Archive for the ‘VIGNETTES’ Category

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

$2.65

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I go home.

To sleep.

To dream.

I get drunk first. On good gin.

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

I go to bed.

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

I’m so tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the pigs.

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

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

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

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

They squeal and clack on my balcony.

They’ll eat anything you know. Anything.

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

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

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

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

He appeared at the head of the first one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or will it be another day?

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

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

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

Drinks for my friends.

The other day I was standing on the sidewalk with a lady friend in Hollywood, we were sharing a cigarette. Out of the corner of my ear I hear a woman call her son Eric and I turn around. There’s Eric, flirting with his mucus.

A toddler dressed in green with his right index finger jammed so far up his nose I feared brain damage.

I told him it was bad form to pick his nose so overtly. He continued his olfactory expedition and fired blanks at me with his adorable kid eyes.

My friend let fly that as long as he wasn’t eating it, he was cool.

The mother hustled him off. We forgot to think about how much we were embarrassing her.

Oh well. Our pie was ready.

Damianos. I still got a piece on top of the nuker. I think she’s about cured.

It was interesting. Fascinating. Kinda compelling.

I had fun with it.

For awhile.

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

Still, enigmatic in the most consumate of ways.

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

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

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

Weird.

Time passed.

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

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

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

Then, he was pictured on packaging for disposable razors.

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

Didn’t hang on to that one.

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

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

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

I thought he was scary as fuck.

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

He kept showing up in different places.

In the audience on a talk show.

Blackjack dealer in Vegas once.

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

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

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

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

Obviously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is bad.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Vignette A Quatro.
Current mood: accomplished
Category: Writing and Poetry

We stand at the light. Waiting to cross. His cologne is fucking awful. But he’s dressed immaculate. Jacket and slacks, no tie. I see he’s thinking. I tell him to stop. He bows his head and looks up at me. I smile.

Nothing to think about I say. Make sure you stay out front on the sidewalk. Don’t approach her under any circumstances unless it turns into an action scene and there’s automatic weapons fire. He giggles a little.

Got to give him something.

Do not step foot inside without calling me first. You feel me? I tell him this. He bows his
head again and looks up at me, no worries he says, and he smiles.

I light one and with a click the signal changes, we step off the curb. Mickey moves slow.

He calls me Mikey and I call him Mickey and Mickey is
insanely fast and crazy vicious when the time comes.
He’s here today because things aren’t great for him so
I said I’d give him a buck fifty to take me over the
hill and get something signed.

I tell him we’ll go across the street after, there’s a
Fatburger. I’m all about a fried egg sandwich with
pickles, mustard and cheddar. You can have whatever, I say.

Fairly late afternoon. We move from sun to shadow. Winter in LA. He looks to his left and clocks the Fatburger. Wait here I say, I don’t want him inside.

I flick my smoke away and walk in. It’s warm and sophisticated. This woman knows her mind and her business. Nobody else in the store. She’s watching a flatscreen on the wall while propping herself up with
arms behind her on a circular couch. Beside her, two remotes, a cordless and her cell. And no shit, an open game of “Operation”.

Mickey’s wide, he’d be a disaster in here.

Who else is here, I say.

What’s up, she says. I only know she said something
because she pointed her face at me and her lips moved.
That’s what she always says even on the phone so I
figure that’s what she’s saying now.

Beautiful is an understatement. Her African skin glows like there’s sun shining on it. She gives me pause and I hope she doesn’t catch it.

Mickey with you? Mickey? She’s loud but not yelling. She gets up
moving towards the front of her store and she does the not yelling thing again.

My phone rings. Tell him he can come in I say.

He appears with a shy smile. She cups his face, kisses his cheek and leads him to a couch that allows him to see outside. She hands him a bottle of water that looks miniature in his fist.

She snatches the envelope out of my back pocket on her way back in. This what I think it is?

I nod.

All business now. She walks towards the register as she opens it and begins to read. You need time to read it over I’ll send Mickey to pick it up, I say.

She looks at me and reaches for a pen. She signs it slowly and deliberately, re-folds it, puts it back in the envelope and hands it to me with a blank face. Things are getting better, she says. I’ll have a payment soon.

Good to hear I say.

She smells her hands and looks towards Mickey. A sour look on her face as she heads off to wash up. Let’s go Mickey I say and move towards the door.

In between tearing off massive bites from his triple and wiping his chin he says, she’s something Mikey. Yeah, I know, but she lacks empathy I say. Classic narcissistic personality disorder. Least, that’s what my shrink says. Mmmm hmm, he says like he knows what I’m talking about. He draws through his straw and it makes that noise it makes in every movie. Why is it only white people need therapy he asks.

The guy who block’s out the sun is coming in the door. His grin is wide but his eyes are empty. Fuck, I say.

Mickey stands wiping his hands and without looking says that’s far enough bro.

He ‘s at least a foot taller than either of us but Mickey never even bothers to size him up. Instead he swings so fast all I see is hist fist connect with Mr. Eclipse’s adams apple and he goes down. The only sound is a big man smacking tile.

Mickey looks at me and all I can manage is a whispered whoo. Then he steps back over to wrap up what’s left of his burger in napkins. You gonna eat that? I shake my head and he begins to wrap mine up too. We need a bag he says. He steps in front of the people on line at the counter who are wide eyed and haven’t moved an inch. Hey bro, can I getta bag?

On the way out Mickey pauses, standing over Mr. Eclipse.

With a grunt he brings is heel down hard on the man’s nose. This time the sound makes my stomach plummet. I look away before I can see.

On the sidewalk he leans against a light pole to inspect the bottom of his shoe. I got paper towels in the car he says.

After cleaning off his shoe but before getting behind the wheel, he takes a gun out of his waistband and puts on the seat between us.

We drive off. Thanks I say.

Mikey, you had me along just in case he says. Well, just in case just happened to happen didn’t it?

I give him two brand new bills. He smiles but never takes his eyes off the road.

You mind if I smoke in your car Mickey? His corpulent fingers claw at the switches and my window comes down. Be my guest boss, he says. Don’t call me that I say.

I’m having deja vu.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Vignette the trifecta.
Current mood: aggravated

There’s blood, and it’s coming from my right eye. Hurts a little, yet I can tell it’s about to have a lot more to say. I’m confused, I think. Then I snort and cough a two syllable laugh.

RacerX slams on the fucking brakes and a massive gravity surge sucks me face first to the rear wall of the trunk so hard I lose my wind. Then some sort of anti-lock bullshit takes over and we violently shudder to a stop. Excellent ride. The rubber smells skunky.

Door slams. Car rocks a little. I hear, get out get out!

Heels clack short and panicked to where I am.

Get the fuck out! Trunk starts to open and I got nothing but fight or flight. Wide enough and I kick through the opening with some adrenalin and desperation. I realize that my heel just connected square with a solar plexus below what seemed to be a rockin’ pair of tits.

I scramble out.

She’s laying on her back in the dirt.

This time there IS a shiny gun in her left hand.

Fucktard! She barks.

She is slow getting up. Slow and clumsy. I’m a little confused by her lack of grace, I’ve never seen her without it in abundance.

You need to get the fucking fuck gone! She points the hand with the pistol in it across the street. I’ll be back. You’re gonna have to trust me. We are so fucked.

She takes off slow and doesn’t spin the tires because she no longer thinks it’s a movie. She’s lighting a cigarette when she hits asphalt and then she puts her foot in it.

The right quarter sphere of my skull aching, throbbing and shrieking. Dizzy, right eye useless because it’s full of blood or gone. I make my way across the street and wonder what I look like.

I take stock under a tree that has long since obscured the street marker. Fuck me! Cell phone, wallet, keys. I’m golden. Wait. No smokes. And I’m really fucking thirsty. It’s hot. Fuck me.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Vignette part deux
Current mood: depressed
Category: Writing and Poetry

She pulls away from the curb and spins the tires because she thinks it’s a movie. I finish my smoke and flick it. I don’t give a mad fuck what season it is.

She speeds and I like it.

We end up at the Daily Grill across from the airport.

The air in here is cool but more green than blue.

She orders a Pinot Grigio and me a Saphire on ice because I don’t know the bartender can make a martini.

So far she’s kinda pissy and elusive. I really don’t care, but I’m hoping to go back to the office with at least a toothless grin. Her dress is tight and the table is a shelf for her rack.

I ask about her kid. She doesn’t say much that I hear.

I think to myself that she really is kind of a bitch and she reaches for my hand.

The drinks arrive and we disengage to take a swallow.

Were in a booth, and we’ve both by habit scooted towards the wall.

A big guy shows up at the end of the table, he’s not wearing an apron, and he blocks out the sun.

He slides in next to me and he’s fucking huge. He says, I need ya ta gimme back what she gave ya.

I left it on my desk, I say.

I look across at her and see chrome coming at me out of the corner of my right eye.

She looks at me like, sorry.

I wake up in the trunk of a car that’s going goddamn fucking fast.

Friday, April 27, 2007

A different sort of vignette.
Current mood: amused
Category: Writing and Poetry

She calls on my direct line. Five people have that number and three of them are in the building. She says, Is your car out front? I say, What? She says, I’m in front of your office.

The wind is gusting and it’s hot. The ground is throwing heat at least as high as my head.

She leans on the opposite side of a black sedan facing away smoking a Camel Light.

I approach with my hands in my pockets while I stare at the ground.

She looks at me from a vacuum.

I do my best version of the same but realize there’s a smirk on my face.

What? I say.

Her eyes roll up as she exhales a cloud.

I light one.

She reaches into the backseat with her left hand. It’s a convertible. I realize she’s rehearsed this moment.

It’s a nickel plated Smith & Wesson and I’m on my back screaming but nothing is coming out and I smell cordite.

It’s an envelope and she begins to smirk as she hands it to me. Hungry? she says.

I say, I guess, you got time? Let me put this on my desk.

I drop my smoke in the 5 gallon bucket of sand outside the door.

I turn and it’s so cool inside it feels slush blue.

The heat is a wall on the way back out. Grab my smoke. She is leaning against the near door now, hands at her sides. She’s looking down and talking to herself. In her left hand the 357 dangles loosely as she bangs it against her thigh.

She looks up and says, Can’t remember if I fed the dog. You wanna drive?

She holds up the keys with her left hand.

I keep walking towards her.

I say, Nope, it’s all you. She doesn’t care and I know that.

As we’re pulling away, I think for the thousandth time about how unsatisfying it is to smoke in the wind.