Archive for the ‘Man In Picture’ Category

The watch looks still to me, it reads five after nine.  For days it reads five after nine. Everyone else can see the time while they admire it.  I think the way they look at it would compel them to tell me if it’s stopped.  I hope. People comment on it often.  I look at the second hand but can’t see it moving.  If someone asks me the time, I turn my wrist and hold it up or my answer will be a guess. Sometimes they say the time they see out loud as though I’m waiting to hear it.

I am.

So confused.

A pair of those reading glasses might allow me to appear less culpable.  I could fumble for them as I hold up my wrist.

If he’s of me in any way at all, he must own his cowardice.  I believe he does.  I see it in him.  Just like me.  He’d rather just fuck with me than confront me.  He shows me what he can do but he never comes straight at me.  A jackal.  A pussy.  Just like me.  He’s always running.

I’m going to kill him.

He thinks I can’t or won’t.

I think I can.

I submitted to a bully once. I was in the sixth grade. I was confused. He wasn’t any bigger, he was simply more evil. Mean. For awhile, I was afraid. I went to ridiculous ends to avoid him. I stole a small hunting knife from a sporting goods store. I would duct tape the leather sheath to my leg before I went to school.  I was desperately afraid of his face and his capacity for cruelty.

I pictured stabbing him.  I believe I would have.

One day the entire student body sat in the gymnasium bleachers for an assembly. A giant red brick structure built in the thirties with an ancient oval roof. Autumn. Cold inside, colder outside. I sat with my friends and spit Skoal on the floor. All of us had our coats on. We did our best to casually smear the tobacco juice into ambiguous weather puddles with our feet.

My friend Lance was next to me. He didn’t chew tobacco. He’s now some sort of neurological physical therapist and or surgeon.

His last name was Dalton and I could feel him behind me.  Every time the crowd would gasp or jeer at the ridiculous civil defense film on the soft sell of nuclear attack we were being shown, he’d hit me hard on the back with fist and middle knuckle.

It didn’t take long for Lance to clock it, look me in the eye and say “Who is this fuck?”

Dalton had always been a coward. He’d always confront me with his friends around him or never at least in a crowd where there was a chance of me having an ally. I would back down, because my shame was my own. There was no one else to see it.

This was different. He’d grown bold. I don’t think he was very smart. He certainly hadn’t thought far enough ahead to understand the corner he’d backed me into. Fear is a great force multiplier.  Fear can be everything.

I didn’t snap, but my decision came quick. I was humiliated and terrified.  I exploded. I spun around and swung as hard as I could for his head. He turned away in anticipation of the blow and my fist landed solid with a pulchritudinous smack on his ear.  It was all I had until he toppled like a raw turkey carcass on a tripod with a shit leg.  I went to work.  I swung and swung, over and over.  He bled and pleaded.  His blood and snot were all over my hands and sleeves.  They pulled me off and away from him.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sobbing and bleeding in the nurse’s office.

His meat was under my fist.  I defeated him.  He was mere flesh and fear.

It’s time for my fist again.

I am sure. I begin to understand him. It will be easier if I lure to him to a mall or a bar instead of an empty field or a park at night. I will kill him. We are the same he and I.  I am smarter.  I wonder how well he understands that.

I will kill him.

Does he know to look inside to figure me out?

Does he drink wine with his meat?

I’m giving him the name him Richie Cunningham.

I will kill Richie Cunningham.

Opie is toast.

The night is pleasant. Barely a moon. I’ve been asleep, the fire is embers. The carafe of water is empty and I figure that I can’t hold out until morning.

Something I hate; finding a bathroom in a strange house in the middle of the night.

In a hotel room, I just bounce around until my feet feel cool tile.

Whatever, I’m like a fire hydrant. I feel good. Energy.  I throw off the blanket and bounce up. Legs are good.  Barely sore.  Past the den and there’s a small bathroom with a light on the left just beyond the kitchen.  Thoughtful of Carlo.

There’s an actual urinal with a heavy duty chrome flush, what looks like a quartz puck that smells like fresh and disinfected heartburn, and one of those long low toilets with a black seat and an identical chrome flush all municipal style. White tile. It’s clean and smells good with an institutional dispenser that spits brown paper when I turn the crank.  The sink has no cabinet and is a white  deep porcelain tooth protruding from the wall.  A vaguely art deco wall mounted soap sprinkler vomits pink powder when I toggle the lever back and forth. I smell pine.

I piss.

I’m back in grade school.

As I’m draining I see the open door leading to the kitchen.

I rinse my hands again.

I decide to make my way back through the kitchen. It’s smaller in the dark.

I come around to the couch and sink back into it’s comfort.

I’m thinking I expect what’s next.  It begins as deja vu.  Creepy.

Richie smacks his hand on the windows. Running around the deck. Frustrated and in a frenzy. I’m spooked but I know he can’t get in or he’d be in.

I attack the fucking window.  I bang hard on it with my knuckles and demand that he look at me.  I scream at this fuck to look at me.  I want to see him. Close.  So I do.  It shocks me.  His eyes are desperation and rage.  He’s not here today.  His head is never still.  It shakes back and forth and nods up and down furiously.  It never stops wagging.  Like a relentless spasm disease.  I’m in an aquarium gawking at a manic shark.  But He’s the beast and I’m in the cage.

Sputum violence.  A misting of blood.

Carlo’s yard is full of dark swine with fear in their eyes.  They scream and stomp.  They swell back and forth like shiny schools of  slippery rapid fish.  There are hundreds if not thousands.  Blue black and brown, stinking of catastrophe and madness.  I think if I just had some weapons of mass destruction.  Guns.  I need guns.

He doesn’t look at me.  Panes of glass divide us.  Either one of us could reach through like the movies.  Pull the other through the panes as our first bad ass movie move.  Then we would do Kung Fu for a little while.  I end up blowing his head clean off with some giant gun.

Oh, man.

I yell and flip him off. I mock and tease.  I laugh at him.  Scream and curse.  I’m seventeen.

He’s sobbing and sucking back drool.  He bleeds from all the openings in his head.  It drips and sprays.  He’s a mess.  He’s in his underwear again.  It’s grimy.  Yellow.  I realize it’s a diaper.  There is dirt caked on his thighs and forearms.  He is hairless except for his head.  He could be comedy.  Tragic while hysterical.

I press my index finger and face to the glass and tell him I understand.

I tell him I understand it’s him or me and that it will be me.

I tell him I’ll kill him.  He will die.  It will be me.  I am shouting.  Promising to kill him.

I work at holding his gaze, his eyes in their convulsing head.  I promise with little breath left that I will kill him.  I will cut him.  I’m going to gut him and watch him bleed out.  I’m whistling and whispering, out of breath.  I’m out of breath but still screaming.  My face feels on fire.

He bounces off the front door.  Raging.  He screams in the yard.  He pounds his own face and head with his palsied curled fists and long ass talons.  He even throws rocks at the windows but none so much as crack.   He leaves sobbing and sucking it back.

I stand and watch his retreat.  He lights a fagot while marching away and his army of swine follow.

He cannot enter.

Dumb and exhausted, violent resolve is slow comfort.

There’s a particular and peculiar sensation upon a man experiencing when he needs to pee real bad.  It vibrates and tickles on down to the wrists and hands.  When the man is able to unleash, there is no greater instant gratification.  The body does quiver and rattle yet the the spasms are cathartic relief.  It is existential.  Primal.  When it’s over, it’s over.

All my fears and unrest go dormant.  The watch still ticks and I don’t care I can’t see it moving.

I go to sleep.  I dream of the watch.

It all stinks of asphalt and road.  Petroleum.  Oil.  It stinks bad.  I check the watch.  It tells me I have twelve hours to go on an eight hour shift.  Life smells toxic pink like nail polish and green weeds in the desert halfway between here and Vegas.  Heat.  Pulled Pork is a despicable term.

Dad says the watch needs a battery.  Tells me Wall Mart.

I leave the dream as we sit down for Rueben Sandwiches.  Corned beef.  Sauerkraut.  Swiss Cheese.  Rye bread.  Mayo and the Poupon.  Grilled.

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.

I’ve no idea if the debt for my weakness has been settled by my death. It no longer matters to me. The universe pays no mind.

In the six or so months since this fucking warlock has entered my life, I’ve been as crazy scared as a man could be without going crazier than a shit house rat, the source of my sanity has been the notion that I would prevail. This idea, mostly predicated on some moral superiority, I took for granted. Some righteousness I possessed that he could not know was my assumption.

Looks like that ain’t shit or it’s not even true.

Arrogance is my demise.

I leave the world with this. Chaos is more prevalent than order. There is far less sense than even logic. I was right not to trust the world because it’s so goddamn random. There will never be a reason. No one will ever find it if there is.

As soon as you turn up the sound the goddamn gunfire starts.

“I am still living with your ghost
Lonely and dreaming of the west coast
I dont want to be your downtime
I dont want to be your stupid game

With my big black boots and an old suitcase
I do believe Ill find myself a new place
I dont want to be the bad guy
I dont want to do your sleepwalk dance anymore
I just want to see some palm trees
Go and try and shake away this disease

We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die

I am still dreaming of your face
Hungry and hollow for all the things you took away

I dont want to be your good time
I dont want to be your fall-back crutch anymore

Ill walk right out into a brand new day
Insane and rising in my own weird way
I dont want to be the bad guy

I dont want to do your sleepwalk dance anymore
I just want to feel some sunshine
I just want to find some place to be alone

We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die” -Everclear, Santa Monica

Always keep your toilet clean. You may have to drink out of it.

Drinks For My Friends.

Studio City California, July twenty three, two thousand and eight.

Adrenaline and panic get him off me.

She’s a pile in the corner.

Small and bent. Folded.

This is not happening.

I shake my head hard.

Everything comes up the same.

In dreams you can’t ever scream or run or fight back.

Not today. I’m fucking nuclear.

Thermo.

Some ridiculous laugh volcanos from my neck. I have no fear.

None.

I fly off my back. I wail, kick and rage. I beat, muscle, force the fight, with fists, knees and elbows, into the bathroom. Lights on because he’s been playing with the fucking toilet paper.

The wet sound of flesh beating flesh. Sickening. Smacks and gasps.

A cloying steam of violence. Like fresh paint.

I swing and swing and scream and swing.

Against the wall. His neck a bundle of cables in my left hand. My right fist an anvil. I beat his face with it again and again. I swing my sledge, his mouth sprays fresh blood across the wall and the medicine cabinet. Again and again.

A tooth dances and rattles across the faux marble vanity.

His blood is humid. It thickens the air. He stinks like wild mammal.

Jacked up incisors lacerate my knuckles but I can’t stop swinging at them. I fucking loathe this fucking thing. I’m going to kill him with my hands. I’m bashing them in.

I will kill him.

I pound and pound.

He turns his hamburger face back after every blow to mock me.

On his knees by my toilet. More blood than I’ve ever seen from a man not dead.

He takes the beating and keeps smiling. He keeps smiling. He laughs like some mildly amused retard. Picture a Down syndrome kid with a Rubik’s cube.

My shoulder burns. I start to kick him.

The eyes spill too, joining the river beneath his nose and mouth.

He smiles as he pushes blood through his remaining teeth with his tongue. Wringing a sponge. It runs from his chin to his shirt, down over his crotch to splatter on the tile.

He has yet to fight back at all. I go cold.

His eyes find mine. Blue pupils suspended in blood. He’s locked, frozen. Staring straight through me.

He laughs like emphysema. A death rattle with mucus and mirth. I’m caving his head into raw meat while he sings a soliloquy minus any fear at all.

His eyes stay empty.

A demon version of the Rope-a-dope. I could beat his head off his neck and he would infect me with viruses that madden and fibers will squirm from sores on my arms and torso like thin white worms. No doubt the pain will be excruciating.

Biding his time while I cave his head in. Not bothered in the least. A lazy chuckle.

I picture the knife and spin to find it.

He’s not long for this mortal coil either. We’re tied. My end is his. His will be mine. I’m about to end it. He doesn’t know this. Somehow I do.

Cold War Policy. Mutually assured destruction. Quid pro quo.

He’s on me in a heartbeat. Before I feel it, he’s bitten a chunk from the back of my neck. It burns. Sickening pain. My stomach rolls hard. I feel air on the crater he’s made in my back. Maybe the weirdest physical sensation I’ve ever had. My own blood starts to flow down my body front and back.

He sucks at the the wad in his mouth and spits it on the floor. It lands with a slowmotion smack a foot in front of me.

I can’t believe it’s my flesh when I see the size of it.

He pounds the back of my head so hard, I go blind after every blow. He’s going to kill me.

Outmatched. I wanted to beat him and die last.

No chance here. High noon bitches. The difference between high school and the NBA. I’m about to die.

I throw my last elbow and manage to knock him off my back. Blind panic. I’m thinking the green dagger. I swim on my belly to my suitcase. Knees and elbows bang tile behind me.

It’s open.

I can’t believe the amount of blood on my hands.

He chuckles low through mucus and viscera. My hand finds the box. Somehow I have it by the hilt.

My calf in the grip of a reptile. I roll with the twist but my ankle snaps like balsa. On my back with the knife in my left hand.

My leg shoots fire. I can’t get up.

He hovers, bleeding on me. To own what I’ve done to his face…… His jaw dangles, my flesh hangs from it. How he took that chunk……..

Left eye dark, impossibly dislocated cheekbone from a countenance shredded and bloody. I flash on any gore I’ve ever seen. Fish guts on a plank to a deer without skin hanging from a rafter outside my bedroom.

All face angles are wrong. What I see competes with everything I know. What I’ve done to his face supplies me confusion and madness.

This amount of violence I’ve committed gives me pause.

It ends up being just enough.

To distract me.

He’s on me swinging so hard and fast I can’t see. He takes the knife from my hand. He plunges into me over and over.

I can hear it.

The sensation and abrupt pinch, blooming into a chrysanthemum of dizzying pain while still being stabbed and I can no longer breath.

There is no God. Yet I pay for my sins.

A dozen or so wounds and the blade shatters. The green inside burning me so that grey smoke clouds agains the ceiling.

A stink of hot grease and flesh.

I was very young, the backseat of a Mercury Cyclone with my family, headed to Reno. A Camaro with a paint job of red and grey primer, rocked past us on the the four lane blacktop. Faster than I could process, the Camaro crossed the double yellow and cars began to fly as high as the power lines along the left side of the highway.

My mother inhaled in confusion and horror.

My father didn’t hesitate. Tires smoked to a stop in the gravel and he’s running across the blacktop to stuff his shirt in the back of some dead man’s head. Somehow we had blankets and he was back in a hurry for those. My mother began a relay of helping her husband to help the smashed bodies and checking on us, telling us not to look.

Eighteen or nineteen dead or at least that many vehicles involved. It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. People in impossible positions all over the road. Bodies opened with that much violence and velocity, spill awful amounts of red. Every glimpse out the backseat window, the gore made me panic a little.

A man wearing a suit visited our house a few months later on a Sunday. He had a handful of money in an envelope for my father. He was there because he believed my father, a stranger, had saved his life. Dad didn’t hesitate, he thanked him and pointed out that he, the stranger, just might be in the same situation some day.

In his mind, he’d done the right thing and it was long since finished. He was not happy to see this man despite the man’s gratitude. He had done the best he could. He wasn’t interested in revisiting it.

I lose for failing to do the right thing. For choosing the wrong thing, one way or another, over and over and over again.

My sins. My recklessness. My fault. My mistakes. I pay.

I’m a bird hitting a window.

I flop and blood runs from my mouth. I’m helpless. I spasm and convulse.

My organs fail one by one.

Breathing stops. I’m bleeding out.

Panic surges like vomit.

My eyes are fixed. I can no longer blink. They begin to dry, my view clouds.

I am dying.

I often dream of catastrophe. Airliners plunging from the sky and exploding. Giant waves destroying civilization. Mushroom clouds and troops backlit by the sunrise of a detonation running along some ridge.

Seconds from death, I piss and shit myself.

I fucking hate that I’ve shit myself again.

My thoughts cease and I am dead.

I’m home. No place else to go. I’m walking into it because there’s not a goddamn other thing to do. I’m not driving, but I own I’m speeding towards a vicious sucker punch.

Here we come, walkin’
Down the street.
We get the funniest looks from
Ev’ry one we meet.
Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees
And people say we monkey around. -The Monkees (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart)

I’m in the door and immediately smacked in the middle of the face with the reek of decay. Time to take out the trash. Do the dishes. Check the toilet.

A lingering smell of The Rabbit Watership. A record skips and I am melancholy. He was soft and smart. The coolest, softest and most amazing colors of brown orange and white.

Just like that I’m leaking and sobbing.

I make a drink. A convoluted recipe with only gin and ice as ingredients. Tricky. There’s a ratio.

Check E-mail. Survey dying plants. Dead plants. Feel doomed.

She calls from down the street, coming up on my cross streets she says. Looking to hang.

I can’t wait to turn around and walk out of here.

He’s been here. There’s pyramid of rolls on the toilet tank. The four ice trays represent eight points of the compass accurately on a shelf in my freezer.

I wash up, brush my teeth. Blow my nose. Put on a little lotion. Powder the boys.

Lips like pillows. Vanilla, berries and muskiness. Sweet almond eyes I can’t always see behind. Fresh fruit from orchards under a silver crescent.

She talks and I’m soothed.

She touches and I’m softer.

There’s no helping it.

I’m so raw.

It’s what I need. See.

First I saw her, she was walking in the rain talking on the phone. She smiled a lot. Not like the sun, like the moon, quitting a cloud on a gusty night.

My nose reminds me every time I walk away.

We had drinks and she ended up with a piece of me. I wasn’t giving it. She ended up with it. She took it.

She kept it for a time. Through some holidays.

She tossed it back. Casually. Unapologetic. Not in the same condition she had come to take it. Not at all. Bruised. Swollen.

I’m a nice guy. I do the best I can. I try. Didn’t take long for me to decide against having her legs broken.

A decision based more in the principles of aesthetics than morality. Just couldn’t perpetrate that kind of crippling violence on such a beautiful woman regardless of what she may have coming to her.

I’m kidding. She deserves nothing of the sort. I made a conscious decision not to be angry and to avoid the temptation to be vindicatory. I have endeavored to be her friend.

I really try to do my best. I’m always looking for early Sunday morning in a small town grocery store with a bakery.
The bouquet of sugar and cinnamon. Men with perfectly pomaded hair and perfect piles of fruit.

Fish drown in air.

Now she’s on the phone. Wanting to see me. To confide in me.

Vulnerable. She would be angry if she knew how adept I am on the subject of her.

I understand full well the apocalypse I’m courting. I whisper in my own ear about making sure she gets home. Drive her if necessary. Get her a cab. I will, I tell myself. So help me. I will see her home safely.

We meet in a dive. Across the street. Convenient for me, I’m not trying to drive at all.

As soon as I sit she is willfull and contrary. She likes to spar. Guilty of being smarter than she is.

Behind the eyes, she’s not so bad. A pain in the ass of innocence. Culpable of zealotry. Pride. Maybe from privilege. Maybe. Too much of one thing or another I’m sure.

I want inside her with my arms around her. She is the Moon. Mercury glass. Shadows and silver light.

Enough obstinance to still piss me off. What to say to someone who barely knows shit about how much they don’t know? Whatever really, why bother? All in time, hers, not mine. Smart, capable and the heat of Georgia asphalt.

She thinks she understands. Bare shoulders and there are my thumbs. Loose sweater and a funky hat. Impossible skin. Impossible color, silk beneath my fingers. Hands turn to palms, fall to hips, the most gorgeous mouth I’ve ever seen.

I hope she resists cynical.

She charms and lures me into places where she can make fun. I return fire with as light a hand as I’m able.

The North Pole may melt this summer. The Earth may have decided it’s done with us.

We’re at each others eyes and we know where we’re headed. We think we do. She drops a credit card on the bar and excuses herself to the ladies. Her heels swing her hips away from me. Her skirt dances with flawless rhythm.

I sign the tab and do the tip in cash. She grins coming from the bathroom. No smile. Grin. I hand over her card and she takes my hand. Outside we’re having a smoke. She points her face at her car and asks if it’s ok here. I shrug my shoulders. I really don’t know.

We break the law by running across five lanes.

My place is kind of a shithole. She doesn’t seem to mind. She uses my shower. She’s wearing my robe.

Lacey thong a gorgeous contrast to flawless skin. Matching bra and I’m consumed. She shines. She writhes as she responds. Quiet until she breathes. In gusts. Little tempests.

Any man, between the ages of thirteen and fifty five to ninety something, will view bare breasts with an absolutely identical mindset.

Take the breath away beautiful. Astride me she’s smiling. She brings the moon. I take her in while I’m inside her.

I look up only to gasp. She is a silhouette in three dimensions with color, sound and smell. Her head back, the moon hangs low and plump. The night blooms.

Like flowers. Just like flowers blooming and perfuming once the sun has hidden itself only to shine the moon for an entire hemisphere all night long.

The breeze is lit and lent weight with fragrance.

This is……….. Moot.

She is dead. She is dead.

Dead.

I’m a coward and a fool.

Life is odd and painful. There is no substitute.

There is no way another person could ever love me if they knew the things I’ve done. No way anyone could trust me or believe I deserve another chance. What I have just done is as bad as even I can imagine.

I’ve sacrificed a human. A woman. A human being. Another one.

A very very special human. Beautiful and innocent. Corrupted only by the circumstances of ordinary existence, no kind of evil or malice or fuckery………

He killed her of course.

First thing he does is fold her like a piece of fucking toast as soon as he has my attention. I look up as he collapses her, shattering bones with two hands. She starts to scream out of simple fright and confusion. A few seconds and she wails like a siren with pain and comprehension. Abrupt stop. She can’t expel breath, she gurgles and burps. He bursts her at her sides, makes her pop and spray as he folds her. A cacophony of snapping and rending, moist and excruciating. Her blood is black on three of four walls lighted only by a cold silver moon.

I will travel to hell, with it being the worst thing I’ve ever seen. All of it on me.

My fault. I knew. My end draws near.

I am sorry. So very sorry.

I adored her. I loved her.

It is easily one of the worst things there is.

Waking up, unable to breathe, smeared in your own shit.

Horrible. Blunt force trauma. Shame, fear, confusion in volts and watts of angst, without understanding.

It gets worse when I begin to remember. When I start to understand.

I’m to the point where I can’t stand myself. I’m pitiful. I loathe what I’ve become.

I’m a fucking mess.

I was going to drop the sheets in the drink until I figured out I’m back on land. I ball them up, stuff them in a pillow case and head for the shower.

I stand under it for a good long time. I scrub. It takes a long time to feel clean. I scrub some more.

Watch reads noon but it’s not yet nine thirty according to the red digits on the bedside. A pillow case full of my own shit mocks me.

I’m on the second floor of a two story chain motel. I step onto the balcony wearing a towel and alley oop the pillowcase onto the roof above. I have a smoke. Clip my nails with shaky hands.

My nails are yellow.

I honestly don’t want to think about the rest. What the fuck was that? The last fucking thing I needed. I’m scared. Now. After all of this. I’m gonna lose my shit.

He’s got me rattled.

Can’t remember my last meal.

My fingers stained from cigarettes. Better than liver disease I guess.

Tomato juice and antacids.

I see his face, hear him pant and suck back drool. I’m shaking. I puke nothing over and over and over. It turns yellow to burn on the way up. I spit dayglow bile.

Back here, on his ground, he is going to kill me or scare me insane.

I wait twenty minutes for a cab sweating like a sprinkler. The driver tells me I can’t smoke. I drop a five through the little window and burn a hole in the back of the seat. I can smell him. I smoke in his fucking cab.

Somehow I remember the garage where my car is. I get in, fire it up and crank the air. Time passes and I listen to talk radio. Randi Rhodes. Yes, Republicans, particularly neoconservatives, are assholes. Seventeen after.

I know I nodded but my watch says noon. Fuck.

The beautiful chronograph Carlo insisted I own has ceased all operations. Think that means anything?

The sun hasn’t moved much. The clock in my car is a joke.

I feel like going fast.

My car is fast.

I ask the booth attendant how much to back up and charge through the arm. I ask where they got that cool reflective tape. My fee is eighteen dollars. She hates me. I pay her and the arm goes up. She thinks I’m an ass. I feel for her. I see she’s customized her stool with duct tape and yellow carpet pad for maximum comfort. What a shit job.

Instantly I have wide streets and freeway entrances. I am a demon. A loop off the 110 with little to no traffic. I barely miss pedestrians and parked cars for a while. After a few laps, they figure out I’m coming around again and get off the fucking street. A few more laps and they give up the sidewalks by hugging the buildings.

I can’t believe I don’t get pulled over, even here in the land of the lawless.

I stop in some dark dive for a handfull of whiskies and a cold long neck. Looks good to me from the outside. Round and brick. Inside smells of men and cigarettes. Nobody smoking. Old TV high in a corner and the click of balls on a table. It doesn’t take long for me to know the place got quiet when I hit the door.

I order a shot and draught. I try to make it clear I’ll be keeping to myself. I relax as the noise rises. I have a few more and take care to pay as I go.

There’s a woman at the end of the bar holding a motor to her throat to talk. She smelled my fear when I walked in. Her nostrils flaired.

It looks like a prototype for the first ever electric razor from the sixties. One pitch. One note. Bb, B-flat, I’m thinking. No subtlety. Forget inflection or emotion. I’m spooked immediately before I’m fascinated.

She is otherwise beautiful. Crisp white blouse and a dark green skirt. Milky skin and raven haired. Red lips, black pumps with a small cluster of pearls in the middle above the toes, reminding me of the strand around her neck and the diamonds in her lobes.

I pass her to wash my hands. Smells like a meadow, woody and fresh.

I don’t look so bad in the mirror. Typical dive piss trailer. Dank and disgusting, the odor of urinal cakes as icing on the ambiance. I piss a little. Touch nothing. Wash my hands and use the paper towel to open the door before I drop it wherever.

Transfixed by her but in a quiet panic, I smile, smack a twenty on the bar and try not to break stride before I hit the door again. Unable to compensate for my ordinary shoes.

Mullholland. I hit a stretch and work the gears finding a rythm just dangerous enough. I come to a stop sign and my headlights shine through brake steam. I apologize in advance. I headlong without caution on Wrightwood, ripping down it without giving a mad fuck.

Every stop sign is stupid. My goal is no brakes.

Downshift.

Eyes wide open.

Wrightwood becomes Vineland at Ventura. I stop at the light, smoke seeps into the intersection. No cops. I creep with care.

I loaf down Vineland for a few blocks, downshift to second and put my foot in it. I’m doing sixty when I spin the wheel hard left towards an opening in the island and jerk the hand brake, drifting just right, I end up in the opposing lane.

Just like that.

I grab second and bury my foot again. A hard winding right going from third to fourth and I’m doing a hundred and thirty in fifth gear on the 101 towards Hollywood.

Sixth gear is dumb. Never use it. Once on open road in Arizona, once in Nevada.

I brake and shift down for Vine. Left on Sunset and I’m prowling.

Grease.

I pull into a Dennys. I order some grand slam thing that promises lots of pork and eggs. A side of sliced tomatos. They have good bleu cheese dressing. I like toast. I ask for coffee and lemonade. I read the free hooker paper I got from a beat to shit red box on the sidewalk right out front. Horoscopes. Movie reviews. Trannies. Oh my.

She tells me the plate’s hot as she drops it in front of me. I ask for A1 and green Tabasco. Just like that, two bottles are in front of me.

Far better than a prefrontal labotomy. I ask if she’ll cream in my coffee. She brings me a small bowl filled with those little mini shots of half & half. I’m so goddamn funny. How could you hate a loser like me.

Is the brochure on the counter the dessert menu? She tells me those are specials, all desserts are at the back of the menu.

I begin to understand how bad I don’t want to go home. I can’t get away from him, he’s waiting for me to come home now. I can’t get away from him. Kill or die. I am damaged. Way off balance. Feeling far from lethal.

I can’t kill. I want to hide. Maybe to die.

Can’t ask for shelter from anyone I care about because I can’t put anyone in harm’s way. I’m not willing to ask people I don’t care about.

I’m almost out of money.

I love that there are turtles. The head sticks out like a penis yet they have such grace and dignity. They couldn’t be less concerned with any of us. They appear a little grim but I bet they’re not. What they are is stoic and determined. Not here to fuck around. You guess their sex by the curve of the shell underneath.

It comforts me to think they can retreat inside their armored selves so easily. I think I want to be a sea turtle. I understand they live longer than humans. I really hope they live in peace.

She’s thick and dark and tall. Green eyes wearing business casual, barely too tight. Lips like pillows and eyes like almonds. Hands and nails immaculate, she reaches for her drink with unlikely grace. White blouse against African skin as I stop breathing for a few seconds.

She nods, so I ask if I may. Yes, she says. Her smile is perfect. A gust of femininity. I sit.

I ask to buy her a drink, she demonstrates a full one. Not yet.

Bellini in a flute.

She is beautiful. She smells of butter and violets

Where am I? Jacked up on vicodin, my tooth seems to be on AM while I’m on FM. Good news. I think about my rabbit and remember the gore. Legs ache a little.

She’s the only thing not far away.

I look at her. Hips wide, legs long and lips glisten. Teeth shine.

Smells like god just left the room.

Her name is Claire.

She extends her hand and mocks me a little when she asks, “rough day?”

A walk in the park I tell her.

She tells me her favorite hair band is April Wine. She likes Vonnegut and Bradbury. Taffy, Zots and any sour or squishy candy. She says Primus are white boy funk but admits they can play. She’s despondent over the quality of local news. She’s a legal secretary. A hint of cleavage, bust straining against the fabric of an ivory blouse.

She’s voting for Obama.

She loves Luther, of course.

I ask her about frozen diet meals, she’s non-committal. We agree whatever is on sale.

We cheers and clink a few times. Then some more.

We drink awhile and she throws down one of those cool Amexes. One of the clear ones that looks like a small laser disc.

She picked up the tab.

I decide to show her my penis.

I take her to the handicapped stall in the men’s. She rests her foot on the rail while removing her silk and I go down on her. She likes it.

Flesh consumes me. I’m helpless. Fragrance so ripe I can’t stand it.

Seconds later I wake up with dark testicles on my chin and I’m gagging.

Her teeth are black. She laughs to mock me. Eyes red and bleeding. Pink lingerie contrasts purple skin and leaking sores. She wears a black vinyl duster, thigh high boots with a stiletto heel. Some stupid military hat.

A cock the size of a high caliber handgun and she waves it while cackling.

She stinks like a bog.

We’re in my room , there’s that knife in my luggage.

How did we get here?

Wait. Wait. Wait. She’s wearing.

I wake up alone.

It occurs to me I’ve shit myself.

Morning.

Pale and bright and.

Pristine somehow.

Peace.

Out the window, blue ocean forever overseen by massive cumulonimbi with acreage enough to turn the sea black for half an hour. They roar over the boat heading the opposite way only slower. Enchanting. Impossible.

I’m good. Energized, optimistic.

An incredibly satisfying crap.

A meditative shower and shave.

Fresh fruit, english muffins and champagne on the balcony. I savor food, drink and Rothko blue water all the way to the horizon. The morning paper is a bitch in the wind. I stuff it under my thigh. Impossible white giants dominate the sky. The slowest motion explosion ever, cruising the atmosphere, punching at the roof. Tall enough to ignore gravity. All of pink and purple violence beneath.

It’s a little chilly so the sun takes it’s turn. Nice.

The Boat docks at noon.

I take my time. Gather my things. I’m anxious to put this chapter behind me and I don’t know why. Some violence, good times and more peace than I’ve had in months. How sad.

It comes to a close, I’m reluctant to turn a page. In my mind’s eye there is a finish line. I don’t look at it. I can’t yet. I’d like for it to stop haunting me before I confront him. I get that’s unlikely.

I think of a smoke shop instead. One with comic books, porn, stereo and science magazines. The smell of two dozen pipe tobaccos collect and make a perfume of raisins, apples and burning hardwood. There’s candy and cigars smelling of cedar and vanilla. A small white fridge full of fish bait rattles in the corner. Beef jerky, lighters and tiny ampules of ginseng at the counter. A yellow cardboard display of of tobacco pipes with lime green text. Saran Wrapped cookies in a basket and Flints and pens with floating things inside. Behind the counter, whiskey and cigarettes. Some plastic bongs, some ceramic ones, a little fimo and lots of cheap imported metal. People I’ve known for years behind the register.

Some temporary buoyancy I’m nurturing.

I know what’s coming.

The molar back left begins to ache.

I haven’t checked baggage since they started putting wheels on suitcases. The tome and dagger is secure among my clothes in the carry-on. I thought about opening the box. I didn’t.

A few minutes to finish up and get organized.

My molar begins to visit a pounder on me.

I pop a couple vikes and dry swallow.

Out the sliding glass for a last smoke and it starts to throb with my pulse.

A swallow of champagne left. It’s coming on fast.

It hits me hard. I’m stepping right back into hell. This is going to suck. A lot. I’m returning to take him on. One way or another, it’s on.

I have no choice. Carlo was relieved he didn’t have to convince me of that. Glad I could see it for what it is.

I’m really not built like this. I’m not a tough guy. I barely know how to fight. I can’t picture it. I can’t even picture it.

My jaw kicks the covers off to show me what it brings to the party. Pain as fresh and old as you can imagine, rips up the side of my head. The skin on my left face is baking off. The deepest ache with a frosting of coals hot enough to melt fat. I stagger.

Two more vikes, another dry swallow and I grab my shit and head to the main bar. All the pantsuits are lining up to file out when I get there.

Wierd. I thought it was a little after noon. I ask the bartender for the time and he says a quarter til. The watch Carlo gave me says noon straight up.

I order a double Sapphire mary.

The woman next to me is festooned with impossible amounts of makeup and perfume. Probably a wig. I look at her watch and it says ten til. I look at mine again and see straight up noon. Her smell makes my tooth scream. I want to cave her head in.

She sports the most beehive of bouffants, resplendently ridiculous. What do I do now? I can tell she collects dolls. Her jewelry and costume clink and rattle. I loathe her.

Spit collects in the corners of her mouth. There’s foam between the point of her upper lip and where it meets the lower. It looks like an elastic band as she talks about not a goddamn thing. I can smell her armpits and vagina over the dense mist of her perfume.

She stinks.

She notices me staring and wincing. She gawks at me wide eyed. The vikes begin to kick but I get that she’s mocking me. Rouge on her cheeks and turquoise in abundance around her eyes. I smile and ask her if she’s ever danced naked with her uncle with a pickle in her mouth. She frowns at me confused and asks me what I just said.

I say nothing. I stare. I wink. I dig for a booger. She turns away.

Pissedoffedness rears it’s horned head and I flick at the back of her hive with my middle finger. She wheels around pretty damn fast. As far as I’m concerned, my startled laugh sounds like a hiccup. I tell her it was a wasp. She frowns but bats her lashes.

Whore.

I spit on the floor.

The entire side of my head bulges on fire. I’m sweating. My balls itch. I’m furious about everything. I think I want to grab the back of her head and pound her face into the bar. Over and over.

My drink comes and it tastes like lunch. It’s the beauty of any sort of bloody mary. Like a breakfast bar. Eat the olives and the celery and you’ve got a balanced offering. There’s the bar nuts and tomatos too.

Then, like gossamer, vicodin saves the day. My rage and confusion subside. I decide I’m in no condition to go far. I grab a cab and get a room. Some chain with a cocktail lounge. Room service. I stop for gin on the way. Fill my ice bucket first thing after I turn on the lights.

Pour one. Wash up. Hit the lounge.

Two things:

I’m housed.

I think my watch stopped.

Back to the boat and Carlo has a little left to say.

“It will be soon. Aim high on his chest and stab as hard. It’s fragile, but plunge and pull down.” He wrings his hands a little.

“Do not get any of the green on you, clean yourself if you do. It is toxic.”

He starts talking staring straight ahead. By the end of a few sentences, his eyes search my face.

“Do it right, he will die. One chance. Be willfull and determined. See yourself killing him. Picture it.”

“Let me tell you this.” He touches my arm. Book and box between us.

“It is his nature is to be aggressive and foolish. Same time, he is at least afraid of you as you are him.” He nods at me but I can’t see his eyes, his head backlit by the setting sun through a half open window.

The ocean in my nose.

Brine on my tongue.

“He will come to you unless you prevent it. Despite his fear, it is his nature.”

“Try to make it otherwise. You have an advantage. He does not know what you have. He is aware you possess it, he does not understand it. His imbalance of late, is because you leave this place with something you did not come looking for. He is confounded by that.”

“That, and he is uncomfortable. Out of his element. He does not like it here.”

I think about Gollum.

Deja vu, the car slows to a stop and I listen to tires meeting damp asphalt ever slower. There’s a light rain. I see the weapon I carry and a green plastic sword in a grilled cheese sandwich.

He kisses at both cheeks and pulls back. His eyes glisten. “Be aggressive. Pursue. Take the fight to him. End it soon.” A rough hand on the side of my face. “Luck is bullshit. I believe in fortitude.”

Determination, I say. No worries, I assure him. I thank him as briefly and sincerely as I can and slide towards the door.

Time to get on with it.

It opens, I stand and Driver hands me my things. I realize he’s Asian, maybe Samoan. He’s huge.

Carlo’s window drops silently. He looks smaller in the waning sunlight. “By all means, pay attention, be aware. He will call on you soon.”

I tell him the meanest man usually wins.

“Well, you don’t swing hard enough to do it with one punch.”

I smile. He’s taunting me.

I board the boat, stop at the bell desk check my bag and find the first bathroom. I gotta piss like a racehorse. I’m in a hurry, I straight arm the door.

There he is. Standing with his ass on the first sink. Gore streams from his eyes, nose and ears to collect on his chest. It spatters between his feet. He waves a snub nosed revolver, grinning and sucking back drool.

Giggling and drinking whiskey from a tumbler with a pinky out. He’s fucking drunk.

Wearing an actual a suit. Black, white shirt, skinny black tie. Kinda sixties.

Still, Puma Clydes.

What an idiot.

I had to piss so bad, I put the box and book in my bag and left it at the bell desk for me to call on after a piss and a drink. Say that fast.

I’m thinking about how stupid I am, he hits me in the mouth harder than I’ve ever been hit. I go down. The back of my head bounces off the marble floor.

Not out but I can’t think. I can barely see. He’s kicking for my gut, he’s connecting with my legs. One of my feet gets purchase somewhere so I push away.

Confusion and pain tie the knot and we have rage boys and girls. Searing. Seething. I think of his stupid electric fucking knife. Then comes Shirley from Alaska, then comes a rabbit. It comes on rails at the speed of sound and I am overwhelmed. I throw a fucking rod.

I’m biting my own tongue. I’m tasting my own blood and I like it.

Up on my knees, I make a fist and swing overhand for his crotch. Somehow I score a ballseye. A wad of flesh craters beneath my punch.

That fucking hurt.

Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

Only the sound of trying, not quite able to suck air, and his head makes a very cool sound against the brass plate at the bottom of the door.

He flops a little. He’s got no wind.

Heh.

I struggle to my feet and start to kick. I’m dizzy and not connecting as well as the choir in my hate filled brain screeches for. I stomp with my heel. Feels better. The choir agrees and begins to crescendo.

He starts to cough and pant.

I’m doing some damage.

The choir rages.

Heh.

Some liver spotted senior pushes the door open enough to get his head and hands in.

My boy on the floor flops forward.

I’m standing, kicking a man and my face is bleeding. So is the man’s face I’m waling on, only he’s on the floor.

I shriek at him to find another bathroom you idiot, and I keep fucking kicking.

I focus on my boy’s head for a minute before common sense pays a visit and a decision is reached for Elvis to leave the building.

He seems to be out. I piss. I wash up.

I literally kick him out of the way and leave the bathroom checking my hands and wiping my nose for blood. I stuff a pocket with paper towels.

That old guy’s hands and forehead looked like desert camouflage. Poor fucker. Hope he was wearing a diaper.

I sweat like an over exerted drunk because that’s what I am.

I head for a bar at the other end of the ship. My legs are elastic. Like I’m on something. It’s happy hour packed when I find it. Still, I find a seat at the end. I’m grateful. I don’t know this fool can make a martini and it’s busy, so I order two double Sapphires on ice with a twist.

He tells me he can only serve me one cocktail at a time. I tell him to watch my glass then.

I see mostly blue and red plastic swords.

I finish the first, order a second, go out for a smoke, and return to notice blood leaking from my face into my gin.

Exploratory diagnostic napkin wielding reveals the flow is from my lower lip.

I smear some on my nose to look like a nosebleed and pull out a credit card to inspire the bartender to get me a check. I gesticulate with a napkin like I’ve got a random bloody nose.

Trickier than you might think, to pretend you didn’t just kick the shit out of some zombie in the bathroom, rather just experiencing a random moist climate induced bloody nose …………

I drink my own blood mixed with gin and ice in an elevator accompanied by a gaggle of geese speaking German or Austrian or some other throaty, ugly tongue. They look odd. Out of place, but happy to be so. One of the men actually has a feather in the brim of his stupid hat. Another wears tweed.

I know they don’t speak english because I ask them about their vaginas and whether Karl Rove smokes a mean pole. I tell them an anti-semitic joke. They smile, ask my name and if I’m enjoying myself. I tell them no. I smile back. I tell them I’m locked in battle with a furious demon.

They all buy the random bloody nose act and clearly understand nothing else.

The doors open and they hold up their cameras and make friendly faces indicating they want me to take pictures. I can’t help it. They’re so damn nice. The men pat me on the shoulder and the women smile close mouthed and wave their flippers at me.

I get back to my room, call for my bag, order a grilled cheese sandwich with fries, buffalo chicken strips with bleu cheese, side of dill pickles, chocolate milk and two diet cokes and a side of mayo.

I pour a drink.

My bag with the book and the box shows first. I open it enough to verify precious cargo and take it with me to the bathroom.

My shoes are bloody so you know there’s some on the pants. Over the side.

Quick shower.

You know what makes the best grilled cheese sandwich? Velveeta. Campbell’s tomato soup to go with it. Lime jello. Grape drink.

The food shows and I’m in awe of the fried, buttery, vinegary bouquet. It’s got that low down pungent off the strip casino room service smell too. I adore that smell. Fuck me I’m hungry.

I check the balcony and throw all the locks.

He won’t be around tonight, I handed him his ass.

Ha!

Stainless cover off a plate still steaming. Excellent. Two green plastic swords pinning two black olives to two wedges of grilled cheese sandwich.

I go to bed happy.

He’s always angry at the oddest of times.

Now, for example. I can’t imagine why.

Is he pissed ’cause I puked?

I didn’t leave a mess.

I see he’s trying to be serious as he begins to talk. Maybe that’s all it is.

I finger my mug and eyeball the pomegranate.

“You are in a bad way. What you have seen and struggled with, most do not have reason or facility to even consider. Why this evil has visited you, I cannot say. I’m not sure how much help I can be, but I have an idea that I can be of some.”

“Help. I mean.”

I take care to deposit pomegranate rubies in my mouth slowly.

I tell him I hope so and not to forget I’ll be tripping the light fantastic on my own in a few hours. Time is fleeting and I’m anxious to see and hear what he’s got. I thank him again for his hospitality and friendship. I’m feeling like I need to get the fuck out of here.

This party needs to be over.

Yet, I need to hear him out.

And I need to get out of here.

He brings the box from the counter and sets it on the table.

“A battle is brewing. Time to prepare. I wish I had more for you. I am giving you all I have that can possibly help you. Time to listen.”

He beams at me. His eyes glisten as he reaches for my hands. His are the rough of a laborer, his grasp confirms it.

“Excercise, if only to clear your head and get your wind up a little. Do not drink so much.”

Bottom left, a molar begins to ache.

I ask if there’s any avacado left.

“You are at the sixth chapter. I mean to say, read the sixth chapter.”

“War is upon you.”

“Take that volume from in front of the couch.” He fixes me with a stare, lifts a finger and says, “Seriously, fetch it now.”

I do, and return to the table. The heft impresses and it’s perfume of leather and library linger.

“Chapter six”, he says.

“Show up in places that make him nervous. Nervous enough, he’s headlong to defend them. It means of course, being the first one there and a guarantee of some confrontation. I’ve got something to help you with that.”

His hand goes to the box.

“Find the weak points and exploit them without putting your own in the wind. Divide and conquer as best you can. Every vulnerability you can discover from your adversary leaves him with more to defend. Spread him thin if you can. Unnerve him if you can.”

The molar throbs. I remember breaking a piece off a month or so ago.

“Keep your mouth shut. I cannot know what he knows or guess at what he can hear. There is no one that can help you with this save for me and thus, no reason talk about it to anyone. You would only be putting that person in jeopardy. I cannot put too fine a point on this. Talk to no one.”

“Not even your Mother.”

He sees behind my eyes as I stumble over how any of this applies or how I can possibly apply any of it.

Smiling, he says, “Do your level best to adapt to whatever circumstances shit all over you.”

I hoover another sausage, gulp on the world’s finest coffee and grab at some bread to slather fruit on.

I can’t help but smile.

Without looking, he reaches to slide the box between us. A dirty rectangle. Maybe half the size of a bathroom scale.

My ears ring, not sounding wooden as he slides it over the table. It sings a little. I look closer and see it’s copper without any edges, all rounded. Oxidized green and brown, rust brown to black.

Old.

“I saw him years back. When I first laid eyes on you, there he was at the same time. It spooked me. I’d almost forgotten, it had been so long. Perhaps a century. Maybe a little longer.”

Looking at the box until his last sentence, he locks eyes with me.

I don’t think I flinch.

What he just said makes me need to crap. My tooth begins a prison riot.

“I fashioned it for him or most anything I saw like him at the time. Back then, they were everywhere. Not so many now, but much more powerful. Smarter, you see.”

Somewhere in my periphery, my tooth rages and I need to piss. He holds my gaze and attention.

“It was the best I could do at the time. I had more influence then.”

He pulls the box to him and and opens it with both hands from either side. The inside lid gleams as though it were polished yesterday. There is no better color than gleaming copper and it smells like a sweaty handfull of pennies.

I understand it hasn’t been opened in a very long time.

Nestled in fine straw or what appears individual strands of pale burlap, is a dagger. The hilt glints like chrome but has the milkiness of silver. The blade is serrated and a bright emerald green.

Carlo pushes it toward me, I see the blade is hollow glass, filled with brilliant green liquid.

“A toxin.” He says.

“Meant for your kind of monster.”

Sheezus motherfuckin.

I’m at the kitchen table drinking the “decent shit” we opened while cooking. A rioja, I think. Can’t focus on the label. I’m housed.

He snuck corn into my stew just after he poured it.

The movie in my mind of Opie Cunningham rushing by in a flaming cape is on loop in my brain. It keeps getting funnier.

Carlo stumbles in the door holding the bundled red white checked table cloth from outside by the top with his right hand while supporting the bottom with his left. His face glows as he manages to release the top and settle the bottom so expertly on the table, the bottle of zinfandel still stands and all stew remains in the pot.

I can’t help but applaud Carlo Tarcisi as he relights the candle still in the stick. He rocks.

“Crazy that bastard running by on fire!”

I laugh. I may be housed but Carlo is shit housed.

He buries is head in his hands and cackles.

He lifts his head, opens his eyes, thrusts the wine at me, “grape!”

I empty it into our glasses and gulp. It is divine. So much better than the decent shit. Turley Zin. Everything from cedar and figs to cigars and plums. “Praise Baccus!” He shakes his hand and at me to assure me there is more.

Zin runs from his chin.

I flip him off and ask when he intends to tell me what I need to know.

“Any minute now”, he laughs crazy.

I remind him I need to be back on the ship tomorrow before sundown and that he told me I wouldn’t be safe here after tonight.

He looks me at my eye with sincerity, “I have much to tell you”. He points a deliberate finger at me right before his lamps go out.

His head hits the table hard enough to startle me.

He’s gone. Unconscious. Next.

Fuck me. Now what?

I pat, slap and shake his
dead weight. My legs cannot possibly carry him. Blowing out the candle and kicking off my shoes, I remind myself to listen for his eventual climb from inebriation to concsiousness. No sooner do I pull the blanket and I’m gone.

It’s dawn. The coffee is pungent, Carlo, smelling of fresh soap and shower, shakes my thumbs in each of his hands. Looks like Carlo passed conscious and now owns lucid.

Look at the big brain on Mr. Tarcisi.

I hate fuckers that can do that.

I plod to the table barefoot and there is buttered toast and jars of marmalade. A small plate of glistening hot sausages.

I hoover one. Fuck, it’s tasty.

I sip and chew for a minute as he looks at me.

I ask if he’s got any cold mineral water or maybe some champagne.

“Not much time and some ground to cover. I need to tell you what I know and see.”

He grips a pomegranate from the bowl on the table and slices it open. The intricate insides, the contrast of ruby candy nodules and mucus white layers startle me into imagining an open human torso with muscle, bone and blood fat internal organs.

I convulse while hot liquid rises to my mouth. Behold a dissected rodent from a fourth grade science fair. Pins in organs with tags naming them. The shrinking moldy rictus of it’s mouth is horrifying. Can’t help but see the stench.

I hold up a finger while my cheeks fill with vomit. I make it to the bathroom sink. Velocity is jet like, I’m grateful the volume is not nearly as spectacular. It goes on for a few minutes. The sausage shows up intact. My bile is day glow on top of the gravy that came before. I stomp my feet and seize. Crystal clear snot streams from each nostril to meet at my chin. Looks like a sling shot made of hand sanitizer.

I look in the mirror and cackle.

I cough some and clean myself up. Drop a deuce. Wash my hands again. As I open the bathroom door I hear him take a loud sip of coffee.

Outside it looks to be a gorgeous day.

There is a wooden box on the table.

It’s so odd. He’s definitely had a presence these last few days. His weight though, is so much lighter. Not so pregnant with consequence. Less evil. He doesn’t like it here.

I picture him dancing and playing a fiddle with it hot underfoot. Wearing a flaming cape. Maybe some fake devil horns.

“You are well enough to talk?” asks Carlo.

“You’re a reckless man, perhaps stupid”, he says.

I tell him confronting him was liberating and I knew he couldn’t get in.

“How?” he asks. “How did you know that?”

It seemed pretty obvious I tell him.

“It seemed obvious that you were protected? That you were safe?”, he asks.

I begin to understand.

“Did you think I slept while you taunted your nemesis?”

I can only apologize. I am tired and doing my best. I meant no disrespect and regret if I took advantage. I tell him his hospitality has been abundant and kind. I tell him I’m very sorry.

“You are callow and shallow”, he says. “I hope I am here to help you because of your potential and not who you are now.”

He points me to the table and tells me to sit. “You are my guest”, he says.

“Breakfast” he claps twice and he is smiling.

Sliced heirloom tomatos, avacados and mild cheeses with fresh lox, capers and thick fresh cooked polenta. Grapefruit juice just squeezed and champagne in a bucket. Steaming mugs of the world’s best coffee.

He tells me half way through breakfast that he is disappionted that I did not think of him. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”, he says. “Your actions were costing you nothing. Who did you imagine was paying for them?”

I have learned a valuable lesson I tell him.

He smiles without teeth and says, “You must be new.”

I am, I tell him.

I wonder aloud what to do, and that maybe I should go back to the ship.

“We are not yet finished”, he says.

I tell him I like it here.

“Of course, you feel safe. You are not, however. Not for long”.

It happens slowly. Surreal.

Blood rushes to my face. Anger and frustration and fear and exhaustion and I can’t stand it anymore. I pound the table and stomp. I can’t breathe. I sweep breakfast from the table and trip to the door hitting it hard with my head. I fall outside onto the deck.

It is humid and warm and I realize I’m sobbing and laughing and rocking with my forehead in my hands. My head bleeds. The ship is going down in the open ocean. No place to go. I’m going to drown. I hate helpless and that’s what I am. Who the fuck is this guy who bleeds everywhere and why me?

He is dressed in khakis, brown sturdy boots and a button up collared shirt striped blue vertical. A wide straw hat and hands on his hips, he walks slowly from the garden up the path towards me and the steps. “Tantrum over?” As he comes up the steps he reaches for my hand. “I’ll need for you to clean up your mess this time”, he walks me in the door to witness plates, food and broken glass on a slate floor.

I tell him I’m sorry.

“I’ll get you a mop and broom”, he says.

I’m thoroughly ashamed after my little fugue. I try to be as deliberate and meticulous cleaning up as I possibly can. Mr. Tarcisi vanishes for a time. I am thankful.

It was probably instinct that didn’t allow me to wipe the champagne in it’s bucket off the table with the rest. I’ve long since finished dispatching my mess and settled down with a book Carlo has left open faced down on the table beside the couch.

The Art of War, chapter six, Weaknesses and Strengths. Motes bob in sun flowing through windows. I sip champagne from a flute.

The sun seems to gush and Carlo bursts through the front door bringing more noise and bustle with him than I would have imagined him capable of. He is full on grinning like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Hope you had a fine day. I see you found that book. I went wine tasting. Feeling better? My God you should see my tomatos.”

Mr. Tarcisi is hammered.

I tell him to point me around the kitchen and I’ll make dinner. I assure him I can cook and after he directs me towards certain vegetables, soup stock and a slab of sirloin he points at with drunken conviction, I decide on a stew.

The kitchen windows face north but I’m able to enjoy the sunset to the left while I chop, cube, braise, boil and sear.

Carlo supplies a jammy rose’ for us to drink and soon joins me in the process.

He’s trying to make my stew into soup. It’s Summer he tells me. It’s Spring I tell him. He sighs when I spy cornstarch in his pantry.

I tell him to go fry something and that we’ll need a big ass zinfandel for this meal. He asks if I’m familiar with Turley. Fucking-A I tell him.

We eat on the deck with the wind blowing. Hurricane lanterns all around. My stew is delicious. Carlo has sauteed green beans and slivered almonds in olive oil and garlic and dressed them with lemon and an exotic mustard. The wine is an early two thousand Turley Zinfandel and it’s all plum, cedar and smoke.

Another day and no closer to what to do. I don’t mind.

I ask him how much longer I’ll be safe here. “Not after tomorrow night”, he says.

He touches me on the arm and says, “Understand, he is primitive in a way. He cannot see you if you do not move.” “He is here, sit still.” and his eyes lock with mine.

Richie runs along side the deck screaming and laughing wearing what looks like a goddamn cape that is on fire.

Running so fast I can’t see his face.

I take care to move only my eyes as I watch him run into the darkness, smelling his burning cape and the screeching pigs that gallop behind him.

I can’t believe this shit. Someone, somewhere, must be fucking kidding.

“Now”, says Carlo, “Into the house”.

I point to the wine and run for the front door.

The watch looks still to me, it reads five after nine. Everyone else can see the time as they admire it. People comment on it often. If someone asks me the time, I turn my wrist and hold it up or my answer will be a guess. Sometimes they say the time they see out loud as though I’m waiting to hear it.

I am.

If he’s of me, he must own his cowardice. I believe it. I see it in him. Just like me. He’d rather just fuck with me than confront me. He shows me what he can do but he never comes straight at me. A jackal. A pussy. Just like me.

I submitted to a bully once. I was in the sixth grade. I was confused. He wasn’t any bigger, he was simply more evil. Mean. For awhile, I was afraid. I went to ridiculous ends to avoid him. I stole a small hunting knife from a sporting goods store. I would duct tape the leather sheath to my leg before I went to school.

One day the entire student body sat in the gymnasium bleachers for an assembly. A giant red brick structure built in the thirties with an oval roof. Autumn. Cold inside. I sat with my friends and spit Skoal on the floor. All of us had our coats on. We did our best to smear the tobacco juice with our feet.

My friend Lance was next to me. He didn’t chew tobacco. He’s now some sort of nuerological physical therapist.

His last name was Dalton and I could feel him behind me. Everytime the crowd would jeer at the ridiculous film on nuclear attack we were being shown, he’d hit me hard on the back.

It didn’t take long for Lance to clock it, look me in the eye and say “Who is this fuck?”

Dalton had always been a coward. He’d always confront me with his friends around him or never at least in a crowd where there was a chance of me having an ally. I would back down, because my shame was my own. There was no one else to see it.

This was different. He’d grown bold. I don’t think he was very smart. He certainly hadn’t thought far enough ahead to understand the corner he’d backed me into. Fear is a great force multiplier.

I didn’t snap, but my decision came quick. I was humiliated and terrified. I spun around and swung as hard as I could for his head. He turned away in anticipation of the blow and my fist landed solid with a smack on his left ear.

I heard he spent the rest of the afternoon crying in the nurse’s office.

His meat has been under my fist.

It’s time for my fist again.

I am sure. I begin to understand him. It will be easier to lure to him to a mall or a bar instead of an empty field or a park at night. I will kill him. We are the same he and I. I am smarter. I wonder how well he understands that.

I will kill him.

Does he know to look inside to figure me out?

Does he drink wine with his meat?

I’m going to name him Richie Cunningham.

I will kill Richie Cunningham.

Opie is toast.

The night is pleasant. Barely a moon. I’ve been asleep, the fire is embers. The carafe of water is empty and I figure out that I can’t hold until morning.

Something I hate; finding a bathroom in a strange house in the middle of the night.

In a hotel room, I just bounce around until my feet feel cool tile.

Whatever, I’m like a fire hydrant. I feel good. Energy. I throw off the blanket and bounce up. Legs are good. Barely sore. Past the den and there’s a small bathroom with a light on the left just beyond the kitchen. Thoughtful of Carlo.

There’s an actual urinal with a chrome flush, what looks like a quartz puck and one of those low long toilets with a black seat and an identical chrome flush all municipal style. White tile. It’s clean and smells good with an institutional dispenser that spits brown paper when I turn the crank. A wall mounted soap sprinkler vomits pink powder when I push the lever back. I smell pine.

I piss.

I’m back in grade school.

As I’m draining I see the open door leading to the kitchen.

I decide to make my way back through the kitchen. It’s smaller in the dark.

I come around to the couch and sink back into it’s comfort.

I’m thinking I expect what’s next.

Richie smacks his hand on the windows. Running around the deck. Frustrated and in a frenzy. I’m spooked but I know he can’t get in or he’d be in.

I rush the window to challenge him. I bang on it with my knuckles and demand that he look at me. I want to see him. Close. So I do. Carlo’s yard is filled with dark swine and they have fear in their eyes. He doesn’t look at me. A pane of glass divides us.

I yell and flip him off. I mock and tease. I laugh at him. Scream and curse.

He’s sobbing and sucking back drool. He bleeds from all the openings in his head. He’s a mess. He’s in his underwear again.

I press my index finger and face to the glass and tell him I understand. I tell him I understand it’s him or me and that it will be me. I tell him I’ll kill him. He will die. It will be me.

He bounces off the front door. He screams in the yard. He even throws rocks at the windows. He leaves sobbing and sucking.

I stand and watch his retreat. He lights a fagot at one point and I’m able to see his pigs behind him.

He cannot enter.

I go to sleep.

Carlo is upset. It is morning. He bangs and mutters. Shuffles and stomps his feet. But I can smell the food.

I sit up and put my shoes on. I go to the bathroom I used last night, piss, and wash my face and hands. The water is cold and I wish I had a toothbrush. I enter the kitchen from the bathroom.

He is suprised, yet the look on his face takes but a second to fade to furious. I ask what over and over. Finally, I’m able to sputter that fear is a great force multiplier and I couldn’t help but confront that which I fear most.

“Perhaps you are a coward, if so full of bravery and force why did you not open the door?” He says.

I just can’t stand it. The way life attempts to imitate art. The way art endeavors to imitate life. The circle closes rarely for reasons other than serendipity. It’s never on purpose. 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.

I’m sure of one thing. It reveals nothing to no one. There is no game and there is no fate. It is random. Despite prophecy, religion or dogma. 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 can conceive or imagine.

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.

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

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

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.

I look him in the eye and tell him absolutely.

I hold his gaze and thank him as sincerely as I can. I tell him I have so many 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 healthy 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 much better.

The driver opens my door and it’s the last I see of him. He’s never looked at me.

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 the side. The entire roof, including the deck, is black to grey and the turquoise of oxidation. Is the whole thing under one copper shell?

The twin front doors are heavy and black. Carlo opens them with practiced effort.

Inside is rustic. A river stone fireplace with a heavy wooden mantle. Silver candlesticks, pictures in elaborate frames and brightly colored glass. A pot boils over a small flame. The floors are black slate and hardwood. Beautiful rugs and sturdy furniture. Plenty of sunlight 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 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 look robust but not new. The floor and countertops are terra cotta. There’s a pot rack suspended from chains over and island. Copper and stainles steel vessels glisten. Blenders, juicers, toasters and processors, none modern, festoon the counters and gleam.

It smells of smoke and apples and good tobacco.

Carlo grinds coffee beans with some hand powered device I’ve never seen. While wearing some welding glove, he takes the pot off the fire. 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 small glass bowl filled with chunky brown sugar. Two spoons, two mugs.

My guess is someone forgot about the veranda.

From another mug, he pours the 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.

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 baby spoon.

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

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

“I have much to tell you.” He plunges the coffee patiently. “You already know, you are in mortal danger. You are beset by a hound.” 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 are often the worst, as are the doubles.” He leans a little harder on the press.

“Those pale and vicious poltergeists will harass a man until his heart explodes in his chest like a fruit pie dropped on a kitchen floor. The good news is, it is not the worst. The bad news is, it is very bad. Perhaps, as bad as I have seen.

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 related to 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? 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.

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 you were within a block from me. Really, the rest is decades of me seeing and understanding these things. You already know, we are not all the same.”

“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 offers me a hunk of cornbread with caviar and creme. The bread is warm and sweet. The caviar is salty with marvelous texture in a creaminess of creme. It’s so delicious I need to replay what he’s said in my head.

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.

“Do notlook at me like that. I am no wizard” , says Mr. Tarcisi.

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

I tell him I was hoping for a wizard.

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.

He walks to the end of the kitchen and back.

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, Carlo brings a single malt whiskey to the table.

We use our coffee mugs.

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

It’s twilight.

I’m on the couch under a thick cotton blanket. My shoes are off but my socks are on. Carlo has left a carafe of water and a glass on the low table in front of me.

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.

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

I’m 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 dry. Not sure what I expected.

Have I seen the last of Shirley?

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. There is fruit and juice. Her cleavage strains against the robe. 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. I grab for the fruit but it’s dry on my tongue. I gulp juice but it’s air.

Blood begins to leak from her eyes. She screams.

I’m awake, still wearing this beautiful watch.

Here it comes. All of it. She’s gone.

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

The mirror above the sink confuses me because I mistake it for blood. It’s lipstick and the message is incomplete. My name and a declaration that 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 must have gone down after the blowjob. 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 a righteous hoovering. She went to freshen up and maybe spit?

There’s blood, viscera and hair in the shower. Blond hair. His knife is there too. Batteries not in the wastebin.

Let housekeeping wash the sheets, 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.

Man I’m in trouble.

“How bad is it?”, he says when I open the door. He looks like he hasn’t slept, pale.

I wonder how he got on the boat.

Mr. Tarcisi probably boards airplanes at will.

I wonder how he knows.

I tell him what I know, and what I think I know.

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 hands it to me 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.

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.

Holdiing up a finger he disappears out the door. Just as quickly he’s back with paper towels and a spray bottle of blue liquid he’s lifted from a cleaning cart. I soon understand that lipstick is very greasy. The blue liquid is a minor miracle. I’m able to make short work of everything.

I can’t help it. I sob. I choke. It’s overwhelming. I dry heave into the tiny sink. I’m a mess.

When I’m finished he’s behind me in the mirror with a sympathetic chagrin. “Shower, but be quick. We need to get you out of here.”

I’ve no idea where to go from here. This is all way too much. A woman has been murdered. An innocent woman. She was nice and she smelled good.

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.

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, I insist.

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.

“Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more
questions about it: so she turned to the Mock Turtle,
and said ‘What else had you to learn?’

‘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?

One of the few things I’ve actually learned in life is that the thing to do with an antogonist is to seize any opportunity to ignore them.

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

When later I look, I can still see my name in the glass like ghost writing on the mirror long after the steam is gone.

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 scotch and think about picking a fight. 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.

So that’s out.

I have another and 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 send her another of whatever she’s having. The bartender winks at me when I ask him to do this. I stare through him. What a dick.

She seems to be game when she gets it. She waves to me and mouths hello. I’m close to shit housed or I’d have no chance here. I wave back and try to look like I have humility. She giggles and picks up her green drink in a silly glass to approach me. I learn from her approach that she has big tits, skinny lips and nice legs. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Guess where from? Alaska. The furthest you can get from America and still be American. She smells great.

Her name is Shirley.

Fuck Hawaii.

Whatever. She’s friendly and I’m as honest as possible. I was recently involved in a car accident 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 tell this all to Shirley.

I’m happy not be on my candy apple red invalid cart.

Maybe it’s the watch.

I tell her how cool my suite is. She doesn’t 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.

I want to roll my eyes but it makes me glad.

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

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

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

I know he’s not. I smile and get the door open. If she even had a single clue she’d run panicked, screaming, snot and drool.

No smell of pigs.

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

His knife goes in the toilet tank. I’m hoping to ruin it.

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

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

She’s in it and her bra is orange. Orange? It matches her lipstick. Her tits look pretty good though. Milky white with a small mole halfway down the expanse of rather voluminous cleavage on the left. I’m thinking Shirley might have double scoops.

She smiles at me and lifts her arms under her breasts so they swell. I resist the urge to roll my eyes but I don’t abandon the idea of giving her the business. I have an eye for subtle and slutty. It requires rosy cheeks and a certain youthfullness and I appreciate the contrast.

Kinda like a bleu Stilton and a nice pink grapefruit marmalade on a cracker.

Whatever blows your skirt up. She does smell nice. Very clean.

She spends time touching me. She does it well. Her nails, fingers and toes are pristine.

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.

She pretty much blows the lid off by asking me if she can put me in her mouth.

She climbs on top of me.

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

This is going well.

Her mouth is on mine. It’s blissfully sublime.

She reaches behind with a thumb and yanks her underwear down to her thighs. She then uses her foot to take them off.

Cool trick. I begin to wonder about my blowjob.

Turns out to be a scorching hoovering.

I sleep fitfully. My forehead sweats but my feet are freezing. At first, there’s the standard not being able to run very fast or hit very hard sequences. Next, I dream of a mushroom cloud. Orange and fiery on the water, it parts the clouds. The sun is a sixty watt bulb. The wind picks up and the ground begins to dance.

Death comes. Death on the way.

A knife with a hollow green blade.