This thing… like human
To begin, there is a man and he carries in his pocket a small, doll made out of golden foil. Although, truth be told, it’s not so much of a doll, not really but in our words there is nothing else for what it is, so unfortunately it is a doll. The man is not exactly sure why he has the doll. It belonged to someone he cared for, sure but even more, it makes him feel this thing that makes his hands shake just a little and his back tighten up and straighten out.
Now to those that knew him, he was not much of a man. Not much of one at all. A child, yes. A brilliant one, for sure and had the city had the mind to measure him as such, he would have been one for the ages. They would have filled themselves with stories of him, some true, some false and all of them just slightly stretched, as are any good stories of children. They’d have added a word he said, here or taken one away. Or maybe a look of awareness that wasn’t really there at all, that would have made his thoughts less self-centered or his offenses a tad more innocent. But alas, he was not a child. Not even close and so when they thought of him, it had to be of only as a man and again, he was not much of one.
And even more, he had in him none of those things that could have ever made him one of any real significance. No desires, nor abilities to rule or reign. No thoughts of collecting for himself (or for anyone, for that matter) an alternate reality filled with shiny, powder chromed tools, winter suits and beveled timepieces. And even worse, when he spoke, it was never with the irony or apathy of a man. And it was never, ever with a measured cadence or in a strong and steady tone. For better or worse, his words were ones of wonder and hope and almost always in earnest but they were never ever clever or really even interesting to anyone but him alone and the pitch of his voice bounced up and down like fingers tapping out a silent song.
This is, however, not to say that he was without friends. Again, not at all. In fact, had you asked those around him, first off, you’d have been told of just how many friends he had. The man was beloved by almost everyone. Yes, yes, that is the perfect word for what he was, beloved.
Within moments, everyone he met felt that inside of him was a perfect understanding of they, themselves and so they surrounded themselves with him, much in the same way that smokers always know each other, long before they’ve lit up and at some point in the evening, they casually turn to one another with a confident, surety and ask, “smoke.” And soon, they’re standing in the dark, with their hands cocked back and continuing their conversation without ever realizing that the odds of meeting a non-smoker are four times greater than running into a tar-stained peer. And of those that did not count themselves a friend, of those that smirked when he came round or turned their backs, it was only because he had in him no ability, none whatsoever, to create a hierarchy in his mind of all the people that he knew. Our man treated everyone the same, as a closest friend, no matter how long they had known him and no matter how close to him they really were. And this, coupled with his overall outlandish outlook on life itself, produced in them a feeling of being slightly slighted, somehow ignored and overlooked and in the worst of cases, all but forgotten.
So it is safe to say that this man, Christopher North, was by no means friendless but also, that in no way was he any bit of a man. Rather, he was like a mascot somewhat for the small community. A pet, so to speak, but one capable of incredibly thoughtful dialogue and the most sincere commonality.
In the small town, if you knew Christopher North, you knew him from the one of the 4 or 5 local bars that he, each night, attended. Yes, that is also said correct. Christopher North, did not just go to bars, he attended them. For him, the city’s bars were like a Church and in the drinking, the shared glances, the occasional brushes of skin on skin, he celebrated mass. Each service ending with the bellowing a-a-a-m-e-e-e-n, of the bartender’s l-a-a-a-a-s-t c-a-a-a-l-l-l-l.
Unfortunately, to everyone that knew him these nightly ventures out were also greatly misunderstood. He never went to see someone, never just to drink, although the drinking did bring him a secret pleasure as great as nearly everything else in his tiny life. He never went to be in the scene and never, ever just to go where he knew that people knew his name. No, his reasoning was much more simple. His attendance, only an act of silent worship of something resembling something purely human.
Understand, this search for something purely human was his great passion. This act of being alive and only what he was. That’s it, more than anything he loved being what he was. This thing awash with feelings and inflamed by flesh. At times, he would touch his skin and marvel at the pressure that he felt push back. He would ask great questions, never anticipating answers but rather fascinated by just the thoughts themselves. The way the words strung together. He treasured the way a woman’s shirt rose and the feeling in his stomach when he stared too long. He loved the way it made him feel to make another laugh and the quiet joy he found in occasionally brutally saying, “no.” (This detail of pleasure in the occasional defiant, “no” to someone in trouble or in need, is included so that the reader does not think he was a good or a simple man.) Understand, he was neither of those. Not even close. But remember, he also was not a bad man. Not by any stretch.
Shortly, after his thirtieth birthday, he had left his work and decided that his was just to experience all of what he was and to find new ways to experience those tiny moments that he found in bars. Finding new flesh to press against, original conversations to overhear. New ways to make people laugh and be made to laugh. And so, our man dropped out of normal life like the hopeless addict drops out of his, all in search of that next hit. Christopher North, mainlined living.
To him, there was a spirit, a daemon of sorts, found only in the bars and it climbed onto the backs of everyone who entered and it made their skin invisible and their words just slightly more clear. And so almost each and every night, he would sit in a corner by himself while people stopped by occasionally for a hello or a quick hug and they would talk and catch up and compare thoughts on the war or the book that they were reading and then the people would drift away, caught up in something else or another. And by himself again, he would look around and watch and listen and feel this wave of awe and wonder at the flesh and bones that moved throughout the room and left in their wake only the purest essence of what it meant to be a beating heart, a probing mind and all these pleasures and pains, jumbled and mashed together.
The owner of his favorite bar, “High Art,” it was called, was nearly his age. He was tall and thin with this translucent skin and had you seen him anywhere but there, you would have sworn that he was on a break from a local theatre that was doing a revival of a 19th century melodrama. And this man, the owner, was the villain and his stretched out, forever smile seemed painted on. Something about him, his behavior and attire, be sure, (he wore ridiculous jackets and tight black pants) but something else, something in his eyes made all of his actions seem exaggerated and overblown. A wave of his hand stretched all the way across the bar and a flick of his wrist felt as though it could knock you over. The patrons all loved him and when he poured a drink that hit the bottom of the bottle, (imagine this), it was yours for free.
Nevertheless, it was commonly assumed that he had some tragedy that loomed heavy over him. Maybe he was left at the altar or touched as a child or maybe he had a twin sister that had died at four, everyone grabbed on to anything that might explain this man’s constant vigor. But he didn’t.
Each night, after closing the bar, he would circle the building and collect the thrown down silver and gold foil from the tops of cigarette packs. At the weeks end, he would fashion the foil into a little person (or people, depending on how much he could collect) who he would then take to his little rental unit and place on a giant sheet of plywood that he had bought from another patron, for this specific purpose. The board housed old men with top hats and canes and young women with dogs. Children played by a cavalry statue and commuters stepped from the metro-rail. It was a wonderful diorama, really, and it flashed bright beneath his kitchen light. When walking by it, slow or quick, the shiny foil off the bulb made it look like it was moving and he could almost hear the city’s screams.
In the center of the little town was the first figure that he had made. It was a little him and he had fashioned it so that its arms stood wide and outstretched like he was conducting an orchestra. Sometimes he made little clothes for himself out of the white, blank backs of the foil and with this, his replica alone, stood out amongst the others.
At forty-one the man, was diagnosed with a tumor on his back and by forty-two, he was dead. It came to be the bar managers task to clear his loft. And so using a key that he had been given years before, the manager and Christopher North, went to the place, found the mocked up city and sat down in front of it and cried. They remembered the man and all of his eccentricities. They thought about how he was always, at great expense to himself, making others cry with laughter and how he had been the only one, to think to give Stephy Witt a card, when the cocktail girl’s mother had died.
Of the two men, North, noticed the little figure in the center first and for a reason he didn’t fully understand at the time, he put it in his pocket before the other man had time to see it. While they sat there, staring at the board, they each explained the man’s crude interpretation of the city to themselves. Here was a soul that wanted to fashion a world for just him alone, or here was one who created reproductions of people that he knew because he had problems with real relationships. For years each of them, would tell others of what they found that night and those people would also create these sad, little incomplete stories that tried to find a reason for the thing itself. And it came to be that the great and only ever tragedy of the tall man’s life, was that not one of those two men and not one of the ones that they would surely tell, was ever even close to anything that resembled why it was.
This thing… like sadness
Chelsea Wilde worked at, High Art on Thursday and Saturday nights. She was petite yet still curiously wide, with a beautiful face and a full, enhanced chest. She wore tight, low cut shirts and you never saw her without seeing just enough of the side of a breast to think that at any moment she might turn and show you more but somehow, she never did. Her shirts always held tight and her best parts remained just out of sight.
Chelsea was madly in love with another bartender, the charming, handsome, young Brian Bates. The two had slept together once but for Brian it was nothing serious, just something to do after a shift. For Chelsea however, it was what one does when you love someone and in this, she was right. It is what one does when you love someone. Unfortunately, for Chelsea however, Brian, was also correct. It really is just something to do and they found themselves in one of those bizarre and completely human experiences where both were doing the right thing for themselves and for the other and yet it made one happy and it made the other terribly run-down.
For the first fourteen years of her life, Chelsea and her parents had lived together in a two-room, converted basement. Her father had lost his job at the local bottling plant and he had decided that after twenty-one years of machining parts for machines that crafted bottle he was not about to learn a new trade and fuck ’em if they thought he was going to earn less than he was used to. That night he got drunk and swore that he would move into his mother-in-laws basement before he would ever work again and so, less than one year later, they did.
Chelsea enjoyed living with her grandma and even more she loved all the little curios and knick-knacks that the old woman had filled her house with. Every inch of every shelf , ever horizontal plank, the top of the television, the window sills, the back of the couch, held something painted and wooden or ceramic and sculpted or crafted and soft and she would take down them down, turn them over in her hands and imagine where they might had come from and what they were. And she would imagine, her grandmother’s face when she had received it. Had she been disappointed or overjoyed? Was it a coming or a going gift?
Her father enjoyed living there as well. At last freed from the grind of daily work and from the upkeep and the mortgage of the home that they had lost, he had actually began to enjoy his life and this stranger that Chelsea had never known began to involve himself in her every day. He walked her to school and back each day and winked at her teacher when he dropped her off. He made up these wonderful games that they would play after school and had names like, “pony-tail surprise,” and “secret-granny.”
They were indeed very poor but Chelsea never knew it. She loved the macaroni and cheese or the eggs for dinner and when Christmas came, her grandma wrapped up her favorite of the curios and Chelsea opened them and pretended to be surprised. With this Chelsea grew to be sweet and loving and she had in her this never-ending longing for all that would come next. When she slid down the slide, she was already fantasizing about swinging on the swings and walking home with her father she was already choosing the book that he would read to her that evening when he tucked her in. For a child, the simple pleasure in all that was to come resulted in an awesome enthusiasm and a perpetually, pleasant disposition.
Still though, with all of this, deep inside of her was a question, or two, to be exact, that once and a while, when she was quiet or alone would ache at her mind and drip down onto her heart. It was a question composed only of a single why and an isolated how. Why, she wondered, did certain other people that she knew, not everyone but some, both children and adults, seem painted over as with a layer of this thing like sadness. And it covered over them even when they told a joke or sang along with the radio in the car. She wondered what this thing was and she felt that she had to know, just how it had come to cover over them in the first place.
Her mother had this thing covering over her, but funny, her father did not. A brother and sister she knew in school had it but she could not understand where it could have come from because neither of their parents did.
As she grew older the pastimes that once so entertained her faded away and she began to long for new experiences that never seemed to come and in the idleness, more and more she thought about this thing. And she noticed that those who had it covering over them seemed to somehow have more credibility in the world. People befriended them easier and they trusted them more. It was assumed, she learned, that those who had it had somehow had deeper thoughts and better ideas. That they understood something about how the world was, that the others didn’t know.
More than anything, Chelsea often wondered if this thing would ever come and cover over her. By then the wondering had turned (as it often does) to desire and even more she wanted the privileges it came with. But it never came. She went through all of high school without it. After school, she got a job as a waitress at a local Pizza house because it seemed that all the girls there had this thing. The customers were always pulling the girls onto their laps and slapping at their ass and laughing but no one seemed to notice her. She started going out with the girls after work and smoking and drinking throughout the night but still, it just never came. She got breast implants and suffered through two weeks of bandages and pain but when she came back to work, she quickly learned that all that had changed was the size of her bras and she was still without this thing, that certain other people that she respected had.
Finally, in an act of desperation, she took a year off from her Early Childhood Education studies and enrolled in a bartending course at the local vocational college. She had noticed that every bartender that she knew had this thing and she knew that while it wouldn’t come with the certification, it might come along as a result of it.
As an attractive, full-figured, young woman, she was hired on the spot by the first bar she interviewed at, High Art. The next day she met Brian. At first, Chelsea thrived at the bar. She was the new face and everyone wanted to get to know her. They asked her questions about her life and they always invited her out. Slowly, as they got to know her though, her new friends noticed strange things about her. Once, at a pool party she spilled a drink and began to cry. A girl, she didn’t know took her into the bathroom and cleaned her up but for the rest of the night Chelsea sat by herself and wouldn’t smile. Another time, when the group went up to the mountains to see a meteor shower, Chelsea wore a sweater with Winnie the Pooh on it and the other girls laughed at her behind her back. Weeks later, the group had an end of the Summer bonfire and some of the girls got drunk and sang and danced around the fire but Chelsea sat by herself and pretended to read the messages on her phone. When they invited her over, she refused and just said, “I don’t dance to this kind of music.” Slowly, the invitations were fewer and further between and Chelsea, sensing them withdraw from her, began to work even harder at becoming one of them.
Now, she went to far and was written up for flashing her tits one evening while she was working. She tried the harder things they did and slept with a few of the regulars, an act that might have changed things had she done it earlier but now, just pushed the other staff, further and further away.
The customers at the bar slowly picked up on all of this and for a reason that many of them didn’t quite understand, several stopped coming in. It was on one of these mysteriously slow nights that she first slept with Brian. She had been in love with him from the moment that they met but since they rarely worked together, she had to settle for seeing him when he came in on the nights she worked or when she went in on the nights he was there. On this evening, she had traded shifts with another girl just to get to work beside him.
That night the bar was dead slow so they closed down early and decided to hit a few local spots to see how the others in the area were doing. First they went to “Austin,” a bar a block away. It was crowded and they had a drink and a shot of whiskey with the bartender. After, they jumped over to, “La Silla,” also down the street. Its trademark was a long solid oak bar, cut from a single piece of wood and tonight it was also filled with patrons. It was rumored around the local industry, that the bar alone had cost the new owner over a million dollars and people came and drank just to stand over it. Brian was a favorite around the area and within five minutes some friends of his that were also there, bought them another round. Three drinks in and Chelsea was starting to feel quite comfortable. Two hours and two more drinks later, she felt Brian’s hand casually slip around her waist. Surprised, she turned into him and he mistook the move for seduction and dropped his head so their lips could meet.
They kissed for a few seconds and then they made their way out to his car. An hour later, she was straightening her skirt and he was fumbling for a cigarette.
“Jesus,” Brian said. “Did that really just happen?”
Although, those were not quite the words Chelsea would have most wanted to hear, she was still high from the hormones firing adrenaline into her central cortex so she laughed and said, “you know it did, silly.” Brian had never been called, “silly,” by someone his own age and he made a promise right then and there, to never sleep with her again. He dropped her off back at her car and she went home, ate a cupcake her grandmother had baked earlier in the day and fell asleep.
Christopher North did not get to know Chelsea in the same way that the others had. He had gotten to know her, slowly, over time and she grew to regard him as one regards a certificate hanging over an office desk or a trophy in their bedroom. An object that makes one feel better about themselves. When he sat at her bar, she had the feelings that she had growing up. She was excited for tomorrow and she felt able to plan for what she might do with her life. It wasn’t so much what he said or how he said the things he said, rather it was the way he sat. He always turned the stool so that it was perpendicular to the bar and he could look down behind it at her and out in front of it and all the way across the tiny, darkened room. He picked at the tiny hairs on his chin and he drank his drink, in long slow sips. Most often, he had this look on his face. It wasn’t quite a smile but it wasn’t stoic, either. Mostly, it just seemed very interested. She liked that everyone seemed to know him and stop by and say hello and she loved the fact that most of the people kept on moving and he didn’t seem to mind at all. He had a confidence about him and she felt proud to know him as well as she did. They had kissed one night when he had drank a few too many and he had had waited for her to close up and take him home. After that, running into him wasn’t odd at all and when she broached the subject he laughed and called it, “high school stuff.”
After the night with Brian, Chelsea waited for him to call. When he finally did, it was to ask if she wanted to pick up his shift that night and two weeks would go by before they spoke again.
He came in on a night that she was working. He came around the bar, like he owned the place and reached out for a hug. When they pulled away, she gave him a quizzical look.
“What,” he said, innocently laughing and shrugging his shoulders.
The bar had gone sort of quiet and while he stood there under her smile that was also at least half a glare, everyone around them could feel that something in the room had changed. They turned to the two of them, standing awkwardly in front of the bottles backlit by lights and waited for the moment to pass. A few more moments went by and suddenly Chelsea felt this weight crawl onto her neck and wrap around her shoulders and it painted over her with a layer of this thing like sadness and it never was to leave.
This thing… like Marble (with Ivory tusks)
Christopher North lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Costa Mesa, a small suburb located almost in the center of Orange County, California. He had moved there from Los Angeles, some eleven years earlier at twenty-one and once he arrived, he swore that he would never leave. It was to be one of the only two promises he was ever able to keep.
At 32, Christopher had already done and seen many things. He had watched an old man die, sold cars at a low-end dealership, tended bars and worked for some time at a homeless shelter. He had also swum with wild dolphins, suffered two nervous breakdowns, fallen in and out and into love again and once, he had even slept with his best friends wife. Now, he spent his days simply, writing stories at a local café. He had never sold one, never attempted to sell one, in fact but it gave him a quiet pleasure unlike any he had ever known. He convinced some people that he knew, to let him write copy and grants for their organizations and he did so between writing his stories. And with this and an occasional labor job that he could pick up here and there, each month he made his way, although there was never room for anymore than that. Fortunately, for Christopher that was fine, even better actually. In his mind, it made sense.
North was never one for organizing or collecting or preserving, so he found the very act of not attaining quite comfortable and to him, it was the only way that he could keep his mind clear. Once, on a family trip he had purchased for himself a small, marble walrus. It sat on a very polished piece of slate and it had ivory tusks. It was a fine piece and he greatly enjoyed looking at it and he enjoyed the smoothness of it in his hands even more.
At seventeen, when he had moved away from his parents, he rolled the walrus in a sheet of newspaper and packed it in between his sheets. Once settled in his new place, he laid it on one of the sheets on the floor (as this occurred before he had a bed), stared at the ceiling and though about where he would display it. The choice was obvious as he had only one flat, elevated surface in his entire room, the dresser. (The tiny shelf above the hanger rod in the closet not withstanding as it was out of view.)
That night, Christopher put the Walrus on the dresser and lay back down. He thought about other places he would go and other little statues he might see. Maybe he would see a teak Giraffe in Ghana or a plaster otter somewhere up the coast. He knew that you could purchase a wax elephant that a machine made when you put a dollar into it at the zoo and once at a local theme park he had seen someone blowing a fantastically colored dragon out of glass. Soon he was picturing his tiny room covered in animals and the he found that the thought caused him this great anxiety inside. People would come in and have nowhere to place a drink or rest their hands. The dust would gather on the statues and soon the walrus would look rough and worn and not at all smooth and shiny, like it did now.
For a while he considered that he could rotate the statues and store away the ones he wasn’t displaying at the time. But after giving this idea a little more thought, he realized the time that it would take and he considered all of the space for the boxes of animals and what would happen when he moved? He would have to rent a truck and stack the boxes on a dolly and at the time, Christopher knew of know one with a dolly. And who would help him? His friends had broken one of the legs on the dresser when they moved it in and he dreaded what they would do to a wonderfully colored, glass dragon.
Some hours passed and Christopher came to see that for him, there was only one choice left. In the dark of the night, he rose, walked past the paneled walls and to the corner of his room. He reached up onto the dresser and took the Walrus into his hands. Thankfully, it still felt smooth and he smiled thinking of his father who had laughed at him, when he had purchased it. Carrying it delicately on an open palm, he left his room, went down the hall, past the roommates playing a game on the television, went through the kitchen and out the screen door. The house they had rented was actually a smaller house behind a larger one and the backyard was covered over in weeds and brush. Off to his right was an old Ford Truck and to his left was a garage where the owner spent his days. From the back porch, he walked over to the trashcans, quietly lifted the lid and gently placed his walrus on top of the box of empty beer cans the roommates had celebrated with earlier that night. The walrus’s ivory tusk glowed bright from the light of the moon.
Christopher walked back into the house, through the kitchen and past the roommates. One of them, moving the controller in his hands furiously back and forth and up and down, called over his shoulder to him.
“Whatcha’ doing out there?”
Christopher waited to respond. “But, I was just a boy,” he finally announced and walked back to his room and fell asleep.
"For Steven Millhauser"
We look up, past the sun and into the heavens,
we say, "But I deserve so much more."
The heavens look down, past the sun and onto the earth,
she says, "No. really. You don't."
we say, "But I deserve so much more."
The heavens look down, past the sun and onto the earth,
she says, "No. really. You don't."
Herping Ain’t Easy
For, Jason.
When he left the house, he really wasn’t hoping on finding anything. Not anything substantial, at least. Nothing, of course that he could post on the reptile forums that he visited several times a day. It was still too cold for anything smart to be out. Reptiles are cold-blooded animals and their hibernation extends on beyond Winter and into the early months of Spring and then out onto the late months of Fall.
Again though, today he really wasn’t looking for anything special. He just needed to be out of the house. He herped all year long, simply because he enjoyed the act of it. Walking through the brush just off the freeway, flipping boards and poking sticks into bushes, it all felt right. He enjoyed the way the brush would tremble and ring as though filled with tiny bells as he passed through the open space. The way field mice would scurry out underfoot and whole families of sparrows would blast off into the air when he passed by. Sometimes, something would catch his trained eye and it really was nothing that he could explain. Many times before he had tried to teach others how to watch for the snakes but like anything that requires mastery, there was something more to it than seeking out any singular, isolated detail. The search was more like a complicated algorithm than any list of specific things to be watched for.
“You have to sense it,” he would hopelessly try to explain. “Don’t look for them. You have to look for where they should be,” he challenged. It was a sort of Zen approach to snake hunting and therefore, not at all surprisingly, the acquaintances that he tried to introduce to his hobby would quickly grow frustrated after mistaking their hundredth or so stick for a rattler and a piece of dirty sandstone for a coral snake. And they would stare in awe at him, when he would inexplicably step into a patch of sage and reappear with a rosy boa hanging from his fingers and dangling down to his feet.
“How did you…,” they would ask.
But it was useless. He saw the serpents intuitively, the way a seasoned ref calls a traveling violation or a collector knows that a set of plates is worth more than the $1.25 price tag at a yard sale. And so, most often he went alone and to him, that was just as well. Or so he told himself.
On this day, though, it certainly was the truth. The night previous, his wife had announced that, “more than likely, I am leaving you,” after rising from the small dining room table that they always ate at and washing her plate at the sink. And although, the frankness of the statement and the confidence in her voice were somewhat of a shock, the message in no way surprised him. They had been having trouble for many months, possibly even a year, he thought to himself and now two years into their marriage it was clear that the cloud of magic that they had dated under was let loose and stretched thin across the ground growth like an albino Ribbon Viper.
His wife was on the comfortably shy side of thirty and worked at the state hospital as an emergency room nurse. She had shoulder length blonde hair and a small frame that was accentuated by the thin, cotton scrubs that hung off her razor blade shoulders and outlined her perky breasts so that they floated on her chest like a child’s water balloons.
They had met at a local pub that their friends frequented. He was attracted to the way her eyes moved around the room as if quietly triaging the patrons. She was drawn to the Western Diamond Rattlesnake tattoo that scrolled up his arm and disappeared into his short sleeve. He had gotten it less than a week earlier and it was still wrapped over with a clear tape that made it look all the more menacing.
His friends had called her over to from where she sat with her coworkers to, “take a look at his are,” and ensure that it was healing properly and her friends dared her to take them up on it. She saw it as a kind of challenge. She was never really the type to flirt or to put her self in the position that women her age call, “out there.”
Arriving at the young man’s purposed scar, she brushed her finger over the bold lines of the snake and mockingly diagnosed it.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” she said, pleased with herself for being so clever. So on the spot. The men around the table bought her another drink and pulled a chair for her up next to him. He was quiet but she was interested and in no time they were in a deep discussion about local eateries and the overall slutiness of one of her friends. After the others left, they stayed. She talked about college and how much she enjoyed the emergency room.
“It’s the pace,” she explained. “It never gets boring.”
He told her about his day job teaching history to privileged high schoolers in South Orange County. “I hate it,” he emphasized. “It’s the pace. Its always boring.” Before they left, they exchanged phone numbers and made a date for the weekend.
That night she imagined him as a misunderstood bad boy with a college degree. As a Pastor’s daughter, all of her life she had wanted to be with someone who frightened her and suddenly, here he was, all serpent to her Eve. Consequently, he really expected nothing of her. He thought that she was beautiful and nice and she made him feel warm like he was laid out on a black top road on a sunny day.
That Saturday, he took her to T.G.I. Fridays. He sipped at his beer while she finished off two then three Long Island Iced teas and did a shot of Jameson with the bartender. By the time they left, she was unable to give him directions back to her apartment so he took her home and she slept on his bed while he roamed around the kitchen before passing out on the couch. The next morning when she awoke, he was in the shower and when he stepped out wrapped only in a towel she anxiously, asked him, “Did we…, you know?”
Back then, he was unable to tell the subtle difference between a young woman’s enthusiasm and agitation, so he smiled weakly, turned his eyes towards the floor and lifted his eyebrows up into the ceiling. She took this as a definite yes and she spent the next few nights writhing silently in her bed, her fingers deep between her legs and her mind imagining him maniacally thrusting over her passed out frame.
But all of that was years ago and now, they had seen more of their twenties, together, rather than apart. And as he hiked around the semi-arid plains of Southern California he could barely remember a time when he did not feel as though he had somehow disappointed her. It was a feeling that wasn’t connected to anything tangible. It was just… this knowing. Like the feeling one has of not being trusted when introduced to someone new. He wasn’t ever, at all sure just what she expected but when he rose from their bed each morning or as they unlocked the door coming home after a night out or most of all when he rolled off of her and rested on his back after they were done fucking, a strong sense of disappointment wafted up, well into the rafters of their two bedroom apartment.
All of this remained on his mind as he halfheartedly herped through the Orange County backcountry. That morning, he had told her he would be out until early evening and she said she was going out with friends and so he knew that he would not be missed until the next morning, at the very least. Over the last few weeks she had stayed out all night more than once. Her shift ran late, she explained or she had crashed at a coworker’s and once she had told him she had gotten into a deep conversation with her father and had talked through the night. Each time, he accepted it without question and this only seemed to make her more and more disappointed.
Last night, after telling him that she was, “most likely leaving,” she had unleashed a tirade on his passion for reptiles and brought back up the tattoo that now had faded and the skin on the snake appeared to be molting as his arms lost the sinewy tightness of its youth.
“You know,” she finished up. “ I only went out with you, hell, I only married you because of that fucking tattoo.”
Although it should have, this didn’t shock him at all. He remembered, in the early days how she stared at it while rubbing little circles into it with her thumb and often insisted that he apply the special tattoo cream each night and morning so that the vibrant colors would not fade.
“You see, I thought it was because you loved the idea of a snake,” she viciously attacked him. “Coiled up and ready to strike,” she said, through her teeth.
“I had no idea that you actually loved snakes,” and she laughed, cruelly and out loud. “Can you imagine that,” she asked, laughing again, her eyes starting to water.
“I married the only person in the world who has a snake tattoo because he actually fucking loves snakes!”
He waited until she was finished and hovering around him and walking circles through the living room and brushing at her eyes with the back of her sleeves.
“Why else would anyone get a snake tattoo,” he asked quiet and calm.
She went into their bedroom and slammed the door.
Unlike most days, today, he kept walking. He was determined to traverse further than he ever had and maybe when he got home he would have something to say on the bulletin boards. Something about the landscape beyond the usual hunting grounds or better yet, casually mention the area he ended at and wait for the thread to pepper him with questions about how far off the beaten path he had been. More than likely though, he thought to himself, the forum would at best completely ignore his post or worse scold him for traveling into protected grounds or private property. The members of the boards were brutal and it had taken him months to even be noticed and when he was it was for reporting on the “boards,” he was sure that he had discovered. That night, he had proudly reported to the community that he had stumbled upon an area that was littered with snakes beneath boards that seemed placed there for that very purpose. Much to his shock and the community’s ire, he was quickly informed that the boards were placed there for that very purpose and he spent the next several weeks fending off nasty e-mails and derogatory threads about the “newb”. Like the snakes they prized, the online herpetology community, he quickly discovered, was actually quite venomous.
He walked for hours, well until the sun was beginning to prepare its descent into the nearby but unseen ocean. At some point he made the decision to stay out in the wilderness all night. It was illegal, be sure but he knew that none of the rangers would be coming this far out and he had his backpack and a few energy bars and even if they did discover him, he could feign ignorance and claim to have just gotten lost. The moon was full and so the light would really never leave and best of all the weather was warm for being still so early in the Spring. When he came to a tiny stream, he decided that he would spend the night beside it and fall asleep to the sound of the water, lazily traversing the valley floor.
That night, while he lay beneath the stars, she was upstairs as she had been on many nights during the previous weeks, vigorously fucking the downstairs neighbor. They had met when she was coming home after a particularly stressful shift. He had asked her to carry a basket of strawberries up to his place because his hands were full with other various types of produce. She immediately noticed his tattooed arms and coyly agreed. When they arrived at the apartment, he complained of the heat and immediately pulled off his shirt. He lit up a cigarette that miraculously appeared between his fingers and asked her if she was a doctor.
“No,” she replied chuckling, “just a lowly nurse.” “But I can fix you up if you get in a bind,” she added suggestively.
“That’s hot,” he had replied.
She was immediately turned on at the sight of the boy’s tattooed chest that was covered with zombies, Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula”, what appeared to be Snow White’s castle being overran by werewolves and a Spaceship that she was sure had been off from a still from, “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”
“Big fan of Ed Wood,” she asked cautiously.
“Who’s that,” he replied, causally ashing his cigarette onto the carpet in the middle of his living room and turning up the music on his 1970’s era hi-fi. Thirty minutes later, his dick was halfway down her throat while he air-guitared the solo to, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
The next day the cuckolded, hobbyist herper awoke to a sun that seemed to be melting the skin off his face. He had the feeling of a hangover and his nose and head were so full of dust and dirt that he could barely breathe.
He dragged himself blindly over to the trickle of water in the stream and begin to splash it onto his face. He was embarrassed by his overestimating his bodies response to the great outdoors and he knew that he would have to immediately head home and clean up or within twenty four hours, he was sure to be sick. Although he loved the great outdoors, nature always just had a way of chewing him up and spitting him out.
As he pathetically knelt over the water, he began to sob into his hands. “Fuck life,” he thought. He cried for a few more minutes and then it happened. He heard the water come to life and he saw something cut through the small stream, parting its shallow waters. Immediately, he sensed a long tubular shape out of the corner of his eye. The crickets stopped while his brain resonated the angles of a delta shaped head and he could literally feel a flash of brown pulse through his body. He pushed off of the rocks he was kneeling on and rolled back onto his ass. He had been startled plenty of times by a noise or a shape but something about this, was altogether different. Something about the way that the flash had lingered, much longer than he had ever noticed.
See the thing, he loved about herping, was that you really never knew what you were going to get. He guessed it was the same reason his wife loved her job. You never knew anything about anything, right up until the moment that you actually held it in your hands. The beasts were so fast in proportion to their size that any momentary contact passed in the blink of an eye and left no lingering trace in the brain. But this flash was different. Whatever this was, it had retained a color, a pattern, a length in his mind and these things combined, immediately told him that he had just been brushed by something big. Not something big in that it was rare or unique. Not something that would wow the boards because of its scarcity. It wasn’t like a sharp-tailed or a two-headed gopher. No. This was something big, in that it was huge. Maybe, monstrous even. Whatever it was, he knew that the thing that had just rifled by was fucking enormous.
His brain immediately ran through the usual suspects: Corns, Gophers, Corals, Kings, Rattlers, Leaf-nosed, Shovel-nosed, Boas, Nightsnakes but immediately, he realized that nothing indigenous that he could think of would fit into the category of size that he had just encountered. Not anything at all and his mind even went as far to make a quick, perfunctory run through the larger mammals that populated the area. Moles, rabbits, raccoons, possums, coyotes, deer, even mountain lions but none of these would have had the length and this thing had been underwater and so that too, immediately reduced the possibilities of species that he was locally familiar with to absolute zero.
In all of this, however, he had studied enough and read enough herp books and spent enough time at local reptile houses and on the aforementioned bulletin boards, that by the time all of these realizations lodged in his brain, within another instant he knew what he had just encountered and for the first time since he had started these herping trips as a teenager, he was instantly beyond terrified.
Still though, his analytic approach wouldn’t allow him to just erase the situation from his mind and so he ran through the checklist again, slowly this time. Recalling the size, shape, color and speed he recognized that all of them were right with what he was imagining but it’s location was more than wrong. Wrong in like several continents away wrong. Urban legend wrong and in the few moments that his mind tumbled and tripped over these facts, the movement in the water stopped and like it or not now, he knew, right then and there that he was within a ten-foot radius of a Burmese Python.
Before rising to his feet, he repeated a quick inventory of what he knew about the animal lurking in the immediate vicinity and since it was aware of his presence and clearly not retreating, he could only now assume was, in fact, hunting him.
Largest snake in the world… Check.
Growing up to 18 feet and weighing as much as 500 pounds…Check.
Fortunately, relatively slow at roughly one mile an hour on land…Check, but,
Capable of easily extending 2/3 of their body length in a single strike…Check
Thankfully, not venomous… Check, but,
Still deadly in that they constrict their prey, which could imaginably be much worse than being poisoned… Check.
(In fact, coincidentally, in elementary school, any time the subject of the worst way to die would come up at the lunch tables, he would always stump his peers by waiting until everyone had stated the obvious and announce, strangulation by a Burmese Python… Check.)
With this in mind, he rose to his feet and without moving, he darted his eyes in a circle around the patch of land at his feet. The snake, now completely visible in the thinned out brush was easily fourteen feet long and didn’t seem to be even paying attention to him. He reasoned that outside of its natural habitat, meals had probably been somewhat tough to come by and while the snake had most likely been inclined to hibernate, it must have had to come out early to find food. Suddenly, the terror that had seized him just moments earlier fell away and now, all he could think about was how he was going to get this beast home and about what all of the assholes on the boards would say about this.
The young man knew that when he made a move the snake would be forced to retreat but with it confined to a rectilinear motion, that is, since it could only move by lifting the scales off its belly, it could only move away from him in a straight line. It would take all the strength he had and certainly more courage then he could imagine but if he could get its tail up over his head, he could pretty much immobilize it. It was a trick that had always worked like a charm with everything that he often encountered. Which was, even he recognized, to be fair, roughly 80% smaller than this fucking monster. There was, of course a much less heroic scenario. If it did manage to turn on him and say get his legs wrapped up or even worse, his arms, and take him to the pebble strewn floor, then death would come in roughly two to three seconds. Often it was not the flow of blood that the snakes nearly impossible pressure stopped but sometimes, the actual beating of the heart itself. For whatever reason though, this outcome was not what disturbed him the most. The absolute worse case scenario was if the snake did manage to get the better of him, someone his size and weight would require almost all of the snakes energy to consume and digest, immobilizing it for three or four days. By nightfall, the word would be out that he was missing and undoubtedly a search conducted and even from the air the snake would be easily seen and when they caught it, killed it, drove it to the nearest University and some asshole PhD, cut into it, there he would be. Laid out for all to see. There would be a phone call, a visit from his wife to identify the body and he could see her now, disappointingly looking over the half digested remains of her once decent husband. For the second time, in as many days, defeated by the thing he loved the most.
And the forums. That would even be worse. They would have a field day with him. The jokes would go on for years.
Meanwhile, less than twenty miles away, his wife was nowhere even close to thinking about him. She was on her fourth orgasm of the morning, her ass in the air and her head in the pillow and her muffled cries of, “pull my hair, smack my ass,” made the neighbors shut their windows and shake their heads. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t mind her husband’s passion for snakes nearly as much as she minded his gentleness with the handling of them and subsequently, the delicateness with which he touched her. Once, when a rock had inadvertently tipped over and crushed a snake that he and a fellow herper, had been trying to squeeze out of its lair, he had come home teary eyed and wrote a two page long apology to everyone on the forum. Needless to say, after that, she was never able to orgasm with him again.
In the blink of an eye, he made his move and leapt for the tail of the python. It darted forward and he fell onto his knees and then his face, and with arms outstretched, he made a final grab. The middle of his fingers caught it just beneath its backside and he clamped down. For a moment he just lay there in complete shock. He had the snake, literally in his hands. His awe lasted only a split second and instantly he felt the muscles in its back swing around and the scales on its middle dig into the dirt to launch a strike. Without thinking he whiplashed the tail of the beast onto the ground and he expected its head to smash into the ground in an awesome recoil. Unfortunately, until right then, he had never fully grasped the sheer muscular mass of a fully-grown female Burmese Python and the snake caught itself, head-up in midair. The motion did however, give him just the time he needed to leap to his feet and in the next instant he had the back half of the snake off the ground and watched with terror as the snake violently albeit, uselessly, swung its massive head from side to side.
Immediately, he realized, this battle was now going to run non-stop for the next six hours. And again, that was the best-case scenario. His backpack, the water, everything that was not in his physical grasp would have to be abandoned. “One backwards step at a time,” he thought. “One foot behind the other.”
And with the snake’s thrashing strength, which he also knew would hold for much longer than his, it would be one step backwards and two steps forwards.
With that he closed his eyes and took the first step back towards the car, back towards the city, back towards the forum and back towards her.
An hour later he could no longer keep his hands over his head and he pulled them down in front of him. The snake now, had significantly more of its body on the ground and therefore could strike much further and turn on him and unless he stayed focus it could easily wrap its body around his legs. He was still out past his normal hunting grounds, so he had no real idea how far away he was from the car. He was however aware that this fight was going to take much longer than he expected.
He ached to stop, just for a moment and rest but like any experienced hiker he knew that his first pause, would officially start a cycle of pauses and from then on, his rests would come more and more often, until eventually, he was only moving a matter of feet before taking a break.
He checked his watch. It was a little after nine in the morning. He would have the sun for at least another ten hours and he was slowly accepting the fact that he was going to need every, single one of them. Up until then it had never occurred to him to kill the snake but now he just wanted to bash its head with something and make it stop fighting. He tried to imagine a way to knock it out but not kill it, like they do in the movies. When the good guy hits someone in the back of the head and they crumple like a melting iceberg. He’d seen it successfully executed enough on television procedural crime dramas to have a general idea of where to hit a person but he didn’t have a clue about knocking a snake out cold. “Fucking A,” he screamed, at the snake. This struggle was going to have to be straight up. Man versus beast.
He kept walking, turning his head around less often to see where he was going and trying to retain as much energy as he could. While he walked his mind thought back to his wife who was no doubt at home and probably somewhat concerned about him by now. He thought about the first time he knew that they were probably not meant to be together. It was during the first month of living in the apartment they shared and a day after they had returned from their honeymoon. A guy friend of hers had come over for dinner and to watch a movie. He was a bartender, downtown and throughout the meal he peppered the conversation with stories about all the girls he fucked and fights that he had gotten into while they had been away. The entire conversation seemed horribly inappropriate to him but she was completely enthralled. She doted on the guy, serving him more and more drinks and at one point even massaging his shoulders, while he ended every one of his stories with, “and then I said,” and the dolt, quoted some phrase that no doubt he had heard said in an action film starring an African American comedian.
When he rose to fetch his third soda, she chided him and said to her now tipsy, male friend, “he can’t hold his liquor but he keeps a great house,” and the both of them just about died laughing. At some point the guy looked over at him with some sympathy and pity and he felt lower than he ever had. It was like being in junior high school and he was the kid with supermarket shoes and a dirty face. That night, when he finally went off to bed, he fell asleep to her giggling and the fucker asking if he could take a shower.
He wished his wife could see him now. He wanted her to see him in an epic battle with a truly formidable foe. He thought that maybe she would see through the conservative polo shirts and topsiders and see him as a rebel. A regular bad ass. But he also knew that it wouldn’t really matter, not to her at least and he wondered out loud, if there were any women on the Orange County Herpetology Forum.
The sun was now straight overhead and somehow he was covered in dirt and dust. It looked like he had been rolling around on the valley floor instead of on his feet all day. The snake was still fighting just as hard as he had when he first grabbed its tail and for the first time, he thought that he might have to let it go. The heat was unbearable, his mouth was as dry as the dirt that covered him and now, his arms felt like solid stone. He turned around for the first time in almost fifteen minutes and with horror saw the chain link fence that he forgot he had scaled the day before.
“Jesus Christ,’ he yelled out at the sky. Immediately, he felt a little bad for saying it. He was an atheist but most of the time he tried to respect the faith of others and substitute the word with a choice euphemism like, “jeezy creezy,” or “Geez louise.” The fence was trouble for two reasons. One, the obvious difficulty of climbing over it while holding a struggling fourteen foot Burmese Python. But even more disturbing, was that this was the first definite landmark that he had come to and he realized with great sadness that he was still two hours away from the car. That is, assuming that he was not carrying the aforementioned Python. He was almost in tears but it thrilled him a little to be able to use the term, “the aforementioned Python,” even to himself.
The fence was five feet high and in perfect condition. No holes or breaks. The top had these little twisted parts of wire that would cut into him if he wasn’t careful and was sure to cut the hell out the snake. As he stood there he thought about last night. Early in the conversation, she had told him, that he never fought for anything. That she hated him for not even being willing to fight for her.
“There’s been plenty of fighting,” he had told her, sadly. “And it doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything.”
He thought about her leaving. Actually, he thought about letting her go and suddenly he had an idea. It seemed obvious now but like any great discovery, he had only come to it out of sheer necessity. What if he lifted up the fence just enough to let the snake slither through and then let it go? Could he hop the fence and catch it before it got away? He was out of options so he slowly started climbing hand over hand up the snake’s long body and towards it’s head. He tried to keep the body above him, in the air so that it couldn’t get a hold on the ground and after ten minutes of fight he had his hands around it’s huge neck. Its head was the size of a shovel and it opened and snapped its mouth struggling to twist back and take a chunk out of his arm. With his back up against the fence he lifted the bottom of it and turned the snakes head and under it. He let go and just like he had envisioned it, the Python made a thrust forward and darted under the fence.
He quickly hopped over the fence and ran towards the snake that was slowly lumbering away. Right then, he decided to not pick it back up, but instead to try to herd it towards the car. It kept him running back and forth, constantly from one side of the snake to the other, but the idea worked perfectly and as the sun begin to drop towards the hills, he saw the car.
When he was a hundred or so feet from the car, he made another lunge for it and found that the snake had completely given up. By then, it was practically tame. He gently picked it up, feeling bad for it for the first time and he stopped for a few minutes and considered letting it go, after all, he realized, he really had no idea what to do with it when he got it home. But just like he knew he would all along, he opened the trunk of the car and softly laid it down and was careful to not slam the top shut so that he didn’t startle it more than he had to.
He slept for an hour in the car and then pulled his ’84 Camry back onto the 405 and headed home. When he pulled into his assigned space at their complex he realized that there had never really been a question of what to do with the monster and he fished through the glove box for the spare pocket-knife that he kept inside of it. His father had given it to him on his wedding day. He opened the trunk and the snake barely even moved. He emptied out the plastic tub he kept his jack and spare tools in and softly laid the apathetic snake inside of it.
A few minutes later, he was cutting a small cross into the screen window that hung over his downstairs neighbor’s bed. The snake slid perfectly through the hole and he watched as it exited the bedroom and made its way down the hall and towards what he presumed was the kitchen.
Even a snake that size would probably never attack a full grown adult but he was sure it would give him the adulterer the scare of his life. And if later that night he happened to hear a ruckus, he knew that he was sure to go downstairs and see if he could assist.
“Although,” he said with just a hint of a smile and a shitload of honesty, “ if that guy has a dog or a cat, that thing is completely fucked.” And when he said it out loud, for the first time in a long, long while, it didn’t even occur to him to feel bad for using such strong language.
Review- Aleksander Hemon's, The Lazarus Project
For some time Sociologists have been discussing the late maturity phenomenon of Generation X’ers and those coming after. And really it shouldn’t even take academics to point it out. I am 36 and while married (although its true, even I am not technically married), I own next to nothing, have no children and only a spotty career as a writer. It should come as no surprise then that we should start to see married thirty-something’s star in the all too familiar, “coming of age novel.”
Aleksander Hemon’s latest, The Lazarus Project, while accomplishing much more, certainly is also a coming of age story. The novel presents Brik, an Eastern European transplant in America married to an American brain surgeon. (Of all things. An oft repeated detail that never quite finds its way into the story. It is a perfect example of Chekov’s loaded gun on the stage that is never fired.)
Brik is determined to write an account of a Jewish immigrant murdered by the Chicago Chief of police in the early 1900’s on account of his supposed Anarchist activities. In order to research his story, Brik returns to his homeland of Sarajevo and along the way learns much more about himself than Lazarus, the star of his story. Accompanying him on this journey is Rora, a photographer who unlike Brik was unable to escape Sarajevo before the war and is constantly regaling Brik with accounts of gangsters, vigilante soldiers, war stories and much, much more.
The novel is somewhat novel (sorry) in that it presents Brik’s account in alternating chapters with Lazarus’s story in between. Personally, I found the Lazarus chapters far more interesting and engaging. Lazarus is in America in a time when foreigners are reviled and constantly under threat of being labeled anarchists (think the ludicrous persecution of the Japanese in WW 2, the Red scare of the 40’s and 50’s and America’s latest fling into xenophobia, the Muslims.).
Lazarus is struggling to barely get by in a country that his sister and him came to for a better life, only to find more of the same. This propels Lazarus into a quasi-anarchist state that is contrasted by his sister Olga’s resolute acceptance of the ugliness of Jewish life. During these chapters, on a historical level, the background provided about Chicago at the turn of the century is fascinating. And Olga’s relationship with Lazarus’s friend was my favorite element of the novel and I am sorry to say the only part the felt completely true.
Brik’s story is interesting and yet at the same time, I was unable to identify with his overall attitude. He is always asking Rora questions that Rora (and everyone they meet along the journey) considers foolish and superfluous. I imagine this succeeds in contrasting a survivor’s mentality with the inquisitive nature of a non-participant’s novel interest. But it is disturbing that Brik seems to not understand the critical difference between him and everyone he meets in his homeland that had to live through the war that he escaped.
In the end, I would recommend the novel although, the resolution that both Brik and Lazarus find felt altogether unsatisfying and somehow rang incomplete.
Aleksander Hemon’s latest, The Lazarus Project, while accomplishing much more, certainly is also a coming of age story. The novel presents Brik, an Eastern European transplant in America married to an American brain surgeon. (Of all things. An oft repeated detail that never quite finds its way into the story. It is a perfect example of Chekov’s loaded gun on the stage that is never fired.)
Brik is determined to write an account of a Jewish immigrant murdered by the Chicago Chief of police in the early 1900’s on account of his supposed Anarchist activities. In order to research his story, Brik returns to his homeland of Sarajevo and along the way learns much more about himself than Lazarus, the star of his story. Accompanying him on this journey is Rora, a photographer who unlike Brik was unable to escape Sarajevo before the war and is constantly regaling Brik with accounts of gangsters, vigilante soldiers, war stories and much, much more.
The novel is somewhat novel (sorry) in that it presents Brik’s account in alternating chapters with Lazarus’s story in between. Personally, I found the Lazarus chapters far more interesting and engaging. Lazarus is in America in a time when foreigners are reviled and constantly under threat of being labeled anarchists (think the ludicrous persecution of the Japanese in WW 2, the Red scare of the 40’s and 50’s and America’s latest fling into xenophobia, the Muslims.).
Lazarus is struggling to barely get by in a country that his sister and him came to for a better life, only to find more of the same. This propels Lazarus into a quasi-anarchist state that is contrasted by his sister Olga’s resolute acceptance of the ugliness of Jewish life. During these chapters, on a historical level, the background provided about Chicago at the turn of the century is fascinating. And Olga’s relationship with Lazarus’s friend was my favorite element of the novel and I am sorry to say the only part the felt completely true.
Brik’s story is interesting and yet at the same time, I was unable to identify with his overall attitude. He is always asking Rora questions that Rora (and everyone they meet along the journey) considers foolish and superfluous. I imagine this succeeds in contrasting a survivor’s mentality with the inquisitive nature of a non-participant’s novel interest. But it is disturbing that Brik seems to not understand the critical difference between him and everyone he meets in his homeland that had to live through the war that he escaped.
In the end, I would recommend the novel although, the resolution that both Brik and Lazarus find felt altogether unsatisfying and somehow rang incomplete.
Thoughts on finishing the novel…
I probably should have written this some time ago, as I finished the novel probably about three months ago. But for the first month I was deep in revisions, then a month of short stories (hopefully some of them will sell and keep us going,) then straight into another month of revising. Revising sucks. It doesn’t feel creative, it often feels like you're just moving words and sentences around and you're reading the same shit over and over and over again.
I wrote most of the novel at a coffee shop and a couple bars. For me, those two places are a perfect environment for writing. You have a couple of drinks, say hi to some friends and then disappear into your head. I had a lot of support at the bars and for an often overwhelmingly isolating pursuit, that was nice. Many thanks to everyone who would ask how things were going, listened to me ramble about the latest developments and didn’t take it personally when I went to the back of the bar and sat alone.
The novel imagines a man in his mid twenties who grew up in the sticks of the deep South. His mother and stepfather are deeply religious. And I mean that not in the sense of the organized kind of religion. Like many of the South’s religious, their faith takes place mostly in their heads and is highly disorganized. Chaotic even. It is steeped in the events of their own lives and in the meanings that they attribute to them.
In this environment, the boy grows up hearing a voice that he believes is leading him. Eventually that voice leads him to OC and then on to the streets of L.A. In L.A. he finally feels like the religion in his head has become fully realized and he begins to evangelize. Since his faith is largely founded on the darker parts of the Bible, I mean the violence and the more Gothic elements, his preaching is mostly acts of crime and abuse. This works for him until he discovers an old man with a secret sin and a girl that belongs to a downtown cult that practices a mirror image of his religion. Its his belief, only flipped over and spun around.
The book asks the sorts of questions that the Post-Modern world presents to religion as a whole. Where does it come from and what role does it play in the individual’s life. It also tries to examine religion from a number of perspectives: altruism, manipulation, shame, guilt, regret. I think that I also wanted it to ask what role truth plays in the entire message. Does a religion need to have actual facts on its side? Or are the stories themselves, enough?
I printed up a couple of copies for friends to edit for grammar and story elements. We’ll see what they say. In the meantime, if you’d like to weigh in, let me know and I’ll get you a copy. Now, it’s on to a play that I’ve wanted to do for the whole time that I’ve been revising. And that feels good. Back to the real work.
Finally, I’ve always wanted to nail down a good definition of art. One that takes into account, literature, architecture, culinary, fashion, film, the whole thing. And while I've been doing this, I think that I've come up with a working version.
Art is anything that when completed, the creator can only sit back and say, "I have absolutely no idea where that came from." I mean maybe they had an originally vision or a concept but then somewhere along the way, something else took over. And that something, influenced the piece in a way that they could have never dreamed of. I imagine that the something is everyone they’ve ever known, every event they’ve been a part of and everything they’ve done, seen, thought about and dreamed about. And the individual really can’t take credit for any of that stuff. It’s like the quantum world I guess, life is just so much more than cause and effect. Its like, 275 years later, we find out that Newton was only half right.
I wrote most of the novel at a coffee shop and a couple bars. For me, those two places are a perfect environment for writing. You have a couple of drinks, say hi to some friends and then disappear into your head. I had a lot of support at the bars and for an often overwhelmingly isolating pursuit, that was nice. Many thanks to everyone who would ask how things were going, listened to me ramble about the latest developments and didn’t take it personally when I went to the back of the bar and sat alone.
The novel imagines a man in his mid twenties who grew up in the sticks of the deep South. His mother and stepfather are deeply religious. And I mean that not in the sense of the organized kind of religion. Like many of the South’s religious, their faith takes place mostly in their heads and is highly disorganized. Chaotic even. It is steeped in the events of their own lives and in the meanings that they attribute to them.
In this environment, the boy grows up hearing a voice that he believes is leading him. Eventually that voice leads him to OC and then on to the streets of L.A. In L.A. he finally feels like the religion in his head has become fully realized and he begins to evangelize. Since his faith is largely founded on the darker parts of the Bible, I mean the violence and the more Gothic elements, his preaching is mostly acts of crime and abuse. This works for him until he discovers an old man with a secret sin and a girl that belongs to a downtown cult that practices a mirror image of his religion. Its his belief, only flipped over and spun around.
The book asks the sorts of questions that the Post-Modern world presents to religion as a whole. Where does it come from and what role does it play in the individual’s life. It also tries to examine religion from a number of perspectives: altruism, manipulation, shame, guilt, regret. I think that I also wanted it to ask what role truth plays in the entire message. Does a religion need to have actual facts on its side? Or are the stories themselves, enough?
I printed up a couple of copies for friends to edit for grammar and story elements. We’ll see what they say. In the meantime, if you’d like to weigh in, let me know and I’ll get you a copy. Now, it’s on to a play that I’ve wanted to do for the whole time that I’ve been revising. And that feels good. Back to the real work.
Finally, I’ve always wanted to nail down a good definition of art. One that takes into account, literature, architecture, culinary, fashion, film, the whole thing. And while I've been doing this, I think that I've come up with a working version.
Art is anything that when completed, the creator can only sit back and say, "I have absolutely no idea where that came from." I mean maybe they had an originally vision or a concept but then somewhere along the way, something else took over. And that something, influenced the piece in a way that they could have never dreamed of. I imagine that the something is everyone they’ve ever known, every event they’ve been a part of and everything they’ve done, seen, thought about and dreamed about. And the individual really can’t take credit for any of that stuff. It’s like the quantum world I guess, life is just so much more than cause and effect. Its like, 275 years later, we find out that Newton was only half right.
Review- Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
When I first read, Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut, I was teaching High School English in the inner city and less than a year out of Seminary and a job as a minister for the Baptist Church. No one recommended the book to me, (that is to say that I had no guidance as I read, which someone with the aforementioned, and shockingly unsatisfactory education could have greatly benefited from,) rather, I had simply found a copy on a coworker’s bookshelf while sitting in for her while she was away. At the time I was also bartending at a local bar in Orange County so although I’ll admit to being entirely unprepared for the work, believe me, I was well on my way.
On my first reading the book seemed altogether like an absurdity. The religious commentary, the social theory, the extremely childish science fiction felt completely ridiculous and all together, well… foolish. Although I confess, it was, an extremely enjoyable sort of foolishness.
Over the twelve or so years between then and now, much has changed. Maybe it was the free love or all the psychotropics. Or possibly it was the German higher critics or Schroedinger’s cat and his quantum physics, or maybe it was Hegel’s dialectics, fuck, I don’t know, maybe it was the Rage Against the Machine show in the Staples center parking lot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Whatever it was, somehow, miraculously, I grew up. And this time, the novel seemed simple and obvious. Athough again, it was a wonderful sort of simplicity. And not at all a contrived simplicity either but rather a honest simplicity, like a fairy tale. Anyway, I tell this story to say that I wish I would have read it in the middle years of then and now. I think it would have been a fantastic short cut through what were for me, some painfully difficult truths to come to. But oh well, when the student is ready… right?
The novel begins by imagining Malachi Constant, the world’s wealthiest man. Right off the bat, Malachi meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, a scientist who flew his personal spacecraft into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (don’t ask) and thus, has become trapped throughout the universe and therefore throughout all time. He exists not at a point but rather on a spectrum. Not like a particle but more like a wave and every fifty-nine days, the scientists trajectory lines back up with earth and he materializes in his study, where outside the entire human race waits for him to share all the secrets of the universe with them. Unfortunately, the man has no interest in this and instead decides to share one man’s entire future with him. This man, is of course, Malachi Constant.
Constant convinced that he can evade this prophecy does everything he can to change the trajectory of his life but like any Shakespearian tragedy, his efforts not only don’t succeed in altering the prophecy but even worse they actually bring them to fruition. So within the first twenty-five pages, Vonnegut essentially lays out the entire contents of the novel and then allows the reader the joy of spending the rest of the book seeing how they play out. And the finding out the way the events come about really is a rare pleasure. For example, the scientist tells the wealthy man who happens to be a true bachelor at heart, that eventually he (Malachi) will marry his (Winston’s) wife, who presently happens to despise him (Malachi.) Now, you might think that this foretelling would ruin the surprise but Vonnegut is an artist and in that fact, the foreknowledge only serves to heighten the tension and in the end he wraps it up just as he said he would and yet, nothing plays in any way that you could have possibly assumed. And that is just one example of Vonnegut’s brilliant device of foreseen events of which there must be ten.
Anyway, as we learn how all these events happen to Malachi, Vonnegut manages to put the reader through an intergalactic war (seriously), envisions four or five original species that put the more peculiar human character traits totally in perspective, presides over a stinging indictment of modern culture and weaves a narrative with as many twists and turns as the best of Chuck Palahniuk (only with about ten times the intelligence). Oh yeah, and along the way, Vonnegut also finds the time to offer a brief explanation of the Quantum world, imagines an alternate creation story and world religion, proposes an alternate world history, and finally, he answers the small question of, the fucking “Meaning of Life.” All this within a novel that will probably take no more than a few hours to read. (Seriously)
In the end, the book is a combination of my two readings, ten years apart. It is an absolutely, absurd fairy tale. And yet, like every good fairy tale, within Vonnegut’s few words, simple plot devices and sly social judgments, there lies an overabundance of truth. Many people do find their prince. Things are often not what they seem. And the answers that seem to be a world away and far too complex to fathom are often much closer and much, much simpler then we might like to believe.
esamuherr@yahoo.com
On my first reading the book seemed altogether like an absurdity. The religious commentary, the social theory, the extremely childish science fiction felt completely ridiculous and all together, well… foolish. Although I confess, it was, an extremely enjoyable sort of foolishness.
Over the twelve or so years between then and now, much has changed. Maybe it was the free love or all the psychotropics. Or possibly it was the German higher critics or Schroedinger’s cat and his quantum physics, or maybe it was Hegel’s dialectics, fuck, I don’t know, maybe it was the Rage Against the Machine show in the Staples center parking lot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Whatever it was, somehow, miraculously, I grew up. And this time, the novel seemed simple and obvious. Athough again, it was a wonderful sort of simplicity. And not at all a contrived simplicity either but rather a honest simplicity, like a fairy tale. Anyway, I tell this story to say that I wish I would have read it in the middle years of then and now. I think it would have been a fantastic short cut through what were for me, some painfully difficult truths to come to. But oh well, when the student is ready… right?
The novel begins by imagining Malachi Constant, the world’s wealthiest man. Right off the bat, Malachi meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, a scientist who flew his personal spacecraft into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (don’t ask) and thus, has become trapped throughout the universe and therefore throughout all time. He exists not at a point but rather on a spectrum. Not like a particle but more like a wave and every fifty-nine days, the scientists trajectory lines back up with earth and he materializes in his study, where outside the entire human race waits for him to share all the secrets of the universe with them. Unfortunately, the man has no interest in this and instead decides to share one man’s entire future with him. This man, is of course, Malachi Constant.
Constant convinced that he can evade this prophecy does everything he can to change the trajectory of his life but like any Shakespearian tragedy, his efforts not only don’t succeed in altering the prophecy but even worse they actually bring them to fruition. So within the first twenty-five pages, Vonnegut essentially lays out the entire contents of the novel and then allows the reader the joy of spending the rest of the book seeing how they play out. And the finding out the way the events come about really is a rare pleasure. For example, the scientist tells the wealthy man who happens to be a true bachelor at heart, that eventually he (Malachi) will marry his (Winston’s) wife, who presently happens to despise him (Malachi.) Now, you might think that this foretelling would ruin the surprise but Vonnegut is an artist and in that fact, the foreknowledge only serves to heighten the tension and in the end he wraps it up just as he said he would and yet, nothing plays in any way that you could have possibly assumed. And that is just one example of Vonnegut’s brilliant device of foreseen events of which there must be ten.
Anyway, as we learn how all these events happen to Malachi, Vonnegut manages to put the reader through an intergalactic war (seriously), envisions four or five original species that put the more peculiar human character traits totally in perspective, presides over a stinging indictment of modern culture and weaves a narrative with as many twists and turns as the best of Chuck Palahniuk (only with about ten times the intelligence). Oh yeah, and along the way, Vonnegut also finds the time to offer a brief explanation of the Quantum world, imagines an alternate creation story and world religion, proposes an alternate world history, and finally, he answers the small question of, the fucking “Meaning of Life.” All this within a novel that will probably take no more than a few hours to read. (Seriously)
In the end, the book is a combination of my two readings, ten years apart. It is an absolutely, absurd fairy tale. And yet, like every good fairy tale, within Vonnegut’s few words, simple plot devices and sly social judgments, there lies an overabundance of truth. Many people do find their prince. Things are often not what they seem. And the answers that seem to be a world away and far too complex to fathom are often much closer and much, much simpler then we might like to believe.
esamuherr@yahoo.com
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This thing like God.
See, where I come from, three things sneak on into a boy’s head round about the time he turns eleven or twelve. First off, he realizes what a fucking shithole place he’s from and what a loser he must be just for being born here. Second, the more he watches his daddy and his brothers grow up and die, the more it occurs to him that things ain’t ever gonna get no better for him or for his kids or for his kid’s kids, no matter what. And round about the time he learns those two hard, painful truths, that suck the life right on out of you and leave you all dried up like the morning after you’ve been drunk for days, well right about then, someone, usually one of his so-called friends but occasionally his own flesh and blood, walks right on up and slaps him with the truth about La La Land.
“La La Land, ain’t what you think it is boy,” they’ll say, all bossy just like that. With a little smile poking out of all their seriousness.
“It ain’t no place for just fun and games, at least that ain’t the all of it. That ain’t nearly the all of it,” they’ll warn. And they’ll laugh and he’ll know that they’re about to tell him something real fucked up, cause where I’m from that’s what people do when they’re about to say something real bad, they laugh. Its like the time, this kid Roger told me he could show me the grossest thing I was ever going to live to see. He led me way the fuck out into the woods, past the river and way down by the gorge and right up to this big, dirty checkered blanket like those ones they use to work on cars. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t pull that blanket back and there was a man, all dead for days with a big hole, carved right through his forehead. I sat there for like five minutes, completely sick to myself before Roger started in on how that guy had got there.
See Roger said that the day before he had been out, shooting birds and shit when he stumbled on this guy wandering around, drunk and just falling all over his self. He said that for over half the day he just followed him around, all silent like and practicing his tracking until he sneaked up real close and drew a perfect bead on the guy with his daddy’s Winchester. Right then, when he had guy in his crosshairs, the guy turned around and freaked out when he saw Roger and the gun and bam, just like that the gun grew all hot in his hands and when he looked up, the guy was gone. For a second he thought the guy had run off but when he looked down, he seen the guy all sprawled out with his head blown back and his arms and legs shaking like the tops of the trees.
Anyway, I’m not saying nothing, I mean maybe Roger shot that guy or maybe he just stumbled up on him or maybe someone led him down to that dead body and showed him just like he showed me, it doesn’t really matter, the point is from the moment when he told me about it to the time he pulled that blanket back, he had that same fucked up smile, smeared all up over his face. And for the next year and a half anytime I closed my eyes, I seen that dead guy with his brains all spilling out.
See, La La Land ain’t really like no place else you ever been. I mean, I know I can’t tell you nothing but I can guarantee that your town ain’t got no place like it. It’s the only one of its kind in the whole world. I promise you that. See, it’s kind of like a fair or a carnival that never gets torn down. But don’t get the wrong the idea, it ain’t like one of them big fun land places where they have those giant concrete mountains and those people that dress up like they was in the cartoons. It ain’t clean and the rides that it does have ain’t fancy at all and they don’t run underground and they’re not stacked up on top of one another in big boxy buildings. No, La La Land ain’t any of that. La La Land is just like one of those carnivals that pass through town with those big, sad rides that kind of wheeze and shake and get dragged around by trucks. And it’s got all these metal tents sitting on sawdust with games in ‘em and those small stuffed animals that split at the seams the first time you hug on ‘em. The whole place smells like a dirty bar and after the first five minutes of being there, your nose gets all dried out and your eyes are all watery cause all that dust just kicking around.
And nobody really ever goes there. I mean, sure people end up there. Guys after work to drink and walk around and throw bottles and shit and some girls go there looking for the type of guys that drink and walk around and break shit. And kids go and wander around with money they swiped from their folks’ wallets and once and a while, maybe a couple or two, out on their first date that want to pretend for a night that they don’t live where they know damn well that they do, they’ll go but nobody really goes there to be at La La Land. It just ain’t that kind of place.
And a lot of people wonder how it even stays open if no one is ever going there. They ask, how come it just don’t shut down and go away like the Tastee Bun that used to sit underneath those big wooden beams that crisscrossed together in a giant “A” and now is all boarded up and kids just sit in there and smoke and sometimes bums sneak in to shit or to sleep on the floor? With everything closing up all the time they’ll ask, “how can that crazy place still be around?” And see, I’m sure that makes sense and all but that’s what you got to understand about La La Land. It just don’t make any kind of sense.
One story has that way back when our town was built for the workers of the, “North and Sons Aluminum Plant,” back then everyone in the town worked for the plant but over the years its just kind of fallen down on top of itself and now it just crawls around, putting out enough aluminum to keep it running but mostly just keeping everyone in town awake all night, with its low groans and smoky orange glow that light up the sky even in the dead of night.
In World War 1, two of old man North’s sons went off to fight the Germans and when they never made it back home, well, he just about went crazy and he locked his self and his family up in his big, old house and let everything else just go to shit. Eventually, he died and left the plant to his youngest, William North the third. And old Willy 3, he was a crazy son of a bitch who inherited a company that was running itself down faster than a skipped stone and they say that he had a mean streak as deep as the Putnam Gorge.
Just to show you what kind of a man he was, one year he bought the town Dog Pound and the story is that some nights he would bring home stray dogs and put on some kind of armor he had fabricated out of some spare aluminum and take ‘em out into this pen in the back of his house and beat those dogs dead into the ground, just for sport, with these big old chains that had links the size of your fist. And they say that once he even brought over this Arab boy from Bombay or somewhere and made that sap live on his hands and knees like a hog just to win a bet. And the day before the State was going to come and check up on that boy, someone called old Willy 3 and warned him ahead of time and that poor mope just disappeared for good. When the State got there, Willy 3, says to them “that boy must have just up and ran away.” But one of Willy’s hired men, he used to tell this story and he swore that old man North just threw a chain around that poor boys neck, rowed him out into the middle of the lake that was out behind his house and drowned him in all that water. They say that when he rowed that boy out into the lake, he didn’t even gag that kid, he just cranked up the turbines of the plant that night so it would cover up his screams. And my own Pop, on the night he came home all drunk and told me the truth about La La Land, well he said he could still remember the night when he was a boy and the plant ran extra loud and that underneath the noise of those big engines, he swore to god that he heard something else screaming. “Something human,” he said. And it kept him awake all night.
Anyway, some time later, North sent away for a mail order bride from one of them crazy countries that drink all that beer and have those big strong women. And some people think that when she arrived at his mansion door, he fell crazy, drop dead in love with her and from that day till the day he really did drop dead, he did every thing that he could to make her happy. And that’s how some people think La La Land came about. They think, he built what he thought would be a fairy tale world for that big old girl. Some people ‘round here say that he dreamed it up as a place where people could go any day of the year and be happy just like it was the Fourth of July. And they tell stories about how North told everyone that he wanted it to be a dream world and that’s why he called it La La Land. But those fools forget what happened next. They forget that one day that poor girl just climbed to the top of that clock tower in the center of the square and just stepped right off of it as the clock rang noon. She was dead when she hit the ground and by the next day, North had rewrote his will so that all of the money he had and all the money he was ever going to have would go to keeping that place open for pretty much ever and ever. And when all that was settled, well he climbed right up to the top of that tower and just shot himself in the head. So even if no one goes to La La Land from now until forever, for better or worse that place will always be open and there’ll be someone there to sell the popcorn and turn on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
But there ain’t nothing true about that story of North and her. Old North never loved anyone and he certainly never loved that girl that he bought just like she was a sack of corn. No way. On the day he died, my pop told me the real truth about that place and he told me why that girl did what she did and why North did it next.
And the real story is as big as any of those ones you can read in the bible. And not just any bible, neither. I’m talking about the huge one that sits on that special table at the front of the Church and stays open all the time and the real story is as special as a peach growing on an apple tree. My pop told me that old North didn’t really make La La Land for that golden haired girl at all and unlike everyone else, my pop heard from someone who knew what he was talking about. He heard it, hisself from North’s lawyer one night when they was all fucked up and out ice fishing on the river.
See, the real story is that around the same time that the girl showed up, well God came down to North, too. And God told North that he had been watching him and he had seen all that evil stuff that he had done to them dogs and to that poor Arab boy and God told North that he had better turn his life around. And North being North, told God to go fuck himself and right then God pulled him up into heaven and showed him everything that he was going to miss out on and then he pushed that rich fool right through the earth itself and all the way down to hell and there, God showed North everything he had to look forward to. And North saw the devil a’whipping on everyone and he felt the flames that burn the skin forever and when North woke up the next morning and found himself in bed, he fell down onto his knees and put his face on the floor and begged God to forgive him for all the bad stuff that he’d done and all those stray dogs that he killed.
And on that very day, just to show God how sorry he was he decided to build a monument to God that would rival heaven itself and declare all the wonders of his truth.
And that’s the real story about La La Land. That’s why North built that silly place. It had nothing to do with love and everything to do with good old fashioned terror.
And if you want to really understand just how God works, you got to understand that over the years, God has gone all over the world and showed other bad men that very same thing that he showed Willy. And when those people seen the wonders of God, they done the same thing that Willy done. And me, I’ve seen some of those places and I’ve seen some of the things that people will make when God comes down and tells them what’s what. I seen these big rocks, the size of Airstream trailers that some men dropped deep into the ground, in a big old circle just like they was pebbles that fell from the sky and I seen the pyramids out in the desert that from afar look like they’re held up by the sun’s very own rays. And I seen gigantic churches built all out of stones with bits of colored glass for windows and when the light comes through all that glass and shines off all those stones, it makes you want to just cry and cry and cry and rip out your very own eyes cause you know you ain’t ever gonna see something that beautiful again. And all these people who built these things, they was just like that evil old Willy and they was just doing it to make their peace with an angry God.
And fuck me twice on Sunday, if God wasn’t disappointed as all hell when that old fool built La La Land because I’ll be damned if that’s what God had in mind. But oh man, that sure as hell is what he got. And you really can’t blame old North because if God is gonna be fool enough to speak to someone from here, well then God should’ve expected all that La La Land actually is. God should’ve seen it coming a mile on down the road. He should’a known that old North was going to build a dirty, stinking heap of aluminum and shit because to someone from where I come from heavens a fucking carnival that never leaves town.
And here’s the best part. Here’s the part that’s really gonna crawl down your throat and just stick to your gut like your momma’s grits. My daddy told me that the Swedish girl didn’t just jump off that tower because she was homesick and North didn’t shoot hisself just cause he was all lovelorn. Absolutely not.
See, after North built that place for God, well God changed his mind about that silly bastard. Somehow, a tiny crack opened up in God’s heart and he decided that maybe there was a place for North in heaven after all. But by then North had gone and got that Swedish girl pregnant and well, even though God has a soft side, he wasn’t about to let the North clan continue. No sir. So he made North and that girl a deal. God told North that anyone who kills they’s self inside that park and if they do it in a way that nobody else has ever done, well then they get to go straight to the real La La Land. I’m talking about the one that God built hisself. And maybe you’re hearing me but maybe you’re not because listen, what I’m saying is that they get to go straight to heaven. And they get to stay there forever. Cause in the end, that’s what God likes to see from his people. He wants to see us just falling all over ourselves to get to him. And that’s why those two did what they did. That girl knew that her life wasn’t going to get any better here on earth and North for once his life could see beyond his shadow, so him and that girl took God up on his offer and did the right thing.
At least, that’s what my daddy said. And it’s true, that man had his faults. Sure, more than once did he take the telephone cord to my mom and me and I’m pretty sure he fooled around with the neighbor girl when no one was around and I know, I’m not talking out of school when I say that it was him and his brother that set fire to the old Chopin place but know this, my daddy was no liar. And I’ll have more than words with anyone who says different.
And I know that what I’m saying about La La Land and about killing yourself there and about going to heaven, I know it sounds as crazy as anything anyone ever said. And I know that some people just blow that story back into the air like they was puffing smoke. Just like the preacher at that little Church on the corner does but listen, that’s just cause he ain’t never heard about any other type of Church other than his own. But I have. I heard preachers tell about God ordering a man to slice open his son on a mountaintop and I seen a church that dances around with snakes and drinks poison. I seen men cut into the privates of little girls in the name of God and I’ve been to places where God tells men to marry as many women as he wants. I’ve seen boys tie vines onto their feet and jump out of trees to prove how much they loved God and if your dumb enough to think that La La Land is crazier than any or all of that, then you’re a damned fool.
But none of that really even matters anymore. Not now. Cause some years ago, when I was as high as a red tailed hawk and just completely falling around on enough homespun crank to kill a bull, this thing like God came to me too. And it came just like it come to all those other people. Just like the postman walks right up to your door and drops one letter out all the one’s in his bucket and that one that he drops is somehow meant just for you only. And when God came to me, just like that girl and old man North, I decided that my life on earth wasn’t ever going to get any better. And I decided that I was ready to turn my own life around and go on and get up out of here. And since I was born here, I knew that leaving wasn’t no answer cause my problem was deep, deep inside of me and if I didn’t cure it soon, well, I may never make it out at all and so together, this thing like God and me decided that the best idea would be for me to just find a way to do myself in right there at La La Land and start this whole thing over again, somewhere else and in some other time.
Now right off the bat, I gotta tell you that this ain’t no easy sort of chore. This ain’t like finding out who your great, great grandparents was or where in town you can get a perfectly fine blowjob for twenty bucks at four in the morning. See no one ‘round here talks about the deaths out at La La Land and even the police and the town hall, they don’t keep no records of ‘em, cause they don’t want no one poking around and asking questions and just make more work for everyone. So if you didn’t know no better, you might think that it don’t ever even happen. But at this bar that I used to go to, there was this green sheriff that used to always get drunk and talk about all the shit he’d seen out at La La Land and believe me, none of it was pretty. Those things he used to say that he’d seen out there, well that was some of the worst things that I’d ever even heard. But not him, man, he’d tell those stories with a smile as big as a rain gutter. And even though just thinking about doing it made me all sick and sad, I knew that if I really was really going to do this right, I was going to have to see all those fucked up things too.
So one day, I walked right down there and into that little trailer that sits just outside where you buy your tickets and I asked the man behind the desk for a job.
“What do you want to work here for,” he asked. And I had kind of thought this thing through beforehand and had even asked another guy what kind of questions they might ask so I said exactly what I had planned.
“Well, I don’t really want to work at all. Its just I got a wife and baby at home and I figure I got to do something and this looks as good as anything else.”
Now, I knew that this old boy, he ain’t ever heard nobody give no answer like that cause he looked up at me and said, “listen kid, anyone stupid enough to answer a question like that is too dumb to operate any of the rides and too much of a smartass to work with the people”. And to be honest with you, I was kind of relieved and having second thoughts. So I turned to leave but had to stop when he said, “But you might be honest enough to work security.” And right then I knew two things, one, that I had the job and two, that God must really want me to do this thing.
Anyway, the man spent the next hour telling me what security was. How I would have to stay on my feet for eight hours a day and how I would have to holler at kids and retards and maybe knock some people around a little if they kept doing something you told ‘em not to do. And seriously that sounded about as much as I could ask for in a job and then he told me what it pays and sent me over to another trailer to sign some papers.
As I left he shouted out, “just do me one favor. Make sure you don’t kill anyone in there.” I just stared at him and he added, “don’t laugh, its happened before.
Now, I’m not ashamed to say that for the first couple of weeks I was a regular secret agent man. Just like one of them you see on television. I was a man on a mission. For my whole shift, I’d just walk around and make little notes to myself and try to learn all the ins and outs of the rides so as I could determine which ones made for the best spots for doing, you know, what I had come to do. I’d strike up stupid little conversations with the handlers (that’s what they call the people that work the rides) and I’d try to find out what shit had already happened where and try to figure out which rides was the most dangerous and stuff. But pretty quickly, the different bosses, they seen that I wasn’t really doing my job and so after something like the second or third week they called me into the main office and the guy that hired me gave me the what for. He told me I wasn’t doing my job right and how I was supposed to catch people stealing or hopping over the fence and yelled at me some more for not having caught anyone since I started. Then he went at me for asking too many freaky questions to the handlers and said, “what are you, some kind of sicko?” For a moment it looked like he was going to cry. In the end, he made me promise that I wouldn’t talk to the women or girls no more cause they all was afraid of me and he sent me back to work.
I walked down those tiny little metal stairs again and sat down. Even though I wasn’t really trying to keep the job, I mean, even though I didn’t give a flying fuck about how I did or what they thought of me, I knew that staying there was the most important part of the plan so I figured I’d better actually start working if I was ever going to do get the chance to do the other thing. So the next day, I actually walked around and, tried to catch people doing shit. It turned out to be pretty easy and kind of fun. I walked my beat, that’s what they call the route you gotta walk over and over around the park and I was on top of everything. I caught the kids getting drunk in the bathroom and the guys that’d climb off the haunted house ride when the cart was back in the trailer and punch the skeletons that’d pop up. And I caught the couples sneaking off into the bushes in the garden and all the crazies digging through the trash for the bottles and even if I’d caught ‘em a couple times, I was sure not to rough anyone up because I’d already decided that I was on my way to heaven and it was high time for me, just like it was for old man North all those years back to change. And anyway, after a couple of weeks of all that, I got to know some of the people at the park and I decided that all in all, it wasn’t so bad working there and at least it wasn’t that god damned aluminum plant. Sometimes after work, some of us would even go out for a drink or two and we’d sit around and laugh at all the people that’d come around that day and at all the stupid questions that they’d ask. And everyone would want to hear my stories about the people I caught. And sometimes this guy that sold the corn dogs would want me to tell him about the couples in the bushes and all that they was doing and about what the girls looked like. I didn’t like that guy too much.
And even though, all in all, I liked pretty much every part of my job. My favorite part by far was at the beginning of the day, when it was so cold that you felt like your pants was made of metal and we’d all walk around with our cups of coffee and our hands dug deep into our pockets and our collars up around our neck and all just kind of bitch about working. “Another fucking day,” we’d tell each other in between sips or we’d say some little joke, like “growing up, gotta work,” and its true, I didn’t really mind my job but I’d say that stuff too and something about saying it with everyone and something about how we did it every day, actually made me feel kind of good inside. And it made me feel like I imagine how a person feels when they is walking out of Church on Sunday and shaking the pastors hand at the door.
And a couple of weeks later, by the time I noticed her, well, by then I’d even almost stopped thinking about why I started working there in the first place. I mean after a full day of work and after going out for a couple of drinks at night by the time that I’d lay down to go to sleep, I was so tired and my head was so full like I just ate a thanksgiving meal that I could barely hear the wheeze of that old aluminum plant or see the orange dim of all those lights. Sometimes my room actually felt like it was dark and quiet and I would lie awake and tell myself that I was the last man on earth. And looking back during that little stretch of time all the gears and pulleys that make up the mechanics of life were really running pretty smooth for me. And then she came around and just shoved a steel bar right into the machine and stopped the whole thing dead.
I remember just how it went. She was standing by the Hammerhead and watching it rise and fall to the earth like a fat kid on a Teeter Totter. The Hammerhead is this ride at the back of the park. Its got this huge steel beam, maybe a hundred and fifty feet long and at least ten feet thick and at each end of it there’s this cabin where the people sit and get strapped in. The beam spins around this axle in the middle of it and when one of the cabins is high in the sky, the other cabin is down below and while the beam spins the cabins flip-flop over themselves. And when you was in the cabin at the top of the beam and falling, you’d swear you were going to hit the ground and then bam, just like that, you and the cabin would turn and go shooting straight into the sky. And I remember it all, I mean everything because that was my favorite ride to watch too and way back when I was still going to do my thing, well, I’d decided that the hammerhead was where I was going to do it and I’d even decided how.
See the Hammerhead spun over this big, concrete ditch and at the bottom of the ditch there was these metal grates and when they was letting people on the ride they would walk on those grates to get into the cabin and when the ride started and the cabin was headed into the sky, those grates would clang open and the cabin would swing through that little area faster than anything you ever did see. And at night, when the ride was turned off, the handlers would stand it straight up like a rocket ship so that one of those cabins was at the bottom of the ditch and over those grates and the other one was way at the other end of the beam, high in the sky.
Anyway, , one night after my shift, I snuck onto the ride and broke into the cabin at the bottom of the ditch and opened up a little hatch on the floor and pulled the grate up and saw that there was a little room under there and that one person, maybe two could lay down in that little coffin area and spend the night with the Hammerhead cabin sitting up on top of you. And see in the morning, when they turned the ride on, they was supposed to come down and lower the grates but they never did. Those retards that worked on that ride they just turned it on and got a kick out of watching the cabin knock over the grates as it swung around. And if a person was in that little ditch when that cabin swung around well, I imagine it would just knock the living shit out of him. And that’s how I was going to do it. I mean I figured that when that cabin swung around and hit me in the it would send me at least a hundred feet in the air, high enough so I could look down on that crazy park and far enough away so that I wouldn’t be found for days and days and people would talk about it for years. They’d talk about that time that crazy boy flew himself right out of La La Land and into a far, far better place.
And, the first time I saw her that’s where she was. Leaning on the railing, craning her neck up and using one of her hands to shield the sun while she watched that ride like it was one of those television serials that she’d followed for years. With the other hand she was smoking a cigarette and flipping the ash off to the side and into the bushes and even though that was against the rules, man, I wasn’t going to say anything. She was wearing this long black skirt that kind of hid her hips, that were probably a little wider than they should have been but still looked pretty damn good and she had on this huge baggy sweatshirt that pretty much covered up what I could tell had to be an amazing pair of tits. She had a star tattooed right on her neck and dark hair that fell just below her ears. She was pretty in a funny kind of way. I mean in a way that might have really flown someplace else like in one of those big cities but here, just made her look weird. It didn’t matter though cause I pretty much fell in love with her the moment I saw her.
So I see her standing there and walk right on by her and she takes her hand down from in front of her face, looks me up and down and then just stares at my badge and says, “yeah, I feel safer already.” Just like that. Swear to God. So I smiled and just kept on going. I mean at the time I didn’t really understand what she said but I knew it wasn’t no invitation out, so I figured I best just keep walking and not say anything.
So for the next couple of weeks every time I walked by the Hammerhead, I looked up to see if she was there and sure enough, every couple of days, there’d she be and always in that same position and always just as serious about watching that damn ride. And finally, probably after like the fourth or fifth time I’d seen her, she walked right over to me and said, “well, if you gonna stare at me like that every time we pass, you might as well know my name. I’m Kate.”
Now up till then, I wasn’t really one to talk to women. I mean, sure, I’ve done it and I’ve even slept with ‘em a time or two but we never said much before or after and I can’t imagine I was that good at it anyways. When she introduced herself, I looked at her for a moment and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what she said. It was like the whole world went silent. I saw her lips moving alright and maybe even heard some of the words but for some reason it was like they was in a foreign language and right then, I figured that I had just better keep on walking and not make a fool out of myself. And the funny thing is, that was just what she wanted. Can you believe it? So, anyway, she followed me and repeated, “I said my name is Kate.” But I was too far ahead of her so that she had to yell it and since I figured I was going to look like an asshole anyhow for walking away the first time, I thought it might be best to just keep on walking. So even though she said it again and then again and again, I just kept on walking my beat and not even turning around and nodding or anything. Well, that must of surprised the hell out of her ‘cause for the next couple hours, she just walked around with me not saying anything and with me pretty much trying to pretend I didn’t notice her at all, which was kind of difficult because we was nearly walking side by side. And she walked around with me like that all the way till I walked into the security office to clock out and change and by the time I came out, she was gone.
I didn’t see her for a couple of weeks after that but eventually she turned up again. It was right about the time that I was starting to get kind of weary with my work. I mean, it still didn’t really bother me, I could go in every day and work my whole shift, only now I didn’t get such a kick out of talking to everybody in the morning and I was starting to feel like I was going to have to knock one of those crazies out, cause I mean everyday it was the same thing with those goddamned bottles and just making a huge old mess of all the trashcans everywhere they went. And sometimes now instead of throwing out those couples I’d catch sneaking off into the bushes or getting a little too friendly in the castle adventure, well sometimes, I’d just sit back and watch ‘em and to be honest, it was starting to make me feel kind of bad about myself again.
When I first saw her, I’ll be damned if she didn’t just straight walk over to me, light me a cigarette off of hers, hand it to me and just walk my beat with me for the rest of my shift all the way till it was time for me to clock out. By now, I figured since I hadn’t ever said anything to her, it would just be too strange to all of a sudden strike up a conversation and since back then I wasn’t much of a talker anyway, I just didn’t say anything and neither did she and by the time I was done clocking out and changing again, she was gone.
For the next month or so, two to three times a week, she’d show up on my shift and we’d just walk my beat and smoke cigarettes and not say anything to each other. I was pretty much done with my job and ready to just about kill someone, so I was kind of relieved when one day she came up to me and right off the bat said, “well, its been really nice getting to know you but I’ll be leaving town tonight,” and just turned around and walked away. She didn’t say nothing else and she didn’t even turn back around to wave or anything and by the time I had taken another sip of my coffee and looked up, she was gone.
Well, that was that, I figured. And I though today’s the day and it occurred to me that in about four months, I had worked an entire career and fell in love and had a relationship and I was thankful that somehow God saw fit to still give me all of that but now I was ready to be done with the whole thing so I went over to the bosses shack and told him that I was quitting. He tried to give me shit and told me he was gonna dock my pay for the last week but I told him that I didn’t even want my last check and so that pretty much shut him up and I left.
That night when it was almost completely dark, I snuck over to the hammerhead. I peeled the steel grate back and sat down on the wet earth at the bottom of that little rain basin. It had been months since I had been there last and I was surprised to see how tight of a fit it was and by the time I had squeezed in there, it felt like I was just engulfed by warmth. I swear, I sat there for about ten minutes, not moving and feeling this tiny, little swell every second or so like I was floating in the river. Eventually, I closed my eyes and was just about to drift off when the swell stopped and out of the darkness the mound that was next to me whispered, “Is you an angel?” Now, I just about had a heart attack and after a minute Kate managed to pull out a little Bic lighter it and looked me square in the eye.
“Is that why you never talk, cause you’re an angel,” she asked.
I didn’t quite know what to do. First off, I mean, I was still blown back by finding her in there and also, ‘cause no one had ever confused me with anything good before. And I guess I could have done or said about a million different things to her but right then only one of ‘em made any sense at all.
I looked her in the eye but before I could speak, she freed another hand and pulled my face close to hers and kissed me hard and pretty soon we were all tangled up and to this day, I don’t know how but we managed to do it right there and then. Inside that little room that was in the concrete ditch just below the Hammerhead in the middle of La La Land and on the outskirts of the shittiest little town in the world. We stayed wrapped up inside of each other for what felt like forever. Through the grates, our breath was warming the bottom of the cabin and the warm air created a little mirror on the metal and our eyes had adjusted to the dark so that we could look at each other’s reflections and see one another’s smiles.
We lay like that for a while until the sky burned orange from the lights of the Plant and the hum of the turbines kicked into full gear. Kate told me how much she loved me and how she didn’t want to do this anymore. She said more stuff about how we could be happy and maybe even leave the town and live somewhere else and someday we might even start a family. She was crying by now, not much but enough and my head was pounding and spinning like an engine belt and what she was saying was starting to actually sound kind of good until she pushed on the grate that would have let us out and learned what I already knew. That that old gate locked from the outside when it was shut and like it or not we were here now and that the time for these two stowaways to jump ship had long since sailed away. I’ll never forget what happened next, she looked back at me and for a moment it looked like she was just gonna’ completely lose it and right then, I don’t know why and to this day I don’t know how it came to me but right then, I told the only lie that I’m proud of to this very day.
“Kate, listen to me”, I told her, “I am an angel, your angel, your very own but I have to go back now,” and I told her how I’d watched her for her whole life, how I was there on her first day of school and her first kiss and the time she did that thing that she thought no one else knew about and that I had come down here just to meet her and how I’d fallen in love with her right off. She stopped crying and her eyes got all big and she started shaking just a little and she was about to say something else and I couldn’t really lie anymore so I said, “but listen you’ve gotta help me now. “You and me gotta show God that you really do want to live.” And for the next hour, I told her about how the Hammerhead worked and about how the retards that worked these rides, they always wore headphones before the park opened and how they’d never hear us even if we screamed and about how they wouldn’t check the grates when they turned it on so it was going to be up to us to make it out. I told her how in a heartbeat, I would fly away back up to heaven and so I was fine but that she’d have help me get her out of the basin and away from the cabin that would be swinging down on us faster than anything she’d ever seen. And even though I knew it was a million to one and even though she probably did too, for some reason she just kept nodding her head and after I was done explaining it all, she put her head on my chest and together, we fell fast asleep. When I woke up, I lay there, next to her and wondered if I would actually make it to La La Land in the morning. I thought about all the work I’d been through and how somehow, now, in the very end, I actually had found something to lose. Occasionally, my mind would drift a little and I’d think about how if this plan didn’t work, one of us might end up in La La Land but the other one, was just simply, completely fucked and I guess as long as it was me, I was gonna be OK with that. So I decided to hedge my bets a little and make sure that if we were going to get hit by that fucking sky cabin, I was going to make damn sure that the reward was hers.
Before I knew it morning came and just like I knew I would, in no time at all, I heard the groan of the Hammerhead’s engine and I timed it just perfect so that right as the grate in front of us was barreling open with a loud thud, I was pulling Kate up. And as she leapt, I tossed her to the side with my arms raised high over my head and I just screamed at the top of my lungs. Kate’s eyes opened with a flash and like one of them big cats on those nature show, she leapt and rolled out of the way and fell into the empty space beside the ditch and the Cabin swung down and missed her by maybe an inch. And I don’t know exactly how I saw this or where I was when I saw it but the last thing I remember is looking down at her as she huddled deep in the rain basin with her hand covering her belly and tears streaming down her face and just like that, just like fucking that, everything went out.
When the ride came to a stop, they pulled Kate out of the concrete pool and she was mumbling something about this thing like God and they took her to the hospital and ran the tests that some weeks later told her that she was pregnant with a son.
Almost immediately the stories started. A couple of people said they saw a flash and a few of the townspeople said they thought they saw a falling star or something flying low over the town early that morning and right about the time they heard the Hammerheads clang. It was about a month before they found my body lodged up in one of the giant oaks that covers the concrete slab with the sign that introduces our town. I can only guess that they were confused as anyone ever has been as they pulled my mangled remains out of the tree but by then, I wasn’t there anymore, at least it wasn’t really me.
Kate had left the town a few days before they found me. She figured she had the son of an angel inside of her and that now she could do anything and I guess in some ways she was right. For the rest of her life she told her son about the night an angel came to visit her and for the rest of his life, he believed it.
Anyway, maybe I made it to La La Land or maybe I was in La La Land inside that little ditch or maybe this whole town is La La Land and outside there’s nothing else, I don’t know and I don’t ask those kinds of questions anymore. Cause now, anytime I want, I can just run around on the tops of all those giant trees that line the main road and catch the little birds that fall out of their nests and zip through the forest and over to the gorge and dive down deep into its waters until I can’t see my hand in front of my face and in the mornings, I can walk through windows and watch the pretty people fuck and I see them lie and leave and hold and push away and I never feel bad no more, not at all and now, at night, when I fall asleep, I dream of her and him and where they are and what they’ll become and I lay in total silence with the air around me, damp and charged, with these little lightning bolts that tingle my skin like tiny pins and I close my eyes and wait and watch and smile and suddenly, everything just goes black.
See, where I come from, three things sneak on into a boy’s head round about the time he turns eleven or twelve. First off, he realizes what a fucking shithole place he’s from and what a loser he must be just for being born here. Second, the more he watches his daddy and his brothers grow up and die, the more it occurs to him that things ain’t ever gonna get no better for him or for his kids or for his kid’s kids, no matter what. And round about the time he learns those two hard, painful truths, that suck the life right on out of you and leave you all dried up like the morning after you’ve been drunk for days, well right about then, someone, usually one of his so-called friends but occasionally his own flesh and blood, walks right on up and slaps him with the truth about La La Land.
“La La Land, ain’t what you think it is boy,” they’ll say, all bossy just like that. With a little smile poking out of all their seriousness.
“It ain’t no place for just fun and games, at least that ain’t the all of it. That ain’t nearly the all of it,” they’ll warn. And they’ll laugh and he’ll know that they’re about to tell him something real fucked up, cause where I’m from that’s what people do when they’re about to say something real bad, they laugh. Its like the time, this kid Roger told me he could show me the grossest thing I was ever going to live to see. He led me way the fuck out into the woods, past the river and way down by the gorge and right up to this big, dirty checkered blanket like those ones they use to work on cars. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t pull that blanket back and there was a man, all dead for days with a big hole, carved right through his forehead. I sat there for like five minutes, completely sick to myself before Roger started in on how that guy had got there.
See Roger said that the day before he had been out, shooting birds and shit when he stumbled on this guy wandering around, drunk and just falling all over his self. He said that for over half the day he just followed him around, all silent like and practicing his tracking until he sneaked up real close and drew a perfect bead on the guy with his daddy’s Winchester. Right then, when he had guy in his crosshairs, the guy turned around and freaked out when he saw Roger and the gun and bam, just like that the gun grew all hot in his hands and when he looked up, the guy was gone. For a second he thought the guy had run off but when he looked down, he seen the guy all sprawled out with his head blown back and his arms and legs shaking like the tops of the trees.
Anyway, I’m not saying nothing, I mean maybe Roger shot that guy or maybe he just stumbled up on him or maybe someone led him down to that dead body and showed him just like he showed me, it doesn’t really matter, the point is from the moment when he told me about it to the time he pulled that blanket back, he had that same fucked up smile, smeared all up over his face. And for the next year and a half anytime I closed my eyes, I seen that dead guy with his brains all spilling out.
See, La La Land ain’t really like no place else you ever been. I mean, I know I can’t tell you nothing but I can guarantee that your town ain’t got no place like it. It’s the only one of its kind in the whole world. I promise you that. See, it’s kind of like a fair or a carnival that never gets torn down. But don’t get the wrong the idea, it ain’t like one of them big fun land places where they have those giant concrete mountains and those people that dress up like they was in the cartoons. It ain’t clean and the rides that it does have ain’t fancy at all and they don’t run underground and they’re not stacked up on top of one another in big boxy buildings. No, La La Land ain’t any of that. La La Land is just like one of those carnivals that pass through town with those big, sad rides that kind of wheeze and shake and get dragged around by trucks. And it’s got all these metal tents sitting on sawdust with games in ‘em and those small stuffed animals that split at the seams the first time you hug on ‘em. The whole place smells like a dirty bar and after the first five minutes of being there, your nose gets all dried out and your eyes are all watery cause all that dust just kicking around.
And nobody really ever goes there. I mean, sure people end up there. Guys after work to drink and walk around and throw bottles and shit and some girls go there looking for the type of guys that drink and walk around and break shit. And kids go and wander around with money they swiped from their folks’ wallets and once and a while, maybe a couple or two, out on their first date that want to pretend for a night that they don’t live where they know damn well that they do, they’ll go but nobody really goes there to be at La La Land. It just ain’t that kind of place.
And a lot of people wonder how it even stays open if no one is ever going there. They ask, how come it just don’t shut down and go away like the Tastee Bun that used to sit underneath those big wooden beams that crisscrossed together in a giant “A” and now is all boarded up and kids just sit in there and smoke and sometimes bums sneak in to shit or to sleep on the floor? With everything closing up all the time they’ll ask, “how can that crazy place still be around?” And see, I’m sure that makes sense and all but that’s what you got to understand about La La Land. It just don’t make any kind of sense.
One story has that way back when our town was built for the workers of the, “North and Sons Aluminum Plant,” back then everyone in the town worked for the plant but over the years its just kind of fallen down on top of itself and now it just crawls around, putting out enough aluminum to keep it running but mostly just keeping everyone in town awake all night, with its low groans and smoky orange glow that light up the sky even in the dead of night.
In World War 1, two of old man North’s sons went off to fight the Germans and when they never made it back home, well, he just about went crazy and he locked his self and his family up in his big, old house and let everything else just go to shit. Eventually, he died and left the plant to his youngest, William North the third. And old Willy 3, he was a crazy son of a bitch who inherited a company that was running itself down faster than a skipped stone and they say that he had a mean streak as deep as the Putnam Gorge.
Just to show you what kind of a man he was, one year he bought the town Dog Pound and the story is that some nights he would bring home stray dogs and put on some kind of armor he had fabricated out of some spare aluminum and take ‘em out into this pen in the back of his house and beat those dogs dead into the ground, just for sport, with these big old chains that had links the size of your fist. And they say that once he even brought over this Arab boy from Bombay or somewhere and made that sap live on his hands and knees like a hog just to win a bet. And the day before the State was going to come and check up on that boy, someone called old Willy 3 and warned him ahead of time and that poor mope just disappeared for good. When the State got there, Willy 3, says to them “that boy must have just up and ran away.” But one of Willy’s hired men, he used to tell this story and he swore that old man North just threw a chain around that poor boys neck, rowed him out into the middle of the lake that was out behind his house and drowned him in all that water. They say that when he rowed that boy out into the lake, he didn’t even gag that kid, he just cranked up the turbines of the plant that night so it would cover up his screams. And my own Pop, on the night he came home all drunk and told me the truth about La La Land, well he said he could still remember the night when he was a boy and the plant ran extra loud and that underneath the noise of those big engines, he swore to god that he heard something else screaming. “Something human,” he said. And it kept him awake all night.
Anyway, some time later, North sent away for a mail order bride from one of them crazy countries that drink all that beer and have those big strong women. And some people think that when she arrived at his mansion door, he fell crazy, drop dead in love with her and from that day till the day he really did drop dead, he did every thing that he could to make her happy. And that’s how some people think La La Land came about. They think, he built what he thought would be a fairy tale world for that big old girl. Some people ‘round here say that he dreamed it up as a place where people could go any day of the year and be happy just like it was the Fourth of July. And they tell stories about how North told everyone that he wanted it to be a dream world and that’s why he called it La La Land. But those fools forget what happened next. They forget that one day that poor girl just climbed to the top of that clock tower in the center of the square and just stepped right off of it as the clock rang noon. She was dead when she hit the ground and by the next day, North had rewrote his will so that all of the money he had and all the money he was ever going to have would go to keeping that place open for pretty much ever and ever. And when all that was settled, well he climbed right up to the top of that tower and just shot himself in the head. So even if no one goes to La La Land from now until forever, for better or worse that place will always be open and there’ll be someone there to sell the popcorn and turn on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
But there ain’t nothing true about that story of North and her. Old North never loved anyone and he certainly never loved that girl that he bought just like she was a sack of corn. No way. On the day he died, my pop told me the real truth about that place and he told me why that girl did what she did and why North did it next.
And the real story is as big as any of those ones you can read in the bible. And not just any bible, neither. I’m talking about the huge one that sits on that special table at the front of the Church and stays open all the time and the real story is as special as a peach growing on an apple tree. My pop told me that old North didn’t really make La La Land for that golden haired girl at all and unlike everyone else, my pop heard from someone who knew what he was talking about. He heard it, hisself from North’s lawyer one night when they was all fucked up and out ice fishing on the river.
See, the real story is that around the same time that the girl showed up, well God came down to North, too. And God told North that he had been watching him and he had seen all that evil stuff that he had done to them dogs and to that poor Arab boy and God told North that he had better turn his life around. And North being North, told God to go fuck himself and right then God pulled him up into heaven and showed him everything that he was going to miss out on and then he pushed that rich fool right through the earth itself and all the way down to hell and there, God showed North everything he had to look forward to. And North saw the devil a’whipping on everyone and he felt the flames that burn the skin forever and when North woke up the next morning and found himself in bed, he fell down onto his knees and put his face on the floor and begged God to forgive him for all the bad stuff that he’d done and all those stray dogs that he killed.
And on that very day, just to show God how sorry he was he decided to build a monument to God that would rival heaven itself and declare all the wonders of his truth.
And that’s the real story about La La Land. That’s why North built that silly place. It had nothing to do with love and everything to do with good old fashioned terror.
And if you want to really understand just how God works, you got to understand that over the years, God has gone all over the world and showed other bad men that very same thing that he showed Willy. And when those people seen the wonders of God, they done the same thing that Willy done. And me, I’ve seen some of those places and I’ve seen some of the things that people will make when God comes down and tells them what’s what. I seen these big rocks, the size of Airstream trailers that some men dropped deep into the ground, in a big old circle just like they was pebbles that fell from the sky and I seen the pyramids out in the desert that from afar look like they’re held up by the sun’s very own rays. And I seen gigantic churches built all out of stones with bits of colored glass for windows and when the light comes through all that glass and shines off all those stones, it makes you want to just cry and cry and cry and rip out your very own eyes cause you know you ain’t ever gonna see something that beautiful again. And all these people who built these things, they was just like that evil old Willy and they was just doing it to make their peace with an angry God.
And fuck me twice on Sunday, if God wasn’t disappointed as all hell when that old fool built La La Land because I’ll be damned if that’s what God had in mind. But oh man, that sure as hell is what he got. And you really can’t blame old North because if God is gonna be fool enough to speak to someone from here, well then God should’ve expected all that La La Land actually is. God should’ve seen it coming a mile on down the road. He should’a known that old North was going to build a dirty, stinking heap of aluminum and shit because to someone from where I come from heavens a fucking carnival that never leaves town.
And here’s the best part. Here’s the part that’s really gonna crawl down your throat and just stick to your gut like your momma’s grits. My daddy told me that the Swedish girl didn’t just jump off that tower because she was homesick and North didn’t shoot hisself just cause he was all lovelorn. Absolutely not.
See, after North built that place for God, well God changed his mind about that silly bastard. Somehow, a tiny crack opened up in God’s heart and he decided that maybe there was a place for North in heaven after all. But by then North had gone and got that Swedish girl pregnant and well, even though God has a soft side, he wasn’t about to let the North clan continue. No sir. So he made North and that girl a deal. God told North that anyone who kills they’s self inside that park and if they do it in a way that nobody else has ever done, well then they get to go straight to the real La La Land. I’m talking about the one that God built hisself. And maybe you’re hearing me but maybe you’re not because listen, what I’m saying is that they get to go straight to heaven. And they get to stay there forever. Cause in the end, that’s what God likes to see from his people. He wants to see us just falling all over ourselves to get to him. And that’s why those two did what they did. That girl knew that her life wasn’t going to get any better here on earth and North for once his life could see beyond his shadow, so him and that girl took God up on his offer and did the right thing.
At least, that’s what my daddy said. And it’s true, that man had his faults. Sure, more than once did he take the telephone cord to my mom and me and I’m pretty sure he fooled around with the neighbor girl when no one was around and I know, I’m not talking out of school when I say that it was him and his brother that set fire to the old Chopin place but know this, my daddy was no liar. And I’ll have more than words with anyone who says different.
And I know that what I’m saying about La La Land and about killing yourself there and about going to heaven, I know it sounds as crazy as anything anyone ever said. And I know that some people just blow that story back into the air like they was puffing smoke. Just like the preacher at that little Church on the corner does but listen, that’s just cause he ain’t never heard about any other type of Church other than his own. But I have. I heard preachers tell about God ordering a man to slice open his son on a mountaintop and I seen a church that dances around with snakes and drinks poison. I seen men cut into the privates of little girls in the name of God and I’ve been to places where God tells men to marry as many women as he wants. I’ve seen boys tie vines onto their feet and jump out of trees to prove how much they loved God and if your dumb enough to think that La La Land is crazier than any or all of that, then you’re a damned fool.
But none of that really even matters anymore. Not now. Cause some years ago, when I was as high as a red tailed hawk and just completely falling around on enough homespun crank to kill a bull, this thing like God came to me too. And it came just like it come to all those other people. Just like the postman walks right up to your door and drops one letter out all the one’s in his bucket and that one that he drops is somehow meant just for you only. And when God came to me, just like that girl and old man North, I decided that my life on earth wasn’t ever going to get any better. And I decided that I was ready to turn my own life around and go on and get up out of here. And since I was born here, I knew that leaving wasn’t no answer cause my problem was deep, deep inside of me and if I didn’t cure it soon, well, I may never make it out at all and so together, this thing like God and me decided that the best idea would be for me to just find a way to do myself in right there at La La Land and start this whole thing over again, somewhere else and in some other time.
Now right off the bat, I gotta tell you that this ain’t no easy sort of chore. This ain’t like finding out who your great, great grandparents was or where in town you can get a perfectly fine blowjob for twenty bucks at four in the morning. See no one ‘round here talks about the deaths out at La La Land and even the police and the town hall, they don’t keep no records of ‘em, cause they don’t want no one poking around and asking questions and just make more work for everyone. So if you didn’t know no better, you might think that it don’t ever even happen. But at this bar that I used to go to, there was this green sheriff that used to always get drunk and talk about all the shit he’d seen out at La La Land and believe me, none of it was pretty. Those things he used to say that he’d seen out there, well that was some of the worst things that I’d ever even heard. But not him, man, he’d tell those stories with a smile as big as a rain gutter. And even though just thinking about doing it made me all sick and sad, I knew that if I really was really going to do this right, I was going to have to see all those fucked up things too.
So one day, I walked right down there and into that little trailer that sits just outside where you buy your tickets and I asked the man behind the desk for a job.
“What do you want to work here for,” he asked. And I had kind of thought this thing through beforehand and had even asked another guy what kind of questions they might ask so I said exactly what I had planned.
“Well, I don’t really want to work at all. Its just I got a wife and baby at home and I figure I got to do something and this looks as good as anything else.”
Now, I knew that this old boy, he ain’t ever heard nobody give no answer like that cause he looked up at me and said, “listen kid, anyone stupid enough to answer a question like that is too dumb to operate any of the rides and too much of a smartass to work with the people”. And to be honest with you, I was kind of relieved and having second thoughts. So I turned to leave but had to stop when he said, “But you might be honest enough to work security.” And right then I knew two things, one, that I had the job and two, that God must really want me to do this thing.
Anyway, the man spent the next hour telling me what security was. How I would have to stay on my feet for eight hours a day and how I would have to holler at kids and retards and maybe knock some people around a little if they kept doing something you told ‘em not to do. And seriously that sounded about as much as I could ask for in a job and then he told me what it pays and sent me over to another trailer to sign some papers.
As I left he shouted out, “just do me one favor. Make sure you don’t kill anyone in there.” I just stared at him and he added, “don’t laugh, its happened before.
Now, I’m not ashamed to say that for the first couple of weeks I was a regular secret agent man. Just like one of them you see on television. I was a man on a mission. For my whole shift, I’d just walk around and make little notes to myself and try to learn all the ins and outs of the rides so as I could determine which ones made for the best spots for doing, you know, what I had come to do. I’d strike up stupid little conversations with the handlers (that’s what they call the people that work the rides) and I’d try to find out what shit had already happened where and try to figure out which rides was the most dangerous and stuff. But pretty quickly, the different bosses, they seen that I wasn’t really doing my job and so after something like the second or third week they called me into the main office and the guy that hired me gave me the what for. He told me I wasn’t doing my job right and how I was supposed to catch people stealing or hopping over the fence and yelled at me some more for not having caught anyone since I started. Then he went at me for asking too many freaky questions to the handlers and said, “what are you, some kind of sicko?” For a moment it looked like he was going to cry. In the end, he made me promise that I wouldn’t talk to the women or girls no more cause they all was afraid of me and he sent me back to work.
I walked down those tiny little metal stairs again and sat down. Even though I wasn’t really trying to keep the job, I mean, even though I didn’t give a flying fuck about how I did or what they thought of me, I knew that staying there was the most important part of the plan so I figured I’d better actually start working if I was ever going to do get the chance to do the other thing. So the next day, I actually walked around and, tried to catch people doing shit. It turned out to be pretty easy and kind of fun. I walked my beat, that’s what they call the route you gotta walk over and over around the park and I was on top of everything. I caught the kids getting drunk in the bathroom and the guys that’d climb off the haunted house ride when the cart was back in the trailer and punch the skeletons that’d pop up. And I caught the couples sneaking off into the bushes in the garden and all the crazies digging through the trash for the bottles and even if I’d caught ‘em a couple times, I was sure not to rough anyone up because I’d already decided that I was on my way to heaven and it was high time for me, just like it was for old man North all those years back to change. And anyway, after a couple of weeks of all that, I got to know some of the people at the park and I decided that all in all, it wasn’t so bad working there and at least it wasn’t that god damned aluminum plant. Sometimes after work, some of us would even go out for a drink or two and we’d sit around and laugh at all the people that’d come around that day and at all the stupid questions that they’d ask. And everyone would want to hear my stories about the people I caught. And sometimes this guy that sold the corn dogs would want me to tell him about the couples in the bushes and all that they was doing and about what the girls looked like. I didn’t like that guy too much.
And even though, all in all, I liked pretty much every part of my job. My favorite part by far was at the beginning of the day, when it was so cold that you felt like your pants was made of metal and we’d all walk around with our cups of coffee and our hands dug deep into our pockets and our collars up around our neck and all just kind of bitch about working. “Another fucking day,” we’d tell each other in between sips or we’d say some little joke, like “growing up, gotta work,” and its true, I didn’t really mind my job but I’d say that stuff too and something about saying it with everyone and something about how we did it every day, actually made me feel kind of good inside. And it made me feel like I imagine how a person feels when they is walking out of Church on Sunday and shaking the pastors hand at the door.
And a couple of weeks later, by the time I noticed her, well, by then I’d even almost stopped thinking about why I started working there in the first place. I mean after a full day of work and after going out for a couple of drinks at night by the time that I’d lay down to go to sleep, I was so tired and my head was so full like I just ate a thanksgiving meal that I could barely hear the wheeze of that old aluminum plant or see the orange dim of all those lights. Sometimes my room actually felt like it was dark and quiet and I would lie awake and tell myself that I was the last man on earth. And looking back during that little stretch of time all the gears and pulleys that make up the mechanics of life were really running pretty smooth for me. And then she came around and just shoved a steel bar right into the machine and stopped the whole thing dead.
I remember just how it went. She was standing by the Hammerhead and watching it rise and fall to the earth like a fat kid on a Teeter Totter. The Hammerhead is this ride at the back of the park. Its got this huge steel beam, maybe a hundred and fifty feet long and at least ten feet thick and at each end of it there’s this cabin where the people sit and get strapped in. The beam spins around this axle in the middle of it and when one of the cabins is high in the sky, the other cabin is down below and while the beam spins the cabins flip-flop over themselves. And when you was in the cabin at the top of the beam and falling, you’d swear you were going to hit the ground and then bam, just like that, you and the cabin would turn and go shooting straight into the sky. And I remember it all, I mean everything because that was my favorite ride to watch too and way back when I was still going to do my thing, well, I’d decided that the hammerhead was where I was going to do it and I’d even decided how.
See the Hammerhead spun over this big, concrete ditch and at the bottom of the ditch there was these metal grates and when they was letting people on the ride they would walk on those grates to get into the cabin and when the ride started and the cabin was headed into the sky, those grates would clang open and the cabin would swing through that little area faster than anything you ever did see. And at night, when the ride was turned off, the handlers would stand it straight up like a rocket ship so that one of those cabins was at the bottom of the ditch and over those grates and the other one was way at the other end of the beam, high in the sky.
Anyway, , one night after my shift, I snuck onto the ride and broke into the cabin at the bottom of the ditch and opened up a little hatch on the floor and pulled the grate up and saw that there was a little room under there and that one person, maybe two could lay down in that little coffin area and spend the night with the Hammerhead cabin sitting up on top of you. And see in the morning, when they turned the ride on, they was supposed to come down and lower the grates but they never did. Those retards that worked on that ride they just turned it on and got a kick out of watching the cabin knock over the grates as it swung around. And if a person was in that little ditch when that cabin swung around well, I imagine it would just knock the living shit out of him. And that’s how I was going to do it. I mean I figured that when that cabin swung around and hit me in the it would send me at least a hundred feet in the air, high enough so I could look down on that crazy park and far enough away so that I wouldn’t be found for days and days and people would talk about it for years. They’d talk about that time that crazy boy flew himself right out of La La Land and into a far, far better place.
And, the first time I saw her that’s where she was. Leaning on the railing, craning her neck up and using one of her hands to shield the sun while she watched that ride like it was one of those television serials that she’d followed for years. With the other hand she was smoking a cigarette and flipping the ash off to the side and into the bushes and even though that was against the rules, man, I wasn’t going to say anything. She was wearing this long black skirt that kind of hid her hips, that were probably a little wider than they should have been but still looked pretty damn good and she had on this huge baggy sweatshirt that pretty much covered up what I could tell had to be an amazing pair of tits. She had a star tattooed right on her neck and dark hair that fell just below her ears. She was pretty in a funny kind of way. I mean in a way that might have really flown someplace else like in one of those big cities but here, just made her look weird. It didn’t matter though cause I pretty much fell in love with her the moment I saw her.
So I see her standing there and walk right on by her and she takes her hand down from in front of her face, looks me up and down and then just stares at my badge and says, “yeah, I feel safer already.” Just like that. Swear to God. So I smiled and just kept on going. I mean at the time I didn’t really understand what she said but I knew it wasn’t no invitation out, so I figured I best just keep walking and not say anything.
So for the next couple of weeks every time I walked by the Hammerhead, I looked up to see if she was there and sure enough, every couple of days, there’d she be and always in that same position and always just as serious about watching that damn ride. And finally, probably after like the fourth or fifth time I’d seen her, she walked right over to me and said, “well, if you gonna stare at me like that every time we pass, you might as well know my name. I’m Kate.”
Now up till then, I wasn’t really one to talk to women. I mean, sure, I’ve done it and I’ve even slept with ‘em a time or two but we never said much before or after and I can’t imagine I was that good at it anyways. When she introduced herself, I looked at her for a moment and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what she said. It was like the whole world went silent. I saw her lips moving alright and maybe even heard some of the words but for some reason it was like they was in a foreign language and right then, I figured that I had just better keep on walking and not make a fool out of myself. And the funny thing is, that was just what she wanted. Can you believe it? So, anyway, she followed me and repeated, “I said my name is Kate.” But I was too far ahead of her so that she had to yell it and since I figured I was going to look like an asshole anyhow for walking away the first time, I thought it might be best to just keep on walking. So even though she said it again and then again and again, I just kept on walking my beat and not even turning around and nodding or anything. Well, that must of surprised the hell out of her ‘cause for the next couple hours, she just walked around with me not saying anything and with me pretty much trying to pretend I didn’t notice her at all, which was kind of difficult because we was nearly walking side by side. And she walked around with me like that all the way till I walked into the security office to clock out and change and by the time I came out, she was gone.
I didn’t see her for a couple of weeks after that but eventually she turned up again. It was right about the time that I was starting to get kind of weary with my work. I mean, it still didn’t really bother me, I could go in every day and work my whole shift, only now I didn’t get such a kick out of talking to everybody in the morning and I was starting to feel like I was going to have to knock one of those crazies out, cause I mean everyday it was the same thing with those goddamned bottles and just making a huge old mess of all the trashcans everywhere they went. And sometimes now instead of throwing out those couples I’d catch sneaking off into the bushes or getting a little too friendly in the castle adventure, well sometimes, I’d just sit back and watch ‘em and to be honest, it was starting to make me feel kind of bad about myself again.
When I first saw her, I’ll be damned if she didn’t just straight walk over to me, light me a cigarette off of hers, hand it to me and just walk my beat with me for the rest of my shift all the way till it was time for me to clock out. By now, I figured since I hadn’t ever said anything to her, it would just be too strange to all of a sudden strike up a conversation and since back then I wasn’t much of a talker anyway, I just didn’t say anything and neither did she and by the time I was done clocking out and changing again, she was gone.
For the next month or so, two to three times a week, she’d show up on my shift and we’d just walk my beat and smoke cigarettes and not say anything to each other. I was pretty much done with my job and ready to just about kill someone, so I was kind of relieved when one day she came up to me and right off the bat said, “well, its been really nice getting to know you but I’ll be leaving town tonight,” and just turned around and walked away. She didn’t say nothing else and she didn’t even turn back around to wave or anything and by the time I had taken another sip of my coffee and looked up, she was gone.
Well, that was that, I figured. And I though today’s the day and it occurred to me that in about four months, I had worked an entire career and fell in love and had a relationship and I was thankful that somehow God saw fit to still give me all of that but now I was ready to be done with the whole thing so I went over to the bosses shack and told him that I was quitting. He tried to give me shit and told me he was gonna dock my pay for the last week but I told him that I didn’t even want my last check and so that pretty much shut him up and I left.
That night when it was almost completely dark, I snuck over to the hammerhead. I peeled the steel grate back and sat down on the wet earth at the bottom of that little rain basin. It had been months since I had been there last and I was surprised to see how tight of a fit it was and by the time I had squeezed in there, it felt like I was just engulfed by warmth. I swear, I sat there for about ten minutes, not moving and feeling this tiny, little swell every second or so like I was floating in the river. Eventually, I closed my eyes and was just about to drift off when the swell stopped and out of the darkness the mound that was next to me whispered, “Is you an angel?” Now, I just about had a heart attack and after a minute Kate managed to pull out a little Bic lighter it and looked me square in the eye.
“Is that why you never talk, cause you’re an angel,” she asked.
I didn’t quite know what to do. First off, I mean, I was still blown back by finding her in there and also, ‘cause no one had ever confused me with anything good before. And I guess I could have done or said about a million different things to her but right then only one of ‘em made any sense at all.
I looked her in the eye but before I could speak, she freed another hand and pulled my face close to hers and kissed me hard and pretty soon we were all tangled up and to this day, I don’t know how but we managed to do it right there and then. Inside that little room that was in the concrete ditch just below the Hammerhead in the middle of La La Land and on the outskirts of the shittiest little town in the world. We stayed wrapped up inside of each other for what felt like forever. Through the grates, our breath was warming the bottom of the cabin and the warm air created a little mirror on the metal and our eyes had adjusted to the dark so that we could look at each other’s reflections and see one another’s smiles.
We lay like that for a while until the sky burned orange from the lights of the Plant and the hum of the turbines kicked into full gear. Kate told me how much she loved me and how she didn’t want to do this anymore. She said more stuff about how we could be happy and maybe even leave the town and live somewhere else and someday we might even start a family. She was crying by now, not much but enough and my head was pounding and spinning like an engine belt and what she was saying was starting to actually sound kind of good until she pushed on the grate that would have let us out and learned what I already knew. That that old gate locked from the outside when it was shut and like it or not we were here now and that the time for these two stowaways to jump ship had long since sailed away. I’ll never forget what happened next, she looked back at me and for a moment it looked like she was just gonna’ completely lose it and right then, I don’t know why and to this day I don’t know how it came to me but right then, I told the only lie that I’m proud of to this very day.
“Kate, listen to me”, I told her, “I am an angel, your angel, your very own but I have to go back now,” and I told her how I’d watched her for her whole life, how I was there on her first day of school and her first kiss and the time she did that thing that she thought no one else knew about and that I had come down here just to meet her and how I’d fallen in love with her right off. She stopped crying and her eyes got all big and she started shaking just a little and she was about to say something else and I couldn’t really lie anymore so I said, “but listen you’ve gotta help me now. “You and me gotta show God that you really do want to live.” And for the next hour, I told her about how the Hammerhead worked and about how the retards that worked these rides, they always wore headphones before the park opened and how they’d never hear us even if we screamed and about how they wouldn’t check the grates when they turned it on so it was going to be up to us to make it out. I told her how in a heartbeat, I would fly away back up to heaven and so I was fine but that she’d have help me get her out of the basin and away from the cabin that would be swinging down on us faster than anything she’d ever seen. And even though I knew it was a million to one and even though she probably did too, for some reason she just kept nodding her head and after I was done explaining it all, she put her head on my chest and together, we fell fast asleep. When I woke up, I lay there, next to her and wondered if I would actually make it to La La Land in the morning. I thought about all the work I’d been through and how somehow, now, in the very end, I actually had found something to lose. Occasionally, my mind would drift a little and I’d think about how if this plan didn’t work, one of us might end up in La La Land but the other one, was just simply, completely fucked and I guess as long as it was me, I was gonna be OK with that. So I decided to hedge my bets a little and make sure that if we were going to get hit by that fucking sky cabin, I was going to make damn sure that the reward was hers.
Before I knew it morning came and just like I knew I would, in no time at all, I heard the groan of the Hammerhead’s engine and I timed it just perfect so that right as the grate in front of us was barreling open with a loud thud, I was pulling Kate up. And as she leapt, I tossed her to the side with my arms raised high over my head and I just screamed at the top of my lungs. Kate’s eyes opened with a flash and like one of them big cats on those nature show, she leapt and rolled out of the way and fell into the empty space beside the ditch and the Cabin swung down and missed her by maybe an inch. And I don’t know exactly how I saw this or where I was when I saw it but the last thing I remember is looking down at her as she huddled deep in the rain basin with her hand covering her belly and tears streaming down her face and just like that, just like fucking that, everything went out.
When the ride came to a stop, they pulled Kate out of the concrete pool and she was mumbling something about this thing like God and they took her to the hospital and ran the tests that some weeks later told her that she was pregnant with a son.
Almost immediately the stories started. A couple of people said they saw a flash and a few of the townspeople said they thought they saw a falling star or something flying low over the town early that morning and right about the time they heard the Hammerheads clang. It was about a month before they found my body lodged up in one of the giant oaks that covers the concrete slab with the sign that introduces our town. I can only guess that they were confused as anyone ever has been as they pulled my mangled remains out of the tree but by then, I wasn’t there anymore, at least it wasn’t really me.
Kate had left the town a few days before they found me. She figured she had the son of an angel inside of her and that now she could do anything and I guess in some ways she was right. For the rest of her life she told her son about the night an angel came to visit her and for the rest of his life, he believed it.
Anyway, maybe I made it to La La Land or maybe I was in La La Land inside that little ditch or maybe this whole town is La La Land and outside there’s nothing else, I don’t know and I don’t ask those kinds of questions anymore. Cause now, anytime I want, I can just run around on the tops of all those giant trees that line the main road and catch the little birds that fall out of their nests and zip through the forest and over to the gorge and dive down deep into its waters until I can’t see my hand in front of my face and in the mornings, I can walk through windows and watch the pretty people fuck and I see them lie and leave and hold and push away and I never feel bad no more, not at all and now, at night, when I fall asleep, I dream of her and him and where they are and what they’ll become and I lay in total silence with the air around me, damp and charged, with these little lightning bolts that tingle my skin like tiny pins and I close my eyes and wait and watch and smile and suddenly, everything just goes black.
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