Roger Changes: First Series
1: I'M GOING TO GET YOU, ROGER
When he was a little boy and I was a little boy, Roger came over to my house and broke all my toys, so then I went over to his house and broke all his toys, too. So then he set me on fire and I had to go to the hospital for many years. When I came back he was almost grown up and so was I only he was several grades ahead of me in school. I tried to catch up but I got tired of people calling me a dumbass, so then I quit school and entered upon the life of a man wearing a ski mask knocking over convenience stores; I even had all the pretty tattoos and piercings you need for that profession.
One day though I run into Roger coming out of Serious Coffee with a stack of lattes in one hand and a cell phone in the other and he was yelling at the person on the other end. I went over to him anyway and I says, “Yo, Roger,” and he just looked at me. I think if he had a hand free he would maybe snap his fingers many times in an effort to remember me, the guy he had set on fire years ago and yet who looked just like he did when that happened. Meaning here we were both thirty-five years old only I looked like a little kid. (Well, I have a slight growth of beard because I don’t like shaving. Well, really, it’s because business men in my profession are supposed to. Actually, I notice even guys in suits don’t shave either now, it’s cool or something. You get these actors and model types with dolls dripping all over them and they don’t shave.) Anyways, so I says, “Yo, Roger” again and for some reason he remembers (this is what convinces me there is some very deep connection between us over lifetimes), and so he goes all pale in the face with guilt. He hangs up on the guy he’s talking to and throws his phone across the street (he can afford to do these things, I guess), and he says, “YO, BRENTO!” and he hugs me all to hell like I’m one of his favorite people or something.
Well, then I says, “You remember many years ago when you set me on fire?” and he looks down and says, “Yeah.” So, I pause for a minute but then I say, “Well, I figure you owe me one, don’t you?” and he says, “Yeah, I guess I do,” and I says, “Well, yeah, but what do you think that would be?” and he says, “Well, hey, I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one, bro, I’m real busy right now, you see, and …” “Well, what if I set you on fire and we call it even?” I says. “You carry any lighters, ignition devices, charcoal starter, briquettes, things of this nature?” and he says, “Nah, I quit that back in Koo-wait,” I says, “Dude, you gotta keep current you wanna maintain a portfolio in the life.”
“Well, hey, Brento? ‘The life’? I ain’t in the life. Never was. Never will be.”
Standing at a distance now, I don’t know how he did it.
“Like to oblige you there, big guy, I really would, but you see I have responsibilities; I’m a citizen now, Police Athletic League, Ten Year Chip Man, sandwiches for lunch with no bread on them. I work out with disgraced Presidents, Men At Arms of the Billy Ray Brass Band, up to my nuts in testimonials, wall to wall mirror maze futures, invisible real estate. I’m a Made Man, son. Now what can I do for you?”
“Heh. I told you so, what you can do: so just be nice about it and go up in flames.”
“Or what? Hey, Brento?”
“Hey, Roger?”
Little pause here. He needs to negotiate a little with the physical world, the lattes, he gives me one, takes one for himself, tosses the others at a homeless person wearing a sign that says, “WILL KILL FOR FOOD”.
Then Roger says to me, “Lookee, now. I got a line of credit at all these places, take your pick: your Rimbaud’s Casuistry, your Chemical Hope, your Travel Careers. And here’s some more.” (He’s fanning out card keys like a dealer, all of them with 3-D logos in candy ass colors, some even with tits that jump right out at you. He’s a desperate man who desperately needs to perpetuate his life eternally, only he knows it’s about to change in some ugly respect because I’m here.)
I says, “Hey, Roger? Why are you doing all that? I don’t need that. I need your absolute, undubious destruction for all time, bro. I need to see you burning, Roger, burning like the House of Desire itself. I want you on the top of the hill, lighting the village for our people.”
And I led him, led him down into the dungeon of my Keep, and I spoke to him in the Voice of His Own Conscience:
“Roger. Ah, Roger,” I said, and there were the phony echoing effects for which Roger is famous along with the dry ice all over the place to give you this fake fog as we crept slowly down the wet, sulking stairs of the Keep and Beethoven or who cares was playing, and I spoke in a bing-bong basso profundo which I amplified by means of various cheap electronics any hobbyist can obtain at one of Roger’s FX For Less franchises (“Become who you CAN be, Manage Like Roger at: FX FOR LESS!” know that one, right?) … for here we have geometries of unmistakable perversion, a house of false witness, a hangman’s dream of shadows against a wet wall, rats swinging by their tails and singing a song you never learned from your Mama, no, you learned it from the boys down in the lost neighborhoods of past lapses, past removes from a Grace invented, dreamed of by drunkards and the wizards of false dawn, electrical flight made possible by the investigations of worms zoned in Dixie, O world lost, O world gained for lies, O white writing of a doomed Palooka, a joker gone wild on blarney from the Rhine, but, hey …write me some lines, can you? Or call in one of them wannabes who’ll do it all for love, which is the Gateless Gate, the faceless and nameless, lossless and gainless; feed me, Roger, as I have fed thee, give me your death, Roger, the real death. Burn for me, Roger, O burn for me.
* * *
I picked up the phone. I didn’t want to.
The guy on the other end said, “Roger there?”
I told him no.
“Well, dig. When he gets back you tell him that I’m gonna kick his face down his throat.”
I paused to write it down.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah-yeah.”
“So, what do you think? What is your response to that?”
“Well, I’m writing it down so I’ll remember. Is that OK?”
I heard breathing. Then he started talking again, only real fast and it was a lot of crap that didn’t make any sense.
I says, “Wait, wait. I can’t get all that.”
“Well, fuck you, then.” And he hung up.
I left the note for Roger and went back to sleep. I guess that’s what I was doing. When I woke up, Roger was there, looking down at the note.
“What is this, may I ask?”
“Oh, some guy. He called and said all that. After awhile I lost interest, I think.”
“You think. Do you want to go on living here?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Then learn to take messages. What is all this other lard? Neo Beatnick?”
“Hey, but Rog. I just took the call. I tried to write it down.”
“So what’s this? ‘WILL WRITE FOR MONEY’? Can you explain such a thing?”
“No. I don’t remember. Was I dreaming or what?”
“I should put you in a box full of holes.”
“You think that would help?”
He shook his head and the rain flew off his face and wet my drawings.
“Get me some beer with a salami sandwich beside it, and beside that a magazine with articles about me throughout.”
“I can do that.”
“No, you can’t. Go to sleep.”
“OK, Rog. But maybe you better call this guy.”
“I won’t do that. I’ll never do that. Good night.”
He was wearing a beautiful camel hair top hat with a band that had a nice flat bow tied into it, if that is possible. He shook the rain from this hat before he left the room, wetting my drawings further. Then I fell asleep at the desk under a tensor light which seemed to draw a bead on just one little part of my head, maybe the best part.
* * *
“Put that thing down. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going to put it down. I’m not going to.”
Roger wiped his face with a large monogrammed napkin, folded it neatly and placed it on the table beside his plate. Then he stood up, walked over to me and removed the gun from my hand. He snapped out the clip and put it in his vest pocket. Then he set the gun down on the table, at the other place setting across from his own. He took a breath in. Then he slapped my face on both sides many times. I was probably very red. If I were in company people would either avoid me or say clever things about sun block, etc., the more perceptive among them even remark on the extreme prejudice of the invitation to the dueling site.
“Do we have further business here?” Roger said.
I told him we didn’t.
“So, go to bed, then.”
“Yeah but … do I have to sleep at the desk?”
He looked at me for a long time. There was a Great Compassion upon him. Then he said, “No, Brento. Remove the objects from the desk and put them in the closet. Be sure and place each object on its proper shelf. Return to the desk. Turn it over and open the large drawer containing your bed. There you may retire for the evening. Do I make myself clear? And Brento? If you ever point a gun at me again I shall have you bronzed. Night now.”
“Good night, sir. Thank you, sir.”
* * *
ROGER IN HIS OWN WORDS:
When I was a child … it seems a thousand centuries ago now … I gently rowed my boat down the stream until I came to the House of My Friend. I was welcomed by his Dog, who barked and snapped at me, knowing that I was a bleeder and that it would make me sore afraid. Hence when I entered the House of My Friend I was sweating and disheveled. My Friend’s Mother asked, “Who’s this little snot?”
My Friend said, “That is Roger, the Handsome. He is my Friend, faithful and just to me. He promises to be a Great Industrialist one day. He has sworn to do so in Writing. The Dog, Willard of Ivanhoe, has distempered my Friend and must perforce be put to sleep. Do so at once, mother.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I disclaimed. “For the Dog broke no skin of mine and so did not flood your yard with the Blood of Life. He will, however, be sentenced. I’d say, Oh, five years at boarding, three for good behavior. With a first offender status he should be back here, entirely reinvested with dignity, in a year and a half.”
“Lose this snot, Brento,” the Mother said, and flew out the window. The Dog followed suit as best he could, having no wings. He was obliged to make use of the Ladder of Lights. This eventually brought about the Fall of Man due to slipping on Dog Shit made famous in Holy Writ, the which who do you think wrote? Moi? That is correct.
My Enemies having departed for the nonce, I took the opportunity to go about the House of my Friend destroying all of his playthings. I did this to provide him with his first Life Lesson, which is that Toys are Made to be Broken. I left him there, weeping.
What followed is well documented and I do not find it necessary to amend any of the available histories in my own account.
This is the Full Truth to the Best of My Knowledge, which is Infinite.
* * *
So, Roger comes over to my place and breaks all my toys. I retaliate. This goes on for years. Often we must separate, live in different time zones with mountains and valleys and various interesting places to visit in between, a common distraction to, and known prophylactic against, warfare. Even so, we often corresponded, friendly at first, then showing not a little bitchiness. Contention ensues, finally outright epistolary warfare. These are punctuated by long distance phone calls of truce, apology, tears. With the coming of the internet we preserved an unquiet peace of sorts, for there is just enough of a distancing effect due to a certain neutrality of tone which only skilled writers (and readers, of course!) can overcome, and in spite of this there is often misunderstanding. So, at various times, Roger and I would break off communications after even a minor dispute so as not to allow the whole thing to escalate into the wasteful exercise of what someone has wisely called recreational malice. Besides, we are older now, in fact getting on to being codgers. We are forgetful, repetitious, and show a certain want of humor in our understanding of the ways of humans these days. We both agree that things have gotten worse, of course, which is the distinguishing mark of codgers throughout time. Wisdom speaks against this, and I am known to hear its voice in my more lucid moments, usually attendant upon a good blow job, in most instances performed by my wife but sometimes by the little courtesan who lives down the lane. Roger says that passion has deserted him completely. I don’t really believe this, coming from him, for he was always a horn dog and made successful moves upon all my women, even my current wife, yet I have heard others of our vintage confess to the same departure of inspiration, some with great relief, and medical expertise will testify to the veracity of such claims.
Yet I must report one incident of recency which has me pissed off to the degree that I find it difficult to keep out of the whirlpools of obsessive/compulsive disorderliness hence I gyrate round in a spiraling orbit which grows smaller and smaller until I fear that soon it will come to utter forth its distress in terms of monosyllables, little turning chips of word fragments which sound for all the world like itty-bitty, over bred dogs choking on pizza … Never mind. (“Recency” is not a word, by the way, thought you could get me there, didn’t you, asshole?) Anyway. Anyway. When I was a boy I’d get drunk with some guys and we’d all pile over there late at night, Roger’s place, and hang out. At some point I’d ask to have a word with him and so we’d go back to the den and I’d ask him, “What do you think? Consider my philosophy, my morals, my methods and way of being” and he’d tell me what an asshole I was. “Have you ever learned to rope a horse, saddle it, climb up there and suffer the punishment you need to in order to break that horse? No? And why? Because you’ve never tried. Which is why you are a failure, Powers. And have you hitchhiked across the country and gotten sodomized by men in powerful cars? Of course not. And what about pigs? Ever stepped into the ring with a pig? Ever hoped to? What a waste of human potential. Admit it. You ain’t going anywhere, Powers. You’ll sit right there until you are discovered by archeologists. ‘Here!’ they’ll say. ‘Here’s where the human animal chewed its feet off.’ Now get on back in there and roll some weed.’”
Ah, yes, I realize that I bear grudges which warp time, make it fly back into my face and insult me yet further. So let us be gentle, let us continue in a gentler vein …
Now and then he sends me an email telling me I am a stupid motherfucker, to which I reply fuck you, too. He becomes argumentative. He reminds me of my various failures in life – as a Cool Dude, for example, which does make me ashamed. I remind him that I am no longer his little potty, the receptacle of his vile projections. He quotes scripture, implying that I am. I remind him of his status in my estimation as a boy from hell. He promises to go weewee in my face. In a pre-emptive strike, I send him doodoo via snail mail. Some while later I receive a package of many boxes inside other boxes. After no little effort I come at last to the wrapping paper which has seals for your protection and discover the Nautilus Shell Containing the Unspeakable. This is the event of reagency, I mean recency, no, not that, never mind. Here I must end. Except to say … well, look, I’m going to get you, Roger. I’m going to kick your face down your throat, you hear me, bugger eater? When next I see you walking down the street with your lattes, looking all handsome and smug and stuff. For now, though, well, for now, all I’ve got to say to you is pooey on you, Roger. Pooey on you forever!
* * *
2: BEND THAT SPOON, MAKES STEEL AS LIQUID
Roger sat in his confessional. This is where he stayed now, hearing them out, trying to forgive in his own cold heart, handing out penances; he liked doing it, made sure they were severe, extreme prejudice of penance: scourgings, ripping of the unclean flesh, beds of nails which murdered sleep, Roger, forgive us, Roger, Roger.
Well, I had something for the Holy One. Yes. I had come upon a Power. Minor, yes, but a Power, all the same. Perhaps others would follow shortly upon, for when such things seized you, a lot of other stuff followed, then reporters, interviews, a whole new way of life for our boy, fame, fame O.
I took my seat in the confessional. The door slid open.
“What is it, criminal?” he said, his voice full of crackling skin.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said hastily. “I shot the sheriff, also his favorite deputy, Terrible Winston. I took the name of the Lord in vain thus: ‘Jee-zuz Kee-rysto, where’s my goddamn satellites?’ Bore false witness, telling others that Bristol hit me, made me black and blue in the face, that the world was made with eggs and milk, ten percent inspiration, the rest expiration, some bird droppings, and a big spring. I fucked my neighbor’s ass, yelled at the hero to whom I report, told an officer of the law that he was a cheap enforcer serving the Boss, Darkness. Other things I can’t remember. This stands out from all the rest, though, Roger Vertigo: I can bend your spoon. Make the steel as liquid.”
He burst from his obscurity. “What?” he thundered.
I looked up into his eyes like saucers. I mean hubcaps, chrome, polished with emery cloth by guilty hands.
“Yes, sir. This I can do. Bring it to me and I shall bend it. With my mind.” I stood and glared at him as only a Man of Power glares, with the gay and dancing beams of recreational malice. Something like that.
“Show us,” he ordered.
“I’ll need the spoon,” I reminded him.
“Fuck the spoon. I’ll give you spoon, heretic. I’ll give you several, all the spoons of this land. I’ll send horses, wagons, convoys of trucks with good old boys inside. These will bring me the spoons. This land is famous for them. They are of the enameled species with little pictures painted upon them in this intractable medium. Pictures of what? What do you think? Pictures of ME. And you know what shit comes down a visiting upon a boy who defaces my image. You, yourself, have suffered for such, among your many sufferings, usually brought on by yourself. I’ve seen you fall into crime over the years. You began, the reader may recall, by setting me on fire many years ago. We were mere boys, yet you could do a thing like that even then. The reader may recall how you went to prison, a virtual school of crime, and came out very learned. Now you say you can bend the spoon. So be it. You bend one spoon, fucko, and the crime of sorcery will earn you your third strike.”
When the spoons arrived I took center stage while a congregation of sheep and goats and good old boys gathered and made themselves as comfortable as they could upon the hard wood of pews.
All the spoons of the land were brought before me in wheel barrows. I closed my eyes, gathering the Force of Prana which I command. Suddenly all the spoons arose and bowed. Some of the enamel cracked, making sounds like the voice of Roger. A great cry arose among the congregation.
“Our spoons! Our chief export! What have you done to the economy?”
“What has he done to the economy?”
“He has brought us down with perversion of force, with profane power.”
“What an asshole!”
“Yeah!”
I stood proudly in the face of this despise in my own land. I even smiled in the face of it.
Roger walked among them, swinging his train like a great saurian tail. Many of the congregation were blown off their feet by the great wind it made.
“Well, my people,” he said. “What shall he pay? What consequences shall he suffer for turning our spoons to drool upon the stage. Shall he, himself, be made crooked? Shall his flesh run like water?”
“He shall be so bent, his flesh will so run,” they echoed.
“Is this the judgment of Heaven and Earth as united by Roger Vertigo?”
“It is the judgment. It’s the judgment.”
“So be it.”
He turned to me, where I stood proudly still in a swill of melted spoons.
“It is the judgment of Heaven and Earth that you shall go forth, never to return, go forth as a crooked river of running flesh and flow through the land until you come to the sea where you shall merge with the Ocean of the End, even unto the place marked ‘Here be dragons’, and these shall consume you, they shall drink you with their lunch. Go now, you weary us.”
So I went, feeling flesh flow away as a crooked water. The spoons came with me, having no family now, no longer of the metal family and worse, art no longer, unexportable, having no impact upon the tourist trade, ruined by sorcery to go forth upon the land in the form of a lava in Brento’s sad flow, one with the River Brento, which is big bad river, a crooked river bringing mischief and drunkenness upon the greenery which fronts his shores. Brento! Old man, Brento, he just keeps flowin, just keeps flowin along. What an asshole.
* * *
3: THE PRISONER OF ROGER
Roger oozed through the heater grill and gradually took form as a cool guy. He wore a black cardigan, some kind of cool shirt, beige slacks and Birkinstocks without socks. Cool. Cool.
"What are you drinking?" he asked, looking suspicious.
"Vodka and Diet Coke," I confessed.
"You are a fragmented mind," he said easily, letting out a long trail of cigarette smoke which formed very interesting patterns in the air: MGs, spurs such as only a Knight of Pure Heart could wear, a silver diplodocus, a variorum edition of "The Da Vinci Code", the need to be loved, the want of a reason, the fear that has no face. "You are a picnic on the grass in a place where grass will not glow, only dry tubes, lacking in that liquid sound one craves while listening to Henri Mancini. You are everything one doesn't want on the grass. Everywhere you go they say unto you, 'Keep off the fucking grass, you snoid. Keep off the grass, and keep away from my daughter. What's more, keep away from my wife. I know you are trying to seduce her with your, your SYSTEM, but it won't work, not with my wife. Wouldn't work with my horse, for that matter.' Wait. I'm starting to bleed into my own imaginings, allowing autobiography to contaminate them ... But what the fuck, Powers, while we're at it: that SYSTEM you tried on Monica. Did you really think it would work? All that oldy horror movie stuff with the electrical arcs and the YAH-HA-HA-HA? Did you? Did you? What a dork. Would you like something real to drink? Something with Pure Water of Life and Single Malt? Do you even know what I am TALKING ABOUT, Powers? What a snoid. Go home. Why don't you go home?"
"You are keeping me prisoner here, Roger. That's why. You are keeping me prisoner and hoping for a handsome ransom from my parents to get me back."
He put his forefinger, the one with the long nail on it, up to his chin to indicate thoughtfulness. Oh, he was cool: knew all the moves, all the business. Could kill him for it, really. Should have.
"That's not bad," he said. "'Handsome Ransom'. Is that one of mine you stole. Surely it is. You don't say things like that."
"It was an accident."
"Which is why you will be sent to the galleys. For five years. It will give you some bicep/tricep. You'll take on the rugged look of a man who's experienced some suffering. Then you will be ready to learn True Cool. Then you can say things like that. And mean it. Silly toad. Go lie down on the roof and howl. Perhaps you'll draw something interesting in through the windows. My wife enjoyed that last thing, that nosferatu dancer with the slippers, you know, which came to a point, very long and curved, so long and curved in fact that they need to be chained to his belt, but he didn't mind, he was in on the belt monopoly up Turkestan way, strongest belts in the fokking woild, boyo. But hey. How do you like my new short? You passed it some months ago when you were brought before me in chains. You could drive a short like that you cooperate, get that dough from the padres. Hell, pencil dick, I'll let you use that thing to paint my wife's nails. There's a little brush on the end of it. This I know because I have seen. In the still of the night when you go weewee my cameras take it all in: the pencil, the brush, the eraser. What sort of genes do you have? I mean, where does a human come up with such genes? Are you an atavistic flashback to some former evolutionary adjustment we had to make, I don't know what for, but certainly something for real very weird, perhaps falling from the sky, a bird, a horrible dry bird, a bird who has seen God and said, 'NO WAY, YAWAY, I will NOT haul that thing for you down all those streets with thousands of amused vendors calling me a three-headed bastard with nowhere to lay them down all three, what's more can't even agree on what their fucking names are ...' ? You know, that bird. Anyway, where was I? The short. Forget it. Repossessed, I think. By Asmodeus, who is the Devil's smarter brother. Anyway, the sumbitch hauled ass outa here with it, kept the thing in first all the way to 60, blew the clutch in a Max Plank minute. No, I mean Borges. Bores. One of them asswipes. Wanna try some of my discos? I have many, many discos. Play em with a bamboo needle. Sounds better. All this mythology about diamonds. Sheer crap. Bamboo is already musical. And dig. Have you ever heard Como No sing the Immolation Scene? What a gas. And on shelac, with bamboo. Sheise, Meise, that's some fine shining sound, comes from the Heaven Designed by Moi Aussi, who is the very Fine Aussi."
My father stood at the door with many bags of money. It was the kind of money that you have to bite for it to work, heavy metal money. Roger ceased talking (rare for him). He came forward. He opened the screen door with all the holes in it from arrows and small caliber bullets, and took the bag from my father, who remained outside. My father would not enter Roger's house. He said it smelled of unspeakable curries. Roger reached in the back, withdrew a coin and bit, bit with feeling, nodded his approval. He then put the coin back, knotted the bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. Then he gestured with his chin towards me.
"Get this evil dream outa here. Can't imagine why you'd pay so much to have him back. I'll need to examine that in my thoughts. Perhaps I shall even abduct him again and have him examined by my staff. Ah, what they hey. Fuck off, both of you."
* * *
4: ROGER'S SHORT
So I drove. Roger held forth in the usual way. Loved to hear himself talk, he did, and he always forced his voice into a lower register. This made him sound more important to himself. When he got excited, though, he squeaked: it was like the whistling sound you can make by releasing air out of the nozzle of a balloon and at the same time squeezing it, strangely erotic sort of business to kids I guess because of the titlike quality. Always respect the titlike quality, know what I'm saying? Roger was yammering away, I don't know what he was talking about and neither did he only don't tell him that, he'll be hurt, but I was branching off, fantasizing again. It was dark now and slightly rainy. The windshield kept blurring. At first I used the wiper, I set it at an intermittent rate, but then I just shut the fucker off. Roger didn't notice, even though this could mean the death of his precious Hugh Heffner vehicle, but dig, I was getting this apparition, it was a girl's face emerging out of the blurry window fogging and rain, she had these large, clear and fragile eyes that suggested a certain fear and awe, well, not quite, maybe just curiosity at who this could be she was seeing in front of her, this silly ass wannabe and his silly ass Guru of Cool next to him, going all Cicero to his own private audience (imagining a vast Senate with rows and rows and rows of fools in togas crying, "SHIT yeah! Tell it to us, Tully!") ... yet these eyes held no judgment, no condemnation but seemed faintly sad, and there was forgiveness. Yes. Don't usually go for that effect but maybe it was the rain and the sense of undisclosed longing that comes with it, longing without an object, I should say, and all the drinking I'd been doing and all the come ons and dry fucking and broken branches of sexual fantasy going on back at Roger’s but ... well then some other thing began to emerge: it was this butterfly thing looked to be an art object, fabricated at least, maybe a pin or a pendant and I was thinking: is she communicating something here? Is this a picture of what had been going on, or a wish, a dream of what could be made out of it. For what is more blatantly emblematic of transformation than a butterfly. "Can you see it that way?" she was asking. "Instead of judging? Instead of condemning?" Well, of course I said No but she gave me pause.
"Trying to get it together," Roger was saying. "Trying to move into the new thing with grace but it's hard, slick. People get to taking you the way you want them to and then you can't escape. You've got to be that way. You've got to be Roger. And even when you're so tired of it you want to tell them to Hey, just fuck off, I'm a differnt cat here now, they won't let you. Rather see you dead than somebody else they've gotten comfortable with. especially a cat they can dismiss as ... you know, Roger. That's just old Roger being old Roger doing his Roger."
"Which is why you changed your clothes and stopped doing beebop awhile ago, nez paw?" I asked.
"Well, you start with what you've got, slick. Only so many changes. Check out your closet sometime. What's in there. Only so many changes. Einstein had several sets of the same set of clothes hanging there in his closet. He just changed when he felt he needed to. There was not always agreement on this point."
He looked over at me for a confirmation and I went HAH!
The girl was still there. The image of the butterfly was breaking up into a pattern of running streams. The girl herself had not changed at all. She was frozen now. Like a photograph. I began to wonder if Roger had a slide projector installed in his famous Playboy short.
I said, "Roger, is there a slide projector installed in this vehicle? Be honest."
"You mean as a feature? An extra you pay the extra bread for, more than it's worth?"
"Yes, that sort of thing. Only a slide projector that puts up images on your windshield to entertain you, or to help you suicide through fascination with the images instead of watching the goddamned road like you're supposed to?'
"You have some interesting ideas."
"So, it's my idea then. I mean, it's not a feature of your Playboy Short here."
"I think they would have told me that. I mean, it would have helped them to explain why the thing cost me so much, don't you think?"
That satisfied me. But the satisfaction made the lovely image slowly fade. See, this is what you get when you slip out of the Dreamtime of symbolism into the Land of the Automobile and the Home of Commerce for which we have fought and died in the darkness of foreign lands. Fuck me and save matches. The Brento don't like that. This pisseth off the Brento. He must spank. He turns to Roger, therefore, and begins to upbraid him for his phoniness after the manner of Holden Caulfield, who had been his only real exemplar in Philosophy prior to Guru Roger.
The latter agreed. He was a Puritan, we all are, by heritage. We carry a Guilt Gene, Guilt Karma, whatever. We know ourselves for Assholes of Fictitious Being. So I set Roger back for a time. I was given that power somehow, perhaps by the vision in the windshield brought to me by Late Capitalist Greed and the General Awfulness of Us but it worked against itself for the good of Vision and Prophesy. Hence I prophesied.
"You will need to jump into the Ganges, Roger. For what you've done. For what you are. You will need to jump into that Ancient River which every conceivable kind a Untouchable Asshole, gnut, gnat, Ganesh and every other gruesome gob of gonna which you have always been gonna do, all your broken promises said into a broken mirror of narcissism while noting your fine jaw line and well kept coif, your ascot and cardigan, all the boss bullshit you let stream forth from your well lathed lips which you also employ in foreplay amidst the deployment of other techniques you got from those motherfuckers at the Cool School for Players in Pasadena, phoniest place on this fallen planet. Get thee to the Ganges, Roger. Jump in. Swallow water. Swim deep. Breath. Breath under water till the end, Roger. This is what is called for. Ask the Reverend Sun, ask the Reverend Moon. Go on, Roger. Go on."
Soon enough though the Power fell away from me because I had put it to evil purpose. I had reversed the process. I had turned Roger back into a cocoon. His wife would be pissed if I brought him back home that way, and since I wanted to get into her pants I couldn't have her pissed at me. I therefore supplicated the Locapalas of Inferiority and became small. Soon I had reacquired the round shoulders, pimples and purple shirt of slum youth, and felt my face being slapped again and again.
"You dumbshit! What a dumbshit! Watch the road. What do you think this is, Disneyland? Think you're on some dumb kidcar ride here you don't have to be responsible for who you are? Get it together, slick. I brought you out here to make you into a human and you're failing me all the time. You're failing me. You'll never change. You'll always be dumbass butterfly boy trying to find your way back to Disneyland. Now, drive like a man, fool!"
* * *
ROGER TODAY
As time progressed, Roger grew old and grizzled, possibly bearded: he wasn’t sure. That he was silly everyone agreed. It was the consensus, that old time consensus. Can’t escape it, buddy-bud. Yet Roger had had a good life, would no doubt die in his sleep, while his therapist, Oliver, who was a genuinely worthy man, one might even say good, would go on suffering until the end. A pisser, no question. Roger would feel briefly regretful about such things, then go on working his lollypop around in his mouth, reducing it finally to just a little sweet bump on the end of its supporting stick, at which point he would take it out of his mouth, throw it at some passerby, and replace it with another, perhaps one of a differing flavor. This was part of Roger’s fair and cozy life, which also included an ocean view, a billiard table, a Tesla, and a professional cocksucker. This last he named Melisanda and remembered her birthdays. He also put her children through the school.
Not much happened to Roger, and what did happen was predictable. Someone threw a newspaper at his house, having already read it. Someone else would put up signs accusing Roger of various crimes. When he took his daily walk he read them all, weighed their contents against the truth of the matter, and went on. When he returned, the signs would be gone, having been removed by members of his staff. Then around 1 PM he received a phone call from his adversary. They exchanged a few pleasantries, then went about the business of blaming each other. This usually killed the remaining daylight hours. As Roger raged and trembled the sun fell slowly into the sea in order to visit other parts of the earth, to light them and provide warmth, to shine upon the guilty and the innocent with equal care.
Roger consulted the paper to see if any of his friends had died. Death is not an event in life, thank heavens, but it does appear in newspapers. Are these a part of life? Well, indirectly. They abide within it, influence it, record its various little thingies. He couldn’t think of a better word just yet but he would. When it came time to say anything out loud about newspapers and their effects upon life, he would find a far better word than “thingie”.
His former wife had called herself “Roger’s thingie” when explaining why she was there with him. In the house. At the party. Why it would be she who had her hand in his pants and not someone more worthy. It occurred to Roger now that women seemed to want to touch his penis. Just touch it. Little else. He often examined it, trying to find its attractions. Well, it had a grip. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself … the phrase came to mind. Others, as well. But the point is, grip, the operative word, was … well, the point, he supposed, being operative. They wanted to grip his penis so as to operate it, like a machine. Come now, Roger. Come now. Language has its own funny little life. It runs away with itself. It can make you do things you don’t want to, rather push you around as if you were a recruit, a soldier of language. Follow me, boys! Do what I say.
Roger, finding none of his dead there, folded the obituaries into a paper airplane, one of those Dutch jobs. When he had done, he sailed his craft way out into the morning, it was almost sublime. He still recognized the sublime, respected it. He made a note in his diary every time he felt he had experienced it. Most recently there were the words, “Today a camel drifted across the lawn. Sublime.” He had wondered about the camel briefly … after it had stopped his mind with sublimity. Wondered what the bloody thing was doing out here, so far from Los Angeles. Camels all over L. A. It was a new fad. That’s what they make there: fads. Fortunately they didn’t have to themselves make the camels (think of what a committee of producers and union writers would come up with and name Camel!). Later his adversary called, saying, “Well, how’d you like the camel, you dripping dick?”
“Inexpressible. All I can say at this point. I’ll get back.”
The adversary, call him HD, sneezed and hung up.
Roger went to his Entertainment Center and warmed up the tubes. He needed music today. Harsh, pounding sounds. The war symphonies of Shostakovich. Mahler’s “progressive tonality”. When the HD called back he’d put on Ornette Coleman to irritate him. “I can’t think with all that scratching,” he’d complain. “You can’t think without it. You can’t think at all,” Roger would counter. They had repeated this exchange several times over the years.
Funny that HD would still hate him. It had been so long. You’d think he’d get tired of it; want to try love or something, give peace a chance. Not HD, though. He carried his sense of betrayal about like a sack of dead babies. “See, here is little Claudius, who might have been a breaker of horses; this the shell of m’lady, Calarice, who might have swung; Terrence, a pirate in potentia; Bill, the boxer; Barbara, the head chef at Four Seasons; she would have had tits to die for. Oh, what lights you punched out, ugly boy!”
For Roger no longer hated HD. He never had, really. He was annoyed by the things HD did to extract revenge, stealing his identity, for example. He’d gotten away with it for a whole week once, in Las Vegas. Went around annoying everyone. “I am Roger Vertigo and I will break your world.” Peeing in their drinks. Feeling up the cocktail waitresses. He’s getting more than I ever did from those bimbos, Roger thought. Of course, I hate Vegas. Only go there because the other fools think it’s cool to close deals whilst floating on huge duckies amid guzzling Russian vodka, or even in the hot tub upstairs with those same bimbos servicing them, taking gulps of air every now and then through glass straws as they suck away.
HD had been a failed actor, then a failed MFA (all MFA’s are failures!) Finally he settled down in Nova Burbank, running guns for the gangs. He liked to compare himself to Rimbaud. “I quit it all when I was eighteen,” he told everyone. “Quit out of revulsion.” He lives comfortably but hates himself. Roger considered: I could say he projects his own self loathing upon me but really, there’s plenty to go around. He can hate both himself and me … Oh, and the government, Oprah, the dog of Oprah, her guts, her tits and ass. Such a nice woman, yet all the best people have to pretend they hate her. It’s not fair. But I’ve just included HD among all the best people.
Roger made himself a smoothie. Then an omelette and toast. He said meal chants before and after consuming these.
When he was a little boy and I was a little boy, Roger came over to my house and broke all my toys, so then I went over to his house and broke all his toys, too. So then he set me on fire and I had to go to the hospital for many years. When I came back he was almost grown up and so was I only he was several grades ahead of me in school. I tried to catch up but I got tired of people calling me a dumbass, so then I quit school and entered upon the life of a man wearing a ski mask knocking over convenience stores; I even had all the pretty tattoos and piercings you need for that profession.
One day though I run into Roger coming out of Serious Coffee with a stack of lattes in one hand and a cell phone in the other and he was yelling at the person on the other end. I went over to him anyway and I says, “Yo, Roger,” and he just looked at me. I think if he had a hand free he would maybe snap his fingers many times in an effort to remember me, the guy he had set on fire years ago and yet who looked just like he did when that happened. Meaning here we were both thirty-five years old only I looked like a little kid. (Well, I have a slight growth of beard because I don’t like shaving. Well, really, it’s because business men in my profession are supposed to. Actually, I notice even guys in suits don’t shave either now, it’s cool or something. You get these actors and model types with dolls dripping all over them and they don’t shave.) Anyways, so I says, “Yo, Roger” again and for some reason he remembers (this is what convinces me there is some very deep connection between us over lifetimes), and so he goes all pale in the face with guilt. He hangs up on the guy he’s talking to and throws his phone across the street (he can afford to do these things, I guess), and he says, “YO, BRENTO!” and he hugs me all to hell like I’m one of his favorite people or something.
Well, then I says, “You remember many years ago when you set me on fire?” and he looks down and says, “Yeah.” So, I pause for a minute but then I say, “Well, I figure you owe me one, don’t you?” and he says, “Yeah, I guess I do,” and I says, “Well, yeah, but what do you think that would be?” and he says, “Well, hey, I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one, bro, I’m real busy right now, you see, and …” “Well, what if I set you on fire and we call it even?” I says. “You carry any lighters, ignition devices, charcoal starter, briquettes, things of this nature?” and he says, “Nah, I quit that back in Koo-wait,” I says, “Dude, you gotta keep current you wanna maintain a portfolio in the life.”
“Well, hey, Brento? ‘The life’? I ain’t in the life. Never was. Never will be.”
Standing at a distance now, I don’t know how he did it.
“Like to oblige you there, big guy, I really would, but you see I have responsibilities; I’m a citizen now, Police Athletic League, Ten Year Chip Man, sandwiches for lunch with no bread on them. I work out with disgraced Presidents, Men At Arms of the Billy Ray Brass Band, up to my nuts in testimonials, wall to wall mirror maze futures, invisible real estate. I’m a Made Man, son. Now what can I do for you?”
“Heh. I told you so, what you can do: so just be nice about it and go up in flames.”
“Or what? Hey, Brento?”
“Hey, Roger?”
Little pause here. He needs to negotiate a little with the physical world, the lattes, he gives me one, takes one for himself, tosses the others at a homeless person wearing a sign that says, “WILL KILL FOR FOOD”.
Then Roger says to me, “Lookee, now. I got a line of credit at all these places, take your pick: your Rimbaud’s Casuistry, your Chemical Hope, your Travel Careers. And here’s some more.” (He’s fanning out card keys like a dealer, all of them with 3-D logos in candy ass colors, some even with tits that jump right out at you. He’s a desperate man who desperately needs to perpetuate his life eternally, only he knows it’s about to change in some ugly respect because I’m here.)
I says, “Hey, Roger? Why are you doing all that? I don’t need that. I need your absolute, undubious destruction for all time, bro. I need to see you burning, Roger, burning like the House of Desire itself. I want you on the top of the hill, lighting the village for our people.”
And I led him, led him down into the dungeon of my Keep, and I spoke to him in the Voice of His Own Conscience:
“Roger. Ah, Roger,” I said, and there were the phony echoing effects for which Roger is famous along with the dry ice all over the place to give you this fake fog as we crept slowly down the wet, sulking stairs of the Keep and Beethoven or who cares was playing, and I spoke in a bing-bong basso profundo which I amplified by means of various cheap electronics any hobbyist can obtain at one of Roger’s FX For Less franchises (“Become who you CAN be, Manage Like Roger at: FX FOR LESS!” know that one, right?) … for here we have geometries of unmistakable perversion, a house of false witness, a hangman’s dream of shadows against a wet wall, rats swinging by their tails and singing a song you never learned from your Mama, no, you learned it from the boys down in the lost neighborhoods of past lapses, past removes from a Grace invented, dreamed of by drunkards and the wizards of false dawn, electrical flight made possible by the investigations of worms zoned in Dixie, O world lost, O world gained for lies, O white writing of a doomed Palooka, a joker gone wild on blarney from the Rhine, but, hey …write me some lines, can you? Or call in one of them wannabes who’ll do it all for love, which is the Gateless Gate, the faceless and nameless, lossless and gainless; feed me, Roger, as I have fed thee, give me your death, Roger, the real death. Burn for me, Roger, O burn for me.
* * *
I picked up the phone. I didn’t want to.
The guy on the other end said, “Roger there?”
I told him no.
“Well, dig. When he gets back you tell him that I’m gonna kick his face down his throat.”
I paused to write it down.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah-yeah.”
“So, what do you think? What is your response to that?”
“Well, I’m writing it down so I’ll remember. Is that OK?”
I heard breathing. Then he started talking again, only real fast and it was a lot of crap that didn’t make any sense.
I says, “Wait, wait. I can’t get all that.”
“Well, fuck you, then.” And he hung up.
I left the note for Roger and went back to sleep. I guess that’s what I was doing. When I woke up, Roger was there, looking down at the note.
“What is this, may I ask?”
“Oh, some guy. He called and said all that. After awhile I lost interest, I think.”
“You think. Do you want to go on living here?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Then learn to take messages. What is all this other lard? Neo Beatnick?”
“Hey, but Rog. I just took the call. I tried to write it down.”
“So what’s this? ‘WILL WRITE FOR MONEY’? Can you explain such a thing?”
“No. I don’t remember. Was I dreaming or what?”
“I should put you in a box full of holes.”
“You think that would help?”
He shook his head and the rain flew off his face and wet my drawings.
“Get me some beer with a salami sandwich beside it, and beside that a magazine with articles about me throughout.”
“I can do that.”
“No, you can’t. Go to sleep.”
“OK, Rog. But maybe you better call this guy.”
“I won’t do that. I’ll never do that. Good night.”
He was wearing a beautiful camel hair top hat with a band that had a nice flat bow tied into it, if that is possible. He shook the rain from this hat before he left the room, wetting my drawings further. Then I fell asleep at the desk under a tensor light which seemed to draw a bead on just one little part of my head, maybe the best part.
* * *
“Put that thing down. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going to put it down. I’m not going to.”
Roger wiped his face with a large monogrammed napkin, folded it neatly and placed it on the table beside his plate. Then he stood up, walked over to me and removed the gun from my hand. He snapped out the clip and put it in his vest pocket. Then he set the gun down on the table, at the other place setting across from his own. He took a breath in. Then he slapped my face on both sides many times. I was probably very red. If I were in company people would either avoid me or say clever things about sun block, etc., the more perceptive among them even remark on the extreme prejudice of the invitation to the dueling site.
“Do we have further business here?” Roger said.
I told him we didn’t.
“So, go to bed, then.”
“Yeah but … do I have to sleep at the desk?”
He looked at me for a long time. There was a Great Compassion upon him. Then he said, “No, Brento. Remove the objects from the desk and put them in the closet. Be sure and place each object on its proper shelf. Return to the desk. Turn it over and open the large drawer containing your bed. There you may retire for the evening. Do I make myself clear? And Brento? If you ever point a gun at me again I shall have you bronzed. Night now.”
“Good night, sir. Thank you, sir.”
* * *
ROGER IN HIS OWN WORDS:
When I was a child … it seems a thousand centuries ago now … I gently rowed my boat down the stream until I came to the House of My Friend. I was welcomed by his Dog, who barked and snapped at me, knowing that I was a bleeder and that it would make me sore afraid. Hence when I entered the House of My Friend I was sweating and disheveled. My Friend’s Mother asked, “Who’s this little snot?”
My Friend said, “That is Roger, the Handsome. He is my Friend, faithful and just to me. He promises to be a Great Industrialist one day. He has sworn to do so in Writing. The Dog, Willard of Ivanhoe, has distempered my Friend and must perforce be put to sleep. Do so at once, mother.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I disclaimed. “For the Dog broke no skin of mine and so did not flood your yard with the Blood of Life. He will, however, be sentenced. I’d say, Oh, five years at boarding, three for good behavior. With a first offender status he should be back here, entirely reinvested with dignity, in a year and a half.”
“Lose this snot, Brento,” the Mother said, and flew out the window. The Dog followed suit as best he could, having no wings. He was obliged to make use of the Ladder of Lights. This eventually brought about the Fall of Man due to slipping on Dog Shit made famous in Holy Writ, the which who do you think wrote? Moi? That is correct.
My Enemies having departed for the nonce, I took the opportunity to go about the House of my Friend destroying all of his playthings. I did this to provide him with his first Life Lesson, which is that Toys are Made to be Broken. I left him there, weeping.
What followed is well documented and I do not find it necessary to amend any of the available histories in my own account.
This is the Full Truth to the Best of My Knowledge, which is Infinite.
* * *
So, Roger comes over to my place and breaks all my toys. I retaliate. This goes on for years. Often we must separate, live in different time zones with mountains and valleys and various interesting places to visit in between, a common distraction to, and known prophylactic against, warfare. Even so, we often corresponded, friendly at first, then showing not a little bitchiness. Contention ensues, finally outright epistolary warfare. These are punctuated by long distance phone calls of truce, apology, tears. With the coming of the internet we preserved an unquiet peace of sorts, for there is just enough of a distancing effect due to a certain neutrality of tone which only skilled writers (and readers, of course!) can overcome, and in spite of this there is often misunderstanding. So, at various times, Roger and I would break off communications after even a minor dispute so as not to allow the whole thing to escalate into the wasteful exercise of what someone has wisely called recreational malice. Besides, we are older now, in fact getting on to being codgers. We are forgetful, repetitious, and show a certain want of humor in our understanding of the ways of humans these days. We both agree that things have gotten worse, of course, which is the distinguishing mark of codgers throughout time. Wisdom speaks against this, and I am known to hear its voice in my more lucid moments, usually attendant upon a good blow job, in most instances performed by my wife but sometimes by the little courtesan who lives down the lane. Roger says that passion has deserted him completely. I don’t really believe this, coming from him, for he was always a horn dog and made successful moves upon all my women, even my current wife, yet I have heard others of our vintage confess to the same departure of inspiration, some with great relief, and medical expertise will testify to the veracity of such claims.
Yet I must report one incident of recency which has me pissed off to the degree that I find it difficult to keep out of the whirlpools of obsessive/compulsive disorderliness hence I gyrate round in a spiraling orbit which grows smaller and smaller until I fear that soon it will come to utter forth its distress in terms of monosyllables, little turning chips of word fragments which sound for all the world like itty-bitty, over bred dogs choking on pizza … Never mind. (“Recency” is not a word, by the way, thought you could get me there, didn’t you, asshole?) Anyway. Anyway. When I was a boy I’d get drunk with some guys and we’d all pile over there late at night, Roger’s place, and hang out. At some point I’d ask to have a word with him and so we’d go back to the den and I’d ask him, “What do you think? Consider my philosophy, my morals, my methods and way of being” and he’d tell me what an asshole I was. “Have you ever learned to rope a horse, saddle it, climb up there and suffer the punishment you need to in order to break that horse? No? And why? Because you’ve never tried. Which is why you are a failure, Powers. And have you hitchhiked across the country and gotten sodomized by men in powerful cars? Of course not. And what about pigs? Ever stepped into the ring with a pig? Ever hoped to? What a waste of human potential. Admit it. You ain’t going anywhere, Powers. You’ll sit right there until you are discovered by archeologists. ‘Here!’ they’ll say. ‘Here’s where the human animal chewed its feet off.’ Now get on back in there and roll some weed.’”
Ah, yes, I realize that I bear grudges which warp time, make it fly back into my face and insult me yet further. So let us be gentle, let us continue in a gentler vein …
Now and then he sends me an email telling me I am a stupid motherfucker, to which I reply fuck you, too. He becomes argumentative. He reminds me of my various failures in life – as a Cool Dude, for example, which does make me ashamed. I remind him that I am no longer his little potty, the receptacle of his vile projections. He quotes scripture, implying that I am. I remind him of his status in my estimation as a boy from hell. He promises to go weewee in my face. In a pre-emptive strike, I send him doodoo via snail mail. Some while later I receive a package of many boxes inside other boxes. After no little effort I come at last to the wrapping paper which has seals for your protection and discover the Nautilus Shell Containing the Unspeakable. This is the event of reagency, I mean recency, no, not that, never mind. Here I must end. Except to say … well, look, I’m going to get you, Roger. I’m going to kick your face down your throat, you hear me, bugger eater? When next I see you walking down the street with your lattes, looking all handsome and smug and stuff. For now, though, well, for now, all I’ve got to say to you is pooey on you, Roger. Pooey on you forever!
* * *
2: BEND THAT SPOON, MAKES STEEL AS LIQUID
Roger sat in his confessional. This is where he stayed now, hearing them out, trying to forgive in his own cold heart, handing out penances; he liked doing it, made sure they were severe, extreme prejudice of penance: scourgings, ripping of the unclean flesh, beds of nails which murdered sleep, Roger, forgive us, Roger, Roger.
Well, I had something for the Holy One. Yes. I had come upon a Power. Minor, yes, but a Power, all the same. Perhaps others would follow shortly upon, for when such things seized you, a lot of other stuff followed, then reporters, interviews, a whole new way of life for our boy, fame, fame O.
I took my seat in the confessional. The door slid open.
“What is it, criminal?” he said, his voice full of crackling skin.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said hastily. “I shot the sheriff, also his favorite deputy, Terrible Winston. I took the name of the Lord in vain thus: ‘Jee-zuz Kee-rysto, where’s my goddamn satellites?’ Bore false witness, telling others that Bristol hit me, made me black and blue in the face, that the world was made with eggs and milk, ten percent inspiration, the rest expiration, some bird droppings, and a big spring. I fucked my neighbor’s ass, yelled at the hero to whom I report, told an officer of the law that he was a cheap enforcer serving the Boss, Darkness. Other things I can’t remember. This stands out from all the rest, though, Roger Vertigo: I can bend your spoon. Make the steel as liquid.”
He burst from his obscurity. “What?” he thundered.
I looked up into his eyes like saucers. I mean hubcaps, chrome, polished with emery cloth by guilty hands.
“Yes, sir. This I can do. Bring it to me and I shall bend it. With my mind.” I stood and glared at him as only a Man of Power glares, with the gay and dancing beams of recreational malice. Something like that.
“Show us,” he ordered.
“I’ll need the spoon,” I reminded him.
“Fuck the spoon. I’ll give you spoon, heretic. I’ll give you several, all the spoons of this land. I’ll send horses, wagons, convoys of trucks with good old boys inside. These will bring me the spoons. This land is famous for them. They are of the enameled species with little pictures painted upon them in this intractable medium. Pictures of what? What do you think? Pictures of ME. And you know what shit comes down a visiting upon a boy who defaces my image. You, yourself, have suffered for such, among your many sufferings, usually brought on by yourself. I’ve seen you fall into crime over the years. You began, the reader may recall, by setting me on fire many years ago. We were mere boys, yet you could do a thing like that even then. The reader may recall how you went to prison, a virtual school of crime, and came out very learned. Now you say you can bend the spoon. So be it. You bend one spoon, fucko, and the crime of sorcery will earn you your third strike.”
When the spoons arrived I took center stage while a congregation of sheep and goats and good old boys gathered and made themselves as comfortable as they could upon the hard wood of pews.
All the spoons of the land were brought before me in wheel barrows. I closed my eyes, gathering the Force of Prana which I command. Suddenly all the spoons arose and bowed. Some of the enamel cracked, making sounds like the voice of Roger. A great cry arose among the congregation.
“Our spoons! Our chief export! What have you done to the economy?”
“What has he done to the economy?”
“He has brought us down with perversion of force, with profane power.”
“What an asshole!”
“Yeah!”
I stood proudly in the face of this despise in my own land. I even smiled in the face of it.
Roger walked among them, swinging his train like a great saurian tail. Many of the congregation were blown off their feet by the great wind it made.
“Well, my people,” he said. “What shall he pay? What consequences shall he suffer for turning our spoons to drool upon the stage. Shall he, himself, be made crooked? Shall his flesh run like water?”
“He shall be so bent, his flesh will so run,” they echoed.
“Is this the judgment of Heaven and Earth as united by Roger Vertigo?”
“It is the judgment. It’s the judgment.”
“So be it.”
He turned to me, where I stood proudly still in a swill of melted spoons.
“It is the judgment of Heaven and Earth that you shall go forth, never to return, go forth as a crooked river of running flesh and flow through the land until you come to the sea where you shall merge with the Ocean of the End, even unto the place marked ‘Here be dragons’, and these shall consume you, they shall drink you with their lunch. Go now, you weary us.”
So I went, feeling flesh flow away as a crooked water. The spoons came with me, having no family now, no longer of the metal family and worse, art no longer, unexportable, having no impact upon the tourist trade, ruined by sorcery to go forth upon the land in the form of a lava in Brento’s sad flow, one with the River Brento, which is big bad river, a crooked river bringing mischief and drunkenness upon the greenery which fronts his shores. Brento! Old man, Brento, he just keeps flowin, just keeps flowin along. What an asshole.
* * *
3: THE PRISONER OF ROGER
Roger oozed through the heater grill and gradually took form as a cool guy. He wore a black cardigan, some kind of cool shirt, beige slacks and Birkinstocks without socks. Cool. Cool.
"What are you drinking?" he asked, looking suspicious.
"Vodka and Diet Coke," I confessed.
"You are a fragmented mind," he said easily, letting out a long trail of cigarette smoke which formed very interesting patterns in the air: MGs, spurs such as only a Knight of Pure Heart could wear, a silver diplodocus, a variorum edition of "The Da Vinci Code", the need to be loved, the want of a reason, the fear that has no face. "You are a picnic on the grass in a place where grass will not glow, only dry tubes, lacking in that liquid sound one craves while listening to Henri Mancini. You are everything one doesn't want on the grass. Everywhere you go they say unto you, 'Keep off the fucking grass, you snoid. Keep off the grass, and keep away from my daughter. What's more, keep away from my wife. I know you are trying to seduce her with your, your SYSTEM, but it won't work, not with my wife. Wouldn't work with my horse, for that matter.' Wait. I'm starting to bleed into my own imaginings, allowing autobiography to contaminate them ... But what the fuck, Powers, while we're at it: that SYSTEM you tried on Monica. Did you really think it would work? All that oldy horror movie stuff with the electrical arcs and the YAH-HA-HA-HA? Did you? Did you? What a dork. Would you like something real to drink? Something with Pure Water of Life and Single Malt? Do you even know what I am TALKING ABOUT, Powers? What a snoid. Go home. Why don't you go home?"
"You are keeping me prisoner here, Roger. That's why. You are keeping me prisoner and hoping for a handsome ransom from my parents to get me back."
He put his forefinger, the one with the long nail on it, up to his chin to indicate thoughtfulness. Oh, he was cool: knew all the moves, all the business. Could kill him for it, really. Should have.
"That's not bad," he said. "'Handsome Ransom'. Is that one of mine you stole. Surely it is. You don't say things like that."
"It was an accident."
"Which is why you will be sent to the galleys. For five years. It will give you some bicep/tricep. You'll take on the rugged look of a man who's experienced some suffering. Then you will be ready to learn True Cool. Then you can say things like that. And mean it. Silly toad. Go lie down on the roof and howl. Perhaps you'll draw something interesting in through the windows. My wife enjoyed that last thing, that nosferatu dancer with the slippers, you know, which came to a point, very long and curved, so long and curved in fact that they need to be chained to his belt, but he didn't mind, he was in on the belt monopoly up Turkestan way, strongest belts in the fokking woild, boyo. But hey. How do you like my new short? You passed it some months ago when you were brought before me in chains. You could drive a short like that you cooperate, get that dough from the padres. Hell, pencil dick, I'll let you use that thing to paint my wife's nails. There's a little brush on the end of it. This I know because I have seen. In the still of the night when you go weewee my cameras take it all in: the pencil, the brush, the eraser. What sort of genes do you have? I mean, where does a human come up with such genes? Are you an atavistic flashback to some former evolutionary adjustment we had to make, I don't know what for, but certainly something for real very weird, perhaps falling from the sky, a bird, a horrible dry bird, a bird who has seen God and said, 'NO WAY, YAWAY, I will NOT haul that thing for you down all those streets with thousands of amused vendors calling me a three-headed bastard with nowhere to lay them down all three, what's more can't even agree on what their fucking names are ...' ? You know, that bird. Anyway, where was I? The short. Forget it. Repossessed, I think. By Asmodeus, who is the Devil's smarter brother. Anyway, the sumbitch hauled ass outa here with it, kept the thing in first all the way to 60, blew the clutch in a Max Plank minute. No, I mean Borges. Bores. One of them asswipes. Wanna try some of my discos? I have many, many discos. Play em with a bamboo needle. Sounds better. All this mythology about diamonds. Sheer crap. Bamboo is already musical. And dig. Have you ever heard Como No sing the Immolation Scene? What a gas. And on shelac, with bamboo. Sheise, Meise, that's some fine shining sound, comes from the Heaven Designed by Moi Aussi, who is the very Fine Aussi."
My father stood at the door with many bags of money. It was the kind of money that you have to bite for it to work, heavy metal money. Roger ceased talking (rare for him). He came forward. He opened the screen door with all the holes in it from arrows and small caliber bullets, and took the bag from my father, who remained outside. My father would not enter Roger's house. He said it smelled of unspeakable curries. Roger reached in the back, withdrew a coin and bit, bit with feeling, nodded his approval. He then put the coin back, knotted the bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. Then he gestured with his chin towards me.
"Get this evil dream outa here. Can't imagine why you'd pay so much to have him back. I'll need to examine that in my thoughts. Perhaps I shall even abduct him again and have him examined by my staff. Ah, what they hey. Fuck off, both of you."
* * *
4: ROGER'S SHORT
So I drove. Roger held forth in the usual way. Loved to hear himself talk, he did, and he always forced his voice into a lower register. This made him sound more important to himself. When he got excited, though, he squeaked: it was like the whistling sound you can make by releasing air out of the nozzle of a balloon and at the same time squeezing it, strangely erotic sort of business to kids I guess because of the titlike quality. Always respect the titlike quality, know what I'm saying? Roger was yammering away, I don't know what he was talking about and neither did he only don't tell him that, he'll be hurt, but I was branching off, fantasizing again. It was dark now and slightly rainy. The windshield kept blurring. At first I used the wiper, I set it at an intermittent rate, but then I just shut the fucker off. Roger didn't notice, even though this could mean the death of his precious Hugh Heffner vehicle, but dig, I was getting this apparition, it was a girl's face emerging out of the blurry window fogging and rain, she had these large, clear and fragile eyes that suggested a certain fear and awe, well, not quite, maybe just curiosity at who this could be she was seeing in front of her, this silly ass wannabe and his silly ass Guru of Cool next to him, going all Cicero to his own private audience (imagining a vast Senate with rows and rows and rows of fools in togas crying, "SHIT yeah! Tell it to us, Tully!") ... yet these eyes held no judgment, no condemnation but seemed faintly sad, and there was forgiveness. Yes. Don't usually go for that effect but maybe it was the rain and the sense of undisclosed longing that comes with it, longing without an object, I should say, and all the drinking I'd been doing and all the come ons and dry fucking and broken branches of sexual fantasy going on back at Roger’s but ... well then some other thing began to emerge: it was this butterfly thing looked to be an art object, fabricated at least, maybe a pin or a pendant and I was thinking: is she communicating something here? Is this a picture of what had been going on, or a wish, a dream of what could be made out of it. For what is more blatantly emblematic of transformation than a butterfly. "Can you see it that way?" she was asking. "Instead of judging? Instead of condemning?" Well, of course I said No but she gave me pause.
"Trying to get it together," Roger was saying. "Trying to move into the new thing with grace but it's hard, slick. People get to taking you the way you want them to and then you can't escape. You've got to be that way. You've got to be Roger. And even when you're so tired of it you want to tell them to Hey, just fuck off, I'm a differnt cat here now, they won't let you. Rather see you dead than somebody else they've gotten comfortable with. especially a cat they can dismiss as ... you know, Roger. That's just old Roger being old Roger doing his Roger."
"Which is why you changed your clothes and stopped doing beebop awhile ago, nez paw?" I asked.
"Well, you start with what you've got, slick. Only so many changes. Check out your closet sometime. What's in there. Only so many changes. Einstein had several sets of the same set of clothes hanging there in his closet. He just changed when he felt he needed to. There was not always agreement on this point."
He looked over at me for a confirmation and I went HAH!
The girl was still there. The image of the butterfly was breaking up into a pattern of running streams. The girl herself had not changed at all. She was frozen now. Like a photograph. I began to wonder if Roger had a slide projector installed in his famous Playboy short.
I said, "Roger, is there a slide projector installed in this vehicle? Be honest."
"You mean as a feature? An extra you pay the extra bread for, more than it's worth?"
"Yes, that sort of thing. Only a slide projector that puts up images on your windshield to entertain you, or to help you suicide through fascination with the images instead of watching the goddamned road like you're supposed to?'
"You have some interesting ideas."
"So, it's my idea then. I mean, it's not a feature of your Playboy Short here."
"I think they would have told me that. I mean, it would have helped them to explain why the thing cost me so much, don't you think?"
That satisfied me. But the satisfaction made the lovely image slowly fade. See, this is what you get when you slip out of the Dreamtime of symbolism into the Land of the Automobile and the Home of Commerce for which we have fought and died in the darkness of foreign lands. Fuck me and save matches. The Brento don't like that. This pisseth off the Brento. He must spank. He turns to Roger, therefore, and begins to upbraid him for his phoniness after the manner of Holden Caulfield, who had been his only real exemplar in Philosophy prior to Guru Roger.
The latter agreed. He was a Puritan, we all are, by heritage. We carry a Guilt Gene, Guilt Karma, whatever. We know ourselves for Assholes of Fictitious Being. So I set Roger back for a time. I was given that power somehow, perhaps by the vision in the windshield brought to me by Late Capitalist Greed and the General Awfulness of Us but it worked against itself for the good of Vision and Prophesy. Hence I prophesied.
"You will need to jump into the Ganges, Roger. For what you've done. For what you are. You will need to jump into that Ancient River which every conceivable kind a Untouchable Asshole, gnut, gnat, Ganesh and every other gruesome gob of gonna which you have always been gonna do, all your broken promises said into a broken mirror of narcissism while noting your fine jaw line and well kept coif, your ascot and cardigan, all the boss bullshit you let stream forth from your well lathed lips which you also employ in foreplay amidst the deployment of other techniques you got from those motherfuckers at the Cool School for Players in Pasadena, phoniest place on this fallen planet. Get thee to the Ganges, Roger. Jump in. Swallow water. Swim deep. Breath. Breath under water till the end, Roger. This is what is called for. Ask the Reverend Sun, ask the Reverend Moon. Go on, Roger. Go on."
Soon enough though the Power fell away from me because I had put it to evil purpose. I had reversed the process. I had turned Roger back into a cocoon. His wife would be pissed if I brought him back home that way, and since I wanted to get into her pants I couldn't have her pissed at me. I therefore supplicated the Locapalas of Inferiority and became small. Soon I had reacquired the round shoulders, pimples and purple shirt of slum youth, and felt my face being slapped again and again.
"You dumbshit! What a dumbshit! Watch the road. What do you think this is, Disneyland? Think you're on some dumb kidcar ride here you don't have to be responsible for who you are? Get it together, slick. I brought you out here to make you into a human and you're failing me all the time. You're failing me. You'll never change. You'll always be dumbass butterfly boy trying to find your way back to Disneyland. Now, drive like a man, fool!"
* * *
ROGER TODAY
As time progressed, Roger grew old and grizzled, possibly bearded: he wasn’t sure. That he was silly everyone agreed. It was the consensus, that old time consensus. Can’t escape it, buddy-bud. Yet Roger had had a good life, would no doubt die in his sleep, while his therapist, Oliver, who was a genuinely worthy man, one might even say good, would go on suffering until the end. A pisser, no question. Roger would feel briefly regretful about such things, then go on working his lollypop around in his mouth, reducing it finally to just a little sweet bump on the end of its supporting stick, at which point he would take it out of his mouth, throw it at some passerby, and replace it with another, perhaps one of a differing flavor. This was part of Roger’s fair and cozy life, which also included an ocean view, a billiard table, a Tesla, and a professional cocksucker. This last he named Melisanda and remembered her birthdays. He also put her children through the school.
Not much happened to Roger, and what did happen was predictable. Someone threw a newspaper at his house, having already read it. Someone else would put up signs accusing Roger of various crimes. When he took his daily walk he read them all, weighed their contents against the truth of the matter, and went on. When he returned, the signs would be gone, having been removed by members of his staff. Then around 1 PM he received a phone call from his adversary. They exchanged a few pleasantries, then went about the business of blaming each other. This usually killed the remaining daylight hours. As Roger raged and trembled the sun fell slowly into the sea in order to visit other parts of the earth, to light them and provide warmth, to shine upon the guilty and the innocent with equal care.
Roger consulted the paper to see if any of his friends had died. Death is not an event in life, thank heavens, but it does appear in newspapers. Are these a part of life? Well, indirectly. They abide within it, influence it, record its various little thingies. He couldn’t think of a better word just yet but he would. When it came time to say anything out loud about newspapers and their effects upon life, he would find a far better word than “thingie”.
His former wife had called herself “Roger’s thingie” when explaining why she was there with him. In the house. At the party. Why it would be she who had her hand in his pants and not someone more worthy. It occurred to Roger now that women seemed to want to touch his penis. Just touch it. Little else. He often examined it, trying to find its attractions. Well, it had a grip. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself … the phrase came to mind. Others, as well. But the point is, grip, the operative word, was … well, the point, he supposed, being operative. They wanted to grip his penis so as to operate it, like a machine. Come now, Roger. Come now. Language has its own funny little life. It runs away with itself. It can make you do things you don’t want to, rather push you around as if you were a recruit, a soldier of language. Follow me, boys! Do what I say.
Roger, finding none of his dead there, folded the obituaries into a paper airplane, one of those Dutch jobs. When he had done, he sailed his craft way out into the morning, it was almost sublime. He still recognized the sublime, respected it. He made a note in his diary every time he felt he had experienced it. Most recently there were the words, “Today a camel drifted across the lawn. Sublime.” He had wondered about the camel briefly … after it had stopped his mind with sublimity. Wondered what the bloody thing was doing out here, so far from Los Angeles. Camels all over L. A. It was a new fad. That’s what they make there: fads. Fortunately they didn’t have to themselves make the camels (think of what a committee of producers and union writers would come up with and name Camel!). Later his adversary called, saying, “Well, how’d you like the camel, you dripping dick?”
“Inexpressible. All I can say at this point. I’ll get back.”
The adversary, call him HD, sneezed and hung up.
Roger went to his Entertainment Center and warmed up the tubes. He needed music today. Harsh, pounding sounds. The war symphonies of Shostakovich. Mahler’s “progressive tonality”. When the HD called back he’d put on Ornette Coleman to irritate him. “I can’t think with all that scratching,” he’d complain. “You can’t think without it. You can’t think at all,” Roger would counter. They had repeated this exchange several times over the years.
Funny that HD would still hate him. It had been so long. You’d think he’d get tired of it; want to try love or something, give peace a chance. Not HD, though. He carried his sense of betrayal about like a sack of dead babies. “See, here is little Claudius, who might have been a breaker of horses; this the shell of m’lady, Calarice, who might have swung; Terrence, a pirate in potentia; Bill, the boxer; Barbara, the head chef at Four Seasons; she would have had tits to die for. Oh, what lights you punched out, ugly boy!”
For Roger no longer hated HD. He never had, really. He was annoyed by the things HD did to extract revenge, stealing his identity, for example. He’d gotten away with it for a whole week once, in Las Vegas. Went around annoying everyone. “I am Roger Vertigo and I will break your world.” Peeing in their drinks. Feeling up the cocktail waitresses. He’s getting more than I ever did from those bimbos, Roger thought. Of course, I hate Vegas. Only go there because the other fools think it’s cool to close deals whilst floating on huge duckies amid guzzling Russian vodka, or even in the hot tub upstairs with those same bimbos servicing them, taking gulps of air every now and then through glass straws as they suck away.
HD had been a failed actor, then a failed MFA (all MFA’s are failures!) Finally he settled down in Nova Burbank, running guns for the gangs. He liked to compare himself to Rimbaud. “I quit it all when I was eighteen,” he told everyone. “Quit out of revulsion.” He lives comfortably but hates himself. Roger considered: I could say he projects his own self loathing upon me but really, there’s plenty to go around. He can hate both himself and me … Oh, and the government, Oprah, the dog of Oprah, her guts, her tits and ass. Such a nice woman, yet all the best people have to pretend they hate her. It’s not fair. But I’ve just included HD among all the best people.
Roger made himself a smoothie. Then an omelette and toast. He said meal chants before and after consuming these.
posted by Brent Powers at 8:57 AM
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