*A new car owner’s work of mostly deniable fiction

LISTEN… GET THIS… I put off buying a car for as long as I could.  Wait, you did what now?  Yes, it’s completely true.  Allow me to explain.

I can’t properly put it into words but I think the decision was delayed due to my fear of crashing.  While some find the concept erotically stimulating  it’s just not my cup of coffee.  For a man so fastidious, so focused and organized I’ve got a reputation for being a tad scatterbrained.  As such, I maintain a healthy flicker of fear for T.S.I.I.T.T.W.F.M. (The Singular Instant In Time That Waits For Me.)  This instant, this animal, this entity has my name scrawled across its forehead in Fate’s finest Sharpie.  And having burned up the majority of my nine lives doing stupid shit in my youth (climbing grain silos in the rain, dodging buses at night, drowning in broad daylight,) I’m perpetually concerned that my debts will be called in, that I’ll wind up in a life-altering motherfucker of an accident, bent and broken like a flesh pretzel with nothing more than a feeding tube, Maury Povich and the Machine That Goes Beep for company.  (Actually, that’s not a bad name for a band, must remember to write it down…)

But seriously, people.  Operating a motorized vehicle is no joke.

I’ve been ‘bike guy’ for the majority of my life and it’s helped to keep me lean, not to mention clear-headed.  Traveling at speeds well below 20 mph has given me a lot of time to think.  It’s kept me safe.  Even if I’ve had to leave early for every job I’ve ever held; even if I’ve had to dress like an REI store mannequin and fit my entire day into the bag on my back; even if I knew that biking would severely limit my social (read: dating) life, I was more than happy to be ‘bike guy.’ Maybe I was (probably okay definitely) hiding from responsibility, thinking that perhaps I could just go without owning a car.  I mean, lifelong New Yorkers get along fine without cars, right?  Yeah, if you ignore their inability to leave the city when the shit hits the fan.  Most probably definitely among these reasons would be because I’m a speed freak.  At least I used to be.

In ten years of driving before ever owning my first vehicle — a delicate old ’77 VW Bus which was incapable of going more than 65 mph without trembling like a frightened crack puppy in a cold hallway — I managed to come this close to wrecking just about every vehicle I climbed behind the wheel of.

There was the riding lawn mower I drove straight into a tree when I was 19.  I could have turned.  I had plenty of time.  But I wanted to know what it was like to wreck.  So I mashed the gas down and just tackle fucked that tree, much to my neighbor’s chagrin.  I flew off the seat, unharmed of course.  The engine stalled out, the cowling was bent to shit and I had to pay to get it fixed.  I claimed I’d lost control. I just wanted to see what would happen…

There was the rented Alfa Romeo I nearly totaled in Sicily.  We were doing a dog-and-pony show, (read: staged ordinance upgrade) for the benefit of three NATO officers who’d be breathing down our necks for a solid week.  Naturally, they needed rental cars.  Two low-ranking friends and myself were given the task of retrieving those cars from the Catania airport.

Think on it:  Three… blood-red rentals… 1994 Alfa Romeo Spiders.  I’m in Sicily.  I’m 23.  I’ve got a mix tape full of Ministry and little-to-no common sense.  You do the math.

The speedometer was pegged hard over from the moment we left Fontanarossa Airport and headed out onto the open road, E45 moving south along SS 194 toward Lentini.  At one point, we were weaving in and out of traffic, passing other cars like they were standing still, like we were auditioning for the fucking Italian Job.  The Alfa handled the straights like a leather-lined missile and I remember being fascinated by just how far to the right I could actually get that big red needle to go.  The music couldn’t keep up with the car.  They were simply two separate occurrences.

Looking back, I’m lucky I wasn’t killed.  I’m fortunate that I didn’t collide with another driver, as Italians are known for turning a two-lane road into a five-way thoroughfare, complete with pull-off-and-chat lanes and a cart for the espresso.  Then again, Italians are far superior drivers.  They make all the best cars.  (And women.)

I was so caught up in the moment — the Ministry, the metal-meat-momentum of the thing — that I misjudged a hairpin turn just south of the Lentini-Carlentini interchange, which immediately unfolded from an overpass and opened onto a scenic vista.  There was a clutch of cars parked in the right-hand lane; tourists admiring the sun-soaked Sicilian view.  And me, headed right for them at a high rate of speed.

With what I felt was a crashing, fiery death fast approaching, I pulled hard on the emergency brake and shoved my brake foot through the floor to avoid slamming into them.  The tires screamed and shrieked, and my heart was in my throat.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared.  The Alfa went into a mean counter-clockwise spin, throwing dust and rocks in every direction and nearly coming up on two wheels before bouncing to a halt in the center of a dirt divider maybe 15 yards short of the group.  There was nothing spy movie about it.  Tunnel vision had taken over.  There was vertigo and physics and I was only partially aware of the steering wheel in my hands.  When it stopped and my vision opened up, I’d run through a rock bed and over the bare edge of a discarded metal guardrail in my quest to not die, and now the Alfa sat there fuming and ticking angrily.  There was smoke in the air and the smell of burning rubber.  The Italians weren’t coming any closer, but, not wanting to stick around for the frantic Q&A session to follow I got the engine started and stomped the gas, revving and shifting wildly in an effort to get moving.  But I was stuck.  The underside of the car was caught fast on a sawed-off section of rebar that probably once held a road sign reading something to the effect of: “Rallentare suo figlio di rotolo!” (Slow your roll, son!)

Point of urgency: The follow van that dropped us off at the airport would be coming around the corner in less than one minute with some semblance of authority behind the wheel, which meant a lot of complicated questions and definitely some entries for my permanent record.  Fortunately, the third and more cautious of we three caught up with me first, and together we bounced the rental free.  It was leaking fluid and some small — probably very important — pieces all the way back to the base, and one of the tires went limp like a weak handshake along the way.  We got the wheel swapped out and closed the trunk just as the NATO posse showed up.   I held my breath for five days but nobody else seemed to notice that a fine Italian motorcar was unraveling like a steampunk sweater, much to my relief.  It would be a few months before I drove again, but there would be other displays of stupid.  It was always just me taking my luck for a spin, revving the engine, watching the needle move toward the right.  I just wanted to see what it would do…

There was a time in my life when I lived cash and carry, owning only what I could cart on my back.  I honestly never thought I’d make it this far in life.  I figured my own stupidity would be my retirement plan, and that I wouldn’t need to worry about owning a house or a car or anything of real value because I’d be dead.  I walked or biked for most of my life, relying on the adversity to make me stronger.  I took stubborn pride in doing everything the hard way.

That era has passed  — although I can still pick up everything I own by myself – and I have nothing left to prove.  The era of collecting dangerous stories is just about over.  Trees grow, stars die and times have changed; new laws and consequences have come into play, and penalties are more rigidly enforced.  I’m responsible now.  The Fear and Loathing of Pretty Much Anything is a thing of the past.  Pack your bags.  We’re all moving to the No Thrill Zone.

Anyway, it was high time to get over the fear of myself.  I bought a new car.  I compared five models for best prices, respective crash test ratings (!), turning radius, fuel efficiency and legroom; nothing too fast and nothing too crazy.  I researched every step of the signing process and brought along a trusted friend who knows a thing or three about cars.  (And beer.  And cards.)  But even after all that planning for a safe respectable 2008 Honda Element, I drove away in a 2012 VW Beetle that was on the top of my WANT list, a silvery sleek thing with just a little extra under the hood.  It had one prior owner who lived in Utah, babied the hell out of it and put less than 14,000 miles on the engine.  It’s still under the original warranty.  Seriously, I couldn’t have gotten a better deal if I’d paid a dollar for a dune buggy that I’d bought from Willie Nelson.

The sticker shock faded within a few days – after all, it’s just time, numbers and payments.  I spent the first two weeks waiting for it to get stolen, kamikaze smashed by a renegade tree limb as an act of revenge for that sapling I tackle fucked with a tractor lo those many years ago, or inexplicably sudden falling apart.  But no, the Beetle is a product of good German engineering.  I will take good care of this car.  There will be frequent oil changes and scheduled maintenance.  I’ve actually read the owner’s manual.

Believe it or not, I’ve grown exceedingly cautious in my later years.  I drive with a GPS and a full tank of gas.  My mirrors are flawlessly adjusted.  I brake gently.  I have a full roadside emergency kit and good insurance.  I drive with two hands on the wheel, and I’m never in a hurry…

Except for those times when the road is absolutely empty and perfectly straight, the sky is blue, and there isn’t another car in sight.  Then, and only then will I turn up the stereo as Al Jourgensen and I discover exactly how far to the right I can get that big red needle.

When I was in the 5th grade, I couldn’t wait to read Popular Science each month.

Not only for the articles, but for the “What’s New” feature, usually located near the center of the magazine. And typically the item was exciting on its own, but sometimes my space-bound imagination would turn the “thing” into a moon cruiser, or a spaceship, or a robot suit, or whatever. This was the era of coffee table books featuring sci-fi pulp covers and *good album art.

What I’m getting at is that one had to LOOK for futuristic inspiration. In the 9th grade, I started an apprenticeship in our school’s graphic arts program where I studied to be a printer. (Three years of paper cuts, darkroom work and getting bombed on developer/fixer to the lush sounds of Black Sabbath, scrubbing ink out from under my nails every day, and obsessive font worship made instantly Dinosaur by the desktop publishing revolution just one year later!) There were stacks of art books just lying around the shop, and I’d flip through them looking for glimpses of the future. I used to tear out the pages and hoard them away. I was searching for something tangible.

(Insert 20 years of sci-fi movies, books, television shows, comics, toys, and mirroring advancements in science, technology and communications)

It’s now 2013. I have often said that the future will be here in five minutes, but fuck it – the future is here. It’s sitting across from me sipping a f*cking latte and judging my Twitter feed. I don’t think 5th-grade me had any idea what the future would really hold. I don’t care that law-enforcement drones are flying overhead, or swimming around in our ports, or crawling through the earth looking for pot tunnels. Because I don’t do anything (*anymore) that would warrant their attention. And while I’m still mystified and in awe of technology, I expect it. I almost ignore it.

Because reality has caught up with my imagination. And that SUCKS.

TWM out

27JAN2013 – Riding the bus for groceries, I fantasized an enormous, transparent millipede some 30 feet in length with an elongated cylindrical body and approximately 100 legs.

The head of the creature is probably rounded above and flattened below and bears large mandibles like jellyfish arms, and iridescent skin that reflect various purples and subdued greens like soap bubbles under bright lights.

The ‘Pede feeds on one squealing, terrified sewer rat per night, and in return secretes a generous lather of anti-bacterial soap.  It first snags its prey with a 12-inch tongue, lashing out with pinpoint accuracy and injecting it with a fast-acting neurotoxin.  It will devour its meal, which takes approximately thirty minutes and then, as a means of aiding in digestion and exercise, it will slowly writhe and thrash its way around the inside of an empty city bus which is locked behind the chain link fence of the service yard.  Passersby may hear the occasional thump, or see the head of a translucent thing appear briefly in the window, and perhaps the backlit shadow of its dinner midway along its body.  There are ‘Do Not Enter’ signs posted at every entrance of the service yard.

With its many legs and body length moving in a wavelike pattern, the ‘Pede could easily force itself into various nooks and crannies around the interior of the bus.  One hundred soapy tendrils, each the length of a grown man’s forearm, will individually collide with a satisfying wet smack against the grimy windows, the filthy black floor and the choking off-cream of the ceiling, smearing each with a thick layer of disinfecting gel.  One million brush-laden cilia covering its skin will scrub hard away at the filth of memories and abandoned skin cells left by the cities hordes of traveling dejected who use the Public Troop Transport on a daily basis to acquire pudding packs, depressing glossy magazines featuring heavily doctored images of other equally depressing people, and mesh bags of low-grade oranges.

When the first shift comes in, they hook an access tube to the side of the bus and open the doors, luring the ‘Pede down the tunnel with the promise of a second, equally terrified rat.  Once it is coiled safely back in its large, glass tank, the inside of the vehicle is hosed down with hot water to rinse off the excess soap.  The windows are squeegeed, the floor is given a good buffing and the last traces of soap are wiped away with clean towels before the bus heads out to pick the first commuters of the day.

Conversation overheard at the back of the bus between two teenage girls:

First girl: “Please, thugs don’t be using Instragram.”

Second girl: “If I was a thug, I wouldn’t be caught dead posting no pictures of myself. Them boys is silly,” she said, her voice assuming a gruff, masculine tone.  ”They be like, ‘Take my picture, no homo stuff.’”

TWM

Just wanted to let you all know that I’ve been tapped as a contributing writer for DigitalNoms. My first piece, a review of Ready Player One, is now available for your electronic chewing satisfaction. I’ll continue to update this site as well.

(In addition, work is progressing on my second novel ’1582 – The Ballad of Joe Parsons’, which I hope to finish up in 2013.

You can buy my first novel here.

Kicking ass and (something… something?) names,

TWM

As such, he’s managed to rack up a considerable amount of comp points from time spent at the tables.  And so, he invited me to help him celebrate his birthday at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.  We churned through his limited CD collection, mocked the Aussie accent of his GPS and braved a snowy mountain pass during the three-hour drive in his old pick up truck.  These are my notes from being in a casino for pretty much the first time.

Step out of the elevators and there it is, the promise of the American Dream we’ve all read about.  This is the killing floor, make no mistake of it.  The bright carpet designed to disorientate, the jarring lights and the free booze.  The wild flash from an army of Japanese-seizure machines hammers away at my senses, strobe lights promising a payout so big you’d have to be crazy to believe.

The seniors manning the slots are caricatures of beings who should be playing slots; satin jackets with the sleeves pushed up, an over-sized visor, once-fit bodies gone all pear-shaped with time and skin like luggage, one hand making the rounds; a non-stop triangle between the drink, the half-smoked Pall Mall and the PLAY button.  This one’s up $250.  I peered too closely and received an eye scolding for my troubles.

The fairway of betting tables runs along the center of the room in opposition to the jingle-jangle of the penny slots, with the pit enjoying a protected spot in the very center.  The comforting green felt of the poker table, the mechanical dance of the dealer’s hands, all actions are decisive, clean and clear.  No room for mistrust here.  Everything is on the up and up.  Real money is at stake.  Each gesture by the dealer is like secret sign language transmitted to the black blisters lining the roof of the casino; everything is under the close watch of cameras.

Periodically, the occasional outbursts of a five-dollar win, a whoop-and-hands-up victory against the big machine.  The whiskey is free as long as you’re playing, so why not feel good about it?

Hours into it.  The tickle of cigarette smoke burns my eyes; the weight and click of the chips in my hand spooks me somewhat.  This isn’t real money.  None of this is real. Speaking of, the world is supposed to end Friday.

I have grown numb to the lights.  While I’m having a good time, I’m also pleased to see I don’t have a true gambling bone in my body.  Can’t imagine being a prisoner here, chained to the lure of the “Super Diamond” promise, a nickel and penny death sentence.  Pensioners pitted against the odds for survival.  Hairnets and dog food.

The feeling of emptiness prevails.  I won for a little while, but stopped caring after my first $100 went south.  After that, I was hesitant to stick my fingers in the lion’s mouth.  This is not my scene.  Craps is over my head where numbers are concerned.  The room is too loud, and I’m struck dumb.  I need silence, now more than ever.

There is a generally amicable spirit among the strangers, each evoking similar body language while engaged in the choke of small talk; hands to heads, deep exhales, fingers on tumblers full of ice and amber-colored hammers.  Watch the game.  “Go!  Go!”

Each tick of the second hand is an eternity mingled with the stench of cigarettes and the tired hope that one lucky hand will turn the tide.  The big break.  Too bad fortune favors the house.

I sip my Wild Turkey and summon Harrah’s history on my phone:  First established in Lake Tahoe when William F. Harrah purchased George’s Gateway Club in January 1955 for $500,000 and opened Harrah’s Lake Club on June 20, 1955… In 1963 Barry Keenan, Joseph Amsler and John Irwin abducted Frank Sinatra, Jr., the 19-year-old son of singer Frank Sinatra, after his performance at the South Shore Room opening for George Jessel… Harrah’s Lake Tahoe earned the first five-star diamond rating in casino history for a $25-million renovation… On December 3, 2005, a shootout occurred in a private booth near the casino floor.  One person was killed, and two Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputies were injured… Past performers have included Burt Bacharach, Blue Oyster Cult, Moody Blues, Night Ranger, Rick Springfield, Cold War Kids, Lawrence Welk, David Lee Roth and everyone’s favorite red-haired stranger, Willie Nelson, to name just a few…

Linden Place, the Short North, Columbus, Ohio, just around the corner from the Busy Bee Auto Shop staffed by the Last of The True Greasers, relics with names like Goose and Duck stenciled onto their work shirts.  Slicker smiles and more carefully combed coifs you’re not likely to find on a bunch of guys who spend their day crushing Budweiser cans underfoot in the dusty gravel parking lot as they tell you precisely why the ‘51 Mercury was such a superior ride, and what a hot piece of ass they were allegedly fingering not twenty years ago.  “Out to here!”  Exaggerated gestures.

Follow this flashback further in to the house on the corner lot, and through the open window to an oval dining room table overlooking a dog-shit battleground of a back yard and what could have been a nice patio in another neighborhood.  This is the place my poker education should have begun; in a room with a framed mirror of Bruce Lee on the wall, country and western albums playing on the hi-fi and a liquor cabinet full of Jim and Jack and Jose.  The devil lives in the details and I remember clearly my stepbrother’s black leather Zippo case that lived on his belt as he strutted and rasped and grumbled, doling out his wisdom.

Everybody wears the Yoda hat come last call, but nobody had more to offer on the subject of cowboys and ladies, deuces and pistols and miners than my stepbrother (also named Mike), with a head full of pepper and the voice of Sam Elliot on morphine. The slow miles I spent riding shotgun in an 18-wheeler with Mike behind the wheel as the white lines rolled along were my early education in arcane greaser knowledge.  I was subjected to decades worth of dubious stories with, conveniently, no one left alive to confirm or deny the specifics.  (Exaggerated gestures:  “Out to here!”)  It was as if he knew, somehow, that I wasn’t from this world.  Like maybe he was hoping I’d take this secret information and run away with it, preserve it while there was still time. He could sense my thirst for knowledge. There was some take away in all of this; I learned to clean up nice and walk tall, and I learned to keep shut when I had nothing useful to add.  I’m not sure what he thought was going to happen to me in my lifetime, but he was the first person to tell me to always pay attention to the exits and never sit with my back to the door.

Sadly, I only retained enough about poker to be dangerous to exactly no one, and for the life of me I’ll never understand Euchre.  I think it’s actually a requirement to be a resident of the state of Ohio at this point.

It’s early.  It’s late.  It doesn’t really matter.  But it’s true that dealers are harder to reach than strippers.  Tipping the dealer is an awkward maneuver and feels not unlike offering a stripper a sincere compliment or a bouquet of flowers.  Friendly banter bounces off an invisible wall.  The three-card dealer on the late shift has the sharp glacial, facial features common to Eastern European women.  She is cold, Polish and therefore beautiful.  She doesn’t laugh easily, have a favorite sports team or think highly of chitchat.  She isn’t paid to.  I look down at the green felt surface at the faded and repeated image of a tall pine tree, nearly mistaking these imperfections for a series of identical drink spills across the silent sanctity of the felt, like oopsy-daisy fractal patterns.

“You have such expressive hands.”  I don’t know why I said it.  I might as well have told her I was admiring the shape of her skull, but that’s been done too…

“Oh?”  The voice replies, the face does not.  Shuffle, slide, and deal.  Every cards lands perfectly, as if flown in on miniature guide wires.  Dealers must have cast iron hearts.  I wonder if they get beaten with bamboo poles or something equally disturbing to harden them against the song and dance routines they hear every day, akin to those who’ve given up on giving money to the homeless.

“Are you in or out, sir?”  Some smile and nod, but not many.

Music: “One more / silver dollar…” Here and now: Mike wins $250 on a single hand.  Earlier tonight, he won a royal flush on a poker machine with three to one odds.  It doesn’t seem to faze him much.  No ripples in his lake, zero emotion.  Lights another Parliament.  This windfall was more or less expected.  He makes a swipe on the table with the cards in his left hand held face down.  He goes, and goes, and he goes.

Sleep deprivation makes every thing really neat, and as coherent thought begins to leave me I finally know what bugs me about this place.  This whole thing is right out of an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series: Starbuck and Boomer discover paradise, a vast underground network of entertainment and gambling venues packed with humans from the Colonies, some of who’ve been there for months, years even.  Meanwhile, Apollo thinks he’s found the Tylium that the Galactica needs for fuel. Bonus! But then he’s surrounded by a horde of insectizoid aliens known as Ovions.  Foreshadowing!  Long story short, several drunks take elevators to their hotel rooms in order to get space busy with some space ladies but wind up in the deep bowels of the planet where they’re seized by Ovions and paralyzed for use as food for Ovion hatchlings.  So I’m going to be real careful when I go to my room, because fuck flies…

And I’m gonna go soon because I ache in all parts of my body from need of substance and emptiness of heart.  My body is numb and my brain hurts.  Yet waves of disjointed rock lyrics continue to attach themselves to the soft tissue walls of my thoughts, digging in, taking root like a seed to a tree, ivy to a brick wall.

The music is the sort of sound that reminds me of brushed-aluminum front stereos, giant volume knobs, backlit dials and giant cloth-covered speakers from those early days when people still gave a flying fuck about hi-fi systems.  See also: the era of the state fair, before that shit went completely over to the meth heads.  Hearken back to a simpler time… stoner chicks named Roxanne or maybe Carla, probably wearing a Panama hat with a Pink Floyd band, definitely red-eyed winners of Led Zeppelin mirrors.

Music: “Sitting in a smoky room/ the smell of wine and cheap per-fuuume…” Every three minutes, a girl in a white vest and glasses in the center of the room lets out a whoop of joy.  The rest of the casino rolls their eyes, visible to me as millimeter wave bands of exhaustion rippling here and there throughout the room.  I can see how tired I am.

A waitress shuffles in from the late shift.  She’s visibly tired.  With a heavy sigh, she takes a seat, waves for a drink and neatly fans three Benjamin’s onto the felt.  “Change out $300,” intones the dealer.  Pop the clutch on the night, shift gears and reshuffle the small talk.  Move the music dial along to Rush and Neil Young.

The girl in white gives another shout.  Again the ripples, the rolling eyes.

The guy at the next table gives his girlfriend’s near-perfect ass a subtle but affectionate squeeze under the roulette table.  Once, twice, and thrice for luck.  There’s every possibility that her soft sighs and moans will be captured in the fabric of the hotel room curtains later tonight, ensnared in the bedspread, trapped in the fibers of the rug and preserved as ghost passion like leftover human radio signals.

The fog lifts.  I’m up $60 on poker and $100 on Clue.  And that’s as good as I’ll do here.  But let me tell you this: never lay a $50 bill on the blackjack table.  Old timers will glare at you as they slink away, like maybe you got a weird thing for horses.

Ad in a magazine offering over-the-phone plastic surgery consultation from the comfort and convenience of your room: “Yeah, it sounds like you’re pretty ugly. We’ve got a suitcase ready, we’ll be right up.  Don’t worry, we’ll make things good again.”

(From my Twitter feed) @TWM71: They’re playing Steely Dan at the bar.  I mention offhandedly that the name comes from a sex torture device in a Burroughs novel. #MoodKiller

(Reply fm @myauralfixation) @TWM71, Urban Dictionary says: Proper name of a steam powered dildo from the novel “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs.

(From a letter to a friend I drafted on my phone during this time) “Hullo some more from Harrah’s.  It is now 3 a.m.  We’re closing down the bars one at a time.  Into ginger and Crown, beer is no good on long nights.  I usually drink Guinness.  Devil gin isn’t right for tonight and Wild Turkey is only for certain occasions.  (“It’s over too quick if I use the nun chucks.”)  But G&C is a long haul drink, likewise Bloody Mary’s.  Vitamins or some such, I’m told.  They’re playing Led Zep on the game floor.  There’s a quiet crowd tonight, small clutches of conversation grouped around the brightest lights like moths bleeding clots of tens and twenties.”

No serious betting taking place anywhere now.  We, the species, in order to tell more perfect stories, gather such events in the window-boxes of our experience, like common garden spices.  These become our credentials when we grow old.

Later, drinking too much Irish coffee and shooting craps.  I can’t make a lick of fucking sense of this game.  I’m starting to hear music that isn’t playing over the PA system.  “I’M GOING OFF THE RAILS ON A CRAZY TRAIN!”  (Guitar solo.)  Seriously, this game is more confusing than watching bees fuck in the center of a Chinese traffic jam.  Maybe it’s all this devil booze.  Probably.  There is no point looking at my watch now.

“Peace be with you / and also with you.”  Now where the hell did that come from?  I’m not fucking Catholic.  (I’m not fucking anyone, truth be told…)

How long can we keep this machine in the air?  A great and powerful form of exhaustion is settling into my body.  No more extra lives, no more levels, no more coins.  Mario doesn’t live here anymore.

MT @M_Lutzey: I’ve been playing poker since 2 am #BIRTHDAY<-I passed out @ 0530. Wake up; he’s got the whole casino eating out of his hand.

Music: “Come on and take a free riiiiide!”  The snow has stopped.  It’s the next morning.  Tickets to Hoth are paid for, the Padawan has his presents.  Everything else in the care of the Great Magnet and these people won’t stop with the drinks or the Irish coffee.  Ever.

An older man with a balding mullet and a paunch wanders through the kill zone in ill-fitting khakis, white marshmallows on his feet, stumbling slightly.  I am moved to prayer:

“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me the dignity of not dying in starched Wranglers, a Christmas sweater and New Balance sneakers when time finally catches up with me and I begin to show my age.  And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!”

Asian girls with straight black hair and Ugg boots storm the floor invasion style.  It is 8 a.m.  Theirs is the modified evolution of the “rawk grrl” look of the late 80s, minus the denim jackets, the teased bangs, the fingerless gloves, Mötley Crüe pins and a ceaseless, senseless dedication to a nowhere-bound deadbeat boyfriend named Donny who drives a Nova, fucks way below his age and hits her up for money more often than he ought.

So long, Harrah’s. I’ll never drink another Irish coffee as long as I live.

TWM

Oops, I spoke too fast.  Enter the grown man in search of Disneymania.  An enormous, gasping escape pod of a man; holes in his shirt, rheumy eyes, preceded by the stale choking dust of bad body odor that makes me whip my head to one side the moment his poisonous cloud crosses my outer marker.  Collectors.  These sad, smelly bastards are my least favorite of our clientele; chatting eagerly about… magazines and paying for their Precious with rumpled, grimy bills as they brandish laminated (and probably forged) collector’s ID badges, demanding tax-exempt prices with all the authority of Serpico waving a badge.  Hey, whatever gets you through the night, I guess?

In other news, I found my next job.  I start Tuesday working for Gardner, Inc., a lawn care parts company.  I’ll be on the receiving end of customer complaints.  Placing orders, then jumping in and taking calls for eight bones an hour with my own desk, Internet access and e-mail and full benefits.  This makes what, sixteen jobs in the last five years?  And I biked to all of them.  My blown sinuses are ticking like a Geiger counter.  I’m off to consume as much hot tea as I can tolerate.

12AUG00 – Warm wet sandbag of depression suspended by an old hemp line creaks gently at the bottom of a dark well.  It’s silent here.  The air is heavy.  The bag swings gently.  No need to speak.  No need for sound.  Silence is accepted here.  Somewhere far above me, the tops of trees are visible.  The warm promise of sunlight flickers in the wind.  Interaction seems pointless, heavy handed and rehearsed.  Quit.  Give up.  Go on.  They won.  You’re just a story now.

I make a conscious decision to run toward a light in the distance, but it seems to diminish the closer I get to it.  It’s like chasing a monkey up a tree; as you leave, the monkey gets his nerve back and climbs back down.  But he’s got one eye trained on you.  And if you turn around and come back, up into the tree he goes, always the same distance from you.  An invisible, flexible pushrod exists between you and this fucking monkey.  You have to give up your thoughts, ignore the monkey.  Make the monkey forget all about you.  Will the blind spot into being.  Kick your way to the surface.  Breathe deep.  Fight this terrible feeling.

Close call.

After we reach a certain age, our fears of the dark are supposed to vanish like car exhaust on a cold morning.  For me, it happened when I was about 10.  Suddenly, the night wasn’t really “the night” anymore and staying up late wasn’t such a big deal.  Just a few years later, I realized I’d started partying with the same monsters that once lived under my bed.  Staying ‘pure’ was out of the question.

Blink.  Now I’m on a starship, moving through the universe.  It’s like an open-air cruise liner.  We pass slowly through a mockup of the Horsehead Nebula as though it were some roadside attraction meant for photo ops and postcards.  They’re serving themed drinks.  Some nice people are playing shuffleboard.  

Smile.  Wave.

As I sat in a booth on a recent Sunday enjoying my meal (after the cornbread came a grilled Mahi sandwich with bacon and avocado and a cup of black coffee), I became aware of a conversation at the next table.

Group dynamic: three males and four females, their ages approximately 15 – 40.

Topic of discussion: the books they were reading at present. Most of them admitted to the Twilight series while some preferred fantasy novels — you know, “like Harry Potter.”

Hey, at least they were reading… 

There was a brunette girl seated at the table, 15-years-old if she was a day, and she was sinking lower and lower in her chair as the moments passed; not really participating in the conversation and clearly embarrassed. It was in her eyes.

Visiting Uncle: (previously dominating the conversation with travel/tech talk) leveled his gaze at Embarrassed Girl and asked, “So, what subjects do you like in school?” Not the more liberating: “What subjects are you interested in?”  This was more of a subtle nudge: in school.

Embarrassed Girl: “I –.”

Younger Brother: (immediately to her left, interrupting) “Yeah, I’m in a band! I play the trombone!”  He crowed, chewing with his mouth open as a dog might catch a biscuit balanced on its nose. His face was beet red.

Female Relative: (sitting opposite him, appearing somewhat confused. Her speech was faltering) “Oh!  Now, is that a… band where you… play an instrument, or is this a group of your little… friends?” Her voice trailed off. Breathing while speaking was out of the question for her; it had been a difficult enough thing for her to choose her salad dressing. Clearly spent for the day, she fell silent once again.

Other Girl A and Other Girl B: (producing a champagne stream of conversation, silvery bubbles that tickled the ceiling, propelled upward by their concerted nodding of agreement) “And then Facebook? And then I was like?  And then she was like?  And I was like?  And then she was like? And then Facebook? So cute!” The world for them, it seemed, was only so large.

Remaining Male: (dead ringer for Tony Soprano): Silent, chewing his bloody red rabbit quite slowly in the manner of a silverback gorilla, the alpha male. He stared evenly at each speaker in turn with bloodshot shark eyes.  Not a reader nor a traveler nor a social media user?

It was then that I stopped short. Once upon a time, I was the embarrassed teenager at the table; horrified by the banality of my white trash family but unable to articulate my own opinions due to a lack of world experience. I didn’t know what I liked, but I was pretty sure it went well beyond the family trifecta of Hank Williams Jr., Jack Daniels and the General Lee. I had a burgeoning interest in science fiction but according to one nobel laureate in the family, Star Trek was “faggy”. I had had meager enough beginnings, so at what point did I become such a judgmental quasi-elitist fuck? And it’s not even like I’m a good elitist! (I am, however, an okay fuck. Punchline!)

But elitist? Me? Hardly. My music tastes are dated, my palate uneducated. Country music doesn’t exist beyond the complete works of Johnny Cash and two songs by Hank Williams. I was never angry enough for punk, but I would find myself pissed off at Green Day, et al, for years of painfully cliche high school anthems. (“That was our song!” said every spotty-faced fuck under the age of 21 that I met during the end of the grunge era. “You just don’t even know!“) The only jazz I can and will tolerate is Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and Sketches of Spain. I haven’t owned a shred of vinyl since my first (and only) purchase of KISS Rock and Roll Over, purchased for a quarter at a garage sale sometime in the late 70s. I’ve been to maybe 11 concerts in my whole life. I’ve never camped out at a music festival. I’ve never even been to a rave.

I am so not cool.

I don’t read popular books. I read banned books, but what the fuck are popular books? I read comic books and own several shelves worth of graphic novels and yeah, maybe a lot of unusual reference books. Yes, I dress like an REI commercial or a retired federal agent on vacation in Thailand, circa 1987. But I won’t wear t-shirts promoting comic books whose heroes and story lines I am not familiar with. It’s just not fair to do so. I am a fan of Spider-Man, but prefer the cold black ideology of the Venom suit to the familiar red and blue. I like Green Lantern, but I don’t know that much about the Green Lantern Corps. Besides, wearing a Green Lantern shirt today sends a mixed message, if you happen to prefer the ladies. Which I do. For the record, I also used to be into the Flash. Superman, however, was too perfect. Too easy.

I like weird movies. Big deal, who doesn’t?

When I was 15, I thought that the most important thing in life — next to owning a land speeder — would be having a job that would let me buy all the books, movies and music I could ever hope to devour. Media falls freely from the trees these days; we are now stories eating stories.

I had a point. Oh, yes. Clarity!

I had once had a boss who, without intending to do so, got me thinking obsessively about “directionless direction” and “absolute precision of meaning.”  Maybe he really did intend to get me thinking about these things, he won’t say. I know he was a fan of abstract thought. But what he did impress upon me deliberately was the importance of clarity. Each and every word must count toward the end result. (Is this too much? Is that an accurate thing to say? Is it more appropriate to say it this way? Are those facts confirmed?) But as hard as I wrote, as much effort as I put into each draft, he always shot me down. My pages would come back raped in red ink. One day, dejected, I mumbled my thanks and slumped back to my desk to revise, accepting that I was never going to get it absolutely right. That’s when the bell rang. I wasn’t going to because I wasn’t supposed to.

In those years, he, through the telling and re-telling of a lengthy and amusing nautical anecdote involving anchor chain, taught me to be wary of the following phrases: “I think so… it should be… probably… maybe?” Well, do you know or don’t you?

Sidebar!

I’ve never been good with numbers. They simply do not stay put. I can’t multiply 12 x 7 in my head because I’ll forget immediately what numbers I was meant to be multiplying. Goodbye childhood dreams of being an astronaut, or an NSA codebreaker. The hard fact of the matter is that I never got beyond 6^th grade algebra, not even in college where I took the course twice, eventually stalemating myself right out of a higher education. I couldn’t advance without first completing that class. Tutors didn’t work because as soon as I left the classroom I forgot what it was that I’d learned. Doing extra problems was a useless concept; I could barely solve one problem, let alone pages of them. For me, the nugget of mathematical comprehension was built from sheer smoke and not a thing I could hold in my hand. And so one day, toward the end of the quarter, after failing yet another exam, I quietly packed my bag and walked away from college. “Yeah, you’re a fucking genius…”

Flashback!

I had attended summer school every year from the 6^th grade until I graduated high school; always for the same subject and usually with the same tutor who, after awhile, stopped looking me in the eye or calling on me when I raised my hand, or even noticing when I stopped doing that much. We had both given up.

Twice a week during my senior year, I attended “special education” classes in a tiny room lined with posters of smiling children eating apples reminding me to mind my manners. My tutor was a middle-aged woman named Ms. Merrick who wore low cut blouses and tried everything shy of sexual favors to get me to understand the basic concept of algebra. Where once I been hailed as a wunderkind for my early grasp of reading comprehension and creative writing, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the realization that my peer group was leaving me behind. It didn’t matter that these peers were essentially strangers; they provided a necessary smoke screen. I was not yet prepared to be left alone and exposed with my faults, embarrassed and ashamed as I was of the “special ed” label.

But wait! I’ve always been able to find the pony hidden among the horse shit. It’s my lame superpower…

I’d been working on a novel since the 8^th grade about a bounty hunter involved in a global lottery alternative to thermonuclear warfare, and so I asked Ms. Merrick to look it over.  Looking back, I’m sure it was cat piss awful; I don’t even have a copy of it left to criticize anymore. At that stage of the game I hadn’t read enough to be able to write properly. The next day, she handed it back to me and posed one simple question (“Like a diamond bullet… right through my forehead…”) that would stick in my brain for the rest of my life.

She asked: “Is your meaning clear?” She didn’t tell me the story sucked, or that the characters were one dimensional. She just gave me some of the best writing advice I would ever receive and she did it Yoda style.

Digging upward, get on the phone to bullshit…

“Worship the clarity of thought.” I used to be into that.  Where did the idea go? Not enough room to run Halo on my Pong-sized hard drive these days; I got bills to pay, failed relationships to agonize over and baggage to lug around. Meditation? Sounds great! I’ll look into that someday. Too many people in my address book right now, too many voices competing for time and attention, each one factory fresh with their own objectives. Not enough time left over, it seems, for self-contemplation.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

What could I accomplish if I could quiet my mind and let the noise of the world whistle out into space like escaped oxygen, or the televised broadcast of the first Olympics?

This is my happy place: Lock me away for a year in a woodland retreat somewhere in the densely forested mountains of Northern California. I’ll start off each day at 5:30 with yoga, an hour of weights and a long bike ride. In the afternoons I’ll take courses in bicycle repair and creative writing, rack up some range time with a variety of small arms and study to be a Mac Genius. In the evenings, I will churn out novels the likes of which the world has never seen. At night, I will look at the stars through a powerful telescope or sit by a fire. Here’s my grocery list. Hold my calls. No internet access, please.

No one has all the answers let alone all the questions, so how will I know when I know what I want to know? Life is short; I want to say what should be said and keep quiet about the rest, but that would make me boring. I’ve watched you, Earthlings. After all, I was sent here to gather intel. In order to fit in at awkward parties, I need to weigh in with a startlingly fresh opinion about social media, a carefully crafted Fantasy Football team, witty repartee about Adam Sandler movies and three thousand other things I simply do not give a shit about.

What?!

Electrons, people. We are electrons and swarms of molecules; marching, mobile landmasses for much smaller forms of life. Between you and me and the next object over exists infinite space and matter, things that would take you a lifetime to sort out with a razor blade. Swing the sharpest axe, pull the hardest trigger, climb the smallest mountain. It all comes down to this:

( X )  //user define (void) awakeFrom {

It is this that I should be focused upon instead of making judgements on the books and brunches of strangers. If I had any balls, I’d make my happy place a reality. If I was brave enough, I’d repair my own damage. If I had the courage, I’d forgive them, forget them and move on.

At the end of the day, what’s really important? What’s taking place just beneath the surface? What’s happening behind you — right now — just around the corner? What are you missing out on by being here?  Are you in the right place at the right time to be who you were meant to be? (Am I too serious, too full of shit, or do you just not understand where I’m coming from?)

And when did I start channeling Dianetics commercials?

Jalapeño cornbread, yo.

“Cities in Dust” by Siouxie and the Banshees throbs from unseen speakers.  Every hungry eye in the room is focused on a beautiful topless girl with long raven hair making love to her reflection in a giant mirror behind the stage, swaying along to the danger sexy sound of the music, her hips rising and bucking like a ship at sea.  Boom, one memory of earth made…  She climbs to the top of the pole with the greatest of ease, the delicate muscles in her abdomen clenching and unclenching.  She wraps one absolutely perfect thigh around it, bends over backwards and spins gracefully back to earth in a clockwise flight path, her soft tresses making an inaudible swish against the desperate background ballad of Pompeii’s destruction.

In other news, I can’t feel my lungs.

Something about the way a girl dances makes my brain short circuit.  It makes the clock slow down and then stop moving altogether.  Everything stammers when a pretty girl moves.  A bell rings in my brain; a low, booming gong that resonates down through my chest like a hammer on a taut steel cable. It is a feeling beyond anything.

The moment is palpably charged. I can feel shivers traveling down my spine.  My heart forgets to beat once, then once again and I sip hard drink from my glass and slowly chew an ice cube, thoroughly mesmerized. My thoughts are pure Glossololia, fragments of texture and descriptions of space, flowers, paintings, the ocean and music.

Why do I come to strip clubs?  Partially because I love women, and because I am partially empty.  Does it help?  Does my occasional frequenting of strip clubs help to patch the hole in my soul?  In no way, shape or form.  I’m not after sex.  I just want to be loved, same as anyone else.  I crave human contact.  I am an addict for the scent of a woman, the crackling fire of soft skin, the feel and sight of her thin fingers intertwined with mine.

But when I can’t get love or contact, I come here and pay – admittedly – far too much for five minutes of friendly female flesh, for the undulating womb of all creative process to writhe about on my lap, nuzzle my neck and tell me I smell nice, tell me that I’m still handsome, and tell me that I’m different from other men even if I know she’s lying.  I close my eyes and breathe deep from that nest of wonders at the nape of her neck and imagine that I can hear distant explosions; the sound of light traveling across the vast reaches of space, booming and rolling across the expanse.  I fill my lungs with the scent of her hair and swear to her that man was made to love women, to appreciate their beauty and to be inspired by them.

She probably hears this eleven times a night.

Some strange sensation, some fantastic, earth-smashingly wonderful… thing! runs laughing lightheaded through my veins when siren strangers smile at me.  It’s got something (and nothing) to do with their eyes, their come-hither scent, their campfire touch, and or their starry-sky glowing skin.  A beautiful woman is a spell and an incantation, a wholly desirable voodoo curse.  It’s in the male programming to heed.  Woman is the quest of all nights, the eternal muse, the tick of the clock, the birth of music, the death of lonely and the spawn of desire.  We write songs about women to watch women dance while the flames roar higher and higher.  Every whiskey bottle rock ‘n roll nightmare, every feverish darkness spent clawing after our wandering mortal souls points to woman as the objet d’art to end all objet d’art.  And I love women, from the edges of their delicately painted toes to the tops of their sweet, perfumed heads.  I just wish they’d learn to love themselves in return.  What’s more beautiful than a girl in her element, a woman empowered, a Valkyrie on her way to war?

Time’s up.  Cast out of heaven, crashing back to my barstool, I sit smiling my idiot’s grin, fumbling fingers tapping and telegraphing this remarkable high into my phone while the tingle climbs the tree of my limbs, driven by the wild wooden whoosh of my pounding heart. Take the picture before the moment flies away… Dots and dashes rise into the night like sparks from a bonfire, secret poems stashed among the pops and cracks, the faces of the dead frozen in the burning embers.

Remember: It’s all bullshit and illusion.  Don’t ever forget.  These women aren’t smiling for you.  They’re smiling for your money.  Everyone on this lost rock needs a way to stay afloat, to live, thrive and survive.  They don’t care about you specifically, your words or the wild, stomping adventure you claim as your life.  Not really.  They’re beyond that, having traded their bodies again and again for the caress of paying pushovers just like you.  It’s all about the Benjamin’s.  We have the graceful swan of human sexuality in a headlock and we’re punching it in the face, over and over.

…

Sitting at my writing desk the next morning, windows open, music on. Struggling to put my notes together, to describe something so beautiful without coming across as hackneyed or ham-handed.  Difficult.  The old masters had it easy; more words in their everyday vocabulary, more poetry on their shelves.  The world was not yet connected, and nothing was “kinda like this”, or “similar to that.” It’s one thing to feel such an overwhelming emotion; it’s quite another to make it explode from your fingertips with any sense of realism.  Words are dumb, like pawing at the piano with frostbitten fists in a clumsy effort to pound out a concerto.  It’s like taking a photograph of the Grand Canyon, getting the pictures back the next day and weeping openly at the celluloid rectangle of rocks and stupid dirt.  (And don’t give me that goddamned crap about art being subjective.)

There are days I’d gladly make a Faustian deal with the Devil if I could harness the pure, unrivaled force of true expression for four, maybe five – okay, – six amazing books, works of such maddening beauty that their release out into the world would ripple across the globe like shockwaves, subtly (or not so subtly) changing the planet forever.  Words of Mass Destruction — the Necronomicon as a perfect pulp novel. Each word in this sentence is perfect.

Instead, I’m human.  I eat, I shit, and I make mistakes.  I don’t know the first fucking thing about writing.  Or love.  Or women.  And someday I will sleep forever in a box in the earth as the rains come down and the flowers bloom while some other lonely sucker drinks away his money, forking over his cash in order to feel loved.

If even for a moment…

TWM

I recommend Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis or this track as you read along. Or something by The Mars Volta featuring Flea…

——

GAME NIGHT: Your favorite childhood games and actors in one place – a blockbuster movie…

This column, co-authored by Thomas McKenzie and Brandon Brewer, will feature selected scenes of satirical scripts from “blockbuster movies” based on card games, board games, etc. Basically, just a few scenes from each of these scripts will blow “Battleship” out of the water. Since we both came of age in the 80s and 90s, we’ll inadvertently focus on people of the same generation.

EXAMPLE COLUMN:

SELECTED SCENES FROM: UNO

by

Thomas McKenzie

and

Brandon Brewer

MUSIC CUE: A few quick strums of an acoustic guitar, followed by somber trumpet music.

FADE-IN

EXT. DESERT – DAY

A 1969 Chevelle El Camino, seen from the air, speeds through the desert, kicking up dust. It’s Le Mans Blue, but the color is barely noticeable under a heavy coating of dust and grime. This car has been in the desert a long time.

INSERT SHOT – EXTREME CLOSE UP – CAR INTERIOR

A brown, dirty, gnarled hand grasps a shift knob. The knob is a chrome skull with red LED eyes. The hand slams the shifter forward.

INSERT SHOT – EXTREME CLOSE UP – CYCLE BOOT ON ACCELERATOR

Cycle boot floors the accelerator pedal

INSERT SHOT – EXTREME CLOSE UP – WRAP-AROUND SHADES

The cloud of dust trailing the El Camino noticeably expands, as seen out the rear window, over the shoulder of the driver.

MUSIC CUE: The acoustic guitar chords come back, and the Spanish guitarist really starts laying down the jams with the trumpet player. (The trumpet player is probably Flea.)

————————————

INT. MEXICAN CANTINA

The El Camino driver, with wrap-around shades still on, slowly approaches the bar.  The plank floor creaks as he makes his way to a bartender in a dingy, sweat-stained shirt, slowly polishing a glass with a dirty rag.

EL SALVAJE CARDA

El Hefe sent me.

(Carda is Danny Trejo!)

BARTENDER

Who are you, amigo?

El Salvaje Carda silently pulls what looks like a playing card from the vest pocket of his sleeveless denim jacket, and flips it to the bartender.

INSERT SHOT – EXTREME CLOSE UP – CARD SLOWLY FLIPPING THROUGH AIR

The card lands in front of the bartender.  He looks down, notices the “invitation” and jerks his head toward a door near the end of the bar that leads into the back room of the cantina.  Carda sniffs the air, walks that way.

——————————-

INT. SMOKE-FILLED BACK ROOM OF CANTINA

Five desperados and the questionable hero, El Salvaje Carda, are clutched around a table in the back room of this cantina, somewhere south of the border in a town that hope worked very hard to forget.  Each man guards his cards with all the grace of a feral dog.  Scattered behind them stands a wall of broken women cooling themselves with tattered fans, remnants of femininity for tired whores with hems hiked high and hearts pulled low.  Their eyes are dead from the inside, for no matter which way this wicked game plays out, one — maybe all of them — will be forced to take a shift beneath the slobbering, fumbling stench of the winner.  These are bad men — gunfighters, murderers, cattle rustlers, horse rapists and claim jumpers, each of them steely-eyed and dangerous, coiled snakes with nothing to lose.  The air is thick with tension and cigar smoke, which hangs over the table like wraiths at a wake.  Beads of sweat glisten like little stars of fear.  It’s the hero’s turn.

He takes a shot of whiskey, slams the glass down and calls his cards as he lays them down.

EL SALVAJE CARDA

Well, I’ve got this reverse, so back to me, and here’s another reverse so back to me again, and then I’ve got this …

From every direction telegraphs the menacing click of hammers and the death rattle hasp of oiled steel clearing worn leather.  The men stand almost as one. Chairs are knocked back. El Salvaje Carda is looking at the barrels of five peacemakers.  A gleaming revolver appears in his left hand, now pointed at the black heart of the man to his left.  He holds his remaining card aloft, his voice no more than a whisper.

EL SALVAJE CARDA

You didn’t let me call Uno.  I believe those are the rules.

EL ROJO

Lying pendejo!  You going to die!

WHORE #1

Let him play his card, you dogs!

One of the desperados backhands the Whore #1.  (It’s Maria Conchita “Predator 2-era” Alonso.  She’s looking good.)  Eyes wide with shock, she swipes a hand over her now-bleeding lower lip before spitting blood and saliva in the general direction of the desperado that slapped her.

EL PEÓN

Mannnnn — you said you were going to win this game and get me outta here!

El Peón is, of course, Shasta McNasty-era Jake Busey.  His character is being held hostage and is chained to a rickety wooden chair in the corner of the smoky back room.  El Salvaje Carda is playing for El Peón’s life.  We don’t know why.

Close-up of Carda’s eyes shows him calmly scanning the room.

DESPERADO #2

Well… Why don’t you lay down your card, “Uno.”

Close-up on Carda’s hand as he once again does the slow motion card flip.  Before the card hits the table, Carda is firing off shots and hitting the trigger with the side of his hand to spin the cylinder.

EL SALVAJE CARDA

Rojo!  Verde!  Azul!  Skip!

Carda is screaming the names of the other players as he guns them down before they can retaliate.  He’s that fast.  He knows these bad men somehow.

EL PEÓN

Yeah!!!!

Dead desperados are spread around the room as the gun smoke wisps away toward the dirty overhead lamp shining above the card table.

WHORE #1

Señor Carda!  Mira!

A single desperado steps forward from the shadows in the corner of the room.  His sombrero obscured his face in shadow since the game began.  He steps forward into the shaft of light, then uses the barrel of his pistola to push back his hat, revealing him to be Al Leong (the long-haired Asian actor who was a bad guy / martial arts expert in so many action movies in the 80s and early 90s).

EL SALVAJE CARDA

Amarillo!

Carda practically whispers the name, reverently. The look of simultaneous disgust and recognition on Carda’s face is such that there’s no mistake in assuming there’s a long-standing grudge between these two men.

EL CABALLERO AMARILLO

You should have spent more time playing cards and less time playing beer pong.

It’s now obvious.  Carda and Amarillo were college buddies.

EL SALVAJE CARDA

Why do you say that, old friend?

Amarillo nods toward the last card from Carda’s Uno hand, resting on the table in front of where Carda’s chair was before all hell broke loose.

EL CABALLERO AMARILLO

You saved a wild draw four card until the end. Don’t you know how to count, amigo?  You should have drawn five times with your pistola!  You were playing against five of us.  One of which is a martial arts expert.

Amarillo jerks the thumb of his free hand toward his chest.

EL PEÓN

Get us out of here, Carda!

 -30-

]]> http://41hebrewcat.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/comedy-damn-it/feed/ 2 TWM http://41hebrewcat.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/next-stop-the-western-lands/ http://41hebrewcat.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/next-stop-the-western-lands/#comments Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:37:19 +0000 TWM http://41hebrewcat.wordpress.com/?p=1159 ]]> 19JUL2012 – If no one had told me I’d be leaving New York City, how much longer would I have been able to tolerate it? Walking the tight rope with that feeling of always being graded or judged, every day being cranked down and dialed in. Conan, what is best? “Tie it off, burn the rest.”

Never let the pure parts of your soul see the sunlight; never let those parts know what they’ve been missing out on. Focus instead on the leper sore sidewalks, the warm smell of bulging black trash bags fermenting in the sun, the fluttering butterfly of disgust that erupts in your stomach when you grab the vertical bar in the center of a subway car and experience residual human warmth, the germ-covered calling card of a fellow stranger subjected to yet another week of annihilation. The subway is a mobile warehouse where all the faces of the world are stored.

There is the faintest hint of a wind tonight, as though someone took a pinhole camera, photographed the breeze in a much cleaner place, brought it back here and made a bad mimeograph of the image on a machine they’d rescued from a burning pile of shit, and then stapled those to all the telephone poles within a three block radius.

Stayed up till 5 a.m. working on that last entry. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter in ages. I hope I can keep it going. Writing is the best opiate I know. I don’t even care if I’m any good at it. All I want is the feeling of words coming out of my fingertips like high-speed miniaturized airstrikes called down over the battlefield of the keyboard. Each time my finger makes contact with a letter I imagine a tiny explosion; the faster the keystrokes, the more fervent the war. The onslaught is relentless, and none of the generals can even remember what they’re fighting for.

Now sitting in the restaurant in the lobby of The Jane, lingering over breakfast coffee. Feels good to be without a schedule for a few days. My architectural and design vocabulary is pretty poor — I don’t know the difference between a niche and an alcove — but I’m pretty sure that gold figurine surrounded by incense and flowers is Bob Newhart. New York is a weird fucking place. Despite the mountains of screaming dirt, the blocks of jabbering desperation, the gravitas of towering concrete, I’m sure gonna miss it…

Later that day. I walked the High Line, took some pictures. I’ll never finish my NYC bucket list, but I’m glad I marked that one off. Now in a cafe somewhere in midtown drinking iced coffee, scribbling in a notebook and listening to Iron Maiden. Ducked in here when the skies grew dark with the threat of rain. Watching the droplets hit the ground. It’s coming down pretty fast now; oxygen scrubbers on a one-way spring-cleaning. The tiny particles of debris ripped from the air are packed safe inside each droplet, then set free upon impact with the earth.

Gave two bottles of water to a homeless guy with an unusual medical condition. His eyes were rimmed blood-red, and they bugged out of his skull like that scene in Total Recall where Arnold gets ejected onto the Martian landscape and can’t breathe. When I reached into his sphere with the bottles, he looked up at me. His smile was just about the most genuine I’ve seen in a long time.

In the two years I spent in New York, I learned to appreciate the push of life happening all around me. I felt as though I were a diver in dark water. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I could feel the displacement of something big passing close by, circling me, and sizing me up. And in those last frozen seconds when there’s nothing to do but watch, the open jaws appear, moving forward like blooming flowers in the morning fog. It’s over before you can react, posture or make a big show of things. Were we capable of eating strawberries at that depth, they’d be the best fucking strawberries you’d ever tasted. I knew I couldn’t stay here, and I wouldn’t want to. I’m not that sadistic.

Of all the billions of (chicken salad) stars in the universe, the mind-boggling possibility of (tuna fish sandwich) life on other worlds and in other (coffee drinking) dimensions, no one else has written this same sentence (eleven billion, four-hundred million, six-hundred thousand and twelve). There. My voice was unique for a moment…

It’s easy to lose perspective, to grow bored, to stop caring, to hurt someone, to bully them in some way because you’re tired of feeling small and trapped. It’s easy to forget about the stars, and that we are part of them. It’s easy to forget about the forces of electricity and gravity, battling it out all around you at every second of your entire life. It’s easy to lose your way. We don’t have time to give a shit about the way our brains work. We just want them to keep our hearts beating so we can go to work and earn movie tickets or put gas in our cars.

The future will be here in three minutes. It’s in a holding pattern above the earth right now, waiting for clearance from a control tower. But should the future make an emergency crash landing, it will most likely do so in New York City. And not in sterile white advertisements with a flashy graphic user interface used by wealthy housewives to purchase green tea on their cellphones during their twice-weekly post-yoga social circles, but in smart phones stolen from elderly subway riders; in wireless copulations; in Filipino phone cards used up and abandoned on the streets with the rest of the trash; in mangled text conversations between oversexed, over-stimulated and under-parented 13-year-olds. There’s a flash of lightning outside; no time to count the Mississippi’s. Whatever it is, it’s coming in fast.

Some days I feel as though I am throwing myself face first against a wall, over and over again, expecting good answers to fall out of my mouth instead of bloody teeth. I feel as though I don’t know what questions I should be asking myself and even if I did I know, I feel I lack the concentration needed to put them into practice. Self-analysis is like taking a motorcycle engine apart in your head, turning the pieces over and over, holding all the tools in your imaginary hands, and never once breaking concentration. I am easily distracted; t-boned by a runaway thought, hijacked by a passing breeze or ambushed by sexual thought, a single dirty frame on the perpetual film loop of the Primal Directive. I want to break out of the cycle and make more of myself.

The Jane Hotel is a strange place, a series of Bohemian cubes linked together by dark wooden hallways so narrow that two grown adults can’t pass each other in the hall without one of them having to hump the wall. The rooms are tiny, modeled after shipboard cabins. A brass peg on the keychain is inserted into a hole near the light switch. This activates the room’s electricity, so there’s no waste. The bathrooms are communal. The bathrobes are miniscule. I feel like Shawn Connery in that James Bond flick where they tried to make him Japanese.

I refer to the occupant across the hall from me as Classical Music. It’s on all the time and there’s a blue bathrobe wedged into the doorframe that prevents it from closing completely. I picture some old hippie in there, just doing his thing, hoping a nice hippie lady will hear his music and knock on the door with a bottle of wine so they can fuck like it’s 1967 again. There’s another room down the hall. Television Man. The set is always on and it’s always loud. Like someone trying to hide from not only their own thoughts but the thoughts of everyone else on earth.

The moments of a human life are spent in the options provided. You can have any kind of car you like, so long as it’s black. We can’t deadhead like characters in Cory Doctorow’s “Down And Out in The Magic Kingdom”, die for a few thousand years and come back when things are more interesting. We can’t climb into a machine like characters in Rudy Rucker “Spacetime Donuts” and shrink between molecules, falling downward through the quarks of the ‘donut until we become the universe itself, falling back into the local galaxy, aiming hard for our own planet, appearing gigantic in the sky as the God or Goddess. Instead, we spend our one-way days dreaming, waking up, going to work to earn enough money to buy a girl a drink on Friday night in the hopes we can persuade her to stay with us as we grow old and die. Birth, school, work, death. Somewhere in between those chapters, we grow up, grow old, grow tired, grow close and grow apart, always in the process of being reborn metaphysically and dying a thousand deaths from embarrassment each time we forget to check for spinach in our teeth.

I’m flying to California tomorrow. This journal is almost full. I fight for a place to sit to finish it off; a bench on the corner of 8^th Ave and 14^th Street: I want tonight to end in bullets, in release, in redemption, in understanding, in your eyes. It’s only those first few seconds with you that I want, when everything is new, before either of us has said a word. It’s only those seconds I really know what to do with. After we’ve said hello there isn’t much left. I want different things than you do. I’m on a different path. It’s inevitable. At every odd moment I am full of need for you, for your warmth, for your smile, for that part of you that can drive away the cold. In the even moments I’m full of self-preservation, bracing myself against you, resisting you, aware that I’m programmed to want you, and that none of this is real. I know that once we are together we will only grow in the Choking Way, like high-speed footage of ivy plants fighting for the same ray of sunlight, snaking, struggling, suffocating and devouring a tree in the process. Be alone, stay alone. It’s for the best.

It doesn’t matter who reads this. What I did, I did for me. What I thought I thought for myself in order to make myself stronger, stranger and more powerful than I was on the last pass through. I want to give away my fear like a Japanese lantern set adrift on the river. I keep going deeper into my brain because I want to see what else is in there, like a sadistic magician pulling silk scarves from the ass of a shivering rabbit.

Someday they’ll throw these notebooks away. Someday they’ll burn these years of mine, and all my fears and drunken questions will rise up in the delicate moonlight like black moths to the lunar flame and choke the living shit out of a firefly on their way out of this world, because no one gets out of here alive.

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