KIM WASHED HER HAIR IN THE CREEK, AT A SPOT in the middle of the forest below an abandoned limekiln. She waded through the shallow trough into a thick rush of cool water and knelt on a shiny black stone. Taking a cracked coffee mug she sloughed ice water over her hair. Pulling a bead of dishsoap into her palm, Kim worked the gel into an acrid lather. She passed cup after cup of creek water over her bowed head. She yawned because she was tired and water gathered in a rush of streams around her gaping mouth. The dog guarding a yard close to where I slept was able to absorb the energy of surrounding ghosts. He barked like it all was unbearable and I know, I know, dog. I choked on the dusty air and lapsed into a franticly disturbed sleep.
I dreamed that I awoke abruptly and found myself in a weather-beaten shed on the beach, which looked to have been built by hand — in what century I couldn’t be sure. Seth appeared in the doorway. He carried a small object carefully in his hands. “You were sleeping. I found you and brought you here. I thought that by waking you would see the world through different eyes… I’m sorry to wake you but I wanted you to see what happened, what I did for you… I wanted you to see what we made.” He held up a tiny pink mask. “All this time while you were sleeping. No one else was around. I wouldn’t let anybody near. And one day it appeared, it just happened. It came from you — from your body. Don’t you see? It’s our image, combined.” I looked at it and saw my features projected down into coordinates in the delicate pink wax. Where he found it I didn’t want to know. I pushed it away. “Don’t you understand? We made this. This is ours.” I coughed and buried my face in my shoulder. He looked positively extinguished. The truth was, I didn’t recognize the damn thing. If I was asleep this whole time and it just came about, well, I couldn’t be sure it was even mine. I chewed nothing inside my mouth, “I’m going away.”
Josh and Knowles found girlfriends in town, these sixteen-year-old rockabilly chicks with smelly old letterman jackets, pegged jeans, and creepers who shared a bed in their apartment with a young cat, made miniature by a steady diet of second-hand smoke. The boys brought them back to the camp and petted them and kept telling the girls how much they were “tortured by their own savagery.” Murph came back with a grocery bag of old bagels he got behind a coffee house.
For me tormented animals everywhere call out all over town, their eyes pessimistically follow me, challenging me to do something about rustlings in the fog hanging in their pens. Over the fire with fingerless gloves dipping into a Swiss Miss packet, Seth said, “These are hectic times. We’re running out of places to go, places that aren’t just containers squeaking through this world on steel tracks.
We are not citizens
.” But is that so bad, to never go back? Endless movement is all some ever know. You don’t get sick if you never stop. But if you ever do, prepare to crumble… The next day we jumped a rail car to Salem. We made a shitty tent on the edge of a duck pond. In town I dug around in a bin out in back of a thrift store as if I knew there was something to it, taking the gouges and varied textures of the pile in stride. There was nothing in there but a bunch of oily metal parts and clothes coated in orange sticky dust. Most loaded objects emit a tone: a possessed bucket of coffee in a convenience store; a red smear on the grocery store floor; a stray bird in a bus station cabinet; a tramp walking into the restroom, yelling at the cockatiel on his shoulder, “You shithead.” Blood blood blood on the bathroom spigot in a diner, a big branch way up high on top of an aisle at Safeway. Piles of anything. Bees with orange and brown stripes lurked in the upper leaves of redwood trees over our camp; yellow jackets ate out of a pie plate on the picnic table. When they got close they gazed at me with dreamy metallic alien stares while they slurped goo through straw mouths. The forest was orange and brown. My eyes were full up with darkness, making my eyelids itch and fight to close. I couldn’t be sure if this was because it was dark in the forest or painfully bright. I knelt at the base of a tree, buried my hands in the grainy moss and it gave completely. I dug for several minutes before becoming aware that I was scraping at the edges of a gelatinous mass lying below the surface like a giant petrified ember. Space gel accumulated under my fingernails and turned the crests orange. Some hours later, at a Safeway, I knelt at the base of a dry goods aisle extending to the edge of town like a cardboard wall. I dug into the packages, scooting aside layers of boxes to find a pile of pills at the back of the shelf. I gobbled them up and crawled behind the deli counter, which supported a sign that said LET ME MEAT YOUR NEEDS, adding that the station was closed until 8 a.m. the following morning. I laid my head down on a bundle of aprons, my anti-dreams gradually turning the pile into a stone.
Geezers lurk around all over town trying to get me to put out. Cops pop out of corners and try to cuff me for no reason. All these
dads
have been ganging up on us, so many blank stares in town. We keep saying, “We’re not citizens, we’re fuckin ghosts to you, you don’t see us,” get it??? We gathered at a place where a Meth house had burned down —
exploded
as they say — leaving only a greasy meadow. But the old downtown strip died a long time ago. A disaster came and changed it forever. Problem is I still remember how it used to be, what used to be where, before that wild storm came through and turned everything into mossy brick-lined basements with no buildings on top. Imagine a whole street pockmarked with fenced-off troughs, like an empty swimming pool town. It was an earthquake, a big one, and it whipped through my city producing rows and rows of open-air basements. So what? We grew up in the middle of all these basements for so long that the ground level seemed just about lofty. Here basements “stood” as buildings in reverse and we stalked the streets above ’em like foremen surveying an invisible production floor. The city filled one hole then another casually over the years, so now only one was left and it collected families of alley cats and the thick smoke of negative space that surrounded all life in this haunted place. So there was the earthquake, sure, but there was also the fog — and it covered everything. We couldn’t even hear our own voices as we called out to each other from our sidewalk posts across town. The fog choked us, erased our eyes and rubbed out our brains with stricken white memories that crawled and crept along streets like a pregnant rat waiting to birth tiny, rain-soaked cottonballs. We spat out poison-soaked memories on the sidewalk.
We walked into a town, a little off the freeway in southeast Oregon, near Hines, stopping only briefly to siphon blood off a young man’s neck. The guy probably didn’t even see it coming. We took expired medication in his bathroom and rounded the corner to a 24-hour Rite Aid. It was four in the morning so we were alone in pretty much any aisle we wanted. Right off the bat Murph compulsively air-wrote the number thirteen in every corner of the store. Funny, cuz his compact little frame of bones and red hair was itself basically a good luck charm — a little furry fetish you rubbed to ward off evil. His arms were just skin stretched over two giant clutches of elbow bones; the tiny, gnarled limbs were covered in translucent white hairs and orange spots. “
Nothing can hurt you — if you don’t care
,” he air-sang. The phone rang and the main clerk guy walked away from the mopping machine he was operating to answer it. He talked quickly and absentmindedly fanned the receiver. I walked by that mopping machine and it was caked with dirt and shit, smelling like a gust of Hell from inside a lemon. I busied myself with a backpack on one shoulder, reading mags. Josh was reading some mom magazine sitting in a machine that calculates your blood pressure, flipping pages so fast it was obvious he wasn’t really reading it. Seth came by and scooped me and my
Us Weekly
up and brought me to the back breakroom. He made a little coffee and stripped and lay back naked on the employee couch and watched TV while he touched himself. I flipped and flipped, finally throwing the magazine down in disgust. Knowles and Josh came in, having snagged some sweatpants from the clothes aisle. Since it was kind of smoky out from fireplaces the sweatpants seemed wet all the time. They smelled like black ash.
Soldiers in the eternal war, armies mobilizing in the night
… We met a soldier in the Anarchist Black Cross at a Black Bear Diner in Sweet Home. His name was Jacob and he ran with a band of sexy peasant-looking boys sleeping their days away in unlocked cars. He picked apart pieces of leathery orange peel in the parking lot, going on and on about selling his body to old men who yanked his pants down in the dark afternoon of abandoned buildings. Pulling up a blue crate next to a pallet fire behind the diner Jacob hunkered down with us and right away started yapping about some crazy dude at the Greyhound station waiting room who said he wanted to pick up a wasted teen vampire to go to the movies but instead he took him to some retaining wall at the bottom of a ravine below a big house in the woods. The guy went to the truck and whipped out a jump rope and all Jacob was good for was to lay there licking his own booze-salted lips while he took a beating. He thought of distracting the guy by taking out his dick, which worked, so when the old dude dove for it Jacob started punching the crap out of him. At this point he was able to run away but the geezer still tried to throw a hacksaw in his direction but he laughed and laughed and ran away covered in blood. Jacob said that nobody but Jacob owns his body. He decides who it fucks and who it pummels. “We own nothing but what’s inside. It’s the middle of the night in here,” he said, pointing to his chest. This is what we own: our thoughts, orange and sickly. You feed it nothing but sorrow and it grows and stars come out and you are the King of your own Island of Night!
Truckers are mustachioed weirdos. They sleep in tiny apartments wedged between their big-ass engine and whatever they’ve got hitched back there. They settle into these metal cubes of gassy, local air with maybe a small TV and square blankets and just wait it out with all their lumber chained up behind them and tons of pink and yellow forms sitting on the passenger seat, ready to be filled out. The foster-care industry directly feeds into the trucker industry. They’re basically grooming personnel to occupy these positions over the course of many generations. I don’t need to mention that the foster-care industry sustains the trucking economy with Roadside Slut Camps to quell workplace dissatisfaction. Foster-care sluts are a piece of bread tossed into the creek to keep the fucking swans at bay. When they look in the mirror all truckers see is a person-shaped cloud of CO
2
.
We sat in a different Black Bear Diner in a different Oregon town sometime shortly before the sun came up. Seth sat chomping on what he called a “Zoo Baby,” which was a plate of cut-up banana, kiwi, and apricot — like something they’d set down at the bottom of the mongoose cage. Josh pounded on the table. “It’s not hard to make acceptable coffee! I mean, it seems almost harder to make it suck.”
Knowles seemed to be making a go of it, grasping the mug with both hands. “I think it’s not so bad if you just get the light roast. It doesn’t have that ashy taste. If you get the light roast and tell your brain it’s tea it goes down okay.”
“Fuck that and fuck you. What do I look like, a sorcerer?”
I could tell this exchange would go nowhere. And just then I noticed Evangele, the homeless regular, slithering across the entire perimeter of the restaurant just to get to our booth, all the while caressing the walls with his hands. Classic schizophrenic behavior. We’d been through town enough to come to expect Evangele here, his Gumby frame bent into one of the booths. Lately, he’d adopted us as a kind of proving ground for new material and fresh schemes. He sat down, his eyebrows jiggling like two flushing toilet handles. “Do any of you people know about the Romanian pornographic actress Blebe ‘Blaze’ Cedourno?” Nobody moved or said anything, “She! does this thing where — ”
“That name sounds Italian or something — ”
“I assure you it is Czech.”
“Romanian?”
“
Romanian
.” And I’m reminded of that strange night at the diner, around Christmastime, around two thirty in the morning. It was me, the waitress, and Evangele. He had wheeled in his brand spanking new homeless man cart with this stuff: a boom box, didactic para-Christian psych-evangelical picket signs, and a live pigeon sitting on a pile of quarters in a cage — all strapped to various parts of this two-wheeler thing. His cart was blocking the entrance so I was almost kind of apologetic when a spacey girl in a dress
and
pants tried to come into the restaurant, only to have to scoot uncomfortably around this odd pile of shit. But then I noticed the girl had barf all down the front of the dress and when she opened her mouth it went something like this: “
You guys
. I just wanted to let you know that my family is coming in here and they are with the fuckin mob, okay? They are organized crime, gangsters. They will hurt you. Be careful, they will fuck you up. Just don’t say a word — be careful!” And the strange thing was that then these white people came into the diner and it was her family, her parents and a sibling. Midwestern types in honest wool and small gold jewelry. They sat and ordered breakfast while the girl spent the majority of the meal in the bathroom, regurgitating. She returned to the table and fell asleep. They laughed with their mouths closed, polished off their various plates and exited as the girl threw up on the booth and waiting area before leaving some vomit on the front door. But the family didn’t run out the door, they strolled — without even
pretending
to mime the international gesture for “Sorry, let me wipe this all up.” Outside they wrapped their safety belts firmly around their midsections and drove away, the girl just folded into the back seat somewhere, going God knows where. I stepped out into the cold night to have a cigarette next to a garbage can and I thought of how Seth and I used to play a game where I would go limp and he would try to stuff my deadweight upside down and sideways into the passenger seat of the car. This was the most hilarious thing ever to happen in a parking lot, we thought (or maybe just
I
thought). My limbs would flop around, willy-nilly, as he threw them inside and clapped the door shut. This display could go on for quite some time, with all sorts of horrified people peering over their shopping bags at me whooping it up with my neck craned around my ankles and my foot on the steering wheel.