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<center>There were some children that were never meant to be children,
Especially when their aunts were such a bore
The boy learned how to put band-aids all over his own sores
They never let him go out play: the world was a vacuum
So he'd smuggle their Lucky Strikes into his bedroom
He'd make snow angels on the vomit-green carpet
There was an antique desk in Aunt Clara's closet
It smelled of moth balls, but he hadn't a choice
They homeschooled him in the kitchen for years
Of the magic of Byron, Yeats and Joyce
Naturally they spared him the dark cirrus clouds of the beats
And kept his mind tame with the lullabies of Keats
Not so long after his voice broke they knew it was time
To send the ripe boy headfirst out on his way
They scored him a bus ride to the claws of New York
And watched him tread into the dark
He knew his aunts wouldn't live forever
So he'd have to work fast and hard to make his mark.</center>
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<center>there was once a boy that grew up with dirt in his hair,
that wrote sonnets, and couplets, and plays
when traffic was stilled all the city people stared,
"his face is stuck in the sky," they'd say
his cigarette was at a slow burn when he made a wrong turn
and collided with a 16th street meretrix
she was tumbling down and willing to learn
the tricks of an age-old religion
his name was christian, and he recruited her fast
between sheets, beneath nails and more
there was never a tale with such a crass cast
than of the patchwork prince and his whore.
</center>
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Trickling down a few clumsy steps to the underground Rite Aid, with his hand groping the downward slope of rail, he jabbed a shoulder into the door, triggering the bird-chirp of the bell. His cigarette was still cradled in the stencil of his mouth, sending smoke signals to the front-end employee who was a teenage girl with quiet freckles and strawberry-red hair.
Mouse-modest, she coyly carved a path around the register, abandoning her glossy tabloid pages.
"Sir," she pleaded.
Either he didn't hear her, or he simply wasn't listening, because he kept blindly working toward the long line of coolers at the corner of the renovated, white-bright store. It was mid-winter; he wore a black, woolen peacoat, and a beanie. Morally, none of these things belonged to him, but he did acquire them some way or another.
It wasn't until she handcuffed his arm with her lilypad fingers that he paused and glanced down at her.
"Sir, you can't smoke in here."
Without reply, his jaw came undone in an acknowledging gape. His disposition seemed so deserted and full of cobwebs when he handed her his cigarette, and turned his back to her. She stared down at it, blinking skeptically, before she rushed to the glass door and tossed it outside onto the snow-garish pavement.
Meanwhile, he stalked down the aisle, his sneaker soles reverberating like some thriller-slow, native drumbeat. He paused to slice aside one door, temporarily mesmorized by the hum of the cool electric. Clutching a bottle of springwater in hand, he blurred past endcaps and aisles compact with Advil and Excedrin, and a thousand other brands. The pharmacy wasn't at all as quiet as the front of the store. The sirens of registers, banter, phonecalls, and frantic pharmacist drew him in. It was alive.
There were briefcase-bearing folk cramped in seats, waiting for overdue prescriptions, flipping through newspaper headlines, complaining on their cell phones. There was a mousy-haired woman in leggings and a bomber jacket arguing with a technician about her insurance.
"What do you mean they aren't covering it? Well, why don't you call them?-- It's six o'clock, they shouldn't be closed!"
Her son was wearing a ski-cap, and a puffy Giants jacket. He kneeled on the floor beside her, swerving his toy car all over the floor, and over people's shoes. The man behind her and stared at the tiretracks on his loafers. His mother whipped a glimpse between the man, and her son. The second was more severe.
"Timothy Sweeney, stop it! I'm sorry, sir---stop that right now, or I'm not going to let you have McDonald's tonight."
The poet stared at the boy watery-eyed in a spell. The boy took little notice of the scolding, and kept up vrooming; his car exploded against the bottom of the counter, and magically realigned again! He hardly noticed the blond-haired boy who held his plastic bottle so tight that he was indenting it.
Standing up, Timothy toddled away from his mother, and made a beeline into the toy aisle, which was accompanied with diapers and q-tips. He scraped past Christian and took a seat, emptying the shelves of a camoflauged toy tank, and a package of plastic soldiers. He managed to rip it open, and spilled the soldiers onto the floor, as the paralyzed poet finally found it with himself to shuffle forward. When he spilled onto his knees next to the boy, he looked spooked.
But the boy shoved his ex-car at him: he was the war tank now.
"You're this one," he asserted.
Setting down the bottle of water, he watched the boy improvise for a moment. He sped the war tank over the laminated floor, and then glanced up at his slack playing partner. "C'mon, you gotta make him run over all the soldiers!"
Christian did as told, and he coaxed the tires to run over a heap of plastic army men.
"Ohhhhnooo, they got me Jim! They got me!" Christian quipped in an alternate, whimpering voice.
"They're gonna getcha again," the boy nudged the nose of the war tank violently against the soldiers. He grabbed a fistful and threw them up in the air only to come back down in a rainfall for the dramatic effect. "Bssshhh, booooooomsshhhh."
Plucking one of the soldiers, and printing the cherry-red Convertible back on the floor, Christian made him scurry away for his life. But Timothy stalked the getaway soldier with his predatory war tank. Christian twitched his shoulder and pretended to make the plastic man shoot bullets. After all, he was carrying a gun. "Bangbangbangbang."
"Ohhh nooooos!" Timothy cried, and wagged the war tank in midair. "It exploded! Booom! Shhhhhh! Boooshhh!"
"Timothy! Did you open those?!" His mother clapped over to the ground zero, her ponytail wagging.
"Yeah, can I have th---"
She grabbed him by the arm, and jerked him up to a stand. She considered Christian who seemed still rather intrigued by the imaginary firework explosions rioting from the war tank. He offered up the car, however, to the little boy, who flexed his fingers around it, trying to worm out of his mother's arms.
" 'Still playing with cars, are you?" She asked.
"I wasn't allowed to when I was a kid," he offered in a sandpaper mumble. In fact, he had never played with any toys. Children had always bewitched him, because he didn't remember what it was like being that bite-sized.
"Well, that's a shame." Her attention span snapped to the boy again. "Timothy, we're going."
"But maaaaaa---"
Halfway down the aisle, the wincing boy managed to offer a chubby-fingered little salute.
"Byeeee sir! Bye!"
"Bye, kid."
-
The brutality of a brittle winter was waning into the prelude of spring; there was longer-thriving, sleepy sunshine and he only needed to wear long sleeves under his striped polo shirt to survive. When he breathed, there were still spirals of frost billowing, but only when the moon was high and ecstatic in the sky. It was a Wednesday evening, so the gaudy slab of uptown wasn't as glossy as usual. The streets were empty save for the stab of high heels and styrofoam doggy baskets clicking dotted lines to mid-life crisis cars from upscale restaurants. Christian was on the prowl, dressed with his normal gear: cigarette, notebook nailed to his hip.
He often window-shopped without the intention of shopping. So it was no wonder when he scrolled past a long sheet of window to a cafe, and became distracted by the single spotlight and the mousy girl onstage. She had her own crowd. No one seemed to notice him when he smoothed into the rear of the cafe, save for the occasional throw of a glance. He sliced down into a small circular table, and ironed his notebook out onto it, squinting his cigarette out into the belly of a tin-dusky tray.
The girl was pouring with dramatic swells of pauses, aborted by the dark pour of her voice over the microphone. Her hair came in burnt-sienna, rippled rainfall, and it nearly swallowed her face. She had a piece of paper splayed out on her thigh, that she rarely considered.
"I feel these chains begin to rust
I am the peanut butter
And you are the jelly
Together, we're a sandwich
That has no crust.
I prefer it that way
My heart sings
When I think of the melody
You make with the cards
In your bicycle spokes
As you ride away.
I think about the time between
That first sip of water
And that last bite of lunch
When we talked so little
About what meant so much
To two people
Who didn't want to be seen.
Together."
She bowed her head with a last, melodramatic eerie underline on her last syllables. Dismounting the stool, the crowd halfheartedly pattered their fingers together in a resonating applause that soon fell into a haunting hush. Christian reluctantly clapped, even though he had no idea what to make of her poetry. The girl in front of him with a long earth-tone dress fluttering around boots that were probably knee-length, and bobbed blonde hair tipped a curious glance over her shoulder. The second she turned back around, something clicked, and she did a double-take. He professionally pretended not to notice.
"Hey," she whispered, her cinnamon-sticky eyes searching out his attention. "Is that your notebook?"
His gaze shifted from the gangly guy onstage, tapping the microphone to her.
"Yes." He suddenly seemed uneasy.
"You write poetry?"
"Well, yeah---"
"You should share!" She exclaimed with an animated exclamation point punctuating her tone. She was started to draw glances, and he started to shrink into his own skin, melting down the seat.
"No--I--uh---"
"You should share," another girl chimed; her boyfriend was wreathing his shoulder, and he nodded adamantly.
"There's no need to be shy around us," the bald guy to the left of him reassured, taking another hit of his cigarillo.
"Go ahead! Don't be shy."
Eventually, he staggered dumbly from his stool, clenching his notebook to his heart, and crushing his pack of cigarettes in the width of his sweaty palm. There was a grateful riot of applause before it went desert-dry. The air was stifling and at a dead-still. With a cheesy spotlight glaring down on him, Christian fumbled with his cigarettes. He lit one before he started anything. He used the sole of his boot to scrape away the stool, as he found that to be too clich? and pretentious.
He offered a gunshot greeting mumble into the microphone. He had to strain his neck far:
"Hey."
The guy with the camouflauge pants that had been previously occupying the stage strangled the microphone stand and adjusted it to Christian's height.
"Thanks," his cigarette wagged around his wording.
Clogging his pocket with his pack of cigarettes, he tacked the fat spine of his decrepit notebook in the span of his palm, and used his forefinger like a baton---pinpointing a random page. Clearing the cobwebs from his throat, he caught the cigarette in the vee of his fingers, and found his place with an earthquaking finger.
His voice was just as shaky as his nerves, he took another drag before the words began to creak and twist around his smoke. With Christian, there were no swollen pauses, no keen emphasis on any particular words, it was all autumn-dry and flat:
"Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway
to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,
are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue
but meant for music?
Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?
Perhaps both.
Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,
knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:
so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word
in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down
in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away,
disgusted, and can't,
it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors
spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly
had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding
keeps on translating:
'Life after life after life goes by
without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.' "
He didn't linger long after. His pulse thrummed bongo-beats in his eardrums, and he clung adhesively to the table for one more performance before he darted out the door. It wasn't until he was cramped between the brick building vice of an alleyway, ducking beneath jangly fire escapes that he noted that there was another drumroll of steps behind him. Staring down at the stretch of shadow over the two-toned cobblestone, he swung a mute glance over the shelf of his shoulder. The balding man with the wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suit was jogging enthusiastically to catch up.
Once he stenciled shoulder-to-shoulder, his palm took a spreadsheet over his heaving chest.
"I've been calling after you for the past five blocks!"
The other was considerably shorter than Christian, five-foot-eight if he was lucky, with angular features and a greasy sheen of sweat collecting beneath his thick glasses.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't hear you, I guess," throwing his thousandth cigarette to the pavement, he mindlessly dismantled it under the spikes of his boot. "So uh..."
"Why was I following you?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I really liked your poem."
"Thanks, then."
"Can I buy you a drink?"
For a long moment the blond-haired boy soaked him in with crescent-narrowed eyes. The suspicion was beginning to rib his detached expression.
"No, no. Not like that." The man held up both hands in a submissive defense. "I'm Brent Hamilton. I'm a writer, too. More of a novelist."
"Oh," Christian semi-snickered, and took his hand, offering a firm shake. "Christian."
"Here, we'll take my car. It's getting cold out. I'm parked right down here."
The Village Pub had poor business. There were a trio of strung-out frat boys bending over a pool table under a vague lamp in a far corner, a fifty-something hooker murmuring to herself with smeared lipstick at the distant pocket of the bar, and the two writers were settled somewhere in the middle. Christian wanted water, Brent nursed a screwdriver.
"Where do you live, Chris? Can I call you that for short?" Brent had shed his blazer, and had his sleeves peeled up to his elbows now, his back giving 'way to a vulture hunch. He called it his 'drinking pose' and gave Christian the bitter 4-11 on his divorce; the bitch was taking the kids.
"No, it's Christian. And I live everywhere. I have no set mattress. I'd be a gypsy if I weren't addicted to this city."
Brent nodded in acknowledgment, his eyes temporarily zooming out of focus on the register beyond the bar.
"So do you just write poetry?"
"No, I wrote a book too."
"I'd love to read it."
Christian scrubbed his fingernails at the nape of his neck before he nudged his thick notebook over. "It's in there."
"Handwritten?" Brent piped incredulously.
"Yeah. 'Ain't got a typewriter, but I'm gonna get one."
Christian concentrated on the white-powdered, crinkled face of the harlot. He dubbed her a 'saggy flower' in his imagination, and solemnly mocked her every move. Whenever her knuckles twitched cigarette ash into a nearby tray, his did as well, whenever she took a sip of her beer, he took a sip of his water. Whenever she shifted, he did too. Brent didn't notice. He was too busy ravaging the notebook, his magnified eyes swarming over the first few paragraphs.
The writing was unique for the modern-age. It was very smug and straightforward, but it was entwined with a sort of dysfunctional mysticism that startled him. The narrator was selfish, he was detached, and intriguing. His thought process came in simple words and curiously open-ended questions. It was so blunt that it left Brett stirring and disturbed.
Neither of them had noticed how much time elapsed until the whore left the bar, and Christian had no source of entertainment. The boys with the pool sticks had left. He hadn't noticed that.
" 'You still reading?"
Brent dragged his stare away, openmouthed. "Yeah, Christian---you wrote this? The style, it's brilliant---his thoughts, his world, his--he's a monster."
"Yeah, he's pretty fucked-up."
"Listen, can I take this home with me? I promise to give it back to you tomorrow. I get off the Metro at four, if I give you my address, can you meet me there at six-thirty?"
Christian casually nodded. "Sure, okay."
After borrowing a Sharpie from the 'tender, there was a soggy bar napkin ripped and maimed with a patchwork promise of an address. That night, Brent left with his black notebook, and fumbled through the streets, his eyes glued on the inked script (which came in different colors of bruise; when one pen ran out, it was replaced with blue, then black, then blue again) and the prince sought out something interesting to fill the margins of his consciousness. Maybe he'd make paper cranes and string them along the bridge. Or maybe he'd wander through the streets looking for people's leftover letters. There were always little love notes hibernating in the grooves of the sidewalk.
At six-thirty sharp (because he already missed his bloodline, his sibling, his notebook) he arrived at the address. It was a split condo, with two doorbells. He rustled up the stoop and buzzed for 18. A high-pitched siren of a woman answered the intercom.
"Hello."
"That's not a question, that's an answer." But he forgot to indent the button to tell her so.
"Hello?..." She was growing increasingly annoyed.
"Oh." Stabbing the gray button, he shuffled forward. "Is Brent there?"
"No Brent lives here."
"Brent Hamilton? Are you sure? Number 18, Spruce Street."
"Are you sure? He has my book, he said that he lived here, he---"
"Well, someone dicked you over son. Wrong address."
It was like being hung up on, he could hear the dial tone in the silence, riding the tail of her brusque dismissal. For a moment, he didn't know what to make of what just happened. He let his chin falter, and he creased the heel of his palm into his temple. He struggled to concentrate, and make sense of things. He checked the number one more time, and even buzzed number seventeen, just in case. Although more polite and polished, the man downstairs had no knowledge of a Brent Hamilton, either.
By the time his footsteps stuttered on the corner of the street, he pricked the sign pole with his shoulder and scrutinized the address until he swore his eyes were going to bleed. The ink was still very well intact, there was no running together or Rorschach inkblots. Wild-eyed, he found his way back to Lauren's house, and slept until Wednesday.
For the next several weeks he kept turning up at the cafe with a sullen puncture-mark of hope glimmering in his heart. He'd ask about Brent, but no one knew where he had gone. He'd loiter for hours after the joint closed. Six weeks later, he relented, and bought a new notebook. It was red, and the first several pages were composed of recycled napkins, paper towels and the vertebrae of receipts.
Nearly a year later, stepping on the burnt notches of November, he had long forgotten the incident and the stranger that still had his notebook. Christian imagined it sitting in his top drawer, peacefully, like some sort of bedtime fairytale or perhaps a private journal. Brent would open it every now and again, he envisaged, over a cup of coffee or tea, ringing the pages with the diluted brown perspiration.
He had been warming himself up in a Borders for hours. He scanned through graphic novels though they couldn't hold his interest, and Bukowski poems. His fingers took dizzy stripes over almost every spine. The college girls sprinkled in the aisles watched him fall to his haunches to read a paragraph or two before hanging up his book. He visited nearly every section before he stumbled on the new release shelf just a few feet away from the front register.
Memorizing writer's names, and interesting titles, his mind caught on one name in particular, and wrapped itself around it. At first, he couldn't place it. Brent, Brent Hamilton. By the time he was unfolding the book in his hands, he was already shaking.
The girl at the front register cracked her gum, and sang to him sweetly.
"That book is really good. You should get it. It's really one of the best things I've read in years---well, that I've ever read."
She was rocked back in a shockwave when he distractedly shoved the book back in place and stormed past her to the automatic split of doors. She shrugged at her friend, who had been pretending to stack Andy Warhol's published diary for the past five minutes.
"At least you tried, Val."
"Yeah, I guess."
He wore a glossy smile to accompany his newly-acquired fame on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. He was being hailed as a genius, his book was already being called a potential classic, and his wife was on her hands-and-knees begging for him back. For once, he got to kick dirt in her face, and count his money in front of her. But that didn't mean that his ego was so inflated that he couldn't go back and visit the place that sparked his own creative genius (or rather, a twenty-year-old bum's). There, his old bohemian friends fawned over him, and clapped their hands on his cheeks.
They canceled the readings just so that the writers could ambush him with questions. He answered them all with a well-timed stride, patient, and grinning something clever. Though Christian always took a backseat in his mind, tonight, he hadn't a worry in the world. That was until, a concerned guy prodded a finger toward the window.
"Oh Jesus, someone's fucking up someone's car."
"Shit, that's Brent's car!" And it was quite a toll for front-row parking.
The windshield glass exploded, dripping its raw, sharded teeth onto the streets from the weight of the baseball bat. The roof of the car was caving in, not because Christian was standing on it, but because he dented the metal so much that the ceiling was officially inverted. He hopped off the car, with his face lava-red and mangled in disgust. He snarled and gritted his teeth when he dissected the headlights and took out every single window in a meticulous perimeter-merry-go-round.
There was a larger audience gathering now than there had been at his first and only poetry reading. Though there were feminine squeals to call the cops, everyone was too paralyzed to budge. It finally took two levelheaded construction workers that had just clocked out to try and contain the madman.
Christian warded them away with his bat, and threatened them with a sickeningly calm, raspy tone: "Go away, this is not your business."
"Hey man, just put down the bat. You don't want to go to jail."
"No," he shook his head, his jaw jutting.
"People that plagiarize go to jail. Not me. I'm not going to jail."
Brent inched outside, and watched the mess, crammed between two gaping girls. They were visually begging him for a reaction---for anything. But he just stared, with his fingers steepled to his nose in mock-prayer. He knew he deserved it.
(Notes: First poem written by ...Ethan. Second written by Denise Levertov.)
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<center>Every day on her way to her dreary Catholic school
Elisa Lynn saw a boy sucking on a cigarette
He sat on the concrete, smoke coming in patterns and spools
She couldn't wait until they finally met
It was an October afternoon when Fate kissed the balding trees
He helped her pick up her papers that fell
He had a locked mouth but she had the rusty key
She easily got sucked into his spell
They pissed off Jesus by smashing bottles and sneaking out
Whenever she tried to kiss him he shrank back
Despite the fact that he was timid, she was never riddled with doubt
She spoonfed days to her diary that her mother often hijacked
Ashley was driving downtown and they were in the backseat
He held her hand, but she convinced it to sneak under her skirt
His face lamped up bright red because he was so mouse-meek
It was that moment when she decided she loved him.
That night they parted with a kiss sick with unease
The very next morning rumor had it that New York called
Her first love had inched away into dirty alleys
When she became a nun her friends stared blankly; shocked and appalled</center>
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<center>i'll never hold you back
and i won't force my will
i will no longer do the devil's wishes
something i read on a dollar bill
a paper tiger can't tell you where he stands
we'll go back tonight the way that we came
i'm not dumb, 'just want to hold your hand
so alright
where we want to be
and alright
what that we could be
we could go kick down some doors together
stay out til morning sharp as knives
the new war will get you it will not protect you
but i will be there with you when turn out the light
said i will be there with you when you turn out the light
i will be there with you when you turn out the light
-- spoon.</center>
-
The ferocity of summer soon dwindled to cyclones of skittering autumn leaves and the bite of winter?s prelude. For three months, Christian washed the streets with his purity, carving left and rights and shop corners, upnodding at his acquaintances with the stale lips and Revlon nails. He took the same route after noon when Sal greased up a paper plate with two slices of pizza like clockwork. He?d stand on Alice Goodridge?s stoop and let his knuckles flutter at her door. The noise would amplify and reverberate with desperation until after five minutes his knuckles would crack with tired tallymarks.
It?d been three months since he had seen her. She hadn?t been to work, but he figured that she was just on a vacation, or there was some miscommunication. Perhaps, she had been busy and just couldn?t track Christian down. But didn?t she know that he ate pizza at noon, and Solomon Stills fed him tea --- lukewarm, tepid, not cold or hot, of course---at six-thirty with a raisin bagel? Didn?t she know that he got out of work at six am? And surely she couldn?t miss him in his navy blue jumpsuit!
It wasn?t until early November that the landlord by chance came shuffling by in a woolen gray coat and one hell of an angry disease mangling his face.
?Stop knocking.?
Christian threw down his cigarette indignantly, his blue knuckles skating along his empty denim beltloops.
?She doesn?t live there anymore, kid. She moved three months ago. Now, knock it off. You keep upsetting the neighbors.?
He stood there for a moment, reeling as the man shook his head and barreled on by, his jawline disconnecting. He scrambled down the stoop and jogged to catch up with the ex-landlord. Once he caught up with him, he spun him by the shoulder and cracked him in the jaw and gut before he sprinted off the sidewalk; grating his jaw and sobbing heavily without tears.
<font color="#f22735" size="1">[ December 15, 2005 01:46 AM: Message edited by: methadrone ]</font>
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With chalky hands all dressed in callous and mismatching shades of tan and brown, the man sat scrunched on the corner of 8Th Street on a fold-out metal chair. The guitar was belting out cheap Christmas-pop jingles, because just across the street he was competing with a Salvation Army Santa Claus in a padded fat suit for attention. There was exactly thirty-three cents lining the bottom of his plastic nuclear-orange Halloween bucket; the streets weren?t rich with holiday spirit this year. His dingy fingernails pedaled exuberantly across the coppery acoustic strings when a young man passed him by. His dark, mucus-filled eyes strapped onto white skin and an overgrown mop of blond hair.
?Boy,? he whistled, his chest shaking with a jolly chuckle. ?You? best bet is to put on a coat, you?re gonna catch an pneumonia out here in this shit.?
Christian brushed to a stop to consider him, his knuckles popping like painted brass around his thick notebook. In a t-shirt splattered with an array of stains and drooping jeans he shifted, and he slowly choked down one knot of a swallow judging by the beaded rope of his adam?s apple.
?Holly Jolly Christmas? reluctantly spiraled out into a wrenching sprawl of silence. The man noted the crazy look in his eye, but was too paralyzed to spit a reply. People blurred by. But the granite clouds in the sky were surely at a stand-still and traffic had never been so timid in terms of volume. There was a reaper-rip in time, and they both understood each other for that pin-needle buzz of wordlessness. Christian handed him his notebook, and the man, with his leathery jaw unhinged accepted it like it was a child. He ditched the guitar to prop against his knee, and cradled it to his heart as though he were covering a bullet hole.
Christian ceased the idling and took a rusty pivot on his sneaker heel and encroached on the street. By the time he hit the curb the man fell from his startled spell and instinctively bolted to his feet, the guitar taking a hollow nosedive to the pavement. The people in pea coats and square shopping bags spared him a few glances ? maybe because of the commotion, or maybe because he missed the social queue that he should still be playing.
As though he was lucid dreaming he could feel the drop of the sneaker sole in the street in sync with his own heartbeat. He watched as the pale-haired kid brawled with the traffic like some solitary angel. He could only shelter his vision with the crunching angle of his forearm when the chorus broke: tires squealing, horns blaring, and the sickening, individual crack against a windshield.
He still clutched the notebook like a child.
-
The olive-black and silver bouncing ball made its mark like a metallic jack, and then dribbled down the hall, drooling out into a zigzagged line past the parted door. A mousy pitter-patter of patent leather footsteps followed it. Other than the uniform bells of the heart monitor, his hospital room was quiet. The air was still; as were his fingers and eyelids until the ball sounded again.
This time the bounce was more ferocious, and the quirky thunder of feet behind it was gaining. It was enough to make the veins in his lids ripple, and the gray iris surfaced, his pupils pooling. He worked himself into a sloppy folded sit, his kneecaps flexing beneath the firm linen. He felt like some inhuman experiment. There were cables and wires everywhere pricking his veins and nestling his temples. He could feel the oozing export of his blood, but as far as pain?there was none.
Zooming in on the door, he listened for the devious scrawl of the ball again. Instead, he was greeted with a glimpse at the little girl. She stood in the doorway?miniature and darling. She had frizzy red hair half-supported by a beret and thick freckles splattered all across her nose and cheeks (although there was a significant amount more on her left one). She had the oversized ball tucked under the wing of her arm, which was garnished in a puffy tea-cup sleeve, her dress spraying in floral foam to her knees. She flashed him a toothy white smile.
?May I come in?? She had the voice of a morning canary pecking away at sugar tarts and candy canes.
Christian blankly nodded, and began to ease from his tense pose, drifting off into prone. It was the same little girl that used to play across the street from his home when he was a child. He used to stare at her longingly from the window sill; neglecting his violin for the sake of reverie. She would sometimes capture his stares and would flail her pink arm at him to wildly gesture for him to come out and play. His aunts would shed their sharp-tongued shadows, and he?d gloomily withdraw. He swore she was his first love. He had watched her break her leg when she was intimidated by a bird on a wiry tree branch, and had watched her outgrow her bows in favor for ponytails and pasty turtlenecks.
She paused beside his bed and daintily squatted down to retrieve the ball before it slid beneath.
?Do you want to play, or are you too sick??
?I wanted to catch you when you broke your leg,? he said in a gulp of spare breath. His throat felt like it was cotton lit with bonfires and his voice was all rusty bicycle chains.
?What are you talking about, silly? You weren?t there! ?Just behind that stupid window of yours!? She fastened a spare hand onto her hip and threw out her tongue at him. ?I?m just kidding. My mom said you weren?t allowed to come out and play because you were sick.?
?Your mother fucking lied.?
?Don?t cuss! Dirty mouth!?
?She lied. I was never, ever sick. Never had a cold, or the flu, or chicken pox, I never had none of it.? As he spoke, he slipped a hand beneath his outer thigh and forced his feet overboard. He pinched and jerked at his mechanical ribbons until his arm bled, and his nostrils were free. ? ?Not a robot,? he murmured in a cheap whisper.
?We?re going to play catch. Boys like to play kickball, but I don?t like that much,? she informed him, edging away from the bed to provide enough capacity for him to operate.
He swore his knees would creak when he attempted to stand, but he didn?t even get that far. He tumbled forward and before he could take her out like a bowling pin he broke into a thousand, glistening ceramic pieces. The little girl was gone, but there was a sudden, rosy gasp at the doorway.
?Oh dear! He?s fallen! I need a broom!? Alice Goodridge abandoned her designer bag on the floor and rubberbanded from the room to gather a broom and dustpan.
She returned a millisecond later, and her knee joints stabbed into the floor, nicking her nylon stockings. She gathered every piece meticulously with the bristled teeth of the brush into the plastic pan. Upon standing, Alice straightened her London-black dress, and tucked her bombshell-white hair behind a pearl-dotted ear. She spilled the flesh-colored shards back onto the sheets and dragged the flimsy blanket over them. She bulleted an electric glimpse around to make sure that there were no witnesses, and settled the brush and pan aside neatly on the mahogany nightstand. She gathered her purse again, and returned to his side like a loyal mortal magnet, and sifted through her bag for a Kleenex.
By the time he roused again, she was hovering over him, angelic and threatening with a fluorescent hospital bulb halo. Her shoulders shriveled, shrank and trembled with sobs that sounded like they were freebasing Valium. He was one piece again, and his skin was crawling. His resentment sat in the front row of his heartcage.
She leaned over and strapped a cigarette between his brittle lips; and unclasped a silver Zippo to light him up. The flame burnt a punctuation mark of a cherry and he exhaled.
?Christian! I am so sorry I left you alone out there in the cruel world for so long! I?ve missed you so! You poor little thing! You poor thing! I?m here for you now: I?m here to take care of you!?
?Fuck off, Daisy. Fuck off.?
She leaned over and strapped a cigarette between his brittle lips; and unclasped a silver Zippo to light him up. The flame burnt a punctuation mark of a cherry and he exhaled. After two drags, he shook his head, and she comprehended the signal and killed it in a tin ashtray that had never been there to begin with.
Her crying subsided just enough for her to choke out a flustered daisy-chain of words. ?But---but---it?s me, Alice. Not Daisy. Who is Daisy? It?s Alice, baby.?
The only thing he could see from his point of view was the dismissive flap of his hand. Other than that, he refused to reply.
Her filmy eyes leapt wide and startled. She shelled her thick mouth with twig fingers. ?Christian,? she pleaded with him through the scissored seams of her knuckles. ?Please don?t be cross with me. It was for the best. I?m back now. I?m back now to love you, and help you get better. They found your letter to your aunts in your back pocket, and one to me. They got in contact with us! I met your Aunt Clara, she?s very nice, she?ll be here in the morning. She?s making you your favorite orange juice.?
?I hate orange juice,? he said flatly, his eyes orbiting back into a lilac wonderland. ?And I hate you. Now fuck off, little girl, before I wring your neck.?
But this didn?t faze Miss Goodridge: she formed a five-fingered bracelet around his wrist and slapped away at the frigid rail on the side of his bed. She clambered in beside him and melted into the ghastly sheets. She pushed his hand beneath her skirt and between her thighs along the scant cotton bridge of her underwear.
?Your fingers are so cold. I?ll make them warm.? Her promise was a hushed anthem, and she kept his wrist sturdy as it fought and tried to squirm away in vain. ?No, you mustn?t fight this, baby.? She didn?t even break her concentration when he cracked into a sob. His features wrinkled in a map of contortions, and his rheumy eyes sprang angry tears.
?Shh, shh, shh.? She tried her best to pacify him with a continuous, maternal lullaby.
Finally, he relaxed, and his stiff fingers unfurled and they tapered beneath the hot barrier and they skid against her.
Alice let her air-drying cheek press against the pillow, her thighs divorcing. A flurry of a sigh escaped, and her throat clogged with a moan.
?Alice,? he choked with a jittery jawbone and teeth biting future scabs into his bottom lip. ?Why did you leave me? Why didn?t you come back? I came back every day. Why didn?t you answer? Why weren?t you there? Didn?t you love me? Alice??
She didn?t answer him, his dug into the honeycombs of his knuckles, urging his touch inside of her.
?Alice??
Nothing.
?Alice, you murdered me.?
?Mmnnn..?
?Alice, I hate you.?
?Move your fingers, Christian.?
?Alice, please listen to me.?
?Harder, Christian. It?s okay, you won?t hurt me.?
?Alice, why isn?t your heart as warm as your cunt??
When he pried away from her skirt, she seemed disappointed, but refused to put on a proper veneer or re-align her thighs. He tugged the pillow out from behind her skull, and he shielded his eyes with clustered lashes so that he couldn?t read the alarm plaguing her face.
He descended on her like a bomber plane at war-time. His shadow took a spear of dread and revelation to her heart, and he anchored down on her cherub lips and china doll cheeks. The branches of her arms darted out avidly on either side, and clawed at his shirt for him to stop. Her squeals were muted by the smothering weight of his thick hands. She was frail, and predictably didn?t fight for too long. She went limp a minute later, and he pried away with a stolid contentment graffiti-painted on his expression. His wrist skied over his glossy eyes and beneath his nose.
When his eyes lunged for her body, it had vanished from the hospital bed coffin. But he wasn?t shocked. It was the newspaper font on his plastic tag that that caught his eye: it really did read Jay Gatsby.
-
?This world,? his brain pulsed with a needle and thread of thought. ?Is full of parasites. We?re in the belly of our mother, we?re industrializing on her organs, and we?re building houses on her white blood cells and rioting in her blood stream. And all she does sigh at us and those sighs are hard enough to blow us over. But the worst is when she slaps our hands. I can?t wait until she wrings our necks.?
He tapped away cigarette ash and his eyes floated over the ceiling, momentarily stepping back to reality just long enough to spy on the bass grunting through the walls. He didn?t dare look down, he just let his eyes dissolve in the backdrop of his lids and fell in love with the purple pixels again.
?If I look down, I?ll just fall. That?s the natural law of gravity,? he didn?t realize he was speaking aloud.
?What?? She came out muffled, like a paper bag.
?Nothing, I was just talking to myself,? his lashes and voice shivered in unison, while he upturned the cigarette. It was sucked dry to the filter, which was something he had never done before. He was actually disappointed to discover that it had to stop burning at some point, and when it met its death, there was nothing but a strand of puffy paper and a dust of tobacco. He nipped his volume and confined his monologue to himself, again.
?And when she does, I?ll just stand on a rooftop. I?ll climb to the highest floor of the highest building ?which is probably just the Motel 8. I?ll fall to my knees in the name of redemption. If I?m really selfish I?ll beg for mercy. But I?ve always been selfless. I?ll make a bargain with her and tell her I wasn?t meant to be born on this planet anyway. That?s what everyone tells me--? Red fireworks splattered in front of his eyes and his hips jumpstarted into a short, jerky frenzy.
Finally, it was over. His cigarette took a nosedive between his legs when she receded, and stirred the toilet water. Her wrist climbed across her puffy mouth ? only because it seemed like the right thing to do. After losing his braided grip on her cheaply-highlighted hair he tucked away faltering erection and used his thumb as a splint to haul the zipper up. His button was missing, but his shirt feathered over the notch so nobody would notice.
?Thank you,? he added meekly, because it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. He curved around her and tricked open the lock of the stall and sauntered out the bathroom door. She waited there on her knees, disoriented, clawing at the tile for the last pieces of her pride.
As soon as he filtered into the red light scene, a girl with swinging curling iron hair catapulted in his direction.
?Christian! That fucker over there is givin? me trouble.? She swapped his wrist and used her spare hand to tattle-tale mime over to a drunken hick in a ventilated baseball cap and the kind of mustache that swallowed your upper lip. He was at the bar, waiting for the froth to go down on his fifth beer.
Christian didn?t ask questions. Chances were she didn?t have much of a motive. In small towns it was always personal. Every Saturday night was empty here because the girls had bruised thighs and Saturn rings under their eyes. They treated the pole like a child molester; their legs were always stiff and scared when they maneuvered their half-circles around it. Maybe the man hadn?t paid his child support, maybe he got drunk and puked over her purse once, or maybe, he genuinely disrupted the peace. He didn?t care.
He was a machine without oil. He stalked over in three long, leonine strides and masked his shoulder with his thick hand. The man turned his neck and began to sputter.
?Oh Jesus Christ, I didn?t cause no trouble. I?m just havin? a drink and lookin? at the ladies and that bitch over there?s always gotta start with me. It?s personal, boy, it?s personal and she don?t need to be bringing you into our business. Now let me just have my drink, and I?ll git.?
That seemed like a logical compromise, so Christian gave a blank nod and slipped to the stool next to him. The bug-eyed (it was the eyeliner) girl behind the bar poured him a straight shot of Jose, because whiskey always made him angry. He hesitated before he knocked it back but he did so with a sort of renewed vigor now that he had come.
-
People skills, hello people. I can speak. I am social. I am normal. I function. Hello. 9-5, 9.00 an hour, paycheck @ about $360 a week which equals $720 biweekly. There is commission too, and I make a lot of that. I can now afford a leather couch. It's brown. I keep a stack of books on the last cushion--the one right next to the keyboard I found. On the otherside of the couch there are cupholders. It's thick enough for a coffee mug. My mug says: "Frontier Diner."
Cubicle 4
was spotless. Everyone else had itty memos and reminders scattered everywhere, family photos like debris pegged by thumbtacks and the occassional multicolored pushpins. He had no family, no waxy crayon pictures, but he did have coffee. That sat beside his computer, inking up a square napkin. The phone was thrashing in its cradle. The ring tone sounded just as chaotic as the person behind the line would be. It was on the third ring, but no one was passing by. Christian was hibernating under his desk like a child in hiding, cradling his knees, rocking himself into a gentle buzz.
But his rule was to always answer by the fifth.
He untangled fast. He was so startled by the lead needles surging through his legs that he knocked his head against the desk. The coffee took a spill and now there was a steady trickle dampening the neutral dustball-blue carpet. Numbly he tucked back his arm inside his dress shirt sleeve and tried to mop it up. But by now he was on the sixth ring. He swiveled in his chair around the mess and crammed the phone against his ear.
"Hello?"
"Yes. Yes. Is this--is this the ...is this for..." It was a mousy-voiced teenager on the other end; a boy.
"Yes, it is," Christian stated. "I'm Christian, and I'm here to help you. What's your name?" His voice began to churn with a paternal balm, it was hushed, it was soothing, it was baby powder.
"Nick. It's Nick."
"Hello, Nick. It's very nice to meet you, even though this is a bit impersonal -- being over the phone and all." He sighed at the coffee and skittered one finger over the keyboard to wake up his idle monitor screen. "How are you feeling today, Nick?"
"Fucking bad, man! Why the fuck else would I be calling?!"
"Well first, you can start by telling me what's wrong so we can talk about this together."
"I--my dad is kicking me out of the house. I have no money, I have no car, I just got out of high school, I can't go to college--I had a school picked out and he won't even help me out!"
"Can you start by telling me why your dad kicked you out?"
"He caught me and my girlfriend--oh, who's not even my girlfriend anymore cos she fucking dumped me, man, because of my dad. He's this crazy Protestant guy and he doesn't want me having premarital sex. But I'm eighteen. He's not backing down. And I don't care anymore. I don't care. It's not like..." The boy on the other line started heaving a mess of sobs and sputtered breaths. "I don't know. I just want to do it."
"Do what?"
"Kill myself."
"How do you propose to do that?" Blank-faced, he canted back on his chair. The machine inside him gunned to a start, this was all well-rehearsed.
"With one of my dad's guns."
"What problem do you think that will solve?"
"Well, fuck it--"
"You're willing to kill yourself to get revenge on your father? This is what this is about. You want to make him feel bad. What about your mom? Do you want to make her sad?"
"No. But she's not doing shit about it either."
"Suicide is a very selfish thing. Most of the time it's done out of anger. You're a young man. You have plenty of things to live for."
"Like what?"
"Shit!"
"The future. Have you ever heard of the DIY work ethic? Making something out of yourself by working? It's not the end of the world. You could put yourself through college on your own. That's what I did." Liar.
"And you work for a suicide hotline?"
"I'm a trained psychologist." Two.
"That's bull, man."
"No, it really isn't, Nick. Could you do me a favor?"
"What?"
"I know this sounds stupid, but take two deep breaths. I want you to speak to me calmly. I want you to feel calm."
There were a string of murmurs on the other end, but his voice eventually watered down to a quiet slur.
"Okay."
"Have you tried talking to your father?"
"Yeah, and he doesn't give a fuck."
"Is there anywhere else you can go?"
"No!"
"No relatives, no friends..?"
"Yeah, I got a grandma. But that's not the point."
"But that is the point. Let's talk about you, Nick. What are your hobbies? Who are you? What do you like to do? Who's your favorite band?"
It took less than ten minutes before Christian maximized the program. It made him cringe each time.
"Have you ever considered a self-help book, Nick? These help you to reach down deep inside, to get to know your inner self, to handle situations calmly and with confidence."
"No, I don't ..." Nick sounded drowsy. Christian always put his customers to sleep before this crucial step.
After typing in 'No' on a black screen, he read his response aloud, convincingly.
"Well, we just put a new book out by a very famous psychologist named Dr. Thomas Wollencraft."
"I don't care."
Christian once more typed in 'no.'
"Let me tell you about it before you get judgemental. This man has helped a lot of people like you. I was once suicidal myself, and after reading the first book by Dr. Wollencraft I found a whole new outlook on life. I've started living for myself. And that's what you have to do [insert name here], live for yourself."
For $44.95, wasn't life worth living?
