The curtains were open. The glass was clean. I just found out there are men who come around and clean it. I bet they wear orange jumpsuits. That's the "in" uniform around here for the working class.

I stared at the houseplants and the coatrack. So this is where he lived now. I stood between two shelves of the ceiling-high library. There were framed portraits. A still-life. Pretty much everything was new. The sun blasted through a cloud, lighting up the living room like it was on stage. I turned and fell into a dream. Fuck, there were even synthesizers playing in the background.

"What are you going to do?" he asked me, "How will you ever find your way back home?"

He thinks it's because of Fitz. At first I was like, "whatever, pass the Camenbert," but then I ended up drinking until four with him trying to convince him otherwise.

His house is a straight line of three floors. On each floor there are one and half rooms. I had to go downstairs to take a piss. The stairs are some narrow, tall ass killers. Don't front by wearing heavy boots like I did, word is bond.

"I think something happened that you're trying to forget," he said to me. I looked up into his eyes and saw kindness, concern.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Whatever it was. It doesn't fucking touch me."

"I'm sure it's fine. I always had the impression that he's a good chap--harmless, at any rate."

"Don't be so sure!" I blurted out. It's one of many things I said last night that I wish I could take back.

Another was when we were at the hooker's, and I asked, "Will you do the same things you do to a boy to a girl?" She looked at me like I had four heads.

I wanted to pay her the same, or more. In the end it didn't matter because my friend couldn't go through with it. He couldn't stand the bluntness of the whole thing.

He's a good friend because he wants to save me. Only he doesn't know from what.

So instead of saving me we walked down narrow snowy streets carrying orange cinch sack bags from the Supermarket.

He said something, cracked a joke, playfully stretched a metaphor. We strolled onto the Grote Markt and bought tuna steaks. I pointed out a pineapple and he immediately scooped it up. The afternoon was perfect--neat and sweet, like the little mass produced coffee biscuits that come with every glass cup of koffie you buy.

Everything in it's place!--a great holiday!--loads of fun!--but all the while, he believes that my options are running out.

the right blog for amsterdam is anti

ms. phil gets up in the piece

Yanqui Blues on the SnelTrain

(Sung Altogether as we Round the Bend.)

The buildings fell away like cards as we rolled round the bend. I was on my way to Delft, a blue roofed town once imagined by Vermeer. We passed a hill covered with bare brown trees whose brown branches reached into the light at its crest. A little further along the tracks and the Earth opened up and the sky filled the train window—a grey, misting sky, in the middle of which something mysterious swung in and out of view. In fact at first it wasn’t anything for certain--just the shadow of something. It happened again. I didn’t know what it was but I knew something was flying about in the air over there. Oh my God, I thought, I’m seeing cartoon shit drop out of the sky, just like that time in Omaha.

I leaned back—my heart felt like it was stopping--even after I realized what it was that I was looking at: the slow, reluctantly turning turbine blades of the modern windmill. It was like a monster in the mist, Godzilla bringing his arm down in slow motion, turning a Tokyo skyscraper into Styrofoam dust right in front of our eyes. It moved through space like time itself, arcing gracefully (the time will come one day) and then spinning back down, domino style (walking alone in my own way).

“Yellow is the color of sunrays.”
I was the Don. The windmill was my destiny.

My camera’s broken and my laptop’s stolen. Someone was trying to break into my blogger account so I changed all the passwords. Sorry F & S, I’ve taken over for the time being…

The train passed rows of low lying buildings with colourful trim and rain soaked rooftops. I saw the letters, “SAME” spray painted across the side of one. A lavender sports car raced along on the highway, cloaked in our shadow.

We passed a long green field in the middle of which a single swan sat picking its butt.

Hopefully, whoever stole my laptop will have it stolen from them, in order to keep the wheel turning.

As for me, I'm slowing myself the fuck down...smoke if you got em.

Winner's Blues

Last night it happened again, that whole shit with my heart. For a good part of the evening I was seized up like a poisoned cockroach. It must be some kind of mind over matter thing when I’m high—a sign that my nerves are fuzzing out, I suppose.

For this and other reasons, I’m leaving Arizona. I bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. I leave this afternoon. I blew my dime and called up some European peeps. They all owe me, anyway. I was up in that piece for three plus years and I built some bridges.

I’ll be in Schiphol Airport just in time for the Wednesday rush hour. I can’t wait to get lost in the morning crowd, jostled about by people with their folded up Dagblad and DeVolskrant and speaking Dutch into microscopic cell phones. Those European smells of coffee, beer and sweat. And cigarettes.

Everything is cold and damp. The sky is white.

But what, if in order to make something happen, I were to make a sign?

Trixie doesn’t believe that I’m leaving. When I told her the plan she rolled her eyes and snapped her gum.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You’re probably right,” I said.

She went back to working on her James Brown cover album. She wore her dead father’s denim jacket out to the garage, where she had an ancient four-track set-up alongside an equally ancient (and dusty) Emerson stereo. Something from the early 90s. There were three black Air Jordan sneaker boxes stacked against a professional looking mic stand. The microphone itself was covered with duck tape, but still. She pulled up a folding chair and sat her skinny little girl butt in front of the mic. The pockets of the jacket were filled with green and white cables. She opened the top Jordan box and carefully selected two cassette tapes. She put them in the stereo and they began to play simultaneously—a warbling, fucked up twist of James Brown and something else, maybe Depeche Mode's, “Never let me down again”. Each playing at various, changing speeds, but never the correct one. It was like a drunken carousel. Here and there you could hear a signature chord from James Brown’s band, “Da-Da-Da-de-Da!” but it would be quickly submerged in a quicksand of sounds. The distortion was so great that it’s possible the tape had been turned upside down and wound back into the cassette.

Trixie waited out a certain number of syncopated, drunken beats before she sat up tall and brought a kazoo to her mouth with one hand and the mic with the other. She let out a series of high-pitched woops and sighs, even spitting and licking the microphone at one point. The effect of all this was both frightening and fascinating—like watching a crack head hit the pipe. Trixie’s eyes became wide and staring. The kazoo made it sound like she’d been turned into a robot. But no robot would ever make sounds like that. I could only make out a few bits of the spoken words interjected amongst the scatting. She seemed to be saying:

“You gotta serve somebody, could be the devil or the risen lord but you know you gotta serve somebody.”

Just now, Trixie looked over my shoulder and saw what I was writing.

“If you really go away, who’s going to help me market my album,” she said, pouting with her pink lip-gloss.

“Aren’t you going to finish the movie? My sister will be pissed—she bleached her hair and everything.”

“I’ll be back,” I said, pulling on a button down over my T-shirt.

“I promise.”

I wrote an email today in which I described an episode from several years back, when the back of my knee was infected by a mysterious tick, and the doctor at the hospital was certain I'd have to have my leg amputated half way down. I went home thinking I was about to be crippled when Gramps, the German Shepherd in the house I was living at, attacked the welt on my leg and chewed out the poison. Then he licked the wound for days straight and eventually I got better. I don't even have a limp now or anything.

Then I think of Sterling, who has to live with her missing fingers every day. Two fingers aren't the same thing as half a leg, she'd be the first to admit, but still. I know it's especially tough for her because she did that shit to herself. She has to live with the story.

Once I asked her how it looked, her two fingers cut off clean from her hand, right there on the thick, lacquered wood of the paper cutter.

"It had a grid across it like graph paper," she said. "The blood ran into every nook and cranny. The cut was clean and straight. If not for the shooting blood, I would have been able to get a close up on a cross section inside my body, right there where those two fingers abruptly ended. My fresh stubs. They looked like the inside of a pocket pizza--round, factory squeezed disc of cheese in the center, surrounded by layers of sauce and meat."

Show Me Your Wound.

Raymi's Wound.

I almost died last night. Word is bond I think I was dead for a couple of seconds, like one of those flatlining ER patients that Dr. Green brings back to life, only there was no Dr. Green, no IV drip and no TV cameras, just an old ass sagging couch filled with horsehair and the younger sister of the girl who was playing the part of Sterling in my movie--my “of the moment” desert epic about characters with European dreams and Hollywood realities. For some superstitious reason that I can’t remember I didn’t want to type out the girl’s name or give her a fake one when I wrote about her before. But whatever, I feel pretty certain that my near death experience set my Karma meter back to zero so let’s call the little dimebag slut “Trixie”, and make it short for Grace. She’s a 12 yr old heavy metal hair whore with an unexpectedly amazing one-man (one-girl) band that I keep meaning to tell you about. The music she makes is strictly next level. You’d never believe it by looking at her—I’ve decided that she must be one of those secret geniuses who’s so smart that they’re stupid. Trixie fucks 18yr olds and hangs out with stoners behind the town Kmart in her Kid Cock I mean Kid Rock T-shirt, smoking Virginia Slims and examining the sharp points she’s filed her nails into. The expression on her face is that of a monkey’s but underneath it I swear she’s the Mozart of electronic music. Shit, I’d like to tell you about her now but it’s important to get the details of this dying episode down before vaporization commences and the memories get left behind like days lost in the wake.

Of course the whole thing was my fault. Trixie and I were home alone. We sat on the couch in the living room and watched “Unfaithful”. I’d given everyone the night off from shooting because we all needed the rest but when it came to it, I couldn’t relax so I did coke off the glass table instead. I also had the one hitter stuffed with hash. I kept going from one to the other, see-sawing up and down, up and down until finally I thought, “This is stupid,” and scraped the rest of the coke into a single fat rail. I bent down just as Richard Gere’s wife rejected his advances in the bathtub. It was the rich person kind that stands on its own little gold feet.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I sat up. There were flashing white squares in front of my eyes, like department store snowflakes or a close-up on a disco ball. I blinked several times, rapidly, but they didn’t go away. My back clenched up and my legs started shaking. I stretched them out in front of me—I couldn’t feel my toes.

“What the fuck, I’m losing my extremities,” I mumbled, panicking.

“Whuh’d say?” Tricia asked. She snapped her gum; her eyes didn’t move from the screen.

“I said, ‘Bitch, I’m having a heart attack.’” It was true—my heart was going a million miles a minute. Not only that, it sputtered and throbbed to the point where it made wet sponge sounds in my chest. I felt a deep ache through to my back and all the way up my left shoulder. That was pretty bad but what was even worse was the knowledge of how unreliable this essential bodily function had suddenly become.

From one minute to the next, cardiac arrest...

(You think you’re mad, too unstable, kicking in chairs and knocking down tables in a restaurant, in a west end town, call the police there’s a madman around, run him down, underground, to a dive bar, in a…)

Actually what was really the worst weren’t the physical symptoms but the psychological shit. How I felt like I was going to stop breathing at any minute, and as a result how I kept giving myself the same goodbye speech: That’s it for you, _____. Your little race is over. Obviously, at a time like this I fell back on the name my mother gave me. It makes me a sucker, I know, but what can I say?

The pins and needles from my toes spread through the rest of me, traveling in waves that corresponded to the ecstatic rhythm of my heartbeat. I was leaving my body, I was sure of it. I started moaning, softly.

“Are you fucking losing your shit?” Trixie asked.

I slid down on the couch so that my head was resting beside her thigh. When I looked up she rose before me like a mountain. I drew some odd comfort over her sudden increase in stature. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to make mountains out of kids.

“I’m dying,” I whispered.

“No, you aren’t,” she said, her eyes fixed on the TV behind me.

“Richard Gere’s getting old,” she pointed out, “But it’s still really hard for him not to be Richard Gere, you know what I’m saying?”

“You don’t understand, there’s something really wrong--help me.”

“OK, OK,” she half-heartedly placed her hand on my trembling shoulder. I looked up—her eyes were still on the screen.

As I watched, her face faded out and I was pulled into a shadowy expanse, filled with pink and turquoise galaxies gently swirling in the otherworldly light. It was an opening up—a feeling of endlessness far away from other people. Dissolving into it would be as simple as giving in to a waist-tugging current. I just had to let myself be swept away. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant.

I focused on Trixie’s thigh, on the exact shade of her retro jeans. Suddenly, it occurred to me that there was too much I’d miss.

Like Jamie's blog.

oh, dag i didn't mean for you to eat the whole bag!

antiblogblue

Core Conditioning at the trailer park with the boys

We broke in. Turned the rusted hotplate on high and made macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and drank shitty lite beer. I had a pain in my chest as I went through the kitchen drawers, looking for drugs. It felt like my lungs were stuck together. The boys laughed and called me a pussy as I leaned against the thin ass plastic wall. Outside the trailer the sky turned dark pink (rhubarb) and then a pale violet (all the stars were just like little fish). The boys stripped down to their underwear and rubbed bronzing oil on their bodies. They were going to give themselves movie star tans. Orange handprints covered their pimply backs like a secret language. I took hit after hit on a dirty inhaler that I found behind a box of Frosted Flakes.

It was like some kind of psycho film noir flick, but for the bluegrass playing.

(The T Stands for Terminator)

But Sterling, you're already dead...

But I wanted to tell you about the one man band, the one woman band, I should say—actually, it’s a one girl band--that of Sterling Fassbinder’s slutty twelve year old sister. Not the real Sterling Fassbinder, but the girl who’s playing her part in the desert epic I’m filming out here. The actress was just your typical small town, chain-smoking waitress until I cut and bleached her hair and taught her how to walk. The real Sterling Fassbinder is stuck back in Brooklyn and is a former junkie and sometimes DJ and a writer on this blog with two missing fingers and a day job on Park Avenue. The real Sterling Fassbinder doesn’t have a sister—she had a twin brother once but he drowned in front of her when they were four. He rode his tricycle into an uncovered pool and disappeared beneath the surface without making hardly a ripple, either in the water or in Sterling’s panic stricken brain. She forgot all about him—a feat of repression matched only by that of her parents, who became born again Christians and brain washed themselves and their daughter into believing it had always only been the three of them, a charade that was successful until years later, when Sterling and I were sleeping on the beach in Jersey and shooting enough drugs to kill a horse and she had a vision and ran out into the sea.

At that point she wasn’t only a dyke but she was a serious boy dyke, meaning she went around dressing and talking and acting like a boy. She was the kind of hardcore chick who kept the piece strapped on under her jeans when she went out the door. She was even thinking of scamming her way to Italy to get a chunk of flesh cut off her ass and fixed with hydraulic tubes and then sewn between her legs. She was going to have to get off the dope to have even half a chance at qualifying for this Frankenstein dick—even in Europe—but getting clean wasn’t an option at that point, which was actually a good thing because eventually the drugs cracked open her head and shook everything out of it, and on that fateful summer evening she could finally see that what she wanted wasn’t to be a boy but to be her brother. Her long lost twin brother named Sterling.

I remember grabbing the blanket and running into the foamy surf where she was flailing about like she was drowning, even though the water was only up to her shins. Her multitude of purple and green bruises turned dark and shiny like oil paint. A sound was coming out of her—it was like nothing I’d ever heard before, a tremendous, guttural moan making me think of birth and zombies.

I wrapped the blanket around her and led her out of the water. She was shaking uncontrollably. Her eyes didn’t seem to be working. She stopped moaning and started whispering the same words, over and over:

“But Sterling, you’re already dead. Sterling, you’re already dead.”

I tilted her face up towards the sky. I remember really wishing we had a camera, because her thousand-yard stare would have made a great picture. Something I could have held on to. As it is the only picture I have of the real Sterling Fassbinder is over exposed. She’s in my bathroom with the yellow tiles and the yellow bathtub and her face looks like a ghost. I showed it to the girl who’s playing her part but I don’t think it provided any real insights or inspiration.

Brett Lamb off the prop list

Hey man,

No doubt you're a smart and creative guy, and I love the Flash--that's what wowed us all in the beginning--but enduring the overwhelming lameness of your site requires more strength than I can muster. Word, I'm not going to go in deep with my criticisms unless you ask me to, but let's just say that it's encapsulated by the daily "slow song" entry. It's not like I argue with the song selection or that I don't find it a little bit sweet the way you stick to the formula "...at 70% normal speed." It's just lame that you do it at all. No one ever leaves a comment. They'll leave comments for other posts, just not the slow song ones. It's like they're trying to forget about it.

Actually, I almost left a comment about a slow song, once. It was the duet between Bjork and Thom Yorke, "I've Seen It All" at 70% normal speed. I was going to write, "How did you know?" but I never got around to it.

Oh, and the crap about Raymi...i don't give a fuck about worst means best and the Weisblott poll or any of that--it was the tone you had and the way you continue to write about it, as if you're gloating which would be strange because you didn't win anything...the whole thing just left a bad smell on you, like you've got poo-poo shoes now and we all know it.

The T Stands for Tampon

My period makes me weak. I know what other bitches say but my body gets too big for itself. I don’t mean fat, I’m talking about the goddamn negative energy that it creates—it’s too much for me to handle. I feel like I’m going to snap in two, cracking like a crab leg right along my spine. The energy is a runoff from the pain, like the energy I make my art from. The bleeding deflates me. My period is a leech that sucks my blood and spits it out again. I’m left a hobbled scarecrow: an empty, aching husk.

When it’s “that time of the month” I stop what I’m doing and hole up with a fat sack, some music, my notebooks and drawing pads. I don’t answer the phone and I tell anyone who asks that, “I’m sick, I’ve got my period, I need to be left the fuck alone, please—and when you go to the store get me a Jamaican raspberry ginger ale and a box of Cap N’ Crunch…yes, Peanut Butter. I’ll be OK, I’ll eat it dry. What? The remote control? Sure, I’ll take that.”

I don’t do anything all day but smoke my head off and draw faces from the television. Some people have said, “Yeah, but you couldn’t do that if you had a job, women still have to go to work,” and I say, “If I had a job I’d call in sick. Why the fuck not? What’s the phone for? So you don’t have to see someone if you aren’t feeling well and you can just call them and say, ‘hello, I’m not feeling well I’m not coming the fuck in to my stupid-ass job.’”

Sometimes, however, my whole plan gets rearranged, when the pain is so bad and my nerves are so shot and the weed doesn’t work, it just makes everything worse, until I’m pulling at my hair and turning up the stereo to block out the sound of my throbbing heart.
I’m pressed into a coal shaft between the centuries. I want to write it all down but instead it’s leaking out of me, unused, useless.

I’m the young city bandit, hold myself down single handed. Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown of thorns.

I sit by the bedroom window, listening to the traffic reports while cars and trucks snake up the highway on their way to work. I pause to think of the cause of it all before I spark some more shit and lie back in my Rive Gauche pinstripe trousers and wife beater, attempting to relax. The ceiling is still covered with early morning shadow. It seems that it’s always one hand iced with “LOVE” and the other with “HATE”, like Radio Raheem. I take off my Tag Heur and toss it to the side. The essence to letting a day slide is that you don’t need to know what time it is. I’ve also taken my platinum symbol off and locked it in the new high-tech security carrying case I "found" for my titanium laptop (also "found").


(link)

I AM

The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore.

My mind’s racing, but my hands are bound and my tongue’s tied. A knot, a nothing: that’s what I am, sitting alone in a stranger’s bedroom. The unscalable wall and everything hidden behind it; I’m that patch of promised land—the athletic, tomboy fuck that you’ve been searching for.

I’m the end station, the one on the dirty, washed-out corner where there’s the shitty little waffle shop with the cracked, hanging sign that also serves booze. Patrons press their fingernails in the yellow laminated place settings, unconsciously tracing the arcs of the silver military jets that are in that moment flying over their heads, miles above in the clear blue sky. Zoom Lens, Flight Patterns, powdered sugar and Grand Marnier. I’m the winding street covered with worn-down cobblestones that leads you, one slick and shiny square after another, to a record shop where you don’t speak the language.

I am the feeling you have as you pick through the crates; you keep your shoulders hunched while you chew on a plastic stir straw. Nonchalant.

I’m the fact that on a certain number of certain mornings, you’ve wanted nothing more than just to die, to have everything stop and then go on without you on it, like the melancholic feeling on a merry-go-round in those awful minutes of slow down, when you look forward to and at the same time are sad about the fact that you’ll have to soon get off.

If that’s the case, than what is even more me were the moments when you walked down the gravel path, clinging hands with each parent, one on either side of you as speakers crackled back to life in the summertime trees and the song of the carousel came back on.

You turned your head and watched that proud, glittery world start turning without you.

(The tinge of regret is smothered out by a glorious thought, "You're going home." You know you’re right.)


ulaan baatar, mongolia

girl-on-girl-on-boy

Jamie of this here known universe/gotham pictures i don't know what the blog is calledthought I was dissing him by linking him to "most cheated" but I was just high. OK, that's an excuse, another lie piled up like the cigarette butts in the ashtray in front of me. In all honesty I don't know why I thought he'd make a good "most cheated", maybe the sad, sleepy look in his eyes in the pic:




Anyway, i don't know why i'm explaining myself. i don't really do that anymore...so let's just say it's all about the picture...and the morning of 9/11...before anything happened. On Grahme Ave heading towards the subway. Man, I know it sounds all cryptic and drugged out but i think it was you...walking ahead of me with the same jeans as the picture. You had a book or something in the back pocket and I remember thinking, "damn, i wish i had jeans that fit like that so a book would stick out of my back pocket just the right amount..." It was early and the sky was that perfect blue. I'm not usually out and about and sober at that hour so i was taking in the whole scene like a visitor from another planet.

Maybe it wasn't you and i'm making a fool of myself...Maybe i just want it to be you because the back of that guy has been stuck in my head ever since that fucked up day and if fate brought me to him again, especially when we're both thousands of miles from brooklyn then maybe i'll have another scrap of evidence that fate exists on its own, without the need of silly poets and drunken rappers and one man (or woman) bands to make it up. I want to enlarge the picture and then enlarge it some more and then some more after that just like in the movie "Blow-Up", but it's digital, so all i'll get are a swarm of pixels, not an explanation for the murder...

whatever, i'm going to sleep my head is filled with styrofoam.

...most weeded...

Right when Sterling's sister said that about her shit, the pipes behind the bathroom mirror started humming violently. It was just like in the movie Eraserhead, when the otherworldly singing and moaning and breathing and dragging sounds float up and reverberate against the metal coils of the radiator. Only this was the desert, so there wasn't a radiator, just some gutted out space behind the thin plaster wall. Inside, among the hanging strips of pink insulation, someone or something had positioned itself to watch and wait. I was sure of it. I could see my terrified face reflected in the mirror as I slowly backed out into the carpeted hallway, arms akimbo. "You're in on it," I told Sterling's sister, who regarded me cooly, her heavily made-up eyes narrowed in suspicion. I don’t remember what happened next. I seemed to have blacked out.

It was night when I came to. I lay perfectly still in a strange bed. The covers smelled like dust and sweat. I held my breath and felt my teeth shaking. I was unbound, ungoverned. I closed my eyes and dreamed of an NYC punk street show in black and white, with a strange light bending over the hipster crowd like heaven itself, streaming through skyscrapers and illuminating boulevards, until everyone and everything was reduced to bare outlines. I woke up with a start at 3AM. I stretched my arms and creeped into the kitchen. I took the keys to the jeep and drove out to the canyons to read the signs.

I came back at daylight and snuck back into bed. The desert sunshine’s too much for me. I’ve become goth rock pale and I like it.

Sometimes, when I'm in one of these suburban houses, I’ll pause in the middle of the upstairs hall, doors and rooms ahead of me on each side, and I’ll cock my head like a dog in the shadows. It’s so silent that I swear I can hear the world stop. I plug in my titanium laptop and watch the red lights race to life along the front. Could it be that the separation has already begun? The lifting off and explosion of my mind’s innermost kernel? That web of beliefs, that sinking anthem, that one holds so dear…I found myself thinking these and other provocative thoughts as I turned a pen over and over in my hands. I looked down at the shiny silver wand, uncomprehendingly. I tried to imagine bits and pieces of myself, blown throughout the air.

…and a strange dust lands on your clothes,
and on your face…on your face…on your face…
(morrissey, "Everyday is Like Sunday")

I woke up after noon and decided to explore my new crashpad. Sterling’s sister was in the living room, listening to Avril Lavigne and lifting tiny pink weights, her face expressionless. She wore glittery aqua colored spandex shorts and a pink Everlast sports bra/tank top thingy. I felt the emptiness of the house on ever side of us as I watched her tiny round ass cheeks squeeze in, and then relax, squeeze in, and then relax.

Those weights couldn’t have been more than five pounds. It was all a show, the way she was straining and flexing like that. I stood emptyheaded in the foyer. I didn’t know what to do so I decided that I was hungry. She caught me moping towards the kitchen.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I’m hungry,” I confessed.

She let the weights fall from her hands, making twin thuds against the hardwood floor. Then she undid her pony tail and flipped her hair.

“You know what I mean.”

“Nope. I don’t.”

“OK, what I mean is, what do you want from this town—what do you want from my sister?” She took out a pink comb from her purse and started combing out her streaked blonde tresses.


“Nothing. Nada. I don’t want a thing from anyone. Just to make this little movie.”

“Why here, though?”

“Why not? For all you know the next scene takes place in Vienna, Austria.”

She looked at me blankly.

“You probably don’t know where that is,” I remarked, chuckling slightly.

“Hey! You don’t know what I know,” she said, pointing at me with her comb. Her eyes narrowed and then widened again.

“Do you wanna see something?” she asked, in a luring tone.

“Nah, that’s alright.”

“No,” she said holding her hand out to me, “I insist.”

“I was going to get something to eat.”

“But don’t you want to see my one man band, first?” She pouted and stuck out her stomach. I watched as a pink pointed finger adorned with sparkly blue polish drew an invisible line from the smooth swell of her tiny paunch to the edge of her belly button. Time stopped again as everything became very still. The previous night, in the canyons, I kept going back and forth on how old I thought she was. In this moment, however, she looked twelve again.

Sterling's Sister

The girl who’s playing the part of Sterling in my movie lives in a little ranch style house at the end of a quiet, cactus-lined street. The thin-walled rooms are filled with third hand furniture and fake plastic trees. The first time I went there, my stomach was churning like a washing machine. I was stretched out across the bucket backseats of the girl’s old-ass, monkey shit orange colored Sentra, fly open and gripping my bloated gut, while she tried to drive as smoothly as possible. She kept reaching back and picking up a plastic GAP bag from the floor and shoving it onto my lap, from which it promptly fell off again.

“What do you think, it’s something you ate?”

“Nah,” I moaned, bringing my knees up to my chest. “My insides have turned into boiling oil.”

“What you need is a glass of milk.”

“No, I don’t. Don’t say that!” I screeched, pinching my arm as hard as I could so I’d resist the urge to tell her to fuck off.

We made it there just in time. I flew past her pointing finger into a bathroom covered in black tiles with amorphous patterns of gray smoke on them. I sat there, watching faces form and then recede back into the walls—narrow eyed spies and leering pornographers filmed in grainy black and white. I closed my eyes and imagined myself at an airport bar in the seventies, drinking a highball and tapping the ash of my thin white, ludicrously long cigarette into a purple-green glazed ceramic ashtray shaped like a pair of human lungs. “You’ve come a long way, baby,” I thought, as a chunky stream of bile hissed and sputtered out of my asshole. I was emptying out—there was more in me than I could be held accountable for. I held my head in my hands and offered a penance that while not exactly sincere was for the most part un-ironical. Wit is the second thing to go when you’re burning and twitching like a beetle on a pin. The first is any residual stock you might still put in the future.

When it was all over I looked into the toilet for the fucking rainbow colored Fruit Loops (I’ve branched off from Cap N’ Crunch) but instead I saw what appeared to be Spaghetti Ohs, all clumped together like they had been burnt at the bottom of a pot. Not a good sign, I thought, glancing up into the mirror as I resolutely washed my hands and smoothed down my static charged hair. I was wearing a freshly washed dark blue denim shirt. The collars were starched and my neck was clean. With the exception of my tits, I looked like an ex-con trying to make good. I mean, we women can be ex-cons trying to look good too, but then you think of floral print dresses, white canvas sneakers and consignment shop rayon jackets with padded shoulders, not some Cool Hand Luke shit like I was on with the denim.

I left the bathroom and ran straight into the twelve year old sister of the girl who’s playing the part of Sterling. She was hanging out under the collection of framed West highland terrier photos in the hallway.

“Hello there,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me.

“Are you sick?” she asked, in that self-righteous, matter-of-fact tone that she always spoke in. She was still on Xmas break so she hung around her sister a lot. I let her around the set because she wasn’t the type of kid to start fiddling with stuff. Instead, she was one of those babies sporting the expertly applied MAC make-up and $400 Prada sling backs in the middle of nowhere, without a job and with a sister who made only peanuts as a hotel waitress. With her raccoon eyes and her conniving smile, I’d written her off as a dime bag slut the first time I laid eyes on her.

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” I told her, as I pulled my pack of Marlboros out of my jeans.

“Didn’t sound like you’re fine,” she informed me. She pouted with her heavily lined, blow job lips and held out her hand. I sighed and placed a smoke in her palm. She tossed it in her mouth and opened a Harley Davidson Zippo with a flick of her wrist as though she’d been smoking for years.

“What’d you do, throw-up?” she said, pushing past me and placing her hand on the bathroom door knob.

“Ahh, no, it was…the other. Hey, don’t go in there, OK?”

The girl kept her hand on the knob and slowly turned to face me. The expression on her face was death itself.

“You’re going to try and tell me what to do in my own house?”

“Suit yourself,” I said as she stepped into the reeking room.

“Hmm” she said, standing in front of the toilet. I watched her nostrils flare as she breathed deeply in and out. She placed her skinny, twelve year old hands on her skinny, twelve year old hips. She was trying to be tough so she let the cigarette dangle out of the corner of her mouth. I knew she was the kind of girl the boys went for, but to me she looked like a rodent with big, teased out hair. Her skin was so translucent and unhealthy that a myriad of eyelash sized red veins were visible on her forehead. “Megadeth” was carved into her forearm, fresh enough so that the letters were still swollen and raised against her skin.

“Hey, you know what?” she said, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and ashing it in the sink. “You don’t only talk like a nigger—you eat like one too!”

She took another sniff and laughed her grating hee-haw laugh. I had an urge to flatten her pink, blackhead covered nose with a single karate chop.

“No sir,” she said, shaking her head, “My shit doesn’t smell like that. Not one bit."

TRUE PACBLOG 2003!

Most Needed,
Most Weeded,
Most Cheated.