We walked to Cockbuster. Since the last time we’d been in there they moved all the videos to the far corner of the store, an obligatory gesture at sustaining what used to be the main goal of the enterprise. You guys suck! we cried, sifting through little white cases. I loaded up my pockets with snacks. The blue and yellow carpet reeked and the clerks all slept in the front. Half the store was dark so we hunkered down back there, crouching behind a display whenever cops shined their Maglites in the window. Murph ripped at the edge of the carpet and kept yanking on this flap and then we found initials carved in the cement floor underneath. I guess the initials were from the construction people who built this useless place… Suddenly we heard a cataclysmic shotgun blast and we stood up to see one of the clerks standing on top of the register with a broom in his hand swatting at something up on the mirrored ceiling. He kept swatting and banged out most of the other lights left in the place. They cranked up the Cockbuster stereo and howled and busted lights all over the place. “Get it! Get that fuckin thing!” What are they talking about? We wondered what the fuck those assholes were doing over there. “Ha ha!” The clerks screamed and swung, but we could barely hear them over the scraping sounds of what they had playing over the store’s sound system… At the basement rock show there was much discussion among the muddy Krishna Punx by the stairs about whether or not the cross was indeed a highly simplified glyph of two persons engaged in sexual intercourse. Other whispers around the venue speculated about whether or not tonight’s frontman would pull his cross out of his pants. And there was yet other chatter as to whether or not that even meant anything at all at this point. Did they not know that there was something missing from all of this? It nagged at me. The pangs of this particular lack whipped up the biggest, bloodiest crisis-froth, rising to the edges of the scene’s busted corpus. Or maybe it squirted out of the scene’s nose because it was laughing so hard. This is progress, I thought. They have won. Real-life has been successfully shackled and hogtied and displayed in the city plaza — as if this image itself hadn’t already been sufficiently tampered with.
I just want it to be real — I’m ready to make it that way
… And as I said these words the skuzzy vacuum sucker that spat blood all over my hair raised itself on its elbows, pulled out an extension cord, plugged up the hole where its belly button had been, popped 38 Excedrin, and quietly died.
I could see the writing on the wall. It wasn’t the ’90s. It wasn’t even the Pacific Northwest anymore. Something had come and swept that all away and I was left cooped up in a stinky sarcophagus dreaming of the place where I was born, feeling very sad because that place, too, had been gathered up and stuffed into the mouth of the world. I felt caught halfway through somebody’s poorly maintained digestive tract.
So many reasons just to sleep all the time. Just too many factors making drowsiness the posture of the day. Except for me it was real. It
had
to be otherwise our kind faced extinction more definitive than ever. What was I thinking? Everyone was so scared of dying that they covered themselves with skulls and choked themselves with talk about famous hobo murderers in an effort to charm it at bay. The truth was, The Fear had already slid down our throats and was waiting like a caustic seed to ignite a flame to burst its host skin from bone. I looked around. Their posturing toward real life was exhausting. Seemingly nothing was sacred — but everything was. People pretended to be sages and sported the long beards of the Russian clergy, or rattled the prayer stick and ate brined fruits like the Born-Agains they were. They were shamans and mystics except they weren’t. Quote marks covered their bodies like blackened rabbit bites, everyone was sick with it. It made me so tired. I just wanted to go somewhere else. The lack made me so sad because it was the death of everything I thought I knew, and it tasted bad. Chalky, the blood had dried weeks ago.
Tonight just before two it began pouring. We went to the supermarket, telling everyone to fuck off as we plowed into the backroom where we collectively passed out under a case of brown rum. I turned around and Murph was jacking off to his reflection in the mirror!
Christ, have a little class!
To add to the effect the little fucker was smoking a cigarette, one of those long, delicate ladies’ ones. He spat the cigarette out, Ha! FTW! as a small fire started in the corner. Knowles and Josh climbed up into the rafters of the stockroom, tearing at masses of plastic-wrapped packages of pantry items, rices, instant noodles. They emptied seasoning packets into their mouths, the powder turning to gravy in their stomachs. Knowles passed out up there too; Josh came back down and started rampaging around in the employee restroom.
Don’t let me close, I will bite you, I will tear at you. I want to eat you!
Head spinning, compulsively wringing at my sweatshirt to keep conscious, I was already soaked with beer from the night before; I started to gag violently and puked on Seth, bile blazing a trail to the rumpled pants at his feet. I fell out and away, rolling under a bread rack in the corner. Next thing I knew I was lying face down in the sand. I spat out several salty cigarette butts. I spent mornings taking the bus to the mall, lurking around the abandoned foodcourt in the early afternoon dead hour. Nights and nights spent sleeping folded high up in the orange steel racks of the Safeway storeroom. Now, from under a pile of seasoning packets, I plot my escape… I seek prey out of the endless night, fog shrouding my knives, my secrets. I will rummage around in your soul — don’t let me!
At the basement rock show: they’re stomping, crushing the green wet leaves into the floor. “It’s okay, don’t be sad,” said a voice out of the corner of the assembly. It was someone from the self-described “Hand Puppets of Jesus.” He fashioned his mitt into a big middle finger, “fuck off,” he burped, his teeth getting pointier… Making out in the midst of the deafening wheeze. Red-lit smoke lifted the room to exotic places. The Sorcerers were on stage and seemingly thousands of identical soldiers — all solidly bored — stared at the exit sign, scratching the mites in their sleeves. A pear-shaped boy/man sent his soggy voice wafting up to the air. Letting my eyes lose their focus there seemed to be something mechanical going on in the room — an allover texture of one large object twitching that could only be detected from a bird’s-eye view. More exhausting was the stench of rotting piles of berries and clover (four-leaf or bust) rotting in large baskets around the perimeter of the hall — potpourri meant to disguise the disgusting corporate agenda of the room. Knowles’ pockets were full of breath mints. He was just obsessed with mintiness and felt slightly flu-like as soon as the flavor subsided and normal breath returned. Between bands Josh made like he was grappling seductively at the air in front of him, said he was going to “fuck the music” as he gestured toward nothing in particular… But the music fucked us. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, three long-haired motherfuckers with black straps got on stage and unleashed a metallic vitriol out of the depths of some kind of horrible prison somewhere. A gleam of Hell shone in their glass eyes. In the dark night at the center of the club their music boiled away in a seething pit of shit broth while fans sucked out of “last chance crank” Vicks inhalers and fell into comas under the large mattresses blocking the stairs… I turned over the small beige patch of cardstock upon which had been written the day’s “affliction.” I had started using chance to dictate how I would feel. Sure enough it came out inconclusive. I shook my head:
too many words
, chewed soft briny beads of chamomile under the crackling florescent light. White gas oozed up and down either end of the illuminated tube. Soot coated the top and flies licked and sucked at mites along the length of the extension cord. I sat up in bed, an unusual contraption I’d wedged between two sinks in a Chevron restroom. I flicked on the light. A few napkins had pressed themselves between my shoulder and the unmade bed in such a way as to clue me in to the fact that I’d slept a long while. My legs were so white, the soles of my feet orange and cold…“
I wanna live in the forest baby, yeeah-eeow —
” No matter where I went, and to what shows, there was always some guy on stage singing about leaving all of this to go live where you could do whatever you want — as if people magically stopped chasing you when you reached some trees and a burpy little creek. Guys will always try to act exactly the way they want, which is to say, they will always seek out ways to make their lives perfect and exemplary artworks of mastery over “The Forces.” They can typically do whatever they want, which makes what they actually
do
do that much more unbearable.
I took a nap and returned to the living room of my childhood — a house of two electrical outlets where every appliance’s electrical cord was pulled to its maximum tension, as if a network of trip wires were teasing us with the impossibility of escape. Small lumps of fur lay slowly bleeding on pieces of newspaper. My house mom busied herself making wire armatures, fastening hardened strips of yellow plastic for beaks and pressing seeds into the heads for eyes. Various concoctions boiled away on the stove and whenshe was ready she dipped the forms into each vat in succession; they gradually grew in size and mass with many fine layers that dried into a flocked hide, a new skin wedged into dusty pleats over muscle forms… Bodies of birds and small animals lay resting on pieces of newspaper. House Mom built small birdlike frames that were motorized out of wire, string, and bits of clay. They shot up into the rafters and stuck there, dripping paste, shedding hairs and tiny springs. Pelts lay drying on wooden forms, pressurized bladders of hot water covered in fur, bird skins wrenched inside out, dusted with cornstarch and arsenic. Fine chisel scrapings on green bone, skulls scooped from the inside. Deer skulls pitted with bleach rot. Stinking hollow shells of water bugs, green beetles, stale meat, tiny stains of black oil footprints running in decorative seams up and down the tablecloth. House Mom had things stashed all over the house. She hid what bothered her. Running around in her black dress with white apron —
You are overreacting, obsessive!
House Mom said to me over and over. All I could see was my unwavering vision of me riding on her back into oblivion. “Obsessive.” Oh Mother! She piled on more and more clothes because the human body exposed below the jaw was obscene (her body below the jaw was strictly
off-scene
and her waist was cinched tight with bandage wrappings in such a way as to suggest a kind of perverse, stylized fertility). Her manias were cyclical in nature. When she wasn’t practicing taxidermy, she lunged at the source of grime, shaping and changing it, extracting things that lay open or uncovered on the floor. Still, she had found new and industrious ways for keeping the storms at bay. She drew beautiful lacelike fans with pencil over the nude figures twisting around the fireplace, dipped photographs in ink, masked off baby pictures on the fridge with little imaginative pants and jackets. The man on the cover of the magazine wore a suit of Wite-Out. There was a book, a chronicle of the conversion of the Costanoan Indians by the Spanish missionaries, that she had screen printed with a new cover. The Spanish braced themselves against small, ornately costumed Ohlones and Miwok, wrapped in the most meticulously crafted crepe gowns. Even the dead lay under heaps of baubles and many-layered finery, tiny die-cut outfits as weightless and impossible as a paper love letter.
Seth and I chased each other, running like stoned dorks into the “mini desert” of open space stretching from the back of the shopping center to city limits — to the small, abandoned airport out there. The runway ended where a wooden electric chair, as big as a house, stood at the top of a mound of dirt. Ten people could have played around on that thing, and by many accounts they regularly did. It was an old art project from a different time, soaked with beer. Squirrel skulls lodged in the cracks of the bowed planks. A shaft of light beamed down on the electric chair from the sky and illuminated it against the dust till the whole world appeared yellow, creamy, and ashen around it. We raced each other to the electric chair, who will win? I don’t know it’s a race.
Who will win?
… I turn around and see sparks shoot out of your eyes. Birds fly from your mouth. Without a sound. I caught you as you fell and we fell silently together, almost like falling asleep, each pulling the other down, grabbing at whatever you can… I spent the whole night with him without actually looking at his face. I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of what I might find if I looked. In his eyes I saw stars fixed upon me — I had read too much already, no more looking. His mouth was the hottest place on his body and I sought it out like a little girl… I could recall the tiny pitter-pat of a radio playing quietly late at night and imagined I could be in the same room as its source, at the site of the song’s origin — and the oppressive moistness of it all. Now its vastness played in my heart as the small, barely discernable sounds coming out of that box, and it was one of the saddest sounds “
He’ll capture and hold you with his stinging velvet arms
.”… He’d dug up a large beet out of a neighbor’s garden.
“I chose it because it looked like a heart, an anatomical one,” Seth said. “See?” he sawed at it with a serrated knife. “It bleeds just like we do. The only plant that’s truly alive.” We stewed the pieces in a pan on the camp stove. I feel flesh and marrow in my mouth. “There’s a reason heavy metal is pre-occupied with meat and blood,” he continued, toying with pieces of it in his fingers, “it’s because they’re warning us not to forget where our flesh comes from — ”
“But they try to shock us with blood. How could it be that waving a scrap of meat around on stage is going to make us feel sympathy for the animal?” The sound of him cartoonishly sawing at his own arm made us both laugh and we shelved the discussion for now.