I could see how you, little girl, could be lured down a scraggly mud path down to a creekbed, under the cover of big redwood trees.Could be led this way by a boyfriend, perhaps. An ally. Told you could leave your purse hanging on one of the low branches. There were patches of ferns, a heavy wet grass, other soft round leaves. Petals. The ground was soaked and swollen with water but red dust hung in the air, settling and solidifying into a black paste. There was rot everywhere. Later, the scene circumscribed with hyper-yellow crime tape. Crime scene/
off scene
. The area of rot may have masked itself off from the rest of the world but not from watchful eyes and perceptive minds seething like a smokestack so many miles away. I blew out a candle at night. Waxy soot eked into my lungs as the cover of darkness allowed me to flow freely to thoughts of fabric hanging over the windows of the trailer in the woods: tweed, plaid, pink and brown. Concentrating on curtains covered in black mold hanging in a trailer somewhere in the sticks, on a flat parcel of soaked straw and burlap… There were whole days of it. Coughing against a backdrop of burning gas. A sky that burned as orange as an intestine. Living within grappling distance of the world’s biggest
loozers
, beating them as they winked at me. The surveillance video showed them scraping some girl off the pavement, somewhere halfway around the world. Militiamen do a dance with shovels. It looks like the whole place would smell like plastic vomit. They stuff the girl in the back seat of a car and drive away. The news footage dramatically fades to red and the anchor makes some kind of joke about murder being “radical” again. I think the word he used was actually “rad.” “If anyone hasn’t guessed yet, there’s a fucking war going on.” The membrane closes around the cat’s eyes, white shutters oozing across… my mouth shuts around the big black and white cross hanging from my neck. Sucking on that big plastic cross makes me happy. My canine teeth grow longer and soon I can’t exactly close my mouth the same, but y’know I became a killing and eating machine, adept at stuffing and slurping. I like my new teeth, don’t you?
I came to throwing up in a trashcan, the container sizzled and cracked in half. The man was gone, but I don’t think he bailed, just went to get some cigarettes and grapefruit juice. I lay back down like I was in my fuckin coffin and stayed there for a long time. Eventually I caught a bus out of town and spent a lot of time walking around various townships, whatever narrow strip of land surrounded the bus station, walked until I fell to my knees and vomited in a creekbed. Stretched out, bloated, breathing shallow breaths under the exposed roots of a massive redwood on a muddy bluff. Passed out on the hood of a blue Honda in the rain, waking up with someone else’s greasy sock balled up in my hand… making soup out of pond water and lily pads… drinking a big cup of non-dairy creamer at 7-Eleven in the hot afternoon… picking up a duck in a park and walking around with it under my arm all afternoon. I also picked up rich dudes with blond hair, some careless jerks, one teen crush I sodomized, and made millions of letters to you in my mind — this is the sound of my soul writing this one to you, okay?
Listen
. It’s spelled out between the breaths of all the kids that sleep on the street, waiting for you to pass by. All the tramps who taunt you, sluts in your city, slimy teens squatting around town with their tiny bodies bundled up all year round, urchin mystics with the rare ability to see ghosts out of the corner of their eyes. All the heshers, thrashers, stoners, gakkers, skaters, graff toys, rockabilly greasers, Dharma Punx, reptile tweakers — will they ever really
get
to you before they themselves are absorbed into the pavement, or swept up into the sky? Our kind is doomed… It’s just that your lifestyle doesn’t include me — it just so happens that
none of this applies to me
. My traumas are individual and specific and private… I was angry that there was a guy going around killing prostitutes and girls who lived on the street — some who had run away, others who had bad homes. But where was the distinction anymore? A slut is a slut is a slut. You can be whatever it is you say you are. If you’re only 14 or 15 none of it applies to you anyway. No moral person would ever hold you to any of it. It was simply “girl” then. The older man took a girl out into the woods, or behind a building and put his hands around her neck. Then threw her away like a bag of garbage. No one nobody should ever call her those things. None of it sticks. None of it sits right… The girl lay sleeping like a painted statue on her side. Pulsing invisible air out of her nose. Flows coming in, flows coming out. All day horror and gore. Serious thoughts were whispered over dusty airwaves. Vibrations received in time to change the outcome of events… I came to be known as the one who could do without suffering, one who was already dead and couldn’t stand the thought of lying down long enough to be covered with dirt. Walking in the forest at night, feeling in front of me for the way out, I could smell an animal presence rendered as plain as an image in front of my face, a black sheet hanging in a smell like wet bear fur. I trudged on even though I froze inside and it was just as suddenly gone. I guess I had moved through it. Walking; walking all night on the roadkill tour of Oregon. Flattened hawks every few miles on the freeway. How do you run over a bird of prey? The more I walked the more it seemed that some of the carcasses could not be identified as any particular animal. Just pulpy bundles of feathers. Two flattened scraps of tire tread lay side by side like blackened hides on the freeway. Elsewhere, with gassy lights burning in the distance my mind jogs to place the animal carcass before me. What is it? A cat? A rat? What do I most want it to be?… I wandered into a 7-Eleven for no reason in particular. People yelled at me and looked the other way. I moved things off the shelves and into corners of the room where fluid had collected. I used loaves of bread and boxes of brand-name cereal snack mix to stem the flows seeping in from every corner. The cereal turned black. In a parking lot I once found a photo of a strange-looking girl dated from the first decade of the 20th century. It amused me at the time. But today when I was rifling through a bunch of my pamphlets I found the photograph again and it freaked me out with a sidelong glance of pure evil and I had to shut it away fast. This youngish woman, a hunchback lady with no neck and a lopsided patch of wiry hair, sits backward on a chair gripping the backrest with pained delight: 1916. She wears the checked pinafore of a girl but she… is… no… human!
We strapped on as many supplies as possible. We were going climbing over the land and no vehicle but our bodies would take us there. Needles were sewn into seams, razor blades and ammo were taped along the insides of our arms. Emergency rations concealed in vials all up our legs, hidden compartments in the heels of our boots were filled with gel caps; our bodies were accustomed to weathering the challenges of the journey. All around us shewolves licked at their wounds. Purple leaves heaved to the ground, growing heavy with rain. I came upon an unlocked car under a burnt out old tree trunk and climbed inside, becoming evermore blind as the glass fogged around me. Losing it is the only way to saveme. I sank deeper; blood leached out into the pebbles below, bringing them back to life. The vinyl seats had cracked in telling patterns revealing dusty tan sponge forms underneath; the surface had recorded every shed cell the forest had ever exhaled. Dust settled in layers over me too, making me part of the oppressive scheme I’d tried lamely to resist. I became historical too, I guess, just another rock. Lying there I began playing back the topography of every little room I had ever occupied. My fingerprints glowed white all over the surfaces in each and I could see the little white dots slowly moving the objects themselves. Radiation burned my image onto the wall. Dust froze my contour onto the sheets, the coddling swath my tar pit trap. Tar caught in my mouth. My shadow on the wall traced cells rubbing off every contour of my enclosure. I seemed to have lived here forever. But this radiation image was the only record that I had ever lived, a cumulative residue over mottled drywall: invisible, unshakable, and distant. It had taken years, but after the rains swept through, water seeping between the interior and exterior walls had settled onto the surface. Moisture gathered in the charged area to the point where black mold took my form on the surface.
Kim always had a ponytail and wore black pants. She had me before any other boy or man ever did. She threw my precious gift into the air and watched it fall down. This is a few years ago — when we were young. Kim got sick of our stepdad and the way he touched her all the time: rubbing her shoulders, squeezing her knee, staring intently her way with his voice soft and cooing. Me he left alone. I went whole days without seeing him. After Kim left he wasn’t really in the picture. I was busy hatching plans that went outside the scope of “mom,” “dad,” and our house. House Mom’s projects took up a lot of the mental energy around the place anyway. She started making me clothes, but I didn’t wear them. Except the aprons. “Gracias, dude,” I said as I snatched one on my way out. It wasn’t long before I moved away and later I heard something bad happened to my sister; she was riding trains with a bunch of rowdy gutter types, turning tricks in bus station restrooms, when she disappeared for several months. It’s easy to disappear when you live in and out of public places — you’re invisible anyway — but she was just
gone
-gone. Not even any train people had seen her, and I know some of them, they see everything that goes on in their fucked up community. But they didn’t see her. I had some idea that something really bad happened to her. Maybe she ended up in a creekbed in the forest, or behind a Spokane Safeway. Those were my two persistent visions. The facts on these are iffy; I had just keyed into what was already present in my scary Robitussin fantasies. When I’d crash out I’d sleep fake sleep and get weird ideas, in a sort of low blood sugar coma. When I get ESP I can see things happening from far away, I can see things that are about to happen. I kept seeing a creekbed. I kept seeing the back of a Spokane Safeway. I didn’t see any
body
, but I felt bad about the whole thing, like my own self was being pressed into something I didn’t recognize. Up against a mossy wall, steel chilling my back. Grim ideas. When I started riding rails myself that fall, getting paid for blowing jerks in bus stations across the Northwest, I thought the touch of many men would be disorienting. But it was just so obvious. And I fell asleep under it every night — when I started dreaming incessantly of
you
THERE WAS THE HIBERNATION OPTION. ANTICONSUMERIST, neo-Stalin types had recently devised a hibernation stance as the best strategy for sticking it to God and man alike. Going to sleep for the winter would not only fuck with the local economy but also derail the food conspiracy. A secret combination of over-the-counter flu medications and wild native herbs was developed to send the “Brown Bear” into a blissful state of anti-consciousness for anywhere from three weeks to two months. During this time other “Raccoons” would be on hand to turn and tend to the slumbering BBs, basting them in disinfectant every five days and adjusting the canvas swaddling as the swelling came and went. Whole networks of abandoned office trailers and rural outbuildings were converted into hibernation storage facilities, including the long-standing, notorious “Motel Hell” in Truckee at the top of a hill overlooking Donner Pass. The compound was guarded by vigilante armies of medicine skaters, armed with crossbows, stationed in bunkers surrounding the hill. The main building housed an indoor spray-paint-crusted swimming pool, and was once a spa complex that had gone to seed long before any of this current nonsense came about.
Some would call you crazy for thinking that you could end the war just by going to sleep, by living self-consciously off the grid. Who would have thought you could turn your back on your town and everything else, turn off the lights, rip the mailbox out of the ground, and hunker down under the sweaty, swollen posture of hibernation? It was an option so few were willing to ever conceive. No food no walking no thoughts of escape. None of it necessary. They were a few of the undead who had decided to stop moving and just sleep it out — not to die for real, but try to live in the lands resting on the other side of their quiet minds. They’d forged their own key out of a visionary narcissism and magically it fit the lock; their lungs sopped up the air that languished and strained at tight dozing skin. So many other solutions had been attempted and yet they had failed. No one ever got it right. The dream was over, so they retreated from the highways and streets of their regions, rooted around in the scrap heap for shavings and supplies and fell into a deep winter sleep that has lasted these many, many months.
Yet here I am, looking for animal signs, traces in the forest, in the city. Little bodies un-buried, un-earthed, in that vague place between two worlds… Traveling toward 3 a.m. Chevron restroom. Little birds crusted with dirt sitting on the ledge, too heavy to fly. The building was buried halfway up to the window. I looked outside with two dry corneas taped to my face, woozy, gradually sinking into an awareness like blood that has been replaced, drained, and replaced with a different fluid that preserves life forever while at the same time it prolongs dying to a punishing slow, eternal pace. Are there other physical signs as well? Marks made on the inside? It is an ongoing process, becoming resolved to this fate when the boxcar bed, forest burrow, and abandoned car are the most enticing places to be filled with longing for a low sleep… Surfacing up into the bright light of 7-Eleven. A little dawn slashed through the membrane of eyelids stinging with the aroma of stale sweets, but brought no actual day. Surfacing up through layers of thick air into more and more daylight, reaching a moment of clarity at the end of yet another rope. There were lots of lost whispered things around. Lots of deaths. Clumps of raw cat meat rested on countertops… On stage at some rock club a fat Nazi motherfucker squawks “I’m gonna rape you” over and over as all the hobos at the bar pump their fists and look at me with their white shiny eyes… “gonna rape you rape you rape you rape you.” He huffs ahkkshhit fukkkin
you goddamn gerls
around on stage before diving into a handful of sticky tables surrounded mostly by drunk people barfing all over each other. He dives in and immediately starts yanking down on any flesh he finds in there. Making out with men and girls alike before guys with mallets descend on him. He screams and barfs at the same time. The stage is cleared and sawdust is sprinkled liberally to catch the dampness that has receded into the corners during the set. It solidified into tan crusty rocks and ants started moving all their belongings into the crevices. I watched in disbelief from a remote perch high in the rafter beams. I gagged a little. That came from a pure place. At the end of the night the only remaining people in the bar stood ankle deep in underwear that was scattered all over the floor. They waded around in it, looking for change and their keys. White patches caught drips, made a nice bedding material for fallen beer bottles.