Among the walls of what remains, there’s always writing.

If I am totally alone, and out on the lake on a winter’s night, I will walk across the ice, and looking up, there it is, the past. I can see the past. The Coma clusters have come undone. I make angels in the snow. Looking up, the galaxies and their wayward stars are overrun by dark matter times ten.

This is often where I decide what I will write. Everything else is suspect. It must have something to do with the ice.

I do my best writing late at night in cheap motels. Places that are part and parcel of a deep and furious discontent. Other wanderers breach the castle walls. Their noises, their fucking, their pizza smells, their motorcycles, their secrets all seep through walls of what remains of cluttered truth, and the accomplishments of snow.

There is the little electric heater not far from the almost empty shelves but for one old shot glass turned upside down. Winter is the wolf outside the motel door. I turn the heater on to full blast, and the little room with its lack of grace slowly swells from its previous state of frozen paralysis. I never get to keep the house in any unborn marriage failed and ended not unlike the quest for pussy, and its sacred relationship to cunt. I become the cunt. I am the snow that creeps in the relinquishment of rent. How will the children howl in packages. UPS refuses to deliver here.

Swallowed by the shivers of tequila. I make angels in the snow.

Our fathers have abandoned the temples of our doom. Rome was rid of them. Their bodies are crumpled disfigurements of spiders. I have always written first drafts on a manual Sears typewriter whose ribbons are a challenge to find, but I do find them when the clerks with spines like rodents disappear into backrooms sufficed with the ancient dust of god.

I masturbate naked on the motel bed where you put a quarter into the slot and the bed vibrates like a rattlesnake. I fuck myself in the hole with a rubber cock that becomes hard as remembering all the motel beds I am able to recall where I fucked myself until dawn with its smells of coffee mixed with hash browns in white cardboard boxes carried from Waffle House in plastic bags to the room next door where the whore has stayed the night. It must have something to do with the ice.

I never stayed the night. Sullen beds. I keep the curtain open just a little. Men and boys walk by my windows like sleep. After they knock quietly at the door, I let them in fully erect. Or at least my cock in deserted but broken promises of ingratitude. I can’t get it hard so you will have to fuck me harder than the rubber cock can bury itself into my bowels with reproach.

Remember, you were the one who knocked on the door. I only opened it. Just a quick fuck emerging from a wilderness of conviction. In the full moon of January, the shadows of death have always clutched at my backward eyes.

Summer has passed. I had sucked on his hole like a scenic railway. The whore had left the room next door and slammed it behind her. We ate the hash browns with ketchup in bed. Tell all the boys and girls I will be here writing all about Assyrian kings and the walls of Babylon. After the hash browns and cold coffee, he needs to take a shit, and allows me to watch, releasing the mad demon’s hunger all men have in them, which becomes a fetish for the darkness, the ice outside on the surface of the lake, and incalculable speed. The gloomy forests of Gaul, and his gray morning of humiliation. I wiped him and that was all.

We sit in an increasing, incremental distance away and away and away from one another and our quarantines of soliloquy that staggers forward toward the scratching we think we hear. Our own definitions of ourselves hellbound, and thin-mouths lurk in rivalry among the walls of what remains.

Wikipedia has asserted that I grew up in a middle-class house, in a middle-class family, and in a middle-class neighborhood. A glory that leads inevitably to bones and graves.

I have never trusted Wikipedia. They don’t know what the fuck they were talking about.

We were living in a very hard-core, isolated place in Northern Michigan in a cabin. I loved that cabin because that was when my dad left us.

He always returned.

But life was significantly better when he was absent. No one got beat up. No one had to drag his drunk carcass into the cabin late at night. I kept hoping he would fall off the dock and drown.

The hard part of being beaten up, was not being beaten up. He made me strip naked, and then he would beat me up.

Naked as a squalid, Toytown deathwatch. Pussy had been a corpse for untold days. I was a hunted animal and thrown into the tortures of tiny boxes where I wept. In the full moon of January, the shadows of death have always clutched at my backward eyes.

I prayed that I would grow older, and bigger so whenever my father tried this, I could be the one who beat him up.

That day did arrive. It was a turning point.

When we were living in the cabin, and he had left us, there was no food. Nothing. My mother would gather herbs and weeds. My favorite was plantain weed and birch bark tea. It was my responsibility to catch the fish. I had a small rowboat and would row out to the middle of the lake. I would stay out there catching fish until it was dark. Then, I would row in, and clean the fish.

That was how we survived. Wikipedia was the future’s lock on silence, and all the noises deep inside our throats.

I knew we were poor, but I did not know how poor. I tried deer hunting. But the gun going off would knock me on my ass. It was my mother who came home with deer. We used every part of the deer for something. She made me eat the liver. It was awful. I vomited.

Wikipedia doesn’t know poor.

The snow could completely cover the cabin. It would take me a few days to shovel the cabin out. The wind would whip the snow on the lake around. I had hockey skates, and I was fast. In the winter, you chopped a hole in the ice, and you fished from the hole. There was no one else around. You could go months before you saw another person. I never thought it odd. It is what I knew. I was born in a chicken coop no matter what Wikipedia says. Wikipedia was not there. It had been turned into a living space which means it was still a chicken coop.

My father returned to the cabin on a snowmobile. I had never seen a snowmobile. I have lived in hunting lodges. I have lived in tents. I have lived in homeless shelters. I have lived in the backs of trucks. I have lived in pickup truck camper shells. I have lived at the Franciscan Motel in Grants, New Mexico on Rt. 66. I have lived on Jones in San Francisco. The Tenderloin was a gray humming of ten minutes later, catlike, inhabited like pennies on a dead man’s eyes.

I have written entire books on picnic tables in camp grounds. Some years, I had no income at all. I ate at Glide Church in San Francisco where they fed the poor.

Poor is when the truck you drive has no floor, and the mud spits up at you bitter as a the total revenue of bullets. Poor is not when you have holes in your boots. Poor is when you have no fucking boots. Poor is stuff the boots with pages from the New York Post.

Poor is when you’re doing sex work and the drugs won’t kick in. Because you are out. You have spent the rent again. This is where you learn that you can get through a night of sex work without drugs. Life gets lower than this, but not much.

When men were fucking me, I would sneak off to this island head space where I could pretend in dreams that the trick fucking me loved me. I would imagine he might say it with conviction out loud.

He never did. In the full moon of January, the shadows of death have always clutched at my backward eyes.

My whore number was a pay phone on Polk Street. It seemed like forever, but the day arrived when I could get what I called a real phone. Working the phones was far more lucrative than working the street.

I do not think I know what the term middle-class actually means. You do not want to think that the people you know are as poor as they really are. I am writing this in Appalachia in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I make angels in the snow. It must have something to do with the ice. I am loved by boys. Perhaps they should know better. Your sheepish mind, old man, thinking a judgement you wish in shadows that it could be true. But I said loved by. I did not say fucked by. There is a difference.

Rough drafts from a cheap motel. This one is not unlike the Franciscan. They are all the Franciscan, and this is where I clean the fish. It is what I know. The view from the window is of a parking lot where the concrete whores are compelled to a coming and a going to collect their tokens in their teeth of flowers. Ladies and the wasteland of the desert. The sound of the torn screen door. Summer porches and the sky. I know why my father kept us in such vivid isolation. He was not unlike the snow out on the lake that turns and turns. No one but no one is ever going to strip me down and beat me half to death. I do not like to be touched much.

One winter, I went back. No one lived in the cabin which wasn’t really habitable anyway. The ice on the lake was three-feet-thick. The wind still blew the snow around like the bitter whip of women whose defiance is arched, and they will never tell another man they love him because they don’t. I want to cut my cock off. Who but lovers brood over the walking wounded of who will love you most.

We continue to hurtle towards galaxies that no longer exist. And in that second, the slow pulse of the universe is suspended. In the full moon of January, the shadows of death have always clutched at my backward eyes. It must have something to do with the ice. Life itself is nothing more than an arrested gesture. The ice was a brilliant blue, and my purple lips were cups. The walls of what remains. I still make silent angels in the snow.

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with lake-ice

The Walls of What Remains