Blood & Speed

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

- Mario Andretti

Yes, Mario, you turned some tight corners at very high speeds. And so have I, for that matter. But there’s always a great fear when you start closing in on the top of the hill, because you never know what craziness is thundering up the other side & there are some bends you just can’t see around. So you just ram the throttle hard & hope you can slip your way through. When I was 16 or 17, we used to race cars around our neighborhood at night and not stop at any stop signs. We’d turn off our headlights & if we didn’t see any lights aimed down the cross streets, we’d fire on through the intersections & hope we were the only people who had the idiopathic nerve to behave this recklessly. Sometimes, things are exactly as they seem…and when you’re playing games like that, it’s not much different from playing Russian roulette. It changes the equation. It is no longer a question of if; it is a matter of time. Because sooner or later, some asshole with ideas as crazy as yours is coming full bore straight towards you with a devil’s grin and a strong potential for becoming a good friend, if the airbags work & our hearts don’t stop beating.

I’m tired, but I know that no matter how exhausted & burned down & wasted my body becomes I will not sleep for many more hours. Another, much worse, idea will invariably sink its terrible claws so deep into my brain that it will seem infinitely more appealing. & Things become horribly frightening once you come to the realization that your friends have already concluded that they can without much difficulty convince you to do nearly anything that they want you to. But that’s all bullshit too. The twitching has begun & I am beginning to feel faint, so I will consolidate my losings & fix myself some coffee. That’ll jam my nerves into complete static & buy me at least enough time to finish this assignment with a relatively clear head. After all, it’s the home stretch now. Why not give this bird one final dent in the fender? It’s still too soon to pull out of the draft, but the end is clearly visible. So why not stomp on the gas for just a little while longer. “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.” Vince Lombardi said that decades ago & since then he’s really run out of Time. I don’t blame him, though. And you shouldn’t either. It was Oswald’s fault.

Hicks…Pumps…Six Shots Into Bogart.

“This moonshine is meaner than the devil,” Eric said, unleashing his maniacal cackle as his rusty sedan pushed on down the road and every bump or sharp turn the tires rubbed hard against the wheel wells & each time this happened, Eric would again drop the reigns.

“They shot him because the hair on his neck was standing.”

“The hair on is neck was always standing, he was just a sweet chocolate lab.”

Poor Bogart. The townspeople said the first shot took him down. The sixth blow must have driven his fur about six inches into the lawn. But I wasn’t there. Not then. Though I don’t doubt it gave the mayor the biggest thrill of his life to see the neighbor’s dog slaughtered on his lawn. No more late night hollering or shit on his lawn is coming from that horrible beast. Not once they rake his carcass off the lawn. Now they must all live with that stir. & I don’t doubt they’ll all rather enjoy it. A little something to talk about now that the high school football program has sunk to the sewer.

It’s what Tom & Allen might be discussing, were they not so cranked up on their moonshine, marijuana and whatever else anyone was willing to give them.

The both of them wore sandals they’d bought in Mexico. Their parents retired down to Puerto Vallerta & every chance the boys had, they’d haul ass down to Mexico to get crazy with the folks. He told Willie of one time the old man took Allen down the coast stone loaded & strapped a parachute on him & told the driver he better “give him a good ride, now.”

So the captain dropped the throttle & pulled that son of a bitch straight up a couple hundred feet over the ocean with the special instruction that he was to pull the descending lever only when the whistle blew, but when Allen heard a truck on the coast backing up he thought the beeping was the whistle blowing & yanked the lever & went hurling toward the sea as the driver tried waving him off & signaling for him to release the lever before that big mouth of his was filled with water at 40 or 50 miles per hour. He was about five feet from the water when he caught on & I don’t doubt that he got one hell of a thrill & so did his father.

“We got these down there,” Allen said pointing to the sandals that both he & his brother Tom were wearing. Allen wore suspenders made out to look like tape measures that latched on to his oversized jeans & up & over his tie-died shirt. His brother was slightly less conspicuous & hid his eyes behind a pair of glasses, only his eyebrows stuck far above & curled every few seconds, so you knew that even though you couldn’t see them, those eyes were crazy eyes.

“I’ve never been down to Puerto Vallerta. I had intended to go down there with my girlfriend once, but she left me just before I bought the plane tickets, so I never bothered. I was in Juarez once.”

“Juarez, shit…” Tom said going on about whores & bad food.

“Well, it’s not anything like Juarez,” Allen explained as Gomer Pile might, “it’s like a paradise.”

I didn’t argue. I’m sure it must have been & it still stings a bit that I never made it down there. Especially on slow cool summer nights when I’m not to far from the ocean & the sea mist hangs heavy in the air.

The intense exhaustion started to settle as the moonshine wore out of my brain, but the steadiness with which I had been drinking the lager had kept my mind at an accelerating distance from clarity. I was still capable of playing poker, so when the cards came to the table, I stayed seated. It probably helped that Eric kept a steady layer of meats and corn on the hibachi. It was the first day of summer & blue smoke was rising off the deck of the cabin. Between every few hands someone would see to it that we all had a shot of whiskey & the game unraveled as the toasts got worse & worse.

When cards were no longer possible, Eric grabbed his guitar & we sang songs that started to sound better & it is at this point where the night became a short string of cloudy 3 to 4 second flashbacks and then nothing.

According to some reliable sources, I went down somewhere between 11 and 12. It had apparently started as sitting down & then turned into a slide & then a roll that landed me drooling on the floor. Willie, who’d just then begun to drink heavily, acquired the assistance of Allen & picked me up off the floor & set me on the couch. More guests were rolling in & out of the cabin then before. I am told of Greasers, a large bald young man with a long goatee & boots that they tell me resembled a skin-head, and two beautiful young girls; one muscular & beautiful, the other a short tight Italian girl with very small feet.

But I missed all of this & was a little sad about it when Will filled me in that next morning. He’d stayed up through all of it, drinking G&T’s & smoking cigarettes.

We brewed some coffee & took a walk down to the Lake & sat in the sun recalling strange memories of the night before. Chumming chicken livers & sealing off the cracks in the distiller so you didn’t get high off the fumes or lose any of the moonshine.

“Allen told me he was schizophrenic last night,” I said to Will.

“Yeah, he looked crazy. Did you see the way he was looking over at us when we were sitting across the deck. It was like he was just waiting for us to laugh at him or make fun of him for something.”

Willie had a point. I remembered this too. Allen kept staring at us, as though we were just waiting for the perfect chance to take a dig into him for a laugh. When it didn’t happen & he realized it wasn’t going to, he kept going on about how amazing it was that no body was fighting, that everybody was getting along, & no one was trying to hurt anyone else, emotionally or otherwise & the whole thing was very said if you considered the sad hell Allen must have been put through throughout his life. His confidence was buried so deep I wonder that he’ll ever find it & his loyalty & love for his brother tell me that there were some bloody noble battles fought in brotherly honor. & if nothing else, there was comfort there.

“Yeah, it was sad how it surprised him that nobody was assaulting him,” I said, then turned a smile & said, “he could be a pretty freaky mother fucker though.”

“I know…I just hope somebody keeps a short leash on him.”

“I know right. Oh, listen to this…while you were sleeping yesterday afternoon, Eric started to take pictures with that digital camera he got from the newspaper & he took one of Tom & Allen & when Allen saw it he said, ‘I look scary…I always look scary in pictures…I’m not kidding, even when I look in the mirror I feel like I’m just a scary looking guy.”

We both laughed, but it was nothing to laugh about. That poor soul was even scared of himself. The outside world came crashing down on his own psychosis so hard that even he couldn’t bear to be around himself. But it was a nice day & Willie & I decided we wouldn’t think too hard on this. So we kept it lighter & just retold stories the brothers told us, trying to get their voices down. & from time to time I’d think of the two young girls I’d missed & of all of the girls out there that only reminded me how long it had been since I remembered what it was like to hold someone I love & to be comfortable with where I was without wanting anything but more of what I already had.

The sun was hot on my back & we needed a change of scenery, so we walked back up to the cabin to see if Eric & Emily had woken. He was holding her on the couch. They were watching television with the volume turned down so low you could barely hear it. Eric laughed like a madman.

“Did you take Tim for a ride into Bugtussle?” he asked.

“It was mentioned, but we just went down to the lake.”

“Well, let’s head out to Bugtussel,” he said & jumped up, put his army green fishing hat on his head & called into the newspaper to make an appointed to interview two fisherman who fished a creek the next town over. Eric was working on a story about fisherman & their territorial feelings toward the habitats they fished. & so he would interview fisherman who fished different waters. I’m not sure what the lead was going to resemble in this story, but Eric had a fishing license pinned to his hat & I suppose that was the only press credential he needed.

“What the hell is Bugtussle,” I asked, feeling slightly embarrassed at having to ask and later feeling embarrassed for feeling awkward for ever thinking that I should.

“Oh, it’s a town not far from here,” Eric explained, “I took Will to see a little of it the last time he was down.”

We got into Eric’s small sedan, beat up, shaking. The tires rubbed the wheel wells on sharp turns, bumps, and dips in the road & each time they did, Eric would let roar that crazed laugh of his. The road wasn't paved and then there was no road, we drove a few hundred yards into the field up and over small hills filled with tall grass and scattered trees. The car came to a stop somewhere in the middle - or maybe just at the edge - of this huge field in the middle of the mountains.

"Well...this is it," he said. "This is Bugtussle."

Eating Octopus, Hailing Limousines & Relaxing With High Class Whores...Just one more. The weird outcry of a grossly depraved line of thinkers.

[An excerpt]

We arrived at Scores some time around midnight & my main idea was to convince Anna that she was falling for me. But she seemed to have already devised some way of coping with the evening & I didn’t seem to be a part of that plan. So I ordered a $14.50 Jack on the rocks & sipped slowly, smoking cigarettes.

I could tell that Heather’s friend and ex-boyfriend, Frank, wasn’t enjoying himself from the beginning & the cocaine joke I had made in the reference went over so badly that I remembered immediately that he was a police officer in Virginia. But we weren’t in Virginia - we were in a limousine hauling ass up Park Avenue towards one of the finest strip clubs in the world. So, I figured I was safe. But when he extended his nice gesture of buying a drink for two people and himself he realized quickly that he had over-extended himself. When the bartender said “that’ll be $43.00,” I could swear to Christ he wanted to get in the first cab he saw & fly like hell back to whatever airport brought him to this terrible city.

He sucked it up quietly, but not completely, & the idea of the whole thing haunted him all evening, I suspect.

It’s 4am now, & I’m still going. But I’m wondering where this weird energy came from. I was crashing & burning 16 hours ago, and still speaking of similar themes. & now, after pushing further for many hours, fueled by shellfish, octopus, duck, shrimp, & other exotic foods washed down with gin & tonics laid out on a bed of bloody marys. But that seed was planted at around noon, when Marco walked into the room with a jug full of bloody mary.

The exhaustion is settling in now, & despite this, I have the urge to do many things. Drink more beer, smoke more cigarettes, write far more, listen to music, call up close friends, or just simply think of all of the whores I just paid to give me expensive thrills in quick bursts of cheap pre-emptive sex that would never occur. But those girls were ruthless with their sexuality. I won’t deny that. I almost believed they meant it when they told me that I was sexy or cute, or that I had nice eyes. & maybe they did. But none of that matters. They had a job to do & there was no maneuver, smooth or ugly, that could convince them that I was a good wholesome guy who could offer them something meaningful. & not even I would ever believe that line of bullshit. But with that sort of acting, I figure you could tap anything if you dug the right well in the right place.

But, despite the crude memories of beautiful bodies, breasts, asses, groins, legs, feet, & faces, I failed in the one fundamentally decent thing I was attempting to pull off. I never convinced Anna of anything at all. When she listened, she listened well, but in the end there was still the thought of ravishing Heather’s lovely roommate & the thought of her legs spread, seeing the strippers grind her dress up far enough that the whole show was showing very enthusiastically against the stripper's body.

Saturday, March 29, 2003.

[From the archives…this is what it thought like at the time]

We’re at war, now. There’s no doubting that. & it won’t be as quick & as easy as the big wigs in Washington led us to believe. It’s strange being here, in New York, at a time like this. There is a general overall feeling of involvement in this mess – in one way or another. It was the first front in this war against the Islamic nation and yet it also houses the greatest uprising against this war in Iraq. And as Churchill noted, the first casualty of war is the truth. & it’s difficult to feel anything if not buried beneath a thick layer of lies, half truths, hypocrisy & misinformation. & even these can be subcategorized if it were worth the effort. It’s hard to maintain a peaceful state these days. Tonight, like many other nights I resorted to dancing with alcohol & cigarettes. I drank two 16oz. cans of Budweiser & just moved on to a glass of absinth. I’m listening to Blood on the Tracks and MSNBC is covering the war in the background. Everyone in the immediate position of caring seems to be paralyzed by this Conflict. Everyone, that is, who is capable of avoiding its presence. The families, the supporters, the protestors & the possible victims of retaliatory terrorist or military attacks.

I was drinking with Greer the other day & mentioned that I’d like to quit smoking.
“This is no time to quit smoking,” she said & she was right.

“Yes…we’re living in an anxious time.” It wasn’t the first time I’d spoken that sentence. In fact, it’s become something of a staple in my day to day life. My good friends were married a week ago tonight & I recall being the most nervous & Fearful person at the wedding. Not because of any mistake being made or because of any sort of imminent harm, but because my nervous have been run so deeply through the ringer that it is hard to react or interact with even the most normal and beautiful moments that life offers. My brother, Todd, came up to visit & had what would seem like a very nice time, but left just moments after a breakdown that resulted, I imagine, from the culmination of loneliness, madness, fear, and hopelessness. And these are emotions that are riding high in all of us. Or at least most everyone I am associated with. Times are hard all over. This is true, and it, too, is a statement that is in no way foreign to what’s been going on in my life. My stomach hurts lately, and two mornings ago, the water hurt when it hit my stomach as if I’d been crawling around the desert for two or three days. My organs are certainly not being treated properly…none of them…& I can’t blame them for their inflammatory behavior, it is one of my greatest hopes that they find the compassion to understand the motivation that lies behind their suffering.

I recently read an Einstein quote that read, “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks & stones.” Those are powerful words and I don’t think they are comfortably enough inaccurate. & as Oppenheimer noted, this is a man whose mistakes take at least 10 years to correct. So where does that leave us if not in a constant state of doom & Panic. Well, at any rate, the drinks are strong, & for people like me, they need to be. I’m not yet sure why that is, but I’ve come to accept it as truth. I look older than my age & until two or three years ago this was very far from the case.

Already they’ve begun comparing this to Vietnam. The idea makes me terribly nervous & to some extent, very foolish. Thinking back, I felt a strange jealousy over my parent’s generation…at least they had a cause…at least there was some Reason to be alive. What a awful thing to cope with once you learn what you knew you didn’t Really want to learn. There’s no doubting things are different these days, & probably not in a positive way. The fear that unraveled & united the sixties has reappeared in a much uglier and globally more terrifying set of circumstances. And this time, we don’t even have the benefit of intelligence on either side of the fence. There is no great voice to follow in opposition to violence & hatred & our Commander in Chief already has books published solely concerning his buffoonery. Yes, the only place I’ve ever seen a book about George W. Bush is in the humor section of Barnes & Nobles. It’s a strange set of circumstances and I don’t think any intelligent person could deny that on either side. But the extremes to which it drives even those who are expected to feel “safe” at home is nothing short of terrifying. & this is their weapon & a battle that was won very early.

I’m supposed to go out & celebrate Rich’s birthday tonight & I will, despite the fact that I’m already drunk & disillusioned & disgusted with everything that happens outside of my door & possibly even more disgusted with that which happens within. But, nevertheless, I feel relatively safe here…I know where I will wake up if I wake up & there is no unforeseen trouble, at least no logical expectation of such trouble.

Yes, it’s a different world from the one I was born into. I watched the berlin wall fall & the soviet union democratize itself & yet here I am watching a 10 year old problem resurface in a bloody nightmare that no one truly understands or can wholeheartedly justify or oppose. Information is rarer than oil & far cheaper.

I’ve sat down to write this story so many times & failed miserably. & now, I recognize the fact that this failure could last the duration of my life, but ultimately I know my failure will be my document. My eternity, my life, misinterpreted from some random notes and desperate cries and loud yawps of Joy that will, perhaps, only be understood by those who were here to hear them. But so be it.

Heavy Doom & Death from Above

Oh, it’s serious, now. It’s all over the news and grafittied on the inner walls of my skull. There’s no doubt that morbs bolted through my body like a gang of Lilliputian demons set out to break down the whole machine. And they were succeeding. Perhaps they still are. They’re in there, conspiring, strategizing; gathering intelligence for the next attack. Oh, and they’re vicious. They’re out there too…Make no mistake. This new thing, they say it will be worse than the last. And I tend to believe them. I realized yesterday that I had to remember that the war isn’t over. Probably, the next wave of soldiers arrived here before the first kamikaze assholes drove their weird party into the WTC towers. Those fucking swine launched the possible apocalypse and if there is a second Reich out there, I don’t doubt the implications of total brutality. One more attack from within will send every Arab in the States running for some safe conduct. These vicious cretins dug their bivouacs so deep we won’t find them until they resurface their atrocities, and even then we probably won’t find them…maybe a finger or two buried beneath sixty or seventy feet of rubble. But one thing’s for sure; we’ll never find their backbone. Maybe there was some mistake in the whole program, but I don’t remember that plaque mentioning “Bring Us Your Brutal Fucking Savages.” Though, I haven’t been out there in quite some time – and neither has anyone else, for that matter. One thing’s for sure…if they get ugly again, they may drive us to disfigure the whole fucking big round ball…Or, at least our involvement with it. Why not? At least the next wave of hopefully more intelligent life forms will have plenty of fossil fuels. But maybe they’ll kill each other for it too. Who knows? But this country will be so full of venom every good citizen will have blood on their fangs, from the geared up Lower East Siders to the itchy trigger fingered flag wielders in the heartland. They’re sharpening their teeth in Middle America; I don’t doubt that for a minute. Not after last night’s report. Their aim is improving, and when the front line fear starts to spread, we could see some blood thirst that would make the Scandinavians proud.

The End of the World Circus

“Did you know that those are the souls of the Dead?” Miles asked, carbon-based and high, as he peered down at a puddle on 12th Street as tiny spirals of gasoline and motor oil glistened in eddies and swirls.

“Yes, I suppose I never thought of it that way.”

“When I was growing up in Alaska, I had a friend who tried to kill himself when he was 7 years old. He tried to hang himself from the monkey bars and for some reason, none of us tried to stop him. The string wasn’t strong enough, and it broke and he fell to the ground. He’d just gotten a bad burn around his neck and the teacher took him away. He’d left school, but we’d heard rumors that he’d been to all kinds of doctors and therapists – only he didn’t even seem depressed or sad – more curious and daring than anything else. Anyway, he moved down to Louisiana with his family not long after that and none of us had ever seen or heard from him again. But a few weeks ago, I got a letter from my mom and she mentioned that he’d hung himself from the same monkey bars – 17 years later – only this time the rope was strong enough. It made all of the papers there. Apparently he’d been missing for a few weeks. The paper said he had a tattoo of a hangman – you know, like the game – on his shoulder.”

“Shit, Miles, that’s a fucked up story.”

Miles had told a lot of fucked up stories, but I had thought about the story of the hangman the most. I had always planned on writing a story about it from inside the mind of the character.

He’d grown up in Alaska, moved to San Francisco two years earlier and by the summer of 1999, he’d gotten himself caught up with a peculiar and offensive assembly of misfits that ran around the country calling themselves “The End of the World Circus” (not to be confused with the small sideshow of the same name that came of fame in Bisbee that same year). Lost in the frenzy of the Y2K scare, they’d tattooed clown makeup to their faces and traveled around the country – amassing wild amounts of credit card debt that they either believed or pretended they would never need to repay. The impending apocalypse funded their season of insanity. Drug fueled and ugly, they pinballed around the south, curled up the east coast and locked their sites on New York City – poised for front row seats when the shit hit the fan. Only the shit didn’t hit the fan that night. Not in Times Square and probably not anywhere else on any kind of scale that would have satisfied what they anticipated – and after that level of commitment, even hoped for.

Luckily, Miles had not joined the Circus in any certain terms, he’d only traveled around with them for 6 months eating acid, drinking beer, and listening to the doomsday philosophies of thirty or forty permanently disfigured vagabonds. Long after the anticlimactic floor dropped out from under these unfortunates, you could tell that the affair had taken its toll on Miles. He cut ties with the Circus, but he was consumed now – although sometimes in a lighthearted way – with Death.

. . .

My great grandfather shot himself through the mouth with a double-barreled shotgun in a barn on his farm in Pennsylvania. There was no note and no warning – at least none that was discussed or passed down. When they found my great grandmother dead on her bed and took her away, they found a letter tucked between her mattress and her box spring – one letter – from a Spanish soldier that was in a Spanish jail for desertion. The letter was signed “J. Basunta” and was addressed to my great grandfather and told of $200,000 in gold Spanish coins that had been hidden on my great grandfather’s farm. Basunta had been captured and taken back to Spain and in the letter, he asked my great grandfather to get the money to his daughter who had been living, for one reason or another, in South America. That there could be a connection to Basunta, the money, his daughter, my great grandfather’s Death and the importance my great grandmother placed in that letter can only be imagined.

My father once thought about trying to piece the mystery together and writing a novel about this. But he lacked either the desire or motivation it would take to write that story. But he had thought of writing many stories.

He had thought of writing the story of his friend who had blown himself and two other friends up in a bunker in Vietnam because he received a letter from his girlfriend in the States who had written to tell him that she did not love him and of how it would not be fair of her to allow him to go on thinking that she would be there waiting for him. He did not think it was fair either as the six or eight of them sat drinking and he pulled the pin on the grenade and threatened to blow himself up. He was holding the lever on the grenade shut with one hand and smoking cigarettes and drinking with the other. His friends and fellow soldiers had been consoling him and trying to cheer him up and were also drinking heavily to ease the tension and they seemed to be succeeding. They had him smiling after a while, but he was drunk and had forgotten that he was holding a live grenade and had never put the pin back in. Not all of them had noticed, as he hadn’t, that he had released the grip on the grenade and Died that day in a small bunker in south east Asia. That he didn’t really want to Die after all made little difference to the grenade.

He had thought also of writing of the Vietnamese woodcutters who were walking up a hill with their axes resting on their shoulders. There was a bunker on top of the hill that they were protecting and the woodcutters had looked like soldiers carrying rifles rested on their shoulders.

He did not not write those stories because he had lacked motivation or the discipline to write them. And they are most vivid in his memory when he drinks enough to remember them.