Walking through town, there’s no limit to what I want and take. I take items from every corner, at every turn there are goods I seize and use up on the spot. I use up men’s bodies. I leave them hollow and sad on the side of the road. I leave them so fucking bummed it’s not even funny. But it’s very very amusing, I’ve come to find.
In the morning I arose from lying face down in the sand. I took myself away from where a series of dogs were tied with ropes, baying at seagulls, and where the people were speaking softly to each other on top of thousands of sandmites milling around their large brown reed mats. Only at Oregon hippie beaches were parking lots more like mall foodcourts in the early afternoon dead hour… I grit my teeth as I passed through the cloud of smoke before me, veering off the rural highway, passing various wrecks on the side of the road, passing the rail yard with dogs swirling around in the dark. I made my way into town as the sun began to rise over the brick retaining wall between the Safeway and the alley on the other side. I dug around in their garbage, rifling through some papers stuck in the corners of a big bread rack. Slipping into the back storage room I disappeared into one or more aisles. Pointedly I yanked down displays around me, breaking cardboard staffs over my knee. “Anything you could imagine,” I yelled, pointing at myself… There were a series of moments at the end of an encounter where the guy fell into a soft tone, his hands became massage flaps and he showed a little of his sensitive side in an effort to get the girl to think of him as not all bad, a nice guy y’know, just a soft public radio voice swathed in corduroy — not gonna hurt anybody, not interested in rape — a grownup, into the give-and-take of love; in his hands a potential white flower that opened under an adoring attentive sun.
I sorted through a box of his mom’s old knick-knacks while he tried to rub my shoulders. If only he could see the expression on my face… but I could see his, in the window (that’s one thing they always forget, say, as you approach a set of automatic glass doors to a business or store: I can still see you, Mr, your reflection, looking at me as I walk away from you.)
I left him after grabbing a few fast food biscuits and a packet of honey butter, two exercise tapes, a bunch of felt appliqués, glass beads, a glow in the dark spider ring, a brown leotard, and some paper flowers. Love is the new gold the man had said… Hot breath and stubble wear holes in spots already taxed from stress, where it ached the most. My pale blue star, my rainbow, how good it feels to know you’re like me… I felt sad, a confused pang for the small pet I could consume visually in one swig. Me, I went on and on, disappearing down into the covers. Something about seeing both the beginning and end of him, the totality in one gulp, made me feel like I didn’t want to be there when the container became problematic, prone to breakdowns — or worse, died with the liquid contents still sitting inside. He got a kick out of it when I cornered him, pinning his body to the wall with a harness. It was amusing because it was so lacking in risk. He exploded out of the hold in an array of pent up maneuvers… Mark my body with this moment forever, I can’t stand it, I’m cut so deep. I know how it is sitting in an old house where horror is magnetically coded on the walls, recorded for all time, how when you walk by the room plays like a cassette tape. Finding a tape as evidence of the crime cannot be denied. Walking through the haunted house my brain operated like a VCR, acting like a remote viewing player as the ghost-show played for me. The organic and mechanical meet here in my body.
These were antique thoughts, marked by a non-specific dread… My first impulse is to go to sleep. My second impulse is to have sex with it and my third impulse is to eat it. That’s how my mind works. But the three are not quite as fixed as you might think; they’ve been boiled down, chiseled out, and refined, painstakingly handcrafted over three centuries resting at the bottom of my brain. The three are like the finest three-line poem chiseled in gold at the foot of a roaring majestic waterfall and I’m sure as hell not giving them up, not for the world. I need them. They’re mine. I’m sure you’ve seen my three pieces of gold flash across the faces of most of this journey, they flashed across my face as I stood in your doorway. I ate pieces of gold like the Spanish forced their heathen children to do. They fell down and died… And in this strange shack, wedged under the glowering scraps of a prehistoric beach cave, your silhouette hung in the doorway. It was as if you’d stolen all sound from within the confines of this space between us in order to trap me here. I cracked up; flies seethed in a vibrant warlike blanket covering every surface, pressing themselves into folds, taking the shape of what surrounded them. You moaned and tore into me, getting more and more psycho on me. Losing your cool, you begged me. You didn’t care anymore. I turned into a piece of enchanted pulp in your arms, falling into a guise that was achingly familiar. You held my head up with both hands and made me look at you while I wavered on the edge of consciousness, going in and out every second, “stay here with me,” you said. I fought passing out, staring hard in one fixed direction. You held me up while I slumped and my knees buckled. Stay here. I fought, passing out; my face fell from your grasp. All I remember from that strange night: crying coming crying coming crying coming, locked in a horrible embrace.
A warlock had found me!
He was so old. So goddamn big and unwieldy. With eyes bigger than his stomach, a neuroses that fueled a huge appetite. His mouth burned for me and I fell inside. I imagined the old man camping out in the mountains, taming a wild dog, coming to rest on the still-sunny side of a baked earthen pallet of dry land under a redwood tree. He sat and told that tree everything, he figured it deserved it. The wolf-dog stared blankly and the old man thought it to be the typical response of all people — including wolves and dogs. He itched feverishly around his eyes with a fingernail. Out many days and feeling a little crazy because of it, he stumbled down the hill and found a woman there cooking at a diner that was so infrequently visited she had run out of most things some twelve days ago. But she made him something and he ate and after that he had her too, in her little room on top of the restaurant. She took and took — so much it scared him. She was crazy too. They put each other into a deep sleep and it has lasted these long winter weeks… He knew he was among the chosen few. Not many could’ve made it this far. But he had come largely without purpose.
He was cursed with sick thoughts. Confused, he left a sachet of his own trimmings of brittle chest hair with the woman as a token of some vague shared meaning she found unclear and downright gross of him. The man felt resolved to his fate on his last day as fully human, part of society. He had barely escaped being burned alive in his mobile home trailer. He ran into the woods with the scraps of turkey jerky and a roll of copper wire, his only remaining possessions, in a bag. His hair was singed and his eyes hurt. His brain felt compressed under a hot black weight. He trudged up the hill and felt like a different person. He paused at the top and took in the expanse below. It was consumed by a thick petrifying smoke. It was only a couple of minutes before he realized it. The whole world can burn.