marketing the weird to the stupid

2006-03-24T07:06:00.000-08:00

Said the Gay Man to the Woman in Heat,

"Get away from me, I can smell you from here."
He goes to manicure his nails;
and watches as the woman wails
of lost Boyfriends, Opportunities, and Chocolate.

__

(i'm an authoress at a word iron) figure that one out.

2006-03-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

jumped

"bitch, you ain't goin' fast enough,"
woulda done it, but no,
three hundred pounds of pure sumo fat
covering the overcoat that was the sidewalk's skirt,

made me see so many colors
the sky is blue and black and blue and black;
another sumo joins in the battle on my abdomen

I feel my ribs becoming one with my lungs
my abdomen pressing into my ovaries, pressing into thighs

As they are killing me I read the cover of a book:
"Seduction."

Death, you seduce me and make the sky
blue and black and blue and black

They're sumo wrestling and they're tickling me,
they haven't bathed in years, I smell old broccoli and Mama's gravy
a meatloaf and a McRib or two,
(they're breaking mine.) When they go, I am relieved.

I have become disassociated with me;
blue and black and blue and black
I don't have the strength to get up, the station is so far away

people are stepping on my precious fingers, worn to keyboards
they are now pressed onto putrid concrete

People are walking all over me and I am dying.
Soon, I am left staring into a pair of ebony eyes; lifted
by strong hands
blue and black and blue and black.

flashback (ab seg)

2006-02-28T18:32:00.000-08:00

It was over the summer. Our first summer after college; the beaches were crowded with people who were relieved that they'd bought would not go to waste, that the water was refreshingly cool, and the wind was pleasant. Neither of us was swimming. I did not know how to, and L. did not seem to want to do much but show off her new bathing suit. It was a one-piece, oddly enough: when I'd seen her I was expecting a thong, perhaps, exposing the tattoo she'd gotten at the base of her back. But no, it was a one piece, the color of seaweed, a gold pattern lining the revealing back. She was short, perhaps barely five feet tall; at five foot six, I towered over her, wearing my boy-shorts and a t-shirt, wondering when I could sit down on a towel on the parched sand and crack open the terrible books I'd brought along with me to read.

She smoothed the towel on the ground as we approached the shore and sat me down. The sky was pristine, the water was sparkling. And there she was, as shameless as Veronica-or-Betty from the Archie Comics, smoothing her highlighted hair until it looked like it was made out of the sun itself. People were staring at her; just like she wanted them to. It was almost like a settled reaction; she spun her black widow web and watched as all the eager spiders came toward her, shirtless and watery to the touch from the surfing and from the sweat.

I could not even pretend to be disinterested--she'd drag me in the conversation like I belonged. I had no interest in surfing, or in the wild Brooklyn parties her friends threw. Although she would casually invite them to come along with her next time she went, I remembered that she'd never asked me to do the same. Perhaps she feared my quiet disapproval. Secretly, I did wonder about whether she would accidentally take a lethal cocktail, or perhaps contract the inevitable from a man who could not resist the seductress that was L.; now, she was batting her eyes alluringly at a man in uniform. Tanned. Medaled. From the navy, in that crisp, blue outfit, staring ahead into the sea. It was something out of a poster. And, she told me, she'd be completely out of her mind to pursue him. ("That's what happens, you know, with men in the Army. THAT MAN will expect commitment while he goes around and fights the enemy! I say that the enemy is boredom¾and I'll screw around as much as I want to because I have no idea what he's up to!")

I pointed out that this was not so logical, but she'd already stood up, casting the sheer blanket she wore to cover her form the sun in a pool about her feet and ran in the sand, barefoot. She was going towards THAT MAN. I found him extremely pleasing to look at, anyway, and found that it was a distraction from the terrible sex scene in this novel I was reading, which I hoped wouldn't include any, instead focusing on the chaste issues of romance--the violence, the drugs, and the inner emotional turmoil. I itched to throw the book in the water; I couldn't believe I was reduced to smut. ("And then she unbuttoned his pants and watched him as he quivered with ecstasy…")

But I was watching it; I was, from a few feet away, observing L. as she smoothed the shirt of the uniformed man. Reduced him into his own ecstasy. Bumped into him accidentally so that their hips collided; was comfortable enough to wrestle him to the ground and kiss him, intoxicated by victory. I should have told L. that there is no greater intoxicator than this force, that she has that gloss more than ever when she tackles, possesses, skin for skin than she does when she empties a cold glass bottle of its contents, or savors a bitter pill on the very back of her tongue. I hope there is still time to tell her these things.

And I wondered whether I should have told her then, that she should not always need saving. After she'd flirted with him, madly, and left him sprawled, she ran up to where I sat and demanded that I get her some ice cream: mango sherbet would do. What she did not know that half an hour after she left him he'd come back to give her a bruise on her collarbone for daring to leave him that day on the beach, stranded and excited, buried in the discontent of hot sand. Eventually, he followed us to the small ice cream parlor off of the boardwalk ¾here, we'd collapsed under the air-conditioner, relieved to have come in from the hazy heat. She saw him come, stealthily¾I faced away from the entrance. The man walked straight, self-assuredly towards her and dealt her a swift blow to the neck, staring at me in mute satisfaction. L. stopped; she was transfixed as he left, slamming his way through the glass doors. Then, she rubbed her smooth champagne arms and folded them about her head. Only then did she start to cry. "What a bastard; can you believe that? What a fucking bastard."

2006-02-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

Tell you what: the answers are hidden underneath rocks. Except that, in order to get to them, you have to sift through the muck, the crap. You have to sweat a little.

Sitting in bed, it makes no sense to sweat. So I'd better grin and bear it.

So what is this sweat doing on my face, glistening, ready to fall down my face in watery clumps? For whom am I laboring?

What if I am trying to deliver that half baked idea, found underneath that stone? What then? Do I engineer a basilisk?

Then, then, if that's the case, it had better shrink ray me to oblivion, baby.

2006-02-19T16:43:00.000-08:00

Blue Fantasy

Autobahn

2006-02-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

True story

The Autobahn at three in the morning. 140 miles an hour in almost pitch dark. Lara's Jaguar cut through roads like a knife, spitting charged air easily like Moses and his sea. 200 miles an hour and the lights turned into a Ferris wheel. They say that the Europeans are über fond of high speeds, but even they are not fond of suicide. Europe is a very asymmetrical place. I could never find my bearings when I visited the continent—what should have been dissimilar was not, and everything else was altogether too foreign. The water was too salty. The sky was the same, skin colors were similar, but the accents were different. Shoes made more sense there, as did jeans—everything was of one size, different shapes, riotous colors. Yet another thing about the Europeans—they crave the habitable space of mythical country—and I craved civilization as I zipped through inhabitable space that day on the Atlantic City Expressway. Lara's eyes were hazy glass, the kind after a long, steamy shower. There was even water, idle and unstoppable tears clinging to sweaty skin. I could see her skin slowly turn transparent, veins deepening in clarity.

We'd come here on a jaunt, one of our usual trips. She'd driven the way down here. It was not as if I entirely trusted her, but driving was as illegal for me as it was to look at the intravenous morphine injections, sitting placidly in the backseat. They were clear, too, giving the mistaken impression of being empty. I knew they were full, because she'd told me back in the dorm. We sat, cross-legged on her comforter; posters of skirts, pretty patterns with French captions
covered the walls so that none of the unglamorous plastered was obvious—she'd delegated them to the cover-up of what she felt was the obscene utilitarianism of the room. "I'd had them brought to me by this guy I met once," she said. "He lives in Miami. If I go down to visit him sometime, you should come with me."

"This guy you met once? Is he a friend?"

"They all are. Convenient, isn't it?" she asked, "But no matter, he's a doctor."

Mental note: Always be friendly with doctors.

The television was blaring an offshoot of Law and Order in the next room—the lawyers were having difficulty putting what was obviously a toughened drug-lord (he wore enough leather and sported enough tattoos for the audience to be convinced that he was one) behind bars. "We should go out," she said, packing a small case of Parliaments, its tobacco smell clinging to the leather of the purse, "I am sick of this place."

"I know. It's a fucking dump at this college."

"Nah," she told me, applying lip-gloss smoothly to perfectly plumped lips. She looked in the mirror—flawless skin, veins nowhere in sight. Her nails reflected little mirrors, and her shirt was low enough to reveal a great deal of shiny cleavage. "I have to get out."
"No one to take you out?"

"I'd ask Dan," she said, referring to her last relationship, "But with him it's like two minutes—the fun is over. He was sitting up in bed the last time I was with him, talking to somebody at his office about filing cabinets. As if it were a science—do people normally talk about filing cabinets when in bed? Is that somehow kinky?" She took out her keys and dangled them for a second in front of me. They were beautiful—silver like her Jaguar, metallic enough to touch, brilliant enough not to be completely solid.

I gasped.  "You have your car here?" I asked, nonplussed. Only upperclassmen were allowed cars—a glorious privilege.

"But of course," she said, "I told them that my back is broken. Only piece of truth I've said in years."

Hamilton disintegrated into East Windsor through the alchemy of speed. Lara's car made it easy for me to indulge in a serious lead-foot, and the fog that obscured my vision was absolutely no obstacle. Rather, it parted a gradual curtain that proved my course to be right. By this time she'd started blinking her beautiful, mascaraed eyelashes. I saw an impatient police car from behind—the third—waiting to pull me off the side of the road. The opportunity never came. I swerved, still well over a hundred miles per hour, into Route 33, into the safety of Hightstown. The houses passed judgment as pockets of windows were lit, languorously, to the speed of crickets.  

"So," Lara asked me, as she looked out the window. "Are we home yet?"

"Don't ask me," I said, as seriously, "I'm only the chauffeur."

We neither of us was old enough to drink. Atlantic City merely held the glitzy promise of pseudo excitement, of the opportunity to drink in gold until we dropped dead of excesses. She was driving and I felt hungry enough—we stopped at the first diner we saw, close to Abescon, where the strip clubs were plenty but any other signs of sin were still nonexistent, a non-preparation for the tour de force that was Atlantic City. My stomach was killing me, a sort of persistent ache that originated from too many tacos, my food of subsistence. There were two men who sat at a table in the far corner—they looked like they were out to get someone in those serious suits, like they were about to chain renegade taxpayers to a post. "IRS police," I mouthed to Lara. "But I gotta take a dump."

"You gotta?"

"When a girl's gotta go, she's gotta go," I said, painfully, pushing the bathroom door open. The diner was lit in gaudy fluorescence that made my head spin; even the bathroom forced me to look down at the mauve tiles on the floor, the only thing that seemed to make sense in this brilliantly green place.

Half an hour produced some relief, although I was not entirely satiated. I came out to find a vivaciously drunk Lara, in the laps of what turned out to be two rather agitated Mexican lawyers. Alcohol was flowing freely down her shirt and over her face in the gloss of tears.

"I got you your" she hiccupped, "I got you your beef sandwich."

"I don't eat beef," I said.

"Well, in that case, I got you my beef sandwich."

I sat along the bar, my head in my hands, and asked the toothless waitress in the short skirt for another sandwich. This time, it was chicken and stitched together with bold mayonnaise—too lazy to argue with anyone, I extracted the chicken with my fingers and threw it out, eating the rest of the sandwich. When I walked her out of the diner, she attempted to apologize for the beef sandwich, but it came out as a, "Daniel says that I am the most beautiful woman he's ever met. Imagine if he actually left his wife!"

I opened my door. "You're actually holding out hope?"

"Never have. I was just wondering."

A few more miles away from the diner and she nearly ran over a three hundred pound man. Her powerful fists beat the horn until even the steering wheel sagged and gave way—before this she'd swerved so violently that my stomach pains had returned in full force, the gnawing monsters in me greedily consuming the walls of my intestines. The city was visible from here—I had no idea that it could be so brilliant. I heard, throughout my life, about the degenerate ways of gamblers. Of addicts. Of drunkards. How dare they have palaces to commemorate them? I thought, suddenly. The Taj Mahal spiraled dangerously, the gold flashing in the inside of my eyelids. I saw the skyline grow from here, colored lights streaming from gold until the black which was the ocean. I could see this even with my eyes closed—I sought to ignore the swerving. Nothing. It disappeared entirely. And then, after two minutes, I opened my eyes and there she was, her brilliantly blonde head stuck to the steering wheel. In the middle of route 30, in plain view of the ocean and the glittering Marina… and what a traffic jam assembled at this place, at three in the morning! It really was a sight to behold.

"What the hell is going on?" I heard someone shout from their window.

I'd thrust mine open to remove the stink of her breath—it was the kind of stench that was incomprehensible to sobriety. Hastily, I climbed over her long legs, my curvaceousness getting in the way as my chest collided painfully with the leather seat. Even my bra strove to strangle me; it was made of ornate lace and bought with Lara's drunk approval. ("Yup, yup, if that don't make the men want to rip that shit right off of you I don't know what's gonna, babe. Buy the shit." And that was all the permission that I required.) my hair got trapped in the crap between the seats—it took such a long time to pry my frizzy, curly ends as I moved toward her, slowly, to the passenger's side of the car. And then, even before I'd properly sat down, my foot was on the gas pedal. As if I'd known nothing else in my life, I made the u-turn through the Marina and there was the rest of the road, just like

the

rest of the universe.

Immediately after I left Atlantic City, I interrupted my journey at a Seven-Eleven. I'd parked the car at the lonely Abesconian parking lot, the Atlantic City expressway only an occasional murmur. I hated leaving Lara there, her face vulnerable, snaky purple veins apparent in the streetlight. I took the keys out and walked—my head was hung low and my hands were very deep in my overcoat pockets I pushed open the door with the filthy lam of my hand. They were putrid with illegality. I laid the money on the counter and a sleeping man looked up, a large hat covering his eyes. He was haggard; his wrinkles fell nearly to the floor in cascading pink blotches. Skin disease—contaminated creature of the night. His eyes were bloodshot from his job and his hands shook as he took the money away form me.

"What do you need?" he asked.

"Coke. As much goddamn Coke as you have. Do have the crates? I could use a crate of coke." Repeating the word, endlessly, the hard syllable, the not really asking for a drug. A liquid stimulant, but nothing illegal or surreptitious. Nothing to make my face a collection of throbbing veins.

"They come in about forty." He looks surprised. "You're going to drink them by yourself?"

"Never mind that," I snapped. "Are they the twenty ounce kind?"

He pulled out a bottle of coke from beneath the counter—he'd been drinking them too, I realized, to get through the long, lonely Atlantic City night. Nobody stops at a Seven Eleven, except to rob it blind of the thirty five dollars in the register. Twenty ounces, it was.

Groaning, he walked behind the counter to get the crate—it is bound by plastic shrink-wrap over the tops of shiny bottles. Yes. Forty of them, perhaps, will do.

He transferred the burden to me. Staggering, I walked toward the door. "Do you need help with that, ma'am? It's very heavy."

(Do I want to get arrested? Would he like to see the dope? Would he like to see all the bottles crusted to the bottom of the car in a coagulation of glass, glass, and more glass?)

"No, thank you," I told him, "I'm good to go, really." I struggled to open the door in front of me and eagerly saturated myself with cold, clean air.

The first cop I lost was in Jobstown, where there were plenty of cows, but no jobs. Here, too, I swerved through the pine-barrens, and the trees gave me no hint of that infamous Jersey Devil, the creature that Lara was positive existed within this stretch of beautiful, bleak stretch of road.

I stopped here, turned the lights off, and I asked Lara, "Lara," I paused, "Dear, are you in love with morphine?"

"Sure I am," I heard a reply, but she was not speaking. I knew it to be true, anyway.

The sirens sped through the trees, temporarily illuminating the comfortable darkness. I wanted. One minute. Two minutes. Five. Out of sheer nervousness, I drank three bottles of Coke, the sugar fluid flowing down my mouth in sloppy exodus. The natural hum of silence.

And the leaves gave way beneath the wheels as I left Jobstown of the cows and no jobs to go north once more.

I'd never driven at this ridiculous speed before—the only experience I had with driving was with a pregnant instructor who was horrified that I did not seem to know the difference between the gas and the brake pedal. There was no one next to me to be horrified—only dying.

"Are we home yet?" she asked me, again. This time, it was really her, stirring. She was bronze perfection put to sleep by design.

I let the roar of the acceleration cut her off. The brokenness of the speed was matched only by the uneven breathing, the consciousness that was gained—but never fully. For now, that would have to do.

The second cop cut me off at a ramp. I was going in the wrong direction and into the turnpike—from the shadows of the thick tree-cover on the very edge of route 206, the still-nerve-wracking sight was almost as reckless as I was. Legally reckless, though, and I cut him off, and through the fog. I snaked the road, cutting the skin from the road shoulder. The thumping of the tires onto the road was an earnest sensation, my caffeinated connection to the present.

The night was heavier. The lights were dimming. The shoulder barriers were fading into the tress. I saw the pupils of my pursuer and I made a silent plea. Stop. Do Not Pursue.

Red flag: pursue.

It was a large truck that saved me, a Mack truck coming in the opposite direction. I could hear the hum and the roar of the engine, feel the force of headlights upon me. All of a sudden I felt something being impressed, the car imploding even though it had not, and all of those sirens, the wrong direction sirens! Through the noise I saw the small green z 1000 sign that told me that there would be an opening in the barriers soon, a lesson I learned form my mother when she drove into the shoulder by accident. ("I feel like Archimedes," she said, "I've realized what it means.") No one ever saw it coming.

I swerved the other direction—so much swerving—and made it back. At 206 again, I saw the familiar tree cover. I thanked it. I thanked it with my head in my hands and my palms saturated with tears.

__

206 became 130. Became empty stretches, once more, stretches of unthreatening, monotonous miles. God, I thought, It would be so much easier if You just blew me up.

(He did not oblige.)

The loneliest thing in the world is telling a story to someone who you know will never understand exactly what it is you're saying. Looking straight into the glassy eyes of a comatose woman whose bulging arms and flattened palms were upturned to the smooth swell of the universe is like telling such a story. It is tragedy beyond catharsis. It is what it feels like for the wheels to constantly rub against the roughness of the road until they, too, bleed rubber. It is the story of route 130 as it is born out of the ashes of route 206. The third cop had just left me near East Windsor, and I was frenzied again. It was pure mania.

The eye of the forlorn hurricane wrapped itself around the strip mall of the route 130. I stopped next to the recently emptied dumpster—the late night garbage crews were my contemporaries on the road, and I could see it in their rear view mirrors—they were not so happy about this late at night excursion. I did not mind. From here I saw the speck of a car, and I followed it. Slowly. I wondered how I managed such a marked reduction in speed. Then I saw it. A Maserati stood there, gleaming. The crown on the grille spoke to me. Whispered sweet things into the air. I saw burgundy curves glisten in the lamps of streetlights. If a car could sweat with vitality it was this one, this beauty among beauties. The top was open exposing a leather interior. I salivated—such a wonderful feast, such a sumptuous thing to look at! Lara had not even blinked since I'd left her. I was considering calling the hospital, debunking my manic ride, but no—I had to see this car.

I walked toward it, my hand held out expectantly. I touched the forbidden wealth. The car quivered underneath my touch. And then—there was the wailing. That horrible, horrible, horrible—

Stop. Do not pursue.

Red flag: pursue.

And, suddenly—

"What the fuck are you doing?" I felt powerful slaps on my face—they stung me raw. The shining nails lay waste to my face, clawing out my rough skin. "Wake up! Wake up!"

I hit the serrated shoulder and my back lurched. "You could have had us killed!" Lara screamed at me, in the breathlessness of finally awakening, "Goddamn it, how on Earth did you manage to get your license?"

__

Now, she was sleeping. She'd woken up because the car was swerving dangerously as I dove into exhaustion, something I'd managed to avoid even while driving at high speeds—I was honed to perfection by adrenaline, the ultimate in beginner's luck. She'd woken up to my eyes shut, dreaming of Maseratis. She woke up from her dreams of euphoria. Nevertheless, I swallowed nearly an entire bottle of coke, reveling in excess. Finally, I was beginning to wake up.

I was almost home. The turn off into route one was approaching, and soon, I'd be running up the artery of the east coast and to my dorm. The miles began to shrink, like the shrink-wrap of the crate on Lara's lap. I'd be able to stop this, put the gear in park, revel in the glory of my success. Soon, I would be able to stop and breathe, to watch the invisible firecrackers of victory. I cut through the parking lot of Syms and through a shortcut I'd seen people make effortlessly so many times, and now, too, the road felt like obliging silk.

I could hear her breathing next to me as I pulled up in the parking lot behind our dorm, its roofs jutting out in the lightening sky. The silhouette would be clear again, soon, and I would be able to see them, brick for brick. For the first time, I was liberated—it was the long journey I had to make home, the exotic place to which Atlantic City was no comparison. Here, too, the lights faded into the abyss of water in the distance, but the river was calmer, a sweeter relative of the ocean I'd left behind.

From my wallet, I'd pulled two twenties—they were crisp twenty dollar bills—and shoved them into her back pocket. She merely groaned, having noticed nothing. Her jeans were tight about her with the luxuriousness of sleep. Blond hair lay over her face, caught in her eyelashes. They, too, were long, like her legs, like her arms... like the dawn.

I left the car in time for it to be ticketed.

The only thing, for awhile, that I had to remember this trip were the scratches on my face. The lethargy of memory was overwhelming. It kept me to my bed, gave me no other option but to look at the ceiling and count tiles after tiles. Over and over again the curves. The streets and Victorian trim, the salty smell of the sea and the Seven Eleven. The pink spots. The vapor, the beautiful fog vapor that clings to me even as I think about this, now—the sheer speed, yes, the sheer speed that I'd grown to love... that is the feeling that can never be gotten again, the exhilaration of knowing what it is to having had come so close to death that I touched it, yes, touched it, and found it to be surprisingly forgiving.

The scabs on my face fell off a week later, over only the second meal I had eaten since I'd come back from Atlantic. It was me, by myself, at a restaurant, the brilliance of a china plate so new to me, the stickiness of fettuccine nourishing to the palate, the marinara sauce only slightly sour. And, afterward, I'd gone outside and sat on a bench, watching the people walk up and down the street. A play review—or a striking lace shirt. Shoes, perhaps, or a vase. Old, wrinkled hands took over strollers and men in suits, forever in a hurry, the Armani glowing brazenly across fabric as if tatooed on temporary skin. And there were women. With their work. Or with their children. Groceries. Not once, not ever did I see a hint of that speed—never the power or the ecstasy of a bloodthirsty chase.

Rubbing a newer face, I bit into a piece of leftover bread and walked home.

2006-02-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

parental units... RUN!!!!!!!!!!!

Today's Bitchery

2006-01-31T12:54:00.000-08:00

Today was sheer stupidity. I had what, one class? Breakfast in Napoleon with the boyfriend. And then after that, we went to the student center together. I disappeared. I went to class and sat through an honors thesis that was deader than a doornail, that was so oddly juvenile and badly at that that I sort of cried with relief when it was over and when the dream came in, the dream where I, you, even the rest of the world is hypnotized by it. That was Nick's piece and I was so damn tired, it made perfect sense to me at the time.

After eating a baked potato over Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, I sat and ate lunch with Eileen and Dianne. I might be going to see a play in Philadelphia, soon. I have some ideas for my piece, but none of them will be realized because I'm just a lazy asshole. Soon, I will get another response from Masuma, who I provoked into responding to me. And soon, maybe I'll stop overeating. I had a can and a half of Red Bull today, I was dying that badly.

Well, then, now I'm listening to how the guitar is weeping and how I have no sex life and how that's entirely my fault (wait, that wasn't what I meant... erm...) I am also semi buzzed but the happy kind that you get after liqueur.

That's just about it for today. Carry on, folks.

2006-01-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

New blog. It's for the peanut gallery. It won't stop me from being honest, though. I've got a steady boyfriend, a hell of a lot of classes, grades that suck, and an awesome red headed roommate who competes with me for the attentions of a man named King Midas, who doesn't really exist.

(Among the interesting characters in my life: a professor who was an ex skinhead, another one who was an amateur comedian, one that was shot by an black man, went on to get anorexia and marry a African. And, of course, my boyfriend, whose hat I wear all over the place like it's a signal, like it's the red from we're-beating-a-dead-horse symbolism.

So, applause for the peanut gallery! (Ok, ok, we get it, can we go home now?)