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Contents
Page 2 – Cockroach Mamma by Maree Kimberley
Page 10 – 2 Poems by Kyle Hemmings
Page 12 – The Ex-Quizzit Corpse by AJ Kirby
Page 26 – Montecito Movie Mogul Will See What He Can Do by Jason Half-Pillow
Page 41 – 2 Poems by William Doreski
Page 44 – Interviews by Frank Strong
Page 62 – 3 Poems by Jack Granath
Page 65 – The Price of Fame by Morgan K Tanner
Page 76 – 3 Poems by Jack Tricarico
Page 80 – The Great Showbiz Onion by Stephen McQuiggan
Page 87 – Binge by Daniel Davis
Page 96 – 2 Poems by Richard King Perkins II
Page 98 – The Arsenal Acclimation by David Pamment
Page 107 – 2 Poems by Tom Pescatore
Page 109 – The Legend of Karkinos by Ben Nardolilli
Page 122 – 2 Poems by Thomas Zimmerman
Page 124 – The Beggar-King by Jay Helmstutler
Page 141 – Contributor Biographies
Abstract Jam / Issue 1 / December 2015
ISSN 2059-8475 (print) / ISSN 2059-8483 (online)
Edited by Sam Leng / Website: www.abstractjam.com
Important! All fiction and poetry featured in Abstract Jam is © The
Authors and Poets, all rights reserved, and should not be
reproduced or retransmitted in any way without their consent.
Cover Art © Anuradha Grover/Artpourri
www.anuradhagrover.daportfolio.com
www.anuradhagrover.wordpress.com
1
Cockroach Mamma
By Maree Kimberley
I was suspicious as soon as Burko walked into the visiting room with a
grin he usually reserved for his most lucrative drug deals. When he
started talking up my story-telling skills I knew for sure something was
ticking around in that messy brain of his.
‘Your cockroach stories are fuckin’ brilliant, Gaz.’ He slapped his
hands on his skinny thighs.
The guard in the corner, belt buckle tucked up under his man boobs,
glared at us and gave his balls a surreptitious scratch.
‘Fuckin’ brilliant.’ Burko lowered his voice. ‘All the crap you see on
tele and stuff today, same old boring shit not worth watching. Your stuff
is genius, mate.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Abso-effin-lutely.’ Burko leant back, legs wide apart and hands
spread open, fingernails yellow under the visiting room lights. ‘Trust me,
we’re gunna make a fortune with your stories.’
‘We are, are we?’ Long as I’ve known Burko, what’s mine was his.
‘I’m serious, mate,’ he said. ‘Stay on the right side of the ossifers
and leave the rest to me.’ Burko turned his neckless head from right to
left, scanning the dirty lemon walls. ‘I got some new contacts.’
‘Last lawyer your contacts hired got me an extra six months from his
own sheer dickheadedness.’
‘Not this time, mate.’ He grinned at me like a sun-drunk lizard. ‘This
is a bloke I met at the Social Good Convention.’
‘The social what?’ I choked back a laugh. ‘Did you get lost on your
way to Sexpo?’
‘It’s where us social ontra-pren-yure-ial types go. To network. Make
contacts’, he said. ‘Anyway, I was at back of the crowd checking out
some chick’s tits when I heard this Paris Smith bloke say “We’ve got
money. We know the talent’s out there. Help us put the two
together.”
2
Abstract Jam: Issue 1
‘Straight away I knew, Gaz.’ Burko’s eye twitched. ‘I knew you were
the one they was looking for.’
An observation to make about that.
Random words were never going to take Burko’s attention away
from a good set of tits, not even if one of those words was MONEY.
There must have been some kick-arse visuals involved: guns, explosions,
bigger tits or all three.
Then again, Burko’s not just a drug-dealing knuckle-hammering
standover bloke with the morals of a starving tiger in a petting zoo. He’s
always had ASPIRATIONS.
‘Just one more crop, Gaz,’ he’d said to me at least once a year for the
past ten. ‘Just one more and I’m out of the game, gunna set up a trust
fund and be a patron of the arts.’
Everyone has plans to do something bigger, something greater.
Never thought Burko was the type of bloke to actually do something
about it. Then again, never thought he’d ever end up at a Social Good
Convention.
‘I’m tellin’ ya, Gaz, the place was filled with lefties more cashed up
than a stripper in a mining town. I reckon this Paris Smith bloke can get
you out this weekend. He’ll cream his pants to meet someone like you.’
‘Me?’
‘You know,’ Burko sniffed. ‘You write, you’re in jail. They love that
shit.’
Over in the corner a fight was brewing between Jimmy and his
missus. Man-boob’s face blew up like a puffer fish as he waddled past
us.
‘Right.’ I nodded. ‘You found me some law-abiding creative who’ll fall
over himself trying to help someone from life’s cruddier side—in this
case, me—express torrents of angst. He’ll want to use his Social Good
Powers to get me out of prison so I can turn my life around.’
The fluoro above our heads buzzed.
‘Yep.’ Burko sat back and grinned as Man-boobs hauled Jimmy off by
the scruff of his neck while his missus tore a new record for the number
of variations of F-C’s in a single tirade.
3
Cockroach Mamma: Maree Kimberley
‘Stay out of trouble,’ Burko tilted his head towards the untidy pile of
guards attempting to restrain Jimmy’s missus, ‘and leave the rest to me
and Paris Smith.’
***
Solitary is no carnival ride. Being stuck inside a small box with only your
own farts for company has nothing to recommend it. But you make do
with what you got, and what I got was an army of little brown
cockroaches.
Did you know that each one of those little buggers, just like us
humans, has its own looks? Don’t know why anyone thinks this is
strange. They’re not genetically identical. Of course, you have to look
hard at each of them, get to know them individually, to see the
differences. But I was in solitary—what else was I going to do?
Those little brown creepy crawlies had personality in bucket loads.
Once, after I’d only been out of solitary for twenty-four hours, I ended
up back in there ‘cause I punched a bloke out for calling another bloke a
dirty cockroach.
‘There’s nothing dirty about cockroaches, you maggot!’ I screamed
while I plunger-ed my fist into his face.
Cockroaches are a model of industry. They work hard, they work
together, and they get the job done. The family in SC 26-8, all nine
hundred and fifty-eight of them, made me think about the way I’d
grown up. How my family, dysfunctional as it was, had worked together
the way the cockroaches did, cooperating for the greater good of the
family. And although the school of hard knocks is a fairy-filled
kindergarten compared to my upbringing, me and the cockroaches had
one thing in common. A strong, take-no-crap, fat-bellied Mamma.
A Mamma like that rules her world. And as it was in my childhood, so
it was in the cockroach family. It was a thing of beauty to observe the
way Cockroach Mamma had those busy little insects scuttling around all
the corners of the cell looking for whatever she needed to make her
happy.
4
Cockroach Mamma was Queen and she surrounded herself with
advisors, and the advisors had go-getters, and the go-getters had
lackeys, and the lackeys had...well, the lackeys were the bottom rung of
the cockroach pile. The shovers of the shit, as it were. Every cockroach
had their place in Cockroach Mamma’s palace and every one of them
was prepared to eat another to get just one spot closer to her.
My first stint in solitary, I sat and watched their little cockroach
shenanigans. And once I started watching them, really watching them,
there were plenty of shenanigans to see. Sex, fighting, secret alliances,
rumours, affairs and betrayal; those cockroaches did the lot.
February I was in for seven days straight and I swear I saw three
triple murders, six crimes of passion, multiple instances of cannibalism
and some illicit egg swapping for starters. Just when their stories were
starting to bury themselves deep inside my head, I got let back out into
the general prison population.
A random assault on some new meat got me back in faster than you
can stick-a-tooth-brush-up-your-arse and I was home with my cockroach
family. But watching wasn’t enough. I had to write their stories down.
No paper and pens in solitary but the bastards have to give you toilet
paper to wipe your dirty arse so that was the paper part solved. Getting
something to write with was harder. Blood is messy and the toilet paper
soaks it up but they don’t call me Gaz the Inventor for nothing (they call
me that ‘cause I worked out how to get money out of a non-paying
customer with two thumbtacks and a dead battery but that’s another
story). I mixed my spit with a bit of dust and dead cockroach guts—
there were plenty of them around—and used my index finger as a quill.
It was hard going so I made my notes brief, like this R CRUSH B so I’d
remember how Brian dropped a moth wing in Cockroach Mamma’s
presence and Roy took his chance, chomping Brian’s back legs down to
stumps in seconds and next thing Roy’s fanning Mamma’s face and
Brian’s on the scrap heap getting crushed up for ink.
It was a bit like the time my middle brother Greg broke my oldest
brother Gav’s leg after a stolen car adventure gone wrong. Greg got me
to hold the wrench. Later Gav used the wrench as a branding iron and
got me to mash it into Greg’s back.
5
Mum supervised.
Such shenanigans.
***
Does your head in a bit, going straight from jail to a riverside apartment
with views out to the bay. Maybe that’s why things turned out the way
they did. Truth is jail’s been pretty good to me. I wouldn’t exactly say I
like it but in there I know who I am. In Paris Smith’s three-bedroom,
three-bathroom, river-view penthouse, I did not.
Didn’t mind it at first. The room had a great view straight into the
apartment of a couple of hot chicks who didn’t mind prancing around
naked in the mornings and I had an office with everything I needed to
produce the first series of Cockroach Mamma. Not that I needed much.
If you can write a script in solitary with toilet paper and cockroach shit
you can do anything. But the gadgets made it easier to write the stories
fast.
I worked like a demon. The stories whirled around in my head like
scraps of plastic in a tornado. I had to grab them and get them down
while I could.
That’s why the interruptions started to affect me. Burko dropping in
was alright, and Paris—well it was his place. Paris’s mate Trent was
pretty helpful at first, too. He showed me how to do storyboards. But
then it was all these other Social Gooders—Tad and Todd and Tonya and
Tiana why the fuck did all their names start with T anyway—all wanting
to come and praise up the jailbird-come-Next-Big-Thing while I
scratched out my storyboards and wished the lot of them would piss off.
But I smiled and smiled when I should’ve just plugged in some
headphones and shoved on a floppy hat and ignored them because then
there would have been no party.
Paris said it was to be the big launch of Cockroach Mamma. From there
it would go viral, he said, and we’d be making a shitload of money for
the prisoner education charity and my life would never be the same
again.
My life, said Paris Smith, would have TURNED AROUND.
6
I should have said no party but Burko said it would be a massive piss up
and that Paris knew the girls from the apartment across the way and
he’d introduce them to me so I’d be getting drunk and laid and I hadn’t
done those two things together in a long time. I kept my mouth shut.
A week out from the launch party I’d fallen behind schedule. I was
missing my muses. I got up, had a wank while I had my morning perv,
showered, dressed and headed for the Valley.
Cockroach Mamma was gone. But she had plenty of relatives. Not in
the shiny glam box that was Paris Smith’s penthouse but down the road
and around the corner in Brunswick Street and the cruddy cafes that
specialised in coffee, stale cake and dirty river floods of my favourite
little brown insects.
I picked a corner table at Roy’s, where it was dark and warm, and set
my old tobacco tin baited with sugar crystals on the floor next to my
chair. Before I could drain the dregs of my coffee a dozen tiny brown
cockroaches had crawled inside and started feasting. I lingered a few
minutes longer in case there were any stragglers, then popped the lid
back on my tin, shoved it in my back-pack and headed to the next divey
cafe where I put out another sugary trap. Three hours and twenty tinfulls of cockroaches later, I headed back to the apartment.
I told Burko to tell Paris to keep everyone out of my buzz-cut while I
worked on the final touches to the Cockroach Mamma script and my
new pals got fat on sugar and stale bread and evolved into plump little
fellas. It wasn’t easy keeping them contained in my room but with some
well placed newspapers and a few piles of free feed they stayed close.
A few hours before the party I gathered them all up into one big shoe
box specially nicked from Paris for the occasion, got showered, shaved
and suited up, and waited for Cockroach Mamma’s big moment.
***
Picture this.
Swanky riverside penthouse apartment.
7
Waiters with cockroach feelers stuck on their heads mingling their
silver plattered canapés between the tall, tanned, slender specimens
of the Social Gooders.
Champagne bubbles in crystal flutes.
Jazz, soft and low.
Dim lights.
Talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
Paris announces me.
A spotlight.
They cheer me in my Cockroach Mamma suit as I work my way
around the room.
Brilliant!
Fantastic!
Fucking Amaaaaazing!
They holler and whoop as I weave in and out of the waiters and the
guests, my floppy fabric feelers brushing their spray-tanned skin and
gelled hair, while they squeeze and stroke my suit.
That was all they had to do.
My cockroach friends escaped the heat of the suit and scuttled out
my cockroach sleeves, my cockroach legs, my cockroach neck, my
cockroach hair and out among the beautiful Social Gooders and their
canapés and their champagne and across their shiny, shiny surfaces like
streaks of shit down a toilet bowl.
My little brown friends scampered into gelled hair and pattered
across slender shoulders and burrowed down cleavage and I darted in
and out of the packed crowd, faster and faster while the Social Gooders
screamed and shook and slapped themselves and cockroaches streamed
across people and platters and scattered their droppings like tiny brown
confetti onto every surface they could covet.
And Burko sat in the corner in a big brown leather chair, slapping his
thighs and laughing so hard a wet patch spread across the crotch of his
jeans.
***
8
I ended up back inside for breaking parole after Paris Smith said I stole
from him. The only thing I stole was his dignity. And, maybe, a Mont
Blanc pen.
They took the pen off me when I got back inside but it’ll be waiting
for me when I get out. Should only be another year. In the meantime
Cockroach Mamma is whipping up a viral storm. Most downloaded six
weeks in a row, Burko reckons, and merchandise selling by the crapload.
Not that I’ll see a cent.
Such is life. It’s the creative process that matters. And here I sit,
writing this down in the prison classroom, while the balding tutor up
front, paid for out of funds from the Social Good Prisoner Education and
Development Program, stares out the window and wonders how he
screwed up a teaching career so badly to end up where he is.
Next time, I reckon I’ll self-publish.
9
Nuke Victim
By Kyle Hemmings
Under the cartilaginous remains of day,
you find her burned beyond recognition,
anonymous. You gather her, careful
not to let her fall between your
fingers--she is now nothing but
shadow without core, a body
of grounded dust. You carry her
over the border, where the sun
paralyzes every living thing,
and you promise to keep her
upright, will hang her in a closet
of steam-ironed uniforms,
holed & stained,
but still hot to the touch.
Sleeping with Civilians Is Frowned Upon
By Kyle Hemmings
My company made camp
in the basement of an old mansion,
some twenty kilometers
from a leveled city,
once known for its rich textiles.
The woman who owned the mansion
lived on the top floor,
came down to bring us
boned-down meals.
She only offered one side of her face.
When the radio signal arrived
that we were to move out,
I trudged upstairs & knocked
10
on the bedroom door.
A voice, a wispy wind of one,
said to enter. She was sitting
at the edge of an unmade bed,
her husband on the floor,
half his head exposed,
thoughts coagulated in blood
& brain tissue.
My company moved out.
I stayed behind.
At night, I slept with my head
between her breasts,
her hands clinging loosely
around my throat.
The sound of bombs rocked
the mansion.
On some nights,
I slept with my face
between her thighs,
my lips sunk.
11
The Ex-Quizzit Corpse
By AJ Kirby
Detective Clay watched as the croupier swept the last remaining handful
chips off the table. Slugged back his rye, and then climbed offof his
stool. Ambled across the casino floor to the cloakroom. Nicky was
waiting; already holding up Clay's leather jacket like it was a bullrag.
Clay said: ‘Bar me, Nicky.’ And Nicky only grinned a Colgate smile. Was
all a part of their nightly ritual.
Nicky offered him another drink, but tonight Clay wasn’t in the
mood. He was a week away from retirement and he figured it might
take him a week to piss away his pension in here. Might. Probably would
be less. ‘Just gimme my badge and gun, and I’ll be on my way. Already I
made you richer’n Croesus.’
Nicky cocked his head. Studied Clay. ‘Why the long face, Bud?’
Clay shrugged. Didn’t put much effort into it. Felt like the majority of
the past few years had been one, long shrug.
‘Long face, that reminds me,’ said Nicky. ‘Hang on a tick.’ Held up a
finger, then fished out his cellphone from his trouser pocket. ‘Listen
this.’ He read off the screen. Some long, rambling joke offof some SMS
he’d received. Referenced the horsemeatburger scandal. Wasn’t the
first time Clay’d heard it. Wasn’t even the tenth. These gallows jokes,
this car crash humour, these morbid chainletter wisecracks. Whistled
around the precinct like goddamn wildfire. The horsemeatburger shit
wasn’t even the worst of these nudge-nudge wink-wink memento mori.
Past few weeks, Clay’d had his fill hearing legless, armless, head and
shoulders above the rest punchlines. Greasy setups mentioning Lance
Armstrong or Oscar Pistorius or Jimmy Savile or Nelson Fuckin Mandela.
Depressed the hell outta him.
Clay left the building. Waited for a trolleycar rather than a taxi.
Brassic. Baltic cold too. He’d a good hour before the first trolleycar of
the next day and he almost thought about calling for a patrol car to
come fetch him, but then thought not. Waited. Scattering of cityfolk
stalked up and waited with him, ignoring the gloaming concrete and
12
neon fuzz of the city in the weesmallhours and instead staring down
into their cellphone’s faces like truth was being reflected outta them.
Some of these folk gave occasional sniggers. Guffaws. And Clay
wondered what the latest on the shaved-knuckle grapevine might be.
Also, he wondered whether he was, as had been alleged in the
changerooms at the station, some kind of ornery old stick in the mud.
***
Detective Clay rarely if ever smiled. Face could have been chiselled out
of rock. Leather jacket and jeans could have been burned clay. He had
five working days to survive and his partner, Tevez, was breaking his
balls about it, keeping up this machine gun rat-tat-tat of jibes and insults
otherwise known as banter. Clay motherfuckin hated banter. He clicked
on the radio in the squadcar. Tevez always had it tuned to a sportstalk
station which was similarly full of banter. Today the presenters were
recycling smarts about bird flu. Apparently some feller had bought the
farm over in Arkansas somewhere. Showed signs of the flu. Now he was
the butt of all the same old jokes.
Tevez came over in a fit of giggles. Practically rear-ended the car in
front of them. Clay sighed. Told him put it in park. And then waited a
quarter hour until the kid finished up rumbling on his seat.
Clay said: ‘Ready to go now, Son?’
Tevez said: ‘Yeah, Dad.’ Then: ‘Wait a minute though. Just gotta text
my man Stevo with thatta joke. The bomb, eh Clay?’ He shook his head
as though the genius of such japery was beyond his comprehension. ‘I
just don’t know how they make em up so fast.’
Clay grunted.
***
There was a bar over on Fifth Avenue not many of the new breed of
cops knew about. Little ol’ place barely even had any bartags out front
of it so you had to be part of the secret nods and winks brigade to even
find it. Clay liked to kill time there before it got lively at Nicky’s joint.
13
The Ex-Quizzit Corpse: AJ Kirby
Was quiet. No jukebox. Chatter kept to a minimum. Lots of old
fellers, cops mostly, just staring into their glasses and watching bubbles
rise, or ice melt. Felt different in there now. A hum of conversation. A
few rumbles laughter. Sounded out of kilter, like belching in church. Clay
swung round on his stool. There were a bunch of guys over by the
fireplace, gaggling like geese over a bluey cellphone screen, reading the
latest joke out to each other and shit.
Fellers mustha saw him looking. One shouted over. ‘Hey! D’ja hear
the latest?’
Clay sighed.
The guy had already taken up laughing again. Could barely get his
words out. ‘Kay Bud, how bout this. Whaddya call Gumbo Harrison
these days?’
Clay shrugged. Or maybe he’d already been shrugging soon as he
turned around.
‘You godda know who Gumbo Harr…’
‘I know who he is. Presenter. Permatanned. Did that primetime TV
show. Quizzit I think it called. One where the wrong answer buzzer
sounded like a fuckin fanny fart.’
The fellers looked at each other. ‘Guy’s a comedian. Okay pardner,
whaddaya call Gumbo now?’
Clay pulled a face.
Slapped his thigh. Rolled his eyes. Spluttered. ‘He’s… he’s an ExQuizzit Corpse.’
Clay pretended to laugh. Then: ‘Didn’t know he was dead.’
Feller doing the telling called over to Slouch, the barman.
Slouch yawned his head up. ‘Wha?’
‘Stick the goddamn idiotbox on, attaboy.’
Slouch groaned for the remote. Clicked a few buttons. The TV in its
eyrie above the bar crackled into eventual life. Was tuned onto a news
channel. They all watched it in silence awhile until the presenter of it cut
in onto some feature about prisoners incarcerated in Louisville chowing
down on horsemeatburgers for the past nine months. The presenter
looked kind of shocked and white about the gills. In this bumpy voice he
started saying there was some shocking breaking news. Just after, the
14
yellow tickertape at the bottom of the screen caught up. It said: ‘Gary
“Gumbo” Harrison, 45, the former presenter of the TV quiz show
Quizzit, has been found butchered at his Chicago home, sources say.’
Clay let out a whistling breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
‘Christ. How’d the jokes start so fast? I mean, how’d they know?’
Slouch scratched his stubbly chin. ‘Mayhap they got a man on the
inside. Know at the phone company?’
Some of the fellers about the fireplace laughed, but Clay didn’t. Clay
thought it sounded all kinds of possible.
***
By the time Clay got the call, he was glad to be putting some road
between him and the station. Cops practically rolling in the aisles as
they tried, and failed, to get to the bottom of the Ex-Quizzit corpse case.
Clay might not have minded but the guys were all rib-tickling and they
were sat directly underneath the grizzly crime scene photographs.
Gumbo Harrison’d been found decapitated and dismembered. Not
exactly minor dental work had taken place. While the rest of the cops at
the Twelfth Precinct, it was all about the banter – Gumbo’d answered
his final quiz question; Gumbo’d become a soup – Clay had taken it
upon himself to track the morbid text messages to their source. He’d
had a guy he knew in the Feebs run some black-ops-type wiretappery
and his guy had just come through. Would cost Clay a couple cool
glasses of Coors at Trixie’s later. Couldha got away with a better deal
except Clay’s guy had made some joke saying Clay owed him some
Gumbo. Clay wouldn’t stoop to that.
They met at a diner close to the freeway. Clay’s guy’d already found
a booth towards the back, away from the windows. He was sat with a
huge horseshoe of onionrings in front of him, a satisfied smile on his
face. Clay slid in alongside him and his guy palmed a brown envelope
over in his direction.
‘Thanks Mart,’ said Clay.
‘No problem for my old roommate at police college.’ Mart stuffed a
horsehead-sized onionring into his flabby maw.
15
‘Enough of this backstory. You find the source?’
Mart, his cheeks stuffed fat like a squirrel’s, nodded down at the
bottle of tomato ketchup on the table. Clay rolled his eyes. Always with
the banter. Everyone with the banter. Life wasn’t a fuckin comedy show.
Waitress came over and took Clay’s order. He opted for a skinny
latte. No food. He couldn’t remember his last staple meal. Subsisted on
the five am sandwiches they brought out at the casino and the
occasional leftover donut Tevez had knocking around in the squadcar.
By the time the waitress had left, Mart had finished what he had in his
mouth, and was sucking the grease off each of his fingers in turn. He
popped the last one, then grinned. ‘We got him.’
‘Well? Who is he?’
Mart picked out another onion ring. It was too big for his mouth but
by hook or by crook he jammed the bastard in, like he was Saturn trying
to swallow one of his own rings.
Clay drummed his fingers on the desk.
Mart finished. Said: ‘Care to guess?’
‘Ferrrchristssakes Mart.’
Mart made the fanny fart noise offof the Quizzit TV show, then:
‘Nope. I’ll tell you. Believe it or not, the guy works for the cellphone
network company. He’s like some kind of fair to middling comedian
offof the circuit up in the Big Apple. Done some TV work but not so
much. He an extra in an Adam Sandler movie once… Anyway, what I
found is all these SMS-chains start with him. The texts get passed on.
Make the network all kinds of money. This comedian, he’s some kind of
secret employee or summpin. Clay? Clay where you going? Come back
here? You ain’t even drunk your cawfee…’
***
The reception of the cellphone company was all kinds of swish. All
chrome and elaborate seating and tall windows. The girl at the desk
reminded Clay of plastic flowers. Pointless and rubber-faced. Examined
her nails as Clay asked her the same damned question for the
16
hundredandeighth time like she’d never heard of the guy named in
Mart’s brown envelope, like he was some kind of ghost.
He wrapped his mouth about the name as he said it again. She shook
her head. He felt like motherfuckin launching over the desk. Grabbing
her by the lapels, or the tits. Shaking her. Didn’t. Could just imagine the
goddamn crack as his legs refused to play ball. As he fell back down
offof the desk, on his back, legs all wriggling, like some kind of
cockroach.
He asked if he could speak to her manager, or preferably, her
manager’s manager’s manager. Girl asked did she need to call security.
Clay bellowed in her face. ‘Yes, call the bastards. Might get some sense
outta them.’
She was crying when security turned up. Security was gotup like he
was real fiveoh, all epaulettes and cap and a fakesilver badge above his
shameful heart. Could see the jealousy burning in his eyes. Also the
desire to do proper policework. Took Clay through to his control room.
Rigged out with hundreds of IP CCTV monitors. Pan tilt zoom controllers.
Lowlighting and topnotch computers. Compared to the control room at
the station, this was techie heaven.
Clay asked him if he had records of all the staff. For access control
passes or somesuch. Security guard shook a mouse and wakened the
screen like it was Orangina. Tapped in a few things on the keyboard.
Then asked whether he could see Clay’s ID again. Clay showed him.
Security nodded. Asked him who he was looking for, and then in a
smaller voice, a more excited voice, added, ‘and what’s he done?’
Clay told him it was classified.
Security sighed, swung the screen round so Clay could see it.
Clay growled. ‘William Hart… There’s a red box around his name.’
‘That means he’s not been in today. That means…’
‘He’s otherwise occupied. Making news. Ready to start spreading it.’
Security raised an eyebrow.
Then Clay’s sideradio buzzed, and even before he answered, he knew
what it was going to be.
Clay had one last quiz for Security. Asked whether the network
company ran trackers on their employee’s phones. Even the ghost ones.
17
Security nodded. Gave Clay the address no problemo. And just as
Clay’d suspected came up a match with the detail from the buzzing
radio.
***
Was an old speakeasy on the outskirts of the city. Ramshackle place
looked as though it had a few missing teeth and might have been blind
in one eye. Corpse of a place nobody could believe it stayed open which
was probably why it did. Clay thought probably still distilled its own
liquor, or watered down what got sent from the brewery. Main part of it
was shack-like and skeletal and branches and roots of drunk trees
climbed in and out of it. Round back there was an old caravan which
doubled as a changing room.
Why changing rooms was needed was for the live acts. Jizz’s was
famous for live acts might have been too rowdy for the main drag.
Snakedancers and cowboy wailers and comedians whose patter was the
smalltown-militia side of right wing. According to the radio, some
woman named Carla Crowe - used to be a famous country-type singer had been on last night’s bill. According to the radio some lone-gunmannutjob’d taken the whole place hostage some time in the weesmalls.
According to all the SMS jibber jabber, Carla Crowe’d already croaked.
Flapped her wings and flown off this mortal coil.
When Clay arrived on scene, there was already half the precinct
there, kicking their heels and whistling Dixie. Waiting on the man inside
showing himself. They were at the foot of the hill, looking up. Clay saw
Tevez and Mike Shard right at the front, crouching behind the open
doors to their cruisers. Both were clutching their shooters, but neither
was cocked. Shard was the older one with the salt and pepper grey hair
and a slight paunch. Tevez was the younger one. Still liked to wear his
standard issue shirts a standard size smaller than required so they
would show off his biceps and pecs. He had a half-assed moustache,
which was more like a sprinkle seasoning on his lip and a pair of fly-eye
shades covering his eyes. Clay wondered if he was seeing the future
when he looked at them.
18
Rest of the crowd was made up of all sorts of other police and
agencies. Amongst them all kinds of suit-wearing desk-jockeys and
Feebs. Negotiators. Profilers. CSIs. All of them ready to set grunts like
Tevez and Mike Shard to tasks like getting coffee and donuts or sitting
on the front line until their asses ached. Clay could easily imagine what
Tevez and Shard were saying. Shard would be muttering it was a case of
too many chiefs, not enough Native American Indians. Shard would be
saying he was sick of taking orders from college boys had less idea about
decent police work than fuckin fire hydrants. Shard said a lot of things.
Tevez wouldn’t be saying much. Maybe he’d crack the occasional wise
remark, lifting it straight from his mobile.
They’d sent a negotiator in already. Seemed pointless seeing as
though the motherfucker inside Jizz’s was already communicating with
all and sundry over the main American SMS network. But them’s the
breaks.
Some guy Clay didn’t recognise - a suit - came over and started
chinwagging. Asked Clay just who the hell he reckoned was inside. Clay
said he didn’t know.
***
Inside Jizz’s, two remaining shot-glasses on the sticky black tray. Only
one man left to drink them. He winked one eye, cyclopsed his shaking
hand towards the drinks. His stomach churned. He gritted his teeth.
Muttered: ‘Mind says yes, but the body says no.’ Picked a glass. Slapped
his palm on it three times. Then downed it. The single naked bulb
hanging on a long wire swayed like a fuckin noose.
Shouldha seen the other guy. Landslid off his stool, he was. Head
crooked at an unlikely angle. Drool spunking out the corner of his
mouth. An exquisite corpse were it not for his chainsaw-snoring.
Last man standing took the last shot-glass. Performed the same
slapping ritual. Sunk this one too. Then he clambered to his feet, feeling
like he was cranking through all the stages of evolution from ape to
man. Stretched. Then walked across the spit and sawdust floor to the
dunny. Kicked open the door.
19
Fuckin stink in there. Vomit slicked everywhere. And shit. And blood.
Fuckin pigsty. Too old for this living like yetis. He unzipped, flapped out
the old man. Tried to concentrate on pissing. Imagined waterfalls and
rainforests. Groaned. Nothing. Not a one exquisite drop. Zipped back up
again, stepped over the body of the barmaid, sans head, and then back
into the bar-room.
Place was a shit-hole too, but he found if he squinted his beer
goggles then it looked a helluva lot better. Could imagine the jukebox
was still lit up and the booths were full and the Coors sign over the bar
did not have a head dangling offof it. He walked like Fonzie. Crossed the
floor clicking his fingers to imaginary music pumping out the juke.
Kicked the other guy as he passed and told him it was no time for
sleeping as they had sharks to jump.
Got a snore in response.
Some fellers can cope with their drink. Others cannot. Specially if it
laced with diazepam.
Slowly, the diazzy was having some effect on him too though.
Fuckin… fuckin… smoothing out the edges and stuff. He lumbered over
to the bar and fixed himself a Coors. Taps didn’t work now after a stray
bullet had damaged the pipes, so he made do with a bottle. Mountains
on it supposed to be blue. Weren’t. But it would do.
He took a long draught and then wandered back over the floor with
it hanging loose from his fingers. Like a cowboy. He wouldn’t have
minded it if he could find a cigarillo too. Have it hanging from side of his
mouth like Clint. He’d scoured the bar for some earlier though and there
weren’t none. Still, despite the diazzy, he walked with a cowboy
swagger now, kind of rolling his shoulders and walking as though he had
a horse still stuck between his legs. Passed a booth and cocked an
imaginary ten gallon hat at the legs of a woman he’d encountered
cowering in the beer-cellar.
Howdy, the name’s Billy.
No response from the pins. Call herself a singing sensation? This was
Carla Fuckin Crowe goddamnit… Still, he was in a brighter mood than in
the shithouse now. Whistling even. Home, home on the Range. He took
a slug of Coors and then went to the window. V’d his fingers between a
20
couple blinds and blinked out into the sunlight. Eyes took some time to
adjust. Eventually saw more five-oh cars parked up at bottom of the hill,
binoculars trained on the building. Wished he was holed up somewhere
less hospitable where cars couldn’t go and where he’d have an
advantage. Then snapped the blinds shut quick before they could rattle
off a few shots on him. There was bullet holes in the walls from the last
time, like woodworm had got into them. Spears of light shone through
these holes and made the dust motes in the air get all wriggly. He fixed
his eyes on this for a while.
Billy was yanked out his reverie by the other guy’s radio making that
KARK- KARK noise. Then it was all come in Yankee-Foxtrot. He stalked
over to it, giving it the weird-eye on account of he had searched the
other guy carefully when he had let him in. Patted every part of him
even the crotch. There’d been no radio then. Which was all kinds of
vexing. Meant he was losing his touch, getting old. Age playing its cunt’s
trick on him and no mistake.
Ol’ Billy hunkered down, ghosted his hands over the other guy’s
body. Found the radio buckled on a belt which was tucked between a
couple folds of the other guy’s stomach. He hadn’t checked for another
belt on him on account of what bastard wears two belts? He unbuckled
the thing and depressed the button on it. Said howdy and gee whiz what
a nice day it turned out as. Then he said over and out.
The guy on the other end of the line asked him what he’d done to
Cody.
Billy said who was Cody.
He's the man you've been making acquaintance with.
Billy nudged the other guy with the toe of his boot. The negotiator?
he spat.
Yeah we, uh, wondered. They asked to speak with him.
He's, uh, a little... indisposed.
They asked him whether they needed to come up there.
Billy shoved the radio under Cody's nose and let the negotiator snore
for them. Then he took the negotiator’s belt and cinched it around his
nose and mouth. Pulled tighter. Tighter. Felt the life rattlesnake outta
him.
21
Picked out his cellphone and jabbed in a rib-tickler. Had a steady
stream of the bastards. Pressed send. Could just imagine the world
beginning to laugh as they got the joke about the negotiator and the
diazzy.
Billy’d always wanted to teach the world to laugh, in perfect
harmony. He was an entertainer. Brand-spanking top of his game. He
couldn’t have been happier if he was up in Heaven, with all they virgins.
Billy turned the cellphone over in his hands, marvelling at the sheer
functionality of it. Amazing the number of uses could be found for they
gadgets. Finally, he’d marvelled enough, and he thumbed the central
button. One connected – 3G dontchaknow – to the explosives he’d set
up in the old caravan-stroke-changing-room. Phone brought up a
stopwatch-timer.
Five minutes… Four minutes forty nine seconds…
Billy Hart grinned. Soon he’d be the punchline to a thousand jokes.
***
Was the Bee Gees sung I Started A Joke originally. Was Clay now.
Rumours and hearsay were spreading about the police clustered at the
bottom of the hill like a venereal disease. Hints and allegations were
whispering Chinese-style, from rough grouping to rough grouping. They
were going to go in. Storm the bastion. Light up the place like a
Christmas Guy Fawkes tree. Waco the motherfuckin bar into
nothingness.
Clay was singing because he was scared. Scared he’d turn out all
cliche, just like his ex-wife The Bitch had always said he would. There
was a course plotted for him as sure as a diversion on the interstate.
Cop. Divorce. Drinking problem. Gambling problem. Nearing retirement
and then whammo. Whole goddamn world would laugh at him, the old
bastard couldn't see what was staring him in the face from the very
start. His own death.
He was going to sing and laugh all the way to the cemetery.
Probably only Nicky’d be at the funeral. Maybe Tevez.
22
They were plotting up. Donning armour-plated bullet-proof gear,
Clay thinking it’d make no difference compared to the firepower Billy
Hart mustha had in there. Some of the guys were laughing. Gallows
humour. Rabbit-punching each other on shoulders. Calling the others
queers if they had to go for a piss. Some wag had whacked on their
radio in one of the squadcars. Clay couldn’t tell which one but assumed
it was Tevez. Kid was like that. Thought he was funny. Sick really, Carla
Crowe’s voice crooning out into the afternoon, singing of lost love and
dead children. Tevez’d learn, if he survived this. One day he’d be just as
old, just as cynical as Clay. The laughter’d just dry up one day, just like
the tears would. Could only lubricate yourself through the booze. Only
feel that twinge of adrenaline at the casino. Until you found yourself at
the end of the road, the punchline about to be applied, and you could
do nothing about it whatsoever.
Some suit came out and made some speech which was caught by the
wind and then scattered over the hills, food for cacti. Feller did a lot of
v-ing his fingers, and then making scurrying motions with them. A lot of
frantic pointing and gesturing.
Clay ignored him. Moved when the guy in front did like life was a
conveyor belt. Like it was one joke being told over and over.
They reached a fork in the road up to Jizz’s and hunkered down in
the dirt. People about him lifted their guns up to their faces and there
was no sound except for the distant hum of Tevez’s radio.
Someone touched Clay’s shoulder and he swung round. Was some
kid he'd never seen before. Hat halfway down over his face so it covered
his eyes.
And he went to Clay, ‘why’s he doing this, Billy Hart?’
And Clay shrugged, asked ‘is this some kind of joke, kid?’
Kid’s answer went blowin’ in the wind, just like the captain’s speech.
The explosion rocked through everything, beginning with a boom out
back of the bar and then spreading, causing aftershocks. Rabid red
flames danced and billowed. Clay felt his eyelids burned off. Eyes
peeled, he watched legs and arms tumbling in turmoil. Badges and
pistols ballooning. Screams, cries, more explosions, then nothing.
Nothing at all.
23
***
Burns unit at St. Mary’s Hospital a soul-destroying place even in best of
times, and this most definitely not the best of times. Aesthetic reasons,
there were no windows, no mirrors on the walls, not even in toilets.
Staff scurried through the corridors quick-sharp, but made hardly a
noise on account of the moccasins they wore.
Clay’s bed surrounded by pissydamp-looking gray curtains, and it was
as though the inside of his body had turned a similar gray, too. Breath
came in raggedy fits and choking bursts. His tongue was all over wet and
dry, clagging in his mouth like a dead flounder and then slicking his lips
with drool which the nurse had to wipe away. He had second degree
burns. Green-fracture to the left wrist after the kid had rolled all over
him. Clogged-up lungs from all the smoke. A nasty twitch in his right eye
which suggested his charred eyelids were a little crumbly, or else tears
were soon.
Lot of the time Clay just lay there listening to the loose-chip rattle of
the rickety air-con unit and the clatter of the clunky breathing of the
feller in the bed on the other side of him. Or else sailing back into
unconsciousness, his hospital bed his liferaft. Sometimes, the only thing
dragging him offof that liferaft was the noise of the feller in the next
bed’s cellphone vibrating, chirruping, otherwise being all-noisome.
Sometimes, he wondered whether there were new jokes doing the
rounds. Bout him. Bout the rest of their unit.
Clay woke this time to see a silhouette outside the gray curtains
surrounding his bed. Curtains whooshed apart and a nurse ushered
herself inside. Didn’t afford him a look though. Was too busy at her
cellphone. Sniggering, tittering at it. Clay let out a raggedy sigh.
She asked him ‘what’s to do?’ Still not averting her peekers from the
cellphone.
He wouldn’t answer.
Nurse perched on the end of the bed. Sheet pulled taut on Clay’s
green-fractured arm. He let out a gasp of pain afore he could put a lasso
on his tongue.
24
‘Uh sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘Say, how about I turn your smile upside
down? Gotta little joke for you, Detective Clay.’
He sniffed. ‘And here’s me thinking you were bringing in my
retirement papers.’
‘Nah, listen.’
Clay shrieked. ‘No!’
But then he heard the feller in the next bed chuckling. And the feller
in the bed next to him snorting with laughter. It was a motherfuckin
conspiracy, that was what it was. Cellphone co’d probably already stuck
in some new comedian to follow up on Billy Hart’s business. There’d be
no end to it.
Banter banter everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Nurse told her joke. And then there was a burning sensation in Clay’s
stomach. A bubbling, caustic feeling he didn’t recognise. Came out of
him like he’d swallowed a gulp too far on a Coors. Snotting out his nose,
bungeeing up in his throat. He laughed, and then asked the nurse to text
him the same joke. Thought Tevez might wanna hear the bastard. It was
an exquisite corpse of a gag.
25
Montecito Movie Mogul Will See What He Can Do
By Jason Half-Pillow
My nine year old son attends Cesar Chavez elementary school in upscale
Montecito, California, which has become a kind of refuge from Santa
Barbara, which itself was a refuge from Hollywood and Los Angeles. My
wife and I (36-24-36) had elected to enroll him in a public school. We
did so, despite her paranoid misgivings about what the experience
would do to him, after realizing that all the private schools in town
would require us to constantly navigate minefields of ever shifting
political terrain, a prospect neither of had any stomach for after just
having crawled up here from the well heeled snake pits of the Los
Angeles private school circles in which we had the ill fortune to swim,
and as things turned out, drown – which is a large part of the reason
why we left there in the first place. But best to not go into all that. Let’s
just say we don’t play well with annoying, busy-body, others.
At first we had entertained the delusion that somehow private
elementary schools in exclusively up, up, and away scale Montecito
would somehow be less pretentious than L.A., but we got the picture
pretty quickly that we were wrong. At all the interviews, I was
interrupted mid way through each answer I gave and corrected on my
word choice, told again and again that “we don’t use that word here,”
or “well I guess that’s one way to put it, but we don’t put it that way
here” and all like manner of such things until I stopped talking, content
in the knowledge that there was no way in hell any of them would ever
get a single cent of my money. My wife was put off by their constant
talk of “volunteer opportunities.” As for the words I was not to use,
they included things such as “tests”, “rules”, “homework”, “curriculum”
and other run of the mill things that I guess I should have learned from
my Los Angeles experience could be mentioned only through endlessly
modified euphemism so that one always left these kind of talks with the
feeling that you really had no idea what had been discussed at all. We
thus put our hopes for at least being kept out of the outer-reaches
26
strata of affluent, private elementary school mind games in our new
city’s fine, public school option.
At first we were more than pleased with the choice. The school was
so out of our face that there were days when neither my wife nor I had
any conscious sense that our child was in attendance there at all. But
after the ironing out all the summer kinks first , few weeks of reacculturation to the daily grind, the annoying factions of the school
personnel found the system running itself pretty smoothly, which left
them plenty of, if not actually too much, free time to make themselves a
nuisance to everybody else, parents such as us included.
I came to wonder if we had made a mistake. I kicked myself for not
realizing that I could have made a sizable donation to a private school
with the overt understanding that a condition of the school taking it was
that they were to contact neither me nor my wife, unless it was in
regards to the most unambiguously dire of physical emergencies –
actual immanent danger – and even then I probably would have insisted
that the fire department was to be called first. The public school could
be just as bad, if not worse, than the private schools, and there was no
bribing them with new orchestra pits and the funds to refinish the gym
floor in exchange for them leaving you alone. They really seemed to
think they had a right to contact you any time they saw fit. Half the
time, it seemed like they did so they way a dog can’t help but gnaw
away compulsively at some spot long ago vacated by a particularly
bothersome flea.
The public schools should really make you go through an interview
process as the private schools do, so you can find out how annoying
they are too before resolving to the mistake of enrolling your child in
one.
It seemed that not a day went by without my wife and I getting at
least one email missive from the Principal of the school banning a new
word in the school and encouraging us to reinforce the ban at home, as
well as during any extra curricular activities that are not controlled by
the school. They seemed to think we had nothing to do but sit around
and watch our son’s utterly lame soccer practices, and, even if we did,
27
Montecito Movie Mogul Will See What He Can Do: Jason Half-Pillow
we’d run out on the field every time some kid who got kicked too hard
in the shins uttered some proscribed word.
We were also sent endless reminders encouraging us to police our
children’s facial expressions , thus playing our role as “partners” in our
child’s education by “fostering in them a proclivity for greater openness
in ‘dialogue’” – a word I can no longer say out loud and grow nauseous
and feel a tightness in my chest even hearing; this was all part of their
“school improvement plan” that had been on-going for three years and
was overseen by a committee so riddled with strife that the Principal
also sent out, more or less, weekly requests for a new parent volunteer
to step up and take a seat recently resigned by another parent. This
happened so often that the Principal gave up trying to give a reason for
the parent’s departure, and finally came out with a curt form email that
asks you to click on a box to indicate you accept the position. But we
get our share also of personalized contact with the school too.
It was soon November, and our child had been there less than two
months and had been suspended three times already. I was not
informed of the suspensions and neither was my wife.
Our
housekeeper found the messages on the machine and went and picked
him up for each suspension. She never told us, and why would she? We
exchanged little more than pidgin bits of one our respective languages,
and what little talk we had was not even necessary, having long ago
settled into a routine. Technically, childcare wasn’t her job; she did us a
favor picking him up, and we were thankful that she didn’t lay on us
some guilt trip about the extra, free work by informing us that it had
taken place. We came home at our usual hours and blissfully assumed
he had just returned from a regular day of school. If he was home early,
and we happened to be there, we assumed it had to be yet another
teacher workday, of which there were plenty. Anyway, we were
determined to reward our maid with a very handsome Christmas bonus
for all of her extra, hard, and mercifully invisible work.
Ordinarily, picking him at school and supervising and keeping him
entertained would have been a job for his nanny, but she had gone back
to Guatemala in September to comfort some grandmother distressed
that all of her male grandchildren had recently been rounded up in
28
some kind of policia nacional raid, staged in hopes of getting more U.S.
aid of some sort – either coco plant eradication funds or something to
help with banana exports, I can’t recall which. I assured her that I had
not contributed to the Obama Campaign, unlike most moguls around
here, and thus was right behind her grandmother in opposing whatever
strong arm tactics her unelected representatives were being forced into
by bureaucrats manning his administration. Someone in the DEA or
Interpol or some other God awful agency was having fun setting up
impossible human rights criteria for the government there that all but
forced the Guatemalan Military to take action and kidnap her nephews.
I said I knew other donors and assured her we’d all be writing emails.
The nanny didn’t catch most of what I said and just left. My wife told
one of the gardeners to drive her home, so she wouldn’t have to wait
for the bus and make all those transfers and would thus shave enough
time off what might end up being her last ever commute home from us
to stuff as many of her belongings as she could in a giant suitcase and
tie it tight with a full ball of string.
We paid for her airline tickets, which was nice of us. We keep
expecting her right back. A week ago we were sure she was coming back
when she called to tell the housekeeper all of her nephews had been
released, which was true. Problem was the DEA didn’t come through
quick enough for some foreign minister, so they were locked right back
up again. The return ticket is no good anymore, so if she does come
back, we’ll have to buy her another one. This whole DEA –Guatemalan
Government thing could end up bleeding us dry. However, getting a
new nanny is out of the question.
And it was really owing to her absence, that our son started acting
up. He missed her and the fun games they played. I think he might have
overheard us talking about replacing her if the Guatemalan Coup
leaders didn’t release her nephews; he didn’t get all the talk of coups,
and the DEA, and banana eradication and all that; all he knew for sure
was that there were whispers of her never returning again. I found,
smashed to bits on the ground near one of our garden’s spitting Venus
statue fountains, his remote control helicopter, and think he may have
flown it into the marble atrocity as some kind of protest against us not
29
paying for the Guatemalan banana pest eradication/coco plant
eradication aid personally, so his beloved nanny’s nephews could be
free and she could come back and once again labor in his home. No, the
move here was not going smoothly.
I was called in to dialogue an issue with the Principal that arose when
a teacher overheard my son calling another student “Kimosabe.” My
wife and I (36-24-26) were both called but only I went. She is very busy
with other things and doesn’t take well to female authority figures, and
the Principal of the school was most certainly one of those.
When I got the call from her secretary, I was busy having an
important meeting with a former member of the Seinfeld cast and
asked the secretary how urgent could the matter really be. She said
extremely. I asked if anyone had been hurt, and she said not physically.
I said then can’t it wait until after Thanksgiving? And if that was
inconvenient, could we reschedule for some time just before Hanukkah
started? And then if, as the time for the meeting approached, the whole
issue had more or less died down on its own, as these kinds of things
usually do, then could we just go ahead and cancel it?
She said no, that I was to come down immediately, that this wasn’t
Oakland where schools are a zoo, and told me the Principal would see
me at two o’clock sharp and then hung up with an abrasive click. I
didn’t even know phones still made that sound. I excused myself from
my meeting and as a result, failed to hear the rest of the former Seinfeld
star’s pitch for a remake of the Poseidon Adventure.
I got to the school and was told that a teacher had to tell my son not
to call other students Kimosabe because the phrase was hurtful to
Native Americans. I said they crossed the Siberian land bridge and
should really be called “Russians” and speculated also that their dogs
should be called Huskies, no matter what the actual breed. She said she
didn’t call me in for a history lesson, and I told her it was really more of
a geology lesson with a dash of husbandry thrown in. She said we don’t
use the word “husbandry” because it excludes lesbian couples. I asked
her if there was a form I needed to fill out to remove my child from the
school.
30
That talk was with the secretary.
The Principal came out and ushered me into her plush office and had
me sit on a chair equal in comfort and aesthetic elegance to the one I
had sat on in the former Seinfeld Star’s office during our first meeting to
discuss the Poseidon remake. I told her the chair was quite “fancy”, and
she said we don’t use that word because its dog food a phobic and
many of her clients had parents who had extremely special relationships
with their dogs. I told her I noticed one volunteering with her dog in a
baby stroller in the hallway, then corrected myself and said she wasn’t
volunteering at the time that must have been days ago, that she was
instead struggling to complete the task for which she had volunteered,
namely, to put up some banner honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
“Looks like she’s the only one who took advantage of that particular
‘volunteer opportunity,’” I said.
The banner read, “When you hear the bell, that’s Freedom’s ring”
and it had a picture of Martin Luther King on each end, pointing
opposite directions, saying he had a dream that they’d all get to class.
I told her the banner was Orwellian, a word she didn’t get. She
asked if that was an east coast thing, and I said no, that I’m from L.A so
it was most likely a desert or coastal thing.
I then told her that I’m a busy homo sapien and queried as to
whether this trouble with my son was just a pretext to visit with me so
she could get to know better the man behind the legend. She asked
“what legend?” and I said “my son. Haven’t you seen his math scores,
they’re through the roof!” She told me she hadn’t, and then said most
districts aren’t like Montecito, so there are often delays in getting
school records. I told her our nanny had handed them to her secretary
personally and she shot up a little and proclaimed, “This was the first
I’ve heard of this.”
I assured her that his perfect scores were more than real, and, at the
rate he was going, he’d finish Calculus by the eighth grade.
“He’s unstoppable,” I said.
And she said, “yes, and that’s what I called you in to discuss. He
won’t stop using words we don’t use.”
31
“Did he call someone ‘fancy?’” I asked, recognizing immediately that
would be a very subtly rendered implication that the person so called
was a homo, but I didn’t say that. “Because I assure you that we had
him cut and paste “I Will Not Call Any Fag Fancy” 500 times on his
teenage sitter’s Mac Book Air last night.”
There was a silence.
“I’m not boning her,” I said. “The nanny’s in Guatemala, and I didn’t
want the housekeeper to stay late ‘cause I’d have to give her a ride
home. The baby sitter lives two doors over, about a half mile from us.”
“I need you to stop being facetious,” she said, and I accused her of
being shit-a-phobic. She didn’t get the phrase, so I said prohibiting a
person from being “facetious” stigmatized people whose sexual
proclivities involved fecal matter. She said that I was being deeply
inappropriate. I told her I heard movie pitches for a living, and for a
person in my line of work, being called “deep “was an insult.
I then asked that if they weren’t going to let my son leave the school,
was there at least a paper I could sign in order to exempt myself from
ever coming again to one of these meetings.
“You have my full permission to suspend him and call the
housekeeper to come pick him up, “I said. “Carte Blanche…expel him if
you want. You won’t need to call. He’ll tell us”
She didn’t respond.
“You probably think this awesome chair will keep parents coming
back for more of your weird Stepford Wives act, but I’ll have you know
that I’ve sat on much better,” I said.
“Our clients all come from affluent backgrounds, and they have all
had better,” she said.
I told her no shit, and asked if she ever looked past the huge gate of
the mansion right next door, the one with the weird marble Doberman
statues bookending the gate.
“Yes, that’s the home of one of our second graders, a gifted speller,”
she replied.
I asked again if we could cut to the chase and when she didn’t, I
realized that she didn’t know the phrase.
32
“So did you call me down here because my son won’t stop calling
kids ‘Kimosabe’?”
“No, he did stop,” she said.
“So did you call me down here because you wanted me to get him to
start doing it again?”
“No, of course not, that would be hurtful,” she said.
“To whom? To me? To Him? To The Lone Ranger? Tonto? I really
don’t follow.”
“To Native Americans,” she said.
“Do you have any Indians at the school?”
“Native Americans,” she said.
“I don’t use that phrase. Nothing is native. Apples aren’t even
native to Washington for God’s sake. I find the phrase ‘native American’
intellectually offensive, though not wounding. I’m not a little girl,” I
said.
“No we don’t have any…of them, here. Though I am part…one of
them,” she said.
“That’s what everybody says. So he’s stopped saying ‘Kimosabe,' so
you don’t have to be offended anymore, so why am I here?”
“He’s been using another, more hurtful term,” she said.
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t say the word,” she said.
“Has he been calling people nigger again?” I asked. “I am sorry. He
found my Ice-T and NWA CD’s and things got out of hand, though to be
fair, he never really called your vice-Principal nigger – he was just saying
the lyrics to himself when she walked by. I still don’t see what the big
deal was – she looks like Betty White.”
She was taken aback by my use of the “N” word and, looking a bit
flush, got on speaker to ask her secretary to bring her an Asian hand fan.
“Which one?” her secretary said over speaker. “You’ve got so many,
purple and white, violet and kind of creamy white, white with little tiny
bluish flowers, another white one with bluish something kind of like
flowers but different, wait, those are chopsticks…”
33
“I don’t care! Just grab a Chinese one and get it in here now! And a
drink, in a tall, thin glass with three ice cubes in it.”
“The usual?” she asked.
She bent her head towards the speakerphone and said quietly, “I
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I drink at work too,” I said.
“The beverage is analcoholic,” she said.
“Yes, I’m an alcoholic too. Do you think it might be our Indian
Blood?”
The secretary brought in a tray with her orange-ish booze in a tall
thin glass, with three ice cubes that floated in a way that made the thing
look almost like a lava lamp. There was also a thin, white vase with a
single red rose in it, and a tiny pillow with what looked like two Tylenols
on it.
“Acetaminophen,” she said.
“Mazaltov,”I replied, holding up an invisible bottle.
She grabbed the pills and threw them down the hatch and downed
most of her beverage, and it left a bit of an orange mustache on her lips.
I congratulated her for her gender bending political correctness.
“So what is the problem, or should I say, what is your problem?”
She said it wasn’t a problem but was more of an issue. My son had
been calling other students “homosabe.”
I broke out laughing and said that was a good one, and, to be honest,
was jealous that I hadn’t thought of it first and was thinking of ways it
could be expanded into a full movie script. She lectured me on how
these kinds of “issues” can usually be traced back “to the home
environment”, and I told her that when said “home environment,” it
sounded like she was talking about a rain forest teeming with howler
monkeys, and I’d had enough of her moronic pretentiousness, that she
was full of shit, and I really had to go.
“There’s more,” she said.
I sat down and asked if her secretary could bring me a drink and
some fun pills on a pillow too.
34
“There was a problem here last year with a lot of students calling
things they didn’t want to do “gay” – the actual expression was ‘that’s
so gay.’”
“Maybe they meant it in the Jazz Age Heterosexual Sense of the
word,” I said. She was an ignoramus and had no idea what that meant.
I let it drop but did inform her that the word “Jazz” originated as a slang
term for sex, then made some comment about how once Jazz became
hyper frenetic, it was replaced by the word “screw,” which I said I felt
signified a coarsening of post war culture.
“But for a while there, Jazz meant sex. As in ‘we had some hooch
and I took her into the rumble seat of my model T and whipped out my
dick and then we got into all that Jazz’, which is why I’ve got this shitty
job selling encyclopedia’s now because I’ve got a big fat hungry mouth
to feed.’ That was not the era of the pill.”
She got absolutely none of my references. Like most education
officials, she was deeply ignorant. Maybe it was the booze, but she
seemed more girded and just went on with her scolding and repression
like I wasn’t there, or was at least no talking.
“The kids were learning to say “that’s so gay” in response to every
teacher directive from some boys at the middle school, who got it from
some boys at the high school…”
“Young men,” I said. “Who learned it from kids at the university,
who learned it from graduate students, also known as Homo Studius,
who must have got it from some reactionary professor…”
“So we had assemblies and organized a series of teach-in seminars in
various parts of the school, with kids free to choose which one’s they
went to…”
“But, in the end, going to all of them was mandatory and the
message at each one was exactly the same…”
“And then the teachers did lessons for a week on how not to use the
word “gay” to describe something you didn’t like and how it was also
mean to use it to describe something you did, and through our week
long dialogue, we also banned saying ‘fabulous’ in a gay voice, and then
our tolerance committee decided, in the end, it would be best just to
ban the word outright because the kids were really too young to
35
distinguish between an ostentatious, mocking homosexual tone
rendered by a heterosexual…”
“A heterosexual third grader?”
“And an actual gay tone…”
“Used by a homosexual first grader…”
“The point is, the kids are not to use these words. But, this year,
some of the fifth graders got around the prohibition by saying
‘fantastic!’ in an obviously gay voice…”
“Who’s to say it was gay? Isn’t that just your own tonal construct
that you’re superimposing on their spontaneous creation of an
existential verbal reality?”
I had attended a UC Santa Barbara lecture series on Portuguese
emigration to the US and overheard a bunch of morons at some
unrelated social I stumbled into overusing those kinds of phrases to
change the talk at a social away from anything learned.
“So we banned ‘fantastic’…”
“I see…”
“But your son has gotten around that ban and is now running around
the school calling everything ‘fagtastic!’”
I almost fell to the floor laughing at that one. She kept going, raising
her voice above my laughter.
“He asks the teacher if she knows what the lunch fare is for the day,
and the teacher says she doesn’t but a student chimes in ‘burritos’ and
your son says ‘burritos? Why that’s Fagtastic!’ and all the kids laugh and
the teacher can’t get them back on track!”
“Back on track unlearning their vocabulary?”
“He even responded to being told you or his mother…”
“36-24-36…”
“Would be called in to discuss this by saying that he found the idea
‘splendidicous’ and was sure the outcome of our chat would be ‘glory
hole-ously fagtasitc!’ And the students went into another uproar. He’s
becoming the most popular kid in school and the fifth graders have
taken him under their protective wing, and they all run around now too,
calling everything ‘fagstatic,’ and have taken to calling the bathroom the
“glory hole chamber’ – I don’t know what that means but have banned
36
it because it’s obviously offensive, but no one cares and even the girls
call it that, the good ones, and they have no idea what they’re saying!”
I’d really had enough, not just of her and this idiotic meeting, but of
the whole stupid thing, all these bans and prohibitions, never getting
through a sentence without a scolding look objecting to some microsyllable’s connotation, the weight of centuries of oppression that it lays
on the shoulders of the moron you’re talking to who just wants you to
shut up and go away, more or less – I was sick of the whole God Damn
thing – and all the while, there always being others who could do and
say whatever they wanted under the guise of their invoking some legacy
of having been wronged which was never actually verified. I was
thinking specifically of a gay LA artist who created a massive mosaic of
used condoms and was praised to high heaven by all the Venice Beach
free weeklies, all obviously afraid to call him and his “work” the farce
that it was, for fear of losing all the gay orgy sex phone lines that
advertised in the back of their magazines. These same magazines called
for Kobe Bryant’s head for allegedly having anal intercourse with a
woman not his wife, plastering their denunciations across their front
pages and before it was all over, the story was continued on the same
page some leather clad freak was whipping his own chapped ass cheek
with a magician’s wand and beckoning you to call and make him hurt
more. And all the editors were scheming to somehow parlay their stint
at these journals into a job at the LA Times Magazine.
And worse, it was always white women wearing over $5,000 dollars
worth of clothes and accessories running the whole show.
I’d had enough and told myself I was going, resolved to homeschool
him in between meetings. How hard could that be? I learned to read in
three weeks and pretty much took things on my own from there, as my
Jewish movie studio mogul father cranked out dumb B- movie after Bmovie, mostly for foreign markets where the voices would be dubbed by
the same four guys, and has his way with an endless string of Hollywood
Has Beens, women reasonably attractive in the face though getting a bit
wrinkled, yet still having it everywhere else, or, at least giving off the
illusion of having it, thanks to the then widespread use of girdles and
thickly padded bras that leant their D cup breasts an aspect of
37
irresistible silky smoothness beneath their lavender, cashmere coats
and sweaters. SCHHPROING!
“Look lady, I’m leaving. This meeting has been far from fagtastic. I
would go so far as to call it a real drooper, the fucking salt peter of all
meetings, a veritable vein clogger, the least homerrific experience I’ve
had since I heard a pitch for a Walton’s remake, where John Boy would
be an adopted son of a migrant worker and one of the girls would be a
closeted lesbian and despite living on a God Damn Farm, they’d all be
Vegans too… I look forward to reading your expulsion notice. You
people are idiots.”
“You misunderstand,” she said. “Your son is untouchable. The fifth
graders who protect him are all sons of the most powerful Hollywood
moguls and scions there are –they’re all part of a kind of heterosexual
mafia.”
“I’ve heard of it. Mostly talk, though. No one has anything solid by
way of evidence.”
“He has total immunity. But if word gets out that kids are running all
over our school saying ‘fagtastic’ and ‘up the butt’erific’ and ‘dick-lickin’
wonderful” and reach arounderous’…”
I had regained my composure but was now laughing so hard that I
actually slid down the chair and was more or less on the floor, laughing.
“This is serious!” she said, rising to come around and stand over me.
“If it is found out that our kids are running around saying these things,
then it’s only a matter of time before we’re all besieged by MSNBC news
cameras and are called racist because the school is more or less all
white and the students here extremely rich and all have Mexican and
Central American servants, and then we come off as some kind of
homophobic training ground! I can’t have Margaret Carlson and
Jonathan Yardley and Eugene Robinson and the whole gay Washington
Commentating Class on TV playing gotcha journalism and dragging my
name through the mud as the queen bee of some kind of junior antihomo brigade!”
“Pun intended?” I asked, still in hysterics. She had actually come up
with some pretty good lines. I could see them said by a Seth Rogan or a
38
drunken Kathleen Turner, now that she’s put on a few kilos and more or
less has the voice of a man.
“I’m imploring you. Please. Get your kid to stop. Bribe him. I’ll pay
for the bribe out of my own pocket!”
“You know you can’t bribe rich kids!”
She held up her thumb and index finger and said “I’m one inch away
from being appointed Assistant Superintendent and I’m not going to
have your son ruin it for me!”
“One inch?” I said, gathering as best I could my composure. “Is that
the size of the dick you have to suck to get the job?”
And then I lost it and literally fell to the floor.
And she stood hovering over me, bending a little to yell her
desperate implorations I crawled away from her, over to her matching
couch – it matched the chair, and complimented perfectly everything
else – and I crawled up on it, grabbing my side and laughing and laid on
my back and turned to face her hovering over me, leaving one foot on
the floor.
She fell on top of me, and, grabbing my face in her hands, she said,
“Please, I’ll do anything. Anything at all. Just tell me what you want. I
need that job. It’s the job of a lifetime. It’s perfect for me. Anything.
Just say the word.”
I gently pushed her off me and rose and straightened out my vanilla
crème, cotton linen suit.
“I’m telling you, the boy’s got a mind of his own,” I said. “But I’ll see
what I can do.”
And I donned my sunglasses and left. That woman who had been
putting up the banner was standing on a chair in the office now and
setting the minute hand on the clock above the door. She kept screwing
it up and spinning it back and forward real fast, always going past the
exact time she wanted. I stood and watched her do this for a while. She
had a great ass, all girdled up in tight tan slacks like I’d grown up seeing
all over our L.A. mansion. But hers was naturally still shapely despite her
years – I could see a faint trace of her panty lines when she almost fell
forward and had to brace both palms on the wall above her head. That
stuck her ass out enough that it tightened her pants to near the
39
breaking point and the line of her panties expanded towards me like a
something popping out of an old 3-D movie screen.
Her little white dog with the purple bow in its hair that
complimented its diamond-studded collar was near the secretary’s desk
in a baby stroller with a parasol over it for when they went out in the
sun. It was all curled up and sleeping on a regal pink pillow but then
suddenly opened one alert eye and stared at me with it.
The whole thing reminded me of stories my dad liked to tell, when
Hollywood was still “tonsil-town,” as he so crassly put it, to the neverending distress of my mother, who had long grown both sick with, but
jaded and accustomed to, all of his tawdry affairs.
She had been great in her time too, he would say. Hollywood’s
Heyday. “As close to a Golden Age as that gelded town would ever
come,” was his favorite joke. We all got it. Even mom rolled her eyes,
letting some of the usually constant tension out of whatever room,
among the more than twenty in our pink hilltop mansion, we happened
to be in for dinner that day. We were informal diners.
For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to be him and even
allowed myself a little slap on the ass of the volunteer as I left the office.
She fell forward and off her little stool. Her dog yapped once and I
walked past her through the office door and then reached up and tore
down the dumb banner on my way out into the 70 degree sun past the
wide open double doors, bouncing their way shut like a swinging,
saloon, double- door exit would. I guess my dad’s dad talked to him
about those once too, and to honor him, he even put a few now in then
in some of his movies. He liked to have people come spinning out of
them wincing and gripping their chest before they fell down dead. He
just loved producing Westerns. He loved the West itself actually, and
said it was one of life’s greatest pleasures to live within any one of its
many clichés.
40
Pallor of the Summer Sea
By William Doreski
The pallor of the summer sea
regresses me to childhood shapes:
playground equipment in fog;
brown bindings of adult books
in a paper-brown room awash
with people older than the century;
crystal moments deep in winter
when I roamed across the front yard
in my thick coat and tasted snow
and thought myself the spirit
rather than the fact of the storm;
and my first sight of breakers
slopping heavy green on foam
as if mixing something ugly
for the desperate world to ingest.
Now that same thick Atlantic
lies humbled in its geography.
Continents shoulder up to it
with familiarity I deplore
yet share on hot August nights
when the windows stay open
and gulls travel sixty miles
to visit their favorite landfills.
Those childhood stage-sets never
41
Poetry: William Doreski
strike themselves, never regret
the lack of audience. The books
in that tough old library sigh
as librarians stamp them red
or green, the snows of long ago
recycle for another season,
and the surf on that public beach
still slops and suds in layers
thick enough to hide whole worlds
plotting to revive themselves-testing those hypotheses
science mumbles drowsing at dawn.
Boothbay Chimes
By William Doreski
Chimes racket all night, seeping
from the book I didn’t finish
reading before I fell asleep.
Cathedral chimes, doorbell chimes,
tinny digital chimes sparked
by laptops left unattended
while their owners succumb to love.
My recent cough has abated.
The gray appetites of pelicans
conform to landmarks below,
where the sea hisses and tumbles
as it tries to crawl ashore and parse
news too desperate for anyone
but confirmed villains to hear.
42
This shabby wooden motel,
a hundred dollars a night, grieves
because the season is ending
with chimes and bird-cries pale
as the months of forthcoming snow.
I shouldn’t have rented a room
with a haunted alcove light
can’t penetrate. The current
state of matter, string theory,
disallows the presence of ghosts,
even those inhabiting books
left open face down on nightstands.
That’s because everything is ghost,
including me, the disembodied
but sometimes voluble creature
staggering off toward breakfast.
Chimes wrinkle the cloudy light,
electronic chimes from steeples
trying to pluck spirits from air.
Spirit is everywhere, packed
into every atom. Salt water sighs,
and the day elongates itself
to fit the saddest expectation,
which only children can enjoy.
43
Interviews
By Frank Strong
Dolores Salamanca. National City, CA, June 1991
I’ll be a senior in high school this coming year. Mi Tia Rosa says that
I’m around the age that my sister went missing. I’ve never met her. My
mother doesn’t talk about her much. We have different dads so I guess
that only makes us half-sisters.
James Barnes. San Ysidro Border Crossing, CA, August 1985
The move to San Diego was terrible at first. I hated it. So did my wife.
You see, I’m a Massachusetts boy so the cold is embedded in my bones.
The other men talked about her often. I hadn’t been working that
long before I saw her. I think it was maybe my first week on the job
when I first encountered her crossing back over. What struck me first
was her beauty, the way she seemed to carry a whole world by herself
in her eyes. With a sea of people passing through each day their faces
tended to blur into a nebulous mass of serious lips and forlorn eyes. I
never understood that, I mean, these people were coming back into
America, this fine and free country, yet almost none of them had a smile
on their faces. Maybe some of the kids, but that’s about it. I guess those
long lines will do you in.
Anyway, I remember her face to this day and I remember thinking
that no matter what country she was in she was probably one of the
most beautiful girls there. No disrespect to my wife, obviously. So of
course I stopped this girl and did the quick preliminary check of her
papers and whatever she was carrying over. Her voice was soft yet firm
when answering my questions. She wore these beat up jeans and
always carried her I.D. papers in the front-right pocket. The only thing
she carried over was a giant brown suitcase that was stuffed tightly with
an assortment of other bags, handbags, purses, backpacks, tote bags,
you name it she had it.
I found nothing but I kept her there a few minutes longer than I
should have, just because the days were boring and I like looking at
44
pretty things. I made a joke, asking if she was going to fill those bags
with flowers and carry them on her back like those famous Mexican
paintings, you know, the ones with the girls hunched over. She laughed
because she had to, because she had to be nice to me, and said no.
Then I let her on her way.
In the years after it was always the same, jeans, papers in the front
right pocket, suitcase, small talk, and I let her on through. I pieced
together that she had family on both sides and the bags were used for
transporting goods into Mexico, stuff you can only get here, I think. I
don’t know. I only know it wasn’t flowers.
Years afterwards her beauty gave way to something else. Not that
she wasn’t beautiful anymore, she probably still is, it’s just that I saw a
different side of her. Sadness, but a strange sadness, as though I were
seeing it through a fractured lens and not quite sure what to make of it.
She carried those empty bags with an air of loathsome dignity and it
reminded me of that Greek story I learned in school, you know, Sisyphus
and his stone.
I don’t know what happened but she just stopped coming,
disappeared. Maybe she finally settled down somewhere. But I thought
of her often, hoping she’d come through again pushing those empty
bags like Sisyphus. Then one day it struck me as odd that I thought of
this girl as an ancient Greek myth. I mean there had to be another myth,
a Mexican one or Aztec or whatever, just one better suited for a girl like
her, you know, everything considered.
I asked a few people but nobody knew any myths. To this day I still
don’t know of any. I gave up trying to find a myth for her. Reading and
libraries really aren’t my thing. I thought about asking her if she showed
up once again, but she never did.
When I retire here I’m moving back to Massachusetts. That’s closer
to Greece, right?
Javier Bustos. Bar Los Ponchos on Avenida Revolución, Tijuana, MX,
March 1988
Of course we fell in love. It was the only logical thing that could have
happened to us. But I guess two weeks was too long for her.
45
Interviews: Frank Strong
We met at that mezcal cantina, the one right off Seventh and
Revolución, I don’t know the name of it, the one where the younger kids
all hang around and act American but speak Spanish. I was there with
my friend Pablito. He looks younger than he is so he can get away with
hitting on the twenty-somethings.
I spotted her a few minutes after Pablito went off to do his
customary lap around the bar. She cradled her drink gently and I
remember thinking to myself that if God cradled the world in that way
then it wouldn’t be such a bad place. Two youngsters were trying their
best to keep her occupied but I saw she wasn’t interested. I made my
way through the dim lights and approached her. Women like a man, a
real man who takes charge so I told the youths that their time was up,
that they couldn’t hog the one beautiful girl in this place. They stood
around a few minutes then slipped away once I started to talk. I asked
her what brought her to the cantina, if her tall vaquero boyfriend was
going to come and try to fight me for talking to his girl. She said no, she
had come with a friend who disappeared somewhere. Great, I said, we
found ourselves in the same situation, my friend Pablito had
disappeared. And I added that it was good she didn’t have a boyfriend
because I didn’t feel like beating anyone up that night. She laughed with
one of those laughs that sweetly stick in your ears long after it’s over. It
was probably at that precise moment that I fell in love. So I did the only
thing I could do and I bought her a drink, one of those girly and
expensive mixed ones, just to let her know she was dealing with a man
who could treat her like a lady. We talked then we danced and I used
my big hands to guide her, to feel, to hold with certainty something
beautiful. We went to another bar, then another. By the fourth cantina I
told her I loved her. I might have been drunk but I said the alcohol made
my words even more truthful. She looked straight at me and I felt the
universe expand in my head, then she placed her lips against mine. And
I assumed that was her answer, that she loved me too. Sometime during
the night she told me about her dream to finally settle down and I told
her I’d give her whatever she wanted. We left the last cantina and I
invited her back to my place but she said her apartment was much
closer. In the taxi I laughed and she looked at me and I said it was funny
46
how we ditched our friends and they had no idea where we were. Two
lost loves, I said, but she didn’t laugh.
Her apartment had and array of boxes inside, some of them packed,
some of them not. I asked if she was coming or going and she said she
didn’t know. It didn’t matter, I told her, and held her close. We made
love and her bare flesh was warm. That little universe in my head filled
with and ocean of warm waters and I swam in her delicate aura.
The next two weeks we saw each other every day. I picked her up
from her apartment, we strolled around town, went down to the beach,
ate, one time we even went to the market and bought groceries as
though we were already married and carving out our new lives together.
Then we’d head home and make love all night. Sometimes I’d go home
to change clothes, other times I’d just stay until the morning and we’d
do it all over again. Of course I paid for everything, to let her know I was
serious about this. But I got the feeling that if it wasn’t for me she’d
probably just stay in her apartment all day. And it was hard for me to
get her to talk sometimes. I asked, Nena what do you want from this?
She only said, You Corazón , I want you. And I would leave it at that and
we’d continue along with our day, but her eyes and words seemed
hollow at times.
Then something happened. It started like any other night, our
breaths synchronized, her bare skin on fire as we made love. Then right
in the middle of our sweet passion she told me to go harder. She yelled,
Faster, damn it, harder! And so I did, but she kept yelling for more and I
tried my best but I couldn’t keep up. My hips became sore and felt like
breaking. God knows how her delicate frame must have felt. I slowed
for a second, then she look up at me and said, Slap me, Javier. I shook
my head and said I couldn’t, No, I won’t hit something I love. She kept
egging me on though, and she finally screamed, Fucking Javier, be a
man! And at that moment I lifted my hand and struck her square on the
cheek and the sharp sound seemed to send wooden splinters into that
tiny universe in my head.
Then it was over. She remained silent and I fell asleep because I
didn’t know what else to do. I had never hit a woman before. Well, not
like that, not in the heat of passion to a woman I loved.
47
I’m usually a heavy sleeper but for some reason I woke up that night
and reached across the sheets. She was still there and so I tried to fall
back asleep. At the time I thought I only dreamed I heard sobbing, that
the liquid state of my mind was playing a trick on me. Her sobs were
light and faint and almost unreal. Or maybe I heard her clearly, that
sobbing, and my muscles were paralyzed with shame because I knew I
was incapable of consoling her.
The next morning she acted like nothing had changed so I kissed her
and ran home in order to change clothes and grab more money. When I
returned she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she was only asleep, or
maybe she had gone out to bring us back some café y pan-dulce, so I
knocked as loud as I could and waited. She never showed. I checked
back throughout the day but it was more of the same.
From then on I stopped by every morning but my knocks were left
unanswered. Then I would write a note telling her where I would be that
day in case she wanted to meet up and I would slip it beneath her door.
Even though I knew beforehand that it’d be useless I still tried every
day.
Finally one morning I had enough so I pounded on the door and
demanded that she come out right now and give me some answers.
Obviously she didn’t come out and that made me even angrier. I went
down to the street, found a big slab of broken concrete, then I chucked
it through the apartment window and climbed in. The boxes were still
scatted throughout, and I wasn’t quite sure but they seemed to be filled
a little more than the last time I was there. Honestly though, I wasn’t
sure.
I searched through the empty apartment, trying to find any clues
that might lead me back to her, but I came up with nothing. Just as I was
about to jump back out I remembered my notes and realized that they
weren’t lying at the foot of the door like they should have been.
Obviously she had seen and picked them up at some time, probably
even read them. I felt something then, something strange, as though I
had approached a certain arbitrary point but I didn’t know if it was an
end or a beginning, an end to our love or the beginning of a regret that
pulls at me like the moon pulls on the ocean.
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I waited a moment but then realized I was waiting for something
ridiculous and I hopped back out the window, careful not to cut my
hand on the broken glass. Of course, being the gentleman that I am, I
left eight hundred pesos on the table for that broken window.
Luis Hernandez. Restaurant Norteños, Tijuana, MX, July 1988
Ay chingado! How am I supposed to remember a random apartment
window from years ago? I have no office to keep any paperwork in. This
isn’t America where you need papers just to wipe your ass, ha! I’m just a
repair man, it’s what I do all day, and this city is filled with nothing but
broken windows.
Emily Watson. Old-Town, San Diego, September 1984
Oh, gosh. It was so long ago, it’s hard to remember. We went to
school together, grade school. We were both in Mrs. Hurley’s third
grade class. I think it was sometime after Christmas break that we
moved desks and me and her ended up sitting next to one another. For
some reason I remember how she dressed, that to my young eyes her
clothes were a little different. She always had these frilly white socks
and her hair was put up neatly, either a braid or ponytail, and always
with a colorful ribbon or bow in it. For a third-grader her clothes were
slightly formal and I thought her mother must have played dress-up
with her each morning, like I did with my dolls.
She was the first person I had come across who spoke Spanish
fluently along with English. I mean, growing up in San Diego you’re
exposed to it but she was the first person I knew who controlled that
other language I sometimes heard. Early on I thought of the only
Spanish word I knew and asked her what the word burrito meant. She
whispered across her desk that it actually meant little donkey. Can you
believe that? I laughed and she began laughing and we were loud
enough to disrupt the class so Mrs. Hurley gave us both recessdetention. But even in detention we still whispered to one another, and
soon after we became friends. After a while I even felt comfortable
calling her my best friend, along with the other handful of girls that I
was close to.
49
She even invited me over to her house once for a party, though, I
can’t exactly remember what it was for. There were a lot of people and
she was dolled up even more so than when she was at school. One thing
that stuck out was how brightly colored the food was, like a box of
crayons. I don’t think my parents were too comfortable and I almost
cried when they told me to say goodbye to her family because we were
leaving early. To her family’s credit they stopped everything and hauled
out the piñata before I left. I walked out of there with two handfuls of
candy and a smile on my face.
The school year was marked by long absences on her part,
sometimes only a day, sometimes a week or more. She always returned,
obviously, and one time I asked her where she had been. She said she
had gone to see her family in Mexico. Being a curious child I asked her
what it was like and she said sometimes it was quiet or it could be loud,
and that people had to stand in lines everywhere. So, the first thoughts I
had of Mexico were images of a country filled with people just standing
around in line.
I still have this one memory of her though, one that sticks with me
like sutures which have never been cut. Our school was having an art
fair and Mrs. Hurley decided that our class was going to do selfportraits. Most of our class drew circle-faces, stick-bodies, the usual. I
don’t even remember what I drew—me up on a hill, I think—but I
remember peering over to take a look at my friend’s. She had drawn a
landscape, an ocean scene. The foreground had beige sand which led up
to an ocean, and lastly, on top, was the sky. They were like three
stratified layers of color. Even though it was done in crayon and colored
pencils, she somehow seemed able to get depth out of the colors. The
sand at the bottom seemed extra dry and thirsty. Her ocean was a
curious mixture of green and blue, mostly green though. Some of the
other kids laughed and told her she had done it wrong because the
ocean was blue, not green. My little mind thought on it for a moment.
Then I realized that her water was somehow more true, that only from a
distance does the ocean look blue, but when you’re in the water and it’s
all around it seems green, it almost even feels green. And then I noticed
the clouds, outlined in black but smudged a bit, as though she had
50
pressed too hard while drawing them. Overall it was actually quite good,
probably the best of the class.
I didn’t want to say anything at first, but finally I asked where she
was in this self-portrait, if maybe she was going to add herself in later.
She said that she was in there, somewhere, and then pointed to the
picture. I can’t remember if she pointed to the clouds or the sand, all I
recall is that she didn’t point to that beautiful, deep-green water of
hers, and I found that very strange. Some days, when I have nothing else
to think about, I find myself thinking about that drawing of hers.
When school started again the next year I looked for my friend but I
couldn’t find her. Nobody knew for sure what happened to her. I,
however, took it upon myself to clear things up a bit and told everyone
that she went to go live with her family in Mexico. That’s what I
assumed anyway.
Leslie Perkins. Encinitas, CA, October 1986
Oh yes, I remember her well! She as such a precious child, so sweet.
Her family must have been so proud of her. Her parents were the
sweetest. I’m sure that whatever she’s doing now she’s great at it. Over
the years so many kids passed through my school, but I remember that
she was one of the best I ever had.
During my tenure as principal of St. Agatha’s we boasted a success
rate of eighty-six percent. For the kids who completed at least six years
at our prestigious institution ninety-two percent went on to complete
college and another thirty-three percent went on to receive a P.H.D. We
had a total of twenty-three students accepted to Ivy League schools and
countless others into the U.C. program. Over my first three years we
grew our mathematics program into one of the top ten in the state,
where it has remained ever since. We were recognized by the state as a
distinguished school multiple times. Our football team made it to the
state championship three times, two of which they won. We have five
baseball titles, eight softball titles, ten for women’s water polo, among
many others. The National Endowment for the Arts constantly awarded
our English program with grants. We excelled in Shakespeare studies
and classical poetry.
51
If she stayed at St. Agatha’s I’m sure that she’s excelling in whatever
her chosen profession is.
Raymond Martinez. Chula Vista, CA, December 1982
Those bags that she lugged around, I was the guy who helped fill
them. Well not all of them, just a few. By the time she reached me most
of her bags were already filled. She had all the name brands, Nike,
Adidas, Lacoste, shirts from Macy’s, linens from Sears, Levis from J.C.
Penny. I remember the bags piled atop bags that she strapped to her
petite frame, so many she almost didn’t fit through the door of my
shop.
I inherited the shop from my father, Luis-Sebastion, God rest his soul.
He opened it up right after he got his official citizenship. Most of the
money he had saved up already, then he got a little more from a loan
and opened up shop. It was nothing too great, just a convenience store
at a great location. He was happy though, the days of working in the sun
were over for him. My mother used to joke that my father took better
care of his small store than her. The day he handed the store over to me
his eyes had that airy, prideful look that fathers get, as though his life’s
work was finally over. He still stuck his head in from time to time, just to
make sure I hadn’t run his other child into the ground. With steady
money flowing in I married and started a family, two boys.
Not long after she began to come in with those bags strapped to her
shoulders. I offered to help her but she refused. She was nice enough
but quiet, and I got the feeling she thought about things more that she
spoke about them. She wandered through the isles, silently looking at
everything, then began to gather products of all sorts, toothpaste, Advil,
tampons, pads, deodorant, cold medicine, candy bars, pens, pencils, the
entire carton of that pink Bazooka bubble-gum. At the register I began
to bag her items but she refused, said she had enough bags already, so I
piled them into her backpack and suitcases. The bill was so high that for
a moment I had serious doubts she would be able to pay. But she did,
her hand unrolled a small wad of money, and she paid in full and then
left. Her single transaction was more than I usually made in a whole day.
52
She kept coming back every week and soon after I’d already have all
her usual items prepared for her before she even stepped in the door. It
was always the same, a wad of cash and then she’d leave.
Now I’m not too smart but I’m not too dumb either, I knew she was
crossing the border and selling those goods for a profit but I never
understood why she came to buy all those things from me. To be
honest, I bought a lot of my supplies from Save-On then resold them at
my shop for a slightly higher price. Even now I still feel ashamed
because sometimes I would add in a few items to her usual bundle, just
to squeeze a few more dollars out of her. I’m sure she noticed, but she
never said anything and paid whatever price I asked. What was I
supposed to do? Two sons, money disappears quick, alright?
Maybe I was foolish but one day I asked why she bought all the items
here, what were they for? She said they were for kids and I knew at that
moment that whatever she bought here she was giving away for free,
and I thought of my own two sons. Then I asked her why she chose my
store. She looked up at me and said it reminded her of how she grew
up. Then she said nothing else. I wanted to ask her more, but I
respected her silence.
When she left that day I remember reminiscing over my own
childhood, my mother, my father, growing up on the sidewalk just
outside the storefront, how the sun seemed to bake the concrete and
evaporate my energy. I got the odd feeling that she had been there too,
somewhere a part of my childhood, but down the streets I never
walked, or around the corner, just out of sight. Maybe it had been her
father with the cowboy hat who came in every Thursday to buy
cigarettes, or maybe it was her mother whose fresh-tortilla aroma crept
out of the nameless windows and clung to my sidewalk. Or maybe I had
it all wrong. I think all boys have some fantasy that a beautiful girl lives
close by but they just haven’t met her yet, that she exists in the horizon.
I never found out anything more because I never asked, and finally
one day she stopped showing up. I don’t want to say the money she
spent was a lot but it was money I counted on every week or so.
America is a land of money and numbers. When there is no money the
numbers don’t make sense no matter how hard you try. Interest,
53
finance, mortgage, all the numbers tumble down on top of your head.
I’m just glad my father wasn’t alive to see the bank take the store. I
remember them calling the police to force me out of the shop. I had all
of her supplies ready for her and I begged for them to let me service one
more customer, hoping she’d come and pay off all my debts.
Sometimes I’ll wake up and make it to my second cup of coffee
before I realize that I don’t have the store anymore. I don’t know what
my sons are going to do. Maybe I failed them. There’s supposed to be
an oil boom going on in Mexico. An uncle of mine works for Pemex,
maybe he can get them a job there. They speak Spanish well, have dual
citizenship thanks to their mother. They can probably make it down
there. I hope they make it down there.
Julio Contreras. Las Playas de Tijuana, August 1989
I was young and it was easy, really easy. You just have someone buy
the stuff up there, from the Norteamericanos, then sell it down here for
profits. The oil boom made everyone hungry, the rich hungry for stuff,
the poor just hungrier for food. I think I worked with her once or twice.
She was tall…or something about her was tall. Her legs were skinny, I
think. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else right now, but I’m sure I saw
her at least once.
Ignacio Torres. Rosarito Beach Hotel, Rosarito, MX, February 1990
She was a nice girl, I have nothing bad to say about her. But let me
tell you, if anyone so much as whispers a word about her to my wife or
my kids I will personally slit their fucking throats. You know who I work
for so you understand that, right?
Paola Rodriguez. Del Mar, Tijauana, MX, August 1990
I know what people said about me, that I was always jealous of her.
It didn’t bother me because it was partly true, for a time at least. She
was a Chicana, American by birth, Mexican by blood. She could be from
here or there, two for one. The border is a prism and she was the light
that passed through either side. I was born in Tijuana, lived here most of
my life, so of course I wanted to be her at times. She’s the one that
pointed this out to me, if you look at the city of Tijuana it butts up right
54
alongside the border, as though it’s trying to spill over onto the other
side while San Diego is trying to retreat north. I would always laugh and
tell her that a few more miles up and I would have been just like her, a
hotdog bun with chicharrones inside. Sometimes she’d laugh but then
she would always tell me that it was her curse, or that it wasn’t easy, or
that I didn’t understand, and then I would ask her to explain but in the
end she never did.
We met through mutual friends at a little get together at Ricardo’s
house. It was a small house with high iron fences, but one of the few
places close to the city that also had grass in the backyard, even a small
garden. Maybe, during that time, we were all a little obsessed with the
other side because if you ignored the smog and outside noise that crept
into the backyard you’d think you were in a typical American home.
Well, at least what we thought would be a typical American home. Few
of us had actually been over but we did watch a lot of TV.
I met her briefly during the party, between the cocktails and cassette
tapes, and quickly forgot about her until a few days later when I just so
happened to see her exiting a taxi. She pulled out bag after bag after
bag. I went up, said hello, asked her if she remembered me from the
party. She said yes, and I helped her pull the last few bags from the
trunk of the taxi. I spied all the clothes in those bags and at the time I
thought they were hers. I asked her where she got all the goodies from
and she said in San Diego. That’s when I pierced together that she was
American. We made a little more small talk and for the first time I really
looked at her, her face, those lips, the piercing eyes, and I noticed just
how beautiful she was. I mean, I was pretty back then, a few pounds
lighter, my skin still held its place, but she was timeless, like if you took a
picture of her and then you looked at it twenty, thirty years from now,
hell even in the year 2666 she’d still be striking. I invited her to go out
sometime, knowing that the two of us would be an unstoppable duo on
the nightlife scene. And besides, I had never been friends with an
American before. She accepted my invitation but said she had to deliver
these bags first. Only as I walked away did it dawn on me that those
bags weren’t hers after all, that she was selling them over here.
55
After we went out a few times, and I became more comfortable
around her, I asked her about the bags and backpacks and suitcases. Her
family needed money, one of her parents was in legal trouble, or
something like that, and that was the easiest way for her to make
money. From what I gathered she had been doing it for a while. Then
she told me the reason Tijuana was so crowded was because she was
the one leaving behind piles of trash, one suitcase-load at a time, and
that made me laugh.
I was right about us tearing up the nightlife, I just know these types
of things. I could sense men grow physically weak when we entered into
the room with our high heels on. There were so much money being
thrown around, thanks to the oil that had been sleeping right beneath
our feet, our soil. We both took advantage of the men and their new
money but she did it better because she caught herself a boyfriend,
Ignacio. He talked to me first though before moving onto her. I tried to
work his friends but none of them struck around like Ignacio did to her.
Things happened fast, Ignacio came around often, relaxing with the
rest of us at Ricardo’s house. Ignacio was handsome, polite, a little more
refined because he was a few years older than us, which I think she
really liked.
One day she called me and invited me to hang out but she gave me
this address which I had never been to before. When I showed up she
led me into a building and up to an apartment which Ignacio was paying
for. I admit, for a few seconds I was envious of her, but looking at her
face she seemed genuinely happy and I didn’t want to take that away
from her. I could have said something, you know, I wanted to say
something, like she didn’t deserve him, that she was taking an easy way
out, that Ignacio only liked her because she was his American treasure,
that she should leave good Mexican men to the Mexican women
because God knows we don’t have enough. All of this I could have said
but I didn’t. Glimpses of happiness are few and far in between in this life
and you shouldn’t diminish or take that away from anyone.
She gave me a tour of the place, we sat in the new furniture, ate
some food, drank a little wine, all of it paid for my Ignacio of course.
After that I saw less of her. Ignacio worked farther down South and I
56
think she enjoyed playing the little housewife, waiting up at night for his
phone calls, fixing and cleaning the apartment, practicing her cooking
for his return. He filled her head with words and she told me about his
promises to take care of her and anything else, including her familywoes on the other side. Every time I dropped by she showed me some
new piece for the apartment, a painting, new dishes, clay pottery
imported from Chiapas.
I knew that Ignacio was taking advantage of her, hell, anybody could
see it. He came around less but kept her content with the apartment
and gifts. I didn’t say anything because she needed to figure things out
by herself, it was a good life-lesson.
After a while I think Ignacio just stopped coming altogether. He sent
a black limousine instead that would pick her up and take her
somewhere. I really didn’t pay attention at that point. I was still going
out, living my own life, trying to hook my own man.
All of our friends still talked about her, rumors circulated, but
eventually everyone found out about Ignacio, that he was indeed
married and even had children. I think she was the only person in
Tijuana who didn’t know, and I sure wasn’t going to be the one to tell
her. And besides, it was hard to feel sorry for her when you’d see that
limousine cruising throughout town while you’re still squeezing into
crowded cabs with your friends.
I was ready to let our friendship die off, we hadn’t spoken in a while,
but out of nowhere she called and told me to come over. When I arrived
everything about her was calm except her eyes. They looked as though
the Holy Ghost had crossed her vision, and at that moment I knew that
she knew. She probably even knew that I knew, but she didn’t lead on
about anything. Instead, she only told me her situation and I had to act
surprised, hugging and consoling her. Something about her was off
though. It was hard to pinpoint. Her grief was real, sadness is sadness.
But I couldn’t tell if she was sad about Ignacio, or her overall situation
and how helpless she truly was. Maybe it was a mixture of both, I don’t
know, but I got the feeling she was more upset at her living situation,
how she had chosen to stay in Mexico and live off a man’s money, as
though that wasn’t good enough for her. God, you should have seen her
57
pouty little face, the arrogance she carried! That’s when my sympathy
ran out for her and I told her my mind. There were millions of girls in
Mexico who would be happy to be in her place. She had a roof to sleep
under, clothes, food, beautiful gifts, Jesus Cristo, even her own
limousine driver! Women were dying no more than a few kilometers
from her! So what if she was a mistress and had to split the love of a
man with another woman? She had the life which a whole country could
only dream of. I told her all of that and then I said that if she wanted to
be a mistress then be a mistress, if not, then she could head back over
to the other side and let another girl happily fill her place.
As soon as those words spilled out of my mouth I knew they had hurt
her. She didn’t say anything, only looked at me, or rather, she looked
completely through me, and I knew then that I didn’t know her whole
story, that there was more to her and I was only catching a small
glimpse, a tiny facet, that our live were like islands set apart from one
another.
I tried to make things better by apologizing. Then I said the words I
should have said right at the beginning, that she deserved more, that
Ignacio was a creep and wasn’t worthy of her, that she shouldn’t settle
for anything less than the love she deserved. Then we hugged for a long
time, though everything in the world, including her, felt so distant at
that moment.
Before I left I gave her some advice and said that she should confront
Ignacio, tell him how she felt. After that things changed, not suddenly or
dramatically, they just changed. She went out with me a few more
times, we talked, I asked her how things went with Ignacio and she said
they were good, that she was good. I knew she was lying and I wasn’t
expecting her to tell me anything because she owed me nothing, not
even the truth.
On my last visit to her apartment there were boxes everywhere, only
half of them fully packed though. I didn’t ask about them, I didn’t have
the nerves to do so. After that I didn’t see her again. Things in Mexico
started to turn sour, the money and oil started to dry up. I worried
about my own affairs, I had to survive. She could always just return to
58
the other side. Sometimes I swore I saw that black limo driving through
town but even that disappeared soon after.
Sergio Fernandez. Tecate, MX, November 1991
All I did was pick her up and drop her off, pick her up and drop her
off. Ignacio hired me as a driver for a little while but most of the time I
acted as a chauffeur for her. They lived in separate cities, she right in
the thick of Tijuana, him farther down the coast, past Ensenada, a house
right on the beach. I didn’t get to know either of them really well and I
wasn’t paid to get to know them, only drive, so that’s what I did. But I
did know that Ignacio was married with children and she was only his
mistress, and I assumed she knew that too. I mean, it’s normal for guys
with his kind of money to have extra everything, right? Extra house,
extra car, extra food, extra clothes, extra time, so why not extra
women?
That changed one night when I picked her up. It was a normal night, I
pulled up to the apartment building and she came down and got in,
then I asked her where she wanted to go. Suddenly I felt my head jerked
back and a cold line against my throat. I looked down to see the
gleaming edge of a kitchen knife pressed to my neck. I’ll never forget
her voice, small, shaky, unsure of itself as she told me to take her to
Ignacio’s house. And that’s what made me so nervous, how unsure she
seemed about everything, as though she might just decide to kill me on
a whim or let me free, unharmed. I told her it was against the rules, that
Ignacio told me to never bring her to his personal house. That tiny voice
said she’d kill me if I didn’t and I believed her so I drove the car along
the coast towards Ignacio’s place.
During the entire drive she gripped my hair with one hand and her
other floated the blade just below my throat. About halfway there I got
the courage to steal a glance at her face through the rearview mirror.
Our eyes locked and her face seemed so sad, so scared, so young, and in
that moment all I thought about was my own daughter and I hoped that
this world wouldn’t be as cruel to her. Then I felt her hands release my
hair and the knife drop into my lap. I pulled the car over and it was
strange because I wasn’t mad at all, I think I somehow knew she
59
couldn’t kill me, as though something had told me all along it would end
like this. It’s not that I believe in God or anything like that, I just believe
in people and maybe I believed in her a little too much only because she
looked like my daughter. I gave her a silent moment to herself and all
she did was look out the window, ashamed probably, before she finally
apologized. I nodded and said to her, C’mon, you don’t really want to go
down there and see him, I can see it in your eyes, there’s nothing good
for you over there so let me take you home. She said yes and thank you
and I started driving back up the coast.
I kept glancing in the rearview mirror to check on her and I kept
seeing that sad face. Her eyes were heavy, though I couldn’t see any
tears. I remember the skin around her cheeks seemed swollen, almost a
light blue, maybe they were bruised and covered with makeup, I don’t
know, but they reminded me of flowers wilting in an abandoned garden.
As we pulled into the city she said she didn’t want to be home and
asked me to take her to the cinema. I assumed I would just drop her off
but when we got there she asked me to park the car and join her. I did
and we watched the movie together. I can’t remember what it was,
something American with Spanish subtitles, a romance with Michelle
Pfeiffer, I think. I watched her sitting beside me most of the time and I
felt really strange, like I was caught in the brief moment of peace that
must happen right after the whole world has fallen apart and the last
piece of dust has settled and there is nothing left.
After the movie I just drove her home, easy and simple as though
nothing had happened at all, or maybe everything had happened and
neither one of us really understood it so neither one of us said anything
more.
I worked for Ignacio a little bit longer. Whenever I picked her up I
talked to her a little bit more, I told her about my kids and wife while
she told me about her family she wanted to see out in Juárez, and I
thought we could even be friends one day. But Ignacio stopped paying
me and so I left the limousine business and got myself another job,
construction nowadays.
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Jennifer Diaz. Oceanside, CA, July 1993.
I think I sold that girl a bagful of tamales one time, long ago, back
when my mom drug me out on Saturday morning and I had to miss my
favorite cartoons. I remember it was a little weird because she had tears
running down her face as she paid me. I was young so I didn’t know
things, but when I think about it now it might have been a pregnancy
test she was carrying in her hands. Or it could have been a box of tissues
or a box of tampons, I don’t know. But no one cries over tissues or
tampons, do they?
I remember she gave me four dollars as a tip and I kept two for
myself and gave the other two to my mother.
Jacob Trader. San Clemente, CA, June 1994.
I was her first boyfriend. We went to a summer camp together and I
really had a thing for Mexican girls. That year I was sixteen and wanted
to be a man. All the couples would go to the supply cabin to do it. I took
her there and she refused so I stopped talking to her.
Juan-Carlos Villeda. Ensenada, MX, January 1992
I was in the orphanage for a while, since I was three I think. I
remember she started coming in when I was around the age of twelve.
She was very pretty. I had dreams about her at night.
She donated a lot and I remember her handing out that chewy, pink
American bubblegum to all us kids. I guess I assumed she worked
through an agency or something. I didn’t know she donated all that stuff
out of her own pocket. It makes you start to remember things
differently doesn’t it?
Francisco Garcia. Tijuana, MX, 1988.
I’ve never had a tenant like her before in all my years of being a
landlord. She left the apartment with all these half-packed boxes in it.
There were a lot of nice things left behind. Most of them I sold but my
wife made me keep a few items. I think we still have a dish set and some
glasses left. You can have them if you’d like. Some things might be
broken though. We have a toddler at home and, you know, they get into
everything.
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Día de los Niños Muertos
By Jack Granath
Confused by the confusing Spanish-language
Holidays of Día de los Muertos
And Día de los Niños, he conceived
A day-long celebration of dead children.
He got up early to prepare a sheet
Of ginger cookies shaped like boys and girls,
The one in overalls, the other skirts,
Or outlines of them, fingered lovingly
And X’s dented where their eyes should be.
Then he splattered them with store-bought salsa,
Jammed a fork into their doughy guts,
And tossed them in the oven with a cry
That echoed through the empty house (“¡Olé!”).
At ten o’clock he finished the tequila,
Got his hands on an accordion
And started mewling mournful songs about
Dead children in a language that he did
Not know. He did it wearing a sombrero
The size of an inflated wading pool.
Apart from that, he hadn’t dressed. By noon
He was the ruin that his neighbors knew
So well they barely noticed his appearance
Out in the yard to string up the piñata.
What followed, though, could hardly be forgiven.
They handled it and sent him off to bed,
Where he would sleep that sleep for twelve more hours
And have to wake to dream up yet another
Celebration for the day that waited.
He would, and that was one thing he was good at.
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Closed Head Injury
By Jack Granath
The banker shanked it and the boy went down.
He woke up twelve days later with a headache,
Double vision, and some crazy dreams.
On top of that he had no sense of time.
The doctors fixed the mortal part of him
With glasses and a bit of therapy
But never managed to restore the grid
With time as passing substance, like a liquid.
Happily late for class each day, he learned
To conjugate and do geometry
And to dissect both books and fetal pigs.
He even wrote a composition on
The decorative properties of clocks.
Some other studies were beyond his reach, though.
Poetry, for example, flummoxed him.
His teachers tap-danced, shouted, cudgeled, pleaded,
And one by one gave up, exasperated.
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Poetry: Jack Granath
Fate
By Jack Granath
The fates should be old women at their work,
Spinning, sizing, clipping with a jerk
Of shears, but these three reinvent the role:
They seem to have been plowed up from the ground,
Each eye a blunt reminder of its hole,
The dead foundation of their flesh unsound.
The last one has no scissors—just a broom
To sweep us toward a far more fitting doom.
The spinner wears an oozing, ink-black dress
That could be chaos with its hem of night,
And out of this inexistential mess
Our future snakes its way into the light.
And there, back there, an afterthought of meat,
We humans hang behind her, trussed, complete.
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The Price of Fame
By Morgan K Tanner
OK, I'll admit it, I want to be famous. To be remembered long after I'm
gone. To be spoken about in newspapers, textbooks, and on the
Internet. Hell, I want my Wikipedia page to have a giant contents list
and multiple photos of me in my many moments of glory. I want things
named after me, important, monumental things that I, and indeed
future generations will be proud of. I want my kids, and their kids, and
their kids to say, 'hey, he was my dad/ granddad/ great granddad' etc. I
think you get the picture.
You see the thing is, I may want everyone to know my name, but I
want to earn it. I want to do something of relevance in my life so that
I'm remembered in the history books for the right reasons.
The key phrase here is earning it. No one seems to want to earn
fame any more, just to have it handed to them on a plate. They seem
much more interested in the premature ejaculation of the sticky mess
that is celebrity, and not the slow, sensual foreplay of worthwhile fame.
In these pathetic, media-driven times it seems that no one is striving to
be remembered, only to be recognised here in the now. What happens
after they're gone is irrelevant to them, all they live for is the moment.
To be in the latest edition of the hottest magazine, or to simply look like
they should be in it due to their au courant fashion sense; to be savvy
with new technology and gadgets; to have their name plastered
everywhere. In short, to create the façade of an accomplished human
being. They try their utmost to garner as much attention as possible, in
as quick a time as possible, but then fade out into the nothingness that
we all invade eventually.
At this point in my tale you may be wondering how I plan to go about
earning my fame. Curtis did too, probably still does. He can't talk much
now, after I sawed off his tongue and all. It had to be done though, after
wrenching out his teeth he was still able to beg for his life with his pitiful
voice, sounding like it was drowning in a sea of blood.
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The Price of Fame: Morgan K Tanner
I am well into my forties now, and my path to stardom has been little
more than a cobbled trail so far. I have played guitar and performed on
one or two occasions in front of people. I've also recorded a demo, well
many demos if I'm honest. And sent them to a whole host of record
labels and local promoters. Not a single smidgen of interest. I really
don't understand it. I can play. I write good songs with catchy,
memorable lyrics. I have a great stage presence. But nobody else seems
to agree.
Then there's my photography. I have a collection of urban street
photographs catching the real life stories of people in the city, from the
homeless to the wealthy. There are also my gorgeous shots of the open
countryside, capturing everything about the wonders of nature
perfectly. And then there are my arty pictures of famous buildings and
landmarks, all slightly out of focus; intentionally of course, to make the
viewer really think about what they are looking at and what they are
actually seeing. Again, no success.
I have even tried writing a handful of short stories, mainly wild west
romance fiction. These have been consistently rejected by publishing
agents, and fiction websites that publish up and coming authors. I feel
that they just don't understand where I'm coming from. It's their loss
though.
All this time, as I reflect on my failures, I see Curtis' popularity soar. I
see he has a channel on a popular website that allows people to upload
their videos. Everyday he puts a new one up, and the little green
'thumbs-up' logo next to it displays ever larger numbers, constantly.
And what does Curtis do to create this pool of fame in which he is
currently swimming, but is constant danger of drowning in? He makes
videos about his life. His mundane life.
He buys a chocolate bar then discusses with the camera how, at the
right angle and light, the picture on the wrapper looks like a penis. He
moans about how the sandwich shop didn't have any cajun chicken
pieces left and how he had to 'make do' with regular chicken. He shows
off a new product he's using in his hair and tells how it makes his hair
that bit more fashionable. He reviews his new jeans, trying them on
with a whole array of different shirts and jumpers. He spouts off about
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how world hunger and war is bad, and that if he was in charge he'd
make all of that just disappear. This last one gathered a large number of
comments that praised how courageous he was to bring real hard
hitting topics to everyone's attention, and to my knowledge and
understanding none of these are in any way sarcastic.
Yes, Curtis is riding high and everybody loves him. There are rumours
of a talk show and book, but Curtis says he is too busy to commit to
anything. Or perhaps too untalented?
Where is the artistic integrity? Projecting something of yourself into
the world, something timeless, something memorable. Throughout
history there are those that have done just so. There are great
composers and musicians, painters, novelists, playwrights, leaders. And
people who video themselves shopping for shoes.
So here he sits, his feet and hands bound to the chair he has sat in
many times before. The chair that has made him famous. His video
camera is on him, not missing a single moment of his latest instalment.
All across the world people will be logging on and tuning in to see what
pearls of wisdom Curtis is to give them today. What has he got to say
about his worthless life that will somehow give theirs a little more
meaning?
Well, today he has very little to say. The blood has clotted around his
mouth, and by his groaning, as fresh blood trickles from the hardened
plaques, I assume it is painful for him to open it. No matter, I can
narrate for him.
“Hey guys, Curtis here,” this is how he introduces all of his videosI've done my research, “today I've just been chilling at home.” My
impersonation of him is rather good. “That's right, I have nothing to say.
Nothing. Noth-ing.”
I leave a gap for what must be ten seconds or more. “So why are you
still watching? Did you not hear me? There is nothing for you to see
here.”
Another ten seconds. “Seriously? Just think what you could be doing
right now; thinking about a story you'd like to write, sketching a picture,
humming a tune, learning a musical instrument, writing down your
thoughts on life and our existence. The list is endless, unlike your life.”
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My Curtis impression is lost for a moment at my annoyance of these
people. I take a second then cough, my mood instantly calmed.
When I watch the video back before I upload it, I am proud not only
of my words, but also the shot. The room is eerily lit with a solitary lamp
on the desk next to the camera. Curtis is sitting one-third in on the left
of screen, with me over his right shoulder, we are illuminated in a
spotlight. My head is cut off but there is a shadow from my chin, moving
with my words. The right portion of the shot is pure blackness.
I tell the idiotic viewers that to be engrossed by such an empty
individual, wasting precious moments of their hopeless lives, is the
closest they could come to suicide without the pills or the rope or the
shotgun. My fingers squeezing Curtis' cheeks, creating the illusion of
him still speaking, is a nice touch.
As I watch myself walk to camera, my hand outstretched, covering
the lens before the screen flicks to black, I wonder whether any of the
fools will heed my words.
Curtis had passed out towards the end of the video and is now
awake again. He's mumbling something. Funny, I don't remember
shoving a sock in his mouth, oh wait, I cut out his tongue didn't I? I'll
patch up his bleeding mouth and give him some more painkillers once
the film is uploaded.
Quite dazzled with the way my words flowed in front of the camera, I
decide to spend the evening trying to outline a plot for a novel, or short
story, I haven't decided yet. Perhaps my fiction mind is not as in tune as
my non-fictional one tonight though, as I struggle to get anything down.
No matter, I need to sleep, I have an important day ahead of me.
I log into Curtis' online video account, he told me the password when
I threatened to pull out his teeth if he didn't. Did he really think that I'd
let him off? When does that ever happen in the movies? Baddie
threatens torture for information, then once he gets it just says 'thanks'
and leaves the victim to get on with their day? I don't think so.
There are many notifications and lots of new comments for the
video. Scanning them quickly, as there are far too many to properly read
through, I am astonished, no, mortified at the response. It seems that
the masses are enthralled by Curtis' attempts at a horror short. Praising
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the effects, how it all looks so real, and especially the lighting. My
lighting! 'Is there nothing you can't do, Curtis?' 'You have such talent.'
'Wow, I'm enjoying this, looks like a David Lynch film.' 'That spotlight is
creepy, top marks buddy.'
I stand, yelling hard and slamming my hand on the table, this wakes
Curtis up immediately. I tell him we are filming again. The camera clicks
on. I take the bread knife I used to stop him speaking- dried, clotted
blood adorns it- and march towards him.
The voice to camera is my own this time. “How dare you people give
this piece of shit credit for my work. It seems irony is lost on you. Look,
let me spell it out to you all.” Pulling on his eyebrows I try to cut them
out neatly, but the knife is so big and his head is shaking that I make a
right mess of it and end up having to rip the skin off. His muffled cries
make everything better though.
“What have you done since watching us together? Have you strived
to achieve something to be remembered for? Or have you simply
posted a brown-nosed comment in a desperate attempt to be noticed
by some nobody who happens to own a video camera and Internet
access? So what, he can reply to you personally, ask you out, marry you,
father your stupid children?” Curtis' moans are becoming too loud so I
use the butt of the knife handle on his forehead to silence him. I walk to
camera and lean forward so that my eye is the only thing in shot. “Stop
watching. Do something. Don't torture your existence like I torture your
idol.” I click the camera off.
The wounds above his eyes have clotted well and I wipe the blood
from his eyelids, I don't want him blind too. Not yet. The video goes up
and I promise myself a little snooze. Curtis is still knocked out so I have
no disturbances.
A little over two hours since the video went live, I check the
comments. His fans are beside themselves with this one, they're asking
who his assistant is. Assistant? There's plenty of gushing over the
grittiness of it, how he's pushing boundaries blah blah blah. And there's
even more comments that yesterday, more followers, more
subscribers... What is wrong with these sick bastards?
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I turn on the TV, the news is on. They are talking about Curtis. For a
second my breathing halts as I consider the consequences of his
martyrdom. But it seems that they are lapping it up. The newsreader
speaks of how the Internet’s hottest sensation is forcing his many
followers, and us all, to think about our actions and how these can
manifest themselves in physical and emotional harm to others.
Unfortunately Curtis is unavailable for comment.
Is that really what they make of these videos? Can they really not
hear my message?
I switch off in annoyance and slap Curtis across the cheek to wake
him up. It takes a couple of attempts and then a stabbed punch which
breaks his nose, to do it. He stinks. His blood has mixed with the
pungent aroma of his piss and shit, his trousers wet with a brown
discharge dripping from the chair. It would be so much simpler to just
kill him, to film him as a bound corpse for hours, and I'm sure his fans
would still continue to watch, just waiting for a twist (or a twitch) at the
end. No, he needs to stay alive and I'm now beginning to consider
changing his clothes to get rid of that stench.
I decide to leave him as he is, changing him is too much of an effort. I
could spend my time much more productively by cutting him a bit more.
His face peels away easier than I'd thought, what I imagine skinning a
rabbit would be like. I've pulled it down as far as his cheekbones when I
realise that I forgot to turn the camera on. I curse at myself for my
foolishness but decide that there's still enough skin attached to make a
decent video.
This next video is silent, well from me anyway. Curtis continues with
his usual whimpers and moans and spasms, but there's no dialogue this
time. What's the use? They're not listening to me anyway.
Curtis' pink, muscled face is causing my stomach to rumble a little,
the sight of raw meat is making me crave a nice, juicy piece of steak. I
tell myself I shall go out and get one just as soon as this latest video is
uploaded...
The steak was beautiful and my only gripe is that I didn't buy two.
Nevermind, I shall buy two tomorrow. I check the ratings and am
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amazed at the number of subscribers he now has. I say he when I should
really say I, it's me that's doing all the hard work now. His fan-base has
almost doubled in just under four hours. The comments section is
updating every second. It seems as though people are now beginning to
see that this is no joke, no trick to try and improve ratings. I see that no
one has commented on how they are to try and make something of
their lives, though. Just pages and pages of people sickened by my
behaviour. So sickened that they watched till the end, of course. How
else would they know that Curtis now only has one hand left.
The tourniquet around his wrist isn't working as well as I'd hoped,
but the flow does seem to have slowed. As I stare at his bloody stump I
let out a guilty burp as my stomach gurgles its appreciation. I only had a
little nibble at it. Curtis is unconscious again and as I have no more
energy to make another video, I bid him goodnight and lay my head
down once more.
I awake in a haze, expecting the door to be being pounded in by the
police or some vigilante, but no one is there. I log in and check the
comments again. I spend a good hour reading through them, but I'm
nowhere close to seeing them all. They all seem to be saying the same
thing; how sad it is to see one of our national treasures hurt and
degraded in this manner.
Finally, they have realised that this is no clever video with a
subliminal message. But there's still no real mention of me and my art. I
am the one who has achieved this pitiful outpouring of sadness unto the
viewers, yet I am uncredited for the gift. There also seems no mention
of the police getting involved. Do they not know where I am? I thought
that maybe Curtis would have some friends who would know where this
place was, his 'media station' in this deserted trading estate. Surely they
would have told the police? Maybe he doesn't really have any friends,
or perhaps the police are also enjoying my videos too much to put an
end to them?
I smash my fist onto the keyboard, hear it crack, then stand and
storm over to the star of my show. He's much stiller than usual. The only
sound is from some flies buzzing around his lap, no doubt after a shit
supper. The smell is worse, like rotten meat left in a dirty toilet bowl of
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lukewarm water. I kick Curtis in his knee, I stamp on his foot, there's no
reaction. A punch to his ribs and a slash with the now rusting knife
across his muscled cheeks reveals no blood. The bastard's only gone and
died.
No no no no no! It is too early, he was meant to suffer. I'd been
planning much much more. I scratch my head and stare at him, willing
him to move. It must be ten minutes I've been staring. I decide to make
once final video.
The light seems dimmer, the darkness is taking over. I am sitting next
to the corpse of Curtis, addressing my audience. “So here he is, in all his
rotting glory. What do you think about him now? A life spent living in
the moment and now his final moment is here on film, forever
documenting his vicious demise. I would like you all to take a moment
to take it all in. Look at his face,” I turn to it myself and then remember
that I'd skinned it, “well, try to imagine the face as it once was, and
think, really think about what your life is worth. Underneath your flesh
you the same as this fool. He will not be remembered for anything he's
ever done, will you? There will be nothing of worth to live on in his
name.”
I finish off by thanking my friends and family for their constant
support and encouragement in all my endeavours over the years, then
stand and walk over to the camera. I try to hide my retching with my
hand at the purulent stench of decay that surrounds me, but figure that
I can always edit the video if I appear too sickened in my face.
The video uploads and I promise myself a drink to celebrate. I head
out for one, to the pub across the street and end up staying there for
much of the evening. I stumble back to my own home, almost forgetting
the way in my drunken stupor. Once inside I make my way to bed but
end up falling asleep on the stairs.
Morning arrives - well, more like afternoon - and my head pounds. I
finally make it to my bed and proceed to lie there for another few hours
trying to sleep off the intense headache and nausea bubbling away
inside me.
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It's dark outside when I awake again and I feel a deep hunger. As I
make my way to the kitchen, carefully stepping down the stairs, I
remember my video from last night. How did I forget about it for so
long? I log in on my own computer, amazing myself that I can still
remember Curtis' username and password, and prepare to assess the
reaction. My mouth hangs open, but I shouldn't be surprised.
'Poor Curtis, what has this monster done to him?' 'He really was a
true inspiration to us all.' 'He will be sorely missed.'
The comments are listed in their hundreds. After reading the first 50
or so I begin to skim them, getting the general idea that they are all
saying pretty much the same thing. Inspiration is the word that seems to
be the most popular amongst these cretins. There's plenty of videos
responding to this one from other viewers and I can't even find the
energy to shake my head in revulsion at the absolute stupidity of these
people. It seems that all they have taken from these hours of great
torture is that they are going to try their utmost to live their lives as
copycats to his great achievement of nothingness. The sickness rises in
my stomach and I leave the computer to finally prepare myself some
food.
I stare at the burnt cheese on toast, unable to take a bite. I'm shaking
and I don't know whether it's through anger, disillusionment, or
whether I'm just so hurt that yet again my attempts at fame have been
thwarted by an amateur. I pick up the plate and scream as I throw it
against the wall of my kitchen, smashing it in the process. I take a deep
breath and try to compose myself before switching on the TV. The news
is on.
“Curtis H Dore,” the newsreader speaks with sad eyes, her hair and
make-up impeccable though, “the Internet’s brightest new sensation
has been tragically killed by a so-called 'Superfan' in his London home.
The shocking footage was uploaded by the crazed fan onto Curtis' own
video channel for millions to see.” At the bottom of the screen appears
a link to the videos, just in case viewers want to see them in all their
glory... My glory.
I sink down to my knees. A Superfan? Could things actually get any
worse? The report continues and grieving viewers give their superficial
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and clichéd thoughts on what happened, there's even an interview with
Curtis' parents who look well groomed and ready for the media
attention, despite their tears and snotty noses. Not once is there any
mention of the message that this 'Superfan' had been trying to convey. I
bang my fist into my head, numb to any pain that this might bring.
The newsreader is back on screen. “There are campaign groups
rallying to set up a Curtis H Dore foundation, for other victims of
Internet stalkers.” This is the final straw. Before hearing another word I
smash the sole of my boot into the screen and the image dies instantly.
Breathing heavily I march back over to the computer and log in again,
this time with my own username and password.
I find that last video of me and Curtis together and I scroll to the
bottom of the comments box. My fingers tremble above the keyboard
but I am able to type.
I find these videos most uplifting. The way this sage-like wisdom has
been parted to me and to everyone who has watched is very refreshing
in these modern times. I, for one am to take on board the message
being presented here and go forth to achieve something with my life.
This will be the last of these videos that I shall ever watch and I hope
that, like the narrator and torturer of these, I can inspire others to do
the same.
I click 'post' and it's done, my comment sits proudly alongside the
rest of them. I smile, staring at it over and over again, admiring my
words my punctuation and my grammar.
Still smiling, I stand and leave the house through the interior door
into the garage. The car door satisfyingly clunks closed. The engine
starts as I lower the window and the fumes began to enter. My smile is
still there and my cheeks are starting to ache like a proud father at a
school play.
My head starts to feel a little woozy but still my grin is fixed on. I
have a fan. It is there to see in the comments. Forever there will be
evidence of my life's work having an effect on someone. Eventually
people will see what a contribution I have made.
The smoke has filled the garage and I'm unable to see anything in
front of me. But I know that the one, solitary comment under that video
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will already be gathering enough attention for my actions to inspire a
whole generation to follow my words. People shall cease to be obsessed
with mediocrity.
Future generations can thank me in their own way.
I die happy.
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Vertigo
By Jack Tricarico
I stare at my cup of coffee
My hands stare at it
The Aztec ashtray from Colombia
Stares at it. My stomach retreats thoughtfully
Filled with its foretaste. It gives me vertigo
The grapefruits beside it
Their sickly, yellow-greenish skin
A day like this color drops from a skyhook
In San Francisco no one believes I sell bibles
The communists, the anarchists, the existentialists
The Kantians, the Hegelians, no one believes it
They laugh at my black suit, my partial stutter
And the twitch in my eye. They think I'm an executioner
They think I sell guns. They give me a shadow
That looks like a praying mantis
And a face that eats bears. It's that Manhattan ambience
Following me around like ectoplasm
"Good evening, friends
Mr., and Mrs., Miscellaneous and Etcetera Incorporated
Mr., Otherwise and Mrs., Beside The Point
Excuse my incorporeal look and the snakes in my hair
Which will stay where they are
Providing you look at this pay-as-you-browse bible
These pictures of Jesus being flagellated up Calvary Hill
Being crucified and resuscitated in the arms of his mother..."
That gong-sounding bell, waking me up
For another day on the ropes. It's lonely in Brooklyn
A bogus passport tells me how threatened it feels
In Alice's looking glass of surrealist navigators
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Which window is spying for the Immigration Department
Mornings arrive with knives at their throats
Everyone has a black handkerchief filled with internal rain
Only I in the memory of another memory
A larger memory around a smaller memory
Can go on without fear through these four dimensional walls
In drafts of chiaroscuro I exit the two doors of my brain
That lead to the same roof. An adolescent girl
Is reading Artaud to the stars, naked for that purpose
I like rituals. Anyway out of the mind
Leaves more room in the head
Dupe of Manipulation
By Jack Tricarico
Who claims to know
Where the weather will take us?
I keep wiping my hands on the air
Counting my steps backward
Behind every confessional tree
The daylight has x-ray eyes
Someone who dies upright
Looking at slow traffic
Turns to his curved silhouette
Sees death walking its favorite color
Out of a dirty, abandoned shoe
Flash back through zoom lens
On idyllic surroundings
He was tired of country life
It's understandable
How everyone needs distraction
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Poetry: Jack Tricarico
As the summer ends in cement feet
Clumps over parasols
On the festively painted grass
Grounding oblique looks from the benches
"Has anyone seen a pink frankfurter dog?"
Asks a man in a baggy gown
Reminding me of a dead aunt
Who has been dead for a long time.
What a fright is his absurdly elastic mouth
His spongy upholstered hair, the blistered effect
Of his burlesque cosmetic
Over his pudgy, gelatinous face
Will the spectacle go on? Cross-dressers everywhere
Shouting: "POMPADOURS REJOICE!"
Are angels empathic? Is the sparrow in my palm?
I only went out for a walk and on every street
Someone was peeling the sweat off of a benediction
Someone was chasing the lice out of a forgotten address
Someone was selling a clock that promised an early winter
For my itchy, reclusive wife I brought home a magnifying glass
To examine her every pore, the infinitesimal wings
Of the heat or the mind? Only uncertainty reigns
"Another day of this and I will immolate myself!" She warned
Already a sacrifice of sorts, I advise her to stare cross-eyed
Remember her diaper rash, her helpless baby cries
How much worse it could be
She slumps to the left and mumbles a calculation
"At fifty five miles per hour the nearest star
Is five hundred and twenty centuries away!"
Misted in bug spray her sphinx pose is awesome
Aimed at a vulnerable ear
The riddle that hammers the door
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The Last Passenger
By Jack Tricarico
Rain on the windshield
The wipers are demons
I listen to how they screech
The car is my outer skin
Where the tire tracks end
I am the soggy shoe of a life
Abandoned by footprints in mud
Body and mind are temporarily separated
Like a distraught couple
Thinking of where to go next
My last passenger wanted to know
What do I do for fun?
I told her I abduct babies
And eat them because
A vegetarian diet isn't for real men
She told me I should eat her husband
He's the biggest baby she had ever met
This is where the streets dwindle
Around the abrupt walls
Of a lower east side apartment
All those years as a urinal on wheels
Did have an effect. The piss I transform
To the ink in my pen smears on a page
That retreats from my thoughts
The face in this smear has a sad, tired look
Like someone surviving a war without end
While the bombing goes on
And the dead walk around
In bodies of smoke and debris
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The Great Showbiz Onion
By Stephen McQuiggan
‘So, what music do you like?’
Down the corridor, watching on the monitor in his dressing room,
Erwin Jordan smiles, and on screen Beppo smiles identically. He will
have Beppo answer, he is the undoubted heartthrob of the band, and it
is a great chance for Erwin to plug his other acts; whatever Beppo says
now will have all those little girls raiding their piggy banks.
‘Well,’ says Erwin, barely audible, and on screen Beppo repeats the
word with the same thoughtful intonation. ’There’s some great stuff out
there right now. Shimmer and GlamGlider are really cool, and of course,
the McBoys album is out on Monday.’
Sweat beads Erwin’s forehead. He’s tired, and when he’s tired he has
to concentrate that much harder to control, to manipulate (such a
deliciously nasty word) his groups. But this was prime time, this would
really break Auto Tuna, so he had no time to be tired.
‘Any of you guys going steady?’ asks the interviewer in her irritating,
over enthusiastic voice.
‘No,’ say Erwin and Beppo in perfect unison, ’We just don’t have the
time. Though if the right girl came along…’ Erwin has Beppo arch an
eyebrow and stare seductively into Camera One.
Not one member of Auto Tuna has a girlfriend, or a social life for that
matter. After the interview they will be locked back in the warehouse so
that he can relax his will, before they are herded back out for the next
press junket, photo-op, TV appearance, whatever. Still, you had to let
the little girls think they stood half a chance.
‘We don’t have time,’ says Rafe, a monotone echo that falls flat in
the studio, startling Erwin back to full attention - did Rafe just speak on
his own? Steady on old boy, thinks Erwin, pull yourself together. He has
the rest of the band laugh, and then Toby (the cutesy clean one who
appeals to the mums) pull a trademark goofy face. Even the interviewer
smiles at that.
‘So, what’s your favourite colour?’
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Erwin smiles to himself - such probing questions! He decides to have
a little fun, and moisten a few teenage tear ducts, by having Beppo look
directly into camera and say, ‘Blue, cos that’s the colour of my heart
when I think of all the suffering in the world, y’know, earthquakes and
stuff.’
He has the rest of the band nod in solemn agreement, including the
sullen Skazz, the bad boy working class urchin whom the interviewer has
been instructed not to question, and whom Erwin now regrets picking
for the band in the first place. Still, there always had to be one ugly little
peanut to placate the weird girls; they thought him cool when at best he
was an oddity. Erwin didn’t understand youth; they thought
skateboards were hip, when he could remember them being geeky as
hell, Rubik Cubes with wheels.
Controlling Skazz is akin to walking a pit bull with a thread of cotton.
Never mind, he thinks, in eighteen months I’ll split the band, concoct a
row between the two most popular ones who’ll then go on to have a
couple of solo hits each, then put them back in storage with the others
for a few years in preparation for the lucrative comeback.
Skazz is sweating profusely. He’s fighting me thinks Erwin, as he
directs the full force of his will onto Skazz causing him to issue a deep
grunt, much to the surprise of the interviewer, and his fellow bandmates who have never heard a sound emanate from him before, not
even in the recording studio.
TeenHits magazine have described his almost catatonic state as
‘enigmatic’ and ‘profound’, mistaking his extreme laconic reserve for
depth instead of vacant idiocy. Thousands of friendless, hormone
drenched girls have latched onto him, viewing him as an edgy outsider,
and that is the only reason Erwin has not ditched him months ago.
He had been trouble from the get-go, from the moment he came
sauntering into the audition, curling his lip and growling, ‘I’m your man,
I’m a superstar,’ before proceeding to sing like he needed more
roughage in his diet.
Cocky little thug, there must have been a ten month waiting list at
his local abortion clinic, but he had a neck made of sufficient quantities
of brass to carry off the swagger.
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The Great Showbiz Onion: Stephen McQuiggan
‘How does it feel to be part of the Jordan stable?’ asks the
interviewer. At last, a sensible question. He likes that ‘stable’, he likes
that a lot. All his protégés are merely animals, cart horses for his
bidding. Plus, it allows him to blow his own trumpet. He has Rafe
answer, the sensible one, recently voted ‘most trustworthy’ on the
website.
‘You know, it’s such a privilege to be part of what I like to think of as
the new Motown,’ Rafe says, ‘and Mister Jordan, he’s like a father to us.
He’s the true king of pop.’
Skazz clears his throat. What comes out sounds suspiciously like
‘crap’. Where does he get the strength to fight so?
There is an uncomfortable silence. Skazz coughs again; no doubt
about it this time - crap. Erwin is sweating now too, there are still five
minutes left before they cut to the video for the new single, Lonely Boys
All Alone, and he is beginning to feel the burn. He has never had these
problems with Shimmer, but then he has always found girls so much
more malleable. He bends all his concentration on Skazz who lurches
back on the garish sofa with a jerk.
‘Are you okay?’ asks the interviewer, defying the direct question rule.
‘We’re all shattered,’ smiles Rafe. ‘we’ve been working really hard on
the new video, but we’re really proud of it.’ Erwin smiles at the
improvisations he has spent so long planning. That should get the
interview back on track.
‘Prisoners,’ blurts Beppo of his own accord.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the interviewer, ‘what?’
Erwin struggles to regain control; he has focused too hard on Skazz
and let the others slip. Thinking fast he has Toby gurn frantically, and
Rafe say, ‘That’s gonna be the next single - Prisoners Of Love.’
Now he will have to get Danny and the team to write that tomorrow
morning; the band can record it tomorrow afternoon. What is wrong
with me today, he thinks, I’m never usually this sloppy.
Normally he can squeeze (that’s the word he applies to his gift, the
one that best describes it) up to ten people at a time if they are
receptive, and still have an independent conversation of his own. Now
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he is in danger of losing even the moronic Beppo, who can barely
function without being squeezed.
He can’t control everyone, just certain vacant types, and that is what
the auditions are primarily for. Occasionally someone being squeezed
can rebel, like handsome Jack the day he put Auto-Tuna together.
Jack had been full of bounce, the obvious choice from the off, a
veritable Adonis who could actually hold a note ( not important but,
still, cute) and Erwin had squeezed so hard, so eagerly, and Jack had
smiled an A-Bomb smile, and then Erwin gave them all his little speech.
‘Showbiz gentlemen is like an onion, made up of many unseen layers
to create an impressive whole. I am the puppet-master who will make
you interesting, build those layers up. I am also the man capable of
peeling the great showbiz onion, of returning you to the nothing from
whence you crawled, for an onion can shed its layers too. On my
command you must shed yours. I want you all to strip. Now!’
And, as always, they had. Not an inhibition in sight. His favourite part
of the job, besides the money, is dreaming up scenarios for his puppets
to act out for him behind closed doors. He can watch their ‘innocence’
on the audition tapes over and over.
But something went wrong that day. He can still see Jack, his face
turning damson, his hands on his boxers, shaking his head like a dog in a
duck pond, somehow breaking free.
‘You sick old perv,’ he hissed, storming from the warehouse, ‘I’m
gonna report this you twisted old bastard.’
Erwin had the others fondle themselves whilst he sat by the window
waiting until Jack emerged from the ground floor doorway. Some pretty
boys confused their good looks with armour. He squeezed as hard as he
ever had, squeezed until his nose bled and Jack, clutching his head, ran
out under the wheels of a bus.
He got Danny to write a song about it - My Angel Caught The No 27 then called back the rejects and hired Skazz. My Angel was Auto-Tuna’s
first hit.
‘Prisoners Of Love? That’s not on the album!’ says the interviewer
scanning the cover of Loverboy Stew. The generic little piece of fluff
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actually looks excited. ‘Wow, that’s an exclusive, you heard it here first
on Download Mania!’
‘Erwin Jordan is a perverted old monster,’ Toby says, just as the door
to the dressing room opens, the door that quite clearly states ‘Do Not
Disturb’, and some lackey with a ponytail and a clipboard is sticking her
nonsensical head in and warbling something about coffee, ‘or
something a teensy bit stronger Mr Jordan?’
‘Get out,’ he explodes, ‘How dare you!’
He has left instructions, as always, with the producer and the floor
manager that on no account, no account whatsoever, is he to be
disturbed when the band are on air, not for the death of a relation or a
terrorist attack. Certainly not when one of his puppets has decided to
denounce him in front of the nation.
He has been interrupted before, once he was accosted by a crazed
stalker demanding to be made famous, and once by Sir Cliff Richard who
wanted him to play mixed doubles in some charity bash. On both
occasions things had been fine; the band simply dropped into
monosyllabic auto-pilot and giggled, which all the girlies found laddish,
pedalling bargain bin rebellion whilst he politely dismissed the intruders.
This is different, he is losing control, his puppets speaking for
themselves, and here is some glorified Saturday job butting her nose
into his sanctuary quizzing him about a skinny latte.
He lifts a candle from the vast array before his mirror and hurls it at
the nosey little cow who manages to slam the door shut just before it
strikes. He can hear the clump of her heels as she flees up the corridor,
no doubt to phone the tabloids for some cold Judas cash.
He swivels back to the screen to assess the damage, to see if the
papers will have a bigger story to tell in the morning. Beppo is crying,
head in hands whilst Rafe is clawing at his face, blood streaming down in
thick rivulets. Skazz is strangling Toby in front of the terrified
interviewer.
‘Me next, me next,’ Beppo is begging Skazz, ‘Release me next.’
Oh Christ, thinks Erwin as Toby begins to laugh, a harsh gurgle that is
nonetheless the first real laugh he has managed since his audition, this
is unsalvageable.
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‘Free me! Free me!’ Rafe with his haunted head, eyes watering with
the unwelcome guest, joins in now. Erwin tries in vain to squeeze, to
regain control, but it is like trying to grasp greasy piglets on a
waterslide. He watches the interviewer scream as blood pours from
Toby’s eyes as Skazz plunges his fingers ever deeper into the little
clown’s throat.
‘Release me!’ Et tu Beppo?
The screen cuts to a test card of Download Mania (sponsored by
Chester’s Chunky Munching Meat) and outside his dressing room Erwin
can hear the tumult spreading, the birth of chaos, as raised voices
mingle with running feet and the barking of inaudible orders.
He half expects The Ponytail to come barging in with the hands free
mike clipped to her ear as if she’s important - I’ve got news for you love,
they wear them at the drive thru at KFC - and ask him if now he’d like
something stronger.
He feels tears come to his eyes; finally the great showbiz onion has
made him cry. Can he no longer control a bunch of second generation
bi-peds? They seemed such boy scouts, but he should have
remembered that boy scouts grow up to rob the house they cleaned.
All that promotion, all that hard work, down the pan. He would have
to concentrate on Shimmer, stick to girls, and only do pre-recorded
shows. He will have a long rest first though, get his strength back if that
is possible. Unless there was a tsunami or an earthquake in the next
twenty four hours he’ll be hounded by the press, be invited on every TV
show in the western hemisphere to discuss the pressures of fame.
Money couldn’t buy publicity like that.
Why, this could be the best thing that ever happened to him! He
could kick himself for not thinking of it sooner.
The possibilities!
The lucrative possibilities!
He should have got them to kill each other on the National Lottery
Show - the viewing figures for that were huge, but no matter, YouTube
would soon be crashing with the number of hits it would be getting
from Telford to Timbuktu.
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The rest of his acts can release a tribute single. It could be bigger
than Band Aid if he milks it right. There will be questions in the
Commons, debates worldwide, and the net will clog with conspiracy
theories. This could make Jackson’s death look like a regional news
report about a stolen bike.
He could drag it out for months, even print up some sick t-shirts for
the older kids (at last, a breakthrough in that market!), he can make the
whole damn planet his puppet.
I’ll get Natalie from Shimmer (voted sexiest in online poll) to take an
overdose when it dies down a bit, squeeze a note out of her that says
she and Rafe were lovers (even though Rafe’s true love lived on the
other side of the mirror), get the whole tragedy up and running again.
Ponytail barges in once more, still no knock if you please, crying like
she knew the band, and Erwin can’t help but laugh in her shocked prune
face.
‘What are you standing there for!’ he shouts heartily. ’Get me a
make up man pronto! I’m going to be a very busy man.’
86
Binge
By Daniel Davis
Before she jumps, the old lady tells me I'll pay for my transgressions. I'm
ten feet away from her, but her tired blue eyes meet mine and she says
my uppance will come. I want to ask how she knows about the dog, and
if she knows that then surely she's aware how much dope I've injected
in the hours since to temper my guilt. I mean, I didn't expect the gun to
go off, I hadn't seen the dog, I wasn't aiming or anything. I didn't know
there was a dog in that house, and yes I'd broken in, but most people
keep pictures of their pets around, or chew toys, or crates or something,
but there had been no signs, and I found the gun and I'm drinking one of
their expensive beers on top of the numerous cheap ones I've already
had, and the gun just goes off. I didn't think my finger was anywhere
near the trigger, but the thing roars in my hands, and the next thing I
know there's a dead dog on the floor beside me, well most of a dead
dog, some furry little European thing that probably wore a collar with
rhinestones and answered to "princess", whatever its true name was.
This dog looks nothing like my Max I grew up with, my Rottweiler the
size of a small car, but suddenly I'm crying, which makes it look like
there are two dogs. I dropped the gun and ran. Hit up Geoffrey and
plugged my arm. Sometimes you gotta.
But the old lady jumps before I can ask her if she understands my
plight. She turns her head from me and steps out into the air. For a
moment I think something will hold her up; she's got this calm,
confident look on her face, and I'm thinking, Jesus, she's Jesus, I'm
witnessing the Second Coming, but no, gravity takes over and down she
goes, into the river below. I don't look, but I can still see the muddy
water embrace her with a murky splash. I can hear it. That's enough.
A few other people are there too. Some cars stopped. Not as many
as you'd think, but there's this Regal right next to me and it kind of looks
like an undercover cop car, so I skedaddle across the road, weaving
through traffic to the other side of the bridge. I can't remember which
way the current runs, so I don't look down, I just follow the sidewalk
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Binge: Daniel Davis
until I'm on solid ground again. A quick look over my shoulder, though I
know I shouldn't. I'm suspicious looking enough. Always have been. Got
in trouble in school for things someone else did. Kids would say, I'm
going to do blank, because Willy's just gonna get blamed for it anyways.
And they were right. Didn't have to try and frame me. I've got guilty
eyes. Bianca told me that. You've got suspicious eyes, Willy, like you're
thinking something you don't want the world to know. My mother just
told me I was a scoundrel, like Bush or Darth Vader or her ex-husband
(the one who wasn't my father). My father never told me anything that I
remember; he died when I was too young, heart attack from all the
cigarettes. But I can picture him holding me and frowning at my
wrinkled little face, saying, You've got the weight of everyone's sins on
you already, Willy my boy.
I'm not Jesus. That woman wasn't Jesus and I'm not, either. I have no
one's sins on me. People just think I do.
Jesus wouldn't flee from the scene of a suicide. He'd try to help, even
though the woman's soul was damned to Hell. Because I think that's the
kind of guy Jesus was. Is. I guess some people believe He's still here. I
think that's crazy, but I just blew a dog's head off and got hopped up off
Geoffrey's third-rate junk because of it, so I'm not one to set standards.
I'm not even one to know where I'm going when I flee a crime scene. If
it's a crime scene. Is suicide a crime? Attempted suicide maybe, but if
you succeed don't you escape punishment? I can't imagine killing
myself. I guess this shit will kill me eventually, and people will say it's a
form of suicide, but it isn't. I'm telling you right now, I want to live.
I head into the nearest block, it's some old record store I've been in
once and they didn't even have the record I wanted. If you're hoping to
make it as a record store in this day and age, you should have legitimate
records, but they didn't. I think I also bought some pot in the back room,
but I swear that isn't why I went in. I wanted an old Jackson Browne
LP, Hold Out, it's not that great but I'm a completest. Maybe I set myself
up too high, expecting a place with electrical tape on the windows to
have some random eighties album. But the record store is near the
river, which is a good place to pass out if you have to, which I frequently
88
do. Not because of the junk. I was like that as a kid. I just get tired
sometimes.
I'm tired now but not that kind of tired. I lean against the brick wall
for a moment and close my eyes. When I open them, my shadow is a
little longer but not much, so I stumble forward again. Police sirens
somewhere behind me but they aren't moving in my direction. I wonder
if the old lady survived. I wonder if I want her to have survived. Isn't it
sort of cruel, wishing someone survives a suicide attempt?
I can't think about that though because I'm moving and because the
dog didn't have any choice in its demise. I push the old lady out of my
head, which feels too much like pushing her off the bridge, and I have to
convince myself I didn't do that. I mean, I know I didn't, but I'm always
like this: spend your whole life with people accusing you of doing
everything, and you begin to think maybe you have. I drowned my guilt
when that first Asian airline crashed in the ocean. Bianca laughed. By
the time the second went down, she wasn't laughing. I think she finally
understood.
Bianca. Suddenly, I know where I'm going. It's probably a bad idea,
because if I'm in the wrong mood then being around her will bring me
down to the lowest I can go, but she's also the only person who can lift
me out of this. Her apartment is this way. Well, it's actually Steadman's
apartment, but I don't want to think about that. I'll think about Bianca,
her slight paunch, her wide brown eyes, her auburn hair that always
seem to catch the sunlight at just the right moment. I'm not sure why
she's put up with me for so long. Maybe she hasn't. I mean, I'm pretty
sure our arrangement is a consolation prize.
She lives in an old five-story Victorian-style complex that looks like it
could fall at any moment, but it's actually pretty nice inside. I've only
seen a couple rats, which is a bonus. I'm walking up the steps to ring her
buzzer when Steadman comes out. He grins at me and offers his hand
like I haven't spent five years pining after his girlfriend.
"Willy," he says, emphasizing the last syllable. Only a certain type of
people do that, I've noticed. I don't trust them. Of course, I wouldn't
trust Steadman anyways. Because he's Steadman.
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Binge: Daniel Davis
"Hey," I say, because I can't remember his first name at the moment,
and I give him the high-five he seems to be wanting. Or I try to. He
moves his hand away, but doesn't say so slow like you're supposed to
when you're just kidding around. To people like Steadman, the entire
world is a competition. Every aspect of life. He reads obituaries and
basks at having outlived so many people.
"She's in the shower," he says. "Go on up, my man."
Because he knows I'm no threat. Because he knows if nothing has
happened between me and Bianca by now, it never will. In this, as in
seemingly everything else, Steadman also wins.
I go upstairs. It's a small victory to be with her when he isn't there.
The steps creak beneath me, and a couple of doors open and gnarled
faces glare at me. I don't look at any of them, because the halls are dark
and everything seems distorted. I can still feel Geoffrey's goods inside of
me, and I'm afraid of what will happen if I try to focus on a pair of eyes
other than Bianca's. I might go mad. I could quite possibly lose my mind
and never retrieve it.
Bianca's door is unlocked, so after knocking a few times, I go in. I can
hear the shower running. I holler out, then sit down in an easy chair
facing away from her bedroom, so I won't see anything when she comes
out. I can imagine it anyways. It isn't a pleasant image; think of a man
dying of thirst in the desert imaging a vast ocean of freshwater on the
other side of the next dune, and he unable to take one step further. I
shudder and long for a hit of anything. Bianca has beer in the fridge. I
grab one and sit back down and drink half the bottle in a single gulp. It
doesn't help but I pretend it does.
We used to live next door to each other. Bianca and I. I was just out
of college and she was almost about to graduate and we'd happened to
have the same degree. So I helped her study. Never once did I think it
would lead to something more. I hoped it would but I never thought it
would. I knew the role I was destined to play in her life when we did
shrooms together and ran around behind the upper decks of Busch
Stadium, listening to the crowd and dodging security. I've come to
cherish the way she smiled at me that night, but that was the first time,
and as soon as I saw it my world collapsed because there was something
90
missing there. Something I've seen on her face when she looks at people
like Steadman. It isn't desire; it isn't love or lust. I think it's something
more like comfort or security. And for this I don't blame her. I am not a
consoling individual.
When Bianca gets out of the shower I think about calling out but I
can't seem to find the words. I'm thinking of that old lady, which leads
to the dog, which leads back to Bianca, so when she comes out of her
room in a lime green blouse and cut-offs, she's probably surprised to
see me but she doesn't show it. She says, "Hey, Willy," and gives me a
smile that for a second makes everything seem okay, like maybe none of
it actually happened and I'm just freaking out again like I did last
summer when I woke up in a college dorm on Christmas break and
thought the world had ended.
I have a habit of breaking and entering. The last therapist I saw said it
would get me into trouble, but that it was a sign that part of me wanted
help. I haven't seen a therapist since.
Bianca grabs herself a beer. I wonder what time of the day it is; I
can't read the clock from this distance. "It's a little after two," she says
as she comes back in and sits down opposite me. "We were up pretty
late."
I wince a little and she smiles and says, "I meant you and me, Willy.
And Jen. Remember?"
I kind of do. I remember thinking Jen was attractive but nothing
compared to Bianca. But I think that every time I'm around Jen. Then I
remember: we raced bicycles in the parking lot. I was sober at the time.
That's what I can't remember.
Bianca yawns. "What brings you back?" she asked.
"Steadman told me you were in the shower," I say, then I shake my
head. "That's not why I'm here."
She gives me that look, she calls it her oh, Willy look, and I think this
is why I'm so in love with her. Any woman who could look at me like
that and still want to be in my life deserves a gold medal encased in
bronze enshrined in a museum erected atop a mountain. I'm a wreck,
and my knowing I'm a wreck only makes me more of a wreck, according
to the next-to-last therapist I saw.
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Binge: Daniel Davis
Then something happens to my eyes and there are tears in them.
Bianca's face shifts among the water; she's frowning but from my point
of view she looks like an unhappy clown on a bad trip, so I close my eyes
and turn away as she asks how much I've had.
Instead of answering her, because I don't remember and can't bring
myself to admit it, I say, "I saw an old lady kill herself."
Bianca has me explain the story front-to-back before she's convinced
it actually happened. Then she says the best-worst thing she could say,
which I knew she would say and that's why I came here. She says,
"Willy, it's not your fault, you could never hurt a fly."
I have hurt a fly. I've hurt flies and cockroaches and a few rats and
mice and once my best friend Ted when we were teenagers and I
punched him too hard for fun and he fell off the roof and broke his arm.
I've hurt grass when I've cut it and a few people I've stolen from, though
I haven't stolen anything but booze in a long time. I hurt my mother
who I thought was incapable of feeling anything and I hurt my sister
whom I barely know and I hurt this little dog but I can't bring that up.
"Now," Bianca says, coming over and sitting on the arm rest, and I'm
thinking no wonder she likes Steadman, Steadman doesn't bawl like
this, but then again Steadman doesn't drink or do anything, if he did
he'd probably cry his eyes out every night. I only do it on rare occasions
that seem to be happening more often.
I feel Bianca press up against my arm, there's a small slit of skin
between her blouse and denim shorts and it burns against my flesh as
she puts her arm around me and says, "Maybe we should get some air."
So I let her lead me downstairs and we go outside and I know she's
wanting to go back to the bridge to show me I didn't do anything wrong.
I think of protesting, but there's a chance this might work and I need all
the help I can get since I'm not sure when my next fix is going to be. We
go past the record store and the owner is in the window and he gives
me a wave and an "ok" sign when he sees Bianca. I want to slug him. I
think he's the one who sold me the pot. It wasn't good pot. It made me
sick the next day.
When we get to the bridge there are police cars closing it off and
more people down near the river on either side with a net strung
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between them. Lots of traffic just stopped, people with their cell phones
up, talking and taking pictures at the same time. I see two teenagers
taking selfies with the cordoned-off bridge in the background. I want to
throw them in the water too.
"I didn't know they actually did that," Bianca said, pointing to the
river. "Dredge it like that. I thought bodies float."
We wait with the rest of the rubberneckers I can't stand until they
finally find the body a little downriver from where they're looking. I
can't see it from where I'm at, it's just a little blur among a lot of moving
blurs that are waving frantically to each other.
"There," Bianca says. "Now let's see if anyone shouts 'murder.'"
No one does. She turns to me and says, "There was nothing you
could have done, Willy. Okay? It was just bad timing."
I could tell her so much about bad timing. Instead I nod and admit
that this lady hadn't been my fault. I admit that maybe she didn't say
what I thought she'd said to me, and as a concession Bianca adds, "And
if she did, it's probably because she was out of gourd. Normal people
don’t jump into rivers. There's something wrong with you if you do
that."
Well okay, yes, maybe normal people don't jump into rivers. I smile
and it feels more genuine than it is, so Bianca leads me to a coffee shop.
She orders for me and we sit near the back, far from the windows. I sip
whatever she's ordered. It's kind of salty but sweet at the same time.
She says, "That should help you come down. And stay down."
Stay down. I could do that if I wanted to. Last night is proof. I hadn't
enjoyed it afterwards, I'd gotten so drunk at this dive I sometimes go to
that I wound up in an unfamiliar neighborhood in an unfamiliar house
and managed to discover a pistol. Sobriety led to tragedy, that is what
my life has come to, and I wonder if any of the therapists I've talked to
would appreciate that irony. Probably not.
"It's just your imagination," Bianca says. "All of it, Willy. You
understand that, right? A guy like you should be writing screenplays or
painting murals. Not doping up all the time. You weren't designed to be
high. You'll drive yourself crazy."
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Binge: Daniel Davis
Which is so similar to what I'd been thinking earlier that I can feel my
sanity a little. That irony I think the therapists would enjoy.
"You're also too hard on yourself," she says, and I've heard all of this
before, but I've only ever believed it when it's from her. No one else
knows me well enough to make statements like that.
And perhaps it had been true.
"It's not the drugs and it's not the alcohol." She shakes her head. "It's
not your job and it's not your mother. It's you, Willy. You're your own
worst enemy. You have to accept the fact that you aren't a bad person.
Remember that movie? 'We all go a little crazy sometimes.' Your
sometimes just last longer than other people's."
So I tell her about the dog. I don't mean to but it just kind of slips
out. I want her to think the best of me, but I don't want her to be
disillusioned. The truth wins this round every time. I have always told
her everything I can think of that is wrong and vile about myself. Some
of it, after I utter it aloud, I know isn't true. But I tell her all of it, because
I want her to see me as I am and not as she wants me to be. And maybe
at one point I was the person she wanted me to be, but I'm fairly certain
I'm not anymore.
The story comes easily as they always do, and at some point I think I
infer that it's her fault so I backtrack and insist it's no one's fault, well
then maybe it's a little bit my fault, but that I didn't mean to. I didn't
know the dog was there and I didn't know the gun was in my hand and I
thought guns had safeties or something. I would never knowingly take a
life especially not a little dog's. Dogs are not masters of their own fate;
they count on humans to guide their destiny. I led this dog astray and
ended its life far too soon, I am responsible for that and no one else,
and that is something I have to live with even if I never had any
intention of doing anything. We are like gods to them, and every action
or inaction strikes them like the word of gospel.
Bianca sips her coffee as I talk. She doesn't look at me until I'm silent
for a few seconds. There are tears in her eyes, not many but I've upset
her and something writhes in my belly like a cauldron of rattlesnakes. I
need something stronger than caffeine or alcohol.
94
Eventually, Bianca says she understands that it wasn't my fault. That
it was an accident and that I could never knowingly hurt anyone or
anything. That I'm still a good person. She speaks with an indifference
that I think will maybe pass but right now seems so permanent that
maybe it won't, either. She believes me, which is a comfort, but it
doesn't matter, which isn't. I can't tell which weighs heavier on me.
A few minutes later and she leaves. I tell her I'll be all right to get
home. She smiles and touches my shoulder, but lights up a cigarette as
soon as she's outside. She smokes so rarely I had forgotten she does it. I
have to look away or else be consumed with guilt, but of course I don't,
how can I, I have to watch her every second I get because I may not
have another chance.
I'm still watching her when she turns the corner back to her
apartment. I'm still watching after her when I pull out my phone and call
Geoffrey and ask what he has for me. He tells me and I hang up and
then I'm on my way to forgetfulness and ignorance and those long
shadows you see out of the corner of your eyes but disappear if you
look away quick enough and never look back.
95
Valance Nation
By Richard King Perkins II
Listen. My black voice slices deepest water, breaks beams of sunlight
apart. Heat escapes; you live for a night in a vacuum of soul. Shrink-wrap
compression in moonlight, it breathes on tight-lipped ice; coarse, cutting,
freed. My actual presence revives from the outside-in, calms wolf-pack
frenzy, hardening your nipples, the petrification of saccharine stone. You
breathe in, grimacing with fractures, plied together with ringlets of dust,
ready to burst apart into the pearly crux of new, amateur constellations.
You dread the personality of night and ask a stranger to erase stars from
the windshield. Sonograms begin speaking to you with shadowy intent
and your mouth tastes iron at the back of your throat, becoming flavor
behind your knees. You try to avoid the revelations held in the freshest,
black umbrella, but by holding back, you uncover yourself further.
Tomorrow night, it will still be out there, carried by an eastern wind. You
fear its leaving as much as its arrival. A new age creeps inexorably toward
you, desperate to be reclaimed.
Grease Poet
By Richard King Perkins II
Carl the mechanic
was the first poet
I ever met—
livin' at home
takin' a few classes
at the local CC
I think us younger guys
in the neighborhood
kinda looked up to him
because he was sort
of a regular guy
but when he
96
came out cryin' one day
and showed us his
first publication
he sniffed that he'd
tried to show
his old man
what he'd done
and all the old drunk
could do was laugh
and drip snot
all over the pages
Carl said this was typical
of how people
treated poets
which was why I knew
I'd never be one
so I asked Carl
to pop the hood
of the Charger
and show me
the spark plugs
or something.
97
The Arsenal Acclimation
By David Pamment
Acclimation: “to adapt or become accustomed to a new climate or
environment” (Collins English Dictionary).
‘I call it the “Arsenal Acclimation”,’ proclaimed Henry Johnson, with the
pompous self assurance of a man who knew his audience would hang
on his every word. He liked to pretend people listened to him out of
respect for his intelligence and wit and because they valued his wisdom;
in truth it was out of fear.
This evening’s audience was a select gathering of precisely two
people. The first, a hired gorilla crammed into a designer suit, was one
of Henry Johnson’s bruisers. His name was unimportant, his role was
twofold: to protect his employer from anyone foolhardy enough to
attack him; and to provide a silent but all too visible reminder of the real
reason why Mr Johnson should be “respected”. The other member of
the group was Arthur Haskell and he too played a considerable part in
maintaining the fear with which he was regarded. In contrast to the
fairly pricey designer suit of the bodyguard and the horrendously
expensive handmade “Saville Row” number sported by Johnson himself,
Arthur wore a cheap polyester car coat and a pair of equally cheap and
equally polyester trousers, the kind with an elasticated waist band.
Arthur was the living embodiment of humbleness. Much like “Uriah
Heep” in Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” he was “a very umble
person”, and while he would never claim, as Uriah did, to be the “the
umblest person going”, he was quite content to be the humble soul he
appeared. As with Dickens’ Heep , Arthur had a father whose “former
calling was umble”, albeit the elder Heep had been a sexton while
Haskell senior had plied his trade as an undertaker.
Something else Arthur Haskell had in common with Uriah was the
fact that beneath that umble...sorry...humble veneer lurked something
sinister, something dangerous. Uriah Heep had been a scoundrel, a
swindler and a thief; Arthur Haskell was, simply put, an assassin. He had
98
plied his own deadly yet successful trade for over twenty years, the last
seven of which he’d spent entirely in the employ of Henry Johnson. It
was this exclusivity, insisted upon by Johnson at the outset of their
relationship, that was the subject of this meeting. Although he received
a considerable retainer the bulk of Arthur’s earnings came from the
hefty bonus he received on the satisfactory completion of each
assignment. Not only had those jobs dried up of late, Arthur also
suspected his employer of using another hit man in his stead.
Before we travel any further along the "Yellow Brick Road" of this
tale, I must confess to having started its recounting somewhat in the
middle. As Glinda, the Good Witch of the "Wizard of Oz"' so rightly said:
"It's always best to start at the beginning". With this in mind it is
necessary to retrace our steps some five hundred yards and
approximately twenty-five minutes to the true beginning of our story.
It was nine o’clock on Christmas Eve. Dark, scudding clouds
populated an even darker sky, depositing a cold, penetrating drizzle on
the world below. As a shadowy figure entered the tunnel which took
both the footpath he trod and the road it accompanied under the
Victorian railway viaduct above him, he could not help but notice the
walls within were no less dry than those outside. Rivulets of slimy green
water ran down the pockmarked, flaking stones and crumbling, mossshrouded mortar, while over his head corrupted stalactites hung down
like the petrified ooze from a rotting corpse.
Prior to entering this dank portal Arthur Haskell, a.k.a. "the shadowy
figure", had parked his car close to a neat row of shops, a bank and
several small restaurants that marked the beginning of a small
community of flats, houses, a church and two pubs clustered about the
intersection of two roads, one of which led directly to the tunnel. As he
exited the archway, however, there was nothing but the disbanded
remains of a former council depot which once utilised the enclosed
spaces below the arches on this side of the railway line. So overgrown
had this abandoned site become not even the gateway was visible,
hidden as it was beneath an overgrown screen of crawling brambles,
interwoven blackberry bushes and displaced saplings.
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The Arsenal Acclimation: David Pamment
Arthur was no stranger to the area and, having checked up and down
the darkened road to ensure he was unobserved, he slipped through a
gap in the tangled mass of foliage that lined up perfectly with a hole in
the rusting chain link fence surrounding the defunct depot. Taking a
small torch from his pocket he made his way carefully along the
potholed, cracked and weed choked tarmac that fronted the disused
railway arches, avoiding as he did so the detritus of broken glass, rotting
wood and corroded metal that littered the ground.
His years of experience warned him of the presence lurking unseen
in the darkness even before it spoke.
'Is that you Arfur?' asked the voice in an exaggerated whisper.
'You'd be dead if I weren't,' replied Arthur curtly. 'What are you
doing out here Charlie? Shouldn't you be inside monitoring the
cameras?'
"Inside" referred to one of the units further along the row. From the
outside it looked as derelict as the rest, but it was here that Henry
Johnson conducted business of a kind less conducive to his public
persona of an honest and hardworking entrepreneur. The well
disguised cameras of Henry's security system monitored the hidden
gateway to the depot, the roadway leading to his hidey-hole and the
entrance itself, as well as the crypt like interior of the former vehicle
workshop. There were additional cameras in two further locations, one
of which was unknown to even Henry himself, but more of that later.
'The bleedin' computer's gone down,' Charlie explained. 'Clint is
trying to fix it before the guvnor gets 'ere.'
Clint, like Charlie, was one of Henry Johnson's minders. More used
to thumping faces with their fists than typing on keyboards with their
fingers the delicacies of modern technology was neither's forte.
'I know a bit about computers and stuff,' said Arthur. 'Let's go inside
and see if we can't get it sorted before the boss turns up.'
'Cheers Arfur,' the heavy replied. 'You're a pal.'
As they walked through the darkness Arthur asked:
‘So how’s the wife and nippers Charlie?’
100
‘Cassie’s fine,’ the thug replied, a less than thuggish smile on his face.
‘She’s seven now, we’ve started her in ballet classes. Dominic started
school in September, he’s loving it.’
‘And the wife?’ Arthur prompted.
‘Oh Cher’s alright. Missing the kids now they’re both at school.
Watch yer step Arfur,’ he warned, ‘this bit by the door is a real so-andso.’
‘Do you think he’s here yet?’ queried Arthur.
‘Nah, Clint would have radioed if he was.’
When Henry Johnson eventually did arrive it would not be via the
torturous route Charlie and Arthur had just negotiated. On the far side
of the viaduct, adjacent to the rear wall of the arch which housed the
long deceased workshop, stood a car dealership legitimately owned and
run by Henry. Not even the cops in unmarked patrol cars who regularly
kept an eye on the place knew the significance of the abandoned units
beneath the viaduct. Nor did they know that in a toilet cubicle at the
rear of the showroom, a building which just happened to have been
built smack against the Victorian edifice itself, there was a cunningly
concealed doorway that led through the wall and into Henry's secret
realm.
On the legitimate side of that “Bond villain-esque” egress the
dealership's staff and customers Christmas party was currently in full
swing with Mr Henry Johnson himself overseeing the festivities. It
would take a matter of moments for him to slink away from the merry
gathering, enter the WC, uncover the hidden exit and pass from the
polished facade of respectability to the dark underworld where his true
business dealings were conducted. It was this very domain that Arthur
and Charlie now entered.
'Clint,' barked Charlie, ‘keep an eye on things outside while me and
Arfur sort this mess out. And don’t forget to take the bleedin’ radio wiv
yer. Do you really think you can fix it Arfur?'
'Let's just see shall we,' answered the newly promoted Head of I.T.
Arthur pressed a few buttons at random on the keyboard, tutted
once or twice, shook his head a time or two, then crawled under the
101
workstation itself. As he'd suspected one of the lumbering gorillas had
disturbed the power cable beneath the desk.
'Try pressing "Control-Alt-Delete",' he suggested. 'Anything?'
'Nah - nuffin',' came the not unexpected response.
'Go round the back and try jiggling a few wires.'
While a distracted Charlie did precisely that Arthur slipped a small
revolver, complete with silencer, from inside his coat. Hiding it behind
the desk's freestanding pedestal unit he called out:
'Press the enter key a few times, see if that helps.'
As Charlie walked back to the front of the desk Arthur reconnected
the power cable.
'Hooray!' cried Charlie. 'It worked.'
Not a moment too soon. As the computer monitor flickered back
into life one of four simultaneous views from the live camera feeds
showed Henry Johnson entering the toilet cubicle in the showroom on
the other side of the viaduct wall.
'Clint get back 'ere now!' shouted Charlie into the walkie-talkie.
Turning to Arthur he announced:
'I'll 'ave to frisk you Arfur, rules is rules.'
'I promise you I'm not packing,' Arthur assured him. 'But as you say,
rules is rules.'
Even as Clint stepped through the door at the front Henry Johnson
arrived via his secret entrance at the rear. Neither the guests at the
party nor any prying policeman would have the slightest clue to his
whereabouts.
'Ah Arthur,' he called, 'give me a minute to get settled and then
come in. Clint, you're with me. Charlie, you keep an eye on the
cameras.'
'Sure thing,' said Charlie eagerly. 'No problems there, Mr Johnson.
No problems at all.' The latter statement was accompanied by a
grateful glance at Arthur.
Five minutes later Arthur sat in a partitioned enclosure at the rear of
the redundant workshop which had once served as the supervisor’s
office. The bruiser whose name was formerly of no importance but we
now know to be Clint was in position by the door. In the midst of a
102
monologue Henry Johnson, our outwardly legitimate business man, sat
on the far side of a shabby desk which, along with the dismal
surroundings, contrasted wildly with his fine tailored suit and the thick,
heavy, diamond encrusted gold adorning his neck, wrist and fingers. On
the desk rested Henry’s signature glass of Hine "Triomphe" cognac,
while between his gesticulating fingers was his trademark Cobilo "Siglo
VI" cigar. Neither the expensive cognac nor the luxury cigars had been
offered to Arthur.
The business relationship twixt Arthur Haskell and Henry Johnson
had begun in earnest exactly seven years earlier, on Christmas Eve 2005,
with a job Arthur still viewed not so much as an assassination but rather
as an exercise in straightforward murder. As with all his assignments
Arthur clearly remembered the details. Henry’s niece Isobel, or Izzy as
she was usually known, had died of a cocaine overdose; Henry
demanded the death of the drug dealer in return. The dealer’s name
was Jake Marlow, ratted out by his partner in crime, Eddie Scuds. It was
Eddie who’d lured Jake to a location specified by Henry, it was Henry
who’d sent Arthur to shoot him. Where was the skill in that?
Arthur had always thought of himself as more than just a specialist,
more than just an expert in his chosen profession, but rather something
greater, something higher. In his own mind Arthur was a death dealing
connoisseur, a veritable artisan midst the humdrum ranks of the world’s
other hired hit men, past and present alike.
His art was not just in the killing of someone, any idiot could do that,
but was in the way he went about it. Being an assassin was all about the
game. It was about researching the subject, his work life, his home life,
his history, his hobbies, his pastimes, his family, his colleagues, his
habits, his movements (I say "his" but "her" would be just as
appropriate; Arthur included several women amongst his hits and when
it came to death he was a firm believer in equality for all). It was about
fastidious planning and precise execution (no pun intended).
The need for this degree of detail was twofold. On a professional
level, it made for the perfect hit: perfect timing, perfect location,
perfect getaway, and, if so required, the perfect impact. On a personal,
and ultimately far deeper level, Arthur insisted that he had to know a
103
life before he took it. Simply eliminating the target would be akin to the
actions of one of that strange breed known as lepidopterists, quite
content to kill a butterfly, pin it to a file card and store it away. Arthur
on the other hand would have to know what it looked like in flight,
where it flew, what it fed upon, if it lived as a solitary creature or as one
of many, how close it had come to meeting its end in the sticky embrace
of a spider's web.
'I beg your pardon?' queried Arthur, returning both to the moment in
hand and to the point at which we originally started.
'I call it the "Arsenal Acclimation",' repeated Henry, just as
pompously as when he’d said it, or rather proclaimed it, the first time.
'Look, there was a time, not so long ago I might add, when an Arsenal
supporter like me could fully expect the Gunners to win a flippin’ trophy
or two. Take the league; five times we won it sixteen years. Up to ‘04
that was and included the FA Cup double in ‘02.’
‘Marvellous,’ Arthur remarked unenthusiastically. ‘Do go on.’
‘I intend to, and don’t interrupt. Between '98 and '05 we were
league runners up five times and won the FA Cup four times. We won
the Cup Winners Cup in ‘94 and made the final in '80 and '95. For
Christ's sake we even made the Champions' League final in 2006 and if
that crazy Kraut goalkeeper hadn't got himself sent off we'd have won
the whole bleedin’ thing most likely!'
'What's all that got to do with me?' interjected Arthur once Henry
finally paused for breath.
'What it has to do with you,' Henry replied, 'is that things come along
in life that require some form of acclimation on our part. I've had to
acclimate to the fact that Arsenal will never win anything or even come
second for that matter. We've come third or fourth every year for the
past seven years, and one of those was down to the fact I poisoned the
opposition on the last day of the season. Look at us today, fourth place
and level on points with flipping West Brom in seventh. It's only effin
Christmas and we're already thirteen points behind United and nine
behind City. So now I'm having to acclimate to the fact that we may be
becoming nothing more than a top six or seven outfit.
104
'That my friend,’ he concluded, ‘is the "Arsenal Acclimation". You on
the other hand,' he said, jabbing a finger in the hit man’s direction, 'are
faced with the "Arthur Acclimation." '
'"The Arthur Acclimation"?' repeated Arthur wearily, ignoring the
poorly concealed snigger from Clint the bodyguard. Much though
Arthur loved fancy words, “lepidopterist” not least amongst them,
Henry’s unrelenting use of the words “acclimate” and “acclimation” was
beginning to grate on his nerves.
'Indeed,' Johnson replied. 'Arsenal will seemingly no longer win
trophies, not even what Wenger claims is the “trophy” of finishing
fourth, and Arthur Haskell will no longer be getting first dibs on any jobs
I need doing. He will however accept those jobs he does get and be
damned happy doing them. Acclimate Arthur, acclimate. On that note,'
Henry pronounced, 'you are free to leave. Happy Christmas Arthur.'
Like a naughty schoolboy castigated by the headmaster Arthur rose
from his chair and walked out into the gloom of the workshop. As he
neared the desk by the front door he saw that Charlie was engrossed in
the single CCTV image now filling the computer screen in front of him.
Arthur recognised it as a view of the ladies’ lavatory in Henry’s car
dealership. This was the camera that not even the boss was aware of;
the camera which Charlie, having blackmailed the installation guy to set
it up, used to spy on the showroom's female staff and customers. With
tonight's part he’d been presented with a banquet of voyeuristic
delights.
Even as Arthur approached on silent feet behind him, Charlie
revelled in the sight of an unsuspecting blonde as she raised the hem of
her party frock above her waist, pulled her miniscule panties down to
her knees (revealing as she did so a neatly trimmed display of nonblonde pubic hair) and hovered over the toilet. A low growl of wolfish
pleasure escaped Charlie’s lips the instant an evening’s worth of white
wine escaped from between the blonde/brunette’s thighs and into the
bowl below.
Arthur had always kind of liked Charlie; the disturbing sight before
him would make it all the easier to do what he was now about to do.
'Cameras still working Charlie?' he asked innocently.
105
‘Sure they are,' the peeping pervert stammered in reply,
surreptitiously switching back to the multi-screen view of the other
camera feeds as he did so.
'Good,' said Arthur quietly. 'Let me just check everything's battened
down and I’ll be off. No need to get up,' he continued, squeezing under
the desk.
Arthur retrieved the gun from behind the pedestal, placed the
muzzle against the seated Charlie's stomach...and fired.
'Hey,' squeaked Charlie, 'what did you punch me in the gut for?'
He died never knowing he had in fact been shot, never knowing the
answer to his question. Immediate and catastrophic internal bleeding
rendered him quickly unconscious and very soon dead. Arthur crawled
out from under the desk and headed back to Henry Johnson's meeting
room. As he drew near Clint moved to block the doorway.
'The boss told you to leave,' he sneered. 'I sugge....'
Arthur's silenced pistol spat instant, whispering death directly
between the bodyguard's eyes; Arthur had always been proud of his
accuracy.
'What in tarnation?' cried Johnson, dropping his expensive cigar and
spilling his cognac.
'Hey Henry,' said Arthur, aiming the pistol straight at his employer’s
heart and squeezing the trigger. 'Acclimate this!'
106
Poems About American Road
By Tom Pescatore
got that pit in my gut running
entrails like the gray road spun
beneath my tires, that uneasy
nervous tick before setting off
hands on wheel, so different
in my imaginings than cool
relaxed reality of humming miles
eventual ends, dreams again-they told me, "write a book about America!"
so I wrote one about myself-I get where I'm going
daydreaming, weaving
involuntarily, unconsciously
working on learned motion
subliminal practice,
hours miles feet seconds exits
are you wandering still?
throwing your voice across the mountain,
I gotta get my head right,
it's not so long now,
it's not so long,
before I'm
gone.
107
Poetry: Tom Pescatore
Intergalactic Hitch
By Tom Pescatore
hollow skeleton hobo
poets hang on branches
in the sun, weightless
like bird's wings
flapping old toothless
jaws, readin' with
archaic sounds,
swinging torn shoes,
biting tin collars,
up on the wire
handkerchief to break
impending fall, over
all beady heads
singing songs,
tweed jackets like
lightning spark up
a breeze, a fantasy
shower, there's not much
left in this dimension gate
they gotta be going
no one listening no one
believing,
there, out there,
beyond that golden orb
is another galaxy far gone
ears and eyes
to turn on
flowers to give
gardens to sow.
108
The Legend of Karkinos
By Ben Nardolilli
I’m on the bus now and it’s no use. Those who call themselves my
followers are getting on board, determined to go with me wherever I
lead. They don’t know I’m not leading. I’m fleeing. Fleeing them, fleeing
Bayville, fleeing the whole business with the lobster festival and the
Prophet Stan.
Jesus, someone just got on asking where the Prophet Jonathan is
sitting. No need for the driver to point, he sees me and he’s
approaching. I already know what he’s going to say. Nothing. He’s not
going to say anything and he’s just going to sit next to the others. It
doesn’t even matter if the only available seat has a strange orange crust
on it. This fool will sit on it with pride.
These people have already created a story for themselves. They have
made the last month’s events holy. I don’t know how they did it. As far
as I can tell, the whole thing began with a mistake. Whose? Maybe
mine. Maybe Stan’s. Maybe it was Bayville’s. I know I only got suckered
into this town because of their inability to clear away the vegetation
around their welcome sign.
Hopefully today will be the last time I see it. Maybe it’ll be more
overgrown with weeds than when I first saw it. How long has it been?
Weeks? Days? I can’t tell. The festival is still going on. It shouldn’t be but
it is. That damn festival was the start of all this trouble. Not my mistake.
Not the sign. It was the festival.
The Lobster Festival. Hearing it makes my skin crawl like… well, like
lobsters are moving across it. Not crabs. It was crabs I wanted and
lobsters I got instead. I should’ve moved on as soon as I made my
mistake but I stayed. Why didn’t I keep going on? I settled for less and I
settled for the Prophet Stan. I guess it was a pride thing. The Prophet
made me look better. He made me feel smarter. Now that he’s dead he
makes me look holier and I hate it.
Driver, roll up the windows please. I don’t want to smell the melted
butter. It’s rancid by the time it reaches us and the lobsters are rotten
109
The Legend of Karkinos: Ben Nardolilli
too. The people are no better either. I didn’t come here for lobster so I
don’t want to smell it ever again. Free me from that. What does it
matter? All the other people in the bus smell like cheap bisque.
It’s clear that a whole storm of things went bad. Why blame one
thing more than another? A series of mishaps and misunderstanding.
Each one built off the other. It’s lead to this: me being called the
Prophet Jonathan. I came to Bayville thinking it was Bayport. Bayville
probably thinks it’s Bayport too. That’s why they don’t clear the sign.
You can read the Bay part but the rest is unclear. You can still see a
lighthouse and half of some aquatic crustacean though.
Bayville has a lighthouse. That’s true. They’re not lying about that. It
still works. How many ships it keeps safe at night, I don’t know. The
engine is broken so it only shines in one direction. Thankfully it’s out to
sea. I’d hate to be stuck in Eddie’s Motel again, dealing with bed bugs all
over and at the same time also losing sleep over a bright beam of fixed
light pouring through the curtains. I might’ve done something very bad
to Bayville.
I could still well do it. Bayville got in the way of Bayport. All I wanted
to do was go to the Fruit of the Sea festival there. Back in those days I
had a hankering for crab cakes and I heard from someone down at the
temp agency Bayport had the best. I looked into the event and noticed
they had other things as well. All the major groups of seafood had some
form of representation. Mussels, clams, fish, shrimp, eels, and squid.
Everything except lobster. It didn’t state so on the website but it’s clear.
Bayville took all the lobster.
I didn’t know that then. I wasn’t even really looking for lobster,
figuring it would be too expensive for me. I needed to make sure I had
enough money for the bus fare and motel. After work on Thursday, I
packed my bags, declared I was going on vacation, and got on a bus
which looked a lot like this one. It could be the same, except the seats
on this one don’t seem to recline.
Along the way there, I noticed people dressed up and ready for a
seafood feast. They wore bibs, held mallets in their hands, and carried
spare lemons and packets of butter in their pockets. A few had sailor’s
caps on their heads. One man was dressed in a slick yellow raincoat and
110
black boots, as if he was ready to scour the sea for its edible treasures in
case the festival was a bust.
When the bus pulled into what I thought was Bayport, half of the
passengers got off. So I followed them like an idiot, thinking they had to
know where to go. Well, they did know something. They knew how to
get to Lobster Fest. Until then, there was a brief window of hope and
rising expectations.
I’ve never been to Bayport. I’m sure it’s lovely. Bayville might be
lovely too. Just not at this time of year. Everything’s buried under
lobster this or that bric-a-brac. I should’ve read the signs better,
especially after I ignored the main sign at the entrance of the town.
Instead, I was taken in by the crowds and the decorations. A band
played. The smell of hot butter and spices filled the air. I should’ve
noticed the complete lack of plastic crabs amidst the sea of fake
lobsters.
Oh there were lobster lights dangling between every post. There
were lobsters on every t-shirt. Lobster license plates on every car. Girls
had lobsters on their bikinis, which I can’t fault them for. Who would
want to wear crabs on their bikini bottoms? I guess clams would be out
of the question too.
After turning past the church, I went up Market Street and saw the
festival in the distance. I still had to walk down Bay Street to get there,
but I saw it. Like all festivals it looked haphazard and ramshackle except
for the fact the stalls were arranged on a grid. But that was okay.
Festivals don’t need to look stable. They just need to look fun. From the
distance, this one did. So the planners did their job.
I paid my entrance fee and a woman wearing overalls and a straw
hat gave me a necklace to wear. I thought it was a lei with little plastic
red lobsters dangling from it. Looking at it some more, I realized the
flowers weren’t flowers at all. The red and white bits were supposed to
be pieces of lobster meat. Of course, they weren’t. It was fake. I bit into
it to make sure.
Another problem with Bayville’s Lobster Fest is that they don’t
advertise it. Not there in the town they don’t. If you’re there the
assumption everybody makes is that you’re already in the know. None
111
of the people there ever stopped to think a person might, just might be
lost and at the wrong seafood themed event. Because walking towards
the festival, I had no idea what I was looking at. There was no sign
overhead saying “welcome to Lobster Fest!” There was just a sign saying
“welcome!” And that was it. There wasn’t a lobster on it either. Just a
claw or a pincer waving at you. The lack of details meant it could’ve
belonged to any edible crustacean. It was attached to an arch made of
red balloons. My hair stood up on its end walking under it because of
the static buildup. I can’t say for certain, but I think the town fathers
and mothers planned it this way. They wanted the visitors to think they
were more excited than they actually were when entering.
After I patted my hair down, I made my way to the main row. It was
lined with tents, tables, and makeshift storefronts. Giant tanks filled
with dirty blue water held piles of lobsters. I stopped at a few and
looked at the creatures. They seemed healthy enough and desperate to
get out. One place tried to outdo the others with its tank. For a few
dollars, I could operate a claw to pull out the lobster of my choosing. I
didn’t play. The thought of claw on claw action sickened me and I
walked on.
While the main drag focused on lobster, there were side alleys and
mews to explore as well. I went down each and every one of them. I
thought I might find where they were selling all the other forms of
seafood. At each stall I asked for clams, mussels, and fried fish. Most
importantly I asked for crab cakes. Each time I found nothing but lobster
or things meant to go with the lobster.
At the end of the one of these sections there was a giant vat of
coleslaw for the taking. Well, it was for the taking if you bought enough
lobster. I didn’t want lobster even if it came with complimentary sides,
so I paid for a small carton to take with me. As I ate it, I found where
they served the beer. None of the brands were fancy. Every last one of
them was cheap and clear. So I decided to get a cup of each and call it a
sampler.
None of them were great but the effect remained the same. Warm
inside and feeling hazy, I drifted through the festival some more. The
sight was sickening. I watched lobster after lobster pulled from the
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tanks and boiled alive. It seemed so cruel. Then there was the sound of
all the cracking people did as they tore into shell after shell. The sound
never bothered me before. This time though, I couldn’t stand it.
Yeah, I know that people eat crabs the same way. They boil them too
and then crack them open with mallets. It looks even more brutal from
a distance. I guess it’s the way we eat lobster without so many tools.
You go at it with your bare hands and just rip the meat out. Yet there
are ways to process it, like crabs in cakes. You can make a lobster roll. I
saw a lot of those there and ended up hanging around a stand that sold
them. It seemed more civilized.
When I realized I was lost, my troubles began. Confusion overcame
me. Disorientation as well. Suddenly I had no idea where I was and the
tanks full of lobsters started to scare me. I was sick of them and wanted
what I had come to Bayport for. Except that I wasn’t in Bayport, I was in
Bayville. Drunk me didn’t know that yet, though he suspected
something was amiss. I drank some more, thinking that if I reached a
magic number of cups consumed it would unlock things. Instead, I
learned where the port-o-johns were and where the line started and
ended. People who’ve been eating lobster all day get really testy when
they think you’re cutting in front of them.
The sun didn’t make things any better. It reached that pinnacle in the
sky which caused all the shadows to go hiding under the tents. So the
merchants had plenty of shade but I was burning up. I tried to stand in
the back to cool off, often hiding behind a lobster tank. Each time they
found me and drove me away. I’d like to think this was what got me
kicked out of Lobster Fest. The truth is, I was getting belligerent, asking
for, then demanding crabcakes. Nobody had them. To placate me, one
woman tried to make a fake crabcake using lobster. She thought I
wouldn’t know the difference. I wasn’t that drunk.
Eventually guards were called and they hauled me off the premises.
You can bet they were dressed for the occasion, wearing giant red
costumes complete with claws and antennae. I wished they left the
claws out and just used their bare hands. I still have red marks on my
arms from what they did to me. At least the grass they tossed me onto
was soft. I landed, dusted myself off, and tried to take some stock of my
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new surroundings. I lost the festival but gained Bayville. I’ve never been
to Bayport yet, but I somehow knew Bayville was just a knockoff of it.
Before I could go back to town, I noticed a man with a long black beard,
bald shiny head, and a sign denouncing Lobster Fest. I went up to him
and took some of his literature.
It was hard to read for two reasons. First, the ink was smudged. If we
weren’t at Lobster Fest, I would’ve thought a nearby nervous squid had
the runs all over it. Second, it was on top of sheets of either neon pink
or green paper. Few people took the handouts and those who did let
them rain down onto the grass. I looked at the pile and in my stupor
thought they looked like leaves fallen from radioactive trees. I must've
been in an apocalyptic mode too. When I started actually putting the
words on the handouts together in my head, it all started to make sense
to me. I felt a burning in my bosom over it.
It only lasted for a few minutes. When it was over, I reread what was
on the ground. None of it made any sense to me. I agreed with the
heading, that Lobster Fest was evil, and it went downhill from there. The
reasons why it was evil weren't clear. A lack of crab or crabcakes
weren't mentioned at all. Instead, the guy handing out the flyers said we
were eating food which God thought was an abomination based on
something he read in the Bible. I figured that since gay marriage is
pretty much going forward with hitch after hitch, these types have to
find some other kind of human happiness to ruin.
The man stopped his ranting and passing out flyers for a moment. He
looked at me with these great brown eyes. They looked like a horses
eyes. While I noticed his beard before, I didn’t notice the rest of what he
had on his body. There was a giant gold cross around his neck and a
bright forest green robe on his body.
I introduced myself. The one though not only Jonathan West. He said
his name was technically Stavros. Everyone called him the Prophet Stan.
I asked him what he was doing. Didn’t I read the pamphlets and the
papers, he asked? Didn’t I read his sign? I did, I told him. But it wasn’t
enough. Abomination is such a strong word yet it doesn’t really describe
much. Just a feeling of disgust. Very strong disgust.
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He huffed and puffed like a prophet should. Hadn’t I read my Bible? I
read a Bible, I told him. Maybe it wasn’t the same one. Stan said he was
talking about Leviticus. The old laws. I said I wasn’t too familiar with
them but my Bible was a very big book. It was possible there was
something like that in its pages. Stan pulled out his Bible from under the
robe and opened it up to a dog-eared set of pages. We sat down on the
grass and read them together.
I wasn’t converted but I could see where he was coming from. While
he believed all seafood was an abomination, except some kinds of fish,
at the time Stan was just focused on lobsters. This was a cause I could
get behind. So we went down to the local dry gods store, bought some
supplies, and then went to his room at the local motel. We spent the
afternoon making a sign for me. When we were finished, it told people
not to eat the lobster because it was Satan’s creation. He drew a lobster
under the words. I added horns and a sinister goatee to it.
Right as we left the motel to show off our new protest materials, it
started raining. I stood under an awning but the Prophet Stan stood out
in the middle of the parking lot. As it poured, he danced up and down.
Every nearby puddle received a splashing from him. He was wet but he
was happy. See, he said, it was a sign. God was angry with Lobster Fest
and the rain showed it. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just
applauded and got him to come inside.
Back in the room, he dried his clothes. His underwear was wet too,
so he took that off. To stay modest, Stan took a bedsheet and draped it
around his wiry frame. I pointed out that it looked like a toga. Stan was
horrified. He didn’t want to wear any “Pontius Pilate” nonsense. He
changed how it hung on his body until I said now he looked like Bedouin
herdsman. It was good enough for Stan.
He did not have much in the way of provisions in his tiny room. He
did offer me the bed for my first night in Bayville. It was the first of
several acts of kindness. The next was offering me half of the uneaten
pizza. We made a repast from it. After dinner, Stan noticed the rain was
over. He went back outside and spotted a rainbow bending in the
distance over some nearby pine trees. It was a good omen. According to
him, our work was blessed.
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Looking at the rainbow, I too thought the work was blessed. Just for
a moment. When the night came and the rainbow disappeared, I
remembered my true motivation. I wanted to punish Lobster Fest with
bad publicity. I wanted to punish Bayville for its duplicity. Exactly how
my sign would do this, I don’t know. I also didn’t know how getting rid
of Lobster Fest was going to get me any closer to crabcakes.
From that morning on, the two of us became a fixture. We held up
our signs, promoted Leviticus, and handed out what barely passed for
“literature.” I guess we could use that term since it was modified by
being part of a “campaign.” Of course there were only two of us, so a
true campaign we were not.
I didn’t want Stan to suspect anything, so I became passionate. I was
already angry about the lobster thing, but I didn’t need to get God
involved. With Stan, that changed. I took on the role of a zealot, making
him look pretty moderate by comparison. My voice was loud and when I
handed people our literature, I did so with the most violent thrust I
could manage. In fact I was the moderate one. The people on the bus
don’t understand that. It’s my fault too. I never told them I was just
against lobsters. I had no quarrel with crabs.
It took a while for anyone to take us seriously. I was surprised when
they did. The Prophet Stan wasn’t, of course. It was just a matter of
time. I broke the seal. Or whatever it was that kept people from siding
with him. Once he won me over, or thought he did, then anyone else
could come along. I’m condensing it all here. But after about a week
there were five people who joined us. The names escape me now. The
faces do too. I remember that they had all gotten sick off some
undercooked lobster. They read the wrath of God into it as soon as they
read our signs.
By this time, I was impressed Lobster Fest was still going on. I
thought it would be a temporary thing. I started to think maybe our very
protesting it made it go longer. Somehow the town fathers were just
trying to spite us. More than anything I was impressed there was
enough local lobster to keep the whole thing going. Yes, I know most of
it was probably shipped in from across the ocean. But still. I didn’t think
it would go on for more than a few days.
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Every day after the protests, all of us went back to the motel. We
took turns sleeping in different places. There was the bed, and the space
by the door, along with another space by the TV. Other than that, one
could sleep in the closet with a head perched against the wall. Oh, and
someone slept in the tub. The Prophet Stan was good about it. He
always picked the tub if no one else wanted it. I guess he was either a
really good sleeper, or trying to sacrifice his comfort for our sake. Most
of the time I was either in front of the TV or the door. The welcome mat
made for a decent pillow, even if it was scratchy.
I was obviously the number two guy in the movement. It became
more obvious as we grew. I was in charge of getting supplies and I
designed the signs. While I kept referring to Leviticus and God’s wrath. I
made sure we only attacked lobsters, not all seafood. As the protests
went on, the others asked me why I hated lobster so much. I lied and
made up stories of them being bottom feeders. They were filthy animals
used to clean septic tanks on ships.
Because of my little stories, I started to get people to join the protest
who liked me more than Stan. They waited for my orders. They followed
my rules. The Prophet Stan was so above it all he was never concerned.
But Randall, who followed Stan more than me, accused me of watering
down the message. He said I was obsessed with lobsters and not
enough with clams and oysters. And certainly not with crabs.
He didn’t get a chance to inquisition me. We got the notice of an
animal rights group and they joined our demonstrations. They thought
the whole thing was wrong for a different reason but we hung out
enough so in the end it all mixed together. Our original group became
concerned about boiling lobsters alive and the rights people started
getting into Leviticus. I was the only one who disliked both of these
positions. I didn’t care how they cooked the lobsters or what the Bible
said about them. I just wanted crabcakes.
News cameras came by and reporters wanted our opinions. They
tried to get as much of the Prophet Stan’s words down that they could.
It was difficult to follow what he said in public. In private he was no
different. As long as he was in prophet mode, he slipped into a lot of
colorful language, citing all kinds of passages, and invoking the fates of
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long-dead empires. The media started coming to me for explanations
and I provided them as best I could.
Soon, I was getting all the interviews and coverage. Stan was just
another protestor. Everyone knew he started the whole thing but I was
easier to follow. I should’ve avoided it altogether. Randall could’ve done
the same speeches and done a heartfelt job at that. I just pretended to
be a prophet while toning it down. If Stan was a rock n’roller, I was a
pop star. He was raw and I was slick.
By becoming such a public face for things, I got more abuse from
passersby. Worse, I got people who came to hear me speak because
they thought I had all the answers, at least when it came to seafood,
because when people got sick eating lobster and heard me cursing it,
they found me appealing. They sat at my feet and whenever I stopped
and tried to get Stan to talk to them, they started getting back up and
going to the festival. Nobody liked his style.
The Prophet Stan finally said something that made us all take notice.
Not just us, but the whole of Bayville as well. One afternoon, he stood
on top of a picnic table and announced the end was nigh. Those weren’t
his exact words. “The end is nigh,” is what he actually said because he
said it in the present at the time. He didn’t explain what he meant. He
just said it, stepped down, and continued to preach at people. We
waited for the clarification, in case he had something else to say; maybe
some instructions about what was coming. There was nothing. Randall
calmly approached him and tried to get the Prophet Stan to open up.
For just one moment, he wanted his hero to break away from preaching
and explain things clearly. Instead, Stan just repeated what he had said.
“The end is nigh.”
The local gazette caught wind of the claim and started covering him.
From there, panic started to spread in the town. Not that anyone
thought Stan knew the future. They were worried about us, his
followers. Was the phrase some kind of code word to get us to take up
arms and start a crusade? The media seemed to think we were all
mindless drones he could activate at the drop of a few words. And since
they thought so low of us, the town fathers did too.
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Now, plenty of us did start arming ourselves in response to Stan’s
words. I didn’t. I’m not good with weapons. They got some handguns
and boards with spikes in them. There was a Molotov cocktail or two
amongst the group as well. Randall was their leader. I wouldn’t say I led
the rest of the group. The animal rights people seemed to have their
own collective mind, even if they were leaderless. No one led the herd.
They just sort of figured when to act and how. Which means I can’t
blame any one of them more than the other for what happened.
This faction was worried about possible violence. It did not matter if
we started it or the authorities did. They wanted to see the festival
destroyed, but they didn’t want to kill anybody to do it. They also didn’t
want to lose their right to protest. The cynical part of me thinks they
also didn’t want to lose something to protest over. That’s just my theory
though. How the people running Lobster Fest go to them I don’t know.
All I know is that the two of them came to some kind of mutual
understanding. Maybe nothing was said. It was all winks and nods.
That’s how the animal rights group tended to communicate among
themselves when Stan was present.
The plan of action was simple, get rid of Stan Karkinos and any of his
followers who might resist or seek revenge. Then let the animal rights
people protest to their heart’s delight without any religious baggage.
One night in the motel, I think they tried to see how faithful I was. They
talked to me and Randall out in the parking lot. Someone passed around
a joint. I took a hit. Randall didn’t. I think that saved my life. They
figured I wasn’t a threat. I wouldn’t get in the way. Plus, while I was
high I tried to order a seafood pizza at Gino’s, the local greasy Italian
place. The only thing stopping me was the cost. Then I sobered up and
realized what I was doing. I begged the group for forgiveness until I
realized they knew the truth and were fine with it.
The town fathers and mothers got to Randall too. I wasn’t there for it
all, but I think the double crossing went like this. They told him the
animal rights people would kill Stan and he needed to be hidden at a
secret location. Why did he trust them? Because he was worried the
rights people were the ones who would get out of control. He also
hated vegetarians. I think it was from dating a vegan in college or
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something. So one night he got Stavros to go with him to a warehouse
down by the docks. He was convinced the animal group was going to
finally act.
True, I later learned about all these details from the local gazette.
They might be a little off but at least I know they’re biased. Stavros
apparently went like a lamb to the slaughter. The newspaper compared
him to another animal. I respect the man for his kindness to me. So I’m
not going to use their metaphor. I’m using the one he preferred. He
went like a lamb. Randall didn’t. He fought because he wasn’t supposed
to be killed.
Both of them died. One went happy and the other went angry and
sad. At least I want to believe Stavros went happy. The reports said
there were no signs of a fight on his end. That’s why they immediately
blamed Randall for the foul play. No struggle must mean he was feeling
some kind of content. Right? Randall had marks on him. Not Stavros.
Not when he fell into a vat of boiling hot water. Randall followed him a
few moments later. The gazette said it could’ve been an accident. There
was enough melted butter around the vat to cause anyone to slip. The
regional coupon circular went further than the gazette. They claimed
Randall felt guilty for what he did and jumped in after his prophet.
Who knows why they thought he was such a threat. Stavros, I mean.
I couldn’t see it. Then again, I slept with the guy in an overcrowded
motel room. I guess he sealed his fate by saying “the end is nigh.” When
Prophets start saying that they get in trouble. They’re either killed, or if
the powers that be let them live, they get disproven. But for the life of
me I can’t see why they had to deprive Stan of his. Maybe he planned it
all from the beginning. Some elaborate suicide.
After he died, the followers didn’t dissipate like I thought they
would. The animal rights people broke off and kept up their protests.
There was plenty for them to still object to. Lobster Fest was going
strong, thanks to the publicity the Prophet brought. Others tried to
coalesce around me. I was just trying to convalesce after losing Stan. I
did get to keep the motel room because I had the key. At least I didn’t
have to deal with the animal rights people.
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That left my own fanatics to contend with though. I tried to get them
to stop following me. I even locked them out of the room. They still
found ways to get in, mostly through the cleaning ladies. Once they
were in, it was impossible to kick them out. They thought my anger was
just a test. No matter how much I said not to call me a Prophet, they
continued to call me one. In their minds I really did want followers but
by denying it I was making sure they had the faith.
It was a sick situation. Lucky for me, the town mothers came to me
with a proposal. They offered to buy me a ticket to get out of Bayville.
They would send me anywhere I wanted. I picked Bayport. We had an
agreement that it was going to be secret. I would leave early on the bus
and I would be given an eyepatch and fake beard. When the time came,
they didn’t have the disguise for me. Or anything else for me to wear.
Not even a cape. I had to get on the bus so I went to catch it. My
followers recognized me of course, and came along. Those town
mothers. What a clever bunch. They got rid of us all.
And here I am now. On the bus. On the way to Bayport. Trying to
leave Bayville alone and be left alone by Bayville. It doesn’t look like it’s
going to work. The seats around me are filled with people who won’t
stop smiling at me. I try to close my eyes so I don’t have to see them.
But they don’t disappear. No, I can still smell the mud and the festival
on them. Lobster, butter, cheap beer, and despair. God damn it. Why do
my followers have to smell so bad?
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Pulse
By Thomas Zimmerman
The hidden river, salt yet fresh, flows blue
then red, balm-warm for now, acrawl with beasts,
chimeras shifting in the silt. And you
a sailor, fisher, boat crammed full of priests
and pilgrims, bluesmen, tattoo artists, sexchange wannabes, and those who spill their ink
as blood, ecstatic seed. The blobs and flecks,
storm clouds, cuneiform to break and link
the codes and cultures. Dying, rising, mold
and yeast. The cure and curse a forking root,
enigma variation, sea-spore-old.
The thousand hooded eyes, the blooms, the fruit.
The ripe, the rot the coupling couple hates,
then loves, while sweet salvation salivates.
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Flying Off
By Thomas Zimmerman
Loose parts of me keep flying off:
my thumb stuck in the tulip tree,
my tongue grooved in the gutter, skull
cap rocking by the poop can.
Someone, come and flip my mind
to its B side, its bonus tracks, its live bootlegs.
The moon is fumbling with Orion’s belt.
Seems everything is hunting.
Percy barks at 3 a.m.
Then burping, snoring—ugh!—and passing
silent lethal gas. Small red erection.
Much like me.
And later, song—
not mine, thank god, but cardinals’,
so a friend who knows such things has told me.
She smells like grass, streaked hair’s a nest.
Doesn’t wear her ring.
Though leaves are turning, feels like spring.
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The Beggar-King
By Jay Helmstutler
Pimpin’ wasn’t easy. I didn’t have the heart for it. All the bitch-slappin’
started to get to me after a while. Started to taint my soul. Not to
mention my relationship with the Man Upstairs, who nearly bitch-smote
my ass for all the brutality. I could feel His wrath churning, His back
turning on me more every day: the hardcore pimpin’ life wasn’t to His
liking. Moreover, I myself knew it wasn’t my true destiny. I had to get
right with My Lord and Saviour again, not to mention my own damn self,
so I went into a new line of work. Helping the needy. The beggar-folk of
my very own community. And that’s how I came to do what I do. And
I’m the best at what I do, you’d best believe.
See, I’m a business man at heart. On the streets, you gotta be a
business man to get by, cuz there ain’t no real jobs out here. Not
legitimate ones, anyway. How else you think beggar-folk get to beggin’,
or someone like me get to becomin’ a pimp in his past life? Streets
force you to compromise and cash in on whatever it is you can. Fuck
dignity. Fuck pride. Pretty soon you either pimp-slappin’ some hoes
into giving better head or you holding a beggar’s cup in your hand. I
ain’t afraid to say that I’ve done both, and didn’t like neither one. But I
needed both experiences to do what I do now. Funny how things work
out.
True destiny is a matter of personal evolution. My own true destiny
is with the begging kind. Destitutes. Beggars. Hobos. Bums. I rep
them, see. Kind of like a Hollywood agent reps big stars. And you have
to admit, they are kind of like stars. The eccentric behavior. The instant
recognizability. They’re like the icons of your every day life. You see
them every day on the street corner, some of them for years. Those are
the legends. Others aren’t so lucky and fade from sight and memory.
Lose their shine. Fall on hard times and disappear from the limelight.
Same way I had, just after quitting the pimpin’ game.
Back when I quit pimpin’, I didn’t know what I was gonna do. My
leap of faith had led me straight off a cliff. That first night away from
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the game, I was already down to my last dollar. I bought a soda with it,
not a drink—one of the vices of my former pimpin’ life—guzzled it
down, and found myself with an empty cup in my hand and nowhere to
sleep, since I had renounced my old pimpin’ quarters, too. I woke the
next morning on a bench in the middle of the city with the cup in my
hand no longer empty. It was jingling now, full of change. I swear that
must have been the Hand of God that dropped that change in, because
it changed the course of my life from that point on.
I started begging to get by, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I couldn’t
stay interested or something. Kept wanting to come up with a new
schtick every day, new variations on the old routine. Vary the sales
pitches I gave to people. Try on different personas, play different parts,
parts other than the “Former Pimp in Search of Salvation” role I felt I
was running into the ground. But the public liked consistency, I found.
Didn’t necessarily want fixed what wasn’t broken, so long as you had a
good enough idea. Even so, I noticed that some of my comrades just
never had their acts together from the start. Like this guy I met early on
named Mr. Charles, who told me the first time we met that he hadn’t
earned more than a dime a day in five years and couldn’t figure out
why. I thought something had caught my eye earlier in our conversation
and asked him to turn around. That’s when I noticed that dude had his
ass hanging out of a hole in the back of his pants. I mean, something as
simple as that had been holding him back all this time. Didn’t take much
to fix, either, but it had been keeping him from his earning potential.
That one gaping hole (or maybe two) reminded me of another: the hole
in the market I could potentially fill. And bam, like that, I had found my
new destiny. I had discovered my new niche in the world.
Unofficially, Mr. Charles had become my first client. But unofficially
wasn’t good enough entrepreneurially. That’s when I drafted up a
contract and made him sign on the dotted line: 45 percent of all
revenues to me, in exchange for my managerial services. We made out
relatively well from the start. Even at a 55 percent profit, he was able to
make ten times more per day than what he had before he’d met me.
And that was even on the several days I caught him with his ass hanging
back out of his pants.
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The Beggar-King: Jay Helmstutler
One client became two. Two became four. Four became a business.
The business became an empire. Today, I am a bona fide king.
My clients are like jesters. They entertain me and speak the truth
with their folly. The truth about struggle and profit. Life.
So you think you know something about the world of beggary?
Mistah P’ll prove you wrong on that. One of them pro bono things I do
on occasion. Take people like yourself along with me on my daily
rounds. Little enlightenment. Little entertainment. Couple laughs,
maybe. Lucky you.
First stop on today’s itinerary is Mickie D’s. Heroin Man’s territory.
A risky placement, some might say, McDonald’s being a family
establishment and all, and Heroin Man being your average
neighborhood junky. Friendly Neighborhood Junky, I might add, in case
that tagline means anything to you superhero fans out there (think
Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, folks).
Everyone needs a gimmick, see.
Heroin Man’s is that he wears a cape and has superpowers. The
cape part is easy—just a blanket tied around his neck, same American
flag-patterned blanket he sleeps under every night—but the
superpowers part is a little harder when you don’t have the budget for
special effects.
Enter target audience: the little tikes who come with the special
effects already built up into their precious little heads.
You gotta love tikes, man. Future of society and all, yeah, but
besides that, them little midgets got a hell of a lot of faith in the
wonders of this world. Don’t need no outwardly show of superpowers
to believe they right there up your sleeve. As long as you got the cape
on, they on board for the ride. It ain’t like lying or nothing. Lying’s
when you mislead and deceive. Telling them dude got superpowers
ain’t a lie because their little minds have already beat you to that
assumption once they saw the cape. They already 90% there before
you’ve even opened your mouth to give the pitch. They want dude to
have superpowers. They need dude to have superpowers. But when
they find out dude done lost his superpowers—that’s the pitch we use
for Heroin Man, see—they gonna do anything their little hearts can to
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convince their mommies to make a donation to the Get-Mr.Superhero’s-Powers-Back Fund. When mommy rolls her eyes and tries
to hurry them past, they’re gonna start throwin’ a fit. May even take
what little change they have in their own pockets and run back across
the parking lot, saying they all the sudden have to go to the bathroom
even though they just came out of there before they left. Mommy may
know this dude’s a junkie without hope, with a blanket tied around his
neck, for God’s sake, but to them little tikes, he’s a superhero under an
evil spell that only they, with the little change they have jingling in their
pockets, can help break in order to save the day.
That’s tikes for you, man. You gotta love ‘em. Especially when they
hand over the silver and green.
Gerries, though? Slightly different story. Now I respect my elders
and all, knowing I’m gonna become one in a little over a minute, but
them gerries is a little more stubborn when it comes to handing over
the dough. One thing’s for sure: when it comes to Heroin Man, they
definitely ain’t buying the whole superhero routine. With them, you
gotta change your strategy and cater to their idea, at least, of what a
true superhero is: someone who’s fought and sacrificed for their
country. Now it’s a boring, overdone schtick, I know, but gerries ain’t
looking for something new; the new is already all around them. They
want icons they can recognize, images of values that meant something
back in their day. Quite simply, they want to see the vet with the
missing limb. Which is why I’ve changed up my strategy with Heroin
Man today.
As it turns out, it’s National Gerry Day over by the Veterans Museum.
Not really, but any sort of event or commemoration over there brings
the gerries out in droves. (Same way with tikes when you’ve got the
holiday parades.) The gerries eat their meals early, so they should be
filing into this place by now. Wonder how Heroin Man’s holding up so
far. Only thing that worries me is that we didn’t spend enough time
prepping for his new role as a vet. Guy’s brain is fried, so he’s got very
little short-term memory to work with. Took me damn near a month to
drill the superhero bit permanently into his skull, but on this one, I’ve
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had to move a lot faster, having just seen the Museum’s special events
flyer two days ago. Short notice, know what I mean?
From the looks of it, I may have rushed things a bit. See for yourself.
Dude’s sitting over there on the bench, flag (or rather, flag-patterned
blanket) all up under his ass, same number of limbs as the plastic Ronald
McDonald he’s sitting beside: four, when he’s supposed to have only
three. No good. Should have known this would happen. Kind of
embarrassing. Will you excuse me for a minute? I’m gonna need to
handle this. Just stay back here for a second. Your tour guide’ll be right
back.
“H-Man. What the fuck is you doin’?”
“Muh-Muh-Mistah P. What you doin’ here?”
“What you think, fool? I’m checkin’ up on your sorry ass. See you
already done fucked up the routine. Got your arm all up out of your
sleeve and shit. You supposed to be an amputee, fool. How the
‘Amputee’ sign gonna work if your arm all up out of your sleeve?”
“Buh-buh-but it itches, Muh-Mistah P. I needs to get me some sh-shshit soon.”
“Fool, what? How much paper you earn so far?”
“Juh-juh-just a duh-duh-duh-duh . . .”
“A dollar? Fool, you earn a dollar and you expect me to . . .”
“. . . duh-duh-duh-dime! Just a duh-duh-duh-dime!”
“A dime? Fool, you earn a dime in five hours, and you wanted
what?!!”
“Puh-puh-please, Mistah P . . . it h-h-hurts . . .”
“The fuck you been doin’ all morning?! The fuck went wrong, fool?!
Was you tellin’ ‘em the story or not?”
“Yuh-yuh-yessir . . . buh-buh-been tellin’ ‘em I’s a vuh-vuh-vet just
like you said!”
“A vet what, fool?”
“A vuh-vuh-veterin . . . a vuh-vuh-veterin . . . ah . . . ah . . .”
“And what, no one stopped to give you change?”
“. . . ah . . . ah . . . arian! A veterinarian!!”
“A veterah- . . . fool, you’se about the stupidest mofo I ever known!
It’s veteran! Veteran, fool! Now say it back to me. Ve-ter-an.”
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“Vuh-vuh-veteran. Veteran.”
“Good. Now put that arm back up into your sleeve and don’t be
pullin’ that shit out again. Itchin’ or not, won’t be no shit runs for you
today till you make some fucking progress out here. Is that clear? I’m
talkin’ Ronald McDonald House Telethon type of progress. Now get the
fuck back out to your spot and earn some green before I have to turn
your dumb ass inside out.”
“Yuh-yuh-yessir.”
Okay. Back now. Sorry about that. I swear, the shit I gotta put up
with sometimes.
Check it. A message for all the young tikes out there. This is your
brain. That was your brain on drugs. Any questions?
I’m sure you might have a few after witnessing that.
Like why is it that Mistah P so damn cruel? Don’t be pretendin’ you
ain’t thinking that at this moment. Some of ya’ll ain’t used to seeing
people getting treated like that. Come from different worlds, some of
ya’ll, where there are more rules and regulations and ethical mandates
and such than there are out here. Well let me tell you something—and
remind myself, too—cuz I’m seeing myself through ya’ll’s eyes at this
moment, and it’s a stark impression of who I am. Listen up, folks.
Guess what? Ain’t no sidewalk version of the streets. Don’t get caught
thinkin’ that just because I represent beggars, I don’t have as much
street in my business tactics as a bona fide pimp or hustler. I still am
part pimp, and I’ve always been a full-blooded hustler. You take an xray of me, it ain’t bone that you see—it’s asphalt. That’s how street I
am, and how street I need to be to stay on top of this here game. It
ain’t a joke, man, cuz I could fall just as flat as any of these fools if I let
myself get soft and lenient. I could easily become that fool Heroin Man
with his habit, or Sonny B with his trumpet, or Old Miss Henry Jameson
with her smelly-ass clothes—not a dime to any one of their names if it
weren’t for me. But guess what? There wouldn’t be no one like me out
there to save my ass, unlike the situation these fools have. Hold up.
Take that back. There is One that would save me. My Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ. But besides that, no one out here on these streets.
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The reason for that is that I am an original. An innovator. No one
else does what I do. No one else shares the destiny I’ve carved out for
myself.
Still with me? Good. Cuz you about to meet two legends under the
management of yours truly: Sonny B with his trumpet, and Old Miss
Henry Jameson with her attitude and rotten smell. Some things never
change. Just need a little updating. That’s why I’ve got the two of them
stationed over at Burger King as a married couple, though they’re not
really married, and hell, not even friends. Temporary setup, I keep
reminding Sonny B. Just temporary, man. Hang in there. Roll with it,
keep your game in check, till I formulate a better use for her useless ass
and give you two the stage divorce you been praying for. Living
conditions really getting to him lately, smell really getting to him, plus,
having to carry the damn stageplay like a one-man show, Old Miss
Henry being a diva and all who won’t memorize her own damn lines.
Script has them traveling the earth as man and wife for like sixty-some
years now ever since their honeymoon, searching for their kid who was
stolen by some UFO mothafuckas. Now that’s some inspired bullshit.
Inspiring, too, judging from the coin the public’s been bringing in this
week.
At least, until today. See that cup next to Sonny B? The one
between his shoe and that catatonic mess leaning against the wall?—
Old Miss Henry, by the way—well that cup’s usually filled with green
and silver by now. Seems like some aliens from the script done come
and ripped us off. Excuse me for a minute. I’ve gotta go look into this.
“Hey Sonny, what’s with the empty cup?”
“Damn, P, we been waitin’ for you. Why ain’t you tell us you doublebooked this place today? You tryin’ to start a three-ring circus? Me and
Old Miss Henry here already two separate rings ourselves. Don’t be
needin’ no third to help us out.”
“What the hell you talkin’ about, Sonny? You on that H again? I
already got one damn junkie to look after.”
“Man, you know I ain’t touched that shit in years. Though this here
bitch be makin’ my ass think twice. Uh uh, P. I think you startin’ to get
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too large a roster. Got too many damn clients to keep track of, if you
ask me.”
“Hold up, Sonny. Let’s start over. I think we on a different page or
somethin’ today.”
“Whole world’s on a different page if you ask me. Your new client
over there’s been stealin’ our business from minute one.”
“New client? You mean HIV-Man? He’s over on Main Street today.
You know I’d never put his sorry-ass song and dance up against your
fearsome trumpet.”
“No, not him. Whoever the guy with the crown is. What he call
himself again, Old Miss Henry? King somethin’ or other. King Wisdom?
No. King somethin’. Anyway. The guy with the crown over there.”
“Guy with the crown? I don’t have any guy with a crown.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I’ve never had anyone like that.”
“Then maybe you should see for yourself. Could be one of them
damn independents I thought we ran out of town. Anyway, he’s been
drawin’ quite a crowd over there all morning. Wipin’ us out over here
on this side.”
“What the fuck. I’m a’ have to go check this out.”
Come on. Follow me. Faster. Let’s move. Need to see what the
fuck’s going on.
Well I’ll be damned. Ain’t this some shit. You seein’ what I’m seein’
or what?
You believe this dude? I mean, who the fuck does he think he is?
King Common Sense, apparently. That’s who. Judging from the
cardboard sign tied around his neck and the Burger King crown on top of
his head. And let me guess. That crate must be his throne. A few cents
for his two-cents. Yeah. I see how it is. Clever tagline he’s got there, I’ll
give him that. But that’s all he’s gonna get from me. No such thing as
friendly competition. You either with Mistah P or you not. And if you
not—like this clown—you’d best stay around your own way. Look at
this fool. Got the nerve to come up into my stronghold, one of my
flagship locations, and take the very side of the parking lot opposite Old
Miss Henry Jameson and Sonny B. Ain’t a secret they under the
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management of the one and only Mistah P—so no way this fool’s
oblivious to the meaning of his act. This look like a declaration of war to
me. I ain’t havin’ it. Plain disrespect.
Here, make yourself useful. Go on over there and see what he has to
say. I wanna see if he’s as sharp as he looks.
You. Yes you. Who you think I’m talkin’ to? Go on over there and
see what he has to say.
Well go on, then. Get on over there. Pretend you just walking by.
And don’t say you with me. I’ll just stand back here and listen in.
Go on!
Good. Yeah. Stop right over there in front of him. Now do
something to make him start up. Good. That’s it. You got him started.
Now let’s see what this fool’s got to say: “Good afternoon, my friend.
I’m King Common Sense. A few cents for my two-cents, what do you
say?”
Psssssst! Don’t give him any money!
“Who are you looking at over there? Is that your friend? What?
Your tour guide? What kind of tour are you on?”
Psssssst! Hey! What the fuck are you doing? Don’t make
conversation, just see what his routine’s all about!
“Who is that over there? Okay then, never mind. Say what? You
wanna know what my routine’s all about? Ha ha. Well I don’t actually
consider myself a performer. Just a man with worldly wisdom.
Everyone could use a little piece of wisdom, no? A few cents for my
two-cents isn’t a bad deal, after all. What do you say? Spare some
change for a piece of wisdom? A ray of light in the darkness of life?”
Hey! What are you doing? I said don’t give him any money!
“Thank you, friend, for your kindness. This is the piece of wisdom I
have for you. Cherish the children of the world, for they are the future.
All hope and strength lies in their little hands. Now go with God, my
friend, for He is our Lord and Protector. And tell your friend over there
to come over too if he likes.”
That’s right. Get your ass back over here. Traitor. How much you
give him, anyway? And why you smiling? What, you trying to say you
bought that crock? I’ve gotten better fortune cookies at Chinese drive132
thrus. Now if you’ll excuse me. I have an invitation to accept. His.
Gonna nip this mothafuckin’ cancer in the bud. Here he go startin’ up
already, and I ain’t even made it over there to him yet: “Oh, wonderful.
Here comes another referral. Hello, friend. I’m King Common Sense. I
saw you standing over there while I was talking to your friend.”
“Yeah? And what, you ain’t recognize me?”
“Should I? “
“The name Mistah P ring any bells?”
“Afraid not.”
“Well guess what, fool, I’m the only genuine king around here. And if
you had any real common sense, you wouldn’t have parked your crate
anywhere near my territory.”
“Sorry?”
“Yeah, you’d better be. And you’d better get the fuck up out of this
place.”
“No, I meant, sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about or who
you are.”
“You one ignorant mothafucka then. Must have been newly born
into the world, else you’da heard my name round these parts and
known this venue is mine. Those two old folks I’m sure you saw on the
other side of the parking lot? They mine. In fact, this entire three-block
radius? All mine. Any beggar you see in these parts.”
“Any but me, then.”
“Yeah, any but you. Exactly. That’s why you’d best be leaving these
parts unless you interested in my representation.”
“Representation? Ha! Representation for what? I’ve got my act
together, as you can see. But you know, that’s funny. Cuz you know
what it sounds like to me? It sounds like you’re afraid of a little
competition.”
“Oh I see, then. I see how it is. You gonna try and call me out like
that. Gonna try and disrespect me by making me look bad in front of
this here audience I’m showing around. That’s fine. I can play like that.
I ain’t had a challenge in a while. That’s what happens when you crush
the competition. Ain’t no one left to challenge but yourself. Fine then.
You wanna challenge me? I accept. I’ll show you how I became the king
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of this market. Tell you what. Rare opportunity for you. We’ll see who
earns more by the end of the day. My two people over there or you
over here. Whoever lose, gotta give up their claim on this place and
spread the word.”
“Very well. But does the money I already earned today count? Cuz if
so, you’re starting off at a distinct disadvantage. You may want to think
this out.”
“I’ve done thought it out, and yes, the money counts. Every penny
you’ve earned so far against every penny my people haven’t, but will.
And believe me. They will. You’ll be gone by the end of the day.
Believe that.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You ain’t such a prophet, then.”
He lucky I can just turn around like that and walk away. You believe
that mothafucka? Took all my strength not to hit him. He lucky I ain’t
into violence these days.
Come on. We ain’t got much time. I got to come up with something.
Got to sit on this curb and think. Here. Have a seat here beside me and
let’s put our heads together. Now pretend you me and think.
Think.
Come on, P. Think.
You been in this game long enough to handle a fool like this. Don’t
pretend like you weren’t expecting this to happen. You knew it would.
Elevate the game, and eventually it elevates itself up to your level.
Entrepreneurial karma or something like that.
It all comes down to this. The jump-off point. The do-or-die point.
The point when you gotta prove you the boss for a reason. Because you
can’t let no one steal your destiny. Not even a piece of it.
Think!
Hold up. Calm down. Reality check time. Gotta face the situation
we in, bad as it may be. Sonny B is a tired old man. Old Miss Henry
Jameson is useless. You just carrying their asses cuz you feel sorry for
them and trying to keep them from becoming obsolete. Cuz you want
to protect them from the changes you made to the market. The
revolutions you brought on by elevating the game the way you did.
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Making it a service industry instead of a charity. Giving people the
expectation of talent and intrigue instead of just some old fool holding
out a cup. Let’s face it. You failing to live up to your own standards.
That tired-ass story you got Sonny B delivering about UFOs stealing he
and Old Miss Henry’s baby just ain’t up to speed no more.
I mean, look at this woman right here. The look on her face as she’s
trying to go in to the Burger King. Looks like she’s being pulled in two
different directions at once. Got a baby all up in her arms crying, and
here’s Sonny B delivering the tall-tale that’s supposed to be funny in a
wink-wink, you-know-this-ain’t true sort of way, but the woman ain’t
even got a smile on her face. She’s just standing there in disbelief,
starting to twist her face all up into a hateful expression. Look like she’s
about to go off or something on poor Sonny, who’s giving the story his
all, as you can tell by tuning in: “. . . but then they lights come shinin’
through the bedroom window again, see . . . and I says to my little old
wife Miss Henry here . . . I says, ‘Honey, them alien ships is back! And
they fixin’ to take away our little Tyrone!’”
And then, watch this, watch Old Miss Henry chime in and turn the
whole damn routine to shit, how much you wanna bet that’s what she’s
gonna do: “I ain’t your damn wife,” she says. Just like I told you she
would.
But then Sonny tries to pick up the pieces and redeem their act: “Uh
. . . see, them aliens . . . them aliens ain’t just stole our little Tyrone . . .
no, see . . . them extraterrestrials was extra cruel that night . . . used
they tractor beam to steal my little Miss Henry’s mind, too.”
Nice job, Sonny. Nice try, at least. But now it’s for nothing, what
with Old Miss Henry chiming back in to take another shit on credibility:
“Ain’t nobody steal my damn mind. Won’t no damn aliens, neither.”
See what I got to put up with? What Sonny got to put up with?
Speaking of. Go on now and improvise around her, Sonny. Do your
thing: “See, she crazy ever since. My poor little Miss ain’t right no
more, ever since them extraterrestrials landed. Stole her mind and our
little Tyrone and we been havin’ to travel round ever since, roundin’ up
the proper funds so we can build a ship of our own, see, with lasers and
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photons and what not . . . gonna travel up into space so we can rescue
our little Tyrone back.”
Weak punch line, I can see that now. But Old Miss Henry ain’t done
fucking it up. Or maybe she’s the one actually making it funny. Here
she goes, at any rate: “I ain’t never heard of no damn Tyrone.”
Time for the plea. It’s a miracle this woman with the baby’s still even
standing here. Hit it, Sonny B, before she leaves: “So anyway, we was
wonderin’ if you might, like, have some spare change to give up . . . you
know, seein’ as how our cause is noble and you look like a nice person
and all . . . I mean, seein’ as how you got your own little tike there and
all, we sorta figured as much as you could put yourself in our shoes . . .”
Get ready. Here comes the woman with the baby’s response. Ain’t
gonna be pretty from the look on her face: “Ginnah, what I look like,
the Salvation Army? I gots to watch out for mines, fool. This here little
ginnah keep my ass runnin’ twenty-four seven. Cry all night like a bitch
and keep me awake. Then piss all over hisself in the mornin’ time.
Damn. And you talkin’ that shit about spaced invaders coming up into
your crib and takin’ your little Tyrone from you? Damn, where those
spaced invaders at? Where them little green ginnahs, fool, cuz I’s hopin’
they pay this here little crib a visit. That’s what I’m sayin’. Take this
here little ginnah off my hands for a while, that’d be nice.” Hold up.
Clouds starting to part in my head. Little idea starting to shine through.
But nah. Nah. Or then again. Maybe. Need a minute to figure this out.
Let her ramble on some more while I think: “. . . and that mind-stealin’
bullshit? Ginnah, wouldn’t even be a daddy’s mind to steal up where I
stay. Least your ass got somebody, even if it is this here smelly-ass ho.”
Old Miss Henry: “I ain’t nobody’s damn smelly-ass ho.”
Woman with baby: “I ask you, bitch? Damn, fools like you make my
ass sick. Sittin’ all up on they ass all day, waitin’ for sympathy and shit.
Like the world owes ‘em for somethin’. Get your ass up, bitch! Least
your husband here do somethin’ for his. Play a mean-ass trumpet, I
heard his shit before. Been out in my parts since I was just a tike. But
you . . . look at you . . . probly’ been restin’ your lazy ass against the side
of this building your whole life, waitin’ for the world to take a likin’ to
you when you ain’t done shit to make ‘em like you for.”
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Old Miss Henry: “What you say?” Oh shit. Old Miss Henry’s up on
her feet. Never seen that happen before.
Woman with baby: “Sit down, bitch. You ain’t deaf. You heard what
I said.”
Much as I’d like to see the Old Miss get hers, that little idea of mine
is ripe and ready. Time to break this up and let the negotiating begin.
Observe: “Ladies, ladies. Please. I’ve got a little business proposal that
I think can clear this up.”
Woman with baby: “Who the fuck is you?”
“Name’s P, as in the one and only Mistah. But your ass can think of
me as the new salvation in your life.”
“Say what? Ginnah, please. All talking like you the Messiah or
somethin’.”
“Check it . . . not the Messiah. I ain’t go there. Only one Lord and
Saviour up above. But I do come in search of the Baby Jesus you holdin’
in your hands.”
“The fuck you talkin’ about?”
“What you think I’m talkin’ about?”
“How the fuck I know unless you say?”
“Well what you think I was gettin’ at?”
“What was you tryin’ to get at, ginnah?”
“I’m tryin’ to get at that baby up in your hands.”
“Ginnah, what? What you think? This baby here’s for sale or
somethin’? You crazy if you think this little ginnah’s for sale.”
“Yo, I ain’t say nothing like that.”
“Then what, ginnah? What you want with this here little tike?”
“Is he heavy?”
“Say what?”
“Is he heavy? I asked if he’s heavy. Cuz if he a burden, I can offer to
give you a break.”
“Speak English, ginnah. Talk straight if you think we on the same
page.”
“What page you on?”
“What page you on?”
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“What book we talking about? Cuz if we talkin’ the Good Book, then
I’m on the page where the Mother Mary leave the Baby Jesus in the
care of the Three Wise Men while she go out on the town and get to
know Bethlehem again, minus the burden she’s been carrying around.”
“Just what you proposin’, ginnah?”
“Nah, see, the question ain’t: What Mistah P proposin’? The
question is: What service Mistah P givin’ away for free?”
“Spit it out then, ginnah! Tired of all your sales-pitch bullshit. Just
get to the damn point!”
“Fine, then. Look here, sister. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Tyaina.”
“Look here, Tyaina. You got a babysitter lined up for the afternoon
or what?”
“Babysitter? Ain’t no damn babysitter up in my life. Else I wouldn’t
be carrying this little fool round every damn where I go.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, you in luck today, Tyaina. Cuz you
lookin’ at your brand new babysitters for the afternoon.”
“Babysitters? Hold up. Why you wanna watch this little ginnah?
Ohhhh. Hold up. Hold up. I get it. You gonna use him as a prop for
these two beggin’ fools, is that it? So you can try to earn more money
and shit.”
“I won’t lie to you. That’s exactly what it is I’m gonna do. But your
baby will be safe at all times. You have my word on that.”
“Hold up. How I know you ain’t gonna steal his ass or sell him off or
somethin’ before I get back?”
“Cuz look at me. I’m just a business man trying to get mine and stay
right in the eyes of the Lord. Ain’t too many can do both on these
streets, but me, no, I’m different: I can. And do. And will continue to,
long after you have your baby back in your arms, after he done been
showered with praise and gifts from the people, and after they all done
blessed his name. Speaking of. What his name, anyway, this little angel
you got here—this little angel about to be in my care today?”
“Mofo. Name’s Mofo. But don’t be gettin’ ahead of yourself,
ginnah. I ain’t gave you the go-ahead just yet.”
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“Come on now, Tyaina. You ain’t gotta play. I know you done
decided in your mind.”
“I ain’t playin’. The answer’s yes. But I do got some conditions for
you and yours.”
“Fine, then. Let’s hear them.”
“First, this here smelly-ass ho don’t get to touch his ass under no
circumstances.”
“Okay, then. I can deal with that.”
(Old Miss Henry: “I ain’t wanna touch your damn baby, no how.”)
“Secondly, I don’t want no stories being told about how this little
ginnah’s the son of some alien mothafuckas or some shit like that.”
“Damn! But okay. I’m a man of my word.”
“And thirdly, I want his ass back here in exactly four hours. Is that
clear? Four hours. Now repeat that shit back to me.”
“Four hours. Got it. That’s all the time I need.”
“Fine then. I’m out. Gonna—how you put it?—see what I’ve been
missin’ in Bethlehem. Here you go. This little burden all yours.”
“Here we go, then … careful now … well hey there, little man…” And
bam, like that, the transfer is complete. King Common Sense’s defeat is
secured. If you’ve learned anything today, then in your own mind, you
can already hear the pitch that will bring his false reign to an end, once
and for all, in a matter of just a few short hours: Look here, good sir.
This here family is yours. This baby needs food just like you did. Don’t it
pull at your heart just a little, now? Don’t it? Don’t it make you want to
give up some change?
Yes. I will put the baby down into the manger and win. But first, let
me look on him a while.
Behold. The key to the future of my empire.
Or should I say: Behold. The future itself.
Kicking and squirming and crying between these hands.
Hands that have pimp-slapped prostitutes.
Hands that have held out a beggar’s cup.
Imagine that. The Baby Jesus hisself between these unworthy hands.
All the promise. All the struggles and profits to come. Life.
Imagine that. We all start out like this. Like this.
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Needy. Helpless. Begging. Whether born onto the streets or not.
Here. You hold him. Hold victory in your hands.
I want to hear what it feels like from you.
140
Contributor Biographies
In Order of Appearance
Maree Kimberley has published a children’s book along with articles,
short stories and flash fiction across several genres. Her obsessions
include neuroscience and things grotesque, bizarre and strange. She
also has a penchant for circuses. Maree enjoys combining her
obsessions into stories but sometimes she just writes about things that
happen. You can find her on Twitter @reebee01.
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in
Your Impossible Voice, Night Train, Toad, Matchbox and elsewhere. His
latest ebook is Father Dunne's School for Wayward Boys at amazon.com.
He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com.
AJ Kirby is the author of the novels Paint this Town Red, Bully and
Sharkways, and the non-fiction book Fergie's Finest. His short fiction has
been published across the web, and in magazines, anthologies and
literary journals, as well as in two collections: The Art of Ventriloquism
and Mix Tape. He was one of 20 Leeds-based authors under 40 recently
shortlisted for the LS13 competition and his novel Paint this Town Red
was shortlisted for last year's The Guardian Not the Booker prize. He
blogs at paintthistownred.wordpress.com.
Jason Half-Pillow’s writing has appeared in Dirty Chai, The Iowa Review,
Hobo Pancakes, The Driftwood Press and elsewhere. He lives in
northern Italy.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at
Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of
Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert
Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have
appeared in many journals.
141
Frank Strong was born in Honolulu, Hawaii but raised in Southern
California. He received his philosophy degree from S.F. State. His fiction
has appeared in The Chiron Review, Locution Magazine, Conceit
Magazine, and others.
Jack Granath is a librarian in Kansas. His website can be found at
www.jackgranath.com.
Morgan K Tanner is a writer, drummer and golfist currently residing in
the English countryside. The quiet surroundings make it an ideal place to
write, drum and hide the bodies. The sound of the typewriter is perfect
to drown out the hum of the torture equipment. His works of fiction and
threats have appeared in the mailboxes of many a celebrity who then
sell their stories to the tabloids, claiming that they are being ‘terrorized’.
Jack Tricarico is a New York City painter and poet who has been
published in poetry journals and anthologies in the United States,
Europe and Mexico. He has completed 10 chapbooks and is working on
his 11th. Some of the publications his work has appeared in are Hunger
Magazine, Home Planet News, Asbestos, Nomad's Choir, Dinner With
The Muse, Exit Strata, The Venetian Hour, I let Go Of The Stars In My
Hand, Anima Magazine, Across The Margin, and De Neza York A Nueva
York / From Neza York To New York. His art work can be seen at New
York Art World® NYC City Art Culture Publication and Gallery
(www.newyorkartworld.com).
Stephen McQuiggan was the original author of the bible; he vowed
never to write again after the publishers removed the dinosaurs and the
spectacular alien abduction ending from the final edit. His first novel, A
Pig’s View Of Heaven, is available now from Grinning Skull Press.
Daniel Davis, a native of rural Illinois, is the Nonfiction Editor for The
Prompt Literary Magazine. His own work has appeared in various online
and print journals. You can find him at facebook.com/DanielDavis05, or
on Twitter @dan_davis86.
142
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in
long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife,
Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a
Best of the Net nominee. Writing for six years, his work has appeared in
more than a thousand publications including The Louisiana Review,
Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The
Red Cedar Review and Crannog. He has poems forthcoming in The
William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State
Review and Texas Review. He was a recent finalist in The Blue Bonnet
Review, The Rash Awards, Sharkpack Alchemy, Turtle Island, Writer’s
Digest and Bacopa Literary Review poetry contests.
David Pamment now lives in Worcestershire but is originally from West
London. He left the big smoke after ill-health forced him to retire. He
currently works part-time for a local charity. He has two books available
for purchase at Lulu.com and Amazon.com; a poetry collection, A
Celebration of Christmas, and his novella, A Twenty-Twelve Christmas
Carol.
Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt
Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row.
He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. He maintains
a poetry blog amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.
Ben Nardolilli currently lives in New York City. His work has appeared in
Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana One Voice, Caper Literary
Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, fwriction, Grey Sparrow Journal,
Pear Noir, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and THEMA. His chapbook
Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, has been published
by Folded Word Press. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is
looking to publish a novel.
143
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and
edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, USA. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and
Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in
2012. Tom's website is thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com.
Jay Helmstutler holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from American
University in Washington, D.C., and has an unpublished collection of
"literary noir" short stories under his belt. He has fiction forthcoming in
Peachfish Magazine, Dead Guns Magazine, Schlock! Webzine, the
Alucard Press Fifty Shades of Slay anthology, the JEA Press Rejected For
Content 3 anthology, and the Horrified Press Sinister Saints "Fugitives",
"Displacement" and "When Disaster Strikes!" anthologies. He has
previously been featured in Freedom Fiction, Ealain Magazine, and the
Low Explosions: Writings on the Body anthology.
A Note from the Editor…
Many thanks to all contributors featured in Issue 1! Your interest, time
and patience has been much appreciated!
To readers of this opening issue, I hope you have found the content to
your liking. Perhaps it has got your own creative juices flowing and, if so,
maybe you’d like to submit the fruits of your labour (ha, fruit makes
jam… get it?!) in the future. If so, read on…
Poetry was a one-off feature of Issue 1 and unfortunately will not be
accepted into forthcoming issues. However, for any authors looking to
submit short fiction to the magazine, please see the submission
guidelines at abstractjam.com.
I hope you all have a great end to 2015, however you choose to
celebrate it, and I will see you all in the new year for Issue 2 in March!
Sam Leng,
Abstract Jam Editor
144

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