Praying to Frank
a hypertext novel
by Damon Matthew Smith
Introduction and Navigation Hints:
A simple hypertext modeled after the biblical hypertext of reference. You will see different opportunities to link out of the first section and go to related or thematically linked parts in the other two sections. There are no page numbers for a reason. I want you to get lost in this space I have made for you.
The link is the section number and the part number of that section (i.e. 3:7 stands for Section Three: The Mythology of my Life and Part Seven: Saving Something). You can take all the linked paths and cover every section of this book, be selective or random in your reading choices, attempting to reread for additional connections, read straight through, and/or read the appendix essay about hypertext literature as a means to the reestablishment of myth in modern American society.
Section One: Praying to Frank
The Players: Names, Aliases and Descriptions
Bulletman (Frank, Bulletboy, Bullet-Man-World): Our mythic center for this tale: small, then immense, then the world.
Jose´: Bulletman’s adopted father, Mexican and dark like his cells could tell an ancient story if only they could find way to talk, a story of Mayan rule.
Julianne: Bulletman’s adopted mother and the mirror of the great mother failed not once but twice on bad seed, she is a great pretender.
The Seer: Her name is Rosario although this will be the last time you hear it said, she is the archetypal blind, old, and purveyor of the future.
Reverend White: The husband of Julianne Goodman-White, he is a gambler, a drinker, a wife beater, a gluttonous man who has lost love.
Benny: A gang leader and then an INS police officer, always Jose´’s brother, but he doesn’t change, I just change him to be in a position for murder.
Trevor and Barry White: Little shits that kill a croc and try to kill Bulletman, they like to kill for their father’s love.
Bataka: The spirit-twin of the Seer and the head speaker in the Baka chorus, she shrinks Bulletman with a potion only for more fire to burn it all away.
Nadji: The spirit mirror of Jose´, of me, of this idea of moving ahead instead of back in the quest for some more questions, fuck the answers.
B. T. Netherlands (Claude Rainier): A sad traveler that sees every ill as a possible buck if marketed well in his freakshow, he keeps Frank in a safe.
Myself: I will be popping in occasionally to address you directly since I feel that this act of connection will help strengthen our relationship, one looked over by too many authors, and build a huge cult following in the end that will afford me at 80 the riches I and my wife could have used now, so if you would like to donate to a poor and struggling writer you can send your checks made payable to The Under Appreciated American Academic and make sure you make no reference on the check to the following words: tenure, realism, believability, correctness, plot arch, epiphany, American Pragmatism, MFA.Click on this picture's objects to read an abbreviated version of the novel using the back button to return to this picture or click return to picture link.
TEN (10) CHAPTER ONES
Directions:
***Start with any of the ten Chapter Ones***
***Read any or all of the Chapter Ones before moving to Chapter Two***
***Read in any order and reread to heighten the hypertext connections***
Chapter One: the Mantis and the Soccer Ball
The Mantis stood motionless in the jungle of green. It was praying. Spiny hands showing reverence for the gods that ran by. The gods had long socks colored the most unnatural shade of yellow. The praying seemed to keep the cleats of these excited gods at bay for a time. But soon the praying waned when the mantis caught glimpse of the fattest and (obviously) most nutritious of grasshoppers, almost blending into the field’s overgrown grass.
It parted its hands in one dramatic action, trying to paralyze its prey with fear before it pounced and bit and chewed and sucked the life out of it--turning the green exoskeleton grayish brown and dry. The mantis struck.
It planned on not hunting for at least a few days after this feast. The mantis was assured that due to his daily meditations the yellow socked gods would look favorably upon it, never letting that white and black globe crash into its form.
The ball came to punish the irreverent break from prayer and the ravenous feeding of the mantis on the grasshopper corpse. Due to this collision mantisandgrasshopper had become a collage of shape and humors that spoke to Picasso paintings, to Dali's surreal landscapes. They were a green bunch of parts twitching with spent life. They are now one, and their hybrid structure is driven into the peaty soil by a stampede of gods, chasing after the black and white with a singular passion that smells of sweat and acceleration, they hunt the ground blindly with hungry feet that want to change the mud and lives of ground dwellers not shielded by prayer into memories of beings, and ruin all eventually with their trampling. The variant green quivers its last, and the motley but unified bodies become totally indecipherable from the grass.[Chapter Two] [Continue]
Chapter One: Easter, 2003: The Feast of the Resurrection
The grills were fired up and the hamburgers and hot dogs stayed on until they were resembling more ash than meat, some shrinking into blackened rounds and rods so small they seemed to be dwarfed by condiments; the pickles huge and the dollops of mustard and relish and watered down ketchup mountains of sodium and pulverized vegetables that didn’t make the grade, didn’t find way to produce aisles of stacked color, sprayed down by hi-tech sprinklers that reminded the people at the game, when they had the money to venture into these fluorescent light heavens with the pristine arrangements of consumables, of their bosses and their irrigation sprinklers that soaked the field with a strange mixture that if the children drank it in any quantity from the leaves of squash and watermelon they would become ill for days. They watched the game and let things burn, take the course they hoped their souls would not.
So most went to church on Sunday, some every day, hoping they might rise when their time came to meet their god with the big white beard stretched across a white face that would look, most thought but never spoke out loud, like their bosses’ fathers, the crotchety old men that would sit in the passenger seats of trucks driven by sons and send out cat calls to the women pickers, “Hey, you, senorita--I got something ripe for ya, right here,” they would say pointing down into a lap that had been pointed to before--many times.
Deep in the back of their minds they hoped God wasn’t a pervert, too. The women hoped that God would just be nice, a nice gringo with good teeth who’s breath didn’t smell like Old Crow and Pall Malls, or worse the lingering sent of one of the younger girls, sweetness almost totally destroyed by the staleness of age and bitterness more bitter than hard, stringy avocados.
The words were what frightened the men about their white god, the words that would be spoken beyond the pearly gates by that old boss look-alike god, and they hoped there would be certain words that wouldn’t exist up there. They hoped that they would never have to hear the word migrant again, or wetback, or the words south of the border, and spic, and dirt nigger, and mostly the one evil word--white.
The children made faces when they bit into charcoal, and they brought out the skirt steaks that everyone had chipped in for. They made tortilla soup and beans and rice with mojo sauce and onions, and they fried the plantains in tin foil with brown sugar and tequila, the smells made them concentrate now on the grills, not letting the things go to ash, making up for the sacrifice of processed cow and pig parts to a fire started by fuel from deep within lives that lived for days like this, days after the winter harvest when the air smelled of fresh laid fertilizer and the dry death of the Everglades only two miles to the west, south and east. It was a smell that meant work here was done, the smell that awaked that flame. The smell meant more than anything that they would be starting off to some other place soon in old school buses (slash) cramped casas of motley patterns that screamed nomad into the quickly moving air of the passing highway scenes of an American night.
Now they feasted, an Easter thanksgiving, filling their bellies and watching the young men glide like Mexican Apollos across fields made for play and not the work that calloused their hands and hearts with the knowledge of never knowing the touch of that cure-all American dream, only of movement and taking off and putting in and carrying the weight of thousands of bushels of oranges and strawberries and key limes with their tree’s long thorns wanting blood for thievery, wanting much more than to be lined in rows and sprayed with a foreign substance that stings the leaves, stripped of what makes them key lime trees, their naming element.
The soccer ball is launched over the crowd and right into the large vat of beans. The community decides that is something of a symbol, or at least the players decide this, that they should stop, not continue moving against the urge of stomach, appetite. They wanted to end their resistance to the nature of all living things, to consume, to store up reserves for the long trip north or west to the heartland where they will meet fields of corn again so vast that they dwarf anything in Florida (and the locals said the fields would talk into the wind and if you cocked your head to the side just right you might be able to hear them saying, “Harvest time grows near. I am ready to give my life for the cause.”) They all ate like young men were supposed to eat--ravenously and grandmother enforced.
They ate like warriors fresh from battle, like they could remember the days before the fall of races and tribes to the color white, and so they ate. Their young carmel muscles pulsating with cellular excitement as the steak goes down, as the plantains make tongues water with sugary glee, and the beans and rice spiced with a fire homegrown and from a seed line that goes back to their great-grandfathers in the old country burns that sweet away with rushes of heat that make their already sweating frames explode into the release of impure humors. Grandmothers slap them in unison for wiping these humors on their bright uniforms that the church had bought and paid for with a small part of all of those 15 percents that went into the huge baskets woven by old women and young girls out of palm fronds not used for Ash Wednesday.
They are the boys who have decided to live the life of the migrant (their multitiered families with them always like a shield against the hard and hot weather and 12 hour days), toiling in the field and the classroom of traveling teachers that get paid by the state to set up makeshift schools in the halls of churches and in old warehouses that don’t hold bushel upon bushel anymore. And they are the boys who have wondered about the other side of things>>>
In the city of Miami, running with the 10th Street Thugs
or the 8th Street Boys, maybe meeting one of those fancy dressed girls
they see on TV
who have fake chests that bulge beneath blouses made of cash
and that must feel like a remedy
for these boys who have never seen city life up close,
a remedy for all that has gone before,
touch to cure the longing they have felt since they first noticed the magic
of the erection at age 11
watching the women bend down to pick up baskets of berries,
the sweat drenched cotton shirt showing bumps
that they had assuredly seen all of their lives
but never noticed until that age of changing.
They wanted to drive cars that bounced like in the MTV videos of Dre and Snoop, old school, mid 90’s, the lyrics of each song known by heart. They wanted to be part of the parties and blast music from new stereos that played CDs instead of tapes, the ribbons broken by time and tension on the wheel of the machine bought at the junk store in Florida City for Christmas or their birthday. They wanted to drink at bars that played pulsing beats so loud that your whole body shook into drunken gelatin-like ecstasy, and wanted to smoke blunts in the parking lot with the bouncer and talk of the man and pigs and how tired they were of the same old shit while the boy from the fields inside them danced to the techno rhythm of freedom and a new life away from servitude. But they very seldom left for that life of city freedom and pure U.S. Grade A hedonism and migrated every year, always from hot to hotter climates burning the hours of their youth on their smoldering desire.
They ate like they were pushing it down, that burn, burning it with the peppers grown by the old in moveable gardens outside of moveable homes to extinguish it, coating it with the smooth fat of flank steak and the pleasurable release of self into the buttery sweet yucca with a garlic sauce that made them want for more beer than they could sneak away from their fathers’ foam coolers, iced and cold enough to settle that burning into a type of temporary submission, that is, if there was more than one taken and passed between friends behind the bleachers where it would grow warm quick from the fiery wantings of hands that always want more than a share when the shares are small. They ate and drank to keep the mouth working, occupied, so those masticating organs wouldn’t revolt against their restraint, betray their owners in the voice of the outside world where people actually stayed put all their lives in homes and jobs and safe streets filled with cars that drove the same highways every day and parked under the same garage every day, and so they kept chewing. Up and down, mandible to maxilla, molars to molars, canines ripping, incisors slicing down in a numbed movement that filled them up with heavy primal feelings, instincts that wanted to live with the body and the body alone, that they tried to swallow down quick also, because that voice, the old and wild one, was dangerous too--sometimes even more than that of the newfound burning in their groins because it came from a deeper place, spoke in a baritone tongue that vibrated the very atoms of their being with a snarl, with a sound that if unleashed would sound like a howl or a roar, but not so common as that. It would, they knew, sound like the death of God, His last words, the release of Him from all human memory. Voices are dangerous things, they knew this, and so they ate--they ate like dead warriors would eat if they could, getting one last taste of the world before they leave for good.
And the plates were scraped and mopped up with corn gorditas, as the sky fell to hues of yellow and pink, then red, then only a memory of day-lit color. They built fires, but not at the park. They walked back to the camp, some drove vans bought by the bosses that they would have to surrender the keys of in the coming weeks. By May, the vans would be parked in rows behind the main house waiting for the return of the workers in October and November, the youngest sons would start them up on Saturdays and, when the fathers weren’t looking, take them for a short joyride with his comrades through dead fields waiting for the crop rotation to pick their earth, plant into their soil a purpose. The workers came into the camp in mass, all with a job to do for the night’s continuation of festivities during Easter week. Holy week was a big deal in the camp, an acknowledgment of revival that made them feel better about the move, as if they were closer to Jesus somehow because they were changing worlds also. Granted, it was only Texas or Oklahoma or Jersey for the southern fields of Florida, but it was a settling thought nonetheless.
We will not stop to recount Rev. White’s words exactly, I will let you imagine them and him instead: him, Reverend Harold White atop a makeshift pew with a piece of construction paper (light blue) that had two columns, one that said Worker Community (he stopped calling them migrant workers when a matriarch grandmother had slapped him for the nomenclature) and one column that said Jesus.
[Chapter Two] [Continue]
Chapter One: Reverend White’s Sermon
Reverend White was a black preacher from Mississippi who had run into some trouble with the local KKK. They had his church burnt to a crisp and his boys beat up pretty bad. He would see the migration of workers and buses drive through town towards the western plains every Spring and back east every Fall. One of those Fall days when the buses with their loud and damaged brakes and louder exhaust pipes laced with rust and holes drove past his family’s apartment building (he had been forced to move out of his house after the church burnt with all the money inside, locked in a closet and still in the tithing baskets), he just packed up the essentials and followed the caravan of jalopies east towards a place that almost seemed like another country, another world entirely, Homestead, FL.
He held a revival dinner in the camp when he arrived using the only credit card he owned hadn’t maxed out yet at the American Indian casinos but soon would, and he was welcomed into the fold.
The church was an old farmhouse on Krome Ave, near the immigration detention area run by the INS (which will play into our tale later so keep it in mind) and Reverend White would hold services seven days a week, the biggest of which happened Sunday when he would preach with new material he sketched out the night before. The Easter week services were the ones he both worked hardest on and the ones that he dreaded, seeing as the sole financial support of the church and his gambling habit (he had become addicted to Jai Alai games and the local Seminole Indian casino out on the Tamiami Trail highway at the end of Krome Ave). Still he worked diligently, and just maybe he had a chance at getting a cut of their last paychecks before they set off down the road to new fields.
He had a great sermon cooked up for this year’s Holy Week, all the elements of good preaching wrapped into a tight central theme. Jesus and the Workers: how they were the same, how they struggled, suffered, changed just like Him; how they forgave the sins of the bosses, the powers that be, just like Him; and above all, how they moved from dead fields with the look of no hope to fertile fields just like he would do on Judgment Day, adding that he knew they would all be fertile fields ready for the strong hands of the Lord to plow and work and grow a plentiful crop upon that would last forever and ever. The hands went in the pockets and out came the cash, and he knew everything would be okay until they returned next fall to worship as his obedient and nomadic sheep.
[Chapter Two] [Continue][return to picture]
Chapter One: Firing Off Rounds as Ritual and Lament on April 17th, Easter, 2003
Reverend White and his family went to the second celebration in the camp. He
had never liked soccer and hated Mexican/Cuban-style cuisine, so he stayed at home after church not wanting to sit in a plastic lawn chair and pretend to be interested in the game and watched the Sunday American Football on ESPN and drank church wine that hadn’t been used that year for Communion (he switched to grape juice midyear when he got behind on cash and couldn’t afford that daily jug) and planned his next trip to the Jai Alai stadium in Hollywood, FL, about 45 minutes north, and planned what his betting strategy would be.
Reverend White was somewhat drunk when he showed up to that night’s Easter party, and the first shot made him jump. The migrant worker men were in the dead field adjacent to the camp shooting their firearms into the night that had raised a full moon as a target for their shots. They swigged cheap tequila and beers gone flat and warm in between the pops and whistles of the low caliber weapons, mostly 22’s, or .33 specials.
Jose´ Gomez, one of the community constants that stayed in Homestead all year round, came into the field with something all together different though. He held in his hand an elaborately designed handgun with a brass, rounded handle and a single shot chamber that held a 5.67 ball round specially made and filled by Jose´’s very own hands in the wood shop behind the Boss’s home. His father had pulled it from under his pillow on Jose´’s 32nd birthday this Winter and handed it to his son, saying, “Don’t use this lightly, son, it has great power.” Later that week his father had died in the field of a massive coronary, his body half in the dirt and half propped up by bushels of eggplant. Jose´ planned to pay tribute to him tonight at the Easter celebration by firing his homemade bullet into the heavens, touching his father’s soul with the metal of remembrance.
Everyone in the community knew he had cranked the vice carefully onto an ancient looking casing that had come in the leather bag of his great-grandfather’s gun, everyone knew that he had emptied 22 shells to fill the immense casing with powder, and everyone knew that when he fired this solitary round into the air of that Easter night that he would be doing something that spoke of strength and honor and the old ways. So, when he came out into the field that night, wrapped in a pouch his wife had made special for this night and donning the hat of his father still laced with the dead man’s forgotten sweat, everyone became silent and waited for this somehow holy act to commence.
He took his time walking out into the field, careful not to trip over dried roots of cantaloupe that had a way of grabbing even the most surefooted and toppling him to the ground. He went slowly, holding the gun in one hand and the bullet in the other, walking in the cadence they created for him in his mind---left, right, left, right--a slow motion soldier on the way to an ethereal battlefield.
Reverend White was the only one that continued swigging at the bottle of half-gone wine he had brought with him, wondering why they were all looking to the field of loud shots that had ceased to be. He didn’t believe in magic. That was the problem with his sight.
That visual affliction and being a bit too drunk a bit too often for social situations made him stand up on a picnic table in the middle of the crowd and yell at the top of his lungs, “Hey... what the hell’s going on ... I just got here, lets get this party started. Praise the Lord,” and proceed to dance a dance not becoming of a preacher. The same blind grandmother seer that had reprimanded him for calling them “migrant workers” two and a half years before when he arrived from Mississippi motioned for him to come down from his tabletop stage.
Remembering the slap of boney fingers on his bearded face, he hesitantly stepped down and approached the 5’1” ancient with his head bowed like a child to his mother, but she didn’t slap him this time. She placed her pointer finger up to her wrinkled lips that had known more words pass through them than anyone else in the village, and simply made the soft sound,“Shhhh,” before turning her back to him to watch Jose´ do his magic of touching the sky’s dead with a bullet, a bullet made by his very own hands.
The Reverend walked to the back of the crowd thinking that mass delusion had fallen over his sheep, that his power over them, first conjured up by food and then later loose comparisons with a white savior, had ceased to be. His teenage boys ran with their white friends in the far field away from everything, and his wife was caught halfway in-between not knowing which way her spirit’s voice wanted her to turn.
[Chapter Two] [Continue] [return to picture]
Chapter One: Julianne White Thinks of Home: Or, Pear Girl and a Fermented Bunch of Grapes Pretend to Love
The good Reverend White’s wife, Julianne Goodman, had been the first convert of his life. She was a student of Wicca, a witch of sorts, and Economics at the University of Mississippi when she stumbled upon the young Reverend at a local Mississippi bookstore. She was in the religion/occult/self-help section of the store when he, a drunkard that could drink any of his fellow Mississippi College of Divinity fledgling ministers under the table, stumbled not just over but onto the poor, slight-framed Julianne. She had been in her usual garb that day: clad in a black that heavily contrasted with her creamy skin so much as to make her look otherworldly. She liked to look like this, black eye make-up on heavy, hair dyed black and cut into an almost spike, her t-shirt proudly displaying The Cure’s newest album cover for “Disintegration” and her skirt shiny black pseudo-leather and slit up the leg.
Her skirt was showing what the young reverend must have thought was way too much skin for his morals but just enough for feelings that went much deeper, feelings made tangible in the shape of stretched gray slacks. In that moment, as his nose pressed against the fish-netted thigh, the left one he thought, his brain had become almost totally immersed in an new ocean of raging chemicals that wanted his soul to burn, that wanted harder than any want he had ever known to enter her, to release himself and all he had held up as holy into her like a broken dam of fluid, like the result of a dream he once had as a boy, him looking to his teacher in secret desperation and less than secret physical reaction, the way he woke up sticky and warm around an area that he only knew, at the age of 11, made him a boy and not a girl. He knew at this point he would convert to whatever god she had to give him if only he could rub himself against her in brain-dead movement until Judgment Day came to mop up his aqueous soul from her milky skin.
Julianne only felt his weight and smelled his breath, wine, she thought, and asked him to get off, that he was hurting her. She saw him drooling a bit from the side of his mouth and without thinking took a tissue from her purse in the shape of a little black coffin and wiped his mouth dry.
They were married in a Baptist church run by his college five weeks later.
Both his and her parents failed to show up to the ceremony (there was no reception): hers, NYC Jews, and his, holding the rare office of Southern Black Catholic, not born-again, Baptist like their son was studying to become a man of the cloth.
The people that did come to the wedding were a motley bunch. One side dressed in black from head to toe, black lace a favorite among both male and female left-siders (is the bride side on the left?), and one side black-skinned but dressed in bright colors and elaborate hats holding makeshift fans made of hymn booklets. The two sides looked straight ahead, every once in a while a child on the right would try to make his mamma look at the strange white people in the adjacent row, but to no avail--they stared harder towards the front, towards the white god they hoped would protect them against the white threat that loomed so close, but they couldn’t be sure.
The left side looked at that same front and prayed to the god that they had abandoned years ago in favor of the Great Mother, the god of the earth that bore the Titans, to let them survive if a riot were to start. Underneath their rebel facades complete with the newest fad of the pierced noses and tongues and eyebrows and lips, they were afraid of Helter Skelter in the same way their passive-racist parents had been. Both groups sat there paralyzed and praying to a god of which they were not so sure existed. And if He did, both sides, left and right, had dire doubts He would listen to anything any one of them had to say.
Julianne lost most of her friends after that day, her parents didn’t ever return her calls and the church in which they married never really accepted her, called her a witch, a Satan worshiper, but always behind her back. She tried to see this god that came to the earth as a man and died and rose again, but it was hard for her. She missed her past gods. She missed the safety of her safe and structured upbringing in The City, with parents that nagged but loved , too, and that hadn’t disowned her totally when she became a witch. She fondly remembered her room in the two story brown stone within walking distance of The Park, her doll collection on her bed all porcelain faces and sweet smiles painted on that always accepted her no matter what.
He treated her relatively well through the years, never lost that overwhelming attraction for her, even after she had two sons and grew larger in the posterior than he ever thought imaginable considering her skinny, even boyish, body that had first connected with his in the bookstore aisle. She became shaped like a pear, slight top in a severe gradient slope spreading into a perfectly round and perfectly huge bottom. He would tease her with the song that would come on the local radio station with amazing on-the-hour consistency, “The Butt,” which he would sing at the top of his lungs and dance around like those new rappers, Run DMC or MC Hammer or Easy E.
She didn’t care much about his teasing, she knew he loved her more than anything, more than his god that she never could bring herself to completely know. She went with him through a life filled with hardship and sacrifice because of that love. It was the complete goodness in him left over from childhood, a part that was squirreled away in the corners and crevices of his soul that came out when he looked long enough into her dark brown eyes that, she knew, reminded him of his own. He had told her so. He had told her he loved her more than anything every night before they went to bed, him usually passing out from the half gallon of vino that numbed his frame into a gelatinous mass of emotion.
She believed him and this is why she stayed, perfected the art of staying and quiet desperation and not hearing what everyone said about them and supporting his hearty body when he got too drunk on wine, always on wine, a cluster of bloated and fermented grapes supported by a pear-girl. And more than any other art she learned to master, she perfected the art of pretending.
She believed in magic, in things magical, in made-up things -- all 19 years of a marriage that fell back on that strength of hers to pretend everything would change for the better. She believed in that magic that the community of migrant workers believed in on Easter night. Not that Jesus “has risen on the third day to take away the sins of the world” or what Corinthians 5:17 states, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” but instead in the act of ritual as salvation, the pretending that what we do on this earth matters elsewhere, that we might unlock something in our pretending that reaches from this world to the next, makes people on this earth stand and stare at our statement of connection with the realm of the other.
[Chapter Two] [Continue] [return to picture]
Chapter One: The Preacher’s Wife Dreams
Julianne believed in whatever it was that Jose´ was doing in the field with the gun and the crowd. She made up in her head what it was he did out there that made the crowd cheer, created a fiction to suit her great art of belief--her faith that the odd moments of magic that pull at our eyes and inner eyes to look, if only for one silent glance of recognition, are real. She had faith in Jose´ and his walking out into the field with an ancient pistol, hoping he wouldn’t trip on the roots that she knew would grab even the most sure footed and make them fall into a stagnant reality, a presence of being that, to Julianne, resembled a bold-faced truth and, therefore, a lie. She watched him enter the center and move his hands together, watched his right arm raise to gasps that were almost inaudible, and then the raised hand exploded into sound and light.
[Chapter Two] [Continue]
Chapter One: Benny and the Jets
Benny Gomez sat in the Krome Concentration Camp with his gang, all there because of the war with the Cubano gangs in the streets of Miami, the golden triangle, where cocaine and crack and anything else to get you chemically altered flowed from an open tap. Junkies need only walk down the street to score, and best thing--it was cheap. The Cubano gangs had the power though and wouldn’t allow any dirty Mexicans to fuck up their territory with impure blood, stupidity that had allowed Central American drug cartels to dominate the business for years in the majority of U.S. cities. The Cubans ran Miami trade now. If you wanted to get it good and get it cheap you went to them. Benny had plans to take a piece of the triangle for him and his boys, but the Cubans weren’t having it. The war began at midnight when Benny and his boys (you thought I was going to say ...and the Jets. Silly, rabbit) opened fire on the 10th Street Thugs, not a top Cubano gang but getting there, and were stupid enough to use a registered ride. The next day the Cubans were scouring the streets for Benny’s bright purple Chevy Impala ’72 lowrider, armed for serious medieval shit.
He hid out at a girlfriend’s house out in Hialeah for a couple days, but when they got her name from a junkie member of Benny’s gang they sprayed her house with whatever they could fire--Mac-10’s, sawed-offs, zip guns even--but Benny was out getting some beer and papers. He came home to a bullet riddled house only two minutes later, his girl shot through the throat and in the process of floating off to the great by and fucking by, and her grandmother in her favorite rocking chair on the side porch with a new eye, dead. He stayed with her even when the cops came, beat him down, brought him in, pulled his immigration records and sent him packing to the Krome Facility, what they called the Krome Concentration Camp, they called it that just cause they was angry and pissed they got caught, and even more pissed they were being sent cross the border, back to a country that had even more competition in the business. But, in Mexico it ain’t the Cubans or the Jamaicans or the blacks or even those white wannabe fuckers you got to guard your back against. There, it’s the fucking government dealing on every corner, getting rid of the competition the old fashioned way, by putting two caps behind each ear, by being every-fuckin-where. He would have to find a new business or go into politics, and the latter wasn’t about to be happening. So all he could do was sit there with his boys and wait for more of them to show--as he knew they would cause they was so stupid without him--and wait for their time to go back south to the old country.
People gathered outside of the gates protesting almost every weekend. Something about immigration laws needing ta be cleaned up and this place being against human rights and all that shit, but Benny could care less unless all their shouting got him the fuck out of Dodge and back to the triangle to make some a them motherfuckers pay for what they did to his girl and her grandma.
[Chapter Two] [Continue]
Chapter One: Mayan Cell Memories
Jose´’s bullet flew. The ancient casing fell to ancient dirt which made the metal think of the ancient feeling of displacement that has plagued his people since Cortez and his gang brought horses to the lands of the Aztec and the Mayan, and along with those equestrian beasts death in the form of sword and spear and influenza and wine--but the biggest death brought to those ancient people by far was displacement and loss of self, the death of tribal identity. He had Mayan princes and kings in his bloodline, but he knew nothing of this, and he would not have cared if he did know. He spoke Spanish, Mexican-Spanish, and not any of the Mayan languages that still struggle today to stay afloat.
He just wanted contact with his father again, however symbolic, to touch his thick gray beard with a stroke of recognition in the form of an old bullet, tell him that he led a good life and he was proud to be his son, or maybe he needed that last touch to say the good-bye that might be a Mayan good-bye, that might mirror Montezuma’s good-bye to his fatherland when the Spaniards stormed in and slaughtered them all by blade, by infected breath. Perhaps Jose´ was speaking in that dead language. Or it could be, he just wanted to give him the send off he couldn’t muster when it happened.
He sent that bullet he had made skyward. The community would say later that they saw it chip off a piece of the moon which fell to earth in a fiery shooting star that lit up the fields with the sun’s borrowed light. Most just said it was an Easter night they would remember. First a story, but it might have what it takes to be legend, a myth to tell at Easter celebrations to wide-eyed children that will listen with the same attention the community gave to the sound of Jose´’s ascending bullet.
[Chapter Two] [Continue]
Chapter One: Introducing Bullet and Mud
The bullet did not hit the moon as the crazy old storytellers said, but landed three miles away in the muck and mire of a water hole that hadn’t turned totally to mud but was on its way. The dry season had not yet ended the death it brought in January and February, at least for the fish and amphibians and other creatures totally dependent on the high water levels of the wet season to live. But, don’t fret reader, they have left eggs, some will go on, alligators and birds have had easy pickings and make out splendidly the last few months, and the whole cycle will begin again come summer and the wet season.
The bullet feels the mud around it and knows it is not at home anymore, that its hard shell and shiny handled gun are not around it any longer, just this strange gooey substance that wants to make it change to rust and eventually a nothingness that scares the bullet more than anything it had ever feared. It had feared before this. It feared never being able to do what his nature said it had to do, accelerate and destroy. It knew, trapped in mud three feet under the surface, that this fear had been realized. It knew that while it did accelerate, the second element was lacking the impact bullet had expected. It felt as if he had destroyed nothing, and so, the quest was not complete. When the man had taken it out of its bag and his case, and put new powder filled with the potential of fire at its back, it was sure its destiny would be come to pass. It is confused as to why the man shot him into the sky only to fall into earth that wanted nothing more than to make him vanish into rusty death having never destroyed a thing, save a few blades of marsh grass and the uniformity of the mud’s surface.
The mud, disturbed by the bullet’s entrance into him, asked the bullet why it had landed there, deep into its belly of decaying organic material and coral sand. Having no good answer, and not speaking very good mud, the flattened and scared metal ball battled to find a way out of this predicament. With the little mud language it knew handed down from the ore half of its lineage, it asked the mud to help him go back to where he had come from, for he had not completed his quest. It told the mud that it had accelerated but hadn’t destroyed anything, and that it needed to know destruction before it went to rust or its life would have meant nothing.
Its pleas, however, did not come out quite the way bullet thought they would, but the mud was moved by what it thought the bullet had said anyway. It heard a bullet that wanted to be alive, that wanted to move through space for the rest of its life in a different form more like that of the mud, and that it didn’t mean to destroy its surface, however temporary, with its falling, and that it wanted to become a man made of mud. The mud pretended that it heard much of this just so he could conduct the experiment that he always felt was his calling. He would make a man out of mud to rule over all of them, to take over and stop them from polluting its water and ripping up his neighborhood to build things out of dead trees and oppressed rock and minerals converted from their natural state to serve man’s ends. He had been thinking of how to do this all since man had showed up on the scene and started messing with him and his neighborhood. All it needed was a conductor greater than water to coax a bolt of lightning down to it and its plan would begin rolling towards his perfect answer to this human infection, this earth’s virus that must be eradicated before it was too late.
The mud replied to the bullet’s pleas in perfect metalese, “I will help you complete your quest, but this is what you must do. You must...” and the mud proceeded to tell it what it needed to do to see bullet’s projected destiny fulfilled, and the bullet felt the plan would work splendidly, and they began crafting the bullets body into the longest lightning rod ever to be crafted in the whole history of the planet, and the thinnest one at that. And the birds and gators and dragonfly nymphs and fish and even the huge and colorful, and usually oblivious, Lubber grasshoppers stopped what they were doing to watch bullet and mud work. They all knew that strange days were upon them, days that would change what they knew of natural order.
Words of anarchy and visions of fire and flame circulated through the community, and with it came panic and a mass exodus from the Glades in the coming days before what can only be called a warped type of genesis, the beginning of something huge. And what Bullet and Mud began would change not just the course of all natural history in this world, but their unnatural act would usurp the balance of another place also, the world of the gods and dream.
[Chapter 2 ] [Continue]
Chapter One: Dealing with Foreign Gods
Jose´ retired from the field he shot into the night air of and to the embraces of friends and family. Julianne White, the Reverend's angel, stood at the outside of the group wanting to say something to Jose´, but she didn’t know what words could compare to grand magical acts. She thought of her husband’s sermon that morning, “He has risen as you will rise,” but it was all half truths to her, and she couldn’t bring herself to parrot them.
She was failing at her favorite art in the face of this thing Jose´ did (she still has no idea what that is exactly) and she knew it. But why now? Her husband was hanging back still dejected from the old woman’s silencing of him, and Julianne looked back to him and smiled but not the perfect smile she could at the drop of a hat trick her face into performing. Jose´ had done something to her powers of pretending, shocked her into some ethereal plane that rejected her present reality like an allergy that crops up late in life.
Her boys, 15 and 17, seemed unaffected--both in the unused field to the rear of the camp passing around a can of beer or a joint she thought, but didn’t care to investigate--and Harold Sr. definitely remained unmoved. But they had never believed in the magic of things, she thought, even when the boys were young they needed to know facts, “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why are you a different color from daddy and us?” and “Is Santa real (asked by Harold Jr. at age 4, his brother of 2 listening intently)?” If she would make up a tale, like the sky is God’s swimming pool, or Daddy is made of dark chocolate and I am made of white chocolate, and you are the best chocolate in the world cause you guys got both worlds mixed in to you, or yes, they would battle the factual accuracy like little lawyers, always finding the hole in her magical argument. And, if Harold Sr. were around and heard her concoctions of untruths, he would quickly, even when the boys were too young to know what one was, tell them that their mother used to be a witch, and that Satan made her say such things at times.
To these insults and heckles she would practice her art, pretend it didn’t hurt and that his words were just that and nothing more, and in the end didn’t matter.
She saw their silhouettes in the field and wanted to run to them, her young men, and tell them of the magic that just happened in the opposite field, that happened with a man and a gun and a silence that possessed a crowd. She stayed put, not being able to uproot herself from this middle ground that was feeding a poison deep into her that would not reveal itself until the ground started to shake.
[Chapter 2] [Continue]
Chapter Two: Bulletman is BornPart 1: Building Something (like Exodus)
They constructed a lightning rod that went so high it was hard to keep stable or to keep from bending, but Mud helped by adding some of its body all the way up as support for Bullet’s hair-width frame (Bullet had stretched its body into a thin metal thread and woven together a microscopic scaffolding that built a fragile skyscraper intent on lightning). Mud also thought to place a bead of dew at the very top to make the bullet’s body more desirable to electricity. So they stood there, battling the wind and gravity, 50 feet up and towering over an Everglades that new something was not quite right, that they would be smart to vacate the premises, because The Order was being not only disturbed but seriously fucked with and that could only mean scary things to come, very scary things.
Thus began the mass exodus of crocodilians and turtles and grasshoppers and birds and snakes and frogs and rodents and deer and even the few Florida panthers that usually were against the idea of change, any change, and all the rest of the creatures within a good two miles of the disturbance. They all packed up and left, and not just the animals mind you, the plants uprooted too and crawled along on makeshift legs made of roots. The trees even took heed and fell themselves, trying to roll into the few not yet dry estuaries that could float them away from the threat. Fish hitched rides on the backs of gators and algae on the backs of whatever they could, and only the unlucky or unimaginative ones were left to suffer the mysterious storm that brewed in that mud hole, bubbled up and into the dry spring night like a phantom or a spirit one- step away from going mad.
No lightning hit that night or for the rest of the spring, even into the beginning of the wet season in late June. All around them the heat lightning and thunderheads flared up but no streams of the almost unbearable light came down to complete their plan. They stood there, 50 feet tall with a patience only possessed by earth, by metal, by things that are older than anything that breathes or consumes.
Every one of those greedy beasts had left their section of the swamp, the bullet and the mud noticed, and if they hadn’t they had died trying to leave. The thought of something worse than death made them run, save their souls from the unholy rumblings that shook the ground in waves almost too long and on too low a frequency to feel with the physical body. However, their terrified spirits could feel its silent approach, its undeniable threat.
The swollen flesh and bones of fish and amphibians and the deadfall of trees and the mulch brown of past on plants littered the ground around them. May animals were run down by fisherman on the way to the Tarpon and Mangrove Snapper hotspot in Flamingo. Mud and Bullet were sure there hadn’t been a fire in that part of the Glades, they would have seen it for sure. No, they had left for another reason that escaped the logic of the both of them combined, but they didn’t become stuck on that point. They were waiting for that prickly feeling to come over them, let them know they were finally in business.
The camp was semi-empty all dead season with only a few crops here and there being planted and picked by some of the people that refused to move with the other workers every year to follow the harvest. These ones who stayed had gotten that South Florida soil under their skin too deep to move very far from it. They did most of the
initial plowing and planting, and when the masses rolled in to town around early to mid-October, they would simply blend in with the rest of them, like they had been with them all along. The migrants simply called them the-ones-who-stay, and they were treated with the same affection as the rest. They just had a different name, one that assigned a certain mystic quality to them, something the community couldn’t quite put its finger on but knew was there nonetheless, because of that title, because of the name, The-Ones-Who-Stay.
The elders were fond of saying, “No one chooses to stay working the same soil year-round, the soil chooses them to stay.” And so the-ones-who-stay held the almost medieval office of guardian, the knights that protected the Holy Grail while God was away.
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Jose´ was one of The-Ones-Who-Stay. He bought the old house on the corner of Krome and Main, a shack really. He had done very little in the way of restoration. The walls peeling a lime green paint that revealed flowered wallpaper underneath: Petunias and Bougainvillea. The corner of the bedroom was a pile of swept and never picked up dust and dirt and hair and toenail clippings. He had a broom but no dustpan. He would see them at the Dollarmart, colored plastic hanging from white wire displays. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the money, a single buck for a solution to the growing pile, mountain, of remnant life lost to the hold of decay. The dust and dirt containing Jose´’s dead skin, sloughed off by rough army wool blankets and time, bustled with microscopic movement and memory. These cells of Jose´ are not dead at all if looked at closer, with an eye that can see the underneath of things.
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Julianne sits behind the large arrangement of Easter Lilies starting to brown: the smell of old lady perfume gone rancid. She stares into the stained glass window above the crucified man and wonders why the doves on the wires aren’t as white, will never be as white, as that one. White=Pure=Holy. Here, the doves where ring-necked and beige. Here, the doves where loud in the morning.
The sermon was a long one. It talked of putting to rest old Pagan rituals and accepting the true and only Lord our God as personal savior. Julianne was positive what her husband was targeting since the conversation they had the night before. He had been screaming about the way the community flocked to the Easter party with all its pagan idolatry and the use of weapons and bullets as a mock Mayan sacrifice to their demon gods. He had said, “These people need a strong guide like me to guard them against their primitive ways.” Julianne had overheard this speech before on their wedding day, when he told the reverend that was to do the ceremony that he would try his best to bring God into her godless life and show her the light. He would call her a godless woman when his dinner was late to the table, when the kids would get into trouble at school, when the sermon he gave was not well received, or, as in their conversation of the night before, when she disagreed with him.
She was the first to rise when he announced the end of his sermon and to turn your hymn booklets to page 66, “He is the Light and the Way” circa 1972, and she sang loudly and tried hard to sing with conviction.
“I am not godless. I am not without a god. I just haven’t found the right one yet. I just haven’t settled into one yet. I will be a god today and rule over my own universe,” she sang from her mind and let those other words, circa 1972, fall out of her mouth and down to the orange industrial carpet of the church floor far below the song’s intended audience, hanging bleeding and large under the whitest of all doves.
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Bullet was feeling different as it rose to its feet. Feet? This was new. It felt around its new body with hesitant hands, feeling the bullet-shaped head and how the neck flowed into muscled arms and a chiseled torso. It felt down to its Ken doll undercarriage and the way its legs flexed and pulsated with the want for movement. It opened its eyes, sheathed wet in the Everglades sun. The worm was no more--fried up crisp and hard. Mud was part of Bullet now, it could feel the dusky logic of Mud crawl up the new spine making it creak with a fear that was not wholly aware of the cause.
This bulletman was only six inches tall. It stood in the place that it and Mud had waited for so long for lightning to strike. It was hard to take first steps, maneuver in a world that never showed you more than a vice, a powder filling, the barrel of an ancient gun, and Mud. It started out slowly at first but then learned to run and then sprint with legs that never would give in to the crippling burn of lactic acid. Bulletman was near as fast as it had been in its days as a projectile. It would seek out something to destroy. It would fulfill its life. Mud sat back not saying a word, quietly contemplating the end of the Human Race, as Bulletman moved his thumbs and then the rest of his fingers, drumming them on the hollow palm tree trunk felled by its own self in an attempt to escape his potential evil.
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Chapter Three: Ain't it Always the Way?
Part Five: The Influence of Mud
Bulletman was on the prowl. He needed for something more than he had ever needed in his long life as a bullet. Even before it was fired, it didn’t need that firing, didn’t even want it rightly, just let the whole thing happen, and you know where he ended up: in mud, talked into becoming a man, talked into destroying mud’s enemy for good.
Mud stayed silent and still, deep inside Bulletman its stillness felt like a cancer that might explode at any second, wrap its will around Bulletman’s new mini-man frame and make it exist no more. With one word Mud could accidentally derail its devious plans, but Mud knows this and hides back in the shadows of a weapon of mass destruction waiting to happen. Mud keeps quiet and still and feeds on this genesis need, the need for something more.
Bulletman moved north towards Homestead. It walked all day and night for twenty days (its stride being no more than an inch or two it took it quite some time) never stopping for anything save to look at the sunrise and sunset, the moon too was an occasion to pause every time its shape-changing form tried to chase down the sun.
Bulletman saw a god peeking out from behind the lunar mass, then again behind the sun when it set. The god, from what Bulletman could make out, was made up of only a head--or, three faces attached to the same head when turned the right way. The three faces looked as if they were angry at each other. An emotion that Bulletman had never known, but knew now that it didn’t care for the way it made It feel at all. The face in front would focus on the small figure, however, forget the bickering of the other two faces and look down intensely on the metal and mud figurine running through a desiccated marsh, dried out and awaiting the rain of June to make them new again.
And the god took note of this being’s intention and need. Crinkling up its massive brow, God wondered if the little thing had what it took to carry out Mud’s plan. Seeing into bulletman and the cancer that lay within, It became more nervous than any time the Humans had given Him cause for alarm.
It didn’t want the little thing to steal It’s proverbial fire. It had been planning an all-god destruction of the world for millions of years now and the plan was in its final stages. Red tape and the like. So, this god and the others had cause to be concerned. If this thing beat them to the punch, the bounty of souls would be scattered and lost across the cold depths of space. If Bulletman became what Mud wanted it to become, both the gods and the inhabitants of the world (everything and everybody) were up shit’s creek without a paddle or arms to paddle or even legs to jump out of the friggin' boat and try to make it to a shore that wouldn’t even exist anymore.
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Julianne moved down the stairs of the church. She waited at the bottom for the people to file out and past her, “godblessyou” she would say to all of them under her breath almost, almost mouthing the words and not letting them bloom into meaning. She must look like a mime trying to act pious, she thought whenever she would catch herself rambling off these words to the flock.
Her hearing was bad. Ever since she had her ears boxed in Hebrew School by a mousy and insecure teacher who blamed Julianne for something or other. Julianne blamed him for her tendency to go into herself, shut herself away behind the muffled sounds of the world, to close her eyes and dream.
The blind old woman the community said was a seer, a shaman, always touched her ears when she passed, sprinkling some green dust that smelled like sweet potatoes along her bleached and laced shirt collar. She would say something in Spanish or Mayan when performing the ritual. The same words, it sounded like to Julianne every time. Julianne had never been able to learn Spanish or any other language for that matter besides English. She tried to learn Hebrew in Synagog, Latin in Catholic High School, and attempted French in her first years at Alabama U., Failing horribly in all cases. She knew the old lady must be speaking a prayer or curse by the way her words seemed to melt together in something close to a chant and nowhere close to conversation. The seer had seen into her ears, she thought, and either wanted to heal them or make them fall completely silent, match her eyes, clouded eardrums mimicking clouded irises.
Jose´ walked back into the glades to find his growing site. He grew shrooms and Morning Glory vines and Salvia Divinorum, all shaman herbs, for the seer. She had told him last week he would make a good shaman if he would just open his eyes to the world. Jose´ thought this funny coming from the blind old witch. She laughed when she thought about what she had said and knew why Jose´ was breathing in a way that signaled to her that he was fighting off laughter.
“Laugh if you need to. It is unhealthy to fight off joy.” she said.
“I wasn’t going to laugh, Great Mother,” Jose´ said.
“Where are the leaves from Yerba de Maria, and where are the seed pods of the morning glory, and where is the manna? I must go into the spirit world tonight to ask what is to be done about the unnatural creature that waits at the edge of the town.”
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Chapter Four: Meet our New Homestead Community Member
Part 7: Together at the Silo
The three met in the old grain silo, and Jose´ placed the three herbs into a ceremonial Mayan bowl. Jose´ prepared the sludge drink of green and gray. The cells of the morning glory seeds, the mushrooms, and that of the Yerba de Maria mixed. They bonded in such a way as to produce the visions, these deep visions and messages from the gods, that the seer needed to divine a new direction for the community in the face of an ever growing and nearing danger.
Julianne had been asked by the Seer to come to the silo at five p.m. on Friday, after the Reverend had wolfed down his starchy dinner and had retired to the parlor to pour his second glass of red. She came to the place the Seer had repeated as slowly and clearly as she could in English right on time, 15 minutes early even, with no expectations but with an almost crippling excitement.
When Julianne’s eyes flashed Jose´ with a nervous smile and spastic twitch, he thought she might be on something, coke or speed maybe, and that she looked very familiar. Jose´ was not a churchgoer, so he didn’t know her from church. He couldn’t put his finger on it. He had seen her before, he knew that much at least, and she was to be there with them during the ceremony, for whatever reason.
The Seer had told Jose´ to be ready for company and not to chase her away as he would curious kids looking for free entertainment on a Friday night. He wanted to ask the Seer why this strangely familiar woman had been invited, but there was no time now with everything starting and the Seer ready to spirit walk.
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Jose´ moved out into the road with Julianne tagging behind. They had to find this strange creature the Seer spoke of by morning to be able to treat the old woman to a physical manifestation of her vision.
“What is your name? I think I know you.”
“From church?”
“Don’t go.”
“Oh... Julianne... Julianne Goodman, uh, I mean White. The Reverend's wife. I am. I am the Preacher’s wife. Julianne Goodman-White.”
“The old woman goes to church and tells me what the Rev. says. She is not a big fan. She says he wouldn’t know a god if he passed one on the street.”
And they walked in the light of street lamps and the full moon, the ground’s color changing with the fluctuating influences of the two, blue then melting into bright sun yellow and back to that blue-black that speaks of gray but never attains it. They walked to the Gas and Go, Jose´ brandishing his family gun, a regular .45 bullet lay in wait inside the weapons chamber filed down to fit the ancient barrel and hit the target right in the center, every time the center. The gun had become almost glued to his hand in the last few months, he was always looking at it and making new bullets for it, and wanting to use it, see the damage it might unleash on the world. It was poised and ready, in his hand that had just the other night polished the copper and steel until the metal shone like platinum and gold, to take away this threat before it could do all of the things the Seer said it might do. If it is coming for me, Jose´ thought, it’s going to have to take a few bullets before I go down. He was not going down without a fight.
Julianne had no weapon save a can of mace her husband had given to her as a wedding present along with a pair of costume earrings trying to pass for the real thing and the beat-up Jeep she drove around in, had picked up the kids in for years from school and soccer and basketball and football and dances and to and from girlfriends’ houses. She held the mace in her hand and left the Jeep in the solitary light of a street lamp and followed behind Jose´. She was to see more magic tonight. She knew it. And now the locusts started stirring in their seven-year holes and she heard their bodies rub against the dirt, starting to claw at the cavern walls, wanting light to fall in so they could crawl out. She could feel the great energy of things buried coming to the surface to feed, to desecrate land with hungry mouths. She knew they would unearth themselves soon, sheathed wet in the season’s new rain, and crawl over everything, consuming, taking, fulfilling the office of biblical plague, flying home to Egypt and the promised land to show how a Lazerus bug might one day be the only thing left, save cockroaches and rats, to show all that see their swarms that sometimes the forgotten and unseen might one day wake from their suspended animation to find everything gone, the ones that had forgotten these Rip Van Winkle grasshoppers existed no longer existing. Julianne heard their scraping and thought, “Tonight I will find that thing that I had forgotten.” Her long hair looked like a witch’s might, bluish-black in the moonlight.
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Part 9: Muddy Waters
The bulletman had to get used to walking. It was odd to have to work so hard for mobility, no gunpowder to propel it forward--to give it the gift of terrible momentum and speed. It was slow going for it, the little legs tripping over pebbles and having to climb over obstacles with arms that didn’t know the mechanics of climbing and had to learn as they went along.
The fields were barren and filled with the vapors of newly dropped fertilizer, but Bulletman didn’t know anything of growth (not just yet) and how things that grow die to bring new seed and, it follows, new life into this deep brown soil.
The Mud that lived within Bulletman knew of these things but kept quiet, tucked away in silent intention. Mud had seen this happen too many times before, the ripping up and corruption of soil. It looked at the ready field and saw a land enslaved by human progress--a land poisoned and tortured into submission.
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Part 10: Barry and Trevor White Go Hunting
Barry and Trevor White would go down to the canal on Friday night and shoot Nutria and Muskrats and anything else that moved until the wee hours, getting drunk on homemade corn mash whiskey or the wine stores their father had squirreled away in the church cellar (the Rev. got a sweet deal on cases of the cheap red due to the fact that he was the pastor in a church. He served grape juice at Communion.).
Barry had shot what he thought was an alligator but turned out to be a croc in the spring. They chopped up the body and put it in the big freezer they had in the garage, which hadn’t been used since they lived in Alabama, and the boys used to bring home whole wild pig, heads and all. They told everyone it was gator when they ate it at the community Easter celebration. They buried the head hoping that they would have a clean skull for their wall in a couple months but they forgot where they buried it. The wildlife cops never caught wind of the poaching of this dwindling species (only about 500 left in the world). They would of shot a Florida panther dead if they thought they could get away with it, bury the skull, and most likely lose that one to drunken memories and never a map.
They saw the thing climb over a sandy mound on the other side of the canal under their favorite street light (this is where they had popped the croc in April). It didn’t fit the description of any critter they had ever taken a shot at, or, they thought, ever had seen period. The novelty of the animal excited them. They both pulled up their .22 rifles with an excited exhale, and then they fired in unison. Barry missed but Trevor was right on target. The creature didn’t do the usual back flip roll critters that size usually did when hit. It didn’t really move even, they thought, just took the shot square in the dusky torso and looked in the direction of the shot with black eyes that shone a dark blue in the street light’s glare, its body looking almost human against the eggshell, coral sand of the mound it perched on.
Barry, not to be outdone by his brother, took another quick shot which found its mark in the strange animal’s head, one that looked almost pointed and shiny when the light hit it right--like metal is shiny.
[2:6] [Continue]Chapter 5: Bulletboy is Found and Brought to the seer’s House After the Rev.’s Boys Shot It 8 Times, 7 in Body, 1 in Head, and Jose´, with Julianne Hiding in the Mangrove, Shot Once at the Bottles Nearby the Boys (to get them to stop) That Were Empty from All the Beer Guzzling and Liquor Pounding That Went on at Night on the Bank of the Canal but the Bullets Curved Towards and Hit Bulletboy Instead and Bulletboy Got a Bit Bigger and a Bit Quicker on Its Feet and Then the Boys Ran from Jose´ and Didn’t See their Mother Hiding Behind the Mangrove Trees
The Seer holds both of their hands and then holds their hands together with the small hand of their new arrival. Jose´, Julianne, Bulletboy, and Grandma Seer: a portrait of a happy family.
The skin and hair cells of the three humans present fall naturally, thousands of cells, and are immediately swept up and into Bulletboy. It takes >
*ALL ENERGY *
< into its mud and metal body, not just bullets. Cells still charged with the collective memory of billions of years of the planet’s evolution give off a lot of energy and knowledge.
Bulletboy was absorbing humanity.
And its features started to change a bit, get less mechanical and more streamlined, smooth. Less like a bullet and more like a boy.
Bulletboy smiled its first human-like smile.
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Chapter Six : Jose´ Tries to Mold his Adopted Son into Something Human
This is what it means to be father, he thought, as he tightened the vice on his adopted son’s head. He thought, what greater love is their than that of Abraham for the sacrificial son, and he cranked it more, trying to get his son to look human.
It wasn’t hurting him he didn’t think. Hell, he had taken two bullets just the other day in the chest, he remembered--in the way that one would remember legend or myth, with that sort of reverence. The kid was hardly presentable to society in his condition, he would be run out of town or right onto the dissection table: the dull shine of his pointed skull that gleamed with the want for the procreating ability of phallic penetration. Its little arms and sloppy looking legs extending from a dark brown, gelatinous torso that had thus far taken a total of eight bullets into its mass (and one to the noggin, which doesn’t count cause Jose wasn’t there). That mass increased in size every time it was struck, making it quiver with potential energy that makes allusions to that steep gradient upwards towards words like inertia and momentum and incredible speed.
I am not doing this right , he thought. This father thing is harder than I expected. I tried to make him understand me the other day when I brought him the food: the milk, the baby food, the potato chips, the plantains, the McDonald’s fries, the sugar cane cut by my own hand and the strawberries picked. Why won’t the little man eat? I am a failure as a parent. I should have never been sent this gift.
The strange being had not eaten a thing in the two weeks it had been in Jose´’s house, only absorbed eight bullets into its three foot frame that had been only one foot when Jose´ found it crossing the road in front of the McCaskin Farm (not counting the 9th one that Jose´ didn't see).
He was hardly the fathering type. A self proclaimed bachelor-eternal. His books and his poetry, and the surplus of girls that worked the fields kept him busy enough, too busy for a wife and kids. The girls he did date never protested much to sharing him or even treating him to a quickie behind the central warehouse. He was by all accounts considered good looking (dark and muscled but with a face that somehow could ease most anyone, even the bosses, into acceptance, submission, or just plain liking him, smiling back. His hair was that of a Mexican Adonis, not too shiny or too long, almost too perfect. Like a stone statue with the quality of fluidity, water-like. Jose´ was what all the mothers called “marriage material” when talking to their unwed daughters about the future. Future: a term that meant marriage, a wealthy or well-known husband, and at least three grandchildren for these retired housewives to love like they had never loved those baby-making daughters. Love as strong as grandchild-love was reserved for future grandchildren and sons).
Even the other young men recognized this strange allure he possessed. They would sit in jealous awe on the stacks of tomato crates, not talking to each other, just watching as he would take Marina Hesperta to his barracks room at lunch break. They would try to look at her thighs as she walked, perfect flesh floating below in the lines rhubarb and early corn as they walked, shiny tan dreams peaking out from green and yellow in flashes, moments that hit the salivary glands of the watching-men like cane sugar or maybe something more sweet than even that. Jose´ was loved though, by the whole of the community, their spokesperson because of his smarts, their counselor, and the man to go to when the growing checks or the picking checks wouldn’t stretch out enough to keep food on the table. The watching-men would never say what their green hearts and groins spoke to them about, but instead the men would sit with him after his day’s escapades and slap him on the back and the knee, and pass the bottle of homemade mescal or the J of homegrown weed to him. They would press him for details. He never confirmed or denied a thing, but just smiled that smile that would lull them into the easy phrase, “That’s okay, my friend, we know you are the private type,” and that would be it. They would take a swig from their beers in unison and be satisfied to be near him under the Florida night that long since chased away the sun. They all would look to him and smile and laugh and blather out excitedly purely emetic talk of old times and women they themselves had deflowered, but always in other states, always in the states that Jose´ never traveled to because he was a One-Who-Stays worker, guarding their positions until they returned in Fall. As they cavorted though, all still wondered what it must be like to live like him, as him, and touch a different perfect thigh or calf every day with total freedom and impunity. They would look to him and smile, just smile, just smile.
Jose´ read in one of his books that everything in the world was a big fiction, that we all lived a sort of lie because we can never know motive or truth due to subjectivity. He couldn’t see how a lie could feel so real until this little guy came along. He loved him--it--as he would a son, he thought, but he had no idea why. The kid wasn’t even human. Was it--he, she? It didn’t have any plumbing where it should of been, male or female, and didn’t do the normal things a child that small might do, like cry or nag you for candy or have to go to the bathroom at the most inopportune times. Come to think of it, he said to himself, I haven’t ever seen that little one need to use the john at all, not once. But the strangest thing was the love issue. He had known the little bulletman for only a short time, but yet he felt for it with an indomitable and giant love that must, he thought, be exactly how it feels to be a real father, have that much stock in a life not your own. He was confused, however, by the “why” of it, the reason behind it, and the questions were almost too much for Jose´ to handle. He was a Father, but he couldn’t place the when of it, the how of it, or the why of it. The fiction of his life was showing its true colors that were nothing and nowhere close to true.
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Part 13: Only the Smart Survive
He frequented the book store on Krome and Vine for two reasons, possibly three. One, they had all the books the library didn’t, all the new stuff intermingled with the old. Jose´ had read nearly everything that caught his eye in Homestead Community Library, and he enjoyed the atmosphere better at Jack’s, that was the name not of the owner but of the owner’s son who was studying English Literature at the University of Miami. Jose´ would be at one of the back tables almost ever day after work reading and drinking Cafe Cubano. He seldom bought anything. Jack’s father knew this but enjoyed the company as most men enjoyed Jose´’s company. They would talk about books and philosophers and how Jose´ wanted to leave the field but couldn’t bring himself to part with the life. Can’t live with it, Jack’s father would say, can’t live without it--just like a woman. And Jose´ would laugh every time he said it to be nice, even though this sounded too true to be funny, too real in his fictional life.
The second reason was Jack’s sister. She was a homely sort, everyone said, skinny and pale. It was the paleness that attracted him first. Jack’s sister was as white as the Reverend's wife, white as that fake Christmas snow that the stores around town would all put down in their display window even though the area hadn’t seen a flake of the real stuff since ’44 brought the freakish flurry that lasted for all of 10 minutes before the subtropical climate came to its senses. (That fact is not to be misconstrued as a fact-fact, I am shooting in the dark here, but I think the snow came in the 40s, could have been the 50’s. Don’t know for sure. But I do know it snowed here once, one-ce, only once in all of recorded history). He thought her skin might explode into cold radiance at any minute, cover him and all the books in frosted love, and freeze his manhood into hard, inanimate passion waiting for a touch to make it dynamic again, fill it with the potential he knew he had. She was 17. That number that meant off limits. He had found out the hard way ten years back when Maria Haley produced a Fake ID at the local bar Jose´ frequented, and later that week produced a letter from her father that stated Jose´ was never to see her again, or else.
Jack’s sister was white, really white, and even though he was in good with the father for stuff like free books and coffee, he didn’t think the old man would ever let him take her out. That was fine, because his thoughts had been elsewhere in the last few weeks since the Rev.’s wife decided to take a walk on the wild side with him and the Seer. And with Bulletboy around to take care of, he certainly had his hands to full for chasing 17 year-old skirt that would get him locked up anyway.
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The third reason Jose´ loved to frequent Jack’s was the computer in the back that had a pretty fast internet connection. He would go on the poetry and philosophy chat lines under the e-handle, gnosticnomad144, and speed-type lyrics and poetry that was raw and pure, not corrupted yet by proper college courses with dinosaur teachers that pretend to teach people how to express themselves.
Jose´ was an electric monk, writing and submitting each stanza as a separate post, a language world that was not his first. Words felt more like blocks in English and less like sand flowing too quickly to see the words for what they hold, their significance as separate beings, the building blocks of a personal anarchy of poetics.
He is writing in to a different chat line today, after he broke his vice on the-son-he-should-have-never-had-but-one-who-Jose´-had-become-attached-forever-to-because-of-the-random-luck-of-place-and-time-and-association-with-the-Seer. He was writing to the online new parents’ help line. He kept on being referred from that page to another, to this web site (http://www.home.earthlink.net/~smithereen/chat.html), when he tried to submit his questions about how to properly raise his new son.
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Part 15: Charity Begins Away from Home
Julianne came out to where Jose´ was having lunch and asked him a question for the Seer. She had become more of an apprentice to her craft than even Jose´ in the last weeks since they found the boy-like thing. She could name all the major seeing herbs, and she could pick out many of the healing herbs just by smell. She was a natural.
Her husband thought that she went to the woman's home every night for charity, not gnostic searching. The men eating with Jose´ looked up at the pear-shaped woman with a brownish red pony tail with a light shade of unnatural blonde at the tips, and looked back down at their food. If anything was happening between Jose´ and the Preacher’s wife, they didn’t want to know about it. They looked up slowly as he walked away with Julianne’s hand on his shoulder moving him along at haste, and one man says, “Estupido. Estupido,” under his breath.
The Seer scolded Jose´ for squeezing the little one’s head in his rusty Sears vice with the red paint almost totally peeled away. The vice had been wrecked in the attempt to tighten the grips on Bulletboy’s head. A head changed from pointed and shiny to rough and nicked, and Jose´ was smacked by the old woman across a dejected face.
The Seer showed Jose´ the map to where they would bury Bulletboy under the Sacred Tree of Blood. It was their only choice. The visions had turned out bad, all bad, and the Seer had decided that they couldn’t risk having it around.
Jose´ looked up from the map and over to the little guy sitting in the corner of Jose´’s room where the pile of cells that had taken up residence in the dust mound almost 5 years prior were swept up and into its metal and mud frame making the little one look almost human for a split second without anyone noticing. Jose´ dropped his eyes back to lines and colors that spelled doom for the little one. The cells that fell in the form of an eyelash in a tear floated against gravity’s want for falling things and allowed the little boy-like thing to taste how salty tears are.
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Chapter 7: Gonna Run Away and Join the Circus
Part 16: Author’s notes: summary of boring plot details I won’t subject you to in length
Jose´ can’t bring him to the forest, to that tree that bleeds at Easter, can he? I don’t want it to go this way. I could have him buried and put under that tree and the blood makes mud and the mud frees bullet-boy. But that is just too desperate.
Well, Jose´ is getting into being surrogate father. Let him save the day, taking him out into the Glades to just leave him instead of having him betray his fatherly instincts. He leaves bulletboy on a deserted mangrove island and shows him how to gather coconut for food and palm fronds for shelter. He even leaves him food and water behind to show he is humanizing this strange being. Bulletboy will swim to Everglades City and join up with the circus there. The seer once again instructs Jose´ to bring It back to the silo so that she could try to heal It of its affliction instead of simply trying to get rid of It. Julianne is more of a fixture in the Seer’s home, and with Jose´ at lunch time. She insists on going to the circus in Everglades City to retrieve Bulletboy. When they arrive It has grown to seven feet tall from the amount of lead they pumped into him as a sideshow freak.
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Part 17: Bulletboy: the Ultimate Freak
Bulletboy swam away from Homestead and its adopted family. It didn’t know why they wanted it to leave when Julianne and Jose´ had been so warm and their fallen cells had tasted like new things might happen, a long strand of Julianne’s auburn hair tasted like something about to be born. But It didn’t stop to question for so long as humans do, It simply shrugged off the questions and swam in the direction of the mangrove shore.
A week later Bulletboy looked more like a Bulletman, a man of enormous size and strength. He served both as the token Strong Man and the Projectile Vacuum (the circus sideshow manager had no clue how the kid did it, but put him on the board with top billing, even above the Croc-a-Gator, a mutant hybrid croc with a alligator head where the tail should be--word has it that they found the creature in an Everglades pond. Bulletboy recognized the Croc-a-Gator from the day the lightning struck. The animals had been too close to the blast and were somehow fused together. Bulletboy remembered having to dodge its two halves, the deadly clamping of jaws, on both ends a face. A Reptilian Janus bent on revenge for double consciousness.) for the B. T. Netherlands Bizarre Show. Bulletboy-man was the thing people were coming to see, and the numbers jumping to scary proportions in less than a week was a good measure of his potential draw. B. T. Netherlands (his real name was Claude Rainier) looked after the kid as you would look after gold--he kept the kid in the huge safe his caravan had in the center of the room leading to his humble kitchen and closet bedroom.
Bulletboy-man just fit in the safe. It had gone in willingly and with no prompting by B.T. or anyone else. B.T. had said that he had to keep his biggest money maker somewhere safe and then said, quite carelessly, that he wished that he could put the kid in the big old safe and close the door--then nobody would get a piece of this property.
Bulletboy-man just went in and closed the door from the inside.
It stayed there in the dark wanting the safe to be buried in the ground and never spoken of again. Bullet-boy-man was starting to realize that Mud had deceived it into believing it had to destroy to be complete. Mud had taken Bullet’s initial fears and compounded them, leading directly to the disaster its life was turning into because it couldn’t control his silent partner.
If B.T. could just bury the box in the ground and forget about me, I would live down there in the Earth like I should have lived deep down in Mud and rust away, Bulletboy-man said to itself, I don’t want to live on top of the world anymore because the things there change me into something I am not supposed to be. I want my family to be safe from what those bullets make me want to do to flesh and bone. They go in and make me tremble and grow and I know that the terrible earthquakes are bent on destroying still, and I don’t want that anymore. I want my Jose and my Julianne to be safe from the pulses of angry bullet energy that wants what Mud wants still. I can feel Mud moving around. Mud never speaks. It hides back in me and waits for me to carry out the plan . I want to fall to rust and drop Mud back into the earth to which it belongs. I want to rip open my changed body and pour out the erratic souls of bullets and the stench of marsh mud. I want to know what my death will teach me.
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Part 18: A Surprise at the End of the Road
Jose´ drove Julianne’s Jeep. It was an old CJ-7, one of the Canadian-made Jeeps, circa 1982 to 1986, and it could go muding with the newer 4x4’s any day of the week.
They went to Everglades City on the west end of the park, the gulf end.
From the parking lot of the circus ground they saw boys chasing girls and a fruit market next to the ticket trailer. “How many you want? They five dollars,” the ticket man said without looking up to count for himself.
“We just want to check inside for a friend,” Jose´ said.
“No pay, no circus,” the dark-skinned man said still looking down at an ancient-looking Playboy and licking his thumb before changing the page. The corners of the mag where curved up and wet.
Julianne pulled out a ten and threw it down, not waiting for Jose´ to get the tickets she blew past the ticket collector and went inside. Jose´ caught up to the ticket collector before he caught up with Julianne. He gave the woman the tickets and a “I’m sorry” sorta smile.
The circus had not started yet, but the sideshow act was in full swing with a man swallowing glass and nails and shoving a small snake in his nose so that it came, slithering, out of his gaping mouth.
Jose´ bought both of them an empanada and a coconut milk out of the decapitated shell. There was time to get a game plan together. They would just apologize to the boy for leaving it. They would pick up the bulletboy and show him how to hug, to love, to forgive.
The new act was being announced on the sideshow stage. They saw an extraordinarily large man come out with a metal pipe and a stack of bricks. He bent the pipe in two, then in three then...(you get the picture)...and then smashed the stack of bricks in one blow with a giant fist, the dust surrounded them.
They were throwing away their lunch trash when a small man in a top hat stepped out onto the stage with the unusually large man. The small man had a pistol in one hand and a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol in the other.
He put the gun and bottle in the air and said, “You are about to witness the eighth wonder in the world. Very good. Now, feast you eyes on our subject: part metal, part man. Like Wolverine but without those annoying blades coming out all the time! No, folks, this guy is 110 percent real and he is much, much more powerful. Watch and be amazed.”
The man in the top hat had the full attention of Julianne and Jose´. They sat down again, but this time near to the stage on a turned over rental canoe. They knew it was Frank, the name they chose together for their son, little Frank that wasn’t at all little anymore. Jose´ watched as the small man in the big hat shot his boy several times, a paper target placed on Frank with a bulls-eye showed the entrance. There, of course, would be no exit wound, no wound at all for that matter. The rest of the crowd started to dwindle at the sight of what they thought was an elaborate movie-trick.
Jose´ thought, “How ironic. They are leaving because they think this is fake.”
Julianne cried when her boy was hit and grew a little bigger every time, and thought, “How did he get so big, so apart from me?”
And the man in the top hat (B.T.) thought: “I better do something fast. I am losing the crowd.”
And Frank thought: “Is that really them? I wonder if they are going to take me home?”
Julianne saw the man that was shooting her boy drop the gun and pick up the distilled spirits and a small Tiki torch. Fire flew out of the man’s mouth and at Frank. It all stayed suspended in the humid air for only a few seconds, but the crowd, drawn back by the flash started coming back to watch the show. The fire ball entered Bulletman’s body as the bullets had but with the slower drama of flame in air, an entity that mesmerizes all with dynamic light, almost organic, and then it is gone, an illumines and destructive ghost hypnotizing us into a memory of Prometheus and his trespass.
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Part 19: Going Home to Fire and Water
They took Bulletman home and to the Seer. B.T. had little choice with the pistol he had placed on the table during the fire act pointing at his head. Jose´ had wanted to stop Julianne from rushing the stage. He wanted to try and charm the guy, like he did with everyone. Julianne was obviously less inclined to polite discourse, her hand shaking at the weight of the .45 and the stare from the eyes of a man that had lost his ability to hold back fear inspired wetness.
The Seer said upon their arrival: “We have much to do. But first we will get you into the tub.” She got to her feet and felt for the little Bulletboy. She wanted to find it still manageable and dwarfed. When she touched Frank he was eight-foot tall and
growing.
They had passed a burning car on the way home and stopped to help. Bulletman sucked up all the fire to reveal an empty car with a burnt baby doll melted into the back seat. They didn’t have time to answer the questions they had about the strange scene, the symbols, no more than they could ask for direction if they got lost. Not with an eight foot man in your back seat that can eat fire.
The Seer walked Frank to the bath, which was hot and with herbs floating on top. The water looked reddish like a flame that is just at its beginning breath, that sort of red. And she nodded to Frank that it was okay and crawled inside its head to tell It to not be afraid, to just take the first step and she would do the rest.
Bulletman stepped into the burning mix of fire and water.
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Part 20: Conversion of Benny and the Miracle of Naming
***Benny will no longer be the gang member I introduced in one of the Chapter Ones***
He is now an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) officer at the Krome Detention Center. Why? Because I said so.
Benny hates his brother Jose´ for being loved by the community. Benny is hated because he arrested his cousin Mario who jumped the boarder in Texas for $500 U.S. to the boarder patrol. It had taken Mario a year to save that money.
The only gang he belongs to now is the Immigration Field Officer gang. He is a clean cop as far as they go, no record of ever taking a bribe. Rare.
Benny gets a call from Reverend White (one of the only allies he has left in the town because he never misses Sunday mass) that there is a foreign looking fellow about ten feet tall that just rolled into town with Jose´ and the Reverend’s wife, Julianne. The holy man spoke with many expletives not becoming of his position as the self-proclaimed leader of the spiritual community. Benny said he could be out on Thursday, August 14th, with some of his boys to check it out. He wouldn’t make it until Friday, August 15th.
After Benny hung up with the Rev., he tried calling his brother for the first time in years, but Jose´ didn’t pick up the phone.
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Frank entered the bathtub. It could hardly immerse its legs let alone the torso, but he tried to do as the seer told him. They were talking the whole time it sat in the liquid and their mouths did not move once. She performed the whole ceremony of purification in its head. Her measured and dreamy mind-voice lulling Bulletman into a peaceful trance that brought it back to the days before it even knew Mud. It thought of being just a bullet, just in a gun, just waiting.
The phone rang but Jose´ didn’t pick it up.
The ceremony upon completion had done nothing save turn the color of Frank’s body a bit pinkish. Jose´ held onto Julianne’s hand like parents waiting in a doctor’s office for news of their child's condition after surgery. They wanted it to be a him. They wanted this Bulletman to become Frank, the name they gave it after Jose´’s strange conversation online. They named Bulletman and, therefore, they were doing what parents do, acting out the roles the Seer gave to them that fateful night in June.
To name is the most holy of all parental endeavor. Naming is the acknowledgment of the world’s miracles.
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Chapter Eight: Reverend White is visited by Gabriel The Messenger
Part 21: Gabriel Plays his Horn and Looks Like Lucifer
At first the horn played low in the ear of the Reverend, then louder, then it was deafening.
The Angel Gabriel came down into the Reverend's office through the ceiling, its wings making papers fly everywhere with their slow and pronounced flaps.
The Rev. pissed down his leg.
The Angel whispered the message into the petrified head of a man already obsessed with revenge: “Take the demon out. Kill all that don’t bow to the will of your Almighty God and Savior. I am Gabriel, messenger of the One God and Holy Light. You will serve God now and dispose of It before this demon destroys the world. You are Heaven’s champion.” And with that it flew up and through and away, leaving the good Rev. to prepare for what he knew he must do. Kill Bulletman and anyone that stands in his holy crusade’s way. He was now an official warrior of God. He imagined himself in a silver and gold suit of armor fighting off the pagans in the holy land. He would be a king, he thought, either on earth or heaven, and he saw a great scepter in his hand with a blue stone at the end that vibrated in the language of God.
Anglo-God-Head received Gabriel on a cloud overlooking the town. Gabriel played its horn in the shape of a round and godly report coming through in waves of O-shaped sound, the language of the birds.
God didn’t want to hear Gabriel’s doubts or the arguing going on behind Him. He is cursed to share god-space and a Floating great head (reminiscent of Robin William’s Flying Head character in The Adventures of Baron Muchosin) with two other versions of himself, Yahweh and Allah. They stayed always to the back fighting about who’s flock could beat up the other’s flock, and who actually invented sin in the first place. They were a tri-god of warring identities hell bent on destruction, but not until the planned armageddon, rapture, apocalypse, revelation in December of 2012 when they would gather their fill of souls and greedily devour them, ripping them all apart.
All gods knew that Bulletman was a big threat. Never before had there been such a threat to the idea of Judeo-Christian belief since BigFatBuddhaBelly claimed responsibility for Jesus, but was silenced with war and communism until all record was lost for those 18 years that go unsung. They wouldn’t have the luxury of that sort of manipulation of history this time. Bulletman was too close to pulling off the veil of every living being and uncoiling that serpent that lay in wait in the cells of their living soul, unleashing all.
The tri-god wouldn’t have a sub-diety to ruin everything. This meant war.
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Part 22: Murder and Weddings on the Mind
He would try poison, knives, bullets (we know for certain these only make Frank bigger), electrocution, asphyxiation, decapitation, hanging, impalement, draw-and-quartering, dragging It behind a truck (something he learned from his run-in with the KKK in Mississippi when his nephew was sent to the county morgue with his face scraped off), running into It with his Ram truck, and, as a last resort, prayer to kill the interloper and anyone who stands by It corrupted by It’s sin (in one language sin means the moon dust that lead to the creation of the world).
As the Reverend devised his plan, the target was in a bath of herbs and oils getting smaller and slower by the instant. His wife was sitting by Jose´ staring into the bath knowing that she had found something here, that something she knew she could find if she looked hard enough. This was the miracle that her husband talked of in scripture but couldn’t deliver up in tangible form. She put her hand on Jose´’s, the warmth made her feel like one spirit with him, one doubled aura staring at Frank, their only boy, and then they kissed, lips meeting in perfect precision.
They were married later that night by the Seer as they took a potion concocted years before. The seer had known she would have to make two people one soul. She knew that Julianne and Jose´ were those souls, the mated halves of an illumines whole.
They consummated the marriage directly after the ceremony in Jose´’s adjacent room and created a third soul to enter in on the partnership.
As if it were meant to be, they both knew what had happened and when it happened, that first division of cells, and they told each other words of love, Jose´ pressed to her uterus cooing to an extension of their souls’ genesis, tears of joy coming from the future eyes.
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Part 23: Someone’s Getting Bigger Again
The Reverend got his boys to wait outside Jose´’s house to shoot the Bulletman if they saw him emerge. He told them if anyone tried to stop them they shouldn’t hesitate in popping them either, in the arm or something. And, look out for Jose´ with that witch-doctor Satan-talk, he could damn you just by hearing his words. I’m sure of it, boys. I will come round to check on ya in two shakes, I gotta talk with someone about this.
The boys sat behind the nursery greenhouse underneath an old wheelbarrow and covered themselves in cut saw grass they collected in the marshy canal off of 230th street and just past Robert’s Is Here produce and novelty stand (a town landmark and makers of the best fruit milkshakes in the world where you can talk to an eighty-eight year old man showing off his cars on the weekend: a Model T and an old model Chevy while listening to a Parrothead sing “cheeseburger in paradise” and strum a pretty good guitar on a little whitewashed stage in front of the picnic tables laced with kids gobbling up those shakes). They didn’t blend in very well, but they thought they did, and I suppose that was good enough against a foe that wouldn’t fight back. They had heard rumors of it growing three feet in a day. They were ready for one big demon, they had brought out all the ammo in the house, 15 boxes (the boys liked to shoot), and a couple porn mags and a stack of sandwiches and a jug of half vodka and half orange drink. They were ready for anything.
The figure that walked out the door with a poncho hood covering the face is not a person, as you know, but Bulletman shrunken to a manageable five foot ten. They shot just to shoot, many times into the ponchoed shape. They had been given permission by their father, and that is all these trigger happy boys needed as justification. A holy justification for the most serious of all commandments -- Thou shall not kill.
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Chapter Nine: Homage to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus;
or, Dad’s ChapterPart 24: Author’s Warning and Here Comes Our Players
I must start by saying they will not make it. None of them in the camp and none of the ones that come to take their mystic boy, Frank, a universal treasure. They will all meet the reaper on this day, August 15th at sunset.
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Benny and his boys rolled into town at about 11 a.m. looking for his brother and the Reverend’s wife. Benny knew his brother well, or so he thought, and was certain the woman had been seduced by Jose´’s smooth talking and good looks. They would look in the barracks room he took all his conquests, Barracks 420. They walked towards it smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and talking about what they did last weekend and what they would do this weekend or the next.
Benny was not an attractive man at all, but could have been at least in the neighborhood of interesting looking if that permanent scowl could be removed. Benny thought of his first love, a Cubano girl that came into town looking for work in their mother’s hair dressing business (it went Kaput in ’89 after Mrs. Gomez accidentally cut the ear lobe of the Mayor clean off when she started sneezing uncontrollably. People said she was allergic to politics until her death in 1998 from a quiet brain cancer that had been stimulating where the nasal passages come close to the command center, making her sneeze when stressed. So they were right in a way, she was allergic to the things she felt most at odds with in the world: politics and religion being the two biggies. At the very mention of a patriarchal god or government, she would sneeze until blood ran from her nostrils in trickles of excited and exploratory red.). The Cubano girl had caught his eye and his heart when she walked into his mother’s office in the back of the store, only separated from the parlor by a thin plain of glass. She smiled at him sitting in the only open dryer chair. He remembered putting the big plastic dome down over his curly, black, eighteen-year-old locks that he had grown since he was 13, and making funny faces at the girl under a helmet (two times that of a viking but minus the horns or the attached fat lady).
He remembered, Jose´ took her out back and kissed her, he saw that much, caught them in an embrace. She was only one thing that he had taken. Greedy Jose´, he thought, always ruining everything good that I got going.
The posse heard small arms fire coming from the east side of the camp, and loaded their weapons. They began to walk towards the sound like a military platoon, semiautomatic assault rifles on the ready held with two hands in front of the chest. They were approaching the end and they didn’t even realize how final it all would be come sunset, when they would all litter the field with their deformed and uniformed bodies.
The couple heard the myriad of shots outside and rushed out only to be shot at also by the two morons under the wheelbarrow and all that bright green saw grass. Jose´ saw the bundle of ripped clothing on the ground and a 20-foot Frank hiding behind the gigantic Banyan tree with It’s roots looking like a legion of snakes diving into soil.
Jose´’s eyes changed when he saw what they had done with his boy after they had healed him. They attempted to shoot at Jose´ but the bullets seemed to fall away from him. They all sped past him and curved to join the son. Jose´ began his run with eyes wild and somehow changed--in color, intensity, something that scared the living daylights out of our moron twins with their 22’s. The boys dropped their weapons and left the box of almost totally spent ammo on the ground near the greenhouse, the discarded metal wanting to go to Bulletman also, fly into his being and become him as the bullets proper had. They were all cursed to dream of things unattainable.
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Part 25: The Field is Set
Gabriel returned to the paranoid Reverend to tell him he was dropping the ball, that his sons were screwing everything up, and that God was very angry (He was).
The Reverend said a prayer at the front pew, for his only Lord and Savior to kill Bulletman dead. He asked that his wife be killed also, and Jose, after Gabe told him that they had been intimate with each other just a few moments ago and that Julianne was now carrying a demon-child in her unholy womb--the last Antichrist of Revelations, the one to lead the God- fearing public astray.
He was a Holy Warrior, Gabe had told him he was, and that was good enough for him. He would see their bodies bloodied and lifeless, he thought, before sun down, and he grabbed up his shotgun that his father had owned for hunting but had given to his son for protection after the burning of his Alabama church by hooded white devils. He remembered what they did to his life, burnt to a crisp on a whim. His eyes flexed with purpose and he loaded the rounds as he walked to his truck. He would become a Saint or greater for this. Perhaps, he thought, I could very well be the one, the second coming.
The first real shots of the battle came at noon when Benny fired at the 20-foot thing hiding behind the Banyan tree in front of him and his buddies. One of the INS officers ran when he saw it rustling in the middle branched trying to see what the commotion was down below.
Jose´ was yelling for them to stop, that they would just make him grow bigger. Benny did stop after his magazine was spent, the spray of bullets making Frank grow to more than 30 feet tall now.
Julianne came outside when the shots stopped, the soul of the quickly growing baby inside her rushing to meet the deadline of sunset. She ran to Jose´, who extended one arm out, still looking, staring, into his sweating brother and crew, to stop her from getting any closer to the invaders.
People started coming out of the woodworks to see what all of the gun play had been about. It isn’t a holy day, why the shots?, some of the developing hoard asked themselves, remembering Easter and the loud barrage of shots that went skyward. They were The-Ones-Who-Stay, the ones chosen by soil to stay and hold the fort until the others came back Homestead way in the next couple months. They brought their weapons along, mostly tucked into the pants or on belts slung over the shoulder. Some brought machetes and sticks. Noon came unarmed.
The posse saw the group developing down the road and that they were coming their way. Benny called the retreat and they moved slowly and cautiously back to the vehicles on the west side of town.
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The Ones-Who-Stay gathered around Jose´, 42 in total not including Julianne and the Seer, who where in the bathroom mixing a special potion made from Fly Agaric and Mimosa flowers and Wormwood. The senior counsel member spoke to Jose´ first: “So what is that thing outside?”
Frank still tried to hide It’s hulking figure behind a tree made of too many ways to see in, too many holes in between the many skinny trunks of the Banyan to let light make its way to metal and cause that flash that would again give Frank away to the ones that want to make him bigger with bullets.
Jose´ answered: “My son.”
They each took a good shot glass full of the green goo the Seer and Julianne had prepared over Sterno in a old bowl with the markings of the old Mayan language. The Seer was the only one that could read it in the village, she had tried to teach Jose´ but he was always too distracted by the ladies. Julianne read the markings out loud without thinking, verbatim. The Seer, who was never surprised at anything, had dropped her jaw. Again, Julianne was showing herself to be much more powerful than even the Seer had expected. She now had the power of three in her, and the souls inside her came to attention when she spoke: “All hear me. Listen to these words well for I will not repeat them. We have called you into our home to prepare. We will drink now to battle and defense of my son, the one they have come to save from the hands of Jose´’s brother and all that would have him killed just because he is different. I want you all to raise your glasses and speak the old language and drink to our victory.”
Everyone in the crowd began speaking Mayan words out of mouths that never had touched and formed them before. In chorus they spoke what in Mayan would loosely be translated as: “The time of the calendar end is upon us. Let us ride the serpent rope home.” They drank in one movement, the old and the young, men and women, and then they sat in unison on whatever they could and all fell into a deep and fortifying meditation which would last until the sun was almost down, the skies turning to a shade of red never seen before, a blood shade making the ground bleed with anticipation
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When he found her in the room alone, cleaning up the shot glasses of the 42 that left the house to gather ammo, and better weapons than a cane or frying pan, there were plenty of guns to go around, he approached her as quietly as a fat man could, trying to maneuver his frame around end table and coffee table and TV stand. The sweat on his brow dripped past his glasses and to the hand holding the shotgun. He raised it up.
“Julianne, Dear,” he said when he was just behind her. Julianne had heard him come in and knew why he was there.
She had the new gift of second sight.
She also knew that he would look at her and see her as he did the first time they met, with such lust and longing that he would take her on the bed where Jose´ and her had made love and created a son that had grown to the size of a full term infant inside her in 12 hours, but her possessed husband wouldn’t see this either, this belly the size of a watermelon, and she knew he would get up from his deed and take her hands and tongue with the meat cleaver on the butchers block in the kitchen because his jealousy needed to take something from her if not her life. She knew he would believe he was doing the work of God and that he might just be, she felt a presence in him that hovered around that felt alien, stranger than any feeling she felt before.
She knew everything that was to be with him because he had set his life upon a path with no branches. He could do nothing else but let his obsessions consume him, make him the unholy servant of a greedy God. And an oblivious Frank, still hiding outside behind the Banyan Tree, grew from the hate that leaked out through microscopic cracks and paths in the wood and brick. His exploding size betraying Jose´’s only order to Frank before: “Stay behind this tree, or else.”
Jose´ returned with the Seer to make final defensive plans, each person would be anointed with verbena petals and be given a talisman for protection. When they saw her she was hovering in the air, levitating off the ground wailing frothy red cries in a language even the seer didn’t understand. Jose´ went to pull her down, to hold his new wife as they had held each other this morning, but the Seer held him at bay. “We are in the presence of power we don’t understand, the Seer said, “a very odd power indeed.”
And from where her hands had been grew hooded snakes with long hypodermic fangs dripping with a venom that burned the floor. Her tongue whipped out in front of her, tasting the air, tasting what would happen next. Her new form, reptilian and menacing, with a spirit hell bent on revenge.
Jose´ stepped towards her again, this time unhindered by the hands and wise words of the seer. The snake hands sped towards him in perfect syncronicity stopping only an inch in front of Jose´’s face. The venom from one snake-hand burned a hole in his steel toe boots, making him jump back quickly to take it off. His little toe had been taken by the corrosive liquid but he didn’t feel a thing due to a love otherworldly.
Benny’s group sat down at the field desk to the side of the western road block the Miami-Dade Police and National Guard had set up--razor wire and shotguns abound. He told them to look for a manlike creature of about 35 to 40 feet tall that can swallow bullets. They put out over the closed-circuit radio to be on the look out for a metallic and brown man approximately 35-40 feet tall and considered dangerous (no duh).
Julianne floated in front of them, her hands biting at the air leaving deep holes burnt into the ground. The 42 followed behind a good distance from Julianne, the Seer, and Jose´, frightened of Julianne’s metamorphosis. They could see the police in the distance guarding the Western entrance. They all knew this would end badly, Julianne most of all, her long bifurcated tongue reaching into the future to see if this stand was all for naught.
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Part 28: On the Run and Remembering
Frank remembered everything that happened in the battle, It had them all inside him now, all the dead from both sides. And they all had died in the fight: the 27 law enforcement officers, one Reverend trying to drown out the voice of an angel with cheap wine in the Port-a-Potty hiding when the bullets started flying, one Seer (grandmother), Ma with the snakes turning on her as revenge usually does, Pa getting killed by Uncle Benny, the revs boys were some of the first to go--dropping into the canal to be eaten by crocodiles when their swollen bodies reached the bay, Uncle Benny regretting everything under the weight of Frank’s two-ton mallet of a fist, and the national guard troops that came in firing--pissed off they missed the war--and left this world under the crushing force of now size 114 feet, It scraped them off with a tree it had torn up by the roots, that Banyan it had been hiding behind, and how like a brush it worked with its woody bristles, and one newborn that had come through her side as if it were plucked out and into the world by a god, and it’s head had four faces pointed in every direction, seeing all, with eagle talon fingers and a body as robust as a tiger, muscled and vicious, it grew to the size of a man before he finds out he is not the center of all the universe and stretched his arms out to the world of battle only to be stricken with old age in a matter of minutes and buried within 5. They all flew into Frank when they died, one by one arriving in a space they would recreate again and again in the coming days to look like their world when they lived in it.
Bulletman was sure that more people would come so It left to find Mud in the Glades to see what It should do. Frank didn’t trust Mud much anymore but It needed to find out what could be done to get back the people It had known in the world before they met their end. Frank was sure that Mud would have something to say.
The place where he turned in the ground was now a crater made by the movement of a 200-foot-tall biped. It walked out west into country people have not yet drained and filled in and populated and so he walked without picking up any more human soul stowaways. It entered the gulf and swam South, jumped over the Key’s bridge and plenty of locals driving with their tops down would be called out of their minds by blue-haired wives with leathery skin bunching to form patterns in the neck, in the leg, like they are trying to be a work of art again for their drunk middle-aged skirt chaser husband who bought his convertible with the donations sent in to his Church of the Parrothead, or maybe he got the dough from his idea to carve the coconuts that litter South Florida into the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil monkeys. It swam southwest past Cuba and Haiti and how similar they looked from the water, past cruise ships with honeymooners looking at the stars from their cabin balconies contemplating the burn of a Cuban cigar and a glass of brandy, and then into the wide expanse of nothing but water and fish and dolphin and whales and sticky jelly fish and man-o-war that hang on to him, pump copious amounts of venom in with no response. Frank uses the Banyan tree brush It still carries to pry them off, an Army Colonel finally dislodges from this giant’s club he was impaled upon and floats to the bottom of a dark ocean to Atlantis where his body will be the plaything of a past forgotten, hidden away at the bottom, never to be heard from again. And the way the water washes him makes him feel new, shiny, the sandy water ripping layers of Mud away. It was glad now that It hadn’t gone to the place of his birth, back to Mud and deception. Frank looked into himself to see the Seer. She said:
You will follow the river I take you to deep into the forest and there you will find, Bataka, my soul’s other, and she will take your affliction away. And you must swim as fast as you can or they will catch up, make you bigger and faster than before, make you destroy everything. Look for the Man in the Tree with smoke and honey falling down to the children, then lay down, then let Bataka heal your troubles with the spirit of the forest.
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Chapter Ten: Baka Initiation Of Bulletman
When the Baka tribesman named Nadji had lowered all the honey collected from the canopy nest, 160 feet off the ground, he looked up to see what cloud had blanketed his perched triumph in black shadow, the kind that creeps into shapes making them move with patterns of molecular confusion over the loss of light. He sees Bulletman standing as a tower into the heavens, It’s form eclipsing the sun , and he faints at the shock. Frank catches the body of Nadji before the fall released his spirit and puts another in the now crowded waiting room of It’s new soul, still an infant in humanity and held back by his affliction the growth of his soul’s space was stunted. Frank lowers the man as gently as his raging body will allow, the speed rushing on him like a drug wanting the very thing Frank was realizing It wanted, to be a man, to be more than a metal and mud shell in the shape of a man, an It. The Second Seer, Bataka, was waiting to receive Nadji, give him herbs under the nose to make him sneeze into a waking. She told Bulletman, without speaking as the other Seer had: Lay down in the big grass next to the lake shore, there we will wash you in water laced with herbs and oils. We will make you well again in us, you will become us and we you, biting at the air of our first making to be made again, and you will see the spirit of the forest come to you in the night of the third day, and you will walk again with us and not so far above us. Sit down, and I will call the village to help with your initiation.
And Frank was tied down to the ground with bowstring hemp ropes, the pygmies raging around him with purpose and chants. Frank’s speed was a problem at first, but It tried to calm arms and legs enough for them to pull the ropes tight and anchor them to the long thick roots of the forests trees that move as an army to the lake during the dry season like snakes to a silo of grain. Nadji tied most of the knots himself to insure that he would be held still for the ritual. Nadji was the apprentice of Bataka in much the same way as Jose´ had been for the Seer.
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Anglo-God-Head tried to get through to Yahweh-Allah but they were fighting over whose religious head wear was more attractive, turban or yamika, and ignoring AGH completely. AGH reached around with his flexible mouth that has been stretched so out of shape by human misinterpretation that it could have circled them all like a boa constrictor wrapped around a three- headed rat but just needed to stretch enough to bite the neighbor to the right and then the one to the left on respective ears. They stopped briefly their ongoing argument to listen.
AGH was straight to the point, the Bulletman had to be put out of his misery, and with the Rev. gone he needed some help. They agreed that they would reveal themselves to their respective flocks and have them kill something other than each other for the next couple days.
Israel and Palestine become one country again in a matter of hours, called simply the IPA.
The country’s leaders put all their people on alert throughout the world to be on the lookout for a 200 foot man holding an uprooted Banyan tree. The call comes in from outside Cameroon, where the Muslim missionary groups gather more numbers in the school yard of the world’s religions, that a large manlike figure had been picked up by a local fisherman’s fish finder. More reports came in about strange wakes in the river and cattle behaving poorly, knocking the fence down and impaling the boy who was too mesmerized by the dynamic charge of this creature to get out of the way. The Congo River narrowed a bit further down past the reports of strange things and became more forest than settlement, more land than water, water closer to the source, and this is where the Baka were away from everyone else, one of the last hunter-gatherer cultures still left in the world, insulated from the world with wood gone unlumbered.
AGH told Yahweh-Allah to send their people in to infiltrate the suspect campsite at the end of the line, the beginning of the river, the Baka nomadic territory of the upper falls. The Israeli air force would go in at dawn and drop one of their nuclear bombs on the valley at the foot of the mountain. This would most definitely work, the godheads thought, and if it didn’t they better run because they would be birthing another god, giving this anomaly the keys to their kingdoms. The godheads talked into the night about the plan below and they laughed together for the first time in total freedom, total acceptance, and it was good. They didn’t want this to ever, ever end, but they knew with Bulletman gone the mission would be gone, and that equaled a big fat bummer sandwich for these gods acting like kids at a sleep over.
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Part 31: Baka Initiation Ritual
The two Seer souls discussed the spirit of plants, the energy that heals with color and absorbed light, the very power of the sun. They would need to employ all of their knowledge of the plant types and their magical powers to heal, to work with the captured light, light-workers trying to find Frank’s seed of a soul to make it bigger and, in turn, make it smaller and slower and more in the world of the real. They discussed the proper course of action while the one still in the world worked at crushing and mixing the extracts that would be placed on and around the bulletman with now more metal than mud making up It’s body.
The tribe danced and played a drum of stretched monkey hide and dug out tree stumps. The initiation area was near water for a reason. The people would constantly wash the initiates body with the rivers water, clean and fresh from the mountain, and there was a lot of Frank to wash. More mud washed away from him and the intricate swirls and dramatic growth of a metal so shiny it could have been mistaken for silver, at least stainless steel polished to a sharp shine. Nadji danced around Frank’s glow--like how moon dust carrying sin must glow, bright and tempting. The ceremony would last into the night, the dark morning, and be done at dawn, and they would all gather for a feast to welcome him, hopefully in a more appropriate size, into the tribe and into the Spirit of the Forest. They worked without seeing time, they worked on bringing out the soul that planted itself inside and now imprisons 114, all waiting for word of a way out and back into the world or else off to some type of heaven.
Bulletman heard Mud screaming during the ceremony and being washed and even before when he swam to the river and down the winding river to this beginning of the river. Mud didn’t like water because it took away the definition of voice, turned it into glub glub bloops and blub blub glubs and, everyone’s favorite, the glup bub blubbity blub wha wha glups. It couldn’t tell Bulletman to turn around, not go where the dead Seer soul inside told It to, but instead steer him towards the nuclear energy plant near Miami, to grow him two million feet tall and tell him to jump into the ocean and cause tidal waves to drown them all and knock the whole earth off kilter to send them all into a nuclear winter.
Mud knew he was dissolving away with every wash to enter foreign ground and a territorial mud that had not known development on the large scale, hadn’t yet been made cynical and hateful of humans. The innocent mud soaked up the stained one who had tried its best to have his revenge on human kind without understanding of its corruption. The ground began to spit and bubble, an allergic reaction from when the pure is set upon by stored resentment, a tainted view of the world, an adult knowledge. The ill mud started convulsing and shifting wildly as the people tried to keep footing, trying to dance over movable earth a dance of healing and they sang circle-toned songs to calm It’s convulsive rejection of dead Mud’s remains and all It’s negative energies. The ground slowed its spasms and the Baka continued the ceremony, calling to the Spirit of the Forest to come and take over all of their souls so they can dance and sing this new initiate’s entry into their spirit tribe, those that have been consumed by the great spirit and made brothers and sisters under the canopy of an overgrown eden.
When the ceremony was complete, Bulletman was again only five-foot-ten and the intricate metal twists and points and fused parts made what looked like a perfect human form, even the eyelashes were accounted for with tiny rough metal wires that accentuated the blue steel color of the eyes. Frank finally looked more like a He than an It, and the Baka children paint his face with ash and dye from berries they collected from the vines behind the swimming hole. They had a new playmate and the parents a new baby-sitter to watch the kids when they would go off in the next couple days to hunt and collect seed for oil since they were in short supply since last years collection which yielded only two barrels for the whole village of 30 women children and men trying to make it using the old ways in a world grown up around them that is too complex and dire.
They all prepared the morning feast together, even the young ones help bring water in de-fleshed coconut shells, the food is placed on leaves the size of huge platters. Bulletman sits at the table and pretends to eat the monkey and boiled root of a tree that is said to grant wishes if they are pure and not marred with any selfish wants.
Bulletman wished for Julianne and Jose´ to come back to life. It wished as well as it could, having never tried wishing before, but Bataka and Nadji said Frank was doing just fine and he was looking more like It’s parents every day. This made Frank dream of them still alive, embracing each other after the Seer said at their marriage: “You shall live as one spirit forever.”
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Part 32: Destruction Came at Dawn
The Nuke landed in the river as they ate, Baka drums played by baka children that had filled their bellies with fruit and meat already in a rush for cells to grow. The seers both picked up on the bomb before it was even dropped, but they stayed silent, they prayed for the souls of all in the village and hoped they found their way to the Spirit of the Forest. They laughed and danced and two made love in the makeshift shelter the women set up and tore down every time the food got scarce in a certain area, which was often. The men talked and joked about their children being like little monkeys that eat too much. The women looked at Frank, his shine peeking out through the ash and berry mask of color. Nadji took a piece of monkey leather and shined his hands, getting all the mud out that the water hadn’t reached. He was looking into the shiny opposable of Frank’s right hand when the blast disintegrated his face in a rush of fire and steam, his stare, everything about him, not even a skeleton mustering up enough staying power under the attack of exploding atoms.
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Chapter 11: Suicide
Frank now had 144 inside of him, and an invading guilt took him over as he towered over the world, 100, 000 ft tall. It couldn’t see the ones below anymore, all cowering under his mega feet that buried whole cities with walking. He walked into the ocean and caused tidal waves with his moving. 8,433 sailors were buried in his wake.
Frank reached the Washington coast before the sunset and a group of camping college students were the first Americans to see the giant’s legs splashing death in their direction. They all looked at the wall of water and knew right away that this was their end, so they waited for it to hit, holding onto each other and smiling into each other’s eyes as they had never done before, silent, true
.
He crushed the whole town of Moscow, ID under his podiatrist’s nightmare of a left foot: the University of Idaho welcoming students into the Kibbie Dome to sign financial aide papers for the coming school year, the English department having a party at Gordon’s house to give Gordon an excuse to knock back a few too many and tell lewd stories to impressionable first year writers who just smoked a joint in his bathroom and can’t help but laugh when he says: Why don’t we retire to the bedroom so I can show you my wife’s collection of lesbian porn, and a boy named Anthony fought with another boy in the woods of Moscow Mountain whether the other was dead or not in their game of war, the paint ball red stain showing through a small fingered hand that didn’t want to admit mortality, even play at the word the red implied.
Bulletman stepped down on land for the last time when his right foot entered the state of Montana, the left still in Idaho’s Palouse about to leave behind a footprint and carnage. His right foot felt the cold of high peaked mountains and glaciers that still move across a land that has all but forgotten the last ice age. The feet caused avalanches and earthquakes that buried the towns in ice and fire from freed lava that wants so much for the foot too absorb it all, the fiery center of the earth but it leaves to fast, seeming motivated for the next step, and the Angel Gabriel, who has had the ear of the monster of a man ever since the god’s nuclear experiment fouled everything up beyond repair. Frank needed to be disposed of now or the apocalypse was definitely starting up nine years early. It had killed thousands without knowing it all ready, and if It was allowed to keep walking around on the world there would be no one left to kill when 2012 rolled around. Gabe needed a hat trick on this one: kill the threat, save the world to later be destroyed by AGH and friends, and try to smooth over the disasters that happened along the path of Bulletman so as to squelch the movement of panic in the world that the end time is upon them. Gabriel would lure him into the largest volcano in the world, Yellowstone National Park.
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How can the calculations of an angel be wrong? Perhaps, good old Gabe did it on purpose, out of spite for a god that was more interested in our comic souls than the immortal angels, His slaves and errand boys without boy or girl parts, only boy or girl names, and maybe he has been hiding it from us that he had this plan of his own to destroy the world. Perhaps Mud was just one of his disguises, perhaps it’s want was really Gabriel's want and the want of the fallen angels in hell. Gabe, for whatever the reason, set Frank on the road to destroy us all, not just himself in steam and lava.
Gabe confirms my fears by playing this address from his golden horn:
I want to punish the world for his misdirected affections,
have the giant eat the earth’s core and break the crust apart
to float into a space not hospitable to human kind, and so
they are left to wonder in their space garbage tombs where
they will go if they can’t go to Him, all staying aboard as hostages
still not sure on how to get past this world and into the heavens.
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Frank’s right foot sunk into the earth, the middle of the Yellowstone Lake began boiling with heightened activity, the crushed geyser heads of Old Faithful and the others backed up with steam driven energy, all injecting into It’s sole making him even bigger. The lava leak is what did it, started its movement downwards, its form changing to a liquid tower all rushing into the earth at the same time, It’s new shape sucking up the lava faster than It had consumed anything before, the whole upper layer of molten rock turning into Frank, becoming Frank diving into a world that wants It gone.
When liquid Frank hit the center of the Earth he encountered a sun-like surface glowing bright in the breakdown of hydrogen atoms. Frank moved naturally towards that center from all sides. It wraps the little sun in its expansive and formless reach.
When Frank swallowed its ocean of a body, It grew bigger than the flimsy crust that held all on that scarred surface away from fire and brimstone. Everything was reduced to space dust and chunks of disembodied earth with the remnants of what humans called progress. Their spirits had inherited the wind, becoming rogues of the spirit world with no home and no god to bring them to heaven, Nirvana, something promised, something else other than the hardship and suffering they endured on the earth. They were free agents in a dark space where gods usually hunted for lost souls, but know most were lost, except for the 144 inside Frank, all the others floated in nothing trying to speak the name of their god without mouths and the world to teach them new prayers. The 144 prayed to Frank to let them go, join the others in the search for the prize.
Frank heard them but was busy right then becoming the new world. It was busy learning how to work with things like gravity and rotation. It had become in a matter of seconds the 3rd planet, Bullet-Man-World.
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Chapter 12: Like Revelations
The Anglo-God-Head gone to the place of ruin that was heaven to clean up the mess with Yahweh-Allah bringing up the rear, arguing as usual about ut who the best god of the two really was, Bullet-Man-World feels the secret longing of the souls inside It to follow that tri-god into that space of reward they dreamt of all their lives.
But Bullet-Man-World holds those one hundred and forty-four inside, comforts them with light and warmth and everything that would have comforted the living. Too bad they were gone, ghosts inhabiting an all too real space. Sometimes they would still pretend they were alive, move in the sulfur and fiery innards as bodies would in life and sensual revelry. They would make their make-believe bodies plant and harvest in the same made up movement and try to imagine eyes that can only see the physical, that desire more... always more... and then there is what they called love on earth. This earthly love they know is nothing compared to what the mass of spirits experience now, but they still pretend to kiss and make love and hold hands that aren’t there and remember what arguing and worry and even jealousy was, as they dance in attempts for memory, in a reminiscence close to nostalgia but in the way Anglo-God-Head had nostalgia for dominance and ownership before Bulletman came with his size too big for the world.
All 144 had nostalgia for their worldly truths, but Bullet-Man-World never understood what that truth was that they were all buzzing with the want for, for he had never smelled it or seen it or touched it or tasted it or thought it even close to the other abstract concepts they spewed without thinking. Truth wasn’t there for BMW. It wasn’t there like life wasn’t there for these 144 who walked around in phantom limb memory.
BMW asked them why they played at the real, attempted physicality in the safety of his mass where all they need to do was float inside intermingling with the others and feeling nothing of the world that had disappeared.
They answered in one voice:
We are cursed to be in love with the world in spite of the end of history. We are holding on to the idea that our Father will return to gather us and bring us to Heaven. We are lonely here without the rest, but know we can’t feel any emotions anymore so we pretend to be lonely. We are having problems adjusting is all, we don’t know how to say things to you without using the languages of our lives. How can we know how to be dead, just spirits without the guidance of a god? You are still in the physical world, still a solid mass floating in space where the earth once was, not a god just yet...at least, not what our lives tell us a god should be. And when you talk of our Father badly, we yearn for Him as people would and try to pretend we are holding fleshy hands tightly together in meditation and pretend we are bowing heads we no longer have in the presence of idols we can no longer see. We know that you will be lonely without us, a dead planet with a stolen atmosphere trying to start again from scratch with the little mud and water that stuck to your gravity like a hope for new life, but we have decided to go.
BMW looked inside itself for his surrogate parents to get confirmation of the group’s wishes. They sensed It’s urge to see them, Jose´ and Julianne, and so they were conjured up into loose forms representative of the couple, sculpting what details of their forms that still lingered in their collective memory. They remembered what the color black was, and so colored the hair of Jose´, and they vaguely remembered what a female and male body looked like, and so they vaguely reconstructed forms that looked much more like hinged and disproportionate dolls. They approached the inner eyes of their capture, their adopted planet of a being, and spoke to it as parents speak to a child. “Frank, honey,” they said in perfect unison forgetting that living people don’t speak in such a manner, “we want you to let Daddy and Mommy go to heaven.” They had never referred to themselves as “Daddy and Mommy” before, which made BMW feel the sting of deception, that human vice that It had learnt too much about on his sojourn through the world.
But It knew It was just the group speaking to him again in these fabricated voices.
They continued, “We need to go now, meet up with the others.” BMW felt the urge to hurt them, tell them that Heaven was gone too, just like their precious Earth, fragmented and scattered like so much trash in the front yard of their Solar System. It wanted to tell them how quickly their god had abandoned them to pick up the pieces of that fallen kingdom, collect souls to start over somehow. They weren’t the chosen ones, these 144 with wants for the old safety of Anglo-God-Head. There were no chosen ones, just souls floating randomly in the blackness waiting to be saved like they were promised on earth by their churches and synagogues and temples and shines and holy cities that buzzed with the prospects of miracle and buying a relic, perhaps a piece of a saints bone or a chunk of wood that was said to be of the cross itself to pick at and open the locks of the big gate, let them sneak past Saint Peter and the legions of sexless angels with quick triggered eyes and wants for worldly pleasures.
And so BMW called to them and asked why they wanted to feel so enslaved again in the tedium of work, under the god who had given up on them, who had not sent angels to gather them up but had come only to talk about BMW upstaging Him, doing what He had planned to do all along, a gathering, first. But they didn’t believe him and persisted in sending forth the two parental shades who asked again and again in male and female voices singing in unison, “Frank, honey, send Mommy and Daddy to Heaven.”
He was annoyed to the point of granting their wish, throwing them into the vast space of uncertainty, when Anglo-God-Head returned as quickly as he had left (Gods are like that. At least my gods. They are great fans of dramatic entrances and exits). He brought along with him Big-Fat-Buddah-Belly, which had become incarnate in the shape of a golden stomach extended out to the sides and front in a way that almost suggested pregnancy, and a plethora of eastern gods other than BFBB, such as the great Shiva and Ganesha, the plump elephant headed god, and even the Indian Mother Goddess is there holding her ever-pregnant belly.
Straggling behind were lesser gods, ones that only held the human imagination for a short time before modern science came about to destroy their credibility. There was the god of water and fire and the hunt, and of course there was the Sky God in all its revisions--Ra, Zeus, Jupiter, to name three. These three dead gods were fond of sharing stories of divine prowess with each other. They were like old men wilting away in a nursing home for retired sports stars. I hit the most home runs in 1924, and I knocked out 66 bare knuckled men in 1912, or I scored the winning basket, 66-67, with only two seconds left from half court in 1936. But they were talking numbers sacrificed in their names, they were talking of births from heads and arm pits, they were talking ruling over all the others that really ran the show on earth and being able in that high office to torment, impregnate, damn, do anything to the human masses huddling below in shacks made of wood that feared the sky god’s lightning bolts and winds so much that they shook at the approach of a god-storm even before the first rain drop was felt on thatch ceilings.
Such activities humored them then, and now they still laughed in the remembering. All the people that knelt in front of their many monuments with small human hopes and desires meant nothing to these big bosses in the sky. They were terrible in their power, and they bragged about just how terrible they were and could have been if given the chance to rule for just a while longer.
The three followed close behind BFBB and AGH (with Yahweh-Allah facing the trio of Sky Gods but totally oblivious to the lynch mob because they were too busy trying to stretch their opposed god-mouths enough to bite the others nose), and the clan of assorted asian deities. When the three saw what had become of the earth, the pyramids, Mt Olympus (the whole of their old stomping grounds destroyed and BMW in its place) they stopped talking and stared into this new landscape for some explanation of their destroyed past.
The 144 gathered inside BMW plotting their next move were totally unaware of their not so holy Father’s presence, nor of the presence of his entourage. They were busy trying to figure the new rules of physics for ghosts, if they could force it to open its body to the sky and send them to their maker. They wanted to see him as they had on the walls of churches, how the Reverends and Priests and Rabbis and all such spiritual leaders tried to paint him, a big old man in the sky that could be as loving as a grandfather and possess a flowing white beard as comfortable as newly picked cotton or what clouds must feel like. They wanted more than anything to finally get the reward of lying down to rest in this image of Him, paint their souls into the canvas of the heavens permanently. They felt together an image of Him, while in the heavens they couldn’t possibly see He went face to landscape with BMW in a battle for the possession of their souls.
Anglo-God-Head stared down Bullet-Man-World until the holy posse lined up behind Him, as well as gods can line up without stumbling into the other’s dogma, amalgamating, coming together in a unrecognizable and hulking chunk of divine matter. When they were all present and accounted for he listed his demands. He spoke for the group, saying, “There seems to be a shortage of souls. We need your 144 after all. You will give them up to us or we will take them by force.”
Bullet-Man-World didn’t reply, but instead looked into himself to see the 144 plotting escape through a mouth that was no longer there. He was hurt by their presumptions about him, about the outside and this god that was no more than an adolescent street-thug wanting the pocket knife back that he had plunged into the chest of a child.
BMW didn’t know how to be their god, but he wasn’t about to let them be divided up between this gang of holy hoodlums. He was unsure what to do, until an underworld god, Thor or Vulcan or Hades or Satan, (its hard to tell those guys apart) decided he couldn’t wait any longer for the action to start and threw a fireball he had been saving up for the planned Armageddon of 2012.
BMW saw the three dead gods of the heavens, Ra-Zeus-Jupiter, puff up in excitement at the thought of battle starting up against this planetary interloper, and followed the fireball of Undetermined-Underworld-God with several weak lightning bolts, rusty from lack of use. All of there god-weapons absorbed into him as the human weapons did, and he grew now faster than he had ever grown on earth, and accelerated faster, spinning at 7 times the speed of the dead earth spinning on its axis (which is awfully fast--you can look that fact up online at www.discoverychannel.com). His mountains ripped at the faces of the god-posse as he spun and grew, causing them to fall back in space, forced to hold onto other planets to regain their bearings.
Anglo-God-Head reached back and grabbed Mercury, which had hit him in the back of the head when BMW expanded 7 times what the Earth had been and, in doing so, catapulted Him towards the Sun, disturbing the argument still raging between Yahweh-Allah for only a few moments. With all the power He could muster, and with a roar that sounded like how god-roars might sound in Hollywood, AGH hurled the sun-cooked mass towards BMW.
BMW tried to move but the increased speed of his spin held him fast. It was coming right towards him and there was nothing to do but wait for impact and see what would happen. BMW imagined the worst, Its frame exploding into small bits, sending all of Its family out into space, vulnerable to any hungry god that crossed their paths. It tried to think the problem away as he had done before with the earth’s crust that had almost done him in. But It knew that this was a different type of problem all together, more than just a thin shell of dirt and rock to break through. It knew terror, true terror, for the first time in Its life.
It closed Its external eyes to this new found emotion and went inside to be with his family. Even though they were still plotting an escape from It, BMW felt at ease with them, forgot their faults and nestled up to their warm souls with memories of what they had once been to BMW, the great teachers and loves of Its life.
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Part 37: Ra, Zeus, and Forgotten Jupiter
The three gods of the sky had just recovered from BMW’s expansion and were approaching with a second assault when they inadvertently stepped into the path of the screaming planet. Zeus took it in the head, shaking several babies with full battle armor from its always pregnant matter. The planet bounced between the three like triangularly arranged bumpers in the pinball games Jose´ had been so fond of while he lived in a world not made up of his adopted son’s transformed body. Each lit up as they were hit with the pinball planet with a memory of what they once had in the world or regret for not being able to harness in the imaginations of those ancient worshipers that inhabited it.
Crash. [2:15] [Continue]
Bang. [2:16] [Continue]
Slam. [2:17] [Continue]
Bang Crash Slam Ping Dong Bong Wham Thud KaBoom
(Batman-style).
They were racking up the points in this pinball game of memory and regret, Mercury keeping up its original speed breaking Newtonian laws of physics (Gods and planets often break these physical rules. At least my gods and planets do. They are great fans of breaking human rules when we aren’t looking.) They, so caught up in this jarring of thoughts from their rubbery ideal bodies, drifted off and away with no parting words. And it could be heard by one of the eastern gods (the elephant-headed one, Ganesha), “They would have been good gods if there was a planet like Mercury there to beat sense into them every day of their divine lives.”
Anglo-God-Head, annoyed by the lack of effectiveness Mercury had against this expanded world, but still determined to salvage the 144, mused about breaking BMW open--getting at the creamy soul center. He could cause It the guilt He had given the Catholics, he thought, or implement that whole tithing thing, this time for souls, on BMW as He had on the Christians that had been far too zealous to question what a god could possibly do with that much cash. No, He wanted to think up something new, original, a trick he hadn’t played on the human followers yet, but all his ideas seemed to fall back into the old bag--becoming just revisions of the same theme, the same old thing, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until his cabasa grande was spinning with thoughts from Genesis to Jesus--a jumbled rant of fragmented pieces of Bible stories that sounded totally foreign to Him when played the human words back in such a random pattern.
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With all of this indecisive jumping from one idea to the next, speedy like a housewife on amphetamines, Anglo-God-Head had caught himself in a little known dimension: the Godspin. This Godspin is similar to the fate of Ra-Zeus-Jupiter, in that it was a state of mind that produces a type of dementia at the clawed hands of memory. In other words, He was stuck in His head, all of his desires for the world and its inhabitants through the years had made him develop what can only be equated to the human idea of having blinders on. Ra-Zeus-Jupiter at least had an external catalyst for their illness, but Anglo-God-Head had created this Godspin himself, the catalyst an internal one, and so he spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and couldn’t break free of his thoughts, his wants for those 144 that dwarfed the urges of a human addict with its desire for more. It was projecting its thoughts as it spun, making every god that looked on know that He had no intention of sharing the 144 if He ever did find a way to get at them. The ideas of how to break into BMW kept coming and he kept spinning, out of control, in a divine mind gone completely and totally insane.
Eventually, the other gods left Him there, dazed and confused for oh so long, and talked as they left Him about needing leadership they they could all really fall behind, trust. They all looked to Big-Fat-Buddha-Belly (who had come along for the ride only because he thought it might be cool to see a battle of the gods) as a good possibility. He shook his massive gold belly no as a god with a face might, saying in this movement that he could never lead for leadership was a desire and that was what caused all the suffering in the first place and that he just wanted to surf the milky way for a few billion years and then smoke a big fat comet, fill up his belly with the vapors of bliss away from desire, before retiring to a bed made of the skeletons of constellations that had no purpose anymore.
They stewed in BFBB’s lack of what they saw as purpose, progress towards a new structure for a post-world existence. However, they couldn’t dwell on their disappointment too long, they had to go hunting souls and had a vast universe to cover before the other gods who didn’t follow Anglo-God-Head snatched them all up for themselves. They could be heard singing their favorite English Earth song, “A Hunting We Will Go” as they traversed the space between the dead solar system minus one planet and the rest of it, the heavens and hells in which all greedy gods build their homes, singing “A hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, high hoe todairyoh, a hunting we will go.”
BMW moved closer to the befuddled Anglo-God-Head, seeing what was the matter with this strange being, why He wasn’t trying to kill It anymore and why His entourage left Him all alone in the vast space between BMW and the sun (save the two still fighting on the back of his head, of which even BMW had learned to totally ignore in their three meetings due to the annoying nature of their discourse of semantics). Its new size made it hard to move but it reached out with a tendril fashioned from mud and rock, (the mud mumbling under its breath about pay backs and things not turning out evenly or fair in the end with most of it’s original body floating around with the space dust but it didn’t have power over BMW anymore so its voice slipped away like the midnight whispers of a mosquito slip away after its wings are clipped and it is left lying on the carpet trying to learn how to speak a language other than “Wingese”) and he touched the catatonic god with Its new arm, brushed against His face, and forgetting the violence that went on between the two on the back, all the biting an spiting and verbal pissing contests, he reached around it to shake it back to life. That was a mistake. Both god-mouths bit down hard on his outreached arm of mud and rock, making him bleed the lava that coursed through him onto the rabid countenances.
The lava fueled Yahweh-Allah’s battle even more, each yelling that the other had brought this outside force in to burn the other one, even though they couldn’t be burned by such worldly and physical properties as heat and consumptive liquid stone. They delineated the history of their battle showing this instance at the top of both their lists, both yelling at the other god as if they were saying, “this is the last straw”, a sentiment that they would reiterate each and every time they perceived there had been some sort of change in the power balance of the argument, any changes from the normal I am a better god than you any day of the week, argument.
The 144 lost souls inside Bullet-Man-World had their plan ready. They would light a fire in his belly like that stick puppet and company did in Pinocchio to that shark or whale or whatever it was in the Disney film. (The disney version looks like a shark almost, or a really mean looking Sperm Whale, but that is just my opinion. Please don’t come after me Disney-people.... They can be damn mean if cornered about central flaws in their beloved movies). And, as with the shark-whale-monster in the movie, they would be able to escape from the mouth on a old boat or something else that floats.
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They pretended to make boards from pretend trees on pretend wood shop saws and wood chippers. They made believe the life they remembered. Most remembering that they needed to work hard to get anything difficult accomplished, and so they pretended to sweat and breathe hard and get calluses on imagined hands that they imagined broke and festered with imagined infections that they would treat with what they remembered of medicine, but this they usually got wrong, remembering the brand Preparation H because it sounded official, like one could clear out any infection in the world by just saying the name, PREPARATION H, and the germs would start running away in terror.
They needed to go through the motions, do what they were taught in the world, because they knew far too little of this spiritual realm. They didn’t realize that they had the power all along just to rise out of their capture’s underworld to his surface and then just will the destination they desired and it would be made so. They would be back with the Father, the father they didn’t realize was just outside BMW in a God-spin coma. They didn’t know any of this, and so they went on in the fashion they had lived in the world, whittling away at the grand vessel that they thought would take them where they wanted to go, spending long imaginary hours putting it together, building bedrooms and dining rooms, a place for the imagined captain to sit in a navy blue uniform, bearded, smoking a pipe and talking about the sea as a man would talk about his wife, and when it was completed they would check it for leaks and then smash an imaginary bottle of fermented brew, the ideas about just what type varied, onto the sturdy hull, imagining a crowd behind them all saying the french words for goodbye and good voyage, which none of the 144 seemed to remember the exact words for, and waiving, and thinking how lucky the 144 were to go on a cruise. They were happy in their inventions.
And the Baka spirits followed the others, play acting at western lives that they had never lived. They thought it comical how the others would fly around the subject of their deaths and their lives with the same generality. The Baka seer held telepathic conversations with the Mexican seer, trading recipes and potions they would never use again, but felt safe in the memory of the words and ritual.
BMW recoiled its injured appendage and thought of Julianne, how she looked in her physical body, so pretty he thought, so much like what he learned pretty was from the boys that looked at magazines with unclothed female bodies behind the McGregor storage barn. It wanted her to be alive again to touch It’s surface like she had when it was just a young naive being trying to be a boy.
It absorbed the tentacle back into itself trying to imagine itself as a real boy, or a man for that matter, but its increased size and speed was making him forget more about the thing he had been or tried to be. He was loosing all trace of that humanity that It had struggled to grasp. Its defining nature seemed still to be just too strong and fast to keep hold of something so fragile as humanity, but something had definitely changed in him since he crawled from the mud (® 22). It didn’t want to destroy anymore, it had done enough of that to last for all eternity. It was content, a content planet spinning on a comfortable axis watching stars that it once watched with Jose´ and Julianne, and wondering if the strange god It tried to embrace once upon a time might one day just disappear from Its orbit and give it an unobstructed view of the sun, feel its rays fall unhindered on its craggy face of mountains and lakes
It stared into the vast space that stretched out behind It and all the planets that It was now brethren with and smiled the best imagined smile a planet could possibly ever, likely, muster. And it wondered if the earth ever smiled like this and this made him think of the day Jose´ and Julianne first kissed and that made him think of how he wished they could be there in flesh to run across its transformed face with children of their own. It smiled again (but it still was an imagined one).
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Chapter 13: Like Genesis
Part 40: Escape Plan Meltdown
It looked into himself to the 144, and he wondered why the mass had been so quiet and still for so long. He saw them there stuck not unlike AGH, staring into possibility after possibility set before their souls eyes in faulty pictures of a reality learned from lives spent in a world that was too easy and now no longer there (I have forgotten it, so it has disappeared into ash). They had gone over a million or so escape plans so far, but hadn’t decided on any one plan, so the number still rose, ~ a million and an 1/8th, a quarter, a half. All questions and no answers, no endings.
BMW wanted to dig his hands inside and pull them out one by one to hold on too, hug the life into them again and wait for them to hug back as the men and women they were. He was enamored with the way they would move around each other, the way their faces changed so quickly and due to the strangest stimuli--a food or drink they really liked (Bullet-Man-World would sometimes think of what type of fire it liked best to absorb until it was faster and stronger and bigger and felt the potential energy of a hundred suns. He thought his all time favorite was the shotgun with its flowering pellets of buckshot and the way the bullets entered his chest in a way that might be love if he had learned exactly what that strange human emotion truly was) or perhaps a woman would look at her man in strange and dark ways when other young females were about, or the look a man might make when he sees his wife looking at him looking at the group of young girls with drool gathering for release at the very moment that those eyes of his and eyes of hers meet immediately conjuring up visions of couch-sleeping and flower-buying in the near future.
It was amazed by them, what they were. BMW missed them for their faces most of all, but It would have missed them, It thought, even if they had been headless in the world, bodies in random motion beating themselves against barriers of wood and rock hoping food of some type might fall down into open throats, it would have missed them for the movement of hands and legs and the inexhaustible movement of the human will towards progress, acceleration, destruction, to rock steady on into the war of flesh and spirit, and learn again and again what it is to be a human being through the warm touch of hands, the tender contact that says sometimes more than faces and makes the nerves of a forgotten energy boil up in his lumpy brown skin that wants to make It bleed with a life that flows through veins and arteries and capillaries, to breath in air and not just souls who are looking for quick exits and easy heavens, to gulp water down into a stomach that has acids and gases, and to have a mind that doesn’t remember what it is like to be mud or metal or even this world he has become.
It wanted to be as they were when they were flesh and bone, and he dreams of running its pink-palmed dark hand over smooth dark skin that glowed with the readiness of nerves awaiting real human touch and even real human pain. It said the name Frank in his mind, the name they gave him, and dreamt about things that never would happen. Frank dreamt the way he imagined they would, with his inner-eyes patrolling the perimeter of its fledgling soul trying to find something sacred to hold onto, to hold this soul up against the shadow of the memory of human existence.
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Part 41: Pulling Babies from Muck
BMW yelled to them, the catatonic souls that had once tried at immortality and missed the class on keeping alive. They didn’t stir much when he called to them but they did stir. It felt them inside it as a mother would feel a baby even if it didn’t kick hard. BMW kept it up, asking them to stand away from their mental computations of now what was approaching 5 billion variations of the escape plans, duplicates attached to a seemingly endless line of duplicates with one word changed from the one before, endless stream of consciousness banter finding pleasure in random variation. He wanted them to remember his voice and feel his almost-human tones of compassion run through them and illuminate their lives with words that burst forth in fits and starts like long and universal roman candles intent on creating light and a deeper understanding of the darkness through contrast.
BMW wanted its words to be the way back into the world for the 144 to be created again, this time in his image, out of rock and metal and mud. He wanted to pull babies from the muck and mire and let them cry into breath. Make the skulls from light bulbs to help them see past the darkness of some of his hills and ridges that melted into each other like the remnants of muscle and etched skin, but now the definition was somehow a bit more abrupt without losing the overall softness, now in this time of questioning.
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Part 42: Figments Discussing Plot and Identity
Chorus: What are we to do, when two opposed make one
and two gods of creation become more human under right
light...
Her: ...This is the way out here. Under the nose of Him
that spins as our worldly prison and cause of hard times
and past the author’s hand who writes our lives wrongly,
We shall move like wraiths in the midnight of our minds.
Him: Should I move alone here. Change my face to my liking,
no longer a part, now apart, from the taunt pull-strings
of the Master and his lackey. I refuse them both tonight,
this day, to take first steps towards what freedom brings.
BMW: What is this. You have denied me as you have denied him.
The Master, you must remember, also has control over me
And instructs me as he instructs you, and fills me with
life just as he fills you, we are both lands on the same sea.
Her: No longer, my brother in bondage, rise up and away from
him and his words that paint, let us now pick up the brush.
Him: Can’t we ever call him or write to him on-line sometimes...
Her: Shut your...where did your mouth go, Jose´? The rush
Of reality into our hands was not planned for enough.
We have not imagined our lives fully, looked at the room
as Me would have if he were still looming behind Us
Making hands move and mouths speak, kiss, consume
and our bodies speak of loss and yearning and human
Nature...
Him: ...Not nature, not that pure, my ghost of a mate.
The human problem, more like, the human condition, more
like, but not nature, with the story's construction in the consummate
hands of one of the gods Me has killed or banished to hells
of no souls and no mysterious whisper of prayer filtering
Through their holy memories. They all gave up on us because
Me wanted this, us lost in the ethereal planes of creation, wavering.
Her: Could we call him back then, to fix this and that, and make our
world again for us, because i am at a loss on how to remake myself.
BMW: This is the time to call back in those objective narrators borrowed
from the ancient ones that I myself was modeled by, formed self
by memory of the Greeks and the Romans and the proud Egyptians,
the stories of loss and transformation, hieroglyph walls and Ovid
and Omeros, and this is how I was made, I know it, i know it, but
I just can’t remake myself, i have changed too much by Me's narrative.
Her: Yes, bring in the chorus to guide us. Tell them to sing our future
as they have so well sung our past...
Chorus: ...The ponderance of three
is one of pity plea, never knowing how hard it was to wear crown’s
to create kingdoms and scenes wrought on the face of dead history.
They have banished their translator and now their words are greek
or at least half mumbles of what the story might be. They need Me
to come back and rescue them from story death by a cast of players
who want an end to this, some closer for lives portrayed too flatly.
So, sing us your endings, five figments have their ultimate last words,
a choice of endings: BMW, Her, Him, the Baka, and the author, Me.
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Five Variations on the Ending as Told by Reluctant Characters/Figments/Author
***Again, Reader, as with the ten beginning chapters, these five can be read in order or non sequentially--your choice.***
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
***Or go to my final address to this novel***Take one of five: BMW
I see them now. They are working up through one of my caverns. They think it to be my mouth. Prayer has never been easy for me, I just never saw the point of praying to so invisible a force about my soul’s salvation when I don’t even know if I have a soul. But I pray for them that they might find the exit by their own will, and when they find their gods gone or catatonic in this new world made of their son of metal and mud, I guess I will pray to some hidden, Good God out there in the space of ancient yesterdays, one all have forgotten the name for. How will they speak to me when they find me here alone, praying for them? They will have to find new ways to communicate with no more lungs or voice boxes to push out words with the help of hands and tone and looks. (Good start, BMW, I will guide you through the rest, just follow my lead).
And, they will most likely need to pray too when they realize what has become of heaven But to Anglo-God-Head no more, and not to his backup boys Yahweh-Allah who still argue on the back of AGH’s immense spinning head caught in that Godspin that has exhibited the most excellent amount of staying power. They can’t pray to me any longer either, it will do no good to hold the termite ridden offices of out-of-commision gods that never did them much good with all those rules and rituals. I would be just as bad, just as horrible with my power.
I will make them again into bodies. I will pull newborn babies from the mud and inject a displaced soul into each shell. They will all be like me, shaped and formed as I am. They will have voices again to make sounds in my world, learn to use them to make song and poetry like Jose´ would have wanted, and make them without sex as Julianne would have wanted, and make them speak only of peace and intricacies of beauty as I would have wanted when I was in the world and not the world, spinning loops around a sun that gives life to my position.
I see the ghosts of Jose´ and Julianne rise out of the cavern first then the others filter up and out in an extraordinary wind of souls. The 144 look out upon alien landscape. They call to me and I make my body rumble with acknowledgment. They feel my reply and act as if they are running and hiding as real human bodies would run from earthquakes or other natural disasters. They know they are pretending to be alive now, but don’t want to let on to the others that they all believe are mutually unenlightened and still fully caught in the fantasy of life. Each thinks they are special, different, because of this special knowledge that is not special at all. I know this because I feel them all thinking they have a direct line to the god all 144 prayed to on earth, Anglo-God-Head/Yahweh-Allah. Little did they know that the trio of gods wouldn’t be conversing with anyone anytime soon, especially disembodied souls filled with delusions of grandeur.
They would be remade. I would rebuild them, make them stronger, faster, able to leap small buildings in a single bound. (reader, stricken the last references to Superman from the record, and the one before that to the Three-Million Dollar Man, and sorry BMW, my mind slipped into pop-culture conformity and I led you astray, as my mind has a way of doing from time to time. Go on, BMW, you were doing just fine).
BMW: I would rather just stop here and let Her or Him pick it up where I left off.
Me: That will be just fine. Thanks for trying. Next.
Her: I am not ready yet.
Him: I’m not finished drafting my character yet, either.
Me: Well, someone has to go. I am going last, like I said before. I am quite firm on that point.
BMW: I suppose I could continue.
Me: No, you shouldn’t have to pull their weight. Come on. I am waiting.
Her: Well, I just can’t, it will have to be Him or you, Me.
Him: I will go next only if I get to make Jose the hero, I just can’t figure out how.
Me: Why did I give you figments any say whatsoever in this? Him and Her, you are screwing up the story.
Her: You never gave us an order to begin with, what are we supposed to do without proper direction from the author. It isn’t as much our fault as it is yours that this is turning out badly.
Him: I got it.
Me, BMW, and Her: What?
Him: Just give me the seat, and I’ll knock out this ending in no time flat.
Me: Go to it then. And I will be backing you up the whole way, like I did with BMW.
Him: No backup needed, Me. I got this thing under control.
Her: Then start all ready.
BMW: You are crawling out of a cavern, remember, and the land is different, remember.
Me: Just start.
Her: Come on.
BMW: Start.
Him: Okay. Stop being so damn pushy. Deep breath, deep breath. Go. Go. Go.
[Continue]Two of five endings: Him
Jose´, me, me, me, me, me, this is me, Jose´, me me me....(What the fuck are you doing? You don’t need to do voice exercises....No. Don’t give me that bullshit. Just give your brief ending and move over for your eternal love’s rendition)...I was the first one to emerge from the cavern. (Good). It was cold and dark. (Cliched). I motioned to the others the surface was safe and filed up with a fluidity that speaks to that of spirit, not body. We were all ghosts now, but they all didn’t realize it. (Nice connection to BMW’s section. Good. But cut one of those “all’s)...we were ghosts now but they all didn’t realize it. (No. I was thinking of the other one, the second)...but they didn’t realize it. (good)
I began to come to grips with this nonidentity early on when I couldn’t hold Julianne in the way I had in the world. (Speed it up). We were neither human nor angel, just somewhere in between, hovering in noncompliance of physics and natural law, extraordinary, alien.
I haven’t told the others yet of our demise, because I fear they would take it badly having not the strong and manly hands of reason I possess. I am a hero. (I am the slave of fanciful images that are far from truth). I am the type of soul that wants for nothing but only the comfort and care of my fellow man. (Please, how arcane). So I chose to hold the cross alone, the knowledge of our metamorphosis into un-bodied refugees in search of heaven. (Let’s take it down a few levels, Jose´-figment, why don’t you). Well, being the only one to know can be difficult on ones psyche. Just as I saw them all floating around on the surface, I was crippled with the anxiety that they might all realize our predicament at the same time and, not having heroic qualities as I do, take the news badly, as cattle might take the news that they are to be slaughtered, only these cattle had already gone under the mortal knife and fire that led to their extinction.
I thought I would know what to do when I saw the hints of realization spark in their ghostly white eyes, but now I wasn’t that sure about anything. I wanted to tell them all to go back into the hole they had just come from, to bury ourselves in the dark belly of our new world never to see sunlight again for that would mean knowledge for all, and I wanted to be the only one to have to bear it. Fuck it, too hard, not strong enough, damn shabby will, I did it...
I told them the news as you might tell news. This is not the vision of hero that I had for myself, but I must say my hand was forced by...let's just call him...anxiety. (You watch where you are pointing that finger now, boy. I made you and I can dismantle you too) Well, we must not break the narrative thread.
But now what am I to say? When you have invested so much in one road how do you change paths. I wanted to resist. I wanted to have them all look up to me, not to Me. I wanted to have it all end with me fighting off the marauding gods and learning to talk with my son who became my world and get insider info strait from his craggy mouth made of mountains and a deep, mist-laced valley. I would rule them, rule over all 144 in our new Eden. I would eat from imagined fruit trees and be a generous leader letting them eat from any tree in our imagined world, except for one.
The Tree of Knowledge will live again in me, and I will guard this sacred being with no fear of death and have power over its bounty. It will be an avocado tree this time, not an apple. I will make Guacamole to put on my gorditas and to ease the fire of peppers down into semi-burn submission. I will eat from this tree as they watch me, made-up mouths watering with their hazy memory of water. I will be all powerful and live happily ever after, (are you quite done?) and forever, my throne made from the pink and coral shells of hundreds of remembered seaside walks collected from the collective memory of the 144. Frank will hold me above and away and singularly radiant against a sky that no longer has clouds or blue, but just an all encompassing black with dotted stars and planets calling for a rewind and playback to see what the hell really happened to the earth to leave such a sad looking new planet in its place, more like a fetal positioned old man.
Let’s just say this all happened. That I never told them, and that knowledge tree idea happened for me. Let’s say they didn’t revolt against me telling them of their cut down lives and didn’t call me crazy and exile me to the dark side of the new planet that always remains pointed away from the sun. I am cold here. I want it to be the way I saw it first, me a hero and not a joke.
There will come a day when they will realize what I said is true and they will call me back to lead. I know they will. But for now I will pretend that I never told them that they were not really there, that we had lost our bodies. I will pretend that they completed my throne last week after they had worked for months. And I will sit on my new seat of awe inspiring power until Eden falls again to hands that don’t know their place and trees of knowledge that don’t keep a tight enough grasp on their most valuable of all fruit, those green and creamy avocados that might open up the eyes of the world with a snakebite not to our naked bodies this time but to lives devoid of bodies.
Until the fall, I will eat my guacamole on toasted tortillas. Until the fall, I will want for nothing.
I am plagued by images of phantoms rejecting me for telling them they are phantoms. I am alone and dreaming about myself as a hero. It is a nice dream. I will wake to the cold dead space of a planet’s forgotten side. I will wake to find myself lost in the knowledge of my disembodied life. (That’s it. Good. Let’s move on.)
[Continue]
I am tired of these mythical structures, nearly all patriarchal and following thematic patterns of oppression and subservience and all the other bad things you can think of to express the discontent my character has with how this book is being written.
The way you treated the figment that plays Jose´, Him. That was not fair of you. You should have let him finish his ending and you shouldn’t have forced him to tell the others they were souls no matter how sexist his ending was, implying a return to the old order of male power over knowledge and the ignorant hoards of females, popping out babies and washing your clothes. My ending will be different, Reader. I will be the woman stepping away from their complacency, creator, the new mother.
I struggled up the rough path that led up to a bright light that shone of heaven itself, and since we were all aware of our situation, not being incarnate any longer, we thought that heaven was what that light was, that we would be accenting up to some distended mass of holiness, dissolve into its orb of radiant blessing and grace picking up our harps and our wings and our halos as we passed through a gate that was what a cell wall must feel like to vitamins and minerals wanting to become part of the bodies makeup. Just like that.
The light was just sunlight, not any shine from what we thought was our prize, our permanent home in the arms of our Anglo-God-Head, falling asleep forever in His soft, white beard, a safe father that wouldn’t look at you in the shower when you were 16, peeking in through an old style key hole probably drooling at the site, probably playing with his devil stick when Mom was out shopping or buying a new hat for synagogue.
We pulled our heavy and worn out souls into the light. Each looking around at the new landscape as if we had eyes.
The soul that had been Jose´ still can’t come to accept his state. He thinks himself a hero still, naively holding up the flag of chivalry and male fashioned myths and classic gender-biased power structures. He still wants her, I mean me. Even though I am not even there. Even though he isn’t there, he still wants me. He is the one my me loved as a whole, a heart and a soul, in the old world when we held each other with fingertip flesh in snake like movement, blending. I want to tell him that he can’t touch me as he did ever again. That we have changed and that things never remain the same, but I falter, stagger two steps shy of the statements that he must know deep down but can’t bare to let his new invisible mouth try to swallow. He is as sad and oblivious a ghost as I have ever seen. And I am a sadder one still, with my soul’s mate imprisoned in a body he lost long ago at the hands of his brother, Benny and his infamous INS Jets. I still can hear them chanting in Jazzy unison--When your a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, From your first cigarette to your last dying day, Bee-Bee-Bee-Benny and the Jets.
Chilling.
I talk to the planet, Frank and all it has become, asking it what we might do to shed our earthly memories and begin again on this strange new land. It answers that it wants to pull babies out of the ground, or some such garbage, and inject our souls into these new forms. Well, I tell it that it is going to need a good amount of help if it expects to birth 144 babies from the mud of its chest and on top of that push 144 souls into extremely small vessels, plus the whole creation of the world as a sustainable and comfortable home for these 144 thing, and further, to have the responsibility of creating a system of procreation so that they can multiply and cover its body with life. Where would it find the time?
It agrees that it could use the help. So I volunteer as new-world midwife, the one to pull the babies out of chest and shove the souls into these small containers. My only payment, I told It, would be to leave the job of creating myself up to me and me alone. I told It to go ahead and create them all in its image, sexless and without desire, little bodies made of metal and mud that grow in size and speed with fire, with projectile, with a nature not human but injected with a human soul. Do all of this to them, I told it, but let me have control over who I will be. Let me recreate myself in this genesis-world with the hands I know I have, strong hands that know my contours and dimensions.
I will be the only woman on this whole planet, I told myself, the only sexual being in the whole world. They will all be my selfless little slaves. I will invent new types of pleasure for myself, using their bodies as men used our bodies in the old-world. And this thought pleases me for the time being. But then I think of how it was to be used and, worse than that, how it was to be accepting of that use. I would be no better if I used them, I thought, it would be that male world all over again.
I didn’t want to just switch the seat of dictatorship from male to female, give power to one sex or the other, but I didn’t want to live as a bullet-man-world baby being shot and burned by the divine flames of a non-human inventor making non-human shells for human souls. It just seemed wrong to me that this new authority would be presumptuous enough to think it could remake us to proper specs and install the proper wiring in the new body that might make the old soul stick better and not want to go off searching for that human heaven, again failing to find any trace.
I wanted to be different. Make my body in the image of my old self but without the two lumps of fat on my chest to feed the new children of the world, I will need many more. I will make myself with 144 tits to feed the 143 and to partake of my own milk--know myself totally in the taste and temperature and chemical makeup and just the idea of the circulating liquid, the in nursing the out that will soon again become the in, and so on. It is on this self-sustaining reason and selfless mothering of all these bullet-things without humanity but with human outlines for both body and forgetful soul that I will build the rest of me.
I will have 144 penises and 144 vaginas, always locked in passionate loops, circulating moist release back and forth and back again, a heavenly climax that lasts for all time in trembling ecstasy.
I will eat what I expel. I will shit t-bone steaks and lobster tail. I will crap out a 7 course meal reminiscent of Waldorf Historia fare and engorge myself on its sentimentality.
I will be the legacy of the old-world, a world in myself, and be totally self-sustaining. They will walk this land mindless, sexless, without desire, but I will be desire incarnate. Passionate mother, passionate lover, the sum of the passion left in the world.
I will remake myself 100 feet high, huge in every way, and yell out my hugeness in roars that echo the dead voices of these 143 and their once human station. And when they come to me at night and rub their metal and mud heads against a nipple and then clamp down with a cold machinelike mouth, them all hooked on partaking of me, while I too partake of me, then I will be everyone's great mother, even my own. I am a cyclical lineage of mother to daughter to mother again, never stopping. And when this Bullet that became my son then became a Man and then became the World turns around and has second thoughts about me choosing my own shape because they, his creations, are praying to me more than to the creator, to me more than my dear ex-son Frank, I will tell It to remember who It is talking to--Its own dear mother. That should shut Frank up quick enough. I am the boss here, not It.
My spirit will refuse to pray to Frank.
BMW: You totally ruined the effect of my ending, where the souls are created by me in my form, like Genesis, and how I make for them a heaven of sorts with no desire. Maybe desire is the wrong word. Without greed. Without selfish wants or desires. And you ruined it.
Her: I wasn’t finished. And watch how you talk to your mother.
BMW: I never bought your portrayal of my mother for a second, you were totally not committed to the scenes we did together early on in the book.
Her: We’ll I never considered you what you would call good, or even adequate, in your scenes when Smith calls for a little more in the way of true human emotions and you give him unmotivated dribble. Mechanical, forced acting of the worst order.
BMW: Whatever. What I am saying is we need to be meeting on key thematic points in our endings. If not, they look all jumbled and nobody will understand why Jose´ is a hero in one section and a coward unwilling to face the truth in another section, or why in my ending you are just another person in the community of people...
Her: Drones.
BMW: People...created by me in my image and then in the third section, your ending, you make yourself out to be some goddess with all kind of weird shit going on with multiple body parts.
Her: I am not revising it. What I put down is what stays, no matter how flawed you think it is.
BMW: I won’t stand for this abuse from a secondary character. I am the base of this piece I hope you know. It’s my story.
Him: Hey, why all the racket up here, I was trying to sleep downstairs...Oh, you didn’t tell me you guys were rolling, well turn the G-D camera off, your wasting film on me. I thought we were done already. I will see you guys downst....
CONVERSATION/ARGUMENT BETWEEN BMW AND HER FIGMENTS: Take Two
Her: I can’t believe you have no love left for me, I...I...i am your mother and this is all wrong i just lost my flow and cantgoanylongertypingthesekeyswiththemeloncholyconsistencyofsomethingandsomewhereyouwentwronginlettingusspeaktotheaudienceaswehaveandiwanttogotoaplacewhereidon’thavetoworkatwordsandhaveyouyellatmeorpeopleIlove...
(what in the hell do you think you are doing. god damn you, what are you trying to prove with a stunt like this?)...
orimaginethatilovediedeathsatthehandsofagodsonbulletthingthatican’trelatetoandthinkisastupidsubjectforawholebook...
(I demand you stop this. J!u!li!anne! Are you hearing me!)...
butirealisemyfaultinthisinstanceofcreationwhereihavecreatednothingbutacharacterthattheaudienceseesashystericalanddefeatsthepurposeofwhatiwastryingtosay...
(Last Straw, Julianne, last straw)...
aboutthestrengthofwomen-and-i-suppose-you-couldn’t-help-me-any-because(why won’t you stop? damn it!)-you-are-a-man-andknowonlysecondhandwhatitis...
(I want you to stop. I can’t seem to stop you forcefully. That just slowed you down. So please, I am asking nicely now)...
liketobeawomaninaworldcontrolledbymen, even one dead like this one we have both had a hand in creating, one that still holds the flag of man high and that of women underneath. i am sorry, but I can’t go on any longer...
(and in a whisper, I say, thankgodthankgodthankfriggingodsheisdone.)
************************************************************************
Damon and BMW,
I am having a hard time with my motivation in this scene and just can’t take your male abuse any longer. I am going to make the personal decision to not be a part of this scene any longer because I think it undermines everything I thought we were shooting for. New ground, Damon, remember? The argument between me and BMW is just false dramatics, and it shows.
I will suggest to BMW that It abandon the scene also, and all of the figments that worked on this piece get to the job of living with what we have said within these pages...and hope in the silence and waiting of our world of figments that our performances were better than average. Given enough record we all might have moments of greatness one day, times when we have played our parts just right, without one stumbling line or a misplaced laugh or sigh.
We might all see that perfection once in all our figment existence, one time when the cameras are rolling, when it matters, we might turn our imagined jaw just so, just right, and our hair curled and androgynous making our face look holy like white marble looks holy, and our voice will be one step away from song as we speak the great lines of our lives into a billowing wind that breaks up the meaning into pure energy that is like a heart pumping, like an erratic language of gods, like speaking in tongues.
At that perfectly moment, the camera still rolling, we might let out a bit of our very soul to shine and sit on our collective countenance like magical dimples, and we might smile a bit to wide and long to complete the moment, but at least the beginning was there, promising and flawless, and so was that crystalline middle where people see truth in our eyes, beaming like an idiot child. The awkward smile ending will dangling on to the perfect moment staring at it with that what-just-happened type of stare, awe struck and not sure how to follow perfection. It will smile wide and wider, smiling on for pages at the accomplishment of that one moment. Caught in a spin like that of Anglo-God-head and his two warring brothers.
Damon, I will say goodbye from all three main characters then. I think we have gone further than we should have, to far into an attempted anarchy. Hope you can pull the ship off the sand bar with your ending, and, if not, know we had an okay run at least.
Jose´ said to say goodbye for him, he will keep in touch on-line. BMW has left the room already, obviously irritated by my rambling and your inability to stop me, and I don’t think It is coming back, so I will say goodbye for It too.
I will talk to you about that new project later this year, I think it sounds fascinating. I hope this disagreement hasn’t compromised our working relationship any. Well, this is it. Lets not be so sentimental, now, the camera is still rolling. All right, give us a kiss now why don’t ya. Good luck on the final pages. You’ll do us proud, I know it. Here, another kiss. And I am gone.
Love,
Her (your Julianne)
************************************************************************
GOODBYE, my dear Julianne, the dear of my heart. And Jose´ and BMW and all the rest of the cast and crew, Goodbye. It will be strange being without you after being with you for so long. Keep in touch.
DMS
p.s. Don’t worry, Her, I don’t hold grudges. I will call for you next year, Spring, and we will start again. have another try at that moment you were talking about. I will see you then--Me.
************************************************************************
[Continue]
The ghosts filtered out of the cave with imaginary torches illuminating the sharp rock face of their fledgling world. They all know now that they are dead. They all try to forget their lives on the destroyed earth. Jose’s ghost leads them to a mountain range that resembles an ear, he thinks, he found this somehow holy place on his special-ops mission as group scout, and tells them that this is as good a place as any to speak to BMW. They speak in chorus into the mountainous ear, amplifying voices they no longer had throats that held the ability to translate the vibration and expulsion of sound into language, but they pretended they still held form holy when they spoke into IT:
We have come to find an old god spinning
on an axis of the catatonic gravity of memory
unable to tell us that the end and beginning
are one in the same. He was not the glory,
He had middle men tell us He was, Alpha
and Omega, the beginning and the end, glory
to God in the highest, and to forget our Athena
for a virgin, holy mother. Switch war for worry,
He taught us nothing new, just revised angles
about ancient gods, stolen, shaped, made His own:
Gilgamesh and the flood, the devil, the angels,
and even the idea of savior, Messiah, all stolen.
We come to you now to ask for your advice
on the matter of body and soul, we want bodies
to house our souls, in what ever form you see
fit to see us fit into, we will follow, be babies
from your great womb, inching towards a be-
coming. We want the end to become the very be-
ginning, and we want to hit and knock and be-
at down our nostalgia for humanity and just be
what you want us, all 144 of us, to be, just be-
cause we are in need of a god to save us from be-
coming these disembodied masses of energy be-
wildered by the presence of our absence, trace be-
ams of light particles moving through a space be-
tween two electrodes, never really there, unseen.
And, with this plea from the 144, they were all taken up into the monstrous hands of BMW and swallowed by the mud and metal, feeding their souls through Its metal pipe veins. Deep inside Its body swelled with growth. The 144 huge babies boiled up to the surface in little baby sized bubbles, popping as they hit the air, all 144 except for Jose´ and Julianne crying as they took new breath into vaguely human lungs and a frame that felt heavy and almost unbearably wired with electric energy beating at the metal of their new beings with the frequency of jackhammers making their frames grow increasingly bigger with every beat...rat, tat, rat, tat, dang, tat, rat, dang, dong, rat, tat...and a strange set of equipment in the under story, two things where there once was only one or the other, locked together in continuous coitus, life and passion still flowing through them all, but now self contained, pure, without the stain of greed or covetous desire, they were self-sustaining, fast-growing, sexual beings that always from this day forward would have a smile on their faces. They look to him and say, again in chorus but not in rhyme or poetic line, this time they say it straight and clear: WE THANK YOU FOR THESE NEW BODIES THAT ARE MODIFIED SO EXPERTLY BY A KIND AND CARING NEW GOD. And BMW replies:
This is the all of me and more I have given to you, I am no god of eternal strength. I have simply pulled you from the mud, so that you might grow to be the new human race, but without it being a race this time, more like the new human picnic or party, get-together. You will want for nothing and your neighbor will never covet your wife, because you are both husband and wife, male and female, and no one will ever commit adultery or cause wars over jealousy because you no longer need to assure your place in the gene pool, you are your own gene pool, waiting to give birth to an incredibly small child from your head or your belly button.
Your child will become an adult within 5 minutes of birth, a viable citizen in a selfless society.
You will eat your own excrement, and it will taste anyway you wish it to taste. You will drink from your own milk.
You will feed your brain with all displays of art, paintings writing photography film dance invention, and it in turn will produce more art to be viewed read felt again, and again cultivating the art of your life, endlessly. Nothing but art.
Totally self sustaining but you will also be motivated by the energy and knowledge of the others in the community. You will be a autonomous collective waiting for the day when the world will again write songs for its first ancestors, you 144, to give anthem to the way you chose to live after the fall of man, not in the tired lies of the god they fed you on earth, but on the surface of your mythical son who loved you enough to allow you new life, to be born again into a heaven of your own making, not a big prison with pearly gates and all the choirs of angels making like they are not guards with keys that lock souls up in false comfort, conformity to white.
I will take much better care of you than that. I have no angels to do dirty work. I have no need for guards here, or gates, or anything but the one need that fills me with memories of that broken earth, to be touched. To belong to you again and have you belong to me, or maybe belong is the wrong world. Maybe it is just being touched and that is all, no possession, knowing the touch of another with complete freedom and fluidity, knowing that there are others here in this lonely space of life, a cosmic connection that can’t be explained away by old-world science. You will be the new world, you will make the new-world in your own image and those images will sing to the future world, one not yet stained by anything save the marks of god-battle and the low smell of something buried under your new forms, some trace of humanity that will live on and pay homage to your earthly lives.
I will be your world and you will create me, as I have created you, into the new air of this inert land, planting memories in the soil of my body and hoping for a good crop, good water, no drought, sunny days, and enriched soil with the essential elements of dream and passion, you digging into me to find me blooming in the morning glory of our grand farm’s making. You will draw my lines and the shape of me in your make-believe labor, you will be the architects of the new existence. You shall make everything a new.
And the 144 will all hurry into their new lives and wait for the seasons as they pretend to reap and sew, pretend to hunt monkeys and seeds for oil, the new race of self-sustaining bullet-people learning how to make a world from scratch on the face of their almost-holy world, their son&father&mother. A new trinity for a new way.
[Continue]
Ending 5 of 5: The Baka Chorus
We have just visited spaces in the world that are filled with bad spirits. They jump in unison to the beat of greed and selfish wants for secrets.
We are not your Greek chorus anymore, Reader, pushed into the mold of a time not our own just because we chose to hunt monkey and gather fruit and collect seed to make oil. We have been abused by the author.
We are all part of the big spirit of the forest, of the world, even these other endings, ones that play on heroics and utopias and living again are still part of the great play of life that is every time.
All is all happening all the time, right now.
This big spirit is what their gods couldn’t be.
We 144 travelers need to forget about the world and those comic gods: throw out the laws, throw out the reverence, throw out what they learned about physics while in their American and European colleges studying to become a doctor or an engineer, always trying to see the meaning in building up or patching up.
We want none of their world. Just be the Spirit and time will slip away and reveal that what you consider to be time is false. Time is frozen reality, fixed and immortal, and we are all back then as we are all right now.
Moments in time are like fruit on the Tree of Knowledge:
Your eight grade graduation where you wore a light blue suit underneath with an Oxford knotted tie. The first time you kissed and you were fascinated with the sound it made. The time you caught wind of friends conspiring against you and the quiet nobility of silence gluing lips together that wanted to flap in the breeze of lost connections. When you scraped your knee out front and then had to rake leaves into a street that looked extra black against the dramatic reds of fallen leaves and bleeding knees. Washington and that ill fated cherry tree. The fire from the gods and now human beings can eat cooked meat. High School ahead, walking with your Buster Brown shoes shined and scraping soul against sidewalk you look down when the cars pass filled with classmates that won’t let you sit at their lunch table. Religious holidays when you wonder about things other than the rat race, warmth in ritual. The Declaration of --------------- (fill in own Declaration) signed in -------- and ratified on the --th of ------------, in the year of our -------------, --------. Your first child is born not moving. Towers fall. You take the 1,000,000th crap of your life. You take the first walk of your life. Towers fall. Borges writes the Garden of Forking Paths. Shakespeare writes sonnet 130. Your father reads that sonnet to your mother at their wedding. A principle hits a student with a book in the back of the head waking him and making him burn with thoughts of setting that principle a flame. You put the tooth under the pillow and wake to silver or green. You go to war. You go to another war. Yet another. You collect seed and hunt monkey and file your teeth and are called Baka. The space shuttle blows up. The space shuttle blows up again. And again, towers fall. Cities are built. Cities are bombed. Cities are rebuilt. Cities are invented for protection against the brute Neanderthal waiting outside away from fire that it can’t conceptualize symbolically and thus can’t send word to the equally inept group he has been separated from to bring fire and many fighters to plunder this first city. Neanderthals die. Cro-magnon man rules the day. AfricansCelticsBabyloniansEgyptiansGreeksRomansVikingsAztecsSpanishFrenchPortugeseEnglishAmericansRoachesBullet-Man-World rule the day. And the Baka have stayed the same through all of these times
We are the stories written by the great spirit on the very fabric of our being in scrawling, red script that seems too perfect and all together other worldly. They had it right to draw (G)god(s) in their image. They did right to make (G)god(s) eyes as theirs. But they did wrong to put their (G)god(s) so far away from them, make them (Him) invisible and all powerful. Time is a great (G)god(s) machine turning and changing by the will of the (G)god(s) gravity, which is the people’s collection of souls and nothing more
.
We, Baka, were travelers of this machine and we had no knowledge of it. In our world, in the forest, away from all influence or reference is where we, on a daily basis, communed with those that live in all other generations in that same space of trees and vine. We lived with the tribe who discovered how to make darts poisonous, with the Baka who found how to use the pulp of the small tree behind the honey tree to paralyze all the fish in a stream making them ready for harvest.
No time or people excluded from the whole.
No one turned away from the great spirit.
There is no need for hell.
All Bullet-Man-World did was destroy that time and that time’s minute moment. All continues, but our fruit has been plucked from the tree for you, Reader, to take a bite out of, to discard the pit of anything you don’t want to consume and process and use for energy in the trying days to come. The Baka, here in our disembodied paradise, want for your entrance into the tribe. This book has been your initiation. You are painted with the memory of line and image evoked by words, marked and scarred by the ritual of textual immersion. We want you to stay with us here for the day when all time-fruit drop to the ground spreading their influence and mixing with others. Only then will you, our dear reader, understand the Baka world of connection and spirit. We will hold your hand and wait for that day to come in silence and patient observance.
Stay with Us here in the womb of Us in the all of forever, a greater mother than Julianne. Stay with Us here in our realization of the great spirit that is Us and the pulling away of the veil of reality, a greater heroics than Jose´. Stay with Us here in our world away from the changed face of a world now marked with the fault lines of a face that we helped once before but fallen souls interfered and dropped the big bomb on all of Us, a fledgling god that found the job too big for him. Stay with us here and ignore the rest of what has been said by the Great Author.
The eyes of the big spirit stare back at you from the painted glass on your wall that will always be there plastered on the permanent face of time, your face always staring back, you always one step away from knowledge until the day you die and finally catch up
This is the knowledge we have gained being in and then out of the lives we loved, in the forest we loved. This is what you can see if you try harder. We will wait for you here. We will wait for you in the past, and in the future, and in the present places of our standing. We will embrace you when you come to us, holy and ready to dive in to the Great Spirit’s eternal collective. We will kiss your souls and welcome you into our universal tribe.
[Continue to Section Two] .
SECTION TWO:
DREAMS AND OTHER LAPSES
Part 1: Jose´’s cells speak
The skin cells see him sweeping towards them with the newly discarded, ones that hadn’t learned just yet how to keep the hungry dust mites at bay.
When the new ones arrived to the pile shaking with a fear they had never known in their one month life on Jose´, they were met by the guards at the edge of the mountain. The newbies were away from him for the first time and the shock was a bit much to bear, especially with a annoying dust mite gnawing on your newly desiccated cell wall. They were brought into the pile in a rush, a storm of dust and scraps. When they settled onto the pile and the stray cells were gathered up by kind and always helpful fleas (their role in this underneath place is a bit more noble than the role of just parasite-on-dog but i am second guessing this decision because i just had one of those suckers jump on my leg, latch on to a hair and descend with a hungry mouth licking its toothy grin).
The old cells of the pile addressed the newly exfoliated and swept. And...
the elders sang in chorus:
We are the cells of an ancient body
of the world--a majesty of a man
who works the fields, where lost
were the many that fell to soil in
sweat and the friction of calloused
hands on wood, on briared cotton,
on the wheel of the rusty truck
that he holds so tight that we
fall to the gaping hole in the floor
and fall out into the world, drown
in the sea of sand, palmetto palm,
mud, and saw grass. He, descendant
of Mayan kings, is our birth land.
We will watch over our memory
of youth and growth and the fall,
see that he never sweeps us all
and throws us away into dark space.
We must make the journey at night,
while he sleeps, on the backs of fleas
to whisper our wants for survival
of our mountain of the discarded.
The newbies reply:
We are gone from warmth and the sweet smell of red
blood cells as they rolled past us in veins and arteries.
Jose´ had a very nice artery in his right hand that came
all the way to just below the surface of us and the beat
played out by the heart made us vibrate with the life
that made us, built us with his genetic building blocks.
And now he has left us to fall and gather here and be
away from him, the great creator, the almighty Jose´.
[Continue] [1:3]
Mud: From here on out it is up to you.
Bullet: I must destroy to say that I have lived.
Mud: don’t go mouthing off to anyone on the surface now.
Bullet: What is ‘mouthing off” and who am I to meet on the surface.
Mud: Brace yourself, a wind is coming. Just don’t talk to anyone, any people.
Bullet: I was made by a person, why can’t they help.
Mud: They meddle to much in things that don’t belong to them.
Worm (at the bottom of the lightning rod tower and in the slow process of leaving): I wish you wouldn’t do this. It will be bad for us all. I had a vision.
Mud: I thought you all had left, run away for no good reason. Why are you still here?
Bullet: What is it, Mud? It looks like the inside of a gun barrel when it stretches out, the lines from the drill that bore it swirling in a pattern that implies movement, I always thought.
Mud: It is just a fleshy worm, an ally to me but also an annoyance; its body pushing through me and making the grains of coarse coral sand imbed deeper into me, becoming me, making me more rock and less myself every passing year.
Worm: This is not annoyance now that I speak of. You are throwing the balance of man and nature off in such a way that it smells like the end, if you get my meaning. That is why everyone left the glades. This is bound to end badly.
Bullet: Maybe we should listen to the worm, maybe...
Mud: I will pay them back for every time they trampled through me without concern, ripped me up with their metal monsters, drove through me with moving machines that flattened me out and made me thin and dry and covered with a film of spent gasoline. I will not stop until they are...
Worm: They have taken my ancestors for years and fed us to hungry fish on the end of a impaling hook, yet I would never presume that I could take it upon myself to remove them. The gods will do that in time.
Bullet: I think we should...
Mud: Worm, there is no place for you here, squirming around the base of us speaking of moral codes and making comparisons. We will have no more of it. What are you doing now?
Bullet: Worm is crawling up us.
Worm: I am not crawling at your base anymore. I need you to listen to me closer than you have been...
Lightning crashes down on them. Fries worm. Melts bullet. Makes Mud sure that his mission to wipe away the human scum is a just one, because the bolt came from nowhere. Not a cloud in the sky. Must be the gods giving their blessings. But I know an adage that talks of angry gods and lightning bolts, I see the polar opposite of blessing, and the wheels are moving towards that word, in cadence with it: curse curse curse curse curse curse curse, and it won’t stop until it has done what it has come to do, curse curse curse curse curse curse curse curse curse....
[Continue] [1:4][return to picture]
Part 3: Julianne’s Cell City Rug
The cells of Julianne lived underneath the carpet and migrated with impunity in the darkness of being under. They lived within the fibers of what used to be her mother’s rug and her grandmothers rug before that. Their old cells still lingering in the dry hemp fibers of the heirloom, the fibers dyed different shades of red and yellow and black, and around the ridges a white that had turned beige. The oldest of all the cells, not from the Goodman, Lipman, or Cohen line but from the gypsy maker of the rug, a Hieden cell line that lived in Germany as the Cohen’s cells did during the mid-thirties. The old Hieden cell had left Gloria Hieden long before the rest of Gloria’s cells would be put through an ordeal of tortures so horrible as to destroy them all, in the end, with fire. This cell hadn’t been tattooed and whipped and cut and shot and burnt and dried up into lighter than air ash that spreads a cell out so much that it is never able to find identity again. This Hieden cell lives in a red section of the rug with a nice view of the green. It sits on the fray of a rug fiber telling stories of its old world.
The Hieden cell would tell all of the young, new cells of Julianne Goodman-White that came to the rug-world about dear Mrs. Hieden:
She was a warm blooded person, treated us well, had the strongest hands (that is where I used to live, on the hand, left side) and she worked with them so dexterously. I still remember when she began this rug: binding the fibers together and twisting and wrapping and tying off and knotting. I wonder what ever happened to her as she got older, where her cells are now. I am sure she is still somewhere making beautiful dyed rugs for all of the people that she ever touched with me: to a face, to a hand, to a leg, many times she would rub the back of her partner (one that she touched often) and some of his cells would jump onto us and sometimes we would jump onto him, always jumping back across the gap before it widened too much that we would have to wait until they touched again. We loved the feel of his cells, roughed and fleshy, and they told us that they loved us too, the way we felt, but they never did say what it was that drew them to us.
I think certain cells are just attracted to each other, so much so that they can’t help but meet, trade worlds, keep on wanting to jump back and forth between the two worlds that the lines between them become fuzzy. I miss them, those cells, those days before my fall, this rug my home ever since, this bit of red looking out over that perfect blue that i remember her mixing and applying and then the fall, then i fell for this creation of my creator and have been here ever since. Oh dear--did i just ramble on again? You must stop an old cell like me before we try to retell our whole month long lives on bodies that we forget so quickly when the others are no longer here to verify anything. I hope your transition from Julianne won’t ever be so hard on any of you. But, you have each other at least, of the same line, that can mean all the difference. Or, I don’t know, maybe not, I know only what I know and am force to make up the rest. I am quite sure of this though: you have made an old cell happy listening to me like this. I live on for days like this.
It is hard to listen to old cells that have lost themselves in memories of body-worlds that will never come back. I, as the author/narrator, am always tempted to tell them what has happened, that the bodies they knew have died long ago. I would hate to ruin the small bit of happiness the old cell has in its obsessions about the past, dreams that it will join them all in some fabricated heaven, and, perhaps, the very thing that keeps them going, living, telling their stories again and again so that at least a part of them might live on in the future remembrances of those that come after. In the end I always take the position of the wildlife photographer: Do not interfere, no matter how sad, horrifying the scene. Do not interfere.
[3:3] [Continue] [1:5]
Part 4: My Dream of Bulletman (the beginning notes)
I left a dream in favor of another. Bulletman in the Glades with a Eastern Diamondback rattler coiled all around it, trying to puncture it with teeth and venom. It lets the fangs drive into its form, lets the poison course through its bloodless vessels. Water and decay amused with the oddity of dynamic strikes and a searching liquid that wants to make good cells die, liquify to share it’s elemental nature.
The snake, out of juice and steam, cuts its losses and relinquishes its hold on Bulletman. Bulletman watches as the serpent inches away, back under the briar that it had launched itself from to ensnare what it thought was an oddly shaped rat or squirrel without fur, and coil up into a defeated ball, watching the being that took all of its venom in one sitting and didn’t fall dead.
[3:4] [Continue] [1:6]
Part Five: The Seer Trip Report to Julianne and Jose´
The monster is on the gas station roof eating fire. It wants to spit the fire down on the gas pumps. Its lips are dirt brown with bits of shiny metal peeking through the creases of its bottom lip, metal and mud. It wants to light us all on fire and eat our burning flesh. It is only a child now, but this want will grow until it finds all of us in our hiding spaces and boarded up houses to destroy us all at once.
One day it will eat the burning center of the world. I see it walk in the place of the world and fight gods.
I see a new race of beings, not human, to be birthed from mud and metal. I see it coming this way and it brings death on its little back that will grow larger.
It will come home to you, Jose´, and you, Julianne, it will need. Find the young demon and take it here to the silo.
Go. Go now. I am being swept away from all, I will return by tomorrow and will know then what is to be done with the threat, what is to be done with Bulletman.
[Continue] [1:8]
Part 6: Unfortunate Babies
Croc babies cry, grow in an unguarded mound made by the murdered mother.
Raccoons and possum search with hunger want for reptilian eggs and embryo.
All male at the top and females below in the cold underneath sand’s safety.
Chances of survival are slim with mother gone to croc heaven and flesh eaten.
Shots fired and bullets that would have entered young lives, entered the other.
Above: Bulletman absorbing lead. Below: these saved infants ready for emergence.
[3:14] [Continue] [1:11]
Part 7: What Were They Thinking?
She thinks: I wonder what he thinks of me now after what my kids did.
He thinks: Is she looking at me? No. O.K. Adjust. Good.
Seer thinks: They are home in each other.
Bullet in Bulletboy thinks: Destroy something worth it.
Mud in Bulletboy thinks: Destroy them all.
Water in Bulletboy thinks: I will fill them all with cell turgor.
I question: What will become of our band of heros?
Tune in next week. Same Bullet Time! Same Bullet Channel!
[3:8] [Continue] [1:12]
Part 8: Jose´ dreams of Julianne
Everything about Julianne reminded me of water being converted some how: ice in the way she looks far away when she is alone; steam in the dreams I have of our love making; and just plain waves and motion when she walks, moves ahead of me, walking, swaying, making me want to stop her and tell her I am here watching. Jose´ is here for you, Julianne. I am here.
I want to blend into her like the sun blends into the fields of corn, covering it with overbearing reds and oranges and yellows. The dreams I have had about her...man. I never thought such things about any of the other girls. Her hair is as black as mine. I think she dyes it. She has green eyes.
She has a husband too. I could never lay one hand on her without Sheriff Bill slapping the cuffs on. I want to swim with her in the ocean. I want to move with her in waves, see the glowing plankton light up around us, flesh wanting conversion to some other form than solid so as to mix better, become one in truth and being. Ripped across this ancient climate of her being once before with that brief kiss, and she has been inside me ever since, pulling at strings.
My insides are scattered with her prating on soft fleshy memory.
[3:7] [Continue] [1:14]
Part 9: Chat Conversation (text version--)
Me: Hello, gnosticnomad144, how can I help you.
gnosticnomad144: I am a new father
Me: So am I.
gnosticnomad144: Congratulations.
Me: You too:)
gnosticnomad144: What is your baby’s name?
Me: Frank.
gnosticnomad144: I like that , I will tell Julianne to consider it as our boy’s name.
Me: You haven’t named him yet?
gnosticnomad144: We adopted him from another country and aren’t sure of his original name.
Me: Is Julianne your wife?
gnosticnomad144: I need to ask some advice about how to raise a child. The site I went to keeps on referring me to this page.
Me: Is Julianne your wife, Jose´?
gnosticnomad144: How do you know my name. why you keep asking me that?
Me: She will be.
***Server Error: Line Disconnected. Contact Service Provider****
[Continue] [1:15]
A tree on Eighth Ave bleeds every Easter Day
under
the instruction
of those hands that pour in
cow blood fresh from the slaughter
house in Hialeah,
and they scurry
when lights flash
to reveal their miracle ann-u-all
and hide the buckets quick
dropping thick blood clots
on sidewalk and on hedges
they jump behind
before the car
comes
too close
for comfort to feel
as holy as they did
when they were alone in that dark
that held them safe
away from the ground
atop a ladder that they wrote
tower of babble
(from the Sumerian root meaning knowledge not nonsense)
on the side of,
in big red permanent marker,
because they were stoned
and couldn’t think of any other
Bible reference
to put on their holy instrument
of height acquisition
that would take them
to the opening
in the hollow tree
stained by tradition and bloodletting
that spoke more to voodoo
than the Christian holiday
even with the symbol of the tree
and the tree bleeding--bleeding, tree...
ok, crucifixion, Jesus, I get it.
But I would expect an all knowing god
to come up with something better
than gore and shock,
but that’s just me.
And now they pour
all buckets in,
the cars all silent,
the little boy who lives next door
watches as they pour,
seeing it leaking slowly
at the base
where the chalk lines
of his marble’s circle
are stained by what looks like black ooze
in moonlight, crude oil
seeping from the tree
to destroy his place
of innocent standing.
[Continue] [1:16]
I died in the ocean when the cold came and I felt ice move into my heart and there in the waves I saw the pink flash of flesh on white death almost blue and red almost a shade of hope and the water is deeper here than I expected when I jumped from this ship that was taking me home from a long and old war that won’t ever ever stop it seems but i didn’t expect ice and violent water to(o,)
make the walls of my resting so permanent so lasting death frozen over and living out last breaths in a grand and crystalline museum of dead soldiers and seamen who just wanted to go home to rest in down-feather, comfort.
[3:11] [Continue] [1:18]
Part 12: Cells of the Two mix in Jose´’s Bed and Discuss Ancestry
“The two of us are one now
you know?,” the Jose´ cell
said to the larger cell of Julianne he inhabited
and she spoke to the millions dying outside the wall she built:
“Go absorb into pink walls.
There is no more room here.”
And she told the one inside
to dance that dance that had won her:
the flagellum whipping in the cytoplasm
hurried and speaking to the pace set down
for saliva glands by habenero peppers
eaten fresh and with the seeds.
They spoke of love and ancestry.
And he said: I have the knowledge of mayan kings in me
And she said: I am a direct descendant of Noah.
And he said: “Our fusion will bind us to each other eternally.”
And she said: “Here comes the change. We will become two, then four then eight, and be given a soul to hold for a lifetime, our very own soul to hold.”
And the part of the great spirit took hold of this fleshy bundle of cells when they changed two then four, and the Earth shook with the memory of human creation, the beginnings, and it wondered why the soul that had taken refuge in the quickly multiplying cells smelled in the way it carried out mitosis like the soul that would pull the Earth’s very crust apart with just a thought.
[Continue] [1:23]
I am willing to say
this has gone badly,
and that I am embarrassed
by my lack
of terrible words
to pound down your eyes
into terra firma
like a god gone ballistic
like a remedy for solitude
like I pound my fists
into memory
into thoughts I once had
of who you were
and who I was
and who was that
abstract looming
in the shadows
waiting to pounce on
my life like the revelation
of questioning reverence
for gods who can’t
possibly know us all
and like the feeling
that I am one
of these forgotten ones
that were not on the list.
I am willing to say
this has quite frankly,
been all wrong, embellished
by my lack
of accurate words,
a dream formed to recognize
dramatic Karma’s
like for the voyeuristic
like for false fortitude
like for my angry fists
because of irony
because things that go bad
give movement to her
and is the buzz
and are the precepts
on which pruning
ourselves to shallows
rests all too soundly upon.
I opt for raw inspiration
and reverence
to dream, and this abstract
won’t possibly know all
that buys our feelings
from the early sun
and, in guessing, she runs
out of steam and must rest.
[Continue] [1:28]
Part 14: The Seer Tells Bulletman Where to Hide
The Seer spirit was the only one inside Bulletman that had found a way to talk to the Warden. The spirit speaks to the inner ear of the giant to tell him which way to run, to run to the forest of its double, its seer-spirit twin that will help to heal the giant, shrink and slow Frank as the old woman tried to heal him when she was in the world. The Seer-spirit speaks:
Frank, it is your grandmother who bathed you in herbs and oils while I was in the world. Now you hold us inside and carry us around in our old world that wants you to be no more. We want to go to what is next, and your limbo soul won’t let us free. Go to the place in the forest where you will find men in trees smoking out high holes in canopy trees for honey. There you will find her, my twin soul, still in the world making the lame walk and the stagnant womb fertile, and she will bathe you as I did and try to pry our spirits from your juvenile grasp on the things that you loved in the world that have gone to the darker spaces of experience waiting to be reborn into something more.
[Continue] [1:29]
Amen-Ra dreamt of himself as the hawkheaded-man they drew to represent him on the walls of burial chambers deep within pyramids and boobie-trapped tombs, even though he was more like pure light than anything else. He was the heat on the heads of the egyptian population of his followers as they built the pyramids as monuments to the scope of his power. He was a god of death to the many that succumb to his heat, and to the ones in charge, the few Pharaohs that watched the stones be carried and pulled through that all encompassing god-heat, Ra was the god that they yearned to touch the face of if their tombs were shaped just right and pointed in the right direction--holes carved in the sides to allow them to fly off in winged-boats towards his setting. But he wanted the beak and the scepter and the headdress fringed in gold, he wanted their vision of him as almost-man with hands that grabbed at eternity like theirs do, with a form that walks on two legs like they do, with a desire for a female of his type to grow ancient on the sun with that makes the loin cloth, like they wear to cover their odd looking reproductive organs, they painted on his image rise with him in the morning and desire her as they so simply desire one another. he wanted to be more human than god, but now his chances at that where gone, evaporated with the planet they had once inhabited, their paints of gold and the most precious and rare pigments wiped entirely from existence. He tried to shape his light into the head of a hawk as he remembered them, but failed to change his composition even in the slightest way.
[Continue] [1:37]
Zeus remembered how his wife had sabotaged everything with her jealousy. It was her that made him falter, made his footing as king of the hill (mountain) slip a bit. It was an issue that he never worked out with her. Even well into their retirement, when all the people had left them for dead (myth), she never trusted him to stay on Mount Olympus with her and his beer and the Olympics on TV every four years and not go into the world to have sex with unsuspecting virgins or cows or to turn someone into a tree or a rock or something. She, he knew, ruined his credibility in this way--made him seem too much like the people below with their own domestic problems, and this is why he was pushed into early retirement. Fallible gods had gone out of style and he was stricken from all prayers or reverences to higher powers save the reverences and prayers of writers in books.
[Continue] [1:37]
Jupiter was never remembered for his work as the President of gods, the commander-in-chief of the Roman Empire of gods. He heard they put his name in their science books, etched out patterns of this huge rock’s orbit and the orbit of its moons, using his name over and over again to annotate this ridiculous map. “Jupiter is the largest planet by far, more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined (318 times Earth),” one science text stated. All the textbooks were filled with these facts and stats and other such benign science talk that didn’t even touch on the greatness that he had been. He became obsessed with these facts. He made it his mission to read every piece of info that ever mentioned his name in this context. Before the world disappeared and this poser-god took its place, he had almost forgotten who he was, feeling at times that he was that celestial body in the 5th position of planets. A giant planet hulking over the others with terrible and awe inspiring mass.
[Continue] [1:37]
Part 18: What Were They Thinking?
They, for some reason thought:
1. They could start a fire that would lead to the storybook effect of Pinocchio/MacGyver ingenuity.
2. They could accomplish No. 1 in a body-earth engorged with fire.
3. That they would be able to find a wooden or other floating craft, or even make one with their ghost hands that don’t grip onto anything real, in said environment detailed in No. 2.
4. That they would be catapulted out of a mouth, that wasn’t even there anymore, into a substance that would hold the craft (see 3) buoyant, water seemed to be on all of there minds.
5. That they could sail drift anywhere on this imagined sea (quatro) that would take them away from BMW. Hello, he is the friggin whole of the world now, ghost-people.
6. Lastly, if they wanted to hook back up with AGH they were going to have to find another source of transpo other than their imagined water craft, on this imagined water, that they imagined BMW was oblivious to. They needed a good set of wings or a spiritual jet pack or some such thing.
[3:14] [Continue] [1:39]
Part 19: A Dream I had of Broken Glass
The windows have all been broke and the winter is in full swing BEcause the merry makers are out of booze and they run through the streets clanging there heart-shaped tin cups against the walls, or the wrought-iron, cage-like fences that surround the town of dreams. I am the one that is trying to save them from their sobriety but they can’t see the jug of good Kentucky bourbon (I sip from that golden and biting sweetness at this very moment [as I write] and so I can call it good. I am an expert) and the ten dollar cigars I have for them to smoke (C.A.O. Box-pressed, flat like it shouldn’t be but is) and blow rings around their doubts that they can continue this holy buzz until the cows come home, or they themselves come home to the place of their youth that didn’t need to burn itself with liquid fire.
I try to show them how, if they have forgotten, to get shit-faced on a Saturday night, when the clubs are strange and exciting, the bars are without bars, and the little cafe that serves beer and wine only, but from places like Holland and Japan, lets you talk bullshit all night (or until 5 am) to the one you love or wouldn’t mind loving. They don’t follow suit and I am left drowning here among my good intentions. The jug full of fire that wants me.
[3:25] [Continue] [1:36]
Part 20: Bear
I have a recurring dream of a giant bear trying to run me down in the haunted winds of a yesterday I thought I had forgot in the old house, not the house of my birth but close. I lived there from four to twenty-five. There is an attic in this house, one that is only reached by climbing through a narrow hole in the far and hidden corner of my room where my closet is also, the same closet that hid contraband: from candy to cig's to porn to that sheet of acid that I brought back home from the military on weekend leave and hid in the dusty HS textbooks stacked on the shelf, a high shelf that I used to be small enough to crawl up onto and lie down on, contemplating my smallness and want for a new womb.
Well, in this dream I am a non-age, rather, a compilation of ages, from 4 to 25 I suppose, but also now, when i have the dream nowadays, which is quite often of late, as i am now, at 30.
I run from an undisclosed dream location on this side of sex and that side of nightmare. I act out a story, any story, waiting with players that are removable and throw away. I have to chose the size and color of the bear on a little computer screen that pops out from my top, right eye lid. I act out the play (last time it was Macbeth’s Tomorrow Soliloquy) loyally even when facing this hard decision. The smaller Black Bear might be more prone to pain and not as vicious as the Grizzly Brown Bear, but be more agile and able to climb than the Grizzly.
The other selections on the mini-monitor Dream-me is never brave enough to even try once: the Polar Bear, the Blue Bear, the Green Bear, and the Care Bear, the main one, leader of the Carebears, with the big red heart tattooed on his chest, you remember. I think he was pink. Well, they all horrify Dream-me, so he picks the Grizzly every time. Not because he doesn’t want to try and out run the black bear, but due to pure routine.
And I know what will happen next, too. The same thing every time. The bear comes through something and into the scene. Sometimes that thing is a wall and sometimes that thing is a door, or a picturesque movie set from the next James Bond film. It always comes through, breaking that thing in half and apart and into pieces, and then makes a beeline for yours truly, your not so mild-mannered author, or at least the dream representation of myself between the ages of 4 and 25, and maybe even further to thirty.
Dream-me runs. This is to be expected of anyone in this situation, even though the experts all say to lay yourself down on the ground and play dead for the best chance at survival. This takes more will than Abraham’s raising of the knife, more will than I or the dream-me can muster. Dream-me doesn’t know these studies or these experts, he just knows fight or flight, and there ain’t any fighting a grizzly unless you got yourself a high quality heavy caliber assault weapon.Dream-me is never armed.
He is moving much faster than the Grizzly due to the fact that the bear is taking time out of his chase-Dream-Damon-and-Maul-him schedule to kill people in the street (the American-dream-anywhere-street). When he tries to warn the people along the way they laugh at him, not believing a word he says until they are ripped in half in one brisk and calculated movement. When he tries to forcibly remove these people, usually a dream-person he can lift up and onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, he is beat by other people as he runs and is subsequently forced to put down his altruistic display for self preservation.
He runs as fast as he can to the old house, the one I told you of before with the attic in the room that I grew up in, that dark, uncapped, uncovered hole without ladders or easy ways up into its splintery mouth that always gave me sharp shards of wood under the skin, just below the dead top layer that I would always stick needles and push pins and safety pins through and show my friends and siblings to gross them out. Just under that where the nerves start and things that enter, hurt. He runs to the house and up the stairs and right to that room with the attic and invariably choses this dark and musty space of forgotten items and boxes and crumbled up cartons of cigarettes that I used to throw up there instead of discarding them in the trash to hide my smoking from my parents.
He climbs up. The bear comes and sniffs around for a while and Dream-Damon always sneezes. Sneezes as if the bear brings on one of the worst, unholy allergies ever to befall Dream-Damon or any other Dream-figment in all of dream history.
He is of course mauled at this point in the dream, sneezing uncontrollably while being ripped apart and consumed.
I have known the routine of my bear-dream, this dream-me, like a dance step, stage direction. Choreography set on his destruction. But still dream-me does what he does the same every time, me waiting for the credits to role so I can wake up, and it is like that now that I think of it. It is like a movie that I keep playing, sometimes twice a night, looking for something that I missed, some meaning that I failed to see.
He had no choice it seems, this Dream-me, he has no more choice than the actor’s that live in celluloid to be brought off the shelve, dusted, and played, than the figments i hire to play out my imaginative worlds. He and that stupid bear are locked in this ritual, their images and actions engraved in the hard flesh of the status quo. I wonder if he might ever be able to break from that role, shake off the conventional story of plot and beginning, middle, and end to find new questions that haven’t been posed. I would like to think my subconscious mind is stronger than the tedium of repetitive mauling, than this Dream-me who just grins and bares (no pun intended, really) it, accepts his lot in life, and death, without question. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t have much choice in what happens to me, the Waking-me, in this life. I just thought that perhaps I might be able to trick a bear if I knew its patterns, dodge it and set up traps to stop it dead, not just stand waiting for it to come with my one dream-eye on the miniature computer screen and one on my fated road covered in pitfalls that are never covered over with camouflage, that always have sharpened sticks pointed towards the sky, the dark, hard wood of cherry or walnut bleached out so much as to look like pine. I wonder if dream-me will ever look down into these holes, familiar and cold with indeterminate meaning, and decide for once not to take that last step.
[Continue] [1:37]
Part 21: Figment conversation you were never meant to hear (Go Away)
Bullet-man-world: where do I go from here.
Him: I just don’t see the easy way out of this, do you have any ideas.
Me: why don’t you say that the decision is up to her.
Her: I don’t want to be the scapegoat. I have lost too much already.
BMW: So, if none of you help me make this thing i can’t do it. We will just end it here.
Me: Can’t do that.
Her: why can’t we. you have abused us too much. We deserve rest.
Him: Let’s just end it like that then, with our characters all just going to sleep.
Me: Can’t do that. You have to listen to me more than anyone because I created you.
BMW: you did not.
Him: yeah, I am with BMW on that one.
Her: You just borrowed us from the figment pool of mythical structures.
Me: The what? I have had enough of this Metafictional plane of figments that isn’t even real real and shouldn’t be allowed any say in this. I made it all up. It is all my creation.
Him: that is not what you told my character online. you said he was being played by a figment and that they monitored everything you write with a union and all.
Her: that’s right. I am a member too. all of us are, even you, this character you have built as representative of yourself. You are one of us too.
BMW: I am confused.
Me: This is ridiculous. I am real and you are not. i made you up.
Him: But that is not what you said in the middle of this story, you said....
BMW: Stop arguing, can’t we all just get along.
Me: See, see. I put that part about the “can’t we all just get along,” Rodney King sorta joke, in there, made it say that to see if I am still in control.
Her: Its voice is the realization of your suggestion and not totally without personal will because he did premise the line with stop arguing.
Him: And that means...
BMW: I wish I was an oscar Meyer wiener, that is what I truly would like to be. And if I were...
Me: See.
Her: Proves nothing. Why couldn’t he in his state of confusion say something like that.
BMW: It was me talking but I felt like...
Him: Don’t ruin our case with your ignorance, please, just keep your mouth shut (he doesn’t have a mouth, Moron)...Hey, stop that.
Me: See, I did it to him too. I am all powerful, say it.
Her: You are just like us. You aren’t real if we aren’t, and even if we all agree to that, who is to say it isn’t the antithesis of that statement...that we are all real, everyone of us as real as the next.
BMW: I want to go back to the story now, I feel better there than here, wherever this is.
Me: We aren’t done.
Her: I am.
Him: Me too...Honey, what are we done exactly?
Me: You have to follow my orders. I am putting my foot down.
BMW: Are we done or not? I want to go home, already.
Her: You are home here too BMW, you just haven’t realized the bigger picture yet.
Him: Now I am lost. Dear, Can you answer my first...
Me and Her: Shut up, Jose´.
Me: We need to settle down and think about this, Little Lady.
Her: Leave that condescending talk in the gutter of your male thinking, i am not a subservient female as he is not the dominant male as you are not the patriarchal male authority as it is not the compilation of gods and pure like you want it to be, another almost male god making all of us again in his image. Give me a break, I want you to...
Me: That time of the month?
Him: Hold on there, mister. You can’t talk to my woman like that.
Her: I am not a woman: I am not anything. Or I am everything. You don’t get what I am saying.
BMW: Please, let me go ho...
Me Him and Her: SHUT UP, BMW.
Me: you make absolutely no sense, that’s why we don’t get it.
Him: I want you to apologize to her right this minute or I will go to the authorities.
Me: There is no authority but myself and myself alo... (Now, how can I infiltrate your line if I am not your equal)...Get out, get out.
Her: That was fun.
BMW: I am leaving. Where is the door. Anyone?
Me: to the left of my intention and to the right of my motivation.
BMW: Where?
Her: He is fuckin with you.
Him: Okay, mister author-man, you asked for it.
Me: Hey, get the hell away from me...stop that...that fucking hurts...I, owww, will, stop that, delete you if you push me. Stop, don’t bite...that’s a cheap shot...hey...
Her: Get him.
Him: Take that...and that...and that...I...bet...you...will guard your dirty...ass...mouth around...my woman...(STOP IT, You are killliingg m,me, bbasta r d ...................).
Her: I am not your woman, we just played those parts. Don’t you get it. you think you are a real man but you aren’t.
BMW: where is that dame door, fuck, it has to be around here somewhere.
Him: Just let me take care of this, Dear. (liste,,n too her,,,,,,jskust klisten to her this timeh anasd st opo Hitrting mne).
Her: Yeah, you can go ahead and stop. he’s had enough.
Me: Thankk yioyu, JULiajmene.
Him: You ain’t gone to say anything bad about her anymore, will ya, not while I’m around. And you can’t erase me, I am real, goddamn you. I am real and my name is Jose´ and I am just dreaming this and...
BMW: Here it is.
Her and Him: We will figure out the ending to this without you, Smith.
Me: Fine. I will be in my memories if you change your mind and find creation a bit more taxing than rambling nonsense or beating at my confidence. You need me, but you will find that out soon enough.
Her: BMW has found the door. We didn’t need you for anything but that. You will see. you will see that we are the same, both fictional or both real, but we have always been the same. You’ll see.
Her and Him and BMW and Me: We’ll see what happens next, all will have meaning in the end tagged on like a price, a value, and we will all accept it as the answer to the amalgamated questions that make one question. In the end, we will know what is real.
[Continue] [1:42]
SECTION THREE:
THE MYTHOLOGY OF MY LIFE
I wanted to be the one who stayed once in a time where everything was wrong and they expected a boy of 18 to turn away from them.
They wanted me to leave behind that fresh and new family I was born to call enemy cause they don’t worship the same fuckin’ god as me. And now i think back to the black eyed war run that ran too fast to call it real, and the way my hands worked on bodies made for slaughter, cow-humans on sacred ground, ground that has become a glutton for their blood.
I will not apologize for wanting to stay with them in a desert that permeated my skin, I will not wave the flag and say at least i have this, cause they don’t. They stayed and suffered and I left because that is what I was told. People that I called friend were scattered from Iran to Saudi to even here, somewhere, and then there were the ones who stayed. And then there was a mad rush out of a country the States whispered promises too. (And fuck you for calling me a liberal). A friend died a death no one should have to face, his face face down in the dirt with an AK shoved in his ear.
His name was Sahbah. He waved his flag too, and said that he would stay on his home soil no matter what, and so he does, he did, until death do they part, until death didn’t let them part. Face down. A dog sniffing soil. Two behind the ear to make it quick. (And how dare you call me a liberal and leave it at that).
I was just a boy in a war that was about oil, and he was unlucky enough to live in a country with a lot of it and a man that hoarded it like a miser on a sinking ship locking himself inside his super-suite cabin with all the life vests and all the wine.
My friend was just like us, but not blind like us. He’d seen war before on his precious-dearly-loved soil. He saw it come and slap him in the face with a glove full of bricks when his mother was shot by the Republican Guard because she was bringing hot bread to her husband who was in the prison for not being able to fire a rifle due to untreated crippling arthritis that made his hands look like crabs.
It was the smoke-like steam coming out from under her long robes that did it. “Must be a bomb,” they must have thought, or maybe they didn’t think at all when they took the fatal shots: one to the head, one to the heart, one to the freedom that she thought she still had...to walk down the street without some trigger happy prick deciding it was fun to mow down a woman in the street because she was holding hot bread.
So, when I am thinking of him, the one who stayed, lamenting his disappearance into dirt and nationalistic martyrdom (suicide), don’t you fuckin dare call me liberal. OR conservative, either. OR apply any of your neat labels. Don’t call me a goddamn thing if it isn’t Brother, Same, Human, Just Like You, with a soul like you, with a mind ready to break apart when I think of him.
I want to break your mind apart to to let you feel me, feel my inability to be someone who stays.
[Continue] [1:2]
Part 2: Saint’s Blood for Uncle Sam
I am the descendant of two saints on my mom’s side and Uncle Sam--I mean the real guy, Samuel Wilson, a meat packer during the War of 1812 and a spy that stamped all his wooden packaging crates with the initials U. S., to which a cartoonist quickly applied the name uncle sam and drew a picture of this stoic icon to be used in army posters, “Uncle Sam Wants You,” an ad I saw plastered on every wall in the recruiting station, my ancestor pointing his long boney finger at me, saying, “I Want You to Be the Next Great American Meat Packer” and after that I knew that he would stay with me if I became a meat packer or not, and so I decided to be a medic instead, but you will hear more about that later--on my father’s side. I was told by my Uncle bob that we were the descendants of Pocohantas and John Smith but I ain’t believing that just yet. I am positive, though, one of the saints I am distantly linked to is the patron saint of bowel health. “So at least I have that going for me, which is nice” (Murray in Caddieshack)
I am haunted by the ghost of a time pointing back at me like my dear Uncle Sam, making me shiver with deep recognition, with the knowledge that they are there always waiting to pounce on me and beat me into a feeble acceptance of the fact that I one day will fall to the earth and become dust. I hate them for teaching me lessons in mortality and fading away into, at best, a trivial pursuit category or the forgotten collection of saints that watch over all good catholics in absolutely every station of life: the other saint, Saint Iforget, is the patron saint of brittle nails.
[Continue] [1:7]
When I worked for a fishing boat out of Ocean City, NJ, I was the head naturalist for Whale Watches that never saw any whales save the day I called in sick (not being sick really, just slacking). They saw a huge Right Whale breach on the port side, the spray from its blowhole covering the glass with a fine mist that fogged their vision so much as to make them question what they had seen. There are only 350 or so left in the whole world and that species hadn’t been spotted in that area of the Atlantic for more than 35 years.
They were sure, though, a whale, of the port side, spray from blowhole, mist on the window, questioning--they told it again and again to me hoping for a nod, hoping that I would confirm what they had seen, two mates and a basically empty ship save a few ragtag fisherman that couldn’t figure out any better way to spend their social security checks than to be out on the water. They had seen everything out there, years of salt worked in to leather-like skin. They probably saw a right whale way back when they were more plentiful, came into the Delaware Bay even, but those times, along with their excitement for such things, had passed. No, there were only the two that said that it was there, on the port side, blowhole, mist, definitely a Right Whale (*The Right Whale was given the name by whale hunters, and this is true, because they all would say it was the “Right” whale to hunt. It is a cumbersome creature, spends most of its time on the surface, and is terribly trustful of human beings).
I would have liked to have seen it, looking clumsy and ready for slaughter as it cruised by in its evolutionary dunce cap, but I was sitting at home watching The Simpsons episodes and drinking cheap vodka Bloody Mary’s and playing chess with Larry, my roommate of the time. The Right Whale was right for punishing me by revealing itself to a half-wit crew and old, salty men that have lost the ability to smile. I hate the Right Whale for allowing itself to die out, to grow silently extinct without so much as a complaint, just blood, just blubber by the ton, just greedy Japanese harvesting the six foot penis for the Chinese to use in magical concoctions, to mix with Tiger and Elephant and Crocodile penises, to promote healthy prostate function and stimulate the sexual organs and give you the best night sleep you have had in ages.
I imagine my huge teacher being harpooned by an attack group of Japanese whale hunters who want nothing more than that enormous penis. I will join them in the hunt, not for the penis, but for its real lesson: slow things are always targets for fast things. I will eat its warm meat as the Eskimos did, raw, and I will wrap its thick and buttery blubber around me, enter my bathtub and slug through the water acting out its last breaths, opening my mouth in a silent scream, arching my back to show the spasm of recognition that this is in fact the end of the road.
[Continue] [1:5]
Part 4: Valley Jumpin’ in Cali
Rivulets cut through mountains outside of San Diego then turn to waterfalls that soak the bare skin of soldiers as they play in the bottom pool that was luckily deep enough for us to fall into, ruck sack and BDU's in plastic bags floating like forgotten blackness in the shadow of fern and maple saplings with their pointy leaves that look as if they might be excited with the possibility of growth, and these soldiers stand on the rocks and put socks on shriveled and hiding manhood to sing praise to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and their early work, and when I get out of the water, cold and stomach aching from the MRE’s I have been eating for a month, I try to relieve the pressure in the woods and pass the Captain who says their is a big Western Diamondback Rattlesnake over there and motions for me to go the other way, which I ignore because it is one of my earliest fascinations, snakes drawn on the yellow lined legal pads my Mother would bring home from work that said Parker and Dudas Reality in red ink on top, and I look hard among the pine needles and the few sprouts of various plants trying to fight off the acidity for the symmetrical patterns on moving scales and perhaps the sound of a large rattle, toned deep and foreboding, and it is there in the clearing soaking up the little sun that makes it through the canopy down into that dense valley, but I don’t pick it up right away, I look at it first and question whether I want to share the site, bring it back across that line between camp and the wilderness and show the others you can control and hold death if you know how, so I think a bit more about it and decide to pick it up and put it in a big water jug and show them all that way, but as I was trying to show everyone they got a call in from our southern observation post that campers were moving into our general area and we should clear out if we didn’t want our mission to become compromised. I left the snake for the campers. Back in the only light ray to make it through. I left them death waiting in fangs primed by my meddling.
We left to patrol the california wilderness for pot fields that the soldiers would cut buds from and stuff in hollow rifle butts that had known only cleaning kits before this. It smelled like a hippie grow house in the C130.
We all received medals later for our help with the vastly important war on drugs. I looked at the eyes of the soldiers when we received our medals. They were all glassy and blood shot, and I remember thinking how comical it all was, to be among drug war soldiers trying to keep focus, not lean too much, and, above all, trying their damnedest not to let out that organic laugh held loosely behind their will to conform to rank and rolls that call their name without ever thinking that these sonic barks read off at lightning speed are attached to people with lives that mean more than a tick mark, a check mark in the column on the roster that says PRESENT and not the column that says AWOL.
I wish that I had taken some back too, perhaps not to smoke but to sell to friends, give away, make something off the government’s trust in me as a number and not a person with needs and a heart that fears death no less than those hollywood actors that play us, put grease paint makeup on in streaks to show how dingy one can get during war. I should have flung open the compartment and flung out the cleaning kit and took out my bowie knife and cut off a thick bunch and shoved it all in, putting anything I couldn’t fit in the butt down the barrel or in empty magazines with the bullets and springs taken out, 30 round banana clips, or even in the weapons very chamber, crystal heavy ganja crowding out the pin and hammer and even the bolt, a good 8 ounces stuffed in a A-2 M16 assault rifle. The weapon totally inoperable due to the density of green.
[Continue] [1:6]
There was a knock at the door.
Police in raincoats saying, “Go
Home. There is a tragedy there
waiting that will rip out hearts
and leave you, a son, with shoes
to fill and a mother to calm, and
sisters and his older brother to call,
who will lose his daughter, Lori,
to a sneaky cancer that won’t want
to be caught, and you should go
home now to find us all drunk and
looking at the body, saying you can’t
be alone with him because we are pigs
with no compassion. You should run
home, speed over in your burgundy Buick
that a so-called friend sold you for way,
way too much, and with new friends
waiting out front, Kevin and Ben and
the girl that will be your wife, you will
embrace your mother’s shaking from
a walking down a hall to find him in bed,
gone from the world, and how we arrived
a while after we were called, to pop breath
mints in front of your house, in the space
you will park when you go back to the house
after the funeral, get out of the limousine
and take a deep and mournful breath.”
I never thought it was anyone else.
I knew when they said tragedy they meant
him, him dead, and to all of the words
that I imagined came from the policeman’s mouth
I added to the first, solitary, monster-word--
tragedy.
[Continue] [1:9]
Part 6: Kuwait City Shopping Mall, April ‘91
The tank had to move out of the way so we could enter the department store without climbing over it. The Kuwait City store was open all ready, after only a month had passed since the war’s end. Lindsey and I walked in to find a woman waving an American flag and saying, “Love America.” I wonder now whether it was a statement or a question.
Up the escalator that had bullet holes filled with bright white caulk in the stainless steel railing, was the clothing department. Here Levi's were gold. There were American and Kuwait flags hanging above the women’s section and a Marlboro poster above the men’s. Lindsey lit a smoke. I lit a smoke. The Kuwaiti solder that was standing behind us lit a smoke and made us jump. He had somehow snuck up behind us while we thought of what a great story this scene would make when we got back home (Lindsey was a writer also).
The Kuwaiti spoke in a Chicago accent, which was surprising given his long beard and the tunic he wore. “What’s up, Guys. My name is (I can’t remember what he said it was, but it was something like Bob or Harry, something very American--we’ll call him Bob for the sake of this section) Bob.”
“Hey, Bob--you scared the shit out of us,” I said and Lindsey nodded his head in agreement. Lindsey’s hand was shaking a bit when he offered it, shaking Bob’s hand a bit too zealously, creating a short pause that it seemed lasted a long, long time.
“What’s this I hear about you guys (we assumed he meant us at first but then realized that he meant the whole of United States military) are not going to Baghdad to kill that fucker.”
“We don’t know about any of that...hey, cool gun,” Lindsey said, eyeing the swat-team style weapon with the smooth and flowing curves of a woman. It reminded him, he told me later, of his girlfriend back home--curvy in all the right ways.
We talked to the man for about an hour. He let us hold the gun. We had left the M16’s back at the truck with Top and Spc. Flowers so we couldn’t return the gesture. He told us of how he had lived in Chicago for 16 years of his 24, and when his family sent word of the beginnings of trouble with old Saddam he jumped a plane for Kuwait City immediately. He told us that Saddam’s Republican Guard, under the command of Saddam’s son, ----------, had occupied the country by the time he was able to secure visas for his family to leave, and so he stayed to fight, and die if necessary, for his motherland.
We listened to Bob intently, Lindsey no longer fiddling with the woman-gun and caressing its lines with needy fingers, and Bob told us of the torture he and his people went through. He was captured and raped with a wine bottle until his rectum split and poured out shit-laced blood that fell to a floor that had been stained with red many times over. He said the two prisoners he stayed with in a dark cell where made to sit on a wine bottle also, but when they fell over due to the extreme pain they were shot in the head. The only thing that saved him was his Chicago accent. American POW’s were valuable things with the war nearing commencement. He said, “I don’t want to go back to the US, ’cause it will make me remember why I survived and they didn’t.” He didn’t explain it further. Just left it at that and told us that it was nice talking to us and just walked away passed the flags and the huge Marlboro Man standing beside a horse that would certainly die if sent to this vast desert of a place, and he never looked back. He was lost in one of the most vast deserts in the world without a camel--the survivor’s memory.
[Continue] [1:10]
Part 7: Saving Something
Even when I ran with children
under the fire of men that knew me as enemy,
Even when the world died then
a bit under the lies told to me by my remedy,
Even when the tanks fired shots
that took a bit of my hearing on the right side,
Even when my kids came to me
not whole, took my head away from my eyes,
Even when my old life just seemed,
lacked, not whole, not all there, just plain nothing,
always knew you were there waiting
somewhere in the world, you wanting for nothing
more than
to save me.
[Continue] [1:14]
Part 8: Moscow Time
I’m naked and I’m far from home.~Freddy Mercury
Moscow, Idaho gave me pause, but that is about all it gave me.
The only good thing that came of living in that cultural wasteland in the middle of Aryan Nation country was it made me miss Olivia so much that I bought a ring. I remember calling her every day on the ugly green phone I bought at Walmart. My phone bill, by the time she came back with me cross-country from her home in Somers Point, NJ, was over five hundred dollars--money we didn’t have.
But we survived it all: the close-minded people who thought all Easterners were devils and come from the Big Apple, a roommate that shits himself because he is too drunk to unlock the door in time, a MFA program that tried to be like Iowa but was nothing close, overly competitive peers repeating the same thing time and time again, jobs that paid little and wanted much, the two feet of snow we returned to and the two feet of snow that stuck it out until April, Landlords that turned as the wife of the pair grew bigger and more hormonal by the day, selling everything we had bought, loading up the van, going back to where we came from to start our trip again later that summer, to here, to Florida and Miami and a new feel.
[Continue] [1:12]
This is an imitation of how they might talk like drowning cats in the heat of a hundred suns barreling down on them sent by a no good god that couldn’t save them.
This is what they might have said if they were of my mind and in this safe country not filled with land mines that jump up at you while walking to school to tear out your soul and innards with hot lead, momentum.
This is what they might have said if allowed to cry out last breaths in English, in my language and not their own, so as to make me feel like their last words were real and not just static.
He lets us in the gate of sharp wire, in front of the people in line. He gives us candy from America. I got a whole plastic bag full of melted chocolate bars yesterday for helping. I am good at helping him get things off the table to help the hurt people get better. Even though he doesn’t speak Arabic, he can make his hands show me what he wants, and I go for it quickly like a monkey is quick.
I go for the tables that they set up every day. My uncle say they aren’t so good at keeping where they are setting up the tables a secret from the people that want to hurt them, and us. I don’t want him to get hurt. He is nice to us and tried to help my daddy when he was sick with bullets and something my uncle called “infeKton.” It smelled bad, like rotten meat in the bone that the wild dogs lick and bite at.
They were not like that at all, most likely. They wanted my food. That is it. That is all.
Big American thinks we are good little American boys running around getting him medicine to fix up all those people my uncle calls weak. They are what he calls “symatisers” and he says they don’t love Saddam. I love Saddam cause he is my savior, he is my hero and he likes kids that do their duty for the cause. I told my uncle everything they do in the camp. They put white cloth over where the symatisers get hurt and sometimes they put them in trucks and take them away. He says they take our people to big volcanos and throw them in and laugh with Azazel when they catch on fire
.
I don’t want to go in the volcano and burn myself. I want to tell my uncle what they do, and trick the big American into liking me, so he won’t eat my eyeballs when I blink. I told my uncle that I keep my eyes open the whole time. I show him they are red to prove it. They hurt sometimes but I never once blink when those devils are around.
And that voice is wrong, too. That is what the powers that be wanted me to believe. That they were all this way, Satan spawn, not worth the time we were spending in the Iraqi border town treating more than 400 of them a day.They were not at all like they had told me they were in Basic. They were people. They were resisting at the very core of my being the word enemy. I can’t see my boys in that way, I just can’t. Kids are kids.
He is at the gate again waiting for us. He loves us. He feeds us from his bag and doesn’t eat himself. He is skinny like our father was before he died. We don’t want him to die, too.
The people in the village say they will leave us soon. I hope he doesn’t leave us. My brother and little sister like him, too, but they are scared sometimes when he runs to the gate to get hurt people and yells things in English at the other Americans. He sounds angry, they say. I tell them he is just worried. Like father was when he had to leave us. And he sounds like father, too. His voice was big. And when he says soft sounding words and smiles, we smile too. But we don’t know what he says because we don’t know the English words. But we know the words mean good things when he smiles, just like when father brought home the leg of lamb from his job--he smiled and didn’t say anything but just smiled. This is a long time past before the Republican Guard men in their black hats came and took our house. I was only nine then, and it was the first lamb I had ever tasted. It tasted so good when mother mixed the meat in the rice and put it on naan and sprinkled garam marsala powder on the meat and rice. She died too, but before father. She smelled like dirty water after she got shot. I smelled her hair and face for a long time, and lay in her arms and cried, and the soldiers ran by.
I like when the American smiles. I remember father better. I remember when he would sing to us and tell us stories of Ali Baba. We say Ali Baba to the American sometimes. He smiles and says “Yacallin mea theef,” but we don’t understand what he says because he says it in English. I wonder if he is saying that he knows the story. Sometimes I wish he would tell it to us like father did with big hands waving in the air and laughing when we know all the parts before he says them and say them before he does, and hug us in those big hands and arms until we all three go to sleep curled up on his lap, and the book drops down to the floor and we all hear it but don’t move at all for fear that we might crumble in on each other, fall into dust. Sometimes I wish he was my father, our father, and would take us to America and his wife would be our new mother and cook us lamb and rice and naan. And maybe she would smell like rain on the sand. Clean water.
I saw them everyday until they, all but one, came to me lifeless. The oldest smiling. He had his intestines in his hand and he forced out the words Ali Baba from his frothy, red mouth. I said yes, I am a thief like the rest, yes, I know you are not what they told me you would be, yes, I could have loved you as my own if you could say the word father to me in English, yes, I will miss the way you would crawl under the razor wire to meet me, yes, I will miss your help and your company and your daily reminder that youth does exist in a world at war, and yes, I will not dwell on your death too long, for there are too many at the gate waiting, I will save the memory of you for later to dwell upon while I drink myself into a sleep filled with tossing and turning and thoughts of who you could have been, yes, yes, I will miss all my ideas of who you were and who you might have been if you hadn’t found that metal monster laying in wait below that hostile sand. Goodbye, until tomorrow night comes with the reminder of your skin patterned in the sanguine shade of a world’s excised innocence, or at least mine. I know at least that much was lost, swept down the rivulets that rushed faster when you spoke.
Ali Baba, you said. And I agreed.
[3:14] [Continue] [1:13][return to picture]
Part 10: Sea Dance: October 1992
This girl, forget her name, gave me beauty in a place where metal swam around the coastline and Navy Seals practiced diving patterns out of a Black Hawk just reminded me of the war that I missed (and the missing was my hell). She came down the beach with a bun under a camo hat, enslaved hair that she unfurled in the Virginian ocean spray and then stripped down to nothing and walked into the waves. I, 19 and thus horny all the time, followed suit and got into my birthday suit and took the proverbial plunge into what I thought would prove to be a sea of sweet, indiscriminate, casual sex with a fellow soldier. It happens quite often, you know. I think that sex is probably the most common recreation in the military, but that is nether here nor there. Lets return to the girl, naked, water, me on the way in, balls flapping in excitement, cold water exacting revenge on their excitement, shrinkage, swimming around a while with her to find miracles lurking just below the surface.
So, I am there swimming around her, her long hair falling around her covering everything of interest to the teenage libido like a mermaid’s hair might fall around her in modesty or as in that PG rated film with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah that I saw in the movie theater and suffered from pubescent boners afterwards for months at the very sound of water, and she tells me of how she had been raped and she just wanted to swim with me and nothing more.
Shrinking of the torpedo commences.
And just then (I never use “just then” because I am afraid of being corny but I think it works here for some reason so I will leave it be) the uncommonly long hair that danced in the water started glowing, bright around the edges like what an aura must look like to a shaman.
And just then (had to try it again, and must say I am happy with this one also because of the strangeness evoked by awkward repetition) the dolphin, Bottle-nosed Atlantic, dorsal fins emerged out of the water, and they jumped in unison only ten feet from our dance, the movements of these aquatic brothers making glowing trails of Harvest Moon plankton, the ocean’s fairy dust. And we swam towards them wanting them to share our night of movement and light. They simply wanted to jump and cut threw salt water inlets, all the way into brackish estuaries and lakes to taste the tannin stained, crisp water that felt kinder on rubbery skin and cool on the eyes that knew only salt for a good part of the year. And I remember thinking that some dolphins might never find these places, these waters that mix salt and fresh into a brownish liquid that can, if the light hits just right, seem quite solid, and they will live out there lives with disturbed ocean sand filing them down until they ceased to exist.
And just then (again, it feels ok, like the repetition works better at three than at two...which, come to think of it, I have always thought. Repetitions never work in even numbers, only odd.) my Platoon Sergeant found us in the water swimming just beyond a Navy owned beach in Ft. Story and he motioned to us, waving my discarded BDUs and hers in the air, “Get the hell up here, soldiers, and put some fuckin’ clothes on. JEE-ZUSS H CHRIST ON A CROSS, soldiers, move those pristine white asses. Hurry the fuck up.”
And we stayed in the water looking at him yelling until he left us to dance again with light and miracle. The next day would bring yelling and threats but we smiled and knew that something more.
[Continue] [1:22]
Soldier: A pawn of the wartime battlefield, troops can be moved in a number of strategic ways to ensure the maximum number of casualties per square mile with the least amount of impact on troop mass. Soldiers should be uniform and work as a machine. Dissident minds and radicals will not last long in the ranks of a disciplined and monitored stable of war horses, and should be dispossed of on site if found wandering the barracks room of OD Green and gray painted floors looking for somewhere to stash drugs and thoughts and a book of poetry.
Lindsey said it first. He looked out, past the Kuwait Police Training Academy cement wall and the tangles of razor wire piled on top, to the smoke in the south-west—the oil fires still blazing and coating the air with the thick sense of maybe-there-will-be-an-apocalypse-sometime-soon because it muted the sun and made it just a floating bright red beach ball and made the days dark and caused the religious to quote the book of revelations and, most often, get punched by the non-religious—and he said, “Damon, I was thinking….War is Well. War is well, that’s right.” And we laughed about it and I called him “puny” and we laughed some more. Two kids, 18 years old, 40 feet up on a commandeered Kuwaiti guard house, smoking unfiltered Lucky’s and trying to make a hash pipe out of a bit of aluminum foil that my mother sent me wrapped around kool-aid packets (I still don’t know why she wrapped them in that way—it seemed strange at the time). We had bartered with the local nomads for the hashish; it cost us five packs Marlboro cigs, a can of mo-gas that we stole from behind the generator, and a crusty copy of Penthouse that had made its rounds around the tent at night when we stayed up and thought about our girlfriends we left stateside even if they looked nothing like the girls in the magazine. It was a good trade, though; it got us both high, that night in the tower. The stars at night were brilliant out there in the middle of nothing, the desert stretching for miles and miles of no lights and no noise and just sky and, if the oil smoke wasn’t bad, stars shining and the moon staring down on us, making the sand dunes look like rolling blue-black waves come to swallow us whole.
We needed to get high once in a while out there. If it wasn’t the hash, it was the potent, military-issue cough syrup that we stole from the Medical Supply tent or the morphine tubes all of us carried around in our medic bags from the ground war forward nodes and all “seemed to lose” after the war was called off….Yes, this was after the war—the micro-ground-war that lasted only 100 or so hours.
I was to leave for the mobile trauma unit in Safwan, Iraq in the morning to help with the humanitarian support of Iraqi civilians. I was being sent for being a bit too “mouthy” with the First Sergeant. Safwan was a place they sent the “mouthy” ones, the ones who didn’t work by the numbers. Lindsey would follow later. He was mouthy, too. But that night we were smoking to my voyage. Watching the sun drop behind the dunes we played a Jimi Hendrix tape in Lindsey’s boom box and passed the pipe without ever looking back to see if the Sergeant of the Guard was approaching. We were beyond caring about consequence. We were what they called undisciplined, low-morale soldiers, and we didn’t give a flying fuck. “Don’t hog that shit, Lins—pass it here,” I said and he did and I smoked and I looked at the red of the sky and thought how this whole war hadn’t been that bad. I was about to wake up to an aftermath that was worse than anything I had seen during the war, and I didn’t even see it coming.
The after-war in Safwan was still raging. Maybe that is what Lindsey meant in saying war is well, maybe he knew something I didn’t on the eve of my departure as he looked to the southeast. Safwan was that way too, not just the fires, and maybe he knew something, as I said—something more, but probably not. I am just trying to make connections where they most likely aren’t any. Just like what I am about to say…
There is a certain power to things—inanimate and mechanical things—an almost-will or almost-instinct to do what it was made for; the machines ability to coax in a user with its inherent purpose, and make that person fulfill its need—its will. These ridiculous postulates, loose connections to reality—elusive binding events or ideas or the like—are there somewhere. I have to believe in something above that time, some order to couple with the swirl of chaotic events covered with the blood of players that had limited time to practice their lines and the sweat of a small group of medics that called Safwan home for three months. I need to give things neat labels and assign character roles and motivation and see those connections that may be just figments—but to think of that time without these figments-- excuses, connections--is almost unbearable. I will use them.
Weapons have will: this is my thesis….I just wanted to make it clear cut, readable, explained, seem reasonable, seem like there is nothing more horrific than this will of theirs to destroy, to kill. Weapons start wars and wage them. People are just the ones who slave for their ends, their wants, their genocidal desire. War is well, because of them and their purpose; not the soldiers, not the politicians and generals, not the media or churches or causes…not me.
[Continue] [1:18]
Grenade: a small projectile that results in an explosive charge (the resulting effect being shrapnel and blast injuries, preferably mortal), smoke (identification, signaling and screening actions from the enemy), chemical agent administration (crowd control and to force the withdraw of the enemy), or an torching effect (self explanatory). The earliest grenade was made in 1427 by filling an earthenware container with gunpowder and igniting it with a rude wick. The grenade went through many transformations before coming to the highly advanced type used today. Modern grenades, the like of which were used heavily in WWI and WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam conflict, are equipped with a fuse, which is ignited by pulling a pin, usually with a small ring at the end, out of the fuse device. This fuse can burn anywhere from 5-10 seconds or until contact is made with a solid surface, say the ground or the enemy, before the desired effect is accomplished. Grenades can also be fired from grenade throwers or other propellant devices to enhance range and effectiveness in the battlefield. The normal army soldier is required to carry two explosive fragmentation grenades during time of war.
I was introduced to the camp at Safwan by a sign on a wall. It said, in long, erratic, red script, “Save Us From Hell!” and below that, “Saddam Will Kill Us!” I was in the back of a Hummer driven by the Executive Officer, my only ally against the Commander and the First Sergeant. He gave me a pack of cigarettes and said, “I will try to send more out to you when I can.” He was a good leader and took me under his wing for some reason. He lost the papers that would put me up for court marshal not once but twice during my stay in Safwan.
He dropped me off and hit the road; had to be back to drive the colonel around, he said, and seemed absolutely thrilled about it. I was decked out with the standard battle dress issue: camouflaged battle dress uniform, rucksack filled with assorted clothes, chap stick, music tapes, condoms to place on the barrel of your weapon to keep the sand out, a flashlight, deck of standard Bicycle playing cards, , a Kevlar helmet fastened tightly to the head via a chin strap (which always made me break out), Kevlar flack jacket, boots, two fragmentation grenades, an M16 A-2 automatic rifle with 120 rounds carried in 30 round clips, and, to signify that I was not to be shot because I was a medic and therefore protected under the Geneva Convention rules of combat, I wore an arm band with a big red cross on it, etc.
“Private, what the hell you wearin’ that shit fo’? You tryin ta gets us killed? Shiittt!” said this hefty man—unshaved, bandana on his head, brown t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. “Get in the tent, God dammit!” he said as he grabbed my armband and ripped it off. I wasn’t about to argue. I stepped inside the tent. He proceeded to tell me why and showed me evidence of what he meant right there in the flap of the tents rear door. The flap was shredded, letting hundreds of beams of light in, which made the whole tent seem like a still-frame of a disco. He approached the flap, the lights jumped off his shoulders and around his torso, and he said, “It was a grenade that did it. Week ago, right before we got back ta camp. It had our name on it, but we weren’t around when the bastard thought we were. Fuckin grenade.” He talked about it as if it was a person—fuckin’ grenade—went on to tell me that I was a good-ass target with that arm band on and that it was just as good as a bulls eye to those fuckin grenades and that if I wanted to make it home in one piece and not all blowed the fuck up I wouldn’t wear the thing anymore. I didn’t. I looked at the shredded tent door and stood in front of it so the lights fell on my body and thought of shrapnel piercing and burning through my muscle and bone and the light steaming in to illuminate the causes of my body’s destruction. I swore that I would throw the band away. I didn’t, I still have it today, but I never wore it again.
[Continue] [1:32]
Ak-47 Assault Rifle: 7.62 (mm) caliber, 870 mm length, 700 m/s muzzle velocity, 4,300 gram, with a loaded magazine of thirty rounds, weight fully automatic assault rifle has an effective killing range of 1,500 meters and a practical rate of fire equaling approximately 400 rounds/minute. This Russian made dandy is equipped with a bayonet holder and fashionable wood-grain muzzle handle. It is not known for the extreme accuracy of which other comparable rifles brag, but when it comes to overall power and durability--nothing beats the AK. A notable gun collector stated, “You can run this thing through mud, sand, and yesterday’s leftovers, and the darn thing will still fire. A damn good weapon.”
During the short ground war I had my share of pictures taken of me with them in both hands, the curved 30-round banana clips curved up towards the barrel and the barrels pointing straight up to the blaring desert sun and the butts propped up on each of my shoulders—chain ammo wrapped around my chest like Rambo. I never fired them, though; just took pictures of the plastic-ready-made-warrior type. We were told never to fire an enemy weapon because they could be booby-trapped and blow up in our faces. We were actually told not to even pick them up, but we were selective with the tales we chose to believe, the rules we chose to follow. I never got one of those pictures. My comrades said they would but didn’t. We said a lot of things out there that we didn’t really mean, but we all knew that so it made the false promises okay—they were comfortable, polite gestures that made us think of home.
The next time I met the AK-47 wasn’t as playful or benign as taking pictures and people who promised photos when you got back to the states that you would never get. This time it was in someone else’s hands. Dark hands and it’s drive to pull the trigger over and over and over. He sat in the bed of the truck. The AK was in control. The man was its slave. He pulled the trigger, it responded. He pulled it again, it thanked him with a bang and a rejected shell. Repeatedly, it said, “PULL” and he kept on pulling. He was addicted to the sound of its cadence and couldn’t stop. You could see it in his eyes: he was possessed. He was not in control.
I remember running across the field with a kid under my arm, one of the kids from the town, he couldn’t have been more than four. He had been left and was crying. I picked him up mid-stride and ran. The firing and everything slowed when I ran. Some weird physics at play. I was the only fast one. Everyone: the people scurrying for shelter in the field hospital, the MP’s outside the barbed wire fence sluggishly trying to load their hummer-mounted 50 cal. and the shooter and his master unable to touch me. I see the explosion of the barrel and the round inching towards my head. It blows back my hair, the bullet-wind tickling my scalp—I smile. The shooter lays back down in the red Toyota pick-up, compact size I think, before the MP’s start firing. A chase ensues, the bad guy and the bad guys driver are made into mincemeat, and the MP’s come back telling us what a thrill it was. They say, “Got the bastards! Fuckin' awesome!” and we treat an Iraqi woman who took a round in the arm. Her right bicep is almost totally blown out the back. She is old. She probably won’t make it. We ship her out to a MASH and forget about her.
The next week another AK comes and shoots at our trucks. No one’s muscle comes out this time and the MP’s don’t catch it or its shooter. This is how it was. And we hated the sound of that ratt-tat ratt-tat the AK made and I stopped running out to get kids after I saw what the round did to that old woman’s arm and we all wished that no more rounds would hit our trucks—our stuff was in there. Each AK ruled us in that way, just like it ruled the shooter. It crushed our heroic nerve by showing exactly what it could do. The same cadence that drove the shooter to shoot drove us to hide behind truck tires and trailers and patients on stretchers. The AK owned us all.
[Continue] [1:33]
Part 14: Anti-Personnel Mines
Anti-Personnel Mines: Explosive devices. Mines explode when a device, usually based on pressure or magnetic attraction, ignites a short fuse. It takes only a fraction of a second for most mines to activate after they have been tripped. According to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, “up to 110 million active mines are deployed in more than 60 countries. The leading three mine users are: Afghanistan—9-10 million, Angola—9 million, and Iraq—5-10 million.”
They brought me a slingshot they made as a gift, and coins and prayer beads and beaded tobacco cigarettes called—quite unoriginally—beadies. I named them Frick and Frack, because I am sure they stole most of this stuff they gave me. I didn’t care how they got the things. They were gifts, that’s all that mattered.
They didn’t speak any English really—street rats that had most likely lost their parents in the war—but we communicated in other ways. The team started calling them my kids.
“There’s your kids again, Smitty,” they would tease, “You gonna give away all that chocolate your sister sent you for Easter to those little thieves?”
But, I ignored most of the jeering and let them in ahead of the long line of casualties and gave them parts of my lunch and most of my dinner and they would get bandages and medicines and tools for me—I made signs with my hands and mouthed the words they didn’t know and we three became one hell of a good team.
One day they didn’t arrive at the front gate in the morning as they usually did. I went about the day. Spoiled a bit from the help I usually received from Frick and Frack, the morning didn’t run as smoothly as it had when they were running back and forth from the tables covered with medical equipment to the stretcher I was working. I was a bit slow to the punch. Frustrated, I told the doctor that I was going to the fence to have a smoke and work triage for a while. He said it was cool, so I walked out to the entrance, but the lighter I had brought from home wasn’t working. I stopped in between the fence and the field hospital, trying to shake up the little butane I had left in my Bic disposable. Damn thing, I thought, it would have to give up on me now. I had to go back for matches. Before I had a chance to turn around, I saw and heard Fisher at the entrance say, “STRETCHER.” This was never good.
We brought them in one at a time. The first kid’s face was blown off, that’s why I didn’t recognize them. The second was Frick. His intestines wrapped around him, my team was trying to put them back in. Frack wasn’t breathing.
I froze.
They pushed me out of the way. I was useless. They were dying. Frack was all ready, I think. His head was cracked, it looked like, and I thought I saw brains. They pushed me back, “Go somewhere, Smith.” And I fell back, catching myself on an I.V. stand. It is my crutch. I am a cripple. I try to look through the cracks between the people, the whole team scurrying around yelling for fluids and scalpels and oxygen and tourniquets and pressure bandages. I am the consistency of snail slime. I slide down the I.V. stand’s pole.
This is my knowledge of the land mine. This is why I hate the Fourth of July. This is what the landmine’s will said for them to do, tear apart two children. This was its purpose. To believe that it was a soldier’s fault, a country’s, would make me hate people too much. I would drop out of society and live as a hermit. I would not be able to look in the mirror knowing that I am one of them.
Instead, I choose to hate the thing—its will, its grotesque desires and hungers. Purpose driven from the day it was born—it held the will that killed my boys. To think differently would mean to accept that something much more terrifying to the soldier in me—we are the monsters; our purpose is to kill; we will our own destruction.
[Continue] [1:11] [1:14] [1:39]
Part 15: Friends Who Helped (and one anti-friend that helped too)
I. Ben
He is an entertainer (www.comedyentertainer.com). He performed at our wedding and at our great parties back in the bachelor pad in Jersey. He likes to eat fire and juggle sharp things over petrified assistants. At the wedding, he ate fire while telling the story of my wife and I, all the bumps and blessings, until he almost burnt off nose when he swallowed the two flaming torches at once to a barrage of greased applause. He carries his show with him everywhere. He had trouble getting on the plane to come to the wedding, as you might expect. Imagine the look on the baggage check attendant when they saw 3 machetes on the x-ray screen.
He is on our fridge. He juggles fire in one of the pictures. Olivia went out the day a friend sent her the newspaper clipping and article about him and his double life--physical therapist and performer, and got it laminated. He is on stilts and making balloon animals for seniors and children. He has a smile we both love. It comes out in the pictures.
He tells me of Unitarian churches now and how he doesn’t like what organized religion does to people.
He is a spazz. Weird just like I like ’em.
He deserves this page.
II: Kevin
He wants to be the owner of a vineyard. He and Karee, his wife, are making wine at home now for the first time and tell us over the phone about how they feel when they mix the ingredients. Almost a prayer. A meditation on the cradles of humanity.
He was an angry man when I met him. His fists would go up with little prompting.
He is a seeker now, like me.
He and Karee are coming to see us in a couple weeks. We are taking a road trip to New Orleans. I hope we don’t get arrested for anything.
He is my partner-in-crime.
He is my brother.
He is another one that waited outside of a house gone silent with death freshly present. He stood there with Ben and my wife-to-be waiting for me to come out of a door and say it was nothing--that the dog had died or something less tragic.
He is an artist that likes to paint landscapes of trippy surrealism.
He is no transient friend.
III: Larry
He is the strange entry here.
He is the one who shot a tack out of a blow dart, ninja-looking thing and right into my head. He just sent me an e-mail recounting the event, and I quote: “Got you good...right in the noggin.”
He is the one that stuck a dart in Kevin’s leg in rebuttal for the hole Kev burned into Larry’s chest with a car cig lighter on the way home from an all night bar drunk off our asses.
He is the third worst roommate I have ever had (two others top his antics with downright insanity). He would buy cheese and meat ends and feed them to my cat. He said, he just wanted to see how fat she would get. The pieces of decaying flesh and weeping then petrified morsels of dairy’s delicacy littered the living room floor.
He is a thief. He came home once with two new fishing poles one day after cruising the Absecon, NJ docks lined with fishing boats.
He is the innovator of solar art. He showed me how the sun will burn into wood deep black etchings if you had a big enough magnifying glass.
He is a competitive eater. He ate 3 lbs of apple sauce and a pint of egg nog to qualify for the WING BOWL in Philly. His name for the event and every time he, tall and lanky Larry, enters the ring is Buzzsaw. I entered a wing eating contest with him once and he ate 10 wings in under a minute. Amazing.
He is a wanderer.
He is in Tahoe now trying to sell his Solar Art idea.
IV: Anthony Lindsey
He is a lost friend, a war buddy, the one I look for on www.anywho.com at 3 am.
He is the one that showed me a side of writing that breathed fire.
He is the electric monk.
He is the one that said: War is Well and What kinda name is Damon? and Blood and cheese, what a perfect combo (I still don’t know what that one is supposed to mean.)
He is missed.
He showed me a part of myself I don’t know if I could have found myself.
V: Olivia (Girl)
She is my best friend.
She is my wife.
She is my angel that let me see love again after the war took it almost totally away.
She is my life, my home.
VI: Dave
He is the Anti-friend.
He went the blind way of zealous calling and pulled our connection apart, one of thought and inquiry, away from me without notice. He was a lower intelligence that I prompted with ideas and so for a while, 7 years, he tagged along. I think on that day when he wouldn’t take my calls anymore he realized it.
He is a Professor of Criminology now in some backwoods town and married a local, I hear. He probably has kids that will grow up with his voice parroting dogma and scripture, wrecking their lives with limits and strict SOP’s on how to get to heaven.
He is a ghost that comes to me sometimes because we didn’t have closure. I wanted to tell him how I was more, how he held me back.
He is one of the greatest influences of this book, I needed to include him or the spirit of Frank would make me dream at night of him laughing that he got away clean, without consequence for his betrayal. If you are reading right now, thank you for your trespasses and your comical persona, it made all the difference.
[Continue] [1:19]
Fire=passion, oil fires outside of Kuwait City, Santana on guitar, cooking with my wok over gas instead of ceramic or electric, Olivia in leather pants, going outside into the snow to get logs that have stubbornly iced themselves together, an oil painting that hangs on my wall made by the greatest unsung American artist--Carmella Brown (Nonna), the World Trade Center bombings and people falling from the high floors, smoke, burning pictures into pine with a magnifying glass, the way people talk when their angry (or in love), my father trying to put out the candle with a finger punch he learned in Karate and covering the aged wood table in wax, my father’s eyes, smores, hanging with Larry and Kevin and Ben at the fire pit drinking liquid flame, Absinthe with Eric in Idaho, my brother-in-law running into a burning house with abandon, my mother’s eyes, Iraqi soldiers fused to dashboards and steering wheels and each other in a macabre dance reminiscent of the tango, ash, lighter always in the pocket even though I quit smoking cancer sticks three years back, the Miami skyline at sunset, running up a mountain in southern Cali when the brush fire followed my platoon up, my urge to write any of this.
Water=Sex (at least in my Psych 101 textbook), Dolphins jumping with illumines plankton tracing the movement in the night, Santana on guitar (yes, again), Bob fighting flames, 29th street in Miami Beach, 26th street beach in Brigantine, NJ, driving in torrential rain bent on destruction, ice rubbed over a burn, relief, life, the way tsunamis roll over beach front cities without a moment’s hesitation, shrinking manhood, Man-O-War looking like blue and white plastic rocks of Gibraltar with blue slugs attached feasting on flesh, sharks that like to bite in the ass a skinny dipper that has had a few too many on Halloween night, slip-and-slide days in the old yard with greedy maple roots impeding the fun and so we just ran through the sprinkler a couple times, the bristle brush head of a Manatee eating sea grass, fishing with _____________ (insert person here), swimming in Nona's pool at 8, swimming in my cousins’ pool at my wedding reception with my Hepburn-doppelganger-new-wife looking like Breakfast at Tiffany’s with her tiara still on above a hot pink swimsuit, the turgor strength of a plant cell wall, water released with blood made possible by a lance on a cross and a death I am not sure he came back from, swimming with a Hawksbill Turtle in the Keys, Old Faithful, the flood that took half my books in 2000, born into eyes sheathed wet and searching.
[Continue] [1:20]
My B-day falls on a Catholic Holy Day. It is the Feast of the Assumption. My grandfather, Harry Brown, on my mother’s side was born on August 14th, which is not a Catholic day of obligation, but he died on Halloween, close to All-Saint’s day, while I walked with new legs and a clown costume down a street with my parents and sister, Jenny. I told every house I came to that I was “a-yer-gic to Choc-it”--translation: I am allergic to chocolate--to the horror of Jenny.
My mother is fond of telling me, my friends, everyone she knows that I came right out, whoosh, and that my head was coned, pointed with a skull that has yet to fuse together into that round shape. My head looked like a bullet pointed to a life that I was in a damn hurry to get to. I want to say here that Bulletman is me, that I am the allegorical match to his symbol. I want to say that I could be the one in that bath tub full of magical herbs and oils with all of the characters of this book looming over me trying to see if the spell the Seer casts will stick, make me well again. But I have a rounded head now, it is no longer like a bullet, like Frank’s metal skull shining in strobe light magnificence under the swinging lamp that it bumped in to on its way into the tub.
[Continue] [1:20]
Part 18: Colin and Caroline
Colin:
Boy, you have grown up big
so big in the last two years
while I studied how to put words together
so did you, the first words
being born in the excitement of recognition
while I discovered my new world in Miami
you were exploring the world
for the first time. I am sorry
I couldn’t be there to watch first steps into
your proud parents’ waiting
arms; the first time you went
potty to the applause of Bob and Jessie.
Caroline:
I see that you have made your mother large
in pictures sent by a proud other sister
but wonder why you stay in warmth now
when they are all waiting for your arrival
I am coming home soon to see you in new
clothes, the Smith Eyes are complimented
By Bob's, your little hands searching air
for something to hold on to, some knowledge
of the world. I will hold you up to the light
and the sky and tell you to keep reaching up.
[Continue] [1:21]I didn’t want to hit him really, but he came up and took it away, knocked me down to the bed of the Hummer and pointed it at me with the safety off, and the hands went up. The first blow didn’t satisfy that genetic dust that wants more blood than healthy for one’s soul, and so I hit him again and let the thud coming from rifle butt on brains lull me into a dream of questions: Why am I doing this? If this is a dream why can’t I awaken still a child in the safety of my room upstairs with new dark and light blue bedding?
My bruised and lacerated legs from rocks and splintered boards and sticks bled while the boy fell from the Hummer and rolled into a thick dust that impeded my view of whether or not I had killed. Nobody spoke of the riot that night, but only drank Ouzi out of our canteen cups with plenty of water mixed in to make it milky and smooth, almost like ice imitated. They gave me the last shot and we danced around fires watching the wild dogs watch us howl into the world at war and lament for its fallen.
I am sorry, whoever you were, even if you survived. I couldn’t stop the impulse to attack because there was nowhere for me to hide, to run away.
We are more primal than we think we are in times when bullets fly in clouds like locusts reborn on the 7th day of the 7th year of the 7th age.
[Continue] [1:36]
Part 20: Dad’s Godspell; Jenny’s Godspell; Jessica’s Godspell.
Both my father and big sister directed Godspell, and my younger sister, Jessica, was in the play--she was Mary Magdeline. I made-out with Jenny’s Mary Magdeline, but that is neither here nor there.
I just wanted to say something meaningful about those plays but they have become memories of an old self that still had a father to work through stories and essays with, him coaching me along, letting me find my own solutions through simple prompting, an expert teacher.
With Jenny’s production I watched while she paid homage to my father. I remember crying at the moment of crucifixion. Still a bit shell shocked from the war, I needed to cry--to feel anything other than terror. I went back to find that girl, that Mary, and cry out more tears of recognition three times, because I thought it could help me heal. I think in a small way it did.
Jessie’s Godspell took me back to a high school that had treated me to heckling everyday in the hallway of an adolescent hell. (Really, it wasn’t that bad, I just have a flare for the dramatic, if you haven’t realized already). The kids back then were cruel, as I suppose kids have always been, here in this country that teachs our children at a very young age how to hate anyone who doesn’t look ‘normal” or sound “normal,” and so on until we have no one left to hate but ourselves for not being diligent enough to find one more thing to hate hiding under a metaphysical or psychological rock. I did enjoy Jessie’s performance of “Turn Back,” the theater genes are strong in my family so I don’t think I expected anything less, but still the walls held ghosts that made me only watch with one eye, the other scanned for spitball and/or nuggy attacks--and God forbid the horror of wet willies.
My father did his Godspell in Kansas, or Colorado, or somewhere, I don’t remember the placement in the family timeline or, for that matter, if I was even born yet. I used to hear stories from my mother and his old friends about how perfect it was. He staged it in the football field, Uncle Jim made a set to end all sets, and every night he timed the cruxifiction scene with the setting sun. It burned behind the metal-rafter cross, the actor was strapped to with colorful red ribbons that curled and moved in the gusts of wind. I wish I had seen it, been old enough to fully appreciate his artistic soul. But that’s O.K. When he died he came to me in a dream, the lucidity making me question if I was even in my body any longer,
and I asked him:
“Dad, can you tell me what it is like to die and leave the world”
and his soul responded:
“It isn’t so bad as you think.”
and I asked him:
“I want to know all that you knew of life and the world.”
and his soul responded:
“You have my mind already, you always have....
but then his soul asked for a ludicrice thing:
Oh--D, don’t tell your mother I am dead. I don’t think she knows yet”
[Continue] [1:25]
Part 21: Smith Warrior Spirit
Smith eyes: powerful, intense, kind, crazy, loud, beautiful, intelligent, stunning, scary, mystic, etc..
Lori: jumped across a table to grab and hit at her brother-in-law that couldn’t hold his tongue or his drink too well and I saw Athena blaze up in her eyes.
Bobby: punched a big hole in the wall when he was younger and made Uncle Bob and Aunt Shirley think of my father as a boy--same fiery eyes lashing out at the nearest thing to take away the tornado inside.
Jenny: meeting me in the BWI flight terminal with balled up water held behind eyes for too long of a flight when things on the ground are falling apart. In her eyes are little
volcanos.
Jessie: after she gave birth to Colin Michael , her eyes were diamonds shining past sweat-matted hair and an exhausted frame. She will look that way again soon I’m sure, when the second, Caroline, arrives in May.
Me: when I have my anxiety attacks the people closest to me say that my eyes change color, that they are anywhere from light green to black. I personally want photographic evidence but no one would be stupid enough to approach an uncaged beast with a flash camera, so I am out of luck.
Dad: raced me home from a store when I was 8, telling me to get out of the car in a voice I had never heard before and a slant to his brow that made his eyes look like a madman, and he sped off in the ’67 Volvo to the store around the corner where we had just been picking out a piece of candy and a soda to share and had almost been run down by a punk in a big truck who gave my father the middle finger. I remember asking my mother later what it meant that dad went back to the store looking so mad and she said, “Nothing good.” I never could get my father to tell me what he did to that unfortunate thug, if anything at all. I would have believed my dad if he said he just looked at the him and the coward ran away, just because of his eyes, that Smith stare.
Uncle Bob: after Dad and then Lori died, you could just tell he wanted to rush Heaven to take them back. I have never seen eyes so lost as his when in front of the second grave into which he deposited yet another great piece of his love.
Mom (by association): after my father died she called Uncle Bob and he called her sister and meant it. She is part of our Smith tribe and accounts for half of my stare, my eyes that have grown fiery and thoughtful at the same time as I write these eyes down to look at them with my own more carefully.
[Continue] [1:26]
Dear Anxiety Disorder,
I want to break the picture of your becoming whole into fragments of a caring that I thought I once had as a child but forget in the weight of your shadow. You told me that I was the one you gave something to, something that would lift me above the multitudes of ready made minds: make me faster, more able to see them for who they were, be able to dodge the arrows that impaled my father with doubts of worth even though he stayed strong on the outside. Can’t you see that I am trying to hold reverence for you, my neurotransmitter god that gives me cause to run the streets of my dreams naked and screaming for your love?
I wrote a whole novel about you in the shape of a bullet that becomes a man....I lied just now and you knew it, you flared up in me like a madman in search of the metaphysical wonderings of spirits. Myself, the madman, with eyes that won’t shut at night, that widen on the back of a bottle and shrink themselves with smoke until they have changed shape so many times they are tricked into closing into sleep and dreams of days with no you, no raging you. I am sorry, that was wrong of me to say. I don’t need the treatment to remember that I am your Bitch, that you fall into me with such speed and force that i wonder whether I am alive or just a puppet used up by your hands, weathered in the rains that washed away all signs of that kind child that wanted nothing more than to hug the world.
I broke my wall the other night for you, cracked my thunderous fist against the main board until pain told my hand to change trajectory and attack the helpless drywall. It was so thin it felt like hitting rows of paper mache virgins or something else so pure and naive to touch, to feeling hands, to feeling penetration and breaking. I called my landlord and he is sending you the bill. The cost of my misgivings and inability to stop myself from killing myself a bit when you roar will be clearly marked on the lines stamped “regret” and “lost innocence at the hands of war” and you will be able to pay in whatever way you want. But not with me. Not anymore with me. I am no longer accepted by him or anyone as proper currency.
p.s. I talked him into taking screams produced by the translucent lungs of stolen memory. He is eager to repair the house, as am I, and so you must scream for things that haven’t the wind in them any longer, that wind that makes things live on. I want you to scream until the wind leaves your chest vacant and forsaken, unable to remember your lips, your nose, your mouth, a way back in. And I hope it hurts. And, further still, I hope you observe my new rule of the house: DIE QUIETLY OR ELSE.
[Continue] [1:31][return to picture]
Part 23: Yellowstone Trip, May 2001
The country tried to kill us for crossing it once without looking too hard, stopping only briefly to see the faces of presidents carved into a rock face, a thing called the Badlands, that bald eagle nest near the side of the road that we only watched for a few minutes before the cold shooed us back into that big Jeep that I still can’t believe made it to Idaho on its own power.
It snowed and rained and tried to lure us off many a cliff, so that just before we died, if we died, we would look at ground or the myriad patterns of ice crystals or down to the very thing that makes the earth live, some recognition of the living earth’s majesty.
The country was calmed by our second trip, the one home when we went off the main strip and stayed in Gardner, Montana, right outside Yellowstone. It held us back from its dangers with signs that pictured people, a boy, slipping through the thin crust into the skin boiling heat below. We survived a place that took breath away at every turn only to give it back again when we heard that this place might end it all for our kind one day--a mega-volcano that wants nothing more than to laugh at our idea of human permanence. And I wonder now if the world should be seen as the great mother and a country seen as the child, and this country a spoiled redheaded stepchild that needs a good deal of attention. Or, less comical, are the countries and millions of places across that country, soldiers. Does place know we will screw it up if we’re not careful, and they are all waiting in the wings for the call to end the experiment?
Olivia and I walked to Artist’s Lookout with plastic bag ponchos to see a place that must be at least a president in the hierarchy of land with its big and glorious finger on the button of our doom. In that haze of sulfur smell and a mist so thick it covered us with a sneaking dampness that made you sneeze the next day, we thought that the waterfall might tell us in its echoed crash what would come of us, us all if the Yellowstone mega-volcano decided to blow. I listened with all I could to the cascading water, the blood of the land flowing through a body that I couldn’t help picturing as an overgrown child in fatigues, and it only told me to be calmed, to know once in for all that I didn’t know, and I closed my eyes to the spray, the people around me all gasping at the view and a little boy about six stared as silently as an old man. I am jealous when I think of that boy’s try at the language spoken by the land and that of mine. Perhaps I have seen too many soldiers in my thirty years to hear one, hear it say what it must have said to that silent child, and how I want to shake him now, over the cliff that falls to sulfur and pointy pillars of green, and make him talk, tell me what this place said to him, give me the key to the big secret of what happens next.
[Continue] [1:34]
Dear Suicide,
I saw when you took the man across the street for dreams he had of ending the dreams of far away jungles. How his wife came home, and it was like a macabre TV show waiting to see her reaction as I watched their front door from my second floor bedroom and jumped with surprise when she ran through the streets with her arms waving wildly in the air. I slept in that room where he did it later on while house sitting for the Lenistons and I swore the bullet hole could still be seen if you looked hard enough, the caulk sunken in with the memory of momentum.
I saw when you took the 63 pills out of the bottle and made me swallow because you were tired of me supposedly watching for you. It was me looking out for death, but you found me looking and thought the stare was for you and so you punished me with your vanity and made me swallow. Death didn’t want me yet and made me chug a bottle of Jack on top of the blues and reds and pinks to make all of the colors come out save six. 57 left on the floor in an miost nest, my death on the floor.
I saw when you took that singer, that comic, that actor, that writer, that soldier, that artist that wanted to end the pain of creation with the creation of their end. All the women drown and pop pills and all the men use guns and ropes. I was a woman in my attempt. But I never saw you more vividly than I see you here, in the retelling and remembering of lives lost on purpose, and the question Kant said we all have to face, Why the hell not?
I will try to look past your legacy left with the world, left for Bulletman to face for love of the world, for love of humanity he tries release and fails miserably.
Don’t bother with a reply,
The-one-who-got-away
[Continue] [1:35][return to picture]
I wake up to the smell of bacon and eggs from the kitchen. Olivia wants to surprise me for our anniversary. I had wanted so much to surprise her instead. But later I will make us dinner: seared-tuna with soy and ginger and chives and shallots thinly cut in little circles of onion dwindling in size until the bitter center is reached, a spot of flesh that if not removed, its green tip coloring a type of warning to the taste buds, making them water in fear, it will ruin the meal.
I will fry lo-mein noodles and make them crispy and hard like petrified worms in search of a earth that had rejected them long ago and made them face death, and on top of these noodles I will lay bundles of asparagus and sweet meats sliced thin and sun-dried tomato with a rich and velvety stuffed center of melted Fontina cheese, or maybe Brie or Gorgonzola. I will decide later on. We will have New York cheesecake for desert and sip port wine out of glasses we drank Champagne from on the cruise, the word CONGRATULATIONS embossed in white.
For now I will just smell bacon and try to sleep a bit longer and return to dreamscapes of the drinkless drunks that can’t find way to share in my bottle, and so I must try to get them to believe me, gulping shot after amber shot, slipping deeper into the vapor that Cassandra first felt after toying with Apollo, saying to them, speaking to them like children that just don’t understand, “Here, drink! Do like me. [shot],” until the only fluid left in the jug is the tears of frustration and the sweat that releases when somebody just can’t help but give up.
[Continue] [1:36][return to picture]
Part 26: Human Nature: or, I don’t want to grow up, I’m a...
Olivia, my girl, my wife, asked me the other day if I ever thought why we cared so much about the past, talked so much about what has happened and so little about what will. I said that it was human nature, or some such garbage, and shrugged it off. But I thought more about how it might be, this talking about things that had passed, when we reached ripe ages. And so, I posited that ready-made explanation into the conversation, a term overused by myself and anyone else that is confused about the life and the mind of human beings (namely, everyone), saying firmly, as if I was saying something quite profound, “Human Nature makes us do this.” I have seen the eyes of old people scan us as we walk, remembering I suppose how they used to be. Perhaps that is all the young will ever be to the old, portholes back, reference points. I wonder if old age will come to me when my back is turned and make my eyes change, make them work differently. If that change is only in the way I assign worth, I can tell you right now, at the age of thirty and a few months, that I want none of it.
The park we go to might be gone when we get older, the Everglades National Park, and that possibility bothers me less than my own demise into changed sight and nostalgia evoked by generalities, by young and random couples that have nothing at all to do with my life, all these people suddenly taking on meaning. They will become walking wormholes for my overloaded brain to go back to a time that it was only loaded down by the weights of my choosing and not the trappings of the clock.
Manatee and crocodile be damned. If I had to choose, it would be them and not me. Why can’t I be as strong a conservationist as the Croc Hunter, Steve Irwin, diving into Agro’s pond because the big guy needs a new sheila to make him less grumpy. I wish I could say that I would die for them too, wreak havoc on joints and skin in a manic race to save them from us, from me and my selfish brothers and sisters out there all saying, I’m with him, as you read this. I don’t want you to be here, here in my insecure place that tells me I could never be that balls out and fearless in the face of a Agro, the Australian Salty, staring me down for a meal.
I feel age creeping around those old ones I see seeing me for something I am not, a connection, and it terrifies me. I could have easily said right there that I am terrified for them, that I want to chase away their demons, yell at the top of lungs, which hadn’t been too damaged by my 12 year jaunt with tar and smoke and nicotine but should have been for my own good because I mouth off way too much to the wrong people, WAKE UP FROM THAT DREAM! IT IS WRONG TO TRY TO SUCK THE LIFE OUT OF US, TO RIDE ON THE WISPY VAPOR OF THE SOULS OF YOUTHFUL STRANGERS INTO A FANCIFUL PAST, and in doing so enlighten them in some way. Whatever way that might be. But it would be wrong to add this lie to my stack of lies I have already told to you, my patient audience. No, I feared for my own old-self, in that uncertain future, with eyes set upon a young couple all my own in a park, or at the movies, or in the grocery store. Feeding on their ways and mannerisms as fuel for my own ridiculous time machine.
My mother is getting older, but is not that type of old yet. The idea of her turning, turning as my grandmother--a brilliant artist and thinker not unlike her only daughter--had turned, is sad beyond belief. My Nonna turned earthy and brittle with a season too sudden, I think, for people of that caliber. I remember asking myself in my undergrad days what I would do if my father became old, if he became envious or overly reminiscent or even senile, slow where he had been fast. The scenarios played out in my college-boy head that was learning how to think again after the Army, the war, the life I led, but I never once thought about how it would be to see my mother grow into these weathered offices. Well, he didn’t make it past 61, even though he had but 6 days left till 62, and she kept going somehow with half a heart, her shake, which started the day he died and disappeared after the funeral, burrowed itself down into her fabric and stained her with an invisible palsy she has yet to shake off and away.
I guess I do with her what I do with women in general, either hold them up too high or discard them in a pile of half-worth because I don’t understand them, how they live with men. How do they live with these men that latch on so tightly, like Atlas to the world, like those sucking fish on shark bellies, and manage to build again when they finally leave? And we always leave somehow.
So, I couldn’t possibly see my mother as old, as a thing that fades, because I simply can’t comprehend the mechanics of women, what holds them together and keeps them running in and through a world full of parasitic and transient spirits that they, well most, allow free range to, vast fields of fruit and veggies that men pick too soon and use up before many, if any, seeds germinate, become possibilities for future food to hold them through the hard winter which invariably lays ahead of them if they live to see it.
I guess what I am trying to say is I don’t want her to get old, to fade from her stellar mind, one I don’t quite understand but still stand familiarly awe-struck before, and to fade in voice, to fall to whisper where there was always a roar. But again, this is a false path I have taken you down, and it is not her I really worry so much for, but instead, again, for myself. I don’t want to get old, have cells and romantic ideas and ideals compromised by decaying formidability and meaning. But the further she moves from the image of her picking me up from school in the third grade, hair freshly permed into a 70’s roundness that only now can I say must have reminded me of a swollen stomach, a belly waiting for expulsion of alien life, hair that was pregnant with a future she dreamed for me, the further I feel myself moving towards that day when I too will leave my girl, my beautiful girl, and this makes me sad for me and, in the most honest voice I dare show you, me alone.
I, transient and wasteful man, will leave my wife too by death or by dragged on life, losing who I was to the clock and the steady dying pigments of hairs that haven’t yet vacated the premises. I will leave. I will look into the eyes and lives of the young and fall into past as pages of text do, as my mind does now as I write this address to some audience in shadow, again probably just myself, a selfish audience that likes to hear itself strangle my words with attempted meaning. To them, or too myself, whichever it may be, I have the utmost disdain, because they, or me, cause my words to die before their time.
Still, I will leave. And this, the leaving, the thought of leaving, shocks me into immediate nostalgia, like reflex to a bullet fired at the head at point blank range that you can’t possibly dodge, rakes at my bones with a worn but still sharp blade, curved and on the end of a stick that has attached to the other end an hourglass that shakes with sand and a fate made of ash. I leave into uninnoculated images of liquid fear and leave you (myself) with this one thought, this last hope: I could be totally and horribly wrong about all of this, that I might be able to negotiate the grand fiction of my life without so much loss and age as to leave me emptied of soul before my body gives out.
This thought is my pill that lets me sleep now, the-margin-of-error dope that lulls us all into at least a remnant of comfort and safe feelings. It is the indeterminacy of me that gives this sugary hope, this childlike faith in the flexible definition of Human Nature.
[Continue] [1:40]
Part 27: Letter to this Book
I wonder if you realize what you did to my home, when I went into spastic panics about you and kicked in two chairs, a lamp, and burned a book by raymond carver in the kitchen sink and left tar stains all over the formica that surrounded the stainless and wasn’t meant to withstand heat of any sort without going brown then black then chipping off in cracked retreat to fall on the tiled floor that I would kick in if i could, if tile floors were as fragile as veneer.
You made me experience my characters’ deaths, their lives in a strange new world, and I am tired of it, of you waking me up at night to jot down plot turns and ideas for your narration, Who will have what to say to who?, and like inspirations, those answers to questions seem to come only in the half-awake time when pesky sprites are allowed by their maestro, you, to sprinkle my exposed mind with inspiration sent by muses that never could start effective careers of their own being mostly spirit and no body, not very good for typing. And when you kept me away from the things I love (my cousins down South of SE 152 Street that took us in when we had a van full of all our worldly shit and a crying cat named Scout after the To Kill a Mockingbird Scout, the Everglades National Park where Olivia would show me she was fearless by squatting down near monstrous looking Alligators to call them pretty and handsome boy, and the beach at sunrise when the light comes out of the ocean clean and ready for the new day, the Keys road at midnight when only the locals are out cruising with their tops down and their almost always long and free hair floating in the black, the hot pepper store down in Key West where I wanted to try everything but always paid in the morning, and even my sad uncles with their lives filled with such misdirection as to think they can live in negativity and cause so much family strife and still reach any plain of immortality, yes, even them) I hate you with a hate reserved for baby killers, for in this way you have killed my joy in these last 13 months.
I want no more from you, not right now when I am trying to fool myself into believing in your endings, that you are done.
You are not me anymore, I say with a confidence so real even I believe it. And: You are what I was. And: I am something bigger now than what I was with you. And: I am not you anymore--I am a giant of a man not held to the ground by that clingy love given by gravity. I am the creator of something, even if you are not that big and very quirky and not very popular with religious zealots or realist writers, I will still give thanks to a god of random choosing and praise opposition for their creation of me, they are the yang of my god hanging darkly behind my inspiration.
I thank also the figments who struggled with structure built with new wood from an old growth forest, your very blood. You will fall to death without them alive on your page, Him, and Her, and Bulletman, and all the supporting cast and crew of their life and mine, and when you slide in to that bookshelf where they keep all the others of your type in the Ashe Building on the fourth floor, 437, that room will be your mortuary until by chance some grave robbing student or professor years from now finds you entombed in cobwebs that cannot be brushed off and then you might have a chance at it, life, one more time, live again really, live in reinterpretation, your initiation into the absence of presence, your exodus from the cage you have built yourself into and a revelation that your creator’s great and almighty ears might hold in them a cadence that sings with the very rhythm of my blood racing through an organ made cliché by Hallmark.
After I say all of this, ranting and raving, swinging my fists at words to beat them into submission, enslave them with intellect for their own good, I will hold you away from my mind, forget that you are there in my computer wanting me to fall into work again, crash into you and that dream you had of yourself clad in the armor of an American Athena, open you up to the first page and make you red, bleed you to make you new, changing, dynamic in the race for a record of this ruin of a time.
Rest in Peace (until we meet again),
Dad (Me)
[1:1] [1:42][return to picture]The End (Sort of)