Geezers lurk around all over town trying to get me to put out. Cops pop out of corners and try to cuff me for no reason. All these dads have been ganging up on us, so many blank stares in town. We keep saying, “We’re not citizens, we’re fuckin ghosts to you, you don’t see us,” get it??? We gathered at a place where a Meth house had burned down — exploded as they say — leaving only a greasy meadow. But the old downtown strip died a long time ago. A disaster came and changed it forever. Problem is I still remember how it used to be, what used to be where, before that wild storm came through and turned everything into mossy brick-lined basements with no buildings on top. Imagine a whole street pockmarked with fenced-off troughs, like an empty swimming pool town. It was an earthquake, a big one, and it whipped through my city producing rows and rows of open-air basements. So what? We grew up in the middle of all these basements for so long that the ground level seemed just about lofty. Here basements “stood” as buildings in reverse and we stalked the streets above ’em like foremen surveying an invisible production floor. The city filled one hole then another casually over the years, so now only one was left and it collected families of alley cats and the thick smoke of negative space that surrounded all life in this haunted place. So there was the earthquake, sure, but there was also the fog — and it covered everything. We couldn’t even hear our own voices as we called out to each other from our sidewalk posts across town. The fog choked us, erased our eyes and rubbed out our brains with stricken white memories that crawled and crept along streets like a pregnant rat waiting to birth tiny, rain-soaked cottonballs. We spat out poison-soaked memories on the sidewalk.
We walked into a town, a little off the freeway in southeast Oregon, near Hines, stopping only briefly to siphon blood off a young man’s neck. The guy probably didn’t even see it coming. We took expired medication in his bathroom and rounded the corner to a 24-hour Rite Aid. It was four in the morning so we were alone in pretty much any aisle we wanted. Right off the bat Murph compulsively air-wrote the number thirteen in every corner of the store. Funny, cuz his compact little frame of bones and red hair was itself basically a good luck charm — a little furry fetish you rubbed to ward off evil. His arms were just skin stretched over two giant clutches of elbow bones; the tiny, gnarled limbs were covered in translucent white hairs and orange spots. “Nothing can hurt you — if you don’t care,” he air-sang. The phone rang and the main clerk guy walked away from the mopping machine he was operating to answer it. He talked quickly and absentmindedly fanned the receiver. I walked by that mopping machine and it was caked with dirt and shit, smelling like a gust of Hell from inside a lemon. I busied myself with a backpack on one shoulder, reading mags. Josh was reading some mom magazine sitting in a machine that calculates your blood pressure, flipping pages so fast it was obvious he wasn’t really reading it. Seth came by and scooped me and my Us Weekly up and brought me to the back breakroom. He made a little coffee and stripped and lay back naked on the employee couch and watched TV while he touched himself. I flipped and flipped, finally throwing the magazine down in disgust. Knowles and Josh came in, having snagged some sweatpants from the clothes aisle. Since it was kind of smoky out from fireplaces the sweatpants seemed wet all the time. They smelled like black ash.
Soldiers in the eternal war, armies mobilizing in the night… We met a soldier in the Anarchist Black Cross at a Black Bear Diner in Sweet Home. His name was Jacob and he ran with a band of sexy peasant-looking boys sleeping their days away in unlocked cars. He picked apart pieces of leathery orange peel in the parking lot, going on and on about selling his body to old men who yanked his pants down in the dark afternoon of abandoned buildings. Pulling up a blue crate next to a pallet fire behind the diner Jacob hunkered down with us and right away started yapping about some crazy dude at the Greyhound station waiting room who said he wanted to pick up a wasted teen vampire to go to the movies but instead he took him to some retaining wall at the bottom of a ravine below a big house in the woods. The guy went to the truck and whipped out a jump rope and all Jacob was good for was to lay there licking his own booze-salted lips while he took a beating. He thought of distracting the guy by taking out his dick, which worked, so when the old dude dove for it Jacob started punching the crap out of him. At this point he was able to run away but the geezer still tried to throw a hacksaw in his direction but he laughed and laughed and ran away covered in blood. Jacob said that nobody but Jacob owns his body. He decides who it fucks and who it pummels. “We own nothing but what’s inside. It’s the middle of the night in here,” he said, pointing to his chest. This is what we own: our thoughts, orange and sickly. You feed it nothing but sorrow and it grows and stars come out and you are the King of your own Island of Night!
Truckers are mustachioed weirdos. They sleep in tiny apartments wedged between their big-ass engine and whatever they’ve got hitched back there. They settle into these metal cubes of gassy, local air with maybe a small TV and square blankets and just wait it out with all their lumber chained up behind them and tons of pink and yellow forms sitting on the passenger seat, ready to be filled out. The foster-care industry directly feeds into the trucker industry. They’re basically grooming personnel to occupy these positions over the course of many generations. I don’t need to mention that the foster-care industry sustains the trucking economy with Roadside Slut Camps to quell workplace dissatisfaction. Foster-care sluts are a piece of bread tossed into the creek to keep the fucking swans at bay. When they look in the mirror all truckers see is a person-shaped cloud of CO2.
We sat in a different Black Bear Diner in a different Oregon town sometime shortly before the sun came up. Seth sat chomping on what he called a “Zoo Baby,” which was a plate of cut-up banana, kiwi, and apricot — like something they’d set down at the bottom of the mongoose cage. Josh pounded on the table. “It’s not hard to make acceptable coffee! I mean, it seems almost harder to make it suck.”
Knowles seemed to be making a go of it, grasping the mug with both hands. “I think it’s not so bad if you just get the light roast. It doesn’t have that ashy taste. If you get the light roast and tell your brain it’s tea it goes down okay.”
“Fuck that and fuck you. What do I look like, a sorcerer?”
I could tell this exchange would go nowhere. And just then I noticed Evangele, the homeless regular, slithering across the entire perimeter of the restaurant just to get to our booth, all the while caressing the walls with his hands. Classic schizophrenic behavior. We’d been through town enough to come to expect Evangele here, his Gumby frame bent into one of the booths. Lately, he’d adopted us as a kind of proving ground for new material and fresh schemes. He sat down, his eyebrows jiggling like two flushing toilet handles. “Do any of you people know about the Romanian pornographic actress Blebe ‘Blaze’ Cedourno?” Nobody moved or said anything, “She! does this thing where — ”
“That name sounds Italian or something — ”
“I assure you it is Czech.”
“Romanian?”
“Romanian.” And I’m reminded of that strange night at the diner, around Christmastime, around two thirty in the morning. It was me, the waitress, and Evangele. He had wheeled in his brand spanking new homeless man cart with this stuff: a boom box, didactic para-Christian psych-evangelical picket signs, and a live pigeon sitting on a pile of quarters in a cage — all strapped to various parts of this two-wheeler thing. His cart was blocking the entrance so I was almost kind of apologetic when a spacey girl in a dress and pants tried to come into the restaurant, only to have to scoot uncomfortably around this odd pile of shit. But then I noticed the girl had barf all down the front of the dress and when she opened her mouth it went something like this: “You guys. I just wanted to let you know that my family is coming in here and they are with the fuckin mob, okay? They are organized crime, gangsters. They will hurt you. Be careful, they will fuck you up. Just don’t say a word — be careful!” And the strange thing was that then these white people came int
o the diner and it was her family, her parents and a sibling. Midwestern types in honest wool and small gold jewelry. They sat and ordered breakfast while the girl spent the majority of the meal in the bathroom, regurgitating. She returned to the table and fell asleep. They laughed with their mouths closed, polished off their various plates and exited as the girl threw up on the booth and waiting area before leaving some vomit on the front door. But the family didn’t run out the door, they strolled — without even pretending to mime the international gesture for “Sorry, let me wipe this all up.” Outside they wrapped their safety belts firmly around their midsections and drove away, the girl just folded into the back seat somewhere, going God knows where. I stepped out into the cold night to have a cigarette next to a garbage can and I thought of how Seth and I used to play a game where I would go limp and he would try to stuff my deadweight upside down and sideways into the passenger seat of the car. This was the most hilarious thing ever to happen in a parking lot, we thought (or maybe just I thought). My limbs would flop around, willy-nilly, as he threw them inside and clapped the door shut. This display could go on for quite some time, with all sorts of horrified people peering over their shopping bags at me whooping it up with my neck craned around my ankles and my foot on the steering wheel.
But let me tell you a little about Evangele (say it “Ee-vawnguh-lay”) and his Vagrant Cart (a new thing; he used to have a van, now he had a cart). He had recently de-evolved to actual vagrant status with his cart, but otherwise he was the same old Moroccan in sweatpants with a boner. An ex-Yogi from Fremont who published a Christian Yoga book in ’72. Evangele, whose true age was a mystery, likewise kept under wraps his reasons for hiding out in the diners and vans of the Northwest. Whispers of possible reasons he may have fled his home circulated around the salad bar but none were as alarming or convincing as suggestions that Evangele was a disgraced Moroccan spirit photography scion. It didn’t help matters that Evangele would speak often, and in the vaguest possible terms, about his “deep ocean of sadness” lurking just under the surface. He was old enough to have lived several lives already and the fact that he surrounded himself with people under twenty just seemed like that much more wood on the fire, one more eccentricity. Just something you want to do, like buttering your bread with salt pork. When he disappeared for four months everyone just assumed he got deported. Maybe they found out about the stash of illegal postcards or the incendiary annotations in his Bible or the whole Morocco thing — or any number of things, come to think of it, the cops could have stumbled upon, their fingers itching with repulsion. Evangele was the kind of man who always had multiple reasons for getting put away all going at the same time. His plate was full of runny side dishes. So no one was surprised when he surfaced several months down the line spouting homespun Commie rhetoric and a whole new take on didactic signage. Where did he come up with this stuff, we wondered.
“What did you — pull this shit out of the sky?”
“You’re a genius!” he told us, no longer differentiating between the individual and the group, “You always ask the wrong questions… I’ve been away these many months now, and I’ve learned many new things. I’ve had many awakenings, many illusions yanked out of my brain and I’d wake up in the middle of the night — every night — and write letters, so many letters, but not to send. They were letters to my children, my past, to Me long ago… There are a lot of things no one will ever know about me, for beneath my smile is a deep ocean of sadness.”
Outside we ran into some crusty straightedge boys (Evangele’s new friends), who were these Victorian-looking Black Cross people with hankies stuffed into their sleeves, all lined up along the side of the building sitting crosslegged. They looked moist sitting out there in the full moonlight, like they were getting a moonburn under all that sweat. Josh threw a branch at them and that started them screaming at us, all charming-like, about how sexy communism is. They jumped up, raised cold little fists, and surrounded us with sheaves of grubby newsletters on the sidewalk. “Listen, skip — it’s fucking May Day.” The ringleader banged on the window with every emphatic phrase, his breath making empty speech bubbles. “Commies from all corners of the globe, wielding scythes in fields, pushing rivets into steel cargo barges are calling us to the table. It’s our time to sniff the gruel of class war!” The ringleader read, “Commies have never been so hot, what with the caps and boots and aprons sheathing their outpouring of earthy laughter. Aprons smeared with the serum of technical innovation, littered with the hairs of chimps projected into space to gather samples of Mars dust for the fabrication of vitamin powder for Red infants. They will grow up to use their soulful, big eyes to reverse the course of enemy tanks.” Hey hey hey hey he barked, shoving flyers at us. “This is full commitment! Join us, swaddled in cloth woven from the loom of resistance. Our hair is like wheat. Papa Karl! State-sponsored violins play for you. The warm embrace of your beard has never seemed so inviting, it’s a specter haunting my conflicted gut!!!” Seth, Knowles, Josh, Murph, and I stifled our giggles (except Murph — he was really upset!) as we hopped into their stolen school van for a ride to an abandoned gas station. There, in this big busted garage, some fat motherfucker was up on stage with a bloody microphone and a blue tarp wadded up next to the drum riser. The crusty Anarchos started screaming at some other kids at the door. They all jumped on each other in a pile which seemed that much more chaotic because it was extremely loud in there. I coughed but I couldn’t be sure it was real cuz I couldn’t hear it. Blood gathered on the linoleum at the bottom of the pile. Dirt filled the air and beer seeped in under the windowsills. The guy on stage was bleeding too and it came off in damp sheets when he sweated out of the top of his head. He looked out into the audience with a brown sweaty stare and barked, “Ow! Hey, my body is the rock ’n roll temple; my flesh, blood, and body fluids are a communion to the people,” before smashing the mic into his clenched jaw and hopping into the drum kit. Yeeyah… He mashed broken glass into his doughy gut — my skin is like paper! He threw shit and glass out into the audience — “My rock ’n roll is not to entertain, but to annihilate” — all around us people started screaming out their names. Epithets and quotations sprung up out of the ground and crashed into each other in the air as if we were in the cemetery and all the words on the tombstones had suddenly sprung loose. Weeds and bramble lay tangled in a mess on the floor —
“My mind is a machine gun, my body is the bullets, and the audience is the target!” —
“My lifestyle pretty much consists of what you see: I got a pair of pants, one jacket, a shirt; whatever can fit into a paper bag. I’m the type of person who has to be able to get out of town quick,” one said.
“I got a wild soul that’s too confined in this life,” another said. The fat motherfucker lay down and sang the next three songs in a semi-conscious state.
Seth and I left and went to a nearby convenience store. “What would happen if a girl tried to cut herself onstage?”
“The crowd would go crazy — they would try to stop her.”
We walk outside to where it had started to rain. What if she killed herself on stage?
We can no longer pass over bridges, only under them. The clerk behind the register was obviously wearing a wig and a large fake beard. I guess if you’re on the run you still have to make a paycheck.
We tried to rob him. He grew frustrated and threw down his disguise. “We’re not your enemies — we’re just like you! I don’t give a shit about this place. I’m just as predisposed to pulling some kind of crap like this on my own. And I do! I don’t give a fuck. I tell my friends to pull up to the back and say ‘Load it up with whatever the fuck you want.’ Just the other day I stole from the 7-Eleven up on Lancaster. Don’t give a fuck!”
“Fuck you, man. Just keep talking. You hate me and I hate you.”
Poised, coffee in hand. The world at large can go fuck itself… coffee fills my mind with thoughts of escape. A scattering of dead leaves loosened their way to the ground
with the memory of one day last fall as I sat out in front of a flattened patch of ivy and hay where our trailer used to be hitched on the outskirts of Eugene, deep in the forest. I had already lived there with Seth for a few months, surviving off crumpled tins of white noodles, doggy bags he brought me from the restaurant. It seemed like whenever I came back home I would find him fucking around with the trailer — trying to patch holes or hook up some hose or other — until that one day when I walked up and the trailer was just gone. All I came upon was some vaguely reminiscent place in the woods. Some dude several yards up the gravel road approaching me with a huge sleepy hound dog on a chain, yelling at me to get away and then starting to chase me. I ran away with one last noodle in my mouth like a bird. The next thing I recalled was waking up in a strange man’s bed, maybe in the morning, with that smell that had taken over my life, like coffee burning on the stove. A sudden realization from far away shook me even more. From the window I watched a small, sharp-jointed day laborer pick a spot in front of Big Creek Lumber. I heard a man stirring and waking up next to me, nightmares causing his jerky fitfulness. I could dream his dream too, if I chose, complete with his perspective on the kids he knew who were fed up with the county system, kids in tight, smelly jeans and monkey boots who were delivered to his house on a weekly basis. One kid came back early in the morning with bruises from this killing. To our surprise there would be an article on him in the newspaper, a story about some guy who picked him up for work but actually took him up to live with the old dude’s secret family, a bunch of children fending for themselves up in the hills. But before the cops knew the whole story they had found a body at a storage facility next to the freeway. The trucker, who had lay there without help for so long he died of his wounds. Later the kids stupidly tried to beat their way through a room of caseworkers. They had got a pretty fucked idea of what they were up against so all anyone would admit to was the story about one kid throwing a handful of gravel in a guy’s face and the rest of them running for it.
The Orange Eats Creeps Page 4