Archive for the ‘FICTION’ Category

A white bug just ended up between me and my keyboard. Upside down and kicking.

I loathe bugs.

I popped it in a tissue.

She swayed across the four lane blacktop from the bar to the 7-11 to buy cigarettes.

I watch this and wonder why there’s blood on my arm.  I’ve just come out and she’s the first thing I see after I straight arm the door and look up to see her despite how far away she is.  I hear her in her shoes.  Hips and nails and rhythm.  I pause to unwrap and light a smoke.  I throw the cellophane in the trash can of stone with an ashtray on top and put the fresh pack in my inside breast pocket.

Hoop earrings and a subtle but feline musky on approach.

I turn to go, thinking about her skin and her sway and her smell.

She swivels and looks right at me.  I don’t know what to do with this.

She says, “I came here for smokes but I don’t need a whole goddamn pack.”  Her head jerks a little at the end of her sentence.

I’m shy, I say something about only buying them by the shipping container.

She says, “Give me some cigarettes.”  She sticks out her lower lip.  She fucking says this and starts to goddamn pout.  She knows I stopped to check her out.

She wears some sort of straw hat with a huge yellow flower on it.  A flowery dress in contrast to her skin.

I’m wearing a coat and tie and start to dig inside my left for my new pack.  I feel like I look like William Shatner.  She smiles and leans an elbow on the ash tray/trash can between us.  She has freckles but barely. She folds her hands across her stomach and cocks her jaw just a little.  I’m leaning in her scent.

I try to smile as I clench teeth on my smoke and shake a few out of my pack.  I hold up three or four and she grins and winks and snatches them before I can blink.  The door jangles behind her as someone exits and she spins away asking me what I’m doing in front of a 7-11 on a Saturday night.

If I had an answer, I’d have to yell it.

I watch her dance back across the street to the bar.

I can’t figure out if she’s waiving me over or not.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m here for glucose.  I have a special tube that collects it.  Looks like a long horn.

I’m like a humming bird.

When you first lay eyes on me you’ll probably think about children’s books, like Dr. Seuss or maybe Sendak.  I’m odd.  I look like an aardvark kinda.  I’m very friendly and enjoy picnics and barbecues.  I eat anything and every thing but my tube gets clogged easily.  I turn blue.  I love cheese but it clogs my tube.  Beans, meat and pasta make me fart.  They also clog my tube.

It’s a small town so at first, people had no idea what to think or do.  I’m sure I looked a cartoon to them.  I did my best to be non threatening.  Non confrontational.  I learned to dance.  Trimmed my nails.  It sucks to be pastel purple.  I pack a blunderbuss.   I can pepper anyone inside of five or seven feet.  I wear lip gloss, mascara and perfume.  Giant hoop earrings.

I’m a tuber.  A root that grows in the ground.  You can eat me.  I’m nutritious.

Mom shops the sales.  The new bottle/dispenser of soap at the kitchen sink was a dollar.  On special post Christmas was this Christmas scented liquid.  Vanilla and fig, I think.  Took me a day to figure it out but it smells like strippers.  Eau De Titty Bar.  I tell my mother this and she’s the tiniest bit taken aback.  I’m all nostalgic.  Having enough money to hold court in a Vegas strip joint is royalness.

She needs a nickname.  Sean calls his mom “Bob”.  I like that.  I think I want to call my mother “Sweeney.”  I had other ideas but they were too many syllables.  Had to be one or two max.  Plus it rhymes with her real name.  I thought about “Jim” for a while.  Couldn’t get used to it.  My mother isn’t any kind of “Jim”.  What she is, is a Sweeney.

I confess, I’m not sure how I’ll do this.  I’ll be subtle and respectful.  I’ll drop it in.  It will take some time.  Patience.

At one point I’ll make her read this.  If I really want her to read something, I leave a post-it on the end of the kitchen faucet.

Sometimes I forget I did so and she has to ask if I want to know what she thinks after 4:30 during gin & tonics and cigarettes with at least one of two propane heaters blazing on the portico.  She is funny and doesn’t really know it.  She cracks me up.  She never stops moving.  I love her.  Oh man.

Kraut Dogs.

Ballparks sliced down the middle and fried in copious amounts of butter and granulated garlic.  Chop yellow onions.  The idea is to make the dogs  begin to curl a little as the butter browns and the garlic blackens.  Kick out the jams and toast the buns (endorsement of Ballpark buns) in the oven.  Then, slather them with mayonnaise and be generous with the mustard.  Best food mayo and anything other than some vanilla American mustard like French’s.  Guldens is good.  I once had a cognac mustard.  It made me weep.

Whatever.  By now you should’ve drained and nuked the Kraut and added celery salt to taste.  Be liberal with it.  The celery salt.

Immediately out of the oven, place a large store sliced square of authentic Swiss cheese on the bread at a right angle and follow up by spinning a smaller square of imitation smoked Swiss 45 degrees in any direction and placing it on top of the larger cheese.  It should look like a star.  Trust me.

Apply the greasy dogs immediately.  I like to cook with tongs and this whole operation goes smoother with tongs.

Onions generously and then the kraut.

Haven’t had it in a few years but maybe a Mondavi fume’ blanc?  I hate that it’s not in the frosted bottle anymore.

Open faced.  Fork and knife.

Macaroni salad.

Drinks for my friends.

I just can’t stand it.  Life always imitating art.  The way art endeavors to imitate life.  The circle closes rarely for reasons other than mere serendipity.  It’s never on purpose or for any reason we are able to divine.  We spend our lives looking to make sense of it and it refuses.  It walks away without a word. It could not care less what we think or what troubles us.

I’m sure of one thing.  It reveals nothing to no one.  There is no game and there is no fate.  Everyone you know who thinks they’ve got it figured out is lying to you and themselves.  It is random.  Despite prophecy, religion or dogma.  I’m not sure math owns the show at all.  I think the universe barely affords the concept of time for example.  At the very least, it does so in a way we won’t conceive or imagine for much longer than we’ll be able to conceive or imagine because our time here is at best a mote in the eye of a spectacular and incomprehensible cosmos.  This I believe at the end of the year of our lord, 2009.

Whatever.

That is not to say justice should not be pursued.  Philanthropy, yes.  Self educate by all means.  Aspire to kindness and compassion.  Eat right and exercise if you must.  People should strive to be as good as they can for a reason that is simultaneously as insignificant as it is fundamental; as far as we know we have but one shot.  In that one run at it, we only have ourselves.

I’m really beginning to own that.

The only magic is brains and the only miracle is will.

A train of thought that sounds like a bowling alley in my head.  Or a train.

My legs are killing me.  I seem to be gaining strength, but they go from sore to searing in seconds.  I’m glad I remembered my cane.

“Coffee on the veranda?” His head bobs while the car absorbs the road.  He strokes his beard without looking at me.

I lean forward to look him in the eye and to say things to him absolutely.  I tell Him I’m beyond scared.  I tell him I’m horrified.

I hold his gaze and thank him as sincerely as I can.   I tell him I have questions.

“We have time to talk today.  My villa is not far.”

This is the furthest south I’ve ever been, everything looks tropical. The grounds are lush and manicured.  Gravel and stone paths.  Palms and grasses.  Plump cactus and moss just a few feet away.  Desert flowers. I glimpse a robust stand of cannabis through some trees.  A handful of fountains and sculptures. The air is perfumed with an organic that is damp and sweet.

It’s humid and cool.

I’m happy to be here.   I feel better.

The driver opens my door and it’s the last I see of him.  He’s never looked at me.  Not once.

Carlo walks me to the door.  The house itself is fairly modest.  Like an early twentieth century LA bungalow.  Broad granite steps to a deck of thick hardwood trailing around both sides.  The entire roof, including the deck, is charcoal to gray or in the turquoise of oxidation.  There is copper everywhere.

Some of it glistens and some a myriad shade of greens.

It seems the whole house has a copper exoskeleton.

Must be a riot in a storm.  Maybe he has seances for Nikola Tesla.  I’m smiling.

The twin front doors are heavy and black. Carlo opens them with a little practiced effort.  Ceremonious but subtle.

I half expected a manservant.

Inside is rustic.   A river stone fireplace of water polished rocks with a heavy wooden mantle.   Silver candlesticks, pictures in elaborate frames and brightly colored glass.   A pot boils over a small flame from coals.  There must be a housekeeper at least.  The floors are dark slate and stone or hardwood.  Beautiful, thick rugs and sturdy furniture.  Blankets and pillows.  Plenty of sunlight through giant framed windows, diffused as the the deck wraps around the house excepting the north side.

The fog has not burned off completely.

On the right is the living area with a high ceiling, the fireplace with pot boiling and beyond that, what looks like a book lined den.  On the left is a small dining area and a large kitchen facing north.  The appliances are robust and sturdy but not new. The floor and counter tops are terra cotta.  There’s a pot rack suspended from chains over and island.  Copper and stainless steel vessels glisten.  Blenders, juicers, toasters and processors, none too modern, festoon the counters and gleam.

It smells of smoke and apples and good tobacco.

It feels cluttered but everything shines in an obvious place.

Carlo grinds coffee beans with some hand powered device I’ve never seen.  Wearing some kind of welding glove, he takes the black pot from the fireplace.  We sit on stools at a small but high iron table with a wooden top.  There’s an old glass French press, a small pitcher of cream and a small glass bowl filled with chunky unrefined brown sugar.  Two spoons, two heavy mugs.

My guess is someone forgot about the veranda.

From the device, he pours ground beans into the press and the boiling water over them.  The aroma makes me crave it. He seals the top with the plunger up and says, “Now we wait.”  He is smiling.

He retreats to the kitchen and returns with a small plate of fruit and bread.  Strawberries, melon, papaya, mango, grapes and what is definitely buttered cornbread.

The cornbread is stupid, buttered sweet and crumbly in my mouth.  Lascivious on my tongue and in my cheeks.  It is delicate cake that makes me anxious to swallow.  It’s color is it’s flavor.  I think there are raisins in it.

I ask.  He tells me no.  Dates.

He raises his eyebrows, rushes to the kitchen and returns with a shiny pile of caviar and creme fraiche on a small bone china dish and an actual silver and bone baby spoon.

He tells me he thought about taking the coffee outside but thought better of it.  He nods as he proclaims it, acknowledging his own wisdom.  That’s how he explains it.

I understand he means he’s not sure I’m safe outside the walls of his house.  I don’t know that I’m safe inside the house so his optimism is welcome.

He smiles and says, “Killer with the cornbread.”

He takes off his coat and he’s wearing suspenders.

“Let’s talk now.”  He plunges the coffee patiently.  Slowly.  “You already know, you are in mortal danger.  Beset by a hound.”  Grinning.  He forces the plunger down a little.  “He is mean as a snake.  A doppelganger of sorts.  He is not your double.  He is not your………contrary or inverse, either, as they say.  They’re all a fucking nightmare.”  He leans a little harder on the press.

Just then, he walks away for a few long minutes.  He comes back to stare into the glass of the press a couple times saying nothing.

He finally returns to push the plunger to the bottom.

“Pale and vicious poltergeists will harass and terrorize a man until his heart explodes in his chest like a fruit pie dropped on a stone floor. The good news is, it is not the worst. The bad news is, it is very bad. Almost as bad as I have seen.”  His hands are in front of his face and his eyes are a little wild.  I go cold.

“He is not supernatural.  He is insane and barely human, but he’s no demon.  He’s just as smart as you believe yourself to be and twice as strong.  But he is crazy, and you would do well to remember that.  It is all you can take advantage of.  You cannot out last him.”

He pours the coffee and generous cream into my mug. It’s sweet enough for me to wonder if I missed him adding sugar.  It’s the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life until I think about what he’s saying and what he may be about to say.  He looks at me like he’s gonna tell me I have colon cancer.  Like I’ll bleed from the ass for awhile and then die.

He’s getting real good at looking at me like that.

“He is about you.  He is of you.  You are entwined with this hound.  It cannot last.  One of you must go.  You cannot both occupy this time and place for very long.  I’m confident you understand that?  Do you see this?  Of course you do.  One of you must kill the other.  He will kill you.  He’s as afraid as you are, believe it or not.  But, he intends to kill you.  He’s afraid but he is hunting you.  He’s begun to toy with you.  He’s long since made up his mind.”

How do you know?  How did you find me?  Who are you?

He raises his hand. “You found me. I was not aware of you until I was but a block away.  Well, I was aware of you but didn’t know you were here until you were here.  Really, the rest is decades of me seeing and understanding these things.  You already know, we are not all the same.”

I nod without meaning to.

He offers me a slab of cornbread with caviar and creme.  The bread is still warm and sweet.  The caviar is salty with marvelous texture in the creaminess of creme.  There’s the tiniest bits of sweet red onion.  It’s so delicious, I need to replay what he’s said in my head.  Hash is to pot as caviar is to sushi, all on brilliant yellow cake.

He walks to the other end of the kitchen and returns with two chilled champagne flutes.

We sip a minute.  Blanc de blanc oh banana.

I’m confused.  I come up fighting.  I can’t help but ask what he does know.  I ask him who he is and despite myself I press him hard on just what the fuck is going on.  I realize I’m pleading.  I try to shut up.  But I’m angry and confused and this dude seems to know something I don’t.  Why am I here right now?

“Do not look at me like that.  I’m not some ‘facking’ wizard.  His accent betrays him occasionally.

Our mutual intensity has us sipping from our mugs and flutes and looking down at the table.  The champagne goes well with the caviar, fruit, bread and coffee.  It all works

“Your only chance is yourself, but I think I can help.”

I tell him I was hoping for a wizard.

He flips me off with a sour look.

I tell him I’m tired and I’m a pussy.

He doesn’t smile.  He tells me my humor is inappropriate.  He is angry.  He seems much older than me, but even in this light, his face is unlined.

He walks to the end of the kitchen and back again.  He does this to gather himself.

“Let me put this as simply as I can,” he says. “Do not doubt that the randomness of life is in some way synchronized with all the things that we do not understand about the universe.  It is what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we do not know blows us along.”

He pushes the plate of fruit at me with the rubied finger.  I reach and so does he.  We chew and look at each other.  We begin to talk like yesterday.  We laugh and point at each other.  At some point there’s not much coffee left and the bottle is empty.  He brings a single malt whiskey to the table in a strange old bottle.

We use our coffee mugs.

The champagne bottle is empty.  Check.

Now and then he alludes to the depth of my trouble.  I sober up some but he makes laugh again and peers inside my mug.

Next thing I know I’m asleep in front of the fire.

Dusk.

I’m on the couch under a thick quilt.  My shoes are off but my socks are on.  Carlo has left a carafe of water and a glass on the low table beside me.  I stare at it with fire on the other side and see that there are lemon slices in it.

His last words to me, “Sleep. You are safe here.”

I look past my feet and he’s in the den reading furiously, his fingers drumming on his forehead. He looks old from here.

I look up to a polished copper ceiling some twenty feet above me with the fire dancing across.

I head back to the party of what I’m dreaming.

There is the ambient noise of a gathering.  Shouts and laughter and the easy rumble of conversation among people comfortable with each other.  Twilight and the warmth of lanterns and candles.

I’m in a kitchen cracking eggs.  White on white and fluorescent lit.  The last one is discolored and it takes more effort to split, the shell is thicker and not so brittle, but leathery and moist.  Inside is thick and viscous.  Blood and short black curls of hair.  Even in the dream I understand this is my sin.  Dread drops my stomach and snatches my air.

Carlo is behind me in a top hat and cape.  A black dog, a hound in deceitful repose at his side.  I look at him over my shoulder as he slides an index finger under his nose.  A yellow to red orange rosebud on his lapel.  He says nothing while looking straight through me.  He flicks long nails through whiskers and I hear it.  With slow motion grace he reveals bird seed from his suit pocket and scatters it on the tile floor.  He blows on his hands and nails and admires them palms down.

He tells me to call him Charlie.

I wake and I’m blank.   I’m alone.  I understand that’s wrong, but it’s all I know.

Hanging over the opposite side of the bed I sleep on.  There’s a tiny smear of blood on the bed skirt.  I dab at it.  It’s sticky.  Not yet dry.  I check my mouth.  Not sure what I expected.

I’ve seen the last of Shirley.  I begin to think about that.  I’m sure it was brutal.  A bird of prey on a rodent.  I want to shit myself.

Nope.

The bathroom door clicks and she’s in front of me in my robe.  Beaming with self satisfaction, she holds aloft a platter of steaming pastries. Ever seen the album cover for Breakfast in America by Supertramp?  There is fruit and juice.  The aroma of cinnamon and sugar.  Her cleavage strains against the robe as it becomes the uniform of a diner waitress.  Sun bangs through the window and it’s warm.  She feeds me pastries from the platter but I can’t taste them and I’m thirsty.  She is matronly and jolly.  I grab for the fruit but it’s dry on my tongue.  Cardboard, styrofoam.  I gulp the juice but it’s air.  Everything looks cloudy.  Everything feels cloudy.

Blood begins to leak from her eyes.  Her face panics while it folds and creases.  She screams.  Snot erupting from her nose and streaming off her quivering chin.  Thick black whiskers sprout and curl as though fertilized by the blood and mucus.  She’s a lumberjack and she’s not okay.

I recoil into consciousness.  It’s violent.

Like I’ve been wailed on until I open my eyes.

I’m awake, still wearing this beautiful watch.

You fucking A!  I’m awake.

Here it comes.  All of it.  She’s gone.

I gotta piss like a racehorse and I’m shaking while it sinks in.

The mirror above the sink confuses me because I mistake it for blood at first.  It’s lipstick and the message is incomplete.  My name and Shirley had a lovely time, then a smear that trails to the bottom of the mirror and her lipstick is in the sink along with the clear plastic cap.

I look like a chicken fucking McNugget.  What we have here is a deep fried and greasy countenance.

I must have gone down after the blowjob.

She wiped me off with a warm wet towel.  There it is, still damp between the bed and the bathroom.  It’s orange.  There’s no condoms, my junk isn’t sticky and there’s orange lipstick on it.

He killed her right there and then.

Right after my righteous hoovering.  She went to freshen up and maybe spit?  Did she already have the towel?

There’s blood, viscera and hair in the shower.  Blond hair.  His knife is there too.  No batteries in the waste basket.

Housekeeping can change the linens, I won’t ditch the bed skirt.  Absence being more conspicuous than a smear of blood I figure.  We’ll see.

Carlo hammers at my door, calling my name.

I’m freaked out all over again.  I don’t know anything about this dude except he’s fucking odd.

Man I’m in trouble.

“How bad is it?”, he barks when I open the door.  He hasn’t slept, he’s pale and a little bug eyed.

I wonder how he got on the boat.  Carlo probably boards airplanes at will.

I wonder how he knows.  I wonder how he knows what he knows.

I tell him what I know, and what I think I know.  Somehow I’d managed jeans and a t-shirt.

He folds his hands and rests his forearms on his knees, looks up at me from the corner of the bed.  The watch he wears is identical to the one he gave me.

He bows his head, then comes up with a grimace.  He goes to the closet and pulls out a plastic bag for shoes to be shined.  He doesn’t look at me as he collects the evidence, the bloody viscera, lipstick, knife and hair into the bag.  He starts the shower, hands me the shoeshine bag and tells me to lose it while indicating the balcony with a nod of his head.

I’m outside and it’s chilly, I look both ways before letting it drop.   I wait for it to hit the water.  It seems too loud, but I probably only imagined hearing it.

I slide the door shut behind me and he’s back in the bathroom methodically cleaning the mirror with toilet paper wrapped around his open hand.  His hat is off, he sweats a little.  It is here I begin to trust the man.

I need a cigarette.

Holding up a finger he disappears out the door.  As quickly he’s back with paper towels and a spray bottle of blue he’s lifted from a cleaning cart.  I now understand that lipstick is very greasy.  The blue liquid is a minor miracle.  I’m able to make short work of everything.  I consider dousing my genitals with it.

This is some bullshit.  No fair.  I’m just not equipped for this.

I can’t help it.  I sob.  I choke.  I dry heave into the tiny sink hard enough to bleed.  I’m aware of stomping my foot as I convulse with anger.
He’s behind me in the mirror all about sympathetic chagrin.  “Shower, but be quick.  We need to get you out of here.”  He points at the floor.

I am grateful to hear it.  I need to wash this off of me.  I need to be told what to do.

I’ve no idea where to go from here.  It’s all way too much.  A woman has been murdered.  An innocent woman.  She was nice and she smelled good.  She didn’t deserve to meet anyone like me.  It wasn’t her fault but it was mine.

She suffered a violent dissection with a a dual D-cell powered, serrated knife.  Not fair.  It’s not fair and I’m in the middle of it.  It’s entirely my fault.

I knew what would happen.  I knew it absolutely.  I fucking saw it.  Now I’ve gotten more than an eyeful.  Now I am guilty.

I’ve just dropped evidence into the ocean.

Mr. Tarcisi hands me a towel.  He is anxious for us to leave.

Before we leave the boat, we stop for eggs, coffee and a muffin with butter and jam, Carlo insists.  I can’t eat.  I’m numb.  I can’t take most allergy medicine because it traps me between wanting to catch a frisbee in my mouth like a dog in a commercial or napping until the solstice and this is exactly how I feel right this minute.  I seem to be vibrating with a low frequency panic and something octaves up that would make for excellent surveillance camera footage.

By the time we’re in his car his impatience is obvious.  Fuck me.  Fuck him.

“I need to take you to my home for a bit”, says Carlo through a smile and a brown cigarette.  He looks out the window when I look at him.

Drinks for my friends.

‘Well, there was Mystery,’ the Mock Turtle replied,
counting off the subjects on his flappers–’Mystery,
ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling –
the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used
to come once a week: he taught us Drawling,
Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.” -Lewis Carol

I need to ask you.  What would you do?  I mean just what in fucking hell would you do?

Forgive me, this question careens in my head like an air hockey puck.  Just as noisy and just as random with the underlying hiss of air.

Here I am suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Back on this boat and he’s fucking right here with me.

I knew he would be.  I knew it.  I ran but knew I couldn’t hide.

I’m the goddamn protagonist here.  I need some sort of secret weapon.  I’ve got nothing.  I’m gonna get my drink on.

I want hard candy with a soft slick center.

One of the few things I’ve actually learned in life is that the thing to do with an antagonist is to seize any opportunity to ignore them.  Best way to discourage.  Remove the contest by refusing to compete.  Sounds good.

This is convenient for me as I sit at the bar.  It works.  He fades.

It’s not really working, however.  This fucker is relentless.

When later I look, I can still see my name in the glass behind the bar like ghost writing on a mirror long after his steam is gone.  How is that even possible?  This really fucks with me.  It’s right there.  If anyone were to blow on it with hot moist breath, everyone would see it.  This can’t be real.

Those chalky mints with the green nucleus.

A 16 pound bowling ball in my head.

It’s still early.  The only thing I can think of is to drink.  Finish my drunk.  I make up my mind to do it like William Holden.  I switch to twenty year old scotch with a single cube of ice and think about picking a fight.  Whiskey makes me mean.  I bet they have some sort of jail they can throw me in.  Bet I’ll be safe there.  But I’m too much of a pussy and know that If I’m successful at getting into a real fight, I’ll lose because I’ll be so fucking hammered and I don’t know how to fight and I’m a pussy.

I’m sure I’d get my ass handed to me.  Probably get hurt pretty bad.  Not sure I’m willing to do that.  I’d like to punch somebody though.  I just can’t invite that.  It would be nice to really punch somebody as hard as I can.  But I can’t.

So that’s out.

I go back to gin.  Another double Sapphire.

I’m a lion.  I’ve got a mane of hair that curls and is blond.  I go to the bathroom, take off the terrycloth scrunchy and fluff it up.  It’s length and luster.  I have broad shoulders and a deep voice.  Thick blond facial hair and sideburns.  I am a Lion.  I’m a fucking Clydesdale.

Gonna get laid.

Back to the bar.

I’m sporting a serious chronometer.

I have another double Sapphire, gin is me and I am gin, and I decide the rosy cheeked kinda dumpy chick in her Sunday best is sexy.  She’s happy and I’m drawn to it.  I’ve never been the type.  I don’t know how to do this.

I’m thinking about those mints, you know, they’re buttery but soft and green and minty.

I send her another of whatever she’s having.  He tells me her drink is full.  I tell him send it anyway, he winks at me when I tell him to do this.  I stare through him.  What a dick.  Stupid porno mustache pencil neck dickhead.  It must suck to wear a vest that colorful and that dumb.  Like a cheesy tropical duvet.  I think it’s the same pattern as the bedspread or drapes in my suite.

She seems to be game when she gets it.  She waves to me and mouths hello.  I’m close to shithoused or wouldn’t have a chance here.  I wave back and try to look like I have friendly humility.  She giggles and picks up her two green drinks in silly glasses to approach me.  Doesn’t spill a drop.  I learn from her approach that she has big tits, skinny lips and nice legs.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Good calves in pumps and thighs thick but not too.

Guess where from?  Alaska.  The furthest you can get from America and still be American.  Except Hawaii.  She smells great.  Tropical and sweet.  Like grapefruit and papaya or mango with honey.  More like Hawaii than Alaska.

I like a clean woman.

Her name is Shirley.

Oh well.

Fuck Hawaii, the other furthest place.

Whatever.  She’s friendly and I’m as honest as possible.  I was recently involved in a car accident, that explains the cane, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I was going bug fuck and needed to get outta the damn house.  I’m single.  Nope, no kids.  I guess I’m selfish and understand that about myself.  Better than being a shitty parent.  I confess this all to Shirley.

She’s a little bucktoothed.  It charms me.  I have a thing for bucktoothed women.

I’m not happy about my candy apple red invalid cart.  Is it still outside my door?

Maybe it’s the watch.

Something is nagging at me.

I tell her how cool my suite is.  She says she doesn’t even have a window.  I have a balcony.  She wants to see it.  Look at me, I think.  We could watch a movie she says and tells me her name is Shirley again.  In the elevator she takes my hand and hopes out loud that I like to snuggle.

There’s a snag in my head.  I don’t know what it is.  Can’t describe it.  I’m hammered and can’t isolate what’s clawing at my cerebrum.

I want to roll my eyes but it makes me glad.  I would like to snuggle with this woman.  I would like, I think, to eat and drink with her.  I would like to have a friend.

Her dress is garish and tight but she’s sweet.  Pastel lime lycra.  Push up bra.  She’s a little round but well distributed.  I bet it’s all good when she’s in the flesh.

Her lipstick is kinda orange and her teeth are a little crooked.

She may have a bit of a mustache but it’s blond.

She’s an excellent kisser.

Trying the door gives me pause.   I’m fucking scared.  I know he’s in there.

Now I understand my trepidation.  What risk am I exposing this woman to?  I’ll just insist that she can’t sleep here.  I’ll make sure she leaves before we sleep.  I can do that.  We’ll have breakfast together, I’ll tell her.  We’ll do our business and I’ll make sure she gets back to her room.  I’ll figure out what to say and she’ll understand.  I just can’t fall asleep with her still here.  It will be fine.  Her breasts are enormous and challenge the fabric of her dress.

She’s got her hands on my shoulders while she breathes green drinks on the back of my neck.

I wobble a little on my cane.

I know he’s not here.  I just know.  I can tell.  I smile over my shoulder and get the door open.  If she even had a single clue she’d run panicked, screaming, tears and snot.

No smell of pigs.

I’m cool.  No sign of him.

I cease to consider the danger I’m exposing her to.  I’m a dick.

She goes straight to the balcony and I take a piss.  His electric knife is in the sink.  Fuck.  I take the batteries out, throw them in the trash and cover them with toilet paper

The knife goes in the toilet tank.  I’m thinking that ruins it.

What am I doing?

Somehow she’s found Steel Magnolias on the flat screen above the mini bar.

She yells that she loves this movie.  I smile.

I yell there’s a good one about the ship’s engines on another channel.  I brush my teeth and tell her I’m kidding.

She asks if I have a robe.  I take it off the bathroom door.

She lies on the bed, head propped up by a hand, grinning with sex, straps off her shoulders, boobs spilling out.

Next.

She’s in the robe and her bra is orange.  Orange?  Maybe it’s a bikini top.  It matches her lipstick.  Didn’t say she was a supermodel.  Her tits look pretty good though.  Milky white with a small mole on the left halfway down the expanse of her rather voluminous cleavage.  Tan lines just above the cups running over.  Shirley has natural double scoops, that’s why she’s here.

She smiles at me and lifts her other arm under her breasts so they swell.  Tan lines and areola.  I resist the urge to roll my eyes again but I’m liking the idea of giving her the business.  I like that move.  I have an eye for the subtle and the slutty.  She possesses rosy cheeks and a certain youthfulness.  I more than appreciate the contrast.

Kinda like Bleu Stilton on a cracker and a good dry, but sweet port.  Kinda.

More like she’s wholesome but wants to fuck.

Whatever blows your skirt up.  She does smell nice.  Very clean.  I glimpse where she’s stopped shaving at the knee.  No matter, it’s a light down from there on up.

She spends time touching me.  She does it well.  Her nails, fingers and toes are pristine.  She uses them with grace and carnal acuity.

I ask what she would be up to tonight in Nebraska?  Alaska, she says.  I’m too drunk to be embarrassed.  I’m not sure what I’m doing but I press on.

Hot and bubbly.  I gawk at her voluptuousness.  She’s spilling out all over the place.

She pretty much blows the lid off by asking me if she can put me in her mouth.  I acquiesce with a laugh.  I don’t know what else to do.

It’s all the permission she needs.

She climbs on top of me grinning devious.

She’s a little bigger, but I like the way she feels in my hands.

This is going well.  Her panties are orange.  It’s a bikini and it frames her wide wide hips in a way that begs for my hands.

Her mouth is on mine.  It’s blissfully sublime.  Her tongue is soft and fat.

She reaches behind with a thumb and yanks her bikini bottoms down to her thighs.  She uses a foot and toes to take them off.  It is velvet brown.

Cool trick.  I wonder about my blowjob.

Turns out to be a scorching hoovering.  She is adept.  All the way down.  Again, all the way down.  Again.  Looking up at me right at my eyes whenever she swallows me whole.  Shirley has talent.  Again, all the way down.  Giggling and moaning that I can feel through my stem.  My root.  My pelvis and up through my spine.

I lose consciousness somewhere.

I sleep fitfully.  My forehead sweats but my feet are freezing.  At first, there’s the standard dream of not being able to run very fast or hit very hard.  Impotence.

Next, I dream of a mushroom cloud.  I’m on some some sort of island and there is to be a missile launch.  On my wrist is the watch Carlo gave me.  The second hand moves smoothly to twelve.  I’m outside and I look down at the missile as it begins to glow on the pad.  This isn’t right.  I’m on my balcony, above it all, excited, full of anticipation and suddenly fearful.  It’s not right.  Something’s wrong.  It arcs over the ocean, glowing orange and then an angry red but not into space.  My stomach drops.  I understand it carries a  nuclear warhead and seconds later it crashes into the water and the weapon detonates in the blue ocean maybe fifty miles away.  A city skyline high froth of water rippling and bursting without any respect for gravity.  Massive and threatening.  Continuing to grow and burst and rush toward the island I’m on.  Orange and fiery on what was peaceful ocean glass, it parts the clouds with dark and foreboding strings and horns of the Russian Symphony.  The sun is a sixty watt bulb.  The music screams and barks.  Then it’s a billion watts.  The wind gusts and the ground begins to dance.  It’s spectacular but no shock wave moving towards me like in the movies.

I’m knocked down flat and hard.  I can’t get my breath.  I vibrate with fear and dread.  I feel and hear the impossible crack and boom as buildings shake and dust and chunks rain.  It’s in my mouth and nose.  I look behind me and all the walls and windows are missing.  My clothes are shredded and smoking.  I’m confused and bleeding and see that my skin has melted away.  My hands and feet are fused into balls of bone.  Phalanges curled and shrunken to clubs of naked gray rounded stumps.

Death on the way.  In an awful, terrible hurry.  Death comes.  Death is here.  Doom is here.

A knife with a hollow green blade.  The hilt is silver.  I’m calm.  I slide back down.  Neither here nor there.  Above and on the bottom.  Into purple clouds.  Out of the blue and into the black.

We talk politics and religion.  Celebrities and ordinary people.  He’s friendly and charismatic.  A quick smile and hazel eyes that seem easy to read.  I can’t help but like this man.  We smoke and drink and talk.  We tell each other excellent stories.

He smokes Dunhills, I smoke American Spirit Ultra Lights.  We try each other’s.  He tells me mine are like smoking angel hair pasta without any sauce.  I till him his are like meat lasagna with a layer of charcoal.

After a time, Carlo looks at me and says with some gravity, “Let’s us visit my shop, you and I.  It’s just round the corner and up the street.”  I tell him I’ve suffered an injury to both of my legs and can’t walk far.  I’m conserving energy for my return to the ship, I say.

“I have a car”, he says, “I’ll get you back in time”, he slides open his phone.  He texts.

Like the movies, an immaculate black Mercedes sedan emerges from around the corner.  The sound of it’s slow rolling tires on a wet and dirty street is something I can’t help but exalt in my head.  I love this sound.  Car wheels on a gravel road.  “Wait, bring your drink, get him a refill!”, barks my new friend Carlo.  Once inside the car, our drinks are passed to us through the open windows in plastic cups.

I’m drinking snake bites.  Hard cider and ale.  Bad idea.  Makes me mean.  Carlo sips from a clear plastic tumbler of what looks like cold medicine with weeds in it.  Who knows?  A mojito?  I haven’t ordered or bought a drink since he sat down.

“I’m going to sell you a watch my friend”, we’re in the back seat, charging up a hill.  He smiles big.  Teeth immaculate.  His face is round, young and enthusiastic.

“A good watch at a good price”, he says.

I don’t feel like I need a watch.  Is that all this is about?  I’ve had no success with them.  They quit working or I lose them.  I like watches.  The precision and the aesthetic.  I’ve always admired them.  I’m kinda broke, most likely unemployed.  I say nothing.  This is a bad idea.  I look out the window.

The surroundings speed by and atrophy by the block.

I was thinking I’d made a friend.  I like this guy.

Past twilight.

No shit, I’m confused.  Some cosmopolitan oddity that I’ve just bonded with on a muddy sidewalk in a third world country wants to take me to his store to sell me a watch?  What the fuck?

Flags go up.

How do I get myself into this shit?

Who is this guy?

I can barely walk.

I look at him and he nods his head while patting his knee.  He’s composed but anxious and I don’t know what to make of it.

I listen to the tires.

We get to the place and the driver puts a fedora on his head before stepping around.  He opens the door for me, then Carlo.

It’s dark.  There’s a single lamp at the end of a long road.  A spooky business district that probably evacuates just before sundown.  Every venue with bars on the windows and those segmented security doors that roll down and lock at the bottom.  Curbs but no asphalt.  Sidewalks but no street. I swear I hear bats.

I won’t succumb to fear.  I can’t allow it.  This isn’t right.  It sucks.  It’s dark.  My legs are killing me.  They will betray me.  Something will deliver me to him right about now and I’ll be helpless and Carlo will laugh maniacal.

“No worries my friend, you’re safe”, he says, looking me in the eye while he pulls out his keys.

I tell him I’m fine and remember my cane.  I’m sweating.  My back is damp.

My shoes are noisy as fuck.  His aren’t.

I’m a little light in the head and breathing hard.

Then.

The shop is a wonder.  A modest storefront on approach.  “Carlo’s Emporium” it says, red and gold in a nineteenth century font.

Labyrinthian inside.

Aisles and rows, irregular of shape with dark corners and odd angles.

The smell of Soaps and salves, potions, lotions and concoctions.

I smell lavender and sandalwood, cinnamon, ylang ylang, patchouli, verbena, licorice, vanilla and earthier more subtle aromas.  An olfactory feast.

Behind the counter all manner of teas, dried weeds and flowers, tobaccos, herbs, insects………a mortar and pestle on the counter next to an ancient scale, paper funnels, empty but corked glass tubes, tins and jars.

Bird’s eggs, fossils, telescopes, globes, animal fetuses in backlit jars, glass eyes, pipes, cigarettes, cigars, lighters, maps, watches, real skulls, human bones and tusks. Guns, rusty knives and swords.

Mounted dragon flies, wasps, beetles, scorpions and black widows.  All giant and arresting though nestled dead in cotton batting.

Masks, odd statues,  ancient anatomy books, old diving helmets and suits made from canvass and brass, velvet paintings, pinball machines and an impressive array of gumball dispensers.  I smell hot greasy fries and ketchup.  Popcorn and maybe the spun sugar of cotton candy.

A popcorn cart.

Everywhere I turn there’s something to covet.   This place is fucking unbelievable.

A huge bin of superballs in neon or with glitter inside.

Cool paintings.  Old posters.  Unopened model rockets from the seventies.  Bins of comic books and bookshelves of The National Geographic.  Old Swamp Thing comics illustrated by Bernie Wrightson in protective mylar.  Original Frank Frazetta, Arthur Suydam and Barry Windsor Smith.

I look closer, there’s a beaker pale green and bubbling with a two headed rodent bobbing.  Organs floating and churning in red or yellow aqueous.

The more I look, the more I see.

There are live owls in the rafters.  Almost completely silent but not at all shy about staring through me.  There’s five at least and they never stop shooting beams.

You know, owls are fierce predators but the biggest ones weigh a mere few pounds.  Their bones are hollow but they are fierce predators.  I could take one out with a badminton racket easy.  For five, I’d probably need a bat or at least a tennis racket.

He reaches under a dusty counter for a tray of watches, and I’m dismayed.  It just reminds me that I don’t understand what’s happening.  I’m confused.  Why would this guy bring me here to sell me a fucking watch?

I mean, Carlo Tarcisi has far more going on than selling watches to dipshit drunken tourists with an unexplained handicap.  As far as I know anyway.

The owls mock me.

I look deliberately at the tray of watches for the first time because I don’t know what else to do.  Craftsmanship.  Nice watches.

Brand names.

There are maybe two dozen and he goes through them with rapid grace, naming the brand and features, weight and thickness, jewels etc.  He smiles while he does this.  He’s proud of them and pleased to offer them to me.  His hands are fast but old.

His hands are old but his face is young.

I know enough.  I’ve admired exclusive watches.  Bezel, band, movement, crown, case and crystal.  These are gorgeous.  They are real.  Authentic.  I’m sure.

I tell Carlo that although I literally just got off the boat, I have no money.  I apologize to him if I’ve somehow misrepresented myself, allowing him to think I was a man of means and in the market for a luxury timepiece.  I am embarrassed and still very confused.

He calls me by my first name, smiles and says, “It’s a gift.  Compensate with friendship and honesty.”

This confuses me further, so I tell him I’d like to buy him one last drink before I go back to the boat.

The Owls compose a very complex chord.  Dissonant and spooky.  Seems to be a note to signal wrong answer.  Everything seems green and blue.

He beams at me and seems lit from beneath, “I would recommend this one, Swiss movement, light in weight, still detailed in a way that appeals to one or both sides of your brain, not too flashy but still intricate and you clearly don’t favor gold.”

Just like that and it’s on my wrist.

It is silver and glistening.  A black detailed face with a style that doesn’t afford contemporary simplicity any more than a nod.  Despite Carlo’s words, it’s heft is still impressive.

He’s given me an authentic and beautiful chronograph for the sum of nothing.  I’ve made it clear I have no money to spare.

I remind him I’m good for a drink and he says quickly, “My friend, it is time we get you to your boat.”

He tells me on the way that I wear, an aura of trouble.  I look in his eyes and tell him I’m haunted and it’s as bad as he can possibly imagine.  He looks at his old hands in his lap and says, “I know”.

I knew he knew.

“We made friends today, you and I.  We are not finished”, he’s smiling.  “You like your new watch?”  I tell him it’s fucking awesome.  “Wear it to bed”, he says.  He nods at me to tell me he’s serious.

We approach the boat and he breaks character to become nearly ferocious when he grabs my collar to say, “Tell no one you’ve met me.  Say nothing of it.  I will find you tomorrow.  I’m going to try and help you.”

I’m frightened all over again.  The door is opened and he tells me with severity, while I gather myself, not to be foolish.  I immediately wonder what he means.

I barely have time to thank him and I’m stumbling with pain up the plank without knowing why any of this happened today.

Ever seen those electric meat carving knives?  My mom had one and could slice up a holiday turkey like a goddamn samurai.  Even as a kid I worried a little about that appliance.  It disturbed me.  I made my peace with it when I realized it was only formidable for the length of the cord.

I guess now they’re available battery operated.

After finally figuring out how to work the fucking lock on the door of my suite, he’s sitting on the end of my bed flicking a flame on a Zippo and then snapping it shut.  Over and over.  I’m frozen.  He looks at me and sings guttural that he got it from Carlo……  He’s in a pair of tighty whities and the blood from his eyes runs down his chest to stain them.

At his side, on the bed, is one of those knives.

I back out.  He screams HA, I can’t tell if it’s angry or amused.

I scramble for a bar on aching legs, I don’t know what else to do.

In the middle of the ship there’s a glass elevator that starts in the lobby, near the bar where I sit, it goes all the way up.  He mocks me from it.  Dabbing at his eyes to write my name on the glass with blood on his fingers.  At first he writes it backward.  Then he get’s it right and he’s delighted.  The passengers don’t seem to notice.

This is not my father’s nightmare.

We’re in for a very long night.

No matter the situation, it’s hard to blame anyone who’s had enough.  We all have a threshold.  I found mine.  I think I’ve just about had enough.  There is longer any joy in anything I do.  I sit with dread.  A monkey on my back.  My neck is a constant thermal knot.

Fight or flight.

I’ve seen the solution in my dreams. The beginning of it anyway.

I can’t tell you about it yet.

Nobody knows how things end.

He hasn’t been around for awhile. You may think that’s a good thing.

I don’t.

The longer he goes missing, the more anxiety I own.

I look for him harder.  I search for him on fast food cups and all other convenience store products.

It’s been three weeks now and not hide nor hair.  Not even an extra in commercials on TV.

Nothing.

Quiet.

No ice trays.  No toilet paper.

I’m as much of a mess as I’ve ever been.

He performs this vanishing conspicuously.  He knows what he does and so do I.  If I’m not thinking about him, I’m trying to forget him.  Either way, he is a Balrog in my mind’s eye.  He sits at a gray metal desk under a bare bulb in the very back room of my dreams.  He sits in there and breathes and sucks back drool and there’s fucking boars stinking and squealing.  Blood pooling.  Violence brewing.

Now the door is closed.  Not a sound.  Like he left.  I hate that.  I imagine some shuffling of paper, file cabinets opening and closing.  Chuckling.  If he’s not in there, he’ll be back.  Shit like this doesn’t just go away.

I still can’t walk worth a damn. My knees and ankles are beyond sore. I fall down sometimes because if I don’t, the low note plucked by my ankle travels up my spine and leaves me dizzy and sweaty and unable to stand anyway.  It doesn’t go away.

He’ll be back.

He owns and operates the opulent lobby to my nightmares. A cancerous entreaty to my darkest places. An invitation I’m unable to resist. I understand that half my misery is my own responsibility. It always takes two.  I’m not sure if I should be more alarmed by the emerging sense that I somehow have this coming or my willingness to acquiesce to it’s inevitability.  I’m so confused.  I’m living fears I could not have previously imagined and beginning to accept it on more than one level.

I am sick, maybe to death.

Do I miss him?

I have to ask, now that he’s gone.

In absentia, he gnaws at me.

I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.

It’s the wrong thing to do but I decide to run.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************

I need to test him.  See if he will follow and show himself.  I need to know if he has borders or boundaries.  This is what I tell myself.  I think I know the answer but tell myself to bear with me.  What if I lose him?  I’ll become a gringo art dealer, sell fake Rolex’s or counterfeit Cohibas.  I’ll do an adobe and cook corn tortillas over an open fire and find a handsome young Mexican woman to take care of.  I’ll learn to do without toilet paper.

Sometimes.
I book a five day cruise to Ensenada.

Last minute, but with help of William Shatner, I get a pretty good deal.  I use that travel service because of Bill.  He’s pretty much the only celeb I’d want a picture with.

I buy a nice cane for myself. The handle is a knife.

You’re not supposed to bring booze on board but I’m successful with a big ass bottle of Maker’s Mark. As soon as we sail, I head down to duty free and pay a buck twenty for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. I feel like good whiskey.  The clerk looks at me like she knows I feel like good whiskey.  I leave carrying plenty of good whiskey on two shaky legs.

I look into renting one of those scooter chairs for the handicapped. I tell them I have sprained achilles tendons. I lean on my cane. I think about flopping. I want one of these fuckers.  I’m in pain.  I didn’t think to book a handicapped suite and wonder about price breaks.  I’m freshly disabled I tell them.  I’m not thinking ahead yet I say.  Ultimately they give me one gratis, candy apple red, but still insist on expressing their displeasure at my not having reserved one. I tell them it just happened.  They tell me I can’t park it outside my room and start in with some yellow sharpies and illegible maps.

I snatch the maps and speed away trying disrupt as many ambulatory people as possible.  As I head toward them, I try to look as many in the eye as I can.  My basket contains spendy spirits.  I’m fucking handicapped.  Get outta my way, just got back from the USA.

Pricks.

I drive around on it a little.  I discover that I feel like a bitch on it because I don’t look handicapped and it’s pretty crowded for as big as I understand this boat to be.

I used to sell glass dildos and at my very first trade show there was a budding young porn star in the next booth.  She was hot, I liked her nose.  My first evening there, a gentleman arrived in a wheelchair he controlled with his tongue, otherwise no control of any limbs whatsoever.  I got anxious as he got more aggressive with his chair.  He was pushing the tables back into the the booth with his passionate, powerful, inflamed and only remaining limb.  Tongue.  It got to the point where it was time to do something as opposed to deciding if something should be done.  Heh, put yourself in that place.  Just then, she came out from behind the tables and sat in his lap.  I was stunned.  Impressed.  Logic and common sense on display from a less than likely source.

Chaos over and out.

I decide to hang on to my chair because my goddamn legs are half numb or half searing and sore.

I park outside my room and stretch the cord inside.

I hole up in my suite with my knife cane and some righteous hooch. I get myself a good heat on. I play with my knife and cane, whipping the handle away to reveal a long serrated blade.  I feel armed.  Prepared.  He won’t follow me this far.  He’s forgotten.  Haven’t seen him for weeks.

I drink more whiskey.  Temporary but severe haunting for my many sins.  I take a minute. I’ve got both bottles open now to compare them but there’s no fucking contest.  Um, Johnnie Walker Blue?

The Maker’s tastes like gasoline so I cap it and admire the red wax seal so much that I twist it back into the place where I broke it.

Liquid smoke with a cedar fire nearby.

I light a cigarette and remember I have a balcony.  I can smoke pot and cigarettes on the balcony with a drink and the ocean speeding by.  The moon is out.

So I do that.

It’s wet out.

I’m fascinated with the whole giant vessel pounding through the waves thing.  It feels like my first commercial jet ride.

I decide to look around.

This night on this boat is windy and rainy.  I don’t mind.  I explore her from stem to stern.  Five floors.  I leave my chair and use my cane wherever I need to.  She is a floating city.  Food whenever and wherever you want it.  Drunk people everywhere.  I’m not interested in talking to anyone.  I really just want to observe. The ship is awesome.  It’s huge.

I get a snifter of good cognac and find a way to step out on the bow.  It’s beyond some theater and down some stairs.  Really easy to find for the front most part of a giant ship.  No  light.  Completely dark save for a veiled moon.  I wonder whether I’m supposed to be out here and check the door behind me.  Unlocked.  Yes.  I say a toast  for my rabbit Watership.  My tears mingle with the rain and are taken by the wind.  I throw the glass into the sea.  Then I throw hard and away the martini shaker containing Watership’s remains.

The wind and rain are pissed off but I look back to see what happens as best I can.  He’s in the ocean now.  It was the most grandiose gesture available to me.  I can’t believe I got aboard a ship with a bottle of whiskey and a stainless steel martini shaker full of frozen rabbit remains.

The best and biggest I can do.  I don’t have his ashes.  I have his scrapings.

I’m glad no one can see me climbing these stairs.   I am fucked up.  Harder to figure out the cane going up.  “The smoker you drink, the player you get.”

In the halls, no one can tell the difference between your handicap and your inebriation if you have a cane and it’s stormy.  Pretty golden but I could walk better despite how fucked up I am if my legs weren’t so gluey and thorny.

Back to my suite.  I dial room service.

A grilled cheese sandwich.  I hope the sandwich has an impaled olive and a pickle on a toothpick cause that’s what I picture.  One of those little red cellophane toothpick trees.-  I kinda wake up when she asks if there’s anything else and I say, chicken nuggets, a side of bacon and some chocolate milk.

I remember I want tomatoes and bleu cheese but I think she hung up.

I watch an interesting program on the ships engines.  This is great.

Fuckin crack the sliding glass and there’s real ocean sounds.  Cool.

I remember answering the door and smelling the food. I’m not sure if it was the boat or me but gravity was a motherfucker.  I know I was still dressed.

Black olives stabbed through the grilled cheese halves with a green plastic sword.  Cool.  It kinda makes my night.  Still hot and melty.

I gorge.

Chocolate milk is moco delicious.

I dream about following my dad through some bar or restaurant and he disappears.  There’s a door in front of me so I push through it.  He’s in front of me kicking some huge guy in the ass or the backs of his legs when he misses with his own short legs and small feet.  I can’t stop my my dad, he’s furious, but this guy is huge, my dad is 77 but doesn’t realize it.  I lock my arms around him and pull him back.  He is very strong but not nearly strong enough.

There’s no way I can take this guy.  He’s fucking huge.

I wake up slow.  The ship isn’t moving. I look out the window at what must be Ensenada.  Gloomy but pretty.  I go outside to smoke and hope to puke so I can get that over with.  It’s a nice view.  Peaceful and colorful even in the gloom.  I can’t see how we get off the ship and realize it’s on the other side.

On my step back in, a humid and cloying cloud of whiskey does the trick.  All I’ve got is bile and it emerges with violence along with the snot from my nose.  Sensing a pattern here?  I’m used to it.  I’ll rehydrate and get some protein and a little fiber.  Some grease.  A balanced diet.

No sign of him the first night.

I’m on my first Gin Mary by twelve thirty.  Haven’t eaten shit.  I ordered some fries.  I asked for a lemon, salt is already on the table.  It’s overcast and a little drizzly but warm in the tourist section of Ensenada.  Strange place. Stray from the obvious path and it gets weird in a hurry.  Flies on meat and shoeless kids selling Chiclets or Wrigley’s.

I left the chair behind.  The shuttle drops me right in the middle.  My legs are killing me until I find a place to sit but I look around and see that it would have been an embarrassing clusterfuck in that chair. What if it ran out of juice?

When in doubt, wear boots. I did.

I can’t help but pay attention to how heels crisp and clack on the muddy sidewalks.  The texture of grit and composition of heel become three dimensional because of the delicate differences in sound.  A brief soundtrack from everyone walking by.  It informs how people stride and what they are shod with.  The scrape and click are a melody today and I am of it.

There’s a man who’s feet make no sound though his shoes appear ordinary enough. He strides with an umbrella as a walking stick and I’m sure he’s not an American.

I only hear his umbrella.

Must be some sorta crepe soles.

He wears a long coat and his hands are very old.  A simple ruby in a gold band on his right middle finger.  I see it from here.  His suit underneath the coat is the color of vanilla ice cream.  The coat is the color of desert sand.

Both pant legs clean, even the cuffs despite the weather and mud.

I see him walking across the street.  Again and again. Back and forth.  He has Colonel Sanders facial hair yet his face is very young.  Hardly any lines at all.

No matter how close he gets, I can’t hear him.  I can’t hear his umbrella anymore.

I’m nursing the mother of all dumbovers.

Eventually he makes eye contact.  Fleeting but I clocked it.  He acknowledges me without any sort of smile.

Within seconds, he’s at my table extending his hand and asking to join me.  Despite the weather it is crowded.  I smile and invite him to sit.  He says his name is Carlo Tarcisi.  He says it like that, I am Carlos Tarcisi.  I wonder if that’s Northern Italy.  I can’t tell by looking at him.

He’s odd.

He’s distinguished but generic.  Charisma but maybe a ghost.  A paradox that I just can’t put my finger on.

I tell him my first name.  He repeats his.

After the third drink, I forget all the rules.   What time the boat leaves etc.

The gold and ruby ring sounds the same note against his glass every time he sips from it.

His charm is Burt Lancaster.

Carlo doesn’t mind buying and we seem to be hitting it off.  I barely think about the boat and how hard it’ll be to get back on two half useless legs while shithammered.  When my mind does wander there, I feel like dropping a deuce, so I table the notion for further consideration once I’m back on the boat.

It’s all in the mind.

Carlo excuses himself for long enough to make me wonder if I lost him somehow.

I sip my drink and close my eyes.

I dream of a knife.  It’s not the first time.  The hilt is silver. The blade is hollow glass.  Inside is a liquid.  It looks like absinthe.

I dream that he’s waiting for me.  He knew what I would do and he’s ahead of me.  I dream he has the glass blade filled with emerald green acid.

Running is one thing.  Hiding is another.

Like somebody snapped their fingers, I’m awake at two thirty seven a.m.  He’s been here.  I smell the pigs.  Hogs, boars,  javelina.  Whatever.   Their breath and sweat.  Raw intelligence.  The steam of their violence.

If I’m ever able to ask him a question, I will ask him about the pigs.

The stench hangs like garbage on strings.  Curtains of rotting cholesterol.  Green meat pulsing with maggots, glistening and clicking like tapioca, sliding up and down on waxy oily twine for no reason other than stinking and shining and making me want to hurl.  If that’s too much, picture folds of bologna and meat drapery, a greasy sandwich opens and there is a moist and pungent eruption.

These are the two things I picture in my head.

Mucus and shit and straw.

It’s like it’s in my throat.

A clack of cloven hooves singing still.

Blank but ringing.

I am way rattled.

Ice trays filled. Toilet paper on the roll. I don’t need to even check.

Did I buy paper towels?

A gob of pungent semen on my pillow and on my cheek.  It smells like bleach and garlic.  And sulfur.  And asparagus.  I loathe asparagus.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Fuck me.

I can’t stand it. I really can’t fucking stand this.

He tips out the door.  Firm quiet slam.  The lock sounds slick as it clicks.  I think it whistled.

I guess he sleeps here now?

He jerked off on my fucking face?  What the fuck?  Everything he does either confuses or disgusts me.  Usually both.  I will kill him or this won’t go away.  That’s what he wants.  The confrontation.  He wants for us to get it on.  For one of us to to be killed, for one of us to die.  I’m not sure he cares who wins,  I know he doesn’t.  I’m beginning to understand this.

I am beginning to admit this.

He just wants it, it’s his whole reason and he’s looking to make it mine.  This scares the fuck out of me.  He doesn’t care.  He sees his conclusion.

He has every intention of fucking my corpse if he wins.

I didn’t sign on for anything like this.  Do I deserve this?  I’m a normal guy with normal problems.  I thought I was.

Nothing like this.

What haunts me is the Deja Vu.  Kind of a new development, either that, or I just noticed.  I know I’ve been here before but I wonder how many times.  Sometimes I see it coming right before it hits.  Just how far gone am I?  How many times have I danced this dance?  How many times?  It doesn’t help at all to realize you’ll be bleeding from the mouth a few seconds before you’re bleeding from the mouth.  It makes it worse.

My feet are dragging.

I throw the bloody linens in steaming laundry water with bleach in a gust of disgust and escape to my shower.  Fucking hot.  The water is as hot as I can stand, shocking the gash in my face when I step in front of it.  My split plumb.  Broken fruit.  Reflex, I lower my head. Blood pools at my feet. It’s coming from my face, but also from just above my knees. Something is carved into the flesh above each knee cap, just beside and beneath the muscle of each thigh.

Mirrored.  Opposing.

I can’t make it out. The blood and water in concert make it impossible.  They flash in my mind’s eye as little swastikas gushing.

I puke again.  Convulse.  Nothing comes of it except sour yellow bile.  Snot, lots of snot.  My eyes watering in the rain.

It gets blurry in here.  Steamy.  I do snot rockets.  Soap up and rinse off.  Rinse and rinse.  Water collects at my feet.

Still faded, this makes me dizzy.  Bleeding.  I grab the nozzle with both hands so I don’t go down.  Swinging in the rain.  Alcohol thins the blood, prohibits inhibitions.

Just swinging in the rain.  Back and forth.

People say their lives are a nightmare, they have no idea.

Ha!

Where do I go?  Who do I tell?

The only blood around here this time is mine.  A white plastic pawn with my hands all over it.  I’ve just poured bleach on his DNA.  Random and surreal but I’m losing my breath.  I can’t breathe.  Crazy.  No police.

Furious confusion.

Can’t even picture that.  I’m shithammered.  911 is not an option.  It’s after the fact.  I smell swine and gasoline.  Grease.  Petroleum byproducts.  It fucking stinks in here.

Man, I miss the good doctor Wednesdays at nine thirty. I doubt I could tell her. Either way she’d think I’m full blown dancing with myself.

I mean, maybe I am.

I’m not sure.

I could book an appointment and show her my knees.  Tell her what’s going on.  Explain the whole thing.

After that.  An exorcist?  Or my shrink has me committed?

No, I did not carve these swastikas on the tops of my knees.

I woke up and I was like this.  He woke me up leaving.

What does he look like?

Well, he’s always bleeding.  From the eyes, and he has giant freckles or melanoma and flaming read hair and giant incisors.  On a street corner he looks cool until you look hard or get close.  He smiles a lot, but his gums bleed too.  Strong giant horse teeth awash in blood like wine over ivory.

See how fucked I am?

Where would you go? Who would you tell?

Tell me.

The carvings in my legs have numbed parts of my ankles and calves. I begin to let go of the nozzle with my right hand and seem to be able to support my weight. I wonder how I’ll walk.

I soap and wash again, over and over, with one hand on the nozzle at all times.  Gotta trade hands to thoroughly clean my butt.

I’m a senior citizen getting out of the shower.

Yer pretty fucking ambulatory!  I shout at myself in the steamy mirror.  I’m still pretty fucked up. My feet feel funny. Like I’m floating but literally tripping on them across the bathroom floor.

I begin to understand. Both my Achilles tendons. They’re kinda numb. They still work, but I’m walking like a drunk with broken toes.  I’m drunk but he didn’t slash the actual tendons, at least not all the way through, because he wants me mobile. I don’t kid myself that he could have done whatever he wanted.  He knew exactly what he did.  What he was doing.

My toes are like grapes I can’t feel in front of a pretty sensitive sirloin or side of pork butt.

Both feet bleeding just above the heel.

The symbolism of that particular tendon. Achilles. Greek, Trojan war icon. ……..

I need another drink but there’s not much left.

This guy is a dick.

I understand this insane liquid oxygen fueled rocket poltergeist has me on fucking defrost. He’s just playing. I’m his Sunday stroll. I wonder how many others he’s doing this to or has done it to.  How many times has he done it to me?

I trip around the bed, putting on fresh linens.  I realize I’m sobbing.  My nose is bleeding.  Blood lands on my flannel linens with small splats that look like red Japanese suns.

How long ’til he blows up my fucking car?

Can’t wait to get to the office in the morning.  But I really can’t show up there again. May have to pass on that. Whether I show or not, no good can come of it, they’re all so close to done with me.  They’re used to either loathing or confusion where I’m concerned.

An Spade and a Club, the two black suits. On my knees. Lotion stops the bleeding long enough to see.  Looks like they were traced out in red pen first.  I’m sitting on the toilet, rubbing lotion on my knees to discover what has been carved into me tonight.  I really had to crap too.  The lime in the coconut melody starts to play in my head.  Over and over.  I pour another Bombay.

I bandage my knees with cotton balls and my last four band aids.  I’m sure it won’t hold but I’m tired and it’s all I have.

Clearly, the Bible is a period piece so I’m not going there, but I can’t help thinking about finding some creepy old cleric or maybe a shaman. What I’m up against here is light years beyond the archetypical antagonist.

For the twentieth time I tell myself I have no choice but to be his doom.

I have no choice. No other option. No other possibility.

No one one can end this but me.

The thought brings fresh fear and frustration.

Just how the fuck am I gonna do this?

It’s gonna have to be big.  If not biblical then cinematic.  Heh.  I’m an idiot and a coward.

I’ve never killed anyone.  He scares the fuck out of me.  He keeps coming and coming.  Relentless.

I’ve been thinking about a crossbow. Grenades. A shotgun.

Anybody know a white wizard?

I am so completely fucked.  Crazy long before I’m in a position to take him on.  I will be full blown drooling, screaming and flailing before I can even attempt his level of empty, diseased violence.

He’s got me.  I can’t compete.  My only relief is to extinguish him and I understand everyday how I’m just not equipped to do that.

Cattywampus.

I suppose I could kill myself.  The idea hasn’t passed me by but I lack that brand of courage as well.  I’m not brave enough to deliberately end my own existence, so assuming that’s his goal, he’ll have to take it.  My life.  I’m just not very badass.  I can’t wait for him, because I’m not that formidable.  The little engine that could is not my mascot today.  I’m a little more David than Goliath.

I’ll have to take it to him.  My only chance is what he thinks I don’t have the courage to do.

Thing is, I don’t have the courage to do it.

I’m starting to wonder if I can run for it.

Furious confusion.

Today will be a big day.

Seven days a week.  At least five. I know all of their faces if not their names.  Nice kids.  As in far younger than me.  Kids.  Still wanting of the future.  Still aspiring.  Faces fresh, bodies able.  Willing and determined.  Full to spilling with hopes and dreams.  Goals.

They share them with me.  I kinda like that they do.  That they include me is flattering.  They tell me what they’re working on.  What they wish for.  What they’re working towards.  What they hope.  I join them in all of that but I’m careful what I say, I encourage but try not to advise too much.  Could be a slippery slope.

I imagine it means they estimate me to have a certain amount of wisdom, the benefit of age and experience.  I think they like me.

I hope they do.  I want for them to.

I remember when that was me.  I remember it.  It’s there,  I did it.  Maybe they see that.   Maybe I showed them that.  Maybe on days when I was happy and optimistic, they saw it.  I let them in and showed them my enthusiasm, because I’d realized my dreams and become who and what I wanted.  I drive a cool car.  It’s a nice neighborhood.  I’m an accomplished individual.  I’m a success.

Sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I wish they would ignore me.  Sometimes they annoy me.  They are needy and shallow and ask me stupid questions.

They are bright and curious but shallow, inchoate.  I might not be the success I think I am.  I might be pretending.

It’s just fucking coffee.

This morning, they take stock of me sideways, glances, what might be a modicum of concern.  I don’t know.  Confusion.  Suspicion.  Fear.  All of the above, I’m not sure.  They see me every morning.  They understand something’s bad.  Wrong.  Been in there consistently for a few years now.  They see it.  I’m far from right and far from what they are used to.  I can’t imagine they really care but they all see it.  It’s glaring.  The contrast.  They are callow but see me like I’m fucking naked.  I am fucking naked.  I’m a hot mess.

I’m so exposed.  What am I doing here?  I should have gone through a drive thru.

I decided not to wear my shades because I can’t find them and I hate that people do that inside anyway.  I’m in sales and if we’re indoors at a trade show, and even if you’re a client, wearing your sunglasses indoors, I won’t talk to you.  I loathe you the minute you approach my booth.  With your stupid fucking shades that prevent me from looking you in the eye.

You’re a dick.  Automatically.  I want to see your goddamn eyes.  I hate that too cool for school bullshit.  Ask me a question and I ask you to please remove your glasses.  If you don’t, I will mock you and not answer your questions.

I’m in trouble.  They see me every morning, they can’t help but notice.  I’m beyond uncomfortable.

Beside myself.

I looked at myself in the mirror.  I know that I fought with him sometime before he left my bed.  Before he left my bed?  Fuck.  There was blood.  Lots of it.  Not all of it mine. A lot of it not mine.  I did some damage.  Not very much of it Watership’s.  I hope.  I think.  I know.  That happened before.  Before we fought.  I don’t remember but I know what I know.  I know he slept with me in my bed afterward.  I know that before that, we beat the shit out of each other.

What fucking madness.  I am dying while losing my grip.   It is the most furious confusion.  I am going mad.

It’s ridiculous but it pleases me.  I fought and I inflicted, and spilled his blood but what does him leaving my bed mean?  Did he fuck me?  Literally fuck me?  I’m sure I’d know and I’m here to tell you that it didn’t happen.  My ass is not sore.  I don’t understand why he was in my bed, it makes my hands and fingers shake but I assure you, nothing like that went on.  Maybe that’s what I was fighting.

Why can’t I remember?

Furious confusion.

Days have gone by.  I think that was Friday and this is Monday.  I look better now.  No contest.  I look much better.

I just don’t have this coming, I’m so confused and afraid.

Scabs much smaller.  Not so much black and blue.  More yellow now.  Much less grief and violence in my brain.  My hands and arms barely as sore as they were before.  My back and ribs still ache.  It still hurts to breathe deep.  My neck, like it had been wrenched and then I think of the hair.  I have lots of hair, copious, but it was everywhere.  I gathered it while I sobbed over the slaughter of Watership with the early morning sun slamming in.  If I remember that, what happened to the rest of the story?

Monday morning.

Starbucks.

So weird.  So disconcerting that they see.  They look at me and stare at me from their corners.  I wonder how hard they think about it.  They whisper.  I wonder about the mess I must be.  What do they think they see?  What are they guessing, what conclusions are they making?

I want to ask how fucked up I look.  I can’t.  But I wonder what they see.

They imagine it’s drugs and I’m really more or less okay with that.  It’s convenient at least.

What would be better, they assume I’ve been in a bar brawl.  That would be best.

Hey kids, not as fast as I used to be.

Maybe that’s my story if they ask.  I lost a fight but I don’t know that I did.  It’s cruel comedy that their guess is almost as good as mine.

I have to remind myself that these are not important people in my life.  They are not family or friends.  But I see them everyday, and I remember that I can’t seem to share anything with family or friends either.  Can’t or don’t while I stand in line and ask myself why.  I begin to realize that I have guilt.  It’s heavy.  My head gets hot as I understand that I think I somehow deserve all of this.  How can that be?

I can’t afford to even think about this now.

What have I ever done?

How?  I’m not perfect but I try.

I treat people well.  I’m kind and considerate.  What have I done?

I’m sweating.

I feel it at the small of my back and on my head.

I’m sweating.  I hate to sweat.  It starts to run from my forehead and down my neck.

There’s this one girl with the most magnificent ass.  It’s huge for her small frame and makes me understand that my appreciation borders on fetish.  Her ass makes my palms sweat.  It’s so round.  I’m telling you, it’s gorgeous.  She’s black and I just want to see her unclothed buttocks.  Just once.  Fortunately, it’s all I’m attracted to about her beside her personality.  She’s very friendly and sincerely sweet, sees me when I walk in to join the line and my beverages are ready on the bar to my right when I hit the register.  She’s not here today.

I’m grateful she’s not here to see me like this.

There’s always tomorrow.

There’s another with a smile that could melt snow cones in a blizzard.  I like noses.  She’s got a nose that allows her smile to blaze and present underneath it like a billboard.  It’s big but shapely.  Her nose.  It somehow frames her smile.  Her eyes are green and flecked with gold and her lips are full and rosy.  She is lovely.  Porcelain skin.  High cheekbones.  She usually beams at me but not today.  A flicker of a grin.  Cautious, embarrassed recognition.  She reminds me of a girl from my youth named Wendy.  Horrible kisser but adorable.  Gorgeous.  Sweet eyes and an infectious sincere smile.  She was a doll.

Not today.

I must look that bad.
I can’t believe I don’t know their names.

I think of them as Mandy and Mandy.  I like that name.

Mandy.

Then the guy with a gold lightning bolt earring that I can’t possibly take seriously because of his dumb earring.  It doesn’t work on many levels, the foremost being that he doesn’t have long hair.  If he did that might be more pathetic but it’s just so out of context.  He’s a good guy but his jewelry shouts something at me.  He gives me fliers for his band and tickets all the time.  He reminds me of show times and I tell him I don’t make records anymore and hate going to clubs.  They all know my name.  I checked his website once.  I listened.  Pretty good thick rock, tuned down to a drop C and some decent melodies.  Good song structure and some decent hooks.  Not bad at all but then there’s his stupid earring.  Is he making some statement with it that I don’t get or an egregious fashion mistake?

I don’t really care.

But I do because he’s nice and enthusiastic and his band doesn’t suck at all.  They are quite good.  If I was still in the business, I’d pursue him.  I’d ask him to lose the earring.

Long story, my hand up when I say it.  Rough night, I tell them.  Corporate interference I lie, aggressive takeover I tell them.  Led to a stupid bar fight.  In court today, I tell them because I’m early in a jacket and tie.  They are young and afford me some respect I don’t understand I deserve.  I say as little as possible but still feel I’m babbling.

They do seem happy to see me despite the mess I am.  Maybe it’s me, but they brighten some at my lame explanation.  Because I usually look them in the eye and talk to them without agenda or because I’m not just some dick and they treat me well so I reciprocate?  I hope that’s it.  I tip well.  I’ve demonstrated an interest in their lives.  They are kids to me.  Weird enough.  Did I ever actually tell that guy with the earring that I used to be a record producer?  I don’t remember it coming up.  I must have.  How else would he know?

Man I’m confused and these people don’t mean anything to me but I see them every morning and I’m worried what they think.  It’s really fucking with me.  My stomach hurts because I think they used to respect me.

Sometimes I buy the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.  I take my Venti iced water, iced Venti drip, dump a little, glug of half & half into it, stir it with the straw and leave.

I’m not a fancy coffee guy.  Hot coffee makes me sweat in the summer so I order it on ice.

It’s then I realize I’ve told the wrong story.  Their friendliness is because they realize I’m lying and they don’t know what to do but be polite.  Effusive forced.  My face is a mess and I’ve just stood in front of them and said things they know to be lies.

They now know I’m a dick.

One Venti iced drip and one Venti iced water.

$2.65

Every now and then I sit at an outside table and smoke half a cigarette.

This morning I leave in a hurry.

Furious confusion.

I sweat in the car in the LA summer and the air conditioner feels like a cold hose on my face.

My Audi has the best fucking air conditioner ever in any car I’ve ever known.  I’m so ashamed.  My hips feel greasy and my legs are rubber.  I’m a loser.

My air conditioner burns at the wounds on my face but stops my head from sweating into them.

I drive to my office striving for numb before I get there.

Once there, I pause to put my briefcase and iced coffee in my office and head down the hall to greet the boss.

I wonder if it would have been better to just slip in quietly.

I’m self conscious. I begin to sweat again and my face throbs.  My head gets hot again. I own that I look like a pile of shit.  So I tell more lies.

Like the truth would wash.

You wanna shut the door? He asks. He’s alarmed, his eyebrows are up, friendly and neutral, but we’ve been close for decades and he knows something wicked has this way come.

Nope. I actually fell down the goddamn stairs, I say. I was hammered, I say. I look at him embarrassed because I am.  I was actually shithoused and fell face first down the fucking stairs I tell him.  He’s a big drinker too, so maybe. The stairs to my parking garage, I say.  I tell him I’m fine and not to worry.  My knees are what’s killing me I tell him.  I need to sit down I say.

My nose feels like a sliced plum and he stairs at it. I try to breathe quietly through my mouth. It’s not really working.  I’m about to snore or sneeze and it’s gonna make me tear up.

Sweet Jesus, he says. That’s gotta hurt like a bastard.

Fuck me it does, I tell him.  I laugh a little, I tell him if I tear up it’s because it smarts and it’s not because my vagina hurts. He laughs but he’s still looking at me.  I tell him my vagina hurts too and he chuckles a little more honestly.

His nose barely wrinkles and he squints a little; I understand he knows I’m bullshitting him. It sucks.  He knows I’m lying.

I can’t imagine sharing with him that I’ve been in a fistfight with a demon whom I can’t explain on any level but I think I won kinda but he killed my pet rabbit and my rage allowed me to prevail maybe but I still don’t have any idea what’s happening or even when the fight happened and I’m beyond confused and so freaked out that I’m barely able to hold it together but I’m happy to be here at work because it feels safe to me and I’m really happy to see his and every other face.

I feel safe here in the daylight.

The girls in the warehouse put their hands to their faces and give me a hug.  I assure them it’s no big deal.

I want to shut my door but I can’t.

I need to be here.  Otherwise, I would not have come.

I drop with care in my chair, it squeaks a riot of mechanical crankiness, turn the computer on, check my schedule and my list of calls.  I grab the phone and realize that even the phone against my face is fucking killing me.

My face hurts, it’s hard to breath and every muscle in my body is sore.  My kidneys ache and it’s hard to breathe and I don’t remember how to do this job.  It’s hard to breathe.

They all do the double take when they pass my office.

Mattie’s office is across from mine and he can’t stand it. By lunch he’ll have his angle. He’s six four with a fauxhawk but today I will kill him. I feel fucking mean. Nothing to lose. I will beat him to death with the goddamn fax machine. I picture it and crack a smile. My face hurts so bad tears well up.

The morning is pain and humiliation. No one has really liked me for awhile. They’re all confused and afraid. I can’t blame them.  I haven’t been myself.   I’ve been confrontational and antisocial for weeks. Today I show up with my face split open. Like that works in any way at all.

Put yourself in my shoes. How do you even begin the conversation? We’re pretty close, all of us. But I don’t even hope to tell any of them the truth. This shit is crazy and that’s all they’ll get from me if I open my mouth. They’ll come away thinking I’ve lost my shit. I hate it, but it’s true.

Best to say nothing at all.

Lunch is cool. Mattie has decided to forgo the canyon in my face as a topic. After the first few minutes, I understand this and I’m grateful.  Until I realize that he is frightened too.  This makes my stomach drop.  I’m freaking everyone out because they cannot possibly understand what’s going on and they see that I’m in rapid decline because of whatever the fuck it is.

So, not cool. Everyone on edge. Best friends and coworkers are beside themselves because of me. They try to include me in conversation, but look at me with cloudy revulsion and confusion.  They want an explanation but I can’t and I can’t tell them why.  They have no idea what to make of me and there’s nothing I can say that will put them at ease.

I’m a fucking mess that keeps getting worse in everyone’s eyes.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this.

I shouldn’t have come.

I want to scream that you people worry about how to pay a vendor, or when product will arrive, while I’ve been fist fighting a fucking demon every night. His eyes bleed and he drools. Fuck me, that’s not the half of it.

At day’s end, my boss, my friend, pulls me aside and tells me that if he can help in any way, to let him know.  Then he tells me to take the time I need to sort or solve or whatever I need.  He tells me he can’t have me here like this and puts a hand on my shoulder.  I tell him I understand and that I’ll be back as soon as I can.  I promise I tell him and he looks at me like he doubts me almost completely.

Then I go home.

To sleep.

To dream.

I get drunk first. On good gin.  Bombay Sapphire.  I drink almost half of it.  I kill damn near half the baby.  The bottle I mean.

All ice trays full.

I realize that my flat plasma throws heat because I feel it on my torn and bloody nose.

I go to bed.

I reach to turn off the lamp and on the nightstand.  A white plastic pawn.

A cheap, ivory white, plastic pawn with the tiniest smear of blood right there on the nightstand that wasn’t there when I stripped the bed and laundered the sheets this very morning.

My heart sinks.  My blood literally runs cold.

I puke in the bathroom sink and everything hurts.  Snot spills from my nose.  There is my hair on the bathroom floor.

Fuck me.  What do I do?  What did I do?

I am angry.  Furious.  My head is hot again.

I dig in the closet for my chess set.  The one my mother gave me after she taught me to play as a kid.  I place a black pawn on the opposite nightstand.  I check all the windows and doors.

I’m so tired.

Furious confusion.

A prologue:

His name is Watership.  My pet Rabbit.  I adore him.  Unconditional love between us.  My best friend.  Even when he chewed through my nine hundred dollar speaker wire.  I’m what you call an audiophile and yes, I spend that much money on just the cables and wires.  I’m geeky.  Used to be a recording engineer /producer.  If your guitar is out of tune I can tell you what string it is.  I’ll tune your drum kit and it will never have sounded better.  I hear every thing.

I’m a goddamn expert.

A blessing and a curse.

He chews things.  That’s what he does.  It’s like his job, his aptitude.  It wasn’t his fault.

The time I spent with simple, cheap Monster Cable on one side of the stereo image made me crazy until the cable was repaired with it’s dialectic sheath repaired and intact.  Yes, I can hear a cable.  Yes it’s about the dialectic, and zero crystal, oxygen free, cryogenically treated copper.  Sound fucks with me.  A blessing and a curse.

He often challenges me at my job of rabbit proofing.  It’s a game we both play like chess.  Willingly.  Both of us.  It’s our game and we’re happy to play it as far as I know.  He has nothing to lose.  Oh well.  He chews, I provide things for him to chew, while finding ways to prevent him from chewing things I’d rather he didn’t chew.  Rabbits are whip smart and so is mine.  He’s clever and determined.  He’s cuddly and gentle and has an ever active velvet nose.  The softest and most adorable nose.  He’s my buddy, loping around the apartment as I go about my business of laundry or dishes.  He follows me.  Greeting me when I come home.  Standing in the entry way all forlorn when I leave.

His name is Watership.  I adore him.

His ears are clumsy, floppy but sharp.

He hears everything.

He is an impossibly soft cocoa brown. His eyes are  kind and bright.  If you don’t know him, they look scared. They’re not.  They are warm.  He shuffles and hops to rub his face on me.  Floppy ears, tender, quiet and sweet.  His nose slays me.

He seduces by simply allowing himself to be touched.  Unconditional love and affection as long as he has no reason to fear you.  He knows if you are dangerous.  He knows.

He knows me.  He follows me.  He understands what I will do next.

The truth is, we adore each other.  He’s my Zen.  I hope and venture to believe I’m his.

I love him in a way that is exclusive between an animal and a human.  He knows me and I know him.  There are very few surprises between us.  No mysteries.  He’s my boy.  I adore him.  His peace.  His love.  His velvet nose.

In light of things I’ve been forced to consider finding a new home for him.  My state of shock has been so overwhelming, I haven’t arrived at where to take him or what to do.  I’ve gotten as far as making up my mind to do something that will afford me to reclaim him once the storm has passed.  If I can weather the storm and find a place for him.  It’s been such a sudden and vicious nightmare.

My friend Jonathan is a good guy.  Maybe he can take him until I do my business.  Maybe he won’t ask many questions.  There’s my buddy Tindle but he’s kinda far.  I could trust either of them though.  I need to do this.  Make something up so they’ll just work with me. Promise a good bottle of wine and bring one when I drop him off.

He sleeps with me sometimes and he’s a snuggler.  Between my arm and torso is his favorite spot.  He’s never any trouble, serene and silk.  He breathes soft and embodies docile.  He parks himself and sleeps.  His velvet nose ceases with his slumber.  More or less.

The nightmare resumes:

He slips inside. The key is smooth, the knob twists. He enters and shuts the door behind,  slick and very quiet.  Clean but greasy.

He throws the bolt.

I see it in my head.

The bolt.

It slides and squeaks.  My stomach drops but I am glued.

I smell rotting lamb and garlic.

I’m aware but not awake.  Not conscious.

I am though.  I understand I think.

I breathe shit. Overwhelming. No air in these fumes. He smells homeless. He smells like piss and puke and shit and sweat. It’s a stench so monstrous.  No oxygen.  Pure noxious.

Fuck.

I gag.

Maybe I’m awake.  Am I?

I retch and convulse but the reek won’t allow for my consciousness.  I can’t swim up from the confusion.  Like a ladder I can’t climb.  I’m down.  Not here.

I’m dismayed and disoriented.

What the fuck is this?

I hear him begin to fill the empty ice trays on the counter. He turns the faucet off after the first one and he whispers….. too full. Very slowly, I hear the trickle, he pores a thin stream into the sink.

He says ah.

He moves to the bathroom.

I see the spring loaded roll snap into place as I hear it.

He says ah, again.

I’m confused and groggy.  Like vicodin and cognac.  I don’t want him here.  I loathe the idea.  I need to fight him but I’ve never had less energy.  I can’t lift my limbs or form a thought much less a fist.  I think about sausage biscuits and hash browns.  Green Tobasco and Hollandaise.  I slip into dreams about Dalmatians and scrambled eggs.  Rural milk delivery and the clinking of bottles.  Blue and smokey mountains.  Syrup and ham.

Dogs chasing and barking in the fog.  Mist in a river valley.  Carrots glazed and cooking in margarine, not butter.  I smell new tires.

My dick is hard.  I have to pee.  I’m suddenly afraid I’ll shit myself.

My eyes are crusted.  My face feels fat.  I’m swollen and lazy.

He’s rolling away from me. Out of my bed.

Crusty eyes and blurry vision.

Out of my bed.

What?

Out of my bed and I smell pigs.  Pungent barnyard.

The front door closes.  I hear the key turn.  The bolt clicks.

I kick my sheets off and stumble away from the bed.

He was here, in my head and in my bed.  I’m so frightened already that I want……I can’t tell you what I want.  This is really bad.

Woozy.  Dizzy.  Lead in my limbs.

I smell the copper of blood.  The ripe, almost metallic citrus of blood.  Bright, dangerous tang entering my nose and collecting on the back of my tongue.  Panic quickens me.  I’m frightened and I don’t know why.  Yet.  Oh my, my stomach knows.

My rabbit is dead.

Watership is dead.

He’s been slaughtered.

He’s been sprayed, torn and smeared on the walls of my apartment.

His skin is on the floor.  Like a bag. A sack on the carpet. Ears and all. He was my boy. His velvet nose.

His gore is everywhere.  On the lamp.  The windows are pink with blood.

He slept in his cage at night or he was in bed with me.  His water bottle smashed on the marble mantle. So sweet and docile.  Above the fireplace is a crude scrawl in his blood. It looks Japanese.

I think of that song by The Vapors.  “I Think I’m Turning Japanese”.

There is fur in the wire around the door of his cage, he liked his cage, he came and went willingly, so I understand he struggled violently.

Ever heard a rabbit scream?

I have. Sounds like a baby human.

Did he scream in fear?  Was he afraid?

I break all the way down. Collapse. Fold. Fall. Lose it.

I sob and scream.  I wail like a woman on TV who’s lost a child or a husband.

I am beside myself.  I get what it means to be beside oneself.  I begin to drink gin.  Bombay Sapphire right out of the bottle.  At first it’s ginger and pepper octane distracts me and then it’s medicinal properties amplify my grief.  I sob and wail.  I grieve while snot pours from my head and eventually I vomit nothing but air while my head swims with impossible despair.

He was my boy.  My pal.  My harmless innocent boy.  Never could have or would have hurt or destroyed any fucking thing.  My boy.  Innocent.  Fucking harmless.  What have I done?

Dawn breaks.

My legs don’t really work.

I scrape his remains.

Gather them.

Thoroughly.

I collect them, all I can get or lift or gather, and deposit them in a ceramic pot I made in grade school.  A Home Ec. project.  His skin.  His bones.  I sob and leak mucus and tears.

I don’t know what to do with the bowl so I cover it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. I’m disgusted by it but it’s all I have.  I drink until I can’t anymore and then I lose consciousness.  The next day I take to it a pet cremation service and explain he met a lawnmower.  They look at me sideways but I suspect they don’t usually ask questions.  I’m confused because if I saw the mess that is me with a ceramic bowl full of rabbit I’d call the fucking cops.

His name was Watership, I adored him.

As I sit here, I miss him. He was innocence and unconditional love.

There’s a big piece of lumber always propped against the wall by my trash chute. It’s handy for forcing fat bags of trash down the maw. It looks vaguely nautical, like it should be on a medium sized sailboat. It’s been here for the two years I’ve been here.

I take it with me. Back to my apartment.

Afternoon the next day and I still smell his fucking pigs.

I will wait forever for him.

He is fucked.

I’m not sure what he is. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill him.

The onus is mine.  The responsibility is mine.  It is my dragon and I will slay it.

We are no longer fucking around.

Silence and then groans of metal fatigue.  Pings and spiraling silence.  Foreboding as we take on water.  Fear and chilly sweat.  Panic rising.  Dry mouth.  Quiet.  Long broad lanes of time with nothing but the creaks and moans of a vessel way too deep.  Attempting stealth.  Hiding.

Damn this empty and hollow.

It’s me.

It is me.

I’m in a submarine, way way down, hull compromised. Pinhole leaks will soon begin to gush.  Slamming and sealing bulkhead doors against an onslaught, an invasion by the depths. You’ve seen the movie. Once that shit starts, it’s the beginning of the end.  Battling rapidly rising cold and stinging saltwater.  Green blue foaming soda lapping at first and then abruptly invading your crotch and ass crack, your armpits and ears.

A death, horrible cold and muffled by the invading sea.

It is me.

I am it.

We are none.

I know this to be true but I continue to walk through life as it is, as I find it.

I’m in real trouble.

Put yourself in my place.  Who do you tell and what do you say?

I’m in very serious trouble here.

There is a straight up fucking monster invading my life.  He keeps getting bolder and I have no idea what to do.  I first noticed him on a Slurpee cup.  Any suggestions?

Anybody?

I understand I’m fucked but I refuse to recognize just how much.  I’m a jigsaw puzzle in the rain.  No chance for resolve, resolution or completion.  Washed out.  Smeared.  Unrecognizable.  My days feel soggy, soiled and desperate.

I’ve got no place to go.

Now he e-mails on all three of my accounts.  Not constantly but regularly.  Consistently.  Nothing too sinister, emoticons and random punctuation that I’m sure are supposed to correspond or be in context somehow with my glimpses of him.

Glimpses that are becoming experiences.  Experiences developing into episodes.  Episodes than are waking nightmares.  Horror movies that make me feel as though I’m trapped in a disabled submarine.

And well, they are.

Numbing.

After the mall sighting there was an enlarged smile of a colon and an ellipse looking up and then down somehow.  The trail of recipients and senders so convoluted that I can’t be bothered.  Lucifer and Lucipher and Louie and Lewis, Lou Dog, Lew Man, Lewinicious, Loustoppingme, Lewanal, Louswelter, Louiville and lewevil among them.  I ran a few of them and came up empty.  Scat porn or ultra right wing hate, Nazi bullshit or nothing at all.  He is mine and I am his.  I know that now.  I smell the scent of cheap aftershave right after I click on one.  Seconds later I wonder if I imagined it, yet it haunts me.  Dime store.  Hoodlum.  Greasy and sinister.  The smell of brown, spicy brown, obvious and offensive like early seventies Avon in ridiculous decanters.  Amber plastic tops and cheaply silvered vessels.  The smell of the look.  Roosters.  Chess pieces and elk or birds of prey.

Ridiculous.

Pungent.  Cloying.

Stifling and stupid.

We are in play.

I haven’t filled an ice tray in weeks, they’re always full.  Toilet paper installed on the dispenser always.  Sometimes the lead sheet folded in a triangle.  Things I never do.  He’s here almost every night now.  While I sleep.  Mornings are creepy, my hair standing up but I know he’s long gone.  I brush my teeth and smell the pigs or the cheap.

Nobody knows the trouble I see.  Nobody.  Who would you tell?

The wind blows hard but when I step out for a smoke, the air is still.  I smell beasts.  Pigs.  The cheap.

Radio in the middle of the night.  Not loud. Weird stations that sound like Ham radio, CB chatter or live orchestral broadcasts from the forties or fifties.  I can’t know if it’s imagined or real but it’s always on the liberal talk station I’d set it to when I wake.

The line between waking and dreaming is getting blurrier.

What would you do?

Then there’s the pigs.

I ask her if she’s noticing them. Not so much says she.  My girlfriend.  I can’t tell her about any of this.  I’m trying not to.  What would you say?  I adore her and she is beautiful and she already suspects my lack of balance.  She knows I’m disturbed because I’m keeping her at arms length.  I’m afraid when she spends the night because I don’t know what he’ll do or whether he’s even been here.  I fear for her but what do I say?  I wrap tightly around her.

They seem to be everywhere.

Pigs.

Iconic to a degree in American culture, she points out, smirk gratis.  She teases me about it but looks at me funny.  They’re so prevalent I say.  So she tells me, people like bacon and pigs are symbolic she points out.  Her eyes wonder at me.  Sometimes iconic she points out.  We eat out Asian and I order chicken with our noodles instead of pork.  She says nothing but I feel her questions and glances.  She has no idea and will assume I’ve lost it if I even try to explain.  How do I tell her?  What do I say?

I can’t tell her.  This shit is crazy.

So I distance myself.  For her safety, I repeat to myself.

I am busting inside with fear and confusion.

She knows it’s wrong.  Something is very wrong and she helps me widen the distance between us because of it.  It’s painful, but I’m so grateful.  She assumes my love has gone astray and I absolutely must let her believe that.  I adore her and love her but it is the best way to protect her and she can’t hear my truth.  She won’t understand.  I don’t understand.  I can’t explain this to anybody that I know.

I could call my mother I guess.

Nope, not going there.

Why me?  What did I do?  Who the fuck am I to deserve this?

I can’t know how crazy I am.  I have no evidence but my torture and terror and I have no evidence of that.  The ice trays?  The toilet paper roll?

See, I just don’t know.  I’ve nothing to measure it against.  No one to talk to.  Maybe I should see a professional.  A medium,  a psychic or a shrink?

The pigs.  Maybe I just notice them more. Everywhere from news magazines to National Geographic.

The thing is, I smell them.  Their filth.  Their disease.  I smell their madness.  How do you explain that to anyone?  How do you tell them it smells like cheap aftershave?  It smells of straw and shit and animal and well, Brut and or Vitalis or Barbasol.  And pigs.  Fucking pigs.

The ones in the Geographic have dirty tusks and crazy eyes swimming with violence. I smell them when I wake in the middle of the night and I know he’s been here. I hear their cloven hooves in other rooms, stomping and snorting away.  Down the halls.  Away from me.

They squeal and clack on my balcony.  Always away from me.

They’ll eat anything you know.  Anything.

They are smart but look stupid.  Retarded.  They will eat a dead human.  Pigs.  Swine.  Boars.  Corn or slop or flesh.  Or a corpse.  Snouts greasy with blood or garbage, they care not at all.  Mindless vicious acuity.  Pigs.

Fucking mad fucking pigs.

The very next time I see him, his eyes are filled with blood. Our entire encounter, he blinks but once.

There’s a big ass Ralph’s supermarket across the street. Tremendous selection of frozen meals as well as standing at the fridge food.  It’s a fabulous place to shop.  You know, cheese, pickles, smoked turkey franks, hummus…….. Good soup kiosk and a really good salad bar.  Single males understand this food dynamic as well as the need for as many plants as you can possibly get down into your goddamn gastrointestinal.

It’s an excellent place to shop.  Tons of different mustards.  I like really big super markets.

I favor a Spring Mix with arugula or baby spinach.  I hate iceberg or romaine.  Empty flavorless calories.  Bullshit. A salad should be a miniature meal.  Tomatoes, marinated artichoke hearts, red or green onions, black olives, cranberries or raisins, pine nuts or sunflower seeds, feta or bleu cheese crumbles, bacon, artichoke hearts, shredded carrots, cracked black pepper and cheese festooned croutons.  Goddamn good for ya.  Vitamins E, C, B and A.

Anyway, sometimes I start on the right because I’m in a hurry. When I start left it’s because I’m cool and I have a little time.  Salad bar and soup kiosk on the right along with liquor and toilet paper, cheeses and salad dressings etc.

It’s an afternoon copacetic as I enter left off the elevator with my smooth and noiseless cart. I turn left then right and set to perusing the produce section and I’m picking out some avacados, tomatoes and onions. I proceed down the middle north to south aisle. It bisects the store and aisles on my right and left.  I’m in a place of relative peace and sanity.  I’m  calm.  I’ve begun to take comfort in public as I can’t picture bad things happening to me in front of the madding crowds, the great unwashed, in broad daylight and all.

Always comfortable by myself, on my own,  I no longer prefer that.  No longer comfortable.  I fear it.  I want to be among people.  One of my few peripheral thoughts being how this all saddens me.  It is a loss to my identity.  A subtraction of me.

He appears at the head of the first one.  At the end of the aisle.  Right there looking right at me.  Ten yards down.  Anger and fear swell in my torso like a thick balloon.

If I had a sword or a gun.  A weapon of any kind.  I think.  Do they sell hammers?  Axes?

His eyes are rimmed with blood. His hair more yellow. I think of a naked corn cob. Right there, thirty five feet to my right. Not showing his teeth yet today and that’s a relief kinda, because the lower front of his face struggles to contain them and they are huge.

I keep moving.

Next block down, he’s at the tail of that one and thirty five feet to my left, chatting up a housewife.  Charming her and disarming her.  She doesn’t see what I see.  I wanted some bean with bacon soup today but I keep moving.

The next aisle is a block party. Fireworks bust and spatter in the open night overhead. The nexus of this venue.  Frozen food.  Red and gold popcorn carts, clowns, balloons and herds of women in pastel stretch pants, heels and absurdly big hair.  Huge boobs and big asses.

I am reeling.  This can’t possibly be happening.

I’ve always been able to shake myself from a dream when it gets too crazy.  It doesn’t work today.  I can’t stand it.

I’m shaking myself hard.

I feel incarcerated and I’m panicking.  I’m losing my shit.

Out of breath.  Pulse racing.

I jerk my basket left down the next lane and it’s just carnival games and more frozen food.  Corn dogs, fish fillets, peas and corn. He’s at that end, so I roll up on him while he stares at me through eyes full of blood. He blinks slow motion and his lids are squeegees.  Fresh red blood runs from his eyes and onto his teeth.  He begins to smile.  Slow.  It’s gushing now.

I am frozen.  Still.  Confounded.

He’s got dozens of pigs with him. Some are hogs. Some are boars. Some are swine.  He carries some kind of staff almost as tall as he is.

They stink like everything from pomade to a shit pile.

My hands are locked like perfectly sized twin wrenches on my cart.  I am a machine.  I’ve become mechanical.

I understand then and there, that if I’m not his demise, he will be mine. I smell this when I flip a bitch in front of him, stare at him hard and head down the aisle on the opposite side.  Lean Cuisine, frozen burritos and pizzas, battered chicken strips and tater tots.  I show him my back after staring him down.

I throw diet meals, soap and shaving cream in my my cart with a lack of chalance.

I get all I need from doing that.

I know that I have no choice.  There is no help or solution.  It will come from me or it won’t come at all.  He is mine and I am his.  It is black and white.  Cut and dried.  One of us will kill the other.  No other thing is even remotely possible.

I will kill him.  I will cut his head off.

He follows me and he’s loud. He marches and bangs his feet down hard. He constantly sucks drool back through his teeth.  Slurping and breathing.

I know now he’s trying to show me.  He knows what I know.

He chuckles and slaps himself while he points out items on the shelves.  Pace Picante, he shouts.  Progresso he announces.  Ladies and Gentlemen he barks, Nature Valley Granola Bars!  Here we are in the dressing aisle he screeches, what will he buy next, he wonders at the top of his goddamn fucking lungs.  Honey!  Mayonnaise!  Ketchup!  Relish you cunts!

You fucking weak ass fucking cunts he wails.

Gesturing and gesticulating while blood runs from beneath his mirrored sunglasses.

It’s all I can do to not turn and attack.  Tear him apart.  Swing and swing and swing my fists, my engines, my justice because I did not ask for it and I do not deserve it on any level whatsoever.

Hostess pies!  Beans, baked motherfucking beans!  Relish!  Ever filled a glass with relish, mustard and ketchup and drank it like a shot of whiskey you bitches?   You fucking filthy dirty cunts?

I am kind and generous and compassionate.

He stomps and screams and stomps.  His feet so heavy they shake the floor.  My cart rattles.  I don’t have any idea what to do but finish my task and check out.  Pay for my stuff.  I’m so rattled and disturbed that it’s all I’ve got.

This can’t be real.  No one else sees it so I need to maintain, pay for my shit and get the fuck out of here.

Nobody pays him any attention at all.  Like he’s not even there.  They see a man but they don’t see or hear what I see.  I’m losing my fucking mind.

I’m panicking. My heart in my throat as my brain screams about how life is brutal enough, why me today?  Such an insipid message for my brain to offer.  I’m gonna shit my pants or piss myself.  Nobody knows.  Nobody sees.  No one reacts.   I am so motherfucking fucked.  So confused.  So panicked.

I glance back and his nose and ears have joined in the gush over his giant teeth.

Red blood streams into his maw like rivulets before a wash.

His entire head is gushing blood.

Right behind me.

I head towards the bank of registers.  Checkout.  Haven, I hope.

Now he’s ahead of me eating slices of pineapple from a can. Blood and fruit juice run over his chin and down to his shirt to look like sweat. I wonder if I have just minutes to kill this crazy motherfucker.

Do I, must I do this now to end this?

Should I try to kill him now?  Will anyone object or try to intervene?

Can I?

I know I can’t do it now.  I’m fucked and crazy.  Unnerved and very afraid.

He beats me to the register.  All I can think to do is complete my task.  Finish shopping.  Pay for my shit and leave.

He bags my groceries. His shirt is a dark blue now and his eyes are bloodshot but clear.

I tell him paper & plastic and to pack them heavy. He does all that.

I still understand that I have to be this guy’s fucking hurricane.

One of us will kill the other.

That’s the way it will be.

I  know things you don’t.

Things you can’t.

Things you would deny.

Things you would refuse.

I know things.

Things that would change everything you do and everything you might know or want to know.

Things you wouldn’t want to know.

I’ve suffered because of what I know.

By the time I’m done telling you this, you’ll understand that there is no such thing as a Jesus.  Or Allah or whoever the fuck.  I’m merely a man and certainly not here to disabuse you of any notion you might see fit to cling to, yet the idea of a benevolent savior is so absurd…..  yours is not my problem.  Your God is yours.  Rest your head on your pillow and be the best you can with that.  My object is not to wrest it from your panicked fingers and the peace you enjoy in your own bed, between your own sheets, on your own pillow.

Or maybe it is.

I’m going to tell you what I know.

It’s awful.

Thick black with ever more and stumbling heat.

All so sweaty.  So moist and cloying and pervasive.

I am trying to tell you there is no God.  It is what I want to tell you.

There is no room for one.   No God to mitigate our suffering or advance our joy.  God is not real.  The universe does not suffer one mad fuck at all.

You’ll see.

The Devil however, is on Holiday.

Satan.  Lucifer.  Beelzebub.

I don’t name him any of these.

Lollipops and necklaces of candy.  Chocolate eggs at Easter and bicycles at Christmas.  That’s all there is.  That is God of  the contemporary.  The God of goddamn fools.

If there  is a God it hates me.  I imagine it always has.

Seriously.  Even though I doubt it’s even there.  Or if it can do a single thing.

All human beings serve at the pleasure of evil no matter what name they give it.  I’m going to show you that with my own example.  I have lots to show you.

***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

I first noticed him rather casually.  Yet he was the Devil and I knew it.  He had no horns, no bifurcated tail, no cloven hooves and no aroma of sulfur.

He kept coming.

Sometimes, I smelled cloves.

Sometimes, I smelled pigs.  Dirty.  Porcine.

Why he came to me, I can’t know.  But, I saw him and I knew what he was.  I tell you this and I’ve never been religious.  I’ve never even worshiped.  I’ve long been suspicious of those that do.  I am and  have been an atheist my whole adult life.  I never bought any of that crap.  Jesus was Santa Claus for adults as far as I was concerned.

But I prayed before it was done.

I came to know him because he kept coming.  Even in a vacuum, He kept coming.  He, the Devil.  That’s how I knew what he was.  He kept coming.

There is no God but there is Hell and it can be in your backseat or your backyard baby.  Ever feel it tap you on the shoulder?    I have.  It fucking banged on my back those first few days.

He keeps coming.

I had fun with it.  For awhile.  It’s true, I did.

I wasn’t afraid at first.  Not really anyway.  I was cocky.

But,  there was his emptiness and viciousness.  A terrible course without relent.  The malignancy of his breath, the toxicity of his purpose.

Still, I didn’t think he was all that.

I was wrong.

At first like picking at a scab, scratching at a wound, tongue constantly probing and prodding a sore in the mouth.  I couldn’t stand it.  But I liked it.  I was infected the first time I laid eyes on him.  I knew him to be a pathogen incarnate.  Yet I revisited and reappeared.  No worries.  I liked his disease.  It’s how evil works.  It’s cancer seduces you and before you know it, you’re complicit.  You are black.

Like heroin or meth.

Not this though.  Not this at all.

This was entirely different.

Within the cage of a single season I was neck deep.

Still,  he was an enigma in the most consummate of ways.  Odd, kinda funny.  My lack of fear was my demise.  My skepticism.  My naivete.

Entertaining the notion someone was only fucking with me.

*************************************************************************************************

All this until he stood over my bed on a windless night, when some sense caused me to open my eyes.  He inhaled and it rattled.  What he did was suck back mucus, blood and drool collecting in his cavernous, lantern jawed mouth.  He sighed then, as though he lamented being so disturbing.  Like he was sorry for just how horrific he was, lit only by moon, breaking through a window behind him.

He paused while he vibrated over my bed.

There were instances when I would be confused and empathetic.  Such instances didn’t last.

My mortal enemy.  My terror.  My waking and sleeping nightmare.

The bane of my everyday and everything.

************************************************************************************************************************************

I believe I first noticed him on a movie poster. Outside of a shopping mall in the Valley. One of those faux shelters for public transportation.  Then maybe on the side of a bus.  Yep, the side of a bus, looking right the fuck at me as I drove along side.

I laughed at it.

Disturbing but compelling.  Some new model,  fifteen minutes of Madison Avenue fickle.  Maybe only disquieting to me.

In no time he really was everywhere.  Nefarious grinning.  Mirrored sunglasses concealing what I somehow knew to be bloodshot eyes.

My own personal goblin all at once in perpetual ubiquity.

He just kept showing up in everything I looked at.

I remember thinking once, after clocking his countenance out of the corner of my consciousness, one of thousands of times, that he was one creepy motherfucker. At the periphery of one of those visually exploding advertisements for some insipid action movie.  Mouth open in mock terror, fingers scraping at the air, clawing with phony panic, volcanoes or aliens in the background.

Sometimes, he registered only after the fact, in my mind’s eye.  Clear as a bell.  Even behind his chromium lenses I knew his eyes were bleeding road maps.

I knew it from my dreams.

Weird.  But still.

I pondered my sanity.

Doubted my senses.

Nobody seemed to see what I did.

It was impossible to tell.

Time passed.

I swear I saw him behind mirrored cop lenses in a potato chip ad on the back of a comic book.  I don’t really read them anymore, but I thumb through them when I come across a display.  I still love their smell.  Inky industrial.  I collected them back in the day.  I have thousands.  Organized, alphabetized, bagged and boxed.  My girl and I sweated over them for a week or two in the dead of one summer.

Not long after, he was an extra in a cell phone commercial on TV. I wondered at how many times I’d watched that one before I noticed him.  I’m almost positive he wasn’t there the first few times I saw it.

Tall.  Pale. Gaunt. Always staring right at me.

There he was pictured on packaging for disposable razors at the 7-11 as sort of a cartoon.

Then again, in the very back of an advertisement for a new amusement park ride on a plastic fast food cup. I’ve always kept those cups. They hold a lot and it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They make excellent mini trash receptacles for a coffee or bedside table in the apartment of a single male.  I tap my pipe into them after the hit is gone.  My toilet paper, once I’ve blown my nose or spanked the monkey.

Didn’t hang on to that one.

Didn’t remember it until after I’d thrown it away.

I could only imagine all these companies hiring him for these ads must have thought he was kinda goofy and cool somehow, they were infusing their shit with character or quirkiness, or something.  Not unlike the concept of “heroin chic” from the 90’s.  How could they possibly entertain the notion that such a brutal and ugly countenance might possibly promote any product or cast it in a positive light for the great unwashed?

Or was it me?

I’d been genuinely spooked by the faces of actors or print models as a young boy.  I was freaked out by everything when I was seven.  Sometimes even the women in the ads were a hair across my ass or a frost across my shoulders.  But they rarely recurred and were never so consistent.

I checked myself.

This was entirely different.

This was insidious.

Was it me?

If it was, it meant I was crazy.  Delusional.  Certainly paranoid.  Schizophrenic maybe.  Fucked up.

I didn’t really think so.

But I didn’t know.

Now I know.

Still, it was my own private mystery.  I coveted it in a way.  I’ve always liked secrets and I keep many.  I never share my first sexual experiences or some of my darker urges.  I’ve seen people do things when they weren’t aware of being watched.  I often know when people are lying to me and pretend that I’ve no idea.  I’ve done things.  I’ve done some unspeakable things.  Seeing him everywhere made me, made me, think of those things.  He sought my worst and brought it out.

I did bad things.

He was mine in a way.  I owned him, he was exclusive to me.

Exactly what he wanted.  Precisely what he intended.

More time passed.

He became three dimensional.

He came to occupy space and time.

My space and time.

He became actual.

I would catch a glimpse of him walking opposite me while driving.  I’d  look back and check my mirrors.  Rubber necking like a stupid tourist, my stomach sinking and rolling.  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  I’d be gassy for the rest of the day.

Not fun anymore.

The rest of my day all pensive dread.

***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Oversized front teeth, buck toothed.  Yellow.  Incisors. Carnival red hair. A crew cut flat top. Pale blue eyes that were unbelievably bloodshot when not concealed behind mirrored lenses.

Get this, he always wears brown corduroy pants, blue suede Puma Clydes, a maroon t-shirt with a breast pocket under a leather biker jacket, sleeves up and he’s pigeon chested. Yeah, he’s all lopsided and the fit of his leather coat emphasizes it. His shoulders are narrow and he’s very tall.  Six Five at least.  Sinewy and long limbed.  Veins in his forearms and neck. A glance at his hands corroborates each could kill if it got you by the throat.  Acne scars and purple lips.

Giant fucking teeth.  He likes to smile.  He drools.

Bear in mind that by now I’d seen him in almost every pose, glimpsed him in dozens of televised commercials.

My man.

Scary as fuck.

He began to appear in my dreams. Pretty innocuous, cameos, but more overt than waking life.  At least thus far. Winking, whispering hello to me.  Hey buddy.  What’s up?  Walking by, pointedly somehow, a little wind as his wake, corduroy pant legs shrieking quietly with the fierceness of his gait.

That sort of thing.

He kept showing up in different places.

My dread swelling as he grew bolder.

In the audience on a talk show waving at me I was sure.

Ever more ominous and foreboding, as a blackjack dealer in Vegas once.

I nearly dropped to my knees on the colorful gaming floor carpet.  Clacking and ringing and shouting.  There he was, out of his usual attire, a green translucent novelty visor, clove cigarette in a holder cocked to the side of his pale yellow tombstone grin, red satin shirt with ruffles, a black vest and garters around his biceps.  Tight black disco pants betraying an enormous package.  He nodded at me while barking instructions at the gamblers with teeth clenched on his black plastic smoking appliance.  The sweet perfume of hams baking, courtesy of his clove cigarette.

Burgess Meredith as The Penguin.  Less comical.  Far more sinister.  The horror of violence promised by a relentlessly crazy countenance.

Just a nod and a cup of his enormous crotch when he saw me.  I swear he hissed.

Blood rushed from my head and face and my legs went all bobble head, cheap thumb toy.  Walking with a group of business associates and struggling for composure.  I reeled.  A bar just around the corner.  Double Bombay Sapphire and excused myself for the Men’s.  I’d started choking.  There I crapped and sweated.  My hands shook and I wiped my sweaty head with toilet paper in the handicapped stall.  I cleaned myself up and summoned some amount of game face.  I ambled unsteadily to the bar and my drink.  No one seemed the wiser as we were all an evening’s length into cocktails already, thank God.  I sucked hard at my glass and raised my hand for another.

And another……

By the wee hours, I’d nearly forgotten except for a carping perspiration.  A subtle but almost cloying sense of desperation.  Low but nattering panic.  I thought I slept well but there was a whiff of barnyard in my room that morning.  Who knows what had occurred there before me after all.

Slowly owning me.  Relentlessly taking possession.  I was his intended.  His object.  His device.

One day, weeks later, he was pumping gas a couple islands over at a Shell station right next to where I live.

Early seventies GTO.  Dual hoodscoops and dual exhaust. It was a metallic lime green with whitewalls.  Wire spoked hub caps, not rims. He pulled out very slow.  It throated like a Harley but with more sinister a baritone.  He never even looked at me.  I heard him accelerating a half mile away.  Ripping down Ventura Boulevard.

In a mall I saw him going down an escalator on a lower level grinning up at me before he looked down, sprinting the last few moving steps before disappearing.  Agile for his size.

Days ago, I was at Starbucks waiting for my unsweetened iced crack and he was backing out the door and firing a gun at me with his thumb and index finger. I pissed my pants. I’d like to believe no one noticed.

I had to go home.  Change my shit. I was late to work. My boss gave me the look and some voice to my performance of late. I nod and apologize.

He always bolts or turns away when I see him. He knows me.

Obviously.

Is he afraid?

I am.

I’m fucking petrified.

He’s huge and supernatural in some way or another.  This I own.  He’s no clown.  I know people.  I could have his legs broken.  I know that’s just not an option.  It’s not on the menu.  I don’t understand why, but I know we’re nowhere near Kansas anymore.

He’s capturing me.  Trapping me.  I understand I am prey.

For whatever reason the universe has, he’s mine and I’m his.

I understand.  I realize we will share doom.  No matter what.  I can’t help but know this.

It’s not just some puzzle for me to solve.

I’m in real goddamn trouble here.

I was frozen.  Paralyzed. The sliding door to my balcony was open, some breeze clattered the vertical blinds, bringing the odor of gasoline and animals.  Pig shit.

He said nothing that night.  That first night he came.  He placed his index finger on my sternum ever so gently as he towered over my bed.  I smelled dirt and grease under his long chipped nails. He said nothing but he looked right at me.  Not through me, but straight at me.  He smelled of swine.  Of their food and their waste and he smelled of an old garage.  He stank.  Things rotting and seething in dark places.  He fucking stank.

He grinned; a rictus affording massive and misshapen incisors. He began to drool a syrup of dark blood and mucus, his breathing was labored and it rattled.  His chin shook some and his sputum quivered a little.  He chuckled and stabbed a little harder with his long dark finger.  Still gentle.  He sucked back violently through his teeth.  His giant head whipped back. He blew air past his lips and he laughed like a lion, so loud I pissed the bed.  Seriously.  It happened before I knew it.  He turned and walked away tapping the walls as he went, away from my bed and out my front door. I heard him close it quietly behind him and somehow lock it from outside.  He tapped the walls with his knuckles all the way down the hall.

I don’t sleep much anymore. I’ve begun to obsess about pigs. They scare the shit out of me. Are you aware of how smart they are? They will eat any motherfucking thing. And we eat them.

I was left in my own piss.

This is bad.

This one is still amateur hour and begs detail but I think I’ve begun to fall into a sort of rhythm here.  Crude but gaining momentum.  It’s more personal and the characters are fatter.  I will rewrite the shit out of this story.  Stephen King, who when firing on all pistons is formidable, said he gets the story out first, recklessly even, and then he comes back with all the crayons.  I’m paraphrasing but that’s the way I understood it.  There’s fourteen more under “Man In In Picture”.  Here we go:

 

 

Man in picture. The sun also rises.

March 14, 2008 – 2:08 am Seven days a week. I know all of their faces if not their names. Some look at me with questions, a few with some concern. Long story, my hand up every time I say it. I take my iced venti drip, dump a little, glug half & half into it, stir it with the straw and leave.

$2.65

I sweat in the car and the air conditioner feels like a hose on my face.

At work I stop to put my briefcase and coffee in my office and head down the hall to greet the boss.

I’m self conscious. I begin to sweat and my face throbs. I own that I look like a pile of shit.

You wanna shut the door? He says. He’s alarmed, his eyebrows are up, friendly and neutral.

Nope. I actually fell down the goddamn stairs, I say. I was hammered, I say. I look at him embarrassed because I am. The stairs to my parking garage, I say.

My nose feels like a sliced plum as he stairs at it. I try to breathe quietly through my mouth. It’s not really working.

Sweet Jesus, he says. That’s gotta hurt like a bastard.

It does, I tell him. I tell him if I tear up it’s because it smarts and it’s not because my vagina hurts. He laughs but he’s still looking at me.

His nose barely wrinkles and I understand he knows I’m bullshitting him. It sucks.

I drop with care in my chair, it squeaks like a riot of cats in a sack, turn the computer on, grab the reciever and realize that even the phone against my face is fucking killing me.

They all do the double take when they pass my office.

Mattie’s office is across from mine and he can’t stand it. By lunch he’ll have his angle. He’s six four with a fauxhawk but today I will kill him. I feel fucking mean. Nothing to lose. I will beat him to death with the goddamn fax machine. I picture it and crack a smile. My face hurts so bad tears well up.

The morning is pain and humiliation. No one has really liked me for awhile. They’re all confused and afraid. I can’t blame them. I’ve been confrontational and antisocial for months. Today I show up with my face split open. Like that works.

Put yourself in my shoes. How do you even begin the conversation? We’re pretty close, all of us. But I don’t even hope to tell any of them the truth. This shit is crazy and that’s all they’ll get from me if I open my mouth. They’ll come away thinking I’ve lost my shit. I hate it, but it’s true.

Lunch is cool. Mattie has decided to forego the canyon in my face as a topic. After the first few minutes, I understand this and I’m grateful.

Not cool though. Everyone uncomfortable. Best friends and coworkers are beside themselves because of me. They try to include me in conversation, but look at me with cloudy revulsion and confusion. They have no idea what to make of me and there’s nothing I can say that will put them at ease.

I’m a fucking mess that keeps getting worse in all eyes.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this.

I want to scream that you people have layed awake worrying about how to pay a vendor, while I’ve been fistfighting a fucking demon every night. His eyes bleed and he drools. Fuck me, that’s not the half of it.

Then I go home.

To sleep.

To dream.

I get drunk first. On good gin.

I realize that my flat plasma throws heat because I feel it on my nose.

I go to bed.

I reach to turn off the lamp and on the nightstand, a white plastic pawn.

I’m so tired.

I know, I know, I need to establish the character of the rabbit Watership more.  It was so painful to write.  More detail and back story is needed all around.  I know.  You gotta admit though it’s gonna be good, as in horrible.  Here we go:

 

 

Man in picture. More.

March 3, 2008 – 5:25 am He slips inside. The key is smooth, the knob twists. He enters and shuts the door behind, very quiet.

He throws the bolt.

I see it in my head. The bolt.

I smell lamb and garlic.

Then I breathe shit. Overwhelming. No air in these fumes. He smells homeless. He smells like piss and puke and shit and sweat. It’s a stench so monstorous.

I gag.

I’ll retch. I’m sure.

I hear him begin to fill the empty ice trays on the counter. He turns the faucet off after the first one and he whispers….. too full. Very slowly he poors a thin stream into the sink.

He moves to the bathroom.

I see the spring loaded roll snap into place as I hear it.

My eyes are crusted. He’s rolling away from me. Out of my bed.

Crusty eyes and blurry vision.

Out of my bed.

What?

The front door closes.

My rabbit is dead.

His name was Watership and I adored him.

He’s been sprayed on the walls of my apartment.

His skin is on the floor. The carpet. Ears and all. He was my boy. His velvet nose.

He slept in his cage at night. His water bottle smashed on the marble mantle. He was so sweet and docile. Above the fireplace is a crude scrawl in his blood. It looks Japanese.

I think of that song by The Vapors.

There is fur in the wire around the door of his cage, he liked his cage, he came and went willingly, so I undersand he struggled violently.

He was soft and cocoa brown. His eyes were kind and he shuffled to rub his face on me.

Ever heard a rabbit scream? I have. Sounds like a baby human.

I break all the way down. Collapse. Fold. Fall. Lose it.

I scrape his remains.

Thoroughly. I collect them, all I can get or lift, and deposit them in a ceramic pot I made in grade school.

I don’t know what to do with bowl so I cover it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. I’m disgusted by it but it’s all I have.

His name was Watership, I adored him.

As I sit here, I miss him. He was innocence.

There’s a big piece of lumber always propped against the wall by my trash chute. It’s handy for forcing fat bags of trash down the maw. It looks vaguely nautical, like it should be on a medium sized sailboat. It’s been here for the two years I’ve been here.

I take it with me. Back to my apartment.

Hours after dawn and I still smell his fucking pigs.

I will wait forever for him.

He is fucked.

I’m not sure what he is. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill him.

As I read it, I realize how clumsy it can be but the concept is still disturbing if I do say so myself.  Again, it needs work, but it will make a fine and horrifying book.  Happy Halloween, here’s another.  To read the entire first draft, search under “Man In Picture” here at brainspank.  Off we go:

Man in Picture part two. The way we were.

February 24, 2008 – 4:01 am I’m a submarine, way down deep, hull compromised. Pinhole leaks will soon begin to gush. You’ve seen the movies. Once that shit starts, it’s the beginning of the end.

Now he e-mails me on all three of my accounts.
Nothing too sinister, emoticons and random puncuation
that I’m sure are supposed to correspond or be in
context somehow with sightings of him.

I haven’t filled an ice tray in weeks, but they’re always full. Lately, the toilet paper is installed properly on the wall dispenser. Something I never do.

I keep hearing the wind blow outside. When I step out
for a smoke, the air is still.

The radio turns on in the middle of the night. Wierd stations that sound like Hamm radio. Sometimes orchestras from the forties.

Constantly lately, what must be ancient perfume. Simple pungent notes. Disturbing but instantly nostalgic.

Then there’s the pigs.

I ask her if she’s noticing them. Not so much says she.

They seem to be everywhere. Iconic to a degree in American culture, she points out, smirk gratis.

Maybe I just notice them more. Everywhere from news magazines to National Geographic.

The ones in the Geographic have dirty tusks and crazy eyes swimming in violence. I smell them when I wake in the middle of the night. I hear their bifurcated hooves in other rooms.

They squeal and clack on my balcony.

They’ll eat anything you know. Anything.

The very next time I see him, his eyes are filled with
blood. Our entire encounter, he blinks once.

There’s a big ass Ralph’s across the street. Tremendous selection of frozen meals as well as standing at the fridge food. Good soup kiosk and a really good salad bar. Single males understand this food dynamic as well as the need for as many plants as you can possibly get down into your goddamn gastrointestinal.

Anyway, sometimes I start on the right because I’m in a hurry. When I start left it’s because I’m cool and I have a little time.

It was an afternoon copasetic as I entered left off the elevator with my smooth and noisless cart. I turned right after perusing the produce section and picking out some avacados, tomatos and onions. I proceeded down the middle north to south aisle. It bisects the store and aisles on your right and left.

He appeared at the head of the first one.

His eyes were rimmed with blood. His hair was more yellow. I thought of a naked corn cob. Right there, thirty five feet to my right. Not showing his teeth today and that’s a relief. Kinda, because the lower front of his face seems to struggle at containing them.

Next block down he’s at the tail of that one and thirty five feet to my left.

The next aisle is a block party. Fireworks bust and spatter in the night overhead. It’s the nexus of this retail venue, and at the same time, red and gold popcorn carts, clowns, balloons and herds of women in pastel stretch pants and heels.

I jerk left down the next lane and it’s just carnival games and frozen food. He’s at that end as I roll up on him while he stares at me through eyes full of blood. He blinks slowly and his lids are squeegees. Fresh red blood runs from his eyes and into his teeth as he begins to grin.

He’s got dozens of pigs with him. Some are hogs. Some are boars. Some are swine.

I understand that if I’m not his demise, he will be mine. I smell this fact when I flip a bitch in front of him and head down the road on the opposite side.

He follows me and it’s loud. He marches and brings his feet down hard. He constantly sucks drool back through his teeth.

I’m panicking. My heart in my throat as my brain screams about how life is fucking tough enough, why me today?

I glance back and his nose and ears have joined in the gush over his giant teeth.

Red blood streams into his maw like rivulets before a wash.

Now he’s ahead of me eating slices of pineapple from a can. Blood and fruit juice run over his chin and down to his shirt to look like sweat. I wonder if I have just minutes to kill this crazy motherfucker.

Or will it be another day?

He beats me to the register and I watch him bag my groceries. His shirt is a dark blue now and his eyes are bloodshot but clear.

I tell him paper & plastic and to pack them heavy. He does all that.

I still understand that I have to be this guy’s fucking hurricane.

In the spirit of the season, I’m re-posting some chapters from my first ever novel.  It’s rough and it really does require an extensive rewrite.  I had intended to revisit it this fall but my work and book about real life in the music business has eclipsed it’s relative priority for now.  I will do the rewrite, as it is a labor of love and I believe the concept to be sound and compelling and it scared the fuck out of me to write it.  If you care to, the entire work is available here at brainspank under the category “Man In Picture”.  It does gain speed and flesh as the story grows.  Trust me, it doesn’t suck, it just needs work.  I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Man in picture.

February 18, 2008 – 1:10 am It was interesting. Fascinating. Kinda compelling.

I had fun with it.

For awhile.

Sometimes, it was like picking at a scab or the tongue constantly probing a sore in the mouth.

Still, enigmatic in the most consumate of ways.

Until he was standing over my bed on a silent night, when some sense caused me to open my eyes.

I think I first noticed him on a movie poster. Outside a shopping mall. One of those faux shelters for public transportation. Maybe on the side of a bus.

I remember thinking, after clocking his countenance out of the corner of my consciousness, that’s one creepy motherfucker. In the background of one of those visually exploding advertisements for some inspid action movie. He registered only after the fact, in my mind’s eye.

Weird.

Time passed.

I swear I saw him wearing sunglasses in a potato chip ad on the back of a comic book. I don’t really read them anymore, but I’ll thumb through them when I come across a display.

Not long after, he was an extra in a cell phone commercial on TV. I wondered at how many times I’d watched that one before I noticed him.

Tall, pale. Gaunt. Always seeming to stare right at me.

Then, he was pictured on packaging for disposable razors.

Then again, in the very back of an advertisement for a new amusement park ride on a plastic fast food cup. I’ve always kept those cups. They hold a lot and it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They make excellent mini trash receptacles for a coffee or bedside table in the apartment of a single male.

Didn’t hang on to that one.

I would catch a glimpse of him walking opposite me while driving. Of course, I looked back and checked my mirrors. Of course, nothing.

He had large front teeth, maybe buck toothed. Red hair in a sort of crew cut flat top. Pale blue eyes that were unbelievably bloodshot.

I could only imagine all these companies hiring him for these ads must have thought he was kinda goofy and cool somehow, they were infusing their shit with character or quirkiness, or something.

I thought he was scary as fuck.

He started to appear in my dreams. Still pretty innocuous, but more overt. Winking, saying hello to me. That sort of thing.

He kept showing up in different places.

In the audience on a talk show.

Blackjack dealer in Vegas once.

One day, he was pumping gas a couple islands over at a Shell station.

Early seventies GTO. It was green. He pulled out very slow.

I walked through a mall and saw him going down an escalator on a lower level grinning up at me before he looked down, sprinted the last few moving steps and disappeared.

He always bolts or turns away when I see him. He knows me.

Obviously.

He said nothing. When he placed his index finger on my sternum ever so gently, I swear I could smell dirt and grease under a long nail. He said nothing but looked right at me. Not through me, but at me. The sliding door to my balcony was open, wind clattered the vertical blinds. I could smell gasoline.

He grinned; a rictus affording massive and misshapen incisors. He began to drool, then sucked it back violently. He blew air past his lips and walked away, away from my bed and out my front door. I heard him close it quietly behind him.

Now I get phone calls at work and on my cell. HEY MIKEY IT’S ME JERRY!! Or, ANTWON!! Or, WILLIAM!!

It freezes me. I know it’s him before it rings, if I don’t answer the goddamn thing, he’ll leave a voice mail and I’ll be absolutely compelled to listen to it. So I try to take it on the chin and then hang up. Get it over with. I know when it’s him.

Get this, he always wears brown corduroy pants, blue suede Puma Clydes, a maroon t-shirt under a leather biker jacket and he’s pigeon chested. Yeah, it’s all lopsided and the fit of his leather coat emphasizes it. His shoulders are narrow and he’s very tall. Sinewy and long limbed. A glance at his hands tells that one of them would kill you if it got you by the throat.

About a week ago, I was at Starbucks waiting for my unsweetened iced crack and he was backing out the door and firing a gun at me with his thumb and index finger. I pissed my pants. I’m pretty sure no one noticed.

I had to go home. I was late to work. The boss gave me the look and pointed out my shitty performance lately. I nodded and apologized.

I don’t sleep much anymore. I’ve begun to obsess about pigs. They scare the shit out of me. Are you aware of how smart they are? They will eat any motherfucking thing. And we eat them.

This is bad.

I keep dreaming I’m going over a cliff in something.  Every night.  Sometimes it’s not a big deal and sometimes I’m gonna die.  I’m always going over a cliff.

The scariest thing about “Man In Picture” is that he just keeps coming.  He never stops.  Once he begins, it never ends.  He is always there.  Relentless.  Nothing to do but deal with him directly until I win or lose.  You should look it up on this very blog under that title in quotes.  “Man In Picture”.  On the right hand side under categories.  It’s the first draft of a novel I intend to start a rewrite on very soon.

It’s crude and raw with an under developed plot and narrative.  The bones are there though.

It was disturbing for me when I wrote it.  I’m going to make it a book soon.  Now would be a good time for you all to weigh in and tell me what you think it needs.  I’m pretty sure I already know.

The worse sensation I can imagine is of thick ropey hairs bursting through my dermis.  Sharp muscular rigid worms.  I see it happening slower than in a movie.  Way slower.  My flesh opens at a rate that allows me to hear it.  The sound of knuckles popping, Rice Krispies and heavy wet fabric tearing.  Canvas, maybe burlap.

Blood flies and floats because it’s happening so slow.

It sears, aches and itches.

It burns.  It crawls.

Sometimes it toggles between hard pleasure and soft pain before it talks me in and out of a waking nightmare.

This happens to me in a hospital bed under a dim blue light.  I’m there for another life threatening reason.  Flesh eating virus.  I’m already horrified as the disease eats it’s way up my torso.  Now this.  There’s a sheet over me but with each smack and crackle the linens bloom red.

Saw something hanging from his ear until I realized it was the zipper on his coat.

Join me.

Drinks for my friends.

She.

Prowess and power to have survived from a time before man walked or even swam.  In the interim millennia,  She evolved in wits and wisdom.  Efficiency of things like propagation of the species, were the domain of a hyper Darwinism with a divine sway.  She.  Always a She, was to be born pregnant in perpetuity.

One at a time.  Never more than two at a time.  The gestation period best estimated in centuries.  She dies and the daughter births.  Over and over, one at a time.  Fire and blood.  Screams  shake your torso and the femurs rattle.  A giant infant three or four times as long as a man is tall.  Violence and blood.  Heat and sulphur.  She lands on all four.

Eyes a fiery pool of refract and gold.  She blinks slow and aware.

Far from malevolent, She is of her own mind.  She does not suffer fools.  She understands almost all human beings to be fools.  Light speed quick and clever beyond, discourse with She will ultimately cost far more than such an experience is worth.  Absent an acute illness within weeks or months, madness will visit sooner rather than later.

When she glances, the weight impresses like twenty feet down in a swimming pool.

There is one thing.  Um, legend.  The way I understand it, I’ve studied it.  I know.  I’ve talked to a lot of people and they all know.  You get one to talk to you right after being pushed out and She is your bitch.  Each She needs to have some sorta relationship with at least one of us.  I can’t find the actual rules.  The idea is to be first on the scene.

I need to locate the beasts, get close enough to evaluate the health of the elder She, make pals with the younger She while making sure She’s ready to kick open the furnace door and produce a flaming prodigy.

What this is, is a stroll in the garden.  Walk in the park.  A BBQ with friends and decent hooch.  Fun will be had and I’ll have giant flying mammal reptile as a courtesan.

My name is Gerald Frankenhammer.  I dabble in finance and intrigue.  Legends and myths.  Ghosts and extraterrestrials.  Conspiracies and the macabre.

What I’m about to tell you,  will astound you.

Drinks for my friends.

All my windows covered with bees this morning. The alarm. It’s dark. No light. I hate this. It scares the shit out of me. What fucking now.

Straight to the bathroom and I crap like a goose. I blow loose gravy. Awful and foul. I retch. I shit blood and it’s all about new copper pennies and deep fermenting sewage. The ocean in there somehow, maybe because there’s pictures of fish on the paper towels I’m using to wipe my ass. I swear I just bought a case of toilet paper.

Nobody knows the trouble I see.

These bees know sweet, sticky blood. They get excited enough to dance.

One by one I thump the glass from inside and they fly away.  The light streams in. It feels natural.  Normal.  Like it’s supposed to work just like that. It makes no sense to me.

Well yeah. Too often things work that way and I’m not inclined to worry because I’ve solved the the problem at hand. But really, I’m getting tired of this shit. I don’t like waking up to a new conundrum every goddamn morning. I just want to be. I’d move to a city. A smaller city, far from this middle of nowhere shit. Austin or Portland or maybe Albuquerque.

I’m tired of the whistling wind and the chaos it brings.

I decide on a peanut butter and honey sandwich with banana slices. I put it together on wheat and butter the bread. I make it a ‘melt’ in a frying pan and eat it while gulping a grape soda. I feel good after I eat it. I use an elbow straw for the soda. I like the way the bread crunches against my gums. I think of the avacados and how I can rub them all over my mouth with my tongue.

I watch Oprah.

These other guys, the ones I share the house with, I don’t know them. I’m not even sure how many they are. Myrus and Paul I know, but there’s a few more that don’t have a bed. Blind shithouse crazy. The shit they leave lying around is insane.

Carcasses and parts. Makes me feel like I’m dead.

I just can’t do this anymore.

He brought my heart to me in a jar. It was Myrus but Paul stood behind him. Handed it to me suspended in a pink liquid. A big glass jar, size enough for a whole sheet of cookies. What happens when all is lost? You are what you eat. Myrus handed me the jar, he’d palmed it by it’s top. I slid the heavy glass lid aside and there was a scrape and a ring as I inhaled the smell of my own heart.

My name is motherfucking Felix.

My name is Felix. I clean up.

I’m here all week. I live here. These boys are messy. I sweep, mop and vacuum. I’m here to do what needs to be done. If the windows need attention, I do the windows.

These two, Myrus and Paul, challenge me. I observe and respect the confidentiality of housekeeper and client. They do give me pause, they provide unique situations.

My teeth will grow back. Myrus says just like hair and nails.

I’m not sure I believe him but there’s work to do. Paul just stares at me sad.

These two are a handful. No one would believe what I have to deal with.

That’s why I’m here. I bat cleanup. I’m the fixer.

I keep a whole grip of supplies under the bathroom sink. I store the the bleach in the garage next to the washer and dryer. I keep a backstock of gloves, sponges, paper towels and trash bags in various places around the house.

My man Myrus shows up last night. Before I even get started he washes up thoroughly. A shower and bloody clothes in the bathroom trash with a plastic liner already in place. He’s pretty smooth. He works with me. There’s a gore and brain festooned tire iron in the trunk. I take care to deal with these items methodically and deliberately. The trunk of the car gets an exhaustive cleansing and a twiceover.

I got a burn barrel out back. I toss full cans of hairspray in whenever I find them. They sound like a shotgun blast. Of course the clothes, but then the iron after I’ve cleaned it. I pull it out the next morning before the sun and after it’s cooled. I toss it back in a clean trunk. There is no cleanse like fire.

Then I do a little shopping. Beer, whiskey, gin, tuna, good bread, tomatos and avacados. Total cereal with raisins and two percent milk.

No cat food this week. Sad. I really liked the little fucker but I’m not about to get in the middle.

Both my roomates are fucking crazy. One think’s he hears shit all the time and the other is unpredictably violent. We all like the same food though. Ballpark smoked white meat turkey franks and bowtie pasta. Classico sauce, onions, butter, pinenuts, applesauce, peanut butter, hummus, various cheeses including sharp cheddar, Ding Dongs capers and grapefruit soda.

Al these items work pretty well for me despite my not having a tooth in my head. I like shopping but everyone in town looks at me weird. I imagine it’s because my lips are folded funny on account I have no teeth.

We all like salad but it makes each of us shit like a goose.

What I do is hold up my end. I pay bills, answer any correspondence, scoop the catbox when Paul gets a new cat and stay way out of the way. Paul’s been freaking out in the garage lately and Myrus has been killing everything he sees.

You can only see one other house from the kitchen window. It’s but a shack about a quarter mile down the road. I don’t think I’ve ever seen who lives there. The wind gets to blowing and you can’t see any evidence of civilization at all. Cars still rock down the two lane blacktop doing eighty plus.

Sometimes the wind inhales and whatever goes by shakes the house.

The telephone poles sway like loose teeth in an infected socket. I can feel the poles rocking back and forth in my gums.

It rained last night enough to muddy the windows.

I’ll be busy all day.

Welcome to the show.

He’s got huge arms that look like hams. Tattoos. Piercings and a long ZZ TOP beard. He’s loud and full of himself. A braggart. I loathe him immediately. Whiskey after whiskey, man this guy can drink. He’s a big boy. Ronald Reagan was our best President ever. I get him to despise chick drinks with me. We start ordering them. Sex On The Beach. Scorpions, Stingers and Grasshoppers. Creme de menthe, Goldschlagger and Jägermeister. I drop a couple percosets into the big bastard’s snakebite.

He’s stumbling and slurring as he tells me he’s gotta piss. I steer him away from the men’s and towards the back door. I hid the tire iron so no one would steal it. I look at him and tell him he’s hammered. I tell him he needs a bump. He looks at me like yeah he knows.

I give him my bullet and he hits it. He hands it back to me and his eyes begin to cross. I see his ankles twist and I swing up on his way down. I hear meat. I feel meat. I tell myself mine is a star studded existence. I just broke this prick wide open. I hammer at the base of his neck. I kick his fucking torso and walk the few blocks to my car.

I feel better. I am festooned with gore. I’m still sad about that cat, but it will never happen again. I feel better.

I am Myrus.

There will be blood.

I promise.

People need to understand there are consequences. For their actions I mean. You can’t just walk around doing and saying what you want.

I like myself. I’m secure.

I hate faggots or people who act like them. It’s not natural for a man to covet the the ass of another man. I’m not on board with that shit. I don’t trust niggers. They hate us as much as we hate them. We gotta spook for President. What does that tell you?

I’m a good guy. People should like me more. When was the last time you had butterscotch pudding?

I think his name is Paul. He leaves bowls and forks in my sink. He brought a cat home the other day. Black with a white face. It was friendly in a disgusting way. Always licking itself and cowering.

Small and helpless. It smelled like broccoli or maybe cauliflower.

It didn’t like me. It could see me. At first it looked at me and then it looked through me.

It licked my fingers and toes. I held it’s head in the toilet until it stopped squirming. Amazing how strong such a tiny critter can be. I kept my fingers around it’s neck and my thumbs on it’s head. He’s not about to bring home another senseless animal. I felt him screaming inside while I did it. He’s pissed.

He’s entirely welcome to go fuck himself.

I can tell you about other things I’ve done. I hate animals because they’re stupid and helpless.

I like bugs. I like to catch them and have them crawl on me. They are so stupid. I can trap them on my belly and chest for hours. I hate bugs with wings. I kill them right away. Some beetles have wings like an afterthought. Like evolution or some crap gave them the ability to fly fifty years ago. I hate them the most. They fly around bouncing off everything, you can knock them out of the air. Like airborne crunchy turds. They smack on the floor, hobbling on weak legs until I pop them underfoot. My naked big toe. They squeek more than pop.

They are shiny, I think about eating them.

I fucking hate them. Greasy. Shiny. Crunchy. Like a glistening peanut.

Found some pretty good tuna salad in the fridge. Don’t remember making it but I can make good food. I’m having this sandwich on a french roll with a grape soda and I think of that cat. It never did a thing to me. Why did I do that? I can’t believe I did that. Fuck. Who am I? What have I done? My head burns and my brain itches. I would kill another human for the same thing.

Fuck.

I understand I did it to make myself feel something. Like I’m in a cloud unless something big happens. Sometimes I have to do something large.

This time. What I did sucks and it makes me awful.

I will find people to kill until one kills me.

I hate my fellow human.

It felt good and I was powerful. Now I can’t stand myself. I see what I’ve done over and over and it’s ugly. Who am I? I’m panicking. I feel it coming.

I’m dizzy and in despair so sharp I can’t breathe. I think about whiskey and head to the kitchen. I’m on my knees and vomiting with a bottle of Maker’s Mark between my thighs.

The first sips go down painful because of the acid still in my throat. Burns all the way down. Puke and whiskey. The humanity.

I’m sure I should quit this earth. I have Tums.

I have done a very bad thing. I can’t fix it. No one will ever know and it doesn’t matter. I know. I remember.

The only way to repair it is to take down something bigger and more deserving. Something thinking and guilty. Anyone who’s done something bad. Easy. They’re everywhere.

They see me, I’m like five foot eight, one sixty five soaking wet. But I’m mean and strong. I will hit you first and hard. If there’s a bottle handy I will cave the middle of your face in. I will run you over. I will kick your head until it’s a broken ugly shell spilling blood and brains.

I hate you because you’re human.

I can’t stand what I’ve done so I’ll fix it. I’ll take one down. A Mouth breather. I’ll find some big stupid shithead at a truckstop. I’ll get his trust and he won’t be threatened because I’m so small. I’ll tell him I have blow and we should go take a piss. I carry a ball peen hammer in my back pocket.

It will be easy.

My name is Myrus.

I blink and there are stars overhead.

Only when I close my eyes. But then it’s like the inside of a giant blue black nightime balloon. The fire of galaxies, stars and supernova. I feel a little crazy. I’m weak.

I understand something is about to happen. I’m excited.

I close the door behind me and sit down in the tiniest of rooms.

There’s a change of pressure, like an airlock and the room groans like a wooden ship.

The most intricate and elaborate shelving you can imagine. Right angles and curves, sloping and graduated, square and circular slots. A porthole of a window at the top of the wall on my right. Desk, chair and architecture of an order that speaks to my sensibilities as fast as my eyes can move.

The leather is creaky. Like it’s old or maybe really new. Like I’m being whispered to. Rolled parchment, tied with ribbon. Red wax seals. Small jars. delicate corks. Coins and watches. Maps on the wall. Globes high up in the corners. Protractors and compasses. They turn when I’m not looking. I hear them squeak and scratch. Beakers and scales. The wind blows outside. I smell cinnamon and cedar.

Rows of drawers, like a library card file. Grids like a post office. Boxes and cartons. Thick green glass in stainless steel. A perch for birds bearing messages and all sorts of chutes and tubes. Chaos on a scale for the singular brain.

Pedals at my feet, switches at my fingers and overhead screens coming into view. Keyboards. Headgear with elaborate receptacles. Things I don’t recognize. Shapes that touch me back. Holographs trying to tell me something.

When I start to hear the room it shocks me. A giant lump of fear settles in my pelvis, in my intestines. It’s starts with old recordings, radio addresses and big band music. In no time it’s black and loud and panicked. Then old video game sounds and music, music, music. Fax and modem bleeps and even more music and speeches and noise. It changes channels back and forth all the while getting louder.

It shakes me, my fucking bones rattle and vibrate. I’m sweating. It screams so loud my head feels like an egg shell cracking.

It stops.

I linger for a minute but I’m so confused. It’s like I can’t focus my eyes.

Leather and oil on wood opulence. Polished metal. Brass and copper. It smells just like that.

I need to step out. I feel overwhelming deja vu. I reach for the slim door and end up on the floor of my garage. It’s night. The door barely clicks behind me. My car doesn’t tick but it’s huge and sleek. Outside the wind is giant inhales and exhales. I hear whales. I feel drugged.

Inside, the microwave clock tells me 3:15. I have to think about what I’ve seen.

I’m panicky. I need a drink.

I like to imagine department stores when I’m confused. There’s an order that comforts me. A certain retail gust that makes me feel safe. The idea of old grocery stores comforts me immensly. The scents of produce, bread, solvents and cleansers under white fluorescents with the chill of a Fall Sunday morning.

See it. Smell it.

I can go to a public place, the scent of textiles or a mall, popcorn and the click of heels, lose my shit and they will get me to my parents. Break down in public and you will get all the help you need. I’m thinking about the Bay Area or Seattle.

I don’t care what day tomorrow is.

A girl named Julie told me once that if I didn’t watch a particular network medical drama, I couldn’t possibly understand medicine. I thought about how a television show could possibly help me to understand medicine.

I’m telling you this because I have to.

I’m Paul.

It’s me Paul.

I made the best tuna salad today. I diced red onions and Vlasic dill pickles. Lotsa garlic, lotsa mustard, lots of mayonnaise. Celery. Maybe some mild green peppers, maybe some paprika or cayenne. There’s other things I can’t tell you, like when to squeeze the lemon or maybe you should consider lime and mint with a sweet relish and a whiskey mustard. Cilantro? Capers baby. Barbecue rub? Tuna is the ultimate white meat. Any and all greens must be crunchy fresh. Either way, use chewey bread. The high fiber kind or rye. It’s about the texture. Ground pepper.

Toast it fer fuck’s sake.

Cheese, yep. Swiss if it’s decent. Otherwise, it’s a quality of life issue. Bring on the Velveeta.

I had a couple cold tall boy Cheladas. They went down smooth.

Mom called, I told her of my recent successes. We talked about the Democrats and how Dad is doing.

I don’t have a fence but I know where my property ends. There are markers. Sticks with faded ribbons. My backyard is the desert and I like that. I wake up at three a.m. and put on my slippers. Next thing I’m eating a Ding Dong a couple hundred yards from my back door. The wind helps me to imagine rain.

It never comes.

The moon lights the desert like it’s a sister.

The county tries to make me put up a fence that will blow down. They ask me if I don’t want to be protected and I tell them fences don’t stop bugs or snakes and fences blow down.

Other than that, it’s not so bad.

I’m in what you would call a modest house. Living and dining area with an open kitchen. Seperate living room with a gas fireplace. One and a half baths. One bedroom. I got some sort of wood laminate on the floor in the kitchen and a nice dark tile in the entry and around the dining area. A nice cream colored carpet that hides the dirt pretty well everywhere else but the bathrooms.

I like to vacuum.

Behind the water heater in the garage. There’s a door but it’s very narrow. When I first noticed it my mind pictured the word ‘slim’.

I like to sweep. I like gathering the soil into the pan. I like looking at what I’ve collected. I found some sort of shrimp once. Must have come from a Cup O’ Noodles. It’s the only possible explanation.

That’s what it was, a skinny door. Took me three or four months to realize it was even there. Even after I first clocked it, weeks went by.
I thought about it quite a lot. I dreamt of it. Then I forgot about it.

It came back around. This last Saturday afternoon I turned the knob.

My name is Paul.

My name is Paul.

I’ve been up since six.

The wind blows and it smells like rain, but I doubt it. Whistling and clanging. Sometimes things tumble. It’s never quiet unless it’s gonna rain, but I don’t think so.

What did I do yesterday?

I saw this cool nasal decongestant commercial where the whole sinus network was sorta represented by one of those vacuum systems like you used to see at banks and in old movies. All the tubes were clear so you could see all the capsules moving around. I like that kind of art. Sorta post industrial meets an ant farm/habitrail aesthetic.

I first glimpsed that technology as a kid along with the understanding that humans were the software. Workers contolled the flow of capsules and therefore the information. Data. Pretty cool. I want one.

It does describe my inclinations to a degree. I adore aquariums. Tunnels of all kinds command my interest.

I wouldn’t enter one. I grew up around the Comstock Lode. Hundreds of man engineered holes. I never went far enough into any where I couldn’t see sunlight.

My interest is exclusively microcosmic. It’s all in the diminutive. Dominance of scale. Beehives fascinate me but I won’t go near one.

I hate that I can’t remember. My hands are a little beat up.

I miss the Sears catalog. I could look at all those dioramas in the toy section forever.

Carefully, I remove layers of an ant hill with a small spade and gloves. The whole community under mere inches of desert; made ostentatious by a mound of their own participation. Like a perfect miniature volcano. I lift levels as delicately as I can. Each revealing the inside of a sand dollar.

I can’t remember what I did yesterday.

The more meticulous, the greater my reward. I am here to watch the tiny doomed scramble and panic in a labyrinth of caves and passages that had never been invaded by the light of the sun until now. Just stay upwind and most will blow the other way all while exposing the crude catacombs of the arthropods.

I’m thinking a little Iron Maiden and a grape soda.

I brought my looking glass, in case I find the queen. She’ll be plump and confused at first. I will roast her in her nest. She will writhe and convulse like an embryonic dragon. She’ll burst like a sausage casing full of blood and there will be a disgusting vapor.

The discretionary chaos of these tiny worlds is almost the entire catalyst for my enthusiasm to live a neat and orderly life. Everything in it’s place. I like right angles and symmetry. I’m both experimental and generous with angles of forty five degrees or multiples thereof.

Sometimes I get excited about insects in a morbid curious sorta way. Most bugs when divided in half exhibit ‘bilateral symmetry’. Each half mirrors the other. Crunch through the exoskeleton of a grasshopper with a scalpel and this will be your reward.

I have no regard for bugs. I loathe them. My most profound emotion is fear.

I really want a nice set of encyclopedias. I adore all the cutaway illustrations of ships and buildings and those cool translucent pages with various human body systems and structures.

My name is Paul.