by Michael Gira
When the onslaught subsided, they collapsed laughing on the freshly slickened surface of the curved walls. The younger one discovered he’d held onto the can of magic fluid like a peasant holding up a crucifix standing before a firing squad. They shared the last of the fumes and threw the can back ricocheting into the blackness. They went on staggering and sloshing in the mush that now filled their boots. Sometimes the older one screamed suddenly at the dark in short dry-throated bursts like a tormented psychotic tortured in his straitjacket. The younger one inserted his grimy black fingers into his mouth and whistled a shrill response into the reverberating depths. He blankly imagined he was being led down into hell, a place where the darkness would fill his greedy lungs with a thick river of ebony scum. He felt no fear or any other emotion as he proceeded, apart from the sense of poisoned euphoria that came with inhaling the vapor, and his submerged total helplessness, immersed in the narcotic hallucinations that grew in the buried absolute-absence-of-light in their tunnel beneath the city.
Gradually, a fog of ochre light could be seen filtering into the darkness around a curve ahead of them in the tunnel. They felt their pupils shrinking in their eyes as they approached the grated metal gate that guarded the mouth of the pipe. Dripping green clumps of matter too large to pass through the grill clung loosely to the steel webbing like toxic carnal vines in a subterranean jungle, infused with fresh light. Each boy saw the other was coated up to his neck in a thick brown shell of slime, like a soft scab grown out in a parody of body armor. Bits of fiber, cigarette butts, clumps of hair, and fly larvae clung to the stiffening muck.
They squeezed through the sides of the gate, scraping off some of the black mud in the process. Yelping like savages, they leapt out into the sun and rolled down the white sandy banks that descended on either side of the putrid stream that regularly spilled from the pipe and blackened the sand and rocks in its path with a coat of slime before engorging the sea.
The incoming waves rolled silently in the thick black water of the deserted cove, depositing back on shore the indigestible litter that had flowed into it along with the sludge — scattered piles of granulated styrofoam, knotted mounds of horsehair fiber, a cluster of oversized veterinary syringes — some broken and some still half full of blood, various small plastic molds used in manufacturing machine fittings, a torn polaroid of an obese naked woman splayed obscenely on a frilly bed as she mock-leered up at her husband behind the camera, discarded rubber sandals, a tangle of cheap glow-in-the-dark child’s bracelets, and innumerable other objects too buoyant to be sucked under in the spreading quicksand of waste beneath the water. The debris was deposited along the beach in ghost-patterns of the waves as they retreated with the tide back from the rocks and sand that fed out from the base of the cliffs that enclosed the cove.
Balancing and slipping from rock to rock, they made their way along the shore. When they came to a deep pool of trapped rainwater, they jumped in and rinsed the scum from their clothes. Sitting on a rock, drying out in the sun, the older one took a still-sealed baggie of brightly colored pills from his jeans pocket and emptied a handful for himself and the younger boy. They found a smaller, clean pool of water, and washed down the assortment of amphetamines, synthetic hallucinogens, and barbiturates with tepid water drunk from their hands. As they lay back among the rocks watching the smoke shifting above them, sealing the sky closed, they listened to the seamless folding of the viscous waves, barely audible beneath the rumbling and groaning of the trucks convoying along the road that abutted the cliff edges up behind them. The trucks shook the earth down through the cliffs to the beach, migrating along the road like a thundering diaspora of stricken prehistoric beasts, roaring their agony up at the sinking sky. As the sun traveled behind the ceiling of smoke and tarnished clouds, the shadows projected on the underside became the drugged anthropomorphisms and apparitions of their chemical dreams.
The older boy lay curled on his side, baking in the sun like a discarded and emaciated fetus left for dead in the rocks by its wandering, mutant giant mother, as she’d scavenged among the washed up trash of the ruined city. His eyes rolled sightlessly in his head as sand flies worked at the gummed saliva in the corners of his lips. His fingers were bunched in against his chest and twitched as if typing out a frenetic description of his dementia.
The younger boy strayed along the thin hard strip of sand between the water and the rocks, oblivious to the punctures and gashes in the numbed flesh of his feet, made by the broken glass and shards of metal embedded in the sand. Out in the stewing black water, just past the line of lethargic waves, a mass of churning shredded flesh drifted southward with the current. Ahead of him up the beach, he saw a dark pile, shaking as if alive. As he came near, he saw it was a large mongrel dog, panting maniacally in quick, steady rhythms. One of its rear legs had been torn away, probably by a truck, and it had then rolled down the side of the cliff and dragged itself through the rocks onto the beach. A murder of crows watched it from the dried branches of a tree at the base of the cliffs.
Without moving its head, the dog looked up at the boy, smiling, its tongue hanging loose from its mouth onto the sand, culminating in a billowing pile of foam. The sand-flies danced in shifting herds from its eyes to its mouth to the pile of foam to the open wound to the expanding pool of blood. Three hand-sized crabs gripped the wound, eating the exposed meat.
The boy found a stick in the rocks and flicked the crabs away. Pressing the stick into the wound, he twisted it until the dog shrieked its last breath of pain, drowned out by the sudden cacophony of the crows, echoing like the schoolyard cries of excited children against the walls of the cliffs.
(1994)
THE COWARD (II)
The sun steamed through the window and soaked the air with bitter yellow gas. I lay twisted and naked on the bare stained mattress in the center of the floor. Without opening my eyes, I reached down and pulled the crumpled blanket up around my face. Behind my eyelids, pools of yellow pain throbbed, then mixed with red. The heat from my breath curled beneath the blanket and sweated my face with humidity. Inside the sealed container of my skull, my brain lay soaking in a stagnant solution of urine and ammonia. I forced myself not to breathe deeply, which would cause my heart to race, then explode in my chest. The accumulated poisons of the night’s drunkenness cohered into a constricting black hole between my eyes. My breath was ripe with the baked aftertaste of vomit and the sour leaked residues of an anonymous woman’s vagina, now turned to paste in my mouth.
I threw the blanket away from my face like someone drowning, as if I’d been inhaling the dry felt material down into my lungs. I could still smell the woman’s scent on the nylon rim, like a territorial smear. So that was it — the sweet, red licorice taste when I’d chewed her neck. In my delirium, I’d thought her sweat was flavored, as if her body were fueled with candy, draining sugary clear syrup from her pores as we undulated and invaded each other on the raw altar of the mattress. I’d licked her skin for the taste like a naked, groveling cretin at a salt-lick. Her eyes reflected the red sinuations of the lava lamp on the desk. The lamp cast a pink glow over our slithering flesh and mimicked us with gobs of writhing plasma, as if our greedy souls had been extracted from our bodies, then encased in the lamp, transfigured into liquefied abstractions, performing suspended in the glass. She moaned like a tortured inmate in a padded cell, in long unbroken exhalations unencumbered by consonants, possessed by a satanic force, spread-eagled and pushing out at the beast-demon struggling and clawing to get born from her cunt. I licked her underarms. The mouthfuls of hair were caked with flaking deodorant and roped with sweat. I licked her belly, sipping the sweat from her navel like absinthe. I licked her back — washing over the ridges of her spine, flicking my swollen tongue over moles and pimples, working down to her ass, diving into the vault of fermented hair and musk like a dog rooting for something buried in the ground. Finally, still craving and thirsty, as if each mouthful of her sweat had parched my tongue with ascorbic aci
d, I subsumed my face in her cunt and sponged-in its weeping juices like a dazed wolf at a wound disgorging blood. As I sucked and probed, I realized I couldn’t remember what her face looked like, that I had no idea whose womb this was. She squirmed and kicked, gurgling catch-phrases like “Oh! I love the way you do me, yeah yeah yeah, chew on my little clit, oh yes! Oh yes!.. .” as if I’d applied the correct sensory stimulus needed to engage the behavior-response mechanism of a sexual episode, leading to a possible spasmodic release of tension.
I recall passing out down there, in and out of consciousness, chewing on the inside of her thigh, sucking on a button of the mattress like my mother’s lit, then realizing she’d left. In order to be able to sleep without spinning, I’d stumbled into the bathroom and kneeled at the toilet with my finger down my throat until I’d jerked out the night’s beer and junk food and vodka. I made my way back to bed and sank immediately into blackness, technically dead until awakening now with my tongue hanging out the side of my mouth, the sun coating it with dry powder.
Little Monica came jumping onto my mattress. “Uncle Dave-ey! Uncle Dave-ey! Daddy called from work and wants you to push me on my bike-ey!” She knocked out my wind as she straddled my naked stomach. Then she giggled, digging her delicate little bird-fingers under my arms.
“Dave-ey’s ticklish! Scoogoodoodooloo! Dave-ey is tick-ickle-ish!” Then, discovering my reeking sweat on her fingers, “Yooooo! You’ re all stick-eeey!” she skipped out to the bathroom to wash her hands, as if she’d just been in the garden playing, digging for worms.
While she was gone, I snuck a taste of vodka from the pint I kept under the mattress. I covered my exposed piss-tumescence with the blanket and drifted back into miserable sleep. I remember her trying to wake me again, flicking at my nose with a strand of her hair, poking my chest with her finger in play-authority like Shirley Temple pretending to be a policeman.
“You - must - get - up – now – because – I – say – so – and – push – me – on – my - trainer - bike - because - I-say - so - you- meany!” and for a second, not realizing where or who I was, I ground into her as she sat lightly on my crotch.
She sensed something strange and ran out. I was submerged again, the stinging fumes of the sun invading my pores, and absorbed through capillaries into my lungs, cauterizing the exposed membranes inside me with cold white flames.
Little Monica (I always called her “Little”, as if she were an alternate, toy version of a more fully developed self) was six years old and was the only child I’d known since I myself had been ejected from the freedom of childhood and incarcerated in the prison cell of adulthood, where daily my imagination and potential drained down a hole in the floor as my perceptions and body were slowly stripped of resonance and mystery, leaving me stupid and drunk. As such, in her unguarded infatuation with herself and everything around her, she was a source of curiosity, and even amazement. I experienced an occasional rush of religious awe (followed by the bitterest, most pessimistic self-hatred imaginable) at her divine innocence, which ran through her dreamy soliloquies like a fragile piano — riding her trainer bike in obsessive circles out in the driveway as she sang a breathless song of free word associations, as if her consciousness were spilling out through her mouth in waterfalls of misting lullabies; sitting on the couch reading from her book out loud in her tiny aerated voice, and if I’d come sit beside her, she’d shush me earnestly as if any behavior beyond total reverie would destroy the spell (and it would have); or narrating like a child newscaster, the story of her mother and father, as she took a bath, locked in by herself for hours sometimes as I listened at the door, draining the cooling water a little, then warming it with hot water that tumbled like music from the faucet, accompanying her voice as she half-talked, half-sang to herself: “ ... and - Mommy- was - an - artist - and - she - would - have - been - famous - all- over - the - world - and she - painted - giant-pictures-with- colors - all - mixed - together - like - the - stars - in - the - sky - and- Daddy - loved - my - Mommy - so - so - much - as - much - as - he- loves - me - and - that’s - more - than - anything - but - the - paint- made - her - sick - and - hurt - inside - her - head - so - she - went- to - sleep - and - I-was - just – a - intsy - baby - and - now - Daddy- loves - me - for - Mommy - too - and - he - says - I’m - special - like- her - and - just - as - beautiful - too - except - little....“
Her father was my brother and didn’t know that I’d also loved his wife, that it was just as possible that Little Monica was my child as his own. When Veronica had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, I’d just disappeared from their lives. Even though I’d never left Los Angeles, I might as well have been in Spain. Now I was mooching off my brother until I could get a job and enough money to set back out on my own, drunk every night and not even bothering to look for work so long as he was handing out the cash. He’d been moved and very emotional when I’d returned, hugging me longer than we ever had as boys and certainly never had as adults. So long and forceful in fact that I began to wonder if he knew about me and Veronica and was now deciding whether or not to snap my neck, something he could have easily achieved without much effort, being twice my size and a diligent sheet-rocker these six years, earning money for the child. He hadn’t asked for any explanation regarding my sudden departure, and had only ventured a few polite questions about what I’d been up to all this time. He pretended not to notice my degeneration in his house and even trusted me with the care of his (my) daughter sometimes — a fraternal nostalgia we’d both have cause to regret.
*
There’s a point when you wake up from a drunk, in perfect clarity. The synapses in your brain feel greased, and the distinction between your subconscious and conscious mind evaporates. A point where everything is hyper-vivid, your intelligence humming at maximum capacity, like a meditating Buddhist acolyte overwhelmed with sudden white-light attainment. And at that instant, you see everything charged with energy — the past, present and future spread out in front of you, blissful and meaningless and simultaneous every microscopic detail in every object drifting through your eyes, along with panoplies of stars and universes, pulled together through the woven fabric of your flesh, so that while disintegrating, you’re invisible, while seeing everything, you see nothing. And then you return to sleep, like I had done when Little Monica left me, and you wake up feeling as if your body were a living corpse and your mind reduced to an ache, to a moronic agony, which is how I woke up now, pulled out from my dull oblivion by the absence of a sound.
The wheels of her trainer bike had ceased to wheeze and grind on the asphalt driveway, and the disjointed silence had not been answered by her feet running towards the front door, then inside and down the hall to my door. It had been quiet for a while now, I realized. I thought I heard something in the living room, at the other end of the house. Something repeating rhythmically, like it was underwater reverberating, something stifled. I wrapped myself with my blanket and got up to investigate. My cock was now hard as concrete, packed with pressurized urine. I padded silently down the hall like an escapee from a ward for terminal patients, wrapped in a tattered regal robe, a cloud of bad breath and sweat-stink following me as I went. The front door was wide open. It swung in the dry breeze, ushering in the unforgiving California sun. The sunlight was increased in intensity by its encounters with stucco and asphalt and car windows along the way, its maniacal desire to reveal everything magnified and searing. It spilled in through the door theatrically, flooding the living room with titanium fog, illuminating the scene like a movie set.
They were on the couch. He was kneeling behind her with his back to me as he pumped into her. He’d pulled her dress up around her neck — the miniature version of a hippie smock, like her mother used to wear — and he was choking her with it in rhythm with his pumping. I presume she was screaming for me, but he’d put masking tape over her mouth so it came out distant, like something leaking through from another dimension, a place where little girls were raped into infini
ty, a place where hell was the tedious norm. Please forgive me, I didn’t do anything. I just stood there peeking around the corner, watching, unable to move as he tore into her and her eyeballs widened in her face, as if the lids had been cut away, as she twisted her head around and saw me. I could smell him, a drinker like myself, that rotten smell of the body eating itself alive, and I could hear him grunting, as close as if he were whispering in my ear, with foul breath like cancer spreading. As I stood there, I imagined I could feel the tight wrongness of her flesh, and I was unable to move until he finished and she went unconscious. I crept back into my room and shut the door silently.
Eventually, I heard the front door shut. Curled on my mattress beneath the blanket, I felt the urine rushing from my penis, thick and pounding, forming a warm sea of sickening pleasure between my legs.
(1994)
WHY I ATE MY WIFE
Everything merges eventually — everything is organic. It’s impossible to distinguish one thing from another thing. When your mind is emptied of selfishness, it crumbles and dissolves in the water. If I cut at my body and concentrate correctly, I won’t feel it. Each time my heart beats, it jerks violently and whips my spine loose, tugging at the base of my brain. Memories move through the clotted and rotting forest inside my head and crush the present beneath them. My memories don’t belong to me. They’re as unknowable as a centipede fluttering its legs in the dark corner beneath the sink. When an image moves through my nervous system, it’s with the predatory greed of an intruder. My body’s laid open, transparent, defenseless. Each second of time is an individual insect feeding on my blood.