I did not know the neighborhood.

It was more a village than a town. 3 traffic lights. We will stone you, too.

Most of my friends wound up at the wire factory. Where they all became beaten men. Forgotten men. Blue veinsd across your forehead. The identity of a stoop. Grinding your bones Slowly moving secrets of the prison house. Our wives would meet with us once a week from behind the glass. I didn’t mean to do it. Then, why did you do it. I didn’t do it.  One beefy cop walked by, and he picked me up and shoved my face into the glass.

“This is going to be you in the cage. Look at your dad. He’s white trash and so are you.”

I knew the neighborhood. But I did not live there. We were the poor of the poor. I would ride into town on my Honda Trail Bike bike. Thievery. No clutch. Nothing to hold on to. It can always get worse. We were beaten every day to within an inch of our lives. I had a wound that went down to bone. No doctors. Doctors mean sticking your doctor nose in our existence. One knife. One hook. One Hills Brother’s Coffee can of worms. One boat, a pram. One winding fish line wrapped around an summer oak twig was food. Perch. Trout. Crabs. Blue Gills Bass:  you can also catch these picky guys with peanut butter. Venison. It was kill this thing or go hungry. I had a gun. I had a gun.

 I brought a stupid gun to ice fish. It was the first time I ever felt safe.

But what did I know of it. Safe. Safe from who. My tricks or my father. Or both. At twelve, I was told he had had enough of me, and I was on my own.

I had no idea what to do.

I sat there ice fishing on a crate looking down into the ice-green water of infinity. Infinity will suck all the atoms, all the electrons, all of the photons. I was the last person in the whole fucking continent who should have had a gun. It is because I was shot that I know what a gun can do. Out on the ice, there is nothing to shoot. Out on the ice was crazy but it had to be done, out there with a hole chopped with an axe, the three feet of solid ice. A saber-tooth tiger might amble by.

Ice you could drive a dirt bike over and slide around in the ha ha. You might need some straw. The entire community was mentally ill.  

At least, I knew what it would be about. Rich people lived up on the hill because they did not live at the bottom of the hill.

I was not the leader. I was the leader. God help me. If I hadn’t had the lake, it was kinda remote, but I loved my ride into town because when I was driving the bike, the voices all disappeared. I drive kinda fast. I would not have had the ability to get lost. Get lost. And I needed to lose myself and the planet. We both have this need to be away from Homo sapiens but alas. I faint dead away. It’s that or blow your brains out. You have to know the solitary life or go home. Go work in the wire factory. Tommy worked at the wire factory for thirty years, no gold watch. No banquet. No speeches. No one at the wire factory was into you, Tommy. It was all for nothing. It is that or we will be compelled to blow our brains out. Whatever you do, do not under any circumstances, write. This hooey was fed to me for years. If they don’t like you, you will starve, and this was my addendum. I would never make it in Hollywood. Damn.

Do you want to do it together.

We had already done it together. Tommy always had a bad idea for just about everything. If it hadn’t been some strange thing, or it could be another. Strange thing. Like an incident. Like the planet itself, or blow my brains out. The thieves lived at the bottom of the hill in an apple grove called Vomit Mountain. The dump was the town. Mom and Pop. The prerequisite neon. Hookers. Hookers. Where the bears came to scour the dump. We were the bad kids gotta cigarette. Over by the river were the Finns. The only time we ever went up the hill was on Halloween. We smoked cigars we stole from Gilly’s Market over by the railroad tracks, the bad part of lost and found, the sign said tattoo, in dirt bike town. Our reality was reality – you were nothing – and your reality was mowing the lawn.

You were not a hippy.

You never wore a cape.

You did not have a sword.

Dope for days, but none for you.

You did not know how to pick a pocket like us criminals. We knew there was no future for us. By sixteen, you wanted to die. You did not see yourself anywhere along this timeline.

A timeline begins with one atom.

Just one. It’s a new timeline. There are a godzillion timelines. All at once. We cannot. we cannot even imagine what the big bang was. To start a new timeline, take one look at your ugly sister, we all have an ugly one, some are just more ugly than the others, and when the farmers come to get their cows, it’s all a new timeline. It means you can’t go back. It just isn’t possible. There is no physics for it, even suggestion thast it is possible to go back to another previous timeline.

And every single time you go back, you are breaking the timeline you are in. Be careful what you wish for.

I stole the costume as well. Zorro was hot that year, and I made a sword from a fireplace poker. I took the Zorro  Chacha from Tommy’s locker, and Tommy would be reduced to Zorro in his pajamas. No one would get me in the dark. I had the costume. I had the camera. I had the candy. I had the cape, and I was so stunning in that drag, I would wear it over and over again because we were fucking poor. If Tommy told on me, he knew I would beat the fuck out of him and give him a concussion, not that I knew what a concussion was. I knew it was bad, but he had to have his head bashed a few times every year. Will you fuck me. No. It doesn’t matter who said it.

The only thing we didn’t do was kiss. I never told Tommy his dad was fucking me and I was making money from it. We always went outside at 2am. I took the plunge. Your dad is fucking me.

Go for the money, I would.

I had saved, and saved, and saved. Because I wanted a real sword and I bought one at the pawn shop where I played poker on Friday nights until they kicked my eleven-year-old ass out the door and don’t come back.

Then, they took my money. You can’t beat me because I can count cards. Double meaning. Maybe, you can. Do I appear to you to be someone who counts cards. No. I am someone who works in vegetables at Ralphs. The blackjack croupier would watch my lips. To see if I was counting which I was. But never with my lips. Do I appear to you to be a stupid man.

In poker, you have to remember and it has to be fast. Sometimes, my mind will drift if I’m winning because I always win. It’s ordinary. Sometimes, we played for fish. My call.

Please don’t dangle your keys in my face. Just don’t do it. It’s a really bad idea.

I don’t want a car. I want two dirt bikes.

Get on the boat. You drank to forget, and now you remember. Most of us had first learned to drive a car by driving a tractor on a tractor path. The mix of urban poverty and rural poverty (there are millions of these places on the earth) that has bicycles and bulldozers on the same parking lot. 

“Do you like poetry. Do you like poetry.”

We wrote poetry because everyone wrote poetry. We were as common as dimes. No, he’s busy writing poetry. May I ask who is calling.

But no one wrote poetry like my mates did and we checked to see who had hair first.

Tommy did.

I think we were a pubic cult. We counted Tommy’s pubic hairs. Three.

We mimeographed (don’t ask) the poetry and sold it to people on a boat-to-the-island who were too embarrassed to admit they did not actually like poetry but if that ever came out they would be thrown into the Bastille by the literary police. Do you like Poetry. Do you like poetry. They would hand me a dollar, and I would hand you a mimeographed book of about six folded pages. My page was one word: fuck. Lord Byron, had a club foot, too. Boating on the lake. The lake I lived on only had a ghost in fog just when the wind would scream ice and fish and ice and fish. We smoked it. We salted it. We turned it into ceiling wax.

So, what was it about the kid in the Zorro cape. For a minute, I thought I was Zorro.

Stepping into an identity yourself had to be a satire on something. Like authority. There was the inevitable apple. Polly want an apple. No. Me either.

My game. My way. Adam was a dickhead. Eve made commercials in Japan.

The camera had a timer. I had not asked for a timer, but there it was, a timer.

The timer means you had to jump in front of the camera fast. It was time for Zorro’s close up. This was not pornography. Maybe it was a little pornography. 

Robin Hood would be all the rage, and the Rifleman.

I was pretty good at putting the camera in trees. But then, I had to dash the flash and you could probably figure out I was naked. Let’s go for a ride. Naked on a dirt bike. At night. I am just a blur. You cannot see my dick. I think there was a butt crack in there. It was a long time ago, and I have dug my own grave every time I switch to a new identity.

The High and the Mighty have informed me that identity theft…

It’s not identity theft if it was a identity I was stealing from myself. Which is synonymous with an echo chamber.

It’s not even difficult to steal some poor car destined for the chop shop. I invented me. I learned how to play poker from necessity. I had the cards. I had the cigarette. I actually was Zorro. But you, the reader, have the whip.

When I saw Zorro being stripped and ripped from his shirt, and tied half-naked to a cross (mask intact) built by a Spanish Parole Officer in the very center of the marketplace, a sun-drenched cloud of slowly moving dust and crows, a shot of Jack, looking out the window of the bar. Dirt bike pulls in and parks.

We are now in my version of a dream, not Zorro’s. I knew there were people who were following Zorro’s ass. My tight little hole could feel the eyes prying. It was either that or Tommy. Every eye would strain to peek. Nice ass. Thank you. My ass has gotten me through many confrontations. Never talk about bar fights. Are you looking at me. Are you looking at me.

I charge extra for the spanking part. No one loves me. No one has ever loved me, I am not a lovable person. I do not get people at all. I run from relationships because I already know what will happen. I will fall in love again because that is a consciousness, too. Being naked is a consciousness in and of itself. I sit for art students every other day. Walking down Duval, I saw myself in every gallery all the way to sunset. People talk. Gossip. Did you hear about those homosexual Homo sapiens. Sunglasses. I hear nothing. Perhaps because there is nothing there there. 

The ones I loved all left. They had such difficulty comprehending what it means to love someone who actually works for himself. Because he has to.

24/7.

Or they were tourists deciding if they would sell their New York apartment. Probably.

Rule #1. Never fall in love with anyone from Australia.

Sometimes a gig can be when so and so is having a dungeon party in the abandoned church graveyard that says in wrought iron text: Blood Cemetery. Do not stop. Do not pass go. And no Park Place for you.

I knew then, someone had to invent rewind. This was what I wanted to do to my teachers. Rewind them.

No one wanted to tie us up and run us through with swords. So we would tie ourselves up with duck tape and we would fight with swords all tied up and no one took the tying up seriously. We should have. Years later, we all still wanted that cape.

I want the Zorro boots. But context is another thing entirely. A bag of candy, a hat, and a timer. I am always on a timer. A timer that I cannot keep up with because I’m stupid. It’s stupid to be hateful. I do not want to be hateful. That is a lie. If I look at you, I will taste your dreams. His lick at the top of it. Every time, he goes into you, I will taste it. Every time you show him your wet crack in the dream, I will taste it, whore.

Give us some cream pie.

Play with your tits.

Why do I always have to tell these humans what to do. I know I’m stupid. I am ashamed I am stupid. Consciousness is suffering. That is why we are here. To suffer. To take pictures of it. We are lonely. We are catfish and this is the ice the fishmongers crawl to. Or they might fall in. 

Bobby got a boner and I told him I was going to tell everyone. I did not tell everyone. I did not tell anyone. Before I could do anything like that, the boner was gone to wherever boners go to die. I still had the camera. And the candy. Bobby was frantic and asked how he could go out like that.

Be patient. It’s going down. Opps, there it pops up again. The only time we ever went up the hill was on Halloween. Dickhead’s dick stuck way out like he was at an elephant birthday party for Tommy the Turtle. Tonight, we are all meeting down at River Park and it won’t be anyone’s birthday.