The Sewer (non-fiktion)

The Sewer

Our feet sucking through the mud, we stomped through the swampy muck, this raw sewage drained from all the nearby farms, a trench and a tunnel, a big pipe, going through it and the dirt road going over it.
We were hunting frogs, me, my brother Junior and the neighbor kid, Mike. Mike had a small, lime fishnet for extracting goldfish. When we spotted the bulbous yellow eyes floating out of the syrupy grime, we called Mike and he scooped up our writhing, squirming prize.
The further down the sewer we went, the darker the drool became. Oily swirls and floating chunks of I-dare-not-think-what twisted in the ripples we caused. You had to duck your head or risk scraping your scalp against spools of cobwebs. Looking down at your shoes, filled with this goop up to your ankles, terrified of snakes or worse, sometimes we’d jump. What was that, what was that? Then, we realized it was our own splashing. Our own ripples.
We kept the frogs in a Tupperware container we took from grandma. We were careful as surgeons not to let them out when adding to the collection. Junior had the net now, and Mike had trekked to the other side of the tunnel alone. I scanned the brown murky mud and parted the reeds near the entrance, looking for any creatures trying to escape in the opposite direction.
Mike leaned his head into the tunnel and called that he thought he saw something. Something big. Bring the net, quick!
Junior wouldn’t let me take the net and soon it became a fight. I was small and gangly and Junior was 200 pounds, at least, and he was gonna kick my ass. Again.
I was tired of it. Junior was so big and stupid and always trying to push me around.
Rage surged through me and I did the most stupid thing possible. In my tiny mind, I became like Riki Tiki Tavi, the mongoose, a rodent that kills king cobras in India by biting deep into the neck and never letting go.
So I bit Junior on the nipple. Sunk my teeth in through his oversized Phoenix Suns shirt and chomped down. Did. Not. Let. Go. Junior pounded on my back with his fists, the whole time Mike watching from the side, rolling his eyes and telling us to cut it out. I wouldn’t let go and Junior wouldn’t stop hammering me.
But everyone has to breathe sometime and I let out a big exhale, enough room for Junior to shove me back and run off down the dirt road. It was a mile to my grandmother’s house and he ran the entire way, shouting, “I’m telling, I’m telling.”
The Tupperware of frogs knocked over, the net in the bushes. Nothing mattered. I ran off down the street after my brother. As I got to the door, my mother was there, asking what happened and I told her she should punish me so, so, so bad. I was crying. Guilt, or fear, but probably both.
Junior’s nipple was swollen and plum purple. My mother tried to stifle her laughter. Everyone was confused about the nature of the fight, but they figured we had it worked out. It was over and I wasn’t punished.
I went back to Mike, still baffled, but more bored and he said all the frogs got away. I looked down at my ankle, sticking out of my mud caked shoes and browned socks. A leech was suckling on my Achilles’ tendon.

Transfiguration

Transfiguration

The day was on the fringe of timelessness, frigid with glaring white sanctity. A brightness more radiant than any bleach, almost fusing my eyes shut. I had to walk through endless, tangled trenches of snow, higher than my head.
Through every corridor, the light headed straight for my eyes and flooded my corneas. Through squinting glints, I could make out the shapes of buildings just enough to navigate through the troughs.
And so quiet. Not a sound but sharp, soulless wind. The howling follows you, burrows into your head and reminds you, there is no life here. This is the edge of oblivion.
At a dead end, I feel my way around a trench wall and climb up. At the top, there is a building, the roof caved in, bombed out almost. No people around, so I crawl through the window and under a broken support beam. Inside, it’s warm like a shrimp bisque. Knocked over shelves, busted walls and insulation freely littered down every aisle.
I travel through the ruins, careful not to disturb any artifacts. I feel hunger, but something holds me back. I have no survival instinct other than to pass through ruins to the other side. Stepping over baskets and tilted doorways and spoiled fruit.
Once I uncover where these fragments of history end, I will step back into the searing, raw light, able to transfigure into a new form. Leave this infertile wilderness.
First, I must give up earthly needs. I must not eat.
But like an animal, I throw myself on all fours and devour the moldy, worm-infested fruit. I chew it down, juicily, like a broth. A different spirit has consumed me, taking over.
When I am disgustingly full, I can only start to gag. I will vomit soon, leaving another mark that I have failed in my goal.

A New Moon Rises

No one is aware of the changes occurring in my life to the point that I wonder if they are really happening.
Oh, yeah, it's a new year.
The sixth day of it, in fact.
I've hardly noticed.
Internal changes are present but I barely recognize any adjustments outside myself.
Like that Dandy song. . .
"Hear me out, I must have changed."
The title, "Everyone Is Totally Insane" is fitting.

If you think of the term "worldview" in literal terms, I've traded in my glasses for a different prescription.
And I feel like speaking in purposely vague terms, so I'm gonna.

2009 was the worst year of my life.
If I could represent it in some kind of effigy, I would use napalm.
Never mind. That's a tough thing to say.
2009 had its moments.
Nothing happened, but in tiny bouts, I felt something breathing. Most of those times involved travel to little scraps of desert realty. California, Arizona, Nevada.

A friend died.
Remorse aside, that set off one weird chain of events.
I had to reexamine every one of my beliefs to make sure I was ready for that kind of thing. Turns out I'm not.

I got my foot in the door of some journalism career thing I suppose I want.
Wait. No, I want it. I know what I want. Most of the time.

Oh, we all do some things we regret, but not as much as the things we don't do.
I was sorta supposed to finish a novel a hundred times over.
And what else? Don't know, don't care.
I need chains to be free.

I guess my stumbling thoughts can be summed up in how I am coming full circle. Yeah. So where I started has led me to be where I already was.


It's interesting how the book of Ecclesiastes maps my recent thoughts perfectly. Everything is meaningless, even the good things, especially the good things.

The only question it leaves is: what to do now?

I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet.

I like resolving to be a better person, even if it's just masturbation. So I have one resolution for 2010.

(1.) Don't suck.

A new moon rises.
We press on.

Stealing the Communist Manifesto

When searching for the top ten list of the most stolen books, I got many differing accounts. Some say Bukowski, Thompson, Palahniuk. Some say Kafka, J.K. Rowling, the Bible. Some sources don't even list titles, just authors. Then there's some book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which doesn't surprise me. I think the decade has a lot to do with it, which explains the variation, but a statistic like this is hard to prove in the first place.

Somehow I thought the Communist Manifesto made that list. I thought, if there's any book you have to steal, it's got to be this one. It has a typical red cover and two yellow price tags. The book costs $2.

Thousands of revolutionaries built empires on the spine of this trashy paperback. Some of them had to steal it. They were rebels, right?

I took the copy into the dressing room, buried under a pair of jeans and stuffed the book into my pocket. It fit perfect.

I took it out and took off the stickers. If an employee suspected anything, I was afraid they'd find the stickers, so I peeled the yellow tabs back. Wondered where to stick them and thought, leaving them in the room would be suspicious as well.

So I bent down and slapped it under the dressing room bench. Beneath it were hundreds of stickers.

sunday school.

Nov. 8 2009

I thought I was "floating in a dream and all my dreams are musicals, so the dead fetuses hanging from the trees were singing". I sung that of course, like that douche from Singing in the Rain.
I kept passing out and writing one line of poetry at a time. This is what I got.

Gliding through fog like misguided lace flies.
The shriveled trees are but fingers groping from the snow.
We approach the exterior of a cave and look at the twisted jaws of a deeper eternity.

Delving between shelves of every level of history, a librarian craft floats us to the floors of time.
The sweet lower symphonies of our minds are scraped from the torn scalp.
The crisp ground of our skulls are the seeds for a meadow of miraculous flowers.

The plants grow three leaves and one eye, to gaze into the sacred realm of geometry.
Every octahedron spins in anatomical beauty until they make up every one of our atoms.
Our lace eyes blink solemnly and by this way we can bat our way over the foggy glade.

The fog is our breath, our very soul.

Like the howling of wolves.

I am a party, strangely enough, and I'm drinking, but not too heavily. It seems like everyone I know or used to know, even for a little scrap of time, they're all here. All drinking heavily. All of the people my eyes ever graced.
I start to feel it coming on, the vomit and I head to bathroom. It's not the alcohol, it's the pills I had hours before. Waiting outside and then, a guy in a red shirt walks out, passes me. He turns and looks me dead in the eyes. I know him, perhaps better than anyone else here, even my flesh-and-blood sister. He looks at me and we both know. He's coming for me, later. He's coming to get me.
I dash in the toilet, quickly vomit and leap up. Splash water on my face and look in the mirror. I can do this, my eyelids flinch. I have to escape. Out the back. Now.
I duck into the back bedroom, kick out the screen and this apartment is on the second story. I have to leap hard, land hard and roll. My twisted ankle, I don't think it's broken. So I run. I run down alleys cloaked in nightfall, past wooden fences with chainlinked pitbulls on the other side.
A howling, screeching terror follows me. Like the howling of wolves, I flee with pumping legs and throbbing lungs.
I dart across traffic, right in front of a police cruiser. The beast floods me with his violet lights and slowly crawls from the cradle of his car. He towers over me, checks that my ID is of age and breathalyzes me. I don't even blow a .07. So weak.
The cop decides to let me go, but I realize it would be better to be imprisoned in the cage of leviathan than the foul hunter on my scent. For I know, he comes for me.
So I sock the officer in the face. Hard. To give him a reason to handcuff me, to sacrifice my freedom for my breath.
But the officer goes down. He's unconscious in one slug.
The only viable option is to steal the cop cruiser. What else is alternative? By barely slipping into gear, I'm screeching off at speeds unknown to physics. The lights are still beaming in all directions as I tear down the wrecked neighborhoods of junkies, immigrants and thugs. A fool's paradise.
A mere second later the hood crumples up into the windshield and the airbag explodes onto my face. Glass and dust bond with my skin, until I am streaked with the blood of the stigmata.
I crawl from the wreckage and inspect my victim. A red sports car, the driver completely flattened by my tires. The angle his neck and limbs hang suggest he was killed instantly. On the other side, I twist the deceased face. It is truly, by the coincidence of saints, my enemy. His life essence leaks and mingles onto my own red covered hand. How could I?
I was guilty all along. He never meant to bat a cardinal eyelash at me. I killed my nemesis with little more than hallucination.
And sirens rise on the peaks and the heavy air, hunting me, like the howling of wolves.

Spacelab (Hundreds of Places)

The car dipped and dodged in potholes, dust speedbumps and avoided jackrabbits, mice and occasional deer. The gas on “E” the whole way down. 40mph.
That isn’t fast enough, Sloan thinks and pulls to the side of the vacant dirt road. It’s 2:13 a.m.
Blackheart skips out the passenger side and Sloan follows, hovered over the door, and staring in awe at the thunderstorm currently attacking the mountains. Lightning tears electric wrinkles across the sky and illuminates the forest of surrendering cacti. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight.
On the horizon, Sloan envisions a horde of angry townspeople, all carrying blazing torches, come to kill them. Blackheart screeches and lightning cuts vertical down the horizon. In rhythm, at every screech of Blackheart, a lightning bolt erupts.
Soon, Sloan hears the baying of coyotes and thinks this must be Blackheart's doing. He's inviting the terrible cannibal dogs!
‘Stop it! Fool! Swine!’ Sloan hisses. ‘You’ll attract the monsters!’
He whips out a butterfly knife and flings it around, cutting out chunks of his knuckles. Blackheart is still screaming at the dogs.
In the moment, Sloan does what he thinks best! He strips naked and wields his belt, still trying to silence Blackheart’s howling. Blackheart ducks back to the car and closes the door as the clouds above burst. Hot, wet saliva-like rain spits on the desert.
Now Sloan is rubbing his terrible cock across the windshield and the rain is rushing across the glass and Blackheart gets out and runs. He picks up a large stick, probably a cactus skeleton, and lunges at a passing minivan. It swerves off the road and is never seen again.
Soon Sloan, still slobbering on the windshield comes to his senses and dives in the car. He races a mile down the road, the wipers squeaking and finds Blackheart cowering in the soaking-wet bushes.
‘Get in the car,' he says. 'We have hundreds of places to be.’