CONTENTS

(we're hit)

Wake up feeling like death all over. It's my last bloody chapter. I'm suppose to go to work now?!

She's done it, first and foremost, fuckin' the daylights out of us, then casting acupple'a poor empty pricks aside. The fag hadn't even cum yet, when I hit her. I dragged the bastard off her. . . and you know the rest. We fought till he broke the nightstand falling off the bed. Crazed. They thought they had a sucker, did they? Sonova'bitch-I gave it to him, all right. Went in dry. Kike screamed good. S'what he wanted-told me he would-put her body in the car, drive'r to mom's and drop her off. Say the light fell from the top shelf, knocked her cold-n'all the passion n'fuckin. Ha! Mom'd like that! Say she was comin' for dinner-it was freak accident, hope she'll be all right hand wringing queer act-she'll believe'im. Funny though, all that humpin' an dumpin' bodies on the bed-wasn't exactly subtle! Deidre remembers him getting real stiff, archin' back-startin' to crush her. Getting ready to squirt, the bastard! That's all, too. God-damn. Wake up next mornin' in a headache, fingerin' that gooey panty swoon juice, and remember fondly, things that never happened.

Damage Report!

There's a shampoo you apply for dry damaged hair that, if spilled on coinage, turns it black. Imagine . . . an over the counter acid, available in your local grocery store, ostensibly for hair-health! Eleven hours after the bottle split in my loose change box, I couldn't read the faces of any currency. Not that I needed to, mind you-"In God We Trust." didn't seem to apply, when I opened the paper and read about a six year old who nearly beat a baby to death, and the little girl who shot the cable TV repairman point-blank in the face, because the neighborhood drug-dealing pre-16 pedophile told her to. What God is that we're suppose to Trust In? Quetzecotyl? Fuck. I'm getting late. The toaster blue-haze alarms another charcoal slab in the immediate-making, the clock speeds fifteen 'fore nine, and I look up from morbidity rag, jam a poorly-margereen'd slice of transformed squishy-white into mouth (cascade volumes of crumbs into still-open briefcase) still managing a curse or two, before standing up so quickly my chair goes flying into a butcher block, shattering a bowl of grout-hard corn flakes. It was the other breakfast I was too late to eat. Okay, I'm a liar. It was last Thursday's. I ain't afraid to admit I don't like doing dishes. Once a week, wherever they are, whether they need it or not. My motto. Clean it up this evening . . . gotta forge ahead now. . . day gettin' on without me. Better to be early, so I grovel the single ladies at leisure. And Deidre. I'd be more relaxed, but the driving sucks. Some days, it just sucks more than others. It'll be 'one of those days', now I'm late. On the run now-The cheesed ambiance of oak bangs its hollow foam-core emptiness on overshiny fake-brass hinges. I fumble the untold mumbo-jumbo of keys, wiggling the kinky one up and down and up and down until the damaged, twice-pried deadbolt relents, slides its hardened self into slot. Gotta-remember oil, for the thousandth time I gotta remember ta-do something like that. Deidre's going to be piling shit in the IN box, as I jog the shortcut cross the fresh-dew grass, on my little rabbit run everyone from the nameless A block uses, even though it muddies our shoes. Every moment's weight makes us do things we probably wouldn't do when there's nowhere to rush to, which is just about none of the time. A whole life rushing to finish some inanity, start another one, or rush get home to take it easy. My car! A fucking ticket!? HAVE YOU GOT GOD IN YOUR LIFE? says the flyer frozen to a windshield of every car in sight. I peeloff bit by red-dyed bit, as shreds from the wet suction to dirty glass pile on my hood. I'd leave it stuck there, but it's smack on the driver's side. What is this! Some kind of celestial conspiracy? God is dead. I read it somewhere. I'm gonna call this church to the carpet for making me late. For making me miss my lust-session. There's going to be scraps of God paper all over this street as people frantically try to peel the shit off, before we're fired. That's some kind holy work; ditching sheep in a heap of debt, because the innocent grass-chewers were forced to read this friggin' paper. Smearly shit all over-what did they use to glue this on?! (More key fumbling) CLICK! pull door open shut it on the seat belt (on cue) turn starter, stop. One revolution. Pump accelerator three times, the last time only half-way down. Wait one whole minute; catch breath. Turn on radio, get the channel without talking-something speedy, to egg driver on, all without rushing, and turn radio off crank straight-on-thru till the beast comes to life. Always the tenth, or eleventh turnover. Always, as land-yacht battery tires-begins to die. Engine relents as juice gives out. Don't ask me why. Something Karmic. . . It's my. . . demonic ritual getting the old girl going. Twenty seconds' warm up-can't afford any more, tunes on talking bump tape in. . . gear (reverse) ease pedal (drive)-roar. Pulse racing. Yo-sir! My 398 Olds rears towards freeway. Look out Hondas, a car's coming. No Jap tinsel on this baby! Ten seconds later, my tape deck jams. I was sitting at the stoplight when the terrible screech dreaded warble announced: I'm accept application for frenetic magnetic sacrifice. I tried to stop the cannibal, even shut the engine down (deck ran all the time) while angry traffic snarled, preparing leap to green, I pry frankincense and myrrh of Memorex dust, scorching plastic, from the maw of the hungry beast, though it's way too late. Ditch the affair out the window, switch to FM dial whatever shows up/sublimates the empty-head attention junkies. They talk about his crash. "He had an unquenchable, king-sized laugh." Rock-hard men openly wept. It was a perfect day perfect track perfect practice lap immediately before the gigantic race of all races, and his tire goes flat. Hit the wall at 230 miles an hour, and isn't that a metaphor of life? The most experienced man, the better's-bet of a car, all the right conditions, everybody loves him, an' Fate plunks a chunk-o-metal smack-dab the middle-o' his way. Shit. That dude probably had all the secretaries he could handle. Read between radio lines, eye tear-jerking proper news response, thinkin' 'bout all the worthless schmucks like me hitting our brakes on the freeway for no-good reasons, having three doubles, and piloting our petrol bombs home. I think about that until his life seems like the hari-kari cassette tape; makes me worry where I'll get another one. Light green home free usual delay as people wake up hit accelerator and next news story… Commuter on-ramp blocked by giant crane laboriously maneuvering way to small dirt road, where developer heydays watch mute video updates of giants crashing soundlessly hydraulic-clippers down. Newcaster omits: They are too busy to hear the tree hit, for on-the-telephone schemings next environmantle rape-pillage. . . Yea. No luck at all today. I sit, engine idle, awaiting the heavy machinations of people devoting whole lives to elimination, ostensibly bleeding and gushing their self-serving apropos of bettering humankind with more tacky condo-dwellings debtors will boost the national economy buying, and filling full of worthless consumer-index shit. So. This is my life, isn't it? I sit here waiting out the lumbering logging crane's painful ten-point turns, while the overpaid flagman makes drivers' head trips, holding trembling hand on the horn for impatience He's just doing his job without a good-gawdamned thought for his kids' kids' legacy. We're all deaf and blind, to put yup with this shit, sitting here. Filthy rude and greedy for a minute more time, to cut the minutes we're all too far behind to catch back up to. Ignorant bastards. That's us. I'm there driving the bulldozers too. Glee, I see they're having trouble negotiating my philosophical corner, while the Cats so-neatly tidy living-breathing plant/animal wreckage, wondering why the crane isn't piling precious wooden cargo onto waiting log trucks. I wonder whose industry ministers slake a sexual thirst on three hundred year old sentinels like these, meeting sharp steel teeth? It's getting too late for on-time now, by any stretch of the imagination. I curse the flagman, who's making me miss my body-gawk. And the man who hired him, so-on. Old stands remind the work ain't done yet. Ah Jesus! The damned things' stuck-I'm gonna kill some one soon. Hey jokers, we're late!! As they stand around hands in pocket ten of them at large looking helplessly around. Thirty five an hour for stone-kicking. For makiing space developers scheme more cheesy shit into-blanketing an earth we butthead commuters will undoubtedly buy. Providing precious roofs for our heads, they angel plywood, 18" stud rock, and two-point-five car garages styled left right center. One color only. Just as I'm thinking . . . (only because they are holding me up) the ground shook. That crane rocked to its side, snapped clean a hundred foot widow-maker, which gravity smashed to the ground. The lead crew scattered, and I thought Hell! then drove around. A line of cars followed, through the recollected wit of flagman waving. Call us lawbreakers. Christ! Worthless bloomin' entrance. More a mud-slopped demolition zone, than a interstate on-ramp. They need a sign: Vehicles Beware of falling objects one hundred feet high that may kill you. Pull down your pants before entering, and watch your ass good. But I'm moving. Thank god fer that. I see a weasel squished pancake-flat on the road. In front of me. Tessellated. Like my day. Probably ran from its happy hole's bulldozering-thought he'd end it here-in the middle of an alien landing strip, where lights scream by, waiting to pick him up. Well, he got him all right. Poor little bugger. Made himself a road-waffle-example of what life can do to anyone. End of the deepening sorrow, less debris, enough of that, I'm later than ever, push the accelerator down V-8's floorboard. Bozo moves over, lets me roar in-flash my lights, clear the air-bag tinsel pretending it belongs in the fast lane. Left is domain of the predators; the two-ton marvels-the rife 60's-70's fire-breath monsters-blowin' oil fumes an suckin' doomsday mileage from nineteen gallon tanks. America ate Tyrannosaurus Rex for breakfast, and will keep on eating him, blowin RayLube-by-the-case cut your product code rebate fumes all over you yupped-out flashy RV four wheel drive bullshit-mobiles. Yea, that's right, moovem on over! (Cattle.) That's right. Use your blinker. Safe lane changes. Dumbshits. We; the people; reduced to freeway robots, rushing to nothing-jobs we'll soon-enough but not soon enough rush home from. Crazy. It's all crazy. Move over Buick, you're out'a here. That's when the cop car saw me. I was rushin' Sirocco wind, and the bastard lasered me from the far side of the road, prowling for right-lane rocketeers. Ten seconds. If you floor it from here to there, that left-exit three hundred yards distant, he'll never know what happened. An ooze of traffic too thick for him to enter. . . get up to speed before. . . I'm gone. So I did. Life's a turning point in life. Not sure why I did it, this nick-of-time rush, like you couldn't botch it-did the exact-right thing at the last precise moment it would work. The engine wore its barely-measurable bits of metal off main bearings, waking up with a dropped-gear roar that slammed me back in my seat. Punchin' the old Yello's like lighting a half-inch fuse on a beefy bottle rocket. At first, nothing happens, then . . .POW! wHOOSH, and FLASH-BANG! All that undetonated four-barrel carb gas ignites in one heady-assed explosion the previous-owners motor-mad after-market cams gave hyper-ventilation to. When the high-octane shit goes down, Yello ram-jets forward at loose-king front-end adrenaline shot speed. When I hit the off ramp, copper was just pulling into traffic. Yello's brakes suck, but I stop, all careening 'round the slightly banked corner, as I scramble frontal lobes full of guilt fear and a need to stop this adolescent charade provide the officer with two limp wrists of stuffed wallet to shackle, and riffle at will. Later. A barely inconspicuous U-ee at a hundred and fifty and almighty God hath provideth broken-asphalt alley for muffler-shredding, and stinky ash cans. So: Exit, stage left. Bravo! peek around the corner. Officer speeds down ramp, heads straight. Straight out of sight. I get back in. I sit there, proud motor off, wonder-wise with what I've done. Everything is re-arranged. Later than ever, Afraid to leave my hideout n'case law returns. Shit. The pullmepushyourbuttons morning! On the other hand, I had to leave, for that-exact same reason. It was a stupid thing to do. It wrecked everything, really. I felt the resistance constricted-vein pulse scouring the cinched-down system. I felt the frontal lobes. Only the gut was happy, gurgling its coffee-rush, giddy with the monkey wrench it threw. I turn key hesitantly, thinking route out. I'll get caught, and go to jail. So what? Never been, part of me calmly decides. What an ignorant fool that part is, and 'Say there son, what's your idea of fun?!' They'll show me. 'Watch your ass, buddy-boy!' Snipes, making an example of me, cast the SOB to lions, take license-he's finished. Finito. Dead. In this culture, no wheels = reproduction nada. Car-less people are lesser members of species. Farmed out to a hippie camp where hitchhiking's still legal. Is a saprophyte lower? Frontal lobes are bulging, currently terrified by everything. It's only eight-ten, and the world is bubbling whiskey wort, frothing its hot elixir waiting yeast-time-containment, for brains of people like me to drink-up! By ten-thirty am, I could be an entirely different person. I'm not sure why I thought that.

All decks respond!

I stopped to buy a box of powdered sugar doughnuts, ostensibly, to cure my cop-frazzled nerves. I called my boss's boss, told him his need to know lies-police-tales cloaked in bus-accident mystery; my precious car is damaged, and I'll be there as soon as I can you bet yes I will. He's an idiot to believe I care that much. I muse life slipping through my fingers, laboring all the good pussy I've missed. Synchronicity: grunge-girl tells her hoop-lipped boyfriend she's pregnant to left, sits crossleg on the one-of-two white plastic tables, dropping tear-duct water over the loss of the fun and games. Sex'll never be the same with her he's thinkin' Ohshit gotta bail on this bitch, down deep, glad-no happy-news reunion married '50-style post-OOPS! coital missionary-position shotgun law. Whoa.. And I think I got bad shit on the burner! Ho! I'm slinkin' up to their little shit-in-the-diaper problem 'cuz makes me feel better, standin' there stupid with sugar feces and crumbs collecting in my fold of suit rumpled by too much sitting position . She's half-beside herself when she notices my nose, driping large and sullen-soaked over private parts' bad-news gloom. Emotion is departing. I see it wick into the realization the public places' lack of copyright, make nosers-in normal. I wanna ask her: How real is it? Your emotion. How real is the thing you completely control? And then I think bout Deidre. I think about raping her sometimes, and if it's real. Some Doritos-lugging fast-food faast lane twelve items only shoppers are flinging post-class statistics. "You wanna know how many o my students are on Prozac?" "Nation wide, they say . . ." %, and so on. " "Here's one for you: (paper turn-page) How many dollars per second do Americans spend on illegal drugs?" The expensive-rag over-educated letters after name couple contrast the bedecked with metal, braids, and uneducated anarchy wise, who slunk off, seeking less invasive surroundings to doom and gloom. Ya. Rape. Intersects something pro-active. I brush my white shirt's stiffness, and saunter out after them. "You got the time?" I ask hip-dude, knowin' he don't. It drags him up from slavery. "Nah." You're in a heap of trouble son. Better start counting your minutes as a conscious-free man. Shrug, and head for car. In cars everything makes more sense. Cars'r my little cocoon from a large invasive world. We pupate in them, emerging civil, or barbaric, depending on traffic. They are our analysts . . . our pupils, kin; lovers really, don'tcha think? I love talking to myself, especially in them, when nobody can hear me. Sky's starting to rain, and I don't know where I'm going yet. And rain makes cars sound ugly-that spinning tire water-thrown teethclench-the wet sibilance penetrates your doors and windows. Makes my nerves grate. Worst time to be outside-too loud to think, getting splashed, feeling left out of the heater-on tunes-up talk-on-the-phone race. Life's suddenly torpid. Caution throws itself to rain-soaked wind, as I decide to go to work, as if nothing amazing happened. Isn't that our answer of the day? In a million years, we haven't changed its flip-sheet. But I'll do it! Why holler in an empty phone? You need a number to call, or it's all charade. So now I'm driving there; but I haven't changed the way I'm driving. I'm gingerly motoring straight down this-here arterial, headed for the freeway. One moment lost, the next found. Hardly worth mentioning, rally (Amen). Every where is no where Intel you finger a reason to take you towards some conclusion. (Like contemplating a deadly sin or two.) I like it, and mentally write on a big blackboard with an ice pick. I scratch proverb painfully out, letter by ill-formed letter, while stoplight doesn't take humanity into account by making me wait its warning reds to empty-side streets straight-ons kittycorner barren treacherous turn lanes. It seems less painful this way. Intel. Yee-ah. Yea-way. And the street opens to the sweeping arc that defines 398's turbulent love affairs with the things that loosen suspensions, wear tires, and generally grind cars down. I punch the JATO-pedal again, just for affect. Just like cummin'. Just for a second or two. Eat some powdered doughnuts and go to work. Why the hell not? What else is there to do? I turn on the radio, out of character-it's usually on before I start the car, and glance down unconsciously at a pile of tape that used to be music. Fuckit. News is better. Traffic news: answer me this oh wise transistors of auto-seek : Is freeway B or freeway A herd-animal mentality bozo-commuter better? Pertinent numbers stand computer-jammed still at NPR as angry traffic slows in rain designed to smear greasy across acid-etched windshields nit-chipped by near-miss rocks and at this rate I'll never arrive anywhere I lock the DX button tryina crackle of some 59 year-old lady who's seein' red complainin' bout the free housin' she's ahad fer sum forty-seven years. 'It just ain't what it used to be, (zzzz-zzztt) webe deservin' better!' and why is that? Why do we (idiotic commuters) pay your single-grand-motherhood way through life? a cheeky interviewer ranted and raved her. A host of illiterate nardowells ply him next, (more sstzzzst and kgrratgt) ratatattatting dem bad-ole drug dealers an dem bad-ole politicians whose money-saving Republicanisms knocked down dare-friends' rathole others wisely knew as concrete high-rise fulla people nobody wants ta-see. Fuckin'hell. Is this my life? Caught in a sardine can full of unused horsepower, listening to bullshit? It sounded full of breath and death, as I waged war with Mr. Electronic Tuner, seeking decimal points to clarity, as brake lights blare, rain comes harder, and I'm forced to consider Sis. Damn. I'm ne-ver gonna get there. If I had a fear-assuage car phone, I could ring boss, rev my engine and prove it. "Displaced HUD. . ." wipers short the radio out, every second sweep, . . .are suing a government poised to change hands. Cheap house bye-bye. Lawyers gettin' their neurons riled, thinkin' fat no-work paychecks for get-evens and then some. (Bastards are on to something.) Yea. Sis. I think my morning sucks. I try not to tink. "Man sues for minor cosmetic damage, gets three million. (ssxzzt) A scientific expert barely detected damage, which in his report, he calls a natural imperfection in the owner's high-tech paint job. Owner didn't notice for an aeon; however, this car's a direct extension of a $40,000 personality. He feels slighted. He's been insulted. Three million is a trifle. Owner now owns a depression only six million will solve. Lawyer gets half, after all. Fair's fair. N.P.R. Gotta love it. They got momentum. More than the traffic. More than Sis. Damn. That girl's life's a disaster. (And she thinks mine is!) I don't even care which freeway-don't even want to know. She's so bought in, she worries when raise the slightest provocative thought. Makes me shudder to think I'm KO'd like her; and she worries . . . whell . . . They're tearing new assholes today. I can't believe this stuff's on the air. Lawyers are too busy lobbying to Deep-Six the Settlement Cap, while judges assume psychiatric records fair game for courtrooms. Rape victim admits her discarded fear she dresses provocatively knee-jerk "my fault" guilt-program offense lawyer gets a copy claims her crying cum running-out half-mad testimony I need this for evidence so judge what's-his-face calls it legal psychologist refuses file her with big-bail revoke your practice drag your sorry ass through stinking litigative diatribal mud fine the shit to extinction trying (single-handedly) protect the privacy of deep inner fears wrecked an' ruined but naturally, confidence remains secret between lawyer and raped-you client who may-well have openly admitted one-point five inches shy of a total fess he'd, "Dun the bitch goood." And who makes law? You've gotta hand it to them. Lawyers probably don't listen to this station. They're disgusted with its truth. They'll button-push their favorite jazz Porche five in-dash CD micro-sense around sound, or click DX out, and shallow-surf three inches of dirty waters' accumulation on our sleazy, accident-prone roadway. Fuckin' traffic. Jackknifed semi. Got to be. "Traffic report coming right up, after . . ." Forget it; I'm stuck. I don't need to take it out on someone. Might as well turn off my engine, just in case. Have a gallon or two . . . maybe more. Hard to tell. Last thing I need is to a flag trooper down, bum an imperial, then flash a APB smile. You're history buddy. FknnGimme them skinny wrists n-might as well grab your ankles right here! Just to keep his In-Charge in-shape. Real good, now hold shake-pen and sign this, hand-swatting your YES, I DID WRONG! while the law watch (and get off, if you know what I mean). Don't matter if a free American don't believe it-gots-ta-sign anyhow. It's only life, after all. I'm thinkin', 'bout my sister again, firmly set up in her Mount Olympian Mortar. That's literal. Olympia Washington-a two kids' baby stolen from the queue of solutions waiting to set your life right back on track. Mmmm. One was only a big problem, so why not try two? Two is numerologically a better correct mumbo-jumbo digit. Second one's the cinch, makes you mellow out; well guess what Sis, It Didn't Work, did it!? Say so in other ways, but can't admit it. Sign your name on the dotted line. If it wasn't the damn-nicest up-un comin' don't bother locking your door downtown little city full of politically correct hangers-on. . . Jesus. She'd be round the loco's-bend if she ever tore open the shopping bag. Look what you bought! Gremlins. And you thought it was happiness!? They'd string her up, and scuttle whatever she's done-start Sis right back over again, binge her on high-cal "happiness", for a change. Why am I thinking of her? Oh, uh-huh. Babe with grungy arms awaiting her babe arms. Ms. Fast-food fashion stalemate complete with no-bra two-bulge nipple rings. Guess she reminded me of Sis, before she bought her farm. How long are we going to wait here?! One inch at a time ain't gonna git-it. I need feet-yards-miles. Fuckin' useless. Better to think about Deidre. Hmmm. Wonder if she's like my Sis? Fight for piece o-security; get hosed-down by American dream. Thought she'd wake up with the booty when the dream ended. I tried to tell her, in a tight-lipped sort of way. She thinks: What does he know?! Dumb kid out'a high school, shooting fer snatch. Hell, I'm the joker who did her, in that Ain't my fault! court-case sorta-way. Could-a been me, for the unabashed smut I was breathing. Hard to admit it-wouldn't even tell her now. Should I honk? I feel like I gotta do something. Kissing this steering wheel's driving me batty. 'Sit up straight!' What mom used to say. Back starts to hurt, and I hear it. "Sitting up straight's an art. It takes practice.' What do I get from it? I ask her. 'Do it like I do, and you'll see.' Dumb. No kid's gonna to buy that. Immediacy is everything. Slump nose over the wheel, and it hurts; sit up straight, hurt wears off. That's immediacy. Kids need action-equals-result. Like now. I need forward motion. Soon. Immediately! America's suppose to be faster than this. Pretty soon, I'm going to have my morning fantasy all by myself. Right here in the steamy-windowed car. Gridlock. E-mail cell phones' network SATcoms T-1 lines etherneted FAX compressed JPEG pentium fiber-opticized encryptions-for same as before, and more of it. More downtime, traffic, monoxide, more gas from more vegetarians, and greedy complaints from both color collar low brows assessing damage of possible get-rich faster rewards. Hell. People sit stuck in this kind of soggy ideological tragedy forever, afraid to start the motor, fear of running out of petroleum. And I'm later than ever for work. Like I'm suppose to care. Like I do. That bothers me. Insert faster Deidre. We coast the current of all this mayhem clogging the world's arteries, thinking we're stuck not going any-damned where. The ring goes out the window. I'm getting a nice, thick-lipped blowjob as the jackknifed semi (assuming there is one) spills volatile chemicals. Now I don't care. Where's a new station when you need one? . . . She's sucking the shuddering hose dry, and don't I wish! Why oh why is man given a head full of fantasies, and not enough women or time to act them out? This is life's circulatory metaphor. Always changing the channel to heat the brain, so it thinks it's getting something different. A million TV channels and one program. I'm awfully dreary this morning. Worse than the dating game, minus tube-topped playmates. I'm suffering from a lack of stimulation suffering from too much of everything. Ah-philosophy's paternal mish-mass of shit going up fast, and looking like hell warmed over twenty years later. Behaviors as condos we're hot to build and sell not thinking they'll be rubbish in a quarter century. They'll be bulldozed; like the trees-they're eyesores, out of fad, and more potential eyesores await the sacred space. Fuck it. I'm going to run my engine, creep forward, and not worry about optimizing anything. Seek! Seek-n ye-shit find. God's minute of ministry for clog-brain commuters. I turn it up. "Children. . . " God's precious never-uttered words via green-tongue religious politician. Yes brother? I'll send my check. I'll Testify! Please make me feel guilty. I love my guilt. Slap me with aesthetic saplings. Harder. Dig thy holy billyclub deeper into this thick antediluvian numskull. Reverend! Lend me thy pre-radio-TV ears true believers walked ten miles pouring rain driving snow ice-cold sandstone church to hear through. I am empty vessel, awaiting two-sided filthy political inbreeding, and narrow-minded maniacal messages. I am constantly sitting on sin's chair edge, waiting to fall over. You are spokesperson for God is everything everywhere no matter what it is God, but whose lips doth froth from? Omnipresence. You know? Murders and debauchery are grace. He is everything; devil included. Don't dare add the "S". Keep talking, man. Keep gobbling. You're sinking the arc of not recognizing eternity. God I love lamb-stringing these guys. Anything to avoid this deluge. The water washing carcasses of God, brother-you're in an imaginary ego-sway, arcing gravity's bottom of your imaginary no-friction axis. (Makes me feel better, knowing Jesus facilitated this mess, so I could look thorough it.) Extra! Preacher-man afraid of GOD metaphors. He likes wave-gazing, crowded in little stinking boat of what he knows . . . all scavenged from the (impending) cultural-cleanse . . . aquiver with miraculous immensity!? It's Lilliputian. We are ants, afraid of water's surface tension. Cum-on preacher, Walk! What do you fear? Assimilation? The dude's full of shit; you can tell from his falsetto. Life's your devil, buddy. And here's your holy-ghost walk in the snow to Church ears back. Now listen fear suffering inimical feedback airwaves. You're talking yourself into the arc, rolling outa red carpet one-way gangplank, waving to those aboard-but you know what? They are going to eat you. Too many felicitous humans, too few animals. Bastard. You think you're chosen. Don't you? Two organisms minimum, but body has to eat. Which makes me hungry. Tasting some sugar condemmed to the bottom of the box. Olds fuel themselves on news. Am I really hungry, or just bored? News consumed by corpulent gout-riddled lawmakers fear up-and-comings. (Maybe I'm thirsty.) I'm starving, and you're offering me tea, preacher-man. Tell your lambs what knobs to turn on their ears to actually hear these alludes. Now add cream. You've been rewarded. Baaa in unison. Refer to God, as if you know a goddamned thing about it. It's a complete debacle I'm caterwauling your prayer channel. Next! And for God's sake, no Ina-Gotta-Da-Vida. Please. I'd have to shoot somebody idling in front, I think. If I had a machine gun, that is. Prob'ly drown out there, sputtering impotently sad pop-cap bullets. Still, you can't blame the weather. The mean-well pavement is varnished with jagged metal screaming victim oil, dripped and spewn from millions of cars like me. The unforeseen rains down, and bullshit arises, subjugating all mental traction to a bead-up waterproof sheen. Fuckiing powdered shugrr! It's all over my seat! Add stuff. Add morestuff. Feel better yet?! More Sisters riding lawnmowers and plastic deer? How about a bigger house? Lack of control chaos out for a low-octane romp, reminder toxins we spurt rushing hither-thither days' long. . . Isn't there some music!? Scratch of shift frequencies, voices in and out . . . Ad times predetermined to synchronize, keep you where you are. At least ten stations for what? Biffy Lube. Buy our version of everyone else's identical version. Foodway. Ditto Insurance company: Be afraid. E-mail us for further info. (We make scads-omoney from people like you!) Completely Newtonian, as fear, as gravity. You are unable to resist. Succumb! Where ARE THE fucking MUSICIANS on this device?! Those police are jinxing my radio, trying to make me give up, run out of gas, go straight their institution all parent-teacher combos bill Justice, reprogram me to enjoy Bon Marché Big Sale!s, Ice Creamery openings and sodid legal firm banners "In an Accident? Receive your Due! Maximum return for suffering" in helpful hints of neat professional package close-tailgate one-Eight-Hundred clever-codes, for alpha-numeric short-term memory loss. I'm dragging engine-off hand-brake, water squishing between my treads. I'm a reject ad execs bee in a soldiers' hive of buy bitter muck we'll call it honey nigthtmare, for drinks-he's-happy. Here's the new car you've always wanted since last week complete with hi-fi radio seek-tuning comes pre-programmed for maximum brainwash. They'll grin, when I never realize sea foam glares insult, perpetrates big-brother white-boil water conspiracy, and the rest of it-those worst-sides of me. They are showing me the me, me-haggles with, hates and denies. They are also caught in traffic, looking down from their edge of their gopherwood ark. They'z fearin' them turmoil waters, much as anyone else, thinkin' they aren't AH! At last. Fifty feet forward. Oldies-goodies forty-minute marathon nails lath- the horsehair plaster's smeared with, why it smell so bad, a hundred years later . . . listen-hammer's bangin' . . . Credence Clearwater Revival in either end, awaits Brothers in Arms sponsor make-money stories to hang on. (Mold grows down wall!) Commercial hands box its tools. Bastards wrote radio-continuity. They're a seam between leaded sheets o-glass that otherwise, couldn't be windows. Shit. I'm really going off now. Without my favorite car's fayvorite fuckin'radio (barely forgiven for eating my fayvorite tape… again!), my every intimate thought taints madness. Don't knock dat hand dat feeds you; or it won't stretch out the food. That's my little-big philosophy. Kick yur thoughts around a little, then leave 'em alone to heal. S-good fer you, and recently tested the bullshit. Kicked my daily routine a bit too hard to hell-and now look what happened! Stuck in traffic of a no-routine freeway, fearin' for my license (but not really), job on the line . . . "…and the tragedy on I-90…" spin it. Twenty cars down a nasty toilet, I'm sure. Sirens', cops and horror-struck faces. No-way I wanna endure a macabre scenery of as an unimpassioned news voyeur. I take gangst'a rock over the morning scramble for grisly facts. Maybe I'll just roll down the window, and see if I can hear anything. See if . . . that's funny. Pretty mixed, as metaphors go. (Yuck! Like popping a mask, scuba-diving!) So much for that idea. Nothing but wet exhaust and piqued patience. Elton John's doing Honky Chateau-makes the getting-old eyes mist up-he's no schmuck, that singer; but doesn't work. Next! "You're not going anywhere this morning if you're on highway . . ." big surprise news. Dare I risk one more tape? Forage crumb-infested thread-wear carpet for music naturally falling from car's useless change ledge. Fingers feeling sharp wires under-seat check blood on Boyz to Men. Toss tune in, cuts radio's "We now return to the antique ow" for Mickey M. on high-test speed squeaking one hundred decibels of mouseketeerisms. I lunge for the eject button. Radio clips back in.

"A Dubroni instant camera is one serious shutter bug's prize possession. Having paid 15,000 dollars for it . . ." fifteen grand for an instant camera? How antique is it, if Herr Polaroid so recently invented the instant camera? ". . . Narrator eager to tell the uninitiated its colorful history." A scratchy signal. I shut down bored motor, to better hear. "But first, did you know Victorian era parties were so elaborate, a complete service for twelve might constitute nearly two thousand pieces? The ten, to fourteen course meals had so many bizarre utensils associated with each particular dish, only the best-bred drew enough practice with their culinary menagerie, to avoid basic fopaws-alerting guests eager for judgment, to question social breeding." Eating out becomes viscous, under glaring salvos. It's a wonder anyone passed down out myth fancy meals are fun. "Mr. Beatte has researched his camera extensively." I'll bet. I start the engine, pull forward a length or two. Shut it off. "The famous Edwin H. Land was eighty-three years behind a power curve, when he patented his Polaroid Land Camera in 1947. The first successful instant camera was registered in 1884 by a Mr. G. Bourdin, following a 1855 design that employed a built-in miniature darkroom, itself a follower of the little-known 1839 model, which sported a mercury vaporizing tray." Fascination and awe. Trivia beyond my wildest dreams. "'Dubroni' developed the very first rolled paper film, as the photographer inserted chemicals via a narrow glass tube into the rear of the camera's. . ." went on. Hypnotized me. I learned all sorts of things describing the pinnacle of that which seems so important but nobody needs to know. Show began to taste magic ice cream Genie-wish Sunday replenishing Islamic whipped cream domes faster than person could scarf. Didn't even get to the ice-cream and chocolate sauce! (But you didn't need to.) Frivolity was the fun. "And that concludes . . ." I've worn the pavement down in twenty linear yards of two-rut, while half-hour show struggled to reach my radio receiver. I start to wish I didn't haveta piss, badly as ah do. What's a person . . .? Leave the car and head for the shoulder? Get rain-drenched, wee in his trunks, like swimming public pool? I'd be somewhat happier, if there were trees about. Not that everyone wouldn't watch me. What else is there to do? My piss exact moment all cars roar forward. Panic thought-activates kidneys. Teeth starting to swim. Can barely hear announcer. He's talking through a cat scratching screen door to get out. Maybe I should lay out in the back-catch a few winks until somebody honks-try to forget. Not a bad idea, really. Lousy denizen of a traffic-snarl thing to do, but . . . All right/I've got it. The milkshake vase. Piss in the cup; pour it out the door. Easy. 7-11 Big Gulp Mug, to porta-potty. Only problem is . . . bench seat's soft as hell. Wrong angle completely. I gotta hunch up high, so they'll see me doin' it six cars 'round. Wait for something intense to happen-an ambulance threading gridlock, an earthquake, anything-then hike-emup and wiz. That, or piddle seat, trying to be discrete. Ah-life the nothing but choices. I should listen to the weather, or the road report . . . see if there's any hope of bladder reprieve in the foreseeable future. Whirl the dial given way to those infuriating preset buttons, and see what the lottery of airwaves spills out. "In news headlines today, scientists study the thriving radioactive voles; species' creation is unmasked in the laboratory; neutrinos found lacking enough mass to hold the universe together . . ." what is this? A science journal watch? ". . . heavy metal contamination kills Northeast forests . . ." Ha! I suppose that's music!? ". . . and a study of chronic whiplash in countries that don't recognize the condition as diagnosable injury, suggests people's lack of insurance is directly related to incidence of no lasting complications. Think that over, you (sleazy) motorists on your way to work. In the meanwhile stay tuned to KNMO radio for a rundown on these, and other NYT Tuesday stories." I listen for sixteen minutes. I know it, because they announce the time every ten, when I ran Seek again, which landed on the time, right before Black Sabbath's Paranoid reminded me how much I really-truly had to piss. It's conditional conspiracy. Time is life life slipping sand time way. Without such principles, the chaos under everything-under the voles thriving holes under Chernobyl, squeeze thousands of years of evolution into decades of genetic maps of wild sunflowers scientists try to tweak-mute. Moot. Both, in fact. "Fact". Should be thrown in there for good measure. We'll sight down fact's apparent gun-straight path scrunching focal-length bellows or micro-stepmotoring parallel beams of interferometrical telescope to "resolve" things that don't comprise facts the instruments attempt to see. I don't know why I'm worrying about this! I could be pissing, or counting sheep bleats in/of languid RPM turnovers bored idles engines. And the price of sauerkraut. In the 1990's. Duh. Sit here like robots waiting to move an inch or two forward. Radio bask : "When Wolfgang Pali . . ." Yea-yea. 30's Pauli cements "fact" to scientific institution of his day, because nobody could afford the traffic jams yet. Mass mysteriously lost in certain reactions. Where is it going? Fact is mass going somewhere. Fact conjecture. Everyone looking backwards, walking forwards, staring at fact. The [the edited version stops here.] more I think, the less I have to feel the necessity of pissing. Pissing is fact. Science (in this case), if we accept its institutional definition, is a contemplation of the things associated to the times I did not have to piss. Pauli is the 30's. His question framed-observations of the epoch he delved into, slash dwelt-within. He is the later denial of a piss everybody is sure to see, being stuck in time that's moving forward locked in their dry boring cars. That's me. What else did they say? I'm thinking about it, when I realize the only thing to do, (based on Mr. PC Engelbart, and his 'intellectual wilderness' statement of: "The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate."), is to open the door, walk three steps, and while pissing in the pouring rain, mark my left front tire. It was my important statement of traffic-jam futility. (Like something you put on toast.) They gawked, for sure. Damn-thoughts. Kept me from doing it sooner. Felt better though. I held it so long, release was ecstasy. But why not?! In the moment of accelerator-to-the-metal cop reaction, there is a freedom to do anything at all. There is a no-caring of someone outside the law (and still running from it) that's oxymoron. Just then, I take the moment of relaxed-released bladder ad-hoc worry-free human sitting in a comfy bench seat, to read the bumper sticker Ignorance isn't just expensive, it's cultural genocide. on the blue Pontiac Firebird in front of me. That's the future, and I'm stalled, looking at it. The past, in my rear view mirror, concerns me more than it should. So I ran a cop's need to enforce his (her?) laws' facts? Let go of it. Let it fly. Don't hold the falcon down, tethering its claw with bear hide, in constant re-evaluation. As the tach waned, I said their ways and means aloud, just to see if I could. "I have the right to . . ." and at six, or seven thousand, I wondered why I had to mention the rights I had, verses the things I didn't. Why hadn't I thought the right to piss a full bladder existed? Why didn't I have the God-given right to slay a dragon, like Don Quixote, if I suck-came to the machinations a fantasy demanded? Arcanna Iccar traipsed off the pages of his book, started the wax brassier, and cooked the meal of tasty savories' new celestial music, with more waiting. At his resignation, traffic began to move. It was a slow, lugubrious animal, twitching each of its countless arms and legs to life one sleepy pins-and-needles shake at a time. I bobbed my head, trying to leer my way back through fact netherworlds' rear-view mirror. But that bumper sticker- It kept shouting in my ears.

Battlestations!

". . . When asked about his religion, he said: 'I don't know what I believe, but I believe it very strongly.'. He treated patients till he was 86, scaled first-ascent routes that scared the daylights out of world's best climbers, volunteered time generously and died at ninety with Mahler's second, The Resurrection, playing softly on a walkman. People he'd cured twenty five years ago used to call, and say how much he'd helped them. What happened ? What piloted this man's imagination through the mediocrity of life? He was a shining star that presidents and movie moguls asked humbly for, gladly waiting in line behind apartment managers, janitors, and other working people, thanking their lucky rabbit's feet to be seen. What made this man, and why can't we (stupid commuters!) ford the problems of life with such alacrity? In the following radio learning hour, we'll discuss the life of Dr. Hans Kraus, and how to live our own moments of the legacy he left us." More Rah-Rah. More you could have lived this way. Nobody can kink their DNA to helix a strand of Kraus. What the hell are you talking about?! Without some losers, there can't be any shine on stars. What's wrong with fools following leaders up vertical walls? Who's going to appreciate what a "successful" climber did, without the people who filled the cemeteries? I can see the accident now; and it's ugly. "The event that changed Kraus' life was the death of his childhood friend, Marcus." Uh-huh. "Kraus, at age sixteen, watched helplessly, as his boyhood friend Marcus grabbed loose rock and plummeted 400'. That day was the self-admitted turning point of Kraus' life. There was BM (before Marcus) and AM, with nothing in-between." There's nine knives pinning you to the wall, and the circus man's still got one more to throw. The odds of dying to the last, are as equal as being skewer'd by an off-kilter flight of a first. The thrower-the target-who'll resign themselves to success? Why am I so introspective today? Cars veer this way and that trying to cinch the tail of their huge metropolitan beast. The strain of life and death hovering minutes from each other, lingers lazily a hundred yards (and closing) from my scene. ". . . When the family moved to Zurich, Kraus was taught by James Joyce in Zurich, while he labored over Ulysses. . ." Ah, I forget the jockeying, and oh, isn't that fine? Auto pilot. Ole' James probably taught him a thing or two. English for metaphorical ascents. Words for best friend death-watching. Grizzly pavement smeared with rain-scratched blood and oil. Beveled greasy gears splayed all over suppressed screams of the dying-means what? I'm crying-scared; meaning . . .? The people, snug in the back seat a few moments ago are now? ". . . His father took him to Gross Glockner, where he managed to summit at age nine." Just the highest peak in Austria. Am I wrong? Can we . . . assume there were endless minutes of privileged first-dos and exceptional experiences in the life of Kraus, leading to his big Gross Marcus moment? He led before he knew what it menaced. He was led by the family hand, to lead. What the hell do I care? What does imitating Kraus hack from cigarette-scarred emphasemic lungs, and mangled semi-smashed limbs? It is too late. His fate, like our own, was fate's wish-start to finish. Cemetaries fill with Marcus-ambulances asking exorbitant bills to scorch rubber and brake pads to a synchronicity of thousands of people's rubberneck and TV-camera screens, trying not to add to the machinations of the commuters surveying death barely avoiding more fender-benders craning over for a no-think look at what they could, in the next series of moments, become. Big accident on Ninety. Avoid at all costs. Don't wait, locked in your no-piss car, for a chance to view this instant mausoleum. Don't think about what you're doing there (here) rusing yourself to the next no-think place, avidly avoiding a series of events that could be your last-ditch chance to sort into OUT, the things stuck in IN. Kraus was a hero for looking. He paid attention-got out of his car, and leapt the barrier-held the dying in his arms, and played Mahler's Resurrection into their last-gasp eyes. He was destined to do it. Simile-to those of us who aren't. The show pissed me off. It was so self-righteous. Fuck the way you should live! How do you want to live! Don't even ask it as a question. State it. Compare its radio-frequency to I'm doing the best I can. I'm hopeless. That's the equals sign. It's all too polluted with heroes. Those corpsed animals . . . their death-senseless, writhing in in disembodied beds, sheets over faces, flying to the freezer . . . What do they think? We will never get and read and consider the 'strong belief of something' about their person after dirt goes over the Grace of God that was their life. There will be no tear-jerking Rah-Rah account over traffic-jammed radios-of being invited to summit Everest at 57 years of age, but needing to decline, based on John F. Kennedy needing care. It will be cold cabbage gruel, and a warning admonition. Don't waste your life so senselessly. Don't pay so dearly for nothing. Don't be a Marcus. And yet; Marcus made that man. Marcus was the reason Kraus faced the obscurity of billions of stars-planets-life-forms and lives, and didn't give up. His friend's wasted life made everything matter. DNA needs its catalyst to function. This accident, and its wait . . .

(Could be mine)?

I donno. Nine lives; can he do it? What was I just thinking? Scary, how you can do a complicated thing like drive, and lose track of a few minutes. Here I am, spacing out, thinking about-something. Right? How could a busy-bee brain, just shut off? It couldn't. It can't. I'm driving, after all, and neurons have to follow neurons firing from a big pink CPU. So, something waas going on, but I didn't want to hear/say it happen. Maybe I was in silence for the hosts of those cars, all tin-canned to rubble. Crazy. Amazing what we do, and don't think about. Science journals; the right to life (and likewise-argued, right to death) . . . A bill pending taxpayers money for a new park, or fusion-reaction research is too expensive. Too many pennies out of immediate-penny's pocket. What if NYC's Central park had been voted down, or any of London's greenways, as too many pounds from old-time taxpayers' pockets? What if we still burnt sulfur-laden coal for heat and power? Shit. I don't know why this stuff is sailing around my brain. 'Your thoughts are like these cars-all bumper-to-bumper'd in.', some jingo psychologist would tell me. 'As space increases, pressure forces the thoughts out, so they occupy a larger area and seem less critically-massed.' Like fusion. Magnetic containment is keeping a million billion thoughts all swirling inside my experi-mental Tomahawk doughnut, hoping they'll combust into . . .?? (Action?) Hmmm. I like that. The sound a low-revving motor makes as it throbs towards second gear. Action: Cruising suddenly . . . Were we ever not going sixty? Waiting seems like a dream. Seventh street ramp. Turn left. Yield right. Follow the angle's arrow lane. Brakes. Spot 567. Bang the long heavy door, and feel the first rays of sun slash through a deep cobalt mash of angry sky. Three maple trees relax their pancake pheromone, and I conjure a business meeting with Aunt Jemima, slathering butter and dripping syrup from the plate to my smug wagging tongue. The boughs wave their little congratulations that I'm astute enough to feel an attraction. I'm still locking the sticky door and . . . (Why bother?) March. There's my left foot that follows the right foot through their door. I'm still a good twenty years of individual feet from walking into my one and only life. Left leads, and I always walk right. It could possibly change everything. Isn't that great? When do I ever walk leg-after-foot-forward left? (The walkway grits and crunches.) Answer: When I think about wearing my vibram-souled shoes, and how they keep me from feeling each footfall towards old goals that are still my choice. Shoes make us numb. No rocks to wake you up. They're insulation from feeling. Like a car. Insulation from the elements. If people were forced to commute in the open air, they wouldn't. They'd put a foot down, and they wouldn't move it forward. Ten years to go. You see me walking? I'm thinking about not walking, and I'm still not thinking to feel that I'm walking. And I'm almost across the threshold. How many more till retirement? Over the stoop, it's harder to count your steps. I can stop. I'm free to do that (Aren't I?). What would I do? Or, what would I do instead?! I seem to hear a dim message to march, without its feeling. MARCH and don't ask why; or scarier yet-go ahead and ask. It won't do you any good. You're the hand reaching for the handle that opens the routine you do automatically that's the routine the people in the accident won't get to repeat. Laying on the edge of their tunnel, they'll wonder why they didn't turn around and do their bliss-full unknowns. My fingers grasp their lock; pull it . . .

Attack!

Hoopla. Claptrap. Vivifying some fad, some unsubtle copy of something only the rich and famous can wear. I'm driving the car of my body through their office. I pretend I am not them, and discard the WE pronoun of ecology-disaster describing human kind.. They are sitting in their cubicles. They are designing the latest-greatest version of whatever it is they're paid to do. It is a science fiction world of scratching blind bigger-than-life aphids growing under the chintz glare of phosphorescent tubes, getting fat with juice, so The Man can come and squeeze them. The man. Who is that cliché? I'm that man. An escapee square peg forced into the round-assed hole. The escapee without the proper education. Without the wherewithal to fire the reto-rockets harder. . . So escape velocity pulls the renegades back, because they're saving fuel for some far-off excursion they never get to meet. They crash back to earth with little knowledge of stars, a quest still burning in their hearts, and the means to execute it gone. In its situation, moorings pull loose. The boat begins to drift. It's the outer, meets the inner gravitational pull. They have to do something important with the knowledge (that glimpsed moments of expanse and dreaded-infinity gave), so they work here, and advance. They dream of another ship to carry them away, and end up making ships for proprietary ventures that take people safely to the edge, then lets them land again. They sell the illusion of success, to compensate for their failures. In time, they may come to believe the ruse, to such a level, it will no longer haunt their dreams. Once you've been in space, you've felt the apex of it all. It doesn't have to go any further. Typewriters clicking their word-processed touches long-cord telephones ringing secretaries cursing wanting cordless-the dim recession of the objective into quantifiable terms. Their render of theories' dreams into price tags and glossy-covered brochures. Their air-bristled tits with conglomerate-cheap decrepit hotels, show palm-frond pictures twenty years old (before all the garbage and sleaze) to appeal to the last itty-bits of What am I doing here killing myself for them? lurking in each human spirit waiting for You need a vacation from the rat race! by delving deeper into it. Buy our products' line, and you'll qualify for a lifetime of timeshare fraternizing with people like yourselves in a long-famous (washed up) holiday resort of XXXXXXX sign on the too-long no gratuities and airport taxes, transfers and tropical disease medicine included line. I nod and smile to the head honcho. She looks at her watch (as if I didn't know). "Mr. . . ." That's me. I'm the object of scrutiny. My tie is straight, my shirt is relatively ironed, my hair isn't windblown, and my Velvet Aftershave baby face still appears unshadowed. I've sweat a lot, but the Arid Summer deodorant, billed to supermarket minds with hot Saharan sands, is working to slice down the smell of all this thinking in big chemically-dependent gulps. Yes Maam, I fucked up. I sat in cars' dead end jammed-up thumb-diddle, thought profound musings on messing up the bench seat with ureic acid, and roundly commented on the insanity of this workplace including the prosthesis-brains who buzz around it. Yes, I'm afraid I underlined me and you in the correlation, much as we'd hoped to avoid it. They're leviathan thoughts for aphids' works of ant-eaten art-I'll be the first to admit it. In the closed space of not being here to face your fancy white nylon legs strutting round the room waiting for the copier, chatting formally with other humanoids' frowns around IN baskets' heights and bitter cups of frankly piss-poor coffee, I seem to have metamorphosed. In other words, (without me having to say shit) you can do with me, what you want to. I don't particularly care. Does she pick up on this? She gives the grave, 'We have a business to run.' speech, and wants my personal phony city bus driver commentary on what keeps Driver Peon # Blah from being at stop seventeen on time. She goes on amidst my wonderment of how she can test herself like this day-after-day-after-day, without arriving at any correct answers. I nod and look repentant, just to act the part. It's a better performance, when she thinks I'm believing what she doesn't. Strangely, it's the beginning of a long affair. If I'd been quaking in my freshly-shined new-on-the-job wing tipped patent leather shoes, I would have missed the signs she didn't have the faintest ideas she was gingerly giving. I told her somebody close to me died, and this event had shaken my life. I cleverly omitted the particular person was me. Her excellent breeding kept her from asking any further, embarrassing questions.

ATTN: Offensive battery...

I have to prepare for new coordinates. The ole' pictures on the desk neatly sharpened pencils-thing, ain't gonna cut inta' dat satisfaction's pie no-more. That's good. I'm a renegade holing in the least-obvious place I can find, wondering how to subvert the most mindless elements of their periodic tables' org chart without causing fervorous global upheaval. I'm the secret agent with all his James Bond goodies stored neatly away. For the love of queen and country, James has to internalize his investigation the hard way. No props or gimmicks. No babes with handguns. No gin, vodka, or olives. Ah, the fantasy! The best and brightest, whiling their lives into dust. Dicing numbers; airbrushing; finding every psychological weakness society has utilized to make us things we respond to with further exaggerated forms of casket-bearing faults. . . Is this the work I wanted to do? I am bred to not ask that question. Whatever you do with God-given vigor is naturally-what you want to do. How could it be any other way? Nascent attraction pules us to our bliss. We can't listen to that bliss in agony, unless both ears are stuffed tight with hardened wax. That's the door's cue to open. Its hinges would veer perpendicular to creak, in film noire. In she walks. Have I done something else wrong? The door closes. It occurs to me, in a suicidally job-secure sort of way, that I should ask her out. Actually, it swings shut, and flies out the other way. I should sleep with you. We were meant for each other. Hear it comes. Here is the days' end. I'm going to say it . . . But instead, I look her in the eyes. I mean, really look. I don't say a god-damned thing. Her body answers. Isn't this fine? I'm not doing anything docu-mentally wrong, but the chase is on. The cop's behind me, trying to figure out what to do. She stammers. It's so ovate. She's forgotten what she came in to say, and is wracking her brain past the prime-human condition of reproduce or die. We could die; or we could do it right here. No problem. Your choice. Pedal to the metal, or cruise in the low-speed lane. I'm here to enjoy the ride. She's caught on the ledge of better judgment, being pulled down by the oversight of never having seriously considered the moment (or me) in her unconscious plans. She does want to, but she; the woman in charge; is afraid. She cares about outcomes. I'm a threat the moment is making, and she downs a Get to business! pill, hoping it will take effect before time has its way. "Ahh. . ." That famous filler of space. Her space is dangerous. She's altruistic. The two have conclusions at positive odds with each other. I'm starting not to care; in a moment, I see our thin chance slipping. (It's) fear. Does she feel what I see? Can those sheer lines of panting-hose tickle the things they need to? I'm imagining her straddle, the escapee, her suppressed means' liberation, a bite of sounds . . . and my desire, biding its time so nicely, loses patience. I break our stare to project. I project with such clarity, she falls out of spell. I am longer and stronger than she's ever seemed to notice . . . but. Buts spoil everything. "Yes?" I manage to blurt. It was imperative to grab the deteriorating nonchalance. "Am I intruding?"

"On the contrary."

One quick look of affable face, likable smile . . . he's safe. (A silent timbre.) I'm telling her this. The game is exquisite. Better than high-speed traffic.

"I was just thinking about you."

Killer. The phone, if on cue, rings.

Fire at will.

She leaves, wet. I harangue the cord with my finger, pretending I'm saying all the things I'm thinking about the inordinately boring call. I know she's sitting in a puddle, thinking about the consequences. I tell nimble, betwixt-words truths, and the listener tends to hear them. I am actually saying the rude-awakening serum, and . . . Why isn't the listener complaining? Because I don't care as much. I still care, as iconoclastic shepherds wail for gotten flocks (who don't worship freedoms, but. . .); what was I talking about? Oh. But I don't. I don't any longer. 'Would you like to go out for a drink?' She'll ask me. I know she will. Or she won't. Hmmm. (Perplexing.) The phone call is going oddly. Am I getting somewhere with this usually-mule-headed person; or, am I imagining I am? No worries. I'll whack off in the men's. I'll pretend I'm attending this asinine call, put it down slowly, stay here and go away. No big problem. I'll oscillate the spin-up spin-down orientation of the beryllium atom's electron, then use laser beams to pull the secondary state from the first. Atomic Houdiditisms-with two mes existing at the same time, but (but again!) in two separate places. They did it in the angstrom-measuring laboratory, so why I can't do it here, isn't a matter of common-quantum sense. It's a total collaboration. No duplication on work time. They said so. Time to say something : "Yes. I getcha. I'll get right on it." In your dreams. I'll get right on top of the desk and shout and scream the conflicting spin-states my brain washes everything into a big black hole with . . . before I'll take that one on. Sorry Charlie. Sior-narra. "Good to talk to you." Bullshit part-thrill, part-fear. I hand the phone to myself, answer, and tell him what I think-no words minced. He's already hanging up. "What?" "OH NOTHING." It's good practice (for something-but what?). That's it. I'm confused as hell. I'm the tornado yelling: Hey you people with nothing better to do, why not come chase me!" so they can have a convention in Oklahoma, sit around all day watching home dioramac videos of my funnel clouds' swirling, to feel their necks bristle again. The tornado yells (bells tinkling, organ-pipes blowing) by on large, by being itself. Addicts drive fifteen hundred miles in a weekend chasing its storm warnings-and for what? The threat and thrill of it all. The grasp at something tremendous in the face of this quagmire of media blahs, and workaday drolls. "Oh pardon me Marie, I'll be with you in a moment." I can hear a voice outside my door. He's preparing to grasp the handle, and enter. "Heya, tried you right about ten, but no answer. Had to step out, so I thought I'd drop by in person." Alas; my mind is the spondylus shell listening to itself, recalling oceans' gods. It's a correlation between hare populations and the ten-year cycle of sunspots-but most of it, is consumed with thoughts of itself, or the metamorphic oxymoron of the Inca sacrificing citizens that survived a lightning strike. (For, as everyone knows, they were chosen by the mountain Gods.) It would have uncluttered the clutter this person was right on the verge of uncovering. I'm sure of it. He spits folders onto my . . . "I've compiled some statistics on the last ad company's product-evaluation criteria, and thought you'd like to go over them with me." As if a stake through your heart feels foolish, instead of painful. As if birds swindle flight, flying only when their water's all slushy with snow. "Shoot." and I mean it quite literally; but he's missed all that, of course. Papers are spread upon the papers spread all over my desk. He launches in to the lot of it, while I nod off, nodding my head, wind blowing between my ears' empty spaces. Why not go? I leave my body to compute, and ask rudimentary questions, while I hover above it (wind still blowing) to pursue a fleeting apparition. Money on the green felt bar in Vicksburg, Mississippi . . . people telling gruesome murder stories, the strongest house-booze martini I ever; and the thought of all those dead people prowling that eerie national battlefield. Then I'm back. I'd been there, smelling stale cigarettes, watching the ole' lady's eyes as she relived raising her .357 magnum, right before the 'fello broke downta-door'. Last one he got, stripped the guy nakked after he raped and kilt him, then tied him to a tree downtown. Stole thirteen dollars from 'im, and his 67 Ford wit no front grill. Did I say I was back? I guess I lied a little. I was back enough to socialize, after pointing out the flaw he already pointed out with the data analyzed, just to make him feel good. I'm still watching lightning bugs flash over the countless monuments of dead fathers sons and brothers walking those trenches of ghosts. "So let's set up a meeting on the eleventh-z'atokay with you, old-man?" Whenever. "Make the necessary prelims, I'll look them over on the ninth." If you're good and lucky. And by the way, stop calling me old man to make yourself feel younger. Tz'fullo shit, as a term of endearment. "Hey, before you go, let me tell you something." I don't think he'll get it. "What?" I don't have the faintest ideas. "I useta live in Miss-ippi, an... " "That's good! Hide your accent from us 'enlightened' northerners, doncha?" Doncha wish. "No, I only lived there a year," This is getting strange. "And I'm not sure why I thought of this, but . . ." Yeseree. A scorcher. June's humid hundred. I'm driving from Birmin'ham (via my girlfriend's house) along the Trace. Natchez Trace. Well of course you've never heard of it. All Northerners sleep through Southern history (even though it's their own damned history). It just happens to be the most outrageous mowed-grass parkway in the US, and before that it was a trade route opening the Southwest, after a buffalo and Indian track, etc. Sheat. Where were you in scheel? But I diverge; I'm drinking locals' favorite, and need a place to rest my tires for a few, b'fore I hit Natchez-(the town Nachez)-proper. Then up comes Mount Locust. I'm thinking it's got the proper kick-back chill-out vibe, if it's a wayfarer's inn (way back when), so I pull over, leave the door open, and fan my sweaty ass. Man, it's hot. The kinda-hot that makes you humble. Ain't no one around; so I labor the hundred yareds to a reconstruction of the inn. "You wouldn't believe this place. I defy you to find something that looks twentieth century, looking around. They've done a hell-ov a job. The field was growing with corn, the fence was split-rail, there's antiques in and out . . . weren't no giveaways. Even the boards were hand-sawed, native hardwoods." Scarecrow was draped in old clothing, smilin' at me. I sat on the front porch, than sat on the back. Beautiful. I thought. This is the charm of the South. This is what those people died for. "How can I say it? The place was magic. Imagine time running very, very slowly. Imagine giant oaks draped with spanish moss, a deep, rich smell-an embracing intoxication. The shade rests, in the knowing of that hand-hewn wood, bleached, and creaking the footsteps of countless travelers receiving hospitality upon that stoop. I sat there, and felt a million miles from this." "Lovely. What's the punch line?" The clock' running. We are paid on the illusion of things being done. "It's all gone." "What is?" "That beauty." "I don't getcha." We killed it with sprawl. Plastic gizmos, Minit Martinizing, prefabs, sewers, electrical nonchalance, air-conditioning (singing louder than frogs and crickets), cars roads trains planes musical recordings fast-food rues cost alacrity dumb bombs smart bombs concrete imported sweatshop goods me-first-you later make a profit mentalities. 'It's still there, but we're trying to save it. It's old and crumbling. It's wholly the past." "What's 'it'? The beauty? There's still lots of beauty in our world. (Why are you telling me this?) How about the National parks! The fact you can drive in, get out of your car and experience this-(strange thing you're recounting)-proves it, incontestably." You don't get it. Trees and ivy answer nature's need to grow. They do it wherever and where ever they 'shouldn't'. Nature can't help itself. "That's just it! This park was trying to preserve a forgotten past. It's trying to make us remember the beauty, under this maelstrom of shit we prod, diffusely attempting to revivify ourselves with outboard motors and callously-chosen condo vacations, and sport cars stuffed with pizza pies, more children, surely-you know the variations." But he doesn't want to (can't?) admit it. "It's a little over the top, wouldn't you say, ald maaan? You're talking about the glorious South; the Gone-With-The-Wind media-hype basted with a heap of other things I've never seen, and I'm just rrevved up to get through the day with a minimum of wasted time, so I can get off and do what I really like to, while still feeling good about how I get there." . . . You've got a twisted mind, sonny-boy. Your ignoble sacrifice, for the sake of enjoying your shallow, responsibility-laden notions of 'FUN' sounds immature. So I back off. "That's what happens, when you're stuck in traffic all morning. Ya get thinking crazy thoughts, and then have to bounce them off someone." (As if.) "I hear those myself, from time to time." Forty minutes each way of not-even-moving, and Mr. Goodyear himself would ask for repentance. You hear them, but you . . . (Silence). "Well then, I'll see you on the ninth." "Eleventh, wasn't it?" "Righto old man; you look them over and we'll get this thing up and running." "See ya. Say, kick that radiator on the way out, will you? Never works without a bit of persuasion." Metaphor. "I thought it was chilly in here." (Ditto) Door closes for the third time in sixty minutes.

Repose.

A short rest.

A respite from physical or mental activity.

To lie dead, lay at rest, lie at rest, take rest, or rest for support.

Act six begins: (Or should I call it, act sic?) He's chatting up my secretary, who will later blackmail whatever he says to my baby-legged boss. I can hear their murmurings through the forest of people mumbling to plastic keys and drawing board scrolls. No time has actually past, and I'm lingering days' and days' drive from here, in a church, where dripping-sweat Negroes install air conditioners for white folks' proper worship, while rank-n-file regulars pour in all dressed to the nines a-gabbin' n wavin' n gossiping (in this huge God-inspired cathedral) pure campy with disrespectin' egos all painted with something flashy, and how do I notice this, but the silence has been shorn from the establishment by an old grizzled monk finding his way to a pew wearing a coarse brown habit somehow leveraged from the middle ages. Someone unseen taps a feedback microphone and less-than-celestial music bombards all hearing-aid ears. I wallow in its pitiful display, then stand and leave. The real service was over before the hordes of believers arrived. I'm thinking in that place, because right outside, my first business idea came flew from the blue. I'm not sure why I walked in. The car was busted, and I needed something to do-that was it. Sucker blew a seal. Pissed oil on the main street of Thibodaux Louisiana, as I was drivin' from Houma to Baton Rouge lookin' for a job. Man, I remember that day like it was yesderday af-dernoon. It was so hot, the back of my hands were sweating, so I pulled a nasty magazine out'a the top o'th trash can to my immediate right, saw a newpaper, and tore a page out to wipe them. It said, Nuke Plants Want To Run Hotter, and make more money. So I'm thinking: That's closer to a mushroom cloud, right? And if the U.S. isn't letting the old crumbling plants run hot, you can sure as hell bet everyone else is-and the reality of that is, most countries don't have near so much money for safeguards. What the sweaty piece of paper boiled down to was a lot less cares for an insignificant oil seal and the two hundred measly bucks I'd pour down the drain fixing it. I wiped my forehead next, turned it printers' ink black (much to my later chagrin), tore another page off for later, and began to read it. Headlines: Chemophyll, a living-tissue matter, may replace electric solar cells. Cold hospital rooms contribute to post-surgical infection. A three quarters of a million dollar basketball-hoop-sized satellite containing two magnetic rods . . . and the rest was jagged tear-off. It was intriguing. I never read the paper much, and hardly thought about it. When I did, I flipped directly to the sports page, or the want ads (to see what I couldn't buy). Here was a whole world of inky depths that had little or nothing to do with my life. They were gene-tweaking mollusks, making rats live longer than they should, and figuring out our friggin' great plains are nothing but sand dunes (like a Saharan Arid-Dry desert, waiting for liberty), and a heap-o other shit. I went back into that maddog sun, and scrounged the rest of the papers up, and read them, real slowly, in the shade. I think it was the first time the world came, and shook me awake, said : Pay attention. You're speaking from a close-game point vie for idiocy, because you don't bother looking for things you 'can't' know about. Humans forget they're specks of dust. It came to me, all at once, sittin' on Thibodaux's hot needle sharp grass. I'd guess you could coax shit like that out, and nothing might come. In fact, I'll venture to say it's got to hit you over the head, and mostly when you least expect it. 'You're sure about that?' somebody always asks. Then it's not true. Know why? Cuz nothing's for certain. And the phone rings, rudely interrupting me. I let it go three times, and drip long thoughts for the day the auto mechanic charged my beleaguered account fifty six dollars and twenty seven cents for a brand new seal. "Hello?" No Mr. Something's office here thank you very much, this is a real person. "Hello. I'm calling about . . ." And I'm certain its telemarketing bullshit. I was wrong. ". . . Your cat." "My cat." I didn't know where to go next. Did I have a cat? "It seems to be locked in your house, and it's making a hell of a racket." Well, cats are allowed to yowl, aren't they? Besides, I ain't got any cat and how did you get my number?! "Breaking things and stuff." Yoow. I opened the door, and stood there a minute . . . did one get inside? I'll Hail Mary if it ain't that big-ole raccoon. "Who did you say this was?" Old lady Leaar's live-in nurse. "I'd help you out, but I don't know how to get in . . .' so I'd better get the hell back there to save my precious glassware. Fuck. This is too much. "Say, I'll tell you what, get that Gila Monster out of my house, and I'll give you fifty bucks. Break the side window, open the latch, and climb in. You think you can do that?" Did she?! "I'll skin the critter myself. You want a cap or a rug?" she's kidding. Right? "In other words, you're on." Fifty bucks anna-busted window pane. Not bad, considering leaving work today would be real grim juju. "Thanks for calling!" "Mrs. Leaar made me." "Bless'r heart. But . . ." The lady's deaf as a stone. (Don't know how she heard anything!) "Bye." Phones ding. I let go of the receiver, and notice my hand's all sweaty. I gaze at the tiny, glistening droplets, and remember the next day (or night, to be exact)-dancing with napkins over our heads after a few 32 oz. hurricanes with fistfuls of booze-soaked maraschino cherries cast in. The music's so loud, glasses vibrate off the table when they're still half-full, so dancers grasped them hard, lest their mutual sweat hydroplane the tall round rims to the floor. It was a hell of a parry for space . . . I remember the marshmallow Michelin Tire couples wiggling their strange, exotic movements like there was nobody else in the room. We respired like mangy dogs fuckin' for our last rut on earth, and I keep thinking of the alligators submarining towards the boat earlier that day, prowling for strawberry Stay-Puff marshmallows floating obscenely in the green bayou goo, thrown by kids who'd just gone swimming front'o that dilapidated 1930's theater catchin' ferry people 'fore that drawbridge got installed, killin' the little one-horse town. So strange, to see alligators trying to swallow marsh-mallows stuck to their grisly teeth. I couldn't help thinking of the fat dancers, and all the gumbo they'd eaten. How come the alligators don't eat the swimmin' kids? I asked the old lady. She was ninety two, and planned to die with her faith-healing art. "Who'sagonna feedemdose marsh mallowsden? Gators'smarter'n you dink." Hell. I'm all over the map today. Off to N'arlans, out through its hinterlands and back to my paper-laden, godfersaken desk. Mrs. Kreednch, something like that. Fix my arm, but goood. "How much do I know you?" and I meant to say: owe. "Alat!" She cackles and coughs sixty years of bad habit. "Annadon mean money!" She was a strange-ole bird. People'd tried to get her ta pass dem-damn secrets fer decades, but she hasn't budged one metaphysical inch. Knock knock. "Mr. Salsbery . . . (That's Jacob, to you babe) . . . there's a man here to see you. He insists you agreed to meet with Mike Matteson and . . ." Who? What I want to know (as time stands still; her lips puckered for the next thing to say) is-Does Mr. Matteson bite their heads off, suck their brains, and crunch their little tails? Does he dance in the streets, let his wife show her boobs for plastic kitsch beads, and grope the women too drunk to know their difference? All I want to jinx him with is-When's the last time you went to Mardi Gras and had some good clean god-dammed out o-control FUN?! . . . Lemme guess. He wants me to-let me clear my throat to get the emotions right-ahemm! DELIVER THE FUCKING CONTRACT! Correct? He wants the Gad-fookin'-damned forty page contract, and he wants it now. "And he's wondering if you could spare some time to talk about the Macmillan account. Shall I send him in?" Very good Moneypenny. "Two minutes. I've got to call and check on something first." "Yes Mr. Salsbery, I'll tell him." She's so frenetically polite, it gives the mean-ass inside me the heebie-jeebies, sometimes. Hello. Dominoes pizza? A large anchovies with fresh tuna. Deliver to the monkey-suit madhouse, and give the joker in the waiting room two slices on your way in. I'd file my fingernails, if I had any left. It'd give me a few more minutes to think of what Jacob Salsbery; the man on the job he's paying for, who's playing his role with less pluck and fire than usual, is planning to say. Well there Mr. . . (I can hardly remember your name. Does that glibly tell you your worst fears? Hear my silent-remembering stutter?) . . . Mr. Nelson (in the last possible flash of blinding light), I'm sorry to say we totally blew you off. Big contract you see-ten times larger than yours-steamrolled the whole working sector. We had to drop everything, and run with it. No, he won't be pleased. I can tell that already. Truth is lie. It lies in wait to devour adroit seekers, in razor-toothed, Hear this!? growls, and their corresponding blood-dribbling, dangling-head tendon shakes. Better to be devout, without being fanatical. What's damnation, if a single ham sandwich sinks a Jewish ship? What's eternity, if a cup of ice-cold beer stops the Mormon's freight train? Lies are good, you know. They let you appreciate the truth. I mean, how would you even know what a one-way is, without the two-way street for comparison? Pep talk finished. "Send him in Mrs. . . (oh, how I hate that heading) Thompson." She tells me to use Deidre, bet every now and again, I have to remind myself. Mrs. A simple apostrophe, and it's-Mr's. (Interesting.) Makes you think about roots, doesn't it? You're fucked, that's what Mrs. means, and probably not literally. "Oh hello Mr. Nelson." Stand and salute with a handshake. Make eye contact-give him male attention-make him feel at ease. It's the clubhouse, and we're goin'ta relax together. Sure! Sit down and make yourself comfortable; let me pull my wheelie chair next to yours, so we don't have this ugly oak desk between us. Friends. Business comes second. Got that? I'm laying it out for you. "We're going to need a meeting." Give it to him before his guard-dog side gets going. "Absolutely. Pick the day." "You're free tomorrow?" Too soon. "What time?" "Noon." "I'm sorry; I'm off from ten to three tomorrow," Suspicion. Loss of trust. "Because I'm volunteering at my son's elementary school." Trust restored. Family man-guessed right. Conversation veers to private affairs . . . kitschy-wallet photos back and forth through the lies I'm frantically weaving. "Thursday then?" "Perfect." He's at ease. Companions in a task, we smile and part. "Hold all calls Deidre." "For how long Mr. Salsbery?" An hour? "Eight to ten minutes." And think about this: she calls me Mr. Name for the dame-darn reason I call her Mrs. When she says Jacob, its like a dike gushing water (and that got me going). What if all the Mr., Mrs., Misses, Ms.s are so you don't hear the Sirens? The excruciating thought consumes my eight-to-ten and then some. I try my best to be productive, and look what happens? "Any calls Mrs. Thompson?" Tension. Back and forth makes tension. "Just one. From a Mr. Kingman." "Thanks." "Should I continue to . . ." hold your calls, or follow my directions? Do whatever you want. "Sure. Why not?" She's not used to my ambiguity. "Till eleven." I'll call Kingman, and slough-off the Nelson account. "You want anything from the deli?" Professional relationship breaking down. "I have to pass it on . . ." on the way to a meeting? She's all over that. ". . . on the way to the park." Left hook out of nowhere. Don't even know why I said it. Truth's curve ball, slinging back for balance, before its throw. "Wanna go with me?" When the ship's already sunk, there ain't no need to bail it. (Pause...) "I guess I'd love to." Owwh. Scorching corruption. Parks on company time. What's next? "I thought we could take some lunch early." What does she really care? Does she get paid anyway? Yes. The only person who'd tell is me, and the boss' morning tirade proved I'm a piss-poor stickler for details. "Leave the answering machine on- I'll say I needed you to take notes at a meeting." As I dare truth to crash down again. She loves it. She's a little kid, breaking rules' improprieties on fun. "It's niceov you to ask me- I was dying of boredom in there." And I'm pleasantly surprised. We stroll past the slaves, looking as business-like, and purposed as possible. Free of the clicking-heels main gate, deference relaxes. The day's sloped all the rain for a week of rainy days in three and a half hours. "Mr. Salsbery . . ." "Please, call me Jacob." "I've been wondering something for a long time now. It's a little rude perhaps, so please excuse me; but . . ." How come I talk so funny? Right? "Where's your accent from?" "Southern, child. You can get the swamp boy out'a the bayou, but the bayou stays in the boy." We walk under frowns of cumulus cloud giving way to sky-blue reprieve. "Tell me about it;" she says, as I dust rain drops from a bench. "I've never been there." So I paint a fabulous frilly picture, leaving out the racism, and the ninny fourth graders in twenty six year old bodies making you wait forever for a fucking videotape at Blockbusters. I delete the sloth, the saturated fat, the tasteless Roman nouveau architecture, the gumbo-brains citizenry, the heat, the bugs, the humidity, the lightning strikes, and stinking-blind moonshine night. I tell her about Oak Alleys draped with Spanish moss, warm evenings' embrace, ante-bellum's nostalgia, and the beautiful pause between words, and salient actions. I talked of catfish, crayfish, okra bathing in Cajun fire, fine antiques, New Ore-leens . . . "And they raised a ruckus so loud, the dead rose, then dug back down for some six-foot peace and quiet." "I've always wanted to go there." You and the rest of the planet. "Tell me more about New Orleans." "What's there to say?" San Francisco's beauty pales next to N'orlans' craziness. "Ain't -b-no place b-like it any-b-where." And I tell her how to say it. "Not N-ew Ore-leans. Shorter. N'alans. Try it. It's the first thing you gotta know." Outside in the cool, summer-cum-early winds, wearing the hide and seek sunshine, I tell her about the voo-doo, the Africans, Haitians, their music, the freedom that made it an island in the South, and that was well and fine, but she wanted the motley facts. . . The things you only hear offhand. No problem. Napoleon's memory lives in a death mask, housed on a Cabildo table, where, ". . . The Spanish paraded out front and guess where they found it? In the rubbish in 1866, on the way to the dump, and don't ask me how anyone recognized the history's famous French general in metal, but they did. I went on morbidity, 'cause the people's fascination wains seldom from it, and did you know Narlins had the highest death rate during the Ante-bellum? The cemeteries were so full, they used to call 'em above ground . . ." Because the bodies floated out of the graves during the rains. Didn't you know Narlins is part way beneath sea level? Yea . . . white marble boxes . . . "Cities of the Dead. It was so bad, they brought over the Irish to dig ditches, rescuin' them from the potato famine, plantin' the bastaards literal, 'cause the work was so detestable, and landowners wanted to save their slaves from that kind'a death." And she's looking at me real hard, trying to imagine it, as I bother asking her when she's going there, and see her blushes. "I'm-nnn, may-bee . . ." She didn't know. "Probably a long time from now." I fill in her blank. "Why do you say that?!" "Because people always want things within their reach, without bothering to reach for them." Now she's a little mad. "I could go soon." They'll keep you from doing it. You'll blame them, whoever they are. "What if we went?" I blurted. "'What if we went?'" she said back. "Right now." "You're joking." It's a bad joke-at first. "Like, go to the airport, right now?" It's impossible; but she's considering its impossibility. I'll venture she says no. "Right now?!" It's worse than baffling-it's an outright dare, and for me at least, a full-scale scrimmage with trouble. "With you? Just like that?" It's one hell of a fat-assed chance, but what the . . .? It's only money and time. "Sure. Why not?" You only live once. Eat while you can; you never know where your next meal is hiding. And other kewpie clichés. She's thinking it over? I can not believe my eyes. "What if I said yes . . .?" Now it's mutual. I'm blackened, frying in a Cajun-spiced pan. "You would?" ". . .What would that mean? What if I said, lets go. How would you read that? What do you expect?" She's sizing me up. She's saying the implicit, trying to imagine it won't be true. "Let's say I take you up on this wager." Her eyes burn. The back of my skull is sizzling. "I'm married. To forget that, would consitute a mistake." I'm blinking the sty of her ring in my eyes. "Look-I said it hypothetically, never thinking for a minute you'd take me up on it." That's a mistake. She takes it personally. I ask her to throw out hesitation; then hand it back to her. "But I'm delighted you're considering it. I'm not sure what it means, but brace yourself-because if you're willing to lay this day on the line," (so to speak) "I am, and will be forever at your service." "That's role reversal when you say it to a secretary." So be it. "We'll claim we both got food poisoning (at the imaginary affair we attended)." Anything, as long as it fires straight into the problem. "My husband's on a hunting trip-he'd never know." "Fun to consider, isn't it?" "Like scheming some prison escape." Did I hear error, or did she just say that? Don't string me on like this. We sat there-brooding. I rose, said: "We forgot our lunch." Indeed, we did. "Chinese?" The blades of grass wept, bent over from gusts of wind. The restaurant's red-lacquered doors bled our unsaid words, looming larger, across the endless veldt of green. I swung one open, and steamed rice smells poured onto backlit sidewalk. "All I want is a meditative fountain, and two fortune cookies." She said, from the middle of nowhere. "Do you think there's one inside?" (We both knew there wasn't.) The door slung itself closed on magic sprung hinges, as our eyes accustomed to the dark. "May I seat you?" a beautiful woman slid by saying. "No, we've only come for fortune cookies. We have a terribly hard decision to make, and we need guidance." She'd listened, passed by us, whisked through the hanging beads, and returned. All in two minutes. "An Interesting Life, is an ancient Chinese curse, some say." handing us one each. We thanked her, and left a dollar tip.

Evasive Maneuvers!

YOU HAVE THE UNCANNY ABILITY TO SENSE AND KNOW HIGHER TRUTH. No kidding! What's your edible I-Ching say? THIS DAY, YOU SHOULD TAKE WHAT EVER IS PRESENTED, AND VIEW IT AS GIFT. Shouldn't that be: A gift? Strange. What's 'gift'? Makes you think, doesn't it? We went on and on. You could say things got more fuddled, confused, and disoriented by cookie-borne clarifications. Problem is, we're looking for outward signs. We know what to do, we're just not doing it. What if I lose my job? What if? Is my little cozy question in my job that's the only job in the world? It's these and mana-crazy udder things we dream about, being too afraid to do. "Agreed?" "It's a deal." We signed, giving each other our fortunes. "I'll need to pack a few things." "Forget it. Let's just go." Mrs. Thompson . . . shall we? Call me Deidre. I love that name. "Partners in crime." "Correction: Partners in fun." She looks for an edge to the word. None intended (past the usual low-level omnipresence). Sex ain't shot-glass neat; it's hid in bottles boxes on musty shelves in dusty ordinary corners of neglected downstairs a-basements. It has to be dug for, through flotsam of jetsam of oily rags, broken dolls and smashed contact-paper boards of tight-ringed, aromatic pine. It was a poor suture underneath the tight outer stitchese, lit by socket minus its Brave New World light bulb, carried by bird minus just enough flight feathers-etc. Am I making myself very clear? Top of it, I wore my mourning cloth of lost lifestyle, and top of that, I wore fear. Our palsy-walsy trip was a chaotic tumult for thousands of practical thoughts which I tried my best to subdue. Are you getting this down? For the moment (at least) she was safe as a safely-packed china box would be. What movers tell too-trusting humans before they sign the dotted lines. "By the way, who's paying?" "We'll go Dutch." "It's better that way." All so formal, and implicitly understood. It's a walk in the park, fucking your life up so. "Are we leaving now?" "May as well. Time's aye-wasting. We walk to the car, and she starts getting second thoughts. I could ruin my marriage. I could lose my position. This is dumb. I see hem and haw and flash cross her profiled visage-deeply-troubled shadows, as we walk straight out of our lives. Each crunch of gravel was a death of a slack-jawed moment. "When we shop at Win Dixie, it will all make a sneeringly-subtle sense." "What?" "Nothing. Just talking to myself." "Do you do it often?" Fainting-heart humor. I coincide. "Only when I'm nervous." "You say it like a question." "I'm asking myself; trying it out." "Does it fit?" Does it ever. "You're sure about this?" "Look, you're thinking way too much. It was a good idea, so let's do it, and worry about the consequences later." Heer-here/hoorah! Someone who thinks with their Newtonian moment's brand new life. "I second the motion." So we force our acquiescence to the epiphanies already happening, and glide wordlessly to the airport. "What if they don't have any seats?" "Impossible!"

But secretly, we hoped it was true.

Sir! The enemy's turning!

Somehow, I'd forgotten I'd run for madness fleeing the police this morning. I'd almost missed work (for good), had my god-fearing boss on the desk, blew off some major accounts, and now here I am. . . almost leaving for New Ore-leans with my innocent (not so) secretary. We wade cars nonchalantly riding the fast lane slowly, and I talked to the presence occupying my bench seat to the right of my turbo-matic transmission. "In the South, you forget about time. It passes, and you don't seem to care. Every shack has an unscreened porch, with two broken-down chairs on it, that people'll sit on all day long smokin' an drinkin' an talkin'. You've never seen anything like it. It could be a hundred years ago, and you could hark sum herald angels singin', b'fore you knew the difference." I talked slow, to calm myself. There was a very sexually-fit, late-bloomin' beauty riding me to an undisclosed destination where nothing but trouble would happen. I was sure of it; and in its face, I was anticipation itself. She's cool as Attilla the Hun. "Keep talking. Tell me about what you dreamed about last night." It took my breath away. Was the woman the lass who'd buzzed my intercom for three years of Mondays to Fridays, nearly to the day? "Last week we've been together three years." It was a funny thing to say. I regretted it instantly "You dreamed about that?" "Hardly. It just popped into my mind." "Tell me a dream. I feel like I'm in one." Fair enough. "I warn you beforehand; I have very peculiar dreams." "Kind man. You're warning me you're kinky, and I may be frightened by the depths of your depravation." Oh, but I wish. "No; I confess I have my share of blue dreamings, but mostly, they are chaotic, and filled with jumbles of scenes from our future." "The real future? I mean, do these dreams actually happen?" You can be honest with me-you're fascinating, because you're fascinated. "Sometimes." "Did you dream about . . . this?" Oh Rasbutan, if ever there dwelt a time to misuse your over-estimated pose of astounding, revelatory answers, this be it! "I would lie to make it spicier, but alas-our trip is all about truth." Flame hits kindling. Kindling is damp, but burns in spite of itself. "I dreamt of . . ." "Who?" "The physicist, that said a cat can be alive and dead at the same time." "Why on earth . . .?!" It was a complete and utter change of direction. It was the unabating truth. "Because I keep thinking about how scientists decided one particle can exist into two or more simultaneous states, then went on to prove it." "Do these sorts of things worry you often?" I ignored the hardy-harr jab. "In my dream, there was a kind of super computer that employed a couple of mote particle change-states billions of times-by cloning all our questions' possible solutions in the Schrödinger collage of different related-time answers, and connected-space second cousins of the questions themselves, through the existence of a multiplicity of concurrent potentiates of the particles being examined by the super computer-which in the dream, was the size of a pin head." "You're joking!" "You asked!" The science calls them Doppelgängers. "Are they ghosts?" "No, they'd be meeting a version of Deidre on the street of herself. I think there's a supernatural word for it." She looked at me differently. I could tell, although my eyes faced the road. "Does it scare you?" I was trying to remember the dream. Was it a nightmare; or not? (Strange, that didn't impress me.) "I'm not sure." "Maybe it doesn't and it does." "That's about right-two states of emotion similarly poised." Bombast. I condition myself to stay strong. It does scare me. In the examination of the smallest phenomenon, we're certain to string the bow of the largest, and pull it taut, micron by micro-newton by micron. "What else do you like to dream about?" We park the car-tell the attendant we'll either be an hour, or six days. The gravel grists the Patent Leather stamped to the bottom of our shoes. "Are you excited?" "Too much so." "I dream about people who die." "Like, spirits?" "No, the people in flesh and bones' clothing. I dreamt the late Dante Giacosa's dream of transportation for the masses, then David Packard's war against corporate I'm better than you-isims . . . oh, Ms. Rockefeller was there as well. Her dreams were amazingly all over the map." "Dream-dreams?" "Life dreams." She's confused. "Who was the first person you mentioned?" "He was the man behind Fiat. You know that car? In 1936 he made the equivalent of a Volkswagen for Italy." They called it Mickey Mouse, but I suppose that's no worse than Beetle. "Under all that stuffy stuffing, you have a faascinating mind." Silence is golder than silver-tongued warbling. "Why thank you, but I question your emphasis on ass." She laughs. "I don't know why I think about this weird-assed stuff. I'm not ever sure where it comes from. I don't think I read it in the papers, however-maybe I do." "You're a secret obituary-follower, I can tell." "That part, yes." "How come?" "Looking romance in the face is tough. You've got to have some examples of who did what, and who didn't do shit." "Why? (Why worry about it?) and what do you mean by romance?" Romance is funny work to pursue. "So I remember life is terminal, and you should make your utter-most best of it." Romance, is tempting passion. Passion is life. It's simple, and oh-so difficult. "That's what we're doing?" "Trying to." You're deceiving yourself, if you think this woman doesn't want to sleep with you. You're setting her up for a wild, raucous ride. The door swooshed open, alleviating the need to push-me-pull-you handles their inevitably-wrong direction, as concrete's silk-smooth shine shifted to a burled marble floor. "Where do we start?" I walked to the wall of monitors, and ran down their lines. "6:00." Instant downer. "Nothing sooner?" "Not unless you want to route through Pittsburgh." "How do you know that?" "I'm guessing." The energy, so newly formed, dropped from us, splattering on the ground. "I thought we wouldn't be able to get on." "Maybe we can't." "That's optimism for you!" A tad of anger. I gave her a dream, then apparently, took it away. "We'll check it out."

Life can be difficult. It's good thinking about Pompeii worms, living in the throes of 185 degree F holes, and venturing out into the barely post-freezing inky black depths 8000 feet of sea water tend to generate. We spectate their lives (as I watch obituaries?) locked in submersible vehicles full of curious stray photons packed in batteries, flooding tube worm feelings. These extremophiles lead a host of other, stranger-than-fiction creations, that hold keys to life on the dire edge of existence. They think their life is normal. We call them impossibly bizarre. See how mad it is? We want to study them, and panache, enslave them, to clean up our most-toxic messes. We humanoids are old car and truck tires. We sit around waiting for the process that will bombard us with a specific, yet to be discovered radiation-rendering us superlative raw material again-(not an enviromental liability) for aggregation to more than one existence and-or state of something wholly different as in running for an offense (office), a marathon, or generally (and specifically) doing this that or the other crazy thing we're terminally too aggrieved with the lack of doing, to ever do. Gorillas are freer than us. "You know what, Deidre? Before you get all frustrated by something that isn't meant to be, I'd like to say 'm highly impressed with you." "Why?! For sitting in stupid offices all those years, and never using my fun-bones?" "Yes. You sat there, and now, you're a million miles away." Her head hands itself support. "Alas, nothing could be further from the truth." Butter on 'Alas'; she missed my point. "I mean, you're doing it. Hardly anyone would, or could for that matter" "You are, and you have way more to loose than I did." (Did? You mean do.) "What do you mean, 'did'?" "Did I say did? I meant to say do." Freudian slip. So we lied in wait, at the ticket counter, and I told her about my day. About my thoughts and the cop and my toast. It perked her up. "You see? It wasn't so out of the blue. I had to suggest going, based on what I'd thought this morning." "You didn't have to." "Neither did you." "So we're even." She could live that possibility. I wrapped my arm around her, in my mind. "The flight is sold out, except for first class." "How much is that?" Way out there. "Try . . ." So we did. We waited in patience-killer line number three, toe-tapping a human deluge traffic jam. "Where are all these people going?" she asks me, not expecting an answer. "Nowhere and everywhere important. That's the same thing I ask myself (and nobody in particular) whenever I'm boxed in Munchkin-tight with commuters at six AM or twelve o'clock at night. What gives them the all-important first place, which logically precedes some form of enjoyment, to get them to their second place, in such heedless rushing to and fro with rabbit-run stopovers?" "Huh?" "I mean, how can everybody be so locked into their little worlds they think what they're doing is vitally important to somebody else's existence? Take me for instance. I'm an unbound white-collar manual on brainwashing societies by jeering them into purchasing things they either can't afford, or could better live without. What could possibly make my individual contribution an integral part of a divine system for justice, and height-of-happiness good?" "I wouldn't use the term unbound; and what, furthermore, does that make me?" I guess that sends her plane down, as well. "An accomplice." "Wrong. An equal partner in crime." The lady behind the counter signals. "Next. You, over there . . ." Our fate's on your lap. Tell us something more interesting than your rival co-worker just did, and put a cherry on top. "We can route you through . . ." It wasn't Pittsburgh. "And then through . . ." It wasn't cheap, and it was hardly direct. "We'll take it." She said it-I didn't. "Are you sure?" "We can't turn back now." Who is this woman, that used to be my secretary? "Flight leaves in two hours." Any bags to check? Why didn't she ask us? Is it so transparent? "When will you be returning?" We look at each other. "Can you make it an open ticket?" For that price, I'd hope so. Lady went on with the superficial stuff the airline people are expected to go on about; we nod and wag our Pavlovian heads on unison's cue. "Your boarding passes." We look at them longingly, and move from the crush of Line Forms To The Rear. "Shall we start in the bar?" she says next. I felt like there were people to call. I owed somebody fifty bucks, my window's broken, and God only know what else is wrong. "That's the most sensible thing I've heard in hours." We walk in scuff-foot silence, reading the Channel-number-something ads. "Tell me about the most incredible thing you've ever heard from the South." "Well, I reckon it's Charles Durand's story." "Who's he?" "A plantation owner. 'E came from France-had two wives and twenty-four kids." "Every man's dream." "You'd think men would be smarter. Anyway, for a double-wedding of his daughters, he imported an untold number of spiders from Africa, a variety known for prodigious web-spinning, letting them loose around his three mile live oak avenue leading to the house. The night before this gala, slaves blew their crisscrosses of webs with gold and silver dust." "How?" "With bellows. I guess they did it that morning, because the route was covered with thick rugs almost its entire length. He invited everyone around." "Are you making this up?" "I was so entranced with his largesse, I had to go walk the avenue (or what's left of it), and try to imagine the scene." "So it really did happen?" "I'm not sure, but people around swear it did. I heard-told thousands of people went to that wedding." "Now that's wealth." "It's a land full-o characters. The guy who invented Tabasco sauce lived there, an' was just as nutty, in a different sorta-way." What makes me go on like this? "He got this little island way down south, and discovered it was solid salt, eight miles deep, so he mined it, grew peppers, made a fortune, and plowed the profits back into his sixteen feet of topsoil, with the most outrageous garden anybody'd ever seen. He hunted all over the world, brought back rare plants, and single-handedly saved Snowy Herons from extinction-not to mention teaching Eskimos football, writing a slew of books, and generally getting stinkinn-filthy rich." "That southern way of things?" "Not necessarily; I guarantee you." I should tell her about all the poverty n-shotgun shacks six kids git raised spittin'-distance of old slave quarters in. I should talk about the ninety year olds on their porches, rocking their last few years away, insides riddled with something, eyes milky, not speaking ten words of English A'cadians wouldn't call their own. 'Bout the snakes, and the flies and skeeters, the dead possums stinking by the side of the road . . . "What about your favorite places-besides N-Orleens?" The waitress comes off pissed, serving us napkins with practiced efficiency. "New Orleans; I been there. Got my purse stolen. What are you two having." Not like a question, more as a statement. "Gimlet." "Me too." "Don't nobody harldy-order those." I think I've had one or two in my whole life. The lady bustles away, oblivious of intruding on our conversation. "Saint Martinville's nice, but there's too many tourists. I prefer dead-end towns. Ones lined with the skeletons of history. Take Donaldsonville for instance. Now there's a town you can sink your teeth into. Anyplace with old funky stuff on main street, that's what I like to see. And, I like a place with balls. Lafayette's party-extrordinaré most of the year, so it deserves two bangs of the gavel right next'aN'Arlins." I sound like a bloody travel documentary. "As for plantation life, I enjoyed the feeling at Houmas, right near Darrow, and Highway 44." she's eating this up. (I could pass as a native.) "I'm prob-lee strange, but I like kinda dumpy places when I'm in that part of the world. Grease-soaked 1950's lunch counters-you know the sort-we saw them in civil rights movies, the ones where the black people would sit down, and be pushed off, get up agin, sit down an' get pushed off. Starting a near-riot, trying to peacefully-protest. That stuff's around still. Take's a little bit-o a crooked nose to find it, that's all." We sat there and soaked in drinks, watching planes fall from the sky, let off people, then leap back up again. "One hour." "Yea." Time's rapping round its dial. "Do you know that 99.9 percent of microbial life is virtually unexplored?" Off the wall. Way off. "Does this have something to do with Louisiana?" "Probably. Place is covered with swamps. What I guess I mean is: We hardly know a thing about life." "Is this some greater statement I'm missing?" Are we slipping down the evolutionary ladder, trying to climb up? "No, I'm just making a statement, and seeing what happens. Today has a tone of exploration to it, far as I'm concerned. I feel like something big could happen, if we let it." "Me too." We look through each others eyes, towards greater a desire. "Eccentric things. Life-changing moments." "We're in one right now." she says, as my nine-alarm mind recounts the seduction of a fourteen year old, at one of those sad-ole lunch counters. I was twenty at the time. Damned, if I didn't come in ten or eleven seconds. "I'd second that." Girl'd known her stuff. And then some. The unnecessary ceiling fan made a few lazy rotations, and the loudspeaker sang out: "United Flight 3450 is experiencing technical delays." Should I look at the boarding pass number? I swivel in my student's-style seat, and check the gate for consternation-vibe. "That's us." she followed-on. "I just checked the tickets." "I don't see any plane out there." "Not good." I mutter. Right then-n-there, I began to condition myself for failure. "Do you think we should have . . ." and I know what you mean. Why didn't we jump at first class? Who asks providence for economy seats, when your fantasy's being fulfilled? "We'll wait a little longer. We can lay about for a while, and still get on the golden route." "You're right; it doesn't leave till six." Another one of those looks. We're each other's copilots, trying to fly a strange, unpredictable machine. "Nothing ever happens the way you think it should, in the end." "What do you mean by that?" "Well for instance," she begins, "I read about this fish," "Uh-huh." I led her on. "That's dying off. Or, I should say, government reports say it's doing just fine, although they built a dam they knew beforehand would seriously threaten its habitat." "Where is this?" "Somewhere in Australia. It's a kind of lungfish." A relic. A living fossil. How dare they?! "Their conclusion was, there's just as many fish as before the dam (which may be true), but these things live an impossible length of time, and all they caught to validate the statement, were old ones." "So?" "The youngsters are very difficult to catch, and they're the ones impacted by the dam." "So, stop me if I'm wrong . . . this fish may not be reproducing at all?" "It's entirely possible. People think one thing is happening, because they want to think it. What's really happening is another matter entirely." Entirely. "That's a good, informative story." It made me want to sign off here, and sign up over there, before-tis too late. "Now I'll tell you one." but I'm talking too far into her eyes, and it loses its punch. "Another round for ya'll?" the chatty woman returns. I nod yes. More luggage to carry on board. . . lost metaphors and broken strings of harps. We promptly get out of each other's ways,

and try the scene again.

Hard starboard!

"I'm sorry; I could put you on the waiting list." Bad dream. It's a coincidence, I just happen to be awake. "A basketball team came from . . ." The down-south express, courtesy of savory-figure salaries. "Sure, put us on." It's four-thirty. No plane in sight. I can not believe people lay out, and tan themselves in this sun! That's what I'm thinking, waiting a the Howard Johnson pool, for the flight I missed. (Going the other direction.) The old waitress, who's daughter works side-by-side'r (And what about the daughter's adult children?), points to a plantation she was raised on, slated this fall for the Wall Mart bulldozers. "They'z killin; out-n-oout; eer histery." With meaningful pauses. "I usea play there, an' ma momma ran the kichen for feedin't the cane werkers, mostly from Cooba. Thy'z fixin' to smashitall down." Tear his heart apart, eating his pumpkin-pecan pie. She's the chitlin' pork-fat sizzlin', the best lookin' sweetie you've seen; she's filling your mind full-o stories-real, live ones, then this. Makes it almost worth missin' a plane. Makes you think of it, when six-figures snag your place. "Lemme try that story again. Here's the point: I heard in science-la-la-land's morning radio brief," . . . You know those particle accelerators, the ones they spend untold years and billions tunneling out? They're being back-burnered for costing too much, right on schedule of far-sighted physicists' supposition it might be possible, to construct an atom smasher two yards long, that does the job of 17 mile money-gobbling monsters. What a nifty coincidence. "One door shut, makes the greedy pry open another, even if its got no hinges, or handle." "I barely know what you're talking about." "It's a lot like the lungfish." He's an odd duck-a reel you've got to wind in. "They're trying to find the mythical Higgs Field, surfing wake field gasses up to however many kajillion electo-whatevers they need to prove the lungfish population is doing just fine-n-dandy. Supersymmetrize all nature's fundamental forces to themselves, spit them into the LEP, see what happens. Or apparently happens. That's what a trillion units of laser-firepower slashing through argon gas gets you. Maybe. "Sometimes clouds look like different things, when you see them from a slightly skewed perspective." Silver linings are underneath coal seams. "Like-from one minute to the next." Speaking of next, what's our move going to be? "Indeed; everything changes." A whitewash of cliche sayings hovered over our disappointment. "Now what?" One acre of rye has a lot of perpendicular stalks, but a hundred million miles of roots hide under it's dirt. "We've got the tickets. . ." So we should wait for a long, fond farewell? "Okay. We'll see what happens." As if that isn't irrevocable interconnected to what could be happening. "But this is a lesson, you realize." "A lesson?" "Undoubtedly." The old ladies who run the exhaust-fan lunch counters, whose sisters live two blocks away n-two blocks from their grandchildren, and a hop-skip from place their parents were born, know about these continuities. In Mississippi, old crumbling sugar mills still inhabit generations of rats and mice with no cause to leave. "Here's an off-the-wall story (if you don't nimbly duck to miss it): I think I heard oak trees are infested by a larva that mice like to eat. If the oak puts out a lot of nuts, the mice are flush with food for the winter, so more breed, which means healthier trees. Healthier trees make more nuts, which are also mean fodder for deer, which, like the mice, carry harmful ticks. Humans hunt the deer, and acquire its tick-borne diseases . . . shoot. I can't remember how the rest of it goes. It gets more convoluted, believe me." "I'm suppose to dive through that, for a moral?" "Ask and ye shall receive." "What's it mean, then?" I was hoping you'd tell me. "That's like asking for a bottle of ammonia window cleaner, and getting a dirty toll booth in your driveway." "And that's suppose to make sense?" "No." "Aren't you the mystic today?" "What I mean is," but I hadn't the faintest idea. Really. Everything is all fucked up. "Ah-m-better giver-up. Let's switch to Mai Tais, shall we?" Quite. "A whole new Perspec-Tai?" We were more ripped with the confusion of the day, than its straight alcohol. "Is the that the plural of perspectives, Maam?" "If you wish; so it shall be." Hard flashback: Staring to the mosaic in Narlins's Supreme courtroom, trying to look through it. It's chock full of mysticism, and archaic retinue, making me . . . "Ever think it's all a play?" "Like Shakespeare?" "More so, even. Imagine our little drama from an audience's perspec-tie. What's the playwright trying to convey?" "We were too afraid to fly first class." "We were to afraid to even consider it." "So? Is that such a crime? (Especially at my salary.)" No, that isn't the paint of the fence-that's the atmosphere surrounding it. The wood (under the color) is yet to be fathomed. "Back again areya? What'll it be?" She treats us like schoolhood friends. "Surprise us." "I hate it when people ask fer that, 'cause I have some straye-j-assed tastes. You still wanna try me?" It sounded downright sexual. "How strange?" Deidre wanted to know. "See? There-ya go. If you have to ask . . ." And that's the problem. Control. Asking. Wanting to know. That's the nine to five-thirty folly. "I'll take it." "What?" "Whatever." Deidre looked less sure. "I'll have a margarita." Curt nod of approval. Hustled walk. "I didn't kid myself-she looked like an Ouzo gal. I hate that anise stuff." "What about Pastis?" "Yuck." Fair enough. Read the situation, and act accordingly. Take your stand. I remember that! A book (wasn't it?) from the thirties. Buncho-southern essays. I'll Take My Stand. (That was it!) Fine writing-too politically subtle for genre. Lost in time and South'll-rise-again fears. I barely remember that guy's name . . . "Here you-be. Margarita, and mystery drink." I look at her, like-keep the tab open, will you? "Anything else?" "Nope. Thanks." she disappears. "What is it?" I don't know. "Coconut Zambeezie surprise." "Never heard of it." She sips, and frowns. "Tastes more like a muddy vodka river meets cheap piña colada mix." "Yea." "You like it?" It grows on you. I was looked over good, staring at the mosaic. It seemed to be fabricated from higher stuff than humans are capable of dealing. Hard to imagine. Louisiana I mean. 1803; they bought it from France, full of ideas like that. Eighty-nine enlightened years later, on the seventh of June, Homer Plessy bought a rail ticket to Covington, and sat in the white passenger section. Asked to leave, he was forcibly arrested, having questioned Separate but Equal's ruling by the literal seat of its pants. Sixty-four years of no tangible improvements later, Brown vs. the Board of Education, forced the courthouse to live its mosaic. "What are you thinking?" "About what's just, and what isn't." "Is missing our fantasy, unjust?" Fantasy is an interstellar word. "Depends on what you mean by taht." Formidable reply. Double-edged blade with pre-lubed beard-removing full-swivel head. "After the fun we imagined, just blowing everything off." Mind Image: Hydrogen gun deep from the bowels of Lawrence Liverwurst Labs. For a fraction of a fraction of a second, liquid molecular gas converts to metal. Or, what they think of, as metal. The silken-tongued spokesman disseminated findings to the gaping ears of planetary scientists, who decided to recodify whatever it is they do not know, based on this momentous discovery. Meanwhile, back in homogeneity (which is really anything but), our bodies' micro-motors continue to thread DNA to RNA with an unprecedented pulling force, and generally occupy themselves with so many things that are vital for our next breath-n-heartbeat, it's hard to be concerned with an airline flight, a familiar M.O., a married set of bookends, the deeply inviting slit in her dress, etc. . . It's working together to grind me down, and procreate. It's the subatomic program, running overdrive. "How do you define: everything?" "My job, the things I was suppose to do tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow. You know." Don't I wish I did. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Should we go?"

Dive! Dive!

Go where? What do you do, when the world has varnished your glasses? We're looking for lone ships in high seas, gazing through two-ton wave-splashed salt-encrusted portholes. "Think the parking attendant expects us?" The long hallway was hollow, slick, and yellow. It pushed echoes forward. "No; I'm sure he doesn't care." I was morose. You're sure about this? When I never wanted to go in the first place, I'd meant, I don't want to be a tour guide to somebody else's fantasy. Sure; I'd get mine too, but Narlins is old. It's past-life stuff. Double doors genie-swoosh open, swinging preset arcs of servo-activated, infrastructural ease. The sun shone brightly. "Where to?" I say it, asking myself to her face. "I'm so sure. I get my wish, and now you offer another: What do you want to do? I give your question back to you." I wander the pavilion of half and relatively-complete truths. "You pose an excellent what if; but alas, I'm not sure." "Go ahead! My wish was outrageous (as it ran its course), so shoot the moon! We'll see if it's possible." You're barely the same person I walked with this morning. It was a little disconcerting, so I thought hard about it. I thought about everything but the thing. "I don't know if I can be this honest . . ." "But?" That means I have to say it now, huh? ". . . But you're about thee most beautiful thing I've ever tried to not keep my eyes (and hands) on all these years . . ." How's it going? Her eyes are still on my mouth. It's a compliment now; if you stop, it'll still be okay. But I couldn't. Men are pigs. You can bet your last dollar man chooses door number one, hiding bleach-blond desire in cheap hotel, over door number two's historic solo stroll on the French Riviera. It's tragic, really. And I wait for inevitable curtailment of the first-name basis. (More waiting.) My look forms down to up. He is flabbergasted. Does she know where we are, and what he's said? Can she fathom his surprise to see she's smiling?! "Some fancies are mutual." One eon elapsed between gawk, and reply. "But," butt boomerangs to kill the kangaroo. "We're highly problematic" What came next couldn't imagine itself. "However . . ." However? You mean this isn't the end of his line? "I have an idea." In the minds' eyes, we greedily pawed each other. "What if you got more than you bargained for?" I started the engine, asking same. "I guess the nature of the beast, falls where it may." "Meaning?" "You can't predict a tiger's next move." "Interesting. How did you know that's my animal year?" Guessed. Looked at your stay-fit jog-bra, and read its original application. I tap my finger against the temple scarred from a bicycle accident. Age seven. "Intuition." I turn the key; the engine meandered through a few coughs, a few histrionics, its stealth-idle minute of do-or-die, then settles into a low, canine growl. "I'll need to make a phone call." (If this jalopy'll make it to a phone booth!) she's thinking. "Are we in a hurry?" I pleasantly inquire. "Perhaps. Will it be more fun, if we are?" "Undoubtedly!" Right captain! Course heading blahblabblah: Full speed ahead!

She balks, as conscious tires spin.

Full left rudder!

Two girls. SURE OF IT. Maybe her sister, or . . . I wait, while she plies the phone with quarters. A little buzzed for high-speed antics, but she liked them. I hear the receiver hit cradle, and see her turn. I like this have, have-not adventure. One day of mayhem in a long string of carefully-woven motor-commuting dollar-sign-added months. Years. Hate to think of it. Depression. Door swings open : "Let's go." "Where?" It's a non-stop flight. Two jumps across state borders. "What's happening?" Too many questions. Drive. "I'm pretending you're on the floor, and the plane's about to crash. What is it you'd like to tell me, before our thin aluminum skin meets earth?" That I'm sorry we didn't sleep together. "Gimme a minute." You don't keep your promises. Truth is always covered. "You don't need one." "Don't I?" You see? We could have been on that airplane. Nothing wears worse than regret." This is the woman I talked in the park with? "And you? No N'Oarlns regrets?" "I'll go next week. How come you say it differently every other time?" "What?" "New Orleans." At this point, I see I've relinquished control. I attack, at the risk of being injured. "Because these gingerbread stories are keeping me South, even though I'm North. I'm in both worlds simultaneously inside another one I used to inhabit." Viably cryptic. Mystical, almost. (She's unplussed.) "Please continue. When I've had my fill, you'll be the first to know what's happening next." The road tire whine makes me remember. "How about a Southern play by Batton-Rouge-to-the-Rockies play road-trip narrative?" One you've taken twice. One your life needs to palaver out again. "Is it good?" "As good as you need it to be." Steam lines bursting; boiler overheating. This is innuendo nightmare. Quite innocent-and deathly serious. Like RNA enzyme, micro-motoring pico-newtons of force, trying to replicate our DNA. Who cares? Business as usual. Hardly matters on NASDEC. On the other hand, it's an opposite. No bottom line exists without this process. Strange. Hydrogen's thrash to its mettle . . . all of it. "So I was drinking a Budweiser (which doesn't make anyone the wiser) . . ." Stories without sugar, without ginger or follow-me thread . . . how to hand them to the children, to hand them to the parents, to place them high on the Christ-mans' trees' boughs? Who'd want to examine, and want to eat such hard-tack scenery? ". . . Having just packed my worldly belongings in the back of the granddaddy of a bad-tempered Triumph convertible."

"Sounds good so far."

It gets better.

Rig for silent running.

When I left; when I drove out of the place, I realized I hadn't seen anything. Two blocks from where I'd lived, was the street I'd never been down, full of cantilevered shacks defying gravity, grubby babies, corn patches, and antique bits of torn-down plantations under tarpaulins draped from dead rusting autos plying furrowed, wagon-rut roads. Everything. And then some. It was pathetic. A friend of mine took me out 'tot-hey-bayou', to show me a giant cypress right before I left. 'Isa five hundred year, if'er-ever did seen one. Whatya think? Useta maybe be millions other-there things, b'fer they 'vented sternwheelers'nnsteamsaws. Left thiserone, too crooked fer good planks.' Apparently, the location of these remaining monsters' kept secret, there's so few of them left. We sat there for an hour and fished. Gator got my catch before I landed it. Nope. Hadn't seen shit; that was for sure. He kept his boat on a block I didn't know existed. It was a distressing boon, so close to departure. I sat on his porch and rocked, reading about geologists' fret over precious gem stones in the Swiss Alps. 415 miles deep, this chunk of earth's flesh traveled up from. Shouldn't a'been t'er a'tall. All thousand by five hundred feet of it. Quite disturbing. What else have we missed? They thought diamond, at a hundred fifty miles deep, was our most eccentric traveler. We were positive. If they'd found diamond voling through the earth, things would'a been easier. If what I hadn't seen was twenty-six blocks to the East, I could have forgiven myself. God only knows what I missed out there! So I decided to take the small roads. The smallest ones I could find. It was a dumb thing to do. That car was reliable as a Sterno-drunkard. Parts were impossible to find. But I didn't let the fine teeth of the comb details stop me. "What happened?" I drove the blue lines, and sibilant levee-dots far as Baton Rouge, where I broke down, and got a job. "How come?" Broke the differential-wasted my wallet. The parts took three months to get, and only one of those was the mail. In the mean time, I toured and snooped-checked the alleys, the dirt roads, and any-old place I could find. "What'd you see?" I saw what I missed lower down. I hung with the old fellas on falling-down porches, kicked stones nexta sweating beers, drank dollar-forty-five port, watched time drip from air conditioners-you name it. One night an elderly Creole led me back to the "Oil companies buying out our plantations, razing them for tank farms, and covering their sins with smoke. You wouldn't believe how many beautiful old places there were round here." I got a topo map four days later, and he pointed through eighty years of memories. "In the seventies, it waza freeforall. But if you still look hard . . ." History has to hide in overgrowth. I hitched to the river road one weekend, and looked 'hard'. Right where he X-d my topography, the relics and ruins remained. There were ramshackles still decked with hand-carved trim and original glass-Cajun mansions, surrounded by caved-in cottages once sleeping slaves, "Never had any front doors, those old places. We thought you English and Americans were barbarians, cause you didn't enter a proper house through bedrooms. We were proud people!-Never gave in. Didn't matter if we were fighting for right, or wrong." (Was this a virtue?) I was forced to consider it. "Why are these places still around?" It was history's backwater, and big riddles hid in plain sight. Don't bugs and gravity do their jobs? Some lady saw me snooping, and invited the voyeur in. Don't you think I'd be shot in another part of the world? Her Creole stew's famous, for three counties-round. I went back to my job, eyes a lot wider. "What struck you bout it?" Her house was full of things her father's father's father made. "I'm sorry I almost missed it." Huh? "Your description's more than I would have seen." Had we gone, you mean? She kicked me out of my story. I reeled from hot summer showers, fried alligator meat, and the black people-poor and trapped, in 1939. Hanging around. Old story. Water everywhere. Things locked in various states of rust and-or full-scale decay. Jambolia, craw dad's stew in the 1890's restaurant-t'one with the sacred hen's foot tied to its mirror. . . I was out and back. In and away. Driving. Covering impossible distances in this big-bore V-8 automobile. "Comfy?" "Totally." "We going the right way?" "She's gonna tell him when to turn." Fair enough. "Now, if you don't mind, we were in Louisiana." Maybe you were. "Won't you give me a hint?" "We haven't even left Baton Rouge yet." Remembering this shit made me less sexy. "That's because the best part of the trip (the part that made me understand every other part) happened before I left Baton Rouge." "You're about to relate a boring story; is that what you're telling me?" "No, those three months of waiting were the keys that opened all locks. Every brand new place is shackled to outside observers." After Baton Rouge, I had a whole ring of possibilities. I look over, and see . . . "Whoops, you made me remember something! Pull off the next exit-we need to find a phone again." I stop. She strikes a nice pose, peering into the ragged, rain-soaked book. Pumps-rump slightly out, pouting-in growing consternation . . . For a moment, I think about work. When that's over, I think about her. Next thing I know, we're back in the car, going somewhere. "Where are you from?" I ask her. "Florida." she says, distractedly. "Something wrong?" "No; I just need a minute to think." Floreeda! Neverwould'a guessed. I remember sticking my head in some cannon, somewhere-by Tampa I think, when I was a rite dinky-little kid. I'd just seen Disneyworld, but I could only remember how fat everybody looked, and how long the longest lines were, to the scariest rides. Strange place, Florida. South as it comes, but it's hardly Southern atall. Nothing but money and transplants. "We have a little bit on common." "What?" Like, huh? Her brain is elsewhere, grinding out logistical trajectory. She's busy scheduling deadly sins, and is lost to the monody I spin. "Sorry, I'm a little preoccupied. Please continue; I'll figure it out later." Continue with? I could take it from the top, or the bottom. (That's a kinky joke, I realize, after I think it.) Her; make that, take her. Not very funny, "I had an uncle in Florida, and used to go there as a kid." It was a noticeable grind of gears. She expected more Louisiana stories, and gaped non-linear astonishments. "Oh, I get it. You asked if . . ." More like where. She turned to face me, and I noticed the break in our sheep-baahing. My eyes dropped, and took in the spunk two nippled dents, made in an otherwise ordinary blouse. I looked up. "Penny for your thoughts.", and she realized. Blush covered blush in the perfect redundancy of faking normal emotions. "You're observant. This is a little . . . Complicated." I'll bet. I bet I'd pay about a hundred and fifty bucks for some of those thoughts. Just a smattering of images, nothing real-live. Pay per-view. Cable voyeurism. You know-in fact, I had a head full'a my own. No doubt, she noticed the rise by the bottom of the steering wheel. "Can I ask?" "Not yet." "You don't even know what." She could tell. I'd undressed her, run ghostly hands in meaningful places. The blouse picked up, shook itself, and went flat with embarrassment. Not so soon. Don't spoil the treat. My guilty doppelganger yanked its shadow back from her little mounds of taut-tan goose-flesh, and reentered my body (with protest) trying to assimilate. All I can think about, is a long hard rod finding its way up that short tight chute. So I consider Einstein's mass density 'blunder' of how our universe was formed. (Wet crotch waning.) Aspiring geniuses wondering if the astrological Omega equals One is maddeningly wrong. (Back seat procreating.) Thirty-percent of Omega. Not elegant, but masterful. Tongue slinking. We're expanding faster now, than we ever were. Periods. Ripples. Big Bangs! Filaments of matter seek matter-forming galaxies, thought patterns, and realities. "Should I start from Baton Rouge?" "Might as well;" she signaled with an exhale. "I don't remember much about Florida." Which means, I'll let you off the hook, because you don't want to remember much about it. Jason opens his mouth, the name of that forgotten fort where he stuck his head in the cannon springs to the tip of his tongue (De Soto) and nothing but Pinellas County's facts volleyed with South, for second in command. It was a most intrusive, not-better-late-than-never realization, and Einstein's assumed fuck-up shot from the clogged-up memory bunkers. Immediately, a hormone-maddened mind grabbed at correlations between the matter-density of the universe, and the Mullet Key's big-morter'd turn of the century fortifications. Intriguing. (Not really.) I recount the article, trying not to think about eternally erect nipples. . . And meanwhile, Jason's mouth helped itself to another three seconds of fish aspiration. "Yes?" That's my cue to say something revealing. Something controversial, to get us off this track. "I was remembering something of my childhood." Weak. Wobbly and understated. "Actually, I was so turned-on there for a moment, I had to conjure up Einstein to keep me distracted, and something about him made me remember Florida." She looks away, grinning all over. "Where in Florida? I promise I won't ask any more about it." "Everglades City." The place isn't even . . . "Leveled by the hurricane." Nods. That's the slap in the face. I try to slink back. Hunkering down in the driver's seat : "One night I was working on a oyster po-boy. . . You know, the sandwich. Invented in Louisiana. Raceland, I think. Anyway, I was wiping up some Etouffé with it, generally making a hello-a mess, when this old codger comes and sits down next to me. Had a little bone in his hand, and a chicken head. Something real weird. Lady to my right, took one look at him and ran." Black as the ace-o. Mist over his eyes-dude must'a been half blind. I jerked some more red spurts O-Tabasco cross my last bite trying to burn his pretense self away-'Git up an-leave, or . . .' the man whispered. Yes sir. I pretended I didn't hear him, forked that bite, and walked out the back door. When I told the tale, not other than a cop (filing papers, where I worked) told me his version. 'Don't ever look straight at those old guys.' 'How come?' one of my new buddies asked. 'Bad for your life expectancy.' Which surprised me, because this cop was a real straight kind'a family man. I must'a harbored some doubting leer, b'cause the next thing I hear is . . . 'One night I got a call from a nearly hysterical woman. Said she rounded a corner on highway 2043 (or something like that), and a bunch of white-cloaked people were standing, lined up, 'cross the road. Not KKK-mind you. Sure I killed one or two, she thought. Just flat-out panicked, and hit the accelerator. They just stood there, didn't move at all. . . arms up, and wavin' like seaweed. I don't know why we couldn't find anything, but I sure know why she didn't stop! Creeepiest goddamned place-made the hair stand straight on end. No blood or nothing. No reports of injury, nothing at the hospitals. I skipped normal procedure, and went for look at her car. It was dented all over the roof and front, with blood smears-gave me the fucking heebeejeebees. She'd hit something, all right. Ran a test on the blood. Human. Two months later, I mention it to Jask. (Who?) Thought the man was gonna cough out forty years of cigarettes. Told me a cupple old men-generations worth-liked to play some tricks (winks without humor), an' lived in the bayou rightabout there. He told me: You stay out'a there! Snoopin gets you killt.' And I never asked again. In fact, I never filed the report. Somethings'r weirder than weird down there.'" I got acquainted, and didn't like the likes of them-but now her attention is piqued. "What else?" What else what?! "'Mind your Ps and Qs down here.' A good old boy told me. I was in a poor-replica pub, where a bartender's mate told me Ps and Qs were pints and quarts (after throwing someone out his door). The the saying's from England ('Where a pint's a proper twenty oz-er'), because if you had a piss, some low-life'ud drain your pint (or quart) of ale. He also relayed the knowledge, that being 86ed corresponds to the proof of Canadian whiskey. Eighty-six 'im, meant fill 'im full-o 86 proof whiskey, so the bloke's out of commission. Feller was full of interesting etymological golly-gee-wiz ways of looking at things, we take fer granted. But she's not into that. "I can't tell you much more, but something's wrong when curly hair stands straight-arrow attention on the back of your hands. Whenever that happens, I leave. Ever since that old man sat next to me. Pronto! "Weren't you interested in it?" "'It' being, the voodoo?" "Sure! It's fascinating." "You're romanticizing the stuff. Voo-doo is very bad business. Once it's on you, you can't shake it off." In my time, I heard too many stories. In hearing them, voodoo gets on you. "You're oddly silent now." "Doesn't pay to get going on that subject." "Shift here for there. Let me tell you something about our evening." Now it was my turn to be between worlds. She told me . . . "No weighing odds, no turning back, no closed-mindedness, and . . ." She's gotta suck my dick now, to get me horny. Then she smiled. "Just kidding on that last bit." but here, her eyes got real deep, and her look didn't stop, and right about then, I could feel my nipples harden, and imagine my tongue tasting hers. "So you're still in Baton Rouge?" she said, to pierce the tension, and make note to the fact I'm very flippantly driving a large, heavy, automobile. "Yea;" Shaking off the need to screech the brakes, tear off her clothes, and hump her immediately. "Just leaving. Tranny's got a new seal, driveline's done, bevel gears replaced. Got some dough in my pocket, it's a nice day, and . . ." "Did you go through Oklahoma?" "Derail my train, will you? As truth 'ad it, I did." "Then start there and work backwards. We'll have to drive fifty more miles . . " "Than the two hundred?" "Yes-I need to use a phone again, now I've figured it out." It was a fast-paced evening still enmeshed in late afternoon. "Sure, no problem." I was wracking my careless brain for place nomenclature. Oklahoma. Those two guys. Drinking beer and smoking 'homegrwon marysjame', simmering surf and turf, tunes blasting, both doors of the Chevy pickup open, country music, cans and smashed bottles in the back . . . goin' the long way to the store, drunk, license revoked, caught him doin' 143 mph flippin' off the cops-let me drive, lit 'em up out the parking lot-Chev 350 built good-jut-touched the accelerator! "I met these two fellows, asking directions." "In Oklahoma?" "The very." Where your ass now? Ada. Fair clip down 270 from McAlester. Worn out, wearing tires thin on Route One Talimina Drive. Lookin' for a place to crash. Tex and Jeff-that's it! "One was recovering from being paralyzed-waist down. . ." "Can people do that?!" "Nobody believed it. Bastard wouldn't take no for an answer. And the other'd killed his wife's best friend in an auto accident before his baby kicked off on SIDS and she divorced him. He's takin' sign language lessons, the other joker's telling me you're got to CUSS at your hot peppers, if you want'ts-ta grow 'em REEL HOT; we're eating them, sweating and crying, Jeff goes picks some more (to put with the shrimpolla-something) b'fore he tells me bout his oil rig work, that pain killers are for wimps (unless they're recreational-'Been Aye to Zee with addictions, Jeff and me.'), an' I can't help noticin' the way he hefs his giant carvin' knife, like its about to whip out and half-decapitate me, when he recites his pothead photographic memory on the way his father looked when he shot himself through the head, even though the boy dreamed it, and hid the.22 ammunition right beforehand. The big black knife's rusty, and a little bit hacked. Tex eats his steak with it, pirate-style. 'How many warrants you got?' None?! They couldn't believe their ears. None!? Ow'd that appen? He's a bronc buster an'-a stud manager. He'll do it again, by God! Look how good I'm walkin' already! But the other fellow's remembering his brother's farewell tape, recording Socrates' dying. 'You take care of yourself now, bro!' while the parody ebbs his one ad-only life away. The listener takes a deep breath, and envishnus red earth, 'slewly' sinking towns, undulating hiss of hefted beercans. "They were out of control. Real Okie marvels. They're mortar, that makes straight-laced bricks like us stick together. Suckers'd lived four lifetimes in thirty-something years." "Is that good?" "Not good, not bad. But it's livin', which is more than most people ask for." Oklahoma's a real fine place. Lot a'dried up mortuary towns, quiet-main streets all preserved. People are civil; and the earth welcomes you. Oklahoma's got the newfangled LED gas pumps that are so outdated, half the delicate pale red lines are burnt out, making them truly unreadable. I remember using their 'older' versions-banging the lever once or twice-the surging, grinding . . . Their numbers sun-baked, cracked, difficult to read-marching drunkenly forward . . . Like they've done you the huge-ist favor by coming to life at all. (Gas is a real big deal, on a cross-country trip. Doesn't she see that?) "Do I look like a service station freak?" Deidre's a control freak. How do you plead? Why not start in Texas, or New Mexico? I'd tell you about the hundred year old hotel in the town named for rats, where ghosts walk the hallways. About the slanted cowboy hall still rife with guns, and Levi'd asses. You feel them smiling, smoking, sitting there-tellin' you how it is was and will be. All the clocks are stilled, the rooms are filled with antiques, you pass through bodies walking the hallways, it always feels deserted as stories crowd the rooms. "Bustling phantoms finish unfinishable business in this weird 400 room hotel-called The Gateway-El Portal. Guess why?" I went there, from a wasteland of off-ramp cockroach accommodation. Capulin Volcano loomed in my rearview mirror, so I turned around in a lightning storm, attempted the gate (locked), and knew I had to go up. Tomorrow morning; I'm going there. Folsom man loped there, looking for ancient bison. Nothing in Folsom. No beds. They name his town after a projectile point found lodged in an extinct beast; or, the other way around. The town washed in a gully in 1908 as courageous telephone switch lady diligently rang everyone from her building uprooted by floodwater. You can still go a museum (which I did, and it's good) but why bother? She's interested in Oklahoma. "Oklahoma: You catch whiffs of crude oil by the rusting automatons swinging their leaden arms around into infinity like nobody provided an off switch, once they outlived usefulness." "Poetic." I should tell her about the wasteland in the panhandle of Texas, where the wind howls dust over the road, and the land grows discarded derricks, decaying trucks, unidentifiable treasures, and snarled wires ad-infinitum. "Driving through those empty hills, it's easy to picture this land of America as one big-assed sand desert." N'fact, the Sahara of this hemisphere seems poised there beneath the surface, waiting to rise again. "I thought that in New Mexico, too." "You-bin there?" "Flew over it." "Oklahoma ain't where I met the weirdest people." "You're baiting me." "Likewise, I think." Shifting gears to nowhere, she's yet fessed-up to. "Okay; touché. Tell me where, the weirdest thing that happened to you, happened to you." "You want the G-rated, or the X-rated thing? In other words, ever wonder why they call them-things G-strings?" "How do I decide?" "Are you vixen, or scholar?" "Do I have to choose?" I'll chose for you. "Hartley Truck Stop, intersection U.S. 385 and U.S. 87, operated by nice-couple Carolyn and Charlie." That's where. Tex-ass-heading for the Okie panhandle, sort-of. Had to play dodge-'em with combines to enter that highway. The urinal. I remember it, and the sign : 'No Chewing Tobacco in the Urinal. Your juice plugs it up.' No thanks, just matter of fact. Sun-burnt farmers with brawny arms, kids baked bronze with wheat harvesting-and that nicknak place connected to it-boxes of things nobody'd think of buying. Double-yellowed National Geographics, unidentified implements of kitchen cookery, sheep castration . . . They lock onto me as I walk in. Sweat stained cowboy hats and big-beer guts. Wrestle a cow as easily as I'd spin a twist-off. Club sandwich slice-o-coconut creampie n-a half-yard of ice tea for four bucks. Mutual interest. 'Where d-you say yurfrom?' Hard to believe, isn't it? I'm liking it; thy curiosity being fed bologna, or truth, and it can't tell the difference. Baseball hail, three days ago. In late June? I want to know. Yea, came early. Usually it's July. Over Spearman, or Stilman, ore-sumthin-way. Spittin' distance from here. (The urinal.) My eyes are big. His story's bigger. Three years ago hit so hard, stripped the leaves and bark from the trees. Crops cars and houses wrecked. Yea-sure. Jeer comes one table over. Four years! (Eavesdropping's a national pastime here). 'Doesn't time fly?!' Meanwhile, this elfen woman's watching me. The farmers get in their strange motorized insects, and lumber down the highway. Does he watch her? Out to the corner of his eye. 'S-that your car?' 'Sure is.' 'I've got one-times-two.' Huh? One good one + one for parts. Howdy doodee. Do you need anything? I could use a . . . (And a . . .) So I follow her home. "Nah. You don't want to hear this one. Leave it; we'll switch to G. I met a guy in New Mexico with a tattooed face driving around a 1927 Chevy Touring Coach with a large portable glass-encased organic homemade trailer garden behind. He was different. And so was that fellow in the Colorado mountains building the ten story fairy-tale castle, single-handedly, in the middle of nowhere. That dude was some piece of work. He'd spent twenty-six years shoe-stringing his colossal anti-gravity structure to life, and it was hardly half-way done. There's more, too." But I know I hat-n-rabbit poorly, and you'll make me finish the squeezebox story. She just looked at me. "Okay; okay. I followed her red '67 Mustang to the Triumph . . ." A cruddy carcass really, pithy with precious-few internals. I borrowed a sack'a tools, broke out my own meager supply . . . ". . . Where I took a slave cylinder, an intake manifold," "This doesn't mean a thing to me. Get to the good stuff." You mean the part where she starts talking about her aerobic exercise routine?" I mean, the gal was a-cute three hundred pounds (all right; maybe 200), and struggled to stand up. You know (or I guess you don't), when you're working on stuck nuts (and bolts-no pun intended) you'll go along with whatever people say. 'Yea, oh really?' 'You don't say.' 'How come?' And so on. "'What kind of exercise routine do you do?' 'Vaginal.' 'Oh.' I mean, what else do you say?" "So what? I've read better in Penthouse Forum." Deidre doesn't like this tale. "Just wait. One thing led to another-a joint, a few beers . . ." "It's like a sad male script." Deidre whistles into the closed glass window. The scenery made me wince. "I wouldn't have, but she offered me a muffler." "A what?" That got her going. "A new muffler. Still in the box." "Did you need one that badly?" "Desperate. Mine was all tin can, bailing wire and epoxy putty. But I held out." "For?" "The headers." "Now I've heard all. What are headers?" "The thing-ohs mufflers attach to. They make a car sound good and go a mite faster." "Oh-well! In that case!" "Plus, I was a lot-a curious." "Hep-cat Jason and his curiousness got curiouser." The elf-blimp said, 'Close your eyes. Imagine the sexiest woman you've ever seen. Don' come inside me-pull out-here.'" I was getting embarrassed. "So I tried her. Damned organ was a vice. Once I got in couldn't get out." "A vice-I like that." She squeezed so hard, pushed all the blood out of it. I had to keep imagining that girl to keep hard, but somehow I triumphed." "Very funny." "Worked pretty well, in fact. 'I'm cummin!" (Let that Siamese pecker-trap loose!) "The whole time, she was making like a doctor removing an ingrown toenail. Very clinical. Very. . ." "Impassionate? So why did she want the sex? To prove something to you?" "Oh-Jesus-no! The fireworks started when I spunked that secret spot previously indicated." Woman howled like a hollow tube being swung overhead-I sort-a rolled away from her, got on my feet, and began watchin'. Now she sounded like a car heater fan on double-extra high-swabbin' it around like there's five seconds left before the world blew up. Went on till it's dry and crusty, her meowing like a cat and lowing like a water buffalo in heat, intermittent to yowling whines. It freaked me right-out, but I hung on and watched, hoping to get my prize. I daftly thought her crazy scene would end, and she'd return to normal again." "How long did you wait?" Bout half and hour. . . "Too long. She was possessed, I think, like those people who fall down and shake in Pentecostal churches. Something about mens jiz just fried her circuits." I talked to Deidre like one friend, confiding another's twists and turns. "That's weird all right. So finish Oklahoma." Aren't you done with Oklahoma yet?! "I'm going to tell you everything I know. McAlester has a nice slow feeling about it, but I drove straight through. In Rosedale, I ate a burrito one year past its expiration date, and in Chickasha, I sat down in a cafe full of crazy people who proceeded to engage me in every manner of conversation you'd never imagine. It had nice grain elevators. Then, there's an American Indian Hall of Fame in Anadarko, which I didn't go into, but thought a very good idea . . . There was Higgins, and Cabaniss before Rosedale, but I din't remember a thing about them, and then there was Mountain View (it did have a slight hill), Byars, Gotebo, Rocky and Retrop. All great, as little time-lost places go. "Like Rocky Mountain High?" "That's Colorado." "No, that's John Denver. But while we're in his neck of the woods, give me Colorado in a sentence." Gear change! Deidre must be desperate to avoid something. "Neat place. Rained the whole time I was there. Too self-conscious. Money's making it shee-shee; a little overplay on historical districts for tourist draws, and I'd say the best way to see it, is driving its byways." "Its what?" "The scenic dirt roads." "Didn't you take them?" "In a Triumph Sports car?! You gotta be kidding!" But now that I think about it, I drove one to Leadville. Just graded, and I still dragged the chasis. Went to a great mining museum there, and when I came out, the car was barricaded in by Harley Davidsons. Wouldn't have minded, but they were all too new. Some darned white-collar-escapist vigilantes, power cruising their work-week away, playing outlaw. Posers. Should'a pissed in their tanks. "Any more remarkable people I should know about?" "Yea. Tons. Like the guide at Wyoming's Frontier prison." "Why him?" "He truly loved his job." That place was a trip. Worse than Alcatraz by far. Which reminds me of anathema for pork fat stew served at that disaster of a prison-diner in Woodville, Mississippi. Really. The place was out of a movie nobody would believe. This cafe looked so impossibly run-down, and blacks only, I just had to go inside. Only later did the gas station attendant tell me it's where the convicts, all slung in chain, geet taken for lunch. I should tell her about that place. It's the other endo-da spectrum from cruisin' top-down 'cross a Teton sunset, sniggering how the cold shaking chills came from the all-around sensory experience, not the frigid wind. Just as good, but different. "That prison was unbelievable." "Where was it again?" "Rawlins (Rawlans?) Wyoming." "Why?" Are you kidding? Two inmates stuck in a 5'x7' space? Thirty-five square feet counting toilet sink and bunks!? "They didn't have hot water till 1978, nor heat till 1981-and let me tell you-Wyoming is cold in the winter. Prisoners built fires in their cells, to keep from freezing to death, but the smoke, some of them claimed, was almost worse. No ventilation at all" "It's strange." "What is?" "That you'd think someone loving their job, qualified as unusual." "Is it?" Who do you know who loves their job? I didn't even have to say it. "So-(on the same general topic)-would you do something different if you could?" "I can, and am." Oh-do tell! "Back to you: This prison seemed to appeal to your insatiable curiosity. How come?" To the quick, m'lady, I feel your steel enter, and twist. "Because I'm in one." "Are you?" Like, what renovations are you going to make, to love your job? "If I tell you, will you tell me where we're going?" "You haven't gotten back to Louisiana yet." "Did you know there's a town in L'weezana called Vixen?" "And what's that suppose to mean?" "Nothing. It's right by Luna." "If you mean my time of the month . . ." I hope not. (Hate getting a bloody dong.) "Never mind. You'll see." You betcha! "More people died in the showers, than died by legal execution. Guy said they'd get three stabbings a week." "I'd be angry too, with no hot water in wintertime." And there was a 'failed outlaw' named BigNose George whose skullcap made an ashtray, as hide was stretched and tanned-made into the shoes a recent Wyoming governor wore to inauguration day. How about that for old-time prison rules?" "You remember anything else?" "Yea. There was this inmate named . . . John . . . Daniels." Like Jack. (That's how I temper his name to this story.) "And he was the most professional escape artist to ever hit the prison system. He was so slippery, they welded him into a cell." "Did he escape?" "Of course." She paused, to let that thought sink in. "I'll tell you what it is;" she reflects. "Looking at the old prison system, we're abhorred by what innmates suffered." "Isn't that what prisons are for?" I devil's advocate. "I mean, horse thieves of fourteen next to lifelong hardened criminals, and kangaroo racial decisions that locked innocent men up for their whole adult lives. But in the new prison system, we're abhorred by what they don't." "Don't what?" "Have to suffer. They've got TV, carpeting, centralized heating, all the lhot water you'd want, free medical, good food, gymnasiums, rights and lawsuits against the state. "Yea yea. The food's decent, you get medical attention, etc. etc." Is this corporate life, or what? Perks. "How would you know? Have you ever been there?" "Not yet." Like I'm planning on it? This sucks. I reach over the sacred lap to the glove box . . . "What do you need?" "The map." "I know where we're going." "No, the U.S. Atlas." She scrimmages for the tried and true, dog-ear copy, as spring-loaded stuff pops out. "Here, take the wheel." I flip to Arkansas. "From Oklahoma, I went (backwards, mind you) through Eagletown, Horatio, Nashville, Hope, Gin City and Welcome." "That doesn't mean a thing to me." "It's just another string of place-names. "But tell me about the Oklahoma itself." "You want qualified, or ephemeral?" "Huh?" "Why are you so interested in the feeling of places? You have to go there to get that." "Not true. You're giving me butter pats of it, and I'm spear fishing for toast to spread them on." I turned and devoted a full second of stare to the woman saying such things." "Why though?" "I'm trying do decide why." Fair enough. She's a speared relic of Oz out of water, gasping-treating air like a poison and a tonic-trying to be a lungfish that will need environmental protection from dim-witted whitecollars building dams. The Lungfish are extinct. Should I warn her? It's a dangerous thing to be. "Let me see that map." We rustle our exchange, touching hands a half-second longer than anyone ordinarily would. "That means you came from Spring Hill." "Name rings a bell. I musta spent the night there, but . . ." I decide it's better to run her run out of questions-begin to slow down, 'You were going eighty;' Mind off the road. Stretch the memory. 'Now you're doing the speed limit!' she might have said. Come on! Spent the night . . . Liked it-right before Arkansas, sneaker state of weird stuff. I can't think of a thing. (Maybe I didn't like the place!) "I don't . . ." Something about a sunset. "OH! Spring Hill. I took the wrong road, and ended up heading south. Highway 157, I think. Gorgeous. Ran out of gas-had to siphon from a V-six water pump." "Eventful." "I hadn't any money (again). Needed a Western Union office, to arrange for that last paycheck, just deposited in nearly-defunct Louisiana bank account. So I hung out at a Sonic Burger Stand, and the ladies there fed my poor-assed self all the mis-ordered items. I remember the sunset best. Impossibly grand." How did you feel, when you crossed the border in Louisiana, and went to Arkansas? That's what she wants to know. She doesn't know why, though. "I'm afraid I'm running out of South to tell you. I could go on forever, but the specifics of that ride cross-country are getting dim. I mention Shongaloo, because the place-name stuck. I don't remember a thing about it. I saw a heap of plantations and ruins, which all blur together at a single point. You want me to describe that point, but you see- a person has to get out of their shell and go there to experience it. Saint Francisville has more old plantations than a whole week of looking would disclose, but without that seeing, the place means nothing. You've gotta drive the backroads, and remind yourself of the white-clad people spagetti-waving in that scared lady's windscream. You've got to see the inland waterways, and imagine slaves and immigrants digging it." You've gotta do a whole lot of things I can't possibly explain. "Go the other way then." (The other way?) "You mean, west?" "Sure. You probably remember that better." I wonder why she thinks that? "Starting where?" "Wherever you want." "You realize, when the memory of this trip runs dry, you'll have to talk." "That's why you slowed down!" "Very observant of you." "I guess we're ahead of schedule," she concludes. "Might as well not rush." Rush. Like that. Rush later. "I'd tell you something . . ." "Yes?" "But you have to promise not to take it personally; if it seems so obvious . . ." "Go on." "I think . . ." I hate it when I say that. I think is almost an excuse, for not believing it's true. ". . . It all began in Montana." "Really?" Another no-say fallacy of response. "Yes. Billings to Helena, when I first thought of going south, et-al." But that's not what I meant to say. "South to New Orleans? Sorry, I mean N-orlans." "No, just south in general. And that reminds me of someplace I was trying to think of earlier." "Where?" "Mmmm-it's right on the tip of my tongue. Big Hole." "Are we back to the porn section of this tale?" "Hardly. Big Hole battleground. But let me back up. Thirty three miles from Enis Montana (where I was served the smothered tectonic plate of strawberry pie). A big truck sped by and hit a bump, resulting in a cascade of egg-sized stones from its battered back end. Before I knew what happened, I was in a ditch, with remnants of mashed front windshield sitting in my lap. Under heart-thumping adrenaline was a little voice saying Go chase that truck! Make him pay!" "Assuming it was a he." "Wouldn't you? However, for many unaccountable reasons, I didn't bother. Guess I'd always wanted a windshield-down convertible, and this was my chance. So anyway . . ." That's what he says when he's getting lost. "What about Enis?" "I was there, reading a Trout Wrapper newspaper . . ." The girl serving with hickeys all over her neck . . . Cute as can be-short brunette with a boyish figure-'S-that your car Mr?' 'Sure is.' 'Nice.' Adoring gaze. 'Wanna go for a ride?' In a half hour, her shift's over. " . . . and this girl wanted a ride to Virginia City," Bitch. Less impressed when she noticed the windshield was missing. "Which, by the way, is a trippy frontier mining kind'a place." Cunt totally used me. Set me up. "Why?" "Well, I thought to myself, what's goin't happen when the old saggy weather-worn buildings fall down?" "I don't get you." "In Virginia City-or, in the South, you'll see slave cabins superimposed on this era, but they're only temporary ambassadors (if the word applies) from another epoch of time. Gravity, wind, worms and fire will soon erase them. What then? Will they be reconstructed from brand new materials? From arms with twenty first century sweat and swear words? Will they be saved from falling with minor (but money-intensive) period-tool repairs? At what point will they no longer be genuine? I thought it, of the hastily-constructed, boom-town relics in Virginia City." I thought it of Leadville, cities in Europe, and every other cool historical place. But I won't get into that. "What constitutes the feeling of a thing that's suppose to make you feel history? What if it isn't genuine?" Crossing the colored state-strung periods of our map-locked minds . . . tracing their tangents to constitute . . . Borders? "That's a little like what I was trying to say." "That's why I brought it up. When you cross a state line, you might feel different. Why? How long will that last? In two hundred years, what will Westminster Abbey feel like, when more its beams and slate tiles have been replaced? Will its history eventually be an illusion. . ." Like old mutates to new?" . . . And if it's true, should history be allowed to die? What value is a history, if it doesn't seem old? I mean, what I guess I'm trying to say is . . ." Stalling. Your engine's slavering for gas. "One day, we will cross a state line, and it won't feel any different?" "Something like that. I'm sure that's already true, compared to the old days." We're lost in thinking something into being. "Let me back up. In a convertible, you have to be willing to brave some elements." "To?" Yea. To what? "To get that feeling." "What feeling?" "You know. The one we're both talking about." "Go back to Enis." She's getting lost. "If it hadn't been for the girl, I wouldn't have taken the road from Enis . . ." Which led to the race, and everything else. "Which eventually took me to Big Hole." "Back to big hole." "It's a National Monument." All the wind through the windowless winshield tore the roof snaps off, and the black thunderstorm shadows were moving at eighty miles an hour, so naturally I to stay in front of them, but a bug hitting your face at ninety (flying ten the other way) feels like you've been shot, and there's a swarm of big yellow bees . . . "Oh." "Basically, I had to stop there." "Where? Enis, or Big Hole?" "Both." Wind is tough. You get appreciation for individual air molecules, slamming into moving bodies. It make da-driver humble. "Have you ever gotten bruised from bugs hitting you?" "No." "Me either, till then." So I stopped. I sat in my open-air car and watched air crackle with light. I'm going to be drenched, then electrocuted. "I wanted to chase the good weather, but I was too worn-out." "Interesting. You still haven't told me a thing about Big Hole." I went there by choice, but it wasn't by conscious choice. I would call it more of a necessity." (Like the haunted hotel?) It seemed like a dumb park. There was nothing there. "I got out and walked around. It felt strange." Soldiers surprised the sleeping Nez Perce on sacred Indian ground. Those soldiers were besieged for 24 hours, while women and children escaped. The Indians fought fearlessly, for everything they believed in. The soldiers fought, because they were told to. Losses, on both sides, were tragically heavy. "'Strange'; how?" Like the ground was saturated with memory. "I don't know. It felt like the trauma just happened. Here's a spot with no obvious historical significance (short of a few hastily-dug ditches, and a place a cannon was moored), but if you get out of your friggin' car and walk around . . ." "And this related to?" Unfortunately, I lost that thread. "A lot of things." "For instance?" "Let me finish. As the storm flew overhead, lightning struck the battleground. I watched it from the visitor center. The instant it happened, I felt a slight shift in the way my trip (life?) was going." I would never have stopped here, and yet, here I was. "Your people tried to annihilate these Nez Perce, who only wanted freedom. Manifest destiny moved us to Nez Perce land-the land we 'granted' them-because gold glitters more keenly than promises. You getting this? Freedom is punished." "It's a rather hard line." For no reasons I'll discern, I'm thinking of Jeffrey City's Ore House, and it's giant dump trucks lumbering 'cross side streets, where Debora, Judy, Ehren, Sheena, Amber, Stormy and Fawn serve you; where, if you sit in the acoustically-perfect bounce of counter seat seven, you hear whoever's in the far corner of booth-something by the cash register whisper their innermost-intimate sexual secrets. It's like they're shouting them, this acoustic's so spot-on. "How can you explain the supernatural? Lightning struck the monument in the same way I walked its sacred grounds." "I don't know about all this." It was true. I had blatantly strayed from whatever we'd been talking about. "Anyway," A word used to distract. "I got in that car and drove through a most hair-raising cascade of electrical fire, trying to miss the torrents water-coloring my East." "All that, for giving a girl a ride." "Yup." "Funny." "How so?" I'd asked dusky-eyed Randy what, 'If you had one single wish . . ." she'd do. 'What's your life dream? It can be anything. A million dollars; a trip to the moon; you name it.' 'I'd like to ride my horse around the wo . . . (she stuttered) . . . w'cross the U.S. Like the old days, where there weren't any fences.' What were you about to say?' 'Around the world.' 'Take ferries in between land masses?' 'Uh-huh.' "And her little wish changed your life?" "I suppose it doesn't matter if she used me, considering that." I imagined her horse, as a convertible. That's how they do it nowadays. Or perhaps a motorcycle. Yeass-more dangerous. More exposed to the elements. Makes me think of evil-grinned Italian and Japanese designers breeding faster horses out of steel, plastic and rubber: Silently calculating stresses for hyper-spacial machinery to drain the blood from tight-gripped knuckles, and drum-taut sphincters. 'Is your car very fast?' The little bitch asked me. That's what did it. I could have guessed. She filled my half-empty cup, disturbing the perfect sugar-cream balance, then raised her eyebrows. Why do they always do that? It's impossible to get it right again. "Fate doesn't care how it happens. It just happens." "We judge it, you mean?" "Y-think god and bad aren't relative?" "Good, you mean." "What's the difference?" as she throws out, on cue, one of her You don't know me. smiles. "So you didn't get another windshield?" "Sure did." I remembered having so many bugs on the windshield of my '61 Volkswagen, I had to use an ice-scraper to get them off. This time they were all over my face. (Should'a left them on for West Yellowstone, runner-up on tacky-heaven, right behind Gateway to the Smokies.) "I was driving through Montana's lack of enforced speed limits-it's pure torture to take a beetle b-tween the eyes at a hundred . . ." Had to re-jet the carbs. Thing was running like shit. Pull over. Place was an ecological disaster of oil. By the way, you got a windshield for this? Unbelievable. Covered with dust. Only one little chip in a far corner. How long you had this thing? Guy went off the road. Killed himself. Galaxy 500 drifted- made his corner too fast, and why did he remember it was a Galaxy? (James Dean did it in Speedster-style, without any help.) Then, for no reason whatsoever, I waxed philosophical. Scraping bugs. Nice paint jobs. How would you know?! It's the life under the veneer of bugs, or youth, that nobody looks at. That's what matters. "What are you thinking?" "It's confidential. But if you must know . . ." Beauty is overrated, and furthermore . . ."My story is nearing its close."

Blow the tanks!

"I said this once, but I feel like I should say it again." her confidence in this situation is eroding. Why would I contemplate bailing, when another woman's affections are waiting? Perhaps she's fat, or deformed. Maybe she's really kinky. She's into bondage for straight-jacket sex show freaks, or-I watch, while they go at it, spanking monkey with the slippery palms of I wish. Could be anything. "It's only about sixteen miles from here, so . . ." reproductive drive is taking over. She's about to interview me, in the newly ritualized sensitive-man Are you good enough to deposit sperm in my womb? verbal mating dance, evolved from various ice-age practices of klumping opponent-insemination-hopefuls over the head with stone axes, while heat-females watch. This inner programming (birth control pays no attention to) will demand a likely candidate for genetic-emotional strength most likely to protect-n-provide for a brood she's imbued with the need to prepare. "How open-minded are you?" Here it comes. After hearing me blab shit, shit and more weird shirts-off tan-navel shit thinking crazy thoughts driving a windowless motorsports antique cross-country with bees plastered all over my face, she thinly assumes, I'm not open-minded enough. "More than most people." Ah! Means and ways . . . As the sun gets hotter (or the planet warms first)-all these cars spew their toxins into the air of your progeny's progeny-so tell me: What caused the frenetic rush that caused the planet to speed up, vaporize its invisible polar caps, and drown us in such pointless worry? Some schmuck isits and posits, watching numbers splay across computerized flat-screen technologies, and finds to his duress (the considerable heresy) that it's all the computer's modeling. The projections of increased temperature, are making it hotter. Subatomic melee! Atoms crash against their atmospheric assumptions. "Good. You'll need to be." "Care to elaborate?" "I need to get pregnant." "Oh. I assume . . ." Ton of bricks-not part of the pleasure deal-who do you think?! ". . . There's some 'good' reason why I have to know this." Meanwhile, Earth hurtles towards a cloud of interstellar matter a million times denser than it's current track through space, and in a mere 50,000 years we'll see all What's gonna happen? conjecture tested. Women attack; men defend. Men attack; women define. "You're the blank in the gun." A hell of an imprecation. "What's that suppose to mean?" "My husband is impotent." "Can't do it, at all?" Cryin' shame. "That's broken. No-he's a little low in the sperm counts." At least she's gettin' some. "And you expect me to . . ." Great! Just fun and games! (Or so you thought!) Then she pulls the old reproductive trap door trick. Women! Shit! Flies develop physiological mating attack and defense stratagems-and humans develop psychological ones. Like I'm going to turn back now, after all this road time! After I wore a veil of open-mindedness, swore by it, and . . . "You getting queasy?" "That's not quite the appropriate word for it." "Better speed up. There's a pack of jackals chasing you." Cars breathing down our muffler. I look at the speedo-50 m.p.h. "Forgive me: I don't really . . . You think I'm shooting blanks too?" Yonder, your destiny wanes. I should bail, while the bailing's goose. I mean, good. Fuck'nbad news. Meteorites hit the earth and spray diamonds-trillions of the much-coveted gem-straight from a world-wide disaster. That's what they tell us. I'm waiting. "Someone's saying they're backing out. I seem to remember their open-mindedness." Go to hell! Caught me in your little noose, did you? "But before you passa-golden opportunity, let me explain." You do that! "The third member (so to speak) is a man." "Your husband?" "No. He's on a hunting trip." She knows I know that. It's an attack-a counter-threat to the threat, I think she's lying. "Oh, relax. It'll be good for you. Open your horizons a little." "Gotta take it up the pooper, do I?" Open the anal wedding ring, so to speak? A few seconds of silence. "That's our exit." Yours maybe. I swing the machine off the bumpy-slabbed freeway. "He wants. . . " and I pull over. "Sorry, I . . ." Just wanted to consecrate what you're about to tell me. "Take it from the top; you know? I don't want to miss anything."

She didn't say a thing about life waiting out there somewhere watching us waining and probing and swallowing and being patient while we unravel the marvelous mysterious mumbo-jumbo oaths of how important life on Earth is. She dint-happen to mention the scientists' leeward glee, when they discovered the ammonia, then the vinegar, lurking in a cloud of dumb cosmic debris. That's building clumps of life! That's Lego for microbes-the start of the non-linear spurts and leaps mice-cro-biologists claim Darwin missed. Evolve, stay still. Evolve; change, remain the same. Millions of years. Tens of thousands of generations. Spurts of cum. Untold megalithic caldrons of the stuff. On and off; tense and relax. All for the progenitors' amusement. All for God's hidden agenda. Seas of the toxic juice-killing rivals' tries . . . Triage? To each his own? And why not?! It's the last thing salmon need, to bash themselves up next year. So he's gay. So he's the rival? Each his own orifice? Both her lovers. . . how will they both fit in? He holds her breath, she closes yelping eyes. . . who's in, and who's watching, waiting for glory? She's nuts; and so am I. I asked for this (inadvertently). I am; and I am; and she doesn't know who plays the gametes' tunes. Gay man isn't really Darwinizing, so I must rut for him, and now I REMEMBER! I am; I am hearing the crack of firing squad guns, one empty casing put secretsly in an executioner's weapon. Each trigger sullenly-assumes its bullet wandered off mark, or never flew at all. Surely; my aim was off. Surely, executioner didn't punish the man he didn't know. I'm ashamed of us. She bows to the desire I do. Statistics show women are more likely to want double-matings during their menstrual cycles-a donor besides the usual-and men have developed sperm to block the other's chances. I jet potent chemicals that keep her further desires down, holds the stuff up there, kills opponents, and eventually a uterine receptacle itself. I can feel it happening. She wants to reproduce; I want to fill their crotches as often, and as magically as possible. We are slaves. She offers her womb to the covenant; and I can not refuse. It is the old-time ache. Strongest genetics win-with no further accountability. Victory fills a woman with child. She thinks, I'm going to lose. I'm the Spanish Fly. I'm full of cantharidin-she puts her feelers in my gland, sizes it up, assuming I'll pass her eggs that booty. But I cold-shoulder. I watch her eyes, and make her case me out. "I'm married. I'm not looking for a provider." "Then why not artificially inseminate?" "I wanted to," "But it gave you the creeps?" "No, I was going to do it . . ." In her mind. In her husband's mind. He talked her into intimate relations with a frozen vial and a turkey baster. She knows better than that. "But it sounded too sterile?" "Something like that. Children are creatures of passion." "You won't tell him?" "Do I look stupid?!" She has a point. Passions are a strange subject. They arrange themselves in vertical layers, of stratified debris, sorted by size in the funnel cloud. And now, it doesn't seem as sinister. Her plan excavates the ground, tearing it up in drunken stumbling we call Random Acts of God. "I'll do it." "Good for you. It will be better than a ride through a lightning storm with the torn top down." I liked that.

It promised things.

So I waited. I waited while she did whatever. He was in a room somewhere, and I was fantasizing clit, getting hard, pretending . . . I wanted in first. Kind of me . . . getting the male edge. He would meet rival, and think what? I imagined the center of the galaxy, where the vinegar roams, and wondered how aliens had sex. They probably watch us through impossible telescopes, equally horrified-slash-fascinated. Cosmic voyeurism. He's in there, and learning his pressure's off. He might not be her kid-giver. Gun blank. He'll want to believe it. AMs will tell. He might be pissed about it! Taht yearning . . . yahknow? Sex with youngsters. With pretty-perfect specimens. Maximum utility. Least knowledge how to prevent it. Least genetic damage. Nothing else to do, don't know who they are yet . . . Like the Army. Indoctrinate the teen-aged asses. Get them besotted with learning, before they choose to learn. He's all obverse with it. Get the lads . . . The pretty boys-it's a flipped gene? An emergency response to overpopulation? Go with it. Stay clear of out-n-out muff bangin', for pushin' genes forward. Still, I'm sure he'll want a tip, a little tongue. I could suck the chances slimmer, and what the hell, makes a god-sent story, all the crazier. As if human kids head a lost-species endangered list next to Plowshare tortoises. I shouldn't be so prepossessive with need to make more of us. She shouldn't be so desperate to souse the earth with more dumb bipeds. We're fussy mice in nature's cage-prisoners of a no-heat getting stabbed in the showers penitentiary. Bars and work and locked doors. Sex for the spurt. Hell with the rest. The only things rare about humans, is their thinking. I'm a sucker; she's yonder, cinching the tether of her plan. The plan I suggested! Fool. Fool equals genius. I could have said nothing-gone home and grabbed my pillow. Nah. Instead, I grab a handful of hotto-trot, stoke it lightly, watch it almost cum, stoke its fires higher . . . Ah, it's a good think, this. All that smooth tight skin. I've watched her plenty-checked out her silhouette, 'gainst the window. Pretty tight. (Downright svelte.) Had a fantasy or two in my time, over that lass. Should say: Ass. Then it occurs to me. I consider the day she didn't bother. No under-wear. Nuthin. Just pure viewing pleasure. Was it a setup? All along?! She must'a showered, and thought about it. I can't believe women don't know when they're being backlit. They must lock the door at night, touch themselves, and imagine it. Imagine having their sperm-choice tableau, asking without saying anything, watching man's life (quite literally) lapping her shore. She's the one with the gun! I'm suckin' the barrel! It went like that for a half-hour. Me thinking wild things, and her growing ever-more desired. 'Course.

Deidre wanted to get me

all along.

Sir! Enemy

1000 meters and closing.

It was a pretty nice room (between cheesy, and tip-top accommodation), except for the dark shag carpets. No stains, burns or rancid smells. Fresh sheets, plenty of towels . . . I sit down, and wait some more. Thisiz nutsaz a widget factory, that Finlandian wife-carrying contest (where winner gets wife's weight in ale, after wife flogs husband with birch branch), or quantum dots-dem single-electron 20 nanometer spots of transistor (Billions dance on a pin's head?). This is nutty as that, and that news Really tripped me out. Trillions of molecule-sized devices squish into a square millimeter. 15,000 times more data than a normal-sized computer chip. All because we thought it. All because we think its next thing's possible. Whoa. Round and round and round. We think it, therefore, it must be possible. It is possible, because we're capable of thinking it. Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. I sit here, and part of me is attacking caviar at NYC's Stork, because my dad claimed he worked there (way back when) and useta tell us bout its clientele. All the glitter and slink. Hemmingway payin' bar tab with a hundred-thou royalty check. (Poor bastard, shotgunning himself. Like father, and brother too. Bad suicide gene intat-der family.) I heat up thinkin-bout Stork speakeasy, and its family of movie-goin' crazies dad told us about. It makes me wanna leave these semi-sordid surroundings, dance with champagne, fall down, and be bedded by someone glamorous. Someone dead, and currently deified, while gangsters with Thompsons wait eternity by the back door. Sure, I read all 'bout it in the NYT cultural resurrection section. Where the gossip hit smut, and called itself art. Dad was pretty right on, 'cording to them. More shit went on in those back rooms than they'd dare publish. Down fightin' in the mens room gettin' gold watches bloody with cold-shower stabs. White-hot mistresses, wondering why they do it, tanking forgetmenot liquor, readying their cold-shoulder adulteries; eh? My dad pours another shot of bourbon, askin' mom for another plate of fixin's. She pretends she can't hear him go AWOL to the things you never tell children. And that was only the start of it. Loven-m and leaven-m. Full pocketbooks, tight alibis, leakin' crotches. Yessir; that place was full of 'em. He was incorrigible, she useta say. Ahhhhhhhhhh-hha. Breathe in breathe out. Time slides by. (Draconeeean.) Perfectly so. She comes out. He must be in the other room. "Sorry, I had to talk to him first, make sure we were straight." It was a funny thing to say about a gay man. God! When I think in those terms now! Sorry, I'm getting off track here. Guess I'm a little embarrassed . . . "He's uncomfortable too." He might not like me. It must be bad enough, fucking tuna-fish when you're a vegetarian-hell, I could bark like a dog-be an equivalent zoo animal-a real 300 buxom pound circus sideshow, taped and strung. He's playin with the fire. He's me walkin' all over that Triumph lady, being walked over. "His name is Mark." Biblical. Plain. (Not Victorya?) Wonder if that's really it. "Where is he?" "Over at the store, getting some drinks." Has this hovel a back door? Drink should hem and haw us some. "Maybe we should be at ease; you know? Get comfortable?" Like atten-HUT! I'M A PIECE OF REINFORCED STEEL, JUST THINKING ABOUT IT. At ease soldier, it was only a drill (so speaking). I sit down, and remember the pain killer in my glove box. "Just a minute, I'll be right back." I walk slowly to the car, humming an old black spiritual. What she gave the world! I felt a tear drip from my weakened duct. Emotions are scary. They're cra-zy. You can cry for Ella Fitzgearld, or turn to mush, imagining the dead Viet Cong propaganda moviegoers in tunnel cities-gaping at US anti-war demonstrator flicks as rats run over their laps, the generator chokes for oxygen, munitions explode overhead, and B-52s droves speed 750 pound carpet bomb concussions for blood trickling from nose and ears of children with their clothing torn off from shock, while elsewhere, whole villages scrape carbon-monoxide walls, buried alive! V-Cong troops wouldn't fight, without a movie first. I think about it, cry, watching young mothers in expensive cars and threads, shopping, strolling designer-clad progeny, fretting their modicum faults of otherwise-peachy-keen lives; I think of Deidre's impending, and wander the disaster of future generations. Look at all this concrete-all the rules posted on all the metaphorical hotel doors, the invisible sprayed-over bullet-hole signs nobody's bothered to erect, that speak from onionskinned leagalese papers lawful incompetents haggle with, and it all sickens me. Little Miss Deidre (animal for a night) wants to follow her wired instructions. She needs to help overpopulate the earth with virile-male me, clogging planetary pores with more fucked-up humanoids' garbage, and chemical excretions. Does she assume the results of these actions? Do I think about it? No. Hardly. I smear topical pain killer on my dick, so I'll last as long as possible before I slap the slot home. I; noble man-savage, dream of grand scale impregnation. As many cunts as possible-and she only worries for one. I fiddle with the door key. Need some graphite lock fluid. Never think of it when I'm not unlocking the door. Click! (Finally!) Button pops up. We're both self-serving. To the Nth degree. But now, SLAM! She's cagey, slipping into something indecisively-yo-yoing between seductive and shy-preparing for conception-and I'm fingering my cock, waiting for her cue. I scuff neat leather shoes back upstairs. Knock-knock on the door. Should I open it? "It's Mark. You get it." Tense moment. I twist its cheesy lock, turning handle against my sole genetic-proprietorship. "Yes?" "You must be . . ." No kidding. Who else would I be? Late night milkman? "Picasso." I don't know why I said it. Just for fun. He follows. "Fabulous. I've always admired your work." "Yes-I've been dead awhile, so it's hard to hold a brush . . ." "Seventy three, wasn't it?" "A bad year, admittedly-still, it was an evincing initiation of sorts, much like the Royal Academy's in 1896-A real turning point." We were hitting off wild pitches. "I particularly liked your blue period." "Before the analytical cubism?" "Before the rose." "Yes, I was depressed then;" And at the end of my Pablo Ruiz Y Picasso trivias. "My next period will be Marxist-hedonism." "Sounds fascinating." Mark was an okay guy. Anyone that obtuse off the cuff, won my immediate approval. "I plan on doing a lot of jaded nudes." He slides on the bed. "Just for the record, I'm bloddy-glad you're here, even if you're straight. This reproduction stuff gives my creeps the creeps." "Then why do it?" A favor? "I couldn't meet the little tike (nine months from now) and think about test tubes. Besides, she asked me. We used we used to be lovers-a long time ago-Deidre and me. That was before." "You didn't know back then?" "I was too afraid to admit it to myself. We'd gone on queer beats; kicked the poor bastards till they didn't get back up, trying to make believe we weren't like them." "We?" "My fucked-up friends in High School." I find muse in his candid nature. "What about her husband?" "Never liked the guy." Interest predicates more. "What would he think?" "He'd note his sorrow for what was about to happen, then kill me." Gay hater. Spicier and spicier it gets! "You're kind of getting even, huh?" "An astute observer, you are. But that's only a shred of the real reason I'm here." For sure, she's giving us time. "Please indulge me-how do you feel about ménage-a twaaing, when the odds aren't stacked in your favor?" "So to speak?" "As you wish." I thought of the cop chase. "It's different. Never thought I'd ever in a million years do it, when I woke up this morning." "That's good. Adventure gladdens the heart." The door to the other room opens. "I see your socks are on."

is all Deidre says.

Bogies mark...

It was easy.

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Nahh. Closed was better. She's luscious. A slender muscled sexy. Definition. That's hard to find on a woman. Mostly, they eat too much. Get flabby. Married makes 'em so-why keep trying to attract? The provider's caught. Modern' life's too easy. Too full of potato chips. Deidre was better looking than I'd imagined. That almost never happens. Better than the gigantic fantasy I had viewing her silhouette. Nice stiff nipples, waiting. They dented sheets real neatly. Oh Jesus, what a lucky little boy I am!. Her libido's cranked up full-volume, thinkin' 'bout man one and man two doin' her hot genetic duty. All hers-one great big sausage duo for the oyster-taking. It's difficult to be patient, when you know it's all lubed up. He got it on one side, and I got the other. Nasty. I geet her little plan. He's poop-chutin', and I'm slipping in strainin'-to feel something, that is. Damned, it's hardly even registerin'. He's doing her thinking (eyes clicked shut) : Boy. Nice smellin'; effeminate. Tight little teen-aged bunghole. Soft and pliable. He'll get so close, the front side won't make any difference. I've worked it out. She's piling on pheromone, getting us steamed and lathered. Sweet little Deidre, hiding under those sheets. Got some second-thoughts? His is a monster. A real fire hose. Like crappin'a Presto log. Smart boy, pulling out-gotta wash good-n-squeaky clean, 'fore going back in. I can see the whole thing happen. Right down to the claw marks. Owww, there she goes, piling the robe at my feet. A tanning-booth body steps forward, glistening with shower water. I am greedy, and simultaneously numb. She is putting her hand to mine, and dragging it to a perfect concurve breast-sign of 'mother nature' Earth, adorin' its due, and recompense to material pleasure. Mark is watching. Is her fabulous body having any effect on his heterosexual pogrom? "Does this do anything for you?" "It's interesting." Like, how? As an intellectual pursuit, or . . .? and she's unbuttoning my pants. This is his interesting part! It makes me a little self conscious, and Mount Vestuvius dies. Mean-while, I'm sure her body is slithering, because tits and ass are oiled, and I manage to romance myself hard whether or not he's looking. That's the moment I begin to think about bulls. The whole asinine idea of seeing red. There's this hot body, sliding slightly across your tummy, and all you can see, do, and otherwise-consider is sex. Like bull going for cape, oblivious of waving sword. Dick as matador, oblivious of danger, intoxicated with moment, cheers its own finale-thrust. Nothing exists but bull. Nothing exists but bull's red cloak. The dancers of death, from two separate corners of the arena, face each other. She wants penetration. He wants to penetrate. Penal. Penetrate. Penal colony. Penitentiary. Isn't it nomenclature? "It-niiice." He talking about me?! Just when I'd forgotten him. That's when he touched my ass. "I . . ." "Don't worry; we're going to make a Deidre sandwich." (She giggles) Like I thought. 'Cept he's not so hung. Butt-stretching sized, but no rips and tears. Better for nerds. Fuckin' disgusting. He says things low, touching her-he's smooth-the lines-they laugh, under their breaths, obviously, they know each other. At ease? (even though) . . . and I realize he's realized it won't be a problem. He's dong and she's hole, even though skew sexual 'orientation'. I'll have to compete-I can tell-he's curious, time traveling to another page of himself, bends her over a bit, from behind, wants . . . IN. No sir. That's mine.

Everything seemed normal at first.. Now I'm caught. I'm Phineas Gage, and the 1848 explosion (at a construction site) drove the hideously long, fat iron bar through my skull. Doctors operate, and to their amazement, I live, but mysteriously, my personality slowly crumbles over a period of years. She grabs my coma'd cock,

and rubs it to life.

I'm the Cu Chee tunnels' nitrate vision, luring villagers wordlessly down to be pogrommed by producers' ideas of a reality they know nothing about. The explosions overhead are our daily life traumas, and we try not to hear them, so we won't have to chance-encounter the source of their munitions. Mark vies for the snatch I'd like to fill, and that brings up very old code. I'm the producer, and my genes are always right. Somebody else's thoughts don't exist unless they are filmed, written, or born to carry on. That's the insanity. In men's need to produce time transcendence, cells must propagate, for steel erodes. Now there's moans. He's ready. Does she want him? Dipshit question. He's the original chosen donor. I am invader, challenging his rut. I am the blank in the gun. She said so herself. He's going all the way-his truck roarin' down the hill . . .

His eyes . . . About to roll back;

I saw red.

I had to do something.

Wake up feeling like death all over. It's my last bloody chapter. I'm suppose to go to work now?!

She's done it, first and foremost, fuckin' the daylights out of us, then casting acupple'a poor empty pricks aside. The fag hadn't even cum yet, when I hit her. I dragged the bastard off her. . . and you know the rest. We fought till he broke the nightstand falling off the bed. Crazed. They thought they had a sucker, did they? Sonova'bitch-I gave it to him, all right. Went in dry. Kike screamed good. S'what he wanted-told me he would-put her body in the car, drive'r to mom's and drop her off. Say the light fell from the top shelf, knocked her cold-n'all the passion n'fuckin. Ha! Mom'd like that! Say she was comin' for dinner-it was freak accident, hope she'll be all right hand wringing queer act-she'll believe'im. Funny though, all that humpin' an dumpin' bodies on the bed-wasn't exactly subtle! Deidre remembers him getting real stiff, archin' back-startin' to crush her. Getting ready to squirt, the bastard! That's all, too. God-damn. Wake up next mornin' in a headache, fingerin' that gooey panty swoon juice, and remember fondly, things that never happened.