Registered: Oct 2001
Location:
Posts: 18340

I’ve got intellectual property.

There’s a guy on my living room floor in a mini-skirt and hose with my cock in his mouth and dirty hands from being under a car all day. He’s begging me to fuck his ass with this 1” dowel rod wrapped in duct tape that he carries with him in his bag with the lingerie, the poppers and the glass pipe he’s been smoking the crank out of. He’s wanted by the law for some robberies and parole violations, and his picture’s down at the post office, so he only comes by in the wee hours. Not only that, his girlfriend is about half-retarded and crazy and comes hunting for him in the daytime. I worked his ass over good for about an hour, but all I was really looking at were his dirty hands and the chigger bites all over his legs from binkin’ off in the woods behind the apartments looking for dope in the underbrush. Sounds crazy, but there were enough binkers at Plantation View at that time that it paid off periodically for those intrepid searchers in the thicket. It’s odd. I nutted on his face and noticed a little tick on his nut sack near where my fist held the wooden instrument firmly. There were a lot of others like him.

There’s another guy I know who was the same way. He’s a drywaller and one of the biggest rednecks I ever knew. He also loves to get wired up, throw on the sluttiest little outfit he can find and ride a dildo for hours watching porn while I talk to him like a twelve year-old crackwhore and make him beg for dick. That gets so goddamn boring. I told him to knock himself out, and then I went back to my room and read a book. I knew he’d be right in the same place a few hours later when I came back to run him off.

”Man, you talk shit good,” he mutters as he tries to swallow and drips sweat all over the arm of the sofa he was riding and covering with moisture and lube for the last six hours. He’s got this big, yellow, plastic corncob that has an electrical cord attached but not plugged in – at the plug end at least, and it’s burrowing in and backing out of his pale hairy ass. I don’t want to think about it.

“Just shut up and eat my cock, you filthy little bitch, before I wear yer ass out and make you cry some more. Are you listenin’ to me?”

How do you put a price on intellectual property?

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: The Bottom of the Toyem Pole
Posts: 9466

Can you date this stuff for us? I'd like to know if this happened last night or last week.

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: I cant say I buy this completely,
Posts: 2542

The fuckin William S. Burroughs of the speed world...faggot shit.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location:
Posts: 18340

Hahahahahaha

I'm loadin stuff from this machine to my site from my documents folder so I can get to it when I get back home. Some of this I'd forgotten writing and don't know where I was goin with it. Bear with me.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location:
Posts: 18340

“That’ll be eighteen dollars’n thirty-five cents, hon.”

John dug for the change and focused on the cashier’s nails with the stars and crescent moons painted on each one as it pulled ahead of at least two gaudy gold nugget rings set with cheap diamonds and gemstones – the gift of some trucker or card counter, no doubt.

“Where you headed to in this heat?”

“My family’s got some land out here I just came into, and I’m supposed to meet the next-door neighbor and see about the place. I reckon I’ll look about’n see what I wanna do with it.”

“’s awful hot, hon. Yer gonna burn up out there.”

“I don’t mind the heat so much, but thank ya.”

“Wherebouts is yer place?”

“S’posed to be down this farm to market road a coupla miles and then off on a county road a bit further’n down by the river. Neighbor’s name is Schinder. Woodrow, I think, is his first name.”

“That’s Woody Schinder, hon. He’s been around here all his life. He acts mean, but he’s soft as ice cream in July. You want me to call the house’n see if he can come pick you up?”

“Nah, but thank ya. I’d just as soon walk. I don’t mind the heat’n I got plenty a water. It likely won’t take me half’n hour’r so to get there as it is. You have a good day, ma’am.”

“Well, okay. Be good, hon.”

John tied the sack of groceries to the top of his duffle bag and stepped out of the deceptive chill of the store on the service road and headed south down F.M. road 1311 away from the interstate where his ride had dropped him.

It was hot. The sun blasted the earth, and the earth gave back as good as she got, and John was caught in the middle of that embrace. The air was heavy and difficult to breathe, but it carried poison out with each labored exhalation. And the waves of heat making ponds on pavement that stretched out ahead until the waves shook everything in his vision and the mesquite and post oak along the fences seemed to wiggle. The road beneath his feet remained the only assurance that the heat would not convert creation to a molten liquid wave. He noticed the buzz of cicadas now for the first time. The constant, rhythmic, clicking whine resonated in him and provided a bit of relief with their promise of heat and sweat and purging. His hat was soaked in sweat and the salt stung his eyes, but for him it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He felt like he needed it. He deserved it. The remedy must be as severe as the injury, and the furnace John walked in was severe. It was hot.

The last few weeks were blurred in his memory. Everything telescoped in on itself, and he had difficulty piecing together the order of events. The death of his mother followed by the funeral, the loss of his job, the reading of the will and this mysterious inheritance, the shame and terror and the drunken loneliness of the last few nights when everything fell apart and his thinking became so clouded – those were the major markers along the road leading up to this hot afternoon. But there was so much clutter in between.

It was all disordered in his mind, and he had to shut it down in order to bring it back up in the right order. Shutting it down usually meant a few cocktails and then a blackout, but he couldn’t bring it back up correctly if he did it that way. It always created more clutter, until his shoulders slumped from the weight and he grew old. He had to somehow shut it down by an act of will and the force of concentrating on the very next thing in front of him at every moment. When he failed to do just that the images floated up and crowded in and he convulsed and squeezed down hard to shut them out. He would squint, and his duffle bag would bear him down towards the heat of the pavement and force him to think about the next step he was going to take in order to avoid collapsing. Then he would gradually become somewhat erect again in his posture as he trudged along.

“It’ll be okay, son. The calendar alone can fix a good deal of things,” his father said.

His father, long dead, had pulled him out of jail the summer after high school graduation. The words of encouragement and loving support had been the couplet on a half-hearted sonnet of wrath. His exasperation and anger at John had lost out, as they always did, to his affection and forgiveness. The weight on John’s back grew heavier in the heat. Thirty-five years of false starts and recurring disappointments had carried him to this stretch of road. His father had witnessed twenty-seven of those years and never wavered in his affection. However, he had acquired a certain resignation and haggard acceptance in matters concerning his youngest son in the years right before his death.

His mother’s lengthy illness had removed her as a visible force in his life for some time. The last year or so she was confined to a bed in a nursing home where John would stop by two or three times a week to sit with her while she stared and mumbled, or slept. The visits were mechanical for him in some ways. The duration of her decline attenuated his awareness of the change in her into increments that were for him more manageable.
John came to the last stretch of road where it appeared the county improvements stopped and the rutted and uneven dirt track commenced leading the last mile or so to where the acreage should be along the river. He stopped and set down his load and pulled out the paperwork with the directions to the place and information about the land left to him in his mother’s estate. There was a neighbor named Schinder who looked after the farm. His house should be on the road just before the gate to the Calvert property.

As he walked down that last stretch of road he noticed he was being shadowed by a black dog that hung back most of the time, and then advanced to within ten feet or so – but always staying just out of kicking distance. He stopped short of the Calvert land to check in with the neighbor, and the mutt ran past him and into the carport to eye him from underneath the dusty and undriven sedan. John felt a bit embarrassed at his apprehension surrounding the dog. She appeared much more benign in her present state eyeing him through half-closed eyes.
“Don’t you mind me. My mind’s elsewhere, hon. I’ll be outta yer hair ‘fore too long.”

He knocked on the door and waited, but no one came. He knocked again. He looked to his papers. There should be a tractor and a pickup and various implements at Schinder’s place that belonged to John and were available for his use. He didn’t see the pickup anywhere, but there were three tractors under a long, open-sided shed that ran past the carport and opened into a shop of sorts. One of these was a large Massey-Ferguson that had been well taken care of and showed little, if any wear. Another was an antique McCormick Cub that was apparently in the process of a restoration. John decided the remaining machine must be his. It was covered in a coat of primer and was of average size. The paper in his hand described it as a David Brown. He had never heard of the brand. John had operated a tractor about this same size mowing for the city one summer, and he was not unfamiliar with the workings of a machine like this one, but it would take a bit of getting used to.

John climbed onto the old British-made tractor with the chalky white paint and scabby rust and checked the tank for diesel. After topping it off from Schinder’s fuel trailer using a Jerry can he gave it a turn to warm up the plug and then turned the key. The machine gave a whining stutter of complaint, then coughed and belched up a healthy puff of black smoke and rumbled into wakefulness underneath him. A sudden, sharp point of heat on the back of his neck, and he slapped away a yellow jacket as he bounced into gear and out of the shed. He pulled to a stop a few feet from where he started and went back to look around for a grease gun on the workbench. The tires looked sound. He spot-checked and added a dab of grease and then greased the mower attachment sitting under a mesquite a few yards away.
The tractor was loud. He backed up to the mower and took a good ten minutes wrestling it into place, busting his knuckles more than once. He climbed back into the seat and rolled out onto the road towards the gate to his family’s property a few hundred yards away. The machine bumped and banged and rattled and roared, jarring his bones and slapping him this way and that each time he landed again on the metal saddle. He let the low roar drown out every other noise as he neared the drive and got his first look at the land.

It was wilderness. The old driveway itself was barely discernible in the thicket of tall grass that came even with the hood of the tractor. John had come fifteen or twenty feet past the gate when he paused to light a cigarette and survey for a moment the task at hand. It was intimidating but ripe. The place wasn’t huge – fifty acres, give or take. But it was all grass and pecan trees. Grass was a bit tame for what he saw in front of him at that moment, actually. Mixed with the coastal Bermuda that must have produced many bales of hay in years past were thick patches of broom weed and thistle and bull nettle in the drier areas with bunches of Johnson grass in the lower places looking a bit like bamboo jungles.

“Well, let’s get to know one another.”

He ground the butt of his cigarette out on the deck with his boot and engaged the mower slowly. The engine labored a bit and then caught its breath, and John eased it forward in low gear to begin chewing his way through the pasture down to the little house half-hidden in the jungle. Grasshoppers flew at him from all directions as if thrown, hitting John in the face and startling him. The grass folded underneath him, caressing the underside of the tractor on its way to the blades whirling behind just a few inches off the ground. He looked over his shoulder with satisfaction at the path he left in his wake. The grass would surrender, if he was determined and had no interference from mechanical trouble. But those were two big ifs. He followed the path of the driveway towards the house halfway back on the property.

There was nothing particularly mournful or abandoned about the small frame house among the pecans, except for being nearly submerged in the merging of grass and trees. John noticed that that grass grew perceptibly taller the nearer he got to the house, until he felt as if he were swimming. The driveway was more defined at this point, however, owing to the extra caliche rock packed into the widening path directly in front of the house. He veered slightly to his right a short distance away, then cornered left and made a slow pass directly across the front of the porch slab and beyond to the end of the house and then left again, forming a rough rectangle of one hundred feet or so long stretching away from the front of the house, which was about a third that distance in width. He was in a bowl of cut grass, chopping and chewing and releasing the thick, sweet smell and anointing himself again and again in the syrupy air. He wasn’t thinking at all.

John had created a nice yard of mulch with a near five-foot stockade of perpendicular Johnson grass mixed with dense coastal governing the perimeter. He killed the tractor and sat for a moment staring at the front door of the house and feeling the silence in the absence of the engine’s roar. Displaced grasshoppers sought to right themselves on glistening clumps of half-digested vegetable matter. The clicking drone of cicadas began its rhythmic crescendo in the trees after a few seconds, and John crawled down from the seat into the moist silage of the newly made front yard and stepped over to the porch. It was only a couple of inches above ground level as was the rest of the house. He supposed that the gentle slope of the land would cause water to come up into the house during heavy rains, but this type of sandy soil never accumulated more than an inch or two of water before it all drained away, even in the heaviest of showers. He reckoned it looked dry enough in any case.

Everything took its share from the soil, and what did not soak away immediately was greedily drawn by the air and every living thing to help keep a man moist while his meat cooked in the sun. This was Texas.

John fumbled for his keys and opened the door into the stale dusty family crypt. The neighbor kept an eye on the place, and the power should still be on, but it had to have been months since anyone had opened the door, or even driven all the way down the drive to the house for that matter. He was prepared for just about anything, from evidence of a few mice to full fledged squatting – though this was a bit far out in the country, the river traffic allowed for that remote possibility as surely as it had channeled raiding parties of Comanche spreading terror here and further south in the dim past along this river bottom. His apprehensions were disappointed by the sense of things about the place. Within was almost a vacuum, no sign of life showed on any surface. The change was remarkable if only for the explosion of green and growing vitality without that crowded aside all other facts and burst into any available space that would support even a possibility of life.

John found the light switch and verified that the power was in fact on before advancing further into the house. Still, he left the door open and let the screen door serve for the moment as he ventured further. The overhead light showed a thick layer of dust on everything. He now moved more quickly as he realized there would be no big discoveries on first inspection. Now was not the time to stop and revisit old memories; there was a tremendous amount of work to be done before he could even begin the work of just staying here a while. And he didn’t know how long he would stay. The place was so lonely and distant. He had no plans and no ideas beyond mowing. And mowing was plenty for now.
The living room opened up to the dining area and kitchen in a spacious room broken only by an island closet set to hold up the roof beam and providing some partition between the entrance and the rest of the house beyond the living room. John walked directly to the kitchen and tried the faucet. It coughed up some dusty brown liquid and shuddered, and then a forceful spout of water getting quickly clearer poured out. A lone coffee cup in the left side of the sink held a dead spider alongside a dead fly. He washed them both down the drain before wetting his head and drinking a sip of the alkaline liquid from his hand.

He checked out the other three rooms and the bathrooms. Everything seemed as if it hadn’t been touched in generations. He was growing more impatient to be back outside, as if staying inside too long would produce a numbing effect until he was unable to make his way back out and wade into the jungle once again. He wet his cap and ventured back out to the tractor, leaving only his duffle bag and a wet sink to show he had ever been there at all. Crossing the threshold he passed from the stillness of a tomb to an atmosphere so alive it nearly crowded him out. The heat wrapped around him and pulled him towards the tractor with a sense akin to an undertow. He had enough diesel to easily complete a good bit of work and no reason to stop for several hours other than a periodic drink from the spigot out front that he had only narrowly missed on his first pass by the door.

Where to start. He had to take this in manageable pieces at first. He wasn’t too ambitious this afternoon, but he needed to make a beginning. He could always renegotiate his position after making a start at it. There was a space in front of the house clear of trees or other obstructions that amounted to roughly eight acres. This would suffice for an initial personal stake in the wilderness that had laid claim to his holding. He could easily finish that much with plenty of time left over to contemplate further adventures beyond if such were his inclination at that time. With this in mind he felt a slight surge of energy, from beneath his current store however, not rising from above it like a bit of foam on an eddy that spins but does not move forward. The air that wrapped so hot around him and felt so heavy had a momentum of its own that only stifled unnecessary movements and thoughts and carried the acts of necessity forward with a force, which while subtle, remained inexorable and ubiquitous once he was submerged in it. Here was the chance at oblivion of a different sort than that which he chased over the last twenty-five years.
John pointed the tractor’s nose toward a fencepost two hundred yards away on the dividing line between the house lot and the large pasture to the south. The rumble and clatter of the engine again resonated into his bones. He depressed the clutch and eased the machine into low gear and released it into a smoother start this time. He eased back into the thick grass and began clearing a straight line to the post. A mild contentment spread through him as the tall weeds bent in submission under the deck of the tractor and the spinning fan of the blades began chopping a path six feet wide behind him. He paid close attention to the line he was mowing. There was something important to him about keeping the line straight and cutting the land into neat squares where possible in order to create some sort of order out of things and cut the job down to right size.

He reached the fence line and hooked left and paused to look back at the line he had cut with some satisfaction before proceeding along the wire toward the low levee that marked a sort of halfway point between the house and the county road in front. Turning left again there he soon crossed back over the drive and reached the third corner and began the home stretch back toward his initial clearing in the front of the house. Arriving back where he began his consciousness of the outside world was narrowing more and more until all he saw was the grass and the pattern he was creating in that disordered riot or green.

A disconnected image from a previous night arose in his mind. John had an instant reaction in which his eyes involuntarily squeezed shut and his stomach muscles tightened so quickly that his knees drew up toward his chin and to the left. He pursed his lips and forcefully blew air out in a stream, dispelling the images and revulsion and cocking his head down and to one side. The entire reaction appeared as some sort of spasm convulsing the sufferer, which having passed would make him remark, “Children are playing on my grave.”

He raised his eyes and looked again to the front tire and righted his course in alignment with that of the previous circuit. The dyspeptic metal rumble of the engine baked through his body in the heat. The mower blades, syncopated, played an old soft-shoe, and the whir of the gears and shafts that linked it to the heavy metal rhythms formed a voice of their own, singing with a light and comforting busy-ness that eased him back to the present moment.

He awoke in a sudden symphony that compassed all his senses. The dust and grass hung suspended in the imperceptible breeze that had developed, and it enveloped him with heat and coated his skin’s moisture with an additional layer, cooking into his juices the earth that made this place. The motion of the tractor bounced and stirred the soup to the accompaniment of its polyphonic chorus of gears and blades and exploding chambers. The smell of sweat and dirt and smoke mixed with the grass. His hands and feet tingled with the humming of the machine, and the sharp edge of the sun was dulled a bit by the moisture and particulate matter in the air to gently flay him and break down his connective tissues. The poisons in his system were running out now in a steady stream with all his vital fluids. He pulled up to the faucet in front of the house and drank deeply of the gyppy water after killing a Black Widow he found lounging underneath.

Returning to his labors brought additional episodes much like the first, but each diminishing somewhat. His mind would be clear, fading in and out of direct awareness of the line of taller grass just inside the line of his front tire, and then the flash of the shame, or the terror, or the momentary image of someone’s face showing disgust or betrayal. Each time he jerked and pushed away at the scenes in front of him. Then, from his retreat he would be drawn back to the present instant by its contrast with the synthetic sights and sounds of the darker corners of his mind. He cried in fits separated by periods of relative peace and pre-occupation with his progress in the pasture.

John soon began to see measurable progress in the work. With each pass he displaced more inhabitants of one variety of another, some to run towards the perimeter and some to fall under the treads and blades of the apparatus roaring into the grass. Field mice of varying sizes looking particularly overdressed for the heat bounded away and into the nearer clumps of cut hay. The cottontails didn’t stop until they reached the perimeter and beyond. Numerous quail and dove flushed before him with only a few feet to spare. Snakes more often than not entered into the blades and came out in pieces after thumping around underneath for a moment. John got a mild satisfaction out of that – two of them were plainly copperheads – though he felt a bit presumptuous at this point for taking sides in the matter at all. He was there to mow and felt no particular investment one way or another how the local residents made their living arrangements as a result; he meant them no direct harm beyond that of altering the landscape. How they adapted was their business. He also saw two tarantulas, two armadillos, two red-tailed hawks overhead and a large swarm of bumblebees gathered over what must have been a disturbed nest. He had passed by that very spot two or three times previous and hadn’t noticed or been stung. He was gazing at it forty yards or so away over the hood of the tractor when he realized the next pass would be his last for this portion of the work.

As the last column of standing coastal passed underneath the blades he turned the machine toward the driveway and began making sweeps up and down either side back up towards the road, until he had a space about thirty feet wide for a driveway with patches of gravel and caliche here and there throughout. He stopped again at the house and drank long at the faucet and wet his head and shirt until he was good and soaked. There were still a few good hours of daylight left. He mounted up again and began his way down the track that ran past the house and toward the river acreage.

John noted that the fence looked fairly sound in the pasture between the house and the river bottom. The coastal was thick and made the tractor shudder as it chewed its way through to the back fence. The place reminded him of his grandparent’s farm where he had spent summers as a child. He imagined a dozen or more heifers and a large bull grazing through the thick green field and lazing under the pecan trees that dotted this paddock. Goats could work the land as well to keep the underbrush cleaned away around the trees and fences, especially down by the river. He thought he missed the smell of manure and the sound of cows when calves were about. He wanted to hear a dog bark a greeting as someone came down the drive to bring news and companionship – both in small doses. The graying light and crowing of a cock were all he craved in the way of alarms. He wanted the music to include the sounds of productive use. It had to, in fact.

He was a city boy. But the suburb he grew up in was one short step from the fields, and more often than not only one generation removed from a dry-land farm. In the shadow of that large southern city John’s neighborhood had been a reliquary of country people sealed in amber. They were all off the land and spoke of an errand to the bank and grocery a few blocks away as a “trip to town” as if it would take a day and require forage for the mules.

The land dropped off toward the river just beyond the fence line. John passed through the open gate and descended into the thickness of the shade under the larger pecans and cottonwoods that grew there. The fence was obscured, overgrown by vines and obstructed by dense undergrowth and trash trees. The mower labored through the thick grass in lowest gear, and John’s progress was slow. The air wasn’t moving down here, and he was wading through the sorghum heat as the tractor was wading through the dense fabric of plants leaving its own vortices of broken matter in disordered moist green heaps in its wake. He hit more fallen wood and tiny trees down here, and the mower continually clattered a protest as it was forced to chew through pecan limbs and mesquite saplings.

The distance to the river was only a couple of hundred yards or so of gentle stair steps of open grass enclosed by thick trees. At each descent the branches reached for him, slapped at him and tore at his face, smearing him with minute traces of sticky sap and dropping ticks and spiders and God knows what on him and the machine before he could break once more into an open space and slap at his face and clothes to brush away the litter and parasites and wipe his face on his shirt. The jungle resisted his efforts, especially since he wasn’t there for a real cleanup yet. It was a premature venture and he felt slightly unwelcome, or unprepared, to be making this part of the trip.

He arrived by the motte of live oak at the last landing before the riverbank and mowed a circle around the trees twice before stopping on the far side adjacent to the drop to the water’s edge. He killed the engine and lit a cigarette. There was a moment of numbed silence and then the slow crescendo of the cicadas and an intermittent birdsong of one sort or another. He looked down through the dense growth of trees and briars on the steep slope and saw that the river, what he could see of it, was very low and still. The channel was only twenty or thirty feet across and then sand and small pools for a hundred yards or so until a smaller channel appeared near the opposite bank. Clumps of tall grass grew on a small rise in the middle and a buzzard circled lazily above studying something hidden from everyone else.

A crow shouted a challenge. John looked up and saw it perched fifteen or twenty feet away. It was large. Everything was a bit larger and more numerous down nearer the water. A cloud passed in front of the sun. The air pressed heavier. He started the tractor as the crow continued to bark at him as he heaved off uphill doubling the width of the track back home. He had an uncomfortable feeling and wanted to get back within sight of the house. He charged through the trees this time taking a few hard slaps and cuts from the branches for his haste. He was cut and bruised about the face and had a fat lip when he got back to the field west of the house and breathed. The black dog was standing halfway between John and the house. There was a pickup parked in the yard by the front door. Standing beside it was Woody Schinder.




“Don’t mind NiggerDog. Apart from the cow shit she likely got tween her teeth she’s harmless. I’m Woody Schinder.”

“John Calvert,” he replied, extending his arm, numb from holding the wheel. Their voices seemed amplified in the sudden silence since the engine ceased rattling.

“I didn’t figger you’d get busy so damn quick, or I’d a been waitin for ya.”

The old man was sizing him up a bit. It was obvious that this reticence on his part was forced and a bit uncomfortable. John saw no profit in being mysterious with his neighbor, though he also didn’t feel like telling his life story at the moment. He stepped over to the faucet and replied over his shoulder as he kneeled to drink.

“I just wanted to do a little mowin and see what the place looked like under all that...grass. I think I’m done for now though.”

“Have any trouble with the old tractor? Seems to cut okay. It’s English made and bout thirty years old or so. They don’t make em anymore, but you c’n get parts through the Case dealership back in town. You shouldn’t have any trouble with it if ya take care of it. I got all the tools ya need up at the shop’n there’s a compressor’n whatnot as well. Everthing shipshape in the house?”

“Seems so. I only spent a coupla minutes in there ‘fore I come out here’n got mowin. I was just in a mood to spend some time by myself in the heat, I s’pose. Figgered it’d do me some good. Hard to explain, I guess, but I got it outta my system for the moment.”

“Oh, I reckon it’s come across me a time’r two, but I had sense to ignore it. You’ve got central air in that house, but I may need to charge it up for ya. I can do that without no trouble’n it won’t take but a few minutes.”

Woody paused for a moment, looked around, paused again and said, “How’d you get out here?”

“I took the bus as far as Weatherford’n then hitched a ride to the exit up on the interstate’n then walked on in from there. I didn’t have any trouble findin the place.”

“Lord, won’t find me out walkin on a day like this, I’ll grant ya that,” the old man motioned to the truck. “C’mon up to the house with me, and I’ll show ya what all you’ve got up there and where everything is. It’s all in good runnin shape’n ready to go, but I can show you the ins and outs a some of it. I’ve got some canned things you c’n have as well. I always have plenty a that in surplus. I grow more’n I’ll ever consume by m’sef,” he said, as they opened the doors to the truck, “C’mon Nigger.



2


John Calvert sat in a stall in the bathroom of Mercado Super-Valu groceries. The last four and a half years he had been pushing a cart through the same twelve aisles in a continuous circuit all the way from produce through canned vegetables and household goods and over to the freezer section and back. He sat in the stall of the bathroom smoking and reading the same old filth on the door. Nothing new. Someone had been picking his nose and daubing the results on the tile around the toilet paper dispenser. John knew the filth was worse in the customer restrooms at the end of the day. “Didn’t use to be this way,” he thought. He took a marker from his shirt pocket and wrote, “stop picking your nose Miguel,” on the tile wall, dropped the cigarette into the toilet bowl, and returned to dairy without washing his hands.

He stocked quart cartons of milk in strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, banana and new coffee flavor with a slow and practiced rhythm and glanced up and about at irregular intervals. The polished, dated chrome trim on the waist-high refrigerator case always made him think of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon for some reason.

“Nothing but Mexicans anymore,” he thought. “Like it all got up and moved and left the people I knew somewhere else.”

It seemed the colors of the place were less vivid. Everything had been scrubbed thin and repaired once too often. The shadows in the aisles were longer, and Tejano music piped in from the rafters. The vendors and customers had changed – everything had changed – from when it was Schroeder’s Grocery years before. There had been a pharmacy next door where St Lazarus now looked out the window of the Botanica Elegba onto the pitted and uneven parking lot.

“Mr. Calvert, could you come up to the office for a minute?”
John looked over his shoulder towards the big double doors about ten feet away and saw Fuentes, the store manager, with his palm stretched out like he was welcoming John aboard a cruise ship.

“Something messed up?”

“This will only take a minute, Mr. Calvert.”

John hated how formal Fuentes always was with him. He knew what was coming, had been waiting for it for a few months now. The stairs made a hollow sound under his feet. He reached the top of the steps and made a motion to go to the manager’s office, but Fuentes maneuvered him into the kitchen area where the administrative staff took their breaks and they took a seat at the table.

“Mr. Calvert...John, I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Any particular reason?”

“If there was any other way, I would keep you on, but my hands are tied by the owners. I’m really sorry, but you know we’ve mentioned before that this might happen if things got slow again. You can go ahead and clock out now. I had Lena put in the check request yesterday for all of your hours plus the two weeks of vacation pay you still have on the books. She’s got it in her office.”

He offered his hand. John took it feebly and let it drop as he rose and then walked down the tight corridor where he was buzzed through the door of the office and squeezed into Lena’s corner, ducking somewhat as he stood between her and the fake ficus tree next to her desk. She handed him the envelope without ever looking him in the eye.

“Can you cash it?”

“Yeah, go ahead and sign it.”

He scratched his name on the back, and she took the check and stamped it and counted out all that was left to him of Mercado Super-Valu without saying another word. The silence was suffocating him; he couldn’t swallow, and he thought his gag reflex might make him sick.

The store looked different and unfamiliar as he emerged into it. The other employees did not seem to recognize him. Of the half-dozen customers in the store no familiar faces beckoned. Mrs. Griffith wasn’t there demanding to speak to Mr. Calvert, the produce manager, about the Pecos cantaloupes. He didn’t see Mr. Schroeder standing in the corner by the front door, red-faced, arguing with his son-in-law about his grand plans or the mousy blonde in braces at the register passing groceries to junior high boys with pimples who bagged them. Nobody noticed his passing. He waded out into the July mid-morning heat on the sidewalk under the awning in front of the store. He realized the apron was still tied round his waist; he took it off and folded it absentmindedly before dropping it in the trashcan by the door. A cicada lay on its back buzzing in a tight circle on a stain accumulated over years of human traffic. He paused a moment looking down at the angry, alien creature and then ground it under his foot in a moist crunch.

“Not now, Mother,” he thought. No way did he want to explain why he was home so early in the day. There was no way to tell if she even knew what he meant half the time, but she knew when the routine was interrupted, and that always introduced its own set of problems for him to deal with. He walked to the corner and stood by the fire ant bed to wait for a bus heading downtown. The bus was slow in coming, and he took off his name tag and stuck it into the ant bed and watched the garrison of this outpost cover the little three-inch square of plastic until all that was visible was the mass of their black bodies. It used to be nothing but red ant beds in his world. When did the others become so common? He got on the bus.

The weight of the daily-ness of his job had been lifted, and a weight of uncertainty stepped in and took its place without missing a beat in the march onward into the nothing. It was a river he waded in up to his chin every waking moment, a slow, dirty, current that never stopped. The mass of mother and his own resentments and regrets pushed down on his head threatening to drown him. Carried along with him were broken bits and remains of familiar surroundings – the skins of things only slightly noticed that made him think himself a broken piece of something that never really mattered. He was filler, a grain of sand in the chunk of broken concrete buried in a landfill that used to be in a sidewalk that thousands of people walked across never once looking down in a town everyone left and didn’t remember. He would not be missed.

Downtown was a relief. The volume of people buoyed him up and diluted the buzzing and humming behind his eyes. He could lose sight of the structure in all those faces and step into that larger stream that ran into endless possibilities. A plane passed overhead going somewhere else with people having 7-Up and pretzel sticks and looking down at the specks on the concrete without seeing them. Thousands of planes all over the world and thousands of people looking past their cocktail napkins and plastic cups and not seeing the millions of specks looking up and watching them going somewhere else.

Last edited by Mugtoe on 11-29-2003 at 04:49 AM

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The dappled sunlight underneath the oak
Distorts and softens outlines of the group
Of friends and pickup trucks with tailgates down
Backed in a circle; keg and smoking meat
Provide a focus and a stimulation
To tired bodies worn out in the river

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Left behind in a fog of wincing shame and flashing snapshot images of just how low he could go – how low he wanted to go – Pelham sensed most of his substance remained embedded in the life he’d torn himself out of only hours before. His head pounded, and the input gathered from his senses was processed at a slight lag that was a disorienting comfort. The bus kneeled forward and breasted the road like a ship on rolling seas with a weaving motion that ate up the miles ahead. The long stretch of roadway, a birth canal, where Pelham could perhaps midwife some new options.

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I don't remember jottin most of this down. And I'm not sure what I had in mind. This is just like a pile of scratch paper on my drive. Welcome to my wastebasket. Now, move along.

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Thousands of crows crowd onto the crowns
Of the trees opposite my apartment
Every day now for a week or more
In grand and stately assemblage
Of oil-slick foliage fed fat on decay
This congress of Corvidae
Capping the treetops in this one place

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Horace saw the planes far, far overhead every now and then. They were only faint lines of silver catching the waning sunlight and focused on a single point. He would for a moment imagine them blowing to bits and falling to earth all around him, and his stomach would catch. He winced. The sun

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Howard owned a transmission shop he’d inherited from his boss. Twice-divorced, he lived alone and spent most evenings laid out on the sofa in darkness save for the flickering glow of the television. His three children were disbursed with their mothers and his brother out of spite and concern respectively. His entertainments were confined to whores and speed binges in cheap motels every few weeks. He would pack a small duffel bag with all of his paraphernalia and get a room. Then he would get the hookup and pick up a whore or not before returning and putting on the panty hose and high heels and mini-skirt and riding a dildo for hours on end in accompaniment to the continuous porno of all kinds piped in on eight channels.

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He never asked Charles for anything outright. They had this understanding before they ever spent any time together years earlier. Since then Booger had been locked up twice for six and fifteen months respectively, and each time he returned a little more solid looking and a little more settled and easier going. He was rough and ready and seemed to take pretty much everything in stride. He liked to work as well, and frequently picked up day labor jobs painting or doing carpentry. But he talked as if wealth and security were always right around the corner. Every job he went out on was going to be his company soon. He took the same proprietary interest in everything he did, as if whatever had his attention belonged solely to him for just so long as he required it. For the moment, that was his Charlie. Charlie who wasn’t rich at all but didn’t bitch about spending the money he had. Charlie who, for his age, was in pretty good shape the way Booger liked them – a real regular guy, not an old troll or a queen. His hands were rough and his arms hard and the gut he carried seemed natural and increased his appeal. Best of all, Charlie liked to do dope right along with Booger and could hold his own without acting like an idiot. And Charlie didn’t act stupid afterwards and try to chase him around being an embarrassment.
There was also something sad about Charlie that drew Booger, though he couldn’t quite articulate that to himself. He simply wanted to make Charlie smile whenever he saw him, and that urge overcame any personal preoccupations he otherwise felt pressing on him at any given moment. So he wanted Charlie to want to spend some money and time with him. He wanted an excuse. He wished boundless prosperity on Charlie in whatever measure would keep him available, but not so much as to render dumps like the Kozy Korner alien to his resources and somehow inhospitable. He was vaguely aware that Charlie had once been somehow more substantial and something had failed in him along the way and caused him to renegotiate his position in life. Booger understood that intuitively, but couldn’t have explained it to anyone else. Charlie read books; he knew things, though he didn’t talk or act any differently than anyone else at the bar at first glance.

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The gentle rise in the land west of Fort Worth inclines toward the sun to expose its sundry nooks and crevices for irradiation by that suspended engine of the heavens. For those long afternoon hours activity is squelched down to its mere essentials.

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Booger

He crossed the street from the transit center and into the windowless darkness of the Kozy Korner Lounge. A blade of dust- and smoke-filled sunlight cut across the room and lit upon the bar at the far wall. The door shut behind him, and he walked by instinct as his eyes adjusted to the burnt-orange neon glow that was the primary illumination in the place.
“You’re here early.”
“Short day for me. I quit.”
“Bourbon or beer?”
“Bourbon. I’m flush.” He paused, and then asked, “You seen Booger yet today, Sam?”
He drawled his words out more around people he knew but was not close to. Most people didn’t deserve to know him any better than that. And the people in the bars were part of that general population – a backdrop.
“Not yet, but he usually gets here before too late,” Sam replied, and then added with a downcast eye and a smirk, “You ain’t pinin for that one, are ya?”
“Nother bourbon, Sam. I ain’t pinin for nobody. I just take an active interest in the lives of people around me.”
“Who’re you kiddin? That boy’s got yer name written all over ‘im. You could do worse though. I ain’t talkin shit to ya.” Sam lowered his voice and leaned forward a bit to veil some conspiratorial secret, “I just wonder why you waste yer time on anything more’n fun with most a these boys. They ain’t gonna stick around, any of em. Even if they wanted to they ain’t gonna stick around, no how. It just ain’t in their nature.”
“Now, you don’t know that for a fact. And ‘sides, Sam, Booger’s comfortable to me, and he’s been around as long as most of us – hell, five years or more, not countin the time he’s locked up. And he ain’t one a them that I gotta worry bout lockin my shit up around. And I got mother to think about. I don’t need to be bringin someone different around the house all time. She’d be ‘side herself with all that changin up just so’s I could get a little strange. I don’t need all that.”
Charles marveled at how people were always coming out of left field to express unsolicited ideas about what would make him happy. He had a friendly acquaintance with Sam, however, and it seemed that the man was simply making an observation for the sake of conversation. He wasn’t sure why he had felt a mild defensiveness and given such an explanation.
“Charlie!” The light cut a quick slice through the blue smoke rising from the cigarette in Charles’s hand falling just under Sam’s face and leaving all but the man’s chin in shadowy darkness. Charles saw the dust on the bottles behind the bar for an instant, and then the darkness hid it all again.
He felt a hand on his back and a whiff of pleasant and familiar sweat mixed with the smell of weed as Booger slipped past him brushing his crotch against Charles’s leg and took a seat on the stool next to him and turned his way.
“I thought you were workin all this week.”
“I quit this mornin”
“Cool! Let’s get drunk, Charlie!”
Charles turned pressing his cock against the boy’s knee and grinning slightly as Booger pressed against it in recognition. He laid his hand on Booger’s thigh, and Booger took it in his own hand and placed it against his crotch where it rested against his pulsing erection. He must always be hard, Charles thought.
“Whatcha wanna drink?”
“Just gimme a Bud’n keep em comin, and don’t lemme get in no trouble. You know yer my favorite guy to drink with, Charlie. Yer my favorite guy to do just about anything with.”
“Oh, shut up. I’m already buyin yer beer. Yer the only reason I came on down here this early. I figgered I’d want some company to drink with, since I ain’t workin today’n likely not the rest a the week anyhow.” He paused and finished his bourbon and then ordered two longnecks, all the while pressing down with his right hand onto Booger’s cock and feeling it press back and Booger’s knee rubbing slightly against his own swelling member. He made an attempt to turn it off. It was too early, and he was too sober, to be swapping spit with one of the urchins from downtown in the Kozy Korner while the rest of the city came and went outside, oblivious. There weren’t but three or four people in the bar, all regulars and all otherwise occupied, but Charles wasn’t ready yet to cut loose.
“Wanna play a game a pool?”
“You rackin?”
“Fuck you. I’m buyin. You rack first game. I’ll put some money in the jukebox. Let’s do a shot a tequila first though.” Charles vaguely sensed that he was being a bit shortsighted by taking a shot so early, but it was as good a day to get drunk as any; he wasn’t driving anymore, and he didn’t have to work tomorrow. And it was never daytime in the bar. It was never any time in the bar, unless it was closing time. But Charlie didn’t remember too many of those when he made them.
Sam accepted a shot as well as if with some resignation, and Booger smiled at Charles with wet lips as he pulled the lemon from his mouth and squinted his eyes for a moment. Charles felt a warm flush in his face and shuddered as Booger stood and stretched, raising his shirt just enough to uncover the precious trail of hair descending from his navel to disappear under the elastic band of the boxers peeking over the top of his pants. The bulge below was noticeable, and Charles wanted to grab it and squeeze and then drop to his knees right there. Booger always reminded him of a satyr; there was something billy-goatish about him. Charlie knew well what Booger looked like out of his clothes, and he fit that image well with his legs thick with coarse hair and his torso mostly bare, save for that trail and a moderate splash of black hair fanning out across his pecs from the seam up his breastbone. Booger didn’t show off his body, however, and Charles liked that just fine. He thought about that belly in front of him and how it looked deceptively soft until tensed, when a quarter would bounce off it. He looked up and realized Booger had caught him staring. He grinned a little bigger and said, “Go play some music, Charlie. Let’s get drunk and have some fun.”
“Aight, aight.”
The promise of sweat and Booger’s body moving against his was deferred for the prospect of a day’s companionship and the affecting of an intimacy of longstanding. It was always an unspoken conspiracy among the drunks and the boys from the street – a closeness and camaraderie that vanished like a morning fog outside of the bars. These little closets of alchemy spread around town could distill from the most hidden fantasies of comfort and solace and recognition a brief illusion of something finer than the drinker could create on his own. But the illusion was never sustained in the sunlight. The only difference for Charlie was that repeated treatments of this process had engendered in those illusions a sort of momentum that carried him between applications. It all began to seem like real life after a few years, so that the only intimacy he found any more was this silty froth on a backwater pool of cheap liquor, crack and sweat.
Charles had always been a mediocre pool player, but he enjoyed the game and enjoyed playing with someone like Booger, who was much better but didn’t lord that over his opponent. Free and easy play continued between them with frequent glances and touches. Three beers later Charles leaned forward to make a shot and felt Booger’s hands on his ass.
“Don’t start no fire you can’t put out, boy.”
“We’ll see,” and with that he grabbed Charlie’s hips and ground his manhood against Charlie’s rump from one side to the other.
Charlie turned and looked into Booger’s brown grinning eyes. The shaggy dark hair curled and framed his face and fell over his ears. Booger was maybe one inch shorter than he was, and he was solid with a thin layer of flesh over his more than adequate muscles. He was much admired up and down the street, but he played it off well. He wasn’t particularly overt in his business, and he and Charles behaved towards one another more as drinking buddies than casual and frequent lovers. But there were fewer people around that time of day, and with each beer they became a bit more oblivious to the presence of others and a bit more playful in their contact.
More people trickled in as the day wore on, and Charles took turns letting other people play against Booger. Then Booger would turn on his game a bit more and win a dollar or two here and there and generally show off a bit as well. A few more of the boys came round, and Booger took more of a proprietary interest in Charles. Charles had loosened up a bit and was noticing the new arrivals now, but he had no real interest at the moment in anyone other than Booger.
“Ready for another shot and a beer?” Charles asked, noticing Booger working more and more for his undivided attention.
“Yeah, let’s go sit at the bar.”
Booger downed his shot and kissed Charles and then began an absent-minded effort on the video trivia machine at the bar while Charles paid for the drinks. Wheel of Fortune was playing on the TV over the bar, and Sam had turned off the jukebox so everyone could shout the answers at the set. Booger kept his eyes on the video game and asked Charles, “Wanna party tonight?”
A tremble ran down his spine and he felt a tickle in his side for a moment.
“Yeah, but not yet. We still got plenty a time to hang out here’n drink s’more. I ain’t gonna wanna leave the house once we get started, and it’s early yet. You hungry?”
“Estella’s?”
“Sure, why not? I ain’t eaten nothin since five this mornin. I could use somethin greasy to soak up all this alcohol. Wanna eat there or bring it back’n eat at the bar?”
“Let’s eat over there. I don’t wanna share with nobody else.”
He might as well have hiked his leg on Charles right there. Charles knew he was the host organism for the night, but he and Booger had a sort of unspoken understanding in that regard. He picked up the tab for the party, and they left it at that. Charles hated feeling like one of the trolls, and he knew he was a lot more fun than the smelly, flaccid old men who pawed at the boys downtown and circled the block by the bus station. Besides, Booger wasn’t like the rest. He liked giving himself to Charles. He may be available to others, but he was at best indifferent with them. With Charles he felt somewhat possessive and tended to resent the attention that didn’t fall his way while they were together. However, it didn’t hurt that Charles had a pocket full of money he didn’t mind spending that day. Booger was always happy to see Charles, but he had to take care of his security first and foremost, and Charles understood that as well and wouldn’t occur to him think of it any other way. He knew he at least had to be responsible for Booger’s upkeep if they spent time together, or he would be committing a type of betrayal. For every moment spent together was time Booger could be getting ahead otherwise. There was more to it than that, certainly, Charles thought. He just wasn’t sure how.
The two of the piled out of the bar and into the smoke-stained pastels of Estella’s next door for the spiciest, greasiest food available anywhere in town at a ridiculously low price. Estella’s was narrow and cramped and noisy and deep and garishly lit with florescent lights. Booger slid in across from him on the cracked vinyl of the booth.
“You want sweet-tea?”
Booger looked up at the waitress, “Co-cola with a straw.”
She turned to Charles without speaking. He looked up at her and caught sight of her mother, Estella, the owner at the register by the door. “It’s really true with Mexicans;” he thought, “they go from luscious beauties to shriveled little husks or billowing matrons overnight.”
“Unsweet tea, please.”
“You ready to order, or you need more time?”
Charles met Booger’s glance and shrugged, looking back at the girl and ordered for both of them, being sure to get extra appetizers. Booger was a bottomless pit to have so little fat on his bones.
They finished their food and sat dull for a good minute or two before Booger spoke.
“Charlie, y