Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 39

American

       We’re all in trouble. But our favorite song is always on the radio. At least that’s how it feels to be in love. Nobody bothers to learn the piano like they used to, but then again, the piano hasn’t been the same in a long long time. We all get money thrown at us as fast as they can throw money at us, a lot of it catches in the breeze and is blown off, way behind our shoulders and the ideas we had of our lives.

There are neon signs every-where and they point right to where I’m sitting. In the middle of the night a dream can either smoke cigarettes by the widow and look out at the lit up face of the bridge, or the dream can have its own dreams. There is always freedom like that. The TVs are usually unplugged, the mail arrives but its not always your own mail. You open it anyway, curious and looking for birthday card money from however can spare it. Nobody minds because they all get your birthday card money. Things even out. They have to.

Everybody has a car, and every car is powered by dinosaur blood and old rotten jungles that have been compressed by mountains and heat and time. America never had dinosaurs or jungles, it didn’t have anything, until we found it. A blank check, pal. So that’s why we get our oil from places like Africa and the Middle East. Not as many people are very worried, as opposed to say; yesterday. There is a calm faith in explosions happening elsewhere, perpetually.

From time to time we pick up the telephone and we talk to old lovers about Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe. We dress in cowboy outfits and sometimes blue jeans and stand shirtless in the streets, all of us thinking we are young Marlon Brandos, or misplaced Bridget Bardots. We fill our mouths up with hamburger and whiskey and we swallow. We don’t go to the prize fights anymore. Our lives are prize fights. we walk around with roses in our teeth and we laugh at anyone who tries to take the roses from our teeth. Those roses are the roses for our true love.Not everybody gets a true love, the roses are always dying and being pressed in books, hung upside down near windows facing brick walls. Sometimes a John Wayne and a Grace Kelly meet in the center of the flashing neon and the John Wayne gives the Grace Kelly the rose from between his teeth and the Grace Kelly holds it, blushing. Nobody is a prince, nobody is a princess but we sure like getting loaded and ignoring the waiting list, walking right to the front only to find its the middle. That everybody on a Saturday night has the same idea.Our bodies are never empty. Our hands are always full. We often sit on the edge of mortar walls watching the sunsets that are always more beautiful than the day before. Our toxic waste is dripped into the sky, to ensure we will always have a sunset beautiful enough for the next class of anxiously expectant child dreamers. Our beds are soft, but we often sleep on the couch, we’re hard to get along with. We have a requirement that our lives be required by everyone more than ourselves.

There’s a lot to laugh at. Sometimes we just sit around laughing. Friends pour us drinks. We pour drinks for them too. Everybody is euphoric on pay day. Pay day is quite often. We go to the horse track and we let it ride on GLUE FACTORY. And Jesus, GLUE FACTORY takes it on the inside turn every time. If we look up at the clouds we can see whatever we want in the clouds, sometimes we even see advertisements for things to enhance our lives, so we go and buy those things. And then the clouds say, GOOD FOR YOU!

It’s easy. Sometimes you’ll drop a beer bottle and it will break on the floor. But it won’t matter for anything, all you have to do is let the dog lick the beer up, they’re hard wood floors and they are treated, sealed, they will last five generations without having to be refurbished.And it doesn’t matter, cause the broken glass can’t get into your heel, it can stay there.

We wear our shoes in our houses. We don’t stoop so low in our culture to leave our shoes at the door. We wear our shoes to bed. If we want to really turn each other on, we wear our shoes to bed, and there is always enough beer to break on the floor, care free. And she always has sexy shoes to wear to bed and high heels and she always has full breasts and long dark hair and her eyes are a dark million miles and the promise of my life is the promise that I will get lost in those eyes for all that they are worth.

The famous are random, they come down from their mountains on Christmas with packages pulled by teams of mules. We walk to town square, overwhelmed in a blizzard of flash bulbs and speech givers. Our president is no king and we never love him till he is out of office. But when something is over it gains some love in its retreat, not because it was worth anything particularly, just because it’s over.

Sometimes there’s a sun shower and it is so beautifucked that we stand around in the rain, looking at the sun, though our Mother told us never to stare at the sun. The famous stand around in the sun showers with us, by satellite hook up connection and we all pretend that we understand each other.

We’re all scared of the kids, any second now one of them is gonna show up with a rifle. We’re scared of each other. We don’t want to let anybody down. We want our funerals to be jammed packed. It turns us on when we meet a stranger on the road and upon introductions, they say, I’ve heard all about you. Say that again please.

Say it slowly. I think I’m in love.

I’ve heard all about you.

We’re all doused with gasoline and perfume and shout out loud gin. We wait at the graves of our dead waiting for another vision. The visions never come. So we invent them. We drive our Chevys and our Fords up to the top of Mount Washington and then we put stickers on the Chevys and Fords that say THIS VEHICLE CLIMBED MOUNT WASHINGTON. We tell stories about the good ol’ days, quite aware that nostalgia is the fastest way to be among the living dead. We all want the end of the world to happen soon. We all want a chance to ride a pale horse across the river Styx. We all want a face to appear to us in a dream and insist that we invest our savings in a certain stock.

We all want stock tips from beyond the grave.

Nobody ever runs out of ice when Rock and Roll is the surest national lullaby.

Sometimes our hands get so soft and pink that we want to go and get temporary employment at a lumberyard, we hear that women with big legs like men with strong hands. We feel slightly ashamed that our hands are so soft and pink and that our women are stick figures without bawdy legs.

My girl has an ass that I bounce quarters off of.  She has tits that knock things off of the shelves when she turns to face me.

She has the kind of mind that makes me forsake all dimness.

She is a genius, her legs are genius, her ass is genius, she came from out of nowhere. She is America. No such thing as a moonless night. every night in America has a full moon, all our lives are plays written by Tennessee Williams in the afterlife. Nobody is afraid of God, because we are all sure that we are God. Each of us understands that the lives we lead, we lead them into the dark water like thirsty horses seeking

escape.I escape into her because she is America.

More Cherries

The ferris wheel was stuck. Gears mashed or severed. Some girl screaming wild and desperate death at the top, an empty wax paper soda cup flying down onto the planks, ice spreading everywhere. There was nothing that could be done. People stood outside Midway Pizza, just looking up.

The wind came down the boardwalk, sending the smell of fried dough and confectioners sugar, the music of the carousel- little grits of sand, whipping across the rough edge of everything making it smooth.

I was there with two girls, as if I’d just won the lottery. My feathers were all puffed up like some champion peacock let out n a Saturday parade.

Mary & Kate.

Kate was in love with Mary.

Mary liked Kate and the both of them thought I was alright, but I got the impression that it was just because they had no clue where I was coming from. What I was thinking. What I wanted. If I was for real or just some weirdo that would dissipate when the wind normalized.

They liked to drink. I remember that. They’d drink anything you put in the vicinity of their beautiful lips.

Neither one of them had seen the Atlantic Ocean. The line of bars in a strip, flashing lights, stuffed animals more outsized then even the most runaway bloated dream. One Win Choice. Step up, play whatever game you want. No one loses. Come on, win these pretty girls something engorged with blood.

The allure of the arcade. Mary had never been properly introduced to either Mr. or Mrs. Pacman, she was confused about which she wanted to play with more.

I explained, “No one wants to admit it, but Mrs. Pacman is better.”

“More cherries.”

I treated them to fifty cent drafts at the Sawmill and just like whenever there are fifty cents drafts anywhere, there was a fight that broke out.

A little man lunging at a meathead, the stool flipping over, both of them rolling on the floor, spit, shouts, the bar erupting in havoc and voices. Boyd in his canary yellow Security shirt getting in there somehow, pulling them apart- the red faced, veiny-necked men. Shouts. You’ll have to leave. The both of you. Now.

No one questioned what the fight was about.

It was about war.

Tail. Wet pussy. Tits with hard nipples like antennas receiving signals from the ready to spring dew nectar of nature. Long hair, eyes all done up, shining, searching. Bare midriffs. Hands motioning for you to come over, put your hands anywhere. No holds barred. Sweat running off a peach fuzzed tan shoulder and down the back of a girl in a neon bathing suit. Somewhere, waiting breathless and for the victor, to come fill some void.

Kate smoked a cigarette on the bench outside the shop with blacklight mushroom posters, concert t-shirts, incense. The shop had some stupid name, in the town, us locals called it something stupider- Bong-Depot.

Mary wanted to go into the little booth, get her fortune read by Madame Woo-the Dead.

“I don’t think so,” Kate said coldly, turning her face, exhaling her smoke as the wind tugged it a thousand miles out over the unknown salt ocean.

“Why not?”

“Not my thing.”

To me, she looked frightened. Not her thing? More like terrified.

Mary took my hand, took me instead. We sat down in the on the steel chairs. Madame Woo-the Dead took both of our palms of our right hands and scrutinized them.

“There’s someone else.” She said, “But the two of you will one day get married.”

Mary started to laugh.

I paid the three dollars, we left.

Kate was gone from the bench. We found her standing on the fringes of the crowd of spectators looking up at  the ferris wheel.

There was talk of the fire department coming with a high reach. Pulling the people out of the sky one by one and introducing them to the ground where they belonged.

That girl began screaming again up there. Her voice was shrill and horror stricken and made us all excited.

While the crowd thought about whether or not the thunderstorm would arrive sooner rather than later, and whether to fireworks would be canceled.

I looked at Kate’s tight jean cutoffs and wondered the way that she would taste and smell if we could somehow get alone.

Mixtapes Eaten in Cassette Decks

We were different people then. I wasn’t very good at saying ‘no’ and she used to litter.

After an off day driving on back roads til it wasn’t fumes, it was the ghost of fumes. Looking at weird shit on the side of random weird shit roads, west, then north, then back home.

Me working the pedal, her shifting. Laughing at the cassette deck devouring reels of thin magnetic tape, mixtapes of the love songs of our nectar soaked youth.

The sun was going away like a flashlight with a dying battery.

We wanted hamburgers and just one beer each. Little sips. We pulled into a strip mall with a new bar inside. Inside the place was dark. A dimly lit cave with Lou Reed singing low and wounded. I took a spot at the bar, she dug her hand in my pocket looking for quarters to put into the jukebox. Her hair was longer then. Her eyes seemed to glow in there. Small coals hovering as she left.

It wasn’t 30 seconds before I felt a clasp on my shoulder. It was Costa. Well, he kept bringing us beers.The food never came beer after beer after beer. Raising glasses! He was just so happy to see us in his brand new place. It felt good to feel wanted.

As we left. It was snowing. The first snow of the year. We were ripped and couldn’t make sense of life underneath the streetlight. We stumbled into my pickup truck, pulled out onto the road. It wasn’t a minute before I saw the red and blue lights flashing behind me. Whoop Whoop.

I pulled over. The snow coming down hard. She rolled down her window, started really talking it up with the officer. Lovey Dovey. Almost pillow talk. She was a saint and trying to distract him. He wasn’t distracted. The man said, “License and registration”. I couldn’t find it. I mean, I dug in the glovebox, but, it just wasn’t there. “Step out of the vehicle”

Now he had me on the side of the road. All the tests. Follow this pen light. Touch your nose. Walk the line.  All the tests. I was done. This was it. They had me. They had me right where they wanted me.

“Alright, I know somebody’s been drinking tonight. I smelled it when I came to the window..”

“Officer, she’s wasted.”

He just glared at me.

“I go to the bar at the end of the night to pick up the drunk girls and get them home. It’s easier that way.”

The cop started laughing. I watched the snow landing on his bottom lip as it hung open as he just laughed and laughed. It was like he hadn’t laughed in twenty years. Snow sticking to his moustache. “I’m gonna try that one.” He said. “You know why I pulled you over right?”

“No.”

“I saw a bunch of garbage come streaming out of the passenger side window.”

“She’s a drunk and a litterbug.”

That littering bitch. I’d have to kill her. Before the cop could handcuff me and drag me to the station, I’d have to slip away and quickly butcher her in the car. I glanced at the back of her head in my truck. She had a pretty head. Too bad I’d have to take it off with my bare hands.

The cop laughed again, “Get your paperwork in order, OK.”

Then- he let me go.

Yeah, no insurance card. No registration. In a town in famous for evil blood drinking cops, nothing better to do on a Saturday night, he just let me leave.

I drove us home in silence.

But when we got in the driveway, I pushed the cassette tape back in and it started to howl and pop and make all kinds of distorted noise and she leaned over and put her whole body onto me- as the snow blanketed the car, obscuring all of the world and the silly shit it insinuated was important.