Holy Water

Holy Water
I.
Engorged on vibes, good and strange, this all black cat--black, thick french braids escaping like
cobras from underneath a wide brimmed black hat, meanwhile flowing black tee shirt falls robelike
to his thighs from where black skinny jeans take over. Thin lip mustache, white white teeth
and equally shiny jewelry, he might be too cool to be admitted outside the New York City limits.
Stop him at the gate, like, “I’m sorry,” militia says, his round young face, thin lips trembling in
the Presence, “but we can’t allow you any further.” And mustachioed, Texas-succession type of
lawman, awkwardly pressed into his grey and black uniform, adds curtly, “You’ve got too much
envy, kid,” but which way is it flowing?
Really
he’s smoking a cigarette, and slow-motion haze of grey matter rising creates an
atmosphere near or past-sacred, the holy of holies on the corner of Canal and Water. Who’s
hotter than HE? they’re asking seriously, in print, word of mouths of pedestrians, passers-by,
tenants from windows and rooftops-- “they advertised a view, sure did--we paid out the nose for
it--but look at this.” --“Worth every penny.” --“Tell me about it.” -- “Worth every penny, every
cent...”
That’s the picture...and a floral aura precedes his Presence and lingers... Today, it’s warm
but he doesn’t have anything to do with it, of course. If you can get him to come to your party
goddamn...
II.
A lady in white either fell from the sky or grew from and chewed through a cactus, needles and all,
stepping gingerly once birthed or freed, blood in her teeth, Mexican wind on her skin. She’s found her
people, or they found her, coming from all regions of the earth’s surface, a Swede by aeroplane, a
Hungarian by blimp, a Nigerian by boat, and Wisconsin wolf boy on his own bare feet. They meet her and
her nymphs in an enclave, palm covered little ridge, down from which they retire naked to the beach,
fanned by the tails of subservient coyotes. In the desert, an oasis. From the eaves, kneeling penitent on
baby cacti, a brown haired peeping Tom with bright eyes. She will summon him in time when he
surpasses pubescence, and who will touch who? Which way does the magic flow: his basking, her glow?
His innocence her nourishment? At the point of contact
in Sector 6,789, star 76A will cross and unnaturally, irrationally linger head on with Star 8,809ZZ
in Sector 4,002,773 before they do go ahead, spinning along their race track parabolas. But cross, from
who’s perspective?
Underneath the Catholic cathedral on 5th Av, she glides along, and who knows if her
dress blows gently at its heavenly hem from an off-Island breeze or is it the vent at her feet? Floating
above the surface of the earth, or is she, this New York pedestrian, held down by the City’s atmosphere,
sometimes smoggy, and always clustered by things seen and unseen. If you can get her only to look, or
glance for once into her immediate present, preaches a fervent yellow helmet-headed Servant, then that’s
all you really need in life, eh?
Are the gates of heaven closed for you baby, cuz--wait, that’s not how that goes...
A Flechazo, no? sez Richardo, and clutches pedantically at his stone-aching heart. In his family,
they know her as the woman who ensnared the husband of La Llorona, but oh, on second look, the glaze
just on the edge of that indifferent glare, and the white dress too--that might be the murderess herself. He
kisses his cross and wishes buena suerte in your sufferings, Senora, before revving up the jackhammer.
He pounds the street she just passed into rubble. Gary Goya, the OG construction spectator whistles his
well-practiced and famously loud whistle, amazingly above his partner’s racket, and hopes that she heard
him on her eternal search for lost children, or secret peace, or just less trouble.

A lace-like white tatter of a wool blanket drapes over the face of a resting homeless man, asleep
to the heavy foot traffic of the street. His baseboard, the Sign: Uptown 6. The green rapports of the steel
portal to under the street, rise like a baseball grandstand above him.
A RED HAND demands you stop. Or suggest it at least to the less adventurous Jaywalkers. A
newfound congregation gathers for the fifty year old man, bald from years of tearing his hair out, prophetstyle,
wearing stylishly cardboard garb decrying the end of the world for your soul unless you take these
steps. Repent, turn around--
--And get get back to your roots! ad libs a high school rap star prospect, and keeps the flow going
as the rest of his posse bangs on the green steel railing above the ‘z’s of the homeless man’s weary head.
To fall into dreams in the street, with everyone around you? Now, that’s skill. And a generous helping of
the LORD’s heavy hand. Up against the pole, a wide-tie wearing Wall Street hot shot motherfucker leans
and shouts on the phone with who knows who but it’s better than you’ll ever do. Unaware in the middle
of it all, a pair of tourist couples, would-be yuppies if not a decade too old, standing there…
This little number goes:
I have heard it from the Most High
Ya Hear, that all these motherfuckers wanna know is you or is not a real nigga
That God Himself, who has whispered in my ear--
yes, we’ve been blessed alright. We were praying for a miracle--this that trill shit I got it from the oracle,
this that hear-it-once-you-won’t-forget-it-shit--it was horrible. He was hardly breathing, the doctor said he
probably wasn’t going to make it--and God, yes He will bring down His mighty hand upon all he deems
unrighteous, but the righteous shall be saved. And I have been made righteous by the Lord, and God has
spoken His voice into my very eardrum--You know all these fucking socialists after the money I make,
that I work hard for. We closed at 70 on the dollar today, and you’re going to tell me how to spend my
money, I can rent out all of Nantucket for all I care. I’m an American and I won’t pretend like I’m in
Switzerland for God sake--and after some worship, and well, it was my wife who saw It. The image of a
man holding a little boy in his hands, angel wings draped and wrapped, she said, over his shoulders and
around our son--that’s what a true Patriot would do, what America is really all about--
(Here, the sleeping man’s nose clogs and his heavy breaths snore out like a harmonizing kazoo.)
--and He came down to me and whispered Truth in my ear, and handed in my dreams the key to all of life,
proclaiming, “Shit, I got money I don’t know whatta do with. I got hoes riding up’n’down my dick’n’shit.
You got your boys lying to ya, say that they hate my shit, but it’s what they bumping when they grinding
on them ugly chicks--” Yes, I made a lotta friends, prolly make couple enemies and the LORD shall make
the sinners suffer if not from the diseases today then the fires of hell tomorrow, and He shall rescue and
provide sanctuary to all those who call and at that very moment they doctor came in and said our son beat
the odds. Most kids die, yes. Truly a miracle and he’s maybe doing coke in a NYU dorm bathroom, yes,
we’re very proud, proud of all my boys who made it, and proppin’ up all the others who haven’t, and God
shall Reign, from now and forever. Amen.
Ha-choo! The man on the ground awakes by his own bodily function, just in time to see yet
another herd leave. He blinks unassumingly.
III.
Paul demands to drink with only good intentions; yes, that’s when Petey decided the kid was
cool and not lame, that he was in and not out. He’d heard stories of people who had parties
where only those with innies, (no outies!) that is, belly buttons, were permitted to enter, and
what? Copulate and preserve a line of inny belly buttoned society--but the doctors’ snips have
the say, wonder if they know that. Well, years earlier Paul’d been down in the City, first time as
a college student, just as Petey was moving out.
The point? Pauly’s first night on this revolving door of a city was Petey’s last for some
time--some type of yarn-of-the-fates paralleled weaving story to be told here, or put more
realistically? A chance encounter.

Petey was fairly drunk when this average attractiveness plain old beanpole white kid,
high school “Colorado” friend of Taylor’s shows up in his soon-to-be former living room. The
only thing notable about him was how little of him there was. Everyone was drinking heavily, in
spite of Midterms, trying to forget, or at least appear to forget that Petey would be leaving soon.
And so, the apartment gets appropriately trashed. Looking for some more destruction, inward or
outward though? or acceptance maybe, Petey and Pauly and Tay, under 21 years old, and Alex
and Dylan, arrived at a place off 33rd that didn’t card. Not too much of that night, they can
remember, but there was definitely the presence of an Irishman in all their memories. A UN
member? one of them remembers and verifies the next day. He, the Irishman, was so drunk, he
stumbled and shouted at them to, “Enjoy eet, whal you’re young lads,” and falling backwards,
making fists, forgetting to pick a fight, then complaining, “You Americans are fuggin’ soft.”
“But, Monsieur, I em Francaise,” said Tay. “Faggot!” He belched, stumbling backwards. “What
is alcohol? What’s intoxication? I thought I knew before I met this guy,” Petey said to Paul.
“Let me introduce you to a famous jazz singer,” the Irishman said. As if she’d been
standing, waiting behind him the entire time, (had she? somewhere in the shadows assuredly)
this woman appeared. She looked like an over-the-phone customer service rep. She had mousy
brown hair, unfashionably tousled into a shoulder length doo. She smiled just as sheepishly.
Like, ‘We both--we all know I’m no famous jazz singer.’ But the Irishman, without comments to
the contrary, kept protesting that she rilly was famous, alright.
The important thing was that the night culminated in, sometime after the consulate or
whatever and his jazz singer for the night tumbled together head first into the welcoming crib of
shadowy blankness inside a taxi cab at the curb, an overturned pitcher. Congratulating something
neither of them can remember, Petey missed Paul’s outstretched hi-five-me hand and slapped a
pitcher straight-on off the table and onto the floor. The Bud Light splattered nearly as far as the
shards of glass. A 35 year old man in glasses and a hat, Steve Bartman look-alike, came by and
told them not to worry about, really, come by whenever, and bring their friends, with a wink that
said he knew their ages well. Cheryl, if her name tag wasn’t lying, too old to be putting up with
drunk 19 and 20 year olds, forced a smile and swept the glass up. She was the only bartender
there too, poor woman.
V.
There are some mythic landmarks in Williamsburg. Let me enlighten you. The
Barbershop of the Most “Long-On-The-Top-But-Short-On-The-Sides” Haircuts Ever Given in a
24 Hour Period, only made more impressive (right?) by the fact that they offered free whiskey to
the barbers and the customers, so that by the time barber, Matt D’Antoni, stumbled out of The
Barbershop of the Most “Long-On-The-Top-But-Short-On-The-Sides” Haircuts Ever Given in a
24 Hour Period, he had given over 170 cuts at half price, part of a promotional bring-a-buddyhalf-off-sale,
and amassed an alcohol in the bloodstream count upwards of 1.0 and a hand cramp
so severe he had to visit a masseuse right away to work out the tightness for over 4.5 hours. The
first goddamn masseuse was dripping sweat, and making aggravated grunts and squeals when he
finally tapped out, and his colleague shuffled in, face severe like a closer in game 7. The second
guy had to perform a move illegal since ’78 where he dug the sharp point of his heal into
D’Antoni’s upturned palm until they both screamed, and the muscle buckled and twitched like a
tough sonovabitch catfish thumping on land, and finally relaxed. There were, understandably,
tears of relief from all parties involved.
And then there’s the Most Urinated On Alleyway Wall in All of Williamsburg ‘bout a
third of the way down Grand Street, a dark little space after the gauntlet of bars that deters all

sober noses with an impressive olfactory Force. The United States government is looking into
weaponizing it. It’s been known to wake nearby residents in the middle of the night to episodes
of gagging, vomiting, and the shrieking of veteran, Private O’Malley who sometimes will even
cry “the stench of death” and proceed to suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms through the rest
of the night. But legendary as these are, the mythic landmark I want to talk about with you today
is the Only Un-Defaced Sign in Brooklyn.
Not a scratch. To be truthful, it’s only been up for 20 months. Regardless, it’s a feat, and
an irrefutable anomaly among the rest of Brooklyn signs that all have some combination of
scratches, spraypaint, stickers, blood, paints, sharpie. It’s a stop sign, often guarded by a
behemoth mutt who’s leash is wrapped around its pole, who gets ornery, at the least, and savage
at the most, and may have an undocumented case of rabies, slobbering and foaming manically
and growling and snapping his jaws at anyone who breaches the leash’s radius. Clearly, this is a
notable deterrent of any would-be graffiti/vandal/promoter, but the fact is, Val Johnson, the
mutt’s owner works her eight hour shift and takes him home after, leaving a 16 hour period of
free access to the Only Un-Defaced Sign in Brooklyn. The only explanation for its current
mythic state rest on some severely suspicious grounds of reality, but all feature some kind of
metaphysical Will of the sign’s, or an Anonymous Protector that keeps at bay those with a
rattling spraypaint can, or sticker or sharpie posed, and returns the defacing tool back to their
pocket. Whenever someone approaches with these intentions, they end up leaving, spookily,
thinking about the weather, or the Yankees, or the plot of Batman Begins and if Bale or Affleck
will make a better Bruce, and then, hours later when they’re out of striking range, blocks or
Burroughs away, they will remember and be unable to explain why they didn’t go ahead and
leave their mark. It’s this strange mystic thing that all the Astrologists or Horror-flick fans I
know give a wide birth, at least a couple blocks.
One morning, as Daniel Craig is waking up from anxious dreams, he discovers that in
bed he’s let his mustache grow a bit too long, and thus, now a bit uncomfortably, the hairs itch
the skin above his upper lip. He rolls in his king-sized bed, and through the million-count
obsidian sheets, and the comforter, and flings lightly his arm to the other side of the bed.
“Rach?” he says. He exhales. He cranks himself up slowly with his arms. Rachel Weisz must
have beat him out of bed, and sure enough, he can hear the timid grate and clang of shifting pots.
He rubs his hand over his face like he’s smoothing a mask, and when he removes it, he ends up
staring at the portrait of a woman sitting erect with a fur boa around her beck and a fur hat atop
her head. His eyes are still burning a bit from a long night’s sleep, having uncharacteristically
slept in until 11, and his back a bit stiff--a result of a minor fall during a Spectre stunt. He had
sprang up off the ground, and grunted, “Let’s do it again” before assistants and producers could
rush over and ask him if he was alright. It’s really nothing. He swings his legs out of bed and
walks to the bathroom.
In this bathroom, built for a Bond, Daniel Craig turns to the sink and mirror combination
to his left. He takes in his face wildly, and opens his mouth in grotesque curiosity. He proceeds
to scream the auditory equivalent of a question mark, but manly and coarse, but completely
horrified. He’s flung his hand over his mouth, the horror. Like, a phenomena so startling, it
reduces a man, a famous movie star and symbol not of courage but an indifference to fear, to a
child in a dark nightmare bedroom. He’s afraid to remove his hand. Overnight, he had grown a
thin black mustache, its ends twirling and circularly curled ends. It’s an exact replica of a 20’s
era villain in a silent film. He tries to tear it off, and screams in pain. Only one hair has been
ripped out in the attempt, and little blood oozes from the pore. No progress, only sadistic

evidence of the depth of his grotesque metamorphosis. The second new metamorphosis, he’s
unable to deal with psychologically thanks to a lifelong history of dreams in which his teeth fall
out or are terribly unaligned, or rest dully with a tint of yellow akin to a heroin addict.
Underneath his hand, Daniel Craig has lost one of his front teeth now filled by the void-like
black of their absence, and worst of all, his canines have been whittled to a sharp point, taking
the shape of triangles. He collapses onto the tiled floor, squeezing his eyes, and trying to wake up
from what is definitely reality.
VI.
Skinny Dennis, that’s the bar to be tonight. A couple Bushwick kids, guy and girl, take large
slurps of the house special whiskey and sweet tea served in Mason Jars, stand in the squashed
center, peanut shells all around, weighing their options. “If I could just get laid tonight, then...I
just wish there were people here who wanted to hook up with us,” the girl, authentically Texan
accent at this Austin-inspired jam-band bar, says above a Jimi Hendrix noodling guitar. If the
music hadn’t been so loud, impairing almost all forms of communication, then maybe it would
have been a hint to those around, but as such, the formation of a few choice dicks around her,
and a selection of pussy around the guy was more like an answer to prayer than anything else.
The red lighted atmosphere, the heat of the jostling crowd, the young Brooklynite uniforms they
wore, one could say, were all contributing factors as well.
They’ve worked their way through the old country hits, Cash mostly, and on to other
crowd favorites. Now, the 35 year old lead singer in a ratty old and faded purple tee shirt is doing
a groaning ’60’s Dylan, “Do youuu wannaaa...” and the crowd, yelling off-pitch, jumps the
timing, “Mmmake a deal!”
A twenty-four year old brown-haired white kid, sharp and bright eyes meanders just as
drunk, but more attentive, and doing so, leans his head out briefly scanning the room at all times.
He’s with friends, sure, but it’s too loud to chat anyway so they mostly filter from the
concentrated pack by the tiny excuse for a stage back over to the bar where thick armed girls
with bangs as short as their crop tops tend coolly at break-neck speed.
The search doesn’t go unsuccessful. In time, he’s bumped into a tanned Australian girl
with jet-black hair, wearing heels, like, four inches high, which is quite a feat given the limited
standing space, and stilts her to 5’4” on a good day. He likes her accent. She tells him he’s got
good style. Not so straightforward as that, but might as well be. They end up having a smoke
together outside. All around new friends swap which Midwestern town they moved to the City
from like each existed as a disparate section of Abraham’s bosom, before accepted, they made it
here, to heaven on a loud and dimly lit cross-section in Brooklyn.
He can see in her the lady dressed in white. His eyes open to deeper dimensions, pulling
the pupil outward, while stretching its tubular device inward through the eyewires to the V1 of
the brain, something strange maybe going on here. They take turns pinning each other to the
brick wall while lips tremble, close and open again, tongues flick and taste, intrude and receive,
perform and submit, either side. He wants what she has: the youth, the beauty, the style. God,
she’s so hip. You think she reads? Reads more than me, I bet. To have her on your arm, by your
side, for people to see you with her, that’s not enough actually... He wants...If I could
just...then...
He can feel that all-familiar asymptote approaching in his mind’s eyes like the target in
Skywalker’s visual processor. The closer he comes to it, the more he tries to push forward past it,
pressing. Is she too, pushing into his? Would he even know if she had?--her mind’s conscious
somehow superimposed without affecting his normative function? Or is there any other way?

The line breaks. He’s passed the gap for the first time since the beach. A high school
girlfriend, sex in the sand, and an uncanny out of body experience. Clearer still, now, he can look
through her eyes. Embodiment, no way.
VII.
Val wears a white tank top, showing defiantly, or at least carelessly, her black sports bra
underneath. There’s some moisture on her brow from the kitchen steam and heat. She holds a lit
cigarette in one hand as she picks up Droog’s water bowl. She likes that she can look through the
steam and the mirage-incurring heat off her grill-top on which she pushes eggs and batter and
homefries around, and see her mutt out there, strutting around like a prize-fighter, just daring
anyone to come close. As soon as she unties him, Droog surges, and removes any slack from the
line as he pulls her along, that is, until he finds another post, sniffs it, and relieves himself. But
he only releases a little spray at a time. If there’s another dog in view down the street, Val can
predict exactly where she will be waiting as Droog cases the spot, circling and sniffing the wall
or post and ground, maybe considering how much he needs to release to properly mask the other
dog’s scent and mark his territory without depleting his own source. Then, he raises his leg and
goes at it.
Val is pretty psychically fascinated with Droog, and perceives a depth of understanding
and feeling unnatural for a dog behind his caramel eyes, and suspects he’s the reincarnated spirit
of a great leader, who’s been relegated to the physical body of a dog, serving time for taking
exorbitant license of human lives. Like Winston Churchill maybe. Droog, with what Val thinks
is a self-awareness of his impulse behind his peeing, will always look backwards down the street
after putting his leg down, making sure no dogs are following him, with their own scents bottled
up in their bladders.
She’s only a couple steps off from the post today, when for the first time ever, she
wonders why she never sees Droog marking this post as his territory, but soon she’s carried off
by Droog’s muscular legs, and uncharacteristically, she notices how nice it’s out today, that
gentle breeze and the sun, just lovely...
It takes four hours for Rachel Weisz to coax Daniel Craig out of his locked bathroom,
and knows that the psychological barrier will take even longer. Outside the door, they’d gone
back and forth, he telling her she can never know, nor would she ever believe if she were to see
this most horrific and fantastical occurrence for anyone to ever be subjected to, and she assuring
him that she knew already. Finally, after a series of sobs growing louder and sharper, Daniel
Craig opened the door for her with a towel around his head like a veil, before slumping back into
a wedge-like shape between the bathroom floor and the wall.
“It’s okay, Daniel,” she says. She comforts him by running her hand up and down the
muscles of his back. “You can show me. I will love you no matter what.”
“It’s hideous, and unnatural,” he cries, “Why would this ever happen to anyone? God!”
Rachel exhales. “Wait here,” she says. She lifts herself off the bathroom floor and stands
before the mirror. She prepares herself, gathering her own psychological sanity. She lowers her
face parallel to the sink, and take out her contacts. She looks at herself--an image she doubts she
will ever get used to: her eyes are bright red, and without pupils. Two near perfect red circles.
“Look,” she says.
Daniel Craig pulls the towel from the top of his head and down, until its edge rests over
his nose, covering his face. “My God,” he says, “How long have you been like that?”
“The eyes? I’ve had the eyes since Agora. So, 2009? I think.”
“You have more?”

“I’ve had the teeth since Brother’s Bloom.”
“The teeth are the worst,” Daniel Craig moans.
“Then you don’t have it so bad,” Rachel says. She returns to the sink and turns on the
faucet. She wets a bar of soap and holds it to her face. She closes her eyes for an extended
moment, then begins. She scrubs her left cheek. The bar stains with an abundance of make-up.
“I’ve had this since ’98.”
She turns to him. He drops his towel in shock, and opens his deformed mouth. There
is on her cheek a sloppily drawn penis tattoo. Its head is directed downward, and two lines shoot
out towards her mouth.
“My God,” Daniel Craig says.
VIII.
Taylor shapes plaster statues and music alike, as it’s been said, and in the dexterity of
each, he forms structures, expressions, limbs and limbic levels even, and bending body parts with
undulations, skipping heartbeats as dead as concrete unpulsing ones but the illusion remains.
Impressions of tragedy as subtle facial twitches, under a cool atmospheric vibe, white noise
kinda cosmic whirrings goings on, they lay back on a chill vibe demeanor. It’s all intentional.
“David Bowie birthed, you could say, and killed Ziggy Stardust, why can’t I? It’s been done
before, it’ll be done again. It’s been done before, it’ll be done again...”
Throughout all of time, no one, absolutely no one has take the amount of time he does to
write a text response, and as he lounges in the hammock, sternly laconic in his thinking, near
sleeping, racking all his circuitry for connections, witty or no, to respond with a pun. It’s who
he’s built up to, with her, her especially, but others and any contradiction a blaspheme to the
person of Taylor Pope. His beard trimmed, he twiddles his thumbs between the loops of his black
overalls. He’s sweating into them in the summer heat.
“I don’t even want to do it for myself, to feel cool,” he says about Ziggy, about himself,
certain details he plans to promote, others to hide, some to fabricate, but cover most with some
ambiguous mist. “The people don’t engage exclusively with the music. People need Ziggy, need
me to be a certain way, to get them where they need to be, to youknow get off on the music.”
Laughs throughout.
FOR WASHINGTON H’TS. BRONX AND QUEENS TRAINS USE UNDERPAnts.
NO PASS: Assaulting MTA New York City Transit subway personnel is a felony punishable by
up to 7 years in prison. Year of the Monkey, it’s what you know but who you know, it’s not.
Petey says he’ll cut his hair. A modern day Sampson? sez Paul. during or at the end of his
first exhibition. He’ll like silently take a chair and whether or not people clear a space for him, or
just keep on drinking the free beer, that would be preferably, he says, his assistant will start
cutting off his hair. Like the altering of the persona? sez Taylor. just like to be weird like that.
People have done much more. People in art school have like competitions who can be the
weirdest motherfucker in those bins of the looney variety.
Petey had an interviewer over the other day. A friend of a friend no big deal, sez Petey.
and she forgot that she was coming over and he did his normal thing and entered the all-toowelcoming/all-too-familiar
arms of the Blackout, which at this point was pretty much
interchangeable with Satan, to whom, either, Petey often exalted praise. She came in and he was
doing that thing, according to the well-written prospective piece, where his eyes get squinty and
he smiles slyly about basically anything that’s said. Given the circumstances, the fact she got
anything out of him was like pretty fucking stellar journalism skills, all agreed. Not to mention,
Petey enlisted Alex’s help to tell his life story, his background, family tree, and apparently, take

as much creative license he needed/wanted to. So as it is now, Petey’s most formative art
experience came from contact with his grandmother in FL, except that Petey told her after it’s all
lies. So the whole thing is on pretty shaky terms as far as facts but who needs em. As the
interviewer duly noted, having seen his art and becoming enraptured in a fascination with its
creator, and scheduling at least part two of a series, in which Petey plans to be his relatively more
sober self.
IX.
Typically, Val takes Droog straight home, besides of course the daunting number of pit
stops on the way. Today though, she figures, “Such a nice day. Might as well really take it in at a
nice park.” So, they arrive at Fort Green park, where Val takes a lounging seat on a grassy hill
underneath a blossoming cherry tree. She lets her eyes close and leans back, receiving the
warmth of the sun. She hears the playful yips of dogs playing around her. She wants to let Droog
run free but she’s afraid he’ll kill, again. She cracks her eyelids and sees that he’s sitting on his
haunches, attentive, yet calm. There is no strain on the leash. She lets go.
Droog starts off slowly, trailing his leash behind his jaunty steps. He trots around,
circling the other dogs, but only sniffing good-naturedly. His behavior is so unnaturally calm and
passive that Val closes her eyes and naps like she’s never napped before. In the lightness that
infiltrates her lids, so that she sees pink, Val imagines blossoms blooming and losing their petals
to a gentle wind, over and over again.
She comes to, in a sense, on the walk home, when a hellaciously putrid smells punches
her. Droog, awakens too, goes apeshit, barking through his snapping jaw as he bolts from her
side. Val looks down curiously at her empty hand. She takes a timid step, then another. Then, as
if she’s only now realizing what’s happening, she sprints, following him down the street and
further into the Odor. He disappears into an alleyway. She slows down at its mouth, realizing it
as the Source, but courageously follows him in. Val watches as Droog aggressively pisses his
entire tank onto the wall.
As the clock strikes 3 am, which might as well be the Cinderellian midnight for NYC,
Michael C. Schmidt is poised with his sharpie to the face of Kevin Hart in an otherwise empty
subway stop. The Express 4, or 5 fucking flies by through the middle tracks, with science fictionlike
whirring and clanging. The world is more absurdly wonderful in ways that appear normal
the closer you pay attention to the basest of sensations, Michael thinks. The tip of his sharpie
makes contact to the face, and braces up against his hand. What to write, what would be funny?
Almost unconsciously, he start the circular, mushroom head of a penis. Before he rounds his way
up to the shaft though, Michael hears the staticky sound of an old school hip hop beat, growing
louder step by descending step. His tip is now motionless.
Eyes askance, Michael sees a figure, naked besides a pair of whitey-tighties, carrying the
burden of a boombox on his shoulder, no straining. Michael turns his head and looks at the
stranger straight on. The man has the dark complexion of a Mediterranean Jew, and holds in his
other hand a can of spraypaint. He turns and nods his head in acknowledgement to Michael, and
the beat of “You Got What I Need.” He has a full beard, and long hair, pinned to his ears with a
crown of thorns. “Oh baby youuu, you got what I need...”
Halfway between the two exits, Jesus puts down his boombox. He flips his arm around in
a circular motion, part art-preparation, part dance move. He spraypaints a line into the oncewhite
tiled subway floor. He skips back and forth along the line. By this point, Michael is, for
good reason, totally fucking transfixed. He’s dropped his sharpie by his side.

“Who among you who is blameless, may draw the first penis!” he yells. He hops back
and forth across the line, with his hands on his hips. “Who among you have not already drawn a
dick on a wall, much less a face?”
He spraypaints the floor in beautifully lines, committing names into the college-ruled
lines of the tiles. After each name, he dabs. He writes Michael C. Schmidt, and the sharpie falls
out of Michael’s hand. Jesus whips, and then he ne-nes.
X.
After gallery perusal in which a American-born Iranian artist painted images of her never-seen
“home”land, Pauly and Petey were headed along Delancey for a favorite old bar of his. Iggy’s.
“Interesting how the gallery guy came over and like, filled us in with the narrative of the show.
In my mind my old New Criticism lit professor screaming ‘only the text speak to what the piece
means!’ the whole time. Course, it’s gotta be a bit different for visual art, the way the piece is
processed like, almost instantaneously.”
“That’s the thing of it, man. When you read a book you don’t actually get the author
myth all the way out of your head ever.”
Pauly took a drag of a cig, threw his flowing dark brown locks over his head, and winked.
“Would you ever do that? Or have anyone ever do that for you, you know, keep a little
separation. Seems like anything would be a little on the nose?”
“I mean, you don’t want to give them too much, but you want to give them something.
And it’s silly, but it’s the dumb game of it. But also, just give them enough of a narrative to get
them looking, framing it, something, and get them to engage, whatever. Music money art
fashion.”
“Fusic funny fart fashion.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
Right before they turned down the street for the final stretch, Petey pointed up at a
grotesquely square and brown building, discrete among the lower two stories and the
atmosphere. “That’s where I used to live as a Freshmen. And I used to come to this bar whenever
SC played.”
From the sky they turned their heads and entered the bar. In the dim-lit bar, highlighted
only by dingy orangish lights, they assumed a couple of rickety stools by the wooden counter,
trailed with crumbs of pretzels. A few scattered voices, excited shouts from an arcade game in
the back corner as deep-cut punk rock played fairly heavy on the straining speakers.
“I used to sit back there,” Petey craned his head back and pointed to the table by the
window, barely in the bar at all. “They’d let me come in even though I was, like, 19, and I’d
order my coke and watch the game.”
The tv screens weren’t like the Murray Hill wall-to-wall full-migraine plasmas, but little
pre-digital cubes perched precariously at a downward angle. Grain and waves rolled down the
screen, jumping back and forth at intervals, as the Mets pushed on towards the playoffs in late
September.
The bartender wore a faded grey ball cap. Probably forty-five years old. “This guy’s the
best,” Petey said, “I doubt he remembers me, you know, this place gets going pretty good.”
Sure enough, he was the best. He filled a glass up with pretzels for them, that was
normal, but he riffed along as they, not even drunk yet, went: “is this organic? My bowels only
take the best?” and “this is gluten-free, right? No, I’m not intolerant, I just don’t like the taste,”
and “theze preztels iz grass fed, of course?” So many to the point, who knows who said which,

or who was even talking. Better yet, he gave them a round on the house, which was accumulating
quicker than either Pauly or Petey anticipated.
Drunk, Paul tried to talk shop about the collaboration with Peter. “Nah, that’s not quite
right”s and “Yes, and”s, “Yes, but”s and “No, but”s and all these ideas smashing up against each
other like an I-90 pile-up. Not to mention, in the later rounds both excused themselves midsentence
to take a piss on multiple occasions. Each time, Petey took some stickers of his graffiti
tag and stuck somewhere along in his journey. After enough, Paul just found himself saying,
“Exactly” like it was settled.
They were talking about sports and fathers intermittently when Paul finally noticed how
high his tab would be. “Yikes.”
Then, from behind, where Petey used to sit and watch USC football, a voice said,
“Peter?” Petey was too drunk to register, or maybe he just didn’t hear it. Paul said, “Someone’s
calling for you,” and gestured that way.
Paul only turned his head to look as Petey walked over and high-fived this tall boy sitting
at the edge, and two girls at the perpendicular meeting of the booth, all young 20’s, well and
weirdly dressed as the best of them. Petey and the boy were catching up, which meant it was
mostly the boy talking and laughing as Petey tried to form adequate syllables, much less
pertinent answers. Paul finally came over, and Petey and him slid in as the others scootched over.
Paul ended doing a lot of the talking as Petey proceeded to take all his stickers with original
hand-drawn tags TM, and place them on the wooden booth.
Minutes later, a square-shaped bouncer with long black hair came through like
Hansel+Gretel on stickers like breadcrumbs, holding a fist full of them when he stood over Paul
who couldn’t help but laugh, as he, the bouncer, sternly leaned over him and ripped them off the
wood near Petey.
“Sorry,” Petey said, and joined him in ripping off the stickers. Their hands inadvertently
touched.
That, and the street air on their way out, seemed to have a sobering effect. On the way
back to the bus stop, Petey said, “That girl with the bleached hair took a picture of me when I
was Xanaxed out and put it on Instagram. Like a week later, I came across it, and--It was...”
“Seeing yourself in that surprising way. Must’ve been surreal,” Paul said. He cocked his
head. “Not surreal. What a dumb thing to call it. But something...”
“It was weird,” Petey nodded.
The two stopped at a spectacle: A ten by ten foot pop-up shop of sorts. There were only
five or so shirts hung up on the back wall, and a big white old-fashioned register with no one
manning it. They went in and looked around. A camera blinked from the corner of the wall and
corner.
“I feel like it’s a social experiment, but that just means they’re asking me to take it,” said
Paul.
“Music Money Art Fashion.”
XI.
The Swede’s gloves are pristine leather, his belt snakeskin, the leather for lining his boots fleecy
white like a lamb. He stands like an explorer when he turns conqueror. Master of language with
one foot planted on boulder at the edge of a cliff. Namer of regions, or savers of peoples.
Beneath, animals trod on under the gun of men in gray uniforms towards an industrious
smokestack ship anchored off the land. Somewhere the woman in white is sobbing blood, fingers
cut anxious with open sores, hair torn. Or she’s staring off indifferently, happily as her

arechested handmaiden braids her hair while commodo dragons perform a tribute dance in
which one pretends to offer itself up as a sacrifice. He shouldn’t care anymore, either way. He
made it away living. So who, tonight over drinks and post-coital smoke, will be Adam? And who
will play Noah and could they be one in the same? The transition from star to human frame came
not without a litany of concessions. Learning names and skin, the two have prepared a Retrouille.
It’s the second date since Skinny Dennis and already she tells him she’s a Taurus, who
wants to be Pisces, who fucks like an Ares, she says. He, he guesses, would be and is a
Saggitarius. And that’s like, cool with her but she can’t see that kind of pairing lasting. “Give us
your best wine, what’s it a Californian?” And that, and its permutations of years and regions are
deciphered in detail, yet unregistered by him.
Maybe they exhumed him from a pyramid, pointed so directly to cosmic points, that is
constellation connect-the-dot eyes, or just a hazy glow? When unearthed, perhaps, wrapped tight,
and kept so fresh and so clean most certainly. Death inside the triangle by Non-Euclidian
standards, and without? Without, there is break from form, and each syllable he mutters produces
near quantum effects half-based on the mind of the perceiver.
In other pyramids, named for their slice of existence, Kingdom Animalia, as if its order
were for some final purpose... Here and now, there’s really only humans and dogs in the
Concrete Jungle. All other species are intruders or visitors for anomalous spectacle. Besides, for
sure, the rats and pigeons, but those two separate Kingdoms of their own, between which there’s
been no peace for hundreds of years.
When the preacher shakes the last of sunlight from his skin, he flips his cardboard
around. He speaks of Retribution. His hair grows back near instantaneously, and the flavor of
contrite sympathy removed, replaced by a new fervor, spit-flying anger.
Night time in the summer-immersed still simmering City means that only a few less
humans number the streets, and the preacher’s parishioners move along, more transient now.
Like common water, un-distilled. A bike messenger smirks on by, wearing short cut-offs, black
tank, tight satchel, and tattoos, one of Kurt Cobain’s face complete with realistic 5 o clock
shadow and saintlike aura of light depicted in thin ink-lines extending from his head. He too,
flows confidently through. The deluge features also some high school girls on their way back to
Queens snapping at each other, like, “na na, if she feel like she pull that kinda shit on me, nooo,”
adding mms and oohs in groovy tonal pitches, extensions to fit the sing-song scansion. “She
might think she one of us but, mm, no uh-huh, get out biiiitch.”
Nocturnally, the preacher speaks more calculating. Almost scientific, or civic, like
Nehemiah and his righteous Divorce, splitting all according to their kind.
So God will remove the wheat from the chaff and then the chaff from the homo-chaff and
they shall be burned at varying degrees and those sitting at the left side will be removed from
those sitting at the right side of God and from there, they shall come two by two in their sin.
Even in chaos, in sin, there is classification. The Heathen.
Approach the Heathen. Wave for us, won’t you? He points caustically at a passer-by
Adorned in Black, who dismisses him with indifference. His Presence incurs a surge in the
preacher’s heart.
See within him the currents of skepticism and hedonism which have plagued our nation,
and he, he wears them like a coat of honors. Promiscuity and aggrandizement of their Sin. Each
based on the prototype of selfish autonomous myth. There’s the Lecher too, who drunkenly
revels in this same pit of unclean things, only the Lecher knows his sight is repulsive in the eyes
of God and enjoys it with a sick pleasure. And the Murderer, who knows what he does or does

not uphold, but like the Heathen, he is self-confident in his own code of life, doing what is right
and necessary in his own eyes, though like the Lecher his desire, whether he knows it or not, a
perverse intent to break from God’s order and desecrate the Image of God with lifelessness of his
brother human and his own bloody, unclean hands. To his immediate side, the Femme Fatale, the
Seductress, who, through use of Sinful Flesh, hands Adam the apple from the tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil. The logic of the Word, of language, now diluted, nay--betrayed!
by this postmodern relativism, she has passed down the Sin of Sentience, of the illusion to
determine right and wrong through human eyes, that same flaw of the Heathen and the Murderer.
It follows that she is the designation, the embodiment of Death, dressed in white, or red in the
guise of vitality. Life. She is the strongest of Sinners, not in her own actions, but her ability to
turn the most righteous of men into beasts of Pleasure, not by the faux-logic of the Heathen or
the Murderer, but with the senses. Visual and physical, external pleasures. Sensual is too fitting a
word, she provokes, and beckons Man into Death.
When will the sun rise tomorrow? This daylight savings is bitch. Kick the slacker while
he’s SAD, keep him down with one less hour of sleep. Prescribe some pills to make money off
him at least, and kick the rest of the suicidal academics and artists to the fringe-curb of reality...
What will be the last invention by human kind? Something sexual certainly. A nuclear
vibrating dildo? A kissbot? In tandem release, the Ruskies will launch all their remaining Dildo
Nuklear across the Atlantic to American shores and heartland alike in an attempt to corner the
kissbot market. Give us all your kissbots, or else. But what will the lonely men do?
...and who will be able to reap the Profits in time, or will they? As the poisonous gasses
infiltrate the last remaining pockets of the atmosphere, a man standing on the top floor of the
World’s tallest skyscraper will dine on the paper he’s won, jerking off to the zeros accumulating
in his bank account, and the base gives out, and the whole thing crumbles.
Footage from the penultimate floor
From the spiderweb corner where the ceiling and two walls meet, downward camera angle onto
an afterthought-of-a-room, where on the bed, two figures lounge on a mattress on the floor.
There is a low hum, that at first may seem like an audio parallel of the visual static that like dicks
around with the image. However, the low hum grows gradually in volume as airplane-helicopter
hybrids begin descending in small fleets, visible through the full wall window. The airplanehelicopter
hybrids are fully equipped with projectors and they beam a gold hologram downward.
The loungers roll their eyes at the spectacle, add some scoffs for good measure. There are clear
body-bags hanging like slabs of meat on hooks from the ceiling, half filled with the prospective
molds, the other half holding cold, hard bodies.
“How do you think I came across?” he began, “I mean, I know I’m not the best public
speaker. But I felt I showed that, and that I didn’t care.”
“Yeah, it looked like you were just like, here’s my writing, here you go. Just like you are.
Here I am, I’m happy to be here. Not like Mallory, in the reading I mean. Jesus Christ.”
“I knowww.”
“She goes for that inflection but it either sounds super contrite or her voice breaks and its
fucking grating. Oh my god.”
“Ha-ha.” Then he looks over at her, “I’m glad you came. I saw you sneak in right before I
went on and it helped. Like even if I got blank stares from everyone else, I knew you’d get me at
least.”
“Hmm.”

“--but the reaction seemed good? Loguemann was smiling, seemed pretty intent. Picked
that up on one of the three times I actually looked up from the page.”
“It was great. I almost don’t want to tell you this because it might go to your head...but
Bri whispered to her friend when you stood up, something like, ‘this kid,’ like pay attention. And
after you finished, she asked, ‘Is he a genius?’ She--”
“Who was it?”
“Bri’s friend. I don’t remember her name. But then Bri was like, ‘I think so.’”
“Wow.”
“And in my head, you know as all these girls are looking at you, I was thinking, you get
to listen to his mind, but I get to fuck him and his mind.”
“You wanted to fuck my mind?”
“A mindfuck.”
“You’ll blow my mind?”
“Ha-ha. That’s how you got me the first time. It was what turned me on. You reading
your book to me.”
“Ha! Why else do you think I wrote it?”
“--I was partly jealous of what you wrote. Especially because it was a drug sequence, and
we both know which one of us is the real druggie.”
“Partly, what else?”
“I knew I had to have you.”
“You’re saying that my writing turns you on. Should I go get my laptop?”
She climbed him. “It gets me on and you get me off.”
She was already licking his ear like she’d be reaching it inside his skull soon enough. His
dick was towering in his pants. He tried making a mental note of the most important exchanges
to include for a character he was working on, but things were hot and heavy before he could
really commit it to memory.
END OF TAPE
O’ Holy Water as i discern it by the taste is the ultimate member of an artifice, and its
spring? Apeman, where are you? digging that dick of yours into the earth? I bet. A bouquet, per
se, via O’Keefe features the same neuron in the mind, maybe, that has us dripping, and yes
salivating, and with the drink, down the hatch salvation. Is it when it first touches the lips? When
it’s swirled in the mouth, and acclimates with the body’s atmosphere, when it integrates, but
then, that spiritual nutrient, what, gone? Non plus. The Lady dressed in white exposes to you her
shimmering black soul and matching noir brain and top hat. She angles their edge with that of
the wooden bar she sits at. She, like the bee, pollenates and eats her floral cake too. Petals drop
from her mouth. Meanwhile, the American’s Penis floats on the surface of the ocean, displacing
darkness like a Japanese inkwell stroke--Serendipitous, he-he.
She’s Venus, shell enclosed, swallowed back up by Neptune. ASAP and Del Rey sing
harmony, Electric Body, no, Body Electric back and forth betwixt overlapping waves, but
through the haze of translation, respective mediums not to mention, they saying the same thing?
Walt’s in the corner going hmm.
Engirth me baby. The man in black, his nudeness really balks account. Like Moses’ eyes
askance, no peeping!, robes hide the Glory. Haven or heaven? and too many overlapping layers
to figure. Our Father to 5 million sons.
And about that, white-haired gents in black suits in the back of seedy FiDi restaurant
turned speak-easy at night, all chain-smoke and peer in the red light down at less than

appropriate detailed map, titled “National Identity.” One’s pointing a shaky, yet resolute prunemember
at a box labeled “The Arabs.” You keep them out, and he stabs at another box, and you
rip them out! And keep doing what we’re doing with them. Ya, ya keep the drinks coming. In
fact, keep bringing them until I tell you to stop, okay? then mutters Jeezus to the rest of his
friends. What about us? What about us? What about us? What about us? (This chorus and
response takes more takes than you’d think.) Well, pointing to a real Faggot, that’s not us. Yes,
well, let’s go one by one then. Where, in how many secret back rooms, or in the grooves of
collective unconscious do the rest of them meet to settle the details; or is the answer more
insidious than that?
Footage from the penultimate floor
...the lights are out. When the lights come back on, the man in white is standing up by the
light switch. He opens the translucent body bags and rotates them to face the camera. The first is
a mold of his face, his body, his erect penis. The next, his face, a bit depressed perhaps in that
way that skin hangs a little lower off the bone than it should, and his flaccid member. The rest
are variations of expressions, postures, and P.O.D. (position of dick). The other half mirror these
in physical form. Cold hard bodies, that is. The animate man in white suddenly withered to the
ground. The timestamp freezes, as, debris flying and quick series of flame shooting, the
skyscraper is demolished.
The blonde swede was talking about colonizing the moon soon. As a refuge while we
developed the science and technology to go find a new, habitable planet. The man in black
asserted, The only reason we want future humanity to live on is that any echo of meaning our
lives had, as faint as it may be, will finally be snipped, when the last one of us dies. The truth is
though, that it doesn’t matter anyway. We will all be long gone.
“Great dinner party conversation,” she had said.
As the sun’s path crests, Nehemiah’s Reincarnation and hair slung now halfway down his
back, is colliding thought and word. Tongues! Tongues and visions. Neither phallic nor ovular,
the gold cube descends. Cowboy rides on top, saying “Woahhh, woah there, woooaahhh.” The
Kingdom of God.
It’s an all-inclusive set. Yes. That means it comes with the furniture and decor, all gold
yes, but you have to be a card-carrying member. Gold, really? Inconvenient? Yes, so what? It’s
the fucking Kingdom of God and like a larger Russian Doll it’s finna engirth Times Square.
Pixelated screens blink in orgasmic, yes, please do. The Lady in White finds her coffin-black
Nuklear Dildo, limited edition, and after picking up a cloud of dust, swirling discarded POST
pages and one-fifty dollar pizza stained plastic plates, disappears--but under, or beyond?
Man in Black levitates at the door of the KoG, and performs countless secret handshakes,
nodding if...then telepathically. He bounces the others. No entry, he motions lackadaisically to
Skull and no crossbones canvas hanging above the door, before looking fervently around, and
knowing he’s too good for this.
Clubhouse Rules!! as follows: Cheap Almond Milk, 8.5 percent alcohol. DVD, Video
Recording, Brazilian Food, breakfast sandwiches--cheap! No dogs aren’t permitted (this with a
series of revisions, circles with x’s, rewrites including moving multiple apostrophes, each
interpreted with the reverence of scripture.) Year of the Booty--A passerby wonders, “what does
that mean for me, you know, astrologically speaking?” He’s presently booted.
As he watches the man reach terminal velocity, the Man in Black shrugs and thinks of
better times. That, then was the time to be alive. Maybe they exhumed him from a pyramid. Who
woke him? Is there in him a half-dreamt vision of a woman with a suit of white medieval armor

leaning over his body, whispering a melodious reverse-lullaby in his opposite ear? He
contemplates for hours.
Cartridge 102-A (the final cartridge)
A summer beach. Her face contorted, and hardened, she takes a long time squinting into
the sky. He feels like he’s saying both ends of the conversation. He thinks maybe it will never be
the same. Her laugh is horrendously forced. She asks if he wants to go the water. That’s where
she tells him they should think about if they should keep dating. He tells her he wants die. He
doesn’t even feel like looking at her. Her pale skin looks gloomy in the overexposed noon sun
above the water. On the walk back, she says, “I can’t be the only thing that makes you happy.”
“That’s not fair and you know it,” he says, “How many times did I sit and listen patiently
as you told me you were depressed, especially, especially because I wasn’t there? And then I do
it once and you use it against me.”
And he knew arguing was besides the point, when she’d been collecting excuses like
shells to cover up the real coffin.
Her mold finally breaks back in his room. They cry together. They pretend like it had all
been a mistake from which there was no way back. “If I had only...” he said, “if you had told
me...then I could have saved you.” They made love one more time. Hours after, she said she was
sure.
He takes her out for a Last Supper. “You can tell everyone on your timeline,” she says.
“I’ll probably just tell Sage.” She sleeps over. In the morning, he makes an inside joke and she
starts to cry. “But I’ll miss all the jokes. I don’t want to lose everything.”
“We won’t,” he says, “we’ll just have them in our friend relationship.”
The footage then rolls into a five second clip of her driving him down the street. As the
car idles, he says, “Everything’s going to change after I get out of the car.” Even he couldn’t tell
if it was a warning, a last ditch attempt for her to change her mind, or simply a melodramatic
statement of fact.
At 6:30, the light breaches the plane of the horizon. The preacher’s hair lies torn out on
the gum-splattered, coffee-stained concrete street. A shoving match between Mr. Met and a lithe
and tatted Philly Brother in a Howard jersey spills Tom-and-Jerry style, tumbling and all, along
the his piece of prime corner property, sweeping his hair away with it at the speed of an
industrious barber. Already a new man to seat in the red plush cushion. To the light, the
homeless man groans, “I’m sleeping.” Preacher quietly acquiesces, flipping the only clothes that
matter inside-out. Right-side in?
In sunshine and summer swelter, a black rubber-gloved hand reaches from out of a still
smoldering pile of rubble. It displaces the charcoal and granite objects with either sweeping,
brush-like motion off the top, tumbling each circular, ovular, or rectangular chunk down the edge
of the slowly shortening mound, or else picking up the wreckage and tossing it either way with a
playful flick of the wrist. A small opening begins forming at the center of the rubble like an
anthill civilization falling in on itself one grain at a time with the gradual domino effect. At this
juncture, the gloved hand selects slower, methodically, now inspecting the crude, sometime oily,
jagged stone and now, down here, finds half-intact pieces of personal debris. There is a simple
card, a pair of socks, fortune cookie fortunes with real predictions, not those broken-English
proverbs, the slips with their ends or beginnings burned off, except for the ones with clauses
begun by “if” and “then,” yet these are just as decipherable, since by whatever malicious or
jocular or seriously confused intention, a key word has been replaced with a heiroglyphic or else
some sort of symbol, like a blooming rose, a rightside/upside down cross, a skull, and the like.

The objects are carefully observed via the limited tactile sensations, inhibited also of course by
the rubber. The gloved hand rolls each piece around on its fingerpads, judges its weight by
bobbing it up and down, even gripping it tight, sometimes to the point that it breaks from the
pressure and crumbles between the black rubbered digits. At the end, though, as the opening
becomes a full-fledged empty crater, the gloved hand picks up the objects still in reaching
distance and drops them onto the glass window built into the ground.
A man in white lays inside the subterranean glass window-box. The man’s white clothing
takes the form of an opaquely white linen robe, tied shut with a pair of strips halfway down the
chest. Pink nipples intimate themselves through the fabric. His hair and tightly trimmed beard are
white. His face is pale and young in a way that it is youthful at its essence, so that at any age, it
would still appear youthful. He now appears just past the brink of adulthood. His hands are
wrinkled like sliding and piled up levels of terrain after a tectonic shift. His hand placed through
a forearm sized opening and into the glove socket, he holds up scraps of paper and places them
face down. He reads them. He finds dusty and chipped tapes lying about, cracked open
sometimes so that the black ribbons spun and wrapped in on themselves and pirouetted back
outward from the potential energy, and then would drag off into the wind like detached spider
web, shining in the sunlight. He fumblingly places them into a tray of a videocamera and presses
the viewer’s glass directly against his own. The footage is highly damaged, typically a three to
seven second loop, a little grainy or otherwise apparently enhanced or revised with technicolor,
and often alternating between the two. It usually depicts the beach and a first person shot of from
a bench or the interior of a car, and the waves beyond, or following her as the she walks, jacket
pulled up halfway over her head and blonde wisps flying and erratically trailing her head like
fishing lines, searching for seashells and grinning ear to covered ear when she finds one, or in the
top floor cluttered room of a collegiate house as she grimaces and cajoles him about something
he has no control over and he proceeds to bite his tongue off and swallow it and let it compact
into a denser and denser piece of coal, that thank god, he tossed from the top of the pile when it
was still scalding. He tries to categorize the cartridges by pleasant or painful on the top of his
pane, but to make room for the next the stacks keep getting pushed down further and out of view
so he can’t tally them against each other. One cartridge, for example, featured her digging her
mittened hand through cold and wet October sand, and unearthing a black canvas body-bag, and
as she grinned up at him, he forced a smile and the condensed piece of coal was sliced in two,
somehow altering their rate of condensing to an exponential rate. After some static, there’s a
beach scattered only with body-bags and she is gone, and his insides seem like they’ll soon
explode, and yet that would be too much of a release, or even an arrival at some distinct inner
destination so instead they just condense, condense, condense. He remembers lugging his chest
around like an anchor. Yet, other times, at this same beach, wasn’t it, same daylight, he floated
two or three feet off the ground and looked on happily.
The only clear experience this far removed was before they’d fucked or even kissed and
had instead only spooned each other on drunk nights. In this singular lucid memory, he sits on
the floor of her closet-of-a-room while she lit the candles on her bedside-type wooden table up
against the wall that she called her shrine to her father, though he couldn’t tell in the moment if
she meant father or Father, even though they had held long discussions on the absurdities of
religion, but that was when he was sober and now he was most definitely not, having just
smoked just a few hits of what was mostly keefer, and while that was his nickname for reasons
he couldn’t explain now, he was way out of his league as far as capacity for enjoying such an
intense high, and super-stoned tried to relax by tapping his foot consistently on her wood

floorboards while peering up at the collections of maps she had pinned decoratively to her closet
door. He somehow had understood its complex grid of perpendicular and parallel lines or streets,
“streets,” that lined the island of Manhattan in black, ocean in blue, as a metaphor, but more
objectively true, for his own personality. As in, these imposed lines represented some sort of
switches, or series of switches, that have led him to here, which is where? Like God, he could be
someone else if not for one switch along the way. Like does he part his hair the way he does?
And why does he enjoy some music and not others? Why does he think of himself as funny, do
others? All traits, or taste, or appearances appeared as they were, and that is: not based on any
objective sense of aesthetics, or even morals, but instead absolutely and absurdly trivial because
he could have, a couple streets back, made an opposite decision, making him better, or worse, or
just different, and that his face, he pictures now with that trivial haircut and trivial expression, is
not a destination at the end of each turn, or the going-straight-rejection-of-a-turn, but instead
composed of the entire positives and negatives of turns, and then she said, “Paul, I think you’re
having a panic attack,” and as he concentrated intently on being chill, furrowing his brow to
relax against the breakneck speed of his mind, he at that moment looked at her and couldn’t tell
if she was an old friend from Colorado, or Victorville even?, or a stranger who had let him into
her home that very day without any previous context. At its outset, and even its ending, this was
the dynamic at the essential coal of their relationship: a stranger, a childhood friend; both
destinations, dead ends. Such an axiomatic understanding is easy and somehow expected to think
from the glass window-box below the rubble and earth’s surface.
At the very bottom of the pile there are two full body molds, remnants from the cryogeny
facility at very top floor of the demolished skyscraper. They are withered and contain relatively
undamaged sections that have small holes of fabric that have been chewed through by moths.
Then, there’s the really damaged regions where the mold material has melted and congealed
waxy, hardening deformed, these regions especially in the face so that you know its off but not
exactly how, like seeing a non-mirrored representation of your mug at close range, and then, the
areas where by fire or by an entire demo-team of hungry moths, the body parts are completely
missing.
XII.
For Pauly’s journey here: Arrive in Chinatown via the Lucky Star Bus you insist on taking,
though your little life is likely in danger every time. And not just from the road, but from that
Chinese place in Hartford. Back on track: Arrive, yes. Walk down West on Canal until you
arrive at the Canal St. Station. Take the 4, 5, 6, preferably the 4,5 express, and this is where it
can get counter-intuitive for you, Take it UPTOWN--and that means physically up on the map,
UP in street numbers, and get off at the 14th Street Station, also known as, Union Square. From
there, TRANSFER to the l, that’s an L, and take it to my stop, Lorimer Street. Walk toward the
exit on the Metropolitan Street side, walk straight one block to Devoe Street, and take that left.
Walk. Arrive at 7-- Devoe Street. Don’t walk upstairs. Upstairs neighbor is a quote on quote
bitch. I’d never, of course, but others have said. And she’s pretty fucking ornery. Take the steps
to the basement. Knock, or don’t. Enter. Have good times.
It’s late when the bus comes in, even later after going the wrong way,
uptown/downtown, he arrives in Brooklyn at 2:32 am, the night just starting...Taylor still
wearing his Trader Joe’s uniform, sprawls out on the couch. “Beantown boyyy,” Taylor says,
without getting up. Pauly shouts, “He’s been shot!” and Taylor groans accordingly.

Pageantry aside, Tay holds his phone by his hip, and texts from it. His new girlfriend,
Paul suspects, especially because Taylor’s never been good at texting back, ie. post-work
paralysis surely inhibits communication with anyone else.
Alex strolls through seconds later in short denim shorts, no shirt, smelling fresh after a
mid-night shower. “Hey man!” They embrace. It’s late, so Petey’s outside with a floodlight
turned toward a cloth canvas pinned against the wood fence upon which he stares intently, hip
popped, one hand on his chin and the other rattling a spraypaint can around. He looks in, “Pauly,
Pauly, Pauly! I’ll be there in a second.”
They come out to him, and in that process, Alex offers Paul a Naragansett, Paul a
cigarette to Alex, and Petey comes over happily, setting the can aside, and collects from each of
them. He brushes his shoulder length dirty blonde hair out of his face before lighting his cig.
They kick around old ideas, and soon, as the night is really getting going, Paul and Alex find
themselves in a reflective discussion about art and sex. Petey watches for the most part,
sometimes looking back his shoulder at the floodlit street art, half-done behind him.
It all starts simply enough. Alex asks Paul if he wanted to be the bassist in their band. He
could teach him if he moved to New York City. “Aye,” Paul says, “I totally would if I do move.
Then again, I don’t know if I could perform.”
Alex has certain qualms as well. “I wonder,” he says, “if it would ruin it, music, for me.
Thinking about how I come across the whole time, instead of the music, you know.”
Paul agrees whole-heartedly. “After a reading, I always end up dwelling on what people
think of me now, now that they’ve heard my more calculated, insightful levels of thinking. I get,
maybe unrighteously, pompous. And then, of course, I have to question my motives in the first
place. Why do I put that pencil to the paper? I want to believe it’s this genial saint-like
contribution to the collective consciousness, or even something less grandiose, but just as
helpful--or help one fainting robin, unto his nest again--that one person somewhere someday, at
any point, reads what I wrote and shares that specific feeling, or understands something in the
way I do, which I find is congruent with reality, but ah. There I go. Getting self-important. So, at
least: quality entertainment. Makes you feel something to pass the time well before you, the
reader, die.”
“But...”
“But what?”
“That’s what you want to believe your motives are.”
“Oh, right. I get caught up...as you can see. Then I think maybe I just want to get laid.”
Alex laughs, throwing his head back. But when it returns, he’s nodding his head,
“Yeah...Yeah. Right.”
“I mean, it could be. Maybe deep down, that’s the impulse. Under layers of selfimportance,
and wanting to feel loved. Just wanna have sex.”
“Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s definitely at play in music. In the city especially...in
Williamsburg, everyone’s in a band, you know. But, when you’re on stage and you sound good,
you’re in the band, and the girls on the floor are looking up at you. And it’s hard not to let that go
to your head. And if you sleep with one of them, are you corrupting your art ipssso facto?” He’s
drunk, and ipso lisps out. “I feel like I was always get hornier in the summer. It grows and
grows, then swells in, like, August--”
“So right now?”
“Yeah, haha. I’m right about at my Zenith right now. That’s the word, right? Zenith?”
“Yeah.”

“And then like, I don’t know what it is...” Alex looks off into the distance, then turns
back to Pauly, gesturing upturned palm and pointing cigarette, “Maybe it’s the weather, getting
colder, or something. But then it decreases, and sometime in February, I feel like I’m almost
asexual. Like I’m not kidding. I have no desire.”
Petey interjects, “I don’t know about all that. You get a couple beers in you and you both
go around complicating things, just for the fuck of it.”
They’ve all added a couple more Naragansetts to their personal tallies, and at this point,
they’re walking loopty-loos across streets, talking loudly in the lamp-lit streets, cars and people
making repeating alarm-like audio, a yawwr of cats scratching at each other, and Alex saying, “I
am attracted to women for who they are...and, like, what that means to me. Like being with them
somehow makes them a part of me, and I’ll take on all their cool qualities that I want for myself.
I think the first...impetus, that’s the word, for my attraction is a strong sense of envy.”
Until they end up at a packed-house bar. More specifically, after ordering PBR and
whisky shots, 6 for each combo, they find themselves in the outdoor patio in the back just past
the NO SMOKING ASSHOLES sign, smoking a cigarette each. Everyone else is too. “You
really gotta move here,” Alex says.
“I want to. There’s something about the city, where it feels like you can find your people.
Your movement, and be a part of it. But it’s all packed on top of each other, I think I would get
super claustrophobic, and I would want to get out...to see an empty horizon, or whatever. I don’t
know what that is,” now more to himself than anything, “what is there in an empty horizon?”
“There’s something in that. Definitely. Did I tell you I went back to Colorado recently?
Yeah, last month. It was so nice, I went up to No-Name by myself, and I was all alone. Tay and I
had been fighting so I went up there...partly out of spite, and you didn’t come with me, also I
think, out of spite. And it was crazy to be all alone. You know, in the open air. The stars so close.
That lake right there under the shadow of that peak...So much to say...I was on the flight back,
and I thought, ah, I really should move back out here. Like I needed that kind of solitude, and I
could move back in with parents, save money and do my music. But then, I descend into JFK
and get on a subway home, and I know I’m supposed to be here. Just seeing all the people,
dressed up, looking their best for each other, for me.”
Paul looks out across the skyline. You could see some skyscrapers breaching the horizon,
set against the cloudy night sky. Alex continued, “It goes back to the thing about envy. It’s that
envy that pushes me to work harder. To make it, as they say.”
Paul nods. And Alex picks up steam, “And with writing, I imagine that idea comes up all
the time too. Do you have enough envy to live here?”
“I do. I think I definitely do.”
Petey’s barely tuning in, instead follows with eager eyes the women who cross in front of
his vision: girls with high-cut bleach blonde bangs, and straight bodies in white black-striped
shirts, and girls in flower print shirts, and high waisted black shorts, and tattoos covering their
arms, and their thighs too, some of them. Alex breaks this concentration, seeking validation for
his thesis: “Don’t you think Petey? New York City attracts especially envious people? You
should do an art piece with sex and envy written on a couple corners and then, like, put stuff in
the middle to connect it.”
“Yeah, I’m going to do that,” he says sarcastically, or is that just his catatonic drunk-state
coming on strong? He specifies, “It’s too much of a slogan. Think of the old Chinese woman
who pushes carts by Trader Joe’s everyday. Like you think she’s thinking that way? Of course
not. It’s a broad generalization.”

“But it has some truth to it, doesn’t it?”
“--It’s too much of a slogan. Like if you’re going to impose that structure on it, then yes.”
“Yes, see. Yes.”
“I’d like to be with one of these girls,” Petey says, starting his own treatise. “But really,
I’d rather be with a 38 year old professor, Columbia, film, Spanish. Maybe she has a kid but he
lives with the father in Madrid, or Sao Paulo. Okay?”
“What’s the draw for that?” Pauly asks.
“Or a 17 year old, upper East Side, 60s or higher. Prep school.”
“Mariel Hemingway.”
“Yeah, her...It’s the same for each. I just want something different than...” he trails off.
Pauly feels it coming on too, flinching at the strung bulb lights in creepy half-smiles across the
tops of the fence posts, and every few seconds they jump to the left, back to right. Presently,
there’s a man standing by their claimed half of the splintery picnic table. Pauly peers sidelong at
him; is he really gesticulated that loudly? Pauly cringes as if he actually hears it. What’s he
compensating for? He takes a peak at his package, indecipherably loose.
“...And the guy flew in on a water jet. A fucking water jet! Can you believe that? So we
had a smoke with him? I’m in awe of him and for some reason I thought how funny would it be
if I just stole his lighter and took from as a souvenir that I could tell a story about Whenever I see
his pieces in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal I’m always like I took that guys
lighter in Switzerland ha-ha It’s this crazy sense of pride, I know it’s crazy but I guess that’s just
the kind of guy I am.”
Petey clarifies: “Didn’t you borrow his lighter?”
“Yeah I did but I just led with how I couldn’t believe I left my lighter my favorite lighter
that I lifted from B-- C----- even when I made a point to buy a pack of cigarettes on my way here
ha-ha.”
“B---?” from Petey.
“C--------?” from Pauley.
“Right on,” Alex grins at him.
In the daylight, they apologetically mention their embarrassment over what was said. It
wasn’t that they had thought they were smart for the conversation, only to realize in the morning
that it was not. It was that last night they had felt the need to say it, and in the hungover morning
they couldn’t find the point. These things had been said, and will be said in, maybe, smarter
ways again. No, assuredly. Last night, they were compelled. Wine will do that.
XIII.
There is a misty rain and a low overhanging cloud in Brooklyn tonight, and through this
white percolation, the yellow-white beams, and red and orange breaklights of passing cars are
muted into pastel orbs floating like objects through a vaguely defined space. It is a warm and wet
Christmas Eve, but that doesn’t stop two pedestrians from wearing masks, and raising potential
questions of necessary headwear vs. anonymity, as they walk uphill on the Brooklyn bridge. The
mask business gives Franklin Sewell a little nerves, but does not contribute to the psychosomatic
heart palpitations he is currently experiencing. A car rushes by, and in the rain, sounds more like
a dislodged log rushing downstream and over a waterfall as it passes, than it does a man-made
engine. Its 1300 hours, and there is no one else coming in their direction, though Sewell’s
partner, Wes Turner, wouldn’t know since he hasn’t looked inconspicuously over his shoulder
like Sewell has, plenty of times. As far as people, a little shadow bends on the downward slant of
the bridge. Further, smaller dark one-strokes of figures slide, crossing over the gentle sweep

from bridge to street. Sewell and Turner stop suddenly at the bridge’s zenith, and Sewell tells
himself, silently, that if he doesn’t look then the heights, and more importantly, the obsidian
waves glinting reds and blues and stark white reflections on the crests of the chopping waves,
and this unwelcoming and seemingly inevitable void of darkness underneath, will not be an
obstacle worth regarding. Just simply, fling your figure around without thinking. Turner does so,
quickly, like he doesn’t even think. Sewell has always found this quality, in Turner and others, a
sure-fire sign of a shallow character. His masked head, its edges now difficult to discern against
the similarly black backdrop, is generally positioned downward, concentrating on finding
footing. Once accomplished, removes and infinity loop of rope from his backpack, ties a knot
around the steal beam, and runs line through his carabiner. He straps himself in.
Sewell feels pretty fucking inadequate, given the fact Turner’s done this more or less in
motion while he’s been inadvertently staring into what now appears to be formation of eyes in
lights on the surface of the water, as he’s lifting his wavering leg less than a foot off the grown.
The realization though of an inadequacy drives him, and he spasmodically jerks the leg up and
over the stone. Paralyzed there for a second, before a second wave of this inadequacy compels
his entire body over the stone edge. He sits on the ledge, legs trembling as the water now
encompasses his entire field of vision. He accepts the rope from Turner and clips himself in. He
looks over his shoulder one last time before turning, bracing his legs against the stone, and
lowering himself to Turner’s level. Sewell takes his gear out of his backpack, then gives his
partner a still-shaky thumbs up. They repel down, past the metal framework, and to the top of the
supporting stone column. Once he locks the rope on his carabiner, Sewell stretches his arms
across the stone, while Turner waits off to the side. He marks two lines of chalk on one edge, and
two on the other, creating the general formation of a box. He unfurls his stencil with his other
hand. He tapes its corners to the chalk marks. Turner swings back into the picture. He
spraypaints, as Sewell holds the inside edges down, moving his now calm fingers nimbly out of
the way of the spray. They leave their mark.
At the edge of the bridge, Sewell, who surpassed Turner as he turned around to take in
the view, now peaks over the stone like Kilroy, looking out for any 5-0. Turner, who’s surehands
and feet catches him up quickly, elects to jump over with a moment’s notice. Sewell
clamors over awkwardly. Once over, Sewell peals the mask outward and off his head. He jogs up
to Turner and gives him a discreet elbow. He points to his own face, forgetting that he could now
speak freely. Turner turns to him, with that black mask, and says, “I’m leaving it on.”
He reflects on the scene often, Sewell does, often while doing grunt work as a bar-back,
expertly carrying up to ten beer bottle necks in the vacant space between his fingers; or in the
early morning when his mind and body both seem to have a hard time conceptually extracting its
form from the bed’s, and his imagination is still trying to achieve some obscure end in a
lingering dream, which is paramount under the parameters of the dream, but in the morning light
seems trivial and non-sensical; or, funny enough, when he’s bed a woman, usually a stray still
hanging out by the bar when he gets off work, who will often come right out and tell him she
thinks he can show her a good time and won’t disappoint, who is set up against the background
of blurring yellow taxis like fleeting halos as he, Franklin, thinks yes, that could make me happy,
not just happy, but--?, and in the act, his pelvis pressed against hers, or jammed up against her
fleshy, sometimes bony ass, as tight as possible, there it is: his mark, he sees in his mind’s eye,
the edges of it’s black paint sharp, the features and limbs and limbic levels, even. Other times, he
sees his old tag, before he and Turner started partnering. He swells up. Sometimes the feeling is
accompanied by the fast, and sinking sensation he knows to associate with his fear of falling, and

the black water waiting not to break his fall, but envelop him, and hide him under its maroon,
and navy, and blinding white reflections. And sometimes the sinking fear comes first, before the
confident swell of seeing the mark plastered onto the grooves of the stone, as he waits for these
women to moan in pleasure at his adequacy.
Before he climbed back up, Christmas Eve, Sewell ran his hand along the stone. He
hasn’t been able to replicate the feeling in his recall yet, though he thinks about it often.
MEMBERS ONLY: INQUIRE WITHIN
It’s Christmas day when Petey and Pauly sit in the red glow of the neon-piped signage
inside and outside of BAR infiltrating the unlit darkness, at stools at a short wooden counter
around the bend, and under some hanging stockings, adjacent to the wall mounting the buffalo
head, who wears a Santa hat. Tis the season. Missing his family, Petey shows it and also has
turned to the ever-accepting arms of alcohol and has accepted the Blackout as his Lord and
Savior. In these throes, he oscillates between silliness and catatonic states, staring off into his
goblet of beer, its amber hue turned pinkish under the Christmas red. He jokes, “This is a tough
time for Satan, it being his nemesis birthday and everybody celebrating him instead of Satan.”
“Glad you’re there for him.”
Halfway into the subsequent staring contest with the unyielding now-empty goblet, Pauly
asks him, “You hungry?” and being drunk himself, doesn’t wait for an answer and asks, “You
miss your family?”
Petey shakes his head and laughs. “That’s too much to take in at once, right now,
Pauly...Those are like the two greatest desires of humankind...Food and family.”
Paul looks across the space behind the bar to the opposite counter, and takes stock of the
patrons who come to a bar on Christmas night: A couple interfacing briefly between screenglow
phone time removed only inches from their eyes, and Lord knows, Pauly is rarely anyone to get
preachy about this subject. They kiss intermittently too. Some well dressed guys with intricately
designed facial hair and high pitched laughs. Johnny Cash plays loudly overhead and sometimes,
they’ll all, without warning, drop into their best baritone and sing along, with pretty good pitch
actually. Two women gossiping at the corner of the bar, and laughing, and Pauly thinks “coping”
on maybe yet another Christmas spent alone. They openly scan the bar between sips.
“And sex,” Pauly says, still focused on all figures, moving as fast as his slow eyes will
take him from figure to figure, excluding only that buffalo head. “Food, and family, and sex.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Petey says.
“You don’t?”
“No,” he shakes his head vehemently.
...Some characters sitting by themselves, cupping their hands around the signature round
goblets like holding a warm cup of hot chocolate and every once in a while looking into the red
mist over their shoulders as if someone had just called their name.
“I’m going to order that six dollar shepherd’s pie” the one they saw a bartender rip from
out of a plastic bag and pop into a small convection oven under the opposite counter. “And watch
you eat it. On your own tab.”
...Two thin artist-type characters hunching at the counter, sometimes talking out of the
corners of their mouths, laughing slyly, and sometimes staring into space, missing their families,
and lovers on Christmas night.
XIV.
Val has dreams in which a psychedelic wave of tessellating blossoms float past her eyes
in sherbet orange and pastel pink and other permutations of brightness and hue she has no names

for, and each wave almost identical as the last, but somehow more beautiful--no, powerful every
time, so much so that there’s a pain, or an ache that wakes her in the middle of the night,
realizing at some point that her eyes are now open, and soon the unpleasant smell and the
repeating in-and-out inhales and exhales from Droog’s snout come to her, at first slowly, and
then overpowering, and as she gags, she wonders how she’d never smelled it before.
In the daylight, there is a man who stands at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, just out of
reach of the water lapping at his feet. His hands are on his hips, and neck craned, peering at
Sewell’s mark. His hair is clipped, as far as Sewell can tell, viewing him from behind, like James
Dean’s, and the wind blows it backwards toward him. He cannot, obviously, see his face, but
only a broad back. His white tee shirt ripples. The man has the tan of a construction worker, and
yet Sewell experiences an overwhelming rush of anxiety pass throughout his entire body. It has a
numbing effect, he can tell most clearly in his inability to feel the wind he sees. The man takes
his hands off his hips and begins free-climbing the column of the bridge. The rushing over his,
Sewell’s body, feels stronger, like being sucked under an accumulating weight as time goes on,
with every step upwards the man takes. The man is now a crisp and white t-eed and tan skinned
action figure in the distance of light blue all-American summer sky. He holds himself at Sewell’s
mark, simply by gripping the edge in one hand. With the other, he sprays in long and continuous
motions. It takes a long time, though this mesmorizing back and forth motion seems to
manipulate the passage of time at an essential level. From what he can see behind the shifting
figure, it is the most beautiful thing Sewell has ever seen. Only then, does he realize he’s under
the surface of the water. He thrashes and feel his body sink further and further, wondering when
he fell in the first place, even as the pattern-repeating flows through his eyes. The game, as it
happens this morning, is Sewell trying to see it.
XV.
In the watery surface of her eyes, there is a speck of comet-red, burning only in Maria
Clara’s left/ his right, eye of gold-leaf, surrounded by the liquid blue and teal. That Christmas
morning, they were sitting on the top of one of several lifeguard chairs lining a Fairfield beach.
There were no skyscrapers here, only the expansive ocean coming in to him and drawing him
out. He kept on trying to see the end of the ocean’s empty horizon, like he could, and would
point it out to her. She was making all things new, and Pauly held her and told her with
reverence, appropriate for the Person of this Power, the effect she had. As if, her iris
encompassed all of his reality, so he felt inside her, but simultaneously pursuing an inward,
unreachable point, the burning comet-red speck, and that the whole thing made him feel more
awake than ever and drunk all at once.
Daniel Craig stands, towel clumped in a pile on the tile floor, before Rachel Weisz at the
mirror sink combination. He reaches inside her mouth and removes without pain or difficulty her
veneers. She is missing all her front teeth, except a lone triangular canine. They kiss gently,
slowly running their tongue’s over each other’s pointed teeth. Daniel Craig pricks the thick
fleshy meat of his tongue against her only tooth. He bleeds, and she stares wildly, in near-fear
and total bewilderment at the strength of this new and strange, grotesque and lovely emotion.
They make slow love for hours on end.
XVI.
On the downswing of Star 8,809ZZ, the leaves more or less have all gone the way of the
jumper, the ghosts maybe still clinging pinned to the sharp branch tips staking the air, certain

ecently deceased spirits waiting their turn for a new vessel, folk tale legends collecting real
weight in the presence of collective unconscious mold and making it known, the wind playing
haunting or jive backdrop, Orion rebuckling his belt and all the flushed faces of NYC pedestrians
with a quick one or two thick brushstrokes of red down wind-beaten cheeks, Pauly arrives,
thinking hard about a woman sobbing uncontrollably in loud hooting weeps, but with dry eyes,
hunched over like sheltering a cough. At the bottom of the condemned townhouse steps, he
enters and feels like he’s a snake, shedding a skin.
Alex is upstairs working like a maniac, part of what Pauly later finds is a drink-a-smidge
and smoke-a-bit method that produces an assload of tunes, little electric piano jaunts,
atmospheric chords, echoing guitar, grooving bass lines, and that in the assload, a lot of them are
really good, and among those, there are emerging some fucking stellar artist-making tracks in
Pauly’s opinion. Taylor and Petey are downstairs squatting on an area-rug sized canvas sheet and
crawling over it, scribbling lines, doodling little caricatures and symbols, before the other,
crabwalking back over, scratches out with a chunk of chalk, or spills painty-water over, or
brushes through, or spraypaints on or around. It’s a process with loose rules that change
according only to some unsaid logic. Pauly stands over them, digging the vibe and drinking a
‘Gansett. After some time, he starts scribbling his own words into a notebook. He gets up
sometimes to flip the record, now spinning mute on the player at the opposite end of the
basement.
The sky is overcast when Sewell finds himself by the Brooklyn Bridge in the first time in
months, having purposefully avoided it since his last, impressing nightmare. He is, he’s now
accepted, cut of the cautious cloth. Maybe not as much, though, with the black mask pulled over
his face, not so much with his stencil placed on the stone for the world to see, not so much
perhaps, also, to those who see him as he wishes to be seen. His and Turner’s stencil is covered
now by a few of your highly serifed type, pointy and jagged tags. A bubble lettered one too. At
the edge of the stone, there is now a yellow figure with cartoony proportions and small eyes and
a playful smile, grinning at anyone who will pay him any attention. Covering his foot, there’s a
claw of the psychedelic variety made purple and silver static-wave-like lines. Who did he,
Franklin Sewell, think he was? He laughed. Up close, running his hand along the stone he’d seen
the subtle discoloration, even at night, of a paint job. Even before, he had known the spot must
have been hit at some point in the past, and that it will be painted over, and that it will be hit
again. Now, he could just make out the edge of their light blue paint, its remnant floating as a
circular end, quickly siphoning to a sharp point.
CHEAP ALMOND MILK HOMIES PARADISE, 8.5% ALC, NOODLES AND NEEDLES.
DON’T NOT BRING IN PETS. THANK YOU COME AGAIN.
After a long night’s sleep, Ice Cube returns per his usual morning ritual to the bathroom
mirror. “AH HELL NO!”
Ride Along 2
COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU
THIS FALL