Sunday, November 02, 2003
Here is the first chapter. Enjoy. Whoever you are.
BARRELS ON THE ICE
Chapter 1: I Dreamt of Tigers
Wake up.
I have something to tell you and it can’t wait until morning.
I know that you might not believe me, but there is something further buried beneath the subdued tumult of the primates. There is a signal emanating from the extreme reaches of the darkness; a single heartbeat that contains the entire beauty and voluptuousness of human experience. You might try to deny it. But, who of us can say that we have not heard it in the most extravagant and rare moments of clarity? Who can say in all sincerity that we have not failed to pay it the due amount of attention and respect? When did we lose our sense of sanctity anyway, and how can we recover it from the garbage heap?
I know this might seem like some sort of religious babbling. I will probably come across at times as one of those shaved and blissed out wackos on the subway, spitting out cryptic messages in wads of semen-soaked toilet paper for sweaty cryptographers to crack over beers. No doubt you wonder if I had some life-altering experience while reading the Baghivad Gita on the subway. That’s the rub of it, though. I did. But I also had a life-altering experience while reading Spiderman in the park. For a time there, every moment I had was a religious experience. Every breath of air I took was a blessed sacrament.
Sigmund Freud had a friend who wrote to him about religion. The friend’s theory was that we all had these moments of feeling a sort of oceanic connectedness with other human beings and with the world itself. We all had moments in which we could look down upon ourselves and feel our lungs filling with air, our hearts beating, and stand childlike and trembling before the magnificent wisdom of a darkened night sky. This guy’s idea was that there could be no name for such experiences. God is simply a word we give to an experience we cannot otherwise name. He felt that organized religions channeled these lucid moments into a safe outlet. They drew us away from the raging river of experience and made us into productive, safe, but essentially complacent people.
Freud, of course, was a neurological tour-guide, prophet, and divine mystic. But, he was also an avowed atheist- one of those people with a superstitious faith in the existence of mankind. From fin de sciele Vienna, no doubt, there is no God. And honestly, I can’t say with any certainty that there is a God in America anymore. But, I’ve heard the song that the unnamed friend writes of, humming away in the darkness. And I know that words like oceanic connectedness seem ludicrous until they apply to the situation at hand; in which case, they’re the only ones we have. And I promise that I will pay attention.
For years, I would search the world like a hunting dog for any experience that could light me up. Sex, suffering, or bewilderment; it was all the same. I lived like an alien and, when I slept I dreamt of tigers. I was voracious and lascivious and lived entirely in the intuitive and a priori. Naturally, this maniacal lust for experience was thoroughly exhausting to anyone within my immediate proximity. I would ramble on and on out of control, giggling at my own jokes, which were indecipherable to anyone besides the cosmos and myself. Inevitably, I would wind up drunk, because that would slow down the gears a bit and prevent my drowning in a flood of my own words. But, that would only last for an hour or so, and then one subject or another would send me caroming into the tangled world of arcane and scholarly pursuits and, more often than not, barreling between mere shadows on the walls of my own neural catacombs.
Naturally, there were a small number of people who wanted to talk to me at all. A few brave Ulyssean loons were willing to go the distance. But, even they were often worn out by my verbal pugilism. That’s what it was; boxing. I would jab with the nouns, connect with the verbs, weave a bit with odd combinations of adverbs and then pummel my partner into the mat with an onslaught of adjectives. It was ugly. It was unseemly and embarrassing. But, it was creation.
My best friend at the time was Evelyn Horovitz, a drama queen Jewess with the prescience of a satellite dish and the energy of a Chihuahua. She was my Delphic advisor and sparring partner for several years. I remember that we were always broke. At least five days out of the week I would saunter about the streets of the District of Columbia humming some idiotic song so that none of the passersby could hear my angry growling stomach. One time that actually did happen to me while I was riding on the subway. My guts were churning so loudly, trying to digest little more than ramen noodles that the burly buck next to me got pissed off and almost started a fight with me. I think he thought I was muttering at him. He seemed to think that he heard racial slurs in the static of my stomach. Luckily, I explained the whole problem to him, how I was broke and working as a construction laborer and living off of ramen noodles and generic soda. By the time the ride was over, he and I were good friends.
That was the way it was when I was a kid. I was always broke, but everybody I knew was broke. We were all of us wiry and jumpy and alert at all times. We were always on the move. There’s something immediate about poverty that makes the most trivial parts of existence into vivid participatory experiences. It’s also very romantic. Since this is essentially a story about sex and romance, poverty serves as an appropriate backdrop. In fact, I believe that rich kids will always suffer because they will never understand the joy of huddling like two warm puppies beneath a moth-eaten blanket in a frigid apartment, knowing that the one with you is your lifeline and sole cohort in the trenches of scarcity. I used to wander around in love with the whole world because there was nothing to keep me from it. No distant goals or diffused joys to keep me waiting or living in the future moment like Heidegger’s workman. I was never as alive as when I was starving.
Evelyn wasn’t so lucky however. Her spiritual eye was working fine, but its searching line of vision was blocked from nine to five by dreadful plywood partitions. At night she was producing plays, but all day long she was calling people on the phone to find out if they would be interested in donating money to the Washington Performing Arts Guild. I remember she was always tired after work. At the young age of twenty-five, work had already laced her auburn hair with countless grays and sunk her green eyes behind thick bags of skin. I still hate and despise the fact that people have to work. Of course, if I tell this to anyone, they usually get personally offended and horrified. Women faint! Men throw punches! Somebody calls security! They huddle in close around you: Sure you can hate your job, doesn’t everyone? But, to hate work itself! You might as well say that you hate America or children or Jesus Christ. In my opinion though, their anger illustrates how thoroughly we have been seduced by the lie, “twas ever thus” and how tragically we have adapted our ludic biological senses to an environment that resembles the Stanford Prison Experiment by way of Taylorism.
And poor Evelyn was on the verge of tears at the end of each workday. She and I used to meet every Friday at this lacquered and bombastically neon Mexican restaurant in Georgetown, which just so happened to have a Friday evening Happy Hour, and we would gab for hours, unrolling the terra firma and remaking it in our image. I remember one particular evening in which we were sitting crow -style by the edge of the bar, staring at the glasses, which were hanging upside down like exhausted universes, above the bartender. Evelyn had on this lurid lipstick that made her mouth look like a bloody nose and she was helping me to anatomize my sexual imagination. “You’re so hung up on Jewish girls” she said. “I don’t understand what it is with you. What’s the big deal about Jewish chicks? Do you have some kind of neurosis fetish or something?”
“I don’t know,” I argued. “Maybe it’s the thick lips and hula hips. They look sensual. Like you could pick any part of their body and sink into it effortlessly. Slide a finger into their belly or fuck the small of their back, or do whatever you want.”
“Fuck the small of their back. Well, I can tell you that there are no scheindelas who are going to let you do that! We have religious reservations about spine fucking. Even if a Catholic boy with Kosher fever is such a rare thing.”
“Yeah, but it’s like Jewesses hold down the earth. While WASPs are flitting about in a miasma of delusions and flatteries, Jewish girls are picking at the scabs and changing the diapers, you know. Their whole outlook is different. There’s just this sardonic sense of humor that Jewesses have that WASPs haven’t even heard of. You know what I mean? WASPs always seem to be lying on the verge of taking offense at something. Like fragile little church girls in pretty lace dresses screaming at their mother because one of the choirboys was picking his nose. Jewish dames usually appreciate a bitter acrid sense of humor. You can make a few jokes to the effect that we’re all screwed and people are evil and the world is a terrible place and Jewish girls will generally have sex with you. Not only that, but they tend to have a perfectly delightful mordant streak themselves. It drives me wild.”
“Yes. We really work that whole ‘overeducated daughters of the Holocaust’ aesthetic,” she said, causing me to laugh like a hyena.
I continued, “But, it’s like the other day, I was arriving for work, and the lithe blonde girl I work with asked ‘And how are you today?’ and I said, just trying to be funny, ‘Oh, absolutely fucking wonderful. Tonight I’m planning to listen to records and garrote myself with a rake,’ in this really deadpan voice. I thought it was at least a little bit amusing, but she didn’t laugh at all. She just stared at me as if I had just taken out my cock at the family reunion. The thing that pissed me off the most was that, not only do I think that she didn’t know that I was making a joke; I don’t think she knew that I could make a joke. As if a sense of humor was limited to her circle of uptown friends.”
“Milo, may I speak frankly?” Evelyn asked.
“Sure, go ahead,” I told her, watching her tense up before walking into this particular minefield.
“You… tend to be… a little… high-strung- and there’s nothing wrong with that!” Good. She successfully avoided rubbing me the wrong way. A pause to catch her breath. “It’s just that girls are often looking for somebody who does not have,” another pause. She sucked on her cigarette like doing so was almost incidental. How should she phrase this? “the soul of an artist. You know? I mean, fuck them, right? But, you’re worrying about entirely the wrong things. You need to focus on your writing, not some stupid girls.” She took a swig of her drink and exhaled, relieved.
“I know that. I do. It’s just that I used to see women as my co-conspirators against this cantankerous trembling world. You know, when I was a kid I blamed everything on these hulking, loudmouthed hostile men who reminded me too much of my father. I always figured that women were my contacts in the Underground Railroad. But, I never saw how complicit they were in everything I hated.” A flood of memories returned, from unfriendly teachers with faces that were pinched as tight as assholes to plastic hateful restaurants in endless strip malls. They all had a different hue now. They weren’t as cruel and malevolent as they had seemed to a cringing skinny kid. They were just part of the background. They were the caverns that hid the sarcophagus of my childhood. They were part of a mysterious alien culture. I felt like I could step out of my life and return there. Tell Pete Walker that I understood how much he hated his drunk mother and sedated father and that I almost forgave him for shoving me down a flight of steps. At least, he wasn’t complacent! At least he drank from the golden cup! I would always remember him, and in my eternal distaste for loutish goons, he would have a sort of immortality.
Evelyn was eating her pita bread and hummus and staring away absentmindedly. I would have spent days in saying nothing, if only to be in her presence. She noticed everything. The paintings on the wall fascinated her and she wrapped them in tissue paper to store them in her heart. She was an enthusiast. Her antennae whipped around the room with love and alacrity. We sat like that for some time, me remembering and her noticing. Finally, her face lit up and she said,
“Hey! I know! Why don’t you come to the party that Chris is having tomorrow night?”
Chris was the director of a local theatre company, which had just performed in an all-female version of Hamlet. The theatre people were my type of people. They all had drinking problems. Another benefit- the entire crowd consisted of gay men and straight women. I could hardly sneeze without hitting somebody who would give me head. I agreed to go.
Evelyn and I left the bar at one o clock and wandered down by the piers beneath Georgetown. So many times I had come here after work to stare at that ugly river and listen to cackling yuppies stampeding through the shopping district. The city seemed to have been designed by an explosion in an architect’s office. There were churches shoved next to sex shops, overlooking abandoned factories from DC’s cosmopolitan past, currently filled with derelicts and drug addicts. There were upscale restaurants and stores mere blocks from slums that looked like they had been imported from a war zone. When I was a teenager I would walk around all summer long, dodging cars and people, skinny as shit in a tee shirt and jeans. I never could afford anything much besides a burrito and a coke. But, I only got kicked out a few stores and that was for being stoned. I remember walking down the street with my friend Harry and staring with a bloodthirsty gaze at these sorority girls from GU. They were probably out drinking and they walked with a WASPish strut and the shorter one (blonde, but they were all blonde) said something like, “Hello, can I help you with something?” in pre-rehearsed snottiness. I wanted to walk off, but Harry thought it would be amusing to tell them that he wanted to impregnate them and then eat their children in nine months because, after all, he had made the brats. Of course, this freaked them out and they started screaming at him and pelting him with change from their purses. I started laughing about the fact that they had nothing to throw except money. That just added to Harry’s blind rage and he started screaming about how these girls were whores, drug addicts, and Navajo spies trying to corrupt the white man. Eventually, the shorter one maced him and he staggered around crying in pain like a bee-stung child until I bought him a glass of ice water from the Burrito Brothers Restaurant to wash out his eyes with.
Back then, walking around Georgetown was like sauntering through the guts of some giant hideous transistor radio. Every corner was the focal point of some sort of weird alien music that came and went with the slightest breeze. The people were fascinating to me. They always seemed to be going somewhere and they always seemed to be late. Harry was bitter about people shoving into him or refusing to hold doors or whatever. But, I couldn’t care less. The way I saw it, walking through Georgetown is like wandering though an open-air asylum with the lunatics chasing their dreams down the street and incorporating me into those dreams. They were commerce fanatics. It seemed as if anything could be bought. There were, undoubtedly, dozens of macings and numerous murders that went unreported. But, none of that matters now.
After two o clock in the morning, the lunatics drifted off lethargically like drugged buffaloes. The place would be deserted and I would walk through the alleys and parking garages. I imagined myself to be a cup filled with loneliness and I would walk carefully so as not to stain the pavement. Sometimes I would wander down to the Francis Scott Key Memorial and look for bums to chat with or sit in front of the abandoned factory buildings, smoking and smoldering. I was never in a hurry to get anywhere. I felt that I was already at the center point of various lines of force, sitting pretty. I could get to my apartment at four thirty in the morning and still be buzzing when I woke up for work. My energy was never spent on anything. It just swirled around in a mad orgiastic dance with an inattentive world. I never rushed to be anywhere or engaged with anyone. I was barely there, but I was more alive than anyone I knew.
Places like Georgetown weren’t really made for people like my friends. We could dance on the corners and slip through the side roads, but never really land anywhere. Nobody I knew ever had any money and we were always scrounging and scraping like hungry rats. My friend Alan, who used to joke that he was born with a burnt spoon in his mouth, would get these jobs at Pizza joints and steal the pepperonis to eat later. I remember that he would come home looking like some demented satyr with a three-foot bulge in his pants, trying desperately to walk normally. Eventually, he had to quit doing this because the neighbors bought a pit-bull terrier that would shamelessly jump on Alan and gnaw at his crotch trying to get to the contraband pork. Harry had a different approach. Usually, he would walk down to the Dunkin’ Donuts at closing time each night and talk the placid hippies who worked there into giving him bags of stale donuts at the end of their shift. Actually, the whole end of the night routine was par for the course with everybody I knew. Just like some people know which restaurant serves the best versions of various courses, we knew which places would give you free food if you asked kindly and which ones were worth rooting through their dumpsters.
Evelyn was a connoisseur of free food. She used to fill her pockets with candy from the bulk food bins at the grocery store and then purchase a soda. They never suspected anything because she always had that soda. The strange thing I discovered when I got a job at the grocery store is that a whole lot of people actually do browse through the supermarket and simply buy soda. Sometimes I suppose that they really can’t decide on anything to eat. Others I suspect are lonely and confused. They were part of the army of extras that would roam through the aisles late at night or, like I did, stalk the streets and alleyways. These were my people. The unaffiliated gypsies, free agents, and forlorn mosquitoes. We shared the fate of being swept willy-nilly by the currents of loneliness. None of us were in a rush to be anywhere, ever.
For a while, Evelyn was the only one I knew who had a job. When we would get together and drink it was all she would talk about. Sometimes we would leave the Mexican place and amble down to a hole in the wall bar that seemed to have been designed by Mickey Spillane. There was honestly this blood-red cigarette-stained wallpaper and aged alcoholics with hacking coughs there. We loved it. Evelyn would sit there in some god-awful secretary garb, bitching and moaning about secretarial work.
“You’d never believe these people. My boss is this ancient born-again Christian drunk whose religion strangely doesn’t prevent him from trying to get into my pants every chance he gets and all my co-workers are those lonely single women who buy romance novels by the bagful and have posters with inspirational slogans on them like ‘Today is the first day of your long walk to suicide’ or whatever. I don’t know why none of them is trying to fuck the boss. He certainly fits all of their qualifications, except the fact that he doesn’t have some exotic name like Sergio and he seems to keep his shirt closed most of the time.”
“Aw hell,” I moaned, “why do you give a shit anyway? Don’t you know that place is ludicrous? All those devotees worshipping at a clock like little masturbating children. Jesus. Punch in, punch out, write everything down; it’s a wonder you don’t go insane there.”
“But I do,” she protested. “Honestly Milo, it’s like I’m being punished for not being able to sit still in class. I have to just sit there and stare at the wall and call up people on the telephone to harass them into giving me money. There’s no point at all to it.”
“Look, I can’t help you with this. You have to get out there and suck the marrow from the bone, you know? It’s not my fault that you’re too scared to quit your job!”
“Yeah, but what am I supposed to do? I have to have money to fund my plays. You have no idea how important my art is to me. It’s like a starving child that has to be fed all the time. Would you rather that I was famished and unable to put on plays?” she asked.
I had no idea. I didn’t understand her plays anyway. They all seemed like political screeds to me. I took a swig of brandy. “Of course not. But, what is the testament that you’re leaving behind here? I mean, how are you going to be remembered?”
She took a deep breath and began a well-contemplated speech. “I want to be remembered as somebody who did whatever she could to represent women in a positive light and draw away some of the negative effects of a poisonous culture. I want to help the underground survive. The same thing you want to do with those novels that you’ve never gotten around to writing!”
“Yes, but how do you know that you’ve really vaunted forth from the darkened corners and not just barked at the walls?” I asked.
“WHAT does that mean? Milo, you’re not making any sense.”
“I mean, how does a play like ‘Feel My Tampon, Be My Tampon’ reflect your struggle to get through life? What part of that play screams against the yellowed brick walls and tries to break through them? I mean, you have to be willing to get down in the muck and shit of your neural trash-heap and reach for that pearl at the bottom of the bucket, you know?”
“What the hell are you talking about? The Village Voice called ‘Feel My Tampon, Be My Tampon’ a ‘classic in the menstrual milieu’! I mean, what the fuck is writing an entire play about the menstrual cycle but getting down in the muck? What else could I be doing? Isn’t that what art is supposed to do? Isn’t it here to stare the ugliness in the maw and keep singing? Look, what did Baudelaire do but break taboos with his teeth?” She was understandably pretty pissed off at this point.
“Baudelaire,” I said, sucking on a cigarette melodramatically, “recorded the moment at which his soul broke into little pieces and floated away as icy floes. He perfected self-obliteration. He was the only person to ever be killed repeatedly by callous women and live to write about it.” I was frustrated. There was a point to all my insane prattle, but I simply could not force it out. It lay wedged between my brain and throat. She must know what I was talking about. This one moment demanded that some connection be made with her. This moment was in defiance of every emotionally distant parent or mean-spirited stranger in the wandering course of every single human being’s life- and I was screwing it up!
“Look, I understand what you’re getting at here. You want me to put my problems and yearnings and whatnot into these plays. But, you don’t understand that social politics really are part of my subconscious. Gender roles are inherent to my experience as a human being. That’s why I have to attack these things. They really are my life.”
“But, you let yourself be lowered,” I grumbled. “You’re obsessed with the stage directions that we arbitrarily assign to our own primate behavior. You worry about how others perceive you in this pageant of civilization. But, that’s not a human concern. Civilization is a convenient hiding place. But, it doesn’t answer the howling in the darkness. The magnificent terror still strikes like an icy stake through the heart. You don’t break taboos for any other reason than to break them. That isn’t art.”
“Oh, come on! All artists have to break barriers,” she argued. “Van Gogh needed to erupt color all over the Western canon just to get his vision across. And what happened? He was made the martyr of exuberance. He was crucified to a shotgun. But, that was taboo breaking. That was the dog shit on the carpet.”
“Van Gogh was exceptional,” I said, suddenly tongue-tied.
“And I’m not?” she asked with her hand on her hip, vampishly.
“Van Gogh was the greatest appreciator in history. He created paintings in which the simple fact of being alive is figured into the paintings’ realism.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was highly amused by this. For the first anybody could remember I was speechless. Standing before Van Gogh I was speechless. I still am incidentally.
The truth was that Evelyn was terrified to leave that job. It made no sense to me at all, but it was the only thing in her life at the time that offered the promise of permanence. She had imbued it with a totemic significance because it wasn’t just a stupid job to her. In her life, it was plugging up a vacuum left by parents who had moved to Florida and a boyfriend who had recently come out of the closet to her in unnecessarily graphic fashion. Not only had he explained to her that he was gay; for some reason he had provided her with photographic evidence that he had engaged in sodomy.
Without the moorings of a relationship, Evelyn had drifted aimlessly. Many days she would spend entirely in filling the margins of library books with pornographic doodles, some inspired by her boyfriend’s photos. She drifted to the safe harbor of a stupid job because it was safer than suffering. She focused on work with the intensity of a Buddhist monk and was named Best Caller ten times in a row. Work offered her the safety that past generations of women had found in the convent.
But, safety seemed insidious to me. It was chimeral and mean spirited. Safety offered a life half-lived and completely unexamined. I thought of my grandparents sitting in their amiable chairs with forlorn grins on their faces and long island iced teas in their hands. They were the safest people that I had ever met, and the polar opposite of my parents. But, when I told them that I had my first job as a stock boy at the age of eighteen, my Grandfather said,
“Good for you. That’s the sort of job you should stick with. They don’t ask too much of you and they always want you there.” In that one sentence he summarized all the problems I had with my elder family members and perhaps all the problems anyone has with their elder family members. He hinted at the sort of resignation and self-laceration that went with any act of denial and planning for the future.
Besides, what choice did I have about being safe? My parents had kicked me out of the house at age eighteen after I barely graduated High School. There were few things I could do and even fewer that I wanted to do. My father taught me everything he knew about his job, trash man, before moving to Alaska to work on the pipeline with a stripper named Salome. Nevertheless, I wasn’t holding out much hope for nepotism. I was poor and starving and freer than anyone I knew.
As for Evelyn, she was crazy as a loon, but she seemed completely unaware of this fact. After work, she would often walk around Rock Creek Park and collect flora and fauna for her scrapbook. Either that or she’d be tinkering on those goddamned plays all night. I liked to hang around the practice space and read books until one of the girls would come up and start talking to me. Evelyn didn’t mind so long as I was quiet during the readings. Eventually, I got to know everybody in her theatre troop, ‘Menses Productions’, and even bought some of them gifts for Christmas.
So, naturally I went to the party in question. I must have looked like a walking disaster too because I came to Evelyn’s apartment right after work and I was still wearing my sweaty grocery store uniform. At the time I was working sporadically at a little family-owned grocery store back in the Maryland sticks about twenty miles outside of the District. The place was owned by this Lebanese couple that fought constantly. They had apparently been the product of an arranged marriage that wasn’t very well arranged. Both of them were short and heavy-set and seemed unable to do anything without screaming about it to somebody. Usually, I got there around one in the afternoon and inevitably the two of them were hollering at each other as if they were in the middle of some military battle and had to yell over the explosions,
“Where in the HELL is the stock dog food, you STUPID!!” him.
“How the fuck should I know you goddamn son of a BITCH!!” her.
“Oh! If you ever talk to me again, I make you into DUST!!” him again.
“GOOD! Don’t you fucking talk to me then! I HATE you!” her.
This would go on from morning to night. By the time the place closed for the evening, you would have figured that the two of them were ready to kill each other, or at least, get a divorce. But, closing up seemed to mellow them a bit and they usually left arm in arm.
The other thing was that they were usually both pissed off at those of us who worked there. They would chew me out on a fairly regular basis. The husband, Muhammad, would catch me in the backroom when I first arrived there and start screaming about, “The floor, it look TERRIBLE, you goddamn piece of!!” He never filled in the noun. This would go on for twenty minutes or so, until he’d become depressed and walk out. Eventually, I figured out that he wanted me to yell back at him, and I started returning his volley of insults with a few of my own. Nothing was off limits with the guy. He seemed to love the way in which a good fight can reorder and alter the social world.
“You lazy American son of a turd! I make you into DUST!! I kill you, you American swine!!” he would yell with his face roughly the color of cranberry sauce ($1.25/can).
“Shut the FUCK UP, you goddamn sand nigger! You fucking camel jockey!” I would yell back. Admittedly, I was never going to win any diplomatic awards with this stuff. But, Muhammad seemed to like it. I actually think he liked getting to yell “American swine” at someone who wouldn’t take offense. I knew it was a touchy subject though. His cousin Ammad had been detained in a Philadelphia jail for a few months over some “incendiary” comments he had made in the middle of an epileptic fit in the International House of Pancakes, ironically enough. The whole thing was idiotic and all of us at the store had written letters to the District Judges praising Ammad and telling them that they were a bunch of jackboot morons. We even had a cashier crying on the phone about the whole thing. Of course, Ammand was eventually released and did no real harm to America aside from the fact that he never seemed to brush his teeth and often smelled like onions.
Muhammad actually liked us, even though you might not be able to tell from his screaming. After two years I could easily sense when Muhammad was seriously angry. He would still yell, but he would be barking out orders and his voice would go up an octave or two. Those were the times that you would want to stay away from him. Usually, those were the evenings that I would be fired and sent home. The first few times that this happened I took the whole firing business seriously. I would go out the next day looking for a job and, when I got home, there would be numerous messages on the machine from Mo, wondering where the hell I was and why wasn’t I at work. After that, I just started coming back to work the day after getting fired and pretending as if nothing had happened.
Firing seemed pretty inevitable on the evening of the party because everything was going to hell at the same time when I got there. For one thing, it was Christmas, and no matter how much I may delight at Christmas in other circumstances, when working in a grocery store on the weekend before Christmas, it’s all anyone can do to keep from pushing a customer’s head through a plate glass window. Literally, everyone you know has to go to the grocery store to stock up for the holidays, and they all need the same things. So, within a few hours, the store is out of; egg nog, marshmallows, fried onion sticks, champagne, soda, Butterball turkeys, and spiced cider. And everyone is ready to kill each other. Just try, for fun, keeping a store stocked and straight with over a hundred angry human beings, at the end of their ropes anyway, because none of the stores have “Rape Me Barbie”, who are trampling over everything in sight and screaming at the top of their lungs about how any store worth an ounce of gold would have fucking cider, for Christ’s sake! The only way I could deal with these people was to maintain a sort of unbreakable Zen composure. Focus on stocking eggs at the expense of everything else, for example. Recreate the universal balance in the banana aisle.
The other problem, of course, was that it was snowing outside. Admittedly, part of me still delighted in snow. But, it did little good for the store because people dragged it in and left a sort of brownish sludge down the first few aisles that needed constant attendance. By four o clock, we had already had three falls and what was most likely a broken anklebone. Also, the other stock-boy for the evening was unable to make it to work that evening because he had never driven on snow before and wasn’t about to start now.
In fact, we were shorthanded all night because our cashier Ellen’s boyfriend had shot himself in the foot while cleaning his gun and she had to drive him to the hospital, seeing as how he couldn’t operate the pedals himself. This meant that Muhammad’s wife, Hassah, had to run one of the registers, while calling to the office on the phone every time the customers were away to yell obscenities at Muhammad for not hiring more people. Meanwhile, Muhammad was running the office because the manager who had been scheduled for the evening had gotten drunk the night before and driven his car through an outdoor nativity scene, forcing a concrete sheep through his radiator. Those of us who were there were doing everything in creation while trying to constantly mop up the brownish sludge. Meanwhile, I had a yuppie arguing with me that the bottled water had “expired” because he didn’t realize that the expiration date on bottled water is for the next calendar year, and a woman yelling at me about how Safeway had spiced cider and she could just go there, which I encouraged her to do.
I tried to remember a mantra of some sort. “Order-a-pizza-from-Dominoes” I chanted in faux Latin. I thought of a universe giving birth to itself. Slimy little amoebas developing flippers and crawling out of the muck in order to breathe the light of the sun. Early funguses trying out shoots, which succeeded and encouraged the formation of brittle branches. Fishes begetting lizards begetting large reptiles begetting birds begetting small mammals begetting larger mammals begetting monkeys begetting monkeys with automobiles. I thought in science filmstrip. I felt peace. The customers kept yelling and leaping and crying their little eyes out. But, I was relaxed.
Naturally, I got fired. Muhammad waited until about 7:57 and called me over the phone to tell me that I was through in the grocery store business and that he would make me into dust and that I was a goddamn son of a bitch. Also, if I wanted, I could pick out a free ham from the refrigerated bin and to have a happy Christmas.
I figured that he would call me back for work the next day. My neck was humming with pain as I dragged my feet across the sludge and out into the parking lot, which was savage with holiday shoppers. I could hear people blaring their horns and yelling obscenities at each other. I saw one woman from across the parking lot, fall on her ass and help herself back to her feet because nobody around her would stop. I trudged to the bus stop and packed myself onto the bus, which smelled at this point like a gym shower. I wasn’t concerned. I was focusing on my mantra.
By the time I got to Evelyn’s I was on the verge of falling asleep in the hallway outside of her apartment. The lobby seemed to have been designed as some sort of sleep aid. The powder blue wallpaper and ersatz bubbling fountain had the combined effect of making me drowsy every single time I went to see Evelyn. Sometimes, I would stay awake by talking to the drunks outside the door. Once, we even performed Shakespeare. I was Lear, and they were Goneril and Reagan.
This drowsiness passed as I entered the party. The crowd was young and lively and mostly new to me. I started shticking and drinking in an attempt to keep up with them. There were several bottles of whiskey and vodka in Evelyn’s kitchen, so by the time I met Cassandra, I was fairly drunk. In fact, I felt like I was burning when I met her. Like I had been burning for a long time; a cheap imitation of an Indian widow consumed by my love for the world that seemed to make me a widower. In fact, to be honest, I was completely immolated and hissing shards of my melting flesh sizzled onto the ground in front of her. The amazing thing was that she didn’t seem to mind at all.
Of course, her name wasn’t Cassandra, but it might as well have been. She had played Rosie Cranz in the female Hamlet that I never got around to attending. But, in the apartment, she seemed to draw attention to her in waves. She stood there making jokes to anyone who would listen to her.
“What kind of bees make milk?” she asked me.
“Excuse me?” I responded, still burning.
“What kind of bees make milk?” she asked again. I shrugged my shoulders and she exclaimed, “Boobies!” I laughed in spite of myself and we started talking. At first, of course, I was terrified. I had attended many parties in DC with women who wanted everyone to know how significant they were and could think of no other way to get this across than to insult perfect strangers. The District of Columbia can be a tough crowd.
Luckily, Cassandra was very easygoing and I found that it was quite comfortable to talk to her. She wasn’t one of those girls who seem like they’re going to call the cops if you deign to even look in their general direction. At the time, I was essentially a little pest and attractive to no one. But, she didn’t seem to mind, and I opened up elaborately in her presence. Cassandra was born and raised in the North Carolina woods and she was of the opinion that kindness was something sacred and necessary. She seemed to give it freely as a balm to all the wounded spirits around her. Other women seemed like little children in comparison. I had met almost no one like her. I was sure of this. She was good. She was blissful. In order to know her, I would have to become a better person.
But first, I would have to talk to her. We pretty much talked all night, in fact. She was of Cuban descent, but had grown up in North Carolina and moved to DC to attend college. She was interested in the writings of Sartre and Dostoeyevsky. Her parents lived in the mountains and owned a health food store called The Happy Carrot. Yes, she had heard all sorts of obscene jokes about the name while she was growing up. She was in college at Georgetown University. She hated the college system, but thought it was inescapable.
I was amazed at how well we hummed along together. She even felt comfortable ribbing me when I asked her what she was majoring in at college. “Oh come on, Milo! You can do better than that!” she laughed. “What’s my major? You might as well ask what my sign is!” Being a bit “high-strung” I’ve gotten used to having friends pick on me. “Look, it can’t all be scintillating conversation! Sometimes, you’ve got to just chew the fat a little bit!” I said. We both laughed at this.
“Actually, I’m a religion major. But, I minor in English literature, so I usually tell people that I’m an English major. That way I don’t have to listen to quite as much shit about why I’m not studying business or something practical like that,” she laughed.
“I know. It’s really a shame too,” I said. “People like Socrates or Aristotle saw the purpose of learning as a quest to become human. We weren’t human, but through patient study of what they called the studia humanitatis, or the humanities, we could become fully human. I think about that a lot. You know, Nietzsche felt that the vast majority of us would never quite make it. We would live as little more than fillers of latrines, forever replicating the mistakes and insignificant battles of the older generations.” I realized that I was probably not going to get laid by coming off as Sir Kenneth Clark, but I was powerless to stop my mouth.
“Yes! I know the studia! That’s why I study literature and philosophy! Nobody understands it anymore, but I want to patiently observe what it means to be alive on this earth. When I read Shakespeare or Confucius, I get a sense of the limits of existence. You know? I mean, why dissect a brain in a laboratory when you can go see a performance of Hamlet?” she was laughing.
“I have a fairly good idea,” I said. I loved listening to her talk. She was confident and forthright and her voice cleaved the air like the prow of a ship. There was something almost regal about her. I would later discover that she had always known exactly what she wanted to do in her life and had followed her plans fearlessly. It was bizarre to me to meet someone who had been told as a small child that she could become anything she wanted to. Everyone I knew had always heard that they needed to calm down and learn to be more reasonable. Here was somebody whose parents held the self-esteem of their child to be all important. Even though I sensed a certain childishness to her personality, it was also somewhat inspiring.
In fact, I hardly talked about myself at all, which was good. I felt relaxed. Our talk was easy and loose and by the end of the night my hand was on her hip resting above the curve of her ass.
The next day, at work, I moved as if in a dream. Nothing registered with me. I only knew that I had met a girl from North Carolina, who was interested in Sartre, etc. If somebody had told me that wild savages were looting the store, I would have wished them the best of luck and went back to daydreaming and scheming. I don’t think I had any real thoughts about Cassandra either at that time. She was just another girl I had some interest in. I wasn’t quite eager to venture into the mysteries of love. But, I was still young enough to do so if the situation absolutely demanded. This wasn’t much to crow about, but it was still noteworthy. Most adults seemed unwilling to love at all.
And, there was indeed some need to proceed with caution. Cassandra was a college girl and from a different world entirely. After I called her and had a few drinks with her in a dingy coffee shop, I found that she wasn’t even from the same universe. Her friends: an Anthropology major studying gender roles in South America, two directors of an Arlington-based nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence, a psychology major who was currently engaged to his high school sweetheart, and a master’s candidate in social work who was teaching inner-city school kids to read. My friends: an internet “school girl” model and sometimes prostitute, the lead singer for the punk band the Filthy Fucks, two avowed fascists, three avowed “faggots”, one heroin addict (since deceased), Evelyn, a couple who had been squatting in a building downtown until the boy received a fantastic stipend from a 1993 car accident in which a schizophrenic rich girl drove him into a tree, a girl who worked in a record store downtown but who supplemented her income by peeing in guys’ mouths for money, and a mechanic and his wife; both “lifestyle lovers”. In the future Cassandra hoped to teach English classes in some high school in the Washington slums. In the future, I had no idea what I wanted to do, just so long as I could read books all day and drink whiskey all night. The world was her oyster. I had a useless high school degree and little hope of doing anything with it.
I didn’t want to get too quickly mired in this thing with Cassandra. But, I also realized that half of the people I knew were emotionally stunted alcoholics. They weren’t an adequate model of normal adult behavior. Cassandra seemed inviting in her normalcy. Besides, I realized that there was little I could do to stop the machinations of adoration.
It didn’t matter. I was prepared for the reordering of my soul. Love rewrites you. It remakes you in a new image, and not necessarily a better one. An object of worship requires a willing worshiper. It needs a loving host. You have to be ready to listen to its soothing whisper in your ear as it tattoos obscenities and coded messages into your skin. There is nothing polite or courteous about love at all. It crushes everything in its path with a steamroller and insists that you understand and keep your mouth shut.
The two of us mostly got along like gangbusters. We walked around the Adams Morgan neighborhood and laughed to ourselves as we passed by boorish drunk yuppies, pissed off drug dealers, Spanish pimps, undernourished artists, insane derelicts and ancient night-owls. The buildings seemed to observe from above when we ducked through the alleyways behind the bars and narrowly avoided getting hit by sport cars. We stopped by the dark Asylum bar and I said hi to some of my friends who were bartending there. Cassandra seemed a bit nervous around the usual bikers, tattoo artists, vampire whores, and drug addicts who hung around there. I figured that she would want me to take her straight home afterwards and that I’d probably never hear from her after that. But, even if she stuck around, she was going to have to get used to my friends. When my friend Lydia walked over with her breasts encased in a latex boostier, I could sense a nascent jealousy bubbling within Cassandra, but I was more amused than annoyed. Later I would tell Cassandra about the men who paid Lydia to piss in their mouths and she would refer to Lydia as “the mouth pisser” with a hint of disgust. Perhaps I should have taken this as a bad sign about Cassandra, but I generally tried to ignore such things.
As for my friends, most of them didn’t know what to make of Cassandra, but I realized that the most important thing to pay attention to when a loved one is seeing somebody is not the demeanor or behavior of the love interest, but how the loved one is acting. And as much as I would have denied it, I was positively aglow with Cassandra. We walked down the louder and more furious parts of U Street and the concrete and glass seemed somehow changed. How many times I had walked alone with a cigarette glowing in my fingers to ward off strangers and I had felt the weight of loneliness, the pressing need to be silent, crushing down on my chest. I would stand drunk outside of the nightclubs and listen to the screeching guitars in the punk clubs and the incessant kettledrums of the go-go clubs. The black girls in tight little dresses would undulate by me, a group of spheres moving rhythmically together. They would never answer my greetings. Sometimes they would laugh, but that was about it.
With Cassandra the streets seemed different. The yuppies that stared glassy eyed as a beautiful girl walked past them with a scrawny wing nut babbling on about Walter Pater and Leonardo seemed like posters on the wall. The stocky Mexican roughnecks who hooted “Me pones caliente!” at Cassandra were mere dust, even when she turned around and swore at them vehemently in perfect Spanish. I could simply not have cared less. I felt like we were walking through the snow in the middle of nowhere with not a soul around.
She had a small apartment about a mile outside of Georgetown that she shared with a roommate from school. After we had another drink at the Black Cat bar, the two of us took a cab back to her apartment and continued talking over drinks. The place looked exactly like two college girls were renting it. There were socks and panties all over the floor, a copy of the translated Nag Hammadi coppices on the kitchen table, Gustav Klimt prints framed on the wall, and a stereo system with the requisite amount of Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan records. I was relieved to see that she still bought vinyl. I had always held a grudge against anyone who looked at my boxes of records and commented, “I didn’t even know that they still made records!” In DC there were gaggles of hipsters and bores that asked stupid things like that on a regular basis.
As could be expected, eventually our talk turned to literature. She had a good handle on writers like Dostoyevski and Emille Zola who were certainly important, but unlike myself, she knew who was currently burning up the bestseller charts. I couldn’t tell you the difference between John Grisham and Frank McCourt if I had to. I told Cassandra that I had little taste for most of the more recent authors. Writers like Dom DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon seemed insignificant and weird to me. I’ve always felt that Pynchon’s goal in his writing seemed to be to gradually waste away his apparent gifts. DeLillo on the other hand, seemed to assign too much importance to the supposedly soul crushing aspects of modern life and too little importance to the soul itself.
“Do you like any of the postmodern authors?” she asked incredulously.
“I don’t really know what that means,” I admitted.
“Well, you know, the more recent and experimental writers. Maybe it’s not fair to call them postmodern,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about. I never went to college, so most of what I knew about such things came from books and magazines. Occasionally Evelyn or one of her friends would talk about this or that author or theorist, but most of the intellectual fads seemed a bit airless to me. I struggled to think of a contemporary writer who interested me at all. Maybe JG Ballard or Will Self. I went with Brett Ellis, hoping that she hadn’t been nauseated by American Psycho or bewildered by Glamorama.
“Well, I think Brett Easton Ellis is a brilliantly cold-blooded author. But, I just think
that literature was expanding the world exponentially before all this deconstructive disgust took over the academy. I mean, doesn’t anybody even read D.H. Lawrence anymore? Can you name one theorist who could write a single sentence that could compa re with Women in Love? People like Kate Millet will never be anything but graffiti artists. They stagger around blindly and piss on everything around them. They want to pull apart the Western Canon with their pudgy little hands, but what we need to be doing is writing love letters to the canon. But, not just the Western canon, the entire human canon! We need to introduce Confucius to Charles Dickens and read the Baghivad Gita to William Blake! We’re being anesthetized by politics, morality, and aesthetic criticism. I mean, what does criticism do but further abstract experience? Critics are nail drivers. What is it mean to read reviews but to say, ‘No, I cannot think for myself. I have to be told how to experience the world.’? Who today could ever understand somebody like Henry Miller, Brooklyn’s answer to Marcel Proust, sitting out in the desert, writing Men’s True Adventure Stories after Freud with blinding flashes of light?” By this point, I was practically shouting. But, I could hardly stop the flow of words if I had wanted to. She was smiling at me and soaking it in. We were both luxuriating in each other.
“I love how excited you get about these things!” she laughed. “Everyone at Georgetown is so fucking bloodless! They say exactly the right things at all the right times. There’s never anything idiosyncratic in the classroom or outside of it. All these kids are destined for Harvard or Yale or some giant conglomerate where idiosyncrasy is trumped by efficiency. They never take any chances!” She took a sip of wine. “They never step forth into the abyss and run the risk of landing in shit! These people are bright and diligent. But like the people I grew up with. You’re an adventurer!” As she said this, her hand was on the crotch of my jeans, stroking my cock through the fabric. Within seconds, I was hard as a rock.
I was already excited in every other way. All my cylinders were firing and all my neurons were buzzing. I decided to ride the exuberance in the little room. I leaned over to kiss her and heard her breath coming with more difficulty than before. We had never kissed until this moment, but I knew exactly what it would be like to kiss her from the way she moved when she crossed the street. I was right and I liked it.
So, we kissed for an hour and a half on the couch. The apartment was bare and her roommate was gone for the evening. I could tell that Cassandra she wanted to take it slow, partition off some sort of thrill for later. She wasn’t a cock tease exactly, but she wanted me to stay around. For my part, I wanted her to think that I might not stay around, even though I was already nuts about her. I wanted her to be a little scared and completely engaged with me. So, I didn’t protest at all, but I kept on making aggressive movements towards her. Every time I slid my hand down between her legs she pulled it away and whispered, “Not yet”. But, every time I could feel an intense heat coming off her pussy that made me try it again in a few minutes.
She pushed me down on the couch, giggling at the fact that I put up no resistance to her weak aggression. I put my hands on her hips and she sat on top, straddling me, and laughingly pulled off her shirt and bra. Her body was brown and pudgy and looked delicious. Women have no idea how erotic fat can be. She was like a newly opened present or a playground. I wanted to bury my face in her tits and suck off globs of flesh. I had no time to. Her tongue was in my mouth as quick as a flash. With each breath, she was moaning and grinding her crotch against me. Her jeans were still on, but I could tell they were damp. She twitched a bit as she kissed me and her hips ground down in a circle. I could feel the blood rushing around my skull like a metal hornet; my body jumping like it was in the electric chair.
“Pinch my nipples,” she moaned. I gave her a sheepishly idiotic grin and complied with her demand. While we kissed and dry fucked each other I could tell she was having an orgasm by the way she pulled her tongue out of my mouth and made this ridiculous expression. Her lips pulled back over her teeth and her eyes rolled back in her head. I imagine she would look the same way if the lost her mind. I held her close to my body and felt her finish the orgasm while biting my lower lip. She sucked air through her teeth and started smiling at me, brushing the hair out of my eyes, kissing my forehead. I felt like a hornet’s nest being sniffed by a bear. I had no release at all. I wanted to pass out.
She asked if I wanted some water. She was blushing at this point and exhausted. I told her that I’d like some and she walked over to the drawer, and got a glass. As she stood against the sink, filling the glass with water, I slid my hand between her legs again, felt the same heat. This time though, her legs squeezed together over my hand. I pushed hard against her crotch, my thumb shoved between the cheeks of her ass. With the other hand, I reached around her body and squeezed her tit hard. She turned her head and bit my earlobe lovingly. I could feel my cock throbbing in my jeans and I felt like I was a teenager at the prom.
I was tired of all the game playing.
Still behind her, I walked her over to the kitchen table and bent her over it. She gasped quite loudly as I started undoing her pants, running my other fingers down her back. She seemed shocked that I was taking such liberties. I remembered that she was probably used to college students and fumbling English majors. I paused.
“What is it?” she asked. “Nothing” I replied. “Well, don’t stop!” she shouted.
I pulled her pants down with one yank and kneeled behind her, admiring her ass. As I pulled down her panties I could see her pussy lips gleaming in the light of the refrigerator and smell the juices lubricating her. I ran my tongue up the length of her vagina, and with my fingers inside it, pushed my tongue into her asshole. I usually reserve the old rim job trick for college girls. Most of them are fairly sheltered and timid and tend to have only dated complacent and conservative suburban boys who are on their way to some idiotic middle-management job. When they date a crackpot like myself it’s usually because they’re looking for some sort of illicit thrills and degenerate complications. I don’t want to disavow them of the idea that I’m a revolutionary because I don’t wear a tie, so I try to keep a few sexual stunts in my repartee that their Ivy League boyfriends haven’t ever tried. Eat their asshole a few times and they think that you’re a modern day Don Juan. As expected, when I poked my tongue up Cassandra’s anus, and slid a few fingers up her vagina, she wriggled like a fish on a hook and moaned loudly, “Oh God! Just fuck me!”
I laughed and stood up. I fumbled with a condom and stepped out of my pants. I could see her staring at my cock over her shoulder, moving her hips up a bit to open her pussy wider. With one hard shove I buried my cock inside her. I could feel her cunt trembling, clenching and unclenching, taking it. We rocked back and forth that way, me fucking her over the cheap kitchen table in a little apartment in Georgetown. I could see stars dancing in front of my eyes and imagined myself to be diving back into the original ooze. The two of us were mere instruments in some obscene and ridiculous cosmic symphony. But, we had harmony. We moved together and, when I came, I swear that I could hear the music playing.
Afterwards, she turned around and pulled up her pants. I felt awkward and halfway expected her to kick me out of her apartment. But, she put her arms around me and held me close to her. It was a bit uncomfortable. But, I lightened up when she took an ice cube out of the water glass and rubbed it over her crotch for laughs.
That night, we slept in each other’s arms fighting off exhaustion. Before I drifted away from the shores of consciousness, I became acutely aware of the fact that something was different in my life. There was some new factor. Something that wasn’t there before that was making a home inside of me. I felt as powerless before it as a little child and as unknowing as some blind cave dwelling fish. Somehow my joy had returned to me. I had given the world my full adoration and poured forth all my bitter loneliness and something had washed back to shore and found itself at home.
BARRELS ON THE ICE
Chapter 1: I Dreamt of Tigers
Wake up.
I have something to tell you and it can’t wait until morning.
I know that you might not believe me, but there is something further buried beneath the subdued tumult of the primates. There is a signal emanating from the extreme reaches of the darkness; a single heartbeat that contains the entire beauty and voluptuousness of human experience. You might try to deny it. But, who of us can say that we have not heard it in the most extravagant and rare moments of clarity? Who can say in all sincerity that we have not failed to pay it the due amount of attention and respect? When did we lose our sense of sanctity anyway, and how can we recover it from the garbage heap?
I know this might seem like some sort of religious babbling. I will probably come across at times as one of those shaved and blissed out wackos on the subway, spitting out cryptic messages in wads of semen-soaked toilet paper for sweaty cryptographers to crack over beers. No doubt you wonder if I had some life-altering experience while reading the Baghivad Gita on the subway. That’s the rub of it, though. I did. But I also had a life-altering experience while reading Spiderman in the park. For a time there, every moment I had was a religious experience. Every breath of air I took was a blessed sacrament.
Sigmund Freud had a friend who wrote to him about religion. The friend’s theory was that we all had these moments of feeling a sort of oceanic connectedness with other human beings and with the world itself. We all had moments in which we could look down upon ourselves and feel our lungs filling with air, our hearts beating, and stand childlike and trembling before the magnificent wisdom of a darkened night sky. This guy’s idea was that there could be no name for such experiences. God is simply a word we give to an experience we cannot otherwise name. He felt that organized religions channeled these lucid moments into a safe outlet. They drew us away from the raging river of experience and made us into productive, safe, but essentially complacent people.
Freud, of course, was a neurological tour-guide, prophet, and divine mystic. But, he was also an avowed atheist- one of those people with a superstitious faith in the existence of mankind. From fin de sciele Vienna, no doubt, there is no God. And honestly, I can’t say with any certainty that there is a God in America anymore. But, I’ve heard the song that the unnamed friend writes of, humming away in the darkness. And I know that words like oceanic connectedness seem ludicrous until they apply to the situation at hand; in which case, they’re the only ones we have. And I promise that I will pay attention.
For years, I would search the world like a hunting dog for any experience that could light me up. Sex, suffering, or bewilderment; it was all the same. I lived like an alien and, when I slept I dreamt of tigers. I was voracious and lascivious and lived entirely in the intuitive and a priori. Naturally, this maniacal lust for experience was thoroughly exhausting to anyone within my immediate proximity. I would ramble on and on out of control, giggling at my own jokes, which were indecipherable to anyone besides the cosmos and myself. Inevitably, I would wind up drunk, because that would slow down the gears a bit and prevent my drowning in a flood of my own words. But, that would only last for an hour or so, and then one subject or another would send me caroming into the tangled world of arcane and scholarly pursuits and, more often than not, barreling between mere shadows on the walls of my own neural catacombs.
Naturally, there were a small number of people who wanted to talk to me at all. A few brave Ulyssean loons were willing to go the distance. But, even they were often worn out by my verbal pugilism. That’s what it was; boxing. I would jab with the nouns, connect with the verbs, weave a bit with odd combinations of adverbs and then pummel my partner into the mat with an onslaught of adjectives. It was ugly. It was unseemly and embarrassing. But, it was creation.
My best friend at the time was Evelyn Horovitz, a drama queen Jewess with the prescience of a satellite dish and the energy of a Chihuahua. She was my Delphic advisor and sparring partner for several years. I remember that we were always broke. At least five days out of the week I would saunter about the streets of the District of Columbia humming some idiotic song so that none of the passersby could hear my angry growling stomach. One time that actually did happen to me while I was riding on the subway. My guts were churning so loudly, trying to digest little more than ramen noodles that the burly buck next to me got pissed off and almost started a fight with me. I think he thought I was muttering at him. He seemed to think that he heard racial slurs in the static of my stomach. Luckily, I explained the whole problem to him, how I was broke and working as a construction laborer and living off of ramen noodles and generic soda. By the time the ride was over, he and I were good friends.
That was the way it was when I was a kid. I was always broke, but everybody I knew was broke. We were all of us wiry and jumpy and alert at all times. We were always on the move. There’s something immediate about poverty that makes the most trivial parts of existence into vivid participatory experiences. It’s also very romantic. Since this is essentially a story about sex and romance, poverty serves as an appropriate backdrop. In fact, I believe that rich kids will always suffer because they will never understand the joy of huddling like two warm puppies beneath a moth-eaten blanket in a frigid apartment, knowing that the one with you is your lifeline and sole cohort in the trenches of scarcity. I used to wander around in love with the whole world because there was nothing to keep me from it. No distant goals or diffused joys to keep me waiting or living in the future moment like Heidegger’s workman. I was never as alive as when I was starving.
Evelyn wasn’t so lucky however. Her spiritual eye was working fine, but its searching line of vision was blocked from nine to five by dreadful plywood partitions. At night she was producing plays, but all day long she was calling people on the phone to find out if they would be interested in donating money to the Washington Performing Arts Guild. I remember she was always tired after work. At the young age of twenty-five, work had already laced her auburn hair with countless grays and sunk her green eyes behind thick bags of skin. I still hate and despise the fact that people have to work. Of course, if I tell this to anyone, they usually get personally offended and horrified. Women faint! Men throw punches! Somebody calls security! They huddle in close around you: Sure you can hate your job, doesn’t everyone? But, to hate work itself! You might as well say that you hate America or children or Jesus Christ. In my opinion though, their anger illustrates how thoroughly we have been seduced by the lie, “twas ever thus” and how tragically we have adapted our ludic biological senses to an environment that resembles the Stanford Prison Experiment by way of Taylorism.
And poor Evelyn was on the verge of tears at the end of each workday. She and I used to meet every Friday at this lacquered and bombastically neon Mexican restaurant in Georgetown, which just so happened to have a Friday evening Happy Hour, and we would gab for hours, unrolling the terra firma and remaking it in our image. I remember one particular evening in which we were sitting crow -style by the edge of the bar, staring at the glasses, which were hanging upside down like exhausted universes, above the bartender. Evelyn had on this lurid lipstick that made her mouth look like a bloody nose and she was helping me to anatomize my sexual imagination. “You’re so hung up on Jewish girls” she said. “I don’t understand what it is with you. What’s the big deal about Jewish chicks? Do you have some kind of neurosis fetish or something?”
“I don’t know,” I argued. “Maybe it’s the thick lips and hula hips. They look sensual. Like you could pick any part of their body and sink into it effortlessly. Slide a finger into their belly or fuck the small of their back, or do whatever you want.”
“Fuck the small of their back. Well, I can tell you that there are no scheindelas who are going to let you do that! We have religious reservations about spine fucking. Even if a Catholic boy with Kosher fever is such a rare thing.”
“Yeah, but it’s like Jewesses hold down the earth. While WASPs are flitting about in a miasma of delusions and flatteries, Jewish girls are picking at the scabs and changing the diapers, you know. Their whole outlook is different. There’s just this sardonic sense of humor that Jewesses have that WASPs haven’t even heard of. You know what I mean? WASPs always seem to be lying on the verge of taking offense at something. Like fragile little church girls in pretty lace dresses screaming at their mother because one of the choirboys was picking his nose. Jewish dames usually appreciate a bitter acrid sense of humor. You can make a few jokes to the effect that we’re all screwed and people are evil and the world is a terrible place and Jewish girls will generally have sex with you. Not only that, but they tend to have a perfectly delightful mordant streak themselves. It drives me wild.”
“Yes. We really work that whole ‘overeducated daughters of the Holocaust’ aesthetic,” she said, causing me to laugh like a hyena.
I continued, “But, it’s like the other day, I was arriving for work, and the lithe blonde girl I work with asked ‘And how are you today?’ and I said, just trying to be funny, ‘Oh, absolutely fucking wonderful. Tonight I’m planning to listen to records and garrote myself with a rake,’ in this really deadpan voice. I thought it was at least a little bit amusing, but she didn’t laugh at all. She just stared at me as if I had just taken out my cock at the family reunion. The thing that pissed me off the most was that, not only do I think that she didn’t know that I was making a joke; I don’t think she knew that I could make a joke. As if a sense of humor was limited to her circle of uptown friends.”
“Milo, may I speak frankly?” Evelyn asked.
“Sure, go ahead,” I told her, watching her tense up before walking into this particular minefield.
“You… tend to be… a little… high-strung- and there’s nothing wrong with that!” Good. She successfully avoided rubbing me the wrong way. A pause to catch her breath. “It’s just that girls are often looking for somebody who does not have,” another pause. She sucked on her cigarette like doing so was almost incidental. How should she phrase this? “the soul of an artist. You know? I mean, fuck them, right? But, you’re worrying about entirely the wrong things. You need to focus on your writing, not some stupid girls.” She took a swig of her drink and exhaled, relieved.
“I know that. I do. It’s just that I used to see women as my co-conspirators against this cantankerous trembling world. You know, when I was a kid I blamed everything on these hulking, loudmouthed hostile men who reminded me too much of my father. I always figured that women were my contacts in the Underground Railroad. But, I never saw how complicit they were in everything I hated.” A flood of memories returned, from unfriendly teachers with faces that were pinched as tight as assholes to plastic hateful restaurants in endless strip malls. They all had a different hue now. They weren’t as cruel and malevolent as they had seemed to a cringing skinny kid. They were just part of the background. They were the caverns that hid the sarcophagus of my childhood. They were part of a mysterious alien culture. I felt like I could step out of my life and return there. Tell Pete Walker that I understood how much he hated his drunk mother and sedated father and that I almost forgave him for shoving me down a flight of steps. At least, he wasn’t complacent! At least he drank from the golden cup! I would always remember him, and in my eternal distaste for loutish goons, he would have a sort of immortality.
Evelyn was eating her pita bread and hummus and staring away absentmindedly. I would have spent days in saying nothing, if only to be in her presence. She noticed everything. The paintings on the wall fascinated her and she wrapped them in tissue paper to store them in her heart. She was an enthusiast. Her antennae whipped around the room with love and alacrity. We sat like that for some time, me remembering and her noticing. Finally, her face lit up and she said,
“Hey! I know! Why don’t you come to the party that Chris is having tomorrow night?”
Chris was the director of a local theatre company, which had just performed in an all-female version of Hamlet. The theatre people were my type of people. They all had drinking problems. Another benefit- the entire crowd consisted of gay men and straight women. I could hardly sneeze without hitting somebody who would give me head. I agreed to go.
Evelyn and I left the bar at one o clock and wandered down by the piers beneath Georgetown. So many times I had come here after work to stare at that ugly river and listen to cackling yuppies stampeding through the shopping district. The city seemed to have been designed by an explosion in an architect’s office. There were churches shoved next to sex shops, overlooking abandoned factories from DC’s cosmopolitan past, currently filled with derelicts and drug addicts. There were upscale restaurants and stores mere blocks from slums that looked like they had been imported from a war zone. When I was a teenager I would walk around all summer long, dodging cars and people, skinny as shit in a tee shirt and jeans. I never could afford anything much besides a burrito and a coke. But, I only got kicked out a few stores and that was for being stoned. I remember walking down the street with my friend Harry and staring with a bloodthirsty gaze at these sorority girls from GU. They were probably out drinking and they walked with a WASPish strut and the shorter one (blonde, but they were all blonde) said something like, “Hello, can I help you with something?” in pre-rehearsed snottiness. I wanted to walk off, but Harry thought it would be amusing to tell them that he wanted to impregnate them and then eat their children in nine months because, after all, he had made the brats. Of course, this freaked them out and they started screaming at him and pelting him with change from their purses. I started laughing about the fact that they had nothing to throw except money. That just added to Harry’s blind rage and he started screaming about how these girls were whores, drug addicts, and Navajo spies trying to corrupt the white man. Eventually, the shorter one maced him and he staggered around crying in pain like a bee-stung child until I bought him a glass of ice water from the Burrito Brothers Restaurant to wash out his eyes with.
Back then, walking around Georgetown was like sauntering through the guts of some giant hideous transistor radio. Every corner was the focal point of some sort of weird alien music that came and went with the slightest breeze. The people were fascinating to me. They always seemed to be going somewhere and they always seemed to be late. Harry was bitter about people shoving into him or refusing to hold doors or whatever. But, I couldn’t care less. The way I saw it, walking through Georgetown is like wandering though an open-air asylum with the lunatics chasing their dreams down the street and incorporating me into those dreams. They were commerce fanatics. It seemed as if anything could be bought. There were, undoubtedly, dozens of macings and numerous murders that went unreported. But, none of that matters now.
After two o clock in the morning, the lunatics drifted off lethargically like drugged buffaloes. The place would be deserted and I would walk through the alleys and parking garages. I imagined myself to be a cup filled with loneliness and I would walk carefully so as not to stain the pavement. Sometimes I would wander down to the Francis Scott Key Memorial and look for bums to chat with or sit in front of the abandoned factory buildings, smoking and smoldering. I was never in a hurry to get anywhere. I felt that I was already at the center point of various lines of force, sitting pretty. I could get to my apartment at four thirty in the morning and still be buzzing when I woke up for work. My energy was never spent on anything. It just swirled around in a mad orgiastic dance with an inattentive world. I never rushed to be anywhere or engaged with anyone. I was barely there, but I was more alive than anyone I knew.
Places like Georgetown weren’t really made for people like my friends. We could dance on the corners and slip through the side roads, but never really land anywhere. Nobody I knew ever had any money and we were always scrounging and scraping like hungry rats. My friend Alan, who used to joke that he was born with a burnt spoon in his mouth, would get these jobs at Pizza joints and steal the pepperonis to eat later. I remember that he would come home looking like some demented satyr with a three-foot bulge in his pants, trying desperately to walk normally. Eventually, he had to quit doing this because the neighbors bought a pit-bull terrier that would shamelessly jump on Alan and gnaw at his crotch trying to get to the contraband pork. Harry had a different approach. Usually, he would walk down to the Dunkin’ Donuts at closing time each night and talk the placid hippies who worked there into giving him bags of stale donuts at the end of their shift. Actually, the whole end of the night routine was par for the course with everybody I knew. Just like some people know which restaurant serves the best versions of various courses, we knew which places would give you free food if you asked kindly and which ones were worth rooting through their dumpsters.
Evelyn was a connoisseur of free food. She used to fill her pockets with candy from the bulk food bins at the grocery store and then purchase a soda. They never suspected anything because she always had that soda. The strange thing I discovered when I got a job at the grocery store is that a whole lot of people actually do browse through the supermarket and simply buy soda. Sometimes I suppose that they really can’t decide on anything to eat. Others I suspect are lonely and confused. They were part of the army of extras that would roam through the aisles late at night or, like I did, stalk the streets and alleyways. These were my people. The unaffiliated gypsies, free agents, and forlorn mosquitoes. We shared the fate of being swept willy-nilly by the currents of loneliness. None of us were in a rush to be anywhere, ever.
For a while, Evelyn was the only one I knew who had a job. When we would get together and drink it was all she would talk about. Sometimes we would leave the Mexican place and amble down to a hole in the wall bar that seemed to have been designed by Mickey Spillane. There was honestly this blood-red cigarette-stained wallpaper and aged alcoholics with hacking coughs there. We loved it. Evelyn would sit there in some god-awful secretary garb, bitching and moaning about secretarial work.
“You’d never believe these people. My boss is this ancient born-again Christian drunk whose religion strangely doesn’t prevent him from trying to get into my pants every chance he gets and all my co-workers are those lonely single women who buy romance novels by the bagful and have posters with inspirational slogans on them like ‘Today is the first day of your long walk to suicide’ or whatever. I don’t know why none of them is trying to fuck the boss. He certainly fits all of their qualifications, except the fact that he doesn’t have some exotic name like Sergio and he seems to keep his shirt closed most of the time.”
“Aw hell,” I moaned, “why do you give a shit anyway? Don’t you know that place is ludicrous? All those devotees worshipping at a clock like little masturbating children. Jesus. Punch in, punch out, write everything down; it’s a wonder you don’t go insane there.”
“But I do,” she protested. “Honestly Milo, it’s like I’m being punished for not being able to sit still in class. I have to just sit there and stare at the wall and call up people on the telephone to harass them into giving me money. There’s no point at all to it.”
“Look, I can’t help you with this. You have to get out there and suck the marrow from the bone, you know? It’s not my fault that you’re too scared to quit your job!”
“Yeah, but what am I supposed to do? I have to have money to fund my plays. You have no idea how important my art is to me. It’s like a starving child that has to be fed all the time. Would you rather that I was famished and unable to put on plays?” she asked.
I had no idea. I didn’t understand her plays anyway. They all seemed like political screeds to me. I took a swig of brandy. “Of course not. But, what is the testament that you’re leaving behind here? I mean, how are you going to be remembered?”
She took a deep breath and began a well-contemplated speech. “I want to be remembered as somebody who did whatever she could to represent women in a positive light and draw away some of the negative effects of a poisonous culture. I want to help the underground survive. The same thing you want to do with those novels that you’ve never gotten around to writing!”
“Yes, but how do you know that you’ve really vaunted forth from the darkened corners and not just barked at the walls?” I asked.
“WHAT does that mean? Milo, you’re not making any sense.”
“I mean, how does a play like ‘Feel My Tampon, Be My Tampon’ reflect your struggle to get through life? What part of that play screams against the yellowed brick walls and tries to break through them? I mean, you have to be willing to get down in the muck and shit of your neural trash-heap and reach for that pearl at the bottom of the bucket, you know?”
“What the hell are you talking about? The Village Voice called ‘Feel My Tampon, Be My Tampon’ a ‘classic in the menstrual milieu’! I mean, what the fuck is writing an entire play about the menstrual cycle but getting down in the muck? What else could I be doing? Isn’t that what art is supposed to do? Isn’t it here to stare the ugliness in the maw and keep singing? Look, what did Baudelaire do but break taboos with his teeth?” She was understandably pretty pissed off at this point.
“Baudelaire,” I said, sucking on a cigarette melodramatically, “recorded the moment at which his soul broke into little pieces and floated away as icy floes. He perfected self-obliteration. He was the only person to ever be killed repeatedly by callous women and live to write about it.” I was frustrated. There was a point to all my insane prattle, but I simply could not force it out. It lay wedged between my brain and throat. She must know what I was talking about. This one moment demanded that some connection be made with her. This moment was in defiance of every emotionally distant parent or mean-spirited stranger in the wandering course of every single human being’s life- and I was screwing it up!
“Look, I understand what you’re getting at here. You want me to put my problems and yearnings and whatnot into these plays. But, you don’t understand that social politics really are part of my subconscious. Gender roles are inherent to my experience as a human being. That’s why I have to attack these things. They really are my life.”
“But, you let yourself be lowered,” I grumbled. “You’re obsessed with the stage directions that we arbitrarily assign to our own primate behavior. You worry about how others perceive you in this pageant of civilization. But, that’s not a human concern. Civilization is a convenient hiding place. But, it doesn’t answer the howling in the darkness. The magnificent terror still strikes like an icy stake through the heart. You don’t break taboos for any other reason than to break them. That isn’t art.”
“Oh, come on! All artists have to break barriers,” she argued. “Van Gogh needed to erupt color all over the Western canon just to get his vision across. And what happened? He was made the martyr of exuberance. He was crucified to a shotgun. But, that was taboo breaking. That was the dog shit on the carpet.”
“Van Gogh was exceptional,” I said, suddenly tongue-tied.
“And I’m not?” she asked with her hand on her hip, vampishly.
“Van Gogh was the greatest appreciator in history. He created paintings in which the simple fact of being alive is figured into the paintings’ realism.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was highly amused by this. For the first anybody could remember I was speechless. Standing before Van Gogh I was speechless. I still am incidentally.
The truth was that Evelyn was terrified to leave that job. It made no sense to me at all, but it was the only thing in her life at the time that offered the promise of permanence. She had imbued it with a totemic significance because it wasn’t just a stupid job to her. In her life, it was plugging up a vacuum left by parents who had moved to Florida and a boyfriend who had recently come out of the closet to her in unnecessarily graphic fashion. Not only had he explained to her that he was gay; for some reason he had provided her with photographic evidence that he had engaged in sodomy.
Without the moorings of a relationship, Evelyn had drifted aimlessly. Many days she would spend entirely in filling the margins of library books with pornographic doodles, some inspired by her boyfriend’s photos. She drifted to the safe harbor of a stupid job because it was safer than suffering. She focused on work with the intensity of a Buddhist monk and was named Best Caller ten times in a row. Work offered her the safety that past generations of women had found in the convent.
But, safety seemed insidious to me. It was chimeral and mean spirited. Safety offered a life half-lived and completely unexamined. I thought of my grandparents sitting in their amiable chairs with forlorn grins on their faces and long island iced teas in their hands. They were the safest people that I had ever met, and the polar opposite of my parents. But, when I told them that I had my first job as a stock boy at the age of eighteen, my Grandfather said,
“Good for you. That’s the sort of job you should stick with. They don’t ask too much of you and they always want you there.” In that one sentence he summarized all the problems I had with my elder family members and perhaps all the problems anyone has with their elder family members. He hinted at the sort of resignation and self-laceration that went with any act of denial and planning for the future.
Besides, what choice did I have about being safe? My parents had kicked me out of the house at age eighteen after I barely graduated High School. There were few things I could do and even fewer that I wanted to do. My father taught me everything he knew about his job, trash man, before moving to Alaska to work on the pipeline with a stripper named Salome. Nevertheless, I wasn’t holding out much hope for nepotism. I was poor and starving and freer than anyone I knew.
As for Evelyn, she was crazy as a loon, but she seemed completely unaware of this fact. After work, she would often walk around Rock Creek Park and collect flora and fauna for her scrapbook. Either that or she’d be tinkering on those goddamned plays all night. I liked to hang around the practice space and read books until one of the girls would come up and start talking to me. Evelyn didn’t mind so long as I was quiet during the readings. Eventually, I got to know everybody in her theatre troop, ‘Menses Productions’, and even bought some of them gifts for Christmas.
So, naturally I went to the party in question. I must have looked like a walking disaster too because I came to Evelyn’s apartment right after work and I was still wearing my sweaty grocery store uniform. At the time I was working sporadically at a little family-owned grocery store back in the Maryland sticks about twenty miles outside of the District. The place was owned by this Lebanese couple that fought constantly. They had apparently been the product of an arranged marriage that wasn’t very well arranged. Both of them were short and heavy-set and seemed unable to do anything without screaming about it to somebody. Usually, I got there around one in the afternoon and inevitably the two of them were hollering at each other as if they were in the middle of some military battle and had to yell over the explosions,
“Where in the HELL is the stock dog food, you STUPID!!” him.
“How the fuck should I know you goddamn son of a BITCH!!” her.
“Oh! If you ever talk to me again, I make you into DUST!!” him again.
“GOOD! Don’t you fucking talk to me then! I HATE you!” her.
This would go on from morning to night. By the time the place closed for the evening, you would have figured that the two of them were ready to kill each other, or at least, get a divorce. But, closing up seemed to mellow them a bit and they usually left arm in arm.
The other thing was that they were usually both pissed off at those of us who worked there. They would chew me out on a fairly regular basis. The husband, Muhammad, would catch me in the backroom when I first arrived there and start screaming about, “The floor, it look TERRIBLE, you goddamn piece of!!” He never filled in the noun. This would go on for twenty minutes or so, until he’d become depressed and walk out. Eventually, I figured out that he wanted me to yell back at him, and I started returning his volley of insults with a few of my own. Nothing was off limits with the guy. He seemed to love the way in which a good fight can reorder and alter the social world.
“You lazy American son of a turd! I make you into DUST!! I kill you, you American swine!!” he would yell with his face roughly the color of cranberry sauce ($1.25/can).
“Shut the FUCK UP, you goddamn sand nigger! You fucking camel jockey!” I would yell back. Admittedly, I was never going to win any diplomatic awards with this stuff. But, Muhammad seemed to like it. I actually think he liked getting to yell “American swine” at someone who wouldn’t take offense. I knew it was a touchy subject though. His cousin Ammad had been detained in a Philadelphia jail for a few months over some “incendiary” comments he had made in the middle of an epileptic fit in the International House of Pancakes, ironically enough. The whole thing was idiotic and all of us at the store had written letters to the District Judges praising Ammad and telling them that they were a bunch of jackboot morons. We even had a cashier crying on the phone about the whole thing. Of course, Ammand was eventually released and did no real harm to America aside from the fact that he never seemed to brush his teeth and often smelled like onions.
Muhammad actually liked us, even though you might not be able to tell from his screaming. After two years I could easily sense when Muhammad was seriously angry. He would still yell, but he would be barking out orders and his voice would go up an octave or two. Those were the times that you would want to stay away from him. Usually, those were the evenings that I would be fired and sent home. The first few times that this happened I took the whole firing business seriously. I would go out the next day looking for a job and, when I got home, there would be numerous messages on the machine from Mo, wondering where the hell I was and why wasn’t I at work. After that, I just started coming back to work the day after getting fired and pretending as if nothing had happened.
Firing seemed pretty inevitable on the evening of the party because everything was going to hell at the same time when I got there. For one thing, it was Christmas, and no matter how much I may delight at Christmas in other circumstances, when working in a grocery store on the weekend before Christmas, it’s all anyone can do to keep from pushing a customer’s head through a plate glass window. Literally, everyone you know has to go to the grocery store to stock up for the holidays, and they all need the same things. So, within a few hours, the store is out of; egg nog, marshmallows, fried onion sticks, champagne, soda, Butterball turkeys, and spiced cider. And everyone is ready to kill each other. Just try, for fun, keeping a store stocked and straight with over a hundred angry human beings, at the end of their ropes anyway, because none of the stores have “Rape Me Barbie”, who are trampling over everything in sight and screaming at the top of their lungs about how any store worth an ounce of gold would have fucking cider, for Christ’s sake! The only way I could deal with these people was to maintain a sort of unbreakable Zen composure. Focus on stocking eggs at the expense of everything else, for example. Recreate the universal balance in the banana aisle.
The other problem, of course, was that it was snowing outside. Admittedly, part of me still delighted in snow. But, it did little good for the store because people dragged it in and left a sort of brownish sludge down the first few aisles that needed constant attendance. By four o clock, we had already had three falls and what was most likely a broken anklebone. Also, the other stock-boy for the evening was unable to make it to work that evening because he had never driven on snow before and wasn’t about to start now.
In fact, we were shorthanded all night because our cashier Ellen’s boyfriend had shot himself in the foot while cleaning his gun and she had to drive him to the hospital, seeing as how he couldn’t operate the pedals himself. This meant that Muhammad’s wife, Hassah, had to run one of the registers, while calling to the office on the phone every time the customers were away to yell obscenities at Muhammad for not hiring more people. Meanwhile, Muhammad was running the office because the manager who had been scheduled for the evening had gotten drunk the night before and driven his car through an outdoor nativity scene, forcing a concrete sheep through his radiator. Those of us who were there were doing everything in creation while trying to constantly mop up the brownish sludge. Meanwhile, I had a yuppie arguing with me that the bottled water had “expired” because he didn’t realize that the expiration date on bottled water is for the next calendar year, and a woman yelling at me about how Safeway had spiced cider and she could just go there, which I encouraged her to do.
I tried to remember a mantra of some sort. “Order-a-pizza-from-Dominoes” I chanted in faux Latin. I thought of a universe giving birth to itself. Slimy little amoebas developing flippers and crawling out of the muck in order to breathe the light of the sun. Early funguses trying out shoots, which succeeded and encouraged the formation of brittle branches. Fishes begetting lizards begetting large reptiles begetting birds begetting small mammals begetting larger mammals begetting monkeys begetting monkeys with automobiles. I thought in science filmstrip. I felt peace. The customers kept yelling and leaping and crying their little eyes out. But, I was relaxed.
Naturally, I got fired. Muhammad waited until about 7:57 and called me over the phone to tell me that I was through in the grocery store business and that he would make me into dust and that I was a goddamn son of a bitch. Also, if I wanted, I could pick out a free ham from the refrigerated bin and to have a happy Christmas.
I figured that he would call me back for work the next day. My neck was humming with pain as I dragged my feet across the sludge and out into the parking lot, which was savage with holiday shoppers. I could hear people blaring their horns and yelling obscenities at each other. I saw one woman from across the parking lot, fall on her ass and help herself back to her feet because nobody around her would stop. I trudged to the bus stop and packed myself onto the bus, which smelled at this point like a gym shower. I wasn’t concerned. I was focusing on my mantra.
By the time I got to Evelyn’s I was on the verge of falling asleep in the hallway outside of her apartment. The lobby seemed to have been designed as some sort of sleep aid. The powder blue wallpaper and ersatz bubbling fountain had the combined effect of making me drowsy every single time I went to see Evelyn. Sometimes, I would stay awake by talking to the drunks outside the door. Once, we even performed Shakespeare. I was Lear, and they were Goneril and Reagan.
This drowsiness passed as I entered the party. The crowd was young and lively and mostly new to me. I started shticking and drinking in an attempt to keep up with them. There were several bottles of whiskey and vodka in Evelyn’s kitchen, so by the time I met Cassandra, I was fairly drunk. In fact, I felt like I was burning when I met her. Like I had been burning for a long time; a cheap imitation of an Indian widow consumed by my love for the world that seemed to make me a widower. In fact, to be honest, I was completely immolated and hissing shards of my melting flesh sizzled onto the ground in front of her. The amazing thing was that she didn’t seem to mind at all.
Of course, her name wasn’t Cassandra, but it might as well have been. She had played Rosie Cranz in the female Hamlet that I never got around to attending. But, in the apartment, she seemed to draw attention to her in waves. She stood there making jokes to anyone who would listen to her.
“What kind of bees make milk?” she asked me.
“Excuse me?” I responded, still burning.
“What kind of bees make milk?” she asked again. I shrugged my shoulders and she exclaimed, “Boobies!” I laughed in spite of myself and we started talking. At first, of course, I was terrified. I had attended many parties in DC with women who wanted everyone to know how significant they were and could think of no other way to get this across than to insult perfect strangers. The District of Columbia can be a tough crowd.
Luckily, Cassandra was very easygoing and I found that it was quite comfortable to talk to her. She wasn’t one of those girls who seem like they’re going to call the cops if you deign to even look in their general direction. At the time, I was essentially a little pest and attractive to no one. But, she didn’t seem to mind, and I opened up elaborately in her presence. Cassandra was born and raised in the North Carolina woods and she was of the opinion that kindness was something sacred and necessary. She seemed to give it freely as a balm to all the wounded spirits around her. Other women seemed like little children in comparison. I had met almost no one like her. I was sure of this. She was good. She was blissful. In order to know her, I would have to become a better person.
But first, I would have to talk to her. We pretty much talked all night, in fact. She was of Cuban descent, but had grown up in North Carolina and moved to DC to attend college. She was interested in the writings of Sartre and Dostoeyevsky. Her parents lived in the mountains and owned a health food store called The Happy Carrot. Yes, she had heard all sorts of obscene jokes about the name while she was growing up. She was in college at Georgetown University. She hated the college system, but thought it was inescapable.
I was amazed at how well we hummed along together. She even felt comfortable ribbing me when I asked her what she was majoring in at college. “Oh come on, Milo! You can do better than that!” she laughed. “What’s my major? You might as well ask what my sign is!” Being a bit “high-strung” I’ve gotten used to having friends pick on me. “Look, it can’t all be scintillating conversation! Sometimes, you’ve got to just chew the fat a little bit!” I said. We both laughed at this.
“Actually, I’m a religion major. But, I minor in English literature, so I usually tell people that I’m an English major. That way I don’t have to listen to quite as much shit about why I’m not studying business or something practical like that,” she laughed.
“I know. It’s really a shame too,” I said. “People like Socrates or Aristotle saw the purpose of learning as a quest to become human. We weren’t human, but through patient study of what they called the studia humanitatis, or the humanities, we could become fully human. I think about that a lot. You know, Nietzsche felt that the vast majority of us would never quite make it. We would live as little more than fillers of latrines, forever replicating the mistakes and insignificant battles of the older generations.” I realized that I was probably not going to get laid by coming off as Sir Kenneth Clark, but I was powerless to stop my mouth.
“Yes! I know the studia! That’s why I study literature and philosophy! Nobody understands it anymore, but I want to patiently observe what it means to be alive on this earth. When I read Shakespeare or Confucius, I get a sense of the limits of existence. You know? I mean, why dissect a brain in a laboratory when you can go see a performance of Hamlet?” she was laughing.
“I have a fairly good idea,” I said. I loved listening to her talk. She was confident and forthright and her voice cleaved the air like the prow of a ship. There was something almost regal about her. I would later discover that she had always known exactly what she wanted to do in her life and had followed her plans fearlessly. It was bizarre to me to meet someone who had been told as a small child that she could become anything she wanted to. Everyone I knew had always heard that they needed to calm down and learn to be more reasonable. Here was somebody whose parents held the self-esteem of their child to be all important. Even though I sensed a certain childishness to her personality, it was also somewhat inspiring.
In fact, I hardly talked about myself at all, which was good. I felt relaxed. Our talk was easy and loose and by the end of the night my hand was on her hip resting above the curve of her ass.
The next day, at work, I moved as if in a dream. Nothing registered with me. I only knew that I had met a girl from North Carolina, who was interested in Sartre, etc. If somebody had told me that wild savages were looting the store, I would have wished them the best of luck and went back to daydreaming and scheming. I don’t think I had any real thoughts about Cassandra either at that time. She was just another girl I had some interest in. I wasn’t quite eager to venture into the mysteries of love. But, I was still young enough to do so if the situation absolutely demanded. This wasn’t much to crow about, but it was still noteworthy. Most adults seemed unwilling to love at all.
And, there was indeed some need to proceed with caution. Cassandra was a college girl and from a different world entirely. After I called her and had a few drinks with her in a dingy coffee shop, I found that she wasn’t even from the same universe. Her friends: an Anthropology major studying gender roles in South America, two directors of an Arlington-based nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence, a psychology major who was currently engaged to his high school sweetheart, and a master’s candidate in social work who was teaching inner-city school kids to read. My friends: an internet “school girl” model and sometimes prostitute, the lead singer for the punk band the Filthy Fucks, two avowed fascists, three avowed “faggots”, one heroin addict (since deceased), Evelyn, a couple who had been squatting in a building downtown until the boy received a fantastic stipend from a 1993 car accident in which a schizophrenic rich girl drove him into a tree, a girl who worked in a record store downtown but who supplemented her income by peeing in guys’ mouths for money, and a mechanic and his wife; both “lifestyle lovers”. In the future Cassandra hoped to teach English classes in some high school in the Washington slums. In the future, I had no idea what I wanted to do, just so long as I could read books all day and drink whiskey all night. The world was her oyster. I had a useless high school degree and little hope of doing anything with it.
I didn’t want to get too quickly mired in this thing with Cassandra. But, I also realized that half of the people I knew were emotionally stunted alcoholics. They weren’t an adequate model of normal adult behavior. Cassandra seemed inviting in her normalcy. Besides, I realized that there was little I could do to stop the machinations of adoration.
It didn’t matter. I was prepared for the reordering of my soul. Love rewrites you. It remakes you in a new image, and not necessarily a better one. An object of worship requires a willing worshiper. It needs a loving host. You have to be ready to listen to its soothing whisper in your ear as it tattoos obscenities and coded messages into your skin. There is nothing polite or courteous about love at all. It crushes everything in its path with a steamroller and insists that you understand and keep your mouth shut.
The two of us mostly got along like gangbusters. We walked around the Adams Morgan neighborhood and laughed to ourselves as we passed by boorish drunk yuppies, pissed off drug dealers, Spanish pimps, undernourished artists, insane derelicts and ancient night-owls. The buildings seemed to observe from above when we ducked through the alleyways behind the bars and narrowly avoided getting hit by sport cars. We stopped by the dark Asylum bar and I said hi to some of my friends who were bartending there. Cassandra seemed a bit nervous around the usual bikers, tattoo artists, vampire whores, and drug addicts who hung around there. I figured that she would want me to take her straight home afterwards and that I’d probably never hear from her after that. But, even if she stuck around, she was going to have to get used to my friends. When my friend Lydia walked over with her breasts encased in a latex boostier, I could sense a nascent jealousy bubbling within Cassandra, but I was more amused than annoyed. Later I would tell Cassandra about the men who paid Lydia to piss in their mouths and she would refer to Lydia as “the mouth pisser” with a hint of disgust. Perhaps I should have taken this as a bad sign about Cassandra, but I generally tried to ignore such things.
As for my friends, most of them didn’t know what to make of Cassandra, but I realized that the most important thing to pay attention to when a loved one is seeing somebody is not the demeanor or behavior of the love interest, but how the loved one is acting. And as much as I would have denied it, I was positively aglow with Cassandra. We walked down the louder and more furious parts of U Street and the concrete and glass seemed somehow changed. How many times I had walked alone with a cigarette glowing in my fingers to ward off strangers and I had felt the weight of loneliness, the pressing need to be silent, crushing down on my chest. I would stand drunk outside of the nightclubs and listen to the screeching guitars in the punk clubs and the incessant kettledrums of the go-go clubs. The black girls in tight little dresses would undulate by me, a group of spheres moving rhythmically together. They would never answer my greetings. Sometimes they would laugh, but that was about it.
With Cassandra the streets seemed different. The yuppies that stared glassy eyed as a beautiful girl walked past them with a scrawny wing nut babbling on about Walter Pater and Leonardo seemed like posters on the wall. The stocky Mexican roughnecks who hooted “Me pones caliente!” at Cassandra were mere dust, even when she turned around and swore at them vehemently in perfect Spanish. I could simply not have cared less. I felt like we were walking through the snow in the middle of nowhere with not a soul around.
She had a small apartment about a mile outside of Georgetown that she shared with a roommate from school. After we had another drink at the Black Cat bar, the two of us took a cab back to her apartment and continued talking over drinks. The place looked exactly like two college girls were renting it. There were socks and panties all over the floor, a copy of the translated Nag Hammadi coppices on the kitchen table, Gustav Klimt prints framed on the wall, and a stereo system with the requisite amount of Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan records. I was relieved to see that she still bought vinyl. I had always held a grudge against anyone who looked at my boxes of records and commented, “I didn’t even know that they still made records!” In DC there were gaggles of hipsters and bores that asked stupid things like that on a regular basis.
As could be expected, eventually our talk turned to literature. She had a good handle on writers like Dostoyevski and Emille Zola who were certainly important, but unlike myself, she knew who was currently burning up the bestseller charts. I couldn’t tell you the difference between John Grisham and Frank McCourt if I had to. I told Cassandra that I had little taste for most of the more recent authors. Writers like Dom DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon seemed insignificant and weird to me. I’ve always felt that Pynchon’s goal in his writing seemed to be to gradually waste away his apparent gifts. DeLillo on the other hand, seemed to assign too much importance to the supposedly soul crushing aspects of modern life and too little importance to the soul itself.
“Do you like any of the postmodern authors?” she asked incredulously.
“I don’t really know what that means,” I admitted.
“Well, you know, the more recent and experimental writers. Maybe it’s not fair to call them postmodern,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about. I never went to college, so most of what I knew about such things came from books and magazines. Occasionally Evelyn or one of her friends would talk about this or that author or theorist, but most of the intellectual fads seemed a bit airless to me. I struggled to think of a contemporary writer who interested me at all. Maybe JG Ballard or Will Self. I went with Brett Ellis, hoping that she hadn’t been nauseated by American Psycho or bewildered by Glamorama.
“Well, I think Brett Easton Ellis is a brilliantly cold-blooded author. But, I just think
that literature was expanding the world exponentially before all this deconstructive disgust took over the academy. I mean, doesn’t anybody even read D.H. Lawrence anymore? Can you name one theorist who could write a single sentence that could compa re with Women in Love? People like Kate Millet will never be anything but graffiti artists. They stagger around blindly and piss on everything around them. They want to pull apart the Western Canon with their pudgy little hands, but what we need to be doing is writing love letters to the canon. But, not just the Western canon, the entire human canon! We need to introduce Confucius to Charles Dickens and read the Baghivad Gita to William Blake! We’re being anesthetized by politics, morality, and aesthetic criticism. I mean, what does criticism do but further abstract experience? Critics are nail drivers. What is it mean to read reviews but to say, ‘No, I cannot think for myself. I have to be told how to experience the world.’? Who today could ever understand somebody like Henry Miller, Brooklyn’s answer to Marcel Proust, sitting out in the desert, writing Men’s True Adventure Stories after Freud with blinding flashes of light?” By this point, I was practically shouting. But, I could hardly stop the flow of words if I had wanted to. She was smiling at me and soaking it in. We were both luxuriating in each other.
“I love how excited you get about these things!” she laughed. “Everyone at Georgetown is so fucking bloodless! They say exactly the right things at all the right times. There’s never anything idiosyncratic in the classroom or outside of it. All these kids are destined for Harvard or Yale or some giant conglomerate where idiosyncrasy is trumped by efficiency. They never take any chances!” She took a sip of wine. “They never step forth into the abyss and run the risk of landing in shit! These people are bright and diligent. But like the people I grew up with. You’re an adventurer!” As she said this, her hand was on the crotch of my jeans, stroking my cock through the fabric. Within seconds, I was hard as a rock.
I was already excited in every other way. All my cylinders were firing and all my neurons were buzzing. I decided to ride the exuberance in the little room. I leaned over to kiss her and heard her breath coming with more difficulty than before. We had never kissed until this moment, but I knew exactly what it would be like to kiss her from the way she moved when she crossed the street. I was right and I liked it.
So, we kissed for an hour and a half on the couch. The apartment was bare and her roommate was gone for the evening. I could tell that Cassandra she wanted to take it slow, partition off some sort of thrill for later. She wasn’t a cock tease exactly, but she wanted me to stay around. For my part, I wanted her to think that I might not stay around, even though I was already nuts about her. I wanted her to be a little scared and completely engaged with me. So, I didn’t protest at all, but I kept on making aggressive movements towards her. Every time I slid my hand down between her legs she pulled it away and whispered, “Not yet”. But, every time I could feel an intense heat coming off her pussy that made me try it again in a few minutes.
She pushed me down on the couch, giggling at the fact that I put up no resistance to her weak aggression. I put my hands on her hips and she sat on top, straddling me, and laughingly pulled off her shirt and bra. Her body was brown and pudgy and looked delicious. Women have no idea how erotic fat can be. She was like a newly opened present or a playground. I wanted to bury my face in her tits and suck off globs of flesh. I had no time to. Her tongue was in my mouth as quick as a flash. With each breath, she was moaning and grinding her crotch against me. Her jeans were still on, but I could tell they were damp. She twitched a bit as she kissed me and her hips ground down in a circle. I could feel the blood rushing around my skull like a metal hornet; my body jumping like it was in the electric chair.
“Pinch my nipples,” she moaned. I gave her a sheepishly idiotic grin and complied with her demand. While we kissed and dry fucked each other I could tell she was having an orgasm by the way she pulled her tongue out of my mouth and made this ridiculous expression. Her lips pulled back over her teeth and her eyes rolled back in her head. I imagine she would look the same way if the lost her mind. I held her close to my body and felt her finish the orgasm while biting my lower lip. She sucked air through her teeth and started smiling at me, brushing the hair out of my eyes, kissing my forehead. I felt like a hornet’s nest being sniffed by a bear. I had no release at all. I wanted to pass out.
She asked if I wanted some water. She was blushing at this point and exhausted. I told her that I’d like some and she walked over to the drawer, and got a glass. As she stood against the sink, filling the glass with water, I slid my hand between her legs again, felt the same heat. This time though, her legs squeezed together over my hand. I pushed hard against her crotch, my thumb shoved between the cheeks of her ass. With the other hand, I reached around her body and squeezed her tit hard. She turned her head and bit my earlobe lovingly. I could feel my cock throbbing in my jeans and I felt like I was a teenager at the prom.
I was tired of all the game playing.
Still behind her, I walked her over to the kitchen table and bent her over it. She gasped quite loudly as I started undoing her pants, running my other fingers down her back. She seemed shocked that I was taking such liberties. I remembered that she was probably used to college students and fumbling English majors. I paused.
“What is it?” she asked. “Nothing” I replied. “Well, don’t stop!” she shouted.
I pulled her pants down with one yank and kneeled behind her, admiring her ass. As I pulled down her panties I could see her pussy lips gleaming in the light of the refrigerator and smell the juices lubricating her. I ran my tongue up the length of her vagina, and with my fingers inside it, pushed my tongue into her asshole. I usually reserve the old rim job trick for college girls. Most of them are fairly sheltered and timid and tend to have only dated complacent and conservative suburban boys who are on their way to some idiotic middle-management job. When they date a crackpot like myself it’s usually because they’re looking for some sort of illicit thrills and degenerate complications. I don’t want to disavow them of the idea that I’m a revolutionary because I don’t wear a tie, so I try to keep a few sexual stunts in my repartee that their Ivy League boyfriends haven’t ever tried. Eat their asshole a few times and they think that you’re a modern day Don Juan. As expected, when I poked my tongue up Cassandra’s anus, and slid a few fingers up her vagina, she wriggled like a fish on a hook and moaned loudly, “Oh God! Just fuck me!”
I laughed and stood up. I fumbled with a condom and stepped out of my pants. I could see her staring at my cock over her shoulder, moving her hips up a bit to open her pussy wider. With one hard shove I buried my cock inside her. I could feel her cunt trembling, clenching and unclenching, taking it. We rocked back and forth that way, me fucking her over the cheap kitchen table in a little apartment in Georgetown. I could see stars dancing in front of my eyes and imagined myself to be diving back into the original ooze. The two of us were mere instruments in some obscene and ridiculous cosmic symphony. But, we had harmony. We moved together and, when I came, I swear that I could hear the music playing.
Afterwards, she turned around and pulled up her pants. I felt awkward and halfway expected her to kick me out of her apartment. But, she put her arms around me and held me close to her. It was a bit uncomfortable. But, I lightened up when she took an ice cube out of the water glass and rubbed it over her crotch for laughs.
That night, we slept in each other’s arms fighting off exhaustion. Before I drifted away from the shores of consciousness, I became acutely aware of the fact that something was different in my life. There was some new factor. Something that wasn’t there before that was making a home inside of me. I felt as powerless before it as a little child and as unknowing as some blind cave dwelling fish. Somehow my joy had returned to me. I had given the world my full adoration and poured forth all my bitter loneliness and something had washed back to shore and found itself at home.
Welcome to my blog. I plan to post my novel "Barrels on the Ice" here.
Monday, October 20, 2003
Number one with a bullet.
