The foul rag and bone shop of the
heart has gone and lost its dogs. I’ve got enough trouble with my eyes as it
is. You see? She wasn’t the sort of girl you’d share an umbrella with or
anything, but she’d do. There’s so much damn neon in this neighborhood. It’s
slashing all through the streets, catching us doing our dying ahead of time, scrabbling
for an out, dear and deep we go, one bottle after another. Just enough time for
one last shave. A potion for arrhythmia. An elixir for groin pains. The night
fate stepped away for a smoke. Vaulted ceilings and detailed wainscoting, the
whole works. Likelier magic doesn’t do the trick. She learned her lessons at an
older age than most. The world wasn’t willing to fix it. A girl like that, she
ought to have her own floorshow, or maybe she ends up in the back of a prowl
car, hiking her skirt back down.
Everyone’s got at least a little
bit of decency in them; maybe mine’s beginning to show. All the nice things
have gone. And so she says to me, “I’m just hoping that you’ll come looking for
me one day. More than anything, I’m hoping for that.” It’s stuff like that that
makes you want to drive the nails in before you should. Rudely shattered
complacency is all I get left with lately. I’m corroded with it. My nights
replete with ungovernable terror. But my observations are shit. Besides, I’m
the gregarious type. Enough talk as it is, you know?
My mom and I, we talk about Orson
Welles and Roald Dahl, old live Westinghouse commercials for home appliances,
tomato plants and bad weather. I ask her about the kids on her block. She tells
me that they’re always up to good.
Zombies from mars are invading the
breakfast nook. My necktie’s hanging looser and looser all the time. Sweating
through my undershirt. Chapped lips and a head made for longing.
There’s a warm chill running
through it all, chemicals in the breeze, a dazed apprehension deliquescing to
morning’s dew. The announcer’s voice rings in another suppertime waltz. Bad
night and worse luck. We’re all here to be juvenile in our most simple and
mutinous thoughts. Overthrow our inhibition? It’s worth a shot.
(Note:
my dreams are hyperboloid structures. They’ve got teeth, rope, shovels, all
sorts of ordinary things that curve inward as they take shape and then lose it.)
Based on all arcs of comprehension,
there are bastards like me all over, and they’re the same all over. A brittle,
coarse bevy of lunatics leering close to the fringes of it all. Man, what a
drag it’d be to be young again. Outer layers, growling down a fleer, hounding
the brash plaster of slingshot nickels, clawed from sheepskin sheets, a lower
feeling than down. Flip the bird to the rest of them. I’m out of coins and
ideas.
Trekking down the middle of the
boulevard in the late-afternoon’s small bit of rain. She wore gold and yellow
boots with lions and blue stars on them. Talking around some coffee in a
midnight booth. Refuting’s for the trashcan poachers and the misguided doves. I’m
less hell-bent about it now.
“You
had a big part in my dreams last night. A real starring role. Your name in
lights on the marquee of my imagination’s theatre. Where was I in yours?”
“Late
for breakfast.”
“And if
we had tire swings? And? What if we made rope from wigs and led stray dogs
through the wilderness?”
“Time’s
a big waste with it all. Tuning frantically in the background. That’s you.”
“But
shouldn’t people be more impressed with me?”
“Maybe.
But I doubt it.”
The visitor-side bleachers were
dripping with sprinkler water. The wood seats soppy and warped, the aluminum
runnels below them shining silvery in the first bright spray of light from the
sun. Two slightly dumpy guys in their mid-thirties were wandering around near
the base, on the cement walkway in front of the first row. They were both
wearing long-sleeve shirts underneath short-sleeve T-shirts. One of them had an
LA Rams cap on. It was becoming balmy out: the first sweat of the day breaking
out on the two companions. Neither of them were concerned about nuclear weapons
or the disappearance of boat-tailed grackles. The moon had just gone down. That’s
all.
“We’ve fallen out of favor with the
drum-machine crowd. Better put on your dust jacket. I’m working on my
pissed-off face.”
“Flowers to put some blight in your
day. Frankie and Shirley sitting on a tractor. Point right away from it, and
the rips of rain tear the bad lord’s echoes to tatters. Peel me a peach. I am
going to all the nowheres that I can.”
“Keeps me up early, this stuff.
Like us. Just like bastards like us.”
“Remain. Just. Remain.”
“My cows are too lonely.”
“That too. Yes. There is still
that, too. Yes.”
“Hum an ‘ahem’ for me, will you?”
“……………………………………………………….”
“Thanks.”
The press greets a benched catcher
who is not quite the spitting image of Mickey Cochrane with a smattering of
awkward applause. It makes him feel a few time zones behind. Just another way
to not catch up to rest of the pack. Nobody’s made for postgame interviews,
two-week marriages, and penny-arcade rings like an out-of-work pitching coach.
The way the shingles just fall on you sometimes. It’s winter’s hold on what’s
not crumby that lets the starters keep diving for seeing-eye grounders. Attention’s
a sham. They all roll over on sinkers sooner or later. Take off your hat. Stick
around for some of the while.
“Cooler burnings. A sleeker shade
of tungsten. Last time I smirked it made my toes itch.”
“This is the life that I’ve made
for myself. The same things, here, year after year, and I find myself all
tangled up in the end of it, or in the midst of it, or, perhaps, just at the
start of something. A bottle of vodka and me, alone in the dark with people
dying all around. It’s the way I’ve mapped it out all along: to be here, like
this. Breaking dishes and moving by habit. A roar that’s whimpered out. Learned
it all so well. And it’s all the same. It’s the same. Days after nights after
more of the same. The life I’ve made for myself out of empty bottles and lost
phone numbers. I might as well give up and get on with it, or without it.”
“You don’t got it. Not any of it. Not
at all.”
“My hate goes with me everywhere,
but where o’ where does my love go?”
“Flushed and weary, down, down,
down.”
“Trucked away we go with ears
pinched instead of cheeks, tongue tucked in them too, and we gust but not like
the wind at all. It’s more of a guess, I guess.”
“Never or nor, a bad like this gets
to be being better, nearly, something unhealed and worth lost money.”
“Careful. Language can be a tricky
thing. Watch it. But you’ll never really see a thing. So, forget it— for now
and for later.”
“Drooled me down to this, didn’t
you?”
“Beats me. My love is defunct, and
I’ve come down with a touch of nothing. And— another ‘and’ too— with this
derangement come lately there are certain bills to pay.”
“The go is with it. I’d suspect at
least that the barmen in purgatory are worth the while, at least. So, how about
a kiss for the dying, Carmelita?”
“She’s just mariachi static on the
radio. That’s all. On the outskirts of hell’s give-and-take that rooms with
every retired boxer in town. Romp and roam and die alone. That’s all there is
to it.”
“I’m all strung out on being
solitary. There’s no way to hold on any tighter. Everything’s just some
black-and-white comic strip that I’m trying to crayon-in the spaces of.”
“Schmucks like us can’t color in,
or even around, any of it. Both of us would be better off scaring up some
lentil soup from the cupboard, just sitting around with our socks on, knocking
back shots of almond milk, resting uncomfortably on perfectly unbalanced
chairs. I’ve got it. I really do. It’s all just carrying around a suitcase
filled with scotch and water. Emergency exit only, you know?”
“Perhaps this’ll be the time of our
lives when we start chanting about it—the Gregorian monks in us having their
night in the moon.”
“Rock with me. These chairs were
meant for it. That’s all it takes, and, maybe, that’s all we need.”
“Sweet.”
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