He rummaged through the desk looking for cash, but came up empty. Duke shrugged, stuffed the sandwich in his pocket and wheeled the bike towards the exit.
Just as he was about to leave the premises, the bookstore clerk materialized in front of him—from out of thin air—blocking his path.
“Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing? That doesn’t belong to you. Please be cool and put it back,” the apparition lectured. It was dressed in a faded tiedyed T-shirt and ancient bell-bottoms. For sure this one don’t live on the street, Duke thought.
“I really must ask you to split, or I’ll be forced to call the police,” the obstruction continued, grabbing the handlebars and attempting to wrest the bike from Duke.
That was a mistake. Duke popped the guy, knocking him to the floor.
“Get the fuck out of my way, asshole—I hate old hippies,” Duke snarled, pushing the bicycle out of the store. He looked back to see if the clerk was going to try to get up and follow him, and felt the bike bump into something—or someone. Duke whirled around and found himself face to face with the one-armed Angel (the tourist he’d been messing with gladly fled).
“I remember you,” the Angel gloated, raising his hook.
UPPER WEST TO LOWER EAST
BY MICHAEL GATLIN
Sezso Ximenez carefully opens the window. He crawls out onto the fire escape and closes it from the outside. He has been doing this for years—slipping out into the night without so much as a suspicious knock on his bedroom door from any member of his family.
He is the man of the house, the provider, the king. The nighttime is his time. He is an explorer of the late hours.
He is happy his birthday is over. Sezso hates the songs, the cake, the arbitrary presents that aren’t wanted, and the worst . . . aging—the melatonin going, the testosterone fading . . .
Two black tennis shoes hit the sidewalk softly as Sezso lands from the last rusted steel rung of the fire escape. He is free from his known life as a faux paternal, familial and financial provider. Free from the presence of his family home. He escapes into the wild Manhattan jungle in search of a medium.
Sezso glides through the streets in black pants and shirt. No one notices him as he slinks quickly down the sidewalk.
He finds his surface: A brick wall on Chrystie Street. Sezso unrolls a six-foot stencil slowly, spraying black paint as he goes. His rubber gloves quickly darken. The stencil is of a Catholic priest in full vestments. The priest is giving communion; the host outstretched from his holy offering. Sezso uses only black on the priest. He quickly rolls the stencil up.
He finds another stencil in his backpack, a kneeling clown. He paints yellow as he unrolls. This stencil is beside and beneath the priest. The clown extends his tongue receiving the holy wafer. He then tapes up a holey stencil to cover the clown suit with polka-dots. He sprays the dots blue, then outlines the shape and features of the face in blue. Sezso tapes up another stencil and sprays the clown nose and hair red.
The clown has a much exaggerated red smile and open mouth, tongue extended. His hands are clasped in front of his belly, below the offering host, around a single reed bulb horn; the kind Harpo Marx spoke with. There is tension and comedy in the piece. The communion will be exaggerated by a slapstick noise.
Sezso rerolls the stencil scrolls and removes his rubber gloves. The contraband is hidden in his backpack, black and snug against his frame as he disappears into the shadows.
Sezso Ximenez is half Mayan Indian and half Spanish Conquistador: His great-to-the-whatever grandfather on his father’s side was aboard Cortes’ ship of gold hunting soldiers who killed savages thoroughly while searching for the map to El Dorado. His great-to-the-whatever grandfather on his mother’s side was a Quichean warrior from Guatemala and survived for many generations and many wars and had many children. Sezso discovered this when he was nine years old and his father had encouraged the young prodigy to do a family tree for his mother.
At the age of twelve Sezso created the family tree of his father and the family tree of his mother. He spent two weeks on the Internet researching ancient connections. He presented the two five-by-three-foot trees to his parents for their fifteenth wedding anniversary.
The trees were done in accurate browns and detailed greens and enlisted the names of hundreds and hundreds of relatives. It was the first time he saw his father cry because of something that he had made. This one act turned Sezso into an artist.
His father studied the trees intently. He had them both framed and they rested on the ground by their bed. Three years later, he was gone, lost to the furies of the Atlantic Ocean.
Sezso’s father was a fisherman. His boat capsized. He became part of the sea. His flesh dissolved and was consumed and transformed with his bones and fluids and tissue to the purity of the carbon element. He was indeed no more.
Before he left the earth, Sezso’s father taught him to catch, scale and cook fish. They would walk from their Upper West Side apartment on Saturdays through Riverside Drive Park to the docks where Franklin’s father parked his fishing boat. It seemed enormous to Sezso then, in the glorious sun, with the dirty water lapping against the old wooden docks.
Sezso’s mother, Ramona Ximenez, was in shock when she realized that they had saved very little money and that she was going to have to not only work but move her family from the safe Upper West Side to the dangerous Lower East Side of Manhattan: riches to rags, practically overnight. Sezso was also in shock and spoke to no one for a year.
Today, Ramona Ximenez is a 250-pound ultra-hyper helicopter-mom whose sole desire in life is to cook, clean, and take care of her four children, which she does with suffocating gusto. Her large Paleolithic-Venus breasts have enough milk to feed an entire housing complex in the projects where she lives with her children: Sezso, Juanez, Manuelo, and Ivana.
Ivana is a gorgeous fourteen-year-old blossom who fears the world away from her mother’s girth and stink of birth. She will be a woman soon and is ready to leave the house, get married, get pregnant, and get tied to the kitchen life, which is the way it has always been in their family.
Manuelo is twelve, and is already starting to drink, smoke pot, and steal petty items from small stores. Neither he nor his sister remembers their father at all.
Juanez is nineteen, and has just been accepted into college.
Ramona insists that Sezso help her raise his three remaining siblings and pay for his sister and brother’s school before he moves out of their four-bedroom apartment on Norfolk.
She is terrified that when her children move out she will be left alone. She shackles her kids to her apron strings with a loving noose designed to tighten anytime they get a sniff of the outside world. Sezso has to go out and make a living—she understands that—but she begs him to continue to live at home for as long as he can, to help with Ivana and Manuelo. She says Juanez is already a man—beyond her parental control.
Sezso has had to fight his whole life because of his very attractive and very feminine good looks. His thin dark face with its perfectly manicured goatee, razor cheeks, thick lashes, smoldering milk chocolate eyes drove the girls in the neighborhood crazy, and the boys in the hood cracked him in the jaw every once in a while—as if trying to prove that they were the better mating choice.
During the day Sezso earns money as a game programmer—enough money to support his entire family though his siblings are unaware of this fact. They wonder sometimes why he hasn’t left the house and started his own family. What else can he do? His mother begs him to stay and he stays. Stays and pays for groceries and his siblings’ education.
Sezso often thinks of his father. He remembers the big fisherman who loved the boat and the ride of the sea. He remembers what a prize occasion it was each and every one of the four times he actually went out to sea with him.
The first time he had just turned nine and the experience was terrifying. The waves were particularly rough for such a partly-cloudy day and the only thing he remembers is
throwing up in the cabin for hours.
The second time he was eleven. This was supposed to make Sezso a man, but he was still going to getting beaten up at school most days because he was having frequent erection attacks and his classmates had started calling him “boner.” On this journey Sezso didn’t vomit, but he didn’t fish either. He was too terrified to let go of the railing.
The third time on his father’s boat, Sezso fished. He was fourteen. He dropped the line into the water and let it explore the ocean depths. He caught a fish that day: one fish—a ten pound baby bass. It was enough to make his father proud.
On his fifteenth birthday Sezso flung the line further, baited it with larger prey, meatier chunks. He was stronger that year, muscles now formed around his svelte brown frame, hair fuzzed his legs and arms and his facial hair was darker, more noticeable.
Suddenly, Sezso hooked a three hundred pound shark. His father watched the rippling muscles on his son Sezso’s body, his biceps pop and forearms flex as he tried to grip the reel. He watched the pole bend and stretch and knew instantly the boy had a monster. He didn’t think the boy had a chance.
“Give me the line son.”
“No! I caught him!”
Diego Ximenez stepped back, challenged by his son for the first time. He felt so proud, he almost cried. It did not matter to him that the boy might not be able to reel in the fish.
Sezso took a deep breath and struggled with the mightiest force he had ever encountered. He was in his first year of high school and on the varsity baseball team. He was exercising most of his erections away and learning to size up his classmates as friend, lover, or foe. He thought he had it all figured out until he hooked this fish.
He pulled and tugged. He wrapped his inexperienced hands around the line and cut his left hand wide open: blood. He kept gripping the pole, fighting the fish, turning the crank, dripping with blood. He wasn’t getting off of the boat without that fish.
That was the day everything changed for Sezso. That eighty-degree day in the perfect blue waters, blue sky with nothing to do but battle nature, god, and the self in one long marathon struggle to catch a bucking fish.
Sezso still had the original photograph and newspaper article of the young man and his father. In the photograph, Sezso posed with the three hundred pound shark that gave him an epic two-hour battle that he eventually won. It was such a beautiful day.
Now, in the cool early June night of another year, Sezso Ximenez smokes a cigarette on the fire-escape, and thinks about his life since then. He hopes his sister isn’t watching.
She is.
Ivana can hear the very silent Sezso when he opens the window. She loves it when she hears him come home. She can finally sleep then. No one knows why her grades suffer and she is tired all of the time. She watches the glamorous cigarette smoke flow from her brother’s mouth and nose in silhouette rivers behind her room’s thin blinds. She hopes it will not be a long night.
Sezso puts out his cigarette and dashes out into the evening, down the ninja fire-escape and soft onto the sidewalk. He has work to do, scores to settle with the way it is and the way it should be.
The playground at night is a still masterpiece of silence. The chains do not squeak with swinging children, pulling and kicking limbs with laughter, swinging to the absolute highest point possible before exhaustion or jumping, depending on the bravery and will of the child. The slides reflect moonlight in their chrome tongue offering, twisting in scooped spirals, rising and falling in humped length, landing in a pit of sand where children either pillow or stick a landing. The monkey bars are simple skeletons of unfurnished homes, indestructible jail-cells, or domes of iron wrought for training exercise only.
It is three in the morning. Sezso’s shadow drifts across the playground. He slithers along the walls and dark corners, until he shows himself, running across the court, dribbling an imaginary basketball, cutting and slicing as if he is playing a game with a team of invisible competitors. Near the hoop, he leaps high to dunk the imaginary ball, and holds onto the rim. With incredible strength pulls himself up, straddles the rim and leans against the backboard, then attaches a brand new rope basketball net to the naked steel circle. This is one of his favorite hobbies.
When he was younger—ten, eleven, twelve—Sezso loved to hear the swoosh of the basketball net when he played. The onomatopoeic SwWOoosh—filling him with the sense of accomplishment with a sound like windy silk.
Sezso smiles as he finishes attaching the final loop. He drops to the ground, soft shoes silent on the asphalt court. He returns to the shadows, disappearing in the concrete darkness with the ease of a tomcat.
He skips in and out of the parking lots and parks and playgrounds around Manhattan dressing one hundred nets on one hundred naked rims and inventing the realities of a hundred success stories that end with the same sound: SwWOoosh!
He scores three hundred points from impossible distances; shooting one hundred times and making every one. He is the all-time leading scorer in the Ghost League and no one knows his secret.
IMITATIONS OF CHRIST
BY PETER MARRA
And her bloodstained kiss burned my lips…
You may have heard other versions of this story. But this is the straight shit.
They didn’t hold me in stir very long. After the incident of two days ago, I was kept on ice at Manhattan South in a cell with a couple of wholesome guys who would give me the once over every so often, after breakfast and after lunch. They would look me up and down, and sensuously lick their lips in unison. I pretty much expected to become their girlfriend, but surprisingly nothing ever happened. I guess they were a little put off by the reason that I was there in the first place. Rumors precede you in prison.
The cops, despite their best efforts, couldn’t produce a corpse. When they arrived at the diner that afternoon they found me, a catatonic waitress in the corner, and a pool of coagulating blood on the floor. One of the cops, a dumb fat fuck, slipped on the blood, fell right onto his greasy pig ass and couldn’t get up. When his partners helped him up he puked and they laughed. The waitress was transported to Bellevue, she’s still there and from what I’ve heard, she will remain there for a very long time counting her fingers over and over again.
They let me out around 5 p.m.—no hard evidence. Also, my inalienable rights had been violated, they had forgotten the Miranda, and so I walked. It was December and the sky was a black velvet painting: faces stretched taut across the sky, a handful of stars, a twinkle, and a flash every so often. I headed to the last comfortable place I could think of: A diner on Eighth Avenue near Forty-third Street, near the old Show World Sex Emporium, now a haunted house entertainment dump for the tourists. As always I was drawn to Times Square, even when it was just to watch it die in a pool of sewer water choking on its own blood and vomit.
The diner I am referring to was never touched by the march of progress. The windows were eternally greasy. When I entered, I was assaulted by a wall of cigarette smoke, bacon grease, and human stink. Formica circa ’65 completed a scene populated with a collection of rancid hookers and scabby drunks teetering on wooden chairs. One junkie, post-mainline, was attempting to eat a hamburger deluxe, but could never get it together enough to take a bite. His eyes rolled back, his lids drooped, his mouth missed the burger and his head gradually inched closer to his french fries and ketchup until at the last possible second his neck would snap back and like Sisyphus, he would start all over again.
I saw that an old acquaintance, Criselda, was working behind the counter. This was a lucky break. I approached the counter; she smiled when she recognized me.
“Hey baby! What’s up?” She shook her head when I finished my story. “Assholes! You’re a dumb mother fucker! How does this shit happen to you all the time?”
“Anyway,” I shrugged, “I need a weapon.”
“Sure, papi.” She reached under the counter, pulled out a brown paper bag and handed it over. I looked around quickly, a little n
ervous that people might notice.
“Don’t worry about these assholes! Bunch of drugged out cunts and dicks. Fuckups,” she said. “Here! Take it. Blued steel, the number’s been filed off. Can’t be traced. Pay me when you have the money.”
“Thanks. Can you get me a black coffee too?”
She gave me the black coffee and I went to sit by the front window at a rickety table which I steadied with a couple of folded napkins placed under one leg. I was glad I ran into her. The word on the street was that she was expert in the Tarot and also possessed a vagina with teeth, which she had used to murderous advantage in the past. I wouldn’t know, but there was that nasty incident at the peep show in Coney Island years ago, all that blood and several dead johns, but the evidence didn’t stick and she walked. Cris bore an uncanny resemblance to 1940s film icon Maria Montez, which made her all the more endearing.
I opened the bag under the table, took the piece out, gave it a quick once over: Smith & Wesson snub nose .38 Special Model 10, blued steel like Criselda had promised. I hid it in my coat pocket. My girl always came through in a pinch.
I stared out the window at the Church across the street. A seagull perched on the top of the steeple’s cross collapsed and fell several stories, ending with a splat on the pavement. It just lay there. An old man stopped to stand over the bird and inspect it. As he looked at the bird, two passing youths knocked the nosey old fart down and robbed him. As he lay on the ground, they kicked him in the head exactly three times. He shook a little then stopped. The kids ran away. Then the bird moved, stood up, teetered, and flew off. A fucking miracle. The old codger remained comatose. People came. People went. Time marched on. He bled. Eventually the cops showed up.
“Nice hustle,” I thought. I felt the fear coming on and headed out the door, making my way to the subway. My stomach was flipping, my balls were rising into my gut, and my hands and feet ached. There was a small circle of blood in each palm. This was not the time for the stigmata. At the corner, I heard the distant groan of a female voice. I shoved my hands into my pockets. Resisting the urge to turn around and see who was moaning, I crossed the street to the subway entrance and made my way down the stairs into the filth and fury of the station. Finally, a place where I felt less nervous. A place of queasy comfort.
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