by Sean Penn
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CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
PART I
PRELUDE
STATION ONE: Seeking Homeostasis in Inherent Hypocrisy
STATION TWO: Recollections of a Teenage Carny
STATION THREE: Ephemerally Disarmed
STATION FOUR: The Scottsdale Program
STATION FIVE: Big Cock
STATION SIX: A Portrait of Entropy
STATION SEVEN: Sexual Dungeons
STATION EIGHT: Insect Homicide 2016
STATION NINE: Religious Tourism 2015
PART II
STATION TEN: Ballad of a Broken Man
STATION ELEVEN: Mein Drumpf
STATION TWELVE: Harking Back: Drifting and Decomposed
INTERLUDE
STATION THIRTEEN: Opiates & Incest
STATION FOURTEEN: Debunking Camus
STATION FIFTEEN: Just a Little Kiss
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS
To A-B-C
Anonymous, Boodi-nut, and Charlie Joe
Live it out like a god
Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt . . .
If that doesn’t make God proud of you,
Then God is nothing but gravitation,
Or sleep . . . the golden goal.
—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.
—Ingmar Berman
PART I
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
—Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
PRELUDE
TRANSCRIPT
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 15, 2001
“911 . . . What’s your emergency?”
“Yes. My name is Helen Mayo. I live at 1531 Sweet Dog Lane. I don’t know if I have an emergency, but I do have a new neighbor and I’m sorry if I just think he’s [loud dog barking renders caller unintelligible]—Nicky, please!—I’m sorry that’s just my little doggy—if I just think he’s behaving strangely, and perhaps, the police would like to take a look, or maybe go and . . . you know, sniff it out. Sniff, chat, whatever it is that you do.” [more dog barking]
“It’s a little difficult to hear you, ma’am. Can you describe the strange behavior, please?”
“Well, it seems he’s wrapping some kind of insulated wire around his house.”
“Insulated wire, ma’am?”
“Yes, or maybe a clothesline. He’s spooling it into his toolshed. I don’t know his exact street number, but it’s just two doors from me and across the street and I can see him from my kitchen window and, well . . . I don’t know. I just think the police should be involved.”
“Okay, ma’am. Thank you for your call. We’ll go ahead and notify patrol.”
“Thank you. Bye bye. [renewed loud dog barking] Who’s a good boy-ee?”
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 7, 2003
Numerous residents of Upper Sweet Dog Lane reporting overgrowth of a neighbor’s lawn. A 30-day notice has been posted.
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 23, 2003
Resident at 1528 Sweet Dog Lane was cited for illegal posting of placard admonishing, “International Airports Boast Morbid Mannequins at Duty Free.”
At 2200 hrs., a patrol car, dispatched to the address, served the citation to the location. Resident was either not home or nonresponsive to officers. The citation was left at resident’s door.
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 24, 2003
At 0634 hrs., Woodview County Sheriff’s office was contacted by cited resident.
“Woodview Sheriff’s Office.”
“Yes, ma’am. I am resident 1528 Sweet Dog Lane and in receipt of a citation for illegal posting. To whom it may concern, it wasn’t my sign.”
(Without sufficient evidence to the contrary, citation was rescinded.)
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 29, 2003
Neighbors complain of excessive lawn mower noise—0300 hrs. When patrol arrived at scene, all was quiet. Scent of fresh cut grass permeating the air.
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 1, 2004
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“Yes, this is Helen Mayo on Sweet Dog Lane.”
“Yes, Ms. Mayo. What’s your emergency?”
“Well, I just don’t know. But that neighbor, I’ve called you about him before. He’s cut his hair in a rather disturbing way.”
“He’s cut his hair, Ms. Mayo?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t bother you with a fashion, you know.”
“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t, ma’am. But you have to help me understand your concern.”
“Well, this hairdo of his, it’s something like a Nazi, or a woodshop teacher. And as you know, I’m not the only one on this street who has registered my concerns about this man. Despite numerous complaints or reports or what have you, I’m just baffled that you all have never actually engaged this gentleman. That you people haven’t made any official law enforcement contacts. Forgive me if I . . . that with all his strange behavior and haircuts and all that . . . you know what I mean . . . I’m not saying he looks Arab, mind you. He’s a white man. Anyone could see that, but I still think that the police should, well, you know . . . yes, sniff him out, just sniff that man out!”
* * *
STATION ONE
SEEKING HOMEOSTASIS IN INHERENT HYPOCRISY
SUMMER 2016
Cactus Fields, a Low-Cost Home for Assisted Senior Living, looms like a large khaki-colored brick isolated against a backdrop of distant ambient light. Its draped windows and solitary silhouette sit in a seemingly endless desert tableau. Here it seems that the desert itself has been deserted.
And there they are, the brand-less beasts of yesteryear. Moist, sagging eyes, illuminated by the rarefied strobe of a passing car on the interstate. Behind the windows of the beige stucco building that sits behind a dilapidated, sporadically visited parking lot where brown weeds burst through fissures in the pavement, eight senior residents have been awakened by the power cut. They huddle side by side in plastic chairs. Portraiture of sagging faces falling in and out of indelicate light and shadow. Theirs, a blotchy batch of colorless dermal masks. That last life spark extracted from their oblivion, a reckoning of their uselessness in a world where branding is being. Bound by brutal boredom. Then . . .
mercy comes.
POP! POP! POP!
A chosen three down.
The elderly are being executed by a talented blunt force.
Gloved hands reconnect wires in a power box out back. Eight now reduced to five whose day will come. A dull white Pontiac ignites its engine, rolls over the fissures of weed on
to the interstate and under its driver’s breath, “It wasn’t me.”
STATION TWO
RECOLLECTIONS OF A TEENAGE CARNY
It is the autumn of the age of reason.
Meet Bob Honey, resident of 1528 Sweet Dog Lane, a man who most often speaks of himself in the third person. A former fixed-wing shuttle operator, barge fireworks display purveyor, and one who made a killing in the septic tank–pumping industry by focusing on an exclusive clientele of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After a brief monopoly on mail-order merkins and managerial stints at the Airborne Ordnance Maintenance Company and the Western Test Range, Bob regretted never attaining a real-estate license, and thereby never using his imagined tagline: “Buy a Honey of a property.” He thought it might even make a good T-shirt slogan, dressed over his honey-bear heft, had his commitment to pocket protectors not overcomplicated the cut. Now, in his midfifties, Bob is a solitary man. If not a solid citizen, a stolid one.
Although he lives alone, it is Bob’s perception that he wakes to his ex-wife, and to their speechless marriage each morning. Every night, he goes to bed alone quoting, “A-B-C / C-B-A . . . A-B-C / C-B-A . . .” The alphabet’s first three, forward-back-repeat, in lieu of sheep. This is typically followed by a dreamless sleep. Come morning, as always, there she still seems to be. His silent ex-wife. Her chub and red hair. A small booger flopping, flittering, and fluttering like a carburetor valve backward and forward in her nostril with every breath in and out. A woman so cynical she doesn’t understand the meaning of her favorite songs. One who concentered candy smells to her crevices in the self-objectification-seeking of every random man’s desire. This pursuit outweighed even her own existence in any actual elation that life might otherwise offer. It is impossible for Bob, waking up all these mornings to her speechless misandry and fraudulently feminist superhero dreams. Impossible for him to not consider ligature strangulation. Droplets of gasoline ignited one by one, the stink of her burning flesh and affirmations of anguished screams. Ah, but when these considerations tickle the tumult of actionability, only then does he relinquish their delicious danger, and find himself buoyantly liberated to move away from the definitively empty bed.
Bob does know how to begin a day. One foot, then the other, into a pair of pants. A freshly laundered shirt. Open the gun safe in his garage, and transfer the wood-handled mallet of his prior evening’s exercise from Clorox bucket to water-billeted brazier. Lock the safe, then whip up some fluffy eggs with cream. Cook ’em in the grease of crispy burning bacon, and get on with it. Yes, Bob is God’s squared-away individual. He knows how to get up in the morning . . . and just do stuff.
The ex-wife his imagination re-committed to loathing each morning had actually left many years before, but she had never gone very far away. With money won in their divorce, she’d purchased an ice cream truck. The kind that cruises neighborhoods slowly, seeking out children with circus music broadcast through its PA system. That alternately haunting and annoying sound that conjures clowns, midgets, and stuffed animals. She’d taken up with another man, he the same euthanizer of compassion who’d represented her in court. Strangely, and to Bob’s mind maliciously, they had bought into the high ground over Bob’s adopted neighborhood, perched just a few short blocks away from Bob’s post-divorce abode. Still, the upper end of Sweet Dog Lane she chooses not to cruise, in seeming avoidance of a direct encounter with Bob. After school in the winter and all day long in the summer would she peddle her frozen wares. The acoustics of Woodview are such that the distant circus music drifts torturously into Bob’s ears for interminable hours. Hence, his life remains incessantly infused with her identity-infidelity, and her abhorrent ascensions to those constant salacious sessions of sexual solitaire she’d seen as self-regard. Ice cream trucks had become the bogeyman of his brain.
It hadn’t always been that way.
A son of the San Joaquin Valley during the 1960s and early ’70s, Bob rode a red Schwinn Stingray. Provided by the pale-blue-collar American neighborhood where Bob grew up was a window-shopper’s gliding glance, while wheeling by the revealing open garages where muscle cars in multitudes marked time. Raised on blocks above oil pans, they were a sure indication of adolescents in Indochina. Riding past his heroes’ homes, he often wondered if those recruited big brothers of his boyhood chums would live to claim their cars, or if they would return maimed, mindless, boxed, bannered, buried, or betrayed as the evening news portrayed. Bob’s boyhood essence set him up for a separation from time, synergy, and social mores, leading him to acts of indelicacy, wounding words, and woeful whimsy that he himself would come to dread.
At its siren song, young Bob would sometimes cycle swiftly to chase down the ice cream truck (not unlike his ex-wife’s), buy the Strawberry Shortcake Popsicle, then join the back of the pack of prepubescent punks, or more often ride alone through the neighborhood. Other times he’d go out to the river basin and throw homemade bombs off the Route 180 bridge. Molotov cocktails were preferable. Glass-bottled fuel, stuffed wick alight. Targeted, tossed, and arcing brightly. If you hit the paved riverbank close enough to the water’s edge, the shattering bottle liberated a magnificent dispersal of high-octane accelerant upon the river’s surface-drift. There and then, even little boys could create an impossible blaze, confound common sense, set a river alight, and amaze.
Out at the I-5 junction was an old mobile home park where Bobby-Eleven-Year-Old learned to smoke ovals on the porch of the tipsy trailer where the teenaged black chick lived with the Cowboy. Though small for his age, B-11 was thought a suburban danger-boy and had trouble making friends in his own age group. Cowboy was often an hour or more late leaving the trailer. He and his juvie Jemima had “realignin’ to do to keep that damn trailer level on its gravel pad.” As Cowboy’d finally appear, it was an appearance sweaty and ready to take the dutiful neighborhood boy on his septic tank–pumping runs. He’d teach “that little chump the tricks’a d’trade.”
They’d saddle up in Cowboy’s tank truck, ignition grinding into gear, as the black chick would emerge and stand wistfully at the screen door, her hair mussed and smile satisfied. Wearing only an oversized cowboy shirt, she’d warmly wave them off to work into the forearc.1 Yep. Cowboy was one squared-away individual with his shit forever together . . .
Or so his young sidekick thought.
On a crisp and windy American morning in a 1960s November, the boy watched as a blue-suited tactical team took down his hero, grappling Cowboy to ground like a graven image. With Cowboy serving a state-imposed sentence for statutory stimulations and locked in stir, Bobby-Eleven-Year-Old turned his thoughts to her. That beautiful black girl, the one the neighbors had now branded a whore. He thought of her beauty and the lure of her shaved and shapely cinnamon sticks standing at the trailer’s screen door. One way or another, he would fill ol’ Cowboy’s boots. But the booty of his desire had run from reputation, fleeing town, and fleeing with her, his Summer of ’42 dreams died like destiny’s deadwood.
In that childhood, he revered The Anarchist Cookbook, a bible of bomb-making and mayhem for the misguided published in 1971. It misguided Bob to the heart of all good things. Potassium nitrate. What ranchers call saltpeter. They mix it into the salt lick of horses when they don’t want them to breed. Saltpeter is a proper devil. If you eat it, your wee wee won’t work. But mix it up with a bit of sulfur and charcoal, or maybe a little sugar, and you have yourself the makings of a pretty pipe bomb. Magnesium ribbon, ignited by the flame tip of a Bunsen burner, illuminated brightly for a child’s eyes. But more impressive was to cut a snip of it off, throw it in a test tube of hydrochloric acid, cover the mouth of the tube with a balloon, and watch it expand with pure hydrogen gas. Then tie the fucker off, get a long stick with a lit matchstick taped to the end of it, contact and ignite it into a fireball that harkens Hiroshima. With these tools (and a Christmas-gifted parabolic microphone), any hot-blooded young American could certainly save the world. Charlie Manson’s world. The Vietcong’s world. The Zodiac
Killer’s world. Bob’s world.
To finance his fever for flame, Bob took employment as a kid-carny in local fairs and carnivals. It was in this occupation where he developed a flair for the mallet. Bob barked for the high striker, what is often called the “strong man’s game.” It consists of a heavy base and a long vertical tower. A groove runs along the tower’s length. A puck sits at the tower’s base beneath a lever, and at the top of the tower, a bell. If one strikes the lever with the mallet asserting enough force, it will send the puck careening upward along the grooves to ring the bell. On Bob’s, the tower ran the length of a fifteen-foot-high cut-out dragon, and the puck was heavy. Bob honed his own skills off-hours. While brute strength alone might’a been enough to ring the bell, it was really in finding the sweet spot of impact and torque of its swing where a mallet could be most malevolent. And the kid-carny barked:
“Be you knave or knight . . .
Come one! Come All!
COME-SLAY-THE DRAGON!!!”
Transitioning into adulthood, Bob, like any man, was introduced to evolving nemeses that began innocently enough with an opposing neighborhood’s militia of dirt-clod warriors, and later graduated to the manipulations of mind mandated by a green-grabbing media. It would be a challenge for Bob to enter each new phase without noticing the pandering picnic of commercial waste offered in societal habituation. Bob knew the media had limited success in telling the country how to think, but was exemplary at telling it what to think about, to discuss, and to value. If the hope of an individual seeking human connection is to merge his or her mind’s pursuit with the common interests of society, they might soon find themselves shorn while crooning, BAHHH-BAHHH-BILDERBERG.