Post by Steve on Aug 23, 2007 14:16:14 GMT -5
memory is boundless, restraint less, never restricted though sometimes sleeping as it grows.
memory doesn't have wire taps or raids. memory doesn't hand out your privacy like grocery coupons to corporations.
so it’s in memory where some choose to live, under the whims of recollections rather than Bugs and sirens.
i was lying in bed, a mechanical sound much like a scallop boat filling my left ear, staring at the night between my face and the back of Sara's head. the air was cool outside, inside felt warm and moldy like morning after drinking. paranoia had the windows shut, drapes pulled and pinned in their stomachs; front door shut and dead-bolted. there was no circulation of air within the room.
i had turned on the air conditioning, or the powerful fan, and moved the typewriter into the bathroom hoping it would make fewer ruckuses. i was wronged. i typed six words before the keys sounded like a leather whip against a bare-ass. six words that sounded like a string of fire-crackers.
i stretched onto the bed and resumed staring at the hair that i knew was there but couldn't see. from somewhere amidst the night, hair and water-logged engine grew the sore moans of a cat by the trash bins. it was a noise like someone slowly carving their initials into the trunk of a car. a train derailing into a scrap yard. or the tin man drunk and rusted,down on his luck, falling down and trying to stand up right again.
it was somewhere in this stew that i remembered a night a few years back, before Sara; before the kidney ailment, a night at this bar...
it was a little strip-club on the outskirts of a city not worth remembering, i'll say it was a tuesday night. the building looked like a southern shack, held together by mud; shit and kept standing by old cargo trailers that must not have been moved in this decade. generally speaking the building was a mess. we were safer in a paper bag drenched in gasoline situated fire-place-front.
prime real-estate.
the inside was where they had spent their money. the stage was in the middle of the club and the seating just big banged out from there. the platform was a giant glass circle with solid glass pillars to reinforce the surface for the weight of the girls. i assumed that this also prevented the girls from going a little over the weight limit the owner instituted. within the circle were tropical fish. exotic breeds that the normal person wouldn't have the slightest guess as to its name. i looked at them as i entered and was more impressed by their colours than anything else about them, though that could have been their entire appeal. i honestly didn't care.
a line of white lights wrapped around the stage and shot through the tables indicating where the walkways were. from the second floor the whole image would look like a poorly drawn sun. a big, wet, fish-filled sun.
it was gruesome to see but there was that charade of intrigue and shunning. the glance to see it again but only to become irritated or disgusted and have to look away once more. it was like being young staring at a dead animal with a stick in your hand. the sight was like a scab begging to be scratched and ripped from the fresh grapefruit skin beneath.
i was sitting at a table on the second floor, over-looking the dancers perfectly, that had the colour of a tired piece of charcoal. it was a frosted glass top with dark wooden legs and in the center-beneath the glass- was a red bulb. every other table but this one was a whorehouse red while mine blushed at the mentioning of sex.
the upper floor was lit entirely red, only the 'exit' signs were different, which were blue. the first floor, as expected, was blue and the escape signs were red. on the jaw of the balcony they had anchored blue and red lights so where they intersected a purple fog grew. it was in this grape-drink coloured cloud that my mind thought i should drink more of my beer.
"so how's your family?" i took a drink and shrugged. i was staring at the red-head that took the stage. she was covered in silver glitter and shimmered like a fish or diamonds behind a flame inside a cavern. the red spot-light turned the blue of the room into a purple where ever she walked. it melted over her like hot taffy, it turned on her hair.
"i guess they're doing alright." i sighed and slugged my beer back. "my sister can't keep her own head, my mother hardly ever gets out of bed and my father, he's eating pills for meals waiting to die-bothering them both while he waits." we both pulled a beer from the case he bought as we entered.
"did your dad have to have his foot amputated?" Pete wasn't paying any mind, he was staring at the match on the stage cat-crawling across the glass. i couldn't imagine that feeling pleasant on her knees. it didn't appear greased and all i could think about was the streaking sound i heard inside my skull everytime she slid an inch. he was an interesting fellow. Pete had his mind about him, knew what he liked and disliked and ate plentifully from the things he disliked. he was a vagrant, as though i wasn't, and was fully conscious of the coming Armageddon, end, whatever you call it, he was aware that we were inside of the vortex spinning dizzily downwards, willing to grin and laugh with whoever chose to accompany him.
two men came onto the platform and proceeded to spray, what only could have been a lubricant, onto the brass pole in the center of the stage. for reasons easily blamable on alcohol, i could only imagine the pole as sewing needle pushed through a small spool of thread. they finished shooting their loads and one after the other stepped off the stage.
one of the two men turned to watch the red-head fold in half raising her ass in the air.
"how's the wife?" he heard me through his fortress of a daydream and drank his beer down then lit a cigarette.
"we're not married."
"pretty damn close."
"Dana's alright."
"good to hear." truthfully i didn't give a damn. i hardly knew her.
"i'm only twenty-four."
"i know you are."
"it’s not like i could get better twat..." he paused to smoke his cigarette and replace our beer.
"there's just the possibility that i Could."
"i know what you're saying." i really did. i understood every bit of it and even more than what i should have at that age.
it was quiet between us for a little while, i knew he was thinking about her pros and cons. if he could actually marry anyone and truly be happy. i thought it was an odd pressure that society places on its era of people. How they came about with the average age that a person should settle and know exactly what they want in life, and how to get it. It’s a recommendation, a suggested number that if pressured into can cause extreme side-effects. It’s the median guideline set by those that chose to bend and give beyond what they should have to, and this number is what they gamble our social security and other financial investments on. Its this number that if a marginal number of people follow then they can put the money back without ever letting out a squeal.
We both were wearing unshaven, Thompson type faces. Haggard and torn from booze and drugs, scarred by a crow bar and scarred by too much understanding. Looking at him I realized how much had changed since last we saw and drank with each other. I think it had been two years our roads crossed. Two years stranded in Europe, and he was two years stranded in life. The anarchistic bonfire behind his eyes had grown cold and tired replaced by warm coals that show they’re not long for life. He was thinner but developing a gut that fell over his waistband. I was still thin, eating only when I had to and not a bite more.
“whatever happened to that cherry you were eating?” he was referring to the girl I had been with last time we spoke.
“she’s doing alright I guess.”
“you guess?”
“yeah, I haven’t talked to her yet, haven’t contacted each other since I left for Europe.”
“what?”
“she said I was smoking & drinking too much. I disagreed but was willing to compromise at a lot.”
“and…”
“well, she didn’t think I should go in the condition I was in, and I did.”
“are you going to call her?”
“no”
“why?”
“and say what? ‘hey guess what, now I am drinking too much?’”
“s`ppose you’re right.”
“then most of it is wrong.”
He laughed and got up from the table pointing to the open door marked “MEN”. I nodded and drank from my bottle, choking its throat as if it had harmed me in some way.
The bulb beneath our glass popped leaving us the only unlit table in the joint.
I thought honestly and sensibly about calling her, may be just to see how she was. My pockets were silent when I swooshed my pants searching for fifty cents to make a phone call. After a sip of beer I decided that I wouldn’t ring her, perhaps ever. There were other people less fortunate that would receive a call from me.
The first person I thought of was Elise from Belgium. We had met at this opening of a new coffee house that was intended to be the new poetry site. It turned out to be bogus and we wound up getting two fifths of brandy and dreaming on a park bench through the early hours of night. And night, the great equalizer that it is, led us back to her apartment where we tangled, folded and unfolded each other before sleeping in the warm coma sun.
I was thinking about the small of her back, the way it felt against my stomach, about ringing her, inviting her to come to America. Pete came back to the table silently.
“so you noticed the real show has started.” I saw he was grinning but I hadn’t noticed any difference in the show. my eyes were on the cherry on the stage but all I could see was Elise’s apartment, one of the last times we saw each other. I was sitting on the edge of her bed, nude, watching the wall. we had just made it in every way possible. we were both drunk, it was sloppy sunshine sex, the moon still just a smoky orb in the sky, I was ready but she refused to let me out. I had to fight to get out from beneath her and barely escaped spilling onto her thighs. like I said, I was on the bed nude, and she was raising a cigarette carefully to my lips with it in between her toes.
“what about the show?”
“look and listen.”
he was pointing to the stage knowing damn well that I hadn’t returned from wherever my mind had been.
“is she fucking the pole?”
“damn straight she is.”
he said it as if this was a scheduled event, like he was ordering a #4 meal at take out place.
the red-head had grabbed the pole above the grease and was riding it like some deviant carousel sex-horse.
what was more impressive was how they had managed a microphone so close without picking up the audience, and with no clothes to tuck or hide behind. through the loud speakers her moans and whines shadowed the songs in the background.
“yeah, this is a real show.”
the sarcasm wasn’t subtle the least. I turned away lit a cigarette and tasted the crisp pop of a fresh beer.
lennon was singing about a warm gun as two girls worked out of their clothes
and into each other. the red-head left the stage unnoticed.
the night was young, still so many long hours left and I thought about the contradiction in my perception of time. the hours were long and slow, like a nearly drowned worm, the days had no loyalty to either cause but the life in general was short. between the two of us we had seen life miraculously quit without warning at least a dozen times.
but they were the dead ones and the night was but an infant with a freshly slapped ass. plenty of time for it to grow old and desperate, time left to leave us bleeding out in the splunk water collecting over a clogged drain. or worse, drowned in the chocolate cream that filled the toilets in every place like this.
the stage was covered with clothing and items that had been used in every orifice of the body. there were the strip club ping-pong balls (a few of them still rolling around the glass); a few leather accessories (masks and whips etc…); a chain and hand-cuffs; a rolling pin; a variety of fruits and vegetables along with a plethora of store-bought dildos.
a trash bag blew off the stage caught in the current of the ceiling fans, and I could only think that it was used for a suffocation act. I couldn’t remember most of the acts that had passed, and it very well could have been used as a tarp for an oil fuck or something along those lines. the sudden hope that it was a suffocation thing, and the glimmering idea that luckily one of them died filled my joints and made my skull feel like it was caught in a mudslide.
I needed fresh air.
I lit a cigarette as I walked through the doors and into wet sand that felt more like an enormous cow patty. it was raining, hard, and it looked like it had been for awhile. there was a stream running off the road and into the dirt parking lot that created a hybrid of quick sand and a small pond. the entire lot and building was surrounded by a forest that resembled the area where the cow-cunts of our high school lived. local is everything for a mood and the environment was laid back but there was that unsettled feeling in my colon, the one that makes you think something terrible is lurking in the darkness waiting to molest you in every way. that feeling in your large intestines that isn’t a knot but more like a blistering ulcer leaking mucous into your shit shaft. I felt like a child in a sand box. the world around me was green and grey, the road illuminated occasionally was like watching a glass of water shatter on an onyx table beneath a spotlight.
I walked around the building close to its shore smoking my cigarette thinking about the works I had in progress. thinking about the money advances and royalties and contracts and accountants and taxes; interviews and love and mortgages and leases and the term contract and how it means non-negotiable binding order of conduct and percentage of the signer’s time, which is ultimately a percentage of their life. I was about to come to terms with these things when I passed a groaning man leaning against the wall. his eyes must have been closed, they shot open like white splatter marks on a black wall and followed me as I continued around the building.
upon circling back to the front entrance the thickness of cottage cheese thinned to its normal consistency of murky confusion and I leaned against the wall and smoked a joint. there’s something mystical about the initial cloud of smoke, it has the appearance of having wisdom, emotion, something that half the people alive lacked. may be it was just quiet understanding.
memory doesn't have wire taps or raids. memory doesn't hand out your privacy like grocery coupons to corporations.
so it’s in memory where some choose to live, under the whims of recollections rather than Bugs and sirens.
i was lying in bed, a mechanical sound much like a scallop boat filling my left ear, staring at the night between my face and the back of Sara's head. the air was cool outside, inside felt warm and moldy like morning after drinking. paranoia had the windows shut, drapes pulled and pinned in their stomachs; front door shut and dead-bolted. there was no circulation of air within the room.
i had turned on the air conditioning, or the powerful fan, and moved the typewriter into the bathroom hoping it would make fewer ruckuses. i was wronged. i typed six words before the keys sounded like a leather whip against a bare-ass. six words that sounded like a string of fire-crackers.
i stretched onto the bed and resumed staring at the hair that i knew was there but couldn't see. from somewhere amidst the night, hair and water-logged engine grew the sore moans of a cat by the trash bins. it was a noise like someone slowly carving their initials into the trunk of a car. a train derailing into a scrap yard. or the tin man drunk and rusted,down on his luck, falling down and trying to stand up right again.
it was somewhere in this stew that i remembered a night a few years back, before Sara; before the kidney ailment, a night at this bar...
it was a little strip-club on the outskirts of a city not worth remembering, i'll say it was a tuesday night. the building looked like a southern shack, held together by mud; shit and kept standing by old cargo trailers that must not have been moved in this decade. generally speaking the building was a mess. we were safer in a paper bag drenched in gasoline situated fire-place-front.
prime real-estate.
the inside was where they had spent their money. the stage was in the middle of the club and the seating just big banged out from there. the platform was a giant glass circle with solid glass pillars to reinforce the surface for the weight of the girls. i assumed that this also prevented the girls from going a little over the weight limit the owner instituted. within the circle were tropical fish. exotic breeds that the normal person wouldn't have the slightest guess as to its name. i looked at them as i entered and was more impressed by their colours than anything else about them, though that could have been their entire appeal. i honestly didn't care.
a line of white lights wrapped around the stage and shot through the tables indicating where the walkways were. from the second floor the whole image would look like a poorly drawn sun. a big, wet, fish-filled sun.
it was gruesome to see but there was that charade of intrigue and shunning. the glance to see it again but only to become irritated or disgusted and have to look away once more. it was like being young staring at a dead animal with a stick in your hand. the sight was like a scab begging to be scratched and ripped from the fresh grapefruit skin beneath.
i was sitting at a table on the second floor, over-looking the dancers perfectly, that had the colour of a tired piece of charcoal. it was a frosted glass top with dark wooden legs and in the center-beneath the glass- was a red bulb. every other table but this one was a whorehouse red while mine blushed at the mentioning of sex.
the upper floor was lit entirely red, only the 'exit' signs were different, which were blue. the first floor, as expected, was blue and the escape signs were red. on the jaw of the balcony they had anchored blue and red lights so where they intersected a purple fog grew. it was in this grape-drink coloured cloud that my mind thought i should drink more of my beer.
"so how's your family?" i took a drink and shrugged. i was staring at the red-head that took the stage. she was covered in silver glitter and shimmered like a fish or diamonds behind a flame inside a cavern. the red spot-light turned the blue of the room into a purple where ever she walked. it melted over her like hot taffy, it turned on her hair.
"i guess they're doing alright." i sighed and slugged my beer back. "my sister can't keep her own head, my mother hardly ever gets out of bed and my father, he's eating pills for meals waiting to die-bothering them both while he waits." we both pulled a beer from the case he bought as we entered.
"did your dad have to have his foot amputated?" Pete wasn't paying any mind, he was staring at the match on the stage cat-crawling across the glass. i couldn't imagine that feeling pleasant on her knees. it didn't appear greased and all i could think about was the streaking sound i heard inside my skull everytime she slid an inch. he was an interesting fellow. Pete had his mind about him, knew what he liked and disliked and ate plentifully from the things he disliked. he was a vagrant, as though i wasn't, and was fully conscious of the coming Armageddon, end, whatever you call it, he was aware that we were inside of the vortex spinning dizzily downwards, willing to grin and laugh with whoever chose to accompany him.
two men came onto the platform and proceeded to spray, what only could have been a lubricant, onto the brass pole in the center of the stage. for reasons easily blamable on alcohol, i could only imagine the pole as sewing needle pushed through a small spool of thread. they finished shooting their loads and one after the other stepped off the stage.
one of the two men turned to watch the red-head fold in half raising her ass in the air.
"how's the wife?" he heard me through his fortress of a daydream and drank his beer down then lit a cigarette.
"we're not married."
"pretty damn close."
"Dana's alright."
"good to hear." truthfully i didn't give a damn. i hardly knew her.
"i'm only twenty-four."
"i know you are."
"it’s not like i could get better twat..." he paused to smoke his cigarette and replace our beer.
"there's just the possibility that i Could."
"i know what you're saying." i really did. i understood every bit of it and even more than what i should have at that age.
it was quiet between us for a little while, i knew he was thinking about her pros and cons. if he could actually marry anyone and truly be happy. i thought it was an odd pressure that society places on its era of people. How they came about with the average age that a person should settle and know exactly what they want in life, and how to get it. It’s a recommendation, a suggested number that if pressured into can cause extreme side-effects. It’s the median guideline set by those that chose to bend and give beyond what they should have to, and this number is what they gamble our social security and other financial investments on. Its this number that if a marginal number of people follow then they can put the money back without ever letting out a squeal.
We both were wearing unshaven, Thompson type faces. Haggard and torn from booze and drugs, scarred by a crow bar and scarred by too much understanding. Looking at him I realized how much had changed since last we saw and drank with each other. I think it had been two years our roads crossed. Two years stranded in Europe, and he was two years stranded in life. The anarchistic bonfire behind his eyes had grown cold and tired replaced by warm coals that show they’re not long for life. He was thinner but developing a gut that fell over his waistband. I was still thin, eating only when I had to and not a bite more.
“whatever happened to that cherry you were eating?” he was referring to the girl I had been with last time we spoke.
“she’s doing alright I guess.”
“you guess?”
“yeah, I haven’t talked to her yet, haven’t contacted each other since I left for Europe.”
“what?”
“she said I was smoking & drinking too much. I disagreed but was willing to compromise at a lot.”
“and…”
“well, she didn’t think I should go in the condition I was in, and I did.”
“are you going to call her?”
“no”
“why?”
“and say what? ‘hey guess what, now I am drinking too much?’”
“s`ppose you’re right.”
“then most of it is wrong.”
He laughed and got up from the table pointing to the open door marked “MEN”. I nodded and drank from my bottle, choking its throat as if it had harmed me in some way.
The bulb beneath our glass popped leaving us the only unlit table in the joint.
I thought honestly and sensibly about calling her, may be just to see how she was. My pockets were silent when I swooshed my pants searching for fifty cents to make a phone call. After a sip of beer I decided that I wouldn’t ring her, perhaps ever. There were other people less fortunate that would receive a call from me.
The first person I thought of was Elise from Belgium. We had met at this opening of a new coffee house that was intended to be the new poetry site. It turned out to be bogus and we wound up getting two fifths of brandy and dreaming on a park bench through the early hours of night. And night, the great equalizer that it is, led us back to her apartment where we tangled, folded and unfolded each other before sleeping in the warm coma sun.
I was thinking about the small of her back, the way it felt against my stomach, about ringing her, inviting her to come to America. Pete came back to the table silently.
“so you noticed the real show has started.” I saw he was grinning but I hadn’t noticed any difference in the show. my eyes were on the cherry on the stage but all I could see was Elise’s apartment, one of the last times we saw each other. I was sitting on the edge of her bed, nude, watching the wall. we had just made it in every way possible. we were both drunk, it was sloppy sunshine sex, the moon still just a smoky orb in the sky, I was ready but she refused to let me out. I had to fight to get out from beneath her and barely escaped spilling onto her thighs. like I said, I was on the bed nude, and she was raising a cigarette carefully to my lips with it in between her toes.
“what about the show?”
“look and listen.”
he was pointing to the stage knowing damn well that I hadn’t returned from wherever my mind had been.
“is she fucking the pole?”
“damn straight she is.”
he said it as if this was a scheduled event, like he was ordering a #4 meal at take out place.
the red-head had grabbed the pole above the grease and was riding it like some deviant carousel sex-horse.
what was more impressive was how they had managed a microphone so close without picking up the audience, and with no clothes to tuck or hide behind. through the loud speakers her moans and whines shadowed the songs in the background.
“yeah, this is a real show.”
the sarcasm wasn’t subtle the least. I turned away lit a cigarette and tasted the crisp pop of a fresh beer.
lennon was singing about a warm gun as two girls worked out of their clothes
and into each other. the red-head left the stage unnoticed.
the night was young, still so many long hours left and I thought about the contradiction in my perception of time. the hours were long and slow, like a nearly drowned worm, the days had no loyalty to either cause but the life in general was short. between the two of us we had seen life miraculously quit without warning at least a dozen times.
but they were the dead ones and the night was but an infant with a freshly slapped ass. plenty of time for it to grow old and desperate, time left to leave us bleeding out in the splunk water collecting over a clogged drain. or worse, drowned in the chocolate cream that filled the toilets in every place like this.
the stage was covered with clothing and items that had been used in every orifice of the body. there were the strip club ping-pong balls (a few of them still rolling around the glass); a few leather accessories (masks and whips etc…); a chain and hand-cuffs; a rolling pin; a variety of fruits and vegetables along with a plethora of store-bought dildos.
a trash bag blew off the stage caught in the current of the ceiling fans, and I could only think that it was used for a suffocation act. I couldn’t remember most of the acts that had passed, and it very well could have been used as a tarp for an oil fuck or something along those lines. the sudden hope that it was a suffocation thing, and the glimmering idea that luckily one of them died filled my joints and made my skull feel like it was caught in a mudslide.
I needed fresh air.
I lit a cigarette as I walked through the doors and into wet sand that felt more like an enormous cow patty. it was raining, hard, and it looked like it had been for awhile. there was a stream running off the road and into the dirt parking lot that created a hybrid of quick sand and a small pond. the entire lot and building was surrounded by a forest that resembled the area where the cow-cunts of our high school lived. local is everything for a mood and the environment was laid back but there was that unsettled feeling in my colon, the one that makes you think something terrible is lurking in the darkness waiting to molest you in every way. that feeling in your large intestines that isn’t a knot but more like a blistering ulcer leaking mucous into your shit shaft. I felt like a child in a sand box. the world around me was green and grey, the road illuminated occasionally was like watching a glass of water shatter on an onyx table beneath a spotlight.
I walked around the building close to its shore smoking my cigarette thinking about the works I had in progress. thinking about the money advances and royalties and contracts and accountants and taxes; interviews and love and mortgages and leases and the term contract and how it means non-negotiable binding order of conduct and percentage of the signer’s time, which is ultimately a percentage of their life. I was about to come to terms with these things when I passed a groaning man leaning against the wall. his eyes must have been closed, they shot open like white splatter marks on a black wall and followed me as I continued around the building.
upon circling back to the front entrance the thickness of cottage cheese thinned to its normal consistency of murky confusion and I leaned against the wall and smoked a joint. there’s something mystical about the initial cloud of smoke, it has the appearance of having wisdom, emotion, something that half the people alive lacked. may be it was just quiet understanding.