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Stephen Boyer
I have been writing and painting since I was very young; art helps me cope and nullifies the boredom. The older I get the more and more I want to carve out a space for me in the art world; that being said, my favorite artists are people like Emily Dickinson and Henry Darger because they made art strictly for themselves. Two of my pieces got published in 2008; "Stall Three: Meditation, Despair, and Solitude" in the Madder Love Anthology edited by Peter Dube and an excerpt from a novel is forthcoming in "Cool Thing, New Gay Fiction" anthology edited by Blair Mastbaum and Will Fabro. I also write for the music website www.fantasticweapon.com under the name Popejohnpaul12. Besides writing and painting I also work in the porn industry primarily as a bottom for gay, straight and trans S/M sites - I'm obsessed with my asshole and enjoy working with a variety of sexualities. I live in the bay area but I hope to one day return to Asia because I think Asia is the most interesting place on Earth right now. I taught English in China a few years ago and took classes online while living near the North Korean Border - while living there I realized nearly everything the American Media says about the outside world is dull and largely mistaken. My dream is to one day find a wealthy benefactor so I can forget financial stress and concentrate on making art that doesn't reflect financial stress.
Here are links to me:
http://www.rebelsatori.com/index.php?id=15
http://www.blogger.com/profile/05864680521855244159
http://www.blogger.com/profile/04215219463065003156
http://www.archive.org/details/JacobTheUnicorn
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hello good people.
i am wolf and i have always, though my paws aren’t really designed for such task, written, almost every day for more than ten years, not because writing is cool (it’s not) or because it can be beautiful (yeah it can but that’s a side-effect), but because words are sacred and the most powerful weapon mankind ever crafted. (if it did). and i’m a sucker for fights.
those four texts are part of a 3x9 series, written in one go in a few hours a little more than one year ago. the original title was “Disaster Steps”, and the idea was to get a multiple-angle vision of the theme of impending doom, fate, choice.. the twenty-seven parts are there.
1_4/9
the utmost distinction between being and existing. you are a spanish grammatical dream. an error perpetuated in complete awareness of its implication, the bugs branching out rhizomically to the rhythm of brain damage recorded in a haunted mansion listening to foxes imitating wolves, only, redder. the program designed once, and then followed, free. free of all choices because all the true choices were made the very second you stepped on his skin. you said, i am not going to fuck your flesh, i have deeper visions, more... fundamental catachresis theories to doublecheck. now, tell me. how does that feel to be the first one? he spat a heavy bullet of phlegm towards your right eye, it landed on your cheek because the moment he opened his mouth you raised your head to look down on him. arrogance deviating the trajectory of bodily fluids, the only thing that truly matters in the end, you would never get enough of it, enough of him, enough of them...
2_5/9
you then come across the possibility of imagining another ending with such strength the walls would bend, the sky would retch from the trigger of your fist forced into its pulp, a divine gag reflex ending in the most violent outpouring of matter, hurled downwards through an exponential increase of gravity, here, on this new planet we have discovered, only the dead will rise, the living will tumble down in permanent hail, to be frozen to the spot they hit, and form stalagmites with the calcareous concretion of their bones, while their blood will congeal the remote sun’s gleam into nightmares of running with paralysed limbs.
2_6/9
here, on this new planet we have finally stumbled upon, hope will not have to be eradicated because it will not even exist, the omens being so clearly written across the land with stones of a sharpness leaving no room for smooth skin. from the earliest stage of life everything will be lacerated by doom and thus will either accept it and create ways of dealing with the loom of his pupils, or try and fight it, only to be crushed within a few hours of breathing, equating approximately 573 pulses. how much easier. love won’t exist either, because love is based upon the assertion that what you desire can be obtained, which is only a slanted equation where both sides dont add up but insist on placing the holy = between them, for the sake of longing, for the sake of hope, which, see above, will not even have such thing as a name there in the first place. hence the perfect freedom of souls.
hence the complete reality grasping allowed to all. we won’t desire, because nothing will be worth desiring, only.... only one’s self and its own weight, its own radiance. all arms will be locked in clearly defined comradeship with no tint of destruction, no vague glow of lust, nothing else than what is, knowing where it’s going.
2_7/9
the argument is fiery, short-lived. a few bullets collide in mid-air and fall on the ground, ripples in regular stripes from the point of impact to the end facing the launcher. you cannot fall there, because there is a hole already filled. but, you must fall. surely you can find another hole? if all else fails, dig your own. shovel your way into a pre-tomb deep enough for all the love you miscarry and the amount of flesh subsequently starved. his fragile frame in the middle of the light making eyes wonder, is he shadowing the coming of another messiah, of is he himself a new form of mythological dream turned nightmare by too many pints of semen? he smiles at your doubts, the softest, sweetest smile, walks towards you and buries his head in your neck. from a distance it looks like affection. but it’s the only way he can manage to hide his features otherwise showing nothing but pity. when you refused all your life to learn the mastery of masks, you must compensate with a skill for concealment. so, let’s not talk about it for more than four minutes, shall we? the obvious is a disembowelled turkey in the middle of the table. cutting flesh that has been bled and emptied is an easy task. the only thing left for the sharpened double-bevelled edge to follow is the line of the bones. no fluid will spurt, unexpected, from meat to face, from insides swelling to the surface of another body in waiting, in wanting.... the truth and the facts are simple, graspable, there for recognition and understanding only, no questioning, and certainly no digging. there is not a single veil to be lifted between you and the acknowledgement of failure. and the proximity of defeat was such, and from so early on, that not even a true battle was granted. a mere substitute for a strike, surrogate fight that you hoped could have been against them, feared might have been against him, but was only against yourself, your own fate.
pathos incarnate. why do you even bother?
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Hey this is Tomk, these two extracts are from the short story im working on and my long stuttering novel. Errr yeah.... Like a stoned teenager or a porn star/ My vocabulary’s limited to describing/ objects proportionately larger/ than I can understand.
Two Paragraphs:
(1) Mark’s hands rata-tat-tat down the banister as his unsteady knees stoop towards a landing his presence spotlights and everyone else’s eyes dance around. In his thinking the winding stairs are one long arm hugging the faces that poke, blissed out, through the bars of their childish prison. The world’s not as liquid as Mark’s easily divertible course of thought though. Rough and unsanded, fleshy hands would snag on their unvarnished surfaces and withdraw pinching their palms. Mark falls a little bit duck walking over the slats of knees at the base of the stairs and surfing the gnarly end of the banister to his inevitable wipe out. He blossoms on the floor like a flower or a sweet packet. People are stroking his hair which feels to him like the word perfection might just about round up on. He holds his hand up like there’s a song or speech to give and almost says: ‘friends, Romans, country men… I am a dream’. Instead he giggles a little, raises his eyes to spell out ‘What was I thinking?’ and removes the tooth pick sized splinter. A royal bead crowns his palm then topples beheaded into the basket of their cupped hands. A girl whose pupils are the friendly face of the void dabs it very gently with a tissue from her bag then proffers it to Mark. Everyone loves Mark.
(2)
In the distance Fiascos head’s like the top of a burnt match. Ramones haircut, not styled that way just overgrown, badly dyed black, nose occasionally breaking through the matted surface like an iceberg in the river Styx. Fiasco’s extremely thin not fashionably but angrily as if his skin sheathed a collection of knives. Imagine an ultra violent peter pan with crooked teeth.
Henry’s skinny as well but broader with the kind of muscular frame that if he grows up, fills out, will amaze him with its lack of relation to his interior thoughts. This is what happens by the way. They fall into step with each other. Their talk is dense, compacted and intermeshed so should resemble in your mind a car professionally crushed into a cube. Everything they say has an absent purpose that serves to obscure the subtext which typically revolves around loneliness, nihilism and this energetic intermingling of the two into violence.
‘I’m alone and it’s making me feel sick’
‘I don’t understand your sadness’
‘that’s why we’re friends’
‘I’m angry’
‘When we get angry the world transforms’
‘That’s cos we’re young. Wait…’
‘When I get angry I want to die’
‘…I thought something would happen. Instead it’s like I time travelled’
‘Robot’
‘Cyborg’
‘I’m so bored and uncared for and I just want to fuck’
‘Why don’t people want to fuck us?’
‘Because its hard to care’
‘fuckers’
‘I mean we don’t care’
‘That’s a problem?’
The sea looked so beautiful it seemed computer generated. Henry is remembering this day because he is alone and in pain.
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Akechikogorou = Kai van Eikels: philosopher, currently working at the Berlin Free University’s Theater & Performance Studies Department. Recent research topics include: social virtuosity and the relation of artistic and economic notions of ‘performance;’ critique of improvisation; non-representational forms of collectivity (such as “swarms” or “smart mobs”); prognosis as performance; revenge and the (a)symmetries of violence; the beloved one.
CV & publications list (German)
Blog with my experiments in fiction (German)
»In the afternoon of May 5, 2002 numerous people appeared at Hamburg’s Main Train Station, listening to the radio. All over the premises, these people with their radios suddenly stopped at the same time and then, after a moment’s hesitation, began performing certain movements: they held the palm of one hand open, arm outstretched, then turned the hand to be vertical; they sat down on plastic bags they had brought; they put an ear to the track, danced on the spot as if they were clubbing, or waved red scarves in the air.
After the dissemination of information in the city’s left-wing scene and some university and arts networks, the LIGNA Group broadcast choreographic instructions on the frequency of independent radio station FSK (Freies Sender Kombinat), which each of the radio listeners followed individually in their respective places.
The movement sequences in some of the choreographic material mimicked actions such as “begging” or “loitering”, which are prohibited according to station regulations. In this, they referred to the privatization of the formerly public space of a train station where five security firms were now operating, and which was additionally patrolled by German border police as well as Hamburg’s state police. For about 15 minutes, an externally soundless performance unfolded before the eyes of passers-by and security staff, the collective execution of which created the impression of an odd dance – a radio ballet.
According to LIGNA, the “exercises in non-regulation idling” were meant to create a “dispersed/diverted public” (“zerstreute Öffentlichkeit”) that sidestepped the ban of political assembly effective in the station, but still – in a different form from a usual protest or demonstration – demonstrated something. By reconstructing the possibility of a political public by artistic and aesthetic means in a place where it was no longer existent as such, these exercises hinted at a link between art and politics that does not consist in art making political statements, but in the fact that the artistic form of a (movement) performance takes on the function of a protective space for acting politically, while simultaneously becoming a kind of training ground for collective subjects (or subjectifications) of action.«
(from This Side of the Gathering: The Movement of Acting Collectively, 2007/2008)
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Thomas Moore
'Thomas Moronic'
My first book of poetry just came out, I'm about a chapter off being halfway through my first novel, I write my blog everyday. I get nervous when I don't write. Some of the major themes that my work has centered around include the nuclear family, routine, and masturbation fantasies. Occasionally I try to be funny but I'm still working on that. I can't stop listening to Stars of The Lid at the moment.
Hi I'm Natty Soltesz. I write porn mostly which you can find on my website, www.bacteriaburger.com. I like writing other things too, and this is one of them.
Deep Hollow
By Natty Soltesz
West Virginia summers were always green, but it had been two years now since we’d been on our own, and Deep Hollow was positively choked with green. It was overtaking all the houses, and ours was no exception. Vines had started to creep under the back door.
---We’d found a whole stack of clean blankets and sheets when we first appropriated the house on Spring Street, and a good stock of canned food and water. But all of it was gone now, and the towels were just as irredeemably filthy as the rest of the place. So I suggested to Haley that it was time to move to the west side of town.
---“That’s where everybody else is, anyway,” I said. Haley got an anxious look on her face. She put down her magazine – Vogue, with a water-crinkled cover.
---“What about all my clothes? I can’t even imagine moving all of this stuff.”
---“Just leave it here! It’s only like a fifteen minute walk over to where Donovan and those guys are living. I mean, this whole house can be our personal closet, if we want. We can take our time moving it.” Because, I didn’t add, we had all the time in the world. Nothing but time, really.
---I walked down the street to the rancid market (as Haley had dubbed it, due to the stench from rotting vegetables that were melting on the shelves during the first year) and found a pallet on wheels that we could use to transport the generator.
---I took the long way back home, past the old junior high school. A dark, stone building, it loomed imposingly above the road.
---I heard a voice call “Hey!” It was Timmy, waving at me from a window.
---“Come up, man! Come check out my place!”
---“Okay,” I said, but I hesitated. The junior high school building had always kind of creeped me out. All those shiny dark hallways; the huge, echoing auditorium. Just the thought of the dusty basement gymnasium and the locker rooms where I’d once changed for gym class made me shiver. I took a deep breath, and ascended the steps.
---It was quiet when I entered, but the wind whooshing down the hall had a voice of its own. I felt dizzy, like I was entering a past life.
---“Timmy?” I called out. For a minute my voice just hung there, racing down the halls like a ghost.
---“Up here!”
---He had made his home in one of the classrooms on the second floor. I had to admit, it didn’t look so bad. He’d hung all kinds of posters and cool stuff on the walls and had put a comfy bed in the middle. He was making bongs out of chemistry equipment and there were some half-finished ones on the teacher’s desk.
---“Doesn’t it creep you out to be here at night, all these empty halls and rooms just outside of your door?” I asked. Timmy just smiled.
---“Sometimes I’m sure I hear people," he said. "You know the teacher’s lounge on the fourth floor?”
---I did. It was the only thing on the forth floor, the highest and deepest point of the building which wasn’t really a floor at all. A flight of steps from the third level just stopped at a tiny green room, where the teachers used to smoke.
---“I don’t ever go in there, man,” Timmy said. “I try to avoid the third floor, too, actually. I only go up there if I absolutely have to.” He said he was growing pot on the roof, and his favorite thing to do was to smoke it in the principal’s office.
---“We’re moving, if you want to come help us. We’re trying to get this one house near Donovan’s place,” I said. Timmy perked up. I always thought he might have had a thing for Haley, but he was too shy, and I supposed Haley just hadn’t noticed him yet.
---Timmy threw a chemistry bong in his knapsack and I all but bolted for the door of that dreadful place. I only felt better when it was out of my sight.
---I told Timmy my theory about how buildings retain the souls of the people who have lived in them, how they become their own entity after a while.
---“You know those storage spaces on Rt. 428?” Timmy asked. “The ones with all the orange doors? Has it been tapped yet?”
---“I don’t think so. We could hit that up on our way, maybe get some stuff for the new place.”
---“Yeah. There could be anything in those storage spaces. Little capsules of people’s entire lives.”
---When we got home Haley had made some mac & cheese with tuna, so we all sat down and ate. Timmy said hi to her, but for the most part they pretended not to notice each other. I thought that was kind of sweet.
---“I guess I’m all packed up,” she said. “I guess.”
---When we left the sun was getting lower in the sky. The world sure looked beautiful that way. It always made me feel strange but comforted. We walked down the middle of the sun-dappled road in a procession, the green trees high above.
---We got to Aunt Mini's Mini-Storage and set our stuff down in the parking lot. I looked down the row at all these spaces, all these lives that I would never lead. I got this feeling, sad and nostalgic. It had something to due with the dying afternoon sun. It was a heavy feeling and I stood with it.
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David Ehrenstein
Old Boyfriends
by David Ehrenstein
“Tho I very seldom think of him,
nevertheless
Sometimes a mannequin's
Blue summer dress
Can make the window
like a dream
Ah but now that dream belongs to someone else”
----- Tom Waits
---You’ve got to pay close attention because it comes out differently every time. Long-shots turn into close-ups, temp morts rush past like the last reel of Pickup On South Street or the first one of The Crimson Kimono. What once began as a long slow track through the rooms of a conspicuously large apartment somewhere in the Bronx (where people you’ve just met are chattering away while some Stax-Volt 45 or other thumps the air), somehow conflates into a rapid pan. Then the boy you’ve come looking for staggers out of the cigarette smoke with that big teasing smile of his. Yes, it's a movie. Playing in perpetuity in the RKO-Keith's of memory. Nobody sitting up in the second balcony but me. Likewise the camera/ projector (they're two devices in one.) And the house lights never come on.
---Wait a minute, am in the right place? Barry wasn’t atr this party, was he? No. So what's happening ? Must we “begin at the beginning” --running down the streets of the Bronx by the Quonset huts towards an intersection big as time and space itself? Yes. I’m all of two alone. Sex came later -- in the basement with Ernest, who I never really liked. But we were eight and he wanted me, and (Frank O’Hara) I wanted to be wanted more than anything else in the world. No, that came later too. First stirrings in High School when I met Cary and his identical twin brother. So beautiful they took my breath away. Not cliché -- fact. I gasped at the sight of them, waving from the window of the apartment where they lived with their mother (a theater director who later became an AIDS researcher) trying my best to muffle the sound. No, “nothing happened" save the jump-starting of a fascination with twins whose apex was reached when I met (separately) the Malet brothers -- one sweet (Laurent) one sour (Pierre). But that wasn't sex either, it was infatuation. Sex was grubbier, like Marvin, the boy down the street, who I didn't like at all yet for some reason wanted (and had). Like the guy who ran the bicycle store on Madison near the Metropolitan Museum (never asked for his name, he never asked for mine.) For two weeks running he blew me as I sipped my morning coffee (always scalding hot), standing calmly in my guards uniform.Just sex and nothing more. And I wanted more. What happened to that beauty in the pool in Berkeley, inviting me to come down from my hotel room balcony to swim naked with him one late August afternoon in ‘71? What happened to the boy with crossed eyes and curved cock who I had in the GAA Firehouse basement? And who was it that I made out with on the Firehouse roof? Nichevo!
Barry Prince
---I can’t remember a first meeting with him at all. Like everyone else back then Barry was just perpetually there, hovering in the half-light. It could have been though Peter or Pepe. They certainly knew Barry, at least as much as anyone else did, which is to say “from around.” -- that great floating crap game of screenings, gallery openings, museum jaunts, coffee shops, city streets. Surely he went to those Sunday morning premieres Warren Sonbert held at the Bleecker. Was there a shot or two of Barry in one of the films (The Tenth Legion, Truth Serum)? He was certainly Warren’s “type” -- smart, self-contained, hot. Oh hell, Barry was everybody’s “type.” But he didn’t go with everybody. In fact he didn’t really seem to go with anybody -- at least as far as I could tell then. (“I’m younger than that now.”) Barry didn’t haunt the de rigeur dives of the West Village (“The Ninth Circle”) or the Lower East Side (“Stanley’s”). Maybe my timing was off. I know I never found him there whenever I (ever so carefully) slipped through, which was fairly often. He was a Museum of Modern Art boy. Very East Side. To the Manner Born.
---Now I’m recalling coffee with him at the food stand by the boat house in Central Park, only a few steps away from the Ramble. Was I headed for the Ramble that day? Was he? We’d run into each other in front of the Bethesda fountain and drifted over to the boathouse to sit around and talk about Godard. We were all about Godard back then. Pynchon too. Easier to speak indirectly through movies like Masculine Feminine and books like V, than head-on about life. Was that Bethesda meet before or after that day I saw Barry on Madison Ave.? No, it was before, because (That Hamilton Woman), “There was then, there was no after.”
---I know I was on my way to one of those little bookstores that used to dot that street (we’re talking long before Arthur Loeb set up shop) when I ran into Barry. Or rather I suddenly became aware of the fact that Barry had run into me -- loomed up “out of nowhere.” Could he have been following me? Too romantic. What was the book I’d been looking for? Something by Laurence Durrell I think, though I know we were most recently talking (as usual) about V, which I was convinced would make an ideal Losey movie. It was a conversation I know we’d had before -- ritual chatter in place of what we really wanted to say and couldn’t because we didn’t know we wanted to. Or at least I didn't. Or maybe did know but was just too scared to make the attempt. And what did Barry know? He didn't say. Ever.
---I know I was in a good mood that day in 1967. Giddy even. So much so, that I didn’t really recognize how little Barry actually had to say, or realize that he was steering me towards his apartment which (like him) loomed up “out of nowhere.” How convenient. It was a late afternoon, bright shafts cutting through the gathering dusk.(The thing I most loved about Madison avenue was the late afternoon light. Like Frank O'Hara says "in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth/ between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles") And so a proposal was made by Barry to stop by to “have coffee.” Or was it just “a drink”? Doesn’t matter really, for the minute we walked through the door he pulled his face up close to mine -- giggling. I can’t recall reacting then as I’m reacting now (aroused). What was I not thinking? Was I that naive to suppose we were just there for coffee? For some weird reason I “didn’t see it coming.” We sat on a couch where I continued to talk -- as if the “face off” at the door never happened. But then in mid mot juste Barry kissed me. Suddenly. Sweetly. Repeatedly. Then he began to undress me. I was being “seduced,” like a paperback potboiler heroine. But was I really? Hey, I was peeling Barry’s clothes off too. The “seduction” was mutual.
---How very odd, I would think to myself afterwards. It was as if a wish unvoiced until just that very moment had been suddenly granted. Was there been even a hint of this previously? “There was proximity but no relating,” (Nichols and May.) Barry wasn’t meant for me, “Heigh-Ho -- Who cares?” (Larry Hart.) And part of the reason was there almost always was a girl in Barry’s general vicinity. Or seemed to be. I wasn’t attentive enough to realize what the presence of said girl actually meant. I was “attracted” to Barry, but not actively, not consciously. I’d never “pursued” him because I thought sure he’d say no. I felt so little of myself back then. I had no body that I could see or even acknowledge (that didn’t surface until years later in L.A.) No face to win or woo. At best I was just a “clever” voice. Why court rejection? File Barry away with “flirtations” like Jonny (who kissed me) and Charlie (who didn’t.) Shove him back into the attic of the “unconscious.”
---But what did I know or care of the “unconscious”? Consciousness was all that mattered. What with all the semi-discreet drinking of those days (and we were making love right around “cocktail time”), sometimes accompanied by select narcotics (opium, mon amour) more than anything else I wanted to be "awake" as much as possible. It seemed vitally important that I “stay up till dawn” or I’d “miss something” (a habit that continued well into the 80’s) And yet for all such temporal scrupulousness I nearly missed Barry; his big Modigliani face, with Ninetto Davoli curls on top, and that fuzzy hedge-like mustache over the smile. A mustache, mind you, firmly in place before the de rigeur “Mark Spitz” arrived. Barry’s was unruly, unlike his manner. That was hesitant, quiet. "Too quiet" as they say in the 40’s programmers. And that was why I was so surprised when he kissed me “just like that.” Sudden pure delight. So intense I can still feel it.. More than I did even then. "And right now" (Frank O'Hara again.)
---So there we were, spooning. Rubbing up against one another, getting hard, looking at our hardness and laughing at its absurdity (sex is utterly absurd) , and kissing more and more. Then Barry took me over to -- of all things -- a waterbed. It was my first and last time on that great silly 60’s-era contraption. Funny to find one in his apartment. He never struck me as susceptible to "trends.” But what did I know? Was it even Barry’s apartment anyway? He could have been “minding” the place for a friend or relative. No reason to ask, for by then we’d started in. It was a long, slow tender fuck, quite different from the furtive late night violence I’d been used to up till then, and largely enjoyed. Sex was something to be consummated (consumed, consume ) with total strangers, not friends. Quickly, vertically, and in the dark -- not savored like this when it was still light.
---Barry cooed, and we rocked gently to and fro with the water. How corny. How hot. Then we lay back, almost falling asleep, then stroking and kissing some more in anticipation of the next round, and then some rest and then some more. Then quiet as we just lay there looking at each other for the longest time. And then there was a knock at the door.
---It was Gypsy. She was a longtime member of The Living Theater, just back from its world tour, totally prepared to make amends for our lack of volubility. Amends hell -- she ignored it. Full of talk Gypsy was, all about there and here and how things had and hadn’t changed since she’d last been to New York. A perfect interloper aperitif, her timing couldn’t have been better, for it was clear we were though with fucking for the short run. Now it was early evening. and Barry and I were on the edge of restlessness. Gypsy raided the ice box and cooked us something. Or did we just open a few cans of this or that “delicacy” and down a few glasses of wine? Here’s a missing reel for you. Not important. We were in such a rush to keep up with her -- physically as well as mentally. We had to go dancing, she said. And she knew just the place. Barry smiled -- a far different smile from those he’d flashed before. It’s taken me all this time to really see that smile, and realize he knew where we were going all along. Not that any of this was "planned." Certainly meeting me wasn't planned. Certainly bedding me was an improvisation. And he hadn’t been expecting Gypsy’s arrival either. But put those chance events together and he knew there was only one place to go next.
---"You can’t live if you don’t have money!" -- one of the many Paradise Now! watch-cries that Gypsy had been shouting out all over Europe. And like any true-blue member of “Le Living,” she wasn’t just mouthing a text that Julian Beck and Judith Malina had handed to her. She lived anarchy. Or rather she lived with it. “Let’s take this cab,” she said striding right out into the street and stopping one, as if for an emergency. Clearly the drive would have stopped anyway. But what did he think of the fare he’d just picked up? He gave no notice of Barry and I needless to say. Gypsy was in complete command of the situation. With her long dark brown hair and bangs covering her forehead in a style Nico made her own (did she copy it from Gypsy or vice versa?) with lovely pale white features peering out from underneath she was a cabby’s dream of a “beatnik/hippie” girl/woman. He was dazzled from the start, and clearly ripe for the picking -- which in this case constituted giving us a free ride.
---“These pieces of paper are meaningless,” Gypsy told him. “Don’t let them control your life. We should all do things because we love each other. We love you, you know. Do you love us?” The cabby chuckled. Had he heard this spiel before? He didn’t say. But there was no way for him to say anything. Gypsy was doing all the talking -- seizing every molecule of air that rushed thought the open windows just as she did the more easily dominated stasis of the apartment. Not that the cabby cared. This would be a story he could tell his fellow cabbies later at the diner (Taxi Driver.) And so we arrived at wherever-in-hell we were going. It was on the West Side somewhere in the 50’s. Gypsy kissed the cabby and we all piled out. Had Barry seen Gypsy do this before? Not important. He was as giddy as I was with the thrill of “getting away with it” And so with this distaff embodiment of Melville’s Confidence-Man we strode up to a front door of a club -- yes it had to have been somewhere in the lower West 50’s -- and went inside. Now what was it’s name? Never looked. Never asked. Never mind.
---It was enormous; decorated in “early nothing” (Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.) But it truly didn’t need any decor at all. It had women. Or rather it had lesbians. A literal sapphic sea. Barry and I were the only men in the place (perfectly evoked in Living Out Loud. Had Richard LaGravanese been there that night too?) Gypsy vanished into the sea, never to be seen again, leaving Barry and I to dance by ourselves --swimming with the sapphic tide. And swim we did, dancing together -- yet alone. For Barry being here was an exercise in perfect solitude. I was along for the ride. His ride. Like me, Barry adored the solitude of crowds. And the crowds he adored were lesbian. The sisterly-maternal warmth they provided had an intoxicating effect on him that was palpable. It was as if he were drunk on air.
---Barry was a lesbian-hag. Like Proust. A singular breed of gay man, not easily found, not easily held. Oh I could hold him for a few hours, but surely I could expect no more. In the wee smalls we left and went back to the apartment. Night and the city and we rocked in my sweet baby’s arms (Terry Melcher) Time stops and the world slips away. And in the morning ? Smiles, kisses, coffee, and good-bye. No, maybe not even anything voiced. Just a kisses -- sweet as pie. Maybe sweeter because we would never see each other again. Not by design of course. We were swallowed up by the city. We spun away into space and time. I don’t know whatever “became” of Barry, a l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. But hey, no tears, no regrets.
---It was a good first marriage.
Tom Dillow
---“Let’s get out of here, Tom whispered down my ear quickly. “OK,” I said. And why not? I was being seduced again, wasn’t I? Well maybe, sorta, kinda. With Tom who could tell? I had just been introduced to him (though I knew of him well before ) at this perfectly lovely party -- winter of ‘67, right around New Year's, somewhere on the east side in the 80s. And who was seducing whom anyway? A very open question as usual.
---Tom had been on my mind for some time prior to this. He was in Warren's first film, Amphetamine where he shares one of the longest most intense screen kisses ever with Tommy Mitchell. They were both high as kites, and Warren was doing a rapid hand-held 360 around them -- a homemade homage to the climax of Vertigo. Oh to be inside that shot.
---“So who was that blonde kissing Tommy?”
---“Oh that’s Tom Dillow.”
---“And?”
---“(knowing chuckle)”
---Of course Warren was at the party. So were several of the others we both knew, like Vivian Kurtz. Vivian and I were cinematic soulmates, strung out on Demy’s Lola, going to see it every time it played The New Yorker or the Thalia. (“I just knew you’d be here,” she said to me one afternoon floating out of the theater just as I was floating in.) Andy Meyer (hushed and slightly withdrawn as always) was there too. He wanted to make Vivian a star. So did Bruce Conner. But Vivian’s taste shifted to eastern religion until she discovered after years of study “I don’t want no Rimposhe romance.” I could have chatted with Vivian all night if I hadn’t been distracted by Tom -- that huge lock of hair falling across his face in the classic manner of the 60’s-era bombshells that owned my heart (Terence Stamp, Michael York, Richard Warwick .)
---Tom was very loud and very forward and very drunk and very hot. Flirting stealthily with great panache (sidling up alongside me, talking in calm, hushed, deliberate tones about this person or that) he was “feeling me out” while “feeling me up” -- learning what and who I did and didn’t know. Then suddenly he proposed, right out of the blue, that we up and go to the movies. Ordinarily I wouldn’t want to leave a party as lively as this one. But Tom was ever so much livelier than any party. So we left, and went to the Regency to see The Chelsea Girls -- which, needless to say, we'd both seen many times before. Tom knew everyone in the cast, particularly the Boston crowd (Ed Hood and Patrick Fleyming) and began dishing away cheerily -- all the while making out with me. It was a delirium of talk and smooch. “Well you know what Rene said?” and “Oh I must show you Boston!” and “Well that night at the Casa B. . .” It was good old-fashioned movie theater balcony necking, but quite intense. I came very close to coming several times. And every time I reached the brink he whispered down my ear to calm me down and hold me off -- which I did until we got back to his hotel room for what turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic. We were both too distracted by then -- essentially already spent. Naturally that was it. Hey -- I'd gotten more than I'd asked for.
---Decades later, I read Savage Grace; the oral history of a real-life incest and murder story it all came rushing back to me. Compiled Edie style the book recounts how the rich and twisted Brooks and Barbara Bakeland destroyed Tony -- the gay son that Brooks ordered Barbara to "ungay." She elected to do so by sleeping with him. Obviously not a good idea. Mother-son relations went from worse to Worst Case Scenario. While on a visit to England he stabbed her to death in what can only be called a fit of pique. Sent to a local loony bin Tony was thought to be successfully rehabbed enough to get shipped back stateside for care in a nice expensive clinic. But due to an unaccountable screw up he was sent to his grandmother instead. He pulled a knife, stabbing her several times. She lived. He went to a U.S. prison where he eventually killed himself. Minus the murder and incest, Tony Bakeland struck a familiar chord -- an Arthur Loeb gone really wrong. But there was something more that popped upright into my face on page 59 -- Tom Dillow. He was describing how Barbara Bakeland told her seduction of Tony “happened in that house they had in Mallorca. . .a real spooky place. . .She didn’t give me any details. Oh no. Barbara was a lady.” Then on page 366, Frederic Combs part-time actor/ model (one of The Boys in the Band) part-time drug dealer (and supplier to Dominick Dunne) mentions how Tom introduced him to Barbara and Tony. But the big payoff is on page 409 where Tom reports “Tony asked Bart for my number, and Bart called to warn men that Tony was trying to find me. I mean, I was in the phone book, but, you now, for the Bakelands a telephone number didn’t exist unless they got it from someone. Bart said Tony told him, ‘T-t-t-tom n-never understood why I m-m-murdered M-mummy.’ ”
---Was Tom afraid that Tony was thinking of killing him? Obviously the book identifies him as a friend of Barbara’s more than Tony’s. But what would that mean in context? After all this was a woman who on the one had pursued gay men (she’s reported to at one point desired to have Sam Green’s child) and on the other called her son a “homo.” The detail about getting a telephone number from a third party rather than the phone book is most fascinating in that it truly evokes that class and their lives. It was a class Warren slipped though easily, but never truly lighted on. Tom it appears was Nick Caraway to Tony’s Daisy. Or better still a player of note in the failed schemes of the Tony the Ripley wannabe. Clearly Warren knew Tony. In fact he undoubtedly turned up at those Bleecker screenings and was probably present at that party where Tom ran off with me. But that was long ago and far away and (William Makepeace Thackeray) “They are all equal now.”
Allen
---It’s all one fast continuous motion. Run up the stars, knock on the door, throw him on the floor, pull off his clothes, fuck him. Could it all have been that easy? Surely not. Surely there was some slight tremor of resistance (either real or feigned, no matter) on his part. Not on mine. I wanted to fuck and he wanted to get fucked. Afternoons were best. Always. We were both awake and alert by then and just bored enough to ache (ever so slightly) for a soupcon of release. Physical only. There was no emotional release -- either sought or achieved.
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Hi Dennis. I've been a big fan of yours since Guide came out 10 years ago. Lately I've been checking out your blog almost daily, and enjoyed the readings you gave recently in New York at NYU and for the Weaklings release. I've attached a pic and 2 poems that I've been working on for a workshop.
Anna Nicole Smith- not the
Anna Nicole Smith that overdosed
on methadone and slim-fast-
spends every Wednesday night the same,
spread eagle on a coffee table,
for the so-called students of
erotic figure drawing 101.
The class is held in a small living room
of a small apartment in a large suburban
complex, the kind of complex that is
surrounded by a huge parking lot, with the
screams of unsupervised kids playing
in the gated pool audible at all times
of the day and night.
In the impromptu classroom, under the
half-assed guidance of the instructor Tim,
a housewife sat next to a high school
student, a widower sat next to a newlywed,
and a lesbian sat next to a gay, while Anna
incorporated what ever happened to be
lying around her into her pose.
Sometimes Anna would lean against the television set,
or read an outdated issue of Entertainment Weekly,
or pretend to ride the dilapidated bicycle that lay
against the wall. Tim would instruct her
to turn her breast towards the students, and as
long as no one touched her, the class was
an easy $50. Anna liked being an exhibitionist.
Today marked the first full month that Anna
had spent living in her car. She was saving
her money to take a road trip to Yellowstone
National Park to witness the Old Faithful geyser.
She’d always been intrigued by organic eruptions
of the Earth. She imagined the students behind
their large pads of paper shaking & emitting steam.
The heads of the housewife & high school student
exploded due to their unbearable stations in society.
The widower & newlywed’s overwhelming amount
of love for someone else caused lava to flow from their
hearts. The lesbian and gay needed to get laid so bad
that clouds of ash puffed from their sex organs. Meanwhile
Anna straightened her back & pointed her tits straight
ahead.
Bar Portrait, 1999
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More of a reader and lurker than a contributor of late...
John W. Hoopes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas.
from "Sorcery and Trophy Head Taking in Ancient Costa Rica." In The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerinds, edited by Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, Kluwer Press, pp. 444-480, 2007.
link
The taking and display of trophy heads appears to have been a prominent ritual activity throughout Costa Rica from at least AD 300 through the late prehistoric period. In Guanacaste, the principal period for the manufacture of ceramic effigy heads began around AD 500, a time associated with significant changes in social complexity throughout the Isthmo-Colombian region. Snarskis (2003) attributes these changes to a decline in contact with Mesoamerica and increased influence from South America, while I attribute the process to a religious movement and ideological shift that affected the "Chibchan world" as a whole (Hoopes 2005). The specific causes of this period of rapid culture change are unknown, but the taking and display of trophy heads may have been directly linked to the formation of ideologically driven priesthoods, among which the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta remain the only surviving example. These may in turn have been manifest in shamanic warfare or the contexts of assault sorcery and its revenge, complex phenomena that must be considered alongside models that emphasize competition over economic resources or the self-aggrandizing activities of aspiring chiefs. Headhunting continued in remote regions of the Talamanca area and the borderlands between Costa Rica and Panama until the early 19th century. However, several lines of evidence suggest that there is more to the identity of the perpetrators and victims than the labels of chiefs and warriors. The representations of individuals who have been transformed into ferocious creatures holding trophy heads suggests a metaphysical dimension related to complex traditions of shape-shifting and vengeance such as that of the kanaimà of Guyana (Whitehead 2002) and other varieties of assault sorcery found in indigenous societies of the Americas (Whitehead and Wright 2004). Like the multiple versions of the story of the Bribri-Teribe war that were told for more than a century, the artwork may not represent a proliferation of trophy head taking as much as the continued reproduction of a mythological iconography featuring stories of a decapitated, shape-shifting sorcerer who carried out supernatural attacks and counterattacks. In central Brazil, "Counter-witchcraft is... both a juro-political instrument administered through chiefs and prominent men, and as an ethno medical technique applied by shamans and counterwitches to rid society of spiritual parasites and pathogens" (Heckenberger 2004: 180). This does not deny a military context for trophy heads, but suggests a ritual dimension that may help explain their prominence in artwork and also their association with individuals wearing special costumes and with supernatural, fanged beings.
The association of the conical hat with the conical house, itself in turn a model for the larger universe, suggests that its wearers identified themselves as agents for change in universal sense. Their head-taking behavior transcended material concerns with territory and property, and even individual acts of revenge. In Bribri-Cabécar shamanism, the awápa are the healers of individuals, while the ancient Úsêkölpa were the healers of the community as a whole. For South America, there is abundant evidence that headhunting was frequently embedded within magical models for disease and illness. If this context was shared by indigenous cultures of southern Central America, trophy-head taking in ancient Costa Rica may not have been incidental, but central to acts of both physical and metaphysical warfare. The purpose of these acts was to combat illnesses that resulted from the effects of sorcery and witchcraft and in so doing to produce healing in a broad, all-encompassing sense. It may be this intent that was preserved in the both the mythology and the iconography of trophy heads in ancient Costa Rica.
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My name is Mark Gluth. I've written one novella length manuscript and am currently writing another. The first one is called The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis, the one I'm currently working on has the working title How We Rise, How We Never Fall. If I could say one thing about my writing it would be that I'm interested in simple language applied to literally true yet logically impossible narrative structures. I also really want my fiction to have an emotional logic that is separate from the structure. I guess I want the emotion to drive the narrative forward. If I could say one more thing it would be that I plan a lot and think a lot about my writing but I almost never understand what I'm doing. I basically understand intuitively when I've reached whatever goal I was aiming for, which is usually totally different than what I planned on. I rewrite so much until the language is perfect to me, and the narrative is compelling enough to sustain it. The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis went through way over 400 drafts. Everything I've ever written has been tied to a bunch of music that I find compelling while I'm writing. Right now I'm really into Mount Eerie/The microphones, and a quote from one of their songs is what's inspiring my writing : 'Is it because, there's a little part of you, that wants to be dead?' Before that it was a quote by Of Montreal "No matter where we are, we're always touching by underground wires" Here's a picture of me I took about a year ago. I think it still looks like me
Here's the opening paragraph of How We Rise, How We Never Fall. I think it's very close to nailed.
Hague’s just there, or barely. The packed dirt is damp n the shade of the tires. It’s soaking through his jeans and underwear. The playground’s a field. It’s baked and flat. The cone or whatever he’s in is cool considering. He can hear a train in the distance. He closes his eyes and pictures it. It’s a mirage. So is everything else. It disappears when he shakes his head. His headache doesn’t. He opens his eyes. It doesn’t matter. The opening over his head is blue. It moves way to slow for him to be able to handle so he digs at the dirt at his knees with a stone. The smooth point dents the ground more than anything else. The stone’s slimy. It slips from his hand. He presses it against his forehead. He feels the dirt and crap stuck underneath his fingernails. He punches at something, everything. His fist hits the wall of the stack of tires he’s in. They’re strapped together by bolts. The whole thing rings. That give way to silence. A cloud gives way to the sun. His knuckle’s cut. It’ll scab. He licks at it. It tastes like when white light fills his eyes. The air smells like wood. He pulls himself up. The swings don’t move. The building’s tan. The bricks are pale. The air smells like a storm. It smells like tar. He’s in the middle of the parking lot. He’s walking towards some cars. He leans foreword and spins. Orange juice and bread comes out of his mouth and nose. The kids in the tennis courts cheep riding their bikes. Hague’s mouth tastes horrible. He pulled something in his throat. The kids laugh and shout. He looks up. One of them lands a trick all blearily. Hague closes his eyes and starts walking. Home. He thinks he can make it, or not really.
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A KNIFE SET
By Marc Andreottola
1: Britney Spears
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Hi everyone… Tony O’Neill here, I post here under the rather unimaginative handle of “tonyoneill”. Since 2006 I have published 4 books, with a couple more in the works. Trying to sum myself up as a writer is pretty hard to do. I suppose you could say that what I do at the moment is autobiographical fiction (which sometimes veers into fantasy). In terms of style I’d say that writers like Herbert Huncke, John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante or early Burroughs have been the most influential when it comes to style. I have always felt that I was a bit of an odd fit in a society that seems to want to impose repressive rules upon us all, and writing is one way that I keep sane under the circumstances. Before I applied myself to writing I kept myself sane by numbing myself with heroin and crack. I spent a long time teetering between life and death, and when I met Vanessa (who is now my wife) I made the decision that I didn’t want to do that anymore. Writing is the thing that I use to fill the huge void inside of myself that the drugs left. I would definitely describe Vanessa as my muse, and she is always the first pair of eyes on any new piece of writing.
My first book was a pretty straight piece of reportage. “Digging the Vein” was written as I was detoxing from methadone and a combination of other drugs in 2003. Writing that book was basically a process of teaching myself how to write. “Digging” is a very claustrophobic book. It is set mostly in Los Angeles and details a catalogue of abuse mostly heaped upon the narrator by himself. In my novels, I leave the narrator nameless, in the hope that it helps the readers to place themselves in the narrator’s position. It was picked up by an indie called Contemporary Press in 2006. Wrecking Ball Press did a UK edition later the same year. The next book was “Seizure Wet Dreams” a collection of poems and short stories that came out in late 2006 on Social Disease, an independent press from the UK. “SWD” contains some of my strangest writing, many of the pieces written under the influence of strange drugs. It also introduces the character of “Joe” who pops up in a lot of my short stories as a stand in for me. He is meant to be a very ordinary, plain sort of a guy, but strange things usually happen to him in the stories (he gets castrated by a prostitute and once ball-less becomes a bestselling author. In another he gets eaten alive by a giant vagina. In another he meets Death.) The poetry collection “Songs from the Shooting Gallery” contains a lot of my most personal writing, and in my opinion some of my best. Burning Shore Press put it out in 2007. I consider “Songs” to be the closest I have ever written to a diary, and the poems – in terms of when they were written – run parallel to a lot of the events I have turned into fiction through my work.
“Hero of the Underground” (St Martins Press) is a book I co-wrote with NFL player Jason Peter. It is a memoir of his time as a professional footballer and his descent into drug addiction. His agent – and then Jason himself – read “Digging the Vein” and wanted to work with me. What should have been a mismatch from hell (I am not a sports guy, and I have never co written anything with anyone) turned out to be an amazing experience… The resulting book is getting good reviews, and as I type this is at #33 on the New York Times bestseller list. In terms of books that changed everything for me, this is it. I landed a fantastic agent out of the deal and interest in my writing has definitely increased. I have a new novel, “Down and Out on Murder Mile” about my time in London (my second marriage, meeting Vanessa and getting clean) coming out in November 2008 on Harper Perennial. That’s what I am providing an excerpt from. I am also putting together an as yet untitled short story collection for new French publisher 13th note Press…
DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE EXCERPT
Sometimes you could hear mice in the walls, in the quiet hours before the dawn. We started using heroin in earnest again. I watched Susan shrink and age here, dramatically - she lay on the bed mostly whining about dope sickness and fixing drugs and stinking the place up with the stench of the living dead - but sometimes – when I was too sick to move – she would relent and make the convoluted journey from murder mile to Hammersmith to pick up our drugs from RJ. I soon realized that waiting for her to come back was worse in a way than making the journey myself. The terrible sense of stasis, of time standing still, slipping backwards even, while bad daytime television crackled out of the set and the demons and the sickness flayed me alive in the bed was more unbearable than making the journey myself – of sweating and shaking in packed commuter trains and watching the stations grinding by…
At least then the countdown…Latimer Road… Shepherds Bush…Goldhawk Road… gave the sense of a building climax… and then in the toilet of the Kings Mall, a depressing Stalinist concrete façade, holed up in the filthy dark cubicle with one foot wedged against the lockless door listening to the homeless guy in the next stall take a spluttering liquid shit, the smell filling the whole place, I’d cook up my shot and thread the needle into my gooseflesh probing for a vein… thick black blood dripping down my forearm, spotting my jeans, forming in dark pools on the piss-wet tiles…
Once the shot was in my bloodstream the homeless guys shit started to smell like a home-cooked meal and I would feel pure pleasure in his guts instead of fear and hunger, and the long ride home became a reverie – relaxed and languid – handsome and perfect on the Hammersmith and City Line to Kings Cross, nodding in time to the trains slow motion lurches.
(Down and Out on Murder Mile – Harper Perennial, Nov 2008)
tonyoneill.net
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Víctor Sierra, en un tono íntimo, conversacional y, ante todo, próximo y directo, con mirada incisiva a través de su personal caleidoscopio, nos entrega testimonio en esta colección de poemas titulada Garabato. Aludiendo, quizá, a los trazos inconexos y arbitrarios que traza el niño que aún no sabe escribir (en Cuba es un implemento que sirve a los campesinos para poder peinar las hierbas altas y despejar el sitio donde, con un tajo, se cortan). Sus poemas nos amparan de lo banal y del sarcasmo cotidiano, indagando en el sentido de la aventura que ya es de por sí existir. -- Alberto Lauro, escritor y articulista del diario La Razón.
Deriva
Blanco esturión, naciste para domar las aguas
Entre los dientes, una lengua te entrega
a la memoria: límpida, perfecta, rotunda
El color de la tinta es el color de los mares
cuando avanzan, invisibles, hacia la noche
Olas llenas de palabra brotan en los labios
coronándote de sal y de misterio
- el secreto idéntico del verso y los océanos -
Sobre el horizonte, un dios náufrago entre lágrimas
muere como el pez, a orillas del poema
de "Garabato" (Scythecut, Madrid, 2008)
Drift
White sturgeon, you were born to tame the waters
between teeth, a tonge deliver you
to the memory: limpid, perfect, resounding
Color of the ink is the color of the seas
when they advance, invisible, towards night
Waves full of word sprout in the lips
crowning you with salt and mistery
- precise secret of verse and oceans -
Over the horizon, a shipwrecked god
dies like a fish on banks of the poem
from "Garabato" (Scythecut, Madrid, 2008)
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"My name is Ali Jaafar and I live in Minneapolis. I have been a reader of the site for about a year now but I have yet to comment. I guess this makes me a lurker but I don't like that word because it reminds of this crappy fake Derleth-Lovecraft book. I mostly write editorials for a local alternative magazine. I started writing sort-of-short sort-of-fiction recently to see what would happen. This is what happened:"
COAT OF ARMS
by ali jaafar
Her hands were like glass swans. They were porcelain, delicate, white-gloved figures possessed of lifelike curves yet ultimately artificial looking. They weren’t made for building, scrubbing, fighting, scratching, working. They were made for holding teacups.
She was holding a teacup. Every once in a while she would gingerly raise it to her lips and go on staring out of a large window set into a small patch of wall above a sink.
The sink was in a kitchen that looked like the rest of the house it inhabited: overstuffed, lacy, complex, Victorian. Everything was a lush red color that seemed to intensify along the edges of the room. At the center stood a wooden table illuminated by a small lamp set into the ceiling. Its harsh light cast dramatic shadows yet failed to wash out the kitchen’s rich red hue.
He leaned against the door frame, watching her. He kept thinking about how red it was in this place. All of their friends had described the place as “sexy” or “seductive.” He didn’t take this as a compliment. Kitchens ought not to be sexy, he thought.
And the whole place was like that. The sexy kitchen connected to the sexy sitting room connected to the sexy study to the sexy entryway to the sexy staircase… he thought of that one kids’ song.
When she had originally decided to redo the place, he was completely onboard. He thought that turning it into a Victorian nightmare-harem would dispel his father’s ghost, a meddlesome spirit that refused to give up the house.
Now invoking the name, he thought of his father. His last memory of that man was of a terrible, rasping skeleton-monster making proclamations from within his cocoon-pulpit. As he lay on his deathbed, he had summoned his children in order to divide up his empire. When it was his turn, his father called him close and whispered into his ear. He could remember the smell. “Son,” he said, “I’m leaving you the house. I want you and your wife to take care of it. I want you to take care of it because it will always be mine. As long as you live in it, it will always be mine. You will always be mine… my…”
Here he let out an enormous cough and gave up on speaking. He knew it was a mistake, that the old man simply hadn’t finished his sentence, but hearing him say “you’ll always be mine” summed up their relationship in a way that was incredibly and unnaturally honest.
Worse yet, he knew it was true. As long as he stayed in this place, his father’s shadow would always loom large. Still, he thought as he stood on the porch, who would give this up? The plot was large, the house was well built and maintained, the whole package in impeccably good taste.
All it took was one trip back inside to remember why he hated the place. Sitting in the violently red living room, he felt like a piece of furniture. Dust piled up faster than it could be swept away. In here, time moved faster as matter moved slower. He thought about moving his hand, brushing at the air, stirring up violent little torrents of dust, but couldn’t actually do it. Strange.
During his reverie, little Annalise had entered the kitchen. She sat at the table with her mother. They were drawing.
“Now, what do you see?” her mother asked, scratching at the paper with a pencil.
“Uh… nothing, really, I don’t think,” Annalise replied.
“Okay, what if I put a line here?”
“Um… a hippo?”
“How about here?” Now Annalise took the paper in her hands and rotated it this way and that. She squinted thoughtfully and set the paper back down.
“Weird!”
“Now do you see it?”
“Yeah! That’s so cool! Do another!” Her mother simply laughed and kissed her on the cheek. As she took out another sheet of paper, he left the room.
Outside again, the sun was setting and smearing color across the pseudo-night sky. Watching it stirred up a nameless sort of nostalgia. He longed for another time in his life. Any time would do.
He blinked and found himself in bed. She was lying next to him, breathing softly. She was awake. He knew that she was thinking of a way to get him to talk to her. He also knew that it wouldn’t work. He really didn’t care what she did anymore. Something had left him a while ago and now he knew that he couldn’t care for her like he used to. He could not say what had left him or why, but he just knew. Sometimes, she would reach out for him or say “I love you” or kiss him and he would respond in turn, but it was purely mechanical and she could tell. Lately, she had just stopped trying. He was relieved. These night-reveries were the only vestige of her emotional neediness and they really weren’t that bad. He only had to put up with the awkwardness of sleeping next to someone who’s awake.
He thought about that for a moment before his train of thought was completely smashed by sleep.
His dreams were frustrating mental vapor trails.
He woke up in bed, uncovered, vaguely aware of someone staring at him.
“Who’s Helen?” she asked.
His mind… turned, in a sense.
“What?”
“You were saying the name Helen. Moaning, a little.”
“It was just a dream,” he mumbled. “It was just a dream I had.”
It was most certainly not. Sitting in the den late that night, a television news broadcast illuminating the darkness, he ran through his thoughts incredulously. How could he have forgotten? Was it so long ago?
It’s hard to describe what he felt sitting in that den, remembering.
Mostly he could only remember the day she left turning into the weekend she left turning into the week turning into the month, semester, year, now… decade? Was it so long ago?
It was.
by David Ehrenstein
“Tho I very seldom think of him,
nevertheless
Sometimes a mannequin's
Blue summer dress
Can make the window
like a dream
Ah but now that dream belongs to someone else”
----- Tom Waits
---You’ve got to pay close attention because it comes out differently every time. Long-shots turn into close-ups, temp morts rush past like the last reel of Pickup On South Street or the first one of The Crimson Kimono. What once began as a long slow track through the rooms of a conspicuously large apartment somewhere in the Bronx (where people you’ve just met are chattering away while some Stax-Volt 45 or other thumps the air), somehow conflates into a rapid pan. Then the boy you’ve come looking for staggers out of the cigarette smoke with that big teasing smile of his. Yes, it's a movie. Playing in perpetuity in the RKO-Keith's of memory. Nobody sitting up in the second balcony but me. Likewise the camera/ projector (they're two devices in one.) And the house lights never come on.
---Wait a minute, am in the right place? Barry wasn’t atr this party, was he? No. So what's happening ? Must we “begin at the beginning” --running down the streets of the Bronx by the Quonset huts towards an intersection big as time and space itself? Yes. I’m all of two alone. Sex came later -- in the basement with Ernest, who I never really liked. But we were eight and he wanted me, and (Frank O’Hara) I wanted to be wanted more than anything else in the world. No, that came later too. First stirrings in High School when I met Cary and his identical twin brother. So beautiful they took my breath away. Not cliché -- fact. I gasped at the sight of them, waving from the window of the apartment where they lived with their mother (a theater director who later became an AIDS researcher) trying my best to muffle the sound. No, “nothing happened" save the jump-starting of a fascination with twins whose apex was reached when I met (separately) the Malet brothers -- one sweet (Laurent) one sour (Pierre). But that wasn't sex either, it was infatuation. Sex was grubbier, like Marvin, the boy down the street, who I didn't like at all yet for some reason wanted (and had). Like the guy who ran the bicycle store on Madison near the Metropolitan Museum (never asked for his name, he never asked for mine.) For two weeks running he blew me as I sipped my morning coffee (always scalding hot), standing calmly in my guards uniform.Just sex and nothing more. And I wanted more. What happened to that beauty in the pool in Berkeley, inviting me to come down from my hotel room balcony to swim naked with him one late August afternoon in ‘71? What happened to the boy with crossed eyes and curved cock who I had in the GAA Firehouse basement? And who was it that I made out with on the Firehouse roof? Nichevo!
Barry Prince
---I can’t remember a first meeting with him at all. Like everyone else back then Barry was just perpetually there, hovering in the half-light. It could have been though Peter or Pepe. They certainly knew Barry, at least as much as anyone else did, which is to say “from around.” -- that great floating crap game of screenings, gallery openings, museum jaunts, coffee shops, city streets. Surely he went to those Sunday morning premieres Warren Sonbert held at the Bleecker. Was there a shot or two of Barry in one of the films (The Tenth Legion, Truth Serum)? He was certainly Warren’s “type” -- smart, self-contained, hot. Oh hell, Barry was everybody’s “type.” But he didn’t go with everybody. In fact he didn’t really seem to go with anybody -- at least as far as I could tell then. (“I’m younger than that now.”) Barry didn’t haunt the de rigeur dives of the West Village (“The Ninth Circle”) or the Lower East Side (“Stanley’s”). Maybe my timing was off. I know I never found him there whenever I (ever so carefully) slipped through, which was fairly often. He was a Museum of Modern Art boy. Very East Side. To the Manner Born.
---Now I’m recalling coffee with him at the food stand by the boat house in Central Park, only a few steps away from the Ramble. Was I headed for the Ramble that day? Was he? We’d run into each other in front of the Bethesda fountain and drifted over to the boathouse to sit around and talk about Godard. We were all about Godard back then. Pynchon too. Easier to speak indirectly through movies like Masculine Feminine and books like V, than head-on about life. Was that Bethesda meet before or after that day I saw Barry on Madison Ave.? No, it was before, because (That Hamilton Woman), “There was then, there was no after.”
---I know I was on my way to one of those little bookstores that used to dot that street (we’re talking long before Arthur Loeb set up shop) when I ran into Barry. Or rather I suddenly became aware of the fact that Barry had run into me -- loomed up “out of nowhere.” Could he have been following me? Too romantic. What was the book I’d been looking for? Something by Laurence Durrell I think, though I know we were most recently talking (as usual) about V, which I was convinced would make an ideal Losey movie. It was a conversation I know we’d had before -- ritual chatter in place of what we really wanted to say and couldn’t because we didn’t know we wanted to. Or at least I didn't. Or maybe did know but was just too scared to make the attempt. And what did Barry know? He didn't say. Ever.
---I know I was in a good mood that day in 1967. Giddy even. So much so, that I didn’t really recognize how little Barry actually had to say, or realize that he was steering me towards his apartment which (like him) loomed up “out of nowhere.” How convenient. It was a late afternoon, bright shafts cutting through the gathering dusk.(The thing I most loved about Madison avenue was the late afternoon light. Like Frank O'Hara says "in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth/ between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles") And so a proposal was made by Barry to stop by to “have coffee.” Or was it just “a drink”? Doesn’t matter really, for the minute we walked through the door he pulled his face up close to mine -- giggling. I can’t recall reacting then as I’m reacting now (aroused). What was I not thinking? Was I that naive to suppose we were just there for coffee? For some weird reason I “didn’t see it coming.” We sat on a couch where I continued to talk -- as if the “face off” at the door never happened. But then in mid mot juste Barry kissed me. Suddenly. Sweetly. Repeatedly. Then he began to undress me. I was being “seduced,” like a paperback potboiler heroine. But was I really? Hey, I was peeling Barry’s clothes off too. The “seduction” was mutual.
---How very odd, I would think to myself afterwards. It was as if a wish unvoiced until just that very moment had been suddenly granted. Was there been even a hint of this previously? “There was proximity but no relating,” (Nichols and May.) Barry wasn’t meant for me, “Heigh-Ho -- Who cares?” (Larry Hart.) And part of the reason was there almost always was a girl in Barry’s general vicinity. Or seemed to be. I wasn’t attentive enough to realize what the presence of said girl actually meant. I was “attracted” to Barry, but not actively, not consciously. I’d never “pursued” him because I thought sure he’d say no. I felt so little of myself back then. I had no body that I could see or even acknowledge (that didn’t surface until years later in L.A.) No face to win or woo. At best I was just a “clever” voice. Why court rejection? File Barry away with “flirtations” like Jonny (who kissed me) and Charlie (who didn’t.) Shove him back into the attic of the “unconscious.”
---But what did I know or care of the “unconscious”? Consciousness was all that mattered. What with all the semi-discreet drinking of those days (and we were making love right around “cocktail time”), sometimes accompanied by select narcotics (opium, mon amour) more than anything else I wanted to be "awake" as much as possible. It seemed vitally important that I “stay up till dawn” or I’d “miss something” (a habit that continued well into the 80’s) And yet for all such temporal scrupulousness I nearly missed Barry; his big Modigliani face, with Ninetto Davoli curls on top, and that fuzzy hedge-like mustache over the smile. A mustache, mind you, firmly in place before the de rigeur “Mark Spitz” arrived. Barry’s was unruly, unlike his manner. That was hesitant, quiet. "Too quiet" as they say in the 40’s programmers. And that was why I was so surprised when he kissed me “just like that.” Sudden pure delight. So intense I can still feel it.. More than I did even then. "And right now" (Frank O'Hara again.)
---So there we were, spooning. Rubbing up against one another, getting hard, looking at our hardness and laughing at its absurdity (sex is utterly absurd) , and kissing more and more. Then Barry took me over to -- of all things -- a waterbed. It was my first and last time on that great silly 60’s-era contraption. Funny to find one in his apartment. He never struck me as susceptible to "trends.” But what did I know? Was it even Barry’s apartment anyway? He could have been “minding” the place for a friend or relative. No reason to ask, for by then we’d started in. It was a long, slow tender fuck, quite different from the furtive late night violence I’d been used to up till then, and largely enjoyed. Sex was something to be consummated (consumed, consume ) with total strangers, not friends. Quickly, vertically, and in the dark -- not savored like this when it was still light.
---Barry cooed, and we rocked gently to and fro with the water. How corny. How hot. Then we lay back, almost falling asleep, then stroking and kissing some more in anticipation of the next round, and then some rest and then some more. Then quiet as we just lay there looking at each other for the longest time. And then there was a knock at the door.
---It was Gypsy. She was a longtime member of The Living Theater, just back from its world tour, totally prepared to make amends for our lack of volubility. Amends hell -- she ignored it. Full of talk Gypsy was, all about there and here and how things had and hadn’t changed since she’d last been to New York. A perfect interloper aperitif, her timing couldn’t have been better, for it was clear we were though with fucking for the short run. Now it was early evening. and Barry and I were on the edge of restlessness. Gypsy raided the ice box and cooked us something. Or did we just open a few cans of this or that “delicacy” and down a few glasses of wine? Here’s a missing reel for you. Not important. We were in such a rush to keep up with her -- physically as well as mentally. We had to go dancing, she said. And she knew just the place. Barry smiled -- a far different smile from those he’d flashed before. It’s taken me all this time to really see that smile, and realize he knew where we were going all along. Not that any of this was "planned." Certainly meeting me wasn't planned. Certainly bedding me was an improvisation. And he hadn’t been expecting Gypsy’s arrival either. But put those chance events together and he knew there was only one place to go next.
---"You can’t live if you don’t have money!" -- one of the many Paradise Now! watch-cries that Gypsy had been shouting out all over Europe. And like any true-blue member of “Le Living,” she wasn’t just mouthing a text that Julian Beck and Judith Malina had handed to her. She lived anarchy. Or rather she lived with it. “Let’s take this cab,” she said striding right out into the street and stopping one, as if for an emergency. Clearly the drive would have stopped anyway. But what did he think of the fare he’d just picked up? He gave no notice of Barry and I needless to say. Gypsy was in complete command of the situation. With her long dark brown hair and bangs covering her forehead in a style Nico made her own (did she copy it from Gypsy or vice versa?) with lovely pale white features peering out from underneath she was a cabby’s dream of a “beatnik/hippie” girl/woman. He was dazzled from the start, and clearly ripe for the picking -- which in this case constituted giving us a free ride.
---“These pieces of paper are meaningless,” Gypsy told him. “Don’t let them control your life. We should all do things because we love each other. We love you, you know. Do you love us?” The cabby chuckled. Had he heard this spiel before? He didn’t say. But there was no way for him to say anything. Gypsy was doing all the talking -- seizing every molecule of air that rushed thought the open windows just as she did the more easily dominated stasis of the apartment. Not that the cabby cared. This would be a story he could tell his fellow cabbies later at the diner (Taxi Driver.) And so we arrived at wherever-in-hell we were going. It was on the West Side somewhere in the 50’s. Gypsy kissed the cabby and we all piled out. Had Barry seen Gypsy do this before? Not important. He was as giddy as I was with the thrill of “getting away with it” And so with this distaff embodiment of Melville’s Confidence-Man we strode up to a front door of a club -- yes it had to have been somewhere in the lower West 50’s -- and went inside. Now what was it’s name? Never looked. Never asked. Never mind.
---It was enormous; decorated in “early nothing” (Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.) But it truly didn’t need any decor at all. It had women. Or rather it had lesbians. A literal sapphic sea. Barry and I were the only men in the place (perfectly evoked in Living Out Loud. Had Richard LaGravanese been there that night too?) Gypsy vanished into the sea, never to be seen again, leaving Barry and I to dance by ourselves --swimming with the sapphic tide. And swim we did, dancing together -- yet alone. For Barry being here was an exercise in perfect solitude. I was along for the ride. His ride. Like me, Barry adored the solitude of crowds. And the crowds he adored were lesbian. The sisterly-maternal warmth they provided had an intoxicating effect on him that was palpable. It was as if he were drunk on air.
---Barry was a lesbian-hag. Like Proust. A singular breed of gay man, not easily found, not easily held. Oh I could hold him for a few hours, but surely I could expect no more. In the wee smalls we left and went back to the apartment. Night and the city and we rocked in my sweet baby’s arms (Terry Melcher) Time stops and the world slips away. And in the morning ? Smiles, kisses, coffee, and good-bye. No, maybe not even anything voiced. Just a kisses -- sweet as pie. Maybe sweeter because we would never see each other again. Not by design of course. We were swallowed up by the city. We spun away into space and time. I don’t know whatever “became” of Barry, a l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. But hey, no tears, no regrets.
---It was a good first marriage.
Tom Dillow
---“Let’s get out of here, Tom whispered down my ear quickly. “OK,” I said. And why not? I was being seduced again, wasn’t I? Well maybe, sorta, kinda. With Tom who could tell? I had just been introduced to him (though I knew of him well before ) at this perfectly lovely party -- winter of ‘67, right around New Year's, somewhere on the east side in the 80s. And who was seducing whom anyway? A very open question as usual.
---Tom had been on my mind for some time prior to this. He was in Warren's first film, Amphetamine where he shares one of the longest most intense screen kisses ever with Tommy Mitchell. They were both high as kites, and Warren was doing a rapid hand-held 360 around them -- a homemade homage to the climax of Vertigo. Oh to be inside that shot.
---“So who was that blonde kissing Tommy?”
---“Oh that’s Tom Dillow.”
---“And?”
---“(knowing chuckle)”
---Of course Warren was at the party. So were several of the others we both knew, like Vivian Kurtz. Vivian and I were cinematic soulmates, strung out on Demy’s Lola, going to see it every time it played The New Yorker or the Thalia. (“I just knew you’d be here,” she said to me one afternoon floating out of the theater just as I was floating in.) Andy Meyer (hushed and slightly withdrawn as always) was there too. He wanted to make Vivian a star. So did Bruce Conner. But Vivian’s taste shifted to eastern religion until she discovered after years of study “I don’t want no Rimposhe romance.” I could have chatted with Vivian all night if I hadn’t been distracted by Tom -- that huge lock of hair falling across his face in the classic manner of the 60’s-era bombshells that owned my heart (Terence Stamp, Michael York, Richard Warwick .)
---Tom was very loud and very forward and very drunk and very hot. Flirting stealthily with great panache (sidling up alongside me, talking in calm, hushed, deliberate tones about this person or that) he was “feeling me out” while “feeling me up” -- learning what and who I did and didn’t know. Then suddenly he proposed, right out of the blue, that we up and go to the movies. Ordinarily I wouldn’t want to leave a party as lively as this one. But Tom was ever so much livelier than any party. So we left, and went to the Regency to see The Chelsea Girls -- which, needless to say, we'd both seen many times before. Tom knew everyone in the cast, particularly the Boston crowd (Ed Hood and Patrick Fleyming) and began dishing away cheerily -- all the while making out with me. It was a delirium of talk and smooch. “Well you know what Rene said?” and “Oh I must show you Boston!” and “Well that night at the Casa B. . .” It was good old-fashioned movie theater balcony necking, but quite intense. I came very close to coming several times. And every time I reached the brink he whispered down my ear to calm me down and hold me off -- which I did until we got back to his hotel room for what turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic. We were both too distracted by then -- essentially already spent. Naturally that was it. Hey -- I'd gotten more than I'd asked for.
---Decades later, I read Savage Grace; the oral history of a real-life incest and murder story it all came rushing back to me. Compiled Edie style the book recounts how the rich and twisted Brooks and Barbara Bakeland destroyed Tony -- the gay son that Brooks ordered Barbara to "ungay." She elected to do so by sleeping with him. Obviously not a good idea. Mother-son relations went from worse to Worst Case Scenario. While on a visit to England he stabbed her to death in what can only be called a fit of pique. Sent to a local loony bin Tony was thought to be successfully rehabbed enough to get shipped back stateside for care in a nice expensive clinic. But due to an unaccountable screw up he was sent to his grandmother instead. He pulled a knife, stabbing her several times. She lived. He went to a U.S. prison where he eventually killed himself. Minus the murder and incest, Tony Bakeland struck a familiar chord -- an Arthur Loeb gone really wrong. But there was something more that popped upright into my face on page 59 -- Tom Dillow. He was describing how Barbara Bakeland told her seduction of Tony “happened in that house they had in Mallorca. . .a real spooky place. . .She didn’t give me any details. Oh no. Barbara was a lady.” Then on page 366, Frederic Combs part-time actor/ model (one of The Boys in the Band) part-time drug dealer (and supplier to Dominick Dunne) mentions how Tom introduced him to Barbara and Tony. But the big payoff is on page 409 where Tom reports “Tony asked Bart for my number, and Bart called to warn men that Tony was trying to find me. I mean, I was in the phone book, but, you now, for the Bakelands a telephone number didn’t exist unless they got it from someone. Bart said Tony told him, ‘T-t-t-tom n-never understood why I m-m-murdered M-mummy.’ ”
---Was Tom afraid that Tony was thinking of killing him? Obviously the book identifies him as a friend of Barbara’s more than Tony’s. But what would that mean in context? After all this was a woman who on the one had pursued gay men (she’s reported to at one point desired to have Sam Green’s child) and on the other called her son a “homo.” The detail about getting a telephone number from a third party rather than the phone book is most fascinating in that it truly evokes that class and their lives. It was a class Warren slipped though easily, but never truly lighted on. Tom it appears was Nick Caraway to Tony’s Daisy. Or better still a player of note in the failed schemes of the Tony the Ripley wannabe. Clearly Warren knew Tony. In fact he undoubtedly turned up at those Bleecker screenings and was probably present at that party where Tom ran off with me. But that was long ago and far away and (William Makepeace Thackeray) “They are all equal now.”
Allen
---It’s all one fast continuous motion. Run up the stars, knock on the door, throw him on the floor, pull off his clothes, fuck him. Could it all have been that easy? Surely not. Surely there was some slight tremor of resistance (either real or feigned, no matter) on his part. Not on mine. I wanted to fuck and he wanted to get fucked. Afternoons were best. Always. We were both awake and alert by then and just bored enough to ache (ever so slightly) for a soupcon of release. Physical only. There was no emotional release -- either sought or achieved.
---Allen was pretentious. Hell, I was pretentious too, but no quite so much as he was. Oh hell, it was a photo finish. Allen insisted that Jean-Paul Sartre was gay because Simone de Beauvoir used to pass her girlfriends on to him. "So who was his boyfriend?" I'd ask. Allen would never say. He'd just laugh his “What a stupid question,” laugh and gloss on. He was always one for great vague pronouncements about one thing or another. And when he spoke to me he always seemed to be looking every so slightly away -- as if he was trying to attract the attention of someone else in the room. But there wasn't anyone else in the room. Not much in the way of furniture either -- which was typical of the lower east side in those days. ("But a chair is not a house.") Just a big and well-swept (the equivalent of "clean") space.
---Allen chattered away almost incessantly. Only sex would shut him up. It was as if someone had left the bathtub running and I'd rushed in to stop it just before it overflowed and dripped into the downstars neighbor's apartment. Rather proud of myself for being able to do so. Then ever so slightly annoyed. Then truly annoyed. No, this couldn't go on.
---It didn't.
---In some ways Allen wasn’t all that special. I recall him as “one of a set.” He was like that guy who lived in a townhouse on the upper east side -- right on the first floor with a view of the park. Just as insolent. Just as self-involved. He wanted it, then hesitated, then took it, then withdrew, then moved forward again. And by that time I’d started to dress and leave. All told it wasn’t half-bad. Just half-memorable, like a quickie at the Baths. Complete strangers can (sometimes) be so much more satisfying than friends. Especially "friends" like Allen who didn't need me. Or maybe he did. I certainly thought I needed Allen.
---From time to time.
---In a manner of speaking.
---In a manner of fucking.
---So I kept going back, maybe in the (vain) hope of breaking through to something more, something other. Somewhere along the way I stopped. And at that point Allen vanished. Nowhere to be seen in the streets, the bars, the clubs.Maybe he went to Woodstock, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Mexico. A vanishing act. When I left New York it was my own vanishing act. I still see Allen’s smile -- hovering Cheshire Cat-like in the half-remembered air.
---I still want to smack him.
Joe Drexel
---Is love necessary? No seriously. So much trouble. So much bother. Sex, on the other hand is necessary. Some of the time. In any event it's a whole lot easier to navigate than love. You know where you are, where you’ve been and most important of all where you’re going. Right there. That’s where Joe was -- the there.
---Allen chattered away almost incessantly. Only sex would shut him up. It was as if someone had left the bathtub running and I'd rushed in to stop it just before it overflowed and dripped into the downstars neighbor's apartment. Rather proud of myself for being able to do so. Then ever so slightly annoyed. Then truly annoyed. No, this couldn't go on.
---It didn't.
---In some ways Allen wasn’t all that special. I recall him as “one of a set.” He was like that guy who lived in a townhouse on the upper east side -- right on the first floor with a view of the park. Just as insolent. Just as self-involved. He wanted it, then hesitated, then took it, then withdrew, then moved forward again. And by that time I’d started to dress and leave. All told it wasn’t half-bad. Just half-memorable, like a quickie at the Baths. Complete strangers can (sometimes) be so much more satisfying than friends. Especially "friends" like Allen who didn't need me. Or maybe he did. I certainly thought I needed Allen.
---From time to time.
---In a manner of speaking.
---In a manner of fucking.
---So I kept going back, maybe in the (vain) hope of breaking through to something more, something other. Somewhere along the way I stopped. And at that point Allen vanished. Nowhere to be seen in the streets, the bars, the clubs.Maybe he went to Woodstock, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Mexico. A vanishing act. When I left New York it was my own vanishing act. I still see Allen’s smile -- hovering Cheshire Cat-like in the half-remembered air.
---I still want to smack him.
Joe Drexel
---Is love necessary? No seriously. So much trouble. So much bother. Sex, on the other hand is necessary. Some of the time. In any event it's a whole lot easier to navigate than love. You know where you are, where you’ve been and most important of all where you’re going. Right there. That’s where Joe was -- the there.
---One thing's certain -- it started with a lot of talk. Joe loved to talk. a fortiori he loved to argue. I loved to argue back. So "conversation" consisted of long, quasi-stream-of-consciousness monologues on his part punctuated with "additional dialogue" by me.
---“I really can’t agree with you on that,” I’d say. He’d fume. And then we'd fuck. Intense angry fucks. A struggle for dominance surely Yet more like clearing the air. Fucking was a way of saying "I don't love you." Fucking was a way to keep warm in his cold water flat. All painted white and clean it was, cozy. Joe was a dancer. No, more than that. What’s called a "performance artist" today. They had no name for what he did back then. He didn’t care. He had plans.
---“I really can’t agree with you on that,” I’d say. He’d fume. And then we'd fuck. Intense angry fucks. A struggle for dominance surely Yet more like clearing the air. Fucking was a way of saying "I don't love you." Fucking was a way to keep warm in his cold water flat. All painted white and clean it was, cozy. Joe was a dancer. No, more than that. What’s called a "performance artist" today. They had no name for what he did back then. He didn’t care. He had plans.
---An original member of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Joe appeared in Wilson's very first New York spectacular The King of Spain. But then Joe moved on. Wilson moved on too, though when I met Wilson decades later and mentioned Joe he flushed with excitement. Who could forget Deafman Glance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the tropical forest, Egyptian pyramids, dancing mammies penguins and bunny rabbits, and Jack Smith fighting his own appearance in the thing every step of the way and screaming about the penguins. No room for Joe in that crowd. In its wake Wilson was taken up by Jerome Robbins and was off to the Big Time never to return to such baroque primitivism.
---Joe was (is) elsewhere. The last time I saw him I was invited to Baird Searles and Martin Last's place for a party around Christmas/ New Year’s. They had been toying with the notion of an orgy, but really didn’t have the nerve for it. Everyone was supposed to come dressed for the beach. But they weren't really serious about it. So Joe and I didn’t bother bringing bathing suits. After lolling about for a couple of hours stark naked, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone else (a dull lot, clearly we had scared them off) Joe and I took a shower and a fuck, then left.
---Joe was (is) elsewhere. The last time I saw him I was invited to Baird Searles and Martin Last's place for a party around Christmas/ New Year’s. They had been toying with the notion of an orgy, but really didn’t have the nerve for it. Everyone was supposed to come dressed for the beach. But they weren't really serious about it. So Joe and I didn’t bother bringing bathing suits. After lolling about for a couple of hours stark naked, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone else (a dull lot, clearly we had scared them off) Joe and I took a shower and a fuck, then left.
---I'm not sure why I never saw Joe after that. We hadn't quarreled. People started to recede in New York by the mid-70's as the city had begun to take on the aspect of a vast stage spectacle -- far more complex than any Wilson could devise. Odd none of his plays ever evoked the piers, like Bernard-Marie Koltes (who I do believe I did one hot afternoon.) New York itself began to recede. So I brought down the curtain and left with Bill for California. All gone now, save for happy thoughts of angry sex. Angry and tender.
Camille
---Los Angeles in the late 70’s. Different place, different mode, different mood, different drinks. (beer and whiskey in New York, gin and tonic in L.A.), different me. The stark blue-gray flatness of the of it all is overwhelming. In New York I was all scurrying about and doubling back -- little circles jutting up and down across the lower West Side. Through the West and East I floated when drunk or stoned. In L.A. movement proceeded in a straight semi-continuous line in either direction -- either down to the ocean and the edge of the world, or back the other way to Silverlake, and the “Swish Alps.” Most often by bus. Sometimes (the kindness of strangers) by car. No rush in any case. Time slows to a crawl, and sometimes stands still. And so I drank at a different rate. Quick nips in New York. Lengthy nursings in L.A. Maybe that’s because I wasn't looking for anyone in particular anymore . If sex happens, fine. If not, not. It’s no longer immanent. I am cruising without object. And L.A. is ideal for solo flights. Or at least it was.
---You could still see the air then -- as if the entire city had just wafted in from the desert, assembling itself as it arrived. And that assemblage was decidedly louche. Today Santa Monica boulevard resembles a planter. A perfectly good decrepit Von’s at the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica has been replaced with a Whole Foods Market -- filled with overpriced “health.” But then the boulevard itself has been brutally “upscaled.” From a place you’d never dare take you mother it’s now a perfect pit-stop for Grandma and Aunt Sylvia. Yes the bars are there, but not as many, and not as lively. Seems like yesterday I was delighted to discover my favorite Spike bartender in a Gage Brothers production. Now the whole area reflects the decline of porn from its 16mm glory days to the video torpor of today -- shaved bodies redolent of candy cream rather than experience.
---And what I experienced thirty years back was always in the late afternoon. Sundays most of all. (A complete 180 from New York’s wee smalls.) And part of this new sexual miss en scene was its inherent conviviality. New York was about solitude. LA casual friendship. One is never entirely alone. Conversations struck up here and there with “regulars” at the Spike or those equally “butch”-named clubs in Silverlake go on for weeks -- months even. Picked up and dropped like verbal knitting. It’s built into the landscape in a way. For Los Angeles is space is applied to time. We float in an eternal present here. No “then” or “when.” Just the contours of a drink. And into said contours Camille came loping one Sunday.
---Late afternoon was about to give way to early evening. Some of the “regs” trotted off to dinner, others (like myself) stayed on for one more. Slowly. “Nothing” happening. Therefore odd to see the entrance of someone who clearly had “an agenda.” His face scoured the patio as if he were looking for something (one) specific -- as if he were there to keep an appointment. But he was just cruising in the aggressive New York manner redolent of a “sidewalk sale.” He came over and began to talk to me. No other reason really. He needed an audience, and wasn’t he lucky to have found one. And who was I to resist anyone with Marguerite Gautier’s nom de guerre. (Yes men can be named Camille too.) We had so many people, places and things to talk about -- though Camille rode in limos that had only rushed past my line of vision in New York. He was sharp-tongued like Ondine, almost as withering. Yet he had an air of “class” remindful of the best bred Music and Art boys Just what you’d expect of a petit ami of Egon’s. So why wasn’t he in New York then? He never said. Trying his luck in Hollywood? Trying to translate his book The Power Look into a movie ? The next American Gigolo? Made sense. After all he wasn’t staying at a hotel. He had rented a furnished apartment in Beverly Hills just on the edge of WeHo. Half furnished, really casual. We did it on the floor.
---Neither of us enjoyed it very much, yet we wanted each other’s company for that space of time -- waiting for a subject to arise that might bring us together more. it never did. The ritual phone number exchange arrived with a sense that while we’d never call we’d be sure to chat again if we “ran into” each other somewhere, likely soon. No, not The Spike. Somewhere more “socially acceptable.” Maybe a screening. And in this Camille evoked what a casual trick’s “second act” might be luck. Lust followed by politesse. I was momentarily impressed. Later annoyed. but not for long. He's gone now and you can’t stay angry at the dead.
Arthur Evans 2
---Back to New York again -- just for a few mental minutes. That’s all it takes, really. The image (his smiling furry little face) appears clearly enough, but the sound's too low -- like a TV set whose volume knob you somehow can't turn up. That's how it was with Arthur 2 -- as we all called him.. Arthur Evans 1 is a figure of historical import now -- Gay Liberation's fiercest firebrand. Loud, brusque, taking no shit from anyone, Arthur Evans 1 was in the front line at every demo; the first row of every meeting, or press conference. And that’s because he belonged there. Arthur Evans 2 was someone very much else.
---He was a GAA. member too -- hence the necessity of numerical distinction. He went to all the meetings, served on several committees, and joined in any number of demos or "zaps." But you couldn't mistake Arthur 2 for Arthur 1 if you tried. Easy to recall this tiny figure in floppy clothes and floppier hair standing at the edges of everything, smiling. Easy to remember runnign into him on the streets and in the bars, and going off with him on jaunts of his own devise -- like that tiem we went to that apartment whose kitchen the two guys who owned it had painted their version of a Douannier Rousseau forest -- with a barber's chair smack in the middle of the room. Arthur 2 happily giggled at the sight of it. Arthur 2 always seemed happy and giggling. And as far as I know he always was -- until AIDS took him away. But that was years later, back in the 80's when I'd lost track of him. The Arthur 2 I'm talking about is the boy who was born to make love. Not expertly. Not “experimentally.” And certainly not “dangerously.” Making love to Arthur 2 was as comfortable as curling up on an old sofa. He kept chatting away. Lord only knows about what -- just a stream of happy verbosity through all the kisses and caresses. The voice was well above a whisper, but not quite as loud as standard speech. Almost like an interior monologue that had elected to make itself slightly heard.
Camille
---Los Angeles in the late 70’s. Different place, different mode, different mood, different drinks. (beer and whiskey in New York, gin and tonic in L.A.), different me. The stark blue-gray flatness of the of it all is overwhelming. In New York I was all scurrying about and doubling back -- little circles jutting up and down across the lower West Side. Through the West and East I floated when drunk or stoned. In L.A. movement proceeded in a straight semi-continuous line in either direction -- either down to the ocean and the edge of the world, or back the other way to Silverlake, and the “Swish Alps.” Most often by bus. Sometimes (the kindness of strangers) by car. No rush in any case. Time slows to a crawl, and sometimes stands still. And so I drank at a different rate. Quick nips in New York. Lengthy nursings in L.A. Maybe that’s because I wasn't looking for anyone in particular anymore . If sex happens, fine. If not, not. It’s no longer immanent. I am cruising without object. And L.A. is ideal for solo flights. Or at least it was.
---You could still see the air then -- as if the entire city had just wafted in from the desert, assembling itself as it arrived. And that assemblage was decidedly louche. Today Santa Monica boulevard resembles a planter. A perfectly good decrepit Von’s at the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica has been replaced with a Whole Foods Market -- filled with overpriced “health.” But then the boulevard itself has been brutally “upscaled.” From a place you’d never dare take you mother it’s now a perfect pit-stop for Grandma and Aunt Sylvia. Yes the bars are there, but not as many, and not as lively. Seems like yesterday I was delighted to discover my favorite Spike bartender in a Gage Brothers production. Now the whole area reflects the decline of porn from its 16mm glory days to the video torpor of today -- shaved bodies redolent of candy cream rather than experience.
---And what I experienced thirty years back was always in the late afternoon. Sundays most of all. (A complete 180 from New York’s wee smalls.) And part of this new sexual miss en scene was its inherent conviviality. New York was about solitude. LA casual friendship. One is never entirely alone. Conversations struck up here and there with “regulars” at the Spike or those equally “butch”-named clubs in Silverlake go on for weeks -- months even. Picked up and dropped like verbal knitting. It’s built into the landscape in a way. For Los Angeles is space is applied to time. We float in an eternal present here. No “then” or “when.” Just the contours of a drink. And into said contours Camille came loping one Sunday.
---Late afternoon was about to give way to early evening. Some of the “regs” trotted off to dinner, others (like myself) stayed on for one more. Slowly. “Nothing” happening. Therefore odd to see the entrance of someone who clearly had “an agenda.” His face scoured the patio as if he were looking for something (one) specific -- as if he were there to keep an appointment. But he was just cruising in the aggressive New York manner redolent of a “sidewalk sale.” He came over and began to talk to me. No other reason really. He needed an audience, and wasn’t he lucky to have found one. And who was I to resist anyone with Marguerite Gautier’s nom de guerre. (Yes men can be named Camille too.) We had so many people, places and things to talk about -- though Camille rode in limos that had only rushed past my line of vision in New York. He was sharp-tongued like Ondine, almost as withering. Yet he had an air of “class” remindful of the best bred Music and Art boys Just what you’d expect of a petit ami of Egon’s. So why wasn’t he in New York then? He never said. Trying his luck in Hollywood? Trying to translate his book The Power Look into a movie ? The next American Gigolo? Made sense. After all he wasn’t staying at a hotel. He had rented a furnished apartment in Beverly Hills just on the edge of WeHo. Half furnished, really casual. We did it on the floor.
---Neither of us enjoyed it very much, yet we wanted each other’s company for that space of time -- waiting for a subject to arise that might bring us together more. it never did. The ritual phone number exchange arrived with a sense that while we’d never call we’d be sure to chat again if we “ran into” each other somewhere, likely soon. No, not The Spike. Somewhere more “socially acceptable.” Maybe a screening. And in this Camille evoked what a casual trick’s “second act” might be luck. Lust followed by politesse. I was momentarily impressed. Later annoyed. but not for long. He's gone now and you can’t stay angry at the dead.
Arthur Evans 2
---Back to New York again -- just for a few mental minutes. That’s all it takes, really. The image (his smiling furry little face) appears clearly enough, but the sound's too low -- like a TV set whose volume knob you somehow can't turn up. That's how it was with Arthur 2 -- as we all called him.. Arthur Evans 1 is a figure of historical import now -- Gay Liberation's fiercest firebrand. Loud, brusque, taking no shit from anyone, Arthur Evans 1 was in the front line at every demo; the first row of every meeting, or press conference. And that’s because he belonged there. Arthur Evans 2 was someone very much else.
---He was a GAA. member too -- hence the necessity of numerical distinction. He went to all the meetings, served on several committees, and joined in any number of demos or "zaps." But you couldn't mistake Arthur 2 for Arthur 1 if you tried. Easy to recall this tiny figure in floppy clothes and floppier hair standing at the edges of everything, smiling. Easy to remember runnign into him on the streets and in the bars, and going off with him on jaunts of his own devise -- like that tiem we went to that apartment whose kitchen the two guys who owned it had painted their version of a Douannier Rousseau forest -- with a barber's chair smack in the middle of the room. Arthur 2 happily giggled at the sight of it. Arthur 2 always seemed happy and giggling. And as far as I know he always was -- until AIDS took him away. But that was years later, back in the 80's when I'd lost track of him. The Arthur 2 I'm talking about is the boy who was born to make love. Not expertly. Not “experimentally.” And certainly not “dangerously.” Making love to Arthur 2 was as comfortable as curling up on an old sofa. He kept chatting away. Lord only knows about what -- just a stream of happy verbosity through all the kisses and caresses. The voice was well above a whisper, but not quite as loud as standard speech. Almost like an interior monologue that had elected to make itself slightly heard.
---I remember being up at Arthur 2's apartment one night. (Was it really his or just a "friend's" place he was staying in? A familiar scene for me.) Nothing specific about the interior. It's just that it was on the West Side -- very high in the New York air. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find Arthur -- a Lower East Side boy. It was a tad more (but at the last not quite) suitable to that other Arthur, Loeb. But that Arthur was an East Side sybarite, not an object of either romantic fixation or political note. But what I'm trying to remember, and can't, is what Arthur 2 was saying -- as much to himself as to me -- as we made love. Maybe I can't remember because it wasn't anything "special." The lovemaking certainly was. It was as if he had no body at all. It was as if he were just pure feeling -- an embrace producing a kind of tenderness that once expended swiftly eases into sleep.
---“We should do this again,” I said.
---“What?” he asked in that soft, sleepy/dreamy voice of his.
---“We should do this more often.”
---“Oh yes, let’s. If you want to.”
---“Of course I want to.”
---Of course I did. But I didn’t. You can’t repeat a dream, as much as you try. You just find yourself drifting off again. And in that memory of sleep I find myself dreaming wide awake. And in this dream I remember something else. We were dancing. We were swaying back and forth in a kind of stoner waltz to (of all things) Buffalo Springfield’s "Expecting to Fly." But in my half-waking memory I hear something else:
“Soave sia il vento
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri desir”
---“We should do this again,” I said.
---“What?” he asked in that soft, sleepy/dreamy voice of his.
---“We should do this more often.”
---“Oh yes, let’s. If you want to.”
---“Of course I want to.”
---Of course I did. But I didn’t. You can’t repeat a dream, as much as you try. You just find yourself drifting off again. And in that memory of sleep I find myself dreaming wide awake. And in this dream I remember something else. We were dancing. We were swaying back and forth in a kind of stoner waltz to (of all things) Buffalo Springfield’s "Expecting to Fly." But in my half-waking memory I hear something else:
“Soave sia il vento
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri desir”
_________________
Ryan Griffin
Hi Dennis. I've been a big fan of yours since Guide came out 10 years ago. Lately I've been checking out your blog almost daily, and enjoyed the readings you gave recently in New York at NYU and for the Weaklings release. I've attached a pic and 2 poems that I've been working on for a workshop.
Anna Nicole Smith- not the
Anna Nicole Smith that overdosed
on methadone and slim-fast-
spends every Wednesday night the same,
spread eagle on a coffee table,
for the so-called students of
erotic figure drawing 101.
The class is held in a small living room
of a small apartment in a large suburban
complex, the kind of complex that is
surrounded by a huge parking lot, with the
screams of unsupervised kids playing
in the gated pool audible at all times
of the day and night.
In the impromptu classroom, under the
half-assed guidance of the instructor Tim,
a housewife sat next to a high school
student, a widower sat next to a newlywed,
and a lesbian sat next to a gay, while Anna
incorporated what ever happened to be
lying around her into her pose.
Sometimes Anna would lean against the television set,
or read an outdated issue of Entertainment Weekly,
or pretend to ride the dilapidated bicycle that lay
against the wall. Tim would instruct her
to turn her breast towards the students, and as
long as no one touched her, the class was
an easy $50. Anna liked being an exhibitionist.
Today marked the first full month that Anna
had spent living in her car. She was saving
her money to take a road trip to Yellowstone
National Park to witness the Old Faithful geyser.
She’d always been intrigued by organic eruptions
of the Earth. She imagined the students behind
their large pads of paper shaking & emitting steam.
The heads of the housewife & high school student
exploded due to their unbearable stations in society.
The widower & newlywed’s overwhelming amount
of love for someone else caused lava to flow from their
hearts. The lesbian and gay needed to get laid so bad
that clouds of ash puffed from their sex organs. Meanwhile
Anna straightened her back & pointed her tits straight
ahead.
Bar Portrait, 1999
Warning signs hang on every wall,
walls painted peeled & cracked black,
people hovering like ghosts by the walls so black.
THIS IS NOT A SEX BAR WATCH YOUR WALLET
Two strangers sit at opposite ends of the bar.
Blonde boy, vodka & tonic, grey-striped polo,
silly grin, face bright red, “looks about twelve.”
Brown boy, Budweiser, dirty yellow tee,
smoking, drunk.
AVOID POLICE ARREST
DO NOT CRUISE 22ND ST BETWEEN
10TH & 11TH AVENUES
A boot shine stand sits in the corner.
An American flag hangs above the bar.
On the men’s room door another sign painted.
DON’T FLUSH FOR PISS
walls painted peeled & cracked black,
people hovering like ghosts by the walls so black.
THIS IS NOT A SEX BAR WATCH YOUR WALLET
Two strangers sit at opposite ends of the bar.
Blonde boy, vodka & tonic, grey-striped polo,
silly grin, face bright red, “looks about twelve.”
Brown boy, Budweiser, dirty yellow tee,
smoking, drunk.
AVOID POLICE ARREST
DO NOT CRUISE 22ND ST BETWEEN
10TH & 11TH AVENUES
A boot shine stand sits in the corner.
An American flag hangs above the bar.
On the men’s room door another sign painted.
DON’T FLUSH FOR PISS
__________________
John W. Hoopes
More of a reader and lurker than a contributor of late...
John W. Hoopes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas.
from "Sorcery and Trophy Head Taking in Ancient Costa Rica." In The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerinds, edited by Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, Kluwer Press, pp. 444-480, 2007.
link
The taking and display of trophy heads appears to have been a prominent ritual activity throughout Costa Rica from at least AD 300 through the late prehistoric period. In Guanacaste, the principal period for the manufacture of ceramic effigy heads began around AD 500, a time associated with significant changes in social complexity throughout the Isthmo-Colombian region. Snarskis (2003) attributes these changes to a decline in contact with Mesoamerica and increased influence from South America, while I attribute the process to a religious movement and ideological shift that affected the "Chibchan world" as a whole (Hoopes 2005). The specific causes of this period of rapid culture change are unknown, but the taking and display of trophy heads may have been directly linked to the formation of ideologically driven priesthoods, among which the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta remain the only surviving example. These may in turn have been manifest in shamanic warfare or the contexts of assault sorcery and its revenge, complex phenomena that must be considered alongside models that emphasize competition over economic resources or the self-aggrandizing activities of aspiring chiefs. Headhunting continued in remote regions of the Talamanca area and the borderlands between Costa Rica and Panama until the early 19th century. However, several lines of evidence suggest that there is more to the identity of the perpetrators and victims than the labels of chiefs and warriors. The representations of individuals who have been transformed into ferocious creatures holding trophy heads suggests a metaphysical dimension related to complex traditions of shape-shifting and vengeance such as that of the kanaimà of Guyana (Whitehead 2002) and other varieties of assault sorcery found in indigenous societies of the Americas (Whitehead and Wright 2004). Like the multiple versions of the story of the Bribri-Teribe war that were told for more than a century, the artwork may not represent a proliferation of trophy head taking as much as the continued reproduction of a mythological iconography featuring stories of a decapitated, shape-shifting sorcerer who carried out supernatural attacks and counterattacks. In central Brazil, "Counter-witchcraft is... both a juro-political instrument administered through chiefs and prominent men, and as an ethno medical technique applied by shamans and counterwitches to rid society of spiritual parasites and pathogens" (Heckenberger 2004: 180). This does not deny a military context for trophy heads, but suggests a ritual dimension that may help explain their prominence in artwork and also their association with individuals wearing special costumes and with supernatural, fanged beings.
The association of the conical hat with the conical house, itself in turn a model for the larger universe, suggests that its wearers identified themselves as agents for change in universal sense. Their head-taking behavior transcended material concerns with territory and property, and even individual acts of revenge. In Bribri-Cabécar shamanism, the awápa are the healers of individuals, while the ancient Úsêkölpa were the healers of the community as a whole. For South America, there is abundant evidence that headhunting was frequently embedded within magical models for disease and illness. If this context was shared by indigenous cultures of southern Central America, trophy-head taking in ancient Costa Rica may not have been incidental, but central to acts of both physical and metaphysical warfare. The purpose of these acts was to combat illnesses that resulted from the effects of sorcery and witchcraft and in so doing to produce healing in a broad, all-encompassing sense. It may be this intent that was preserved in the both the mythology and the iconography of trophy heads in ancient Costa Rica.
________________
My name is Mark Gluth. I've written one novella length manuscript and am currently writing another. The first one is called The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis, the one I'm currently working on has the working title How We Rise, How We Never Fall. If I could say one thing about my writing it would be that I'm interested in simple language applied to literally true yet logically impossible narrative structures. I also really want my fiction to have an emotional logic that is separate from the structure. I guess I want the emotion to drive the narrative forward. If I could say one more thing it would be that I plan a lot and think a lot about my writing but I almost never understand what I'm doing. I basically understand intuitively when I've reached whatever goal I was aiming for, which is usually totally different than what I planned on. I rewrite so much until the language is perfect to me, and the narrative is compelling enough to sustain it. The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis went through way over 400 drafts. Everything I've ever written has been tied to a bunch of music that I find compelling while I'm writing. Right now I'm really into Mount Eerie/The microphones, and a quote from one of their songs is what's inspiring my writing : 'Is it because, there's a little part of you, that wants to be dead?' Before that it was a quote by Of Montreal "No matter where we are, we're always touching by underground wires" Here's a picture of me I took about a year ago. I think it still looks like me
Here's the opening paragraph of How We Rise, How We Never Fall. I think it's very close to nailed.
Hague’s just there, or barely. The packed dirt is damp n the shade of the tires. It’s soaking through his jeans and underwear. The playground’s a field. It’s baked and flat. The cone or whatever he’s in is cool considering. He can hear a train in the distance. He closes his eyes and pictures it. It’s a mirage. So is everything else. It disappears when he shakes his head. His headache doesn’t. He opens his eyes. It doesn’t matter. The opening over his head is blue. It moves way to slow for him to be able to handle so he digs at the dirt at his knees with a stone. The smooth point dents the ground more than anything else. The stone’s slimy. It slips from his hand. He presses it against his forehead. He feels the dirt and crap stuck underneath his fingernails. He punches at something, everything. His fist hits the wall of the stack of tires he’s in. They’re strapped together by bolts. The whole thing rings. That give way to silence. A cloud gives way to the sun. His knuckle’s cut. It’ll scab. He licks at it. It tastes like when white light fills his eyes. The air smells like wood. He pulls himself up. The swings don’t move. The building’s tan. The bricks are pale. The air smells like a storm. It smells like tar. He’s in the middle of the parking lot. He’s walking towards some cars. He leans foreword and spins. Orange juice and bread comes out of his mouth and nose. The kids in the tennis courts cheep riding their bikes. Hague’s mouth tastes horrible. He pulled something in his throat. The kids laugh and shout. He looks up. One of them lands a trick all blearily. Hague closes his eyes and starts walking. Home. He thinks he can make it, or not really.
_________________
Marc Andreottola
A KNIFE SET
By Marc Andreottola
1: Britney Spears
She just woke up, the pink comforter between her legs and around her neck. She walked over to the sink and spit into the salmon-colored sink bowl. Combing her hair, she looked at her face. A part of it was purple. She put some Proactiv on her face. Part was purple still.
Outside her Los Angeles mansion, it was hot and muggy. She stalked around her room, trying to decide if she should put on something greenish. She cleared the floor, including the tacks. There were a lot of things on it, including bras, dirty socks, baby toys, money and pills. There was also someone who was “disappointed”, but that was just some lady on the TV blaring and talking about political stuff. Britney saw the new code on the dresser. She rushed downstairs and tried the new code on one of the doors. The new code worked.
She went through the house and didn’t run into anyone. She saw something on the floor. Was it puke?
She saw the baby buggy in the living room. She found a pacifier on the green couch.
She was still naked now. She decided she would put on an old sundress that belonged to her grandmother in the fifties. It was a brown sundress with faded muddy daises on it. Her grandmother had committed suicide. It had a very low neckline.
Britney went downstairs and ate a bowl of Chex. She poured more sugar on the Chex. She picked up the phone. She poured more milk on the Chex.
She went upstairs to look at herself in the brown dress. She put some blush on. She put more makeup on, but not too much.
She went searching for some pills. She flushed those pills down the toilet, but put one on the dresser just in case. She went downstairs. She turned on the stove and placed the pill bottle in the flame until it was brown and bubbling. The burning created a foul chemical smell in the kitchen. Britney said, “Ew.”
She sat in front of the mirror over in the dressing room. She put on different wigs. She kept the black bob. She had a picture taped on the mirror with Marilyn Monroe in a black bob wig.
She looked at the clock. It was 7: 21 a.m. She wrote one note on the desk. She scribbled a new word, “jonyx.” She walked over to the window and peeked behind the curtain. She saw about fifty paparazzi by the gate. She went online and read two celebrity gossip sites. Both sites said she had legally confined herself in her own home and changed the locks. She scratched at the carpet and sniffed it. It smelt like the smell of nothing. She scratched it. She sprayed Clorox spot remover on it. The spot remover smelt like something. There was a fake tree in the corner of a windowless room.
Outside her Los Angeles mansion, it was hot and muggy. She stalked around her room, trying to decide if she should put on something greenish. She cleared the floor, including the tacks. There were a lot of things on it, including bras, dirty socks, baby toys, money and pills. There was also someone who was “disappointed”, but that was just some lady on the TV blaring and talking about political stuff. Britney saw the new code on the dresser. She rushed downstairs and tried the new code on one of the doors. The new code worked.
She went through the house and didn’t run into anyone. She saw something on the floor. Was it puke?
She saw the baby buggy in the living room. She found a pacifier on the green couch.
She was still naked now. She decided she would put on an old sundress that belonged to her grandmother in the fifties. It was a brown sundress with faded muddy daises on it. Her grandmother had committed suicide. It had a very low neckline.
Britney went downstairs and ate a bowl of Chex. She poured more sugar on the Chex. She picked up the phone. She poured more milk on the Chex.
She went upstairs to look at herself in the brown dress. She put some blush on. She put more makeup on, but not too much.
She went searching for some pills. She flushed those pills down the toilet, but put one on the dresser just in case. She went downstairs. She turned on the stove and placed the pill bottle in the flame until it was brown and bubbling. The burning created a foul chemical smell in the kitchen. Britney said, “Ew.”
She sat in front of the mirror over in the dressing room. She put on different wigs. She kept the black bob. She had a picture taped on the mirror with Marilyn Monroe in a black bob wig.
She looked at the clock. It was 7: 21 a.m. She wrote one note on the desk. She scribbled a new word, “jonyx.” She walked over to the window and peeked behind the curtain. She saw about fifty paparazzi by the gate. She went online and read two celebrity gossip sites. Both sites said she had legally confined herself in her own home and changed the locks. She scratched at the carpet and sniffed it. It smelt like the smell of nothing. She scratched it. She sprayed Clorox spot remover on it. The spot remover smelt like something. There was a fake tree in the corner of a windowless room.
Explanation:
This is an excerpt from my novel-film-video-theater work, A KNIFE SET. It is about Britney Spears running off to lead an anonymous life in smalltown Iowa, a man who seeks to recreate the film narrative of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and ends up lving inside the world of that film, and two teens who simulate a videogame where the players take an entire shopping mall hostage.
This is an excerpt from my novel-film-video-theater work, A KNIFE SET. It is about Britney Spears running off to lead an anonymous life in smalltown Iowa, a man who seeks to recreate the film narrative of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and ends up lving inside the world of that film, and two teens who simulate a videogame where the players take an entire shopping mall hostage.
________________
Tony O'Neill
Hi everyone… Tony O’Neill here, I post here under the rather unimaginative handle of “tonyoneill”. Since 2006 I have published 4 books, with a couple more in the works. Trying to sum myself up as a writer is pretty hard to do. I suppose you could say that what I do at the moment is autobiographical fiction (which sometimes veers into fantasy). In terms of style I’d say that writers like Herbert Huncke, John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante or early Burroughs have been the most influential when it comes to style. I have always felt that I was a bit of an odd fit in a society that seems to want to impose repressive rules upon us all, and writing is one way that I keep sane under the circumstances. Before I applied myself to writing I kept myself sane by numbing myself with heroin and crack. I spent a long time teetering between life and death, and when I met Vanessa (who is now my wife) I made the decision that I didn’t want to do that anymore. Writing is the thing that I use to fill the huge void inside of myself that the drugs left. I would definitely describe Vanessa as my muse, and she is always the first pair of eyes on any new piece of writing.
My first book was a pretty straight piece of reportage. “Digging the Vein” was written as I was detoxing from methadone and a combination of other drugs in 2003. Writing that book was basically a process of teaching myself how to write. “Digging” is a very claustrophobic book. It is set mostly in Los Angeles and details a catalogue of abuse mostly heaped upon the narrator by himself. In my novels, I leave the narrator nameless, in the hope that it helps the readers to place themselves in the narrator’s position. It was picked up by an indie called Contemporary Press in 2006. Wrecking Ball Press did a UK edition later the same year. The next book was “Seizure Wet Dreams” a collection of poems and short stories that came out in late 2006 on Social Disease, an independent press from the UK. “SWD” contains some of my strangest writing, many of the pieces written under the influence of strange drugs. It also introduces the character of “Joe” who pops up in a lot of my short stories as a stand in for me. He is meant to be a very ordinary, plain sort of a guy, but strange things usually happen to him in the stories (he gets castrated by a prostitute and once ball-less becomes a bestselling author. In another he gets eaten alive by a giant vagina. In another he meets Death.) The poetry collection “Songs from the Shooting Gallery” contains a lot of my most personal writing, and in my opinion some of my best. Burning Shore Press put it out in 2007. I consider “Songs” to be the closest I have ever written to a diary, and the poems – in terms of when they were written – run parallel to a lot of the events I have turned into fiction through my work.
“Hero of the Underground” (St Martins Press) is a book I co-wrote with NFL player Jason Peter. It is a memoir of his time as a professional footballer and his descent into drug addiction. His agent – and then Jason himself – read “Digging the Vein” and wanted to work with me. What should have been a mismatch from hell (I am not a sports guy, and I have never co written anything with anyone) turned out to be an amazing experience… The resulting book is getting good reviews, and as I type this is at #33 on the New York Times bestseller list. In terms of books that changed everything for me, this is it. I landed a fantastic agent out of the deal and interest in my writing has definitely increased. I have a new novel, “Down and Out on Murder Mile” about my time in London (my second marriage, meeting Vanessa and getting clean) coming out in November 2008 on Harper Perennial. That’s what I am providing an excerpt from. I am also putting together an as yet untitled short story collection for new French publisher 13th note Press…
DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE EXCERPT
Sometimes you could hear mice in the walls, in the quiet hours before the dawn. We started using heroin in earnest again. I watched Susan shrink and age here, dramatically - she lay on the bed mostly whining about dope sickness and fixing drugs and stinking the place up with the stench of the living dead - but sometimes – when I was too sick to move – she would relent and make the convoluted journey from murder mile to Hammersmith to pick up our drugs from RJ. I soon realized that waiting for her to come back was worse in a way than making the journey myself. The terrible sense of stasis, of time standing still, slipping backwards even, while bad daytime television crackled out of the set and the demons and the sickness flayed me alive in the bed was more unbearable than making the journey myself – of sweating and shaking in packed commuter trains and watching the stations grinding by…
At least then the countdown…Latimer Road… Shepherds Bush…Goldhawk Road… gave the sense of a building climax… and then in the toilet of the Kings Mall, a depressing Stalinist concrete façade, holed up in the filthy dark cubicle with one foot wedged against the lockless door listening to the homeless guy in the next stall take a spluttering liquid shit, the smell filling the whole place, I’d cook up my shot and thread the needle into my gooseflesh probing for a vein… thick black blood dripping down my forearm, spotting my jeans, forming in dark pools on the piss-wet tiles…
Once the shot was in my bloodstream the homeless guys shit started to smell like a home-cooked meal and I would feel pure pleasure in his guts instead of fear and hunger, and the long ride home became a reverie – relaxed and languid – handsome and perfect on the Hammersmith and City Line to Kings Cross, nodding in time to the trains slow motion lurches.
(Down and Out on Murder Mile – Harper Perennial, Nov 2008)
tonyoneill.net
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Víctor Sierra, en un tono íntimo, conversacional y, ante todo, próximo y directo, con mirada incisiva a través de su personal caleidoscopio, nos entrega testimonio en esta colección de poemas titulada Garabato. Aludiendo, quizá, a los trazos inconexos y arbitrarios que traza el niño que aún no sabe escribir (en Cuba es un implemento que sirve a los campesinos para poder peinar las hierbas altas y despejar el sitio donde, con un tajo, se cortan). Sus poemas nos amparan de lo banal y del sarcasmo cotidiano, indagando en el sentido de la aventura que ya es de por sí existir. -- Alberto Lauro, escritor y articulista del diario La Razón.
Deriva
Blanco esturión, naciste para domar las aguas
Entre los dientes, una lengua te entrega
a la memoria: límpida, perfecta, rotunda
El color de la tinta es el color de los mares
cuando avanzan, invisibles, hacia la noche
Olas llenas de palabra brotan en los labios
coronándote de sal y de misterio
- el secreto idéntico del verso y los océanos -
Sobre el horizonte, un dios náufrago entre lágrimas
muere como el pez, a orillas del poema
de "Garabato" (Scythecut, Madrid, 2008)
Drift
White sturgeon, you were born to tame the waters
between teeth, a tonge deliver you
to the memory: limpid, perfect, resounding
Color of the ink is the color of the seas
when they advance, invisible, towards night
Waves full of word sprout in the lips
crowning you with salt and mistery
- precise secret of verse and oceans -
Over the horizon, a shipwrecked god
dies like a fish on banks of the poem
from "Garabato" (Scythecut, Madrid, 2008)
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Ali Jaafar
"My name is Ali Jaafar and I live in Minneapolis. I have been a reader of the site for about a year now but I have yet to comment. I guess this makes me a lurker but I don't like that word because it reminds of this crappy fake Derleth-Lovecraft book. I mostly write editorials for a local alternative magazine. I started writing sort-of-short sort-of-fiction recently to see what would happen. This is what happened:"
COAT OF ARMS
by ali jaafar
Her hands were like glass swans. They were porcelain, delicate, white-gloved figures possessed of lifelike curves yet ultimately artificial looking. They weren’t made for building, scrubbing, fighting, scratching, working. They were made for holding teacups.
She was holding a teacup. Every once in a while she would gingerly raise it to her lips and go on staring out of a large window set into a small patch of wall above a sink.
The sink was in a kitchen that looked like the rest of the house it inhabited: overstuffed, lacy, complex, Victorian. Everything was a lush red color that seemed to intensify along the edges of the room. At the center stood a wooden table illuminated by a small lamp set into the ceiling. Its harsh light cast dramatic shadows yet failed to wash out the kitchen’s rich red hue.
He leaned against the door frame, watching her. He kept thinking about how red it was in this place. All of their friends had described the place as “sexy” or “seductive.” He didn’t take this as a compliment. Kitchens ought not to be sexy, he thought.
And the whole place was like that. The sexy kitchen connected to the sexy sitting room connected to the sexy study to the sexy entryway to the sexy staircase… he thought of that one kids’ song.
When she had originally decided to redo the place, he was completely onboard. He thought that turning it into a Victorian nightmare-harem would dispel his father’s ghost, a meddlesome spirit that refused to give up the house.
Now invoking the name, he thought of his father. His last memory of that man was of a terrible, rasping skeleton-monster making proclamations from within his cocoon-pulpit. As he lay on his deathbed, he had summoned his children in order to divide up his empire. When it was his turn, his father called him close and whispered into his ear. He could remember the smell. “Son,” he said, “I’m leaving you the house. I want you and your wife to take care of it. I want you to take care of it because it will always be mine. As long as you live in it, it will always be mine. You will always be mine… my…”
Here he let out an enormous cough and gave up on speaking. He knew it was a mistake, that the old man simply hadn’t finished his sentence, but hearing him say “you’ll always be mine” summed up their relationship in a way that was incredibly and unnaturally honest.
Worse yet, he knew it was true. As long as he stayed in this place, his father’s shadow would always loom large. Still, he thought as he stood on the porch, who would give this up? The plot was large, the house was well built and maintained, the whole package in impeccably good taste.
All it took was one trip back inside to remember why he hated the place. Sitting in the violently red living room, he felt like a piece of furniture. Dust piled up faster than it could be swept away. In here, time moved faster as matter moved slower. He thought about moving his hand, brushing at the air, stirring up violent little torrents of dust, but couldn’t actually do it. Strange.
During his reverie, little Annalise had entered the kitchen. She sat at the table with her mother. They were drawing.
“Now, what do you see?” her mother asked, scratching at the paper with a pencil.
“Uh… nothing, really, I don’t think,” Annalise replied.
“Okay, what if I put a line here?”
“Um… a hippo?”
“How about here?” Now Annalise took the paper in her hands and rotated it this way and that. She squinted thoughtfully and set the paper back down.
“Weird!”
“Now do you see it?”
“Yeah! That’s so cool! Do another!” Her mother simply laughed and kissed her on the cheek. As she took out another sheet of paper, he left the room.
Outside again, the sun was setting and smearing color across the pseudo-night sky. Watching it stirred up a nameless sort of nostalgia. He longed for another time in his life. Any time would do.
He blinked and found himself in bed. She was lying next to him, breathing softly. She was awake. He knew that she was thinking of a way to get him to talk to her. He also knew that it wouldn’t work. He really didn’t care what she did anymore. Something had left him a while ago and now he knew that he couldn’t care for her like he used to. He could not say what had left him or why, but he just knew. Sometimes, she would reach out for him or say “I love you” or kiss him and he would respond in turn, but it was purely mechanical and she could tell. Lately, she had just stopped trying. He was relieved. These night-reveries were the only vestige of her emotional neediness and they really weren’t that bad. He only had to put up with the awkwardness of sleeping next to someone who’s awake.
He thought about that for a moment before his train of thought was completely smashed by sleep.
His dreams were frustrating mental vapor trails.
He woke up in bed, uncovered, vaguely aware of someone staring at him.
“Who’s Helen?” she asked.
His mind… turned, in a sense.
“What?”
“You were saying the name Helen. Moaning, a little.”
“It was just a dream,” he mumbled. “It was just a dream I had.”
It was most certainly not. Sitting in the den late that night, a television news broadcast illuminating the darkness, he ran through his thoughts incredulously. How could he have forgotten? Was it so long ago?
It’s hard to describe what he felt sitting in that den, remembering.
Mostly he could only remember the day she left turning into the weekend she left turning into the week turning into the month, semester, year, now… decade? Was it so long ago?
It was.
The television bleached the darkened room. On it, another semi-real drama played out: a helicopter swooped over a road running by a river. Out of the soft, river-side soil, the cops were pulling a huge bag. An ambulance sat idling nearby. The announcer prattled on and on.
His hands flexed, grabbing at nothing, something, nothing. He was thinking of something absurd as the river-side scene disappeared.
He made his little circuit around the house. Back in the kitchen, he saw the drawing pad that his wife had used. On it was an emblem, a generic symbol that he had seen somewhere but couldn’t place. It bothered him.
He tried to think about Helen but realized that he really couldn’t remember anything and that his own little bout of existential grief was probably made up, fabricated, taken from a book or play or movie, there probably was no “Helen” and who was named Helen anymore, etc. His memory was shit anyway. He tried to think about someone who would love him with the dumb intensity of a silent-film heroine.
All he could think about was that stupid symbol.
Back in his bed, he lay flat on his back, thinking, hoping for some solution. He gave up.
“Honey?”
“Yes?”
“What was that symbol you drew earlier today? I saw it in the kitchen and…”
“It was just a dream,” she said. “It was just a dream I had.”
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Derek McCormack
I'm Derek McCormack. I'm a writer from Toronto. I am a devotee of Dennis Cooper's, and a longtime lurker at this blog. I've published a bunch of books -- a novel, a couple of short-story collections, a history of Christmas in Canada. My new novel is titled "The Show That Smells." It's an homage to the movies Tod Browning made with Lon Chaney. It stars Lon Chaney, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Coco Chanel, and Elsa Schiaparelli, the scandalous Surrealist couturière. It's set entirely in a carnival Mirror Maze. Here's the opening section:
---Jimmie Rodgers.
---Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.
---Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.
Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.
---Jimmie Rodgers in a Mirror Maze.
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Stan Czarnecki
Hi, my name is Stan Czarnecki and I began to write at the age of 15. As a child I wasn't much into reading, due to the conservative and unimaginative books that my parents and school made available to me. Yet once I discovered the work of people like Genet and Burroughs, I found voices that I responded to. From then on I became an avid reader of both literature and poetry and started writing my own short stories and poems very soon. I'm not too good at analyzing my own work, so I'll just say that the following poem is about the source of ideas and the mind's images.
Alone
Melinda, Arianna,
Where is it coming from.
She floated across the room,
that fleeting tear
enveloping her skin like
velvet.
On that once shimmering
cold marble
floor, each tactile step of
her bare foot
left a mark, evanescing as
swiftly as her generous glance.
Hazy perception,
vivid reverie. Each smoke of
that wet cigarette she took,
remained. No reason to exhale,
not now.
After all, these lights;
tingling,
made even dust seem
irrelevant.
Was it, in the end,
tonic fiction.
Or merely fact.
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Lux
I haven’t written anything in a year. I don’t consider myself a writer, a serious one anyway. Every now and then I write a story. I make films more than anything now. When I saw Dennis was looking for contributions I sifted through my stuff and thought it'd be fun to submit the first thing I ever wrote. This was around 8 years ago when I was in college. I sat down blank not knowing where it was going or what I really was trying to say. So here it is unproofed and probably ridden with typos bad grammar formating and all that other good stuff. I chose not to re-read cause I’d probably chicken out of posting it, it feels like finding a love letter you wrote to a crush as a young teenager. I just cut n paste it and sent it to Dennis before I changed my mind.
X
I woke up around eight and smoked a cigarette and thought about the dream I had last night. It was fucked up some guy in a big room screaming and crying. Come morning I’ve usually forgotten it, until I see something, something which triggers the memory. I used to write them down but I don’t think it’s healthy if you remember you remember if you don’t you weren’t meant to. Like most students I don’t want to go to college who the fuck does, but today was the last day before we split for summer the sun the late nights and the barbecues. That’s what I expected but this was just I don’t know…
I met Tom before class I was surprised to see him so early cause the guy never wakes till around twelve and comes into college around lunch. There was a guy who had a fucked up sleep pattern he’d sleep all day. I’d phone him sometimes around six p.m. and he’d still be asleep. How can you sleep that late? He wouldn’t be lying awake just one continuos sleep, his parents were through telling him ‘your’re gonna sleep your life away’. We went round to the alleyway and smoked a joint before class it hit m straight away my head felt heavy and my body just went with it.
We walked to our first class Drama which was fun and a little surreal. We done this scene where a convenience store was being robbed by two armed gunmen I was one of the felons it was fun I got into character straight away swearing at the shop keeper threatening to ‘blow his fucking brains out if he don’t open the till’. My accomplice this girl Natalie, she was cool. She was this tall brunette which was really skinny and had these mad eyes which depending on which way you looked at them were green or blue she looked real cute holding this big air gun which we used as a prop it was a colt .45 I had a snub nose magnum. I kept shouting “gimmie the twenties don’t just give me the fives you fucking cunt”. Jonathon who was playing the shop keeper this small Italian kid who really loved drama and always had the lead role in the school plays began screaming and holding his hands up in front of his face. His screaming was really freaking me out I jumped onto the counter waving my gun at him, my head swirling. I looked down at him, Jonathon was lying on the floor curled up like a dog asleep still screaming I shouted again ‘Shut the fuck up you bastard stop screaming stop crying I’m gonna kill you, I’ll put this gun inside your mouth and blow the back of your head out”. I wanted to really kill him for a moment. Those screams echoing through the class room were freaking me out like that fucking nightmare I had. He stopped screaming. Me and my partner in crime took the money and ran out “give us an ending people” Mr Kaine shouted from the far corner. I didn’t know what to do I looked at Natalie I couldn’t think cause of this fucking skunk. We stood staring at each other, looking into to each others eyes for about five seconds I was fucked my head was swirling about. I was out of breath I stood stoned staring at her I and needed to sit down Just as I was about to raise my gun to Natalie’s head and sqeuze the trigger to Natalie pulled me toward her and kissed me full on and I was about to put my tongue into her mouth when the applause started from our audience. We stopped and looked at each other a little embarrassed and turned to walk of stage and walked toward our seats I was rushing from the smoke and the applause my body flowing with adrenaline I was sweating when I sat down my shirt stuck to the back of the chair our teacher took the floor “great acting Natalie, Jason, Jonathon ( I forgot about Jonathon who smiled at me as he sat down a few seats behind me.) “Very intense and nice ending he smiled the bell rang.
I went to the toilet on my break I locked myself in a cubicle and sat on the toilet with the lid down. I was rummaging through my bag looking for a lighter and I found this letter which I read while smoking my cigarette it was written a week ago to my friends Kate who moved to Scotland with her parents about six months ago. It’s weird when ever I’m feeling down late at night I’ll write her a letter ranting as to how empty I feel and I usually cant be bothered in telling her what I’ve been up to, I just whine about things. The main reason I wrote the letter is ‘cause I recently heard she was going out with someone and last time I spoke to her on the phone she told me she was in love. Now I’m much more interested in her in a sexual way than I ever was before and really jealous, it’s so pitiful. I find it’s so easy to write letters but posting them is a struggle buying stamps finding the address usually they just float around my desk draw in amongst the empty cigarette packets and cassette tapes.
As I read the letter I felt I don’t know it was a weird emotion that came over me happy and sad. I started to remember and X- girlfriend I had about six months ago Who attended Leicester University we lasted six months and then broke up and two moths after the break up she went out with this philosophy student. I was infatuated with her again I showered her in phone calls and letters and a few music compilation tapes Its really weird I began to listen to what she was saying more and pretended to really give a shit all over again. I finished the letter took a few final tokes of my cigarette.
“J you in there?”
a voice from behind the door inquired. I jumped, I was in a trance sitting on the toilet.
“who the fuck is that?” I snapped a little shaken.
“It’s me man T.C.”
T.C. was a friend from primary school we live on the same street as kids we used to ride our BMX’s all day around the streets and watching films. I stepped out of the cubical.
“Yes T.C. sorry you scared me”
“No worry Tom said you went in here I’m going shop you commin?”
“Why not”.
I picked up my bag and walked out the front entrance nobody gave a shit. The sun blazed down on us as we walked along the pavement the sun reflected off the car windscreens that passed us blinding me each time for a few seconds the skunk was still lingering in my body but it was nice. T.C. and me discussed if we’d miss school we said no that this was the beginning of a new era bigger better and free there was summer, the beginning.
That evening I lay on my bed Listening to LTJ Bukem thinking of spaceships and big stealth Plaines flying in the sky, Flying over blue skies with huge cloud formations looking like angels and demons the spaceships exhaust fumes had a chemical reaction with the cloud and it turned into something else something special. Tears gathered in my eyes, I began to think about my sister. I find it so easy to slip into my own little worlds when alone I like it but sometimes question if it’s natural. I thought back to X girlfriends and how I would love to meet them again when I’m rich or famous and I’ve got a new girlfriend and she’s beautiful and I’m in love and my X wants me back “look you lost me but look where I’m at now”. I lay on my bed for an hour till about eight p.m. I reached to my phone to ring Karen a girl I meet through a mutual friend we hit it of straight away talking about old movies.
Hello
Hi Karen it’s J
Hi
Whas up?
Not much just got Joey here
Oh. what you up to?
Not much he’s acting stupid, as usual
Why what’s wrong?
Nothing he was just complaining that I kissed Henry
You Kissed Henry Why did you kiss Henry?
No not that way on the cheek, you know I’ve known him since primary.
Yeah
Well I saw him on the way home and I kissed him. I was glad to see him ‘cause I haven’t seen him in about six months and we arranged to go for a drink this Saturday and Joey’s jealous. Saying I shouldn’t be kissing other people and making dates with guys.
Karen, Joey is a fucking cunt you know it. Sorry I hate him. He’s an asshole he’s way insecure jealous as hell when your out drinking he spends the entire night watching your every move that’s why me and TC call him Kevin Costner
What?
The Bodyguard
That’s’ not funny he’s not that bad
Are you happy
Jason don’t…
What, answer the question are you really happy?
…Sometimes
What’s sometimes when your having sex?
J fuck off your being really rude your sounding like a …I don’t know a,.. You don’t have to protect me J I know I’m doing I know your only looking out for me but I don’t need it. Hang on.
I heard Karen taking the phone away from her mouth and telling Joey to leave, give her some privacy while she was on the phone. She was arguing with him for at least four minutes, which was ok ‘cause he was just proving my point the douche bag. I was restless so I reached for my stash and began to build a dobby with phone balanced between my shoulder and my head. As I built I could her Karen repeatedly saying ‘I don’t wanna get into this now’ and toward the end ‘Just fuck of Joey’ I was just sealing it as Karen came back to the phone I sensed in her voice she was a little upset.
Karen honey are you ok
(I blazed the joint)
Yeah Jason sorry you had to hear that.
It’s ok he’s really insecure.
Yeah he’s just really overprotective
I suppose he doesn’t want to lose you you’re a definitely a special
person
shut up
Nah really Karen you’re a superstar.
Jason you’re sweet
I know
Are you smoking?
Yeah I got a nice one skin just tokin you know me
Yes I do know
Yep. I got da herbs felling the effects -tassy. Listen hon’ I gotta go but take care.
Yeah Jason thank you for feeling me I’m…
A superstar you know you are Karen and if Joey doesn’t realise he’s Just deserve you. You deserve you. You deserve to be treated better. Well I got go I will catch you on a later note.
I…Love you Jason
I love you Karen
I put the phone down. I lay awake for an hour thinking for an hour. Then I went down stairs and in the hallway we have a this table with a vase on it I began to stare at these dead flowers we have in the vase I watched them for about ten minutes.
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Philip Clark
I am a writer who spends the vast majority of my time telling everyone within earshot about other writers’ work. This means that I am actually an editor and a promoter masquerading as a writer. When I do write, it is almost exclusively nonfiction. One of my long-term research obsessions—of which there are several—is the photographer F. Holland Day. Look at the picture that goes with my writing sample: isn’t anyone who would take a photograph that beautiful worth being obsessed with? Then realize that he took hundreds of photographs at least that beautiful.
If you write gay poetry that doesn’t suck and (perhaps) has erotic content, you should make a submission to Velvet Mafia, where I poetry edit. It’s one of the many projects I work on that doesn’t actually involve much writing, as mentioned above.
Dreams carried him [Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden] back to those ancient times when prejudice against homosexuality did not exist…A world without obscurities, opacities and miseries of the flesh – this is the world presented to us by the ancients. They offer it to us in all their Arcadias with their motionless perfect climes, peopled by Corydons and Tityruses feasting on ambrosia and the piping of reeds.
-- Jean Claude Lemagny
Erotics in Arcadia: Symbolic Myth and Homosexuality in F. Holland Day’s Photography
---Shortly after the November 1904 destruction of his Boston studio by fire, turn-of-the-century photographer Fred Holland Day vacationed among the bucolic woods at his summer home in Little Good Harbor, Maine. It was there that he began to create pictures in a style, and of a subject matter, which had only been briefly explored in his previous work. Day’s photography turned increasingly to the male nude during the summer of 1905, and between 1905 and 1913, he would produce a body of photographs that frequently referenced Greek mythological themes, particularly that of Arcadia. Day establishes these long-running motifs with carefully wrought poses and the extensive use of mythological props, including laurel wreaths, lyres, and classical statues. With their extreme emphasis on the sensuality of the male body, the photographs are classic of homoerotic art. Some scholars, though, have used the classicism of Day’s themes to distance the photographs from the homoerotics they portray. In their arguments, Arcadia loses its longstanding sexual association, particularly that with homosexuality, in favor of its link to pastoral innocence. Despite this unwillingness to confront the nature of Day’s pastoral photographs, the pictorial references to myths involving Pan and Orpheus use a sub-layer of homosexual codes to filter Day’s obsession with the male form. In these photographs, Day follows a pattern of the use of Arcadian tropes by homosexual writers and artists, sublimating his own homosexual desires beneath images of Arcadia.
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Larry Lillvik
'Winter Rates'
I guess I'm a poet who doesn't read poems who wants to be a novelist but can't even finish writing a short story. I simultaneously understand this and refuse to give up.
THREE POEMS
Honey Mead
It's not as if some dirt adept, harvest-seasoned
And corn-tickled, took off with your tractor, or
A maze of landscape was altered in your absence.
More like your weary focus blurred into a landfill
Of spectators draped in the colors of resignation.
Your borrowed focus lures neighbors of
Light into racoonish forays through your passion
Pantry. Paw-prints in marmalade, and gold medal
Flour - tracked across your fussed over blueprints
Demand an action plan, perhaps a board of advisors.
The Soft Lust Of Extinction
Be it a bleak stain as observable and
Fly-specked as a copyrite infringement,
A song of musk-ox yet less erudite, near
Malleable upon billboards. This patience,
Bitch-meandering thru coppertop hosannas,
Small-speakered tweet above fir-tipped
Roofscape, tar-topping the broadlight,
Will be beaten before the beak-pecked
Hatch of eggshell. The curtaining
Aspect of her eye soothes only the
Snowpacked loss and inward flight
Of the dodo. Hope entrenched in scar.
ante meridiem
The angernaut manipulates
Vitriolic polymers while
Just outside his door she
Vacuums up the last crumbs
Of laughter into an oil lamp
To be emptied when the
Crows allow passage to the
Curbside. To shuttle his
Gifts of reason, the angernaut
Travels the synaptic interstates
And prole-funded toll roads,
Avoiding backstreets where
Mongrels of instinct, hole-
Pokers, and taste makers
Costume themselves in
The alchemy of unfettered
Access to the nightmares
Of passers-by.
intro to Novel In Progress
"What makes you think she'll come?"
---"The sweat will summon her."
---The two men crouched side by side on a wide crag in the cliff face. Below them the river was patterned in charcoal gray undulations as the evening breeze gained force. The men wore Royal Navy jackets nearly a century old, which was evidenced by countless patches and mended seams. The rain, at irregular intervals, fell in tiny rashes. It rolled down the pyramid-shaped hats held tight to their heads by chin-straps. They were Cooksmen.
---"These Finlanders sweat everyday. Maybe the boy won't see her."
---"She'll come. We'll all see her."
---Behind them coals smoldered. A bright red fillet of salmon was nailed to a cedar plank and stood upright in the center of the fire pit. Its scent mingled with the scents of burning alder and cedar, the smoke lingering in the moist autumn air. The fire was built next to a lone, dead pine with a twisted trunk blackened by previous fires.
---A boat appeared below them out of the evening mists, made miniature with the quarter mile distance.
---"That's them."
---"I know."
---"I'm hungry."
---The birdless sky was thick with clouds. The smaller of the two men, Billy, was having a hard time deciding if the water, or the air that met the horizon, was a darker shade. At first the river's gray appeared deeper, but that changed when he focused on the boat's white sail, then the sky surpassed the water on its journey toward black. That night there would be no stars and a new, invisible moon.
---The larger man, Gus, gave Billy a handful of filberts from his trouser pocket. He stared at Billy with mild, almost tender, reproach like he could read Billy's mind and pitied the contents there-in. They each placed a nut on the stony ground and cracked its shell with their respective knife handles.
---Their camp was bare, temporary. They were without horses.
---"What if the Finn's son don't co-operate?"
---"What if, Billy, I stab you and leave you for the coyotes?"
---Billy shrugged.
---"I'm just saying is all. Gary is acting like it'll be no problem getting him to the sweat lodge, out there at the pow wow. But…he has to come by his own accord. Ain't that the way it has to work?"
---"Those coyotes won't wait for your death rattle to start feedin' neither. That I know for a fact."
---A foghorn sounded in muted bursts. The landscape beyond their campfire sloped steeply upwards behind a dense wall of fir, pine and spruce whose tops were bent from the eternal winds. Several miles Northeast, on the other side of the butte, was the town of Astoria, Oregon.
Billy Hubris (an abandoned serial)
Chapter I
1.
Billy Hubris woke with a taste of his own making in his mouth. Lysol skies kept him indoors. His shit was far from firm, the Pacific Princess logo had begun to peel off his muscle "T". Today would be erudite with a possible chance of malaise. His jar of fluff was dangerously low. The palm fronds outside the kitchen window sway slightly, creating Balinese Shadow Puppet/Rorschach tests on his cabinets. The Seagram's Seven beckoned. Billy getting bent on some 7 and Squirts started scrawling (fancy toe work) his dreams with a Sharpie across the Asbury Park Press. The Living Arts section was fluff smeared and smelly and the phone had been ringing for at least 20 minutes. Dreams of bleachers and chocodiles, he felt Mizundastood.
Everyone on his block was in their yards brandishing garden weasels. Finally the answering machine picked up, he'd jerry rigged it for maximum ringage, and it was Salome Baptiste Schnell requesting accompaniment to the WAWA. Perhaps her skies were gentle.
2.
See the way she walks, with butter in her hair, codified speeches broadcast from her fillings. See the way she skirts the edge of the reservoir sketching in her notebook the lies of the seasons. See the way she smiles at the scents of the juniper and the musk of the rodents who feast near the drainpipe. See the wawa up ahead and Billy Hubris balanced near a concrete ashtray, twirling the pebbles with a discarded straw.
In this criminal Township she struts unobstructed to the front of the WAWA. Miscreants crowd the entrance but it's smoke and mirrors. "Let's not have a dialog" she thinks and the dragonflies swarm the dumpster.
read more
Three Standard Stoppages (a work in progress) :
PART ONE.
---And what would Louise make of these "stoppages?" Three of them. "Standard" according to the Frenchman. And though he tried his best, and requisitioned my opinions and such, I felt the patronizing urges that lurked beneath his end of the conversation.
---I carried them home on the "C" line. They had their own case, tailor made and lacquered. Damned if I could figure out if he actually built the thing himself, the carrying case that is, or the "stoppages" for that matter, or merely had them commissioned to his specifications. In these matters he was always vague and dismissive.
---"Just use them to measure the mundane," he said to me, " and be sure to record the results, as they occur."
---I'd like to say I was humoring him, but it was more an exercise performed with a fear, a fear that if I didn't do as he asked our conversations would soon be ended. A test of sorts? I didn't know.
read more
________________
J. Campbell
Hello. This is J. Campbell from blogspot (the blog "Rocket Surgery"). I've lurked for a good 2 years now (back before your other blog was destroyed), but finally made my own blog and started to comment. Here's an entry for writer's day (whic is a great idea!).
About me: I'm 33, gay, and working on a PhD in English Studies at Illinois State. I'm way into American pop culture studies, and transgressive fiction (especially by gay authors -- I owe you big time not just for your own novels, but for introducing me to Matthew Stadler -- I used his "The Sex Offender" on a syllabus for a course in dystopian lit this last Spring). The novel that I have been talking to you about I wrote over the space of 2 years back when I was working on my Masters in Lit. -- I had terrible insomnia and writing helped me get through those long long mornings. The loves of my life live together in the same head with dissociative identity disorder.
Here's an excerpt from chapter 40 of the novel coming out this fall, "Stealing Ganymede" under the pen name J. Warren from Rebel Satori Press (www.rebelsatori.com):
Forty: Wade in the Water, Children
---I remember we made the trip all the way to San Diego. This big water park there. I was just a little older than the whole photograph thing I was astounded. I'd never seen that much water before. That many fish all in one place.
---The moment I remember most was standing in front of this enormous tank full of all that water. It was so gigantic, and yet so peaceful. My little hands pressed against the glass. Sharks swimming right next to fish that they would eat if they weren't so well fed. I just wanted to climb into that peace and swim. Just swim for the rest of my life.
---"Look, honey, that one is called a lemon shark. " A man standing not too far from me was knelt down near a boy almost as tall as me. The boy, wide-eyed, safe. Loved. I watched them out of the corner of my eye for what seemed like hours. The kid was an endless fountain of questions which his father answered with no anger, no frustration. I wanted to walk up to them. I wanted to ask him to be my father.
---I just wanted to swim there.
---That's when the guy grabbed my shoulder and forced me along with him to the nearest bathroom. One of the ones that told me to call him 'dad'. It was the worst beating I ever got. The taste of the pencil between my teeth. I had to stay quiet because it was a public place. I remember how mad he got that he 'couldn't get a good god damn swing' in the small stalls.
---I had wandered off. I did that a lot when I was a kid. I used to pray that I would get lost and not have to go back. I was still young enough to think someone was listening. That, somehow, the police would find me and see what he'd done. Then they'd come to the house and kill him. When you're a kid, you think like that: that killing the bad guy solves everything. Walt Disney did that to us.
---The whole time I stood there, pants around my ankles, snot and tears streaming down my face, I thought about swimming. I almost didn't even feel the belt. I almost didn't hear his heavy breathing, or how cold my legs were getting. There was just me. And swimming.
---There's always a part of that memory, though, that I can't get beyond. The beating stopped, I think, and I remember him hissing 'stay quiet'. Then there was a hand on my hip. I don't remember anything else until what must have been about a week later.
---Swimming at the local public pool. I was always there early, so I was kind of alone. Not many people. I remember holding my breath and sinking. All the way to the bottom. I just sat there, slowly blowing bubbles up. There was a peace and quiet. I sat there until I was burning inside, like my lungs were about to explode.
---They hauled me up. I gasped and sputtered. Pushed the lifegaurd away when he tried to give me mouth to mouth. I left, hurried, embarrassed. Ashamed. Everyone thought I had tried to commit suicide.
---I was just trying to be alive.
---That was one of the early places. It got a lot worse. I think that was the second family I ever stayed with. I don't remember a lot about it. Just that day. Just that feeling. Swimming. Sinking.
---Peace.
_________________
Doug Wasted
I’m Norwegian. I’ve published two books in Norwegian. I’m struggling to put out my third, an existential slasher. These days, I divide my time between a screenplay and a fourth novel called “Palestine”. Its first chapter is my contribution to this day. It’s a first draft, translated from Norwegian. I apologize in advance to any Israelis out there, as the Hebrew dialogue is absolute gibberish.
Palestine/Chapter 1/Il’in village/The occupied West Bank
It’s like something out of a tourist brochure: A pestilent stench from a lake of raw sewage sweeps through the crowd like a demon, the chalk white sun screams mercilessly at us, whirlwinds of sand and litter dance between our feet, and I’ve swallowed so many flies that I’m actually full, despite not having had a meal since breakfast. All in all, this place is much cry and little wool. I really don’t understand why they’re fighting to keep it. It must be one of those “matters of principle”-type deals.
---What we’ve got here today is a direct action/die in-combo. We’re not only showing our resistance/disgust towards the security/apartheid fence/wall, but also marking the one day anniversary of the Israeli air force’s bombing of a south Lebanese hospital for retarded orphan girls. Israel apparently thought it was a weapons cache. Bad intel. What can you do? Anyways – there’s a huge stink about it over here. I’ve not seen people this pissed off since … well, the last time the Israeli air force bombed a south Lebanese hospital for retarded orphan girls. The death toll was originally reported to be 109. This was, of course, pure Hezbollah propaganda, and was later revised and revised until it reached a measly 82. But the PR damage had already been done.
---”To be honest – I’m kinda glad the body count dropped,” says Gilat, anarchist-sculptor. ”109 dead kids is a tall order.” He dabs the dolls with “blood” and passes them along to all the attending “internationals”, who’ve formed a surprisingly polite queue. “And guys, try to bring them back in one piece, ok?” Gilat turns to me. “I have an exhibition at TAU next week.”
---There’s about thirty of us, gatherered on a barren patch of land at the bottom of a hill. The youngest of us looks fifteen, the oldest … God only knows. A hundred. All ages, all races, all religions, all sexes are represented, unified by a noble common purpose: Getting their asses kicked by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), by batons, rubber bullets and water canons. The only thing that varies is the extremity of the violence applied. There have been relatively few bloodbaths recently. The International Solidarity Movement’s (ISM) non-violent approach has resulted in stone throwing and anti-semitic slogans being replaced by stupid banners and negro spirituals, which do not authorize the use of lethal force per IDF rules of engagement (ripe for revision, in other words).
---Personally, I’m getting ants in my pants. Let’s do this thing. I realize I might be, as my ex has accused me, a “Eurocentric” after all, because I only now notice that this Palestinian demonstration is sorely lacking in Palestinians.
---”ALLAAAAAAAAAAAH O’AKHBAAAAAAAAAAAAAR”
---There they go. We fry in the heat and the shit while we wait for the good people of Ni’lin to return from Friday prayers (obviously not to be confused with Thursday prayers, Wednesday prayers, etc).
---”Ok, guys, can I have everyone’s attention?” Jason is an American with a thousand piercings all over his face. He is extremely irritating, because he talks in a puny, nasal voice that always reaches up at the end of every sentence, so that everything he says sounds like a question? Right now he mounts a dirt mound and claps his hands together.
---”We need to talk about tear gas? Cause they will use it? First, obviously, avoid inhaling it? And DO NOT rub your eyes when you get hurt? Because that only makes it worse? Wash your eyes with water, guys? Covering your nose and mouth with your t-shirts also helps? Don’t try to pick up the tear gas canisters, because they’re really hot? Kick them away instead? And another really important thing? Do NOT use water-based sunblock? Cause the tear gas sticks to it? And your skin gets burned really badly?”
---Cue a bunch of morons reading their sunscreen bottles. Those with the right kind pass some around.
---Ted, a slightly less irritating American with a hat, climbs up to Jason. ”It’s fat based, dude.”
---”What?”
---”You get a rash from the oil based one.”
---“Are you sure?”
---“Pretty sure.”
---“What do we do now?”
---“What do you mean?”
---“I mean cause they’re all doing it?”
---They seem to agree to let it slide and hope for best, seeing as how everyone’s lathering themselves up now. I break out my camera and shoot some footage of the crowd. Suddenly I think I recognize a familiar face through the viewfinder. It’s difficult to be sure, seeing as how it’s not covered in my come, but, shit yeah, it’s Juliette (French). We fucked in an olive grove after a demo in al-Khadr. Apparently, tear gassings get her hot. But is she fucking ignoring me now? She has to be. I’m the only one here in an orange vest marked “press”.
---Never one to be discouraged, I walk over and pinch her ass.
---”STIAN!”
---She says my name before she even sees it’s me. “What up, BITCH!” Ok, that’s maybe a bit much.
---I give her a hug My Way, but she acts all light pole-y. What the fuck. I say, “Soooo … what’s up? How are you?”
Juliette says, ”Ai’m guuhd.”
---This huge Palestinian guy is staring at Juliette. In a place where the women go around dressed like beekeepers, I can understand that French petites in a tank top and shorts get a bit of attention from the guys. But this is seriously overdoing it. I practice my Arabic: “Imshi.” (= beat it). The guy takes off his sunglasses. He has the face of a puma.
---”Excuse me?”
---What we’ve got here today is a direct action/die in-combo. We’re not only showing our resistance/disgust towards the security/apartheid fence/wall, but also marking the one day anniversary of the Israeli air force’s bombing of a south Lebanese hospital for retarded orphan girls. Israel apparently thought it was a weapons cache. Bad intel. What can you do? Anyways – there’s a huge stink about it over here. I’ve not seen people this pissed off since … well, the last time the Israeli air force bombed a south Lebanese hospital for retarded orphan girls. The death toll was originally reported to be 109. This was, of course, pure Hezbollah propaganda, and was later revised and revised until it reached a measly 82. But the PR damage had already been done.
---”To be honest – I’m kinda glad the body count dropped,” says Gilat, anarchist-sculptor. ”109 dead kids is a tall order.” He dabs the dolls with “blood” and passes them along to all the attending “internationals”, who’ve formed a surprisingly polite queue. “And guys, try to bring them back in one piece, ok?” Gilat turns to me. “I have an exhibition at TAU next week.”
---There’s about thirty of us, gatherered on a barren patch of land at the bottom of a hill. The youngest of us looks fifteen, the oldest … God only knows. A hundred. All ages, all races, all religions, all sexes are represented, unified by a noble common purpose: Getting their asses kicked by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), by batons, rubber bullets and water canons. The only thing that varies is the extremity of the violence applied. There have been relatively few bloodbaths recently. The International Solidarity Movement’s (ISM) non-violent approach has resulted in stone throwing and anti-semitic slogans being replaced by stupid banners and negro spirituals, which do not authorize the use of lethal force per IDF rules of engagement (ripe for revision, in other words).
---Personally, I’m getting ants in my pants. Let’s do this thing. I realize I might be, as my ex has accused me, a “Eurocentric” after all, because I only now notice that this Palestinian demonstration is sorely lacking in Palestinians.
---”ALLAAAAAAAAAAAH O’AKHBAAAAAAAAAAAAAR”
---There they go. We fry in the heat and the shit while we wait for the good people of Ni’lin to return from Friday prayers (obviously not to be confused with Thursday prayers, Wednesday prayers, etc).
---”Ok, guys, can I have everyone’s attention?” Jason is an American with a thousand piercings all over his face. He is extremely irritating, because he talks in a puny, nasal voice that always reaches up at the end of every sentence, so that everything he says sounds like a question? Right now he mounts a dirt mound and claps his hands together.
---”We need to talk about tear gas? Cause they will use it? First, obviously, avoid inhaling it? And DO NOT rub your eyes when you get hurt? Because that only makes it worse? Wash your eyes with water, guys? Covering your nose and mouth with your t-shirts also helps? Don’t try to pick up the tear gas canisters, because they’re really hot? Kick them away instead? And another really important thing? Do NOT use water-based sunblock? Cause the tear gas sticks to it? And your skin gets burned really badly?”
---Cue a bunch of morons reading their sunscreen bottles. Those with the right kind pass some around.
---Ted, a slightly less irritating American with a hat, climbs up to Jason. ”It’s fat based, dude.”
---”What?”
---”You get a rash from the oil based one.”
---“Are you sure?”
---“Pretty sure.”
---“What do we do now?”
---“What do you mean?”
---“I mean cause they’re all doing it?”
---They seem to agree to let it slide and hope for best, seeing as how everyone’s lathering themselves up now. I break out my camera and shoot some footage of the crowd. Suddenly I think I recognize a familiar face through the viewfinder. It’s difficult to be sure, seeing as how it’s not covered in my come, but, shit yeah, it’s Juliette (French). We fucked in an olive grove after a demo in al-Khadr. Apparently, tear gassings get her hot. But is she fucking ignoring me now? She has to be. I’m the only one here in an orange vest marked “press”.
---Never one to be discouraged, I walk over and pinch her ass.
---”STIAN!”
---She says my name before she even sees it’s me. “What up, BITCH!” Ok, that’s maybe a bit much.
---I give her a hug My Way, but she acts all light pole-y. What the fuck. I say, “Soooo … what’s up? How are you?”
Juliette says, ”Ai’m guuhd.”
---This huge Palestinian guy is staring at Juliette. In a place where the women go around dressed like beekeepers, I can understand that French petites in a tank top and shorts get a bit of attention from the guys. But this is seriously overdoing it. I practice my Arabic: “Imshi.” (= beat it). The guy takes off his sunglasses. He has the face of a puma.
---”Excuse me?”
---”This is Ahmed.”
---Palestinian boyfriend. Activist Nirvana. The ultimate in street cred. This guy has suffered, now they’re suffering together, apocalyptic orgasms on the side, every fuck an attempt to write their names in stars on the sky. Or something.
---I try to fly in some words under Ahmed’s radar.
---”Porqoi … non … moi?” Three years of high school French, right there.
---”Bicauze Ahmed doez not zink that luuurve is illusory.” She ties her hands around his waist and adds: “He is aaaall maaan.”
---Bitch. Fucking terrorist groupie. Ahmed gives me look like he’s about to kick my ass. I’m saved by a surge in the crowd, carrying me forward. The godawful bellowing of the minarets has finally died down and the local Palestinians are shuffling back.
---”Ok, here we go, IDs, people!”
---Passports rain over Ted, who drew the short straw and has to hang back with a big sack full of everyone’s personal papers, in case the military police should go on a bust-athon.
---”They can’t deport you if they don’t know who you are,” he tells the camera. ”I got arrested once, and I’m not telling them a fucking thing right. And the interrogator goes, I know who you are. I think, Oh fuck. And then he says, Your name is Paperwork. First name: Lots of. And he lets me go!”
---The military police need no legal formalities like due process, appeals, or even knowing what the fuck his name is, before throwing a Palestinian in administrative detention. Therefore, because of the natives’ quite precarious position, the demonstration parade is arranged in order of arrestability: old ladies first, then Israelis, then young internationals, then Palestinians, and then the international media (me). Fun fact: If the soldiers see white people in the crowd, it’s illegal for them to fire with live ammunition, lest they inadvertently shoot a Jew. That’s not to say that rubber bullets are comfortable, but everyone here is pretty sure that they won’t get killed today.
---Off we go! I turn the camera on myself, and start my backwards walk’n’talk.
---“Hey, all, this is Pale-Stian, coming to you from deep inside the occupied territories. The weekend is coming up, and while you and I go out clubbing, the people of Il’in also go out … protesting, confronting the occupying force with what little they have. The controversial security fence is being built right through the middle of this village. The Israelis say the fence is needed to stop terrorists from killing Jews, while the Palestinians say the fence is a land grab. Personally I don’t know who to believe, but one thing is for sure – today is Friday. Are we talking about much land here? No. Is it an especially nice or arable piece of real estate? Not really. But, by God, it’s all these have, and they’re not gonna give it up without a song.”
---Oh, deep in my heart / I do believe / We shall overcome some day
---Signs are jerked up and down, saying stuff like, “I(swastika)RAEL OUT OF THE $ETTLEMENT$”, ”JUSTICE FOR THE 109 97 89”, ”NO MORE DEAD KIDS”, and, confusingly, ”BUILD WALLZ, NOT WALLS”. The fake dead kids are lulled back and forth. Some of the protesters are moving the dolls’ mouths around, making crying noises. I’ve always hated “colorful” parades, but this one is kinda winning me over.
---The whole wide world around / the whole wide world around some day
---We reach the top of the hill, and see what awaits us at the construction site. A Caterpillar conference guarded by take-no-shit-types in none-shall-pass-mode. These guys are actually thumping their clubs in their palms, grinning, looking around for any excuse to unleash holy fuck. The procession slows down as we reach the site. The commanding officer or whatever starts waving a piece of paper and shouting in Hebrew. The old “closed military area”-routine.
---The front row start pressing their dolls way up in the soldiers’ faces, chanting:
---“Look what you did!
---Look what you did!
---Look what you did!”
---Suddenly, Ahmed strides through. He starts eyeballing the soldiers, on the right side of outright provocation. He shears the sunglasses from his face and holds his megaphone aloft.
---”One, two, three, four – occupation no more!”
---Hey, that rhymes!
---”Five, six, seven, eight – Israel’s a fascist state!”
---Ooooooo. How punk!
---Everyone joins in, and Ahmed swings his arms about, like he’s conducting an orchestra. He’s acting like it’s all his demo. Big fucking man. I wonder if he’d be all careless, were it not for the international presence outlawing his on-the-spot execution.
---I look around. We look like dicks. Not even hard-ons. Just penises with clothes.
---The megaphone is passed on to a middle aged Israeli hippie.
---”We are carrzyink no weapons, we shows ouer haandz, anz I say to my fellow Jew, brothzer, we are not attacking you, zis is agaaainst the occupaaaazion …”
---Enough.
---I crouch down and pick up a rock the size of an egg, lobbing it over the crowd. On its way to the soldiers, it hits someone’s sign, falls out of orbit and ends up just kind of rolling in front of the soldiers, resting at their feet. They look at it, then at us.
---No sound.
---I cover my mouth and yell into the ground: ”ITBACK AL YAHUD!”
---(= Slaughter the Jews.)
---Juliette turns around and looks at me with huge eyes. “You –“
---The IDF commanders interrupts her with a bellow -
---”! אשה נפצעה בינוני”
---- which must be Hebrew for ”beat Ahmed to a pulp with your clubs”, because that’s exactly what happens. Juliette screams.
---The soldiers bowl tear gas grenades in between the legs of the demonstrators; the canisters hiss and spin furiously about, spreading people like billiard balls. This is normally just a prelude to the really heavy action, but a lot of people go down already now, as the chemicals in the gas stick to the oil in their sunscreen. Those with the prescience to protect their skin look like they’ve been hit with sarin; bright red, bubbling with boils, screaming bloody murder. I see a young girl bury her nails in the skin of her other arm and pull, like she’s harvesting potatoes there. Fucking hell.
---The hard core activists keep on truckin’, though, and push on to get past the soldiers and reach the fence. I grab Juliette, who I find blinded and crying, and shove her in front of me while I film over her shoulder and yell: “I’M NORWEGIAN!” The soldiers whack-whack-whack with their clubs, but we get past the barrier. I toss Juliette to the side.
---Some Bob Marley wannabe motherfucker starts climbing the fence, waving a Palestinian flag. Poppoppoppop! Four rubber bullets send his ass to the ground. I’ve got it all on tape. It turns into a dizzying panorama of falling bodies, shots and blows and clouds of gas. I feel a rubber bullet graze my arm.
---”HEY! I scream in protest. ”I’M NORWEGIAN!”
---I see Gilat creeping across the field, a wet towel covering his nose and mouth. He starts negotiating with the soldiers in Hebrew, gesturing to his dolls scattered on the ground. The soldiers talk in what sounds like Russian, laugh, and shoot a tear gas canister right in Gilat’s stomach. One soldier starts smashing the head of one the dolls with his batong, screaming furiously, “KUS IMAK! KUS IMAK! KUS IMAK!” (= your mother’s cunt)
---Wroom-wroom-WROOMWROOMWROOM!!!
---Someone’s patience is up.
---IDF bulldozers are not like your average bulldozer. These are armour-plated, and so fuck-off huge that using them on olive trees is just showing off, really: A “look how big my bulldozer is”-type deal. The Caterpillars plough gravel on their way to Il’in’s last remaining little forest of olive trees.
---ISMers have already chained themselves to the trees, the rationale being that the Israeli army won’t tear the trees up by the root if drug users are stuck to them.
---Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeak.
---Palestinian boyfriend. Activist Nirvana. The ultimate in street cred. This guy has suffered, now they’re suffering together, apocalyptic orgasms on the side, every fuck an attempt to write their names in stars on the sky. Or something.
---I try to fly in some words under Ahmed’s radar.
---”Porqoi … non … moi?” Three years of high school French, right there.
---”Bicauze Ahmed doez not zink that luuurve is illusory.” She ties her hands around his waist and adds: “He is aaaall maaan.”
---Bitch. Fucking terrorist groupie. Ahmed gives me look like he’s about to kick my ass. I’m saved by a surge in the crowd, carrying me forward. The godawful bellowing of the minarets has finally died down and the local Palestinians are shuffling back.
---”Ok, here we go, IDs, people!”
---Passports rain over Ted, who drew the short straw and has to hang back with a big sack full of everyone’s personal papers, in case the military police should go on a bust-athon.
---”They can’t deport you if they don’t know who you are,” he tells the camera. ”I got arrested once, and I’m not telling them a fucking thing right. And the interrogator goes, I know who you are. I think, Oh fuck. And then he says, Your name is Paperwork. First name: Lots of. And he lets me go!”
---The military police need no legal formalities like due process, appeals, or even knowing what the fuck his name is, before throwing a Palestinian in administrative detention. Therefore, because of the natives’ quite precarious position, the demonstration parade is arranged in order of arrestability: old ladies first, then Israelis, then young internationals, then Palestinians, and then the international media (me). Fun fact: If the soldiers see white people in the crowd, it’s illegal for them to fire with live ammunition, lest they inadvertently shoot a Jew. That’s not to say that rubber bullets are comfortable, but everyone here is pretty sure that they won’t get killed today.
---Off we go! I turn the camera on myself, and start my backwards walk’n’talk.
---“Hey, all, this is Pale-Stian, coming to you from deep inside the occupied territories. The weekend is coming up, and while you and I go out clubbing, the people of Il’in also go out … protesting, confronting the occupying force with what little they have. The controversial security fence is being built right through the middle of this village. The Israelis say the fence is needed to stop terrorists from killing Jews, while the Palestinians say the fence is a land grab. Personally I don’t know who to believe, but one thing is for sure – today is Friday. Are we talking about much land here? No. Is it an especially nice or arable piece of real estate? Not really. But, by God, it’s all these have, and they’re not gonna give it up without a song.”
---Oh, deep in my heart / I do believe / We shall overcome some day
---Signs are jerked up and down, saying stuff like, “I(swastika)RAEL OUT OF THE $ETTLEMENT$”, ”JUSTICE FOR THE 109 97 89”, ”NO MORE DEAD KIDS”, and, confusingly, ”BUILD WALLZ, NOT WALLS”. The fake dead kids are lulled back and forth. Some of the protesters are moving the dolls’ mouths around, making crying noises. I’ve always hated “colorful” parades, but this one is kinda winning me over.
---The whole wide world around / the whole wide world around some day
---We reach the top of the hill, and see what awaits us at the construction site. A Caterpillar conference guarded by take-no-shit-types in none-shall-pass-mode. These guys are actually thumping their clubs in their palms, grinning, looking around for any excuse to unleash holy fuck. The procession slows down as we reach the site. The commanding officer or whatever starts waving a piece of paper and shouting in Hebrew. The old “closed military area”-routine.
---The front row start pressing their dolls way up in the soldiers’ faces, chanting:
---“Look what you did!
---Look what you did!
---Look what you did!”
---Suddenly, Ahmed strides through. He starts eyeballing the soldiers, on the right side of outright provocation. He shears the sunglasses from his face and holds his megaphone aloft.
---”One, two, three, four – occupation no more!”
---Hey, that rhymes!
---”Five, six, seven, eight – Israel’s a fascist state!”
---Ooooooo. How punk!
---Everyone joins in, and Ahmed swings his arms about, like he’s conducting an orchestra. He’s acting like it’s all his demo. Big fucking man. I wonder if he’d be all careless, were it not for the international presence outlawing his on-the-spot execution.
---I look around. We look like dicks. Not even hard-ons. Just penises with clothes.
---The megaphone is passed on to a middle aged Israeli hippie.
---”We are carrzyink no weapons, we shows ouer haandz, anz I say to my fellow Jew, brothzer, we are not attacking you, zis is agaaainst the occupaaaazion …”
---Enough.
---I crouch down and pick up a rock the size of an egg, lobbing it over the crowd. On its way to the soldiers, it hits someone’s sign, falls out of orbit and ends up just kind of rolling in front of the soldiers, resting at their feet. They look at it, then at us.
---No sound.
---I cover my mouth and yell into the ground: ”ITBACK AL YAHUD!”
---(= Slaughter the Jews.)
---Juliette turns around and looks at me with huge eyes. “You –“
---The IDF commanders interrupts her with a bellow -
---”! אשה נפצעה בינוני”
---- which must be Hebrew for ”beat Ahmed to a pulp with your clubs”, because that’s exactly what happens. Juliette screams.
---The soldiers bowl tear gas grenades in between the legs of the demonstrators; the canisters hiss and spin furiously about, spreading people like billiard balls. This is normally just a prelude to the really heavy action, but a lot of people go down already now, as the chemicals in the gas stick to the oil in their sunscreen. Those with the prescience to protect their skin look like they’ve been hit with sarin; bright red, bubbling with boils, screaming bloody murder. I see a young girl bury her nails in the skin of her other arm and pull, like she’s harvesting potatoes there. Fucking hell.
---The hard core activists keep on truckin’, though, and push on to get past the soldiers and reach the fence. I grab Juliette, who I find blinded and crying, and shove her in front of me while I film over her shoulder and yell: “I’M NORWEGIAN!” The soldiers whack-whack-whack with their clubs, but we get past the barrier. I toss Juliette to the side.
---Some Bob Marley wannabe motherfucker starts climbing the fence, waving a Palestinian flag. Poppoppoppop! Four rubber bullets send his ass to the ground. I’ve got it all on tape. It turns into a dizzying panorama of falling bodies, shots and blows and clouds of gas. I feel a rubber bullet graze my arm.
---”HEY! I scream in protest. ”I’M NORWEGIAN!”
---I see Gilat creeping across the field, a wet towel covering his nose and mouth. He starts negotiating with the soldiers in Hebrew, gesturing to his dolls scattered on the ground. The soldiers talk in what sounds like Russian, laugh, and shoot a tear gas canister right in Gilat’s stomach. One soldier starts smashing the head of one the dolls with his batong, screaming furiously, “KUS IMAK! KUS IMAK! KUS IMAK!” (= your mother’s cunt)
---Wroom-wroom-WROOMWROOMWROOM!!!
---Someone’s patience is up.
---IDF bulldozers are not like your average bulldozer. These are armour-plated, and so fuck-off huge that using them on olive trees is just showing off, really: A “look how big my bulldozer is”-type deal. The Caterpillars plough gravel on their way to Il’in’s last remaining little forest of olive trees.
---ISMers have already chained themselves to the trees, the rationale being that the Israeli army won’t tear the trees up by the root if drug users are stuck to them.
---Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeak.
---Now everyone’s in a hurry to get loose.
---A lanky Ethiopian soldier close to me lifts his gun and sprays the crowd with rubber bullets. It’s the point blankest range I’ve ever seen anyone shot at, they all fall to the ground bleeding, even some of the other soldiers are taken aback. But my man just shrugs. Suddenly he turns and looks straight at me. My heart’s in my throat. But what he says is:
---”Personally, I’m against the use of rubber bullets.”
---I sense a punch line coming up. “Oh yeah?”
---“Not until Palestinians start throwing rubber stones.”
---I love this guy.
---The soldiers starts arresting away, throwing people along like sandbags in a flood, finally packing them into jeeps at the end of the line. The ISMers unleash their de-arrestation techniques. Since male soldiers cannot detain women who resist arrest (it’s probably a religious thing), girls jump the guys about to be arrested and cry rape. That usually works, but this time the army has brought a woman soldier along. Hoo boy! She’s got sunglasses on, she’s chewing gum, and wielding that baton like it’s the penis she never had, probably pissed off because this is time out of her making-up. She breaks the big boulder of activists into pebbles, tossing them into the last jeep, audibly breaking bones.
---”You wanna throw me in the back as well, you fucking fascist?” A big dego beats his chest, the last man standing.
---My Man, the Ethiopian, sighs. He hangs his rifle across his back, changing to a tear gas grenade launcher, breaking it up, slipping a fat cartridge into the barrel before flicking it shut and firing it in the guy’s general direction. The canister flies in a low arc, before landing in his mouth. That’s in his mouth, where it stays. I think he tries to scream, but all I can hear is a sort of muffled retch. Plumes of gas spit out of his mouth, eyes and ears. I hope he’s not allergic or anything. He runs desperately around in circles, shaking his arms about. I keep waiting for his head to explode like in that movie, but he eventually just kind of collapses on the ground and lies there. Which doesn’t have to be good news.
---The Ethiopian makes a that’s-gotta-hurt-face. ”Oy,” he chuckles. ”Oy, oy, oy.” He turns to the other soldiers. ”הודה היום באחריותו לפיצוץ”
---”?הודה היום”
---”!הודה ”
---”Oy, oy, oy.”
---I sort of laugh along and pat the Ethiopian on the shoulder. Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful -
---”Get the fuck out of here before I kill you.”
---“Yes, sir.”
---I shuffle back through a foggy field strewn with fake dead kids. I pick one of them up. I hope they haven’t all left without me. I reach the village, and see that bus is still there, along with three Red Crescent ambulances, a dozen stretchers, tens of bloodied people -
---Juliette: ”That’s him!”
---Oh, yeah. That whole controversy.
---I haul ass up and over a terraced hill to reach the settler road connecting Jerusalem and Hebron, flagging down the first car I see, a green Volvo. A chubby guy with a yarmulke pops his head out the window. He seems mildly skeptical about my camera. And the press vest. And the bloody doll. “Something wrong there, chief?” he says in a New York accent.
---I jab my finger in the direction of the approaching angry mob.
---”Left-wingers!” I shout.
---”I see,” the American says. He turns to the back seat. “Baruch, get the gun.” His son, who looks about twelve, gets out of the car carrying a huge automatic rifle, which he lays across the car roof and fires at the legs of the activist, who reverse direction pretty quickly.
---One of the military police cars carrying the arrested protesters slows down alongside us.”?שר החוץ”
---The American waves them on. “We’ve got it under control!” he says, smiling.
---BANG BANG BANG
---The soldiers nod and drive on.
---“That’s nice shooting, son!”
---”Thanks, Dad!”
---”Want a lift?”
---“Sure,” I say.
---We’re driving.
---”Where are you from?”
---”Norway.”
---“Norway?” His eyes light up and he launches into … a joik? I stare at him with utter horror until I recognize it as “Sámiid Ædnan,” the Norwegian Eurovision song contest entry of 1980.
---”That’s very good,” I say.
---”This is my son.” We shake hands. “One day –” We almost drive off the road as he gestures at the barren desert we put behind us, coming into to rollercoaster hills of greater Jerusalem.
---”Pretty sweet,” I say.
---I’m let off at Damascus gate by the Old city. I find the nearest internet café to file transfer my story to ABCNews [terrible Norwegian online newspaper, not to be confused with the American tv news network, author’s note]. I get online on Messenger with my editor. Whaddaya got, shots fired, many injured, ok ok, and I post links to Ha’aretz and Jerusalem Post, who both carry the story, I see, I’m checking out your stuff right now, and I’m hoping to get, if not the top story, then at least a bit of prominence on the front page, after all, they don’t have many foreign correspondents, and they should put them to good foreign side column, sorry, we’re all backed up. I check the front page. The top story is about a giant octopus being eaten by an anaconda.
---I fucking hate Jerusalem. Every rock is holy to someone, I can’t fucking piss or puke anywhere.
---What I long for, is the Israel of my dreams, the world’s safest war zone, a hub of terror, with unspeakable atrocities and great blow jobs both 45 minutes away. I grew up on news stories on suicide bombings and the follow disproportionate responses, it’s what I had instead of pop music, it’s what I remember most about my youth, television images of buses blown apart and villages razed, crazy funerals with God’s vengeance being sworn on both sides. It felt like something happened every day: Mohammad al-Durra, blown away with his father, Shalhevet Pass, shot through the brain while in his stroller, by a chivalrous Palestinian sniper, Rachel Corrie, Caterpillar’s poster babe after being run over twice by an IDF bulldozer twice, Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP secretary general bombed in his office by Israel, Rehavam Ze’evi, the racist tourist minister gunned down in retaliation, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avraham, lynched in a PA police station after making a wrong turn, their heads like broken eggs on the pavement, people were dropping like fucking flies, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Netanya, Haifa, Ramallah, Nablus, Beersheba, Jenin, Hebron, during operations Defensive Shield, Days of Penitence, Colorful Journey, the Passover massacre, the Sbarro bombing … my heart is heavy with grief and nostalgia over the passing of a heyday I simply missed out on. Today’s sad kerfuffle is a crumb I’m hungry enough to treat like a feast. Nothing – fucking – happens – anymore. Oh sure, the odd Palestinian gets killed, when they’re stupid enough to resist arrest, but even the Arabs don’t seem to mind too much. I guess they’re reconciled to the idea of an existence totally without opportunities, joy, beauty, love or hope as long as their broadband connections are somewhat stable.
---Mostly I paraphrase agency stories so that ABCNews can stick on them the byline of someone who’s technically in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Once I did a feature story for Magasinet [Norwegian weekly, wants to be the New Yorker, isn’t – author’s note] about this rabbi who could breakdance. And that’s pretty much my journalistic zenith so far. I have been totally fucked out of my golden opportunity to be disillusioned by the cruelty of man towards man, lost my chance to bear a constant mask of cynicism to mask the sorrow that has sunk into my very bones, sorrow for all the terrible hurt I’ve witnessed, the symbolic bloody child’s shoe the only thing we’re able to show on television, while my head is a film festival of gruesome b-roll, with children blown to bits, men executed in front of their families, generations buried under the same rubble, young boys running around like human torches, yeshivas covered in blood. But I’m too late to have seen anything, not to mention Seen It All. My God, life is futile. Would it kill them to have a suicide bombing?
_______________
Here's mine. I'm one of those multi untalented Fine Art graduate types who wants to somehow combine various media he didn't really try very hard at hoping that he'll come up with something impressive by accident.
Bubble bath for brains
For quite some time now, all my goddamn life really, I have been trying to get to grips with The Middle Class.
Why? Thinking about it, I'd say a good part of the energy I have spent on this subject is quite likely to be rooted in the fact that I am not Middle Class. For me, they are that other they're always going on about. And for them I would suppose I'm theirs, a rugged, virile member of that stock which doesn't hold revolutionary change in its calloused hands after all.
I should state here, that I am in fact not working class - I am upper working class. I am not lower middle class because I am not (despite appearances, anecdotal evidence etc), a complete cunt, and I am not working class simply because I hardly ever work. I believe that this quibble of class distinction may hold the key to my tenacious interest in this subject.
In my various studies of this grouping - in the workplace, in the universities and in civilian life - I have observed that one factor keeps cropping up: They are telepathic. It is true; the Middle Classes are telepathic. Walk into any smart cafe in a rich area in London and you will see what I mean. Something is being said between them, but it is not verbal. Something is going on, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones. As you carry your coffee from the counter to the table it is as if you are breaking security laser beams that will trigger a deafening alarm at any moment. I am certain they share a hive brain, a Midwich Cuckoo thing. You can observe it in the Universities too - they all progress at exactly the same rate even though you'd be hard pressed to get a single word out of them. At every seminar I attended all I would hear was my own voice reverberating around the classroom while they sat in bland silence. Of course, it did me no good to complain, because the tutors were in on it too, they were all part of the hive.
Which area of society encapsulates the values of the Middle Class most? The Arts. I encourage readers interested in the ideas I discuss here to pay a visit to the South Bank in London on a Sunday. You will observe a long procession of them walking towards the Tate Modern in exactly the same way the Eloi walk towards the caves of the Warlocks in The Time Machine. There's even a ramp at the Tate that they walk down, never to be seen again. Why do they go there? I don't know. They don't know. If you look at their faces as they travel up and down the escalators, they never seem to be enjoying themselves. Quite often, they have small children with them and they hold them up in front of the paintings and sculptures, presumably hoping they will absorb something important. The children, being tactile creatures, usually reach out to the art and are sharply pulled away with a panicked NO!
Yes, The Arts. Books, films, music, visual art - the Eloi can only live second hand; they can only live in a reflection. They are like clones with bubble bath for brains, condemned to a model of living, not living. Do not hate them reader; pity them. And rejoice in your vagrant thoughts.
________________
I've been writing since 1994: porn and non-porn novels and short stories, articles for 'Roughcuts', the magazine of the Scottish screen industries. I got into film writing through a local scheme for new screenwriters, in 1999. The results were a short film I can still bear to look at – 'The Sucker Punch' (2002) – a feature length film that ended up with few if any merits – 'Night People' (2005) – and 40-odd episodes of a soap-opera which paid for my flat and nearly put me off writing for ever. Drawing a veil over all that, I'm now back licking my wounds in prose. Below is a bit from Chapter 2 of what hopefully will be another novel, working title 'Shelter'.
*****************
Kyle picks at his food, poking a roast potato around his plate.
---'...and I think someone's got something to tell us, eh Cammie?'
---'It's no big deal.'
---Kyle hates the false modesty in his wee brother's voice. Fingers tightening around his knife, he slices through the roast potato, halving it.
---'What's all this?'
---And his mum's playing along, pretending surprise, pretending like she doesn't know. Kyle carefully separates the two roast potato sections, easing them apart.
---'It's nothing – the list for the swimming team went up today, that's all.'
---Kyle chews his bottom lip, positioning his knife above the smaller of the two roast potato halves.
---His mum laughs. 'And??'
---His dad. 'What's he like, eh?' Fondness in the voice. Then: 'You going to eat that or play with it, Kyle?'
---Kyle says nothing, just pushes the knife through the roast potato half. It's now roast potato quarters.
---'And...I'm in.' Said like it doesn't matter...
---'Oh that's great, Cameron – well done you!'
---...which of course it does. Massively. And his wee brother knows it.
Kyle glances up from the roast potato-dissection just in time to see his mum beaming at Cameron, and his dad smiling proudly: 'Gonna be the next Mark Spitz, aren't you?'
---'Who's Mark Spits?'
---A laughs. 'Before your time – but he only got where he got cos he kept up his training, Tiger.'
---It's like that knife's turning in his guts. Kyle looks back at his plate. With the flat of the blade he squishes one of the roast potato quarters, mashing it into pulp.
---'Yeah yeah – can we get a dog now?'
---His mum groans that pretend-groan. 'I said we'll see. Kyle, you're very quiet.'
---The roast potato quarter's now this off-white smear on his plate that he can't tear his eyes away from.
---'Kyle?'
---'Give the guy a break – can't you see he's in love.' An edge in the voice.
---Kyle looks up, glancing between his mum's semi-concerned face and his dad's twinkling grey eyes. One of which winks.
---'Got himself a girlfriend - haven't you pal?'
---Kyle's getting hot again. He hates that he's now just pal. But when his dad's big hand reaches across the table to roughly tousle his hair he almost smiles.
---'Kyle's blushing – Kyle's got a girlfriend!'
---'Cameron, leave your brother alone.'
---'Can we get a dog, mum – can we?'
---Then his mobile's buzzing against his thigh. And Kyle's still half-smiling at his dad. Somewhere, in some other life, his mum's clearing the table and Cameron's clambering all over his dad and his dad's scooping Cameron up into those big arms and laughing.
---Like Kyle's just a smear on a plate, headed for the dishwasher.
******************
nick's been writing longer than I've known him, which makes it eight-plus years. Being nick, he over-thinks everything way too much and, as a result, hates everything he writes. But he's finally been persuaded not to automatically delete. He sent me 'A Thousand Nights', in 2006. I think he catches something really special here.
More of nick's writing can be found at string-and-wire.blogspot.com
a thousand nights
blurry with sleep
i hear him crash through the door
drunken slurring
his fist in my hair
yanking my head back
rolling me
knee crushed at my crotch
jamming the bottle between my lips
drink
swallowing instinctively
the burning down my throat
the bourbon i love
the warmth in my gut
head spinning as it becomes my world
my friend jack
roll over
i won't feel much else
as i drift to safety
from his sour breath on my neck
his thick wristed pawing
and hoarse voice
i absently suck
at the spilled amber liquid
on the stiff white hotel sheets
baby
his grunts echo
ricocheting off the thin walls
sounds of a thousand nights
his thick digits find my mouth
suck
he forces my head back
thrusting them deep
the cracking of my arched back
in synch with the creaking of the springs
taking all he wants
---A lanky Ethiopian soldier close to me lifts his gun and sprays the crowd with rubber bullets. It’s the point blankest range I’ve ever seen anyone shot at, they all fall to the ground bleeding, even some of the other soldiers are taken aback. But my man just shrugs. Suddenly he turns and looks straight at me. My heart’s in my throat. But what he says is:
---”Personally, I’m against the use of rubber bullets.”
---I sense a punch line coming up. “Oh yeah?”
---“Not until Palestinians start throwing rubber stones.”
---I love this guy.
---The soldiers starts arresting away, throwing people along like sandbags in a flood, finally packing them into jeeps at the end of the line. The ISMers unleash their de-arrestation techniques. Since male soldiers cannot detain women who resist arrest (it’s probably a religious thing), girls jump the guys about to be arrested and cry rape. That usually works, but this time the army has brought a woman soldier along. Hoo boy! She’s got sunglasses on, she’s chewing gum, and wielding that baton like it’s the penis she never had, probably pissed off because this is time out of her making-up. She breaks the big boulder of activists into pebbles, tossing them into the last jeep, audibly breaking bones.
---”You wanna throw me in the back as well, you fucking fascist?” A big dego beats his chest, the last man standing.
---My Man, the Ethiopian, sighs. He hangs his rifle across his back, changing to a tear gas grenade launcher, breaking it up, slipping a fat cartridge into the barrel before flicking it shut and firing it in the guy’s general direction. The canister flies in a low arc, before landing in his mouth. That’s in his mouth, where it stays. I think he tries to scream, but all I can hear is a sort of muffled retch. Plumes of gas spit out of his mouth, eyes and ears. I hope he’s not allergic or anything. He runs desperately around in circles, shaking his arms about. I keep waiting for his head to explode like in that movie, but he eventually just kind of collapses on the ground and lies there. Which doesn’t have to be good news.
---The Ethiopian makes a that’s-gotta-hurt-face. ”Oy,” he chuckles. ”Oy, oy, oy.” He turns to the other soldiers. ”הודה היום באחריותו לפיצוץ”
---”?הודה היום”
---”!הודה ”
---”Oy, oy, oy.”
---I sort of laugh along and pat the Ethiopian on the shoulder. Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful -
---”Get the fuck out of here before I kill you.”
---“Yes, sir.”
---I shuffle back through a foggy field strewn with fake dead kids. I pick one of them up. I hope they haven’t all left without me. I reach the village, and see that bus is still there, along with three Red Crescent ambulances, a dozen stretchers, tens of bloodied people -
---Juliette: ”That’s him!”
---Oh, yeah. That whole controversy.
---I haul ass up and over a terraced hill to reach the settler road connecting Jerusalem and Hebron, flagging down the first car I see, a green Volvo. A chubby guy with a yarmulke pops his head out the window. He seems mildly skeptical about my camera. And the press vest. And the bloody doll. “Something wrong there, chief?” he says in a New York accent.
---I jab my finger in the direction of the approaching angry mob.
---”Left-wingers!” I shout.
---”I see,” the American says. He turns to the back seat. “Baruch, get the gun.” His son, who looks about twelve, gets out of the car carrying a huge automatic rifle, which he lays across the car roof and fires at the legs of the activist, who reverse direction pretty quickly.
---One of the military police cars carrying the arrested protesters slows down alongside us.”?שר החוץ”
---The American waves them on. “We’ve got it under control!” he says, smiling.
---BANG BANG BANG
---The soldiers nod and drive on.
---“That’s nice shooting, son!”
---”Thanks, Dad!”
---”Want a lift?”
---“Sure,” I say.
---We’re driving.
---”Where are you from?”
---”Norway.”
---“Norway?” His eyes light up and he launches into … a joik? I stare at him with utter horror until I recognize it as “Sámiid Ædnan,” the Norwegian Eurovision song contest entry of 1980.
---”That’s very good,” I say.
---”This is my son.” We shake hands. “One day –” We almost drive off the road as he gestures at the barren desert we put behind us, coming into to rollercoaster hills of greater Jerusalem.
---”Pretty sweet,” I say.
---I’m let off at Damascus gate by the Old city. I find the nearest internet café to file transfer my story to ABCNews [terrible Norwegian online newspaper, not to be confused with the American tv news network, author’s note]. I get online on Messenger with my editor. Whaddaya got, shots fired, many injured, ok ok, and I post links to Ha’aretz and Jerusalem Post, who both carry the story, I see, I’m checking out your stuff right now, and I’m hoping to get, if not the top story, then at least a bit of prominence on the front page, after all, they don’t have many foreign correspondents, and they should put them to good foreign side column, sorry, we’re all backed up. I check the front page. The top story is about a giant octopus being eaten by an anaconda.
---I fucking hate Jerusalem. Every rock is holy to someone, I can’t fucking piss or puke anywhere.
---What I long for, is the Israel of my dreams, the world’s safest war zone, a hub of terror, with unspeakable atrocities and great blow jobs both 45 minutes away. I grew up on news stories on suicide bombings and the follow disproportionate responses, it’s what I had instead of pop music, it’s what I remember most about my youth, television images of buses blown apart and villages razed, crazy funerals with God’s vengeance being sworn on both sides. It felt like something happened every day: Mohammad al-Durra, blown away with his father, Shalhevet Pass, shot through the brain while in his stroller, by a chivalrous Palestinian sniper, Rachel Corrie, Caterpillar’s poster babe after being run over twice by an IDF bulldozer twice, Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP secretary general bombed in his office by Israel, Rehavam Ze’evi, the racist tourist minister gunned down in retaliation, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avraham, lynched in a PA police station after making a wrong turn, their heads like broken eggs on the pavement, people were dropping like fucking flies, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Netanya, Haifa, Ramallah, Nablus, Beersheba, Jenin, Hebron, during operations Defensive Shield, Days of Penitence, Colorful Journey, the Passover massacre, the Sbarro bombing … my heart is heavy with grief and nostalgia over the passing of a heyday I simply missed out on. Today’s sad kerfuffle is a crumb I’m hungry enough to treat like a feast. Nothing – fucking – happens – anymore. Oh sure, the odd Palestinian gets killed, when they’re stupid enough to resist arrest, but even the Arabs don’t seem to mind too much. I guess they’re reconciled to the idea of an existence totally without opportunities, joy, beauty, love or hope as long as their broadband connections are somewhat stable.
---Mostly I paraphrase agency stories so that ABCNews can stick on them the byline of someone who’s technically in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Once I did a feature story for Magasinet [Norwegian weekly, wants to be the New Yorker, isn’t – author’s note] about this rabbi who could breakdance. And that’s pretty much my journalistic zenith so far. I have been totally fucked out of my golden opportunity to be disillusioned by the cruelty of man towards man, lost my chance to bear a constant mask of cynicism to mask the sorrow that has sunk into my very bones, sorrow for all the terrible hurt I’ve witnessed, the symbolic bloody child’s shoe the only thing we’re able to show on television, while my head is a film festival of gruesome b-roll, with children blown to bits, men executed in front of their families, generations buried under the same rubble, young boys running around like human torches, yeshivas covered in blood. But I’m too late to have seen anything, not to mention Seen It All. My God, life is futile. Would it kill them to have a suicide bombing?
_______________
Sean Edwards
Here's mine. I'm one of those multi untalented Fine Art graduate types who wants to somehow combine various media he didn't really try very hard at hoping that he'll come up with something impressive by accident.
Bubble bath for brains
For quite some time now, all my goddamn life really, I have been trying to get to grips with The Middle Class.
Why? Thinking about it, I'd say a good part of the energy I have spent on this subject is quite likely to be rooted in the fact that I am not Middle Class. For me, they are that other they're always going on about. And for them I would suppose I'm theirs, a rugged, virile member of that stock which doesn't hold revolutionary change in its calloused hands after all.
I should state here, that I am in fact not working class - I am upper working class. I am not lower middle class because I am not (despite appearances, anecdotal evidence etc), a complete cunt, and I am not working class simply because I hardly ever work. I believe that this quibble of class distinction may hold the key to my tenacious interest in this subject.
In my various studies of this grouping - in the workplace, in the universities and in civilian life - I have observed that one factor keeps cropping up: They are telepathic. It is true; the Middle Classes are telepathic. Walk into any smart cafe in a rich area in London and you will see what I mean. Something is being said between them, but it is not verbal. Something is going on, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones. As you carry your coffee from the counter to the table it is as if you are breaking security laser beams that will trigger a deafening alarm at any moment. I am certain they share a hive brain, a Midwich Cuckoo thing. You can observe it in the Universities too - they all progress at exactly the same rate even though you'd be hard pressed to get a single word out of them. At every seminar I attended all I would hear was my own voice reverberating around the classroom while they sat in bland silence. Of course, it did me no good to complain, because the tutors were in on it too, they were all part of the hive.
Which area of society encapsulates the values of the Middle Class most? The Arts. I encourage readers interested in the ideas I discuss here to pay a visit to the South Bank in London on a Sunday. You will observe a long procession of them walking towards the Tate Modern in exactly the same way the Eloi walk towards the caves of the Warlocks in The Time Machine. There's even a ramp at the Tate that they walk down, never to be seen again. Why do they go there? I don't know. They don't know. If you look at their faces as they travel up and down the escalators, they never seem to be enjoying themselves. Quite often, they have small children with them and they hold them up in front of the paintings and sculptures, presumably hoping they will absorb something important. The children, being tactile creatures, usually reach out to the art and are sharply pulled away with a panicked NO!
Yes, The Arts. Books, films, music, visual art - the Eloi can only live second hand; they can only live in a reflection. They are like clones with bubble bath for brains, condemned to a model of living, not living. Do not hate them reader; pity them. And rejoice in your vagrant thoughts.
________________
Jack Dickson & Nick
I've been writing since 1994: porn and non-porn novels and short stories, articles for 'Roughcuts', the magazine of the Scottish screen industries. I got into film writing through a local scheme for new screenwriters, in 1999. The results were a short film I can still bear to look at – 'The Sucker Punch' (2002) – a feature length film that ended up with few if any merits – 'Night People' (2005) – and 40-odd episodes of a soap-opera which paid for my flat and nearly put me off writing for ever. Drawing a veil over all that, I'm now back licking my wounds in prose. Below is a bit from Chapter 2 of what hopefully will be another novel, working title 'Shelter'.
*****************
Kyle picks at his food, poking a roast potato around his plate.
---'...and I think someone's got something to tell us, eh Cammie?'
---'It's no big deal.'
---Kyle hates the false modesty in his wee brother's voice. Fingers tightening around his knife, he slices through the roast potato, halving it.
---'What's all this?'
---And his mum's playing along, pretending surprise, pretending like she doesn't know. Kyle carefully separates the two roast potato sections, easing them apart.
---'It's nothing – the list for the swimming team went up today, that's all.'
---Kyle chews his bottom lip, positioning his knife above the smaller of the two roast potato halves.
---His mum laughs. 'And??'
---His dad. 'What's he like, eh?' Fondness in the voice. Then: 'You going to eat that or play with it, Kyle?'
---Kyle says nothing, just pushes the knife through the roast potato half. It's now roast potato quarters.
---'And...I'm in.' Said like it doesn't matter...
---'Oh that's great, Cameron – well done you!'
---...which of course it does. Massively. And his wee brother knows it.
Kyle glances up from the roast potato-dissection just in time to see his mum beaming at Cameron, and his dad smiling proudly: 'Gonna be the next Mark Spitz, aren't you?'
---'Who's Mark Spits?'
---A laughs. 'Before your time – but he only got where he got cos he kept up his training, Tiger.'
---It's like that knife's turning in his guts. Kyle looks back at his plate. With the flat of the blade he squishes one of the roast potato quarters, mashing it into pulp.
---'Yeah yeah – can we get a dog now?'
---His mum groans that pretend-groan. 'I said we'll see. Kyle, you're very quiet.'
---The roast potato quarter's now this off-white smear on his plate that he can't tear his eyes away from.
---'Kyle?'
---'Give the guy a break – can't you see he's in love.' An edge in the voice.
---Kyle looks up, glancing between his mum's semi-concerned face and his dad's twinkling grey eyes. One of which winks.
---'Got himself a girlfriend - haven't you pal?'
---Kyle's getting hot again. He hates that he's now just pal. But when his dad's big hand reaches across the table to roughly tousle his hair he almost smiles.
---'Kyle's blushing – Kyle's got a girlfriend!'
---'Cameron, leave your brother alone.'
---'Can we get a dog, mum – can we?'
---Then his mobile's buzzing against his thigh. And Kyle's still half-smiling at his dad. Somewhere, in some other life, his mum's clearing the table and Cameron's clambering all over his dad and his dad's scooping Cameron up into those big arms and laughing.
---Like Kyle's just a smear on a plate, headed for the dishwasher.
******************
nick's been writing longer than I've known him, which makes it eight-plus years. Being nick, he over-thinks everything way too much and, as a result, hates everything he writes. But he's finally been persuaded not to automatically delete. He sent me 'A Thousand Nights', in 2006. I think he catches something really special here.
More of nick's writing can be found at string-and-wire.blogspot.com
a thousand nights
blurry with sleep
i hear him crash through the door
drunken slurring
his fist in my hair
yanking my head back
rolling me
knee crushed at my crotch
jamming the bottle between my lips
drink
swallowing instinctively
the burning down my throat
the bourbon i love
the warmth in my gut
head spinning as it becomes my world
my friend jack
roll over
i won't feel much else
as i drift to safety
from his sour breath on my neck
his thick wristed pawing
and hoarse voice
i absently suck
at the spilled amber liquid
on the stiff white hotel sheets
baby
his grunts echo
ricocheting off the thin walls
sounds of a thousand nights
his thick digits find my mouth
suck
he forces my head back
thrusting them deep
the cracking of my arched back
in synch with the creaking of the springs
taking all he wants
you fuck
throws me drunk from the bed
my head slamming against the wall
my gut heaves
as the door slams
he leaves behind
the sealed envelope
a bit thicker than usual
boy
next week
same time
the keys will be at the desk
grumbling in the quiet
grabbing the half empty bottle
the room mine for the rest of the night.
________________
Dennis Mahagin
Dennis Mahagin is poet from the Pacific Northwest. His verses are wrought through an eclectic approach, sometimes splashing modern motifs upon long-established poetic forms, such as the villanelle below. He greatly admires the work of writers such as Gregory Corso, Stephen Dobyns, Philip Larkin and Charles Bukowski. From these widely-varied influences, he attempts to hone a voice that is freakishly, honestly his own.
Bi - Polar Pomade Villanelle
I call my cowlick Sylvia Plath
In whistling tempest of Bad Hair Day
Sylvia, she back-flips, twixt ecstasy & wrath.
Water Board sticks her-- temporarily, in the bath;
Sylvia definitely digs it, when the suds turn g r a y ;
I call my cowlick Sylvia Plath.
I rake her, stage left, w/ curling iron gaff,
Like a randy flapper in a bad Gatsby play;
Sylvia she back-flips, twixt ecstasy and wrath.
Afro-Sheen to Dopamine, tried it all on her behalf:
Yet mere chemicals can't keep Wild Hair at bay;
I call my cowlick Sylvia Plath.
=0 A Gonna cut her loose from root, or leastwise by half;
By God, this Plath will go too far, one day!
Sylvia, she back-flips, twixt ecstasy & wrath.
Dyslexic pig tail, treble cleft that left the staff,
As Scott said to Zelda: if you weren't such a good lay…
I call my cowlick Sylvia Plath...
Hippie Chick she back flips—twixt Ecstasy, and Wrath.
________________
Patrick Wall
I'm 23 years old and am currently an elementary school teacher. I studied film in college, but focus now on writing. I write some fiction, essays, and poetry. I'm in an electro band called DIY Hospital. I'm interested in issues of queerness, race, gender, identity and other things that sound like bullshit when you say them like that.
The Miracle Machine
by Patrick Wall
---Tommy owned a pistol he called the Miracle Machine. No faggot, bitch teacher, or bitch girl was safe, he said.
---Max called his guitar playing “raping the axe,” which he said felt “wicked fucking good.” He detested all things gay, but accepted the label “queercore” for his band, Black Eye for the Straight Guy. He referred to the cuts along his arm and thighs, as well as his asshole, as his “AIDS Loading Docks.”
---One morning during first period Max cut class and walked to the field behind the school. Behind a shed that had been used to store lawnmowers and weed trimmers back when this field was mowed and trimmed, Max took out his pipe and began smoking his meth. He was somewhat high and digging a pentagram into his calf with a nail he’d found—feeling, he told himself, as Jesus must have when he was in high school—when Tommy came along.
---Max put the round hole to his lips and inhaled as hard as he could, but nothing came and the smell was foul. “You dumb fag, that’s my pistol.” “Oh, sorry.” Max tried his pipe and Tommy sat down. “Let me hit that or I’ll blow your brains out.” “Do you promise?” “Shut up, fag” Tommy said, grabbing the pipe. He’d not had the stuff and coughed violently, got a terrible headache, and felt better than he had, maybe ever. Max pulled out his cock and began squeezing it, getting it hard. Tommy’s eyes bulged. The weeds and grass around them swayed in unison like potheads at a concert. All eyes were closed. Mouths opened and things went deep inside them, sucking up smoke or precum or the scent of gun powder. With an explosion, there was a high, an orgasm, and a brain scattered about the field like ashes. He knew that teachers and jocks, then police and paramedics, then judges and jail and rape and terror and death would all come soon, and tell him what to do, and how he should feel, but for now he just lay there, covered in blood and cum and smoke, crying, for all the joy and the peace in the world.
---Kathy wrote that on a weekend wondered what effect it would have. She was so angry about so many things that she knew she had to do something, but inevitably, the something came out like this, bruised, vacant, and corrupt. She phoned her mom to ask how things were but could barely listen. Things were necessarily shit, marriage a farce and a sentence, prices a scam and an outrage, children distant and unconcerned. Typically, she was right. But Kathy couldn’t hear truth from her; it was like re-watching a children’s movie with adults in gigantic, terrifying creature suits spouting off moral proclamations to the toddler audience, probably there was some truth there, but the prophets were so hideous that the message, not noble enough to withstand it all, was destroyed or else just disappeared.
---I wrote this this morning. It’s for an author’s blog. To me, it’s like shitting, pulling the feces from the toilet, and giving it to someone in a plastic bag. It’s disgusting, and recklessly hostile, but the truest thing I can give of myself. I’m going to dump my boyfriend today and do some work and maybe call some friends. I’ll try to describe the anger I feel, the rage which is violent in me, as much as I say I hate violence. Typically, it will feel like loving the boy in the porn, or the picture of the boy in the porn, or the screen with the picture of the boy in the porn. It’s being a reference to a person who is a political writer. It’s living the writing of stories that are bruised, vacant, and corrupt. It’s writing a story called the Miracle Machine.
Friend of a Friend
by Patrick Wall
---The bar where I met Michael and Roger had been described to me as “edgy.” Introduced by a mutual friend, we started talking when he went away to court someone. Michael was upset because Roger had rolled his eyes at some guy. “He does this all the time,” I was told. The guy, white, like most of us, but not like Roger, looked like most of the other people there: short, styled hair; form-fitting shirt; tight jeans. “I’m just tired of guys that look like that.” But you don’t need to judge him completely based on the way he looks, Michael more or less said. I interjected. “Well I don’t think Roger’s saying that there’s anything wrong with looking like that. I think his point is just that that’s all there is around here, and there’s not much space for people who don’t fit that mold.” Right, said Roger. “Well people should be able to dress how they want.” When Michael went to piss Roger and I eyed each other knowingly. Then I checked myself out in something reflective and sipped on my vodka cranberry.
---Michelle was wearing tight, faded blue jeans, a shirt too-baggy, and a fluffy, filthy Winnie the Pooh backpack. She walked into the Chinese diner, tried the payphone, it didn’t work, walked back onto the street. Some ways down some of the yellow lights of a sign saying “Liquor” blinked erratically. There she went. She bought a plastic flask-full of cheap vodka and a can of Sprite to be her chaser. Also, a pack of Newports. On the curb she blew a small menthol cloud up at an oldish white man, his saggy gut making a pouch of his button-down shirt. In bed he smacked her face just before he came. She winced. With the money she bought another flask of vodka, a phone card, some chips, and more Sprite. She stumbled a little this time when she stepped out onto the sidewalk. A cop stared at her for a full minute. She kept walking, measuring each step to extend exactly twelve inches forward. Finally an outdoor payphone that worked. Her cousin said she could sleep there, if she was gone in the morning, before her boyfriend got back from work.
---“Well, and you have to admit that there’s a race factor involved here too, Michael.” Roger nodded. Michael didn’t know what to say, so he sipped from his drink, his arm around Roger’s waist. I smiled at both of them and mentioned our friend. He was making out with some guy. I got another drink.
---Doing as she was told, Michelle got up at six. She rinsed out her mouth, vomited, rinsed again, and washed her face. Pam, her cousin, gave her an apple for the road. She bought coffee at a 7-11 and poured the few sips of vodka she had left into it. Downtown at First Presbyterian they served lunch from eleven to two, so she started walking in that direction. A bum said something to her and she told him to fuck off, motherfucker. A black cat with white spots rubbed against her legs by a bench in a park and she picked it up. It laid on her lap and purred. Unexpectedly, she started sobbing. People walked by but didn’t look in her direction. Eventually the cat left and she got up. Near a tree that didn’t really block the sun she heaved but nothing much came. She counted the bills and coins she had and she had enough for vodka, Sprite, and chips. She went back to the park and had them. In the shade of a tree she watched joggers, rollerbladers, mothers pushing children in strollers. She thought of the Christmas when she was eight and her dad gave her a kitten. By New Year’s the thing had destroyed the rug and they couldn’t afford the cat litter or food. She gave it to a neighbor and tried never to see it again. On the path she tripped once and saw black spots that floated and got bigger and bigger. She almost vomited but didn’t. She sat on the stoop of the church, waiting for it to be eleven.
---Roger and Michael left together and I hugged both of them, telling them how nice it was to meet them. Later I found out that Michael is positive. I don’t know about Roger. The same day I was told this a gay acquaintance asked if I was gay—I’d thought it was obvious—but I said yeah, I’m queer. I rode my bike home quickly, dodging cars and listening to music loud enough so that I couldn’t hear anything else.
---Laying in the entranceway of a condemned apartment building Michelle looked up for a second and saw a young white boy riding quickly down the street. She laid her head back down. Just then a siren yelped and she pushed herself up. By the time she was walking the cop was behind her and told her to stop now and get down on the fucking ground. She did and he cuffed her and told her her rights.
---I looked at some porn, texted a friend in New York, and went to sleep. I dreamt of watching Michael die, while Roger cried and I didn’t know what to do.
______________
Michael Buitron
An excerpt from my notes on a trip to South America:
---Across the plaza behind me, my new friend says that he sees police walking this way, then stops me from turning around. He signals for me to stay put and continue talking as we are supposedly doing. There are three of them, wearing bullet-proof vests that say 'POLICIA' across their chests. They are wearing army fatigues, combat boots, and a thick leather belt that holds handcuffs and holsters and a black wooden stick.
---They push us apart and my companion explains that I do not speak Spanish. One of the cops is in my face. He pushes me in the chest and asks what I'm doing here. His nostrils are flaring, like he's on the verge of flying into a rage. With my index finger I point to my eye, then to the twinkling lights in the tall buildings that surround us. "Soy un turista," I explain. He wags his finger no, makes a fist and moves it to his mouth while poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue: the universal sign for giving head. I reply with and adamant, "¡No!" then ad, "only talking," moving my fingers and thumb together and apart like a talking sock puppet.
---My friend is taken to the other side of the plaza and I am turned with my back to him so I can't see what's happening. One cop is with each of us, and the third moves back and forth between the two groups, trying to ascertain if the story my friend is telling and the one they don't understand in English corroborate.
---I am made to stand with my legs apart and my arms straight out. The angry commando interrogating me opens my water bottle, smells the contents then uses it to wash his hands. One by one items are pulled from my pockets, inspected, then put in my outstretched hands. He asks where I work and I say in a hospital. He shrugs his shoulders, as in, 'what do you do there?' and I say, "Counselor." He doesn't understand.
---"Doctor?"
---I shake my head no, then fumble around for a word I know that he'll understand. "Psicologia." My wallet is inspected in front of me, then put in my hand. Then the camera, the lighter, the cigarettes (opened up and smelled), and a receipt from an earlier visit to a museum. I'm thoroughly patted down: around my ankles and up my legs, around my crotch and all over my torso to my armpits then down each arm. I take my shoes off and my feet are felt through my socks. My shoes are inspected and the insoles are pulled out. He then gestures for me to put myself back together.
---This process happens three times, once by each of the policemen. I can't stop thinking how sexy they are, and how good it feels when their strong hands roughly grope me. They have the sleeves of their uniforms rolled up, revealing their strong brown hairless forearms. I imagine that their ass cracks are smooth, brown, and muscular too.
---The first cop says something to me that I don't understand; I say I don't understand and he gets very angry, saying something that seems like, 'I'll beat the shit out of you if you don't start understanding Spanish!' a technique unsuccessfully employed by my grade school nuns to teach Latin. I try to say in Spanish that I understand a little, and he seems less upset by this than when I say that I don't understand at all. My friend is brought back over with his upper lip swollen and bloody. He explains that they want a bribe. I've never paid a bribe before, and I'm worried that if I give too little I'll get beat up anyway.
---I pull out my wallet and count out 40,000 Bolivars, about twenty dollars in US currency. I hand them the four 10,000 Bolivar bank notes. I figure one for each of them, and one for them to fight over like vultures. He takes the money, smiles, and shakes my hand! The other two cops step up and shake my hand in turn then the three of them walk off. It was like paying to see a theater piece except instead of paying up front for the performance, the money is extorted out of you afterward by the actors.
---We stand there silently, motionless, until the cops are out of sight, then head off in the other direction, down the stairs. He stops to show me the bloody underside of his lip. He says they hit him because he had no money to pay the bribe. I gently kiss his swollen lip and give him a hug.
---At the far end of the complex we sit down. He asks me for money and I give him five bucks. He motions for my camera and has me take his picture. He has me take a second one, and this time he pulls his dick out. He tells me to meet him at this location tomorrow at three in the afternoon. I say yes, nodding my head, holding up three fingers, then pointing at my watch. It is an empty promise.
_______________
An extract from a work in progress by Aspen Michael Taylor
I’m over here now. Not there where I was. I’m here. The couch is in the shape of a semi-circle. I’m sitting in the middle. You could seat about eight or nine people comfortably in a row on this couch. The light grey of my suit and the color of this couch are bringing me back to the point I was at in my brain when I was over there. What color is this couch anyway? It’s a demented form of light red, maybe an ugly old man pink or a faded fuscia, or an ugly blending of what I just said. Actually it’s a salmon color. The television is turned off. The lights from the ceiling reflect off it. I can see the shapes of the living room’s objects in it vaguely and it is allowing me to see behind me, and I can see the vague outline of the hallway entrance that leads down the hallway. The first door on the left is his bedroom and the light is on in there, and because the door has been left open, the light that is emanating from the lighting fixture on the roof is filling that room and is casting a shadow up the hall. By the time the light has reached the end of the hallway that leads into this living room it’s already gone. It isn’t strong enough to go this far. Or maybe it could if there was no other light source in the entire house. Maybe some of it would lightly fall or gently be cast into this room. From there. It would maybe, I think. If I were to think of that room being the only light source in this whole house, I would… well I don’t really know. I’m standing at his doorway. It feels like a clear plastic sheet could cover his bed, draping right down, almost to the carpeted floor. That could be perfect. Seeing that image in my head makes me want to squash myself in the small space between the glass window and the bed. Still the rain has not let up outside and the wind blowing in is so cold that it doesn’t even freeze you anymore, it just does what it does. The house I am in has no other houses around it. Everything outside is just solid blackness. There are tall tall big trees around it. I don’t think one curtain is closed in this entire house. If someone was standing outside, looking into in here, they could see everything that is happening and I can’t see anything out there, just emptiness that has had its light source extracted. What have they seen me do? I am completely and utterly on display, lit up in a house in the middle of blackness- the only light source. If you are out there, you can see me do this. I won’t do it anymore. I should walk over to the window and close it but I am stiff, paralyzed. If I were to move, it could be a mistake right now. It is alright. Nothing will move right now. Nothing will move. Nothing will move.
I have just started unbuttoning my shirt when I see something from the corner of my eye, coming from through the other end of the hall. My breath stops and my heart is thudding so hard it feels like it is going to smash a hole through its cage. I’m standing inside my bedroom, looking down the hall through to the living room. The television is on. It’s fuzzy. No picture. The shadows on the floor raise up the walls to the top of the hallway ceiling and he runs across the living room in his black robes. I scream and my face distorts. There’s a glass with a strange liquid in it that’s spilling in ultra slow motion and I am moaning like a PHARAOH. Screaming with my hands to my face- the stubs of my fingertips gnawing down my cheeks with a distorted face that I saw in a vision when I was a child in a bowl of black water. The beings that stand over the treetops bend their knees and fall. One continuous scream in slow motion. God himself has stepped aside. I know you can see from out there. I know you’ve seen everything I’ve been doing. You’re out there in the grass staring right at me. You know I can’t see anything except the black.
“Hey what are you doing in there?”
I’m in here.
“Why are you next to that kids bed. Why is your face contorting like that?”
Aaaaahhhh. I am screaming in a vortex and my fingers are going through my head.
“Hey what are you doing in there?”
I’m in here.
“You’re in a little little bedroom”
I’m in here.
“Hey listen… you wanna die?”
---(Insert audio input here. Frequency looks like this:
-----/ ___/ ---
----------------)
He’s running up and down that hall in his black robes. He’s frantic. Stuck in a loop.
“Hey listen, I got your face”
CLICK.
“Hey, you wanna die?”
He’s running on a loop up the hallway. Every time he passes the door, a violent thrust of wind sweeps up my spine, making every hair in my body stand up.
“I heard about youuu”
-
“ I seen it myself at times. That’s me up there right now”
Face distorting.
“I had a little bird used to smell me things at 444 in the black”
I never did anything.
“Hey what are you doing in there? In that little little room. You’re bigger than you can see yourself”
---(Insert audio input:
------/ // --/ _____ -/
---------------------)
“Can you see yourself in there?”
Rushes of wind up and down up and down the hall behind me. Finger stubs inside my brain. Up and down. Up and down.
---(Insert audio input:
ssssssssssssssssssssssssss
sssssssssssss)
“I’m gonna show you what you look like”
I can see myself from outside where I can’t see. My face is wobbly and I’m screaming. My fingers in my bones aren’t solid. Standing over his bed at night, right now with the lights on.
----
---They push us apart and my companion explains that I do not speak Spanish. One of the cops is in my face. He pushes me in the chest and asks what I'm doing here. His nostrils are flaring, like he's on the verge of flying into a rage. With my index finger I point to my eye, then to the twinkling lights in the tall buildings that surround us. "Soy un turista," I explain. He wags his finger no, makes a fist and moves it to his mouth while poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue: the universal sign for giving head. I reply with and adamant, "¡No!" then ad, "only talking," moving my fingers and thumb together and apart like a talking sock puppet.
---My friend is taken to the other side of the plaza and I am turned with my back to him so I can't see what's happening. One cop is with each of us, and the third moves back and forth between the two groups, trying to ascertain if the story my friend is telling and the one they don't understand in English corroborate.
---I am made to stand with my legs apart and my arms straight out. The angry commando interrogating me opens my water bottle, smells the contents then uses it to wash his hands. One by one items are pulled from my pockets, inspected, then put in my outstretched hands. He asks where I work and I say in a hospital. He shrugs his shoulders, as in, 'what do you do there?' and I say, "Counselor." He doesn't understand.
---"Doctor?"
---I shake my head no, then fumble around for a word I know that he'll understand. "Psicologia." My wallet is inspected in front of me, then put in my hand. Then the camera, the lighter, the cigarettes (opened up and smelled), and a receipt from an earlier visit to a museum. I'm thoroughly patted down: around my ankles and up my legs, around my crotch and all over my torso to my armpits then down each arm. I take my shoes off and my feet are felt through my socks. My shoes are inspected and the insoles are pulled out. He then gestures for me to put myself back together.
---This process happens three times, once by each of the policemen. I can't stop thinking how sexy they are, and how good it feels when their strong hands roughly grope me. They have the sleeves of their uniforms rolled up, revealing their strong brown hairless forearms. I imagine that their ass cracks are smooth, brown, and muscular too.
---The first cop says something to me that I don't understand; I say I don't understand and he gets very angry, saying something that seems like, 'I'll beat the shit out of you if you don't start understanding Spanish!' a technique unsuccessfully employed by my grade school nuns to teach Latin. I try to say in Spanish that I understand a little, and he seems less upset by this than when I say that I don't understand at all. My friend is brought back over with his upper lip swollen and bloody. He explains that they want a bribe. I've never paid a bribe before, and I'm worried that if I give too little I'll get beat up anyway.
---I pull out my wallet and count out 40,000 Bolivars, about twenty dollars in US currency. I hand them the four 10,000 Bolivar bank notes. I figure one for each of them, and one for them to fight over like vultures. He takes the money, smiles, and shakes my hand! The other two cops step up and shake my hand in turn then the three of them walk off. It was like paying to see a theater piece except instead of paying up front for the performance, the money is extorted out of you afterward by the actors.
---We stand there silently, motionless, until the cops are out of sight, then head off in the other direction, down the stairs. He stops to show me the bloody underside of his lip. He says they hit him because he had no money to pay the bribe. I gently kiss his swollen lip and give him a hug.
---At the far end of the complex we sit down. He asks me for money and I give him five bucks. He motions for my camera and has me take his picture. He has me take a second one, and this time he pulls his dick out. He tells me to meet him at this location tomorrow at three in the afternoon. I say yes, nodding my head, holding up three fingers, then pointing at my watch. It is an empty promise.
_______________
Michael Aspen Taylor
'Kiddiepunk'
An extract from a work in progress by Aspen Michael Taylor
I’m over here now. Not there where I was. I’m here. The couch is in the shape of a semi-circle. I’m sitting in the middle. You could seat about eight or nine people comfortably in a row on this couch. The light grey of my suit and the color of this couch are bringing me back to the point I was at in my brain when I was over there. What color is this couch anyway? It’s a demented form of light red, maybe an ugly old man pink or a faded fuscia, or an ugly blending of what I just said. Actually it’s a salmon color. The television is turned off. The lights from the ceiling reflect off it. I can see the shapes of the living room’s objects in it vaguely and it is allowing me to see behind me, and I can see the vague outline of the hallway entrance that leads down the hallway. The first door on the left is his bedroom and the light is on in there, and because the door has been left open, the light that is emanating from the lighting fixture on the roof is filling that room and is casting a shadow up the hall. By the time the light has reached the end of the hallway that leads into this living room it’s already gone. It isn’t strong enough to go this far. Or maybe it could if there was no other light source in the entire house. Maybe some of it would lightly fall or gently be cast into this room. From there. It would maybe, I think. If I were to think of that room being the only light source in this whole house, I would… well I don’t really know. I’m standing at his doorway. It feels like a clear plastic sheet could cover his bed, draping right down, almost to the carpeted floor. That could be perfect. Seeing that image in my head makes me want to squash myself in the small space between the glass window and the bed. Still the rain has not let up outside and the wind blowing in is so cold that it doesn’t even freeze you anymore, it just does what it does. The house I am in has no other houses around it. Everything outside is just solid blackness. There are tall tall big trees around it. I don’t think one curtain is closed in this entire house. If someone was standing outside, looking into in here, they could see everything that is happening and I can’t see anything out there, just emptiness that has had its light source extracted. What have they seen me do? I am completely and utterly on display, lit up in a house in the middle of blackness- the only light source. If you are out there, you can see me do this. I won’t do it anymore. I should walk over to the window and close it but I am stiff, paralyzed. If I were to move, it could be a mistake right now. It is alright. Nothing will move right now. Nothing will move. Nothing will move.
I have just started unbuttoning my shirt when I see something from the corner of my eye, coming from through the other end of the hall. My breath stops and my heart is thudding so hard it feels like it is going to smash a hole through its cage. I’m standing inside my bedroom, looking down the hall through to the living room. The television is on. It’s fuzzy. No picture. The shadows on the floor raise up the walls to the top of the hallway ceiling and he runs across the living room in his black robes. I scream and my face distorts. There’s a glass with a strange liquid in it that’s spilling in ultra slow motion and I am moaning like a PHARAOH. Screaming with my hands to my face- the stubs of my fingertips gnawing down my cheeks with a distorted face that I saw in a vision when I was a child in a bowl of black water. The beings that stand over the treetops bend their knees and fall. One continuous scream in slow motion. God himself has stepped aside. I know you can see from out there. I know you’ve seen everything I’ve been doing. You’re out there in the grass staring right at me. You know I can’t see anything except the black.
“Hey what are you doing in there?”
I’m in here.
“Why are you next to that kids bed. Why is your face contorting like that?”
Aaaaahhhh. I am screaming in a vortex and my fingers are going through my head.
“Hey what are you doing in there?”
I’m in here.
“You’re in a little little bedroom”
I’m in here.
“Hey listen… you wanna die?”
---(Insert audio input here. Frequency looks like this:
-----/ ___/ ---
----------------)
He’s running up and down that hall in his black robes. He’s frantic. Stuck in a loop.
“Hey listen, I got your face”
CLICK.
“Hey, you wanna die?”
He’s running on a loop up the hallway. Every time he passes the door, a violent thrust of wind sweeps up my spine, making every hair in my body stand up.
“I heard about youuu”
-
“ I seen it myself at times. That’s me up there right now”
Face distorting.
“I had a little bird used to smell me things at 444 in the black”
I never did anything.
“Hey what are you doing in there? In that little little room. You’re bigger than you can see yourself”
---(Insert audio input:
------/ // --/ _____ -/
---------------------)
“Can you see yourself in there?”
Rushes of wind up and down up and down the hall behind me. Finger stubs inside my brain. Up and down. Up and down.
---(Insert audio input:
ssssssssssssssssssssssssss
sssssssssssss)
“I’m gonna show you what you look like”
I can see myself from outside where I can’t see. My face is wobbly and I’m screaming. My fingers in my bones aren’t solid. Standing over his bed at night, right now with the lights on.
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4 comments:
dennis, i haven't heard from young and stupid but i really hope she's doing ok.
sweet dennis, are you doing ok too? you seem a little bit down - i hope everything isn't getting on top of you too much. thanks for being so thoughtful and kind all the while, even when you're feeling crappy.
This is fucking awesome. All of it, fucking awesome.
Dennis, what's yer email to email you things?
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