“Detouring Vol. 6”
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
I’m still pretty drunk as I sit here at the bar. I feel giddy. Happy. Effervescent. What’s more, I don’t even harbor ill will towards Steve, who tonight has his Mohawk spiked and dyed orange. The makings of your typical "mall-punk;" all the studs in his face arouse in me only laughter, but I‘m sure his actual intent was to somehow distinguish himself from the twenty other douche-bags who regularly stomp up and down Lower Greenville. Way to make a statement. Of course, Strange doesn’t understand why I always pick on him specifically. Why I have a problem with him. I say, “Maybe I’m just an asshole.” The only response I get is an impassive “probably.” Holy shit, I say. Is “the Strange” becoming burnt out on my negativity?
“Nope. It’s just that the amount of shit you talk far outweighs the times you’ve had your ass handed to you. Karma, she’s gaining ground on your pacifistic ass. I can’t protect you forever. Even if you are right.”
“Fuck the alpha-male mentality, man,” I say.
Yes. Fuck it. The alpha-male mentality. That’s the thing, though. I need a friend, not protection. A friend. He could’ve stood there earlier and let Steve pound the snot out of me and I wouldn’t have loved him any less. Shit.
The music provided by the house DJ is becoming ever more grating. This is weird for me because when I’m drunk like this, I usually tune out anything undesirable. That is, if it doesn’t make me want to dance or fuck, or if it doesn’t remind me of some off-the-cuff talking point, then I assign it non-existence. It’s really quite easy.
On particularly bad nights, I can go the entire hop without noticing any songs. I’ll focus on visuals (i.e. women) or on drink specials or on titillating conversation I might be able to overhear without being too much noticed. If a cabal of chatters seems amenable to my injection into the proceedings, then there’s little room for the music to impinge on my ears because one as passionately focused as myself when it comes to talking, lecturing, and socializing cannot be shaken by mere top 40 variety songs. No, no, no. It takes something I really enjoy. Something I can-- if only vaguely-- connect to an indefinable nostalgic memory. The kind of music that awakens the sentimentalist in me. Makes me think of a girl. Hearkens me back to better days. Sadder days. Days of the 400 Blows!
The songs playing tonight are typical jock rock bullshit. The DJ smiles wide and nods his head from track to track, so proud of his plebian tastes, somehow confirmed by the fact that no one is paying any god damned attention to him. No one fucking cares. He could just as easily let the night go on auto-pilot and it wouldn't sound any better. The difference would be nil.
I see Steve grab a beer and lean his ear into the cocktail waitress' face. This place is busy. I would say "busier than usual," but I am not usually around. I am thinking of stumbling back home. It's not like I can ride on Danger's tab all night. I need some sleep. I resolve to lift myself from the seat.
My legs tremble beneath my upper body as I stand. I'm a bit dizzy, but I think I'll be fine. Lately I've been getting really sickly drunk. Tonight, my stomach feels calm. I think that I might be hungry. I'll have to raid the pantry when I get back to the apartment.
Approaching Steve as if we're good buddies and not arch-nemeses, I ask him to tell Danger that I'm out. He gives me a brief glance and says "ok." Just like that. Giving the four letter, two syllable word the brevity it deserves. He doesn't look at me, expecting me to be verbally combative, abusive. Begging for an ass kicking that I rightfully deserve. Maybe it's not even worth it to him anymore. To indulge me in my drunken outbursts.
I don't know. There's something disingenuous about Steve’s persona. His appearance that so gently caresses the face of social conformity. His bullish, pseudo-protective stature that only seems to reinforce all societal stereotypes; reflecting upon him negatively as self-righteous bully. Yeah, he says he’s punk. He exudes aggression. But deep down he’s no different than those people who insist half of America should rightfully be in prison.
He’s a fucking phony.
This is not to say that I’m the only one that sees it; that I’m some kind of savant, revelatory, seeing through some kind of transparency that no one else recognizes. No. Everyone knows this. Everyone on this block accepts this. Strange knows it, too. He’s just too busy actually being a punk to notice it.
I step outside and I see a crowd of people stuffed in the door of the bar across the street. It’s The Peruvian. I’ve never been in there. In fact, I think it just opened. Like, they had a “ribbon cutting” ceremony, a “grand opening” very recently. Paying no attention to the traffic, I make my way across Greenville. People are shoving, fighting, yelling obscenities. Some are snapping photos with their cell phones. I can hear something about “fucking assholes” and “dickheads” and such.
Peeking through the crowd, I notice that there are several guys, some with the “twist-tie” handcuffs cutting through their wrists, others in plain black shirts, and still more with hats that have TABC emblazoned across the front.
“These motherfuckers! These fascist motherfuckers!” One of the guys yelled. There were some retorts to the effect of “shut the fuck up,” but they were responded with more profanities. A guy started talking to me. I am winding down to a state of tipsiness, and I feel very tired and sleepy, but we’re engaged in this conversation about cops and we’re both feeling the same way about the situation. You give these assholes any kind of authority and they abuse it. Hell, these TABC guys are nothing more than glorified security guards. Fucking rent-a-cops for the state of Texas. Basically, what they do is troll bars and clubs and streets for drunken violations. Their main function is to write tickets and assess penalties to liquor selling establishments, but of late they’ve been rather forceful and even more recently, brutal.
A while back they were in hot water over some aggression at a gay bar in Ft. Worth: lies, accusations, physical abuse, violations of civil liberties, etc.. I expect this to be in the papers and on the local news, too. The TABC finally makes the fatal mistake that results in its immediate disbandment: they fucked with the wrong white people.
I reach over the crowd to snap some pictures on my cell and go on my way. The cops should be around soon, and I’d rather not incriminate myself with an inebriated presence.
My mouth is parched and I feel like having a lie down on the sidewalk. However, I know that I must resist such urges, considering the propinquity to my apartment. Less than ten minutes. That's all I have to wait. Then I can suck down a few glasses of tap water and throw myself onto my unmade bed.
At the Ross light, I balance myself against a telephone pole and stare emptily into the distance, the headlights of vehicles blaring out from the abyss ahead. A voice calls my name. I turn my back and I see a young woman's head poking out of the driver side window of a Kia Rio.
“Vanessa!” I shout. She cries out my name and I make my way to her window. Car horns are honking behind her as the light has just changed to green. She begs that I quickly hop into the passenger seat, and unthinkingly, I do.
The AC blasts in my face. She’s asking me what I’ve been up to. I smile and shrug. “Are you drunk?”
“Yes. Yes I am. Is it obvious?”
“I don’t know. You are walking along Greenville at almost two in the morning.”
She makes a right on Live Oak, accelerating westward. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a car. It smells new. Definitely not the kind of smell one would encounter in a vehicle that has been made into a temporary love den. Oh how one’s dreams can weigh on one’s perception of reality!
“I have cigarettes in my purse if you’re interested. It’s at your feet.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
I grab her purse, look inside, and there they are, a pack of Marb Reds, nestled between her wallet and a tampon. It’s unopened. I pull the pack out and slam it against my palm a few times. The car stops at the light on Washington and Live Oak. The Jack in the Box to the right of us is dark, with all appearances lending credibility to the fact that despite the sign proclaiming its 24 hour availability, it’s closed, sitting on its concrete island in silence.
Trails of smoke billowing from my mouth and nose, I say, “We’re going to your place, huh?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Oh. Cool. You live far?”
“Just a little further down on Live Oak. Pretty close to downtown, which is good because I work downtown.”
“What do you do?”
“Office work.”
As it turns out, her residence, a studio loft on the corner of Cantegral and Live Oak is one of the structures that I marvel at in passing on my treks downtown. As the car slows to a stop, she grins at me. I’ve been kidnapped, I think. It’s weird; kind of a thrill. Most of all because it isn’t true; it‘s not real. And though I’ve disabused myself of childish games and the melodramatic angst indicative of adolescent sexual development (or claim to have), I can see why “playing” can be so exciting.
We both slam the car doors and she steps onto the curb and holds her hand out to me. Crossing the threshold of the opened front door, we go hand in hand, her first (as per the chivalrous dictum that goes something like, "ladies first"), etc. and she slaps the wall, which lights up the entire room.
The place is immaculate, Spartan, the antithesis of "lived-in." I stand in the middle of the living room-- I think-- and if I say something, I believe the reverberation will overcome the both of us.
"Nice, right?"
Nice, right?
Yep. Indeed, I say. Indeed. I'm staring at the black leather semi-circular couch in the middle of the room. Wooden floors unadorned by carpeting of any variety. Walls barren and white/grey. The glass coffee table; the floor beneath, unobstructed by magazines or newspapers or books, taunting me with its empty middle class modernity. I motion to the couch as if asking for the privilege to sit. She says, “take a shower first.”
I laugh.
“Seriously,” she says.
The contrast between the bathroom and the rest of the loft is noticeable. Opposing. The bathroom is cluttered with beauty and hygienic products. Unmentionables are strewn about as if in the aftermath of a tornado. I have to hack my way through the jungle of lingerie to find the shower.
I strip down and step into the shower. The water temperature fluctuates then settles into a nice warmth as it plashes over my head. I start smelling the shampoos and conditioners. They're all very fruity. Feminine.
Sitting on the toilet, I towel myself off. I hate bathing. I hate getting my head wet. It gives my naturally curly hair reason to act up. The act of putting my clothes back on seems counterproductive. I mean, I'm clean now, but they are dirty; redolent of spilt alcohol and cigarette smoke.
In the living room, Vanessa is sitting on her couch as I enter. She is grinning at me. Scaring me. I say that I'm tired. She asks me to have a drink with her on the balcony. She promises the view of downtown is beautiful.
We are sitting quietly, drinking some really god awful champagne. I think of asking her how someone who "works in an office" can live like this. Instead I take in the sight, the neon lighted structures of downtown Dallas looming monolithically to the west, representative of the western world's contribution to architecture.
Why not? You know? It doesn't matter, this really is nice. A breeze blows in from the north and I feel a smile forming on my lips. I just hope she doesn't expect me to fuck her.
©Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
26.9.09
Flâneur Fiction: "Detouring Vol. 5"
"Detouring Vol. 5"
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
The phone is ringing. Shit. Strange is expecting a call from a possible future employer and I'm supposed to pretend that I run a small mom and pop pizza shop; as a reference. Or something. The details were never clear, so the assumption is that he expects me to come up with something believable. Because the truth is that he is an employer's worst nightmare. He's flighty. He quits jobs and doesn't say shit to the people in charge. Leaves other hapless paeans in his wake; hanging, as it were. When questioned, he simply shrugs and calls himself a proletarian nomad.
Dilemma. Why? Because I'm beating my fucking meat, that's why. I stop and reach for my phone. The display is a number that is not logged in my SIM card. It suddenly stops ringing. The display reads that I have a missed call. No shit.
I regain my masturbatory mindset, gradually pacing myself back into a good frictional momentum, pumping my fist into my crotch quickly while the images on my laptop monitor provide me with the appropriate visual stimuli.
When I finally spill some seed into my hand, the phone rings again. I reach across my body with my left hand for the phone. My arm, however, isn't that long, so I have to slightly dip myself into the crevice of the couch made by the convergence of cushions in order to pick up the phone, which itself is resting in the fault line created by the middle cushion and the far right cushion. I can feel the semen that has oozed between the head of my cock and fingers getting cold.
Looking at the display, I see that it's the same number as before. This person is unrelenting. I press the green 'go' button and put the phone to my ear. "This is Benny Salvatore; Benny and Vinny's Pizza, whadduya want?” There is a silence here. Then:
“Hello... um... I’m calling regarding an applicant. Um... an Adam Rodriguez.”
“Oh yeah? Haven’t seen him in a month.”
“Well, I’m a manager at Profit Bar. We like to screen our applicants for references. What can you say about Mr. Rodriguez?”
“Who?”
“Uh... Adam Rodriguez.”
“Oh. Called himself Strange. Good guy. Can‘t usually trust Mexicans, so that‘s saying something. My brother Vinny hated him, though. His friends were obnoxious drunk fuckers, always come in and hit on all the lady patrons. But he worked harder than anyone, and if my brother wasn’t such a pussy, the kid’d still be working for us.”
“Oh. Well... um... thanks a lot... Mr. ... ?”
“Salvatore.”
The guy hangs up and between a dial tone and the cold, disgusting bodily excretion seemingly gluing together my flaccid cock and my fist, I feel very silly. I can’t believe I actually did the Italian American accent. I know it probably sounded fake and awful, but fuck it, I think I scared that guy shitless.
I go into the bathroom and wash my hands and my dick and begin searching for clothes that smell clean. My Nirvana shirt is on the floor. I pick it up and smell it. Nothing discernibly foul, and from looks, besides a few wrinkles, it’s good. I pull it on and then cover the lower half of my body with a horrendously ripped up pair of jeans.
While doing vanity exercises in front of my bathroom mirror, I feel the sudden urge to laugh at myself. In the past, girls have accused me of being more obsessed with my appearance than their younger teenage sisters. I laugh and say aloud to myself that they were right.
I hear the front door open. It’s Strange. He calls out. “Marco!” “Polo!” I echo back.
I see his head peek into the bathroom. He asks me what’s up. I tell him he got a call from Profit Bar. He smiles. I follow him into the living room. He says he has good news. I see a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of vodka on the table. Both 750 ml. The whiskey is Jameson. The vodka is something that I know he picked up for less than 10$.
“Well. My mom is throwing me some money. Grudgingly. So I can get a place.”
“Awesome,” I say.
“Yes. I feel kind of dirty. Like a middle class suburban bitch.”
“Anyone would take the money. Guilt free. They’re liars if they scream otherwise. Hell, even I can admit that my dad will probably drop me a few pounds this week.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Help me find a place around here. No Upper E shit, though. It’s only $500.”
We decide to “think efficiency.” Yes. It’s like living in a closet, but it’s better than sleeping in parks or beneath underpasses. “I might do that just for inspiration,” he says, laughing. We sit on the right and left cushions of the couch, staring into the wall ahead. He says that I should do something with my empty, boring wall.
"What? Knock it out? No thanks. I'd rather get drunk and pretend there's shit on the walls than have to look directly out into that nightmarish still life called ‘the porch‘ by management even though it is undoubtedly a courtyard."
"All I'm saying," Strange says, cracking open the bottle of vodka. "Is that arty renditions of naked women might spruce shit up some."
“That explains why your place was always so boner inducing despite the lack of promise...” I trail off.
Thoughts are conjuring themselves in my mind. I laugh. We both laugh. Drinking, passing back and forth the bottled spirits. But then I tell him that the truth is that that kind of stimulation is bad for me. Yes. It’s enough that I jerk off to internet porn as much as I do. I mean, shit. I can’t even operate without the imagery provided by my open laptop.
The days of rubbing one out in the shower or laying in bed, legs akimbo, blowing loads onto my stomach or fucking seldom worn dress socks are quite past me. There is a challenge-- a certain sacrament-- in having to push some buttons and wait for a wireless network I can surf and wank to ejaculatory glory. Walls adorned with fleshy feminine shapes would give me an ease of mental access that left zero room for ritual.
Strange lights a cigarette and leers at me a little. He laughs uncomfortably. We both do. All is quiet. The white wall ahead watches over our gluttonous imbibing, over my revealing revelation.
And amidst the quietude of the abated mirth-- discomfited as it was-- and through a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle, I say, "So yeah, the Profit Bar called about references for 'Adam Rodriguez.' I pretended to be this transplanted New Yorker named Benny Salvatore. I think I scared the guy, but he might call, so just a heads up."
"Ha, he bought it?"
"Yeah. I even added that bigoted Italian American thing. You know, where they hate immigrants and minorities and shit."
“Cool.”
I ask him if he got anywhere with Vanessa. He says no. Not at all. I say that I had a dream that they were fucking in a VW. “She has a Kia Rio,” he says. “They started out making bikes,” I say, getting up. I go into my room and shuffle through a pile of books. I pick up Strange’s book.
He turns to watch me bring the book around the table and plop myself into the cushions of the couch. I grab the whiskey, throw back a gulp or two and then flip through the book. The cover is somewhat bent because it was jammed, sandwich-like, between two other books. Something called, A Freudian Interpretation of Dreams and Debord’s Panegyric. The only thing I remember about the former was a six page explanation about the significance of a silken white glove in dreams. Hint: it’s sexual. Debord’s book is a postmodern memoir of sorts. I remember some stuff about how he likes women. Other than that, all I can say is that the pictures are cool.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a passage in your book that my dream reminded me of,” I say.
Of course, there was nothing exact about the relation between my dream and his book, except that in both cases there is this weird tunneling through of the REM wall that separates actual sleep from the environs in which said sleep takes place. There is certainly a scientific phrase for this phenomena, but fuck if I know what it is.
Anyway, when Strange took off with Vanessa, the idea of them walking to her car made me dream of walking. The previously built up sexual tension without release set up the vaginal and sexual imagery; a manifestation of a theoretical continuation due largely to my failure, in reality, to perform ’neath and ’twixt the sheets.
In the book, there’s a bit, which I begin reading aloud to him, where the narrator is dreaming through a haze of a malt liquor and marijuana that his female roommate is sitting naked, sweating, talking to him about her mother who has a parrot that says things like “fuck me! fuck me real hard!” and he questions her as to whether or not she taught the parrot to say it as a practical joke on her mother and she says, “are you kidding? I’m too much of a stoner to take the necessary time for that. My mom fucks all the teenage acne-faced boys in the neighborhood.” The narrator of course stirs himself awake, his underwear heavy against his flesh with perspiration, and realizes that his roommate is fucking her boyfriend in the adjoining room, screaming “fuck me! fuck me real hard!”
“My question, dear Adam, is where the fuck did the parrot come from?” I ask, laughingly, closing the book and swigging on the bottle of whiskey.
“When I was writing it I had this great tat mag that had a pullout section dedicated to tattoos of exotic animals, and this very beautiful girl had a huge tattoo of a macaw on her back. Amazing coloring. It seemed like something funny and interesting at the time.”
We sit around and continue to drink. It’s dark outside. Strange pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to me. I look at it. It’s a phone number. “Vanessa?” Yes. Vanessa. I crumple up the paper and toss it into the kitchen.
Inundated by a wave of spontaneity, he asks me if I want to walk down to Lower Greenville. I think about it briefly. We’re obviously more than a little drunk (hence the rashness). I say yes. Fuck it! Let’s do it. I stand to my feet, salute Strange, and take another nip of whiskey. Both bottles are dangerously low on liquids.
Even in our soused stupor, we realize that we’ll have to empty our pockets to see for ourselves that between us (remember I am flat broke) we have about $1.69, which isn’t enough to buy shit. At least not at bars on Lower Greenville.
Placing ourselves gently, in concurrent motion, back onto the couch, we sip at the remnants of the bottles, Strange with the vodka, and me with the whiskey. Then we swap.
“Well,” I start. “We’re already pretty lit, wouldn’t you say?” He nods. “Well then, lets just head out and see where the night takes us.”
“Could be promising,” he adds, belching loudly.
Outside the air is neither humid nor arid. This balance is somewhat staggering because it has been hot and dry of late. A beautiful, timely surprise really, especially with the warmth in our guts and heat on our faces due to the alcohol consumption. There is a breeze roving over from what feels like a northwesterly direction. It feels amazing. We begin our stumble through the parking lot toward Munger Ave.
Thoughtlessly, we drop trou in the alley and release some fluids against the newly erected wooden fence. No one sees us and we continue northbound on Munger. Strange starts talking about some of his ideas in relation to my blog. He wants us to collaborate on a massive happening campaign involving city council members, black dildos and jail time, if necessary.
“Think of it. Like... live art.”
“Spontaneous!” I shout.
“Kind of. I mean, it’s planned.”
“Calculated.”
“Yes! I mean, fuck city council. Look at our black leaders. Look at them! They throw around allegations of racism like they’re paid to do it, and then they run out any and everyone who might be willing to help the predominantly black neighborhoods that they represent yet don’t even live in! They do more harm than good.”
We cross Swiss Ave.. Without bothering to question or assume a position of “devil’s advocacy,“ I allow Strange to continue his drunken inveighing unabated as we pass the quiet mansions on the corners. It’s about giving voice to voiceless people, he insists. Because they vote for the representation who they assume, due to racial similarity (which is an interesting fallacy; hear: What’s Beef? by Black Star [Kweli and Mos Def]), will represent them justly and fight for their best interests, and what they get out of it is fuck all.
“So here, here’s your black dildo Mr. Councilman. You like to fuck your own constituents, here! Here’s an object with which to actually do it!”
This unusual grammatical precision, combined with uncharacteristically coherent annunciation makes me laugh. Normally he's very disjoint and unfocused in his drunken proclamations. As most are-- more so than most. In extreme cases, his language will devolve into grunting and other slurs of the tongue. But right now, as we trek toward Lower Greenville, penniless yet excitable, he's the most articulate I've ever known him to be in this state. Or maybe it's simply the fact of my own state, which is quite similar, commenting on his, filling in the blanks. Articulating automatically that which is in fact, not articulate at all.
We stop at the light on Live Oak and Munger and I start laughing for no particular reason. I feel light headed and nothing seems to have any weight about it. No solid, tangible qualities. This compels me to muse about the red hand commanding us to not walk. That we should just fuckin' cross because it's not like the red hand is really an authority. It is an inanimate object which must defer its very existence to our animate dominion.
“Now,” I reason. “One can argue that the hand is a symbol, suggestive of the authority of our governing body, which has so decreed that the only way for our streets to function is to force everyone to take turns getting from one point to another and to defy said decree can lead to many an unfortunate result. Like getting ticketed or being hit by a car, etc..”
Strange looks at me and the light goes green. We step into the street with faltering steps. “All that talking while you could’ve been walking,” he says, shaking his head.
“And why didn’t you go ahead and cross?”
“Because I wanted to hear your drunken bullshit. It’s only fair. You listened to mine.”
“That’s very sweet of you.”
“You’re the cautious one. I just walk. Those lights and signs are suggestions to me at all times. Not just when I’m drunk. You preach to the choir.”
“We do that all time with each other. Things like this, we fuckin’ agree.”
Lower Greenville, from this distance, seems fairly dead. With this in mind it should also be noted that it’s a Sunday night. We’ve crossed over to the east, northbound traffic side of Munger. There’s a big church to our right. Some mornings homeless folk can be found sleeping in the stairwells and in the grass near the back of the church. On the other side of the street is a quiet park with benches and picnic tables and 90’s style playground (plastic) equipment. During the day, it’s a family friendly gathering place. At night, old men partake in brown bag dinners on the benches. This is Strange’s vocabulary. He admits he has himself been guilty of this (see: routine). After work he'd pick up a forty across the street at the Valero and stop at the park en route to this apartment on Swiss. The one he’d roomed in with Danger.
Munger has turned into Greenville Ave. and we’re coming up on a deserted strip of former bars and clubs that now seem little more than obstructions due to the great difficulty of walking the sidewalks that border them. Ferns, pines and other flora protrude in vivid color, with the slight suggestion of something approaching zest, into the walkway, daring passersby to brave the gauntlet. After all, to get across to Lower Greenville, it’s impossible to avoid. Unless one drives or jaywalks.
We do neither. Nor. At least not normally.
The reason the northbound traffic side is easier is because of the nature of the intersection ahead. Ross and Greenville Aves. both fork at odd angles; Ross peals slightly southeastward while Greenville goes northeast. This leaves a blind spot on the corner of the southbound traffic side of the intersection.
There is a white sign with a crude pictograph representing a peripatetic human of some sort surrounded like a child in a bubble by a red circle with a line (of same color) slicing through the human depiction-- the universal symbol of negation-- on the north side of Ross in front of a small taco stand. No Pedestrian Crossing.
We are now crossing Ross onto Lower Greenville. Passing a tattoo parlor, Strange fumbles with his cell phone. He punches a button and puts it to his ear. He’s trying to reach Danger, I assume.
For some reason I’m thinking of Kundera’s euphoniously titled Unbearable Lightness of Being. Saying it over and over in my head. I like it. It sounds elegiac. Poetic. I’ve never read the damn thing, but the title alone is enough to merit a read one of these days. And I laugh. I’m laughing because the “lightness of being” I am currently experiencing is anything but unbearable. It is euphoric.
The Euphoric Lightness of Being.
I say it aloud as we approach Revolution ‘59. New Edition’s Candy Girl can be heard distinctively as people pass through the doors and onto the sidewalk or vice-versa: from the sidewalk up to the bar. For the longest I had assumed that it was a Jackson 5 tune. The guy outside the door asks us for our ID’s. We oblige and without incident or even comment, are ushered in.
“This is my kind of place,” Strange shouts to me over the music. It’s empty, but revolutionary paraphernalia abounds. The prevalent ubiquity of Ernesto “Che” Guevara-Lynch manifests itself rather forcefully and prosaically; the famous mural made t-shirt design for young pretenders everywhere to express their suburban/urban haute discontent. Hell Yeah (Pimp the System) by Dead Prez kicks in and I begin to nod my head with the beat as M-1 and stic.man begin invoking ‘hoods and cities in much the same manner epic poets of yore would invoke muses.
“I like this song,” I say. “But there’s a reason this place is empty.” I point to the sign.
Strange gives the sign a glance and then walks up to the bar. I follow. The tender has an undie mag. splayed out on the counter before him. He’s chewing gum and there’s a sharpened pencil tucked between his head and the soft fold of his right ear. From the looks of the magazine, he’s been giving the models moustaches and shit.
“What’s with the prices?” Strange strains his voice over the music.
“The prices?”
“Yeah. The prices. Who can afford this?”
The guy just looks at him. “I don’t fuckin’ know, man. I don’t set the prices, I just charge them.”
“And what kind of tips do you stand to garner?” I slur.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I shout.
The guy looks at me and then at Strange and then points to me. “I’m not serving him. He’s drunk off his ass.” I am not bothering to defend myself. I start for the door. Yes, I’m feeling it. The whiskey. The beer. Taking its toll. “The only thing revolutionary about those specials is how fucking expensive they are!” I shout. Strange grabs me and we head for the exit.
“Yo! Yo Strange!” I blather as we crash out the door together. “What is big, dumb, and less punk than Punky Brewster?”
He laughs. I stumble and point to Steve, who I see across the street. “That gargantuan motherfucker right there! Hey Steve! Steve! Stevie! Hey man, don’t hurt me, alright. I’m afraid of the pain. That, and if you slug me in the gut, I swear I’ll puke all over your pansy ass shoes.”
“He’s a dumb fuck, Steve, but don’t hit him,” Strange says.
“Wait a minute,” I say, really feeling the liquor hit my brain. “Hey Steve, man. I’m sorry, but I was thinking about Kundera earlier and... ever read that guy? Me neither, but I was inspired to write a story. Yeah, it’s called “The Unbearable Stench of Steve the Closeted Homosexual.”
He laughs. “You’re real funny, man. Look, I could beat you six ways to Sunday, but it won’t change the fact that you’re a broke fucking loser that needs to learn some self composure.”
“Composure? Oh, look at this Adam. Look! This fucking guy! Where’d you learn to talk like that Steve? Hey, I got a book for you to read...”
Strange smacks me.
“Shut the fuck up, man!”
I wake up at the bar where Danger works. Steve is smiling at me. I look at my phone. The digital clock in the corner of the tiny glowing screen says 12:53. I groan and ask Steve what happened. He leans in and tells me that he didn’t beat me up or I’d be in a hospital having my stomach pumped to retrieve my own teeth. I rub my head and fake a laugh. I tell him that I’m drunk as shit. He puts a beer in front of me. Says I’m on Danger’s tab.
“Can I get a shot of whiskey after this?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
I sit back in my chair and sip the beer. It’s a light beer of some sort and tastes like shit. Just as I begin to wonder where Strange has gotten off to, I get a text. In typical Strange fashion, it’s brief.
Seeing Danger for the first time in a few weeks, all I could think was to ask if he had any white pony. As we’re exchanging pleasantries, I out with it, and he looks at me very seriously and says, “No fucking way would I ever sell to you.” I laugh and thank him for the drinks. He says “no problem, brother. Any time,” and quickly cuts over to a girl he knows. Or doesn’t know.
The MILF looking lady nursing a neon colored cocktail next to me has a cig in her mouth and is looking through her purse for a lighter. I unsteadily flash mine in front of her. She inserts the tip of the cancer stick into the orange part of the flame and makes an audible sucking noise as she takes in the fume. In this process, her cheeks deflate against the bone structure of her face. I ask her if I can have one and she shoves her pack against my elbow, now digging into the counter.
Lighting my cigarette, I attempt to start conversation with her, but she tells me there’s a group waiting for her, and picks up her purse and cocktail and slides off the chair. Fuck it, I say to myself and knock back the rest of the beer.
©Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
The phone is ringing. Shit. Strange is expecting a call from a possible future employer and I'm supposed to pretend that I run a small mom and pop pizza shop; as a reference. Or something. The details were never clear, so the assumption is that he expects me to come up with something believable. Because the truth is that he is an employer's worst nightmare. He's flighty. He quits jobs and doesn't say shit to the people in charge. Leaves other hapless paeans in his wake; hanging, as it were. When questioned, he simply shrugs and calls himself a proletarian nomad.
Dilemma. Why? Because I'm beating my fucking meat, that's why. I stop and reach for my phone. The display is a number that is not logged in my SIM card. It suddenly stops ringing. The display reads that I have a missed call. No shit.
I regain my masturbatory mindset, gradually pacing myself back into a good frictional momentum, pumping my fist into my crotch quickly while the images on my laptop monitor provide me with the appropriate visual stimuli.
When I finally spill some seed into my hand, the phone rings again. I reach across my body with my left hand for the phone. My arm, however, isn't that long, so I have to slightly dip myself into the crevice of the couch made by the convergence of cushions in order to pick up the phone, which itself is resting in the fault line created by the middle cushion and the far right cushion. I can feel the semen that has oozed between the head of my cock and fingers getting cold.
Looking at the display, I see that it's the same number as before. This person is unrelenting. I press the green 'go' button and put the phone to my ear. "This is Benny Salvatore; Benny and Vinny's Pizza, whadduya want?” There is a silence here. Then:
“Hello... um... I’m calling regarding an applicant. Um... an Adam Rodriguez.”
“Oh yeah? Haven’t seen him in a month.”
“Well, I’m a manager at Profit Bar. We like to screen our applicants for references. What can you say about Mr. Rodriguez?”
“Who?”
“Uh... Adam Rodriguez.”
“Oh. Called himself Strange. Good guy. Can‘t usually trust Mexicans, so that‘s saying something. My brother Vinny hated him, though. His friends were obnoxious drunk fuckers, always come in and hit on all the lady patrons. But he worked harder than anyone, and if my brother wasn’t such a pussy, the kid’d still be working for us.”
“Oh. Well... um... thanks a lot... Mr. ... ?”
“Salvatore.”
The guy hangs up and between a dial tone and the cold, disgusting bodily excretion seemingly gluing together my flaccid cock and my fist, I feel very silly. I can’t believe I actually did the Italian American accent. I know it probably sounded fake and awful, but fuck it, I think I scared that guy shitless.
I go into the bathroom and wash my hands and my dick and begin searching for clothes that smell clean. My Nirvana shirt is on the floor. I pick it up and smell it. Nothing discernibly foul, and from looks, besides a few wrinkles, it’s good. I pull it on and then cover the lower half of my body with a horrendously ripped up pair of jeans.
While doing vanity exercises in front of my bathroom mirror, I feel the sudden urge to laugh at myself. In the past, girls have accused me of being more obsessed with my appearance than their younger teenage sisters. I laugh and say aloud to myself that they were right.
I hear the front door open. It’s Strange. He calls out. “Marco!” “Polo!” I echo back.
I see his head peek into the bathroom. He asks me what’s up. I tell him he got a call from Profit Bar. He smiles. I follow him into the living room. He says he has good news. I see a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of vodka on the table. Both 750 ml. The whiskey is Jameson. The vodka is something that I know he picked up for less than 10$.
“Well. My mom is throwing me some money. Grudgingly. So I can get a place.”
“Awesome,” I say.
“Yes. I feel kind of dirty. Like a middle class suburban bitch.”
“Anyone would take the money. Guilt free. They’re liars if they scream otherwise. Hell, even I can admit that my dad will probably drop me a few pounds this week.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Help me find a place around here. No Upper E shit, though. It’s only $500.”
We decide to “think efficiency.” Yes. It’s like living in a closet, but it’s better than sleeping in parks or beneath underpasses. “I might do that just for inspiration,” he says, laughing. We sit on the right and left cushions of the couch, staring into the wall ahead. He says that I should do something with my empty, boring wall.
"What? Knock it out? No thanks. I'd rather get drunk and pretend there's shit on the walls than have to look directly out into that nightmarish still life called ‘the porch‘ by management even though it is undoubtedly a courtyard."
"All I'm saying," Strange says, cracking open the bottle of vodka. "Is that arty renditions of naked women might spruce shit up some."
“That explains why your place was always so boner inducing despite the lack of promise...” I trail off.
Thoughts are conjuring themselves in my mind. I laugh. We both laugh. Drinking, passing back and forth the bottled spirits. But then I tell him that the truth is that that kind of stimulation is bad for me. Yes. It’s enough that I jerk off to internet porn as much as I do. I mean, shit. I can’t even operate without the imagery provided by my open laptop.
The days of rubbing one out in the shower or laying in bed, legs akimbo, blowing loads onto my stomach or fucking seldom worn dress socks are quite past me. There is a challenge-- a certain sacrament-- in having to push some buttons and wait for a wireless network I can surf and wank to ejaculatory glory. Walls adorned with fleshy feminine shapes would give me an ease of mental access that left zero room for ritual.
Strange lights a cigarette and leers at me a little. He laughs uncomfortably. We both do. All is quiet. The white wall ahead watches over our gluttonous imbibing, over my revealing revelation.
And amidst the quietude of the abated mirth-- discomfited as it was-- and through a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle, I say, "So yeah, the Profit Bar called about references for 'Adam Rodriguez.' I pretended to be this transplanted New Yorker named Benny Salvatore. I think I scared the guy, but he might call, so just a heads up."
"Ha, he bought it?"
"Yeah. I even added that bigoted Italian American thing. You know, where they hate immigrants and minorities and shit."
“Cool.”
I ask him if he got anywhere with Vanessa. He says no. Not at all. I say that I had a dream that they were fucking in a VW. “She has a Kia Rio,” he says. “They started out making bikes,” I say, getting up. I go into my room and shuffle through a pile of books. I pick up Strange’s book.
He turns to watch me bring the book around the table and plop myself into the cushions of the couch. I grab the whiskey, throw back a gulp or two and then flip through the book. The cover is somewhat bent because it was jammed, sandwich-like, between two other books. Something called, A Freudian Interpretation of Dreams and Debord’s Panegyric. The only thing I remember about the former was a six page explanation about the significance of a silken white glove in dreams. Hint: it’s sexual. Debord’s book is a postmodern memoir of sorts. I remember some stuff about how he likes women. Other than that, all I can say is that the pictures are cool.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a passage in your book that my dream reminded me of,” I say.
Of course, there was nothing exact about the relation between my dream and his book, except that in both cases there is this weird tunneling through of the REM wall that separates actual sleep from the environs in which said sleep takes place. There is certainly a scientific phrase for this phenomena, but fuck if I know what it is.
Anyway, when Strange took off with Vanessa, the idea of them walking to her car made me dream of walking. The previously built up sexual tension without release set up the vaginal and sexual imagery; a manifestation of a theoretical continuation due largely to my failure, in reality, to perform ’neath and ’twixt the sheets.
In the book, there’s a bit, which I begin reading aloud to him, where the narrator is dreaming through a haze of a malt liquor and marijuana that his female roommate is sitting naked, sweating, talking to him about her mother who has a parrot that says things like “fuck me! fuck me real hard!” and he questions her as to whether or not she taught the parrot to say it as a practical joke on her mother and she says, “are you kidding? I’m too much of a stoner to take the necessary time for that. My mom fucks all the teenage acne-faced boys in the neighborhood.” The narrator of course stirs himself awake, his underwear heavy against his flesh with perspiration, and realizes that his roommate is fucking her boyfriend in the adjoining room, screaming “fuck me! fuck me real hard!”
“My question, dear Adam, is where the fuck did the parrot come from?” I ask, laughingly, closing the book and swigging on the bottle of whiskey.
“When I was writing it I had this great tat mag that had a pullout section dedicated to tattoos of exotic animals, and this very beautiful girl had a huge tattoo of a macaw on her back. Amazing coloring. It seemed like something funny and interesting at the time.”
We sit around and continue to drink. It’s dark outside. Strange pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to me. I look at it. It’s a phone number. “Vanessa?” Yes. Vanessa. I crumple up the paper and toss it into the kitchen.
Inundated by a wave of spontaneity, he asks me if I want to walk down to Lower Greenville. I think about it briefly. We’re obviously more than a little drunk (hence the rashness). I say yes. Fuck it! Let’s do it. I stand to my feet, salute Strange, and take another nip of whiskey. Both bottles are dangerously low on liquids.
Even in our soused stupor, we realize that we’ll have to empty our pockets to see for ourselves that between us (remember I am flat broke) we have about $1.69, which isn’t enough to buy shit. At least not at bars on Lower Greenville.
Placing ourselves gently, in concurrent motion, back onto the couch, we sip at the remnants of the bottles, Strange with the vodka, and me with the whiskey. Then we swap.
“Well,” I start. “We’re already pretty lit, wouldn’t you say?” He nods. “Well then, lets just head out and see where the night takes us.”
“Could be promising,” he adds, belching loudly.
Outside the air is neither humid nor arid. This balance is somewhat staggering because it has been hot and dry of late. A beautiful, timely surprise really, especially with the warmth in our guts and heat on our faces due to the alcohol consumption. There is a breeze roving over from what feels like a northwesterly direction. It feels amazing. We begin our stumble through the parking lot toward Munger Ave.
Thoughtlessly, we drop trou in the alley and release some fluids against the newly erected wooden fence. No one sees us and we continue northbound on Munger. Strange starts talking about some of his ideas in relation to my blog. He wants us to collaborate on a massive happening campaign involving city council members, black dildos and jail time, if necessary.
“Think of it. Like... live art.”
“Spontaneous!” I shout.
“Kind of. I mean, it’s planned.”
“Calculated.”
“Yes! I mean, fuck city council. Look at our black leaders. Look at them! They throw around allegations of racism like they’re paid to do it, and then they run out any and everyone who might be willing to help the predominantly black neighborhoods that they represent yet don’t even live in! They do more harm than good.”
We cross Swiss Ave.. Without bothering to question or assume a position of “devil’s advocacy,“ I allow Strange to continue his drunken inveighing unabated as we pass the quiet mansions on the corners. It’s about giving voice to voiceless people, he insists. Because they vote for the representation who they assume, due to racial similarity (which is an interesting fallacy; hear: What’s Beef? by Black Star [Kweli and Mos Def]), will represent them justly and fight for their best interests, and what they get out of it is fuck all.
“So here, here’s your black dildo Mr. Councilman. You like to fuck your own constituents, here! Here’s an object with which to actually do it!”
This unusual grammatical precision, combined with uncharacteristically coherent annunciation makes me laugh. Normally he's very disjoint and unfocused in his drunken proclamations. As most are-- more so than most. In extreme cases, his language will devolve into grunting and other slurs of the tongue. But right now, as we trek toward Lower Greenville, penniless yet excitable, he's the most articulate I've ever known him to be in this state. Or maybe it's simply the fact of my own state, which is quite similar, commenting on his, filling in the blanks. Articulating automatically that which is in fact, not articulate at all.
We stop at the light on Live Oak and Munger and I start laughing for no particular reason. I feel light headed and nothing seems to have any weight about it. No solid, tangible qualities. This compels me to muse about the red hand commanding us to not walk. That we should just fuckin' cross because it's not like the red hand is really an authority. It is an inanimate object which must defer its very existence to our animate dominion.
“Now,” I reason. “One can argue that the hand is a symbol, suggestive of the authority of our governing body, which has so decreed that the only way for our streets to function is to force everyone to take turns getting from one point to another and to defy said decree can lead to many an unfortunate result. Like getting ticketed or being hit by a car, etc..”
Strange looks at me and the light goes green. We step into the street with faltering steps. “All that talking while you could’ve been walking,” he says, shaking his head.
“And why didn’t you go ahead and cross?”
“Because I wanted to hear your drunken bullshit. It’s only fair. You listened to mine.”
“That’s very sweet of you.”
“You’re the cautious one. I just walk. Those lights and signs are suggestions to me at all times. Not just when I’m drunk. You preach to the choir.”
“We do that all time with each other. Things like this, we fuckin’ agree.”
Lower Greenville, from this distance, seems fairly dead. With this in mind it should also be noted that it’s a Sunday night. We’ve crossed over to the east, northbound traffic side of Munger. There’s a big church to our right. Some mornings homeless folk can be found sleeping in the stairwells and in the grass near the back of the church. On the other side of the street is a quiet park with benches and picnic tables and 90’s style playground (plastic) equipment. During the day, it’s a family friendly gathering place. At night, old men partake in brown bag dinners on the benches. This is Strange’s vocabulary. He admits he has himself been guilty of this (see: routine). After work he'd pick up a forty across the street at the Valero and stop at the park en route to this apartment on Swiss. The one he’d roomed in with Danger.
Munger has turned into Greenville Ave. and we’re coming up on a deserted strip of former bars and clubs that now seem little more than obstructions due to the great difficulty of walking the sidewalks that border them. Ferns, pines and other flora protrude in vivid color, with the slight suggestion of something approaching zest, into the walkway, daring passersby to brave the gauntlet. After all, to get across to Lower Greenville, it’s impossible to avoid. Unless one drives or jaywalks.
We do neither. Nor. At least not normally.
The reason the northbound traffic side is easier is because of the nature of the intersection ahead. Ross and Greenville Aves. both fork at odd angles; Ross peals slightly southeastward while Greenville goes northeast. This leaves a blind spot on the corner of the southbound traffic side of the intersection.
There is a white sign with a crude pictograph representing a peripatetic human of some sort surrounded like a child in a bubble by a red circle with a line (of same color) slicing through the human depiction-- the universal symbol of negation-- on the north side of Ross in front of a small taco stand. No Pedestrian Crossing.
We are now crossing Ross onto Lower Greenville. Passing a tattoo parlor, Strange fumbles with his cell phone. He punches a button and puts it to his ear. He’s trying to reach Danger, I assume.
For some reason I’m thinking of Kundera’s euphoniously titled Unbearable Lightness of Being. Saying it over and over in my head. I like it. It sounds elegiac. Poetic. I’ve never read the damn thing, but the title alone is enough to merit a read one of these days. And I laugh. I’m laughing because the “lightness of being” I am currently experiencing is anything but unbearable. It is euphoric.
The Euphoric Lightness of Being.
I say it aloud as we approach Revolution ‘59. New Edition’s Candy Girl can be heard distinctively as people pass through the doors and onto the sidewalk or vice-versa: from the sidewalk up to the bar. For the longest I had assumed that it was a Jackson 5 tune. The guy outside the door asks us for our ID’s. We oblige and without incident or even comment, are ushered in.
“This is my kind of place,” Strange shouts to me over the music. It’s empty, but revolutionary paraphernalia abounds. The prevalent ubiquity of Ernesto “Che” Guevara-Lynch manifests itself rather forcefully and prosaically; the famous mural made t-shirt design for young pretenders everywhere to express their suburban/urban haute discontent. Hell Yeah (Pimp the System) by Dead Prez kicks in and I begin to nod my head with the beat as M-1 and stic.man begin invoking ‘hoods and cities in much the same manner epic poets of yore would invoke muses.
“I like this song,” I say. “But there’s a reason this place is empty.” I point to the sign.
Revolutionary Specials:
Draughts (Dom.)-- $4.50
Draughts (Foreign)-- $6.50
Bottles-- $3.50
Well drinks-- $4.50
Strange gives the sign a glance and then walks up to the bar. I follow. The tender has an undie mag. splayed out on the counter before him. He’s chewing gum and there’s a sharpened pencil tucked between his head and the soft fold of his right ear. From the looks of the magazine, he’s been giving the models moustaches and shit.
“What’s with the prices?” Strange strains his voice over the music.
“The prices?”
“Yeah. The prices. Who can afford this?”
The guy just looks at him. “I don’t fuckin’ know, man. I don’t set the prices, I just charge them.”
“And what kind of tips do you stand to garner?” I slur.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I shout.
The guy looks at me and then at Strange and then points to me. “I’m not serving him. He’s drunk off his ass.” I am not bothering to defend myself. I start for the door. Yes, I’m feeling it. The whiskey. The beer. Taking its toll. “The only thing revolutionary about those specials is how fucking expensive they are!” I shout. Strange grabs me and we head for the exit.
“Yo! Yo Strange!” I blather as we crash out the door together. “What is big, dumb, and less punk than Punky Brewster?”
He laughs. I stumble and point to Steve, who I see across the street. “That gargantuan motherfucker right there! Hey Steve! Steve! Stevie! Hey man, don’t hurt me, alright. I’m afraid of the pain. That, and if you slug me in the gut, I swear I’ll puke all over your pansy ass shoes.”
“He’s a dumb fuck, Steve, but don’t hit him,” Strange says.
“Wait a minute,” I say, really feeling the liquor hit my brain. “Hey Steve, man. I’m sorry, but I was thinking about Kundera earlier and... ever read that guy? Me neither, but I was inspired to write a story. Yeah, it’s called “The Unbearable Stench of Steve the Closeted Homosexual.”
He laughs. “You’re real funny, man. Look, I could beat you six ways to Sunday, but it won’t change the fact that you’re a broke fucking loser that needs to learn some self composure.”
“Composure? Oh, look at this Adam. Look! This fucking guy! Where’d you learn to talk like that Steve? Hey, I got a book for you to read...”
Strange smacks me.
“Shut the fuck up, man!”
I wake up at the bar where Danger works. Steve is smiling at me. I look at my phone. The digital clock in the corner of the tiny glowing screen says 12:53. I groan and ask Steve what happened. He leans in and tells me that he didn’t beat me up or I’d be in a hospital having my stomach pumped to retrieve my own teeth. I rub my head and fake a laugh. I tell him that I’m drunk as shit. He puts a beer in front of me. Says I’m on Danger’s tab.
“Can I get a shot of whiskey after this?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
I sit back in my chair and sip the beer. It’s a light beer of some sort and tastes like shit. Just as I begin to wonder where Strange has gotten off to, I get a text. In typical Strange fashion, it’s brief.
With a cute pnk girl. See ya tomorrow.
Seeing Danger for the first time in a few weeks, all I could think was to ask if he had any white pony. As we’re exchanging pleasantries, I out with it, and he looks at me very seriously and says, “No fucking way would I ever sell to you.” I laugh and thank him for the drinks. He says “no problem, brother. Any time,” and quickly cuts over to a girl he knows. Or doesn’t know.
The MILF looking lady nursing a neon colored cocktail next to me has a cig in her mouth and is looking through her purse for a lighter. I unsteadily flash mine in front of her. She inserts the tip of the cancer stick into the orange part of the flame and makes an audible sucking noise as she takes in the fume. In this process, her cheeks deflate against the bone structure of her face. I ask her if I can have one and she shoves her pack against my elbow, now digging into the counter.
Lighting my cigarette, I attempt to start conversation with her, but she tells me there’s a group waiting for her, and picks up her purse and cocktail and slides off the chair. Fuck it, I say to myself and knock back the rest of the beer.
©Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
22.9.09
abbie collins
*Currently, I am incredibly (?) with slothfulness. That is not to say I am extremely lazy (though, don't be mistaken, I can be a useless toad when so self driven). No. I am artless, although this may appear (to simpleminded individuals) to be nothing more than the equivalent of a rash, to me....
it is a very slow death; it is the labor bed of the most revered of every hell pit; it is the mother of irrational tantrums; it is the father of my fake hope provoked; and less than thought out adventures. I swear, I fuck more when I'm less creative. "I'm bored! I'm without milk I'm without seed!" during half the relationships I've gone through I've gone to such lengths as bruising my upper arms with teeth marks as not to spit my actual opinions all over their desired passions. (MOVWDST) "this is the only thing I've had inside me all day!" they think I'm being sexual, on the contrary..... I'm being completely apathetic.
"Crying and fucking go hand in hand, you feel nothing but a lump in the process." I've said since the age of 14. I've been debating adding constipation to the list, or guilt. Guilt and sex....one and the same, for someone who has frequented sexual pleasure as much as I have, I sure don't like it. It has transcended beyond pleasure to me, but, not an act of art, not even a useless act, something to be compared to clipping your toenails. I receive a slight satisfaction and maybe a slight feeling of productivity or accomplishment. Truth is, I'd rather cook a good meal than fuck these days, at least some fruition comes out of that. I'm looking for stimulation. Have you ever seen a man or woman lose their ability to create? To execute the action that lends to love?
I have one answer to that, "get the fuck away... I can set fire to myself with one hand thank you."
*By Abbie Collins transcripted by Adam Strange from a notebook, posted with permission
it is a very slow death; it is the labor bed of the most revered of every hell pit; it is the mother of irrational tantrums; it is the father of my fake hope provoked; and less than thought out adventures. I swear, I fuck more when I'm less creative. "I'm bored! I'm without milk I'm without seed!" during half the relationships I've gone through I've gone to such lengths as bruising my upper arms with teeth marks as not to spit my actual opinions all over their desired passions. (MOVWDST) "this is the only thing I've had inside me all day!" they think I'm being sexual, on the contrary..... I'm being completely apathetic.
"Crying and fucking go hand in hand, you feel nothing but a lump in the process." I've said since the age of 14. I've been debating adding constipation to the list, or guilt. Guilt and sex....one and the same, for someone who has frequented sexual pleasure as much as I have, I sure don't like it. It has transcended beyond pleasure to me, but, not an act of art, not even a useless act, something to be compared to clipping your toenails. I receive a slight satisfaction and maybe a slight feeling of productivity or accomplishment. Truth is, I'd rather cook a good meal than fuck these days, at least some fruition comes out of that. I'm looking for stimulation. Have you ever seen a man or woman lose their ability to create? To execute the action that lends to love?
I have one answer to that, "get the fuck away... I can set fire to myself with one hand thank you."
*By Abbie Collins transcripted by Adam Strange from a notebook, posted with permission
21.9.09
Booze-Sleeve Crew/Comix
"I Can Indeed Eat a Star"
"He and I Have Had Problems"
"Never Leave the Planning to Me" Ft. Anthony Obi
"I Am Incredibly Modest, I Must Admit"
"Micki's a Con-Artist"
"Papier-Maché-ville"
All drawings by Robby Mexico
20.9.09
Flâneur Fiction: "Detouring Vol. 4"
“Detouring Vol. 4”
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
I smell tobacco smoke as I awaken, eyes blinking rapidly, the hangover screaming at my ears like a nagging, self-righteous mother giving me the “what-for.” Sitting up, I hear noises in the living room, amplified by my condition, banging around dolorously in my head. A familiar heavy-set figure appears in the doorway.
“You’re awake!” says she, stating the obvious as people with pretensions to humor in situations embarrassing to anyone but themselves tend to do.
“Yeah, I’m awake.”
“You were unable to perform last night.”
“Who are you, again?”
She’s telling me that we met at the party on Live Oak last night. I know that. My last memory of her was watching her vomit into the shrubbery. Strange appears in the door behind her and laughs at me.
“I have all kinds of fucked up pictures of you.”
“That’s not surprising,” I say, lifting myself from the mattress. “Why the fucking congregation in my living room?”
"Trying to figure out how it was exactly that Jesus turned water into wine... and how it relates to our salvation."
Further, Strange explains that he tried to tell the heavy-set girl (note: in vol. 3 referred to as chubby) that these sort of sleep-ins were normal for people who binge on a regular basis, and that her response was that one day these kinds of binges lead to death; so they were discussing what to do in the event that I were to either stop breathing or begin vomiting. Naturally, they then go into a debate on whether or not I should be on my back or on my stomach while I sleep the sleep of the most devout of Dionysian devotees (my metaphor, not his).
I laugh and pick myself up; dizzy. My posture is, of course, a feint. I definitely want to stagger. To fall, even. But I have a reputation of hard drinking stamina to uphold. And all I can manage is to blurt out, “If you’ll both excuse me, I have to piss.”
My stomach is rumbling as the piss streams from the tip of my dick and into the bowl below me. I will probably end up on my knees, puking into it before all is said and done. I am not too proud, no. I figure that Strange has enough to lord over me as regards my escapades, and the heavy-set girl, well, she’s already made it clear she’s a novice when it comes to the ingestion of spirits; no, I simply didn’t want to fall from my bed directly onto my face, and I certainly didn’t want to crawl into the bathroom.
I tuck my penis back into the fold of my boxers and kneel to the throne. The tingle moves from my stomach and into my throat. The hairs on the back of my neck are raised, and I’m retching, even going so far as to shove my fingers into my mouth in an attempt to precipitate regurgitation. This works. By now I’m used to this sort of thing. I’m not accustomed to this activity in the same way that young women who counteract their binges with purges are, but I do have a liver that is dreaming of the day I become an ascetic teetotaler. Dream a little dream, dear liver.
Strange sips on a beer in the kitchen. No doubt it is the last one. I say nothing. I reach over him and into the cupboard for a glass. He says there’s no ice. It’s okay. I run tap water into the glass and chug it down. The heavy-set girl whose name is Vanessa comments on the fact of my dehydration with an annoying upward inflection indicative of a question, failing just as miserably in her second attempt at humor as she did in the first. I ask her if she’s always this poignant in her observational routines. This doesn’t register. I fill the glass again, gulp down more water and then set the glass noisily into the sink.
All three of us sit on the couch, smoking. Vanessa smells good. I think she may have used my shower. But it could be Strange. He’s finished his beer and is now peeling his jeans away from his crotch. Vanessa comments on this as typical male behavior. I’m starting to worry that sweet beautiful silence may never spend the day (or night) here again.
“So. Last night,” she says. Strange forces a chuckle.
“What about it?” I ask.
“I wanted to have sex, and you were too drunk.”
“It’s called whiskey dick.”
She asks me how old I am and if I see a proctologist regularly. I say that I’m twenty-five and that I don’t know. Turning the table, I ask her how often she sees her gynecologist. She says that she doesn’t because she has no healthcare.
“Fucking Republicans,” Strange interjects. “Those motherfuckers think everyone should bow down to their fucking OTB scam. ’Here insurance company, here’s my monthly fee, because I just KNOW that I’m going to get sick!’ I say FUCK MIDDLEMEN.”
“OTB means off-track betting. I think it has to do with horse racing,” I say.
“Huh?”
“OTB just doesn’t make sense, though I get the comparison. Sort of. I think.”
Vanessa is silent for a change as me and Strange banter back and forth. We are carrying on to the point where I know that I will have to pull out my laptop. And we’ll have to Google the term OTB. My assumption will be proven correct and he will concede victory to me. I will smoke a victory cig and then take Vanessa back into my room and do to her what I should’ve done last night.
However, the most that this will ever be is a fantastical succession of possible events lazing around in the back of my mind while I’m trying to convince Strange that it isn’t a big deal. Which is exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m telling him that I agree with the premise, it’s just that I’m not sure if the metaphor is apt. And does it matter? Not really. The point is that her asking me about my proctologic history is neither here nor there. It has nothing to do with the fact that I couldn’t get an erection. I’m not forty.
“Is it because I’m not skinny?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t care about that. I’m telling you, there is a ceiling to what you can do while being heavily intoxicated.”
“It sucks," Strange adds, "Lady Liquor can be a bitch like that. Sometimes she just wants to be the only lady in a guy's life."
I motion an "amen" in his direction. Always a good wingman. Vanessa stands up and gives us each "once-overs," finally demanding that I take her to my room and finish the job. After some laughter, I tell her to go and get ready. She smiles, curtseys to us both and runs into my room, slamming the door behind her.
"Got a condom?" I ask him.
He laughs.
"What happened last night?”
"You started giving girls piggy-back rides. Then guys. "
“That’s hilarious.”
"Oh, don’t doubt it, asshole. I have pictures. So you can Google it later, motherfucker."
Then he shows me the pictures. Photographic evidence of my much heralded stupidity. Yes, I’ve heard the stories. But this is the first time any real visuals have been provided. Pictures of me rolling around on the wooden floor, spilt liquor mixing with the dirt from peoples shoes, leaving colorful streaks; me licking it up. There’re pics of me hanging my dick out of my jeans while wearing the shittiest of shit-eating-grins on my face. Tousled hair. Slideshows of me lip-locking with every girl whose personal space I could charm/drunkenly invade my way into. A fat guy sitting across my back, likely the result of a piggy-back ride gone awry.
“Could’ve been worse,” Strange says, commiserating. “Could’ve been caught giving that guy’s asshole a moustache ride.”
“I wasn’t talking about how ‘throwed’ I was, was I?”
From his grin I deduce an affirmative answer. Fuck. The best one, he says, is the one he didn’t get. But everyone was talking about it.
“You pulled down your pants and took a shit in the bush.”
“That’s too bad. I would’ve gotten you a frame for that one.”
My social M.O. might not preclude benders and awkward sexual encounters at gatherings, but it doesn't normally include shitting in shrubberies. This most isolated of incidents could've been the result of anything. Perhaps in my clouded perception of things, I was expressing boredom. Boredom with routine. Partying, a routine in many circles, combines the same elements (with some variation) but coalesces different perceptive expectations. The good time vs. the bad time. Inebriation vs. sobriety. Sex vs. a landscape of copulative aridity due to a great many of variables: A gender ratio skewed in favor of the opposite sex/sexual orientation, one's own finicky aesthetic tastes, one's own displeasing aesthetic appearance, a lack or over-abundance of liquor (as per lack: causing one to be more inhibited, discerning; as per abundance: causing an inability to perform, sexually, socially), or more likely, one's unpleasant attitude; anything may or may not happen because the cut and dry is that routines can be planned, outcomes cannot. When I decided to step onto that property, it was to get drunk, talk a loud load of shit about journalism and literature and film, and maybe make out with/offend women (beautiful and not-so-beautiful alike), but I had no idea that things would end with a scatological act. To quote the hipster art gallery guy I once interviewed: “Totally fuckin’ drunken DADA, man.”
I didn’t want to break the man’s heart, but the qualifier cancelled out the word it qualified.
I enter my room and Vanessa is spot reading of the books that was laying on the floor. I ask if she’s enjoying what she’s perusing. She says yeah, because it’s straight up porno. I feel like maybe discussing the finer points of Henry Miller with her, but realize that that sort of endeavor would be comparable to me climbing the Himalayas. I.e., fucking impossible. “Yes,” I agree. Total porno. No substance whatever. But I enjoy it. I begin to climb onto the bed, but she commands that I bathe myself because she doesn’t want to be turned off by the pukey, shitty smell of my person.
“The hot water is out of commission,” I say, lying. Of course, she doesn’t believe me and checks for herself. Her suspicions are confirmed and she says that if I don’t want to fuck her all I have to say is I don’t. I argue that I don’t see the point in showering to do something dirty. It’s counterproductive, and more than that, as senseless as demanding that a girl shower pre-cunnilingus.
“But... you stink,” she insists.
So I climb into the shower, turn on the spout, and let the water rinse over me. The previous night’s should-be regrets circle the drain. I wash everything thoroughly. My nether-regions have never been so clean! Clean to the point that I start thinking to myself that there's a possibility that what I figured was a really bad tan was actually just an accumulation of dirt and grime due to my inconsistent showering habits.
Toweling myself off, I start to put on a fresh pair of boxers but reconsider. After all, I'm going to be naked anyway. Instead I cover the important parts in talcum powder and open the door. Vanessa is lying spread-eagled under the covers.
"You're clean," she says.
"And naked."
Underneath the covers we begin kissing. It doesn't last long because she realizes that I haven't brushed my teeth. She's just looking at me. Changing the subject of voiceless subtlety to the act at hand, I insert myself betwixt her thighs. She sighs and I begin to push dryly into her. We're both quietly discomfited. I try to get some juices flowing by grabbing her breasts and sensually squeezing and kissing them. But I can't keep from slobbering for some reason. As I expect, she tells me that it isn't working. Her breasts aren't that sensitive. At least not to loose saliva and poor hand technique.
"Well, I can't stay hard, anyway," I admit.
"Fuck it. I'll masturbate. Leave me be."
Strange is drinking a beer and eating some chicken. "You had money?"
"I didn't have money until I lifted this guy's wallet. Drunk. Loud. Talked way too much... what's that word you like to use?"
"Braggadocious.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Talked lots of shit. Found him passed out on a couch, ass pocket bulging. Snagged it easily. Only had about thirty bucks and a couple of credit cards. I wasn't so cruel, though. I left him his ID."
"I hope you bought beer for all of us."
He points to the fridge and mumbles something along the lines of "help yourself." I open the fridge and there are five beers left out of what was a six-pack of Modelo Especial sitting next to a carton of OJ and half a package of bacon. I grab a can and sit on the couch next to him. Steam escapes the lip of the can as I crack it open. As I begin my first sip, Strange asks me if I fucked her.
“No. She made me shower.”
“Oh. Yeah, you’re pretty fucking dirty.”
“I can be.”
“You shit in the bushes,” he says, sucking on a jalapeño. “It’s not illogical to assume that in the course of a drunken shit, you might forget to wipe your ass.”
Vanessa’s moans can be heard over the hum of the AC, which kicked on only minutes ago. Strange comments on the fact that I’m letting a strange girl pleasure herself on my bed.
“Well, I couldn’t get the job done.”
“Again? Shit. Let me do it.”
I’m not so sure that I want to confront seriously my manhood and its deficiencies, drunken or mental. Because I’m certain that I don’t suffer from ED. So certain in fact, that I am actually concerned. I’m too young, right? I’m not a drug addict-- booze and assorted pills, sometimes coke-- is that a factor? I’ll have to do some research on causes of ED, but I’m almost positive that I’m not a candidate. Vanessa emerges from my room with a satisfied countenance.
“Will one of you fine gentlemen walk me back to my car?”
“You have a car?” Strange asks. “I’ll walk you if you take me to the liquor store.”
“Sure,” she agrees.
Strange blows me a kiss as he and Vanessa head out the door. I finish the remaining gulps of my beer. The pack of cigs is next to my laptop on the coffee table. There are two left. I pull one out of the packet and light it. As I exhale, I follow the trails of nicotine fog as it floats away from me, gradually entering an oblivion that I couldn’t even begin to imagine to fathom. I continue smoking in the kitchen. Pacing somewhat, I take casual puffs of the cig between my fingers, talking to myself, wondering if the assholes at Artology are going to stick me with yet another bullshit interview. At this point, I’d rather do opinion pieces about the new DART Rail Station or the beloved Good-Latimer tunnel that no longer exists except on Flickr pages than interview hipper-than-thou gallery owners or up and coming artists who will say anything for cred even if it means subverting their own values which were clichéd or untenable at best to begin with.
I open the fridge and pull one of the beers out, tear into it and commence chugging. It’s all I know at this point. Because I always want to tell myself, to convince myself even, that I have so much integrity and that these artists, these gallery owners, they’re the problem. They aren’t taste making, they’re selling. They’re selling and they’re hoping we’ll buy. They aren’t out scouring the gutters or the schools for who has the most talent or promise; no, they want a gimmick and all that’s needed to drive gimmickry is ambition and a shit load of it.
But even that wasn’t true. I finish the beer and toss it into the sink. Open the fridge, pull out another and crack it open and chug. Now I have beer dripping from my chin hair and onto the floor. Some of it has gone down my neck, onto my chest, and down into my belly button. It wasn’t true because I know for a fact that given the first opportunity at some kind of exposure, I’d off and run with it. Simply put, one could say that I am a hypocrite. A hypocrite stewing in his own dearth of acclaim. A wannabe Thompson, Bangs, or Self, even more subtly, scholastically, a Robert Hughes at the height of his acerbic acuity, which he uses to deftly poke and prod at sanctified monuments of liberal and conservative thought alike. Shit, carving a niche of one's own becomes more and more of a depressing proposition the more one ponders it.
I finish the can and drop kick it into a corner of the living room. I go into the fridge and repeat the cycle. I’m beginning to wonder to myself if I should dispense with bad habits and sit down and write a novel or something. I’ve never really considered myself to be creative, even in my most calculated of deconstructive screeds against a great many artists and the like. There’s never been an afflatus to imagine or perceive in a manner befitting a writer or artist. But I’ve always been able to dissect, comment, and laud or pan or whatever. Quite effectively, in fact. Better than most other writers on the Artology staff. Putting aside the inherent silliness of astrology, as a Libra, I strive for balance. Even in my desperate toil for concision, I have been known to consult various thesauruses and lexicons when simple everyday vocabulary just doesn’t get the point home.
Then I start arguing with myself over the semantics of writing “professionally.” I’m getting mired in how to define objects and states, etc.. Such as: can one be a critic and still be creative with words? Should my Wordsmithery be viewed as an art or craft? Both? Art vs. Craft. Is one superior or do they exist on different planes of creation? And if so, do they ever converge? I’m drinking. I’m talking to myself. I’m half naked. Mostly naked, actually. I’m sporting wet hair and boxers. I finish the beer. I walk into the living room and pick up the pack of cigs, burrow my finger through the silver lining and extract the last cigarette. I put it to my mouth and light it. Maybe I should sleep, I say to myself.
Striding and puffing my way back into the kitchen, I open the fridge and peer in. One beer left. I decide to drink it because, fuck it, Strange is out getting liquor. Besides, my fridge, my fucking rules. I pull it out, crack the tab, and have my way with it. I drop the diminished cig into the can and set it in the sink with the other can I’d previously used and abused.
I throw myself onto the couch and close my eyes. After a time, I fall into a dream. A dream where I’m walking the streets of Dallas, hand in hand, with a flaccid, uncut, immaculately veined cock, seemingly representative of a map of the highways and byways of the Plastic City herself. And in front of me and this sad excuse for a member, an impossible to reach vagina, spread before us. The more we walk, the farther away the massive pudenda gets. I’m starting to sweat and so does the cock, accompanying this likewise perspiration an odorous emission of god knows what.
We walk. And we walk. Interminably, it seems. Briefly I awaken as a noise stirs me, but then I fall right back into the dream. Except now the vagina is draped in pubic hair in much the same way the old houses on Swiss Ave. are covered in twisting, verdant vinery. The penis now appears to me more rigid. Erect. Proud. Lacking that awful fancy dairy scent. This is better. This is more acceptable. We are walking east bound on Live Oak. We pass Strange and a fat girl, fucking in broad daylight in a luxury VW.
I shake myself from the reverie and sit up. My dick is poking out through the hole in my boxers. I stuff it back in, sit up, and realize that I’m bit light headed. I run into the bathroom and puke some more.
© Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
I smell tobacco smoke as I awaken, eyes blinking rapidly, the hangover screaming at my ears like a nagging, self-righteous mother giving me the “what-for.” Sitting up, I hear noises in the living room, amplified by my condition, banging around dolorously in my head. A familiar heavy-set figure appears in the doorway.
“You’re awake!” says she, stating the obvious as people with pretensions to humor in situations embarrassing to anyone but themselves tend to do.
“Yeah, I’m awake.”
“You were unable to perform last night.”
“Who are you, again?”
She’s telling me that we met at the party on Live Oak last night. I know that. My last memory of her was watching her vomit into the shrubbery. Strange appears in the door behind her and laughs at me.
“I have all kinds of fucked up pictures of you.”
“That’s not surprising,” I say, lifting myself from the mattress. “Why the fucking congregation in my living room?”
"Trying to figure out how it was exactly that Jesus turned water into wine... and how it relates to our salvation."
Further, Strange explains that he tried to tell the heavy-set girl (note: in vol. 3 referred to as chubby) that these sort of sleep-ins were normal for people who binge on a regular basis, and that her response was that one day these kinds of binges lead to death; so they were discussing what to do in the event that I were to either stop breathing or begin vomiting. Naturally, they then go into a debate on whether or not I should be on my back or on my stomach while I sleep the sleep of the most devout of Dionysian devotees (my metaphor, not his).
I laugh and pick myself up; dizzy. My posture is, of course, a feint. I definitely want to stagger. To fall, even. But I have a reputation of hard drinking stamina to uphold. And all I can manage is to blurt out, “If you’ll both excuse me, I have to piss.”
My stomach is rumbling as the piss streams from the tip of my dick and into the bowl below me. I will probably end up on my knees, puking into it before all is said and done. I am not too proud, no. I figure that Strange has enough to lord over me as regards my escapades, and the heavy-set girl, well, she’s already made it clear she’s a novice when it comes to the ingestion of spirits; no, I simply didn’t want to fall from my bed directly onto my face, and I certainly didn’t want to crawl into the bathroom.
I tuck my penis back into the fold of my boxers and kneel to the throne. The tingle moves from my stomach and into my throat. The hairs on the back of my neck are raised, and I’m retching, even going so far as to shove my fingers into my mouth in an attempt to precipitate regurgitation. This works. By now I’m used to this sort of thing. I’m not accustomed to this activity in the same way that young women who counteract their binges with purges are, but I do have a liver that is dreaming of the day I become an ascetic teetotaler. Dream a little dream, dear liver.
Strange sips on a beer in the kitchen. No doubt it is the last one. I say nothing. I reach over him and into the cupboard for a glass. He says there’s no ice. It’s okay. I run tap water into the glass and chug it down. The heavy-set girl whose name is Vanessa comments on the fact of my dehydration with an annoying upward inflection indicative of a question, failing just as miserably in her second attempt at humor as she did in the first. I ask her if she’s always this poignant in her observational routines. This doesn’t register. I fill the glass again, gulp down more water and then set the glass noisily into the sink.
All three of us sit on the couch, smoking. Vanessa smells good. I think she may have used my shower. But it could be Strange. He’s finished his beer and is now peeling his jeans away from his crotch. Vanessa comments on this as typical male behavior. I’m starting to worry that sweet beautiful silence may never spend the day (or night) here again.
“So. Last night,” she says. Strange forces a chuckle.
“What about it?” I ask.
“I wanted to have sex, and you were too drunk.”
“It’s called whiskey dick.”
She asks me how old I am and if I see a proctologist regularly. I say that I’m twenty-five and that I don’t know. Turning the table, I ask her how often she sees her gynecologist. She says that she doesn’t because she has no healthcare.
“Fucking Republicans,” Strange interjects. “Those motherfuckers think everyone should bow down to their fucking OTB scam. ’Here insurance company, here’s my monthly fee, because I just KNOW that I’m going to get sick!’ I say FUCK MIDDLEMEN.”
“OTB means off-track betting. I think it has to do with horse racing,” I say.
“Huh?”
“OTB just doesn’t make sense, though I get the comparison. Sort of. I think.”
Vanessa is silent for a change as me and Strange banter back and forth. We are carrying on to the point where I know that I will have to pull out my laptop. And we’ll have to Google the term OTB. My assumption will be proven correct and he will concede victory to me. I will smoke a victory cig and then take Vanessa back into my room and do to her what I should’ve done last night.
However, the most that this will ever be is a fantastical succession of possible events lazing around in the back of my mind while I’m trying to convince Strange that it isn’t a big deal. Which is exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m telling him that I agree with the premise, it’s just that I’m not sure if the metaphor is apt. And does it matter? Not really. The point is that her asking me about my proctologic history is neither here nor there. It has nothing to do with the fact that I couldn’t get an erection. I’m not forty.
“Is it because I’m not skinny?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t care about that. I’m telling you, there is a ceiling to what you can do while being heavily intoxicated.”
“It sucks," Strange adds, "Lady Liquor can be a bitch like that. Sometimes she just wants to be the only lady in a guy's life."
I motion an "amen" in his direction. Always a good wingman. Vanessa stands up and gives us each "once-overs," finally demanding that I take her to my room and finish the job. After some laughter, I tell her to go and get ready. She smiles, curtseys to us both and runs into my room, slamming the door behind her.
"Got a condom?" I ask him.
He laughs.
"What happened last night?”
"You started giving girls piggy-back rides. Then guys. "
“That’s hilarious.”
"Oh, don’t doubt it, asshole. I have pictures. So you can Google it later, motherfucker."
Then he shows me the pictures. Photographic evidence of my much heralded stupidity. Yes, I’ve heard the stories. But this is the first time any real visuals have been provided. Pictures of me rolling around on the wooden floor, spilt liquor mixing with the dirt from peoples shoes, leaving colorful streaks; me licking it up. There’re pics of me hanging my dick out of my jeans while wearing the shittiest of shit-eating-grins on my face. Tousled hair. Slideshows of me lip-locking with every girl whose personal space I could charm/drunkenly invade my way into. A fat guy sitting across my back, likely the result of a piggy-back ride gone awry.
“Could’ve been worse,” Strange says, commiserating. “Could’ve been caught giving that guy’s asshole a moustache ride.”
“I wasn’t talking about how ‘throwed’ I was, was I?”
From his grin I deduce an affirmative answer. Fuck. The best one, he says, is the one he didn’t get. But everyone was talking about it.
“You pulled down your pants and took a shit in the bush.”
“That’s too bad. I would’ve gotten you a frame for that one.”
My social M.O. might not preclude benders and awkward sexual encounters at gatherings, but it doesn't normally include shitting in shrubberies. This most isolated of incidents could've been the result of anything. Perhaps in my clouded perception of things, I was expressing boredom. Boredom with routine. Partying, a routine in many circles, combines the same elements (with some variation) but coalesces different perceptive expectations. The good time vs. the bad time. Inebriation vs. sobriety. Sex vs. a landscape of copulative aridity due to a great many of variables: A gender ratio skewed in favor of the opposite sex/sexual orientation, one's own finicky aesthetic tastes, one's own displeasing aesthetic appearance, a lack or over-abundance of liquor (as per lack: causing one to be more inhibited, discerning; as per abundance: causing an inability to perform, sexually, socially), or more likely, one's unpleasant attitude; anything may or may not happen because the cut and dry is that routines can be planned, outcomes cannot. When I decided to step onto that property, it was to get drunk, talk a loud load of shit about journalism and literature and film, and maybe make out with/offend women (beautiful and not-so-beautiful alike), but I had no idea that things would end with a scatological act. To quote the hipster art gallery guy I once interviewed: “Totally fuckin’ drunken DADA, man.”
I didn’t want to break the man’s heart, but the qualifier cancelled out the word it qualified.
I enter my room and Vanessa is spot reading of the books that was laying on the floor. I ask if she’s enjoying what she’s perusing. She says yeah, because it’s straight up porno. I feel like maybe discussing the finer points of Henry Miller with her, but realize that that sort of endeavor would be comparable to me climbing the Himalayas. I.e., fucking impossible. “Yes,” I agree. Total porno. No substance whatever. But I enjoy it. I begin to climb onto the bed, but she commands that I bathe myself because she doesn’t want to be turned off by the pukey, shitty smell of my person.
“The hot water is out of commission,” I say, lying. Of course, she doesn’t believe me and checks for herself. Her suspicions are confirmed and she says that if I don’t want to fuck her all I have to say is I don’t. I argue that I don’t see the point in showering to do something dirty. It’s counterproductive, and more than that, as senseless as demanding that a girl shower pre-cunnilingus.
“But... you stink,” she insists.
So I climb into the shower, turn on the spout, and let the water rinse over me. The previous night’s should-be regrets circle the drain. I wash everything thoroughly. My nether-regions have never been so clean! Clean to the point that I start thinking to myself that there's a possibility that what I figured was a really bad tan was actually just an accumulation of dirt and grime due to my inconsistent showering habits.
Toweling myself off, I start to put on a fresh pair of boxers but reconsider. After all, I'm going to be naked anyway. Instead I cover the important parts in talcum powder and open the door. Vanessa is lying spread-eagled under the covers.
"You're clean," she says.
"And naked."
Underneath the covers we begin kissing. It doesn't last long because she realizes that I haven't brushed my teeth. She's just looking at me. Changing the subject of voiceless subtlety to the act at hand, I insert myself betwixt her thighs. She sighs and I begin to push dryly into her. We're both quietly discomfited. I try to get some juices flowing by grabbing her breasts and sensually squeezing and kissing them. But I can't keep from slobbering for some reason. As I expect, she tells me that it isn't working. Her breasts aren't that sensitive. At least not to loose saliva and poor hand technique.
"Well, I can't stay hard, anyway," I admit.
"Fuck it. I'll masturbate. Leave me be."
Strange is drinking a beer and eating some chicken. "You had money?"
"I didn't have money until I lifted this guy's wallet. Drunk. Loud. Talked way too much... what's that word you like to use?"
"Braggadocious.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Talked lots of shit. Found him passed out on a couch, ass pocket bulging. Snagged it easily. Only had about thirty bucks and a couple of credit cards. I wasn't so cruel, though. I left him his ID."
"I hope you bought beer for all of us."
He points to the fridge and mumbles something along the lines of "help yourself." I open the fridge and there are five beers left out of what was a six-pack of Modelo Especial sitting next to a carton of OJ and half a package of bacon. I grab a can and sit on the couch next to him. Steam escapes the lip of the can as I crack it open. As I begin my first sip, Strange asks me if I fucked her.
“No. She made me shower.”
“Oh. Yeah, you’re pretty fucking dirty.”
“I can be.”
“You shit in the bushes,” he says, sucking on a jalapeño. “It’s not illogical to assume that in the course of a drunken shit, you might forget to wipe your ass.”
Vanessa’s moans can be heard over the hum of the AC, which kicked on only minutes ago. Strange comments on the fact that I’m letting a strange girl pleasure herself on my bed.
“Well, I couldn’t get the job done.”
“Again? Shit. Let me do it.”
I’m not so sure that I want to confront seriously my manhood and its deficiencies, drunken or mental. Because I’m certain that I don’t suffer from ED. So certain in fact, that I am actually concerned. I’m too young, right? I’m not a drug addict-- booze and assorted pills, sometimes coke-- is that a factor? I’ll have to do some research on causes of ED, but I’m almost positive that I’m not a candidate. Vanessa emerges from my room with a satisfied countenance.
“Will one of you fine gentlemen walk me back to my car?”
“You have a car?” Strange asks. “I’ll walk you if you take me to the liquor store.”
“Sure,” she agrees.
Strange blows me a kiss as he and Vanessa head out the door. I finish the remaining gulps of my beer. The pack of cigs is next to my laptop on the coffee table. There are two left. I pull one out of the packet and light it. As I exhale, I follow the trails of nicotine fog as it floats away from me, gradually entering an oblivion that I couldn’t even begin to imagine to fathom. I continue smoking in the kitchen. Pacing somewhat, I take casual puffs of the cig between my fingers, talking to myself, wondering if the assholes at Artology are going to stick me with yet another bullshit interview. At this point, I’d rather do opinion pieces about the new DART Rail Station or the beloved Good-Latimer tunnel that no longer exists except on Flickr pages than interview hipper-than-thou gallery owners or up and coming artists who will say anything for cred even if it means subverting their own values which were clichéd or untenable at best to begin with.
I open the fridge and pull one of the beers out, tear into it and commence chugging. It’s all I know at this point. Because I always want to tell myself, to convince myself even, that I have so much integrity and that these artists, these gallery owners, they’re the problem. They aren’t taste making, they’re selling. They’re selling and they’re hoping we’ll buy. They aren’t out scouring the gutters or the schools for who has the most talent or promise; no, they want a gimmick and all that’s needed to drive gimmickry is ambition and a shit load of it.
But even that wasn’t true. I finish the beer and toss it into the sink. Open the fridge, pull out another and crack it open and chug. Now I have beer dripping from my chin hair and onto the floor. Some of it has gone down my neck, onto my chest, and down into my belly button. It wasn’t true because I know for a fact that given the first opportunity at some kind of exposure, I’d off and run with it. Simply put, one could say that I am a hypocrite. A hypocrite stewing in his own dearth of acclaim. A wannabe Thompson, Bangs, or Self, even more subtly, scholastically, a Robert Hughes at the height of his acerbic acuity, which he uses to deftly poke and prod at sanctified monuments of liberal and conservative thought alike. Shit, carving a niche of one's own becomes more and more of a depressing proposition the more one ponders it.
I finish the can and drop kick it into a corner of the living room. I go into the fridge and repeat the cycle. I’m beginning to wonder to myself if I should dispense with bad habits and sit down and write a novel or something. I’ve never really considered myself to be creative, even in my most calculated of deconstructive screeds against a great many artists and the like. There’s never been an afflatus to imagine or perceive in a manner befitting a writer or artist. But I’ve always been able to dissect, comment, and laud or pan or whatever. Quite effectively, in fact. Better than most other writers on the Artology staff. Putting aside the inherent silliness of astrology, as a Libra, I strive for balance. Even in my desperate toil for concision, I have been known to consult various thesauruses and lexicons when simple everyday vocabulary just doesn’t get the point home.
Then I start arguing with myself over the semantics of writing “professionally.” I’m getting mired in how to define objects and states, etc.. Such as: can one be a critic and still be creative with words? Should my Wordsmithery be viewed as an art or craft? Both? Art vs. Craft. Is one superior or do they exist on different planes of creation? And if so, do they ever converge? I’m drinking. I’m talking to myself. I’m half naked. Mostly naked, actually. I’m sporting wet hair and boxers. I finish the beer. I walk into the living room and pick up the pack of cigs, burrow my finger through the silver lining and extract the last cigarette. I put it to my mouth and light it. Maybe I should sleep, I say to myself.
Striding and puffing my way back into the kitchen, I open the fridge and peer in. One beer left. I decide to drink it because, fuck it, Strange is out getting liquor. Besides, my fridge, my fucking rules. I pull it out, crack the tab, and have my way with it. I drop the diminished cig into the can and set it in the sink with the other can I’d previously used and abused.
I throw myself onto the couch and close my eyes. After a time, I fall into a dream. A dream where I’m walking the streets of Dallas, hand in hand, with a flaccid, uncut, immaculately veined cock, seemingly representative of a map of the highways and byways of the Plastic City herself. And in front of me and this sad excuse for a member, an impossible to reach vagina, spread before us. The more we walk, the farther away the massive pudenda gets. I’m starting to sweat and so does the cock, accompanying this likewise perspiration an odorous emission of god knows what.
We walk. And we walk. Interminably, it seems. Briefly I awaken as a noise stirs me, but then I fall right back into the dream. Except now the vagina is draped in pubic hair in much the same way the old houses on Swiss Ave. are covered in twisting, verdant vinery. The penis now appears to me more rigid. Erect. Proud. Lacking that awful fancy dairy scent. This is better. This is more acceptable. We are walking east bound on Live Oak. We pass Strange and a fat girl, fucking in broad daylight in a luxury VW.
I shake myself from the reverie and sit up. My dick is poking out through the hole in my boxers. I stuff it back in, sit up, and realize that I’m bit light headed. I run into the bathroom and puke some more.
© Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
14.9.09
Reruns, Syndication & Reiteration
"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl." -- H.L. Mencken's epitaph
I sing the body articulate looking for love (?) for pseudointellectual banter (?) for companionship obsessed (?) find chubby art chicks beautiful women all shapes all sizes find artistic expression in fishnets and skirts no black no black but sort of intriguing not quite interesting it's art the body articulate finds the body inanimate looking for ideal when they could be searching the shapely illogic of the pseudointellect find chubby art chicks find love find banter find yourself without going to California.
(2008)
Heaven 1997
I stood outside the club, dark, the rain splashing in puddles around me; the only thing keeping me dry a canopy and a thin, miserable excuse for a jacket. I could feel the vibrations of music from inside. All I really wanted was a cigarette to go with my cup of whiskey. I noticed that not too many women come to shows like this, and when they do, there's usually a boyfriend-- or male approximation of-- not too far ahead (or in some cases, in tow). I sipped thoughtfully, hoping, surprisingly enough, that some tobacco carrying soul might approach for a round of small talk. This never happened.
I considered leaving the fucking place. Taking my cup and never looking back. I don't like music anyway. At least not that shit. And those people! Those fucking people with their band shirts and their clove cigarettes and their stupid dances. FUCK THEM.
So I leave. Just. Walk away. It's better this way.
(2008)
Es un "cliché"
sino tus labios
son como
el sabor
de vino tinto
y tus ojos
son como
"limpid pools"
así que
en los desaparezco
sin aliento
me ahogo
...bueno,
ahorita estoy pensando
que
si nado para seguridad
dejarás la lluvia de tus emociones
y no me matarás
como le hiciste a tu papá
but anyway
Olvídate esos tonterías
Soy cómico.
(2009)
I shit you not, I was in the express lane at Kroger with a couple bottles of PLONK and a big box of condoms, and the old lady behind me smiled and winked. I winked back and put my arm around her. The burly black guy behind the counter goggled at me. "Yeah, man," I said. "I'm not ashamed. I like a bit of mature."
(2009)
"Kissing"
Kissing is only great when drunk with desire or drunk with booze. Anything else is mauvaise foi.
(2009)
Day 9. Sex.
I called you from a payphone outside your boyfriend's apartment complex. See, lucky for me, before I did my laundry that day, I felt through the pockets of my favorite jeans. The wadded up piece of cocktail napkin. Your name in all caps and your number beneath.
MELINDA.
832-XXX-XXXX
You answered and asked where I was calling from. An undisclosed location, I said. You chuckled and told me that it was a weird number for a cell phone. I forgot to pay my cell phone bill, I answered.
"Melinda," I said, "I think that you're the most beautiful woman in existence. How does dinner under the stars followed by sex sound to you?"
You hung up.
Fucking call girls.
(2007)
All writings and photos by Patrick Patterson-Carroll
9.9.09
Untitled 2
Remnants of a Plastic City Rebellion stain the walls of everyday life.
Free of any commercial success.
Self styled suicides masturbate to Betty Page clone burlesque dancers spraying the walls with low brow murals to hidden gods known only to the lost.
In the holy gutters of Deep Ellum, washed clean by sleazy demigods in business suits, Mohawked winos scream for a fix of whatever turpentine you happen to have left over.
In art galleries no one sees, no one cares about what will be known as the last great scream into the starless bloody night lost in the great abyss of who gives a fuck.
So we drink garish concoctions of the vilest swill sweetened with the bitter tears of forgotten dreams and pray to a long lost dead beat daddy god for quick fix.
Life in Dallas is a cherry crowned with a razor wire chastity belt brought to you by Belo.
Observer alternative to what! what! dreams of ecstatic insincerity that fail to find the popshot.
Mad men shoving green cocaine coated wads of paper screaming fuck the proletariat babbling into crystal martini glasses about the grand ole days of Reagan.
And a poet long since gone mad cries out form on top of crooked teeth abandoned buildings about the sadness of it all.
Free of any commercial success.
Self styled suicides masturbate to Betty Page clone burlesque dancers spraying the walls with low brow murals to hidden gods known only to the lost.
In the holy gutters of Deep Ellum, washed clean by sleazy demigods in business suits, Mohawked winos scream for a fix of whatever turpentine you happen to have left over.
In art galleries no one sees, no one cares about what will be known as the last great scream into the starless bloody night lost in the great abyss of who gives a fuck.
So we drink garish concoctions of the vilest swill sweetened with the bitter tears of forgotten dreams and pray to a long lost dead beat daddy god for quick fix.
Life in Dallas is a cherry crowned with a razor wire chastity belt brought to you by Belo.
Observer alternative to what! what! dreams of ecstatic insincerity that fail to find the popshot.
Mad men shoving green cocaine coated wads of paper screaming fuck the proletariat babbling into crystal martini glasses about the grand ole days of Reagan.
And a poet long since gone mad cries out form on top of crooked teeth abandoned buildings about the sadness of it all.
8.9.09
File under: People whose couches I've literally slept on.
Fragments from Elaine Harwell's fb notes: 55 word short stories, a poem, a haiku or two
The Jailer's Daughter
“Please return for me.”
I reach back through the open window and squeeze her hand. “I will.”
Silently I scramble down the ladder away from her quiet sobs and towards my freedom.
I feel awful about lying but there’s no time to worry about that now. I’m busy praying the soldiers have mercy on her.
10-1-08 (?)
---
Bang
When I catch up to him I feel the need for an explanation. "I panicked." My voice sounds dangerously hollow.
He backs away, his face pale.
"Look, man, help me out here." I turn to re-enter the store. "Don't be chicken shit."
"Bro-" He trails off.
In the distance we can already hear the sirens.
10-2-08 (?)
---
Opportunities Abound
"But he's so nice," she protests.
I roll my eyes. "Whatever."
"You're so callous." She slouches back in her seat.
"Whatever." I take a sip of my coffee. A guy walks past. I eye him and he returns the favor. I wink; he blushes.
"You see that?" I ask her. "I bet he's nice, too."
10-4-08
---
Pills
She slams the empty pill canister on the table with such force that the orange plastic cracks slightly.
"I took these," Her voice quivers. "All of them."
Tom sighs and slowly folds his newspaper with painstaking deliberation. Finished, he reaches up and adjusts his glasses.
He clears his throat. "Are you breaking up with me?"
10-5-08
---
Urban Haiku
Pigeons are parrots
and all the towers are trees
in concrete jungles.
---
Formatting
When he grew quiet and said
“It isn’t working”
I should’ve said
Instead, I said
“Ok”
andsilently removed myself from the vehicle.
Now I am left with seven digit questions.
---
Orion is my Patron Saint
Orion is my patron saint;
He and I: we stalk the night.
And when the roads are dark and long,
He alone will share my plight.
Orion, lodestone of the sky!
Steadfast with unyielding light,
Unwavering, silent he waits.
Standing tall with heroes’ might.
Orion: blessed sentinel,
Come to me, o silent knight.
In darkness deep shall I find peace
With him above, shining bright.
Orion is my patron saint;
He and I: we own the night.
---
Banter Barter
“May I have one?”
“Sure,” he hesitates, “… But only if you give me your number.”
“For you? Anything.” I reach for a cocktail napkin as he fumbles around with the carton.
Our exchange complete, he gets the urge to confess. “I’m sorry, those weren’t my cigarettes.”
“It’s ok,” I reply. “That’s not my number.”
---
Bi-ku
Two girls and two boys.
Homosexuality.
I would date them all.
---
Stop! Adventuretime!
He looks me up and down.
“You always dress like that?”
“Only until I take my clothes off.”
His puzzled look was beginning to show a heightened curiosity. Reconsidering my words, I realized where I went wrong.
“No, no. Stop it. Not like that. I mean, this is how I’ll look until I change.”
“Oh?” Tilted head. He still didn’t understand.
“Today I’m a hipster.” I explain. “Tomorrow? School girl. Or secretary; can’t decide.”
He nods wisely, as if considering. “School girl, I’d say.” A planned squint. “Yes, school girl for sure.”
“Maybe. Just clothing-turned-costume, after all.” I fiddle with my iPod, waiting an appropriate amount of time for a response. None comes; I lift the ear bud.
“What are ya listening to?” I waited too long.
“Music.” I consider taking off my sunglasses so he can get the full effect of my scowl. It’s sunny out, though, and I don’t like painful experiences so early in the day.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” His eyes begin to lower towards the screen. Quick! A decision must be made: tilt toward him for friendship, away for a peaceful bus ride.
Ever so slightly, I tilt the screen… towards him.
First, neon pink shoes. And now, this.
I am the proper picture of adventure this morning.
All writings © Elaine Harwell, posted with permission
The Jailer's Daughter
“Please return for me.”
I reach back through the open window and squeeze her hand. “I will.”
Silently I scramble down the ladder away from her quiet sobs and towards my freedom.
I feel awful about lying but there’s no time to worry about that now. I’m busy praying the soldiers have mercy on her.
10-1-08 (?)
---
Bang
When I catch up to him I feel the need for an explanation. "I panicked." My voice sounds dangerously hollow.
He backs away, his face pale.
"Look, man, help me out here." I turn to re-enter the store. "Don't be chicken shit."
"Bro-" He trails off.
In the distance we can already hear the sirens.
10-2-08 (?)
---
Opportunities Abound
"But he's so nice," she protests.
I roll my eyes. "Whatever."
"You're so callous." She slouches back in her seat.
"Whatever." I take a sip of my coffee. A guy walks past. I eye him and he returns the favor. I wink; he blushes.
"You see that?" I ask her. "I bet he's nice, too."
10-4-08
---
Pills
She slams the empty pill canister on the table with such force that the orange plastic cracks slightly.
"I took these," Her voice quivers. "All of them."
Tom sighs and slowly folds his newspaper with painstaking deliberation. Finished, he reaches up and adjusts his glasses.
He clears his throat. "Are you breaking up with me?"
10-5-08
---
Urban Haiku
Pigeons are parrots
and all the towers are trees
in concrete jungles.
---
Formatting
When he grew quiet and said
“It isn’t working”
I should’ve said
Instead, I said
“Ok”
and
---
Orion is my Patron Saint
Orion is my patron saint;
He and I: we stalk the night.
And when the roads are dark and long,
He alone will share my plight.
Orion, lodestone of the sky!
Steadfast with unyielding light,
Unwavering, silent he waits.
Standing tall with heroes’ might.
Orion: blessed sentinel,
Come to me, o silent knight.
In darkness deep shall I find peace
With him above, shining bright.
Orion is my patron saint;
He and I: we own the night.
---
Banter Barter
“May I have one?”
“Sure,” he hesitates, “… But only if you give me your number.”
“For you? Anything.” I reach for a cocktail napkin as he fumbles around with the carton.
Our exchange complete, he gets the urge to confess. “I’m sorry, those weren’t my cigarettes.”
“It’s ok,” I reply. “That’s not my number.”
---
Bi-ku
Two girls and two boys.
Homosexuality.
I would date them all.
---
Stop! Adventuretime!
He looks me up and down.
“You always dress like that?”
“Only until I take my clothes off.”
His puzzled look was beginning to show a heightened curiosity. Reconsidering my words, I realized where I went wrong.
“No, no. Stop it. Not like that. I mean, this is how I’ll look until I change.”
“Oh?” Tilted head. He still didn’t understand.
“Today I’m a hipster.” I explain. “Tomorrow? School girl. Or secretary; can’t decide.”
He nods wisely, as if considering. “School girl, I’d say.” A planned squint. “Yes, school girl for sure.”
“Maybe. Just clothing-turned-costume, after all.” I fiddle with my iPod, waiting an appropriate amount of time for a response. None comes; I lift the ear bud.
“What are ya listening to?” I waited too long.
“Music.” I consider taking off my sunglasses so he can get the full effect of my scowl. It’s sunny out, though, and I don’t like painful experiences so early in the day.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” His eyes begin to lower towards the screen. Quick! A decision must be made: tilt toward him for friendship, away for a peaceful bus ride.
Ever so slightly, I tilt the screen… towards him.
First, neon pink shoes. And now, this.
I am the proper picture of adventure this morning.
All writings © Elaine Harwell, posted with permission
7.9.09
Dangling off the precipice of literature; below, the depths... trash.
“Two Days (?) Inside the Head of a Brain Dead Socialite”
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
Brent woke up to find that he wasn't in his own bed. In fact, he realized that he wasn't in a bed at all. He was driving with velocity, accelerating and decelerating-- with each shift of the gear-- down North Central Expressway in a convertible. Top down. This he knew because despite-- and perhaps because of-- the streaks of light whizzing artfully by and the strands of hair interrupting his vision, there was a city glowing, blaring around him unimpeded by glass and metal, slapping him about the face with its totality.
While attempting to make out the reading on the speedometer, he noticed the fingers on the hands that clutched the wheel. They weren't his own. They were small. Slender. Punctuated by candy-apple red colored endings. Fingertips much like the ones that arouse him so when digging into his back during sex. He wondered why he couldn't have awakened to that.
The right hand went from the steering wheel to the gear shift, and then to the dashboard panel that operated the stereo-system. Soon music thrummed around him, heavy on low end, very muffled. A feminine voice erupted into indecipherable lyric bursts; on top of the music; they were off-key, even for shouting.
Brent began to worry. He wanted to believe he was having some drug induced trip, but knew that that was impossible because his employers had a strict drug testing policy, which they faithfully adhered to. Because he feared the possibility of being fired and having to move back in with his mentally unstable aunt who had taken to evangelical Christianity in recent years-- the woman thought everything from binge drinking and casual sex to watching TV on a Sunday was a sin-- he stayed on the "straight and narrow."
This meant not turning his apartment into an opium den even though he knew some Puerto Ricans down the street who would practically give it to him. Even his landlord said that he didn't give a shit what his tenants did as long as they made themselves seen and not heard, and most importantly, paid their fucking rent. And here was Brent, immobile-- paralyzed, in fact-- and with tactile anesthesia but aware that what was happening was not normal.
What happened?
He suddenly blacked out and awakened again. Still immobile. Still with tactile anesthesia. How much time had passed (?) he did not know. His shaven left leg-- obviously not his-- stuck out from under a pink, frilly bedspread.
The sun radiated into the room, its rays illumining everything he could see. He thought he could faintly hear the chirp of birds, but it was difficult because of the throb. The pulsating sound of hangover. The symphony of audio-visual sensitivity. The remnants of the previous night’s dirty deeds, which of course, he had no knowledge of.
Moments later he was in a bathroom looking at his reflection in a toilet bowl. Beautiful, he thought. I’m beautiful. I am a beautiful young woman. But he knew that, though. What else was knew? What happened?
Being that he only seemed to have the benefit of perception from the girl’s POV, could he really in fact say that he was the girl? Or was he in reality lying in a ditch somewhere-- an out-of-body-experience courtesy of yet another decision to drive home drunk-- ethereally floating through different “planes of existence” when he happened upon the most fortuitous of opportunities-- the chance to be a woman?
Either way, why did she look eerily like Prissy Swain, the daughter of that 80’s “heroin chic” fashion model and mogul Erin Swain? Because that’s precisely who she was.
Swain, the latter-- the senior, the mother-- was part of the mid 80’s shift from cocaine to heroin amongst the southern set. She was the American version-- the precursor-- of/to Kate Moss. In the mid 90’s, and at the height of her influence, she retired from modeling, got clean, had her name attached to a hot clothing line, and became even richer than she was when strutting runways.
That, marriage into money, and a busy professional life due to the preponderance of business connections made for the kind of environment that brought both privilege and neglect to her young daughter Prissy.
Not inconceivably, Prissy grew up lonely and starved for attention. As a result, her rebellious, mischievous behavior brought her all the attention she could ever want.
Her crowning achievement, the event that made a media darling of her was when it got out that she was trying to sell sexual services on an internet ad page. She was even keeping a barely literate blog on her every encounter; visuals included. In one photograph she was dancing, topless, on a bar counter. In another, she was giving an older gentleman a lap-dance.
This sort of behavior, expected of, in a social sense, the “lower class:” those unfortunate inhabitants of the ghetto, the barrio, and most humorously, the trailer parks, is mostly greeted as scandal when it comes to the rich, the famous. For them it's regarded as a byproduct of the worst excesses; something that that level of social notoriety will give cause for the public to view you either as victim or villain. Or both.
So it came as no surprise that these views varied. On one hand Prissy was lauded for her beauty and charitable nature, and on the other, people derided her lack of intelligence and deficiency of moral character due to her nymphomania. Her head was empty but her bank account and willingness to fuck anything for the right price runneth over.
Brent, consigning himself to being trapped inside the nightmare, watched as the water in the toilet suddenly turned shades of green and yellow and became foamy. She was vomiting. The retching sounds were loud, clear, and fucking awful. It was usually enough to make him toss his own cookies, but for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the need nor have the ability. It was refreshing.
A feeling of disorientation began to overcome him. From what he could see, the best he could surmise was that Prissy was propping herself up against the door frame in the threshold separating the bedroom from the bathroom. Everything was at a slant, the room tilting and blurred. Brent noticed a lump in the bed. Shrouded in comforter. Also pink.
Already this sight was more intriguing than anything he’d normally see on a Saturday morning. It wouldn’t last long however, as he blacked out again only to awaken to a guy thrusting into his host, sweat dripping into his vision. Her moans overtook his auditory senses-- why? The guy’s stroke was pathetic.
Then came the thoughts and feelings that weren’t his, rushing into his head-- or what approximated it. Stuff like wondering when mother was going to put more allowance into the bank account and what kind of cute skirt she was going to buy; when this pathetic fuck was going to finish; “Oh! That feels good, I guess. Getting kind of tired and sore, though.”
None of it moved him to anything except thoughts of “perfect, I am inhabiting the body/consciousness of the paradigm of vapidity. I should be the guy pounding into her joylessly. Let this boring fuck get the benefit of her ‘thoughts.’”
It got worse.
He was beginning to feel things. Things he’d never felt before. It was like he’d acquired the nerve endings to this girl’s pussy. It really WAS sore. The guy finally pulls out and he hears the thought, “Oh, no. Not that.” Yes, that. Darkness.
He can feel her face as if it’s his own. Something warm and wet splatters all over it in globules. Brent blacks out again.
Awakened by a rush to the head followed by snuffling that pulled at what he thought he could feel were his ears, he saw lines of white powder lined regimentally on top of a surface reflecting his new countenance. Certainly, it had been a long time! He hadn't seen that much blow in one sitting since his trip to Toronto a couple years back.
Bitch lives good! If he couldn’t get used to feeling like his penis was being uncomfortably inverted or having his face ejaculated upon, he could definitely get used to the idea of never being at a loss for coke.
In the wake of this indulgence, the brunt of which Brent was able to experience, the weight of euphoria had carried over into what was supposed to be the inevitable come-down. He didn't understand what was happening to him or why, but his worry and the sense of urgency that normally accompanied it was replaced first with unconcern, and then with joy. Joy that it was happening.
Brent woke up in a shower. He knew this because he was looking down at those same angrily colored fingertips kneading small, perky breasts, the sensation of which he could almost feel because the tactile anesthesia he'd been hitherto experiencing was gradually wearing off. It started, of course, with the sex. The sore vagina, the gooey semen about the face, and now the wet water, hot; the expert fingers.
Thoughts of dirty possibilities overcame his entire awareness. He found himself praying to a god that he found to be-- at least conceptually-- silly, that his condition would better itself to the point that he could control his “host,” enough to get those fingers further south. Yes, what Brent wanted was to finally experience the female orgasm firsthand.
Deciding that his desire, his want, his craving to feel EVERYTHING wasn’t merely some empty male curiosity spawned from a need to have something to say when it came time to “talk shop” with other men, that it was the absolute sensation that he wanted, that he needed for a more comfortable, more complete experience, he willed the words into a mouth he did not have:
But this god either didn’t hear, didn’t grant these things or didn’t exist. And the last part suited Brent fine. “Fuck it,” he thought. The idea that he’d even supplicate in such a disgusting manner upset him. Prissy hopped out of the shower without even putting soap to her genitalia. Or maybe that’s what she was doing while he was thinking of how he’d ask god for a chance to reach climax as a woman.
Voyeuristically, as if he were behind a one-way mirror, he watched her dress in front of her own reflection. The clarity of vision was even better than before. He wasn’t blacking out anymore. Prissy’s thoughts were becoming clearer, that is, more easily heard. The muffled wall blocking her thoughts from his had been brought down and Señor Raygun was nowhere to be found.
The humdrum emptiness of this young woman’s ramblings, which could also be clearly heard as she argued over the phone with her mother about her allowance, combined with the inner thoughts that consisted of little more than, “Woe is poor little impoverished me, I can’t spend hundreds of dollars on absolutely useless shit,” was beating at his consciousness ferociously.
Yes honey, you’re so fucking poor, he thought. Poor little old neglected you. She sat on her bed, the reflection in the mirror looking progressively uglier to Brent. Despite this-- definitely because of this-- he was then ever more childishly optimistic for his own satisfaction, hoping she would get bored and start playing with herself. Or at least go out and trick for money.
Depression snuck in and began to do an even more exhausting number on whatever it was he consisted of. It wasn’t just orgasm he desired. He hadn’t even experienced hunger since he first came to his realization; cruelly awakened to as he sped down North Central Expressway in a car that he wished he had when he had a penis.
Prissy deluged her nostrils with the remnants of the coke. Brent once again received the same high; the “umbilical cord” separating her tangibility from his intangibility seemingly located in her nasal cavity. A coke high combined with boredom for most probably lends itself to spring cleaning or the rearranging of furniture. For Prissy, it was going through her closet and alphabetizing her clothing by designer.
Thirty minutes later, with this arduous task complete, she stripped completely naked, and stepped onto her balcony. Suddenly, Brent could feel a slight breeze as it bounced off her flesh, her body-- which now felt like his-- splitting itself against her as if it were two superstitious lovers on a sidewalk with hands clasped together making a last desperate effort to avoid doing so. As one, Prissy and her male parasite leaned over the railing and inhaled deeply.
“Those pills are really kicking in,” she yelped with joy. And before he could object or question anything-- because he couldn’t remember her ingesting any fucking pills-- she leaned so far over the railing that her grip, her body untrammeled, in fact, betrayed by its recently bathed, silky smooth dermis, allowed her to freefall ten stories to her death. And poor Brent felt every bone shatter, ironically enough, all over the interior of her convertible, parked illegally in a fire lane.
The only thing the police found in the empty apartment aside from his corpse, slumped against the tiled wall of the bathroom, naked, gun in lap, with a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, was a note:
© Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
By Patrick Patterson-Carroll
Day One?
Brent woke up to find that he wasn't in his own bed. In fact, he realized that he wasn't in a bed at all. He was driving with velocity, accelerating and decelerating-- with each shift of the gear-- down North Central Expressway in a convertible. Top down. This he knew because despite-- and perhaps because of-- the streaks of light whizzing artfully by and the strands of hair interrupting his vision, there was a city glowing, blaring around him unimpeded by glass and metal, slapping him about the face with its totality.
While attempting to make out the reading on the speedometer, he noticed the fingers on the hands that clutched the wheel. They weren't his own. They were small. Slender. Punctuated by candy-apple red colored endings. Fingertips much like the ones that arouse him so when digging into his back during sex. He wondered why he couldn't have awakened to that.
The right hand went from the steering wheel to the gear shift, and then to the dashboard panel that operated the stereo-system. Soon music thrummed around him, heavy on low end, very muffled. A feminine voice erupted into indecipherable lyric bursts; on top of the music; they were off-key, even for shouting.
Brent began to worry. He wanted to believe he was having some drug induced trip, but knew that that was impossible because his employers had a strict drug testing policy, which they faithfully adhered to. Because he feared the possibility of being fired and having to move back in with his mentally unstable aunt who had taken to evangelical Christianity in recent years-- the woman thought everything from binge drinking and casual sex to watching TV on a Sunday was a sin-- he stayed on the "straight and narrow."
This meant not turning his apartment into an opium den even though he knew some Puerto Ricans down the street who would practically give it to him. Even his landlord said that he didn't give a shit what his tenants did as long as they made themselves seen and not heard, and most importantly, paid their fucking rent. And here was Brent, immobile-- paralyzed, in fact-- and with tactile anesthesia but aware that what was happening was not normal.
What happened?
He suddenly blacked out and awakened again. Still immobile. Still with tactile anesthesia. How much time had passed (?) he did not know. His shaven left leg-- obviously not his-- stuck out from under a pink, frilly bedspread.
The sun radiated into the room, its rays illumining everything he could see. He thought he could faintly hear the chirp of birds, but it was difficult because of the throb. The pulsating sound of hangover. The symphony of audio-visual sensitivity. The remnants of the previous night’s dirty deeds, which of course, he had no knowledge of.
Moments later he was in a bathroom looking at his reflection in a toilet bowl. Beautiful, he thought. I’m beautiful. I am a beautiful young woman. But he knew that, though. What else was knew? What happened?
Being that he only seemed to have the benefit of perception from the girl’s POV, could he really in fact say that he was the girl? Or was he in reality lying in a ditch somewhere-- an out-of-body-experience courtesy of yet another decision to drive home drunk-- ethereally floating through different “planes of existence” when he happened upon the most fortuitous of opportunities-- the chance to be a woman?
Either way, why did she look eerily like Prissy Swain, the daughter of that 80’s “heroin chic” fashion model and mogul Erin Swain? Because that’s precisely who she was.
Swain, the latter-- the senior, the mother-- was part of the mid 80’s shift from cocaine to heroin amongst the southern set. She was the American version-- the precursor-- of/to Kate Moss. In the mid 90’s, and at the height of her influence, she retired from modeling, got clean, had her name attached to a hot clothing line, and became even richer than she was when strutting runways.
That, marriage into money, and a busy professional life due to the preponderance of business connections made for the kind of environment that brought both privilege and neglect to her young daughter Prissy.
Not inconceivably, Prissy grew up lonely and starved for attention. As a result, her rebellious, mischievous behavior brought her all the attention she could ever want.
Her crowning achievement, the event that made a media darling of her was when it got out that she was trying to sell sexual services on an internet ad page. She was even keeping a barely literate blog on her every encounter; visuals included. In one photograph she was dancing, topless, on a bar counter. In another, she was giving an older gentleman a lap-dance.
This sort of behavior, expected of, in a social sense, the “lower class:” those unfortunate inhabitants of the ghetto, the barrio, and most humorously, the trailer parks, is mostly greeted as scandal when it comes to the rich, the famous. For them it's regarded as a byproduct of the worst excesses; something that that level of social notoriety will give cause for the public to view you either as victim or villain. Or both.
So it came as no surprise that these views varied. On one hand Prissy was lauded for her beauty and charitable nature, and on the other, people derided her lack of intelligence and deficiency of moral character due to her nymphomania. Her head was empty but her bank account and willingness to fuck anything for the right price runneth over.
Brent, consigning himself to being trapped inside the nightmare, watched as the water in the toilet suddenly turned shades of green and yellow and became foamy. She was vomiting. The retching sounds were loud, clear, and fucking awful. It was usually enough to make him toss his own cookies, but for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the need nor have the ability. It was refreshing.
A feeling of disorientation began to overcome him. From what he could see, the best he could surmise was that Prissy was propping herself up against the door frame in the threshold separating the bedroom from the bathroom. Everything was at a slant, the room tilting and blurred. Brent noticed a lump in the bed. Shrouded in comforter. Also pink.
Already this sight was more intriguing than anything he’d normally see on a Saturday morning. It wouldn’t last long however, as he blacked out again only to awaken to a guy thrusting into his host, sweat dripping into his vision. Her moans overtook his auditory senses-- why? The guy’s stroke was pathetic.
Then came the thoughts and feelings that weren’t his, rushing into his head-- or what approximated it. Stuff like wondering when mother was going to put more allowance into the bank account and what kind of cute skirt she was going to buy; when this pathetic fuck was going to finish; “Oh! That feels good, I guess. Getting kind of tired and sore, though.”
None of it moved him to anything except thoughts of “perfect, I am inhabiting the body/consciousness of the paradigm of vapidity. I should be the guy pounding into her joylessly. Let this boring fuck get the benefit of her ‘thoughts.’”
It got worse.
He was beginning to feel things. Things he’d never felt before. It was like he’d acquired the nerve endings to this girl’s pussy. It really WAS sore. The guy finally pulls out and he hears the thought, “Oh, no. Not that.” Yes, that. Darkness.
He can feel her face as if it’s his own. Something warm and wet splatters all over it in globules. Brent blacks out again.
Awakened by a rush to the head followed by snuffling that pulled at what he thought he could feel were his ears, he saw lines of white powder lined regimentally on top of a surface reflecting his new countenance. Certainly, it had been a long time! He hadn't seen that much blow in one sitting since his trip to Toronto a couple years back.
Bitch lives good! If he couldn’t get used to feeling like his penis was being uncomfortably inverted or having his face ejaculated upon, he could definitely get used to the idea of never being at a loss for coke.
In the wake of this indulgence, the brunt of which Brent was able to experience, the weight of euphoria had carried over into what was supposed to be the inevitable come-down. He didn't understand what was happening to him or why, but his worry and the sense of urgency that normally accompanied it was replaced first with unconcern, and then with joy. Joy that it was happening.
Day Two?
Brent woke up in a shower. He knew this because he was looking down at those same angrily colored fingertips kneading small, perky breasts, the sensation of which he could almost feel because the tactile anesthesia he'd been hitherto experiencing was gradually wearing off. It started, of course, with the sex. The sore vagina, the gooey semen about the face, and now the wet water, hot; the expert fingers.
Thoughts of dirty possibilities overcame his entire awareness. He found himself praying to a god that he found to be-- at least conceptually-- silly, that his condition would better itself to the point that he could control his “host,” enough to get those fingers further south. Yes, what Brent wanted was to finally experience the female orgasm firsthand.
Deciding that his desire, his want, his craving to feel EVERYTHING wasn’t merely some empty male curiosity spawned from a need to have something to say when it came time to “talk shop” with other men, that it was the absolute sensation that he wanted, that he needed for a more comfortable, more complete experience, he willed the words into a mouth he did not have:
Can you hear me, god?
It’s me, Brent.
I could not give two shits
about whether or not you exist.
I don’t know what the hell is happening to me,
but since this is happening and I have no options,
I’m stabbing in the dark here.
Let me please be this woman long enough to experience
that much conjectured female orgasm.
But this god either didn’t hear, didn’t grant these things or didn’t exist. And the last part suited Brent fine. “Fuck it,” he thought. The idea that he’d even supplicate in such a disgusting manner upset him. Prissy hopped out of the shower without even putting soap to her genitalia. Or maybe that’s what she was doing while he was thinking of how he’d ask god for a chance to reach climax as a woman.
Voyeuristically, as if he were behind a one-way mirror, he watched her dress in front of her own reflection. The clarity of vision was even better than before. He wasn’t blacking out anymore. Prissy’s thoughts were becoming clearer, that is, more easily heard. The muffled wall blocking her thoughts from his had been brought down and Señor Raygun was nowhere to be found.
The humdrum emptiness of this young woman’s ramblings, which could also be clearly heard as she argued over the phone with her mother about her allowance, combined with the inner thoughts that consisted of little more than, “Woe is poor little impoverished me, I can’t spend hundreds of dollars on absolutely useless shit,” was beating at his consciousness ferociously.
Yes honey, you’re so fucking poor, he thought. Poor little old neglected you. She sat on her bed, the reflection in the mirror looking progressively uglier to Brent. Despite this-- definitely because of this-- he was then ever more childishly optimistic for his own satisfaction, hoping she would get bored and start playing with herself. Or at least go out and trick for money.
Depression snuck in and began to do an even more exhausting number on whatever it was he consisted of. It wasn’t just orgasm he desired. He hadn’t even experienced hunger since he first came to his realization; cruelly awakened to as he sped down North Central Expressway in a car that he wished he had when he had a penis.
Prissy deluged her nostrils with the remnants of the coke. Brent once again received the same high; the “umbilical cord” separating her tangibility from his intangibility seemingly located in her nasal cavity. A coke high combined with boredom for most probably lends itself to spring cleaning or the rearranging of furniture. For Prissy, it was going through her closet and alphabetizing her clothing by designer.
Thirty minutes later, with this arduous task complete, she stripped completely naked, and stepped onto her balcony. Suddenly, Brent could feel a slight breeze as it bounced off her flesh, her body-- which now felt like his-- splitting itself against her as if it were two superstitious lovers on a sidewalk with hands clasped together making a last desperate effort to avoid doing so. As one, Prissy and her male parasite leaned over the railing and inhaled deeply.
“Those pills are really kicking in,” she yelped with joy. And before he could object or question anything-- because he couldn’t remember her ingesting any fucking pills-- she leaned so far over the railing that her grip, her body untrammeled, in fact, betrayed by its recently bathed, silky smooth dermis, allowed her to freefall ten stories to her death. And poor Brent felt every bone shatter, ironically enough, all over the interior of her convertible, parked illegally in a fire lane.
The only thing the police found in the empty apartment aside from his corpse, slumped against the tiled wall of the bathroom, naked, gun in lap, with a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, was a note:
If you're reading this right now, I'm dead. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, considering I've given away all my worldly possessions-- impending suicide hint 101, really-- and it's okay. It's no one's fault per se. There's just... well... there's gotta be something better. The only thing that could possibly depress me more than my current existence is waking up to find that I’m some empty headed moron with more money and tits than good sense. Here’s hoping.
Good bye. Brent.
© Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)
5.9.09
Stu González puts the oral tradition to typography
The Man and The Clown
An Adaptation by Stuart González
Stop me if you've heard this one.
Once upon a time "the man" had everything. Yes, well, at least in the American sense of the word. Fuck it, in the WESTERN sense of the word. The great job. The hot wife. The two and a half kids. The home on a cul de sac in the burbs. The golf club membership. All that dumb ass shit. Hell, "the man" had enough clout in his "neck of the woods" to not even have to talk his way out of a speeding ticket because when the fuzz saw his face, they knew it was the face of someone special. Someone muy importante. Entonces, they had to get the fuck out of the way.
"The man" never met a shrimp cocktail he didn't like or a tax loophole he couldn't exploit. He would dance on top of his remarkably clean desk with glee as his bank account swelled by the hour. He once came home and told his wife, in front of their two young children, about the massive boner he got while he was in a meeting about "monopolies." She giggled at his impropriety and winked in his ear. He was going to fuck the shit out of her after the little bed wetters were herded to their cozy little rooms with their HDtvs and their video games and their access to internet pornography.
At his wife's request, during sex all "the man" wore were ties. She was obsessed with Chippendales and he was obsessed with his own success. For him, a good tie denoted his level of achievement. It also gave her something to choke him with. He liked that. Being asphyxiated while he crashed into that space between her thighs gluttonously.
"The man" liked playing games with the poor people downtown. Those fucking beggars, they'd solicit him for money and he would tell them straight-faced that they had to dance a jig. But it couldn't be something wino-ey and stupid. It had to be a traditional Irish jig. He provided them with tunes, humming them tunelessly, and they would try their best to impress this oh-so-important man. After they finished and received ovations from onlookers, he would give them a quarter and implore them to not spend it all in one place.
Of course he was booed by the crowd and cursed vehemently by the sensitive wino who desired little more than to acquire the couple of bucks necessary to remain in booze heaven. "The man" laughed all the way to his office. "The man" spent most days in his office, alone, watching Sports Center (he was a big Lakers fan, in fact, he liked any team that was always winning or at the pinnacle of their respective histories) or playing solitaire on his computer. That is, when he wasn't getting boners in meetings and thinking of wasteful ways of spending his ill-gotten lucre.
Sometimes "the man" was invited to "golf" with other successful "men," but he usually made some excuse to not show. The only thing he hated more than people who weren't as successful as himself were those who were successfully equal or greater to him. It really pissed him off that others shared in his ambitions and even dared to be better. So if he did deign himself to such appearances, he would usually do his damnedest to berate his opponent. Or his opponents' wives and children.
"The man" liked being on the gifting end of good tongue lashings. He also liked "ad hominems" and "straw men." He once accused one of his obese opponents of being lazy and thus ill-equipped for the kind of success he miraculously had. "How does one become rich by sitting around huffing down cheeseburgers and soda?" he wondered aloud as he teed-off into a lake.
"It's glandular, you fucking asshole!" the obese man screamed.
"Glandular. Right. I'll bet... and I'm sure you'll blame my shitty form for that tee."
"It's woefully bad."
"I have tennis elbow, good sir."
Enter the Clown
Despite "the man's" protestations, his FEARS, he promised his young daughter that for her birthday this year he would take them to the circus. So take them he did. They piled into the SUV and drove downtown for a day of fun for the kids, and what he knew would seem a lifetime of misery for him.
His wife teased him playfully about his absurd fear of clowns. "Absurd," he snapped. "NONSENSE. My fear of clowns is what got me to where I am today." Emboldened by his wife's imbecilic assertion, he cut off an old lady in a Buick and parked proudly, forcefully into a parking space that was too small for his SUV (it took up half of the space next to it). His daughter told him that "the clown" was supposed to be the world's funniest.
"Clowns aren't funny, mademoiselle," he corrected. "Clowns are the American equivalent of untouchables. They are sad, ridiculous creatures that should indeed be laughed off when they refer to themselves as human beings." Upon hearing this, her eyes began to tear up. He entreated his young one not to cry lest she embarrass him and all he has worked for, making it clear that he was not in the least pleased to be in such environs.
The wife corralled the children to her arms protectively. "The man" huffed a little but accepted his situation. After all, this discomfort, he was certain, would pay even more dividends (in more ways than one) once the day was done. The hour's imposition could do him wonders.
"The man" and his wife and brood took their great seats, silently waiting for the show to begin. The lights went down, the announcer's voice boomed throughout the great civic center, built on the backs of the poor, for the rich, much to "the man's" glee, and the show began.
"First, the majestic Mickey's Donkeys," The announcer's bass-y voice rumbled.
"The man" sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then the announcer sing-songingly marked the arrival of the elephants and jugglers and firebreathers. His children squealed with delight as peanuts were passed out to the crowd so that they might be able to feed the beasts. Still, "the man" was unimpressed. In fact, he was bored. He began searching for porn on his mobile web phone.
Soon the arena went dark again, the only light emitting from thousands of cell phones amongst the throngs.
The announcer's voice bludgeoned the ears of the mob once more. "Ladies and gentlemen! It is my ever groveling pleasure to now give you, Cuddles the Clown!" The massive arena exploded with applause and cheer. A single spotlight shone at the center of the stage and Cuddles coyly stepped into it. His hands were behind his back. He looked around. Mucho Silencio.
The hushed crowd was so because word had it that Cuddles often opened his performances by singling out a member of the audience and asked them an incredibly difficult or embarrassing question. "The man" continued to fiddle with his phone as Cuddles scanned the gaggles for his victim. He spun round in his spotlight, finger pointing to the stands. He stopped, snapped and the spotlight disappeared and the lights came on. His finger was pointed directly at "the man."
Unbeknownst, "the man" continued to rifle through videos on tube8. Everyone was watching him. His wife nudged him and he looked up.
"You!" Cuddles shouted.
"Me?"
"Yes, sir. You!"
"I am too good for this," "the man" says, putting his eyes back to his phone.
"Okay then, sir, then may I ask you, are you the front end of a horse's ass?"
Everyone laughs. "The man" was perplexed.
"Huh?"
"Sir, are you the front end of a horse's ass?"
"What? No!"
Everyone laughs.
"Fair enough," Cuddles said, rubbing his chin. "Then sir, is it true that you are in fact the rear end of a horse's ass?"
"What the hell are you babbling about?"
"Then this is also a 'no.'" Cuddles asserted.
"Correct."
"Sir, given your previous responses, I have no other course of action than to assume that since you are not the front nor are you the rear end of a horse's ass, that you are simply, inevitably, the totality of a horse's ass!"
"The man's" jaw dropped, the crowd exploded with riotous laughter, and the lights went down. The crowd chanted "horse's ass! horse's ass!" in the direction of "the man." He wanted only at that moment to retreat into himself, so demoralized was he by Cuddles' probing, prodding, absurd line of questioning.
He ran out of the arena in tears.
From The Man to The Erstwhile Man
Only days after his encounter with Cuddles the Clown, "the man" lost everything. His job. His hot wife, who took the children with her. His home on the cul de sac. His country club membership. He owed alimony and back taxes. All because of fuckhead the clown. That was how "the erstwhile man" now referred to his new arch-nemesis.
At first, he plotted to kill Cuddles, but killing a clown is heady business. "The erstwhile man" would've had to do that sort of dirty work on his own. No mob in the country hated a funny man. So he had to bide his time. He had to figure out another way to destroy the clown. Every night, as he slept uncomfortably on his mother's fold-out couch, he fought the urge to check down all the ways in which he could mentally massacre the fucker. He needed to sleep, though. The bags under his eyes were beginning to make his head tilt slightly ahead of him.
"The erstwhile man" made do with his meager monthly wages from the local Goodwill, folding clothing and gathering baskets from the far reaches of the parking lot. But he hated it. It was the essence of death to a man used to so much leisure; TANTO PODER. It made him want to use all the grocery money he earned to buy a gun, go to a park, find a nice tree, and blow his fucking cerebellum all over the place.
He confessed to his mother over breakfast that he was in the grips of a deep depression. This fuckhead the clown guy had ruined everything. And for what? For a fucking laugh?
She encouraged him to let it all out, and he began to cry like a small child. Unbridled and without dignity, he shoved his breakfast away and ran into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. Moments later his life-giver knocked softly on the door, calling his name repeatedly, urging him to keep his chin up.
This kind of attitude toward the utter poverty of his existence made him want to kill her instead. But he could never do that. Matricide would not do anything to harm Cuddles. It would only unburden “the erstwhile man” of a minor annoyance, and that relief would later turn to even more essence extinguishing depression. Because he loved his mother. Immensely.
One morning he awakened to find a newspaper clipping on his stomach. He lifted it to his weary face and read it. The circus was coming to town. Cuddles was back. This would be his chance to redeem himself. He had two weeks to mentally prepare.
He took notes, practiced with notecards, studied the best stand-up comedians on those local late night shows. Wit would be his savior, he was certain. Perhaps he could hand that undeservingly high and mighty clown a deathblow. THE deathblow. To end all other deathblows. In the history of deathblows.
So "the erstwhile man" saved up every penny and bought a ticket to the circus. He camped out to be one of the first. The next day, he eagerly grabbed his seat. He even bought popcorn. He'd resolved to slam it in his face triumphantly, T.O style once dealing the aforementioned "deathblow."
The lights went down and the announcers voice rumbled the arena once again. The show opening Mickey's Donkeys had been replaced by the Camel Cigs Camels. "The erstwhile man" sat on the edge of his seat, biting his nails. He was expectant, but also doubting that he would be fortunate enough to get a second shot at fuckhead.
The announcer then moved on to the elephants and jugglers and firebreathers. "The erstwhile man" was getting annoyed. Fuck, bring out the stupid fucking clown already, he thought. The lights fell out again and the announcer's voice growled, the speakers crackled, as he was taking his sweet ass time, begging the crowd to partake in the wonderful concessions. People moved by the light of their cell phones.
Then, the spotlight. Silencio. Una otra vez. Cuddles the Clown trucked into view. An explosion of applause and hooting commenced.
"Introducing, once again, the man of the night, Cuddles the Clown, in all his humorous glory!" the announcer beamed.
"The erstwhile man" stood and clapped, cheering loudly, trying to cancel out the crowd. Cuddles put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion. He pointed into the crowd and spun. He came to a stop, nearly falling over his huge feet. He was pointing at "the erstwhile man." ¡Que Suerte! The lights came up and Cuddles called to him.
"You sir! I have one question for you!"
"Bring it on, Cuddles!"
"Are you... the front end... of a horse's ass?"
He stood to his feet, "the erstwhile man," and he stammered. "Huh?"
"No?" Cuddles retreated. "Well then, are you, dear sir, the rear end of a horse's ass?"
"You gotta be kidding me!" "the erstwhile man" screamed.
"I assure you, I am not. And I will add... more appropriately I will assert, that since you are not the front nor are you the rear end of a horse's ass, that you are, in essence, the wholeness of a horse's ass!"
"Ahhhh!"
Once again, "the erstwhile man" had been bested by the clown. The masses exploded into laughter. The lights died and so it was once again. "The erstwhile man" stormed out of the arena and into the streets of the city. Screaming. Crying. Falling to the concrete in the fetal position, sobbing like the Patriots had just blown a perfect season.
The Erstwhile Man Descends.
It became tragic for this man, this erstwhile man, who once had everything. He now, quite literally, had nothing. His mother passed weeks after the second Cuddles debacle, and her home was foreclosed by the very obese man whom he'd offended lo those many months prior. His kids wouldn't even speak to him. He walked the streets, dirty, hungry, doing jigs for quarters, sometimes even acquiescing to selling his own body.
This was the lifestyle that, as "the man" he'd so derisively objected to. Now he was a product. Soon to be the poster boy. When he wasn't tricking himself out for the benefit of some hapless pimp, he was hanging around the library taking bum showers in the men's room and using the internet access computers in feeble attempts to e-mail his ex-wife, who had stopped agreeing to charges on pay-phone calls.
Life couldn't get any worse for this "erstwhile man." The fucking clown ruined everything. Todo fue follado. He couldn't even afford the fucking gun now. He would beg people who crossed him in the streets to put him out of his misery. No one would miss him. He was simply going through the motions. Breathing. Existing. Uselessly.
One night as he tried to catch some z's in an alley, as he was wrapping a piss soaked and dried entertainment section across his torso, he noticed an ad for the circus. It startled him. Cuddles would be making his final appearance in town. He would be retiring the next summer. Briefly "the erstwhile man" contemplated a final showdown with the fuckhead. He then shook his head and took to what he called sleep.
But it wasn't sleep. It was all a fucking nightmare. He got up, the pissy paper in his grasp, and walked the dark AM streets. Until sunlight he stalked, looking for someone who might aid him in procuring tickets to the dance. He found one taker in a young comedian who claimed that he knew the one weakness of a clown. The greatest comeback ever. The heckle. The heckle to rival all heckles. The answer to fuck all answers.
And so it was.
The comedian bought them both nosebleed seats to the circus. They filed in with the rest of the proletariat. Took their seats. The arena went dark. The announcer started shit off with his baritone voice. The Trix Bunnies replaced the Camel Cigs Camels who had replaced the Mickey's Donkeys.
"Here come the elephants, aren't they pink and enormous?" the announcer cried.
Then came the jugglers and the firebreathers. They even added a bearded lady and a man with tattoos all over his body. The freakshow had come in full force. The comedian looked at the grizzled "erstwhile man" and put his finger to his lips in a shushing fashion. As if to say, "you're okay, my friend. I got this.”
But erstwhile had his doubts. What if this time he wasn't selected by a random point of the index finger?
The arena went dark. The announcer begged the audience to buy, buy, buy, the capitalist fuckers. We're selling shit! You fucking buy it and you fucking like it! Bright cell phone screens blurred toward exits.
When they returned, all that was bright was the spotlight in the middle of the stage. The announcer welcomed back all the lovely consumers. He even congratulated them on their buying power. He asked for silence y le dieron.
Cuddles stepped into the spotlight and played shy. The crowd ate it up. Laughing, cheering, giving applause. He signed for silence. He received it. He shot his index finger into the crowd, spun round and round, and stopped. He snapped, the lights brightened, and amazingly, "the erstwhile man" was on the business end. He stood. He couldn't believe it.
The comedian stood as well. He patted "erstwhile" on the back and deferred attention to Cuddles.
"Hello sir!"
"Hello Cuddles!"
"I only have one simple question for you."
"I would be delighted to answer you!"
"Tell me, are you the fr..."
At this moment the comedian shouts down to Cuddles,
FUCK YOU CLOWN!
An Adaptation by Stuart González
Stop me if you've heard this one.
Once upon a time "the man" had everything. Yes, well, at least in the American sense of the word. Fuck it, in the WESTERN sense of the word. The great job. The hot wife. The two and a half kids. The home on a cul de sac in the burbs. The golf club membership. All that dumb ass shit. Hell, "the man" had enough clout in his "neck of the woods" to not even have to talk his way out of a speeding ticket because when the fuzz saw his face, they knew it was the face of someone special. Someone muy importante. Entonces, they had to get the fuck out of the way.
"The man" never met a shrimp cocktail he didn't like or a tax loophole he couldn't exploit. He would dance on top of his remarkably clean desk with glee as his bank account swelled by the hour. He once came home and told his wife, in front of their two young children, about the massive boner he got while he was in a meeting about "monopolies." She giggled at his impropriety and winked in his ear. He was going to fuck the shit out of her after the little bed wetters were herded to their cozy little rooms with their HDtvs and their video games and their access to internet pornography.
At his wife's request, during sex all "the man" wore were ties. She was obsessed with Chippendales and he was obsessed with his own success. For him, a good tie denoted his level of achievement. It also gave her something to choke him with. He liked that. Being asphyxiated while he crashed into that space between her thighs gluttonously.
"The man" liked playing games with the poor people downtown. Those fucking beggars, they'd solicit him for money and he would tell them straight-faced that they had to dance a jig. But it couldn't be something wino-ey and stupid. It had to be a traditional Irish jig. He provided them with tunes, humming them tunelessly, and they would try their best to impress this oh-so-important man. After they finished and received ovations from onlookers, he would give them a quarter and implore them to not spend it all in one place.
Of course he was booed by the crowd and cursed vehemently by the sensitive wino who desired little more than to acquire the couple of bucks necessary to remain in booze heaven. "The man" laughed all the way to his office. "The man" spent most days in his office, alone, watching Sports Center (he was a big Lakers fan, in fact, he liked any team that was always winning or at the pinnacle of their respective histories) or playing solitaire on his computer. That is, when he wasn't getting boners in meetings and thinking of wasteful ways of spending his ill-gotten lucre.
Sometimes "the man" was invited to "golf" with other successful "men," but he usually made some excuse to not show. The only thing he hated more than people who weren't as successful as himself were those who were successfully equal or greater to him. It really pissed him off that others shared in his ambitions and even dared to be better. So if he did deign himself to such appearances, he would usually do his damnedest to berate his opponent. Or his opponents' wives and children.
"The man" liked being on the gifting end of good tongue lashings. He also liked "ad hominems" and "straw men." He once accused one of his obese opponents of being lazy and thus ill-equipped for the kind of success he miraculously had. "How does one become rich by sitting around huffing down cheeseburgers and soda?" he wondered aloud as he teed-off into a lake.
"It's glandular, you fucking asshole!" the obese man screamed.
"Glandular. Right. I'll bet... and I'm sure you'll blame my shitty form for that tee."
"It's woefully bad."
"I have tennis elbow, good sir."
Enter the Clown
Despite "the man's" protestations, his FEARS, he promised his young daughter that for her birthday this year he would take them to the circus. So take them he did. They piled into the SUV and drove downtown for a day of fun for the kids, and what he knew would seem a lifetime of misery for him.
His wife teased him playfully about his absurd fear of clowns. "Absurd," he snapped. "NONSENSE. My fear of clowns is what got me to where I am today." Emboldened by his wife's imbecilic assertion, he cut off an old lady in a Buick and parked proudly, forcefully into a parking space that was too small for his SUV (it took up half of the space next to it). His daughter told him that "the clown" was supposed to be the world's funniest.
"Clowns aren't funny, mademoiselle," he corrected. "Clowns are the American equivalent of untouchables. They are sad, ridiculous creatures that should indeed be laughed off when they refer to themselves as human beings." Upon hearing this, her eyes began to tear up. He entreated his young one not to cry lest she embarrass him and all he has worked for, making it clear that he was not in the least pleased to be in such environs.
The wife corralled the children to her arms protectively. "The man" huffed a little but accepted his situation. After all, this discomfort, he was certain, would pay even more dividends (in more ways than one) once the day was done. The hour's imposition could do him wonders.
"The man" and his wife and brood took their great seats, silently waiting for the show to begin. The lights went down, the announcer's voice boomed throughout the great civic center, built on the backs of the poor, for the rich, much to "the man's" glee, and the show began.
"First, the majestic Mickey's Donkeys," The announcer's bass-y voice rumbled.
"The man" sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then the announcer sing-songingly marked the arrival of the elephants and jugglers and firebreathers. His children squealed with delight as peanuts were passed out to the crowd so that they might be able to feed the beasts. Still, "the man" was unimpressed. In fact, he was bored. He began searching for porn on his mobile web phone.
Soon the arena went dark again, the only light emitting from thousands of cell phones amongst the throngs.
The announcer's voice bludgeoned the ears of the mob once more. "Ladies and gentlemen! It is my ever groveling pleasure to now give you, Cuddles the Clown!" The massive arena exploded with applause and cheer. A single spotlight shone at the center of the stage and Cuddles coyly stepped into it. His hands were behind his back. He looked around. Mucho Silencio.
The hushed crowd was so because word had it that Cuddles often opened his performances by singling out a member of the audience and asked them an incredibly difficult or embarrassing question. "The man" continued to fiddle with his phone as Cuddles scanned the gaggles for his victim. He spun round in his spotlight, finger pointing to the stands. He stopped, snapped and the spotlight disappeared and the lights came on. His finger was pointed directly at "the man."
Unbeknownst, "the man" continued to rifle through videos on tube8. Everyone was watching him. His wife nudged him and he looked up.
"You!" Cuddles shouted.
"Me?"
"Yes, sir. You!"
"I am too good for this," "the man" says, putting his eyes back to his phone.
"Okay then, sir, then may I ask you, are you the front end of a horse's ass?"
Everyone laughs. "The man" was perplexed.
"Huh?"
"Sir, are you the front end of a horse's ass?"
"What? No!"
Everyone laughs.
"Fair enough," Cuddles said, rubbing his chin. "Then sir, is it true that you are in fact the rear end of a horse's ass?"
"What the hell are you babbling about?"
"Then this is also a 'no.'" Cuddles asserted.
"Correct."
"Sir, given your previous responses, I have no other course of action than to assume that since you are not the front nor are you the rear end of a horse's ass, that you are simply, inevitably, the totality of a horse's ass!"
"The man's" jaw dropped, the crowd exploded with riotous laughter, and the lights went down. The crowd chanted "horse's ass! horse's ass!" in the direction of "the man." He wanted only at that moment to retreat into himself, so demoralized was he by Cuddles' probing, prodding, absurd line of questioning.
He ran out of the arena in tears.
From The Man to The Erstwhile Man
Only days after his encounter with Cuddles the Clown, "the man" lost everything. His job. His hot wife, who took the children with her. His home on the cul de sac. His country club membership. He owed alimony and back taxes. All because of fuckhead the clown. That was how "the erstwhile man" now referred to his new arch-nemesis.
At first, he plotted to kill Cuddles, but killing a clown is heady business. "The erstwhile man" would've had to do that sort of dirty work on his own. No mob in the country hated a funny man. So he had to bide his time. He had to figure out another way to destroy the clown. Every night, as he slept uncomfortably on his mother's fold-out couch, he fought the urge to check down all the ways in which he could mentally massacre the fucker. He needed to sleep, though. The bags under his eyes were beginning to make his head tilt slightly ahead of him.
"The erstwhile man" made do with his meager monthly wages from the local Goodwill, folding clothing and gathering baskets from the far reaches of the parking lot. But he hated it. It was the essence of death to a man used to so much leisure; TANTO PODER. It made him want to use all the grocery money he earned to buy a gun, go to a park, find a nice tree, and blow his fucking cerebellum all over the place.
He confessed to his mother over breakfast that he was in the grips of a deep depression. This fuckhead the clown guy had ruined everything. And for what? For a fucking laugh?
She encouraged him to let it all out, and he began to cry like a small child. Unbridled and without dignity, he shoved his breakfast away and ran into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. Moments later his life-giver knocked softly on the door, calling his name repeatedly, urging him to keep his chin up.
This kind of attitude toward the utter poverty of his existence made him want to kill her instead. But he could never do that. Matricide would not do anything to harm Cuddles. It would only unburden “the erstwhile man” of a minor annoyance, and that relief would later turn to even more essence extinguishing depression. Because he loved his mother. Immensely.
One morning he awakened to find a newspaper clipping on his stomach. He lifted it to his weary face and read it. The circus was coming to town. Cuddles was back. This would be his chance to redeem himself. He had two weeks to mentally prepare.
He took notes, practiced with notecards, studied the best stand-up comedians on those local late night shows. Wit would be his savior, he was certain. Perhaps he could hand that undeservingly high and mighty clown a deathblow. THE deathblow. To end all other deathblows. In the history of deathblows.
So "the erstwhile man" saved up every penny and bought a ticket to the circus. He camped out to be one of the first. The next day, he eagerly grabbed his seat. He even bought popcorn. He'd resolved to slam it in his face triumphantly, T.O style once dealing the aforementioned "deathblow."
The lights went down and the announcers voice rumbled the arena once again. The show opening Mickey's Donkeys had been replaced by the Camel Cigs Camels. "The erstwhile man" sat on the edge of his seat, biting his nails. He was expectant, but also doubting that he would be fortunate enough to get a second shot at fuckhead.
The announcer then moved on to the elephants and jugglers and firebreathers. "The erstwhile man" was getting annoyed. Fuck, bring out the stupid fucking clown already, he thought. The lights fell out again and the announcer's voice growled, the speakers crackled, as he was taking his sweet ass time, begging the crowd to partake in the wonderful concessions. People moved by the light of their cell phones.
Then, the spotlight. Silencio. Una otra vez. Cuddles the Clown trucked into view. An explosion of applause and hooting commenced.
"Introducing, once again, the man of the night, Cuddles the Clown, in all his humorous glory!" the announcer beamed.
"The erstwhile man" stood and clapped, cheering loudly, trying to cancel out the crowd. Cuddles put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion. He pointed into the crowd and spun. He came to a stop, nearly falling over his huge feet. He was pointing at "the erstwhile man." ¡Que Suerte! The lights came up and Cuddles called to him.
"You sir! I have one question for you!"
"Bring it on, Cuddles!"
"Are you... the front end... of a horse's ass?"
He stood to his feet, "the erstwhile man," and he stammered. "Huh?"
"No?" Cuddles retreated. "Well then, are you, dear sir, the rear end of a horse's ass?"
"You gotta be kidding me!" "the erstwhile man" screamed.
"I assure you, I am not. And I will add... more appropriately I will assert, that since you are not the front nor are you the rear end of a horse's ass, that you are, in essence, the wholeness of a horse's ass!"
"Ahhhh!"
Once again, "the erstwhile man" had been bested by the clown. The masses exploded into laughter. The lights died and so it was once again. "The erstwhile man" stormed out of the arena and into the streets of the city. Screaming. Crying. Falling to the concrete in the fetal position, sobbing like the Patriots had just blown a perfect season.
The Erstwhile Man Descends.
It became tragic for this man, this erstwhile man, who once had everything. He now, quite literally, had nothing. His mother passed weeks after the second Cuddles debacle, and her home was foreclosed by the very obese man whom he'd offended lo those many months prior. His kids wouldn't even speak to him. He walked the streets, dirty, hungry, doing jigs for quarters, sometimes even acquiescing to selling his own body.
This was the lifestyle that, as "the man" he'd so derisively objected to. Now he was a product. Soon to be the poster boy. When he wasn't tricking himself out for the benefit of some hapless pimp, he was hanging around the library taking bum showers in the men's room and using the internet access computers in feeble attempts to e-mail his ex-wife, who had stopped agreeing to charges on pay-phone calls.
Life couldn't get any worse for this "erstwhile man." The fucking clown ruined everything. Todo fue follado. He couldn't even afford the fucking gun now. He would beg people who crossed him in the streets to put him out of his misery. No one would miss him. He was simply going through the motions. Breathing. Existing. Uselessly.
One night as he tried to catch some z's in an alley, as he was wrapping a piss soaked and dried entertainment section across his torso, he noticed an ad for the circus. It startled him. Cuddles would be making his final appearance in town. He would be retiring the next summer. Briefly "the erstwhile man" contemplated a final showdown with the fuckhead. He then shook his head and took to what he called sleep.
But it wasn't sleep. It was all a fucking nightmare. He got up, the pissy paper in his grasp, and walked the dark AM streets. Until sunlight he stalked, looking for someone who might aid him in procuring tickets to the dance. He found one taker in a young comedian who claimed that he knew the one weakness of a clown. The greatest comeback ever. The heckle. The heckle to rival all heckles. The answer to fuck all answers.
And so it was.
The comedian bought them both nosebleed seats to the circus. They filed in with the rest of the proletariat. Took their seats. The arena went dark. The announcer started shit off with his baritone voice. The Trix Bunnies replaced the Camel Cigs Camels who had replaced the Mickey's Donkeys.
"Here come the elephants, aren't they pink and enormous?" the announcer cried.
Then came the jugglers and the firebreathers. They even added a bearded lady and a man with tattoos all over his body. The freakshow had come in full force. The comedian looked at the grizzled "erstwhile man" and put his finger to his lips in a shushing fashion. As if to say, "you're okay, my friend. I got this.”
But erstwhile had his doubts. What if this time he wasn't selected by a random point of the index finger?
The arena went dark. The announcer begged the audience to buy, buy, buy, the capitalist fuckers. We're selling shit! You fucking buy it and you fucking like it! Bright cell phone screens blurred toward exits.
When they returned, all that was bright was the spotlight in the middle of the stage. The announcer welcomed back all the lovely consumers. He even congratulated them on their buying power. He asked for silence y le dieron.
Cuddles stepped into the spotlight and played shy. The crowd ate it up. Laughing, cheering, giving applause. He signed for silence. He received it. He shot his index finger into the crowd, spun round and round, and stopped. He snapped, the lights brightened, and amazingly, "the erstwhile man" was on the business end. He stood. He couldn't believe it.
The comedian stood as well. He patted "erstwhile" on the back and deferred attention to Cuddles.
"Hello sir!"
"Hello Cuddles!"
"I only have one simple question for you."
"I would be delighted to answer you!"
"Tell me, are you the fr..."
At this moment the comedian shouts down to Cuddles,
FUCK YOU CLOWN!
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