He is alive. In a way.
The ticket comes as it always has via hypodermic syringe. Specifics still need fleshing out but apparently one is to inject a full syringe of their own blood into him. The blood courses through his body, hot-wiring his brain, and after a couple hours one is made to draw out the blood and inject it into one’s self. This is meant to show you what he saw and felt. Without inhibitions. Complete and uncensored. True sight. True experience.
You do know the original text for Naked Lunch was twenty-seven thousand words longer, right? No of course you would not know this. A portion of it was even written in the language of insects, best considered simply as “the language of insects,” as any attempts to define it with our meager alphabet are rendered futile and even in some cases have left those who have attempted mentally scarred. It is the most prevalent language in my world, though the language of reptiles—see the previous note on “the language of insects,” add ten, subtract millennium—is also widespread. English and Spanish and some obscure and mostly dead African languages are also spoken by most. I’ve learned some but not enough. Yet. Latin was apparently a joke that took foothold in the old world. The insects still find amusement in this.
“Riding the Centipede” is supposed to be the ultimate experience for any living being. All living beings. Human. Insect. Animal. Alien. As well as those of other dimensions.
(I must clarify: when saying “insect.” I do not mean the minimal percentage known in of your world. I mean insects that only the imagination of those in sync with the dark frontier can even fathom. Thus goes defining animal, alien, and those of other dimensions. I’ve only made acquaintance with a few of each but must confess their repulsive beauty or beautiful difference enamors me. So different. So different.)
I must experience this.
I’ve only now gotten this much information. I had heard of it on the hot winds in southern California before. Along beaches in Oregon and alleys everywhere. It was only when Grimes, one of my regular suppliers, detailed the most concise refinement of information beyond whispers and cacophonous dreams, that I realized it was real.
Real in my world.
Hence, as I talk to you here, in my head, where you might be a receiver picking up on my messages, I make way to the green limousine parked in front of the Beat Museum, to take the first step into total illumination.
Hold my hand, dear sister. We’re on our way.
Chapter 4 Blake
San Francisco was always one of Blake’s favorite cities, despite his less than cheerful history within its crisp, cool borders. He’d even thought of moving there after the last job that led him to the City by the Bay, sinking into the more relaxed vibe.
He knew it was all a masquerade, though. The true personalities of all cities were revealed by what lives in the dark spaces between. The core, the essence, of any city was mired in parchment promises and dreams eroded by tears, grist for hope to chew up and spit out. Nothing more.
Though he’d taken many trips to San Francisco, he’d only had a couple of North Beach experiences. They left him wary of the task at hand. The crux of his existence was wariness. It was woven into his flesh, holding him together. Pain of memory; pain of the physical type. Pain, his ubiquitous god.
The first North Beach incident had occurred almost thirty years ago, when he was on the edge of adulthood, still feeling his way through a world he did not understand. He’d spent a summer in town, a nomad in need of money, and his six foot four inch frame allowed him to provide bouncer services for a couple of the clubs.
After the rough upbringing he endured with his army father, it seemed the only logical path. His meat and muscles, and especially his mind, never refreshed with a word of encouragement or any words at all really, made this kind of work ideal.
He’d also done some on-the-sly detective work for one of the club owners. It led to a metal pipe pummeling that shattered the bones in his right hand. He also got a message to move on, big fella, move on, from guys not as big as he was but more experienced. The message was punctuated with one sharp crack to the skull, a fracturing exclamation point. He woke up hours later in a hospital, head and hand wrapped in gauze. Before the nurse made her second pass, he slipped out. Pain and humiliation had prompted his swift exit. It reminded him of home, the one he’d left after barely graduating high school, so he left San Francisco, burying another body in the already stuffed coffin of his past, this one still fresh.
The second time he came to North Beach was ten years ago, having graduated to official private eye status, his diploma wrought by-rote experience. Time may have healed the head and hand on the outside, though every chilly night was a merciless reminder that magnified the pain to unbearable levels inspiring his alcohol intake to push into the red, but it did not matter. Anything to alleviate the initial pain, and the harsh memories it inspired. The memories couched in events from a few years after the damage had been done…(Claire…)
Pain reminded him he was alive.
He was on the trail of a wayward husband of a rich socialite from down south. Cheating seemed as popular as shopping to those with money to spare and time to waste. For most of his time on surveillance he had been on stake-out outside of Vesuvio, a famous, poet-friendly bar where the husband made regular connections. With the strategically installed mini-cam Blake ended up snapping a few less than flattering shots of the man in a dank hotel room in the Tenderloin while he was getting anally reamed with everything and the kitchen sink. A couple of the local denizens, a poet of minor ilk—Blake had never understood the attraction of poetry, his tastes veering toward men’s adventure tales and pulp fiction, Doc Savage and the like—and a former hot-shot player for the local baseball team who’d succumbed to steroids misuse and a rumored propensity for bleaching his anus, watched in dimly lit revelry.
He’d drifted for a few days after sending the photos to the wife. The information she received inspired a smoke and shifting mirrors sleight-of-hand campaign that somehow kept the illusion of their marriage intact. While the couples’ carnival act played out, he took in North Beach’s cafes finding a brief moment of fresh air before the place lifted its veil again, showing him things one would rather ignore, Disillusioned, he headed back to his home base.
When he got to San Francisco, he contacted Derek Potters, an old boxing buddy from his two year stint in the army, a like-minded private eye based in the area, to secure Potters’ beaten up dog-shit brown sofa for his stay, acclimating to the task at hand: the search for Marlon Teagarden. One he was sure would lead nowhere. He’s already had Potters scope out the street-laden rumor mill via his informants, to no avail. He slipped as discreetly as a man his size could, into the margins, asking questions himself, to similar futility.
After living on double slices of pizza for three days, he stepped out of Molinari’s Delicatessen chewing on an Italian sandwich—prosciutto and provolone, straight up, no trimmings—ready to call Jane Teagarden with the insubstantial news, when one of the street vermin he’d spoken to the previous day sauntered up to him and said, “You’ll know it when you see it.”
“See what?”
“The Ano-anomaly.”
What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
Dozens of flies buzzed feverishly about this wiry person’s unkempt, dirt-crusted head, like some mud-packed pigmy. The smell hit him next, the heavy stench of excrement. The man’s pants sagged obscenely.
“You’ve already seen it, you know?”
The grimy man twitched uncontrollably, guffawed sharply. He was an obvious meth zombie, the place was crawling with them, cockroaches dressed in soiled human flesh. Razorblades sliced through his skittering eyes.
Though he classified this man as street vermin, scum, he also knew he could be like him within a week or three of giving up and giving in to the painkillers and alcohol. Chances were he’d find purchase in harder drugs, ones made of diamond and meant to slice cleanly into the soul, dump the spirit, purge it as one would sour milk
or fish gone fishy.
Blake started to verbalize the thought—“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”—but the man was off, loping like a sick gazelle, finally turning toward the dark seam between two buildings and disappearing.
Blake followed with curious detachment. The message meant nothing to him. The scum—he remembered him from the previous days paltry encounters, had said his name was Joe, “but my friends call me Skinny J,” so Blake called him Joe and moved on with haste at his lack of anything important to say. When Blake observed the slim seam between buildings, there was no sign of Joe, but also no signs of exits, no doorways, no nothing. Where had he disappeared to?
Blake backed into the bustling midday street-life, contemplating the derelict’s words, finding nothing to hold on to.
Then it hit him. An Ano-anomaly. You’ll know it when you see it. A flicker from twenty minutes previous, before he’d strolled into Molinari’s—a green limousine.
Parked on Broadway, across from an array of strip clubs, an oddly shaped and more oddly colored neon green limousine had caught his eye. So out of place. So out of place.
An anomaly.
He dumped the last third of the sandwich into an already overflowing garbage receptacle and raced toward the corner of Columbus and Broadway, glancing to his left the whole way. Barely acknowledging the flapping books artwork above his head or the various words stamped into the sidewalk he stomped on.
What if this green limousine had something to do with the whereabouts of Marlon Teagarden?
His instincts kicked up a notch, triggered by the odd statement from the derelict. Receptors on high, he didn’t just sense this might mean something more, he knew it.
But when he made the corner, his pace slowed. The green limousine was gone.
He cursed his folly, and then cursed his uncertainty.
Never doubt your instincts, they’ve always been good up to now.
He shrugged his heavy, black trench coat snug to his big frame, the chill of something besides the weather weaving through the clothing to address his flesh with the faint kiss of discomfort.
Wandering back to the space between buildings the derelict had slipped into, he lit a cigarette, dragged deep, and measured the whole space with his eyes. Even though Joe had been skinny—Skinny J—it seemed impossible he could fit into this space. Perhaps this fella walked through brick walls. He chuckled unenthusiastically as he regained a foothold in the here and now, though still unsteady. Tracery remnants of shit tickled his nostrils.
That’s when he realized the prevalent buzz of flies that accompanied all this, just as it had accompanied the filthy man. He swatted at the flies as they hurried with intent over a section of the brick wall.
Perhaps the man had the talent for walking through walls?
Either way, in the six years since Jane Teagarden had initially called him, he felt like some sort of progress had been made for the first time. Not that anything here pointed to that much, or even to the whereabouts of Marlon Teagarden, but the surreal quality to the episode touched his instincts with this impression. His instincts: the only thing he really trusted.
Chapter 5 Teagarden
Tiny dents like acne scars are littered across the grungy neon-green skin of the limousine. Greasy fingerprints, not mine, smudge the door handle. A long, lean arm the color of a dung beetle’s carapace or perhaps petrified shit with the veins wending over it push the door open and it squeaks, this door, and it reminds me of another language I need to learn. My mind wanders, a stray cat in need of a midnight hump, juiced by the language of desire.
Everything speaks in my world. Everything has its own language.
I’m drawn back to the car, the open door, the gateway to an abyss about to swallow me and the woman inside smiles with leering intensity.
“My name is Alice. Welcome to Wonderland.” She snickers, the sound akin to a cage door being unlocked. There is cruelty in her tone but I skip past that because of what I need. I don’t listen to my instinct when my mind and body yearn for experience at all costs.
Thoughts scatter:
I wonder what pills Wonderland’s Alice was really taking. Specifically what pills or drugs was her creator Lewis Carroll taking? Was he one of those opium hounds from way back when?
If Lewis Carroll was privy to the world I travel in, he most certainly ingested drugs outside of the homogenized norm. With his proclivities for young girls, he was already wired for deviance. No, not exactly deviance though in the limited views of your world, the domain of those afraid to tap into their true selves, it might seem that way. What those people might consider as a perversion, I, and those like me, consider simply different.
It took me a while to learn this, the depth of this. Circuits open to evolve without restriction. Naturally. Leading into the dark frontier
I’m still learning now. It is constant. The influx of information. Of understanding.
I still want our father and his cohorts to die slow and painful and fully experienced deaths. There are some things I can never change…
Alice sits across from me, heavy breasts encased in a filthy yellow tank top, but not mustard yellow, so I don’t chew on it just to spit it out. Upon further inspection, watching a spider dance on her shoulder, I realize the tank top might once have been white. Might once have been silk. The spider might be her tailor.
Denim short shorts, frayed edges caressing her brown thighs, smoother than the arm, her arms, no cracks to scar the surface. Sweat and the raw stench of her unclean womanhood clogs my nostrils. I’m hyper-sensitive already. I know it’s the anticipation of the needle taking over. Of the drug I’ve only recently heard about. Of the drug meant to enhance my journey. Get me to the point. Make a point. Sharpen perceptions.
Open unseen doorways.
They’re everywhere these doorways. But only those with the proper mindset and different eyes can see them. Travel through them.
I’ve never traveled this way before. I may be nervous but am also eager to undertake this new experience. Life demands as much.
Beyond the tinted windows, I view the faceless minions; truly faceless, putty to be molded, but molded by what? By whom?
Or squished beneath my thumb for their conformist rituals.
It took me a while to learn the depth of the possibilities that render this world relevant, even if wired properly.
Alice speaks, her rough cadence scratching at my eager veins:
“I am the way. The will and the sacrifice burn through my veins, man.”
She can’t mean literally, though the promise of doorways opened and more importantly information attained causes my pores to gasp on the fever sweat of anticipation. I don’t care what she says or does. Whatever is necessary is always the path as long as she gives me what I need.
I must assure myself of her intentions.
“Burroughs. The Centipede”
“The Centipede. Burroughs, yes, Burroughs. The first step is…in here,” she says, nodding to the syringe and the thick green liquid within. Something or some things swim in the liquid. Clawing for escape. For a willing vein. Pulsing to the tip of the needle. “The Centipede is yours…soon. I need one thing from you.” She hands me some pliers and opens her chapped lips wide, the maw teeming with teeth and more teeth.
In my world, currency comes in many forms. Fetishes, objects of desire, are the most commonly bartered items. One’s murkiest transgressions are polished to crystal clarity without the shadow speculations of your world. Here, there are no boundaries.
Perversion blows hot air with regularity up the ass of the addict.
My loose grip signifies I’m at a loss. Alice, sweet Alice, and her mouthful of filed, sharp teeth, jabs a thin knife into one of the blackened sections of gum in her mouth. Blood beads and drips. She rudely slides filthy fingers into my mouth. Caressing teeth. Pulling on what’s left. I gag from the force of her intent. More likely from the years of disreputable transactions coating her fingers like a glove, e
tched in the lines, never to be washed off.
I’ve only got half my teeth left since dental care is not a big deal in my world.
She grunts. Words are not necessary but I know what she wants. One of my teeth to join her enamel colony, her bartered collection.
She beams, her face in the shady confines of the green limousine, a black-light horror. Her point is made.
My hand trembles but I am not sure if it’s with fear of the pain yanking a tooth out will instill in my already pain-wracked body or if its adrenaline amping up. I need the Centipede now.
No matter. I stick the slimy pliers into my mouth, taste the sticky fingerprints and residual fear leftover by those who have succumbed to Alice’s proffered addiction before me, as well as the tangy, bitter taint of rusted metal, and let the snapping jaws make their choice. Halfway down the left side of my jaw their jaw clamps down on a loose tooth and I assist by squeezing with all my might to make the acquisition of the tooth as swift as possible. My eyes close and I hear only Alice’s rapid breath as if on the verge of orgasm.
Anticipation has her in its slippery grips.
A harsh groan accompanies the task. The tooth refuses to come easily. My muscles, what muscles I have left, tend to the battle at hand.
Alice’s long bony fingers wrap around mine as a spider to the cocooned fly—not her pet, her tailor, another arachnid imposter—but I shove them away.
Her breath only grows more hurried.
Finally, twisting as I pull, the sucking pop narrows the pain that inhabits the whole of my body, the nerves stripped bare and gnawed on by life, to this one point, the intersection of tooth and gum, and the deed is done. Blood spills on the crinkled fast food bags and empty cigarette packs strewn across the floor of the green limousine and my shoes. My fingers ache from the mighty grip and are still shaking. Tears of pain varnish my face. I see my reflection in the metallic void of her eyes. An unhealthy gleam. A tortured repose.
Alice pries my fingers from her pliers and takes her prize. She pushes the tooth into the recently excavated hole and uses the closed pliers to hammer it into place.
Riding the Centipede Page 3