April
120 Days of the Bunny Part IV
by
Polycarp
Kusch
7/18/98 9:32 PM
I feel dirty. The things I do for couches-beer-lovelust-money-fame-SimplyBeing in the esoteric, sometimes I sicken even myself. Imagine small children. Not naked, but sitting in a circle on pubic school crapets, redding out of grit beg pitchair books. Imagine the moon. Imagine the concept of scientific discourse. Now imagine the name polycarp kusch across the bottom of those books. This is where we all are July 1998. Be afraid.
I sold my first story to Humpty-Dumpty magazine. 1204 Words. 22 cents/word. (income: $264.88). That's more money than I made last year working, like a real job. The title: We're Moving to the Moon? The story is simple: A boy misunderstands his parents and thinks they're moving to the moon. He asks all the people he knows to tell him about life on the moon. A bunch of modest artless descriptions of moon trivia follow at a 7-10 year old reading level (that of the average graduating high school senior) and the big ending twist… they're moving to Moon Street. One block over. Ha-ha! Doesn't life always turn out for the best? The magazine loved it. People love crap! It's great. So long as they don't let me die before I'm done. I can live for 3 months on food stamps and $264.88. Let me just say, If ya don't want me around, don't keep encouraging me.
I can no longer die. God only hates the polycarp because she's jealous! - Someone else's quote - not mine. Is God subject to Freudian desire? Didn't ID invent IT. Sure, I can't have friends or elongated lovers or people who like me for very doG-awful long, but there are so many unhappy people one can touch in their life that I could run around for 50 years with my ass on fire, burning every bridge and trestle behind me and still not fuck over everyone in the world. And really, if all it takes is to suck to make others feel better about themselves, then if we love them , why not extend the hand of uselessness? Every creature needs gradation. Whether it’s the yard stick daddy raps upside your head or the multi-guess college entrance exam that society stuffs up your behind. Worth is measured by performance. Now what the fuck that means, I'm not altogether sure of, but I'll be damned if it ain't one heck of a pretty sentence.
I went to get a beer from the fridge. Wendy's on the phone in the kitchen. The tape player's playing CB's -Tomorrow Wendy. No connection. Stop looking for one and start your own Cable network. People will tell you it can't be done, but those people are hired by the existing networks to say shit like that in your ear while you're sleeping. If I said people actually crawled into your room at night and said these things in your ear, I'd be paranoid (which I am). Which is why I say - this IS what happens, but that it comes in the apparently harmless dancing cartoon animal forms of public school education, newspapers, the condescension of the economically socialized, through the TV, through mass-market paperbacks and, I'm sorry to say, through the chattering containment-walls of well-meaning friends. Which makes me not a paranoid, but a psychotic social maladjust (to grand degree) with a conspiratorial fixation stemming from my own issues of small-dick sexual inadequacy and the external forces of my mental earning potential vs. America's wanting and deserved cry to be peed upon. Just once. By someone who knows how to pee proper, with the proper English involved. Properly.
Ok, I'm a real writer now, so you can read on and not feel like you're getting gypped by some amateur, with that crap behind me, I can move on to the more important topic of my date with the lovely and well-vigorously rounded Laura. I picked the young lady up from a very nice East Mesa neighborhood, on 1st street around Pioneer Park. (Across from the Mormon temple) The park that keeps on giving… murders and rapes and inoffensive traffic violations which, of the three, the traffic people seem to do more time for. She's a vision of majestically upward pointing breastitude. She doesn't like me. I can tell. She's not sure. She doesn't understand me, and doesn't want to know, but doesn't realize that I am, all as yet, an enigma wrapped in a Kaiser roll, smothered in Ball Park franks, but desirous of so much more. This does not emphatically mean there'll be no sex this evening, but it's a damn fine indication.
Date. A date. I'm on a date. This date is 7/17. I was married twice and gone from both before I ever had my first actual date. Before that, I fucked people then lived with them (and in some cases married them). She's cute though. Tiny. Blonde. Wiry and brain mean loud. She wanted to know if I was playing. I didn't have an answer. Still playing.
We drive down University Drive. Horne to Mill is quite the trek. Not mileage-wise, as it's only 6 or so miles, but in the scenic transformation. Mesa is hot, red, lower class drug-related gang-shootings and KFC meal deals. Tempe, on the other hand, is iced mauve, college educated, high-end, art fag, outdoor-café living magazine trends walking on two legs with elbow patches - tell me there's no such thing as evolution and I'll tell you a tale about the black baby Jesus in the Comptonian dialect of Ebonics.
So crossing Price Rd, I ask why she works at Walgreens. "It's a job", she says, "why don't you work?" I say it's a job and she lets that one slide. She keeps smiling at me though. Nervous? Horny? Mocking my very existence? Anything's possible at this point. She squeezes her purse and says, "I have some money." No. No. The evening's been planned. No money will be necessary. I see the power station stopping for the light on McClintock Two fat-necked post-teen mumble-fuckers are fist-fighting in the parking lot by a Suburban at the Circle K. Her head tracks back, mind-wanting the fight to be more graphic I think, as we travel down the ASU corridor and under the big sucky people bridge by the dorms.
Welcome to Tempe. Asshole. Get out of my way. So very, very mauve. We turn North on Mill. A herd of flightless English Oxfords wanders freely through the tribes of Benneton and the walking Grateful Deadulites. Whites. Blacks. Yellows. Browns. The Indecisive face-fuck-only fence sitters lost in the undertow of their own illegitimate stark-white oppressive ethnicity. Cunt-dick pant pouches stroll along, all so crotch-indecipherable from outward car-passing appearances with K.D. Lang haircuted up pets on light and airy leashes. It's not a dog. It's not a cat. What…? A faint stink of Patchouli, clove, 7 people to a cramped Chevy van mattress sweat and Wigley's double mint. The popping sound that non-bubble-gum gum popping makes. A blurry make-up caked 13-yea-old waiting in a crowd of pimps for her mom to pick her up from 'Titanic' at Harkins, and as inattentive and safe as a prime pink veal cutlet at a PETA luncheon. All the social monsters, in their downtown walking poses, biding the beck and call of electronic traffic flow, going this place and that place where they should be now. Being seen.
I glance down. Laura's dress is riding up. I'm way too obvious in the crack hunt, and she pushes my head away, but hangs on, hand on my neck and smiles shaking me for some unknown but quite cool reason. Things are looking up.
Long Wong's on Mill. Best chicken wings. Best pitcher prices. Best of Phoenix '98. Home of Dead Hot Workshop, Gin Blossoms, et cetera, et cetera… infinitum ad nauseum, sic transit gloria mundae. Hosanna. All hail…a bar. Now park three blocks away because it's a cool bar. We park by the mosque on College St. and walk over. She puts her arm around me first off when we head down the street. What's this? Who cares, it's all good.
We're going to see Karen's band because Luke's band is out of town. I've never heard Karen's band, but I tell her it's great and she'll love it. She stops on the sidewalk and kisses me and laughs. Ok? That was nice. I kiss her again.
Walking up Fifth to Mill, Lynn's outside in the gazzeeboo drinking area and she waves us in. Lynn plays bass. Lynn sings. Lynn has nipples that can cut glass, a belly you can bounce quarters off and she only fucks women. From topside. So sad are these 90's where we find ourselves. We all head in and nuzzle up to a pitcher on the down side floor by the stage. I do mild intros of the Blonde cashier to the guitar lesbians and since neither of the parties seem too interested, I stop. And we drink. Laura slams her beer leaving me envious as to her capacity and excuses herself down the bar.
Rob comes up. He just got out of 26 days in tent-city for check washing and meth possessing and undisclosed weapons charges and wants to know where in the fuck I've been.
CT.
Again?
Yeah.
Why?
A redhead.
You suck.
I know.
Well stop.
I don't know if I can.
Try.
Later.
Yeah later.
And he's gone, like my beer, and I look around to see if anybody I know is within beer-bumming distance. No. I turn to hunt for beer tickets and, lo and behold, who shows up with a pitcher? It's that girl. That one that I brought. That came with me. She has a pitcher of beer for me!
"You suck", she says, kisses me hard off balance and sits down. I say Not! filling her glass in obvious defiance of the truth. We do the random blathering chat thing. "Do you know…?" No. "How about…?" No. The band goes on. "Have you ever been to…? No." We're still talking. "What about…?" The band's good. "What?" We go outside so we can hear. Bands start and stop.. I ask if she wants to go. She says Where? I say Good question.
It's like 12:45 and we drive back to her house. She's drunk but not drunk enough, because she still has the presence of mind to stop for more beer before the 1am cut-off. I think I love this woman.
We sit in front of her house talking about more crap and doing the tongue thing that involves skirt line pulling up and zipper unzipping and bizarre references to Colombian coffee beans (my fault, should've gone for the romantic poetry thing) and I find myself invited in. Into the house. Inside. I don't have to leave. We go in and I meet her roommate and we walk down the hall and left turn into…
Sex occurs. Insert sex here.
What the fuck is that? She pulls me down on to the bed and starts whispering in my ear like a wife I used to have years ago and then there's this perfect pink body scrunching out of a blue tight Levi cacoon and half-buttoned silk shirt, never losing contact, on beat, pulling down my head, moaning that noise. Yeah, that noise. "Wow! I like this", I say to myself. "So then, It's ok if I stay", I ask. She puts a pillow over my face and presses me out flat laughing. "Shut up. Dip-shit." There's something to be said for the sweet hormonal jackhammer of outright objective ridicule as an aphrodisiac. It should always be there when things get that sweaty.
Now I try. I try hard to understand the workings of the human mind. But I will never, for as long as I live, understand the panoramic split Plexiglas kaleidoscopic mind-spew of a beautiful girl who thinks I'm cool. It amazes me. And I know I'll soon pass into the why-was-this of their outright hatred of all the things and feelings they despise in me about themselves and their own lives but, for this tiny cathartic jugular slice of time, I represent for them, in bold and bright AllTempaCheer colors, the incarnation of ambiguous desire, fraught with all the splintered arms and legs of cars wrecks and filled up level with a simple soothing of all their wounded feelings with even simpler words, and twisted in amongst that carnage sit all the grand monoliths of romantic invention, all myth, one-eyed beasts, shining heroes, helpless maidens, beatific sex organs: eyes, mouth, chin, curving hip, navel, calf and cunt glistening terror-moist and blind-hungry, not pausing a single second, not for a single glance back inside, as to their personal choice in this matter, to be present here and now or not. Then I suck, by design. My own? Perhaps. I make myself available. Thus, the sex is tight wound, screaming, passionate amnesia in an arena of emotionally abandoned kittens, into which I hurl myself as a self-appointed fast boot stomping maniac devoid of feeling or even the simplest of possible emotions above greed and self-preservation. God damn it I love to fuck people I just met.
This seems to imply that she fucked me and threw me out in disgust. This is not the case. This is the future. Now we're bonded, merged, or something like that…together. I think? I really like her. She said she really likes me. That was today though and this is tomorrow. She's nice to me in the vicious self-demeaning kind of way I'm accustomed to. She let's me know how intrinsically wrong I am. She laughs at me when I shop out of other people's grocery carts and ask old ladies if it's ok that I fart in their line. The road signs all say plane crash crossing. Who cares right now? Again.
We woke up 10a and fucked again and took a shower, went out and she bought me breakfast. I told her heart attack stories and she called me stick-boy and told me to eat more. I made some obtuse reference to cunnilingus in a Denny's and she said 'Eat shit'. I made a cross referencing comment about the under-cooked hash browns. She didn't want to go home so, we went to Smith's Foods on Broadway and Lindsey and I yanked out the throbbing poverty muscle of hunger Q-pons. She tried to make me buy vegetables. Ha. Talk about putting the quick whoop down on a bee-atch who's out of control. I showed her how to cruise the aisles making free sandwiches and told her how the management loved it when people did shit like that. "Fuck off!" And then we stood at the dairy case doing whip-its off the ReadyWhip cans (far end of aisle 6) until we had to sit down and drink the 2 liter of coke we'd opened because my head was spinning far and above the allowed public puke rate.
Hold on. I was thinking of this when I talked to Wendy the other day. It has to do with how very simple modifications in the everyday fabric of life can change the entire world. Take puke for example. If puke was made purely of chocolate syrup people would not be so disgusted by it. If someone spit up chocolate syrup on the floor, the janitor with that wonderful pink sawdust, that already smells like puke (what do they make that shit out of, parmesan cheese?), wouldn't come by and slop it on top, covering it up. People would throw ice cream and peanuts on the floor and make a sundae. Of course it would have no effect on bulimics, but calorie conscious people would be crossing puke off their diets going, "No puke for me thanks, I'm getting a little thick in the ass part of my body." The world would just be different if puke was pure chocolate syrup. Maybe we wouldn't have thumbs. Who can say? I don't know what else to say about the matter, so I'll stop.
We're in the parking lot. I'm loading the groceries into the Mazda and she says she has to get ready for work soon. And I say, see how much you suck, we could go fuck in a big pile of government bought food, but nooooooo. You have to go to work. She says shut up and take me home. I do. Broadway by Lindsey is old white folk trailer parks and nursing homes. As you get closer to Gilbert Road, the complexion darkens to check cashing liquor marts named 'Manny's' and 'La Pocita', which I think means 'The Little Little' (feminine diminutive), which is not a place I'd want to cash a check. She's wrapping her knuckles on the dashboard by the glove box and the light turns red. The Taco Bell over there is closed down and colorfully spray painted by youthfully talented inner-city artists, who probably had just as much paint go up their noses as on to the wall. Gotta love those poor people drugs. I really think she doesn't want to go. She keeps looking at me, looking down, then kissing me and throwing herself back in her seat. Starting to say something, but then not saying anything and mumbling 'Never mind'. And it pops into my head, "I really want to fuck this woman again and right fucking now!"
I turn North and go up Horne past the junior high soccer field and the red brick Mormon seminary and the drunk homeless people park with the spring dragons and we have to stop at the light on Main by her Walgreens. She sighs this very cute "You're right. I want to quit and have fun, but I can't" sigh and I put my arm around her. She lays her head on my shoulder and puts her hand up under my shirt. In the lot right across from Walgreens, there's this Mexican owned, run and shopped almost exclusively by Mexicans thrift store where you can still barter prices on the extremely cool run-down crap they have if you speak Spanish or at least make a vague white attempt at it. I got an Akai reel-to-reel recorder there with sound on sound that was marked $45 for eight bucks because I knew how to say 'ocho' and hold up cash money. I'd think myself quite the ugly American, but it wasn't worth quattro and we all knew it and were all quite pleased with the transaction.
Straight across Main is an old barbershop with an actual cobbler in the rear who's got a half door facing Horne that he opens at nine and closes at five. I don't know if anyone ever goes there or if he's just old and owns it and is there everyday waiting to die. "Cobblers in the 21st Century!", I say and she puts her hand over my mouth to shut me up. "Have you ever had a cobbler in your rear?" I ask. The light turns. We pass the bowling alley I used to take my retards to when I worked in the group homes, on the right. On league day, the alleys were full of mongoloids and the bar full of Michelob drinking lesbians in bowling shirts. It reminded me so much of Yuma, that I would sometimes break down and cry right by where the people came to swap their shoes. It even smelled like Yuma right around that area.
I pull up in front of her house, kiss her and go to get out, but she holds me there. Not talking. Still not talking. Nope, not yet. She's running her hand down the side of my face. "We going in?" I ask in the passing broad band of silence. "You've got ice cream", she says in this secular sigh, like I'm carrying around somebody's donated kidney in a Coleman ice chest and just fucking off instead of quick driving it over to the hospital. I laugh at her and she looks at me like, "What?" So I pull her out the driver's door and set her on the hood. I close the door, scoop her up and carry her up to her door. (net weight: 105lbs maybe, naked holding a 2 lb lobster and a baked potato) She's going, "Stop! Stop!", but when we get to the door, she hands me the keys. Like I'm supposed to open the fucking door. I do and her roommate's gone to work, so we fuck on the living room floor and then she's getting ready for work and she's putting on lipstick and we fuck in the bathroom and I make her late for work and I tell her I feel really bad about it but, in all honesty, when I got home my ice cream was melted so I think we both got exactly what we deserved.
She turns and starts mock sobbing for me to please go home so she can go to work and I say ok and walk out the door. "Hey! Get back here!" she yells from the door, blatantly chastising my manhood in front of the entire neighborhood and I say What? Real loud, trying to regain some semblance of wifebeatibility among the strangers who heard the onslaught. "Comere", she says standing in the doorway in just her Walgreens shirt and a pair of ankle socks. Comere - in English, is actually two words, 'come' and 'here', but in American it's beautifully blanded into 'Comere'. I say, "You comere", back to her. She says she doesn't have any pants on and I say Good. Then I walk back up the path, kiss her and she says, "Now fuck off. Are you coming in later?" I figure she means to Walgreens. I show her I've got about 5 cigarettes left. She asks if I need some money. I tell her no, I'm rich, that I'm the Prince of Trailervania, 52nd in line to the throne and all that and I say You're impressed aren't you? and she's asks, "Do you want money or not dip-shit?" She calls me dip-shit… I'm all a titter with boyish lust. I kiss her yet again and say no (net worth: 91 cents) go to work, I'll just go home and be lonely. "You don't have a home!" I thank her for reminding me. "I'm off at 12. What are you doing tonight?" I say Fucking somebody cuter than you, to be mean, and she runs into the yard naked from the waist down and throws her lawn sprinkler at me. I grab her before she can toss the wheel rim in her driveway at the Mazda and ask her what she's doing tonight. "I don't know now?" Come, I say, and stay with me at my wife's mom's house. "That's too fucking weird. You come stay here." Ok, bye. Bye.
I drive back down Horne and two homeless people have a head on shopping cart collision. Now how often do you see something like that? What do they do, trade AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System) cards and say I'll see you in court, bitch? No. They probably have knives and will work things out the way poor people have for centuries. One of them will be dead, the other one will get their stuff and not a whole lot of people will care one way or the other. The world's pretty and smells good today.
