by Sean Penn
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”69
Bob lies back on the bed, pulls an iPod from the bed tray, ears-up, and presses play. Phil Ochs’s voice:
. . . even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die,
I declare the war is over . . .
* * *
68 AnnenMayKantereit
69 The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist in 1892. The version above specifying the United States, in 1923. And not until 1954 were the words “under God” added in response to the Communist threat.
STATION FIFTEEN
JUST A LITTLE KISS
It’s August 21, 2017. A driver drives. A sole passenger in bandages sits on the bench seat in the rear of the vehicle. As the automobile hits intermittent speed bumps, its radio reports the accidental gas-line explosion of a Woodview neighborhood home on Sweet Dog Lane. Its only surviving fragment, a posted placard reading, “THE ECLIPSE HAS COME QUICKLY.” The report shifts to Midwestern viewings of a solar eclipse unseen in the far west of California. The passenger wonders if the sun might have looked ashamed after being uncovered, like the nightmares of an eight-year-old who’s arrived at school unknowingly unclothed to face the laughter of cruel classmates. Was that our new America revealed? Was that the reveal of our humiliated sun intrinsically casting flaming hands to cover the fiery crotch of our country cringing? The vehicle passes under the shade of an old oak and onward to a halt.
Blank-eyed and bandaged head, Bob exits the small white shuttle van, and pays its driver. Grabbing his two suitcases, he moves slowly toward a building of indescribably faded color. A color not unlike those of Irish walls painted in the rain. Above the entryway of this assisted living facility, a branded aging logo of the new billionaire president’s name. He walks past wheelchaired VFW members and decrepit oxygen tank breathers. As he approaches the admissions desk, he notices an unusual thing. Sitting atop the desk’s counter, an un-potted plant balancing on its root-ball. Some kind of Caprifoliaceae. Perhaps a teasel? Appearing from behind the plant’s obscuration, a bioluminescently beautiful young woman, the rims of her blue eyes haloing from behind brown contacts. A face so familiar. He must know her from somewhere. Is he blanking a buried memory? Perhaps prosopagnosia? Maybe it is a confusion caused in conflation between the institutional nature of her fitted white shirt and the girl it adorns? Or might it be her garment’s microthread-seamed shoulders that throw him? But then comes the gentle velvet voice, “May I help you?”
He pauses and ponders her pleasantry and pout before shyly sharing, “I want to be admitted.”
“Well, of course, sugar,” she says. “Name?”
He pauses. Then, in cautiously questioning containment, responds.
“Goat. Gruff Goat . . .”
“Let me get you sorted, Mr. Goat,” says the beautiful young woman.
After some time in processing, an orientation tour, and the assignment of a residence on the second floor, the beautiful young woman walks Bob to his room. After unlocking the door, she hands him the key.
“This will be your new home.”
Bob nods. As he enters his room, consumed of antiseptic air, he begins to close the door, leaving the young woman in the hallway, but her hand halts the door from closing. He offers little resistance. She pushes it open enough to ask him face-to-face, “Are you better now, Bob-beam?”
His face stoic and still as a single silently streaming tear descends over the remaining contour of his condition.
He answers, “I’m better now, Annie.” The beautiful girl leans between door and jamb, kissing Bob’s teared cheek gently. He finds a hair clip in his pocket and presses it into her palm. They close the door between them and in the corridor, he hears her footsteps patter away into silence, and in that silence does his solipsism sing his eyes dry. Bob finds his bags sitting in front of his bed where an aid had pre-positioned them. He moves to the window of the retirement home and opens the blinds. There in the parking lot he notices an auto on approach—a bangin’ black 1985 Buick Grand National. In its time, the fastest US assembly-line car ever built. Zero to sixty and back to zero in a turbocharged ten seconds. At top speed, a Corvette-killing 120-ONE mph car to the Corvette’s petty 120. Add nitrous injection to this beastly battering ram and you had yourself the marauder of muscle cars. Behind its wheel, parted from his patronizing Prius . . .
Spurley Cultier.
Spurley stations the Buick in the shade of an oak. Bob had anticipated him an amateur. An anticipation now matured. In the pro-ranks, there are second-nature checklists. Any sense of heightened sensories in a shady hide would be noticed and corrected. Spurley is, at distance, nearly unrecognizable under the shadow of the oak. But, what he has clearly not noted is the blade of low-lying sunlight that illuminates his mouth like a beacon. Does he not notice its wily warmth? This utter and insensitive lack of professionalism and surrender to sophomore spy-craft SOP70 offends Bob deeply enough that his strategery begins to huddle around a play of rarely employed humiliation.
For many in Bob’s biz, a pre-operational mantra is practiced to calm the nerves, steady the hand, and blind the conscience. With Bob’s nearly cosmic ability to read lips did he quietly chant aloud in perfect harmony with the movement of Spurley’s mouth’s mantra.
“Chinese boogie dancers and pale-headed priests, vodka and tonic, life may be deceased. But I still know what’s cookin’ in the oven, and, man, I know the beast.”
Do you, Spurley? Bob wonders. We’ll see about that.
Who knows what may be that bastard Spurley’s weapon of choice? Likely a g-u-n, spelled p-u-s-s-y. Or maybe a piano wire garrote, spelled q-u-i-e-t.
Bob considers this briefly, then approaches one of his two suitcases, zips it open. From it he lifts a small Remington typewriter, carries it to the provided desk. In the drawer of the desk, he finds retirement home letterhead stationery. He rolls it into the typewriter and begins:
Mr. Landlord,
So, I see you’ve sent a lackey to finish me off. Perhaps you’ve underestimated me. Perhaps you’ve underestimated us all. Our will to face attrition, to die, to kill, to be persecuted, to be shamed and humiliated. Our will to be mocked by your army of sycophantic provocateurial propagandists is eternal, hungry, and inviting. Many wonderful American people in pain and rage elected you. Many Russians did too. Your position is an asterisk accepted as literally as your alternative facts. Though the office will remain real, you never were nor will be. A million women so dwarfed your penis-edency on the streets of Washington and around the world on the day of your piddly inauguration—unprecedented (spelling okay?).
We, not you, own the most powerful weapons on earth—our dreams, the science of physics, seismology, geology, topography, and typhoons. Common sense and a child’s experimental taste of dirt, so common to the grown-up boys, girls, colors, creeds and football players you divide. At the bottom of any fissure, a reconnection. We’ve seen rock walls of time, space and the pace of water. They are not your buildings of bargain. Your gasconade and cache of catchphrases, so limiting and reflexive, escalate the emasculation of you by a world whose patience is in nuclear peril. These sciences and sensibilities are our guns your narcissism neglects. Weapons your NRA masters are incapable of proffering for profit, and outside your dutiful military’s might, mandate or mission. So, to your attempt to posthumously assassinate our Founding Fathers, and bait and switch your core, I say I will eat where the fish are glowing. You are not simply a president in need of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin. I am God’s squared-away man. I am Bob Honey. That’s who I am. Sir, I challenge you to a duel. Tweet me, bitch. I dare you.
* * *
A nearly indiscernible smile comes to Bob’s face as if for the first time he’d
been gently touched by the hand of God and the zephyr breeze of his zenith. He rolls the letter out of the typewriter, folds it meticulously into the size of the small envelope appropriated from the desk drawer, boldly licks the glue strip with his own tongue, and seals the envelope. He then saunters down the stairs to the landing above the foyer. From there, he can observe unseen. First, re-clocking Spurley through the windowed facade, still sitting in the Buick beneath the oak, mouth no longer radiating, but still regrettably conspicuous. Within the foyer, a communal television plays the news. On camera, an anchorwoman, who in Bob’s younger days, would’ve been thought more suited for a guest role on The Love Boat than for her current lead role relaying rumors to our republic. Her editorial, in strong opposition to the woman who was the other side’s selection. As the anchor satisfies her audience’s appetite for absolution. “. . . She was absolutely the worst possible candidate to represent the party.”
Really? wonders Bob. As a mind that had managed thought in the silent circumlocution of sentences suddenly sharpens. Not charismatic enough for you folks? Too shrill? Too hawkish? Isn’t it true that you never wanted qualifications? You wanted a star, you wanted to be charmed, seduced, and entertained. Was she the worst possible candidate or are you the most arrogant, ill, and unqualified electorate in the history of the Western world? And what does it matter now? She never came to entertain you. Neither did I. You want to kill me because I won’t blow you hard enough? You want to kill me because I don’t really believe we’re the “best” country in the world? Because I don’t want to buy a used car from your boss, or don’t believe in the gods you lie to? You want to kill me, you boogeymen and women, you worshipers of tits, ass, and beefcake, you sniveling, vomitus, kike-, nigger-, towelhead-, and wetback-hating, faggot-fearing colostomy bags of humanity? You should’a-been-aborted skanks, you want to kill me? You want to kill me? Queue up! And if you don’t have a VIP pass, they’ll take you for your pussy or your cash. And if you don’t have pussy or money enough, then queue up as cattle, behind your bourgeois beasts and traitor-in-chief. You murderers of man and nature. Queue up, you, behind those VIPs you worship in redundancy as they worship themselves with you.
Oh, my beautiful, Bob-beam. I must help you let off steam. There’s a place of tenderness that somehow your standards try to, but cannot allow. This is why they hate you. Why your love for me . . . is NOT true. Yet, mine for you exists, without my being by your side. Mine for you exists despite the way you cried and lied. Still, I need you, beautiful Bob-beam.
—Yours, Annie. My love and vagina (on your team).
From his position at the landing, he now steps into the foyer and approaches the beautiful girl at the counter as though they’d never had an encounter before. “Would you let me lick . . . a stamp?”
“A stamp?” the girl asks in her adorable accent. “A postage stamp? You mean like for mailbox mail?”
Bob pauses with patience, then, “Yes, a postage stamp, please.”
From a drawer behind the counter, the girl produces a roll of stamps, and hands them to Bob. He tears three from the roll, licks each one, enjoying them as if they were grape lollipops, and affixes them to the envelope.
“Please post this for me,” Bob says as he hands the girl the envelope and returns the stamp roll.
The girl looks bewildered as she accepts the blank envelope. “But to whom am I posting it? There’s no address.”
Bob replies, “Post it to the landlord.”
Before leaving the counter and the bewildered girl, Bob glances over his shoulder where through the front glass doors he can see that indeed Spurley is still there encamped in his vicious vehicle awaiting opportunity. Bob makes a point of walking a wide banana to the stairs so as to be sure to be observed. He returns to his room, finds his second suitcase, zips it open, and pulls out a hat box, placing it for luck on the bed. He then withdraws a sleeping mask, iPod, and an envelope addressed to the ASPCA with a bundle of cash he shuffle-checks, then seals inside. He lays himself on the bed, pulls the sleeping mask over his eyes, presses the earpieces into his ears, and sets the envelope on his chest. With a delicate touch of the iPod, Phil Ochs sings:
I can see him coming
He’s walking down the highway
With his big boots on
And his big thumb out
He wants to get me
He wants to hurt me
He wants to brii-ii-ing
Me down
But sometime later
When I feel a little straighter
I will come across a stranger
Who’ll remind me of the danger
And theh-eh-eh-eh-ehhn
I’ll run him over
Pretty smart on my part
Find my way home
In the dark.
* * *
70 standard operating procedure
EPILOGUE
What would be a nightmare?
What would be a dream?
One thousand golden churches?
Melted wings of clotted cream?
Communes of corruption,
in no mood for nuanced things
just tit for tat instructions
as the pompous pendulum swings.
Cyber wars a-wagin’
by hands that seem so clean
while Yemen’s children die
in a terror best unseen.
In aggregate atmospherics
our country dance boots
burst its spleen.
Fussy fated fusion fists
at the tip of a laser beam.
From Jupiter it must look so small
the petty pustule bickering of it all—
in war between women and men
un-adhering to nature’s call.
At the Mandalay in Vegas,
so much terror death and shock
little men made big
by legal bump fire stock.
Sexual misdoings awakening a rage
Net-pix recasts readers,
hiding its cabal
with the “slick Ted” turn of a page.
Though warrior women
bravely walk the walk,
derivatives of disproportion
draw heinous hypocrites
to their flock.
A child’s question comes on Sunday
“What if Monday died?
Would there be only six days a week to live?
And if Monday can die,
so can the rest of days
and I.”
Puerto Ricans catching hand towels,
but they have no home nor light
So let’s all just be loving
no need to scream and fight.
Fat men tell fat lies
while G-men sift their treasures
this season of treason’s triumph
under Moscow’s active measures.
There are no men nor women
only movements own the day
until movements morph to mayhem
and militaries chip away
whether North Korean missiles
or marching Tehran’s way.
Where did all the laughs go?
Are you out there, Louis C.K.?
Once crucial conversations
kept us on our toes;
was it really in our interest
to trample Charlie Rose?
And what’s with this “Me Too”?
This infantilizing term of the day . . .
Is this a toddlers’ crusade?
Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?
A platform for accusation impunity?
Due process has lost its sheen?
But, fuck it, what me worry?
I’m a hero,
to Time magazine!
Mandatory service
might humble a man, woman, or three
but it all adds up to a scratch
when “we” is never we.
They’ll do
all that they can
to scare, play and distract you,
keep you up all night
with news of nothing but a who’s-who.
Some seize on scientology,
padlock wives inside a cupboard
So when is it time to say,
“We all knew about Ron Hubbard!”
And while we feuded, failed, and fought,
we watched Sagan’s precious dot
turned tawdry on its axis
raising humanity’s mortal taxes.
Net neutrality no more,
have we all become the big man’s whore?
So rattled, addled and saddled
our entitlement is recklessly embattled.
Hawaiians felt the drill
while denial had thirty-eight minutes to kill,
but the mainland’s recognition?
Too exhausted, so quickly left nil.
And Bob? Well, he’s been resting
hours have gone by
here’s what we must see
when survival tells no lies.
Night has fallen over the retirement home.
The elderly sleep in their beds.
The Buick door creeps open,
amber security lights overhead.
Step by step he approaches,
a killer disguising his dread.
When he crosses foyer to counter
the blonde, face down,
resting her head.
“Excuse me, miss,” whispers Spurley.
“I’m looking for a Bob?” he said.
The girl’s velvet voice gently answers,
“A man named Bob is doing his job . . . in bed.”
But underneath the counter unseen
had the voice really come
thrown so clean
from Annie, completely bald and in underwear
and body so supple and lean.
And the girl seen resting her head?
Gosh, she suddenly looks big
over there.
Her tight shirt of institution
around shoulders bursting
its microthreads bare.
Then suddenly lurching like lightning
charges that blonde-haired body so big