by Sean Penn
“Hi, Bob,” Spurley says.
“Spurley,” says Bob.
The local TV station and its overly tanned and toothy male reporter have set a camera and tripod in the center of Sweet Dog Lane, panning the crime scene to land on the toothy-tan one, whose backdrop is the wreckage of Helen Mayo’s smoldering house. The reporter’s pulpy piercing voice clearly audible on the porch where Bob and Spurley stand: “Officials are not prepared with a determination that this has been an act of terrorism. The deceased pilot is burned beyond recognition— Sorry, folks! This is graphic stuff . . . kids go find your mommies. What authorities have verified is that the pilot’s remains were found with a charred turban on its head. As for Helen Mayo, they did Sikh and find remains. Get it? Sikh! Get it?? No? That’s all. On a beautiful Sunni day, did I say Sunni? I meant sunny. In either case, Shia beauty! Your man in the field, Cheeky Chuck.”
“Quite a little drama,” says Spurley with an expression bordering on ironic scorn.
“Bad optics?” asks Bob.
“Seems to be a lot of that in your orbit these days,” Spurley responds.
“Orbit, hmmm,” mumbles Bob.
Back in Bob’s living room, the two men return to their established positions. Spurley launches in.
“Here’s the thing, Bob. The folks I work for had asked me to pick a random male living in my own community for a feature focusing on an American man unknown to his own neighborhood—yes, I’ve gone door-to-door here on Sweet Dog and not’a’one knows ya. This may sound a bit esoteric, but stay with me on it. You know the sort. The individualist. The archetype. Mailer’s White Negro. That fella on the block, nobody knows him. He’s a loner. Antisocial. Maybe he has a dark secret? You know what I mean? Something seemingly sinister. A scheme. A schedule. A sexual dungeon. That kinda thing.”
Bob takes exceptional offense. “I don’t have a sexual dungeon, Spurley!”
“No, no. I wasn’t insinuating that, Bob.”
“I’m not a Negro either, or sinister, or whatever you said.”
“Relax, Bob. I know that. Of course. All I’m saying is, I went ahead and asked a few questions in the neighborhood and of the local police, and there seemed to be only one fella continually drawing my attention. And that fella is the same fella whose timing, be it inconvenient or coincidental, had him taking his morning walk at just the right moment to observe the very neighbor who had most often filed complaints with the police about him, being obliterated by a rapidly descended helicopter . . . Like you said . . . optics. Together, we can alter perception.”
Bob nods.
“You spend a lot of time on your own, don’t you, Bob? You got a gal?”
Bob nods. From the distance, he begins to hear the circus music of his ex-wife’s ice cream truck.
“Where is she, Bob? Where’s your gal?”
“I don’t know, Spurley. I haven’t seen her in a long time. I get messages from her sometimes, er, pictures, you know? Will you excuse me, Spurley? I’ve got some things I gotta do.”
“Like what, Bob?”
“Just . . . stuff.”
As he walks Spurley out, the music of the ice cream truck attenuates in amplitude. Bob moves back into his house, leaving Spurley on the stoop, listening through the door as Spurley goes on his way. In his bedroom, Bob sits on the edge of his bed and opens the drawer of the bedside table. In the clutter of the drawer, he finds a picture. It is of him and Annie. The only time the two of them had ever traveled together was when Bob had been hired by a Bolivarian state to orchestrate a Cinco de Julio pyrotechnic display from a barge off the Venezuelan island of Isla de Margarita. The picture is, along with Bob’s passport and California driver’s license, one of only three photographs he knows to exist of himself. It is of the two of them, him and Annie, the ocean, the palms, and the hammock they shared on a Wednesday afternoon. Annie, a vision. Eyebrow bare and beauty so fair. But Bob? His best face of good fortune feels forced as a festive felony mug shot, yet mercifully sympathized by the drooled bit of banana that rested obliviously beneath his lower lip.
He carefully replaces the photo at the bottom of the drawer in one corner, sliding camouflaging clutter over the top of it. From there, he moves back to the closed toilet seat, sits on it, and lets his eyes wander the marble, like a map of human history. A metaphoric rock of re-crystalized carbonate minerals, the calcite or dolomite. He pulls the cell phone from his pocket and googles “Gabriel’s Oboe.”24 As it comes up, he presses play and lets the music make the marble and its faces of time dance before him. The oboe and strings develop the faces of primitive man. In the prelude to the climb rises a deformed face of Christ, bleeding into the Crusades. Gargoyles gasp and birth monkeys creep into lava-lamp articulation. A piccolo flute’s solo calms Cretans and lepers arriving three at a time. The French horns, like conquered Nazis, in any color of marble do their eyes reflect blue, while Plutarch’s men of Parallel Lives barter bluster. Then caught by the image of a smoking boy with blue eyes wide, flash-framed through a fissure, asking, “What’s up, Mr. America?” And in the requiem . . . Bob is born, grieving in granular detail. Cued are the choral cascades and faces of fallen friends when, in its conclusion, would Bob weep.
And so he does, as the marble of mankind dances before him, from the beginning of humankind to the creation of Annie’s face. Hers, like KEPA,25 ballistically blasting away the battle scars of Bob’s heart. The blubber tears burst from his eyes and snivel from his nose into the magic whisper of Morricone’s flute, until the entire form of Annie molds itself outward from the marble in dance. As her apparition releases her falling hair, the clip she’d removed falls into Bob’s agile hand. He closes his fingers and grips it. Bob utters to her dancing form, “I want to be drowned a little bit by the baby soft hair at the nape of your neck. The lenience of your lips in the sun. There’s just too much oxygen here. I need to know more about peeling bananas from the bottom, but I also want to do that in tropical places. There are these extraordinary feelings I get, Annie, after vacuuming my house, but, even they don’t compare to you. You’re too banging beautiful for words, and are far too precious to ever see hurt. In any way you will ever allow me to love you, I will. I’ll be vacuuming till the next time I see you.” Bob wipes his tears as the form of Annie is reabsorbed by the wall. Still, the hair clip remains cupped and real as royalty in his unfurling hand.
Where has life gone? Where is its data on previous engagements?26 Bob is fifty-six and numbness dominates his day. As a creature adept at selective memory, he’ll sometimes fill gaps by speaking aloud to himself. “Woodview, California, has trees and birds. Woodview, California, has treason birds. I am Bob Honey, surrounded by trees and birds.” Surrounded by treason. Treason to love, to creation, to art and authenticity. He stands, returns to the bedroom, flips on his television. A former professional athlete is modeling underwear. A famous movie star is driving a marquee sedan above cliffs and sea. A game show host selling cell phones, and all so proud in their specimen standing and justification for the self-charity cha-ching and bling. Branding is being born, as the elderly drive us down. Bob stands between the ages. Torn, broken, co-opted, a mercenary for marketing in treason to thy self.
He tries to medicate against the slow-coming dark and devastating dawn of depression. He begins with a child’s word trick. “Whatever.” Then moves on. “It doesn’t matter.” “Have a sense of humor for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!”
The splitter. The splatter.
The ‘I love you’s’ without any truths . . . or does it matter?
When everything is replaceable,
all of us traceable, and memories erasable.
Nothing matters in vodka or tonic,
in the absence of ironic, in exhibitionism so chronic.
Nothing matters if we let it be so.
If no isn’t no.
And yes, is just something we say until we go.
Nothing, that is,
but blood flow.
nuclear glow.
* * *
20 cunts
21 a type of gas operation for a firearm that directs gas from a fired cartridge directly into the bolt carrier or slide assembly to cycle the action and expel the casing
22 camouflaged sniper position for urban settings
23 moving off the line of force, or away from crosshairs
24 Ennio Morricone’s orchestral masterpiece
25 Kinetic Energy Penetrating Ammunition
26 aka DOPE. A process used by precision rifle shooters to log, track, and access information specific to his or her weapon’s behavioral history and unique machining.
STATION EIGHT
INSECT HOMICIDE 2016
Sometimes Bob would hear Annie’s voice in a whispered tone, even long before he’d met her.
“I love the way you love me, my Bob-beam. You know it. And I know it. The music of an ice cream truck sells sweetness, but its wares are cold and fattening . . .”
She’d hit the nail on the head. FLASH: Four-year-old Bob with a bowl-and-bangs haircut crawls under his young mother’s hospital bed. Her head is shaven and marked, mapped for imminently invasive incision. His mother calls out with weakened words, “Bobby . . . my little Bobby, let me see you. What are you doing, darling, under my bed?” He claims he’s hiding from the sun. That the glare through the open vertical blinds of the hospital room window had hit him at her door. Says his eyes are watering, not tearing. The TV is selling erotic perfume while the blood of an aneurism is exploding inside his mother’s brain. His father holds his mother’s hand. Asks his wife if she might like to try the perfume . . .
Advertising. Bob’s albatross. His burden least benign. Its way of sanctioning ego and deceit. The transparent greed of it. Its saturation of popular imagery. His sense of a malignant mass amnesia that has been welcomed by the worms among us into social acceptance like a creeper in the night. A country so marketed into madness. Manipulated and aghast. Now comes into craze this ubiquitous shock and dismay while witnessing fellow citizens fall witlessly to fascist forays.
Though dumbification clearly plays a leading role in herd immunity to wisdom, Bob, a man so significantly self-educated, attributes this populist lapse more to a forfeiture of the electorate’s youth’s truths. A lapse in recognizing the basic complexity of each human’s history of shame and isolation. Humanity’s unending game of hide-and-seek with its own soul, reconditioned to downtick its hiders’ heart rates and seek safe passage in the comforts and valuations of common celebrityism. This, the new American dream, where arrogance is charisma, character is complaint, and gray, a color of tolerance no longer tolerated.
Bob’s ex-wife’s ice cream vending business has become a sensation. She’s done interviews and has her picture in the local paper, bought herself and her lover a big fancy house on the upscale side of town. Expanded her fleet and therefore expanded the territory of sound that Bob cannot escape.
In his nightmare, he is married to her still. Stemming from the previous day’s circus music–infused air, and his drive home from the market, when several insects had exploded on his windscreen, the nightmare begins with memories sweet as nicotine.
She tastes so good, you roll her in your mouth.
Then it kills with cancer, and life goes south.
Through insect homicide, all these towns,
all seen before.
The interstate abandon
while she neglects a fragile core.
Cacophonous castration is such a fuckless bore.
Insect homicide. I’m here not sure for what.
For insect homicide.
Then the ceiling is large and ornate.
Doors creek over posh Austrian slate.
She lies sleeping in the big plush bed.
Last night’s champagne eyes are this morning’s red.
Life, full of strangers.
Words like interviews and phoners.
Life, where what is sacred is only for the crowd.
Life, lived in circus music played aloud.
Nothing is private nor special in the notoriety of frozen sweets.
Decay is all around.
Men are monsters, we all know that.
So, Bob sits still and listens
for the sound of her vengeful bat.
And the religions of success that succeed only
In the hatred of god.
“Oh, my Bob-beam, drifting in such a terrible dream. It’s you and not the ice cream vendor who need clarity and cream.”
Bob jolts awake.
It hadn’t been a pleasant dream but that he’d dreamt at all leads Bob to recommit to the seeking of social connectivity. He’s been hoping to have that impulse plussed. He’s seen it in others but it has always been elusive to him. A purpose-driven soul, the soul of his purpose had remained elusive too. He’d been close once, to a fulfillment. Its formula perishing in a mathematical mind-fuck, whilst endeavoring to make faces from fractals, effigies by equation in evidence of great spirits. And by these means, he’d come so close to rendering the visual equation manifesting the face of God. He lamentably lost a thread of his thoughts and cursed his human bandwidth deficiencies in numerical retention, those that had left portions of his prognosis to simply perish from consciousness like dreams had, or jokes heard. So, as one does, he picked anew from what drew him at any given time. Bob’s life, almost less human than dog, is a life lived as his own pet. He takes himself for walks, roams into adventure, and protects his master. One could always count on a dog to follow his nose. After some fluffy eggs and bacon, Bob takes his morning constitutional.
Out on Sweet Dog Lane, he takes to the street. The trees of treason and the worker bee ice cream trucks look down, superintending the landscape of Woodview, viewing Bob’s walk and broadcasting John Lennon (as sometimes trees do) in the unrevealed post-apocalyptic neighborhoods of the dwindling middle classes.
Mommy-daddy
Yo-Yo
yummies
Little Bobby’s
broken toy—
Nineteen sixty’s
promise broken
Battered brilliance of an
unspoken boy—
Patriots poundcakes
drowned the dreams of coital
comfort joys—
Where did all the great loves go?
Lasting life’s . . .
less than lasting toys.
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,
Bob stepped with his right, and then his left.
By giving you no time instead of it all,
He pulls his watch from his wrist and drops it to the street. A neighbor boy rides up on a red Schwinn and lifts it.
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
Blooming with berries, birds besiege Mountain Ash as Bob bounds forward, chin up.
A working-class hero is something to be,
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool,
His lace comes undone and nearly trips him.
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules,
A working-class hero is something to be,
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career
As he turns down a perpendicular street, he locks eyes with his ex-wife cruising the next block in her ice cream truck, thawing liquids leaking languidly from her cargo-cabin. She pauses at the intersection, glaring at Bob. Hers, a face that creates and collects ignorance, arrogantly assimilating it as common knowledge. Her expression on this day is fraught with the same disgust she showed whenever Bob chewed the ice of his cocktails on their evenings out. In her sophomore sensibility, it had never occurred to her that his liquor intake solely served as a delivery system to his interest in ingesting ice. Now, she sells ice cream for money.
&
nbsp; Funny.
As she turns back to the wheel, she reveals her body’s silhouette. A physique surgically enhanced since last seen by Bob. Had she traded the mythology of her modesty for cosmetic self-awareness? Getting older in America is tough on a woman; seeing what she’ll do to avoid it is tough on a man. While there can be nothing better than doing business with an established firm, Bob often thought, the maintenance of femininity cannot be measured by masquerade, masculinization, or marvels man-made. To Bob, his ex seems all. The lovechild of unobtainium and transparent aluminum, she has more baggage than inventory in her physical excesses and ice cream trucks. As she accelerates away, Bob feels incommodiously un-inebriated.
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear,
A working-class hero is something to be,
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
Behind decorative gabion walls, an elderly neighbor sits centurion on his porch watching Bob with surreptitious soupçon. Bob sees this. Feels fucked by his own face.
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see,
A working-class hero is something to be,
Now, over the topography of Woodview he sees his ex-wife’s continuing navigation toward higher elevations of town.
There’s room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working-class hero is something to be,
A kind-eyed danger-dog appears before Bob. Its eyes lock with his. But for only a moment as if to say, “I’ve been waiting for you.” The dog cuts into an alley and Bob feels pulled toward it as if by a huge Neodymium magnet.
If you want to be a hero, well just follow me
A break in flux density27 and the dog skitters away. A spontaneous breeze picks up a page of morning news flying into Bob’s face, wrapping it into momentary blindness. Bob takes a last few futilely following steps and is reminded of the last friend he’d ever made. That man in the middle of the sea.