Strange as the rain they didn’t predict I was there staring
across the when the phone rang.
The phone was black as arrest warrant ink, a quality that was
more ominous by the sound of the bell, which was shrill like the cry of man
bobbing on the line where the sky meets the lake.
Mary turned her head from the mirror where she was watching
herself undo a ribbon around her neck as I stood in the middle of the room,
counting the rings with the tap of his big left toe.
“Silly” she said, walking to the phone, two strands of ribbon
blowing over her shoulder in what seemed like a wind, “your games amuse me, but
really, someone might be trying to get through to us.”
She stopped just short of the night table the phone rested on
and picked up the receiver from the cradle with an arch of the back and a swoop
of the arm that seemed professional, very profess
The phone seemed to leap into her hand through attractions
unspoken of in the city. though by some natural attraction, L paper clips
soaring to the north and south poles of a horse—shoe magnet.
Mary said a few words, nodding, cradling the phone between her
Mar and shoulder as she finished untying the knot around her neck.
The ribbon floated to the floor as Mary took the phone from
her ear and pointed it my direction,
“It’s for you” she said, “it’s Andy
The walk across the room took along time.
“Hi Ted, this is Andy. I wanted to see if you’d gotten those poems I
dropped off?”
His breathing was a gurgling, grating rustle of congestion and
worse. The black holes of the receiver appeared to vibrate, pulse in time to
his rasping. The receiver was clammy,
and the wallpaper, which I hadn’t noticed before, was suddenly bright and
screaming with reds, yellows, pinks, and punishes blacks. This was all wrong.
My scalp felt as though my hairline had been stapled into position as a guard
against a long and blunt wind from the desert.
“Well?” asked Andy, “Whattaya think of the poems”.
“Yer poetry sucks and yer mama dresses you funny, Andy…”
“I see…”
“Kerouac was a weenie and you gotta leave that shit alone”.
“Gotcha. What else?”
“You spell like a muthafuckah!”
“Oh yeah? Well, you suck”.
“Fair enough” I said, “Lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m there” said Andy, “My treat this time…”
“You’re on…”
“Fuck off. Later.”
And the phone went dead. And then the sun exploded.
In heaven I was seated on a cafe on a cloud over looking
planet debris. Monkeys were at every table, tossing silver ware and plates
across an endless expanse.
Barry Alfonso
ReplyDelete21 hrs ·
"Canned jazz spilled across ribbed asphalt. The stars a million pieces of shattered glass, a huge accident across the darkness.
Priscilla is drinking motor oil again, out on the front porch. She sips from an open can and half hopes somebody will see her. Her mom and dad picked up this ability touring in a carnival and passed it on to her. She won’t – can’t – explain it to me. It hurts my head to think about it. I’m sure she does it to assert her individuality. One can every few days during the week, sometimes one or even two a day on the weekends. Penzoil usually, sometime an off-brand. I actually don’t mind it on her breath. Priscilla kisses me full on the mouth and I feel like I’m falling into a deep, warm garage somewhere.
So she sits on her porch in her little bungalow by the main road after work, reading a copy of US Weekly and sipping on that fat can of black stuff, her dirty blond hair creeping over her forehead. I wonder if it is possible the motor oil is making her fat in the thighs. The oil must be doing something to her. I’ll bet she can taste her parent’s world in it – that must be why she does it. I only met her Dad once. He was living in a trailer down near a beach on the Florida panhandle. His name was Chet and he looked as if he’d crawled in and out of his skin a few times: baggy, with odd folds around his neck and under his arms, where he could hide things. Chet would lean back in a rusting deck chair under the trailer’s awning and tell me these unbelievable stories. He might’ve been drinking, and I don’t mean motor oil. Still, the look in his eyes was cold sober, scarily so. By his account, he’d swallowed claw hammers, bathroom fixtures, a steam iron and the stick shift of a ’61 Falcon during his years on the sideshow. He quit when the new digital electronics came in – he was afraid of silicon poisoning, or so he said.
Those stories have haunted me for years. When Chet died, we went to his funeral up in northern Minnesota. Most of the escape artists and freaks and contortionists he’d toured with had already passed on. The ones who did show up were subtle, covert deviants and mutants – I saw a fat woman and wondered if she’d been fat enough to be part of that world. There was a thin man with a beak-like nose who could’ve been The Bird Boy if the carnival had been hard up one season. Actually, the service was very moving. Chet was the one being swallowed, for a change.
It was after her Dad’s death that Prsicilla started drinking motor oil out on her porch, where everyone could see her. Except nobody noticed. Priscilla assumed there would be people looking, catching a peak out of the corner of their eyes. But she was just another 30-ish blonde woman sitting out on her porch in a working class neighborhood, which wasn’t enough to divert anyone’s attention.
I believed then as I do now that Priscilla is incredible sane, almost stolid, bulletproof to all psychic gunfire. But she could be reckless and needlessly provocative. One time she went to talk to the neighbors with a can of Penzoil in her hand, held like a can of beer just below chin-level. No, she didn’t take a drink, but I can read eyes and body-language and I could tell it disturbed the old couple she was talking to. The wife’s eyes started darting around, looking for the car with its hood up that was undoubtedly parked in front of Priscilla’s house. She started to shift her weight nervously, like the sidewalk was trembling a little.
But nothing really happened, and Priscilla finally turned and walked towards the house, catching herself before she took a sip.
Priscilla’s taste in motor oil was really no more mysterious to me than her placid, philosophical nature, probably determined by her Scandinavian background and the innate balance learned from having parents who constantly risked their lives doing horrific stunts in public. Some people grow up in a war zone and grow vegetables as the bombs fall; others drink motor oil and watch the sun go down over the power lines."