Once upon a time, in the land of the hostess twinkie and the energizer bunny....
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"I can't stay..." She said to me lighting a cigarette "Do you hear me?Why are you looking at me like that?" "Photographing you..."I say.She just laughs. Do you know those moments? I assume everybody has them, but hey I've been wrong about a lot of things. I remember going to visit her at work, I can't even remember where it was. It was summer, and the place, whatever it was (does it really matter) was at the end of this old country road, along this hilltop. At the edge you could see the tree lined landscape (in your mind you probably see one of those Bob Ross paintings with the 'happy little trees', but it wasn't like that at all). As I came up over the edge of the hilltop in my beat up Toyota, I saw her standing out in front of the place, and between that and that perfect blue sky, I was skating on the edge of an almost perfect happiness. In the immortal words of Richard Hell, "Love comes in spurts". The rest is heartache, blue balls, death threats and restraining orders. You hold those three second bursts of bliss in your mind to get through the millions of others that have you putting the barrel in your mouth. Anyway, this, at least in my mind, was one of those moments. I sit up next to her, placing the finishing touches on the image. The wisps of bluish smoke impaled by the noonday sun. The torn fabric of the concealing comforter. The distant sounds of passing traffic on the highway a few miles north. The throbbing grind of industrial beats and blackened growling guitar chords on the neighbors radio, accompanied by a groan of exertion as he lifts this or that grease covered auto part. The play of light from the crest of her forehead to her belly. The soft gold of her hair splayed in haphazard patterns on the down pillow. "There, your finished..." Another laugh …I open my eye's to a dubious questioning expression...she doesn't ask and I am grateful... "What are you thinking about ?" "I'm not sure I can put it into words..." She pulls on her white cotton panties, I help her fasten her bra ..she pulls on the dress and says goodbye, disappearing out the door and into memory. Jimmy sits in my living room in my pilfered jeans and tee shirt munching on cold pizza. dirty blond hair tied back behind his head, scratching his goatee with blackened finger nails... "You don't have any beer left..." "How the hell did you get in here...?" He points to an open window... "Who's the girl?" Lascivious gleam in his eyes, licking a remnant of congealed sauce from his lips. "Nevermind her...you didn't say anything to her I hope?" "She's you'res man...what the hell do you take me for..." "I don't own her."I say "O.K leasing with an option to buy." "How long have you been here?" He smiles, launching into a long series of mock spasms and orgasmic moaning. "Your a real fucking piece of work." He folds the empty pizza box sticking it into the overflowing kitchen garbage. "You guys playing tonight...?" He fishes with dirty fingers through his mouth extracting chunks of pepperoni. "Not tonight." He jumps up from the couch, escaping into my bedroom, and begins foraging through the dresser drawers. "You could at least wait until I'm not here to steal from me." He looks as if I just produced photographs of his mother coupling with a German shepherd. His hand reappeared , unearthing a small bag of white powder. "What the fuck is that?" "My emergency stash..." "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Don't ever leave your shit in my place...I'm not going down for you, you bastard." "Would you fucking relax? You're a fine, upstanding citizen... No one's going through your shit.. No one will ever know it's there." He clears off a glass coffee table, fishing a half gram onto the dusty surface, chopping it expertly into two long lines.
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A half an hour later I'm at work, talking with a group of grimy Australian nomads. "Phil 'ere only 'as one kidney..." The leader cackles. He has no front teeth. He explains that they travel the world ...a month in Zurich...Berlin...six months partying in Amsterdam, then London. It's their first time in the states...medical laws too strict for their taste. The bunch lease themselves out for medical experiments of an extremely questionable nature. The one called Phil sold his kidney for twenty grand. The leader has had all of the fingers on his left hand removed and reattached. Not a bad profession if you ask me. He adjusts his glass eye in the reflection of a c.d. case. I look up some dance single in the computer for them, gliding past the boss. He is dead man in almost every respect. Vacant eyes and acne scars. Bad jokes always at the expense of others. He seems just likable enough that he avoids being stabbed to death by an irate employee, but beneath this almost likable façade lurks a cynical scum bag who would sell his mother to the first one eyed, Australian nomad off the boat for a dollar fifty in loose change and a used piece of chewing gum (spearmint). For all his idiosyncrasies, his shady past as coke dealer, his trailer park upbringing, his elvis style shooting of his television, his penchant for eating bugs for money during the tedious nightmare of inventory, he was merely a type;The platonic form of Power records management. Beaten down and cowardly, an advocate of the trickle down theory of stupidity, a grown man who had made a tragic error in his youth and who was now forced to cater to the whims of an eternally young and unfortunately deaf audience of frenzied teenagers in perpetuity. I couldn't blame him, there were more where he came from and they were probably worse. It was the job that did it to you...You could struggle against the tide of mismanagement, but like some world weary politician, sooner or later you'd go on the take. There were worse jobs out there but who really wants to find them. Besides, the employees aren't really much better. Record stores attract three kinds of people; the clinically insane, professional slackers in search of a cd collections or junkies who steal the c.d.s to support their habits. A distorted play on urban drift theory yields a perfectly feasible sociological law...the unemployable will either be found in fast food restaurants or record stores...Power in a rather cynical play on apparent tolerance attempts to keep itself young and hip by dragging from the dregs of society. unlike the fast food restaurant, they don't care what you look like...in fact the more deviant your appearance the better. For five dollars an hour they lease your rebellious carcass and put you on parade as the latest in avant garde performance artist, while you complain about the customer's derisive laughter concerning your green hair and septum ring. Who cares (so the cold clinical corporate rationale goes) the old farts expire by the truck load at your appearance making more room for that theoretical thirteen year old girl who really buys all the prepackaged rebellion they're hawking. I go in the back to avoid any future work that might be thrust upon me by circumstance. Instead I'm intercepted by Power's resident Oscar Wilde, Boodles...He assails me with his latest romantic failures; the weekly crush on the latest irrefutably straight male who refuses to renounce his hetero orientation in favor of more manly pleasures. This weeks special has gone so far as to desert Power for the Irish Republican Army. I wipe away his weak tears as he launches into his latest manic tirade; his life long dream of realizing Das Boot as a Broadway musical. I suggest Fitzcaraldo as an alternative, but alas Klaus Kinski is unavailable for the engagement. He insists I behave more responsibly with the time clock...According to his latest calculations I have worked fifteen minutes in the last year. He giggles maniacally and escapes into the men's room singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". I contemplate asphyxiating myself with a shopping bag but change my mind, at least for the moment. I can't tell you the feeling (maybe I don't have to tell you ...maybe you would gleefully toss your entire life in the garbage to work for $5.05 an hour, maybe you already have ) of arriving in that parking lot day in and day out. Like the post office, Power is open regardless if the snow drifts in front necessitate the use of flamethrowers and steam shovels in order to gain entrance. On Christmas day, New Years, Thanksgiving, All hallows eve, the spring solstice, President's day, Judgement day...If the earth swallowed New York, if the Archangel Gabriel was blowing a baroque trumpet concerto up the boss's anus as Yahweh spewed volcanic ejaculations of molten lava down aisle thirteen, there would still be some ass hole at the front desk asking for the latest Spice Girls single; a trail of drool defining a path down his slackened jaw, staring vacantly as the hounds of hell clamp their jaws around his empty bulbous head. All cds 9.99 for an extremely limited time...Please pardon our appearance were remodeling for Armageddon. Legend has it that our illustrious head honcho once attempted to purchase a cd (a cd? Why would a guy who owns a record store shop somewhere else for a cd? Perhaps it wasn't a cd ,it could be anything ,a new hairpiece a lollipop for a hooker girlfriend..) on New Years day, and he was outraged...OUTRAGED ... there was nothing open. From that moment on he vowed that his store would be open 368 days a year till midnight (it actually says this on the stationary).Of course...he gives himself the day off whenever he damn well feels like it, an option the lowly proletariat scum who work for him do not have, dragging their sorry selves to work while their friends or family gather (actually now that I think about it, maybe we're better off) I really shouldn't complain...In fact I'm not really complaining about a record store...My theory is that Power is a microcosm of the larger universe ,a miniature of a misruled creation. I imagine the god of the Hebrews, the Christians, the Manicheans, the Zorastorians, the dead god of Nietzche, the opiate god of Marx; not so much as thundering titan or bearded patriarch, but as bureaucrat...as administrator of the department of metaphysical affairs. The blind idiot god of the gnostics, crouching behind the scarred plastic of some otherworldly equivalent of the DMV counter...telling you've been waiting on the wrong line, that your karmic punch card hasn't been initialed by the right seraphic authorities, the lines running in a double helix stair well winding through millions of miles other dimensional space, resembling nothing so much as a traffic jam of the human spirit as filmed by Jean Luc Godard. Heretics burning their persecutors in the Spanish Inquisition, the roving bands of predatory lambs pouncing on the stray lion, Russian czars criticizing their Bolshevik murderers haircuts, Protestants and Catholics flipping coins to see which one's going to hell ,on off days flinging pork chops at their Muslim line mate, all carrying on their disputes beyond the grave in some magnificent orgy of destruction and chaos that makes their earthly travails seem as a minor warm up for the chaos that follows. It's no wonder the universe doesn't spontaneously collapse into non being ...who knows it might any minute. I'm called to the front by one of the clerks. A shirtless man in his mid twenties discordantly strumming a battered acoustic guitar in a deranged fashion has been inquiring where to get the best acid. The clerk(I can't remember his name, in fact I don't ever remember seeing him before...turn over is so frequent the applicants sometimes leave before the customers do, if their smart) "Well, do you know where to get good acid?" The clerk looks at me and I can almost here the gears grinding in his head. He's about nineteen and hasn't bathed in as many years. To make matters worse, he's wearing as sweater in the middle of summer, and it smells like week old road kill in a microwave oven. I repeat the question and he eventually shakes his head. "Sorry man...No acid here. Try the guys in the video section...Any particular variety of acid?" The guys expression brightens. "Blotter or window pane..." I point across the store and he wanders off. He stops before one of the classical employees wandering back from break, a defrocked Russian orthodox monk and part time pedophile by the name of Reger. He's wearing a Viking helmet to commemorate Wagner's birthday though it's still three months away. He stares at the bare chested man with a perplexed expression, after a moment, directing him again toward the video department. He strolls past me giving me the full nazi salute singing the Liebestod from Tristan & Isolde in a choking raspy tenor. I hear the boss's droll expressionless voice summon me to the back room just in time for me to miss the food truck as it pulls into the front parking lot. I pause before the front door, watching the ebb and flow of traffic on route 80 clotting in chunks of glistening metal ,whirling purposefully across the twisted arterial knots of the overpass at the next exit. The whole world progressing towards some distant goal as if it knew where it was going with unflinching certainty. It's not too late...the doors only twenty feet away. I wouldn't even have to punch out. I could just walk away, after all It's a free country. There are more fundamental rules in operation here I realize heading back to the office...inertia for instance. He's reclining in his leather chair amidst a fractured pile of cd case's and junk mail .I recognize the smile on his face, the I know you fucked up look;the I know your not going to get a raise this year look; the why don't you quit and get a job in telemarketing look. "What's up?" He gestures toward Kathy the A.A, and she escapes out the door, flashing a sympathetic look my way. A pregnant pause. I glance at the cartoon tacked on the wall behind him, a caricature of Jimi Hendrix at a job interview with the caption"So are you experienced" below. "Well you've been bugging me to give you your review...so here it is." He hands me a peace of paper. On the top of the page is a legend with which to interpret the score. A forty designates the rarified heights of unattainable employee perfection. For a moment I mistake the circled number at the bottom for that very number before I realize my mistake. "A four ...a lousy four..." Images flow through my mind in effusive violent torrents. Slasher movie scenarios, describing with erotic precision the removal of my oppressors epidermis with surgical instruments designed by mad men, unfamiliar with the contours of the human body. Glistening steel, heated white hot by acetylene fires. The boiling gelatinous fluid of the exploding eye ball pouring in thin rivulets of pure pain down the veined crevices of freshly inflicted brands on his scarred drooping cheeks. The numbers of my salary screaming forth from the steaming stench of incinerating flesh. The anguished screams supported on the comforting arpeggiated gurgle of urine trailing down his leg. The light from the office neon refracting in the growing pool at his feet, surrounding the desk as if it were a freshly created island. The varnished mahogany streaked with the bright oxygen rich scarlet of his life's blood liberated from the diverted track of a streaming jugular. "Frankly...your not cut out to work in retail...Why should we kid ourselves about this...? Strictly between me and you...I don't like you...I never liked you...If I had been manager when they hired you, you wouldn't have lasted a week...As it stands, I'm just waiting for you to fuck up enough so I can justify getting rid of you..." "You'll never fire me...then you'll have to pay me unemployment and Power doesn't like to pay.." And I'll never quit because that will mean I let you win, I finish ...to myself. "And I suppose you were born to work in retail?" "If your born to work in retail, you might as well put a gun in your mouth." Ah the momentary resurfacing of the corpse of his idealistic youth.. nothing worse then a lapsed hippy. I start toward the door and he let's out a chuckle. "I'm glad my poverty amuses you." "I didn't say I was done." Fortunately the god's intervene. The distorted, fear filled voice of the aforementioned clerk requesting a supervisor. Thankfully .I am the only example of that particular sub species present in the building. "There playing my song." He grunts, dialing the phone, muttering something about finishing his tap dance on my already bruised ego at a later date. "And what did you say to him." Jimmy lights a marlboro, his hand alighting on the moist crotch of his adolescent girlfriend. His usual cronies are slumped in his couch watching jeopardy, obscured by a translucent blanket of stale pot smoke, oblivious to our conversation. "What do you think I said? What can I say?" "I'll tell you what I would have said. I would have said listen you sperm burping ass faced excuse for an aborted fetus, your face looks like somebody dragged it across 90 miles of asphalt ,poured gasoline on it, lit a match and put the fire out with an ax." "Well that's you...I'm not you..." He climbs to his feet, disappearing up the stairs for a fresh libation. I'm left to stare at the carpeting. His girlfriend asks me for a cigarette, which I provide. She's a cute red head, who despite performing an ever lengthening list of menial tasks for her less than attentive boyfriend, was smarter than the scene would suggest. She yells at rat boy for blocking her view of the t.v, a smiling auto lobotomized wretch who was two or three grades behind us in high school, ready as a kamikazi pilot to immolate himself in the service of jimmy's latest whim. He falls over scratching at a submerged black head on his neck, his unwashed curly black hair clinging to the gray shag carpeting like velcro. "Give me your keys ..." Jim fumbles down the last three steps cursing ,spilling the precious drops of his freshly concocted mystery elixir along the floor behind him as if leaving a trail to follow back later on in the evening. "No fucking way man, it cost me four bills last time I let you drive."He replies speaking more to the floor then anyone else. "Rat...you know how I am when I don't get my way." There's a long pregnant pause, punctuated by the rhythmic click of the jeopardy theme in the back drop. Silently Rat boy's hand climbs into the air swaying in the stoned breeze of his muttered protests like a broken flagpole, the keys dangling between the upraised thumb and forefinger.
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The beige 83' Nova harrumphs, lets loose a few hesitant, sputtering farts before spilling over the cub into the path of oncoming traffic. I bite my tongue and close my eye's waiting for the impact that never comes, instead I feel the soft spurt of beer foam soak through my coat sleeve as he cracks open a pint can of lukewarm Guinness. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" "I'm glad you asked...I've come to the conclusion..." He pauses for a second weaving momentarily into the other lane in pursuit of a stray house cat that only narrowly evades certain death. "Where was I...?Oh yeah...I've come to the conclusion that It's impossible to go insane and that I am the only one to have managed it so far..." "Managed what..." "To go insane." "But you just said...?" "I know what I said ...what I mean is an entirely different matter." "Well what the hell do you mean?" "I mean that it's Impossible to go insane in the traditional sense since the world is insane.. therefore it follows that to be sane in an insane world is to be insane in the eyes of the insane so I mean that in the eye's of the world I'm insane but I'm really sane." "According to whom?" "The only sane person in the equation...myself." "You know I've come to the same conclusion myself..." "What do you mean?" "Well I figure ,if I'm stupid enough to get into a car with a maniac like you than I must be just as crazy." His faces seems to throb with unexpressed emotion, but he says nothing to me, instead sticking his head out the window and screaming "I CAN'T GET NOOOOO .SATIISSSSFAAACTTTTTION.I CAAAAAAN'T GEEEEET NOOOOO." He sticks his head back in the car screaming along with the radio until the bubbling chemicals in his brain subside for the moment anyway. "I thought we were going for beer...the liquor stores the other way.? He straightens his windblown hair in the rearview mirror. "My friend...it's time for you to liberate yourself from your oppressors..." "My oppressors...what the hell are you talking about." "That super bitch girlfriend of yours and that fucking dead end loser job." "Look...your not one to talk, at least I'm not a half crazed asshole who sells hash to 8th graders for a living." "I know you look down on me...I can see it in your eye's...look at you man, they tell you what to do and when to do it...you sold you life away to line the pockets of some fat cat...you bitch and complain about your boss but one day soon you'll be that guy." He pulls into a residential area off the highway, pulling with uncharacteristic silence toward the curb motioning for me to be quiet. He leads me over a fence and through a few backyards ,uniformly pristine and boring as if the entire block was ordered from the sear's catalog and shipped in one piece complete with lawn jockeys and optional dog house. A pitbull terrier howls off in the distance awakening it's canine brother's whimpers, like a chorus of angry car alarms, or some cacophonous aleatoric opera..I feel absurdly drawn to follow him as if he were my guide through the landscape of another planet or through the veils of a drug induced nightmare. We stop at a the back window of a house which is of course the exact duplicate of the one's that preceded it save that it is the color of dried bile. In the drive sits a beat up old escort that mysteriously resembles Kim's car. He drags me by my shirt collar to the window, Two people are fucking in the darkness of the unlit room. At first I feel ashamed and embarrassed, but it quickly melts away into a numb rage. From beneath a pale stream of moonlight, a crumbled dress, and the contorted features of her face ,distorted but recognizable even at this distance. I cut back toward the street and climb into the car, not speaking, my teeth clenched so tightly that I can feel the dull pink throb of my heart beat in my temples. Jimmy climbs into the car, starting to speak in that apologetic tone that he could never make sound sincere. I tell him to shut up. "Why the fuck would you show me this...do you get some perverse thrill out of it?" He just shrugs. "If I had told you, you would have called me an asshole...Now if I tell you that I fucked her, I'm just one in a long series of guys..." "WHAT!" "Now don't look at me like that man..." I get back out of the car looking for some large piece of metal that I can bludgeon him to death with. Instead I keep walking out toward the interstate. He begins to shadow me with the car. "Where the fuck are you going...?" "Shopping for c.d's." I reply
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"I've come for my pay." He looks me over appraisingly. "Your drunk..." "Get that bottle of Jim Beam out the bottom drawer and pour us some drinks, I have a proposition for you." He doesn't know where this is going but he dutifully complies. "Alright...let's hear it." "You and me out in the parking lot...if you win you get my final pay, and I walk out of here forever." "And what do you get if you win...?" "The satisfaction of kicking the living shit out of you." He shakes his head. "What's it going to take?" I lay out all the money in my wallet...not much but enough. "O.K. you're on..." He nails me with a cheap shot to the gut and I hit the concrete. I don't feel anything. Blood flows from my broken nose staining my white tee shirt. He doesn't look much better, but he has the gloating look in his face...I grab his balls and bunch him in the jaw. He wobbles a bit but he's still standing. The employees are gathered around us in a circle. Money changes hands, but they're too afraid to lose their jobs to cheer me on. "Hey shit bag...I just want you to know...I've been pissing in your coffee pot every day for the last five years..." Simultaneously, in one last burst of energy, we come at each other, a second later collapsing against the side of the building ,bloodied and broken. Jim, eyes agleam with mischief, collects the cash from my fellow indentured servants as I climb to my feet.. I extend my hand to the boss bu he just grunts. "Keep the money, it looks like you'll need it for reconstructive surgery. "Your still nothing but a loser." "That may be...but I'm the loser who kicked your ass." I turned around and started walking down the highway. Jim ran up behind me gesticulating wildly but I don't think I said anything to him. Eventually he gave up and I was alone, my gaze fixed on the fractured pavement, on the dingy windblown billboards that blotted out the sun in the day. I was alone without a woman or a job or any hopes to weigh me down. I felt alive in the silence of mad universe. return to taf main page |