The city smelled like a wet paper bag. That great big dirty rag hung up in the sky, casting a shadow over the middle of town. A motel was strangely and inexplicably equipped with a smokestack and it spit streams of pigeon-shit colored smoke up into the sky. Inside the reception area had remained basically untouched for 35 years. Other than a mess of coffee mug rings aging the coffee table like rings on a tree, the place was a crypt unmassaged by time. There was a lady at the desk and several fans set blowing against each other in the corner of the office behind her. I could smell her teeth from across the lobby. She sat at the desk behind a life-sized bust of what appeared to be
herself
rendered in popcorn. This is what happens when local color stays in one place for too long. They begin attracting the attention of the local “craftspeople.” And then the local newspaper comes out and they have to do a human interest story about it, about her and that big famous roll of spun pigeon shit on top of her head. A newspaper article clipped and hung in a frame on the wall next to the bust outlined the general story, for the curious. The lady was an institution. Bustworthy, even. The article itself was 23 years old, making that popcorn way past edible. But who’s counting when it comes to a popcorn bun sitting on top a popcorn lady’s head? Looking more closely around the room I noticed bite marks covered the armchair I was sitting in. I waited for the legitimate motel guests to finish up in the snack room where the morning’s complementary breakfast was still laid out. I stopped the door from closing with my foot and scooped up most of what was left into my mouth: some random pastries, a bagel/donut (couldn’t be sure which). The coffee was
horrible
, just lazy… I drank it anyway. I needed my medicine.
In the middle of the forest little brown birds spat up sticky beads of phlegm on a dark forest trail. I took care to walk around them before settling into a bush at the crest of a cold stream. Wayward girls like me wandered all over town looking for answers. They spent hours on their face in gas station bathrooms, refracted in dark mirrors that shattered on the planes of their clear flesh. Rockabilly girls are the most expressive of all creatures, all eyelashes and twisted red mouths, brows straining to gather up at the center of their foreheads as they muffled a sob and begged to be kissed while the band played behind them. He didn’t hear it… Just sitting next to the bag of bones I could feel the power of them all rattling in my chest. They clicked together in subtle tones and squeaked and clacked incessantly as my eyes bulged out of my head.
“What’s wrong with me?” they asked over and over again.
Twisted songs from gigs, all those basement war dances, filtered back to me. All the haunted, huddled forms reclining and pumping fists and they turned around and they had skulls for faces, wrapped in broken bits of rope. All the blood that sloshed around inside their heated, bloated bellies, each cell bursting at the seams screaming flying, flung dirt clods reaching the rafters. Sizzling boots scraping fried dirt-clod scraps, burnt flesh smashed into the floor. The floor was so sticky. Madness… shelter-less, frigid… slimy confines trapped up inside a jellied casement huddled screaming. Tearing at our scars. We never stopped dying all those nights ago in the Northwest. Remember how we sang? Remember how we danced? How we fell and lost our lives? Remember those who got cut down, who got left dying on the grass, in the sun? What do you see when you look at one another now —
tell me, little boy, where will you run?
Death is sewing a calico dress next to a fire in the ground. Do you dare approach her, little boy? Do you dare to make her real for you? You walk out in these woods, you wanna see her… You park at the bottom of the old fire road, turn off the lights and wait to see the glint of a needle stitching calico next to a clutch of embers in the dark. You want her — you wait for her to open that door for you. She lives and she breathes… she feels you… she needs you… Are you ready to make it real?
There were many lost boys who went up to The Highway That Eats People, parked their cars around back of the unpaved fire road, settled in and killed the lights. She even showed for a couple of you. Another boy went walking down and down and down a twisted spiral of thorns and pale dirt to a spot in the woods where a group of masked men bent low over a flame to conjure an image of the lady in white rags who once disappeared into the trees. Ran away. They want her back. The boy crouched down behind a big bush but he made a sound and the men fell silent once more and one by one they turned their masks toward him, carefully rose, and crept after him… There is a myth up on The Highway That Eats People that there’s one way in and one way out. There are actually many ways in and many ways out — the trick is to pick the road that leads out and not ever deeper. Which paths lead to the gauzy powder image of the woman — the one with white crepe shadows wrapped around her body and a skull where her face should be? She fills her nights flying low over the woods, the murderers’ cabins, and under the bridge where the bodies were kept (not “found”), flying around and down the spiral path that corkscrewed down down to the center of the woods, until she came to rest and lay in the middle of the highway, splayed across the road like a fallen bough —
There she ceased to exist except as two enormous black holes for eyes.
In her waking life the skin of the woman’s arms was made over in a flower print where calico had burned through. Her legs were stained black. There were big spaces at the bottom of her skirt where her feet used to be and in front of her breasts she hoisted two big bushels of chamomile. Her voice sounded off through the forest as a brown pounding footprint. Air rushed out of her eyes, freezing cold… The wind whipped down an empty road. I approached a house at the end of a raw, partially unearthed rock driveway. Inside the house I found people stored in every crevice, and roped-off stalls in the massive dark wood attic where mattresses traced out a patchwork warren of rooms. All the squatters lived in among these partitions — a mess of ladders, platforms, lofts and sub-lofts — odd corners one had to wedge one’s body up into in order to sleep. The sleep in this house was equally fractured by the intermittent gasps and munchings of others living out their variegated gutter punk fantasy lives in the same open space. There was no walking, no mere
standing
here. Every movement was designed to fit this place, every body was bent in new ways by the weird angles that this giant house demanded. A 17-year-old monk lived under the stairs, painted icons all day and drank raw egg. There was talk of a girl living in the kitchen. She slept in there, in some random space no one really knew because no one had actually ever seen her sleeping. Another girl, named “Ill,” showed me the crawlspace under the house. For rent, only 98 a month. I noticed a chair sitting alone in the middle of the dirt, barely clearing the three-and-a-half-foot ceiling. “There used to be a girl who lived here and she would just sit in that chair all day,” Ill said, “drawing.”
I pressed the doorbell of another old house, the next on my list of possible places Seth, Knowles, and Josh could be crashing. The buzzer twitched under my finger and it seemed as if I was electrocuting the house.
A group of fruitarians who made thousands of dollars a week growing pot had commandeered a large ski-lodge-style manse on a parcel of pleasing oxalis and milkweed. I settled into their periphery, in a fort out by a woodpile loaded with wet spiders. One of the boys who lived in the house took his smokes out on the back porch. He looked intently in my direction but I kept to myself out there, rummaging around in my stuff or whatever, catching up on some detail work. Or otherwise buried in some old magazines and stuff from the garage — including a box of pamphlets from the 1970s explaining the plight of the Donner Party to visitors of the state parks, campsites, and visitor centers along Interstate 80. One day I woke from a nap and this guy was just waiting around outside my shelter. “What do you want, little boy?” I said, still horizontal. It was the way I talked to other people now; it corresponded to my new not-giving-a-shit-ness. I had by then become as comfortable as any mammal could be, which is to say I fell into an abiding silence, puffed up, preening with my eyes well trained to rustlings on the periphery.
“Who you calling ‘little boy’?” The young man, pug nosed and hunky, his longish mod hair parted at the side, said to me as he leaned against a peeling black painted fence. He held one of his white stick arms crooked at the elbow with the cig part poised in front of his earthworm lips. “Every time I come out here for a smoke I see you sitting on that log set up with a bunch of shit around you, like your own little garage sale. What are you doing hanging out in Monmouth?”
“I’m just making the rounds to this side of the region, collecting things,” I answered, non-committal. “I thought I would meet up with friends here, but they already left town.”
He held up a tarot card, one of mine from a bowl by the entrance to my shelter. “Watch, this is a man pulling this card. A man’s fortune, tell it to me.”
I took the card but I didn’t need to see what was on its face. I narrowed my eyes at the sun. “I see… the end of the game. Days that are few. Imminent decay. I see a man with a large heavy coat. He’s gonna come and cover you with it.”
He probably didn’t like that. But what am I supposed to say? It’s all over his face.
Though they were among the living the squatters more resembled the stricken people of history, their bodies altered by a lifetime of fire, proximity to fire: powdered grey skin, black fingernails — not to mention the slick of oil guarding the darkness in the middle of their chests, deadly caves sending off toxic plumes of smoke out of their mouths. Their breath came out like smoke… These air-filled, fire-shaped people of history, Victorian flesh-eaters with a cannibal pact… Fire changed their bodies over in its own image, into
something else
: not-dead, not-living. They followed the smoke; their clothes smelled of wet gaping embers and they lived in calico-lined caves. They burned whatever they could, what little food they had raised was cast into the flames. Life itself was firewood. They burned each other by throwing fire rocks at passing carts. These doomed people of history were Fire Children… Well one day the fire went out. Some people climbed up into their wagons and set out to find where the fire had gone. They searched and called out until they couldn’t anymore and lay down and died. They answered to no name but doom. They ate death in the snow, when it was winter all this was covered in ice. They could have been anywhere. But they weren’t, they were trapped in some odd mountain pass in Truckee… I wonder if their handmade clothes got caught on the thicket of snow-covered firs, if their dresses snagged on snow-covered blackberry bushes. I wonder if they had cuts that wouldn’t heal, feeling around with those numb, useless hands. Could they even build a fire with their hands like that — afire in the middle of the snow? There weren’t any fires for hundreds of miles around (and the damp flame in each body was so easily extinguished) but there was a fire there on the trail, all right. Their collective misery built a house of flames in the middle of the forest… a tent of burning fibers braided through with suffering. The corpulent membrane blew up like a balloon and sat empty like an incubator of death trapped at the bottom of the trees — which hissed,
Remember it’s black, it’s always black
…
The things you’ve made — your creations, little minions, little lumps of cloth, little masks — will leave you. You can’t really own them even though they are shadows of your body. Symptoms that will be shed, forming the residue of your life on the surface of your existence, like all surfaces that your eyes have coated with their gaze. Like a snake shedding its skin, your residue forms a ghost image all over town, everywhere you have ever been. Don’t fight it. The ghost guide will lead you all over the world in connecting shadows, a chain link of dark felt memories.
Most people think you only get one grave. This is not true. The spaces you inhabit, the territory you belong to, the town of your birth — it’s all coated in miniature graves, dappling every surface as you blow through town; a residue of metallic vagabond hail.
Just sitting with the bag of bones in my apron I could feel the power of them all rattling in my chest. They clicked together in subtle tones and squeaked and clacked incessantly as my eyes bugged out of my head.
“
What’s wrong with me?
” they asked over and over again.
Lock me up and throw away the key
. The skeletal lady dances on a bridge of ironed lace; her legs are lengths of stretched white stockings stuffed into boots. If I hadn’t seen her I’d swear it was a man singing, her voice was so unusual, but being a spectator to this display made the wasted femme hysteria that much more transfixing. I had made my way to the club through neighborhoods full of small dark-stained wood bungalows dusted with yellow lichen, a remote settlement where nobody ever opened a window or raised a blind. Set up but cold with lack. I took careful steps in the dying light. Inching along in front of me was a late-model Chrysler, a thick curl of exhaust bouncing along the pavement in its wake like a ghostly Pekinese. Tracing the desire line paths that cut diagonally through people’s yards, I reached the edge of the houses to where it became parking lots, each successive one descending in terraces that flowed down in easy worn expanses. Everybody seemed to have gone away.
A couple of dudes filled with beer and fries guarded the door to the miniature green punk club. Onstage the band played idly along with the jukebox as they waited for the singer to tape down her lyric sheets…