Patrick Fealey's Blog, page 16

November 09th, 2012

their questions

 their questions

they all miss her. my friends, our friends. i can see it, they all miss us. they miss our ferocious light and the heat we shared. we gave them all reason to believe in love. they’re married or divorced now and we’re dead and moved on to two lives, forever blanched by the nova we lived and died by. have you seen her? when i say no, i haven’t seen her in a year, heard she’s living with some brute, the curiosity becomes a five-year silence. i haven’t seen her. i haven’t talked to her. i don’t want to see her. i don’t want to talk to her. i could see her. i could talk to her. but it’s over. (next subject.) but no, they don’t want to see the wreck marked with a buoy. dinners. wine. card games. laughter we all once made. the sounds she made . . the neighbor consulting her on orgasms. they all miss her, us. they don’t like knowing their memories are memories. they think of themselves today. if jess and pat didn’t make it, nobody’s going to make it. hope wants hope. they’re scared. they never ask if i miss her.

the machine. SC, $6 at Sally's: 2,000,000 words.

other people

. witnesses and actors in a play, from role to role, we try to upstage silence with the engines of fornication and hearses. it’s a primordial play where all of the characters are named yet. you must remember that everyone has had the luck of insanity, the biggest fuck off going. you must remember that to a dunce the holes in your jeans say more than the holes in his head. you must forget the women. you must forget the dog shit you stepped in and forget the dog and forget the man who dragged him into your path. you must forget the monstrous laziness of an ungrateful race which resists being reborn on this earth. you must forget a universe inside which revolves a system of morons and burning rocks. you must remember that it’s always been like this, always. you must forget about hope. you must bully those pea-brained glares whose acts smell like the cesspool you crawled out of. you can’t eat it twice. you must remember not to believe in god, but that GOD IS.

seaman's church institutute, newort, ri

romantic

romantic

i can’t find my soap

i’m out of old spice deodorant

i’m out of pinaud aftershave

my razor is dull

my clothes are dirty

i have no food

but i have cigarettes

i don’t have shoes

but i have beer

and cigarettes

i’ve got sweaty balls

and dirty feet

and no one to talk to

i can’t think about anything

but a rotting tooth

i move like a plant

my conscience is broken

the best things

about me

are my sunglasses

and maybe my hair

step by breath

i call myself a romantic

so i can fit in

to what

is not here

white pride

           

 we pulled up the driveway at high noon. brown mountains rose behind the house. the drought sun burned through november’s reputation.

  the front door opened and we were greeted by a fat guy in a red sweatshirt embossed with greek letters.

  “this is fred, freddie-the-wanker, from manhattan beach,” bobo said.

  bobo had told me freddie’s parents owned a chain of round-table pizza franchises. back home, he was the man to touch for sustenance.

  We climbed out of weederman and stretched out.

  “bobo? what happened?” freddie-the-wanker said.

  “i was in them thar hills running after bigfeets. this is roosta.”

  “you’re too skinny too,” freddie-the-wanker said. “what is happening?”

an after-the-storm quiet in the house, or you might call it an eye of the storm deception. everybody was in bed. in the living room the sun blasted through the white curtain in the bay window. under it was the couch, which had been reassembled with duct tape. a guy with a shaved head lay on his stomach with his face resting in the lap of a blonde. she was upright at one end, leaning back with the sun on her hair and face. they were sleeping. he wore a leather jacket and his right arm dangled so his knuckles touched the floor.

  “yaw,” bobo said in a reverent whisper. “stick.”

  freddie-the-wanker stood like a curator showing off his most prized exhibit, the man who had beaten his expectations for himself and had gone on to paint self-portraits with his eyelashes.

  i was less impressed. probably the swastika.

  the blonde was stirred by our talk and opened her eyes. she looked at us and closed her eyes. she was good looking. by most standards where i’d come from, rhode island via humboldt, she was hot. she was the first woman i had seen in days and though she was with stick, she was a draw. she was in her early twenties and she had once been beautiful, before she had lived and let go of her responsibility to her face. She had only looked at us, but I could see that she was smart and serious. i would have gone out with her. by bobo’s standards, she was used up. any girl out of high school was used up, for him. you had to get them before they got their drivers licenses. once a girl had her license, she was free to become a vessel for tequila and semen. this was all theoretical, of course. for what did bobo know about women, except how to avoid them. bobo might have been a virgin, for all i knew.

stick moved.

a roll onto his side, maybe a protest to our intrusion, or a better spot on her thigh. he was shaven and the skin of his face was taught. asleep he did not look tough, just a guy with a shaved head. he was small. i guessed he knew we were there, but he was resisting the day. finally, his eyes half opened to the presence.

   “bobo?” he raised himself. “you sonofabitch.” bobo moved in and gave stick’s head a rub. stick pulled his head away, smiled. the blonde was awake, cool and intelligent.

  “how you been?” stick said.

  “more i learn, thinner i seemta get,” bobo said.

  “the more i learn, the more i lift,” stick said. “but i’m out.” he rubbed his face.

  “not for long, i hear,” bobo said.

  the blonde frowned. stick grinned. “fuckin’ parole. they told me i can’t leave l.a. county. supposed to see my parole officer tomorrow. but i gotta see my friends.”

  “right on. stick, show us your new tats,” bobo said.

  “c’mon man. i just woke up.”

  “c’mon stick. i wanna see ‘em.”

  “fuck you, you just woke me up.”

  stick blinked, stared assimilatingly. he didn’t look at me, but he saw me. he saw me the way most criminals see me, as a cop. had he been a cop, he would have seen a criminal. bobo smiled, as if he had let go of the tattoos, as if being told to fuck himself had actually worked. as if, because bobo was only using silence, wishes legible. stick saw them hanging and maybe appreciated it, bobo and his childish manipulations, which were always shy of subtle. stick was absorbing. still he did not look into my eyes and we were not introduced.

  “all-right. you really wanna see them? but you’re a pain in my ass.”

stick came off the couch and standing in his boots, peeled off his jacket and white t-shirt. his skin was pale, sunless. the swastika on his chest was in green ink, like the others. his muscles were big for his small size, thick muscles but undefined, not toned like a surfer’s. weights,  a prison yard response to violence, intimidation. the defense imperative to be bigger than that guy. a recreational build-up to be bigger than yesterday. most of the tattoos were simple and crude, all of them green. the swastika was a decent job, about five inches across, but the others were murky, prison work without proper tools. there was the impression of an unsteady hand in some of the lines. his marks, marked. stick turned around and pointed over his shoulder at the latest:

                                           WHITE PRIDE

. . . from shoulder blade to shoulder blade in outlined letters two inches high. this one had artistry, professional.

  “yaw,” bobo laughed. he read to me off stick’s back. “white pride.” bobo seemed genuine, this was a good thing for stick, on stick, perfect.

stick was mostly a spectacle to bobo, though maybe bobo felt himself an accomplice of sorts. they had a shared past. stick had declared his sentiment on his hide, spoke his mind in a way which won bobo’s respect, even if he did not subscribe to stick’s message. bobo was not a racist, but acted as more of a universal middle man who was trying to stay out of hell by accepting everything and everyone. He had known stick all his life and he accepted that this is what stick was about. I don’t think bobo had any grasp or sense of depth regarding stick’s hatreds or racism.

the tattoo seemed to me like an ad slogan. sentimental and loud. it did not mean he walked the walk, but i had little doubt that stick believed in what he was saying and that in prison, where subtlety is less effective, it was a necessary flag. it was a liability and an asset, stoking hatred and fear, antagonizing, but summoning protection, reminding enemies there were more like him. it was a practical line to draw in prison, but in a house of upper-middle-class college boys it was just novel and inane. not that stick was the lone racist under that roof. he was just the most obvious, and, by his lack of brains and often his freedom, one of the least effective.

i had met some of bobo’s friends at the lumberjack days celebration at h.s.u. they’d come up from l.a. to shave bobo’s head. buford wore white sunglasses whose lenses concealed half his head. stork looked like a basketball player. he was blonde and serious, of german descent. tall, lean, and strong, he was a good-looking jock and allegedly a card-carrying member of the nazi party. one day while we were walking in l.a., bobo asked to see his papers. stork frowned and kept on walking, like it was not a joke or even something to talk about. bobo could have been full of shit, but he sounded like he was not baiting an innocent man. he wanted me to see. stork never said anything i could interpret as nazi ideology, but he had the bearing of an ss officer. i liked stork. he was regal, and an outsider. if he was a nazi, i would have had to have killed him, but walking down the street or in a bar, we got along. we got along without a lot of talking, which neither of us did. we shared a similarly evolving grasp of reality and we were aware of this, even from a distance. he could get caught up in the drinking, but he was a solid, bright guy who almost had more realism in him than the other pigeons could withstand. i guessed he had a strong and sensible mother and was protected by his moodiness and fast talent for acting hard. i imagined stork hardening toward humanity with each day he saw it, but i couldn’t see him as a fanatic, or submitting to anybody’s speech, or saluting anything, or wasting his time with aryan idiots and symbols. hard did not mean hate. but bobo was serious enough and stork did seem irritated. i didn’t know. stork was asleep in the house while bobo and i checked out stick’s white and proud back. an interesting location to tattoo such a nationalistic, inciting, statement of racial hatred. interesting for a small guy who lived in the big house. a guy who needed to repel blacks with the help of big white friends. he held onto life like a dog.

answering bobo while he was pulling his t-shirt back over his head, stick said, “you mean the big house? it’s not as bad as you think it is. you got food. you got a roof. and in a way, you got a family.”

  “you don’t mind it?”

  “i got friends there,” stick said. “in a way, i can’t wait to go back.”

  bobo was silent.

  “like big stan,” stick said. “big stan with the big twenty-twos.” stick grabbed his bicep and wrapped his hand around it, drummed his fingers on the muscle. “i’m part of big stan’s family. big stan with the big twenty-twos. his biceps are twenty-two inches ‘round, bobo.”

  “that’s bigger than my brain.”

  “i don’t need to think much. i do what big stan asks and he takes care of me. you gotta stick together in the house, bobo. there are three types in prison. white. black. and mind your own business. there’s a lot of nigs in there. and they’re bad nigs. nig nigs.”

  “then why don’t you mind your own business?” the blonde said. she had been disgusted with the talk from the moment they were awakened. she got up and vanished.

  big stan’s harem. that’s what i was thinking. protection.

  “big stan asks you to do something, you do it. he’s bad. he’s never getting out. he’s the boss. if a nig’s talking shit, thinks he’s bad, if big stan tells you to shank him, you gotta do him.”

  “kill him?” bobo said.

  stick laughed. “shank him. whack him - to let him know he isn’t the shit.”

  “you do it?” bobo asked.

  “one nigger big stan said to do, so i did. put a lock in a sock. i did it when he was in the gym locker room, when he was alone, sitting on a bench. from behind. the sickest noise it made when that lock hit his head. it fucking bounced! he fell on the floor, blood everywhere. i ran.”

  “he live?” bobo said.

  “he was fine. he never talked no shit to anyone again, minded his own fucking business. if you’re not big, like big stan with the big twenty-twos, you need him just to do your time without getting knifed by some niggers who think we won’t fight. big stan is big.”

  “big stan with the big twenty-twos,” bobo said.

  stick grinned, grabbed his biceps, “big stan with the big twenty-twos.”

  “how’s your old man?” bobo said.

  tripped into another reality, stick blanked and recovered. “my old man? fuck i don’t know. i don’t talk to him much.”

  “i heard they put him in charge of the los angeles diocese or something,” bobo said. “your father is almost the pope, stick.”

  “as long he pays my lawyer, he’s a saint. but they don’t have popes and shit in the episcopal church, bobo. i don’t know what he is, but he likes women. he gets more trim than the pope’s cadillac.”

with bobo on the day’s first beer and the rest of the pigeon gang just waking, my mind turned to waves. the coast was 20 minutes. “you go without me,” bobo said. “i’m gonna try and rustle up what i can toward the acquisition of a keg.”

i took weederman west on a road paralleled by high voltage wires strung from gray girdered towers, tower after tower on my left. the towers just kept coming, planted in the tilled ground, with wires tightened up and over hills. they marked the road ahead for as far as i could see, for a long ride. those twenty miles.

the sun got lost in a fog and then i saw the beach. i saw where the wires were going to, or coming from. looming in the overcast, a gigantic dome sat by the beach. the surf was frothing in a hard onshore wind, the waves were shit. knee-high whitecaps pawing the sand at the foot of a nuclear power plant. the plant was a dark gray, concrete painted the color of a warship, ocean camouflage. my skin peeled off in red sheets.

i drove weederman across a great wide lot to where there were cars and people, a young couple walking close through the sand, an older couple too, others tossing a frisbee and dogs running free. the members of a family dressed in pink and purple windbreakers were eating cheese sandwiches and tossing some to hovering gulls. there was one guy out, fighting with the water. bobo would have attributed his attempts to radiation. he was a kid and you could tell he could surf and also that he knew better. he lacked restraint, maybe sense. those six-inch waves were kicking his passionate ass. bobo would have been unable to watch. i would have agreed with him, for once. this was no more than a windswept puddle. i hung out for awhile because it was a beach and i had driven a ways to get there and all i had to go back to was a house full of hung-over strangers and stick. stick and i were not getting along. we had an aversion on the particle level. Also, there were women at the beach. i watched the frisbee get pushed around in the wind, the loose and smiling dogs, and the people, who seemed to have found a spot of enjoyment in the shadow of the giant dome. i never saw any of them look at it. i guessed they were used to it. there was little to look at, anyhow. it was deflective and cold. it was sealed and resistant. it was hidden out in the open, gunmetal and silent. there were no visible workers about, just wires tightly strung on insulators. the lines were impressive from an engineering standpoint. i was not opposed to nuclear power, but i had never been close enough to have one grab the landscape from me. there were practical reasons to put them by the ocean. there were reasons to put them elsewhere.

i went down to the beach and sat on the concrete wall. there were not a lot of women around, but that didn’t mean a goddamn thing. It only took one. a brunette in her late twenties walked by in grey sweats and white sneakers. i didn’t know it yet, but this girl’s name was julia. I could see that she was beautiful, but I didn’t know she was viciously funny. tall, thin. she was italian. my first impression was correct, she was a graduate student at cal poly. Mathematics. i thought i’d lost her, but she walked back to me and it was do or die. we smiled and said hello at the same time. she was standing in front of me. she asked me what i was doing and i was honest. i was looking for a woman while trying to keep the seagulls from reading my thoughts. i wasn’t having many thoughts, but i didn’t want any bird picking one up. she said she knew i would still be there because she would be coming back. she was glad i was. she was a most confident and attuned and open girl, if a little enthusiastic. things moved fast, but she was comfortable with that, good at that. I was the one being seduced. she sat down with me and we talked. we had all the subjects available to us. two hours passed easily. she brought up the fog and dampness and suggested we sit in her car or mine. having seen that she was driving a small car, i suggested weederman. She agreed. as we stood up, i made my move. i was not nervous. she kissed me back like she wanted more. we stopped at her car so she could grab her purse and then we went in through weederman’s side door. We were out of our clothes in minutes.

“you have a ten inch cock,” she said.

 “right.”

 she found her purse, produced a tape measure, pulled out a foot of tape and aligned it. “you’re right. it’s only eight. but it’s not even all the way hard.” she put her mouth on me. i didn’t want her to stop, but-

 “get that ruler - is cold - offa me!”

 “you know how many dicks i’ve seen?”

 “i don’t want to know.”

 “you might be number two out of hundreds. two-hundred.”

  “two hundred?”

  “no, okay, a hundred.”

  “you’re a lying whore.”

  “you can’t handle the truth.”

  “you can’t measure the truth.”

  “more than a hundred. less than three hundred.”

  “who’s number one?”

  “the first or the biggest?”

  “whichever you can remember.”

  she lit up. i was wilting. “he had a 12 inch cock.”

 “adjusting for your excitement and exaggerations, that would be a ten-inch cock,” i said.

 “no, it was a 12 inch cock. just like this ruler. don’t worry. i wouldn’t go out with him again. he’s too big. it hurt. and he’s fucked up. he’s a real fucked-up person.”

 “so i’m number two?”

 “i think so.”

 “am i also fucked up?”

 “well, yes. look at you.”

 “so truthfully, you can only remember number one for sure.”

 “well. you’re up there with him.”

 “no i’m not. he’s 50-percent more. he is the biggest and then there are the rest of us.”

 “you’re perfect.”

 “yeah, i’m here.”

 “do you know how many dicks i’ve endured that were no bigger than a hotdog?”

 “five-hundred?”

 “no, but they’re out there and you never know when someone’s gonna spring one on ya.”

 “i’ll take your word.”

 “think about a cock the size of your pinky, what would you say to that?”

 “i don’t know. ‘i’ll have a hamburger?’”

 “mercy is no place for mercy, i mean bed isn’t. trust me, you have a huge cock. i can’t believe no one’s ever told you that before.”

 “just the guys in the shower.”

 she laughed. “males of all species, assemble and brawl it out.”

 “if they hadn’t, i might not believe you. i don’t know. there was a girl who brought down the house every time, a thousand times, and all she ever said was, ‘i have no complaints.’”

 “the bitch was playing poker.”

 “you’re the first chick.”

 “yes. i’m the only woman for whom size matters.” she laughed. “size is presence. simple as that. sex is about being there, right? don’t you agree?”

 “being there and getting there.”

 “the amazing thing about cocks, to me,  is how much they can grow. look at you now. you must be down to two inches.”

 “get that thing away from me!”

afterward we sat in weederman’s front seats and stared at the pacific.

the focus was on bobo’s successful hunt. two brothers pulled the keg out of the trunk of a beat chevy impala and carried it into the living room. a couple guys moved out of the way, then fell in behind bobo. the installation of the tap was an invitation to brothers and friends of brothers, friends of friends, girlfriends of brothers, girlfriends of friends of brothers, to pigeons on the roof, to all the thanksgiving flotsam and jetsam at california polytechnic institute. the usual. music, shouting, gambling, television, and arriving bodies on a scale unlike what frat had meant back east. this was small.

i found stick was back on the couch. or still on the couch. he was fielding questions from the curious gathered on the floor to learn about his accomplishments. stick was drinking beer and was louder than this morning. he was not relaxed around these college kids, with a crowd. he was into a character. he gestured, made jabs at the air. his stories hinged on irony, on inacceptance. i saw a nutcase drinking down his last night of freedom, settled into a central position where he was unable to shut up. but he was the least boring thing at the party. he was second to the keg, which, only feet away, captured for him new listeners. like many criminals i had met and would later meet, stick was an adept story teller. he talked in the moment, like he was there. he also was right on himself. always right. stick never made mistakes inside his stories. And he was justified. he did onto others as he would have done onto others. i don’t know why i listened to him. maybe it was because he was a character. whether his crime stories were true or not didn’t much matter. he was a reality, breathing in ours.

stick was a skate punk during high school. they fancied themselves neo-nazis, but mostly it was about meth and half-pipes. he skated on after his friends split for college. he didn’t say why he skipped college and he didn’t need to. he was restless and did not desire to know those things. while skating through what might have been his first year of college he got tight with some guys in the aryan nation. lacking a job, thanks to illegal immigrants and bloated social programs, he began robbing people to pay for his sneakers and wheels. as he matured, he set buildings afire. he suggested it was entertainment more than pyromania, but i figured he had a purpose and it was tied to his political activities. one l.a. apartment building burned to the ground. everyone got out, he said, nobody was killed. he emphasized this. nobody was killed. he didn’t say who the people were. he said he was never a suspect. but it was another apartment building which landed him in prison for arson. he didn’t say who lived in that one either and this time he didn’t mention injuries or deaths.

he said he first killed a man in tahoe. he did it on a dare, he laughed. “this guy i was with said, ‘i dare you to off a nigger.’ we had been drinking in the hotel room with two girls. i was getting cocked. i said, ‘fuck you! why don’t you off a nigger?!’ and the guy said, ‘i have. plenty.’ and then he told me about the nigs he’d killed. some jews too. it was humbling. the guy was bad. i had no choice. i had to go out and get myself a nigger. so i left the hotel on a hunt. the first one i found was out in the parking lot, by the edge of the parking lot where there was this hill or whatever you call it, you know, goes down . . i used a knife. the guy never knew what happened. blood squirted out his neck like, i didn’t know there was so much blood! it was like a hose going off, the funniest thing. then i went back to the room.” stick settled into a smile. “the girls were pretty impressed.”

a man died because he was there. a man died because stick was there. i stabbed a man in tahoe. i shot a man in reno. i watched a man lie in san luis obispo. maybe.

white privilege laughed. there was some admiration in that room and the respect due violence itself. there was no fear of stick. they were safe, he was on their side. and what about his victim, his supposed victim? i believed that, for however briefly, the man who was stabbed in the neck knew. if he had just two seconds with stick’s knife, he knew. if he existed. i wondered if a body had been found, if the lake tahoe police had a cold case of a man found on a hill by a hotel parking lot. throat cut. no apparent motive. no suspects or weapon. black.

imagine, a nationwide hunt for a man already in prison for a crime he invented in his head.

  “how about doing someone tonight?” somebody said.

  “yaw!” bobo cheered.

  “how about it, stick?”

  “you mean roll someone? tonight?” he was half addressing himself. “i’ll roll someone tonight, grab a wallet. hell yeah. i’ll go right now.”

  he’d trimmed the request.

  stick was alone, blood in his cheeks. His knife came out.

  the blade of the stiletto was ready to scare an old lady out of her purse, an old lady who went to his father’s churches, an old lady who gave money to his father’s churches, money used to pay stick’s lawyers. (and money the old lady would be taxed out of by the separate governments to pay the cops, prosecutors, judges, and the prisons which kept letting stick back out.)

  “are you stick?”

  heads turned from the living room to an archway. a girl with dark hair stepped forward.

  “yeah,” stick said, drawn out and curious.

  “what do you have against black people?” she said.

  stick, folding up his stiletto, said, “they’re niggers.”

  “my step-father is black. i love him very much. he’s a wonderful man,” she said.

  “your mother fucked a nigger?”

  “you’re a pig!”

  off the couch came stick, straight at her: “fucking nigger lover!”

  the girl lunged for him, screaming. her girlfriends grabbed her back as she told stick what he was. she was strong in what she knew. she broke him out for everyone. it was as if a stick had never occurred to her and now it had, she was applying herself without hesitation or regard. she was a beautiful sight. two guys had gotten in front of stick and were blocking and talking. he did not resist these guys, his friends, but he ran his hatred at the girl. she screamed back until she was in tears and her friends escorted her out of the room.

  “earthquake.”

  silence.

  eyes turned to the tv. the volume was down, but the message moved across the bottom of the screen: “an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the richter scale hit the los angeles area at 10:23 pm this evening causing minor damage in the san bernardino valley area . . .”

   bodies moved toward the keg.

November 02nd, 2012

the bobo character depicted in "the turkey shoot" is none other than the bobo now famous on the nature channel, chasing big foot all over the world. we were close friends at humboldt state university in the late 80s and surfed together and i will hereby swear that he is the best longboarder i have even done witnessed. we drove around in his faded 1967 VW bus, surviving on cheap beer, which i'll bet he still favors. he has many fans worldwide, including me, and i anticipate that some executive will wake up to his charm and humor and give him his own show, where he will chase bigfoot, the lock ness monster, ufo's and the weinermobile.

p.f.

the turkey shoot

the turkey shoot, excerpted from the novel THREADING

it wasn’t easy to climb a tree with a 12-pack under my arm.

  “-mee a-brew,” someone said from the branches to my left. the hand, the eyes, were red.

  i tore open the end of the cold twelve and handed him a busch. then i opened one for myself. the cracking of beers filled the forest, most of which could have been felled with one swing of a machete.

  “crsht!”

  “krshtt-pop!”

  “psssht!”

  there were maybe twenty of us roosting in the tallest trees around, excluding the palms which were too difficult to climb, could not hold many pigeons, were dangerously high, and already claimed by rats. this was a pigeon thanksgiving tradition they called the turkey shoot. ideally, at the end of the night there would be only one pigeon remaining in a tree, the rest on the ground, unconscious, or gone home. when a new arrival was spotted on the street or coming into the field below us, he was greeted by taunting turkeys: “bok bok bok bok bok bok bok . .” from the leaves and branches. once a pigeon was in a tree, he was handed a beer and was expected to become a turkey with a bottomless gizzard for premium brew. i knew from my hunting experiences as a kid upstate new york that turkeys did roost in trees at night and so i was impressed by the authenticity of their re-enactment.

  i listened.

the guys were not saying much. the mood was off, not high like it had been at the crevice bowl. there was a reason. two of the pigeons, brothers, had lost their mother that afternoon. all the guys knew her. the brothers had just stopped to talk in the street. they knew where to find a lot of friendly pigeons posing as turkeys. they left us after sharing the news. she had been in the hospital for more than a week. she had been run over by a transit bus. the bus had passed her by and she had run after it. she slipped in the street and her legs went under the bus. the rear tires crushed both legs. one leg was amputated right away, but doctors tried to save the other one. this leg became infected and they gave her antibiotics. the infection spread. they continued to give her antibiotics, but gangrene set in. they amputated high up the thigh. she remained on the antibiotics after the amputation and the bacteria seemed to have been defeated. she had lost both legs, but she was alive. then a few days later she got a fever. the infection had spread into her pelvis. they gave her more antibiotics and she held on. though her fever fluctuated, there was an agreement that the worst was over. she would come home. then she deteriorated fast. she was on morphine and nodding out, blanked to the presence of family members who never thought she could die from this. the last time the brothers had visited, she was feverish and dosed on morphine, but she was talking. the possibility of death hadn’t occurred to them. her legs had been run over. people lived without legs. they had faith in medicine. the brothers shared their story with the other pigeons. their mother was gone. just like that. waiting for a fucking bus. talking to friends took the brothers out of a shell-shocked living room. this gathering was a tradition, solid. friends and beer. perhaps there was an incomplete appreciation of their loss, but aren’t all empathies and sympathies? the pigeons gave their fraction and the brothers drove away. the guys were down and the noise of the turkey shoot was assumed by impersonal jets and cars. leaves in the wind below. i heard the crushing of aluminum. the ridiculousness of her end. you could not so much as breathe on it.

on the way down a hill squared off by roofs, when our shadowy stand of large leaf trees appeared, i had been surprised to see trees from back home amidst stucco and tar. under a smogged sky slit by jetlights, real trees were living on dried up earth? i’d asked bobo where we were and he’d said it was the lawn and playground of the elementary school where most of them had gone. the school lay dark behind the trees, not a light on, closed to the turkeys it had incubated. i could make out that it was brick. bobo’s mother had taught third grade there. she knew every pigeon in existence and acted like it was not her fault. the night crouched with its elbows on its knees, protecting us against cops. our void did not demand much guarding otherwise. occasionally a human shadow waltzed through the sodium vapor. they were over there. they stepped on intervals. they were unaware. we watched them. cars passed by. nobody knew we lived here or anywhere. for hours we existed in a simpler world of pale eyelids and wet lips.

  “moe! you must tell us what affirmed your ascendancy to status of grand poobah, commencing with the exodus of your last hope for a woman as beautiful as you weren’t going to get.”

  bobo was enraptured by this kid. i had met the guy at his house on one of those days we were cruising l.a. he had not been in san luis obispo and since the rumor was he had metamorphosized, visiting him was classified by bobo as an utmost duty. his name was moe. he had grown into the fattest pigeon in the land. grand poobah, wings down. we had found him on his couch and i had sensed we were unwelcome and distracting him from a football game. he talked to us from his couch and we left him on his couch. he never moved, like the one hair on his head would tumble if he turned his neck.

 “i told you,” moe said. “it fell out.”

  “yaw! you must recount the chilling drama in hairline detail, grand poobah, drinker of free drinks.”

  “most of you bastards are drinking free,” moe said.

  “’tis so, but we didn’t earn it.”

moe had torn through seven pant sizes since june and had gone bald. there was awe. moe was leading the charge and his metamorphosis was among the most heroic feats they’d ever seen.

  moe: “i was watching football. and drinking beer. and i musta put my hand through my hair. it was a close game. and, and i musta been nervous. i musta pulled on it. or something. ‘cause my hand comes away with this clump of hair. a handful. i looked at it for a second and i says, “wha?”

  “yaw!”

  “then i did it again. ‘cause i was thinking. how the fuck? and it happened again.”

  “yaw! hail moe!”

  “and i musta kept doing it because by the end of the game, i was bald!”

  “impressive, moe.”

  “moe is impressive.”

  “i must concur, most impressive.”

  “my hair was- everywhere!”

  “not in your beer . . . ”

  “yes. but i drank it anyway.”

  “impressive. may we inquire as to which brand of brew you were drinking?”

  “grade a swill.”

  “to moe!”

  “to moe!”

  i drank to the grand poobah’s hair, glad it was him.

  “i also lost twenty bucks,” moe said.

  “yaw!”

my feet were on different branches. i was maybe 12 feet in the air and my left arm was wrapped around a branch about chest high. i could also lean my shoulder into the branch and stand there.  i had to let go of the branch and balance myself to drink. drinking was done left-handed, with legs spread and a 12-pack under my right arm. occasionally i traded the 12-pack to my left arm for relief and grabbed a high branch on the right side. that branch was a stretch up and out which took me away from the security of the left branch. i spent most of the night drinking from my left hand with the box of beer under the right. if a foot slipped, the left branch would be my savior. i’d probably drop my beer, but not the entire 12-pack, and i’d save my neck.

the 12-pack got lighter with each beer i drank or handed out. when handing out beers with my left hand, i held my own beer and the box in the right. i had to let go of all branches while i took out a fresh beer. but then i could lean into the left-side branch when handing off because the beers were going out left to red, who then passed them on or drank them. there were plenty of other guys in the trees who were working as bartenders.

i was able to get plenty into me . . .

  -and onto me.

  the beer slid cold down my neck.

  i didn’t blink. i might have reflexed, but i did not touch myself, i definitely didn’t react to the beer on my chin. i had learned the deal. i still felt the deal. i was probably deserving of some additional rehabilitation for this mishap, but it was a holiday and i was stressed.

  i waited on them.

  nothing.

  i decided to make a pass with my sleeve.

  i did not escape the senses of the pigeon nearest me: red.

  “roosta,” he reported.

  cluck cluck clucks from the trees, ugly turkey faces necked through leaves for a gander at my blood. red himself was in shadow, deep inside the leaves near the trunk. he had a web he couldn’t fall through.

  “sacred blood has been spilled.”

  “not very impressive.”

  “no, not. and to be the first. a pity and a shame.”

  bobo’s laugh was permission for red to kill me. “you knoweth what shall be finished.”

  red walked his branches. i finished my beer and moved left as well as i could. i knew his punches. bobo’s face, my arm. i made a silent request for leniency on the grounds of shared insight into the ridiculousness of his pending action. he read it well, this imploration, and he swung into me. i threw my elbow around the branch before i fell. betrayal and swill. they were idiots, not friends. i was an idiot, not a friend. i stayed calm, but the pain spread its wings and poked my eyes out from behind. i had to hold my weight with the wounded arm, my temples pulsing. the 12-pack was tight to my right side.

  “that’ll learn roosta.”

  “better’n’ve.”

  mired as my life then was in the greeks, it came to me that it was not democratic to be in a tree near red.

later, much later, when i had reached an unspeakable understanding of my life,  i spilled again. it was so far into the morning for anyone to care. red was drunk in his hole and he missed it, but this time i looked down at where my beer had gone. there were no bidders and it seemed i was going to get away with it.

  “roosta did it again,” someone said.

  the slow rising of drooped necks. the snitch was in another tree. the voice of a slurring vulture. how the hell did he see me spill an ounce of beer in the dark under the shade of a tree at 20 feet, in the middle of the night, after probably downing 20 himself? did he smell it? no. his beer told him. all beer is one beer, an oceanic entity with one dream, to be drunk and pissed, not spilled.

  tree on left: “jeez, this kid is sloppy.”

  tree out there: “i cannot express my unimpressiveness.”

  tree over here: “you mean his unimpressiveness. your unimpressedness.”

  tree out there, bobo: “’tis not what i said, but meant to think: unimpressediveness. in a school yard is no time for grammatical pridings. t’is the hour of crime and punishment, which i have not the time for unless t’is about me, witch it’aint. this is a time for the due to be done to the duly deserving desecrater, roosta, the dirty one i would disown had he not already deserted us.”

  i liked the speech, but bobo was the prick who had betrayed me. there was no temperance in the mist. hard dreaming going on.

  red: “i must beg forgiveness for my blindness of duty. the denseness of your discourse defies decoding at this darkest drunkenest hour before dawn, but the required duty is one i will demonstrate.”

  bobo: “red. you have the honor. the sinner believes he is untouchable by me.”

  red crawled out of his web.

  “take it easy,” i said. “truth, temperance, toler-“

  “@’&%$%####”!!!*???”

   i hung from the tree.

earlier, while the mourning brothers were with us, bobo had said to one, “usc-notre dame tomorrow. you going?”

  “ . . probably, yeah, i guess, yeah, the biggest game of the year and season tickets. they’re, you know . . .  yeah, mom would want us to go.”

  “guess you have an extra ticket, then?” bobo said.

  no self-deprecating chuckle could cancel his tactlessness or hide his humiliation with himself.

  i faded.

  the son responded, “yes.”

  i heard bobo already.

  “can i have it?” bobo said.

  silence getting late, a son’s exhale becomes grace. “i guess my mother won’t be needing it.”

  bobo let out a quiet “yawwwww . . . .”

we stayed in the trees until december. my arms and legs ached and i no longer trusted the arm red had adopted. in the grass below cans testified.

the 12-pack was empty. i moved out for a clear piss, one foot on one limb, one foot on the other. my bruised left arm was wrapped around my safe branch. i traded my beer to that left hand. with my right hand i pulled down my fly. i pushed down my briefs with the back of my hand and scooped out my works. i threw it all out my jeans with a thrust. my foot slipped. i locked my arm around the branch, but i lost the beer.  i saved myself, but the aluminum can hit the grass. i hung from the tree with my entire deal out.

  beer foamed onto the grass. i could hear it. i had dropped a fucking full can. the hiss of foam gave me up.

  laughter.

  “he did it again?”

  first i pissed through the leaves, on my feet, everywhere. using the narrow passage sewn into the underwear might have been the way to go, but it was too late for regret. i relieved myself.

  there were calls for my execution.

  i pissed on them and told them where to go.

  red was there, waiting for me. he had not called it. had he missed it? or was he cutting me slack?  he hung waiting, somehow higher than me. i walked out and steadied my legs, again showed him the only arm i could offer his way.

my eyeballs dropped into a jar filled with ammonia. they were locked inside a gray steel box addressed to the smithsonian. a sticker was affixed: “liver pending.”

who the hell knew what brought us down. the beer was low, but we had some. no turkeys had flown the roost. it was unanimous, whatever it was. i had drifted into a play where light touched hands and faces and shadow melted trees. streetlights, stars, moons in the audience.

walking back to bobo’s, sirens curled our peace. we feared for our freedom until we saw a fire engine. more than one. they made a sharp right and went up a hill. there was a ladder truck stacked with polished controls and horns and sirens loud enough to kill people in their beds. lights spinning on and off the windows and sides of houses, they lit the path we followed.

we broke into a run. we thought we were running. the lights got away. i made it half-way up the hill and then i was heavy, slow as slow. i made it to where i saw a tornado of fire. we ran again straight into the heat of the orange flames. a hundred feet high. i moved closer, among the firemen. they were too busy to hassle me. their work was a huge three-story house, a million dollars dropping from the sky as cinders and ash. firemen continued to run hoses off the trucks. leaks in the connections made an orange lake around our feet. the flames ate through the utility wires. the neighbors’ homes were catching. those houses were the job now.

alone, i ran down the street and around the side of an adjacent house. in seconds i was climbing a wood fence and jumping into the backyard of the burning house. the firemen weren’t there yet. flames reflected off the motionless surface of a swimming pool. a beautiful disaffection in that pool, bottomless and invulnerable, blue without defiance. it was cool. two firemen with oxygen tanks appeared and put the water on where the flames were burning the neighbor’s house. the hose looked fit for watering the lawn. two firemen looked over the fence i’d jumped. they were also wearing masks. one came over the fence and dragged a canvas hose to the fire, shot white spray into a glowing ruin. mist fell onto the surface of the pool while the house vanished. the place was gone before we had caught our breaths. the fire was beautiful, intimidating and so unassuming.

Marrow Editions lands Distribution Contract

October 31, 2012

We are happy to announce that Marrow Editions has signed a distribution contract with Small Press Distribution of Berkeley, California. This will allow maximum market exposure to our client authors, including Patrick Fealey, whose novel MOSTLY MADLY was recently published, and for Jack Evarts and Paddy Brett, whose novels are forthcoming in 2013.

Remember, tomorrow, Thursday November 1, free copies of MOSTLY MADLY will be available through Amazon.com.