Dirt Bike Town
Tim Barrus: Novelist
Robin King: Audio Reading/Music
BLADE RUNNER MEETS 12 MONKEYS
—It was Civil War. We had the last of the dirt bikes.—
—Tim Barrus —
Author: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams
The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
Geronimo’s Bones
Anywhere, Anywhere
Dog Landing
Genocide
My Brother, My Lover
Men On Men
Tales of the Island
The Great American Novel
Dirt Bike Town
Year of the Hyena
We Will Tape Your Mouth Shut: My Relationship With the New York Times
Mineshaft
To Indigo Dust
4 Tom Pynchon
Awards: Pen, City-Wide Reads, National Magazine Award Nomination, 2 Best Books of the Year Awards
Email: TimothéeBarrus@gmail.com
Website: http://tim-barrus.format.com
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/timbarrus
Top Contributer: NYT Opinion, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/timothee.barrus
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I am a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole. — Malcolm X
I believe in talent. Who you are, what gender you are, what race an author is, where the writer went to school, how many kids he has, his dog’s name, what is your age, what is your mother’s maiden name, and all of this is the stuff of a publishing whirlwind that ends up as simply fashion. There are no gay books. I would rather know by a star’s heat, the satisfaction of whatever you think — the driving of desire — is as it has been baked into the very genetic fabric. Stories as material. As it has been the heart of the secret world, such toxicities tongue-tied around the myths of itches and the secrets of Socrates. Unless books have secrets, all good books have secret rooms. A chosen few. There are only voices. Only whispers. All of it. All of it for humanity as a whole. — Tim Barrus
I DID NOT DO IT.
Put on your warpaint. I bought a .12 gauge shotgun in New Orleans. We were in a different motel every night. The Normals were hunting us again. Mets tes seins sous mon nez.
We don’t break the ‘Normals’ laws, and then not to become infected when they take turns with you. It was getting deadly out there for albinos. There are those albinos who do fight back. And we fight back hard. There are those albinos who do not fight back, and all of them are dead.
There were a lot of us living in Louisiana. Meat Market for the Normals. Always the Normals, Cher. Do I really, really have to spread around crumbs for you all, who do you think you are, what role do you play in this, on whose knees. We may be kept hidden away in the background, but we have vowed to never bend the knee to the Normals who do their best to destroy and deny the fact of our existence. We are here. We are here to stay. My mission is to create something called a resistance.
I did not know what a resistance was. I learn fast. My people. My albinos. My lovers. My albinos. My warriors. My albinos. My dirt bikes. My albinos.
We have more dirt bikes than anyone, anywhere. In the world. We stole them. Usually, by stopping trains.
You would think the Normals would have found ways to stop us. They will never stop us. I want to bring them down. I want to kill all of them.
I kill Normals. It’s what I do. I show other albinos how to murder Normals.
Be honest. You are tempted, too.
They’re the Normals. We are here, and we are homo sapiens, as well. The goal was to rid the planet of the goddamn, fucking Normals.
What is Normal deceit. They kept us alive. Barely alive so we can clean up after them. For a small, hard piece of bread.
The ocean was itself on fire even as it came rolling pushed into a sorry shore of dead birds and the Dead Birds Motel. Tijuana. HBO. Next to the ice machine. Things we took for granted are no longer regarded with indifference.
We needed soap.
We learned how to make it.
Humanoids know no shame.
The ocean was penning us in from all sides. The planet was on fire. Vegas, just kept going strong. Until the end came. What just kept going was disease. People were crowded together mainly in ruins. Tuberculosis was a pandemic. There were tuberculosis cures. But none of that trickled down to anyone. They couldn’t bury the bodies fast enough. Like an angel on a drug binge. Gang fights within gang fights inside gang fight ideology. From what I got out of it is that Vegas has kept all its secrets with the possible exception of the Archives who have everything. Filed. Away. Away. Away. Far away. But there you are. It is not usually a good thing, Cher.
I’m a criminal. From the future, and you do not want to know. What The Future. Is. No one knows it, it just keeps fapping its wings. Not flapping it. Fapping it.
A shotgun’s barrel has the same blueish tint a dirt bike has just before a meltdown. Because it hasn’t happened yet. Hecuba was on high alert.
The veins in her neck throb. I kiss them, she throws her head back. She laughs. It saves us all. It’s called tight and bonded.
Never get off the dirk bike. Not until you cannot stand. Down you go. Falling down can be a good thing. If you learn from it. You should never leave your dirt bike because Smorgs. Smorgs will steal anything. Smorgs are evil blue steel witches and they look into the windows and they climb up all the trees (but there were no trees). It’s about the voices in your head. The Sahara was everything. The ocean burning, sending poison into what was called the air. Somebody bombed the bank. I was shocked.
The Smorgs are the bad guys and we needed them even if they are medieval.
Mitya did it. Sometimes he lets me blame him even when I blame him.
Both Vegas and New Orleans were under an unbending ocean serving up pyclophlamic carbonate. Methane. Retro-Labatine, an industrial acid. Coming for you. With a radioactive overflow times ten. The Gulf of Mexico was not unlike the appearance and consistency of raw tar.
Do not touch it.
We did this. We sold our souls to treachery. We would ride out into the desert — screaming — back and forth on Texas beaches, we three by ourselves because why would you ride on a sand so hot, it melts, tires, boots. Shoes. And lipstick. You could still find old lipsticks, having washed up there from the one lipstick-maker cranker left after the last Dope War Leadership had banned lipstick as currency, but the rule is currency itself is corrupt, Cher.
We tell everyone that we are Irish. They smile and run. The Irish thing is so far back, they were literally writing with quills. They won every literary prize there is always a compromise.
The publisher says: Tone it down.
The publisher says: You can’t do that.
Motel Lights a Go Go. Graffiti. If you haven’t sawed off a double barrel 12 gauge shotgun in a generic motel room next to New Orleans Denny’s, you, Cher, have not lived. I worked the river boats once. The Government Slavery Commission caught me but I could swim. The snakes alone. I was not aware that bull snakes could swim. I have seen so much wildlife struggling to eat and digging up the frenzied ground. Strippers in Baton Rouge were the most wild of the creatures and they were dangerous, to release such animals, the sea eats them up. Wolves will howl when they begin to smell the sea. Predation has its rules. Paradigms of remorse and regret like both barrels down to smoking some dark anonymity. A scattered buckshot will put you down, and you will stay there forever. Down means down. What does Put Your Hands Behind Your Backs Really Mean. The principal will see you, now.
Wrong town. Wrong country. Wrong timeline. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. But that is what we are left with. A world scabbed with burn. Whole armies retreated to shelter by noon and the heat just held us there. Dangling. Our best battles were at sunset, the witching hour. You semi circle your enemy. With your back to the sun. The Normals would lunge for you, but all they’re really seeing is the setting of the red sun. The little one was blue, but it was growing. Mitya said it behaved like antimatter. The blue baby was spinning fast. If matter and antimatter. You know the rest. The solar system was kinda interesting to study but it’s overrated.
The red sun. The blue sun. Give me a break, god.
Albinos were at risk for skin cancers and blindness. Blindness because we carry the melatonin gene what expresses itself in (what else) the lack of melatonin which plays a vital role in the development of sight. If you had not found shelter by noon, the radiation alone would fry you into a Krispie Kritter. Humanoids are draining.
Always the same old response. Swords. Machetes. Knives. Tybalt Capulet. Blazing blinders in the sky. We were afraid of wind turbines, but we could build them.
Albinos are not stupid. Everyone knows Normals are degenerates. The development of rebellion was not unlike the Spanish Inquisition. Lots of naked albino women tied up and spread — I said — we need to remember that we were hated to that awesome extent. Why do you think all those Normal little boys openly wear their knives.
For me, they went for the throat.
That is why I only whisper. The Whispering Machine in his robes or naked. Mainly naked.
You can’t write that.
Why not.
There is no such animal as semi nudity. You are. Or you aren’t. Everyone in Dodge danced naked in the desert, Cher. Drunk with hookery mushrooms. Grown in a blackmarket in a ruins. No one would really know more than twenty-five miles of the reality (there might be a semireality), this is all you know and god is gonna smote you down with his mighty balls of bloodworms. God is gonna smote you down. How normal is this god thing anyway, god is going to smote you down.
WE Had Our Own Chop Shop. In Baton Rouge. Because we did not tend to commit crimes, organized or not organized, in our own backyard. We worked New Orleans to the ground. Baton Rouge was another story.
Gruel’s Chop Shop Hugs and Hogs. Mainly, we stole cars. Tech is easy to disable. Albino newborns could do it. We would steal that car for the parts. I am a criminal. I kill Normals. I bomb them. I rob them. I hang them. I push Normals from the tops of buildings. Wrong town, kiddo. My brother, Mitya, is a criminal. Hecuba, our wife, is also a criminal. We three thieves. The Baton Rouge Hecuba Detective Agency. Because we like it. That way. I am not asking for permission. Wrong guy.
Earth’s weather will kill you. It had become monstrously violent. There was nowhere safe anywhere on the planet. It was a butt hole one day, and the next day, it was another butt hole. Wyoming appeared to be a cauldran of radioactive soup goop. Pepto Pink. It’s not like you can run away to somewhere else. There is nowhere somewhere else. There is another story here. The terms Somewhere Else and Somewhere The Normals Will Not Find Me. Two stories that are making the rounds of albinos and Normal Sympathizers. Even now, you are missing most everything that is happening all around you. The last dope war focused on bombing roads. To slow the evil (everyone I know is evil incarnate) travelers down by riding around destruction or ruins now fully emblazed-amazed. A kar, any kar, will not be able to avoid pot hole cluster bombs. You land on one of those babies, and no one would ever find any pieces of you in the trees because there are no trees, they were all burned or beaten to death. Whenever Normals went too far, such as teaching their kids how to communicate by two magical words, it was hard to find your way through it all.
Babies and rabies.
Bend. Over.
After this ordeal, many things would take a bad trip turn on a dirt bike where the rider was armed with a machete. Civil unrest. What does civil even mean.
We were standing with our three dirt bikes, leaning up against us, but the bikes were off. Watching Topeka burn. What was there to say. This had been the Cypress Ridge Crematorium. They took all the gold out of your mouth, and threw you into the river. We told them they only had two choices. Death by hanging, or death by one too many pill parties.
Take the Pill Party refrigerator.
It is a term still inappropriate. The desert would eventually, in two or three daze of scraping dried blood from eye sockets, dry as a bible black whipping of a sandstorm directly over Alamogordo. The White Sands and the devils book of Ashes On Your Forehead. The machetes of scorpion eyes upon us taking notes.
Topeka had got what it deserved. No one had ever seen a Harley-Davidson. It had become one of many legends. Harley-Davidson was a historic bike. All we had were dirt bikes. Yet we were dangerous. Murderous. The Normals had grown kinda lazy hazy. A little chunky waddle.
Our dirt bikes are very different from dirt bikes from the past. They’re faster. They make no sound. Equipped with Forever Batteries, the Forever Battery is about as big as a thumbnail. As in forever. Powered by raw isotopes. They made a huge impact in the lives of homo sapiens and the civilizations they had built.
We had been weapons dealer to the whole world. We don’t give a fuck about the whole world. We were the deadliest weapons. Imaginable. The .12 gauge barrel is cold steel to my rusted lips. I wither in the salacious absence of light while you hold the gun’s thick barrel up and down my throat. Dark and mesmerizing. Take any stance you want. One way is to keep the barrel by your dick. A deep aspect to all the princes of the shadows and the lips of Desert Diva’s writing loveporn on most of the planet’s canyon walls. Dystopia is filled with color. Say it to me. Dystopia is filled with color.
Refract the light yourself. Men and women with creatively stunning mindgames as distractions that consequently produced more mindgames with better distractions that became more and more sexual on an incline of data to represent what the numbers had to say. The numbers did recognize that something was out there. But some other “community” thought it looked a bit better on them. Time is running out. Put on your warpaintbitch.
You can’t say that.
What. Warpaintbitch. All cultures have exhibited wearing warpaint at some point in their evolution. Some gods are scary and they are armed.
I know things. My wife knows things, too. You wanna hear what I whisper. No. Why are we whispering. Now, I know what is out there.
The thunder and the horsemen.
All of it leads straight to death and rape. Isn’t that what war is. Gender being irrelevant. Then, being irrelevant, the Normals were simply allowed to rape us in the middle of the street, and everyone, of course, would bring a shotgun just for safety, it’s the only thing that made any sense, but they were encouraged to rape everyone in sight. The children of the Normals were taught how to rape us in their schools. We were not allowed to attend a real school. Not unless you worked there. Some Normal children had to be fed by hand. We have no color, but we are colorful.
Who are the Irish, anyway. Is é an grá an t-aon teanga amháin atá san áireamh sa deireadh. Hecuba’s bright red hair caused most males to be curiouser and curiouser.
“Curiouser and curiouser! Hecuba snarls. I want lipstick.
If there ever was a Warrior Woman, this would be Hecuba. I said open. They take our teeth. In some schools, Normals allowed us to clean the place, and do not speak, or the consequences would your garden variety of a gang rape that could last a week. Hows does that work for you.
What they call the Life is overrated.
It’s like being dragged through the Kansas desert and the fucking snakes, it killed most people but that never stopped a Normal who desired to rape you was going to rape, and the last time you fucked up, it was piano wire which leaves your back flayed to bone. Recovery was a risk. So was strangulation.
When was the last time you walked down the street with your head on shoulders. Someone else’s shoulders.
I feel better when the three of us are in bed tasting the dreams, all the Other Other’s dreams and we are in Vegas but there is no more Vegas what happened to Vegas.
WE TOOK A ROAD TRIP.
Where did you get cigarettes.
Fuck you and your wife.
She’s your wife, too.
Hecuba rolls her eyes. I’m not for sale you cheap beach bums, so what did anyone get from the experience of a romance with the ocean. We have evolved from that.
Hecuba made it three. Like sparks from some strange fire. Always fires. The old ocean is a hell hole. It ferments Full-Beach Babylon. What was left of Los Angeles was what is left of Los Angeles when it arrived on the Vegas shore. That whore. Which. One. There is no Los Angeles.
There is no Vegas, either. Unless someone was living in the ruins of what the fuck ever.
Reno. Fuck Reno.
We took a road trip to area 51 where we were supposedly meeting the man who called himself, father. We tried pretending we did not know him. We knew him. We just didn’t trust him. The bikes parked where the horses would be. Reading and talking around midnight campfires of Prozanaphene Sulfate. A gathering of welders. It was very dangerous sleeping outside on the ground. My back was a coathanger. If You Sleep With Flares Around you, it’s an old wedding trick. The bigger the snake, the bigger the take, as kids we’d slice the head off. Bull snakes will grow a new head.
It may as well be named: Area Infested With Hyenas.
It must have cost him a fortune to grow us in the vats.
He only shows up in the strange places. Why.
To impress us.
I am not impressed.
Fake it.
This is where the aliens come to die.
He can’t be serious.
Oh, yes, he can.
We help bury them right there, out into the desert. He points. Like it means something.
Old man, you rang that bell and now, we’re here. What is it you fucking want.
I want to see the men you are.
Mitya’s son was beheaded by the Normals. You. Did. Nothing.
What did you want me to do, screw it back on.
It would have been nice, Attila, if you had been around. Stealing cars that don’t go anywhere is not a legacy.
Maybe we should make a move to Tombstone, not Dodge. The train between Dodge and Chicago shipped out a lot of dirt bikes that mysteriously never made it to Chicago. The rich did have dirt bikes. Three dirt bikes to be exact. Historical dirt bikes. No gasoline. Texas and Louisiana no longer produce gasoline. No more sucking any more oil from the ground. Enough. They are kinda pretty to look at, but they’re not going anywhere. The Topeka gangs had been warned.
Normal gangs are just not that bright.
How are your radiation levels for today.
Normal.
The rich were kinda sad to look at. They tended to just stare at the ground. Everyone hated them. They’re always whining about something. Whining. Whining. Whining. It’s okay if you are moved to Antartica. A lot of people just shut up when they move to Antartica.
Those dark thunderclouds of disdained horsemen screaming through the thunder’s kingdom had brought down to their knees if you please, a trajectory, a schism an echo beneath the thunder, and the wonder of how the thing had a trajectory not unlike a desert dervish in full dervish for our ancestors who we all worship but if you were my boyband you’d be a dervish, too.
Follow the dervish.
If I get caught with a dervish, you all better run for the longtime. Whose hair’s on fire, now, Cher.
Then, there are the Irish Writers. They were allowed into the last of the boats leaving the piece of mud that was now Ireland. Some missed the boat. A punitive collage of grey and black and approbation. Lord of the Pharos. The double barrel glints a deep Recessive Blue. Uranium teeth. What more do you need to know. Or do. The black market is a friend to me and you, too. Well, maybe not quite everyone. There was delivery to the squat we use as a meeting spot. We used it two or three times a year. It stunk like seaweed vinyl, a habitation of Copperheads. It is totally wrecked. No one lives here. There are few people here for the rats to eat. Twelve gauge shotguns have never been regulated well. The delivery boy was maybe about eleven. The shotgun was broken down, and Mister Raggedy Eleven rides his horse through all the addictions kids get, their skin peels off in layers and slayers — like glue, these kids live in a paper bag. Where the sailer meds are in the ditty. No one wanted to touch it.
Oh, for fuck’s sake…
“Language.”
I’m being ordered around by a kid. What the fuck language. How much am I worth in the Post Office on the wall. Even my photograph is submerged. So this was global warming. I guess I’ll have to kick off another day.
The ocean was coming for my bike. This was unacceptable. I am going to stand my ground. It will not happen here. Sometimes these ragamuffins work for me Mister Family Man Lost in your head, you all, four thousand bones and bones and suburban homes.
I notice you like to fuck my wife.
Love, actually. I love your wife.
I think the whole thing is about brotherhood.
What is brotherhood and how much does it cost.
It’s free. It might even save you.
Who is you. I am what I say I am.
I can usually see a dust storm coming. Dust storms create their own weather. A blank, numb recidivation. This was climate change. So put on your warpaint.
I chase him and Hecuba kicks off both of us in an energy volt that bounces off the canyon walls. Driving like your mother’s lipstick just hit your lips.
Fast but perfect. The taste of lipstick was honeywax and strawberry juice grown in a food vat.
And fast was what her pussy was, too.
Slick as a click. The next day, every single pussy all over the world, turned blue.
There was a new glowing diamond in the sky. No one knew what the fuck it was. Strippers had their own versions of how it was probably paste, and not Lucy or any of her demure hallucinogenic footholds to wedge the mighty mountain up with diverse classes of psychoactive drugs — the bugabuga — that can produce altered states of consciousness by throwing bags of pills out of planes characterized by major griz griz alterations in thought, voodoo, and perception was code for being as extraordinarily committed to whispering, as well as other changes. Most hallucinogens can be categorized as either being psychedelics, dissociatives, or deliriants in the attic. Looks up. No. No. You can’t come down here. You stay in the attic. The blue diamond in the sky appeared to be glowing that way women glow in titty bars, pole dancing Tattoos Are Us.
They want your carcass dragged by mules through Dodge to the slaughterhouse and welcome my entertainments to the entertainers. But, I never give anyone what they want, and I do not give a flying fuck what they want. Kids are never born as adults, but it would be a better place if they were, entertaining.
Nothing is entertaining.
How old are you, kid. Rolls his eyes. “Sixteen.”
The lies we live on. He counted the money. It was all there.
Gun and ammunition. Deliveries Are Us. Thunder, sand, and history.
We tend to think our times are the worst times ever. Because it is. Always. That.
Are you guys going to make me have sex with you. I sighed. I could tell this was definitely a kid who needed help. The eyes were wild with I Cannot Breathe.
Kid, are you Irish.
Chests. Heaving. Hecuba smiled. He’s so cute, you little cocksucker, give me that gun. I took it from her. Thank you. Hecuba laughed. It’s all that red hair every time. Males stare. The mask goes on and then another mask goes on. Two masks. After three masks, I can guarantee you albinos need to mask even more times twenty. Because the culture at large means the Normals will exploit you, and then you will explode into a pot roast and you do not even know it. You will.
Romeo, are you done.
What is it. Usually, it’s her ass. That happens once or twice a week. Her ass. That is a broad’s ass. Language. Old School. My bad. My sad. My process.
Staring out the window. These kids would eat you alive. Fuck your language you little. I called them Literary Figurines. Usually it means they bring the guns out. The goal was to kill them all but it was frowned upon by darker sources in Rome. Most of these places were in ruins where you used to live. Mitya, Hecuba, and the Queen of Sheba: Me. The usual Suspects. Reel them in. We will always have Kansas. No one knows if we actually, exist. The Queen of Sheba is a pejorative.
Good evening. My name is Romeo Void, and I’m a waife.
Welcome Romeo Void.
Wrong town. Nothing but shattered dreams. That is what I taste most nights in any one of them. You said you’d die for me.
Look at me straight in the eye, Hecuba, I double dog dare you.
“I’ll do it naked.”
Will someone get my wife a coat, please.
They’re all looking at us.
Let them look.
SOMETIMES WE GO TO THE DESERT WHERE WE DANCE THE BANGO TANGO.
We three dance together in the Kansas Desert. I flip that red head around on rocks. Dance, Hecuba, dance. Why, Romeo. That would be a question no one wanted to answer. Were we real. Validation was another one of those things that had taken a long way home and lost again. What about me do you value. Nothing. Wrong number. Wrong noose. Every town was the wrong town. The entire planet was a tar slime of who knew what makes a fucking petition calls the mayor a juju from Baton Rouge. New Orleans juju was the skull of Motel Six.
No one really knew what a motel was and why there were six of them.
Are you mad.
Yes. The Mad King of Bling.
A guy from Wichita, Kansas with a cigarette. We need pills. Just pills by the handful. They threw bags of pills from planes until. There were no places. What was place. All places seemed to be the memory of a wizard.
Free drugs for everyone.
Who cares what kind of pills they are. They’re pills. A hundred ships a day.
I am Motel Six. I am who I say I am.
PROVE IT.
He doesn’t have to prove it prove it is the last place you want to prove. Anything.
The Biggest Secret of all. I am a fraud. I have no idea what I am doing.
Nothing like a dervish.
Kid. Look at me. A changeling. The changelings can be defeated. It was kinda fun. I would take pity on them and throw them some fungal bread crumbs. This albino kid knew way too much.
Hecuba licked his ear.
Why haven’t we recovered from the dope wars. Who is hiding albinos. No decorum. No respect. No hope among the hopeful. It came from a summer’s day. Hope being hope was not unlike cosmology itself. Stuff happens. My turn to roll my Jesus eyes to recognize, the obvious. Someone sacraligious drains our eyeballs at night.
Oh, what do you do.
I am a car thief. What do you do, Tybalt. We burned our bridges down.
Usually, they bugger off. This one did just that.
Bugger on. Bugger off. Nothing had worked. One more time. Boom. There was another war sinking into another appropriation. We had to have a twelve gauge in New Orleans. Don’t get it wet. Look at all the smuggling going on here. Boats and Taxes. You might have to defend yourself from an army.
More like a navy.
Like swimming in the darkness. You can carry shotguns quite openly. They are very dangerous. Who. Is going to fuck with you when you are holding a sawed off, double barrel twelve gauge shotgun. Yeah, girl. It will knock you on your ass. Even if you are Irish. Don’t write about it.
They write about every fucking bottle unplugged with cork, what are you doing.
Mitya has to keep track of me. I drain him.
This from my brother who knew exactly what I was doing. I had my diamond saw. I love that saw.
Dreamtasters are very odd even for albinos. Otherwise, we’re sawing the barrel in the squat down to the desire of risk, and how desire walks the walk, and most of us are still talking that talk, even in whispers, we stand before you, entirely irrelevant. Flashlights. Naked. Again.
And hard as that shotgun. This was how everyone lived. Sugar and I have scoured everything.
That was the exact moment I saw something walk by the roof of the building across the street. What the fuck.
A fat albino with a drum. And a kid in Spiderman pajamas. Sugar, what year is this just another hallucination our work is never over. We lit that window up like the squat would burn but it kinda smoldered.
Spider kid was out there.
Grieving over what it had been and never will happen in any circumstance. History does not repeat itself. Much. Small and hot steel shavings. The room smelled not too unlike the surface of the sun. The old red sun. This new blue thing was nothing anyone would take home to Mother. It’s not even warm. But it’s big. Now, a sawed off double barreled shot gun sporting Jesus, individualism, and Educational Master’s of Ceremonies Where Is My Whispering, I’m a Kar thief. My wife, Hecuba, is a Kar thief. My brother, Mitya, is a Kar thief, too. Eat me. Areola leaks fire. She slapped the kid across the face. He was going to cry. We are hard core criminals. This kid was nothing. The three of us are married. Hecuba has enormous tits.
Can I say tits.
No. How red were they.
I am saying jack nothing until a lawyer gets inside this stage and cage or we go Manacle In The Chair. Old school was better than no school at all. And yet. Old stuff is entropy. Entropy is eternity. There is no such thing as eternity. It’s still exploding. Then what. The old stuff is the new stuff. As Attila the Hun so apply observed in Berlin in 1933 at the birthday party for James Joyce.
Sweet Pea. Do you believe in miracles.
You are not using proper language. No one knows who’s talking.
I spit on the railroad tracks a timeline of Jesus Juice.
Mitya, I’m Special, and that makes me special.
Does that mean, I have to be special, too.
God forbid.
Does that mean…
No.
Who gives a flying fuck who said it. Sometimes, it’s obvious. Sometimes, I would rather it all go away. It’s the march of progress and literature leads to the left, the left, the left, right, left. Sometimes, it’s not obvious at all. Why. Ireland.
They did it first. I love what they did. History is a very crazy witch.
Something is going on with this shit and answers do not seem forthcoming. It is never forthcoming because Winds, Wizards and Winos will not budge one widget. It was about the widgets. Always. They’re kinda cute, and I hope they leave the room by midnight. The more widgets and sex workers you have the more widgets will allow you to put it (whatever) into fourth gear. And hit it. Where did you get those cigarettes, Romeo Void.
I lit one. Who are you to me. Your commanding officer. My what. You heard me. Fuck you. I never liked high school. Not one fucking minute of it.
You didn’t go to high school.
I didn’t.
You don’t have a commanding officer. You’re it.
I want a present.
Oh, for Christ sake, somebody go get him a present. Shut up. We are getting you a present. No tantrums because you know what will happen digging graves. People elected you because they thought they would get a kar. Remember: Free Kars for Everyone. Per fiscal policy.
I could not believe what I was hearing. There really were other criminals who were more stupid than I was. I never told them to do all the things they went and fucking did in the name of the Pope of Rome.
He was my Pope.
He’s been making dirt bikes for the gangs. I want that coat thing. Remember that historic rat coat. Sugar is good at some things. Funny things.
I think we are all going to die this time. I mean, who is going to like this motel.
Does everything have to be a motel.
Louisiana has one of two.
How many bedbugs does that make you you you.
You are who you say you are.
You dry off fresh from the vat, and suddenly with no warning whatsoever, you kinda wake up and you’re a badass cowboy.
Everyone wants you. Throw out gender. Throw out sexuality. Throw this out, and that’s why we have vats.
I still think it. The Pope was involved in so many civil wars. I have pictures of that guy in a car you would not believe. I want that hat.
We’ve been stealing jewelry from them for years. But why. There were no roads. They were clusterbombedfucked. So where could people drive. Up and down the driveway. Around and around the backyards. Come on Aunt Winnie, we’re going for a drive. No, I’m going. Who’s driving. I’m driving.
No, I’m not going.
Why.
I’m Irish, you fool.
Another cigarette to prove I am worth another look and look at that ass.
Women love my ass.
I love your ass. We were all innocent and flew miles, miles, miles. You do remember, Mitya, that we are brothers.
Romeo, is there any way we could sedate you.
I stole that kar, too. It’s Karma. What goes around comes around. The French Quarter has the best juju cards, as always. I only drink Jesus Juice. I started drinking it in the Navy. Whose Navy. My Navy. Did you know that when you go down to Duval by the ruins of the levee, there’s a shop. Not a chop shop. A voodoo shop. The Gris Gris.
Who knows what Old School even means.
Old ideas. Old math. Old equations. Old vernacular. Old school never tamed them. They began to rape us at age four. That’s disgusting but ordinary people are going to rebel.
Only they never do. Sitting around bonfires singing songs and doing obscene things with hot dogs.
That was a summer song. Summer is over. It’s all the same season, and not a good one. Nobody cares. Some stuff just is. We are the resistance. I take it from what I read about the past in the archive that brothers cannot marry. Fiddledeedee. Three ways. And then, fuck’em. Before the Dope wars, I am led to believe that in the past, this was frowned upon rather vigorously. And.
Dope wars. NarcoStatesMates. A pit bull from Hell.
Many males are sterile and impotent. I’m back on the chain gang. Get back on the pain train. That kid with the Spiderman pajamas and the drummer who he came with. The last dope war turned the testicles of men with holes from termite mounds and ant eaters, hideous. I know all your dreams. Open your mouth and stand still. I crawl into them and then, slowly release this tea in a tempest. The albinos slaves could be raped in the middle of the street. Holding your sanity was the biggest struggle. Sometimes, the other people in your life can step in. Bring a net.
The Normals raped us through war and peace, but there were signs of things that had to change. I put the double barrel in my mouth and tasted it. It had no dreams to invade. If that doesn’t tell you something, I would be kinda speechless to explain it. Let alone interpret it. All of you are suicidal. You were who you said you were.
The news was some dancing girls in swim suites. Mind your language. It was war. Fucking war. The Normals had to go.
I wanna be your lover, Mitya. You are already my husband. Let’s take all their jewels.
TAKE NOTES, YOU2, HECUBA. You get a pad and a pencil and you take notes what else would you use you are either who you say you are. Or. You know those dog chains they sell in pet stores. I had a pet like that.
Shut up, Romeo.
She flashed those red eyes at me. That old love light. We were teenagers in Baton Rouge at the county fair. We stole a lot of cars how did you steal them we exploded them for their parts right there. As a marginal, we’re gonna have dancers and prancers and crashers, and slashers, bands and pink smoke, boybands disco globes, our work is never over. Never over. Never breathe pink smoke are you deaf. My oxygen mask just suddenly appeared. What are the percentages. Risks. Investment. How many guns do you want to acquire besides all of them. We did all the things we were told to do. It didn’t fucking work. Earth to Romeo. Let’s go tango.
A palace, a piper, a song, and a some bling. A penchant, desire, and I know what I sing. Get up. Get up. The tight ropes at the circus is made from string.
Gruel showed us how to pick pockets. All you need is a computer.
We were stealing cars for people who would ride them a whole block. And back again. There were no roads left. There had been no roads for a long time, Cher. Nevertheless, we stole bikes and broke them so someone else can fix it to what it used to sell it back to the underground dealership it was stolen from. Get a little Krazy, Dayzie. Blood was spilled at the levee. All your Second Selves can do anything they want. No rules. No ransom.
The dark metal taste where only the edges of the hell of a thing was a thing. The shotgun still existed. It has never changed once since it was invented. There was an element to it about ten seconds before you were pulled into yourself, tasting a cruel gravitas like a dick you swallowed all the way to grit. It was a frozen apparatchik I had never tasted before.
It was the stuff of Orpheus with his lute, writing plays and Purple Haze and songs for daze. I have now heard all the rock and roll that exists, dance with me, the literary lute. A thing for palaces, wars, temples, Neanderthals, iron, copper, fire, slaves, slaves, and princes dark and hungry as a chichichich Tongues and Cobra.
Back on the banana boat. Filled with the Irish who had escaped. Lucky them. The Scotts had haggis but we took a rain check, and basically left them on one old mountain in Scotland. Nobody move.
That is who we were as homo sapiens. We were murderous, and the Neanderthals say thank you for the genocide in the gravy of the discontent.
Spacetime does not travel at the speed of light. Spacetime doesn’t travel at all.
Sugar has been so impatient with me trying to teach a mystic dimwit shit. How much energy does it take for planets to circulate even stay resplendent in the Digital subtexts pushed hard on accumulated black holes of what else.
Everything in the universe is its own place. Let me explain to my dear readers that all perception as a rule has no association with Uranus. Third Grade Boy homo sapiens sapiens has a bit of a problem with all of it. The reality is not that spacetime draws galaxies into a nest of margins. Bat Man, My Billionaire, I saw all those movies cry me a river. Spacetime is a lot of junk. And, I gotta say, the universe is butt ugly. Dull grey rock. Gas. Methane. Snow. That never melts. I have seen all of this in the archive. We call her Sugar. She keeps throwing stuff at us. Sugar thinks it’s best we know some of the compelling stuff which is often a different take because Sugar takes no prisoners. You study this shit or else. It is now addictive. I am exhausted with it. I want to know more, and more, and more. Sugar is happy to oblige. War to Peace.
Burn all bridges down. No one can drive across them anyway.
Mitya was into risk as an entirely economic entity.
Hecuba does her nails. Do not let it fool you.
She loves us because we’re cute. Mitya studies percentages in order to know what who was making what whom bedazzled the minions, and it’s always an eye opener.
If he wasn’t my twin with his own slew of second selves, got us out of there when people starting coming around with stories, ropes, chains, the rotunda. We had a lot of second selves around. Some get hungry. Someone gets all of us in trouble.
And I have tasted every dream anyone here in Dodge has ever had. It’s still darkness. Everyone take off your clothes, get naked, now hold each other do it, by Jesus, do it. They formed a group of albinos grieving.
That warmness of the albino body. No one sees color because there is no color to see. So you remain unseen, unrecognized, uncovered.
Nothing beats grieving for a while. They are to record. Why do people ask me about this stuff, and I have no idea what they were wanting to talk about because what was done was done.
Good times. Undone. Sometimes we all just stand together and straight eyeball to eyebrow digging a hole in the sun. It was the last time. Everything blinded and dancing at the waterfront on the dock in New Orleans, you all come down, now, juju. Can’t go on. Everything is fucked. You’re only looking for attention.
I want to fuck Hecuba. Shrugs.
He does like attention. We are the people who are forced to listen to his revenge on them, Mister Creative.
He has no idea what he is doing.
You do know, he talked back then.
Out loud.
First, some Normal kids cut his throat. They took his larynx out. It was another score to settle with my Number 12. It’s hard to miss with the fucking thing and I want to register a complaint with Whoever, my Number 12 is seditious. You want to kill someone because your great disappearance no one believed it. I would die for you.
I want that. I know it’s crazy batshit. But I need someone I would die for you. Whoever you are, Mister Bullet it could get a small arrow split hold that. Everything is all right there in your homo homo sapiens airplane ride to nowhere. Perhaps if we had not encouraged you. Mushrooms. We should never encourage you. Cigarettes only for the camera. After that that girl, that girly girl. Perhaps we would not be in this pickle of a dickle. I have your number.
I have everyone’s number. I have everyone’s information got your number, you all. I need escorts because California. It gets ugly out there, Mister Counselor.
But. Are brothers real.
No. I would die for him.
You gotta go do what you wannabe, baby but it rocks, you know. How about Is Global Warning Real Enjoy the Weather. It was a very unpopular idea. Not a good combination but you never know. We need more albino dancers down here. They spend the whole summer in waiting to release the wolves. Sometimes, you are compelled to step aside. This would never happen here. We are told these engagements with Other Species (who the fuck knows) would begin with curiosity. The wreckage of setting the dust storm on fire, righteous fire, lending whirling dervish why.
Some asshole killed three, well, four Normal boys and the freeway of love in any way shape of curves baby. Make me a Scotch. Give me the bottle.
That was when they had traffic. That was when Crop That Top Baby Riding round and round the Backyards Love Machine. Freeway, my albino ass.
The Other Species did not think that. But no. The Other Species came for us, terrorized us, and the perp grabbed your mechanic who has just become a father bother. Where did you come from, Baby.
Nowhere but I love you. Love the hair. And the eyes. I got it really bad in junior high school. Poverty awaited. From there, we crawdaded, swamp buggers to survive.
Isn’t that was all of this hurt and pain come on just pour boiling oil over all the farmland, and you have lost the Big Time and Vegas all gone. We either move up or we move down.
Why do these people, the Normals, hack us just for the thrill of it. Where albinos are slashed and hacked at by Mickey Shivers himself. Inspecting his slaves his finger in your ass, your fire until you go just busted get in the backseat, Maxine. Slavery is where you found it. Ot it found you. If I found him, I was inclined to chop his head off. Let them photograph that. Becoming involved in sadomasochism is de Sade himself, his body was down in the bowels of Do Not Touch That Button.
WELCOME TO MISS SUGAR’S HOUSE, YOU ALL. Miss Sugar is the archive. She lives in a ruins of a building, Bomb Shelter a Go Go. The repository of totally useless information. Sugar rules her not so little world. Iron fists and pussy. Someone had to write on a blackboard. Do not fuck with Sugar. It would be frowned upon. The Sugarland Express and California Club Car.
Back on the train. Most homo sapiens sapiens were dead. No one really knew how many homo sapiens there were on the planet. The mirror behind the past, just above the speed of light. One following the other. We guessed that we were with some team headed to the dope mines. Some albinos never lasted a day. The dope wars started the plunge towards way past decline until there really was Nowhere To Go. We did not know how a lot of old tech population numbers of years ago worked. Let alone how to turn it on. Some tech did work but only women could rev it up. Or turn it on. No one knew why. Why do they have to know why. Bugs Bunny. Why, why, how much you all going to spend, anyways, Doc. There was still something of humanity left to deal with. The world had changed again. And again. And again. We call it geographic time. As opposed to spacetime. During the Paleozoic, water arrived. Nine million years of sheer rain. Our species did not not exist. It’s hard to see the earth without us in it. Our brains are presupposed to believe that the brain itself has no memory, therefore we exist to exist. Not so fast. Therefore, we are many things. We have managed to hang on.
We endure. Where are the lines between luck and luck and luck and fuck. Handy dandy. You cannot have it both ways. We make angels in the snow. There was no snow. Kansas was a desert.
Sometimes the threads we are hanging onto break like Oh, Damascus. The name alone gave albinos pause.
Disease still kills us, and we have no idea what it is.
It’s not rocket science. We did all the work. We belong to you. You own us. Until you don’t.
Humanoids have come and gone. Fifty thousand years. You are mongering the whipper snappers. The last dope war had killed most of the earth’s favored guests. The earth does not care if you come or go. It knows nothing about the little species, oh, us. We mean nothing to it. We rape the skies. We rape the dirt. We rape the mountains. We rape the oceans. We rape one another. We rape and rape and rape the rivers. We eat other life forms.
Consider the source.
I have studied all of this with Sugar. Sometimes I am overwhelmed and lost in the stream of it. Plug into Sugar, and if you are lucky, she shows. She’s erratic. A huge thing. She’s funny. Crank her up, she filled with stories, madness, genocide, light, and tomorrow.
The world is wrapped around your dreams, and I will drain you of all your guilt.
The dreaming room smelled like someone’s stagnate basement and the smell of cement. We plugged it into energy from an air turbine on steroids. All of these places tasted like the meanness of that gun. There is never much of you left on the subway floor.
All my mates no fun.
My bad. He’s coming for you. He tastes blood for it. Something is out there.
There are a billion stories about surprise is surprised. Basic physics.
The rumors about what existed in those old under water railroad tracks are true. I believe in all conspiracy theories, they are the mad, and we should be celebrating, not muzzling the mad because they will still be mad. To the mercy of a corpse’s scream. All corpses scream. As did trees. All corpses scream. All corpses dream. The dream machine. I should know — I’m a Dreamtaster — we are few in numbers. If you like, I can taste all your darker shadows. I can go through your ear, my dear. Or any other hole you might have. It will only tickle a little. Maybe a bit more than a little. Maybe a lot more of little. Isn’t it krazy daisy when they — who are these people they’re voices, they’re voices — bring in the next one.
The desert is an ocean. No Big Rains. Keep looking up. It was the Time Of Contemptuous Repudiation. Toi, avec ces yeux aux Couleurs de la Terre, rentre chez toi, tu es la lumière portée dans ton cœur par les ondes de l'espace-temps des doigts collants plus complexes que la gravité. You all. We always said the swamps will be the first to go. But no one listened because no one listens.
Humanity did not know anything about what happens more than twenty five miles away. More than that, you’re in a foreign country. Deep diving into starlight, all light is starlight. That was about as much There Was No Center to gravity or gravitas. Most people ignore the bones of whoever because there were such great heaps of them bones everywhere. You can make soup again. Or just eat plain old dirt. Most deep space is filled with Toi, avec ces yeux aux Couleurs de la Terre, rentre chez toi, tu es la lumière portée dans ton cœur par les ondes de l'espace-temps des doigts collants plus complexes que la gravité.
The swamps of righteousness. Means you, too, Cher. Cher, you need to call home. Your house is on fire and where are we tonight, Cher. I told you.
Humanity was sparse and getting sparser. In what had been America, there were about ten places where human beings emerged. We were all at war. You used to call them gangs. We are the story and the history of the earth.
Tribes. Oh, happy day.
Culture. Sing happy songs.
Religion (quite weird).
War wind. I took a drink of something poison. Us. Just poison us. We’re tired.
Education. Nothing to lose.
The shingles move around the house. Havoc is geology. Most of the planet is geography. Like a wounded animal casts off the insects with its tongue its tongue. I know what you dreamed of yesterday.
I do not have a handle on what tomorrow is. I am afraid. I have whiskey, though. Whiskey made from pencils. They have never called my bluff.
I call. Cards on the table. I have never lost at cards. Not even once.
We are the history of blackjack. Ladies, place your bets.
Nine million years of rain. Our ancestor is rain.
Go stand in it. Look up. Open your mouth of tit. Your eyes are made of rain. Drink. Drink deeply and silently. Drink rain. Warm rain. Down your baby throat. Something out there is going on. The resistance had spread. Crackdowns on things like sit ins and petitions and fucking with your electric grid. There is now the drifting of diaspora. The slow walking with the slow. One foot at a time. Dirt bike town would boiled over. There was just too much hurt in one place. I wanted to capture that. With revenge. You dive down deep into some’s brain. You taste it, you record it, you tell it that you’re sorry.
You pull out.
We had never seen snow. It was all going tribal. Sometimes, I would read stuff on the raggedy Internet. Which flips off every day at least a thousand times. Many people were only hanging on. No more babies. We could not afford to parent them. We could not afford to educate them. We could not pay their parking tickets. People do whatever they want. Radiation or no radiation. It was a minority opinion. That we could be corralled at all. Denial is the sunshine of your shriveled life. Your dick and your lives are memories themselves. Even the weather and the heat were ruthless, enraged, and restitution.
I am not asking anyone to like me. Stop. Legends and mythologies are narratives that have lived beyond the timeline called Pick One.
Do not do that. Get out of my face, warriors. Warrior meat. I never willingly reinvent the wheel. When people hate on you, people hate on you. When people hate on you, they love you. They love hating you.
They become invigorated and all of them were spies.Unsymmetrical seas tangled up in swamps of weeds, Creole Tenderfoot.
I don’t reinvent. I invent. The Normals were breeding babies in a big hurry. But their vats were breaking down. It’s about the mistakes. The accidents. Evolution itself is an accident. For every kid born, there are nine other ones who never survived it. It was a radical notion. Babies with wicked claws, babies with radiated spit. Babies with four feet. Babies who were butt holes. Butt holes dancing in the middle of the street. Butt reality. You call the shots. You decide what you do in life. To be someone other than the brand given to you by someone else. Name yourself. Be yourself. Learn how to run fast. You better run. You better, Cher. You better.
The Sand Hills were just south of Dodge.
From Jesus Juice to China. People will talk that smooth talk to Father Christmas, too. Mine, a You Are Your Freezer Burn, yourself, just one more piece of historical fame.
We were making history. And we knew it. The infirmity of the whip torn by the melting of the throat to swallow the errors of ordinary men and succor with who knew of the slaughter house of regret. After. Regret.
I do not know what my brother, Mitya, knew (if anything) about that fly over it, rain and buzzards. I do not know what my brother and my wife knew, either. We argued. About what is real. A big bad box of fun things. Then, we fuckiefuck until the rain comes. It is a mistake to assume that rain never rains or reins in the howling of the dead.
Not so fast, Cowboy. Sometimes, I walk all around the lonesome naked desert, all by my naked ass self, and if a war doesn’t kill you, the desert will always try. Desert Toads’ skin when licked induces hallucinations. Century old video cams that had rusted into the color of Mars. Achilleus wants to own more hyenas. Yes. I kiss hyenas on the lips. My tongue in a hyena’s mouth. They are in mortal fear of me. No one knows why. I have pointed them at certain Normals. Millions and millions of hyenas. Their dreams in the tiger’s den, mewing, little dogs and socks. Standing pools of ancient glib. Kansas smelled like hyena blood meat shit. We killed them and the desert was saturated. No one knows where they came from and what hyenas did you know and when did you know it.
The hyenas loved me. Still.
Who is that Spider Man pajamas and that kid, and the fat man with the banging of that big drum. What the fuck. Songs of lost languages. All those languages at risk had vanished. Not unlike flocks of Geese that used layover in a briny lake lost in the Sangre de Christos, tell them: It’s hyena tonight folks, sorry.
The Normals all throw food at the wall because maid albino slaves converge to clean it up.
It’s hyena tonight folks, sorry.
People need to eat. People have to drink blood.
It’s hard to kill the very tough cactus, and all that purple ooze of magic back on the chain gang, Baby. Hecuba swivels them randy hips. And I do hear people eat it. People need to eat. My feet were not unlike some gnarly marley toes, the apocalypse of cow hide. I bought a shotgun in New Orleans. Just before that old sea witch unhinges plunder. A horseman rides from beneath the thunder. Horsemen with breath and seditious wonder. A lot of albinos were from the South. The albino slaves of the North, worked naked in the winter. Louisiana was one thing. All we knew was the land of rape. All we knew was to plot. To gather and to plot. You had to be willing to give your life to it, your life to it, do the legends and the myths sustain you, rock you, Miss Bliss, or your red pussy to the lips, I love you, somebody I can kiss, I am so lost.
Come to me, Babe, sit like this.
The Chicago gangbangs were rumors. No one really knew. Spies. I need spies, where are my spies, my spies.
Mitya rolled his eyes skies and spies.
Earth to Romeo. Earth to Romeo Void. Don’t come back here with that hyena meat, you all.
You don’t cook, Hecuba the heat was hot. She showed my brother her tits.
Mitya, will you be my lover. Good times.
We’re married. Remember.
I wanted him to remember. Are you on that purple rage again.
I’m cured. They cured it.
There is no cured it. Your cities are an evil dust.
I do not know why people keep coming here. I am not sure what they wanted to join. Gone in your head again. The ha ha has no plans, no, pots, no pans. What if I just didn’t want to get up some morning.
You would be arrested.
Arrested for what.
For being a lazy slut. Jailed for giving the enemy a few hyenas to feast on. It’s okay. Just fuck me.
They will jail you for that, too.
How many cheap hotels have we lived in.
I’ve lost count.
“We’ve seen things out those dust encrusted, dusk scratched, and sand soon enough, through those windows of a sip of something boiling sea through those windows. Predation by the second. We were only one breed of them and they will swear on bricks that it’s never, ever, ever enough. There were only two humanoid albinos who knew what I knew. Bring me some drinks downstairs and you all work to god damn we cannot do this day and night or a house will fall you where do you think you are.
Did he take his pills.
No.
Well, now we know what happened. Those pills are murderous. They pour pills on us from planes.
Not anymore.
Dead albinos. In the sun. Take that walk downstairs and dancing, dancing with the hyenas, the twirls, girls, the cops, the pearls. We sneaked around at night to drag the bodies home.
I put my hands up and ran swift as stars.
Who would outrun star after star. Them two would. I would be straggled along behind the line and the time.
Albino slaves were naked in the blood splattered snow of red dots like cough cherry lozenges on Normal Baby’s birthday cake. Normal Baby’s hehe gift was shooting any albino he could pick to be murdered in cold blood, and Baby could hold the gun and blow someone’s brains out. Someone had to clean it up. Clean it up. Clean it up.
Say please.
And we had to stand there, naked, forced to watch. I focused out the window on a little golden ball on top of the Normal’s flag. The autistic gods were all powerful. I could see into that golden ball on the top of a flag pole as if it was the awesome ass thing, a dimension I could crawl into, curl up, and be allowed to die in.
I could stare at it for a solid week, but I forced myself to never stim at all. My heartbeat was the stim.
I can control it just like I can control the Jack Daniels and the pills they throw by the ton where we grab them just like the slaves we are. Stuffing them into our greedy mouths in the jesus mud. We are animals. We are animals. We are not above them just because we enjoy eating them. Chop your own chicken’s head off. Albinos down on their wooden knees in that wet earth, pawing at the pills and eating them. The albinos had no water because they had no water. And they were albinos who were right up there with fruit flies.
Are we having albino death thoughts again. If I could do punctuation, I would. But it doesn’t interest me. I am not a fucking fruit fly. I write what I write. I am a failure at predicting risk assessments. I climb mountains I only just met that day. An embarrassment to humanity. Or what was left of it. There had to be other tribes just like Dodge, I can’t say if this is good or bad. Whether it works or not.
I knew this: A dirt bike never falls apart. But you have to get on it to know that.
Are you going to be lost in space all day, Romeo Void.
I will be walking on haze until the daze is done. Click. The lights go on. The sewers are relics. New Orleans like a deboned fish. Any rain at all. Over and over again. What is with this long farewell to anything our species had known or know about whatever existed out there but for the hyenas.
He’s lost inside the hallways of the whorehouse. He lived in one in Mazatlan.
My brother’s sarcasm was like last year’s oil change. I am from the vats. It was the vats that made me the most infamous albino thief in Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge. Is only. There. There is a there there. In the vats, you think you can hear the gossip in a vat. You think what the vat wants you to think. It will raise the stakes somewhere in the back of your unraveled head. Toi avec le gris-gris dans le trou du cul.
Being from the vats can so define you. There is nothing anyone else can do. It’s like being beaten up with baseball bats wielded by the powerless. Where are you from and when did you know it. I am from the vats, motherfucker, you know the Swamp Vats. Toussaint’s Vats, Inc. of Baton Rouge, vats for everyone. Some fishes we keep. The rest get thrown into Vat Precious so they can fish us.
No one I know is ready for a fight. We bite that hook anyway. No one wants to spend another ten to twenty years, in another vat. All the brown fish tubes feeding us were a live wire mess of a spaghetti dinner bouncing like a carcass in a lake so clear you could see the top of Everest in the fluttering of the freezing encrusted wind. The extremes of weather decide where you would live or not live. The rain was the act of a deviant.
I will blunder you cold and crippled with the outraged deaths of whores and princes. And when that death called corruptions, religions, authority, and More Entangled Than A Barrel Of Fishhooks.
All of us knew what Vat Precious was. Chicken bullion. The fish that were pulled out of that dungeon hole could arrive with brains outside their skulls. Brand spanking new. Looked like a Barracuda with beach balls. Smelled like one, too. Mitya and I knew all the fish swish in that vat. Some of them had been in the vat for over a decade. People just forgot about you because most of them were poisonous junkies to begin with.
High you all, I’m Romeo Void, and I am here to be a testament, I am from the vats. It was not a pretty picture. But it is one Truth. I do remember the vats. It’s not unlike being stupid. I am stupid. Ask anyone. Alligator gumbo. Me and the devil.
I was aware of my twin. I do not know why Mitya was so afraid, he needed some protection.
We married him because he was frozen in time over his dead son. An infant. He was with us and he would go for a little dance with Miss Antsy Pants. You would do that with and for your brother. Or, Cher, did I say brother. What self are we today. De Sade or de Christo. You choose. You can’t say both.
He says both. What the fuck ever.
I am just me today. My second selves went shopping.
There is no such thing. As a me. As a second self. They come and go like vodka tonics.
But where’s the punctuation.
I’m from Ireland.
I’m from Romania.
I’m from Outer Mongolia
I pick refrigerator number three.
I have learned through jacking into the archive, that in the past you went way too far into slavery if you said the word brother — connected in more ways than one — because, well, you know. It was suspicious. Why. Because the Normals are titillated. By anything that moves. Incest and I’m way past go collect two hundred dollars and sell Park Place. The archive was underground in all of the rubble that Dodge City, Kansas had suffered in the Dope Wars.
The rising of the water was righteous.
The rabbit hole is always out there. Oh, Sugar, you might have avoided one. But no one hole had ever emerged from the hole of their second hole in the rabbit community.
You are meant to be confused. The bimboboybrain is constantly assessing risk. And we pretend we have no limbic system. I knew lots of rabbit holes in New Orleans. I know a beer garden that’s a hole inside a hole. I am not allowed. In New Orleans or any of those New Orleans bars what bars. Oh, those bars. I don’t go into those bars anymore which is its own rabbit hole. A symphony. Is that an albino sitting at the bar.
Sugar knew a lot of stuff. Stuff we did not know. Someone had collected a vast ocean of data and what our histories were and where this data came from. Sugar was absolutely obsessed with all the shit Sugar knew and if no one downloaded at least some of this historical analysis, Sugar would explode. Homo sapiens sapiens would get a schizophrenic taste, but some of us had tasted Sugar before. All sugar on the planet was devoured by hyenas.
Bingo goes female. Must be a mistake of genderblendering and away we go.
Genderblending was what I did. I genderblended. I was a kar thief. Who had been genderblended twins of Looking At Myself. You should see his dick. There are no roads.
Memphis Rawlins was a lowdown rabbit hole thief himself. He would return from the Sugar hole (I do not want to know how) with treasures.
Are you sure you’re not a Krow.
No, I’m a computer: Ladies and gentlemen: The AA group will now be seated.
There were no seats (no one knew how to make them). There were a few antiques, but albinos did not know about antiques because they knew about escaping with the raw skin on their backs and burn the numbers off and throw the GPS into a radiation incinerator. We sat upon the ground of kings. Right now. Not back to the vats again. Toussaint’s Paradise Islands got old Toussant’s alligators, the backyard special. Baton Rouge vats were lugged all the way to Dodge. I saw to it. Heave Ho.
The Normals have warrants out on everyone.
Vat people were exactly like NonVat people. But no one believes it. Because we are mainly clueless.
Tuasaint’s Daycare. We need babies set on stun. I set my sights trained way past everyone. Stun into the mouth of sons and suns. The blue sun was voracious. There was panic in the streets and millions of people jumping from buildings. I saw the vids jacked in. I think that’s when I fucked a Normal in the middle of a dustridden whirl of bone and silicon and the wind will whiplash your face with razorblades and the Gris Gris.
If you think I am going down that hole with you, you are sadly, sadly the hehe. We all knew him. Singing whispers over every bridge. Take notes. Take flight. Take me to your Caves of Bats And Underpants. A sun’s soul is his wishing well of gravity machines. For some, soul is their shackles unshackled and the barricades. We butchered Normals and fed them gasoline. A long slow french kiss sucky suck and blow. You know how to blow, dontcha. Goes boom, and no, I have no conflict with it. I have now read de Sade. The bastille with its bed lights and the kind of lantern death is made of soap.
Human rawraw.
Memphis Rawlins can recite Plato. Or anyone else among our ancients as they whisk through the history of literature. I connected his lit net directly to Sugar’s net. We are fossils. Empty shells. Worms. Our genetic evolution carried around with us for hundreds of thousands of years as markers that tell us who we were and why. We are the unconventional locked in culture. It’s a prison if you make it one. Like nine million years of rain. I do not think of the universe as sentient. The universe wants to kill. You. Me. Everything it can.
Pausing. It’s a prison. They only cut a head off once a day. He’s coming for you. I think I could handle Mickey Shivers.
We wanted to rebuild culture. We wanted to change it. Change or die. Most choose death. Most choose death because there was not one good thing to being alive. Everyone had lost someone. Most were shipped to the Dodge slaughterhouses. No one was supposed to know. About the dead babies with fistulas and there were brains in the gut. It was a mystery. Flippers for arms. It almost made life bearable. Some of us loved mysteries. Some of us definitely did not.
You had to stand on the bus.
What we knew was urban Louisiana. What we also knew was stuff like fishing, teasing gators then run. And stealing kars. I had never been to Dodge. I thought I might be the Sheriff because it would be easier stealing Kars if you were the law. I am my own law. I am my own hyena. Someone has to do it. I would never go into the drug trade. At least, I had values. Until I had no values. Life is overrated.
Who says I have to live it.
No suicide, remember.
Humans are such hard work, Mitya, and I just want to spank them silly.
We would be the ones in charge now. But we had never built a culture. How do you build a culture anyway. Pounding nails. Pounding heads against a wall. Pounding ideas to see if they worked when wrecked. One caveat: It was double duty. Pounding their ideas with hammers and nails into the walls of Trader Vics. It was overtly revolutionary. The weather was always an editorial. Not unlike that way they make a coffin shut tighter than Mitya’s asshole. The bones of hope are grasping at elusive shadows. So much for straws. Show me you have nothing to lose.
Not a problem, he he.
A man walks into a bar.
No. No.
A man walks into a whorehouse.
A man was thrown into the street from the same whorehouse bar. The bouncer wipes his hands together. The dust of time. Particles are people. People are particles. The most fundamental particles are incredibly short-lived bingo games. D is for Dickhead. “I have a big D.”
Bingo Ringo. What I read in Sugar is that they ran out of toilet paper about a century ago. The Motel Six Era. This is where Jesus Juice was invented in a vat. The one from the Proterozoic.
I always wondered what toilet paper was. A paper made of a toilet or the other way around. I know what makes Jesus Juice. A cup of sperm in the blender. I kid blenders. Me and the devil I am always dancing with.
Sugar makes me watch hundreds of newsreel reruns of a lady with Mrs Big Hair piled high as hair spray can fly. Soft landing. This was ancient history.
What the fuck happened to you people.
Sugar, I think I am the one who asks the questions.
I wanted to know to know what Disaster Economics means and who led that revolution with all that big hair, and suddenly thousands of Normal women with tall, tall, tall hair I thought it all might float away. Hairspray will do that. Bleach will turn your hair bee hives. And then, she had it died a nice mousey brown like the Thames. A pharmacy at Oxford. It’s like a sail. The physics chaos theory has to be available and happening for other functions to occur. When scientists measure their masses by adding up the asses and momenta of everything they decay into. Physics is everything. Homo sapiens do not get it. Bring in the next one.
Good times. Outrage over truth. It’s what people have always wanted. You walk out on the stage and you fucking give them what they want is always revenge.
Always. Eternity there is no such thing as eternity. People always think the ghetto bubble they live in will save them. Nothing we could think of was going to save us. That wretch, The Wind was not backing down. Sugar was resolute.
You did it to yourselves.
We had put too much gunk into the clouds. The Normals had been to outer space. That group never came back.
They just kept on going.
My people are slaves. Still. A Dystopian Utopia. A Vomitoriam. We are wretched. Looks at palms.
Wretches of no remorse. We as homo sapiens sapiens are illusions. We experience the societies we live in as a going forward dressed in socks. No one knows why because no one knows why. I find it not entirely impossible that I am a spy. But I lost my way again.