Fragment of Chapter Scribbled Today in Coffee Shop

Chapter 8.

The train is nearing Anniston as I feel sleep starting to tug at me. Two microwaved ham sandwiches settle into my guts with all the subtlety of a trailer park couple fighting over the last swig of Ol' Grandad. I feel bludgeoned into this seat. It occurs to me that my body chemistry is going rancid.

A jostling behind me.

"Miss, you can't use that curtain as a blanket!"

"Fuck you sonny, ya got the goddamn AC on full blast!"

Her voice sounds like Mcarthyism and racetracks and film-strips showing you how to hide when the Reds nuke us. Annoying. Intriguing. I peer through the gap and subtly get an eyeball full. Holy Hannah! Trenches criscross her cheeks like writing in the sand, topped off by yellowish white hair frayed by cigars and bingo halls.

The conductor's mug is a funny mix of anger and pleading.

"Now miss, we'll get you a blanket..."

He timidly reaches for the curtain and she flings it over with a jerk of irritation.

"Better be quick about it sonny...or your ass belongs to Mama!"

A cackle escapes her, followed by a cough that manages to sound gleeful. She makes no attempt to restrain either.

Things quiet down as we ease into the station. Funny. This one has none of the concrete and steel trappings of the others. Just a little ticket office with a bench in front. There's a calm earnestness on the 12 or 15 faces readying to board. A nice change from the big city, where everyone's grill is all corked up with ego and drive.

An Excerpt...

From Just Another Mook Singing and Burning:

2.

It's another one of those Sunday mornings. I'm walking along Central Avenue, wobbling off another mean knot tied on in the after-hours underneath the M-station. It's always weird, and somewhat jolting, the way you walk out of the bar, shrouded and sealed off the way it is, and get whacked in the face by a sunlight you can only describe as accusatory. After all, it's Sunday morning, and staggering about with a gut-full of bottom-shelf scotch shouldn't really be standard operating procedure.

Anyway.

Despite the warm temperatures, the streets are pretty barren. I figure it's about 7 AM, just going by my internal clock and the unadorned naked quality you get in all the birds chirping in branches overhead. I get to the old Episcapalean church, when a van - the only car in eye-shot - pulls up next to me.

It's a big powder blue Ford - illegal tint job peeling at the corners and what looks to be a skeleton in Mormon duds with a Bible in one hand and a firing pistol in the other. I kind of like it truth be told.

The light goes green and it pulls off, only to stop in the middle of the next block. I'm a little curious , a little thrown, but I don't change my gait. I finally get up next to it, shoot it a quick glance, only for it to pull off again and stop in roughly the same spot in relation to the next block. I feel my pulse quicken the tiniest bit.

"I know you fellas?" I ask, not expecting much in the way of an answer.

Seconds pass, no reply - then I hear the faintest whisper of a latch giving behind the side door.

A heartbeat before it blasts open. What I hear and see, I don't want to believe, and sure as shit don't like.

When I was a kid, I joined the track team just to be around my friends. I hated the running, hated the jagged way your breath ripped in and out of you, hated the stabbing and crushing sensations of a taxed writhing spleen. Hated the coach screaming "Up on your toes, up on your toes!" there on the unforgiving Van Cortland hills.

After a point, I never ran for anything. Punctuality meant nothing to me, and if a bus looked to be pulling off without me, well . . . there'd always be another one.

Anyway.

The door blasts open, and standing in its wake, ready to pounce is a stocky guy encased in a silver HAZMAT suit and wearing a Jerry Lewis mask. Visible behind him are two more just like him - two more identical portions of wayeward nightmare. I notice him coiling back on his legs, ready to leap.

"We're your conscience, asshole!" I hear him roar from somewhere deep in his housing. He takes flight. I break into a dead run, and sliver of a second later, I can hear boots start hitting ground. I don't know what these fuckers want, but I don't reckon they're dressed like that to sell me a set of Ginsu knives. Nope, I'd wager they are looking to do me some more-than-garden variety harm, and possibly plumb and stretch a few bodily apertures that I personally feel are doing just fine as they are, thank you.

I peel down 67th Street, heading in the direction of the old sugarplant. Somehow, even in those bulky suits, they're managing to keep up alright.

But my brain's working feverishly - for once, in a good way.

It occurs to me, hits me like a cinderblock through the bedroom window.

I reach Otto Road right by the plant, then peel a right. Another block over, there's an entrance way to the tracks - I take it. They're within eyeshot, probably only about a hundred feet behind. Taking a gamble here, I figure. I'm on the far side of the tracks by the time they hit the entrance.

Up ahead is the gamble - the back fence to the old abandoned mall - namely the little hole towards the bottom I'd hacked into it myself ten years ago. Hmmm, not much bigger nowadays. Little softer and rounder in the middle perhaps, but nothing of consequence.

I reckon I can get through it.

I reckon, in those outfits of theirs, they can't.

I reach the fence, my heart grinding. Moment of truth: the hole is still there. I pause by it. I want them to see this, and luckily enough, they're gaining ground pretty good.

I take the sight in and wonder if my grip on the firmament of reality has weakened at all. Three giant Jerry Lewises in tin cans running towards me with perdition in their eyes. Oh well, fuck 'em, I figure. I raise up one middle finger as they get within about 20 feet, then slip through the hole .

Making a break for the old rampway, I look back to see the lead guy trying to shoe-horn himself and his HAZMAT tuxedo through. All he's doing is tearing that shit up.

I can't think of much in the way of witticisms.

"Whattsamatta?" I scream. "You don't like that?"

Then I hit the ramp and head up to Metropolitan Avenue. Time to head home and make sense of this, or at least bang down some real scotch while trying.

A Good Kicking

A little blood loosened
on an off-white
slept-in wrinkled shirt
and one droplet for good form
on a playing card I've never dealt or learned to play

I poke around my face, jaw, everywhere
like any good mook on a Sunday or Tuesday morning

my mouth is parched, hot, rotten

Never trust dames with saints' eyes
or saints' ways
cuz
they
take your hand with jellyfish fingers
and kiss your cheek with lips turned inward

Another tumbler of The Black
just to burn
like real love ought to.

3.16.05 1:28 AM

Some nights
these nights
these cold March
marching cold
stone cold
stone drunk
stone deaf
tone deaf
blind drunk
nights

I

admire
sit and admire
my own great work
in photograph's handiwork
color by color

all my greatest
finest
bound
collected
revised
betrayals

Now there's only wind groping at the window...

Much like the appendix
and the Edsal
bravery
becomes
evolution's sweet victim.

The Hun...has just begun. 

Vigor Mortis

Tonguing down the
'lectric
'lectric
'lectric chair
you'd expect bolts
and volts
and electro-orgasmo epitaths

but it's learned me right quick
that
bottling redemption is like
snapping your fingers at the super-nova
and shouting "Fetch!"

it takes children
and idiots
to try that shit

I wake up to smoke woven of shattered razorblades
and questions on the wind screamed by acid-bathed vocal chords

In my previous incarnation, I never smoked,
but find myself fumbling through my raincoat for a Chesterfield

ain't it funny
how you can
slap gold on bones
and sell 'em like new

ain't it just so right
to breathe the raindrops
ain't it just so right
to shackle the elements
while whistling to comatose gods.

The Slobster Debacles: Entry 3

Castillo was the scariest fucker I knew. And he had a big dick to boot. I remember, every once in a while, we'd be standing there in the warehouse, cracking open warm Guinesses, and he'd just whip that shit out...of course, you'd look away, but as the thing virtually rolled out, like some thick serpentine carpet, you couldn't help but catch seconds of circumference and length that were beyond belief.

"Put that shit away!" you'd yell, forearms clenched like twin pit bulls over your eyes. "You're giving me adequacy issues!"

He'd do that weird laugh of his - head bucking back and forth, an open grin, a sound like bone chips rattling under radial tire loosening out.

Sometimes Castillo would disappear for long stretches of time. Before and after these hiatuses, you'd often find him talking to the boss in quick cryptic whispers. Something was up.

One night after one of these instances, Castillo approached me. His eyes darted left and right as he drew nearer, as if the aisles and shelves themselves were tapped. As he gripped my buggy whip of an arm in one of his bronzed mitts, he said, "Listen you're a pretty smart guy. There's something I need to know."

I gulped hard. "Yeah man, sure, anything I can do..."

His eyes lightened a touch, but his tone stayed stone serious. "Listen," he said, "let's say you happened to get yourself a punctured lung...would you die?"

My mind flashed back to some of the few instances of such an injury that I was aware of. I told him what little I knew.

"I never heard of anyone dying from it. Fucked up...yeah. Surgery...sure. Months of hellish rehabilitation...yep. But not dead."

He lightened up, seemed to get even broader and taller as balled-up tension left him. He playfully wrapped me between the shoulderblades.

"Thanks man. I feel better you little fucker. You need anything, just name it."

I couldn't resist the urge.

"Not for nothing Castillo...why do you ask?"

The second those syllables escaped my lips, it occured to me that their very utterance was a bad...potentially tragic misstep. But Castillo simply adopted that big open grin and extended his hand.

"Maricone came for me with an ice-pick. I laid a hurtin' on one of his boys. He lunged for me, but lost control of his shit, and I fed it to his ass!"

The handshake ended and I nodded. I knew at that point that Castillo was the scariest fucker I knew.

A couple of days later, we had a heavy pull - full truck of canned goods, detergents, HBA. It was gonna suck.

Then Jerry showed up...a half hour late as usual. Me and Castillo had already banged down a few hot muddy Guinesses. But Jerry looked flushed and angry. He was short, stocky, powerful...but had sensitivities as dainty as China Dolls.

"On the way in...some fuckin' kids started calling me a fag! What's wrong with these little punks? Somebody needs to teach them some discipline!"

Castillo perked right up . . . you could almost see his ears rise and a generous stream of saliva on his jaw.

He shot a quick jab into the truck wall and said, "Fuck man, at 7 o'clock we go and find these little shits! Where were you when this went down?"

Jerry wasted no time. "Corner of 76th and Atlantic," he replied.

Well, that tore it.

We spent the next hour and a half pulling and breaking down mile-high skids of painfully heavy shit . . . shit that tore your arms up and left them hanging like ragged moth-eaten curtains in some widow's house. Then 7 rolled around, a son from war.

Castillo took the lead and we hit the streets without a spoken word. 76th and Atlantic was just a mere couple of blocks away, and as we exited the parking lot, we could almost make out the shapes on the corner.

Still no exchange of words. There were three kids on the corner as we approached, 3 skinny white kids, all with flat tops, windbreakers ans sports pants.

Castillo stopped, eyeballed them . . . then grabbed the tallest and slammed an open palm into the side of his face. The thud was deep and sonorous.

"Is this the bitch?" he screamed, grabbing the faltering punk by his windbreaker.

"NO, NO!!" screamed Jerry plaintively, waving his arms in a way that told me he was already losing his belly for it all. Castillo relaxed his grip, then slapped another one.

"Bitches," he said "I'd kill your asses just to break the boredom of a Sunday afternoon. Go home and suck each other's dicks."

The three punks said nothing . . . they simply reeled, and the two stricken mooks rubbed their battered mugs. Jerry was aghast now, his frail nerves stretched and tensed like so much shrink wrap.

"Listen, man . . . they're gonna be looking for us. Let's just go back and forget it."

Castillo frowned, looking hurt like a kid whose Tonka trucks were about to be taken away. We headed back, the three of us, wordlessly as before.

But there was grim knowledge, knowledge as certain as light . . . that Castillo was the scariest fucker you'd ever wanna meet.

betting heavy on forever

february tore cruelly at my cheeks

and screamed

"Take a bulldozer to what's left here and pour lye upon the ground!"

an eye-flutter
before
the door clicked shut

I heard you talking only loud enough not to scream

after all
a scream would have done me justice
an act you'd avoided like a black cat draped in barbed wire on Friday the 13th

february pummeled me with a funeral dirge meter

and shouted

"Withdrawal happens with people too . . . better get some good rope to chew on
and a cold, dark room!"

With a bellyful of Fleischmann's
and the eye-glint of the great explorers

I walked on into the cold, unbending question mark called tomorrow.

Giggling During The Autopsy

The dark
broken
by crimson candle

as great bald Kurtz
stares grim-faced off the wall
bathed in beloved storm and malaria

Faust calmly lilts out of dusty
garage sale speakers

and a floor festooned by
empty root beer bottles
vintage 70's copies of Wrestling Review
and NRA pamphlets

If this is my cross
please bronze it
because
I want this to last forever.

American Idol

I've always loved Batman

loved the way
the superheroes. . .you know,
the ones who had it easy
with their strength
and flight
and heat vision,

looked on in horror as he
popped some punk's arm out of joint
or
splintered up a jaw
just cuz he could
or
dangled some well-moneyed asshole from a rooftop
with the faintest ghost of a grin slashing over expansive chin

"He's too brutal!" they would moan

and that little grin would widen just one one millionth of a tenth of
a millimeter

Sometimes
you have to pity
those
coddled
righteous
gifted

who will never know all those
vicious
inventive
fun
little
measured
necessary
methods used by those among us who burn.

just another mook singing and burning

a shotgun
in a room of arthritic trigger fingers

wings doused with fire

and gusting torrential sand

player pianos
set wailing
as grizzled
buzzcut
pro bowlers
shoot strikes and pick up spares with their own heads

sharks with jaws wired shut and clown noses

baby
i'm a million different flavors
of all kinds of wrong.

Torched

We sit over coffee
and I try to stretch the moments
capture them without terms and conditions

It is cyclical:
your laughter
my small triumph

the passage of your hand over even the most banal of skin
a masterpiece

Somehow
even after all these years
I remain
a man set ablaze and loving it.

not going quietly

beware the seed you've lost or scorned
better to burn it or salt its harboring earth

fear this seed,
that in your arrogance
you have forgotten

what grows
grows wild
mangled
malignant
strong in its dysfunction
a
beautuful
deadly
smooth to the touch
cancer

with that in mind
how long did you think it would stay gone

when the raidrops are needles
and the air is thick with fever

realize
this errant seed is your master

more monsters

i look at you

and i realize how dracula must have felt

you figure that after a couple of hundred years

the novelty of immortality and near-invulnerability wears off. . .
and what are you left with?

a few blood-drained carcasses strewn about the place like empty 12 oz. cans of Schlitz Light
minus the recyclable value

all your past victories are
little more than a shoebox full of grainy polaroids
or
just after-images burnt into your eyelids

it
all
becomes
so
routine
with you gone

i look at you
and feel a kinship with ol' Larry Talbot

the morning will find me
with tattered clothes
and tattered memories
and maybe even a few tattered notions
of redemption via silver bullet

only problem being. . .
this slug's heart-shaped
and has your name carved in it

i look at you
and emotion is

a million Frankenstein's Monsters
running amok with lumbering heavy feet,
arms outstretched,
and a poker face
that only blinks or wilts with fire

the fire of your eternally non-plussed gaze.

Entry 2: Boxcutter Brown

Boxcutter Brown had a peculiar habit.

On any given night, there you'd find him, careening around outside the Atlantic Avenue bars wearing a half-opened Hawiian shirt and madly swinging the implement that was his namesake at phantom attackers.

"Who's got the power?" he'd ask of all those who he encountered, both real and imagined.

Oddly enough, few of the Avenue dives had cut him off. Once within their confines, Boxcutter's worst sin was slowly passing out while grimly muttering a litany of complaints against society at large.

The next morning would usually find him nearby the bus depot, awakening in a puddle of his vomit and/or blood.

This morning was different however. . .he could feel it right away.

Slowly, as his encrusted eyes strained against the dreams, he became aware of his surroundings. . .which, by the looks of things, was the backseat of a foul-smelling yellow cab. There was no one in the front seat. . .

Next to him was an unconscious Hindu priest wearing a long white frock and matching skullcap. Boxcutter Brown inspected him further, only to find streams of blood oozing from the man's eyes, nose, ears. . .probably every orifice was breached.

Boxcutter frowned. Something was definitely wrong
here. . .but what?

And why were there emptied out Shasta bottles all over the car?

The Slobster Debacles---Entry One

I've witnessed scenes like it so many times, I can almost count down the seconds before it starts.

The stupidity.

And I end up cursing myself for being right one more time.

The Rabid Dog languishes behind a Te-Amo and under the G-train, and unless you're a narc or a hopeless degenerate in search of summarily executing whatever pale remnants of hope remain in your heart. . .you have no business even looking at it.

And so of course, there I was, sitting in there on the eve of my 31st year, sipping harsh German beer and doing my countdown.

Off to my left, the Good Doctor was eyeing a plump blond dressed in sweatpants and a white Care Bears shirt. Jimmy stood to my right, looking fidgety, his eyes turgid and lost in a few million different elsewheres.

Then the door swung open fast and hard, and I saw this kid. He just stood there a minute and sneered. All of maybe 19, short Ceasared-out hair, olive complected. And a nimbus of drunkdom surrounded the brute.

He walked up to the bar, his footsteps loud, clunky, measured.

"Vodka and tonic," he grumbled. The accent was thick and hard to pin down precisely. Definitely Eastern European.

Behind the bar, the curvaceous young Hungarian girl obliged with a hurried silence. She had dealt with him before - tension riddled her eyes and movements. Had he fucked her, only to kick her into the street without so much as a mumbled goodbye? Had he hit her?

The questions burned like creeping tetanus.

The kid took a swig and it started.

"Fucking Puerto Ricans. Hate 'em, hate 'em all. They jumped me out there, but I beat them back."

He shook a clenched fist before continuing. "Don't fuck with Albanians. Not my family. My family's crazy. Into all kindsa shit."

The hefty Care Bears chick turned around, shot him a hard look. "I'm half Puerto-Rican," she said. "Don't be fuckin' goin' there."

"Oh hey, I meant no disrespect. I have Puerto Rican friends. It's the niggers I hate."

She only got madder. "Hey my boyfriend is black you asshole!"

Something very uncomfortable had risen up in this room and bathed everyone and everything in it. I clutched my warming beer viciously.

From off to the shadowy right of the bar, a tall bald man peeled himself off one of the lounge seats and rushed over.

"Shut up and get out." The owner evidently. He pointed at the kid. More words followed in frenzied Albanian.

The kid didn't move and didn't much care, at least not outwardly.

"Leave? Leave? Fuck you! You know my family! You know we don't fuck around! Any more out of you and your ass belongs to Daddy!"

"Yeah, yeah," the guy replied cryptically. "I know your family." He'd calmed down in a hurry. I got the feeling he did know the kid's family, and he also know they could get to him if need be.

In a flash, I envisioned a chartered social club. . .card games, dominoes, cigars. . .exotic topless women swaying atop the bar.

I shoulda stayed there.

"The luck of the devil," I muttered to no one for no particular reason.

The kid's eyes sharpened and aimed my way. "I'm the devil," he said. "The Albanian devil." A laugh followed, almost diffusing things.

I felt a tension dragging at the corners of my mouth. "That's news to me. Don't look like any devil I ever saw. Albanian or otherwise."

The kid nodded, either not comprehending or not caring. Momentary puzzlement, then he looked back up.

"You're like me. I know you are. You're Aryan like me. A good Aryan. Me and you...we're the same."

I didn't much like the sound of it.

"The same but different."

Jimmy was focused now. "Why don't you shut up kid?"

No way could I let this go any further. . .the evening had already been rendered a shameful absurdity.

I looked at Jimmy, lightly took his arm. "Awe, c'mon, I'm bored with this shit already. Let's go to the Hangman's Noose."

I threw my coat on, walked out and up the block.

In front of Te-Amo, the DiMaria twins were walking by.

"Hello ladies, I said, kissing both of their right hands.

They giggled. "Whattya always call me?" asked Denise DiMaria.

"Neeeeeeeesy," I replied, making my voice unnaturally light and benign. And the three of us laughed...and something inside me warmed up.

And it occured to me. . .sometimes its as simple as opening the door.

That night, at the Sunnyside Gardens, Bruno Sammartino defeated Ivan Koloff with an atomic spinecrusher to retain his World Wide Wrestling Federation Championship.

Not Fucking Around 

More Formulae

Spend your days confounding and annoying both friend and foe alike. Throw cinderblocks through their bedroom windows in the middle of the night. Call them from a pay/cell phone from within earshot, then hang up. Maybe slip some visine in their next meal.

Simple Life Formula #7:

It's Great When They Hate.

Above, all, make certain your attack is as senseless and unwarranted as possible.

Hell to give...Hell to pay...One Hell Fits All 

7/18/04 10:04 PM

It had to play out this way didn't it?

A few feet down the bar, the softball team from the Bronx is drinking and shouting and leering.

And I really like them.

"Kiss me," she says, her grip on my arm a coiling of fast-twitch strength...managed despite the bloating of rum and Coke.

I excuse myself a moment.

"Look there's a 20-spot in it for ya," I tell the shortest among them, he of the buzzcut and thick shoulders. "Take her off my hands."

It's the last desperate attempt of a man with a live grenade stuffed down his pants.

Outside, in front of the post office, she loses it.

"What do you want of me?" she screams.

I pause not a second. "Nothing. Less than nothing."

"You're not gonna swing that fucking cell phone on me."

WHACK!!!

And the night lightly brushes my shoulders, and whispers its warm lies. I want a cigar.