Neuroses are Red
a collection of short stories by ssy
Torture
A rough sketch of Kennedy Plaza, the bus station in downtown Providence, includes the blurry figures of some still rougher characters. Before renovations the place underwent in the early years of the new century, it was much less brightly lit, the statues were green with oxidation- everything was covered in pigeon shit. It’s not to say that these days it’s any less dreary or dangerous for the uninitiated, but the current blinding fluorescence that assaults drugged eyes at night gives it the illusion of safety that the average taxpaying white collar commuter is easily lulled by. The junkies, drunks, thugs and madmen of yesteryear are still roundabout, but they have less shadows to skulk in.
In the older, darker Kennedy Plaza of the 1990s on a humid summer night, once the suits, students and underpaid secretaries had found their worried way home and the buses dripped by at an incrementally slower rate until midnight (when service just plain died), there were all sorts of people laying around, going nowhere- body and soul. You could expect someone painted like a prophet to wander through gargling ‘fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck’, or a tall bruiser with a small baseball bat asking wannabe victims for cigarettes, or two kids like Pat and Saul, waiting for an agonizingly late bus on their way to score a twenty sack.
“This fucking sucks, man,” said Saul, throwing a bottle cap at nothing in particular but scaring a few diseased pigeons savaging a wet doughnut all the same. “My brother wanted to boycott RIPTA a while back, they’re such a sloppy organization, can’t keep what few buses they can even afford to run on time. Listen to the drivers, they’re the most depressed people in the world. Mortally.”
Pat leaned back on the stairs of a war monument and stared at the pointed tip of a dreadlock floating in his field of vision, yawning.
“Whatever, it’s no big deal really. Just chill the fuck out, we’ll get there when we get there.”
Across the street a fat Asian man was being chased by a decrepit, half naked hag who was either his girlfriend or his mother, screaming English profanities in an otherwise undecipherable language. A middle aged guy in what looked like a sewage worker’s uniform and a banana yellow baseball cap with a hot pink brim sat down nearby on the steps of the statue while letting his plastic picnic cooler drop at his side with a watery slosh.
“Hey fellas, check it out- remember that if you ever decide to get married.”
“Yeah, sorry man, crazy crackhead whores with AIDS aren’t my type,” said Pat, snickering while the woman slammed the poor bastard over the head with her Price Rite bag and of course, he just kept on walking.
Saul sat down with an irritated sigh and lit a Marlboro, holding it in the hollow of his hand to avoid passersby from asking for one from his nearly depleted supply. He watched someone approach with strange, lurching steps from the corner of his eye.
“I hate waiting like this, it’s torture.”
“Shit, that ain’t torture,” slurred the man who staggered up, his weather bitten face covered in blood.
“Hey man, what the hell happened to you? You look like you got caught giving head to an iron cunt” said the guy with the cooler.
“Zat you Tim?”
“Jesus H., you’re all fucked up. Here dude, have a beer.”
“Fuckin’ runnin’ to the Broad St. and one’ve those plastic things they tie newspapers with- tripped and hit the fuckin’ curb, got fuckin’ hole in my cheek, teeth went right through.”
“You need to go get that stitched up!”
“Last time i was there stole a bunch of meds, still on probation.”
“I hear ya, I’m on my way to check-in now. These damn skippies they give you are killing my feet.”
The bleeding man took a huge swig and heaved his head forward from the contact of cold beer with his open wound, covering a greasy, pubic beard with a froth of suds and rusty saliva. He pored some in his palm and washed his face as best as he could. Pat grimaced at the spectacle of the gangly wreck’s ablutions and sat up straight as wild and unfocused eyes pressed in.
“See, this ain’t even torture. You wanna know what real torture is?”
Saul shrugged, not trying to push his luck with a definite ‘no’ for the slurring, bleeding man intent on speaking his mind. He prayed to an uncaring god for the swift arrival of his bus.
“I had this broad I was goin’ with for about five years, like we were married, and she went and fucked this guy from work behind my back- like I wouldn’t fuckin’ find out! Only it’s not just they fucked behind my back but one day she left the cocksucker at my place to use the shower- my own fuckin’ shower!- when she got called in by her boss and didn’t know I’d been hiding in the basement the entire time listening them fuck, waiting for her to leave. Slammed his gangly ass up against the wall ’til he passed out. Took this old trunk my uncle left me- big fuckin’ heavy antique wood trunk with all sorts of shit carved in it- and I drilled a couple holes in the top just big enough to see out, then I locked the fucker inside and took him down the train tracks where there was this big, empty field and left him there for a while. Even if somebody was ’round to hear him scream, it was muffled by the trunk, right? Sat there and watched the Sox smiling like shit when she got home acting all miffed her little fuckin’ boyfriend hadn’t called her or something. Went back the next day and showed him food and water and told him he wasn’t gonna be having it anymore, told him how I’d fucked her in the shitter night before and how good it felt, but he just kept saying he was gonna kill me. Next day though, he was begging like a bitch, said his whole body got cramps and he was gonna die, which was the whole point- I mean, I wasn’t gonna really kill him- that’s how my lawyer got me kidnapping and assault, but I wanted to scare the motherfucker like I was. Fucked up and got stupid, had this .38 loaded with blanks that I shot at him, pretending I was too drunk and missing while he screamed like a girl and some security guy at the truck depot heard the shots and called the cops.”
“How long a stretch did you do that time?” said Tim, who all the while had been throwing in jovial chuckles and encouraging prompts, unphased by the tale having heard far worse during his own prison stints.
“Only five years, good behaviour. My old lady could have fucked it all up, but she cleared out of town the minute she got hip she was next, backstabbing bitch,” he said before hacking blood laced phlegm into the street. “She should have known better, don’t go doing that shit and expect to get away with it.”
The two once and future inmates talked about how what’s-his-name was and where the best place to score valiums might be while Saul and Pat sat uncomfortable but ignored, not wanting to invite another tale of true crime by pushing the wrong button. They finally saw their bus roll in and went to the curb to wait. Saul hissed between his teeth and mouthed the words ‘fucked up’ as the man with so much to say about torture followed them over.
“Watch that guy, Tim- I used to know him back in the day- he’ll fuck you soon as look at you, two-faced sonuvabitch.”
“No shit- and remember, don’t tell Ray Ray that it was me that said anything, I still owe him for that weak assed baking soda he’s trying to pass off on the kids.”
Pat and Saul went to the middle of the bus, taking sideways facing seats so no one could be behind them, out of sight. The man sat directly across the way, although he could have sat anywhere else- there were only three other passengers.
Saul was quick to throw on his walkman and leave Pat to field any conversation. Pat acted as if he were sleeping, he hadn’t slept in 36 hours anyway. A sexy African girl a few seats over wearing sunglasses (despite the dark) and a filled-to-overflowing denim bodysuit accompanied by the largest beltbuckle in this hemisphere uttered a sound very much like ‘tit’ with the vowel devoiced upon meeting the bleeding man’s naked stare. She moved near the driver and two Philippeno women all but shrieking in a frantic exchange.
“Bitch,” he muttered while he slouched back in his seat, spreading his legs wide. A single dessicated testicle popped out of his jogging shorts. Pat and Saul made their way to the front as well, pretending to ask the mournful driver a question.
The twenty plus minute from downtown to the Bucket and the dealer they were planning on pinching a little extra off of dragged, dragged- stop- “No, that’s the 23, next block over- the 23! Look lady, I’ve got a schedule to keep- Yeah? Well, you too!” Pat tried to make an snide remark, but the irony was lost in its own hollow echo. Saul’s batteries died somewhere in the middle of “Bears of Destruction”, but he kept his headphones on and faked a head nod, b’boom-chick, b’boom-boom-chick. Just when it seemed as if the fucked up derelict was going all the way to their stop he pulled the signal cord on a deserted street lined with rundown vinyl sided houses, temporarily lowering the volume on the Philippenas as he made his bleeding, limping way out.
Saul turned sharply around as the bus moved on and broke the spell that had been over them.
“What the fuck was that?!”
Your Demons Are My Demons’ Enemies
She was sick of it. More than sick, she actually felt like it was catching. A little of what she dealt with:
in a trance, hey sorry- in a trance, can’t take me can’t wake me when they bake me in the crem-a-tooorrrrr-eee-ummmm- scraps of high school ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ untaken paths produce wavelengths that break shackles from a slave’s legs, plastic mind maps separate and blend in the shakie shake of salad dressing ‘cuz i’m the snakie snake- various oak branches grown backwards through time (or outside linear time) up the genetic spiral stairs in the back, behind the boiler room and up to the parapets, bouncing back and forth between their electronic existance as Pong pads of fate and free will- BLIP BLIP BLIP- a dash of following the signs of the times in the Time of the Signs, when 3 blips plus 8 elements equals (E-QUILLS: electronic writing; or E-KILLS: electronic murders; possibly E-GILLS: our new way of breathing when the Dragon King of the Sea takes his pound of flesh) 11 spells, sigil laden (lading, as in a ladle/dipper/Aquarius, the water bearer; or LADIES- lay dem) spilled off the sorceress’ lips- i’m no longer a person, i’m her idea.
Living at close quarters with a schizophrenic, it feels like their madness is transforming reality around you, an all consuming tidal wave at the end of the world, and that psycho just stands there smiling. She was finding it harder and harder to breathe, his chain smoking aside.
She’d only moved in with him because she’d had no other option. One day after she’d quit her job, her father walked in her room and told her, “Get the fuck out.” She slept on her mother’s couch for a couple weeks until the building manager (a busy body with no life of her own) threatened to raise the rent because the occupancy was over the limit. She mentioned this to her crazy friend and he was more than happy to have her move in.
He wasn’t her first choice. He drank too much and got out of control, his insecurities were overwhelming, like when he used to call her up crying or screaming nonsense in the middle of the night, and there was one point where he hadn’t talked to her for almost two years on some immature pretext she couldn’t begin to understand.
He was nice to her though, in his own bitchy way. He’d listen to her problems (when he wasn’t obsessing over his own), compliment her on things that the guys she was interested in were too dense to pick up on. He even treated her like his daughter in a cutesy fashion she liked. Unfortunately, he was too much like her real father: Mean spirited, self deprecating, temperamental and an angel’s host of other bad qualities that she had to stay on the right side of. You couldn’t mention certain people or ideas without a fit of dementia or silence that made the house grow cold (if it hadn’t been already, for lack of heat).
She didn’t take the fact he resembled her daddy seriously; it would’ve been too disturbing considering the blurred memories of the one or two drunken times they’d fooled around to mutually embarrassed, unfinished and unsatisfied conclusions. It was only a small worry when moving in, she knew they wouldn’t be involved again- he was too busy sobbing over some chick that didn’t love him, hated his guts in fact. She had had boys it was difficult getting over as well, although she always moved on. She might have been a little over weight, but she knew she was hot.
The real positive of the move was that she didn’t need to pay rent for most of the year she lived in his pigsty. The real negative was to reveal itself constantly over the course of that twelve months: she hadn’t realized how completely and undeniably insane he truly was.
Avatar mass production, the arbiter of ecstasy, a virus in antibody’s clothing. To beat the enemy, be the enemy. Kinesis and karma, harnessing vibrations for the integration of adverse will in my desire’s manifestation. Does the sun shine for the moon to shine on you? i fondle the scaffolding as the cairn expands to make its home in the void, where the mask is the real face in the wake of the original’s osmosis and tautological synthesis.
Sure, she’d once seen him freak out, counting the metal bars of a stairway and giggling at a high pitch while saying the things he always said that never made sense to her- but he’d done a lot of drugs in his time and everyone deserves a break on that account. The real issue was magic.
She had her own sensitivity to the spiritual side of life- she dabbled in astrology, and she felt a strong attachment to what she called the goddess, embodied by the moon. A deck of brightly colored cards somewhat like the Tarot were her constant companion, and she took what those cards said seriously. The kind of thing her roommate was another matter altogether, and it made her nervous.
Every conversation’s words would be smashed up and distilled into unrecognizable elements that got poured onto the shadowy armature that began to loom over their apartment and friendship. He hinted that he saw things in the future that she didn’t want to come. When he wasn’t hiding in the dark, cut off from the rest of the world, he was busy turning everything into his own secret scripture. She’d sit with her oracle card deck asking for advice, but his own was a few cards shorter by the day.
One time, when he was slightly more lucid than usual, they sat up drinking cheap wine and he told her about a group of people he’d known who had sacrificed five pigeons, burning all but their wings at the points of an inverted pentagram around the area where they lived and something clicked in her head: she’d always gotten a bad vibe of that neighborhood. This was how his twisted world view began to intrude on her life.
Something bad happened on a night she slept in the small space they traded off on as a bedroom in lieu of the lumpy sofa (it was really more of a large closet). She awoke with a shortness of breath to what should have been pitch darkness, but there was a grey light she couldn’t see the source of. Someone stood at the edge of the bed. At first she thought it was their friend Saul, but she wondered how he could have gotten into the house, and she knew the closet under the eaves of the roof was too small for him to be standing where he was. As if in response to her doubt, it began to seem like someone else. She lay there literally paralyzed- she couldn’t move at all, although her skin crawled with a life of its own. It wasn’t anyone she knew, it wasn’t human- and she sure as hell realized it was no nightmare. There was something reptilian about it, coming closer. It needed her to believe it, to answer with an invitation. If she would just say its name it could get what it wanted. Something inside her broke and she shrieked for her life.
Her roommate, who’d been half awake in a drugged trance on the couch, came running and moved her outside as he tried to talk her down from her state of panic. She shivered uncontrollably, too shocked to even cry. He hugged her and tried to find out what exactly it was she’d seen, almost clinically she later thought. He stayed up with her for a long time until she crashed suddenly as an accident victim will after the adrenalin wears off. She never went in that room again.
Later when his lack of insanity in the pursuit of the-goddess-knows-what had broken their friendship completely, she remembered that night and wondered.
The loss of a name’s power in our world has subordinated people to the sway of alien bureaucracies’ ideas (i.e.: christian names) and sapped the power of those peoples’ wills. They have two choices if they want their will back: DETOX and confront the poisons they’ve fed on their whole lives, being born and bound into systems that weren’t their’s by choice; or they can METABOLIZE and walk in the Demon Body, drinking the poisons and spitting them back in the faces of their would-be captors twice strong. What are demons? They are ‘not things’, the ANTI, the world view that is anathema. They live in reverse, drawing events in the direction of infinite zero. The fleeting moment is eternal. The Demon Body is the form our true names take when confronting those spheres of will opposed to our own desires.
Eventually, it wasn’t worth giving him a chance to put himself together. She started staying at her mother’s house again, screw what the building manager said, she’d pitch in some cash from her new job. Everything she loved him for became tarnished by his future prospects as the resident of a rubber room (where he actually did end up for a few days after the ultimate worst when he wrecked the house, stabbing things with a butcher’s knife to the tempo of gutteral screams, froth spraying). What little she showed up at his place for those last few months was for a change of clothes. He started getting weirder if that was even possible, long jags of self loathing behind a glassy stare. She would say things behind his back because his pathetic state had started to turn her stomach.
From out of nowhere he suddenly changed. Instead of clinging to her like the infant she thought he’d degenerated into, he called her at her mother’s house and said, “Get your shit the fuck out of my house,” as the result of one delusion or another.
She arrived with some friends for emotional support (or protection- who knows what that lunatic was capable of?) to find him stacking her boxes on the pavement like an asshole. She avoided him as much as possible. It was like being with a boyfriend she’d broken up with.
A tiny viscous exchange erupted over a piece of furniture and he used the opening to tell her he hated her. To her surprise, even after everything, it still hurt. Despite the contempt she had for him, she didn’t yet hate him, and she told him so.
Time passed, and it doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. Some lacerations fester, grow gangrenous- and to save the patient, you have to lose the limb.
After a while she didn’t remember things clearly, they were unimportant memories of someone she’d rather forget. Like a building receding into the distance when the eye sees only the most obvious design features and misses the individual bricks that may in fact be cornerstones holding the whole structure together, so a broken friendship is remembered for its extremities of emotion the further in the past it’s dimmed, and the picture loses all perspective.
Her reluctant description of her former friend whenever his uncommon name came up became Dorian Gray ugly. She’d tell people she feared for her safety if they crossed paths in a bar or on the street in their small city, although he’d never actually harmed or threatened her in any way. When she met a woman who knew him, she’d relate an especially grotesque critique of a suicidal, sexually represses stalker to warn them off. She was sure he had his own things to say about her and it gave her the right to be nasty (a painkiller for what little guilt she felt).
…and if he was the real genesis of the thing she’d seen in the closet, she never once stopped to consider he had his own demons in the dark.
Disco Fries
9:00 pm
Robert Thanes walked into The Place well aware that no one he knew would be there aside from the waitstaff and possibly Fred, but it was even too early for Fred. There wasn’t a single person in the dining area of the largish all-night ‘breakfast anytime!’ restaurant. He walked into the back and around the corner to the coffee station, looking through the cups that had been washed for one that wasn’t stained too badly, or at the very least didn’t have an unidentifiable chunk of some food-like substance stuck to the bottom. He poured himself a coffee burnt beyond all hope and grabbed an ashtray and stack of napkins, taking a booth where he could watch the door without being seen. He wasn’t avoiding anyone; it was a small satisfaction to see someone without their knowledge, voyeurism lite.
Silly pop music gently bounced off brown stained formica and pastel blue vinyl booths. Outside, the shower that had been lisping most of the day increased to a full blown late fall storm. Cars shot past on the busy main route through the suburbs with loud, wet calls for silence. Thanes could hear voices from the kitchen discussing matters entirely unrelated to work. He heard someone say, “you’re shittin’ me!” and wrote it beside the vampire octopus with a top hat and cane he was drawing on a napkin. From behind a wooden lattice he saw a waitress emerge from the far kitchen entrance with a kick-pan and broom in her hands.
“Hey Amanda.”
“Jesus!” she exclaimed with a jump, walking over to where he sat, “you startled me,” (her accent making ’startled’ rhyme with ‘throttled’. “What are you doing here so early?”
“Oh, you know… smoking, drinking, drawing… wasting my life away.”
“Where are the rest of the guys?”
“They’ll be here in awhile.”
She sat down across from him and lit a long cigarette while she untied and re-fastened her highlighted hair. Rob secretly wished she’d kept standing, maybe turned around- Amanda was famous far and wide for her fantastic behind.
“I’m so sick of this place. I’ve only had two tables so far and I’ve been here since six. And one! They ordered, like, fifty dollars worth of food, had me running my ass off, ‘Girlie! These homefries aren’t cooked enough,’ and then they leave me seventy-five cents for a tip!”
“Wow, that’s very rude,” said Rob, used to the staff’s confessions of job dissatisfaction. “Being a waitress, do you find yourself leaving large tips when you go out to eat?”
“Only if they earn it. I mean, if I’m out with a bunch of friends wasted as hell ordering crazy food and they do their job right, I make sure everybody coughs up.”
“But otherwise, your own job makes you have a better sense of what a waitress goes through- so if you get someone lazy who only shows up when it’s time to pay the check…”
“They don’t get jack.”
The main entrance creaked and Amanda stubbed her partly smoked Marlboro out to go and take care of her customers, but she stopped short to grab a cup of coffee and an ashtray. It was only Fred.
A voice from the kitchen screamed, “Freddie!”
He walked at a clip that made you think he had somewhere important to be, a pace which belied his middle aged bulk and deep throaty growl done over with almost a half century of smoking, much of which he’d done while sitting at The Place for unfathomable stretches of time, downing cup after cup of bottomless coffee as if to fill an unfillable hole in his life. He was more a fixture in the restaurant than the plastic potted plants, ultra-bright lighting and obligatory tacky ‘paintings’ of fruit, flowers and pastoral scenes hung slapdash on the walls. An old, gossiping woman who was a regular at The Place had once told Rob that Fred was a genius, having attended an ivy league school. Apparently they had met when he’d hit her with his car.
“Hi Robert, how’s it going? Waiting for Simon and the others?” he asked with a local accent that was Beethoven’s Fifth compared to Amanda’s lilting piano concerto. “It’s really starting to come down out there, hanh?”
Clearing his throat, Rob made polite hellos and weather observations with as much finality and in as few words as possible. He thought Fred was an overall decent person, but once a conversation started with him it could drag on into an inescapable labyrinth of details and digressions he wasn’t in the mood for (”Do you know the white house the street over from where the supermarket used to be? Not the big market, the small Portuguese store that carried those fruit flavored sodas without all the carbonation, I used to drink those all the time- carbonated drinks give me indigestion. Well, that white house had a grape trellis in the back and Pete Medeiros’ grandfather used to make Portuguese moonshine- that’s what we were drinking, so anyway…”)
Rob turned back to his napkin drawings while Amanda and Fred discussed the merits of rival television stations’ meteorologists. The same voice from the kitchen as before screamed, “Freddie!”
Rob didn’t really know why he was there. He could sit at home, drink coffee for free and smoke the expensive imported cigarettes that he liked which the clerk at the store called ‘fancy-pants’, but he kept crawling back across town to the same dreary destination night after night. He considered that this was how things had started out for Fred. The fact he wasn’t yet old enough to legally drink didn’t keep him from getting plastered, but it did keep him chained to The Place, the only venue in his small town to serve as a hang-out for the under 21 crowd, short of some parks and wooded areas regularly patrolled by the cops in hope of getting some from scared teens in reefer maddened orgies. Rob longed for a car, an efficient form of public transportation, a fake i.d., a girlfriend that didn’t care about the contents of his wallet or past history as friends. He tossed aside his small sorrows and went to take a leak.
While Rob stood in the unwholesome bathroom at the cigarette butt and chewing gum clogged urinal, Simon Tenders walked in the restaurant to the smoking section, brushing the rain from his jacket and lighting up a smoke that he lipped as he went for a cup of coffee, giving a hello to Fred and professing he had some reading to do. Simon enjoyed the wisdom he received from him, but for some reason assumed he could go to The Place and be left alone with a book when in actuality he was generally at the center of the party when the many people he knew showed up, even though he might not have much to say, the calm eye of a hurricane. He picked a place in the corner to sit and apologized to Amanda, who’d noticed another regular walking in and prepared the accessories for his booth. He made some vague replies to questions after his welfare and turned to the collection of Vedic hymns he’d been trying to get into between customers at the Shell station where he worked. The borrowed book had been sitting in the small library stacked in the back of his ‘85 accord and it was time to lessen the burden of his material possessions by a few hundred pages.
Rob returned from the bathroom and greeted Simon with relief that his boredom might have found alleviation.
“I was sitting over here if you want to move.”
“Well…” Simon hesitated, “I need to get some reading done. I’ll be over in a bit.”
“Schoolwork?”
“I hope not. That might take away from whatever I might learn from it.”
“Hm. Well, I’ll be over there.”
Rob went back to his table and started in on a fresh napkin which he covered with what Russian he could remember from the lessons he’d never finished. Simon puzzled his way through a footnote relating to an obscure tale of Indra, who was cursed by a sage, the wife of whom he’d seduced. The god’s body was covered with 1,000 vaginas, later transformed into 1,000 eyes when all was forgiven after humbling austerities. Fred mumbled something incomprehensible to himself.
“Freddie!” said the disembodied voice from the kitchen.
10:00 pm
[The place is a little busier, additional waitstaff have arrived for the late night rush along with some customers in nonsmoking. Comments in the kitchen predict a dead night if the rain doesn’t let up. The voice from the kitchen screaming, “Freddie!” reveals itself as a waiter who sits at a booth and flicks sugar packets at Fred to the latter’s mild irritation. Enter Saul Eddy, semi-stoned and quieting the slosh from a pint of rum concealed in his pocket. He wanders over to the smoking section and finds himself both amused and perplexed at Simon and Rob absorbed in their individual activities at individual tables]
SAUL: Hey!
SIMON: There he is.
ROB (addressing Saul’s confusion): Simon’s got some studying he wants to catch up on.
SAUL: Okay. I thought you two had become mortal enemies or something.
SIMON (chuckling): N0, no, nothing like that.
ROB: Mm- actually, we’re testing to see which one of us our friends will talk to us first.
SAUL: Really. Who’s winning?
ROB: Simon has about two more than me, but I was in the lead for the first few hours.
SAUL: So why exactly are you doing this? Is it a test of loyalty? Do I have to swear an oath?!
SIMON (more chuckles): We’re not really doing that…
ROB: I just felt like lying. Was I convincing?
SAUL: No (laughs). Say Simon, could I bum a stoge ?
SIMON (passes Saul a cigarette): Dozo, dozo…
SAUL: Arigato. Well, I’ll let you get back to you ‘reading’, fucking geek.
SIMON (laughs): I’ll be over as soon as I finish this chapter.
SAUL: Whatever you say… brainiac. So Rob-
[Saul sits down with a crash as he casts his damp hoodie and back pack under the table, readjusting his trademark baseball cap. Amanda brings him a cup of coffee]
SAUL: Thank you.
AMANDA: You poor thing, you’re soaked through.
SAUL: What, are you kidding? I love the rain. I feel refreshed, invigorated- no, actually this sucks- i feel like a tampon. So Rob- (drums his fingers on the table) I’ve decided what I’m going to do with my life from this point on- my calling if you will…
ROB: What brought about this revelation?
SAUL: It just hit me on my way here.
[Amanda enters the kitchen and Saul pulls his bottle of Bacardi from hiding, raising his eyebrows in invitation and Rob nods assent with a narrowing of his eyes. Saul tops his cup off and takes a straight shot for himself]
SAUL: Remind me to order a Coke when she gets back. So- (manically giggles, smacks the table making the cups and silverware rattle) I’ve decided…
ROB (wincing at the spiked coffee’s kick): Yes?
SAUL: …to fight evil.
ROB: Hmmm…
SAUL: With a sword, of course.
ROB: Of course (smiles).
SAUL: You can’t go around fighting evil without a sword.
ROB: It’s just not done.
SAUL: What? You don’t think it’s a good idea? This is my calling, man! I’m totally fucking serious.
ROB: Oh it’s not that (laughs), it’s just uhhh… what kind of evil are you going to fight?
SAUL: You know, Evil- capital ‘e’- if you fight evil, these things are clear-cut. This guy’s evil, he wears black, kills babies- BAM! Like that. You don’t believe me- Hey Simon! I’m going to get a sword and fight evil, what do you think?
SIMON: I’m all for it. Please, let me help.
SAUL: Sorry, I’m a lone wolf, a renegade. I put evil to the sword and walk alone in a world of darkness.
ROB: Give me an example of who’s on your list though- who does your sixth sense as a ‘fighter of evil’ tell you just has to go?
SAUL: I don’t have those powers yet. It takes years of training for that, standing under waterfalls, finding a master to study under at a temple way up in the mountains. But if i had to say who I’d battle right now… I’d say the Composer.
ROB: ‘The Composer’?
SAUL: You know, that guy that comes in here and writes sheet music.
ROB: Oh, the Composer. Why him?
SAUL: I’m not saying he’s evil or anything. He just strikes me as the kind of guy that reads pretentious books, or has a trust fund or something. Like knowing how to read music or play an instrument makes you a musician! And he has the same polo shirt as me, like he’s biting my style. He just strikes me as an aristocratic asshole.
ROB: And you’ve never spoken with him?
SAUL: Never. Well… there was that time I bumped into him when I was shitfaced and knocked his coffee over, but other than that…
ROB: Alright, I get you… what the hell were we talking about again?
SAUL: The Composer. I hate him.
ROB: Because he’s pretentious.
SAUL: Because he’s my enemy, my arch-rival- he’s my nemesis!
ROB: And you’ve never had a conversation with him.
SAUL: Nope (he slops more rum in their rapidly emptying cups). Why would I talk to him if he’s my nemesis?
ROB: Well, everyone needs a nemesis. I guess.
SAUL: It’s like in Amadeus and he’s going to dress up as the ghost of my dad and drive me mad.
ROB: But your father’s alive and well!
SAUL: Exactly! My father’s alive and I’ll be seeing his ghost at the same time- it defies all logic!
[Saul laughs and gives the table another pound. Rob does the same and Saul gives it one more as customers start to turn their heads]
11:00 pm
[Most of the regulars have made it in despite the rain, including Thomas Angell, a compatriot of Rob and co. who slumps over while noisily slurping a Sprite. Simon has given up on reading and joined the crew, whose table is covered in drawings of intentionally bad tattoo ideas, maps of the U.S. reconstructed from memory, lists of essential records and awful movies, and a recurring comic character of Saul’s with scissors stuck in it’s throat (aptly dubbed ‘Scissors’). Fred occasionally tosses a topic in their direction and Simon briefly joins him for a meditation on the drawbacks of working alongside a college co-ed with a great rack on an experiment involving lab rats and becoming fixated on the word ’suckling’. Saul’s rum is gone, and Rob is slightly drunk with his otherwise empty stomach]
ROB: I was just thinking that earlier! Once I’m 21, I’ll probably never come here again.
SAUL: Ha! Only a year away for me.
SIMON: I don’t know about that, I’ll still come here now and then. Maybe when I have kids.
TOM: All I was saying is there’s not much to do around here compared to Kenyon. You’d be surprised- put a college in a small Ohio city with a student body about twice the size of the town’s population, shit blows up! And believe me, the bartenders don’t give a rat’s ass.
SAUL: Simon- what are you going to name your kids?
ROB: You drink?! I’m shocked. I’ve seen you leave just beers laying there at Azrael’s house with only a couple of sips taken- and you’re not the one that has to listen to him bitch later on.
TOM: I’ve been getting some practice in.
SIMON: Kids? I don’t know… Ezekiel? Lakisha?
SAUL: See, I’d go for something like Agression Eddy, or Danger Eddy. Hippies do that sort of thing all the time, only with lame words like Sunflower of Rainbow.
TOM: Clamidia- for a girl, of course.
SIMON: How ’bout Tiger?
ROB: Ugh, Clamidia?
SAUL: Pistol Eddy.
SIMON: Yeah, but all the penis jokes they’d get in school…
TOM: C’mon! Clamidia’s a great name for a girl- rhymes with Lydia.
ROB: Heinous Thanes.
SAUL: You want a great girl’s name? Bitch Eddy.
SIMON: Carotid Tenders.
SAUL: That sounds like a swear, ‘My carotid TV’s broken again.’ Say Rob, can I bum another stoge?
ROB (making a nearly imperceptible frown- his cigarettes cost a couple bucks more than most): Sure.
SAUL: I’ll pay you back. I’m going to the store in a minute, I think the rain’s stopped.
TOM: I’m gonna hit the head (exits to the bathroom).
SIMON: I wish I had my urinary tract running through my index finger. Wouldn’t that be convenient? If you were stuck in traffic on a long ride to Manhattan, you could just hang your hand out the window.
ROB: No one would be able to shake hands then.
SAUL: We could bow, like in Japan.
ROB: Shit. Now I have to piss. This sucks. It’s so gay going to the bathroom when another guy does.
SAUL: Not only that, woman can go at the same time and no one blinks an eye. They’re probably just sitting there talking about the guys they’re with- it’s a double standard.
ROB: But there’s a stall separating them- that’s better than standing elbow to elbow with some dude. I hate that word, ‘dude’.
SAUL: Dude!
ROB: Dude. fuck. dude.
SAUL: That’s it, I’m going to get cigarettes. Cigarettesssssssssss. Hey, could one of you guys order me a plate of fries with gravy and cheese?
ROB: Gravy and cheese? Isn’t the coffee bad enough? It’s already making me sick.
SIMON (shudders): What do you call that combination?
SAUL: I don’t know, but it tastes good (exits).
[Tom comes back from the can]
TOM: Did I ever tell you guys about that time on the train back to Paris when I shit my pants at the exact minute it stopped in the station?
ROB: I think I’m going to vomit.
12:00 am
Saul’s fries had only just arrived. A group of goth kids sat nearby being obnoxious, one fat girl with a nasal whine nearly spilled out of the leather corset she was wedged into with every over-exaggerated plea for sexual attention and still no one was interested except for some cro-magnon looking scumbag. Two wannabe mafioso flipped through survivalist magazines and talked too loudly about where the bodies were buried while they gorged themselves on bacon.
Rob, despite his misery, was still there and drawing a caricature of a drugged couple two tables over. At one point, the Composer had walked in and Saul had given him a mock withering glare. Tom had spilled a glass of water with a wide sweep of his hand while doing an impression of what he thought the stereotype of a ‘white guy’ was, leaving the table top a swampy mess of napkins and paper bleeding violet with even more napkins ineffectually heaped on top to sop it up. Simon wrote in his dampened notebook and tuned out the steadily increasing din around him. Fred was on his second pack of cigarettes, occasionally shaking the room with a cough.
A girl with a flat mid-western twang in her speech ordered food- “I want pancakes, should I get four or eight? I’ll get four chocolate chip pancakes- wait, make that eight. Do you have low-fat chocolate chips? No? Okay, I’ll get four chocolate chip pancakes with a pat of margarine and whipped cream, but only a little bit, and put it on the side. Wait- do you use the kind in the can or the kind in the tub? Then could you bring the can out here? I only want an eensey-weensy little tiny bit because people usually soak pancakes in whipped cream and I gain five pounds and break out even though people tell me I’m thin as a rake and I only get teeny tiny zits and they really don’t taste right with that much.” Amanda contemplated murder.
Three hard core alcoholics harassed a short waitress who stomped into the kitchen and complained in a voice the opposite of her height to her manager so that the whole restaurant could hear. The cop that stood guard at the entrance and the sawn-off Vietnam vet boyfriend of one of the other waitresses (who’d been waiting to practice his Green Beret training on some dumb punk’s skull) went over to the three and breathed on them until they settled up and scurried out the door leaving a trail of piss, making way for even more boozehounds lining up in the foyer waiting for a table to open.
In a near delirious state from hunger and the after effects of alcohol on an empty stomach, Rob’s head weighed heavily on his thin frame, swaying to the dim beat of the chaos around him. His unfocused eyes darted to the side upon hearing the grating laughter of what sounded like a group of kids fresh from a high school dance but were actually sadly tanned adults clutching at the straws of their thirties for dear life, mired in all the current hot styles and buzz words, which only served to emphasize their wrinkles, receding hairlines, sagging breasts, threatening paunches and bloodshot eyes: how long before the helplessness of the grandfather who can’t program his home entertainment center took hold, the acidic shrew who didn’t have children so she could focus on her ‘career’ as a beautician when she had secretly wanted a few awful, smelly, shrilly shrieking leeches to have ruined her life with before her womb ran dry? Rob dismissed these people to a small note in his mental orchestration of the atonal free jazz improvisation around him, the cacophonous laughs as trumpets, the smoke from a multitude of cigarettes soft clarinets, the clink of silverware and ceramic thump of mugs Max Roach on a mad drum solo to the steady walking bass of base sexual urges clouding the air and rebounding off the walls to make the coffee all the more bitter and pre-douche/ post-gang-bang vaginal, droplets of grease or soap swirling on the surface of every cup with an oil slick’s rainbow. Someone had scoured the walls of Thanes’ soul with steel wool.
Simon did his best to enjoy the quaint customs his small city had to offer while he tossed a pair of meager comments into the fray erupting between Tom and Saul over the merits of a director he could agree with either about. He thickened the magnetic field that stood as a barrier to the outside world and retreated back to his notes where he used the momentary snares of the illusions around him to dress the howl of spinning goddesses and gods starting the dance of annihilation, resolving the polarities that chained him with karma and duty, trapping his branches in a network of high speed fiber optic wires. What distance he couldn’t find in the urban worlds he inhabited he tried to invoke in his communication with their people, leaving even the ghost voices from the stacks of books in the back of his car and all knowledge behind if he could help it, just to rest.
His rage with the exceedingly aggravating repetition of suburban life sublimated into sarcasm, subdued by regular sex (but not nearly as much as the rumors would have you believe) and casual hedonism such as the bowl he’d smoked on his way to and from the store where he’d bought his fast disappearing Marlboro Lights, Saul rode a roller coaster along a snaking line of thoughts that were the refracted color of a college science textbook diagram explaining DNA and he somehow made his debate with Mr. Angell transform into a slithering mass of ramen noodles he’d cooked the previous week but which he remembered as spaghetti soaked in garlic and basil infused butter, forgetting the french fries drenched in coagulated cheese and gravy he’d consumed with not a few snide remarks for their poor preparation. As if he were a man dying of thirst in the desert, unsure if an oasis was actually a mirage (and he did have cotton mouth), he noticed the goth kid dressed in a lavender tunic, pirate pantaloons and various pieces of costume jewelry encrusted with gaudy plastic stones who had appointed himself filler of empty coffee cups.
“Hey , Magellan! I need a refill here.”
A baritone voice boomed with laughter. Thomas Angell, mystery and wild card, had acted as a hinge the entire night, dragging conversations back from the brink of suicidal seriousness to the common denominators of the Wu-Tang Clan, spot-on impressions of acquaintances and dick jokes. He paired the most robust everyman’s criticism with the sharp, lemony acid of a conservative streak. His chimerical opinions made him an adept at emotional illegibility, not letting whatever mood he might be in inhibit his social output. For his all the more average appearance compared to the slight eccentricities of his friends, he sometimes dropped hints like turds of his deeply rooted abnormalities and then whisked them away before they came grunting into the light. He was able to not only wear the masks he put on, but to absorb a part of their essence in what traits he identified with and seem more honest by virtue of parody when compared to the limp ‘truths’ many of his peers left on display like a cock from a flasher’s pants- that bland run of the mill egoism of human beings in their late teens and early twenties that makes a great summer blockbuster coming of age film with feigned originality, message that everyone’s special, and some emo geek in Buddy Holly glasses to boot. Tom had escaped New England, but he hadn’t found anything wrong with it in the first place.
They’d all leave The Place for the distilled dementia and well brewed bedlam of bars, for Brooklyn and Morningside Heights, Sienna to London and back again with a quick minute in Jerusalem; these four hadn’t felt the cement pouring in around them and harden like Fred had felt long ago. It was only a short while before that quarter of a century line drawn in the dirt came around, when they’d realize it was the same shit anywhere they went and, that as time passed, there was just more of it to shovel. Maybe Rob had some presentiment of this with his queasy innards and heavy eyelids, head resting in the crook of his arm as he looked for the tenth time at the small smear of lipstick on the rim of the glass of orange juice Simon had been kind enough to buy him, a smear that he’d only noticed after the juice was gone.
3:00 am
Amanda plopped her fine behind down and had a well deserved cigarette to fend off the ache in her bones, charging up for that last disgusting stretch of cleaning, a dull throb wrapped in itchy wool that retold every sad story a waitress has had about being on their feet all day long since time began.
Fred got up from his empty creamer covered table and wished her a good night as he made his purposeful way to the door, off home to not sleep. Amanda almost wondered what kind of house he was going to and quickly forgot in the onslaught of nesting instincts that ensued when she remembered the teal toothbrush holder and sunflower shower curtains she’d bought at an outlet store the previous afternoon but hadn’t a clue what other objects she’d need to accompany them when she finally remodeled her bathroom.
She rose with the last burst of energy she could muster, using the table for support, and grabbed a dishrag and spray bottle. She nearly smiled, noticing Thanes and the rest had cleaned their table for her, except for a single sheet of paper written in what looked like four different hands.
This is what it said:
“WHO IS JOHN DISCO FRIES?”
John Disco Fries was tired of elusive medication. The pharmacist’s union hadn’t settled their dispute with City Hall AND THE MAYOR CALLED FOR WHOLESALE EXECUTIONS. John thought he could get by drinking coffee from dirty cups SPIKED WITH WINDEX until the sun came up, but Andy Garcia’s example in ‘Black Rain’ proved the rising sun shouldn’t be taken for granted. But what about the prescriptions? THE DRUGS WERE TUCKED INSIDE HIS HOODIE WITH A PIECE IF THINGS GOT TOO HOT as he ran through the silent trees. He’d had enough of the boredom and stale air, getting dragged by his nipples, having been born from his mother’s side. Fries felt it was time for a change AND A HAIRCUT AS WELL. “These pricks won’t hear me, fuck ‘em,” he choked over the phone TO HIS DEAF APARTMENT MANAGER. The bible belt was for hanging so he made his slow way to the northeast listening to Dylan while doing 69 on 95, sobbing every time he heard a B-flat. “Jesus Christ CLONED FROM THE BLOOD OF THE CROSS! What are you doing here?” said his sister when she answered the door of her pink vinyl sided condominium HOPPING ON HER ONLY LEG. She hadn’t expected her brother’s deep seated urge for incestuous sex. THEY PUT ON SOME Stravinsky TO SET THE MOOD. The bomb dropped the next day and the east coast sank beneath the sea.
Puzzling over the handwriting, Amanda muttered, “Weird,” and dropped it in the trash.