Jealous Ghoul

Greg brought the bone ceramic to his lips. The coffee steam swirled up his sinuses and soothed his soul. He gazed over the white sheets as they soaked the buried hills. Down the hill, a film of fog blurred the distant sticks, once holding thousands of orange and red specs of fluttering candy. New England animating inside his oak framed living room window: inspiration to write.

Journalist Greg’s writing deadline ended at five PM. The story argued for allowing graffiti to be painted on the town’s skatepark as long as nothing obscene. The city’s bourgeois against graffiti’s “low art”.

A black squirrel hopped in the snowflakes carrying Greg’s eyes to a queer arrangement: Two tan breasts protruding out from the fresh snow. He squinted out the shapes of two flesh-skinned water balloons with scarlet nipples. “…a dead body,” he said.

He reddened his ankles as he strangled on snow boots. He marched out twenty yards to the two humps. On his knees, he sculpted out the breasts like a sandcastle. With his fingers, he dusted a feminine neck like a fossil. The oval shape of a face formed with blond frozen hair like crystalized honey.

Greg’s penis grew in his beige long johns. It marbleized when his wrists flattened the warmness of her tits. He squeezed them and watched her mouth gasp open. Her arms lifted. He palmed her burning right tit and sucked the nipple. Her fingers crawled under the webbing of his long johns and tickled the underbelly of his scrotum.

She climbed out of the snowy grave. Tan as a California blonde, she flipped over and buried her palms and knees into the cold. Greg slapped the frost off her ass as his erected dick leered the wobble. New and bathed in the early sun; a firm smooth honey ass for his cock to hide. He fucked her. A million-dollar ass that jiggled as his smacking pelvis echoed across the Berkshire mountains.

A red barn a mile down the road reflected Greg’s eyes as he cried in disbelief. This being the first hot pussy since college twenty years back. His knee caps slid apart as he fondled her tits like heavy sacs of water. He slid her knees flush, tightening her bubble butt. Her bulging ass swollen ripe, the head of his cock smooshed into a slippery slope back inside and filled her pussy for five more minutes.

Holding her hips firm, semen flooded and spilled down her gingerbread flesh into the frozen blanket below. His eyes contemplated the distant red barn.

He looked back down to see his dick inside a zombie unicorn. He jumped back and left a trail of vomit to the blue wooded planks of his patio. Oh my God. I fucked a zombie unicorn.

Greg showered and squeezed half a bottle of shampoo over his fleshly temple. Particles of wild magical beast and hardened blood twirled into the drain specs. Vomit fountained off his torso and into the porcelain curves. Everything splashed clean before he ran back and found the oak framed window. Nothing outside but a brown spot the size of coconut.

Ashamed of his continued numbness from the best sex ever, he spilled tears over his keyboard. He needed to finish the skateboard piece, or he could lose his job at Farmville Times. The morning light in the monitor reflected the deer’s head behind him. Drilled into the living room wall, a hefty buck that his father put an arrow into.

Greg’s stiff fingers pounded away seven hundred unsophisticated words, the monitor smeared movement. A brunette with leviathan tits like Elvira leaned forty-five degrees out of the wood paneled wall. Her juicy crimson lips kissed vowels, “Come here big boy.”

Greg hopped up like a spring rabbit and watched Elvira slither out of the wall. Her milky skin and snowball tits swayed with each step. She peeled down his jeans and stroked his hard cock. He rubbed her tits and sculpted her ass with firm smearing.

She bounced on his arched cock on the flowered sofa by the window. The red barn swelled in her ice blue retinas. He palmed her cold tits and unloaded his left-over juice. She squealed from the abdomen.

In the vanity mirror over the fireplace, the severed neck of a purple zombie unicorn crowned his cock, and he death gripped the glowing pegasus. I am losing my fucking mind.

In his orange mushroom bathrobe, he tossed the shampoo bottle in the blue recycling bin. Dried his hair and tried to swallow. The phone rang and pierced the empty cabin’s stillness.

“Greg, you finish the skateboard story?”

“No Ralph. Give me a half hour,” Greg said.

“Hurry up. One half hour,” Ralph said.

Greg penned the graffiti pros and cons on the tiled kitchen counter. His pad laid flat in the shadow of a skyline of hemorrhoid cream, his wife’s stone urn, a stack of delinquent mortgage statements, and an empty .38 special.

After twenty minutes, he finished the piece with blue ink but needed to type and email it. Jack Daniels burned his esophagus as he emailed a mediocre story to his boss. An hour later, no email back. The phone silent like the third batch of afternoon snow.

An intoxicated Greg examined his dick in the bathroom light. Over the toilet, a framed watercolor of the red barn brushed by Debbie, his late wife. The same cherry red as the pick-up that ran her over. The medicine cabinet squeaked to a forty-five-degree angle; its reflective surface carried the shine of the silver .38. The doorbell chimed.

He opened to the pink winter landscape obscured by a transparent apparition: his wife bobbing up and down with fluorescent green eyes. “I’ve been fucking with you.”

“By having me fuck zombie unicorns?”

“I will make it up to you,” she said.

“I think I lost my job. I cannot pay the mortgage. I miss you and I have been fucking zombie unicorns. I figure, what a good time to blow my brains out.”

“Go to the red barn silly,” she said. Her ghost soaked into Greg’s bone marrow. He then layered his gaunt body with old winter clothes and carried a shot gun. He marched two miles to the barn.

The front door opened to a black crevice. Cold air with gardenia fragrance inflated his lungs like sweet gas. He lifted forward the darkness into a warm lantern. A hearth rug covered in valentine’s hearts flickered by a crackling fire. The most beautiful calligraphy black haired woman with emerald eyes walked out naked. Her torso soft like butter that shaped into perked swollen tits. As she moved, her shaved pussy smiled. She carried a red cape.

Greg charged like a bull with rotating testicles. She dodged and unveiled behind her cape; one gold typewriter. His wife’s voice as tough as gravity filled his ear drums: “You must type a forty-thousand-word bestseller,” she said. “You will keep the cabin, have your hemorrhoids laser beamed, and fuck this woman for the rest of your reclusive life.”

Three months later, Greg’s bloody finger prints stained the alphabet keys. He wrote a story about an artist that almost committed suicide but stayed alive. After years of misery, the artist found himself having the time of his life—even better than his greatest childhood memories. The book became a bestseller and he built a fence around the cabin to keep out the zombie unicorn.

The emerald eyed woman knocked on the door. Her violet silk thong covered nothing but a dimple above her ass. A bra hung from her neck and obscured the rings around her nipples. His wife’s voice dripped out the air vent: “This is your reward my darling.”

“Can I have kids with her sweetie?” Greg said.

The air vent continued to blow freezing air like a flamethrower kept on by the rigged finger of a dead soldier.

With his teeth, he revealed her farmer’s tan. After pulling the violet silk past her toes, he spread her white thighs on his cedar writing desk. His erection plummeted. Debbie watched her living husband’s pelvis slap the woman’s belly. “Oh, this pussy is so nice baby. I wish you were here honey,” Greg said. The flesh of his bare ass wobbled with each thrust. His floating wife had it.

Greg flooded the inside of another zombie unicorn.

“You are a fucking bitch,” Greg said.

“It is the best that I can do,” Debbie said. “I am a jealous woman.”

Greg ran to his van. He turned the engine for CVS to buy a fresh bottle of Head & Shoulders.

Dead Leaves

The leaves were scattered around the tree in the middle of the yard. The leaves looked like crumpled pieces of paper. Maybe they were discarded love letters that had been caught up and blown by the wind. Summer was over and the shadows fell across the grass stretching toward the house but not quite reaching it.

I was standing near the window with a beer in my hand and I kept looking at the dead leaves and the shadows on the ground and I knew I was no longer young. I drank some beer and in my mind I didn’t feel old. I mean, maybe, I felt lost and, maybe, I felt afraid and, maybe, sometimes I felt like I was stuck and there was something above me that kept pushing downward and something else under me and it kept pushing upward and I felt like I was trapped and I couldn’t breathe. But I didn’t feel old.

I finished off the beer and tossed the empty in the trash. I heard it clinking against the other bottles that were already there. I came back and looked out the window and I saw Rachel pulling into the driveway. I wondered what she was doing here since the last time I had seen her I thought she had made it pretty clear she didn’t want to see me anymore. But it was definitely her and I watched her get out of the car and come up to the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked her when I opened the door. She looked good. She looked really good.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you going to let me in?”

“Sure,” I said, stepping out of the way. I watched her glide slowly into the room as if she had wheels instead of feet.

“Did you miss me?” she asked, throwing a smile my way.

Her smile splashed against the side of my face and I raised my hand to touch the dissolving layer of heat. Rachel came over and put her arms around me.

“I missed you,” she said.

Now everything was getting warmer and I pulled her into me and tried to put my mouth on hers. It wasn’t much of a kiss because she laughed and turned her head before breaking loose and taking a few steps away from me.

“Hey,” I said.  Rachel laughed again.

“Easy now,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get you all fired up.”

It made me angry but I tried not to let it show.

“So what do you want?” I asked. “Do you want a beer?”

She waved her hand at me. “No,” she said, “I don’t want a beer.”

It was my turn to laugh.

“Well,” okay, I said. “I’m going to have a beer.” I went to the fridge and got me another beer. I came back and looked out the window again. I saw the shadows had reached the house. It was going to be dark soon.

“Have you been thinking about me?” Rachel asked.

I took a long pull from the beer. It felt good going down my throat. Instead of making me feel drunker, the cold beer cleared my head.

“What do you want?” My voice came louder this time and it startled her.

She gave me another smile but I saw in her eyes something had changed. She didn’t come over and try to touch me the way she had before.

“Okay,” she said. “I was wondering if you could give me some money. I’m kind of in a jam and I could pay you back in a few weeks.”

I took another drink of beer and waved the bottle back and forth in my hand.

“How much do you need?” I asked her.

Rachel pulled at the front of her blouse so that the fabric stretched tighter across her tits.  Damn. She did look really good. I turned away and looked out the window again.

“A couple of hundred,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I had some more beer and then I looked at the bottle. I saw how little was left and finished it off. I took the empty to the trash before going to the fridge for another one.

“You sure you don’t want a beer?” I called out from the kitchen.

I heard Rachel’s voice flare up from the other room.

“No,” she said before she caught herself. “I don’t want a beer, thanks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as I returned to my spot near the window. “I don’t think I can help you.”

Rachel was doing something with her mouth, and I was just about ready to tell her I was only joking with her and she could have anything she wanted, but then she turned and headed for the door.

“Okay,” I heard her saying. “Okay.”

She opened the door and went back to her car. I watched her until she was gone. Her face never gave away any sign of anger, but I was sure she cursed my name all the way back home.

I laughed again. I stood near the window and looked at the dead leaves. I looked at the shadows on the ground. I drank some more beer and I still didn’t feel old. No. I didn’t feel old at all. I just felt tired. I felt so fucking tired.

Big City Dreams, Part 6

Mr van Alen didn’t waste much pencil lead or blueprint paper on his masterpiece’s netherworld. Polished cement floor, and a labyrinth of plywood doors straight from 8^th Avenue hardware stores. The Chrysler Building’s basement reeked of disinfectant and mildewed mops, but it was a secret agent Shangri-La for Jena Panhard, the rich girl who dreamt of washing dishes.

“Where’s this theater you dreamed up? We don’t have much time. There’s cameras everywhere. Chrysler security guards are watching to see if we do dirty stuff. They’ll call the cops. We’ll wind up in handcuffs. They’ll throw us into separate cells at Riker’s Island. Dyke matrons will rape me with a mop handle.”

Mop handles are the stuff of wet dreams, for some rich girls.

No alarms sounded as we tried door after door. Liveried Chrysler Corp security couch potatoes snoozed as ghostly images danced from square green screen to square green screen. Soundtrack of snores, an audience share of zero, our late show was a brain-dead sleeper.

Unless Lester Frills was watching. What Security outfit would hire a wild-eyed, flowery weirdo as a rent-a-pig?

Security camera scans might be good meditation material. Zen adepts rack up hours like airline pilots. I lost count of meditation time long ago, but the zen clock never stops ticking. I popped locks, shouldered doors. Jena acted impressed.

There were no secret stairwells, or sliding doors behind the elevator. No hollow floors, no batpoles to slide down. Besides, Jena was wearing a Poiret gown.

During the search, I tried to telepathically transmit Deco dream pictures to Jena’s Deco-radar.

When the Deco Theater case closed, and whatever in-Deco-rous disaster followed on the heels of Lester Frills’ musical ambitions, the next job would be to remove Jena Panhard’s dull-as-dishwater dream life. Figure out how Lester’s dream-projector worked, and give Jena Deco Technicolor Nirvana-dreams. The words and music came from out of nowhere:

“Take my dreams,

Make my dreams,

Come completely true…”

A song for groggy muted horns and torch singer in the Rainbow Room. Jena took up the melody.

“Attractive dreams

moon-light my way/

Banal nightmares will fade away.

Dream me to serenity/

Dream for two in the Big City.”

Piano notes tinkled and trailed off like flowers from a happy childhood. Jena said she had to use the little girls’ room.

The sub-basement grotto had a little girls’ room. The door was suspiciously ornate. Sparkplug inlays sparked and metal-flake comets streaked. Nickel-plated letters spelled out “Little Girls’ Room”.

A Deco architect’s signature on a top-secret collaboration.

The women’s toilet was a small Art Deco treasure chamber. The streamlined stalls were pink shellac. The sea-green tile walls had a waving seaweed motif. Jena hummed a song from intertwined dreams, and hoisted Poiret silk. I pushed panels, rapped for false walls, tapped the mirror over the sink where jazz babies sprinkle their pinkies after they tinkle.

Live, Strive, Dream was etched on the silvered glass. A phony reflection gazed out.

Lester Frills snorts rails of crystal Brain Drano off Deco mirrors, lifts his head, offers the rolled C-note to the next person in line. That was me.

Too late to pull back. The mirror was stuck to the wall with Deco-rative nipple-shaped screws. Jena giggled as I twiddled them. I pushed the glass. No give to it. No choice but to smash the thing. I shrugged out of the jacket borrowed from Jena’s dear departed grandfather. Off with the wig-hat. Off with the pants too, what the hell.

The key to breaking things is to concentrate on the space behind them.

“Stand back, Jena. They hadn’t invented safety glass when this was made. Close your eyes.” Too bad about the last part. I wanted her to see me smash something heavy. But if I messed up, she wouldn’t see a fist turn into a bloody cauliflower.

Hadn’t done kung fu in ages. Take a stance, go into a trance. The mirror image became an opponent.

Before I could yell hi-yah, the mirror slid inwards. The sinks sunk into the floor with a hum and were covered by a trapdoor whose intarsio inlay read, Live Strive Dream. A woman in a pointy-ear bat headdress spread her bat-wing cape in a gesture of welcome. There was a door where the mirror once hung. Beyond was the Deco theater of New York dreams.

“How’d you do it, Zee Gee? Power of peaceful meditation?”

“Uh yeah something like that I guess.” A glimpse of oneself the way one is was the price of admission.

We went in. The mirror door and fake-sink floor whirred shut behind us. Chrysler goons would burst in on an empty Deco Little Girls’ Room.

Jena waltzed to the proscenium. Her gown rustled, her heels clicked. She vaulted onstage. I settled on a gilt-and-black velvet seat.

“Dance,” I said. “Bring the place to life.”

Fresh air blew in from a pine tree forest in the Poconos or Adirondacks. The pressure of Jena’s feet on the stage boards summoned a Wurlitzer organ from the orchestra pit. Jena’s clothes fluttered in a major-chord breeze. A spotlight shadowed her like a moonbeam on a lake as she danced. No underwear, no hair down there, Jena’s silhouette laid bare in bas-relief.

Satori, or as close as this zen garbageman had ever been. I stomped, clapped, whistled like a wolf while Jena whirled, twirled and frugged. “Whoo! Aw, take it off, baby. Strip! Peel! Shake it!”

Nirvana, transcendence, cosmic consciousness, right in your face. Twenty years in pursuit of The Way, and you act like Joe Lunchpail.

A Paul Poiret gown fluttered like a butterfly wing. Where had Jena spent her off-hours from the Hayden? Billy’s Topless? The Baby-Doll? In answer to the koan, a Zeiss projector descended on cables from the ceiling and bombed to life with strobes, red-and-blue laser beams. Jena’s nude body glowed. The Man in the Moon snorted neon cocaine from a magnesium-flare spoon and turned into a banana on Josephine Baker’s Van Allen Belt.

Champagne corks popped, the fizz flew. The music said, Dance, dance, dance, dance.

***

Dazed, Jena and I circumambulated the Chrysler Corporation’s skyrise. The phone rang in one of the last glass phone-booths left on Manhattan Island.

Lester Frills drooled into an over-designed techno-mouthpiece on the other end of the line.

“You brilliant, beautiful Sanitation Department sanitary napkin, you. You found it. They hid a diamond on 47^thStreet. Can you comprehend the genius? I’m ready to take possession. In other words, gimme!”

“Not so fast, Frills. First, I want Rei. And if you harmed a hair on her head, I’ll personally tear you a new one.”

“Slapping Japs ain’t my style, Garbage Dumpster. Wipe the jism out of your mind’s eye and you’ll see where she’s stashed. And you can have her. Man, I’ve had more fun playing parcheesi with showroom dummies. Collecting stamps is Studio 54 compared to her aphorisms. You two’ll get along like a fucking maison de couture on fire.”

Lester’s dream projector blazed a Japanese Living Treasure™ of avant-garde fashion design, suspended from a ceiling in a squalid shopping mall. Rei Kawakubo was a prisoner of SoHo.

“Tell,” Lester rasped. “Give up the secret for entry to my stage. I wasn’t able to glean the proper phrase or gesture from my dream-surveillance mechanism network. Tell me how you got in, or I’ll send 10,000 volts through little Rei’s fashion-puppet strings. She fries like teriyaki.”

“You mean tempura,” I said. “Go down to the little girls’ room. Look in the mirror, and Live, Strive, Dream. See yourself the way you are.”

“Cinch! It’s show time!” Lester crowed in triumph. “Make sure you reserve your banquette seats now, you socially mismatched lovebirds. Attendance shall be mandatory.”

The early-morning Chrysler doorman yawned as he held the door to Jena’s Hudson. Instead of a tip, I handed him a koan. “If you stage a musical and no one shows, does it count as a no-show?”

The key is to never take no for a Noh.

Rei Kawakubo was strung up in the sub-basement of her former flagship store. The place was packed with overpriced sneakers, designer jeans, and T-shirts. She must’ve suffered horribly. I cut her down, pulled the gag from her lips. After a few minutes, I put the gag back on and left it there until we reached the zen diner. Rei broke her fast with edamame, sea salt and green tea.

“Green is most problematic color,” she said. “But look ah-so smashing next to black.”

She handed me a perforated disk of sea-green jade on a string braided from human hair. Hers. “Amulet,” she said. “Protect you from vanity and acquisitiveness.”

The zen waitress misunderstood. She brought Rei a tempe omelette with banana tea and asparagus mist. We laughed, then contemplated uneaten food on the table.

Pollice collared Lester Frills in the Chrysler Building’s sub-basement ladies’ bathroom. Security staff spotted him pressing his face against a mirror, muttering magic mumbo-jumbo from old movies, turning chimp-like backward somersaults of rage and frustration.

The cuffs went on—snap! Entrance to the Theater of Deco Dreams forever denied to those incapable of self-perception. Lester begged the arresting officers to put him out of his misery.

Police dumptrucks carted off his state-of-the-art Karaoke sound system and costume changes.

Every now and then, I head the Hayden Planetarium towards closing time. A pretty lady locks the place up for the night and we walk downtown to take in a show under the Chrysler Building. The show is us, our dreams.

Lester can’t interfere with our dreams from his cell at Riker’s Island. He wouldn’t be interested, anyway. His life has changed. He got married. His husband, who’s built like the Sears Tower in Chicago, claps, laughs and shakes his head whenever Lester performs, “Drag Me In! Drag Me Out! Drag Me Off!”

Jena said she dreamt of a wooden house near a beach, set among dunes covered in waves of sea-grass. The house was full of happy mixed-race children.

Rei Kawakubo opened a new store at an undisclosed New York location. The phone number is unlisted. No one is allowed in to shop. There’s no merchandise on display, nothing to buy.

fin

The Job

I was waiting at the usual spot pretending to enjoy my drink; it was the same venue as always but as that icy December winter wind blew the door open I could see that it wasn’t the usual agent walking in, as he brushed off his coat and scarf I could recognize that it was one of our top guys. This either meant one of two things: One of us was going to end up with a fork in his neck by the end of this meeting, or there was going to be a very important “mark” in my future. The agent sort of slithered over to me with a haunting look of trepidation in his face; I immediately readied my fork which was already in my hand beside my thigh, but as the gentleman arrived at the table he just tossed an envelope in front of me, turned, and made a beeline straight to and out the door.

I was a bit taken aback as the whole nuance of that encounter left me with a macabre sensation, and an insatiable urge to find out who I was going to have to murder this time. The envelopes were always quite thorough with photographs; residences, behaviors, family and friends, a full chronological history, and of course the best way to locate the mark. As I teared open the envelope with great anticipation, I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes, I couldn’t believe what I was fucking looking at.

Fucking Santa Clause? I’m supposed to motherfucking kill Santa Clause? What kind of fuckery is behind this demented lunacy? He’s not real, he’s not fucking real. I started to peruse through the contents of the envelope and they had all sorts of shit on this guy; photos of him in a sleigh with fucking reindeer pulling it through the sky, blue prints of his house up in the north pole, locations of all his toy warehouses, connections with disgruntled elves willing to sell out the fucking fat guy at the drop of a hat. It was all there; his whole fucking profile, with copies of all his I.D., I was completely dumbfounded, I thought I was going to shit myself, Santa Clause was real and I’ve got to murder the bastard.

I payed my check and left the pub, I scurried home as fast as I could, almost bailing on the icy sidewalks. I immediately went over to my desk to give this another more extensive inspection, Jesus fuck! This guy was a fully-fledged whack job, some of the photos were so fucked up that even I was disgusted: Fucking around with elves, whips chains and all sorts of dildos, he even got in there with the reindeers “and I mean GOT IN THERE”, “my fuck those poor animals”. What kind of an abominable organization was he running up there?

“Up there” Jesus fuck! I was going to have to go all the way up to the fucking North Pole, how could I survive those temperatures? How could I even get up there? There’s no airline that lands next to Santa’s village, what am I supposed to do, rent a fucking dog sled? Piggyback on Frosty the fucking Snowman?

As it turns out, the Agency had already arranged transport on a Soviet submarine that would take me close to my destination; it would break through the ice about a mile away from the coordinates, then I was to meet some agent with a ski-doo to take me the rest of the way. “FUCK ME” this Agency’s got everything covered, it sure beats working solo; I mean, a fucking “SUB” man, agents working in the North Pole, they’ve really got their shit together. The only drawback really was that they’d eventually kill you, no one leaves the Agency.

My luxurious journey in that fucking under water tin can was a lot less than settling; a left over from the cold war, Christ! It was older than I was; I couldn’t believe that people actually spent months in these fucking metal tombs. After about six days or so, I’m really not sure; these sailors sure knew how to put it back, Vodka seemed almost required amongst the crew, they were pissed the whole time, and when I thought I heard someone utter the words nuclear and problem, so was I.

We cracked through the ice right on the coordinates; I think my head cracked a little too. I crawled up and onto the top of the sub and saw absolutely fuck all; the sun was fucking blinding me, all I could see was white nothingness. I felt a tug at my leg; it was one of the boys tossing up a bottle of vodka with some goggles, after my eyes adjusted I could see the agent within a few hundred meters, I waved goodbye to my friends who I really would have killed if I had to be locked up any longer, the only problem would be driving the sub, thank fuck it never came to that.

The agent was like any other agent; faceless and foreboding, he had two ski-doos with him and my usual kit: fire arms, knives, explosives and the like, he also provided me a fully detailed satellite picture of Santa’s compound. He said security was no problem and the only trouble I might have would be the elves; they’re hard to spot and they’re quick little fuckers, but they’re not armed.

The other agent took me about half way then he veered off into what looked like nowhere; actually everywhere looked like nowhere out here, and it’s really hard to drink from a bottle of vodka on a ski-doo while you’re trying to take compass readings. I finally came up to the top of a precipice that looked like the agent had described; I got off my ride and scurried along prostrate to get a better view, and there it was, motherfucking Santa’s village, and it sure as hell didn’t look like Christmas, it was more like the images I get when I read fucking Kafka.

It was like a shanty town; with shacks upon shacks and it was all covered in what I assumed to be reindeer shit. The elves didn’t seem to be doing well at all; their clothes were all torn, their faces looked frost bitten and miserable, this was no happy jolly fucking place by any measure, I got a good glimpse of what might be Santa’s castle, it really wasn’t a castle it just looked like one against the rest of this dilapidated monstrosity. I spent a few days on reconnaissance; the compound was easy to get close to and I found that I could get into some of storage shacks, I couldn’t believe what I was uncovering, this place was rigged up to be a full on fucking sex dungeon.

Most of the shacks were piled to the ceiling with all kinds of cash, all nations and denominations were represented in 5ft squared cubes wrapped in plastic and loaded up on top of one another. I came across a few creepy corners and got myself lost, it was a fucking maze of shit being built over the shit that was built before, I opened a few doors that I wish I hadn’t, the fucking carnage left over from a slaughter that was quite obviously sadistic slow and painful, and done with the most frightening blood soaked machines, none of which I’d ever seen before or even imagined. Scattered around these terror shacks I could see all the torn and shredded pieces of what were once the elves, just lying there rotting, the fucking stench was insipid like these shacks had been used for this evil fuckery for decades.

I fucked up; it was one night when I was working out how I was going to get in to Santa’s place, I heard a stirring sound so I ducked into the closest door. The place was full of fucking elves, all chained up, some in these little cages and even ones strapped to the goddamn wall with barbed wire. They all started fucking talking at once; I immediately pulled out my assault rifle and educated them on what could happen if they didn’t shut the fuck up, NOW! One elf quietly asked if I was there to free them, and then a few more started in with “please free us” and “please take us off the wall”. Jesus Fuck! I wasn’t there to save any fucking elves, man; it was going to be hard enough hauling those bundles of cash out of there, I didn’t need a community of malnourished and half dead little people with pointed ears following me out of this shit hole, I wasn’t fucking Moses, there was no mass fucking exodus going down here. Anyhow, I told the elves what they wanted to hear; I’d come back for them after I get the big guy, which seemed to bring some form of hope to their collective misery, so I booked, the time had chosen itself, there’s no telling what those elves will say under torture, it’s time to murder Santa Clause.

I had to enter through the stables and those reindeers stunk with a fucking funk that made me wretch as soon as I got in there, JESUS FUCK! It was unbearable, but I did catch a glimpse of who I thought to be Rudolf, half of his fur was fucking falling off, and that shinny glowing red nose was nothing more than a strange type of fungus that had infected his face. I was in; I could hear screams and whips and some boisterous howls that dominated over the other noises, as I approached the room I could only imagine what I was in for, different marks get different deliveries, and this motherfucker’s going to get a straight razor for sure.

Opening up that door changed me forever; Santa was in full on garters, although, retaining a nuance of that Santa I once knew and loved as a child, he was still sporting that fucking red and white toque, while he was sodomising a baby reindeer while the reindeer was sodomising a fucking elf, there were about four elves tied up with rope all fucking beaten bruised and whipped, they’ve obviously already had their turns with the big guy, and he really was a fucking huge motherfucker. As the ferociously malicious degradation of these weird little fucking elves and the baby reindeer took place, I hesitated in awe.

As it turns out I hesitated for too long; Santa spotted me out of the corner of his eye and pounced like a cheetah, he had me on my back in seconds with all 300 pounds of him on top of me, no way this was going to be a fucking bear wrestle, that fucker would crush my ass. Within a few moments Santa stopped moving and the blood started pouring out and all over me, I went half way through his neck with the razor and I was drowning in it, but I couldn’t get the fucker off me, finally I kind of rolled him over to the side and sort of squirmed my way out.

Dead is dead and Santa was as dead as they come; the blood from that fat fuck pretty much filled the room, I released the elves against my better judgement, who knows what they’re going to want from me? Christ, they’ve been sex slaves and presumably beaten all their lives, what kind of jobs are they going to get? How’s modern society all of a sudden going to deal with 4ft high pointed eared little people walking around with P.T.S.D.

Ah! Fuck it! The elves started to free each other and I beelined straight into one of the cash shacks, gabbed what I could, and got the hell out of hell. I speed off in my ski doo to meet up at my extraction point; this time there was an airplane pick up, I could see the agent who looked half frozen, then I thought of how I looked, completely covered in blood carrying Santa’s toy bag which happened to be full of money, he asked me how the “JOB” went, I just gave him a cold hard stare.

Big City Dreams, Part 5

When I woke up in Jena’s Donald Deskey platform bunk, she’d already run off to her Planetarium guard job. I skipped meditation, hit the Panhard mansion’s private library.

William van Alen designed the Chrysler Building. Acrimony arose between the architect and his automotive client. Motown hicks insisted on mock-Tudor furnishings for the Cloud Club. Mr van Alen tried to set them aesthetically straight. Unpaid bills and breach-of-contract lawsuits eventually fade away. Businessmen die, and their suits and ties end up at the Salvation Army. But gleaming towers scrape the star-filled sky forever, or for a long time, anyway.

There are no stars visible from the sidewalks of New York.

Stars form the van Allen Belt, which anyone who pays admission can admire at the Hayden Planetarium. Jena was there. A looming Zeiss projector whirred to life somewhere. Lester Frills’ remote-control dream machine beamed a reverse-time telescope vision of William van Alen and Edward Durrell Stone in a meeting. The men had already downed too many mar-toon-eyes at the Stork Club.

Stone was flush with cash from the colossal success of his Radio City Music Hall. William van Alen was embattled, embittered. His Big Auto client pinched pennies till they bled. The only thing Detroit cared about was owning the world’s tallest skyscraper. They couldn’t see his creation as a world-wide beacon of Deco-American optimism.

William van Alen gulped dry gin and rumbled, “Stone, those Detroit gangsters and Texaco cowboys screwed my Cloud Club. Now they’re trying to stiff me out of my fee. Help me screw them back. I’ll siphon funds out of Chrysler and Texaco, clear out space in the foundations. That’s the last place they’ll look, even though it’s strictly bottom line, with them. I hand you the dough and carte blanche on the design. We’ll get Donald Deskey involved, bring in all the hot boys. We’ll create our own theater down there. A stage for you know what.”

Edward Durrell Stone’s hands twitched. He knew exactly what van Alen was talking about. It was a show he too desperately wanted to see. As soon as he was sober again, he’d hit the drawing board.

A waiter in white tie brought a fresh bottle of champagne from gay Paree, in a Dunand ice-bucket. Pop went the cork. Splish-fizz went the bubbly. Stemware clinked, Deco architects drinked…drank…drunk to a Deco deal, done.

Stone said, “We’re too good for them, Billy. They don’t deserve our sparkling diamonds.”

***

Paul Poiret will run up the costumes. Cassandre will design the posters. Donald Deskey will handle stage design. Dave Tough will slam down syncopated Synthetic Cubism on the drums. Django Reinhardt will jangle a D’Angelico guitar with ivory inlays on the fretboard. Nijinsky, all thumbs, and Josephine Baker in her G-string of rhinestone bananas will fling themselves across the intarsio parquet.

Lester Frills struts onstage in ostrich plume drag and lip-synchs “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

The injured Chrysler Building folds in on its chrome-molybdenum girders. The spiky headpiece, the eagle-head and flying-hubcap flanges sink into a cloud of cocaine, plaster dust, gilt and glitter. Looks like Lady Liberty’s flashier kid sister being sucked slowly down into the New Jersey swamps in a blizzard.

The disastrous vision filled me with horror and grief. Whatever ghoulish spectacle Lester Frills was planning had to be stopped. But first I had to find him.

New York City absorbs flamboyant macaw-men and bird-of-paradise babes such as Lester and his gang of Black Zen boys and girls. A flaming tiger slips into a fake-fur warehouse and disappears.

Lester would emerge from his spidery hidey-hole when I found the theater. Hand over the keys in exchange for quivering, bound Rei Kawakubo?

Peel the bandaid gag off her lips.

She whispers a fashion koan.

What happens after that? No insights occurred. I went out to look for Lester.

A once-admired shop-window had been raped. Showroom dummies with glass eyes, fake eyelashes, erect nipples had taken over. Over-designed furniture was jumbled together for a backdrop. An amphigory of useless accessories, plastered with corporate logos, burst in hideous fireworks over a compulsive-shopping soundtrack that thudded like the sex-and-torture moans from grindhouses on the Deuce. Come inside for a $3 thrill! Seats the color of rotting liver, floors sticky with spilled sperm and soda pop. Furtive figures fumble, feel, find each other in the fug and flicker. 42^nd Street was the black belt on Manhattan’s waist.

No belts needed, for the clothes that once hung suspended in SoHo thought-space. You put them on, they stayed put. They fit, no matter your size or shape. They looked right, gave the wearer confidence. Such clothes exist only in the mind. They once existed in a shop-window. Rei Kawakubo showed the world another way of being dressed. In other words, not naked.

A 7^th Avenue dumpster yielded discarded bolts of gray worsted and navy blue cotton jersey. Look, you can make your own clothes. Sewing requires patience. Cover your body thoughtfully before you enter the outside world for the day. The world is thought made visible. A skyscraper’s an idea dressed in steel and stone.

***

Jena, a red-headed panther with a flashlight, opened the Planetarium’s back door. We sat through the spacy matinee together. There was no other audience.

When she punched out on the streamlined Burroughs wage/time tabulator, we had a theater date. The show was at a theater only a few people ever knew existed, and most of those who knew were long dead.

The usual zen rags wouldn’t do. Jena knew people in high corner offices at the Chrysler. She was welcome anytime. Passing as her spiritual adviser was implausible.

Jena’s auto executive grandfather’s business suits still hung in one of her walk-in closets. Jupiter Panhard was a huge man. Jena got busy with the safety pins. We only had to get past a sleepy doorman.

Being driven around Manhattan felt wrong. When you’re used to walking, machines powered by dead dinosaur ooze are bizarre. When Zeta Centauri aliens train their Zeiss telescopes on the Earth, they see dinosaurs. Light travels at a constant speed in all directions. On Earth, we stop at red lights, emit engine noise, heat and toxic fumes. In Buck Rogers movies, and in William van Alen’s dreams, Deco spaceships built like flying skyscrapers buzz around the Van Allen Belt in silence, with no exhaust.

What would a zen skyscraper look like? Does an architect have Buddha nature? Should a zen buddhist belong to a Cloud Club that would have him as a member? Jena was so beautiful, the traffic lights turned green. While I dreamed up ridiculous koans, she let the Chrysler Building doorman help her out of the car.

She handed him the keys. They jingled like money. “Any space you can find, Reeves, as long as it’s within a block or two. Me and Daddy Warbucks here might have to make a quick getaway. There might be gunplay. Oh I would not entirely rule that out. Come along, dear.”

Chrysler Building doormen dream of roaring-30s scenarios. They accept packages, sign in surly bike messengers, hail taxis for rude businessmen in the rain. No tips, no thanks, no appreciation, no respect. Then the lady for whom glorious confections of steel are hurled skywards materializes out of a dream. At the wheel of a gargantuan American automobile—who cares if it’s not a Chrysler?—dressed in a gown that turns life into an endless party. So what if the shmo in the shotgun seat looks like he’s never stepped out of a car or worn a suit or leather shoes with hard soles, fer chryssakes.

Jena danced across the lobby. Red-eyed security cameras stared as a dream went by in real life, but nobody was watching the show.

Silver okapis with horns like narwhals’ tusks grazed spear-grass under stylized clouds, rainbows and lightning bolts in a geometric elevator jungle lit by interpenetrating diamond sconces. Jena bubbled over. We were in.

How cool, to be a pretty lady who snaps her fingers and the world does whatever she wants. She pulled me into a clutch. Crinoline crunched against chrome. She hit the SB button. We went down.

The sub-basement service elevator went down even further.

***

Queasy

It was the day of my Uncle Alvin’s funeral when they came for me. I always knew they would.

I’d started drinking by breakfast, and I feel queasy by the time Alvin’s widow Brenda retrieves the bottle of liquor from her handbag at the crematorium.

At one point I consider climbing into Alvin’s casket for a lie-down, but then I remember the dismembered state of his corpse, and think better of it. So much of him was missing that the morticians filled the coffin with polystyrene to stop the body from shifting position during transit. They forget to remove the polystyrene before they burn the body though, and a toxic stink fills the small chapel.

***

The wake takes place at the Dirty Lemon. I’m drinking shots at the bar with Brenda, and feel halfway to oblivion. She’s a scorched-looking brunette who dresses like a streetwalker. She turns heads, just not always in a good way.

The room goes quiet when they walk in. Two men wearing overcoats and full-face balaclavas. I recognise them, despite the woollen masks. Their names are Rudy and Ron. Earlier this year they thought that they had nailed a big score when they ripped off the Sex Shop on Winner Street. All they found was a shoebox full of dusty family bones and a few choices extracts from Dirty Harold’s private porn stash.

The safecracker they hired was a drunk named Arlo Noakes. He blew his own fingertips off with plastic explosive because he was too lazy to do the job properly, and obliterated a crate of nearly-new dildos in the process. Arlo later claimed that he stemmed the blood-loss with a back issue of Tailgunner, but I didn’t believe him – the paper would be far too glossy.

Afterwards, Arlo hired me to deliver a message to Rudy and Ron, and paid me well for my time. Things got bloody, as they often do, but I was happy to snap a few bones. Ron was jailed for gross indecency in 1989 while running a video shop, and he hasn’t held down an honest job since he got out of Channings Wood. On his 50th birthday he was arrested for trying to chloroform a boy at the Crossways Centre. Rudy is a part-time morgue worker and ex-weight lifter – he’s the really scary one. His face looks like a fucking Halloween mask.

Rudy snorts a bump of something – probably homemade crank – off his hand. He has a tattoo of a tombstone on the fleshy patch of skin between his finger and thumb.

Ron’s scarred eyebrow crumples as he winks at me. Up close, his cologne smells of gutter water. He has a claw-hammer up the sleeve of his overcoat. What a lovely surprise.

He dents my skull with the flat end, and my vision goes blurry. I start to fall and he hits me again – behind the ear this time.

***

When I regain consciousness there is a fat dog pissing on my leg. I realise that someone has dragged me out of the pub and left me on the wheelchair ramp. My hair is sticky with blood and there is a tender crater on the side of my head. The dog is chained to the railings. It looks dangerous, so I slowly detach its collar and point it towards the bus station. It’s someone else’s problem now.

I can taste blood in my mouth. I must have bit my tongue when Ron hit me with the hammer.

I wrap the dog-chain around my right hand. It will have to do. It might break my fingers, but I’m hoping that it will also be sufficient to break a nose or a cheekbone, maybe a fucking eye-socket.

***

When I push my way through to the back-room, Rudy and Ron are still loosening their belts, which means I can’t have been knocked out for long. Feeble sunlight filters through the greasy window, and I feel a jolt of nausea as I see Brenda sprawled across the piss-coloured linoleum, fishnet tights round her ankles. I can see the tattoo of Alvin’s name on her pelvis.

I grab Ron by his greasy hair and slam my chain-wrapped fist into his face. I feel a couple of knuckles pop, but I hit him again, regardless. My third punch knocks him out. Rudy retrieves his hammer from the top of the chest freezer. He hits me on the shoulder blade, and I feel hot sick rising in my throat.

If he hits my skull again I’ll probably end up fucking brain-damaged.

I let the dog-chain unravel and whip it across his face. He’s a tough little cunt, and he barely makes a sound as it crumples his misshapen nose and knocks him off his feet.

I stand over him, thick blood dripping from the chain.

He reaches for the hammer and I stamp on his wrist. He reaches for it again, so I stamp on his mouth instead.

I look down. Jesus. His ruined face looks like a vaginal infection. In the half-light, the blood on the floor looks black.

I wipe the blood off my right boot and pick up his hammer. I fake a lunge with the tool, and hear an erratic splattering sound – followed by a thick, evil stench. He gurgles teeth.

I help Brenda to her feet. Her red eyes look out-of-focus and her skin looks chalky.

When she kisses me she tastes of blood. Blood and black-market cigarettes.

She presses up against me, looking dazed. Her nylon underwear feels wet against my leg.

“Is he dead?”

“No…”

It hurts when I talk, and my voice comes out as a thick-tongued slur.

“…but he will probably have difficulty remembering his own name in future.”

***

Outside, the early evening sky looks bloodshot. I dump the dog-chain on top of an ashtray and we drift towards the sea-front, arm-in-arm.

“Who were those men?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She lights another cigarette.

“You know what Alvin used to say?”

I shrug.

“There is a price we pay for the mistakes we make.”

I shrug again.

“Well, he would fucking know.”

Strangers In Strange Fucking Lands

There once was a woman named Nancy Botkin. She’d always wanted to be a writer, but she’d had a son Nick with a deadbeat poet named Frank Beachwood who disappeared ten minutes after he saw his newborn spawn. And for sixteen years, she tried to raise Nick to the best of her ability, making sure he was clothed and safe. She took him to school, to piano lessons, chauffeuring him around as though he were a fucking king. And she tried to love him, but a part of her saw a kind of tyrant, a sort of emotional Pharaoh weighing her down with demands. Love me. Focus all your attention on me. Nick clung to his mother like Superglue, following her day and night. And he criticized her because she wasn’t the sort of tender, weepy mother in the old movies. She grappled day and night with her feelings. She tried to say she loved him, but it was near impossible, especially since he reminded her so much of Frank, with his long nose, his dreamy hazel eyes. So she kept doing things for Nick, trying to fill in those gaps, to express things she couldn’t say.

After sixteen years of motherhood, and Nick’s complaints about her mothering style, she up and left. Nick had complained about how she was too obsessed with writing and how she needed to accept shit. And that had filled her with a sensation, a feeling of both dread and possibility. She saw the painful present, she saw a future calling her like a sultry seductress.

For forty years, she wandered across the country, occasionally writing Nick. She wandered across vast cities with bustling crowds, through small towns, staying in old motels and in shacks along the coast and she felt a sense that something vast was unfurling, as though the world were becoming something new. She was Nancy Botkin. She was a writer. An artist. She was no longer someone’s girlfriend or mother.

But after forty years of bliss, ever the good writer, she felt the inevitable urge to drop back to her old town, to remember the roots from which she came. She was curious about the things that had gone on without her and felt a kind of stirring, something pulling her back toward the vortex of the old world. She was horrified to discover that Nick was now the producer of a successful TV show, “Runaway Moms”, a sitcom about mothers running off, with a very obnoxious laugh track. Nancy wandered into Nick, while he was directing an actress playing a drunk mother, telling her she needed to truly hate the actor playing her son.

The minute Nick saw her, all he had to say was “you need to see a psychiatrist, Nancy. Forty years. Amazing.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?” she said. “You’re the one producing this godawful show.”

“Because you left me.”

“Your father left you too,” Nancy said. “Produce a show called Deadbeat Dad.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t really know him.”

“What you mean is because he’s a man,” she said. “Mothers are different.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you, Nick,” she said. “You never asked about your father. You just needed me to be there for everything. That’s my role, no doubt.”

“You were gone for forty years.”

“I needed to get lost.”

“You need to see a psychiatrist,” Nick said.

“You need to see a psychiatrist,” Nancy said. Surprisingly Nick agreed to go see one.

They went to a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Greenlee. He focused entirely on Nancy’s problem. He asked her about the towns she’d been in. When she told him about the lighthouse she’d visited along the coast, he said, “Well then, you truly craved a man all along.”

“What does a lighthouse have to do with men?”

“A lighthouse looks like a penis,” Dr. Greenlee said. “Therefore you subconsciously clamor for a man’s penis.”

“Bullshit.”

“What did you have for dessert last night?”

“Ice cream. Is this relevant?”

“Another penis shaped object,” Dr. Greenlee said. “My advice is forget the wandering, and find a man. Go back to your natural sphere.”

“Things look like penises because men have too much power. Men make objects in their own image,” Nancy said. “What does that have to do with Nick?”

“Semantics,” Dr. Greenlee said. “I’m just saying perhaps you need a family. Perhaps the penis represents a lost lover. And perhaps Nick by extension. Nick has been denied much. We must focus on this poor child.”

“I don’t want to have sex with Nick.”

“I’m just saying he represents a need for male companionship on your part, and a need for female love on his own.”

“He’s fifty-six. He’s my fucking son.”

“Semantics,” Dr. Greenlee repeated. “Don’t make this about you. We need to focus on the truly traumatized Nick here. Only if we dissect Nick like a frog can we learn about you.”

“What about Nick? He produces a show about bad mothers. He hasn’t lost his ability to live.”

“That’s a normal manifestation of grief. It doesn’t mean he hates you. It’s an avenue Nancy,” the doctor said, nodding his bulbous head, stroking his Freud-like beard.

“Fuck it,” Nancy said.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Greenlee said.

“So is my need for escape.”

“We can talk about that later.”

She waited for Nick to say something but he was nodding, hypnotized by Dr. Greenlee, who had begun to laugh maniacally, like a villain, as if amused by all this. In his laughter, she thought of Frank Beachwood for the first time, thought of the ease with which he left. Nancy stepped outside the door, flipped the bird to her son and Dr. Greenlee, and wandered out into the wilderness, to never be heard from again, until one day, a group of actors from “Runaway Moms” found a very recognizable woman in the desert, holding a sign next to their filming location.

The sign read: If you like freedom, ban “Runaway Mothers.” Run away mothers. Runaway mothers unite!

The Great Kwik Stop Heist

Two weeks before they became accomplices in murder, Jimmy and Kelly met at the Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse. Kelly was trying to meet the terms of her probation and Jimmy was lonely and bored. Neither were alcoholics.

Kelly held herself out to be the mistress of heists but was really just the kind of girl that would stick $15 worth of Dollar General makeup in her pants for the rush. Five different times. The judge was ready to sentence her to serious time when she ditched her public defender and found a bulldog of an attorney whom she let suck her toes in lieu of cash payment. The afternoons of propping her feet on his mahogany desk paid off and she got a stint at AA as punishment.

Jimmy should have known she was trouble the first night he met her.

“You’re hot. Wanna go in the bathroom and fuck?” she asked without an ounce of shame.

“Not in the bathroom,” he said. “Let’s get out of this shithole.”

***

Jimmy and Kelly were half way through a bottle of whiskey, naked on a consigned couch at the corner of Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn, when they decided to steal the mini ATM at the Kwik Stop Food Mart.

“You really want to knock over the Kwik Stop,” Kelly laughed.

“It’s the only way to get the big bucks,” Jimmy slurred.

Jimmy Swindell had never been particularly business savvy. Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn was an ill-conceived whim after his father passed away and left him with a quarter million dollars and a small box of Kruggerands. He had one made into a necklace so he could flaunt his new wealth. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” was his motto. It worked—kind of. “Jimbo! Can you spot me a couple hundred until payday? I’ll give you my stereo as collateral,” his favorite bartender asked him one day. Thus, Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn was born.

These days, the shop was fewer guns and gold coins and more expired baby car seats and dusty disco balls, along with an assortment of hunting rifles his old friends would come by to hock for Xanax money.

Jimmy needed cash to stay afloat and a heist seemed about right.

***

In the backroom of his shop, Jimmy collapsed against the wall, sweat rolling down his face, his eyes darting back and forth from Kelly to the locked door.

“You fucking shot him. For $180 and a broken tabletop ATM.”

“What? It was a heist? What do you think happens in heists?” Kelly asked, incredulous.

“Well, what now?! You fucking killed a dude. An innocent dude.”

Jimmy knew Kelly was stupid but didn’t realize the extent until that moment.

For a petty thief who had just committed her first murder, Kelly was oddly calm. “We can call my lawyer.” The more Jimmy looked at her, the more disgusted he became.

“The toe sucker? Really, Kelly? We need a real plan.”

“Run? I have a friend in Texas we could crash with for a couple weeks. Go to Mexico after? Just me and you. I’ll be your Bonnie and you can be my Clyde.”

“Fuck off, Kelly.”

***

Jimmy, having never stolen more than a pack of gum and Kelly, petty thief extraordinaire, didn’t know anything about heists beyond what they saw on TV.

“Should we go with ski masks?” Kelly asked.

“Nah, too hot. And a little cliché,” Jimmy said.

“Pantyhose?” suggested Kelly.

“Maybe.”

The mini ATM was near the slurpy machine and coffee makers, near the back of the store. Jimmy had done some casing and noticed only two security cameras at the front of the store: One outside and one inside.

“You a good shot?” Jimmy asked Kelly.

“Yeah, of course I am,” Kelly said. “I used to go squirrel hunting with my daddy all the time.”

“Good. You think you can handle shooting out the security cameras then? With a .22 maybe?”

“Definitely.”

The next day, it was a go. Kelly drove, since Jimmy’s Suburban had the Guns and Pawn logo on the back window. They parked around the corner, Kelly with her .22 and Jimmy unarmed, so he could grab the ATM and run.

It was Sunday night and the Qwik Stop looked empty.

“Ready for this?” Jimmy grinned.

“Damn straight,” said Kelly.

They each pulled a pair of panty hose over their heads and stormed the front doors.

“This is a holdup!” Kelly screamed a little too loudly.

The guy behind the counter, a pimple-faced 40-something, looked up from his phone, annoyed. “Shit, y’all. I haven’t even been here a week.”

“Shut up and no one gets hurt!” Kelly yelled.

Jimmy headed to the back of the store and tried to lift the ATM. It wasn’t any bigger than a large microwave, but was heavier than he expected. He wiggled it off the counter, not noticing the handwritten note taped over the screen: Out of order. No cash.

He almost buckled under the weight of the machine, but remembered the future of his shop was at stake.

“All the cash in a bag!” Jimmy heard Kelly yell.

The register wasn’t part of the plan.

“Kelly, the cameras?!” Jimmy struggled with the broken ATM.

“C’mon, bitch. Y’all got the ATM,” the clerk said, annoyed.

“In a bag. Now.” Kelly meant business.

As Jimmy struggled to push open the Kwik Mark double doors, he heard it: A pop. And then another.

***

Kelly calmly counted her nine $20 bills. “I’m telling you: We need go to Texas then head on down to Mexico.”

“Screw that,” said Jimmy. “What even happened back there?”

“He wasn’t fast enough. And I didn’t like his face.”

Jimmy didn’t have a chance to respond before heard a knock at the front of the store. “Police, open up!”

“Shit.” Jimmy whispered. He felt panic welling up in his stomach. He looked at the back door and then to Kelly. “Mexico?”

“Si, Monsieur Clyde!”

And then they were off.

Cat’s-Eye Bullet

The old man says, “Cancer’s like having termites in your house,” sitting there in his shitty bathrobe with his skinny legs. “I’ve been tented and fumigated twice and it’s no fuckin’ picnic.” He rattles a giant vial of Norcos and tilts two into his mouth. He squints at me with one eye while he chews them, then he takes a hit from a bottle of Tanqueray and breaks into a coughing fit.

Frank is the sickest of my five cancer clients, with stage-four lung cancer. He lives on Dilaudid patches, Norcos, and booze, but tells me that the weed I bring him is the only thing that quiets the pain. The rest he’s just stuck with ’cause it’s too hard to stop. Most of my clients are healthy: stockbrokers and gym trainers, a restaurant manager, some housewives, and a few teachers at the local community college.

He fires up a pin joint and takes a long hit. It crackles a bit, which is odd. When he hands it to me I say, “Is this mine?” He waits until he’s ready to let loose a billow of white smoke and then says, “Yeah, kind of,” which is also odd. I take a hit, even though it’s earlier in the day than I like to start.

Something strange happens right away. The room contracts and then stretches. I have tunnel vision and there’s a buzzing in my head, like hornets in an echo chamber. I look at Frank, who seems far away, and say, “What the fuck?” but I’m not sure if real words come out of my mouth or if I’m just beaming the thought. Frank is chuckling, chuckle chortle chuckawalla Chick-fil-A—Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with me?

For some reason there’s a gun in Frank’s hand. “What did you do?” I beam at him.

“DMT,” he says. “It’s good for you. Clears the mind.”

“What are you fucking talking about?” I manage to say.

“It’s been preparing me for the big event,” he says, “and now I’m ready.” He puts the gun barrel to his mouth for a second, then thrusts it out toward me.

“But why me? I thought you were my friend.” I try to get up, but it’s not happening. My heart sounds like a basketball pounding on a gym floor, but I can’t make my body do anything. The hole at the end of the gun looks big enough to shoot marbles. I imagine a tri-color cats-eye flying at me, and for some reason start cracking up. The world goes dark and I see a glowing cobalt sphere; I envelope it and perceive it from all angles at once and become the sphere and shoot out a ray, like a laser, and another and another. I am a glowing cobalt sea urchin whose spines shoot out like questions into the Universe and then retract, unanswered.

“I am your friend,” Frank says, and now he’s squinting at me again. He’s laughing like an idiot and pointing the gun at me. “Fact is,” he says, “I just don’t want to do this alone.”

For a brief second I see myself through Frank’s eyes and then the gun goes up and turns and Bang! Frank’s brains are on the wall. My mind is infinitely elastic; there is nothing it cannot accommodate. The questions go out and come back unanswered. The rays go out and retract like breathing. The breathing accelerates, it pulses, it oscillates, it hums, it harmonizes, orchestral now, and a voice—Frank’s—says, “Hey, fuck, Robert, come back, what the fuck?” He’s trying to hand me a black glass pipe, but I’m in love with the music.

nothing happened

we stand in the corner of the club his hands are down my pants then I’m invisible hiding behind roses in the cab, he laughs and says he’ll drop me off the motion makes me sick the driver thinks I’m going to be sick and won’t turn the air on I stick my head out the window and do not throw up and the air comes on as his hands return to me at my building he gets out with me I’ve kept him away from my apartment until now it was the last defense but when he comes up and sits on the couch I insist that he follow me to the bedroom he turns me on my stomach and yanks my boots off lowers my pants I take my shirt off unhook my lace bra he bites my nipples kisses my stomach sticks his tongue in my pussy before yanking my pants off at some point I’ve opened his belt and pulled down his zipper and I want him to fuck me he says he doesn’t know if he can get hard but he does and he kisses me the first real kiss we ever had and fucks me with his clothes on I’m naked he’s hot afterwards kisses my back says he has to go can’t stay I can’t figure out how to call him a car still drunk so he puts his guitar on his back and says he’ll get a cab there are never any cabs down here, but I can’t figure out how to communicate that either, I do the drunk thing where I promise to never do the drunk thing again sleep for a few hours wake up and text him ask if he got home ok and he answers all good calls me at 10 AM, asks if anything happened last night I tell him no, he says I just dropped you off, right? I laugh and say of course and he’s relieved because of course nothing happened if you don’t remember it and if that’s what he needs to hear his black-outs are not my problem my denial is not his problem and if I had any doubts there is evidence, the leopard boot on the windowsill, the sock hanging from a lamp, the upside down Dylan poster on the wall, my panties on the bathroom floor, my shirt and pants inside out, the other boot on the couch, the second sock in the garbage, the sheets streaked with cum and shit, the quilt under a chair, but as far as we know nothing happened.