There was a heart in Central Park. It was lying there in the curled leaves and the grass saying goodnight. It beat a bit but was slowing. I was sitting on the park bench watching. Nobody cared. The idiots were oblivious. I was alone as usual, trying to get some fresh air and think about things that didn’t have to do with the mad city. I thought about love, with that heart lying there all derailed and fucked up and crying. Imagination haunts us. I have nothing left but this walk I take every day. Why do I have to end up seeing someone’s cut out heart lying in the grass like that? My apartment isn’t far, it’s small, and only about 723 square feet, but I like the tight corners and the lack of space for all those pitiful material things. There were dreams upon a time, you see. They had ripples like fire set on fire. So maybe that’s my own heart lying in the litter.
What words we breathe. What words we digest. What am I? A bucket of skin ready to toss? I am a slice of time in flesh. I sit at the counter and eat my food like everyone else. But I know I am different. Some birds came and pecked at the lawn. I thought about the peace of modest brick houses on a tree-lined street in a cozy suburb of Chicago. I can hear the lake smashing against the shore ever so gently. Dad looked out at the sea, and I wished I was alone so I could smoke a fag. Big jets scraped against the sky, the massive whirl of the heartless city of souls hummed all around.
Sometimes I can’t breathe; like a diner joint in T or C and the toast was good for my heart and the local souls all around me glowed a fluorescent green. I got lost in the desert, totally immersed in isolation, and I read On The Road by a trickle of water under the sun. On the outside world, everyone was dead. I didn’t have anybody—ever so it seems. There was but sun and sand and coyotes and my own wayward mind settling in the dust of the earth. And here the world goes on and a man like me doesn’t know where to step—I’m in it, but out of it. Turn a page. Hold your head in your hands as the mighty tangerine sun slips away. I’m a disposable heartbeat. Sin is no longer an option to avoid. I wish I was a normal man of love. I got off the bench and stretched in front of strangers. The walk home was a bit windy, but I didn’t mind. I don’t mind anything anymore. Life is life. Love is a crap shoot. Maybe the past is gone, but still alive in the hurting ways. My apartment is on the third floor. I go home like I always do, alone, one stair at a time in a hollow hallway. I open the door, and everything is butterscotch dim. So, this is the end, I wonder, solo in a glazed apartment. I’ll wander after them—chased by the blue ghost in my grandmother’s guts.
He made it with her in the bathtub because she was bleeding. That animal. That gyrating, groaning animal. It was that negative breeding. She pulled him in, he slapped against her. They breathed, they kissed, they tangled. When they were done, they stayed in and showered. The water felt like rain against them, tasted of the sewer city dry desert beat town. His name was Francis, and she was Chloe. They beat each other senseless with their reckless hearts. He loved too much, she too little. They met naked in the middle.
The bedroom was a blue bejeweled blue, dazzling in its dimness, the floor wooden, how the bed posts glided across when they ground into each other like an overworked oil drilling rig. Francis was a butcher; Chloe was an aid to the elderly. She enjoyed making friends with her distant future. He liked to cut things up with sharp instruments. Francis had wanted to be a doctor but never made it. Chloe just wanted to be loved by anyone, and so she made it with more men than Francis. She didn’t think he knew it, but he knew it. Chloe was an over-shaken bottle of seltzer in the social circles. His heart bent toward a distant sun, a far horizon, to the day when she would be nothing but a memory and perhaps, he would be her greatest regret, the lost escape.
He recalls the Fish lyric: Read some Kerouac and it put me on the track to burn a little brighter now…
It was at the Variety Lounge on the west end of town where he got a full taste of her flirtations. It was the mad tolling noise and the whiskey smoke, and her playing ho hen as she jumped about like a Roman candle all ablaze from seat to seat to see whatever handsome ho Mr. Kool was getting on about in drunken hazy wisdom of the dream. She smoked fat Camels and laughed and touched while Francis brooded at the end of the bar, head hung low in a shot glass, hot amass, alabaster crass, swirling slurring words of talk with a stranger arrow, the desert yarrow, the place on high near those decrepit dams in the dryness beds.
Francis was 14 years her elder, but Chloe only thought it was something like 10 because that’s what people told her, and he never admitted to her the truth even on the day of his birth and the candles on the cake ablaze in a veil of misleading. But then poor Francis never thought it would matter for her to know anyways… What good would it do; nothing would change, nothing would stay the same. She had her plot all laid out in front of her nice and neat. She knew she would be going; she knew she was to leave him behind in the desert dirt, to ditch him to the hot earth to ache and mope and question his own heart and ability to love. Love? Chloe didn’t know what that really was yet. But there would come a day when perhaps she would, and she would look back and wonder where Francis burned out at. Wonder where he crash-landed and vaporized. Whatever happened to poor Francis? Oh, how I broke his heart. She laughs so hard all the windows in California shatter.
These nerves are voiceferous and restless, like a baby with Batman, a highball hangman, make them speak, red walls with dust, a sleeping woman, a YouTube chime in the head, celestial salad raining down from space. This world all nonsense, like the gravity of a rainbow, the yoga of a leprechaun, the salsa of Chen Chin Chong.
He feels plastic and numb. He feels as flat as a flatline. The interstellar heart like a champagne rowboat floating. He just realized that he no longer laughs. Does he even smile? For real? What does he feel? A perpetual boredom, a perpetual disinterest in life. The pharmacology of alteration. The pills keep us in line. Living life in short bursts, like fireflies in the grass, momentary blips of Hollywood, champagne bursting bubbles, rubble, glittering crackers. And why do we divine so much time to barely trying to survive? If we could just be what we wanted to be… Imagine the world. Instead, we wrap our wrecked minds around all the glittering nonsense, all the traps, all the worries, all the fucking battles with bread.
I fight to find purpose in my movements. I struggle to fill in the gaps between the numbers of the atomic clock. I ache to flow like the softest, unmuddied river. I wander like midnight in the gardens of Ankara. The tower bells toll. The smell of fertilizer comes from space, the air is wet, lights flicker, traffic groans out there on the great Interstate rolling west, rolling east, the great asphalt ribbon full of crazies and hipsters, and the dead, and the meek, the young ones rolling toward new life, the old ones rolling to final spaces and memories.
Sometimes I don’t even remember the days on which my parents died. Ah, this littered life, my constant motions, breathing but a tick, I’m a clock with a sock stuffed into the medusa obligate, like irate pyrite, irrational hawk men, desperate gold men, trapped in a Cripple Creek hotel room, dim and dark, gold and orange and green reflections on the streets, ghosts in the halls and I felt them there in that desperate getaway from death, the longitude all latitude, my drunken attitude, playing mechanical poker at the bar, alone, made her cry for the very first time on those streets of gray gold. The red brick buildings, the church on the hill with its faint stained-glass preaching pictures, and we drove in the night, and I made her cry under the mountain moon of blue.
An empty Coke bottle sits on a worn, brown Formica table in a restaurant booth. The resting back and seat padding of the booth is a sickly mustard color. A half-used plastic bottle of generic brand ketchup sits at the table’s edge along with a silver napkin holder, a miniature silo of sugar, salt and pepper shakers, and three plastic menus ripe with human disease.
The walls of the restaurant are half wood paneling—on the bottom half—and a pale-yellow paint job on the upper half. Crooked pictures depicting old time western scenes hang on the walls in various places. And old television set that no longer works is perched on its dusty metal cradle in one corner. The unplugged cord dangles behind it. Country music moans through the dusty speakers of a dime-store stereo that sits on the end of the lunch counter among a tangle of green vines from an overhead hanging plant in dire need of watering.
The windows along the booth are oily and smudged with the fingerprints of unruly, messy children. The scene through the windows is one of dry desolation, wayward desert brush, and purple-blue mountains rising in the distant haze. Sunlight streams in and casts perfectly cut geometric glows across the tables.
There’s the murmur of broken passions among the patrons that sit around there. Many are hard-working people with bitter assessments of the world and their talk of rebellion comes from deep within troubled, trembling souls encased in dusty work clothes. Others are merely travelers, passersby with no hint of what it’s like to live in a town that is merely a speck on a map, a quick piss stop on a highway, the dead end of a dream or two. These are the people on their way to somewhere more like paradise, bigger, brighter. They’ll talk about Feldspar, California with scathing laughter and jokes. “How can people live there…?”
People are living there, some have lived in Feldspar for a long, long time. People like Brady Gander who sits in the restaurant of bitter souls and eats a chicken pot pie with a cup of black coffee. People like Brady Gander who works on fixing cars at his very own Gander Auto Repair on the far-flung edge of town. The Brady Gander who spends his days beneath a propped-up hood and goes home every evening with greasy hands and beat up knuckles. The Brady Gander who once he showers all the grime and pain away goes into his padlocked secret room to have secret meetings with his Council of Mannequins. They love to talk about guns, and the government, and patriotism. They vote on their own brand of law making and they have a binder stuffed with papers that Brady Gander, being the official secretary, meticulously types up and prints off. But the newly enacted laws of pretend never leave the secret room. The only thing that ever leaves the secret room is Brady Gander, and maybe a mannequin or two or three or four or even five.
Brady Gander never married because he has problems with socializing and relating to others, especially women. They make him nervous, and he acts brash. His house is a squat place of little stature out behind the business. It’s the color of the desert around it so it blends in and sometimes vanishes all together, which Brady Gander likes. On the hottest days of the year, the house simply vibrates and moans like a highway mirage. Brady Gander has lived there for 23 years, and tonight he has a visitor.
The honking of the horn out at the fixing garage was incessant. Someone was desperate and determined, Brady thought as he walked with his LED lantern to see whoever it was. They must have seen the house lights on and put two and two together.
He arrived at the front of the shop to find a young woman leaning against the outside of her convertible and reaching in with her arm to press the horn. “Oh, thank God!” she said when she saw him. A nearby streetlamp cast her in a pinkish, yellow glow.
“Were you fixin’ on honking that thing all night,” Brady said to her, and then he spat at the ground. “Because if you were, you’d better think twice about it.”
She immediately straightened herself. “I’m sorry… It’s just my car keeps doing weird things and I need to get to Phoenix and, well, I was hoping you could look at it.”
“Weird things?”
“Like stalling out, jerking.”
Brady rubbed at his chin as he looked her up and down. “Shop’s closed until morning.”
“Ah shit,” she said, and then she started looking around as if she was going to find someone else more willing. “Ah, shit… Can I leave it with you for the morning then.”
“Sure,” he said, and he stepped closer and reached out his hand.
She didn’t know what he wanted her to do.
“Your keys,” he said.
“Oh, right. Here you go,” she hesitated to let him have them. “You aren’t going to steal it, are you?”
Brady laughed and turned his head and pointed. “Do you see that house back there. I’ve lived there for over 20 years. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart. This is my business, my livelihood. I don’t steal people’s cars.”
She was looking around again. “Is there somewhere I can stay?”
“Hmm,” Brady thought aloud. “Well, I’ve got a spare room if I don’t creep you out too much.” He let out a nasally snicker.
Her expression soured. “Maybe I’ll just sleep in the car.”
“No, no, can’t let you do that,” Brady said. “All sorts of weirdos wander around here at night… All sorts. This happens more than you might think. People wander into my life. I never eat them if that’s what you’re thinking.” Again, he let out the nasally snicker. “What’s your name by the way? I’m Mr. Gander, but everyone just calls me Crazy Brady.”
“Lillian. Lillian Hampton.”
“Lillian Hampton? That sounds puffy and annoyingly self-important… Did you say something about Phoenix? Are you planning to rise in Arizona?”
“What?… One of my best friends is getting married there Saturday. In the hot city it is.” It was Thursday. “That’s why I need my car fixed. I’m in the wedding party.”
Brady watched her underweight body as she went to open the trunk and retrieve a bag. “Here, let me get that for you,” he offered. He could smell her feminine flowery scent as he got closer to her and grabbed the duffel. “Anything else?”
“Nope. I travel light.”
“Follow me then.”
The moment they got into the house Lillian sensed something was off. There was a strange smell, it was dimly lit, and someone was sitting on the couch, but they didn’t make a move when she approached to say, “Hello.”
“Is that a mannequin?” she asked Crazy Brady.
He whipped around to look at her as he worked to clean some of the mess in the kitchen. “A mannequin? Yes, it is a mannequin, but he’s much more than that. That’s Councilor Troy Brisbane. He’s a very important member of the board. Very powerful.” He watched her as she just stared at him. “Well, don’t be rude… Say ‘hello.’”
“Hello,” she breathed cautiously.
There was no reply from the plastic person. Councilor Troy Brisbane just smiled his fake plastic smile and said nothing.
“He’s just tired from all that impactful decision making he does,” Brady told her.
“Is this the couch I’m going to sleep on?” she wanted to know. “It seems dirty.”
“No, no. I told you I have a spare room… Right next to mine. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She followed him around a corner and down a short hallway. He opened a door. It squeaked. “Here you go.” He motioned with his old head. “Bathroom is right back over there if you want to clean up before going to bed. You know, get all that sticky road grime off your silky, sweet-smelling skin.”
He turned on the light for her and she poked her head into the room. There was a double bed, a dresser, a chair, a desk. It smelled funny, she thought, like musty old furniture, like musty memories.
“Do the doors lock?” she asked him.
“No, no. I removed most of the locks because… Well, my plastic friends tend to close themselves in… And if I’m not around when it happens, well, they can get violent and break things. But then again, without the locks, they often wander the house. It’s a challenging situation.”
She half scoffed; half laughed at him. “Are you being serious, Mr. Gander?”
He was very serious, and his eyes twitched in telling her so. “Yes.”
In the deep of night, Brady Gander went before the Council of Mannequins in the secret room. He walked back and forth across the cranberry carpet, tapping his knuckles together as he thought. Councilor Troy Brisbane tapped a yellow pencil at his center seat in synchronicity. “Will she still be here at the dawn of hounds?” he wanted to know. “You don’t plan on eating her, do you?”
Brady stopped where he stood and turned his head to look at the council. “I’m not a bad man,” he began to tell them. “I just have all these crazy thoughts in my head. I’ve tried to get help, but you know how it is out there in the real world.”
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep leaned forward. “We really don’t.” He looked at the other mannequins before turning back to Brady. “But you didn’t answer the question, Mr. Gander… Do you plan on eating her?”
Brady took a moment to breathe. “I’ll try not to.”
Uptight Councilor Stella Spaceport smiled at his haphazard answer. “Does she have any weapons? Does she have anything of use to us?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Brady answered. “But we are running short on time. She’s planning on leaving in the morning.”
“Have you considered gassing her?” Councilor Greep asked.
“It’s crossed my wicked mind,” Brady said.
“But what’s the goal here?” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve demanded to know. “What is the end game for this girl? And for us? Do we simply want to play with her and send her on her way, or will she serve a greater purpose? If she is to serve no purpose, then let’s just get it over with. But if you simply want something pretty to look at, get yourself a plotted plant or a dirty magazine.”
“Orgy!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw stood and declared. “It’s been eons since we’ve had a decent orgy around here.”
There was a communal sigh. “Sit down, Karl, and oil your joints,” Councilor Spaceport said.
“Look,” Brady began to speak. “She expects me to fix her car, but what if I can’t. What if I purposely keep her stranded?”
“I thought she was attending a wedding,” Councilor Brisbane pointed out. “Surely, she’d find alternative transportation. No. Something more drastic, something more physical must happen to keep her here. And I for one will make it happen if no one else has the wax to do it!”
There was a grumbling rumble among the council.
Councilor Eduardo Greep stood and pointed a finger straight up into the air. “I for one am tired of outsiders bothering us. We have more important things to consider. We have important work to do. A revolution doesn’t happen overnight! I say we beat the hell out of her and leave her in a ditch.”
Stella Spaceport leaned forward in her place. “Mr. Greep, that seems a bit drastic.”
He threw his plastic arms in the air. “Fine! But can we at least just go watch her sleep?”
Lillian Hampton felt a presence and stirred in the sheets. Her sleep in the strange place was restless and full of cracked dreams. Her hand rested against something out of place, it was like skin but cold and hard. She heard wedding bells in her head. Then she felt something move and there was a pressure upon her, a weight. Her eyes flickered into focus, and someone was inches from her face. “Hi there,” came the voice. Lillian screamed and bucked and leapt out of the bed. And then she saw him there in the bed, naked plastic and with a smile stretched across his fake face. “What’s the matter?” Troy Brisbane the mannequin councilor wanted to know. “Don’t you think I’m sexy?” Lillian screamed again and rushed for the light switch at the wall.
The room illuminated and then she saw that it wasn’t just Troy Brisbane in the bed, the room was occupied by the entirety of the Council of Mannequins, and then coming toward her with a grin of his own, Crazy Brady.
Lillian went to pull the door open, but Brady slammed a wide hand against it and forced it shut against her will. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. My friends here are looking for a good time and we need you to stay.”
She hurled a fist in his direction, but he gripped her by the wrist and spun her around, pinning her arm behind her back. Brady hissed like a rabid porcupine. “Now listen. I am strong and you are weak. Got it?”
Lillian scanned the room. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing—mannequins come to life and holding her captive—“What do you want from me?” she whimpered.
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep stepped forward and touched her face with his dead hand. “We want your respect, we want your loyalty, we want your warm, moist love.”
“Love? I could never love a mannequin!” she snapped. Then she screamed again, and Brady tightened his grip on her.
“We want to mate with you!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw cried out as he jumped up and down like a lunatic. “Won’t be any babies, but there sure will be some noise!”
“Cool your jets, Karl,” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve said. “But it’s obvious we need to put her out. Bring me the Huff ‘n’ Puff cloth with the magic juice on it.”
Stella Spaceport stood at the ready and handed him what he asked for. Adam Eve held Lillian’s bony jaw with one hand, and then with the other, he smothered her mouth and nose with the cloth until her eyelids came down over her glazzies and her body went limp.
It was incredibly hot as Lillian’s car broke past the city limits line of Phoenix, Arizona. Councilor Adam Eve drove, Troy Brisbane sat in the front passenger seat, dirty Karl Capshaw, Crazy Brady, and Stella Spaceport filled the back seat. Lillian Hampton was gagged and bound in the trunk, her eyes wide and crazy with fear, the sweat beading on her face.
“You did a good job on this car, Brady,” Adam said. “It drives like a dream.”
Karl was restless in his seat. “You should have let me put it in her tailpipe,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you, huh? She was still okay to take it.”
“Shut up, Karl,” Troy said, and then to the others, “Why did we bring him?”
“Because I don’t trust him enough to be alone at the house,” Brady said. “Now, you have that church punched into the GPS?”
“I got it, I got it,” Adam answered, and he tapped at his fake plastic head. “I may be a mannequin, but I’m not stupid.”
When they arrived at the Church of the Great Alabaster God, a white torpedic building that reached high into the sky with great stained-glass motifs of universal love, they quickly jumped out of the car and scrambled to the trunk. They opened it and Lillian, always the screamer, screamed through her gag cloth.
“Hurry up and get her out of there,” Brady ordered. “Quick now before someone sees.”
Karl and Adam lifted her out and carried her toward the front of the church. They laid her down on the cement walkway. She wriggled like a worm. Karl kicked her in the side and then leaned down near to her face. “You should have been nicer to me,” he said to her.
They all got back in the car and as they drove away and left her there, the front doors of the church suddenly burst open, and the wedding parade emerged, and the celebratory rice flew high into the air, the grains coming down atop her like rain. Lillian rolled and watched as a crowd quickly gathered around her, and the eyes that looked down upon her were no longer real.
A long morning yawns its mallow yellow yawn out there on the grass where the trees and the heart live, out there where the mad heat melts the orgy moon and capsizing starships. It was a day where I felt my guts reeling in agony and worry. I had been at the hip girl’s room and holding her in the sheets while she fell asleep to the baa baa of the sheep dream king.
And I rise up to make the world uncomfortable, I rise up to make the sane seem insane. I make candles and wax them, I bathe babies and attach them to mothers, I rain God a Zippo, strike fire to the fear of the streets, the piccadilly rhombus all nonsense… Like gravy in a gravity-free orbital freefall.
A heartbeat knocks at the door, a witch rises up through the floor, mad Cigarette Sally on her haunches bellowing Bible songs, fellow longs, golden gongs, monks pray to bluebirds in the clouds, aloud, all around. Peace and tranquility for the turtles, the myrtle creeps, someone pens a letter to a lemon. A lemon has its rind broken.
He looks at her lips in the golden break of afternoon day and he thinks of all the words she forms and the ideas she has and all the good heartfelt notions and the crazy thoughts that make her so special.
A tight piece of comatose ass rested in the closet of his mind. She was in dark green work pants and a black top—short-sleeved and revealing the pale softness of her arms—and her wavy cornsilk hair was wet and dangling like restlessness.
And here I am, a scattering of thoughts, a pyramid of jingles and jangles all up in this red head of mine. I eat blueberry pie on medicine street and the medicine man says I have a million miles of corded, tangled thoughts and he just don’t have a cure, man, ‘cept listen to some ambient cyberpunk stream, sit by a real stream, dream, languid row oars on the river Middle Time, think of high grasses wavering in the breeze of another sun and soak, another moon and dive, another starlight far right gong show, the amber ass clown in cuffs. Justice for dessert lies vivid in the sun beneath the lid of a cake holder, key holder, bra holder… Get ready to bend over and get it like you’ve given it.
Milk and minstrels flow down Nickel Lane as the barbarians wait on the hill, flags of war unfurled, girls of prey uncurled, thoughts all in a bucket, sometimes just say ‘fuck it’ and the eyes bounce this way and that way… A cold creek makes a menacing sound at high noon. Meditation insists peace. The hounds of dawn wake the world, a skunk and her two little skunklings waltz up the road where we live. It’s a warm day full of sun and green. I can’t seem to lean into something that isn’t mass unfocus and restlessness.
I went to Athens and wandered through the ruins and listened to the stark larks whispering their songs in the olive trees. I shuffled through the bustling streets, the heavy air, the smell of strange food burned in my face. “I need experiences if I’m ever going to be any good,” I thought aloud to an ancient wall. I turned to look at the details in the sunbeam. I went to the plaza with the big black box and the turning tide of people. There was a man made of rope and he was dressed in black and red. He was waving his arms in the air and chanting some ancient chant of the sea. I looked up to a hotel window and saw a lamp burning. I thought of soft furniture and peace and liquid drink of the mesmerizing type. I thought of creating my own periodical and I would call it The Vespertine Lamp… Despite the sun.
I went into the hotel lobby and ordered up a room. I wanted something dim and cool and with a view of the plaza or the Saronic Gulf. I got checked in and made my way through the lingering tourist crowds and up to my room. I clicked on the jibber jabber box and went to take a shower. The soap smelled like salt and clean men from the sea. Afterward I wanted to tilt and so loaded a bowl with some high-grade Colorado herb and smoked. It’s so strange to be so high in such a foreign and grandiose place. Nothing is familiar, there is no reference point for anything. “Oh, yes this. Oh, yes that.” None twat for a measure. Hypodermic consciousness, laughing gas, permanent waves of perception now twisted like taffy. I went to look out the window and I felt as if I were on another planet, not some cumbersome rock in the Milky, but some far away place, far from the missteps of man, far from the land of aching hearts and unpolished souls, far from the meandering senseless megalithic maniacs and their war machines.
“We do not kill each other here,” someone in the room whispered, but no one was there.
I went to recline in the bed and read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow until I grew sleepy. I got back up to look out the window and this time it was night. The stars roared overhead like liquid electric bastard lanterns. I bucked my hips and impregnated the galaxy. I bid farewell to the world and curled up beneath the satin sheets and slept long and coldly, the dreams coming like liquid flashes, the long dawn waiting on the precipice.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 