Mean

“Schick’s a mean bastard,” the boy thought when he saw him in the distance, walking in Seattle’s grey snow, down beside the tracks. Under the bridge’s thrumming perpetual shadow, the boy saw him step onto the steep concrete and stone embankment, and begin to climb. The boy melted. But then he scrambled to hide his food and empty his pockets of change. It was too late. Schick had seen him.

Schick announced his arrival by clouting the boy's face with a closed fist. The boy fell and stayed down. He felt the grit of concrete and loose gravel under his face, against his split swelling lip. Schick kicked the boy twice, once in the ass and once in the ribs. His voice was thin and grating, demanding money. The boy turned out his pockets as Schick stood over him. When he was done, two dollars and twenty cents in change lay at Schick’s feet.

Schick was not happy. He said “It’s not enough.” He kicked the boy again, once in the arm where it meets the shoulder, and in the gut, to the left of the navel. The boy curled there, his hands covering his head. Within the boy’s breath-stealing pain, shame vied with fear as he shat his pants. Schick scooped up the change and walked to the boy’s house, wedged between the embankment and the bridge above.  

The cardboard of the boy’s house gave way to Schick’s hands and feet. He lifted a blanket, wadded it and threw it down to the railroad tracks below.  The boy’s prized sleeping bag and scraps of his clothing went into a dank oily puddle in the darkness where great steel girders met concrete. A book of Whitman’s poetry flew from Schick’s hand, landing open to the snow, outside the bridge’s shadow. Schick found the boy's stash, a small metal can. He crushed it, pocketing a few dollars and a half smoked joint.

The boy’s breath mixed with tears. His face flushed and he made a high keening sound when Schick turned from the ruin of cardboard and cloth and said again, “It’s not enough.”

A chaos of kicks and blows left Schick’s boots damp with the boy’s blood. Bones broke. Screams rose in pitch then faded to whimpers. There came a silence deeper than the constancy of rushing machine noise above. The rage, the madness of Schick’s insufficiency was sated. 

Schick was tired. He paused for a moment to light the roach he’d found, taking a deep hit, and then another. As he exhaled the smoke, he pulled down his zipper and pissed over the boy’s still form. Yellow and red mixed, painting the concrete and loose gravel, running downward in thinning fingers.

In the morning they found Schick’s body first, head crushed against the steel track below. His boots were encrusted in black half dried blood, blood that had lubricated his fall. The boy’s body was not found until later in the day, when an observant police woman tried to find the precise place where Schick had fallen. From below the embankment’s edge she looked upward into the gloom and spied the crumpled still form of the boy.

“Father Abraham,” cried out Schick across the abyss. “send me a drop of water, for the fire burns without ending!” To his great surprise, he could see a glint falling from the higher radiance. Closer and faster it fell through the æther. Schick’s mouth agape, he felt a bead of water strike his tongue. Heaven’s dew met the infernal and passed to steam. He cried out, “It’s not enough!”

Above, in a place of seeing and knowing, of warm shade and cool light, a place where enough was enough, the boy smiled as he heard Schick’s cry, and again he pissed.

And the angels of God sang praises for the victory of the lamb.

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[This is a reworked version of a story I first published to this blog in 2008, and is part of a fiction series written out of the experience of being a homeless teen in Seattle.]

The Eyes Have It. A Painting and a Fabulism.

The Eyes Have it: Self Portrait by a 7th Generation Omniocularis, digital painting by D. H. Hermanson. Original is 12” x 12” at 600 dpi printed on Moab 300 gsm archival paper.

There are 9732 living members of my generation. Amidst the millions upon millions of varying Homo sapiens that share this world, we are often viewed with a kind of unpleasant scepticism or even disdain. In meeting these prejudices, my self-portrait does not include the lower part of my face, which so many find distasteful.

The Raw and the Cooked

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Does the troll under the bridge tire of his meals? 

Or does it find in the matters of size, gender, 
race and age sufficient variety? 

Does the troll prefer a milk fed suckling 
direct from a passing perambulator 
or the range fed marathoner caught unawares 
in the midst of road drills. 

I have never noted smoke near the bridge. 
Perhaps this troll prefers carpaccio.

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Calliope

There comes a moment when the sound takes over from the singing. She no longer saw the notes and words on the page, or heard the voices of those around her. She was the voices. They were her. Her body broke with gravity and became like a soul.

Afterwards, sitting and listening to the tape of the performance, she could feel the Muse embrace her voice. Her cheeks flushed. Her legs moved. Listening felt a kind of pornography.

Prolepsis

Jeffrey lost a bit of his hair every day over the last twelve years, and with each strand found at the bottom of the shower, it seemed that an ounce of passion had drained away. He was afraid now, not in any grand terror, but in that slow, embracing dismay that comes when a cough persists, or the with slowing dribble of urine, or with the appearance of yet another mole on the shoulder.

He found when he woke one morning that a strange suspicion shared his bed.  At first he was jealous of his solitude. He did not care to share his bed, even with his own suspicion.  But as time passed the suspicion became more ample, even fecund and he found it provided a kind of warmth. He came to know that without his suspicion, he would be a different man, a colder man, a man whose surface would betray even less depth.

One morning, he rolled in his bed as he woke. His hands passed over it, and he found his suspicion was swollen, gravid to the edge of bursting. He found himself bemused and proud, that at his age he could father new thoughts, thoughts that were his alone.

That day he stayed home from work and tended his suspicion. Late in the night, long after he would typically sleep, his suspicion gave birth. Tiny fears spread across the bed to suckle at his breast. He cradled his suspicion in his arms as his new children fed. As they  grew, he felt their teeth first gently nipping then truly gnawing at his flesh. He reveled in every bite. Eaten by his fears, the man was nowhere to be found when morning came.

Friction Fiction

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Long division misses the point of entropy. A laborious project, it fails to see that it mocks fate. 

Charlie was thirteen when he lost his virginity. It was an indifferent experience. He valued it only in that it proved his boasts of the prior year. He truly expected more.

The next day he expected to walk differently, feel differently, talk differently. He expected others to see what he himself did not feel. When none of these things happened, he talked to her about doing it again.

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Mikey in the Ground

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Mikey is not the kind of man that you would choose to meet. First of all, he’s a paraplegic; and even today that’s a turnoff for most people. Second, Mikey doesn’t like people very much. He makes sure that everyone around him knows of this opinion. Third, Mikey is a thief. He doesn’t take much, a silver spoon here, and an iPod there, and any money left out anywhere.

The fourth thing about Mikey that turns almost everyone off is that he look like raw meat. His face is heavily scarred from fighting, accidents, and most importantly, from a severe and continuing case of acne. His mother, in one of her sober moments, told Mikey that he would grow out of his acne. But as often was the case, his mother lied. At 45, Mikey’s face was as red and white with pustules as when he was 15 and in the throws of a terrible pubescence.

It would seem that the testosterone that caused his acne at age 14 was still with him at age 45. And as was the case at age 14, the 45-year-old Mikey was not at all successful with the opposite sex. At 45 it no longer mattered. His paraplegia left him virtually neutered, a fact that drove Mikey to anxious and disruptive anger. And this is the fifth thing that drives people away from Mikey: he’s badly oversexed and at the same time unequipped. So he talks about sex all the time, hits on women all the time, but can never go beyond talk, even with the most hearty and daringly sympathetic.

Very few people knew how Mikey made a living. It didn’t seem that disability payments from Social Security could support his lifestyle. He had a decent apartment that was well furnished. He had an outrageous vehicle -- an oversized pickup truck with a complicated folding ramp that allowed Mikey to power his electric wheelchair up to take the place of the drivers seat.

He drove maliciously. He ran red lights, daring the oncoming traffic to hit him. On the Parkway or on the Turnpike he weaved his great truck through traffic as if it were a Ferrari. But as much as he induced fear and anger in the drivers he sideswiped or forced onto the median, he seemed to have a magical ability to avoid damage to his truck or to himself.

At the funeral home, Mikey was laid out in an open coffin of polished bronze with silver tracery. His face was covered with pink foundation and ugly rouge, in an attempt to cover his acne. The room had a faded pink carpet. The walls suffered silently under red and white striped wallpaper. The colors suited Mikey.

Only three people went to his funeral. Surprisingly, all of them were women. Sandy told the mortician that Mikey was always generous with the tip when she was bartending. She said he was mean, but only because everyone was mean to him. She felt sorry for him.

The other two women just turned away when the mortician came near. Neither of them signed the guest book.

At the cemetery, Mikey was interred without ceremony. He was buried in a plain cardboard box. The mortician, who like Mikey was an unrepentant thief,  saw no sense in wasting a good coffin.

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Niagara of Memory v. Storytelling

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My Grandfather was a storyteller, but not in the manner of Clemens or Will Rodgers.

He held no nostalgia and no great love for the past.

He did not seek wisdom, but loved progress. His stories were of Popular Mechanics as life: Cars that could fly, engines that ran on water as fuel, miracle cleaners and labor saving devices. He believed in Progress, in the technical world giving life.

He worked most of his life in a chemical factory. He took early retirement when he found the tremor in his hands and the spasms that overtook his gait embarrassing.

He trembled with mercury poisoning. I’ve never been sure: Was he a martyr or a fool?

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Mona Died on the Tenth Day

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Mona died on the tenth day, when the hospital’s generators gave out. She was so tired, that with no help from the respirator, her wasted body, thinned by age and infection could no longer keep up with the thick hot air of the summer.

We took her body home with us. The nurse told us to. No power meant no morgue, no polite guidance from a faceless mortician, just the tears that come with trying to dig a hole deep enough, big enough for some one that was once a friend. I suppose it was at then that I knew the power would not come back, that moment when I dropped a spade full of earth on Mona’s body.

Afterward, I walked home from Mona’s, and climbed the steps into the darkness of the house. It felt lonely there, even though I could hear Ben in the kitchen. Before the power went out there was always the sound of otherness about us. The house was always alive with music or the TV. I would come home from work. I’d turn on the news and sit at the computer, answering emails and writing till Ben came home. We lived in response to . Our conversation was born from the words we heard, the songs that played, the text that played across the screen.

I walked into the kitchen. The window was small, and the light poor as Ben, my wonderful, strong Ben struggled to clean out the last of the refrigerator’s decay. I touched him on his shoulder as he knelt in front of the opened door. He stood and for moment held me.

I’m not sure why the grid went down. That morning 10 days ago we woke to the sounds of sirens. Police cars ambulance and fire trucks taking up the first casualties. The radio said that it was nation wide. Soon we learned that it was larger than that. There was speculation the first few days about a computer virus.

The first day seemed a lark, a national holiday. We came out of the house and talked to our neighbors. Ocean Grove is an old town, and we joked about returning to the age of gas light. But even that first day there was an edge of fear to our jokes.

Ben planned to walk over to Asbury, planning to check with a few friends, but the foot bridges across Wesley Lake were closed and locked, and the path along the ocean beach showed the flashing lights of police cars. Ben came home, and when night fell, we locked the doors.

When there was no power on the second morning, we decided to try the Shoprite. I felt a kind of foolish pride for having filled the Civic before the power went out. The streets of the Grove were quiet. When we drove down Route 33 we could see that the lots at the service stations were filled with cars, with more parked or abandoned on the streets. We took the Neptune Blvd past the police station and the empty high school to Route 66 and the Shoprite. As we came closer we could see again the flashing lights of police cars in the store lot.

There was a crowd at the doors. I looked at Ben. He agreed. We turned around before entering the lot . We listened to the car radio as we drove home. They played Beach Boys songs and a familiar DJ talked about the power outage. He didn’t have any news: “Emergency crews are working around the clock to restore service. Europe and Japan were also affected.”

That night we raided the refrigerator for the first time since the power went out. We invited a couple of neighbors to join us, and ate on the porch by candlelight. That night I remember we were cold. In early summer the Grove is unpredictable. With an Atlantic breeze it might be 50 at night. If the wind came from the land, it might be 75.

Day three: Ben and I stayed close to home. The car radio told us about fires in New York, and again promised that repair crews were working around the clock.

On day four, Ben and I started to talk about leaving. We had heard gunfire twice during the night. The car radio had only two stations playing by then. Both gave out only official news: “Stay at home.” “Travel was hazardous.” “Repair crews were working around the clock.” Call-ups were announced for the Reserves and the National Guard.

Ben’s mood’s was dark. He asked where would go and how would we travel. He worried about the house. We had struggled together for ten years to save enough to buy. He was worried about Mona. Our first friend in the neighborhood, Mona had come to our front porch with a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of sandwiches the day we moved in. In her late seventies now, her health was failing.

Day five began with more gunfire during the early hours. In the morning the gas began to fail. Ben put on the kettle for morning tea, but it seemed to take forever to boil. The pressure faded throughout the morning, and gave out altogether at lunch.

Ben called me outside in the afternoon. He had walked through town. He told me that more than half the houses were empty now. The sky was grey, but not with clouds. It smelled much like it did after September 11th. It was the scent of New York burning.

When we walked to Mona’s, I didn’t like what we found. Her skin, usually possessing that wondrous transparency of the aged, was ashen like the skies outside. Although she denied it, she was clearly in pain, and struggling to breathe. She took little sips of air, as if through a straw.

Ben and I half carried her to the car. Her doctor’s office was out Route 33 at the hospital. The roads weren’t too bad. A few cars were traveling slowly, treating each light as if it were a stop sign. Once, about halfway there, we stopped short, hitting the brakes hard as a group of teenagers walked into the street in front of us. They half surrounded the car. A police car scared them off, coming up behind us with lights flashing.

At the hospital there were more police. The only entrance open was at the back, leading to the ER. A nurse met us at the door, and they found a wheelchair for Mona. The hallway was packed with people with minor injuries. They let us stay with Mona as she was taken into the ER proper. The little rooms that usually had a single gurney, all had two , but even so, Mona was put in the hallway at one end of the long nursing station.

Ben looked nervous, standing there by Mona. He always said he didn’t like the smell of hospitals. It took me a few minutes to realize that I was standing in an air conditioned room with fluorescent lights, but only a moment longer to realize that that the hospital generators, not the grid were giving us light.

Some things never change. We waited forever for a Doctor to appear. He listened to Mona’s heart and lungs, and asked her what medications she took. He ordered something from a nurse to help Mona breath, but the order led only to sotto voce argument, to the effect that the med he wanted was out of stock.

A few minutes later a nurse came by and told us we could take Mona upstairs. She said the unit on the fifth floor had oxygen that would ease her breathing. We were told we would have to stay and help.

We went to the 5th floor. Only one elevator in the bank of 4 was working. The 5th floor was warm, and the room even warmer, but Mona looked better once she was hooked up to the oxygen. Her skin pinked up a bit, and her voice became firmer.

Ben stayed the night. I went home just before dark. Driving back into the Grove I saw that more cars where gone. The only other vehicle I saw moving was the Civil Patrol, in this case two elderly guys in their fake police vehicle. At home, I opened a can of soup and warmed it over the grill on the back porch. That night I didn’t really sleep.

The next few days for the same. Ben and I alternated in caring for Mona. Our shifts at the hospital were unbearable. It was hot and no air conditioning was running. The oxygen helped Mona, but the heat melted strength.

On the 10th day the oxygen failed as the hospital’s reserves ran out. Mona died striving to breath. She asphyxiated, her eyes wild with terror as I held her hand. I yelled for a nurse. And then I yelled again. Finally, a nurse appeared. She looked at Mona. She said, “just stay with her”. And I did.

I took Mona’s body home with me. It seemed as if she weighed nothing at all as I lay her body across the backseat of my car.

When I got home, driving through the empty streets of the Grove, I called to Ben. Together we carried Mona to her house. She had a favorite chair in the living room. We sat there for awhile.
 

That afternoon, we left the empty Grove.

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Adumbration

When her husband’s cancer began to cause him pain, she began to notice things, new thing, odd things around the apartment. At first it was just the sound of clawed pads tracing paths through the walls of their section-8 high-rise, but, as her husband’s illness progressed, the demons became bolder.

Soon the sight of a slit eye opening from within the tracery of the bedroom wallpaper became commonplace. With each day of her husband’s sickness they grew stronger. Soon snouts were visible. Sometimes late at night, when they were strongest, a hand like paw would emerge from the ceiling over their bed, groping through the air like a blind man searching for his cane.

When the priest came to the house he seemed more concerned with the way the doctors treated her husband, than with the demons that were now half revealed in the walls and ceiling of the apartment. He read through pill labels, and nursing notes, and then spoke with her husband. When she complained, her husband spoke in quick English words that she did not understand. Only then did the priest seem to notice the infestation that surrounded them.

He came again few days later. Again he looked at the doctor’s pills, and the read the chart left by the visiting nurses. Again he seemed reluctant to see the enemies in their house, but before he left, he went from room to room sprinkling the walls with holy water and chanting psalms and prayers.

All but one of the demons fled from the holy water and prayers. But the priest forgot to sprinkle her husband, and the demon that ate his bowels continued to feast through the night. Two days later, when her husband died, she saw the creature emerge, fat and happy, coated in his blood.

At the funeral mass she was angry. The priest did not seem at all embarrassed by his oversight.

Auden's Fall or the Autobus Ride

[Auden's poetry where surface meets depth in a granulous curve.]

When the old man, needing a cane but without one, approached the bus, the driver saw trouble with a capital T. When the man reached for the doorway one foot and then the other slipped from beneath him. He spun, his arms flailing, breath fleeing and turning the cold air to a covering fog.

In the driver’s mind, the fall read as a bad Polanski: motion slowed, the man’s costive grimace of startlement taking hold. Even the sound of breath and that final grunt seemed to descend an octave. The driver laughed.

Waking from his dream, the driver looked out and saw the old man lying there with one leg stretched at an odd angle. Even from his seat behind the wheel, he could see the tears on the old man's face.

His finger stabbed at the button to close the doors. He missed and stabbed again. Even when the doors hissed shut, he laughed. He could see the man through the glass panels. The bus lurched forward.

Were all stars to disappear or die

Testimony

There was a time when “one” did not imply “zero.”   I’ve tried to imagine life without zeroes, a world of absolute presences and no possibility of absence. Imagine a world of gods without question, of angels that do not leave like dreams and demons that do not hide in the shadows. Of all that is sure and certain, not in hope of resurrection, but simply being.

The Babylonians, Chinese, and Mayans all invented something akin to the zero at various times in history, but it took Buddha to say “There is nothing” and close his index finger and thumb to make a zero. Did he mean to kill the gods?

Bataille tells us that most of what we do is a diversion from the zero, an insistence upon action that will save me from the zero. Can I, sitting here with pen in hand, deny the need for action, for activity, for words to save me from nothing?

Jacob answered the phone. The caller identified herself as God, and sought Jacob’s opinion: Was it true that she had died? If so, she wanted to know, would it have an effect on her time-share booking? She was looking forward to a little time off.

Jacob pondered all these questions in his heart. He looked to the phone and said “ah-nate-sa’ (which means “there is nothing”),

It would be clever to say that Jacob later suffered some nasty denouement for this offense, that God in her anger found a way to punish Jacob, but the truth is, nothing happened, zero.