The following is a Joycean, 25-page-long, short story written in joy, rage, regret, nostalgia. A short story in Novel drag. A cry for hurt, written in 2015. It could not have been written by any writer, of the current era, who writes for money. It was written (in every sense of the word) Free. Only a deeply word-mad lunatic could get this. Challenge…?
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CHAPTER ONE: Reap the World Wind
The splendors of existence are so near. Smell them, taste them, they are yours, right there, in thick liquids or crunchy solids or blown twinkling on your face in a highway mist through the passenger-side window of a secondhand clot-red car in the night, an emergency road trip, a quest, a sacred journey to the Mexican neighborhood down whining interstates and mumbling roads where cakes are purchased on the cusp between waking and not. D kept thinking how he was not an inanimate object. I am not an inanimate object. He stretched his hand out the window against the misty night. Tomorrow thirty. Not a devil-cold mineral-prism tumbling senseless in deep space away from the sun. Thirty. Not a pebble on a stain on the road. D could think yes or no, say yes or no, do yes or no, could also be either or both, which is Maybe. Thirty. He could breathe and shit and reproduce. He could take a 5-week correspondence course in Scat Singing or sign up for scientific service in a super-cooled bunker near the core of the Earth for a contract covering most of his adult life or fuck a cripple in the morning sun or say “tine”. It was the morning. D held his own head as the highway stripes blurred under the car and D’s head beheld It Self holding It in the oblong rearview that might have saved his life if Moog hadn’t just then reached up to make an inexplicable adjustment to center his own noir eyes in the oblong. Moog then asked D to roll up the window. The word Moog used was crank. D suddenly realized tomorrow was already today and D was suddenly thirty and wealthy and famous and D said,
“Are you cold? You never get cold.”
Moog said what Moog meant was that Moog couldn’t hear the stolen 8-Track proper with the window down. Moog (who had killed) said what Moog meant.
Moog was pale fat pre-morph transsexual with teats installed but pre-pumped I mean stembud-boobies and the cockadick still on (not yet chopped and pickled for some sicko doc’s collection) so in six more weeks there’d be a pronoun change and anal amnesty with new port for (imaginary) lovers to pummel with gargantuan cockadicks of Swiftian fiction. Clinicians were planning to fashion slick red long clitoris from cultured divot out plumpunderside of Moog’s hot tongue which Moog said was every kind of wrong laughing. D did not roll up D’s widow but reached over and batted Moog’s meticulously-manicured, garishly-ringed and sweetly powdered hand from where it hovered near the 8-track and twisted a knob to woofer-distorting max until Moog could only grimace. Super-loud Gordon Lightfoot. The yardless stumble-down houses careening by while the red and orange and green logo on the side of Moog’s clot-red secondhand car as Moog and D enjoyed Lightfoot melodies of chesty puissance. The car was guided by a bootlegged dog brain in copper cases of positronic oils which Moog had said was every kind of wrong but what can you do? You take it or leave it as is is how the World works now. There were crashes sometimes when the Inhibitors fritzed and the cars chased cats across the sidewalk.
A convoy of huge Ojibwa Copwheels roared by on the left shoulder of the highway under a vast hologrammatical turret-light and a glowing headdressed chief towered gold on the dark with arms outstretched above the highway.
“What?” shouted D over distorting sounds of Gordon. They were back on surface streets. Moog shouted there it is and they right-swerved-sudden up a long driveway lit with hurricane lamps and took a short drive behind the main house toward a sort of converted carriage house behind it bedecked in signs and symbols for commercial cola and eased to a halt near its rickety floodlit porch. Moog left the motor running, CAFfer music blaring at four in the a-m as Moog jumped out, ever-surprisingly nimble for a three-hundred-pounder clad in department store smock and boa. D reached over and switched off the 8-track safely in Moog’s absence and finger-punched the FM radio in time to hear the noodling jazzy guitar vamp at the end of Elvis Costello’s Alison. D was in two minds about the noodling. A) it was corny B) D wished D possessed the skill. D thought: this stumble-down ramshackle house on a street of ramshackle stumble-down houses in a ramshackle neighborhood in the sonic shadow of the stumble-down highway has life in it. All the lights were on in all the houses as far as D’s eyes could see up the alley. D said chesterfield, out loud, alone in the car, to surprise D. The DJ said it was four oh seven in the a-m and that D was listening to RADIO KNOBU FM and this next track goes out to Lord Mountbatten. And D was jarred by that and unsettled by subliminal peripheral movements to D’s rear left.
A lot can be thought in a minute.
See how much you can think just reading this sen
A lapsed Catholic striding up the driveway in tail-light red and inching up on the driver-side of the idling clot-red quest-car with collectible pistol drawn and cocked while Moog inside the carriage house hungered hot eyes through cracked glass of stolen pastry displays with a tattooed finger on his big dry clot-colored lip. Moog took his time picking with a practiced eye to the bemusement of the mustached proprietor the birthday cake he’d take home for D’s party later. In D’s last minute-of-thought D remembered re
membered
re
FLASHBACK ONE
The Summer not of Love but Drum Machine.
Streaming with light and beats. Do we or do we not experience Love in its most intense and actual when we have lost or are in suspense of losing the beat? The Negative Culpability called Love in the form of lost beats.
Love when it hurts so super bad hard it’s a birth defect LOVE. Love like jerking a backbone out your rectum LOVE. D had thought about jumping in the Mississippi river LOVE with D’s boots on and muttered to D with a winning sneer LOVE it was convenient that D’s mostly-non-white mother had never taught D to LOVE swim. To no beat.
THE SUMMER OF NONE
It was a postcard day in the Two-Towns.
Down the gently grading hill from the summit of the sun-torched aluminum of the Rothschild Artifact Museum, down the hill and across a narrow up-curving road and suddenly down a much steeper hill tangled and knotty with roots and roots-bisected slabs the cold cool lather-brown sluice of this bend in the Mississippi dazzled D in the erotic aura of D’s shirtless despair, arms folded over D’s hard flat chest. Glass-bottomed Triremes filled with gawking N’orkers circled low in sky and way high up one of those new sick bloated cross-country Michelin Dirigischooners blotted the sun for what felt like forever as cold crept in from the edge of the district-shaped eclipse and trailing flocks of inevitable bird shadows and warm wooshy wake of litter and grit as sun poured back to flowers rejoicing.
LOVE
D had curly black shoulder-curtaining hair like Indian braves with perms and something of the thug in D’s jaw, something of the effete French poetaster in D’s lyrical fuzz-fringed lips, a pinch of Negro in D’s nose and a kilo of Negro in the black-dolphin gleam of the cockadick of D. The cockadick stowed and savory and crusted with flaking residue from JJDDBBE’s haunting Cumnumen on the footpath above the river itself a trillion mighty unsprung crystal signatures upon silt. D a fine-featured Aborigine or a Dahlit-looking dude with magnificent mane of curly hair on banks of the Mississippi after a bad breakup with the only girl D’d ever fuck. A river so mighty it connected every sopping inch of the rich black fudge of the aborigine-run sub-Canadian nation called US. D would have looked so great on a pony. Imagine girls with all Cumnumens gooey in a surge after pony and D up Hennepin avenue from riverbank up long hill all the way back to Lake Street in growing mobs of bobbing teats and winking Cumnumens and whipping ponytails LOVE.
Lost love is the first Great (loss, love) LOVE. The beautiful midnation city was full of it. All around D people throb in hushes resonant the liquid-filled squibs of ache both fresh and buried since the core of ache is always molten LOVE meaning a willing warm body was snatched away by death or emotional caprice and though D could find no solace in that D should have. D, you should really find solace in that. How common you are in that. D wailed to the midnational branch of the Mississippi river singing LOVE casting rippling arm shadows on the water.
D sang a song both loud and long which D borrowed from the people Led Zeppelin. He considered jumping in river to sing it true, borne along on D’s back in D’s boots under the wheel of the sky on the axel of the sun which is LOVE but D knew D couldn’t swim and D wanted to live if only to LOVE another day and eat another taco LOVE. D sang slowest Zep song known.
“What a voice!” said a voice after clearing its throat of the hermit years. From a mud-cave in the inclined side of the gooey hill beneath D’s feet but three meters above rivery roil a muddy man with mop-hair scampered right up at D like LOVE.
****
D was renting a humble kitchenbedette right on Lake Street over the famous Blue Heron café where the girl who’d lost her taste and smell worked. The blonde with the Swiss Miss plaits. Ah.
D’d recently quit his job on the stinking river-tunnel docks in a department store downtown and had enough super-tokens boxed in the bank to pay two-and-a-half months of rent on his kitchenbedette if he chose to eat and three months if he didn’t. Lake Street felt like the run-down back of both neighborhoods the eight-lane street divided because there were very few trees along it and several used car lots and Mexican joints with outdoor seating on rickety benches and a token-operated bestiality booth or a Jerk Box every five blocks or so and bars where the beers were spiced with Asian blood for that extra oomph. D prepared tacos while the muddy man he’d found in the river bank took a luxurious (for him) directed-energy shower. I am trying to keep this part of the chapter relatively normal. We are still in flashback one while older D is still in the dark of 4 in the a-m in Moog’s idling clot-red station wagon, waiting to be shot in the head.
To a beat.
D’s kitchenbedette was essentially a kitchen with a bed in it and a door to a bathroom and three curtainless windows in the wall to the North overlooking Lake Street. His futon was under the over-sized wall-hinged table tripling as storage space and a bunkbed with an area, a clearing, a gap in the magazine stacks and penny-piles and sock jumbles, provided for tacos. The futon doubled as a floppy petabyte memory-bank storing a perfect chemical model of JJDDBBE’s floriferously ultra-copious Cumnumen. The upper class Ojibwa Princess’s ultra-copious Cumnumen D’d lost all access to save in the form he maintained in the memory bank of his bed reeked wonderfully of cinnamon and crayfish. D would have to clear the table top if the mud man was planning on sleeping over.
But D wondered about the mud man…
He’d seemed lucid enough on the long walk with D back to D’s kitchenbedette and had even offered fairly rational advice on the topic of D’s breakup with JJDDBBE but didn’t living in a mud cave along the Mississippi deserve a default diagnosis of some kind of mental problem? The sane-but-homeless lived in cardboard boxes behind supermarkets. The mud man had said,
“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, never make that blunder again.”
He’d said other things too. He was full of sincere enthusiasms for D’s singing. He offered himself to D as D’s manager while walking backward, facing D, making a passionate case and gesticulating wildly, inadvertently flinging mud every which way for emphasis. Video information faded in and out on certain squares of the sidewalk, some cracked, as they passed, and several followed them in playful swerves, way ahead then back, like stray dogs disingenuously presenting hunger as playfulness and asked them to eat at X or shop at Y but D had trained himself to never look down or up (at the billboards) outside his kitchenbedette while walking. But he couldn’t help glancing at the playful pretty colors and vivacious gamines and flowers or dogs with Frisbees in beach scenes running under his feet. Mud Man called D a real find. A long-form ad kicked in. Closeup of a gamine’s perfect ear was hopscotching sidewalk squares from miles back to catch up and follow.
“Good-looking partially-black boy like you? With a white-sounding voice like that? We could make hundreds!”
EDISON’S MIRTH-INDUCING EAR PLUGS
“But why?”
TURN THE WORLD INTO YOUR WHOOPEE CUSHION
“For money, chump!”
PATENTED AUDIO-MUTATION FILTER
“Money is but a small problem.”
APPROVED BY WORLD’S TOP COMEDIANS
“LSSBBSKIN!”
EDISON’S MIRTH-INDUCING EAR PLUGS
“What?”
NOW ON SALE AT HOMOLECTRIX
“LSSBBSKIN!”
TURN LEFT HERE 100 METERS SOUTH
“What?”
HOMOLECTRIX TURN LEFT HERE
“Little Spiders Sometimes Become Big Spiders, Kill It Now!”
HEAR WHAT EVERYBODY’S LAUGHING ABOUT
A fleet of Injun Copwheels sounding like a thousand lawn mowers resembling dusty huge doughnuts in a long blue cloud aimed at the horizon projecting flashing hologrammaticals of three-storey headdressed chiefs at every intersection right palms outstretched commanding perpendicular traffic to STOP as they roared by.
The year was ’87.
He’d left the door unlocked and the faucet running in the sink. The kitchenbedette still smelled of her…
“My humble…”
…of her…
When Mud Man finally emerged from D’s directed-energy shower his long, mumble-blonde hair was slicked back in a pony tail tied with a rubber-band he must have had with him all that time in the riverbank cave. He’d hacked away his beard with D’s toe-nail scissors and then shaved the stubble with the last bit of sharpness to a disposable razor D had been conserving for a month. His cheeks were slap-ruddy from the scraping and he stood in the door to D’s bathroom naked with a neighbor’s warped vinyl Dylan blaring, hands on his hips, salami half-cocked and tip-dripping (the water keeps the microwaves from incinerating you, as it explains on the package), with an anticipatory what-problem-should-we-fix-next smile on his face. Behind Mud Man on the wall was D’s poster of a shit-eating-grin-bearing Willie Mays on one knee, bat upright on perfect grass and its hilt gripped heraldically thumb-down like Excalibur, most of the colors but the blue bleached out.
…of her Cumnumen…
“Threads couldn’t be salvaged, man?” asked D, who glanced away as he returned a small plastic container of grated taco cheese to the refrigerator. Not super comfortable with the male stranger’s fat dangle or rosy sluiced peach-crack as the male stranger in his kitchen turned and toweled his underarms.
“At this point they are structured mud,” said Mud Man over his shoulder.
Her florid Ojibwa Cumnumen
D tossed him JJDDBBE’s still-fragrant too-long bathrobe which had once been D’s still-fragrant too-short bathrobe and Mud Man sat at the clearing on D’s kitchen table in a perfectly-fitting bathrobe and waited for D to join him before starting on tacos as the bathrobe absorbed Mud Man’s gradually-regenerating fragrance with polyester grace.
Where Mud Man sat at the clearing on the table was where JJDDBBE was supposed to be sitting. D felt the coping drug wearing off but there was enough of a shimmer on the glaze of everything still and missing tits and the tiny music box of laughter that belonged to them were everywhere he looked. He saw JJDDBBE’s full mouth and short nose and narrow low forehead and black silk serape of hair where Mud Man’s thin lips, Germanic nose and receding pony-tail hairline simmered in a beam of late-morning sun which had mere minutes before contented itself with spreading flat on the windowpane like a sugary plasma of sparkle in the scratches in the glass without entering. D projected beautiful neutral black upper class LOVE Ojibwa eyes where Mud Man’s actual eyes reflected cold European ambition of murder’s sticky wet conquests.
Her crayfish-and-cinnamon Cumnumen.
Cunt in old English to an Eighties beat.
DUMPED FOR A CAFfer
Mud Man was waiting to eat and skimming a copy of the Two-Town Rag, the grubby free newspaper in bleeding ink you could find in piles all over the place, sometimes in open wire racks and sometimes in newspaper machines of molded shock-resistant plastic the teens loved to kick which you didn’t have to stick coins in to open despite their coin slots and often just sagging in smudged heaps, piles and heaps, in vintage clothes shops and record stores and oily wings from which were blown around the sidewalks in front of Mountain Burger and other chains down Lake Street desolate as LOVE.
The coping drug had nearly worn off completely by the time D addressed his meticulously structured taco. The Mud Man said skoal and dug in singing–
Beans, beans, mighty nice/
Eat ‘em once, smell ‘em twice!
–and D no longer saw the lost Ojibwa Princess where Mud Man hunched chewing LOVE. He saw a Mud Man chewing while skimming the Classifieds in the Two-Town Rag for a keyboarder. Finding nothing Mud Man paged no-nonsensically to the poignant chronicle of metrical half-truths they called the Personals and dreamed of legally violating a stranger’s unloved body for a night.
THE IMPERIALIST 