11am — I’ve cut Math1 and I’m in the teachers parking lot smoking fags with the fags. Solomon is showing off his self-harm scars which are a bunch of small mostly uniform slash marks on the lower part of his forearm. I’m trying to find someone to bum some weed off. I decide I will get Charles’s dad to buy me beer after school. He’s a weird guy, and his kid is even weirder, but he just smiles meekly and takes the money2 and knows to come back with the most beer possible for what you give him, no questions asked. No “haha sport, having a party?” maybe because he knows there’s no party. Just a few kids getting hammered in the back of a mid-60s rambler and trying to shoot at squirrels with a pellet gun.
In the meantime my afternoon is free. My CD player is broken so I don’t have any music to drown out my developing schizophrenia. I have contempt for every person I see, every car, every establishment. They’re walking dead. Us kids are still alive, we only think we’re dead. It’s not much of a difference. They’re preparing us for a career in death management. Buying, selling, cutting, merging. The holocaust was orchestrated in PR speak, in multiple choice boxes, on dotted lines. I work three days a week at McDonald’s and two at Dominos pizza.
动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门
They had me making pizzas to start even though I told them I only wanted to drive. I’m mostly driving now on nights when I’ve got dad’s car. I make good money in tips. I spit in pizzas all the time. It’s what gets me through the job. I think about busting a nut in them sometimes too. One of these days I’ll crack. One of these days I’ll do it. Nobody gives me the good tips. All I hear from my coworkers are the tips they’re getting. There’s this twenty something Buckley who thinks delivering pizzas is some kind of high calibre sales job, always primping himself in the locker mirror and whooping and yelling and high fiving the manager about how much he loves the place. He hasn’t a brain cell in his head. Big dumb golden retriever. I’m sure he fucks like the devil. It makes it worse. I don’t mind the driving. Sometimes I love it. It’s the only time my alcoholic waste of a father will give me the car. Mom is a real bitch about her shitty van and hasn’t ever let me drive it. The last time I took it out to the store to get some toilet paper she greeted me back home up frantic from a Lithium nap, bawling and telling me I was killing her. I tell her maybe she’s right; but I don’t say it, since from there it’s hysterics and Xanax prescriptions and the lawn doesn’t get cut by the Mexican fellow because she can’t be bothered to call if she’s mixing meds. Just lay out there, catatonic-like with the soaps on, bouncing off her retinas.
McDonald’s is not so bad if I’m baked. But my managers, ooh I want to kill them. I want to grab them by the hair and plunge their heads in the deep frier. The customers are no better. A generous cross section of All-American slime. Fat fucking pigs we ought to be slaughtering for their meat, septic tank homeless counting handfuls of loose change with shaky hands, tweaked out hopheads finding fights to pick with the girls at the cash register, dead-eyed soccer moms with Wallmart smiles buying a happy meal for each of their rodent children, some with actual rattails limply falling from the back of their heads, hoods, hoodie wearing hoods who ask for extra large cups of water and buy two of each item on the value menu to feel like they’re cheating the system. All while the same dozen corporate pop songs cycle through the PA system, speakers placed strategically around the building to make sure you cannot be anywhere completely free of the music, only in its liminal spaces where the natural reverb gives it an extra sense of mocking. One of the older guys, a Mexican who hardly speaks a word of English that isn’t printed on the McDonald’s menu loves to smoke weed and we try to get some reciprocity going so the two of us can stay high at work but our schedules are at odds and sometimes he just no-shows without a word from management. He laughs a lot and treats me real fatherly when we smoke together, patting my back and shoulders and saying things like “promotion” or “big moolie America.”
I reach the supermarket by the highway and briefly dream about hitchhiking somewhere far away. But where? I’ve hardly ever left the city. The city is all I know, this city. And what else is out there but more city? I could drive for days I think and still be where I am. Even the managers would stay the same. Just the lackeys that change. I’m somewhere close to Jen Marie’s house and I start to feel nostalgic for middle school when me and her were still fucking. I loved her and she fucked every one of my friends to repay that. I’m exaggerating. But innocent little Jen fucked around on me, and wanted me to know. She wanted me to know she was grown up now, or she was independent now, that she had options, that this was only natural, that I was only an option. That she wasn’t who I thought she was, or something. It worked. I could see through it but it still worked. It’s been over a year since I have had sex and the horniness has all turned to rage. The sex on TV is mocking me. Women have finally begun to fill me with every bit as much rage as men. I would tell Jen this made me a Feminist after all if she were still there to listen. My intestines gurgle and stomach growls. Taped to a telephone pole is this curious image:
3
There is a self-righteous anger in me, but I don’t know a thing. There is a raging violence in my head. I think often about killing myself. I have dreamed up a whole catalog of different methods ranging in gratuity and practicality: from driving off the old train bridge in dad’s car at very high speed, to rigging an elaborate system of motorized blades to hack me apart and cover every wall in my room with a mess. Leave something for mom to clean. There’s also the going-postal route, one where I take enough xanax to effectively dissociate and take as much of the death machine with me as I can. I’d be a hypocrite. No better than they are. But why should I be? They made me in their image. I am my father’s seed and mother’s womb. An alcoholic and a pill head. A psychotic and a neurotic. I think sometimes maybe I should go out killing a politician or a big bank or business pig, but I wouldn’t know who to target and anyways it wouldn’t mean a thing once they were dead. There’s always someone else to fill the spot. That’s all it is, a spot in the corporation. But these are only fantasies. Evil fantasies. Fantasies that make my stomach sick. But satisfying. Easy. Like popping a pimple. But I don’t have the guts to kill myself or anyone else for that matter. I’m chained just like the rest of them. Raised on just the right chemical feed to keep me docile. I have too much fat on my body. Too much fat in my brain. I can’t think straight about anything. I want to live in a music video. Things happen in a music video. Life is ordered. Everything is in order. I want to live in a porno. Jen never fucked like a porno. She tried to. I could tell, she was acting. As much for herself as for me. And then I noticed I was acting too. I was doing things I’d seen in pornos in movies. The whole thing blew up in my face then. We were all acting. We are all acting. Only none of us this side the screen are any good.
I get off the path at the creek and decide to follow it upstream through a graffiti covered tunnel. This is where the homeless sleep.4 They’re all out now picking cans, shitting themselves on buses or harassing5 people for change right now, but they’ve left their stuff all lying around. No way to tell their garbage from their possessions. I run around kicking and stomping all of it.6 They’re hoarders, the homeless. Maybe this is indicative of some toxic consumer addiction that lost their houses in the first place.7 This and this and that. I am excited to find a tallboy of Lonestar beer among a pile of shit-smelling clothes. The lip looks clean but I wipe it down with my hoodie anyway, crack it and begin to drink. The day is looking up. I don’t have a watch but it can’t be later than twenty past eleven. I won’t be able to get any more beer until at least four. I will have to get home and steal some money from mom to buy a twenty four pack.8 I’ll try and drink eight or ten before work. Any more and my burger flipping skills begin to waver and I don’t want the manager asking any questions. I hate drinking with Charles. I’m beginning to suspect I just plainly hate Charles, but he’s the only friend I have9 whose dad10 will actually get us alcohol. He might be the only friend I have period. Every time I go over there all he wants to do is play Playstation and he only has one controller. He plays this shitty car game11 and always puts it in the first person perspective that makes me feel motion sick. His older sister Brenda is in College now and she’s smoking hot. I used to like trying to flirt with her when I went over but Charles has taken over for me, doing shit like slapping her ass or telling her to come over and suck him off when she comes in the room looking for something. He thinks it’s hilarious, she doesn’t think it’s funny at all. When she leaves in a huff after Charles has called her ‘sweet-tits’ or ‘honey-cunt’ he looks at me and laughs a big toothy grin like I understand and am in on this, with him. I am not in on it, and I want to sock him in the face and maybe choke him to death.12 I heard something once like “the state's money is incest”. I guess that’s right. It is explains all the incest porn then. Indoctrination in the last place you’d think to look. Someone has to catch the deviants. But I’d like to choke him with the playstation controller cord, then take his dad’s credit card and go to Blockbuster and rent something that doesn’t suck like Blasto or MediEvil.
When I come back out the tunnel into daylight I pick up a big stick and poke at the rocks in the creek with it. It’s good timing too because I come upon a blown open dead cat who looks like he’s been getting picked apart by birds all day. I can’t help a smile and I squat down to take a look. I set my beer in amongst the rocks and get precise with my stick using it to pry open the cat’s chest. Most of his identifiable organs are gone or mashed to a vague reddish orange pulp. I think I can see his ribs enmeshed in some kind of gelatinous substance. Other than missing some eyes his head is intact. He looks peaceful. Cunt as any living cat. I get an idea and go looking for a bigger stick. I find a perfect one projecting off a tree at the side of the creek and climb up to snap it off. It’s sharp at the end and I feel like a hunter-gatherer holding it.13 A hunter, out here alone with my stick. I feel for a moment like I have actually escaped the city. But then I hear the cars rushing by in the distance and the desire to impale this mutilated cat corpse on my stick returns and I know the city is inside me and there is no escape as I would ever want it. I return to the cat and shove the sharp end in until I feel some resistance. I put one foot on the cat’s body and push hard until the stick suddenly pops out the top of the neck. I wanted it to come out the mouth. I wonder if I can remove the stick and try again but I figure that may risk decapitating the thing and then I don’t have a cat on a stick but an anonymous mangled torso on a stick. I raise it up towards the sun and take a gander at my work. It’s a flag fit for Ghengis Khan. I let the stick slide within my grip and hold it close like a cadet holds his gun and begin my proud march upstream with my new cat companion by my side. I almost forget my beer14 and quickly discard the cat-flag to go back and get it. I stand there and finish the beer in one chug so I don’t run risk of doing this again. I feel a great This fat guy Simpson burp coming on at the end and give it a go. Nothing beats a Homer Simpson burp. Homer knows the pleasure of a stomach filled with fries found in a PlayPlace plastic ball pit turned dour15. I crush the can underfoot and toss it into the creek and watch it float down. So it goes. I grab the cat-stick now already quite bored with it and carry it along over my shoulder like it’s a bag of my only belongings. I decide to leave up the hill through the bush and I come up to a chain link fence and tossing my cat-stick over climb over myself. It takes me a minute to get my bearings. I didn’t realize I had come this far but I am out back of Target at the Vibrant Hills Metromall. I figure this is as good a place as any to leave my cat-stick and lean it up against the dumpster as tribute to whichever schmuck is next to take out the garbage. What a scene that will be. Will he see himself in this crudely crucified cat? Will he laugh or will he weep? Maybe it will drive him to quit his job. Maybe he will feel liberated. Maybe he will go home and tell it straight for the first time to his wife or mom or dad. Maybe to his son. Maybe he will slap his son silly and throw his videogames out the window into the street. Maybe he will lock his son in the closet and blow his brains out with his dad’s old sport shooting gun. Anything could happen.
I see another poster like the on the telephone pole, this one captioned in black marker “Purple People will March with Pride!”
I begin to feel my consumer conditioning kick in and the faint mall smells bring me inside. I check my wallet. Ten dollars and change. More than enough to satisfy myself at the food court. I try to remember if there is a liquor store in this mall, but I am pretty sure there isn’t. I would try and get someone to buy a beer or two for me. Only the last two times I tried this the cocksuckers ran off with my money. The first time it was a very homeless looking guy. I should have known better. The next time it was a corporate yuppie type who was distinguishing himself from the pack of crew cut chinos crowd with a METALLICA16 RIDE THE LIGHTNING t-shirt which I took as a marker of enough mid life crisis anti-authoritarian moral ambiguity to mean he would get a real thrill - maybe sexual - out of buying some kid a couple beers. I gave him ten dollars and asked for two king cans of Budweiser. Five minutes later I see him come running out of the store with a bag under his arm like he wanted me to know in full just exactly how he’d fucked me. I followed him out into the parking lot but lost the cocksucker as he pulled off in his red Miata. I realized I had confused a sympathy in the mid life crisis type for what was actually just jealousy. Men like this were old and knew it. Kept alive by modern medicine and human rights standards that biology didn’t know a word of. The man was decaying or already dead and he hated me for the little life I represented. Meanwhile only was I young and virile and in his eyes fucking all the little girls17 he used to dream of, I was also now breaking the iron rule his generation was meant to hold over me, trying to do something for myself, with myself. I had to be quashed. I was surprised he didn’t come back around with his Miata to try and run me over driving fender first through the glass mall doors. Like ending his entire career in a hit and run bloodbath with me as a hood ornament. Or come circling around to follow me halfway home and drive-by me with a can of mace, grab me up, zip tie me, and take me home to plow my asshole18 in19 between20 his21 video yoga sessions and night time Police Drama serials where the white officer and the black officer put their racial differences behind them to hate the Mexicans and the poor together. Of course I would have liked it just as much as he if either of these things happened. SOMETHING then would be happening to me. I would have only been able to say ‘ok’ and pass the torch right back to him. But he didn’t do either of those things. He took my ten dollars and left me without a beer, running maniacally to his car, writing and rewriting the story in his head on the way home, to explain to his fiancee how some thug had jumped him outside the liquor store and he had not only heroically took the assailant down, with the help of the US NAVY SEAL22 martial arts guide he had been reading of course--evidenced by his leaving it open face down on the bedside table for the past month--but that he had also in his badboy METALLICA23 kind of way also stolen one of the thug’s beers in his flight from the scene. And Angela or The other bitch or That other bitch24 would flutter her eyes and say Oh Guy who symbolizes the phallic object, and squeeze his one large bicep25 just like he likes and go on sapping him of his income to sit around all day turning her thoughts against the public image and flaws of everyone she’s ever known, Guy who symbolizes the phallic object included, who would be the last of a series of takedowns, the final flourish of the current season, the great Opus, like it was for the WWE Title Belt, the Execution which would have to happen in the company of Guy who symbolizes the phallic object’ and her own parents - the first pair to heighten the shame and embarrassment and the latter for the fallback support and ride home - and would have to involve not only the size of Guy who symbolizes the phallic object’ penis but also his salary and his frankly abborhent political views and racist tendencies26 which seemed to just start pouring out of him27 right around the time of the engagement. She would finish the display out with one last wailing28 cry, this one so convincing even Guy who symbolizes the phallic object himself is back on her side intimating that Guy who symbolizes the phallic object may after all be -- a homosexual.29 Her parents at this point, especially her father - who did his part on House Unamerican Activities all through the 1960s and worked first as a union buster then as a National Guardsmen basically wherever he could be paid to break the skulls of fags and leftists, (no real distinction for him) or anyhow sit back and enjoy a medium rare salisbury steak and a cigar while ordering the skull cracking of fags and leftists - are appalled, clutching her tight repeating apologies to her and staring deep deep into the eyes of their counterparts in Guy who symbolizes the phallic object’ parents. It is their game too you see, and they are happy to find themselves suddenly winning.
I’m in the foodcourt now. Everything looks exactly the same. It’s a large hexagon of fast food fronts selling the same buckets of Consumer grade Meat-flavored-filling in various crudely appropriated culinary disguises. The burgers, the chicken, basically whatever you can get here is the same shit we’re printing in large sheets, dying red, pressing into small pepperoni shaped circles and putting on your pizza at Dominos. I’d wager there’s only about 5 major food distributors and 2 or 3 producers in the entire country. Everywhere I’ve worked save for McDonalds gets their shit from the same distributor. McDonalds has their own branding on everything. McDonalds is nothing if not monolithic. But the repurposing of one generic protein goop is all across the board status quo. Nobody can tell the difference, nobody here has ever tasted the alternative. I can tell you I haven’t. Mom made me pop tarts when I was young. Dad used to barbecue a good hot dog. Dad loved using the grill, talking about the grill, showing off the grill, tinkering with the grill. He would have been a car guy if he wasn’t always getting his car repossessed or fighting a DUI - so he was a grill guy. There was a masculine pride in it but it was a Ronald Reagan kind of masculinity. Once mom left and the nuclear family as he liked to call it was broken up the grill lost its appeal. He wasn’t the Father-Provider anymore. He didn’t belong in the graphic on the beef patty packaging. Now he was just warming up food for his lazy parasitic. It sat on the deck and got rained on day after day. He was making a point of not covering it. A point to himself, I guess. It took me a long time to learn to read him that way but dad was an actor too like the rest of us then. Caught up in his personal symbolic suggestive dramas. Not anymore. He used to come home drunk and watch Nascar and pretend to know or give a shit about any of the faceless drivers, sometimes, worse, he’d put on CNN30, to try and chant the party line, pretend he was a man of ISSUES and THREATS who thought long and hard about PLANS and REASONABLE MEASURES. Now he just comes home to shit and piss himself, puke on himself and then hug and kiss me when I ask for something to drink and he slowly releases the bottom third of the bottle to me. You would think having an alcoholic for a father would make access to alcohol easy but the man was no fun at all about it. He liked to go off about alcoholism, his ‘disease’, and was against my drinking ‘in principle’ as much as he had the strength or mental capacity to hold anything ‘in principle’. What’s more to the point is his house was not cupboards full of different liquor bottles and a fridge full of boxes of beer. There was no bar in the house. He did not mix drinks. He did not hold drinks for company. He bought beer on the way home and drank it in solitude until there was none left or he was forced by another’s presence to lock himself with it in the bathroom. I decide to go with Panda express.31
I sit in the back of my shitty pickup pulling drags off half a Marb Red I got off the driveway, my dad leaving them to litter the lawn on his “smoke breaks”--what he calls leaving the computer where he plays internet poker 10 hours a day to kill all the plants in our front yard through exposure. The front yard also looks like shit. There’s a ratty feral cat perched across from me, on the fence lining the backyard that I look out on from the wraparound driveway. I can’t tell if it reeks or I do. I hear cursing from through the screen door of the house and can tell he’s losing. If only he could gamble his EBT, he’d do that too. We’d be dead in a week.
That school-shooter-looking kid came over again today and watched me play some Motocross Mania. I don’t give him the controller more since he throws it when he gets angry; right across the fucking room. And that game is so poorly-made that anyone’d get angry playing it. I just have the benefit of not having to think about it. Things go a little better that way. Another curse from the house, this time in triumph. Put out the embering but of the cigarette and walk inside to tell him I’m going to work. My sister glares at me through the crack in her door. I grin, which only makes her angrier. She slams the door and I go in my room and throw my uniform on--Carl Jr.’s--and head to the door though my shift doesn’t start till 6. It’s 3 now; I don’t get to drive the truck unless that old fuck knows I’m going to make him more money he can steal. He side-eyes me from the overstuffed plush chair he pulled up in front of the old desktop computer so he could rot better. I think I see his face sluffing off in the brief moment I can force eye contact, as if to say here’s your boy at work. Here’s where your money comes in, you porno-mustache wearing chairwarmer. I leave through the creaking screen before I get too mad, open the passenger side door and reach beneath the seat to grab a warm Steel Reserve. I pitch it back before getting behind the wheel. The leather’s warmed to a fever point, and I feel boiling in my skin as I pull the sunvisor down, that only covers half of my eyes and leaves a corona around the bottom of every metallic surface to further impair my vision.
Out on the main street32 where traffic rumbles by, I hang a right and pull into 2nd gear, then 3rd while I turn over locations in my head. Solomon’s probably locked in his room cutting himself, so that’s a no-go. School Shooter is out who-knows-where, probably playing Hey Mister. I make a mental note to track him down after work and see if he hasn’t pushed through all the 24-rack he said we’d share. Georgia might be free. I wish he didn’t always wanna hang around the mall though, getting busted for petty theft and being let off since his dad owns the See’s Chocolate33 there.
Then it’s decided. I turn off onto King St.--named for burger King--and find a little side-street where I can make a call. The flip phone’s antenna won’t find service until it’s so bent it might as well be a wire sculpture. Georgia picks up. He’s not around. Brother died in the Navy and they’re at the funeral, so he won’t be home till later tonight. Bummer. I grab a road soda way out from under the massive front pickup seats and sit in the shade of the truck eyeing the chain-link fence that separates me from the house I’m staring at. It’s 3:19.
11pm — Me and Javier are the last ones here cleaning up during changeover while the manager Paul sits in his broom closet sized office pretending to enter data into an empty spreadsheet and we are fucking spaced. When we dipped out into the alley for our smoke break Javier pulled out a pipe and what I thought was a big bag of weed but turned out to be that synthetic K2 shit. It hit me hard but not in a good way. “Good boy” Javier said when I coughed. By the time our break was up we’d almost smoked half the bag and ambled back in there like zombies. I was hearing some kind of machine sounds or chanting voices in my head changing pitch and speed. I felt like I was made of tin and that everything in the world was made of tin or copper wire. Javier was just smiling and acting like a clown. He climbed into the PlayPlace ball pit and started throwing himself around like he was splashing in a pool. It was funny but I wanted to get our work done and go home. I kept losing track of which inserts needed changing over and I must have taken the pickles out three or four times over. By the time I was sweeping up the high had mellowed out but given me a nasty pineal gland headache. I asked Javier where he got the spice or what it was called but he was either too high or too Mexican to understand and he just smiled and ruffled my hair. Paul came over and started jabbering to me about a TV show I didn’t care about. He knows I don’t like him. I wonder why he speaks to me. What social function does it serve him when he tells me what he thinks of these TV shows I say I haven’t seen? Is he rehearsing what he will post on the forums when he gets home tonight? He knows I do not like him. It is a social fascism. I have no choice. I looked down at the broomstick in my hands and imagined thwacking it across his head. I nodded as he spoke and tried to play it cool like I wasn’t totally high or plotting his death. In an act of gross submission I laughed at one of his jokes. In my head flashed images of me and Javier carrying his body rolled up in an XXL apron to the trunk of Javier’s car and dumping him down some rocky cliff into the ocean. After punching out I followed Javier out the front door instead of leaving out back like I normally do because I wanted to hound him for some more spice. I got the message across in body language and we smoked another few bowls outside his car.
Once he left I looked around felt the loneliness of the parking lot and all its empty cars. I remembered a statistic I had heard about crime in mall parking lots. I looked around and realized I wasn’t the victim in that statistic but the criminal. All these cars side by side waiting for the right person to pillage them. The K2 was making me creative. I wondered what I could get away with. Of course the cars all had alarms these days. If I wanted to smash and grab a wallet or CD player it would be one and done I’d have to be out of there. The nice cars, wherever they were, were obviously not to be fucked with. Those guys probably had security cameras inside their cars and had the money to make mall security review their tapes of the incident. It’s much easier to steal from the poor than the rich. I could go through every car in the lot trying the handles on each. Then there would be no alarms. I could do more than one car if I found more than one unlocked. One of the cars at least had to open. And maybe the kind of person who leaves their car unlocked in a mall parking lot overnight is the same kind of person who leaves their keys inside the unattended car. I would have only a night’s joyriding in it, but that would be enough for me. Anyways leaving it somewhere to be found and identified would make the investigation open and shut, no need for tracking down suspects. And I would be tried as a minor, more or less exempt from long term legal consequences. It would be a shame to enter legal maturity without having made use of my rights as a youth. I looked toward the MegaMall and the McDonalds entrance for security cameras. I looked up the necks of the lot lamp posts. I didn’t see cameras anywhere but decided to play it safe and first clear my security image as far as it represented the identifiable employee seen leaving McDonalds ten minutes ago with a coworker. I put on a casual act and walked out across the street probably looking very very suspicious. When I felt safely out of range of mall security I took off my hoodie and hid it in a bush separating two low rent office lots. I returned in a dark t-shirt which was not much of a disguise but at least somewhat harder to tie to the hoodie wearing McDonald’s employee who just exited the building. I began walking along the rows of cars weighing my options, window shopping. I was filled with excitement. Here I was at the start of what could be a long and prosperous career in auto theft. I felt like I was in a movie. I have always been happiest when my life most closely resembles a movie. Just then a rattling cart jockey comes from around the corner and spooks me. The moment is shattered, broken. I run. I forget about my hoodie. When I die it will be someone like Javier or Paul who speaks at my funeral. Choking back tears they will read from my employment record, and light a smoke of something not for human consumption.
Me and mom are waiting for dad34 to get home for work to go out for a fancy Friday dinner at Pizza hut35. Mom is all dressed up and made up and carrying a large black purse I have only seen her take to funerals before. She is running around the house checking the locks on the windows and doing more anxious busy work. I see her through the cracked door in my room where I lay watching Jim Carrey on my 8-inch Sony TV surrounded by crushed and empty juiceboxes. I drink a lot of juice when I am excited. The sugar calms me down. I am excited to go to Pizza hut. We have had Pizza hut delivery before but tonight we are going to The Hut. We have passed the building many times on the roadway and I think it is beautiful. It is shaped just like the logo. There is no telling what will happen when we go in there. We will be changed forever probably. We will become like the families on the commercial. We will laugh and gasp at our pizzas and have a group hug before going home. This good cheer will follow us home. At least until the pizza is all digested, but probably forever. I like the little white table that comes in the middle of the pizza when you open the box. Dad likes to put an olive or a piece of pepperoni on the table and say it is a table for midgets. Dad loves midgets. He will rent any movie from the video store that has midgets on the back. He rents a lot of bad movies from the video store, but the ones with midgets are usually funny. My favorite movies are Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, and Dumb and Dumber. Dad’s favorite movie is Predator but he says it’s too scary for me to watch at this age. He doesn’t know about the videos I get from Travis and watch by myself at night. He doesn’t know what comes on TV. I think the restaurant tables will look just like those mini tables but be shaped for grown adults. I wonder if all the tables at The Pizza Hut will look like large versions of that little table. I wonder if they will introduce me to the chef. He will be a great big Italian-American with an upturning moustache and hands as big as one large pizza each. He will always rub his belly. He will always be hungry. That is part of making the perfect pizza. Of being the perfect chef. You must always be hungry so you take that extra bit of care in making the food perfect. One day I will be a pizza delivery driver. I can’t think of a more beautiful job in the world. My car will be shaped just like the pizza hut logo. At my feet will be a hundred empty juiceboxes. There will be so many my feet will disappear in them. But I will be the best delivery driver so nobody will tell me what to do. No, they will be empty beer cans. I will be a man then, just like dad, and I will drink Budweiser with my friends at barbecues and football games and the girls will lay their heads on my chest while I sit in a lounge chair and drink. I will save my money from that and I will move to Russia when I have enough. I will go there to welcome them to the free world. I will introduce the Russian people to pizza and beer and Jim Carrey and they will love me then. It will be my home away from home and everyone will love me then. I will open the first Pizza hut in Russia. I will iron my uniform every day. I will have a Russian sweetheart and then a Russian wife and she will iron my uniform every day. We will be in love and we will eat pepperoni pizza and watch adult shows together like Seinfeld and Frasier. I will have sex with her every day and I will play with her boobies every hour of every day. We will sell the Pizza hut and return to America one day and I will introduce my Russian wife and Russian children to the true meaning of freedom. We will go to video arcade where you can play any game you want and we will go to grandpa’s house where you can fire any gun you want. We will drive in a Ford Mustang and listen to Bruce Springsteen and they will be Americans then. Dad finally gets home and mom is so happy she runs to hug him at the door. He is wearing dark shades inside and smells funny. Mom seems hesitant about something and begins to question him. She tells me to shut my door. They yell at each other for ten minutes and then Mom comes to get me to go to pizza hut. She isn’t excited anymore. She has been crying. Dad is smiling a huge grin and calls me “sport”. Dad never calls me “sport”. We get into the car to go to Pizza hut. We have a “reservation”.
8AM — No sleep. I had some kind of psychotic break last night after smoking Javier’s K2. I was plotting auto theft when some downs syndrome guy with a stack of shopping carts came out the dark and scared me into a real bad trip. Flashbacks and everything. I spent all night pacing mom’s house, drinking lots of water, and watching the exits so nobody would sneak in behind my back and get me. It’s 8AM now. I’ve made my way to Casey P.’s place in the trailer park and the two of us are lounging in a little kiddie pool he’s got filled up out front for the summer heat. Casey was the only one I knew I could call. He told his mom I was sick and she made breakfast for us. His mom was always nice to me. She’s good people. She raised a good son in Casey. Casey’s two years older than me but we used to hang out in elementary school because we played baseball together. Casey dropped out in 9th grade to take an expedited GED at home and started working real hard toward becoming a mechanic. He’s like a grown up now only he still manages to be alive. He takes good care of his mom and helps pay the rent. Things could have got bad for him after his dad died, he used to be a real heavy drinker and he was getting into shit like meth when most kids were just starting smoking weed but he levelled out. I’m proud of him. I don’t see him much but he’s like an older brother to me. He understands. He said he’ll give me a ride into school today if I wanted. I know I could tell mom I’m sick and sleep the day through but I think I want to go to school to help get my head straight. I need a drink but I’m too embarrassed to ask Casey. His little brother is screaming inside the trailer. “He’s not right” Caseysays. They think he’s retarded but they haven’t taken him for any testing. He has anger issues and doesn’t communicate well. He loves to throw toys and kitchen shit at his mom and smokes a pack of cigarettes every day. He’s in first grade. Casey has to go in to work so he drops me off at school and drives on.
I lose my nerve when I get there and I decide to go to the smoke pit to see if I can bum or buy some weed off someone to help flush the K2 out of my system. I get paid by McDonalds tomorrow so I’m hoping I can buy something on credit. There’s a circle of younger kids there and I manage to smoke half the joint they’re passing around. They’re either afraid of me or they think it’s cool to be smoking with an older kid. I want them gone and shout “Now get to class you little faggots!” I kick one in the ass as they scatter. I sit on a log and decide to beat off because I’m feeling horny. I don’t know who or what to think of. My sexual fantasies have become more and more abstract as I’ve gotten older. A bra catalog or a memory of sex used to be enough to get me by but no longer. I try to think of women but no one woman in general. Things get messy in the right-after if they get emotional in the heat of the moment. An image comes to me right out of thin air. I’m fucking this tight black girl right in the middle of the freeway. She’s not wearing anything but she’s also wearing jean overalls. Cars are zooming past us and I think we’re going to be killed each time one passes but there are also no cars, no buildings, nothing but pavement stretching on forever and ever into the landscape. It’s the old west and she’s laid out across the entire plain reaching out and grabbing at the pavement like bedsheets. She’s faced away from me but I can see her face. It’s my face. She’s a white girl now. Her hair is white blonde. I’m fucking her ass and her pussy at once. We are big as freeway billboards and the entire nation is watching. We are live on TV and my cock is 9 inches long. Now I’m the girl and I’m being plowed from behind. I feel the cock up in my guts. It’s my own cock. I’m being fucked by myself. Horses gallop across the plain and the black girls’ arms are scraped and bloody. I panic. She grabs me and we roll over so she’s riding my cock with her ass in my face. It is gorgeous and there is something monumental, seismic, aeronautic in its slapping. It is the launching of the Challenger space shuttle. Her entire back is ripped up and roadburned or worse. There are maggots in the wound. I’m in bed with Jen. I’m playing road hockey with her outside of mom’s house and launching the little orange puck as hard as I can at her in my goalie gear. I cum.
I open my eyes and look around. Fifteen or twenty feet down I see Mr. Rabbit the guidance counselor staring at me from the trees smoking a cigarette. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can’t look away. He turns and slowly disappears into the bush. I sit stunned for a minute more starting to ask myself whether or not I just imagined that. I am losing it. I wipe the cum off my trousers and head inside to wash the crotch of my pants in the toilet. I try drying it with toilet paper but the single ply all comes apart against the rough surface of the pants and now there’s a big wet mark with tiny shreds of TP clung to it. Whatever. I look at the clock. First block is half over. My next class will be history and I commit myself to going. In the meantime I drift into the cafeteria and see who’s around. Nobody. I check the computer lab and there’s a class in there but I slip in anyway. In the far corner I find a couple older kids playing Unreal Tournament with big headphones on. I know these guys, vaguely, and pull up a chair saying “hi” and “can I watch?” It’s a little LAN game they’ve got going. The four of them are in a ‘directed studies’ IT class where they come here once a week to play games off of burned CDs. The computers wipe every time they are signed out or shut down so against their best efforts they usually have to reinstall the game each time they come in. These guys are serious. Plugged in. Bobbing their heads to the 150bpm eurotrance. They wear athletic clothes or Jinco jeans. They cultivate pubescent goatees and sideburns. They say video games are the athletics of the future. They talk about their own futures. About colleges they are going off to. They all want to get into programming and move up to California where things are happening. “That’s where the programmer pussy is” one says, and the group devolves into a shouted argument about feminism, women in programming, and this guy Travis’ being a nice guy pushover virgin all while they play at what looks like a very high level of skill, hopping and bouncing around the map and picking eachother off with a rail gun mid air at great distances. Meanwhile the 9th graders stare blankly into their word processing programs and the teacher scrolls through a sports gambling website on his desktop at the front of class unaware that he has left his computer projector on. The keyboards crackle like some kind of mechanical rainfall. I can feel myself getting cancer from all the screen light and decide to get out of there. I say goodbye to the gamers and head back out into the halls dragging a hand across the wall as I walk to bounce every lock I pass against its locker. I wonder if I can get some weed off the vietnamese gangster kids who hang out in the basketball courts and go looking for them. It’s fifteen minutes to history. I go and shoot hoops with the vietnamese kids for a while and they’re outplaying me with every move. They’re all yelling “white boy” at me in unison which is surprisingly intimidating. Then the leader of their little gang Dat comes up to me and puts an arm around me. This is how they roughhouse. They don’t mean anything by it. Then he says something something he fucked my sister and they all laugh. I ask if they have any weed they’d be willing to sell me and Dat starts getting real defensive asking if I think he’s a criminal just because he’s Asian which is not even close to a stereotype but I don’t say anything about it, I just say someone told me they were selling.
Dat asks if I like to party and before I know it I’m getting into a van with them driving up to Dat’s dad’s house. I expect to be going to a poor part of town filled with low income houses and struggling Vietnamese American immigrants in some tight knit community but we go up into the hills and it turns out Dat’s dad is filthy fucking rich and owns a whole change of combination car garages/car washes in the area. We get to his house which has three cars parked in the driveway. It looks like a house from the movies. Maybe like the Home Alone house. We head on in. I notice how high the ceilings are. I want to ask Dat for that weed now but he has disappeared somewhere upstairs and his friends have split into two teams of two for a game of pool on the large table. I do some snooping and walk through the kitchen into what turns out to be his father’s office. He is seated at a desk in a big chair against a wall of books. I’m surprised and I fear for my life for a moment. I don’t know what kind of man Dat’s father is, how he feels about white boys, or whether he’s expecting Dat or his friends in the house. I see the clock behind him and feel only now how far I am from history class. “Enter” he says to me softly and motions me over. I walk over. “Please, sit.” he says and offers me a cup of tea. He has a pleasant aged face and he purses his lips to focus as he slowly pours the tea. I get into the chair opposite him and feel at once like I am his equal partner in something. It’s as if I were expected company, counted on even. I half think he is going to put his hands palm up and invite me to begin our discussion, but he begins. “You, American, you came to my country and destroyed what you found. You destroyed it. The Europeans were there first, The Japanese before them, but in all those years of colonial violence never did they destroy with the arrogance and the waste that you destroyed with. For Japan we were an outpost. Our people meant nothing to the Japanese. But they held us in no contempt. Our land was a tactical asset, and so they learned our land, they lived in it. They were in touch with it. In that way they were Vietnamese. The Europeans too, in their campaign of greed they saw at least the value in our land, in our people as a workforce, we had what they wanted, we were respected at least in that regard, and we could understand them, we could truly hate them. But when you came, American, it was all different. There was nobody to hate, because there was nobody in charge. You dropped bombs, napalm, agent orange indiscriminately. You massacred our villages, raped our women, destroyed our food supply, killed those you took prisoner. You came in a pop music package, you bore signs of your TV and your radio all over your equipment. Everything to you was a joke. An expansion of the mall. There was no honor in your soldiers. There was not even guts. Your soldiers did not want to be there. Many did not even know that they were. You had cameras everywhere. You were making a movie. You were making the greatest war film American audiences would ever see. It was all propaganda. It was a propaganda war after all. It was your government’s regulation of our peoples’ minds. It was your government trying to stop a foreign people from building themselves better lives. It was fear that we would be right. It was the fear of your government your system feeling challenged and deciding they would rather burn down paradise than be proven wrong and disarmed. Why? I cannot be sure. Perhaps it is as the Marxists say and your capitalism your markets are all controlled by one central committee barring all outside entrance. How then I ask you does my family rise from peasantry in Vietnam to aristocracy in the US? The system does not seem rigged against me. Still I was a communist in my day. And I consider myself one now. Does that word make you uncomfortable American? But I wonder if the Marxists aren’t wrong, if America isn’t every bit as free as they say it is, and that your underclass isn’t just the cancer of laziness engendered by your culture. It was laziness I saw in your Vietnam. It was laziness in the eyes and the fat roll filled necks of the American men I strangled to death.” he made a wringing motion with his hands. “It was an emptiness, a lack of values, a lack of investment. You Americans all think you are cowboys like in the movies. But the movies never show the cowboys herding cattle. And so you have only learned how to drift like a cowboy. How to point your car down the freeway and drive. You have not learned commitment. You think your childish version of freedom is romantic or strong, but it is weak American, it is weak. You had many more guns than us, many more bombs, more gadgets. And yet still we won. It was because your soldiers did not care. If half your soldiers were as committed to war as ours were… things would be different now. This is what the war was about. The preservation of laziness. The self defense of laziness. The wholesale extermination of those who reject laziness. Your rhetoric against communism, American, is always a rhetoric of laziness. Really? A system in which every citizen is asked to do his own part? A system born in the circles of workers? This represents laziness? You can think only of American laziness to poke holes in this dream. You cite your American definition of “human nature” and project your laziness onto my people. Well. My people are not lazy. My people are not Americans. You are like cattle. You have heard this comparison before. You are without souls. You are profit margins. You are the easiest race of men on this earth to enslave and manipulate. Your only advantage is your uncaring. You have no dignity. You will murder hundreds of thousands if it means getting your way. How do you stop the nation which has nothing to lose? You do not. Do you rise then, by the sweat of your own toil, by the blood of your own people in its shadow? You will be bombed and stomped out by teenage boys high on drugs, who haven’t even started to shave.” I drank the tea. This guy was pretty cool after all. “Yeah fuck America” I said and Dat’s father smiled. “But that communist stuff is pretty gay too. I don’t want to work at all ever.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “The American is a strange breed. He can acknowledge his flaws in the same breath as he doubled down on them. Your laziness has a sick pride to it American. Maybe you are not so empty after all. Maybe you are positively charged with something negative. A great sucking hole. Maybe you are all of the devil.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but it sounded right to me. “You might be onto something Mr. Dat” I said just when Dat came into the room looking for me and dragged me out embarrassed like.
“Did he say anything to you?” he asked, giving the impression that this kind of thing happens often. “He just talked about the war, I guess.” Dat shook his head. “Fuck that old. He don’t know a thing. We’re the American dream and he talks like he would just throw it all away. I’ve heard stories. He was a hustler once, before I was born, but he’s lost his sense. Every time he mentions that war I say good all those coomie gooks died. I say they should have dropped the a-bomb on those niggas. I look like a Vietnamese but I’m an American!” Dat sells me some weed and gives me an adderall for free, then shows me his gun. A 9mm. He points it at his head and pretends like he was going to pull the trigger. For a second I sort of hoped that he would, but it’s probably best for me he didn’t. “I’m just joking on that suicide shit. This is for business homie.” and now he pointed it at a human target that wasn’t there, closing one eye and gritting his teeth. It looked cool I had to admit. He must have practiced the look in front of a mirror. I took some of Dat’s papers and rolled a couple joints. These guys were staying here the rest of the day so I walked back down to school by myself smoking and inadvertently playing snippets of song from the McDonald’s radio over and over in my head. By the time I got back to school it was already last block. I was hungry and tired. I went into the cafeteria and bought a cheese sandwich and a Coca-Cola with my last coins. I fell asleep at the cafeteria table and was woken by an office admin about an hour after class got out. She asked if I was ok and I wiped a big glob of spit from my mouth. I asked the time and told her I had to be somewhere and left. I didn’t have anywhere to be. It was my day off. I wasn’t going to let my tiredness get in the way of a day well spent. I thought about finding somewhere to bunker down and watch TV or play video games but nothing came to mind besides’ Charles place and I still owed his dad money from yesterday. I felt depressed. I was too tired to be angry. I went to the gas station to get a slushy and annoy the Indian guy who worked there. I put all the flavors in the cup and then mixed them together. It came out a brown-green. After I paid I told him he smelled like poo and copied everything he said in an Indian accent. He threatened to call the police and I sat right outside on the store curb to enjoy my slushy.
I’m at one of those community youth rock shows. I can hear the band from outside and decide not to waste $5 going in. It’s another shitty “alt rock” spawn of the MTV consciousness. I stand outside and bum smokes off everybody there. This girl Layla I vaguely recognize from classes comes up to me and tells me that someone named Henry is looking for me and gestures down the hill toward the treeline where a golf cart sits under a lamppost in the dark. “Henry Perrera?” I ask. “Yeah” she says “He’s acting weird. Talking to people in riddles. I think he’s going to try and hurt himself.” “Where’d he get the golf cart?” But I knew the driving range of course where he’s been working since middle school. He must have finally snapped like his brother stolen the thing and driven it on miles of asphalt to get here. “How did he know I was here?” “He asked if you were here and I saw you standing outside.” I figured I better go see what he wants. I lost the music as I walked through the dark toward the golf cart and I felt suddenly something very bad was about to happen to me. Henry’s brother Callum was in the Gulf War. They were a military family. Henry’s dad served and did something with radar technology now. Henry was a little marine back in grade school. He was going to be just like his big brother off fighting Saddam and his dirty camelfucker army. Then one day something happened and Henry stopped coming to school. Callum had lost it out there in the desert, went AWOL, and began murdering US troops. There was no pattern, no strategic coherence, no apparent ties to Iraqi forces. He was not a defector, but a man possessed, lost. He was thought responsible for the deaths of 14 US soldiers before disappearing for good, possibly seeking refuge in the Saudi underground. “Hi Henry.” Henry was out of it on something. “I knew you would understand. I knew you were the only one who would. Get in.” I took the passenger seat and he began driving. I asked where we were going and he ignored the question. He explained that he wanted to kill himself and knew only I would have the sense to help. He couldn’t express just how happy he was to know a guy like me. I wans’t sure what to make of this. He took a small dirt footpath which I was certain the golfcart would topple off of at any second down toward the creek. For a while it was all silent and dark. Just the wind, and the forested path in the headlights. When we got there he explained he wanted to drown himself in the creek. The creek held important significance for him. It was important to die somewhere natural like this, so his soul would not be “reabsorbed by the urban sprawl”. He needed me to hold his head down in the water so his instincts wouldn’t bring him back up for air at the critical moment. “The important thing to keep in mind is I want to die. There’s no blood on your hands.” “What’s in it for me?” I asked and he gave me his house keys. “My parents went out of town today. I’ve been waiting all year for them to leave so I could do this. You’re welcome to anything from my room. You want an N64?” “Yeah.” “I have one.” It was a good deal. “Ok” I said, “let’s do it.” Henry was ecstatic. He gave me his address scratched into the back of some receipt paper with his thumbnail. He lowered himself into the creek thanking me profusely and dipped his head under. I notice he gasped for air going under like he meant to hold his breath. Force of habit I figured and held his head down with one hand at first. It was quiet and still for about thirty seconds but then I began to feel him trying to rise up out of the water so I applied a second hand. Then he began thrashing, legs kicking, arms reaching up to grab me. I climbed in on top of him and gave it all my weight to keep him down. The thrashing kept up for another thirty seconds until it stopped. I stood back and watched him for a while. He certainly looked lifeless, but I thought I should check for sure and dragged him out the water and checked for a pulse. I tried doing some CPR kind of chest pumps on him but he seemed well and gone so I threw him back in the water face down. I didn’t feel much of anything. I wondered whether or not he had felt he truly wanted to be let back up at the end but I also knew he was dead now, and whatever had been in his head didn’t matter now. I was glad to see I was capable of killing without taking any special pleasure in it. Maybe I wasn’t half as far gone as I’d thought. I was helping a friend after all. I got in the golf cart but realized I wasn’t going to be able to return the same way up that snaking path. I followed the creek downstream for a while and came to the graffiti covered hobo tunnel where people were sleeping now. I left the cart with them knowing they would be quick to get rid of the evidence. I carried on walking downstream until I came out at the street by a gas station. I went in for a coffee and to use a map to find Henry’s house. It wasn’t too far. I walked the way there and found it easy enough. An all American suburban ranch house. Arm in arm with a whole network of dopplegangers. I used the key which I half expected not to work. The house was cozy and smelled nice. There were photographs all over of Callum and his father in uniform, of Henry at sports events, of family dinners. They must have been a very religious family for all the crosses hung around. How did they reconcile their religion and their patriotism with Callum’s murders? How would they take Henry’s death? I went into Henry’s room and found his N64. Perfect Dark, James Bond, Star Wars. Nice, he had some good games for it. I went back into the kitchen and grabbed a grocery bag to put the stuff in. I was feeling sleepy and climbed into Henry’s bed just to rest my eyes. There was a phone on the nightstand beside me. I considered calling Jen… maybe I could call Brenda or even Layla. Charles? It was too late to call anyone. I went into Henry’s parent’s room and got a pair of his mom’s panties out of the drawer. I found a family photo where she was wearing a low cut top and masturbated myself with the panties. My head felt clear and focused only on the pleasure. After I came I decided to sleep in Henry’s parents’ bed. In the morning I discovered the family computer and found a shortcut to the game Half-life on the desktop. I had heard good things about this game but never actually played it. I played all day and didn’t beat it. I saved my game in case I wanted to resume it later. Then I showered, changed into a fresh pair of Henry’s clothes and went off to work.
Summer is in full bloom now. The days are hot and humid, marshlike. It is an alien world outside my house. I am living at dad’s full time since mom was admitted to the psych ward. Dad lost his job shortly after for showing up to work blackout drunk and crashing a forklift. He’s attending AA now and trying for the first time in his life to stop drinking. He has tried to replace the habit with large amounts of coke and marijuana. Dad works at a Wallgreens now, and I’m helping pay the rent by delivering pizzas six days a week. I took pleasure in quitting McDonald’s and calling Paul a cocksucker to his face. His reaction was priceless. He was dumbfounded and scared. He went white as receipt paper and cowered with his hands raised in front of him. I wanted to grab a spatula and beat him to death with it. Dad’s lost his license again so it’s my car as long as I make payments on it. A lot has changed since school let out. Charles is in summer school and he’s taking it real seriously all of sudden because he wants to get into Business school after he graduates next year. I tell him good luck. I wake up late afternoon and sit around the house. My days are all the same. I don’t have the money to drink like I used to. I deliver pizzas until we close at 3am. The scope of my life has shrunk significantly. My relationship with my customers has become desperate. Behind every door I am secretly waiting for some beautiful woman or mysterious man to save me It is awful I know. I think about Henry sometimes. I spent a few weeks at the library reading medical manuals and looking for whatever I could find on the process of drowning. I didn’t get much more than footnotes or anecdotes. There wasn’t an actual book on the subject of drowning. I wondered if ever there had been. It would have to be written by someone who drowned somebody else. It is the only way to become close to the subject without dying. To see a friend or loved one drowning would not be enough. It would be missing something. The thrashing. Probably it would only amount to finding the body. It would be a neat and painless thing for them. It would take on mythological aspect. They would secretly thank the Lord for letting them drown. I found one diagram of a pair of lungs filling with water which I cut out of the book and kept with me for a while. It took on different meanings. In the end I only thought it looked like something that might go on a band tee, by which point I felt I was at last purged of any lingering emotions tied to what had happened. I played Henry’s N64 some. The games felt old and childish and I got bored quickly, letting my character stand still and loop through an empty breathing animation. I would have staring contests with the characters and try to determine how alive they were as compared to somebody like me. I never did beat Half-Life. I want to get a computer but they are expensive. Dad is against it. He says the world wide web will be the death of us. I spend a lot of time in the laundry room which is the only part of dad’s house underground. It is cool and dark with the lights off and smells like earth and chemical cleaners. I sit and watch the rat traps for hours, hoping for some action. I feel close to God there. There is a different texture to the air there. The outside world is real so long as I am down there. It is the furthest one can be from city lights but somehow it affirms them. I sit and let the whole comedy wash over me. The obesity. The addiction. The shopping carts, the motor scooters, the long haul trailers, the gas station attendants, the rapists, the murderers, the foreign wars, the terrorists, the factory farms, the smog clouds, the broken families, the dead, suffering, and dying and I see the cars like micro machines, so many cars, too many to possibly count, and growing, with minds of their own, driving, no longer driven, I see the spiders’ web in the corner of the room and the dried dead moths caught in it and myself at the center of it all on even keel. I keep thinking I will start to spend nights down here. I will need to get a sleeping bag from mom’s. I will light the room with candles and do nothing but record the emptiness.
Well I saw the thing comin' out of the sky
It had the one long horn, one big eye
I commenced to shakin' and I said "ooh-eee"
It looks like a purple eater to me
Well he came down to earth and he lit in a tree
I said Mr. Purple People Eater, don't eat me
I heard him say in a voice so gruff
I wouldn't eat you cuz you're so tough
I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line
He said it's eatin' purple people and it sure is fine
But that's not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a burger Punk band
Play four chords and tour in a van
Knock up girls after the gig
No one buys our CD’s the game is rigged
And then he went on his way, and then what do ya know
I saw him last night on a TV show
He was blowing it out, a'really knockin' em dead
Playin' rock and roll music through the horn in his head
(clarinet solo)
Tequila
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