Sometimes I would get invited to a party or to go out to dinner by one of them and I would decline. Part of me wanted to go, but those kind of outings always made me feel even more alienated than usual. Hearing them talk made me feel lonely and hateful at the same time. Lonely because I didn’t fit in, never did. When I was reminded, it hurt. And hateful because it reaffirmed what I already knew, that I was alone and on the outside.
I spent a lot of time feeling alienated and lonely. But with all of that also came a real solid feeling of independence. I came to enjoy eating alone and spending my off time for the most part alone. I was walking down the streets here today, cloudy sky, on-and-off drizzle, and it all came back to me in waves, perfectly structured memories. That was the autumn I remember most clearly. I was no longer in school, and it was a strange feeling for it to be autumn and for me not to be sitting behind a desk. I was more aware of each day and each night and all the time in between. Sometimes I miss that way of life. I enjoyed the nights at the ice cream store. A place to be doing something that wasn’t the apartment. I would walk home slowly, enjoying the street lamps, smelling the cold air. The apartment was like a prison cell. I felt like kicking myself every time I slept late. It was a long walk to Georgetown, but I knew the sooner I got out of that apartment, the better. Damn, I was lonely that autumn. I wished for a girl I could hang out with. I never really did anything to meet girls, too shy, too fucked up. Autumn makes me think of women.
At the ice cream store I would get one or two days off a week. But as I took on more responsibility at the store, the days off decreased to almost none. That autumn I almost always got Friday nights off. Friday is my favorite day of the week. Friday night was either spent walking around until I got tired or spent at Mike’s or Chris’s house. We would sit around, drink Cokes, and play a lot of records. That became one of my favorite memories.
I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does. The sidewalks, the trees, the storefronts, they became my friends. Every time I would pass a house that had a wood-burning fire, I would try to imagine what the people inside were doing. Sometimes I felt so outside of everything that I wanted to die. I felt terrible, but then out of nowhere would come an overwhelming wave of relief and calm. It was my life! My depression! Good for me! The air and the leaves and the streetlights would smile at me and I would feel okay. I realized that autumn that yes, I was alone in this world, totally alone. Alone and on the outside, but at the same time I wasn’t alone, I had myself. I was always alone as a child growing up, but this was the first time that I ever clicked on what it meant to be alone. I felt invincible. I felt as if I could withstand the longest winter ever.
I feel uneasy when my mind gets crowded with memories that I can’t shake. I write them out of my system and hope it works. I run breathlessly from one word to the next. Sometimes I think I’m dissecting my brain into little pieces. When I’m forced into a frame of mind and time by outside elements such as season or geographical location, it drives me nuts. I feel I have to write a telephone directory-size book to get it out of me.
Nothing gets me like autumn, though, nothing. I can see myself walking down P Street right now, I can feel it. I can smell the fireplaces on O Street right now. I can see the street lamps glow on R Street. But at the same time, I can feel the consuming emptiness that paralyzed me and made me sullen and cold. I can remember sitting in that dark apartment that reeked of paint and insecticide wanting out so bad but not having the slightest fucking idea where to go. Every time the air turns cold, I am transported back to all those places. I have visions of the fluorescent glow of the ice cream store when it’s observed from the People’s Drug Store across the street. The place looks busy and cheerful. A lit glass cube in a dark, cold wall. It makes me feel like I’m watching the world from the outside. Walking the streets on the outskirts of earth. Alone and on the outside.
How are you today? Are you climbing that ladder? They told you all about that ladder. Climb that ladder and find that salvation. Sure is a hard climb I bet. Arms getting tired? Sure is a long ladder. Faith, is that the word they used? Hope? I’ve been watching you from a long ways off. You’re not climbing on any ladder. You’re running on a treadmill.
This summer has left me on an island all by myself. My mind goes its own way, usually to the streets of my hometown. Walking alone on MacArthur Boulevard at night. Muggy, unmoving air. Watching the moths play around the street lamps. I walk through the night, ill at ease and alone. The sun will never rise on this street. MacArthur Boulevard is always dark and quiet. The street lamps are small yellow planets that keep me from falling into the distance. I feel the isolation. I sink inside myself so deep that I turn into the most pathetic, lonely, ugly animal there ever was. Summer becomes a jail, a ship run aground, a ladder to nowhere. Summer brings back the thoughts of the girl and her house. I would feel so small that I would sink into the cracks in the brick sidewalk. The summer animal, I can never outrun or hide from it. The journey in my mind continues along, and I find myself standing in front of a house with a roofed front porch on Beecher Street. I see myself and others I recognize sitting on the porch, they are unmoving. They are statues. Suddenly I grow heavy, as if filled with water or sand. I grow tired, lazy, and thoughtless. Stagnant and breathless. I know what I am, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. When in doubt, I move. So I leave and walk somewhere else, trying to walk out of the mouth or asshole of the summer beast that has consumed me. The sunsets are the worst. They sink slowly and mournfully, burning and waving good-bye. I want to reach out and grab the sun and throw it back up high in the sky so I can have more time to figure out this dilemma. I know that it’s too late to turn to other shores. I wouldn’t even if I could. The summer bores me out, turns me into a hollow carcass. Fueled by insomnia and a thirst for everything. I turn into boneless limbo man caught in the middle. My skin turns to leather, I turn inside in. I seal off. Every pore, every orifice. Underneath this leather exterior I scream, twist, convulse, and burn silently. I wonder to myself wouldn’t I be better off far from everything that bears the least resemblance to this? You can change the scenery that surrounds you. You can run from the fists that pound you, but you cannot escape your feelings. I’ve crawled every sewer from here to there and I’ve never done it. And I burn silently.
I had a dream the other night. I lay on the floor and closed my eyes and the creatures came to life: A snake is crawling along a desert trail that parallels a straight, black paved road. The sun is going down but it’s still quite bright outside. Over the horizon walking down the road in the opposite direction is a woman. The two get closer and almost pass each other, but each stops just in time. They both step into the area that runs between the trail and the road. The wind gusts suddenly, and the snake is instantly transformed into a man. He has dark hair. He is marked with scars and symbols, patterns of his tribe. The two walk toward each other and embrace. Another gust of wind comes and blows all vestiges of clothing off them both. The sun holds still for a moment and starts to slowly rise, and as it rises it turns a deep crimson and gives off a low, metallic whine. The couple are fully embraced and perfectly still. Their bodies fit together like two parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Another gust of wind comes and blows the flesh and organs off the man and woman so all that’s left are two skeletons locked in embrace. Their jaws open and they start to grind into each other, bone on bone, tooth on tooth. The sun is emitting a pitch that is making the ground rumble. The skeletal bodies grind together as if trying to destroy each other. Another gust of wind comes and forces the two to totally intertwine with each other until only one is visible; this lasts for the blink of an eye before the image implodes and turns to a pile of sand. The pile of sand conflagrates with white-blue flame, and nothing is left. The sun has now changed shape, transformed itself into a double helix, bright red and twisting. It sinks into the distance, and the rumbling quiets as the light fades.
I like my headaches, they�
��re pure. The ones I’ve been getting lately are the ones I like best. The pain jumps all over my head. Sometimes they come out of nowhere. The pain rushes through my head like splinters of lightning. The pain is sharp and pure. I see cold blue shards in my brain. They make my head expand, contract, and distort into vile shapes. The pain sometimes makes me squint. Like a bullet entering my brain and then altering its normal path and wriggling about like a snake plugged into a light socket. Sometimes I think that something wants in, and sometimes I think that something is trying to rip its way out of my head. Like a rising sun. Ulcerating. Burning. Destroying my brain cells. Spinning and aborting constantly. Maybe I harbor a colony of fugitive rats in my head, turning my brain into a ghetto and a rancid nest for dreams and hallucinations. They eat away at the center of my brain consuming white and gray matter. Fortifying themselves, strengthening themselves so they can employ and embody plague and infestation. The pain strengthens and educates me. Forces me to understand, acknowledge, assimilate, and enjoy pain and pain’s by-products: vision and brutal, absolute forward movement. I like my headaches.
I’m a multicolored man scar tissue. I’m a self-inflicted kind of guy, and I’m self-inflicting down the road. DRAW THE LINE! I’ll fall short. I guess I forgot to mention the overflowing cowardice, stupidity, and sheer unadulterated pettiness. But I’m a stranger in your face and my mood swings like a guillotine and my hands aren’t connected to my head bone and I got crazy muscles and wavy eyes and I got an urge with no name I don’t know what to do with it muscles, cock, brain, knife—whatever. I just want to do it.
Me and Ian went for a drive in his car. We went over Key Bridge where I used to walk home from work. We drove down M Street. We drove down R Street, past the place where that black dude slammed my head against the wall of the alley and took my tape player, past the place where that dog looked me in the eye a split second before he got hit by a car, covering my shoes with blood. Past the block where a hippie girl put flowers in my hair while her male companions turned over cars. Past Montrose Park. Past Jackson School, where I went for first, second, and third grade and got beat and harassed because I was white in 1969. Got held responsible for the death of Martin Luther King. I could still remember hearing them chant: “Fight, fight nigger and a white, beat him nigger, beat him ’cuz the white can’t fight.” I could still remember how my stomach would twist and my head would grow light. Down Thirtieth Street, over to Q Street, past my old bus stop, past that apartment where that young white boy was raped and made to play games with that black dude. Back on Wisconsin Avenue, past 7-Eleven, past the library, past the Safeway.
We keep driving, we stop at Ian’s parents’ house. We park the car, we walk to Wisconsin Avenue. Ian goes into the bank; I take a short walk over to the building that once held the pet shop I worked at for years. The building is a restaurant now. I walk behind the building to see the back steps, the steps that I walked up and down for years hauling out garbage. The steps that I sat on and ate my lunch. The steps that I stood on and destroyed litters of sick animals. Cats, rabbits, you name it. People would come in with their sick animals to have them put to sleep. Of course, we had no facilities for such things. Didn’t matter to my boss. He took the money and I took the animals on the back stairs and killed them. Some, I broke their necks with a sharp twist. Others I took and bashed their heads against the wooden rail. The move was smooth and swift. I used to go home with my shoes covered with blood. The back steps. One time I went out to dump the trash, and I saw a guy getting head from a stripper from the bar next door. I walk back up the alley and reemerge on the street. I look around me, almost every building in the area has been torn down. I walk past the restaurant and look inside. A family of well-dressed people sit at a table, they look up and see me, their eyes swell up. I pull away from the glass and walk back to Wisconsin Avenue toward the bank. I’m thinking about that family eating their food, their feet tapping on the floor. The floor that acted as a roof for more rats than you will ever know. We had rats all over that place, ratshit everywhere. Piles of it stacked high and rotting into every two-by-four in the joint. A miniature ghetto of sorts. Upstairs from where the family eats is a room where my boss used to fuck his boyfriends. One day he told me how hard it was to get the Vaseline out of the sheets.
Keep eating, lady, the rats squirm, crawl, and shit below you. Neurotic fags fuck and moan above you. You’re surrounded, entrenched in shit, sweat, and Vaseline, eat up, sleep tight. It gets so twisted, so distorted, that I lock myself out of my own house. I look at myself looking at myself, inverse to inverse, turning inside out and the other way around.
I’m going to wait until the ghosts come out again. I’ll see my boss walk through the rear wall, naked, heaving, smelling of shit, complaining of the sheets and how bad he hates “the niggers in this city.” That was one of his obsessions. He had a huge dog that he trained to hate blacks too. He would say, “Tannis, don’t you want to eat a nigger?”
There’s ozone in the air now. I’m sitting in a room with an open window The ozone air comes flowing in gently. So gently, I might just drift off with it. I get lonely when the ozone comes out. The smell of it makes me remember lonely times, always. Gray, cool, and empty, leading to a cave-in. I’ve been to that window ledge before. I never jump, I never have the guts. I just sit in a chair and contemplate my body falling through the ozone. Thinking of girls, thinking of how it never works. Never. And then you die or just go to sleep …
I go out on the street. I hear the cars and the people, but that’s not what I want. I want to hear jungle music. It’s all lies out there. I think I understand the difference between dirt and filth. The dirt is clean and the filth is filthy and it’s everywhere. It rips at my eyes. I can keep a better grip than a lot of people I know. And when I make an effort, I can maintain out there. But sometimes I get pushed and my brain goes into automatic pilot and I feel like kicking and walking a straight line right into their diamond minds. But you know you can’t do that. You will never touch their minds. That would be like punching at thin air. If you’re going to get all the way into it, you might as well take that straight line right into their flesh. You know what I’m talking about. With a smile on your face speak the international language: dirt and filth.
The noise comes in, crowds me out of my brain. At first, the sound of children laughing mixes with the sound of rain. The sound of the children fades out and is replaced by the sound of gunfire. The gunfire remains at a steady pitch as the rain fades. Now I hear the sound of people talking, laughing, screaming, crying. Reminds me of when I was in the hospital. All night long they would scream for their medicine, they wanted to get better. The old woman in the room next to mine sounded like she was being cooked alive in her bed. The whole place was screaming. Made me think that I might lose my mind in there. In there, out there, I don’t know the difference anymore. The sound, I can’t shut off the sounds of their voices. When I’m all alone in my room I can still hear their voices screaming in my ears. I know that I am to blame for letting them in. I want to get better myself. I’m not running from anything, I’m just trying to free myself from their sounds. If I don’t, I’ll become accustomed to them and that will be the end of me. The sound of rain, pelting down on boxes holding the dead. The rain mixing with dead children. What I see, what I hear. The whole place is an insane asylum. A screaming shit house. Gunfire off in the distance. The bodies are falling, crying, trying to get better, doing anything to get well. And you know how bad the emptiness feels when you’re full of it. They fill you with emptiness, and then they come to get their pay. They want their pay, but they don’t want what’s coming to them.
It never fails. My weaknesses are always strong enough to knock me to the ground. My weaknesses are the greatest weapons I have when I turn on myself. It won’t always be like this. I’m getting better every day. Maybe someday I won’t want, I won’t be such a sucker. It’s all one big insane asylum, a screaming shit house.
The sound of children
splattering, sounding like gunfire. For every voice, a bullet. For every scream, every prayer, every day, annihilation inside my room.
S&D Vacation Package Pt. 1: Organize leisure air tours during wartime. Vacationers who could afford it would be flown over battle sites and would have the opportunity to drop napalm and bombs on the villagers below. I can see them now. Wagner’s The Valkyrie blasting through the quad system. Fat white tourists dressed in polyester pantsuits and those silly Hawaiian shirts sit in their seats, each with his own personal trigger. “Can we do it now?” they ask.
A smiling stewardess gives them a knowing wink and says, “Soon, very soon.”
“But I want to drop fire now! I want to kill now! I want to incinerate now! Now!” says a fat balding man.
“Calm down honey,” his wife says. “You heard the stewardess. We’ll be in bombing range soon. See honey, the music’s starting and everything.” Soon they are dropping fire on the cities below. The conversation in the plane resembles one that can be heard in a boxing arena on a good night. The vacationers come home with pictures and souvenirs. Some pose with charred dismembered bodies. They smile and give the thumbs-up to the camera. Some are wearing strings of ears around their necks. The women all want their pictures taken with the captain. People will come back with their own stories about the number of gooks they killed, each will exaggerate like crazy. Each will have a story about the one that got away. “One of those little bastards was hiding in a rice paddy. I was so plastered on those goddamn huge drinks they were serving that I missed him. Madge blew the little son of a bitch right out of the water. What a woman.”
The Portable Henry Rollins Page 3