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.
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.
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Broken wanderers. Space mice. Toe signals. Crap melons. Divided thesaurus. Purple dinosaurs. Egg cabbage. Lettuce wraps. Feet sores. Mice house. Calm attack. Divine moons… Nine moons.
There was:
The Conch moon.
The Devil moon.
The Gun Barrel moon.
The Black Button moon.
The Radial Eye moon.
The Turkish Comet moon.
The Phone Dial moon.
The Blood Smear moon.
The Red Chili moon.
They were all displayed on a window tapestry in a room of all red and gold. It was the place of tomorrow. It was the place of two weeks ago. It was the place of leftover laundry and moans. The world was becoming different out there. He stared at the door many times a day. He would crack it open for just a moment and peer out. The traffic was too much. The noise was too much. He wanted to create a real living being. He wanted a character that would move somebody, a character more than just a slice of cardboard.
He returned to the typewriter table, sat down, and stared at a piece of bleached paper. It was brighter than the sun. An ape came out of the fibers. He was white, too, with red eyes. His name was Grant, and he was reminiscent of Grant Goodeve. Think about it. Eight of them, but nine moons.
He sought a calm device. He sought a miracle drug and blue soda fizz in the window of the dime-store soda pop shop with its white counters with gold flecks and the silver stumps for the stools topped with red vinyl discs that spun like the galaxies.
Everybody AI now, creating with AI, the cheap gauntlet texts unfurled like red ribbons. Gibbons. Another sort of primate. Gate keeper. Toast peeler. Potato roaster. Midnight coaster. Soul tingler. Tiger sauce. Scrambled eggs for brain trains.
Baguette ragdolls pirouette like cold river salmon. Bear claw swipes, a rabid bite. The hurricane of the heart stretches out like pink taffy in the summer sun. The odd roofer carries a hammer and a satchel. He’d rather be walking with a scythe for all the stupidity the world reflects.
Breathe through the pineal. Hope stirs like a West Texas sandstorm, shitstorm, trash cyclone. Fast-food bags skitter across the landscape because people just don’t give a damn. AI hoot owl will clean it all up. Trash the planet, trash the kids. Trash the hearts and souls of men. Sick to the stomach via the most senseless things, those that should be senseless.
Hobbled voodoo at the crack of dawn. There it is. Another day.
He was feeling restless in his overheated testicles on that day when everything changed.
The man named Steeple resembled a yellow wooden pencil as he shimmied down the sidewalk and away from the store on Story Street that sold mostly women’s lingerie and unmentionable undergarments. One of the clerks in the store had caught him grotesquely fondling frilly panties that were displayed like religious pamphlets on a table in the center of the store. He had been quite brazen about it, too—whispering unspeakable things and moaning. The clerk forcefully asked him to leave.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy I’m in trouble,” he said aloud to himself in a sing-song kind of way in his getaway. He walked rapidly, his long legs skating along awkwardly, arms pumping, elbows cocked out to the side. He kept turning around to look to see if anyone was following him. His head spun in all directions as he scanned the cityscape for a fresh poppin’ police cruiser tailing his ass. There were none.
He ducked into a small park and hid behind a tree. He suddenly had the urge to make pee and he undid his zipper and let it out. A woman holding a small child by the hand saw him as they passed by. “What are you doing!?” she cried out. She whipped the child around so she wouldn’t be able to see him.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy I’m really in trouble now!” the man who resembled a yellow wooden pencil said, and he quickly zipped up and scurried off like a frightened small mammal.
“You’re a pig!” the woman called out after him. “You should be behind bars!”
Steeple started to run, tripped, and fell, and then hurriedly got back up again. He had ripped his pants when he fell and could hardly stand it. He went straight off to see Mr. Calypso, the tailor on Harding Street.
A small bell attached to the door jingled when he walked in. “Hello… Mr. Calypso! Are you here!?”
A short man with flowing white hair and a big white moustache wriggling beneath his swelled nose emerged from the back of the shop. “Oh, hello there, Steeple. How are you?”
“I’m having a rough day,” Steeple replied. “A very rough day. And now my pants are torn… Right here in the knee.” He displayed the rip to him.
“Oh, my,” Mr. Calypso said, and he came out from behind the counter to take a closer look. “Take them off and I’ll get them fixed up for you.”
Steeple looked around the dim shop. “Right here? But people will see me in my underwear.”
Mr. Calypso bent his head down and looked at him judgmentally over the top rim of his glasses. “Do you think I have that much business?” He waved a hand in the air. “No one will come in, but if it makes you feel any better, you can come sit in the back with me while I work. Okay?”
“But then you’ll see me in my underwear.”
Mr. Calypso shot him an annoyed glance. “It’s underwear, Steeple. Everybody wears underwear. If you want, I’ll take my pants off, too. Then we’ll both be in our underwear. Okay?”
“That’s fair,” Steeple said, and he followed the old man to the back of the shop and the area where he did all his work.
“Now,” Mr. Calypso began as he undid his pants and stepped out of them. “I’ll just sew on a patch, okay?” He folded his own pants neatly and set them aside before spreading Steeple’s pants out on a broad table. He sat down on a stool and clicked on a light and went to work repairing the pants. “So, what’s this about a rough day. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Just between you and me?”
“Just us, my friend.”
“I got caught messing around in the women’s lingerie shop.”
Mr. Calypso suddenly stopped what he was doing. “What? What kind of messing around?”
“I was just touching the women’s underwear.”
“More god damn underwear! What’s with you and underwear?”
“Yours are funny looking, by the way.”
Mr. Calypso looked down for a moment at his plain white briefs. “Never mind that!”
“Have you ever touched a pair of women’s panties?”
Mr. Calypso chuckled as he went back to fixing Steeple’s pants. “It’s been a few years.”
“They’re so nice. So soft and lacey and… I just can’t help it. I mean, men’s underwear are like tool bags, whereas women’s underwear are like cradles full of lullabies.”
Mr. Calypso looked at him strangely and shook his head to cast off the words Steeple just uttered. “And so, what happened? You were touching them and then what…?”
“The lady that worked there, she like, yelled at me to stop and I ran out of the store.”
“Well… I don’t think they’ll send you to prison.”
“And then some woman and her kid caught me peeing in the park. That’s when I ran off, fell, and ripped my pants.”
Mr. Calypso laughed out loud. “Oh, my. You have had quite the day. Ooo hoo. Anything else?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Come on,” Mr. Calypso said. “Don’t be so glum. It could be worse. It can always be worse.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“I am right. I’m always right.”
They were silent with each other for a while as the tailor finished his work on the pants and then presented them to him. “Good as new,” he said.
“Thanks,” Steeple said, and he hopped off the stool where he had been sitting and put the pants back on. “What do I owe you, Mr. Calypso?”
“Don’t worry about it… Think of it as the one good thing that happened to you today. Free pants repair. I know it’s been bleak.”
“I appreciate it… I’ll see you around.”
Steeple walked out of the tailor shop and went up two blocks to a coffee house. He ordered a regular coffee and a piece of cherry pie. He sat in a small booth by a window. He sipped at his coffee and poked at his pie with the tips of the fork tines. “Oh, boy, oh boy, oh boy, I’m a damn fool,” he whispered to himself.
A moment later something in the corner of his eye caught his attention. It was a red balloon floating listlessly in the air. He followed the white string down and saw that it was tied around the wrist of a young girl. It was the girl from the park, and her eyes were boring into him like the gigantic drilling machine in the movie At The Earth’s Core.
The girl tugged on her mother’s sleeve and when the woman realized who it was, she thrust out her pointer finger and yelled across the restaurant, “That’s the man who made pee in the park! Security!”
Steeple panicked. He roughly got up from the table and ran out of the coffee house without paying the bill. He ran and ran and kept on running. A police cruiser eventually rushed up beside him; it’s lights suddenly illuminated and there was the blurp blurp sound of warning.
Steeple could run no more, and he hunched over and placed his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. The new patch felt strange against his palm. He could see the officers approaching. Then once again from the corner of his eye, something caught his attention. There was someone sitting in the back of the patrol car. It was Mr. Calypso the tailor and he was scowling back at him and wagging a finger of shame in Steeple’s direction.
“Oh boy, oh, boy, oh boy,” Steeple mumbled as the officers of the law roughly put him up against the outside wall of a building. “It was all just a trick. Life is nothing but a trick.”
CEREAL AFTER SEX 