Where is everyone?

(Tumbleweed and the smell of fear, blowin through the blog-o-sphere)



So I’ve been killing time in a silly little French café down the street from Paddington station run by two old sisters with identical, unironical hairdos serving plates of lukewarm spaghetti with a super shiny meatsauce, mushroom omelets and chips, horseradish and mayo in silver finger bowls. After 5 the mysterious Algerian cook in the back who understands my English but won’t speak it back to me starts making highballs absurdly garnished with glittery swizzle sticks. These are for cocktails, I shout, why would you put this in a highball, I don’t get it. I sigh and take the festive little stick out of the drink and give it a desultory toss onto the table. Is this really happening—am I wasting away in a French dive in the middle of London, so high I can barely walk, watching the tall suits stooping to make it through the low-ass doorway, watching them snap open the paper like the big dick kings that they are, watching their eyebrows like furry caterpillars, watching their wallets as they absentmindedly take them from their silk lined pockets and place them on the table.

I was well enough to venture out of my apartment this morning. I felt a little spacey after so many days of being sick. I looked at things as though I was seeing them for the first time. The delicate, glowing underside of the world was turned up, like a leaf before the rain. Objects seemed to smolder around the edges.

I made several mental notes.

On the way to the subway:

Half obscured by a tree, I watched as a woman wearing a plum colored nylon rain jacket, (Banana Republic or some other tightly hemmed, three-hundred dollar shit), surreptitiously brought the tips of her fingers to her nose and gave them a quick sniff.

Glittering among the green pollen dust that coats the sidewalk was a foil square with a plastic bubble in its center. Inside the plastic bubble was a bare wisp of a pill—hardly the size of a thumbnail and ivory in color. That’s got to be some pretty strong stuff if they make it that small.

On the train:

I was mesmerized by two kids, one boy and one girl, their faces striking enough to be models. Both of them wore plain cotton t-shirts and jeans. I realized that rocking a fresh, clean look never goes out of style. I didn’t want them to see me staring at them so I watched their reflections in the window. When my view became obscured by people standing in the aisle, I reluctantly turned my attention to the floor, where I spotted a dusty gummy worm. It was green with a red tip that made me think of blood. I clenched the muscles of my right hand and thought of my missing fingers. Strange to think that they’ve long since disintegrated and turned to dust—pieces of my body that have already died and gone away.

Meanwhile, I’m still here.


agedandconfused

clandestino

Everything that's not in the blog is its wind and weather.

Smells like...

...a TB ward in hee-yah. While my mind is locked in the sick bubble, floating in nuclear green phelgm, I thought I'd enlighten you to my pastime of sending mass e-mails (otherwise known as SPAM) to unsuspecting college students. Fuck, if it's good enough to spread the word about Viagra, then it's good enough for BRANDTRUEBOY.

Whatever. I've always been fascinated by college students, having not been lucky enough to go myself. The first one went out to NYU and the second one to Yale. For added entertainment, I included one chick's response, taking care to delete the part where she gave me her dorm room number (sweet!)


From :
"Sterling Fassbinder"

To :
xxxx@nyu.edu

Subject :
Hey Fellow NYU Kid!

Date :
Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:55:13 -0500

OK, so not really a student--but i used to buy that shitty ass brown weed in washington sq. park. just think of the movie KIDS and that's me. OK, so not really because I never skateboarded. And i've never been date raped, at least not to my knowledge. one night, however, towards the end of my drinking days, i came close to the other side. i downed 5 shots of absinthe (the real stuff, smuggled from Poland) and followed a girl for several blocks with evil black thoughts racing through my brain, cold-hot like turpentine. Chemical rivulets, absolving me of my subjectivity--that pesky "I", that constant soliloquy. I was a monster, a hunched street shadow...Mr. Hyde; the hideous result of my own experiments...The girl never knew how close she got. All she saw was another girl a short distance back with a hood she kept pulling on and off. She couldn't see that I was edgy and indecisive, sniffing and farting around like a dog. Meanwhile, her shoulders never tensed-up; her pace didn't quicken...she took what seemed like hours to rummage through her fake Kate Spade, looking for her house keys on her dimly lit front stoop.

It was just the wormwood talking, I've since rationalized. I don't want to hurt anyone. And if I ever have, I didn't mean to...

http://www.trueboy.blogspot.com

Thank-you for your time.

Regards,

Sterling Fassbinder








_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail





From :
Jennifer xxxx

To :
Sterling Fassbinder

Subject :
Re: Hey Fellow Yale Kid!

Date :
Wed, 27 Nov 2002 13:09:13 -0500


Reply Reply All Forward Delete
Printer Friendly Version




fassbinder,

i forgive you.

Quoting Sterling Fassbinder :

> OK, so not actually a student...but back in the day when E was a new thing (when the Tunnel had a skate ramp and Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark)I ran around with a crew from New Haven for a minute. They all sported camouflage tank-tops, Liquid Sky jeans and tight Caesars, even the girls...We drove up onto campus with White Owl blunts behind our ears and tiny bottles of amyl nitrate in our pockets. Every door was opened for us, no questions asked. We looked enough like students so as not to arouse attention and enough NOT like students to be taken seriously. Feet up, trademark heavy lids...we made ourselves at home in the common areas, commandeering the remote, inviting whoever to party with us, telling them we were the friends of a friend, the djs from down the street, the hydroponic technicians on a service call...whatever, it didn't matter. Free drugs=immediate trust, something I've never forgotten, even now, years later when I'm nearly
reformed.
>
> Just before dawn we robbed those kids blind...the TV and its stand, the
> stereo and the CDs lying about, the coat rack and the coats, the toaster
> oven and the 12 grain, healthy ass bread...
>
> ...I never meant to hurt anyone...
>
> http://www.trueboy.blogspot.com
>
> Thank-you for your time.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sterling Fassbinder.
>
>
alana rocks my world

jamie

It’s an eighties memorial day weekend all across the dial. I’m sitting here, steeped in silly nostalgia while the rain doesn’t stop and the phone doesn’t ring. The weekend slips past like a whimper.

I’ve had a fever since Friday. I’m not going to be able to hang out today, Jamie. I’m sorry. I got it walking around in the rain, like an asshole. I was killing time downtown after cutting short a date. I can’t have some little girl trying to tell me about myself. It freaked me out when I found out she reads this blog. She checks it out everyday at her shitty cube in the high ceiling office of a Madison Ave advertising firm. She told me she was surprised that I really wore a glove over my right hand. “Only it’s a baseball glove. The Expos--weird. I thought it was a plain black leather glove.” Was she for real? Have I really revealed that much on this site? I walked out with a hitch in my step, spotting long junkie foreheads among the huddled crowd crossing the street. Living in New York City gives you the feeling that you’re life is ruled by traffic lights. How many times have I sat in the back of a cab, swearing to myself that I was going to die if we hit just one more light?

I was on Lafayette when the sickness came over me. I was bumping into walls and having feverish half ideas that I struggled to take down, hunching over and writing sideways in my notebook. I realized I had the shakes, intermittent tremors behind my knees.

What is this shit? I thought. I’ve spent all this time nursing my nerves back to health, but here I am, twitching like a beetle on a pin.

It felt like years earlier, before I went to Europe and before my name was Sterling Fassbinder, when I had a lot of friends and too much time on my hands. I was all styles, all positions, all party, all day long. Girls bought me gator belts and leather bras. There was no clear beginning or end to anything—the contract was never upfront, you know what I’m saying? It was a matter of time before the dramatics and the drugs would turn against me, and I’d leave a girl’s place after something had gone wrong. Maybe the money ran out, or daddy called, or the chick woke up with bad breath and decided enough was enough. There was real drama a few times, a little blood, a police car or two. I was always lucky enough to sneak out and hit the streets with a folded up twenty. I relished the feeling of being sick as I immediately started to look for a quick bag. That’s the junkie mentality. I waited all day just to get high and feel like a Casanova again.

It was the one thing I could do, the one thing I was good at. I hadn’t gone to college and I didn’t have any skills.

The memories of those unkempt, greasy times weighed heavily on me. The way the girl looked at me with such disdain brought it all back. I didn't trust mysef. I slumped, pale as a ghost beside the ice cream van near the Astor Cube. It’s been a slow season for Mister Softee. Not much of a demand for air pumped pork fat in this weather.

keyword ownership

"unrepentant"

"propmaster"



"he wanted to sell me fifty kilos of hash"

"high on top of the chrysler building..."

"st. angel in the mix"

"twelve hour nic fit"

"let's burn the hills of beverly"

"raymi the minx"

"white underlined links"

"radio sausage specialty"

"since i left you..."



"b-boy extinction"

"wave your credit card in the air"



"when my edge calls back you better beware"

thesunisshininginsouthlondon.

(do you wanna ride in my mercedes, boy?)

bunnie

marry me...eat me...

kicks

I'm sitting on a folding chair, smoking a cigarette and trying my best to type. Both of my hands are wrapped in thin white gauze, with a couple of holes cut out for fingers.

It hurts, party people, it hurts deep down.

Everything changes. Go with the flow and get your kicks: run down the council flat hallway, punching out every sickly green glass light with your bare hands until you reach the window at the end and see the whites of your eyes reflected back at you in the darkness.

Learn to embrace all the reality tv shit mixed with the mobile phone web shit mixed with the tiny apartments and the percentage of internet usage among people who sleepwalk through their day, trying not to talk to other people, a subacultcha THAT HAS BLOSSOMED IN THE LAST QUARTER DECADE and in turn inspired an entire younger generation of holdits/controlits who work long hours during the day so they can be all alone at night with the curtains drawn…

(A piece of coffee cake, a mouthful of swill, cyber benedictions and prescription pills)

fuck empty-v

fuck the b-word

in the twin peaks afterworld, entertainment will come to you when you need it most and expect it least. it will be a secret soul thing, like when you're shitting your greasy guts out and suddenly see jesus' face in the bathroom tiles. instead of shows and channels there will be scenes and freeze frames. googled haikus. moonlit miles. goddesses parachuting out of the plane as pigeons and hitting the ground as phoenixes.

your kicks will come to you through raymi's words, the ones you waited for, ringing your hands and checking for days, until suddenly and without warning they fell from the sky and piled up around you, inches thick.

Perfectly round, translucent white glowing stones...

your kicks will mess with your mind like jamie's chicken or jg's tornadoes. they'll teach you to expect the unexpected, to feel the secret systems that feel you back. aurore's golden jukebox. ultra b's verbal whip.

hold on, party people, someday your kicks will come...

(you came to my world, only on a hunch,
i don't need no cook, girl
i need lunch)

Hello Darlings. Much to my chagrin, I recently received several fan e-mails thinly veiled as plaintative requests for more info regarding the sick little wage-whore anthem that I posted last week. "I Want A Cookie" is by The Evolution Control Committee. They've got an album out called Plagiarhythm Nation V2.0.

Click here for the original (non-malfunctioning thimbletron version) of "I Want A Cookie". Thank-you, Mr. BJ for the download and for your awe inspiring, hot buffet of a site. Perfect strangers, perhaps, but I do believe we are peas in a pod, hermano. The wee, beer stained hours of dawn are better because of you...

bj's gay porno-crazed ramblings

The State I'm In

I don't really want to get to know the German girl. I want to keep things light and casual. To that end, I prefer the stereo or TV to be on in the background when we fuck. I'm afraid of our eyes having secret communications in the silence.

She thinks that the flimsy, transparent disguise I wear is my real skin. She doesn't question it when I tell her I don't drink for "health reasons." The rest of it hasn't come up. I gave a polite chuckle when she told me that the few times she smoked pot made her paranoid.

Have you ever tried it? she asked.

A couple of times, I said.

(a couple of times everyday for 13 years until my nerves were shot and my memory destroyed)

The German girl's the kind of hard working, well-intentioned person who won't give money to a homeless person because how can she be sure they aren't going to use it to buy a drink?

She's the kind of person who wakes up early on a Sunday to go to IKEA for a few odds and ends.

"I need one of those trays that go in the drawer to hold the cutlery--how do you call that?"

"Ah, I don't know. 'Cutlery Tray', maybe?"

"Yes, a green one. Or maybe blue. And a steel trash can with a lid for the bathroom. I don't want to be able to look inside anymore."

Before I knew what was happening, I was whisked into her Jetta with my pockets full of coins and dollar bills for the tolls.

I pushed my shades up on my nose as we crossed the GW, keeping a nervous eye on the speedometer.

"Remember, darling, this isn't the Autobahn."

I was fucked if we got pulled over in Jersey.

The last time I was on the turnpike I was drunk off my ass and throwing the contents of a McDonald's extra value meal out the window. One by one they hit the road at 90+ mph...a Big Mac...large fries...large coke....

Nothing changed. There were still the same glowing power stations and mysterious square shaped plants spewing gray smoke and white steam. The meadowlands were the same dismal stretch of yellow bent reeds and the planes over Newark Airport still did that crazy nightmare thing where they came to a full stop in the sky and turned 90 degrees before starting up again.

I asked the German girl what she thought of the view.

"You used to live here, yes?"

"No."

"Oh. I thought you told me you grew up in New Jersey."

"Not me, sweetheart."

"In that case, I'll tell you. I think it's disgusting."

"Absolutely."

By the time we got to IKEA I was already exhausted.

Needless to say, the place is immense. It remeinded me of the NATO headquarters in Brussels, except all the flags were yellow and blue and said IKEA on them.

In addition to the sprawling showroom and furniture pick-up area, there's a Swedish specialty shop and a cafe selling sugar iced buns and hot dogs and a children's play area with safety netting and seas of yellow and blue plastic balls.

According to the posters on the restroom hallway, the goal of IKEA is to provide well designed furniture to the masses. Everyone should have access to clean lines and vibrant, yet tasteful, color schemes. From what I could tell, the Elizabeth showroom would have made the founder proud. Folks from the G were rolling up, sporting immaculate sweatsuits and intricate extensions. I listened in as a beautiful hispanic mother with turned down, bloodshot eyes exclaimed over the computer desk that her husband and son were inspecting.

"It's perfect. And you know, for this price we can buy two if we want!"

The husband was beaming. Jailhouse tats were visible on his forearms.

I was overcome by the power of dreams coming true. I decided to pick out a vase for the German girl while she was busy inspecting butcher blocks. I walked over to the display wall and picked out a tall, perfectly smooth, perfectly white, glazed ceramic vase.

I checked the tag for the price and learned that this particular kind of vase was called "Slump" in Swedish.

I stood there for another minute, scratching my head and thinking it over. Sheryl Crow's "Leaving Las Vegas" came on the store system.

I placed the slump gently back on the shelf.



onebitterman

I walk the line with the bloodsuckers. My goal has always been to stay human. Once you are a vampire you can never turn back. You leave your family and friends. You stay out all night and sleep all day. You stop eating, except for Cap N' Crunch, Royal Ginseng Jelly, black coffee, Diet Coke, blood, Scotch and aspirin.

One of the first symptoms is that cocaine doesn't work anymore. Your hair becomes coarser…



It’s important to love yourself in a real way. You can’t be weak and you have to stick up for yourself. You’ve got to have your own favorite bands and be able to back it up. If you know your spot and go out and prove it, you can sometimes last for a while with a crowd of vampires--but sooner or later you get tired.

wax

my

nipples

Right now I’m experiencing a low-lying fear that makes my right knee bounce uncontrollably.

A swallow hard, scratch your head kind of fear that makes me pace and chainsmoke and make long distance calls with other people’s calling cards.

I can’t eat without feeling like I’m going to choke. I have to chew each bite of food a million times. As a result, I’m always the last person to finish lunch.

It’s England, fucking England that unnerves me. The sounds, the light, the smells. The sound of the telephone ring, the fan blades in the kitchen windows that never quit turning.

Something happened to me here, that much I’ve known.

Yesterday, I had an anxiety attack in Selfridges and ended up spraying on tons of CK ONE all over my clothes. Now my denim jacket reeks of the smell, which embarrassingly enough, was the “scent” that I wore during the year I was at Oxford.

I had the notion that smelling it would help me remember.

I want so badly for it all to come back to me.

I want to burn through the black outs and fit together the pieces of all the hours I lost.

My body’s freaking out, all the joints are jammed up, swollen with arthritis and stress.

I’m lying low again, in the attic with my DVDs and frayed nerves.

Jules came in from the clubs and caught me watching Vanilla Sky.

She sighed.

“How many times have you watched this?” she said, lighting a cigarette.

“Twice. This time and when I was on acid.”

“That’s when you freaked out a bit. I don’t think you should watch it again.”

“I want to see exactly where I lost it.”

“That’s stupid. You’ll flashback, you know?”

I picked up a roach from the flat, ceramic ashtray.

“The thing is,” I said, feeling around on the couch for a lighter. “And believe me, I know it sounds like bullshit, but I think that after that last time with the mushrooms, it’s possible that I haven’t stopped tripping.”

“Give me a break,” Jules undid the strap on her shoes and kicked them off in the direction of the closet. She was a towering figure, even without her heels.

“It’s not constant. No. It comes and goes, but yeah, I think I never fully stopped tripping.”

I watched her undress, peeling her tights off like she was a stripper. I got a little turned on by the blank, yet somehow expectant expression that was on her face as she took off the silver hoop earrings I’d given her.

It’s an expression similar to the one she gets when she’s putting on her lipstick.

“I think you’re losing your edge, darling,” she announced, slurring her words a tiny bit.

“Oh, come on,” I said, pulling up the blankets for her to slide in.

She came behind me, her large hands covering my hips. She had that vibe she gets when she’s made a lot of money.

When the DJ knew which beats were which and the crowd was happening and all eyes were on her when she got up to dance and there’s no doubt she’s looking good.

That’s when I like her best, too, when she’s super-confident.

“Let’s go out,” she said, pressing against me.

“Now?” I said, already breathless.

“Yeah, just you and I. We’ll get drinks.”

“I don’t want any drinks,” I said, my voice forlorn.

“Don’t whine,” she said, biting on my ear.

I undid my pants and rolled over on my stomach.

The bulge of her cock slipped back and forth on my nylon underwear.

She placed her hands over mine at the head of the bed.

“Wait a second,” I said. I could hear Tom Cruise screaming, “Tech Support! Tech Support!” I knew he was running down an empty hallway of an office in a skyscraper.

“This is the part, this is where I started freaking out when I was on acid.”

Jules wouldn’t let me get up.

“Just tell me what happens, instead,” she said, grinding down on me.

“No,” I whispered.

“Please?” she asked. She sat up a bit and gently pulled down my underwear.

“They’re going up,” I said, closing my eyes as the pillow pressed against my face.

“Who?”

“Tom Cruise and the tech support guy. In a glass elevator.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

“Way up,” I said, “Up, up, up, up, like Twin Towers high.”

“Yes?”

“They were heading for the roof so Tom Cruise could have his moment of choice.”

“Then what?”

“I felt like I was going with them.”

“To the roof?”

“All the way.”

“All the way?”

“All the way to the top.”

“What was it like, peach fuzz?”

“I don’t know, let me get up, let me see.”

“There must have been sunshine,” she said, pressing gently down upon me.

“I just remember the Hollywood lights, the blue computer glow.”



tonypierce

Need you now, like I needed you then

(you always said, we'd still be friends)



right now everything depends upon remembering the name of my fourth grade english teacher. the fat as a house one with the out of fashion 70s make you wanna barf floral print housedresses and dyke black rimmed glasses and greasy brown hair parted down the middle like mama cass. i keep getting confused with the name of my tenth grade english teacher--mrs. juhasz. she was also huge. we called her ju-horse, but that fact's just getting in the way as i try to remember. it's extraneous, party people. the fourth grade teacher made the entire class memorize robert frost's "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening" and recite it, one by one, standing beside our desk. it was nerve wracking to be sure, none of us wanted to do it, me least of all. but as i read the poem, i found it easy to commit whole chunks of it immediatly to memory. it was the first poetry in which i understood all the words, with the exeption of haiku. it was written normally, with normal words, so i could actually picture someone having those thoughts.

when it was my turn, i stood up and stared at the ceiling and the words rolled out of my mouth like they'd been made there.

(and miles to go before i sleep, and miles to go before i sleep)

when i was finished, yorkie bobbed his flattop in approval

"ain't no half-steppin," he said.

now i want to say thank you to mrs. what's-her-name.

(is it possible that she got married in the middle of the year and changed her name? you never know. some of the fattest bitches get theres.)

nine yrs old. that was also the year i first heard OMD.

the year before that was "roxanne, roxanne"

i've been running around the tube, with my 80 dollar italian ballpoint pen, writing whatever shit i think of on whatever paper i can find. movie ads, service line advisories, fuckin flattened candy wrappers...i'll tell you it's like the old days, drawing an outline of my sperm trademark with just the leather holder for my pen in my side pocket. no drugs, no cash, no worries. the pen writes so beautifully, the line of ink so perfect and thin...i wrote the word "radio" on my hand and it looked like a tattoo.

i don't know where the fuzz is, england will always be a severely foreign country to me, no matter how much i figure out about it.

they could be anywhere, at any time. even that old lady with the white patent leather handbag, raising one eyebrow and my impishness. she could be one, readying to lash out her "long arm". fuck, maybe she could run.

(feet stop working, i'm having too much fun)

nas always has an effect on invisible eyes. i flatten myself against the shaking train wall and start to write across the latest television disaster:

life's a bitch and then you die
that's why we get high
cuz you never know
when you're gonna go

fuck everyone.

go nets.

drunken call

I stayed over the German girl’s place last night. She told me I looked sad. I lied and told her I was just tired. She made me dinner and gave me a bath, rubbing down my back with a course, brand new loofah that she took out of a drawer in her little wicker bathroom organizer. There was another loofah hanging from the faucet. Either she didn’t want her skin cells to rub off on me or she didn’t want mine to rub off on hers, I don’t know.

That’s life. You can stick your finger up someone’s asshole and ram your tongue down their throat but you wouldn’t dare let them use your toothbrush.

I lay there between her clean white sheets, staring at the ceiling while she dutifully sucked on my tits. Everything she did was perfect. Perfect job, perfect clothes, perfect hair. Her jewelry was laid out neatly on the dresser. The coffee maker was filled with fresh coffee for the morning. All she’d have to do was press the little green button. The alarm on her satellite radio was set.

I felt myself sliding across the smooth comfortable surface of it all:

There was no place to get a grip and get in sideways; no place to shove my sharpened heel.

This morning, I walked her to the subway, but at the turnstile I made up a lie about needing something from the pharmacy. She checked the time on her Tag and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I went back outside and bought a pack of cigarettes at a bodega that stunk of cat piss. Fuck it, I thought as I lit one of the things up--it’s better than beer. There’s a Catholic School in front of the German girl’s apartment building. I stood there, smoking and watching the uniformed kids drag their feet up to the twin cement archways of the front entrance. I tried to pick out which ones had the right idea: at most there’s usually only one or two in any single school. Just as I was about to give up, a superstar walked right past me, cutting through my cloud of cigarette smoke like a runner crossing the finish line. I saw her backpack—a plain blue Jansport decorated with black marker, homemade foil letters that spelled out “SICK”, and what looked to be an actual handcuff sewn on to the top in place of a handle. Her dark orange, badly dyed hair was in a sloppy ponytail. She matched her burgundy plaid uniform (skirt, white shirt and spring jacket) with super-faded purple Converse All Stars. Hightops. There was secret, illegible shit scrawled all over them in blue ink.

I hoped that she would turn around so I could see her face, but she kept straight on, slouching and shining in the morning sun.

“Good luck, sweetheart,” I said, stomping out my smoke. I picked two purple wildflowers and twisted their stems together. Then I put on my walkman and listened to “Satellite of Love” with the volume turned all the way up.



gay girl stabbed to death in jersey

Pilgrimage

(it's up to me now to turn on the bright lights)

I lost my bike.

Oh, Laura, I hardly knew ya. My ass had only just begun polishing your torn vinyl seat.

I also lost my copy of Hawthorne’s The Metaphysical Railroad and Other Stories. I had carved my initials in its laminated cover with my fingernail.

They were my “real” initials--the ones I got for being born and the ones I’ll leave behind when I die.

This morning I came to on the tube with no idea of where I was or where I was going. It was rush hour so the train was crowded, but for some reason there was a seat free on either side of me. Whatever, I thought, hobbling over to the door. Everyone around me took a step back. A dark haired couple wearing sensible jackets whispered and stared. Their hair was perfectly styled. Her fat diamond ring glistened like in a magazine. It wasn’t until I got off and started wandering towards the metallic blue exit that I realized there was dried puke all over the right arm of my retro tweed blazer.

It was green and pink. Merry Xmas, wasters.

It turned out I was in Paddington Station. After a few wrong turns, I managed to make it outside, just as the last drops of a rainstorm were falling. A yellow glow lit up the bellies of the black clouds on the horizon. Oh, happy life, filled with such unexpected, but well-timed epiphanies. I bummed a Silk Cut from a startled Jamaican who had just watched me blow a string of brown snot into a nearby garbage can.

What was it that Snoop said, “The game is to be sold, not to be told”?

That’s the situation, baby.

Check me out, London, cuz I’m looking good. Hooded and heavy-lidded, I’m walking the blocks with a bop, eating pound cake out of a bag and checking the way the dappled sunlight falls across these white British sidewalks. I’ve got those eagle eyes you’ve been wanting. I circle miles high over the earth: I can always spot the tasty pink fleshed rabbit, whether I’m up for the kill or not.


miss you, raymi

fuck this working for a living shit

fmu

Repeat after me, my fellow stressed-out wage whores:

I want to go home.

I want sex.

I want a cookie.

I want a raise.



play this and ignore the malfunctioning thimbletron.

baby if you give it to me, i'll give it to you

I know what you want,

you know I've got it...



happy birthday, jennyeah.

all i got to say is fuck tha police, lady.

court date, sport shake.

check on this lyric from one of my favorite tracks

the roots with DJ Krush in the back:

(when in doubt i let hip-hop tell me how to act)

I'm trying to make it, cause if I don't I'll probably take it
But perserverence is a virtue
The person that you thinking you hurting might hurt you
Ya celly might jerk too
Perhaps I'll go to court this time when I'm summoned
But I'm a rebel to the system so I might not be coming
So if I fail, man just get up the bail
It's just more time to write another story to tell
Ill elements, drop intelligence, Black Thought Malik B
fuck up their-re-le-vance
We got strain on the brain from bodies left in the dust
Man just leave it to us, look main aim and I'll bust
Fuck betrayal just trust, all the tracks we lust
With DJ Krush from Japan with no more need to discuss

la lady, with the detroit gravy,

if you ride with btb than you ride with the best,

go ahead,

take two shots deep

feel them burn in your chest.

theresaholeinmyheadwheretheraingetsin

I finally managed to leave the house.

I took the last of my money and purchased an ancient red Raleigh bike. I named her Laura, after Laura Palmer.

Now I spend my mornings riding across London at breakneck speed, helmetless, rude and feckless.

(Still drinking brew for breakfast…)

Pink petals shoot up from my tires. It was the bike or a 4-track. I couldn’t decide so I flipped a 50 pence coin.

I take Laura to the Thames everyday. Sometimes Jules gets on the back and we cycle down there together. She prattles on endlessly about books; I think she’s read even more than Fitz. But only fiction—god forbid she put some facts in her pretty head. She seems to think I should write one. I told her I don’t have the stamina. I can’t deal with plot and I can’t deal with any of that postie-toastie, meta-writing wanking. I want to tell a tale with stickers, and put them up on bus stops and those red royal mailboxes across the city.

On Monday there was a carnival. Black and Indian families gathered by the water and cooked food on filthy grills. I bought a gigantic plastic capsule filled with ground up mushrooms from a skinny, shirtless American reading On The Road. He wore hobnail boots and turned out to be a Californian. Big surprise. He gave me the rest of his Newcastle to wash down the shrooms.

“That will be the best 20 quid you ever spent,” he said with a wicked glitter in his eye.

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It’s bad luck.”

I pulled at the long reeds on the shore edge and watched the Ferris wheel rise and fall in the sky. “Just like the magic number itself,” I said, not because it meant anything but because I liked the sound of it.

Suddenly there was a commotion as some drunk guy fell into the river and had to be pulled out. The wave vibrations looked like white lines of TV static. I stood there, swaying slightly, lonely as fuck.

A song came into my head, just as the curtain started to fall:

“And the sky was made of amethyst. And all the stars were just like little fish.”

The next thing I remember I was in a plain white room, looking out an open window. The view down below was of a garden in bloom.

ultrablognetic

lost in the forest

quarlo

That’s right. Yes, yes, y’all: I hiked into the forest on Saturday and I never came back.

My friend Z’s sister and I went and got gone for good. I’m communicating to you via the spinning satellite heart of the forest floor, where I was shit out in steaming chunks after being eaten whole by the bears and picked clean by the birds.

As I transmit this, bits of my brain goo are getting mixed up with swallowed seeds in some turkey buzzard’s gut, to be squirted out later across deep black soil in a thin white line of diarrhea.

One or two of my memories will be born-again as tiny green, fertilized shoots.

They’ll grow up to be Venus Flytraps. Mindless mouths. Wide open, soaked and sticky.

Shhhhh, now! Show some respect! The outline of my human face is in the wood swirl stump of that overturned tree, lying there and disintegrating less than five feet away.

The whole thing started out as a leisurely stroll. Z’s sister and I needed to unwind and clear our heads after staying by Z’s side through her ridiculously long labor. On Friday evening, I borrowed a car and raced upstate thinking that there was no way I’d make it in time, but when I got there at 11, nothing had happened. Z was completely exhausted. She had tubes in her arms and black rings under her eyes. I was surprised they let me in to see her and wondered why a bigger deal wasn’t made about this whole birth thing. It felt like a real emergency to me. There was the same kind of frantic rushing around paired with unbearable periods of waiting for news. Finally the doctors told us they didn’t know how long her strength would last and that the birth might be a Caesarian.

I had an urge for a cigarette, of all things.

I kept thinking of sweet little Z in her sweet little designer jeans. She was so tiny: it seemed unnatural to picture her as a mother.

I don’t know how she did it, but 12 hours later she squeezed out her first child.

A bouncing baby boy…Z’s husband said that N came into the world like a bloody cannonball: vivid and shiny against the anesthetic white background.

When we got the good word it felt like something real had happened. I became sentimental and spoke to others of having felt a ripple run across the sum total of the world’s being.

I decided that this baby was the nighttime breeze that shook the tops of the trees.

He was that delicate angle of sunshine that brightens a corner at a certain hour.

I took a peak at him from behind a glass window and felt real warmth and real love for something so defenseless and cute.

Everything, however, is relative.

It occurred to me that the world was expanding and dying at the same time, just like a flower in bloom.

I realized that the expansion is the dying.

(sell the kids for food)

It was getting close to my period and I found myself imagining something alive inside of me.

Something bloody that was going to slide out and expect me to take care of it.

When Z’s sister, O, suggested we take a walk, she didn’t have to ask twice.

A private preserve was just down the highway.

(weather changes moods)

Millions of branches were waiting for me to walk beneath them.

Rocks wanted to be overturned,

Anthills obliterated,

Roots trampled…

It’s not that a hike clears your mind as much as it forces it to push out of whatever little hole it’s receded into.

You concentrate on your surroundings in a loosely focused way, treating everything as facts in need of evaluation.

The route as a whole becomes a series of moments: the steep uphill trudge, the stomach flipping view of NY state over the cliff. There is always something to take in and deal with, like the way down from the cliff over ancient, slippery rocks half buried in the ground.

At first it was all vaguely annoying. There were the gnats, which swarmed our faces in black clouds from time-to-time, as well as the fact that we’d only slept a few, disjointed hours the night before. I didn’t think we’d be able to stay out very long, the way we were stumbling around. Strange thing is, however, that we got better as we went along. We found a pace, O in the front and me in the back. She’s a bit older, with glasses and shoulder length, curly hair. Her English isn’t so hot, but it doesn’t stop her from communicating. Before the hike I didn’t really know her, but during the course of the whole being lost part, which officially started three hours into the hike but became deeply apparent at sunset when we realized we were reading the map the wrong way, O. told me about the affair she had with a (younger) French guy in Paris, and how, during weak moments, she sometimes seriously planned out the steps necessary to leave her husband for him.

“Life of adventure, life of family,” she said, holding her hands out like the scales of justice. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, for emphasis.

I was sitting on a log, carefully eating one of the two, small Macintosh apples we’d bothered to take along.

“Your family can be an adventure,” I said.

“No,” O insisted. “A family is boring!”

“I disagree.”

“Where is your family, Sterling? Are they nearby?”

“I don’t know.”

O looked shocked. She came from one of those big family cultures.

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen anyone from my family for over ten years.”

“You’re kidding!” she gasped.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said, feeling more embarrassed for how she was reacting than about my feelings on the subject, whatever those were.

An hour or so later we huddled together under a pile of leaves. It was pitch dark. There was a long night ahead of us.

Apparently, at some point I said, “Nature loves to hide,” through chattering teeth. I was half asleep and don’t remember. O reported it back the next day.

I also shouted, “Over the top! Over the parapet!”

I have no idea what any of that means.


bobby skullbolt

Pack a hit to this...

modraymi

Hey blog world

I’m a boy and you’re a girl

I want to make that pocket novel magic.

I want to make it with you and you and you and you.

I want a ticket for a midnight train that’s reflected in long purple lakes.

I want the hit with no bruise and the needle prick with no bleeding.

(Won’t you…

Take me to a restaurant that has glass tables so I can watch myself while I’m eating?)

I want the microphone reverb, the anthem’s chords crashing all around. I want to find a way to pull us out of this 16 bit PC color world. My wrists are cramping up, my eyes are swollen and red and the monitor buzz is piercing my brain.

I want to see you—out there in Brooklyn and Boston, Toronto and Kansas. I want to see you once and I want to see you often. Cali and Hawaii, Norway and strangeways and Detroit and school halls and Montreal and Grosse Point and the lil ol’ Jersey shore.

I want it all and then I want more.

I want all your missed opportunities. I want the balled-up Kleenex, the smelly hair, lines of prickly pimples, yellow half moons on the underarms….overripe fruit of the loom…I want your drugged out prayers for a god you don’t know or understand, the god behind the blue and white Kmart glow.

The one who knows how to make your heart beat stop.

The one who pulls the switch for the pressure drop.

From: "TRUEBOY *" [Save Address] [Block Sender]

To: james@xxxxx.com
Cc:
Subject: Re: smith-corona
Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 10:39:52 +0800




REPLY | REPLY ALL | FORWARD [As Attachment]
Previous | Next | Delete | Done

word jamie,

glad you wrote. just got home: timestamp=a little after three in the
morning. i'm listening to a hip-hop mix tape. i don't want anything
low-key tonight. i'm roasted. totally. and it's about that time.
everything outside has turned quiet and blue.

i'm slowly getting back on my feet after a fucking long ass spring
disease, a diluted (deluded) new-fangled asian/traveller's illness.
whatever, it's wrong to make jokes when people are dying. but people
are always dying.

hells yeah i want the smith-corona. the heavier the better. i'll
have one of my servants come by and pick it up if you need it out.
he's got muscles so feel free to ask
him to help you move something else.

if i was around, i'd help out for sure. someone's got to supervise.

yo biggie just freestyled on my tape,screaming his raps into the mic.
the crowd wastotally enthralled, you can hear it in their scattered
applause. they're deep in his flow--it's like watching the gears
turn inside a handwound watch. his precision cuts you open like a
surgeon's knife.

he never loses the beat, even when the dj drops it out and he's
rapping accapella for a verse.

at the end they go beserk.

so do i

j-

i'm so shy, it kills me.

when i was little i used to imagine having a secret world to disapear
into behind the walls of my house.

a little like the house in webster. now that was the sheeeet.

anyway, there were all these secret hallways and slides and ladders
leading up to special secret rooms.

one for video games

one for eating pizza

one for duran duran concerts.

these were actual rooms, huge and hidden--an entire world i accessed
by one secret tiny passage.

a hole behind a picture on the wall

the space behind the TV

the dark spot in the back of the closet, just like in the lion, the
witch and the wardrobe

anyway, what the hell am i talking about?

time for water

love,

TRUE

baby if you get on your knees

with me in your mouth

and suck me off

(you know i got you)



what you got?

what you want?

(what'd you say to him?)

jaguar iced-out beats

(hold your cranium)

I had a dream in which I was lying on a bed with Sterling. My head was nestled into the crook of her arm like a child. She smiled sweetly as I read aloud from one of my notebooks. I ran my finger under each word as I spoke, but at some points I found my finger pressing blank space in the middle of sentences where the words just stopped. These were places where I hadn't bothered to go on writing--where I got high or tired and my thoughts just trailed off. Lying there against Sterling, I felt a flash of embarassment before I quickly went on, making up words on the spot.

Sterling didn't seem to notice. She went on smiling; her support and admiration went through me like a sip of hot tea.

I went on improvising. The dream ended with me feeling like a failure.

NYC Everything

enjoy eboy

I was killing time at the silver diner, waiting for the sun, when all of a sudden a heated discussion started at the counter. 2 Greek women were waving around, trying like hell to communicate with a Spanish guy who had just walked in wearing paint splattered beige overalls. One translated what the other was saying from lightening fast Greek into busted-up Spanish. She’d manage a couple of words and then stare up at the ceiling, repeating, “Y entonces”, over and over until the next word came to her. The guy kept nodding his head and snapping his fingers, trying like hell to get her to speed it up.

The words made a spiraling rush like a waterfall…it was the countertop of Babel up in that piece. As I strained to understand, I felt my brain pulling at the bit even while my hands were involved in the mundane task of carving up my French toast.

Just when I was about to give up and zone out, I heard English.

“Ice pick!” shouted the woman who was translating.

“Ice pick?” the Spanish guy asked, incredulously.

“Si,” she said, glancing at her friend. They both nodded mournfully.

I took this as a sign to ask for the check.

Later, on the rush hour subway, I sat slouched over, half-passed out with Aphex Twin on my headphones. Something brushed against my knee. I opened my eyes and saw a girl standing in front of me. She wore a short black mini skirt and translucent black tights, a slightly tacky black and white blouse decorated with a repeating pattern of red roses and a fake Kelly bag with horrendous stitch work running up the sides.

She used her large number of shopping bags to cover the sight of her leg rubbing my knee from the rest of the car. I peered up with one eye half open. She was Hispanic with black feathered hair, gold liquid make-up and giant hoop earrings. A working girl, just like me. She didn’t want to make eye contact, so I slouched forward to make more of my thigh available. Then I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.

Sure enough, she moved closer, subtlety rubbing against me in time to the back and forth swing of the train.

Clean and Ironed. She was trying hard to make something out of her life.

I opened my eyes and caught a look from the silverhead sitting next to me in the beige double-breasted suit. The train wasn’t crowded, so he was sitting some distance away, but I could tell that he knew what the story was nevertheless.

He knew I wasn’t sleeping.

And he knew that I knew that he was looking.

His gaze gave off a heat, like steam rising off metal tracks.

I felt myself sinking forward:

In this city, everything is up for grabs.


bing + jennyeah = may makeout!

vicious

jamie

I kept a diary before I started BRANDTRUEBOY. I chronicled everything that was going on, paying particular attention to the friendship between Sterling Fassbinder, Fitzcarraldo and myself. We had a lot of fun and the time went by quickly. The diary entries started in Belgium, quickly filling one black notebook after another. I’ve lugged them around the world, decorating them with stickers and little bits of art. They’re my prized possessions.

I feel compelled, almost obligated to write down everything that happens. The drugs, the endless self-pity, the psychoanalytic discussions…I want to save it all for later.

I’ve had a vision that when everything is said and done, I’ll be holding the last piece of candy.

The two most important things in this world are candy and bacon.

The world is a stage, the world is a sponge.

The world is an everlasting gobstopper that makes my eyes water.


September 10, 2001

11: 30pm

what the fuck, money. Shit was on this evening—it was like old school silver stoned sterling and me up in that piece. Fitz came too. He was the driver.

I was blitzed up in shotgun with a tube sock full of quarters.

Yo money, bet. Here’s what happened: around 4PM I was walking home beneath the BQE, turning onto graham and heading for bayard when suddenly it started to pour. I had to run back into the shadow of the underpass, where it was cold as hell. I got a little soaked and my cigarette got soggy.

I stood there, practicing a couple of rhymes, trying to think about what I wanted from the day. The rained tapered a bit and all at once it stopped, as quickly as it had started. I waited a few seconds before continuing on my way.

I heard footsteps as I lit another cigarette.

“Hey, can I bum a smoke?”

A good looking, teenage guy with shoulder length dark brown hair came up from behind me. I-tailian, I guessed, from the neighborhood.

“Sure, why not?” I thought, digging one out of my pack.

“Can I get a light, too,” he asked. I made eye contact with him. He seemed happy and harmless. Young.

I came to a complete stop and started rummaging in my bag, where I had just dropped my lighter. It was at that moment that he leaned over and ran a finger over my right tit. I was wet so everything was super-defined. He had no trouble finding the nipple and pressing down on it. I looked up and saw that his face was stupid and lustful.

He felt me looking at him and looked up. His eyes narrowed upon meeting mine.

There was that fucked up dream feeling as he pushed me back against the black metal fence and fully felt me up. His face was close to mine. There was a mole beneath his right eye, dark and pronounced.

I heard him make sounds, “mmmm, mmmmm,” like he was eating something.

Right there in broad daylight, with cars passing by on McGuinness.

Suddenly, I felt myself taking a step away.

“What the fuck?” I gurgled.

His eyes turned wide and he bolted.

“I’m sorry,” he called back to me. Deep Williamsburg accent.

“What the fuck!” I shouted back.

“I’m sorry,” he shouted again, before turning and breaking into a full run, sneakers slapping against the sidewalk.

I wondered if I could catch up but he already had a pretty good start.

I focused instead on memorizing what he looked like. Then I went home to call up my peeps.

(I’m the judge and the jury)

First I stopped at the bodega for some beer.

My body was twitching, money. I was fucking suped up.

Fitz used one of his dad’s cards to get us a black Escalade.

I was disappointed that the trim was factory, but whatever.

It had the size and it had the height.

It also had the system.

The right sound is essential on quiet nights like these, money.

Although I love Escalades, tall-ass Fitz was the logical choice behind the wheel. Motherfucker pulled up to the manhattan corner meeting spot in a black Armani suit, and light violet silk shirt, smoking on a phillie stub. Dapper in the Ballys moccasins. No socks—he’d worked on his tan all summer.

“I do believe it’s acceptable not to wear socks in early September.”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling my body viciously shake as I leaned back into the cream-colored leather seat. My brain was tuned into the high pitch whine of the air ionizer.

“Is the 10th still early September?”

“Certainly, anything up until the 15th.”

“What are you planning to use to cover your face?”

“Nothing,” he said, and tapped a fat phillie ash into the brilliantly clean silver ashtray.

“I’ve realized that my face is completely unremarkable. Don’t look so shocked, darling. I’ve come to terms with it. I’m over it.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

He winked and nodded his head, cigar clamped firmly between his teeth.

“Don’t worry darling, I’m the invisible man. And I’ve got a pair of Ray Bans for the magic moment. Put in a CD.”

“I made a mix.”

“Of course you did. Let’s pick-up the dyke.”

We got Sterling in Times Square, where she materialized out of the crowd like Moses.

I leaned back to look her in the eye. She looked tired out from her temp gig downtown.

“It’s fucking on,” I told her.

She nodded and stared out the window. She had on her black Steelers skully.

My homegirl’s got the most to loose but she’s always down for the cause. I can’t go wrong with a kid like that on my team.

First song on the CD was “Crackity Jones,” by the Pixies:

(Please excuse me, Jose Jones,
You need these walls, for your own
I’m moving out of this hospa de hate
I’m afraid you’ll cut me, boy!)

We drove across the ornate as hell 59th Street bridge and turned onto McGuiness Blvd. I took sips out of a forty and watched mazes of brightly painted, single story manufacturing buildings fly by.

“How are we going to know where he is?” Sterling asked.

“I’ve got a psychic hold on him,” I said.

“C’mon with that shit, TRUE.”

“C’mon with what?” I shouted. Every emotion was right there on the surface. I was angry, elated, sick and confident, all at the same time. I pulled the black nylon doo-rag over my eyes and readjusted my black on black Yankees cap.

“She’s got inner vision, like Stevie Wonder,” Fitz called out, laughing with that stoned laugh of his.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I heard Sterling say, disparagingly.

“Just drive,” I told Fitz, running my hands over the dashboard until I felt the volume control.

It was the WU:

(killer bees, we’re on a swarm)

“Go straight until I tell you to turn.”

“Whatever,” Fitz said, and gunned it.

I felt us jumping up and over bumps, crashing over potholes.

“When do I turn?” Fitz said.

“Wait,” I called out. Yo, money I had that shit over my eyes, I couldn’t see. I was just trying to feel.

“Guns Blazing (Drums of Death), that UNKLE, Kool G Rap song came on.

It always gets me hyped.

I nodded my head back and forth.

*see lyrics on folded note paper



“Next right!” I heard myself call out.

“Feel the fury!”

I pulled the nylon off my eyes.

“Up there, to the left!”

We turned and immediately came upon a crowd of kids.

Some were wearing hoods, some were smoking cigarettes. A skateboard and a girl or two.

My eyes were on the look out for dark hair and white skin.

“Is he here?” Sterling asked.

“Do you see the fuck?”

“No,” I said, tying up the sock and feeling its weight. I readied my finger on the window button.

“But I will.”

(we allow some violence,
...to prove us rebaptizable.)


palace