Home's Unpainted Closets...roughly
My neighborhood is made up of monsters.
I didn’t want to learn what I did. I didn’t want to do what I did. I wish I hadn’t. No, I wish I had. I just wish I didn’t know I did it.
I wish somehow I didn’t know now, what I didn’t know then.
Make sense?
No?
Good.
I only set out to buy some perishables from the HEB on 41st. I live on 38th. That’s only three blocks away. (Actually it’s four. They have half streets in this city.)
I only wanted some healthy soy milk to pour on unhealthy sugared cereal. A wash.
Breaking Even is the best I can do.
Especially in all this Kodachrome© ready expanse of Americana, bathed in the unbearable sunlight that highlights all of my imperfections and raises my temperature so much that my pores become wild, broken spigots oozing disgust and dirt.
Directly across the street are two white men. Middle aged. Not tall, not short. Average in their short pants and stupid t-shirts and hair that is falling out.
They are not friends. They are not lovers.
These two chicken hawk faggots eyeball my lips because the tops peak out and the bottom looks kind of fluffy and big. Pretty. They lick theirs. Think that they see the outline of my hodensack banging against the inside of my Levi’s. They’re wrong.
These two accomplices would put Jeffrey Dahmer to shame if they were ever caught. But they won’t be. Not because of me. I’m not scared of them. I don’t give trophies to cops.
They know I know and eyefuck me all the same. They like to live dangerous and stupid. They know I’ll never tell.
The heat is death.
I forget my backpack. They watch, from across the street, with festive eyes as I turn around, like a West Point grad. I begrudgingly enter my empty house. It’s home.
It’s full of boxes and garbage and musical instruments and comfortable chairs and roaches and dirty sheets, dirty clothes, dirty underwear, dirty pictures, clean ideas and ceiling fans of course, but there’s no one else inside. There hasn’t been for some time. No life.
Giggles erupt from the queer factory across the street. Giggles like girls who don’t bleed between the legs. I notice this and try not to pay attention, clear my throat, look away, do anything but make eye-contact as I saunter back out the door, down off the stoop, across my yard, out of the shade and into the bright sunlight, my mind the sun-bleached black and white Rorschach of a composition notebook. This is golden.
This is my street. East 38th in Austin, Texas.
The zip code is 78705. I am served by a Republican troglodyte in Congress, where America struggles to stand.
But my City itself is a hotbed of myopic Liberalism with a capital L. You should see the street corners, dirty and homeless. Whores and agents for the Democratic Leadership Committee bang down your gates. People have a lot of pets. Run with their shirts off and put stickers on the back of their cars. Some even swim naked.
This City is beginning to be ringed by Republicans from California who know how to vote. These hard-toothed quitters are kept perturbed by an expressly annoying enclave of blind-fighting gender feminists, human rights and fair trade activists (Radiohead and Cold Play fans, respectively), socialistic Trots, unyielding enviro-fascists who eat as much meat as Al Gore, Jews who truly believe they’re a prosecuted and pitiable minority and the ever amicable Empowered People of Color.
In this People’s Republic, amidst the usual flower eaters, sandwiched-in like cat litter is every other conceivable reason to complain and perform community service embodied by a group given refuge under the status of non-profit.
Everything that is nestled and nurtured by the self-important filing clerks that hand out grades in the academy and publish anything and everything written by women, homosexuals, non-whites or postmodernists so that someone, somewhere receives tenure flourishes here. When one succeeds, we all succeed. From each according to [their] abilities, to each according to [their] needs. As you grow dumb, I eat shit.
But I digress. These are the children. I was talking about monsters.
Monsters eat children and these two across the street would serve me to myself if they had their way.
I am one and the other, you know. A monster and a child. I wish that made me a man. But the truth is that I am just another chimera: the worst spots hidden by what might be mistaken for moderate-end fashion in some circles. I just like to look American. Bleed, ooze and exude it, nauseatingly and passionately.
Like I believe. And I guess I do.
That’s what makes me better and worse. A wash.
Like a self-righteous lunatic on a swing set, trying to loop around the bar, full of venom and come and cusswords and Billy Joel songs. Why should I worry?
I. Do. Not. Care.
But I do despise monsters.
Two streets over I pass by a house with an addition more recent than not. They got a variance. It’s not hard. Donate to a re-elect campaign and learn how to cry on command. I’m working on it myself.
The addition is painted red. Not like the rest of the house which is grey. Just the addition, the second floor where you hear screams and nine times out of ten they’ll claim the porn is just too loud. On the tenth they’ll smile with a two by four in their hand; one end whittled down and wrapped in duct tape, the other end dark brown and rotten.
I think they’re baking a cake.
They overcompensate and paint their second story addition, thank you councilmember, bright red and in the shape of a vulva if you look at it from above.
Separately, the squatty foundation of concrete leads to grey and boring wood that actually looks like the disfigured shaft of a penis after being stuck in a c-clamp and spun in a paint spinner on high.
They think no one will notice but I can tell.
They don’t fool me. I’ll never be over for Scrabble.
The sun is microwaving me like a fruit fly caught inside and this is disgusting because I’m trying to heat up food as something flashes and pops. I scratch my head to get the sun out.
On the same street there is a tiny home that shelters a husband and wife past their prime but still young enough to be paying in. They are, like most people their age, sad and miserable. They do not work for the Lower Colorado River Authority.
They work, between them, a job that is hard and a job that is boring. It doesn’t matter who does what. One is sucked of life, the other of soul. It can get hard to tell the difference but like I said, it doesn’t matter.
Sucked. Like a lit cherry bomb through a coffee stirrer.
This couple, in their well-kept, technologically sound home, cannot conceive. They’ve tried. Many, many times. That’s the story.
The truth is this:
Black lilies grow over death.
In two separate patches on the front lawn are dozens of the kind of almost-but-not-really lilies that grow only when fed the rotting remains of carbon-based life. Black and purple, dark and smooth, like pussy from the Congo or Cleveland.
The front-most patch is a pet cemetery. Not unusual. Not in these would-be ‘burbs. The Law of the Jungle commingles with Puritan respect here. Let’s play Yahtzee! These are the green parts of the grey city not subsidized by taxpayers and lorded over by loonies and they do as they please, as pleases the Lord.
Death still follows, but is made polite.
Dumb animals-hamsters, cats, mice, guinea pigs, ferrets, dogs, pet snakes, gold and angel fish-they die every day. They are buried in Jell-O and Reebok boxes, half of an egg carton, maybe a cigar box if Dad liked the ole boy. Sometimes they are double-bagged like an idiot dick or cans of tomato soup and spaghetti sauce. They are sprinkled with sand, popsicle-stick crosses, prayers from a seven-year-old, Mom’s tears, Dad’s beers and seeds of some kind of liturgy or death devouring flora. Here they went for the plants, to pretty up the sad.
It happens. Pets are just lessons. Machines made for our emotions.
Those flowers that devour death, though, they’re weak on tiny morsels like that. They live, but sputter about and wilt, shrink like common violets.
They’re just Popeye without Spinach, the flowers in the front. They are small. I wonder what Olive Oyl and Bluto are up to. He’s got such strong hands.
The lilies near the back, on the side of the driveway. Look at them. They’re almost as tall as that basketball goal that’s never been used. The black one, caked in rust, missing a net for ages. The one that was supposed to be movable but is now buried in the earth around it, gripped by hands and roots like the anxiety that strictures my heart, that I feel all the time.
That hoop is not going anywhere. It knows too much. It’d squeal like a stuck pig or hungry infant. It’d bleed tiny teeth and bone fragments.
That patch of almost-lilies, the kind that grows over death; the hungry Black pussy blossoms that cannot…get…enough is about eight long by six wide.
That’s easily five average-sized adults-stacked four long with one on top, like the wooden block or Lego that keeps the rest standing up. The King of Hearts on top of a house of cards. You’re out of the game.
Get it?
But these sick fucks don’t have the strength in their cowed and conformed hands to quickly, quietly, callously kill people that big.
Five average sized adults. How many toddlers brought up in the basement and fed mother’s milk and wheat paste does that equal?
If they get to be that old.
God has two seats at his dining room table for these monstrous, ritualistic psycho-ceramics: They take after his own heart.
On Becker Avenue there is a house set back ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. The grass has overgrown all the tombstones but the mausoleum sits winking in the back, jutting out in the shape of a ramshackle two-story that looks like it belongs in Galveston, except it’s missing the stilts.
I can hear cicadas. Too many.
This house is uninhabitable. Someone or something lives there, sure. In this market, in this world, they find a way. They always do. Like cockroaches and love.
Hard on the outside, squishy and disgusting in the middle.
A son of a bitch, man, a son of a bitch.
This house is worst of all. It does not even pretend. It smirks at and smites the lawn-nazis and death gardens. It is become death itself, destroyer of souls. Oppenheimer’s butler holes up here to sell ice cream cones to the kids and milk to all the housebound housewives. Hose ‘em off.
The cicadas are incessant, of course. They screech without the idea of relent in their primitive, would-be brains. Like evangelicals with wings.
These noisy boy bugs are on guard constantly.
No.
It’s more like a warning.
I hurry past.
Scenes and vignettes overpower now. I knew I’d be here, in front of the Turnberry Apartments where a rapist used to cook and sleep. I tried to avoid this place like I try to avoid the slump, sickening and sinking feeling in my paunchy gut. It’s no use.
All I do is scream inside with rage; practice punching.
Rapists deserve to die. They deserve to have their skulls and all else rubbed against ripped and ragged steel. Slow at first, then faster, more vigorous, until the wheels come off, until they are disarmed and deformed. Then let them sit in front of a mirror for a few months and do it again, this time ‘till the answer is a smear.
Their parents and friends ought to watch, cry, beg, plead and then, in a cruel and just turn, come to understand the punishment, want more of it and accept this justice.
Monsters. My neighborhood.
Death blossoms. Fear spreads the-is the seed.
The sun, you can hear it. It sounds like a brown paper bag being crunched by large hands. Just muffled.
I take a shortcut across a beaten path until I see a red, five-pound woman wasp threaten me with the switchblade on her ass.
“BUGS!” I yelp, before taking the long way around. That cunt wanted to kill me. Not unusual. Not around here.
I scramble past a sign worn and half-covered in graffiti.
It used to say, in brilliant brown and metal-grey:
HANCOCK RECREATION CENTER
Now it merely says:
HANCOCK RECREATION
There is no longer a center, no mushy middle, no beacon of hope, no lighthouse in the darkness where Gatorade is overpriced in a dimly-lit rectangle next to a dirty fountain that hiccups warm water on a concrete pavilion two miles high with wishes. There is now only the concept of recreation.
Except, I look and see people playing golf.
And, then, around the bend, after so many pauses, I have reached Mecca and God is Good.
Back to the cold, calculated, developed and dissonant reality that soothes my inner workings like a good herbal cleanse or decent fuck. I am at peace. The spirit is here.
I stop holding my breath. No more of that haughty decay at my back. Your bad spirits and arcane magic is not wanted, cannot survive. Your death song has no rhythm or meter.
Maybe I’m wrong. I may be crazy. The option to opt out is still on the table, but hold steady, America. Just reign in corporate. After I buy my food.
My fly is open. It’s hot outside. I’m slimy with saltwater and the spot on my head voted Most Likely To Go Bald is ablaze.
Hey little girl is your daddy home
Did he go away and leave you all alone
I got a bad desire
I’m on fire
Oh, I can breathe.
I inhale the scent of some fired flesh and look around for the evidence. No restaurants that serve cows that big or burnt make money around here. Maybe they’re burning tires. Or Muslims.
Maybe the Muslims are burning effigies because of cartoons.
This evil, liberating stench fills my lungs like El Paso in summer, 10, 15 years ago.
I’m playing croquet now, with my brothers and losing, like always. Everyone is so happy. I think I’m on the set with Donna Reed. We’re playing army, playing family, looking for turtles, walking to the park with Grandma. I’m making a cake that looks like Old Glory and tastes just as sweet as democracy itself. I’m walking to the park with just Kane now. We’re older. Then I’m walking to the park alone. I’m a weird kid; I like to be by myself. I’m stuck in a tire swing and no one can push me forward or pull me out.
Still in El Paso I’m at the video store inside the Big 8, next to the Furr’s. I can’t rent R-rated movies. Then I can. As long as there’s no tits. I’m at the original Pancho’s because my grandparents know the founders and it’s pretty cheap and good. Flautas, please. No one’s name is Pancho. You knew that, right?
I’m watching cable in the living room on an uncomfortable couch, the kind that old people buy. I’m trying to get HBO to come through because I think I like to see naked women. It turns out I’m correct.
Innocent again and we’re cooking steaks every weekend with hot links and toothpicks and my America Cake once a year. We’re in Mexico at least once, buying whips and bottles of liquor. Everyone’s here and happy. Even Mom.
Now Mom’s here and mad. I’m here with Kane. Mom never comes anymore. I’m here alone. Mom and Dad don’t like each other anymore. Mom and Grandma hate each other. Mom and Dad live in separate, glass houses. Completely different places. Why are there still steaks every weekend? Why can’t I make my cake anymore? Why do I want to ban the Fourth of July?
I don’t eat meat anymore. We don’t go to El Paso so much; don’t really take road trips at all. I’m not innocent but I don’t jerk off in El Paso. It would be wrong. Just would not be right.
Not that any of this stuff matters. I’m stuck in concrete slippers now, my feet scarred in the shape of something approximating asphalt. My shoulders are burnt to a crisp because it’s not the worst pain in the world. You know what I mean.
I think she’s doing it again. She’ll never tell.
I’m being too honest.
I’m back in Austin.
I like the smell that I hate. I wonder if the vaquero I saw scrounging around the dumpsters is the one who is cooking the cow. Probably not. I’m sure he lives east of the Interstate. I’m still one block west. That’s all it takes.
It’s artificial and it’s not. I like my things. I like cargo and convenience-the deeds to my lot. I don’t like to sweat, not if I don’t have to. Not if I’m not really working. Or laughing. Or fucking.
I walk past a video store. Past a liquor store that is advertising a pretty girl’s disappearance. She’s dead and probably raped. I see a closed sign because it’s 10:45 am on a Sunday and the sun is still trying to kill me. I guess it didn’t get the memo.
In the window I see a large bottle of Crown Royal hovering somewhere over nothing and the cheap shelving so I slam my fist through to grab it. It doesn’t even hurt. I don’t think I know how to bleed anymore. I take the bottle and look at it. Actually this does hurt. A lot. Scared, I take the bottle and throw it on the ground in front of me. It breaks like a skull filled with laundry detergent.
Glub, glub, glub.
I’m in the parking lot now, pouring sweat. Hungry. Thirsty. Anxious and full of wonder. I don’t know why. I don’t think this is news.
Why no alarm? Why such an idiot? Shouldn’t there be sirens coming to arrest me? They will again, someday. You too. If you’re lucky.
On the outside of the HEB they sell all the state’s major dailies, including my hometown shit rag. Now that Molly Ivins is dead it’s useless. There’s the New York Times, and USA Today. But not the Wall Street Journal? That would have been a crime, but now I’m not so sure. I suppose the statute of limitations has passed, in the blink of an eye. I’m kind of glad.
I know exactly what I will do when I get inside: I will sit down in the deli section or walk around in all the cold places and drink a Vitamin Water even though I hear that Glaceau is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Coca Cola Co. which is in the habit of turning a blind eye as their processing plants in Latin America hire thugs to murder union leaders. Tastes like the real thing.
I will spend a long time wasting time as my sweat turns to ice beads and then drops from my body like fleas from a drugged cat. Then it’s out into the heat again.
I pretend like I’m a child of peace. That I’m sweating away the impurities. Some common, filthy hippie. Out go all the bad thoughts, the anxiety, the worry, the rage, the fear, the sickness, the pity, the sadness, the Glancing Evil, the superficial and vain hang-ups and obsessions, the useless DNA, the desire, the anger, the blood, the bloodlust, the hunger, the death. But it’s just salt.
And when I rub my skin it looks like dirt-it is dirt.
I wish I sweat neon, at least. Like in the Gatorade commercials. Ruining all my clothes with Cool.
I ignore my own plans and walk through produce where the avocados are too expensive. My dad would buy them anyway.
Yes, this place is alive and in such a bustling, crowded, egalitarian Petri dish I lose some of the edginess. It’s all alone when I’m most untouchable, mad, convinced of some ghastly irrationality, victimhood and thus brilliance. Only by myself does the stupid truly set in.
I check a label. No mention of Coca Cola anywhere. Now, I can lie to myself and say that Mike is wrong. For the time being.
I wander, wide-eyed and cruel, through the Pergo section of the store and can’t help but laugh at the types who shop here (except for me.) Some things are just too hilarious, like seeing the word “pregnancy” on a bottle of liquor.
I wonder: who on Earth would buy certain things?
Eco-sensitive yoga mats, bottled water from Calcutta, ten-gallon tubs of plain yogurt mixed with bull semen, wheat-free anything, soy and veggie chips, riboflavin in bulk.
We’re only gonna die.
How does anyone like me? Where is the vegan mayonnaise? I’m sure now that there’s something I’ve lost. Let me know if you come across it. This really is pathetic.
Two double-packed soymilks are $4.99-the leader in the field of soymilks. An individual store brand costs $2.39. That would be $4.78 for two. Twenty-one cents more and I’ve got a name brand in my hand.
What do I do?
Pay the man.
Grab a vegan yogurt. There’s the mayo. Pass the beer and wine and rabble and snag a Vitamin Water. You see? The plan is ruined.
I either set myself up to fail or I play to lose. Which is which?
Kill the dog. Get in line. Open my drink. Now, do I, in my desperation, violently suck or just let it flow and go along with it? Active or passive? Either way I’ve just paid for another bullet in Colombia.
There’s a couple and neither are attractive. That’s cute. They might last. They’re buying things separately. That’s annoying. Quit talking and pay already. I’m in a hurry to sweat.
No thanks, I don’t want candy or an inexpensive, translucent calculator-that’s a lie. Why won’t…my card work? I’m plastic. This is wearing me out. Three times is not a charm it is embarrassing.
Oh, I’m using the expired one. Sorry, lady.
Hurry out and hope for the worst.
I want them to stop me and ask to look at my receipt. I want to then tell them, politely, if I can, to fuck right off. I want to leave as they stare at my Levi’s and New Balance and plaid Lucky shirt hop-walk away into the bright and stinking asphalt of the parking lot. I want them to be scared and confused at what I just did.
You see, I’m guilty every time I leave a store, at least I feel that way, but I’m never in violation of any applicable laws.
Of course there’s no one at the door as I exit. I have gotten away scot-free and they didn’t even go for the shakedown. No one will ever know. Our little secret.
I fumble with my cell phone and text my roommate without looking up. I’m a pretty oblivious pedestrian. I might appear to be walking to my car, but I only live three (four) blocks away.
Again the smell of some dumb, charred beast wafts into my large, welcoming nostrils. Bring it on: all the pieces of meat to add to my collection. I can see, smell and hear and still say no. There is a higher law. We create it. Against suffering.
I take my last breath and then hold it in again. I’ll soon be surrounded by death. It’s coming, but I walk home quick. A West Point stride.
Past the brown sign, past the wasp, past John-Michael’s old apartment complex, past the garbage on the ground, past the foot in the mouth, past the slump in my gut, past your eyes watching me think, skip and sing, past the cicadas, past the lilies…past the monsters, my neighborhood is filled with them.
I take a wrong turn and end up on 39th Street, where I never need to be. Just another line in this maze and I could be gobbled up at any moment. But turning around would be a sign of weakness. I’ll take this long way back. But, I think: what about the wasp?
It’s never weak to survive.
There is a yucca plant off to the side of some yellowed grass in a yard that looks abandoned of concern. It’s big. Bigger than the one that I pushed my brother into at On The Border. He retaliated by burning my arm with a lamp as I lay sleeping.
Yucca plants aren’t the kind of thing you’d see in Massachusetts, that’s for god damned sure.
I count the numbers on the houses and figure out which one would be mine if I had gone down the right street.
I shut my eyes and find the sidewalk, walking blindly to shut out the monsters. I don’t need any more of this. Never again do I need this. Never again. Do you hear me?
I pass by a house that looks nothing like a Spanish villa.
There’s a pink yard sale west of here. I shake my head: no.
Two cats need a new home.
An unripe pecan needs to be smashed on the hot pavement like a skull filled with gelatin. Green.
My back hurts. I’m hungrier, thirstier, hotter, dehydrated and of course, the anxiety is back. I’m almost home.
The chicken hawks are still lingering outside, touching each other in obscene and garish ways. I’m ambivalent.
There’s an older woman who says hello to me. She’s going to be swallowing Drano later this evening because of the situation at hand. Maybe she’s right. She’s tired of being a monster.
I’m almost home.
I’m moralizing with dice.
What am I saying?
In a moment there will be blood. I mean red. My door. There will be central air. Sin. Cereal. I will sweep away the death that stands outside and opens my mail.
My shirt will be soaking wet and my arms will be impossible to write on, my sores will be pulsing like my head and my heart will try to explode unless I douse it with canola oil and …contains less than 10 percent fruit juice.
I just have to get inside. I’m almost there. Almost home.
One more dozen steps. One last look around:
There’s a young girl with a backpack on. She is about to go the grocery store. And even though her backpack is lime and blue, it has shades of grey and she is my soul mate for a brief and glorious instant. There is youngness in her because she is young. The fat of her ass belongs to a baby, not an old lady, not yet.
I don’t think she’s a monster; I’m just very scared for her.
I didn’t want to learn what I did. I didn’t want to do what I did. I wish I hadn’t. No, I wish I had. I just wish I didn’t know I did it.
I wish somehow I didn’t know now, what I didn’t know then.
Make sense?
No?
Good.
I only set out to buy some perishables from the HEB on 41st. I live on 38th. That’s only three blocks away. (Actually it’s four. They have half streets in this city.)
I only wanted some healthy soy milk to pour on unhealthy sugared cereal. A wash.
Breaking Even is the best I can do.
Especially in all this Kodachrome© ready expanse of Americana, bathed in the unbearable sunlight that highlights all of my imperfections and raises my temperature so much that my pores become wild, broken spigots oozing disgust and dirt.
Directly across the street are two white men. Middle aged. Not tall, not short. Average in their short pants and stupid t-shirts and hair that is falling out.
They are not friends. They are not lovers.
These two chicken hawk faggots eyeball my lips because the tops peak out and the bottom looks kind of fluffy and big. Pretty. They lick theirs. Think that they see the outline of my hodensack banging against the inside of my Levi’s. They’re wrong.
These two accomplices would put Jeffrey Dahmer to shame if they were ever caught. But they won’t be. Not because of me. I’m not scared of them. I don’t give trophies to cops.
They know I know and eyefuck me all the same. They like to live dangerous and stupid. They know I’ll never tell.
The heat is death.
I forget my backpack. They watch, from across the street, with festive eyes as I turn around, like a West Point grad. I begrudgingly enter my empty house. It’s home.
It’s full of boxes and garbage and musical instruments and comfortable chairs and roaches and dirty sheets, dirty clothes, dirty underwear, dirty pictures, clean ideas and ceiling fans of course, but there’s no one else inside. There hasn’t been for some time. No life.
Giggles erupt from the queer factory across the street. Giggles like girls who don’t bleed between the legs. I notice this and try not to pay attention, clear my throat, look away, do anything but make eye-contact as I saunter back out the door, down off the stoop, across my yard, out of the shade and into the bright sunlight, my mind the sun-bleached black and white Rorschach of a composition notebook. This is golden.
This is my street. East 38th in Austin, Texas.
The zip code is 78705. I am served by a Republican troglodyte in Congress, where America struggles to stand.
But my City itself is a hotbed of myopic Liberalism with a capital L. You should see the street corners, dirty and homeless. Whores and agents for the Democratic Leadership Committee bang down your gates. People have a lot of pets. Run with their shirts off and put stickers on the back of their cars. Some even swim naked.
This City is beginning to be ringed by Republicans from California who know how to vote. These hard-toothed quitters are kept perturbed by an expressly annoying enclave of blind-fighting gender feminists, human rights and fair trade activists (Radiohead and Cold Play fans, respectively), socialistic Trots, unyielding enviro-fascists who eat as much meat as Al Gore, Jews who truly believe they’re a prosecuted and pitiable minority and the ever amicable Empowered People of Color.
In this People’s Republic, amidst the usual flower eaters, sandwiched-in like cat litter is every other conceivable reason to complain and perform community service embodied by a group given refuge under the status of non-profit.
Everything that is nestled and nurtured by the self-important filing clerks that hand out grades in the academy and publish anything and everything written by women, homosexuals, non-whites or postmodernists so that someone, somewhere receives tenure flourishes here. When one succeeds, we all succeed. From each according to [their] abilities, to each according to [their] needs. As you grow dumb, I eat shit.
But I digress. These are the children. I was talking about monsters.
Monsters eat children and these two across the street would serve me to myself if they had their way.
I am one and the other, you know. A monster and a child. I wish that made me a man. But the truth is that I am just another chimera: the worst spots hidden by what might be mistaken for moderate-end fashion in some circles. I just like to look American. Bleed, ooze and exude it, nauseatingly and passionately.
Like I believe. And I guess I do.
That’s what makes me better and worse. A wash.
Like a self-righteous lunatic on a swing set, trying to loop around the bar, full of venom and come and cusswords and Billy Joel songs. Why should I worry?
I. Do. Not. Care.
But I do despise monsters.
Two streets over I pass by a house with an addition more recent than not. They got a variance. It’s not hard. Donate to a re-elect campaign and learn how to cry on command. I’m working on it myself.
The addition is painted red. Not like the rest of the house which is grey. Just the addition, the second floor where you hear screams and nine times out of ten they’ll claim the porn is just too loud. On the tenth they’ll smile with a two by four in their hand; one end whittled down and wrapped in duct tape, the other end dark brown and rotten.
I think they’re baking a cake.
They overcompensate and paint their second story addition, thank you councilmember, bright red and in the shape of a vulva if you look at it from above.
Separately, the squatty foundation of concrete leads to grey and boring wood that actually looks like the disfigured shaft of a penis after being stuck in a c-clamp and spun in a paint spinner on high.
They think no one will notice but I can tell.
They don’t fool me. I’ll never be over for Scrabble.
The sun is microwaving me like a fruit fly caught inside and this is disgusting because I’m trying to heat up food as something flashes and pops. I scratch my head to get the sun out.
On the same street there is a tiny home that shelters a husband and wife past their prime but still young enough to be paying in. They are, like most people their age, sad and miserable. They do not work for the Lower Colorado River Authority.
They work, between them, a job that is hard and a job that is boring. It doesn’t matter who does what. One is sucked of life, the other of soul. It can get hard to tell the difference but like I said, it doesn’t matter.
Sucked. Like a lit cherry bomb through a coffee stirrer.
This couple, in their well-kept, technologically sound home, cannot conceive. They’ve tried. Many, many times. That’s the story.
The truth is this:
Black lilies grow over death.
In two separate patches on the front lawn are dozens of the kind of almost-but-not-really lilies that grow only when fed the rotting remains of carbon-based life. Black and purple, dark and smooth, like pussy from the Congo or Cleveland.
The front-most patch is a pet cemetery. Not unusual. Not in these would-be ‘burbs. The Law of the Jungle commingles with Puritan respect here. Let’s play Yahtzee! These are the green parts of the grey city not subsidized by taxpayers and lorded over by loonies and they do as they please, as pleases the Lord.
Death still follows, but is made polite.
Dumb animals-hamsters, cats, mice, guinea pigs, ferrets, dogs, pet snakes, gold and angel fish-they die every day. They are buried in Jell-O and Reebok boxes, half of an egg carton, maybe a cigar box if Dad liked the ole boy. Sometimes they are double-bagged like an idiot dick or cans of tomato soup and spaghetti sauce. They are sprinkled with sand, popsicle-stick crosses, prayers from a seven-year-old, Mom’s tears, Dad’s beers and seeds of some kind of liturgy or death devouring flora. Here they went for the plants, to pretty up the sad.
It happens. Pets are just lessons. Machines made for our emotions.
Those flowers that devour death, though, they’re weak on tiny morsels like that. They live, but sputter about and wilt, shrink like common violets.
They’re just Popeye without Spinach, the flowers in the front. They are small. I wonder what Olive Oyl and Bluto are up to. He’s got such strong hands.
The lilies near the back, on the side of the driveway. Look at them. They’re almost as tall as that basketball goal that’s never been used. The black one, caked in rust, missing a net for ages. The one that was supposed to be movable but is now buried in the earth around it, gripped by hands and roots like the anxiety that strictures my heart, that I feel all the time.
That hoop is not going anywhere. It knows too much. It’d squeal like a stuck pig or hungry infant. It’d bleed tiny teeth and bone fragments.
That patch of almost-lilies, the kind that grows over death; the hungry Black pussy blossoms that cannot…get…enough is about eight long by six wide.
That’s easily five average-sized adults-stacked four long with one on top, like the wooden block or Lego that keeps the rest standing up. The King of Hearts on top of a house of cards. You’re out of the game.
Get it?
But these sick fucks don’t have the strength in their cowed and conformed hands to quickly, quietly, callously kill people that big.
Five average sized adults. How many toddlers brought up in the basement and fed mother’s milk and wheat paste does that equal?
If they get to be that old.
God has two seats at his dining room table for these monstrous, ritualistic psycho-ceramics: They take after his own heart.
On Becker Avenue there is a house set back ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. The grass has overgrown all the tombstones but the mausoleum sits winking in the back, jutting out in the shape of a ramshackle two-story that looks like it belongs in Galveston, except it’s missing the stilts.
I can hear cicadas. Too many.
This house is uninhabitable. Someone or something lives there, sure. In this market, in this world, they find a way. They always do. Like cockroaches and love.
Hard on the outside, squishy and disgusting in the middle.
A son of a bitch, man, a son of a bitch.
This house is worst of all. It does not even pretend. It smirks at and smites the lawn-nazis and death gardens. It is become death itself, destroyer of souls. Oppenheimer’s butler holes up here to sell ice cream cones to the kids and milk to all the housebound housewives. Hose ‘em off.
The cicadas are incessant, of course. They screech without the idea of relent in their primitive, would-be brains. Like evangelicals with wings.
These noisy boy bugs are on guard constantly.
No.
It’s more like a warning.
I hurry past.
Scenes and vignettes overpower now. I knew I’d be here, in front of the Turnberry Apartments where a rapist used to cook and sleep. I tried to avoid this place like I try to avoid the slump, sickening and sinking feeling in my paunchy gut. It’s no use.
All I do is scream inside with rage; practice punching.
Rapists deserve to die. They deserve to have their skulls and all else rubbed against ripped and ragged steel. Slow at first, then faster, more vigorous, until the wheels come off, until they are disarmed and deformed. Then let them sit in front of a mirror for a few months and do it again, this time ‘till the answer is a smear.
Their parents and friends ought to watch, cry, beg, plead and then, in a cruel and just turn, come to understand the punishment, want more of it and accept this justice.
Monsters. My neighborhood.
Death blossoms. Fear spreads the-is the seed.
The sun, you can hear it. It sounds like a brown paper bag being crunched by large hands. Just muffled.
I take a shortcut across a beaten path until I see a red, five-pound woman wasp threaten me with the switchblade on her ass.
“BUGS!” I yelp, before taking the long way around. That cunt wanted to kill me. Not unusual. Not around here.
I scramble past a sign worn and half-covered in graffiti.
It used to say, in brilliant brown and metal-grey:
HANCOCK RECREATION CENTER
Now it merely says:
HANCOCK RECREATION
There is no longer a center, no mushy middle, no beacon of hope, no lighthouse in the darkness where Gatorade is overpriced in a dimly-lit rectangle next to a dirty fountain that hiccups warm water on a concrete pavilion two miles high with wishes. There is now only the concept of recreation.
Except, I look and see people playing golf.
And, then, around the bend, after so many pauses, I have reached Mecca and God is Good.
Back to the cold, calculated, developed and dissonant reality that soothes my inner workings like a good herbal cleanse or decent fuck. I am at peace. The spirit is here.
I stop holding my breath. No more of that haughty decay at my back. Your bad spirits and arcane magic is not wanted, cannot survive. Your death song has no rhythm or meter.
Maybe I’m wrong. I may be crazy. The option to opt out is still on the table, but hold steady, America. Just reign in corporate. After I buy my food.
My fly is open. It’s hot outside. I’m slimy with saltwater and the spot on my head voted Most Likely To Go Bald is ablaze.
Hey little girl is your daddy home
Did he go away and leave you all alone
I got a bad desire
I’m on fire
Oh, I can breathe.
I inhale the scent of some fired flesh and look around for the evidence. No restaurants that serve cows that big or burnt make money around here. Maybe they’re burning tires. Or Muslims.
Maybe the Muslims are burning effigies because of cartoons.
This evil, liberating stench fills my lungs like El Paso in summer, 10, 15 years ago.
I’m playing croquet now, with my brothers and losing, like always. Everyone is so happy. I think I’m on the set with Donna Reed. We’re playing army, playing family, looking for turtles, walking to the park with Grandma. I’m making a cake that looks like Old Glory and tastes just as sweet as democracy itself. I’m walking to the park with just Kane now. We’re older. Then I’m walking to the park alone. I’m a weird kid; I like to be by myself. I’m stuck in a tire swing and no one can push me forward or pull me out.
Still in El Paso I’m at the video store inside the Big 8, next to the Furr’s. I can’t rent R-rated movies. Then I can. As long as there’s no tits. I’m at the original Pancho’s because my grandparents know the founders and it’s pretty cheap and good. Flautas, please. No one’s name is Pancho. You knew that, right?
I’m watching cable in the living room on an uncomfortable couch, the kind that old people buy. I’m trying to get HBO to come through because I think I like to see naked women. It turns out I’m correct.
Innocent again and we’re cooking steaks every weekend with hot links and toothpicks and my America Cake once a year. We’re in Mexico at least once, buying whips and bottles of liquor. Everyone’s here and happy. Even Mom.
Now Mom’s here and mad. I’m here with Kane. Mom never comes anymore. I’m here alone. Mom and Dad don’t like each other anymore. Mom and Grandma hate each other. Mom and Dad live in separate, glass houses. Completely different places. Why are there still steaks every weekend? Why can’t I make my cake anymore? Why do I want to ban the Fourth of July?
I don’t eat meat anymore. We don’t go to El Paso so much; don’t really take road trips at all. I’m not innocent but I don’t jerk off in El Paso. It would be wrong. Just would not be right.
Not that any of this stuff matters. I’m stuck in concrete slippers now, my feet scarred in the shape of something approximating asphalt. My shoulders are burnt to a crisp because it’s not the worst pain in the world. You know what I mean.
I think she’s doing it again. She’ll never tell.
I’m being too honest.
I’m back in Austin.
I like the smell that I hate. I wonder if the vaquero I saw scrounging around the dumpsters is the one who is cooking the cow. Probably not. I’m sure he lives east of the Interstate. I’m still one block west. That’s all it takes.
It’s artificial and it’s not. I like my things. I like cargo and convenience-the deeds to my lot. I don’t like to sweat, not if I don’t have to. Not if I’m not really working. Or laughing. Or fucking.
I walk past a video store. Past a liquor store that is advertising a pretty girl’s disappearance. She’s dead and probably raped. I see a closed sign because it’s 10:45 am on a Sunday and the sun is still trying to kill me. I guess it didn’t get the memo.
In the window I see a large bottle of Crown Royal hovering somewhere over nothing and the cheap shelving so I slam my fist through to grab it. It doesn’t even hurt. I don’t think I know how to bleed anymore. I take the bottle and look at it. Actually this does hurt. A lot. Scared, I take the bottle and throw it on the ground in front of me. It breaks like a skull filled with laundry detergent.
Glub, glub, glub.
I’m in the parking lot now, pouring sweat. Hungry. Thirsty. Anxious and full of wonder. I don’t know why. I don’t think this is news.
Why no alarm? Why such an idiot? Shouldn’t there be sirens coming to arrest me? They will again, someday. You too. If you’re lucky.
On the outside of the HEB they sell all the state’s major dailies, including my hometown shit rag. Now that Molly Ivins is dead it’s useless. There’s the New York Times, and USA Today. But not the Wall Street Journal? That would have been a crime, but now I’m not so sure. I suppose the statute of limitations has passed, in the blink of an eye. I’m kind of glad.
I know exactly what I will do when I get inside: I will sit down in the deli section or walk around in all the cold places and drink a Vitamin Water even though I hear that Glaceau is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Coca Cola Co. which is in the habit of turning a blind eye as their processing plants in Latin America hire thugs to murder union leaders. Tastes like the real thing.
I will spend a long time wasting time as my sweat turns to ice beads and then drops from my body like fleas from a drugged cat. Then it’s out into the heat again.
I pretend like I’m a child of peace. That I’m sweating away the impurities. Some common, filthy hippie. Out go all the bad thoughts, the anxiety, the worry, the rage, the fear, the sickness, the pity, the sadness, the Glancing Evil, the superficial and vain hang-ups and obsessions, the useless DNA, the desire, the anger, the blood, the bloodlust, the hunger, the death. But it’s just salt.
And when I rub my skin it looks like dirt-it is dirt.
I wish I sweat neon, at least. Like in the Gatorade commercials. Ruining all my clothes with Cool.
I ignore my own plans and walk through produce where the avocados are too expensive. My dad would buy them anyway.
Yes, this place is alive and in such a bustling, crowded, egalitarian Petri dish I lose some of the edginess. It’s all alone when I’m most untouchable, mad, convinced of some ghastly irrationality, victimhood and thus brilliance. Only by myself does the stupid truly set in.
I check a label. No mention of Coca Cola anywhere. Now, I can lie to myself and say that Mike is wrong. For the time being.
I wander, wide-eyed and cruel, through the Pergo section of the store and can’t help but laugh at the types who shop here (except for me.) Some things are just too hilarious, like seeing the word “pregnancy” on a bottle of liquor.
I wonder: who on Earth would buy certain things?
Eco-sensitive yoga mats, bottled water from Calcutta, ten-gallon tubs of plain yogurt mixed with bull semen, wheat-free anything, soy and veggie chips, riboflavin in bulk.
We’re only gonna die.
How does anyone like me? Where is the vegan mayonnaise? I’m sure now that there’s something I’ve lost. Let me know if you come across it. This really is pathetic.
Two double-packed soymilks are $4.99-the leader in the field of soymilks. An individual store brand costs $2.39. That would be $4.78 for two. Twenty-one cents more and I’ve got a name brand in my hand.
What do I do?
Pay the man.
Grab a vegan yogurt. There’s the mayo. Pass the beer and wine and rabble and snag a Vitamin Water. You see? The plan is ruined.
I either set myself up to fail or I play to lose. Which is which?
Kill the dog. Get in line. Open my drink. Now, do I, in my desperation, violently suck or just let it flow and go along with it? Active or passive? Either way I’ve just paid for another bullet in Colombia.
There’s a couple and neither are attractive. That’s cute. They might last. They’re buying things separately. That’s annoying. Quit talking and pay already. I’m in a hurry to sweat.
No thanks, I don’t want candy or an inexpensive, translucent calculator-that’s a lie. Why won’t…my card work? I’m plastic. This is wearing me out. Three times is not a charm it is embarrassing.
Oh, I’m using the expired one. Sorry, lady.
Hurry out and hope for the worst.
I want them to stop me and ask to look at my receipt. I want to then tell them, politely, if I can, to fuck right off. I want to leave as they stare at my Levi’s and New Balance and plaid Lucky shirt hop-walk away into the bright and stinking asphalt of the parking lot. I want them to be scared and confused at what I just did.
You see, I’m guilty every time I leave a store, at least I feel that way, but I’m never in violation of any applicable laws.
Of course there’s no one at the door as I exit. I have gotten away scot-free and they didn’t even go for the shakedown. No one will ever know. Our little secret.
I fumble with my cell phone and text my roommate without looking up. I’m a pretty oblivious pedestrian. I might appear to be walking to my car, but I only live three (four) blocks away.
Again the smell of some dumb, charred beast wafts into my large, welcoming nostrils. Bring it on: all the pieces of meat to add to my collection. I can see, smell and hear and still say no. There is a higher law. We create it. Against suffering.
I take my last breath and then hold it in again. I’ll soon be surrounded by death. It’s coming, but I walk home quick. A West Point stride.
Past the brown sign, past the wasp, past John-Michael’s old apartment complex, past the garbage on the ground, past the foot in the mouth, past the slump in my gut, past your eyes watching me think, skip and sing, past the cicadas, past the lilies…past the monsters, my neighborhood is filled with them.
I take a wrong turn and end up on 39th Street, where I never need to be. Just another line in this maze and I could be gobbled up at any moment. But turning around would be a sign of weakness. I’ll take this long way back. But, I think: what about the wasp?
It’s never weak to survive.
There is a yucca plant off to the side of some yellowed grass in a yard that looks abandoned of concern. It’s big. Bigger than the one that I pushed my brother into at On The Border. He retaliated by burning my arm with a lamp as I lay sleeping.
Yucca plants aren’t the kind of thing you’d see in Massachusetts, that’s for god damned sure.
I count the numbers on the houses and figure out which one would be mine if I had gone down the right street.
I shut my eyes and find the sidewalk, walking blindly to shut out the monsters. I don’t need any more of this. Never again do I need this. Never again. Do you hear me?
I pass by a house that looks nothing like a Spanish villa.
There’s a pink yard sale west of here. I shake my head: no.
Two cats need a new home.
An unripe pecan needs to be smashed on the hot pavement like a skull filled with gelatin. Green.
My back hurts. I’m hungrier, thirstier, hotter, dehydrated and of course, the anxiety is back. I’m almost home.
The chicken hawks are still lingering outside, touching each other in obscene and garish ways. I’m ambivalent.
There’s an older woman who says hello to me. She’s going to be swallowing Drano later this evening because of the situation at hand. Maybe she’s right. She’s tired of being a monster.
I’m almost home.
I’m moralizing with dice.
What am I saying?
In a moment there will be blood. I mean red. My door. There will be central air. Sin. Cereal. I will sweep away the death that stands outside and opens my mail.
My shirt will be soaking wet and my arms will be impossible to write on, my sores will be pulsing like my head and my heart will try to explode unless I douse it with canola oil and …contains less than 10 percent fruit juice.
I just have to get inside. I’m almost there. Almost home.
One more dozen steps. One last look around:
There’s a young girl with a backpack on. She is about to go the grocery store. And even though her backpack is lime and blue, it has shades of grey and she is my soul mate for a brief and glorious instant. There is youngness in her because she is young. The fat of her ass belongs to a baby, not an old lady, not yet.
I don’t think she’s a monster; I’m just very scared for her.