This is another story I wrote when I was about 19. I don’t remember what made me write it. I think I was just getting into reading Beckett at the time. I just hope u like it.
I’ve just stepped into my usual room it seems for the first time in my life. I lie in bed and roll a blizz. Feet and voices climb up into the darkness of my apartment window from the streets below covered in shit and piss and trash, an interstice of sin, but I feel as comfortable as a god. Bless.
No doubt, a voice in my dream told me I was bound for some kinda greatness, and I had this vision because of the golden teachers that Zizo gave me. I still ask, what was it?
* * * *
I haven’t paid my rent in 4 months. They even sent some goodfellas to try to make me pay but I won’t even though they know I have the money. But I wanted to forget that. I’d dive into the first chance of leaving this bodily world for the visionary. I would nosedive through the whole oblivion and land in some paradisal Persia of love and mutual support.
I decided to wander the avenues — stenches of gasoline, cigs, black n milds, dry-cleaner steam pouring onto the street corner like a wet dog rubbing its back on the frame of a steel cage, a TV screen hidden in the top corner of a café, a CNN headline, “President Approves Pipeline, Natives React.” I turn the corner and overhear two voices, “There’s a flu going around. Could be a pandemic by now. Even the hospital’s restricting visitors. It could be the next bubonic plague.” The pickled faces you could sense but couldn’t see. The individual is depersonalized in a large populace which makes them more of a person. Feet and hands of an anxious public. This is how I imagine the fall of Rome. Stagnate swamps of men straggled down in repetitive leaps from a portal in the facility’s horizon, stamped, microchipped, controlled, unsure of what’s real and what’s fake. Variations of the same situation and clothes. A skinny pale girl, her sullen, pretty face eyes impatient assume the world blue hair canary dress black choker a ring of fake blood around her lips tattoos of witches and labyrinths an iridescent nose-ring. She avoided men’s eyes intentionally. A suited Wall-Street man bawling over the phone smooth rage leather briefcase the hands of some infant engulfing his only chance of escape. A homeless man next to him his hair a dry spinode of hardened dust dressed thick in shredded wool revealed in gashes ancient blotches gene-beamed bruises bare bronze skin split into circles while he yelled he’s a living monument in the middle of an intersection cars honked their horns at him to move impatient drivers split past him the more tardy waited why aren’t you more? His arms wild “Amendment 3! No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war! — We the people. Get duh fuck out a my house! All you backwards demon warmongers! Get duh fuck out a my house white Puritan American Russian Chinese Thundercattled devils! I’m homeless on my knees with a Harvard degree. Don’t eat the microchips!”
Empty space around me. Look — I don’t want to sound like some rinsed-dry stream of consciousness zealot that over-describes and yaps and bitches to apotheosize every common event moving in the faculty of mental-illnesses but my isolation in this citytown was a ghastly thing to observe my decay in the midst was ghastly to accept in a place where isolation seemed either impossible or downright heretical to culture no to humanness until it suddenly became normal and the unreal became real. Each scene fleets and flickers involving me not involving me with any person I might meet that I could imagine myself divided by myself from myself like some mutant object and half-observe my crippledness was spectral not particularly accommodating after so much fuckery though I suppose one must love himself first with what he has or has been handed him or her or they it’s this involuntary solitude that suffocates and oppresses and kills with its lack of resourcefulness not that I’m envious of others but everyone who was someone had some kind of companion even if it was a phone or in a parallel sidewalk prance hand-in-hand. Strangers luminous in beautiful decay a taxi swerves to the side of the street a couple bolt from the yellow mass like icing scooped from a cake a blind man screams at the intersection, “Fuck you! I told you this is the the end of something big!” And many fuck yous and beeps. Dollars spit in the drivers face, “Don’t fuck me with your sick money!”
All this was passing when a cheery classic American family of four perfectly uniform shifted by me. The daughter no older than 9 was a miniature of her mother — white jean shorts and a logoed tank-top revealing shoulder the son, a prototype of his dad — a dark logoed tee cargo shorts thong sandals bare legs and arms the same curt regimental hairstyles. They’d been stuck to the taxi scene until the wife happened to look up at me. Astonishment her daughter’s hand in a stone-grip and pulled the little thing to her hip and the mom looked into me with a mixture of fear and lust. My presence threatened her. The kids studied me too with their innocence slowly corrupted by mindless parental curses but they seemed more frightened and disturbed by their mom and those small faces expanded into a brightness of non-expression a melancholic wasteland as they looked at me a kind of love because I knew what they really saw until the daughter yelled at her mom to loosen her grip and I had taken three xans before hand. She moved the family bus in a single file line away from me to pass.
I turned back and walked into 50 Secrets cafe .
* * *
A familiar face came to me. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it.
Pretty faces everywhere. Young city people each conversation singular warm brilliant miracles each subject more interesting than the last every language like dandelions that float with the voice and are seen by the ear the air sweeping us with a brush and a broom and that’s our story for now.
