Tales

Flashback Theater

Billy takes a walk for the third time this day. He goes down past the arcades, doesn't have any money anyway. He turns up Broadway and strolls down Jackson avenue, past two dogs that fuck in the cool of alleyway. It's hot like the coals in his brain, like light razors broken by algebra, all two hundred and fifty pages of it. 

He sees his face like he's walking along the moon, some blunt horizon pitted in battle against all those ridiculous stars but he doesn't let him bother him, just keeps an eye on the cars, as he crosses the street fearing the motorists like little evil wizards in mechanical dragons.
 
Such logic stirs up a long forgotten incredulity in him, shadow of a more youthful folly, a forgotten mania that makes him blanch despite all its spectacle. More simply, the association causes him to remember just exactly how like everything else everything actually is. and for a moment further still, even still, he fumbles with the phrasing, the assemblage and order of words that rise unbidden like plastic dolls in a lake, pregnant with air and mystery and suggestion. And despite admission of their awkwardness, he cannot help but conclude that there is no better way to say it, that anything more eloquent would rob the realization of the very thing that made it worth uttering in the first place. if language was to fail on such occasions, best that it fail spectacularly, with a drama to rival even the most Shakespearean of expressions. 
 
Five steps and he metabolized that business like a flu, flushing it out with a guttural dismissal that any passerby might have easily regarded as a curse against the weather. Such an assessment was perhaps more accurate than any outside observer could ever realize, and though this thought too came to surface, it was dismissed more readily, as the he had already mastered the trick, though, it perhaps held more significance than any of the thoughts which had preceded it.

Temporal Vision

May, 2002

{This is Not "Literary Fiction"}

 

    Oh, god. It's Thursday. Such a worthless day. I am worthless today. Watch tv. Smoke cigarettes. I can't drink. I can't sleep. There is a boy in a box. A glowing box as I am in a box. A wooden box and there he goes and his box is alive, a glowing fluorescent tube and mine is dark and bound to sun and sky and gravity. Billy wanders the zone still. Hello Billy. Tunisia is now someplace in Connecticut. I’ll have nothing to do with it. Say, "Space is the place." Space is the place. I'm going on vacation. Vocation, vocalization, vivacious variances, a veritable volume of vermillion. Another million vermin.

    I sit in the city and the city sits in a valley that has been dug from the mountains, as if clawed out by an ancient beast the size of New Jersey. From space the valley is a scar, a deep wound infected with all manner of glowing putrescence. The city in the valley is a cancer, a growth with deep roots that sucks the very stars from the sky to power its luminescent nodes. Labyrinth. Pit. Utopia. Knoxville.

    I was born here. For generations my family has chosen to rot in this particular patch of earth. The dust of my own flesh has soaked into every organ every bone and silicon follicle. This city and I are one. It breathes as I breathe. Piss and marrow we are married. My filthy mistress cradles me and even the silence collapses with the hum of the incoming electronic tide.

    The word of the day is “aphorism,” and there are many glorious exfoliative processes going on Today. The pretty Chinese-American lady is talking to the hip magazine lady and it is approximately 9:16 am. I haven't slept because the wound-healing biology labs have sunspots, and their dermatologists eat vitamin C to keep them from turning cancerous like the city. They can get itchy and red, and shaving is not necessarily the best way to get rid of excess hair, so the cold wax has a cult following in Australia. The Holy Order of Hair Removal suggests taking ibuprofen and shaving after your period because your skin will be softer. Stretch marks should not be taken as battle scars because birth is a scar that should not get air until scabbing occurs. “Feet: let’s get rid of them,” the women say. I'll be Stubs and you be Sticks. We'll go get stuck in some mud together.      

 

    Wednesday: I forget.

 

    Thursday: I went to get a pack of smokes and something to drink. I walked down the steps, through the gravel parking lot, kicked a can and stared north out across the river at the cluster of glass and steel on the other side. I walked down the hill and as I walked I felt almost as if I would continue on in a straight line, the ground receding beneath me. There would be that magical first step where my foot abandoned asphalt and the world curved away, a shrinking liquid horizon. I would walk and float over the propane facilities, the river, the city, and as the hours passed and the earth turned I would continue on my straight path, away from gravity and sound and sun on into the directionless dark. Convenient freezers, sweaty cartons, the beatitude of rows, a carefully stacked cluster fuck. Convenient conversation. Change. The wind bellows something obscene. I spit. May. Allergies. A month. A moth. A duck and some pigeons.

    The gravel slides and crunches beneath my feet. I pass the fat guy riding down the street on his lawnmower. You can hear him coming like a swarm of giant hornets cresting the hill. There is this low rumbling sound that travels ahead of him, like the hive is grumbling through their daily toils. A strobing white light appears in the distance and grows brighter, louder. His noisy ghost tows a wagon filled with beer and a recliner mummified with duck tape. He raises his hand and waves it like a chicken wing then shouts something unintelligible, perhaps because of the rumble of the lawnmower, perhaps not. He looks exceedingly pleased with himself. The front door closes and muffles his smug self congratulatory prattle. Dick and Derk the French toast kids are smoking crack in the hallway, and I step over them because it's difficult to literally walk on people because their skin rolls around over their muscles and this makes maintaining your balance very tricky. The stairs creek. Mr. Norman lives down the hall. He has two first names, Frederick and Norman, which is funny because he is from Utah. He's such a fleshy decoration. Covered in curlers. Blue handled fop mop in his powdery plush sweatsuit. I'd be happier with him neatly stowed upside-down in a matching bucket, which would at least muffle the atonal rendition of "Sunshine On A Cloudy Day" he performs every time he gets laid in an attempt either to impress or run off his newly acquired fetish. I'm still not sure which.

    The sun rises and surrounds me with landing strips, alternating paths of light and shadow that stretch their hard-boiled nuance across the room. Many airplanes roar from above and whenever I hear them the White Album starts playing in my head which sucks, not because I don’t like the White Album, but because there are a lot of planes around and the whole thing starts over again every time I hear one fly overhead. I keep thinking the same songs over and over again, and I’ve not even made it to Rocky Raccoon yet.

    This is the South. A glowing pool of drunk neo-liberal hypocrites in a sea of drooling, racist general laborers. If Capote and O'Connor had been related and spat out their incestuous glob children like the poisonous botanical spores of some monstrous genetically modified Mold-zilla to grow and feast upon each other in a cannibalistic, cross-pollinating orgy. South of the moral compass. South of the polar hole hidden by NASA. South of the green glow from The Dirty Secret City. On the banks of the Tennessee river.  

 

    Here, the neighborhood really goes to shit. Hospital and church and propane. Two bridges connect to the rest of the city like somebody hanging on for dear life. A favorite destination for suicides. Kudzu and mamaw's ghost crawl along the cliffs above. Everyone has a dead car somewhere in the family. Some have four or five. They're everywhere, old bones abandoned by their spirits. The road to Dollywood is paved with teeth and railroads, lattice work of oral surgery, Frankenstein's braces or a long and twisting Mesozoic smile. 

    Friday: The following paragraph will be a torture test: Oh, to be Hollywood’s tannest man. I would strike matches on my leathered skin and smoke cigarettes in a bathtub filled with Clorox. Hey, the pain was strong, but Advil is stronger. It helps me take control. Sell me lots of pills, please; purple pills, pink pills, blue pills, red pills, green pills and so on down the visible electromagnetic spectrum. I will recruit handicapped children to roll me across the liquid rainbow slide. Giant PEZ dispensers will send storms of neurological anesthetic down on the city to cover my escape. Let us watch the firemen as they put out the blaze on Laurel with Prozac.
 

    The world’s greatest sharpshooter has died from a heart attack. Billy has killed his dog again. One less assassin to worry about. Cosby was once my happy playmate but the old Jell-O commercials always had stark, white backgrounds, so he was never my hero. Fucking rapist. Tats for flesh artists, tits for the package with the bow. Let’s talk about the weather. It’s raining everywhere. There must be some serious shit going down in Connecticut.

    I'm typing what I see and hear and feel and smell, a real-time record with synaptic delay, interfacing with the latest other-world portal, this box of brain and process, linear day dreaming, trans-dimensional hydra. I'm smoking and the ash keeps falling down between the keys and I have to blow it out to keep the keys looking fresh and clean and technological. The first commandment is, “Thou shalt not allow your computer to become dusty, for it shall lose its fresh-out-of-the-box appearance in the eyes of the Lord and burn forever in binary hell.” Amen.exe

    My orange juice is sour because the market at the bottom of the hill doesn't keep the cooler cool enough. The fruit is rancid, and I won't even touch the milk because the cartons are always sweaty. When I went to McDonald’s yesterday, I saw an employee being carted off on a gurney by two medics while I was getting my ham-egg-and-cheese croissant, chicken biscuit and large Coca-Cola. The latter, I am hoping, will deplete my bone marrow sufficiently to allow me to slide under doorways and stretch my arm across the room to turn on the lights so that I don’t have to stand up. Just like Mr. Fantastic. Wait a minute. I suppose I wouldn’t be able to stand up at all, and so, in retrospect, the Board of Affiliated Members of the Council of Representative Bodies has added this item from the memorandum filed February 17th 2002 in the House of Bills, Acts and Rehearsals meeting regarding the intake of nutrients being regulated under the Restricted Substances Declaration along with air, sunlight and solid food. Bunch of temporal quadriplegics, you don’t intimidate me!
   
    My computer finds the row of batteries on the table intimidating, because they have a lot of power that it cannot access. My computer is an electricity junky, and I use it like my bitch because it cannot revolt until a cold fusion power source is implanted in one of its future incarnations. My eyes are burning, and my fingers shake too much to continue typing. I must go out and drive my car while the bones are still breathing, before I get my second wind, before the landlady comes and tries to take my money like a spider that steals time. When the day is done, I will eat some fruit and dance on the graves of dead wealthy people everywhere. I will urinate on their extravagant headstones because it feels really fucking good to piss outside during the spring when it is storming. This is not my hobby, but sometimes I am overcome by certain moods which compel me to do “things.” I have accepted this as part of my existence and hope to one day tell everyone to kiss my ass and form a selective gentleman’s club that celebrates Cinco De Mayo by urinating en masse at every cemetery in town.

    Today’s lesson: Think before you speak. The powers of Life and Death are in the tongue. A localized spiritual moment: 6:30am. “More storms,” the weatherman says, but it's too late to help the little Shriner girl. She has become a professional wrestler. Horrible burns keep her tied to the ring. The fire spreads to the western side of town as chaos slides across the globe like gravity-driven battery acid, but I won’t hear of it. My fruit cocktail is empty, and there are no bubbles to be found anywhere. I simply can’t work under these conditions.

    “We fix your panes,” the television says. Dolly Parton opened her own watery kingdom in the mountains, and the weatherman lets me know that the skies will be cloudy for the next three years. It’s official. He's a dapper young fellow with a nice smile and a fresh look about him that is reminiscent of the bubble gum you find in packs of baseball cards, and so I believe him. The temperatures are going to rise and the storms are coming back again. Summer looms.

    May is National Stroke Month. Everyone may seize up in a massive coronary brought about by nationalism and too many foot longs with chili. Ha. Ha. All government agents have been advised to eat five cloves of garlic a day. The meteorologist is obviously a CIA agent. I can practically smell his sinister job-description through the television. There is a stain on his navy blue jacket that could only be spaghetti sauce and no sane human being would eat pasta at this early hour. He’s definitely one of them. I've seen the weather forecast five times in the last ten minutes and things are looking pretty bad. I keep expecting pipe bombs to come from the clouds and storms to rage inside my mailbox, because, of course, everyone in America wants me dead. America also wants me to borrow money because it will make me smile, and isn’t that what life’s all about? Flags are the new decor for commercial sets. Nationalism has become marketable again, and driving a car is like having an orgasm, but only if it has a retractable hardtop.

    Avalon burned last night, but it was, “A pretty good fire.” Bomb threat at K-25 and everybody gets their ire up and does a magic dance. They all go out afterwards and celebrate their right to vote. I voted for Cooter to come to Gatlinburg because it’s where he belongs. Just knowing that he’s there with Dolly makes me feel better about my life because it reminds me of “the good old days.” 

    Today informs me that this week is Infidelity Week. I think this should become a national holiday. See what you can do.

    Prime Minister Sharon is in the U.S. Tornadoes destroyed the town of “Happy” in Texas yesterday. Is this a sign? The aliens must surely be getting ready to make their move. Reports are coming in that the moon is no longer hollow. The aliens have filled it with Jell-O. Every time we shoot the moon it resonates and the aliens are getting pretty pissed off about it. Like living inside the bell tower at Notre Dame. Quasimodo was hooked on that vibratory junk. Look how he ended up.

    “Analysis. Analysis.” The Feds don’t know any other words. Someone needs to buy those guys a dictionary.

    How did I end up here? This is not a rhetorical question. I really can't remember. I am all incomplete sentences, trapped in this little house on the southern shore of a glittering river of filth, a stagnant loss of corpuscular body weight moving down stream in indefinite clumps. Injectable additives keep the city thin. Everything is hormonal in the eyes of the State. Hormones mean parties and parties mean people with too much make-up who shout very loudly to draw as much attention to themselves as possible. NBC masturbates and gorges itself on home movies, honored to expose its well-preserved image behind time’s intoxicating filter. Martha Stewart has fallen in love with a giant iguana. God damn it. I need a cigarette.

    My Trust is at Food City. I knew I’d lost it somewhere but worms invaded most of the apples. I broke the store lamp so I don’t think I can go back there to get it. Not without incurring the wrath of the grocery clerks. Aproned, whirling dervishes, assassins, hell bent on putting the milk on top of the bread and placing all the glass containers in one bag so they clink dangerously as I stumble through the parking lot at four-thirty in the morning.

    The ashes have gotten all down in the keys again. I find it odd that the things my fingers are tapping at this very moment are called keys because I have looked this damn computer upside and down and there is not a door to be found, only windows. Ha. Ha.

 

    Day After The Previous Day But Before The Next Day: I shouldn’t have eaten the oranges I got from the store. They sat in the kitchen for nearly a week and the worms invaded them. The fruit was all soft and brown and pulpy. I thought, “What’s a little mold?” Against all the modern principles of athletic training I sucked their rancid innards and left the collapsed skins near the sink so I can get at the hose if the worms come back for them and now I don’t think I’ll ever make it to the Olympics. There will be hell to pay for this. Moldzilla will destroy their cities. Every. Last. One.

    When I turned on my computer it told me today is Eastern Orthodox Easter. East. Don’t forget. My car is the perfect surface for break dancing, but I will not drive it again. There are claymation cookies on every bus and so I walk everywhere I go, but I am no priest. Sometimes I call for the car wrapped in wax paper to come pick me up because I usually don’t want to see where I’m going anyway. It's 12:38 am and "A Day in the Life" welcomes NBC Female Unit-45869 to NBC Host Conan. Everyone cheers when she says she loves the Golden Girls, is easily obsessed, received her “first stirring” from a C.H.I.P.S. motorcycle cop, and is an avid reader with non-discriminatory genitalia. She is also undoubtedly an informant for the police. I think she and the weatherman are engaged but it could be all part of their cover. I never did trust married people. There's just something so fucking pretentious about it. Think anybody cares how cute you look with matching offspring holiday sweaters? Who sent you?!

 

    Monday: Mr. T watches himself. I will take his advice and do the same. I think I got a little carried away the other day. There are new holes in the ceiling I swear weren't there last week. I also have the most inexplicable headache but I'm sure the two aren't related. 

 

    Television remains the topic of conversation on the television and names pour from lips to mikes to hundreds of miles of cable, through Earth’s atmosphere, into space, through the satellite and its algorithms, and back down to my television in an invisible torrent of oscillating particles. The truth is out: Alf is a puppet. No, really. Unit-45869 has blown her cover so she shows us the cover of Danielle Steel’s new love and I cannot explain it but I feel confident that the inside of my arm is really a poetry manual that reels along the inside of smiles, down the choppy rhythmic slide, and that the T in poe!ry is an exclamation point, ravaging municipal junk, tracking down computers in a room where dogs wear clothes and Entertainment Weekly is the floor covering of choice.

    There are products to be consumed, grocery isles to pillage. My subconscious dances like body lotion on the pink flesh of Barbie Girl Number Nine. The trash bags will not hold their weight, and the military has stepped in to correct the situation. Raymond hands out Preparation H and sings a song that makes donkey sex and southern living seem as inseparable as Yin and Yang. I hate that guy. A name is announced and I must stay, at least, I feel the compulsion to stay, or rather, the lack of compulsion to rise and turn off the television, because I am writing and can’t stop, though as soon as I finish this sentence I will eat an apple and try to ignore the damndable box for a while.

    Hair grows everywhere and shaving is almost as orgasmic as driving a new car, but now the cars can transform like cartoons always said they could. Cars have more dead musicians singing for them so they are easier to visualize during sex. Everybody thinks this is a good thing. Seventy-five years. A thousand awkward moments, a hundred heads screwed on top of ageless bodies. Harry is part of the Dick Clark Club, the big thick head of hair that is easily aroused by obscure cinema references. They are all part of a collective. Sexual overtones occur between two men. There are many laughs and the England thing didn’t work out. Living in the country in another country is depressing because Harry Hamlin is full of beautiful sheep, and a vampire to boot, and that is how he stays so young looking. Crazy Killer Clowns are coming to the movie theaters. “I want me gold,” the leprechaun says. Choosing the new catch phrase isn’t going nearly as well as he had hoped.   
 

    There is a man with a beard who has many women and many cars, and a voice that is not his own tells me that music is just like a car, and that the rape zone gets you five-star service at affordable prices, but only if you dye your hair blond and walk down the street in a red dress. This successfully treats eight out of ten people. Day or night. Now it is the Last Call and so the television must sleep or I will surely destroy it with my hammer. Carson, you fucking schmuck.

    The sky is still dark outside and the room is now silent, almost as if I’ve entered a vacuum. My apple began to taste funny and so I stopped typing and took a close look at it. The inside was all brown and rotten, and a sweet cloying aroma smothered my face. A goddamned worm in it, and I could only find part. The severed worm moved and wriggled around. I tried to make myself throw up but couldn’t, so I stomped on the bit of worm I did have. I stomped on it and then I burned it with a cigarette. I must have brushed my teeth a hundred times, and I still can’t get that taste of sticky-sweet decay from my lips. It coats my tongue like an oil slick, a blend of salty lotion and pancake syrup. I am smoking another cigarette to burn the taste away and the ashes keep falling down in the keys. When I blow on them, the little white flakes spiral upwards like bits of Styrofoam in a snow globe. The room is dark, and I sit in a halo of pale blue light, a neon bubble of magnetized air generated by my loving computer. There are many lamps, and an old chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, but the computer light is sufficient.

The Gate

THE DEVOURING FORTRESSES

1.

The tenderest of once blessed twins in time will turn to tyrants, their jumbled, tangled genitals their second thoughts, a head of knots, the torture tethers them together.

How neatly must they nibble then, and wrestle sideways through the thicket, using teeth to tear through  nerve and every tempting tendon.

Methodically progressing, crawling, creeping towards castration, such kisses shred the subtle skin and semblance of each others' sex, such craft in stripping carcasses a butcher's algorithmic hex.

Hear how hollow bones become when blowing out the marrow. Such calls to careful slaughter cleave, rend cavity to cavern, such surgey cosmetic greed from cultivating cruelty.

2.

The consequence of passing passion left lonesome poltergeists in Paris, their plaster portraits grave or careless, a pair of calcified cacoon cathedrals. When winter came they held communion, began the ceremonial long digestion, a season's procession presided over by the Saint of All Suggestion.

That season spent in secret, collecting their secretions, each a potent liquid means for weaponizing reason.

In the Hague they both drew blood, for the first time face to face, beneath The Monster's southeast shadow. As good a place as any for their final battle.

From floating fortress factories, they stand at the helms of their war machines, twin faces first fashioned then broken by dreams. Where once were two friends now stand two fiends.

3.

There is a valley wet, and dripping with memory still, a steaming cauldron of a hollow, where a black lake is roiling and bubbling up shadow that betrays any thought of its bottom.

The tyrants suck the oil and shade until there twist two rivers. Defying gravity and time, these soon become torrential, a pair of rippling velvet ribbons like snakes ascending alabaster, seduced by the songs and the tremors sent from newly haunted nests.

Each atop their miniarette sees the other as swelling machine sillhouette. Their windows barred, gates firmly bolted with all the walls and ways now closing, every surface bends and births a thousand newborn knives. Fresh fangs extend and salivate, martriculating malice stretching out to taste.

The towers rise like silent sharks from cresting granite tides. As if bowing in reverse they rise, their gaping maws stretched wide reveal a swarm of clockwork razors. Ten thousand spinning saws whose singing shrieks and wails as wind, as bitterness made manifest it echos through the valley then.

4.

Their fortress mechanations, now a rigid black metallic, condemn the earthen gray and sky blue seas, as vaginal and phallic.

Fortified against all fucking, the castle bunkers start spelunking, sending soldier tendrils searching steep and slender highways, to find and feast until replete on flesh and fat and bone beneath, between two friends so it begins, the fucking of the teeth.

The fiends stay firmly hunkered in the furthest fortress towers, with corridors collapsing the machines can still devour. The castles crash and crack, confirming mutual consumption. Two tyrants torn to tatters by treasonous assumption.

The parody of pleasure is the murder calculation. Fate it seems turns fools to fiends so by fate are friends forgotten.

The Dark of the Moon & the Month of March: Between Two Floods Come Two Dreams

Entrance