My Beat Up Old Notebook

When My Father Was a Son

2011-11-15T21:54:00.000-05:00

When my

father was a

son, he wrote letters to

my children. I have read

those letters, they

are drawn

and discarded

in every word he speaks.

All conversation is correspondence.

If I

could give you some

thing, I would bury and

seal my father’s letter to you

from me.

The Flapping Thing

2011-10-25T20:09:00.002-04:00

It was a flapping thing.

Under the bright, full moon, he’d not switched on the outdoor light nor had he lit lamp or candle and somehow from the shadows, the thing flapped across the wooden, upper-story deck.

It was a black thing. It was a black, round thing shot through with glittering flashes of metallic yellow. It was a round thing, no more than three inches thick in its middle and thinned considerably out to the edges of its round body, a foot wide, two feet wide. Maybe less. Its rectangular body. Its ovoid body. It seemed to be changing as it flapped itself across the boards.

‘What is that?’ David thought, and he rose from his deck chair to get closer though he didn't light a lamp or use the flashlight.

“What is that?” David asked aloud though no one inside, not Janet in the kitchen finishing the dishes, not Andy in his room “on his computer,” not Sarah gone so far, it seemed, she had become past tense even when present.

“What is that?” he again asked again knowing no one would hear him.

David reached down and with his right forefinger, touched its glittering blackness, its sandpapery, shark-skinned, slimy, slick, dry, and scaly wing and the pain was instantaneous and of a kind he could only describe as “exquisite,” a precise and high-pitched pain that pierced him completely from that small contact with his fingertip to the farthest limits of his being, each nerve in his body whining the same razor needled song, each synapse in his brain snapping down with a clearly audible and synchronized click. As he snatched his fingertip away from the flapping black thing’s horrible skin, David knew he’d been poisoned, that the rot and suppuration of first his finger, then his hand, then his arm, then his heart and his head would not kill him, but it would, instead, change him and he sat back in his deck chair.

He reached for his glass with his left hand and took a small swallow of bourbon and melted ice water. He felt the infection, the invasion, the transformation of his physical self moving methodically through the flesh of his right arm. He felt the poisonous thoughts begin to well up inside his envenomed brain.

David leaned his head back and looked at the sky, at the night sky, at the few stars that penetrated the thick layer of suburban light pollution, and he wondered at the sudden clarity with which he could perceive the anti-constellations formed not from the stars or planets themselves, the few that he could see, but from the emptiness between them.

The black flapping thing paused and became just a black thing. If it had eyes, it, too, may have been looking at the sky.

‘Maybe,” David thought, ‘it sees with something different than eyes.’

He could clearly see the shapes in the sky, wondered how he’d never seen them before, the negative space between the heavenly bodies patterned and embodied. The Leech, The Nailed Pig, The Hungry Man, The Flayed Swan, The Wound—all new constellations seemed to step forward from the background of the sky, from behind the stars and planets scattered there, to become a new kind of zodiac, one that David could clearly understand and read.

It didn’t look good.

The black thing became like a starfish or an anemone or a chrysanthemum and it stood itself up on the points of pseudopodia, but the exact number of legs is extended was unclear. It was better not to look at it directly, David decided, but instead to watch it through his peripheral vision where it seemed to gel something with into a more understandable image. It legs, its pseudopodia, its fingers, whatever they were, pushed the black thing’s thicker middle up and up until it stood as high as David sitting down.

“What is that thing?” he asked again just as the first wave of corruption hit his chest, strangled his heart, pushed the air from his lungs, and possessed him. David’s mind folded into itself many times as his body ratcheted into a new form until what was left was not really David at all anymore in any conventional sense. Whatever it was whatever David had become and extended and at least one and probably no more that six glittering black phalanges to first envelope and then bring to David’s glittering black pseudo-mouth the last swallow of bourbon and water.

The other black flapping stretching thing began to sing and David instantly understood the meaning of that song, could feel the click as its meaning fell into new shape of his new brain and he wondered what and for how long Janet and Andy and Sarah would think as events unfolded, as his pseudo-voice began to harmonize with the other black thing, with the new formations in the sky, with his black glittering future.

My Christmas Monkey

2010-12-22T08:52:00.007-05:00

“Do you remember Boys' Life?” he asked Chris.

"The movie with DiCaprio and Dinero?”

“No,” he answered. “That was This Boy’s Life and it was a play before it was a movie. I mean the magazine Boys’ Life, the official Boy Scout magazine.”

“Oh, sure…’The Tracey Twins’…’Mark Trail.’ Get it? Mark Trail? Mark trail?” Chris recalled.

“Right. Those were the comics in the middle of the magazine. Do you remember all the ads for mail-order animals in the back?”

“Mail-order what?”

“Mail-order animals. You could mail-order a raccoon or a box turtle or a half dozen fertilized quail eggs with an incubator like an E-Z-Bake oven.”

“You could?”

"Absolutely. Baby alligators, boa constrictors, chinchillas, skunks, armadillos, and flying squirrels. You could also order a ‘life-size nuclear submarine’ but the rumor was that it was cardboard, a cardboard diagram of a nuclear submarine. Anyway, one Christmas, my best friend in second grade, a kid named Marty Bruno, no lie, Marty Bruno, and he’d saved up for like 10 months to pay the $10 they charged to ship a squirrel monkey to any address in the world and Marty, my best friend, had them ship it to me.”

“They shipped you a monkey?”

“Yeah, a monkey in a toilet-paper tube, you know, the cardboard tube that’s left over when all the toilet paper is gone. Christmas Eve, last day of mail until after Christmas weekend or something and my mom thought it was a good idea to just slip the package under the tree with the rest of the presents and I would open it on Christmas morning with all the rest of my presents and I guess that monkey was just perfectly still and just waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for what”

“Waiting for someone to open the tube.”

“Waiting for you to open the tube.”

“Waiting for me to open the tube. Christmas morning, hot chocolate and banana nut bread, some parade on the TV with the sound turned down and guns and robot astronauts and cowboys and binoculars and who can remember what else until I was pretty much down to it and my mom said, ‘Here, open this’ and handed me this cardboard toilet paper tube with a mailing label stuck around it and I took it and I opened it up and something like nine ounces of insane squirrel monkey from the Amazon River regions of South America just came boiling out the end of that tube screaming this insane monkey scream with these tiny white scary monkey teeth and it started jumping and clambering and climbing with its slick black little monkey hands and the whole time it was screaming but it was also pretty much emaciated and weak from postal starvation and dehydrated from lack of water and my mom was screaming and, let’s face it, I was screaming and my sister was screaming and I guess my dad was probably screaming at us to shut the goddamn hell up while this monkey was looking for a place to perch and have diarrhea and the dry-heaves and glare at us all, the screaming family, and blame us all for everything, for being caught in the Amazon River regions in South America and for being sold to an animal wholesaler and for being advertised in Boys' Life magazine and for Marty Bruno saving up his allowances and most of all for the international postal service in which it had passed nearly a week of close confinement inside what was later confirmed as an actual cardboard toilet paper tube.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for the monkey.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for you.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for everyone. My Christmas monkey story has a sad ending.”

“They usually do.”

“Yeah, I guess. Like, really, any Christmas monkey story, mine has a sad ending involving the father, a paper bag from the Piggly Wiggly, and a garden spade.”

“Ouch.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas monkey. Living in the Amazon jungle, spend two weeks in a cage at some reeking dockside trading outpost, spend another week in parcel post and travel thousands of miles for the Christmas surprise of being beaten to death with a shovel on the garage floor of a house in the mountains of Colorado where it’s fucking freezing.”

“It’s a fucking Hallmark special, man.”

“So, when school started up again and Marty Bruno asks me if I like my Christmas present, I just say, ‘Which one?’ and when he says, ‘You know, the monkey,’ I just say, ‘What monkey?’ and he’s pretty disappointed thinking I didn’t get the monkey he’d saved up for almost a whole year to buy me for Christmas.”

Riding the Number Three Bus on a Late Wednesday Afternoon

2010-11-21T17:59:00.004-05:00

Xian, Shaanxi Province, The People’s Republic of China, late winter 1986

The kid is a drooler. It looks like he might have something like Downs Syndrome, maybe not so terribly severe but bad enough. He seems to be around 35 or 40 but that doesn’t mean much and the old man who sits next to him, who regularly holds a white cotton handkerchief to his son’s or maybe his grandson’s lips, that old man looks 60 or maybe 90. Again, hard to tell.

They get off the bus at the Bell Tower stop just inside the city’s ancient wall. As the rest of us pull away on the Number Three bus, a flash of white cotton marks their path across the crowded avenue toward what I hope is their home.\

We pass a pack of Rider Fellows, the guys with the hand tractors (like a rotor-tiller with wheels instead of earth shredding blades) attached to wagons piled with cabbages or bricks or Japanese cassette players, and their bandanas and goggles are little protection against the poisonous air of the Number Five Road, but the Rider Fellows are a tough crew. The black and yellow satin jackets they all seem to wear are silk-screened with a distorted photo of Dennis Hopper riding his chopper to flaming death by the side of a Florida road and the words “Rider Fellow” as a rocker beneath the image. I wanted one of those jackets very badly but could never find the hand-tractor driver store that sold them. It was a secret store just for hand-tractor drivers.

It’s easy to spot the country people, the farmers, the peasants, the migratory workers, on the Number Three bus; they stick their tissue paper bus tickets onto their lower lips so the conductress can easily see their destinations and tell them when to get off. They chew raw garlic to kill the city germs and the delicate bus tickets flutter with each slack-jawed grind on each clove they pop.

The ladies next to me are talking about me.

“This one looks crazy,” the one in the blue Mao suit says.

“Is it a boy or a girl? I can’t tell these foreigners apart. It has long hair and earrings, but it has no breasts and all foreign women have enormous breasts,” says the one in brown Mao suit.

“Is he a movie star?” Blue asks.

“I think so,” Brown answers. “He was the bad guy in the movie about explosions.”

“All foreign movies are about explosions,” Blue patiently reminds her companion.

“The one with explosions and kissing,” Brown clarifies.

“Oh, yes!” Blue exclaims. “My husband loves that movie. He watches it every chance he gets.”

“I hope he doesn’t watch it too much,” Blue says and the air of betrayal suddenly hangs in the air of the Number Three bus as it lumbers down the Number Five road.

“Well, not every chance,” Brown amends.

“I should hope not,” Blue answers.

Other passengers have begun to listen. Soon, they join the conversation.

“All those foreigners eat is meat and milk,” a man with long, lucky eyebrows adds.
“It’s true,” says another woman holding a bag of onions. “I saw one of those foreigners once before, and he was drinking milk and he was eating meat.”

“I saw a foreigner last year, and he yelled at my sister-in-law for spitting on his shoes,” Eyebrows contributed.

“He had too much hot blood,” Onions agreed. “Too much thick blood. All that meat makes them hot and the heat makes them angry all the time.”

I’m holding on to the steel pole and rocking as the bus driver hits every pothole on the Number Five Road. We pass a bicycle towing a locked screen box full of little Chinese toddlers. The cyclist is taking them someplace or he is taking them back home after taking them some place. I wonder where they had been and where they were going. I supposed it might be a school bus, a locked screen box school bus.

“What is that thing?” I ask Blue.

Her eyes widened wider then they have probably ever widened since the Great Helmsman died.

“What…What…What did you say?” she stuttered and, believe me, stuttering in Chinese is not easy.

“I was just wondering where that locked screen box of toddlers is going,” I answered.
Everyone became very quiet on the Number Three bus and all we all could hear was the bus engine groaning and the bus body creaking as its cheap steel bent and twisted with each bend and twist of the roadbed.

“Do that again,” Onions told me.

“Do what again?”

“That thing you just did.”

“What thing?”

“Speaking,” Onions explained. “It sounded like you spoke like a person, like a human being.”

“I did,” I told her.

“Do it again.”

“I just did. I’m doing it now.”

“That is so strange,” Eyebrows chimed in. “I wonder how he does it?”

“I just talk, that’s all,” I say.

“It must be like a parrot or a trained monkey,” Blue offered.

“That’s right,” I responded. “You may think of me as you would think of a parrot or a trained monkey. I am a badly trained monkey. Sometimes, I bite people.”

They fell silent again, each deciphering the meaning of my human words and whether I knew the meaning what I was saying or if some clever Chinese person taught me to say the words without me understanding what they meant.

“What. Is. Your. Name. ?” asked Brown.

“My. Name. Is. Keith. Richards.”

“Kee-if Risher Duhs?” she rolled the syllables through her rotten-toothed mouth.

“Exactly. You’ve said it exactly correct. You must by very good at speaking English.”

“English?” Brown exclaims. “I’ve learned to speak English?”

“I think so,” I answer. “We’re speaking English right now.”

“We are? It sounds just like Chinese!”

“Yes, it does,” I confirm. “English sounds exactly like Chinese.”

“Do we all speak English?” ventures Onions.

“Yes,” I answer. “Everyone on this bus speaks English like a professional English speaker. You could all be tour guides and make a lot of money speaking English to foreigners.”

The excitement was fevered in our section of the Number Three bus as it lumbered its way down the Number Five Road. My circle of passengers all contemplated a lucrative career change. I could practically see the TV sets and brand new electric fans and self-winding wristwatches swirling around their heads. I watched the screen box of toddlers disappear behind us in the cloud of bus dust and smoke.

“Perhaps you know where we could find this kind of work?” Blue asked me.

“I recommend you present yourself at the American consulate in the heart of the city and tell them very loudly how well you now speak English.”

I could see them turning such a plan over inside their heads. The advantages of a new kind of job with plenty of foreign capital streaming into their threadbare pockets weighed against the dangers of being seen visiting the local headquarters of an imperialist nation.

“Don’t be afraid,” I told them. “Be brave. Be strong. Show them that the Chinese people can master any task and surmount any problem. Do it for the Motherland.”

They remained silent.

“Remember that risk is its own reward,” I continued and they didn’t understand me at all.

The Number Three bus stopped with a jerk and we were all thrown forward to mash against each other awkwardly. I looked out the filthy window to see what had happened.
We had stopped on the bridge over the Wei He River that ran outside the city. A man hung from the high tension electrical cables strong from tall steel pylons and he emitted sparks. I still now as I did then wonder what it must have looked like to him incandescent, eyeballs ribboned with blue fire and below him spreading all horizons, the city slowly pulsing, hot and dusty for this late in the year, everyone says so.
Who knows, who will ever know what caused the fatal spark, the brilliant arc that clenched him tight, convulsed in one long spasm when everything inside him jammed up with electricity rampant and when he began to smolder. I wondered then as I still do now if he even noticed he was on fire. One of his feet fell slowly tumbling over and over to the riverbed with gray smoke trailing.

The river bridge was jammed both ways, typical post-revolutionary rush hour and a quarter of a million people stopped their bicycles and put one leg on the pavement so they could safely stare up goggle-eyed and open-mouthed at something different, at a man two hundred feet in the air who twitched and blackened and was never coming down.
The wrongness of this all was overwhelming, and still now as I did then I consider what it must have seemed to him there among the wires thrumming harsh, the river silver and thin along the wide sandy bottom, a half a million eyes toward him and just diesel smoke from idle bus and hand tractor engines like mist in a scroll painting one thousand years old, this same river and this same city, now hanging in a temple in the mountains far to the west.

“Look at the man,” I told my companions. “Look at the man on fire up in those wires.”

“It is a terrible thing,” Brown declared. “It is not a good thing to see.”

“But when will I ever see such a thing again?” I asked.

Blue reached her callused hand to touch my arm.

“Never,” she said. “Never in all your life.”

And she was quite right.

*

After an hour or so, traffic began to move across the bridge again. Below us on the sandy, exposed river bottom was the place where they executed criminals in the springtime and, in a few more weeks, one of my Chinese friends would come to my dormitory and tell me the story of that year’s killings.

“The people run forward to dip their money in the dead person’s blood,” Mr. Zhang told me.

“Why do they do that?” I asked him.

“Because it makes the money lucky,” he explained.

“That sounds very strange,” I said. “Why would a dead criminal’s blood make money lucky?”

Mr. Zhang paused to form his answer.

“It is a tradition,” he finally said.

“It sure doesn’t seem lucky for the criminal,” I replied.

“It is a tradition,” he repeated. “It is an old tradition from feudal times and it is very backward and ignorant.”

There was a lot I could have said to him on that subject, but I remained silent until something else occurred to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Have you ever seen an old guy on a bicycle pulling a big, locked screen box full of little Chinese kids down the Number Five Road?”

“Hmmm,” Mr. Zhang pondered. “Perhaps I have seen that man.”

“Why is he doing that?”

“Hmmm,” he again pondered. “I think maybe he is taking them to a place or bringing them back from a place.”

“That makes sense. I wonder what kind of place.”

“It must be a place for children.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “That must be it.”

“Yes,” Mr. Zhang said. “That is probably the answer.”

“I once saw a man get electrocuted down there by the river.”

“What a terrible thing to see!” he exclaimed.

“Is it worse than watching people be shot?”

“Of course,” he explained. “What you saw was an awful accident.”

“And what you saw was planned out.”

“Yes. Accidents are much worse than things that are planned.”

And he was quite right.

Late Afternoon, Late July, Late 1960s

2010-08-26T22:49:00.003-04:00

“There’s one of those old wives’ tales we had as kids, one of those things that kids tell each other on a hot day like this when they live way out on a farm and they say a dragonfly is the Devil’s Darning Needle and those dragonflies’ll zip by and stitch up your lips quick as that,” and she did a little juggling with her plastic tumbler of vodka tonic, her partially smoked 100 centimeter menthol cigarette, and her fingers so she could almost snap them when she said the work “that.”

She looked at her fingers as if they were in some way defective, unsnappable for a heretofore unsuspected reason. She sighed a gray cloud of minted smoke. And she made more of the same finger snapping though mostly silent gestures at the children tumbled in the flowers along the driveway in the backyard, children in their bathing suits of striped and dotted elastic fabric and playing with the garden hose, children of whom some were hers, and her fingers made a gesture to simulate the erratic and precise flight of a dragonfly as it flew to sew these children’s mouths quite shut.

“Zzzzzz,” she mimicked the sound of a flying sewing machine. “Good Lord, but do I wish that old wives’ tale was true? I sure do.”

And the ice in her drink didn’t so much rattle or ring but rather clunked it’s way around when it shifted within the thick walls of the faded orange plastic. The cigarette gave an extra puff as smoke as a small pocket of an accelerant added to the tobacco caught fire.

It was like she was just waiting for someone to get hurt. The backyard was a wasteland with a thousand yards of burned and glassy dunes between her and the children clustered around the water tap. She could barely see them across the blasted sands’ glare, shapes first bloated and then minuscule, body parts all out of context and seen merely as “foot” or “sternum” or “vertebrae.” She winced against the sun, took a long drink from her orange plastic tumbler, took a long drag of her long menthol cigarette, and sort of whisper-yelled across the desert toward her own and other people’s kids.

“Be. Careful,” she whisper-yelled. “It’s. All. Fun. Until. Some. One. Gets. Hurt.”

And, then, as she whisper-yelled it, some child did get hurt and headed toward the shape she made in that child’s eyes, and she quickly dropped her orange plastic tumbler and her 100 centimeter long menthol cigarette into the sink to splash and sizzle out and mix there in the bottom of the kitchen sink, and she quickly wiped her hands on her apron, already saying, “Oh, honey, what happened?” before she knew whose child it was, if it was one of her own or another mother’s, before she knew its gender, its name, its stumbling odor. The mewling sound it made could have been one of hers, but it was still too far out in the dunes struggling against the burned sand, its arms akimbo and its breath in short gasps, for her to properly identify it as anything other than a child hurt and shocked by being hurt and she would wait at the edge of this great basin of children’s play and children’s pain until the poor creature could work its way close enough to be comforted.

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge

2010-07-10T16:41:00.002-04:00

I think of him every day,
my father,
and always on my drive to work,
and I think of his,
my father’s,
work painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was the only job he,
my father,
ever had;
27 years in the rigging with brush and buckets of
Golden Gate paint
(orange vermilion called "International Orange"),
enough Golden Gate paint
to float an aircraft carrier or
an armada of small sailboats
each with a happy family aboard,
enough Golden Gate paint
to raise a family and buy a house,
to send two kids to college
and another to art school,
enough Golden Gate paint
to start three families
who bought three houses
to fill with grandchildren
and a divorce or two
and dogs barking in the yards
and barbeque grills for Saturday cookouts
with the whole family.

He,
my father,
painted every day, all day,
the endless job of painting the Golden Gate Bridge;
from north to south on the bay side
and then from south to north on the ocean side
and always to begin again,
north to south,
every day in all weather and never finished,
a möbius strip of painting
that kept him,
my father,
smelling of acetone and benzene and Golden Gate paint
until the day the knot slipped,
until the day the link snapped,
and he,
my father,
toppled backward into the sea
accompanied by a smooth, gliding arc of Golden Gate paint,

And so, yes, today, like every other day,
I tie the knot and snap the link,
take my bucket of Golden Gate paint and my brush
and lower myself down to
pick up the job where he,
my father,
left it.

excerpted from the much longer “Suicide Girlfriends” (2010)

2010-06-25T19:18:00.002-04:00

Sunday was the main day for families to get new cars or even just new used cars because, I guess, the dads were rested up enough after a long week at work and the kids were semi-etherized upon the table of tomorrow being Monday and all with classes and stuff. It was a strategic day, the day of the good deal with low money down, no money down, tug it, tow it, lug it, or push it in for fantastic deals Sunday, man, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. And whole families left in the old and came back in the new or almost new station wagons or sport coupes or god maybe mustangs or cougars and it was days of standing in a short line to enjoy the new car smell, rides around the block with somebody else's Dad at the wheel until he said, “Enough. Go home now.;” it was “power windows” this, and “automatic wiper fluid” that, it was “Danny’s new daddy’s new El Camino can lay a patch in third” until the thrill of a new car was long long left in the road and the old car just heaved itself up into the driveway at night, glad to have made it home, glad to have made it all, and just sat there with the brake lights first on and then off just ticking cooler in the carport.

Summer Gets Kind of Hot Around Here

2010-05-26T18:50:00.002-04:00

‘Is this what it’s like to go crazy?’ he wonders. In the broadest of broad summer sunlight, the asphalt of the road soft beneath his feet, heat shimmers warp his dim visions. The street tar soft enough so his bare, burning feet sink within it. His fingers woven into the nylon mane of a Malibu Barbie with fully pose-able extremities, her soft and evenly tanned vinyl skin brushing his own pale legs, pale legs spattered with suppurating sores, and his painless descent into the smoldering macadam a metaphor for something only dimly visioned.

“This must be what it’s like to go crazy,” he stated with only Malibu Barbie to hear his whispers.

And he was right.

When the Sun Shines Even Though It’s Raining

2010-02-09T14:03:00.001-05:00

It was Saturday morning about 9 o’clock and Pop came in off the porch.

"Any of you kids ever see the ocean?” he asked us. We were still in our pajamas watching some Saturday cartoons on the beat-up old black-and-white with the coat hanger for an antenna. Nobody said a word and, instead, watched the poorly drawn animals beat each other up on the screen.

“I said,” Pop continued, raising his voice to the “someone better answer me” level. “I said, ‘Any of you kids ever see the ocean?’”

“No, sir,” I answered, assuming my role as eldest and spokesman. “I don’t think any of us ever seen the ocean.”

The ocean was actually the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico was about 25 miles south or maybe west of us and where we were living. I’d heard about it and plenty of kids at school had seen it and told about it but I was pretty sure I’d never been there. I was pretty sure that none of us had been more than five miles from that house in our lives and I was 9 at the time and WalMart was, I estimated, about five miles away from our house because it had taken me about two hours to walk back from WalMart last year when Pop said I was acting like an asshole in auto parts and just left me there.

“Then we’re going to see the ocean today,” Pop announced. “Marie! Marie! Where the hell are you, Marie?”

We all just stared at the television knowing full well that Mom was still laid up in bed after the Friday night they’d had. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to walk back and forth from WalMart five times. I figured it would take me ten or eleven hours and that was how far away the Gulf of Mexico was, ten or eleven hours of walking and it might as well have been Ding Dang Dong in China.

“Goddammit, Marie,” Pop muttered as he went off to look for her as if he had no idea where she was. “We got us a car to pack up.”

It took the family three hours to get ready to go to the ocean. We had to find all the things Pop said we’d need—towels, bug spray, shorts and t-shirts because none of us had a bathing suit, the old Polaroid to take photos to document our trip and paste into an album we didn’t have, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch in the sun, toys so we could play in the sugar sand Pop said the ocean was beached up with. Mom sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of instant coffee and smoking Virginia Slim Menthol 100s one after the other. Pop was in charge of his refreshments and us kids did everything else under his direction. Connie started crying which wasn’t unusual since Connie cried at least once every day and that day she cried twice. The first time was for I don’t know what and the second time was when Pop smacked her face to get her to stop crying the first time.

“Get you a little shovel and a pail for digging in that sugar sand,” he said and off we went looking for such things.

“Can’t find no little shovels or a pail,” one of us told him.

“Goddammit,” he answered and ended up shoving a broken up garden spade and a plastic flowerpot into the trunk of the Ford. “Gotta do every little goddamn thing myself.”

“Get you one of those blow-up rings for swimming,” he told us.

Later, one of us came up and told him the bad news.

“Can’t find no blow-up ring thing for swimming.”

“Goddammit,” he answered and ended up shoving some black plastic garbage bags into the growing tangle of beach gear filling the Ford’s trunk. “Kids got no sense at all. Garbage bag’s like a big balloon anyhow. Blow one up and paddle around all day.”

It took us about three hours to fill up the trunk with all the stuff Pop said we should take to have fun at the ocean and then it took another half an hour to get Mom in travel shape. She got herself dressed, filled up one of those convenience store plastic mugs with about half-a-gallon of instant coffee, and shoved an extra pack of cigarettes into her purse. We all climbed into the Ford, kids in the back and grown-ups in the front with a mug of coffee between her legs and a can of beer between his, and Pop started driving us to the ocean.

By my reckoning, we’d gone about seven and a half miles or about a 90-minute walk when the left rear tire blew out. Everybody stayed real quiet and then Pop got out of the car and slammed the driver’s side door so hard the rearview mirror cracked. It was just one more thing.

About that time and even though the sun was still beating down sort of smoky hot and fierce, it started to rain a bit and the drops that hit him made little dark circles on his t-shirt. Pop just stood there in front of the Ford getting wet and saying “goddammit” over and over again.

“When I was a little girl, you know what we used to say when it would rain like this when the sun was still shining?” Mom finally said.

“No’m,” I answered. Connie was sniffling beside me.

“Us kids used to say that the devil was beating his wife.”

Laundry Day

2010-01-12T17:54:00.004-05:00

It was July and all us kids were home or at least near home when the cleaning started. I was in the back yard playing Hot Wheels with Jeffery and the girls were in the attic snooping through the trunks up there from who ever knew how long ago.

Mom started in the kitchen with all the pots and pans and plates and glasses left over from the night before. We could hear her banging things around and opening and shutting the cabinet drawers.

Next, she started vacuuming and over the next hour or so we could hear her hoovering the carpets and the wood floors from one end of the house to another.

Then the washing machine started and, after a while, the dryer.

“Blam,” Jeffery said when he sent one of his Hot Wheels into mine.

Jeffery was only four so I let him smash into me all the time.

The washer and the dryer were basically going the whole time.

The girls wandered down from the attic; they all were dusty and smudged.

“What’s Mom doing?” they asked.

“Cleaning?” I asked them

“That’s what it looks like,” they answered. “Sort of.”

We could see Mom struggling to get the curtains off the rods in each of the rooms facing the backyard. One at a time, she pulled them down and the washer sounded strained and forced as we supposed she fed them into it.

“She’s cleaning everything,” I proposed.

“Everything,” the girls agreed.

After about three or four or five hours, after about the time it would take to wash every single curtain, sheet, and towel in the house, to dry each item, and to fold them all or hang them all back up, things inside the house quited down. In many ways, it appeared ominous.

The girls made themselves apparent without interfering with the Hot Wheels in the dirt.

“Blam,” Jeffery said. “Blam blam blam.”

Sooner than we expected, Mom was at the back door.

“All you kids get inside right now,” she told us.

We got inside.

“Everybody go to their rooms right now,” she told us.

We went to our rooms.

One by one, she came to each of us.

“Take off your clothes. All of them. Right now,” she said.

It must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon by that time. Our beds were bare, nothing but mattress ticking showing. We had curtains, but they were clean and ironed and smelled like bleach or something.

We shucked our clothes, t-shirts, pants, shorts, socks, underwear, everything, into the big hamper Mom held in her hands and sat on our naked beds naked. We could hear the washing machine and the dryer growling away from the other side of the house.

“For once,” we could hear Mom say, “For once in my life, everything in this house is going to be clean.”

It made a kind of sense and, since it was summer and we weren’t cold or anything, it seemed like a good time to do it.

We sat there in our rooms naked on our naked beds and waited until Mom came back and gave us clean clothes and told us to get dressed or something.

We sat there a long time.

It must have been about five thirty when we heard the front door open and Dad came home from work.

We could hear Mom meet him at the door.

“Take your clothes off,” she told him. “Take them off right now.”

We could hear Dad make some noises, sort of confused and blustering.

“Where are the kids?” he asked.

“Never mind the kids. Forget the kids. I’m serious,” Mom said. “Take all your clothes off right now.”

The noises Dad made changed tone.

“It’s not what you think,” one of the girls yelled from their room.

After Falling Down. Again.

2009-09-14T09:39:00.001-04:00

A passerby,
that is to say a person passing by,
might have wondered at me
on my back
in the ditch
with my mouth open
in the rain,
but, since no one was,
that is to say passing by,
no one did,
that is to say wonder.

And, really,
it was not so much
a rain that fell
as it was a mist
that drifted
and my mouth
was not so much open
as it was ajar.

Still, I was not comfortable
alone
in a ditch
in the mist
on my back
with my mouth ajar,
but the company I longed for
was long fled.

She had not so much fled
as she did just turn her back upon me
and move in one of the infinite number of
directions that led her away from the place
where I lay
on my back
in a ditch
in the mist
with my mouth ajar,
but to say she left slowly
would be a lie.
That is to say not true.

There is comfort, though,
that is to say a kind of consolation,
in knowing that when I
finally close my mouth
and rise from this ditch
and wipe the moisture from my face
and choose one of the infinite number of
directions that lead away from this place,
the chances are quite good
that I shall find her.
That is to say,
she will find me.

A Funny Story From a Former Soviet State

2009-09-13T11:22:00.000-04:00

A man was working late one dark winter night. His boss comes up and says, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re closing the factory. Don’t come back.’ and the boss gives him some tires (that’s what they made at the factory) instead of severance pay.

The man takes his two tires and leaves the factory. Sadly, outside, there is a power outage and the streets are dark. Recently, thieves have begun to steal all sorts of metal to sell for scrap and have removed all sorts of metal objects from the public landscape toward that end. Soon, the man stumbling through the darkness stumbles into an open manhole that, once upon a more prosperous time, had been covered by a thick metal disc now purloined and sold to a dealer in such dubious items. And the man breaks his leg. Attracted by his screams, local ruffians from the adjacent apartment block pour forth to kick the man in the face, break his nose, laugh at him, spit and piss on him, steal his hat, and roll his tires away down the ink-black street (careful to avoid similarly gaping holes in the street).

Eventually, a taxi comes and the driver takes the last few crumpled hvrina the man had secreted about his person, his belt, his shoes, and his watch. The driver then actually takes the man to a clinic and, driving back into the pitch-blackness with his headlights off, wishes him well and good luck.

There are many sick and wounded people at the hospital waiting to see the one doctor visible who seems content to merely sit and smoke cigarettes while picking at the crusts formed upon his white coat, ignoring the low moans from those waiting to see him. After several hours, a woman who seems like a nurse gives the man a pill, a cold cloth for washing, and tells him it might be best to return at another time.

The man begins to limp home. Finally, he arrives at his apartment block and, since the elevator has not worked since the mid-1990s, he crawls up the ten flights of stairs to his apartment.

Inside, he finds his best friend and his wife waiting for him.

“We love each other,” they tell him. “We have taken everything and we are leaving. We are going to live in the mountains and chop wood together.”

And they leave the man, broken-legged, broken-nosed, beaten, pissed upon, robbed, and drugged in an empty apartment. The man crawls into the kitchen, takes off his belt, climbs up onto the small refrigerator and loops his belt over a pipe in the ceiling. He slips his head into the loop and tries to jump off the refrigerator to hang himself. Instead, the pipe breaks, he tumbles to the floor, the refrigerator falls on top of him, breaks several of his ribs, and ice-cold water begins to pour from the broken pipe to soak him.

However, when the door of the refrigerator pops open during the fall, a half-full bottle of vodka that the wife had forgotten to take comes rolling across the filthy, rotten floor to within inches of his snot-filled, blood-crusted nose. The man lay there with his broken ribs, broken leg, broke, in an empty apartment covered in ice-cold water. He reaches for the bottle.

“Hey,” he says to no one in particular. “Today turned out to be a pretty good day.”

Some Q. and Some A.

2009-09-12T11:57:00.007-04:00

Though not necessarily surprised at finding the toilet full of debris--copies of my books, the jewelry I had given her, and some of her feces--I was shocked at the vulgarity of the note that had been scotch-taped to its handle.

I am giving you everything you ever gave me back to you. I wish there was more. Enjoy it, it’s all you have left because I am gone forever and am never, ever, ever coming back. I wish there was more.

Love always Denise

XOXOXOXOXO

you stupid fucker

“XOXOXOXOXO” means “hugs & kisses” and I still don’t know what “Love always Denise” means. Was she trying to tell me that, despite the anger and the bitterness that prompted her to leave my books, her jewelry, and (presumably) her shit in such a sodden arrangement, she would still love me in absentia? Or, was I being instructed to continue (or, perhaps, to really start) to “love always Denise” (Love Denise Always)? And did “stupid fucker” mean that she didn’t like me or that I had sex like an idiot? Boy, that girl sure could be confusing. I had already started to look for her to ask for a clarification, an explanation, of those confusing portions of her note before I remembered that it all meant that she wasn’t around to answer my questions anymore.

When I heard the back door open and then close, I remembered, guiltily, that I had forgotten about Ariel, Denise’s 11-year-old daughter. I was then surprised that A) Denise had not taken Ariel with her when she left and B) that since Denise had not taken Ariel, that she had not somehow arranged for her daughter to be in the bathroom, if not actually in the toilet, with the rest of her message.

“Hello?” I heard Ariel’s thin, 11-year-old voice from the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and the corresponding rattle, of the jars of condiments stored in the racks. “Hel-lo-oh?”

“I’m in the bathroom,” I called back to her.

Several hours later, Ariel and I sat side by side on a couch in the living room (there were three, three couches; one living room) looking together at the place where a television had once been. Three couches, one living room, and zero televisions seemed somewhat imbalanced to me but we usually sat thusly on more normal evenings watching a television that was no longer there and I did not wish to upset Ariel any more than I thought she should be normally.

“We’ll have to go shopping,” Ariel said eventually.

‘Good,’ I thought.

“And get some new stuff,” she continued.

‘Excellent,’ I continued thinking. ‘She’s adjusting.’

“Like a TV,” Ariel attempted.

“We’ll see,” I replied, not wanting to step too far out of my normal character, not wanting to upset her anymore than I thought she should be.

“She does this all the time,” Ariel said.

“Who?” I answered. “Does what? When?"

I returned to the house with plastic grocery bags full of things that I had been certain Ariel would love. Though I knew that food could never replace her mother, I felt that the child should somehow be comforted, should know that someone cared enough for her to bring her delicious snacks.

As I began to unload boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, Cherry Cokes, Count Chocula breakfast cereal, Hostess Sno-Balls, beef jerky, Butterfinger candy bars, and Strawberry Quik, Ariel came into the kitchen.

“What is all this?” she asked me.

“It’s all for you!” I crowed. “It’s all your favorite things!”

She looked at me for a moment before she again spoke.

“How long have you known me?”

I did a quick count in my head. “Almost eleven months.”

“Have you ever seen any of this kind of stuff in this house before?”

“No, sweetie. That’s why I got it for you.”

She looked at me for a moment before she left the kitchen.

I was positive that it was not possible to return groceries for a refund and I didn’t want to try to explain how these had been accidental purchases anyway. I set the brightly colored boxes and packages in a long row outside the house along the edge of the sidewalk. By morning, every single item was gone.

On the way home from work that next evening, I realized that I was cashless and, quite rightly, assumed that Denise had taken the checkbook and its corresponding money when she left. I pulled into a convenience store, removed the water pistol from the glove box where I kept it, and went inside. I walked to the register and pointed the pistol at the clerk. Without a word, she opened her drawer and handed me 63 dollars. I refused the change she offered and she returned it to the drawer. She smiled as I left through the door marked with feet and inches. The water pistol is made of lime green plastic and has the words BIG SQUIRT embossed in gold along the barrel. I have “robbed” stores like this many times and have never had any trouble, have never seen these “robberies” mentioned in any newspaper, have never seen my description or height in feet and inches on the television show “Crimestoppers,” have never been approached by any member of any law enforcement agency, and stopped feeling regretful over 10 months ago.

When I arrived home, Ariel was sitting on the porch reading an old textbook. I had no idea what textbook it was and did not remember keeping any textbooks but there she was reading one. I gave her twenty dollars.

“Oh. Great,” she said. “Now my friends will love me.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I told her on my way into the house.

I dialed a number I got from the business personals section of the classified ads of the newspaper in our town.

“Deja vu hotline,” a voice said but, before I could begin talking, it also said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve had this conversation before.”

Ariel came in the door with a new hairstyle.

“Isn’t that a new hairstyle?” I asked her.

She looked at me a moment before she answered.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said and she looked at me for a moment before she left me sitting on the couch. I could hear her pick up the telephone in the other room and dial a number. It seemed like something like this had happened before. At least once before. Before.

Something had hit me and I had tried to become conscious but it was difficult because I had been asleep. It was Ariel hitting me and saying, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

When I was awake enough, I said, “What is it, honey?”

“Earthquakes,” she said. “There’s earthquakes on the TV. You come and watch them.”

“Honey,” I told her, “we don’t have a TV anymore. Remember?”

“Oh,” she said and let me go back to sleep. Again.

The next time I remember I was asleep and Ariel woke me up was when I was sleeping on one of the couches in the living room and she slammed the door walking in. I woke up and she threw my BIG SQUIRT water pistol into my lap.

“Here,” she said, holding a twenty dollar bill at me. “Now your friends will love you.”

“Thank you, honey,” I told her when I took it.

She just looked at me for a moment before she went back outside.

“You’re welcome,” I called after her.

When I answered the ringing telephone I discovered it was Denise calling us. After I said “hello” I listened to her voice for what seemed like the longest time.

“Yeah, yeah,” I was finally able to say. “I’m sure we’ve had this conversation before.” And hung up.

“Who was that on the phone?” Ariel asked from the other room.

“When?” I answered.

I began to disobey traffic laws. At first, I would merely slow down at the stop signs, look both ways, and proceed. I began to do the same at stoplights. I began not to yield, began not to look both ways. Soon, I drove without obeying a single symbolic directive, as if I was the only driver on the roads, as if the rules did not apply to me, as if all the obvious signs weren’t there at all.

Not one single bad thing happened.

I began to wonder why Ariel was apparently not going to school and approached her about it.

“Why are you apparently not going to school?” I asked her.

“I go to school,” she answered. “I go to school every single day. Except Saturday and Sunday. I go to Horace Mann Elementary School and am in Mrs. Whalen’s sixth grade class. I bring home notebooks and textbooks and can often be found at the kitchen table doing homework in the early evenings. Jeez.”

“And why, then,” I asked her, “have I not noticed this?”

“Because,” she answered, “you leave before I do in the morning and return after I am already home.”

I had to admire her because it was really that simple and easy to understand the way she explained it.

One night I was awakened by someone hitting me and it was Ariel. Again.

“Wake up,” she said. “Wake up. Wake up.”

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” I asked her.

“There’s mudslides and tornadoes on TV,” she said. “Get up and watch them with me.”

“Honey,” I tried to tell her again, “we don’t have a TV anymore.”

“We do now,” she answered. “Get up.”

I was glad to hear we had a TV and, after I watched it, glad she’d gotten me awake. Those were some good disasters we watched that night.

One day, I approached Ariel with the intent to confront her.

“Okay,” I said. “If you go to school, what did you learn today?”

She just looked at me for a moment over the top of what I had only at that instant recognized as a textbook.

“In school. Today,” she answered. “We learned how telephones work.”

I was in the bedroom listening to the call-in program on the clock radio. It was 3:47 pm. The call-in program was coming from a (clock) radio station that played tapes that had been made in Los Angeles, California. They said it was a beautiful day “in the city” and that the topic was “protectionism.” All in all, I found that great. I heard the front door open and, a second later, I heard the front door close.

“How was school? Today,” I called out. “What did you learn? Today.”

“What?” I heard Denise, not my little Ariel, reply.

“Jeez,” I answered. “Where did you come from?”

(Originally published in Triage, Boulder, Colorado, 1990)

Manuscript Found in a Mad Dog Bottle

2009-09-10T11:13:00.002-04:00

This is one of the stories I heard told under an overpass when I was, for a variety of reasons, listening to stories told under overpasses. And, even though I, for other and equally various reasons, no longer listen to stories told around garbage fires, fires fueled with cardboard and plastic smoldering under cement pylons, fat tires thrumming overhead, some of those stories that I did hear bear repeating.

In such environments—underpasses, crack houses, abandoned cars, cheap motels and the like—the usual denizen possesses but a limited repertoire of stories and repeated haunting of such environments and repeated interaction with the usual denizen and, perhaps, even becoming a usual denizen oneself soon exhausts all shallow wells of anecdote. Despite the varied backgrounds one will find represented, despite the varying degrees of social, economic or educational history, the stories tend to the deadenly familiar.

When one day is pretty much like any other, when all days are pretty much just one big blurry today, when not a lot different happens from big blurry day to big blurry day, amusing stories do not usually spring to mind. Despite popularized imagery, the occupants of this particular segment of the underworld actually see very little of it, entrenched as they are in the niche of addiction. They tend not to have their ears to the ground except for a single word: “dope.” They tend not to be tapped into the grapevine save where it concerns their own habits. They tend to be unreliable, capricious sources of information, eager to please but woefully lacking in both judgment and memory retention ability. They tend to lack the inclination or perspective required for anything remotely resembling an objective overview, to lack access to any kind of big picture. The same weary tales of violence and sex and some kind of pathetic, trivial triumph clung to all these passing years conveyed in a could-have/should-have/would-have mode of discourse; the same wearisome explanations and justifications and self-flagellations comprise the usual and expected gamut of street derelict cocktail conversation.

Most stories are truly in-one-ear-and-out-the-other oratory, ethanol or methamphetamine inspired rambles that start with tearful childhood reverie, veer off into social injustice and end with the tellers face down in their own white froth. It's hard to keep an audience when one's stories continually begin, "Last night, as I lay huddled in my filthy clothes and felt the tangible hand of my own self-loathing and shame spread it's long fingers into my freezing entrails...." People will tend to drift away from the fire when one begins one's narrative in such fashion.

But if one collects and sifts, if one listens long enough and closely enough, one will hear the truth of the world in the drunken whispers uttered by the lame, the broken, the insane and the outcast.

If one is to hear a story that begins, "Last night, I watched this woman and her dog save this blind guy's soul...," one tends to draw closer to the toxic flame, to carefully eye the speaker for clues as to where such a statement might lead, as fervently, Christianly evangelistic it may be.

"I have a talking cat in this here bag, but it's day-ed," while a suspect claim, carries enough intrigue and promises enough novelty to provoke a willing suspension of what's left of tattered disbelief.

"I used to be in NASA," will, of course, be greeted with derision but, more often than not, the speaker will be encouraged to elaborate for the sake of the yarn itself.

And if on one early November evening with gloaming still crisp and not heavy somehow on the western horizon, that kind of sky that makes a razor swipe of every telephone line, each troop of river-bound ravens dragging the night sky with them, if on that kind of night with the trash just catching flame within the barrel, with a jug of alcohol extracted from two cans of AquaNet® hairspray still two-thirds full, with no one yet hurt or in tears or screaming hollow noises against the sound of the interstate that shelters all...if on that kind of night a fellow draws into the circle and holds his cracked and bleeding hands toward the fire as if they could be warmed in that way or as if warmth was what they needed and that man says "I seen me how come people do so many bad things" well, that is indeed the kind of story that has a good chance of making a lasting impression.

And when he continues to speak, one can’t really help but listen.

“They’s like this worm, see?” he would mumble through filth-encrusted lips. “An’ that worm jes’ digs isself inside they heads and puts some bad, bad thoughts in theyah.”

And if one thinks about a “bad-thought worm,” it won’t make any sense at all, but if one just listens as his mumble draws one’s eyes into the fire where he stares himself while, unbroken, a stream of words falls out of his mouth and into the air beneath the highway.

“You can see them worms almost any bad place you care to go…I seen ‘em in Vietnam feasting in ’72 and it had got so bad by then that they’s come right into the cities and sometimes right inside our camps…and you better believe they was ever’where in the boonies…couldn’t hardly find a clear spot in the whole damn country.”

This is a point where some will ask for clarification, offer feedback if you will.

“What the fuck are you taking about?” might come the query.

“You weren’t ever in no Vee-yet-nam,” another might suggest.

“Why don’ ya shut yer fuckin’ mouth?” another of one’s company might suggest in a particularly vehement fashion. “Ya don’ know wha’ tha’ fuck yer talkin’ about.”

“I seen ‘em when I got back, too,” the narrator would continue, undeterred by his audience. “I started lookin’ for ‘em and then I started seein’ ‘em. They was inside the heads of the worst sort of folk, the sort of folk you see in the crazy house or the penitentiary. But I’d see ‘em on the street and know they was doin’ all sorts of bad things.”

“Anybody else see your worms, old man?” would come the inevitable question.

“Some do, some don’t,” he would reply. “Some can and some don’t want to.”

“What? Are these magic worms? Only magic guys like you can see ‘em?”

“I don’t think magic has a goddamn thing to do with it,” he would reply. “Magic is rabbits in hats, card tricks and sawing girls in half. These worms is part of somethin’ bigger’n any magic act. I don’t know what it is and, man, I don’t think I want to know. I just try and squash ‘em when I see ‘em.

“They’s bad and they make folk do real bad things. I watched one of ‘em dig it’s way into my sergeant when we was LURPing the Central Highlands an’ I still don’t like to think about what he done to some people after that, how long it took us to finally kill him and what that worm done after. Took us more’n six weeks to find that lil’ fucker and we tracked it from bush pig to VC sympathizer to a whore in Da Nang what liked to suck G.I cock with a mouth fulla broken glass.”

“You are so full of bullshit,” the same vehement soul would rejoin. “What the fuck are you trying? Who the fuck are you trying to scare?”

“Mebbe I’m talking about the fucked up worm inside your head that gives you the ideas to do the things you do to those kids,” the wrecked storyteller would conclude. “An’ mebbe I know the way to dig it outta theyah.”

And, with that, this underpass oracle would produce a rather impressive blade and begin to thrust it rapidly into the throat of one of the assembled company.

Now, these things happen in the course of this kind of life and no one is really terribly shocked when it does, but, still, to be standing in such close proximity to both victim and killer, to feel the warm spray of life pumped from a dying throat, to taste the rusty sweetness of another’s blood on one’s lips and to wipe it from one’s eyes in revulsion is quite another matter.

And, should one observe what appeared to be lavender gray, throbbing muscle, oily and wet and gasping, issue from the dying ragman’s wounds, uncoiling into firelight and poisonous air before flopping to earth, one might reconsider one’s earlier assessment of the storyteller’s veracity.

“I really hates them things,” the man with the gore-dripping knife would say. And placing his boot across the squirming, squealing thing’s back, he would skewer what could possibly have been its head and all the assembled would involuntarily take one step back to watch it writhe, twist and arch itself in futile agony against the blade which pinned it to the ground, the body of their one-time drinking pal forgotten in their fascination with the slimy knot of muscle convulsing in the dirt.

“God-damn,” someone might interject but it might also remain deathly quiet until long after the thing stopped twitching.

“Where’s that jug?” someone will eventually ask and agreement will be unanimous that it will be time for another series of drinks.

(Originally published in Cthulhu Sex Magazine, December 2005)

Straw Man

2009-09-08T18:29:00.002-04:00

There is something fascinating about watching one’s home and possessions burn. There is grief and panic and fear and horror, to be sure, but there can also be a frightening, overwhelming sense of relief and release.

One can see it on the television news when watching other people watch their houses burn down, when the screen shows the faces of families huddled on sidewalks wrapped in blankets, ignored by working firefighters, just standing there while everything they thought was important disappears. Mostly, one sees confusion and sadness and loss flowing across those faces, but if one looks closely, one will often see subtle smiles and dancing eyes as people watch themselves reduced to absolute freedom. Especially the ones without insurance; those folk can be hysterical.

There’s a noise that cars make when power steering starts to wear out; it’s a shrill, squeaking kind of noise that sounds like a cage full of screaming monkeys or millions of steroid-addled crickets in chorus. Anthony was amazed sometimes that he’d gotten used to it.

“Fucking piece of shit car,” he said.

The car shrieked in reply.

That was the kind of relationship they had, Anthony and his car. Sort of like the one his parents had shared for almost thirty years, though he and the car had only been together five. He loved hating his ride just about as much as his parents had loved to hate each other. Anthony had never known a girl well enough to hate her, so the car just had to do.

“Goddamn miserable cocksucking piece of whore-shit,” Anthony continued, thinking fondly of his dad.

The car squealed back just like mom.

It looked like a scarecrow. Or a crucifixion. But neither definition could explain its presence one hundred yards from lakeshore. They had to row out in a small boat to examine it. It was just a life-size facsimile of a person made of straw and crucified on a post sunk into the water with his straw back turned to the shore and his straw face turned toward the eastern horizon. Chief Margery sat in a boat that was rowed out for a closer look at the straw man. She was the head of local law enforcement after all (even if she was the only law enforcement officer on the force), and an investigation seemed clearly an official duty.

It was straw and skillfully made. Each stalk of straw had been carefully placed into each bundle then carefully woven into a near perfect, albeit straw-colored, simulacrum of a man in extreme pain. The detail of his straw face was extraordinary. The straw seemed molded, the parallel stalks shaping contours of cheek and brow blending to form a straw face, and the twisted rictus of his straw mouth drew back from meticulous straw teeth clenched in what appeared to be straw agony. Straw muscles strained against binding wires cruelly biting into straw flesh and straw tendons stood corded under straw skin along a straw neck. He shone golden in the bright summer sun.

Margery reached out from the boat to grasp the wooden pole supporting the effigy. A ring of rainbow oil haloed the spot where it entered the water’s surface. Looking up at the straw man, she marveled at the skill and effort it must have taken to create him.

“What the hell?” boat owner Mel asked no one particularly.

“It’s a man made of straw,” replied Tom, one of the many homeowners whose property now boasted lakefront views of this torture tableaux. “He’s crucified in the lake.”

And because Tom had said it out loud, they all had to believe it.

“What’s it for?”

“Who made it?”

“That’s fucking weird.”

“What should we do?”

The recognition of what they’d all been looking at released a tumble of words from their mouths. No one listened to what anyone else said; they all needed to speak a moment for release.

“Okay, okay, okay everybody,” Margery interjected and brought them back to quiet.

They waited, sitting in little rows in the small outboard boat that rocked in the slight motion of the lake’s currents. Since she had demanded their attention, they were giving it to her.

“Let’s just go back to shore for now,” she told them and Mel turned the boat and they returned to land. “I need to figure out how to cut this thing down and get it to shore.”

The impromptu reports delivered to those on shore did nothing to assuage the general unease. That it wasn’t a real man crucified there offshore was only slight comfort; for some, a real man crucified would have been less disturbing than this strange artifact. A real man would have been somehow more understandable. The unanswerable questions flew about Margery’s head and she was searching her own knowledge for some procedure or protocol to guide her through what was quickly becoming a “situation.”

“Chief Gold,” one of the assembled spoke. “What are you going to do about this?”

Margery was stumped. She couldn’t see any crime that had been committed, but that didn’t mean a straw man in the lake shouldn’t be investigated.

“Teenagers,” someone said. “Just kids fucking around.”

Based on what Margery had seen of the local youth since moving to the area 12 years ago, something as complex and even artful as this straw man was completely beyond their abilities. They were a mouth-breathing bunch, much like their parents, and Margery knew them from their drunkenness, their violence, their auto accidents, and their vandalism. She did not know them for their artistic abilities.

“Devil worshippers,” another offered. “It’s the fucking Manson family or something.”

“It’s blasphemy, for sure,” still another contributed.

“People! People!” Margery raised her voice above the lakeshore chatter. Again, all eyes were on her, waiting for her to speak.

“There’s nothing we can do right now, right here,” she told them. “Let’s all go home now and let me do my job.”

And she wondered what “job” she was going to do.

He was a man made of straw wired to a pole with a crosspiece and he was tortured in the water one hundred yards from the shore and someone must have put him there but she already knew no one would admit it and no one knew why he had been placed there in their lake, so they just left him there for the time being. They were too confused to do anything else and there he stood where everyone could see him and no one would take him down, similar in that way as well to the original.

“Does someone want to help me get this thing out of the water?” she asked and went to her car to see if she had some tools that would be useful.

Anthony had flooded the car. Again. The starter danced on the verge of accomplishing its mission but the car itself seemed determined to remain asleep, only midly disturbed in its mechanical repose and certainly not to rousing.

“Muh. Thuh. Fuckah,” Anthony swore as he twisted the key, as he tried to physically hurt the car for not starting. If he could have, Anthony would have stepped outside and whipped the car bloody.

When it did finally catch and sputter to life, Anthony was not grateful. He was irritated because it had taken so long.

Gears ground when he yanked the shifter and the squeal began as he pulled into the avenue. If the radio had worked, he would have turned it on very very loudly but it didn’t so he didn’t. The one working headlight, angled off into the night and away from the roadway, burned dull yellow.

Long after her workday was supposedly ended, Margery sat at her office desk and pondering the results of her internet search. She had entered the words “straw” and “man” and “straw man” and “strawman” and every other combination and tangent she could think of trying to find something, anything, which would be useful. What she found was right out of her college freshman English class:

“The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of ‘reasoning’ has the following pattern:
1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
3. Person B attacks position Y.
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of ‘reasoning’ is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.”

Following a tangent on the web-threads her search revealed, Margery also found reference to the Devil, to Satan, to Lucifer the Father of Lies as the originator of this particular fallacy: “Now we come to the heart of the matter. Having set up his straw man arguments, Lucifer knocks them down with one swift stroke. After vilifying the corporate church and predicting awful judgments from God to come upon her, he gleefully declares, ‘The church age has come to an end.'"

This disturbed Margery. The lakefront crowd had murmured of devil-worship and sacrilege, but she had dismissed it from her mind until reading the words on her computer screen.

“One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person,” she spoke aloud. Looking up from the computer screen, leaning back in her chair, squeezing shut her tired and burning eyes, Margery asked, “Whose bad drawing are you?”

The straw man, propped in a corner of her office and filling her air with its clean stable smell, declined comment.

Anthony flooded the car. Again. It was 9:00 o’clock in the evening and Anthony was going to work. If such a thing were possible, Anthony hated his job more than he hated his car; in fact, Anthony often blamed his job for his car, reasoning that if it were a better job that paid him more money, his car would then logically be a better one and more inclined to get him to his better-paying employment.

As it was, working in an all-night convenience store, sitting behind smeared and grimy bulletproof glass, selling disposable lighters, lottery tickets, copper scrubbing pads, and disposable diapers to the crackheads and meth-tweakers who patronized his little corner of hell, was certainly not lucrative. None but crackheads and tweakers and crackhead mommies and tweaker mommies needed such things as he sold in the middle of a series of rotten nights and he hated them, his customers, while they counted out their dirty little coins and filthy bills into his steel tray. Of course, his customers hated Anthony as well. It was like family like that.

So, it was with a modicum of curiosity that Anthony watched the unfamiliar face (and body) enter the store. Squeezing between racks of pork rinds and Inca Cola, Chore-Boy copper scrubbing pads, macaroni and cheese, dog food, and diapers, was the most beautiful woman Anthony had ever seen in this or any other store. She wore little clothing, a micro-something around her hips and what looked like a band of rubber across her breasts. Her feet were bare and beautiful. She wore no jewelry. She was incandescent. Anthony hated her instantly and his rage burned whitely behind his darkened eyes.

She floated to the bulletproof cage protecting Anthony from the store. The closer she came, the more dazzled and enamored he became and the bile that rose to answer his infatuation, the red fury growing with each step she took, his rising wrath at her perfection flushed through his bloodstream like burning acid. She stood before him, languid eyes searching for his, long legs pushing her pelvis against his station, her long arms laid like a gift upon the counter.

“Cigarettes?” she purred.

Anthony just stared at her.

“Cigarettes?” she again spoke, moist lips barely moving, eyes hooded but hungry.

“Whaddya want?” he answered her finally.

“Something good,” she replied. “Something really good.”

Anthony just stared at her. If such a thing were possible, he would have reached through the thickly smeared glass and smashed her pretty face into an ugliness to match the ugliness he felt inside himself when he looked at her pretty face.

“Ferchrissake, lady,” he snapped. “Jus’ tell me watcha want, wouldja?”

“For Christ’s sake,” she murmured. “Yes. For Christ’s sake.”

Anthony fumed. And waited.

“Tell me, Anthony,” she eventually broke their silence. “Are you happy?”

And he wasn’t even surprised that she knew his name.

Chief Margery stood with the rest of them on the shore waiting for sunrise and looked at the new straw man standing there on the new cross sunk there in the waters in the lake shallows where the first straw man had appeared. Dawn light silhouetted this new straw man and then, when the sun’s first direct rays burned across the water and touched its straw head, there was sudden illumination, a burst of straw-gold light released holy fire and the new straw man was truly radiant in the morning light, the dawn of another holy day.

As the rising sun warmed his limbs, what used to be Anthony was feeling more and more happy. Things were finally going his way and the loss of hatred and rage lightened him as the sun’s rays lit him. As glow and heat grew, as the burning globe before him lifted itself from the watery horizon, Anthony smiled to greet what was looking to be the best day of his life.

The Raid on Smara (introductory fragment)

2009-09-07T08:06:00.005-04:00

Preface:
Michel Vieuchange, costumed as a Berber wife
North Africa, 1930, 2:47 a.m.

For him and in his eye, it is gray and that is a grayness called "pervasive" and it is contained within and it is part of all things seen and all things sensed, of sparse grasses and the greasy wools draped over the shriveled gray bodies of the sheiks and the sky at night, not black, but grayed by the smear of stars more densely spread and deeper than any French skies seen, unseen, or dreamed.

Out there, amidst and amongst the gray, squats Smara, long dead and long forbidden city of the Muslim desert's heart and neither ever home nor any shelter to any Christian white man. And his journey, his swift and terrible dash through that dark and terrible wasteland, is as much a journey through grayness as it an embrace of grayness and that grayness, as the sweetest and most terrifying of lovers always will, enwraps him and envelopes him and enters his heart, his lights, his liver, his lungs, his soft gray brain in equal measure for his penetration of itself.

Under a dull moon's light, he writes the mystery that surrounds him; he measures things and he collects small samples of what surrounds him. He imagines as much as he sees and, below him, across dully lit gray valleys, crawl ghost caravans of ghostly warriors and ghostly camels burdened with ghostly salt and trailing long ghostly lines of slaves. And the word “Smara,” no matter how imperfectly formed and imperfectly pronounced, remains inside the dry regions of his throat and upon the cracked posture of his dried lips.

Moonlight silver on dull, pebble-flecked wasteland and he rocks camelback half remembering, half recreating, half dreaming Josephine Baker and the dans savauge into some half again real. For six nights complete he’d sat as in mesmer, polished and waxed and falling to pieces, to watch the arc of her arm and her leg create an invisible hanging geometry, a geography of clear longing the led to this, his nightmare raid on Smara, gray dead ghost city raised and fallen among low gray, long gray hills.

And Vieuchange can taste the ice dry evaporation of champagne someday in his mouth, small amounts and parceled and savored. He will stand erect and tailored to be introduced as Monsieur Le Explorer Formidable, a veritable voyageur, socially poised and, yet, enclouded with a vision breaking far beyond Parisian walls, the imprint of a kind of lunar gray dust lingering, yet, around eyes both narrowed from having glimpsed the infinite and somehow sunken both but brighter and darker and opening more deeply.

"Mon Deux, monsieur," Josephine Baker will someday say. "Your eyes! How they burn! You must tell me everything."

Ton O' Bricks (a song)

2009-09-06T13:26:00.001-04:00

Up until the moment that you walked out of the door
I thought things for us were going pretty good
And then it hit me:
Something was probably really wrong with our relationship

[Chorus; maybe a bunch of swirly harmonies or something?]

Ton o' bricks, ton o' bricks
a lot heavier than it sounds
Ton o' bricks, ton o' bricks
unpleasant to lug around

I punch my PIN number about a hundred times
but nothing good ever happens
And then I remembered
I don't have any money in my checking account
[or]
you cleaned out our joint checking account

[Chorus]

I might go out some evening to a bar or to a club
and hope to meet some people but I never do
And then I'll realize:
My fly's unzipped and everybody can see my underwear

[Chorus]

I crawl across the desert on my hands and on my knees
and I'm looking for a sweet oasis
And then I finally understand:
I'm going to die out here and no one's ever even going to know

[Chorus; repeat as often as necessary]

Exquisite Corpse (SMS & RCM)

2009-09-05T14:18:00.002-04:00

When the rain dropped it was still making green

alive sounds a moisture that refreshes

without satisfying

we’ve been there before

like a cat licking fur that is necessary so

smooth and rough

moving from this way to that way

because that is the way movement is supposed to

happen especially the jaw bones and how

they displace the yes and the

no, the way language is fouled against

the gums and the teeth and the soft palette

of the speaker who gropes for messages. encoded he

writes them, encoded he hears them, and they

are passed on because he cannot keep them

Which wind blowing carries syntax? Which

wind blowing my tiredness that is enveloped

a soft down cushion so I can dream, dream and not

be tired be sleepy be almost dreaming and

remember the last time you remembered

remembering that it is like a fancydance diversion

you are denying me what I

want and there is that taste again

that taste of what I’ve always wanted

3 September 1994

Mister Man (an exquisite corpse by Bruce Burrows & Robert Masterson)

2009-09-04T20:13:00.003-04:00

She was hanging over the coffee cup so wiped of sleep,

wiped in that way that gives her the eyes like the

eyes on a dollar bill pyramid. She sucked the steam

through her nose. No way that was going in

her stomach.

I was hovering behind the counter, holding that

pot in my good hand for no real reason, her cup

was getting empty and I just starting to let my

stare go when she said,

"Mister Man, you are my dream boat,

you are my dream,

you are putting quarters in my jukebox

and making the sounds you make."

I was stunned. I listened.

"You, sir, I said sir, are the one with

the one that I want."

I looked at my toast and wondered about

marmalade. My two hour snack into the

shift and not really ready for this. You do

the job and just want to get through another

end and some peroxide dream starts this?

Sitting right there, right in front of it,

impossible to miss that shriveled thing

at the end of your right wrist, something

that looks like it belongs in between

Sunday morning legs instead of where

God put it?

"Sure honey. Sure I am."

I am thinking about taking a big break

in the bathroom in the back of the room,

thinking about this place and that place

and the place between my legs

(it's getting semi-, if you know what I mean).

I am thinking about leaving her a big tip.

"Do you come here often," I said just

like that.

She said, "Cream? Sugar? Taxi?" Just

like that.

I looked at the menu and I did not see

her on it and that was disappointing.

But not surprised.

"Yeah, taxi," I said. "I can get you that."

She pushed the coffee away.

"You goddamned son of a bitch,

you'd fuck a snake if someone would

hold its head for you."

"You need the fare?"

She put a ten on the counter, stood up.

"No, honey. I got all I need."

I put the pot down. "Yeah, I figured.

Must be nice, that."

She laughed, turned towards the door.

"Never count on that, Mister. Man."

Exquisite Corpse (Matthew John Conley & Robert Masterson)

2009-09-03T14:21:00.002-04:00

phallic phallicle follicle

pressing in through the window

there is no question, no negotiation.

There is only a compromise between

legs between legs a compromise between legs

of compromise compromise of promise

promise this because it is an honest request

my baby my baby my baby my soft reverse option

opening up wide in the chair

beneath, poised

and gasping, I wonder why

I am in this position

bound to immobility

grasped as much by it as by anyone here

or not here; it is practically the same thing

because we have been loving each other

because we have been pinning each other

down teeth to throat on the river

which is bending this way and that way

some kind of ox-bow reference to our literary past

splitting open the brain

and watching the knob burst

a fungus, a spoor

that we have found when we walked through the heavy,

darkening forest

hair growing

all along the base of the trees and lips of melon earth

so fragrant like the way we exit

smooth and silent, you know, like the way we steal

children from the forest and turn them

into surface under wheels

like the ones, the wheels that rolled over me

at the Big Daddy Tractor Pull for us.

The Expression of Symptoms

2009-09-02T06:54:00.000-04:00

has changed throughout our history

and we think now, when holding our heads,

of those who convulsed as lightening struck the ground

or who bled at unusual odors.

If we reconsider love to be disease

then, too, we may whisper ourselves toward a leech's philosophy,

a surgeon's bowl to be filled by our efforts, with our desires.

Resist these passions in the ways

this razor has been cutting my arm

here and here and here.

Prozac Before Swine

2009-09-01T09:13:00.001-04:00

I remember fun but I don’t remember liking it all that much.

--Daniel Pallas

Letters: Collected, Undelivered, Found

1993

The idea of the crimson foliage stroke is to knock the opponent’s sword down and take the sword over.

--Miyamoto Musashi

The Book of Five Rings

1643

Armed with nothing more than the arm of a mannequin

I charged them all

and broken glass did skitter through the alley

and I remember I didn’t quite

make it all the way across

and

instead

face down in the gutter water and grease I remembered

that I had forgotten what I was mad about

I think about the rows of cages and in each one

a rabbit wearing Maybelline mascara

I think about monkeys with Lucite skull caps and wires

shot into their thinkers

I think about a cicada at the end of a string buzzing

around and around my head

“I have seen a naked boy asleep on a clear hot day

on the back of a water buffalo

in a malachite field of rice,”

he said

“I watched a girl in a conical hat drive a thousand ducks

down the road to a slaughterhouse.”

I remember him saying that

I thought about thinking and

then thought again

She Said, "This Is How Much I Love You,"

2009-08-31T09:02:00.000-04:00

but she meant how much she loved to hurt me.
I have always hated the way
she can impose herself completely across our lives,
how these kinds of gestures clutter the apartment and
make it extraordinarily difficult to move,
for movement to even seem possible.
This objectification of both our selves is dangerous,
leads to actions which lack all but the most abstract context.
It compresses the definitions of our individuality and
summarizes our relationship as individuals all out of shape.
"Muh daddy gimme that knife," I told her.
"When I was a kid."
And we both followed the darkening pool
that spread across the table from where it pierced her hand.

Portrait of the X

2009-08-30T08:57:00.001-04:00

Epicanthic eyes and brows that peak,

that point to a grey-streaked tangle.

Cat anger, quick spitting, sharp

drives her car blindfolded, singing.

Small hands, inkstained, and nails cut down, cut back, cut short.

Rolling lust and the clenched gasp of desire

pulls the weeds in a garden of peas and lilac.

Walking, toes pointed out and hips rolling like roadside warnings,

fatigued pleasure and indolent joy

washes her pots and pans, singing.

Recognizable Food Groups

2009-08-29T10:32:00.000-04:00

She can make a wish by moving

the clasp of her chain to

the nape of her neck.

It's a thing girls can do;

they teach it to each other.

From below and off to her left,

I spend most of the second half

with my neck all twisted around and

watching her watch the game.

It might be acrylic but her sweater is certainly blue

and a ragged flash of 14k electro-plate

suits it pretty well, I think.

Meteors, cars with one headlight,

heart-shots, and money

are the kinds of things

boys wish on when they wish they had girls;

we figure it out for ourselves.

In line at the snack-bar buying Bomber Dogs

I saw some kind of large, black bird fly through the lights

on its way back into wilderness

and in its mouth it carried a loop of dime store gold.

I made a wish;

I made a really big wish.

Smoke From a Japanese Cigarette (Silk Cut)

2009-08-28T09:04:00.001-04:00

curls backward to this boy's mouth

against the current of typhoon.

No way will any divine wind change

the way these blossoms

fall

in flame

again and again

and then stop falling.

(Originally published in Wild Dog Nights, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993)

Shades

2009-08-27T08:39:00.001-04:00

She removed all the shades
and placed all the lamps on the floor
and it changed the room.

Shadows rose instead of fell
and our faces looked startled and alert
even though we weren't.

When she took off her shirt
the outline of her nipples spread across her collar bones,
became lines to follow to her mouth,
opened then and illuminated in a new and interesting way.

(Originally published in Basura, Boulder, CO, 11 October 93)

Tabula Rasa

2009-08-26T09:51:00.001-04:00

After the accident, she had almost total amnesia. The doctors were conciliatory and vague, sending her home with a calendar full of therapy appointments and best wishes on reconstructing her life.

She stood in front of her open closet door looking at the clothes she'd been told were hers. Some still had tags. All were revealing, sexy, even sluttish. Her drawers were filled with strange underwears. She tried to imagine a self of hers, a self she might have been, that would feel comfortable with all these clothes' complicated straps, suggestions, contours, and strange pressures. Her husband assured her these were what she'd always worn and urged her to use them again, to try and get her memory started up again. She would, instead, wear the plainest robe she’d been able to find in that closet; she’d wear it all day before she could manage to costume herself in hose and heels, push-up bra and low-cut mini-dress.

If she balked or stiffened when in bed, if his sexual behavior seemed assaultive, her husband assured her that it was what she'd always loved, had craved, had begged for before the accident. Their sex life then had, apparently, been filled with postures and accessories she had difficulty now imagining or imagining as pleasure.

She felt a need for essentials, for elemental experience, rather than for variations upon themes in which she still felt unschooled. She felt virginal and, despite the various proddings and manipulations performed in her marital bed, she still felt that virginal aspect untouched, unassailed as yet, by anything he’d yet down to her.

She began to suspect her husband's veracity and his motives, began to question his version of her past and her past behavior and her personality.

What He Remembered of that Day

2009-08-25T08:59:00.001-04:00

was, of course, completely different than her version.

An outsider would imagine their argument was over these details

and be wrong.

When it began to rain

she raised herself on her hands and knees

and reached across the discarded knot of their discarded clothing

and her eyes rolled back into her skull.

Her hair darkened and began to flatten as it became wet.

Water began to collect on her skin

and she moaned with a new passion that frightened him

when the lightening began to hammer so closely around them.

She says it was nothing like that at all.

(Originally published in Huevos, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1987)

Shan Hai Hua Jiewen*

2009-08-24T09:53:00.001-04:00

(24 September 1958 - 13 July 1995)

How can it be a glass half full or a
glass half empty when it
isn't even a glass anymore?
We can never sweep all these slivers away
and, years from now,
one shard will work itself into a naked heel
and that wound will echo
the sound of a vessel shattered.

If we can imagine Oak Creek Canyon
as an island north of Cuba,
then the dolphins among
the fruit trees of this orchard
are no more astounding
than blood and tendon traced beneath
the skin grown tight around a wrist.

There are holes in our hearts
the shape and size
of those whom we have lost
and we patch them
incompletely
with what is left of each other.

Each movement,
north or south, back or forth,
reveals nothing so much
as where we've been.

What we leave behind
is what we also walk toward:
scraps of paper shaped like ourselves.

Twice glimpsed through autumn foliage
and once through thickening glass,

we are waving to each other.

*Literally: Mountain Ocean Flower Kiss, though more accurately translated as the notion of "monumental opposites blossoming toward union"

Off-White Noise; Actually, More of a Bone-White Noise or Ecru

2009-08-23T07:41:00.000-04:00

It, the speedometer, says ninety miles an hour but
it must be lying because things aren't moving at all.
From where I sit,
things couldn't possibly be moving.

Off center, as other things move faster, they compress,
they contract around themselves and
all appearances become skewed, off-kilter,
and what is not moving is stretched-out, expanded,
and takes up more room than it actually needs.
Or is it the other way around?

What I see when I look through the glass at the front of the car
are the things that look like the people I used to see but distorted.
I point at them, I wave, but whatever they have become
doesn't seem to recognize me.
I guess they see something else. And
I wonder what it might be? Perhaps
a shooting star, a what-do-you-call-it, a meteor?
A piece of burning something unrecognizable in a cocoon of flame?

Now it, the speedometer, says one hundred and ten but
things are still the same.
What is going on here? I ask myself
but it is an echo of something I'd heard before,
a sound I’d just caught up to hearing.
I wonder when this will stop? I ask myself,
long after it already has.

On the Occasion of Thursday in Bronxville

2009-08-22T10:03:00.001-04:00

A Filipino lady
in a green dress
hawks mucus
into an uneven star
onto the asphalt.
It sizzles.

The train to New York City
flies through the village
without stopping
and the hardware store here
is called Tru-Value.

Sweaty girls and sparrows
flitter across the bricks.
There are no boys in sight.
no skateboards or
cigarettes held in cupped hands.
Just girls in sticky dresses
and dust bathing sparrows
with their beaks open,
panting,
and one of the girls
keeps saying,
“Penis.”

The theater’s doors open
ejecting the weekday matinee audience
into the heat,
seniors and children
because all the mommies and the daddies
in Bronxville are at work.
The kids and the oldsters,
they blink in the light
and they sigh
for the heat and the
moisture hung heavy
in the dirty air.

The only dwarf in Bronxville
hustles through a crosswalk
with a cell phone to her ear
and she is speaking something
that isn’t English.
It might be Russian
or Polish or Ukrainian,
but the sparrows don’t care.
They think her phone is
something good to eat
and cloud around her
hoping for crumbs..

It Was "Hey!"

2009-08-21T08:56:00.000-04:00

and every one's word was for me
to do me a favor, to warn, to better get ready

Remember that girl who could melt metal with her voice?
Remember that girl who jumped the tracks for another beer?

And there she is with bruises
Blue trophies of boredom and adventure
"You,
you force me to laughter," she says
She also:
"...appreciates the attention but...[she] has a lot on [her] mind...."

Chasing her name down dark hallways
and "slashed" is not too strong a word
to describe the angry black stokes with which it has been painted.
Another good word would be "hungry."

Bus Poem #8

2009-08-20T13:00:00.001-04:00

We love the diesal-sweet smoking blast
from the bus we’re riding west, riding east,
just riding to get to where we want to go,
just riding to take us home where we want to be.
Are those mountains in the distance?
Are we going toward them?

(written for the Albuquerque SunTran Poetry in Motion Project, 1999. This one wasn't taken, but they did accept an excerpt from "In the Era of Machines" which is posted elsewhere on this blog.)

A New Kind of Kissing

2009-08-19T09:42:00.002-04:00

has been created

has erupted

between us, she and I.

Breath is pulled away,

eyes open only to dilate again and again,

our tongues become together a fugue.

Our tongues become knots,

our knots become words,

our words become.

We come.

Our words rise above us

and bless themselves

by blessing us

by becoming.

To LaLa on the 15th Floor

2009-08-18T11:00:00.006-04:00

(click to enlarge the image)

Irony Can Be So...So...So Ironic

2009-08-17T08:10:00.004-04:00

I remember sitting in a vinyl upholstered booth in a restaurant called Slappy's. It was a restaurant like a chain place, like a Denny's or a Big Boy or an IHOP or a Village Inn, with all the chain place type fixtures and those huge laminated menus with pictures of everything and a huge children's menu fix prix. It is a kind of restaurant in which I am rarely. Ordinarily, when I leave my home to eat I eat: ethnic, greasy spoon, or credit-card self-indulgent, in that order. For me, eating at a place like Slappy's on a winter Wednesday afternoon is like going to Red Lobster for their Super Shrimp Feast Weekend or maybe spending my birthday at the Olive Garden wearing a funny hat while the waiters all sing "Happy Birthday" in phonetic Italian, a candle sputters in my chocolate canoli, and somebody takes a lot of pictures. Or drinks after work, TGIF!, at Bennigan's in the mall. Or jamming on karaoke night at the Ramada Inn. It just doesn't happen that often. It just isn't on.

So, the point first of all is how odd it was for me to be in that Slappy's place in the first place. I had been doing odds and ends at the bank and the post office and I decided to see the dollar matinee of a Steven Segal movie, a kind of movie I rarely see unless it's at a dollar show or on video, and I decided to kill the half-hour with coffee and pie. I really don't know why I thought "coffee and pie" but I did and there was that place, Slappy's, only about four blocks down from the Hiland Theater. So, I parked and grabbed my book and went in. It was pretty empty in there since it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, and there weren't that many people around, waitresses or customers, and they were all mixed couple septuagenarians and two girls about my age, respectively.

The sign said "Please Seat Yourself" and I moved down to the smoking section counter. A waitress was right there, bam, and I asked her what kind of pie they had and instead of telling me she opened a menu and pointed to the dessert section and the list had about fifteen kinds of pie. She stood there tapping her pencil on her pad and looking down with her head tilted and her mouth in a crooked half-yawn/half-sigh or over at the other waitress or basically anywhere except at me. I asked her what kind of pie was best and she just said something like, "Depends on what you like to eat."

I thought that was a kind of strange thing for her to say but decided on pecan pie and she was gone before I could say "coffee, too, please." She came back and, bam, she threw the plate down in front of me and stood there like she wanted me to say something about what a bitch she was being. I asked her for the coffee and she gave me a look that said "Oh, yeah, right. You would want coffee" but she brought a pot down and sort of slopped some in the cup at my place. And the saucer. And the paper place mat with the map of New Mexico's historical and scenic points-of-interest. So, that was pretty much too much and I said, "Do you have a problem?" and, bam, the other waitress was there with a cloth to wipe up and the first waitress went back down by the cash register.

I asked the new waitress what was going on and she just said something like "you know how it is" which didn't make much sense but seemed conciliatory. I tried to read my book and eat my pie and drink my coffee but the two waitresses seemed to spend a lot of time together looking at me and not talking when I looked at them. It was creepy so I just ate as fast as I could and didn't ask for a second cup and just dropped three bucks on the counter and walked out. They both stared at me the whole time.

Now what was really classic about the whole experience was that in the movie that I went to see later that afternoon, one of those action/adventure blow-'em-ups that I normally don't have much interest in except as a way to fill up an empty afternoon or evening, in this movie the main character was Steven Segal and he was a cook on a ship and he spent the entire first part of the movie doing this running joke about making his pies, cooking his pies, worrying about his pies getting burned, and then getting pissed-off that his pies got burned. A restaurant I never go to, I movie I never see, and pies all over the place. Strange shit like this happens to me all the time.

On The Occasion Of The Unveiling Of A Statue Of A Representation Of The Feeling Of Estrangement

2009-08-16T08:05:00.000-04:00

A man with his back to the window

wonders where that noise is coming from;

the one that sounds like a 45rpm kitten

being on played on 33,

not the noise like a throbbing hum.

That one's from the refrigerator

and he already knows that.

Inside a helicopter thousands of feet in the air,

the man on the radio tells us about the traffic.

When we look up we can see him

but he can't see us.

Inside his head, he's thinking of a woman

and the way she hooks her bra in the front

and then twists it around

and then kind of shrugs into the rest of it.

He loves that.

A woman moves her eyes away from the screen for an instant

and that instant is multiplied,

falls away faster and faster

until it becomes itself a blurring mosaic of fossilized moments,

and there is coming now a sound of applause

that becomes the sound of waves.

Her hand is poised above the keyboard;

it floats over all the letters and all the numbers.

Free Shoes

2009-08-15T09:36:00.002-04:00

Depending upon the weather and the selected activity, I had two choices of footwear for Physical Education: bare and “street.” Indoors, I could usually go barefoot for tumbling and any particular school's version of the universal, red utility ball game known officially as “dodge ball” but locally and variously as “blood ball,” “kill ball,” “death ball,” “smear the queer,” and “that game we play when it rains.” Basketball, unfortunately, and square dancing (who cared?) required some form of foot wear and my “street shoes” were accepted and served rough duty. Outdoors, all sports required shoes and I presented no incongruity on the field; children wore their “street” clothes for Physical Education. This was true for all the elementary (or grammar) schools I attended.

Gymnasiums in those schools were as likely as not also the cafeterias and auditoriums, as well as linoleum covered. Physical Education classes were generally co-ed, though games were often assigned by gender. Boys whooped and flapped around in disordered fashion with little observance of rules and little expectation of skill, whatever the designated sport might have been. Girls tended to form small discussion groups. Fundamentals were stressed with obsessive frequency and little outward effect. “Street” shoes fit in just fine. We had relay races and “tumbling.”

This was well and good for elementary school, grades K through 6 (or 5, depending on how any particular district was organized, whether they used “junior high schools” or “mid-schools” as the transition to “high school.”). Junior high school or mid-school, gym requirements changed drastically. Physical Education classes were segregated and, while the boys were required to wear jock straps, the girls could stop going altogether due to “cramping.” We were asked to play real games, football and basketball and baseball forming a holy trinity. The level of competition during these games increased, a reflection, I suppose, of generally increased competition throughout the student population. We were no longer little kids. First girls and then boys began to feel the effects of hormonal tides. We no longer “played” and the games in which we engaged ourselves were the outlines of cliques and social stratification that would follow us, in some form or another, for the rest of our lives. Special footwear became an imperative.

Nan usually falls asleep early, a combination I think of the many drugs within her system and sheer boredom. Her eyes lose their focus, her rhythmic shaking slows and slows and slows, she stops heaving to retain her drool. She relaxes into the bedclothes, the flannels and quilts her mother and I have insisted on using to make her bed, have laundered ourselves in place of the wretched linen the hospital provides. The room is dark, the door is ajar and the hospital insinuates itself blah blah blah.

I think we are comfortable, I think we are growing accustomed to these circumstances. Nan is no longer attached to the various machines that monitored or assisted her vital functions. Her wounds have healed, her condition is stable. She is still tested by shifting teams of physicians, she is still losing weight and she is still having trouble accepting nourishment.

It has been almost fourteen months, it has become a routine and I don't have to look at my watch to know when it is about 8:30 PM. Nursely chatter and gossip-tones are my wife's nightly lullaby; I can distinguish the voices, provide the faces from which they issue, but I still don't know all their names. Nan's mom has developed relationships with the nurses, but her motives are mercenary and expeditious. She's a smart woman, Nan's mom, and uses idle conversation and cranberry bread to bribe these dim nightingales toward some semblance of humanity. They, in turn, find themselves forming a “relationship” with Nan and, according to plan, treat her with the respect and compassion often withheld from more objectified patients. In private, Nan's mom expresses a vague distaste for nurses, their personal limitations, their lack of broad education. Same thing with doctors. Same thing with sons-in-law.

We have formed a kind of truce, the three of us. Nan stays in the hospital for rehabilitation, therapy, treatment and around-the-clock-care. Nan's mom helps baby-sit her granddaughter, Ariel, spends a lot of time at the hospital, keeps Ariel's father posted and informed, and just sort of arranges things. I work, I keep house, I cook, I stay up late at night sitting on the porch in the dark and recently occasionally I see this girl I met.

I was taking marinated chicken breasts out of the refrigerator, I was chopping up carrots and onions, and Ariel was telling me about her day at school, about an assembly for the whole school during the afternoon. All the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders of her mid-school assembled in the cafeteria/auditorium for an anti-drug rally. There were motivational speakers, a video, a testimonial speaker and a “rock” band whose members were also police officers.

“They were called 'Hogs Wild,'" Ariel said. “Because they were all policemen, they called the band 'Hogs Wild.'"

“I get it, sweet pea,” I told her.

“It's like a joke on the people who don't like the police, who maybe think that police are bad or even call them 'pigs' or something bad like that,” she continued.

“This is great. This is really interesting. Did they wear their uniforms?”

“Oh, yeah, it was cool so people will see them when they play music and then they'll know the police can be cool and rock out like normal people.” Ariel was really into this. Those cops had really made an impact on her perception of law enforcement. “They played all these cool songs and even some eighth-graders got up and danced.”

“Did you dance?”

“No way,” and Ariel said this with emphasis. “They played that song from that TV show—‘bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?’—and some old songs we didn't know and the drummer did this really cool solo part to a song all by himself....”

As she rattled on, I suddenly realized that Ariel had been to her first concert, her first “rock” concert, at school that day. It was true, she'd been rocked by Hogs Wild as part of some D.A.R.E. community outreach program, but she'd also really heard electric music in person for the first time. She'd enjoyed it tremendously.

“...and people cheered and clapped so much they came back out and did two 'freebirds.' Even the teachers were clapping and....”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “The band played two whats?”

“They played two 'freebirds',” she answered.

“What's a 'freebird’?"

“You know, like when the band is finished and they leave but everybody keeps clapping and yelling and people yell 'freebird' but you're supposed to have a lighter to do it for real like at a concert...”

I was both surprised and a little shaken. “You guys call an 'encore' a 'freebird'? You guys called the band back on-stage by yelling, 'Freebird!'?”

“Yeah,” she shrugged and might as well have said, “Duh.”

“Have you ever heard of Lynyrd Skynyrd?” I asked her. “Have you ever heard the song 'Free Bird'?”

She had no idea what I was asking her. She didn't know what those words meant.

“Never mind,” I backtracked. She was twelve. “So, what did Hogs Wild play when they came back on-stage?”

She visibly groped to pick up the threads of her thoughts. “Um, I'm not sure but there was a cool part where they all like moved at the same time, like a kick, like this....” and she started to demonstrate a little stage-craft, a little shuffle step to which I could just imagine uniformed police officers really grooving.

“Which one was the cutest?” I asked her and that was a completely different kind of mistake.

“No street shoes in my gym,” Coach bellows.

It has rained that day, it is raining all day, and period 3 Boy's PE will not be playing flag football on the all-purpose athletic field. Instead, we will stay inside and play a few rounds of “blood ball.” Already, red utility balls are in evidence. Coach tosses them to the milling class from the Dutch-doors of the equipment room. They are retrieved, they are bounced, they are thrown and caught, they are thrown and not caught.

“There will be no hard soles on my shiny, hard wood floor,” he again announces and he is talking to me.

“Blood ball” (“dodge ball”) is played in a few variations along the same general theme. Kids in a circle, kids against the wall, or kids on two teams are the usual permutations. At Jefferson Junior High, two teams play on a basketball court, the centerline designated the “death line” across which no one could pass unless on a suicide run to the “hole” to rescue captured teammates. I will spend that hour darting across waxed, ash wood floors in my bare feet and I will blister.

I begin to notice the other boy's shoes, the sneakers and tennis shoes they wear and that make it possible for them to run, stop, turn, and leap without pain. I notice Coach watching me and I know if he's wondering if this day will be my last day of PE, if I'll start ditching and not dressing out because of my pain, my humiliation because I don't have “gym” shoes. He imagines me one of those poor kids whose family can't or won't afford proper athletic footwear for their child. He imagines me smoking cigarettes, of glimpsing me after school with hair hanging down in my eyes and an adult-sized cigarette awkwardly held in child-sized fingers, defiantly self-conscious and painfully self-aware. He wants to know if he will have to cast me out, to scorn and mock me for the rest of my junior high school “career.”

“When I lost Nan's grandfather,” Nan's grandmother told me, “I thought the world was over. I thought there would never be another person in my life like that.”

I was listening.

“And I think to myself, I think I understand, how 'gone' Nan is for you...the way she is, she's not really here anymore. She may come back someday, but for now, she is 'gone' to you. It's like you've lost her but she's still here and she still needs you and there you are.

“I know I was surprised when I realized the world wasn't over, that there were other people in the world, that there were other people in my life.”

I knew that one of the people she was talking about was her live-in boyfriend, Roger. And I had recently found Carrie who seems receptive to forming a relationship, an emotional relationship beyond the sexual, despite my present situation. Despite Nan's situation. And that's the difference.

When Nan's grandfather died, he did just that. He died. They said cancer, they tried treatments, the treatments worked for a while, and then he died. Dead. Nan's grandmother was able to mourn, to grieve, to “heal,” and to move on. She can take her boyfriend to the cemetery and point to a particular spot and say, “This is where my dead husband is buried.”

Nan and I are in quite different circumstances. I fear that Nan is very much alive, that her character and her personality and her memories and her intellect and her emotions are very much intact. The thought of this is terrifying, partly because I cannot believe she will get any better. The damage has been too great, has gone on too long for me to hold out any hope that she will live out her life as anything other than what she's become.

I was “it” then and they, my friends and my enemies both, threw those red utility balls at me fearsomely and I dodged them as best I could in my bleeding bare feet until I learned how not to play at all.

Tommy Opened and Closed the Knife;

2009-08-14T07:38:00.001-04:00

he could do it with one hand

Suzi held the fireworks like a bouquet

and asked "When do you want to do these?"

He said, "At night. Outside. Later."

She said "Yeah. Sure." and sounded pretty sarcastic about it.

I was very drunk, too,

and crawled to the low table.

I touched Martha's calf with my fingers.

Something was sticky and dirty there

and she brushed my hand away in annoyance.

"I want some more of this good stuff," she said

and held out her glass.

The carpet fibers against my face

were stiff and hot, seemed to catch weird fire

when they reached my tongue.

The television showed some people fucking

but it was part of a story.

"What's this movie?" I asked when Martha

reached down to give me a pipe.

She exhaled gray smoke and said "It's a comedy"

and that sounded just about right.

Martha disappeared then

into the bathroom and I heard the water.

She called out "You made me all nasty"

and I went in as she took off her dress.

I could hear Suzi's groaning laughter and

I cleaned my hands by peeling off

long yellowish strips.

I said "What is this? These things look rotten"

Martha did not answer me

but I saw that as she washed her legs

flesh fell away and dissolved

in the brown water.

I wanted to smoke

but my fingers, my lips, were soft

clinging to the matches, the cigarette, each other.

Martha's hair had fallen heavy across her face.

She stared at the her wet white bones dangling into the tub

and, when she started to tremble,

I knew her mouth was open,

that she was crying.

BAMBAM

2009-08-13T11:41:00.000-04:00

He shouted rhetorically.

She spun her back to him

and caught the stupid echo,

the one that came from

the glass wall and the wooden floor.

"Woof!" she said then wanted to hear it again.

She thought it like a lovely picture to herself,

something to look at over and over and over.

It could fit in her pocket like a good little hammer.

I Think She Was the Kind of Girl

2009-08-12T07:38:00.001-04:00

who hadn't worn much underwear since she left for college
I could just imagine

I sometimes wear my helmet and sometimes don't
I can't decide if my brain is something I want to protect

When she got on back
I could just imagine what vinyl felt like
how she might stick to it (or it to her)
and the way it would sound if she ever got off
and the ways her thighs would rash and redden

"Oops," I said when the motorcycle went down in gravel
and I guessed I should not have been showing off so much.

(Originally published in Huevos, 1987)

Exquisite Corpse (Glenn Norman & Robert Masterson)

2009-08-11T06:36:00.000-04:00

He was starting to be less surprised by the phenomenon of twins. It had taken him a while to get used to the idea that there were people who looked like other people.
“Oh, it is you!” she said, and he realized his mistake.

It was the doubling and not the doubled that was familiar,
that was recognizable.
Twice embodied, he saw another moment
when any flesh can mirror us all.

“Um, yes,” he stammered, “it is,” because though he recognized that face, he still couldn’t quite remember who she was. “How have you been?”
“You don’t remember,” she said, and laughed, “me, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” he admitted as graciously as he could, smiling, because at some visceral level, he did know her. He knew something about her.

A vase can and has held more than flowers cut
from hothouse rows.
A shadow may linger
long after the light that cast it fades.
He began to remember knowing things like these.

Finally, when she pouted, he told her, “I knew someone who looked just like you, maybe.” He shrugged, but put one hand on the wall behind her.
She looked at the arm laying over her shoulder, turned her eyes up to him, blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. It must be my mistake.” She appeared confused, then resigned, something utterly too familar about the shifting of her face.

He began to witness an event
and was pleased to discover his ability
to create the event he was witnessing.
It felt expansive.
Exhilaration propelled him toward
a moment of assurance and certainty.
“Audrey,” was what he said. “Your name is Audrey.”

“You used to have one of those bikes, a little kid’s bike that doesn’t have any brakes. I left a note in your desk at school.” He was awestruck by the irony, the incredible awful irony, of meeting his first-grade sweetheart on this particular day.

“And your sister’s name is Angela,” he continued,
completely helpless in the wash of inspired recollection.
He smelled something waxey and sharp,
he suddenly wanted to whisper.

at the memory of what had happened. But instead he simply stared, no longer even breathing out.
“You do remember,” she said, still smiling uncertainly.

Or something like that,
though memory seemed too small
to hold this sensation.

In Memoria Nostri Monumentum Invicem*

2009-08-10T07:42:00.001-04:00

Snow, streaks and dirty lumps mostly,

across the brown grasses,

fescue and Kentucky blue mostly,

and piles of flowers red and white,

mostly carnations,

and a breeze, cold at this time of year,

and from the southwest mostly,

making stiff vibrato from frozen blades

among the flat bronze plaques,

marble tablets,

mostly names and dates with

small sentiments mingled:

beloved this,

sleeping eternally that,

angels guiding those,

Jesus welcoming these.

Mostly words and pictures

cut into metal or stone,

and all the way across this decorated field

I can see you

wrapped in camel’s hair and knitted wool,

black leather boots and a plume of steam

that means you are whispering.

And when you look at me,

shivering in cloth and canvas

with a plume of steam, I know

you can mostly hear me muttering

my own frosty prayer.

*In Memory of Our Memories of Each Other

Two More Bits of Hint Fiction

2009-08-09T08:55:00.003-04:00

Dinner Time

Sheila brought the silverware and plates into the dining room. When she finished setting them, she saw that there was just one place too many.

New Kid in School

Lumber, nails, and a hammer were all little Sammy would need to build the perfect fort. And after the fort, he would build some friendships.

Hint Fiction Submissions

2009-08-08T10:41:00.001-04:00

Retirement
Nursing his shattered hand, Johnson struggled to pull in more sail. The growing waves powered over the rail, steadily filling his long dreamed of yacht.

Filial Piety
The soft and jagged moaning from his mother's room would not distract Andrew from preparing her lunchtime tray-orange juice, soft-boiled eggs, and many, many pills.

Twelve Steps
Staring into the tumbler of amber liquid, Thomas came to the realiztion he'd awaited. “There is no higher power,” he told himself as he sipped.

Submit your own hint fiction at http://www.robertswartwood.com/?page_id=8. Deadline Aug. 15.

Her Temperature Seemed To Have Frozen At 99.8℉

2009-08-08T09:44:00.007-04:00

(perhaps it was the thermometer but, looking back, I don't think so)

and our fevers rolled between us.

Our bones, by themselves, became an aching groan

with spooky dreams all day, every day.

Those marks, then, on the palms of my hands

I began to consider a kind of stigmata

and thrilled at the tracings of blood they left

on this woman's body

the line from breast through waist and hip

that scattered into the smear I had made around her vagina.

"Do that again," I told her.

"Do that a lot."

And panting on elbows and knees

a mask of lipstick and saliva and threads of my own semen

crawled underneath my eyes

I buried my hands inside her bedclothes,

each fist a growing evidence of fear and faith.

Snow at a Bad Time

2009-08-07T11:42:00.003-04:00

I am pulled outside, out the door, off the porch and into that patch in front of my house called the "yard";

I am walking in small circles and I'm saying or thinking or thinking I'm saying,

"What is this stuff, what is this stuff, whatisthisstuff, stuff?" even though I know it is snow;

so, I start thinking "why did it have to snow now? Of all times, why did it have to snow now?"

and my footprints are punching holes in the whiteness and I can see the grey and the black

and the dirty brown beneath and I start to feel better right away.

Miraculous

2009-08-06T08:07:00.005-04:00

Could it be considered miraculous if a man were to live in bed for almost 35 years eating precious little but chocolate cake and milk and writing ream after ream of nearly insensible pornography?

And the pounding on the floor,
her ceiling,
for more cake and more Big Chief writing tablets and more pencils and
the odor of sour milk creeps down their parents’ stairs while the miracle pounds on the floor for supplies
and the miracle’s sister stands in the kitchen for just a moment, just the barest sliver of her heart’s beat,
and imagines herself just walking out the back door
and down she’d pass the little shed and through the back gate to the alley and from the alley to the street and,
in that heartbeat’s passing she can imagine
a life complete and full but,
then what?

So, which is more miraculous? A man living in a bed for 35 years, the cake, the milk and the porn or that this same man, out of all the people in the entire history of people, would be related to probably the only person on the planet who would put up with that kind of shit?

(loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft)

To: Those Who Think That Where They Are Is Why They Are

2009-08-05T09:43:00.004-04:00

He walks the streets
night lit down
searching for murders
and often finds them
Standing far back to treasure
the jeweled squealings
the liquid blessings
for asphalt and broken glass

Sucking meats from smallish bones
he grins
to remember spare delight
and shuddered tenderness
Grease wanders from his face
congeals
and melts again

He washes his hands
in the pools of battery acid and antifreeze
that gather behind the ZipLube on 9th Street
and he knows it is a good place to be
Red and black checkered flannel
is a kind of solace
and the sun that rises behind his eyes
is no less dim than that one, there, on that horizon

(Originally published in Blue Mesa Review, 1992)

Stephanie Inside the House, in Chains

2009-08-04T09:54:00.000-04:00

The apartment looked deceptively small from the street. It had been a store of some kind and then converted into a "living space" by hippie artists years before we ever moved in. It was narrow but very long. Sometimes, it seemed to stretch forever, back and away.

In the morning, sunshine streamed through the plate glass windows that had once been for display. It could become quite warm then and we often left the door open and fresh air would circulate. On the roof, I had built a platform and we would sunbathe there or, at night, listen to the scattered small arms fire from the Valley. One summer night, we made love there while a thief broke in through the back door and stole our television. Stephanie's thighs, coated with her own secretions and my semen, had glistened in the night sky's frantic light.

I built a partition and a sleeping loft under which I placed my desk. I would work into the early morning while Stephanie slept above me and, when I was finished, I would climb up. Sometimes she would almost awaken and murmur strange things in a kind of half-sleep, and I would stroke her cheek or forearm until she turned back to dreams.

We lived there for five years and Stephanie wore her bruises like secret medals. I would sit outside on a kitchen chair with my shirt unbuttoned in the afternoon sun and I would imagine my envelopment within her, imagine my consumption of her, imagine her trembling with anticipation. She would writhe. She would whisper, "I love you. I love you. I love you."

He Was Sorry.

2009-08-03T08:51:00.001-04:00

He was sorry that he had even come over

in the first place.

In the first place, why was he still bothering her?

Next, she had left

her shades up in the window

by the window he had to look through

when he was just ringing her doorbell.

Her breasts were flattened against the table.

Her spine made a convex and then a concave line as it

pushed against the man who pushed inside her.

She didn't even see him at first

and then she did

and then she made a stupid little smile on his face

and waved a little wave with his hand.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn't see him

and the long muscles in her shoulders stood out

when she arched her back

(Originally published in Tyounyi, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1989)

The Money Shot

2009-08-02T19:00:00.002-04:00

The difference between lovebirds and true lovebirds is a swallow.

Anonymous

If that squall of semen

strung across your face

slantwise from eye-line to jaw-line

isn’t the signature of

your true affection,

then it’s close enough.

It’s close enough for me.

July 19 - August 1

2009-08-02T18:58:00.003-04:00

I was away for a family health crisis and cut off from my computer and files.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Thank you for your patience and continued patronage.

Robert

They Took It Outside

2009-07-18T09:06:00.001-04:00

I mean, these two middle-aged men,
salesmen both or managers maybe,
each bald but each in a different way,
gripping thin glasses of, for god’s sake,
scotch & water, seven & seven, beige drinks,
fumbled their escalation through quilted doors
to mix it up, settle some hash, pound it out
in the parking lot.

It was awful as their disconnected swings
dissolved into panted wrestling,
six inches of pale skin showing as the fat one’s
trousers twisted up his leg,
the slurred curses swallowed,
short breath gargled in the shuffle
as they tired of what had seemed
like the thing to do.

Somehow, I held their coats
and the fabric of each looked
especially weird under the
sodium lights outside.

It was embarrassing.
Locked together half under a Taurus,
wet from parking lot puddles
and the tall one’s shirt had ripped at the shoulder seam,
they half-rolled back and forth,
now silent save for whistled breathing
and the argument was lost
among the gravel and the bottle caps.

I draped their jackets together
across the hood of an Acura
and left them there,
but I kept the wallets.
I wanted to get out of there
before things got hideous,
before they agreed to respect each other,
shake hands, buy each other rounds.
I wanted to remember them
just they way they lay.

Imaginary Syllabus

2009-07-17T09:23:00.001-04:00

Eng345 – Writing With Purpose
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 am
The course is designed to build upon previously learned writing skills to provide the student with a renewed sense of intention and an appreciation for the varied communicative values of language.

Spring Semester
Learn to bake bread
Fight, break up, and make up with a romantic partner
Eat something unfamiliar
Take something apart. put it back together, and make it work despite the leftover pieces
Watch the last of the ice in the gutter dissolve under the first warm rain
Explain a feeling to a stranger
Eavesdrop constantly
Read a paperback book at least 25 years old (especially one with a lurid cover)
Remember something forgotten
Drink to excess and experience remorse
Make a mask
Buy used shoes at a thrift store or flea market and wear them

Summer Semester
Wake up late
Try to attract songbirds to your home
Give up an advantage
Wear a t-shirt backwards and/or inside out all day
Assemble a model airplane, boat, or car
Slowly reread a favorite book from childhood
Eat cold food
Experiment with musical instruments
Eavesdrop constantly
Revisit a childhood playground
Wear shoes on the wrong feet
Learn the names of 12 stars

Fall Semester
Destroy a favorite possession
Explain centrifugal force to a child
Pick at a sweater
Go barefoot all afternoon
Smoke a cheap cigar
Call someone unexpectedly
Read outside until darkness makes it impossible to continue
Stare at a half-glass of vodka for at least 20 minutes
Imagine what it would be like to lose a limb
Eavesdrop constantly
Run laps around something
Do something that seems like a good idea at the time

Winter Semester
Wear a friend’s shoes
Learn a new game and play it obsessively
Compose a love letter and burn it
Consider the leafless trees
Eavesdrop constantly
Exacerbate a problem
Nurse a houseplant back to health
Experiment with smoking a pipe
Read someone else’s diary; don’t get caught
Say something awkward in public
In some fashion or another, go fishing
Sit by a window with a cheek pressed to the cold glass

She Would Wake from Her Nightmares and

2009-07-16T10:25:00.001-04:00

angry, she would carry her emotion
against him, against whom she had dreamed,
against whom she'd dreamed badly.

Sleep soft palms slapping him,
his shape there next to hers in a black iron bed,
with barely formed
groans of strange words,
words like "blue"
and "steam ship"
and "corridor"
and, until she woke,
their meaning was clear and
when she wakes all that is left her is the sadness of the dream
and there is no comfort in embrace.

The dry sound of them panting confusion
is a metronome for the movement again
and back toward another kind of sleep.

A Bunch of Pictures Back from the Film Lab

2009-07-15T08:59:00.003-04:00

The Four Good Ones

1. New Moistness

Bobbi was as surprised as she could be by the shards of glass that appeared in her lap–-so surprised, in fact, that she did not connect the noise of the window's shattering to the wicked looking splinters with which she was covered. She just aimlessly wondered what they were and where they had come from. Bobbi was so surprised, in fact, that she really didn't hear Eddie as he screamed at her from the other side of newly glassless window nor did she really see the blood sliding out of the inside of his arms and onto her flowers. Then she was afraid to stand or to brush herself, afraid she might get cut.

2. Field Work

Little teeny green cubes of auto safety glass
are scattered at this particular spot along the interstate.
There was an accident here once; someone probably died here once.
If he can lay down flat on the shoulder in the pebbles and dirt,
those little squares of windshield
can catch the light
and that light can then catch his eyes
and he can no longer see the cars at all.
He can only see the light sheeting off their windshields.

3. Broadcast TV No Longer Holds My Interest The Way It Used To

I'm making my own shows now:

She is naked and asleep
which is just about as vulnerable as she ever gets.
She is rolling through the bedclothes and
I know she is dreaming about her hair and her teeth,
about losing them.
Her nightmare causes her to grip her pillow very hard, very tightly.
One artificial fingernail falls away
like a kind of shell caught in a powerful tide.

4. A Point of Convergence / A Point of Departure

I watched her limp out of the surf and at first I thought she'd been bitten by something in the water. She was wincing. She sat down in the dry part of the sand and I came over to see what was wrong. What it was was that there was a long splinter of bluegreen glass angled into her instep. A thrilling, painful sympathy shuddered through me when I knelt beside her. We were both terrified that something was so obviously wrong, that she could be so obviously damaged. She drew her breath in sharply, much more sharply than usual. There was no blood on her foot at all until I worked the sliver from beneath her skin.

(Originally published in Carp, Volume One, Issue 3, 1996)

Saying a Name One Thousand Times,

2009-07-13T11:28:00.005-04:00

it has become an empty noise.

Right here
she is rolling in bed
sheets tangled in her legs
sweat traces
a line from wristbone to hip
her hands hold the bedpost to whiteness
in her dream it is raining
in her dream they are rained upon

She sees him led to adventure;
he is buying Plum Blossom a drink and he is
wasting that madness to carve her name in the soft tar of a street.

She is suddenly then open
and turned from dreaming rain
her hand slipped down into absence
a knot relaxed and then harder still.

He will bring her
a foreign bloom
for her catalog of flowers
and she will fold it into her album,
the one she keeps under her bed,
the one place he'd never find a greenhouse.

One Quarter of One Hour

2009-07-12T08:57:00.001-04:00

The first time when we were on Oprah was physically the hardest. It got easier to talk in front of people the more we did it; I didn't get sick to my stomach or tremble and we all relaxed enough to stop saying the first things that popped into our heads. It got routine--like, here it is Wednesday and I have to talk to my mom (by phone) and Sam and Diane (my foster parents) and The Eggman (that's what I call my mom's lawyer, his real name is Jergenson) and miss school or a couple of days of school and get my homework done on a plane maybe and yap about the legal stuff and the court stuff and our feelings with Phil or Geraldo or Sally Jesse or all the local shows like PM Magazine or Inside Edition-type shows or just even the real news. It was weird to get used to it. I don't think I ever really liked it, but it was a part of my childhood that will always be special and will always be with me. Sometimes, now, at home when I'm watching TV during the day I'll think about the way Phil's studio in Chicago was like, before he moved to New York, and the way all TV studios seem really cheap and shabby in real life. I'll remember being in make-up.

People ask me sometimes if I miss it, if it was strange having those years of my life and the trauma of those years televised. I tell them to ask Lance Loud. I met so many people and lived in hotels and studios and green rooms and airplanes so much that it seemed as if all that had become my life and that it was natural to live the way I had grown up. When I thought about it, it was part of show business was the way I thought about it -- tried being in a band, tried writing, tried "production" work. But it wasn't the same for me and those others like me. We hadn't been actors in commercials or in a series or on Star Search. We didn't have "acts." We were the entertainment; our problems with drugs or incest or satanism or curfews or our parents or gangs or foster-parents or 976-numbers or step-parents or rock lyrics or body piercing or homosexuality or cancer or nightmare proms or pregnancy or sneaker murder or eating disorders or uncontrollable crushes were what made us interesting.

I ended up getting my GED and then learning some word processing (I'm using the computer at work to write this) and started working here. It is only occasionally that someone will look at me as if they remember seeing me before. It's no big deal.

Breath

2009-07-11T11:30:00.001-04:00

He remembers
he thinks again
of a night filled with sighs
though not his own
hers

her sighs have filled him
enough to remain filled
though not quite enough
to last until there are sighs again

he has heard
and is hearing a sigh
as it falls through silk toward him

through silk it falls
past silk it is caught
and in the catching is the filling
and in the catching is the remembering
and in the remembering
is the sigh again

stretching into the memory of a sigh remembered
there is silk
and there is the sweet exhalation called a sigh
and that is enough
to make a memory

there is a memory
and there is breath
and there is an empty place
where a sigh would be
and he can catch that empty place
and fill it with his own
his own empty place
his own sigh

(published in El Nopal, University of New Mexico, 1991)

A Kind of Photograph That's Hard to See

2009-07-10T09:13:00.000-04:00

this room smells of cancer
and I see loose crazy cells
there in the corners by the window.

thin branches tap the glass here
and I can see the pruning shears
on the workbench in the garage, waiting.

knots of phelgm-soaked tissue
demand the kind of attention that won't come
from me, a guy now wistful.

I miss you already.

Picking Melons by Moonlight

2009-07-09T08:50:00.000-04:00

Picking melons by moonlight
It seemed like a good idea at the time
Green fruit glowing in moon-blackened leaves
They call them honeydew

Giving the baby a bath in the sink
The odor of Ivory Soap
Moonbeaming baby in the sink
Water droplets shifting in the air

She opened her mouth and
Let the moon pour down her throat
Until she was full
Until she illuminated herself

Untitled Portrait: revised view

2009-07-08T10:34:00.001-04:00

Right-handed right now and right-legged, it shows in the crosses she describes,
a ragged gesture pushed through her close hair, potential knots long fallen away
and the whitened part between thumb's knuckles
against a coiling wire

Lips bitten slow
hollow pressures shaped like pain

Light cracks against this morning's bakery's windows
and there is always yeast,
the delta of condensation rising over the sinks
and the way she passes the back of her arm across the plane of her hairline
This won't last

This is by no means this moment, any moment,
so you hurry up and
turn up the radio and
go home and
quit your job and
get another job
move someplace else
do something different
That's what really happens all the time

Girl At A Window Cleaning Squid

2009-07-07T11:08:00.000-04:00

(for amjp)

one hundred, one thousand,
they slip blue grey pearlescent
through her fingers
quick practiced fingers
still baby fat but flying a knife
through squid bodies
endless buckets of dead squid

and the light,
if indeed there were light,
might seem to bend itself toward her hands
and they shine, they glisten
her hands
and the knife
and the bodies of squid

Dog Dreams

2009-07-06T09:03:00.001-04:00

(after kathleen spivack)

When I dream I am a dog,
I’m not thinking in the dream.
I’m not thinking,
“I’m dreaming I’m a dog”
or
“I think I am a dog”
or
“so this is what it’s like to be a dog.”
I think
“I am a dog”
and I think it like a dog would think it
which is to say without thought at all.

Untitled Poem About Three Traditions

2009-07-05T12:20:00.006-04:00

A Chinese feast begins with candy and Spam,
processed, potted meat food and jellied meat paste all
carved up and shaped into elaborate lucky goldfishes or
a tableaux of Quan Yin, the elaborate Goddess of Mercy, or
elaborate battles between Tripmaster Monkey and
elaborate sculpted turnip demons.
No one can remember how or when a Chinese feast ends,
exactly which of the of dishes was the last or
when we stopped eating from them.

Back in America and
up in the mountains near where I grew up,
the first time a boy went to prison
they would have a funeral and
bury a casket in a grave until that
boy came home again released or paroled or best of all escaped,
and he’d return tattooed and maybe still a man or
maybe a broken man or maybe a punk
and his family would dig the casket back up and burn it and
they’d have a new birthday party for
whatever kind of man had returned and
they’d all drink beer and eat cake,
maybe cake from the Piggly Wiggly
or maybe homemade.

Out on the flatlands beyond that first line of cliffs
the horses still graze free almost the whole year
until we ride other horses out there to bring them all back
closer to home and on those autumn mornings
we have twenty-five or thirty horses running along the
now-dry river through the gray and yellow and brown of whatever grows there along whatever water flows there and they steam, the horses, all of them, a flood, a flash flood of horses,
their chuffing breath and their hides
rising steam in the air at the end of the season,
at the end of our year.

Quan Yin

(another version of this poem appeared in Lunarosity, October, 2003)

Morning Exercises

2009-07-04T10:13:00.002-04:00

southern suburbs, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PRC, 1986

Every morning, we go down to the market and watch the axe men slaughter pigs beginning at dawn. They sleep there, too, both the men and pigs, and then standing in darkness among the carbide lanterns hiss and glare.

So much killing has made them, the axe men, cruel and, in boredom, they often torture the pigs just for something to do; they don’t kill them before gutting them and we watch that, too, pig eyes rolling first in pig skulls and then in the dirt, pig squeals thick in the air like seagulls screaming, the cast-iron smell of pig blood, and axe men laughing.

The people’s radio, the loudspeakers still affixed to poles around the market, at 7:00 a.m. Unified China Time still blare military music for morning calisthenics but nobody does them anymore. The cadence overlays all else like a tulle fog, shrill skirling, and numbers up to four, starting all over again.

(From Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Camber Press, 2008. Click on title or cover for more information.)

Pickman’s Progeny: The Horrid Truth Below

2009-07-03T09:21:00.005-04:00

(After H.P. Lovecraft)

You ask me if I remember how we used to ride in the very front cars on the subway, pretend we were driving the train, pretend we were in control, back before the success and before the money and when we still road the trains. You ask me when was the last time I have ridden that way. Pour yourself another glass of port, old friend, for it’s the last bottle in my cellar. For god’s sake, light that cigar instead of letting it just hang out of your mouth; it’s the last of the Cubans. Start smoking and I’ll tell you about the last time I rode in the very front of the very front car of the subway train and why I’ll never do so again.

Graffiti changed in the 70s remember? It was the birth of wildstyle and the ghost of Vaughn Bodé stalked the Lower East Side, branding the sides of building, bus, train, and tunnel. Everything, whether moving or stationary, was tagged, decorated, illustrated, storified, politicized, aethetisized or otherwise adorned. Everything, whether organic or man-made, seemed to wear a coat of spray paint. And for every Keith Herring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, there were 10,000 others and far less talented scrambling through the night with their satchels of purloined paint and super jumbo markers seeking aerosol expression.

Those were crazy days and I remember watching white-powder deals transpire between white-lipped junkies and the local supply, an anonymous hand that reached up from a storm drain to take money and deliver drugs. It was way before crack.

Summer nights when the city just lay gasping and indolent beneath the filthy, wet heat, we would bounce from bar to apartment to loft to bar, music pounding all the time, torn t-shirts and safety-pins, spikes and gripes, white noise and black hair dye. The Ramones wrote our anthem, Talking Heads interpreted our dreams, Blondie asked us to dance, Devo introduced us to our destiny, Eno was a god, the Sex Pistols were our stooges, and the Stooges were our elders. Nothing made more sense than nonsense and we excelled at chaos.

So it was with the usual nihilistic buoyancy we boarded the train that (what’s a word that means “sweltering” but ten times so; what’s another way to say “brutal, aggressively hot, hellish, and virulently foul”) night in August. My 22-year old’s version of seduction dependent upon privacy, I pulled Daisy Mae away from the group with a promise of adventure and, in those days, the only thing worse than being ugly was being boring. Through car after car after car, I dragged her forward through each double set of graffiti-etched doors, across each gap with jostling couplings just inches below our feet and I hoped the joining of the subway cars put ideas into her head about coupling and jostling.

When we reached the very front of the very first car and stood at the only forward facing window on the train, stood just inches from the motorman locked in his motorman’s booth with his hand on his deadman’s switch, I put my arm around Daisy Mae’s waist and pulled her closer to me, soft flesh damp beneath damp Fruit-of-the-Loom cotton.

“How fast do you want to go?” I asked her.

“Faster,” she replied. “Always faster. No matter what, faster.”

And for some reason, the car sped up and we stood there swaying together, sweaty young bodies pressed together, and I was afraid I was getting a hard-on and afraid she would notice and thrilled that she would. We watched our own reflections, wet matted hair and pale faces and glints of silver, superimposed over the image carved by lamplight into the tunnel. I certainly did not pay attention to graffiti flashing by; it was a multicolored, ubiquitous background scrawl signifying nothing.

So I cannot tell you exactly when the neo-primitive obscenities of modern urban flash became replaced by something more Neo-lithic. The random-seeming letters and numbers of our many tribes’ jabber was infiltrated and soon supplanted by another tribes’ images of fat times and famine. The images I retain from my fragmentary glimpses of their passing are of rage and terror, hunger and violence, raw meat and bloody hands. Like a Lascaux Cavern of the insane, these crude murals unfurled like a demented cyclorama telling stories of the hunt, of the slaughter, and of the unholy feasts to follow where stalker and butcher and beast all appeared human.

Under what exact street and avenue that shift from 20th century punk tag to nightmare prehistoric cave painting occurred, I cannot say. I had my hand down the front of Daisy Mae’s daisy dukes and my fingers inside Daisy Mae and my tongue explored the long hard tendon of her shoulder. So did my teeth, but only a little bit and just hard enough to make her squirm. My tastes then, in contrast to my costume of punk anti-finery, were simpler.

It was the frozen image of something, something I don’t want to know, that took me from my pleasure. For one eternal second I saw a thing there in the tracks agleam with headlight glow and I will never not see it again. As if burned into my retina, I still raise my eyes to a thing, clad in pale leather loincloth, raising its eyes in fatal surprise from its awful feast there on the tracks, eyes wide and screaming and glowing in chorus to the screaming brakes, in pain from the awful stabbing light, in a rage at a meal interrupted and baboon or madman, mole person or demon, friend or terrible foe, what shall always remain behind my eyelids is the horrible image of its scant clothing and the terrible remnants of a tanned human face there covering its loins.

The rest of that evening is forgotten and Daisy Mae long gone. She said she never saw the thing that I saw and I believed her and I hated her for it.

So, my friend, let us savor the last of this fine port, the taste of contraband tobacco, and never, dear fellow, never ask me of the subway again.

(Published in Arkham Tales #1. Click cover or title for more information.)

BAMBAM

2009-07-02T10:40:00.000-04:00

He shouted rhetorically.
She spun her back to him
and caught the stupid echo,
the one that came from
the glass wall and the wooden floor.
"Woof!" she said then wanted to hear it again.
She thought it like a lovely picture to herself,
something to look at over and over and over.
It could fit in her pocket like a good little hammer.

Cold White Fungus In Heavy Syrup

2009-07-01T11:02:00.004-04:00

Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, the People’s Republic of China, February, 1986

It had a name, a real name, a name like Pearl Music Garden or Fragrant Gardens, but the foreign students had begun calling it The Hey! What’s Happening? Some of our Chinese friends picked it up and the name spread until it soon seemed as if Xi’an’s entire demimonde called it that although we never knew what the owners thought about that nickname or if it was good or bad for business.

“Where do you want to go tonight?” a foreign student might ask.

“Let’s go to the Hey! What’s Happening?” another might answer

“Again? We went there last night.”

“Peace Café?”

“We went there two nights ago.”

“How about we just hang out at Jiaoze Hut with Madame Liu?”

Jiaoze Hut is a little hard to explain. I was visiting the city one afternoon with my new Chinese friend, Mr. Zhang, and we stopped to have a snack at a brand-new roadside snack shack that had a brand-new sign saying something like Six Felicitous Portents but also had a stencil of a happy, fat, Italian chef with a thin twirly mustache. The name Jiaoze Hut seemed almost mandatory with graphics like that. Jiaoze Hut was wobbly wooden stools and a dirt floor inside and wobbly wooden stools outside in the dirt proper and all under the diamond glare of carbide lamps. Half the ownership of the restaurant, the half that cooked, came outside to take our order, the first order, the first order of hundreds. She was a peaceful-faced woman whom the boy foreign students began calling Madame Liu. Her name really was Liu but calling her Lao Liu, i.e. Old Liu, just wouldn’t do); the girls ended up calling her Momma Liu or just Mom and we all called her the Madonna of Noodles in private) and she was wore a white apron and a white cotton cloth that tied around her head. She looked like Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa.

“Ni ye tongzhi yau shemma?” she asked Mr. Zhang. “What do you and your comrade want?”

Mr. Zhang ordered a half-kilo of jiaoze for us to split and a big green bottle of Fish Hill Beer, two glasses. “None of that horrible Xi’an beer that is always…um…err…fake…um…err…very bad.”

But he waited until Madame Liu turned her back and gone to turn his front toward me and stare saucer-eyed.

“Did you hear what she called you?”

“HUH?” I answered as a truck bounced through our section of potholes.

“Did you hear what she called you? She called you tongzhi. She called you 'comrade.'”

I stayed blank for a second until I could grasp what it meant when a middle-aged Chinese woman called a foreigner, any foreigner, “comrade.” People around here called each other “comrade,” they called anyone in a Mao suit comrade, and they might even refer to their animals as “Comrade Horse” or “Comrade Chicken” but they never ever called foreign student dead demon ghosts “comrade.”

We ate at Jiaoze Hut an awful lot, hung out there for hours playing drinking games with chopsticks with whoever happened to wander in. And then we learned that Madame Liu and her partner, ecstatically skinny Mr. Yue, the chopper and lifter and holder of flashlights when someone needed to piss outside in the pitch-black backyard, had gotten the license to run the Hut for one year only and then, when the year was up, they had to return to their respective work assignments of dormitory maid and truck mechanic. Neither was thrilled to think about going back to work like that and the Hut was making money hand-over-fist from the quality products at reasonable prices, the dozen foreign students who became regulars, and the old regulars, other middle-aged Chinese people who smiled and nodded at us over their steaming bowls of jiaoze. Nevertheless, there was nothing anyone could do and when, without a “going out of business” sign or a melancholy party or a final piss-off, the Hut closed, many of us cried to think of returning to the Peace Café or the Hey! What’s Happening?

But whatever it was called and whoever called it that, the Hey! What’s Happening? was just another low-rent gangster hangout for low-rent, shifting economy gangster pups playing the first act of their version of Scarface or King of New York or Iron Monkey Beats All, the part of the movie where the rising young gangster enjoys nightlife, the drugs, and the chicks. It’s an old story.

Still, even old stories have twists, and, in this one, I’m eating or trying to eat a bowl of cold white fungus soup that some new gangster-type or wannabe friend has purchased for me to enjoy at his expense and, therefore, perhaps, owe him a favor except this girl keeps banging into the table, this chubby Chinese girl who is chubby when Chinese-chubby-anything is still pretty rare considering the recent famines and troubles and food rationing and whatnot. She’s banging into my table because she is dancing convulsively, her sweater riding up over the roll of her belly fat, and, most remarkably, a necklace made entirely of Smurf key chains. Dozens of the adorable and adored Danish cartoon characters dangled from her neck and gnashed and clashed with each lurch or rumble she made in the name of rhythm.

Oh, yeah. She was also crying, sobbing hysterically as she danced for, at the or against the table. My new gangster wannabe friend ignored her so I did, too.

The soup was terrible. On top of being cold and made from white fungus, it was diabetes-inducing sweet, with a heavy lashing of industrial-strength high-fructose corn syrup on top of the reconstituted mushrooms. I couldn’t swallow a second mouthful.

“How is the soup?” he asked me, each word punctuated by a jostle to the table that set my the semi-solid gel in my bowl rippling to the beat of whatever Hong Kong pop music was rippling out of the sound system.

“It’s terrible,” I answered in that way one talks when the terrible food is still in one’s mouth.

“It’s good for your chi.”

“It’s awful.”

“It balances the winds within the body.” And he used a theatrical gesture to indicate the area between his sternum and his groin. The body. The winds. I didn’t know.

I spat the remainder of my cold white fungus soup into one of the waxed-paper squares the Hey! What’s Happening? used for napkins, made a neat little ball of the toxic sugar mush, and dropped it onto the floor.

“That’s it,” I declared and lit a Space Tour cigarette.

At almost that exact same instant, another gangster wanna be came stalking up to our table, grabbed the hysterical Smurf girl, and more or less dragged her back to their table where he delivered four good smacks to her face, two front-handed and two back-handed, in sequence. She didn’t stop crying.

“That’s really it,” I said. “I’ve had it. I’ve really had it.”

(from Artificial Rats and Electric Cats, Camber Press, 2008. Click on the title or the cover photo for more information.)

On the Fourth Floor of the Shikishima Building

2009-06-30T09:42:00.001-04:00

(for Mac and Yuri-san, Hiroshima 1993)

The sounds rain makes
when it falls on foreign pavements.
Sweet, and mild, this cautious noise;
the reflection of other lights
on different streets, happens
when small pleasures will suffice
and become large in another country altogether.

Hot Wheels Run Through My Brain on those Orange Tracks

2009-06-29T09:59:00.002-04:00

I remember Deora, lime-green bubble-topped fantasy hot-rod, and, when I clamped my daredevil loop to the top bunk of my only child bunkbed, how it would throw itself off the track in g-force induced delusion and tumble free until smacking itself against my closet door. I loved that little car.

I let twin red Camaros free on my nubbly chenille bedspread to act out the chase scene from Bullit on the San Francisco hills of my knees. I always wanted to be in Steve McQueen's car but never that other, bald-headed guy with the shotgun's car.

My little cop-car with the plastic blue flasher welded to the roof was almost always the bad guy and got confused on those dusty corners when the Mustang with the really steerable wheels did donuts by my desk. The odor of Crayolas shavings from the 64 box with built-in sharpener filled my head like gasoline fumes as I laughed and laughed along with another clean get-away, another harmless romp through the backwoods of my bedroom as the tiny little cool guy kissed the tiny little cool girl wearing tiny little cut-off Levi's and a tube top inside that tiny little Mustang.

I still have a drawing that I encased in wax paper with a hot iron under adult supervision of me, almost life-sized, sitting at the wheel of a gold custom El Camino with two surfboards in the back having a drag-race with a purple Baja Bug and I'm winning, I'm pulling ahead, but just barely.

Choosing the Right Dog

2009-06-28T09:56:00.001-04:00

He heard her voice coming from the porch but he couldn’t hear what she said.

"What?" He said it loudly with little inflection, just a pointed monotone for clarity. But still, exasperated as if she were interrupting him.

She repeated what she had said. He could tell she had not raised her voice or turned her head, or done anything to make it easier for him to understand her.

It sounded like she said, "Let's get a dog," something unusual enough to make him forget his irritation. He made a humming noise to let her know, if she could hear him, that he had heard her.

A dog was a funny thing to want. He wondered if she had a specific breed in mind, some kind of dog she'd seen on TV or out shopping. He got up and went to the kitchen, thought about going to the porch to talk about this dog thing. An unusual dog wouldn't be so bad as long as it was not a lap dog.

Softly, trying the phrase in case he could use it later, "That's all we need--a yapping dust mop running around the house."

He decided to like Dalmatians and Collies, maybe even Boxers. "Medium dogs," he said aloud, again to himself, "But not a Labrador."

"DAN-iel!"

He jumped when she yelled at him from the porch door.

She was the one who sounded exasperated. “Where's that extension cord?"

Daniel replied, "I thought you said, ‘Let's get a dog.’”

Smoke Break

2009-06-27T09:02:00.002-04:00

He wanted a cigarette and looked over his shoulder at his daughter and her friends as he stepped out to the sidewalk to smoke one. He ducked his head to light the Camel and, at first, he thought the butane lighter had exploded in his hand. But, then he realized his hand was empty, that he was on his knees and bleeding. He guessed he must have fallen. He twisted around to the shop behind him but he couldn't see it. He twisted some more and felt sharp pain. He wondered what was going on here, just what the heck had happened. And some part of him was already afraid that he knew.

The rest of that afternoon was kind of blurry. The moment immediately after the blast was crystallized, however, and became frozen in such a way that while he and events all moved forward in time together, that moment remained unfinished and attached to each successive moment. It was a lot more than that he just couldn't stop thinking about that moment. He could not get out of, remove himself or move away from that moment.

A man came to where he'd been blown. There were other noises--screams, the last rumble of damaged architecture--but they conversed together in a normal tone.

"I guess I fell down," he said.

"Oh, gosh," the other man replied, distractedly pulling needles of glass from his own forearm.

"That was so weird. What was that?"

They both turned their eyes to the boiling ruin of the shop. They heard the noises, they saw the flame inside the building, they smelled the smoke and meat.

"Oh, gosh," the other man said in genuine puzzlement. "Something must have happened."

And suddenly and very surprisingly, the street and the sidewalk and the area around the store was filled with people. They walked, they darted, they stood and turned small circles, put their hands to their faces. They wore regular clothes, they wore bloody rags, they wore uniforms. Some were shouting and pointing, some were crying, and some were just looking silently about them. There was a lot of junk strewn all over the place.

But even as these things happened, as he noticed these things and these things happening, he was (with the same kind of clarity and attention) still within that moment on the sidewalk before he knew.

The hospital was the worst place to have gone but they made him. The emergency room was bedlam; it was an unquiet place when all he truly wanted was a very quiet place. He kept thinking that if they'd only let him go home, he could clean himself up while watching himself for signs of concussion, pour some disinfectant on the worst of his scrapes, rest up a little and gather his wits, smoke a cigarette, and then come back for whatever disaster examination the hospital had prepared for him. As it was, he was triaged off by himself into a curtained area where he sat for a long time until the chaos subsided enough to allow a doctor time for a visit. All that while, even as he peeked at the action through a slit in the curtain, he was at the same time on his hands and knees on the sidewalk in a crust of broken glass worrying about his defective lighter.

"Well, then," the doctor said. "Let's take a look at you."

As expected, his clearly superficial wounds were identified, examined, sterilized, bandaged, and dismissed. The doctor paid lots of attention to his head, though, shining lights at it and in it from alarming angles. He was thinking about how nice it felt to grab a moment to himself after a long day of following teenaged girls as they shopped. A cigarette would taste very good, he thought.

The doctor said the word "observation" and, sure enough, some time later a young man came to take him upstairs in the hospital. They put him in a room and taped wires to his chest and left him alone. He couldn't get the lighter to work, kept scratching the flint uselessly. He turned deeper upwind; he hunched his shoulders and he cupped his palms to shelter the flame.

Some time later, another doctor came in.

"Has anybody had a chance to talk to you?" the doctor asked.

He really didn't know how to answer.

"I know you've been through an awful lot today. And, I'm afraid you've got some more to go through," the doctor began. "Your ex-wife will be here in a few hours. She's probably on the plane right now."

He had his eyes focused on the tip of the cigarette, at the place where the flame would be. He could taste the odor of unburned tobacco and the cotton filter; he anticipated the first lung full of thick smoke.

"You've sustained some injuries that aren't too serious," the doctor continued. "Scrapes and bruises, mostly. But, we're a little concerned about concussion so we're going to get some pictures of your head in a minute. You may even have a small fracture...you took a pretty good blow out there. The nurses will come to take you to the Imaging Lab and we'll get a better idea of what's going on."

The doctor moved over to almost sit on the edge of the bed.

"You know," the doctor said and his voice had changed. "You've been through something terrible and a lot of what you're feeling right now is just shock, pure and simple, plain old shock. Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in, for the body and the mind to prepare themselves for a trauma. And you've already been through one terrible trauma this afternoon."

The doctor paused and looked out past the hospital room, out the room's grey window to another grey window on the opposite wall of the hospital.

"It's so hard to imagine someone doing this," the doctor finally said. "How could anyone deliberately do something like this? I find it hard to believe."

"You can't believe it?" he asked and the emphasis he gave those words must have sounded sarcastic because the doctor apologized but he meant it sincerely, had seized upon that phrase as a confirmation of his own inability to continue past a particular moment in time. If a doctor can't believe it, he reasoned, why should I?

"Listen," the doctor said. "If there's anything you'd like to know...any, ah, questions you might have...anything at all that might be on your mind...anything you're worried about...just ask me or call the nurse. Whenever you're ready...."

He moved his thumb deliberately to create a long, perfect spark, to get this cigarette really going, and he couldn't quite understand the doctor or what the doctor was saying because he was guessing he was about to fall down.

It’s Different on the Border

2009-06-26T14:51:00.002-04:00

It’s different on the border. Things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else and, really, since the borderland is neither here nor there, not the U.S.A. but not quite Mexico, the kinds of things that happen here can be said to perhaps not happen at all. How can something happen if it isn’t happening in some place? And, since this isn’t really a place but the place between two other places, how can things really happen if they happen in no place?

Out there in the desert with the big empty watching and waiting near the ruins of what used to be, miles from anything and I can see that if there really is a line dividing two nations, it’s worse than invisible and it’s locked up on a map in a book a thousand miles away from here and that magic invisible line has nothing at all to do with the snakes and the starlight and the tarantulas and the people and the wild dogs and the nobody-really-knows-what-else moving back and forth, across and over, up and down. This is all for the good, believe me.

If I was you, I wouldn’t be out there, but if you was me, you would. You’d be parked in my 1975 Ford F-150 on a dry hill among the brushy gray bushes, the black outline of a new moon hanging among a thousand million million stars to illuminate the landscape enough to see how dark it really was.

Out there, things are moving. Some of them are animals, some of them are people, and some of them have to be classified as “other.” If I’m quiet enough long enough, long enough for the motor to cool down and stop ticking, long enough for all the things I scared away to move on, new things that don’t know I’m here come by. Sometimes it’s an animal, a skunk or a skinny mule deer or even a peccary, and sometimes it’s a person, some skinny brown man or woman or child big eyed in the night or sometimes even La Migra, a broad-shouldered white man with a rifle and a badge. And sometimes, you know, there on the border at night under that black moon, sometimes it’s something else entirely that moves through the brush and close enough to smell until suddenly I don’t even want to know what it is anymore or what it could be and I’m just very very quiet until it goes away.

During the day, out by the vague ruin of a failed ranch melting back into the earth or out on the long dry flats, deep in the termini of steep-cut canyons or high on a windswept promontory, I find all sorts of leftovers. Rubber tire sandals and plastic water bottles, dry bones and fresh feces, the brass casings of spent ammunition and old horseshoes and the charred carcasses of motorcycles, blood soaked altars of haphazardly stacked stones, inverted forged iron crosses draped with garlands of plastic flowers and dried fingers, the skin of a young woman stretched out on a forgotten section of barbed-wire fence dividing ranchland long without cattle or cattleman, sacks and bags and packs filled with the strangest things, all sorts of weird stuff like underwear and drugs and a thousand snapshots of someone’s family and money and dried fish and jewelry and five hand-carved wooden dolls: a mommy, a daddy, a little boy, a little girl, and a baby.

As often as the wind here carries the odor of cactus blossom or the dusty tang of a rainstorm coming up, it carries also the miasma of gunpowder and blood, of sweat and fear, of semen and rotten meat and iron. As often as a coyote howl or an owl hoot breaks this still air, so too will the screams of women and children fly out across the desert to disappear without echo or consequences. Names whispered in the darkness, supplications to deities both conventional and obscure, lost children wailing for their mothers, mothers crying out for their lost children, a full variety and variation of shrieks to convey indignant pain and horror, pleas for mercy, petitions for release from torture, and soft begging for the kindness of swift murder all dissipate in this borderland atmosphere; they spread out unheard over a landscape unconcerned.

I’d been tracking this fellow quite a while and I had a pretty good idea what he was up to. He seemed the type. He kept moving around, setting up an ambush, waiting, waiting some more, moving again, setting up again, waiting. I kept him in my sights, watching with one eye from, oh, I’d say a half-mile away. He had no idea.

But he knew what he was doing. And about the fifth time he set up his little ambush, he caught himself a brown girl. It was slick and it was sweet like he’d done it a hundred times before; he just stepped out of the brush and slipped his big old knife under her chin and that was that. She dropped her pathetic bundle and her plastic water bottle, and she kicked a little bit as he lifted her up with his other arm wrapped around her waist, and she lost one of her rubber tire sandals. I was watching this through the scope, lining up the shot.

He half carried, half dragged her back into the brush where his kit was laid out and ready; he had stakes already in the earth, lengths of rope ready for her ankles and wrists, and duct tape for her mouth. He got her down, tied her spread-eagle, taped her, and kneeled down between her legs to start cutting away her clothes. I got the shot and his head disappeared, all bone and brain and tooth become a variated mist traveling fast and away. The neck stump fountained thick towers of blood until the body crumpled across her right thigh, spastic movements rippling through its limbs. One shot, one kill. The earth disappeared what poured out of the body.

It makes me feel especially…it makes me feel really…it makes me feel full to be able to do that, to look at someone from so far away and to point and to reach out and take his head off from a half-mile away. I doubt if the girl even heard the sound of the shot that killed her attacker. He sure didn’t.

All the way walking over there to where the girl lay draped with that fellow’s corpse, I was not doing much more than enjoying the feeling. By the time I got there, my breathing had mostly calmed down and I kicked the body off that girl there all splayed out in the dirt. I took a few of the fingers so I could add them to one of those upside-down crosses I liked out in the desert. Without the head, though, the body didn’t have much left in the way of trophies—no ears or nose or scalp—and I sure didn’t want anything to do with his pizzle though I know some folk what don’t feel the same. They’ll cut a fellow’s business off and do bad things with it. That girl was all big eyes and little squeaking noises behind the tape.

I stood there above her looking down and still feeling that good full feeling inside me.

“How you doing?” I asked her and she stopped making those noises. I could see all sorts of things going through her head fast. She looked up at me and past me with those big brown eyes; she looked all around as much as she could but there wasn’t nothing else there but me and a lot of blank black sky.

I squatted down where that other fellow had kneeled before and I picked up his big knife. As I started in to cutting off the rest of her clothes, I was talking to her the whole time, talking soft like I would talk to any frightened creature no matter how badly it was suffering, and I kept talking to her like that as I started to cut away much, much more than just her clothes.

Lesbian Picnic

2009-06-25T10:41:00.003-04:00

"Hey, these are fish sticks!"
she nearly screamed.
"I only agreed [to picnic with you]
to come on this little excursion
because you promised me treats.
Cold [Mrs. Paul's] fish sticks disgust me.
You must take me home."
I had no more chances.
My heart had been devoured
but for the last time
and I would think no more
of the ring hidden in her lunch,
her calm pleasure had she found it,
or how I could have licked the breadcrumbs
and grease from her fingers
and how that jewel might have cut my lip.

Sank You, Missa Smiss

2009-06-24T09:39:00.008-04:00

The mud of Shaanxi is extraordinary and during the autumn rains, when this Shaanxi mud flourishes, we grew intimate with that particular gumbo. A combination of the highly acidic rains and compacted dust (loess), the entire landscape becomes gelatinous, adherent. Roads especially and those unpaved, country roads we bicycled on weekend outings even more especially had long stretches of truck and hand-tractor churned puddles too deep and thick to ride through.

Wet or dry, the soil itself, this aforementioned loess, is sterile. Four thousand years of continuous, unbroken, intensive cultivation have left most of the province's arable land long ago leeched of nutrients and about as fertile as broken glass. It, the soil, functions as a hydroponic medium through which the farmers deliver fertilizer (human and animal wastes) and water.

Sufficiently compacted, the loess may be worked and the tradition of cave-dwelling in Shaanxi stretches back to the early days of the Silk Road and forward (or, actually, back again) to the terminus of the Glorious Long March when Chairman Mao headquartered in Yanan.

Brief days of October sun tempted us beyond the city and we trudged through long stretches of bleak farmland, from village to village, mud-spattered, pushing our bikes through shin-deep lagoons and in the villages, hanging from the trees in the villages, long garlands of yellow corn drying. Great ropes of pale husk and golden ears looping over every branch and from tree to tree and every household wall and roof and eave and gable (and god, I'm going to say it) "festooned" with corn.

At the Foreign Language Institute where I teach classes in conversational English to second-year Tourist Industries students, our main goal or, rather, my main goal, this semester is to master the sibilant "th" sound so elusive to Asian tongues. With this in mind, we begin each class the very same way. My students have seized upon this exercise as routine and, I think, find comfort in it's consistency and predictability in what, I think, they otherwise find a chaotic and confusingly spontaneous classroom environment. Their normal courses, those taught by regular faculty, are structured around rote learning. We, the foreigners, have grown accustomed to seeing our students around the campus memorizing their other textbooks, literally committing entire volumes to memory in anticipation of the final exam which will ask them to duplicate selected passages. There are no lectures, no discussions, no quizzes, no experiments, no laboratory, no papers, no tests. On the first day of class the "professor" distributes the textbooks. On the last day of class the "professor" collects the textbooks and writes "pages 145, 215, 232" on the blackboard. The students do their best to regurgitate, word for word, the indicated text; the "professor" collects the papers and grades them according to accuracy. Of course, this or any other academic work counts for only 40% of a student's final grade with the other 60% consisting of political attitude. My classes as well as most other foreigner taught classes, tend toward the Socratic and veer sharply away from the Confucian/Maoist tradition. At first disconcerted by the spontaneous informality of such a class, the students soon enjoyed themselves. Instead of droning out the lessons from a workbook, we would converse and practice vocabulary usage and pronunciation. We invented dialogue together, asked and answered each other's questions about idiom and culture, we made up bilingual puns, we sang pop songs together; the shy students would blush and giggle and bury their heads on their desks; the bold students would stand and with theatrical gestures declaim the Declaration of Independence.

The relative high ground of a village somewhere to the northwest of Xian seemed a good place to rest. We leaned our bicycles, wheels heavy and caked with plastic mire, against a loess-block wall and stretched out in the warm sun, rubber boots heavy and caked, a crazy pattern of corn webbed above us.

Soon, as we knew they would, they came. First, an old man in a ragged blue Mao suit, he was wearing agate sunglasses and smoking a thimble-bowled pipe. He stood before us, puffed twice on the pipe, and rocked on his heels.

"Ni hau, laodz [Hi, old guy]," somebody said and his lucky, bushy eyebrows rose behind his stone lenses in surprise to hear us speak human-being speech.

He raised his right hand in a gesture much like a royal or beauty-queen wave.

"Hhh," he glottalled at us. "Hhh."

A couple of kids, little toddler-aged kids in brightly colored quilted overclothes, were starting to creep closer and closer. The old man was probably supposed to be baby-sitting them or something. A woman in grey trousers and a white blouse came to the door of her cave house and leaned out to look at us, to wipe her hands on a pink towel. She yelled "Foreigners with bicycles are sitting against the wall under Auntie Lo's big tree!" back into the blackness and pointed at us with her chin. She went back inside.

Someone pulled out a camera.

"Keyi? [May I?]" that someone asked the old man.

He squatted down on his haunches to be on our level and pulled one last lung full of tobacco from the tiny pipe. He knocked the ash into his palm.

"Hhh? [What did you say?]," the old man answered, clearly still disconcerted by both our arrival and ability to use language like people.

"Keyi zhao-xiang ma? [May I photograph?]," someone tried.

He smiled a gap-toothed smile and bent his head between his legs, shaking it, and he couldn't believe we were there in the first place and in the second and third places, we talked and wanted to take his picture. He looked up and away, still smiling, at some corn.

"Hhh [Sure. Why not? I guess so....]," he answered and somebody took his picture.

We drank some boiled water from some canteens and the kids were getting closer, getting louder and gigglier. Soon, they would be right in front of us, pointing and laughing, screaming "yang gweidz! yang gweidz! [foreign devils! foreign devils!]."

"Nice corn," somebody said in English, exhaling smoke.

"It's feed corn," somebody else said. "It's not for people; it's for their pigs."
"Really? Could you pop it, though? Would popping work?"

"I don't know. Is popcorn the same as feed corn? How do you say 'pop' in Chinese?"

"Probably 'pop' or maybe 'pa' or something like that. 'Corn' is yu-mi," somebody else said. "Maybe 'pop' is like 'explode' or 'blow-up.'"

"Okay," one of the first ones responded. "Ask this guy if they blow up their yu-mi and see what he says."

The old man shifted his gaze from speaker to speaker as if at a tennis match. The kids were delighted and squealed with amusement to hear the sounds we made and used amongst ourselves. We were as a flock of noisy birds or a troop of singing monkeys to them.

I got this job at the Foreign Language Institute sort of through a back door. I am supposed to be a student here in the People's Republic of China and taking special foreign student classes and taking special exams and educational field-trips to educational points-of-interest on weekends but that didn't last more than a couple of weeks. We stopped going to most of our classes most of the time and, instead, began to explore in ever increasing radii, the city of Xian and the surrounding suburbs, villages, and satellite towns.

We began to make friends among the other foreigners at other schools and also among the Chinese themselves, those bold enough, foolish enough, or desperate enough to risk association with Westerners. We spent our evenings inside the city walls within the fetal Xian nightlife at clubs called Art Salon or Peace Cafe or Friendship Gardens.

It was through these friendships and the friends our new friends knew that several of us got jobs as teachers for the quasi-legal, back-door language school inside the city. Our night classes, held in a mid-school building and organized by the family who are employed as caretakers, are popular and command high tuition from the adults who wish to and can afford to learn English. Our students are engineers, doctors, People's Liberation Army officers, cadres, and bureaucrats who wish to enhance their career opportunities during flexible periods of history. The same connections soon led to a more officially sanctioned position at the Foreign Language Institute.

When I started teaching these classes, I quickly noticed this "th" problem. More than any other sound , the "th" was an alien noise and uncomfortable for most of our students. The simple phrase "Thank you, Mister Smith" became "'Sank you, Missa Smiss..." on their lips and alarmingly snake-like for my taste.

The exercise was most simple: Each student was to grasp the tip of his or her tongue between thumb and forefinger, pull his or her tongue out of the mouth, and repeat the aforementioned phrase, laden as it is with the elusive phoneme.

"Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth," they would chant together, happily in unison and happily ridiculous, holding their tongues between their fingers, more rain and lightening flashing from the southwest. I would lean back in my chair and smell the wet dust approaching storm smell on the wind and listen to them. "Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth...Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth..."

We stood to gather our things.

"Women zou, laodz [We're going, old guy]," somebody said.

"Hhh [Thanks for stopping. It was nice to meet you. Please come back soon and meet the rest of the family. You kids are all right. Have a pleasant afternoon]," the old man replied.

We swung our mud heavy boots over the bars of our bicycles and began to coast down the road to the next stretch of quagmire. The children of the village followed us running, laughing, and shrieking "yang gweidz! yang gweidz!" and we waved as we left their village and the oldest among them stooped to pick up corn cobs to throw at us and some of them came pretty close.

(from Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Camber Press, 2008. Click on the title or the cover for more information.)

Cookie In The Picture

2009-06-23T09:01:00.000-04:00

She told me she was going shopping and that she might drop over at her aunt's house for a while; she might even stay for dinner. She had been telling me things like that quite a bit. Cookie was a liar.

I followed her until she parked our car and then I followed her while she walked until she went into a building. I went in a Koffee Shoppe and I started smoking cigarettes until the waitress bullied me into ordering. I figured I'd be there a while (knowing Cookie like I knew Cookie) so I asked her, the waitress, for koffee, another and cleaner ashtray, and a new glass of V-8 vegetable cocktail. I tipped her, the waitress, five dollars and did not see her again. Didn't expect to.

I waited for what seemed like hours and, coincidentally, it was hours that I waited but I was ready when she, Cookie, came out. I grabbed my Nikon and I was out the door and out on the street to meet her.

"What are you doing?" she shrieked but I had her in the frame and her mouth was an ugly oval when I hit the shutter.

"What are you doing? What are you doing here?" she continued to shriek and I continued to hit the shutter; I was snapping shots like crazy.

"I wanted to see a whore," I told her from behind the camera, the Nikon, and I kept pressing the button. The auto-wind was screaming and everything was green-light as far as aperture and shutter were concerned.

"Stop it!" she screamed. "Stop it! Stop it!"

I ignored her, her words, and concentrated on her image, the image in the viewfinder. The few people who had noticed us ignored us and I kept hitting the shutter, the button that made the lens open and close around the image that would become Cookie when she was printed.

"I wanted to see a whore, " I told Cookie. "I wanted to see what a whore looks like after she's whored around. I wanted to see her in the frame."

And I took some more pictures.

"How does it feel, baby?" I continued. "How does it feel to be famous? Show me how it feels to be famous. You're going to be so famous."

"I can't believe you're doing this," Cookie sobbed and she slid down with her back against the wall behind her, the wall of her new boyfriend's apartment building, down to the dirty sidewalk in front of her new boyfriend's apartment building while her old boyfriend took some photographs of her sliding.

"That's it. That's it, baby," I encouraged her. "Work with me here. Work with me."

I kept snapping, kept looking for the best angles and the good shine off her tears, off the strings of snot and saliva across her face. It was a face I loved. I made some beautiful images that afternoon, I developed some beautiful prints, and Cookie's never seen them. She's never even asked.

July Something, Maybe August

2009-06-22T10:15:00.000-04:00

We, she and I, sat together across from one another at a wooden table set in the back yard under the big elm. Summer nights had begun and as the gloaming atmosphere blued itself toward another hazy darkness, I took an apricot from the bowl and carefully began to pull its flesh from the hard, dark stone with my mouth. Each bite dissolved into sweet juice as the fruit meat collapsed around my lips, against my tongue.

Moths flew methodical loopings against the lamp over the backdoor; the neighbors' windows trembled a soft television blue through window glass and curtain; I'm sure there was music playing inside our house. Careful, precise, I stripped the apricot seed to reveal it convoluted, shining and carefully I placed it on the table. And just as carefully, she lifted the wet seed of that fruit to her own mouth and carefully placed it within.

I stretched myself out on that table, my cheek cool against the polished wood and her fingers cool again and light against the skin that covers my throat. I could feel each click that apricot pit made as it brushed against her teeth and how each click echoed inside the bones of her skull and through her spine to her rib cage and down the long bones of her arm and through the maze of small bones knit together as her wrist and hand and that echo lingered there at the tips of her fingers, at the point of the lacquered plane of her fingernails, and lost itself in the tangled ropes of my pulse.