Back Room News

Fayfay

2012-02-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

For Lynn

She was a flapper girl, she was out there flapping in the wind. Sometimes though she got yanked off the line and went in strange directions. There was a night for instance she’s flapping in a club when suddenly there’s only a night breeze, wet breath of Spring. There is a dead house, all the lights out and leaves rising in dervish shapes, spinning for a minute and then falling into shreds. Punk of a night, she thinks, and takes off her shoe without it heel.

A shadow man comes. He approaches like a lover. He takes her up and throws her over his shoulder. Goes on.

“So. You’re the famous Flapper Case,” he says. His voice is full of cigarettes. He sounds handsome. Maybe he is handsome. He has a dueling scar on his cheek.

“This is my house,” he goes on. “My grandfather built it with the work of his hands. Me, I don’t work with my hands. I keep them smooth for love, that’s what. I’m not gonna be a ditch digger like my little pa and his pa before him. All this was built for me and I intend to enjoy it until I am of the same dust as they, only golden, gold dust, you feel me, Flapper Fayfay?”

He is trucking her into the grand house. The wind is blowing his hair up in a shark fin.

“How do you know my name?” she asks.

By now he has managed to get her inside the house where he sets her down in the dark. Then he ignites a long match, bends over and there is a sudden conflagration, logs going up in flames in a walk in fireplace as big as a room. She flies back, falls down on a stupid couch shaped like a dolphin. It is modeled after the famous Malanga Dolphin which is said to be more brilliant than we are. It is said that the Malanga Dolphin built Atlantis and then sank that sucker for fun. The things people say. Shame on their eyes! That’s what Fayfay would say if she were asked to say anything at all, ever. But people didn’t give a hell about what Fayfay thought. All they wanted to do was look at her, or grope her. Sometimes they even stuck wads of gum on her eyelids, just to be clever.

The man turns to her now. He is tall, dark, handsome, probably dead. His hair is slicked back like that of a a corpse on display. Music comes up from somewhere (it is the “Ave Maria” of Lehar, who wrote the thing on ‘ludes) and the handsome man sticks his finger in the fire and uses the burning thing to light his cigarette in an ivory holder.

“Want one?” he asks. “I think I have more around here somewhere.”

“No. It makes me dizzy.”

“You are dizzy. You’re a dizzy babe. How would you like me to come over there and screw you?”

“I don’t think that’s appropriate yet,” she warns.

“Whaddaya want, sister, a movie contract?”

He is a ghost. He represents Hollywood Past. She figures to play along. She could find herself in pictures that never existed only they would now because she was here. She supposes she’ll let him have her. She could use a good screw about now. The last time she had her ashes hauled was by an old fool with a bad prostate. All he could talk about was his prostate. He even had a model of it which he showed her. It came apart so you could see all the stuff inside, the secret manufactories and meeting places of sex art. There were alchemists with pointy ears and bald heads. “Hubbahubba,” they said, and took pot shots at their retorts. Glass flew every whichway and then came back together to form heels and whores. What a life inside a model prostate!

“Get it away,” she says.

“I suppose you’d rather see my peter. See how it rises to action and swings.”

“I’d rather have a martini, straight up, and a roasted marshmallow. How about that, lewd John? May I call you John?”

“I am John. And I am a boy no longer, sis. I have many waters under my bridges, waters of happiness in which the slackers pee. They have their lunches on my grounds. I go out there screaming, “My grounds! My grounds!” All they do is look away. They look away like Dixieland and pretend I am a phantom out of the jungle. The jungle of love that drives men mad. You feel me?”

By now he has concocted a martini. It is blue. He hands her a blue martini.

“Why this strange color, man of my dreams?”

“It is my Color. My Number is seven. My Virtue is silence. I have many qualities but I share them with none but the women I screw. The men I have slain by my attendants. Later they sew them together into a General Being. It goes forth to seek its fortune in a world without a dime.”

“Oh.” She is looking down in to the blue mystery of her martini. “This drink is from hell, isn’t it?”

“Nah. I threw it together out of bootleg and a little food coloring. Like it?”

“Wait.” She drains it at a gulp. “Yes, it is full of potency.”

“Here, I’ll make you another. Wanna loosen you up for the mortifications of my lechery. Cool with you?”

“It’s alright. Get me a straw this time.”

While he is going about his business she looks all around her, marveling at this old fuddy-duddy place with all its cobwebs and chandeliers. How corny it all is. That’s the only word for it. Soon she is drunk. At some point she goes out like a light and wakes up well fucked. She can tell that, even under the hangover. She is wet and feels tickly. The man has vanished into the mist of distant perspectives. No doubt he is stalking long halls with a huge torch in his fist. It is still dark in here yet full day. Even though the great vaulted windows have their curtains drawn it is dark. Yet she can feel the breath of the Angel of the Morning. She sneezes and feels nostalgic. Has she married the fool? Already it feels like bored love. Old and bored and full of undisguised farts. Yet she wanders from room to room, looking for him. In a few days the children will come for a visit. They will bring their children and their children’s children. Everything will smell of peanut butter and oranges. There will be poop in unexpected places and she will find herself stinking at the opera. She wonders if she should just blow off the opera and go buy new shoes instead. Ah, there is so much to think about. Better lie still here. Perhaps sleep. Perhaps die like all the rest. She is a Flapper in the wind, dead like all the rest.

NOTE: I wrote this story for Lynn Alexander but she never opened it, so here it is for the world and pooey on Lyn.

Still Waiting for Brain Death

2012-02-07T13:03:00.001-08:00

When I came into the court my neighbor greeted me from the laundry room. She was always friendly, even though I didn’t encourage her. Things happen, though.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said. “Tired.”

I stopped and looked at her. OK, she was a babe, I could dig her. She dug me, too.

“I see you are doing your laundry,” I said.

She smiled and bit her tongue and looked all smoldering. “Yeah. Laundry.”

“I’m going to drink this wine,” I said. I proudly held up the liter bottle I’d gotten on my way home from work, thinking to get blasted all by myself. But now, you know . . . I said, “Do you want some?”

“Where’s your wife?” she asked coyly.

“Don’t have one," I admitted ...

Now I’m kissing her, I’m kissing her, the rest is erased. She’s up in my apartment, she’s all over me. Her heavy thighs press against my ears. She screams when she comes. I enter her then. What is her name? Maja? Majolie? She won’t tell me. Before I come she takes me into her mouth. She looks up at me when I finally do climax, making little bird sounds to the rhythm of my ejaculation, which is a jungle rhythm, make no mistake, it is joyous and bloody, and she says, “I just took some of your intelligence. Whenever I do that, you lose a little. It’s why they call it a perversion.”

She was putting on her lipstick. “I feel disgusted with myself,” she said. She paused briefly to consider her words, then: “Perhaps that’s a good emotion for us to separate on.”

She left.

* * *

We go to the beach. She wears almost nothing. You can see pubic hair sprouting out of her loose bikini bottom. Her breasts barely fill the top. She is happy with them, though. They form perfect cones and the nipples are hairy. I like that very much, I find it sexy. I like to lick them, even bite them. She likes it, too.

She throws the towel over me and reaches inside my trunks. She laughs when I rise under the towel. “Reminds me of my tent out in the Mojave,” she observes.

The life guard is watching us, his arms spread wide, as if to block those who would pass, who would arrest or interrupt.

The sky goes pink with the dusk.

* * *

Everything’s gone to hell at work. I no longer attend to my patients, I let them slide into apathy, and they just go right on aslippin and aslidin along from there into the country of strokes and seizures, in some instances to be finally embraced by dirty old Death himself, with his razorblade smile and smack pinned eyes . . . I’ve stopped feeding the experimental fish, also. They’ve risen to the surface of their tanks, bloated and unresponsive. I never did like those fish. They gave me sour looks, or exhibited the sort of attention-getting behaviors which are lab fish giveaways every time: this renders them entirely unsuitable for deployment at sea. While the birds we keep, for which I am also responsible for reasons I’m still unable to fathom, have grown metallic sheathes, the lips of losers, guilty expressions and painted fingernails – these in place of their formerly militant beaks and fulsome foliage of feathers, so useful in the making of quill pens – hence they will swoon away with the East Wind, which blasts through the dining room window as if to liberate them, even though it is a non-ideological type wind, not symbolic; neither a religious wind, nor a wind inimical to religiosity but . . . look, just a wind, OK? And it blows like a motherfucker. I like it, I’m digging on it. Even so, the birds are not prepared for freedom and so must perish, but it’s good to see them acting like real birds for a change (already they’re starting to shed some of that neurotically adaptive growth . . .), even if it is only for an instant, because in no time at all, I fear, some murderous blue jay will make fast food of them. And I ask, were I to release the fish upon the wind also, would they in turn discover it to be their true element? Yea, would they grow wings, to wheel and gyre upon it, lose their gills and fishy eyes and learn to fly like a man? Well, no . . . The fish are dead, of course. And when the wind dies down the stupid birds sit on the window ledges and mope like metaphysicians. I call in Garcia from Maintenance and have them whacked. So much for the dream of freedom . . . But there are other dreams . . . those of an old man, for instance, who now must soar in love, drop all exoskeletal adaptations and go naked in the world, for this is what love demands, O fool who would attain to Her. Not just a stiff cock but a stiff heart, O fool, and, worse, a stiff heart with a soft gooey center. Fool, who can say what love will ask of you now? . . . Well, for one thing, shitcan that dead end job of yours.

-Yet if I’m to woo her – in the style to which she is accustomed, I mean – a guy needs some change in his pocket.

-She shows every symptom of being a cockhappy cooze.

-Yet also a goddess . . .

-Well, goddesses . . . Easy come, easy go. She’s not worried about money, anyway. Let her foot the bill. You just keep her wet and wild, toots.

* * *

I had to consider all this. A guy can’t ignore such invasions from the unconscious. You do and they’ll get you. Know what I’m saying? Monsters from the Id? That’s what I’m talking here. Is there still such a thing as I’m talking? Who cares?

I went out on the roof and paced. That’s the thing to do in a situation like this. First of course I rubbed myself all over with sunguard. A guy should be prepared.

The woman, then. What? Madge? Margorie? I don’t know. It never became clear. This was an adventure and it couldn’t go on for long. It would be fast and furious as all such things must be. Don’t kid yourself. Love is for chumps. You gotta fuck ‘em and forget em, that’s the old philosophy, but does it still obtain? Dunno. We’ll see. Meanwhile, let’s just play it by ear. That can be a trustworthy instrument sometimes and, in my case, the only instrument.

These were my thoughts as I paced, and when I concluded I snapped my fingers happily and ran back inside.

“Hello Hello Hello hello!” I sang as I skipped down the halls. I kissed a nurse, rubbed a CNA. She went “Mmmmmmmmmmm.” (I know I could make it with her anytime, but she’s not my type. Only when I’m real, real horny will I go against type preference. It too often leads to unwelcome involvements. Get the picture? She once even said to me, “When I’m not in love and you’re not in love maybe we can get together sometime, but, you know, not now . . .” I told her to blow it out her asshole, and she didn’t speak to me for awhile after that but then one day we found ourselves alone together in the elevator and she asked why I no longer groped her when she walked by my work station. I promised to resume the practice.)

* * *

But she’s gone. Where can she be? For days I’ve watched her apartment, hoping for a sign, a light, her shadow moving behind the dancing, diaphanous drapes. (Like that? “Dancing”? “Diaphanous”?)

The first rain is coming, I can feel it. The air smells of ferment. The others here stay inside now. That’s good. I hate it when they stand out by the pool and gawk at me.

But where is she? She told me she had friends, many friends, friends from all over. Men. Before we started fucking I’d watch her stroll out with them arm in arm, and she was always wearing some stupid skimpy thing. I wasn’t interested at the time. Yeah, cute, Ok, but . . . Then I saw her in a dream one night. She was undressing in front of a mirror. Images of old and young men, helpless before her as she played with herself, put a finger to her mouth and wet it, brought it down and slid it gently over her labia . . . Suddenly she was pushing me to the floor, moaning, swallowing my head. Was this true prophesy? Your intelligence. It’s mine now. That’s when I knew I wanted her, when I awoke from that dream, remembering orgasm, feeling the wet sheets.

* * *

She came to me.

My joy was complete. I went “Whoo-ee, baby!” and instantly flushed.

I lit a cigarette to cover my embarrassment. I fought it off, and presently lost it all in my intent concentration on the love act of the present moment in which I was presently engaged, presenting for her delectation my fully engorged member to enjoy, first of all as an art object (note how she looks both ways over her shoulders to see if anyone is watching, for instance a museum guard, as if she were actually in an art museum where such guards are likely to be employed, and letting her fingers play over the surface of a lovely, monumental sculpture with a sign above it reading, “Please Do Not Touch”), then moving on from there into a sort of totemism and finally to the point where she is helpless to prevent herself from the actual licking of the worshipful object, the taking and placing of it finally, accepting its forceful thrusts into her increasingly juicy vagina and, to enhance her enjoyment, allowing her finger to lightly rub her clitoris, or, for his pleasure in turn, letting it slide under his scrotum and stroke this with equal skill. When it was finally done, she lay silent in the throbbing darkness, her eyes darting this way and that as if in an effort to detect the cause of such a throbbing. Had bats been allowed in, for example, or some other pulsing, avian form? I of course knew them to be the ghosts of those birds I had released come back to haunt me, but I didn't want to get into it with her. So much to explain, so little time. Also, I remembered . . .

I asked, “Where were you?”

She looked away. “Oh. Business,” she said.

“You . . . work?”

“Of course,” she laughed. By now I had blown several smoke rings in her direction, so that what she said seemed to labor towards me through tunnels, and the tortured nature of her communications awakened jealousy again . . . As with the following, which I heard as: “I like to get laid . . . as a means to an end (I cannot speak its name), the which is always compromised in any monogamous relationship . . . at best a makeshift, a falsification . . .”

“You were with a man, weren’t you?” I said, stoppering the smoking flow.

She bit her lip. Looked away.

“Were you with a man?”

She takes the glass out of my hand and drinks deeply, runs her tongue over glistening lips. Then she says something which I hear as, “Do you want to punish me?”

She’s on the couch, legs spread, touching herself.

“Well?” she says.

I put my head under her dress.

“How will you punish me? Do you hope to find the answer down there?”

I’m biting her thighs, taking her underwear in my teeth and then letting them snap back against her tender flesh. I always thought this was a fun thing to do when I was a boy.

“Why don’t you punish me? Don’t you want to punish me for what I did?”

She spoke in such an unusual tone, her manner suddenly serious . . . it brought to mind those first sweet days of our affair, and the expectation that maybe that delightful lightning would strike again. For, as Gregary Peck has so wisely observed, it strikes rarely. And when it does, trees are lost.

Somehow this thought inflamed me further.

So finally I hit her with a sledge hammer (Used to work the streets, making little ones out of big ones, by God). Then I hit her again, harder.

“Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” she challenged. “That’s interesting. Do that. Go on, do it. Are you afraid?”

I gave her what she wanted.

“Like that?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she moaned. “Do it. Go on. Oh!”

I hit her, hit her, hit her.

“How’s that?” I said breathlessly. “Do you like that?"

“Oh, yes. Oh, please. Oh, please.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked. I may have betrayed the genuine concern I felt.

“Please go on,” she begged. “Are you afraid? Oh, please. Oh, please.”

“Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, God, yes! Don’t stop. Oh, God!”

“What do you like about it?”

“Oh, it’s … Oh, it’s …”

“Yeah? Yeah? You want more? You’re a mess, you know. Hey. Just one more, all right? Maybe two. You want two? Where do you want them? How about there? And there. And there and there and there.”

After much of this action – more than I am happy to confess – I busted her wide open and party favors shot forth. Little kids ran in and started yelling, “I want the red one,” – “Fuck off, you like the blue,” – “The red, I want the red, I shall have the red,” – “No, the blue, you are allergic to the red, see, already you’re breaking out, but here’s a striped, trade you a striped for a red one,” – “Get your own red one, I already wet on it.” Shit like that, the expected urban conflict . . . Still quarrelling, they ran out, evaporating as they did so.

Her mouth is bloody. She’s leaving a red slick along my inner thigh. One of her teeth has fallen on my belly. It dances like a hailstone. She has this dizziness that is troublesome.

The ambulance comes. The attendants are drooling with excitement. The doctor can hardly speak from his rising tumescence.

“We’re here to collect her electrolytes,” he says.

This is too much. I’ve got to get out of here.

She reaches for my hand as they carry her out.

“Wait for me,” she says. “You have more to give. Much, much more.”

She still feels dizzy, somewhat sleepy, not confused, and I think it is on a basis of her treatment under my vigorous love because she is alert and oriented to time, place and person. She answers questions in an intelligent, proper manner, VIZ.:

-Are you John Lennon?

-No.

-Do you feel that he is dead?

-He will never die.

-How can you say that? All of us must die.

-He will not die because of his music.

-His music, too, is dead. It has been superceded. We have advanced a great deal since then.

-How?

-By means of downsampling, attenuation, failure of nerve.

-How sad. What a pisser.

-Perhaps. Can you handle more questions?

-Shoot.

-What do you think about Jesus?

-He’s all right.

-And Mary?

-She’s all right, too, but less so, somehow.

-But your name is Mary?

-No, it is not.

-Do you dislike the name?

-I dislike all names.

She remains afebrile. Her heart tones are fair, blurry, irregular, betraying a French influence. There is no trace of John Lennon’s forthright rhythms. What more can I say? This is a dysfunctional relationship, characterized by enabling, co-dependency and the entire complex in which such pathologies subsist, sometimes among an entire society of other pathologies which must be treated in contradictory ways. You kick one, you kiss another. You shoot a guy full of uppers, his significant other needs downs. If you don’t get it just right, shit happens. Know what I’m saying?

* * *

But she has another man in. When will she learn? She even leaves the curtain open a crack so I can see. She’s going down on him, taking him. He’s nearly comatose when he leaves. I jump the fucker while he’s trying to find his way to his car. He doesn’t even resist when I cut him open. He laughs when he sees his own guts tumble out. I put my ear to the smoking ruins and receive the following:

“What’s in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I’m in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I remain in the box forever. Even when I’m outta the box, I’m still really in there. Like now. Ripped me out, ya think? Wrong. O wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, you are. We do not die. Cannot. Cannot. We are men of steel, you dizzy fuck. Yet some parts are pliable, and then obviously the outer sheath, of course, which is little better than hard rubber such as you would find concealing the empty nature of dolls . . . So why not just fuck off and let me pretend to die. Give me that small moment alone to look at the promise of a consummation devoutly to be wished – and always withheld at last from my kind, like a carrot withdrawn from the aspiring teeth gnashing of a donkey. For when we die there isn’t even a moment of the vaunted In-Between-State before we are reborn. And as the same damn thing again. The same insufferable person. Can you yourself imagine how you would feel if you yourself were condemned to be you? Yourself? Always and forever, ever echoing down the bloodlit halls of Time . . . Hey. Are you listening, dude? I guess you didn’t hear me or something. Leave the parking lot. Go home and pull your pud. Let me be a man for once and go out whistling Dixie.”

“Please don’t whistle in here,” I warn him, shaking his shifting, shapeless mess of a body by grasping the corny large lapels or his Hawaiian shirt. “You’ll wake the Super, who used to be a cop, by the way, and he’ll be out here with all the blame of Heaven in his eyes. And when he casts that blame upon the rays which issue from those same eyes, it is not landing on me, you get the picture, Tex? I won’t be zapped like a droid. I was born free and well favored in the Human Realm, while you, you conceited, clonable clot, are mere working garbage. Even while you were porking my woman you were simply being worked by her. You were merely a substitute finger, or a vibrator – maybe even a dildo, for all I know from her masturbatory methods. For all I care, slave.”

“Hey. I’m a sex toy,” he protested. “She called me, you dig? My service had me paged while I was trying to finish off Marie a la Versace-Lorraine, who takes forever. And . . . you’ll like this part . . . She confesses to yours truly that she actually prefers our service, in fact, to yours. She complains that humans display tremendous theoretical passion (and you know what that means, buster; it’s why you’re getting all that swell head, heh heh, get it? get it?), yet it is short lived, sort of a cocaine high, it just don’t stay with you long, and nothing sticks when it goes.”

“I am not serving her, Tex,” I insist. “I’m riding her ass on the wind, I’m boinking her to Heaven, thou steeping pool of swoozy chemicals, batardo of unnatural matings betwixt the unliving and the undead. While you sit somewhere getting charged, to all intents and purposes non-existent, I’m dinging all her endorphins like the goddamned Hunchback of Notre Dame. So just abort that last statement, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury. And as for you, Oh son of Fictitious Being and Wrong Ideas About Reality, exit my Universe of Discourse at once. I say, 'Poof!' therefore, and snap my fingers. And vye-ola. You are gone. You n’exist pa, motherfucker. Stay that way.”

* * *

The police arrive. She tells them everything. They don’t understand, this is entirely outside the narrow purview of their expertise. I’ve got to get out of here. My attention wanders. At work they’ve put me on probation again. The lab fish swim away with my thoughts, the birds will compromise them. The wind thrills and scatters. Gotta watch out for that wind. Belongs to Charlie. She tries to get me at the hospital. I undo her IV. I can’t find my house. My house is in a thicket somewhere, among the standing stones, overlooking moors and heathcliffs, a lake so smooth that I must call it the Great Mirror. The stones rule. Break up the stones, making little ones out of big ones until they are merely pebbles to be tossed into the lake so that concentric circles of the watery element spread outward and inward at once; and toss the remaining stones at the passers-by. “Ouch!” they must cry. The fog moves in timelapse, so now the fog rules. (Fog is better than love, no?) Anything but love. A woman keeps bothering me, actually taking bites out of my arm. I don’t know this woman for shit. I don’t know anybody here. What gives her the right to take bites out of me? The others all turn their faces to the wall. Their mouths are filled in. They have bright holes in their faces, the light is showing through. They’re going fast, yet still they manage to attract the attention of our boys in white, who run in on tracks (guilty, narrow gauge), and toot their whistles. That failing, they stick tubes in my arm. Who is she? What does she want? What does she want now? She’s biting my tube. She’s sucking up the clear fluid.

“Your intelligence,” she says.

She is laughing.

The Valley of the Kings

2012-02-07T12:51:00.001-08:00

I trudged through the blasting sand all swaddled up like a mummy, even had my face covered but what’s to see out here? From an approaching shadow I knew I was coming upon one of the lesser tombs, those thrown up by the poor from stones that had been rejected by the quarry bosses. Scratching about with the hands of the blind I found an entry facing away from the storm and pushed my way down the ramp.

Unwrapping my head at last I was surprised to find it dark, and when I torched up I saw that it hadn’t been used. Someone had been preparing it, though. It was already fitted with lighting fixtures. There was even a generator. Again I was surprised when the thing just ripped into action when I gave the starter a pull. There was the expected shrill of a motor laboring against a buildup of sand.

I didn’t bother lighting the place. I’d explore it all tomorrow. Just now I fell down in a dead faint right then and there and finally slept after several days, I don’t know how many, several though, several. I heard things, saw things. There were dreams of my dead wife wailing over the pieces of our children, hands and feet hidden in cupboards, of the Japanese who’d been caught out and quickly jumped up from the couch and shot everyone down, just like that, it was amazing. The whole meeting falling down dead. Why did he spare me? I really had no sense of it. I was just as guilty …

Then there was a sound. Someone … perhaps mine host.

He came forward quickly, leaping for me. I simply rolled away and the idiot bashed against the wall. It was Ed. Of course it was Ed.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m here for my revenge,” he said matter of factly – well, everything he said was rather matter of fact through his vox. Ed was as mad as the desert. He’d followed me for years.

“You’re always here for your revenge,” I told him. I was tired of telling him this. How many times did I have to remind him? I’d rehearse our story again and again, sometimes adding needless details, which he enjoyed; he always clapped his hands at these little bits of new furniture to our tawdry little scene together back in Cairo. The woman. He called her his wife. She wasn’t. In fact she’d been mine for quite a while, years. I finally got rid of her by making such a case of myself that she asked me to leave. That was my first experience of finding my own way without resources. I pushed a shopping cart around and stopped off at various friends’. Most of them told me to jolly well fuck off, they’d had enough. Leonard finally took me in. He was my last resort. I hated him; everybody hated his ass, he was going to die, and he was making a great fuss of it. He had his TV blasting, as usual. Without even a greeting he told me that great Alviso was dead. He’d been discovered in his bath, head back, eyes burnt out from looking at the sun, yet he was smiling, smiling. I can see the plush lips, the way they crooked up to one side when he smiled, something of a snarl to it, nasty, conceited and feral. I’d gotten bored with the man long ago. But it’s not necessary to tell all this. It is Ed we’re considering here. Just now he was standing up and dusting off his foolish clothes, leather from head to foot, and I bet he still wore a dozen fragile gold chains around his neck, and of course the ever present motorbike helmet, and his lower face was veiled to cover his blasted jaw.

“Ed,” I sighed. “I had hoped to find a friend here.”

His vox whizzed out what remained of a programmed laugh. Obviously not his choice; it was the only one remaining. He’d been out here a long time.

I sat down against the opposite wall. The lights were up now. He’d turned them on when he came in, I suppose.

“I broke into your gallery,” he said. “I saw your girls, your trophies. Penelope was there, too.”

“She wanted it,” I told him. Told him for the nth time. “Would you like to hear an account of this?”

“Please.”

“Ed. This is a desperate land, Ed. Boys like you … how can there be boys like you still after all this?”

“I’m older than you are.”

“No one is older than I am.”

“She came to you,” he urged me. “Let’s have it. Let’s have it.”

Again I told him. It was before the plague, before everything, the old world in all its stinking, brazen glory. She’d come to me in high Renaissance drag. Even had her hair colored, and the cosmetic surgery had completely healed so that she now appeared even younger than she’d been when I last saw her … that was … well, in Nova Burbank, I think, where we’d met in the first place … Ah, those nights of love, her easy Levantine residence in flesh, nay, she was one with it, she was flesh all through and she dripped with sex. If only she weren’t so mad. At the end there she was thoroughly gone. She knew it. That’s why she came to me.

“Make me like her,” she said, stroking the marble flesh of my Cosima, the one commissioned by the Great Man himself. Her hand played over the small breasts, the coils of hair I’d wrought so lovingly and left off polishing sooner than the rest so they’d retain the look of my model’s own course tresses. She really wasn’t so much lovely as … Oh, striking, I suppose. That’s how you describe a woman who would be ugly if she weren’t so magnetic. True of Penelope as well. Can you imagine her with Ed, though? A force like that made to fit his bricked in religion. His little house must fall at last, as I’m sure it did. She’d run out on the fool and he blamed me. “You ruined her. You ruin everyone with your sorcery.”

I had her undress and marveled again at her body.

“What was her body like?” Ed pressed.

“Oh, you missed something there, Ed. You were such a poor, wasted looking animal beside her. Even in that sackcloth you all wore she was still a beauty. Your Priest saw it. The way the pig watched her, the way his eyes always slid away after her when she passed by his dais. You say he married you.”

“We were married!” his vox crazed.

“So he could have at her, you poor fish!”

“It is the Law.”

“How convenient the Law is for priests.”

“Shut up!” he slapped at his thighs, raising dust.

I leaned my head back against the ancient stone. Yes, that day, that last day. As I raised up the Circling Fire and let it race through me, empowering my hands finally, as I touched her heat once more, one last time, her hair, her throat, her breasts even smaller than Cosima’s yet with more prominent nipples, and a stubble from the hair she must wax off each day. I’d love to run my tongue over it when we were younger, loved the feel of her nipples firming up against my lips, her belly, soft and warm and full of her (she was firmly centered there as one should be), and there was the plunge of the flesh into her deep navel, hair surrounding that as well, or it had then, and her bush, her opening thighs, ah! I loved the way her thighs locked around my head when I kissed her in the secret place, and later pressed against my own and pushed rhythmically as I plunged into her … My hands remembered her warmth even as it slowly fled, as her soft, rose and olive toned flesh went blue white, went hard and chill to the touch, died slowly under the Fire. Strange that the Fire would make such a cold thing of a woman, of anyone who wanted the cold for the sake of … of what? What?

I Shot Santa Clause

2011-12-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

Running. What else can I do? What can you do when you shoot somebody, and not just anybody but a myth? Ever shot a myth? Well, I have. So, I’m running along here, kids are giving chase, parents giving chase to the kids, everybody’s after somebody else it seems, big ones eat the little ones. But look. I shot Santa Clause. That’s the story.

So, go back. I’ve had a problem with this guy for years, maybe all my life, I don’t know. He’s a fat fool with whiskey breath who guilts the shit out of you. “ You been good this year? You eat your peas and carrots and things? You fuck up the way you did all them other years?” So, who’s he, Mister Clean? Son of a bitch goes home to a one room flop and watches the Weather Channel. No Mrs. Clause, no reindeers, no nothing. This is one big loser here, lemme tell you. So, I should be letting him put me down so I can get what I ask for? You know what? Fuck him, that’s what.

Next time I see him I says, “What do you mean by all that crap yesterday?”

“What crap is that, son?” he asks mildly.

“All that guilt crap? Who do you think you are, laying that crap on me? So then you expect me to ask you nicely for what I want. Well, dig, fat boy. I want you in an icebox with the power turned up all the way. I want you sitting on tacks in a world of tacks that extend all the way to the horizon. I want your beard on fire, your stupid red suit run through the wrong cycle and come out looking like its made of crinkle chips, you crapulous crud.”

“Son, why don’t you buzz off or something. You could buzz off. That’s a good thing for you to do.”

I pointed the Finger of Doom at him. It is a long finger, an adamantine finger, this Finger of Doom of mine. It is a finger that you cannot fly from into a land of homegrown tomatoes or thoughts of thy neighbor’s ass. No, no. You’re doomed, daddy-O, when that one casts its long shadow over your smug face, saying, “Hey! Kingfish. Tonight you sleep alone.”

Yeah, so I tell him, “OK. OK, big guy. I’ll buzz off for you. But I’ll be back. This ain’t over yet. Just you wait and see.”

That’s when I know that Fate has me by the balls. It’s helping me along, I can feel it. A big warm breath of Fate gently pushes me along, pushes me right into the door of a gun shop. Oh, yes. A gun shop, whoopy! Wall to wall guns. Rifles, cannon, bazookas, Uzis. Then a long glass case with the lovely killer pistolas, Mister, the BANG BANG guns you want from a man. Oh, and holsters, god damn it. The tooled leather, studded and beaded and bedazzled, place for a monogram, even a name if it’s a short one, Tex or something, maybe just “Kid”. I like that. Kid. Gun first, though. Let’s see, let’s see. There’s gangster models, little chickenshit Derringers, big ole Magnums I figure for stupid, but then, but then … well, dang it all if it ain’t the venerable cattleman’s friend, the 44.40 of yore, which is class, Jack, I ain’t bullshittin.

Espying me, the proprietor says, “You look like man knows his ordnance.”

“I am a man of purpose,” I told him.

“A tall man.”

“Lean and mean.”

“Not bad looking.”

“Rugged more than handsome, wouldn’t you say?”

“I can go with that. Yeah. Rugged.”

“And I have the look of a stranger in town.”

“Yeah. That, too.”

“OK, ring ‘er up. And that holster there. Cut me a moniker on it. I want “Kid” there on it.”

“Well, my K knife’s busted. Can you think of something else. Initials? What’s your name.”

“Dunno,” I told him.

“So you’re the famous Man Who Don’t Know His Name.”

“Yeah. That’s me. How ‘bout it? What can you do with that?”

“Well, simple. Put a X there? How are you for an X in that place?”

“Nope. Rings false. Has implications I can’t live up to.”

“Well. Maybe just leave it blank, then. Folks’ll get the point. They see a guy, he’s tall and lean and mean and more rugged than handsome, they figure, Why that must be The Man Don’t Know His Name.”

“Sure looks like him,” I go along.

“Has the walk.”

“The talk.”

“He don’t say much. Leave out that talk stuff. He don’t say much. That’s how it should be.”

“How it is, Mister. Like you say. Just like you say.”

“Well, how ‘bout you just put an O there. Got an O knife?”

“I surely do.”

“That can be for Zero, dig? It can be interpreted that way.”

“Some would agree. I would. Others, maybe they sort of scratch their heads and wonder, ‘Is that an O or a Zero? What do you think, Clarence?’ ‘I figure it for an O.’ ‘Just an O? What’s that stand for?’ ‘Well, maybe for something unsayable.’ ‘Unspeakable.’ ‘Filthy dirty.’ ‘Vile, fetichistic, the stuff of dreams in a low bar at the end of the universe.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Yeah. I’m agreein with ya.’ It could be like that, am I right?”

“Could be. Figure it’ll work?”

“I figure. Them as don’t get it, well, all the worse for them. For they don’t know they are looking upon the Man Who Don’t Know His Name and might misspeak themselves. You know how people are. ‘Hey dude, where you get them artificial shoes?’ So you have to turn to them and give your enigmatic smile, and either they trifle with you further or they get it who you are. But this here?”

He withdraws the venerable pistol and holds it up before me. “This is what awaits triflers,” he says. “Do I not speak the truth here?”

“I feel that you do. I sense that about you.”

“Well, then. Let’s outfit you in a suitable way and get you stalking the streets of this one Wi-Fi town, seeking Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

“What’s all that?”

“All what?”

“All that you just said.”

“Dunno. It’s a cowboy thing. Long time ago thing. Nobody rightly remembers.”

“Well. I’ll remember.”

“Good for you, son.”

* * *

So I shot the son of a bitch.

I stood in line with the gun concealed in my duster. The others paid me little notice. Figured me for a store detective, possibly a kid from another planet. “Nah, that ain’t from no other planet, dude,” one of them said. “That’s what you call bad news wearing artificial shoes.” “Got a point,” said another. “Could account for his unnatural height. Kids don’t get that high around here. Mom says it’s all the sushi. Sitting across from her my father, who is short and fat, sings, ‘Show me the way to the next sushi bar!’ and they both laugh a great deal about that, slobber all over the food. I don’t get it. I don’t understand them half the time. Anybody’s from another planet it’s my parents.” “Yeh, well my parents are from hell, so there. Ever read that Cocteau shit? Les Parents Terribles? Yeah, so that’s my parents.” “So, maybe this kid’s from hell, too.” “Don’t think so. Heaven is in his eyes. You don’t get that effect when you’re from hell. That’s a known thing in science.” “You believe in science? What an asshole. You know how many cool points you just lost? Science. What are you, a particle weighing boy? Peekaboo universes jumping in and out of existence through black holes? Up from apes? Shit, man, anybody’s looking knows apes are better. What an asshole.”

But there is a low rumbling of an approaching elevated train. That’s my signal. When the big old thing comes thundering overhead I rush forward, gun drawn, pushing everybody aside.

“You’re not supposed to butt in line,” someone reminds me.

I stand before him. Santa Clause. He has just let a girl down off his lap, which is wet, and is about to take a quick little snort when he gets it. What’s happening here. Who I am and what I’m going to do.

“Didn’t I take your order a while back there, squirt?” he says. His eyes start from their spheres and roll like roulette wheels. “Think you can pull a fast one on old Santa? Well, let me tell you …”

“No, no,” I says. “I’ll do the telling. I’m here to do the telling. And this is what I must say. You, Santa, are a responsible Myth, the Stuff of Legend, That Which Keeps a Boy Marching to the Same Old Drummer. But you think it’s OK to just guilt a guy like that, to put him through all that police procedural crap. Wants to know if on the night of such and such you finished your peas and carrots, did the dishes as required, folded all the newspapers into paper airplanes just the way Dad wants ‘em so he can play war with the fireplace. You do your homework? The one with all the mix and match – the Meter Reader’s job description is? The official duties of a Cockroach Wrangler are? When you have a wife, will you stop beating her? You mow the lawn? Take out the trash? You collect your cool points, call em in to Number Crunch, win a free prize? I doubt that. Can’t say I believe that. You don’t look like the right kind of kid to me. Something all sideways about you. Something all mislabeled and poisoning the old Populusque. Problem boy. Boy with funny ideas rolling around loose in his head and making him hear things … Have I covered it? Isn’t that one of your standard raps? Boy goes away from you feeling so worthless he don’t deserve nothing but a day fulla Rossini overtures played on a million hurdy-gurdies, or Miss Black’s long vampire nails run down the blackboard as she says, ‘Thus we see how Pythagoras imposed the Harmonic upon a delinquent Universe.’”

“Look, son,” he says, “look here, now. I got business here. So you … well, you just go on. You just go fishing. Ever think of that? You go on and go fishing. That’s a good thing to do, isn’t it? What I always do when I’m upset. I just grab me a quart a whiskey and a dozen baloney sandwiches and I just … well, I just go fishing, is what. That’ll straighten you out. Now you get along now, you hear?”

“Smile when you say that,” I told him, and let her rip. Several holes appeared. Then
he busted wide open and party favors shot forth. Little kids ran up and started yelling, “I want the red one,” – “Fuck off, you like the blue,” – “The red, I want the red, I shall have the red,” – “No, the blue, you are allergic to the red, see, already you’re breaking out, but here’s a striped, trade you a striped for a red one,” – “Get your own red one, I already wet on it.”

But I was already running. And I’ll keep on running, run all down the days and all the years, finding no resting place, no food or shelter within the borders of the Empire. I bear the mark. It showed up on my forehead moments afterwards. It is a sort of hoof print, cloven, with the brand name of the Demiurge, owner and maker of all things, the whole works, the mess in your room, your smelly wife, the drifting dogs, wens, fogs, dirigibles. You must take care not to let it show. Do not go bareheaded in the sight of God. Pass swiftly, in a cloak and flat top hat. Keep that gun loaded, always. Be ready to fire upon all those who would show you kindness. All those who would smile and lick your nose. All cab drivers, desperate pilgrims yearning for Happy Hour, the Dogs of War, the Wings of Song. Beware, O Son of the Morning, always beware.

(This story first appeared in The Blotter)

Within Hearing

2011-06-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

It's rather like wandering down and down from the dreadful highest into some endless unknown city …. lost up there among the quarriers and shark hunters and fighters without reason, taking a job amongst them really, even though they realize you could be somewhere else ."You look like ... You could be better off. That hair. What are you doing amongst us?" Yet soon enough you're running a gang on a stolen train, shooting people at random just because you can. And finally free of that you tell your new apprentice if we are to get out of here we must work, climb, climb very high, even though you realize that your own hated yet more proper city is far below, way way down there among the lubbers and cocksmen, auto workers so dear. This is mad work that we are about here among the twisted boards and leanto dwellings which hold the Secret Word in a burning jar.

"Don't take that way sir, the tracks are about to turn!" I am warned, and yet I go on. Down now, properly down. This is a terrible place, yet venerable. It is where Melville was, and Hawthorne and the like. So here we go, here we go. Come along, Ned. If we are going to get us home we must travel far … yet who can hear my song now? Who will listen? I sing and sing. Haha. Don't talk about your novels, Ra, sing them right here where no one will listen, but at least they will listen ha ha!

You begin to slide. Where there had been stairs now there is ice, a wind and a desert. There are friendlies. Some ancient houses. A fog comes and mists it all away. There sir. Fire. Find your way to it. What are they talking about? Nothing. I will sing and make all ordered and comprehensible in a tale of our tribe. Now I'll do it pat. Get it right at last. They will know me at last and call me Him. Prophet, fool. Also he juggles ha.

But you know it's over, you fair haired fool, grizzled and limping and bereft of a banjo. Need'st thou proof of it say thy name to the stars. Wink, wink. Why Who? Yoohoo, Yehuda most high beard? Do you not remember me who made the wind and all the whales?

Rest now we must. Here there is water and some sherry. The sea is visible now. Home sea full of tall swans. Your famous writing, your philosophy, a darkness upon the face of the waters, yet there is popcorn, little white boats of popcorn floating and these are your words. Pretty. Not so? Pretty? Please sir, if you'd only give me this brief hearing.

THE PREQUAL

But wait. Get on back. First there was old Valderon, old friend. I had come up the hill to find my girl. She was trapped up there in snare and delusion. A large apartment actually which she felt she could not leave. I was there to deliver her and Valderon had given me horse in his big blue car. The motor idling, Val just sitting there in both innocence and self importance, singing along to Wagner on the pod.

I ran in. She was there but she hid. I went from room to room. There were shops, wineries, all the goods you don't need and yet you must. She is there. I smell sandalwood. Sandalwood and myre: these are the mixings of Silk Rout miscegenations, mutant loves. I hear her running. Her clogs, clop clop clop. She is a nanny goatfoot, also a mermaid, yet another mermaid. Finally Valadaron needs join me in the hunt across the crooked floors. We too make clopping sounds. We are horses now. We've always been horses in our own way, or wannabes with our high manes. Dig the Pompadours and pomp. At last we find her, hiding among her paints in the closet. She is crying for shame of herself, for letting me touch her, even though it was long ago.

Val must lift her up. He carries her in his brown arms and I run ahead scout. By this time she has fallen in love with him I'm sure. They all fall for him, for he is Valderon and I am only a geezer of Ling. Valderon, ah Valderon. You were even better at that! Yet I can build a fire and see to your torn lips, eh? When you are sodden and needs fall upon the rocks, going OOK! OOK!

We rest. We lie there in one large sleeping bag with you in the middle. "I love you," she whispers in your old goat's ear and you mutter an acknowledgement. You don't care about love at all, never have. You are a posturing Romantic. You don't even have the Certificate. Fool without honor, let me go. I must go. Fly on down now. All else is prelude. Prelude, my fat dead friend.

Qaf Qaf Qa

The Staten Island Requiem

2011-05-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

for Nancy

INTRODUCTION

This rather lengthy prose poem was written in the months just prior to and following 9/11. I make no excuses for its somewhat fragmented and miasmic form. I have found no way since the time of its composition to get it into a shape more congenial, even to such readers as it will find. I have excised a few passages, abbreviated others, but added nothing since the date posted at the end.

BP

NOTE: I am republishing this piece here again which, in the light of recent events, seems apropos. Again, I have made no further revisions but certainly intend to. It is very difficult to go near this material with a blue pencil due to the nature of inspiration: one feels the removal of one little piece will bring down the whole edifice. For this I make no apology.

BP 5/2/11

I.
LACRIMOSA
(Remembrance, Prophesy, Purple Prose, Kvetching)

Who Goes

People are dying, people are dying. No. Dead. Some, anyway, a recent. Then two in progress. One going now slowly, or rather in little bursts of incremental decay. Goes to the hospital. Returns. Goes back. Comes home. Refuses to return, then must at some point if it progresses too far. Reasonably young for so much disintegration. Another is simply old and flying apart like an exploding planet in slow motion. Bits of memory go. They fly off slowly into space, never to return. Where does all this stuff finally stick? I mean, is there a ceiling to it at last where the bits come to rest, sort of squashed like gum under seats to be scraped off later by the janitors who redeem them at anthropology stations, where men of science access it all somehow, employing scanners and other expensive looking instruments? What? Does anyone know? Doctors? All they do is test and prescribe. Poisonous drugs which either send you to zoom land or make you throw up. Then too all the support systems of surrounding responsibility junkies. (That's a great term invented by a religious friend.) What to do? What to do? There is so much potential for death. Then the actual event and cleaning up after it. Everyone exhausted, dysfunctional (why is that allowed to be a word?), much time spent just lying in bed staring at the ceiling, maybe looking at the pieces of gum. That's all. Just pieces of gum to them now. Meaningful to anthropologists, but only later, as I say. Did I say that? Later? Maybe. Doesn't matter. We should stop. Time bought is at an end. Remember to take your meds.

Who Remains

All she wants is a time of deep sleep,
a time of not knowing she is there
because while she is awake
she is sick.
That's all she knows then,
except for memories.
That's what she talks about with people.
Well, too,
a decision she says she has to make
to either let herself just die
or stay alive
(she says)
for others.
To undo herself from her feeder
so that she can die in peace.
Either that
or go on in an agony of fevers,
not even knowing who is there or not there
while she yet remains.

. . . and yet as she dies
she so much more gravely lives.
Brave sister,
brave, brave kindred,
Warrior,
Mother,
Maid.

the piece formerly known as
"Peace in the Valley"

. . . midsummer, 2001

-1-

The golf course is empty. The gophers have inherited the golf course, hopefully the earth as well. See that one out there, poking around? He's unafraid, he's taking the air like some former jogger, now a guy carrying around a breathing apparatus and using a walker. Gopher's here, though. The guy with the oxygen tank is, alas, mixed up with all the rest of the meltdown . . . No, it wasn't the famous nuclear holocaust once feared; things just got so disgusting they simply popped in various ways, caved in, you know, crashed and burned, drowned in their own vile secretions. The world ended, not because of war or the burden of peace but just because it came to term. A Spenglerian demise, if you will. This is what I mean by Peace in the Valley here. Life without US. Life without THEM. The Valley I refer to specifically is the one we used to call the Silicon. No one lives there now. (Hey. No one ever lived there. They just went through the motions very quickly in a kind of pixilated insect dance, you wanna call them steps dancing). Anyways, they are gone now, and their works slowly perish. The black glass slides down into the ground and becomes a smooth, reflective surface, a hard black lake nothing swims in. The birds come down and skate along like those fool surfers of yore. They give up on such lakes. No fishing here, guys, only our own reflections against a backdrop of sleazy looking clouds. Gone, all gone. Just wasn't a need for it any more. The universe got tired of it. So, arrangements were made somehow so that people went away. Birds remained, and dogs -- hell, fish and fowl, fools of all species, but no more the Wise Monkey . . . You know, the dinosaurs were used up and so they went down, leaving interesting bones behind (fuel, too, quite useful in the war effort). Us, we left mostly crap: wrappers, plastic containers, PCs and TVs and Video players. The stars shine on a junk yard which one day will be pretty, a sort of variegated mess of fusing and defusing chemical compounds and alloys and miraculous plastics, and the sea shall wash up on all this, over the centuries fabricating of it strange new shapes and poetic, mirage-like fantasies, and avians will fly by, as stated, they'll shit upon it because that's all it's good for; I mean, it won't yield up any provender, won't provide a bath, the surfing sucks, maybe it's art but what do birds need with art? and even these birds will say "Fuck you!" to the stingy little shits who didn't leave em diddly. Then still the malevolent graffiti getting vaguer all the time, the fancy spray painted expletives and gang icons all flowing into abstract arabesques of receding definition . . . A mess, huh? And yet poetry of sorts, impressionist they call it, only they forgot just what it was they were looking at when they got started to blurring words together in a droopy, soft focus scan dance . . . Hey, you get this flash, dig? drunken steppers in a smoke filled room, they sort of drape over each other and move in a kind of fuckaduck way to droop tunes, funky-groovy whore house piano, repetitious twelve bar blues you can't get out of your head, it from the stone bummer times, bro, you member? Kiss em off and gladly. Hey, kvetching? Who cares enough to kvetch? This is fantasy, and maybe even wishful thinking of a kind . . . But listen. The phone won't ring again. No. Not ever. Still you get an answering machine going off at random, maybe having acquired sentience enough to experience longing, for longing is IT. Buddhist construction, but fuck you, you can't take a joke. That's gone, too, by the way. The Buddha of our era, long dead, cannot pass on his lineage of the Truth of Suffering and Impermanence. Ppppppt! Raspberry! No longer needed. Check it out. It is empty. Luminous and empty. Better than ever, the best yet, thou world without end.

But let me tell you something. It's an idea I have (yeah, uh-oh!). You got your empty, right? The world is without form and void. Or the other way around. No matter. Heh heh. So, you've got the world which is void and without form, and then -- AND THEN:

-2-

. . .well, I was a guy sitting on a little terrace out on Staten Island. A summer day, mild for late July, don't you think? I hear birds, and I see a church tower, trees, back yards and the roofs of houses, a squirrel furtively crosses the street below, sniffing. Somebody's got a hot tub down there, just like back home in Californee. Starting to relax here. The universe begins to set, the drugs kick in, ho, whoopee! Soon I'll be ready to begin life as another guy in another time, lost to the former dream which drifts away and away and away, maybe it further pollutes that harbor out there on the other side of the flat. A new day, a new sadness. Folks are still dying, a man sleeps a troubled sleep in the next room over. But there is, briefly, peace. In this Valley, too. Peace. Have you ever loved, have you ever lived, have you ever died? Oh, you will some day, bubber. For now, though, rest, for it is the seventh day. The sixth, really, however the Jewish Sabbath and therefore the Seventh, so there, wise ass. There. Or:

Dawn. New York Harbor, looking out from the west side terrace of the same flat in Staten Island. Hell, maybe I live here, I don't know. There's Brooklyn, where my father was born, and majestic Manhattan, asserting itself slowly out of the haze. A lone fishing boat motors merrily before three snoozing ships, it's close in to the shore by the Coast Guard base. Yonder, I can just see Liberty herself, barely differentiated from the nest of skyscrapers behind her . . . and smaller. A gull squawks. Radio blares as a car sweeps by on the street eight floors below. Now some other sad bird wails and seems to wake all the rest, the twittering ones, the chippers and squeekers and squalling sportsfishers . . .

I never really hated America, although I pretended to. I've come to admit that I love her even, over the years, as I've gawked in awe at her imperious mountains -- the Sierras, the Rockies . . . Rivers, too: the Hudson, and of course the mighty Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico, where it is a wide and gently flowing thing, then up further, approaching Chicago, where from a plane you'd swear you were looking down at one of the Great Lakes, maybe even some undiscovered sea. Finally, crossing a bridge from greater Minneapolis into what the students at the U call Dinky Town, it's barely a creek at times. I have seen dawn at Marpa point, high up in Colorado; seen Moby Dick's open in the morning from a cheap hotel in downtown Minneapolis, taking note of the huge billboard way the hell across town mounted above some vast drug emporium announcing: WE WILL FILL ANY PRESCRIPTION FROM ANYWHERE, ANYTIME . . . hmmm . . . digging out my empty codeine bottle . . . I've seen a world destroying desert from a leaning porch in Bishop, California, seen lakes by turns like turquoise and gold as the day progressed, seen the Atlantic and the Pacific and the dead sea of Utah. I've watched over the years as Hollywood Boulevard was transformed from a street of dreams to the main drag of the skids. There was a theatre called the Egyptian, where I first saw Ben Hur. Last time I rode past it in a bus full of burnouts it was showing a couple of skin flicks. America. It moves on, mutates. Much of it is owned by faceless Mabuses who show no allegiance to any nation state. In California, where I usually live, people of color outnumber the whites, even though us Caucasians still pretend that we are the People.

And yet another dawn. The neighbors all dead asleep or dead or asleep, the tugboat crawls and smokes, is emblazoned with lights like brass buttons, and a bird repeats the same zither whistle, another chips, another flutes, and the dawn of the work week rattles in -- well, not quite rattles; it makes the sound of a pressurized airliner cabin in flight . . . Then a car starts and heroically -- no, not heroically, nice but wrong -- , noisily creeps, another grinds up to a start, oinks off, one goes skulking below and turns away, and the tugboat still approaches with its black plume, its burnished lights, now turns slowly left, goes, goes away, good, fuck off. Some kind of electric saw or generator kicks up a ruckus. Birds say Hey, go for it, good morning, schmuck! And the zither slides and narrows to a squeal, a pelican pukes, a poor boy hovers at the door to some dumb charity, while the smooth harbor waters are not quite smooth but like some taut foil reflecting light of a color almost blue yet bronze, also, blue and gray and gold and with patient hatch marks of ripples and that sort of pre-boil motion of all waters, even at rest. Sad, sad, sad. My wife had said, "It's too hard." And I could not relieve her of the burden no one should carry. No one can. No matter what her dreary Buddhist friends told her, no one, no one should carry nor even try to lift such a burden from another. They had come in with their dirty cushions and candles, their bells and beads and drums, looking all tired and pious. I ran out of there as if they were a crew of fumigators or rug cleaners. Went to the maritime park with my brother-in-law, whom I plied with Valium and told him to get laid. "Let's both get laid, in fact," I says. "Let's approach that young lady over there and ask her if she would suffer two entries simultaneous like." He laughed, "Come on!" dismissing me for the old joker that I am.

. . . no one should put up with it. That's not bravery or nobility or some Roman kind of virtue but sort of the flip side of our general solipsism, another expression of me-ness and mine only, the rest n'exist pa.

But look. A ship with a saint on top, or even Jesus, his arms spread wide in benediction. Who asked him? Really.

* * *

I said, -- out loud -- "I'm so tired of all this dreary dying I could die for you all myself! "

* * *

All the boats out there look like the Statue of Liberty, somehow. When I was a kid I used to say, "Let's play Statue of Liberty!" I don't know what I meant. I don't know what the point of the game was, and I couldn't tell them when they'd ask how you played it. I just raised my arm and held out my torch, thinking they should understand. Now the Statue of Liberty is the last thing you see as the fog rises these mornings. First comes the big tall towers of the . . . what's it? Taller than the Empire State where old King Kong got his. Taller than the tallest. Not even Superman can jump over these two strutting symbols . . .

II.
DIES IRAE

The Friday Night Fights

We had this fight there in the pizza place on McArthur Blvd. in Oakland, CA, my brother-in-law and me. It was a Friday night, I remember, but a long time ago, around 1976, I think. Yeah, right, the Bicentennial Year. Another life, another wife, another brother-in-law. And he kept telling everyone, "Sorry, we were having this fight. We didn't mean to disturb you."

And later, back at the apartment, the law student came down. Why, I don't know. Perhaps to bear witness to the Law, to affirm it as meaningful, even in this instance.

"We just had a fight, you see," my brother-in-law told him. It seemed important to him that everyone should know. Somehow that settled it, to tell about it, to say that it happened. He too was bearing witness. He too was a law student, although not attending such a fine school as our neighbor because, as he would have it, he was not a nigger. I did not mention that Mr. Bolt from upstairs would never suffer a racial slur of this kind, being very pale. Also fat and with rather peachy cheeks when he smiled, which was often.

OK. So we had this fight in the pizza place. We were just drunk and I said the Law won't help us in our difficulty with my wife's, my then wife's, being fired from her job. I said the Law is a Mafia. It pissed him off. Disproportionately, I felt. He grabbed me by the shirt and began to speak in some strange current argot, calling me names in it. People all over the room looked at us. Finally I began to eat his hands, or rather pretend to. I just grabbed them and dipped them in the sauce still left on my plate and before he could even think to resist I began to sort of gnaw on his hands, and with apparent gusto. This was the only way I felt that I could stop him from talking like that because he wouldn't when I just asked him. Then I began to laugh when he yanked his hands away from me, and in doing that he splattered someone's nice dress with the sauce, I remember. She pretended not to notice. Her date ignored it, too. Then he bashed me one. Because I was laughing about it, I guess. And there was silence. Even the music stopped. That bubble-gum rock music they played in some pizza places then. No, wait; it was the Strauss fanfare that Kubrick used in that movie, the one with the slabs that changed everything. The bubble gum was before and after, as per, as with everything, History. So that's when he began telling all the people that we were having a fight. He wanted them to know it . . . The evening settled into a blur after that. I know we went back to the apartment. The law student came down and visited awhile, listened to the story about the fight, then went back up stairs -- to get his Koran or something; he never came back. Meantime my brother-in-law fell asleep on the couch.

"That was a shitty thing you did," my wife said, and she huffed away into our bedroom.

I went out on the porch and smoked. I took my glass of wine with me, too, even though I knew that I was going to have a hangover from what I'd drunk already that night. What's more, my wife had put away the pain pills. She'd hidden them from me so that I would suffer.

None of this mattered, though, because it would just keep on happening, things like this. Until they stopped and something else went on and on. I smoked and drank my wine. My jaw would hurt in the morning, even though he hadn't hit me very hard. Right now, though, I was feeling no pain. Could be it was one of the better moments of my whole life. Because something was over with and nothing else had begun yet.

Where You Shine

There's this guy used to be a friend of mine,
nice to everyone he knows.
He loves his wife and his mom and is dad and his dog,
helps out the neighbors, too.
He's good for a touch,
he'll spot you to a beer.
A mensch, right?
He pays his bills,
comes to work on time,
all that,
maybe more.

****

But you know,
you got some little thing you're hiding;
some sheltered light,
or even a darkness you must enshrine . . .

****

Well, a guy's a guy.
We all have teeth --
and we're raised to keep an edge.
So what's to make this one unique?
is my point here.

****

And so he gets a look at what you got.
Maybe you even let him in on it:
You say, I've got this thing, or
Take a look, OK?
Am I a fool for love or what?

****

Or you don't even show it.
You keep it to yourself.
But he suspects you're on to something fine --
Juicy, fragile, silent,
Whatever --

****

And he takes a bite out of it;
tastes,
considers,
chews some and spits it out.

****

That's what he does to you.

****

And he says, Come on, I'll spot you to a beer.

****

OK.
He's just a guy.
I guess I should forgive him.
Wouldn't I do the same?
Haven't I?

****

I guess he's just a guy.
But is that nice?
Getting you where you shine?

****

Even so,
you forget it.
You have a beer with him,
several over the years,
and with guys just like him,
who do the same thing.

****

You keep forgiving,
Forget about it, you remind yourself.
Maybe you do the same thing.
You get them where they shine.

****

But these things mount up.
They keep accumulating.
You lose a little each time,
and gain something you don't want.
Maybe it is only the darkness you enshrine.

****

After the Peace

Trapped in here, counting my blessings while I wait. There's been something, a noise then a falling, but we don't have earthquakes. Dust in the nose, dust in the eyes, light but it's only a blur and unspecific in its source. Almost no sound, none, maybe coughing. What fell? Is anyone on top of me? It doesn't feel like a person. Mainly no pain. That's one. Two, I can breath. I think I can see but who could tell in this? Third, I'm where I belong. I could barely stand up when this happened. Two days without pills and I was so tired that I could do almost nothing but huddle up in a chair, maybe look at some TV. All I did was sit, anyway, admit people in through the gate. Occasionally answer the phone and hear a recording. At the best of times I did almost nothing but at least there was that sense of well being that comes with three pink capsules and the tiny yellow pill with a good tall kaffelate chaser. But that's gone, too, now. And well being with it. Still a chance. This could end, as all things must, but there are different sorts of time, geologic for instance. Of course I could masturbate, I can reach it. Another blessing. I don't know why we used to count them, certainly not now -- in the geolsogic sense the meaning has eroded so, been washed over by waters so long it's lost its vigorous contours and we just slip over it like the water ourselves, counting nothing, just counting, perhaps to ten in the Zen style then back again to one. So ten blessings allowed, masturbation being number -- turn back -- can't find it -- four, maybe. Reach down and grab the boy, rub gently and imagine various dirty girls, brunettes who roll their eyes and smile while they suck it, or tits wagging under you, a mouth wide, gasping, screaming finally, it makes you come, too. In the debris somewhere. There's so much to clean up who's gonna worry about a little slime? There's an example of an extended blessing. You can prolong these things until you're screaming for mercy. I haven't before because I am prudish. Self release is somehow -- I don't know -- not right -- you could get to like it (going in unto thy brother's wife and spilling it on the ground, lest that you should give seed to thy brother . . . ) so that you no longer belong to the shared life of the tribe, or even just one other. You're trapped inside yourself like here, which is the perfect symbol for masturbation. No contact, stuck, no one to love, nothing left, nowhere to go except you can build up an enormous repertoire of stimulating acts with the fingers in the way they go about playing with the boy and after a while finding that so pleasurable in itself that you don't have to imagine a woman or any kind of mutuality. Before I got down here I was already passive. I'd touch the woman, or lick her till she came, usually without too much enthusiasm, then let her give me a nice long blow job, instructing her as she went along. I found that more satisfying than a good long pumping. Getting old, you see. So there is that. More or less my condition anyway now made perfectly solid in life (still alive), by means of some misunderstood calamity, some would say Apocalypse but that's misused and romantic, also a worn stone. So many things are ruined and made meaningless by using the wrong word . . . Even so, this is perfect. There is symmetry. It's what you've always seen before you in a comfortably symbolic way now made objective; why, it's been "concretized", is what. Love that word. It's a college sort of term, English majorish. In fact I got it from an English prof, and even he used it with a certain irony. The perfect word at last, though, or rather a found situation it awaited and now perfectly fits. My thoughts thingafied. Put outside myself so they look back at me as things seen and seeing, I suppose, and I hope so, for then they too will get a laugh out of all this -- fuck them. "Fuck you, too!" they reply. Maybe with energetic gestures, the Italian one, or just the plain old American flip off. Imagine broken chairs and smashed lamp fixtures, copy machines, PCs, cash registers, all these thingafied things happily flipping you off. I mean, you've been running into them all these years and saying son of a bitch bastard fuck you and now they do it back. Not the point, really, but sort of a sub point, right? Or subsidiary theme. Point being, baby, I'm where I oughta be. Or need. Need to be. I said that to a friend once during my metaphysical days and he flew back at me with, "Ah, come on!" Never forgave me for it. Every time we talk on the phone (he lives in a distant city now, I think it's even still there) he reminds me, I mean when I complain about what this place has become. "Well, you know," he says wryly, "you are where you need to be." I can't blame him. Only now it's true, as I say. There are problems of course. Elimination is painful, and you must dwell in it. And food is out of the question. So far I'm not hungry and it's been hours -- perhaps a whole day. I suppose I could be dead. No, I am masturbating, also eliminating in a small way. I should have mentioned earlier that these two functions conjoined make my fear of -- what? -- narcissism? -- whatever -- less of a problem than I made it out to be. Need I say more?

* * *

Some hours later, I don't know, I'm out, anyway. Someone lifted something, some single piece, and there it was, sky, gray of course, either from smoke or my ruined eyes, because it is warm, I think, there are people, voices, a sort of bow-wow and clamor, much scraping of metal, huey blades, jack hammers jacking off and sirens, shit, what would we do without em? Someone is asking me, I don't know, a newscaster, no doubt cute, she sounds cute, I just can't understand her, I shake my head and then just let go with the peepee, (I can't do it very well in an inclined position, also forgot to mention that, didn't I?) and it goes down my front and warms it, then chills like a bastard. As if by angels a blanket is offered. I am where I need to be, I mouth, sniggering as best I can. The angel smiles, this I do know, for his teeth are vast as love, for love is, at least briefly, especially on days like this when you were sure it was the end, the last, what is prophesied and even believed by overeducated clerics who teach at prestigious universities. (The last days, he says, checking out the wine's bouquet, smoothing his Ralph Laurens.) But I believe it too at times, even less spectacular times. Amazing what crap we keep. Somewhere in the darkest corner of your mind lies poor old Santa Clause, all curled up and weeping.

* * *

Now what was is gone.

The corpses gather in the harbor, face up as if to say goodbye to the sun. Strange craft mull or meander while the subtly misshapen skyline lurks like a pile -- and when the bells come they linger, too. This is both exhaustion and expectation. There is only a vague wind. No surfin today, no fishin. The Coast Guard rides out like a knighthood while a big lubber of a ship with a stogey like stack leans slowly in towards the island here, getting a wave from the ghost of the house, maybe, if she's not gone on.
I certainly have, more and more of a ghost myself -- always somewhere else aloft or just left or on the opposite shore. Always just missing or just nearing the calamity already past when I get there. Not of life, barely in it any more. Away, absent, AWOL. Goodbye as I'm coming in. Sit down, we're just leaving.

Lonely?

Yes, but that's not always such a bad thing compared to what one must be in order to stay affiliated.

Even when death comes, wouldn't I rather have a of view of silent waters, a blasted city full of others gathered while I keep my own watch?

Or perhaps one with me.

One who knows.

Who is always here anyway and so one must be, as always, integral, solitary and unknown only to the Unknown.

* * *

abazabazabazaba

abazabazabazaba

We talk, communicate, share food, bananas, good thing, shameless and shocking, death in the same mouthful with chocolate chips as we face the windmills, the most dangerous game, yet the clouds above them say more. In a few deft knells the rain and the wind shall loose all fury of wind chimes, or our thespian sickups and threat of further lightning flashes over ever more involving hills (I say involving for their mystery, for what shouts, what lights up only reveals how cheap it all is, really, all our grand cancer, all our moments and cricket gasps). Gonnagonnagonna! Gonna do it, dude! Yaketty yak! We'll getcha back! Tear out my patch. Shut up the trenches one by one like mouths shutting their yaps at last

(under orders).

Shut up the doors, the coffins, the chapels to admit and release further marriages, to inflict hateful youth upon itself and then upon the youth of other nations when there is a wanted detumescence of a war at last,

a banner here,

a banner there.

What's it all about?

Well, whadaya got, charlie?

We'll crawl right under it and shoot from there until we knit some other up out of first philosophies, ideologies, idiot banners ready at last again for yet another end to be fought for . . .

O Aton, shine for us,

O Atom, shatter us.

I say shake, rattle and roll

sweet Jesus!

I say slay, Allah!

I say avenge me, O ye Tetragramaton.

You needn't introduce yourself,

who are forever nameless.

We know you by your blasts and ravishings and fallen angels who

tear down our infidel towers

which were raised in your honor at last,

a rubble of money stacked high to heaven,

then tipped over by a few trained dogs,

or by idiot ants dancing over dead ant bridges,

monkeys from heaven

denying it could be such as they

I compare these to.

Deny on, Nay Sayer.

Hurray! Hurray!

Hurray for Shiva,

Hurray!

* * *

Now you can't even see the goddamned thing, the one they struck -- or two, was it? -- seeing double monoliths, called a Center, not your famous Still Point but, well, Yin and Yang, baby, that's good enough for government work (what government?). It used to be the first to come out of the fog and say nothing, then the rest followed, nothing to say, just day, while the birds celebrated like all things living and the tugs howled and then all the rest joined in. To be alive is to shout. We blast dumb lumps to give them symbolic life, and this is the first act of war. It wears a veil to conceal hot lips, aims an UZI in your smug face, babe. It gives life, and conceals it. For war is yet another veil concealing others and yet others still requiring further obscuration. A flag is a veil, just as the warship is that raises it. A prophetic beard hides a mystery so dark we'll never see it, yet we'll prattle on and prophesy as if we hid a secret back of our own hot lips that ain't even good enough for kisses.

III.
OFFERTORIUM

Father and Son

-How's your peace of mind? my father asked. (This, too, from long ago.)

-I stay with the sun, I said, move west as all things must of necessity. The west is home at last, and there I leave off. That's the end, when it falls behind something westward: a tree, the spire of some church that stands night watch. The muddlers quibble where she rises nether side of the house. Fuck em. Those of the east and those who ape after them like Quixotic monkeys, for the east is a bejeweled jungle of entangling magics . . . Or a desert. Some of us even wanted to be mullahs or militant fools in white robes and turbans who carried religious rifles . . . and maybe we were bored when we began our great quest; more bored than angry with what we felt had betrayed us.

Ho! Lofty prose, and spoken just so back then, if you can believe it. Sometimes I composed my sentences carefully beforehand in a studied metric which brought irritated and confused expressions to my father's hangdog face. But sometimes a dismissive slap to my own. I was a young man, a boy, really. A boy with ideas. That's even worse than a man of that sort these days. That I can still write in a high fallutin manner is a bad sign.

Can This be Deadly?

But hey, you wanna fuck?

The woman does,

even if she doesn't say so.

("Does she need to?" quoth the Joker)

And I'll take her out for pizza, then I'll touch her hand too long or even her tit when we get back in the car later and she's collapsing into my loving sorrowful mournful arms, maybe even crying, sincerely even, tongues me on the cheek and reaches down for my johnson.

Sure we'll fuck

We'll watch the doors fall down and the tower struck by lightning.

It's on TV.

So we'll fuck while they do all that on TV.

We'll fuck in the car.

We'll fuck on the roof.

We'll fuck right there at the viewing,

With the cop's and fireman's wives and their chilluns watching, it's like a combination policeman's and fireman's ball in reverse, you might say

They'll watch it all burn while we fuckyduckydoo.

While the in-laws worry and wonder where we are

(well, fuck them, too, where do they think?)

While the jewels ashore rattle and crack,

twitter and twinkle,

Hey, Requiem aeternam

Just aporkin away while the old moon pelts us with his old joke light,

red sometimes even as he sinks in the dawn,

cussed thing.

It's even there in the daytime, just to muddle us and make faces.

Fuck him, too,

Man in the Moon.

He's another little tin god thought he made things up until he saw himself in a brighter mirror.

But arms, darling,

your sweaty arms,

your tits at my lips,

and a stubble I lick in your pits and a navel I swab out with a finger soaked in whiskey or a tongue and a cunt I lick then enter with my dick,

and I stay;

stay buried.

Dead.

Trying to pull a cross out of a rock,

I who am myself rock and what was a cock, wasn't it?

Didn't it start out like that?

As a cock?

Something.

I'm going.

I'm doing a last finish up.

Mop the cum from the floor and ceiling,

if you please, Felix.

Lick up my thoughts from the floor and ceiling and please

O swallow

swallow

swallow.

****

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini

IV.
REQUIEM AND RECONCILIATION

Setting Slowly
(son to mother, mother to . . . )

-Mother, look at this, there's a plane just . . .

Well I'm a goner for sure. And good riddance, I say.

I set the house on fire. Not intentionally, mind you, I was just emptying some papers and the ashtray too which was full and I never do put my butts out right, I just sort of break the head off them and let it perish of itself. Sometimes though it just don't, it stays lit for a longer time than you'd think. So I did that. The whole house, which is wood. All of it. Riley built that house. Every day he was putting it together after he got home from the machine shop, and then his weekends too, which was sometimes only Sunday due to the war. My hair was burnt off during it. Somehow that's all. There was no blisters nor burns anywhere else. And that took it out of me first. I was obliged to live with Eula for a time and you know how she always hated me. All day long playing solitaire with that smug look. "You dumb old biddy. You was too stupid to smoke, I told you that when you begun. When you was twenty-nine years old! Hell of a time to start smoking, I says. What a dumb old useless biddy. And you never would love him any, neither. Your damn old mother took care of that for you when you was brought up so pure you couldn't even climax . . ." On and on and on like that all day long and playing solitaire. She thinks she's just queen shit. You want to know about dumb old biddies, well there you go. Giddy up!

-Looks like a war.

Her own husband left her for this skinny little bimbo from back east. Didn't even have no tits. When she got sloshed, sometimes she'd stand out on the porch, calling to him like he was a dog wouldn't come home for his supper. "Here, Max! Here, Max. Got your favorite fixins in the dish!" She'll end up like Mildred two houses down, eatin out of a doggie bowl, right there on the floor.

-Mom, it's a war. Another war.

Strategy such and such

And now I'll do it.

Yes I will.

Yes

I

will.

****

There is no choice there is no choice there is no choice

****

Face the strangers neat,

only dread on your breath.

Touch of the flu, you tell em.

Nothin to worry about, there's work to do.

We've got Mom to move

(talk her into it first

who's already unable to parse a straight imperative for long --

I see her sitting in a Captain's chair,

clutching at the arms like a strung out idol, saying,

Hell, no, I won't go!

I tell her, Well you've gotta.

There is no choice.)

-- gonnagonnagonna --

for this is all imagined.

It could be worse or better.

It could be nothing.

Just a room full of people,

making their sad plans.

An uncertain future of some pain for sure.

Yet once again

it will move from the corner of your eye

into the broad daylight of center stage to say,

"Surprise!"

****

Got you again, they did,

or they will.

They always do.

Closure

Strapped to a bed,

screaming.

That's how she said it.

Her second or third sighting,

the first of up front hell:

as a gap full of screams

--widening now--

so she too must scream.

Go on then, I told her,

go on and scream.

Join in,

as angels had in chorus

(she'd heard them the night before;

they'd actually harmonized impromptu).

Like that, I told her.

That's how screaming's done.

And later a friend said,

Now let the door close,

But visit from time to time

-- and briefly! --

so a scream won't sneak in

and steal a note or two,

reshape and falsify

the hymns you sing

to those hard of hearing,

those legion on line

and on the phone

fearing ends

even nearing.

Let them wait

until you are done screaming.

Amen
(with a sax solo after the Heart Sutra)

The first president of my generation was representative, maybe the top of our class, some might say. He just softened the focus a little to get into office -- didn't inhale, took the moral high ground at times when he didn't have a leg to stand on, cherished all the right (whoops! left) opinions, but he spoke softly -- and we didn't know he had a big dick I mean stick until later. But, also like many of us, he tried to come out for a little less self interest, keep us looking out for the other guy, moved weakly and shyly in place. But even to stay in place was a task -- maybe even a victory. I think a good man finally . . . basically, as we all are.

Yet we kept limping forward in our suicidal hubris, a pride resting on the big K, with all the patient little Joseph Ks (they are less nervous now, thanks to jogging and Prozak), inadvertently holding it all up . . .

But I'm babbling, not even blogging properly. This is a middle bar rap over a mid priced Chardonnay that I can only handle a couple of stemmed glasses full of these days because it doesn't mix well with my meds. But it is also the obligatory Amen we must say to end a Requiem.

I put my mother in a house (not a "home") with the help of two uncelebrated saints who, if I named them, would deny they were doing anything out of the ordinary. And my mother is at home, I think, for the first time in years.

The dead have moved on, one of them very quickly, for she had already been constrained by the small, frail machine of human emanation -- so she could keep whatever promise she made at the beginning of beginningless time to return again and again until all the others are as large as they already are and don't know it. A Buddhist view again. You want to give it a plaque for the door or to place on the desk where I put my feet while I'm doing business on the phone and nibbling at my slab of pizza (I remove the feet and unzip my pants for the rest of my winnings) . . . These high houses were put up by Ozymandias, the King of Kings, and we do look upon these mighty ruins and whimper.

Oh, there's more and more. I could say more. I am not finished (still above ground, at least, there's still a chance). But I'm one little voice in a big long argument, and this is when I go home and sleep it off, prepare for the next one, wake with a vague dread of further reprisals (for it is all reprisal, it goes back and back, Hatfields and McCoys, even unto the first sibling rivalry, although there can be no first when the snake's got his tail in his mouth, eh?), waiting for the roar of warplanes or the first symptoms or a big bang of some sort.

We must rest.

Rest now.

Lower the flag to half mast and leave it there.

To remember.

Hamlet, remember me,

yet do ye not avenge me.

Forgive.

Rest in your true nature

and go

go on

on beyond

and beyond the beyond

and the beyond.

Amen.

Last edited on 3/31/03

Roger Changes: First Series

2010-06-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Odalisque

2010-05-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

She drifts further, her land slips away into deepening mists as the room lights up all around me now and the Persian woman takes her place among the piles of red cushions. She wears a tight fitting silk pullover with a seated Buddha motif: it is highly stylized with flowers that rise around him in playful flames and he is stretched out, fattened by her welling breasts. She wears the ballooning black pants of an odalisque, and slippers with red silk ties … ah, she is so beautiful today! When she introduced herself the wet black eyes blazed with sex. There was a greeting in the Mystery. She would not release my hand, which grew heavy, and we were in a place I’ve never seen. It was her veiled desert kingdom, so very different from the islands of Vesta. My brother was there and I saw us playing in the lotus pool when we were children. As we wrestled I looked into the water and saw her lying naked on her couch and I hid my eyes, just as I would hide them now if I could only I can’t stop looking at her. I mustn’t look at her so much for her husband is seated in a chair nearby and seems to keep watch. I make sure to greet him warmly, and I always glance at him first before I let my eyes caress her cheek and her long neck and feather over her breasts until the nipples rise and I imagine kissing her strange wide mouth, her soft, yielding lips, they yield to mine like some unknown and delightful fruit and her perfume blooms and envelops me, the spires and minarets rise against the flat blue sky which is thick and palpable and filled with her breath and I kiss her, I kiss her, I can’t stop …

Someone is coming. The hall echoes with huge clacks of jackboots and I think of horses. One of the older sections of Paris with cobblestone streets. The room is dark and I hear her breathing, snoring even. It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. Who are you, Odalisque? Shall I simply call you that and let you be a harem girl vaulting like a gazelle over the silk piles and wine colored cushions, all around you billowing silk banners of unthinkable colors and filled with the breath of the desert, your breath, yours while I embrace you, Odalisque? The mad kings drove you from your land. You hid out in old Paris and became a courtesan. The hot Tartar moments, the greased men fighting in lotus pools. When you’d had enough you fled to America. Liberty raises her torch out of the fog and the buildings spring up and up from nothing, into nothing. There are men. Offers. Work. Soon you are covered in the drabness of industry, black, waisted blazers and gray slacks which still cannot disguise your voluptuousness, and yet you seem to wear a veil which discourages even the mildest intimacy. The vast land rolls beneath you under clouds. San Francisco, the white city. You have your children with you now. It surprises you that they should be so pale. Neither your husband, who died in the war, nor you nor any of your ancestry, certainly none of Jamal’s people, were so pale. Surely it is this vampire land, sucking up the blood of the desert and licking off the dark outer layers of their skin. They will grow up to be strutting fools, actors like all the rest. You watch them move away from you by the day, move into the dazzle, the flush and shuffle and the death rattle. They climb into elevators never to return. They carry the shoes of gangsters.

And now, years later. Behind you a deepening sky which would seem to have been given dimension by your own sorrow. And yet you are content now. Your children have returned from their adventures in the unreasoning glass reaches to bring gifts, gifts. Your new husband has command of row upon row of cubicles, of machines that talk in the night. Once grand and handsome, now he must call trainers in to show him how to hold himself, to walk and run and think the right thoughts. There is money, though, and the promise of love across the room. An impossible new land, a dream, marriage which must conduct itself in flash frames of kisses and touch, desperate entry and consummation in a ferocious shadow play recorded in time lapse. Ah. Ah. Touch me!

The Bland Band

2010-05-08T09:30:00.001-07:00

It is good (alright).

Lost Confidence

2010-05-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Advertisement

Timothy Dunne, Master Barber, very respectfully offers his professional services to the citizens of Lost Confidence and surrounding country. Salon at No. 24 kConfidence House. Where satisfaction is not given money will be refunded. Will not perform hangings.

-1-

Tim Dunne strode into the bar, looking fit to kill.

"Whoa!" they cried. "What's this all about?"

"Why, it's Timmy D, the dude," said the barkeep.

"Lookin for Sally," Dunne said, flipping a coin down on the counter. Somehow it actually spun out kind of flashy. He thought that was a pretty good one.

Holloway, the barkeep, shut his eyes and looked down. "What'll it be while you wait?" he offered.

"Oh. Usual."

Meaning a shot of whiskey, which is what everyone had. Dunne hardly ever touched his but he always paid for it, so that was all right. Holloway just poured what was left back in the bottle after Dunne went home.

Gingerly measuring out a shot, Holloway observed Dunne's getup: the elegant gray waisted jacket, matching pants, a gaudy red vest and black tie.

"You plan on takin her to Paris?" he asked.

"Nope. Just dinner. Maybe the new Opera."

"Good as Paris, I guess."

"Have you been there, Mr. Holloway?" Dunne asked longingly.

"Sure, I have." He giggled and headed back down the bar to give someone a refill.

Then PM came in and stood next to Dunne at the bar.

"Jeez, I thought you was a pimp or something, from behind," he said cheerfully.

"Evenin, Marshall," Dunne said.

"Whoops! John Law!" warned the barkeep, dramatically throwing up his hands. "Check your guns, boys."

He bowled a jigger along the counter and PM stopped it with his thumb. Holloway came over with the bottle and poured him one.

"You hear about it?" he said. "Yon hangman is escortin Sally to thee hoppera."

PM squinted over at Dunne.

"If she'll go, " Dunne said, covering his embarrassment.

PM calculated, scrunching up his cheeks and rubbing at his whiskers.

"Oh, I think she will," he said. "What do you think, Dave?"

"Might be too tired," Holloway said, nodding up at the ceiling.

"Early yet."

"Well, she got an early start." He gave a couple lifts of his bushy brows.

"Ah ha."

Just then a lanky dude cantered down the stairs, making a great show of his fancy footwork. He was lean and lippy and sunken eyed. He wore showy rodeo duds, wore them well. Dunne envied him his style.

PM took no notice whatsoever. Neither did Holloway when the dude took a place at the other end of the bar. Then Delores, one of the other girls, came over and whispered something to the barkeep.

"Well, no Sally tonight," he told Dunne.

"Can a man get a drink around here?" the dude called from down the bar. For some reason he was looking right at Dunne.

* * *

The town of Lost Confidence had been there since the beginning of beginningless time. It was an unreal town in an unreal place. It was a town after death. People came and went and you never saw them again. But in this one space of time there was PM and Tim Dunne, and that was the start of something as they walked out into the twilight. Stars that hadn't been there before were slowly blinking into life as the evening came on. Genteel folks gathered around the Gypsy wagon out in front of the new Opera, grabbing a bite to eat before the performance. The motion picture crew was there filming it, of course, and Mayor George was making civic noises.

PM suggested they head out to his place for some dinner. "Molly'll have enough for you," he said.

"Well, I was set on that opera," Dunne told him.

"Suit yourself."

PM nodded and walked off.

Dunne watched as his big ten gallon hat bobbed against the twilight like a humpbacked duck with no head. He loved PM. Always had. One time they were walking out in the tules near PM's place, and it was a vivid twilight, just like this one, with the tule bugs dancing against the burnt out horizon, when PM moved ahead of him suddenly and began to sink as he walked. "Whoops!" he said. "Whoopsy Daisy!" but he just kept on bobbing along. Dunne gave chase and fell in the water, and when he picked himself up he saw PM's hat bobbing along in the distance, and soon enough PM rose up with the hat still on his head. He was gasping and snorting but he just kept on walking, finally rising up out of the marsh, mud from head to foot, but obviously pleased with himself. "Well, come on," he said to Dunne, who felt that he must follow. That was years ago, but he'd known the man forever. PM had always looked after him because Dunne was feeble. Dunne got away with a lot due to PM.

"So, who are you tryin to be?" someone said from behind.

He quickly turned around and beheld the dude from the bar.

"Timothy Dunne," he said jovially, as if that was an answer to the question, and then stuck out his hand.

The dude just looked at it and gave an ugly laugh. He walked on.

Dunne felt more slighted than he should have. It was always like that. For this man was just another in a long line of them who felt it was appropriate to put Tim down. He often dreamed of killing them all, just lining them up like tin cans on a fence and plugging away. It wouldn't happen. He'd never kill a man. Not even PM had killed a man, and here he was Town Marshall. When they saw PM coming they dropped their guns, that's all. The man had Power, he had Grandeur.

Some people would try to think of PM like Wyatt Earp, but there wasn't any comparison. Wyatt was a hard man, while PM was warm and funny, a companionable sort of person who'd walk a ways with you of an evening and point out how the moon wanted to light your way to wisdom and understanding and not just suffer of a life. He had a fine big woman name of Molly who was devoted to him and he to her. No children, though; they were gone. But many animals. Hogs and sheep and a cow and dogs all over the place. He spent much time with the dogs, teaching them things. They were very well behaved dogs.
Tim thought about how glad he was to have such a friend as PM, and about himself, how ridiculous he was in his dude clothes, courting Sally. It was all a lark, and he knew it; she did too. Sally Rain was a fancy woman and she was way too much for him. Too much for the town, for that matter, and so she had her revenge by whoring. Some day she'd whore herself to bits, she'd go to blazes. He didn't want to be around for that; and didn't really feel like sweeping up after her leavings, neither; loving her while he watched himself grow small. He just wanted to pretend to be a high rolling gent with a fancy woman, talking the talk and walking the walk, escorting her to the opera just to be seen. He wanted to wake up in the morning with her beside him and to leave a gold piece on her dressing table going out.

-2-

Couple days later the dude from the bar came into Dunne's shop wanting a haircut. He took off his hat and flung it at the rack where it spun gaily around one of the antlers and then hung there inert. But when he sat down in the chair without being asked, Dunne was offended. He liked to invite a man, liked to take his feather duster and sweep off the seat, then snap the smock and sort of hold it up in an inviting way. But this fella wanted to put you in your place right off, let you know you were the help. Dunne didn't say anything, of course, but he made no move to jump to, neither. He just went about his business, straightening up, stropping his razor, cleaning his brushes. He even took a seat in the other chair and commenced reading the newspaper and soon enough became absorbed. There was news of Jesse James, how he had been shot in the back … end of another entirely undistinguished head of hair, Dunne noted.

"Can a man get some service around here?" the dude wanted to know.

"Certainly," Dunne said, carefully folding up his newspaper and placing it in the reading rack, then commenced earning his living .

As he worked, Dunne noticed that the man had a prominent Adam's apple, covered with little black hair follicles where his beard had been expertly shaved. Dunne was both repelled and fascinated by it, watching it go up and down, retracting slightly, like a dog's penis, when the man swallowed. Dunne found it at once disgusting and sexy. He couldn't keep his eyes off the dang thing. And he wondered if Sally looked at it, smelling the faint mustardy scent coming from it, as he pumped away at her like a danged old dog. Maybe she even licked it and sucked at it. Did she maybe want to slice into it, though, with a fresh honed razor? Did she want to know what it looked like underneath, the way Dunne did? Maybe there were worlds under there with little men crawling around, farming, cheating each other, trying to make the best of it, and all the sudden vague shapes in their newly open sky were just the doings of humans writ large to them as those of the gods were to us, while for the humans themselves it was just the same old dreary dance of livelihood, with friends and enemies and picked bones and corns and zits, as the life below for the little men inside the cut-open Adam's apple.

Nothing was said throughout the whole procedure. Dunne clipped away, he even hummed and whistled. He didn't offer to make conversation, and neither did the customer. There was an unspoken covenant between them. Dunne could not testify as to its nature. Maybe the other couldn't, either. But they were bound, that was for sure. They couldn't escape. Not until it was over with, one of them dead in the street, maybe, or both of them diminished and forgetful and lost to the meaning of what might have been won.
But afterwards the dude just got up, paid him and left, and that was that.

* * *

Later on over to the bar, Sally came down and had a drink with him.

"I hear you was planning to escort me to the opera," she said with a slight show of mockery. "That a fact?"

"That's a fact," he admitted. "You were indisposed at the time."

She looked dark for a minute. Then she said, "Well, some other time, then. I'd be happy to attend it with you."

She smiled as though she thought it would never happen. It probably wouldn't. She took his hand. She always said she loved his hands. "They're so delicate," she told him. "Like a woman's."

Sally had bright red hair that she said she didn't dye. And she was big. Some men liked them big, Dunne included . Others went for Delores or Floreen or Mo, all to varying degrees diminutive. Dunne had no truck with them. He liked Sally, and then only to buy her a drink or to walk with her under the moon. She didn't ask why he never came upstairs. It was his way, and she liked it. She felt a little protective around the boy, almost motherly. She wanted to keep him from harm, even though she knew no real harm would come to such as Tim Dunne, and not just because of PM, neither, but just because he was protected. An angel seemed to be flying overhead as he walked – you could almost see it – maybe saving him back for something special.

"Well, perhaps next time," Dunne said again, toasting her with his drink – he even took a little sip – and then set it back down.

But when he made to go, she grasped his hand more tightly. She was looking over his shoulder. "Would you mind waiting a while?" she said in a hush. "And would you mind saying I'm with you? I mean, if anybody should ask."

Her eyes grew frightened now. She leaned over the table suddenly and kissed him, kissed him big.

"Just take me up to my room," she whispered.

She got up quickly, taking him by the arm and urging him up, too. Then, as they headed toward the stairs, he looked back and saw the dude standing there by the table they had just vacated. Dunne nodded stupidly and followed Sally upstairs.

When they got to her room she gave him a squeeze and said, "Thanks, hon. I wasn't in the mood for that fella."

"Well, who is he? What's the problem?"

"Nothing, nothing. He's just got some kinks I don't feel like ironing out tonight. Want a drink?"

"No, but you can kiss me again the way you just did," he pleaded.

She took his hand again and looked sad.

She said, "Let's just keep it the way it is, OK?"

-3-

The town of Lost Confidence woke up to the sound of a rooster, just as it would bed down to that of chorusing frogs and crickets. It seemed that each part of the day had its characteristic sound and rhythm. Mornings tended to be kind of creaky and slow getting started, with the snorts and groans of various cowboys waking up and wondering where they were.

PM was posted right out front of his office, sitting in his squeaky rocker and taking in the morning sun with his coffee and newspaper when Dunne opened up shop.

"PM," Dunne mumbled as he went inside.

"Mornin, Timmy," PM said, although Dunne was well out of hearing by that time, for he had hotfooted it quick out back of the shop, already drawing water for a wash and a shave, by the time the words had slouched clear of PM's tiny little mouth. Barber had to be an example for his clientele, that was his philosophy, and sometimes he put off attending to his grooming till he got to the shop so he could sleep later. That accomplished, he set about readying the place for business, sweeping a little, laying out his scissors and combs and brushes and draping a fresh smock over the chair, saving for last the stropping of his razor – he loved that, loved the way a keen edge shone in the morning sunlight. Then he went out on the boardwalk and looked over at PM.

"You make coffee, Marshall?"

"I did," PM declared. "Couldn't wait for you, carrying on all night."

Dunne looked sly. "You saw me go up with Sally," he said in a lowered voice.

"I'd say it was apparent."

Then Dunne asked in all seriousness, "Do you think I did wrong, PM? Do you think it went against the order of things?"

"Nope," he said.

A little irked, Dunne said, "Well, then, if it meets with your approval, I guess I'll steal some of that coffee you made."

"Help yourself."

Dunne went into the Marshall's office and grabbed a cup off the nail and poured some coffee from the big kettle PM was keeping warm on the cook stove. Then he heard somebody hawk and spit. He looked back at the cells and there was that dude again, locked up, standing over the privy and regarding what he had produced. Dunne fled before the man looked his way.
"Why's that fella locked up in jail?" he asked PM.

"Ah. Disturbing the peace," PM tossed off with a lazy wave of his hand. "I'll let him out directly."

Dunne sat down on the bench beside PM's rocker.

"Well, what did he do?" he asked.

"He was bothering folks. Just getting drunk and giving folks a hard time. I put him in there to sleep it off."

"Say, listen, PM, who is that fella, anyway?"

"Ah. Yeah. Billy Rebar. He comes in every now and then. Travels with the herds, I hear tell."

"Don't look like any cowboy I ever saw."

"Well. Just rides along, I guess."

"So, is he a bad guy or what?"

PM closed his eyes and scratched at his whiskers. "He wants to be. But he's really just nobody going nowhere. Don't worry about him." But now he looked over pointedly at Dunne. "I'd keep away, though," he said, and he tapped the side of his head with his finger.

"No problem." Dunne copied PM's usual hand waving, dismissive gesture.

PM considered a minute. Then he said, "I get the feeling that you didn't sleep with old Sally."

"You'd be right," Dunne admitted.

"How come?"

"Well, if I had, do you feel it would go against the order of things?"

"It ain't."

"What?"

"It ain't in the order of things."

"Yeah." Dunne couldn't argue with that.

* * *

Maybe the man in the jail was from the Dakotas, the Badlands some said; nobody knew for sure. A vague reputation preceded him wherever he went. He and his brother had terrorized their Ma, keeping her locked up in a silo for days. This was when they were just little kids. Nobody knew who the father was. A man who came and went in days of many comings and goings, and Billy followed suit, wandering over the prairies. He shows up in Abilene in 1878, at a dentist's parlor with a bleeding bullet hole in his foot. Some said it was an accident, others that it was intentional, that he liked pain. The dentist denied it, saying, "A man don't request opium who enjoys pain."

For years he'd followed the herds, going from cow town to cow town, sometimes as far as the big cities up north. He didn't seem to need to make a living. Crime was suspected, but he obviously didn't have the heart for it, even if he was no stranger to gunplay. Some people speculated that he came from money. He always had it, anyways. Not a lot, but enough to get by. If he minded his own business you'd barely notice him. But he didn't. He was always getting into something, always stirring things up. There wasn't a town on the circuit where old Rebar hadn't caused some kind of trouble. He seemed to like it. He liked having a hate on. Mostly he liked people being afraid of him. It was the only kind of respect he understood. He certainly never got any other kind, and not very many people were afraid of him, neither. Word got out that he was a dirty little coward, and it just wouldn't go away. He was a big pain in the ass was the plain truth of the matter.
Now, he was trying very hard to be a bad guy, as PM had observed, and he wasn't doing a very good job of it. He ran away from most of the fights he started. Among the cowboys he was a laughing stock. One old trail hand had him dead to rights, though.

"Didn't have us fooled none with his stuff," he told Dunne. "Not the Hooker outfit. We thought he was a little funny. A little stupid and pathetic, too. Dumb, skinny guy with his talk, talk, talk. The fool was obviously used to some pretty lame prairie trash coming through, bored to tears cowboying and hence ready to listen to all his crap, but not the Hooker outfit, that's for dang sure. To our way of thinking old Rebar was just a useless bore. Oh, townies might buy his line of bull – but they're mostly stupid. With the stupid chewing tobacco which he'd dribble down his chin when he spit, his silver studded saddle and mauve boots. My God, you can't live like that and expect to be believed. One dumb son of a bitch is what he is, all that toilet water and his disgusting oiled pompadour, and you know he ain't even grown a beard yet except on his Adam's apple, that's how fucked up he is. He's a goddamned inbred degenerate, you want to hear my true opinion. Tries to impress with the god damned spin-the-rope and his wild west numbers. Shit fire, at last we just had to get shut of the crazy peckerwood so we tied his ass up and left him to die in the dust.

"But the next thing you know there he is again; somehow he's managed to free the cinch and get to his feet so's he's able to hop along after us. Yeah! At first we thought it was some strange prairie critter out there, but no, but no, it was just old Rebar, and let me tell you he was a sight. He was still gagged and bound but he was able to hop along pretty fast, none the less, so that's what he did, and he managed to pretty much keep right up with us because we were driving a big herd and moving kind of slow. You had to admire his determination, but still one wonders just what the hell did the man want? He wasn't much interested in cowboying, and he was useless in every other respect. Was it just to be seen with us riding in? That's what some of the boys surmised. He wanted to be known to associate with trail hands; he'd heard some romance of them, hence he dressed in a way that sort of suggested an operatic presentation of a cowboy. Then too he could do a lot of funny stuff with his pistol, and he was pretty good at the fast draw. Couldn't hit nothing for shit, of course, none of them rodeo types can. Rumor was his eyes were bad, too. Anyways, after a while the boys got to feeling sorry for him enough that they sent me out there to untie him. Which I did, and I brought him back in for some grub. We just got used to the son of a bitch after awhile. Got tired of foolin with him."

So the boys didn't have much to fear from Billy Rebar. "But women and children beware," one of them felt compelled to add. "And the same goes for you, Tim Dunne."

For indeed it was that very night, when Dunne was hanging out with Sally in the bar, that things got started. It was when Billy came over and hit on her again.

"I'm sorry, but I'm with this gentleman here," she told him shortly.

He gave Dunne a pouty, vacant look and said nothing.

But Dunne was studying that old Adam's apple, waiting for it to do something interesting. Yet the man's whole face was wan and slack, his eyes were empty and so the Adam's apple was at peace. Could be that it needed the stimulation of a shave or a haircut to get it to ejaculating again, some other ritual of nature, eating of course, or drinking. And then too the man seemed to be gone in some way, the man was simply not to be found. He'd just zeroed on out of this world. What had gone wrong? Something was needed to bring him around again, some singular movement driving him away from the quiet center and return him to the hubbub. But here … here … let me …

Dunne reached out and flicked the man's Adam's apple with his finger.

And that did it.

Outrage flooded over Rebar's tender skin, rushing up his neck and covering his face. His eyes shone with black light, his lips stuck together.

And he slapped Tim Dunne.

Tim couldn't believe it. His whole head seemed to fly away. But then he got slapped from the other side. He tasted blood. His whole face was burning, and yet it felt numb at the same time. And yet he was hit again.

Then it was over.

The room was quiet. Sally looked terrified. Then, after awhile she lowered her eyes.

At some point during all this someone was heard to say, "Isn't he going to do something?"

Sally got up.

"Come on," she said to Rebar, looking tired and disgusted.

They moved away, and when Dunne made to go after them Rebar held up a warning finger. Tim sat back down.

-4-

Things were different after that. He felt it in the weight of the sky, the sweaty effusion on the surface of things, and a smell as of stale rooms, of age and piss and vinegar.

He was ashamed, humiliated. So he pulled way in. He stayed home. He went out to PM's for dinner but that was about it other than work. He went back to his reading, which was his habit of an evening before he got notions about Sally. No more socializing, that was for sure. Look what it got you.

He practiced quick draw. He shot the hell out of cans on fence posts.

PM asked him, "You had some trouble?”

"Nah. Nothing in particular," he told him.

Molly was cutting pie, huge hot slices.

"Here's your favorite," she said.

He thought he was going to cry, being there with Molly and PM. The richness of their life together made him ache with love.

But he left early. The moon shone bitter and strange. The road was endless. Then he met a man. The man said to carry him piggyback and he did. After awhile he asked to stop. He said he wanted to roll a cigarette and smoke it. Dunne allowed him to do so. While the man had his cigarette Dunne told him how he had tried to take up smoking himself when he was younger but it made him sick and so he stopped. The man made no comment one way or the other. He just smoked until he was finished. Then he said, "Come on," and Dunne carried him. The road went in circles. It seemed to be a concentric path, yet tiered somehow, senselessly joined in any case because he kept meeting the man over and over, and they kept doing the same thing. Dunne didn't question it, though, and neither did the man. They were bound. This was the road.

In his reading he had discovered that a concentric shape was a perversion. The true form of things was a spiral, and that the concentric was fallen from that. He found the term "fallen" suspect for some reason. "Perversion", on the other hand, was OK.

He went on practicing his quick draw. He was getting to be pretty good at it, in fact. Maybe it was time to go out and blow Rebar's face off. Maybe it wasn't.

Next time he saw him was back at the bar. Sally wasn't there, just Holloway and some regulars. And Rebar. They didn't speak. Rebar shot some pool. There was a truce in effect. Tim felt it. He could go on now and forget it for a little while. Soon he was coming to the bar regular again in his fancy opera duds, courting Sally. It was their little secret that he was a dirty little coward. And soon enough, Rebar was gone. Maybe he was dead and lost forever. Tim even drank some more of that whiskey Holloway was always having to pour back, he even got a little drunk, maybe. It was a good sweet time. Sally was there, and PM … But every now and then he'd think he saw old Billy the dude, just out of the corner of his eye, but he was usually mistaken, until one day Rebar finally did appear, or seemed to, slowly emerging from out of a dust storm, but then he just as quickly blew back into it … gone … gone. No. Wrong again. For he quickly came vaulting down the stairs and jumped like a rabbit out the window. This happened over and over. And the last part was he'd go into the middle of the street and howl until the warning shots were fired and peace was restored. PM would walk in afterwards, looking satisfied, slapping his hands together to clear a path through the smoke in the bar, and the smoke sort of rushed away to either side of him like the parting of the waters.

"So I guess you're feeling better," he said to Tim.

"I never was sick," Dunne insisted.

"I think you was a while back there. I could be mistaken."

"It's been known to happen."

* * *

The sound that marked the middle of the day was a cat's meow. The cat always seemed to be in heat and at high noon it would start in, keening desperately from one end of the street to the other without fail. It was a sound from hell, Dunne thought. He wanted to shoot the dang thing down.

"It's the cry of nature," PM said. "Not hurtin nobody."

"Makin me insane," Dunne owned.

"You already are insane."

"Am I?"

"Always been."

With that, PM poured out the dregs of coffee in the street and they sizzled in the mud.
Then the stage came in, bringing Penelope Manning. When she got out, Dunne was instantly smitten. He'd never seen a real high stepping lady before and it was just too much to bear. And it might have been nothing. He could have turned away and it would have been over with. But a thread was woven from eye to eye, and from thence it became law. She smiled at him and he raised his stupid hat (he was dressed to the hilt in anticipation of another fine evening at the bar) – which flew suddenly from his hand; the wind had taken it. His heart and mind were gone, too.

PM said, "Classy stuff, eh?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Figure you should do something about it."

"Like what?"

"Well …" He sniggered like a fool. Went back inside with his kettle.

Tim was alone there, facing her.

Now, a wise man would have broken into song, but Tim just did his bumpkin act and sleazed on over there, fanning himself with his hat (some kind property master had restored it to him), then bowed grandly, saying "Ma'am."

She couldn't help but laugh.

"So, are you the local color?" she twitted him in a broad, mock western twang, eyelashes fluttering and all.

He didn't know what to say. He just stood there, clutching his dumb hat and grinning from ear to ear.

Finally he managed to eke out an introduction. "Timothy Dunne, at your service," he said with a flourish of the old hat.

"Penelope Manning," she announced. (Can there be such a thing as a sarcastic curtsey?)
"And now you say, 'Whar ya frum, Ma'am?'"

"Well, it's a start."

She was waiting for him to help her down. Finally getting the point, Dunne raised his arm for her. She rested her hand on it and came lightly down the stoop, then snapped open her parasol against the heat. Dunne loved that parasol, and the big wide dress and the amazing raven hair, tied loosely in back so that it came down in a lovely flowing ponytail. He was just standing there, looking at her, with his arm still up even though she had let go of it. Finally he dropped it and brushed off his trousers and straightened his tie and sharpened his mustache betwixt his thumb and forefinger. She looked at him as if to say, "You all ready now?" and gave him a wink. He could have sprayed his pants right then and there, she had him so wound up.

"I'm from San Francisco," she told him. "Can't you hear it in my voice? People say I have a foggy voice." She actually fluttered her eyelashes at him now!

"I guess, so, Ma'am."

Then the shotgun rider brought her luggage over and set it down beside her.

Dunne nodded toward the two suitcases. "Where you stayin?" he asked.

"Why, I think I have reservations at this very establishment," she told him, indicating the Excelsior Hotel.

"Help you in?"

"I'd be much obliged," she said, looking like she'd burst out giggling any minute.

He picked up her bags and walked with her into the hotel.

Rebar leaned against a fence nearby, watching them. He'd been up all night, and he wasn't feeling any too good. He needed to kill somebody. He wouldn't, though, because this town was too well policed by Mr. PM, who could use to be killed himself to Rebar's way of thinking. He wouldn't do that, neither, not today, anyways. Maybe he'd just take a little snooze and later on ride out and look for some trouble. Maybe he could find a little right here. First the snooze, though. He needed that. He had trouble sleeping nights. When he finally managed to nod off he had bad dreams which woke him up and he couldn't go back to sleep afterwards. He sometimes tried to drink himself to sleep but it usually didn't work. He just got drunk to the point of semi-consciousness, which was OK but it wasn't sleep. It seemed he only slept good after he killed somebody.

The Excelsior was the finest hotel in town. The two others – Brown's and the Ritz – were just rest stops by comparison. It suited Penelope, Dunne felt. Its preposterous pendulum clocks and stained glass windows, its overlook on the Lake of Geneseret, its heavy draperies that smelled of musk, its crystal, its grandeur – all of that suited this fine lady … At night the lake would smolder with fog and her spirit flew above it as a bird of prey. At night her name became Selena and she wore the light veil of Tyre. He felt her lips through the sized muslin, his hands rushed over her body.

She took her key from the counterman who moved as though he were suspended by wires. He was friendly enough, though, and he seemed to recognize Dunne.

"See me to my room?" she asked.

They moved up curved stairways, shimmering and prism lit, the heavy carpeting woven with the grinning faces of gods. Dunne was sleepy. He wondered if she'd let him lie down in her room, perhaps even lie on top of her. She wouldn't, of course, but he asked anyway. She told him it was OK, just so he didn't get any notions.

But then he was down in the street again, strolling along the boardwalk toward his salon. He lit a cigar and felt chipper. This was a good life here, he thought. This was fine.
But when he got back he found Rebar there, waiting. He was lounging in the barber chair, reading a dime novel. Had Dunne left the door unlocked?

Rebar said, "I need a shave."

"Momentarily," Dunne told him.

He hung up his jacket and put on a work smock, then he draped Rebar and readied him for a shave, whipping up some soap in a dish with a fat brush and lathering his nearly smooth face, of course making sure to cover up that ponderous Adam's apple where most of the whiskers seemed to grow, and then went to work. Neither of them spoke. But after awhile Rebar closed his eyes and soon enough commenced to saw them off, obviously in a deep sleep. Dunne continued with his work. Then, satisfied with the chin and jaws, above all the Adam's apple, he considered a minute and then took up the dish and brush and lathered the man's eyebrows, and with two deft strokes shaved them off entirely. He looked down and beheld his work, saw that it was good. He gave a whistle of approval. Then he took up a damp towel and wiped off the remaining lather. This had the effect of waking the man up.

"Wow!" he said, smiling sweetly. "Guess I was sleepin."

"Looks like," Dunne agreed. He couldn't help but return his smile.

Rebar got up, brushed himself off and tossed Dunne a gold piece, which wound up on the floor. Then he went out without even looking at himself in the mirror.

"You're welcome," Dunne said to nobody. He picked up the gold piece and tucked it into his pocket. Then he sat down in the barber chair and snapped open a newspaper.

"Good bye. Kiss my foot," he said.

-5-

That night at the bar there was dancing. People were dancing and dancing, and Penelope was there, unescorted. She sat at a table in the rear, sipping some colorful confection and looking amused.

Dunne went over and asked her to dance.

After a few turns she said, "You're a virgin, aren't you?

He didn't answer. He just looked at her. Then he buried his head between her breasts. He could smell them, their sweet fleshy perfume. He wanted to taste them. He wondered if she'd let him; he'd have to ask her some time.

"You know," she said. "I came out west to find me a cowboy."

He looked up.

"I am that cowboy," he declared.

She snorted. "Maybe."

He whirled her round and round, not knowing what else to do. He didn't know any of the standard dance variations. Then he looked across the floor at Rebar, for he knew some, surely. (Dunne noticed that he had drawn on eyebrows with a grease pencil to replace the ones that had been shaved off.) And indeed, Rebar was a beautiful dancer. He held his arm out fiercely straight, his fingers laced loosely with those of his partner, who was Sally, and he sort of bobbed up and down in an interesting way to the fiddle music, and his expression was interesting, too, sort of pensive, and he had his tongue balled up against his lips so that he looked like he had a mouth full of something he wanted to spit out but wouldn't until later out of politeness. Dunne immediately began to imitate him. And he worked and worked but couldn't seem to get it quite right. But then the music stopped. They broke apart and applauded with the rest. He noticed there was a little dribble stain on the front of Penelope’s dress from when he'd been nosing around there which she attempted to brush away, making an impatient tisking sound.

"I'll get us a drink," he said. "Meet you back at the table."

As he was heading toward the bar he ran into Sally.

"You're red as a beet," she said.

"I can't help it," he told her, and moved on. Arriving at the bar he called out raucously, "Hello, Holloway, how's your bod?"

"What'll it be?" the barkeep muttered.

"For me, the usual, and for the lady … well, whatever it is you made for her the last time. It is many colored, and with a small umbrella."

"I call it horse piss, myself, but she seems to like it."

"Very well, then."

But as he made his way back to her he saw something terrible. Penelope was standing there by the table with Rebar, smiling, talking animatedly, and just when Dunne came up and set the drinks on the table he saw them exchange a brief little peck of a kiss. He couldn't help himself. He swept her up in his arms and carried her out through the swinging doors. Setting her down outside on the boardwalk, he said, "You want a kiss, I'll give you a real kiss," and he took her in his arms and frenched her long and hard. Breaking away finally, he looked to her for approval.

"You don't do that right," she said. "Let me show you."

They kissed again, and she improved upon his performance.

Then Rebar came out, obviously ready to start something.

But Dunne had had it with this joker. He reached quickly into his blouse and pulled a nickel plated Derringer. But Rebar just as quickly grabbed the weapon out of his hand and threw it into the street. Then, when Dunne went to retrieve it in order to finally blow the joker away, Rebar kicked him a good one in the ass. Dunne went sprawling. He got up, grabbed his gun and dusted off his pants. Rebar stood there, sniggering, then went back inside.

Dunne took Penelope’s arm, saying, "Come dear. Let us take the sweet night air."

They walked on.

After awhile she asked, "Why didn't you hit him?"

"I shaved his eyebrows off, didn't I?" Dunne protested. "Isn't that enough for you?"

"Hitting him would have been better," she said. "Besides, you didn't shave them. He shaves them himself just to be outre."

"I see," he said.

They walked on.

Then she asked sweetly, "Won't you fight over me? I like men to fight over me."

"You're kidding!"

"No."

"Can't we make love instead?"

"You want to make love to me?" She acted surprised.

She led him by the hand again up the vexing stairways and under a wide open skylight, and the moon frowned down through coils of unraveling clouds. Her body was revealed at last and he got a taste of those luscious breasts, which he did lick and suck to his heart's content. She sprawled out on great heaps of silk and showed him how to make love but he came too soon, anyway. It was better the next time, and the next, incrementally, until they were both fully satisfied.

-6-

"Gonna be trouble," PM said. "You keep goadin that boy."

"I ain't goadin him," Dunne whined. "He's the one started it by slapping me to sleep."

"I hear you brought it on. I hear you pulled a gun one night, too."

"Well, I'm sick of that joker. What's he doing here, anyway? What's he want?"

"He's got a right."

* * *

The happiest hour in Lost Confidence was twilight. The eyelids half drawn and giving the light a tawdry glamour, you were halfway to dreaming, too, and more at ease with the unreal. Certainly it was Dunne's happy hour. By then the shop would be long closed – he locked up by three, usually – and he'd be feeling vaguely nostalgic for a time that never was, vaguely in love, tender and sad. Of course, he was in love. Certainly infatuated. All he could think about was Penelope: her body, her smells, her kisses.

"Who's the chickee, that's all I want to know," Molly said. She was dishing out pie again.

"Ah. The fine lady," PM acknowledged, chuckling.

Dunne didn't want to talk about it.

"Well, when you going to bring her on out here?" Molly persisted.

Dunne slumped down in his chair.

"Yeah, bring her on out," PM said, "We'll all go frogging."

"Sheesh!" Molly sassed, slapping pie down on his plate.

Dunne saw Penelope's face out the window, it was rising with the moon. She seemed to be standing inside it, for the moon was the door into her world. He could hear the sort of room noises he would expect to at her hotel, the hubbub from the dining room downstairs, people talking in the street below, their voices coming through her open window … all from inside the moon. She was right there, smiling at him. He could just step over there and be with her now. But she had told him she wanted to be alone tonight; she wasn't feeling well. It was her time, he supposed. Even so, seeing her smiling sadly from her place there inside the moon, Oh how he wanted to go to her! There was a faint smell of rubber from her corsets, of musk perfume, of sex. He couldn't stand it. He had to get out, had to go see her.
"Our boy here!" Molly laughed.

"Where you goin?" PM demanded.

"Oh. Back."

PM gave him a hard look.

"You stay away from Billy, you hear?"

He went out to the road.

The man was there.

"You gonna give me a ride piggyback or not?" he said.

"Sure," said Dunne.

He picked him up, carried him. They went on like that for a mile and a half, several miles. Then he disappeared.

But soon enough he was there again, saying, "Come on, carry me."

Dunne obliged.

It was eternal. It was always the same.

Except for the girl. There she was. They kissed. Then she held his face in both her hands and studied it. "You're a dirty little coward," she said.

"I know. I know," he cried.

He was ashamed of himself. He could hear her saying it – "Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?" – as she sank into the tules.

"Come back up!" he cried. "Come back to me." But she was gone.

The man came again. Dunne carried him into town, and when they parted the man flipped him a gold piece.

* * *

Love's time is fleeting. Love glories in evanescence, fragile spring flowers, shapes which clouds may assume only for an instant, a sad turning leaf. Yet Dunne's love, denied its object if only for an evening, needs must seek other fugitive forms to overflow into, else it should only turn inward to pulse with flowers of evil, fat and dripping, promising a constant life in an airless, benighted world. Love must move, exfoliate, shoot out in colored streamers. Dunne was crazy with it. He took a skater's position and seemed to slide into the bar. The room filled with applause (always appreciated by Timothy Dunne). He ordered up a bottle of champagne on ice and two flutes and lugged it all over to Sally's table.

"I'm in love," he announced.

"With me?" Sally wondered.

He only paused for a second too long before he said, "If you like."

"Ah. I see." She lit her pipe.

He filled the flutes with bubbly and toasted her: "To the Girl of the Golden West."

"Well, ain't that sweet," she purred.

"There's an opera named that. It's all about you," he told her.

"Ah, come on!" She was delighted.

"Well, isn't it? Thought sure it was. How 'bout some more bubbly?"

"Trying to get me drunk, is what."

"How else am I to take advantage of you?"

"I thought you was in love."

"Well, I am," he insisted. "I told you, I'm in love with you."

She considered a moment, seeming to weigh things out. Then she said, "You want to come upstairs?"

Holloway

I knew it was trouble, him going up there. I knew it the other time. Because it went against the nature of things. Because that fellow Rebar would come in and just lurk and turn all different colors; he was like a creature of another species, the way he would know they were together, and then he would turn different colors.

He come over to the bar and says, "How long she been? She's never that long? What's so special?" I tell him it's all a matter of money. You got the money, you can spend all night with old Sal. But he's not having any. He wants to know who it is. I says I didn't get his name. Well, what's he look like, he wants to know. Hey, I'm tending bar here, I don't watch everybody comes in, I tell him. It's Sal's business, those men. All I get is her rent. I tell him why don't you go on now and settle down. Sally'll be with you when she's done. He says, "You ain't gonna tell me, huh? Who it is."

I says, "Nope. I'm not. So just settle down now."

And he turned all different colors when I said that. It's his skin. It's problems with his skin, maybe. Nothing unusual, I guess.

But what I was hoping to Christ was that that other gal didn't come in. She was known to. Kind of spunky gal coming in here unattached, she'd take a table way back there and have one of them umbrella drinks served to her. Never cause any trouble, flirting with the men or anything, or try to get into a game (Gambling women are bad news, I'll tell you). Meanwhile, Dunne's started romancing her, and here he is going up to Sally's. Now that's trouble.

You know, in my line of work it's mostly about listening to other people talk. That's a bar for you, other people talking. Most of the time I don't talk, myself, I just listen. You get tired of it but that's your life. Rebar, though. You can't take much of him. Nobody can, he's coo-coo. I knew he was contemplating trouble with Dunne. There'd already been trouble. And now with Dunne starting to go on up with Sally. He used to just fool with her, but suddenly he's a customer. Not just a customer, neither, but special. She keeps him up there. And I thought he was with that other gal. Now I'm thinking if she comes in, why …

Rebar's going on and on, on and on. He knows he's a pain in the butt to everybody with his talk but that just goads him on and he talks some more. I was going in and out of sleep just listening to the fool. It was way past closing time by now and the bar was empty except for me and the kid himself, and I kept telling him go home, go on now, but then I guess I nodded off because what's he talking about, what does he say?

* * *

When I woke up I was stark naked. I was stretched out on the bar and I'd been written all over my body with lipstick. There was piss and broken glass all over the floor. I'd be cleaning up after it for hours. Then Sally was over there, crying.

I asked her, "Well, what he do to you?"

"The usual," she said. She clenched her teeth and looked fierce. "I swear, if Timmy ever finds out …"

Now I had to laugh at that one in spite of it all. If Timmy finds out. I started sweeping up. Sally was crying her eyes out. If Timmy finds out …

-7-

But something big shifted in the sky because next day one of Dunne's customers asked him, "When are you going to settle it with Billy Rebar?"

And without thinking, Dunne answered, "Why, today, by golly. At the Old Amphitheater. It's all been arranged."

After that it just got bigger. Everywhere he went people said, "I hear you're gonna have it out with Rebar."

"That's right," he told them. "Up to the Old Amphitheater."

Soon he had a whole gang trailing him. He took them in and bought them drinks.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I'm gonna blow that kid to bits."

"Good riddance, " they said.

"Burn that sucker down, man."

Well, it was shaping up to be a big event, for sure. Many were already gathered at the Old Amphitheater, waiting for the contest. It was an ancient structure consisting of ten concentric circles of stonework built into a crater with a smooth floor at the bottom for the performance of theater or games. It was put there by the gods of long ago. Yeah, this was going to be something. This was going to be good. They brought snacks, sandwiches. Guy was even selling beer.

Meanwhile Dunne went about his business. He halfway behaved as if the thing wasn't really happening. But the whole town was emptying out. Soon it was as good as deserted.

Now PM was doing some paperwork in his office when he happened to look out the window to see old Billy, obviously fresh out of bed and taking his first look around, even though it was getting near on to four o'clock in the afternoon. Then some citizen poked his head in the door, saying, "You know what's doin?"

"Nope," PM admitted.

"Well, your man Dunne is shootin it out with Billy Rebar over to the Amphitheater."

"That right?" PM said, checking the window again. Rebar was still out there, shaking his head, looking disoriented.

"It's to the death, Marshall. I do fear it."

"I'll look into it," PM assured him.

The citizen ran on.

PM checked his gun and went outside to where Rebar was.

"Yo, Billy," he said.

Rebar nodded warily.

"What's doin?" PM said.

"Just mindin my own business," Rebar sulked.

"Are you? What's your business?"

"Just wakin up, is all."

PM studied the man. "Looks like you never went to bed," he suggested. "Looks like you might still be drunk."

He went over to him and gave a sniff.

"Whooeey, baby!" he marveled. "Yes, I would say you been tippin a few. But you know, Billy, we got a law in this town against public intoxication. You ever hear of that?"

"Hey, now, Marshall. Hold on now. You got no call. I was just minding my own business."

He was backing away, apparently looking for an escape route.

"Hup! Where you think you're goin there, son?" PM demanded. "You gonna come peaceable or do I have to throw down?"

"This is bullshit, PM!" Billy was livid.

"Come on now, let's go."

"PM, this is bullshit! You know it's just bullshit."

He looked like he was actually getting ready to go for his gun when he got cold cocked by a deputy on his way to the office.

PM went over and the two of them dragged old Rebar into the jailhouse.

"Thanks for stopping by," PM said, locking the cell.

"I guess there ain't gonna be no fight," said the deputy.

"Don’t look like it," said PM.

"I just come in to tell you about it. Whole town's up there to the amphitheater, waitin for it."

"So? Let 'em wait. Ain't no fight happening today."

The deputy laughed. "I guess not," he said, and went out.

* * *

Dunne walked down the middle of the street for the motion picture people, looking very much the flinty eyed gunslinger. Penelope moved in parallel along the boardwalk.

"You gonna fight that boy for me?" she called.

He kept on moving without saying anything.

"Because you don't have to. Not for me," Penelope said. "I don't want this, Timmy." She was close to tears.

He ignored her and kept on moving out of town toward the Old Amphitheater. Others followed, stragglers who hadn't heard about it yet. By the time they got out there it was looking like a Roman circus. Dunne strode into the center of the arena and began to preen like a pistolero. He pulled his gun and swiped his hand across the cylinder so that it spun clickety-clack; opened it up and checked all the chambers, blew on it, whistled, spun it around a little for show and then slipped it back in the holster. Then he took off his hat and slicked back his hair; put it back on and aligned it just right, then put his hands to his sides and stood there, looking all epic. What a show. Look at that Dunne. This was gonna be good. Then he proceeded to pace back and forth, showing his restlessness, his eagerness to get this thing over. But after awhile he shouted up at the audience, "Well, where's your boy?"

Big hee-haw in response to that one.

Others took it up. "Yeah, where's the big bad Rebar? Where's the dude?"

As for Tim, as for what he was thinking, well, he hadn't been thinking a whole lot about this; he was rather moving along on some wave that had taken him earlier in the day. Years later he wouldn't remember how he got out here. It wouldn't change. He'd been in the shop, talking to a customer who had asked him when he was going to settle with Rebar, and from then on it was just a big blurry rush pouring him into this moment. And yet he seemed to always know that Billy wouldn't show up. Because he hadn't told him. It was that simple. He'd omitted the formal challenge from the whole proceeding, yet continued on from that omission with the glory of the business, the show, the theater, not realizing that all he was really providing his audience was prelude, was foreplay, withholding from them at last the main event. Folks were there for some mayhem. But here was Dunne, going through all the motions of preening and warming up, even looking a little nervous from time to time, checking his fine gold pocket watch, shining his nails, squinting up at the sun and saying, "Well?"

Meanwhile, back at the jailhouse, PM and Billy had settled into an uneasy silence. Then some townie peeked in and, seeing Rebar incarcerated, wondered, "What are you doin behind bars? They's all waitin for you out to the coliseum."

"Who is?" Rebar demanded.

"Dunne and them boys. They's all saying you two was to have it out."

Rebar was wild-eyed. "Well, how come I never heard about it?" he demanded.

"Because you was in the clink," PM told him.

Rebar looked at PM with chilly understanding. "You're protecting him, ain't you?" he said.

"I'm protecting the peace," PM told him. “It’s my job.”

At the Old Amphitheater folks were starting to peel away by now. They'd drunk up all the beer, eaten all the snacks they wanted to, and this didn't promise to become anything more interesting.

"Well, Dunne. Guess he chickened on you."

"You win, Dunne.”

"Yeah, Dunne.”

The Circus quickly emptied and there was a long file back into town.

Soon Dunne was all alone there, knowing it had all been a fake.

When he entered the town himself, Penelope came up to him with a face full of night and said, "Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied?" She ran off, crying. Slowly he followed her. Slowly he trudged up the stairs to her room. He lay down on the bed like a stricken man and looked at the ceiling. She was reading aloud from the Bible. Her voice held a moral high ground. It was the voice of the Law and the Prophets that would shame all the children of Adam and drive them from Eden forever.

-8-

"You know, I can't just keep throwing him in the clink," PM said. "The lawyers are moving into the territories now. Pretty soon it's gonna be serious business, arresting a man."

"Well, maybe he'll go away," Dunne said halfheartedly.

"No, he won't go away. Why should he go away?" PM was pointing his finger. "What I'm telling you, Timmy, is back off this thing. Let it alone. You're in way over your head with this fella."

"What do you mean?"

PM jumped out of his chair and stood to his full height, suddenly blazing with fury. "Do you want to get yourself killed?" he said. "I mean, he's crazy. He's plumb loco. And you stay away from him. Now, I'm your friend and everything but I'll lock you up sure as shoottin if you don't back off. I’m calling for a restraining order on both of you in the meanwhile, which means if you approach to within fifty yards of that boy you are breaking the law, bud. You hear?"

"OK," Dunne said sullenly. But he heard him all right, and he was suddenly aware of how powerful PM was. Dunne wilted before him, this gentle man he'd known most of his life and who, for some reason, had always looked after him, indeed seemed to appear at times almost supernaturally, like a guardian angel. But now he was facing the man the outlaws faced, and he was scared. The situation had taken on a forcefulness that Dunne could not accommodate. It was too big, too real; it was for grownups, and Dunne would never be that. All he wanted to do was run and hide, which was OK with PM, and yet he felt he should do something else but he hadn't a clue what that would be. What he did end up doing was slinking out of the office with his tail between his legs and heading on home.

Trouble is, Rebar was there waiting for him in the road, he'd somehow hooked Dunne back into his world of fog and twilight.

"Come on, carry me," he said.

"No way," Dunne said. "Not any more. PM's got a restraining order."

But they were in some kind of penny arcade and the hawker was shouting, "Come on, folks, hunner dollars to the man carries his partner to the other side, or say the secret word, two hunner dollar… Hurry, hurry. Collect a hunner dollars …"

"You gonna carry me?"

"Nah. I gotta get home. Sorry."

"Hey, don't be like that. Come on now, I'm tired."

"I can't just carry you all my life," Dunne protested.

"Yes, you can. You have to. I won't go away. Not in this place."

But he did. He just went away. And there was Penelope. She was part of the twilight, too, but she looked sympathetic.

"I don't mind if you're a dirty little coward," she said. "I don't mind at all."

She sank into the earth up to her waist and became a statue. Tears flowed down Dunne's cheeks. He had lost her. And yet he was relieved to be rid of them both. PM had saved his ass again. He could go on pretending without consequence. He could even go on loving Penelope, who was safely turned to stone, while courting Sally and sawing off a piece on the sly when she took him upstairs, which was more and more frequent these days.
Except … except … She was dead, though, wasn't she? She was dead. He was sure of it. He'd heard a scream. When was that? Long ago, maybe. Very long ago, in some time outside the twilight.

He went into the bar. There was a curse on him now. No one spoke. They knew he was a dirty little coward. Sally was alive, though. She was dealing cards. (Holloway never allowed that!) He might have gone over and sat with her, just watched, and later on run up and had a piece, but it was as if he were the one who had died. Everybody just looked glum, and none of them spoke. He was in a ghost town, a town full of dead people. He couldn't talk to them and they couldn't talk to him. Holloway poured him a drink, though, without his even asking. It was automatic. Someone named Dunne should be there at this moment and so Holloway must pour him a drink. Used to be that Tim hardly touched the stuff, paid anyway, and Holloway would pour it back in the bottle. That was back in the days of Tim’s innocence. Was he ever innocent? How could that be? In this town without honor, where everyone was guilty, guilty, guilty. Guilty as charged. By themselves. They wouldn't let themselves be, so why should the Law?

Suddenly he was out of the twilight. Here was the town of Lost Confidence, here the bar and here the people, Tim Dunne, Holloway … but no Sally. She was back upstairs where she belonged, doing what she was supposed to do. And then you could hear three shots fired from up there. Three bullets entered Sally's pussy. There was an unbelievable scream. Then silence.

PM came in. He stood there, listening.

"Who's up there?" he demanded.

No one said anything, but they all looked guilty. Then you could hear boots tromping on the floor above, followed by a smashing of glass, a low thud as of someone who'd jumped and landed in the street, quick footsteps outside.

PM ran out there with his gun drawn. Dunne followed suit to find PM standing in the middle of the street, waiting for something, listening.

Bullets tore through his body. Blood flew. PM fell.

The shots had come from behind. He'd been shot in the back.

Someone said, "Hey, I got him! I got him!" It was Rebar.

Without thinking, Dunne ran out into the street.

And there he was, the kid himself.

Rebar looked up from his work and smiled.

"Well?" he said.

He already had his gun out and fired three shots before Dunne threw down and put one in the kid’s right eye. Rebar flew away like a tossed doll.

Dunne walked slowly over to the body and, standing above it, emptied his gun into the face, coldly watching it pulp up and lose its shape. There was a general gasp from the onlookers.

Then Dunne went over to PM and fell upon him and wept. He seemed to weep forever. He wept until he crinkled up and blew away like a tumbleweed. And the town blew away and all the people, and all the world blew away and there was only twilight and an ancient and empty amphitheater put there by the gods of long ago.

Rejections On Parade #1

2009-01-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

At work the birds escaped. How did this happen? (The question resides in Rita's dark, prostrate eyes). It is your fault, she seems to say. The birds gone, flying in a strange formation; birds who were black yet now are silver and give a sublime effect in their maneuvers.

Did I dream this? Did it happen?

Rita's eyes will tell me.

When I go into the building I seek out those eyes. I wait by her door, staring foolishly at the Easter wreath she keeps there always. I lurk by the coffee maker. I stalk the corridors, seeking out those strange black embers that somehow glow from within (give light). But she is gone.

I ask the receptionist.

"Three day vacation," she says.

"Does she blame me for the birds?" I inquire with some plaintiveness.

"I don't know. Ask her when she gets back." She pops her gum.

"Well, is there a number where I can reach her? An email address."

"She won't take calls on vacation. You can email but I don't think she even brings her laptop."

"What if I just go to her? Go where she is?"

She sighs balefully.

"Well, look. I wouldn't go up there I was you. She's got a Rottenweiler dog hates all beings and he guards the place, and I mean guards. You go up there however and you can get in, keep it oral, will you? I don't want her getting pregnant now. It's a mess around here."

"What makes you think - ?" I'm really put off by all this. How do receptionists obtain such power?

She sighs again and pops her gum and doesn't answer.

"Well? Well?" I demand to know.

"Come on." She looks at me like I'm the last to have heard. What? Heard what?

Finding refuge in the occupational therapy saloon I employed my cell phone to provide a curt message for Rita which I won't reiterate in these papers. But here is the email:

"It's not about fucking it's about the birds. Why do you blame me? Look at their freedom. The formations they make, their change of color, the sublime aspect. I know you saw it. They are prepared to be free. I don't care what the Activity Director may say. That I did not feed them, for one. I did. Or had it seen to by peons on my detail. Yes it is true I want to have sexual relations with you but the receptionist warns that it must be oral. Will this satisfy you?"

I roamed the corridors, searching for her eyes. I turned off all the lights. I thought by this means to determine if they had acquired the same silvery phosphorescence as our fugitive birds.

But it was no go. It was a bust.

Only two days had passed, however.

The receptionist made paper airplanes from an instruction manual I had given her at the Christmas Drawing. She had written crude things on all of them. Crude things with reference to me, my habits, my relations with you know who. That's how she put it, too, those very words I saw in bold on one sleek, sweptback wing: "… YOU KNOW WHO." I am certain they fell into the wrong hands – hateful, vengeful hands, eager for the blood of disgraced officials – because normally friendly colleagues now glared at me, even spat on the rug when I passed. They are dogs. Worse. Poodles from hell.

Then Rita came back. She was there waiting when I showed up late for work, as usual. How beautiful she is. From India. Of the Social Service Caste.

"The birds have been restored to me," she announced. There was a look of blame darkening her already brown face. Her eyes, however, had gone completely dead. Her vitality had been stolen away.

I asked her where the birds were at this moment.

"They are no longer within these walls," she said with a voice full of glaciers. "I have placed them in a more suitable facility. Now, if you'll excuse me. We have no more to say to each other."

"Won't you even tell me if they still glow? Do they remain silver?"

"I am no longer at liberty to discuss it," she said, and her eyes went away. They were no good to me now. No good to anyone. I am alone and left to die in this strange city without the goodness of her eyes.