The Writings of MQ Davidson

I wrote a joke at work today....

2010-01-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

How can you tell if a ghost is horny?

From his BOO balls!

Woka, woka, woka.

A Man wearing a business suit sits alone at a bus stop. He has black hair and a red tie, and he busies himself

2009-11-11T11:52:00.000-08:00

eating teeth from his palm.

Bloat Intro in Summary

2009-11-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

The Marble Hills as they are called for reasons no one seems to remember run into each other from the east and west, forming between them several valleys and a stream that runs cool all year down from the apex. Situated in one of these valleys cast beneath the shadows of the overlooking goliaths one slightly taller than the other, is the town of Barking Knee. The small residential community is dominated by the Kitty Hawk, a converted manor house that sits on a small plateau surrounded on all sides by a series of mum gardens that can be viewed from the granite terrace that encircles the building. Backed away from the flower gardens, on the aft side, are twin tennis courts, the first grass and the second clay, that although rarely used are tended daily by the estates keeper, Mr. Pill. Silence, save for the rare chirp of cardinals and the click of woodpeckers against the siding, grants a palatial desolation that pervades the Hotel and alienates it from its more humble surroundings.
Barking Knee in its formative years had been sustained largely by coal and the single road that runs between it and the mines. In better days the road had been choked with traffic, a constant heavy bustle of horse, car and man created little room to maneuver as the underground fingers of the river eroded both sides of the road making them rocky, sharp and treacherous. Since the coal vein had dried, the road had gone largely unused and the local economy of Barking Knee shifted to logging the dense woods that crowded alongside the river’s northern edge. It was barely noticed, and certainly no one had protested when Post, a senile miner prone to rambling and violent outbursts packed his meager possessions on a cart and mule, and made his way up the road, where at the base of the two hills he erected his shack.

It had been to the will of the town to allow Post and the road to themselves, to wither back into the landscape of which they had always been a part, wandering endlessly through the abandoned mines ‘prospecting’. But, then most suddenly, there was the boy. A deformed little thing, paralyzed from the waist down. Strangely talkative in the brief glimpses that people had had of him. Where he had come from, no one was entirely certain, but Post was so protective of it that he had made a contraption of scraps and cloth and kept it constantly adjoined to his chest, as if their two frail heartbeats could find some comradeship in the eternal loneliness of their exile.
I found him, where you left him, in the mines to die, Post would say when asked where the child had come from.
Barking Knee thinks she can bury away secrets. But I find them all in the earth.
The townspeople rubbed their chins in brief concern, and went about their daily doings, considering in somewhere in the backs of their mind an effective method for extracting that poor thing from the crazed old coot.

The Bloat Part 4: Post

2009-11-08T19:06:00.000-08:00

4.
I walked
Sink ring
Ten times now
Tracing same treads
Through mud
Though I get
That they maybe
My own
Harder to see it
Everyday I know
The coop doors been
Swung in
& the eggs is all
Been shattered
And I touch
In to it
And feel
T’at whatever
It was
Done left
Running yoke
To drip
down to the
Knuckle low checked
Locks twice
This week so
Cant be wrong in
That just dont
Know who would
Break eggs to
Break them when
They is full
Of food
& even
snakes know
that much
& boy keeps
saying Post
I seen what’s
Gotten to the chickens
& I say what
boy he
says
Hens smashed
Them eggs all
Themselves
That he seen
Em’roll em
Right out
To nest edge
With their beakies
& let em
Off right on
The floor
To splat
& I said
why them hens
would make a
mess a their
babes
& he says
Post you
Dont know
Chickens.

The Bloat Part 3: The Boy

2009-11-08T19:05:00.000-08:00

3.
I
Seen stink
I knows it well
When breath
Sweats
Made water for
My eyebrow
But never left me
Unhidden for long
brother
See I’d seen
The sorry or heard
Them say such things
bublous
den of buttons
& clloth
heard them
tell of lillacs
That crossed
Stems to
quit
When our
Blood mixed
Like oil
all grown out
from
the belly
but
the same but-in
A million
That Never made
Less than something
Big
Or not
i could’ve
Been Mary’s
Boon Breeze
Or dog cotton
Swimming
I must
Ask Post
If shames
What for
Yellow jackets
fly the nectar
home
Or if it was
That maybe
Then
When the flowers
All smelled up
Like oil
that I was part
of it.

Guests From Out Of Town

2009-11-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1978 my parents drove from Champaign, Illinois to New York City in a used Volkswagen Westfallia. It was cream colored with standard issue brown and yellow checkered curtains on the windows. There was a sink, a stove, a closet and a table with two seats facing each other that converted into a bed. It had a pop top roof that opened like a bellows into a canvas tent with a cot atop the rafters, it had a tiny refrigerator for meats-- all the amenities of a camper, save for a bathroom. There was no toilet.
The Westfallia was supposed to sleep four comfortably, but barely held two on this particular journey, as my father had filled the van to near maximum capacity with his record collection of over two thousand. All my mother brought were some clothes and a Sony Trinitron television, her most prized possession. Only the essentials, the rest could be sent for later. She was that desperate to get away from the Midwest.
The car wasn’t running when my father bought it, (few of the cars he’s ever purchased have been), so he got it for a song. With some work it ran, barely. Still, they managed to cruise comfortably through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. But the weight of the albums took their toll and the four cylinder engine gave out in mid-Pennsylvania, before College Park.
They had camped for the night in the blacktop lot of the Bell Star Cafe Rest Stop, and found, after a saturday’s eggs and some bacon, that the Westfallia refused to turn over. I imagine my father cursing the machine, jamming the key in the ignition and pumping the break several times, before pounding dramatically against the wheel with a closed fist. But in the version he tells, he is calm, and in that calm way he reentered the Bell Star, and calmly asked the waitress who had served them, if she knew of a mechanic that worked on foreign cars.
She wasn’t sure of any garages that would do the work. They mainly knew domestics, and even if someone did have the experience on an import engine, it was after all, a Saturday. But she made several phone calls all the same, and after an hour of waiting in the large empty lot, a tow truck arrived.
It wasn’t like any tow truck either of my parents had seen before. In fact it wasn’t even really a tow truck at all. It was an ancient Ford pickup, corroded through in the doors and sides and painted over with several coats of blue house paint. A salvaged crane that looked as if it had once belonged in a shipyard, was screwed into the bed by bolts. The driver was the waitresses brother-in-law, Spider O’Dell, a large burly man splattered in a layer of engine grease. His bottom jaw protruded in a grotesque over bite, and several of his tiny teeth gnarled above his lip. He was accompanied by his son, Rusty, a fitting name as both the young man’s face and hands sported tufts of red stubble that sprouted from his ashy skin like weeds.
The two men hooked the van up to the truck in amateurish fashion, puncturing through the bumper, and something beneath the carriage that hissed steam. The O’Dell’s seemed to take no notice of the screaming car, but rather turned towards the east shielding their eyes from the mid morning sun, and scanning the horizon for rainclouds. The Westfalia dangled from the bed like a dead cow on a butcher’s spike.
“Don’t see nothing,” Spider said kicking away a loose piece of gravel with his high stapped combat boot.
My parents sat a three deep shotgun in Rusty’s car as Spider led the way to wherever it was he planned on taking them. They drove through the twisted mountain country, at times rising above the tree line, before pitching back down into the dark, dense woods. Rusty held tight to the wheel with both hands, craning over in such a way that when he turned his knuckles scraped the drooping ash from the cigarette that hung out from the corner of his mouth.
My mother and father watched their van sway behind Spider’s truck through the snaking capillaries of Interstate 80, looking as if it might fly sideways and take off somebody's front porch. Homes were built extremely close to the road so as not to sit on an incline. Rusty noticing their apprehension, told them that it was not uncommon for drunken youths to bed their car inside of a living room. “They drink too hard, drive too stupid and it happens. It’s normal.”
My father asked for a cigarette. Rusty pulled one out from his front pocket, lit it off his cherry, and handed it to my father, whose hands shook.
The three vehicles veered off from the interstate, and slopped back around the hills, entering the soft underbelly of Pennsylvania coal country. The familiarities of civilization began to dissipate. “Coal vein went dead in the thirties,” said Rusty as the drove deeper into nowhere, “Dad was a coaler, pap too and everyone else before that. Then they built 80, and people worked for a while on road crew. Everyone around here, got a gun. Got a good living snaking for a while, you know, killing snakes. But you can only work for about ten miles either way before a road passes you by.”
They went farther. The country became more rural, and the pavement gave way to red dirt choked along its sides by the carcasses of ancient vehicles. The O’Dell’s and others lived from the highway, and what was left along it’s side for dead was, slowly but surely, digested into the landscape. “See all those antiques. Real valuable,” said Rusty pointing to the twisted metal that could not have been worth more than several dollars-- even as scrap parts.
The van ahead stopped, and Rusty ground the brakes to a halt behind it. “Here we are,” he said. The radiator popped as he turned off the engine.
A tiny man wearing a Dekalb t-shirt and ill fitting trousers, was waiting for them in front of a garage fixed to a modest residence. His dark hair was matted with sweat, and he smiled at them crookedly, as he ran through with a black plastic comb. Above the garage a two by four held up with carpentry nails read “cloased”.
My mother reached for the doorhandle, but Rusty leaned across and held them both fast with the back of his large arm. He told them to wait for a moment. “Now that’s Lucas,” he said pointing, “he’s a bit strange, but really he’s harmless. And he’s the only one around here who works on foreign engines. So just, be mindful. Oh, and the doors got a trick you gotta open it from the outside.”
With that they exited the car, and stepped out onto the lawn, a naked patch of dirt littered with mufflers, brake lines, batteries, pistons, cranks shafts and half stripped chassis. An emaciated blood hound circled the stuff, occasionally lifting his leg to water the tin flowers.
“So heard you have some car troubles,” said Lucas, drying his palms on a red rag. He introduced himself and shook hands with my father, ignoring my mother completely.
He stepped over to the Westfalia, and examined the undercarriage, as Rusty and Spider lowered it from the crane by manual force. “I don’t know how long it’s gonna take to finish her up, and it is Saturday. Don’t know what kind of parts I’m gonna need either, not until I really get in there. But, I think I might be able to fix it.”
My father asked if there was a hotel they could stay in for the night, some place reasonable.
“Well,” said Lucas, “there’s one in town, and they’ll probably have a room.” He stopped for a moment and sized them up. “But, if you’d like to save some money-- I’ve got a weekend house off a little ways in the woods, and I can put you two up there for the night if you’d like.”
It’s always shocking to hear of a time when your parents were young and naive, fallible, flawed and stupid. But I can’t blame them for the decisions made--they were fresh out of college and completely broke. And charity is charity after all. So possibly against their own better judgment, they accepted Lucas’s offer.
He took them “up the road” in his Jeep; driving for half an hour in silence before he set the e-brake and engaged the four wheel drive, turning the front lugs with a monkey wrench. The trees broke away, and the sun shone down on the Jeep, hard and direct. They went up a hill of pure slag and shale, a lunar scape of burnt out rock. “Coal companies raped the land,” he told them. “This all used to be forrest. Now it’s just a scar.” He explained to my parent’s that big business had strip mined for soft coal. Soft coal didn’t run clean, and when more efficient fuel was found, the companies pulled out-- leaving the land depressed and dead. “It’s terrible what they did to the people round here,” he said, “nothing lives anymore.”
The three moved closer to the giant sun. Lucas became more comfortable in their company, and spoke to them in a frank, salt of the earth way that my parents felt good about. When they reached the peak of rock, and descended down the other side, they found themselves in virgin forest. Lush and green with hemlock, what my mother called, “Hansel and Gretel country.” Nestled in a clearing, was an A-frame house. It was not old at all, but was built in the style of a classic Swiss chalet.
“You’ll be really comfortable here,” said Lucas, “no one will bother you. The only other person who has a house around is a Colonel in the army, and he’s off on maneuvers.”
The house was simple; one large room with a loft. There were oil lanterns along the walls as the cottage had no electricity. There was a couch, several chairs and in the center was a wood burning stove, which was used for both cooking and heating. As Lucas explained how to light the stove, my mother began to wander.
A brown stone fireplace made up the cottages far wall--a possible remnant of what had been there before. At the lip of the mantelpiece, above the open hearth set inside a gilded frame, was an enormous photograph of Adolph Hitler.
My father, still discussing how to light the stove with Lucas, set a glance on my mother. She had gone sheep pale. She motioned to the portrait with her head and sighed from panic. My father donned his best poker face upon noticing the source of her agitation. “Wow, Lucas--” he said, “that’s a very interesting picture you have.”
Lucas grunted as he turned his chin across his shoulder. “Yes, it’s very old,” he said, “please don’t touch it.”
Several minutes later, with the intricacies of the stove fully explained, Lucas took his leave. Reminding my young and frightened parents to, “lock up the door when they went to sleep.”
Several minutes after that, my mother had caught enough of her senses to communicate reasonably. “What?” she asked pointing to the portrait.
“ He says it’s old,” my father answered, “could just be that.”
But upon exploring the chalet further, they discovered that it wasn’t ‘just that’. Arranged along the mantelpiece were three live grenades. In the loft above the room, they found photographs of Goebbels, Himmler and Mengele. Swastikas were decoratively etched into the windows, casting ominous light upon what sat in the corner-- an unbuttoned S.S. uniform, and a sharpened machete.
My father, airing towards caution, took the knife, and placed it beneath their cot. “Just to be safe,” he said. Some beers and a good meal eased apprehensions and ushered on a much needed sleep. As they bedded their dying transistor radio diffused into the wood’s cricket song.

They slept for several hours before they heard it. Distant at first, yet distinct. A rolling, that crackled against dirt. It came closer, becoming loud enough to shake my parents into consciousness. Headlights were stalking between the hemlocks, briefly illuminating scales of bark and a quilt of fallen needles. “A car?” said my disoriented father, grabbing for the hard plastic hilt of the machete beneath the bed.
It halted at the A-frame’s stoop. The engine spewing diesel breath in wafts, as its phosphorescent eyes scanned the chalet's interior. Boots sounded on the precipice. The door burst open as if it had been kicked. My parents shielded against the flood of brights, where an unidentifiable silhouette stood out against the blinding back light. It pulsated with manic breath and dust swam across its black shoulders. The shadow grew gigantic across the wooden floor. My father drew the knife close to his chest.
“I know what’s wrong with your car!” said the figure, with the voice of Lucas, “One of the pistons is stuck in the engine, and I can fix it!”
The Jeep coughed uncomfortably, and the crickets were long gone.
“And I’ll see you in the morning.”
He drew the door closed, but thinking better, opened it again. “Oh, and you really need to remember to lock this.” With that, the light rescinded and he was gone, leaving behind gasped breathes and the faint scent of Marlboro smoke.
Needless to say, my parent’s didn’t get much sleep for the rest of the night, and were in ragged shape when Spider O’Dell and his wife came to pick them up the next morning. “Huh,” he said as he glanced at the portrait above the fireplace, “Never been inside here before. That Lucas most certainly is an odd number.”
My parents joined the O’Dells for Sunday diner, a healthy spread severed in the mid-afternoon. The whole of their extended family attended, wanting to get a good look at the guest from out of town. My mother stayed with the woman, shucking greens in the kitchen, and answering questions about Chicago. My father went with the men to Spider’s barn, where they drank beer out of a Coca Cola vending machine. The men presented for his approval, various “treasures” they had discovered roadside. Priceless pieces of rusted out junk.
A few paces from the shack, an entrance to the coal mine yawned like a black hole in the earth. Not blockaded in anyway, but abandoned forever.
At five o’clock Lucas telephoned the O’Dells. The Westfalia was nearly ready. With diner finished and their good-bye’s said, my parents trekked to the garage on foot. Lucas was buried in the engine when they arrived, finishing his final tinkering. Neither of my parent’s had forgotten the incident of the night before, but it seemed as though Lucas had, or that none if it had even seemed the slightest bit off to him. He just continued to turn and adjust screws, humming a marching tune as he did so.
“Well Dave,” he said to my father as he closed the hood, “why don’t you get in the cab and fire her up.”
My father did just that. The Westfalia turned over beautifully. My father thanked Lucas as he dried his hands on a red rag. Lucas blew hair back from his face, and bit his bottom lip. “The Fuhrer,” he smiled, “would be proud.”

Thanks, Buddy.

2009-03-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

And I generously pour myself another glass, allowing the liquid to roll beyond the lip, and drip my dry cuticles where chap burns from scotch. To myself, in a room filled with captive audience, myself, I toast. I’ve written more lately, and fear the ruddy cheeks that face me in reflection are the forfeit for it. Fair enough, but would be glad if my shit didn’t stink for once, and I could think of myself as healthy when starring down into that water every morning, crossing the bridge, and as my arms cramped raised, never sure where to stand really, because this way hurts, and this way doesn’t feel right, and this way makes me realize that I will have to do it again soon. Morning heaves. Tip glass, and wonder if the room will clean itself, Styrofoam that consumes Styrofoam, and all waste wastes itself. Never seen this place more a playground for the rodents who sit in my sleeves when I’m lost. And the dog foes nothing but sits and stares at me for hours, with teeth pouring from a mustached lip, and tongue curled dry up from drink. And we make a blood oath that one day he and I will run off from here, deep into the country where spring smells lavender and wisteria eat through time collapsing structures weighed by dust, termites and magazines and the land rises up to turn back cities in waves of sod, and tills each decomposed silhouette until it blossoms ragweed and hornets. Springs light reaches through the glass that paints the room amber when held to it, seems as though we were both built inside the bottle. The ceiling gapes wider turning orange and expelling paint, while it rains indoors, each drip dropping clear a fog of steam, and clearly I think when I make to you this toast

that in the dreams of dog we may one day find a son.

Thunderchicken and the Cock-a-Fire Exlposion

2009-03-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay...
So its a movie about a guy who fakes his own death to reinvent himself with a new gimmick.
Also, could be a TV series or a serialized radio program.

Next week, guy who wears shorts all the time becomes failed child actor becomes man who wraps fruit roll-ups around fingers before eating, becomes the solution to the universal question...
which is "why ask."

John Coltrane was a beautiful, beautiful man

2009-03-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

I deserve more respect, and I agreed, not looking beyond the screen or the half wall, where her eyes wavered teased with the red wash of unshed tears, and I agreed in silence or the shuffle of papers along the warring surface of a cluttered desktop. I have become less human, or so she seemed to say as she told me in her practiced and honed stutter, that she had punched a hole in the bathroom wall and now her hands were shaking and torn at the knuckles, and her hair the same frayed nest always. When an authority which did not belong with her pervaded her still childish kindness, and I should have said nothing at all, but she asked for respect and I agreed, but none was given, mutually. So it is in the land of communication, where talk without word continues in a low drone while a cacophonous key fire augments days which have no beginning or end. Efficiency and silence scars once against the land of communication, where the screams of forced laughter echo motionless from the prefab walls, torn down and reshuffled into far greater mazes when one, created now and delivered overnight in code to twelve hours in the future. Expenses over eggs, and humor so dry that I may need a second glass of water to wash away a hangover that weighs down my brow like a reclining imp. With challenge and age comes reward, and in this economy, in this economy, in this economy, or so its was written to fool you in wipe off boards at convention centers where I felt it first myself in a conversation with an Egyptian man who drank black coffee from the side of his mouth and he told me government money, government money, government money. We all deserve more respect, we all deserve that attainable dignity of dying alone, aged creased by time with a cabby hat atop our heads wrapped in quilts and breathing some imagined body of water where pelicans fall and rescind to the sky, and fall graceful and careless, toppling with wings tucked closed to the breast and slowly, slowly, slowly. It was on my way home that day that I saw the father and his son. No more, he said, you’re with me now, and he asked, and he said she is where she is, and he said, and he answered no more, your behind, it wont be fun, but you need to catch up with your brothers and sisters, and it wont be fun, because in four years you’ll be thirteen, so there’s no more messing around. He asked, and he answered, Church Avenue, and I came home, and fed the dog from the same can which I ate and as he slept with his ears open to the noise of the boys playing basketball in the first evening of spring, I told him that I deserve more respect, and he growled turned once and said nothing more.

Superhero or Why Sean is a Yoko

2009-03-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

Exclamation Mark has the power to keep it short with criminals.
"HEY!"
"STOP!"

The Closer

2009-03-10T16:34:00.001-07:00

1: hello, how may i help you here, sir?
2: hi ummm
I'm looking for the person in charge of purchasing for translation and interpretation services have i reached the correct line? My name is Unknown While and I represent Big Butter and the Egg Man Inc.
1: well, unfortunately, no...we're a butcher shop here. if you're looking for intersecting service. you're talking to an expert here.
2: we provide interpretation for the incontinent and other people with bathroom difficulties. would you have a need for those specific services?
were a crucified with the seventh circle of hell department of small business services. License number 666wewillrockyou666
1: that's a rare services isn't it.....bathroom difficulties. i'm sure you get a lot of business everywhere in town
2: yes ma'am, every place with a bathroom
1: do you do that for doggies?
2: we do have a dog interpreter, and he is up to date with his shots
if need must i can forward you the veterinary records
1: i have some problem with my doggie he doesn't pee or poop in the public. he can only do it in the bathroom with the door closed. just like human beings!
he's the most profound dog you'll ever meet in your life.
2: so, does he leave the seat up/ not flush? if so we also have interpreters specialized in flushing toilets and putting down seats
1: he's smarter than a fifth grader i would say, in some cases, some young adults would be so ashamed in front of him. the amazing thing is, he flushes. he even asks me to wash his paws after he pee. you know since i'm a real human being with thumb, so i need to help him with using the faucet.
2: why dirty your hands? we have interpreters with four year degrees in turning faucets on and several with Phd's in turning faucets off
1: good! you're hired!
2: Hurray a sale!

Something Strange in the Moccasin (Amen)

2009-03-10T16:27:00.000-07:00

Come down from Clongers Avenue, straddling the guardrail and angling a toe out for the moss rocks. About 20 feet shy from Adele’s back porch, where her and Boone sit smoking Kools and watching the mutts pace along the links of fence, probably wondering what’s given a man the notion that January is as good a time as any for a dip in the Moccasin.

Make the path, good enough but not graceful, that runs pitch straight between the dead reeds, worn ragged or bent crooked where the kids hack them at the gut line with kitchen knives, and the bullfrogs don’t whomp quite as loud as they used to out of fear. Jackets a dirty heap on the black asphalt stretch, latch belt is somewhere off in the mud, go back for that later, but the buttons on the cuff of this shirt are the real trick, and it’s a fight getting them over the bandages. Use teeth. Lucky, the doctor had said, with his voice like copper and a smell like menthol. Adele’s dogs are kicking up a real racket, and Boone’s appeared out in the middle of the road wearing his thermals and a Dekalb hat, hugging a bag of kibble to his boney chest. Poor Boone, doesn’t get it, and despite the hollering, just stands dumb on the spot, as the boy keeps floating down the Moccasin, his hair parting with the easy current and his pale naked skin shining out like a beacon.

When the moss rocks give way to the small skipping stones, the drift wood, the metal parts painted orange with corrosion and the smooth edges of tumbled glass from bottles smashed upstream, and the tide jostles the silt with cold white caps that call in the water weed, it is there in that brackish swell that the small body dances towards the shore, passed amid the intertwining appendages of the Moccasin. And almost distant Adele is cursing the dogs, chasing them about the cage with a leather leash slapping up a cloud of dirt that coils above her modest house with the large back porch and the Fleetwood riding cinderblocks. She trots like a boar, leaving the latch of the gate hanging, and the frenzied mutts follow her past Boone, who bows his head and wishes her good evening as she passes, to press the front of her bulbous thighs against the guardrail on Clongers, with the best of intentions but her ticker and great girth and the narrow path down to the river’s edge.

The trees along the bank make a sunless canopy, and my bandaged hands are held up to the shadows, not meant in prayer, but to confront them in the full on darkness of day. Lucky said the doctor, while he stitched closed the mangled bags of skin, and I’d closed my eyes until he’d made them little mummies with gauze and all the while I breathed his thin menthol smell and felt lucky like the lottery.
“Work,” I say. And damn that fool Boone. Able enough to gather the little body, but lost in a foolishness, chasing the dogs along the yellow hatches, saying now you quit, now you quit right off, while the hounds gyrate, whip their tails about, open their long mouths to shed teeth. Breaking from their forelegs when he gets close enough to loop back around him. The bags sprung a leak and he’s leaving a trail of brown pellets behind his boots and the mutts are nipping his soles. He turns in circles until his Dekalb hats falls from his head, and he can’t figure how to fetch it up without putting the bag down. Down in the river that boy is a straight line off to me and I’m standing here with my hands out watching. Doing no good for anyone. So I jump in. And the water meets my half bare chest, and fills up the socks, and runs up my legs, and shrinks my balls way back up into my stomach. The brackish January cold fills my mouth and I drink it down and vomit, and drink it down again and vomit. And I think I may choose to sink down to the silt bed and rest. Be a fossil for a while at least. Imagine the coroner’s table against my back, while they open me up and dig in with hands like copper. Saying look at my luck, the fish haven’t picked the left eye. But I don’t sink. I drag my elbows into the top of the water, kick my legs in it so they follow. Hold my hands up above it so the bandages don’t get soggy. My breath comes with spit and half drowned in salt, but I keep digging my elbows in, getting closer to that island of skin. Where veins show out like the webbed imperfections of marble tile, and the rivets of a spine arch towards the little sun. I touch it, and the bandages know, right then.

I Lean

2009-03-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

A Found Poem by Doind Vincent; world famous tuba player

i lost my brain this morning on the subway
i sneezed, and there went my brain. it landed on the subway track.
and the train came, it ran my brain over.
so i have no brain today.

Untitled Work in Progress

2008-09-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

Hello. This is some new writing. I don't think anyone ever goes on this, so from this point forward I figure I am maintaing this as a virtual back-up for my stuff in case my hard drive fails. Oh, and if anyone does happen to come across this page, get season one of Mad Men on DVD.
(Ready, begin.)

He’d been at it again, they said. Now, here they were to listen, set about on the studio couches for hours of silence, or what seemed to them only the occasional whistling of wind through dry leaves, the grumbling of the recorders stomach, the sound of the tape winding in on its own spool. They ruminated upon the slow turn of magnetic tape to magnetic tape written with dual needle for the full stereophonic sound of the grass growing out. Yeah, and that earth tone man, dig it. Heavy like dirt where the dead slumbered beneath. And Joe standing behind them all at the control board, nodding as if some unheard rhythmic pulse drove the negative space forward at the timing of a waltz. He was wearing a leisure suit ill fit around his broad breast, looking like a capital square, salary man. The fabric was starched and stretched like a synthetic blended cocoon. The stiches barely holding so that he might erupt from them any moment and flee screaming nude into the London night. His hair was cropped tightly to his head like a spill of black ink, and his eyes darted hither and tither beneath it. They tried to isolate the source of some inane buzzing that only he was attuned to. That’s a gourmet pallet for frequency; you’ve got to vibe on that. The band sat around the room, scratching, picking unwashed come late imitators of free love revolutionaries and heard none of it. At times the silence would make Joe smile, at others a pop in the recording would cause his lip to dance up in a sneer.
Soaps ruffled his hook through the coiling locks of his hair, and removed both sandaled feet from the coffee table, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. He turned towards the great genius who spun gold from shit, and hunted raccoons with a 12 gauge when they broke into the dumpster in the studio front, chasing that invisible audio gnat with his maniac gaze. This was the Mongol’s fifth day in London now, since the label had sent the boys across the drink, and all Soaps had seen of it so far was brief flashes through the one studio window, a rock n’ roll city seen in a tangerine drop glow of street lights in the fog, dig it. But he wasn’t disappointed for his lack of leisure, the Mongols were here in the nitty gritty now, swinging in all the way from Beantown on company dime to leave the B-Side and the novelty shit behind. Yeah, dinosaurs, the goddamn stoneage. The 45 was dead as a doornail. It was albums now, full blown records. Any one can make em’ dance, but it takes a real vinyl painting to make em’ think. And it was under Soap’s specific request to the label, after hearing his work on The Honeycomb’s “Rats Eyes” (what a record) ,they’d landed Joe at the boards. On the cheap too, because some of the industry coots said he’d lost it. But, Soaps had told those stiffs you can’t lose that Telstar sound, that lush warm undertone, the distinct cut of each instrument, (the Mongols single for “Shimmy Sunshine” had always sounded too muddy for Soap’s liking) and that volume, no record was LOUD like a telestar record.
In their five days in the studio, they had recorded drum tracks for only one song. Soaps counted the gold records hanging over the motherboard. –I mean, Joe, this is all real far out man. Like way out, and I can dig it, but maybe, and guys let me know if you think I’m wrong or if I’m being a square here, Joe. But, I can’t figure for the life of me what it is we are listening to right now. I mean the whole recording in the graveyard thing is far out, I mean out there like mars, I get that, but, I mean we got a schedule to keep don’t we? We got a hit record to make, am I right? Is this even going on the record?
-Wait, said Joe, raising his arm so that the wrist protruded far from his sleeve. Quit on that guitar, he said to Rick, who quit the strumming on the holy body acoustic right out. Right now I am perched beneath the tombstone, in the far corner of the cemetery. I am squatting, and holding the microphone away from my body. There is a slight chill in the air, but I am comfortable as the winds send past me a flock of fallen leaves. The moon is hanging fat and pregnant in the sky, and casts a bright unearthly pallor across the hummocks. It’s day on the roofs of the mausoleums and the stone statues of saints and angels, and some of those departed who made portraits of themselves in granite, all chipped now with moss and lichens. The green makes capillaries and veins in marble, and the roots splay up into the branches that make dark fingers against the sky. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And the steel gates, the rust is making them sing out on their hinges like a hi-hat. And the branches make the bass. Two. Three. Four. Now, a great flock of ravens form in the corners of the billowing nothingness, and send their feathers of in a furious whirlwind. Oh, I hear it now the whole kit is going. And there he is—licking full length down his leg with a rough pink tongue, ass naked and twitching. He notices me at his headstone, and unashamed steps carefully, one foot before the other. He comes in an unfamiliar vessel, that of a stranger, but we recognize each other immediately. I am lost in him, he and I. Oh Buddy, I wish to say, but the tenor of my own voice may frighten him and plunge his poor soul back into the terrible tailspin towards, oblivion. He knows I am here to save his voice, that he must speak in me, in order that the celestial un-bodied may be freed from the burden of heavy dirt. Here he comes. Listen, this is where I catch the ghost.
A cat began to mule over the recording, a long morose bellow that made the room shiver. Joe turned the knob at his left, and pushed forward several toggles. The cat lolled on, he raising the tenor now to such a horrible racket that the speakers began to hiss. –Who is that speaking?
The room listened, harder, attempting to open themselves to genius expression. The drummer nodded as if he got it. –So that’s it? Rick asked –That’s the voice of Buddy Holly? Well, it ain’t Peggy Sue, sure as hell can’t dance to it I’ll tell you that much. Or maybe, he began the first steps of the mash potato, nope, I don’t have any steps for the cat’s meow.
Joe was past the woods at that point, off the planet as it were, where simple chides meant nothing against the timeless waves. So paddling somewhere in the celestial ocean, surfing the rings of Saturn, speaking with a Martian on the great unknowns while drawing pentagrams in the red sand, he drew at the sound. Orgies on Venus, with the spindling legs and many arms o splayed open and accepting to the full rockets thrust, he plucked out the sound. To hear a new world beyond the candied mountains of ancient civilizations lost by the crushing wave of meteor, and only their greatest left as a milky surf, carrying voices off in the undertow of stardust. Where on the shore, Joe picks up the sound holds it to his ear and isolates each note. I hear a new world with ears far beyond those of mortal men. I’ve made souls a bargain for this wand of studio magic, and given myself to the astral unknown, thank the devil, I pluck the sound.
He adjusted another knob, pushed another switch forward with the flat of his palm, furrowed his brow bit his lip. Rolled the tape back, and cracked his knuckles, the hiss rolling in before the sound of the cat raised now in an quake that seemed as if it would burst the speakers in a shower of electrical light and wires wriggling about twirling red wire, white wire, blue wire. But above the bombast the voice now sounded through clear, and discernable. Now in the center of the auditory stage was the voice of a man. “Help me” it said, “Help me, Help me, Help me.”
-Jesus Christ, said Soap watching as Joe leaned back in his controller’s chair lacing his fingers behind his head, a contemplative looking now dripping to his lips from the inky dark of his brow. –Gentlemen, said Joe, I present to you Buddy Holly.
“Help me, Help me, HELP me, help ME” and the reel to reel spun dead, the loose tap end lashing against the stop pin, and repeating like waves crashing on the celestial shore “Help me”

Sneetches Get Stiches

2008-07-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

This is a paper I wrote in college. I read it earlier today and it made me laugh.
The professor was an asshole. He had this paper coming.

Maxwell Davidson
Culture and Personality
The Sneetch: A Society Divided
or Sneetches Get Stiches

I had a teacher of Cultural value and social relevance at an early age, and am somewhat perturbed that none of his writing appeared on the syllabus for our specific course. The mans name is Dr. Theodore Geisel and his writing imparts many of the same lessons presented in the material of our course specific. Geisel in his writing, excels beyond the field, offering not only a deep critique of society but also presenting said critique in a format tangible enough for a child to grasp.
In his work “The Sneetches”, Geisel grapples with weighty issues of race, class and social status. The narrative, cleverly composed in anapestic tetrameter, (Freud’s good and all but I’m pretty sure all of his work stands in basic compositional format), begins with a portrait of a society divided by culturally motivated factors. The narrative, (if I remember it correctly), unfolds as follows: in this distopia, a future world gone mad with faction, those with access to the wants of life are delineated by stars on their bellies. Those without stars sit on the bottom wrung of society as the ‘untouchables’, abused and emotionally broken by the cruel hand of their one starred overlords. The no-stars are forced into degrading acts of menial labor, in the undertaking of which they are subject to oppressive governmental jurisdictions and random drug urine screenings. The hypocrisy of the one star regime holds no bonds however, as during these random screenings one star insurgents introduce into the “blanlkie” ghettos a highly addictive narcotic called “crizzledinkle”, forcing many into unemployment and serving to widen the rift further between the haves and have-nots.
Here the story turns on it heels, as a dark stranger arrives from the horizon, Sylvester McMonkey McBean, by name. Sylvester, an un-liscensed cosmetic surgeon ejected from medical school for unethical experimentation on the “FongleBongle,” a mute but highly intelligent species of “DingleDorp”, rises to finical prominence from the slums of Sneetch society. Sylvester exploits the modern Sneetch secular discontent and makes promise to re-enchant their bleak worlds, by way of painful physical alternation. Doctor McBean adds stars to the bellies of the starless, and in doing so collapses the very foundation of the Sneetch’s totem based society. No longer are the upper crust able to delineate from the rif-raf, and the playgrounds of old money such as intimate retreats in the “Spunglebork mountain range” and the club house of the “Lorax memorial golf course”, become overrun and non-exclusive. This the one stars cannot stand for , and so collectively approach Doctor McBean, requesting the removal of the stars from their tummies, hoping this variation will once again create the delineation necessary to effectively govern their society. McMonkey, obviously a metaphorical representation of the Old Testament Satan or Loki the trickster of Norse mythology, obliges the teeming mass, for a fee of course. The lines of star and no star identity are further blurred as the recently transformed Stars begin adopting the most popular of ‘no star’ music acts, offering them seemingly lucrative but ultimately exploitive multi deal record contracts.
After years of chaos and Star related gang violence, the Stars themselves have been swapped so freely that all the significance that it once carried is lost, and the two independent groups diffuse into one middling class. At this time, Dr. McMonkey, once again appears on the scene to exploits the confused Sneetches, using the money earned from his cosmetics business to erect seven open air mini malls. Sacrificing connivence for comfort the Sneetches flock in droves. Sneetch family businesses are unable to compete with multinational chain stores and many are forced to permanently close the doors whose anchors rested squarely on the sweat and blood caked shoulders of generations.
The Sneetches fall deeper into poverty and depression, all the while growing obese and lazy on a nutrient free prepackaged diet. Imagine if you will, a Sneetch holding his feathered hands together in silent prayer, looking for a glimmer in the heavens... fearing that the God he had forsaken so long ago truly was dead. His beak opens and a dry scream rises from deep within his gullet, and now the tears flow freely from his googol eyes. “Where is my savior?” he pleads, “where is my savior...”
A familiar presence steps from the shadow and wraps a friendly wing around the weeping Sneetch, “Worry not comrade,” he says in a tone warm and comforting but not lacking an heir of authority, “our deliverance is soon at hand. Sneetch cannot live as Dumbledonkers forever. Alone, we will break like glass, but together we act as twines within a rope, an unbreakable force,” his tones rises now and he raises his arms for combat, “McMonkey and his robot army are helpless against such strength! No longer will brother and sister be subject to subordinate and dominant relations. No, cooperation... that is the key, through it we will unlock the door and rise far above the system. And with those same keys we will ignite the engines of production which we... we will own! Freedom I say! Freedom! No longer bodies in the gears of the apparatus... living cogs in McMonkey giant machine, left to wither and die alone.”
The praying Sneetch chokes on mucus drip deep within his throat, “how do you know this is so?” he asks skeptically.
“Because...” says the other, “I recognize my place in the system.”
Through teary eyes the Sneetch’s gaze is drawn skyward, and now he peers into the visage of Carlton Macdonkledork, the leader of the Sneetch Labor Coalition, (SLC for short). He is not unlike most Sneetches, his belly is starred as the rest, but about him their hangs a presence only definable as quality of leadership. The Sneetch breaks again now into hysterics, kissing Carlton’s flippered feet, “you’ve come to save us! Our salvation is nigh!”
This is where the direct narrative ends however the book itself closes with a confusing and controversial image, the oft debated image being a crucifix placed in juxtaposition with the hammer and sickle made infamous by the communist party. Read into it what you will, but in my opinion this narrative is most certainly a commentary on racial, gender, or any number of other social categories. Geisel's strength is the ability to shows us just how arbitrary and constructed these categories are. Features -- such as a star, but also skin color, gender attributes, can be used to define people as dominant and powerful, or repressed and marginalized. What is at issue is not which characteristics are used to delineate people into specific social categories or identities, but how people marginalize others by playing up those definitions.
Furthermore, the ultimate villain of the narrative is a representation of a secularized capitalist society. He comes with promise of salvation but leaves them only with empty pockets, weighty hearts and 10,000 dollars worth of debt in student loans... a most poignant commentary indeed.

Beardo

2008-06-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

Okay-- here is the first draft of a screenplay that I have written.
Tom and I, along with a grand collective effort of everyone who wants to be involved in any capacity will be working on actually filming this silly thing over the summer.
If you have advice, comments or want to be involved in any capacity, please let me know. We need you.

Also, thanks to a new friend for keeping me blogging. I'm giving a solemn oath to post more often. From this moment forward-- starting-- now.

Truly... I mean it.

Beardo
Written By: Maxwell Davidson
Original Concept: Maxwell Davidson & Thomas Luczak

Opening scene- Interior
Over heard hanging light clicks on. We are in some kind of basement or large commercial warehouse space. Various refuse lines the floor, boxes, packing peanuts, pieces of large construction material.
In the center of the frame the single light bulb swings by its pull cord. Directly below the light is a badly beaten bearded man strapped to a barber's chair. He does not struggle, but pants in exhaustion.
Footsteps echo on the concrete floor.
We pan over to an operators tray, on it are various hair trimming devices all of which are finely polished and glimmer beneath the light.
Mustache man enters, and pulls on a pair of white surgical gloves. His movements are slow and methodical. He draws his glasses from the far end of the tray. He runs the white-gloved hand over the metal instruments. He settles on a pair of chrome platted scissors, which he holds up to examine. He flicks one of the blades and the scissors begin to hum like a tuning fork.
The man tied to the barber chair begins to struggle more violently. Mustache Man descends upon him. We watch from the rear of the room as hair and blood flies in all directions.
Cut to the operating tray, where the white gloved hand places the beard, from which large pieces of flesh still hang. We close on Mr. Mustache face as he removes his blood-speckled glasses and polishes them with a white handkerchief. He examines the now dead man tied to the barber chair. He sighs and runs the rag down the length of his face.
He turns back to the operating table where the beard is still wriggling. He picks up a syringe laid on the table and a can marked Barbasol. He inserts the syringe into the side of the can and draws. He pulls up his sleeve and ties off his arm. He injects the Barbasol into his vein. A look of euphoria washes over his face, which quickly turns to panic as he looks to the table and sees that the beard has escaped.
Shift to POV shot from beard, escaping as Mr. Mustache begins to search frantically, over turning boxes and throwing over the operating table. Exiting the room we see the title "Beardo!" written on the floor in shaving cream.

Exterior Night, New York City.
Credits roll as we follow beard POV, it scampers through city streets dodging dogs, cats, persons. We have various reactions to the beard from passers-by, ranging from fear to bewilderment to awe. It hurtles other obstacles such as garbage cans, fire hydrants and park benches. It reaches the foot of The Host, who is standing on the street corner obliviously picking at a muffin.
We pan from ground to Host's face. We can clearly see that he is clean-shaven. He shoves a large portion of muffin into mouth then reacts as the beard bites him.
We follow the descent of the muffin in slow motion as it falls from The Host's hand to the sidewalk, it settles with a dramatic echoing thud. When the Muffin settles on the ground we pan back up The Hosts leg, as the beard scampers through his pants, and his clothes.
The Host smacks his body as if in great pain. He falls to his knees in agony and reaches for the muffin. As he stretches his right arm becomes exposed from the sleeve of his shirt. We see a rippling beneath his skin as if the hair itself is traveling through his bloodstream. The ripple moves through his arm and up into his neck. He tears at his cheeks as the giant beard begins to sprout and grow from his face.
The Host rises from the ground. He examines his horrid bearded reflection in the window of a nearby shop. He takes off running down the street. The people he passes begin to fall and seize on the ground. This makes the host even more agitated and he raises his jacket over his face as he runs.
The host exits the scene at a sprint. For a moment all is silent as the bodies on the avenue cease to convulse. Suddenly, there is movement as slowly they begin to rise, cold, indifferent—bearded. They all stroke their new facial hair in an eerie unison.

Scene Interior, Host's Apartment
Host enters the apartment frightened, and bolts the door closed. His eyes dart about in nervous agitation.
He runs to the bathroom. He draws his razor and attempts to shave.
For every nick he makes in the long mane of hair, it quickly restores.
The hair amasses in the sink, as The Host wails.

Scene Interior, Host's Bedroom/ Bathroom
It is the next morning, and the light of the new day shines on the Host in the grade of his closed blinds. He is laying on his back, asleep and snoring in bed. His beard has grown out into a great web that covers the room. We pan around and see the hair entangled with his various personal items; by in large this consists of snow globes. His alarm sounds, and before his eyes open, the beard retracts into its dormant size.
He feels his face. The beard is still there. It was not a dream.
The host turns on his television. On the screen Mr. Mustache stands against a swirling background. He stares blankly. The Host becomes drawn to the screen, pressing his nose against it, and then licking down the glass.
On the screen Mr. Mustache draws his gloved finger along his chin and across his throat.
The Host reacts violently, overturning the television.
He stands panting his shoulders rising up and down. He is a bearded silhouette over the fallen television set.

There is a sound in the hall.

The Host follows the noise to the bathroom where he cautiously opens the door.
On the mirror the word "Mother" is written in grease pen.
The balls of hair, which had fallen from The Host's face the previous evening have begun to move. They make cooing noises like newborns. He places one of the hairballs in his palm. He is apprehensive, but still reaches down to prod it with his pointer finger. The hairball giggles, and The Host begins to smile.
He gently places the Hair Ball back into the sink, and waves to it.
He touches the beard and feels a pulse in his palms, a heartbeat. The beard is alive.
He writes "Father" beneath "Mother" on the mirror. The handwriting is the same.
The Host nods with an expression that transmits an acceptance of a great duty.

Scene Exterior, Street
The host exits his building, and walks down the street. He is wearing a trench coat with the collar raised to his ears, and a tweed hat atop his head. His Beard hangs down from the open collar. As he walks, we see that in the background many of the posters that line the street have been tagged by vandals—with beards. We see a newspaper box on the side of the street, the headline reads "Face Fungus" and "Saturday's Game Called Due to Five O'clock Shadows".
As he passes people on the street some fall to the ground convulsing, but a growing number of bearded others turn and stroke their facial hair in a choreographed and menacing fashion.

Scene Interior, The Shop
The Host enters a dilapidated junk shop. The shelves are covered with oddities, shrunken heads, animals in jars of formaldehyde, glowing orbs, etc. The Host examines a stuffed bear with a beard attached to its face. We pan away to see that a decrepit old man is standing to the Host's direct right. The Old Man is transfixed in a close examination of the beard. He reaches his gnarled hand to touch it, and The Host noticing him for the first time, rescinds.
The Old man mimes calm with his hands, and hobbles behind the counter. He removes a brown paper bag from beneath it and offers it to The Host.
The item inside is not reveled to the audience, but The Host gazes into the bag and is pleased. He reaches for his wallet, but the Old Man gestures for him to put it away.
The Host nods and reaches out to shake the Old Man's hand, but the Old Man by passes the gesture and leans in for a hug. He nuzzles his head into the beard, toying with it, and using it to mimic a head of luxurious hair. He makes feminine noises.
The Host stands nervously still, but allows the Old Man to continue.

Scene Interior/ Exterior Subway and Platform
The Host sits on the Subway handling the bag. He looks into several times and shakes his finger at it, as if to say, "oh, you dickens."
Someone clears his throat and The Host looks up to see that Mr. Mustache is sitting directly across from him. There is a briefcase in his lap. Mr. Mustache gestures to his naked chin in a sweeping motion. He pouts his lip and shrugs.
The Host attempts to avoid Mr. Mustache's gaze. Mr. Mustache upon seeing this opens his brief case. The contents are revealed to the audience as a collection of loose mechanical parts. Each fixed into their respective places by foam. Mr. Mustache takes the pieces out and begins to assemble them with dexterity much like a infantry man assembling a rifle.
Tension grows as we inter-cut between Mr. Mustache's tinkering, and The Host's rising apprehension. In the subway car the number of bearded riders begins to multiply. Mr. Mustache completes his assembly. The device is a chrome electric razor. He clicks it on with his thumb, and it begins to buzz loudly. He holds it to the light and aims it threateningly at The Host.
The Subway car bleats the Station Stop, and The Host backs nervously through the door.

At the Station Stop, The Host exits the car. He is in a shallow focus, but further down the track the audience sees that Mr. Mustache has exited the car as well. He clicks the razor into life, and The Host quickens his gait, eventually to a full run.
Mr. Mustache continues down the platform at a consistent pace, but the crowd of waiting bearded riders on the platform begins converge around him. Soon he can no longer move and is swept out of sight by the human current.

Scene Interior, the Bathroom

The Host enters, and raises his finger to his lips to quiet the balls of hair, which cry out loudly. He reaches into the bag and smiles as he reveals the mystery inside of the bag. It is a bottle of Rogain Foam. He moves toward the sink about to spay the foam directly on top of the hairballs, but halts himself. He turns the can in his hand and reads the instructions. After a moment of consideration he shoots a large portion of it into his mouth. He regurgitates the half digested foam into the waiting hairballs.
The hairballs begin to coo with delight, and pulsate in a glowing red hue.
The Host smiles.

Scene Interior/ Exterior Interchange Montage
Montage segment begins with The Host walking down the hall. His hands are filled with supplies. These supplies include an oversized sketchpad, rulers, compasses, protractors, pens, an abacus and pencils.
He is followed down the hall by several free ranging beards. We time lapse forward. As he works the amount of beards surrounding him continues to multiply exponentially.
We watch him return to the house with potting materials, and light fixtures for garden growing. When he enters the house he smiles and laughs as the beards greet him at the door. He rolls on the floor with the beards, kissing them and throwing them into the air.

Mr. Mustache sits alone at a bar. He has been roughed up a bit from his encounter with the crowd of bearded individuals on the train platform. He is sipping at what appears to be whiskey on the rocks; he finishes his drink and signals for his bill. The bartender points at a sign above the bar it reads “40.00 Minimum on Credit Charge”. The bartender strokes his beard. Mr. Mustache gesticulates to a group of Beards at the end of the bar. They turn away, seeming to want to be left alone with their drinks and their facial hair.
He signals for them to follow him outside.
A fight ensues in which Mr. Mustache quickly and violently dispatches the Beards. He pins one down to the ground and holds out a poster with a picture of The Host’s beard—beneath it is the tagline, “Have You Seen me.”
As he walks away from the beaten crowd we see that a beard is attempting to form on his face. It fazes in out as he gyrates and twist painfully. He struggles toward his a white van, and pulls open the rear doors. Inside the van is Mr. Mustache’s sanctum. On the walls of the van are blueprints of beard anatomy, along with a wire rack that contains “samples” and beard in ice. He slumps next to a miniature refrigerator, and removes from it another syringe filled with shaving cream. He inserts this into his vein and quells the beard. He passes out with his arm still tied, and the syringe hanging between his fingers.

Inter-cut various scenes of similar action, in which the audience learns that the Beard infestation has reached an epidemic level. (Headlines, driving shots, TV casts with bearded news reporters, Mr. Mustache punching bearded people in the face etc.)

Meanwhile, The Host’s apartment has become a virtual beard farm. Beards are living all over the furniture, the walls, the ceiling. They grow from plant potters, over which florescent lights hums. They free range around the apartment like boneless cats. Newspapers are spread around the floor announcing the beard epidemic. One tabloid cover reads “Mary Kate Olson’s Beard proven prosthetic, linked to tragic death of superstar Heath Ledger.” Magazines are strewn about the apartment as well. All clean-shaven celebrities, politicians, public figures and advertisements have been meticulously bearded with a sharpie.

The Host is now dressed in a bright green frog suit, with a large pair of night vision goggles. Only the lower half of his face is left uncovered allowing his beard to hang down along the front of the Spandex uniform. He sits at his sketchpad making the final adjustment to his plan. He smiles and sets down his pencil. He begins to laugh manically as his sketch is revealed to his throng of hair minions. He has drawn the Empire State Building—and placed a beard on it.

(Fade to black)

Scene Interior- Apartment
We now see the Host in a calm moment. He is carefully watering his beard garden with a gigantic can of Rogain foam. It is roughly the size of a quarter keg and is fixed to his back, by way of interlacing straps. There is a tube on the end, which leads to a pump handle that sprays the foam in a broad shower. He is humming along to a Dixie time rag that plays on an old Victorla. Florescent lights hang above the planters along the walls of the room, providing a sparse and ethereal illumination. The Host makes familiar and loving gesticulations to the beards. Some seem to be closer and older friends than others.

The pump runs dry, sending out a choked spritz. The Host examines the tube as if there is some mistake. He removes the container from his back, listening for the slosh of liquid. There is none. He places the container on the floor and walks down the hallway. He passes the bathroom door where we see that there is a red glow. The host enters the room and an indecipherable conversation takes place behind it. As he exits, we are permitted a brief glimpse of the rooms interior. The Hair now has assembled into a great glowing mass, feelers protrude from it like the tentacles of some octopus, and as it moves it makes a sound, much like the crinkling of a paper bag. As he exits, “the Mother” closes the door behind him.
The Host walks to the front door. He goes about his work of unchaining the many locks that bar him from the outside world. The door opens with a flood of light.

Mr. Mustache stands backlit in the doorframe, holding forward the “Have You Seen me Sign”. The Host panics and attempts to slam the door, but before it is fully sealed what appears to be a mechanical blade jars it open. The door flies in, and we pan up from the ground to reveal Mr. Mustache snarling. In the place of his left hand and forearm an enormous electrical buzzer is affixed.
He scans the hallway and we briefly lapse into his POV, The Host is nowhere in sight. We pull down the hallways where we see The Host leaned against the wall of the main room at the end of the hall. Mr. Mustache approaches from the background, kicking beards from his path and hacking them from the walls. They explode in puffs of loose hair. Theybeards squeal in a high pitch as they are pulverized.

We zoom to a close shot of The Hosts face as he reacts dramatically to the screams of his children. We intercut to jump shots of the lifeless beards. A tear rolls down the Host’s face. He can take no more, and so reveals himself with a pained cry. There is a beard in each of his hands, and he flings them at Mr. Mustache, who cuts them down with a spray of loose bits. As the tension between the two mounts we intersperse shots of the bathroom, glowing and steaming. Strands of hair begin to vine out below the saddle of the door.

Mr. Mustache halts for a moment to clean hair from his glasses. The Host flies into frame and the two engage in hand to hand combat. They are evenly matched. They fight until they have reached the open window. The back peddling Mr. Mustache trips over the empty barrel of Rogain, and falls with his back to the metal fire escape. The host jumps on top of him, and his beard begins to constrict around his throat. Mr. Mustache struggles against its power. A five O’Clock shadow fazes in and out from his face.
Mr. Mustache grabs hold of the beard with his right hands, razes his razor arm and de-beards the host. The Host backs away blood running between his hands. He collapses, dead.

Mr. Mustache rises holding the beard in his hand. All is calm for a moment. Suddenly several spiraling hair tendril rap around him and suck him back into the apartment through the window. Mr. Mustache is dragged struggling down the hallway towards the glowing bathroom. The door swing open and “The Mother” is fully revealed. It is a gigantic beehive hairdo, its enormous teeth line a waiting and open mouth, its pink tongue thrashes, and it tendrils whip about violently. Mr. Mustache is sucked into the bathroom and the door slams shut.

We hear struggling behind the door, bangs, crashes, gunfire. The door swings open with a bombast of music. Mr. Mustache is free. He pulls back his coat and reveals his belt. Hanging at his hip is a bottle of Nair with a grenade pin at the top. He removes the pin with his teeth and throws the flaming Nair into “The Mothers” waiting maw.
She explodes in a shower a hair and cream

Scene Exterior, Street

The battered Mr. Mustache exits the building. He walks towards his van, nearly collapsing several times and steadying himself on anything around him.
We shoot from the interior as he opens the van door, and removes the razor arm. He places the still wriggling Host Beard into a jar and seals it tightly.
There is a shuffling sound behind him, and he turns.
We now reveal an army of bearded individuals watching as he goes about his work. They stroke their beards.
Mr. Mustache nods, and removes a gigantic bic razor from the bed of his truck. It has a sight and scope on the right side and he holds it in his hands like a high-powered firearm.
There is a safety at the end of the handle. He flicks it and cocks the front of the razor.

Mr. Mustache: Beardos.
(Subtitle: Beardos)

We move through back of the crowd towards Mr. Mustache, who screams and begins to charge forward with the razor poised for battle.

(Cut to Black)

END SCENE.
Credits roll.

Moths and Horseflies Part 2

2008-04-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here is the opening of the second half of my novel.

iI you're interested in reading the first part, hit me up. You'll learn which characters are dead and why everyone is so pissed off at each other.

-MQD

Garrett O’Clair had a dream. In it, he and Caleb sat atop his wall shrunk down to the size of a post fence. Their naked feet dangled over the precipice and the grass beneath tickled their souls. Garrett’s riding britches were rolled up to a bunch at his knees, and the raw sores that formed on the arch of his calves stung in the crisp air. He didn’t mind though, because sometimes a nagging pain is all that lets you know you were there. He was there, with his brother, in a sea of grass that stretched on and on and touched against a sun that sank at the wrong end of the sky.
Garrett leaned forward and picked a reed, keeping careful balance on the wall with a flat palm. He held the little plant between his thumb and forefinger, twirling it, and looking. The end bent like a crooked finger, and bounced in the breeze as if it were scolding. He placed it between his teeth, and pretended to puff at it like a cheroot. “Haven’t had one of these in years,” he said.
Caleb sat close, their shoulders touched. When he breathed Garrett could feel it in his own body. Slow and easy, but with a rasp behind it that sounded like his lungs were filled with water. Garrett inhaled and held for a moment to set his own breathe in time with his brother. He felt the warmth of his sleeve, and the skin beneath, alive, but kept his eyes fixed on the skyline and thought about the pain in his legs, because he didn’t trust himself not to turn. He didn’t trust his own memory of Caleb’s face.
“You ain’t seen a sky like this ever that I can recall,” said Caleb.
“Not in a long time,” he answered, rolling the grass reed across his teeth.
“Where you think it was that you remember it from?”
“Something from when we were young. Something that you wouldn’t been old enough to recall I don’t think.”
Caleb laughed and wheezed. The wind kicked up from the north, and made the back of Garrett’s neck cold. “You’ve never seen this, as much as I haven’t. It ain’t real.”
“It’s from a long time ago,” said Garrett, “things looked more like this then. The earth hadn’t been broken in.”
Caleb laughed, “You’re a horse shit prophet. Nah, strike that, you’re a goddamn Injin chief.”
He slapped him against the shoulder, and Garrett smiled a bit. Then they sat watching the plains blow in and out again, with clouds of fat pollen like surf above.
“You want to know what I seen while you was gone?” asked Caleb.
Garrett didn’t answer, and he asked again louder, but didn’t wait for a reply the second time. “Seen a man stripped neked of all his skin live on for a fortnight. He screamed for two days while I set with him, wrapped him up. He kept screaming until he’d screamed himself all out. Then he calmed down a bit. Watched him try and smoke, but he said he could feel the flame and put it out. Heard him tell his stories through the dirt cloth. Heard him laugh once too. Told me about how he’d come from some place far off. He spoke funny but he spoke strong. Told me about this beautiful country, how we was rich with beauty, and how he didn’t bear no grudge to those Injins who took his skin away. Said he owed them that much for letting him see it.
“One time brother, I seen the Buffalo stampede against the Iron Horse in full plains of snow. Just stampede blind into it. All of em’ in a line like they was waiting on a turn. And that train kept rolling through, painting its muzzle red. And the Buffalo’s eyes was all wild and ready, bowing in the gore, and muck. Came so thick some of em’ slipped in their tread, and they was trampled down by their own kin, because their brothers who was killing them, they couldn’t stop even if they wanted too. Yeah, that rail was humming some kind of devil music in them, and I think they were dumb enough to think that they were chasing God in there. So, even when the strongest was all gone and the snow had turned deep and dark for miles, the broken ones got up then, limping and lolling to the grey sky, because the train was long gone and they was too broken to chase them red wheels.
“So, you know what I did? I spent five hours walking those tracks and my boots and britches got so heavy with guts I could hardly tread on. But I gave each and everyone of those poor dummies a bullet so they could meet their brothers at the next station.
“And that’s just the Buffalo, don’t even get me started on the women. Showed me to known a bit more than Texas ugly,” he nugged Garrett with the point of his elbow, and it felt hard and sharp. “Man, you been gone too long.”
Garrett bit down and the reed snapped. He let the raw end sit on his tongue for a moment then spat it out. It disappeared into the untamed reeds that shook in a thousand different directions. He breathed in, and let the sweet air percolate before he spoke. “It tastes like clean dirt and clouds,” he said.
He could feel Caleb turn, and knew that his brother was studying his face, and the arched curve of his slight smile. “Is that what that is?” he snorted, and adjusted his body so that he and Garrett no longer touched. He felt strange and off balance then with Caleb moved away, like a kind of drunk. “All I smell is horseshit.”
The sky was blue, but he couldn’t help thinking that rain was on its way. “Maybe it’s the company you keep, guru,” Caleb continued, “horses and shit, ain’t that right?”
Garrett pushed his weight down into his heels, and rolled his ankles. He’d been so content to sit there in nowhere, with that lonely company, and ponder nothing in particular. “I guess your right Caleb,” he said.
“Hell, I’m as right as anything. And I’ll be right now to tell you that you ain’t riding towards nothing but a bitter end.” He coughed and some of the stray spittle landed on Garrett’s forearm. “Go back, and be the lord of shit, be as you were. Command your army of it. Shovel it around, put it in different little piles or however it pleases you.
“But, don’t do anything to gain my good faith and favor cause Garrett, I’m dead and rotten and you already know it.”
Garrett winced. “And you making a face in such a way. Like you didn’t know. I’m dead Garrett. I was dead before you set out. If you’d look at me you’d know it too. My necks stretched out like the Rio Grande, bent up and broken. And you can kill em’ all from here back to Ulsa, and it don’t change nothing.”
“If you don’t quit to quiet,” said Garrett, “I’m gonna put a beaten on you.”
“I ain’t got nothing to fear from you. I already seen the face of God, and you know what he says to me, ‘go sit a while, and think about what you done.’ And here I am. Sittin’ an thinking, Goddamn, if I didn’t earn it all. Just watching the grass from now till the Kingdome Come.”
Garrett pulled his Stetson down his brow, and blew out hard.
“No wrath, isn’t that what the lord saith? No wrath, and no killing thy neighbor.”
“I haven’t made plans to kill anybody.”
“But you already have. What about that boy? The one you let the Indians eat up. You killed him slower than if you’d put a bullet in his brain.”
“Samuel,” said Garrett, “and you know I feel mighty low about that.”
“Well, I’ve spoke with him, and he don’t bear you no grudge in particular. Mighty concerned about his momma though. Was wonderin’ if you could get his horse back to her sometime.”
Garrett cracked his thumb in his fist.
“You see!” said Caleb, seizing onto his brothers bicep, and squeezing with a grip like metal. “This is foul business. They strung me up fairly squarely—ain’t nothing else to say on that. And if you think you’re going in that town on business of not killing. Well, that towns certainly got another plan of business for you.”
Caleb’s grip continued to constrict. “Look at me Garrett.” The sun was still bright, but had descended on the opposite horizon. The grass still swayed to the north. The air smelled like clean dirt and rain. “Look at me Garrett.” He thought about maps, he thought about desserts. He thought about dead boys pleading for his favor, and men without skin laughing in the face of the countries infinity. He thought about the Buffalo made sacrifice to the great rolling machine, and he thought of nothing in particular.
He felt bone snap in the cold grasp. He screamed without a sound, and shut his eyes and pain shot across like light. Caleb pawed toward his face, and forced it towards his own. Garrett tried to turn his neck, but his brother was strong. He breath smelled like dead fire. His breathe reeked of ash. Garrett’s hip burned. “Look at me.”
The muscle in his arm frayed. The fragment of bone cutting through it like old rope. His eyelids peeled back as he screamed, and his hip felt like flame.
Caleb’s neck bent like a crooked finger. His tongue fell out past his chin. His face was a railway of convoluted veins that stood out in a bright blue contrast against translucent skin. His coffee hair had turned dust gray. Those eyes that always seemed to be pleading but never outright, were like twin spiders eggs at the ready to burst. “Look at me Garrett”.
His hand moved by reflex to his hip then, where he felt the heat of twenty-seven notches. He drew with his free hand, and fired into the blind sacks. Again, and again and again. The sun settled with the spinning chamber, and the wind had ceased to blow. And as the man know as death to many wiped his brother from his heavy brow, he thought, indeed, what a country this is.

Garrett O’Clair, woke to the first light of morning and a bayonette, beneath his chin. The blade bounced in the shaking hand of a young infantryman, and Garrett feared that if the boy continued in such a manner, he would by way of his clumsiness, be breathing from a fresh mouth.
“I just had the strangest dream,” he said raising his hand to push the weapon aside with the back of his palm.
“Don’t you move a muscle Garrett O’Clair,” said the young officer, holding firm, “or I will run you through, and be a richer man for my actions.”
Garrett smiled and lay back on his bedroll. He could see from his periphery that several officers were having some difficulty capturing Big Blu, who was making a fuss, bucking and gnashing out with his big teeth at anyone who came within striking distance. “If you have dried meat he’ll eat it,” said Garrett, “probably be a lot easier to wrangle once he gets some to. He’s starved.”
The young officer shook the bayonette. “We have all situations under control. We will not need any advice from the likes of you—swine.”
Garrett knitted his brow in a motion of concern. “You harm that horse, and I’ll drink your blood.”
Blu continued to buck in a frenzy, and struck one officer in the side with his back legs, sending him twirling through the air. He landed on his side with a hard thump, and began to gasp in airless refrain that it was broken. Another lept for the reigns, and after attaching himself, was dragged several feet behind the galloping animal. The young officer, fearing then for his life and safety, let loose and sat in the dirt scratching violently at all parts of his uniform.
“If you can’t catch it, put a bullet in it,” snarled the young officer holding Garrett at bay.
“If you harm the horse,” said Garrett, “ I will drink your blood.”
The officer raised his weapon high above his head ready to strike down full weight on Garrett’s crown, and Garret tightened to brace for it. But a booming call of “attention” left the boy frozen in full stretch. The officer, was caught prone as he turned his shoulder. Garrett delt his boot in a hard strike to his belt, and rose gripping the bayonets barrel beneath the blade. Blood ran out between his fingers, and down the stock. The officer fell as the handle slipped from his open hand. He gasped and beat his fist against his leg, with one finger motioning to the injury. Garrett pulled back the hammer and poised to fire above, but lowered his arms to a familiar voice, “My God if it isn’t,” Col. Watherall, who in a bounding motion unbefitting of his age, and handicap, had seized Garrett in an embrace.
“My God, O’ Claire,” he said, lifting him from the ground in a great bear hug, “it has been generations!” And after a pause with the killing piece still dangling in Garrett’s grip, Watherall released. He backed away. “Let me have a look at all of you.”
There, teetering on his lopsided peg was Wayne Watherall, thrice decorated general of the confederate war, under whom Garrett had served. He was at least sixty then, and with a weakness for chaw, that let a spritz of brown juice trickle from either side of his mouth. And the grime caught by a beard which hung down past his belly, and danced a bit with his motion. Since Garrett had last seen him, it had turned an aged gray, which in spite of its weathered condition, blended cleanly into his uniform. His hair, cropped at the shoulder, was a youthful blonde that masked the aged elements of his face not obscured by the great turf of his beard. His famous peg peeked from beneath the cuff of his right pant.

In the company’s first tour, Watherall, regarded as a bookish tactician who spoke little, and dirtied his hands even less, had had his leg carried off by a cannonball. The troops in a state of disarray held at an abandoned manor hose, while the commander waited for death in the master bedroom. But, Watherall refused it. Then he, only on his second day of rest and after taking his whiskey in the morning, and against the panicked advice of the medic who was overseeing him, pulled himself from his sheets. He seemed then in the throes or under the guidance of some fevered illusion, as he clawed his way across the floor to a Victorian chair. He asked that his pairing knife be brought, and when it was, set about the task of mangling the chair with it. The company members standing at the ready exited the room and barred the door by Watherall’s command. At the time, they had all thought this as his final motion of order.
But, after an hour of pounding racket he emerged on his own power, sweating profusely in his long john’s but standing firmly on his new leg. It had been fashioned from the arm of the lavish chair, which in its new role drew greater attention to its meticulous design. The arm, now a leg, was made as a bestial hand with spiral knuckles, and long nails, rapped around the remnants of a miniature globe cut flat at the equator. “Dress me with my saber,” he snapped, “these Yankees damn well wont kill themselves.”
Garrett observing the little Colonel’s manic stare and the fury behind it, had never admired a man more.
The lacquer of the wooden claw, which had shone brightly on the day of his transformation, had worn with time and stress, but as Garrett observed the pegs menace had only grown with age.
The men had said that when there was less of Watherall, he was more. After his scaring Watherall had become a boisterous motivator, who lead the company in every charge. In the field his troops, Garrett among their ranks, had fought with an oft marveled at fury, as by Watherall’s mantra, which he could be heard hollering with his saber raised in every skirmish “if a gimp can do it”.

Watherall quirked his thick brow, and gummed his lip. “You look old O’Clair,” he said, “the years, have not treated you well.”
Garrett handed the infantry man back his arms, and helped him to his feet. The troops had ceased in their attempts to capture Blu, who swished his tail in the settling dust. The reins had been thrown over his head, and hung from his mouth like gigantic feelers.
“Same horse I see,” said Watherall.
“Different horse,” said Garrett.
“The horse looks old too,” continued Watherall as he limped towards Blu, “how hard do you drive the beast?”
“Blu’s had a leisurely go up till late,” said Garret.
Watherall touched the horses muzzle with palm. Blu leaned in his head, and sniffed. “Ah that’s right—The Exodus of the mysterious Garrett O’Clair. The mountain man with his great iron wall.” He smiled, and his tooth showed. “I know what brings you down.” He stopped to shoo away a fly on Blu’s mane. “Your brother’s been strung up two days prior to this.”
Garrett counted twenty men in the unit, who all stood then in some manner of attention. There was a group of cattle grazing behind them, and a covered wagon sat unmanned several yards away. The flies droned loudly around it.
“And he doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest. Does he?”
The company grunted in agreement.
“But I’ll still let him know the full story as I have read it.”
Garrett gathered his hat, and beat the dirt from it against his hip.
“All over the papers. Biggest story since they gunned down the Kid. The local sheriff has made a regular character out of himself. Throwing parades, and feasts to the honor of your sweet kin. Oh he is a great baffoon, but you—you O’Clair are the far greater.
“He has in employee, an assassin. One who has received the greatest praise, and is become as it were, a legend. It was indeed, by his arms that your brother was felled.”
The troops expecting retaliation to the captain’s jabs locked cocked their arms. Garrett made no move.
“I’m going to pick up the body, and nothing else.”
Watherall hobbled towards him. The creases in the old man’s skin looked like stress marks in stone. “Huh—well, if you are so content to gallop towards-- young death, then I can do nothing further to protect you. And that is correct I have said protect.”
Garrett opened his mouth to speak but was silenced by the captain’s gnarled pointer finger that bent in a different direction at each knuckle. “Protect how you would say? So you thought it chance that you were left alone to contemplate your navel atop a mound of government scrap.”
Watherall turned down his wrist as if he was holding up a skirt. His voice raised in pitch to the top of his throat, “Garrett O’ Clair has some how fallen through, and no one has seen where he has gone to, although,” he froze and began to stroke his beard, “for a hermit he has made a grand spectacle of himself. Hogwash!
“Or were you truly arrogant enough to think that the Federal Government feared battle from you? Balderdash!” he pointed towards his peg. “They have cannons Private O’Clair. Cannons!” He straightened his beard and paced, pivoting in a three step path. “So how have I protected you—or what position have I found myself in where I can levy such influence to allow a felon to piddle about in the hill unmolested?”
Garrett, not sure of what Watherall was on about, shrugged.
“Have the decency to ask man. Good God. I know you’ve lived among savages, but you were once my pupil, and as you know I demand excellence in gentlemanly decorum from all those who have passed through my influence. Tell him how,” he said pointing to an officer, who blushed.
“He’s making us read,” said the ruddish officer.
“He took us to a cotillion,,” said another.
Watherall nodded, making notation of those that spoken up. They would be medaled for this. “You see, O’Clair, I have granted them the ability to think.” He smiled and the broken edges of his teeth interrupted his gums. He closed his mouth, and as if shamed continued. “After you and I parted, and the company had all broken up, I received a notice from the desk of the governor himself. He’d written me of his night terrors. How he had been losing all of his sleep to a devilish dreams, which persisted upon him like a fever. He told me his vision. It started as a shadow rising up from the outlands. It is small at first, but begins to spread further and further until its darkness eclipses the western coast. Pulsating and writhing as if in great pain it begins to take a form. He sees now, that it is not a shadow at all, but a colossal black bull. Moving its neck with abominable fury, he wrote, it shatters the binding horizon. Then with a leap it tears itself free and stampedes towards the open window of his bedroom. It halts there, and speaks. He knows it voice well. It is the voice of the dead. It is the voice of the consuming all.
“ It speaks for millions-- the Indian chiefs who died with tomahawks raised and bloody scalps dangling from their belts, the hangmen whose last words were choked away by short rope, the negroes whose black backs broke beneath the thrust of a masters whip, the Mexicans pushed from the temples of their cannibal Gods, and all of those trampled by the pursuit of our manifest destiny. Yes, Private O’Clair, it, spoke, with its great tongue lashing about, as he our poor governor, raised his quilts to his quivering chin. One word it said, and one word only—vengeance.”
Garrett thought of his dream. He remembered fields of green grass, and nothing else.
“And what did the governor gain from this vision?” Wahterall began to pace again, “an immediate terror, for what he believes is an impending doom. So, you see, he needed someone with a special brand of talents. Someone acceptable in the lavish halls of decorum. Able to sit in and dine with those companies whose table conversation consists of the secretive calculations and cerebral planning that formulate the direction of world’s and men. But in the same body able to communicate with or conquer the degenerate wilds, wherever the action seems most fitting.
“ So it has come to I, intimate with the final bound in the push towards a unified continent, as the best, excuse me, the only choice. I received this invitation to duty, and not only was I flattered, but had been growing weary of my impoverished state. Sacking barn houses, and stealing chickens from coops. I immediately accepted the governor’s most generous offer. Thus I have been named unofficial commander in chief of the secret military mounted police for the exteriors valley region. My duty is too, castrate the great black bull, as it were.”
One of the officers standing by Garrett’s bedroll sniggered, and upon catching the fiery eye of Watherall, pretended that he had been coughing into his sleeve.
“These here,” said Watherall twirling his gloved hand in the air motioning to no one in particular, “are the troops under my command—they are not many, far less I shame to admit, than when I began. But they are good, strong and proud boys. And I do love all of them as if they had been children of my own. Do I not treat you fairly boys?”
With his chin pointed to upwards and his arms to his side the officer whom Garrett had struck answered, “quite, sir.”
The others echoed the sentiment in a murmuring disorder.
“For every scold there is a pat,” – he crooked one finger, and his inconstant demeanor shifted suddenly to it’s most menacing. “O’Claire,” his voice dropped deeply into his gut, “you live in my jurisdiction, and thus, by order of the governor himself, you are my bounty.”
Garrett’s beard stubble, several days thick, was beginning to itch. He scratched at it with his fingertips. He wanted to strike Watherall, but stowed his anger away, recounting in his mind the deeds, which had given him such affection for the old general. He scratched harder making red lines on his cheeks.
“But, Private O’Clair,” he said turning off and surveying the tufts of crab grass, and the bare hills further off, “I have greater bounty than a lone bandit.”
And then Watherall raising his arms above him like a conductor turned towards his men, “where is the war men?”
“In the heart, in the mind,” the boys chorused in unison, “Ho-rah.”

Erwood Maston slipped into the bath, some of the water sloshed over the open lip landing on the wood floor with a thud. “The bath is too full and the water is too hot,” he said over his shoulder to the woman behind lathering a bar of soap into a washrag. She was naked from the waist up and as leaned and dipped the cloth into the water at his side the tips of her dark breast skimmed the surface. Causing a ripple that moved from around his navel, to his knee caps that protruded from above. The bath was too small for him to lay back flat completely.
“Come around here so I can see you better,” he asked and she did. She moved slowly, and it amused him to watch her trying not to watch him. She made no movement towards his body with her eyes, but rather fixated upon the window and the dust motes that swam in the yellow sashes of daylight. The same daylight that beat harshly on the short roofs of Walton below them. The same daylight that beat harshly on the streets labored now with endless celebration. Was that the voice of Holcoum he heard, calling yet again for a toast of his own honor.
“Look at me,” he asked, and then she pushing her long black hair behind her ear, did. “Are you afraid of them,” he asked flatly and raised his arm from the water. Letting the full sunshine illuminate the twirling lines of his scars. She said nothing, but lathered the arm gently with the cloth. And the suds ran down catching in the uneven skin that rose and fell like canyon passages. He raised his leg up next, asked the same question and she did the same.
She worked the soap into his hair then and her delicate fingers would catch sometimes in the knots, and he laughed. He closed his eyes, and the dark throbbed as he waited there in the still water.
“Do they hurt,” she asked and he answered. “When they’re dry certainly.”
“They don’t scare me,” she said, then touching his hand with hers, and letting it rundown the rough arches and curves.
“Know a man once a time,” she said, “burnt worse than you.”
She waited, and he said nothing so she went on. “The flames, they’d touched his face so the skin growed down over his eyes. And his mouth, but they’d cut in to open that up, so that he can eat and all, but it’d grown there too. It was always like running—“
“It’s alright if you want to put your clothes back on,” he said, and she said that it was alright and she didn’t mind. But she looked to make sure that her dress was still where she put it. Slung over the arch of the shabby sofa. His rifle leaning on the wall beside it, and his clothes neatly stacked there beside.
“I always, did wonder,” she said, “whether he could see through those lids, or if, if you know, it just stayed dark there always. I mean if the light came through in the day or not, or if he saw people like shadows. He couldn’t talk nothing like words, and didn’t have a name that I’d known of.
“Just some big idiot that the ranchers drug around like a toy. They’d drunk him up sometimes. Make him dance, and all watch him and laugh when they’d bring him up here.
“I really don’t know if he’d always been dumb, because he was here before I ever was, and been that way since I’d known him. And I’ll tell you something though, I was shamed to ask.”
She put the cloth down in a clay bowl on a short wood table, and leaned her cheek against the lip. She moved her fingers in the water like they were swimming, and looked at all of him. How the burns plunged down the neckline below where the shirt would show, and how they’d cover him all about his chest, and down. He liked that she looked at him.
“And you—“ she began.
But he raising his fingers to his mouth answered, “Don’t shame your self to ask.”

The Bloat (Part 1 & 2)

2008-04-28T11:02:00.001-07:00

(Okay, this is a real work in progress, but I wanted to unleash this little monster and see what people thought. These are the first two parts of an extended narrative poem-- called The Bloat.)

1.

Today rose on tide
with blind red sea
of dust baked black
coal cast fume.

Salt char
chaff cliff
fractured, wordless
dawn does not
write memory of foreign pasture &
fields on fire.

Rather rest
in a clapboard shack
in ease of apex:
with voice with thin leather
hand, & limestone face
cracked
from rains of summer,
or springs
or falls or--
who can really
remember?
Whenever it was
that hornets burrowed
barn roof
mazes
& beat honey heart
was punctured by
broom
gnub.

With the same welted
finger Post spoons
phlegm
upon a hang nail
hacking thunder
to pluck the strings
in Barking Knee.

Both bodies quiver

& replace a jam jar
filled with crickets
beside the cupboard
where stuck by pin
his map hangs.

Post nearly
sightless, blinks
twice & sighs
The Twin imitates
gesture, tipping
his derby with
an infant
appendage: Left, Post,
Left, no more Right.

There is a tenor in his
guts unlike that late idiot
who for his shame
had hidden
brother sweltering
beneath corduroy-

thinks Post
how-- He must’ve
Oh how He must’ve stunk
a naked lip
warbles
the jam jar teeters
upon a ledge &
tumbles
Post it has shattered
our friends are
everywhere
singing
& Post bends
with the weight of harness
collecting crickets
snap snap snapping
& as the jar
but louder in
commotion so now
does The Twin
tip-topple
to chipped wood
& earth

jumps to meet him.

Post I am on the floor.
Post I am on the floor
& there is glass
& there are insects
& here is a warmth
beneath my
back & fearing now
(as I am prone to fear)
I fear that
warmth
to be old friends
who we had known
& named.

To the Right
Post
Yes, Here I am
dared he look behind
as lifted now
where legs
twitched with final
synapse segmented
did they close.

Thank Goodness,
only strangers
queerest in our family
really, I had found
them beneath a
log only last
was it--tuesday?
Whichever,
the same day
as the salamanders.
Post
they had been
hostile to our
ways & preferred
their own company
exclusively

never taking
time to mingle
despite the others
kindliest advances
& never singing out loud
even when asked
politely.

Oh, but this
is a funeral
& I should say something
kind shouldn’t I Post
picks glass
from curved
transluscence The Boys
tiny back heaves
but Post I do feel better
off, without them
Don’t you
feel better now.
Like a clock
says Post
turning his lug wrench
chomping cheroot
keep it tight so
as not
to slip again
keep her
wound up like a
clock Post
replaces Monocled
eye wink winking
it into place as
milky iris magnifies a
salamanders meal
spread chirp
chirping swarm.
a mattress unsexed
at the far end
straw peaks through
the foot--

Post
does covering
oneself in sheet
truly make a
ghostly one
of self
Post

& for The Twin
a shoe box lined
in purple wrapping tissue
where doll body may
rest, despite
tremors, for which
emergency a
gnawed stick leans
below the charcoal map

but only when the
fiddles begin distant rise
do I say
bite down, boy
bite down
when pale skin
throbs blue web
& coal mines sing sing
saw insect joint
from insect joint
do I say
boy, bite down.

I hear em’
fiddles, oncet
when
I was once
one & two
& now half of
that or less
I guess
when the better
all decked in corduroy
sung sang along
& beneath coal
devoured--gobbeldy
gobbled oh brother, Post
we need a new jar
how ever will we count
them cricks
without proper jar.

& for fear
of agitation
sad strange
head oblique
translucent in shape
not unlike walnut
squash did he
collect leap leaping
critters from all everywhere

as boy in box
navigates from
soft interior below
map of charcoal
bone on
bone & giggled
softly

Post for his
own leap leaping
agitation

nearly got--

Antony, his name
is Antony
& he is
jumper king

--misplace
monoclade
slip slipping
as
cracks table
to crown
ancient rickets
giggle softly.

Post
poorly wonders
why oh why
they had
not made family
with snails.
2.
When the song first
had come
Post barely shy of
fourteen at the time
spry, able bodied
single minded in
working duty
did barely watch virginal
swell in gut &
Barking Knee
bark immaculate
to heaven &
each coaler claim
with righteous
indignation that it
was his daughter
who did
burden a true boone
of Holy Ghostie.

Fiffty, all untouched
or so claimed
showing months
carry somehow
in days.
How they were
paraded through
square most promient
throne to son’s shoulders
& fathers smiling
toothless
grizzly barbs
signaling flair to
most welcome Shiloh.

Halleljeuah preached
preaches of
divine lottery
that one womb
as one Lord
most favored should
spread forth
Jesuit dam.

& each made
comfortable bed of
barnyard, claiming
his own pig troth as
New Bethelham
& strewn in throbbing
phosperus & donned
in quilted bedding
did they
stage nativity.

Post not wise
nor a sheppard
& without young
daughter found
immune to
solemn fervor
& thus alone dug
deeper to coal
as blue his
eyes
gave way to
blind white of
spidery egg.

not pausing
to question the
weird
will of town’
although (or was
it imagined) that
that
fiddle slowly
swelled.

The Grand Central (Part 3 of 3)

2008-04-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Originally Published in Prick of the Spindle: Literary Magazine, Issue 1.2

Yes, the ceiling is tall. Yes, a universe is encapsulated here from the view of God--love him as He sees Us/ bless Us from His holy vantage. & there, the Aquarius pours his mighty jug & the Taurus stampedes with coal iron fury & the twin Carp are united by a winding umbilicus. Bellow & above, I lean on a marbled rail and watch the black suited, black skirted collide in an elapsed time. Most have urgent neck tied purpose & runwalk accordingly. But some are still, some are wandering. Some will wait at the base of the many faced clock staring in more directions, than even four eyes raised on a gilded post could see. I see it now. The flood of man on man is not unlike the human circulatory system. The bustle = the pump. ComMutants = red blood cells. They move as they would through capillaries. Yes. This is a cross section of plasma placed under a great microscope, (bodies within an enormous— no, no.) Bodies Within a Grand Whole! Paul Cesar Helleu, The Scientist stands next to me, pulling graphs & charts from the many pockets of his tweed stitched laboratory coat. The papers match God’s map of the universe only organized; broken into the finest, most complex series of algorithms, geometric shapes & off-peak fare notices. He shakes his great bushy beard; three stars fall from the domed sky in a rain of plaster. The cracks of a flat universe show the old façade, stained black not by plumes of smoke from Diesel, but the tar of human breath. Truth. The scientist is frustrated & begins to eat his research, shoving it down his gullet with a closed fist. “I will digest this,” he says as he chews, “you will write what is left.” He shoots three raw oysters, some of the gooey membrane sticks to his gnarled beard. “I prefer the way they taste when I have historical context. That’s how you know a true gourmand, one that can taste history!” I sip my beer, it tastes like beer. “Look, wooden boats!” he points, & I see that We have wandered to the tiled catacombs, to the room of vaulted ceilings. The tables are “L’s” where Japanese businessmen nod, adjust their glasses. & through the swinging doors of Ye Olde Saloon, Jerome Brody, The Jerome Brody, proprietor extrodinaire enters like The Red Stone Rocket, chanting “U—S—A,” much to the behest of the Japanese businessmen, who, politely finish their oysters, bow & leave. A drink, he offers. A drink, I take. “Been here since 1913,” he says as he pokes me in the eye with a gigantic pretzel rod. “Good year, Good Year” says the Scientist, “tastes like Wilson & Ottoman.” “Indeed!” answers The Brody, eyes bulging from his bulb head, “I see you have a time trained pallet. Probably never misses a train” he says elbowing me in the ribs. The Scientist blushes, “Aw shucks.” “We certainly gave those old Penn-cil necks hell didn’t we?”questions the proprietor, “never much fuss after this The Grand Central”-- a statement of fortitude, the period at the end of the universe. “It took balls, great big New Yorkian balls!” says the Scientist shattering his pint against the cherry wood. I raise mine and purpose a toast. “Let us thank the Vanderbuilts, without whom none of this could have been Van-Der- Built” 40% of the World’s population, stops running for a moment to scream HUZZAH into cupped hands. Ye Olde Saloon catches a fire with song as Ye Olde Dancing Blackman meringues into the room, tipping his fedora as he introduces us to an invisible partner, who curtsies so no one can see it. Then comes Ye Olde Playing Whiteman, strumming away on his dan Electro with a quiet mutt in tow-- the mutt sings a round of “Everybody is a Weirdo” and Everybody joins in:

(Set to the tune of ‘New York, New York’)
Minerva laid in Tiffany Glass, watchin’ as the buses pass
How does she see the city sprawl, or does she see it? Not at all.
How she define Somebody Else, when I don’t got the eyes to see myself?
The chorus now all starts to sing, underground from rainy spring.
‘Campbell’s loft is for rich, the floor all laid in persian stitch’
Meet me by the clock at three, got tons of time because it’s free.
I’m sure we’ll find somethin’ to do, in this place where old is new
old is old, made bright with gold, dancing shoes worn by the bold
In the ballroom homeless sleep, where forgotten tracks run dark and deep

Everyone is weird I guess, and so I make this one request
Take your time to see it all, walk a bit before you crawl
People ain’t just what they are, buy em’ a round at the Oyster bar
Everyone in such a rush, slowing down wont hurt you much
Forever may seem long away, but take a breath and live today
The center of the world is here, and though it seems a little queer
Drop your briefcase, shout it out! Undo your tie and flail about!
Everybody is a weirdo
(Repeat X Infinity).

We Conga through the Concourse. We Shimmy past the Shoe Shines. We Pock & Lock by Plain Clothes Cops. We Go Go at the GrayBar. & We all Veneese in the Vanderbuilt. The Scientist has gone crazy with it, his moves stop making sense, two stepping as he mash potatoes, pirouetting as he jives. “He’s gone to free!” says The Brody ducking for cover beneath a stack of stale hot dog buns. The confused Scientist meeps twice like an electronic bird, & in mid-Hucklebuck, combusts in a shower of Metrocards. “Wow!” says An Old Friend, “he’s one with it. He’s become part of the Universal Period-- The Grand Central! Now they can put his portrait up in the Gallery of Missing Persons! What an honor!” An Old Friend is sitting at a checkered table, around her two rail ties intersect, behind her is the American Flag. She is picking at a Catfish Sandwich. “How is the writing?” I ask An Old Friend and An Old Friend answers, “how am I supposed to eat this without tartar sauce? I keep eating the coleslaw and I don't even like coleslaw. In New Orleans we had tartar sauce when we ate a Catfish Sandwich, this is bullshit. Oh the writing-- the next piece will be in a historical context of course.” “Of course,” I answer. “Did you know,” says An Old Friend, “that actresses were once waitresses, & the other way around?” A waitress walks up smiling with a bleached mouth, she is followed by a midget cinematographer cranking a motion picture camera. The waitress hands me an Amstel Light, recites an Oscar acceptance speech, (in which she uses the words Darfur and Jesus 7000 times interchangeably), until the music crescendos & she dips behind the flag, drying her eyes on a corner. “Actresses?” I tell An Old Friend, “I never would have guessed.” I see the edge dripping with snot: the white stars set to blue the red stripes set to white, & the green mucus camouflage set against a day in mid-september. Helmeted, diligent, they patrol the cruel city that dies by degrees inside of this marbled monument to Trumpian ingenuity, arms raised & ready to strike down all the burners, the terrors. In the splotches between green & brown I hardily see their leather necks. They blend the terrain perfectly. Is this the beauty that will inspire our children? Not Zeckendorf’s Tower of Babel nor Supreme Court Cases that die gasping preservation and the names of Kennedys on the Eastern Steps. No one dances anymore, they have been scattered by bullet spray and fallen from the beat of this subterranean pumping heart. There is no rhythm but, forward. Alive but, impersonal-- flowing to the body of steel boxes inside of glass boxes inside of steel boxes inside of-- A time when time wasn’t. Do you see it in the ceiling yet? The universe dances in ways we couldn’t imagine, because no traveler could send their essay from the curved hourglass of being . It would ruin him, shred him into the very string frequencies of which this “being” is composed! Thinking of it ruins him, makes him spontaneously combust! & so to bolster our importance we latch to what histories we can invent, to touch that immensity we build monuments to ourselves in the most grotesque of scales only to raise & resurrect them with new faces attached, (this is the 3rd coming of this very place). We give names to the stars, place them on our flags & ceilings so that they too might become a commodity. Something that belongs to us, to the uniformity of what we are, even on an interstellar scale. One day, (when they word ‘day’ no longer has a meaning) the verges of space will cease to grow and all that is or ever was: life, art, human relations, police dogs, Whole Food Markets, The Harlem Line, The Hudson Line, aquatic life, the meteoric drifts, the Omega Board, Mugler’s Shoring, and so on, will converge. & what will be left? A period at the center, filled with stars, stripes and automatic weapons. The Grand Central, the sum total of all, the face of God-- &--

our final station stop.

MetroNorthern Lights (Part 2 of 3)

2008-04-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

Originally Published in The Submission Literary Magazine

It’s funny, when you’re on a train how your eye keeps moving as if you were reading on the page. I can follow a distinct point on the framed landscape, until vision stretches out to the very cusp of blackness. Then it pulls back to the left-- my retina is attached to a string yanked by some invisible finger. I’m glad it works that way. If I’d kept going my eyes would have turned around in my head. I see something else now anyway. The playground next to Sing-Sing prison, an ancient Pepsi can, gutted couches spewing their coils, and other dead things that rest along the pebbled shore of the Hudson.
Sometimes geese fly, racing the train. Their awkward necks point straight on towards the next station stop. If they make it there on time the whole gaggle will board. They will sit across from me speaking too loudly about geese things as they rest their wet feet on the leather. When preparing a duck one must make sure to coat it first in a citrus, otherwise when cooking, the reek of sewage will become unbearable.
Everything is tagged. This bridge belongs to someone, and this abandoned car-- that’s his too. A wall of boulders, dripping with mossy septic runoff reads: “SATIN LIVES”, in white acrylic paint. The coming of satin frightens me more than the Antichrist. The world suffocating underneath bed sheets; a new ice age where rippling purple Nylon replaces the sky. I could stop breathing now thinking of such things.
New York rises cold and impersonal, billowing industry from Brick Towers corroding the billboards advertising menthol cigarettes. The city is a smoker chewing Nicorette. It used to smoke two packs a day-- but that was before Walt Disney sacked midtown and made it the world’s largest amusement park. Sometimes when it isn’t working, Manhattan sneaks down to Harlem or Chinatown for a butt.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe it was never any different than it is now. I know money has always been its heart.
My head is against the glass or plastic or whatever it is that train windows are made of. When the train jolts I think of it tipping, wondering if I’d be better off it fell torward or away from me. If it tipped toward me, I think I’d pass out the window, driven through it by the weight of the car itself. I could survive that-- maybe, like in a Buster Keaton movie. The train would fall around me and I’d dust off my shoulders, pick up my messenger bag and high step the hell out of there. If it tipped away, I would be in more trouble. If it tipped away the laws of gravity would give and I would shoot through the top of the car like a cannonball propelled farther and farther, spinning uncontrollably until I became a satellite orbiting the earth.
A couple gets on at Fordham. They are trading blurbs from a Zagat’s review guide.
“I wonder who Zagat is?” the boy asks.
Oh, I know, I know. Bob Zagat, you know the comedian-- Danny Tanner from Full House.
He wants to go to Wolfgang’s because he has heard they serve a great bacon appetizer; he considers himself a connoisseur of fine pork products. She wants to go to Nobu; it’s a hot spot for celebrity watch.
Three girls sitting together prefer talking on their cellular phones than to each other. It’s just-- easier. They are so confessional with themselves that it makes me uncomfortable. Ten years ago people would have thought they were insane. Right now, I think they’re insane. “Well,” says one, “I was going to profess my love to you-- but now I’m not sure.”
“ I haven’t told him that I’m pregnant yet-- the timing just hasn't been right,” and another.
“I’ve had terrible diarrhea,” says the last.
I hate the phone. I spend most of my time on it trying to get off. These girls are with each other, but can only make plans with the ether. I wish I could look at them, see if there is anything there or if they are simply a chorus of digitized voices. But I cant reveal myself. I am the sneaking paparazzi, the man behind the curtain--a perverse eaves dropping troll.
“Wanna do irish?” says the hungry boyfriend in a terrible impersonation of an accent.
I’m embarrassed that he did that. But I must be kind. I am teaching myself this as a new writing tactic. Kindness and non-judgement, the writer is at the same time one with his environment, and that environment is a facet of his creation. Everything that is said and I commit to paper is a reflection unto myself and the universe that I create. A universe hurtling forward to a finite destination. There is no infinity on a train.
“How about Ethiopian?” says the starving boyfriend.
I take it back. I take it all back. These people need bad things to happen to them.
“Wow-- this place is called, The Kingdom of Cheese!”
Wow, really? The Kingdom of-- Cheese. Provolone pillars, buttresses of Brie, fondu fountains and a Swiss soiree thrown by the great King Colby.
The conductor enters the car. He is short, pock marked and bubbling inside his blue regalia. He stops first at two fat nurses who have deep soulful laughs. He seems to know both as regulars on his line, and so begins to converse with them, “You know, if you go way up north to Alaska, you see this thing called the Aurora Borealis-- or The Northern Lights. It’s an effect of the earth’s rotation and gravitational pull. But it makes it look like there’s a rainbow in the sky, and you can only see it at night. But there night is forever. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to see. You know it’s like-- the curtain of heaven.”
The women laugh.
“It’s true though,” he smiles, “I couldn’t stand going to Mount Rushmore, and seeing those big faces looking down on me. No-- I want see the Aurora Borealis-- it dosen’t judge, it’s just light from God.”
“Why don’t you take your wife?” asks one of the fat nurses, giggling.
“Oh I couldn’t have taken my wife. You know in the Bible when they talk about a contentious woman-- Luke 19 I think it is. Anyway, that was her. She’s that contentious woman they talk about. Not married anymore though. But I tried it.”
For a moment even the girls on their cell phones are silent. The train rattles through Harlem, and the conductor stands transfixed with a distant smile on his face. He is in Alaska watching the Northern Lights.
“Here give me your ticket,” he says to one of the nurses. She hands it over and he punches two holes for eyes, one for a nose and four for a mouth. “It’s a face,” he says as the nurses laugh, “it makes an excellent bookmark.”
He comes to me next. In someway, I feel connected with him-- a man who travels the same route everyday wishes he could keep going north forever. Until he reached heaven’s holy satin sheet and could climb that too. Going north into the stars, and past that. Following the Aurora Borealis to the ends of the universe where time and space unfurl and nothing is finite. Everything is infinite.
“So do we want to go to a French Bistro or a Brassier?” says the ravenous boyfriend.
I close my notebook.
“A brassier is a bra,” says the girlfriend.
She closes the Zagat’s.

Rackets For Revolution (Part 1 of 3)

2008-04-28T10:57:00.002-07:00

Originally Published in The Submission Literary Magazine

It must have been ten years ago that the Yuppies finally defeated the Communists in the great local war of attrition. The village proper had always belonged to commerce but Mount Airy was for the Reds-- a center for leftist thought outside of Soho. Isadora Duncan had opened her first school of dance in the trails, although the task of day to day maintenance fell upon her sister. Isadora was too busy taking carriage rides in Europe to be concerned with menial tasks. Max Eastman and John Reed wrote for The Masses from a split level that they shared. Rumors have it that even Trotsky made the village his home for a short time, subsequent to the Menshaviks fall and prior to his meeting with the infamous ice pick.
They all played tennis together, and the court still stands in my backyard, a functioning monument to what once was. Looking at it empty and covered in snow, a naked rectangle fenced in by a rusting cage, I can almost imagine the sounds of their rackets echoing down the hill like riffles for a revolution. I can nearly hear Eastman grunting as he slices a looping forehand down the line, his voice exhausted by the weight of proletariat oppression. I see Isadora Duncan pirouetting for a return lob that lands just out of the reach of Eugene O’Neil-- or maybe its a young Jack Nicholson-- I can’t tell from this far away. He throws his racket, not upset that he missed the shot (it was most certainly a winner), but furious with the widening gap between the haves and the have nots. So furious that he may write a play about it.
All the while Trotsky reclines in a beach chair at the side, an open copy of Marx’s manifesto dog eared in his lap. He is like a wise sage or a favorite grandfather. Everyone on the court is playing for his affections, but he disperses his praise evenly. Applauding the fine effort of each player. But ghosts in time disappear, and I see that the clay play feild is empty and silent, like the road and the trees around my home.
That was the highlands as it was, but now the second generation of leftists, the champions of the common man and the environment, grow old. Their stories locked inside of overheated homes with yellowing walls. They don’t even come out to vote anymore-- why bother? No one listens. The town will have it golf course at the expense of the woods and the town will have its Dunkin Donuts at the expense of its soul. But still they create their masterpieces: a final sonnet, which quantifies geese and love, an opus based on the existence of molecules in man, each strand of DNA mapped in melody. A proposal for clean energy that would render the nuclear heart of Indian Point obsolete.
The Hudson goes brown as the break of white caps settle. At the shore indistinguishable mansions sprout from the dirt like three million dollar weeds. The train yard whistles and for the second time today, commutants bleed traffic through the streets rolling from the steel capillaries of the Metro North. Another pizza shop, another nail salon, another deli rise from tire treads of SUV’s as screaming children locked in the back seat demand take-out.
And another’s breath moves to silence, as Betty Heinz's pottery wheel stops spinning; her final piece remains unfinished. It’s the face of a young woman, or half of it, made from clay. It’s the size of my torso and heavy. I hang it on the red exterior wall of her home, and say good-bye as best as I can without really knowing what to say, “I remember you at Christmas dinner every year, and how nice you made things seem.”
The face and I watch a doe tip toe through the fallen leaves and snow. It’s fat with pregnancy and looks like a donkey. I don’t want it in Betty’s yard eating the buds of pernials that peak through the cold ground, so I throw a rock and it scampers off across the frozen lake. I feel as though I should explain to the face why I would do something so cruel.
And I tell her, that if Trotsky had an eye to cry-- I think he would.

When They Dream

2008-04-28T10:57:00.001-07:00

Our Host was the kind of blowhard that too much academia produces. The head of John Hopkins, suckled on affluence and general public fear of his possibly nonexistent authority. To say the least he was mildly disturbed. Balding, with a snipe nose, and tiny black marble eyes set far behind in the cavity of his skull. All framed by a set of protruding ears where tufts of gray sprouted from the lobes like dandelion cotton. There was no joy for this man, save for meanness and the general discomfort of others.
He speaks over the potato salad, and I sit two seats away, in the sun that beats down harshly on the concrete deck. Next to me is the old gay couple who met as history teachers at “sloppy hollow”. One is deaf and has traveled the world, but nobody cares to know about it, really. The other is a sun glassed mystery, and his khaki shorts ride so high that I do fear that one of his testicles may dislodge from its sleeve, taking on the appearance of our Host popping from behind a tan curtain in bird’s eye view. Our Host, discusses an atheist mass he attends on any day but the Sabbath, where the non-preist preaches; last week his topic of discourse was anything but God.
“Pedophiles,” says the Host as he slops a healthy portion of mango beans on his plate, “the man was a pedophile.”
I raise my napkin covering my mouth. I laugh a bit and choke. “He told me this after mass for my wives Unitarian sunday,” the Host points towards a skeletal woman with a dollop of hair dyed strawberry. It is the fruit topping on a mummy. The Hosts eyes narrow and his voice takes on a gravely under current, “how I do loathe you.”
“It is not a service really,’” says the wife, holding the ‘e’ for so long, that I feel as though I may sneeze. “We do not use the Christian Cross or the Star of David for our symbol, but rather a question mark. For who truly has the answer but--”
“A pedophile!” the Host interjects, flinging a crystal ashtray that shatters against his wife’s forehead. She whimpers slightly and adjusts her hair, from which several hornets escape, and circle the picnic. “He told me this, and I had never spoken to the man before. He seemed perfectly normal in every way. He did not have tentacles or an elongated proboscis, or scales or segmented eyes or the body of a gigantic slithering worm, nor did he seem to have a brain in his anus nor large wings made from crocodilian toe nails. Perfectly normal in ever way I say!”
The deformed Jell-O mold acting as the picnics cornucopia wriggles with shame. A blue berry rolls from its adanois interior and explodes beneath the hosts wing tip, much to the behest of Monty, a golden lab who patrols beneath the table. He eyes the smashed fruit shamefully. His brows raising as if to say, “I probably shouldn’t,” ( a gesture of face I have seen grace many a gaunt female), but after consideration he indulges.
“He was administered therapy-- the pedophile that is. Shock therapy to be exact, as well as a new nonintrusive form of full frontal lobotomy. And by his request, the pedophile’s general reprogramming made specific a unwant for supple, virginal, untainted,” the Host’s mouth begins to water, he takes a bite of raw hamburger and blood runs down his hands, “girlish flesh. So asked then that they mold him in the likeness of a gay man!”
“A gay man!” the two gay men chime.
“You cannot be made a gay. You are born,” says khaki shorts, “I know this, for I,” he pulls out his glowing member--
ship card, “am a gay man.”
His partner adjusts his hearing aid and tells me that he has always preferred chocolate pudding to Jell-O.
“Ah-ha,” says the Host parrying like a swashbuckler, “this may not be true! According to an article in last sunday’s Times,” he pulls a paper from behind his back, a large section is highlighted, “women are born without sexual preference and are guided via various outward stimulus towards an end. Gay, straight, neutral or otherwise--” he shakes the paper as if it is the atheist commandments, sent down to Not Moses by Not God, “all women are bi-curious whore nuns, whose true sexual potential can only be awakened by--”
He sniggers drying his hands on a red napkin, his eyes dart to and fro as if attached to a pendulum
“Pedophiles!” screams the host, throwing three sausages in the air sans buns which he gobbles upon descent between his lupine incisors.
“Clap for me!” he stamps his feet in exaggerated motion, “this is my picnic. Clap for me, or none of you will partake in the special hot dogs!”
There is applause all around the table and the host returns to his seat with a disgusted sneer on his face. “You,” he says pointing to the man seated across from me, “you’re an indian.”
“Why yes,” he answers, “but, I am also--”
The host cuts him short, “ I saw a movie about Indians once. A strange people indeed.” He moves his finger down the line to the man’s fiancé,”and you, you’re black.”
“Why yes,” she answers, “but I am also--”
The host puckers his lips and emits a simian “oooooooo” grabbing onto his toes and violently rocking on his keister. The couple laughs uncomfortably as the Host’s limbs flail and contort into impossible angels. He “oooooo”’s on, the pitch rising to that of a train yard whistle. The couple nods, dabbing bead of sweat from each others brows. The Host’s pigment transfers from a red to a deep purple, and the capillaries in his bead eyes begin to burst with a pop not unlike that of corn in a fire. Large veins rise on his forehead and neck. The Host’s wife sighs and leaves her seat. She walks down the porch and retrieves the grill cover, brushing Monte from her path. The Host with both hands raised to the sky crescendos into an unholy pitch that opens a great rift in the earth. The tectonic plates begin to shift and a waft of volcanic ash rises from the earth core. The air smells like sulfur and for a moment the dead walk. The host’s wife, returned for porches end, bashes the grill cover violently against the crown of her husbands noggin. He pitches forward, landing face first in the Jell-O mold that gurgles with the exhale of his breath.
“Well that’s quite enough of that,” the host’s wife says, throwing back a cup of decaffeinated coffee. She grabs my arm, digging in her elongated peach nails and drops the grill cover with a rattle. “As a writer,” she says, “I hear you see things in narrative form. Me, I only see jumbles and shrieks. I dream when my husband isn’t around and the dream is always the same. There is a man with hands the size of the Hawaiian islands, but his palms are in the shape of pinwheel macaroni. Beautiful pinwheel macaroni. He asks me to cook them because they are raw, so I place them in a gigantic boiling pot, which I stir from the moon. Then suddenly his hands begin to chip and flake, until all of the order that was once there collapses into chaos. And he looks upon me, with his frightened Samoan eyes, and devours me completely with teeth like towers.” she sobs, as the hornets burrow back into her hair, “His hands. Why do they always flake? And why do I feel such a guilt for it? Can you make sense of my nightmares, writer boy?”
The Host snores in the center of the table. She stabs his rump with a fork.
“Well,” I say, “yes, I think I can.”

Year of the Pig

2008-04-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know it was Chinese New Year when I stepped out onto Clinton, but I found out quick. Orange and white traffic cones blockaded the street that veered off from under FDR drive. Down East Broadway, temporary wire awnings, interlaced with flaps of bright plastic hung between the electric lamp posts, framing a statue of Lin Zexu. The hero of the first Opium War cast in aging bronze elevated on a pulpit. His hands were interlaced behind his back and, although covered in pigeon shit, his patient face suggested an air of quiet understanding. Behind him the business district rose from what was once Confucius square. The new buildings looked out of place, nestled between the foreign awnings-- chinese characters punctuated with english exclamations: DVD! KARAOKE! EMPEROR!
Several police officers stood at the mouth of the broad avenue, leaning against their two wheeled carts and nervously surveying the blockade. One pulled at the corner of his hat, upset that he “wasn’t getting time and a half for this.” Another lit a cigarette and took a few drags, watching the East river and the Manhattan Bridge. “What year is it anyway?” he asked.
I had to catch a six train at Canal, but knew that the human traffic-- difficult to traverse on an average weekday, would be unbearable. So I decided to kill some time. In the distance was the faint sound of rattling tympani gongs, and I was so intrigued by that noise that I made a tiny mission of finding the source. Passing barricades, fists shoved into my pockets, I walked with a sense of purpose and urgency so as not to attract the negative stigma attached to tourism.
The festivities must have been several days old at that point; the gutters were filled with confetti. Once vibrant, pink, purple and blue, it had been dyed the color of trash, brown and rotten-- moving towards the sewers with the ebb and flow of the melting city slush.
In ancient China the New Year’s celebration was based on the legend of Nian. A gigantic sea beast that would emerge every spring to devour as many people as it could. Only the color red and the noise of fireworks could send it back to the water. Fireworks had been outlawed in the city due to reoccurring episodes of maiming and disfigurement, so long cardboard combustion tubes filled with the colorful paper had become the industry standard for celebration. They were loud--deafening. Nian certainly wouldn’t be coming back this year. When I saw a smiling child ahead of me holding the ignition string of one of these pipes, I cringed. There was something maniacal in his glee, something sadistic in his Power Ranger beanie. I knew he was waiting for me to pass so he could set the damn thing off into my right ear. But I tricked him. I dipped down Mott, feeling only slightly the gunpowder wind on the back of my neck as he fired. The crowd growing more dense with each step ahead ohhhh’d collectively, and the child yelped with glee.
On Mott the shops were all open despite the holiday, belching tiny trinkets onto the congested sidewalks. A new campaign for intercultural immersion forged in plastic knick knacks-- coal eyed Sanrio kittens; agents of change doomed to adorn the walls of Westchester Wasps.
A troop of white men wearing rice hats, representing the midtown business sector were busy at a concession tent, serving with gigantic spoons from aluminum troughs. Runny sesame chicken, and a lanyard for all. “Straight from the kitchen of Chef Marimoto,” one said as he plopped the wretched steaming stuff onto a paper plate, “and compliments of your friends at A-Language Bank--because we care!”
Their table was covered in a long banner. Printed in the middle of it were two children, one was red haired and freckled holding an ice cream cone, the other was chinese and wore a Mets baseball cap-- someone had colored in three of his teeth with a black ball point pen. I wondered if the A-Language staff, serving and smiling with reckless abandon had even noticed the vandalism.
Red envelops attached to parachutes showered down from apartment windows. Most were taken away by the wind to parts unknown. But the few that made it to the street were contended for violently. Young men toppled over each other, kicking and punching until the lazy envelop was plucked from the sky, and one boy would flee with his arms raised in triumph. The parachute whipping behind him like some strange sort of jelly fish.
“What are those?” I asked a vendor.
“Hong boa,” he answered, “filled with money.”
The Hong Boa always contains cash in even numbers. Odd’s are saved for dowry at funerals. The number can also never be four, or any combination that when added equals four. In mandarin four is a homophone for death.
The tympani was close now, and its steady rum-pum-pum drove me deeper into the heart of the celebration. I could see the drummer then, he was in the back of a two wheeled cart pulled by several men, it was decorated with streamers and swirling paint. The paint had a distinct yet unfathomable pattern, turning in and outside of itself, eating up its own lines. The instrument was gigantic, its broad face spread tight across the barrel, leaving hardly any space for the musician to stand. He was thin and the heavy sticks in his palms seemed wider than the width of his arms as he dropped them in a winging motion against the skin. He wore a hooded sweatshirt embroidered with the insignia of his kung fu school: a chicken with raised talons. The rooster is a symbol for bravery and a tenacity of spirit, that same symbol adorned a series of flags raised behind the drummer.
So enthralled was I in the steady pounding rhythm, that I took no notice of the crowd as it converged upon me. And when I did , it was too late. The weight of humanity was so great that I could not budge an inch in any direction. The new year is the largest human migration on earth, all ethnic Chinese converge upon one point so that families may partake in the “reunion diner”. They were all here in Manhattan-- in that very crowd, hemming me in so that I could only stand and watch, as life-size dragons back down from a nearby stairwell. Their enormous heads rose above the crowd, shaking back and forth . They had the faces of menacing dogs with snouts pushed in on themselves, and smiles stretched to strange proportions. Their sequined eyes blinked and their mouths opened controlled by an internal mechanisms of puppetry that I would never see. Their dance represented the taming of the Nian, a story from the Fukan province. In the story an immortal harnessed the power of the sea beast by absorbing wild animals such as tigers and snakes. When the immortals power was at its zenith, he flashed his red undergarments and the Nian, in fear of the color-- submitted to him.
A grandmother clutching a boy no older than five pressed against my side. She was panicked, screaming into my ear things I couldn’t understand. “I can’t understand you,” I said, “and I can’t move.”
The child however was calm, and in his calm way clasped my hand as though I was his guardian. His palm was wet and as I saw the fresh snot dripping from his nose, I understood why. There was something profound in this, and thus raising that same hand I rubbed it against grandmother’s shoulder passing on the child’s slimy blessing. “I’ll get you out of here,” I told her.
I’m not sure that she understood, but she smiled as I maneuvered in front of her and the child, taking the full brunt of fake snow blast from an Aerosol can. It smelled like concentrated citrus, but tasted awful. “It’s snowing!” said the man who sprayed the toxic stuff, “five dollars!”
A store front was six feet away, but nearly forty bodies were between us and that. Children sent pop packets that looked like sperm cells at each others feet, the confetti screams made the sky thick like rainbow ash, the only air I could breathe was human air-- desperate gasps from crushed lungs. The dragon blinked twice at me and turned away as the crowd continued to press forward. I gripped the grandmother, pulling her and the child. “Watch out,” I said over my shoulder, “there’s a kid.”
A tourist, insane with claustrophobia began to flail her shopping bagged arms wildly. She was fat, sweaty, floral patterned and terrible. Her face grew scarlet beneath a gigantic pair of pointed lime green sun glasses. She screamed, “move, everybody fucking move!”
A shop owner with a large wart on his cheek, scolded the tourist with an explosive baton. Her jowls quaked, terrified--he blinked, often. She became more violent-- the bags in her hands moving like lawnmower blades. He became more violent-- grabbing her large collar and shaking. “You don’t” he said, “you don’t.”
The child grasped tightly to my leg. “Don’t worry,” I said, “we’re gonna make it.”
The tourist toppled and landed on the shop owners items set out on cardboard covered milk crates. It all falls: painted turtles in bowls, plastic battery operated robots with spinning lights, pokemon cards, pigs, poppers, lighters shaped like penises, reclining Buddha's, cats holding signs in cantonese for good will, Bruce Lee wall hangers, the great wall, T-shirts (my God, all the T-shirts!), snow globes filled with the Manhattan skyline, jade necklaces, Maoism, the statue of liberty, the empire state building, The Little Red Book, the eiffel tower, post cards, shot glasses, butterfly knives, Ultramen wind up walkers, remote controlled cars, singing spinning tops and a rack of shoes.
Flames shot from the nose and mouth of the dragon in recognition of the shop owners fury as he pounced upon the frazzled woman splayed out between the items--all cattywampus on the sidewalk. Somehow the crowd took a collective step backwards, and most suddenly sprung in upon itself as if the whole mass was being sucked down a sinkhole. Feeling the pull of their gravity, I lowered my shoulder and barreled through bodies like an linebacker. Cutting a straight path for the nearest awning-- (no, no, no) cutting a straight path towards freedom. My companions were behind me huffing to stay in my tread, the grandmother whimpered. I vaulted the painted turtles, more beautiful than before speckled with blood, and stuck a two footed landing beneath the awning. Reaching backwards I pleaded to the grandmother over the sound of pop music, explosions and clattering gongs “Hurry there is no time!”
She reached out as well, but the crowd converged, and she and the child were swept away in the vicious current. Gone.
I stood there for a moment, contemplating all that had happened-- feeling a sharp pain in my lower back and soul. A new year and a promise of rebirth, yet I had already been touched by loss. The evil Dian had been turned away, but I was alone. And still, Confucius slimed down upon me from a raised picture frame-- he had felt pain in his life, born from wedlock to a father that would die after only three years of his life. It is only from pain that we can garner true wisdom. And only the wise can smile in such a way.
I bought him immediately, and, having tucked the portrait under my arm, climbed a rusted fire escape nearby. At the top I sat with Confucius next to me on the corroded planks, together we watched the confetti spray up like the breath of whales. Twin dragons picked at heads of lettuce which bobbed above them on fishing rods. I saw the expanse of the ancient kingdom then, the flat roofs of Manhattan transforming into the multiple arching angles of pagodas. The bridge melted into the East River, rising from its own bubbling wake as the enormous serrated back of the Nian. A great wall corrals Manhattan. The air was fragrant with the sweetness of lotus and poppy. The sky became fine brush strokes cast upon a porcelain dome, which as the sun sank, became a red dusk illuminated under five enormous stars. In the light of the largest I saw the child and his grandmother, escaping from the far edge of the crowd at Canal. “Happy New Year!” I screamed, wildly waving the portrait of Confucius above my head.
“Lo-fan!” they answer.
I catch paper in my hands like cherry blossoms drifting in the coastal breeze of Hainan. Confucius and I laugh out loud together--only one of us knowing that I had just been named as white devil.

Artist Profile

2008-04-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

Writer by trade, world traveler by chance, playboy by destiny. M.Q. Davidson sends us the log of his travels from the brink of all human experience. Stories which touch, tickle and tease at the stings of those vital question that plague us all. Vivid, eloquent, vividly eloquent. Critics around the word agree, M.Q. Davidson is a “Masterpiece” (Peter Hammond- Maxim Magazine).

Born from humble roots Mr. Davidson, the middle child in a family of twenty three, was raised in a small mining community in Virginia. Overcoming blindness at the age of four, the young Davidson vowed from that moment onward to capture all of existence with the eternal brush of vocabulary upon the canvas of the cosmos. “I remember what I saw, when I saw for the first time, and what I saw was beautiful,” said M.Q. in a recent interview with “Vogue” magazine. “A single tin can, carved open at the top with the sharp blade of a hunting knife. It was serrated around its edges, and on the torn label was a portrait of a man with a large mustache, and kind forgiving eyes.” Mr. Davidson paused touching two fingers to his lips and nodding his head lightly. A soft smile graced his face. “He was wearing a sombrero-- a golden sombrero, as if the sun itself had perched atop his head in its descent from the sky.”

M.Q. Davidson’s resume includes (but is not limited to) stories published in the New Yorker, Playboy, GQ, Granta, The Submission, The Sear’s Men’s Apparel Quarterly and Penthouse Letters. Recently he was awarded a Day Time Emmy for his work on “Jeymes Karate: Adventures of a Corporate Samurai.” When asked about production of the show Davidson chuckled, “well you know-- Jeymes Karate was sort of a fluke. He was a character that me and some of the guys on my Crew Team in college thought of. But it seems like America is really relating to Jeymes and his misadventures, and I’m just ecstatic about that. All the credit really goes to Michael Biehn though, he’s been simply inspired in the role.”

Gracious, kind and humble-- is there anything this man is not? I’d say-- not.

Check back often: new stories will be posted regularly, and Mr. Davidson wants to hear from you!