hollywood

[cutthroat]

<center></center>There she is.

The voice that screamed the loudest.

I know she wants to come out tonight because
I feel like going out and buying LOTS OF DRUGS
and talking to BIG MEAN BOYS
and going out to DRIVE REAL FAST and LUMP OUR BLOOD WITH POISON

She pokes at the shallow of my ribs and points out to the bright bright lights below and tells me the best thing is that someone's always dying somewhere!

With that stupid-crazy smile on her face:
Let's go sing songs with our fists, because it's a REAL LONG DROP when you look at it from up here and there's ALWAYS someone DYING.

She says you can learn these things
If you want
By sucking them right out of the fine young men on the east end but you can always read everywhere that you can tell if he loves you because "he doesn't come in your mouth."
I tell her that she's sick
Too tired
Iced

And she screams NO WAY
Someone who's sick would never turn down such fine pussy! Pussy that'll leave her strung out like the cheapest cocaine for days, frantic lines defining her
But tonight she doesn't demand candy or sex or drugs, she just wants to be let out for awhile.

Stretch her long, bruised legs.

Turn out into the city, cut the stars from the sky and

Illuminate the whole world with a primal scream.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ March 28, 2007 02:27 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ September 02, 2007 09:19 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

It was Labor Day.

Juels had finally emerged from the house -- lime green paint sandwiched between her tits and a dirty wifebeater -- to join Renton on the lawn. She had spent her morning finishing a lovely needlepoint of a lynching, superimposing it onto a lacy throw pillow, swathed in superfluous blooms of crack-smoke.

"My God! Oh my God!"

From two steps behind, Renton giggled at the gaudy belt of bulletholes slung fashionably over the waist of their humble home. The houses on either side seemed to shrink away from their wounded breatheren, or maybe that was just the wash of narcotics webbed between them in glimmering threads wilting in daylight.

"Oh, God!"

"Who, who do you even call?! Hello, police, some lunatic RUINED MY HOUSE?! Do you know a GOOD VINYL SIDEIST?!" She shrieked into the faux-phone of her fist.

The lady of the house crowed, a shining vision of white plastic sex boots and latex-based paint that clotted a blown-out mane of black hair that flapped dramatically like a cloud of attacking birds. Tippi Hedren-a-Go-Go gone haywire.

She penetrated one of the sooty holes like a young, adventurous lover with paint-lubed fingertips, marveling at the uniformity.

"My, what kind've ammo was that?"

She pulled her best Bob Evans, gashing her eyes and baring her teeth in a botoxed sneer. "Classy!"

"Oh, maybe it works."

"Aye," Renton agreed, "Chic."

[cutthroat]

"Some men."

It had to be gasped with a fist tattooing her chest, shrieked while she slumped over a cheap Formica countertop or whispered into a dirty mirror while she pulled at her eyelids and checked for heavy dialation.

Sometimes it was growled into flesh as she knock-knocked on ribcages, searching for hollow spaces.

The destute Russian blowhard didn't need much room and she prefered the shadowy real estate behind hearts, across burned bridges, where she could easily use fists to make lumps in their throats when they thought about what life could be without her.

Where she could lovingly grip trembling lungs and even control the air they breathed.

It wasn't stolen air or bruised throats that she wanted but they were the closest things to home she could find, faking a passion for life out of constrewed beaucephus boy-bones consetellated over her dirty matresses, roped by strands of unfiltered cigarette smoke and that please take everything roll of her eyes.

Most nights she just sealed her eyes with thick ropes of mascara and kicked back into colder green water, tumbling soft and funny, maybe sometimes ferocious, slipsliding over asphalt eventually, and blinking at the dirt on her palms in the morning -- leaving muddy handprints on backbones she shoved out from underneath the sheets.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 12, 2006 11:47 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

Behind hollow red doors, crooked signs phosphorescent with NO VACANCY, she would peel the white pleather fuckboots off and he would kiss her feet. She was enchanted, she would stay for weeks. He would psychoanalyze and she would tumble from the bed, to the floor, across cumstained carpet to roll in the moonlight stealing though a greasy window, making his toes curl up in his expensive wingtips. Trauma and neglect had bleached her cocaine white, with charcoal edges and cold red aureole around her eyes so he would photograph her in grainy monochrome.

Wide-eyed, overexposed-- clawing out of a filmy bathtub, voguing nude through the fish-eyed swell of the peephole, draped over the static glow of a antiqued television and hanging from the seventh story window, calves scissoring red felt curtains.

She would sing to the dark shadows behind his eyes, claw at his lapels and plead into his neck. "Does it burn you, too?" Waiting for his ribs to turn to ash, for his chest to open in a flood of sulfur and sin, betrayed by skin that ignited with a whisper of flame. She would ply him with passages from the King James' edition in the bedside table when she wasn't hoovering rails of blow off the leathered cover and he would answer in hexing monotone--

"No, no, no. We owe our lives to the wolf. The snake." He took his rails from the withered slab of her hip, or the groove of her sternum, the sunken juncture of ribs that caged the yellow canary of her heart, chirping an alarm at the unbreathable air inside of her.

Things would turn to God. Things always turned to God. Dusty-lunged lunatics with tongues seeping gospel into pink young months, recruiting hopeless youth. More sentimental garbage with the holy Ghost in the attic, sin laid on the heads of infants, who would bawl in cathedral mouthed unison through a bubbling veil of rosewater. She related him to the gritty salt taste of Christ on her blistered lips, he drenched his feet in the Mother mary eddy of hair, tonguing each other in scripture, sliced from a bloated vein of vulgarity and spraying onto water-stained ceilings.

[cutthroat]

"He's sick, but she's everything he's ever wanted, I can see that look in his eyes. He wants to take her in those clumsy hands and have her until he's shooting spinal fluid into her guts. He's positive that this is the cure."

[cutthroat]

. . .Home is where he found her submerged in the astro-turfed womb of their soon-to-be-former bathroom, tub lined in the coarse faux-sod boiling over with effulgent bubbles and the exaggerated limbs, swathed in bruises, of a damp, heavily wigged junkie in hiding.

"Jeuly." His throat was clogged in syrup-sweet sympathy as he dropped the astroturfed lid onto the astroturfed seat and sat down. Just the mirror and some chrome fixtures glinted, everything else pulsing shaggy electric green. Every time he took a crap, he silently marveled at Jeuls' determination to completely obliterate all sense of normality, even in this cookie-cut townhouse. "Whott're y'doin'? 'is can'nt be healthy. Yer gittin' all pruney."

Her body was bent and blue, the water long since gone from lukewarm to cold, dingy like dishwater. Sinking lower into bubbles, she hissed out a plume of smoke that stretched for the ceiling and continued to glower.

The paranoia of an addict was not pretty. It was dark bruises and eyes that rolled to whites restlessly and a heart you could see bloating against straining ribs every time a car growled down the street. It was the sound of teeth grinding into dust down black throats, the color that skin turned after weeks of living behind blacked out windows and symphonies of deadbolt locks clattering shut.

"Were you eating .. eating pork with that woman? In the kitchen? Is she still here?"

"That wis like, two days ago."

She propped her ankles over the lip of the tub, bathwater lapping at a tattooed neck.

"Oh."

Silence would find them following the points their bodies met on a map of desperation and sorrow. Fingernails chipped to the quick, knuckles often bleeding. Bundles of veins swelling and strumming with frustration under oily skin. They were identical twins in their bruises and soft wounded eyes, using long nights and narcotics to craft their hearts into matching hollows. They didn't need blood to bind them, just sticky glimmering threads of obsession and throats trumpeting the same plague of disaster.

"You know, you can't chase three rabbits at a time and expect catch them all."

"But ay'll pro'ly b' dead soon. Yew tew. So why nawt?"

[cutthroat]

By Sunday she was throwing wrinkled cocktail dresses and blue jeans into hard Mary Kay pink suitcases on either side of the finely embossed birthday invitation opened on her mattress, shrieking "I don't care what you do, but I'm going!" -- her hair still tornadoed around her in a swampy bathwater slick of limp brown Shirley Temple curls. "Like she's not traumatized enough?! You're crazy! Better yet, you're going!"

"Aw, c'mawn.." Jeuls did not miss him dipping for the door, tearing at his hair with fists rattling and wishing he'd gotten the mail first.

"You're going!" She shrieked, kicking a suitcase across the gouged hardwood floor, popping open with a wheeze in the doorway.

"Aw!"

"She's turning six, Renton! Christ, you can't just send her some, some stuffed animal! Call it a fucking birthday!"

"Ay.. ay jis gawtta show 'er 'm thinkin' o'er."

"What?! Who the hell told you that?!" Suitcases snapped shut with twin clicks, leaving her free to turn on Renton with eyes blazing (urgent, thirsty for new air, leaping at an excuse to fly across the ocean) and flat palms shoved him into the hallway, towards his room. "She's your fucking baby, Renton!"

"Tell 'er fucken mother!" Elbows locked in a protective X across his chest, shying from the her harpy siren shrieks. "I can'nt afford t'jetset 'round th'fucken world fer a fucken birthday party!"

"Well, I can." She chucked the suitcase onto his mattress, sheets undisturbed from weeks ago. Little sister wanted to know where he'd been sleeping, sure to cut him with a suspcious glare as she disappeared into his closet, bent on both knees. "Where's your suit? That grey one, the one we wore to Sid Eli's funeral?" Clawed from the depths of the stale-aired closet, she stretched a thinning leather jacket barnacled with pyramid studs and duct tape across her own shoulders, knuckles going white with a buck of her hips. "Oh my god, can you imagine?" Disgusted, she flung it over her shoulder and the halfdead boy went scrambling after it, crowing indigantly.

"Hay, puttit back ona' hanger! C'mawn! Fuck!"

"Here," Pinning him against his bed with an armful of t-shirts, her doe-wide eyes bled into determined gashes. "Finish packing and find your passport."

"But," Arms dripping with tattered scraps of his dumpster rag wardrobe, he lurched for the door, mouth knotting in confusion.

"It's ok!" The still-pruney princess pinched the fuzzy cheek of the stuffed koala sitting crookedly on his bedside table, painting Renton with broad, reproachful strokes before flying through the door, cracking elbows into molding. "We'll get Ryn something nice on the way to the airport!"

[cutthroat]

Frosting-faced Grecian children, olive-skinned and fierce-eyed ran rampant over the immaculate yard overlooking a sprawling stretch of grassy villa, screeching and swinging pi?ata sticks while Tara and Jeuls looked on (the junkie far more intrigued at the idea of a child gutting another for a tootsie roll than the demon, who's fingers twittered nervously over her silverware, like a mother's should) from a cluster of tables at the side of the yard. It was their second day in Greece, and Jeuls was still reeling with jetlag, keeping herself energized by frequent trips to the bathroom with her thumb against her nose. Her exhaustion was amplified by the demon's transformation from fire-haired loudmouthed activist cunt to jetsetting ash-blonde mother of the year, but those steel blue eyes were unchangeable and Jeuls had seen them flash piteous and sad when she saw her junkie prince. And Renton's still-empty guest room, bed still tucked up immaculate confirmed her fears that this would not be some harmless trip.

"So, how's he doing?"

Jeuls snorted, squeezing a fistful of birthday cake into her palm and slurping the frosting from the grimy webs between her fingertips. "What is this, buttercreme? Great choice. I mean, kinda high class for six year olds, but this is Greece, right? Very Mediterranean."

"Julia."

"It's Jeuls. Jeuls now."

"Right." The demon leveled calm eyes on her daughter, who was dancing on the tops of her daddy's motorcycle boots as they waltzed around the lawn, around the clown mangling balloons into creatures and through a cluster of kids waiting to get their faces painted. All the while Jeuls leaned forward, so curious as to if Tara had tearfully ripped him from every photo, burned his clothes, pawned his jewelry and stereo and spent the money on a pair of six inch fuck me heels, unable to lap emotion from the young mother's eyes. Frustration set in, forcing her to empty the wine from any abandoned glass on the table. "Is he doing all right?"

Jeuls' laugh could strip flesh from bone, turning her mouth mean, ugly, accusing. But the demon didn't flinch, and Jeuls should've known. No one survives eleven months fucking the bonemashing smoke spitting junkie prince in the most deranged warehouse ever and comes out scared of some whacked out junkie whore. Even if she is on vacation and wearing her Gucci stilettos.

"He's doing great. I'm taking care of him, don't you worry."

"Oh really?" Eyebrows elevated towards a gaudy fringe of mousy blonde hair (that Renton had almost lost his airline peanuts over, but was apparently OK about tangling his knuckles through it while he sweat against her belly when it was dark and the baby was sleeping) as Tara leaned a chin into her palm, shooting the junkie princess with a beatific smile. "And who's taking care of you?"

"Mm," Jeuls' eyes collapsed into catty gashes, wiping her frosting-caked palm down her thigh. "Touch?, mamabird. But don't you worry, we're all just fine."

"We?"

"We! Me, the rentboy and Norma Jean!" Jeuls' eyes practically dripped with perverse joy, staining the fine cut of her knockoff Versace dress as Tara's jaw sat like granite and the junkie princess could hear her back teeth grinding. "You remember Norma. She's the fucking original!" Jeuls gushed with a unwavering fondness for the un-doped snowbird who could still pluck at Renton's nerves like a pro, strumming him into frenzy. "All these other girls, they could fuckin' learn a thing or two from our girl. But I think she's finally wizened up, ya'nno? You cannot tame such a destructive force. It'd be like trying to marry a hurricane, right? A big dope-shooting meth smoking hurricane?"

"Other girls?" Eyebrows crumpled into devastated, finely plucked caterpillars lying lifeless above deep blue eyes, the color of the ocean after a nuclear strike, claimed Renton. Who had tangled himself in Tara's sheets not more than six hours ago, laying praise at her feet and spewing promises (that sounded familiar and lame and pleading and she, for a second, had wanted to believe them, fall into those sore wasted arms) against flesh as he tore at familiar bones with tears in his eyes.

"Jesus Tar', you should see this one. They've all got that fucking red hair," A frosting-slick fingertip rimmed the top of an empty wineglass thoughtfully. "Which looked stunning on you, Tar', blonde really makes you look too old. But one of these girls, god, I can barely keep track of them anymore, but it's like, Rent-on! Are you still eighteen?! Hello! The last thing he needs is another junkie holding his hand, right? You'd think he'd learn a thing or two eventua--Tar'? Tara, hey! Where are you going?"

[cutthroat]

<center>it's time, little sister, to peel your faith from the pavement (in long, pristine white lines) and slip your arms into the devoted dress of your bondage. we know the climb is long and the wet brown earth breaks at your touch (if only you were lighter, if only there wasn't so much blood, if only you could use the silver spoon to scoop the weight from the tunnels of your bones) but it's time to crawl from the shallows of your daughter's grave. time to call the dawn to your palms, cradle her heavy wheaten curls and sing to her your grave-rocking lullabys. these arias of grief are the only way you'll teach her to survive. to shine bright, hot furious white long enough for night to come. </center>

[cutthroat]

"A sombrero?"

"What?! No! A cowboy hat!"

"What's the difference?"

"It's all the difference! People will see a sombrero and think 'What the hell is that Mexican doing with all those bullets?!'"