scarecrow pages

Three Microfictions . . .

2009-06-30T23:18:00.011+01:00

Daisy Chain

Gazing at the bus window on the way home. If she were sitting on the top deck she would be able to see the heath but as it is only the hill is visible from her seat. When she was younger they lived on the far side, her nursery school bordering one of the gates. And after being picked up her mother would always pretend to let go of the stroller as they went down the hill on the way home. In summer, they would stop and play on the grass slopes, those days long gone now she’s finishing secondary school. She smiles, reminiscing about making daisy chains with her mum on Parliament fields. They called it daisy chaining at the party, so 'bohemian' after exam stress. And now she has to tell mum she's pregnant.

Called Off Play

She had brought the tickets. As a surprise. It wasn’t his thing really, open air theatre, but these days they did so little together that he had agreed to go. Sitting on the rug with their picnic scattered around them, most likely the last one of summer. Not paying too much attention, letting the actors' words be carried away with the breeze. And now a shower had started, only drizzling down on the far side of the audience. He watched the edge of the rain. Still half-basking in the sun; the other side holding their programs aloft like umbrellas. The scene mirrored him and her, he thought. It really was time to let her know it was over.

Snow Comes Early

He really wanted this job, it was made for him.

Nervous, palms beginning to sweat, sole applicant waiting in reception with the secretary and the trade magazines.

Wouldn't hurt; give his confidence a kick.

Flushing the toilet, covering the sounds while unfolding his wrap, the credit card chop.

Flushing again for the sniff.

They're ready for him when he emerges.

In full stride now, leaning over the smoked glass desk to emphasis a point.

A little pile of white powder falls from his nose.

Julian Baker much prefers writing to working, and really wishes he could afford to do it more. He blogs at sybawrite.wordpress.com

Jesus Saved . . .

2009-06-26T09:53:00.005+01:00

I peeked every second day, through the banisters on the stairs at my daddy’s, at you, earnestly leaning on a rock in Gethsemane, patent light poured down in sprinkles on your face somewhere above you, the grip on the wood stripped my knuckles white. I left you a cup of tea with three sugars, allowing you time to gather your strength for me later.

Your eyes where the murkiest greeny colour, like the sea on an ill-tempered day, my fingertips took small strolls across the wiry channels the thorns made on your forehead, all the time you had a serene look sitting there, like my hands on your face mattered. I read from The First Testament, you laughed with a donkey’s bray, slapping my ass red raw. I’d have a bruise later and would ponder, while eating Mammy’s soggy fish sticks, over your caress, your flimsy, whimsical ways. Long spindly fingers seeking divination in my shitty asshole, and I was led to believe you where the masochist.

On Sunday we became part of a film on telly, a group of fairground performers dancing around a circle in a tent and we where invited to join in holding hands with them, we all began to sing an old-fashioned song, ‘ola, it’s time to talk of Anderton…’ After this Mammy sat on the toilet with the door open and hollered down the hall ‘that song is a call for nuclear disarment’ you watched her piss sayin’ nothin’.

Jesus and I sat in Bingo with Mammy, we watched her with her eyes on the card, her tongue sticking out of her gob like an utterly demented puppy. Jesus put my hand under his robe; his pubes tickled the palm of my hand, my face burned with shame. His wounds sang when he was aroused, heads done a 180 in the bingo hall.

In the bedroom I said to Jesus:

‘Let Jesus FUCK ME” Let Jesus fuck me! LET YOU FUCK ME!’ he only smiled, got very vocal about a concern for Linda Blair. When I asked if the rumours where true that Roman soldiers raped virgins in Bethlehem with live chickens he shook his head from side to side smiling and opened his robes, His cock stood as confidently as a charming man, his cum was the brightest white of fresh oysters and when I swallowed I had long strange trips where I would roam across the ceiling while he wore my Pet Shop Boys CD out, playing the same song It’s a Sin on loop.

You never wore the sandals mammy picked up in Penny’s, you walked around the yard barefoot and afterwards sank back in the chair and I would have to wash off the dirt and dogshit with a nailbrush.

I remarked once ‘I feel like Mary Magdalene.’

My mammy’s head sprang up from her crossword and exclaimed:

‘You look like her to!’ she chuckled.

Jesus looked at mammy asking ‘Do you know who Mary Magdalene is?’

Mammy’s veiny face dragged on her Silk Cut and thought of how best to answer Jesus ‘course I do, president of Ireland isn’t it’ Jesus sighed, the thorns whined and I went on scrubbing the manky yellow shite from between your toes.

One evening near Easter after Jesus and I had sat through the box set of Songs of Praise season one he jumped from the chair announcing he was going home. My body splintered with disappointment, Jesus swept the parts of me up off the floor and took me to the bedroom. Carefully he assembled me, when I was put back together, he opened his robe, his fingers crucified me before his departure.

You were a brazen comet blazing across my ken in those days. I stuck my head out of the bedroom window, your naked body was on our roof. Moody clouds gathered overhead, you looked like an illustration in a children’s book. A seer in communion with the trees, sensing the future – I went back to bed and covered my nakedness.

I woke, twisted up in his robe, my body sticky with his sweat, grateful that at times like these, sometimes Jesus did save…

Before sleep sunk me I heard the bombs begin to fall from the sky . . .

Alan Kelly.

Alan Kelly is the contributing editor to Dogmatika. He has worked for a number of specialist magazines, Film Ireland, Pretty Scary, Penny Blood, Bookslut et al. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Beat the Dust, Lit Up, Sein und Werden, 3:AM, Gold Dust and others.

Seven Poems . . .

2009-06-22T18:54:00.004+01:00

the person next to me has been uncontrollably touching his hair for 15 minutes

my feeling of apathy is incredible

80-hour long sad facial expression

i believe that is a true representation of my feeling

i think people see my face and think i’m depressed

i read a story last night in front of my webcam but read the story only a little

then sat there, clicking things vacantly

i am satisfied with these lay’s original

i have stolen over six cigarettes from keith today

i have a small figure of hulk hogan, it clutches my lamp

i want to clutch my lamp

as i was typing a small piece of chip fell out of my mouth

it feels depressing

this poem was supposed to address something else

my voice intonation, represented in a poem, completes everything i wish to convey as myself

the immense destruction of the planet

i did that earlier, my poem about society is forthcoming

immediately

escaping myself is impossible; it is not possible

brandon

again i am not sure of my reason for writing a poem

people will disagree with this as a good reason to write a poem

i’m out of coffee

really bad

today i got four emails, one was from barnes and noble

i unsubscribed from barnes and noble

the other emails were something i don’t feel like describing, they were not emails that i feel like describing

i feel the need to type, ‘i’m listening to the windows media player’

i have a pervasive feeling of impending doom, it is associated with the layout of my blog

my friend is going to japan

i kind of want to expand the time which i can predict accurately

that makes me confused

i keep looking at the coffee cups on my table

i feel like my brain should understand more about this situation

my brain just keeps trying to process ‘coffee cups’

i have felt afraid of writing poetry

i have been listening to the same playlist on my headphones for over four hours, this is so good

my legs are functional

i have at my disposal over 200 gigabytes

today i sat on my bed and looked at myself in the mirror

yesterday i showered

this morning i took the bus

yesterday i felt confused

yesterday when i learned it was thursday i spent five minutes trying to verify that it was not thursday, that it was wednesday

i feel confused about how it is friday, i am afraid, i feel really confused about it being friday

seems bad

maybe

is it bad or good, how should i feel

Brandon Scott Gorrell.

Brandon Scott Gorrell is the author of DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT (Muumuu House, 2009). His blog is here. He lives in Seattle.

Bleach the whites . . .

2009-06-22T08:46:00.008+01:00

I was twenty-nine when men started referring to me as a woman. I wasn't sure exactly what had changed. My breasts were as pert and juvenile as they had ever been. My hips, slimmed since my mid-twenties metabolism slump and prescription oblivion. No more anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-anxieties, and anti-baby meds. Although, I still hated babies, I also hated the anti-sex drive, and had decided to allow my self one abortion if it were ever necessary.
Now. Condoms, and pull out. And cum. All over my chest, or back, and sometimes in my hair. Still, the sleeping pills.
"I saw you on the street after work Friday," Jorge informs me.
I nod.
"I thought I should have asked if you wanted to go."
"Oh, yeah?"
"So, would you like to go sometime?"
"Sure," I smile with the congenial nature, befitting my new vanilla job as a hostess.
Jorge raises his black eyes and lowers his chin. "Can I call you sometime?"
Oh, this is serious. My body manifests the frailness of my collarbones, as I sink against the wall next to my podium. "I have boyfriend," I confess.
"Ah! What are you doing then?"
A laugh, nervous like pointlessness, crumbles out of my mouth. "I know," I say, even though I don't.
Jorge raises one index finger, in front of his broad, handsome chest, to play his other like a bow on a violin. "Shame, Shame." He shakes his head.
"I thought you meant as friends!" I playfully defend, feeling the anger that will fuel my obsessing after this interaction is over, like a faint nat-wisp in my subconscious.
"Come on! I'm a man. You’re a woman."
"OK," is all I can get out with disgusting apologetic-ness before he trots out the door, killing his memory of me, or at least dismissing my existence in his head at an instant.
No, we're both human beings. I play in my mind as the sentiment I should have responded with, annoyed at being in a scenario in which such a melodramatic trite expression would have been my weapon of poignancy. So, I begin replacing this mantra with a new one.
Fuck Him. Cleaning up the trash on the floor.
Fuck him. Stacking the menus.
Fuck him! Seating a party of two.
Fuck him. Running upstairs to mentally catalogue open tables.
I have cramps anyway! Let him bleed from his crotch for, roughly, one fifth of every month and see how well he responds to being put on the spot, doped up on inadequate over-the-counter painkillers.
Fuck him. As a fat man in a tropical shirt and a turquoise necklace grabs my hand on the way out, smashing his sofa-cushion lips into my skin, making love to my epidermis like a hand-fetishist. I go to the bathroom and wash off this stranger's lip moisture. Three pumps of nondescript pink pub-soap and a mini-Niagara fall of hot water.
I catch the L train to Union Square after work, deciding to walk to the bar from here. A guy merges into my path, eager to sell some romance. He's a bit younger than me, dresses like a boy who will be dressing like he was in a frat for the rest of his life, even after his spunky bleached hair begins to bald.
"I just have to tell you that you have the classiest walk of any woman I’ve seen since I've been in New York.
"Where are you from?" I prod, wondering where a guy with this kind of line could come from.
"Guess."
Dear God. "Alabama?"
"My accent's not that thick is it?"
I shrug my shoulders.
"North Carolina?"
He sighs, "Close. I'll just tell you."
This conversation doesn't strike me as being on the level of sophistication, worthy of the woman with the classiest walk in New York City.
"OK. Where then?" I concede.
"Kentucky!" he throws his hands up like it’s so obvious.
"Oh," My voice betrays the level of interest I attempt to conjure.
"Am I bothering you?" he asks.
"No. It's just that you've been walking with me for almost two blocks, now." "I just had to talk to you. You're too adorable not to."
"Alright."
"Where you headed?" he asks me.
"A bar to meet a friend."
"A guy?"
"Yes."
"You stringing me along?"
"You came up to me," I point out.
"But you could tell me so that I'm not following you for three blocks."
"Am I supposed to assume you're interested in me?"
"Why else would I be talking to you?"
I look this vapid hick in the eye, "What's your name?"
"Eric."
"Go fuck yourself, ERIC. Is that clear enough?"
"You don't have to be such a bitch."
I ignore him as I walk the rest of the way to the bar. My boyfriend and I do shots at Otto’s. Then we go back to his place and I let him fuck me without a condom on top of a bath towel. The sound of him cumming is enough to make me climax. He folds the bloody towel up, telling me to remind him to bleach the whites.

Amiee DeLong.

Aimee DeLong lives in New York. She writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in such places as Cherry Bleeds, 3AM, Lit Chaos and Yellow Mama. She's also the winner of the 2008 Famas Poetry Prize. If this is not a long enough list of vague accolades please visit her website at www.aimeedelong.com.

Small White Space . . .

2009-06-12T08:12:00.002+01:00

I’m now a small white space like a square of light or a blank sheet. On my skin I can feel the weight of the whiteness. It’s cool and smooth and soothing like a balm. I’m waiting in here to be the me that doesn’t know what all the fuss was about. Not the me that is distorted, like I’m seeing myself through double-glazing; me and a shadow me just to one side. The shadow me is always ten years older, uglier, more out of shape. A shadow made of the smoke from a part of me that’s on fire.

I draw my knees up inside the sleeping bag and wedge the torch between them. The light bounces off the lid and onto my head. It warms my bald patch like a wool cap. In the mirror I’m holding, the wall behind me, its surface like packed ice, crisp white and crusty. I press the glass to my chest, not daring to look at myself, not yet; it’s too soon. Instead I stare at the torchlight till my eyes grow heavy. Till I’m not sure if I’m asleep or awake or neither of these. I want to sleep, crave it, but the Seroxat won’t let me. It teases me with the idea of sleep, my lashes batting at it. But the drug pulls it away before I can take hold. Gone, like it was never there, like sleep is a thing that doesn’t exist. I’m afraid I will never sleep again, but then I’m afraid of most things these days. I’m afraid because in my mind everything really does happen. I really have lost my job, my wife really is divorcing me, I really am suffocating to death in here. I live in a world where loss is an inevitability, where inanimate objects move of their own free will. I reach up, fumbling for the gap between the lid and the rim, and the piece of wood holding them apart.

This morning waiting for the train at Hemel station I saw a youth wearing a t-shirt. It said ‘If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space’ and suddenly I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t catch my breath. I had to come home. That’s why I’m in here, in this place that feels safe. This place that feels like it’s filled with forever. I stretch my legs out and press my feet against the end wall, my elbows against the sides, and infinity, it pushes back. In here, tomorrow feels possible. I feel possible. I rub my eye and feel the suggestion of sleep loosen beneath my finger. A tiny nugget of something prized. Its sand-coloured solidity is reassuring somehow. I reach for the plastic container in my shirt pocket and drop it in with all the others. I have it in mind to make an egg timer with them, which made my wife laugh. It’s been a long time since I heard Laura laugh. She used to laugh all the time before we married, before the children.

I rest my head against the back wall and close my eyes. I’m coming back to myself, I can feel it, smell it – hair: greasy; body: sweating. The sense of being inside myself is returning. If a hair moves on my body I will know it. Yes, I’m remembering how to be me again. Bringing myself back into line.

“Tim? Tim, are you in there?”

Tim. Yes, I’m Tim. That feels like a name that belongs to me. I look at my watch. 9 o’clock. I’ve been in here for twelve hours. Twelve hours made up of endless minutes. I unzip the sleeping bag like I’m removing a layer of myself and manoeuvre onto all fours. My back and shoulders press against the lid. I start to stand up. The lid lifts, ratcheting open like it’s my spine. Eventually I’m upright, bathed in the light from the torch at my feet.

“There you are,” Laura says. Her tired face thinks about smiling. She holds out her hand to me. I swallow, seeing the bitten fingernails, the redness beneath her wedding ring. It’s cold in the garage. Dark but for the torch and the light coming from the back door behind her. The children are standing in the doorway dressed in their pyjamas. Will is sucking his sleeve, half-hiding behind his sister. Amy is clutching her stuffed monkey, one bare foot resting on top of the other.

“Come on, let’s get you inside,” says Laura, taking hold of my arm. Through my shirt and fleece I can feel the detail of her fingerprints on my skin. I smile to myself. Back. Gripping the rim, I clamber out of the old chest freezer and follow my wife into the warmth of the house.

Melissa Mann.

Melissa Mann [http://www.melissamann.com/] writes and runs Beat the Dust, which includes BTD TV, the online Bookshop and coming later this year... drum roll, fanfare, ticker tape parade... BTD Press. Her first collection of poetry, 'baby, i'm ready to go' is due for publication in September 09 by Grievous Jones Press.

West Hollywood . . .

2009-06-11T21:42:00.002+01:00

Melrose Avenue at Four a.m.

Blood everywhere
on the car's seat
on the floorboard

and me
freaked and desperate and helpless
saying shit like - it's okay - you're gonna be okay - we'll be there in a minute - just hang on for chrissake

and more blood

Your shirt and pants sopped by it
your face white . . . drained . . . porcelain

an entire liver puked up - on the floor of my car

Hang on, goddamnit! Can you just hang on?

"I'm hanging on, fucker . . . . drive faster"

And all the love and all the lies of our friendship
the years of our days and nights together
have
devolved
to this
last careless ride

Okay . . . okay . . . we're here . . . can you hear me?

kissing your head as they wheeled you in
but
only later remembering
I
never
stopped
to say
goodbye

Dan Fante 2007

Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. At twenty, he quit school and hit the road, eventually ending up as a New York City resident for twelve years. Fante has worked at dozens of crummy jobs including: door to door salesman, taxi driver, window washer, telemarketer, private investigator, night hotel manager, chauffeur, mailroom clerk, deck hand, dishwasher, carnival barker, envelope stuffer, dating service counselor, furniture salesman, and parking attendant. Fante is married and has a two year old son named Michaelangelo Giovanni Fante. He hopes eventually to learn to play the harmonica.

http://www.danfante.net/home.htm

Pub, Pictures . . .

2009-06-10T21:54:00.004+01:00

The pub, the King William was tucked away at the bottom of a stubby mews, somewhere between Sloane Street and Belgrave Square. Over eighty years old and free of tie, it was invisible to passers-by save for the pansy-filled hanging baskets, out of keeping with the other houses with their dwarf topiary, and two wooden barrels flanking the door, which smokers used as table tops. Though there were a stream of regulars who drank there: local residents, alesmen, shop workers, and a number of suits who lunched with their mistresses, it was untroubled by the need to provide the full London welcome and obligatory Ploughman’s for tourists, being happily off the map and generally unwanted. What kept the place afloat was a freehold bought in the late 60s, and a target of thirty lunches and dinners a day. The mistresses brought here were not the catering types, so fulfilling the target was easy. The establishment was small but comfortable, and satisfied with its runnings: good ale, convivial atmosphere, and low overheads.

It was also filled with paparazzi because it lay across from Jaq’s house. For over a fortnight , a group of overweight men loaded with cameras and zoom lenses the height and weight of small children, bought halves from midday until closing, and watched hawkishly by the window. At the first sign of life, the twitching of blinds or the nervous scuttle of the housekeeper, they would down glasses, forks, crisp packets and crowd around her front door. Their heckles were as repetitive as the notes from a music box, switching between arse-licking and aggressiveness. And every question prefixed, suffixed with her name.

- Jaq! Where you going, Jaq?
- Jaq! You look lovely this morning, Jaq.
- Who’s that dress by, Jaq?
- Give us a smile, Jaq.
- Have you heard from Louis, Jaq? Has he gone back to his wife?

Jaq was not a post-teenage pop floozy, still on the pill and racking up overdoses and STDs, but an Anglo-French supermodel from the 70s who was financially independent and only worked when she felt like it. The paps were there because she was in the middle of extracting herself from an affair with the owner of a reviled High Street clothing chain, and she was not the type to disappear, crying her eyes out from the seclusion of the Caribbean. Knowing her only comment was to dress through the scandal, she fell back onto the simplicity of professional language: full coverage make-up, smiling for the cameras and getting into her cab each morning. Whether they chose to make anything of her leopard print, the four-inch heels, the scarlet lips, or the prolonged moment on the front step, which allowed them the most flattering angle, was their business. (At this stage, there was no work or appointments for her to attend. The cab simply took her to her agent’s office where they would pour over the print and online coverage and discuss outfits for the following day.)

Once Jaq had left, the boys contentedly settled themselves down for the afternoon and awaited her return. They weren’t of the body type, nor had they the inclination, to jump on a scooter and follow her around all day. That was best left to school leavers. They were in their forties and no longer had an appetite for the chase. The push and pull of breaking through a crowd to get the shot, having to hold the camera above their heads for extended periods of time, flashing indiscriminately, was unbecoming, and bad for their blocked arteries. Acting as the welcome crew suited their personalities and the state of their health: a single location, good morning and good night.

As with the previous days, they hoped she would be out for the duration, allowing them to take full advantage of the pub’s hospitality and their per diem expense allowance. It was hard to turn down three courses including cheese when it was staring you in the face. Bob, the landlord’s boy, cooked everything fresh and made a good job of it, probably better than most of their missus’ if they were to be honest. True, he was cooking to order and getting good coin from it, but there was never any stress on his face or acrimony as he put the plates before them. No banging crockery or accusatory, hate-filled looks that marked mealtimes in most of their homes. It made a nice change, from home, and from fast food crap, snatched on assignments where there were fewer eateries, and so they spent freely, knowing they would be reimbursed so long as they kept getting the pictures.

They were tucking into wood pigeon and potatoes Dauphinoise, when they heard the cab as it trotted across the cobbles. One of the motorcycle boys should have called ahead, but he’d either been distracted by a tip-off, or couldn’t be arsed. They were professionals, but to be interrupted in the middle of their dinner was a pain in the arse, same as it was at home. She’d been gone two hours, and even in a different outfit, had a face like thunder.

- Jaq! What you upset about, Jaq!
- Did he dump you, Jaq!
- Have you any comment on his wife’s statement to the BBC, Jaq? Was it fair to call you a tired old slapper?
- Nice pillbox hat, Jaq. Just like that Sarkozy bird.

Her eyes, shielded by shades their fashion editors told them were vintage Linda Farrow, continued to give nothing away. The only sign that she wanted to tear their heads off was the rictus that had set in her jaw. Still, the acknowledgement of the pillbox hat was better than a kick in the nuts, and the front door closed with a click rather than a slam. Even in anger she was a class act. They made it back to the table whilst the pigeon was still warm.

After the fuss died down, the errant husband pledging fidelity, and an increased footfall in his high street stores on the back of the publicity, they continued to stake out her place. It was partly because, as they justified to her editors, she had a colourful history of rebound relationships, worth pre-empting, but also down to the pull of the William being the best office they’d ever had. The headquarters of their newspapers and photo agencies, where there was no desk, and possibly shared use of a direct line if they were lucky, had nothing on the William’s amenities: two payphones, wi-fi, table-service, ale, and a gander at Sky Sports if they asked very nicely. When the pub closed at midnight, quiet and civilised, without a chorus of meandering drunks to mark the occasion, they were at a loss; not because they were worried about losing her, more to do with leaving the cosiness of the William for the long drive to the suburbs and the chilliness of their martial beds. If Bob had let rooms in the place they’d have moved their stuff in like a shot.

Soon they began to leave their camera gear in the car rather than have it clutter up the tables, which were best left for food, halves, and the sporting pages. One of the boys brought some dice in and they played craps for matchsticks. Bob turned a blind eye so long as the regulars were either not disturbed, or invited to play, whichever was their inclination. Somebody tuned the radio to one of the golden oldie stations instead of Radio 4, so they had some proper music in the background rather than a load of newsroom clatter they could pick-up back at head office. Furniture was shifted, with the padded banquet dragged from its place under the main window to a more comfortable position facing the fireplace. Cushions and blankets were pilfered from airing cupboards and conservatories to make themselves cosier still. And allowances were given for them to use the ladies – far closer than the gents, and not involving a flight of stairs – in the absence of any females on the premises. They stunk it out by the end of the first day.

In spite of their different paymasters, they started checking in less frequently with the tip-off lads for any other juiciness in the area. Jaq was only part of the tombola. Also included in the mix were actresses and heiresses out cycling for their dope or botox fixes, children of celebrities caught shoplifting, and honoured government servants taking time from the House to screw other men’s wives. But none of these were of interest. The call rate deteriorated from twice hourly, to twice daily, and then to a more sporadic remembrance. Stomachs stretched to bursting with game and cheese, bladders shot to pieces with beer, they fell headlong into the noble vocation of bar room raconteurs, with a strong belief that nothing existed outside the saloon. So long as they got the picture. Bob cheerfully racked up their bills.

Seldom these days did they look outside the window and wonder of Jacq’s goings on, relying on frames of closed curtains and previously unseen frames of her leaving the house in different outfits to satisfy editors. Neither did they notice when she sat at one of the back tables alone, nursing a glass of red, nor the following night when she was joined for dinner by the owner of the clothing chain and they shared a two pound steak and a raspberry souffle. England ’s tour of India was going to pot and they were all hooked.

- Boys! I’m here, boys! Look who I’m with, boys! Anyone want to take my picture?
- Out the way, love. We can’t see the telly!

Niven Govinden.

Niven Govinden is the author of the novels We Are The New Romantics and Graffiti My Soul (Canongate). His short stories have appeared in Time Out, Stimulus Respond, 3:AM Magazine, Bad Idea, Transmission, and on Radio 3’s The Verb. You can say hello to him at: myspace.com/graffitimysoul

What's in Swindon? . . .

2009-06-01T10:20:00.002+01:00

It had been ten years since I’d last seen Angela Fulton, when I’d watched her toss a three-foot stuffed rabbit into an overflowing rubbish skip. I remembered the incident in astonishing clarity, not least because I’d won her the luckless animal from a hook-the-duck stall at Wigan’s World Famous Winter Wonderland Extravaganza. As a peace offering it had had the opposite of the intended effect.

The rabbit, however, seemed far from Angela’s mind when she called me late on a Tuesday evening. I don’t know how she got the number, neither does it matter.

“You never forget your first rejection,” she said after an initial uncomfortable silence. “It’s something from which you never recover.” I didn’t know what to say. She was just so controlled and so grammatically correct. It was like old times.

I didn’t know what to say. The fridge hummed as if deciding where its sympathies lay.

“Are you with some one?” Angela said.

“Well, no . . .” I said.

“Good,” she said “Meet me this weekend.”

I had no plans, and no defence. How are supposed to say no to a woman you still masturbate about a decade after she broke your heart?

“Okay,” I said “Where?”

There was a sound at her end, like she was holding her hand over the receiver and talking to someone else.

“Are you still there?” I said.

“Of course,” she said “I was just thinking where we should go. I think Swindon.”

“Swindon?” I said “What’s in Swindon?”

“I will be.” She said and rang off.

I had never been to Swindon before. I will never go to Swindon again. She booked a room at a hotel called the Nightingale. Inside it was woody, the ambience like a downmarket Swedish ski lodge. The man behind the counter was sullen and gittish. I told him of the reservation; he puffed out his cheeks and answered the telephone. I looked around for Angela but she was clearly not there. “Sorry,” the sullen man said. “Why don’t you wait in the bar?”

I took my place at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. It felt like the right kind of drink to be seen with by an ex-lover – from a distance it looks like carbonated water. The barman was sullen and gittish. He tried to get me to order some olives. I ordered some olives.

Angela Fulton arrived as I was skewering the last greasy olive. She looked older, but in a good way. Her hair was kinky and her eyes fizzed like Coca-Cola. She sat at the bar and drank the remainder of my gin and tonic.

“Say nothing,” she said and took me by the hand.

The bedroom was brown and cream and much too bright. She sparkled in her silver dress. She pushed me against the wall and for a moment we were twenty again. She guided us both back to a time when we didn’t need worry about bullshit and bills, pensions and cancer, lies and betrayals. I made sure that she came first; I had memorised how in much the same way I can still remember how to launch Honda’s thousand hand slap on Street Fighter II.

After it was over, she looked at me expectantly and rolled over. I held her close to me and felt that this was the greatest moment of my whole life.

“Hello,” she said, “I’ve missed you.”

“Me too,” I said “I never thought . . .”

“You can smoke now,” she said, laughing. “I booked a smoking room especially.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I quit about five years ago.”

“Quit?” she said “I never thought you’d quit. Not ever.”

I didn’t like the maddened look in her eyes: she was naked but not in a good way.

“Well I did.”

I put my hand to her neck and she looked aghast, as though I had properly let her down.

“Do you still drive that Vauxhall Viva?” she said

“Of course not, that’s long gone. I’ve got a Mondeo now.”

She pulled the bed sheets over her body and put her head in her hands.

“I never should have done this,” she said, “it was a terrible idea.”

“What all because I don’t smoke?”

“You know it’s more than that,” she said before turning her back to me then and making her way to the en suite bathroom. She had cellulite on her thighs. It was sexy in a way that women don’t understand.

“I did what you always wanted.” I said “I grew up.” But she wasn’t listening. When she came back she was fully dressed, her hair wet at the ends.

“You’ll like the Oasis centre, “ she said, throwing me a flyer, “waterslides and a wave machine. I bet you’ve not grown out of them.”

I shrugged and she picked up her overnight bag.

“At least we both know now, don’t we?” She opened the door and waved quickly, then was gone. For the first time in years I felt like smoking again.

Stuart Evers writes about books for a variety of publications including the Guardian, the Independent and Time Out. He is currently working on a collection of linked stories called “Ten Short Stories about Smoking”, the first of which appeared in Litro 86.

I'm going to change my clothes a few times . . .

2009-05-29T08:07:00.003+01:00

A text I received recently: "Feel bad and also feel no desire to eat anything bad."

I can't think of anything to twitter. There are four cigarettes in the apartment. Rent will be due in a week.

Is there anything I can write that would be the same as a bird flying? Is there anything I can write that would give the reader the same feeling he would while watching a bird flying? How like a bird flying is any piece of writing? What piece of writing is the most like a bird flying?

The cat wants something. There's a glass of water. There are still four cigarettes, or five, or six.

A New York Magazine review of a bar I went to recently confirms what I thought.

My girlfriend smokes cigarettes. Later she says things like "Why did you let me smoke those cigarettes?" and "Ugh, I feel so polluted."

I google the word "proseca." I see it's spelled "prosecco." I look at the word "prosecco." Will I remember how to spell it? Prose. Two 'C's. O.

Zachary German.

Photo by Thomas Shelley.

Zachary German was born in 1988. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. His first novel, "Eat When You Feel Sad," will be released by Melville House in February 2010.

Some poems . . .

2009-05-25T23:09:00.006+01:00

i change my mind about everything as of five days ago

i dont care what people say
you are not a turtle
you are a bunny

i never thought
a little bunny
would be such a good fuck

today i thought i had a good idea but it turned out to be maybe not such a good idea, or maybe it was a good idea, but really i dont think it was

i was tired of forgetting to put on earrings
so i took a needle and string
and a seashell

i sewed the seashell to my ear
it hurts like hell
maybe i should have sterilized the needle
or maybe sewing things to your head is stupid

my permanent earring is very pretty though
aside from the crusty blood on it

everything i own is pink

i dont know what age i began to be such a little twat
(im guessing about five or six)

what does it feel like to wear those glasses?

well, it feels like i just got out of jail with thirteen counts of child molestation under my belt and im going back to my job on the school bus and i got a pocket full of jolly ranchers

my hands are really quite clammy right now

my lover is wearing a business suit
she looks very important
she is interviewing at a hedge fund firm
i am taking her very seriously right now
i am going to masturbate in the bathroom
when she leaves

i change my mind about everything again (this is getting awkward)

i fall in love on average
twice a year
i'm not sure
if thats a good ratio
or not

Kendra Grant Malone.

Kendra Grant Malone's poetry and fiction has been widely published worldwide. Details of her forthcoming chapbooks can be found here.

Reading Instructions . . .

2009-05-25T22:53:00.002+01:00

They had to restrain me. Give me some kind of sedative. And it had all started so calmly. Hold on. Let me think. That could be so different. They had to restrain me, give me some kind of sedative, and it had all started so calmly. That’s better. Or is it? The first has an imperative feel. Direct. Urgent. They had to restrain me. Fact. Am I still restrained? If I am, then the sympathy is with me, the empathy. If not, I have escaped, I am the hero, the revenger. If they let me go, then where am I? Hiding in a broom closet? Beneath a table? In the boot of your car? Could this be a tale from beyond the grave; a manuscript found hidden under the thin mattress, written on sheets of toilet paper using blood as ink, a tongue depressor for a pen? Or a memoir – now rich and famous, be-robed in Egyptian cotton, ensconced in a sumptuous suite, recording how I rose from oppressed individual to advisor of kings and governments. Perhaps nothing really happened and the narrative you are reading is a fancy, drawn up to keep you amused while other more important things are played out behind your back. While you’re not watching. For what we have to ask is: who are “they”? Why no names? They? It’s rather vague isn’t it? Some shady organization? An experimental medical facility kidnapping people off the street, drugging them, tying them down, injecting them with viruses, diseases, bad blood. They. Or family? A Christmas argument. An insult. The dredging up of not-so forgotten feuds. A wisecrack about weight. A complaint about the turkey, the lack of chestnut stuffing, the consistency of the cranberry sauce. They. Or friends? A confrontation. An intervention – all of them there when you come home, the women sitting on the sofa, the chairs, the men standing against the wall telling you you have to pull yourself together, stop drinking, stop taking drugs. Or someone stopping you punching someone who spilled your wine, your beer, insulted your girlfriends, your favourite football team. Stopped you going around to your ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s house to: give him/her a slap, kidnap the kids, abuse the new lover, slash the car tyres, sit outside hunched in your soon to-be-repossessed motor. They. But it was I they restrained. They. The faceless mass, the nameless throng, the shadowy crowd. It could have started so differently. He had to… She had to… You had to… Or better. The police had to… The doctors had to… The nurses had to… Or better even… K had to… X had to… V had to… Or better still… Sue had to… Mike had to… Gary had to… Whatever it wasn’t, what it was was, “They had to restrain me.” They didn’t have a choice. Nothing they could do. I didn’t give them an option. Or you. If I wrote, “They didn’t have to restrain me,” or “They didn’t restrain me,” or “They failed to restrain me,” then I would be free and there would be no They, no imperative, categorical or not. And not in my case. I’ve just thought. Maybe you are they. The you of you with other yous lost in the they, the them. And if so, then you must want to know the story. Must want to know why you restrained me. Why you were impelled to restrain me. What I did that made you join in with them, lose your you, become one with the throng. What did I do? They had to restrain me. Had. The past of have. The saddest words. Have. Has. Had. He has money. He had money. The book has a meaning. The book had a meaning. I wanted to join the priesthood but they wouldn't have me. I have a role in a film. I had a job as an extra. Have a great trip. I had a bad time. He had pancreatitis. He has diabetes. I have morals. I had ethics. Have him bring me wine. They have no beer. He has two brothers. He had two sisters. He has a beautiful wife. He had a faithful girlfriend. He had the balls to question my actions. The book has a flowing narrative. He had a large nose. I will not have any distractions. Rumour has it. He had it. To have neither love nor happiness. To have a monster of a child. He has you where he wants you. After you have finished this story you might think you have been had. This sentence had me stumped. I had a devoted follower. She has left me. She had left him. I have to go soon. You had better get home. They had to restrain me. They. They had. They had to. To. Not from. Approach and arrival. Insistent. Help if you want to. I went to the house. The road was clear all the way to the off-ramp. The road runs perpendicular to the facility. Turned to me and said. Loved her to a fault. Brought her back to life. The time is four in the morning. Slept from one to three. Stepped out to relieve myself. A rag to the wind. Take me to a doctor. Had the room to ourselves. Guiding the blind to the darkest room. Their faces close to the whirring blades. Nose to nose. Searched for the bullets to the gun. Calling for an answer to my prayers. Unsuited to punishment. An outlook different to the doctors. Pull the door to. I’d like to leave. To hold back. Restrain. They arrested me. They put me in binds. They fitted a white polythene bridle in my mouth. Chained me to the bed. Confined me in a room. Constrained me. Contained me. Controlled my breathing, my blood pressure, my heart rate, the flow of my urine. Curbed my flight impulse. Curtailed my freedom. Delimited my liberty. Detained me. Fettered my limbs. Gagged my mouth. Handicapped my legs. Harnessed my body. Hindered my movement. Hogtied me. Held me. Impounded my papers. Imprisoned my family. Inhibited my movement. Jailed my friends. Limited my access. Locked me up. Manacled my hands, my feet. Muzzled me. Pinioned my arms. Prevented me from escaping. Repressed my natural instincts. Restricted my vision. Subdued my thoughts. Suppressed my ideas. Tied me up. Tied me down. Twisted my words.

Steve Finbow.

Steve Finbow’s novel Balzac of the Badlands will be published by Future Fiction London in October 2009.

Cops . . .

2009-05-23T00:26:00.005+01:00

The two of us are bent cops. I use those words deliberately. Although we speak with English accents, the landscape of the city we are in is American. We have just come out of a Federal building of some sort. They are on to us, it seems. Or at least, on to you. You are upset, distraught, on the brink of cracking and throwing the whole thing away. Maybe you’ve been caught or punished before. Maybe this is your last chance. The important thing is to calm you down. I try to calm you down.

It seems like you haven’t been in the city for some time. Perhaps we work in another city or a smaller town and have been summoned here for you to be questioned at the Federal building. Perhaps I came to keep you company, to make sure you don’t crack. I keep telling you it’s the same city, it’s the same old city. I talk about the marvellous sights, the wonderful places to visit. You’re almost in tears, trying to hold it back, and I think my tour guide patter helps. We get in a taxi of some kind and begin to drive through the streets as I point out monuments, towers, museums, galleries, whole districts, areas of local colour. After a while I suggest we go to the Blue Beach. I tell you it’s just the same as it’s always been, suggest it’s just like it was when we were regulars round here. Did we work here?

The taxi we’re in is a boat. We’re on the sea, so it must be. Though the sea is also the streets. We turn out of one watery road and left, up towards the Blue Beach. Our driver (our skipper?) forces the boat right up on to the sand and we glide to a halt, the impact far less than I was expecting. The sand is an insipid colour, the kind you buy in sacks to fill kids’ playpits. But across the surface, as if deposited there by the sea, is a thin scattering of bright blue copper sulphate crystals. Without looking at you – I stopped looking at you as soon as we started walking – I comment on how the beach is just as it’s always been, how good it is to be back at the beach which is just like it’s always been.

The sea must have risen a little because we’re floating again and our driver or skipper sets the boat moving, this time without any suggestion from me. He aims for a little alley between two houses across the bay from where we entered. We move slowly along this narrow concourse, the buildings high and grey on each side of us. The road ends in a T-junction a little way ahead. He cuts the power as we approach the turn and we move forward, a kind of ghost motion, until the prow of the boat bumps against the garage of the building opposite. I presume it’s a garage, although it’s one of those roll-down, segmented metal shutters, so perhaps there’s a shop behind it. The shutters boom, empty, as the boat hits.

All three of us jump out and we’re standing on sand again. We ask the boatman whose house this is and he will only say that we don’t want to go in there. He says it in a way which means we shouldn’t go in there, that it would be unsafe to go in there. The boatman has curly hair, a halo of it, and leans against the wall by the garage door, very relaxed, but quite insistent about the house. We knock at the door on the other side of him, the door of the house he doesn’t want us to go into. He tells us, still calm, that we can see our parents. Are we brothers, you and I? Or are they all there, the four of them waiting for their two sons? We don’t ask him that. Perhaps it would be embarrassing to ask him that. Instead we ask him where our parents are. With his head he signals out to sea and tells us they are two hundred metres away. We knock at the door. He tells us we shouldn’t but we do. We keep knocking and he stops telling us not to. Perhaps he stops being there.

When the door swings open we are met by two creatures. They are birds of some sort, or like birds in that they stand on two legs, although they have no wings. But they have no arms either, just these two spindle legs. They are about the size of partridges or pheasants, a dirty brown colour, not necessarily feathered. They have our faces. Our faces are stretched and distorted and move oddly, as if the images of our features are being projeceted on to the blank screens of the animals’ heads. But still, they are our faces. There is no sound, from the sea or the streets or our driver. The acoustics seem to have closed up deep inside my ear, as if I’m underwater. The two creatures walk out of the door, jerky, with the twitch and tic of prey. They move towards us, each aimed at the one with its own face. Mine taps its side into my leg and pushes me back a little. Or, rather, causes me to move back. Because I don’t want to be touched by it. Because, for reasons anyone can understand, I feel unsettled by it.

I look down at my trainers and there is a hole in the toe of the one on the left, ragged, a friction rip. My creature moves its little head down toward it as if examining the damage. It tips its head on one side and then the other. I don’t know where I am anymore. The light seems very grey and the tourist spots of the city are forgotten. The only sound is a long, low rumble. Without warning, the thing is sucking itself through the hole and into my shoe and I can feel it in the space between my big toe and the next, even though I know there’s no room for it there. Then it’s inside me and I look up again as if the most important thing left is to see how yours will enter you.

Will Ashon writes novels (Clear Water and The Heritage so far, both published by Faber & Faber) and (kind of) runs Big Dada, a record label. There's a good piece about him in the Independent here his blog is vernaland

William Blake . . .

2008-04-08T22:34:00.003+01:00

It is a well known fact that William Blake lived around these parts, close to where I am sitting right now with wet hair, bare feet and a view of neighbour enjoying the back garden that I can see into. There’s no romance between us; she’s a lesbian.

In fact, I have no idea who she is because this is London, it is the present day and no-one communicates with one another any more. If you make an attempt people will think you’re weird. Besides which, she’s seen me naked in front of my windows of my studio flat She could have me arrested for waving my cock at her of a morning without even realizing it.

Best to not push your luck by instigating conversation, a breeze filters by, heading south for the winter.

It was near here, half way between the hot cracked pavement and a sky that looks like a vast military tanker viewed up close from a dinghy that Blake saw angels in the trees during one of his infamous reveries. I too see such heavenly creatures from time to time. I know they are real only in the metaphysical sense, that they aren’t necessarily tangible or visible to other people and accepted that may well be a figment of my imagination as they had been Blake’s.

My mind is always doing stuff like that. I think it over-compensates for the mundanity of every day existence by creating interesting characters and scenarios to keep me interested, much in the way Hollywood movies are a distraction from the truth of life in modern America.

But I was grateful to my imagination for being over active. He was alright, my imagination. Or she. Always there when I need stimulus, and there too when I don’t. There to place angels in trees where others see birds, flapping carrier bags or the occasional Nike trainer hanging by a solitary shoelace.

William Blake said:

“To see a World as a Grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

You could say the same thing about a kidney.

When William Blake died it was in poverty and obscurity, something which gives hope to all struggling artists.

So underappreciated was Blake in his lifetime that no-one is entirely sure where one of the greatest creative minds this island has produced was buried, for he lay in a pauper’s grave, which was no doubt sad for everyone concerned but Blake himself, who was too dead to care anyway. Instead they erected an insult of a headstone that said:

Near by lie the remains of
the Poet-Painter
William Blake
1757-1827
and of his wife
Catherine Sophia
1762-1831

Which – reading between the lines – might aswell have said:

William Blake
1757-1827
We know he’s round here somewhere.
Maybe if we dig long enough we’ll unearth a jawbone
or the clavicle of his wife
Catherine Sophia
1762-1831

But it still wouldn’t be as honest as:

No-one gave a shit about
William Blake
1757 - 1827
They thought his art was tat and his poetry poofy
But then what do people know?
We put up this headstone out of guilt.
At least his wife
Catherine Sophia
1762-1831
loved him.

Taken from Ben Myers’s forthcoming novel The Missing Kidney.

Ben Myers is a writer and journalist. His first novel The Book Of Fuck, a fictionalised account about a hapless music journalist, was published to acclaim in 2004 through Wrecking Ball Press. It was published in Italian in 2005. The novel drew comparisons to the likes of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson and J. P. Donleavy. His short stories and pems have appeared in numerous anthologies since 1999. Myers has also written a number of music biographies which have been published in the United Kingdom, United States, Finland, Germany, Italy and Russia. In the US he is published by Disinformation. As a teenager he began writing for British weekly Melody Maker. As a freelance journalist he has written for publications such as Mojo, The Guardian, Alternative Press, Kerrang!, Time Out, Q, PlayLouder, Plan B, Careless Talk Costs Lives. Along with Tony O'Neill and Adelle Stripe he founded The Brutalists poetry movement in 2006, and co-authored the 2008 collection Nowhere Fast. He is also author of a poetry collection Spam: E-mail Inspired Poems, published by Blackheath Books in 2008. Ben Myers also ran the independent record label Captains of Industry from 2003 to 2008. Bands he released included Gay For Johnny Depp, Kinesis, Hell Is For Heroes and Marmaduke Duke.

More information: www.benmyersmanofletters.blogspot.com

One X One . . .

2008-04-08T22:21:00.005+01:00

Working thirty seven and a half hours a week in an art supplies shop in the city, Clair cannot afford to live on her own. So she lives with a man bitter and tired and jaded enough to be a hundred years old. Daniel. Clair thinks he’s twenty eight, but she isn’t sure because she’s never asked. It’s not a friendly arrangement.

Clair answered an advert. They do not speak and have silently arranged to never be in the kitchen or the living room at the same time. If they ever find themselves in such a situation, they make sure to be out of each other’s company again as quickly and quietly as possible.

Their communication comes in little notes, tacked to kitchen walls and appliances. Most of the notes were there before Clair moved in. Since she moved in, there have been two:

Remember: do not leave the bin to get too full.

and

Please remove all washing up from draining board once dry. Thanks!

After work, Clair gets lost in the Tesco’s wine aisle. She knows nothing about geography. She is stranded somewhere between France and the New World, searching frantically for Argentina. She’s not even one hundred percent sure Argentina is a country, and not just a very famous city.

Clair does time-saving things.

She clips her toe nails, talking on the phone.

She rolls a cigarette, waiting in the queue for the basket till, shuffling the basket forwards with her feet.

Clair should not be doing this. She should be spreading the small remaining elements of her life out as thinly as possibly. Because between these things is nothing; a lurching stomach, memories. She should do her things one at a time.

As slowly as she can.

One by one.

Sometimes George would start crying, unexpectedly, quite dramatically, often in public. Clair wouldn’t know what to do. She’d feel embarrassed. She’d look around to see if anyone was watching. She’d feel very alone.

Sometimes, when there was nothing to say, George might say ‘Tell me a story.’ When he said this, Clair would go blank. Her head would empty. She’d search around in it, panicked, and there would be nothing.

She’d feel herself, sat on the bench outside Tesco’s or in that old pub in Salford or wherever, turning into an empty sketchbook page or a primed canvas. She knew that no matter what she told him, all he’d do was create his own version of it afterwards.

That was what they were. She realised this in the basket queue: they were ideas. She wasn’t a real person to George, and he wasn’t a real person to her, and especially, especially, that girl who’s name she will not say out loud or even in her head anymore – that girl who also painted and went away for a placement year in the States and then came back; that girl who George was ‘still in love with’ – was certainly an idea.

*

George is a romantic. He is his own construction. He seeks out other constructions and then further constructs them, or re-constructs them, or what do I even fucking mean? He never knows when a painting is finished. That is what I mean, I think. But still she feels, sadly, almost untouched by him. Nothing of her true self was discovered. He found only the most obvious parts of her, the ones he could sum up easily, to himself or to others; the parts she’d made up:

Clair writes.

Clair dresses like something from a book.

Clair has a brilliant novel, half-finished.

She was an experience, a muse, most of all a fucking falsity.

One night, too, she became an approximation of a late-night porn clip she’d found, saved, hidden, on his computer. She was a person on her knees with his dick in her mouth, knowing for definite now that this was something he ‘liked’.

She’d felt jealous of the computer girl.

She’d wanted to compete.

When Clair received the announcement by email – not even by phone-call or letter or over a drink or a cup of tea, but by email – she decided to try and walk around the city and discover them together.

I should let you know, I am back together now with _____.

So she walked all the places that she went with him and all the places he mentioned from his past, and when they weren’t in any of those places, she made up some other places. She confronted them over and over again in her head. She interrupted them, mid-kiss, tapped him on the shoulder. But in the fantasy, she was only able to get that far, not to what happened next.

They just disentangle and turn round to face her and their faces are blanks.

Drinks with her ex-university friends, Kate and Simon.

They’re together now.

They hold hands and speak in code and occasionally ask her how she is.

They’ve never been more like strangers. Their faces and bodies and voices are strange, grotesque, finally to become horrifying when remembered in the locked toilet cubicle of the Kro bar. Clair doesn’t want to come out again unless it is something like six months into the future. She waits there, with her elbows making red marks in her knees, for that to happen.

She doesn’t want to admit that she is not a part of someone else, that he probably isn’t thinking about her, that she wasn’t strong or definite enough to make a dent in him.

She is alone, single, singular.

She is one times one.

Clair gets up and goes into the bathroom. She pisses. Blue light is glowing behind the curtains. She will be back at work four and a half hours from now. There are birds singing. She’s still almost drunk.

She goes into the kitchen. She turns on the tap and waits for the cold and fills a glass. She hopes the noise wakes him. Daniel. She finds his commanding red pen and square of post-it notes stacked neatly on the top of the fridge.

Please keep the snoring down in future, she writes. It is keeping me and my boyfriend awake. Thanks!

She walks down the hall, treading quietly, just on her toes.

She listens for any sound or movement or anything.

She sticks the post-it gently to his door.

Then she creeps back to her room and gets into bed and takes one of the extra pillows from the empty side and holds it to her as tightly as she can.

Chris Killen is the author of The Bird Room and can be found hanging around here.

For Jan Jakub Kotík*: In Memoriam . . .

2008-01-16T19:09:00.005Z

On the coldest night of the year. A siren swirls, the darkness blanches it all out. You become aware of a sudden shift in circumstances – someone you once knew is no longer. The formality is driven to make your eyes cave into stones. And there I sit in my black suit and watch another body dreaming, counting each exhalation, wondering what the total sum will tell me. It is not hard to find oneself in total discomfort on an emotional level. I only wish there was something higher than all this looking forward as I look back. The speakers blast out a warning – you were always tapped into the raw transmission, the circuitry threatening to shred us. We smoked dope at the Cannibal Corpse concert, nodded at the stage and said this is the real art. The ashes are circumstances that defy our genial loathing. If only a sheep really led to sleep, we’d have something to work on – something real to defy. There are lands he wouldn’t go to, places made of plastic with syrup for oceans. I hate those places. What I’m talking about is a genuine shelter called home. That was the last place I saw you – a sunny day in autumn, rays bouncing off the Vltava. We were so eager to speak, from one side of town to another, I nearly forgot to step off, while you continued on to Anděl. There was no death in your face then. The way the tram goes down that hill, past the government. Here, a million stories get told each day. I could barely serve as a container for myself in those years, and yet I caught you rising. Days, I fear, when it was cold enough to snow. The monitors blasted forth the wilful supplication of the powers you had long run away from. Sometimes thought can be imagined. Sometimes those imaginings can be transformed into structures. Sometimes structures come in and interfere with our lives. And sometimes those structures rest dormant inside us, just waiting to erupt.

* 22.10.1972 – 13.12.2007

Travis Jeppesen.

'Hail to the Chief', an installation by Jan Jakub Kotík

Travis Jeppesen is a novelist, poet and art critic. More details can be found here.

We are only humans . . .

2008-01-16T19:06:00.002Z

Walking, my feet firm on the pavement, absorbing the suck of gravity, my watch tapping out time on my wrist. There is nothing outside the words, those distorting breathed words. Is my looking at the other pedestrians an act of theft? Flowers flare in small beds. Broad houses, stucco over the grubby voices, the small foot steps from room to room, steps smothered by drab slippers, the battlefield smell of cooking flesh, the scrape of a chair pushed sharp from a table. I am sick of words and their tyranny. It repeats, like a loop, people go by, over and over, legs, legs, arms and head. Bound by breath; fractals of an abandoned idol. As I walk I turn the palms of my hands inwards to hide my lies. The sun scorns behind a cloud, I am descended from a long line of liars, some of them compulsive, most of them elaborate, all just fiction. They were fat, with the bloat of the drowned. A day with its remote movement, the circles, I forget, but look at the man passing me by, his paper tucked under his arm, a carrier bag flush with supper to be warmed, his black shoes pressing into the indifferent earth. I want him to turn and reach for me Milk warm, this mammalian press to be held tight, his breath soil rich, hands that lie flat on skin, like a silk sail on a windless day. The perfect dark of a human kiss.

I am reflected everywhere, in the shabby puddles, the miniature video screen behind the counter relaying my purchase of a bounty bar, the silvered windows of the car showroom. I am aware of myself – what a sight.

I found a dead bird, at the foot of a tree, the roots concreted into the path. Snatched from the air by death, an immaculate treasure. It had eluded the scavenging night. A blue tit, perfect unlike human cadavers with their flung limbs and slack mouths, the frank stare of blinded eyes. Its beak firm shut, eyes closed, its weightless body a tidy oval, egg like, its wings carefully folded. I carry him in my pocket, stroking the feathers; the lacework once readied for flight. He is marvellous, this alien creature subject to different laws, defiant of the bondage of gravity, giving it the slip, till now. I touch him, the spindle of his beak, the contracted claws hooked around air; I slip my finger into the ring, a marriage vow, a contract of claw and bone, small flesh. Manacled as I am to this obdurate planet, its grip. Possessive and unbending in its silly rules, there is music, a bird song, time made manifest. Light binds, with its strict geometry. The dark disarms us. My bird husband and his human wife. I think only of pale blue eyes.

Heidi James.

Heidi James's novella The Mesmerist's Daughter (published by Apis Books) was launched in July 2007 (‘Ingenious’ – Dazed and Confused), her novel Carbon (published by Blatt) will be out in Spring 09 and published in Spanish by El Tercer Nombre. Her essays and short stories have appeared in various publications including Dazed and Confused, Next Level, Flux, Brand, The Independent, 3:AM London, New York, Paris, Dreams That Money Can Buy, Full Moon Empty Sports Bag, Pulp,net. She is publisher and owner of Social Disease Books.

The Heart is a Small, Amputated Thing . . .

2007-10-24T23:18:00.003+01:00

Nicole drove away from Raphael at a good clip, as soon as they had copped the drugs. Nicole was focused and silent. Carl was too. Carl could not drive. Since he hadn’t acquired the skill in all the years he had lived in LA, he safely assumed that he would go to his deathbed without learning.

Carl was in the backseat, tearing open one of the black balloons with his teeth. He had the spoon balanced on his knees. He poured some Evian into the spoon and dropped a nugget of dope into the water. Nicole had the radio on. It was an 80’s flashback weekend again. Every weekend in LA seemed to be an 80’s flashback weekend. Rodney Bingeheimer started to play “Dead Mans Party” by Oingo Boingo and Carl yelled, “Turn that shit off, you’re gonna kill my high.”

She stuck a tape in, The Smiths self-titled first album. Carl instructed her to drive steady, as he cooked the dope, dropped a cigarette filter into the solution, and drew it up into 2 syringes. On the backseat was an empty bag of Jack In The Box from last week which had made the whole car stink of stale onion rings. Not even the smell of just cooked heroin could mask it. Carl had a rubber tourniquet around his arm and his syringe between his teeth.

People were honking at Nicole because she was driving slowly, mindful of Carl’s activities in the back seat. A Toyota Corolla pulled around them, the driver gave the finger, and cursed at her in Spanish. Nicole yelled for him to suck her dick. Carl slid the needle in his arm.

He was burrowing around in there. In was 11am on Saturday morning, and the heat was already oppressive, stifling. They had just spent their last 100 dollars on heroin and crack. They had another 2 weeks wait until the next disability check arrived. It was hopeless. But they couldn’t figure out what else to do. They couldn’t figure out a way of spending the 100 dollars that would save their asses. 100 dollars didn’t go far. It represented either a few more nights in the hotel, food for the week, gas for the car. Other than that it had little practical value. Spending it on drugs seemed to be a much more sensible thing to do.

Carl had been an addict for several years. Before he was an addict, he ghosted from job to job, girl to girl, always feeling somewhat sad and unsatisfied with life. Sex made him happy sometimes, but after he came he would feel slightly sick in the pit of his belly and melancholy in a way that he couldn’t quite understand. As if he had taken advantage of the girl, or himself, and he couldn’t quite figure out how. Every morning he woke up with a sad, disconnected feeling that the day was something to be overcome, like a bout of illness or a mathematics test.

Heroin was rife in the music scene in LA. It seemed that nobody left turds floating in the toilets of LA bars anymore – just crumpled bits of tin foil. Heroin was not hard to track down. For want of a strong pull in any other direction Carl had tried it and liked it, and kept doing it from that day on. It didn’t cure the ache inside of him, but it cured the boredom he felt. Life on heroin was as much of a chore as life off of it, but at least on it he woke up with the feeling that something interesting might happen.

Carl pulled the needle out of my arm, causing some black-looking blood to gout out a little. He thought “Where were you when I needed you?” He stuck the needle back in, a little further down, and started probing around again.

Suddenly the car bounced, and he shot straight out of his seat, hit his head on the upholstery, and tore a hole in his arm the size of a nickel. Carl looked very bloody, and he had somehow bent up the needle too.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded, “Drive slowly, bitch!”
“It was a pothole!” she yelled back, “You can’t expect me to take the blame for all of the goddamned pot holes in this city! And don’t call me bitch. Stop talking like a nigger! You’re Polish!”

Carl got it in. The needle was bent, but he managed to strike red gold on his third attempt, and I fed the shit in, slow and steady. Somebody else was honking at them, as Nicole made a turn into an “El Pollo Loco” parking lot. As the dope hit, the frantic, staccato horn started to sound like John Coltrane blowing on his tenor. When the second guy that day started to curse them out in Spanish, it sounded like he was reading Lorca.

“You just couldn’t wait two fucking minutes. Look at you. You look like you’ve been in a bar fight. You’re such a fucking pig.”

In the parking lot Carl sat back, jaw slack and mouth wide, while Nicole fixed in her groin, knees up on the steering wheel. When they were both high enough that the question didn’t hurt, she asked him:

“So what are we going to do now?”
Carl said: “I don’t know.”

They had already moved their shit out of the hotel, and stashed it in bin liners in the trunk of the car. There was no more money for drugs. The disability checks were arriving at their old apartment, but instead of changing their address, once a month they would stake out the apartment, wait for the mail man, and then sneak their check out of the mailbox before the new tenants got to it. It was stupid system, but the whole process of writing to the county and informing them of the new address seemed unnecessarily long and fraught with potential anxiety. Carl and Nicole didn’t like anxiety. That’s why they took heroin.

“My mom keeps saying we should stay with her to get clean.”
“Will she give us food?”
“Yes.”
“Money?”
“Nope. But I know the combination of their safe. As long as we don’t take too much, they would probably never even know. We could detox ourselves, just take the bare minimum and reduce.”
“That doesn’t work. That never works.”
“People get clean that way. I’ve seen it on TV.”
“TV isn’t real, Nicole.”
“Look – some people get clean. They have to. Where do all the ex junkies come from?”
Carl shrugged. But then it was decided. They were going to stay in Nicole’s mom's house, in Venice.

When she first told him that her mom lived in Venice, Carl stupidly thought that she meant Venice Italy. But there was nothing romantic about the part of Venice that Nicole’s mom lived at. It was called Ghost Town. It was a crack neighborhood. Nicole’s mom’s house was beautiful. Nicole’s stepfather had built the whole thing himself. He was a city architect. He had built it in the early 80’s, convinced that Ghost Town was a neighborhood on the verge of a sudden gentrification. He was wrong.

The house reflected his obsession with Japanese culture. It looked Japanese. It had a wood façade, and was surrounded by sliding glass panels. There were mediation rooms and samurai swords on the walls. It looked like it had been airlifted into the ghetto from Osaka or something. You couldn’t see any of this from the street, because the house was surrounded by an imposing brick wall, covering all but the roof. It was like the house was a high-risk prisoner, locked away from the general population for its own safety.

After they moved into the guesthouse, Nicole’s mom left them alone. She seemed quiet and anxious most of the time, ghosting around the two of them silently. The guesthouse was small, and contained a kitchen, a computer, a bathroom and a bed. The first thing they did was smoke some crack. Nicole was showering. Carl opened the door a fraction and watched her. They had met at an East Hollywood bar 2 years prior. Back then she had been extremely pretty, slim: a cute blonde California punk rock girl. Now she had lost too many pounds, and her blonde hair had almost all grown out, and she had tried to dye it red making it come out a kind of dirty shit-brown color. She was bad at shooting up and she had chewed up a lot of the skin on her arms. Nicole would tell him that she didn’t mind looking like this, though.
“It’s a relief. I don’t feel that I have any expectations to live up to. I can just be me now. I don’t have to me, you know, Nicole. I can be me.”

Watching her, her hair slicked back tight against her skull, the dimensions of her face altered, the fat and the innocence eaten away from her cheeks, the eyes bigger, the skull more pronounced, like another face was trying to force its way through the shell of the old one, the breasts smaller with hunger and neglect, and the scabs, bruises, lumps and red raw injection marks which traced the backs of her hands, her arms, even her hips and her legs, Carl started to wonder about fucking her again. It had been a long, long time since they had done that. Carl’s usual explanation for their newfound celibacy was the state of their bed. When a bed is filthy, burned with cigarette holes, piled high with unwashed clothes, stained with blood and wine and malt liquor, the last thing one wants to do on it is get naked. Even after they were evicted, each successive motel bed had transformed with baffling speed into a similar picture of dysfunction. Now there was a new bed, just made by Nicole’s mother, with flesh linens on it. Maybe now he could have her, while the cocaine was in his blood and he fleetingly felt like the thing between his legs was more than just extra weight to be carried around.

But instead of having sex with her, he looked at her naked body one last time and then ran to the fresh, clean bed, threw off his jeans and underwear, and masturbated furiously. It seemed quicker, easier, and fraught with less potential anxieties. Carl did not like anxiety. The thought of the aftermath – the two of them, naked and sweaty in the Los Angeles afternoon murk, making small talk, smelling each other, it was simply too much. After a few moments he realized he could not come, and that Nicole would surely be out of the shower soon, so he dressed again, stuffed his still hard penis back into his pants, and smoked a cigarette.

Over the next few days several things happened. They walked around the neighborhood and found three connections for crack, and began playing them off against each other for giving drugs on credit. Nicole’s mother came to have a serious talk with them about how they were ruining their lives, and by the time she left Nicole had managed to borrow 100 dollars off of her, supposedly so they could pay to get on a methadone program. Carl was pissing one morning, and he noticed that there was blood in his urine. One of Nicole’s molars rotted so badly that a chunk broke off when she was eating a Skor bar. One evening Carl stole a scooter - one of those stupid things that you have to pedal manually - and while he was pedaling away from the yard where he found it, a gang of black kids hanging out on the corner noticed him and yelled, “Hey nice SCOOTER!”

Carl didn’t say anything. He kept pedaling it, trying to get back to the guesthouse, hoping that it might raise a couple of dollars in the pawnshop. But when he heard feet pounding the road he turned and looked, and the kids were chasing him in up the street. They were gaining on him too. They were screaming “GIVE ME THAT SCOOTER, MOTHERFUCKER!” and Carl started furiously pedaling as fast as he could. He hit a hole in the road and flipped off the scooter, flying through the air, and landing in a heap 3 feet from the scooter, which looked rather sad, twisted up, it’s front wheel still spinning in a futile way. Carl stood unsteadily, felt hot blood dripping down his forearms, and fled the kids, cutting through a back alley to escape a beating. He thought he recognized one of them as the black bastard who had sold him a piece of soap instead of crack when they had first arrived in this place.

On the forth day, it was Sunday. Nicole’s mom and step dad were gone for the day. Nicole let herself into the house and took 80 dollars. Nicole took 40 and went downtown to score dope. Carl hit the streets of ghost town to find crack. It was 10am and the streets were empty. Carl found himself wandering, shell-shocked, like the survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Things he noticed lying in and around the streets of ghost town: used tampon (one), broken glass, used condoms (several), dead leaves, bloody underwear (one pair, female) and something that he thought was a dead rat but which turned out to be a weave.

Carl was by a church. Inside he could hear people singing. As he loitered, scanning the streets for a likely face, and old white woman emerged from the church carrying several heavy coats in her arms. There was no doubt that this woman was a crack user. She just had that look that all crack users get over time, as if they are all eventually turning into the same, little old lady. The crack head spotted Carl and walked across the parking lot to speak to him. She was sweating profusely.

“Are you looking for someone?” she asked.
“Yes,” Carl answered, “I am.”
“Are you trying to score rocks?” she said, squinting and looking at him closely.
Even though Carl had seen plenty of elderly crack fiends, something about them still did not compute with him. He could not understand the idea of being an old crack head. Old junkies were something different altogether, but old crack heads were a strange proposition. He started to doubt the evidence of his own eyes. Maybe she wasn’t a crack head! Maybe she was going to call for help if he answered in the affirmative. Startled, Carl started to stutter.

“Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh!” the old lady imitated, “Well goddamnit spit it out! You looking to score or not? You sure as shit ain’t here to pray! Here… hold these-“
She shoved the coats into Carl’s hand.
“How much money do you have?” she demanded.
“Like, 40 bucks.”
“OK give it to me.”
“What?”
“Gimmie the 40. I’m meeting Ray-Ray over here –" she motioned towards an alley running off of Rose Avenue, “If we pool our money we can get a bundle. Then we’ll split it up, and we’re both happy.”
“Erm… OK?” Carl said, confused.
“Come on, come on!” she insisted, “Give me the 40! We can’t keep him waiting!”

Carl found his footing again. The old bitch was trying to fast-talk him.
“I ain’t giving you my money! I don’t know you, bitch!”
The old lady looked at him, mockingly.
“Why you gotta go talking to me like a nigger? What are you, a Polack or a wop or something? You don’t look like a nigger to me. Why you talking like that?”
“Sorry,” Carl conceded, genuinely confused now.
“Walk with me.”

They walked away from the church.
“I’ll just go meet Ray-Ray with you,” Carl suggested, although he was still not happy with the idea of then having to split a package of drugs with this old woman. The dealer could be in cahoots with her. This whole deal reeked of a con.
“Ray – Ray don’t deal with people he don’t know.”
“Then introduce me!”
The old lady tutted and they walked into the alleyway.

They found Ray-Ray lurking by a dumpster smoking one of those tiny little cigars that only the extremely poor or they extremely old seem to smoke. Ray-Ray looked to be both. He was skeletal, black, wearing a neat black suit and a fedora despite the 80-degree heat. Tufts of grey hair poked out from under the hat. As they approached he spat on the ground, looked at Carl and then demanded: “Who’s this honky?”
“I’m Carl.”
Ray-Ray grabbed the woman by the arm.
“Bitch, I tole you not to be bringing people I don’t know along with you! What the fuck is wrong wit’ you?”
“He wouldn’t wait where I told him to wait! He doesn’t trust me!”

Ray-Ray sucked his teeth. Then he said: “OK quickly, let’s do this. What you want?”
Holding the coats with one hand Carl rummaged in my pocket and pulled out the 40 dollars. He handed it over. The old woman did the same. Ray-Ray pocketed the money and spat out a pretty healthy looking rock. When Carl saw it he started to think that maybe this hadn’t been such a bad idea after all. When split in two, it still represented more than what he was getting for his money from the other goons who operated in this neighborhood. Ray-Ray passed the rock on to the old lady, and split down the alleyway. Before he did it, he glared at Carl and her and said: “Now go on then! Git!”

They walked back the way they came from. As they exited the alleyway and started to cross the road, Carl was asking her where they cold go to break up the rock, when he started to hear yelling. He turned towards the noise, and saw a group of well-dressed young men walking out from the church, yelling and pointing at the both of them. At first Carl had the idea that they were yelling at someone just behind them. He looked, but there was no one there. He looked back at the men, and they were practically on top of him.

“There he is!” they were screaming, “That son of a bitch has the coats!”
“But-!” Carl started to yell.
As he did so he realized that the old lady had vanished in the confusion, and Carl was being grabbed from all sides, the coats pulled from his arms, and the man who seemed to be the leader of the mob punched Carl in the mouth, knocking him to the floor. Carl tasted the hot, coppery-ness of his own blood. After he fell to the ground, a couple of the others, possessed of the sudden bravado of numbers started kicking him and yelling “Motherfucking crackhead!” and Carl just lay there, grunting a little with each kick, until they left him and went back to tell their women folk how they had subdued the drug fiend who’d tried to rip off their Sunday coats.

Carl lay there for a while. There was something comforting about the feel of the tar underneath him, the taste of blood in his mouth, the sounds of sirens below and helicopters overhead. He knew that as soon as he stood, he would be re-engaging with the day, confronted with the reality that he had no money, no crack, and that Nicole would be pissed. Maybe she would not even feel obligated to share her dope with him. This whole string of events had been all down to utter carelessness on Carl’s part; even he had to admit that.

Sometimes Carl imagined that his soul was a large clear balloon filled with black water. When he was high enough, he imagined it frozen solid, dripping with icy particles. He imagined that his soul wore sunglasses, like Eldridge Cleaver on the front cover of Soul On Ice, arctic and inscrutable.

In time Carl would quit, would become re-addicted, and quit again. Nicole would eventually join a Christian commune and shave her head. They would split without a goodbye; something involving a bad drug deal over a particularly long, remorseless summer, only to meet again, 4 years after the men had beaten him and left him on the Venice sidewalk, at an AA meeting in Culver City. Nicole had put on weight, and allowed her hair to return to brown, and had removed all of her piercings. Carl had allowed his hair to grow and had a new tattoo on his forearm that read “Everything Is Broken”. They swapped small talk over instant coffee, and the conversation was forced and stilted, as if they had never really met before this moment. Each glanced over the others shoulder, looking for the easy escape of a less familiar face. Both of them would relapse within the year.

Nicole commented to Carl: “The heart is a small, amputated thing. Lonely and scared.” Carl had nodded silently, unsure of the correct response.

Neither of them would ever really find true happiness, only extreme moments of elation interspersed with many, many years of boredom, sadness, and fear. Drunk on rum playing chutes and ladders with his 3-year-old daughter. Listening to Johnny Thunders. Awash with broken transistors. Time travel and memory. Enough, enough. Carl never learned to drive.

Lying there, on the sidewalk of Venice beach, bleeding and content, Carl was of course unaware of all that life had in store for him. He was for once, truly, unbreakably in the moment. Overhead the seagulls whirled and called. The sky seemed impossibly blue.

Tony O'Neill.

Tony O’Neill is the author of "Down and Out on Murder Mile" (Harper Perennial)“Digging The Vein” (out in the UK on Wrecking Ball Press[UK], Contemporary Press [US]), “Seizure Wet Dreams: Poems and Short Stories” (Social Disease), and “Songs From The Shooting Gallery” (Burning Shore Press). He lives in New York. He will be featured in the following anthologies: “Brutalism #1”, “Falling From The Sky” (Another Sky Press), “Danger City 2” (Contemporary Press) and “Writing From The Edge”. Please visit http://www.tonyoneill.net/ to send hate mail, or for more info.

Carnaby Street . . .

2007-03-06T01:26:00.001Z

Carnaby Street has been a tourist Mecca for several decades and while the fashions displayed in the shop windows constantly change, there are plenty of specialist outlets catering to those with a nostalgic bent. I'd been invited to a sixties party and wanted to gear up as a mod. It was a Monday morning and the only sign of excitement in the premises I'd entered was the sound of a Desmond Dekker greatest hits CD booming out from Wharfdale speakers.

'Can I help you?' a woman in her late thirties enquired.

'Yeah, I want a suit,' I replied.

'What size?'

'Thirty-six inch chest, thirty waist, thirty-one leg, charcoal grey.'

I didn't need to state the style, the only type sold in the shop were the three button affairs with narrow lapels that had been favoured by mods during the cult's sixties heyday. The sales assistant pulled what I needed from a rack and handed it to me as I stepped into the store's only changing cubical.

I took off my coat and then dropped my trousers.

'How's it going?' the woman asked as she yanked back the curtain.

'I haven't got the damn thing on yet!' I replied as I stepped into a freshly ironed pair of sta-prest trousers.

The shop assistant zipped up the fly as I fastened the button on the waist-band. The woman smiled at me, the corners of her mouth turned up in a laugh as she took in my mild embarrassment. I slipped on the jacket and the sales girl ran her hands over my body, simultaneously smoothing down the odd crease in the material.

'All the boys look very smart in our clothes,' the woman told me. Then touching my erection with her hand added, 'the tight fit shows your body to its full advantage.'

I tried to put my arms around the sales girl but she stepped out of the cubical. Reaching forward again, she grabbed my shoulders and then spun me around, so that I was looking at myself in a full length mirror.

'Being dressed in a smart suit must make you feel more of a man!' the shop assistant cried.

'Yeah, I feel really good,' I crowed as I looked at myself in the mirror. 'But why don't you wear the kind of clothes that are sold in here, I like what you've got on but it would be great to see you in mod girl gear.'

'No, no, no!' the woman shot back, 'I'm not a youngster like you, it wouldn't be dignified at my age, I'm more at home wearing skirts from Marks and Sparks.'

'You're not that much older than me!' I protested. 'And I'm sure if you let your hair down, you'd be asked for proof of your age every time you ordered a drink in a pub.'

The shop assistant fiddled with some clips and then shook her head, so that her shiny black hair cascaded around her shoulders. With her face framed in this fashion, the woman's infectious smile was even more stunning than the first time I'd clocked it.

'I think that dark suit is a little too sombre for you,' the sales girl observed gravely. 'What about trying one in a different colour?'

'Blue,' I said, 'let's see what I look like in blue.'

As I hung up the first suit I'd tried, the woman zipped around the shop. I smiled as she locked the door. Split-seconds later, she was back with me, a new suit, white socks, black tie, white shirt, union jack boxer shorts and loafer shoes in her hands.

'I want you nicely packaged,' the shop assistant told me, 'your grey briefs and socks are a fashion mistake. The loafers are size nine, you'll look a lot better in them than those awful trainers.'

I stripped off. Once I was naked, the sales girl stroked my pubic hair but was very careful to avoid touching my throbbing erection. She handed me the union jack boxers shorts and I stepped into them. Then I pulled on the socks and slipped into the shirt. The woman lifted my collar and wrapped the tie around my neck, knotting it and pulling it tight. After this, I slipped into the sta-prest trousers, jacket and shoes. Once again, the shop assistant smoothed down the creases in my clothes. This time she kissed me on the cheek before stepping back to admire my sartorial elegance.

'You look great!' the woman said admiringly, 'I told you all the boys look very smart in our clobber!'

I spread my arms and stepped towards the sales girl but once again she spun me around. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror and what I saw did a great deal to add to my self-confidence. It made me wonder why I'd spent so much of my life slouching around in jeans and a leather jacket. Power is sexy and the mod gear gave me an aura of youth and vitality, something that is often in short supply among men in their late twenties.

This time as I advanced on the woman, she let me put my arms around her. We kissed but she pulled back as I tried to force my tongue into her mouth.

'You're too greedy for it,' the sales girl laughed. 'I like to take things slowly, I want you to smell my hair and then kiss it.'

I took the shop assistant in my arms a second time and pressed my nose against the crown of her head. I sniffed and inhaled a peachy fragrance.

Her hair smelt really fresh, I guess she must have washed it that morning. I let two great handfuls of the woman's silky black hair slip through my fingers as I kissed the top of her head. Then I moved my mouth to the right until I was kissing and eventually nibbling at the sales girl's ear.

'That's really nice,' the woman laughed as I bit her lobe, 'but now I want you to start at the other end of my body, I want you to give me a shrimp job.'

'Okay,' I agreed, 'but I'd better take off my trousers because I don't want to crease them.'

As I kicked off my loafers, the shop assistant stepped out of her white stilettos. While I carefully folded the sta-prest, she peeled off her tights. The sales girl sat on a high stool that had been placed by the till. I got on my knees and licked at the purple varnish that had been painted over her toe nails. Then, I worked my tongue in and out of the cracks between her toes. While I was doing this, a youth banged on the door.

'Come back in twenty minutes,' the woman shouted at him, 'the shop is closed right now.'

I took the sales girl's big toe in my mouth and sucked on it. She moved her foot back and forth, I quickly caught on to what she wanted and bobbed my head up and down, so that my lips were rolling up and down the toe.

'That feels so nice,' the shop assistant moaned, 'it's got me all wet! Now I want you to run your tongue around my clit!'

The woman stood up, simultaneously rolling her skirt around her waist. I raised my head and pressed my mouth against her pubic thatch. I flicked my tongue back and forth across her clitoris, then ran my nose up and down her slit. Her olive brown skin beautifully offset a profuse tangle of jet black hair.

'Work your tongue up my hole!' the sales girl screamed as I lapped at her quim.

I did as I was told, then replaced the tongue with a finger and successfully penetrated the site of her mystery. I worked a second digit into the shop assistant's cunt, while simultaneously using my mouth to lap at her clitoris. Sex juice was splashing between the woman's legs and she was bellowing the sweetest of obscenities.

'You beautiful bastard!' the sales girl howled as I worked her hole with my fingers and mouth. 'That feels so good! Now I want you to lie on your back!'

I did as I was told. The woman hauled the boxer shorts I was wearing over my ankles and then rolled a condom down my prick. With my cock in her hand, she straddled my thighs and guided the throbbing member into her cunt.

'Lie still, I'm setting the pace!' the shop assistant barked as I thrust upwards.

Allowing my buttocks to sink back against the floor, I obeyed. Ever so slowly, the woman raised and lowered her body. These movements became more and more subtle, until she was sitting motionless above me.

'Can you feel my cunt muscles contracting?' my partner demanded. 'Do you like it?'

'Yes, yes!' I yelled. 'Your body fits me like a glove!'

'I've studied tantric sex and I'm gonna make you come by relaxing and then increasing the grip I've got on your prick!' the woman hissed.

I could feel the muscles in my crotch contracting as she worked me up towards orgasm. The sales girl's hands were pressed against my chest and I grabbed her tits before shooting off a great wad of liquid genetics. The shop assistant yelped with pleasure as a simultaneous orgasm swept through our twin bulks. Then she tilted forward and fell panting against me.

The few minutes during which we lay together on the carpet were an utterly blissful moment of union. Then the sales girl got up, pulled on her knickers and unlocked the door. I skulked back into the fitting room split-seconds before a customer came through the door. Once I was dressed, I paid for the blue suit with a credit card.

'I can't remember how much those ties cost,' the woman laughed, 'so I haven't put it on the bill. I hope you're honest enough to come back in a few days to settle up the difference.'

'Oh yes,' I assured her, 'I'll be back!'

Stewart Home © 2007.

Stewart Home, 43, is the enfant terrible of the UK post-punk avant-garde art movement and cult writing circuit. He is the author of over 20 books including: Memphis Underground, Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess and his most recent, highly acclaimed, novel Tainted Love. Famous for his elaborate hoaxes and agit-prop art events, and feted by the likes of Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair and the NME, he is often referred to as the English successor to William Burroughs. For more information please see: www.stewarthomesociety.org

The Song of the Canary . . .

2007-03-05T22:09:00.001Z

When it all fell apart the first time around, Susan’s father carted her off to rehab heavily strung out and half insane, while I ended up getting a grant from a foundation that helped addicted artists get into drug treatment. It was a bad time all around. We had lost the apartment and were reduced to sleeping in our car. When the car was gone we checked into a scummy hotel on Wilcox Avenue called the Mark Twain. When we couldn’t pay rent there anymore, and the dealers wouldn’t front us any more drugs, we threw our hands up and gave in to Susan’s parents. He had to get clean.

My wife ended up in a nice rehab, one of those country club places where the sons and daughters of Hollywood’s elite to go dry out, while I was stuck out in Pasadena in a place that didn’t take any shit from junkies, and had us scrubbing the toilets with toothbrushes if we got too uppity. Once the councellors made a girl walk around all day with a toilet seat hung around her neck that had the word “PRIDE” painted on it, reputedly because she wouldn’t admit she was an alcoholic in addition to being a crack head. I thought then – and I still think now – that 99% of what goes on in drug treatment is total bullshit. All of the self-help nonsense that they promote in there: letting go and letting God, taking it one day at a time, surrendering. It all sounded like a bunch of religion to me, just a cynical attempt to convert people while they were at their lowest ebb. Honestly what most of the guys I met in there needed was detoxification, a holiday somewhere warm, and maybe a blowjob.

I visited Susan’s rehab once, on a day trip from my own place. I’d assumed that all rehabs were pretty much the same. Mine was full of Mexican gang kids, junkies, jailbird meth freaks, and boozers. The men and women were strictly segregated and even saying hello to a member of the opposite sex was an infraction that could result in your getting thrown out. They took it very seriously. I once held a door open for a female and she smiled “thank you” as she passed. Someone snitched, and we both had to clean the toilets on our respective floors instead of eating lunch. By the time I got down to eat, there were just some ratty hot dogs left. No girls ever said ‘thank you’ to me after that.

But since a lot of the guys were fresh out of prison on my floor, they didn’t really care if they fucked a girl or a guy. Guys having sex with each other was strictly verboten as well, but it was harder for them to clamp down on that. The older guys were expected to form bonds with the newer guys, lead them through the twelve steps, mentor them, etc. So there was a lot of ass fucking going on after lights out. But if you were straight it was frustrating because despite the fact that all of the fruits were getting some, a guy simply saying hello to a girl could lead to his cleaning shit stained toilets and eating cold hot dogs.

We had 2 Narcotics Anonymous meetings a day. And on top of that meetings with caseworkers, shrinks, relapse prevention experts, the works. And cleaning duties. Emptying out the overflowing ashtrays. Scrubbing toilets. Scraping the mould from shower stalls. Kitchen duty was the worst because of the smell of the decomposing food. And out the back of the kitchen there was a McDonalds across the road where some local crack dealers operated from. Throwing all of that rotting food into the big garbage cans out there, you’d see drug deals going on under the tables through the windows. It became a running joke with all of the guys. We talked about the idea of running across the street and copping some rocks as “going for a Happy Meal.” We never did it though. They were on top of all that shit, everybody was a potential snitch, and they tested your piss so much that it would be virtually impossible. Most guys had more to lose than me. A lot of them were facing serious jail time if they fucked up their treatment.

So it was that kind of rehab. Hard work. There were fun things, mostly stupid shit we did to entertain ourselves . . . stealing of the old meth freaks false teeth and hiding them about the place, coming up with vindictive nick names for the councellors, passing notes with lewd sexual suggestions on them to the female patients, childish shit like that. Mostly though, it was work. They kept you so busy that you didn’t have time to think about getting high, except when you were in your dorm at the end of the day listening to three other junkies snoring in unison, with the big neon clown from the liquor store across the road blinking on, then off, then on again.

So after a couple of weeks of prayers and meetings and cleaning detail, I earned a day pass. On a day pass you had to do something recovery orientated, and take one of the long-term inmates with you to watch over you. So I decided to visit Susan in her rehab. My companion was a junkie trombone player called Jock who had been clean for almost a year and was practically a staff member at this point. Jock was OK though. Some of them turned into uptight motherfuckers as soon as they made trustee. Bestow a bit of meaningless, symbolic power of 99% of the assholes in this world and they will turn into Stalin. Things are no different in rehab. Guys who were laughing and joking with you about wanting to cut out and sneak some dope into the place a few weeks ago suddenly would report you for suggesting such a thing, resulting in piss tests, a ripped apart dorm - and if you were really unlucky - a hand up your ass. Jock somehow had retained his soul despite his position of authority. He was a good guy.

So we drove up to Susan’s rehab and the first thing I noticed was all of the green. Trees. Grass. A lot different from the utilitarian sand, steel and concrete of my place. We signed in, got searched, and then were directed to Susan’s room.

She was in a beautiful log cabin, in the middle of this great big field. I came upon her sitting in a circle with some guys. One of them was playing a guitar, like the cliché of a west-coast hippie wannabe. He was singing some terrible song about the scars on his heart, and when I caught the lyrics I prickled with embarressment for him. Birds were tweeting, and the air was cool. I felt like at any moment some prick in a tuxedo was gonna walk past with a tray full of Mohito's. Guys and girls could talk. Meetings were not compulsory. It seemed like the biggest con of all time, and I was immediately jealous.

But Susan, true to form, was still bitching about the place. She claimed to have a back problem, and complained that the doctors wouldn’t give her painkillers, just Valium. Back in my place a girl had gotten kicked out because she had a gallstone, went to the hospital, and accepted a shot of pethidine. Apparently, the routine was that you had to call ahead to the rehab before accepting treatment and get it cleared with the higher ups. She didn’t, and was on a bus back to a California women’s prison by sundown. Susan had wangled a spot in this place because her father was a doctor and pretty well connected. My father was a bus driver back in the UK, so I suppose that’s why I ended up where I was.

We had to be careful when I called her from my institution because all phone calls were monitored. So when I called over to see how she was doing we’d talk in generalities, how the food was, what the other inmates were like, that kind of shit. When we were face to face, while the fool played his acoustic guitar, I finally asked her:

“So what do you think of all of this?”

Susan sighed and sucked on a cigarette, exhaling out of the corner of her mouth. She had gained weight in the weeks she had been here. She must have been up to a hundred pounds at least.

“Well, it’s all a pile of shit, obviously.”

“Yup. Do you go to meetings?”

“When I feel like it. Over here they feel that us just hanging out like this is a productive part of our recovery.”

“Lucky you. I wake up saying the fucking serenity prayer sometimes. I feel like I’m being brainwashed.”

“You are. You think we’ll get high when we get out of here?”

“Probably. I think we might die if we do, though.”

“Probably.”

Jock pulled me aside as said that if I wanted to sneak off to have sex with Susan he wouldn’t blow my cover. I laughed and told him no thanks. He looked puzzled, so I whispered: “I’ve seen that girl stick needles into her tits trying to find a working vein. That kinda takes all of the romance out of it, you know?”

And then it was over, and I was driven back to my rehab in time for supper and a final meeting. There were some real cranks in there. One guy was a little meth head called Peter who I thought was OK because he looked like a weasel and put me in mind of a junkie I used to shoplift with in Hollywood. I met Peter when I first got out of the detox wards, and I was still sleep deprived and loaded with anti-anxiety tablets and dope sickness. Peter decided he wanted to take me under his wing. He would bring his tray over to me and sit with me at lunchtime, talking about sobriety. He had been in this place for 6 months in all. I asked him if he wanted to leave.

“Oh sure,” he said, “All of the time.”

“So why don’t you? 6 months is a long time! You could make it now, baby…”

“Well my caseworker says I can’t.”

“Who is your caseworker?”

He nodded over to the staff table and said “Maria.”

Then I understood. Maria was one of the longest serving staff members here, a huge, motherly castrating bitch. You could glean that information from just looking at her. She looked like a mean, pinched face, church going sort of a cunt, and consequently I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her fat ass. The first time I came across her was when we were all assembled in the dining room for morning prayers. I thought that she was just a regular inmate. One of the head guys was due to come in and lead us in prayers and he was late. We sat there, as was protocol, in total silence for at least ten minutes. Nobody walked through the door. Then people started looking at each other, raising eyebrows, shrugging. It was my 3rd day in the place. I turned to a guy I knew from the detox ward, a motor-mouthed Boston-Irish crack fiend called Billy and said: “Godot will be here soon”, and Billy started to crack up. I laughed too, and suddenly Maria was on her feet and striding over to me on her thick legs, pointing an accusing finger and incandescent with rage.

“YOU!” she screamed, “WHY are you TALKING? You know that we have RULES and REGULATIONS here, do you not?”

“Sure.” I said. I didn’t like he way she was looking down her long nose at me. So I smirked at her. It always worked on my wife when I wanted to provoke a situation, and predictably it worked on Maria.

“You sit here and wait IN SILENCE! I’ll bet when you called the dope man and he said he’d be RIGHT THERE and he was LATE you SAT YOUR ASS DOWN and WAITED, RIGHT?”

“Right.” I conceded.

“And when the LIQUOR STORE wasn’t open yet, you SAT YOUR ASS DOWN and WAITED for it to OPEN, RIGHT?”

I shrugged. I was never much of a boozer, but in 3 days I had had this argument no less than 5 times with my caseworker and I knew I wouldn’t win. For all intents and purposes, while I was in this place, I was an alcoholic.

“So while you are waiting for the man whose job it is to SAVE YOUR SORRY ASS, you can SHUT THE FUCK UP and WAIT, RIGHT?”

“I am waiting. But when I was waiting for my guy to bring me dope, I didn’t have to act as if I was in fucking church.”

She slammed a pudgy hand on the table, and her entire top half wobbled with fury.

“That attitude,” she hissed, “will leave you back out there in the goddamned gutter with a needle sticking out of you. You understand me?”

“Loud and clear.”

So it all made sense with Peter. I could see it now. Twice a week he’d have a meeting with Maria and in the meantime he would work himself up enough to tell her that he felt strong enough to go home, go back to work, and stop living in this fantasyland of prayer meetings, urine tests, and day passes. And twice a week Maria would tell him that he was a weak man, and that he would relapse as soon as he left this place of sanctuary. And despite how ridiculous life in rehab was, for a lot of people when compared to life on the needle or the pipe, it was actually preferable. Human beings are easily manipulated animals. All they really want is 3 square meals a day, a roof over their heads, and a bed that doesn’t have lice in it. As shitty as rehab was, for a lot of us it seemed like Disneyworld compared to where we came from. So giving in was easy, and Peter was defeated until the next time. And when the pettiness of life in the place finally got to him, when he couldn’t piss in a bottle on command any more, or eat stale slices of pizza, or hold hands and say the lords prayer without smirking, or read the motherfucking Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and all he really wanted to do was grab a beer, watch some TV and maybe get some pussy, he would storm into her office again full of determination and fire. And for the past six months, he eventually walked out with his meth-head tail between his legs. I pitied Peter a little, but I also feared for my own immortal soul the longer I stayed here.

I finished my dealings with Peter after I was walking around the yard with him on a break one day and I confided in him that I was thinking about leaving.

“But w-w-why?” he stammered.”I don’t like all of this AA stuff. And I spoke to Susan, and she’s ready to leave her rehab too. She called her sister up in San Francisco, and she said we could go up there and stay at her place for a month or so. Maybe all we need is a change of scenery. A cocktail. Just a little space, you know?

“You’re crazy! You’ll he high before you get on the plane! You’ll both die!”

“Jesus Peter,” I told him, “You’re starting to sound like that crazy bitch of a caseworker!”

“Maria isn’t a bitch!” he protested, “She has my best interests at hear!”

“Oh yeah,” I laughed, “and Hitler loved the Jews. She’s castrating you, Peter! She may want you off drugs, but she’s prepared to amputate your soul in the process!”

“Soul, soul, soul! You’re always talking about your soul! You need to stop worrying about your soul and start worrying about your ass!”

And right there, right in the middle of the exercise yard, in front of at least 2-dozen junkies, juicers and ex-cons, he fell to his knees and grabbed my hand. I tried to shake free, but his grip was too tight.

“Kneel with me!” he implored.

“Fuck off! You bugging out or something?”

“Dear Lord,” he started, “please protect your lost child in his hour of need, and watch over his wife Susan…”

“Oh fucking hell!”

People were circling around us watching with detached amusement. Somebody was always flipping out in this place. Today was Peter’s turn, and I was right there with him, holding his hand like we were fucking high school sweethearts.

“Please intervene and keep them in this place of safety. Please help him to turn away from the darkness of addiction and into the eternal light of your love…”

“GET YOUR FUCKING HAND OFF ME YOU FREAK ASSHOLE!”

Michael, one of the new trustee inmates came over and asked what all the commotion was about. Peter looked up and told him: “He wants to leave and go to San Francisco.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” I pleaded.

And with that I shook free of Peter. But it was too late. That evening I was called in for an extra counseling session. I had the eyes of the entire facility on me. I was put into the high-risk category and so I had to endure a bright-eyed fucking pep talk from every trustee and staff member I bumped into. I never confided in Peter again.

Across the road from the rehab until was a liquor store called Circus Liquor. The places claim to fame was the 20-foot neon clown signage the place had, with a flashing neon red smile. The window of my dorm room looked right over to it, and it blinked on and off all fucking night. Sometimes my roommates and I would stare at it for an hour or more. One of my roommates was an old sex change called Marty whose teeth had fallen out, and whose implanted breasts had been removed, leaving him with two saggy pieces of skin where his tits used to be. Marty was cool. His taste in music left something to be desired though. I had pawned all of my CD’s for junk prior to checking in, and so I had to rely on my roommates for music. The first guy claimed not to like music, and owned nothing. Marty had 2 CD’s – A Moody Blues greatest hits, and a terrible dance CD with a name like “Mega Hits 47” or some such shit. Marty was quite insane, and seemingly immune from all of the nonsense that went on in the counseling rooms. He was the only person in the place who never once tried to talk recovery with me. He talked exclusively in non-sequiters after 20 plus years of IV meth use.

“That fucking clown is taunting us…” Marty muttered, as the neon reflected on his shrunken up old face, “he saying ‘hey boys… come have a gin and tonic boys… with ice…’”

Our other roommate, David, yelled over: “Shut the fuck up!” He was reading the Big Book again. They banned books that weren’t recovery orientated, and indeed 12-step orientated. Other methods such as Rational Recovery, which was in vogue at the time, were as off-limits as an illicit copy of Playboy or Naked Lunch.

“Oh shut the fuck up, mary!” Marty retorted.

“That’s alcoholic thinking Marty! That will land you in trouble!”

“Marty isn’t an alcoholic. He’s a speed freak! Right Marty?”

“He is so an alcoholic! You’re talking a lot of shit! We’re all alcoholics or we wouldn’t be here!”

“Bullshit! I could have a beer right now and I’d be OK!”

“You’re a fool to yourself, man. Why don’t you open your ears and your mind a little? You might learn something that will save your life…”

The booze thing was total bullshit as far as I could see. I had never had a drinking problem. I thought at first they were joking when they asked me to admit I was an alcoholic. When you check in you have to do an inventory of every intoxicant you have ever done, and list the first time you did it, how much, etc etc. Mine was a couple of pages long. It started at 14 years old when I had my first drink. This was perfectly normal for all of my childhood friends. There’s not much else to do in Blackburn, Lancashire. Everyone I knew back then managed to get booze somehow - through an older brother or a parent’s liquor cabinet - and get drunk at least once a week. My caseworker seized upon this as proof of my alcoholic tendencies.

“Well if that’s the case,” I told him, “Everybody I grew up with is also an alcoholic. By that logic, my father is an alcoholic!”

“Well,” he told me perfectly seriously, “It does run in the family you know. There is irrefutable scientific proof that alcoholism is a genetic disease!”

I have my own theory about booze and addiction. As long as I’m still drinking, I know I’m OK. When I started doing coke, I used to snort it socially and still drink. I was doing OK then. When I smoke weed, I drink as well. But when I started smoking crack and injecting heroin, I stopped drinking altogether, because the high from booze lost all of its appeal to me. I mean, why fuck around drinking a beer when you have a needle full of cocaine and heroin? If I ever get so into a drug that I stop drinking, then I know I’m in trouble. In a way, the booze is an indicator that things are good, like the song of the canary that they used to send down mineshafts looking for gas leaks. When I told my caseworker this, he looked horrified. He had the same look of his face that I suppose I get when people tell me that they love the president, go to church, or give money police charities. Complete fucking astonishment.

“We are going to have to do a lot of work with you…” he warned me, opening his notebook.

Despite her rehab being free and easy, Susan eventually checked out against doctor’s orders, and moved into an apartment she had found through a guy she met in there. My funding from the artists on the skids foundation ran out, and I was turfed out too. The rehab was trying to look into getting my stay extended via Medicaid, but at that point I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Susan’s sister wired us enough money to get up plane tickets. Unfortunately, our connection was still operating on the same street corner, so we blew ticket money on crack and dope.

Peter was kicked out the day before I left. They discovered that his brother had mailed him an American Express card and he failed to tell the staff about it. He owned up to the card in a counseling session with Maria. She told him to hand it over. He refused and said that he would like to do it in his own time. She told him that the card represented his next relapse, and by holding onto the card he was holding onto his old behaviors. Peter refused, and Maria went to the higher ups. Peter was turfed out that evening. We said a stiff goodbye, before he walked out to his fate.

I still think 99% of what goes on in rehab is bullshit, but I have used the other 1% to my advantage, I’m typing this pleasantly high, but not strung out. I don’t have a higher power, but I do have a daughter and a wife who keep me from sticking needles in my arms. I never heard from Peter again, despite giving him my phone number. I heard that Billy got drunk and hung himself. Christ knows what happened to Marty. The last time I saw Susan she was in London, living with a junkie we both knew. She was walking with a cane and holding onto him for support, both of them phantoms on the fog bound platform of Queens Park Underground station.

And I still worry about my immortal soul every single day.

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

Tony O’Neill is the author of “Digging The Vein” (out in the UK on Wrecking Ball press in June), “Seizure Wet Dreams: Poems and Short Stories” (Social Disease), and the upcoming poetry collection “Songs From The Shooting Gallery” (Burning Shore Press). He lives in New York. He will be featured in the following anthologies: “Brutalism #1”, “Falling From The Sky” (Another Sky Press), “Danger City 2” (Contemporary Press) and “Writing From The Edge”. Please visit www.tonyoneill.net to send hate mail, or for more info.

Chapter 11 & 12 of Heaping Stones...

2006-04-19T15:25:00.000+01:00

Chapter 11 of Heaping Stones

I arrived at work the next night tired, but in a nice mellow fucked out mood. Jimmy was already there when I arrived, sitting at the table closest to the bus stand eating some lasagne. Arturo was sitting at the table too, sipping a cup of coffee. “Hey, Rob,” said, Arturo, as I walked in the front door.

“Hey,” I said back automatically, as I approached the table.

I went into the bus stand, poured myself a cup of coffee, and then sat down at the table with Jimmy and Arturo. Right as I took my seat, Christine, the third server working that night, came in the front door, while Bob, the manager/part owner, walked up to the table from the kitchen. We then all started engaging in the usual pre-shift restaurant discussions. Would it be busy? How many reservations were there? Did the new shipment of wine come in yet, Bob? It did? Good. You know, we’ve been out of Chianti Classico for almost a week. It’s not my fault—the distributor’s been out of it too. Yeah, you can be first off tonight, Jimmy. Got a wild night planned? Oh yeah? What’s his name? It’s not Bob like you dream, boss man! Hey Arturo, how much money did you end up making last night? Not bad. Not as good as Christine last Saturday, though. Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I worked my butt off for it, though. Have you signed up for classes yet, Jimmy? Did you get into that stats class you need? I took that class. It was a nightmare. Try to get professor Ginsberg. He lets you drop your lowest test and the final is open book. Do you want some more coffee, Arturo? Grab me a cup too, Bob. Who’s the third busser tonight? Rachael. Good. Good for you anyway, Rob. She’s a good busser. Yeah, but that’s not why you’re always giving her those fatty tips! Jealous Jimmy? You couldn’t handle me and you know it! Speak of the devil. What? Why is everybody looking at me? Laughter. Smirks. Where were you last night, girl? My mom flew into town unexpectedly and we went out to dinner. Uh huh. Sure. More laughter. Smiles. Whatever. You guys are a bunch of perverts! Rachael’s gentle voice moving upward thru the din like a flock of doves taking flight on a spring morning. Warm feelings in my heart and pants … Laughter arises on the distant sea …

Rachael was a serious cutie, I’d decided, probably within the first tenth of a second after I’d met her. She was a short (she claimed to be 5’-3”, but in reality checked in at about 5’-1”) curvy little thing with an amazing hard-swinging low-slung ass, large round breasts, and a similarly rounded belly, which she sometimes tried to hide by wearing loose tops or by sucking in her gut when she caught someone looking at her in profile. She had thick curly black hair that hung just to the top of her shoulders, intense wide-set black eyes, a tiny button nose, a small delicate mouth, and dark olive skin. Her ancestors were mostly Greek on her mother’s side, she said, and Scottish and Irish on her father’s, which gave her the last name of Macgregor as well as a face full of incongruous and cute-as-hell freckles. For the first couple months I worked with her I thought she was just another cute high school girl, one of many I’d seen pass thru Martino’s over the years on their way to bigger and better things. But then one Saturday afternoon she came in before her shift lugging a huge cardboard box overflowing with books. “Look what I’ve got,” she said, setting the box down on the bus stand counter. The box was filled with all sorts of cool titles, including stuff by D.H. Lawrence, Balzac, Conrad, Thoreau, a three volume set on medieval European history, and even a tattered copy of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. “The Friends of the Library was having a book sale and I majorly scored,” she told me. “I only spent like five bucks for all of them!”

After that scene Rachael ceased to a be just another high school girl to me and became a human being, one with whom I could talk, one who I really began looking forward to seeing the three or four nights a week we usually worked together.

The first book she started reading out of the box was Lawrence’s The Rainbow. “How do you like it?” I asked her, the first time I saw her sitting around Martino’s reading the book before her shift started.

“I really like it,” she answered, putting the book down and effortlessly slipping from reading into conversation. “It’s all just sex. The buildings the haystacks, everything the people do. Somehow it all just ends up being about sex. It’s really weird the way he does it, but it’s cool too.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much Lawrence from what I remember,” I said, laughing a bit. “I’ve got to admit that I haven’t read too much by him, though.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always found him kind of hard to read. He’s really long winded. Plus, he’s kind of humorless and over the top.”

“Yeah, I see what your saying, but I still really like the way he writes. He just makes everything seem so alive.”

“Hmmm. I should probably try reading him again.”

“You should.”

“Maybe I’ll borrow your copy of The Rainbow when you’re done.”

“Maybe I’ll let you,” she answered straight-faced and staring me directly in the eye for a couple seconds, before she finally started giggling.

After that little conversation our relationship broke wide open. All thru our shifts we’d talk about books and music and movies, everything artistic under the sun. I told her that I was a writer and eventually about all the problems I was having with my profession. She encouraged me and asked if she could read something I wrote. I told that I didn’t have anything I felt really comfortable in showing anybody. I then changed the subject slightly and asked her if she wrote. “No,” she said. “I don’t have the patience. I write a sentence or two and then I can’t think of anything else to say and get bored.” She then went on to tell me how she liked to draw and paint. I told her that I messed around with watercolors, but that I didn’t think I was any good. She said that she wanted to see those too. I told her OK, but that she had to show me some of her art in exchange; and a couple days later I brought some of my paintings into work and she a big notebook full of pencil drawings she’d done, mostly of flowers, trees, and other things growing in her backyard, she told me. Her work was really good, mine wasn’t I realized, comparing it to hers. But she said she liked my paintings, praised them. She asked me again to bring in some of my writing for her to read. I tried to change the subject, but was eventually forced to promise that I’d get something to her soon.

I began realizing that I had a new friend in Rachael, a book buddy, a fellow artist with whom to commiserate. I brought her in a book, Knut Hamsun’s Pan. She read it and loved it. She then got me to reread Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for the first time in about twenty years, and I realized, really for the first time, how good it was, that it wasn’t just a cool novel of my adolescence, but a damn fine piece of literature, a gusty uncompromising book about the things in life that really matter.

In retrospect, my little work friendship with Rachael really helped me get thru my post Maggie implosions, gave me precious moments during which I could again feel innocent and clean during times when my mind and soul were being almost constantly ransacked by demons and my body pounded by alcohol and the reverberations from my emotional meltdown. It was a wonderful thing for me to see her fresh beautiful face for those twenty or so hours we worked together each week, to look into eyes brimming with enthusiasm, as she talked about what she was reading or when she would tell me about how she spent all morning sitting in her backyard drawing a bed of marigolds or the little juniper bush her dad just had planted out behind the pool filter …

All thru this, I tried to convinced myself that Rachael was just my work buddy, just someone with whom I talked about books and art in general, while grinding my way thru a job that bored me stupid and a life in general that seemed to be making me insane. I was still trying to ignore the other stuff that, in retrospect, was so obviously bubbling just beneath the surface, still maybe honestly blind to it in some ways. I mean, flirting was just flirting: we all did it to each other in one-way or another at that job. So what if most of the staff at Martino’s had commented upon the “special” relationship Rachael and I had, implying some sort of erotic underpinnings. Once again, that was just flirting, joking, just the job. But she was beautiful, I did admit. My kind of beautiful, anyway: a cute, dark, exotic, chubby little ball of fire and intelligence. And I definitely didn’t mind the little sexual innuendos we’d been exchanging either, or when we’d playfully goose each other in the bus stand, or when her breasts would rub up against me an inordinate amount of times during the course of our shifts. Yeah, she was attractive, crazy smart, and even worldly in a way for her age; but she had just turned eighteen and sometimes betrayed that fact with girlish concerns and adolescent reasoning. I couldn’t get involved with her, I told myself—it would damage us both in the end. And if I did allow myself to think along those lines for any length of time, I’d quickly counter with thoughts of what it would be like to involved with someone her age, with thoughts revolving around the general social repercussions, or sometimes with specific images of her father coming after me with a shotgun or a freshly sharpened axe. Yeah, I’ll tickle you in the bus stand, Rachael, and accept the warmth of your breasts as they drag against my back in some close-quarters “accident”—but that’s where I’ll leave you: in a safe, still fundamentally innocent place, where I can’t run aground on your youth and beauty and you cannot be lured into my difficult world by the fact that someone of your intelligence and depth must be completely bored and annoyed with the stupid boys your age who doubtlessly cannot understand your beauty, who are still searching for the skinny little blonde beach bunny nightmares the television tells them should be their life’s goal. “Read a book,” I can almost hear you saying to them, Rachael, looking over your shoulder, as you throw your arms around my neck. “Make that two, and then get back to me …”

On the surface, that night at Martino’s for Rachael and me was pretty much like all the other nights had been for the previous few months: hard work, interspersed with our usual flirty games and the excuses we’d find to touch and tickle. But something seemed to have shifted between us: the games we were playing seemed to be slightly more serious; when she goosed me to get things started she was gentler, left her finger on my stomach or under my armpit a little longer than had been typical; when she brushed her breasts up against me she was more deliberate and I often altered my position to prolong the contact; when I reached around to tickle her stomach I tickled her a little more softly than before and left my hands around her waist for longer than I had previously.

Why that night? I don’t know. I hadn’t told Rachael about Veronica, but maybe she could smell her on me and was feeling the need to mark off some territory herself; or maybe my mounting disgust with myself over Veronica was opening my eyes to other obvious options; or perhaps months of close contact and denied attraction finally just started to boil over, with Veronica playing little or no role. But whatever the reason, I was suddenly viewing Rachael as much more than my work buddy: I admitted to myself that I wanted her, badly, and I was pretty sure that she was feeling something very similar.

Late that evening, just before Rachael was about to go home, I tested this theory. I came up from behind her in the bus stand and wrapped my arms around her stomach like I was going to tickle her. But instead, I dropped my hands to her hips, left them there for a moment, and then finally pulled her back towards me. She relaxed into me, while rubbing her curls against my chest and neck. I let her go after several seconds of this and she turned around and we smiled at each other. She then went back into the office to clock out before coming back to the bus stand and saying a lengthy coy goodbye.

Chapter 12 of Heaping Stones

I drove home that night thinking of nothing but Rachael. Veronica had called me at work and asked if she could come over again. I told her no. Or more accurately, I told her that we were really busy and there was no way I’d get home before midnight and that by that point I’d be completely worked and up for nothing beyond a good night’s sleep, which was something I really needed. It was the truth and I was glad. Something had snapped in me because of Rachael that night, and I suddenly had no interest in seeing Veronica; no matter how great the sex was, it didn’t change the fact that on a gut level I found her kind of repulsive and myself equally so when I was with her. If I couldn’t be with Rachael the next best option, I decided, was being alone.

Rachael. Rachael. Rachael. Rachael. Bellflower. PCH. Park. Redondo. Cross street after cross street and I couldn’t purge her from my mind. Rachael. Rachael. Rachael … Fuck. Don’t be like this, Rob. There’s no future with her and probably a whole bunch of pain. She’s eighteen and you’re thirty-eight. Pervert pedophile Rob. Mobs chasing you thru the streets with burning torches, their faces distorted with hate and ignorance. No wait, it’s even worse than you thought, my friend—they’re nailing your ass up. Property in the Golgotha area is cheap for a reason. Laughter. Aren’t you the melodramatic bastard? I mean, think about it—she’s legal. The worst that can happen to you is what? Some ugly incident where her father bursts into the restaurant and tells you to stop fucking his daughter? Yeah right, like that’s going to happen. She’s yours for the asking. I mean, she so obviously digs you; she thinks your some sort of struggling artist. And the thing is she’s right—that’s exactly what you are! The muse is testing you at the moment, holding Rachael out and inviting you to make a decision: love or society. For a real artist the choice is obvious, beyond debate. What are you, Rob—a poet or a politician? Just fucking go for it, dude! Just go for it! …

When I got home from work I saw that my answering machine light was blinking. I had two messages—both from Veronica. In the first message she said that she’d just called to see how the rest of my night at work had gone. In the second, she asked pretty much the same thing, but also told me that if I’d changed my mind about wanting some company when I got home to just call her, no matter how late it was. I listened to the messages and then grabbed one of the left over Pacificos from the fridge, popped it open, and took a long swig. As I swallowed that first gulp of beer the phone rang. I didn’t answer it. Veronica’s voice kicked in over the answering machine speaker after two rings. She said she was just calling again to see if I’d gotten home from work yet, etc. After she left this third message, I finished my beer, unplugged the phone, and then headed into the bathroom, to take a piss and then a long hot shower.

After I got out of the shower, I went into the living room and put on some music, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme album. I then went back into the kitchen and grabbed another beer and my lighter. Then I lit all the candles in the living room, turned off the overhead light, and plopped myself down on the couch.

Coltrane, beer, and candlelight, as they so often did after a hard night at work, turned out to be a wonderful combination; and I lay my naked body back onto the couch and let all three move thru me. Outside of Rachael, it had been a stressful night: I’d really run my ass off and had to deal with a fair bunch of bullshit. But I felt tired in a good way as I lay there, and quiet inside for the first time in a long time. After a few minutes, I sat back up and took a big hit off my beer; and the icy Pacifico felt great as it hit the back of my throat, soothing, deserved. I then lay back down and began watching the flickering candlelight dance back and forth across the ceiling above me, while listening intently to what Coltrane’s tenor was trying to say, trying to say to me …

And soon I was gone.

“What’s that, John?” I asked several minutes later. “You say everything’s going to be all right, that there is a heaven and that I’m heading in its general direction? Yeah, that’s easy for you to say, though, because you’ve got a direct line to the place. I mean, you’re fucking Beethoven and Lester Young rolled into one and then lit on fire! I’m not a god like you—I’m just dumb writer Rob …”

“Chin up, Rob,” interrupted Trane. “Look into your heart and you’ll see that what I’m saying is the truth. You burn inside, burn like all the great poets have burned, like a great poet must burn … In you is heaven and hell—just like everyone else. The only difference between you and most of the people you pass on the street is that you not only see this, I mean, really see this, but are starting to stare this truth directly in the face. That’s what’s making you so crazy, my friend: you’re looking God in the eye and demanding an explanation, and at times, even an apology … You’re not just another guy who can write or just another talented painter or just another dude who can blow a horn: you’re Henry Miller during that moment he first truly understood his art; you’re van Gogh in love; you’re me, you’re John Coltrane blowing into your sax as truthfully as you possibly can until you think your heart will burst and your mind collapse—not because you’re better than anyone else, or even more courageous; you’ve just been given the gift, and because of this, you ultimately have no choice but to stand and face your god, the god who loves you, dreams you, demands everything in return, and will give all of it back to you when you finally catch your first glimpse of your true home …”

“YES! YES! YES! Scream John! Scream your tenor to the heavens and tell me more! Tell me more about beauty and art and good truthful things about myself. I’ve always been so alone, walking along the edge of a Grand Canyon of insanity since the day I was born—and I don’t think I can stand the stress for one more second! I need a friend so desperately at this moment, someone who can understand and help me give shape to my dreams. I thought I’d found this person in Maggie. One day I looked into her eyes and saw Eternity; but she then ripped out my heart, threw it against the wall, and laughed insanely as it slid to the floor in a bloody still-beating streak … How could this have happened? How can love not be when I feel it down to the very strands of my DNA? If this is a mistake, nothing more than an expertly told lie to myself, then how do I know what’s real and what’s not? Maybe this moment is too a lie, as all my moments have perhaps been … Tell me more, John. Deep down I know you’re right, but my faith is wavering … Maggie loved me and the sky is blue—of these things I am sure … but the slope is slippery and it would sure be nice to have someone to talk to more often, someone to remind me that I’m not simply crazy or a fool …”

But John was gone.

Infinity had again become just great music and my exalted understanding of myself was fading back into the reality that I was a thirty-eight year old man with a beer in his hand lying naked on a couch in a small candle-lit apartment in Long Beach, California at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But this was OK, I decided.

I still felt good, great actually, like something important and real had just happened to me. For several minutes I just lay there, listening to the spacious closing movement of A Love Supreme, not really thinking about or not thinking about what I’d just experienced. Soon, though, images of Maggie began drifting thru my head; but I was detached from them, able to let them move thru me as they pleased without feeling the least need to control their movement or understand their meaning. Veronica drifted thru my head too, as did Rachael, my mother, my sister, my dead grandparents, and strangely a couple friends from high school I hadn’t thought of years …

Eventually, though, my mind settled on Rachael, on the beauty of her face, the potential of her mind, and how good I felt whenever I was around her. As the Coltrane album came to an end, I sat up, drank the last couple swallows of my beer, and then set the empty bottle on the coffee table. I then lay back down on the couch, on my stomach this time. As soon as I was back on the couch, I began thinking about Rachael again, about how much she turned me on. I began slowly humping the couch, rubbing my now half-hard dick against its worn corduroy material, while imagining Rachael naked beneath me, her short legs wrapped around my waist and her soft belly and breasts pressed tightly up against me. Gently I moved in and out of her in my mind. While we fucked we were looking each other directly in the eyes, but without a hint of challenge: ours was a mutual gaze based entirely in love, trust, and empathy. I began pumping the couch harder, while still concentrating on the look I imagined I was seeing in Rachael’s eyes. In a minute or so I felt I was about to come. In my mind I felt Rachael suddenly wrap her legs around me as tightly as she could. Just before I came, I stopped humping the couch and slipped my hand under my waist. I shot off into my hand and then just lay there, breathing hard, until I felt that the cum was about to start seeping thru my fingers. I then got up, washed my hands in the kitchen sink, and grabbed another beer from the fridge, before heading back over to the stereo to put on some more music.

Copyright © 2005 by Rob Woodard

This work cannot be reprinted in any form or manner without the express written consent of Burning Shore Press.

ROB WOODARD was born in Anaheim, California in 1964 and raised mostly in the nearby Long Beach area. After graduating high school, he dropped in and out of various community colleges and worked mostly in restaurants in southern California, Hawaii, and Australia, while taking breaks to wander aimlessly across big swaths of the globe. During these years he wrote consistently in search of his voice as a writer. Frustrated by his lack of progress, he returned to school and eventually obtained bachelors and masters degrees in anthropology from California State University, Long Beach. After a brief stint as a college professor, he returned to working in restaurants and writing. Burning Shore Press recently published Heaping Stones, his first novel. What Love Is, his second novel, is scheduled to be released by the same house in the summer/early fall of 2006. He is currently writing poetry, book reviews, and a journal.

Contact: bsp@burningshorepress.com

Sweet Fanny Adams Reloaded...

2006-03-19T16:45:00.000Z

Granted, it could have been an airport, say, or any other point of departure for that matter, not necessarily a railway station. Then again, I wouldn't want you to go thinking that his choice had been totally arbitrary, although he was, admittedly, no stranger to acts of random behaviour. It didn't have to be an overcrowded railway station, but it sort of made sense somehow.

It's like this: your train is due to leave any minute now. You look up from your book or paper -- if you are reading, that is, but I think we can safely assume that you, mon semblable, mon frère, are reading at least one or the other, possibly even both, one after the other, or, better still, simultaneously. You check the time on your wristwatch, the kind that they advertise in The Economist and suchlike publications, something Swiss or German with knobs on (the more, the merrier) which exudes manly sophistication. Just as the Red Sea parted for Moses, the door slides open, blissfully pneumatic, to reveal a stunning Mary Poppins -- stacked, stockinged, sorted -- in a comely knicker-skimming skirt: entrancing entrance. Being the proud possessor of a Y chromosome, your eyes make a beeline for her A-line, zooming in on silken thighs, NordicTrack-toned. While she fafs about with her umbrella (which will be left behind, of course, accidentally-on purpose like), you are at leisure to divide her putative weight in kilograms by her hypothetical height in metres squared, thus reaching the satisfactory conclusion that the young woman's Body Mass Index slots into the ideal 18 to 20 range. Stocky stoccado, scatty scattato, she click-clicks her way towards the only vacant space (which just so happens to be facing you) aloft a pair of chichi cha-cha heels, whereupon her petulant posterior takes a pew. As she crosses her endless legs with a hushed swish whoosh, the bright young thong hitches up her skirt a notch, pinching the flimsy fabric on either side of broad hips between manicured thumb and forefinger. At this juncture -- when you are about to abandon wife and children, sail the seven seas or commit genocide because men cannot help acting on impulse -- you notice that those are tear- and not rain- drops irrigating her tanned, yet still unblemished, features. Ever the gentleman, or simply embarrassed, you interrupt your ornithological study and peer out of the window which, being in dire need of a good clean, forces you to squint in the most unsightly fashion. Now is when it happens. For a few split nanoseconds, another train pulling into the station tricks you into believing that your train is pulling out.

***

Adam Horton -- 33, caucasian, 5'6'', underendowed, thinning on top -- viewed this sensation as a perfect metaphor of his stumbling through life like a sleepwalker on a treadmill, a pet hamster on a wheel, or a commuter on the Circle Line. Hence the choice of a railway station over any other point of departure. But which one? Paris offered un embarras de choix.

Gare de l'Est was a definite no-no for some obscure reason. Gare d'Austerlitz was likewise ruled out: Adam, you see, had a passion for Waterloo Station. Watching the workers munching their lunch-break baps at the bottom of the up escalator, eyes cast skirtwards all the while, never failed to microwave the cockles of his little heart. Since childhood, he had conceived of Austerlitz as a sort of counter- or even anti-Waterloo; it was enemy territory. This still left Gare de Lyon, built in the grandiose style -- probably the most pleasing, aesthetically. Gare St Lazare, caught between the red-light district and the posh department stores, scored a few brownie points. Proust's lycée was close by, as well as the Opéra Garnier (a fine example of architectural eclecticism) and, more importantly, Marks & Sparks with its large lingerie section where Adam often indulged in a little lingering among the petticoats and suspender belts. There was also Gare Montparnasse, where the muses hung out, free and easy, serpentine locks flailing the air. They rode around like BMX bandits astride expensive Dutch bicycles sporting a saucy look on their freckly faces and precious little else. The area never failed to remind him of the time when he micturated on the tomb of Jean-Paul Sartre after burying his late goldfish (Botty, short for Botticelli) in the shadow of Baudelaire's corpse. Such fond memories.

In the end, however, he had plumped for Gare du Nord which houses the Eurostar terminal. Adam's grasp of French had greatly improved over the past twelve months, but he was looking for a lady who spoke the old mother tongue. Besides, the word 'terminal' had a certain ring to it, the finality of a full stop.

***

The air hung heavy with Chaucerian expletives; dropped aitches were strewn about his feet. Here and there, love thugs sprouting Hoxton Fins were reading redtops from back to front. The odd diamond geezer was getting twatted while his missus flaunted the latest erogenous zones. In the distance, a posse of blue-rinsed senior citizens could be seen giving a spirited rendition of the hokey-cokey. A good vibe was being had by all. If I should die, Adam muttered, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign railway station that is forever In-ger-land. And there she was.

Sweet Fanny Adams.

Sweet Fanny Adams and no mistake.

Although he had never actually seen her before, he recognised her at once, and once he had recognised her, he realised he would never see her again. After all, not being there was what she was all about; it was the essence of her being, her being Fanny Adams and all that.

As he walked towards the bench where she was sitting pretty, Adam missed her already. Missed her bad.

'How do you do?'

'How do I do what? The imperfect stranger looked up from her slim, calf-bound volume and flashed him a baking-soda smile, all cocky like.

Their eyes met, pairing off at first sight. The earth moved, orbiting at half a kilometre per second around her celestial globes -- a couple of scalloped cupfuls with peek-a-boo trimmings -- in what can only be described as a new Copernican revolution. For the first time since Mrs Horton's belaboured parturition, when he was eventually sprung off into the world, Adam didn't feel at the wrong place at the wrong time: he was back in the bountiful bosom of Mummy Nature. As if to celebrate this return to the much-maligned Ptolemaic system, a gaggle of gurgling putti glided overhead to the strains of syrupy muzak and departing trains. All in all, it was an auspicious overture, fraught with the promise of premise.

'Adam,' said Adam, extending his right arm.

'Margherita,' said Margherita, giving it a hearty shake.

Still reeling from that initial, blinding smile -- let alone the handshake -- he struggled to regain his composure. 'Have you read The Leaning Tower of Pizzas by N.E. Tchans?'

'Is that the one which ends with an epic battle between gangs of pre-pubescent herberts bouncing around on orange space-hoppers?'

'Yes.'

'No, but I read a review at the time.'

'Well, it's all about this Mr Soft Scoop bloke, right, who comes from Italy and settles down in South London where he falls in love with a girl called Margherita.' She was fiddling with her umbrella, a faraway look on her face. 'Like you, like.'

'Oh, I see, yes. Sorry, I was miles away.'

'I know: that's the attraction,' he sighed sotto voce, before getting a grip on himself. 'Anyway, you should check it out some time -- if you're into lolloping lollipop ladies, lesbians from Lisbon, the romance of ice-cream vans, that kind of thing.'

'Sounds right up my street.'

'I see it as a contemporary footnote to Dante.'

'Talking of contemporary feet, mine are killing me.'

'Dying on our footnotes are we? One footnote in the grave, eh? How long have you got left?'

'Long enough to grab a bite to eat -- or so says my chiropodist.'

'I think there's an Italian just round the corner that might tickle your fancy.'

'Sounds great. I feel like a pizza.'

'I'm not surprised, love, with a name like that.'

Adam caught a fleeting glimpse of the dark, gaping twilight zone between Margherita's parted thighs as she uncrossed her legs to get up. That topsy-turvy Bermuda Triangle twixt skirt and stocking exerted a gravitational pull of such magnitude that he was sucked in, there and then, never to re-emerge. He picked up her bulky suitcase, l'air de rien, but in his mind's X-ray eye he could see her neatly-packed unmentionables. He was big on smalls was old Adam Horton.

'Heavy, innit?'

'It's a burden I feel I've been carrying all my life.' He turned to face her, fair and square. 'This may sound potty, but you are the hollowness inside. At last, I have found my sense of loss.'

'I'm flattered,' she said in Estuarine undertones, blushing a little. Her dimpled cheeks resembled two squashed cherry tomatoes, only bigger. 'I always like to be of assistance to strangers.'

'After you,' said Adam, bowing theatrically and showing the way with her suitcase like a truncheon-toting gendarme stopping the traffic for pedestrians. He couldn't help noticing the shaft of light that fell on Margherita's top bottom -- proof positive that the sun shone out of her behind -- before leaving the station, hot on her high heels.

They repaired to a Greekish spoon which Margherita praised on account of its 'atmosphere'.

'Looks great,' she gushed, surveying the menu in the window, 'I feel like a cocktail'.

'I'm not surprised, love, with a name like that.'

***

The walls were festooned with fairy lights, garlands of garlic and pictures of Asma Assad, the Syrian President's glamorous wife. The waiters were all male to a man. It soon transpired that none of them were actually Italian having been born and bred, through no fault of their own, on the wrong side of Thessaloniki. ('Oh, that's a shame, isn't it?' cooed Margherita, detaching each word as if she were dismembering some winged insect.) The chef, a diminutive Algerian with an endearing paunch, had a Saddam Hussein mustache going on and a nice line in knock-knock jokes. The toilets were typically Turkish.

Having taken in the scenery, Adam proceeded to pour out his heart and a couple of cheap, albeit cheerless, bottles of Sidi Brahim. Whining and dining, in medias res.

'We are all post-Denis de Rougemont.'

'Couldn't agwee maw,' said Marwghewita, making a mental note never again to shpeak wiv her mouf full. Frankly, she didn't have a clue what he was going on about.

'We are the first generation to know full well that love doesn't last, and yet we cling to the ideal like shit to a protective blanket.'

She turned up her already-retroussé nose. How more retroussé can it get? he wondered.

'Maybe it's just me. The whole thing's very Oedipal, I know.' Adam cringed at his attempt to laugh it off.

'I could spank you, free of charge, if you think that might help.'

'I'd rather not if it's all the same with you,' he replied rather primly, his flushed face a slapped-arse crimson, 'but thanks for the offer. Might even take you up on it some other time. Except…' Adam paused for effect, 'there won't be another time.' He sighed, baleful, into his bowlful of miniature bow-ties, topped up their glasses and cleared his throat. 'Love stories are like fairy tales…'

'Aren't they just,' she interrupted, a trifle too eager.

'…in that we know the end from the start. Only it's not and they lived happily ever after, is it?'

Tears welled up in her belladonna eyes.

'You know, someone should really write a different kind of love story for the new millenium. It would start with the foregone conclusion and work its way back towards the unknown: how it all started in the first place.'

'Will you write this new-fangled love story?'

'I'm writing the first pages even as we speak -- with your assistance, of course.'

'I like to be of assistance.' She smiled a wet smile.

'Shall we call it a day then?'

'Call it what you like. It's your book, your call. So that's it then, is it?'

'Yes. In our beginning is our end.'

'We're obviously going nowhere slowly.'

Margherita seemed in a hell of a hurry all of a sudden, even her nose was running. Where is it running to? he wondered. To by-corners Byzantine, I'll be bound, and wondrous Wherevers, to the end of the earth, at the end of its tether. Then he shrugged -- to himself and at it all -- because it didn't really matter anymore, it really didn't. Whatever: yeah, right.

It was raining when Margherita stepped out of the restaurant. Adam watched her amber umbrella disappear from view, a Belisha beacon of hope on a dimmer switch. He scribbled a few words on the paper tablecloth. D'elle, il ne reste que ses tagliatelles.

***

The door slides open -- which is where you came in. You assess her golden-delicious breasts as if you were picking apples on a market stall. You think that a man should never trust a woman who offers him an apple, let alone two. You think that this woman's tits are perfectly identical, for Christ's sake. Like bookends.

God knows what happens next. God -- and you.

Andrew Gallix © 2006.

Andrew Gallix is Editor-in-Chief of 3:AM Magazine. He lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne University.

Dr. Ira...

2006-02-27T21:53:00.000Z

Sterile white room, hum of air conditioners, dried up cunt stink of sour faced junky-baiting receptionists, shhhhht! of automatic doors and bad modern art on the walls...

Uh-uh, here I am again... Treatment.

Taking the cure with Dr. Ira Silverstein at the St Vitus Hospital of Addiction and Disease. Dr Ira is a repulsive old specimen ... smell of pipe tobacco and professional arrogance all over his stinking bones... That red drinker's nose all of these old bastards seem to have - why are they always alcoholics? I suppose they would wither and die without the sweet nectar of hypocrisy and condescension...

Hooked worse than I have ever been hooked on dear old dead Macho's synthetic dope... no amount of smack will fix me now. Pleasure centers all burned out like a terminal coke fiend...

"I have - ahem - been looking at the... reports... you have been writing... Just skimmed the surface really - pages and pages of the stuff... time constraints, you understand..."

Dr Ira's eyes grow moist with a puritan righteousness.

"I must say that I and my team have come to the conclusion that you are an - ahem - undiagnosed schizophrenic, psychopathic type. You understand that I will have to make these findings the heart of your treatment plan..."

I know where the good doctor is going with this particular line in bullshit. An excuse to try and keep me dumb with lithium or antidepressants... an old trick of croakers like Dr Ira.

"You know that I'm no more of a schitzo that you are, Dr Ira - maybe less. When do I get my dose? All of this talking about my problems is just wonderful and all" I tell him my voice dripping with sarcasm, "But I'm sick here... got the chills... guts knotting and unknotting..."

"Ah yesss... of course... your methadone. Are you sick Joe? Does it" he leans in with a dreamy faraway look in his eyes and purrs real nasty, "Does it hurrrrt, Joe?"

And goddamn if old Dr Ira doesn't stand up and start loosening his belt and unzipping his polyester slacks.

"We'll dose you right now if you don't have any objections" he dead-pans handling his tired old meat right in front of my disbelieving face.

He pulls out his nasty looking old man prick and waves the stinking swollen thing in front of me as if he is trying to hypnotize me with it.

I sprint up from my seat knocking over his coffee and a stack of leaflets bearing the legend Relapse Prevention - Practical Tips.

"Jeez Dr Ira!" I yell, "Whatcha doing?"

"Oh this old thing?" he laughs, wagging the prick in my direction, "Oh! You think...? Oh my dear boy, no! This isn't some kind of Turkish bath house! This is a place of recovery! Of safety! Really I have never been so insulted in all my days in medicine..."

"Gee Doc - then what the fuck are ya doing?"

"Oh" the doctor starts coming over all coy, like a twelve year old boy caught whacking off by his mother, "This is simply a new treatment practice... This is a methadone dispensation device, new to St Vitus.

We consider ourselves at the cutting edge of addiction research... This is simply a prosthetic - ahem - device attached to a bladder, if you will, which contains your... um... medication."

Dr Ira stands in front of me and nods towards the mute thing like I am supposed to know what to do with it. I look around the room - the chair, the electric blue carpeting, the white walls, the calendar with careless doctor-scrawls all over it but my eyes eventually return to the doctor with his brown pants around his ankles and an erect penis in his hands.

"And what the fuck" I ask, "Am I supposed to do with it?"

"My dear boy" he harrumphs, "Don't be coy! We're all adults here... Just put your mouth to the... hole... and suck out your dose. It's quite simple, no?"

I look at the doctor's prick, pointing towards me like a loaded gun.

"It doesn't look prosthetic" I comment, quietly.

"Enough shilly shallying!" the doctor bellows with renewed vigor, advancing on me, "I have other patients to see today. Do you want your medication or not?"

"Can't I just get it in a plastic cup like always?"

Dr Ira shoves his prick towards and laughs a guttural laugh... "No, dear boy... he, he, he... this is all in your treatment plan..." his face flushes and his eyes glaze over with a soulless, black lust.

He takes the time to snap on a pair of latex gloves with a puff of baby powder.

"Come and get it" he sing-songs, filling my frame of vision...

Outside of the institutional windows crows whirl and fall to the ground, the sky is a Sunday gray and all is silence in the world.

Nothing but the worms and the air conditioning and the smell of Dr Ira's pipe tobacco... Maybe there has never been anything but this. Time drifts by and the sequence of events becomes jumbled when you have a habit. Did the life before you got strung out ever really exist? Was there anything real and tangible outside of this moment? Life boils down to a series of moments that must be endured before... relief.

Methadone floods my system and a million hungry junk cells scream in rapture, a symphony of reward and relief. I am partially disconnected and everything has the slight sense of being disassociated like in a half dream. The sense of struggling to surface and Dr Ira is stroking my face with a nasty smile of his thin lips.

"Good little doggy" he is saying, "You are all my children... good little doggy..."

I stagger away and pull open the door but outside there is nothing but void which stretches, enveloping me, encroaching into my lungs, my chest, my heart and the dark chill of total anesthesia is all I can hold onto as I tumble out into inner space.

In a previous life Tony O’Neill played keyboards for bands and artists as diverse as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles his promising career was derailed by heroin addiction, quickie marriages and crack abuse. While kicking methadone he started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and he has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel DIGGING THE VEIN is published by Contemporary Press, in the US and Canada. Wrecking Ball Press plan to release a UK edition Summer 2006. He lives in New York where he works a variety of odd jobs and writes.

More details can be found at http://www.tonyoneill.net/

Jeanie...

2006-02-27T18:33:00.000Z

Franklin was feeling love for the first time. It suddenly chanced upon him after 15 pints of beer in the Howden Arms. Through the poisoned haze, and cheap cigarette smoke, in walked the prettiest girl he had never seen.

Franklin had lost his sight at the age of 7.

One day he was riding his bike home behind a lorry stuffed with straw bales, and as it edged around the corner it flipped over to one side and crushed little Frankie’s Raleigh, whilst flickers of grains flew into his pupils at one hundred miles an hour. The crown of his ginger hair could be seen poking out from the mound of straw covering the roadside like an elaborate nest for the finest show horse in town.

He felt nothing, but lost vision from his eyes, and from then on in, became the blind tyrant who pissed in fireplaces. A whole life spent stumbling down the high street without the white stick, blind bareback riding, picking fights with imaginary hard men and winning every time.

He dreamt in twisted Technicolor, walking through glimmering blue seas, standing on tops of mountains, holding the hands and squeezing the peachy flesh of every girl he had ever smelled in the four walls of his local.

That evening he stumbled through the back door, about to order another fresh pint of Samuel Smith’s finest, when across the snug, walked a lady who crept up behind him and stroked his fuzzy fingers.

Frank stopped in his tracks; “I can smell your cheap perfume. You put it on about an hour ago to disguise the sweat from under your armpits”

“That’s no way too speak to a lady Frankie” said the voice, deep and seductively from deepest Doncaster.

“I don’t need no woman in my life. I’m a one horse man.”

“Not remember me, Frank?”

She blew a kiss into his ears and collar of shirt, clasped her handbag shut and walked out of the door.

Frank sat on the stool at the end of the brass railed bar, and stopped for a few moments to think.

Picking up his white stick from the stone floor, he tap-tap-tapped his way down the high street, chasing the scent, running over cobbles, manically trying to find his way home; where she would be sat, toasting on the bedside, in a satin gown, marabou slippers, and the finest lace from Victoria Quarter negligee merchants. He could feel the satin slip through his fingers, sending static tinges up to his elbows, dipping his head into her cotton wool groin. All these years he had waited. And she had come. At last. To touch him, to hold him, to smother him with petal kisses and rescue him from the darkness.

His bed-sit was cold and damp, with water pooling in the bases of the windowsills. In winter it would freeze up, the ice creeping up the inside of the glass, causing his toes to scrunch up and turn blue in the night. He slept under a damp blanket, but tonight it didn’t matter. Tonight he felt warm.

She stood in the corner of the room, and beckoned Frank to follow. He wandered out of the corridors, leaving the exits open, and without his stick, held her hand and chased her up to the riverside viaduct. Where they lay side by side, and gazed to the stars. They glimmered through his eternal black night, piercing the midnight haze with twinkles of silvery half light. She wrapped her gown around his back, as they jumped from 200ft to the murky waters down below; like goose down feathers floating effortlessly through the night sky.

Adelle Stripe © 2006.

Adelle Stripe is from Tadcaster in Yorkshire. She writes in her spare time for a self published East London fanzine ‘Straight From The Fridge’, and has also written for The Times amongst others. She hopes one day to write a book about rural life, and the dark underbelly of northern Britain.

Angel at a 25 Degree Angle...

2006-02-06T21:50:00.000Z

Imperious, impervious, Girl on the escalator going up, pulling her case behind her like a lapdog on a lead, going up. Nifty, shifty, eyeing up Girl going up, naughty, haughty, hoity-toity.

Did she condescend to look down upon you as she went up, Angel at a 25 degree angle? Did she acknowledge your existence as she plucked celestial chords on her flyaway hair and breathed honeyed tones down her cellular phone? Did she fuck. No: your eyes did not meet. You looked at me looking at you looking at her looking up, all high and mighty, pulling her case behind her behind like a slave on a lead, soaring up -- she mighty high, you mighty sore. Looked at me you did, with your chastised eyes, all hot and bothered, hot, hot under the collar, your face a slapped arse.

Andrew Gallix © 2005.

Andrew Gallix is a writer and Editor-in-Chief of 3am Magazine, he also teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Love and Hate on the Silver Screen...

2006-02-03T12:38:00.000Z

Charlie Boy had it all. And here he was, enjoying the perfect wind-down after the grind of the day. Lights dimmed, beers within reach, a Gwyneth Paltrow film on the go, and a comfortable sofa to stretch out on with his cock in his hand.

As it happened, minus the sardine-run on the tube and the dark walk home, his day hadn't been too bad. Actually, it had been fairly satisfying. A morning of hard, fast IT wizardry - which included getting some praise from his boss - followed by a nice steady afternoon of catching up on his own projects. Most notably, tartversustotty.com, which was coming along quite nicely.

Charlie catered for an audience obsessed with the glitz and glamour of fame (however minor) but eager for another angle, an alternative view. Charlie liked to believe his website attempted to reveal the true nature of these pampered princesses (no males of course), removing them slightly from their rigid, tight-lipped artificial habitat beneath the spotlights. To do this, he first removed their clothes. Bring sex into the mix and you're laughing. Literally. Black humour and irony were the order of the day. Charlie had his routine. Every time the boss fucked off it was me time. Work stopped. Do not disturb. Creativity in progress. Charlie was proud of his achievements.

All those naked bodies with celebs' heads attached. Brit soap-tarts to major Hollywood superstars. Fantasy paparazzi shots. Storyboards. Star sacrilege. It was all in a days' graphics. Cockney frump Jade Goody with her big fat tits getting ordered to get down and perform on Sienna Miller, the anorexic little rich girl. Primrose Hill meets the shitholes of Bermondsey. Yeah! Mixed, criminal, docker's blood fucking with the sex-crazed, drug'n'orgy-addicted, fox-hunting landed gentry. He'd have to think of some toilet-wall witticisms for the bubble captions. Sienna: Get down there you fat, chav, half-black, lard-arsed peasant and suck my A-list top-notch pussy... NOW! But what would Jade say in return...? Maybe he'd stick boxing gloves on the pair of them. Get them in the ring. Battle it out old-working class style. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, let's hear it for a naked bitch slappin' frenzy. He'd make sure Jade would win. Batter fuck out of the bitch...

Yeah. This was Charlie Boy's kind of evening. Legs stretched out, stroking his cock-a-doodle to Gwyneth's attempt at true-totty English. The film was set in London. Bollocks this and Wanker that. Nose-in-the-air Ken and Chelsea style.

Americans made Charlie laugh. Especially when they tried to posh it up. If it wasn't more Jane Austen drivel it was total wank like this. The svelte star taxi-ing across a mythic contemporary London: spotless, well-functioning, no cattle tubes, no crime, white as a Dickens novel (without the hunger). The actress was getting rat-arsed in a bar. Charlie smiled. He wanted to fuck this bitch. Loved her cool stride. Her confidence. Her nonchalance. Wanted her wrapping her body all over him.

He cracked open another can. Even considered heading back to the video shop, making it a double bill, grabbing Bridget Jones' Diary, more pseudo-Anglo made-for-US-market bullshit; for the crack picturing himself as a male version, here alone in his flat with his cock and his alcohol, wallowing in a singletons' lifestyle of one night stands and marathon wank sessions and lots of self-pity and self-loathing and self-fill-in-your-own-fucking-blanks...

But he had to laugh at himself over that (and besides, he wasn't going anywhere). The whole idea of "Bridget Jones" was bullshit. The notion of a woman with blonde hair and big buxom tits having trouble filling her hole was fucking absurd. All that crap about evenings alone. Someone like that could breeze through life without a problem in the world. Charlie was no Bridget Jones. No loner, unable to pull. For Charlie, life was good. So he didn't have a girlfriend? So what. Charlie loved his own company. This was the fucking life, mate, he told himself. And he wouldn't want it any other way. All these real-life Bridget Jones characters he'd read about in the Standard, all alone in the capital and crying over glasses of wine each evening, should get off their arses and get some cock. Charlie laughed, tugging away. There was no shortage of that here, boy...

He watched the screen. Gwynnie was top-class totty, there was no doubt about that. But even better, she was top-class Jewish totty. Oh yes. In other words, that bit more untouchable by all us lowly, unblessed, uncircumcised ones. Being honest, every race and creed in the world looks down on other breeds like they're the lowest form of human shit. Except for the English, of course. We look up to other races as if we are the shit. They've got all the culture and tradition and cuisine and mystique, and we've got fuck all. England in submission, perhaps, wanting to be whipped back for all those Empire days. Forgive us, please, for we have sinned. Who knows. But Charlie would have Princess Gwynnie play the race card on him any day. Oh yeah. Her stiletto heel grinding his face down into the mud. As long as she was in suspenders. Ready for action. What was a good bout of sex without an element of hatred anyway?

One class, one race, fucking over the other. Getting the better of. He imagined the stark naked actress towering over him like an icon, pushing her dampened crotch towards him with force. NOW TAKE THIS YOU LITTLE UNCIRCUMCISED RUNT! and grabbing him by the hair and slamming him in, and in pure Ken and Chelsea saying NOW LICK SOME CHOSEN PUSSY YOU GENTILE WANKER OR I'LL CRUSH YOUR FUCKING BOLLOCKS!!!

Ha! That made him laugh, that did. Cheek of her. Blonde bitch. He was sure she had a sense of humour. Though of course a lot of these Americans didn't. But there was something different about Gwynnie. An un-American genuine classiness. A snobbishness. She had famously slagged London off as a grubby dump with bad restaurant service. You wouldn't hear Madonna say that. She'd be down the backstreet boozer with Guy Richie supping pints of ale and chirping cockney slang. Either that or playing at Enid Blyton down the country manor. Come to think of it, at a press conference for one of her kids books, she hadn't even heard of Enid Blyton. Never put to pen to paper in her life the slag. Full of shit, that Madge. Not alot upstairs. Good body on her though, he'd give her that. Well fit.

But Gwyneth... Hollywood royalty. Once, Charlie had watched a Michael Douglas interview where he'd praised her as having "good genes". Which presumably alluded to the trick of Gwyneth (like him) being naturally blonde and Jewish. Odd that. Jews going on about genes. A touchy subject you would think, almost taboo, considering it was one of old Hitler's favourites. The blonde and blue-eyed Superman and Superbitch. The Aryan blueprint stamping over and conqering the entire fucking world.

But Hitler had got it wrong. Blonde was good, but not for every day of the week, surely. Diversity was beautiful. The only way forward. Multiculturalism? Bring it on, man! A good Latino salsa shag never hurt no-one. Look at Asians. Now they knew about sex. And what about black girls. Best arses in the fucking business. And black girls were hungry for it as well, let me kid you not. Check out the rap videos. Fucking hell. Women being exploited? I don't think so. Strong assertive bitches expressing their sexuality more like. Even if they are gyrating round some gun-totin' pimp's cock.

This Greek guy at work reckoned he got off with this fit black girl from Tottenham. Had her down the car park of an estate. She was begging for more more more, this way, that way, every way going. Couldn't get enough of his white man's cock. Well, if you want to call Greek white. The way this bloke talked you'd think he was one of Hitler's Supermen. "They love it," he said. "Love a good white shag. Goes back to the slavery thing. And who can blame them? All the bruthas off chasing white trophies. Lots of lonely sistas."

The bloke never stopped. He reckoned the Turkish were all total arseholes, so he got one over on them by constantly fucking their women. He had some footage on his phone. He must have been giving it to this Turkish bird up the arse because she was fucking screaming for England. Either that or she was getting raped. One or the other. Of course, he said she'd loved it. Wanted more. Just like the black girl. Costas saw himself as a right romeo. An ego freak, more like. Anyway. Enough about him. The thought of his Greek arse going up and down was putting Charlie off.

On the screen Gwyneth was talking about "going to the pub to get drunk". Who the fuck in London ever admitted that? And a double error - alcohol would never touch that woman's lips. Well, not in real life anyway. Charlie could picture her and that Coldplay prick. On the organic smoothies, the macrobiotic diets, the yoga and everything else. The big hippy-noveau lifestyle. Come the bedroom and it was probably a different story though. Under the sheets these poshies were known to be well adventurous. The whole Freudian thing coming into play. With the upper-class it wasn't a case of coming home exhausted, humping on top of the wife for a minute then you're out like a light. Not at all. That was peasant style. All those cliches about judges getting their bottoms whipped or married MPs with their rent boys was damn fucking right. Everyone knew about public schoolboys and the perversions they kept for the rest of their days. Couldn't forget all that dormitory arse-frollicking with the boys. Martin probably made her wear a big black strap-on to poke his puny rich-boy arse every fucking night, the public-schoolboy crying out HARDER! FASTER! YES!! YES!!! in those poncey tones of his. Charlie'd like to scalp the fucker. Give him a circumcision on his fucking head.

Charlie pressed STOP. He needed a slash. The TV flicked onto London Tonight, a report about the high obesity rate of the capital's kids following him into the bathroom. He shut the door. As he pissed he turned round to observe his bollock-naked figure in the full length mirror. What a stupid place for the landlord to put a bloody mirror, right across from the toilet. Every time he took a shit he had to stare at himself, grunting away. He made little thrusting motions with his arse, careful not to miss the bowl, imagined a sexy hot babe on the receiving end. It wasn't a pretty sight. He'd have to start working out. That arse was too flabby by half. All those burgers at lunchtime, doner kebab dinners, buscuits, cakes, evening beers in front of the screen. No exercise ever. I suppose it all added up. And the hair. Big ferocious patches over his back. Hair all over him. He looked like something from Planet of the fucking Apes. Mediterranean birds might go for it, (and thankfully, there was no shortage of them in North London) but who the fuck else would? Can't imagine some spick-and-span Paltrow lookalike wanting a load of that...

But he relaxed. For now the waxing and the gym membership could wait. There were other things in hand. Like his cock for instance. A fair bit of meat there, that's for sure. No problem there, girls. Why worry? One of these days he'd be back. Slim and rippling. Dick up and out like a fearsome truncheon. Female gazes of awe and wonder.

ATTENTION LADIES, CHARLIE BOY IS BACK IN BUSINESS. Hordes of them lining up in their hotpants, black, white and everything in between, Jewish princesses and Arab whores, equal opportunity for all (he was no racist - colour made the world go round), babes galore turning out in their droves for a Charlie Boy Special. A night in the sack they would never forget. Damn right.

God, he hadn't had a real physical bunk-up in years. Couldn't even remember the last time. Too tanked-up to register it no doubt. Probably shagging some equally pissed meat-market slag that was more out of shape than he was. Some big lump you wake up next to with a hangover and think, NO... I DIDN'T... SURELY. But that was all back in the day. Charlie hadn't been to a club in two years at least. And come to think of it, three, maybe even four stone ago.

Returning to the living room London Tonight was polluting his living space with some story about a gang rape in Finsbury Park. Apparently a foreign exchange student had befriended a gang of youths who dragged her to the roof of a towerblock and did their stuff. The reporter was standing by the estate, filling us in on the gory details, local kids in the background pulling faces. The rapists boasted of their deed and flashed the mobile footage around at school the next day. They ranged in age from twelve to fifteen. A girl had been involved, helping out, cheering them on. The judge waived her right to anonymity, and there she was on the screen. White, pretty, but spiteful looking. Probably abandoned at birth. Should have been strangulated. Charlie imagined the rest of these two-legged beasts. Dumb estate scum. Bigmouthed wannabe gangstas. Only ever born so their cock-humping mothers could jump the council waiting list. Pump out a few more for a bigger flat. On and on. People like Charlie footing the bill. Estates full of walking fucking abortions.

Like the pricks that put a knife to his throat that time. Called him a Fat Pussy. Demanded cash and goods - NOW. You know the procedure, they'd said. If you wanna live. If you know what's best. You fat fuck. And before he knew it - whack! in the face. One of the little bastards broke his jaw. Walked away laughing. Cunts.

Two months' sick leave. Creeping out of the flat for food and videos or whatever and that was it. Living on take-aways most of the time. Not going anywhere. He'd almost wanked his dick away. Tugging at the thing night and day like his life depended on it. It was his only pleasure, the only respite available. It was around this time that he got sick of hard porno. It lacked personality. Who wanted to see a load of butchers' flesh anyway? Cheap cuts. Scrag ends. Heroin-addicted slags cut open like pigs, rotten intestines spilling out. Abused meat. Like you really want to get stuck into that. Forget it. Charlie developed taste. Class. Women were like fine wines - not that he was into fine wines, but it was a good comparison. The gift of connoisseurship was acquired by the very few. Charlie considered himself privileged. FHM, Loaded and Maxim - yeah, fair enough, he subscribed, he went along with the joke. Even some of the cheapo womens' ones with their HolbyCorrieOaks wannabes and trashy headlines: Posh Spice's dress size enters minus figures! But Hollwood... Hollywood was another league. Hollywood, in an unsubtle way, provided the world's real Royal Family (Fuck the Winsors). You despised them, yet you loved them; envy strong in the equation. They provided examples of the highest human perfection. You couldn't get any higher. And you couldn't help it, you worshipped them. The whole world did. Paltrow, Theron, Aniston, Knightley (Cor!!!)... the list was endless. Princesses of wealth, slendour, regal sex on high...

Charlie cracked open another beer, popped a tube of Cheese and Onion Pringles. Man, he was feeling pretty light-headed now. A bit drunk. He chuckled. On the screen a bearded expert was talking bombs and Al Quaida. Rounding off with his belief of more attacks being likely on the tube or in large offices, this time of an unprecedented scale, maximum fatalities, terrorists employing the use of gases, viruses, bacteria. A nuclear dirty bomb perhaps...

For fuck's sake!

Charlie didn't need this! The real world seeping in, infiltrating his set-up, beaming into his living room shouting the odds, plaguing his evening with doom. He flicked back to the movie with disgust. All the killjoys out there could fuck off and die. Bollocks to them. He wanted none of it.

The good life was available, but every day there were people trying their best to poison it out of you. Out to make you go running for the anti-depressants. Please Doctor, dope me up, I can't handle this. No way, not here you don't. Now Gwyneth, she knew a thing or two about the good life, that was for sure. All the Hollywood fucks did. A thing or two about not giving a fuck. There they were climbing out of their limos, parading the red carpets when on the other end of town it was a firearm flarin' muthafuckin' war zone. Poverty, deprivation. London had its similarities too. Except here apartheid was less the rule, less blatant. Hate less voiced. The no-gos were carefully diffused across the board. Dilution. In other words, the no gos were nowhere and everywhere. Anyone anywhere could be your attacker. Jump out and stab you in the eye. Push you down into the tracks. Come up to you in a pub when you're minding your own business and say,"What the fuck are you looking at?", butt you in the face and kick you into a coma. Nobody was safe. You lived in fear...

But it was best to stay indoors in the evenings anyway. Watch the telly. Socialise on the web. If the need arose. Charlie himself couldn't be arsed. In that department tartversustotty.com kept him quite happy, passed a lot of the slow hours at work, tickled him. As for webchatting with sad bods, why bother. Best to sit and watch the World of Gwyneth. He focused in on her snobby face. Once again got an erection going. Observed her tall, lean body. But he found himself waning. He'd lost his momentum. Maybe he'd drunk too much beer. He felt full, squeezed out a full-bodied fart and the obligatory aaahhh. Jesus, the smell of it. Those spicy zinger burgers at lunchtime, triple helping of onion rings, chilli sauce. That sneaky bag of onion bhajis at afternoon break. Just heading out for a Standard. Like fuck. Eating like a pig. Even now, Pringles getting wolfed in, without even thinking. Four beers gone already. Onto the fifth. There was no limit. Charlie ate and drank without even thinking about it. What was the matter with him? Strong accusations were filling his head, fingers pointing, taunting him, telling him he was some kind of slob.

Like the fatsos you saw on the street. Always eating. In supermarkets, stocking their trolleys up wholesale. Hobbling into Burger King, McDonalds, putting people off their food. Gall of these people. The other day for instance, in KFC. Some morbidly fat wreck blown up like an air bag, plonking his lardy arse right across from Charlie, the slob sweating over his grease, wheezing away, heart attack any minute, swallowing down his swill. Charlie felt dirty. Had to get the fuck out of there before he vomited.

God, so many people needed putting down. Get a machine to melt the cunts down to oil, power vehicles, machinery, with the fuckers. Cheap energy. How these fat overweight slobs could even show their faces, Charlie just didn't know. There were limits. Limits to everything. He cracked open another can. Felt pretty pissed now. Concentrated on the screen. That was the trick, concentrate on something else so your whole world doesn't just topple in before your eyes. Gwynnie was the diametric opposite to a slob. Gwynnie kept herself trim. Prim and proper.

But, loath to admit it, Charlie wasn't satisfied. In all honesty, her body wasn't really all that. Not much tit to speak of at all. Not really womanly. Being slim was one thing, but where were the tits and arse, man? This bitch was taking it to Kate Moss extremes. Kate Moss, hey? There was a girl that needed a good ten-inch dick up the arse, if ever there was one. Shaft the life out of the coke snorting slag. COCAINE KATE DIES IN ROUGH SEX RITUAL. Fucked, bound and gagged, and buried in a pile of Columbian snow. Enough there for you, Katie? Fucking dream headline. And hey... there goes another fart. Liquidy, that one. Phew!

When he'd finished inspecting the stink, Charlie sighed. He wasn't pleased with life. Discontent snaked through him like a bad drug. He felt a pang of regret. Maybe he should have braved the night, opted for a double bill, hired the Zellweger Bridget Jones after all. Zellweger in plumped-up mode looked like a Texas milkmaid. The earth mother with the milk. The milk of life. Tits to feed off. All this Sliding Doors bollocks was beginning to seem like, well... exactly that. Bollocks.

Charlie knew exactly what he needed. He checked through an old pile of wank for a copy of Heat magazine. OUR JADE'S AMAZING NEW BOOB JOB! boasted the cover. The Big Brother star had no style, no decorum, but a fine pair of lungs, that was for sure. Jade's position in the world of celebrtity was like that of a sore thumb. Jade was off the street. The real deal. The kind of bird you had up against the bus stop after ten pints and a kebab. No pretence, no bullshit. No illusions that she was anything else but a good shag once you'd licked your fingers clean of doner meat. Right now Charlie didn't need pretense, bullshit, insincerity. He focused in on the chav-idol's tits. They were massive. Could do some damage, they could. Suffocation at least. Real working class in-yer-face knockers. Sometimes in life all you needed was simplicity. No complications. No crap. He had issues he needed to purge forth, get off his person, before he could relax. His ball-bag felt like a dead weight. Once he ejaculated Charlie knew he'd feel a whole lot better.

Michael Keenaghan © 2006.

Michael Keenaghan grew up in Wood Green, North London, where he was [mis]educated at St Thomas More Secondary School. His patchy work history includes burger flipping, general labouring and being a van drivers' mate - none of which proved successful. He has also played in a variety of alternative bands which have railed against the mediocrity of indie and attempted to ressurrect the mythic values of punk. He currently writes furiously.

Intermezzo...

2006-02-03T12:18:00.000Z

happily growing breasts in NYC until you exploded midway through Macy’s red and blue and golden like the 4th of July cheap jewellery assistants flying customers ducking themselves down into small customer piles like unwanted news sheets the contents of my head involved in aerial moves of an unpredictable nature my injuries minor all wounds fortunately psychological sooner chewing off my leg than wait around for the lacklustre matinee performance uncannily matching luggage scooped up one-handed by Snoop Dogg asked by the black janitor what do you look for in a ham? not recognising the full significance of the question but wording my reply with extreme caution because in Manhattan people take their hams very seriously I have observed in the short time I have been legally handsome here in the studious gloom copiously numbed the caustic Jewish double act at reception commenting meaningfully on my self-conscious footwear meaning to be helpful with their caustic Jewish double act demeanour but I always follow modern hotel etiquette anyway - to avoid small fines and short uptown prison terms – learning to live through my Jacob’s Creek addiction with a piece in the New Yorker I happen upon during a three-course Chinese breakfast banquet…all disease finally outlawed says new Mayor brain tumours now illegal in Manhattan… a talking point among the Saatchi sociopaths I know and love at The Ear over on Spring Street discussing discussing important topics of the day Tony Award opinions swamping and overflowing will it ever happen? why won’t it happen? what if it never happens? other unwanted media intrusions assaulting my senses indiscriminately another evening alone with myself dying like bad fruit left stranded on the vine feeling wan and languorous and not phoning not speaking not disclosing anything through a glistening high-stemmed glass just one night without myself is all I ask reclined again? pre-Tony under a mid-morning Campari and soda with Henry Kissenger in his prime time TV talk show You Say I’m A Bad Lover But I Have Another Who’ll Tell You Other interrupted by Mother Love at the door with her small team of cleaning dwarves who want to install the latest air conditioning system unit because it is their paid occupation and this is what they do this is what they do this is what they do really? everything bigger outside except the Statue of Liberty - which is smaller - the streets sexually charged with ambiguity the air non-breathable though intercourse is free between consenting men and women during the hours of daylight there may be a small surcharge for homosexuals amidst the uncertainties and distractions of city life little Koreans in tall size shoes chattering friendly and approachable Picasso busking Loser on a slide guitar his pet goat not for sale down in the subway Blondie’s original line-up performing Hangin’ on the Telephone for the 18,438,259th time all this time everywhere passing slowly a New York minute more involved and seemingly complex than a minute anywhere else with all this time still passing at a similarly leisurely pace the persistence of memory tending to get in the way of things as I notice cab drivers wearing abstract expressions not violent but requiring precise neo-geographical co-ordinates because they actually hail from Wapping and speak only Estuary English their tendency to convey weary world travellers to exactly the place they want to be proving more than useful locating the Whitney Houston Museum the Lloyd Cole Collection a private viewing of softball moms in Central Park hot pants cheering on a thousand little juniors beneath the lengthening shadow of the Dakota a late May pang of regret internalised ouch! the tortuous circularity of life moving slowly through the Village passing e.e cummings and his enormous room at 4 Patchin Place with Eugene O’Neil just across the street although they say John Masefield moved out angrily in the middle of the night later citing musical differences which is one way of looking at it taking in the smells and sounds all around all the smells and sounds around not real but piped direct from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore lending the environment you exist in a more realistic edge in denial of true perspective how I long to hear the waitresses speak the language of love watching the Knicks in St Mark’s personal ale house Ruby shooting Oswald on the wall next to a pair of Siamese twins joined at the head and a squad of Irish telephonists wearing a tone of broken glass and lime green sandals the future is in Manhattan they say you could try commuting from Houston but we wouldn’t recommend it supporting Kent Brockman’s Campaign Against Racial Profiling during their day off donating my shades to the campaign but another evening alone with myself? how I long to hear the waitresses speak the language of love is it really as easy as it looks? and if it is can I do it too? but… your life is totally empty… a song reminds me as I’m rollerskating back up Broadway rain sheeting horizontally against the dirty tenements of another evening alone with myself and the 32nd annual televised Noam Chomsky Arm-Wrestling Championship his third round tie with Harry Belafonte a big draw with the smiling housewife fraternity Noam charasmatic stripped to the waste and flexing despite all my numerous educational experiences something I have never seen before a golden tumbler before me evoking intense memories of my father dancing at weddings - spurious: and if I am this way? what about other people? how do they manage? are they this way too? these and other ethical dilemmas debated at my own private night school gymnasium the morning ashtray suddenly broken: reality cracking through the glass tossing loose coins down for Mother Love to pick up on (enough for a birthday bouquet) wondering whether she will understand the meaning of these coins or not white lions waiting outside to snare the unsuspecting blind tigers prowling up and down Bleecker Street in search of Middle Eastern cuisine distracted (temporarily) by the MOR charm of Brendan the Brewski’s barman resembling Greg Rusedski after facial reconstruction surgery (his testimony put his kid brother in jail or so they say over at Chumley’s the Speakeasy on Bedford Street: Faulkner Salinger Kerouac drinking wheat beer with real men who look like sailors (sailors?) not liking wheat beer but drinking it because they do and even if you were a zillionaire Faulkner says you couldn’t enjoy this wheat beer any more…) feet hitting the perfect street in sluggish unison with one another sinking down into pavement looking out for the famous NY anthropologist I met first ten years ago on Fifth Avenue longing to say hello longing to say thank you longing to say goodbye and thanks for all the pepperoni seeing instead Dawn Vigil the New York Times food columnist from Little Rock AR shoplifting in the world’s unfriendliest book store (previously we had only corresponded) counting her stolen change classy and kooky lipsticked flats and bra straps in her hair duly snappled in the cunning linguistics section care to buy a thirsty girl a drink? choirs of indecision riding bare-backed to the Temple of Beer Worship your real name is unimportant silent Brewist monks encouraging bad drinking habits in the men’s restroom hidden behind the commemorative Marcel Duchamp revolving bookcase can I survive all these new feelings inside? resolve them too? the lure of legalised Indian prostitution beckoning hypnotically: swapping the smiling teeth of the tabla player for Quentin Crisp’s Pasta & Piano bar hey! how ya doin’ a former Scotsman now based in Harlem croons ordering the garlic bread that is never lacking on the tables of our existence the first course delayed by the random drive-by shooting of important kitchen staff: enjoy! drawing strength from the act of breaking the garlic bread that is never lacking on the tables of our existence eventually earning four and a half apples out of five plus the eternal gratitude of being alone with Christopher Street and in the dark: do you believe in Jasper Johns? or Eduardo Paolozzi? and what about Kierkegaard? does irony deprive an object of its subjective reality? is an original event devalued by such distortion? should the facts get in the way of a story? shall we discuss the matter further? my place? 11:30? can you make it? instantly plunged into difficult social waters and screaming (inwardly) NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO then politely inquiring (of one’s inner self) but why not?: 1) people who know me well tell me I deserve better 2) and although this is always the way it has been doesn’t mean it’s always the way it should be 3) and these days I don’t get along with myself terribly well 4) and I never really meant all the things I used to say anyway 5) and I think I deserve it 6) and people who know me well tell me I’m much improved than I used to be 7) and how would things feel if this never actually happened? 8) and everything even you and I has to wither and fade into the dust eventually 9) and this means the means always justifies the end in my book 10) and so much empty time has elapsed since before 11) and there is still so much time on my hands that by now surely I deserve it 12) and that makes everything okay: okay! box cars turning how the streets flew! into west 35th street a room full of the blandest women’s books falling falling falling onto soft white linen the wallpaper on the walls singing: stay for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent! the wallpaper vintage and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for commercial reasons a shadow reaching across the wallpaper shaped like a hand eager to strum upon an acoustic guitar Frank Lloyd Wright looking down beatifically on your golden legs (your legs?: are your legs golden unlike the legs of others? or is a thigh just a thigh? are your legs as meaningless as everybody else’s?) an impressionistic blur of rapid thigh movement like a recent auto-erotic art exhibition before the same room moments later: the moment settling down nicely thank you everything even ourselves quietly enveloped by the velvet fog of several new thoughts entangling themselves into the well-oiled narrative of life gradually returning to earth (moving on moving on moving on moving on) ebbing along Grand Central Parkway pressing on through partially delighted solid reams of traffic slowing me down like frozen treacle tyres creeping little by little toward JFK impossibly complicated new cadences of the vernacular taking a left turn via the language of hazardous emotion molecular structures lifting from the tarmac hostesses bulging at their pretty patterned seams while through the glass golden-bosomed Siamese idols dwindle into the distance and all those once longed for horizons diminish intangible and already half-forgotten like a beautiful shining intermezzo

H P Tinker © 2006.

HP Tinker is an accidental byproduct of Simon Prosser’s controversial attempt to genetically engineer a brand new radically hip Brit Lit author by cloning the narrative technique of William Burroughs with the social largesse of Kingsley Amis. Somewhere the experiment went horribly wrong. Now released into the wider literary community, HP Tinker has been published here , here, and even here. More recently he was published here and can be purchased here. Should you, for whatever reason, wish to find out more you can do so. Here.

French House, Soho...

2006-02-02T17:27:00.000Z

A London pub that doesn’t sell pints of beer might sound like some flight of fancy, but if you open your mind to a different drinking culture entirely, then a whole new world can be found awaiting at the French House pub in Soho.

At 11:19am on a pleasant Friday morning, I attempted to make my passage through the pub’s sturdy entrance door, instead finding it to be quite locked. Cupping hands around my face like wrinkled racehorse blinkers, I peered through the white-frosted windows, but these offered forth no glimpse within. Finding a second door locked also, I then noted an opening hours sign that indicated that the doors would open this day and every other at 12 noon. I had to laugh. This was to be my first encounter with the ways of an exotic, foreign drinking house.

Upon entering the premises at the appropriate time, I was immediately taken by the very small surroundings, cluttered as they were by all manner of photographs, paintings and illustrations that framed every inch of wall space. Enquiring as to the costs of hiring an audio guide, in English, in order to aid my studied browsing of the artworks upon the walls, the barman lifted his hands before him in an easily understandable gesture of incomprehension. I laughed, only too aware of the cultural divide that separated us. But this chasm deepened when he informed me that the pub only served beers in half-pint glasses. GOOD GOD! BUT…! Obviously familiar with the naÔve likes of me, he slowly repeated this charming local tradition, and shaking my head, I dispensed with some coinage of his fair currency, and left the servery with 300mls of ale.

My early arrival had been rewarded however, with a prime corner bench seat in a cul-de-sac to the rear of the bar, and I made claim to this position by arranging the contents of my pockets in neat, horizontal piles across the table, like the contents of a small nation’s time capsule. The half pint of ale I had purchased was, of course, now empty, and as the bar man again filled my small glass, he reminded me of a petrol station attendant refuelling a vehicle that has just left the station, driven once around the block, and immediately returned with an empty tank.

A large black and white photograph featured a character that looked like an oriental Winston Churchill. I stared at him from my seat, thinking how eerily quiet the pub was without music, TV, or annoying gaming machines. Despite the clink of glasses, and coins being fingered within the pockets of the cash register tray, the only noise of note was the constant hum from a vent in the wall above me. Ghosts speak through radio static, and I was listening out for them in the fan when my mobile phone suddenly rung loudly with its distinctive Easy Lover ring-tone, a track first brought to life in 1984 by English musician Phil Collins and his American counterpart Phil Bailey [must buy Bailey’s Chinese Wall album]. I let it ring for sometime, worried at first that I would have to pay overseas charges if I answered it, but just then the barman stuck his head around my back corner of the bar and loudly exclaimed, ‘No mobile phones in the bar! Thank you!’ An accusing silence sounded like a pane of glass that had been kicked in by a yellow boot roller skate. No mobile phones? I was astounded. What queer custom was this?

Back at the bar, having just broken the rules and traditions of the local ways, I attempted to play my appeasement card by requesting a bottle of fine French wine and uno glass. The barman smiled slightly, as if in pain, and he fetched a bottle and set about uncorking it. Once seated again, I began writing myself a postcard on a piece of scrap paper:

Dear Paul,

Hello! I’m at the French House pub in Soho. Drinking French wine. Here’s to you! Am fully absorbed in the culture having spoken often to a local man who knows me well. My table is clean. They only serve half pints! Mobiles are barred! And they don’t open until midday! How are things south of the river? For God’s sake, don’t open the door for anyone and never answer the phone.

All the best!

PAUL.

Just then, the barman placed a simple glass bowl before me, filled with fresh olives. Smiling, he said, ‘Enjoy!’ I was taken aback. As he disappeared again, tears began welling in my eyes until a sharp voice nearby said, “Pull yourself together, you big sook.” I glanced around, fearing that it was the voice of a French ghost speaking through the soft baritone hum of the extractor fan. “You stupid man with no taste.” The words seemed to come from beneath my very nose, and as I looked down, I saw the open end of an olive move to perfectly form the shape of the word ‘Loser.’ More olives began piping up with insults out of fish-like mouths. It was extraordinary! Talking olives! In perfect English! The next thing I knew, the entire chorus had begun loudly humming the Easy Lover tune of my mobile phone ring-tone. I was mesmerised. They were very good and they swayed slightly like a church choir. I began swaying too, and the barman looked quite angry when he suddenly appeared again, making it clear in no uncertain terms that mobile phones were not welcome in the French House.

I had an olive squeezed into each eye socket when I returned to the bar, because they told me they wanted to order the wine. But the barman showed me the door instead, and I wish I’d left some more room on my postcard to mention the really early closing hours.

Paul Ewen © 2006.

Paul Ewen was born and raised in New Zealand. After spending six years living and working in Asia,including four years in Vietnam, he moved to London in 2002. His short stories have appeared on 3AM magazine, in Tank magazine and in the Times Higher Education Supplement, and in 2005 he was featured in the British Council's New Writing 13 anthology edited by Ali Smith and Toby Litt. 'London Pub Reviews', his collection of stories based in real London pubs, will be published this year. Paul Ewen can be contacted at: londonpubreviews@yahoo.co.uk

Ways to go...

2006-02-02T17:15:00.000Z

I leave New Street via WH Smith and M&S Simply Food Shop exit, past cash points and taxi rank, full with police raid vans, unmarked cars (either silver or dark blue), the sight of them always unnerves me, after the London Bombs, and one summer after September 11th, when the station was evacuated, we thought it might be a bomb, but it was a small fire. The panic was real and tangible, the public turned into lemmings, running to the way out.

They are always waiting, and watching – high visibility cops panic people more, so plain-clothed officers watch. I see them, I’m regular as the clock, the CCTV must know my face, same time each morning; and the police, their faces, positions, quasi-casual man at Topman clothes, blend in, mingle, and become one of the crowd. But they are easy to spot. I used to carry a backpack, because my spine won’t take heavy loads on my hip – paper round damage inflicted by those huge Sunday morning papers. After London in July, I found myself cautiously eying up all backpacks in my locale, and then realised it could as much be me with my backpack. Although a skinny white girl doesn’t fit the face of international modern terrorism, even so. I wonder if CCTV ever watched me. Probably not, those cameras never record anything, do they?

Speed walking through the deserted Bullring, I know this is not recommended for my safety- I could be raped, murdered, mugged, or any number of horrible urban crimes that Birmingham is noted for; shooting, stabbing, etc…I often enter the Bullring through the glass doors next to Boots, and the silence closes in, the cold and dark stays outside, sometimes I encounter the man filling up the vending machines, he ignores me, I ignore him (but secretly take in every detail, jut in case anything should happen and I need to give the police a description).

I see the shop girls waiting on the balcony outside Topshop; I wonder if they see me. I wonder why they need to be at work so early. I see some cleaners wheeling sanitary bins back and forth from the ladies toilets, I see security guards in pairs pacing about, and when I move to the underground level via the escalator, I am alone, my footsteps echo about the space, I feel a bit panicked, silly really, but if anything should happen, who would come to help me? I’m so stupid really, should stay where people can see me.

I see a man walking towards me, older; I’m a bit worried. It’s just me and him. I walk a bit faster, pass him without incident, round the corner and out into the open, the Indian man is setting up his shop, traffic is minimal, and buses are plentiful. I sometimes see a black cat, padding around by the entrance to Moor Street, that cat must be tough, a little city cat who knows the streets and gets fed by passers by, or goes after rats, which are in large supply on rail lines. I wonder what the cat is called.

Lauren McCarthy © 2006.

Lauren McCarthy currently lives in the heart of England’s Black Country, somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

Almost Blue...

2006-01-15T14:59:00.000Z

I am sat in the apartment with William, Susan and Eva. Susan is sucking on a Marlboro as she says “That was a close one” and Eva is touching up her lip gloss in a compact mirror, legs crossed, flicking a strand of dirty blonde hair off of her sweat glistening brow, hand trembling slightly as always from the crystal meth she has been smoking and she – um-hmmm’s – in agreement barely taking her attention from her lips, the compact, the gloss.

“I don’t feel so good,” William offers before staring off into space again and I am shivering slightly, not so sure why I am cold and staying quiet for now wondering if it would be prudent to go fix up a shot so close to the incident, then absently wondering if there is an established protocol in such situations.

A CRASH! interrupts my thoughts and the glasses on the old oak table we are sat around jump and tumble, sending Coke splashing in all directions and I look around to see Susan looking startled, Eva with one eye on the floor the other still checking out her reflection and William no longer at the table. With a groan he gets up from underneath, his right cheek and eye an ugly red color from where he caught the corner of the table as he blacked out and collapsed out of his seat.

“You fucker! What’ya do that for?” he moans raising a hand to his eye and staring at me accusingly with the good eye and I turn my palms up and say “What?” and he spits “You hit me in the fucking face!” as Eva laughs loudly and inappropriately at William's pratfall. Susan shoots her a dirty look and says “You fell off your chair and hit the table sweetie; you blacked out.”

“Oh, sorry…”

“That’s OK”

“I busted my face up good. It hurts.”

“Yeah, you did”

“Fuck. Michelle is gonna kill me!”

I laugh a little. “Michelle’s gonna kill me. “

“I just fell off the chair, huh? The last thing I remember is… “ He drifts off.

“Just tell her what happened. It’ll be cool.” offers Eva, and William thinks about it for a second and says “No fucking way, she’d freak out… Uh, I’d better go home...”

Driving William home we stop by a McDonalds drive-thru and I convince him to eat something “It’ll make ya feel better” and reluctantly he orders a cheeseburger which he chews at morosely as we head towards his place on Normandie Avenue. As we pass Western he starts to vomit violently out of the window, splashing the inside as well as the outside of the door, but I suppose I can’t be too mad with him considering the circumstances.

At 2224 North Normandie Ave we pull up and I offer an apologetic “Here we are” rousing him out of his stupor. William opens the door with a sick stained handle and staggers out onto the sidewalk.

“Don’t fall asleep when you get in,” I tell him “Drink some coffee, do something for the next couple of hours but don’t sleep. Sleep would be bad right now.” He just nods and turns to head towards his apartment.

“Hey” I yell after him “I’m real sorry, you know?” and he half raises his hand in some kind of response as he walks unsteadily to the house. I pull away heading towards Fairfax and an oldies radio station plays Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons singing Big Girls Don’t Cry. It’s Friday night, and I’m not really sure why but I start to get the urge to sob. I try to swallow the feeling down inside of myself but it sticks in my throat like wadded cotton wool and the need to vent becomes so big that it feels like a physical pain in my chest. I need to get high. Higher. As high as I possibly can. I need to cook down all of the drugs in the world into an evil dark brown goo and shoot it all straight into my heart and maybe then – maybe – I will feel like a human being again.

-------

“He’s not breathing! Jesus Susan he’s fucking DEAD! I FUCKING KILLEDHIMHESDEADIFUCKINGKILLEDHIM!!!” and Susan is screaming “JUST CALM DOWN….shit, Eva! Close the door the whole fucking office can hear this… OK listen, do you know CPR?”

I am standing over William, he looks dead, surely he can’t come back after this? His face is red; I have been slapping him around ever since he took his shot and started turning blue. After the third blow he simply slid off of the couch and onto the floor, limp.

“No, I don’t know CPR you stupid cunt! How the fuck would I know CPR?”

“Fuck! Pinch his nose and breathe into his mouth! Inflate his lungs. Then pump his chest …. Fuck, is it 5 times? Ten maybe?”

“Fuck me! Just guess, you stupid junkie bitch!”

“OK… 5 times, then repeat. Listen I’m hanging up! We’re leaving right now! Eva, we’re going-”

“Hurry the fuck up!”

And then the line goes dead. Dead. Oh Jesus. Susan works at least half an hour's drive from here. If I don’t do something we’re either gonna have to call the cops or dispose of the body and run. I start to vomit. I didn’t know fear could make you vomit. It is hot and it burns and it lands on my shoes and the floor and some of it splashes onto William. It came so suddenly that I didn’t even have time to direct it away from him. Great. I’ve killed him and puked on his body. I imagine the headline DEGENERATE DRUG FIEND KILLS FRIEND, BEATS HIM, VOMITS ON THE CORPSE.

I think I see a flicker from William. Maybe it is just a twitching nerve. The death twitch. But it happened right after the puke splashed on his face. Maybe it was related. Maybe there’s still some life in him.

Inspired I run around the house and find a vase. There are dead flowers in it. The water has evaporated. Susan got it when we moved in here and like everything else it was ignored as we just sat around and shot drugs. It withered and died, like her cat. Ernie. We heard his meows for days. Maybe weeks. Stupefied by the heroin we injected we ignored the whines, the passage of time became blurred until I found him dead under the sink one morning. I think he starved. Maybe he died of thirst. To avoid one of Susan’s periodic psychological breakdowns I simply threw the cats body over the balcony to the rocks of the Hollywood hills below us for the coyotes to eat. She never once inquired as to where her pet of 7 years had vanished to and I never brought it up.

I fill up the vase with water and walked over to William.

“You’d better wake up cocksucker,” I tell him, my hands shaking with fear, adrenaline, “Please wake up-“ and I dump the water all over him.
Like Lazarus William shakes and twitches. He gasps and coughs and starts to heave. I drop the vase to the floor and it shatters into a million pieces with a crash that sounds like all of the hearts in the world exploding at once.

“Oh Jesus!” William gasps, “Where am I?”

“You’re alive. You’re fucking alive!” I gasp hardly believing it.

“Yeah.”

“I brought you back to life!”

William just shoots me a dirty look. I try and think of the right thing to say.

“I need a shot,” I tell him, “I need one really fucking bad.”

Then I hear a key scraping in the lock and the door bursts open.

“OH JESUS!” Susan cries, staggering in, dressed in her work clothes, “He’s alive? Oh thank Christ!”

“I told you” Eva says, following her. She looks like a meth-whore, even in her cheap attempt at office attire. Susan – the head of finances at a chain of Laundromats - got Eva the job as her assistant in an attempt to get more money coming into the house since she landed here and started mooching drugs. In an attempt at making herself useful, Eva lets me fuck her whenever I like and she lets Susan fuck her too, but with the amount of drugs we consume neither of us can manage that very often. Anyway, I have no doubt that Susan and Eva will both be fired soon. Somebody will open Susan’s desk and find her works and her drugs. Or someone will realize that Susan has been creaming money off the top and hiding it with fancy account keeping. It is a matter of time, and I fear what will happen to all of us when that happens.

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ, what am I doing here?” William moans and I sadly wonder the same thing as I help him to his feet.

-------

William is here to write songs with me. The band is stalling badly and I am blocked. The songs I have for him to work on are pitiful, piss poor imitations of better songs by better bands. My creativity is gone. My days are totally focused on the scrabble to maintain the flow of drugs that enters the apartment. I have no time to create. I have no drive to create. The misery inside of me is so great, so tangible that the only way to deal with it is constant sedation. I only agreed to this because I am embarrassed to admit to my erstwhile best friend in Los Angeles that I have become the hopeless fuck up that he warned me I would become if I started shooting drugs and didn’t break off my relationship with Susan.

“She may be smart and be able to pull in money right now,” he told me, “but she’s fucking crazy. That girl doesn’t want a boyfriend. She wants someone do die with her.”

And he was right. I suppose I wanted to see what dying felt like. But now I was stuck, horribly alive and horribly alone. So I kept to our songwriting date so prove something to William that I already knew was a preposterous lie. To prove that I was OK.

“I’m gonna get high before we start,” I tell him, “You don’t mind do you?"

“Nope,” he tells me, then, “Do you have a little spare?”

We’re in a band. We share drugs. William smokes heroin on occasion but is basically a good-natured cokehead. But I suppose he wants to connect with me a little before we start.

“Sure “I tell him, “But I’ve only got a little. Do you mind shooting it instead?”

“I don’t do that –“

“Come on, man! I only have a tiny bit until Susan gets home… You wont even feel it if you smoke it. Don’t worry, I’ll make it a tiny shot. You’ll get high, nothing more. I’ll be careful.”

“Michelle would kill me if she knew I’d shot up. She didn’t even want me coming over here.”

Now, that hurt. Fuck Michelle I silently fume.

“Look, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ve done this a million times. You’re doing it ONCE. You’re my friend. Nothing bad will happen.”

“Well, I suppose…”

“Trust me.” I tell him, as I start to prepare the shots, and tell him to wrap my belt around his arm.

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

In a previous life Tony O’Neill played keyboards for bands and artists as diverse as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles his promising career was derailed by heroin addiction, quickie marriages and crack abuse. While kicking methadone he started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and he has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel DIGGING THE VEIN will be published in Feb 2006 by Contemporary Press, in the US and Canada. Wrecking Ball Press plan to release a UK edition Summer 2006. He lives in New York where he works a variety of odd jobs and writes.

More details can be found at http://www.tonyoneill.net/

Enough Ribena to Incarnadine the Multitudinous Seas...

2005-12-18T11:38:00.001Z

Once upon a time my sister baked a batallion of gingerbread men who seemed destined for doughy, doughty deeds so gallant were they. I simply couldn't bring myself to eat them; had neither the heart nor the stomach to do so. A moratorium was declared by sisterly decree and the spice boys remained in battle formation on the kitchen table pending mum's final verdict. You could smell the sensuous, exotic aroma from my bedroom, even behind closed door.

That night, I had this vivid dream in which the ithyphallic gingerbread men rose from the baking tray Galatea-fashion. Still under the influence of the self-raising flour, they legged it upstairs to gang-bang the Play-Doh model of the Girl Next Door I had lovingly sculpted and kept secretly beside my comics and sensible shoes.

Breakfast, the morning after, was a truly religious experience. I binged ravenously on the horny homunculi, tearing away at their limbs, biting off their heads with sheer abandon, and washing them down with enough glasses of Ribena to incarnadine the multitudinous seas.

Andrew Gallix © 2005.

Andrew Gallix is a writer and Editor-in-Chief of 3am Magazine, he also teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris, lives his life like a string of beads tossed from a frilly balcony and dedicates this story to William Gallix.

Crack Whore and Chicken Strips...

2005-12-14T18:26:00.000Z

I was sitting at Denny’s one afternoon.
It was winter and the sun was going down.
So I guess it was around five PM.
I was sitting at the counter.
I was reading About Behaviorism by Skinner.
Down a couple of seats was this strange African-American female.
She kept smiling all weird.
And making little disturbances that kept causing me to put my head up.
She was eating chicken tenders and drinking a soda.
She seemed like she was on crack.
Which is common at the Youngstown Denny’s.
People of all color, genders, and ages on crack.
So it was Denny’s as usual.
While I was reading I heard in a whisper, “Hey you, come over here.”
It was the crazy lady; she wanted me to sit next to her.
I didn’t see why not.
I sat next to her. I don’t know if I can duplicate her language. It was a confused word salad. I’m not talking Ebonics; I’m talking she was all fucked up.
She said in a whisper, “Somebody was supposed to pick me up. I don’t know where they are. I’m missing a party. I was supposed to dance for these guys. And they were gonna pay me one hundred and fifty dollars. No one has come to pick me. My dude dropped me off. Yeah, one hundred dollars, can you fucking believe? I should be at that party. If you pay for my food, I’ll give you a blow job.”
My first thought was that she is one weird fucking human.
Then questions arose.
Is she an escaped mental patient?
Does she really want me to pay for her food?
Would she really give me a blowjob for paying for her food?
If I pay for her food, how much of a tip should I leave?
Do I want a blowjob from this crazy human?
I said, “Yeah, I’ll pay for your food for a blowjob.”
She smiled.
I paid for my coffee and her food and left.
We went to the dirt motel down the street.
It was one of those hotels where people live, sex is purchased, crack is smoked and spouses are cheated on.
It was perfect for this.
We went into the room.
She immediately took off her clothes and I took off mine.
She began sucking my dick.
But I couldn’t focus.
There was something terrifying about this whole event.
There was something terrifying about her.
She was crazy, on crack or something.
Something miserable about her.
Something too miserable.
I couldn’t get off.
She offered to put it in her pussy.
But she wasn’t wet enough.
I couldn’t understand her intentions.
Maybe that was the problem.
She might have been crazy and on crack but she still wanted sex, and that’s why she offered it because buying chicken tenders for somebody does not constitute prostitution.
Maybe she was schizophrenic or a feral child.
I lost the need for an orgasm and started thinking about the horror of living.
The horror of living exists for everyone. If anything ties the people of the world together, it is that unceasing horror.
I decided to leave.
Put my clothes on.
Offered her a ride home but she said she would stay in the hotel all night.
She asked me if I had a lighter.
I gave her the only one I had.
She lied on the bed with one light on.
She smiled at me.
I smiled back.
Then left.
Got in my car and drove back to Denny’s to read About Behaviorism.
That was a strange experience.

Noah Cicero © 2005.

Noah Cicero (born 1980) is an American novelist, essayist, playwright, short-story writer, and poet. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and is the author of two books of fiction: The Human War [2003, Fugue State Press, New York]. The Condemned [2006, Six Gallery Press, Pennsylvania]. His stories, poetry, and essays have also been published extensively on the Internet. His prose is spare, extreme in its directness and force, and addresses with brutal Absurdist humor the day-to-day lives of urban-wasteland characters who are painfully aware of the futility of their existence. He notably depicts crumbling urban America, in particular the bars and strip clubs of Youngstown, with a bleak black humour. The work, while highly accessible, is imbued with political critique and an existential examination of reality. He has cited Sartre, Hemingway and Beckett as central influences.His essays are both political and philosophical in nature, sometimes using the tools of psychology and philosophy to crucify those political leaders or followers he sees as acting in bad faith. Some of these essays have been written in collaboration with Ohio journalist Bernice Mullins.

Agamemnon . . .

2005-12-12T18:11:00.001Z

A play in two acts by Tom McCarthy

Act One

Lights up to reveal the entrance to a house. This consists of a free-standing doorway (frame only) installed in the middle of the stage and facing along the stage right to stage left axis, i.e. at an angle of exactly ninety degrees to the audience. On the floor immediately to the doorway's left (stage right), a doormat bearing the word 'Welcome'. Several feet to the doorway's right (stage left), a bathtub. At the base of the doorway itself, a block of wood or metal three feet long and one and a half inches high. This must be firmly attached to the stage floor.

Enter, from stage right, Agamemnon, a man in his mid-forties. He walks from stage right towards stage left in a straight line that runs through the doorway. As he passes through the frame, he trips on the block and falls over.

Lights down.

Act Two

Lights half up to reveal a set cleared of doorway, doormat and bathtub, i.e. consisting only of the block. Across the stage's back wall the events of Act One, which have been filmed by a camera intalled in front of the stage exactly in line with the doorway, are replayed by means of a video projector. The replay must take place in extreme slow motion, at such a speed that the sequence from Agamemnon's entrance to his arrival at a state of rest on the floor lasts forty minutes.

Lights down.

Notes

1. Agamemnon's fall must follow the same stage right to stage left trajectory as his walk, so that he falls through and from the frame towards the bathtub, coming to rest face down with his feet pointing back towards the doorway and his hands towards the bathtub.

2. If the video replay equipment being used for the production is not sophisticated enough to replay Act One in extreme slow motion within Act Two immediately, Act One should be filmed and the footage slowed down to the desired speed using appropriate editing sofware prior to the performance. In this case, the actor playing Agamemnon must ensure that his movements are identical both times he performs Act One.

3. For this version of Agamemnon, the camera must be placed among the audience seating exactly in line with the doorway, as stated. The director can, however, choose to stage different versions by placing the camera on the theatre's ceiling directly above the doorway pointing down towards the floor, in which case the play's title for that particular production should be amended to Agamemnon (Gods); or by placing it off stage left pointing across towards stage right, in which case the play's title should be amended to Agamemnon (Clytemnestra); or by using three cameras, one placed in each of the positions indicated above, in which case the play's title should be amended to Agamemnon (Cassandra).

Tom McCarthy.

This first appeared in the Prague Literary Review.

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. He is the author of Remainder, Men in Space and Tintin and the Secret of Literature. His ongoing project The International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as 'the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years' and by Art Monthly as 'a platform for fantastically mobile thinking'. An ongoing archive of his work can be found here.

The Kiss

2005-05-16T19:29:00.000+01:00

As he approaches today’s dead children Doodles McMaster closes his lips. His breaststroke forms a small bow wave which makes the dead children bob a little as he meets the first of their motionless bodies. Doodles puffs out his lips, then tightens and thins them. He presses forwards against the carpet of dead children. There are three thousand today, just as there are every day. Today’s corpses will join yesterday’s three thousand. Tomorrow’s will join today’s. There is no smell of putrefying flesh. The bodies are too fresh for that. Rigor mortis has set in, as swiftly as it always does, so much faster than you might imagine if you have no experience of the freshly deceased. The faces of the dead children are waxy and yellowish, resembling a fine olive oil. Doodles eyes twinkle as he glimpses Zoe. At first he could not see her. Zoe is just the other side of the three thousand dead children. She grins at Doodles and waves as he swims closer. The dead children do not upset her. Someone walking on her private beach at low tide upsets her, but the dead children are not a problem. They are there but they cause no real upset. They are quite a long way out and rarely come close. They never wash up on the shore or become entangled with the tasselled legs of the pier. Doodles cuts through the dead children, their bodies bumping against each other as they bob out of his way. Zoe blows him a kiss and Doodles winks back. Now he is through the last of the dead children and moving in towards the shore. Dripping, he runs out of the shallows. Zoe throws her arms around him. Seeing this, the witness shapes what he has seen into words. Doodles kissed married Zoe on a night out. Upper case, bold. The dead children are now so far away there is nothing to see. A faint shadow, a line at best. Most probably imaginary.

Ellis Sharp © 2005.