Torqued. Tortured. Treasure. Henry Miller twisted the valve He spoke of animals and wet love with the voice of a typewritten angel Big Sur. New York. Paris. 1930-style suffering in a cup, a golden flask a Barbados map all channeling the energy of my road. Red tilt-a-whirls spinning madly in some garden of red on a warm summer day far North where the ice cream vendors bleed blue and the bank is some giant morgue Airplanes streaking across the sky on the same warm summer day wrecking balls sexing up dirty brick walls all in the name of pain windowpane holding robotic Christmas cheer at bay with a knife or a guillotine or a child’s empty tear. Christmas morning glories gory stories of long lines and the word ‘bitch’ Clicking consumers all a bedazzle by the gold and green and other colors unseen the underscore of black and white dreams. But what of Henry Miller then? His days in Albuquerque long ago, walks to the park with children not his own the desert blur sparkling with real country dark. 3:38 a.m. in the den with the TV rhyming with the buzzes of saviors and someone old is having difficulty breathing on the wrong side of town on the wrong side of this dimension Someone … Don’t be afraid the solid background isn’t black anymore it’s white in the night of Christmas lights and the snow that blows up the alleyways of this city bright The skyscrapers are needles of light.
Author’s Note: You can read the previous part of this story HERE.
In Need of Serious Correcting
Rude Rudy squirmed in the chair in the office that smelled like sterile, dusty discipline. Across from him seated at the big important desk sat the stodgy principal, Mr. Simon Falcone, and he was staring at Rudy through round rimmed glasses lightly tinted green and he was rhythmically tapping the tip of a pencil against a pad of yellow paper as he considered his next words.
Beside the principal, standing and with thin arms crossed against her narrow frame, was the school counselor, Miss Clementine Grady. She was blonde like Marilyn Monroe and dressed tight like a mummy in its bleached white bandages. She appeared stern, but at the very same time she appeared light and airy as a feather loopily falling through the wind. She was nervously tapping her right toe clad in a glossy red shoe.
Mr. Falcone glanced at her rigid stature and then tossed his pencil aside like he was sick of life, and he got up and sat on the far edge of the desk nearest the boy. He took a deep breath and began to speak in that intellectual professor-type kind of tone he had. “Inciting a riot on school property is a very serious offense, Rudy. Are you aware of that?”
Rudy scoffed and shook his bushy orange head at them both. “I can’t help it if my people get excited. They have a right to be upset.”
Miss Grady leaned forward and blew the hair out of her face. She was always blowing the hair out of her made up with makeup face and people always wondered why she just didn’t pull it back and clamp it down to her head. “Your people?” she replied as a cluster of hair fell back down across the tip of her nose like a tail.
“That’s right. My people. They’re great people and they look up to me. Everybody knows this. These kids need a leader who doesn’t mess around.” Rudy grinned like an orange devil. “They need someone to direct their frantic youthful energy.”
“And that includes bullying poor Adam Longo?” Counselor Clementine Grady replied. “Why? Why would you taunt and tease him like that? You should be offering a friendly welcome, not sadistic rebel rousing.”
Rudy leaned forward in the chair and his lizard-like eyes bloomed wide and clicked. “It’s not my fault the new kid can’t take it. He needs to toughen up and quit being such a baby.”
Mr. Falcone broke in. “What do you mean when you say your people have a reason to be upset?”
“What?” Rudy said. “I can’t understand you. You talk like you have shit in your mouth.”
Mr. Falcone shot up off the desk. “Young man!” he scolded, visibly distraught by the words. “You will not speak to me in that manner.”
“A thousand pardons, master,” Rudy said in a salty, mocking tone. “Continue.”
Mr. Falcone eased back down onto the edge of the desk and wiped the nervousness from his face with a slowed, carving hand. “As I was asking, why are they upset?”
“Because school sucks. It’s boring,” Rudy said. “There’s not enough proper stimulation of our young minds. We have energy to burn and there’s no kindling.”
Mr. Falcone scratched at his face and spoke in line with his manufactured authoritative status. “What I’m hearing is that you want more options, more activities, a bigger sky in which to spread your wings… Have you ever considered getting involved with student council? It would be a wonderful opportunity to plant the seeds for positive changes that deliver results.”
Rudy laughed out loud at him like Bart Simpson. “I’m not hanging out with those nerds. They don’t ever do anything that matters. They’re limp wristed and idle. They’re horribly ineffective in their roles as so-called leaders of this school. Who gives a crap about some stupid school dance or what’s on the lunch menu or pep rallies for the so-called popular crowd. People want real-life action… And I give them real-life action.”
Miss Grady laughed back at him. “Well, young man. I’m afraid your real-life action has earned you a week of detention.”
“And you’ll be expected to help clean up the mess,” Mr. Falcone added.
“And another thing,” Miss Grady said in turn. “You’ll be required to attend anger management sessions with me once a week for two months.”
“What!?” Rudy yelled. “You can’t make me do that. I have rights. This is America! I have way better things to do after school.”
Mr. Falcone rolled his eyes at the foolish boy. “What things could you possibly have to do after school? Let me guess… Masturbate to underwear pictures in the JC Penney catalog and play video games?”
Miss Grady tossed a queer look of interested disgust in his direction.
“And it might be America out there in the silly world,” Principal Falcone continued. “But in here you follow my rules. That’s non-negotiable. You will do what we expect of you. Understood?”
The boy chuckled. “You’re so damn weird… And gross.” Then Rude Rudy rudely got up out of the chair and pointed at them. “Guess what,” he said. “This is happening,” and he turned around, yanked down his pants and wriggled his pale, freckled backside in their direction. “You can both bite my orange ass!”
Mr. Falcone took grave offense to the disgusting display and growled like an angry man-animal and leapt from his spot on the edge of his desk and put the whole of himself smack down on top of Rudy’s bent over body, roughly flattening the boy to the floor. “Oh yeah! How do you like that young man!? How does it feel to be pinned to the ground, to be helpless and with nowhere to go!?” he seethed into his ear. “I bet you feel like a prisoner, huh… Sort of like how you must make Adam Longo feel when you fill his world with nasty bullying. Not too fun, is it.”
“Get off of me you pervert!” Rudy yelled out; his breathing compromised.
Miss Clementine Grady was stunned, shocked, bewildered. She clamped her feminine hands to her powdery face and screamed out. “Mr. Falcone!” She rushed to where they were pressed together on the shiny school tile and grasped the man by the shoulders. “You’re hurting him! Stop it!” She tried to pull him off, but he was too large and strong, and she was too small and weak.
Young Rude Rudy was trying to buck him off like how a horse does to a cowboy, but it only tired him more and he relented. “Help! Help me!” Rudy screamed out to the counselor.
Miss Grady quickly scanned the room for something, anything she could use to dislodge the brute of a principal from the boy. She spotted a spinnable globe sitting on a table near the window. She snatched it up and then crashed it down on the principal’s head as hard as she could, leaving a cavernous dent in the continent of Africa.
Mr. Falcone made a grunting uummph noise and fell to the side allowing the boy to scramble up to his knees, his pants still down around his ankles. Rudy was panting like a thirsty camel and his face was flush and his wide lizard eyes nearly filled with tears. He looked up at Miss Grady in ultimate dismay as she stood over the moaning Mr. Simon Falcone. She was till holding the globe. “You stay right down there on that floor, Mr. Falcone,” she said in an uncharacteristic threatening tone. “Don’t even twitch, or I’ll put your lights out for good with the Earth’s core!”
She looked over at Rudy. “Go on now. Get your pants up and get out of here! Go to my office and wait there. Stay there. Don’t go anywhere else.”
A humbled and frightened Rudy nodded his head, embarrassingly fumbled around to get his pants back up and fastened, and hurried out of the principal’s office.
I don’t know what it is, but lately I feel like a human magnet.
That’s not the same as a chick magnet. I define human magnet as in everywhere I go, other human beings seem to have the need to get in my personal space… Uninvited and unwanted, of course. In light of the whole COVID mess, I have become hypersensitive to people getting too close to me when I am out in public. I really don’t like it.
Since I am a house husband, I do most of the grocery shopping. Other than our crappy Walmart, the town I live in has only one regular grocery store… And it sucks. It’s too small, it never has anything in stock, and it takes forever to get through the checkout lines because they can’t retain new employees for more than 4 hours it seems. But enough of that, the point is that the town is growing and growing and so the grocery store is getting more and more crowded. So, pretty much no matter when I go, the aisles are usually crawling with undesirables of all types.
The problem I have been facing lately is that whatever product I’m looking for, there’s always a cluster of other people right there and in the way. The section can be completely empty otherwise, but sure enough, when I go to get the one thing I need, someone’s right there, bent over and filling half the aisle with their huge ass. Ugh.
It happened to me twice today alone. The first time was in the Latin American food aisle. All I needed was one damn can of enchilada sauce. There was one other person in the whole area, and what was she doing? Standing right in front of where the enchilada sauce was and filling, and I mean filling, her cart with boxes upon boxes of taco shells. And she was going at it like a fiend. One would think she was on Guy’s Grocery Games and the countdown was on to win $20,000. Who the hell eats that many tacos? Wherever and whatever is going down with that kind of party, count me out. I like tacos, I just don’t want to be around when that digestive nuclear bomb goes off.
Anyways, I grumbled, looped around and came back later to get my one can of enchilada sauce. The taco shell section was obliterated.
The next event occurred in the salad dressing aisle where they keep all the mayo and Miracle Whip. Whip. That’s fun to say. But once again, the aisle was barren except for this couple kneeling down in front of the mayo… And I just got an image of Louis Gossett Jr. calling Richard Gere “Mayonnaise” in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman… Yeah, I watched it. So what? Check the clip out below.
But like I was saying, this couple was kneeling down in front of the mayo and looking and talking and talking and looking at all the different jars they had there. I’m like, “It’s god damn mayonnaise. Pick one and move on!” I didn’t say that out loud, I just thought it to myself. So, once again, I had to reroute, loop around, and come back. These people are chewing up my valuable time! Valuable time like writing about mayonnaise, I guess.
But the main point of this article is the fact that people have little to no sense of personal space. I don’t know if I smell good or what, but the last few times I’ve been at the store, people have creeped up on me so close that I can actually feel them breathing down my neck. I’ve had people rudely reach out in front of me, from the side and the back, and snag something off the shelf. I’ve had people nearly step on my shoes. I’ve had people nearly dry hump me from behind. What the hell!? I just want to step aside and say, “Could you back off please!” But of course, I never do. Not in this day and age. You never know what kind of lunatic you’re up against.
I want to wrap up my bitchfest by talking about the biggest violator of personal space in my entire life… Polly the cat. That’s right, our pet cat takes the cake, and the cat chow, when it comes to invading personal space. I don’t know what her problem is, and we are always asking that very question, but we have never had a cat that gets so right up into your face as this one does.
Polly isn’t one of those nice kitties that jumps up on your lap, curls a couple of times, and then plops down for a nap. Nope. Not this one. Polly is the type of cat that literally tries to crawl up your body and rest on your shoulder. And that’s how she got her name… Because when she was a kitten, she’d love to climb up and sit on your shoulder, like a parrot. Get it? But now that she’s full grown, and I mean really full grown, (she’s a fat cat, a chonker my wife says) she can’t sit up on your shoulder but really just rests her head on it, her two front paws wrapped around your neck like she’s giving you a hug. Cute, yeah, but then she licks. Yep, she’s a licker. Any kind of exposed skin is doomed to be assaulted by that sandpaper tongue. I don’t like it. My wife doesn’t like it. It’s gross. That’s the point at which we softly push her aside. And the whole gross licking thing is part of the reason we don’t have dogs. It’s so off putting and just not for us. We’re not prudes, just cat people. No offense dog lovers. She’s also into headbutting and nose to nose staring contests. It’s creepy.
If you haven’t guessed by now, the picture at the top of this post is Polly sitting in a spaghetti strainer while I was cooking dinner the other night. I never had a cat that had to be near me or next to me or on me so much. She literally follows me around the house. We don’t let her in our bedroom at night because she would literally sit on one of our faces. (I could say something dirty here, but I won’t). I don’t know about you, but I can’t sleep like that. So, out she goes to the living room. Nighty night.
Maybe I’m overreacting about all this closeness, but you have to admit, a lot of people are gross, and I don’t want to get sick. Besides that, it’s just downright rude. Sure, some might say “excuse me” but the majority say nothing at all and actually act like I’m in their way. Hmm. I was here first, dipshit. I have rights. I guess I just need to plot out my course more carefully and do the best I can to avoid the glommers who love to glom on me. My wife says I just need to accept and appreciate the love, not from the people in the grocery store, but the cat. Accepting love. That’s always been kind of tricky for me, but I’m trying.
mindless and blind like seven mice in a grinder, palpitating in rhythm to the chagrined man stuck high in the trees on Michigan Ave., trees of glass and steel penetrating the clouds like a needle copulating with the airy blue
a jumper at the precipice Chicago oil and steam below, a great sea of fluttering beings all wired on something mindless blind like cats with no eyes, eternally hopping from this and that with no real solid goals in mind, taxi exhaust floating up and stinging his eyes, his nervous wife at home in Arlington, pacing the floor, biting the blood red polish from her nails, clenching her thick pale lips wondering why why, why, why did I move to the suburbs mom? Is Darryl Ok? Yes mom, he’s fine, he’s at work watching the Sandpeople
he closes his eyes and lets the wind suffocate him the medics scrambled up from their lounge chairs dropping their Long Island iced teas, the sirens and the lights came to life, and they rushed to the scene, his body had bounced from the roof of a car, broken glass, spatters of blood, the smashed remains twisted freakily near a front tire, a mass of chattering folks gathered all around… Darryl, you forgot to close the door his mother screamed from some distant vision
his wife drinks a martini and smokes a fag in twilight the ringing of the phone breaks the big silence shrouding the American dream and she lunges for the receiver, her hands shaking, her drunk head reeling and angry. Darryl! where the hell are you? I’ve been waiting for two hours!
there’s a rainy funeral near a grassy hill his pieces lay in an expensive box, the wife sits stone still, her eyes looking straight ahead above and beyond the casket as it is lowered down into the ground, and one by one the people turn and slowly walk away, disappear into the trees behind the wet grassy hill, like ghosts from a previous life
the padded cell was comfortable but lonely she arranged invisible flowers in an invisible vase, she checked her invisible watch and then darted to the small wire laced window, the sun was dropping quickly, so this is winter in Madland she thought as she looked down at the red scars ripped across her wrists and the doctor pushes her wheelchair slowly along the path on the cold grounds, he points out the ducks skating across a near-frozen pond, they’ll be gone soon he whispers in a dirty breath, and puts his hand down the front of her sweater
an unwanted ache is born beneath an August moon she tries to stab it with a nail file, and they rush her away, a mad fever takes her hand and drags her to a lightless room where she stews in impending doom and has dreams of being killed by a pack of witches with brooms
a long coil of mercy strung tightly around her neck strangles her in nightmares and dark prophecies, images of her husband pecked full of bleeding holes, stabbed gently with shards of glass by an angel lightly spritzed with a wedge of cut lime and she bows down in grand finale within her cell and squeezes the tortured mind out of her head. she is mindless and cold upon a silver tray and her soul ponders how God looked away from the atrocities of her life, her husband’s life, their life together so quickly ruined by the madness of an unloving world too caught up in the gains and percentages, too caught up in selling every single freaking thing that there was nowhere left to go for free and everyone striving to be plastered in perfection, a glossy glow about their faces, a finely cut suit clutching the flesh and bones within so that when you walked you were admired for being so fashionable and beautiful and perfect and everything that mattered came from within a clean window on some fine street in some fine city where life is real and pumping and let’s forego the little children in Snapwood UK who go to bed with nothing in their bellies whilst Pa pistol whips Ma ‘cause he ain’t got no job and he’s frustrated to the point of inflicting bodily harm upon the one he fell in love with so many centuries ago when his blood was comatose in a hidden vein far beneath the rock of Planet X and the leaders of the free world step up to the microphone donning their $3,000 suits, smile into the camera and tell us how wonderful life is and how much more wonderful they’re going to make life for us whilst Bobby Blue stares into a nearly-empty refrigerator and curses the piles of bills and bleeds over his laundry list of worries that come creeping up from the shadows right when the sun rears its ugly, fiery face down upon the world, he swears at his trap, calls it all crap and beats himself with a rusty chain
cornflowers dripping wet in the sky Jesus passed her a joint as they sat on a bench in a golden-green park like Oz far up in Heaven and she asked him why the world was so mindless and he just smiled, shrugged off his Shroud of Turin and said: I don’t know why, I’m too high.
NAKED You can’t say no to that when she feels so good naked
RIVER The guide drew me to the edge of the river where a steamship was piping some smoky tune the flags that hung on its mast depicted the reality of falling over the waves and time takes a sleigh ride to another globe somewhere far, far away
GOLIATH To this blue and silver house on Sandra Lane with windows like little squares of chocolate veiled with thin curtains of muscle gone wrong the snow was thick and heavy on the ground, in the trees, across the spread wings of aeroplanes He noted that the queue was winding round and round like a child’s roundabout in the park a metal pinwheel with rainbow gills spraypainted upon the buttons of industry hammered by the Goliaths of war where friends never die and the sandwiches are made by clean hands in a turbine called Eden the glass wands spin threads with oil beads running like little mercury balls on fire no one to conduct them no one to stop them as they blur oblivious to the appreciation factor of the untamed heart
MASTER ROGUE Howie went to Paris with a pair of gloves and a cane he was studying the effects of ice on large groups of people winter lasted forever for him it was his paradise his burning drum unkempt by any silver maiden and he threw his arms up in the square and shouted to the whole city “Let me entertain you!”
TO KNOW IT’S LOVE Gene drank a bottle of Scotch and tried to play cards with diving flippers his old stash from the islands where he almost got stabbed in a bar and he wondered if it was love or just the thought of being in love and in the end he knew it was love
WATER There are police knocking at the door German guard dogs scratching at the wood pistols are drawn, batons raised and man takes another whipping from the guy who doesn’t like water.
The house was an orgiastic glory hole of shining metal and stunning stone, sharp lines, and tall windows. It had a mid-century centurion vibe to it, the slopes and angles of it crooning Albuquerque hipness in the hills. I imagined the interior to be gloomy and plush while at the same time being glittery and cold as ice in a crystal glass. I wanted to get in there. I wanted to get lost in someone else’s life — even if that life included some devious murder plot carried out to completion.
The murdering man must still be in there, but just as I completed that thought, the garage door opened like the bay of a star cruiser in vast space about to eject a fighter into the realm of another galaxy. And I saw him twaddle nervously around the car. He opened doors, looked inside, and then closed them again. I watched as he lifted the trunk, studied the inside for a moment, and then slammed it back down. He turned and looked out at the street, and I feared he had sensed my presence via telepathy or some other psychic ability. He withdrew and lit a cigarette and for a moment it seemed our eyes connected, like a hard plug into a wet socket, and some evil drenched electricity was about to flow. I was sure he would cross over at any moment, and halfway to my car he would pull out a shiny black revolver and start shooting with little to no mercy. I was ready to bail in a raucous squeal of burnt rubber and smoke. But just as I was about to ignite the ignition, he tossed the cigarette out into the street and turned away.
He then walked around the front yard a bit looking at his pristine ornamental shrubbery and rock gardens. He kneeled in the grass and plucked some weeds from one of the flower beds. The funny thing is, he was still wearing his suit, complete with the strangling, murderous necktie. Then he stayed like that for a while just staring at the dirt like he was talking to someone buried in it, like people do at the cemetery.
He eventually got up and strolled around some more before going to the trunk of a tall palm tree and there bent his neck like one of those weird birds that drinks water upside down to look up into the underside of the fronds. I’m not sure why he did that unless he was looking for coconuts or something. He then went around the side of the house and then came back lugging a black garden hose behind him. He twisted the pointy brass nozzle and started watering all the greenery like he didn’t have a care in the world.
When he was satisfied that he had gotten everything wet enough, he turned the nozzle off and returned the hose to its place at the side of the house. He went back inside the garage, glanced at his wristwatch, and got into the car there. It was a black Mercedes. He carefully backed it out. The garage door slid back down into place, and the man sped off as if he had suddenly remembered he had to be somewhere.
As soon as I was satisfied that he wasn’t returning because he had forgotten something, I got out of my car and went across the street to the house worthy of a spread in Architectural Digest. I’m really into architecture and even went to school for it until things derailed as they usually do.
I went up the curving walkway neatly lined with dew-dappled greens and flowers. I went to the wide front door of ornamental brown wood. There was a tall vertical window to the side of it, but the glass was colorfully stained so I couldn’t really see in. It didn’t depict anything about Jesus or sheep like in a church, but it was more artsy Bohemian pieces of color is all. I jiggled the doorknob, but it was locked. My hand reached for the illuminated bell switch, but I pulled it back just before pressing it in. Instead, I put my ear to the door to see if I could hear anything going on inside. It was silent and I backed away.
I’ve stood upon the threshold of death’s door more than once in my life. I’ve pressed my fingertips against it and gave it a slight push and that’s always when the light begins to leak out and try to take me over. For some reason, I’ve always been pulled back into the world of the living, or the dead. I suppose it depends on how you look at things. Some people believe life on Earth is really just hell in disguise. I can go along with that notion to a degree. All one has to do is look at the news of the day. Seems like hell to me. But then again, I’m a private detective and I’ve seen a lot of bad things. I deal with people’s problems when they can’t.
I haven’t always been a private detective, and that’s okay because I’m not really all that great at it. I’m not really great at a lot of things, and I guess I haven’t been for a long time. I’ve dimmed as I’ve grown older. But high school, now that was the time for me. I was bright back then. In fact, I was so bright my nickname at Cerritos High School was Star. Why Star? Plenty of reasons. I was a start athlete. I was a star academic. I was a star in school politics. I was a star in popularity, especially with the girls. Everyone wanted to be like me, and everyone wanted to be with me. I was the one that was supposed to go the furthest. I was the one who was to become rich and have a killer wife with great tits and live with her in a magnificent house… Just like the one I was at, right now, 26 years later. I haven’t even gone that far down the road. What the hell am I doing here? Some days I just don’t care, and so I rang the doorbell after all.
Deep-seated dreams play in my head like an 8mm film. I can hear the monotonous whir of the projector. I can see the images flash across a square white screen tacked to the wall with screaming skull nails. Her heart spills out to me in black ink calligraphy a moment before I was running through that red brick schoolyard, my rubbered feet slapping that sliver of silver walk, deep green grass all around. The bombs let go like children being dropped from a burning building to save them. Then that thunderous burst, the roll of debris, the dust, and the smoke… Blood stains for Christmas.
I was hanging out down in Laguna Beach sipping a tropical drink from a cup made of broom straw. I was wearing my green OP t-shirt, the one with blue and white waves on it, and I was trying to be California cool. I was having stomach problems and money worries and then I looked back behind me, across the asphalt artery bloated with vehicles, and up to the house made of gold and glass perched precariously on a cliff there. With all those tall windows, I thought, they must have an amazing view of the ocean as it rolls and sleeps. Then I noticed there was some person sitting out on the high veranda in a pale pink bathrobe and she — for it seemed to be a woman — was eating something. I pulled out the pair of binoculars I kept in my fanny pack and aimed them toward the veranda of the gold and glass house.
She seemed to be enjoying her fat lifestyle up there as she munched away at her toast slathered with peanut butter and plum jam. These were very good binoculars, military-grade. They came in very handy when I was fighting over in Oman. Someone came out of the house through a glass doorway with curtains that fluttered like a spinning ball gown. The man sat a drink down on a round table beside her. They spoke for a moment and the man went back inside. He must have been some sort of butler. He was tall, thin, had a pointy nose and a balding head — the slick hairs grossly combed across his scalp like tiger stripes — and he wore fancy clothes of black and Christmas red. Like I said, the binoculars were great for detailed observation.
I put the binoculars away, finished my drink and went down to the sand. I stripped off my OP t-shirt so that everyone could see my muscles. I sat there in the sand wearing only my swim trunks and a pair of cool, dark sunglasses. Some unattended kids came by and wanted to know if they could bury me in the sand.
“Shouldn’t I be dead first?” I asked in all seriousness.
They looked at each other and then one of the boys with hippie hair said, “We’ll leave your head sticking out so you can breathe.”
I agreed. “Okay. Go ahead.”
The small troop circled me, plastic beach shovels in their hands, and they feverishly began covering me up with the sand. It wasn’t long before there was a great mound of it on top of me, and like the boy had said, they left my head sticking out so I could breathe that Southern California air – that unique blend of saltwater and pollution.
They looked down at me and laughed. There were two boys and three girls. Someone called for one of them from a distance. “Over here!” one of the girls yelled out, and I saw an arm wave through the air. “We got to go,” she said, and then she snatched the sunglasses off my face, and they all ran away giggling.
“Hey!” I yelled out. “Bring those back. Do you want my eyes to burn out!”
I wriggled in the sand and eventually extracted myself from the grainy mound. I stood up and tried to brush what remained away. I shielded my eyes with a hand and scanned the beach for the little heathen that ran off with my sunglasses. And that’s when I saw the woman, hauling the girl along behind her by the hand, approach me holding out my Oliver Peoples. She handed them to me. “Sorry about that,” she said with a glossy tanned smile. “She can be a little brat sometimes.” And she gave her a forceful tug.
I looked down at the girl struggling to pull away from her mother. “It’s okay, but yeah, these are pretty expensive. Thanks for returning them… I was about to call the cops.”
She twisted her face and gave me a funny look. “Really? You would have called the cops on a kid?”
“She broke the law. It’s called theft.”
She looked me up and down like I was the most horrible person in the world. “Asshole.” She turned and clumsily stomped off through the sand, the squirming girl in tow.
I went back up to the wicker bar because I wanted to get wasted. I don’t know why I wanted to get wasted, I just did. I took a small table off by itself with a good view and the waiter brought me a bunch of Long Island iced teas. I got out my binoculars and aimed up at the gold and glass house again. The woman in the pink bathrobe was now standing against the rail smoking a cigarette. She was dreamily looking out at the ocean. I just kept on watching her to see what mundane thing she would do next, and it was probably a good thing I did.
The next thing that happened was kind of crazy because some man, not the butler, came storming out of the house and he was clutching a striped necktie in two tightly clenched hands, and he came up behind the woman with little to no hesitation and put the necktie around her throat and started pulling on it. The woman dropped her cigarette and sort of stumbled back against him. I could tell she was really struggling because she was desperately trying to claw at his forceful grip and it looked like she was choking, and her mouth was open, and her tongue was hanging out like a dog’s would in the hot summer sun.
I suddenly stood up. I bumped the table and my drink spilled. One of the waiters rushed over with a white towel and began to mop up my mess. I handed him the binoculars. “Take a look at this,” I said.
He looked through the binoculars. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked.
“That woman over there on the veranda. She’s being strangled,” I told him.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. “Are you just being creepy?”
I snatched them back from him and looked myself. There the woman was, still being strangled. Her arms were now desperately waving in the air and I’m sure she was trying to scream. Her eyes looked straight at me, and I saw her lips form the word help. Then she went down.
I kept watching. The man was panting and wiping at his face with his hand like he was worried and upset. I saw him frantically look around. He must have been checking to see if anyone had witnessed what he had just done. He paced around the veranda trying to calm himself. He combed at his wild Al Pacino hair with his fingertips and he seemed to be arguing with himself. He stopped moving and straightened his clothes as he stood over her. Then he took the tie that he had used to strangle the woman with and put it around his own neck. He carefully knotted it, pulled it, and straightened it as if he were looking in the mirror while getting dressed for work. He glanced around one more time. Then he reached down, grabbed the woman by the arms, and dragged her into the house.
“Damn man. Some guy just killed that woman,” I said to the waiter who was still standing there with me.
He just shook his head and handed me my bill. “You’ve had too much to drink, mister. I’d advise that you just get yourself on home.” Then he walked off mumbling something to himself.
“It’s nice to know you don’t care about people getting murdered around here!” I yelled out after him. Then I threw some money on the table, re-checked my pockets to make sure I had all my stuff, and went to the street where I had my car parked.
I got into my little midnight blue convertible and started it up. I revved the engine a bit because I wanted to be cool. I checked myself in the rear-view mirror and then I checked for traffic in my side mirror. I stomped on the gas pedal and pulled out in front of someone just for fun. They laid on their horn and I flipped them off.
The traffic was just too much. Why do we live like this? I wondered. I took the first left that went up into the hills. I searched for the gold and glass house, and it wasn’t too hard to find. I pulled to the curb on the other side of the street, shut down my ride, and just waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for, but that’s what I did.
It was an autumnal Sunday full of color, her favorite being the peachy orange as it stood out as the brightest and boldest among the others. I glanced over at the woman in the passenger seat and my heart jumped and my stomach made a longing roll within itself. I knew I was in love and would be forever with this one. I was living in sort of a dreamland at that moment.
We had just come from sculpting our bodies and filling the auto with petrol. We were in the mood for a good coffee and some brunch. And since Halloween was edging closer by the day, we decided to go to one of our favorite haunts, that place downtown where the mists of our ghostly memories cling to the air like cream on pumpkin pie. The Coffeehouse.
The Coffeehouse sat on a popular corner in the downtown sector of our town and was one of the few places open on Sunday seeing that many of the townsfolk flocked to the booming bell towers to chant and sing to great stained-glass Bog in the sky, their voices like bleached licorice streams frothing and flowing forth from their hypocritical holy gullets and spilling out into the world like sirens in the sky.
Parking came easy, which it never did during the week, and we walked hand in hand down the crisp concrete, staggering behind some old lady in a red coat puffing away on a white cigarette. We caught a whiff of the cloud she spoke of, and memories of wild younger days danced in my head as my lady friend battened down the sweet hatches of her body – for she has battles between the air and her own lungs.
We entered the establishment and there was a small crowd inside quietly murmuring among themselves and we made our way to the front counter and to where they had the large rectangular menu board set off to one side. Our eyes strolled along the boardwalk of selections and my lady friend went straight for the London Fog, some kind of tea mash up that I don’t really clearly understand, but it gives her great joy as it slips across her lips and down into her glorious guts.
I usually would opt for a Cuban coffee, but on this autumnal Sunday inside The Coffeehouse, I wanted to try something different and went for the elderberry tea because I wanted a jolt of something that would rev up my immune system or whatever the hell it does. I also wanted the waffle with whipped cream and sliced banana. My lady went with the waffle as well, but with fresh berries and whipped cream. I was feeling a bit randy after all that talk of whipped cream, and I pulled her close to me and whispered something about uncontrollable hot love and madness.
The clerkie at the counter was a confused, nervous type – probably a newbie that wouldn’t last – and she kept asking the barista beside her questions about this and questions about that, and then as she was clumsily punching our order into the machine there, she would look up at us with a pained expression and tell us, “We’re out of that, we’re out of that, too. We don’t have that. I’m sorry we don’t have any of that either.” They had a piece of paper there with a list of things they were out of that the girl kept referring to. It was a long list. My lady friend wanted to look at it, but they kept it guarded like some great royal secret.
They didn’t have either of the teas needed for our chosen beverages. They didn’t have what they needed for our backups, as well. I wondered if they even had water. With frustrations growing, my lady and I settled on Plan C – drinks we didn’t really want because it was all that remained. The sadness in her eyes made me want to smash a spooky pumpkin right then and there, but then again, I would have probably been busted up myself by the bobbies for causing a radical disturbance on the Day of the Lord.
Grief-stricken by the news of the Coffeehouse’s diminished supply, we took our number to a small table for two and sat down. A short while later, the same girl who had taken our order at the counter strolled over, a haunted house type of fear smeared across her face, and she informed us, “I’m sorry, we’re out of waffles… But we have pancakes.”
My lady friend, who is often much bolder than I, quickly snapped back with, “This is ridiculous. How can you have pancakes, but not waffles? Can we just get a refund.”
My nerves were tingling throughout my body as we made our way back up to the counter to engage in whatever process would be necessary to get our refund. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I figured it would be some horribly complicated thing that they couldn’t figure out and it would take half the day. But then, the humbled and meek clerkie girl came through the crowd with a palmful of cash and some coin. She handed it to me and apologized again. After that, we walked out.
I took my lady by the hand, and we strolled along the walk, my insides grumbling with anger. My lady friend, however, is quick to resolve disappointment in life by looking at the brighter side of… Everything. She has a gift for staying positive in an increasingly negative world. I was ready to smash things, and she was more than willing to just move on to a greater destination and not let our let down weigh us down. She’s angelic like that, and I often believe that is the reason the universe gifted her to me. She’s always what I need when I need it. She always has been – from the very beginning of us to the very breath I take now. I only hope I can return that gift tenfold.
We crossed over the street to the other side and found a little patio bar type kind of place we had never been to and were happy to see they were still serving brunch. We sat outside and we had the sugar waffles with syrup, fruit, and bacon. We were tucked up against each other on a bench at a metal table as we ate and drank. The weather was perfect. The sky was a pure, unmuddied blue. The air was kindly littered with gold and green and orange. And in the end, things turned out better than I expected. We were in a passing moment of life, and we were in it together, and that’s perfect imperfection.
I had a dream in the opening creaks of dawn today that I was getting ready to graduate from high school again. In my dream, the colors of my cap and gown were white trimmed in gold. In my real-life graduation, the colors were green and gold… I think. I don’t really remember because it was eons ago. I had attended a Catholic high school my last three years because I had been a bad kid in regular school and kind of got kicked out. I guess it wasn’t because I was bad really, I was just maladjusted. I didn’t fit in. But truth be told, Catholic high school was rougher than regular high school. That’s just what I needed.
The point is, because it was a Catholic high school and a relatively small class of less than 100 people, we had our graduation ceremony at a godly chapel on the campus of one of the local colleges. It was some sort of long-standing tradition. I suppose I didn’t really care about that. I hated high school and was just so ready to get it over and done with.
Moving on, I guess it was only fitting that my final act as a high school student turned out to be an exercise in my own misplacement in the world. After I accepted my diploma and began to stroll across the chancel, I reached up and struggled to find the tassel that I was supposed to move from right to left. It never occurred to me that performing such a seemingly simple act would have turned out to be my penultimate high school kick in the crotch. I was mostly concerned with the damn cap completely falling off my head and then everyone would see my messed-up hair.
Like I said, I had reached up and I was feeling for it, but I just couldn’t find the damn thing. I could sense the breathlessness in the gathered crowd. I was immediately struck with panic and what I really wanted to do was just run, run, run and never return to society ever again. But that would have been impossible. Everyone was watching, everyone was waiting. And then, as I took nearly my last step at the come down point off of the chancel, I found that damn tassel and flipped it to the left. It had slipped to the very back of the cap somehow. I was relieved. The crowd was relieved. The saints and demons etched into the colorful stained glass of the chapel were relieved. The whole damn universe was relieved.
That was my graduation. While everyone else was happy, excited, and celebrating the coming joys of their surely bright futures as they gathered on the perfectly manicured lawn outside after it was all done, I had had a tussle with a tassel. That is my memory. That is the little burn scar from my 18th year of life that for some reason really sticks out to me. It shouldn’t though, because over the years I have collected many more missteps and scars – much thicker and deeper ones. Such is life, I suppose.
I would think that for many people, high school was the highlight of their lives. For many people, I believe, high school memories are pleasant ones filled with friends, good times, laughter, dances, football games, parties, trips, dating, etc… Not for me. I was never involved in anything because I just knew I would have made a fool of myself, and those bastards would have jumped on that opportunity and torn me to shreds. And you may think I’m a psycho, but I actually burned my high school yearbook in our downstairs fireplace at the brutal Colorado house in the foothills where I lived. I just kneeled before that hearth of red brick like a monk and watched it flame up, curl, and finally turn black and tumble to ash. I don’t know why I even had a yearbook. My parents must have gotten it for me because it surely wasn’t something I would have chosen to have on my own.
Anyways, enough of that. I think this post was supposed to be about a dream… Yes. The dream.
In the dream this morning, I was getting ready for my graduation, and I was terribly anxious because I just knew, knew, my cap was going to fall off and I’d be made fun of… Again. So, in this dream, I was madly scurrying about in some cabinets searching for hairpins. I needed hairpins because I wanted to have them with me in case I needed to pin my cap to my head to keep it from falling off – which is really stupid because I never had hair thick enough to pull something like that off.
I was searching and scrounging and scavenging for hairpins, and in the process, I was making a huge mess of everything because I was just tossing stuff everywhere, like in a cartoon. My mother was in the dream, and I recall she looked really worried about me as I was just flipping things about in search of hairpins. It was as if she already knew I was going to have a very rough life and there was nothing she could do about it. She knew she had bred a cuckoo. That’s the look she had. The dream ended when I finished shoving everything else back into the cabinet and it was such a disheveled mess in there and that bothered me and I hated leaving it like that, but I did. I just closed the cabinet and then I woke up.
Fast forward umpteen years and at this moment my beautiful wife is gathering the laundry and clanking dishes. I’m madly typing away at my desk. I just finished my coffee and Greek yogurt sprinkled with granola and soon I will down my daily dose of prescription medication and head off to the gym. I didn’t need high school for this. What a painful waste. I just needed a chance to be what I wanted to be. I never fit into that small rectangular box that I sternly looked out from in that burning yearbook. I never will properly fit – not like they want me to.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 