This is the e-zine version of Red Dye Number Five #2.  Feel free to
print, re-print, and distribute at your own free will, taking into respect
the author and not editing or altering the story/stories in any form 
whatsoever.  They are indeed Copywritten.  No, really.

December 1995- The print version usually precedes the e-zine version, but I've had
way too much shit to deal with to get it together lately.  Anyone who has sent
money for subscriptions will get a copy as soon as It's released.

email: 	
	t3@escape.com	
	t3@aosi.com - [submissions only]

Red Dye Number Five #2- 



     Red Dye Number Five is a so-called "literary" zine catered to
the growing masses of people that seem to lack attention spans.
The stories, rants, complaints, and other various scribblings in
this zine are not written with the intent to blow minds, assert
literary quality, or do anything special except for one thing:
please the reader.  

Some of you have been wondering where the name Red Dye Number Five
came from.  Red #5 was a FDA approved colorant that was taken out
of products after there was a supposed scare that it caused cancer.

This was ultimately found out to be hype that (apparently) a
disgruntled employee concocted.

I'm not sure about that, but Red M&M's used to use it so if you
develop any odd cists or lesions I would target all lawsuits
towards Mars Inc.

Our poor attentions are a result of one piece of junk that every
family has.  It has a cathode box and it waters eyes and ruins
young minds.  I leave you with a quote from Fred Allen, a genius
radio personality of the forties:

"Television: A device that permits people who haven't anything to
do to watch people who can't do anything."

























RDNF is available for free through the Net by emailing
<t3@escape.com> or by:

ftp     -- ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/WhateverRamblings
gopher  -- gopher.etext.org/Zines/WhateverRamblings
web -- http://gn2.getnet.com/~rdnf

I have raised the newsstand cost of RDNF to $2.00.  This is the
first time in six years I have charged more than $1.00 for a zine
of mine.  Single issues cost $3.00 PPD, mail to:

Red Dye Number Five
5 Greenview Avenue
Princeton, NJ  08540

Submissions or inquiries: t3@aosi.com
Hatemail and/or blatant criticism: t3@escape.com




The contributors to this issue were:

Mike Kelly - (#18) Birdfood 
Andrew Ian Feinberg - (#20) Testicular Trauma:  Thoughs of Designer
                      Imposter Body Spray <afeinber@panix.com>











"If you don't like it, then make your own."

















Red Dye Number Five, September 1995.  Everything in this zine is
legally Copywritten (C) 1995 by their respective authors.  Like you
were going to steal it in the first place...



Index
-----

1] The Red Dye Spills
2] The Dance of the Princes
3] Existential Contradictions
4] My Paradise (Part One)
5] Zoom
6] Cramped
7] Going Down
8] Metropolis
9] Virginal
10] Vibrating Ants
11] The Pressure of It
12] The Truth about Rainbows
13] Prate 
14] A Peasants Vantage
15] Chris and Me (Part One)
16] Presently in the Past
17] An Angels Wings
18] Birdfood
19] Turn the Ringer off next time.
20] Testicular Trauma: Thoughts of Designer Imposter Body Spray


1] "...The Red Dye Spills..."
   --------------------------



Pretty tired of reading about clueless teens shooting up heroin in
the village and getting various virgins pregnant in the backroom of
the Limelight as magazines converge upon these new-breeds with
urgency.  Sure its a generational thing where any and everyone that
does or does not have legitimate complaint to walk around head down
kicking 40 oz bottles down the street and contemplate plans for
takeover.  A true slag would not have a paragraph of writings that
would be tolerable in the least.  All of those types are rotting in
front of televisions subconsciously absorbing commercials into
their numb brains and exercising finger dexterity by rapidly
changing channels from one infomercial to another.  How tasteful
that is upon the palate of the terminally lost.

I find myself being guilty of things like this, and on frequent
occasion.  When you stumble home from a local dive at two a.m.
dripping with summer humidity you lay rest on the closest
comfortable spot and look for entertainment, scratching your lonely
sack in reflex.  Peeling sticky clothes off bleached white skin and
watching commercialism take you to a new desensitized world of pure
unarguable bullshit.  The cat sits on my chest and gets comfortable
shedding hair that never goes away, such as from a fresh haircut. 
It faces me purring in content, occasionally nodding off into a
tabby dream which must certainly be beautiful.  I squirm as the
room spins, only lit by that glowing box of disease square in front
of me.
You get this shit out of your system because harvesting it in your
mind is self-destructive.  So you take from your supply of
righteousness and deliver it to the masses any way you can,
preferably in a zine or something similiar which is not caught up
in monetary gain or social advancement.

Bukowski talks about elder blondes with platinum wigs that he's had
and I see older Italian women on an invisible chain being held by
their husband, being dragged across the street lacking equilibrium
from those high heels that were discounted from their unevenness. 
I crossed their path on the way back from the cafe just as the cold
burn of iced espresso hit my belly.  That long dark brown hair of
this particular thirty-something was stunning and her legs were
just that of Bukowski's definition.  Those full luscious lips were
crying to be touched by mine, if only for my own satisfation but
hey she's been treated like shit for so long she'd hopefully fall
to the ground in a youthful faint.  I'm one of those few that find
women and cigarettes a sexy combination any way you slice it and
she took a sensual drag of her non-filter which shaped her lips in
such a way that I couldn't help but get excited.

In such a small and desperate town one must certainly open their
eyes wide with surpise when they see someone new from a far place
wandering the streets in relaxation.  As I took my daily jaunt from
the cafe to the typing machine I ran into Jessica of whom I had a
brief passing with some years back and she's as beautiful as ever
but I recall something.  She was a hanger-on type that somehow met
me through my writings which such situations terrify me because I
am treated like a boost for her image more than a living breathing
person.  Sure I can play this game but to what conclusion?  She
bought me coffee and wanted to discuss ME which made me feel
interrogated and eventually bored.  The various cafe junkies
obviously live in the place and any infraction of their environment
is as obvious as a mouth full of diseased teeth.  Not a cafe in the
country is different.  The die-hards most likely with some sort of
psychological disorder drink straight hot espresso by the gallon
and stare blankly into their palms as they shake uncontrollably
from the poison.  The two of us talk in the very far corner of the
cafe, me sitting purposely in the absolute corner so I can see
everything and miss nothing.  Its a bland conversation really going
nowwhere and I forsake her words after twenty minutes and
concentrated on her beauty, the curves of her breasts, and the lips
which I concentrate on always and on all women.  Lips tell all,
especially those full ones that meet mine so perfectly.  

Summer storms are more exciting to me than any other natural
unplanned occurrence.  A perfect romance for me is sitting in the
middle of an open field having glorious humid sex as a tornado
swirls above us creating a steady howling wind, air-raid sirens
screaming from the urban outskirts.  Hitching with Chris on the 101
we argued that one because he insisted that sex on an abondoned
ferry submerged in the toxic waters of the Newark marshes would win
the race.  He was kidding but in general sex anywhere but on a
twin-sized bed is just as romantic and memorable.
6am in the summer morning is odd for the unemployed because I watch
scores of business types speeding quickly to a job they would quit
if given the option.  If society isn't alienating enough, jobless
people are even more likely to watch a baseball game from the other
side of the stadium.  I ride the clunker bike which succeeds me by
ten years all through town, re-exploring places I use to roam five
years ago.  The fire in the sky is viewable and pleasant through
all the morning haze, telling all that today I will make you hotter
than you can possibly imagine.  I ride a mile downtown watching
bread and newspaper trucks dominate the streets careening around
corners so fast that I always expect them to flip.  The cops switch
shifts and speed up and down the streets like new kids with
training wheels.  I end up at the only store open down in the
Eastern side of town.  I walk in with my battered sleepless look
and the girl at the counter awes at the silver change as it pours
all over the counter.  Nickels and dimes and the dimes being the
highest denomination.  I ask for cigarettes and she grabs for them,
a look of true boredom on her smooth young face.  She counts the
change as regulars pile in line behind me, quietly and internally
cursing me for existing.  All these types are blue-collar fellows
that always tend to have mean tempers and resent people like me
that look seemingly unconcerned with haste or anything for that
matter.  I engage the man behind me asking, "You love this don't
you?" in mock coy and he doesn't even respond, I guess because he's
thinking about his long and painful day of work ahead which he
undoubtedly denies as "fun".  The girl gets my drift somehow and
tells me I look like Jim Carroll.  I tell her that I hated that
book and she looks at me for a few seconds as if the tape had been
paused.  I push through the two sets of double doors and inhale
pure dew as now the sun is working its way down the trees.  I
secure the iced tea to the front of the bike and pedal as fast as
I can up the big hill parallel to the university.  The buildings
have so much character and seniority to them that I can't help but
imagine what, if anything, was different a hundred years ago.  My
mind intermittently blanks in and out of thought and when I wonder
"why am I not thinking?" I begin a perpetual catch-22 where I can't
muster up a thought about anything until I stop asking myself such
obsessive questions.

I long for fantasy mostly because although I'm living over here in
reality, I tend to only react positively to fictional or surreal
events.  Surreality is when you're 22 years old and you can fill up
all ten fingers with names of friends that are now married. 
Surreality is when you can walk down the street and assume that
nobody is thinking about, looking at, or even feeling the wind of
your passing figure.  I took a pair of partially rusted scissors
and chopped my hair off as linearally as possible although I
haven't quite gotten down operating anything in mirror image.  The
cat fiddled with my fallen hair and sneezed as if allergic to me. 
Threw on a Princeton cap and went through town as if doing my own
cute little sociology experiment.  I blended into the masses and
felt comfort in my new stealthy look.
Finally after the sun beats your skin into cancer you grow
lethargic and lay in your bed nodding on and off into dreamland
having disturbing visions, incorporating the whirr of the boxfan
into your fantasies.  The night comes around, the students screech
around corners you hear the clinking and clanking of cheap beer
cans blowing down the street.  You wake up as if to a new day and
remove your head from the icebox or take a cold shower that
palpitates your heart.  Eric and I walked casually into town
sidestepping all known tourist paths and got yet more rounds of
caffeine at another cafe downtown, this one known as a place only
for tourists to frequent for it has the cute quaint look and that
inviting environment.  This place in particular some offshoot of
New Jersey's biggest dairy that offers ice cream and watery coffee
drinks.  Obviously a tax writeoff for certainly one of the richest
families in Jersey or possibly a front for the IRA or maybe some
other organization that ironically bombs pubs in Europe.  The
evening is beautiful with a thin layer of haze covering a crescent
moon.  High school and college students alike wander down the tree-
lined streets smoking cigarettes and oggle at each other in spring
sexuality.  I am entirely too oversexed and forsake social
conditioning or any sort of correctness and stare with uncontrolled
perversion at girls whose rich parents would have me in jail by
midnight if I even dared.  Ageism when it comes to good hot and
humid sex would be a deadly sin for me but only during the spring
when hormones are so present that you can see them dancing in the
air.

The wee hours of the night are the only hours worth taking full
advantage of and the concept of a 40-hour work week almost seems
fictional.  If one has a choice I propose sleeping during the day
and making the night your time to get things done.  I left the
house ready to get a lot of exploring done, walking a few blocks
towards the university.  The cops and school security so familiar
with my presence at 3am that I can't help wonder if they'll
eventually set up surveillence to see where i'm planting those
explosives.  I ducked into the religion building and climbed four
flights of stairs to a belfry with a small window leading to the
roof.  No need to worry for god is protecting me from the man.

Acuity is obtained quickly by surveying your surroundings from high
vantages.  I'm standing on top of a church easily eight stories
high fighting off remnants of childhood acrophobia.  I light a
cigarette and sentimentalize on traces of memories from years ago. 
The roof angled sharply covered with slippery corrugated sheet
metal that rises to a peak about thirty feet, comes to a point, and
leads back down in mirror image.  This is the secret of the city
and scant few locals even know of the place.  Not the sort of place
you'll find discarded condoms and bottles of cheap malt liquor,
although if given the chance the town folk would live up here and
smoke their first joints.  University proctors scan the city
looking for Townies and Trenton hoodlums invading Ivy-League
territory.  The cityscape is actually a beautiful site and seldom
few truly have any grasp of the city from above.  Blinking red
radio towers, low-flying prop planes and various saucers from far
away galaxies soar in the sky.  The last view from Boston was
infinitely better what with the intermittent blinking of the
bulblight YMCA sign, however this is certainly better than Oakland
which all you see is low flying pig choppers with their 20,000 watt
bulbs illuminating black fellows drinking forties.

The cemetary continues to idle across the street.  A no-frills
Friday morning begins and the Gatekeepers son steers carefully
around the dead with his John Deere.  The cat cries for food, I cry
for food and I drink cheap warm cola from a 2-liter bottle.  "Just
another day" I mumble subconsciously and eventually turn off the
computer to get get some more coffee.


2] The Dance of the Princes - Alex Swain
   -------------------------------------

"Ack!" he moaned smiling grinning like a sweating tabby from a
round of kitten deliveries.  He heft up himself up onto the dining
room table, stomping bread and cow tongue in front of the entire
French Parliment screaming, "Thats how ya like it, motherfuckers!" 
He hopped down like an age-old rabbit tipping a crystal vase of
wine onto a three piece Gucci suite so white that the albino boy
down the table looked tan in comparison.  Wait.

A roar ensued and the whole room broke out into a waft of smoke as
combustion took the man and now we only have two hours left until
sundown.  Fritz Lang looked weary sitting in the corner threading
the projector, digging his crusted pale-veined feet into the
shagpile.  Aforementioned table dancer Kale whom incidentally is
quite directly related to Mr. Selenium continued to hop around the
room like a white grasshopper to the cognac where he refreshed his
drink and looked sentimentally out the window at the Ver Sailles
grounds exploring ancient art and oddly carved bushes the shape of
Coke cans or possibly a nuclear pink bottle of Pepto; can't tell. 

The sun burned like acid but that doesn't stop Marcio Colopolilia
from peeling her dress like a banana and exposing her "bits" in
front of such dignitaries as ones that coin terms like, "Close
cover before striking." A chuckle comes from a lopsided parrot the
extreme result of a hammer and a young disturbed Fritz but truly
thats a different story.  She meowed and mewed in heat like she
truly hadn't experienced even a long projectile inside her
regardless if its alive in quite some time.  She was starved like
an elder into diaper-wearing elite boys from the Upper West.

The humidity caked dew on the absolute unarguable palacial walls
covered with Rembrandts and Degas' and a few various other
unmentionables like that damn splatterfuck Pollock.  Drip drip drip
and before long we're all in a psychedelic paint shop splattering
our pale bodies with spectral designs and running small laps around
the hanger-sized room.  

Nobody but nobody can be stifled from such a world where trapeze
artists casually inject H into their muscular veins and old fat
ladies have several sets of genetalia and have beards beyond the
unshaven hippy anywhere in Berkeley.  Hey, you can take your pick. 

"Travesty, injustice!" Fritz cleared his throat instinctively
swinging his ball-peen around as if for therapautic purposes.  But
what is this injustice the prince speaks of?

"Refrain from such swinging of said ball-peen." Marcio proposes but
it was truly more of a threat and like the gong of a bell...

"BONG!"  The clock strikes ten but wait its only 9:45 so that must
explain why Marcio has a hole in that wincing head of his and body
on the ground and that odd jitter to her warm brown legs that never
seems to ever end but now....You can see them end for she looks as
if her insides are one 5 foot 8 long vibrator shaking like milk and
projecting vast amounts of mellow red to the victorian floor.
Fritz really has to cut that out for the whole family will die at
the end of that cylindrical metal meanie.  Who really knows but
Kale and Fritz leave the room heading for the kitchen where elder
black fellows dispense soup and crackers in less than satisfying
portions, sweating profusely and singing songs from the day, none
of which these two boys could possibly understand.  The sound is
the dew in the night.  The boys run down the delapidated old
service stairs into the concrete basement complete with grinning
corpses and vampire bats, but they're looking for the poison and
the crunch crunch crunch of various rodent and human bones reminds
me alot of the inaudibility of hearing a goddamn fucking word when
you're eating a bowl of fresh cereal, yet I digress.  

The chamber went on for hundreds of feet, yet neither of them
phased from the jaunt for both at the ripe age of 17 were
essentially already accomplished cognac abusers and tobacco
smokers, leaning on each other down the narrowing passages where
ancient relics lay on the floor like peel-top orange crush cans and
the like.  The mustiness was enough to make a grown man sick but
these particular juvenile's were strong and ambitious and literally
they came upon a light at the end of the tunnel.

The light was as saveur for it was a barrel room full of every
imaginable swill all corked aging into the next millennium if their
ancestors had it their way but quite obviously this booze will be
nearly gone before they turn 21 what with all the country boys
wanting to get wasted and take out a few barnyard animals, sexually
or with the sword of excalibur, thats truly their own decision.  

As it was written "A pop and a waft of whiskey pervaded the musty
environment bringing smiles to all known living culture..."  It was
time to celebrate and neither of them truly knew the quality of
this premature brown concoction but didn't care.  It glug, glug,
glugged as Fritz lay back down facing this oak barrel pouring its
contents into his aristocratic belly.

"Ahhhh.."  He moaned which caught the resonance of the room and
reverberated quite cold and bitterly considering.  Kale implored
him yet to hold the barrel, however shakey Fritz was from nearly
two gallons of poison in an hour, he was quite steady and the glug,
glug, glug was again to be heard as Kale and his handsome blonde
hair was covered with a viscious brown coat of whiskey and proposed
, "Awwww yeah...." With a truly comfortable "Yeah..." ..

Falling over in absolute anti-sobriety the boys (brothers) lay
together several hundred feet below insane civilization and toasted
their futures and ignited tobacco in cheery celebration, never
looking back except to wipe the past from their soiled trousers.


Everything is in accumulation and nothing ever slags in regression,
and if it does it still seems its moving forward.  Storms beat my
city into timid submission but I still sit comfortable in my
leather chair, illuminated by a mere dark green of the sky.  My
palate rich with garlic and cholesterol-bloated butter, and sliding
care-free into my bowels.  

She smiles at me from below drenched to the bone; wet.  "Have I
seen you somewhere before?"  I mutter silently, however loud enough
to attract the voracious tabby darting from room to room in
thunderstruck terror.  Hops on my lap and stares in jealousy at the
soaked beautiful flirt.  Gives a meowing sigh of disapproval and
sets itself on me coating my chest with his special trademarked
scent, possibly foiling my plans.   She yells up as if signaling
for life, "Hellllo up theeeerre?" she waves her hands in SOS-like
patterns and I acknowledge her with the flame of my cigarette
lighter, "My dear, you'll catch cold." I state passively, yet
enforcing of her to come inside to me, to ME.

The squeak of the rusty spring brings a chill to me as the screen
door slams behind her.  She climbs the stairs slowly, the sloshing
of waterlogged sneakers, the slap of her long hair against her
shirt, the slippery squeak of her hands on the wooden railing.  

Slowly the music shifts to an anticipative mood, her slick figure
slowly working down the hall.  I can feel my pressure rise and she
enters the room drenched and sexier then ever a woman.  I realize
my sheer nudity and arrange my boxers hiding my sexy parts, sit up
from my slouching position, and unstick my sweaty back from the
unrelenting leather of the chair.

"Hi" I say.




3] Existential Contradictions

        "A Non-Story"
   --------------------------
Lay stable on that gurney as the operator calmly relays, "In forty-
four seconds you will be no longer."  She's a sparkling beautiful
girl from lucid porno dreams, cropped short hair, smooth face, long
figure strapped loosely to the leather straps.

That total haze of awareness wets your palate and burns your vision
in a stinky unhygienic sleep of early June.  She remains attached
and somehow you understand it all, although perturbed at the loss
of your sensual pornographic beauty, who is yet still about to die
by injection in roughly twenty-eight seconds.

I can feel my own heart pace slowly with hers, feeling the lethargy
of a body full of poison, so painful, so direct, that almost is
pain one cannot feel.

The doctor conveniently begins the operation on my leg with what I 
apparently assume is a local.  However the anesthetic ends up being
more painful that the operation itself.  Unknown exactly to me WHAT
the operation is, I am lost in a trance watching her fall into
death.

The sound of a thousand ringing telephones aurally swirled into a
great mammoth blender created a stereophonic wail that relaxed my
muscles and softened my bones as if dipped into novocaine.  This
conjured the real possibility of impending death as I casually
floated down a long tunnel with a cliche-ridden light at the end.

Awoken to the mellow whirr of the boxfan I lay a bit shocked
staring into the great grey yonder through the seaweed green maple
trees.  The waking swallow goes down raw and bladder calls which
always is the excuse to wake up in these fucked-up days.



4] My Paradise - I
   ---------------

Her name was Pilo Carpine, an eccentric beauty from the east that
smelled erotically of motor oil and motor homes.  She kept a rancid
keep in Deeth Nevada sweating always, dark and tan from the
unrelenting bastard known as the sun.  Cigarette poised graciously
she pulls the cord and vroom vroom of the generator reverberates
the desert sands which tickle the feet of scavenging buzzards ugly
with bad symbolism.

That certain definition of long, tired legs rested flat on
hard-plastic chairs placed on the makeshift back porch covered with
an overhead thickle of dehydrated ivy and bleached sparrow bones. 
As if oddity weren't this mans breath, she sipped from a salty mug
of warm water, sun attacking pores and implying cancer, scaring
smoking scorpions from their firery world and cracking dust into
myopic jigsaw.

The breasts are still young and firm, although neglected.  Her body
unattacked by 9-month disease she otherwise is a perfect date to
the drive-in.
The hills haze at the lower elevations, dust tornadoes spawn in the
foreground, grabbing snake bones and various marrow and swirling it
about into a soup, landing nowhere significant which apparently is
a given for such a dead world.

She pushed back her, ahem, naturally bleached hair and smiles in
bemused content.  She lightly strokes her long-haired tabby
uncomfortably writhing and contorting to the heartbeat of sun spots
and spewing flares.

Palm trees sizzle like ice cream in a microwave, cacti bloat and
pop like an inflated tummy, as implying a particularily warm day in
Deeth Nevada.

She cried salty tears in lonliness and listened to the crackly
distort of the transistor radio.  Corrugated sheet-metal encasing
her home, her reflection pure and ethereal fantasy in the mind of
the heat-stroked demented.  She shines on her own but metal helps.

Once inside I help myself to a hot bloated can of Milwaukee's worst
and make concerted effort to extract the water as my cause.  Bugs
and rodents converge upon me possibly forming a overthrough of this
man filled greedily with a millions colonies water for a year. 
Could be delusional but you never can tell.

I removed my shirt, sticking as if lined with flypaper, and threw
it to a corner.  I heard the cavalry call of four-thousand desert
species of pest and set outside to sit with the Pilo.  I removed my
shorts considerably lightening the load and allowing quick access
to an irritated scrotum.  Pilo nodded in a sweaty daze and we
began.


5] Zoom
   ----

The small car goes zoom zoom down the road cousins bitch and yell
about pure bullshit and I fly down backroads going
UP....DOWN....UP...DOWN...all over the bebop just blaring
through those big speakers, however strong the wind wins and I hear
a steady blowing, like that of a humid hairdryer in my ears.  I
turn every few blocks, determining where I go....Its truly
unknown..I just go and I don't think about anything current.  The
houses blurr by I look around and feel myself in a film once again.

I look around, I look in the sideview, the rearview, my hair
blowing wildly from the wind its just so fantismical.  

Grandmother's house goes by at lightspeed.  I think, if for a
second of the memories I had there for so many years.  Straight,
concise, vivid memories.  The stop signs go by with little
mention, breaking my concentration if only to humor this social
condition around us.  I tap on the breaks in respect, and blow
through the sign like it was a mirage.  It screams by, the
motor revves, I shift gears, the car takes off, faster, faster.. 
The controls lit only by small dash lights and ambience from the
dusk, late coming at 9pm.  Small rodents dart under the
car and magically enter from the rear; shaken but not stirred.

Its just a perfect dream of mine, things like this happen every ten
full moons so I snatched it up.  People drive by, at half my speed,
they stare in awe, in dream, in jealousy.  They're all
looking at ME.  Attention is evil for me I propose more speed. 
Eventually I will be only a wisp, a trail, a fume of steam darting
by their very eyes.



6] Cramped
----------


Scores of desperate airline folk pack deeply in the grease of a
thousand mechanics smirking and moving uncomfortably in their
compartmentalized seats, of course making sure to ignore passers-by
with bronze faces and caked makeup.

The ethereality of height is undescribable at times.  The world is
down there killing and playing bullshit social games, you glide by
assuringly eating peanuts, gaping at the sectional land and clouds
that sail by.

Sometimes you can excuse futility and triviality and relax, locking
anxiety in the basement of your assumed home, chaining the door
shut and beating your lazy fucking feet to Newark.  Don't look back
unless you're using it as a method to check your future.

Examinez Vos Environs.  Smile at inviting eyes that draw you like
a magnet.  Feel free to decline and dip that wet spaghetti spine of
yours into cognac.  Who gives a damn fuck.  Currently, to be bitter
is to be logical.

Pull the pin and sink to the world fire in the sky, hell we're all
going to die sooner or later; perhaps sooner.


7] Going Down
-------------

Smile at her, touch her, flirt with her, she comes to you in
passion touching lips shedding pants, underwear exposing tall,
thin, long curved figure, lush giving lips speaking only in a
whisper, "I love you."

The bed thumps and cracks the paint of the wall dancing on its own
across the hardwood floors.

8] Metropolis  
   ----------


"If you don't like it, then go start your own world or something."
Tattooed and the Aqua Velva green coating him he conjectured many
things feeling insidiously Celtic covered with lace and design. 
"The bird will die, the bird will die!" she yelled, rounded boobes
always at the forefront of everyones imagination 'cept a few who
actually SAW it and are happily content with knowing.  Heat
provoking nipples and shapely figure for the whole school to feast
eyes upon, regardless of gender.

The black chill always goes down like no other in this heatwave
that shortens breath.  He used to run miles upon miles around the
track dead of day after music lessons, finishing with a cigarette 
and a few odd mannerisms that made him so unique.  She floated from
here to there feathers dancing in stale exhaust or the like,
flirting and speaking foreign tongues to strangers all around.  It
was hot and confusing and heads spun all around attached by metal
hanging wire to the outsides of merry-go-rounds.  In otherwords
shooting blanks into the lake where white bats fly freely and
contrivation is not a regulation but a law punishable.

Not only myself per se lost beyond all belief in thick forest but
deep in a patterned city of reflex and moral.  Most of us follow on
the sidewalks some walk backwards naked or run awry at twelve noon
with a spear yelling foreign tribal chants and exposing appendage
and ass alike.

Young men dispose of immense amounts of paint or furniture or
whatever they can get their pink hands on if only to watch things
become destroyed.  Tempers flare humid nights are times to explore
sections of this vast metropolis and walk around casually with
chilled vodka slowly pushing the borders of sobriety.  Yeah the
sentiment is there what with genius crazy girls with beautiful
minds and bodies caressing my dick or playing Go on rooftops.

All ethereality should be reserved as a mystical device good for
attaching sentiment or recollection.  Sparks fly in all directions
all the time mutated frogs float upside down in polluted Beantown
waters their last stare a puft of machine-made cloud unnaturally
swimming by in the citylit sky.

The soothing mellow comfort of knowing it is there with that
sexually romantic feeling of company cools hot heads and makes one
content and alive.  Mostly roamers such as destitute musicians and
ones posessing prodigal qualities cling like electricity and travel
in communities like fish knowing all too well that the point is to
swim upstream if anything, at all, to prove a point.

All so psychotic high on rooftops peering at manmade stadium light
from trendy mafia-encouraged bars.  The youngfolk merely remain to
appease the pre-determined kegs of light yellow ale waiting to be
breathed like through the gills.  All here for a young man to
snatch up and fuck or a young woman or some sort of beef or it all
might as well just be something to ring on at the deli we just
butcher it all up anyway.  The thump thump is entrancing to all
tanned specimens sealing their fate with tumors and black cists or
what have you, she is but my only savour as all for contentment is
an understatement, contentment is the solve for living.

Click click of the credit machine passing pink livers into bloated
hunks of abuse, they just swim in it.  Dark and enigmatic
everything glitters in the twilight, bottles of poison tobacco
cocaine ecstasy its all here taste test it like it and eventually
live it but call me when you get back let me know how the trip was.
"Hey thats real gold in there.."  "Look at her oh my god.."  Soft
and cushy like a womb we sit grouped not alphabetically but
stereotypically all yelling all screaming all ranting, raving,
whatevering.  She remains caring of everything but nothing, or
something like that prancing like a gypsy vixen examining
penetration or breaking prodigal wrists on broken bicycle stolen
seat oh how the envy can burn you up inside.

Little broken clocks or signs from the future put people in front
of our little abode for twelve weeks this guy slumped in nirvana
beyond all of us nodding on Beam or Rye or Cossack or quite
possibly throat syrup or something, point is all the self-
extinction, taking place on my own private channel looping
repeatedly no apparent evidence of deviation its pretty scary if
you take some time to think about it.

"If you're wondering what I'm thinking.......Its nothing." Blue
nods truly over influenced starry skies swimming electric green
eels slithering through the trees haunting angels showing the face
of devils posessive spirits deities poltergeists he's pushing
whatever it is he experiences.

The fuel is boiling in everyone's fucking libido just screaming
FUCK ME or who knows something more a bit more eloquent, the method
is all the same ask any priest or lost celibate loner.  She still
sways to the influence of the potion stumble down the tree-lined
paths sweating sexual scents poking humor, poking bellies licking
lips tongues rubbing hands along pale soft flesh caressing grabbing
idling casually meandering tugging at my cock bells ring and angels
gets their wings orgasm approaches I think of her who cannot be
named oh the irony this must be a sign but I do digress.

The thump thump produces ringing ears 2am time to stumble back lit
on coke or thc through the busy avenues dodging drunkards cruising
for a kill, the talk is all stale slobbery scattered but it all
clicks together like a Lego somehow.  The moisture just too much
the two of us "hah hah hah life is perfect.." etcetra duck down to
a little hideaway off the main drag take a good look around for
convening homosexuals in the dark shadows...Sit down grab the bag
dish out stimulants nostrils flare tempers tend to stay mellow, a
bit anxious of course.

You just have to wonder whats more lethal: A remarkable woman or an
endless supply of whisky.


9] Virginal
-----------

I fly on contraptions fashioned for those that want to sail, above
and beyond clouds - attached to a large kite-like device taking me
up up and away - The only virginity left is up here, clouds of
puffed cotton and dreams ethereal and surreal.  The poison travels
to and fron neglecting humanity but I got an edge...
I take people with me show them the stars the cool calmness of
untouchable dimensions...The twinkling of pinball lights and pastel
constellations the silver linings of every cloud and wandering
soul.

I say, "Dream what you will" and I do, and they do, and I move on
stopping on a cumulus for a smoke.





10] Vibrating Ants
-----------------

I smile, I look down in wonder dancing ants going to and fro small
but detailed pieces of life going by their own business to the
store, to the park, to work on a humid midwestern day.  Yet all I
hear is the whirr of the jets and the vibration of the chassis.

I hear that faint garbled voice of the passenger in the background,
talking without letup about sports and Marines and things yet i'm
so out of tune that nothing will get through to me now, nothing.

There's this odd propulsion coming from somewhere.  Possibly under
the seat, purely contrived, shaking my libido, making me consider
taking one of these bronze statuettes into the cramped
bathroom..I'll sit on the aluminum toilet while she glides along
slippery sensation, me fearing "oh man my whole ass is going to get
sucked into outer space."  It certainly may not happen but it would
be something to write about if it did.  

I may not know her, and she may not know me, but I can see her
23,000 feet below in that aqua-blue pool of hers oh that figure oh
those small yet elegant breasts...

What state am I in anyway?

A couple squares of land zoom by without hesistance come crop
circles actually ovals or ellipses some deserted dusty fields of
failed farmers grow mold and tumbleweeds that look like shadows
from the scattered clouds.  Every now and then a comparitively
interesting city will roll by and i'll see old ladies cooking in
the sun at nursing homes or mobil homes possibly looking up at me
in awe wondering: can anyone see them from such a height?  The
answer is yes.

All I really want as I stare spaced out the bubbled window is a
sweetheart whispering sweet something dripping with honey screaming
louder than the whole town of Auschwitz bloody "OH GOD FUCK ME." 
Which although less than assumedly romantic, i'd rent a movie like
that anytime.  I'd promise to make idle committments to her even
COME and bring up a beautiful airline baby with golden wings
tattooed on his fat belly with an insatiable craving for honey
roasted peanuts.

Oddly enough the biggest downer of reality is when you see it up
close.  Pressure, like dimensions, breaks my concentration reaking
evil on my eardrums and general equilibrium.  Random procedures and
checked and re-checked I hastily clasp the seatbelt, restore all
comfort to its normal upright position, and rattle wearily back
down to Earth.



11] The pressure of It.
-----------------------

She repeated over and over again, no she didn't want to provoke me.

But deep down I knew her whole existence with me was about
provocation.  She filled my stomach with butterflies everytime she
walked into the room.  Her very hand on the twisting doorknob
brought me to submission.  She would hint, imply, beat around the
bush, but never say It.  It was truly some fantismical imagination
of mine dreamt up in books of Voltaire and those cheap Harlequin
Romance books I would read at the bookstore I worked at.  I had
seen it all before, not in substance, but typed out in Palatino on
sheets of paper.  It was the anticipatory hardness of my dick or
the warm feeling of sensuality much the same as the initial shot of
whisky.  What It was, my control of this sensation was that of no
control.  And you see this is what I mean by provocation...Her
movements, her emotions, her eyes were all the poison like arsenic
or the bottle.  But I kept on, like all suckered men grasping that
sweet lollipop with the tongue, sucking and absorbing the flavor,
carefully making sure not to hastily wear the surface; leaving you
wanting more.

She came to me not in a dream but in person, stopping a scant few
inches from my lips, staring into my eyes I feel the impression of
her breasts on my chest.  A clouded romantic dream I can taste her,
I smell her, I felt It pleading for more, she places her hands on
my narrow waist and rubs slowly, forward to back, inching her hands
under my shirt; exploring me.
Snapshots of erotica flash into my imagination like that of a
strobelight brothel, the mind racing the pulse beating hard like a
drum.  An enchantment under the sea slow-dancing under the crystal
ball, watered makeout music reverberating throughout the hardwood
gym.  The slow even stride of a romantic step with a sweetheart, I
feel the punch spiked blurring the hanging mermaids, the three-
piece principal on the sidelines, the etchings from years gone on
the bleachers.  Yet she's still there, caught in a fifties mirage
or in my cramped space in 1995, her lips are poised querying mine. 
Now I can feel her smooth lips touch me, the steam fogging my
senses, numb.

The dark room rings only in my ears, a pervasive chirp in the dead
of night.  The only sound that of It, or, possibly the air
conditioner, chirping locusts on the dew-covered leaves, the hum of
the amber streetlight.  I feel the intention there, of provocation
if not through a misfired or faulty libido but of true sensuality
with her.

All is quiet and calm save a steady breathing and the movement of
skin on skin.  She sits atop me upright hair reaching down to her
narrow waist, lightly brushing her thin belly.  They stare at me
her captivating eyes I feel the pressure of her sliding slowly,
slippery engulfing me deep into her heat, her passion.  A figure of
art rests on me soothing the pain ironing out the anxiety sending
my mind traveling into nirvana, into a hot resting place of sexual
vibration.  Small, timed cries come from her, quivering
occasionally wincing or shaking in lust.

I feel the exhilaration that of only a dream or a fantasy about
another woman, unable to compare or imagine anything quite as
realistic as this.  I fall into a sweaty summer daze, eyes closed
her sweaty arms pushing roughly against my chest.  Telephones ring
answering machines click and whirr, cats cry and scratch on doors,
junebugs buzz around the light of the city, all these occurrences
happen without incident on-time in perfect sync, like the pulsing
and pushing of bodies one late Tuesday night.  


12] The truth about rainbows
    ------------------------


Perversion come perversion.  Come one to the circus of the socially
insane misplaced cretins of America feasting their beaded glassy
eyes on juveniles and pre-pubescents alike.  Agree you all must on
the deviance the digust the cruel lack of respect for humanity and
animal behavior.  

Who is one blinding with this rhetorical bullshit that manifests
itself in this ugly domain of conformity.  This lethal lifesaving
charade makes me uneasy with nauseous contempt watching crowds of
swaying drunks yelling "JUMP!" to the disillusioned one on the
ledge.  I propose let the man flee at his own leisure, not at the
expense of one media's whim or by pure unified coercion.  Let them
have their footage, their thrills, their temporary view of
scattered fragments of a recluse, but please, let the lottery
cards fall where they will.

Caught up in fear of a rotten world of a rotten dungeon where dead
children lay idle for eternity, one only escapes to another plateau
of so-called life.  A needle in the arm, a home beneath the stairs,
a compulsive inclination to masturbation of god's creatures or
propped open a copy of a coroner's report.  Some are raised by the
hand that feeds which is himself, kicking cans down the gutter
counting tiles on the crooked sidewalk, sucking pollution like a
nutrient looking for escape around every corner.  One's deviation
a product of bad environment, a bad hand, an unlucky deal.  Taste
this and feel it like a polar opposite of your lifeblood, this is
your nemesis, the one cleaning your sparkling windows with filthy
spit and the business section.  One pukes this portion of displaced
diseased humanity directly into the shiny blue water of the toilet,
flushing it to be purged at a more convenient, important time.

So he may jump, to a cheer of you all, half disgusted, half
gleaming with vibrance as if sucking the soul right out of the
spine.  Sure, another one down no biggy happens everyday, and yes,
it does.  The collection of them preserved in miniscule print
obituaries only a passing glance, if that.  Long gone good riddance
those creationists once alive with broken minds struggling to free
the demons, caught up in a psychosis of unspeakable depravity. 
Thrown padded coats and barbituates of the rainbow, for if one
can't put the fire out the next best thing?  Soothe the burn.

Lock them down, hide the key in the Ming vase, they're coming to
town cruising for a kill.  One dimension is what we see these
brutarians as dismemberers eviscerators and sodomizers, all shock
words and connotations this is all a part of our world.  Sympathy
for the insane is an admirable emotion.  Attention cravers want
their fifteen minutes somehow.  If we don't provide it they'll
achieve it on their own.

You see crying eyes propped up on bank walls pleading for a prayer,
the same type locked down in asylums tasting that same rainbow. 
The ripped veins of a clouded mind, just want help or recovery or
a way out of this hell.  I am not a purveyor of realism trying to
correct a dying breed, I am a self-proclaimed informer of the poor
condition.  And one may pity such a destitute, spit on them, scoff,
ridicule or dehumanize, but you must ponder this one fact:  

It is you whom is playing the game, not them.
  

13] Prate
---------
Repression: always a good excuse for violence.  After bidding
farewell to his brother, soon to die at the hands of bad guys or
maybe slipping when scrubbing the deck of the carrier.  The former
will get you eternal recognition but the latter will note your
death with a chuckle from the belly.   
He's hard as a rock worked at the steelyard his entire life comes
home from a long day wants an ale and a twenty minute suckjob from
that lady over there knitting those sweaters.  You could call her
his wife but only cause they'll end up dying together.  He exists
to be irate, to massage those worn hands, to sit in the aqua blue
plastic-covered recliner reading various catalogs from the coffee
table.  

Here she comes more like a worn out record than a beautiful woman;
in his eyes.  She greets him he sighs and looks at her, a woman
aged thirty-five considerably more youthful than his half-century
mark.  Words are nothing but fluff or fleeing thoughts.  She's
sporting the style of the day, a 1930's dress configuration which
leaves everything for the imagination.  Something stale and
uncomfortable resembling quite the housewife.  

Minutes later his anxiety releases as she mounts his penis in daily
ritual.  Back in this day the slow, steady motion was of preference
to the hurry and bustle of today's oral satisfaction.  She feels it
her duty, a shame today but in the B&W day of July 24, 1937 its a
stiff sentence at county and a guaranteed desocialization maneuver.

Meaning nothing to her engulfing this sweaty appendage the
sexuality is at low tide, tears fall from her eyes in abandoned
hope.  She finishes up with haste catching the come, fixing her
permed hair, wiping her quivering lips and retreating back to the
kitchen, making sure to turn the pork chops for fear of an enraged
husband.             

The meal is set and my storytelling succeeds this.  I decide to
join them for dinner, pork chops always being my favorite.  The
table is of light green formica, the chairs shiny steel upholstered
with the same but in red.  I help myself to the chops, the corn,
the peas and run quickly to the liquor cabinet and hastily grab a
bottle of whisky.  I make a sloppy whisky and lemonade and run back
to the table hoping not to miss any conversation between the two. 
What a shame it would be the let a story escape the hands of an
author just because he needed a whisky.  But what a letdown this
turns out to be, he just sits there in his tanktop and his muscles
shoveling food in, not even I know what he's thinking.  My dear she
stares into her flowered plate toying with the mashed potatoes
periodically shifting her beautiful blues to his dismal browns. 
Her eyes so glassy, so gone.

At the expense of emotion I resemble much this man, of whom is
unnamed and unnameable.  I have never tasted food so full, so
fattening, so damn good.  I end up finishing my meal and grant
myself a cigarette from his pack.  I lean back and prop my feet up
on the edge of the table, they don't appear to notice.  So now I
sit here, looking at these two, haven't said a word haven't even
coughed or sneezed in over an hour.  My boredom succeeds this yarn
and I leave them to their own fate, of which has already been
sealed.

14]  A Peasants Vantage
-----------------------


I spent considerable time babysitting on the eve of July 27th for
a family umistakingly wealthy.  This hot and steamed evening was so
far untolerable for an adult such as myself, so I found myself
sitting on the porch watching a gang of kids playing street hockey
at dusk.  It was a combination of many things, but I fell into a
purely sentimental movielike daze almost feeling as if watching
myself only ten or twelve years ago.  The rules of the game pre-
determined by the oldest and most senior of the lot, the teams were
the three brothers that I was babysitting against several other
children filtered-in from local mansions and tax-brackets of same. 
It wasn't at all like playing stickball in Brooklyn in 1952, but it
still maintained that air of vibrancy and juvenilism that makes me
time and time again wish I was a kid once more.

The house was of only the best of my dreams, large and with
definite character.  The "era" house the way I see it, for every
room I entered I felt mysteriously transformed into a period of
royal dignification.  The type of rooms you enter with a WHOOSH
like traveling through time, examining all the pieces of victorian
furniture, the sandalwood coffee table with copies of the New
Yorker, Architectural Digest, L.L. Bean catalogs, etc.  Everything
appears so placed that you wonder if this place shouldn't just be
roped off entirely.  Its all for show and never has an ass sat on
these two-hundred year old chairs or never has a hand but that of
the keeper switched circulation of the coffee-table literature that
always appears up to date but never appears to have been read.  Its
an eerie sort of thing but you can't argue it provides a mysterious
character.  

The character being a result only of my excessive drinking for the
last three hours, the time now checking in at around 9:30pm.  The
boys have calmed to a slow as I purposely got them to eat as much
as possible for dinner, hopefully facilitating a lethargic
digestion process.  It worked relatively well and with what little
comanditive power I wanted to exercise over these lads, I posed a
house rule of staying upstairs for the duration of the evening.  I
maintained myself in the kitchen fighting off two pure-bred dogs
incessantly licking my ankles and teething on my sneakers.  I
brought a book and a notebook, hoping to get some work done, but my
anxiety level was too high to focus.  So instead I sat myself down
in front of the Steinway Grand and played the same songs I always
play when in front of a piano.  Either songs from my stint at
Berklee or improvised versions of Swan Lake, which at last
comparison was twenty times easier to play than Chopsticks.
The locusts rattle in waves, the lightning bugs blink and mate, the
crickets chirp, the heavy foliage of elder trees sink low to the
grass from the moisture of the evening.  I sat on one white-painted
metal chair of victorian design, part of a set of four, a fashioned
table of same in the middle.  The whole setup reminds me exactly of
my fantasies of middle 19th century relaxation of royal families. 
Its so damn hot out here my thoughts are stunned, entering and
leaving without a trace of memory.  I can't seem to put my finger
on anything of substance so I fall into this sweaty trance, where
again everything is picturelike, painted into a Van Gogh or a
blurred pastel Monet.  The immense backyard transforms itself into
an English garden landscape from the day, complete with pacing
mistresses and mademoiselles walking submersed in summer romance
and sexual scents.  Careful not to disturb, the deer walk
confidently throughout the elaborate scene, directly past a couple
on a marble-white bench facing the recently constructed depiction
of the Bathing Nymphs of Diana.  The two court each other,
silently, elegantly.  Her long white summer dress being held from
behind by her equally stunning maid of nineteen.  I can faintly
hear them speak in overtones but cannot make out their flirtations.
They will soon make their walk back to the chateau and retire to
their own chambers, later rendez-vous'ing in a secretive chamber
reserved for linen and various beddings.  Respectfully I leave the
rest to the readers imagination.

But no, I'm sitting here dragging on a cigarette sipping on a sweet
lambic sweating and swatting at the bugs.  The three boys are in
their room jumping up and down on their bunkbeds yelling minor
profanities and arguing about "who is the best" in any given sport.

Its all small and trivial to us adults, but all of these are what
dreams are made of.  We can dream and fantasize, but never will we
feel the excitement and vibrancy of youth at play.  Our fantasies
are broken by our everyday existence being forced to live almost
entirely in a world structured and real, these kids know no
limitations other than parental which tend not to encroach so much
on freedom of imagination but freedom of decision.

And during these exact thoughts, the authority figures make their
entrance from an elegant escapist dinner with candles, wine, and
Benny Goodman covers from a youthful big band, back to their abode,
their mansion, their indoor wonderland.  I casually sigh, belch a
fermented strawberry taste, wave back to the flirting couple in my
sweated fantasies, and lollygag home with my hundred new bucks.


15] Chris and Me
----------------

I looked at Chris as he pulled out his Swiss Army Knife and broke
the crank into sniffable lines.  I sat in the three-legged chair
quite shaken from a few locked-up days of amphetemines in Oakland. 
It was a particularly hot week on Aileen and San Pablo and neither
of us felt the inclination to do anything but get juiced on zoom
and drink cheap coffee I stole from work.

Both of us were rail-thin prior to our experimentation which only
managed to narrow our waists and stomachs more, making our joints
and our limbs numb and crackly, almost incapable of handling our
combined 250 pounds.  He stood six foot three and had that
characteristic swaying motion of really skinny types.  I myself
wasn't that bad, still hanging on to a little bit of baby fat and
a naturally puffy face.  We had been lit on speed for three days
now and I was quickly approaching a level of complete hysteria. 
Things weren't happening in this place we called The Hole, littered
with various transients crashing on our floors, in our bathrooms,
under our one dead avocado tree.  The Hole was dark and dimly lit
from makeshift soundproofing and had a natural lack of windows due
to its basement status.

Both of us were jobless for a long time, maybe three months without
work.  I had picked up a job on Telegraph down by 40th st. being
the drive-in "clerk" at Jack in the Box, California's greasiest,
most expensive, and most poisonous burger dive.  I took it as my
last ditch opportunity after me and Terry were turned away from a
McDonalds at the Alameda Air Force Base for being "overqualified"
as the red stamp said on the application.  The job paid $4.50 an
hour to wear a headset and stand up for eight hours at a time
repeating "Thank You" atleast two hundred times a day.  I was
"lucky" though said the Manager, noting, "Alex you are the first
white person I have hired.  These mexicans can't speak English to
save their asses so i'm putting you on Drive-Thru.  And Alex, I'm
starting you at $4.50 an hour because you can speak English, you
should feel lucky."  I had a hard time believing I was lucky and
after four days I would leave that job.

Chris got the exact same job in Emeryville at Burger King which
lasted for a good two or three months, coming home all dressed in
pointless tacky garb noting to the ten or fifteen slackers smoking
cigarettes, "Every day I leave that fucking place I want to go
straight to the pawn shop and by a nice CZ-75 and kill every
fucking wetback that gets in my face."  He'd say, "working fast
food as a white person isn't trying in itself, its working with all
the minorities that hate your very existence and blame you for
being the reason their lives suck."  My particular situation was
more like alienation for out of the ten people that worked there at
a time, only two of them could I converse with.  A big and tall
black guy named Sylvester that operated the fryers, and my boss,
ironically a Mexican herself that spoke broken English.  And now we
were both sitting here in my room with the sniffles, teary-eyed and
dangerously malnourished.  Chris was taking the knife to his arm
making manic incisions, the two transient girls were in the living
room making necklaces out of 9mm casings, and I was ready to check
myself into the hospital.  There had to be a way out..

[To be Continued..]

16] Presently in the Past
-------------------------

Now August second, and the first thing that comes to my mind every
year is, "Where has the summer gone?"  Has it disappeared from lack
of respect for the days over, has it escaped my mind or my concept
of time because of denial or overwork?  I doubt its the latter but
I do wonder if this world infact is sabotaged by littler people,
hidden in the shadows of the trees, in the dampness of the
basement, plotting methodically small things that end up driving an
otherwise sane person nuts.  Maybe these midgets set ahead my watch
thirty seconds a day starting in April, slowly losing time.  Not
enough to question the mechanics of the timepiece, but just enough
to ask in all honesty, "Where has the time gone?"

Perhaps my hunches are true.  Maybe there is a drug injected in
this generic iced tea that softens my membranes, specifically my
brain, perhaps it numbs any concrete image or memory.  This
explains alot of things, and these cigarettes as well may be
contributing to this whole ordeal, I suck in the cancers that cling
to my soul, excreting more than just a puff or a ring, but my very
essence of comparison, lucidity, sanity.  And this food i'm eating,
although not poisoned with arsenic or some silly delusion, but
maybe little ants, small organized ants are filling my bowels like
parasites, eating all this sustinence up for their greedy selves,
excreting their wastes into my poor poor intestines.  

But alas it would be ridiculous to think perhaps this pillow, this
very pillow I rest my weary head on every night, proportionally
pushes timed amounts of transdermal mind wasters, like sand from
him or maybe the novocaine from the once hidden tooth.  And this
wine that I drink before sleep, the sulfates are an education in
sentimentality, YES, thats it, and I am medicinally being
encouraged to live in the past.  And just like a severe drug
reaction, I see things, or places, or what have you as things
already occurred.  I further state that this explains the artifical
sentimentality when this red wine touches my palate and slides
comfortably down my esophagus, its all a medicinal delusion.  What
a relief..

You, reader, stare upon the letters and words, punctuation, of a
crazed man, stuck now in the present, but a shame for I, your
author, seem to be assuming that everything has already happened. 
So from my lovely vantage, lovely as only a mental of the asylum,
I have no present.  As well, odd as it may sound, but logical all
the same, my capacity for the future is struck with a bolt of the
most awkward lightning.  Don't pity me, your author, for some of us
just get an unlucky deal.  But now, as we both should concur,
understand quite plainly the question:

"Where has the summer gone?"




17] An Angels Wings
-------------------
  
"I'm not sure if I would say I am a youth without a.." he paused,
scratching his goatee.  "Without maybe a, clue, or per se....I
don't know, I have angst, I am pissed, I feel ungrounded, all that
shit."  Not necessarily what I was getting at, I pryed him more
asking, "No, I mean...Like perversion and shit, like perversions,
everyday perversions..."  I tapped my finger on the rectangular
diner table, in a fifties style, you know, with the formica surface
and those spaced out wack colors like ultra-light blue.  Kale
stared at me, yeah he was thinking about something but was he going
to fucking say it or let it hang in limbo like all those other
professional evasionists.  My doubt was there, our existence, mine,
yours, everyones is trivial, even negligible if you can't come to
terms with your perversions.  Yeah, sure, you may not have to throw
it up out of your subconscious, ralph it all over the proverbial
diner table, but you can slowly burp it up, coax it out.

And I was the one to squeeze him like a ketchup bottle.  His words
captured onto my microcassette and later transcribed, looking alot
like this, if not exactly:

....But man I would look at them like they were real estate,
something to fuck, something to buy up and consume, even build land
in..shit, you know, like a baby, building a house in this girls
womb, like fourteen or something innocent these virgin girls, well
you know...whatever...point is, its a depraved way of seeing women,
as land or property, but sometimes by perversions they...they lend
themselves to such fantasies.  I've had..oh man, wait, last week I
dreamt about this super chick/girl/man whatever, I don't know, she
had a dick and a cunt and nice tits, you know, like Kale kind of
tits, and she had this ass, not even a damn ounce of fat anywhere,
strong legs, but all the same feminine. ..[laughs] Psychanalysis
would never be the same if the quacks got ahold of that, [laughs]
and she had this dick, you know what man?  [Pause] It was MY dick
on this girl, I mean, exactly mine, I think I visualized it on her,
shit, uncircumcised dicks on chicks... thats something more
subjective, right? [laughs]....

.....Its when they get up in the morning, maybe the first time
you've seen her in the light, you can see her whole body right
there, which sometimes is bad, all those minor imperfections are a
nuisance man..but some girl, I don't remember, fucked her in
Boston, uh [Pause] can't remember but whatever, she had these lips,
crazy as shit, the top one was really thin, the bottom one was
really fat, y'know, like both of mine...But she would sit there and
beg for it, I mean she was truly craving cock [Laughs] like a
finicky cat meowing for that shit going, "Gimme DICK gimme DICK!"
like some prehistoric Planet of the Apes shit.  You see she could
make my dick hard by complimenting it [Laughs] not this "wut a cute
wittle dickie wickie" shit but by staring at it like a crystal dick
seeing her future or something, my damn dick captivated her. 
Anyway I remember she lived by Fenway in some digs her parents paid
for, amazing place, three bedrooms, that kind of really rich shit. 
Went to some really traditional school, or famed for virgins like
Emerson or something and here she was buying Bushmills for me and
feeding me and sucking my dick, talking to it, jerking it, and
otherwise worshipping it and i'm [Catches breath] laying there
sipping whisky out of a real whisky glass, you know, all angular
and bumpy on the bottom so you don't need a coaster or
anything...She used to do this thing, she'd slowly go up and down
only like, an inch on the top, sucking the head, but more like
kissing it, she'd spit a ton of saliva all over the top and it felt
just like fucking...Then the saliva would drip down and she'd
slowly go all the way down sucking it up... fuck it was amazing. 
But she had these light green eyes and the perfect smile, she'd
look up at me, her lips all glistening and look directly at
me....[Pauses, contemplates].....You know those cum-shot pornos? 
[Yes] Like two hours of girls just totally being exploited, and man
I sometimes wonder where things like, like how much come these
girls drink a day, must be something outrageous.  Must have been
raped or abused or something, thats the only way you could be a
porn star, if you're already sexually dysfunctional.  The kind of
fathers that when asked, "Why is the sky blue daddy?" he replies,
"Because you've been bad honey." [Laughs]

...[lighting cigarette] Shit, I don't know, my libido feels like
its been injected with coke.  [looks out window into parking lot]
well...[Pauses]  There was this other girl, took her back to the
dorms from some club on Landsdowne St.  She was some raver chick,
god damn must have been eighteen and we were stumbling back down,
um, I think behind Fenway park...it was really late and Desi, you
know Desi? [Yes] he wanted to fuck me, wearing all that drag shit
talking all feminine and all that shit...anyway he had that private
party, "elite only" shit with an open bar...whatever, the point is
that I was so fucked up, this girl must have thought me a total
lush or whatever...I remember she's trying to talk to me and I'm
hearing all this weird aural shit, sounded like locusts everywhere
being crushed or fucking or something, but over that I can hear her
voice, this really nasal Jewish sounding whiny type voice and I
kept thinking, "Shut the fuck up will you..."  I'm begging her to
shut up and she keeps saying, well it sounded like, "Kale ale ale
ale are our ew ew you oh oh kay kay?"  Man I thought SHE was going
to make me puke alone...I knew I wasn't [pauses]...Oh, you know
what?  She was so cute, so sexy, I just wanted to fuck her right
there on the street, yeah and.. okay I remember, I had to sit down,
I was so lit so wasted I just felt like walking death and I looked
at her face, all swirling around, exactly like those cartoon
symbols of birds after someone gets whacked on the head, right? 
Know what I mean? [Yeah]  She's got this short bleached blonde
hair, real pale complexion, really innocent looking...Something
about innocence, makes you want to bring them to reality and
corrupt them.  Whats wrong with that...Shit it'll happen sooner or
later..i'm not the devil, shit if you're going to live you might as
well taste the poison, you will anyway, right?  Anyway, this raver
shit, these chicks wear real tight shirts, no bras, you know, like
a combination of the sixties burn your bra revelation and the
ninties "I want you to look at my tits" intellect, which only
pisses me off when chicks can't handle a cat call or a prolonged
stare from every guy aged eighteen to eighty...They tell the cops
when they're filling out that fucking rape report that they "wear
what they wear for themselves" which is indisputable bullshit man,
completely.  So we're sitting there and she's kissing my neck and
with what little energy I have, probably from that coke from Rusty
or that other guy...I take her shirt off and she's on top of me,
legs on either side of me, a short black skirt, really nice legs,
you know, a completely innocent Beacon St. chick looking to live a
crazy life.  You know, [Pauses, contemplates] with me and alcohol
its a catch-22.  I always meet the most amazing chicks when i'm
fucked up, don't know if its because i'm more forward, you know, my
morals or otherwise sexual hangups just disappear.  But when it
comes to actually fucking this girl, i'm too drunk to take a leak
much less get my dick hard.  Its a real effort and so the point
here is...The point is that I wanted to fuck her right there and
then and she's already turned me on, I can feel this warmness in my
lower stomach, like right above my crotch, and my entire nervous
system becomes acutely sensitive, right?  Here she is, on top of
me, i'm looking beyond her at this huge stadium, you know, its all
deserted and armageddeon looking over there, and I can't get my
damn dick hard...[sighs, obviously disturbed].  And you know that
chick thing, that thing where they grind up and down on your dick?
[Yeah] Some of them are excellent at this, like a-1 amazing what
they can do with their clothes on, but see my dick wasn't hard and
she kept trying to position herself, all the while i'm sucking on
her tongue like a dick, don't ask, and she appears a bit
troubled...She says to me, but not in that nasal sounding voice,
she starts kissing my ear and whispers, so silently, "you're a
fuck, you retard."  I swear thats what it sounded like what with
all these weird locust sounds and shit chirping and
whatever...[Pauses] Man I was really fucked up...But a few seconds
later I figure it out, and she really said, "Are you too drunk to
get hard?"  Which I heard subconsciously but who the fuck knows
what I was thinking...So I said "I dunno" and she giggles that
little girl giggle, the kind you hear at sandboxes or at pre-
pubescent slumber parties or something, it was so juvenile
sounding.  Okay, she pulls my jeans right off along with my boxers,
in one big swoop and I can feel my ass on the cold concrete, all
boney, the shit hurt.  And there's my dick, softer than a baby's
skin, just idling, drunk, stoned, and hornier than could possibly
be....  [Pause]

I quietly listen, smoke cigarette after cigarette and stare out
into the parking lot where these two girls, both about seventeen,
cute and innocent like Kale's women, are staring at us in the
window, batting their eyelashes, all that pre-foreplay drivel.  I
find the irony warm and comforting, almost filmlike, casted girls
paid to watch us talk, strategically setting themselves into my
imagination as a perfect tale of kids fucking in uburbia..

...[Pause, catches breath]..And I know she wants to fuck me right
there, I saw it in her eyes, her lips, all smeared with spit, her
eyes glazed over, she was shaking like she was having anticipatory
orgasms or something.  I rub my hands up and down her legs, smooth,
lightly tanned, long.  I love the curves from the upper leg to the
waist, that crease that leads to her space..you know..And my hand
is under her skirt, it feels numb like shot with novocain, and
she's soaking wet, her juices spilling onto her legs.  I remember
thinking, looking at my poor dick, "If you're going to get hard it
will be now." or else never, because my mind was in nirvana, I
could feel myself inside her, that initial heat followed by total
encompassment, complete bonding..[Pauses] The slow, even stride of
two forces working as one....Shit.. [Frustrated] So she sits up and
pulls her skirt up right above her waist so she can bend over more,
and I feel it, man, this intense heat, like a sauna on fire and I
couldn't figure it out, not at all...But I felt it, and I knew it
was sex, and she gasped, just like that other girl with the great
lips, her mouth opened up wide and she pulled her head back, like
a chain reaction, and she swallowed difficultly and was making this
sound, this woah sound, starting low going high in waves.  That was
the weirdest fucking sound but it drove me crazy.  You know that
thing you were talking about...

"What thing..." 

"That thing about the film, like that feeling that you're in a
film, that everything is so fantismical that it feels like it was
scripted or something?"

"Oh yeah, like whatever you're doing is happening naturally, but
you feel detached from it, like a director?"

"Yeah man..Yeah.." Enthusiastically

...Well so it felt like I was floating above her, like on one of
those camera cranes, striving for the best shot, the best view,
getting everything to look the way I wanted it.  Crazy man...
And it was so damn hot out, you know that night? [Yeah] Fucking hot
as hell and she was dripping with sweat, all down her neck making
her chest shine from the streetlight, it was so damn sexy...I fell
into this director thing again and I was holding her waist, she was
slowly, I mean REALLY slowly going up and down, like no urgency,
which made me think she wasn't just in it for a quick fix or
something...And I sat there, I couldn't raise my head so I bowed it
down and I was watching my dick slip in and out of her and I didn't
even realize until the next day that it must have been hard, but I
swear it wasn't..Man [Confused] who knows...I held her legs and
they were visibly shaking, she was freaking out, having a ball...I
remember saying, "Oh fuck, oh god" over and over again, everytime
I entered her all the way, like a skipping record....And about ten
minutes later, I heard this ring, sounded like those hearing tests
you get in grade school, starts low, goes higher and higher until
you can't hear it anymore...But it kept on, [Pauses] starting over
and over again, and this big flash of heat came over me, like heat
from a nuclear blast, this windy rumbling sound, and these little
dots, tiny sparkly dots appeared in my sight, right in front of
her, covering parts of her body...Right then I felt this extreme
liquid heat on my crotch and I couldn't explain it, and when she
raised herself high my dick came out and she had just came, all
over my legs, my crotch, the curb...That was the dramatic climax to
this perceived film, you know, and quickly my periphereal vision
started going black and started closing in and I suddenly felt sick
and weak and the last thing I remember...[Pauses] The last thing I
remember was this bell, like a bell at a front desk of a hotel,
"Ding" and thats all I remember...Wait, [pauses] Oh yeah, man, this
is crazy [Excited] I woke up, an hour later and I'm laying there
staring at the Citgo sign, that huge bright sign and there's puke
all over me and man, I can't explain how bad I felt, it was
terrible.  As I looked up at the sign I remember thinking, and just
thinking of one phrase, "When you hear a bell ring an angels gets
her wings."
 

18] Birdfood
------------

I was stuck to my tomato.  I chewed its savory flesh and sipped the
sticky juice.  All this food was going to make me a nice healthy
slug, for sure.

Sitting atop another tomato which was a little below mine I noticed
a pretty girl slug.  She was yellow and spotted and glistened in
the early light.  She was staring intently at something over the
edge. I lifted myself up a bit, for I was a curious little snail,
and followed her gaze to the shady ground.  She was watching a
large and hairy worm, which I had once observed feeding on bean
leaves. He had black and orange stripes and bright, shiny black
eyes, and whistled gaily as he inched his way through the garden.

"Hello there!" I called down to him.

The strange worm stopped whistling, and glanced up to see who had
spoken. He spotted my fat, gray body attached to the underside of
my tomato.  "Good morning!" he called back in high-pitched voice,
and continued merrily on his way.

I glanced over at the girl, who had turned towards me, and I
introduced myself.

"Hi. My name's Bernie," I said. "What's yours?"

"Claire," she said.

"Not that it's any of my business, Claire, but donžt you think it's
dangerous to sit out in the open like that?  Especially a pretty
yellow snail like you. A bird is likely to see you there."

"So what," she said.  "Let them see me all they want."

"But you'll be eaten.  Surely you don't want to become a tender
morsel for a dirty crow."

She closed her eyes and lightly sighed, and stretched her lovely,
slimy body out so that all the birds could see her better on top of
the tomato.
"You must be insane," I said.

"Yes," she said.  "And you must be that fool everyone's been
talking about."  Then she turned away and looked back down at the
hairy worm, and for the rest of the day, despite my attempts at the
usual pleasantries, she would not speak to me.


The next day it rained.  The girl slug was hidden from view.  I
assumed she was stuck to the bottom side of her tomato, away from
the stinging raindrops. I ate my tomato juice but didn't really
enjoy it.  Afterwards, I took a nap, for there was nothing else for
me to do.

In my sleep, I had a dream.  It was about a girl to whom I had once
been engaged.  Her name was Amelia.  I thought she was the most
beautiful, most wonderful snail a guy could ever ask for.

It was a dream in which I was subjected to a horrible memory.  In
the dream, I watched helplessly from under a mushroom as a cruel
boy sprinkled table salt on my love.  Salt is a slug's worst enemy.

It burns the skin and draws the slime out of our soft bodies, until
nothing is left but a gruesome pellet floating in a puddle of
frothy goo.  Slugs are quiet, meek creatures by nature.  Amelia did
not make any sound as she curled up and disappeared before my eyes.

When I woke up from my dream, I saw the clouds had scuttled away to
rain, perhaps, upon other gardens, and the sun was shining anew.

Claire was down on her tomato.  She was looking up at me, sideways.

"Hello," she said, licking her lips.

"Hi," I said.

"I'm so terribly bored," she said. "I wish I had something to do
other than sit here on a tomato."

"Then why don't you come visit me?" I said.  "There's plenty of
room on my tomato.  Why, just look at it.  I must live on the
largest, ripest tomato in the whole garden."

"What's the difference if I'm on this tomato or over on that
tomato? I can hear you just the same."

"For one, we wouldn't have to shout," I said, picturing our two
slimy bodies intertwined.  "I'm a poet, you know. I could share
some of my poems with you."
She didn't know what a poem was, so I explained it to her: "A poem
is a composition of carefully chosen words designed to convey a
vivid and imaginative sense of experience."

She snorted and gave me a dirty look.  "Experience?  What
experience?  You're just a slug."

"Perhaps," I said.  "But at least I try.  I've been all over this
garden, met all the other insects and crustaceans and spiders,
sampled cucumbers and mushrooms and zucchinni, even hitched a ride
on the back of a turtle.  All you do is sit around and lament the
fact you're part of the food chain.  How pathetic!"

She crawled back under her tomato.

"Bitch," I whispered hotly, and went back to eating.

A week passed, and Claire reappeared on her tomato.
"I'd like to hear some of your poems," she said.  "You may visit me
this evening, if you'd like."

And then she disappeared under her tomato again.

I thought about it for a while.  When the sun began to set I walked
down the vine to her tomato.  It was covered with trails of her
shimmering, tantalizing liquid. I went over to where she sat, in
full view of the birds.  She was staring down over the side, as
usual, probably looking at the hairy worm.

I gazed about the clear empty sky, nervously.  "Nice view," I
mumbled.  "Do you think it's safe?"

She let out a snort.  "I hope a bird will swoop down and gobble me
up."

I was horrified. "Now why would you wish for something like that?"

"Because I can't stand being a slug any longer.  I was meant to be
something else."  Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if to keep the
vines from hearing her dark secret.  "I was meant to be that hairy
worm which passes through the garden."

"Oh, that's silly," I said. "Why would you want to be that?"

"I don't know why." She lowered her eyes, and spoke in a soft,
quivering voice.  "I've had dreams about it, ever since I was a
little girl.  At first, I didn't know what I was inside my dream. 
I would only look down at my body, and see it was covered with fur,
and not know what I was.  And when I walked around the garden, I
was filled with joy, because I knew some day I would be able to
leave.  Then I saw him one day, and I knew what creature I was in
my dream."


I shrugged, which is difficult to do when one has no shoulders. 
"Perhaps it was a coincidence," I said, rather lamely.
"There's more," she said.  She shut her eyes.  "About a week ago,
I dreamt that instead of slime, a silk thread squirted out of my
body, and I wove myself a warm cocoon.  I crawled inside, and felt
safe and content.  It was such a beautiful feeling."  A sour look
crossed her face, and she opened her eyes, keeping them fixed hard
upon the tomato's skin.  "Then I woke up, and discovered I was
still a slug."

"What a strange dream," I laughed.  "What an odd imagination you
have!"

"Not really," she said.  "Look."

She called my attention to the bean patch.  The worm was hanging
from the tip of a string bean.  Sure enough, a slender thread of
gossomer was squirting out his body, and he was slowly fashioning
a little basket around himself.

I was puzzled, and would have rubbed my chin thoughtfully if I had
one.  "Now, why would he do something like that?"  "I don't know,"
she said, sadly.

She then gazed about the tomato sickly, and sighed, and told me to
go away.


A few days passed, and I didn't see Claire the whole time.  She
remained out of view.  Then one evening, just as the sun was
setting, I saw her, gazing up at me with her pretty dark eyes.

"Hello," she said.

"Hi," I said.

"How have you been?" she asked.

"Okay," I said.  "And you?"

She fell silent.  For a long time, she simply sat there, saying
nothing.  Then she said, "Why don't you tell me one of your poems? 
I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything better to do."

I thought for a while, trying to remember a good one. Then I
cleared my throat, and closed my eyes, and slowly began:

Once I found the day unwelcome
Cursed the time when I'd been birthed
Wish'd to die, to crawl no more
Upon this gloomy earth.

If I could, I'd move to France
Where snails are considered yummy
Ižd serve myself upon a dish
And see a Frenchman's tummy.
Then I met a twinkling beauty
How splendid was this lucky find
We made love inside a mushroom's shade
A snaily, sweaty kind.

Our speckled, plump and snaily bellies
Press'd and glued in snaily kiss
There my love revealed to me
Dreams of snaily bliss.

Upon a sunlit bean she placed
A necklace shining pale and pearly                      
Tonight I shall sing to the Snail in the Moon
And go to sleep a little early

Now the world ain't so gloomy
No more shall I live in sorrow
Though she's gone, she'll still live on
In my heart tomorrow
See the garden all a-glitter
The dew lays thick about the ground 
Under the sun they shall sip the tears
Shed by God, the biggest snail around.


I opened my eyes.  Claire looked more sullen than ever.
"Did you like it?" I said.

"It was okay, I guess."  She didn't sound very impressed.

"What do you mean?  Was there something wrong with it?"

"Well... I think you used that word too much."

"What word?"

"You know," she said. Her lips curled back in disgust as she said
it:  "Snaily."

I bit my tongue.  "Well, I don't think it's so bad, especially for
a mollusk which has a just a simple bundle of nerves for a brain. 
Besides, what better adjective could there possibly be?"

Her mind was elsewhere.  "The sun's going down," she whispered,
flatly.  "I think I want to go to sleep."

Then she closed her eyes, and went into sleep, and soon I joined
her.


When I awoke the next morning, I looked down at the other tomato,
and saw that Claire had changed into a small, gruesome pellet,
floating atop a puddle of frothy goo.  It was true.  She had cried
salty tears when she was asleep, cried all over herself.  A slug
shouldn't do that.  I never knew slugs could cry.  I hadn't even
cried when that fat little bastard sprinkled salt on my lovely
Amelia.

I wondered what she had dreamt.

As I crawled miserably to the edge, thinking about how tragic life
was, I took note of the hairy worm's basket, hanging from the
string bean.  The sunlight had just touched it with a glowing
finger, and almost imperceptibly, I saw it quiver. 

I watched as the insect tore from inside, struggling to break free.

I looked closer, and saw it had changed. After several minutes, it
squeezed out through the hole, emerged trembling in the sunlight,
and unfurled a delicate pair of orange and black wings.  A light
wind blew through the vegetable garden and whisked the creature
into the air, away into the bright summer sky and disappeared from
view.

"Oh, Claire," I whispered, sadly.

A shadow passed over my tomato.  The bird had spotted me.  It was
too late now, I was all stretched out.

But I knew I wasn't going out like her, not like that.

I was going to make that damn bird very happy.



19] Turn the Ringer off next time.
----------------------------------

"Vulgarity is a style, stupidity is inexcusable."

"Who said that?"

I checked my watch, keeping my eye on Angela, she took a cigarette
from its pack and rolled it between her thumb and middle finger.

"It was Cocteau, came from a book of quotes..."

"Ever read Les Enfants Terribles?"

Lit the cigarette, she exhaled, "Yeah thats a pitiful book."

"You mean pitiful as in saddening or as in you didn't like it?"

"Well both, I guess.  Cocteau is the poster child for cynicism. 
Just about everything that comes out of his mouth is about how lame
things are..."
"They just turned it into a film, playing at the Grand...I think
its alot better than the book.."

Angela leaned onto the small circular table, arms draped on the
sides, "Cocteau is shit.  You can't convince me of his abilities,
for he has none."

I know this game, she's always playing devil's advocate, provoking
me for unknown reasons.  I sit back, distancing myself from her
intimidations.  I take a quick glance at her pure body, her pale
complexion, and switch my thoughts to those more sexual.

"You turn me on when you insult me, it humbles me enough to feel
like your slave.."

She grimaced, appeared taken aback, and placed her cigarette on the
ashtray.  

"You know Seb, your problem is quite obvious: you need to get laid
and you think I'm going to let you fuck me."

I smiled, knowing that eventually she'd succumb, if anything to get
me to shut up about it.

I attempt to sweet-talk her, mock a French accent, coming out more
broken English or Spanish, "Mademoiselle, my dear, I will romance
you, I will caress you, seduce you."  Paused, grabbed her hands
suddenly and intertwined her fingers with mine, "The years have
passed, all I dream is of you, all the warmth I achieve from cold
days is yours, you must be with me.  Come with me, on the next full
moon we will meet at the Chateau, we will dine like lovers and..."

She interrupts, smiling at me not so much in happiness but absolute
fear of my rants, a sort of coverup for a face wanting to express
terror.

"What logic is that?  Using that Cocteau shit with me?  Trying to
seduce me with a character of a person that I hate?"

There's a certain calmness to this conversation.  Everything is in
high-humor, this discussion, and I know nothing I say will mean or
imply anything but our capacity for eccentricity.  She wears this
look of seduction on her face everywhere she walks.  To the
convenience store or the cafe or to the liquor shop, she seduces
everyone....Activating mens libidos and bringing women wet with
sensuality.  A true mistress of the streets, licking her lips at
the precise moment eyes fall across her, pushing out her breasts
just when she brushes against a person.  She's got it refined, like
pure sugar, but with the sweetness miraculously extracted.

"And besides..." She wears a look of improbability, "Its taboo for
us to do anything, ever...We've known each other too long, talked
too much about sex and romance and love in a distanced way...A way
that makes the actual act of it something too bizarre."
I've heard this sort of angle many times, usually at a bent of
"Can't we just be friends?"  But the sensation is all the same, and
I know, forsaking all male cliche in this regard, that she wants me
and truly, its only a matter of time before she lets me have her. 

Her voice lightens, this voice, I know, is a voice of Angela
fantasizing.  

"Seb you know..Through all the people I've been with since I've
known you, I always wondered why I never let you get through to
me..."

"Get through?" I question.

"Well remember at Mark's a few years back?  When you came late and
I was with.."  She pauses, unable to remember whoeever he was.  I
take no offense, atleast not visible, knowing well her past
tendencies to sleep with any and everyone.

"Who?  Mike Ronson?" I interject.

"Yeah him.  Well, you walk in the door and i'm on the couch on top
of him."

"Don't remember that.." I state, although the image of her with
this guy is one of few that I can recall with perfect lucidity.  I
lie for pride if not to perpetuate this everlasting Game.

She goes on, "Well this guy was nobody, I mean nobody.  He meant
nothing to me, not even as a friend, and there I was kissing him,
rubbing up and down on his dick, totally innate behaviour;
completely.  And there you are with, with..Amber?"

"Yeah.."

"And I remember looking over at the two of you, just talking about
things, chatting, talking about...Gulliver's Travels.."  

Her memory was finite, accurate, exact.  I knew that this evening
had been to her what it was to me, unforgettable.  Her acuity in
recalling exact events was that of mine, warming my body leaving a
mellow buzz.

"The two of you just standing there, it made me jealous Seb.  There
I was kissing and groping this guy thinking that this is what I
should be doing, but at the same time wishing I were that girl
talking to you."

If our friendship had been taboo for all these years, it was now
taking a sharp turn from the norm.  She positioned herself upright,
and leaned back away from the table.  My perversions controlling
me, I watched as her nipples appeared, impressed upon her t-shirt. 
I knew now, like never have I guessed in the past, that she loved
me.
I clear my throat and unknowingly pull a cigarette from her pack,
lighting it.  I pause, not trying create a uncomfortable situation,
but so I could find the words to respond.

"So you're on top of this guy, and you're thinking..."  I pause,
hoping for a perfectly timed interruption..It comes..

"I'm thinking I want to be on top of you."  

The dice had been rolled, landing on snake-eyes or the like,
something rare, and now the turn is mine.  I take this literally,
now, my mind racing to analyze and pick apart the very essence and
meaning of this remark.  The very future of our friendship has been
compromised, dissected, and edited to such an effect that the words
we have said in five minutes will change things forever.

She leans forward again, inching herself to the edge of the chair. 
I pass a bleak smile, one of terrifying confusion, and look deeply
into her soft blue eyes.  Now I can feel the heat of her breath,
the taste of nicotine in the air.  I inhale it, taste it, absorb it
as if in a dream, a dream I have had many times.   Although
admittedly a bit more sexual, she was still in it, part of it.

"Seb I DO love you, and I want to have a relationship with you" She
whispers, our lips touching the moment after "you", shaping her
mouth in a perfect kiss.

The book falls to the floor, a book of quotes.

My eyes open to the ringing of a phone.  

I answer it half-asleep.

"Hello.." flatly


"Seb do you remember that party at Mark's house?"

It was Angela.


20] Designer Imposter Body Spray 
--------------------------------


I can remember the first time I saw the commercial vividly, for I
was scarred eternally, not unlike the first time I had a woman look
me square in the eye, force a smile, and mumble "Don't worry, I
heard it happens to a LOT of guys."  While channel surfing a few
months ago, I found myself landing on MTV.  It was The Real World
Two that was on, and I couldn't change the channel because it was
my favorite one, where Tammi purposely wired her mouth shut to lose
weight.  I was thinking about taking up a collection to keep it
wired shut forever, but alas, I digress. 
A commercial interlude began with a Mentos commercial, and I was
appalled to find myself mouthing along "Mentos, the freshmaker!"
with my television.  That was bad enough, but when I realized I was
actually holding my remote triumphantly, not unlike the girl
holding up her mighty Mentos, I knew I must turn off the television
and get some fresh air. I reached for the "off" button on the
remote, but found myself unable to hit it.  Instead, I my eyes were
glazed as I heard my RCA beckon: "The following demonstration has
been made suitable for television."  It piqued my interest, I
figured I'd watch the commercial.  Big mistake. 

It was a naked woman prancing around the screen with a spray can,
covered only by two blue bars that followed her around covering her
breasts, and her holiest of holies.  Now, seeing an attractive
naked woman bopping around on a television screen, this is not what
scarred me.  Don't you worry.  In fact, it made me laugh
hysterically.  A voice-over was explaining "First, spray Designer
Imposter Spray on your arms, and then spray some on your (beeped
out the breasts), and the same time the woman was spraying it on
the described areas.  It went on to describe all the different
places one could spray it, while the woman, seemingly in
ecstasy, followed suit.  It was truly a ridiculous image, the
quasi-orgasmic quality of spraying some cheap-assed imitation
perfume all over herself. She wound up spraying every part of her
body really, as the voice-over told me that spraying this poisonous
smelling fluid all over feels so good "you could spray them
everywhere".  But this of course, is not true.  She missed a spot. 
If she was to spray the faux- spray in one particular place, shall
we say, below the equator, this would not produce the ecstatic
result as it provided elsewhere.  I believe the correct word
to describe the result would be "agony".  But, thankfully, she
missed that spot, so the commercial, which I thought was over wound
up being just silly, not traumatic.  Little did I know that in just
ten seconds, I would be huddled in the corner of the room, rocking
in the fetal position, hand immersed in my pants, a la Al Bundy. 

It seemed as though the commercial was over, as they showed a
bottle of the stuff on the screen.  But then it happened.  Like all
horrible things in my life, I saw it in slow motion, like when
Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction had Zed give him a proctologic
exam without the courtesy of a sigmoidoscope.  A nude man appeared
on the screen, bottle in hand, blue bar on crotch.  The voice-over
triumphantly announced, "Available for men too!"  The man, with a
smug as hell grin, SPRAYS HIS CROTCH AND CHUCKLES!  He laughs with
this smirk on his face, as if it were the most euphoric and
wonderful experience he had ever experienced. .And the commercial
was over.  It was an overload for my brain, I believe that was when
I went into shock.  In my trauma induced state, my entire life
passed before my eyes.  Well, okay, not my WHOLE life, but an
incident in particular that involved myself, and my cajones. 

I flashed back to seventh grade, I must have been around twelve or
thirteen years old.  I remember being twelve quite well, it was
when I was a tiny 5'4 boy, and knew that someday I would grow and
grow and finally be able to conquer that freaking sign that said
"YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO GO ON THIS RIDE".  Now I'm twenty-five. 
Hey, it's not that I'm still not allowed to go on certain rides, I
just CHOOSE not to okay?? I could go on any ride I want, I just
don't like waiting in line!  Wait, I'm mixing up my traumas.  Let's
go back to my being twelvish. 

 My dream girl, Penelope Horowitz, had asked me whether I wanted to
go over her house on Sunday and study with her for an algebra exam. 
I could hardly sleep that night, knowing what would happen when I
was alone with her, perusing the subtle nuances of algebra.  I knew
in my heart of hearts, that in the midst of studying, we would look
up from the book, stare into each others eyes, admit our undying
love, have a torrid affair, get married, have children, and happily
grow old together.  I just had to make sure everything was right. 
Sunday morning, I spent two hours getting myself absolutely perfect
for the big study date.  When I felt I was ready, I started to
leave the house, but ran back into the bathroom.  As I was singing
along to "Islands in the Stream" on my radio, I realized I had
forgotten the key to getting a woman to think of me as real man. 
Cologne.  So I covered myself with my dad's English Leather, not
thoroughly unlike the naked woman in the Designer Imposter
commercial.  But what if Penelope begged me to have sex with her? 
This was a real possibility.  The prospect of her finding me "not
so fresh"  was strictly unacceptable.  So in the middle of singing
the Dolly Parton part of the chorus, I pulled out the waistband of
my underwear, and did my final spray.  "Islands in the
stream...that is what we AREEEEEEEEEEEEGHHHHHHH!"

I had never experienced such excruciating pain in my entire life. 

I had to cancel the date.  I spent the remainder of the day holding
my wounded huevos and cursing the day I had tried to spray myself
"there".  Penelope went on to date and marry my best friend.  Oh
Penelope, I miss you so...if you're reading this give me a call, I
know I can make you so happy... 

Back to the story at hand.  the man in the commercial had made the
same mistake I had made, yet suffered no ill consequences.  It was
the most unreal and unjust act I had seen since Marisa Tomei had
won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.  But like the Tomei
tragedy, this wrong could be righted, I knew it.  I knew then why
I had been put on this earth.  It was to get that commercial
modified.  I wrote letters. I made urgent phone calls.  I boycotted
using the product.  Okay, I hadn't really used it in the first
place, but hey, manufacturers didn't know that.  Yet every day
that blasted commercial would come on time and time again. 
Hundreds of times, I saw that smug bastard spray his crotch.  Was
there no justice in the world?  The horror, the horror.  But just
as I began to give up hope, it happened.  The commercial began the
same, bimbo dancing around in her Imposter glory.  Same guy, blue
bar on privates.  But this time, he sprayed his CHEST, smirking and
chuckling. Glory, hallelujah!  Can I get an amen?  There's no need
to thank me.  Just knowing that I might have saved one pubescent
boy from making the same mistakes I made is enough.  All I ask for
is a page in the history books documenting my selfless effort to
make the world a better place to live.  Or maybe a statue. 













































I COULD WASTE MY WHOLE FUCKING LIFE TELLING CHICKS SHIT THEY DON'T
KNOW.