“I walked in and it was clearly a gang bang gone awry.” - Mustache It’s amazing how comfortable these strait-laced, iron-armed, curly-toed wooden benches can be, when you’re leaning back like Pythagorus in the sun. Clouds are typographical errors that make the sky’s page illicitly beautiful. The problem with tea, is it’s complicated. If you don’t want a complicated, self-conscious ritual, it’s hard to just have, you know, tea. Without dragging out all the spoons, and the bear, and the little starry dimpled plates, and the this and the that the this the that the this the that the the the this and the the htat. Haaaa, hatatatatatta! Tata-toww! Kawhonk-a-WHONK-a-whonk-A-WHONK-a— The pony boys come in and wheel my peurile fantasy away. At the threshold he stops, wipes jiz off his red head with a snot rag, throws the rag to me to smell later, or to stuff in my mouth and pretend it’s him gagging me. Those lips touch a quarter-moon’s worth of a plastic cup of water, and welcome the energizing flow. It’s morning! Again. Hello, hi, hi, hello, howzitgoin. Two flies circling the light fixture. They’re walking, not flying. Dumb fucking flies. We’d light a joint if we had one, but supply lines are short. It’s this new government; it’s going to take a while for the scum and sleaze to get their act back together. But they will. I went to jail. Now jail is not a very good place. But, they got a lot of video games, and curves, and all the pone you can murnch, so it really ain’t too bad. Not nearly as bad as all the wastoids will have you believe. If you live in a little apartment, across from a new old café, you probably already have a fair idea of what exactly jail is just like. And then, more quickly than it began, your turn is over. And it’s my turn now. Okay, okay, what else? Serve tea. I smile. I fumble. You want a smoke? She disappears, turns into a brick, goes through the window the wrong way and I get blamed for it. So much for parole this year. Of course. Other people see the news, too, dumbass, I tell myself. I glance up at the red LEDs faux-rolling blinkily along. I smoke. Shut up, bitch. You commence the pacing around of him. Your boot heels (where’d you get those? I want a pair. Oh yeah. As if my stout thighs would ever be bludgeoned into that svelte a leather strait!) click his pain onto the damn floor. You’re lucky they even let you have electricity, he said, thinking of what his idea of prison must have been. Idiot. But he’s my friend, and I sure do love him. Plus, he has cute nipplies. When I get back, they’re playing pin the teabag on the jail cell wall, like a bunch of fucking sophomores. That’s so cute I think I’m going to pile. Strike another match, lite another fag all up on fire, like, so’s you can suck it. I got in trouble for smoking. That’s one of the reasons I’m— And when he is a bent daisy on the god damn floor, you open your mouth so slowly he can hear your lipstick unsticking, and the sound reprograms his brain. Chase them all out. Immediately feel remorse. Mostly because you looked like a fucking idiot in front of the someone’s girlfriend. I don’t think she trusts me any more. But you’ll invite them all back tomorrow. While we’re here, we might as well smoke. I love the sound of the train we’re on. It goes, chuk!-ka-Chuck!, h-uk, h-ChuCK!, a, over and over again. It never gets tired of going that. And what’s more, it throws in imperfections. Just when you subdermally start to flinch away from the repetition, it’s suddenly non-Euclidean; it violates a principal; it’s, as are all events and patterns perceptible and therefore musical to humans, more perfect than perfect; it flies in the face of the compass, the ledger, and the laborious pursuit. Relax. Books! Books are everywhere. It’s a bookstore, after all. Now her fingertips go pad-pad-pad along the spines of volume after volume, tracing a path in the dust. No-one ever reads these books, really. The few customers the shop has are generally only here to see her—remarkable, considering this is only her second day employed here, and her first day, yesterday, was only a half day because she didn’t get hired until noon. You wonder, in a city like this, how shops like this can exist. And then you drive on, in search of your next hot dog, and forget all about it. Try to pretend they’re not here because they pity you, you jail-brick-sucking piece of cuntass bitch... Bitch. But—why? You’re closer to tears than you realize. I’m not even going to bother to punctuate the equilibrium. No. There’s no more tea. The guards are hoarding it, over in their jackbooted corner. They’re holding out their pinkies, talking in bogus accents, and saying, A little more honey, please, and stuff like that. One of them’s not here. He went to go get the flowered dresses. Have you ever noticed how angelic the barrista’s voice looks when you’re bent over the coffee table getting raped in the ass by a hypertrophic murderer? As his spit-lubed cock barges in and out, and my intestines get acquainted with my soft palette, I stare at the perfection of her celestial eye-liner. My best friend, in a small-cocked version of empathy and barely-veiled lust, sloshes a quart of olive oil all over my back. The oil runs down into my crack just in time for the lifer’z next hump. My best friend’s simian fingers curl around my suspended prick. Three strokes. I go blind. The one stroke thug unleashes the one stroke fury of his seed; my one stroke ass fills up like a one stroke balloon. One str— Fuck. Oh god. It’s happening again. Your biggest concern is how to get through the next twenty seconds! Then you do that thing you don’t even have to think about any more. You stand there, weight more on one hip, arms demoniacally feminine inside their men’s dress shirt sheaths. You watch him wither. You got walls all around you! Oh shit! I’m still in here! I’m still in mother. Fucking. Jail, you ratshit batshit cage-fucks. And you’re drinking my mother fucking tea!!!!! So far we have Trish, Sue (whom we haven’t seen yet), the Interview guy, and The metapresence of the randomly artucilated jail cell arena. Is that it? Is that even true? Our “Characters” are actually electrons; we can predict a probability for any one of them appearing at any given time or place, but the more we try to observe them, the less we can pin them down. We’re not even sure if they are distinct, discriminated individual meatheads. They might be Quarky. Plug the power adapter into wall current before connecting it to the laptop—if you learn nothing else from me today, learn that. That’s one thing at least you can use. In or out of jahe. I know a word. Who are You? Who am I? What’s the differmints? A voice keeps saying, “You should,” while another voice answers, “It doesn’t really matter if you do or not.” For a while you sit there. But not for very long. You know what happens when you sit someplace like a bench on the boardwalk? You start to feel as if you’re on TV. And then you cannot cry at all. Books tight, corset tight, lips soft. It’s morning. Time to thrill in the cool quiet of this place. Outside begins to warm up. Inside stays cool. This bookstore is the fleshly wound of all her deepest secrets. I brutally murder you and throw your carcass to the baboons! I drag your blood all over the flagstones! I lick it! I step on your lungs while your babies are watching! I rake your astonished face across a bed of glowing nails. You’re not dead yet? I rip your cock right off what’s left of your pathetically mangled stump, and slide it slowly, smilingly into your fattened mouth! I piss on you while I’m holding your warm, soft, white wife. She’s so gooooooood. . . . Want to watch me fuck her salt and sweet while you unhurriedly expire? Want the last thing you see to be her, reluctantly, hating herself, starting to enjoy my humongous cock plumping her fat cunt and making her hum with wretched, horrible, sobbing pleasure? They push you out the door onto the dock. Fusty tears fill the canal beneath your hot feet. Why are you wearing black socks on a day like this? Time can only imagine. Alis, arie, tric, terp, ablew, entof— You smack your head again, but again, it does no good. Flip, flip, flip, one glossy page after another; trying, for the sake of a stranger’s dignity, to look normal. Trying to look as if she hadn’t stumbled into a rude mess of secrets. Everyone’s here; my gang. My friends. I feel so warm and cozy, I could be basking by a hot-springs sauna, redwood all around. Two of the witches are already having an irreverent debate about checkers. I smile. Then something else from that cloaky closet, memory, rustles out of hiding.... Sobering thought. I thought, Tomorrow at least I’ll get to smoke again. And then I thought, well, I kind of have to piss, so I just let go, and piss got all over my thighs, and then I got up, took off my flowery girl-shorts, and had a smoke right now, just in case. And so it began; a trickle, turning into an outpouring, turning into a rocket blast, then turning back into a kitten again. Just like my friend’s girlfriend, I sez to myself very silently, because any time I hear, even in my head, wordz like kitten, I get a very funny tingling under my eye, and I think about the in-between-the-TV-stations kind of aura the female past has all about it, like fireflies at the bogus Rennaissance. You gots to do what they say! You wish you waz someplace eltse! The plate slams the table, hard. Here. A man wants to interview you. You sit and stare at the blind walls all day and all night! Is there any more tea? 1) Why are you so afraid of passion, and Really, when you think about it, that’s what everyone in this room is saying. When you think about it. Again. Why is this jail? Because eventually, he’s going to leave, and I am not. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter if he’s a social worker or a frog. Did you want to work on anything in particular? the social worker asks. He’s a business man, too, after all. I lean back. Time to smoke. I’m the king of the armpit, times like these. It ain’t my girlfriend. That’s the best. The damn best. Like when you got a job but you don’t have to go to it yet. The god mother damn very ass best. I’m not even trying very hard on this, I tell the girlfriend. The way her smile demurred by proximate boyfriend falls on joy head of me. I like the way I know she likes me but she has to wait because her boyfriend is like, supposedly my best friend. “I would’ve ended it right there,” says a voice. You ever been in jail before, sweetie? you ask sweetly. You’re a worm! This is a whole new kind of, I mean, this is like a totally way to, I mean, for me. . . , she gasbags. When I was nine years old, my uncle used to come over and play whenever my actual mom was incapacitated. . . . You were about to jump in the canal, weren’t you? Yes, says the social worker. In the third afternoon of being a gemstone, you thaw out. I’m sorry, the owner says. I’m going to have to let you go. Sorry, guys, we’ve got to adjourn til tomorrow. The interview man sighs. Looks like he’s going to have to do his thing. Y’all set doon on a binch in front of the ice cream establishment. But you don’t get any ice cream. Other people do. Other people walk in there, disappear, come back out galaxies later wearing iced cream all over their nannies. But choo—don’ ge’ no cream. Why? B’cuz y’already had a falafel today. You don’t have much pennies left. I’m glad you could come, I say to the social worker. The social worker nods like a banana. By the time the tea was boiling, everyone that was coming was come. Cum leaks whisperingly out of my ass. And now, back to you regularly scheduled jail sentence. Did you think we were going to let you off that easily, you And flernched. Call me subacute. Call me hypercritical. But I died in there, and then where I went, she warn’t exarctly hebbin. He glowers. I say If I did got any, I ain’t given em up to a krainch like you, but I’m just kidding and she knows it, and she knows I know she knows it, so it’s all right, even though I don’t get to slap nobody’s else’s ass on account a all this tim-fuckery. The sun sets early on the bookstore. The not shoppers don’t not go home. The door jingler throws on another imperceptible coat of rust, and gets ready not to go out, nor to stay in, but to half-exist on the threshold of either way. I’ve been hurt too. People start to trickle back in. Music plays. He looks at me as if reevaluating the past twenty years. He glowers. I’ll ask the questions here. Smoke, smoke, smoke. There’ll be time to tune into the conversat-i-on, a little later. Right now, I hafta piss. You’re tougher than any other girl’s husband! You don’t get fried chicken every Friday! Break, heart, and beat, mind. The brain doesn’t know what to think. But somewhere in the lung, a separate piece goes, he’ll be back, and breathe out, and breathe in, and Yeah, that too, he says in that abrasive, nasal, uneducated but spitefully smart voice he’s starting to seem to have. When he talks to you. There’s something disingenuous about being in or out of jail—even as you’re trying to act all transgressive, you find yourself not much more extraordinary than a cup of fucking tea. What is, after all, passion, except the bituminous response curve of an alien grove? I give you a command, thus: walk with me, and you expect a certain oh nevermind. What the hell. We’re all going to die in prison anyway, right? This is a test, I said as soon as they was all seated around the enormous spool. Tell me everything you know about jail. You sit around and play with barbies all day! Cash in the trash can. It’s funny what this place makes you become. She’s an anomaly. How else could you explain the fact that, when she realizes why his manner is so discomfited—it’s because he’s quietly, quaintly masturbating as he backs back up toward the door—she doesn’t freak out, doesn’t bring charges, doesn’t even frowl. She simply says, in that husky tinkle she doesn’t even realize is her incredible voice, Yes, thank you. Everything is perfect. I can tell by the way he takes it he’s not really a smoker. But I don’t find the pretense irritating. I find it— He goes before he comes, thank god. Maybe it’s because you like this place. Maybe it’s because you’ve only just emerged, chick-wet and frazzled, out of jail yourself. Or maybe you’re losing it—no! don’t be silly—but in any case there’s one thing you don’t see as you go about this old familiar process, one thing you would have seen if you had been a little hungrier, a little older or younger, or just a little little. You don’t see the interview man casually not watching the whole thing from his resolute stance behind the felf section. You close the door to your nest, upstairs. Downstairs, the interview man closes his book and a galaxy of dust is born, swirls around, dies. Damn time. Smoke the rhythm of Canal Street. Tornadoes and houseflies. Elevators and the great within. Skateboards, music. Caricatures and rose dust. Loss. Smoke. Brother and sister, smoke. I hate having my own girlfriend, in case you hadn’t noticed, but I sure like someone else’s’ being in the room. Whatever. You end up in the hole! Prisoner jailed for principals, group claims. Prez says, Revisionist History still Immoral, hurts Country.... I thought so. There’s plenty to say about that face: it’s not perfect, is beautiful, has caused several traffic ensnarlments, is plastered across the dreams of many a bawd and a lewd still languishing in the jails of the nation. Almost suffice it for now to say, it’s a face you can almost taste. Something so ephemeral yet humble, wise yet pristine, white yet deep there is about her face. I love it and you do too. It goes with black leather, which goes with anything. Versatile! To call it “sexy” is to call the notes of an old familiar, gut-wrenching pop-love-perfection-confection “catchy”—it means something, but it doesn’t mean anything. Shut up. I get that god damn cake. She’s only halfway through perusing the veri section when the door rings again. With quietness she faces the new visitor. It’s him—the interview man. Here. In the bookstore. How did he find her? Or did he? Does he even realize it’s her? He doesn’t act like it. He only nods at her, as dismissively as a frustrated man can in the presence of the type of youth she un-self-consciously exudes, and starts shopping like there’s no to-fucking-morrow. Tryin’ to make it real, one more time again. The guards are as corrupt as you are! You pop a chocolate eyeball into your mouth. Everything has changed. With his little confession, he has eliminated your fear. There’s that love again, that strange little word that for as long as you can remember has represented surrender—and none of it yours. Furn. Amca. Sili, holla, abac. Well, the guy’s a creep anyway, she concludes. I don’t really trust him. So it’s no big deal, I guess. Emerging from her nest in the back of the upstairs, she nearly smax the No Smoking sign with her alarmingly moonlit face. The pizza comes in a box. I open the lid. A fairy jumps out; she had been crouched on the tiny plastic table, you know the kind I mean, the cheese table. And she says some words of wisdom I shall never forget: So he plugged the power adapter into the wall before plugging it into the laptop, and the thing fired up. Who are you? Who am I? Who is that fat guy over there? Why are we so obsessed with body image? What other countries can we go to, even if we’re in jail? Hey, this ain’t so hard. More tea. Yes. What would you do if I told you I love you. I scream. I smash the teacup in my hand. Hot tea fucks up my forearm. The barrista almost but not quite looks away demurely. I am so shockingly in love with her for that instant I want to die. Everything smells like hot sea monkeys. This is the closest to a tree or a universe I will ever be. I killed someone. And shit, thinks I; I’ve made a friend. The dock is calling. Sunlight penetrates the top two feet or so of green. Tiny bits of moss and duck shit hang suspended, given an earthly glow by that celestial intelligence. If there are any fish down there, they’re not coming up where we can see them. But then—and I feel a little foolish for just now realizing this—that’s the whole point of fishing, sometimes, isn’t it? We make duck tracks on the invisible water. Lickingly, someone taps me on the soul. I stop. So it comes time for my class, right, and after all is said and done I did manage to prepare some; I actually kind of got excited about it. I had all my tubes with rolled-up posters, my kite, my butterfly nuts, and something, and I waltzed into the jail school room all ready to fly off the wall and be average to above average, and maybe inspire some greatness and then meekly refuse to take credit for it—sly—but then guess what? It’s the rhythm of a train, and I like it. This ride is only just begun. Utter and complete dernt. And then. And then, um. There are tinkling noises in the creek behind your back. You turn around slowly, not because you think you’re going to see a bear, but because you’re petrified of what might happen if you don’t see a bear. You don’t see a stomach. You’re scared stiff. I wish I could explain to you how stupid you are. You ride up here in your car. First of all, anyone who drives a sedan is a total Dick and Jane. Anyone who can’t fucking toddle on their lap all the way across the desolate tract is dumb cane. You’re dulcet. Okay? Okay. Yeah. Right. Uh-huh. Sure. I’m secretly, for one instant only, glad this social worker is a man. He has long, disarrayed hair, and jubilant but somehow still guarded eyes. He has certain veins that stand out. His leather jacket creaks a little when he moves in this quiet room. This is a man of passion, I find myself thinking. I find myself magnetized a little bit by this man, perhaps in spite of the fact that he’s a social worker. He looks older than you’re supposed to be in this society, but just about the right age for smoking and going to the grocery store, maybe even fishing. I hate fishing, but some giddy little guppy in my gut tells me it would be fun to fish with this cat. Dumb, I guess. God. Help me. In some peaple, they call it thea. Until you figure out how to have tea parties, you ain’t got any friends! So but I don’t know how to prepare for my class. They borrowed me some books but I can’t read. I was thinking maybe I would just play the trumpet in front of everyone, but brass instruments make me look fat. So I guess I’m going to wing it. That’s the last thing you want to do, they tell me. You always want to be prepared. If you aren’t prepared, if you don’t know what your students are going to look like, then you might as well be a piece of cheese going into the butcher shop. . . . he glowers. Stop. Go back. You kan’t go back, I mean you just kant. I’m too untalented not to resort to metafictional porn; if that’s a problem for you, just consider this: Yes? pussy? Those lips— Hey, you. Yes, you. You want a smoke? No, I’m not talking to anyone “in here.” I’m talking to you, out there. If you exist, can hear me, and are jonzin, come get a fucking fag offa me and light it with this lighter. Please. Let me know I exist. Fuck all that. Move along. These aren’t the Quarks you’re looking for. And no sooner is the sweat stuck to my tattoo like a Nipponese fairy merchant, than it happens. A-gain. Table. Chairs. Bad, bad, bad rusty pipe music. Old bashful computers; they don’t make them like that any more. God I think I miss those old, harmless computers, with their wan screens, their steady fans, and their utter, absolute, unthinkably sublime dumbness—most of all. Clickity-click, snippity-snap, whirrdley-pop. But we’ll get back to those little boxes of inert imagsperation in a lil’ while. Right now I’ve got customers. An embarassed forelock gets swooped back on her lovely, round, faintly sweet-sweat-smelling head. She busies herself with the business of sudden forgiveness. Almost shaking, she flips through a magazine. Tomorrow comes. I’ll wear my boots next time, cunt, he says. He’s gone. She slides her cool hand along the tortuously ancient wood of the balcony rail. She can see downstairs from here; the sun is already shopping though the shut doors. Sometimes at a certain indefinite hour, if two men could smoke the same fag, they would. Two lights, two ends, one stick. It’s the closest thing to kissing some of us clowns ever get. When we’re dry, have clothes on, know which way is up, which, face it, is most of the time, even when we think we’re all wet and naked and turvy. That must be it. That’s got to be it, she insists to herself. Smoke. Okay. I’m trying to (shift, ker-chunk, into a stateless state called the present) make myself pretend that I’m either lonely or else a retard, so that maybe I can get a fucking cup of tea around here! Tomorrow night draws to the pale. Stars crinkle underfoot. Your gasbag heart goes plernch! plernch! plernch! as you circle around and around the true meaning of things. Love, me. Tomorrow night comes, and your “little friends” are back in the jail cell cum café witcha once again. Oh boy. Here we go again. Uh. Yeah. I’m not as oblivious as I feel obliged to act. “Talentless hack” is another way of saying, “I’m hungry.” Your microsocial rebellion was a matter of convenience when you were very young; now you don’t even know how to make a footnote in history. But, you still have something they can never take away (because they don’t want it). . . are you in jail yet? Mortal embarrassment is the only purity. I have good friends. They get my terry cloth bath robe, set me down on the love seat. The barrista tinkles; laughter of pure, heavenly condescension. She goes to get more tea. The warden is a server. Alone jh sits in the decency of jhs own room; forty-two and forty forty-thirds floors above the rest of the heirarchy. Don’t be a technophobe! common sense cautions; jh is not a computer. In the post-techno-dichotomous domain, a server is simply a server. A server is not a subcategory of machine. Because I’m in love with you! There! I said it! This game was where we turned into bunnies. We go hopping through the sinister fields, avoiding laser beams and doing ninja moves, and basically bringing down the elephants. It was fun but dumb. Like a movie, only where you get to do everything. God I’m stupid, I thought to myself, as we drifted off to sleep on the floor while the video game was still flashing bleep, bleep, bleep, and flickering all its inane wisdom onto the pisscolored ceiling. We were so drunk on pain pills it didn’t matter. There is a parcel of silence, wrapped up in clover and history, delivered to the space, dwindling, between you and the man. His chest. You fuckball! Now I’m on drugs. You stand there just a fraction of a hair of a scosh too long, just so he’ll not know what he’s supposed to do next, or, in fact, ever again, and then you do that turn, one more fragile killing time, and you walk as slowly or as quickly as you please up the stairs, one stair at a time. Pussy! They installed a news ticker. It’s one of those red LED jobbies, just constantly scrawls meaningless important shit across it all day long. Things about the national soap opera, who’s been assassinated, who’s at war with us, how bad we’re kicking all their nigger asses, etc, etc. It’s news. Right now it’s saying, Angst and anguish pour out of the very walls of our very own jail, day and night while the innocent sleep. Our infustigative reporter shows you why you shouldn’t care. And then it’s some kind of commercial: Get out of jail free—if you have excellent credit, or are already out of jail. We sit. You want to go somewhere with me? he asks. Click. Click. Click. Pause to turn, more slowly than a dreamboat, and click. Click. Click. Stop. Over? chinese tit star dog china wisdom. We smoke. About five feet tall. About four and a half feet wide, so not exactly a Mister Five by Five, but pretty close. Hair hangs straight down like hypodermic needles that sag. Eyes a little squinty back of all that cheek. Breathes a little harder than he should have to when he feels he may be under scrutiny. Suspicious of almost everything. Every five minutes he says something that makes you think he thinks he’s about to catch you in some hypocrisy, and he’s going to be good-humored about it, he just wants to purvey some common sense, I mean come on, this is this country. We speak this language here. How your kids do on test scores, that sort of thing. But as annoying as he really is, you don’t quite bring yourself to say, You’re annoying, you festering sac, because there’s something gentle about him underneath all the whine and bitch and squelch, something that just says, Yes? Yes? Cosse. She pulls the laces tighter. It’s about time to go to work. She’s one of the lucky extremely few: she got a job her second day out of jail. She spent that first night in a bush. It was damp and steamy, and the whole secret city seemed to be inside-out; the bush was the solar system for a change. She slept rather well in there, all things considered, until sometime around dawn when a shifty-eyed litterbug threw a wadded McSchwerman’s sack into the bush. The cold, greasy detritus made her think of better times, to be sure, better times than these. What the fuck else am I going to do? Not play video games. I’ve already done that, motherfucker. Nothing does, nothing did, nothing doodle doo-dah squid. I was thinking about writing a bunch of slogans on the walls. We could have a whole, write a bunch of shit on the wall and deface the place party. I was thinking of getting things going by writing, Jail: See where it takes you, like a recruitment ad or some shit, in big, wet lipstick up on the mirror under the naked lite bulb up over here, and then I could give everybody some naked pens and paint and crayons and whatever the fuck, and we could all say fuck until we didn’t want to say it any more. I smile. about another man, are you? Ha! But I can say whatever I want! I’m already in jail! As soon as I got up this morning, my dogz waz barking. I mean, I’m in jail now, so I sez to myself, Fuck! I might as well smoke! and I wrapped up about five or six rollie-fags in a bunch, and hove ’em all in my craw at the same time. Smoke was billowing out of my kranch like a Schwerman the Steam Engine, I kid you not. I felt so sick. In my cell. Right before you approached me, yes. You can’t smoke in here, she suggests, but he does anyway, so she decides to roll one up herself. What would you do, you repeat, putting on your best philosophical swagger, if I told you, you pause, I love you. Thank bajeezus for the echo machine love you. love you. love you. love you Oh, and I forgot one. Nobody’s ever going to trust you, ever again. Jail sux. Haha, sez her thug, she likes, tea cakes. Once that particular layer of thin ice is broken, we may have found a little niche of freedom. As much freedom as there is cinnamon in your almost-empty shaker from the last decade. It is never enough. But it is enough. Didn’t someone Absurd say that? Whatever. I’ll give credit when credit is due. So sue. Me. Ooooh, you’re a back door man! Magazines. She hates magazines. Chittering Forceps I could just sit and chain smoke with you guys forever, under this kind of old guitar sounding air we got going in here. I think maybe I will. I think maybe I’ll fuck off the rest of my time in jail and just sit in here, over here with you guys and sit by the fire and say fuck whenever I feel like it. Forever. How old were you when you went to jail? the man asks. Hey. Hey bro. Anyone who calls me “bro” is probably stupid. But I’m magnanimous in my incarceration. Wouldn’t you? Be? Hey. ’Sup. ’Mon in. Have a seat (laughable). Serve tea but the tea fish don’t seem to be biting today. Oh well. What’s tea after it’s grown cold, after all, but another reflection of where your life has gone.... Anyway, it’s not your problem. Words like cern, sition, ly, pital, kets, doned, gan, and oirs kept standing around in the forum of my connivance engine. So I thunk to myself, I’m just wasting time anyway. I might as well go to jail. They throw me against the opposite wall. They say it’s someone else’s turn. They don’t need this kind of shit. Nobody does. Nobody indeed. I was about to get to the good part. I was about to get to the part where I say I never did any of this, could never even dream of acting like that, but then I was going to reveal the unholy, ironic truth—of why I actually did get thrown in jail. And believe me, it was a shocker, it was a stinger, it would’ve made you think. Does that make me a bad man? He shops. Another tea party, so soon after the last? Where are my manors. Oh well, okay. Here we go. Well, I don’t know what it says. God I love that. Hey— And you love them. Laughter. Sobering thought that it’s probably, out of all of us, really only me who’s going to die in here. They pretend not to be pretending not to notice that discrepancy. Their laughter is kind. Everything is piss-yellow, or choked-on feather-mattress-white! What jail does to one. Every. Single. God. You write letters to the editor on fine, onionskin paper! Sure. And just like that, he walks away. Leaving you the hot-dog bun he didn’t eat. He doesn’t even have to whimper. Dude, one of the boys has brought his alarm goes off girlfriend. Now, if you know me, you know that’s good and bad. And if you don’t know me, well, fuck, as they say.... Still, it would be nice, if only for the sake of continuity, if he realized or acted as if he realized, or even remotely cared, that only yesterday they had had a rather intimite, if generic, conversation, that had been her first conversation after getting out of jail, and that had actually registered in her memory. This time tomorrow we’ll all be sitting here, wearing our flowered dresses, some of us smiling and trying to play it off, some of us mortified and utterly stiff, some of us actually really turned on and surprised how good our legs look. But we’ll all be sitting here, talking about stuff. That’s one thing that never seems to change. No matter where you go, people generally tend to sit and talk about stuff. You notice you say “I love you,” not “I loved you.” It’s not parallel with the conditional mood (is it?) and yet it is just exactly what you wanted to say at that time. It’s thinking like that that got you stuck in jail in the first place, you hose! Slp er igh. I tried to write a novel that afternoon, because I was still in jail you know, but it didn’t turn out so good. It was too, I don’t know how you’d say it. Oh. Sorry. Heh. Sweat invisible. Knee of his jeans, a different color in this polychrome outdoors than if in any house or jail. What is it about the color of denim, used-up as a condom that was wrapped around a scared girl’s first time? Empty now. Why does the sun always have to change the sky? You predict: Night is coming soon. You buffoon. Always making that same prediction, every single day, and every single day you’re proven wrong, and yet— You go up to the front. You say, So anyway, as I was saying, it’s poetry night here, which mostly means we have a bunch of tea, get sopping pissed, and try to elocute as long as we can before the guards come and laugh at us and make us wear flowered dresses. Phone rings. Depression pizza is the saltiest. Not together, they smoke. She with her pliant, pretty boots up on the counter as she sits in the torn-up desk chair (that chair used to be in the owner’s grandmother’s house; it was where she sat when she squirted out the owner’s mother. There’s nothing like a chair someone was born in for easing out the aches of gravitational existence. But our bookseller doesn’t realize the history of the chair. For all she knows, it’s just a comfortable place to smoke and pretend to be working), and he with his eyes almost bugging out as he scans every single book on every single shelf, in order, from iou to alth. Someone else’s lost history tapers down around the jaded rug of right now, like a juvenile candle burning up the evidence. Naked. What choice indeed? There we go. That bitch is talking again. God I want a smoke. What the— what? What? Yes. Yes. Okay. No, that’s okay. Yeah. Sure, no. No, yeah. No, that’s not a prob— what? Because it isn’t. It just isn’t. Okay? All right? Is everything all right, then? Ha. Yeah, well. Yeah. I know. Okay. Okay. See you later. You smile, even though you know she’s not really a bitch, and you know it never works out the way it does when you imagine it. Alone again in this unthinkable sanctuary, she decides to have a look around. It’s your turn. You realize this man probably is no student. More likely, he’s a perv. A creepy, possibly sociopathic perv with a bad haircut. So why do you kinda want to fuck him? That’s one of the minor mysteries. The great ones are too obvious. What the fuck you mean? Hearty laugh, slap on the butt. . . mmm, sweaty boy butt underneath those vacuous sweatpants. Say something else cute and dumb, so’s I can slap you again in front of all these.... They go home. I have several nightmares about killing everybody, and then I’m just so dry, so dry. I wake up. Try to get a bath in the piss-ass sink. Wish I had a comb so I didn’t look like a dried-jiz-covered dick head, which is obviously what I am. My friend, the idiot with the saucy girlfriend, brought me a new video game. He said it’s going to take me wherever I need to go. Even offered to hang around after everyone else was gone, to play it some with me. I said okay. It’s coming on the cold part of the year. I know they have a word for that part, but I can’t think of it right now. And well, okay, I says, but what choice do I have? Why things end is that you start to groove on them. And that makes them end. It’s dumb, it’s tragic; it’s like the national soap opera or whatever, but it’s what happens. Did anyone else notice? Probably not. But you’ll never know. You walk with him through the blasting sunshine, along the boardwalk. Is he really taking a class? Or does he just want to watch your tits? Smoking in the bookstore. That face makes men who don’t like kissin’ want to kiss! You’re so full of shit. The owner sobs softly on the floor, his pool of tears growing muddy in the dust, even as he replenishes it. Finally, he can cry no more, and he goes home—to see his wife? What is he going to tell her? Honey, I’m in jail. Sorry. Thought you might like to know. And how will she respond? Oh, that’s okay. What would you like for dinner, you puscillanimous nit? I need a donut. A donut is the last thing I need. Door rings. It’s the owner. He’s “caught” her sitting idly by the counter, playing with a spider. But if he cares, he makes no appearance of it. When she starts like a sexy horse, supple as a rubberband, he simply says, I wanted to make sure you had, uh, found everything all right. Time to order a pizza. Normal people are all made of secrets these days. Normal people don’t have much dignity left, and what remains is usually tattered and puking. Right before I approached you on the dock that day, and saved your slender life? Tel, vian, teers, stomy, tera, sor.... Tits. Well— Well aren’t you going to say anything? he quests. Let’s have friends come over again. We can sit down in the little dank hole with blanket walls and pallet floors and a ceiling of imaginary planetary delights. Glow-in-the-same-old-dark thing. Shine a lite, shine a lite. Send, it out, to your brothers and your— We all have to eat hot rat sometimes. Let’s just say there’s an infinitude. Focus is not our main focus, these days. There are more “characters” than you can shake an IP address at. Any one of them can be pointed to in any way at any time, although the funny thing is, randomness is not really random. I guess if there’s a moral to this story, that is not it. In the meantime, we still have regular old killing smoke. I eat my pizza. The anchovies taste like Paris, France, and the pickle-loaf smells like cheese. Oh—elp—are you in jail now? you ask, a wave pattern on your true forehead. You are sexy as a horse. He laughs enough to prove he still kind of thinks you’re trustworthy, but everyone present (except a few idiots) realize full well that you’re projecting again! Feel. Yeah? No. No. No, not until yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No. Sure. Bye. Sit down, settle my gelid thighs into a jiggly old easy chair, the rivets are showing through, and wait. Real, real, real, real, real, real, real, one more time again. Smoke all morning. Cough, cough, sit on the couch, listen to the conch go conk when I throw it against the stale, urine-coloured cinder wall. Jail. Ha! Okay then. Welcome back to my jale cell. I’m gitting ready to teach a class. Or a clernch, as the young men have it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it at all. But, my parole orificer says I have to if I want to have any hope of ever getting out of here at all. They line up against the far wall, patiently waiting for you to explain your little thing. You never would have had the balls to orchestrate something like this before you were in jail, now, would you? We smoke. I was alone. You got dreams about girls with handcuffs raping you! Time. I mean, nobody. Where’s my one one dollar bills? Give me back my eleven swine. Poetry nite at the ol’ jail cell. Come one, come awl, come in nuttin’ but a yaller shawl. We gots plenty of jam. I got pain medication that would make you blush, kitten. . . . Did you know, I ask the social worker, the news scrawler says I’m a martyr? Giggling. Tea smoretimes make you giggle. Giggle up your whole brunch, see if I care. Poetry—ha! It’s just a bunch of pigeons swooning. But of course there’s no cure for procrastination so effective as having absolutely nothing to do and noplace to go, so up she got, and she tightened up the laces on her stinky, cute boots, and she started walking up and down, and up and down, and up and down old Electric Node Ave, until she by gawd found herself a by gawd job. Yeah. That’s pretty close. We’ll go with that for now. Go back to the deep freeze, you corpulent fink. I smile. You think about it. Time suffers sweetly, offers the two of you some smoke. It’s so much easier to allow yourself to discuss potential suicide with a perfect stranger, when you have a fag between your lips and so does he. It happened. Whatever. I got in trouble. Same old. Fall air.