“You want to keep our love private, baby. You want to keep
it to yourself.” --The Crags
from chapter 7
It
was right around the time when cilantro started to taste like soap. I’d always
loved cilantro. We’d had a wonderful thirty-plus year relationship, and now it
had come to this. I was devastated. It was like losing an old boon companion
because of creative differences, and I fell into a state of despair and
despond. The taste I’d once cherished and courted had gone bitter and
astringent on me. It was rough. There was nothing I could do about. My taste
had irreparably been hampered, never to return.
I
couldn’t find time for things that used to seem important: mopping the floor,
doing dishes, taking out the trash, watching TV. It all seemed a sham. What was
worthwhile? I suddenly had no reasonable answer to that question.
Humming
became a hobby. My only one, really. There was no shared space to question.
Dweebs of thoughts went and soiled my wristwatch, and this crane-necked
willy-and/or-nilly perspective was something I kept daring to not come true.
Varnishing the same old ideas, wobbling about with both hands clasped behind my
back. Yes, or almost it, I wasn’t planning a routine.
I
borrowed some time from a parking attendant. He told me to pay him back in
two-hour increments. There was electricity in his hair. I bowed semi-deep,
brushed a stray hair from my sleeve, and made a promise I had no intention of
ever keeping. Be that as it may or may not, I was solid in my dedication to the
pursuit of falsehood. You see, out of doing very little, I emerge.
Voracity
tells one thing while a skidded destiny slyly holds its nose. I think back to a
time-- not a simpler one at all-- when my wife would pick salad shrapnel from
her teeth with the pointy end of a tiny umbrella she’d snatched from my
tropical drink. The birds groan. In the backs of my knees a careful stinging ache
starts. My medicine’s a steel mug of brandy that’s been boiled with nickels and
flypaper. Don’t get me finished. Thinking back spills death like hooligans from
a broke-down limousine. I’m just in time to be late.
Cigarettes
read lips. Olives soak up gasoline and tears. Worries and bland music kick
college radio stations off the air. And as far as my ripped-at-the-knees
pajamas go, that’s the same story. No class. No contender. Just a bag of
dustless bones kicking out the lights.
I
used to work for the Gopher Sign Company out of St. Paul, Minnesota. We had a
good run. The signs sold themselves. Parking signs, No Parking signs. We
produced our own scrap. We took cover when the cooks retired. On off days I’d
collect ticket stubs with my birthday’s date on them. People would bring them
to me from odd corners of the city-- rummagers, fledgling hat saleswomen,
boycotters, label thieves, poncho hawkers, and blubber-fed postcard
aficionados. I opened my mail only on odd-numbered days. Once in a while the night
watchman would play the warped piano in the warehouse bathroom. It tinkled and
jounced the atmosphere with a grainy death sentence. And sometimes, if things
slowed more than normal at the factory station, I’d grow even less garrulous
than normal, sink my chin down into my chest, rest my elbows on my desktop’s
edge, and think about Ida Lupino singing One For My Baby in Roadhouse. That job
didn’t last long.
from chapter 11
Drinking
coffee, reading the paper, selling things that nobody wants anymore. I’m moved
by the sound of sirens. Ambulances of every nation have a unique sound, just
like the mumbling of junk-shop owners and the bark of dogs. The array of deceit
in my current residence amazes me: the stink of steamed cabbage curdled with thoughts
of one wiping the ass with the cheap stuff again, wandering the deserted floors
of an abandoned Woolworth. I don’t want it to come down to a pair of high heels
dangling from a crooked chandelier. If looking down is necessary, well, here we
go. The rusted torsos of a few tiny robots strewn among empty Raid cans and
rust-speckled mousetraps; pumpkin seeds, cut hair, and granola; a legless
Charlie Chaplin doll. It’s a risk just being yourself sometimes. And to think I
started it all with nary a broom to my name. Outmoded and discarded things just
bloom out here in the dust. I mean, you take some stock of your life at some
point; you look around and see nothing except emptiness and clutter. I do my
moaning through a copper bullhorn with a sun-bleached sticker on it in the
shape of Porky Pig. Lucky though, ‘cause lord, that tuxedo-top-with-no-bottom
look really gives me the heebies and/or jeebies, even just thinking about it. I
don’t scream, “Curses!” anymore though.
Gizmos
break down around here all the time, when they don’t show up that way at least.
I crank them, shower them with oil and WD40, throw a few at the wall and see
what does or doesn’t fall out, see what makes them rumble and row, tick and
traipse, and who knows, maybe figure a way to bring some sort of a semblance of
life back to them, or to me. There are stairs too, in the back, if it comes to
it. I do what it takes. Squinty chops of motion, sometimes quick seizures of
breakneck speed, or just hunches of twitch-and-jerk mobility. These damn toys
ruin themselves, collapsing in defeat before they’ve given it a real go. I
should take the useless ones and expel them to the funeral-pyre heap out back,
and sometimes I do, but it’s hard to give up on them. I don’t want to be the
one making the last call. Rusted bolts and tough stringy wires, heads with no
top, stray arms and strange plastic parts with no semblance of anything even
resembling…well, anything. So, I’m left with more and more useless things that
won’t even go bump in the daytime.
So
many stacks of calendars gathering dust. Calendars of frogs, harlequin romance
covers, scenes from Basic Instinct, anatomy charts, losing presidential
candidates, Kentucky Derby runners-up, to name a few. The years are all long
gone. I stare at a hundred Januarys, the boxes all X’d off, and wonder about
the winters of my life: all that time spent huddled in corners next to heaters,
worrying about soup and sandwiches, cowering under heavy blankets, craven and
dismal in the dark, unable to imagine even crossing the street or shaking the
hand of another person. Everything’s luck in this world, and it seems mine
turns richer towards the worst of it. I grow slunk and lean towards the
shadows.
It
is going on later than usual. It is past the rayed returns of dim beams, the
beak-pocked boards in the rafters strung with webs and the gonfalons of defunct
sports steams. A second coat of dust gathers. My head’s festooned with scars
slashed long ago, like an old dead tire cracking and crumbling into small
sun-baked bits. Russian knows my thoughts by heart. Officious mumbling gets me
through it, though, and I keep my customers close enough to satisfied, for the
most part. But hell, don’t get me finished-- when it comes to the bottom of the
coffee pot. I’ve got restriction’s livid temper to deal with still, and right
about never I ditto a sucker’s pluck and hurl my sentiments from the upstairs
bathroom window. That’s my way in, or out, if you’d prefer to think of it that
way. I do and don’t. And then there’s me, here, fuming about some general
disturbances in the twist of my not-so-personal, so-so space. You’ve got to do
something to keep yourself company. That’s about it. Somewhat-done crossword
puzzles littering the carpet. Crumpled sacks filled with the torn yellow pages
of formerly waterlogged magazines, their covers even still a bit glossy-- out
of place in a place where nothing shines much. I’d pack my bags but they’d just
fall apart before I even buckled them shut.
In
the morning, before the coffee’s ready, before my head catches up with the rest
of me, Arnold comes in and starts pushing stuff around, toying and schmoozing
with little tchotchkes he finds amusing. My eyes are too heavy to focus
properly, and the best I can do is growl a meek, “Hey there, Arn.” It’s enough
to keep him at bay. He knows not to approach me to hastily first thing after
daylight. I’m a man of slow, cumbersome motions in the a.m.. Just leaning on
the counter’s enough to kept my busy.
The
windows start to fill with light, a little, and I squint out towards a break in
the clouds: a frowzy, piss-yellow scuttling on the horizon’s yawning mug that
seems to be mocking me and my sluggish puddles of ambition. A sudden blunted
dourness overcomes me, and I feel as if I won’t ever escape these walls of
overloaded shelves. Arnold’s flicking the silver flags of two identical
miniature rocket ships
with a finger of each hand, making them spin around and around while he
whistles When Johnny Comes Marching Home. I try not to pay attention. Instead I
listen to the coffeemaker sputter, wheeze, and eventually drip to life. My gaze
is gauzy with sleep. There’s no telling how far I’ve strayed from the calm of
rest. Very little comes easy to the flutter-singed mind of insomnia’s
early-morning dementia. I find myself giving up and in a little more with the
arrival of each new day. As one might expect, intruders, like Arnold, who
scramble into my pre-coffee daze with their shambling theatrics, are not a
welcome sight. I close my eyes and try to dream my way out of all this and all
the way back home. It doesn’t work.
Drizzling
on about the commonplace, I make up for gained time. A real stickler for the
uncanny relief of settling in. I’m cursed with petty annoyances wherever I go.
It’s layman’s terms my memory’s coming to, in the tact of being considerate to
what fortune holds aloft, gone or lost just the same, from what reality’s not
very good at understanding. I don’t get to see myself from the curt
perspectives that others take. Not that I’m one to get all sentimental over
thrown-away things, but still, I’m not the sort who takes these things with a
bashful shrug and moves on. My taste may change, but my will is still solid.
Fuck salsa. I’m making a break for plain tortilla chips soaked in butter.
There’s
a guy I’ve nicknamed Pockets. He’s shifty with a wild stop-sign red crop of
hair, and comes in here twice a week or so, but never too early to be a real
hassle to me. But he’s here this morning, and starts paling around with Arnold.
I hear Pockets mumble something about disregard for understatement. He’s
off-the-charts rifle-happy while the radio plays Roy Orbison. Arnold shudders.
I don’t blame him. Pockets can be quite a handful when he gets this way.
Ostensibly I make to be ignoring them, but my eyes are watchful enough. Who
knows when one of these homegrown bastards will turn to a filch. It’s better to
play dumb.
Some folks come in searching for the
holy grail. It’s like they’re saying, “Hello, Lady Darkness. Always welcome in
my home.” They’d be better off dreaming up toilet paper slogans, if you ask me.
They ride the swale between the tules of sleep and wakefulness, and they forget
their hats on a bed. Buckboard moans and shakes under their stride. I am not
giving in. I tell them to keep up with the bad fight, for the good of it, or
whatever good it’s going to do any-old-one in this sheltered maroon-lost place
we keep telling ourselves that we’re alive in. It’s Bunk. I know it. And I’m
shoving off. It’s all I can do that’ll do. Better than mooching around with all
of this forgetfulness. But I do. The nuns have all gone on attack. And I do.
A
crowd is scrounging around through the junk by noon. Sheila and Nellie, the
Harmon twins-- who both do more than scratch at the surface of ugly-- are
ranting and slandering around as usual. They’re both pushing fifty, and don’t
like it. The rolls have gathered at their middles; their thighs shred tights
like junk mail; faces like car wrecks; yellow hair shot to stringy split dry
weeds; and there are more than a few boll weevils in their less-than-verdurous
fields. I enjoy their conversations immensely.
Sheila pipes
up, “My son, he’s a miscreant. And, to top that, a weeper too. A real master of
the old waterworks spiller. Yep. Can’t get him to handle much without a bawling
jag coming over him, and then, well, forget it. It’s all done in. No way to get
to him, through and in. It’s over. All the theatrics, sprinklers, and then
some. I just let him go on. It’s all you can do. That kid. He’s a lost cause.
“But
you got to love your kid, right? Your own fleshy bloody thingy, and all that.
It’s up to you to find a way to accept the shit licker into the folds of your
life. But please, don’t think that it’s easy, especially if your own’s making
up for lost time by smearing his milquetoast crap all over the sappiest parts
of your personhood. Loopy as they come, I tell you. Wish for a muzzle. Maybe
you get lucky. Well, at least it’s something to do in the drained thick of it.”
Nellie
isn’t talking, and there are scrunches her face gets into that it seems it’ll
never recover from. She’s a real squinter. Hard to tell if she’s happy about
anything or even ever content. A purple scowl boils on the thick painted grease
of her crusty mug, and, hell, maybe it’s about time we all get better at
deciphering our own moaning. Maybe I’m just the same, whining on about nothing
much, nothing much at all. We’re all just as boring as being bored. When I get
around to choking somebody, it’ll be with both hands.
from chapter 22
The
crickets and the howls of coyotes scrawl tattered wrecks on the evening. I’m
not lonely at all. My voice is deeper tonight, deeper than wild violets, and it
threshes fallen leaves, and it cracks and falls, while I too am shallower in
its depths. We all need a nice calm place to dream from. There, of course, is
nothing to be done. There never is.
from chapter 5
You ask yourself, “Where am I going to
eat? Am I going to put socks on? What does a ringing phone sounds like?” But in
the end it’s all just decorative, arrangements you’re making within the
outside. I don’t regret the sinking I’ve done in (or out) the slouched course
of my wandering. For the charge, the brunt of it at least, I go screaming
Yiddish down the halls, again (or over and over), and then it’s a placated
smile planted sullenly on my curt way of handling business. Sense doesn’t make
me hard and gruff; it flows cussed and ribald, crooked to bend the stream
better where something’s resisting more than a tad. But, hell, there I stop and
go all self-absorbed and hollow. It’s better to just paint yourself behind the
burning bush, I’ve found, and let others make distinctions for you. I’m done
with chasing and being chased. Somebody cue the mood music, please. There’s no
time like the present for hiding out and waiting for the future to arrive.
from chapter 9
Stacks
of CDs, most with cracked jewel cases and scratches cobwebbing out on their
no-longer-shiny bottoms. I flip through them, wondering about why somebody’d
bought them in the first place. Horrible titles and pictures: Little Handy And
The DewBirds; Blithe Retreat; The TableTops “Platter Up”; Joe Nixon and The
Blind Hunters; JizWeapon. It’s sad. All this wasted energy come to such a
meager end, gathering dust now, never to be played or handled by expectant
fingers again. Barney Koulfax and The Barroom Baritones. Gordie Takes
Manhattan. It’s a fool’s hell disguised as Eden, and I don’t want to give in to
it. I want this music to exist again, to rise to the rafters and fill this
small room with everything it’s got. Somewhere in the dizzy realms of schmaltzy
wonder lies a place for all this god-awful noise we make, this attempt to show
the world that we are alive, real, and more than just another body taking up
space and wasting air. I nab a CD from the pile at random: Louie Chalk’s
Singing Flowers Back To Bloom. It’s still got the shrinkwrap on it. Never been
opened. This makes me indescribably sad. I check it into the store’s CD player
and hit PLAY.
A
slight maundering mixed with the pulse and throb of a rumbling bass, and then
some scraps of guitar, flickering and distorted-- almost a squeal. A voice
chimes in, discreet and saccharine, with a falsetto croon: “If I were a little
petal, afloat upon the wind of your breath, then I’d give my heart a merry
chance to wink and kiss and undress.” It’s horrendous. Worse than that. My
whole body flinches. It’s like the world has suddenly gone off key, my brain’s
out of tune, and the windows are rattling with the dire urge to escape.
Everybody in the place has the look of surprised terror suddenly flash on their
faces, and I lunge at the CD player to hit STOP. Silence ensues. Relief fills
the room like cotton candy, and we all sigh through it.
I used to know a guy named Presley. He’d
wave at mirrors. Crowds never gathered, but he addressed them anyway. His hair
was always slicked with pomade and smelled like vanilla. The way he walked was
inimitable, like a cowboy drenched in kerosene doing the mambo. Red shirts and
bandanas around the neck. He used to play his 33 LPs at 45. Little Sister at
this rpm was amazing. We danced to it, pounding the floorboards with our sweet
mediocrity. I enjoyed his company quite a bit.
from chapter 3
Courtesy
goes a bit longer of a way around these parts. I give it a go-- just
easy-does-it, for the most of a while. I’ll get my share of jerks and
bad-mouthers in here. It goes with the territory, and I put up with it, as far
as my temper will allow. I let them have their blurts of frustration, and maybe
take a bit more than I should, but it keeps up appearances around here, and
that does me better in the long of it. I keep to monosyllables. Curtness goes a
long way to keeping things easy. I dust myself of others, and the static cling
of them keeps me honest and irritated.
It’s
like missing something you’ve never known. Sniveling over a ubiquitous riot
that’s been quelled in your heart’s fondest corner-cleaning ways. A rutty pinch
of light knifed blazing through troubled waters, momentarily, and then all’s
calm and slow again. I can’t fuss over my own finger-pointing. Guessing glazes
over and stultifies my finer points. I, somehow, get by without much gruff.
Vulpine and a little less free with each passing night. It’s plenty.
from chapter 14
A
girl’s leaning against a lamppost, thumbing through a paper, dangling a
cigarette from her lips as she goes. Her eye’s not there to be caught. It’s a
slight wish of a thing, taking truck with fallen trees and gopher holes, and it
plays itself straight ahead, burly and overreaching too, but I’m too sly for
it. Maybe it is Beverly Sills, caught between an aria and a hangnail. I doubt
it. I do my looking somewhere else. My eyes stretch skyward, as is their wont,
and I catch nothing but a few wind-tugged bodies of flimsy clouds and long vast
stretches of bowl-you-over blue taking more space than even emptiness could.
The window’s smeared in places, chalky in others, and I gaze over the flinty
ruins of old dirt paths no longer cut so distinct leading away from the road. I
drag my eyes all over the place and get nowhere. This is always the decisive
part of the day for me. There is a place that’ll turn one way or a hundred
finite others. It plays havoc with my motivation, rues my milled volition, and
steps brawny and curt on my dreams. There is nothing to do or be done. I have
discovered only false tenses in today’s strips of hope. In the meantime, I cut
my whisky with maple syrup.
There
was an encoignure on the sidewalk. The sun was doing a number on the wood,
baking it to a scarred velvety texture, a scaling rust-colored patch of scabby
shreds. It was gutted: the drawers were gone, and some dead leaves had settled
their way in the bottom. It no longer matters how much money it might’ve
fetched. It’s resilience is for not. Love’s last trickle has dried up. The
world erodes it and takes it back, slowly, into the caldron of undifferentiated
mass: a place where destruction is creation, and the rules no longer
apply.
from chapter 87
Jed
counts the steps as he goes up the stairs, lumbering one by one, dazed and
rocking some, hesitant too, and willfully sated with the journey. Like dead
leaves swept up by a heavy gust of wind-- a crinkled sound that scrapes and
rustles and lifts-- I hear him stepping his way towards where I am, tucked away
in the attic room here, trying not to be bothered. It’s no use. His gangly gait
is soon shuffling too close to keep going without me opening the door to let
him in. There’s something princely about my undertakings, and I succumb and go
to the door to unlatch it. There he is, face pawed at and pocked under a swash
of black yarn-like whorls, chipped front teeth jutting out crookedly, and his
aimless eyes slumped under droopy upper lids. Of course, he is invited in, and
soon we’re kicking up our feet on various footrest substitutes and, while
gandering around in feigned ambivalence, grinning at the unbearable, waiting
our turn to speak.
The clouds sneak on up over the hills.
The chumps don’t even put up a fight. Touched restless. The sweet, bubbly thrill
of her voice gone for good. And for me, now, it gets loneliest in the
afternoon. The day shrinks away, dappled and dreary, from my wherewithal. The
stuffy things that arrive, the crank and wheeled brunt of them knocking around
in my skull, have the most staying power while the sun’s getting on past
straight overhead. Can’t blink these exudations away as they roost to brood. I
cut my coffee with snake oil. Time just goes and goes and goes.
from chapter 1
A
deeper voice, more rich, almost a baritone, drooling and raspy just a lick above
the plunk of a warped piano. A wise way to limn the necessary from monotony;
nothing like the rash spate of today’s culled deliverance. It wakes one from
its noon slumber while the strangest thoughts chip and dart through my warped
brain, like being attacked by a butterfly. A weighty stroke of another hour
upon us, lazily strangling me, and the music’s boring holes in the bleakness
with a softly lulled timbre. The teakettle is whistling. Yes. I still find time
to pour some tea in.
The
days bury themselves in under-priced jewels. The light remains intact, skidding
on the dirt-streaked window glass. The trees shave your uncle. The jasmine
distills. We are just reflection of our own reflections. I keep thinking she’ll
dive her way out here, here where all I do is miss her. Forenoons tarry with
bounded reasonableness, lasting painfully enough. Once, the cartoons were all
in a foreign language, and I just found myself staring at defunct neon signs,
doing trivial things with my time, and pouring grape soda over salted ice.
There is a rich valor in the roses here, a steep unhurried hinge of newness
that swings easy in the straddle of the days-- the floating absurd days that
flutter by, not really like petals falling at all. Not really. Carved apses of
reality lapse and lurk like timid frowns. The sling of curves, the crop-hungry
wilt of barren love, the optimal dose of languid spaces spread through
drowsy-thick harbors, a creep that’ll clutch at whatever winds up around. I think
of her more often than a lot. Yellow digs. The mustard fights. Potatoes peel
themselves. The days here are just shattered glass from a one-way mirror
without her.
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