NIGHT WITHOUT STARS BY REX SEXTON
About The
Author
Rex Sexton is a Surrealist painter in Philadelphia. His award winning art has been exhibited in museums, televised on PBS, written about in newspapers, reproduced in magazines and included in national and international exhibitions. His poetry and prose have appeared in cutting-edge literary magazines. His short story “Holy Night” received an Eric Hoffer award and was published in Best New Writing 2007. He is married to the neuroscientist Dr. Rochelle S. Cohen.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to
thank the editors of the following publications
in which many of these poems and stories have or
will appear: Mobius, The
poetry Magazine, Flat Iron, (A Brilliant)
Record, Edgz, Waterways, Reflection, B&R
Samizdat Express, Hazmat Review, Time Of
Singing, Clark Street Review, Saturday At The
Diner, Plato’s Tavern, The Rusty Truck,
Fighting Chance,
Lone Stars,
Nut House, Nerve Cowboy, Poetry USA, Feelings
Of The Heart, Bear Creek Haiku, R.KV.R.Y, The
Pen, WriteOn!!, Willow Review, Struggle,
Love’s Chance, The Externalist, Paradoxism,
Always Looking, Back Street Review, Ardent,
The Stray Branch, and Soul
Fountain.
Contents
Drumbeats Sounding A Rhythm To The Brain
Fairy Tales Can Come True It Can Happen To You
For Rochelle
NIGHT WITHOUT STARS
Listening to it in the darkness,
the lullaby of hopelessness,
played by staccato rain
across the Chi-town tenements,
gunfire and sirens tossed in
to make the rhythms of the night
even more disturbing,
I dream colors,
paint prayers,
across the blackboard of oblivion,
where all lessons of the street are learned,
without degrees,
and tattooed in the heart and mind
with graffiti signs.
TEN COUNT
Fist hit days knocking us off our feet
and no way out, not tomorrow, maybe
never, rain pounding down sad enough
to make you weep, all day, every day.
“Punch out and pull your pay, everyone,
we’re closing down.”
With the weighted steps of weariness,
we walk the stormy streets, looking for
anyone, anything hiring, bills to pay,
mouths to feed, hearing the music of
life’s mystery play in shadowed souls
and haunted heartbeats as we search
the city, restlessly.
GLOBAL MOURNING
That moment in the night when the echoes and
apparitions of the tenement’s evicted-from-life
former residents, begin to haunt the tumbledown
premises, amidst the clanging of old pipes, the
creaking walls and groaning staircases, the hiss
of radiators, with their moans and spectral appearances,
is my cue to grab my coat and get my hat and hole up
in one of the neighborhood’s booze and blues rattraps,
until I can numb myself from their cries and sleep
while the bedbugs bite.
I known they all need closure from their victimization
by fate and that they will never rest in peace until
they get it off their chests and attain that catharsis.
But I’ve heard their stories before, seen them on TV,
read about them in history: slum landlords, usury,
discrimination, exploitation, tyrants, death camps,
ethnic cleansing, aristocrats, bureaucrats, slavery,
iron fists, holocausts – every misery one can imagine
involving man’s inhumanity to man. I see the sequels
of their tragic destinies all around me in the misery and
poverty I move through every day. Besides I have my
own sorry story to relate, which I’m sure I’ll do when
my hard-luck lot is through and I clatter around in my
chains. You only live once. There’s no second chance.
When you never got your due wailing through eternity
is all that’s left for you.
I developed a theory nursing my nightly drinks in the
ghetto gin mills, surrounded by lost souls almost as
dead as the ones I fled. Tenements topple, ghettoes
crumble, civilizations fall to ruins – all of them
replaced by new habitats that will also be erased. What
do the ghosts haunt then? I think they roam the wind,
form a civilization of howling phantoms, cause
hurricanes, tidal waves, change the climate, melt the
ice caps. I believe everything they say about carbon
emissions, toxic waste, air and water pollution,
all greed and gluttony and abuse propelling us toward
the end of the world. But I think the haunts contribute
as well with their tales of living hell.
ATONEMENT
Night, snow falling across
over tombstones. The streets are crowded with
shivering commuters who cough and shift their
glance when I stick out my hand. In the store
windows temptations sparkle. They avert their
eyes from those too. This Christmas will be poor.
The grand cathedral in the middle of the downtown
bustle. I slip inside, out of the menacing night, into
darkness adorned with candlelight, sacred statues,
flickering stained glass windows, altar, pulpit, the
son of god nailed to a cross and wearing a crown
of thorns.
In the hushed, hallowed quietude I choose a retreat
amidst rows of empty seats – a widower here, a
dowager there, another half dozen other lost souls
with their crosses to bear.
My home away from homelessness, this house of
worship, along with the soup kitchens, rescue gospel
missions, park benches, tunnels, viaducts, card board
boxes, shelters, bridge basses, police stations, public
libraries, museums on free days.
In the warm and mellow illusion of transcendence,
I can sit and reflect upon the mystery of birth and
death and feel a little peace and momentarily forget
my permanent state of hopelessness: roofless, jobless,
friendless. “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” I say
to the man upstairs, who probably isn’t there. “I cheat,
steal, connive.” But not like Madoff. I brood. Not like
Wall Street. I sin to survive.
THE GUILTY
Hustle or muscle is the only way
to get by in the ghetto: deal, steal,
pimp, kill.
The hobos I pass in the train yard
waiting for their escape ride to
anywhere are free to relocate their
poverty. So are we, theoretically.
But it’s a little tough with a family.
The same old crime of being alive
from cradle to grave replayed each
day by the incarcerated.
Bars without spaces to look through
surround you. That’s because no one
outside wants to see your misery or
hear your cries – the deaf ear,
the blind eye.
“What did I do?” “What have we done?”
“How can we escape?” “How do we
survive?” Deal, steal, pimp, kill …
NEVER-NEVER LAND
The room is like a coffin,
sleep a death-dream of
childhood
sweating, tossing, running,
hiding …
“Come in from the night.”
A voice says from behind a
door the kid has
The night. The
night.
Outside the sounds of the
dead zone abound: sirens,
gunshots, screams of terror.
“Come in from the night.”
The voice says.
ghetto’s answer.
HANGING TREE
Jumble, fumble. The alarms go off. Faster than a speeding bullet the cops show up. Camacho catches the El train, rooftops interrupted by flashes of lightening. Cold, alone, pounding rain.
Full pedal, passing the bottle, Plugger races the car down the side-streets at a hundred or more. You don’t ride often in a flying coffin but ain’t that what life is for?
“So, he gave me inches seven,” the wild white girls sing some anglo bottle of beer on the wall song variation in the back seat. “I said honey this is heaven.”
Two wheeled corner, slides, skids, the radio blasting something about things going better with Coke.
Someone say
coke? Yeah
man.
“So he gave me inches ten, I said double it again.
Houses a blur, whoosh, whoosh. Minds in a whirl, whoosh, whoosh.
ENCHILADAS
They flash past a curbside stand in the industrial district where their parents slave every day for minimum wage.
“Enchiladas!” The white girls giggle.
Plugger slams the breaks, slides, skids. Camacho laughs as Plugger jams it into reverse and they fish-tale back.
“You no can do that.” The proprietor shakes his head. “Park on the sidewalk.”
They all pig out – the wild white girls with relish. They wash down the food with whiskey and malt.
“So he gave me inches twenty,” the girls sing, gleefully, greasy goodness stuffed in their mouths. “I said honey that’s sure plenty.”
They creep cautiously down the darkened streets, through the blackened gangways, along the unlit alleys. They spotted their hit while cruising the main strip – a cluster of punks drinking beers in the bowling alley parking lot.
“Geronimo!” They whispered.
They park Plugger’s junker in an alley around the corner – an old beat up taxi painted black and lettered ghostly with “Tales From The Crypt,” and “Death You Deserve IT,” scrawled on the sides in swirls of white – an American flag flying from the antenna.
There are a dozen of the enemy. They have to do it quickly, before the bowling alley gang gets wind of their gorilla attack and piles out on them in mass. Plugger walks straight at them, Mr. Good Wrench hidden in his army surplus jacket.
“You guys seen my brother?”
They fan out around the cars, gripping tire-irons, crowbars.
“Who’s this jerk?”
“It’s me, Tony.”
“Anyone know this punk?”
They rush them, swinging. The
punks are fast.
Camacho blocks a bottle. Sixteen
stitches along his arm later, no problem. They
beat the punks bloody. Bam,
bam. No
one died. The
punks must have had God on their side. Next
day the punks jump them back, outside their pool
hall. Have
themselves a ball.
Good training for war. With
jobs scarce, everyone is thinking about joining
up when they are old enough. Even
Camacho. Why
not? The
streets of
A good run. Camacho leaves the pool hall, pockets the fives, ones, puts the tens and twenties in the duty booty for his parents. Too good to leave behind, he takes his beer with him and drinks it in the alley.
Dissolving night over urban blight, the rising sun pointing at the “on the run” like a gun. All over the Dead Zone the junkies are searching the catacombs for that breakfast of champions, hidden in the labyrinths.
Being, being, nothingness.
Camacho closes his eyes and downs the beer, feels the darkness of the universe and all its shadows disappear.
“We’re done man!” Skinner’s teeth chatter as they sit shackled together on a lockup bench waiting for the Sergeant. “Murder one! Life man! Unless they give us death! You don’t think they’ll do that?”
Things happen. This one had happened fast. Camacho said “Stick ‘em up” and the gun went off. They had bolted out the back door and down the alley. Camacho threw the gun in a frenzy at a backyard tree where it disappeared in the leaves.
The cops were right there. They must have been cruising by and heard the shot. Camacho watched the tree as they grabbed them, put them in cuffs, roughed them up – two troublesome looking teenagers in the middle of suspicious circumstances. It didn’t fall, the gun. It must have got stuck, good, in some branch, something like a golfer’s hole-in-one, or some basketball players one-in-a-million full court shot.
“Look Skinner,” Camacho whispers, “we went in the front and came out the back. No one saw us enter or exit. No one was in the old man’s shop. Hey, we were just cutting through the alley. As far as they know, whoever blasted the old man went out the front while the cops were wasting their time arresting us. They got nothing except us being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not even in it, just near it. They got no weapon, loot, and it ain’t like we got long rap sheets like hardened criminals.”
“Unless the gun comes down!” Skinner hisses. “Then it’s homicide!”
“Calm down Skinner. We got luck on our side. Enjoy the ride. Unless some little bird talks, we walk.”
They walked alright morning, noon and night, Camacho and Skinner, alone or together in any kind of weather, up and down the alley past the tree, braced to jump the fence and snatch the evidence before it fell from some branch on the grass and the old couple who lived there found the gun and the cops had their ass.
“I’m going in there.” Skinner hollered. “I’m climbing that tree and getting that fucking thing!”
“You ain’t doing shit, half-wit.” Camacho spat at a garbage can. They were sweating bullets. It was the dog days. Flies swarmed around them. “When the leaves fall we’ll be able to spot it up there. Maybe. I’ll jimmy up there faster than you can. Bim bam the monkey man. For now we leave it alone. I don’t need your skinny, clumsy white ass clowning around and falling down. It’s a miracle.” Camacho’s voice was hushed as he stared at the tree. “It’s like divine intervention or something. Like God said: “Wait, fate, give them a break.”
“Miracle? It’s a curse! It’s torture! If you think God’s protecting us you’re nuts! We’re killers – at least you are. If God’s doing anything he’s giving us a taste of hell before we go to jail!”
“So, it’s just dumb luck! Don’t fuck it up! You’re as guilty as I am and just as damned in the eyes of God or in the eyes of The Man. Get your head together, amigo, you’re going loco!”
They never even charged them at the station with anything, although they questioned them long and hard for hours. Skinner almost broke. He started crying like a baby and babbling incoherently. Luck all he bawled basically was “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. Leave me alone.” Meanwhile the pigs combed the shop, alley, backyards, rooftops, and finally had to let them go when they came up with zero. Camacho had washed his hands as soon as they hit the station, jumping up and down and complaining he was about to pee in his pants. They never did that forensic gunpowder test on them anyway.
“Skinner look. It’ll be OK. We’ll get the gun. The shooting was an accident. We just wanted to scare the old man. We didn’t want nothing like that to happen. God, fate, whatever, we got a break. Maybe a chance to change, repent, do good things not bad. Think about that. You know what they say: God works in mysterious ways.”
Jesus Skinner was a handful. No cojones.
Skinner was dangerous. In his tiny, sports-poster filled bedroom, Camacho lay propped up by pillows on his bed and stared at his rumpled reflection in the dresser mirror. With his sweat matted hair and haggard face, he already looked incarcerated. Skinner would squawk, Camacho knew, and soon. He would get some neighborhood mouthpiece. They came cheap enough. Quick and dirty plea-bargains were what they were all about. He would show the cops where the gun was, testify. The miracle tree and the magically hanging gun were a gamble that Skinner’s nerves couldn’t handle. Could Camacho blame him? Freedom or life, all or nothing. They would try them as adults, two slum punks with nothing and no one to prop them up or hold their hand. The court would pull the chain and flush them down. But Skinner could be out before he was thirty if he played his cards right. Turn states, point the finger at Camacho. Would he do the same if it were the other way around? God, if it only had been! If only he had not been holding the gun that shot the old man.
The room was a hot box. Camacho pulled off his shirt. He tried to mop the sweat off his face, chest but the shirt was sopping wet and his efforts were useless. Through the paper-thin walls, he could hear his family talking and laughing – his mother and sisters in the kitchen cooking, his father and brothers noisily watching the baseball game in the living room. He closed his eyes and shuddered as he listened. This would kill them. His father would die inside. His mother would go crazy. His brothers and sisters would be locked up in their own little prisons with him and would sadly miss him on Christmas, birthdays, weddings, births, graduations, all the times a family came together he wouldn’t be there.
For the thousandth time he reran the nightmare in his mind. It was a two-bit jewelry store, no cameras, alarms, but enough gold school rings, trinkets, wedding bands to make a take even the head hanchos in the neighborhood could celebrate. Fence it, melt it down. The price of gold was climbing through the clouds. The place was a piece of cake. He was amazed that no one had hit the store before.
But the gun went off and the old man dropped. He dropped like a rock. It wasn’t like the shootings you see on TV. It was like the old man was a puppet and Camacho cut his strings.
“Julio, we gonna eat now!”
His sister Maria shouted from the kitchen. He could hear the clatter of plates and utensils, the sliding of chairs. He couldn’t face them.
“Pronto Julio!” His sister Nanette shouted and laughed. “You don’t come quick we gonna eat it all!”
“Eat it all! Eat it all!” Little Fernando laughed and stomped around the living room floor.
Camacho rose slowly and faced
his reflection in the mirror. Julio
Camacho, he brooded, the pretty boy with the
ugly name.
Camacho meant humpback. “We’re all
humpbacks in this neighborhood,” was one
of his father’s favorite jokes, “we’re all
bent over by the burdens of the poor.” He
felt another weight on his back now. The
weight of a murderer. This
weight he couldn’t throw off, despite all his
sculpted muscles.
He was a champion wrestler on the high
school team, at least in his weight class, short
like most Mexicans but strong and quick. If he
stuck out two more years of high school and
managed to pass, he could probably get a college
scholarship.
But that was a gamble he couldn’t
handle. Try
as he might, he could never get the complexities
of math or science, or that world of chemicals
and gases, all those protons, electrons,
neutrons, formulas, equations, astronaut stuff. Camacho
felt a fool in school. The
champion with his muscles was El Stupido in the
classroom.
This delighted his teachers who liked to
stick it to him, “that cocky Camacho kid.” “Mr.
Camacho, today’s lesson seems to have you in a
strangle hold.
Maybe you should exercise your brain
now and then?
Instead of biceps and pecs try to put
some muscles in your head.” To
save
face he played it down, swaggered around. “Fuck
that book shit!”
He would blow it off to his friends. “Who
needs it?”
They felt the same way. Brains
were a liability.
Didn’t that honor student in the black
neighborhood just get beaten to death because he
wanted to study and not join the gang? Besides,
did book brains ever do anyone any good in the
hood? His
odds for getting out of the ghetto, like theirs,
were zero.
So, say he did get into college; how long
would he last?
So he could wrestle; was he Olympic
material? The
gangs were all he was good for, Camacho knew,
committing crimes, running drugs. His
glory days were here and now on the streets
where he could flash money and strut his stuff. But
that street of dreams had its dead end coming. It was
written on the walls with graffiti scrawls. “Eat,
drink and be merry amigos.” Their
leader Pena would salute them with his toast. “If you
don’t die on the streets you’ll die in jail.”
“Poppy, I
got to get out of here.” Six
months ago, he had sat down at the kitchen table
with his father after the party they had given
him on his sixteenth birthday. The
tiny, appliance cluttered room with its faded
walls and warped linoleum was still decorated
with streamers and balloons, as the rest of the
house had been, courtesy of his sisters’
talented hands.
“I
want to join up.
Next year. If
you sign for me, I can start the papers now. Be a
Marine. I
can get my GED while I’m there. Pursue
a military career.”
His father was sipping a beer. He looked tired and old beyond his years. He had spent his life in these South Side slums, before and after he had served in Desert Storm; and the mystery to Camacho was that he never seemed to regret a day of it, even though he must have seen and lived a life of hardship without let up.
“You want
to go to
“But it’s no good here Poppy.” Camacho’s mind swirled with the life in the hood, drugs, guns, gangs. Things were different now then they had been for his father when he was a kid, no matter how bad things were back then. It was a different world. If you didn’t join a gang now you were a marked man. “Es muy malo aqui, Poppy.” Camacho pleaded.
“Malo? Bueno? If
it’s no good here,” his father tapped his
heart, “it’s
no good anywhere.”
“Julio, we’re waiting!”
“Un momento, Mama. I got to change my shirt!”
Camacho fished a tank-top from the dresser and pulled it on. He pondered his biceps, dark eyes, wavy hair. What the zombies wouldn’t do to him if he landed in stir.
“I’m almost there! Presto. Change-O!”
He glanced at the window as he ran a comb through his hair. After everyone was in bed he would slip down the fire escape. He would meet Juanita in the church yard, go drinking with his friends. He had to get out of there, get some air, get high, forget about Skinner, the murder, before he lost his mind.
A peek-a-boo moon in a storm chased sky, like an avenger’s eye peering through its cosmic keyhole at the sinner below, watching for the chance to transform the night into God’s holy wrath and cut his throat with a lightening bolt.
Skinner moved through dark
and street glow past the poolrooms and the
taverns, the seedy blue-lit lounges, down into
the back alleys of the catacombs amidst the
midnight prowl of shadows. No one
went at night to No Man’s Land. Even
during the day you didn’t want to go alone. You
went after school in pairs or groups to your
favorite trick to get your treat, clicking
switchblades and looking mean. Hands
in his pockets, sweating bullets, Skinner
stumbled down the unlit streets, over the broken
sidewalks, amidst the abandoned buildings, most
of them fire scorched shells, like they weren’t
in
For the thousandth time, he reran the robbery in his mind. How scared he had been when he saw Camacho’s gun. “How else we gonna rob him? Say: ‘Give me your money or I’ll kick you in the shin?’” They went in as soon as the old man opened. No customers then. They lifted their T shirts over their noses, pulled down their hats, wore dark sunglasses. But the gun went off. Boom. Skinner had never seen anything like it, the way the old man dropped.
“If we repent and are serious and we beg God’s forgiveness with all our heart and soul,” Camacho put his arm around Skinner’s shoulder as they patrolled the alley, “God will forgive us, amigo. God wants to give us another chance. It was an accident. I’ll get the gun. We won’t go to prison.”
Was Camacho feeding him some jive, as if he was stupid? Maybe Camacho really believed all that bullshit? Camacho was not so bad. Camacho was his only friend. If it wasn’t for Camacho, Skinner knew, he probably would be dead long ago. Eventually the gangs would have stomped him good. They had come pretty close more than once. Maybe they would have set him on fire with gasoline or whatever like the gangs did to that white kid in the news.
“What you
doin’ here white trash?” They
surrounded him after his first day at school. Skinner’s
family
moved to the neighborhood a year ago. “You come
to give me some money? No?
I think maybe you better have some tomorrow.”
Skinner’s father had lost his job. They lost their house, savings, everything. Both his parents worked in the packing plant now for minimum wage and were lucky to have that. The new life was a shock. They came from the suburbs, good schools, jobs. The more Skinner tried to fit in the worse it got. The gangs would taunt him, shake him down, beat him up – the blonde, blue eyed target. Now everyone left him alone. He hung with Camacho. “Muy intellegente.” Camacho would pat Skinner on the back when they ran into his pack. “A master mind.” Camacho would tap his temple. “He gonna rob a bank with his brains and put you Frito banditos to shame.”
“Dealer.” Skinner whispered and tapped at the sheet metal door across which Death was spray painted. The building was an old, brick, boarded up warehouse. The phantom shapes behind him ghosted away. “Dealer.” He tapped harder.
“Nada mas.” A dark voice hissed. “Go away. We closed.”
“It’s Skinner.” Skinner stammered. “Camacho’s friend. You know – Blanco.”
“Beat it.”
“I got money. Plenty.”
“Stick it up you ass.”
“It’s an emergency.” Skinner pleaded. “Camacho sent me.” He lied. “We got this party, these chicks. Camacho begs you.”
Skinner had stolen a hundred dollars from his parents savings toward rent. He could sell the crack over the next few days and put it back. He was going crazy. He had to talk to Dealer. His mind was in a frenzy.
“How much is plenty?”
“A hundred?” Skinner held his breath.
“That’s plenty? Shit!”
The door swung open. Looking at Dealer made you shudder. He had wild hair and a shock theater face, nose ringed, eyebrow ringed, the forehead, cheeks, chin slashed with zipper-like scars. His eyes could stare down a firing squad. Camacho had gotten the gun from him.
“Blanco.”
Dealer swayed in the doorway and sneered at Skinner. He stood stark naked, holding a gun. His sinuous brown body shimmered with tattoos: devils, demons, screaming faces, snakes, magic numbers, voodoo writings.
“Let’s have it.” Dealer stuck out his hand. Skinner’s pale one shook as he paid him. “Stay there.” Dealer pointed at the doorstep with his gun. “Lilliana!” He turned and disappeared. “Bring me my box! It’s in the closet!”
The room beyond the doorway looked like a psychopath’s nightmare. Skinner had been in it with Camacho a few weeks ago. It was a huge, dimly lighted space. Somehow Dealer managed to reclaim part of the warehouse from extinction with plumbing and electricity. Miracles like that happened in the hood everywhere, mystery electricity, phone connections, cable TV. In the vast, warehouse space, naked light bulbs dangled from steel beams. The walls were painted with surrealistic street scenes in which giant, garishly colored figures, twisted in a hell that raged from floor to ceiling. Hell was the hood on fire. The jumble of toppling tenements and gaudy storefronts were whipped by flames and peopled with demons. In every building’s windows, Hispanic families howled with torment. Dealer must have gotten the neighborhood graffiti artists in there and supplied them with paints and brushes. Their vision was a holocaust of despair and destruction. Dilapidated furniture was scattered throughout the room. In a corner there was a kitchen, television, computer, CD player. Beyond Dealer’s torture chamber, blocked off by a maze of cinder brick walls, was a gutted shell filled with rubble and junk, inhabited by stray dogs, winos, druggies and rodents,
“Enjoy your blow.” Dealer reappeared and tossed him a bag. “Don’t do this no more, Blanco. Never. When I say ‘no mas’ you get lost, fast.”
“Dealer.” Skinner stammered. “Can I ask you a question? I don’t have a computer anymore so I can’t look up the answer. Do guns attract lightening? I mean they’re made of metal. I know cops wear guns everywhere. But say a cop stands by a tree in a storm. Trees get struck all the time. Would a gun increase the odds of lightening striking? If anyone would know you would. Dealer?
Nights winds whispered around them in the tangled parish garden, like chanting saints or nuns at prayer. Or maybe it was more like midnight angels fluttering in the dark, or priests reciting sermons, or choirs caroling incantations. Sweet sin, the sensations on their skin as they kissed, bit, tangled with delight, naked in the garden moonlight.
“Bueno.” Camacho groaned. He leaned over Juanita and searched her features, tasted her breath, felt her quiver. The heavens opened up on a world that is enough. “Bueno.” He repeated. “Amen.”
They had attended the night mass, knelt together, prayed, or at least Camacho did. It was his idea. He had showered after diner, put on a silk shirt and new chinos, had an impulse to attend the service. “Oh, I don’t know Julio.” Juanita hesitated before the great doors of the grand cathedral with its ringing bells, towering steeple. “It doesn’t seem right. We can’t pray, then go out in the garden and – you know.”
“It’s OK.” Camacho squeezed her hand. “We’ll pray for a baby.”
“I don’t think so! I think I pray the other way! Julio you crazy!”
Darkness adorned with candlelight, silver and gold flickering in the shadows, stained glass windows that sparkled like jewels, sacred statues, the altar, the pulpit, the crucifix, the priest, alter boys, hallowed music, heads bowed they closed their eyes and crossed themselves, silent before the holy rituals and mystical aura of a transcendent world.
Camacho had quit going to church long ago. He would pretend he went, saying to his parents that he would attend a later mass. He was too tired Sunday mornings from his week of school and wrestling practice. The mysteries of birth, death, living, dying, creation, sin, meant less and less to him as he grew up in the hood. “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” What did that mean? He lived in a no man’s land of stab and grab, where everyone was on the make, take, fake – not just the barrio but the whole country – everyone running around with their bag of tricks, rip-offs, tip-offs, payoffs, shakedowns. Where were the goodies in his Christmas stocking? He figured out real fast he had to fill it on his own. And it wasn’t through worship and prayer – that never got anyone anywhere.
“If it’s no good here,” his father tapped his heart, “it’s no good anywhere.”
Camacho watched the priest perform the service and recalled the words of his father. It was true, his heart was no good anymore. He was as bad as the worst. He was a killer – just an old, miserly man at the end of his days but still he deserved to live and Camacho had taken his life away. “What do you know about war, muchacho?” His father had chided him. He knew rumbles, drive-bys, gang initiations, the dangers of the streets, and now he knew murder. Could he do it again if he joined the service? Killing felt different. He should kill Skinner, Camacho knew. Snap his neck and throw him off a viaduct before he chickened out and talked. There was no way he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Something had saved him, God, luck, the souls of his ancestors. A hand had reached out of the sky and grabbed his crime, hid it so he could get rid of it. Something had given him a chance to start again, maybe to do something grand. Could he let Skinner ruin that?
Skinner was his friend, his amigo, more than anyone else in the ghetto. He was the only reason Camacho hadn’t flunked the school year. “Let me show you some tricks.” He had sat down next to Camacho in class, after the teacher had humiliated him again. “PEMDAS.” He wrote on a sheet of paper. “This is a formula. It’s like tips on how to wrestle, trips and flips. I’ll explain how it works. What’s important is to multiply or divide before you add, unless there’s a parenthesis. Do these guys, exponents, first.” It was miraculous. Skinner was better than the teacher. He helped him with all the astronaut stuff too. Enough to get him through. “Mi amigo! What would I do without you!” What would he do with Skinner now? Skinner was a danger. He had to keep Skinner quiet one way or another.
Camacho looked at Juanita. Bonita Juanita with her eyes closed and hands folded. She had a hard life. She had dropped out of school to work at the plant. Her father had left them. Her mother worked the second shift, which was why Juanita could easily sneak out whenever he
called. She had two little brothers and three younger sisters. She paid Carlotta, the oldest, to baby sit and keep her mouth shut.
“Get a job, get a wife, get a life.” His father chided.
“Pretty one,” Camacho whispered, “it’s time for our communion.”
“That Blanco loco!” Dealer stormed through the door. “That crazy anglo! You hear him? You hear him jabber at me about lightening and cops and guns and trees? I do his skinny white ass a favor and he babble like a mad man at me about computers and metal and lightening and drive me crazy!”
“Calm down Ramon. Sit here, smoke this.” Lilliana gave him the joint she just lit. “I get you a nice cold beer. He just a loco anglo. Let it go.”
“I keel him!” Dealer flopped back on the sofa and waved his gun. “I aim and pull the trigger but the safety’s on! I get so mad I forget to take it off! I keel him!”
Lilliana returned with a beer. She snuggled up to him on the sofa and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Easy baby. Blanco gone now. No more Blanco.”
“I rip out his gut! I cut off his nuts! Next time I see heem, that Blanco he a corpse!”
“Shh … shh …”
Guns and lightening and cops and trees, over and over – his brain was dizzy. Dealer imagined grabbing Skinner and slashing his throat, watching those blue eyes bug out, blood pour out of his jabbering mouth. “Un momento.” He calmed down. “Un momento. Mas tarde, mas tarde.” He took a sip of the cold beer and a drag off the joint. Guns and lightening, cops and trees. His eyes swept the wall across from the sofa. There was a sprawling tree painted near the door. A noose hung from it. “The tree of crime bears bitter fruit,” was scrawled under it. He remembered the shooting a few days before. The old guy who owned the jewelry store. Rumor had it that the cops had hauled in two suspects but they couldn’t pin it on them because they couldn’t find the weapon. Blanco and Camacho? The gun he sold to Julio? Maybe they hid the gun in a tree? Crazy but maybe.
Dealer pondered this, trying to imagine how it could be done. Jump a fence and hang it on a branch, jump back and run? Dealer was a snitch. That’s how he stayed in business. The cops let him operate for rumors, leads, names, tips. Now and then they would raid him, but it was just for show. He’d be out in the morning, shrugging it off, letting rumors spread around about his mystic powers and underground connections. A gun in a tree in a yard across the alley from the store. He’d make a call. Maybe it was nothing, but just trying would keep him in favor with the law.
Most nights, in the back of no man’s land, where the tracks turned by the packing plants, hobo fires would toss around the shadows of homeless men Chicago bound. The freight trains slowed down there to round the bend in their final run to the city where a vagrant’s paradise of missions, soup kitchens, and bustling streets where quick change could be hustled, lay waiting for the taking.
They would drop off there to avoid the risk of beatings and incarceration from railroad security for vagrancy, trespassing. They would take the CTA the rest of the way. When the snow came they’d be back again, heading south or west – those who weren’t dead from bad booze, fights, or who had landed in prison.
The moon was gone. Black clouds closed over Camacho like the lid of a coffin. He sat on the roof of his sweltering tenement, drinking tequila and smoking cigarettes. Like a holy vision his mind revisited the Cathedral and Juanita – how they had lain side by side on a blanket of soft grass deep in the garden, two breathless shadows. The tangle of trees wove another cathedral above them as they cuddled, with a window on a dream of starlight and moon glow.
“Are you really there?” The night seemed to whisper. “Yes we are, yes we are.” Was the answer.
Thunder boomed over the tenement rooftop. The winds picked up, blowing through the windows of the inferno below him like an angel’s breath, soothing the bodies if not the souls of the dreamers who tossed in their slumbers.
Camacho watched the tiny,
hobo fires shivering by the tracks beyond the
catacombs.
Maybe he would ride a train soon the
other way – if it came to that. Could
he let it come to that? Take
one west where there was not so much law and
there were a lot of Mexicans and he could blend
in, get lost.
There was a city of vagrants who lived
under the storm drains of
He imagined himself running along side of a freight car, climbing in, another lost soul on a ghost train – running, hiding, begging maybe, stealing maybe, staying in flop houses, missions. He wasn’t going to be caged in. He wasn’t going to fight for his life everyday with sub-humans. Maybe he deserved it. Was he one of them? But what did anyone expect of him? He had spent his life watching everyone around him, family, friends, collect their junkyard dreams and pile them in a heap amidst the acid rains and tangled weeds of poverty. They expected him to live that way? It was an accident that he killed the old man. But he would make up for it someday. That’s what the miracle tree was all about. At least that’s what he felt in his heart: make amends, start again, do something noble, worthy, serve his country, save lives, give up his own if necessary.
Skinner. Camacho brooded. He twisted the bottle around in his hands.
Thunder rumbled across the blackened city, lightening flared. The dark, desolate buildings zigzagged through a nightmare. Skinner crossed the deserted ghetto furtively. Although no one was there, he felt he was being shadowed everywhere.
“I keel
you!”
Dealer had screamed, pointing the gun at him.
He stumbled out of the
catacombs, staggered home, more confused than
ever. Everyone
was asleep.
His parents drank now heavily. They
lived in a daze, working double shifts for
minimum wage.
His younger sisters were druggie sluts,
all made up.
Before you knew it, they’d both be
knocked up.
“Hey
Blanco, last night I boom boom you seester. You
no like it?
Maybe
you want to
do something about it?”
He hid the crack behind his dresser, sat in the dark in a frenzy looking for the answer. Maybe they should both go in and confess? They hadn’t taken anything. They ran. They were in shock. It was an accident, kind of like reckless driving. The cops had no suspects. If they did the right thing and went in, spilled their guts, the authorities should be willing to cut them some slack – serve a little time, go on parole, rehabilitation. But he knew it wouldn’t work. They would need a high priced mouthpiece to pull that off. That was rich kid stuff, suburbia. Everyone knew they threw the book at inner city fuck ups.
He got a flashlight from the kitchen and went out again. He felt like a ghost in a dream as he moved down the lightening-lit streets, along the pitch black alleys and the crypt-like gangways, stepping over broken bottles, stumbling over piles of trash. This was not his world. He couldn’t even read the writings on the billboards and buildings. Now it was his nightmare even more than before. “I keel you! I keel you!” He couldn’t stand it anymore. He wanted to go to college, be an engineer. His dream was to work on the space program, be part of conquering the new frontier. The new frontier? He was back in the middle ages. War lords, drug lords, turf wars, misery, poverty, murders, robberies – Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the barrio, what was the difference? Instead of exploring the stars he faced a life behind bars. But he didn’t do anything! Camacho brought the gun. He didn’t want to rat out Camacho. But what did the code of silence have to do with him? What did any of this have to do with him? He was white trash in ghetto land. They would have killed him long ago if he hadn’t played along, made friends with Camacho. But would Camacho have been his friend if he hadn’t helped him? No way Jose! But that wasn’t really fair. Their friendship went deeper than that now. There had gotten to be something inexplicable between them, something close, important.
Skinner could see nothing. The city was erased. The only way he found the jewelry store alley was through flashes of lightening. The sprawling tree was waving its branches in the wind. It looked like some sci-fi movie monster menacing the world amidst flares, rumbles and explosions of blinding light that erupted with the storm.
“They got a dog, amigo.” Camacho was suddenly standing beside him holding a bottle of tequila. “Big, black, ugly, ferocious – a hound from hell.” He took a swig from his bottle and squinted at the lashing downpour. “It’s chained to the tree. It can cover the whole yard. It lives in a little house right next to it. ‘Casa no tresspassa.’ It’s in there now. It gave up trying to eat me when I moved away from the yard.” Camacho downed the rest of the bottle and tossed it in the trash. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his rain soaked silk shirt. “You got a flashlight. Bueno.” He clicked on his. “We do some tricks of math, amigo. Multiply, divide, subtract. You go over to the end of the fence and attract the demon. When he try to kill you, I hop over and climb the tree. That gun got to be stuck in some thick branch by the tree’s trunk. When I get up on a limb I shout at Satan. When he come after me it’s your turn. That grande tree too much for me. You come around back and I pull you up. How do we get down? Maybe we have to subtract the demon with the gun.
Skinner’s heart pounded as he listened to Camacho. The air had cooled dramatically and he felt a chill shiver over his rain soaked body. He remembered the first time the gang had surrounded him after school. He felt a fear like that come over him now. He felt trapped, surrounded and there was no way out.
“Let’s do it.” Skinner tapped Camacho with his flashlight.
“Bueno! The
Skinner crossed the alley tensely and moved along the fence. He tapped on it with his flashlight, bracing his body for an attack. It was as if the night had transformed into a creature, exploding thunder and flashing death. The dog flew at him from out of nowhere, snarling, growling, snapping as it tugged fiercely at the chain which bound it to the tree. Skinner almost dropped his flashlight. The sudden shock of the monster caught his breath. For an instant he was staring into the mad dog eyes of Dealer. “I keel you! I keel you!” Just as suddenly the demon disappeared.
Real time was dream time – staccato images captured in flashes of lightening. Skinner saw in cosmic blinks Camacho trying to shimmy up the tree drunkenly, slipping, leaping, grabbing at a branch. He saw the bolting dog lunge at him. They were on the ground. Camacho wrestled him off. He leaped for the tree again. The dog was tarring at his leg.
“Aii
“Psst!” Skinner was behind him reaching for the branch. Camacho swung around, reached down, and grabbed him by the hand. “I thought that demon was going to see me!” Skinner rasped and shoved a tangle of leaves away as Camacho pulled him up. “I don’t know how I made it!” He settled down on a neighboring branch.
“No, he too much busy trying to kill me. Beside, Blanco, you too skinny.”
It was like a clown circus act, the two of them trying to keep their balance as they stood up and beamed their flashlights on the tossing limbs and branches. The tree pitched and swayed and swung its leafy limbs at them; but at least it kept the downpour off them. They divided the tree between them, circling around its trunk. They moved across and back, up and down, shining their flashlights all around, crisscrossing, colliding. “Man, I couldn’t have thrown that gun this high!” Camacho whispered. “I know we should have found the fucking thing by now.” It seemed like daylight when lightening lit the sky. One flash was so bright it was blinding. The thunder that followed was like the explosion of a canon. They had to hold on to one another to keep from falling. “Can you see anything?” Skinner blinked. “Only shooting stars amigo and cross-eyed moonbeams.”
Sometimes Skinner was above him, sometimes below. Sometimes he disappeared in the leaves altogether and suddenly Camacho would find him standing right behind him. “This is loco my friend.” “I know.” They could no longer hear the barking dog. They could no longer see the ground below. The rain stopped. They had climbed above the clouds. The stars looked like basketballs.
“Where are we going Camacho?”
Skinner sat on a branch and looked down at the spinning earth in a trance.
“I don’t know.” Camacho kept climbing. “Maybe heaven, amigo.”
DINER
Cut-paper couples eat blue-plate specials at Formica tables –
spirits steaming from their coffee cups – in the dead of winter,
sky a shroud. “Long ago
and far away and when you wish
upon
a star and …” Chalk white light makes ghosts of their shadows.
Apparitions crowd the counter, huddled from a grim world of ice
and rock. “Wish I may
and wish
I might and once
upon a time …”
I bundle back into the blizzard, bowed against the swirl, where
fallen angels dream of sorrow.
SHOOTING STARS
At the edges,
I lie dreaming
a dark illumination
of life passing,
your face emerging
against the perpetual night
like candlelight.
“OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING”
Whisper a prayer wind,
sing me a song of revelation
as I sit in meditation,
rocking in this back porch chair,
a bundle of aches and tangled hair
gazing at the dream-like dark,
waiting to join my loved ones in
the kingdom of stars.
STARCHED NAPKINS
Tea for two on the table,
she stands combing her tangled hair
in the room without a rocking chair.
“I am so glad that you are here.”
She says to the full length mirror.
All the doors are locked.
All the clocks have stopped.
But tea will be served with care
in fine
ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
Visiting the Holocaust museum in D.C.
really wrecked me – a black hole of human
nature that sucked me into a
nightmare.
I fled to the National Gallery where wild
flowers and butterflies dance on walls under
sunny skies – Calder, Matisse, those bright
colors and shapes making a harmonious
symphony of reality. Some artists can take you
to La La Land, where life is beautiful and living
is grand. I’m not sure where they’re coming
from. No place I’ve been. But more power
to them. We definitely need them.
MYSTERY
The new leads promise nothing except exhaustion and more black magic tricks in the Dead Zone’s matrix, where missing persons wander in a trance through the labyrinths of chance filled with secret passages, false walls, corridors cluttered with carnival mirrors, stairways to nowhere, trap doors – the only way to negotiate the maze being Ouija boards.
“All the measures have been recorded in ledgers.” They informed me when I began my round of the underground. “But they disappeared altogether when the center fell apart forever.”
I move through light and shadow past doors which have no numbers, down streets which have no names, amidst shapes which have no faces, under clocks run out of time, while smoke billows from manhole covers like the ghosts of dead men’s dreams.
“One wonders how it entered,” my informant whispers, “the cry for help in the house. ‘Did you hear it?’ I remember saying. ‘What is it?’ ‘There it goes again.’ Not some overwhelming howl of agony as from a lost soul suffering in hell – just a lonely, plaintive wail. ‘Is it upstairs?’
My wife asked. ‘Downstairs, I think.’ Male? Female? Impossible to tell. Was it a trick of the wind in the wainscots? We wondered. Rocking rafters? The creak of old floor boards? With the hustle and bustle of life going on, the cry is often ignored. Who can listen or pay attention amidst the vicissitudes of living and all the hopes, dreams, triumphs, disillusionments, twists and turns too numerous to mention? But then you hear it again, when night begins, saying: ‘Here I am. Here I am.’”
In one dark doorway and out another, all of them locked, block after block. The city is empty. But you could see this vanishing act developing. The man who wasn’t there that I met upon the stair. The ticket to nowhere that the post man made me sign for on his official ledger. The game of blind man’s bluff in which “getting colder” couldn’t have been shouted at me enough. The expired passport, the lost key, the anonymous caller who lung up on me. I pound the pavements desperately. The desolate buildings are like an eerie dream.
“The ceiling is unsafe!” The caller shrieks on my cell phone. “The walls continue to crumble! I have been paying rent – I don’t remember how long. Maybe nobody lives here? I went for a walk in the wood. The lanes no longer turn there. A spider was spinning the end of days for some prey. Instead of leaves the trees held dead letters. Now sitting at this table, with its pen and yellowed paper, in this room of dusty books and faded furniture, I wonder if the garden can be nurtured?”
Impossible to prove, I reconstruct the clues, formulating fresh equations from known relations, shifting speculations, new suspicions, the whole mind devoted to the question, like a storm closing in from all directions. What does it mean? When did it begin? How did it happen? Where will it end? The dinners that were seated at the table, the dishes that were served, the drinks that were consumed, the conversations that ensued, the omissions, contradictions, affectations, the lies, asides, miss-directions – like rigged roulette wheels, loaded dice, shell games, stacked decks, parlor tricks. Who stole everyone’s soul will never be established.
NIGHT LIFE
Night haunts, night spirits,
slipping through moonlit rooms,
down starlit stairways,
past mystery doorways,
into dream chambers,
where love potions splash on ice,
and music plays magic melodies
for sleep walkers, like us, who dance
in a trance, arms holding each other,
eyes blazing with rapture,
mouths pressed together,
as we devour each other,
before youth is over.
INDIAN SUMMER
Top down, Stormy beside me,
blonde hair tossed by the wind.
Streets of amber, scarlet, gold,
leaves flying, whirling as we
cruised along, listening to the radio
and its top ten songs.
We were free and easy that
sparkling day. Then winter came.
ANGEL
She always spoke in a prayer-like manner,
her voice hushed as if softened by God’s
echoes in a holy chamber.
She seemed enveloped in some private wonder,
as if “the mystery” spoke to her secretly.
She walked amidst perpetual moonlight,
dissolving into the sway of night.
She belonged to a separate realm and she
totally turned me on. “Bring me a higher
love” was our song. Mine anyway.
“You know I can’t live without you baby.”
Some said she was a trick-turning junkie who
would sleep with anyone for money.
“Bring me a
higher love.”
She was a dream who dazed my being.
“Crash us.” She whispered one night when
I put the pedal to the metal of my car after
we had a fight over her infidelities in a bar.
“Crash us. Go ahead, crash us.”
I sometimes wonder what happened to her.
I guess she crashed with someone somewhere.
LOVE STORY
Lost in the moon’s glow
we chased the dream shadows,
down the lanes of love’s wonder
through our heart’s mysteries.
Holding each other, we waltzed
round a rainbow, dancing on
stardust, till we split up.
TABLE FOR TWO MORE
“I feel uncomfortable in the places
you go.” I informed my new in-laws
when they generously invited us for
dinner at the Ritz after graciously
attending my poetry reading
at The
Pits. “And comfortable in the places
you wouldn’t go.” We settled for
“Kettles” and await the next hurdles.
PERFECT STORM
Rain, just the same – you as
sunlight shining in Smokey’s bar,
yellow slicker, golden hair.
You could come over to me.
We could drink, discuss how
not to make the same mistakes,
discuss life’s gives and takes.
I could go over to you. But I can’t –
because I remember those black
mascara smears running down
your face with your tears.
BACHELOR PAD
If I stand the bed up on its end, like this,
I can slide the over-stuffed armchair past
it into that corner, after I move the dresser,
and still have room for the locker, once I
shove the bed against the radiator. Hell
it’s summer.
“What are you doing Shakespeare?”
R&B is standing in the hallway glaring
at me, a beer can in his fist.
“I’m rearranging the furniture.”
“Interesting. Ever figure out what this hole-
in-wall used to be?” R&B sips his brew
and surveys the scene.
“Closet maybe. Pantry?”
“With a window?”
“Hide out? Lock-up for the family loony?
How would I know, I’m from
Never saw a room like this before.”
“The Big Apple with its little worm holes.”
R&B belches. “Why are you rearranging
the furniture?”
“I’m trying to create a space with a little
ambience, add a small table and a folding
chair.”
“Where?”
“There. In the corner next to the armchair.
When I get it over there. I met this chick
in the library, a poet. Want to give me a
hand with it?”
“Looks like it weighs a ton. First, you
have to move this other stuff around.
When you do they’ll be no room to move.
I doubt if the door will open and close.”
“I measured, everything fits.”
“Sure if you’re anorexic.”
“She’s on her way over.”
“OK. But maybe you should give her a
heads up. Put a sign on the door that says:
Enter At Your Own Risk.”
ARCHIVAL
As in a dark cave,
lips pressed together,
spellbound as sleepwalkers,
hearts beating faster,
rain pounding down,
arms holding each other,
bodies merging together,
“You Send Me” now a
memory playing that night
long ago on an old car radio.
TILL DEATH
Moments lost, withheld, passed over,
moments at the bottom of a
from which we could have drank our fill.
But we
Maybe we didn’t dare.
Across the table, you give me your icy stare.
I give you my lethal glare.
Must be love, we’re still together.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
I met her in a blind alley bar.
She had “Queen of Darkness”
written all over her. Roadkill
dripped from her lips. She drank
from a bottle with a skull and
crossbones on its label. “Are you
the one,” she batted her Black Hole
eyes at me, “looking for some fun?”
I downed my beer and went home.
DESTROYER
In the dark in bed she said:
“Damn the torpedoes! Full
speed ahead!”
RUBY
“Love is
strong as death,
passion
as cruel as the grave.”
I read that in a Bible in a cheap hotel.
Got into the habit of looking through them
moving around as I do in my travels with
the band, when we get gigs that is. I play
the guitar, sing some too (I’m a singing fool).
But that’s me and Ruby to a tee – love that
strong. And more: it’s like coming home
when we’re together. We belong to each other.
There are two kinds of love, it says in the Bible,
the soul kind and the bodily kind. We got them
both big time.
Ruby’s got her demons though. We all do.
Her mother was a junky and her ole man a drunk.
She ran around in rags and the kids treated her
like junk. Pretend playmates was all she had.
Imaginary boyfriends later on. Life was a ghost’s
dream way back when. But things changed.
She became a knockout. Men with money chased
after her – life in the fast lane, living large – she
still can’t resist the Diamond Jim charge. For
love or money? Ole Ruby will vanish in a blink.
Same old ghost world, as I see it, ‘cept now she
haunts it in mink. But she’ll come back, always
does. We were made for each other – got that Good
Book love. I wrote a little
song for her.
Starts like this:
Hell woman
with your flashing eyes
Body heat
and lips of fire
Heart from
Hades and soul from Hell
Banshee
daughter of Beelzebub
Hell woman
raging in my brain
Hell woman
you’re the Devil’s dream
STORMY NIGHT
It’s still raining. I bundle
into the bistro and sit down
across from her at the candlelit
table, hoping I don’t look too
disheveled. I drop my book
bag on the floor and toe it
under cover as if it contained
anything important.
“No rain no rainbow?” I offer.
Our table is in a corner by the
window. Shapeless figures shuffle
to and fro, hidden under umbrellas,
like plodding turtles. She sighs and
studies the menu as if we were going
to order anything except the cheapest
items presented on the venue. The
nightly crowd slowly gathers, there
is violin music, whispers and laughter.
“Beyond the world’s tears there are
stars?” I wonder.
She smiles. “The night is ours.”
Rex Sexton
THE MOX NIX BOX
Winter blows through the rattling
barracks windows and with it,
off the snow, comes the scent of
wet hair and soaked clothes, in
the memory of that rainy day we
met in a
you sit, I know, in your window
watching the shadows on the street
come and go, looking for me in the
only place I can’t be, with you.
Mox Nix means “means nothing”
in German. I learned that during
the year I was stationed there. All
possibilities exist in a box which
remains locked. The Mox Nix Box
is filled with nothing one can use
like trinkets, souvenirs, tears.
TROUBLE TOWN
Plant closed, her sister up and gone, nothing but trouble since she got off the Greyhound … five days traveling and everything upside down … room by the station cockroach nation … still more than she can afford since she was expecting free room and board. At least till she got on her feet. Not that she could ever depend on her sister or anyone for that matter. She should have known better, stayed where she was even though her life was in tatters.
Sheila drinks and wonders what else can go wrong, aside from the roof in the dive she’s sitting in caving in. She was holding her own out west as a strip mall beautician, until the country made “Born To Lose” its new national anthem and the no hairdo blues became the recession fashion. No work, no prospects and on top of that the jerk she got herself hooked up with going even more berserk than she could deal with. Drinking non stop, beating her up.
“I’m living in a world of wonder.”
the jukebox is playing her favorite song,
“happiness around each corner.”
About the only happy thing
around her corner would be the coroner. She
felt herself getting tipsy, frowned and took
another sip of her peppermint martini. The
master of mixology behind the bar didn’t have
any strawberry or chocolate kind of flavor so
they had to concoct it with schnapps. It was
a miracle he found a cocktail glass in that old,
warped, spider webbed cabinet. Last
time anyone used one in this neck of the woods
was probably the Englishman they stole the bar
from at the point of a squirrel gun, back when
moonshine cost a dime, and the Declaration of
Independence was just signed. Who
was celebrating “His” independence from “them”
happy to get back to merry old
“Buy you a drink?”
Sheila glances in the mirror at a shady looking guy who sits down next to her – pockmarked face, brown bomber jacket, greasy black hair. He lights a cigarette and taps the ash on the bar. Tobacco country where asphyxiation is not open to litigation and no one ever heard of cancer or the Surgeon General. Everybody’s mouth is dangling one, if they’re not puffing on a corn cob pipe or chomping a cheap cigar stink bomb. Enough smoke in the room to set off a fire alarm. Just as well considering the place is a real eyesore and it helps to hide the fact that it’s crawling with mice and rats. Across the dark man’s Neanderthal forehead is a home stitched zipper scar, which helps him look even more like some character from the shock theater.
No thanks. I’m waiting for someone.”
She forces a smile, meets his dark eyes in the mirror.
“Your boyfriend ain’t gonna come, Hon, cause you ain’t got none.”
His expression is blank, frank, grim; no smirk, sneer, grin.
“Then I’ll learn to live without one.” She shrugs. “So long.” She toasts him. “It’s been fun.”
“The fun ain’t begun, Hon.”
He studies her and sips his beer.
The bartender slides an ashtray over, backs her martini with another, which she didn’t order, this one in a tumbler. She drops her eyes from the mirror, which she noticed had taken on the look of a startled deer. “This guy bothering you?” Wasn’t going to come from anyone in the room soon. OK Trouble Town, bring it on. Your day was long but I see your night is still young.
“I’m all out of fun Sugar Plum.” Sheila manages to turn to him. Now, for sure, he martini is shaken, if not in the glass at least in her intestines. If you let a situation own you you’re through. Lesson one in grammar school. “Been traveling sweetie. Traveling makes me sleepy.” She forces another smile and she hopes a cute, helpless little yawn. “Someone ain’t my boyfriend but my brother. He’s coming after me soon. He had to work late. Just got out of the service. He’s an ex-marine. We’re getting together with our family. It’s a family reunion!” She manages, she hopes, to infuse a little flirtation in her baby blues. “But maybe some other time if you don’t mind. I’ll be around.”
“You ain’t got no brother
either, Sugar.”
He takes a drag off his cigarette and
blows a smoke ring at the mirror, studying her,
not bothering to swivel his bar stool around and
face her. “I
know everyone and everything in this town. I’m
the dog catcher, trash collector, public
investigator, probably the next mayor. I knew
your sister Sue.
When the plant closed she split. Party
girl, wild as they come. Probably
partying tonight in parts unknown. She
told me you were coming – dishwater blonde. She
really didn’t want no part of you. ‘I
need her clinging to me like a dog needs a
flea.’ She
said. You
came in on the greyhound. You
put your bag in a locker and made an unanswered
phone call.
After that, you walked through the town
to the pickle plant that just shut down. You
read the Closed/Keep Out sign and walked back. You
got your bag and rented a room at the
“You stalked me?” Sheila’s voice came out squeaky. The shot and beer wizard didn’t have an olive or one of those little onions or even a cherry to make her martini look fancy so he put a pickled crow’s egg in it without a toothpick, which he finger dug from a jar on the bar. “The townie stalked me.” She stared at it. She could see the headlines in the Goober Gully Gazette or whatever they had, assuming anyone around here read. “WHITE TRASH TRANSIENT FOUND RAPED AND DEAD! The mutilated body (fingers and teeth removed to eliminate any identification) of an unknown white woman was found this morning in a garbage can by the Greyhound bus station …”
“I like your scar.” She took a big swallow from the martini in the tumbler, which was even stronger. “That scar will take you far. I mean around here if you want to be mayor. Kind of makes you look debonair with that greasy, black, duck ass hair, and unique, since everybody around here pretty much looks the same due to all that inbreeding.” Once she got started poking she couldn’t stop, which was why Mr. Wonderful used to beat her up. Now there was a Jock. Sit and stare in his under ware at the football games and drink beer getting all turned on by the physical contact between the men in helmets and the bouncing boobs of the cheerleaders who they tried to make look like girls next door but you could tell weren’t nothing but sluts and whores till he jumped her at half time whether she had her a real headache or the usual fake. “You get run over by a tractor? Maybe you had a lobotomy? You could run as a Republican. Better yet that new Tea Party might be up your alley. Sarah Palin was a Dogpatch type mayor and look what happened to her!”
Her head was spinning and her eyes crossing as she shifted her foggy scrutiny from the blank profile beside her to the deadpan face watching her in the mirror until they combined in her mind to form a police mug shot like you see on “Most Wanted” which Mr. Wonderful liked to watch, maybe just to see if he was on it before he jumped her if he was still sober enough to get it up.
“Who’s this bitch?”
An Amazon from swampland suddenly appeared behind Cro-Magnon man in the mirror and was staring at her, hands on hippo hips, wild hair a tangle like black lagoon brambles.
“I told you I don’t want no woman of mine comin’ in here.”
Mr. Personality stares at the reflection standing over his shoulder and lights another Marlboro.
“I asked you who this slut is? Gargantuarina stamps her foot and the rafters shake. “I’ll stomp her whore ass all over this bar! I’ll rip out that bleached blonde hair!”
Yes, love is a many splendid thing. Sheila watches and sips her drink.
“I really enjoyed meeting you both.” She hops off her bar stool. “But I got to go.”
“You ain’t going nowhere.”
“You better get your tramp butt out of here!”
“’Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!’”
Sheila spins around and lifts her glass in the air.
“’My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten to the knee.’”
Chairs slide out of her way as she staggers across the floor.
“’I am defense less utterly!’”
She shrieks.
“’I slept methinks and woke.”
She peers around and lowers her voice.
“’And, slowly gazing, find me stopped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours.’”
“My God she’s crazy!”
The Amazon gapes at her.
Cro-Magnon stares wide eyed, mouth open.
“
Sheila opens the door and bows.
“I exit as I entered, on the Greyhound!”
Lucky she had to memorize and recite Thompson’s “The Hound Of Heaven” for Mrs. McCully’s eighth grade English class. Probably just saved her ass.
DERBY
A black cat crosses the race track
as the gamblers place their bets.
The horses break from the gate.
Around the bend they run.
Down the stretch they bound –
eyes blazing, hoofs pounding –
as the jockeys whip them along.
Spinning out of the turn, the crowds
roar as they thunder home.
Lightening flares in the sky,
as they race for the finish line.
A black cat has crossed the race track.
A black cat has crossed the race track.
Tonight no one will win.
CAROUSEL
I get up at noon, come here,
sit in my corner, drink beer,
eat lunch, scan the scratch
sheet for a score, call my bookie,
drink more, nail a winner, stay
for dinner, chat with the regulars,
all of us stuck in life’s rut hoping
for some luck, work out the kinks
in my system, recording odds,
jockeys, track conditions, linger
through the evening, bolt down a
stiff one before leaving, go home,
go to bed, dream about horses,
wild, free, furious horses, like
storm clouds driven by the wind
as they race down the track
never looking back.
TABLE STAKES
Nothing … nothing … still nothing …
“I’m out.” I fold my cards, toss them on
the table. “I need some air. I’ll be back.”
“We’ll be here.”
Time out … time’s up … time … I glance
at my watch, which isn’t there, remember
I hocked it as I climb the stairs, along with
my gold lighter and lucky ring which I still
keep feeling for like some phantom limb.
Everything
I do, everything I touch, every
tip, hunch,
skinny, bet – forget it!
The streets are empty, not a soul anywhere.
But I know I’m being shadowed everywhere.
Step on a
crack,
cross a
black cat’s path and feel the demon’s
wrath, walk
under a ladder,
and presto “they” are there. It’s something
you know even when you’re a kid, which is
why you have the instinct to look under the
bed. Where you break their rules you never
know; but suddenly you find yourself stuck
behind the eight ball. I stop at a church. There
are still lights burning inside. Maybe a priest
can exorcise my jinx? Maybe some sacred
saying can get me back in a winning game?
This is evil, right? Something like Satan?
I spin around at the sound of footsteps bearing
down. But no one’s there – just darkness,
shadows, smoke and mirrors. Collar up, I hurry
inside. There’s a “poor box” in the vestibule. I
come to life. A little stake for the take, eh? I’m
poor. For sure. Just a tiny loan to change my luck.
I’ll give it back. I’m not a crook. I sigh and shove
into the “poor box” my last buck. Now what?
ALL BETS OFF
Nothing struck, strokes of luck as rare as words
of wisdom from a Cuckoo clock. I toss my ticket,
head for the exit. Life’s rat race recurring like a bad
dream with no wins, places, shows in between.
“Taxi!”
Flocks of birds flutter like dark shadows over the winter,
fleeing the city for someplace safer, warmer, where the
“Hawk” doesn’t swoop around every corner.
“Where to?”
“Follow them. Just kidding.”
A read my lips no tips warning fixed on my grim
expression. MARKETS
CRASH, BANKS CLOSE,
INDUSTRIES FOLD. I scan the headlines of the rag
someone left in the cab. Good grief! Below them are
an assortment of articles about people losing their jobs,
homes, reminding me that I have troubles of my own.
“I lost my luck!”
I inform Finnegan as I flop down at his bar.
“Join the club.”
“I’m on the skids!”
“Who ain’t?”
“I’ll flip you for the drink.”
“You can have it. I’m bankrupt. This is my last day.”
“Alms for the poor.” I imagine swarms of people crying
on the streets. I picture little girls selling matches on the
corner, raggedy kids learning how to pick pockets from
some old crook in a cellar.
“What was that!”
An explosion rocks the tavern, makes me spill my drink.
“Just a crowd in the back playing Russian Roulette.”
“Is it an open game?”
“Sure, anyone can sit in.”
“What’s the stakes?”
“You know, life and death.”
“Just that?”
SOLITAIRE
I get to the place,
sit in a corner and wait.
Something is missing,
although everything seems
there – the shadows at the bar
staring in the mirror, the silent
jukebox, TV flickering muted
news in the darkness no one
is watching or trying to hear:
about death and destruction,
Wall Street and war.
And then I see Hope at her table
near the window, huddled over
her cards playing solitaire.
Her charms have tarnished.
Her beauty has vanished. Her
sparkle has faded. The shuffling
cards whisper sadness.
ALLEY CAT
Life bottoms out, no dreams left, loneliness, misery, but say I lay down a buck win the lottery, beer, laughs, company …
“Playing the four ball cross-corner.”
Beers tilt, cue-sticks rap, bets lay down.
“Playing the five ball next to kiss in off the eight.”
“Wanna call your shot deadhead.”
“He called his shot. He called four cross-corner, five to kiss.”
“Tell him call ‘em so’s I can hear him.”
I sink the six, nail the seven, all lined up, a gift from heaven.
“Beat it shine.” The giant I’m shooting, flanked by his biker friends, says to the shoeshine guy who sets down his box.
“This is one of my regular shows, bro.”
“Not tonight, Roscoe. You’re bringing me bad luck.”
“Man, I got nothin’ to do with you!”
“And you don’t want to.”
I call the eight – side pocket off a ricochet.
“You drop that one chum and me and you gonna have a little fun.”
Geometry, artistry, maybe a little black magic thrown in is what it takes to make the eight ball run. To collect you need a gum.
Talk about a loaded gun, there she is again.
Magic wands, mystical diving rods that conjure up gold, greenbacks, that’s what we feel we deserve when we lean over the pool tables in our dark, smoky corner of the world, after mixing our blood, sweat and tears with our beers. But since that bell never rings, most of us will take anything that resembles a break, stroke of luck, freebie tossed our way by the fates.
She’s small, flat breasted, almost like a boy, with thin ratty hair and something odd about her eyes. She shows up, periodically, out of nowhere, baggy dress, battered shoes, moving like a sleepwalker through our dead end bar and poolroom.
“Gentlemen.”
She smiles as she sashays amidst the mob of drunken men.
“This way princess.”
One of her eager footmen opens the back door. Another has a junker in the alley ready. “Your coach awaiteth.”
“We’ll settle up later, punk.”
The giant leers at me as the place clears.
Outside she pitches and sways like a puppet on a string, purring and preening like a cat in heat. In a blink she stands as naked as a nymph.
“Get your ass in the car!”
A gruff voice orders.
“I do declare. You boys certainly carry on about a girl.”
Her voice is light and lyrical with a sugary Southern drawl. She sits in the back seat, sips a beer and pats her hair.
“Get on your back and spread ‘em!”
Someone commands. The men start forming a line.
“All in due time.” She sighs, not acting sexy but coquettish, as if her dance card were filled but she will try to accommodate all her suitors. “The night is young boys and I am yours.”
I suppose there’s an element of grace in here somewhere. The solemn continuation of night and expectation.
“The belle of the ball.”
I light a cigarette and wonder at it all. She’s in a world of her own – some dime store novel or Civil War flick, filled with regal ladies and landed gents.
“I got her ball.” Someone grunts.
Not my party. I hope they don’t kill her accidently. Leaving the bar, no moon or bright stars, just broken bottles glistening in street-lit gutters.
A PERFECT DAY
Clouds like whipped cream
float across the sky like a
dream. A bad one. I can’t
fight it. There goes my diet.
I head for the Dairy Queen.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Back and forth, bats fly past the motel window.
Under the bed, strange things hide and cackle.
A psycho’s eye peeks through my keyhole.
I hope the desk clerk remembers my wakeup call.
DEATH ROW
The last hold on the invisible
forces in the impalpable net
of life’s coil of turmoil that
entangles you, when you pay
your dues, in the spider web
of the living dead.
Is that what’s next, after they
ho ho over my portfolio,
repossess my limo, foreclose on
my big home, and I spend my last
bonus check and hock my Rolex?
DISCONNECTED
Talking, speaking, cackling, yaking,
babbling, screaming, laughing, repeating:
this is
if you rant into your cell phone, nonstop.
So does life.
THE WIZ
Grip,
slip,
dangling in the blackness
over the precipice of existence,
hanging on for dear life,
day and night,
by a thread …
STOCKS
PLUMMET,
BANKS
FOLD,
HOUSES
FORECLOSE.
I stagger through the labyrinths,
looking for another chance
in the win, place, show
of the corporate cosmos.
“The cause of your misfortune is apparent.”
Says an official of the government.
“You bought into the American Dream
and overspent.”
Blind alleys, broken clocks,
dead end streets, road blocks,
cul de sacs, no way’s out …
I struggled up the corporate ladder,
bought a house,
car, boat.
So what?
I wasn’t greedy. I helped the needy.
I wasn’t extravagant. I couldn’t afford
any rich and famous life of aggrandizement.
Grip.
Slip.
Plop.
How could I know
that the “Slight Of Hand Investment Corporation”
hired the Wizard Of Oz as it’s CEO?
WASHED UP
I worked in an All Nite Laundromat.
I take care of the machines, keep
the place clean.
Mostly loners come in with their
bundles. Inside, they sit back and
stare and watch the machines cycle
dry. I see them. Blobs and sacks
for eyes imitating life with blank
expressions and occasional automaton
movements. When I started having
dreams of ghosts staring at me from
white Whirlpool coffins, ghosts
shivering. ghosts grinning through
the window in the washer’s door,
I knew, yes I knew it was time to
put a new spin on my life.
STAYING ALIVE
Rock it planet! Shake it! Sock it!
Bing it! Bang it! Let it all hang out!
Twist and shout! Screech birdies!
Scream kiddies! Varoom vacuum!
Toss and slosh through my bad dream
washing machine! Run your lawn
mower over my hangover grass grower!
What a night. What a fright. The no jive
five. The live, live, live until you die five.
Together again, at last, for a reunion blast!
The high fivin’ five! The strivin’ five!
More like a reunion of the crucified. The
forum filled with boredom quorum. The 9
to 5 five. The better off dead than alive five.
The upright, uptight, pay your bills, bite
your nails, do not make waves, not even
ripples, hung over heads buried under our
pillows fellows. Bip it! Bop it! Stomp it!
I deserve it!
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (here)
Technicolor monotony,
surround sound lobotomy,
(or is it snooze orama yawn on a?).
“HA HA HA.”
Someone made a funny,
quite accidently.
“HA HA HA.”
Sleepwalkers with their arms
lifted, hands pointed, coming at
you in slow motion from every
direction (subtitled somnambulationists
as pests, or blank minds put to the test?)
Oh what a party
Oh what a party
Live from Entropy in 3D misery.
“Having fun?”
“Ah.”
“There’s more to come.”
“Ah.”
Rewrite! Rewrite!
Trash the script! Can the cast!
Get me my agent! I want a new
contract!
THE TREE OF LIFE
Intelligent Design saw a cosmic sign
and wondered: “What if I use the slime
to start a ‘line’ to the Divine on which
waving hands can bud as they climb along
a vine out of the mud to say “hello” to me
and perhaps, eventually, grow up and form
a tree and from that height will see that
the next step to be like me is collectively
to pull out of the ground, jungle bound, and
crawl around, independently, on little pegs
which develop legs which lead to feet as
they move around adapting in shape, size,
savy and learn to use their limbs to clutch,
and spiky thorns to munch tasty meat which
will give them a brain so that, technologically,
they can appreciate, when becoming humanoid is
their fate, that it was “The Divine” from where
they came or is that insane?”
JACK IN THE BOX
I never liked Jack. He drinks too
Much and he can’t hold it. Not a
good thing when you have a lot
of weight to throw around, no soul
and are a complete asshole.
“Jack’s in a straightjacket.”
I informed the crew back at the
bar after my futile effort to bail
him out of jail for assault and
battery with intent to kill.
“No shit?”
No shit and although I didn’t
admit it, it was a pleasure to
see him sitting there in his
little cell, close to tears, with
his big fat butt wrapped around
his ears.
“They think he’s nuts. They’re
going to take him to the loony
bin for observation.”
“He never should have hit that
sales guy with the mannequin.”
“He said it was an accident.”
“Probably was. Sort of. He
went in there to dance with
her. You know how he gets
when he’s drunk. He thought
the sales guy was cutting in.”
“I believe him.”
“So did the cops. That’s why
they wrapped him up.”
ROMPER ROOM
The cockroaches searching,
the children’s eyes watching –
do they dare commit murder
and ponder the bloody mess?
What’s your guess?
“Get away from the bugs kids.”
Trudy has left me with her pack
of brats. Gone to a New Year’s Eve
Party. They like me. I make
no sense. “Come here. I’ll tell
you a story. Do you like scary
nursery rhymes? Sometimes?
Have you ever heard of the ‘End
Of Days?’ No? Don’t know
anything about the Mayan
calendar and how the world is
going to end December 21st
two thousand twelve? Listen
up anyway: They crowd the
night cafes, the ghosts of the end
of days. They drink hemlock on
the rocks under broken clocks
and listen to the organ play.
‘Is it you?’ The ghoul asks.
‘Are you there?’ His friend answers.
‘Where is here?’ ‘Does it matter?’
The catacombs have grown – bones
stacked to and fro. The delights of
living flesh, the sweet taste of breath,
are a thing of the past. They don’t
exist. ‘There seems to be nothing
left.’ Says the first ghoul. ‘Yet we
sit here nevertheless.’ And with that
the black cat frolics with the bat and
the winds wail with deep regret.
“Like that? No? So go back to
killing the roaches.”
ON THE TOWN
Slow night on
“Quiet night.”
I say to the barkeep at the bistro, looking over the sparse crowd of irregular regulars in the unfamiliar room where I stop every evening on my way home.
“I wouldn’t know, never worked here before. What will you have, the usual?”
“The usual, for a change. But not the same ole same ole again.”
“Nowhere is everywhere when nothing is anything,” I brood as I gaze in the mirror at the face of the stranger who looks back at me, indifferently, “and everyone is no one when someone is anyone.”
Now and then, someone I never saw before and will never meet again stops for a drink and we resume the same conversation we never had which ends, as usual, before it begins with nothing being said.
“Did you ever overhear yourself talking to yourself in a language you don’t understand?”
A businessman stares at me starkly, holding a martini in his manicured hand.
“May I make a suggestion?” The barkeep, who has changed his identity and now is me sets a drink down in front of who I used to be. “Instead of that try this.”
Light flows around my mental breakdown. A golden mist in which nothing exists replaces it.
“What is it?”
I smack my lips.
“It’s called Forgetfulness.”
The combo in the cabaret can’t quite coordinate their conga today. But they continue to play (badly) anyway. Dressed for dinner, the Diva, ceremoniously, enters holding a dead bouquet.
“We played to an empty theater.”
She announces to the world weary waiter who tosses her ermine on the radiator.
“But it really doesn’t matter. We merely closed sooner than later.”
The black cat curled up by the cabinet, dreams of falling nine times from a parapet.
“No one
will catch you.”
Says a voice in his purring brain and his recurring nightmare begins all over again.
Brooding beneath his beard, like a repentant behind a confessional curtain, the bard at the bar orders a bottle of Vichy water and canard in a voice without pitch like a ventriloquist. (Which no one finds especially ridiculous.)
The old couple in the corner hold hands and gaze at each other (and remember) knowing that they both soon will be goners.
The siren at the next table checks her compact mirror and finds another wrinkle.
The drunk staggering across the floor is determined to make it with dignity to the door. (Since he can’t afford to imbibe anymore.)
White mice scurry to and fro, up and down the crowded bistro, scavenging for food as they go, back and forth, in and out, hoping that nobody will notice.
Shooting stars suddenly fill the night. We watch them fall from the cabaret’s sky light. And we smile with delight at the wonderful sight of the heavens exploding with celestial light.
The scary lair of sleep where white mice in labs smocks dance around alarm clocks. Is it a good time, bad time, standing before me, tonight, in the snow – this new version of apparition guarding the shadowy, night world’s black hole?
“Well, well.” The poltergeist studies me, mockingly. “Do tell.”
It’s wearing gaudy, glad rags instead of garbage bags, a Mardi Gras mask, a tilted top hat over a carnival colored fright-wig, and holding a shrunken-head filled whirl-a-gig.
“Are you ready to make merry? If so, away we go!”
Ghost haunts, spectral walks, dead zones fogged by smoke and gin. Up and down, round and round, falling down, we stagger through night town – dancing in dungeons with demons, gamboling with goblins and cretins, cavorting with catatonics in catacombs, wooing witches, making mad love with mummies, playing Russian roulette with zombies.
“What’s next?” I smile at the dream fairy. “That was merry.”
“How about a little snow therapy?”
We fashion snow dreams in the dark under the moon and stars, making “Frosty” men and women with charcoal studded eyes, icicle noses and cinder dust grins, we shape angels in the drifts, igloos, Eskimos, polar nears, castles, draw water from the park’s pond and sculpt ic palaces along the moonlit snow mounds. Suddenly, the sun comes up and we watch it all melt.
BZZZZZZZZZZZ
Daylight on drawn blinds – I rub my eyes and take some time to come to myself in the haunted house.
“We will
never part.”
I remember some siren whispering in the dark.
“Our love
is here to stay.”
Itry to recall her face.
Cobwebs cluster in the corners. Bats flit to and fro. Creatures circle the bed like the walking dead. A psychotic eye peeks through my keyhole.
I was midnight mad, I remember, and on the loose. I found her number in a telephone booth.
“Come in
from the night!” was scribbled under it
in lipstick.
“Experience
delight!
Don’t
be
so uptight!
If it feels good it’s right!”
A costume party? A ceremony? I remember a potent drink – and then everything went blank?”
“It is you
that I adore; our love will last forevermore.”
Dancing puppets on a parapet encircle my brain like a tourniquet.
What do you do after work?
ELEGY
Talk about nowhere, I was there.
We lived in a bungalow on No Man’s Road,
near the intersection of
and Take A Hike Turnpike, in a well
populated village with few living inhabitants,
where “you’ll
welcome mat for most of the residents
(along with “don’t wake up the dead, we
need them for our overhead”) and the only
where my father finally got himself a job, were
the innumerable cemeteries to which caravans
arrived, periodically, to deposit their loved ones
in the lonely, willowy, burial facilities.
I was ten. Both my parents were working then.
My mother commuted to her office-job in the city.
My father put in long hours at the factory. They
signed their “rest in peace lease” and buried
themselves alive to pay the bills and raise their
offspring, me.
School was out. I was alone. There were young
couples about with babies in the other bungalows.
No kids my age.
Mists, fog, eerie lights, howls, moans filled the
days and nights. I roamed the graveyards. They
were my home away from home. My friends became
the names chiseled into the weathered headstones.
Everyday was a dream of Halloween. Every night,
in sleep, the departed would creep from their tombs,
vaults, mossy mausoleums, graves and visit me.
Life, death, the mystery of being, joy, sorrow, and
everything in between came with them as stories
written on the wind between the birth and death dates
and transferred to my imagination. Before I knew it,
I became a poet – talk about nowhere.
“DRUMBEATS POUNDING A RHYTHM TO OUR BRAIN”
We lit fires in the woods and danced around
the
and war paint – or nothing at all.
The girls wore bangles, bracelets, beads and
rings. They were painted up too, half-naked and
beautiful.
We drank and smoked dope listening to blasting
rock and roll. We laughed, made love, whooped
and screamed on those summer nights after
high school in what seems in memory like youth’s
Mad Dream.
This was long ago and far
away in a town I
saw again after
what happened to everyone there with me in the
woods partying like savages, so briefly, before we
became ghosts, widows, orphan-makers, cripples,
or down and out writers trying to solve life’s riddles.
WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
They busted down my door
in the dead of night
and dragged me out of bed
by my hair.
“Rise and shine princess.”
“What’s going down!”
“You sleeping beauty.”
Godzilla riffled through my
drawers and dug out my stash
of uppers, downers, acid, weed,
hash, smash, dealer/big-time-user
written all over it.
King Kong shoved me to the closet
and told me to get dressed.
“I want to see a badge!” I stammered.
“And a warrant!”
Show hippy-dippy some stars.”
Godzilla chuckled, which King Kong
did. A whole constellation appeared
with the blow from his fist.
Serve time or your country, they gave
you that option back then.
You wouldn’t believe the stuff we
had in
MANEUVERS
The bus arrives in the city as night comes on,
tunneling off the backstreets to the terminal
underground, which seems packed with every
lost soul the devil could drag down – junkies, winos,
pushers, pimps, beggars, hookers, small time cons,
drifters, runaways, the down and out, and huddled,
here and there, in the corners, on the stairs, or sitting
on the floor amidst the sleeping drunks, a number
of homeless families taking refuge from the cold.
I’m in between nowhere and no way out, discharged
after two tours, no prospects, no job, caught in the middle,
of nowhere with time run out.
(Find a mission, scrounge a flop, hit the streets in the
morning, look for some luck?) I shoulder my duffle bag
and maneuver, carefully, through the mob, who crowd
the drafty shadows along the stairway life forgot.
Stateside is just another battle to survive.
AND OVER THE EARTH WHAT?
Rain lashes the troop train and we light ‘em if we got
‘em, as the broken down leviathan lurches across the
storm pounded stateside wasteland, hauling its monstrous
killing apparatus and the remnants of what is left of us,
while wailing a death-drone like howl of agony, periodically,
as it coils through the jumbled rocks and twisted trees.
“How do you spell amputee?” Ricker looks up from his
letter and asks no one in particular since we’re packed
together like smoked sardines. “Like in, ‘Barbie you still
fixin’ to marry me now that I’m an amputee?”
“With two ee’s.” Crawly offers. “Like am pu tee, ee ee.”
“Maybe you should just tell her you’re a crip, so forget it.”
“But add that if she does she’ll regret it when they fit you
up to the max with your brand new army issue prosthetics.”
“How do you spell prosthetics?”
I feel sick. Train sick. Home sick. Or maybe I’ve just
had a belly full of it. We can see nothing. Sheets of rain
blot out the shapes of everything. Veils, shrouds, ghost
swirls tumble past the windows.
“I feel like I’m in a washing machine.” Cox complains.
“Don’t worry soldier, they gonna hang us all out to dry
when it’s over. Who you writin’ Slim?”
“God, as usual.” I look up and force a grin.
“My, my, HIM!”
Doors in the rain, I scribble on the fly of a book
by Thomas Wolf: “You Can’t Go Home Again,”
locked,
lonely, all the same. And
the long night
turning
into daylight, where we fall through the
cracks like vanishing acts. I glance at the cramped vets,
try to continue with a stanza that fits.
“I don’t
like this box a bit! There’s
no way out of it!”
“You’re in
a coffin, you idiot!”
Somehow the
curse began.
The wizard said “Shazam!”
(Or maybe
he said: “Be damned?”) It
was all over
then. We
would never be the same again. Snipers,
road
bombs,
scrambled brains, our wide, staring eyes like
the
dead,
economic conscripts moving from no jobs, no
prospects
into a Holy
War that has no end, left with voices that can
no longer
be heard, stiff, swinging limbs like lead,
feet with
no
direction to tread. Was
it some “act” that set us back?
Was it the
falsification of some fact? How
did we end up
on the
wrong track with no turning back?
“Barbie would never leave me.”
Ricker looks at his letter wistfully.
“Sure not Rick, now that you’re so pretty,”
NIGHT WATCH
Out of the black,
star-domed unknown,
nothingness rushes in with a scream,
a shrieking, circular, no more,
which mangles the jungle night with flames.
Vietnam and
napalm,
fear death
agony destruction
and all for
nothing!
Slanting forward, I slash the canvas
with colliding colors, fractured planes,
splintered perspectives, blood-red rhythms,
writhing soldiers, twisted trees,
(gray hair soaked with sweat,
old clothes splattered with paint)
a crazy conflagration of distorted shapes,
which looks like nothing so much
as a Hieronymus Bosch on hash,
(or maybe some asylum inmate’s “art therapy” piece)
destined, when it’s done, for an exhibit at the
as I lash away and of the roadside-bombed soldiers,
I read about everyday, reassigned to graves …
“Art tells
us the truth about being human.”
I remember reading in one of my art criticism books.
So does a bullet.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
The years go fast, destined for oblivion, and no matter how you live them, or what you might pretend, you still cross that last horizon a mannequin in a coffin.
“Drink up,” the barkeep says, “it will ease your troubles.” Yeah, if I don’t start seeing everything double.
Talking about our life, earlier, with my wife, since it’s getting to me, and beginning to look like ground zero rapidly, and there’s nothing, as usual, to watch on TV.
“Remember when we met?” I ask.
“What about it?”
“What happened to that?”
“What happened to what?”
“The way we were. The way we were going to be, like, when we ’grew up’? Like our hopes and dreams?”
“We got it.”
“We got it?”
“And more.”
“More?”
“Think about it.”
So less is more. Not what I bargained for – living an obituary which no one will bother to write, I go out into the night to get good and tight and think about how I can make less is more something to wake up for. Maybe I’ll pick up some bimbo in a bar? Maybe I’ll cash in my 401 K and get a sports car? Maybe I’ll get a wardrobe of new threads, join a health club, get fit and trim? Booze, babes, maybe I should retire early and play?
“Remember me?”
Suddenly, I’m sharing my funk with a stumbling drunk. This guy looks like the walking dead. To add insult to injury, he grabs and shakes my hand.
“
I can’t place the guy’s face. Who could? It’s kind of been erased.
“Those were the days!” He shakes his head. “Three squares and steady pay. Ain’t been as good since. Going from job to job. Couldn’t nail anything down. Married a floozy, had to pay her alimony when she left me. Kids all ne’er-do-wells. One of them in jail. On top of that all these medical problems – liver, heart, kidneys, lungs. Never thought I’d see you again! How you been?”
I guess not as bad as I imagined.
HOME COMING
A dull gray day, despite the whiteness
of the falling snow, as steeple bells toll.
“
flurries off the ocean whorl in with the
north wind – a satin shroud descending.
Ghost ships fill the harbor. Houses huddle
together, like castaways, refugees, shaken
by the stormy weather. I keep to the cover
of the hoardings along the water, a dark,
stiff silhouette of a soldier, down dilapidated
streets, around tumbledown tenements,
past poor men’s pubs, shabby storefronts,
many boarded up, posting notices For Rent.
At a gaunt, grim building, I slip in from the
blizzard, cross carefully through a darkened
corridor, quietly climb the staircase. The garret
at the top is stifling and dark, filled with the
odors of the rubbish piled along the landings
of the lower floors by the other tenants.
Warped walls, cracked ceilings, rotting rafters,
stanchions and beams – I lay my duffle bag
at the foot of the bed, hang my army issue coat
and hat in the closet. Despite the fairyland
of falling snow which whirls outside the
garret window, the streets below look bleak,
lonely, hopeless, mean. I had forgotten how
shoddy the houses were along the waterfront,
how hard life had been for the souls who lived
in them, when they lost the American Dream.
BETWEEN THE CLOCK AND THE BED
She awakens to the wind’s wailing,
through half-closed eyes sees
the dead around her bed.
The rafters creak and the windows rattle.
Snow swirls beyond them in the winter night.
“All dead, all dead.”
She shudders, trying to clear her head.
Her head is foggy and her body aches.
She gropes across the room and turns on the light.
Her reflection in the mirror meets her with a shock.
In her dream, she was dancing
in the arms of a young man,
whirling and laughing.
“Ruchela!”
“Yes Papa!”
The ghosts of life’s forgotten don’t forget you.
Their voices echo inside your head.
“Ruchela!”
The young man was Aaron. The dance they never had.
Maybe their eyes danced, their hearts. But there
was little rejoicing back
then in
Life was dark. Life stopped the heart. The birds knew
something was coming. They built their nests with
black ribbons of mourning.
“Ruchela!”
“Yes Papa!”
The moon
weeps looking down, maidela.”
The moon wept, the sun, all of creation, as she
still does.
MIRACULUM
Fog theater where haunts wander through an unscripted
stupor, amidst empty bottles and broken clocks and each
scene is a sequel to a final act.
“If the world was as it should be,” I brood as I crawl out
of my jerry-built, blind alley bunker, coat collar turned up
against the blistering cold, fists pushed deep in its threadbare
pockets. “There would be no need for charity.”
Derelicts dig in dumpsters for breakfast. Church bells toll
throughout the labyrinths. Homeless families, jobless Joes,
shuffle back and forth, nowhere to go. “Life is like a lottery,”
I muse, “winning numbers not for everybody.”
Different church, same pew, late for Sunday mass as usual,
last row, seat by the aisle, shivering by the drafty doors of
the vestibule.
I pray for the homeless and the helpless and for the soldiers
off to war. I pray for the lost, frightened, confused, anyone
that life has abused.
Lightening flares in the stained-glass windows. Rain pounds
the roof, thunder rumbles. “No rain no rainbow.” My mother
used to say. No rainbows around here sad to say.
FAIRY TALES CAN COME TRUE, IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
Snow White in a glass casket was what I had been
aiming at with my Surrealistic portrait of the Dead
Zone’s crack racket, trying to symbolize the lost soul
in the black hole of the ghetto, and the living-death-
quest of hopelessness all around us. But the chaos
of contours I created in the fairytale beauty’s features,
after I started drinking and slashing paint on the canvas,
and the undulating rhythms of brush strokes with which
I concocted her coffin had her come out of my backstreet
fable as an angel wearing a death mask of sable, asleep
on a billiard table. So maybe “Dust” was the thrust of
my journey into oblivion in a game you can’t win because
a drug is a drug and there’s plenty of “Dust” in the hood.
Besides, while Picasso said that what one paints is what
counts and not what one intended to accomplish, he also
said that if you know exactly what you’re going to do
there’s no point in going through it. Life lives as it does,
I guess. I’m no Picasso, let’s face it; but neither are you.
Dead of winter, I look out at the falling snow from the
window of my ghetto studio. Ragged figures roam the
streets below, dragging through the drifts – bag ladies,
homeless families, dead-enders, penniless pensioners.
And more each day, as the cubical people lose their
lives in the sitcom world and join us in hell: shivering,
pale-faced strangers who come and go, the likes of
which none of us has seen before. As the Dead Zone
grows, wedding rings, good luck charms, Rolex watches
fill the pawn shop windows.
I grab my sketch pad, draw an old wrought iron oven.
On the top of it I put a kettle. Inside I sketch the
portraits of Hansel and Gretel.
SUMMER AND SMOKE
pink combustion blotches of flame
smoke funneling out of the towering smokestacks
like sulfurous serpents roiling against the sky
“TRAIN!” Bigger bellows
heat shimmers in the toxic air starch fakes fly
like snow with the feverish wind swirling between
the industrial buildings glazing the sun scorched ground
like frost sticky crunching under your work shoes
“Coal Train Comin’!”
the earth shakes the tracks rattle the train’s whistle shrieks
through the swelter like a strangled banshee i squint down
the line shielding my eyes from the blinding sun
black as death the iron nightmare rounds the bend
charges the yard i watch Bigger lumber doggedly toward it
pushing his wagon-sized wheelbarrow broad back bowed
shoulders slumped pick and shovel clattering in the wooden bin
the death dream roars swiftly past him winding helter-skelter
through the maze of tracks thundering between the buildings
hauling thirty cars brimming with coal like metaphysical
coffins for Bigger and me to bury “fucking coal”
the sun is Satan’s eye watching me grab my shovel follow
the train through the smoke of hell hell flares all around me
as i stagger the windows of the towering buildings have caught
fire heat quivers on the tarred rooftops the spires and gables are
molten gold while flames shoot from the forges foundries
bellows boom pumps pound gears grind heavy equipment
hammers a city in flames Hades on fire the coal train has
stopped starts to unload coal is funneled a car at a time
across giant conveyors which feed the boilers the train jerking
forward stopping jerking behind me Bigger lumbers down
the line in the opposite direction when he reaches the track-turn
off the main line he’ll lumber back scooping up the spills
shaken from the cars i’m headed for the PIT a cement bunker
below the coal drop rapidly filling to the brim with the running
conveyor spills in the heat and dark and dust of the day
i’ll dig a grave for near poverty wage to bury my soul
when it’s laid to rest a ghost of myself will stagger from the
plant with another day’s rent ain’t only war that’s hell
AMERICAN PIE
Better to blackout than be;
better the bottom of the bottle
than reality – dead end days,
sleepless nights. Why paint,
why write: about the old
lady in the alley asleep in a
doorway, the raggedy kids
playing in the gutter, their
families living in squalor,
the derelicts, lunatics, pimps,
pushers, muggers, killers,
the lost vet begging for cigarettes?
Scenes too real to find a refuge
in bookstores or museums,
amidst the soup cans and
American flags, and the golden
words penned for the aesthetic
ruminations of future generations.
ALL THE PRETTY BALLERINAS
The whirl of white dresses between the matrix of mirrors morph into a wreath of white ashes in this soldier’s reveries, spinning with the winds of time, war, remembrance or like visions of angels amidst a holocaust … leaping … twirling … pirouetting …
I sit on the floor in a corner of the dance studio, drawing spirals, parabolas in my battered sketch book, trying to capture the poetry in motion flying across the room to the plunk of a rehearsal piano as Degas once did long ago. War went on then too.
One two three four what are we fighting for? The words of that old protest song fall out with each cord.
When I went off to war, I knew I would never come back – at least not with my mind in tact – and I didn’t, which is why I used the G.I. Bill to go to art school instead of studying something practical.
Up and down round and round – right, wrong, truth or dare, upside down, inside out, makes you wonder what the dance of life is all about.
“How you doing Soldier?”
The dance director is suddenly beside me, seated like a Buddha, arms folded, legs crossed. He gives me a soft tap on the arm.
“Looks like you had a few before you came here this afternoon. That’s cool. Now, Soldier, we don’t mind artists making sketches of rehearsals but it might not be such a good idea today. OK? A certain diva is going to conduct the next class. I know everything is mellow between you two but we want everything to go smooth. Know what I mean?”
Yeah, you mean hit the road Jack.
**
Dark, rocky days in dead zones (like a dream but not) where nowhere is everywhere and nothing is anything and unknown hours fade to black.
“The end of the world is at hand, man.”
The alley man stares at me starkly, gripping a sterno can.
I shadow through the snowfall, past doors which have no numbers, down streets which have no names, through shapes which have no faces, under clocks run out of time, while wind whipped shrouds swirl around like the ghosts of dead men’s dreams.
“Death toll mounts!” A newsy shouts. “More troops killed!”
I buy a paper, use it for a hat. White veils wrap around me like wreaths, as I bundle down the ghosted streets, past the small grubby pubs and around toppling ghetto tenements, along the rows of shops filled with such stuff that only the poor would want. “I am a soldier of misfortune and” I muse as I march through the deepening drifts, “I fought that holy war on the desert sand.”
At a dead end dive, I duck in
from the cold.
DEATH TOLL REACHES 4,000. I scan
the headlines as I slump onto a stool. “Draft.” I tell
the barman and drop a fistful of day labor
dollars on the counter. STOCKS
PLUMMET, PLANT’S CLOSE, RECESSION DEEPENS,
UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES RISE, HOUSES FORECLOSE. I
shake my head and brood through the article
about
A fairyland of falling snow,
whorls in the barroom window.
“4,000
souls,” I brood, “Gone where
nobody knows.”
**
No guardian angels in these dark grottos, crypts, caverns, night world catacombs, no mojo, ace in the hole, as the winter winds wail like junkshop violins and winos rummage through the streets and sanitation trash bins, while gunfire crackles across the Dead Zone’s labyrinths.
I move through night and street glow, past the bars along the Combat Zone, the seedy, blue-lit lounges, the strip joints and the dice dens, the crack shacks and the brothels, the dead end dives and gin mills, while eyes watch me like cocked pistols.
“I can deal
with trouble, cause it.”
Nothing doing anywhere. Cracked
mirrors, broken clocks, windowless rooms, bolted
locks, disconnected phones, loaded dice, stacked
decks, snake eyes … time in a bottle …
Up town down town round and
round falling down.
As they dance in black dresses around the rim of each drink, the daughters of darkness who circle the brink
.
**
I see black
leaves scatter with the wind across a
graveyard adrift with snow … I see ghost faces
gaze at me through the smoke of war … I see
Death march with a shovel across his shoulder
down the road of no return … I see night and
storm and lightening flare …
“Ace of Spades.” I call the hidden card.
“Shoot the soldier!”
I change nightmares and open my eyes. Phantom figures glare at me down the empty bar. Someone buys me a shot. Someone reshuffles the cards. I hear a fresh round jacked in the chamber as someone slaps a new card face down on the bar.
“Another shot soldier?”
The jukebox wails its songs of glory, pain and joy, love and heartbreak, luck and loss.
And the whiskey burns. And I close my eyes.
Amidst the
apparitions – which is the only magic I got
from the war, cryptic visions of the fated
future, -- I see
myself floating from my body through the other
side of Time.
Fate and Chance play fortune’s draw in
a casino in the stars. Their
deck is flush with hopes and dreams, laced
with tears and sorrow.
“Ace of Hearts.” I tell the ghost soldiers at the bar.
**
The old man stands shivering in the alley, hand in hand with himself. A bundle of rags holding itself in the dead of night, staring through the darkness – a frail, wasting shadow of himself. Then he takes a step forward, although he has nowhere to go.
**
Candlelight flickers in the open doorway at the top of the stairs. A veil of smoke drifts down the landing and shifts, ghostlike, amidst the hallway’s shadows. I can smell her perfume. The smoke holds the dense aroma of incense burning. Incense always made me dizzy – its heady fumes hypnotic.
“Death’s perfume.” I remember an old priest’s cryptic comment when I was an alter boy. Nuns and priests and devils and holy ghosts whirl with my intoxication as I stagger to the top. I grip the banister to keep from swaying.
She stands across the room with her back to me, dressed in black – a gossamer black with lavish jet trimmings and lush midnight lace. Her long, golden hair fans across her shoulders, flares down her back. Her skin is so pale it seems translucent. Candles, candelabrums flutter on bureaus, bed stands. Incense is burning everywhere.
“Cin der el
la dances on star dust.”
She sings to herself in a mirror, applying red lipstick. The ashtray on the bureau is filled with butts, her eyes heavy from smoke and the long night.
**
I wake up. Strange patterns from cloud shadows sweep across the studio from the gritty skylight. I sit and smoke and watch the phantom figures shift and change. They are like a dream you can’t awake from in a sleep born from delirium.
It is cold in the loft, fever bright with harsh dead light, an incandescent haze. I sit up, find I slept with my army notebook. I flip through the pages, try to see the war in what is written. But my mind is given over to the ghost shapes on the warped walls, the whiteness of the notebook’s paper. The scrawls and scribbles take me nowhere.
“Light so
bright, only light, everywhere …”
I finally get the passage into focus.
“I am alone on the train.” I seem to have written before I passed out. “The empty car, ablaze with light, seems as ephemeral as mist as it streaks across the night.
I sit in the back in a cold sweat, light headed and panic stricken, wondering whether I am awake or asleep.
The thickets and rivers and ravines fly wildly by, like waving arms menacing my night trip to tomorrow. The ghost-white winter landscapes – white hills, white valleys, white fields and woods – are as much an unreality as my blazing dream of radiance. I cannot move and I am afraid.
‘Ten hut!’ The sergeant smiles at me.
‘But I wake
up sarge and the night is still there.’
‘The lord
is my shepherd.’
The train’s wheels seem to whisper
darkly. ‘I shall
not want.
I shall not want, although I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death …’
I sit up with a jolt, covered with sweat, heart pounding, pulse racing, eyes blurry. Masked figures surround me. I sit naked on a narrow cot. IV needles puncture my wrists.
‘Lie down!’
One of them puts a hand to y chest.
‘Don’t move!’
The others reach forward and grab me.
I remember the incoming ordnance, the explosions, traveling through a tunnel, a golden radiance enveloping me. I remember my shapeless arms reaching out for God, my fingers slipping through air.”
Karrump! Karrump! “Get
down! Get
down!” Like
an echo in my head. Karrump! Karrump!
**
We drink at the dock waiting
for the truck to haul us from Day Labor to the
meat packing plants at the edge of the
We drink as we slide through gristle and blood shouldering sides of meat from the delivery trucks to the slaughter rooms inside where the butchers chop them up, kicking off the mongrels as we stagger in and out, who fight for the bits of meat which spot the grimy walks.
We noon on Muscatel in the alley in the back, toss the stray dogs lunchmeat from our crumpled deli bags.
We drink as we sweep and mop the bloody floors, scooping entrails into trash bags which we pile outside the door.
As the world drops into night, we cash our checks at the corner bar. We stare at our drinks and wait for the whores.
**
“She’s beautiful.”
“She isn’t done.”
“Who’s the model?”
“Death.”
“You’re crazy! Hey, I know that girl! She’s that ballerina, your old flame. How come you never paint me?”
“I only paint what I hate.”
“You do not.”
“War, plague, famine, betrayal. I’ll paint you when you grow up kid – nude.”
“You will not. And I am grown up. Where are you going?”
I move from the couch to the easel, take a hair of the dog on the way, squint as the sunlight sets the canvas ablaze. Fat Cats, the Jet Set, the artsy social whirl, play in my memories of the pretty ballerina, along with some specter of myself who quickly became an inconvenient oddity amidst that rarefied swirl with my hard scrabble sketches of working class life, battlefield drawings, painting of the down and out.
“Why are you doing that?”
I ghost the goddess with a solvent-soaked rag, fade her beauty, erase her eyes.
**
Bad times when falling angels fill the sky like carnival confetti for the devil’s delight. Bad times when nothing jives and the same lame lies pass like valentines among the cubicle people in their sitcom lives. Bad times when the wind cries toxic moans as the planet dies.
“The cause of your misfortune is apparent.”
Say an official of the corporate establishment.
“Your errant mind is completely aberrant.”
Candlelit skulls light the windows of the tenements. Corpses chant mantras throughtout the labyrinths. Each day shoots for the moon, lands on vampire bat wings.
“Poverty is a privilege not a privation.”
Says the official from the corporation.
“’tis the lifeblood of a
might nation.
Bodies float down a river of blood – orphans, runaways, suicides, fallen soldiers, the lame, sick, halt and blind in a survival of the fittest where only the empowered thrive.
In a cellar
window a wizened widow eats dog food from a
can at a three legged table.
Bad times
when peace is war, homeless shelters are
closed for the poor, tax cuts for the rich
increase and jobs are outsourced overseas, up
is down, wrong is right, and you’re in between
nowhere and no way out.
Sewers run
to the sea, wait for me.
**
“So what’s the trick Soldier?”
Tony’s Tavern is jammed with its usual crowd of degenerates.
“No trick. It is what it is.”
How do you explain glimpses of the preordained?
“Shoot the soldier!” Some drunk shouts.
“Maybe it ain’t what it isn’t and it weren’t what it wasn’t.” Tony glares at me as he wipes off the counter top. “No one calls cards off a deck like that. “ Tony grumbles. “Not unless the deck is stacked.”
“It’s your deck Tony.” I spread my hands. “You laid them down and you picked them up.”
“And now I’m tossing them out!”
Tony throws the deck into a garbage can.
“There ain’t gonna be no more of that card shark shit going on here!”
He turns his back to me and walks away.
“Your place, your call.” I shrug. “But don’t forget, pal, that you owe me a round.”
Stack the deck? Blame God for that.
“Shoot the soldier!” The dipso next to me raises his glass.
**
I am moving, not moving, somehow being transported, a step at a time, around the broken chairs and tables, between the crushed beer cans and empty bottles, passed the pile of unpaid rent bills, toward the easel in my garret corner. The sky-lit loft is an aquarium of starlight. Munch like moons haunt the heavens. Van Gogh constellations swirl the sky. Atop the nightstand paint jars sparkle like prisms. The ghost-white canvas shines with astral light.
The wacko world of drunken dream, dark and deep.
I am painting, not painting. Slanting forward, I slash the canvas with road signs, religious symbols, astrological charts, corporate logos, chemical formulas, designer labels, mathematical equations, secret signals …
The creatures from my cracked world cautiously climb out from their demimonde tableaus – their Brut Art rendered gin mills, strip joints, dice dens, night clubs, jail cells, missions, soup kitchens, back street labyrinths, blind alley flops – bag ladies, homeless families, penniless pensioners, beggars, winos, hookers, junkies, grifters, gangsters, orphans, runaways – my non-sellable oeuvre of the near-dead and the might-as-well-be, which includes my sallow “Self Portrait In Straight Jacket,” rusty dope needles sticking through my head. They slither down the warped walls, crawl out from the festering stacks, crowd around me with their dead end eyes, watch me as I work.
I repaint us all in a castle in the clouds, feasting around a royal table, dressed in finery, flush with merriment, while cherubs circle chandeliers, and virgins dance on marble floors and rainbows arch across a kingdom where ketchup is no longer a vegetable to politicians, and lives are no longer negotiable to corporations, and liberty, equality, fraternity reign forever and no child is left behind.
Anything is possible when nothing is real.
**
“Dear Mr. Lonigan.
Thank you so much for your submission to our agency. Yours is a well written and compelling collection of stories. However, after careful consideration we decided we are not the right agency for ‘Mine Fields.’ We urge you to keep searching for the right fit.”
“Dear Mr. Lonigan,
Your collection of war stories is a riveting read. Some of the descriptions make you stand up and salute. Unfortunately, we don’t think we can handle it sucessully. We wish you the best with placing it elsewhere.”
“Dear Mr. Lonigan,
Thank you for your submission of slides to our gallery. After careful consideration we heave decided they are not quite right for our collection.”
“Dear Writer,
Many thanks for sharing your
idea or your work with us. Alas,
we must reject what you have been kind enough to
submit. But
the only way we can make a living is by selling
books to the large and medium-sized
Please forgive this form letter. We wish you the best of luck with your writing career.”
**
This used to be a good place, back when Smokey owned it. The food was bad, the booze cheap, the patrons more dead than alive. That was before they jazzed it up when the street got gentrified and the Dead End became the living End filled with movers and dollar smiles.
It was dark here then. You could sit, forget, bottle it up inside. You could think, dream, reflect, regret. You could hide from the whispering night.
**
Black winds chase across the concrete canyons. Designer dream worlds appear in storefront windows. The streets are crowded with tourists, shoppers. On corners, Christmas carolers sing the season’s songs.
“My art
expresses a vision of the world which has its
basis in the paranormal.”
I brood over my artist’s statement which no one seems to get, as I bundle through the cold looking in the windows of galleries and bookstores, collar turned up, fists pushed deep in the pockets of my long coat.
“Reality
becomes shadowy from this perspective, dreams
abound.”
I pass a doorway where a frail, old lady lies fast asleep. Around her snowflakes circle each pale ghost that passes. No one drops a coin in her cup. I do, I want a peaceful sleep too.
**
Wind, earth, sky all one, white veils whirling in a winter storm. In the diner we sit like sleepwalkers, me and the kid, steam ghosting from our coffee cups.
“Here comes the bride,” the kid sings softly looking out the window at the storm, “all dressed in white. Do you believe in dreams Soldier?”
“Dreams are strange.”
“I dreamed we had a baby, Soldier, a little girl with coal black hair and eyes as blue as yours.”
Jesus. The kid’s as cute as a courtesan but completely jailbait. Her parents are junkies basically – “avant-garde” artists with a studio down the hall from mine. Although I can hardly take care of myself, I try to help her out. I guess she helps me to.
“You better dream about getting through high school kid and getting a job, working your way through college and getting out of this neighborhood. Then you can have some real dreams that will do you some good.
Pale souls shuffle past the diner’s windows as the Hawk beats its wings down the city’s frosted blocks. It’s one of those dead winter days when the sky’s a shroud.
“I dreamed you were a famous artist, Soldier, and a famous writer too.”
Hey, anything is possible when nothing is real.
SILENT NIGHT
Huddled like headstones in a graveyard,
the rows of working class houses lay buried
in the blizzard – earth, air, sky all one.
We can see nothing; the world is erased.
Wind whipped shrouds swirl around.
We knock on doors, ring bells, holding
each other, searching for shelter.
STOCKS PLUMMET, BANKS FOLD,
JOBS LOST, HOUSES FORCLOSE …
Newspapers flutter around us in the
darkness; white veils whirl like ghosts.
THE BIG CHILL
Days bleak, bitter, with the early
onslaught of winter,
no heat in the building, night coming
quickly, wife stoic, kids colic, “holding
money” gone with the economy,
I prowl ghostly streets, past shut down
workshops, factories.
No going back to what was before,
because it isn’t there anymore.
WHEN YOU WIS
Spirit gone,
world all wrong,
inside out,
upside down,
blowing
bubbles,
bubbles
burst,
Fantasia ride in
“Bar’s closed.”
“One for the road.”
“You’ve had an ‘extra’ two.”
“I’m not through.”
“Time to go home!”
“One more and I’m gone!”
Bubble,
bubble, toil and trouble …
Mickey Mouse bought a house for
Cinderella and little Jiminy.
“Don’t you have a home?”
Next stop the Twilight Zone.
THE POLITICIAN
You walk into a room,
study the faces, expressions.
You know right off where
the bodies are buried, the
skeletons hidden. Who’s on
the take, who’s on the make,
who’s selling themselves, or
something, or someone else –
you know all of this. Your
opponents do too.
You fight fire with fire, not
holy water, on Capitol Hill.
Sparrows peck, chickens peck,
eagles swoop and kill, too swift
for detection.
That’s how you win an election.
HOOP DREAMS
“No job? No prospects? Goods?”
“My word is good.”
“I can’t bank on words, not even yours.
They’re just diminishing returns.”
“I have a car.”
“What kind.”
“Two year old Jag.”
“Bring the title?”
I lay it down on the table.
“Sign it over and I can give you half
of what you’re looking for, which is a
friendly more.”
“That’s not enough! We’ll be on the street!
Look, we played together on the championship
team! I need help! I’m at my end! I thought
we were friends!”
“We were, a long time ago. But I really haven’t
seen much of you since we finished school.”
“That game against Lane! We won it together!
They said so in the papers!”
“Those games we played. The rules of games
strangely change. One day you’re a two-bit
businessman operating a penny arcade in the
poor part of town and the next you’re one of
the few still solvent because no matter how bad
things are people are going to find some way to
have a good time. OK, for the glory days.”
LINE, FORM, COL
I stare. I see it emerging
on the canvas, hand and eye
mesmerized by the nightmare
in the room’s glare coming to
life.
It is cold in the studio.
Sirens wail outside the windows.
I shiver at the easel.
Gunfire crackles across the ghetto
like insurgent fire in a war zone.
Back and forth, left to right –
faces filled with fear, despair,
hopelessness, along midnight streets
no one would dare to enter unless they
had to because they lived there.
I put away my brushes, paint tubes,
turn out the lights. Enough truth and
beauty for one night.
ON GUARD
The living room carpet is
covered with paint splattered newspapers. Whiskey
bottles, crushed beer cans, ashtrays, paint
jars, rags, soaking brushes, crumpled cigarette
packs, are scattered everywhere. While
empty pizza boxes clutter the dining room table
and clothes are tossed over lampshades and
chairs. (It’s
amazing how an artist can wreck a place when his
wife is out of town.) I
crawl through the rubble, feeling for my last
twist of marijuana, find it in the pocket of a
crumpled work shirt and light it up. I
bought a bag as soon as Rachel left for a visit
with her parents, dragged the canvas out from
under the bed and went ballistic. I sit
on the sofa, smoke the joint, study the work in
progress. The
giant monstrosity, which is supposed to be a
bombing in
Mello as moon glow, I decide it’s perfect for the show.
**
A lone wolf in Poodleville is
about the only way I can describe this
museum-guard deal.
I took it when my grunt gig at a South
Side Chicago factory got shipped overseas. Now, a
hardscrabble job which paid pretty well, had
decent benefits, treated you OK, is a semi-slave
slog for some poor soul in labor hell. (Like
we’re not headed that way in
In the room the curators come
and go talking of Michelangelo and designer
hairdo’s and designer clothes and vintage wine
and
“You on tonight, Blake?” Crawly (Creepy Crawly) the special event manager is suddenly slouching toward me, buzz haircut, buck teeth, hook nose, beady eyes. “I’m short.” Crawly pokes me in the chest with his clipboard. “Let me put that up front. Volunteers get on my good side. You know how it goes for the rest.”
The Million Dollar Donner wingding – the big annual ass kisser that starts in the morning and goes on past midnight. “The rich, they are not like you and I.” Someone once said to someone. I think it was Fitzgerald to Hemingway. (I kind of spotted that right off myself.) Trucks have been pulling up since noon. Which is the main reason they stuck me on this post –to direct the musicians, jugglers, dancers, caterers, florists, event organizers, contractor waiters, waitresses, and extra hired hands of every description, as well as the befuddled museum staff (curators, lecturers, toadies, executives) who never seem to get the ins and outs as to the way these big affairs function.
“I didn’t sign up.”
Crawley’s beady eyes bore through me like lazar beams. His breath hisses like a radiator (in the dead of winter) past his smoke stained buck teeth. “What are you writing, Blake?” Crawly looks down at my hands. “Something happen in the lobby today, Blake?” Are you writing an incident report? Let me see it.”
He sticks out his hand.
“I was just jotting down some notes about the cash-changing jib.” I tuck my poem into my blazer pocket and give Crawly a lazy shrug. “I’ve got to train Johnson on the detail tomorrow – safe combinations, pick ups, drop offs. The usual stuff.”
“You do that stuff on your own time!” Crawly goes ballistic on me. “You don’t do that shit on the floor! You’re supposed to be monitoring this lobby, not scribbling in a fucking book!
That stuff constitutes a write up! Three of those and you’re out! Ever hear of OT, Blake? You come in early for shit like that! Got a problem with putting a little extra time in for the museum?”
“Actually I was wondering if I could get on the roster for tonight? I was hoping you weren’t filled up.”
“You’re on.” Crawly chortles as he walks away.
“What did Creepy Crawly want?”
Romeo Ramero is suddenly beside me, looking pissed off.
“He signed me up for tonight. It was that or a write up.”
“Me too.” Ramero’s eyes flare. “God damn it! I met this hot chick in photography. I’m supposed to meet her after work.”
“I wanted to get home and clean up my pad.” I brood, picturing the mess I left. “I wrecked it doing an art work while my wife was out of town. It’s for an anti-war show at the Focus Gallery. Rachel comes back tomorrow.”
“Tell you what.” Ramero’s eyes narrow. “Here’s what we do. A eight o’clock I call Control from a pay phone. I tell them I’m your brother. There’s a family emergency and you got to be there. Crawly has to let you go. He’s got no choice about that. We both know he’s too lazy to follow up on the paperwork. Everything will be forgotten before you know it.”
“What about you?”
“Next time, amigo.”
“It’s a deal.”
**
Fate, I ruminate. What you elect? What you reject? Seems to always be something you don’t expect. Unless you’re rich. I look around the blue-collar bar, nurse my drink, contemplate my poem. Having cleaned up the apartment, I’m out for a nightcap, giving the day a recap. Half the guys in here have been laid off with the recession. More will be, or forced to take jobs that suck like me or maybe join up with the military. War, politicians, poverty, Wall Street, corporate greed, exploited labor, lavish parties, Creepy Crawly – fate is in the hands of whose dealing the cards and we all know who they are.
“Cubicle people live in corporate cells.” I toast life’s wishing wells, “Artists live in fairytales. We all die in lullabies. Pleasant dreams and goodnight.”
ZIGGY THE KILLER ELEPHANT
Ziggy danced in the “Follies.” That’s how he got his
name (Ziegfeld). He was in the movies too. A “big”
star before we were born. One day he up and killed
his trainer. They
put him in our
killed his attendant there as well and they had to chain
him in his cage. We read about him in the papers when
we were kids. It was a sad story, Ziggy’s life and times.
We got to thinking about how awful it must be to be
chained up that way in a tiny cell as the papers described.
We wondered if he missed dancing. What he did all day.
We went to the zoo. We brought our harmonicas. We
figured we’d play a little music for him, cheer him up
if we could. We were all rock star musical, Elvis, Fats
Domino. That elephant was huge. He must have been
something phenomenal to take in on a theater stage. He
was so big he had no room to move. He couldn’t even
turn around in any kind of way with that chain fastened
to his back leg. Ever see a trapped giant? It’s hard to look
at. We started playing “up” tunes for him. “The Yellow
Rose Of
But Ziggy just stood there, like he was deaf or brain dead
or he was too beaten down to care.
Meanwhile, all the other elephants in the house, who were
in group cells and could move about, started dancing to
beat the band. It was like a Disney cartoon. All around us
The elephants were rocking back and forth, sashaying their
hips, waving their ears. They even looked like they were
smiling and we realized that these elephants weren’t out of
sideshow or circus – performing gigantos.
Then Ziggy started getting into the show. He picked up one
foot, then another, and before you knew it he was marching
in place one foot after the other, front to back, and eyeing
us as if to say: “Have I got the rhythm? This OK?”
Meanwhile, the people in the elephant house were getting
freaked. They start running in all directions, like there was
going to be a stampede – as if the caged elephants could
actually go anywhere. Some of the women screamed. So,
these security guards swoop in. We run. A secret smile on our
frozen faces as we tumble out to freedom. Ziggy still had it in him.
Ziggy still could cut a rug. It was probably the last good time
Ziggy ever had.
WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
Sitting alone in this café,
scribbling on bits of pocket
crumpled paper, I notice that
people have a tendency to look
at me, sneakily – men, women,
young and old all poking at little
hand held gizmos, I Phones, Black-
berries, god knows what.
What they seem to see is a mystery.
Someone that does not quite fit into
the reality of their uniformity and
what that should be. While they don’t
want to offend, they must peek at “it”
again. I think that I engender this by
simply being a something that is,
obviously, not becoming anything
other than nothing. I don’t have that
“How To” book look as they do:
Succeed,” “Attract,” “Fix This,”
“Solve That.” I guess there’s
nothing to be done but grab a fresh
Starbucks napkin and write another
poem.
THE PAU
Work comes harder while the pay gets
smaller and the hours longer.
If there’s one thing I learned by growing
older it’s my life went nowhere and it’s
getting shorter.
I lay down my shovel and pick up my
lunch pail. I search the towers, spires,
domes, silos, the docks, walks, doorways,
windows, every nook and cranny of the
industrial buildings, looking for suits,
white shirts, hardhats with clipboards,
snitches, rat-outs, lifers and squealers.
They are out there, everywhere.
I unscrew my ice cold thermos top, look
around again and take a pop. Cheers.
OUR TOWN
I had to get out of the city, if only for a day:
the congestion, pollution, noise, confusion.
I took a Greyhound to the nearest small town.
The Mayberry streets, lined with gingerbread
houses with white picket fences, surrounded a
lush town square with a stately, brick courthouse
in the middle of it.
I got an ice cream cone at a Baskin-Robbins
and sat outside on a bench.
The weather was perfect, sunny, warm.
A rat poked its head out of a hole in the asphalt
at the edge of the sidewalk and looked around like
a submarine periscope.
He fixed his eyes on me. I wondered if there was
some kind of recognition – that he saw that I was
as out of place as he was.
He bolted from the hole and, clutching my cone,
mouth open, I watched him walk directly to me, wary,
but resolute, moving forward on some mission.
Suddenly, he leaped into the wastebasket next to me.
I watched him dig around in the garbage and pull out
an empty malt cup. He jumped back onto the sidewalk
and gave me a final look, his teeth griping the empty
container, and then he scampered back to his hole.
He placed the upended cup beside it and dove out of site
into his underground hide-out.
His head popped up again and he pulled the malt cup over
his chambers and fixed it securely like a man-hole cover.
I guess everyone needs a quiet escape.
WRITER’S NOTES
Four drab walls with smog in the window …
dark streets below no one dares to walk through …
creaky bed, small table with a wobble …there’s
a hotplate on the window sill.
The bathroom is down the hall. There’s a public
phone down it, too, although you never get a call.
The radio on the dresser was purchased from a thrift
shop. The classical music you play on it always sounds
a little shocked.
A shoebox filled with rejection slips lies on the floor
of the closet. Next to it is a stack of literary magazines
with funky names. Each one has a sample of
your work in it – which makes it all worth it.
TOXIC TOWN
Cabbage soup, cabbage salad,
stuffed cabbage, boiled cabbage,
sauerkraut – everyone in the
tenement ate cabbage everyday,
everyone in the town. You had
to eat something.
You couldn’t breath anyway.
The factories smothered the town
with toxic clouds. Smoke from
their chimneys filled the streets
and alleys. It could have been
Maybe angels flew with the wind.
You couldn’t see anything.
My father had a face which looked
like a kicked in door.
My mother had a face which looked
like a cabbage cooker.
It’s hard to describe hell well.
I got drafted — three squares a day,
meat, potatoes, pie alamode.
The air was filled with bullets, explosions.
Couldn’t wait to get home.
THE NUMBER YOU HAVE DIALED
Cleaning out the attic, I find in the pocket of
an old, moth eaten jacket a little Black Book.
Within its yellowed page are the names,
numbers, addresses of women long forgotten.
Fog, Snow, Rain, and so on, are written beside
each one like youthful cryptograms. Who was Ice?
Doesn’t sound very nice. Sun sounds like fun.
Hail? I dated Hail? Must have been hell.
Sleet! How and where did I meet Sleet? “I am
dating Sleet. What a treat. I’ll introduce you to
her sister Slush. Nice stuff.” Wind, Drought,
Thunder, every kind of weather, got to make
you wonder. Who said women are all the same?
There’s enough mood swings here to drive a
man insane. Breeze, Freeze – womanizing can
be demoralizing, bring a guy to his knees. Must
explain some things. Mist, Hurricane, Hurricane?
—you’d think I could put an encounter to that name.
Got to wonder what their notations about me were
and if they were all the same – Lame.
The fun of being young. More like misery seeks
company, desperately. Sun. Must have been blonde.
Kind of makes your breath catch and your heart
pound. Should I call that one? What would she say?
“Lame? You again?”
BLUE SKIES
You’d think one of these days I’d
get the one every dogs got coming –
like now and again, from time to time,
something to do with the moon and
stars and planets and signs.
OK, I saw my sign when I was knee-high,
big middle finger
My ole man hit the bottle and me too and my
brother and sister and mother.
So I got in trouble, didn’t do well in school,
had a little problem with the golden rule.
Someone told me to pray and the Lord would
show me the way. All that got me was sore
knees and allergies from the stuff they burned
at their rituals and ceremonies.
Someone said I should read these books about
positive thinking and influencing people.
All that got me was a stretch in prison.
There’s no moral to this story. All I want
to say is if you ever got that day you did
OK and if that big hand in
the sky
threw you a bone you’re not alone.
THE BEAT GOES ON
“Those
eyes,” I
ponder my reflection in the barroom mirror, “like a cat
in the dark, some mangy alley prowler.”
They watch me watch myself take a drag off my cigarette, sip some beer, while the jukebox wails some song in the darkness about heartbreak and loneliness.
Down the
black hole of your non-life,
I scribble a poem on my bar napkin.
(No One is
the ID of your Being)
as you
flail through the needless nothing
(Like a
puppet on a string)
and drop
through your vapid nowhere,
(Life is
but a dream)
toward the
dead end of your no more,
(“Nevermore.” Quoth
the raven.)
don’t
forget to scream.
The
Bimbo, not a bad bod for an old broad. How come I never noticed it?
The bar is
a lonely haunt for ghosts,
I scribble on another napkin.
lost souls
at their dead end.
I drink and
watch her dance through smoke
to the
music in her head.
She waltzes
with some phantom beaux
down the
floor and back again,
in a dream
that makes her pale face glow,
a cocktail
in her hand.
My dreams
like hers died long ago.
Life stole
our one small chance.
I rise as
she drifts my way again,
close my
eyes and take her hand.
Na … I think I’ll just pass out like Paco.
**
I’ve slept on park benches, mission cots, in cardboard boxes in vacant lots, barrack bunks, army tents, in jungles, swamps, transport trucks, conjugal beds, death beds, restraint beds in psycho lockups, box cars, brothels, artist’s lofts … I slept with inmates, cell mates, lovers, bugs, in Grand Hotels, cheap motels, wind rattled shacks, my dreams the kind you fight to wake from for that first cigarette.
**
Spaz drools and spits and
chews his wrists on the flop cot next to mine. Goat
wheezes, bleats, beats his meat, pants down on
the other side.
Across the
I live from day to day, try to survive the nights, in lost chance land where jackpot stands for what you score from a garbage can.
Each night the ghost of Marilyn Monroe haunts the missions of skid row. She makes mad love with each lost soul along her ethereal, back street stroll and then vanishes in a cloud of ozone.
**
“Like ghosts in a dream,
I type out my latest bar napkin scribbles on a computer at Kinko’s.
we huddled in the alley doorways,
hunched up against the raging snowstorm, and waited for
the Rescue Gospel Mission to let us in from the lethal night.
The usual assortment of city shadows on the loose, all shivering
in our Salvation Army castoffs.
Inside there was oatmeal, a hot shower, and later (after they tossed
us out to panhandle for the day) a bowl of stew and a cot for the night.
In between, there were sermons, repent signs, pictures of Christ, Hell,
Satan, and the loathing looks of the Saved.
The satin shroud descending was all there was to see. All these was to
feel was frostbite and our minds and souls growing numb from the cold.
I had just been released from the County Correctional Institution and
found myself half wishing I were back. But we all were wishing we
were somewhere else, or someone else doing anything else, which is
probably not an unusual wish, on any day, for the drifters, druggies,
dipsos, jailbirds, the beggars, tramps and the mentally diseased who
haunt the city’s skid row missions. Perdition is our normal lot, but
sitting in a blizzard was a little over the top.
A small child sat shivering beside me on the mission steps, clinging
to the arm of her sleeping mother, who was not much more than a
child herself. Thin, pale, disheveled, she sat slumped forward in the
swirling snow, head bowed, eyes closed, elbows resting on her knees.
A tiny baby slept on her lap. Now and then, the little girl would peek
at me, lost, frightened, eyeing me no doubt as another phantom in a
nightmare which would not stop.
This was long ago and far away, and my memory is as blurry as the
snowstorm was that day. But there were a number of odds and ends
mixed in with us in the alley. Odd happenings in life stay with you,
and back then was not like it is today, where homeless families, jobless
Joes, and penniless pensioners are common sights most anywhere,
sleeping in parks, alleys, vacant lots, or in cars or vans or out on the
sidewalks. Watching the hurricanes on the newscasts brought it back –
Katrina, Rita, Wilma – with thousands of lives displaced by an
“act of God.” But then what act isn’t?
I had a penny flute in my pocket. I found it in my cell, hidden by
some former inmate, maybe to be turned into a shank. The slim, tin, sad
excuse for an instrument helped pass the time; its lost lament filling
the void in the dead of night.
I slipped it out and played it for the little girl, who peeked at me cautiously,
as I tooted my lonely cell tune into the blizzard.
Listen to the wishes in the well
Listen to the wind atop the hill
Listen to the patter of the rain
Listen to the story of the dream
Listen to the silence of the night
Listen to the love birds in their flight
Listen to the whisperings in the dark
Listen to the beating of your heart
I smiled when I finished and held the tiny flute out for her for her to take.
But she shivered and turned away.
Jesus! I read over the piece. Damned thing actually brings a tear to my eye. I sit and wonder if anyone will actually publish the stuff?
**
The black winds howl and the warped walls creak. Under the bed rodents eat the rug. Snake like hisses steam from the radiator all winter. Up and down the Hell Hotel, DT’s dance while wino’s scream. Is it for you that I am screaming Cara Mia – mouth open, eyes shut, toes curled, fists clenched – and your lips of fire, mouth of flame, warm heart, body heat, or do I need another drink?
**
In nursing home hallways, like fading memories, the aged sit. Someday it will come to that. (If there’s anything left.) But the beat will go on for a good while yet, between one thing and another and my social security checks. (Getting paid for not working after a lifetime wasted punching clock’s and breaking my neck – imagine that.)
Marriage? Scary music played when she entered the room. She got the house, car, pension, bank account, six quarts of my blood. And what little was left of my brain. Kids? Hope I don’t see any of them any time soon – all alumni of the local reform school.
I have a post office box and a Greyhound locker key. Half the week I live on the street; (except in winter) the other day’s it’s flops, diners, cheap hotels, “Midnight Angels” and the occasional police cell.
But I’m back with the Beats. The way I started out – before the draft, the lifer job, love, marriage, the baby carriage. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, my hero’s, and of course Bukowski and Carver. Better late than never.
**
Like rags in the wind we chase helter-skelter, searching the street for something to duck under, rain pounding down amid lightening and thunder, all the buildings boarded up or burner to cinder.
“I’d a swore there was a mission here!” Whitey curses as we scramble back and forth. “I know I flopped round this dump heap last year!”
“In here.” I duck through a black hole and tunnel through broken brick. A marble staircase in a roofless shell climbs to a balcony floating in a netherworld. “Under there.” We scurry for cover and sit shivering in a corner.
The walls are plastered with tattered movie posters, faded, ragged but still packed with glamour. Ravishing women and matinee idols – Gardner, Gable, Marylyn Monroe, the Duke, Rita Hayworth, still fabulous in their Technicolor dream-world.
“Seems we found us a movie palace.” Whitey digs in his pockets for makings and rolls two smokes, hands one to me and lights his own. “More stars than there are in heaven.” Whitey blows rings in the air. “Remember that show played old movies on TV way back when? Bet I seen all of these on the tube in my time. Some on the big screen. Look at that one! Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life! They don’t make flicks like that no more. Doubt if they know how. Hero’s, heroines, the American Dream, all gone with the wind, bro, down the road of no return.”
Nam, Nixon, Desert Storm, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Wall Street run amuck, Gitmo, jobless Joes, the Patriot Act, homeless, the helpless, everyone falling through cracks – don’t know about no more but not anytime soon.
**
The waiter brings us fresh martinis on a silver tray with Spanish olives. The notes from “Stardust” flutter through the club like birds of paradise.
“I love talking to poets.” She whispers.
The tables flickering candle, lights her platinum blonde hair and sparking smile. Over the rim of her raised cocktail glass she devours me with her large onyx eyes.
“Poets are so inspiring!”
We met in the poetry section of Borders bookstore. I was figuring out how to borrow a volume by Bly. (The best way to beat the sensor machine at the door is to drag the book along the floor under your foot, while sneezing violently to the distract security guard standing there.)
“Bly is my guy.” She says.
“We shared a reading once in
She’s had about a thousand facelifts, looks to me, and is as mad as a hatter like most old rich dames. Just hope the old bird remembered to carry her credit card.
**
“What’s in the bag old man?”
A gang of punks with greased back hair looking for some kicks just to pass the time, saunter up the alley where I’m seated on a milk crate drinking a bottle of wine.
“You hear me you old fuck? I’m talking to you!”
I get up, pull the cheap vino from the bag, roll the brown paper into a funnel and jam it down the neck of the bottle.
“Molotov cocktail son. Want some?”
They back away as I flick my Bic.
**
Infomercial, infomercial,
sitcom, sitcom, infomercial, infomercial …
semi-naked warrior midgets suddenly pop up on
the tube. The
little merciless men are swinging tiny tritons
and tiny torches.
Amazon women, wielding giant swords,
battle them in an arena in ancient
I hurry to the kitchen, grab a beer. Nice digs. What they call a studio – pull out, bathroom, completely furnished. Had to lay out two month’s rent security deposit. Get me through the winter. I’ll get most of the money back. Take them six weeks to evict me after I quit paying the rent.
A giant gorilla charges across the screen galloping on his knuckles. He races to a blonde
Chick tied to a stake. She
screams. The
gorilla is startled. He
studies her, fondles her, rips her apart. Jesus! A
guy with a lot of muscles fights a fat black
bear. The
bear eats his face. Another
gladiator type wrestles a
Car commercial, car commercial, fast food chain, Jamaica, Bahamas, season sale, season sale … News update: “12 more US troops were killed today when” … another mosque bombed, another jihad beheading, Bush Cheney, Abu Ghraid, Gitmo, more Katrina …
I turn it back up, run to the kitchenette, crackers, cold one … Some kind of creepy dungeon. Christian martyrs being led through mazes, tunnels, out into the arena through a giant gate. The martyrs huddle together, pray, sing. A mother hugs her child. Lions rush out through the arena doorways from every direction. They swarm the martyrs, chase them around, rip them to shreds. Good god! I bolt my beer. Next comes a panorama of audience reaction shots, as the camera sweeps the coliseum, which is jammed to the rafters with partying Romans – pigging out, drinking wine, giving each other high fives. Close up of the big shots in the box seats: Caesar, Nero, sporting sardonic grins.
**
Some of them are partying on the pullout. Some of them are passed out on the floor. Others are dancing in the kitchenette. I don’t know who any of them are.
It started out with me and Bimbo on a wild ride through her imaginary world. Whoever she thought I was must have been some strapping young stud and I’m amazed that I survived the ordeal.
“Pops we’re out of Schnapps!”
A blonde, Germanic, bovine girl is screeching in my face. She’s wearing some sort of deli style uniform and I kind of remember dreaming I was Ahab harpooning the great white wale.
Hot dogs and whiskey, bratwurst and beer, memories of a housewarming barbeque on the kitchenette burners comes into focus and disappears. Did the smoke detectors go off? Were the neighbors pounding on the door? The police? The fire department? I think I remember the landlord throwing everyone out. But everyone is here. Guess the party returned.
**
We blew up chicken gullets, like balloons
for the girls to carry around on strings in the
City of
pirate with sharpened stockyard bones which
we sheathed in out clothesline belts, like swords,
marauding through the neighborhood.
Along the sidewalks, the girls play hopscotch,
arms raised in the air like wings, hopping toward
the Blue Sky with tiny, one-footed leaps.
Angels flew in the city of wind, around the steeples
of the churches, over the rooftops of the tenements,
under the viaducts and bridges, through the gangways
of the houses, down the narrow streets and alleys,
above the fuming slaughterhouse chimneys
billowing black smoke into the wind.
**
It is midnight. In the dark, in bed, lying alone and naked, I stare at the ceiling fan and smoke a cigarette. The room is a stage set from the Twilight Zone. There is a three legged chair beneath a wobbly table, a broken television and a one station radio. The window won’t open and its shade won’t close. The sink faucet drips, the water pipes rattle, the floor boards creak, the radio crackles. There is no hot water in the shower in the bathroom down the hall. There is no lighting in the hallway except a feeble, hanging bulb. There is no paper for the toilet. There is no lock on any door. The table lamp flickers when lighted. The dresser drawers won’t budge. It is the dog days of summer.
I hear the voice of God in the torpor, hacking and cackling through the static of the unchangeable radio, in the heat and swelter of the steamy Uptown night, indecipherable yet all powerful, unknowable and unrelenting, telling me that somewhere and yesterday and tonight and tomorrow and nowhere and always and never and forever …
There is a full moon tonight. The walls are weeping. Teardrops glisten like diamonds in the purgatorial dark. I reach for my bottle, drink to the hidden, like fog in a daydream, mingling
shadows and moonbeams.
And moonstruck lovers sign on their pillows.
And midnight revelers dance in the moon’s glow.
And my childhood voice laughs near my window.
NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
Strange place – at night the yard
below my window is filled with
darkness, shifting shadows.
The darkness is visible; the shapes
you sense, like equations on a
blackboard in a school room long
forgotten which have been erased.
During the day, it’s the other way –
light too bright, ghosts at play.
Three squares a day, meds, shrinks,
burly attendants – all you need
between the clock and the bed.
The days pop up like white rabbits
in a magician’s top hat. Each night
you vanish.
RACK’UM
With a shaky hand I grab the tumbler
resting on the
close my eyes, taste the thunder.
“Death.” The whiskey whispers.
“Bring it on.” I softly answer.
Half-wits and whores, drunks, degenerates,
undead corpses, living obituaries no one will
bother to write surround me in the night.
“Double-cross in the corner.”
I stroke the pool-stick and watch the colored
balls collide like constellations in a sky gone
wild, criss-crossing, cascading, ricocheting.
“Life sucks in the side.”
I bury the eight ball and hang my stick,
stagger through the shadows, collect my bets.
A Midnight Angel waits by my bar stool.
The juke-box wails some song in the darkness
about hard times, heartbreak, hopelessness.
KNOCK KNOCK
“Who’s there?”
“Me. It’s an emergency.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
The door opens a crack.
“What do you want? As if I can’t guess.”
“The usual. I got money.”
Shadow waves the gun he’s holding for me
to come in. The shack by the river is clean
as a whistle as usual. Over in a corner is
a potbellied stove burning a small fire.
The wind wails through the warped walls
and I think with winter coming on it must
get kind of cold in here, maybe unbearable.
“We’re closed man.” Shadow grumbles. “It’s
four o’clock in the A and M.” He lights a
kerosene lamp and hangs it on a hook. Black
girls are asleep in cots all around us, tossing,
turning, throwing off their blankets. There’s an
interior door to another room which I imagine
smells like perfume.
“Coffee.” Shadow mutters to a girl sitting and
smoking on the nearest cot. “Bring me my box.”
She stretches, yawns, studies my ghost-like face
and disappears in the room’s dark recesses.
“Put it down.” Shadow taps the small table by
the window with his gun. “This all you got?”
He frowns as he counts. Coffee comes back and
lays the box on the table. “Do to an increase in
operating expenses, the price has gone up.”
Shadow shoves the packet down my shirt pocket.
“You look like shit.” He smiles and pats my arm.
“Next time bring more. Better yet, do yourself a
favor, don’t come at all.”
GIVE ME ONE MORE TIME
A shadow in a phantom world,
I tilt my bottle.
The night-town tavern is dark, smoky,
crowded with haunts: dipso’s, boozers,
alkies, losers, ghosts of dreams who
The night, try to get through it, forget:
what you
could not do, missed, lost, blew, before
the darkness which you don’t remember
begins again and this time forever.
SABBATH
Shrunken old,
she steps out of the shadows
into the noon day sun.
Watch the fun,
as she hobbles along
on her way to church,
through the midday throngs.
You know the rest.
They knock her down,
grab her purse.
Broken jaw, broken hip,
Her eight bits for the
collection basket street-punk
ripped —“That old bitch wasn’t
worth shit!”
You cross yourself.
What’s left?
STORE CLERK
“You squeal on me?”
“Cut his throat!”
“They don’t know who they’re after.”
“You didn’t tell them who did it?”
“I left them chasing shadows.”
“But you saw me kill the old man, rob
his store! You came out of nowhere!”
“He just hired me. I was in the back doing
inventory.”
”So? What? You told them the killer was
wearing a mask?”
“Something like that.”
“Something like what?”
“I told them I was in the back. I heard a
gunshot and came up front. I saw someone
running out but I didn’t see his face.”
“Why you lie? You’re crazy! You know they
gonna finger you now. An inside job. You’re
their main suspect!”
“I’m not sweating that. Why didn’t you kill me
too? You had your gun pointed at me.”
“I don’t know. We go back, at least we did in
grade school. You were OK. I
You used to come up to me and say: ‘Hey man,
help me eat this; it’s way too much!’ I knew it
was charity. You were as poor as me. I ate it
anyway. So I remember and I can’t pull the trigger.”
“The old man was a crook. He cheated everyone
in this neighborhood a nickel and dime at a time.
He knew I really needed this job to help my family,
yet everyday he leaned on me, rubbed it in my face
that I was his nobody. Does anyone care that he’s
dead? I don’t. Besides, we go back in the hood.”
BODY AND SOUL
That dark spiral down,
even beyond the reach
of the reach beyond.
I’ve looked into their eyes –
staring at the day as if life
took place in perpetual night.
I’ve had to because my own
comic shadow searches the
same maze we all stagger
through, between the soup
kitchens and the rescue gospel
missions, amidst the trail of
broken bottles we follow like
grown up Hansels and Gretels.
“That’s what you get when you fly
without a net!” The spectators laugh,
enjoying the show from righteous row.
“That’s what you get when you can’t
hack it! ” Watch the clowns tumble
down. “That clown got what was coming!”
“That clown never was good for nothing!”
So, blow the trumpets, bang the drum,
gather round, rejoice, have fun — but
know: every soul is a rainbow, every soul
is hallowed.
RAP
They let him cool his heels for a while
in an isolated cell while they got their
stuff together. They needed him to get
his stuff together too: get all nervous
and tongue tied while he waited for
them to march in with their charges,
whatever they were.
It worked, played on his nerves, sitting
there in a cage trapped like an animal.
“Hey, how about my phone call!”
He shouted.
No one answered.
“How about my lawyer!”
Not that he had or could afford one.
“You ain’t been charged with nothin’ yet”
A gruff voice grunted around the corner.
“Then why am I here?” Show your face!
Where’s my habeas corpus!”
“Don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that and
couldn’t care less. All I know is I’m
trying to read the paper and you’re
disturbing my peace!”
The next morning he learned. There
was an attempted
near where he was walking – a big man
in a hooded parka. The family dog scared
him off. The owner was pretty sure he
saw a black man running from the house.
“I didn’t have nothing to do with that!”
My cellmate keeps shouting and giving
me a migraine. “Before I know it I’m in
a lineup. Some guy says that’s him and
here I am!”
All blacks look alike to folks around here,
I’ll admit. And all crooks look black when
their wearing hoods and all you can see is
their back. Lester looks kind of scary
anyway, although he’s not. Hey I believe
him! I just
ROAD KILL
I sit in my cheap room, watch the raid from the window. PD flashers strafe the dead zone dark. Vice squad walkie-talkies crackle in the chaos, sirens wail, shadows scurry.
They hustle the whores out first, cuffed, kicking – a prima dumba backstreet ballet of fish-net stockings, skin tight shifts, spiked high heels, nightglow flesh – all shrieking, cursing, spitting at the narcs.
The John’s follow hard on (no pun on that one) and nightsticks rain down, as the brawl of good ol’ boy beer guts, biker brawn, lunge, jostle, try to run.
I pack my suitcase, thunder threads tossed in the trash, light another Lucky, slug sown cathouse Jack. Paylor the pimp, Bubba the bouncer, are frog walked out next, sweating bullets in their lounge lizard best. Back stabbed, double crossed, facing jail, they look like cremating corpses on flame from Hell.
Hookers, strippers, poker machines, drugs, booze, dice, ex-cons, thugs – by the time anyone wonders where the bartender’s gone (ont the back as soon as the first narc walked in) I’ll be dreaming of you Ruby (dead drunk on a Trailways Bus).
Life goes on.
Drifter digs, you open the door and flop into bed. A single snaked light bulb hangs from a ceiling chain. Devil shapes toss the room as its harsh light swings with the windows wind.
Each night I hear the exiles doing pratfalls in the dark. They stagger back and forth to the washroom down the hall, or try to maneuver through their tiny flops. Across the alley a back street lounge sleep streams until dawn. Jazz and blues fill the night with saxophones and wailing songs. Silhouettes slow dance in the windows.
I watch them through my window, pillow propped against the wall, sipping rye and blowing smoke, while the demons shift around. The music wraps the night in dream. Ruby and me dance inside a memory.
“Into the
night riding that mare.
Man on the
un – danger, beware.
Nowhere to
go, nowhere to hide.
Into the
night, grim reaper behind.”
Eyes heavy from smoke and the long night, fingers furtively stroking the cue-stick, I move, back and forth, around the lamp-lit pool table and study the cluster of brightly colored balls which seem to float there. The room rocks and creaks around us in the lamp-lit dark, as Johnny Gun and the Rustlers ignite a foot stomping line dance in the rhythm and blues bar upstairs, driven by wailing harmonicas and electric guitars.
I lean into each shot like a sleep-walker in a trance, dizzy from drink, playing combinations so crazy they make no sense, lost in some Twilight Zone of hustler Zen which, playing stick for meals and flops in two-bit joints, from time to time, never happened before and probably won’t happen again.
Shadow shapes crowd the smoky cellar, as still and silent as apparitions in a dream. The usual specters who haunt the gaming dives – grifters, gamblers, sharks and jives, pimps, pushers,
And other denizens of the night. Amidst the jamming from the rave upstairs, the clapping hands and stamping feet, I hear the rustle of money changing hands around the room, like the flurry of wind in a crypt, or the flutter of ghosts in the dark.
“Ever make the wrong move,” I hear Johnny sing upstairs, “in the wrong town, cross the wrong path at the wrong time, play the wrong game with the wrong crowd?”
There’s a nightclub in a cellar (in my dream) small, dark, empty. A ghost woman in a gossamer gown sits at a piano under a spotlight. She sings:
“Man in the
moon,
Lord of the
night,
Talk to the
whispering
Winds in
their flight.
Man in the
moon,
Tell them
to sigh.
I have a
new love.”
The singer’s eyes are like holy mysteries. Her pale skin is so perfect, it seems painted on.
Her voice is like something you’d hear in heaven, and I’m wondering if she sings her love song to everyone lying on a slab in the county morgue?
“Easy does it.”
I try to sit up but a big hand pushes me down. I’m lying on the asphalt looking at the moon. A PD flasher is circling the alley. My head is throbbing. I feel it oozing blood. A rangy lawman crouches over me, holding a gun. He is pointing it down the street and whispering “ka boom, ka boom.” He smiles faintly and then his edgy features cloud.
“Someday, I’ll clean up this town.” He looks down at me and frowns. He has coal black eyes and a prizefighter’s face, wild dark hair with lightening sideburns. “Saw them jump you from down the block.” He pushes up the brim of his cowboy hat with the barrel of his gun. “Three. They went at you pretty good with saps, digging in your pockets. They scatted when they heard my siren. Should of shot the shitheads.” He looks down the street again. “Let’s see if you can stand.”
The long arm of the law. I grip onto it and struggle to my feet. My head is reeling and my legs feel numb. The lanky lawman towers over me, looking me up and down.
“Better red than dead, I
reckon.” He
pokes his fingers through my hair. “I’ll
run you over to General.” He
holsters his gun.
“That’s in the next town. We can
fill out an official
“On the run son?” The
sheriff lights a cigarette as we drive along
through the black windowed backstreets of the
small tank town, takes a long drag off it and
tosses me the pack. “Car
break down?”
I close my eyes as his Zippo flares in my
face. “Seeing
the
Buildings blur past, crumbling brick boxes, ramshackle houses folding in upon themselves, shanties, shacks, all smothered by tangled trees and dense foliage, and then a dark rush of nothingness, as the highway comes at us, its white line unraveling in my foggy head like a silk snake from the sleeve of an illusionist.
“My wallet.” I fumble at my back pocket, try to shake away the cobwebs from my shadowy consciousness. “They got it.” My head pounds and my back aches. A couple of my ribs feel cracked. I press around my stomach, feel under the belt, take a drag off the cigarette, manage not to choke on it and settle back in the seat.
“No ID.” The sheriff says flatly and scribbles on his sheet. “Vagrancy?” He muses. He blows a perfect smoke ring at the windshield. It floats like a ghost’s mouth over the steering wheel and dash, vanishes when it hits the glass. “Just kiddin’ bud. Give me a name, where you’re from, where you’re going, what happened.”
Paylor, Bubba, Ruby, the raid
– there can’t be any kind of A.P.B out on me. That
would be crazy.
No one in Madden even knew my real name,
or anything about me, not even Ruby. All
they knew was that
“Corbett.” I stub out my cigarette in the ashtray, slide the pack back over to him. “Jim.”
My fingers feel like an assemblage of wooden clothes pins. I must have really nailed someone. I fold them, stretch them, gingerly touch my swollen face.
Four flat tires seem to occur simultaneously as the squad bucks, bounces, bobs along the highway and I look out the windshield to see a migration of snakes slithering across the asphalt under the squad’s headlights trying to shimmy like crazy to the other side.
“Snakes in a lane.” The sheriff smiles as we roll across the road kill. “Down the road of no return.” He picks up the cigarette pack with his forefinger and thumb, studies it and puts it in the glove compartment.
I feel woozy. Like I woke up in the Twilight Zone.
“Gentleman Jim Corbett.” The sheriff glances at me. His coal black eyes ignite. “heavy weight champ of the world in 1890? 1910? Sure it ain’t John L. Sullivan?” He laughs softly to himself, stubs out his cigarette and picks up the pen. “Go on.”
A sign flashes by for SPECTER, five mile down the road. The sheriff looks at me and clicks his pen.
“I’m just passing through.” I try
to keep my voice steady, but I still feel dizzy
and the psycho sheriff is driving me crazy. “I’m
traveling to
“So what are you doing here?” he fixes me a look. “A snappy stud like you, out in the middle of nowhere, get bored with the Riviera?”
“I stopped to visit a
friend.” I
feel the pain settling behind my eyes that I get
when I have to make up alibis. I’m
not fast at it.
“McDonald,
“Old guy owns the farm? Na, he’s still around, Eee I o in and Yo in.”
The sheriff chortles as he scribbles something down and then reaches for the intercom.
“Cole to
“Go Cole.”
“Drivin’ a drifter to General. Corbett James. No ID. Twenty something. Caucasian. Stocky. Ugly. Got banged up by the boys. Bar fight. Back in a jiffy.”
“Copy Cole. Hey bring me some Crispy Creams!”
“’Where I come from nobody knows.’” The sheriff whispers and winks at me. He reattaches the hand radio, pus away the pen, pulls over to the side of the highway and parks by the tangled trees. “’Where I’m going everyone goes’ Got that from an old flick.” He reaches in the visor and pulls out another cigarette, lights it. “Here’s the rest – best I see it. You won a bundle at the Haystack shootin’ pool. Must have been a bundle or the boys would have let it go. You saw the writin’ on the wall and snuck out the bathroom window. Shoved the money down your crotch. Give it to me.” The sheriff sticks out his hand, blows a smoke ring in my face.
The radio squawks unanswered calls. Snakes slither across the lonely highway, as give it to the small town sheriff, over and over again, with the dropped sap I picked up in the alley.
NOW I LAY ME
Dreams float without soul, each night a new death.
Each day a postmortem on dreams abandoned.
“Do you think we’re going to make it through this?”
My wife asks.
“Sure, we can raise some cash.”
If we can sell all our trash – furniture, bungalow, used
car, nick knacks, clothes. Factor in my unemployment
checks for as long as they last. Add whatever handyman
gigs I can put into that. Government food stamps?
“I’m afraid.”
“No need to be. We’ll be OK. Take care of our needs –
housing, heat, food for the kids.”
I stare at the darkened ceiling of our bedroom.
Fire sale!
Fire sale!
Flames leap. The
night stands ignite.
The bed
burns, dressers, tables, chairs, drapes, the
whole
bungalow
swirling in flames, boy scout, girl scout,
little
league
pictures erased as plumes sweep each the room.
“Try to get some sleep.”
PAPER MOON
The world dropped into night
as I flew my kite up and down
the school’s playground.
Lightening flared, thunder rumbled,
but I held on tight, spellbound as it
danced, fluttered with the black winds
in the stormy sky, until the rains came
and it tumbled.
BORN TO LOSE
Like a death rattle of wind chimes
playing the desperate cry’s of hard
times, through dark, despairing notes
across the shivering rhythms of their
hearts and souls, the lost generation
wanders the recession, searching for
salvation from life’s regression, hoping
too little, too late won’t come from
whatever can change their fate.
It’s the music sensation that’s sweeping
the nation – the beat of a dream’s retreat.
You can hear it in
City, in
down in
country
DREAMLAND
Hard wind, everything tossing, chains snapping, cars rocking, Tanner shut down the Hell Bound, looked around: Dreamland a delirium of flying coffins. “Fucking Jim.” Tanner searched the labyrinths. “Fucking Jim.”
The
dream lanes were jammed – the
usual midsummer night’s bedlam: trailer park
vamps in their short shorts, beehive bouffants,
more makeup on their doe-eyed faces than on a circus
clown’s (each of them promising their own wild
ride for a box of popcorn and some cotton
candy on the side), the townie gangs looking for
different thrills than the amusement park could
provide with its danger rides, the working class
couples and their kids from the prefab housing
developments around the industrial districts,
the ethnics from the city’s edge, as awed as if
they found Shangri la or
Tanner
shouldered through the mayhem, everyone around
him enjoying the big wind as if it were an added
attraction, laughing, screaming with glee as
they clung to one another and ducked the flying
debris, arcade tents
Rides awry, storm clouds chased across the sky. “Man, you better get moving.”
“Shut it down!”
Tanner shouted at the gangly kid operating the Flying Squadron.
“Where’s Jim?”
Wild-eyed, the skinny kid gaped at him.
“Shut it down. You’ll kill someone!”
The mock planes were rocking, dipping as they whirled on their lines, veering with the gusts into the branches of the giant trees, which were everywhere, and made the “amusement park a park” according to the old man who refused to cut them down, despite the numerous warnings and frequent safety citations, which he bribed his way out of and were seasonally forgotten.
“Chain them!” Tanner hollered. “Chain them when you’re done!”
The kid stared at him, blankly.
“They got anchor hooks on the bottom!”
“Because of the wind,” Tanner brooded, “the wind …”
They were in for a big one. “The big blow from Kooky mo.” as Jim called it, the winds sweeping across the plains along tornado lane, which gave the windy city down the highway its stormy nickname. Jim, Stacey, the old man should have seen it coming (like on TV?) and done something.
“Move!” Tanner shouted and the kid almost jumped out of his skin. “Now!” Hope you don’t end up in my platoon, simpleton.” Tanner brooded, as his thoughts flashed back to the day he had gotten himself into this mess.
“This
summer you’re a danger runner.” Jim
had handed him a beer and informed him when they
opened for the season. “If you
want. Tagart’s
off to
Jim waved his can of beer.
“Then help with the rest. Twister anywhere around, we close the park down – or anything near as fierce. You know how these summer storms get around here: monsoon rain, lightning and thunder, bar the door and duck for cover. Buck and Whitey round out the crew. But I’m counting on you. I assume you know the pay raise for your upgrade in responsibility and authority: zero. That’s the old man for you, thinks I can be everywhere. In other words you’re a volunteer. It’ll ruin your summer; so if it’s a no can do I ain’t blamin’ you.”
“Zero and a beer.”
Tanner had lifted his can in the air.
“I knew I
had me a sucker here. Bet
Uncle Sam’s got one too. Suppose
you’ll be joining like Tagart now that you’re
through with school?”
“I been
talkin’ to the recruiter.” Tanner
had stiffened.
“But
I’ll finish the season. That’s no problem.”
“Young men
and heroism.” Jim had shaken his head. “When will
it ever end?”
“You
joined for
“You don’t
win nothin’ in war son. You
only lose.
War changes you. Besides,
they were
draftin’
then. They
would have got me in the end.”
“There ain’t no jobs, Jim. That’s kind of like draftin’. I don’t see any end to this recession.” ( And I ain’t going to get anywhere working here. That’s for sure!) Tanner had added to himself as he downed his beer.
The Hell Bound, the Flying Squadron, the Spinning Jenny and the Ferris Wheel, the Parachute, the Merry-go-Round – six rides where a strong wind could hurt someone. Whitey had quit; Buck didn’t show up for work. Without Jim he was on his own. There was no way Tanner could close the danger rides alone. They were too spread out and with this wind anything could happen in a split second. Two down, four to go. “You got to move fast.” Jim had warned him. “The crowds are the hang up. Knock someone down if you have to. They’ll be OK. Better than havin’ some guy take a high dive from the Parachute or Ferris Wheel.”
Rides of every kind spinning before his eyes, criss-crossing, cascading, dropping, climbing, intertwining – Scrambler, Roller Coaster, Tilt-a-Whirl – fifty altogether, making him dizzy as he pushed through the mobs, all scattered amidst a forest and connected by a maze of lanes that would drive a laboratory rat insane. Tanner could hardly remember, on any given day, exactly where the rides were, or anything for that matter. The maze went every which way.
You
could get lost in the Dream Lanes. Plus, they
were as mad as a Mardi Gras in
“The old
man designed the park hisself.” Jim
had informed him when he first hired on three
summers ago during his first high school break
and Jim showed him around. “Can’t ya
tell?” That
made instant sense and explained a lot. His
first impression of the old man, when he shook
his hand, was that the amusement park owner was
as mad as a Hatter. He
certainly cut a fine, distinguished figure with
his snow-white, designer cut hair and clothes
you only saw inmovies about millionaires. But
his sky-blue eyes looked hypnotized, as though
they were looking, not at Tanner, but through
him and beyond him and Tanner was just something
in the way, which confused and amused him, while
something way deep in the back of his mind was
what consumed him. “He
designed some of the rides, too.” Hands in
the pockets of his faded jeans, head bowed,
massive shoulders rounded, staring at the
ground, Jim had given him the lowdown, as
they strolled around, drawing him in with his
drawl and creating a bond between them, man to
man, which was probably something he learned how
to do in
That
wasn’t true from what Tanner knew. The
old man couldn’t have gotten the park off the
ground without Jim around. They
were wild times back then, thirty-five years
ago. The
area was unincorporated. You
had to depend on the state police to keep the
peace. They
were few and far between. Jim
was the enforcer.
Tanner knew all about Jim from his
father. “You
workin’ where?
Can’t you get a job as a stock boy or
grocery clerk? That’s a lowdown, lowlife
carnie world and the guy you’ll be workin’ for
is a
psycho killer.
Yeah he was a hero in
“Shut it down!” Tanner yelled at the kid running the Merry-go-Round. The painted ponies were the ultimate danger ride in this wind, at least for toddlers. It could knock them down and break their little crowns and you might not be able to put them back together again. “Get the kids off! Close the ride! But start it up circling again or the top will blow off!”
“What?”
“Run it with no one on it!”
“I don’t get it?”
“Just do it!”
Thunder
rocked the reeling rides. Lightning
streaked across the blackened sky. The
gusts of wind brought bursts of rain. “Three
more!” Tanner
brooded,
clothes
Dreamland
was a dream.
Girls were everywhere all summer. Pretty,
tanned teasers looking for fun and Tanner was
more than willing to oblige them. This
was the place to have it. It was
in the air like magic. Dream
and reality all mixed up, chills and thrills. He had
his share of rides through the Tunnel of Love. He had
his wild nights, with drinking and gambling and
carrying on.
But that was on his own time. He
wasn’t fooling around with bimbos on the job.
Tanner was sick and tired of covering for Jim. “I think I
got me a sucker here.” He
sure did. All
his “volunteers” were. War
hero or not, there was a limit. Right
now, he
If it wasn’t for Beth, the old man, his volunteers, Jim would probably be a hobo panhandling for cheap wine and change, if his brawling didn’t land him in prison. After a couple of years in the military Tanner would muscle up. He imagined himself with big biceps. He would come back and knock Jim’s block off, just for the hell of it.
“Shut it down!”
Tanner cupped his hands and hollered at the kid running the Spinning Jenny. Mouths open, eyes wide, laughing, screaming, waving their arms as they flew in all directions, inside out and upside down, the spinners were having the time of their lives, as the wind and rain lashed at them and they whirled around, maybe in some imaginary Katrina or other catastrophic dilemma from which they soon would be rescued safe and sound.
“’Bout time!”
The kid shook his head and hollered back. He was wearing a big popcorn carton on his head as a rain helmet.
“Where’s Jim?”
The old man was, suddenly, standing beside him, dressed in a fancy rain slicker with a matching hat – an outfit that must have cost about as much as a Cadillac.
“In the back, last I saw him.” Tanner lied. “Some trouble in the arcade. I think a fight.”
“I can’t contact him.” The old man stared at his hand radio, which was sputtering and hissing. “All I get is static. We’re closing. If you see him tell him. Tornado warnings for almost every town, village and hamlet. Mute point at this point.” The old man looked around.
“Everybody’s leaving anyway.”
The
crowds had finally given up on Dreamland for the
day and were taking off in droves as the rain
came pounding down the
“I’ll tell him.” Tanner looked up over the trees at the Ferris Wheel, which was still circling around with riders, the cars rocking with the gusts of wind. “Soon as I shut down the Parachute and the Ferris Wheel.”
“
“Fucking Jim!” Tanner cursed to himself as he stalked through the fleeing mobs. He knew where to find him; that was no problem. Jim’s beat up van would be parked, as usual, somewhere in the ring of trees which surrounded the old man’s mansion. So what was his detail? Help Jim? “Hey Jim, move over man. The old man sent me. It’s my turn.”
“We’re shutting down!” Tanner pounded on the counters of the barker booths as he went along. “Twister’s coming. Hide the leaded ducks, the blunt darts and crooked target rifles! Batten down the hatches! Evacuate before it’s too late and tell Jim if you see him!”
“Slow down soldier.”
A grip like iron grabbed him – Jim. “Don’t spook the crowds son. They’re spooky enough without you announcing cyclones.”
A popcorn bucket pulled over his head, sporting his usual shit kickers grin, Jim hovered over him. “So the old man’s shutting everything down, even the underground eateries and the Tunnel of Love? Must be a bad one.”
“Jim. Where you been?”
Tanner gave him the evil eye, his face grim.
“Puttin’ a pony down.” Jim shook his head, his expression forlorn. “That new Shetland went wild, threw a kid, buckin’ and kickin’. When the runner tried to grab him, he bit him. I chased him off, gave the kid first aid. The kid’s OK, just bumps and bruises, scared. We may have a lawsuit on the way. They can’t hit the old man for any kind of real money; but the park don’t need the bad publicity. It’ll probably all get settled in a friendly way, a key to Dreamland, free everything for the rest of the season. I had to call the sheriff, the vet, make a report. Sure did hate putting that pony down. You know how they are, cute as buttons, like little toys. But you can’t take chances. He was kicking up a storm, damned near broke my arm.” Jim held up his hand and Tanner noticed his arm was wrapped in a sling. “Maybe he was half crazy anyway and the big blow riled him? We’ll have to see what the vet says. Hope he wasn’t carrying anything contagious.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Tanner swallowed hard and felt ashamed.
“All in the day.” Jim shrugged and his smile returned. “You got it done, son. I been lookin’ around. All the danger rides down. Good job. If you want to stay on the clock, make some extra pay, I got some soft duty to throw your way. I need me a big blow emergency merry-go-round babysitter trainer. Somers is the trainee. Good kid. He’s always looking for extra work. Says he needs the money for college. He’s there now. Dogs in a steamer and cold brew waitin’ for you. A bag of clothes in the office you can change into. Clean jeans, sweatshirts, rain slickers. Pants a little big but you can hitch them up. Be good enough. I’d get him started, myself, but after I close down I got to get back to the stable. Vet’s still there. We got to figure out what happened and I still got to bury that pony somewhere. When I’m done I’ll drop around.”
“No problem.” Tanner found himself mumbling. He couldn’t face Jim. Not the way he damned and cursed him. He knew how hard killing that pony had been for him. Jim loved those little horses, for some reason. His face lit up every time he looked at them. He was always petting and patting them, giving them sugar cubes, drawling Southern nothings in their twitching ears. “Somers is a cool dude. I’ll help him get going.”
“You’d be helpin’ me too, as usual. Stay as long as you want. All night if you’ve got nothing to do. The old man will grumble some at having to fork out the extra funds. But training must be done, and if anyone can do it he knows it’s you. The old man has noticed you. He ain’t no fool.”
“Fucking
Jim.” Tanner
brooded
as he cut across the crowds toward the offices. “He always
wins.”
He felt guilty and angry at the same time
because it could just as well have been the
other way with Jim having himself another roll
in the hay.
Still, it put some pep in his step, Jim’s
compliments on how well he’d done and the old
man knowing who he was.
“Mary, Mary, quite count weary.”
In the cinder brick fortress, which looked more like a military installation than an amusement park office, Mary, the old man’s daughter, was seated at her desk recording stacks and piles of money down to the penny.
“Tanner, Tanner, mind your manner.”
She frowned as she counted. The take had been bad, the day’s receipts way off. The old man would hit the roof.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
She waved him off.
He found the bag of dry clothes and changed in the washroom. It felt good. He donned the yellow raincoat, pulled up the hood and went out into the monsoon.
“Somers!”
The rider-less carousel was circling around in the blackened downpour, lights blazing, calliope music playing, painted horses bobbing up and down.
“Under here!” Somers poked his yellow-hooded head out from the hatch beneath the floorboards. “Studying the gears. Trying to figure out how you shut that damned music off before it drives me nuts!”
“I’ll show you how it all works.” Tanner crouched down in the whipping winds. “Keep the music on ‘til the crowds are gone. You may want to keep it on all night; gets spooky looking at those charging horses going round and round without a sound. Besides, it helps you stay awake. Keep the lights on. Jim keeps a watch from his shack. If he don’t see them, he’ll think something’s happened. There’s a tarp under there, a pole and some folding chairs. Bring ‘em out and I’ll show you how we make a tent. I’m gonna slow it down a bit.” Tanner pulled the lever. “Got it going a little too fast.”
“Bombs away!”
Somers tossed out the pole. Tanner slid it over and plunged it down a deep small hole.
The tarp came next. There was an iron ring wrapped up in it. Tanner fixed the ring on the top of the pole and threw the tarp over it. There were hooks in the ground to which he attached loops
t the ends making a little poncho like tent.
“Looks like a teepee.” Somers scrambled out of the hatch carrying the folding chairs.
“More like a headless Mexican bandit to me. Here’s the opening. Jim put it together for the merry-go-round babysitter when the park opened. Said he found out about the top blowing off the hard way. The old man told him, with these winds, he should have anticipated that. Jim says he thought the old man was the expert in aerodynamics.”
“The ride’s that old?”
“Don’t look it, does it? But it’s the original. Those painted ponies were created by Eastern European craftsmen. Jim says each one should be in a museum.”
“I guess they are something, now that I look at them.”
Somers
watched the carousel horses circle before him,
nostrils
“Let’s
get in!” Tanner
held open the
“Fucking
Jim.” He
brooded as he sat down next to Somers and dug
in. “You can’t
stay mad at him.” “When
and if the blow stops you can go home. Jim
will let you know.
I had to stay all night once. Almost
drove me nuts.
There’s nothing to worry about. The
ride will keep going. If
anything weird happens, if anything starts to
fall apart or starts blowing off, contact Jim. He
gave you a hand radio? OK. But if
that don’t work, if there’s too much static,
turn off the lights. Jim
will be here in a
Tanner liked Somers. They had been in classes together. Somers was smart, cool. They should have hung around with each other more through school.
“Hear you’re joining?”
Somers popped his beer.
They ate and watched the carousel, listening to the thunder rumble and the winds wail.
“Looks that way.” Tanner shrugged. “Got to get through this recession. After, I’ll go to college on the G.I. Bill. Hear you’re startin’ now?”
“I’m going to give it a shot.” Somers frowned as he chewed his hot dog. “Since I have some kind of job. Seasonal, menial, but maybe I can pick up another something for the winter. I’ll have to live at home for four years, go to a state school. I applied for a ‘needs’ scholarship but I doubt if I’ll get it. My parents can’t help me with anything more than room and board. It’s going to be hard, maybe impossible. But I can’t complain. Most people I know are just trying to survive these days. Keep a roof over their heads, feed their kids.”
“Stars twinkle above.
The calliope music blared amidst the raging storm.
“It’s the loveliest night of the year.”
“When I was a child, I rode a painted pony on a carousel surrounded by my family, who waved at me, merrily, as I whirled toward my happy destiny, dreamily.”
“What’s that?”
Somers laughed.
“Nothin’. Just made it up. I’m hoping to be a writer in the future. The teachers always told me I had a knack.”
“It’s all dreamland ain’t it,” Somers sighed and sipped his beer, “life?”
“Yeah, ‘til you get on a real danger ride.”
“What’s that?” The little tent was fluttering, rattling on its pole.
“What?”
“Somethin’.” Somers parted the canvas, peeked outside. “It’s Jim.”
They crawled out and steadied each other, as the wind and rain whipped at them. Jim stood swaying on the merry-go-round. His battered van was parked beside it, engine idling.
He was strapping the dead Shetland pony to a carousel horse, tying the two together so they rode, side by side, bobbing up and down with each other, as the ride went round and round. He
guzzled from a whisky bottle as he worked.
“What you doin’ Jim?”
Tanner scrambled up the platform. Somers chased up after him.
“You boys can go home.” Jim was blind drunk, his expression grim. He lashed the horses heads together, took another swallow from his bottle and glared at them. “Weren’t nothin’ wrong with the pony, vet said.” His eyes looked dead. “Scared is all. Scared little pony. No need to kill him.” He staggered across the platform and moved the lever. The ride went faster. “Ole man wouldn’t a kept him no ways. Useless little pony. Too scared. Would of sold him to a glue factory.” He downed the rest of his bottle. Pushed the lever further. Tanner and Somers had to hold onto each other. “Tired of killing.” Jim muttered. “You boys git.”
The ride was reeling, the tent top flapping and fluttering. Tanner and Somers jumped off,just as Jim shut the ride down and the top went flying like some great ghost into the storm.
ANOTHER DAY
Why?
I am. Do I need another reason …
does anyone … God, the Big Bang,
Revelation, Evolution?
The steps go up.
The steps go down.
The spiral staircase
goes round and round …
Wait.
Linger for a moment.
Listen to the wails of sorrow,
the laughter of children.
Imagine the journey of life
from birth to death – joy,
love, heartbreak, despair, passion,
disillusionment, longing, languor,
trial, tribulation, triumph, celebration,
loss, grief, loneliness, resignation,
regeneration, renewal, jubilation,
expectation.
Quiet thoughts, blue skies, dream …
THE TRAVELER
In and out of places
where no road leads.
You imagine you are living,
and you are in a world apart,
writing words that no one cares
to read and couldn’t comprehend,
about the places you have been.
REVELATION
Confined in my cloud prison,
I watch a rainbow arch across
the heavens.
Dreams shimmer through fate’s prism
I crawl through life’s crystal ball.
NIGHT LIGHT
Dreams flicker
in the cosmic darkness —
our ray of hope in chaos.
CALL IT SLEEP
A dream of light
behind the mystery of night –
I was too young to understand.
But now, it seems,
the dark beyond the dream,
was life.
BOTTOM’S UP
This last round is for
the invisible lives in
the slums, ghettos,
grottos, hollows,
who pray themselves
to sleep each night,
hoping their children
can have a better life.
__________________