Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Chapter Two

I’m subletting this closet at David’s on Court Street for only two months this summer between Euro tours where I play guitar for various bands overseas the bulk of the year, so since I’m here for such a short time I have no choice but to embrace minutia as the key rather than attempting to take the whole city in and being left with nothing more than a scattered palette in the end. For example, if my room were any larger it would be a small room. In fact, it is so tiny it forces one to edit their margins of focus and turn this box into a microcosm. Enter this world and every scratch on the plaster walls becomes an importantly illustrated detail. It’s that small. When I lie on my cot and stare down at my feet which practically touch the other end of the room I’m amazed at how fast I can twinkle my toes with info sent from way way back here in my skull seemingly landscapes away. Imagining marveling at a city that coordinates its drawbridges in succession as a barge passes underneath five overpasses, those are my toes. If I get my dick to stand up straight it looks like an oracle guarding an entrance to a wasteland designed sans distractions to clarify and fast out inward purges. And if it’s standing up straight I have but one question to ask it. I ask…and know I’ve understood its reply correctly if it’s still standing straight up staring back when I respond, allowing me passage through to the nether lands. If instead it curls away I know it’s in fact shriveling in shame from the amateur crap sprung from the cap the wise oracle is attached to, and grabbing the seer’s attention again is a bitch.
Disgusted, “Oh c’mon man, you didn’t just say that?”
Well if I belabor my ish there’s no getting him back up. He can and has pulled the repugnant card on me many times, “It’s fine. I’ll still always be here to help you piss, Chris. Just think of me as something that helps you piss, that’s all.” He’s right to pull that card. I can be a fool. The only success I’ve had at reopening the discourse destroyed has been through counter-attacks.
“My! What power I hold over you, my subject, to change your mood so abruptly!”
“Yes, yes, that’s the attitude we’re looking for! More, more, in what other ways doest thou reign?” proudly cow toweth (while he climbs!) the oracle .
Less manic times on my cot I imagine one of those demodex mites living inside my eyelash follicle embarking on the long journey out to harvest cheese from the Valley of the Toes. He kisses his wife and children goodbye. If the elements are on his side and there are no soap slides he will see them again with a new harvest next season. His wife warns him to stick to “the side of the beast” (an aphid’s aphid metaphor for wilderness) because it is known that a woman’s tongue (a metaphor for weather) rarely sweeps across its plains though woman’s avoidance thereof is an unquestioned provident mystery. Worlds are created in this small space while white whales splash away on the ceiling and somewhere out the window below.
Women are shocked when I take them in, but the precision and patience with which I’ve given them head has been a direct result of these confines and quite frankly it’s made their clits seem so substantial I’ve questioned what really it was I was licking down there and when their heads crane back in abandon from my concentrated expertise that could only come from such pure desire their eyes have but one place to fall, out the one window that occupies the bulk of the wall that the door does not and onto the vast skyline blocked only by the opaque gothic steeples of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights and their appall is annulled, they cum with the city while they see it upside down and once they are the city’s they are no longer just mine either and I am free to roll over and fall asleep afterwards as nothing more than an appendage of the bigger crease, right? What a little dick in the face of it? Even if my dick were black I could argue that at this moment it’s little in the face of both being fucked and masturbated by the Greater New York. The city did it, not just me. I’m just a piece of they. I’m just a piece of us, babe.
And these oracles stand so firm and proud from every angle it is irrelevant whether we work within a clitoral or phallic metaphor. Yes this room is huge, gigantic. Park bench or palace from this summer on since it’s been proven right here in this room that they amount to equivalent things.
When daylight breaks and the pigeons above my window leave their nest to forage through the spillover from the gutters you’re so close you feel as if you catch flight with them as they swoop down. It isn’t until the seventh or eighth dumptruck rolls through that the dream is shattered and these women are jolted back into the actual hole they spent last night in. Smallness then quickly spirals into a greater and greater force against me and the shreds of a few condom wrappers all in sight because they have nowhere else to hide look like they could have easily come from a million condom wrappers and I receive instant karmic backlash for hubricly claiming to be the city last night, for I am also not the lowly letch they begin to envisage me as. Woah woah woah! That’s also the city! We really did use that many condoms, rubbers suck remember? We had to keep changing them, but that many is not as many as it seems under these circumstances! As I peeled a piece off her moist ass I knew she wasn’t even sure if that wrapper was ours or mines. Bullshit. We were drunk, possibly hammered (how else would she have agreed to come here?). It took me eight bites to get a suitable rip out of each package to slip the rubber through. Doesn’t she remember? Were we that far gone? Could she possibly have forgotten my near slip on the issue when I begged at the height of a drive:
“Can we not kill the condom in this cut?”
Horrified by the thought that I just called her gash a cut, she skittered back a few inches leaving only my suffocating head inside – I wasn’t letting that thing loose -- which just put her closer to the window I was committed to hanging her head out of when summarization surmounted anyhow. Her hands dashed about trying to recall where she tossed her glasses so she could get another glimpse at who exactly, what maniac this is she went home with.
“You didn’t just call my –“ were her last word before my barrage.
“Christ no!” drive
“Have some faith --” jiggle
“Cut, like Biggie Smalls would have –“ retract
“said. As in ‘up --” drive
“in --” drive
“this cut.’ “ drive, drive, drive.
“Like a temporary state --” ischium sets about milling pubis to rubble. Then shifts to give acetabulum a shot.
“of mind or place.”
Still confused we reposition to the semi rear. On a forty five degree angle rather than on our knees my hips can lock into her ass if I connect right and my leverage is fastened with one hand on the hip and one hand clenching her shoulder via the roundabout route round the front. Textural Tourettes tempts me to swear something out loud but I swear I have no opinions of this girl yet so I swallow it.
drive, drive, drive.
“And like the Indo cum Latin ‘cut’ comes from, –“
“Time to shut up, faggot. Wait, did you just say you came?!”
ram, ram, ram the retort home.
“Sker cum caros, from which we get –“
Then sometimes even I’m distracted by sex and it takes me a few later to continue my thought, “body like corporal --” in “and therefore corps--” in “and maybe even couer like courage and corazon like the bleeding beating heart, in between which an eternal bleating binds the verbs –“where my head was when she skittered away, “I meant I wanted to be fucking your body, the cut. The whole thing. The real thing. I didn’t want to be fucking some rubber inside your body, I mine as well only be fucking your cunt then.”
again.
“Oh is that what it feels like?”
again.
“I’m digging myself in deeper, aren’t I?”
fasten a fit, coccyx to coccyx.
“Well if you’re gonna dig boy, dig.”
My sentiments exactly, so I leapt on her pardoning. She mounts, she rides, then she gets back into it, “lose it from your head. Do you think I like these things? You’re wearing it. There is no other reality” at which point I lift my ass to meet her in the sky on her ride and as I sense her getting there she plants the seed that will time release a recurring stall in me at any given point the next day. The stall will go like this:

“Love?”

-- And after the silence I’ll pick up wherever it was I left off. The seed went like this:
“Go ahead, finish your thought,” so coolly cackled, and knowing that she didn’t mean it – her smug champion’s grin followed by my confounded lack of response followed by her cum cementing it – skipped me into the plane of considering if I had been sacked, blindsided, and this unsuspecting character was the one I binged and starved for down Court Street all summer, in which case she’s lucky I didn’t lose my hard on straight away mid her cum with such stuttering a thought. I mean, I had already snuck the condom off anyhow, hence the cum was all cued up. Wow! it didn’t take much to plant that seed. I wasn’t aware I was so famished!

“Love?”

Flip her over and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig until it’s dug and wrung wrung wrung it out..
I collapse hidden between her neck and clavicle while she, on her back, stares at the ceiling. I roll over to join her eyes on the ceiling for a few, but passing out now wouldn’t rid me of the love notion so I roll back towards her and poise to repel, nip this question in the bud. Kill it. So while my left arm props my head up to peer, my right hand surveys the landscape with jaunty skips of finger tips up and down her torso, la la la, as to take her off guard until it settles into a précised reaping of sexual snots from her crotches’ fresh crop. First the ripest ready dangling at the end of her pubes, then, for my appetite to be dismissed was ravenous, I had no choice but to pluck the young ones (working their way up her urinary tract towards an infection anyhow) protected amidst the tauter folds and my hand is finally smacked away.
Thinking my dismissal complete I rolled over, setting into a contented snuggle so soft and natal already anxious for next morning’s metaphorical mobile. What will I imagine the dumptrucks to be tomorrow? If you drift off from the right place maybe you can influence your dream, mmmm.
If it’s not obvious, my brash bents only serve to bolster my lack of god given guile supplements and thus I did not see the flipside lurking.
“Incarnadine,” was the venom seethed between the teeth that bit my earlobe from behind my mind.
It can’t be! She must be dreaming already, talking in her sleep. I was supposed to be the one to fall asleep first. Man, though she’s spooning it’s only because she’s not in a lucid state. She’s cuddling up to what she thinks is an old ex, def. I’ve been guilty of that before too so I’m not accepting it. I’d pray these things weren’t so if I had the power to do anything at all, but her fangs fixed in my flesh froze me straight through with a fear colder than the North Atlantic produced when it seduced my fingertip. I am powerless now only to lie and take it as she oozes more and more in through the puncture, deflating, deflating, I feel the air on my neck.
“Like all bodies dead read. The Devil incarnate, Evil incarnate, Anger incarnate – because those soon to be Catholic Guineas knew that the body, caros, was only truly visible through the cuts, the skers that exposed the flowing fickle flaws inside. Everything else was a mere façade, as much bodice as body. From blood to bloody to body,” the bleakening bloke broke as she poked and she poked, “sker cum caros, like the incarnadine coagulation of my menstruation on one of your collection of condoms scattered about the floor. Do you see how red that mess is? I won’t risk any of your white pulsing it to an incarnative pink while you’re scared of the sker that exposes your ink, little one. Oh sweetheart, do not grieve for even the cardinal receives a reprieve, half of his corpuscles too are white through, though his breed in bones while yours in boners --and his mitre? Why its meter ticks too while your cock crows (thrice!). Yes Sker, like all the lacerations you prefer to lash yourself with rather than get certain. Oh deary, am I sharing a bed with someone more Sirius than serious, more cane than carne? Woof woof, puppydog. Oh Chrissy, let’s not avoid these names any longer, are you over there on your side away from me now tearing with tears, replete with rips, singing a song so sanguinely sick? Did you not think this conjugal visit wouldn’t conjure these wee ghosts within us?”
As she withdrew her fangs the venom’s pangs ceased drowning my lymphs and in a pinch I was released to open my eyes to the sun and seventh Humpback bounding past the Van Westerdonk Mother Cabrini Social Club. For no, it wasn’t she that was talking in her sleep, dreaming. It was me. A bit of a let down to find that my bed talk fell on deaf ears once again, but still more a relief to be reminded that at least she was drunk enough to forget my embarrassing slip that bled into that dream:
“Can we kill not the condom from this cut?”
Gone.
All the space we created was shrinking fast. One more dumptruck and this room will be too small for even one person to breathe in. Irrelevant really, it’s all irrelevant, I’m ready for my coffee by that point anyhow and the pursuit of all things small still does me more good than it does me harm in the mornings.

Initially, I drew inspiration for this mini model from graffiti inside a bathroom stall. I was passing Niagara Falls driving from Buffalo to Toronto on a solo tour when I saw a billboard for a Seneca Casino called “Vegas” so I ran in. When I entered the main rotunda I was given the option of going downstairs to the Atlantic City Wing which featured the Monte Carlo Lounge, or heading up to the roof and into the Macao Pavilion, or just following the dazzling lights straight ahead to the main rotunda. I walked straight through the slot machines in the Strip section where they played U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” in perpetuatum. Once through, more choices. To the right the roulette tables sat beneath a giant black pyramid while to my left the poker and blackjack section lay beneath a miniature model of the prominent logos of the New York City skyline with a Lionel rollercoaster functioning as a bombed up elevated subway weaving throughout. This would have been the moment I finally played my money on red and walked away a winner or a loser knowing either outcome was extraneous had it not been for the maitre d’ catching me before I had even made a choice of where to sit and chatting me up about how this Seneca casino was actually inspired by an Apache who visited Las Vegas on The Day Irony Died. He assume I knew what that meant. I did. He alleged to have been in the New York Casino in Las Vegas at nine am when the first tower had already been hit. As word spread the screens that covered sports twenty four hours a day quickly switched to the catastrophe and it appeared as if horses reigned by chariots, last ditch punts, and short stops catching stealers pelted the towers down. At said point he alleges he saw the writer who either wished or claimed he were Hunter S. Thompson stroll in off the desert still somewhere else, not quite with us, to witness the event liveish. So seeing as the Seneca have always held a mythical place in their hearts for the Apache and seeing as the Apache considered Niagara Falls the inverse to the towers at the opposite end of the Empire State he decided to give it a go up here.
I had a go straight to the toilets without playing a hand, and though my bowels released, my gut was not clean. No matter how much they evacuated, their was a filth that clinged. This was the moment my brain was beating for a brand, a motto, a reason. On one side of the stall

While each breast abuts
We stand with cheeks of butt abreast
was amounting to slightly less than the maxim on the other
When minutia is no longer my new shit
It’s time to go macro, amigo.

So the stoked iron chose the latter and imprinted away because it had to choose something and here I am now spending a chunk of everyday rationalizing an unfortunate ingestion burnt in at a ripe instant (to the point of banana bruised ripe) as smarts because it’s with me whether I laud it or laugh. I laud. It is lawed.
Fortunately my new shit is still minutia. I have no choice, so I find the spoils of this little life:
On the walk to the deli that David tried to keep me from I read a plaque on the entrance to the Carroll Street Park that tells a tale of the empty pigeon coops on top of our brownstones which were once used to house homing pigeons the Italian émigrés brought with them from Italy. When they’d financially secured themselves here they’d send the pigeons back across the Atlantic to fetch their remaining loved ones. If you saw a white pigeon in the coop you knew a Spaniard was living in the building. All the white ones came from one city only, Seville. Dego doves, they were mocked. Hard to imagine Spanish was once as foreign to this city as white pigeons are now, as David’s kind was to Court Street two years ago, and as the Italians will be soon enough.
The spoiled though?:
As I’m leaving my deli destination coffee in hand David pulls up in a black sedan!
“I tried to catch you but you walked down a one way street going the direction I couldn’t go. I was gonna give you a ride. If you weren’t in such a rush you could have gotten a ride. Like the car? It’s one of the perks of my p.a. position on this Scorsese film. They gave me a car for the week. Not only did they give me a car, but it comes with an exemption tag hanging on the rearview mirror from the mayor’s office allowing me to park wherever I want. And the best thing is – hey, you got a couple minutes? Sit down, drink your coffee with me, I’m gonna grab a bagel. One minute, wait one minute.”
This is my life. I am an adult, but I walk back in to the deli and take my seat as commanded and David returns with his bagel. I hope it’s apparent that I love David, but I wanted my coffee alone.
“So I haven’t spoken to you since I made my tickle fetish flick in Connecticut this weekend have I? This all goes back to my Porto Alegre escapade.”
“That’s the second time you worked Porto Alegre into conversation this morning, and I really don’t think it’s nine a.m. yet.”
“Right, that’s because I knew I needed to tell you about this past weekend, but couldn’t remember what it was I had to say so different parts of my skull were just firing bits and pieces like a pinball machine searching for the stuck ball and it came out with only a partial context. What did I say anyhow?”
“Something about the mayor’s –“
“Right, so I’m fucking the shit out of her. Rebecca doesn’t mind because she claims to be polyamorous anyhow and quite frankly she doesn’t know what I’m up to down there. I’m getting so much pussy in Brazil it’s criminal and then on top of that these friends of mine decide to take me to a brothel, get to the brothel and I’m like ‘why would I wanna pay for this when it’s coming my way for free anyhow’ but I go to a room because I don’t want to be disrespectful to my hosts. My hosts, it should be added, who get even more play than me and yet here we are all at a brothel. So I ask the whore if I can take a few pictures of her and she says no, she’s a Muslim and some cleric decreed that photography steals the soul but I can do anything else I want with her, particularly up the ass because the Koran avoided that, but I don’t know what else I want so I look around and I see this feather, like a peacock feather hanging on the wall and I don’t know what came over me but I asked the prostitute ‘look, do you mind if I tie you up and tickle you?’ She consults the holy texts in her mind, comes up blank, and obliges…”
And as I drift away for a heartbeat, a heartbeat! David scolds me again.
“What are you looking at? What’s over there? Try to pay attention, c’mon. You’re not getting laid this early. No nooner for you, give up on it. No matter how vainly your dress –”
“Vainly!”
“C’mon faggo, I’ve never seen you wear the same pants twice.”
“That’s not vanity David, that’s the inverse. I don’t want to be connected to my clothes. The more you vary it, the more you’re free from materialism. You c’mon, how put out would a Buddhist monk be if we made him wear a mauve vestment? He’s the materialistic one! He’s the one attached to his clothing. Imelda Marcos and her million shoes? She’s free, her feet are her feet because they can’t be attached to any one pair of material –“
“Fuckin’ A, sorry I hit the funny bone undercummed cannon. If it makes you feel any better, my weekend was not about cumming either.”
Turns out David unearths his tickle fetish at this Brazilian brothel and this weekend he unveiled it on his girlfriend and her friend in a Connecticut chateau with the cameras rolling of course. The good stuff was yet to come.
“So despite this parking exemption tag hanging on my rear view window I arrive at my car this morning to find a parking ticket issued by one…James M Milton III! What was this guy thinking!? Isn’t he aware of the aggravation this is gonna cause the city? It’s not gonna make them money, it’s gonna cost them money! It won’t cost me a dime. I take it to my boss at the set, he writes an angry letter to the Parking Commission, someone over there has to file more paper work that voids the ticket out, and when you factor in all the wasted time and paper they just spent themselves a buck, they didn’t make a cent! I mean…oh, alright alright I see you looking over there again. A mother with a stroller and another busting from the gunt? You’re through with me. Wasted effort my friend, wasted effort. Fine, let’s go. I’ll give you a ride.”
Before I could resist, because the whole point of me stepping out of the house was to walk not ride and get some fresh air, he cuts off my protestation still in thought form. It is, by the way, never my turn to speak.
“C’mon! Over here.”
Then I cease to exist as his gaze fixes on yet another orange parking ticket on the windshield. You can see its luminescence from a block away. The silence by which he walks towards it and picks it up trembles the air terribly enough to finally place me inside this day. Now I’m giddy with fear. I am in! I am in this day now. What’s David gonna do? What’s he gonna do? He opens his mouth as wide as it can go and chokes the barrel by shooting his chords up to the heavens away from us letting it out at St. Peter instead who I assume enjoyed this as much as I did as he pounds his fist on the hood of the sedan:
“James M Milton III!”
I’m in the car before David even. Let’s go! Mumbling to himself, “I’m finding this fucker, y’know what? I’m finding this fucker.”
Yes! We pull out onto Smith Street but a tractor pulls around the next corner in front of us first. Yes! Yes! He fumes from every hole.
“Let’s go! Why the fuck do these Guineas need tractors in the heart of urban Brooklyn!?!”
Neither his jerk of the wheel right nor left lends a gap large enough for us to pass the tractor, but fortunately for David (and to my dismay) the tractor turns at the next corner anyhow.
“You know where that tractor is gonna turn next? The next corner. And after that? The next corner. And after that? The next corner and de ja vu on Smith Street again driving around the block all day long working on the union clock.”
But as soon as the tractor is no longer an obstruction David slows down anyhow remembering that this morning’s enemy is not the tractor, unions, or Guineas. It’s James M. Milton III who could be hiding in any nook or cranny on a cross street off Smith.
The gas, brakes, left and right up Baltic? Nope. The gas, brakes, on Warren? Nope. The gas, brakes, Wyckoff? Nope nine times all the way to Atlantic by which point my elation has been alighted and I’m ready to take my coffee back to my computer and work but poor poor James M. Milton III! You were almost in the clear! You scored two parking tickets this morning. Isn’t that over your quota? Why’d you push it, Jim? Are you not salaried? Couldn’t you have just hid out somewhere for awhile and still gotten paid? No. You were on a roll and you couldn’t stop for you’re both a pig and a meter maid so nothing would suit you more than a promotion. You needed a third ticket in one morning so my pity for you extends only so far, bra.
David spots his car slinking up Atlantic meter by meter.
Who’s this madman racing up behind a cop, James M. Milton III? Why it’s my flat mate, of course.
Rather than pull us over Milton speeds ahead. It takes him two blocks to realize he has the authority to instigate chase, not us. He stops and David pulls along side him.
“Pull over,” David’s pulling his yells but the entire avenue, even the concrete, feels them,” Pull over. I just wanna talk to you. Pull over.”
Poor young Milton whose fresh micro dreads must have been woven in at the Neo Nubia Salon the same recent week he started writing parking tickets consents because I’m sure the Academy hadn’t prepared him for such a wild card.
“Do you see that tag hanging on my rear view mirror? See it? That’s an exemption tag. That means I can park wherever I want to. Read your handbook. Yet you’ve given me two tickets already this morning. They didn’t teach you what an exemption tag was at the Academy?”
This is now more than I can take. I sink into my car seat occupying no size and hopefully no color at all. I do my best to disappear. My chin becomes my neck, my chest caves in, my legs wrap around the bottom of the seat and I am one with the fabric.
“Listen, I know what an exemption tag is,” Milton slips in between David’s breaths, “It’s just that my superior was watching and she said I should still write them.”
“Well your superior’s a fucking cunt! What’s her name? I mean, she doesn’t understand the first thing about the headaches and mindless paperwork she just caused this city. She’s not working for this city. She just cost it money – “
“Well take this matter up with the Transit Authority then –“
“Oh well that’s exactly what I’ll do, Jim –“
“Sir, you need to just calm down then and issue the proper complaint. Again, I was only doing what I was told –“
“I understand that! Look, I’m not mad at you! I’m not mad at you! You should just tell your twat superior I think she’s an enemy of the city and she’ll be hearing from my superior soon enough. Have a good day, officer!”
We’re silent in the car for a few minutes as we drive away and my body gradually begins to retake form peeling itself back into the air.
“David, I really must applaud your use of the ‘I’m not mad at you’ strategy.
“What?” Still in a daze. What’s it called when your head wags back and forth? Whatever the word it’s reserved for times when you’re feeling the opposite of when a dog wags his tail back and forth. David wags his head and licks his lips and I sense another outburst so I beat him to it.
“I’m not mad at you! I’m not mad at you! You’re a maniac! That was brilliant. You were too mad at him, psycho!”
“Psycho? Me? No I wasn’t mad at him, well, listen –“
“You dragged me into this day, you listen, yes you were you were mad at him. You mine as well have commanded him to calm down while your face looked like a beet. You should have asked him why he was so stressed out while you finished your third filterless cigarette in a row in two breaths. You –”
“Go ahead, keep ‘em coming wise guy. Let’s hear them all. What else you got?”
“…Well I’ve actually just run out. I’m still reserving my best poesy for later over a solo coffee with me and my computer.”
For a brief moment I thought I succeeded in bringing clarity back to the morning, but now he had to repeat his whole manifesto a few decibels lower to prove to both of us he was not out of his mind.
“No really, I feel bad for him. I do, but my boss is gonna be briefly pissed at me even though I had nothing to do with the ticket so it’s only fair that it should trickle down the other direction too. It’ll begin with a few irate faxes to the Transit Authority…”
He dropped me off in front of the flat and threw in an arbitrary conversation addendum just so we wouldn’t leave on the hairy note.
“Hey, do me a favor? Put one of those sake litres in the fridge so it’ll be nice and cold when you and I crack it open later? A’ight, adios, I’m off brother.”
I wait until the sedan rounds the block, bid a “buongiorno” to the old Italian guys in front of Mother Cabrini’s before I enter the flat and relax with the knowledge that my bike is safe another day.

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