragged free of the roof I blew over the house and fell two stories through the front windshield of a pick up truck. +“And that is why I don’t walk quite right. And I’ll tell you, I don’t remember it happening but to hear Dave tell it, it sends chills down my spine, he saw the whole thing, he was the one that got me out of the truck and rode to the hospital with me… it just sounds so funny to me you know? There’s times when it think I might have made the whole thing up… like I never did cater films, never lived in Hollywood, never went sky diving, never knew Debra, never did any of it… I’ve just been here the whole time and I just made this stuff up to impress you guys…. I mean there’s really no way for you to know… for all you know I could have had polio or something as a child… of course there is the scar so I guess I’d have to get more creative than polio… plus I think polio was cured by the time I was born… or is polio cured? I don’t really know… you don’t hear about it much anymore…” + Dean and Scratch drift into a conversation about all the horrible diseases that are known to man, but I am thinking about Scratch. Scratch has always been in the shadows of my life popping in sparingly like a seasoning, but still during those times I often felt myself in the presence of a true saint, a Buddhist that never knew Buddhism, a sharp contrast to most Buddhists… occasionally I used to think Scratch might be the Buddha himself. He had this tranquil quality about him, maybe it was the coma he had been in for a couple of months after the accident, maybe it was twists and turns of his life, of which I knew only a handful, maybe it was the way his shaved balding head bobbed a bit while he limped about the house, maybe it was me, but I always came away from his presence wanting to be a better person, wanting less and less, in fact at the end —nothing at all. Scratch lived a kind of Zen in which there was life and it was led, but there was this other thing, this separate energy that was dedicated to expressing itself, it came through in his food, it was like a work of art; it came through in his endless ranting about the sorry state of American Health; it came through in the way he moved, slowly deliberately and without ever wasting an ounce of energy that didn’t need to be expended. Everything in him seemed to be in harmony, in proportion with itself as if the crookedness of his physical stature had corrected that of his soul…. +Sometimes I wonder though what the difference is between one disease and another,” Scratch is turning philosophical. “You know what I mean? Were all terminally ill from birth… we’re going to die at some point, does it really matter when or how? I just don’t really care anymore…how can you care about a thing like death? What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You are waiting here to die, that’s why I like to serve fatty meals because I look out in the dining room and I see these people that look dead. They’re so fat and clean and yet they stink, the smell of molds and internal decay comes off them like a dead possum rotting on the street. It makes me sick to my stomach watching them eat, they don’t even eat they shovel it like little pigs lining up at a trough… I like to think of myself as a kind Kevorkian mercy killer… I am just speeding up the process… you can see it in there eyes kill me please!… empty shells… waiting… waiting… dessert...? Ya I thought so…. They want it all….” +We lapse into silence, I am think about the old idiom that conversation moves in measurable waves, about seven seconds of silence on the average. Those numbers were for sober people whose minds function mainly as a self imposed veil which keeps the silence of eternity at bay so that they can hold down a job to afford rent and the mortgage and the BMW and the kid in private school and the housekeeper and the gardener and the cell phone and the ground phone and the and the and the…. Seven seconds is not enough for those in the cannabis universe there is and endless supply of novel thoughts from which to choose sometimes it’s hard to get them out because you want to get out everything all at once. Language doesn’t work like that though, unless you’re speaking in tongues… but we’re not so the silence hangs while we contemplate the nature of… still empty silence in which to mind walk. +A girl knocks at the door. The girl is Dean’s doing. The girls are almost always Dean’s doing. The curious thing about Dean, which I have observed over the years, is that when he falls for a girl he doesn’t just fall for her, he falls for every girl. Dean is in love Woman; he just shifts his focus from one to another. Shifts it a little quicker than they tend to be ready for…. Right now he’s in love with Sara who is knocking on the kitchen door, but tomorrow he will likely be back in love with Amanda and let us not forget the stripper downtown who calls herself Serendipity. Sara looks like she’s trying to look like Betty Page, but doesn’t actually know who Betty Page was. The pale skin, the dark bangs, they’re all there but something is missing, there is nothing driving it. She’s an inflatable doll —almost real, life-like. Dean just sort of dragged her back to the house one night and she decided to keep coming around. She is nice, thoroughly infatuated with Dean, indifferent to Scratch and a little bitchy to me. But the salient thing about Dean and I, perhaps the reason we remain friends is that our love interests have never overlapped. Women that like him hate me and women that like me hate him and both of us love and hate all of them in end. +However Sara was a burden to the beat. That is to say that Scratch’s house had a sort of rhythm to it that she didn’t hear had no response to or chose to ignore. It was one of those shotgun houses for which New Orleans and the south in general is sometimes noted, but Scratch’s was a modified shotgun, in a true shotgun there is no hallway. To get from one end of the house to the other one must pass through every room. No hallways or antechambers or any sort of division whatsoever —communal living. Whoever had owned this place before Scratch must have walked in on his masturbating daughter one to many times, or perhaps the kids walked in on the parents puffing away a big fatty, whatever the case someone added a hall passage as an extension of the left hand side of the house. Didn’t put much effort into it either, the skeleton of two by four ribs had never been covered with dry wall and the cracks between the outside panels let in a healthy amount of spiders. We treated it like outside and consequently the bedroom doors were always locked. The architect behind the tunnel as Scratch called it had also added a rickety second story in the back overlooking the alley and the courtyard of the mansion behind it. It was accessed from the outside up stairs. Scratch had set me up in the second story so that I would have some peace and quiet to write. That a lot of spiders, liberal helpings of cockroaches and black and white cat that acted as if it came with the place. +Dean was happy on the couch, but in truth he spent most of his time on Scratch’s computer humming out the love letters, sex stories or whatever it is that he and April talked about until six in the morning central standard time. Dean remains secretive about that affair; it was only today that I heard him use her name, which of course doesn’t mean he hadn’t said it a thousand times before…. +The front door opens into the living room which is the biggest room, half of it is occupied by a wrap-a-round six seater couch with pop-up lazy-boy style footrests on either end, and across from it in the dark corner opposite the picture window is the computer desk where Dean lives. The door to the left of the couch leads to the kitchen through which I pass on my way outside to the stairs and on the right is the door that leads to Scratch’s room and then in the far back bolted and accessible only to Scratch is the grow room. Scratch went so far as to bolt a K mart pressboard bookshelf to it. A tattered copy of Journey to the end of Night guards the doorknob. In actuality Scratch can’t open it by himself, he turns the knob and pulls while someone else pushes up on the bookshelf enabling it to clear the floor. The growroom is temperature controlled and subdivided so that plants can pass through various growing stages requiring less and less light as they approach maturity —all in one closed area. Most everyone knows its there, but out of respect no one ever mentions it in conversation. +As I was saying the house has a kind of rhythm to it. There is never moment when someone is not home, which is only partly coincidence. Should there be a fire or related disaster the last thing Scratch wants is someone breaking down the door with an ax. At least not unit the growroom is disposed of. But it just so happens that Scratch is the early riser up and cooking eggs and bacon at eight in the morning to the delight of Dean who is generally still awake from the night before. He has breakfast, shoots the shit with Scratch and goes to bed for the day. I generally try to make lunch and turn in around four when all the alcohol has generally been consumed and there is nowhere to replenish the supply. Dean gets up for dinner and Scratch sends us out to buy that night’s supply of scotch, sherry, beer and wine all coordinated with whatever he is cooking. Scratch turns in as soon as he get home from the restaurant usually around midnight. It has a rhythm a life to it. Sara is a monkey wrench; she upsets the balance, sleeps on the couch at night when Dean and I are trying to talk. When she does stay up she is usually too drunk or high or some combination thereof to add anything other than misery to the air. And there was plenty of that before she arrived. Her sole chance of staying in my good graces and Scratch’s as well depends on her friends. So far she has not produced. Scratch told me this afternoon that he had a talk with Dean that morning… get me laid or the girl goes were his words. I assure him that Dean would take care of it, but now watching them hustle off to my room for a little roll in the hay (or spider webs as the case may be) I am not so sure about it. + + + +We have only been here two weeks but already it feels like years. Scratch’s growroom means we never want for relaxation tools. This morning the repo men came and took away Dean’s car for lack of interest on his part. We are stranded in New Orleans now, but worse things have happened. Now Dean doesn’t have to wonder when they will come for him. Nor does he have to make car payments anymore —not that he ever did. If we were good citizens merrily building credit we would be horrified by our situation, but luckily we aren’t. We made the best of it; Dean even gave the repo men a couple of beers and they knocked off work for a while to drink them with us. I didn’t care because it wasn’t my car; Dean didn’t care because caring would do nothing for the absent Corolla, because there is nothing that he can do except let go and sail right on down the river. I don’t care because I never have cared, the apathy is its own reason, it's own alpha and omega. So we are Huck Finning it this afternoon in my room stretched out on the recently laid carpet and staring at the ceiling fan as it tries and fails to cool the room. +“How long do you think Scratch is going to put up with us?” +“Dunno I know he’s not keen on that Sara girl… but outside of that I think we can stay another week or two before we smell like dead fish….” +“Friends and fish….” +“Yup. How many days is it until they smell?” +“It depends on your friends and your fish I suppose.” +“Hey, what are you going to do without the car?” +“Well see that’s why I was asking because Amanda has offered to send me some money to get a plane ticket and I should probably take her up on it if I want to get out of here, but part of me isn’t ready to do that yet. I mean not that New Orleans holds anything great for me, but I know I’m not ready to be tied down in DC yet,” Dean cracked a smile. “Well I’m ready to be tied down physically but not figuratively speaking.” +“How do you know she’ll do that to you…?” +“Which part? No… I don’t. Its just a hunch, I mean its not my first trip around the block you know… I have started to notice and become aware of certain patterns in my life that are not necessarily healthy, but even though I can see them I can’t stop them yet. I’m working on that; that’s why I need to stay here a little while longer… so I can figure this thing out. I’m getting closer.” +“Well I don’t think Scratch will mind… just stay out of his way you know… do him a few favors… dishes, shit like that, he’ll be cool with it. If worst comes to worst I don’t think he’d mind us staying up here for a couple of hundred a month.” +“You know… I was thinking about it this morning… I haven’t worked… I mean worked a real job… forget the pizza place… in about six months. And I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I mean true, I spend most of my waking hours in pursuit of food and alcohol, but it has led me places that I would have never gotten had a actually done the standard work-for-a-living thing….” +“Ya I know I’ve managed it for a year and half now… okay I cheated a little in Denver and cash advanced a credit card, but other than that… It makes you wonder why you ever worked in the first place… I mean what did I get from working that I am missing now? I look around and I expect to see things that I miss… things that I want… but there aren’t any. The only drawback is that you have to keep moving even when you’re somewhere you might want to stay….” +“Not really though, I mean if you wanted to stay in New Orleans you could always get a job and hang around….” +“Ya I think I’m going to half to get a job to get out of New Orleans… in which case I may be here a while.” +“Well ya know if Amanda changes her mind and you need a roommate up here let me know….” +“Ya if we got rid of the bed and just used hammocks or something of that nature there would probably be enough room for the both or us….” +“I dunno about hammocks man that’d be a little too Gilligan's Island for me… I can’t be Skipper to your Gilligan and I don’t even want to picture your Gilligan to my Skipper…” +“Riiiiiiiiiggggggghhhhhhhhht…..?” Dean gets these ideas sometimes when he’s stoned and there is just no accounting for where he’ll go with them. It makes him fun to talk to, but sometimes you find yourself stuck on a deserted tropical island when all you wanted was a three-hour cruise. His ends cross over into his means or his means cross his ends or the ends are the means are the ends if there were any means, but it doesn’t mean a thing. Right? No thing. +“Well I think I’m gonna head down to the French Quarter… Sara and some of her friends invited me to go watch this Blues band that’s playing at Checkpoint Charlie’s off Esplanade… supposed to be really good… you innarested?” +“Ya I might meet you there later… I wanna get some dinner before Scratch goes to work, but I don’t even know if he’s working for sure so maybe if he doesn’t I’ll drag him down there.” +Dean leaves. I keep staring at the fan wishing it would do its job, but know how nice it feels not to have a job to do. Knowing that in the end the only job any of us ought to have is ourselves. To drive the little bodies around in pursuit of awareness and ecstasy, and it can be a tough job this one, tough on the body and soul to sail this ocean of sewer through the air-conditioned claustrophobic American night. So cold when it should be heating. So vast when it is all right in front of us all along. So nonexistent when seen from a distance… Only cognac and French wine, Irish beer dark as night, gin crystal clear twinkling like stars… so infinite in existence so huge… yet in the midst of it one star… one planet… on content… one country… one city… just like another…. One soul… just like another… one… nothing just like all the others, but with no more Corolla to worry over. Simple. + +When I went down to the main part of the house to get some food Scratch’s informed me that we need to talk but we were interrupted by his friend Jason who dropped by the house for a little meal. I was relieved because I thought maybe Scratch was going to kick us out, but whatever it was he dropped it the minute Jason walked in the door. Scratch’s friends were always dropping in around dinner hoping that he was tinkering about in the kitchen and maybe had some new morsel for which they would guinea pig themselves. Jason was a nice, somewhat quiet, graduate student at Tulane University. I would have said thirties maybe forties but it’s hard to tell with Scratch’s friends. Jason was young in spirit but terribly old in his mind, he was stooped mentally buried under the weight of all that knowledge he had to keep in his brain for grad school, not to mention all the stuff he still remembered from his undergraduate degree. He was a philosophy nut too, which made for a heavy load. +Tonight Jason’s only contribution is a bottle of chartreuse for which he was richly rewarded with the truffle cake Scratch had whipped up for desert. We hit the sherry though because cake and chartreuse seemed wrong to them and as for me I wouldn’t know chartreuse from indigo. Scratch and I had already put away shrimp scampi; we had our feet up on the table and soon the bullshit was shooting around the room from the squirt gun mouths of the comfortably stuffed. Jason was hungry. In between voracious bites of truffle cake he started firing off about the nature of God and universe (a frequent topic among Scratch’s friends). Jason was rattling on about what he called pop philosophy, which from what I gathered is any philosophy of life that uneducated folks like you and I come up with, philosophies that lack the anal language fixation common among the professionals. Scratch had an analogy about rock, rocks and poprocks to neatly explain the differences between say you and Plato, but the distinguishing thing about pop philosophy is that no one believes themselves capable of deciphering the nature of man as well as Plato so by adding the word pop they have a failsafe, a way to avoid embarrassment if proved wrong. Jason seemed to believe that we are relying on our own beliefs more and more or at least we are willing to “mainstream” “borderline” beliefs. My head was in a tizzy by the time he came around to what I then gathered was his original intention, a movie he had seen that set his own head in a tizzy. +Jason was quite enamored with the worldwide conspiracy of power idea wherein certain high up, enlightened (read wealthy) individuals are living lives of extraordinary decadence at the expense of and always scheming against shmucks like you and I. He delivered his rap via the Matrix, which he had seen earlier in the day. I hadn’t seen the movie, but it sounded like a cheap effects- driven rip off of Buddhism to me, but Jason assured me I would love it, “there is one line that I know you’ll dig,” he said. One character, a machine apparently, says to a human that we, presumably the human race, are the anomalies in the natural world and the only thing that behaves quite like mankind is a virus. Or words to that effect. +Why would I love that one I wondered? Perhaps it was the cover of my notebook stenciled with William Burroughs epithet “language is a virus,” but it hardly follows that I would enjoy being compared to a virus. Besides that is only the top of the notebook at the bottom is the Firesign Theatre quote everything you know is wrong which eliminates any confusion about anything else, all of which what seemed lost on Jason. +Jason was an earnest man, a scholar even, but he lacked what all scholars’ lack —diversity. Every thing had to relate to philosophy even the packaging on dinner mints. He knew so much about so little that he was cut off and isolated from everyone but his colleagues; he saw Scratch and I as kindred spirits I guess, but what he failed to realize is that neither Scratch nor I were concerned with world views philosophies or any other fancy term for such a thing. Scratch didn’t care because he was Buddha and he didn’t need to care and I didn’t care because abstract philosophies are just that abstract and detached from anything that might be real. I have a deep interest in the subject of life but I require that my models of the universe be true to both what I know and what I don’t know. Jason seemed hell-bent on getting me to agree with this idea that we humans are despicable creatures and ought to be put out of our misery, but I wasn’t buying. +“What about love?” +“What about it? What is it? +“Well I don’t know for sure myself, but I can do a little logical reductionism for you, Goethe said ‘Existence is God,’ and Jesus of Nazareth said ‘God is Love,’ so I figure existence itself is love. But I don’t believe that because a German and a Jew happened to have said it, I believe it because when I lie in bed at night with beautiful woman asleep on my chest I feel existence and it feels like love. I believe it because when I walk the streets around here I can smell it blowing through the air; out west in the desert I found that I could taste love in the sizzle of a steak….” +“Oh come what are you man some kind of romantic poet?” +“Yes.” +“But that’s a bunch of crap you’re way too intelligent to be buying into that tired old ‘stop and smell the roses,’ always a smile on your face, life is wonderful, I’m singing in the rain kind of sappy kind of…” +“Too intelligent? What does that mean? How do you know I’m intelligent Jason?” +“Because I’ve read what you wrote in that little book over there and I’ve listened to you talk a few times and I can just tell. The intelligent can always distinguish one another across a crowded room….” +“Ah is that it?” +“Is what it?” +“The crowded room… love... distinguishes us to each other…” +“Whoa hey wait a second….” +“No you wait!” Now I was pissed at him. “Let me tell you Mr. overeducated-sneering-at-the-world- intellectual-waste of human existence what you ought to do is go and fall madly in love with woman surrender everything in your life to her, have children with her and then lose her and then you can come back and tell me how intelligent I am, but until you actually have something other than parrot-speak memories of dead men who wrote of love but didn’t clarify it enough to break through your bitterness….” And I sputtered out. He was taken aback. Shocked even. I tried to apologize and Scratch poured more Sherry, but the damage was done; I had struck a nerve. Perry was right in a strange way, sex is violence. Or more properly as Reich said in so many more words, lack of sex leads to violence. +Not that I harbored any feelings of violence toward Jason on the contrary I felt immense pity for him because his life seemed so cold and unforgiving I was trying, I guess, to wake him up but I didn’t; I only pushed his buttons and got him angry. Jason would wake up someday and I think I am right… it will be woman who does the job… it usually is. It certainly won’t be that Holy Grail of the indestructible philosophy that he’s chasing after right now. It will be a girl with dark hair and fire in her eyes and first she will chew him up, then she will swallow and then she will regurgitate him back to the world as innocent as a newborn. He had not lived, he was not even alive, he needed to get out of school and cast himself on the siren shores, maybe travel would be his thing. Maybe a sunrise on the island of Crete with the dark haired girl… maybe a tour through the slums of Calcutta… maybe a ride on the outside of bullet riddled bus through the violent streets of Moscow… there’s something out there for every one, one thing that can not be ignored. Something will wake him from his dreamy slumber, and then he will be able to use all the vast amounts of knowledge that he has crammed into his gray matter. But it won’t be me to do the job, I’m no good at the savior biz and neither was Jason any good at the life biz. In the mean time he will forgive me and come back next week to have another talk about a book of some sort or a movie or where ever he can find an intricate conspiracy to extrapolating into a giant skyscraper of bitterness pushed around by man forever complaining about the size of his task. Conspiracies….. Or were they philosophies? +The tragedy of the current and endlessly desperate world situation is that for the most of the wildly skeptical cynical Americans the difference between a philosophy and a conspiracy is nil. Modernism in all its forms reeks of two things —apathy and suspicion— but as I listened to Jason launching himself off into that neverland of the graduate student where everything is abstract and intangible I knew there was no talking him out of it. Maybe it was the professors he looked up to so much, maybe it was the sixties and all the disillusionment that followed them…. The sixties when mankind stood on the precipice of something unfathomable, something radical, and then pulled back much to the relief and/or disappointment of those who watched it happened. We didn’t jump, we didn’t go that’s the only thing I can say about the sixties; the most concrete and to me depressing thing about the era I missed by half a decade is Jason. Not Jason, but the paranoid untrusting nature of these new beliefs. Where’s the fun in that? +To bring him back round the rational ground where he was much more comfortable and agreeable I through him a bone, perhaps to cheer him up, perhaps to cheer myself up, it was my point that humans may be like a virus but they are not viruses. It’s that sort of “semantic nitpicking” as Amy once called it that I have found irritates the hell out of people. Why? I have not the slightest idea. I happen to believe that it is very important that if you and I are to communicate that we all first understand what that means. So much of the world’s problems stem from the inability to communicate effectively. I had just watched it in microscopic detail at Mike and Halley’s place in Denver and now here was Jason again reminding me that most of use have no idea what we are saying. Not that we are dumb or even confused, but rather that language and how it functions is not taught to most of us. We attempt to put into words things that are not at the same level as words… its all in the relationships of the words the good count would say… parallel words, diagonal words, tangential words, Euclidean words, Einsteinian words, all just words, but when you start to put them together images form, emotions well up, anger and passion are aroused all by what? Letters arranged in sequence? It made my head spin and in that moment Jason became no longer words no longer even human he was reduced to irritating static, white noise, his face was television snow and the voice crackled like an old crystal radio between channels. That sent me to think about Burroughs again, thinking about the stories I have heard that he used to write with three radios on all tuned to static so that the waves of each overlapped, converged and actually created words that were not there. If language is a virus Burroughs was its greatest junky… I wandered off. Jason and Scratch talked in the background of my thoughts. Scratch was bored of Jason that I could tell without thinking about it. +A virus! How monumentally depressing to think of oneself in such a light! How do you get out of bed in the morning when you think you’re a virus, a plague… better yet why? Why not end it all right now? It reminded me that this is an insecure world in constant state of indecision and confusion. I decided to go for walk, stretch the legs and chew the cud as they used to say in more agrarian times when people knew what cuds are. I lipped the name of the blues club to Scratch as I was leaving, trying to hint that Jason wasn’t welcome, but that Scratch should come if he wanted. +The night was a wildfire, a cracker eaten in bed. A virus! The notion is seemed funny the minute I hit the street. I doubt very seriously if any virus conceives of itself as such. To Ebola the human body is raw material inspiring the greatest creativity, that in its re-sculpting it destroys the individual is of as little concern to Ebola as the empty canvas’s blank nature is to the human artist. I started to see little Ebola’s decked out in turtlenecks and berets debating each other on whether or not it was wrong to restructure the body… restructure! It’s not restructuring! Its murder! Why not a symbiotic relationship with the creatures? Why not improve them?! Why not build to create instead of destroying to create!? You! You weepy eyed communist! You BACTERIA! All right that’s it!!! +They scuffled in my head all the way down into the French quarter. It was a quiet night on Bourbon, a few swarms of homeless or nearly homeless teenagers drifting here and there in the shadows trying to make a touch for some sort of alcohol. The punk rock syndicate Dean calls them. They have a separate reality in every city. I’m a romantic sap about that sort of thing. I always wanted to be homeless and sit on the steps with a woman I love and humbly ask the world for some spare change. I just haven’t met the right girl yet. I bought a bottle for a couple that happened to be sitting on the steps of the liquor store when I decided I needed cigarettes. I didn’t have any intention of doing that when I went in, but as I waited in line I noticed incongruously located next to an extensive collection of pornos (Butt Fucking Whores? I wonder what that’s about?), a bookrack full of New Orleans local heroes, Faulkner, Williams, Anne Rice and some others I hadn’t heard of, local poets mostly. When I got to the counter I was still flipping through As I Lay Dying and I thought what they hell… a bottle of good whiskey, a copy of As I Lay Dying and some cigarettes… that about does a twenty and I had a few of those I didn’t need. I wrapped the bottle in a paper bag and went outside and sat down next to them. +“Hey buddy you got any change?” +“Nope. But I got a bottle of whiskey and book for ya.” I cracked it and took a swig of fire. I passed the bottle to him and opened As I lay Dying to the first page. I tore out the introduction and handed the book to the doe eyed girl. “Have a good night.” I walked off in the direction of Esplanade. I heard a startled voice saying thanks mister behind me. Get drunk I silently encouraged, get drunk on words, on spirits and on you and I walked away leaving them with a few hours entertainment. +I found Checkpoint Charlie’s easily enough. If Dean was in one of those moods where you need to have some drinks, smoke too many cigarettes and shoot pool he had gone to the right place. I swung in the door at quarter past ten and there he was all in the thick of it with Sara and two of her friends, I went back outside and called Scratch from a payphone. Come down he got you a girl…. I felt like a pimp. +The women were talking Dean in circles while he shot a game of pool. I went to the bar and got a Guinness. I sat down for moment at the bar and was promptly set upon by a man who spoke something so mumbling and thick with Cajun ancestry fueled by hard liquor that all I heard was “therinsomefouatin benhavehrd goddamn suckafishafool scratum hars?” +I nodded, smiled and tried to suck down my beer in one cool gulp that coated my still burning throat. The place was New Orleans no doubt about it, that strange mixture of music, Cajun architecture, and an overly polite bartendress that called me sugar. The crowd was mostly locals complete with some redneck swamp people that would be punching each other out later on in the night. I finished the beer ordered another and headed to the back to see what sort of trouble Dean was stirring up. When I was about half way across the room the band returned from their set break and began to kick out the blues or maybe stomp would be stronger, but no, once the gravel voice hit the microphone behind me the blues were getting tore up from here to Pluto and I had no choice but to turn around and watch. The band was the most phenomenal group of musicians I had ever stumbled across, every note was bent against the grain of the next so that they all trembled and wailed up on top of each other and the piano chased the whole sweeping melody back into the pocket and then they shot off again. Dean threw his arm around me and leaned in close to my ear. +“Un-fucking-believeable aren’t they?” +I nodded and the drums launched into a solo that crawled all around the room beating its fists on the walls and leaving child footprints on the ceiling. It’s all upside down, banging out rhythm and melody together, as inseparable parts of a whole that only the creator can hear. It was mind-boggling; it went swoosh splatter rat-a-tat tat boom blam a ram…. I would have gotten lost in the music for good if I hadn’t seen the girl that came up and handed Dean the pool stick. I turned around with him and followed them over to the table. Over the gargle of the saxophone I caught her name—Gia. There was also Sara and Delilah, but I paid them nevermind. Gia was the thing. She looked like a sultry Italian pastry. Her brow was heavy and Ceselian, it made me think of Frida Kahlo; her hips swung wide and she played them like backbeat rollicking around the table dancing, laughing, and shooting pool. When she leaned in to take a shot her shirt hung down and revealed milky breasts like rolling Tuscany hills, she caught my glance, looked down her shirt and then back up at me smiling defiantly. +“See anything you like?” Her voice was melodious and sarcastic. +“Everywhere.” I retorted. She scratched on the eightball with a grimace. +“Well then why don’t you rack a game and we’ll see what you can do?” +I laughed. I dropped a couple of quarters in the slot. She broke and went on a run that didn’t end until she had only one ball left. I took the stick from her outstretched hand and missed my first shot. +“Well you suck at pool…” She laughed. “But you’re cute so you can play another.” +“Uh huh.” I racked them again and this time she didn’t drop anything and she scowled. “That rack was terrible” +“So was the last one… you did all right with that.” +Dean came over to watch. “Now Gia you have to watch out of this one, he’ll shark you when you’re not paying attention.” +“Ha! I already beat… what’s your name?” +“Sil” +“Right . So Sil,” She slithered in front of me, “why don’t we make a wager on this one? Say maybe twenty bucks?” +“I don’t have twenty bucks…” +Dean frowned at me. “Whatya mean you just…” +“Spent it.” I cut him off +“On what?” +“Underage drinking education…” +“Huh?” +“I bought a book for these kids, something to go with their whiskey….” +“Jackass.” +Gia listened with a bored expression on her face. “Okay Robin Hood, why don’t we wager something non-monetary?” +“Sexual favors?” I had to try. +“Uh no. How about just favors… How about if I win you have to do whatever I say for twenty minutes?” +“And if I win?” +She smiled mischievously, “I’ll give you my underwear.” +“You mean panties?” Dean said it with touch of sarcastic dandy in his voice. +“Ya panties…underwear whatever…” +“No Gia, see there’s a big difference… underwear is what guys and ugly girls wear… lovely young ladies such as yourself where panties,” Dean smiled at her. +“Okay I’ll give you my panties (roll of the eye, flitter of the lash) …right here in the middle of the bar…” +“Alright it’s a bet.” I wasn’t sure exactly what use I would have for women’s underwear, panties, pasties, drawers, knickers, or snatch covers by any other name, but it did make a good healthy fuck that much closer and I needed one of those. “My shot eh?” +“Yep” (leering, challenging grin) +I just smiled and took a shot. It dropped and so did the next five I aimed at. The eightball however refused to cooperate. Gia was a little disgruntled and flustered, she missed her shot and I dropped the eightball in the corner. I smiled at her and held out my hand. +She rolled her body around so that her back was pressed tight against my stomach and pulled my neck down and whispered in my ear. “I’m not wearing any…” And she walked away. +I let her go without protest and Dean racked a new game. We played doubles him and Delilah against Sara and me. Sara didn’t like me one bit and we lost badly, but we all got drunk with Guinness, with the blues, the pool game, with laughter, and innocence. Clarence, the singer, tore off on rant, extolling everyone to loooooove and kicked into an old Lightnin’ Hopkins song about a black Cadillac; Gia came back and sat on the other side of the table and stared at me smiling. Just then Scratch came strolling in and then the wildfire really got going. The clink of shot glasses raised in celebration of nothing, the clatter of them slammed down on the table, the burning beauty of good whiskey hitting the back of my throat; it all skips merry metallic through the night. The pinging of the pool balls and the thump and clatter as they bounce off felt walls and find their way into the pockets… it mixes with voices, laughter, lewdness strung out on a line with six fish to single hook. The fisher king rose from the back of the room and Gia said, “Its last call!” +“Damn!” Dean ran for the bar. +Scratch curled his lip and screwed up his face. “Jesus,” he called after him, “It not like there isn’t a ton more back at the house.” He paused a beat and then added, “You are coming over aren’t you girls?” +Naturally. Everyone is going everywhere and we are all running rampant and expansive by the time we hit the street. The lights cover the streets in prismatic splendor. Scratch drove down so all six of us pile in a 1972 Mercedes —shit brown and dancing upside down around the chandelier. +Gia leaned out the window and flashed her tits at a group of high school hoodlums smoking cigarettes on the corner. They whistled and yelled come back here baby.” +“Sorry… She yelled, “you wouldn’t know what to do with me if you had me.” Scratch laid it on the gas and we torn around the corner. I was rubbing on Gia’s nipple and she leaned her head back drunkenly mumbling “you’re gonna know what to do with me right?” +“Don’t worry about a thing.” I noticed as we pulled off that one of the kids was sitting on a fire hydrant away from the others reading a book. + + +It was well after two when we got back to the house and Scratch produced the bottle of chartreuse. By the time Morphine hit the stereo we were in full swing again. Delilah danced with Scratch or tried since his dancing is a bit limited by his injuries. Gia pulled me into her waist and swayed her hips grinding gently into me with the undulations of the bass and saxophone dancing through the air. Everything was colored in gaslamp light and arranged like cobblestone streets I got lost in Gia’s emerald eyes, lost in wonder, sheer wonder at the idea that this might be the very reason all four of us ever came into existence, that this one moment of abandonment to wine, music and the mysterious permeating rhythm of the universe. It’s everywhere… in her eyes, in the way the books are arranged on the shelf behind the sofa, in Scratch’s hobbled dance, in Delilah’s bouncing auburn curls, in the sway of Gia’s waving raven hair, in the beat of the drum in the pulse of energy that carried us from one end of the living room to the other. Dean is tapping it out with his feet sitting on the couch but leaning forward and lifting up Sara’s skirt like he was checking the ripeness of produce. +Eventually I passed Gia off to Scratch, flopped on the couch and poured myself a glass of red wine. As I was doing so I glanced out the window and somewhere on the blurry edge of the reflected inside and what I could see by the light outside, reality merged and I saw a man standing on the edge of small lakeside dock such as one sees in New England. He was looking up at the sky or out across the lake I could not tell but I could see his suit was tattered and his back hunched as if he were rather old. He took a deep breath, sighed and then the image was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. I thought of children’s rhyme just yesterday there was man on the stair who wasn’t there/ he was there again today…. Gia lay down across me and turned her head in so that he breath was warm on my stomach, she looked up at me with he liquid glass eyes and smiled a tilted drunken smile. I returned with one of my own, but I was looking at her breasts, they were rising out of her dress. +“Just so you know, I don’t go to bed with everyone I meet….” +“Never would have thought that….” +“Ya sure… all men think that a woman who lets herself get picked up in a bar is a slut.” +“That’s not true…” Dean piped up from the other end of the couch. “Women are no different than men, we all need sex….” +“Ya no shit.” Sara spoke up for the first time. “I hate it that I’m supposed to act all coy and demure when in reality sometimes you just need some dick and you really don’t care where it comes from so long as its not there when you wake up. I mean I want to fall in love and be swept off my feet too, but not tonight….” +Dean got up and pulled Sara off the couch with him, they danced slowly for a minute, kissing and then his hands groped at her ass and they veered off into the a dark corner away from the couch where they fell into a chair and all over each other. Scratch was less subtle he flung himself on the cushion next to me and Delilah pounced on him snaking her hand down his pants. Gia rolled over and began to blow through my pants; warm air flowed around my cock and it grew hard. Gia bit and nibbled at it while I tried to dodge her by flexing my muscles and making it jump. She laughed and broke the silence that had settled over the room. +“I have heard that Sil is hard to have sex with because he spends most of the time laughing,” Scratch snickered at me. +“Ya? I like to laugh… but I think I can make him stop if I want to…” +“Oh you think that now…” Dean called from across the room. +There is something hilarious about the grunting animal reality of sex, but I wasn’t in the mood for Scratch and Dean’s silly reindeer games so I scooped Gia up and carried her into Scratch’s bedroom and locked the door. I laid her on the bed as best I could but the last foot or so was more gravity’s work than mine. She yelped and I dove on her. In the crook of her neck I caught the smell of Jasmine or Frankincense or Myrrh, a pungent odor of beauty that wafts about through this world all the time —you catch it in the fall air, intangible but just barely, it hangs on the edge of recognition, the edge of the known and unknowable. She made up for that. She was all there and then some. And then she kissed me. There was the taste of hot cigarette smoke on her tongue; I caught it greedily the way plants grow to the sun, drawn by the familiar. She tasted like orange blossoms or smelled like them or felt like them, powdered sprinkled orange blossoms. They were in her eyes the smell came out of her eyes and then she opened them stared at me for a while hanging on the edge of my lips. There was no word, no sound; no connection at all just lips resting together, sticky, warm honey kiss. There was a riot of color that streaked by my eye, with all the fanfare of the flags at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. She rose up in black leather pants out of a sea Jasmine, Sunflowers, Scarlet Sage, Rocket Larkspur, Lupines, Butterfly Weed; there were riots of color, indigo and vermilion, violet, lavender and softer tones too, pastels and baby's breathe. I felt delirious and rolled over onto my back. Gia climbed a stride me. The black leather of her pants ground against my cock. We kissed ferociously and tore at each others clothes and then she grabbed a handful of my hair and held my head while half biting on my ear and half whispering the words you are not going to fuck me… the world stood still and roared for a millisecond and then fell as her lips bit at my neck and she clenched her thighs around my leg and ground her cunt against me. I could feel the heat on my leg and the pant of her breathe in my ear. I grabbed her hair and pulled her neck back so that she gasped and I started to fuck her with words. This was no Amy and this was no cheesy attempt to put zing back in an otherwise dull sex life; these were raw, skinned, de-boned words of lust not fiction at all but happening in. I told her what I felt. I felt the warmth of her cunt I felt how badly it need to be fucked; I became cunt and talked her right up to the edge and then stopped and tried to pulled away whispering what made you think I wanted to fuck you? But as I tried to pull away her legs tightened again and she fucked my leg until she came. + She relented and I sat up on the edge of the bed with my cock straining against my pants. She reached behind her, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and lit it. She smoked between gasps; her hands were shaking a little. She looked at me and started laughing, giggling mirth that eased any lingering tension out through the glass and left us in the warm fecund waters of silence. She took another drag and I just watched her, too exhaust to move. She was beautiful to a fault, but she had an earthy ethereal mixture to her skin that made her seem at once detached and warm. He lips pursed teasingly around the filter of her cigarette and she regarded me with raised eyebrow. Her eyebrows arced off brown eyes and her black hair was tussled atop her head, she looked disheveled and out of order the way everyone looks after coming. Raw and beautiful. And then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I am going to give you the best blowjob you have ever had…. Right after I finish this cigarette.” + Not with your clothes on I thought to myself. I undid her belt and she wiggled herself out of her pants and underwear. I pulled her down so she was lying prone and spread her legs. I got down and inspected her cunt. It wasn’t dolled up or trimmed, it was an honest slit. I poked in a finger and wiggled it a bit to hear her moan. I smiled at her. She rolled her eyes faking boredom and took another drag. I started in eating at that honest slit; the hair around her cunt was soft not like most I have felt, like it had been conditioned. She smelled husky but with something light on the end of it —lilacs maybe. She tasted thick like heavy rich syrup. It wasn’t long before she was bucking her hips and fucking at my face. She was hoarsely growling out commands and then she came again. +It was my turn to light a smoke. I sat on the end of the bed digging through my pockets for a lighter. Gia came over and took a drag. Everything was happening in slow motion… her legs half arced out behind her and she leaned over at me looking at me from under her forehead, eyes clouded with something I could not yet feel, something trance like, drugged passion. She swayed there for a few seconds teasingly and the she started rubbing my already stiff cock through my pants and murmuring to herself. She picked at my belt like a bird peeling the husk from a coconut and then in one gruff movement she fished out my cock and squeezed it gently with the tips of her fingers. Her lips pressed together and she leaned her head against it with eyes closed. It was then that I heard the bass fading in and the sharp tap of a snare drum, my head collapsed back like a nod from heroin and I felt her tongue circling the swollen head of my cock. I rolled around to look down at her. She looked up at my movement and smiled with her mouth open and her tongue teasing the underside of my cock. Still looking at me she engulfed me in her mouth and tussled her head slightly sending tremors down the base of my spine and uncomfortably settling them in my ass. She seemed to sense this and used her hand to massage my balls and slowly, wetly started slurping up and down. Her free hand she wrapped lightly in front of her mouth and alternated between her hand and her mouth and just when I felt it start to build deep in the base of my cock, all the way back down inside my body she stopped, stood up and climbed up on me so that her cunt was in my face and her head returned to its work below. I stared absently at the cum that clung to short-cropped hair they glistened with moisture. I worked my tongue up her and for a moment lost track of what she was doing and then like blinding flash my cock came back to me full force with waves of pleasure that pealed up my body and work themselves out through my tongue and back into her body. A strange loop of energy circled through us out of the humidity, out of the heat, out of the jungle, out of her cunt into my mouth and out my cock into her mouth... endlessly. A loop of something that tightened and squeezed at us constricting itself slowly into concentric circles until the loop became a dot and we came at the same time flowing cum in each others mouths. It is one thing to cum together with a woman when you are fucking, that happens with some frequency. But I had never cum at the same time during oral sex. As I lapped at her flooding cunt I became aware of the need to breath and her leg's gentle collapsed onto my shoulder and she slowly rose up with her arms on my knees and swishing her wet cunt against my bare chest. She turned around and we kissed, I could taste my cum and her mouth and she licked across my lips to taste her own. She curled up in my lap and we lay motionless and silent for sometime. + “I need water… you want some.” +“Ya I might sleep for second…” Her eyelids looked heavy, she smiled at me sleepily. “Will you fuck me later? I mean with your cock? I need to feel your cock.” +“Of course. Sleep a second, I’m going to get some water.” I headed out to the kitchen and found Dean and Scratch sitting on the couch talking softly in candlelight. They smiled at me. +“Doing alright?” I realized I was naked, but I didn’t care. I grabbed a pack of cigs off the table and sat down to light one. +“So Sil… I was just telling Dean here that I have job opportunity for the two of you… or just Dean if you don’t want to….” +“Lay it on me.” +“Well okay now this guy I sell to sometimes at the restaurant, one of the dishwashers, he has a cousin up in Brooklyn who wants to buy my entire harvest in one fall swoop which makes me quite a bit of money and saves a lot of hassle. That’s where you come in… you drive it up there and I will cut you guys in on a thousand each, plus gas money….” +“What about a car?” +“This is the best part…” whispered Dean, laughing softly. +Scratch chuckled to and then said with exaggerated severity, “There will be 1959 Cadillac at your disposal. Of course there is going to be ten pounds of marijuana in it so you might want to drive it like a Yugo, but anyway you drive it up there, call me and I will confirm that I have received the money and then you tell me where it’s parked and you’re done. I’ll wire you the money.” +I was already feeling the rush of the air and floating ride of a caddy. I saw it convertible and black. I didn’t say anything for a moment. I looked at Dean and I could see that he was going to do it with or without me, he was probably secretly hoping I wouldn’t. We could kiss our lives goodbye if we got caught…. Ten pounds would land us in prison and it didn’t really matter how long we got…we’d be dead the first day. But that thought only lasted a second and it was quickly replaced by an image of Gia’s naked body spread sleepily across the bed. I said yes and stumbled on to the kitchen. I grabbed a glass and turned on the water, but I set the glass on the counter and leaned against the sink just staring at the water running down the drain. I must have stared at it for quite sometime because Dean came in and poured himself a glass and then turned it off. +“You okay man?” +I started laughing, great peels of laughter that were uncontrollable, his words had burst some sort of dam that had been holding it back; I slumped against the cabinet and kept laughing and laughing, deep rolls of laughter that started somewhere below the gut and wouldn’t stop. Dean shook his head at me and walked back to the living room. I heard the flick of his lighter and I stopped laughing. I collected myself, got another glass and filled it to the top. I went back and crawled in bed with Gia. + + + + + + + + + + +The bus takes a left and heads up North Rampart Street. This is by far the worst neighborhood in New Orleans. The buildings themselves look violent, the shattered windows the abandoned factories are black eyes on the face of beaten man slinking home unnoticed through the shadows. There is only on place that most drivers will stop down here, in front of the superdome and even then it is only if someone rings that bell. For the most part the bus roars right through as if the driver were trying to keep something from getting in it, although what that something is no one can tell me. This place, area, ghetto, is reputed to be the worst in America. + Today the streets are empty. Its Sunday afternoon, September, the perfect time to be in New Orleans, not too crowded, not too hot, just about broasted to perfection. The streets are modeled I guess after France, but I wouldn’t know as I have never been to France except on grand mental sojourns. Still this is how I picture Parisian streets, the trademark metal railings woven with hyacinth and framing narrow balconies. The ride from Scratch’s house, which is just north of the garden district, not in the midst of Anne Rice’s finery, but more toward the French Quarter, the edge of the acceptable part of town, takes about twenty minutes by bus. From here I head up through the French Quarter for an afternoon walk, but it is the trolley ride that really sets my mind in motion, it passes through as I said the worst of the worst, but it is a lesson in American history, not the usual textbook fare either, no here is real history where you can see the casualties of human folly first hand. +The south actually has history in the common sense of the word, that is they have been invaded, and usually when people talk about history it is in reference to war or more so the ravages of war. Most Americans not living in the south tend to view the Civil War much like the revolutionary war, so much ancient history, when in reality it is only four maybe five generations removed. I try to bear that in mind on the trolley. These people and these neighborhoods have seen if not with their own eyes than through the eyes of their relatives, the horrors of war, slavery, riot, crime, violence and all the other jewels of history. +The architecture is old, ancient for America, but not preserved or taken care of as in the nicer neighborhoods. I take the bus because the people are savages so I am told. From the paper, and the gossip of the town this here is only one step above Beirut, but it doesn’t look it. The Cuban man selling roses out of a bucket for a dollar a longstem does not strike me as a cut throat murderer or drug running thug, he strikes me as non white, which as I have said earlier is unacceptable in this country. To be sure we have no slaves anymore in the physical sense, but equality is lacking, separation not equality was the route chosen by our forefathers. Or perhaps they did not choose it at all, perhaps no one is to blame, perhaps we are all guilty of the same thing, whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Europeans, Cubans Arabs, the whole rabble lot of humanity guilty as Mussolini. +The architecture is European; everything in fact is closer to Europe than the rest of America, and by Europe I mean the southern parts. There is of course the French influence in houses of the French Quarter, but there is also the Italian, the Portuguese, and the hybrids, the Cuban, the Haitian, the Mexican. New Orleans is the least American of all American cities I have lived in and yet it still has that stale death stink of America about it. Perhaps it is actually in the soil and leeches itself into DNA over time; this explains why New Englanders are the worst of the lot, but fails to account for the Native American tribes that seem unaffected. Perhaps they had a genetic immunity that the Europeans lacked. +But today is as I said a beautiful day and I am not in a hurry to get through the French quarter, usually until I have crossed over into the very north side the gay district in walk with my head down at tope speed weaving in and out of the throngs of tourists and head straight for the Elysian Fields. I always walk down to Elysian Fields, my favorite street by the simple virtue of name and at the end of it on the Lake Pontchartain there is a little bench of rock and wood which overlooks and the lake. I stop here and make notes about what I see walking, little furious scribbles while watching the afternoon thunderstorms roll across the water. Its about five miles there and back so I have the entire afternoon occupied. +Today Lakeshore drive is devoid of traffic, it feel a bit like I would imagine it if one survived a nuclear holocaust —serene, welcoming, dancing, empty. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + |