While immersed in these thoughts, sitting there at the end of Cameron’s bed, my eyes inflated like blood-filled balloons and burst just before a new set of eyeballs rolled up from my guts, pushed their way through my constricting throat and popped back into the place of my old eyes. I wiped the bloody tears from my face, having sobbed so hard at the mere idea of happiness. Then, impatient, I stood at the doorway, exhaling smoke toward the kid’s room until Cameron came back with the look of an exhausted trial on her face. I quickly retreated back to her bed, plopping down hard enough to make the bed shake and springs squeal, kicking my feet up with a smile that said: I’m happy here and not going anywhere.
“Seriously?” she said, nonelectric shoulders slumping.
“What?” I asked, cigarette smoke slipping from my mouth and the hole at the base of my skull where it meets the back of my neck.
“Luke, I told you to put on some fucking clothes,” she said, arms folded, face stretched into seriousness.
“They burned,” I told her, smiling.
“Luke! What the fuck are you talking about?” she asked, dropping her arms to her sides, still standing in the bedroom doorway, the hallway light haloing her slim figure.
“They burned. My clothes. Myclothesmyclothesmyfamily. Up in smoke… uh, just… just, um, my clothes,” I trailed on, confused, not smiling, and wondering if I’d said too much.
“Luke, put some damn clothes on,” she said, walking toward me and grabbing some other man’s clothes from beside the bed and tossing them at me.
“These aren’t mine, Cameron,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, confused, but as her eyes settled on the pile she’d thrown at me, a look of alarm washed over her face.
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings or start a fight because I wanted to stay, so, I put them on even though they were far too tight and obviously belonged to her Asian ex-boyfriend, Tam, that rode a Harley and played in a satanic death metal band called Hot Mayonnaise. I didn’t even tell her that his clothes smelled like her pussy, though perhaps they smelled more like his. I couldn’t remember.
After putting those clothes on, I leaned back on the bed again and felt another overwhelming sense of accomplishment. It was shaping up to be a great night. I believed Cameron and I were really going places.
Only then did I realize Cameron was already out of the clothes she had on earlier and was now in her bathrobe, smelling of cinnamon toothpaste and coconut lotion. She must have changed when she put the potato in his sack.
She clearly put the robe on in haste, however, and her breasts, though small, were almost falling out. Unable to control myself, I got hard. I smiled at her, told her she looked nice—that I liked her hair. Because the pants I wore were so constrictive, she noticed where I was going with that kind of saucy talk and responded by blowing a raspberry and giving me a thumbs-down.
Out her bedroom window, a sasquatch howled and gutted a father of four on his way home from a twelve-hour security guard shift at Walgreens. His pockets were full of the Altoids tins he’d pilfered on his way out, meant as a gift for the kids and payback to his employers for his lousy pay, but ended up as the perfect after-dinner compliment for his assailant. Various legs, arms, and heads also rolled up Geary Street in a flash flood followed by the acrid, thick perfume of bloody feces when the giant, tangled ball of intestines that daily patrols the entirety of San Francisco followed suit.
“Look, Luke,” she told me. “I don’t know what I was thinking asking you up here after work—”
“But you ask me up all the ti—”
“But clearly it was a mistake. I barely know you. I guess I just got lonely tonight and wanted some company—”
“But this isn’t the first time I—”
“…and you were there, I guess. Just there. Like you always are at the end of almost all of my shifts at the bar—and even most of the beginnings of those shifts, now that I think about it. But, seriously, I really shouldn’t be bringing people I don’t know around my kid, you know? I hope you understand.”
“Cameron, we’ve been sleeping together now for over—”
“I think you should go,” Cameron said.
“I just want to be your dad.”
“What?”
“I just want to be a father figure to the kid, if I can. Like, be a good influence and be there for him. If I can. And you, too—I want to be there for you, too, Cameron.”
“Just, you know, go. Now. Please go.” Her arms were crossed again, head down. She stepped out of the doorway so that I could see the front door more easily.
I felt hurt the way one is supposed to and my gut somersaulted. I pulled myself from the bed, touched her shoulder to see what would happen, but nothing happened so I stumbled down the piss-wet stairs of her Tenderloin apartment building, tears streaming down my face, and skipped my way home up the hill around the corner, playing a game of hopscotch over decapitated bodies while smashing heads like rotten pumpkins against Union Square store fronts as soon as I found them trundling in the gutters, pulling themselves along by their tongues, licking at discarded cigarette butts, chewed gum, empty syringes, and used condoms. Whistling “Blue Skies” all the while.
I recall this bitter-sweetly in the fall morning light as I bend down to look at the leaf’s imprint on the steep sidewalk hill of Leavenworth Street. I try to keep myself from crying, from wishing I had, in fact, cracked my head open just now so I could let it all out and be rid of it—but it’s no good.
Everything—birds, trees, windows, parked cars, bones, and the candy wrappers in the gutters—rattles around me like gypsy music. My guts, my lungs, my heart, also shudder. My hands shake. They shake as I touch the imprint of the leaf, which really looks like a black star stuck in the sidewalk. My finger goes into it and there’s nothing around my finger but the coldness of empty space—like a black star. I think about being born and my finger disappears within the leaf’s imprint embedded in that grey concrete. I pull it out, confused. I think about having children of my own and I push it in again and the black star contracts, slowly closing up around my index finger, so I pull it out and look again.
It’s just a leaf’s imprint on the cold sidewalk.
I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong.
When I try to touch the barren black starhole again it quivers and the wind moans my name and the trees call me sick and twisted while telling me to hurt them, to strangle them, to pull their limbs back and spank them. I quickly thrust my index finger in again and the whole sidewalk suddenly ripples into a wave that rolls all the way down the hill causing the asphalt to undulate and parked cars to hop like frogs, many of their windows shattering from the activity. From the force of my penetration, the black star puckers, flutters, and tightens around my finger, so, I decide to put my middle finger in there and attempt to loosen it up, slowly spreading my two fingers apart to pry it open. Those fingers go wet with blood and a sensuous cracking sound greets my ears. Then the wind wails and the blue bay about four blocks down the hill shimmies and glitters with hints of red leaking from its sore, raw edges like blood from pinpricks.
The sidewalk again swells and crests.
I hear “Jesus! Put some fucking clothes on” and then more moaning. Then, “Get out.” Then, “No—more.” So I put a third finger in and everything shudders more violently and there’s electricity ringing up from my knuckles all the way to my elbow like when I touched Cameron’s sweatered shoulder. And now Cameron’s face contorts in front of me. It pulls up through the cement in the sidewalk, grey and cold and wanting me. A warm fluid makes its exodus and splashes across my midsection as her body splits in two down the middle like an axed piece of veiny firewood, arteries ripping, then suturing themselves back together beneath me while the trees’ bare limbs rattle and their roots push hard up against the surface and the houses around me bow and breathe like wooden giants in the gale and I hear the sirens singing to me the way they’ve sung to me my whole life. Those sir
ens whip up their songs from the edges of the city but the sky isn’t changing from its soft contrast of ash and blue as everything below it forcefully tries to change its shape, tries to metamorphosize into the monster it is. It all looks so normal as the monster, which is the city incarnate, forcefully tries to penetrate its dozen bloody horns and tendrils through the earth’s crust while at the same time its scaly back arches out of the bay in an eruption of salt water and breaks the Golden Gate into a thousand shards before snaking through the water to the Bay Bridge to collapse that, as well, ensuring what we all fear: that we’re stuck here. It’s not just a choice to never leave this place and visit the real world.
As my fingers, one after the other, become a fist and get lost inside the black star, I feel myself get hard. Now I’m on the sidewalk, pressing my face against the grey concrete, trying to get a closer look at this black star fallen into my path, the ground turbulent and waving as I whisper “What do you want?” and “Why me?” while I attempt to glimpse what’s on the other side of time and reality as my fist slips inside the black imprint and the star wraps itself tightly, now, around my wrist without submission, crushing it, the bones splintering with the sound of large trees teetering and crashing against the street, against houses already crumbling as everything in my arm pops with finality. Lights flash behind my closed eyelids as the hole pulls me in further, squeezes, tugs and pulverizes my fist, my wrist, tendons and all, veins popping like garden hoses folded over themselves unable to handle the immense pressure of blood doing everything it takes to reach its unappreciative brain.
I try to push myself up away from the sidewalk. The pulsating black imprint of the leaf gapes open wide for a moment like a breathless mouth finally taking some oxygen, stretching open more than thought possible before it snaps back tight with lightning quickness, yanking me in so fast I smash my skull against the concrete and go out into the blackness of that absent night.
When I come to, I’m in the back of an ambulance and sirens are everywhere and I want to tie myself to the ship’s mast and be fed to them even though nothing in my body seems to be moving and there are two or three uniformed people over me mining my body for gold and saying things like “There’s no use” and “We’ve done everything we can” and “What do you think we can get for this?” and the other says “Nothing” looking over a chunk of me, following that up with “fool’s gold” and I’m yelling “Hit me with the defibrillator! Please! Hurry! Please! There’s not much time left! Put a spark in me! Light me up!” and then the glimmer I thought I could see radiating out of me all my life starts to dim, dull, flicker, and finally go out like a city in a power outage.
And then they’re trying to tell me what has happened to me, and I can’t move or get out so I try to breathe through the waves of pain and morphine and not listen to them and instead tell them what actually happened. I say, “I saw the world open up for me and invite me in. It wanted me. It wanted to love me. Me! I’m telling you… you have to listen. When the world wants you, you listen. You listen and you don’t fight it and you thank your fucking lucky stars! You give it what it wants. It wanted me. It wanted my children. It wanted my seed. It wanted… it wanted us to be a family. Cameron, please, kiss it and put a Band-Aid on it,” I say, yanking one of the EMT’s heads down to my bloodied crotch, the ache and absence there turning now into a hot tingle under the song of sirens and the trundle of tires. But those people looming over me in fluorescent lamplight just pat my shoulder, push me back down on the gurney, tell me not to speak, and say “It’s OK, fruitcake” and “Just try to calm down” and then they keep saying “Don’t speak” and “It’s OK” like I’m too stupid to know any better. And as I’m lying there I realize I cannot make a fist or hear my own breath or feel a heartbeat and eventually, after a long ride that doesn’t end at the hospital or my home or Cameron’s, I also notice no sparks of electricity are flying, not anywhere.
A PARADE, ALWAYS
The light’s hazy the way I remember it from childhood. Always hazy. The way the light back then sifted through the Sacramento smog and caked the air over endless flat fields next to freeways and highways and beneath overpasses. That light seeps into the bar through big front windows as the sun sets out there, ready to plop into the ocean, fizzle, and send a tsunami of boiling water our way to free us from our skin and bones in a violent act of forgiveness. No artificial lights—expect the strings of holiday lights around the stage at the back—are on to interfere with this natural phenomenon I can only recall in my few memories of childhood. It gives me a giddy sense of innocence as I drink another glass of Jim Beam and blow smoke from my Winston into my friends’ faces, smiling an ugly smile that turns beautiful in the sandpaper light.
Me, Sanchez, Kevin, and Russ sit around a round table at the Pelican’s Bill in Oakland discussing rat bites and the best ways to treat them. The cure for the itch they make in the sores all over our bodies is our holy grail. We’re also congratulating ourselves endlessly on what a great reading we just gave at some hole-in-the-wall around the corner, despite the fact that we were the only audience for it. I pitch Russ a quarter and tell him to go find our holy grail. He waddles over to the jukebox and plays The Fall’s “Eat Y’Self Fitter.”
As Sanchez and Kevin debate the merits of Sanchez’s pencil mustache, a skinny kid in filthy jeans and denim jacket stumbles in, nearly falls down the two steps leading into the stage-room and tumbles into me, knocking me and Jim Beam from my chair. The back of my head clacks good with the cement floor. The kid, early twenties, rolls off of me, pushes himself from the floor, wipes his nose, twitches, looks down at me and smirks, twitches again, and turns to walk away.
“What the fuck?” I yell, feeling a bit dizzy from the hit as I stand up.
“Excuse me?” he asks, turning back toward me.
“Exactly, shithead. That’s what you should be saying. Nobody in this whole goddamned state has an ounce of manners.”
Without a second’s thought, he walks over and slugs me in the jaw; however, its effect is almost comical as it lands with all the force of a large horsefly. I don’t flinch or even stumble back a half step. It’s like he slapped me with a helium balloon.
Instead, I feel the sun boil the ocean. I see all of Cameron’s dead babies bleeding out of it. I see the earth erode at its watery edges. I see the light. I see God in love and violence.
Shaking the illusion from my jostled skull, I grab the kid by his jean jacket and throw him across the table where Sanchez and Kevin sit. They’re mildly amused as he fumbles to get himself off the table now slippery with whiskey, vodka, and the strips of skin that have been peeling off me all day.
When he manages himself away from the table, I grab him again, throw him against the wall, and put my fist through his skull, which collapses like a rotten pumpkin. He slinks down the wall into a sitting position, pumpkin-head to the left, shoulders slumped, veins of red mucus spilling from his jack-o-lantern mouth.
I regain my seat just as the middle-aged female bartender strolls over with extra-large breasts and sinewy arms, each of which make me flinch and quiver.
“We don’t much care for people coming in here and beating up our regulars,” she says. “That’s Tommy. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Couldn’t if he wanted. We like him. You better leave before I call the cops.”
I look at Sanchez and Kevin, who suddenly don’t know me anymore. They saunter away from the table and over to the bar, grab a stool and call Russ over to them and look every which way but at me directly.
When I exit the bar, I pull my Winstons out of my pocket and find they’ve been turned to confetti. A young couple stands near me by the front windows of the bar smoking, so I ask them for a cigarette.
“Sure,” the guy says.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and the girl cups a flame to my face and lights it.
“We never liked Tommy,” she says. “We saw what you did in there. We’ve wanted to kick that fucking kid’s face in for years now. But we�
�re pacifists.”
“That bartender said he’s a regular. That people like him,” I say, blowing smoke.
“That’s horseshit,” the guy says. “She’s just a fucking sadist. That’s her son. She knows he’s a fuckup and a junky so she calls him down here knowing he’ll do something stupid and by night’s end get his face broken. It’s her sick way of teaching the punk a lesson, I guess. I mean, look,” he says, pointing toward the bar’s windows.
Inside, she’s leaning across the bar chatting gleefully with my friends, everyone laughing as she pours them shots while they, in unison, flip me off, and continue laughing.
I look down the street, past the nearly vacant downtown of Oakland filled with featureless buildings that give off the air of not having been frequented by a living being for centuries. Low grunts and sick coughs echo from the shadows. The orange nickel of the sun dips into the horizon’s slot and is gone.
“You wanna come back to our place and get fucked up?” the girl asks.
“Sure,” I say.
We’re walking through alleyways between dumpsters and garage doors covered with graffiti. As we walk, those illicit illustrations make a movie, one after the other depicting me as a small child chewing on my fingers then my arms, blood coating my mouth until I’m armless. Then I start in on my legs. The last few frames are my pathetic, limbless attempt at eating my own torso, my child’s mouth snapping like a Doberman’s, teeth clicking with each attempt, blood and spit and snot flying from my crazed mouth and nose, accomplishing nothing.
“Here,” the guy says, handing me a joint. I take a drag and immediately my feet turn to cinderblocks and my head goes fuzzy in the haze of sunset, the grey and rose-hued illumination of the air.
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