Do you ever forget everything about yourself? Driving home drunk through the rain, trying to piece together the bits you can remember: listing events that happened, friends' names, influences you surely had, ideas that were once important. Trying to form some human shape from the frays?
Do you shuffle through your damaged cellphone on wet patios, hoping the physical mechanic will make you less terrifying to groups of young women discussing reddit and Mingus? Hoping for a moment another will play initiative, just one time, to juxtapose the backdrop of a hundred tries and dead-ends? I too know the Clown exists.
Do you build word games? And repeat them aloud like a chant to ward through the day? On sunny mornings in dirt fields I made many laughing: Polyp poppin' papas putting pasta in the pot. The clown ground his crown down. I make them still, but they are different: faggot kike dyke nigger ass full of cum, cunt in the morning light, cock when day is done. During the hour drive to/from work I hang out the car window and yell it at people stuck in traffic going the other way, yell it to their faces. It's out of loving hatred, I promise. But for who?
Words are utensils, there to cut the meat.
Are you haunted by fallen friends' specters? Steeled against/through mundane labor, remembering in your bones what it is to do worse, knowing from example what lurks below man's poverty baseline? Do white ghosts chase you down the alleyway? And get high? Do you say never again and hunt every friend/cousin/acquaintance looking for a job, hook them up only to watch them crumble?
Do you feel on rainy drunken nights, left only with a keyboard, that some ancient beast has taken a poisonous shit in your heart? And it festers slow and old and mundane, like the approach of a glacier from a hilltop?
My dental hygienist invited me to help him kill/dress/butcher his cow and hog this fall. I said yes, he writ his address and phone number, but I don't even care. What's wrong with me?
Do you await the borderline where self-hatred finally liberates?
Tucked beneath the rails is a strip club called Hurricane Betty's. Pimps and dealers visit from time to time, but they typically regular the Platinum Club. Old mills cage in the street. The freight trains roll overhead and the rain collects below. Such it is, that I would get that deep tingle-- skip the other clubs, and head to Betty's. On snowy Sundays after midnight, rainy Mondays at 1 am, on Easter and New Years Day at noon I would go through the doors.
My first night, drunk and aching for the touch, I spent all the seven hundred dollars I had in this world. 15 women worked the floor that night, and I paid them each in time for a private booth and a song worth. After that night, I was remembered. The old woman at the bar would pop a beer as I was patted down at the door. Girls I recognized would recognize me, occasionally leave other men and come to talk. I always paid in twenties and always tipped, and always wanted one more dance. I rarely watched the stage, I waited for the floor girls and the private boxes.
Months would pass between each visit, but I came back. And the beer would still be waiting and a familiar face would come to sit on my lap. It was pure chance, on those nights, I was the only paying customer. A stout lesbian couple were regulars and always took their chairs at the stage side. Their polo shirts were neatly tucked and I never saw them holding an empty beer. Occasionally a wrinkled and self/unemployed business man would enter, sit for a beer, tickle a dancer's asshole, laugh and then leave. It's all the same. A heavy set Hispanic man would sometimes sit at a table back from the stage, carefully nursing a bottled water he refilled in the bathroom. The gangsters and thugs would come through, silently pay, receive, watch their phones and leave. Time stands slow in the club.
In those days so many girls were my age. Young. They danced for their rent, car payments, kids and pills. I was just another investor and it suited me fine. Just a broke farmer in every sense. They'd call me their farm boy. Maybe one or two meant it-- I was on the same road to hell. Occasionally, their guard and professional face dropped. We're all only human. I would tell them jokes and bizarre stories, and when they laughed I felt like a man.
The older white gals were exhausted with life and professionally closed. There were no older black gals. The young white girls were all eastern European and they were blank eyed and angry-- maybe I was too insulting or just too broke. The young black girls were as human beings should be. I remember three.
Jasmine was very aloof and disinterested. She went through the routines of conversation and the routines of dancing. But she asked about me and so I told her. One night, she stopped. Naked to her heels she squatted between my legs, resting her elbows on my thighs, she stared into my face. She asked-- is it true everything they say about food? Will the poisons on bad veggies tear you up over the years and leave you to die of cancer? She was serious. I couldn't spout farmer market "white" bullshit about politics, morals and... I sighed and was caught in the lie. Eventually, I must have had something to say-- eat how you want or how you can, or there are more important things than what we just shit out. Whatever I said she took blankly, gathered her clothes and left. Never saw her again.
The next girl's name I cannot remember, and I loved her for better reasons, maybe it was Nadine. There was a thunderstorm that night. And I was truly alone in the club. Most of the girls had left, writing off the night as a loss. But Nadine had nowhere to go. I sat at a table watching an empty stage. She sat down across from me and started mid-sentence-- tonight's my birthday, can you believe this miserable shit? I laughed and we got to talking. Bullshit about weather, became jokes about middle aged shitty men, became commiseration on our mutual poverty. Then we realized we knew each other. She was a forgotten-friend of my book-friend's wife. Being real people changed things. Nadine's parents were florists and owned a shop, but her day pay couldn't cut it. So she danced. Nadine's mother was from Atalanta, but her father was an older generation Syrian immigrant (I'm sure I made that one detail up for romance). Her family was in shit--not from money, they managed-- but her older brother had driven himself insane. He was in his thirties and when the recession hit he lost his job, then slowly and terribly lost his wife and children. The brother was still alive, but nearly an animal, he was broken past fixing. We started talking about all this shit the world becomes sometimes. We agreed that luck was bullshit. We talked about what we though was worth worrying about. As closing came, she decided she should probably dance for me. She was exhausted, but with a redbull could pull herself together. I promised to get her one. Except I had no more cash. I went to the atm with the $10 surcharge-- but I was declined. I went to the bar, and the old woman charged me my last $70 to get 60. Embarrassed as all hell, I bought a red bull and a beer and Nadine looked at the ceiling. I got my dance. Afterward Nadine said I should be smart and not go blowing my money on white girls. I never saw her again.
Bree was closer, out of them all. I came out of a night blizzard in the week before Christmas. It was something different and complicated. I smiled at her. And she left a man and came to sit with me. We talked, but I can't remember what because something different was happening. She was a professional. She laughed deeper than the other girls and she whispered the filthiest shit I'd yet to hear. Is it so simple as pheromones sometimes? Or what it is? She was young and so was I and I had money, that's all . After the third dance, things became complicated when she kissed me. Deep to the lip. My belt was off and her hand snuck down my pants as she peaked to see where the bouncer was sitting. We lost track of the dances, but settled at five. It could have been ten, twenty seemed right too. Kneeling in my lap she took my phone and entered her number. Professional. Rummaging my pockets I had cash for four dances. I promised her the rest. Once again, at the atm I paid $10 for my last 50. By then Bree was hiding at the far end of the bar, in the shadows near the backdoor. Her head was in her hands, the bar tender had left her three shots. I gave Bree all the cash and she ignored it. I asked when she was dancing next. She said wednesday, but it might not be a good idea if you come by. I took a drink and left. And I never saw her again. But on Christmas eve Bree sent me a text saying "Happy xma." I thought she meant eczema.
This recent trip by Betty's will likely be the last. As madness fell on me. It'd been months since my last visit and all the women my age were gone. An angry middle aged white woman danced for me and the madness came down. A private dance was $25. A beer was $5. The VIP room was $170 minimum. Average sex was $300ish in this city. I started rolling over the street price of every high school date, every college girlfriend. Which were $700 nights? Which were $2,000? These thoughts made me sick of myself, I felt like a rotted tree. I drove through the city until morning, going around a rotary ten twenty times before turning home.
I think the holocaust made being naked really complicated
for everybody. It was like national geographic, as a kid, watching those documentaries
in class or late night History Channel or wherever. You’d always see the piles
of bodies and, as a child, my eyes would zero in and look at each man’s penis. Breasts
and vaginas were there too I guess. But the penises I remember. And they were
penises, not cocks really. Cocks started in 1974, I’ve decided after reviewing
the footage. It requires a lot more leisure and nutrition than was available in
those times to grow a proper girthed and manually practiced cock.
Honestly, I don’t think cocks really exist anywhere except
in our heads. What I mean is cocks are the idea and fantasy, but the piles of
3inch flaccid penises are the reality. Looking at those black and white people was
kinda like the high school gym showers, but more like the YMCA. The universal
penis on display and it fucks everybody up. We can handle cocks, they blend
into the scenery much easier. But I certainly ain’t the first to say penises
are a bummer.
I grew up around here, outside the city I mean. Right on
that line where they forgot to keep building shit. So there used to be trees and
rocks and stuff like that. The woods would just take over, man, fellas with
chainsaws would be out every summer weekend hacking that shit back to keep
their yards from turning into savages’ playpens. Out back as a kid, right past
the tree line, kinda swallowed in brush and leaves were these disintegrating
tarpaper and twine chicken houses. Big ol’ crummy sheds to keep the little
fuckers in, you know? Being a naturally stupid child I broke the rusted-over
locks and would sneak inside. Then for whatever reason I’d dig down into the
dirt floors—for treasure? Treasure, yes. I finally hit the jackpot one day,
broke through that boring dirt barrier and got to the mounds of dog skulls,
tuna cans and chicken rib cages. That’s a special day for a young man, to hold
his first dog skull—probably some prized whippet from the 1890s county fair. Being
a stupid child, who never really thought before doing shit—I remember kissing it
on the teeth. Why not! But then I freaked out realizing what I did and just spat
and cried and ran and washed my face out with detergent and just kinda shivered
like a Mongoloid.
Haha, that’s stupid. So anyway, somebody once said that half
of all problems start by ascribing lots of complicated reasons to something in
order to avoid the very simple things at the bottom. You know, okay, suits me.
Let’s try it. Maybe daddy drinks because of a bad accident he once saw on the
highway? Maybe Robbie is such a shit because his grandmother found his 13year
old thai murder porn stash and the old dame refused to rat out her own grandson? Maybe
General Electric makes cars because Teddy Roosevelt had night terrors unless he
was snuggly tucked in the back seat of a Model T with three or four gentlemen
companions? Maybe airlines are terrible because cabbalist monks saw forty seven
feathers descend from the Giza
pyramids one Walpurgisnacht in 1963? Or maybe shit ain’t really that crazy, we
just desperately need it to be. Like some hick 12 year old fucking a pig by
candlelight, we just need her to be real and daddy not to catch us.
Whatever, it’s all stupid. I like cars, anyone else here
like cars? God, I can’t do this. Sorry the car shit is over—I have a really
intense memory of shame from being ten years old. It was the magic summer of masturbation,
where one month before it was hot wheels and another later it was the hot heels
in Spanish music videos. It was right then, the weekend after the first jerk
session that actually meant something, that my Aunt decided to take me camping
with her boys. I was a pig in rut. I ran to the little outside wooden shit trench,
propped the door closed and beat off every twenty minutes. It was something. I
remember my cousins banging on the door—Just a minute! I’d have to start from
scratch, paranoid and sweaty. Finishing a half hour of tears later, only to
desperately pretend all was normal when I got back to the campsite. There was a
plastic port-a-potty by the beach and that was my castle. I took a pocket knife
and cut a little hole, and just rubbed raw watching the ladies swimming—finally
thought to use the hand sanitizer(wink) . That was a magic summer.
G’night Ladies and Gents, you’ve been great. Ricky Thomas is
up next! Thank you.
Roots from the earth guided by suns wamrth to form weeds.
From the roots, the stem splits from the stalk to form arms bearing buds.
Within the recess, trichomes of profound mystery.
However...
Where may she be grown?
Where can her profundity be shared?
Only Behind deadbolted doors and on a screen of brass.
Or trapped in a Skin made from her sister.
Hidden from sight; exiled to a street corner, lost in a crowd.
Kept secret in containers of glass with an iron roof.
She burns alone and misunderstood.
Bring her from the shadows of the BlackMarket
and radiate her golden Strength to all the
Wounded, Sickly, and Dieing.
Allow her grace to bless!
instead of confuse, blind and Strengthen the Wicked.
Guide Number Four
(1) Walk with INTENT
(2) Ask Everyone you encounter their proper "Christian" name
(3) Treat all individuals as soft furry animals sleeping in the grass
(4) Speak with Honesty, even if it puts a Colt '45 to your temple with a hollow point in the chamber
(5) Maintain appropriate eye contact
(6) Remember where you parked the car
(7) Remember to forget
Guide Number Six
- Respect the landlord
- Don't share your problems
- Don't show your weakness
- Don't tip the cabbie
- Only fill up the tank in NJ
- Supply, stock and shelve Boxed Red Wine
- AVOID ALL EYE contact
- Shoot the messenger (2 in the chest, 1 in the head)
- Only compliment yourself
- Only use "otis" elevators
- Wear wooden shoes up escalators
- Obey all stoplight signals
Guide Number Nine
- Replace all Church hymn lyrics with the word Watermelon (you will leave feeling better)
- Write Russian literature on company post-it notes
- Learn Spanish Cursive
- Lock your car doors three times
- Enjoy your HARD earned 3 day weekend
- Always be full of pride, even if it kills your friends and family while Strengthening your enemies
- Subscribe to Readers Digest
- Be the applause, NEVER receive it
