John Horatio Smith was an odd man. He sold top hats in the men’s boutique down the street. The street that streamed near Jack Kerouac’s grave. He sold top hats to idiots, to henchman, to rich and bolshy bastards eating wet cigars for an afternoon snack. John loved his work. No, he really hated it. Hated it so much that he had devised a plan for revenge on the cards he drew. He was going to place a bomb inside one of the top hats in the shoppe. A wee little bomb, but one that had incredible destructive force.
John Horatio Smith pet a stray cat lollygagging in the alley behind the shoppe as he aggravated his cancerous condition with yet another cigarette. He tilted his hand too much to the right and the tip of his cigarette went right into the cat’s eye. The thing screeched an unrelenting feline screech and John H. Smith jumped back. He felt terrible. The cat patted at its burning eye with his paw. It cried painfully. John H. Smith just laughed. He laughed with the power of a communal jeer at a Super Bowl game.
He couldn’t help it because he was so damn odd. The cat stopped pawing and looked up at John. The cat seem shocked and amazed by John H. Smith’s humorous candor. “When I die,” the cat began. “I want to be cremated. Just burn me up, I want to be ash.”
John H. Smith looked around before he spoke. “What?” The cat was frustrated. “Don’t you know if you stick a lit cigarette in a cat’s eye you are obligated to take me on as your number one pet.”
“But I don’t want a pet. I couldn’t feed you.”
“Hey,” the cat smiled, “I’ll just have some cereal.”
John picked the cat up and carried it back inside the shoppe. He set the cat down on the counter and it crawled into a tipped-over top hat and fell asleep. “Hey!” John H. Smith blurted out to a huge audience of numb shoppers and co-workers, “Look! It’s a Cat in the Top Hat!”
An old lady bent over the counter and peered into the hat. “By golly! He’s right!” she exclaimed. “Come have a look at this then,” she said to her friend resting in a rocking chair by a window. “No …” the friend waved her hand in disinterest, “Don’t want to.”
“Oh come on then! It really is a cat in this here top hat!” The excited woman poked her face into the cavernous top hat and suddenly jumped back and screamed. “The bloody thing nearly took me eye out!” she bellowed as she frantically covered her socket with a now red hand. She stumbled back screaming and fell to the floor.
John H. Smith jumped over the counter with a warm, wet towel and hurriedly placed it upon her wound.
“I’m going to call an ambuli!” he hollered, “A big bolshy one with Herculean lights of red and fire in the headlights.” John Horatio Smith picked up the phone and dangerously dialed for help.
As John H. Smith walked home at 6 clutching a warm bag of bread, he stared at the sidewalk and thought of the poor old women all injured like that with only one eye. He tried to choke down the visions of her being loaded into the ambulance and the whole time she was bellowing like mad and her clothes were covered in the red red flow of her injury.
John Smith tried to shake it out of his head as he turned the key to his flat and went inside. He threw the bag of bread on the couch and quickly tugged at his tie to tear it off him. “This noose will choke the life out of me!” he screamed at the walls as he continued to strip down to his underwear. He turned off all the lights, switched the stereo on full blast to Hotel Hobbies and divided himself pole to pole all over the black dance floor.
It was 2 a.m. when the dancing stopped. John H. Smith drew a deep breath and ate cottage cheese within the glow of the refrigerator light. The sweat poured down his body; dripped into the creamed, white spoon. Then, there was a knock at the door. John Smith’s pale heart began to thump in his chest. He turned his head to look at the clock on the kitchen wall. “It’s past 2 a.m. … Who the hell could that be?”
John set the cottage cheese down and tiptoed toward the door. The knock came again, only this time, it was more frantic. “Who is it?” John H. Smith yelled through the wooden door.
“It’s Sherbert.”
“Who?”
“Sherbert!”
“Who the hell is Sherbert and what brings you around my abode this time of night. What business do you have here, eh?”
“I’m looking for Carina.”
“Carina? Who’s Carina? I don’t know any bloody Carinas. Now bug off before I call the police.”
“All right then. Excuse the intrusion sir. I must have the wrong house then, eh? Sorry to have disturbed you mister. I’ll be on my way now.”
John H. Smith put his ear to the door and listened to the footsteps shuffle away. He sighed deeply and leaned the whole of his weight against the door. Then, the phone rang. “What the hell is this?!”
John H. Smith picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“_____________________________”
“Who the bloody hell is this?!”
There was a click, then a dial tone.
John H. Smith slammed the phone down.
When John Horatio Smith awoke the next morning, there was something furry with fury curled up on his stomach. Toast was burning in a distant dream. John H. Smith realized he was caught in the whirlwind of life.
After a shower and shave, John Smith walked to work. He wondered if he had killed the thing well enough. He stopped suddenly and stood stone still looking at the ground. He stayed that way for eight days and no one paid him a dime of attention.
When John Horatio Smith returned to reality it was snowing. He shook off the cold flakes and continued walking linear north, to the shoppe of top hats where he was immediately terminated for unexcused absences. “But mister, I was frozen in time, right down the street. It’s a bloody good and honest excuse sir.”
The shopkeeper waved him off into the cold and John H. Smith stood there, in front of the shoppe window, glaring at the warm comfort of a job he had come to despise but kept him fed and sheltered. He spat on the glass and walked home with his hands tucked deeply in his pockets and his head tilted toward the frozen ball of white in the sky he called the sun.
“Piss off!” John H. Smith screamed through the wall at his neighbor who was wailing on the harmonica like a bastion of mad devils feeding on endless time. He picked up his favorite vase, green glass with lots of sparkles, and he hurled it against the wall. The vase shattered explosively, and John H. Smith pushed his head forward to kiss the shards of glass whizzing by his face. It was all slow-motion madness with a pinch of solidified holy grace.
When he calmed down and clicked the light on which illuminated the oval mirror in his mahogany, steamy bathroom, he stared deep into the rivers of red that were flowing down his face, frantically searching for the Gulf of Mexico. He curled his fingers gruesomely at either side of his face and screamed louder than he had ever screamed; looking at the triangular, rhombusical, trapezoidal kaleidoscope of tiny green mirrors stuck in his face like glossy spaceships that just crash landed and steamed in the epidermis of John Horatio Smith.
A daddy long legs scuttled across his forehead as he lay naked and breathing heavily upon his bed. He had a white cloth draped across his face. Cold, wet cloth. He slapped at the spider and felt it momentarily brush against his fingers before it was catapulted into the great void that surrounded them. Satisfied that he was clean of all multi-legged creatures, John H. Smith got to the business of sleeping.
John Horatio Smith resented the noose around his neck. It was a tie that bound too tightly. It was the ignorance of bliss. The hammock that never swayed. The pendulum frozen in the body of a dead grandfather. John H. Smith’s eyes opened widely, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time. A whisper of new-day light sprinkled through the thin, torn curtains and splashed upon his already warm belly. He tried to wipe the glow away, but it did not move, simply wavered a bit and then went back to its
stronghold on his body.
There was an explosion, outside somewhere, and John H. Smith leapt up with a ragin’ heart and smoke bunnies in his eyes. He tore the curtains aside and peered out, straining to see where the blast came from … And then he noticed the cloud of smoke filtering up through the clouds. The building across the street was a spire of blackened rubble and mist; the screams were wafting their way up to his head, strong screams of fear amidst the rabble of darting folks ducking for cover.
If I was the man on the moon, I would fly to Mars just to know your love, thought John Horatio Smith, as he watched the mass ascension of firemen and police and Doctor of Law. They cradled the text in the basket that was their arms. The steam and hiss of death curled away from the object of destruction and made its way up to the pearly eyes of John H. Smith … He did not cry, for he could cry no longer. He threw on a Sting CD and began wandering around his home like a lost sheep. He was baking bread and thinking of time. How much time had slipped through his fingers. He destroyed his heart and soul daily just to feel nothing. John H. Smith was close to complete breakdown, but no one cared, and John H. Smith knew it; he was no longer afraid of death, for Sting knew the way to eternity.
His bread was still wet in the oven; the smell was beginning to be birthed about in his place—his flat, his condo, his home in the cemetery called STREET. And John H. Smith asked for advice from his soul: will I ever be loved again? Will the volleyball break my head, could she be any closer? Those shorts my dear, they are beautiful on you.
Magic.
Do you ever wonder if you are magic, beautiful, desolate, hurting, afraid or full of joy. What are you? What are you, beautiful woman? Love me beautiful woman… Just love me before I vanish. Vanish to the sea of all my dreams… Every scene of paradise with you as the main character in the play illuminating my heart.
John H. Smith rode his bike to the other side of the wicked town. The gray day was polished just right. The leaves were silver pallets of wind as they whipped past him through the slipstream of his vision. The air grew cooler as he came to the desolate end of it all; a great blockade steaming and weaving through the wonder of it all. Train tracks that never end, sailing ships that never dock, spaceships that never land… It was all there on the very edge of his life, his strife, as the angel in the clouds kissed away the simmering pain of all his bee stings.
He missed the glowing passion of her eyes, the love he saw, the glistening tears of all her caring. And as he stood and looked over the whispering, windy edge, he longed so deeply to be near her, to feel her, to smell the scent of her in his restless dreams… He wanted to love her again, only her and always her and his heart throbbed from the ache of it all, for her shadow was but just that: a shadow; a spiked memory constantly telephoning the empty room in his head, the vacant stare in his beating heart, the incessant lump in his throat when he thought of her fingers, her hair, her lips, her passion in the dark.
John H. Smith was lunching in the Dead-End Café… The windows were large and full of warm sun and cold grease and views of the edge of the world, the drop off point. John H. Smith sipped on oily, black coffee and read a newspaper, but all the pages were blank, and John H. Smith filled in every box with pictures of her—pictures of her in a brown wedding gown clutching a bouquet of green roses and smiling as if she were now truly happy without him.
John H. Smith never stopped to wonder why he was here. He sank as he looked around at the shiny hall that was the Dead-End Cafe. A breeze from the ocean whirled in through a waltzing screen door. The fan blades on the ceiling turned so slowly, and the light was lemon… Bright and sour. John H. Smith couldn’t swallow all his regrets any longer and he bowed his head upon the table and began to cry it all out. A river steaming with every bead of sorrow in his aching soul. And still the screen door waltzed, the hall was empty, and the ocean stretched out for endless miles.
John H. Smith had no more promises to make. His soul was reckless, his mind was a corner in the white ceiling—compressed experiences that made him bloated and fearful and wishing to escape. He felt so out of place as the pace of time dragged its feet through the mud in the sky, the shiny wax on the floor, the floodlights illuminating his circle of space, all the satellites spun around him, zapped him with illusions and delusions of what his life meant. The lines were all cracked and fuzzy, incoherent and John Horatio Smith wished for another dream, another goal, another life.
When he went to pay his bill, the waitress smiled and pushed the money back into his cold hands and she told him: the last drop is always free.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 