When I was a kid I would go with my dad to weekend flea markets. We’d load up his F150 on a Friday night and he’d wake me up the next morning for a trip to one of two local drive-in theaters. The South Drive-In is still in use, but the 3C was torn down years ago. This all might have been at the end of the 70s or the beginning of the 80s, I don’t rightly recall.
After I helped my dad set up his stall I’d run off to explore the grounds, the soles of my cheap tennis shoes stumbling across the oversized white gravel. I can tell you from experience that the sound of a rock striking the bottom of a drive-in movie screen not only sounds like laser fire, but if you do it hard enough, the kids gathered around the opposite screen across the grounds can hear you. SCIENCE.
We were pretty poor and I knew better than to ask my dad for money, so I looked through those stalls as though I were purchasing items with my eyes. I wanted to remember the stacks of Penthouse magazines, the Pink Floyd mirrors, the ninja throwing stars and the tables and tables of trading cards, the milk crates full of dog-eared books, vinyl records, velvet paintings, ornate lamps, enormous belt buckles, motorcycle and car parts, musical instruments, models of spaceships, giant bags of kettle corn — I mean the whole goddamned world was for sale in front of my eyes. It was something –
On Friday nights, we’d order pizza and watch Buster Keaton films on a projector in the back yard. Holy shit, I just remembered that…
Sometimes my dad would just give me stuff that he’d found in a dumpster, or picked up for five bucks at a garage sale. That’s how I got my first planner. When I opened it, I wanted to be able to fill the pages with interesting things and dates to remember and important cards for all the slots. But I was still a kid. I could have (would have, should have) filled those pages with entries like FUCK OFF ALL DAY TOMORROW – STILL ON SUMMER VACATION. I would have scribbled I DON’T KNOW ANYONE EXCEPT MY FAMILY in the address book and never even stopped to consider what it meant. Instead of observations on the human condition worthy of preserving, and lofty insights with which to inspire future generations in the notes section, I probably wrote “RODE BIKE ALL DAY.” I had no responsibilities. I was not yet in the data stream. What else was supposed to go on those pages?
The Navy has employed Smart Sailors as far back as World War II. One elite group of these trouble sniffers could tell how far off shore the German were hiding their U-boats by the flavor of the local fish. LT Chuck U. Farley picks up a chuck of sashimi with his chopsticks and takes a bite. “Thirty miles out… tastes like the crew might have picked up a flu virus in Spain.” He licks his lips, dabs at a morsel of wasabi on the corner of his mouth. “Now would be an ideal time to strike.” He licks his lips and slaps his hands together, barking and flexing his throat. The consultation is over.
Still remembers the first time he obsessed over the correct spelling of calculator,
There’s nothing worse than going to sleep hungry, especially when it’s for six months.
I’ve been dreaming about food since I went into freeze — and I mean real food, hot and proper, not the slippery nutrient crap they slop down your gullet, stuff all made of fish eggs or some such. When the Apes get orders for a new driver, they start prepping you for cold shipment to the Raceway.
You want me to tell you I’m innocent? I got news for you, friend. Everybody in this motherfucker was set up, framed, or otherwise “didn’t do it”. No one in prison is particularly guilty. We just kill for the same reasons anybody kills anymore. To stay off the Raceway.
I could tell you about Naptime, but that’s too short a tale. You get your head shaved, you get dipped in vitamins to shut your bowels down for six months while you sleep thirty-five high and eighteen wide in a frozen tube wired for sound on a one-way trip. End of story.
Imagine being spot-welded into the cockpit of a ground-bound cruise missile powered by the sun, or in this case, PEDL — the Perpetual Energy Drive Link. Once in, no out.
There’s three suns in close proximity to the Raceway. Orbiting each one is a kind of hard-core processing platform that converts energy harvested from coronal mass ejections and photon emissions into useable plasma. From there, it’s beamed several million miles to a second processor, which uses it to fuel a vehicle with so much potential for pure speed and final power that it never sees the same pilot twice.
The Mechs coat you in a special foam which constricts your body like a giant snake, forcing your blood to your brain, keeping you conscious. But once the speedometer moves from green to red, all you can do is hang on and hope your heart doesn’t burst. Crossbolts aren’t equipped with a brake.
The IRF prefers to use condemned cons, but they’ve been known to take terminally ill war heroes. Those boys volunteer in droves. Beats punching themselves in the face forever or flinging poop at the walls, a fate typical of most of the grunts involved in chemical warfare or sufferers of survivor’s guilt.
Once you’re sealed into a Crossbolt, you race until every other driver dies from exhaustion, starvation, inertia, or what the IRF terms ‘sudden involuntary deceleration’, i.e. slamming into a wall, or another driver. Then you race again.
Most of the runs don’t go beyond a day or two but on occasion you’ll get two old goats with something to prove and they’ll lap the planet again and again, meters apart, barely visible, reduced to a high-speed blip on the lap clock while the triple suns rise and set and rise again.
The action aboard the betting ships gets hotter until one of the racers finally passes out from starvation, heat exhaustion, or their skull plain ass cracks from the pressure of whipping around the surface of the globe at plus-times normal gravity. There’s no getting away from the future when it travels this fast.
The worst part of it — for me, anyway — is the cameras. There’s two of those and one microphone mounted in the cockpit of every Crossbolt. One camera sees what the pilot sees; a blurry mess of readouts and control lights just below the glass-flat surface of the planet, hemmed-in by two high walls that ring the equator and prevent escape. Crossbolt goes forward, not up. The other camera stares straight in the pilot’s face; you see the fear in their eyes in the instant before he dies. The microphone picks up all kinds of shit; screams of fear, pleas for mercy, cries for mommy, rants, raves, hallucinations, last minute confessions, a man vomiting his terrified soul back into his own face — a live broadcast the Apes are more than happy to pipe directly into our cells, day and night. I’ve known men who swallowed their own tongues or bashed their heads against the wall as a way to turn it off.
So that’s my story. If I win, I race until I die. And when I die, my soul will be thrown clear of the cockpit on a high-speed head start to a better place.
12JUN2011 – The last of the great mindships had sailed from sight and his shoulders were sore from waving goodbye when he noticed the blank sheet of paper lying on the patch of sunlit grass at his feet. Reality gathered like a cold grapefruit in his gut; the visitors were gone, but the page was still there. One was a dream. The other was very much a fact.Days after the incident, he still couldn’t write. Nothing made sense anymore and the ideas he’d birthed a decade ago were useless children to him now. Meatland technology had caught up to his imagination rendering him null, if not void…
2004 – That late night December flight to Dutch Harbor really did it for me. In the weeks preceding the wreck of the Selendang Ayu, I’d been reading a Ray Kurzweil book, one I own but cannot remember the name of. It prophesied the impending Singularity and spoke of a fantastic host of futuristic possibilities that set my hungry brain spinning in more directions than I could count. It was the right tool at the right time.
During that skeleton era I was writing for pure escapism; my boss wanted me dead and I was experiencing my first Alaskan winter on the poor. The credit wolves were sniffing constantly around our door, although the use of the word ‘our’ in this sentence is questionable. My already-troubled union was falling further and faster apart and, adding insult to injury, the fridge was always empty. I was down to my high school weight. (There was always milk and peanut butter for the young John Connor but Sarah and Reese were left to fend for themselves. Once close friends, they now hid behind library books, reading an odd or amusing passage aloud now and again from opposite ends of the room.There was no Internet, no television and nothing resembling a social life to distract them from the awful glare of silence.)
I looked forward to Friday nights; I’d put the Padawan to bed, fix myself a cup of heavy fuel and descend into the dusty black of the basement to a red-lined writing room in the bowels of the House That Drunk Built, armed with a stack of burned CDs, a piece of shit IBM ThinkPad and what was left of my imagination and I wouldn’t leave my desk until the morning sun insisted upon it.
It was during this time that KnoWare Man was born. I genuinely believe that book saved me. I put everything I had left into it and it made for a good read. It began as a short story in 2001; the dialog took a few years to focus and the plot was streamlined over the course of a hard winter or two or three. Or four. I finally released it in November of 2010 while working a case in Grand Isle, La. There were no trumpet calls or angelic choirs when I hit the ‘send’ button. Instead, I watched this video and took a moment to imagine I’d be rich someday. Then I took a healthy slug from a box of wine, made myself a bologna and mustard sandwich and began writing cutlines for work photos I’d taken earlier that day during a trip upriver in an aluminum boat. I’d already outlined my next novel so I thought I could just “whip another bottle into fire” while the crowd was still laughing, shocked by the explosion of breaking glass.
Not so fast. It turns out I’m too comfortable to write now. I live in a nice apartment on a nice street in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn and my bills are paid in full each month. My boss is only half kidding when he says he wants to kill me, and my credit score is good. Really good. I drink coconut water like it’s my fucking job and when I get antsy I do chin-ups on the bar above my bedroom door. (Sarah and John are taken care of to the best of my ability. She wisely decided we should part ways for the continued preservation of our little tribe…)
“Caterpillar to Agent Monday.” – A man spoke those words into the cuff of his jacket one afternoon last month during my subway ride home. He was standing about five feet away from me and just to my right. Maybe he was crazy, or maybe I misunderstood what he’d said. I misunderstand a lot of what I see, hear or read. That’s not a flaw. It’s a goddamn gift…
//
The sign on the truck said Green Renovations: An old man with wild eyebrows wearing a painters cap and a work shirt that’d seen better days stepped down from the cab of the truck and blinked for awhile, double-checking the address. After a smoke break, he supervised the offload of a cumbersome grey box and an industrial-strength tripod from the back of the truck as it was carried up two flights of stairs to a room at the back. The gear took a little time to set up; measurements were taken and calculations were made, switches were flicked and dials were turned. The warming machine reeked of hot ozone. Goggles were donned. When all was ready, the tech took a remote in his hand and depressed a single button with a gnarled thumb. A pointed apparatus at the business end of the device flashed once, twice, three times before a bright red line leapt horizontally across the top of the wall, leaving a hint of shadow across the paint. More adjustments were made and more dials were turned. Another trilogy of flashes filled the room before a second vertical line was scored across the left edge of the wall at a right angle, intersecting with the first. This careful procedure would be repeated for the baseboards, ceiling and remaining edges of every wall in each of the empty rooms, wrapping around doorframes, windows and outlets.
Across this burn line, the nanites would not venture. This was important. Once they were let loose, they’d eat everything up to the line and down to the treated plaster — nails, scraps and all, smooth as good whiskey. Renovation without the fuss, dust or noise. Care must be taken, however. If the box of lines weren’t properly closed off — if the lines didn’t intersect, if they didn’t go deep enough – well, there’d be almost no stopping a swarm of nanites. Accidents were common in the beginning. An inexperienced tech was responsible for an entire block being consumed by nanites thanks to a tiny gap, a simple miscalculation. Fortunately, the lifespan of a nanite is less than twelve hours so the other side of the street was spared. There are very few businesses in this city permitted to practice Green Renovation but their reputations are gold…
In an apartment down the block, a child strokes and plays with her seedCat in the triangle of sunlight pouring in through the open window of her bedroom. As the animal purrs and arches contentedly beneath her hand, small puffs of dander are released on the breeze, clinging to the splinters on the windowsill and the burrs of the brick wall beyond but not taking root. Not here. It isn’t safe. The stronger seeds will drift out to the buildings and rooftops below where they’ll begin to germinate. In just five months, a squat thorn bush with dazzling green flowers will produce five small pods the size of walnuts. Two months later, those pods will erupt with a slight pop and a crop of seedCats will tumble to the ground, blinking, mewling and ravenous for flies, leaves and twigs…
Sign on the walk: “Grand Ma Seizure’s Chicken Shack.” A line of ambulances as far as the eye can see….
Ben-wa Albuquerque, the exquisitely spoiled teenage daughter of a mega-wealthy businessman saunters down Fifth Avenue wearing little more than a smile, led along by a pair of Bengal tigers adorned in matching diamond collars. She rents them by the hour from the estate of the deposed Queen of England, who packed her bags and boarded a fast freighter for Brazil in the dark of night with nothing more than the clothes on her back and the Royal Pool Boy in tow when the shit got too real.
Ben-wa gestures and points at every object she desires in a dreamlike, languid manner, every detail of her experience having been addressed to the nth degree. Ben-wa doesn’t look at price tags, she doesn’t speak to a sales-anyone and she damn sure doesn’t want to damage her two-thousand-dollar manicure by carrying fucking parcels.
This week’s hot item: sex slaves built from salvaged vagabonds and rehabilitated paste junkies. Hose ‘em down, clean ‘em up, give ‘em their shots, get ‘em to a gym and feed ‘em a steak now and again. They’ll gladly withstand the excruciating pain of the gold-leafing sessions on a steady diet of Betty Ford’s Ashes. Frequent use turns the pupils of the user a soft, milky white.
Ben-wa’s purchases will be airlifted by silk dirigible to the roof of her enormous handcrafted Manhattan loft and arranged to perfection by temperamental interior decorators with one-word names; prepubescent protégé’s who panic and flail like windmills in a hurricane if they’re not served a brand of Swiss mineral water so exclusive it doesn’t even have a fucking name. Each portion is filtered through Natalie Portman’s twat and served in a one-of-a-kind crystal decanter made by a blind French designer whose name is far too A-list to be listed here, and chilled with icy blue shavings from an endangered Alaskan glacier…
It’s raining outside. I’m waiting for a friend in an oxygen and blood boutique on the Upper East Side. The room is populated by three scowling androgynous bicycle messengers, two Greek housewives and one trans-gendered DJ with LED sub dermal implants that jump and flash like eels in a fish tank. A nice girl-from-next-door type serves mood-enhancing ice cream behind the counter while hololamps alter the decor to match the mood of the music, pouring forth from liquid glass speakers painted across the ceiling. From where I’m sitting, I can see an old woman exiting her luxury apartment. She’s wearing the pelt of a freshly-slaughtered hipster; the empty eye sockets, the intricately tattooed flesh and magnificently waxed moustache perched high on her left shoulder as his draining irony gland weeps down the back of her dress like the trail of a snail. She’s assisted into a white stretch hansom drawn by a team of black supermodels…
R.E.S.C.U.E comes to the aid of an advertising executive who finds himself pinned down in a daytime firefight between warring cabdrivers while he’s enroute to a planning meeting. Seeking cover behind a rusting dumpster, he winces at every ricochet, emptying the contents of his regulation-issue stainless-steel briefcase onto the filthy pavement and cowering beneath it while frantically pressing a small red button on the handle, praying to fuck that his recent work on the SupraTec account has been up to par. (Employers reserve the right to discontinue their employees’ Esc@pe accounts without prior notification.) “Welcome to R.E.S.C.U.E. Please wait while I triangulate your position and plot your escape route. If you are presently in a situation which threatens your safety, please seek suitable cover…”
15JUL2011 – Good morning from 42nd gear. I am:
Listening to: Iron Maiden, Fugazi and KISS, three of the four basic food groups. Speaking of the fourth, I’m:
Drinking: Venti iced coffee (black-eye, sweetened) made with average care by some cute little barista who slaves away at the corner Starbucks. She’s got big brown eyes, perfect teeth and the good graces to laugh at my dumb jokes when I’m in the mood to make them. I like my coffee like I like my women: way too young to interest me. (I am to 4 p.m. what 3:30 is to 1:15.) And I’m:
Functioning: But barely. This week has been an experiment in sleep deprivation. I’ve been awakened every morning at 3 a.m. by the chirp of the Batphone. Sometimes every half hour. And each time I’d settle back into the soothing syrup of slumber, the motherfucker’d chirp with news of an oil sheen or a vessel collision, a swimmer lost to the appetite of a rogue wave, a jet skier grounded on a sand bar, a report of a bridge jumper or a body in the water. The lines between sleep and awake have begun to blur…
Outside my window, sunlight-dappled Battery Park is full of well-rested tourists going on about their happy affairs, expensive cameras slung around meaty Midwest necks as they pause to take snapshots of the first skyscrapers they encounter when they step off the Staten Island Ferry — which is weird, because there’s nothing on Staten Island to draw them away from Manhattan in the first place except mafia housing, sandwich shops, a methadone clinic and a boat rental agency. The once-idyllic fishing village has earned a bad reputation for being the Island of Misfit Toys and brother, when those Toys come a-charging out of the ferry tunnel like B-Boy baby bullets with bad attitudes, you don’t want to be standing in their way. A parade of used-up harpies, strung-out scarecrows and burned-down buildings of human beings trickle into the heat of the morning sun like blood from a gut wound, searching for a free cigarette and a park bench to snuggle up to, squawking at each other across the busy pavement about nothing you’d ever want to hear once you’ve washed your face and hands…
In the future, we will all have a chance to bite the hand that feeds us,
Please refrain from A) the use of a phantom fetus-conjuring blunderbuss B) the levitation of more than three novelty-themed Rubik’s cubes during a single séance, and C) the piloting of a square-wheeled tank boasting ineffective armaments in public places.
We’ll have more news of this at eleven. And now, tonight’s top story:
There’s something living behind the walls of this Brooklyn-time summer moment that paws, sniffs and stamps restlessly at the scattered ground, sifting through the raped and littered soil with a decidedly pointed hoof for telltale signs of a missing future. And as it just so happens, this creature and I are hunting the same mouse; a secret stashed safely below the surface of the immediate past and cleverly camouflaged by the present tense.
Imagine if the universe worked differently; suppose every minute in history is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained and torn down once the world finishes with it. And further contemplate that somewhere, someone decided that this particular instance, one containing a living photograph of alien world, needed to archived and viewed again for whatever reason. Okay, but why? What was so important about that moment, that planet and that dimension? Was it worth saving because it wasn’t ours? Was the archivist hoping to somehow rescue this civilization and provide a how-to or an example of how different life could be if it were DIY’d in another part of the universe? Was this about “art”? Perhaps it was the archivist’s job to catalog civilizations and somehow this fragment was inappropriately absorbed by the bandwidth of my dreams. I have no fucking clue.
What I do know is this: I’m attempting to reverse-engineer a fragment of a memory using the mnemonic equivalent of a gasoline-scented scratch-n-sniff sticker, an oft-folded illustration torn from a science-fiction magazine and a die-cast metal toy. And someone off-camera is demanding that I use these items to return a forgotten city to its former glory. The simplified instruction manual provided to me was downloaded as a zip file and stored somewhere in my skull but the link is 404’d, and now I’ve got this… thing bumping around in my not-so-big upstairs with a case of amnesia, creating unwanted bulges in my reality.
Anything I attempt to do while in this state becomes ten times more difficult; everything gets sped up and pinched, as though one were fishing for a shell fragment in a bowl of yolk. Time (yolk) is distorted, flowing faster between the outer shell of this 404′d object (thumb) and the walls of my perceived reality (bowl); images of some mysterious and misplaced Martian market become momentarily visible, projected against the ghostly flicker of heat waves of this New York Minute, brought to you in part by Friday, June 10, 2011, the letter thirteen, and viewers like you.
The good news is that I can almost feel what it was like to live in this place, but I can’t put the experience into words. Not yet. The bad news is that it has to come out.
The key to unlocking this thing’s got something to do with the way that Kanji seems at once ancient and futuristic (likewise Arabic, likewise the art of Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest), so I try to focus on that. It also smacks roundly of the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine I devoured as a teen, the art of Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), selected writings of William Gibson and the feel of films like Fifth Element and Blade Runner, where the overt alien undertones are just part of the experience:
- a Bodega cat seeks relief from the summer heat on the lid of an ice-cream freezer.
- a matronly Ugnaught of a woman, with cast-iron breasts like matching Civil War cannons, stomps and sneers and stabs at her sequined-pink cellphone with the gold-painted nails of a velociraptor, talkin’ ‘bout how she gonna “fuck that dumb bitch up!”
- a hovering trade ship from some dusty distant world waits patiently above the East River for permission to land.
… and it’s all part of the Mise-en-scène.
Primarily, it’s got something to do with that fucking sticker.
I scratch at it furiously and press my nose against it, breathing deep. It works, albeit feebly. Something churns in my stomach and my field of vision becomes momentarily faded and narrow. Encouraged, I scratch and huff at it some more. This goes on for about ten minutes. Beads of sweat begin to form along my arms and a rising sense of vertigo develops in my stomach. Now I’ve got the half-summoned memory of a lost alien world caught like a cat hair at the back of my throat and I’m desperate to cough it loose.
I cram my fingers down my throat and after a moment’s salivation I begin spewing forth watery chunks of buildings and backgrounds which slap at the pavement like horse piss on a flat rock before standing up slowly on their own, like a prizefighter ready to talk serious business at the end of the seventh round. Slumped against a wall with one hand on my knee, the sensation rises up again, coursing through me like a tidal wave as a half-completed grid of city streets soaked in stomach acid snakes forth like umbilical ropes from the enraged space between my lips, anchoring themselves to the soil like plant tendrils and immediately taking root, unfolding like ugly flowers. My jaws are pried open against miles of sewer lines and buried electrical cables and in a brief reprieve I take a few breaths in through my nose. Soon, my abdominal muscles are convulsing and contracting again as the five o’clock skyline of a world I’ve only imagined rockets the wrong way up my esophagus and my mouth gives birth to an alien sunset. It splatters first on the sidewalk before instinct drives it to its feet on doddering legs and it takes its place at the top of the page.
I gasp air for few minutes, wiping the puke from my lips and spitting out the taste of concrete and anodized metal, surveying the half-formed thing that I’ve made.
14OCT2010 – MSY – I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to leave New Orleans…
The piece of paper that sent me down here in the first place clearly stated that I was to be “(*)repeatedly stretched to the breaking point, ground into paste, ingested and excreted from the assholes of both September and October for a period of no less than sixty days at the leisure of the King of Hawaii for no good goddamn reason at all.” That I should find myself in the departure lounge, boarding pass in hand forty-four days later is a lucky break, and I have no true business staring into the mouth of a gift horse.
Howe’er.
I arrived at Louis Armstrong International only to discover that my 1130 flight back to LaGuardia had been canceled, and the next one wouldn’t depart until almost 17 p.m., getting me home at 21 p.m. Lesser men would have screamed, possibly taken hostages. And still others might have hailed a cab and headed back out in search of debauchery.
But in some weird and admittedly perverse way, this makes me happy. I’ve got the entire gate to myself, I’ve got a seat next to an outlet, and I came prepared: laptop, iPhone, headphones, journal, Sharpies, a brand new copy of Cory Doctrow’s “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”, a lightning fast Wi-fi connection, and a damn good cup of coffee.
Pending a zombie invasion, a Die Hard-esque shootout between a burned-out cop and Ze Germans, a colicky baby or some other natural disaster: I’m aces, thanks for asking.
One hour till departure: Seat near the window, bonus! Listening to: Dead Can Dance, Led Zep, Deftones. Charging: my gadgets. Checking: my email. Watching: Several hundred tons of taxi gather the much-needed speed to fuck its way into the unresisting sky. Gravity, lift, drag, and thrust. Peanuts and Sprite. Over and over, these common theme of my travels. All those people, all those aliens, all those dress shirts.., (X) ft of white headphone cord, and (Y) lbs worth of “Compounded Negative Body Issue Monthly” being spread like a fucking virus, their once-glossy corners now gently bent and fetal against the protective interior leather of designer carry-ons.
My eyes move around the room, mining the details, but wholly unable to keep pace with the flow of arriving passengers, the rolling rectangles, the designer sunglasses and three thousand other items of little to no consequence. It makes me wish I could sketch. Finally, my oculars come to rest on the matched set of thigh-high silver cylinders guarding the entranceway to Charlie Sixteen, my home of record for the next hour.
Trash cans they are, and trash cans they will stay. When one finishes ones damn good cup of coffee, one is expected to do the decent thing and force the empty paper cup into the mouth of said cylinder, where it will tumble briefly southward before coming to rest in the whispered clutches of a petroleum-based, quasi-disposable stomach lining, later to be gutted and gathered by minimum wage taxidermists whose first language is probably not English.
Look at the trash can, now look at me, NOW BACK TO THE TRASH CAN:
Out of sight, out of mind. But when you throw something away, what does away really mean? The more I stare at the cans, the more I begin to see them as something else, slowly rebuilding them in my head, swapping the plastic intestines for something else:
Suppose that when you tossed a piece of trash into the can, it was instantly incinerated, and that the energy extracted from the incineration process went toward creating the energy required to incinerate the next piece of trash, and so on, and so forth. How far ahead in our technological evolution would we have to be to pull off a stunt like that? Get back to me on this.
06JUN2010 – Hot as fuck outside, and I’m not in the mood to sit on my floor, pace my floor, sweep my floor, or get into a mental wrasslin’ match with my inner accountant about my lack of groceries as I wait for the Big Fat Paycheck that isn’t due until the first of next month.
Instead, I told myself that, historically and artistically speaking, it’s all the rage to be poor and hungry in New York. I think I bought it, so I decided to step out for a stout. Presently holding court at the Barcade, brushing up on my Galaga patterns, and penning nonsense in my ubiquitous journal, as follows:
What do the following have in common?
- Any liquor store
- An aisle of a bookstore devoted to bibles
- The cereal section of your local grocer
- Gun shops
Give up? Variations on a theme. How many different bottles of booze can one person possibly crawl into? Why are there so many versions of the Bible? How much Muesli do we really need? Isn’t one gun enough when you catch your wife making magic monkeys with your best friend?
“Well, people need choices.” No, we fucking don’t. We don’t need leopard print cell phone cases. We don’t need peanut butter AND jelly in the same jar, and we sure as fuck have no business sipping anything from a can marked JOOSE. Call me crazy, but sometimes I think free will is a loaded firearm: something best kept under lock and key, especially when there are children in the house.
P.S. Crocs were conceived as a dare. Ha, ha! Fooled you!
Common courtesy is a disease we could all stand to catch. Don’t get the sniffles, or a weekend bug. Catch a fucking plague of it. Lose your leg, if need be.
[HHG SHIPMENT ARRIVED SOMEWHERE DURING THIS TIMEFRAME. CASUALTY: ONE FLOOR LAMP]
08JUN2010 – MEMORY OF EARTH: 8th Ave subway stop, hot summer night, drunk on tequila and red wine. Across the platform, a beautiful young black girl with Cappuccino skin plucks wandering melodies from her acoustic guitar, the notes lost among the cocktail din of the other commuters waiting for the Brooklyn-bound L.
09JUN2010 – Tired from walking, stopped into Cho’s for an iced coffee. It’s just around the corner from my place. Don’t want to go home, but I’ve been wandering for a few hours now. No money, no friendly faces.
You: “Oh, but there’s so many free things to do in New Yor–.”
Me: Shut up. I know. None of them include eating.
Planet WillBurg is kinda weirding me out, anthropologically speaking. I’ve been dressing like a power nerd since Christ was a messcook: thick black glasses, courier bag, tattoos, camo shorts. It’s been my thing for years, and I’m great with it. Imagine my reaction — nay, my chagrin! — when I roll off the train to find these irony-based motherfuckers dropping out of the trees, and all of them look like me. There’s probably fifty-million dollars worth of India ink walking down Metropolitan Avenue at any given point in time! So much for being different. Not sure how I feel about it. Safety in anonymity?
I tried to strike up a conversation with the barista. It went like this:
[brief introductory chatter here, blah, blah]
Her: “So, what do you do?”
Me: (pausing, not wanting to mention government because it always gets a weird response; not quite ready to say, “I’m a writer” because my book isn’t published yet; not wanting to say something coy and asinine like, “Oh, this and that,” because that’s a fucking retard movie dickhead answer; and definitely not wanting to throw down my entire goat-choking title: crisis communications, risk management and media relations specialist…) “Uh, I’m a photographer…”
Her: (dismissively) “Oh, just like everyone else. That’ll be three-fifty.”
That’s right. I look like everyone else, and I’m here to open a gallery, just like everyone else. My mom’s paying for this coffee. I’ll be over there taking MySpace photos of myself and trying to look poor.
Guess I should go home. And do what? (Image of an action figure in blister packaging, sitting erect on the edge of a perfectly-made bed in an inspection-ready apartment. Towels folded to crisp precision, fridge gleaming – albeit empty. Glasses and plates washed, dressed to the edge of the cupboard. Floor swept, files organized by color, trash empty. Room suffocatingly silent, except for the air conditioner. Cursor blinking, awaiting further instruction.)
Part of me is thrilled to the gills at not having a social life. No distractions. Nothing to do but learn my job, aspire to greatness and write my ass off. That part of me knows I can survive for extended periods of time on nothing more than beans, rice, tuna, coffee, Sharpies, music, and social media. But there’s another part of me that knows that first part is a lying motherfucker. “Friends are a form of wealth, as is knowledge. Likewise, health.” I don’t know who said that, probably me. Plants need food, sunlight, water. Human beings need their Maslow’s met.
I have dreams where I can fly, or move objects with my mind. And in these dreams, I can feel the part of my mind that knows how to do these things. I understand the weight of the object on some deep level. I feel it rising up, moving toward me, coming to rest in my hand. But on awakening, that part of my brain reads as 404 FILE NOT FOUND. It feels like something in me has died.
I wonder what will become of these journals. Used as tinder, perhaps?
All my travels and years set free in the tears of slowly rising flames.
Maybe they’ll put stretch marks on the bottom of a trash bag. Guess it doesn’t matter, brevity of life, Pale Blue Dot, blah, blah.
Relax, people. I’m not looking to conquer anything but myself.
26JUN2010 – I’ve fallen into the Pit of Quiet. I go for days without saying much. Don’t feel like speaking. Took everything I had to dress myself and wander into the sunlight this morning. New York might be safer, doesn’t make it any friendlier. Found a series of coaxial adapters approximately three inches long on the sidewalk near my apartment. Walked along twirling this tiny technological sword of state in my fingers, hefting it, feeling the weight of the thing. Remain silent, stay hidden, Ghost Dog my way through my environment, wait for the map of familiarity to reveal itself. Muscle memory takes time to form. Someday I will think to myself, “Remember when this was all brand new?”
Sometimes a woman is a beautiful painting. She doesn’t need your consent, she doesn’t want your admiration, she doesn’t care for your conversation, she doesn’t require your loyalty, your chivalry or your complication. Sometimes she just wants to walk down a sunlit street in a pretty dress, wearing her favorite sunglasses and the sandals that took her forever to find. Sometimes she just wants to be pretty. Let her.
I’m still afraid of ending up broken and homeless; filthy and terrified, hungry and wasting, begging for the change you got from your latte and have nothing better to do with, but still won’t give it away. All my clever will be for naught, my stories will fall upon deaf ears, and that will be that. We leave this world the same way we came in.
The music is this place is god-awful, unless you’re a raging fan of Christmas 1985 Casio keyboards and tone-deaf, two-chord sorcerers wringing every nuance from a simplified rhyme structure, where every line begins with “I feel”. Makes me want to punch a goat.
Fascinating to consider that people make a conscious decision to dress as they do. Observe the wild-haired man passing by the window: “I WILL leave the house today dressed in camouflage trousers, a red tank top, worn leather sandals and a healthy stack of ‘rock guy’ bracelets on each wrist.” There must be an anthropological study on why people dress as they do. We’re like pirate radio stations, walking the street, broadcasting our likes and dislikes, wearing our hearts on our record sleeves, staying awake on strong coffee and cigarettes, exhaling into the microphone and wondering if anyone is still listening.
A song is like a piece of software, or a tool. Someone has to dream it up, write it, assemble it from the tools they have on hand (and hopefully have a working knowledge of). Then they send it out into the world. Their user/audience learns of this product, using his/her own personal network to acquire it, and is forced to make an ethical decision: “Hey, my favorite (programmer) has a new (meme/abstract analogy/external emotion experience/brain virus) available! I will (or will not) engage in the exchange of valued currency to obtain it.” For some, these programs are just background clutter, and they interact with the program on a very basic level.
For others, the program becomes something like a theme for their computer; it changes the color of their background, selects a complimentary font, or has some other effect on their overall system.
And for still others, the effect is all-consuming: it becomes a photograph, an envelope, a time capsule, a shorthand statement, a bookmark, a reminder of the state of their perception and senses during a moment in time. “Yes,” we imagine them saying. “Song X reminds me of time period Y when I was in a relationships A, B, and C with the following objects, systems, or people: [DESCRIBE FURTHER]”
I sat at the far end of the bar shoveling white cheddar popcorn into my mouth like the world wasn’t really gonna end in a week, casually eyeballing the stripper working a VFW party in the other room. She swayed along to bad music, her youthful body earning her the attention her aged spirit wasn’t really interested in.
I could have sworn I knew her from somewhere, and I sipped the darkness from my glass, delicately wiping away the condensation until her name surfaced in the foam.
Six. The stripper – sorry, the woman who took her clothes off and danced for money had a name – but she told everyone it was Six. She finished her gig, made with the smiles and the flirting, endured the hungry looks from the old farts poised atop the red pleather stools and darted into the bathroom to change, leaving soon after with the hired tough in the stupid sunglasses and the floor length duster. She’d be back – she’s in here more than she should be.
I say this as though I have room to talk.
A few hours later (told you so), she was back at the other end of the bar, half off her chair. Her head kept beat with the belch of the jukebox with all the precision of a broken-necked drunken junky rag doll riding a slow motion roller coaster to Sweden. The dark-featured man looming over her, however, was sizing her up, dressed as he was in a suit and an unbuttoned shirt. The look is called “power casual.”
I know what he’s thinking. She’s easy prey, and if he can cock block the rest of us long enough, he’ll have her TV dinner all to himself. I take another sip and look around. It’s dead for a Tuesday night; the septuagenarian soldiers engrossed in the game, the bartender, the Suit, Six, and me. I watched him paw her with a catlike smile for a good quarter of an hour, whispering sweet bullshit in her ear. She batted away his pimp hand, fluttering like a bird with a broken wing and mouthing the word “no”, but he won’t let go. He’s too hungry. I can’t even imagine what line he might be using on her, but it ain’t working.
Shit. Guess I’m the Calvary.
I sigh a heavy sigh and make my way over. My drink in my right hand, I nod to the bartender who takes a few bucks from the dwindling pile of bills where I’d set up camp.
“Hey, Six! How’s it going?” My voice breaks the spell, but she turns to me so slowly I thought I might have to slap her for a reply. Wow. She’s really bad off. To be honest, Six isn’t that great looking, but when I talked to her before she seemed a nice enough person, and this is the gentleman thing to do. That’s the only reason I’m shooing this vulture off her back.
The Suit sizes me up the way all guys do when someone barges in on their action. He probably thinks I’m after his meal. As long as we’re telling the truth, I haven’t thrown a punch in anger since the eighth grade, when I got my ass kicked by Lee Sorentino, but I’ve watched plenty of Kung-fu Theater in my time. I figure I can take him.
I glance back at Six. Her eyes are nearly closed, an Olympic ring of empty glasses in front of her. I look at the bartender, who leers back at me. He’s marked her, too. I’ll bet he’s the kind of slime who calls a cab for a girl when she’s had too much and cops a quick feel while he’s pouring her in the back of the cab so he can look like the ‘concerned big brother’ when he goes back inside. ”Aw, he’s so nice!” Fucking vultures, both of them.
I put an arm around Six and led her to a booth against the opposite wall, smiling my best Fuck You over my shoulder. She can barely walk and I’ve got my liquid muscles on. The Suit looks to be about six-four, and built solid. If he takes this any further, I could be in a lot of trouble.
After some cuff tugging on his behalf he follows us to the booth, and stands right in front of me, one hand reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. He doesn’t see Six anymore; she’s not important. It’s as if he were looking through me now, examining the insides of my T-shirt, eyeballing my spine, surveying the red metallic flake of the bench seat through my ribs, and watching my heart pound. And it is pounding.
My attention is 100% focused on his hand, like a dog waiting for a biscuit. Or a knife. Or a gun.
Finally his hand comes out.
He’s holding a tape cassette. Inwardly, I exhale with relief as he lays it on the table with a careful click and slides it over. Outwardly, I scowl and try to remember everything I’d learned about predatory animals from watching television. I think I’m supposed to hold a chair over my head so’s I can appear taller.
The Suit doesn’t say a word, this bastard. Just looks at the tape, and grins at me all shit-eyes.
“What’s this?” I demand, picking up the tape. I sipped the last of my drink, eyeing him through the bottom of the glass, a move both casual and guarded. The glass was heavy in my hand. I set it down, tape still in my other hand.
“Well, what is it?”
“Do you like science fiction?” I couldn’t place his accent.
I turned it over in my hands. There was nothing special about it, no markings or play list, just a glossy black cassette, rewound to side A.
When I looked up again, he had vanished in the sudden crowd that had gathered. I felt a strong desire to chase after him and give back the tape, but Six mumbled something and held onto my arm. It was strange, him just approaching me like that and giving me this. I shrugged my shoulders, and slipped it in my coat pocket. I was just glad he was gone.
When I got home, I dropped my keys on the table by the door, flung my coat over a chair and flicked on the lights in one rehearsed motion, grateful for the eternal mercy of the electrical company.
Something fell out of my coat. The tape. I picked it up, and put it in the stereo (the one thing I’ve not yet hocked) and pushed ‘play’, heading for the kitchen to look for food that didn’t exist.
And that’s when it hit me.
I collided with the floor, the strength sucked out of my body like air from a slashed tire. Reaching the little piece of black plastic on the stereo marked ‘stop’ was out of the question, because I lacked the iron will needed to cross the miles of cheap shag carpet that lay between us. A few feet away was as good as forever.
It was the sound of an entire civilization, dying all at once.
I felt my throat choke up, clogged with the horrifying sensations of some terrible doom which flooded my brain. I can’t even describe it without crying, that’s how bad it was. Then again, that doesn’t even come close.
All I could do was lie there in a puddle making a lot of weird noises, and shivering like a leaf while something dark and intangible poured out over the room from my speakers, crawled through my ears and kicked down the door of my mind.
The real bitch of it was, I saw my cassette player was set to ‘loop.’ After that, I blacked out.
Consciousness returned like a red beast in a dark tunnel. Bright sunshine silhouetted against my crusted eyelids, and my face was stuck to the pile of sick on the floor. I was badly dehydrated, and my pants were literally full of shit. I had been there for days before the electric company shut off the power – I seem to recall drinking the money meant for the bill.
And, I can’t get rid of the tape. No one else will take it. I’ve tossed it in the river, left it in the street and mailed it to Rhodesia with no return address. When I got home there was a package in my mailbox from motherfucking Rhodesia. I would have known what it was without even tearing it open, but I did it anyway. It just sat there in my hand, smooth and black. Mocking me.
There are no scratches across the surface from smashing it with a rock, and no marring of that inky ribbon after dousing it with lighter fluid and setting it on fire. I fed it down the garbage disposal for almost two hours – all that did was piss off my neighbors.
I’ve got a court case next week, the small matter of a B&E. I broke into the junkyard and tried to erase it with one of those giant magnets they use to pick up cars. Imagine how my story sounded to the cops when they busted me.
So I’m stuck with what I presume is an alien artifact I don’t dare play and can’t get rid of. I can’t eat proper, can’t sleep. My landlord is ready to evict me, I got fired from the last job in this shitty town when I didn’t bother to show up for a week, and now I find out Six has spreading rumors that I took her home that night and fucked her in a “very uncomfortable” place. Nothing could be further from the truth.
