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<center>
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...arty/abel2.jpg
Smart went crazy, truth went trendy
The story got lazy, so I rewrote the ending
Manipulated the entry, more user friendly
Now a city full of pain pills & tattoos defend me
I waver from the dead to the half dead
Grey space, between the fan base & the crackhead
Sunset, sailboat, set course for Hell
A cross & a hammer, but you'll have to get some nails
Take credit for anything, embedded in the edit
As long as you meant it when you said it
</center>
Name:
Abel Lorainne Griselle
Age:
Seventeen
Born January 5th, 1990,
in St. Louis, Missouri
Location(s):
New York City, New York.
Frequents three of the five burroughs.
Family:
Vicki Griselle-Owens; mother
Randy Griselle; father
Austin "Texas" Kusovac; "big brother"
Clifford Roe; mentor
Religion:
Too old to believe in Jesus,
Raised Baptist.
Occupation:
Queen Beat of The Slums, an underground "urban commune."
Part-time DJ at local skating rink.
Criminal record:
Listed as a runaway in St. Louis county.
Demeanor:
Child/Autist.
Vice(s):
Puma sneakers, laxatives & mainstream gangsta rap.
Favorite song:
Felt - Dirty girl
[ Modern/realistic. If you're looking for cybersex, keep scrollin'--absolutely no sexual SL's. I hate talking about playing. I don't wanna plan out a scene/relationship, I want true character relationship development and plot procured through real fucking play. Let's boogie! ]
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ April 22, 2007 12:54 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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".. And I shoulda jumped on the counter, like "YOU DON'T KNOW ME!""
"And I woulda just been like, all like "DAAAMMNN!" That bitch's always tryin' to get in our business, anyway..like really, she doesn't know you, right?"
A few "economy" twelves throbbing behind the seats laid down early Wu Tang tracks for their smoky symphony to collapse over, bent knuckles kissing over the middle armrest as a resin-sticky roach passed between their clouded mouths. The inside of the windows dripped with the dampness of their own breaths, already cloaked in a blackout tint that helped the car disintegrate into night, seamless, hemmed by glinting points of dirty chrome..
Their conversation was not a steady train of thought, and careened from one subject to the next as
Texas kept one claw of fingertips rubbed raw by vinyl clipped to the circle of the steering wheel.
"Yo Abe, what would you do, if, if this car next to us, like, it's tires, the tires grew spikes and slammed into your car and shit? Like old school chariot thunder dome shit."
Abel paused for a moment, hunkered low in the seat with her legs kinked underneath the dashboard. She was six foot one with barely enough meat to sufficiently pad the extreme angles of her joints
, but with lungs toughened by years of smog-sucking and rhyme-spitting, releasing smoke in a steady, controlled stream before she punctuated the exuberant gray bloom with her answer.
"I?d be a lot sadder if we were in the 'pala."
"Oh!"
"Yeah."
"You'd just be all "aww, I miss the impala, fuck this cheap ass tin can piece of shit"?"
"Yeah."
Tex's head bobbed in agreement, eyes cutting over the cheaply designed dashboard of the Honda, stereo cranked too loud to pick up on the faint dings and protests of the engine. While the blunt burned steadily towards the crux of their knuckles, they let the silence die between them, replaced by Rza's gritty, stylized trash beats.
When she finally spoke again, she had to reach out and clip Tex?s shoulder, to ply his attention
away from the white lines whipping away underneath them as traffic opened up in the early hours of morning.
"You know, when you asked if Chinese sounded good again? I was thinkin', remember, we never ate Chinese that one time, remember?"
"I didn't say again."
"Yeah you did, you said 'does Chinese sound good again?' but we never ate Chinese food last week like you're thinking, we drove around and we couldn't find anywhere I wasn't scared to eat at so we had burgers. Bucky's."
"I didn't say again."
"Yeah, ok."
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ February 04, 2007 11:40 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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"...Yeah, but what's her deal? Can she spit, can she dance, can she sing, what the fuck, man? I have to know what we're working with, here. You can't just send me a headshot an' shit, man, we're trying to run a business here."
With Tex gone for the afternoon (he was at Kinkos, printing off ultra-sized stencil bases that wouldn't fit through their printers), it was up to Abe to (wo)man the ship, and instead of the padded swell of stereophonic headphones crushed between her ear and shoulder, she had a silver of a cellphone wedged there, yapping down the now nonexistant wire as she dropped into a desecrated office chair and spun across the refinished hardwood floors of the warehouses' second loft. Bouncing off exposed brick walls and steel support beams as fat as oak-trees errupting from the floor, legs that formed at knotty joints kicking out to avoid a crash landing when the old wheels started to squeal their protest and set the chair on a precarious tip. Everytime she kicked up against gravity, she'd funnel a squeal down the phone's pinprick of a mouthpiece, clutching the chair's arms with knuckles gone white.
The tinny voice on the other end of the receiver buzzed back in her ear, half obliterated by the sticky-sweet blossoms of smoke she was pulling down into her lungs, clearing her head in one bloodthobbing whoosh as her chair rolled to a stop near the center of the room.
"Man, 'cuz, a pretty face ain't enough, though. I've got enough of that kinda talent. You think alll these pretty things don't wanna work with me? and shit, even if they didn't, you think I'm gunna fly some in from Jersey? Jersey?! C'mon, man!"
Abel Griselle, just barely seventeen, paused her negotiations to pull another endless thread of the burnt weed's offering down her throat, listening to the agent wax nonsensical, eye lids dripping under the weight of a thick smoke halo slipping down her skull.
"You get me a mixtape, man. send me a mixtape and I'll call you."
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ February 04, 2007 11:45 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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1990. A young rapper named Tupac Shakur joins The Digital Underground as a roadie and dancer. controversy over 2 Live Crew's 'As Nasty As They Wanna Be' results in a Florida record store owner and Luther Campbell getting arrested. DJ David wins the World Techniques DMC DJ competition. Fresh Prince comes on the air. A young intern named Sean Combs joins the crew of uptown records..
and Abel Lorainne Griselle was brought into the world by two aging hippies turned middle class wage slaves on the west side of st. louis, missouri, to the beat of her father's heart and her mother's infidelities. Torn corkscrew limbed from the womb, she proved "you always have to watch the quiet ones," limping through the hospitals and playgrounds youth with a crooked toothed smile over a cake with multiplying candles for the camera and a beat-up four-track hidden in the back of her closet. And soon the tapes started to pile up, frilly dresses and mary janes replaced with adidas hoodies and puma sneaks, playgrounds and Barbies replaced by squares of cardboard on the street corner and quivering beatboxes.
An emerging scene of scratchy grime-crusted rhythms and flashy smiles collapsing under billows of smoke and hot furs in new york whispered her name when she turned fifteen, packing up the lessons she'd learned on the streets of The Lou and her two tables and waving goodbye to a family that never really realized she was there in the first place. It's in the fourth burrow that she met Texas, and they skewered and rebuilt the concept of Family together. They rewrote the script of the American Dream to include parts of the jailbirds and runaways, addicts and maniacs and visionary hustlers. Building a collective of sound and movement and artforms looked down on as lower around the crumbling foundation of a warehouse in the South Bronx.
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ February 04, 2007 11:51 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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<p align="justify"><blockquote>"the slums of babylon? they're andy warhol's factory put to a bassline. the manson family with a melody. they mix, they spit, they dance, paint, protest, photograph, vocalize, demolish and reconstruct, all in the name of a breakbeat culture that's struggling to survive under the shadow of a multi billion dollar hip hop industry. if you ask them, they never sleep, and there's always a light on somewhere in the ruinous warehouse nestled in the south bronx that the b-family calls home.
and just like warhol's factory churned in frenetic waves around it's superstars, the slums sparkle with their own supernovas: a boy named austin they call texas runs the business side of things, while a clan of young degenerates makes the world move around him. lyricists erdman and fields introduce poetry to a whole new generation while graffitti artists the three mickeys repaint the streets. and preacher, the grow boy, he fuels them all with his sticky sweet cannibus blends while nashville, a one-eyed southern belle controls the flashbulbs and exploits the hip hop couture created by their head fashionista, a closet-phobic post-op tranny named bambi.
and then there's abel, the queen beat, a musical meat cleaver, a midwest native just barely out of her baby teeth and already building herself an empire. and if you ask her what the biggest problem is in hip hop today, she'll tell you.."</blockquote>
"biggest problem in hip hop today?" the melodic maniac's brows humped down the wrinkles of her forehead in confusion, dim grey eyes clouded by smoke making fine crosshairs on the skull of the conservative looking brunette with a tape recorder. "what kinda fucking interview is this?"
she flung visual daggers down the couch at tex, giving the southern boy a rancid look before he sat up, most of the family arranged on the hardwood floor in front of them. as always, preacher's gaze was distant and unfocused, while nashville was too busy reloading a stack of negatives into her polaroid to pay the interviewer any attention. erdman and fields flanked abel with matching masks of apathy while the three mickeys stood behind the couch and picked spraypaint flecks from off their fingernails. only bambi was missing, and abel started to wonder if she knew something she didn't, convinced transvestites were more adept at picking up on the hidden motives of a situation than people with only one gender.
"we just want your perspective on what's wrong with--"
"fuck, you mean besides kanye west? besides fucking mtv and the glamorization of a culture that doesn't fucking exist?" abel's stogie was collecting ash, so she flicked it, and sneered. "fuck you, fuck this shit."
the interviewer, a connecticut native with mousey brown hair and two hundred and thirty six dollar shoes started to loose control of her forced faux smile, eyes shooting from one person to the next. none of them seemed concerned until tex caught the fleeting in headlights expression and flinched.
"abe, wait." tex rose up in mockery of abel's sudden jolt upright, reaching for a wrist. but he was slow by nature, even in his rhymes, and she railroaded over his pleas with a snap of gator-like jaws.
"no, fuck her, she wants to know what's wrong with hip hop? it's bentlys and bling bling and motherfucking gold teeth." she counted off the deadly offenses on one long-fingered hand, lips mutilated by a snarl so white hot that it made nashville raise her camera and squeeze one off. "it's fucking bullshit magazines that try to analyze our lifestyles so that they can break 'em down into something that's easy to fucking market."
"but--"
"nah," the midwestern mess threw her hands up, taking a delicate step over preacher's bent knee and leaving the fumbling interviewer alone with her eight maniacs. "go find someone else to put on the fucking cover of your magazine."
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 18, 2007 01:55 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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"hey whoa, whoa, turn it up, shut the fuck up!"
through a shifting cloud of smoke, texas waved erdman out from in front of the tv, tipping forward with both elbows pointing into his kneecaps as he watched the six o'clock news flicker in apocalyptic flashes across the television screen. abel lifted one disinterested eye from the pages of a rumpled maxim she'd pulled out from underneath the couch, legs wedged underneath the coffee table and torso sprawled across the carpet, folding her nose back into the glossy pages as erdman cautiously goose-stepped over piles of recording equipment, milk crates full of spray paint and industrial sized rolls of paper before collapsing next to austin with his socked feet propped on abel's belly.
"whoa, the doom clock moved! a motherfuckin' doom clock?! shit, a whole two minutes, man." tex's eyes bulged, an elbow finding the soft spots between erdman's ribs and digging there as abe lifted her head again, under the support of a shallow palm, mouth screwing up before she spoke, watching the newsreel glow from the television..
"the what?"
"the doom clock, abe. what a fuckin' idea.."
"the fuck?" the maxim rolled down her chest in a fruitless flap of glossed over pages over erdman's toes as she sat up straight, propelled by both hands now, magazine resting in the hollow of her stomach, pages cramped against erd's feet. as is whenever something bigger than her happened, she had to know who was behind it, murky grey eyes narrowing in on the tv screen, trying to separate the mechanical voice coming from the tv from the static pops of a bad reception. "a doom clock? who moves it? who moves the doom clock?"
"..stephen hawking, apparently."
"huh." abe's interest faded much like the thick reams of smoke that rose towards the ceiling, spilling from the tip of a gutted philly refilled with chronic, magazine collected from between her hipbones and reopened over her face as the boys leaned ever so intently into the electroglow of the television. a sterling-smiled news anchor was delivering the more bad news from the middle east, lips moving along with the roll of the teleprompter without passion.
"wait, what, third world war? is this shit serious?!"
"one arab later.." abel whispered in a sing-song from behind her magazine.
"christ, don't you watch the news, tex?" erdman's ratty face pinched even tighter in disbelief, shoulders jumping as he nursed the swollen roach between his fingertips. a stunning lyricist, erdman was lucky he did not have to rely on his looks. "don't you have any idea what's goin' on in the fuckin' world?"
"abel doesn't allow television in the warehouse."
the queen beat snorted from behind her magazine, eyes roaming over the well-greased body of some luscious starlet as she rubbed the balls of her feet back and forth on the nap of the carpet, bringing clumps of dog hair and weed stems to the surface in neat little balls.
"that shit is poison, tex."
"shit, abe. i watch the news twice a day, every day. six am and ten pm."
"yeah, see tex, erd watches all kind of tv and just look at that motherfucker."
"fuck you, abe."
"fuck your tv, erdman."
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"abe?"
fields found her draped in a rattlesnake coil in the corner of an overstuffed couch, sugar on milk white skin cracking the camoflauge of black jeans and wifebeater in the blackout dark of her bedroom. she squinted one grey eye at him as he leaned in the doorway, silhouetted in the splash of sunlight that leaked around his shoulders and skimmed past narrow ribs.
"abel."
he managed to navigate the maze of milkcrates without snapping an ankle, cracking the seal of her headphones with a curious fist, leaning in to decipher the muffled mating of sugary vocals over upbeat guitar-laced beats pumping from the stereo
"aw, are you serious? you can't listen to this shit."
"why not?" the midwest's daughter slit her eyes and cranked her spine up straight, jacknifing one knee to her chest while the coal-skinned poet settled into the darkness with a breath of thick grey smoke.
"oh fuck, c'mon, the bandaid!? you're kidding."
"it's so catchy, though. listen." abel propped the side of her skull against his own, twisting the shell of the headphones earpiece towards his ear. he slipped away after half a chorus, lips wrinkled in mock approval.
"soo.." she stretched her word along the long spiral of smoke that spewed from her lips, stretching one long arm up over her head, to clutch along the spine of the couch. "is everyone really pissed?"
"nah, they understand." fields lifted two fingers, scratching a box into the darkness in front of him. "she was a total square."
"fuck." she let the silence swirl around them in the guise of heavy bouquets of smoke, nervously working the chipped edge of her thumbnail between the crooked string of her teeth. "what was i supposed to tell her? i mean, it was just a question. and i could've gave her a real answer."
"just forget it."
"i could've said something.." but who wanted to hear the answers from white girl from missouri? who could possibly believe the distented gospel breaking from the mouth of an underaged prophet from the slums of a white collar town?
"abe."
"i could've said something that changed the world."
"oh, jesus."
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<center>
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...abelseleep.jpg
This is the point
from which I could never return
And if I back down now
Then forever I
Burn
This is the point
From which I could never retreat
Cause if I turn back now there can never be peace
This is
the point from which I will die and succeed
Living the
struggle, I know I'm alive when I bleed
From now on
It can never be the same as before
Cause the place I'm from
Doesn't exist anymore</center>
<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ April 18, 2007 10:19 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>
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she filed them in uniform rows on the sludge-pitted asphalt, the little pills that allowed her an appetite she refused, that helped her scrape the heavy burden from her bones in a pathetic attempt to become weightless. an airborne thing that could abandon this weary world in a flap of arms turned to angel wings. but for now, the crust of the city felt like six feet under and the sugar-skinned daughter squeezed the minimal slabs of fat on both thighs and propped herself back on a great rusty wheel. great titans of industry crumbling all around them, maturing gracefully into steel-splintered ruins of a working class society hurtling towards extinction.
"hey mickey, have you ever chewed one of these?" abel eclipsed one flat stone gray eyeball with one of the laxatives, slicing her depth perception in half as she shrunk into the shadows of her well-worn hoody.
"nah love," rattling metal cans in his fist spit synthetic rainbow colors across the rusting flank of the train car, "can't say i 'ave. r'mind me to try it sometime?"
"definitely." she rolled the pill between bonesharp fingertips, eventually rolling it into her palm and past her teeth. "it's something i'd like to see again."
with a smog-smeared whisper of wind, silence razored between them, the unconvincing prophet's eyes rolling closed as she listened to the hiss and tinny rattlesnake shake, a graffiti beat that rendered itself in two artforms. the three hooded artists continued to splash paint down the belly of the locomotive, forming a loose chain that a expertly crafted blunt traveled through like a transmission through the wires..
from the other side of the traincar, another mickey spoke.
"you were pretty fucking drunk last night, abe. you need to slow down on that shit." because when abe got drunk, she got sloppy, careless, working her mouth in a deafening machinegun clatter of crooked teeth and uncomfortable truths that should've been safely guarded. blind to the boys who's hearts chimed in a casino fevered pitch and eyes rolled to cherry, cherry, cherry, the usually reserved prophet skewered to a tune of jackpot jailbait when the gin seduced her.
from behind a selfspit scarf of smoke, abel frowned deep.
"i was fine."
"fine?" two mickeys chorused in disbelief.
at four am, she hurricaned into the house clutching one overpriced sneaker and clawing at the elaborate buttonfly of her pants, pinballing from one sleepy supernova's bedroom to the next in a gin and tonic slurry that lit up her eyes and made her hands electric. eventually, after an argument over fashion verses function with a sleepy-eyed jamaican with a headful of fat curlers (the slight, anemic mc screaming and gesturing wildly at the stubborn fit of her jeans), she'd dropped into a fitful, liquor lacquered sleep curled in a fetal twist around the foundation of the toilet.
"you're only fucking seventeen, abel. and it's not like you really have, you know, room for the liquor to move around in, i mean look at yo--"
"you sound like my father."
"w' jus' want you t' be safe, love."
"both of you. if i wanted to be safe, i would've stayed in st. louis."
the foreign-tongued mickey threw a dry, cultured laugh into the wind, replacing the sound of their voices with the serpentine hisssss of paint spit on rusting steel.
-
the weary wooden skeleton of his futon groaned underneath her, and not to be outdone, the waifish gin baby moaned in repose, slipping a palm over the bony, skeletal crest of her hipbone, body shaped in not-so-gentle waves of skin falling straight over bone without an ounce of fat to cushion the blows. clifford let a blunt spark and smolder between his knuckles while his broad shoulders in front of the window broke the never ending flow of neon from the streets, draping cloud-eyed attentions over the filthfouled gutter gulches below. you were never alone in this neighborhood. there was always a bloodthirsty puerto rican whacked out on pcp behind that rusty dumpster, or a transgendered hooker belting out invitations to a night you'd never forget, and you had to keep moving, fast, agile, scalpel-footed, because idle targets got their sneakers pissed on by bums. together, if only for tonight, they were four fists and two mouths spitting smoke whips that told stories of cut throat street beginnings and sprawling violet-dotted meadows where their memories weren't bleached white by trauma or the piss-hot bitterness that weakened their knees and burned up their stomachs and hearts to nothing but ash in hollow rib cages.
"your hips hurtin'?"
"they do that.. when it's wet out.." she hoisted eyes the color of a rolling thunderstorm from the moon-splashed shadow of his silhouette, watching smoke writhe from his lips only to be vacuumed through his nostrils in a clean french inhale. clifford roe was the closest thing abel ever had to a boyfriend, their sputtering tornado affair severed by his higher morals when she waggled her tender tongue and flashed a pair of under aged breasts. she whispered "go, please, make me something," into the soft, earthen brown shell of his ear and they danced the devil's lustful waltz for months, decked out in teasing silks and brutal battlescars, eventually collapsing at the impasse of her own insecurities. so now he played the role of mentor from the shadows, bending the city's smog atmosphere to his will, just to build a smile on her face, just because he was good at it, his cheap one room apartment her home away from home away from home.
"it's not even rainin', boo."
abel smiled flatly at the twenty eight year old mc, arms thrown out to her sides like a cretin christ and the weight of a thousand black lashes coaxing her eyes to sleepy gashes arranged underneath a molten chocolate splash of curls. seventeen years ago, deep in her mother's womb, nature's revenge had raged for her mother's ugly deceptions, corkscrewing the lily-white limbs of a fetal prophet as she swam through the sphere of her mother's belly. it was god's halfhearted attempt at a super slow motion abortion that would've climaxed in another cripple's suicide, a double barrel shotgun blast, the spitting snake rattle of a hundred pills cavorting in the bubble of an empty belly. when abel tumbled from the crux of her mother's sex crooked feet first, she sacrificed the first few years of her life to a fog anesthesia and the calming swirl of hospital decor, to endless surgeries that relaid the precious foundation of muscle on bone, each one slowly untwisting bright red bindings and snipping loose the knotted tendons that pulled her feet almost completely backwards.
"yet." the midwest's most emaciated daughter crooned from iron lungs in bedroom tones, an action she mimed from the silver screen drive in movies of her youth. she didn't have any experience otherwise. just another scrap of wilted flesh, sheltered and saucer-eyed. clifford only smirked, turning to watch the wasting break beat baby turn onto her side with a flinch that ground the crooked lines of teeth together in a clenched jawbone.
she was so painfully thin that the scars seemed to sit on right on bone, traveling in thick serpentine ropes from her ankle, where they splintered off into dizzying tributaries at the joint of foot meeting leg, where the surgeons reworked the intricate bones in a beautiful design jigsaw, to the tip-top of her pelvis. her trophies. sixteen surgeries before she blew out seven candles on a chocolate cake, first steps staggered at a belated three years old. she rebuked their claims that she'd never walk without a crutch, throwing off plastic corrective braces and the help of walkers and canes to create her own unique gallop, a means to escape a sheltered childhood, parents exhausted by too much responsibility too soon, a suffocating city, stagnant cesspool fairytales ..
"do you have any more chocolate bars?"
"nah," (but he wished he did, frustrated at another missed chance to feed her something, even if her rotten sweet teeth allowed nothing but chocolate and licorice and toffee-swirled pecan clusters to fall into an eternally empty belly.)
"then we're gunna need some more oxycodone .."
.. so it was no wonder that she'd been running ever since.
