[open-ended]
this is what i never saw coming.
seven months after you asked me to say
sorry — i am lying awake
looking at photographs of you
and feeling all the love rise up inside me
again, as though it never slept.
when are you coming home.
i am using the kitchen curtains as
kindling so when you open the gate,
you can see me slow dancing
alone beside the microwave.
kiss me. tell me you were wrong
and that you'll always love me.
why is it always my hands painted
red like the town, flowering
with guilt and skidding on freeways.
how much can i depend on you
before you know it.
if stars were girls you'd be the sun,
and if you were here
i would never stop kissing you.
your rose-lips. hair like salt waves.
am i nothing else but heart
when you are with me.
but the house is empty, so
i am standing here in silence
and praying for absolution.
god help me i am not a romantic.
i've fucked for rent
and paid my father's debts
with this body, and your body —
you should know this:
your body could take your place.
sometimes i look out at the harbour
and we are lying in the wet sand,
still making empty promises.
(and i think i will always be one
to leave goodbyes open-ended.)
[no vacancy]
a love song for the girl
who grew up confusing anger
for love. unconditional.
hands that press unyielding
against shoulders like push doors
and pull childhood secrets
from between your legs.
what do you remember when you
call home. no answer.
i drive from jersey city
to your one-light college town
and call you asking
where you are. i'm at the door.
if you spend any more time fucking
strangers, we'll be late.
no one spends less time
reading quality literature than me.
i am heroically uncultured,
and the only thing i can say
when you recount the years of therapy
is fuck babe that's so fucked up.
are you asking for more.
are you lying in my arms asleep
and wishing there was
one more man inside me,
one man enough to say he loves you
when he kisses your eyelids
and knows he does.
find someone else then. hook up
with someone your own age
who understands the millennial
need for absolution. how you need
someone to need you
the way you need him. or
are you settling for me and for this
emotional distance, detachment,
fear of depending too deeply
in someone i love. because i love you.
this is how i am telling you,
in small words you can read
quickly, without feeling too much,
because you trust the boy
who would have let you be hurt
rather than learn to put your pain
before his. so history
repeats itself. in fourteen years,
we stand silent in a hospital morgue
looking down at our daughter
who is saying i love you
by loving the ones who hurt her
more than i will.
Fiction—Time Tours
Arisa sighed so deeply she almost dry heaved as she collected a bucket and mop and tried to soap up the green stain on the floor of Paul Revere's house. She looked to Paul and said, "Sorry about that," and he waved his hands dismissively—he was one of the few historical greats who enjoyed the groping stares of tourists. Arisa put the cleaning supplies back in the Vault and wondered if the guides covering Ancient Persia had to deal with this much puke, but she knew they had it worse—mounds of McDome wrappers, discarded bottles of sugar cola, the occasional beheading, and tourists sneaking aspirin to Alexander the Great. She didn't even want to imagine all the fanny-packed Americans bumping into each other at the barricades of Revolutionary France, disappointed when the Bastille raised the white flag after a few gunshots.
As Arisa came out of the Vault, she suppressed a sigh that threatened to blow the back of her brains out. There were two fresh pools of goo on the floor where she'd mopped. She nodded thankfully as one of her past selves went back to the Vault. Or future self. She couldn't quite tell as she always wore that crisp black tee with the text "VASS STAFF" in poison green on the front and kept her hair in a permanent collarbone chop. Of course, these were only past selves from this week. Time Tourism was only possible for short durations to the same spot, same time, lest the area become over packed with panicking, puking people stepping on the Dead Sea Scrolls and interrupting Hitler's speeches.
"All right, folks," said Arisa, motioning to her group. They mostly consisted of old people and women of all ages and a fat goateed man with his hair in a ponytail. None of them looked quite ready to go back to the Vault but she had a schedule to keep. Otherwise, they'd be trapped in 1775 as a cube ported directly on theirs—inside of which would be a whole new slew of stinkers led by a whole new Arisa. That’d be bad enough if the overlapping Vaults didn't generate an explosion about three planets wide. So, disinterestedly saving the human race (something she did fifteen times a day, Mondays to Fridays), Arisa herded the group back into the Agency’s timebox and punched the coordinates for April 19th—Concord. The doors shut and the Vault rumbled like those simulator rides in Los Angeles theme parks and the doors opened again to a haze flickering with red sparks like an army of fireflies. Gas masks on, the group spilled onto a hillside of gravestones overlooking old colonial mansions (not old at the moment) and regiments of red-and-white infantrymen in shag hats firing on a horde of green, browns, and blues—the Americans. This was the highlight of the day before she took the timesick to the Second Continental Congress for cocktails and a healthy dose of patriotism.
Down in the creek, she watched with almost dull apathy as a Vault appeared and two figures in orange snipsuits creeped out. One took a bullet to the chest and the other rushed back inside. The Vault disappeared. It was an event some ten years ago on Arisa's side of time. These were first scouts to investigate the Battle of Concord for a view. Now, preserved in time, there was nothing to do but watch as Butter Khowaja died and Keely Varga escaped. Scouting was a dangerous, exciting occupation. Guiding, on the other hand, was like waiting for a broken clock to fix itself.
[art history]
pushing ninety on the turnpike;
listening to soft grunge: so american,
white lies and white supremacy.
youth – beauty – adrenaline –
clinging to these childhood fantasies,
desperate to turn body to hard cash.
and this is summer in the city,
writing love songs in funeral homes,
pretending life is like art
when the blind truth is
cold coffee in an empty car park –
sun city with its windows
all smashed in, blue glass
on concrete, and imagining life
in a one-light small town
with nothing to remind us
of warm days on the east coast.
someone saying in a voice
like a sunrise: one day, a window
closes on the sound of blues music,
that could be new orleans.
these quiet nights,
speaking in line breaks to sleep
and turning sun to shadow.
Uphill from here
'Rrrrr Rrrr' .The lollipop stick elasticated to the forks bounced of the spokes to be the base note of speed down the hill. Until.
Incline bites thigh muscles and breath was taken from smooth clutch changes to painful squeals of absent syncro-mesh . The 'dong dong' of wood on wire ; in a slowing metronome . The illusion gone the number 7 had lost it's (Barry) Sheen. At the brow the boys and girls looking back, waiting .
Press:
“DNF in Tipton leg of the British GP was a consequence of Baz's fall when a stick jammed in his wheel”
Debasing the Bird.
Her head is full of the sin,
And the fetish of Western men,
Where dancing Buddha's might once have been.
Strange pleasures locked in darkened rooms.
Feigning a smile to their exotic climax.
Each and every secretion staining her mind,
Forever.
Each sweaty palmed slap stinging the spot,
Eternal.
Visions of the village stamping on her heart like a psychotic elephant on the Mahout's sleeping head.
Provoked by bondage.
Simple pleasures, complex tastes, warm summer breeze.
Lazy river washing.
Chicken's fed.
Crops dug.
Primal existence.
True - existence.
Thrown to the city like a chicken to the chopping block.
Spiced with cheap perfume and even cheaper thongs.
Threaded on an upright skewer, mounted to a strobing stage.
Grilled over the throbbing eyes of hungry foreign men.
Tagged with a number.
Traded like cattle.
Aided by amphetamine.
Comforted by a balance sheet.
Subdued by a fist.
A profession as old as her village.
A place that still echoes her childish laughter,
Tickled by boys, only after a smile.
My Life of Crime
After the late shows let out we always had a rush, and working alone, I scrambled to pump gas and wash windshields. Occasionally someone who'd won at the tables would tip me a couple singles or a five. Except we didn't call them tips, but tokes or comps: "You see that old bat in the pink T-Bird? She toked me five."
There'd be another smaller rush when the dancers, musicians, and stagehands started home. They were nice, but seldom tipped unless I'd done a quick repair or jumped a dead battery.
But it was a decent job for a high-school kid, better than digging ditches or hanging drywall in the heat of the desert day. That was my last summer there, working from midnight 'til 8 AM. During the school term, I'd worked afternoons and evenings, saving for college. I was a good student, but not outstanding, and wasn't sure I'd earn a scholarship.
My Mom lost the ranch a few years back, after Dad died when his pickup rolled off a dirt road, to a couple generations of mounting debt. After paying off the debt, she got almost nothing from the sale and we ended up in Vegas. I never got used to the heat.
I remember riding my motorcycle to work a graveyard shift when the time-and-temperature sign on top of the Sahara Hotel read 11:42PM/102°. Summer days could reach 120° (in the shade) and I preferred the nights. At least you never had to walk out from under the canopy over the gas pumps and feel that sun slamming down on your head, like the door of a trap.
From about 3:00 am 'til dawn was quietest and coolest. Then, above the neon dazzle, the sky lit up and the mountains rose from their pediments, dark purple, then oceanic blue, like a strange new world, before dulling down to their daytime grey and umber. Morning traffic filled the air with dust, that turned to floating gold as the first sun struck through.
That was when Tammy showed up at the station, on foot, mascara running down her cheeks with the tears. She didn't have her bag, which was a bad sign. All the hookers had big shoulderbags, loaded with their essentials.
Tammy was upset: besides crying, she had marks on her brow and cheek and a bruise on her forearm. "My last trick rolled me," she said. "Took my bag. All my cash and keys. My car's in the Caesar's lot. Could you break into it?"
"Can't leave. I'm alone."
"Christ, you gotta. My dog Blackie's locked in the car. Windows are up."
I looked at the white tangle of light edging over the peaks, and felt the first sudden heat on my face. Locked in a car under that sun, a dog would be dead in an hour, tops.
Dreading the consequences, I hung the little sign with the clockface on the inside of the window, shut off the pumps, and locked up. The morning rush was about to start. If the boss came by I'd be in a world of hurt, but not as bad off as Tammy's dog, that was for sure.
I snagged my toolkit and drove her down in the tow truck, so the cops would know we weren't stealing the car. Not that it was worth stealing: it was a baby-blue Mercury Comet with dented hubcaps, grimy from the drive from LA. As I shut off the truck I could hear barking.
It was already warm— the sun promised our daily whipping. She went over and started trying to comfort her dog— Blackie— through the window while he yammered. I flexed the spring-steel jimmy and slid it between the glass and the rubber gasket, hooked the button, and bingo! I opened the door, feeling strong, brave, true— all the good stuff.
Blackie jumped out and she caught him up as he licked her face, taking off the streaked mascara. Ugh, I thought. It was already hot in the car, so I cranked down the windows and poured water on my bandanna and handed to her.
"Put this over his head— cool down his brain. Or put it on his belly— that works, too."
He was panting, but didn't look heatsick. "I think he's okay," she said, pouring some water into his bowl as he lapped it up.
"Could you drive me to my room so I can get my spare keys?"
"Like to, but I'd get fired. But I'll get the car started so you can drive." Another little device from my kit, plink-twist, and the engine sputtered into life. "I need this back. And your car needs a tune-up. Bring it in, okay?"
"Jeez, thanks. I owe you. Really— I won't forget."
How many times had I heard that? On the Strip, people were always promising something or other. But I liked Tammy. She was pretty and seemed soft, for a hooker: not physically, but in her way of looking at me and talking. Some people can have hard lives without being hard, suffer bad luck without becoming bad. We'd talked a bit, when she stopped for gas. She'd tried to give me her cards, but I wouldn't take them.
"I don't do that," I said, and she took the cards back and rather than cuss me out, like most hookers would have done, she said she understood.
It was common practice for gas pump jockeys to get questions from the customers: "Where can a guy find some fun in this place?"
"Here's a number you can call."
Your initials on a card would get you a five or a ten, your toke, your juice, when the girls or their pimps made the rounds at the end of the month. I had school friends who started with small rackets early on, and were involved in heavy lifting by their senior year, and it scared me. Vegas seemed like a big, shiny trap, and I didn't want to get caught.
I watched her pull out of the lot onto Vegas Boulevard and then climbed back into the truck and drove to the station. There were cars lined up at the pumps, honking. An emergency call, I explained, twenty or thirty times. By the time I got off, at 8:00, I was soaked in sweat. It felt good to hop on my motorcycle and run up the gears, roaring onto I-15, making my own breeze.
By my last year working nights on the Strip, I was in some ways tough. I could sort the tourists—players and gawkers— from the locals: food service folks, housekeepers, cocktail waitresses and bartenders, dealers, stagehands, performers, hustlers, pimps, and petty crooks. I could spot a punk casing the station, planning to rob the till, and I had a routine. There was a huge chrome wrench, a one-and-a-half-inch box/open end, that was long as my forearm and heavy as a Viking sword. I'd carry it out under the canopy fluorescents and flip it, up with my right hand, spinning as it chopped the light into warnings, and catch it with my left. Flip it up, catch it behind my back, and then stare the punk down. I'd never been robbed or even threatened.
In other ways, I was way too innocent to be there, in the bright-lit jungle, among the beasts of prey.
I didn't have much social life. Didn't go out for sports or go to dances, or go cruising on weekend nights, like my classmates did. I missed the ranch so badly it ached. I went to school, studied, worked, and slept. I also did most of the cooking and nearly all the housework, because my Mom, who'd been a staunch, dedicated ranch woman until I was in my early teens, had pretty much fallen apart.
She missed my Dad more than she could stand. She managed a bingo parlor, hated it. Hated the old, weird people who doted on bingo, and came home from her shift sick and coughing from the cigarette smoke. I'd cook her something from my limited repertoire—fried eggs, bacon, potatoes, frozen fish sticks, hamburgers, canned corn or peas, a basic salad— and she'd hole up in her room with the TV and vodka tonics. She'd taped aluminum foil over the windows so she could sleep days. Even in summer, when I'd have to sleep in the afternoon, I could never bring myself to do that: wrap myself like a TV dinner, shutting out the light.
She pushed me hard to get out of Vegas and go to college. But I worried about what might happen to her when I was gone. Remembering the days when she taught me to ride and fix fence and recognize when a cow was sick or about to calve, I knew how sad she felt to be trapped in her present life.
Knowing her, knowing that, gave me a tenderness towards women in general.
When I went on a rare date and got excited and the girl said I was hurting her, I stopped. I dreamed and lusted and was terrified by it. It got to the point where I was almost afraid to kiss anyone. So by my senior summer, I was still a virgin, which was not a word that guys used back then. Girls were virgins.
Or, like the girls I met at work, hookers. My last year at high school I knew way more hookers than I did cheerleaders. But I was cautious, maybe frightened by the hookers (who knew things about sex I could only imagine) while I lusted after the cheerleaders, and what they represented, not just sex but respectability and status and. . . America, dammit.
But America had some drawbacks. Johnson was bearing down in Vietnam and the coffins were coming back to haunt us. The hero of our block, Larson, went over there and got killed right away. At his funeral the casket was closed and the word was that there was barely enough left to identify. It hurt all of us. His dad grabbed a bottle and never let go. We'd hear yelling and things breaking over there. We never called the cops, but someone did. A year on his parents divorced. The next summer, I saw his kid sister Dar, who'd been one my my first crushes, out on the Strip with a short, fat guy: hooking.
Night is when things happen out there, and they did. A carful of drunks sheered off a signpost, pulling into the station, and poked a hole in their radiator. I called the cops. One of the guys threatened me and I showed him the wrench and made them get back in their steaming car and wait. They said they'd be back to teach me a lesson, and I hoped they'd reconsider when they got sober.
An old guy who drove a pearl-white T-Bird and dressed in womens' clothes tried to pick me up. I turned him down, as gently as I could, and he pounded the dash of his car and then started crying. After five minutes that seemed like forever, I pulled a bunch of blue windshield wipes out of the dispenser and tapped on his window. He took the towels, cleaned himself up, and drove off before it registered with me that he hadn't paid for his gas. I wrote it on my charge sheet, swearing under my breath.
A really drunk woman barfed and passed out in the restroom and her husband was too drunk to retrieve her, let alone drive, so I had to call the cops a second time that week.
By Friday I'd forgotten about Tammy and her dog, when the ratty blue Comet rolled up to the pump about half-past midnight, with Blackie doing flips on the passenger seat. She rolled down the window and he stuck his head out and licked my hand.
"You're his hero," she said. "Mine, too."
I blushed, and went for the gas cap. "Fill it?"
"Yeah. I've got a proposition for you," she said. "Not that."
"So— what?" Working nights out there had given me a healthy suspicion. Quite a few of the guys I worked with had gotten into trouble in various ways.
"Could you, like, take care of Blackie tonight? I've got a dog chain and a bowl for water. His blankie. You can tie him behind that wall out back and just check on him every once in a while."
"I don't know. The boss is on the warpath about. . . you know." A couple guys on swing shift had been trading batteries and tires to hookers in return for professional services. One guy's wife had stormed in demanding his paycheck and the boss had to show her his charge sheet: sets of tires, batteries, shocks, tanks of gas. He actually owed for the month.
Tammy got an upset-girl expression. "I can't leave him in my room— he chewed the drapes last time. And I'm scared to leave him in the car. After. . ."
Should I wait for the tears?
"Okay. But let's not make it a habit. Check?"
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled clean. I wondered how long she could hold onto that.
Blackie barked the first few times I checked on him, then settled down and snoozed on his folded blanket. At dawn there were crickets in his water dish, so I refilled it. Tammy showed up about six-thirty and loaded him into the car. She said thanks, no kiss, and in a businesslike way pulled a twenty from her bag.
"Half a night's wages," I said. "Too much."
"Not compared to what I make," she said.
Saturday she came by again, and Blackie camped under the stars. You could actually see stars from the shadow behind the wall, which blacked out the leaping neon glare of the casinos. I collected another twenty. Easier, the second time. Tammy drove up from LA to hook each weekend, renting a motel room and making more than she did in a week at her straight job, some drab office gig.
Next Friday she brought another LA girl along, Ginger, a tall redhead who said she worked as a receptionist for Universal Studios, with Sport, a terrier-looking frazzle of grey hair. Snarly. I tied him far enough from Blackie that they wouldn't get into a fight. When I checked on him, he growled, but was no trouble, really. Forty bucks, Saturday morning. Same again Sunday.
Damn! I had a racket.
It started out as a favor, but as word got around other working girls begged me to babysit their dogs, and I found it hard to turn them down. The gas station was set back from the street, with the huge parking lot for Caesar's Palace on the south and a vacant patch of desert on the north. Out back, to the west, it was dark and empty with the roar of I-15 a quarter-mile or so away. I cleared away the heaps of tumbleweed and windblown trash behind the pierced block wall, to make room. If a dog barked too much or tried to start a fight, that was it. I wouldn't take them again. I cleaned up all the dog crap before I went off shift. I couldn't risk complaints.
Before, after cleaning the service bays and the restrooms, I'd lolled between cars, passing the night hours with made-up games. The big neon signs for the hotels cycled up and down, and I'd try to keep count of the nearest two: Caesar's and the Dunes. Now, instead of counting, I'd go out to check on the dogs.
Weeknights, I might have two or three dogs out back, pets of the local girls. Weekends, there were more: ten or twelve, at the height of the season. I made about forty bucks a shift in wages and commissions, and a few hundred dogsitting. Some weeks I banked five or six hundred.
Pretty soon, I had enough for tuition and living expenses for a year, then two. I was acutely aware that the money I was banking had been earned through prostitution, which was a criminal offense in Clark County. But since when had dog-sitting been a crime? It seemed to me that I was doing something good, keeping the dogs, who were by any reckoning innocent, safe and fairly happy. What their owners were up to was not my lookout.
I never knew who tipped off the boss. When he busted me, at 3:15 AM on a Sunday morning, there were eight dogs tied out there. One hundred and sixty dollars worth. He pulled in, got out of his car, and walked out back, just like that. No questions.
He came back and said that it had to stop.
When I explained how it got started, he raised an eyebrow. "I know about Harry and the other guys, loading up their charge sheets, stealing from the till. One reason I trust you here alone is you don't do that."
I offered him a cut. Vig. Juice. Vegas runs on juice. Caesar's Shell Doggie Parking: a business opportunity. Bad move: he gave me a disappointed glance and shrugged it off.
"When you're here, you work for me. And I'm not in the business of providing an open-air kennel for ladies of the evening. Understood?"
He was a Mormon and didn't use words like hooker or pimp.
"Sure. Got it. I'm really sorry." I said, even though I wasn't.
He went out back again and leaned over the wall to look at the dogs. They woke up and peered at him and didn't bark, bless their hearts. I joined him.
"I've got nothing against the poor dogs. You've been really good at your job and I'm not firing you. But— no more dogs."
He patted my shoulder and drove off—a decent guy— to catch a few more hours of sleep, have breakfast, and then go to church, I guess: a normal life. God, I envied that.
The office was locked at night, so I went into the stockroom and leaned on the sink and cried, quietly, watching my tears make wiggly tracks toward the drain. Then the bell dinged as a car pulled up to the pumps. I doused my face and dried myself with blue paper towels before going out.
"Evening, sir. Fill it up? Super? Check the oil?" The blue towel squeaked on the windshield as I polished it, lifting the wipers one by one.
Then I stood in the burnt-smelling night air and counted the ups and downs of the neon signs, into the hundreds before I lost track. The streets were almost empty but the signs stayed on until sunup. It was crazy.
Meanwhile, the mountains loomed out of the dark like watching faces, ragged, harsh, perfect: everything the signs were not.
All the dogs were asleep, just before dawn, when the blue Comet rolled in.
You place nine
blueberries
on your knockoff cornflakes.
On the fridge there hangs a list and it is the recipe to happiness.
It starts with blueberries and a balanced breakfast
yoga
some work
some play
you need a balance in your day
after all.
A jog.
Careful, mindful steps towards completion
early to sleep and early to rise.
This is healthy. This is happy.
You are happy.
( But about what about that time we walked all night - )
Hush. You are happy.
( - to get to school
down the mountain through the forest and along the lake where we drank sangria and ate strawberries
and our soles were bared because our shoes were badly chosen and we were too tired to guard our words against each other
stumbling into class at 8:17 two minutes after the bell went and no one knew what we'd been through and - )
Go for a jog.
Gently, now. Push yourself but not too hard.
A drink in the evening
with friends
it's Friday after all
but one beer and avoid cigarettes darling
they're a filthy habit.
( - passing a cigarette between fumbling fingers
because it was so cold but you loved him a little
so you stayed and watched
the sun rise over the - )
Read a bestselling book
it'll give you something to talk about at parties.
( - standing in front of a public bathroom mirror
for an hour and convincing yourself that you cannot
possibly
exist
because Descartes wasn't thorough enough and
the pragmatists are ridiculous - )
Go to bed early.
Take a pill to kill the anxiety
and to -
( - sleepless nights and tears
the kind of laughter only exists when you’re a little bit tipsy and haven’t slept in thirty six hours and you’re both profoundly miserable and elated because look look look at that sunrise.
Look at the crazy people at the mad angry broken people).
- block the bad dreams.
(You had better enjoy those nine blueberries.)