Part One
My intention was to write an exquisite, precise, highly-calibrated account of the time I arrived at a therapy appointment covered with little green worms. It was to be written in the 1st person with little parenthetical flourishes and jokes. It would build to a breathless climax and end with an ironic punchline.
But almost everything I wrote, I discarded.
This is all that’s left:
What’s the point of writing something unrecognizable? Something so insular it exists only in the mind of the creator? The writer must convey. Madness is a paintbrush striking against the empty atmosphere. Describe the air in front of the subject, not the subject itself.
It’s a window, boy. Just look outside. You’ve trapped yourself like a rabid animal. Other people’s dreams bombard you with image artillery. With poems written on the tips of poison darts.
There is a stoop-shouldered man in Amsterdam who has compiled a roster and every name on his list is lost. He imprisons them in the dank oubliette of his memory. He is unmoved by the circumstances of their lives. He refuses to translate their screams.
If I want to tell you something I must utilize the language you have previously approved. I have to obey and spell it out for you. With vowels you will recognize. Translate my wounded screams. My voice communicates through airless strangulation. The choking gasp of an epiphany smothered under a plastic Walmart bag.
Groping toward the final millisecond of my doomed childhood.
Wanna watch me die? Okay, here. Now what? You’ve learned what my end looks like. Great. Bravo. Bully for you.
Feel the hot hunches of grass that cluster around my headstone. My pen name chiseled in polished marble: Here Lies Hank Artemis Christopher Kirton. Beloved only by himself.
That’s correct. My initials are HACK. And I remain unloved.
Rigor mortis will make your muscles contract too, same as mine. I have nothing to add to the equation. It ain’t glamorous at the bottom of a whiskey glass.
And yet, sip, sip, sip.
Piss, piss, piss.
In out, in out. All of life is in and out.
I am a motorcycle careening around a vertical circular loop. Turn the key and watch me pee. Dizziness begets clarity. Thoughts become gumdrops. Life is an upside-down blur.
Here baby, lemme show you. Gametes and sausages. Your Commanding Officer bleeds in your bed. Tangles of ruinous red sheets. Hang `em on your proud self-important American flagpole so they can dry and flap and turn brown. Starched by ichor. Dim-minded brutes will gather around the bloody flag like ants around a discarded tampon.
And salute. They are only saluting themselves. Just ants on a tampon.
My portrait. Your banner. Explain yourself in terms cockroaches can grasp and they will carry that blank understanding back to their shadowy camp under the oven. Infect their dark insect society with the truth of their imminent oblivion. The truth spreads like creamy peanut butter over an infected leg. Peel the skin back to reveal the whimsical runes tattooed directly into the muscle fibers. Surely, you can understand that. Nerves burn.
Oh? You can’t see it? Gee, what a surprise.
Neither can I.
I’ll cave in your insensible head with an obtuse blunt object until you black out. There is a chalk outline waiting in your future.
That’s my Art.
The aesthetic technique of a chalk outline.
Everyone deserves a turn to be surrounded.
Even me. Even my conniving neighbor.
I hereby accuse my neighbor of using pernicious, mathematical incantations against me. The light in the bathroom fluctuates when I urinate. My belt loops have become so narrow as to be virtually useless and there’s some kind of black ectoplasmic discharge leaking from my front door keyhole. This is not a coincidence. My neighbor is a witch. As soon as I work up the courage, I will confront her with surgical tools recommended by the Malleus Maleficarum, the Medieval textbook on witch persecution. It’s merely a matter of pest control. I will Cotton Mather her evil Satan-sucking ass. I will trace an outline around her unholy corpse. Feed her to the fleas in that dusty apartment of hers.
But first I have to get ready for my appointment. Put on some clothes. This damn belt. For a moment I consider keeping my appointment wearing only my underpants. But then I decided to improvise a belt with a length of yellow extension cord. It makes me look insane. Perfect for a therapy appointment. Besides, my testicles tend to spill out of my shorts. That might look a little too crazy. Arrest-warrant crazy.
I take the bus. The other passengers notice me without seeing me. My thoughts emit like breadcrumbs spraying from a vacuum hose. My ideas are crumbs and they explode from my mind like fireworks, raining on everything like tiny baked hail. Small and stale and yet still edible. I had a friend named Eddie who slept on a bed of crumbled saltines. He died with a razor blade on his tongue. I miss him sometimes. When he went fishing he brought a Mr. Microphone and lured the bass and trout to the lakeshore with white-hot Pentecostal sermons. He screamed the fish to their deaths with the Word of the Lord. He was magnetic. His righteous holy voice was the bait AND the hook.
Then he’d pick up the flapping, gasping fish and drop them in his black plastic bucket. We enjoyed a succulent fish feast every Friday. Eddie never owned a fishing pole in his life. He was above common, pedestrian angling. Lures and flies and impaled earthworms? Never. Not for Eddie. He fished with charisma. Like Jesus Christ himself.
The bus came to a sudden stop and after several anxious minutes it eased slowly forward, directed past an accident by a waving, barrel-chested policeman. The crash happened on my side of the bus so I got a good look at the death festival. A man was hanging out of a shattered windshield and his blood trickled like sauce across the hood of the car, dripping down and then resting in a red puddle on the asphalt.
A woman lay splayed beside a fire hydrant, her face masked with blood, her blond hair dyed with fresh wet red. She looked like she’d drowned in marinara. Her legs had been violently fractured in a dozen directions. There were no more cartwheels in her future. Even if by some miracle she survived, dancing for her was dead forever.
I heard a woman behind me gasp.
A male voice said, “Oh jeez. That looks really bad.”
I fingered the chalk in my pocket.
This was my big chance.
I stood up and pulled the cord to ring the bell. The driver said, “I can’t stop here buddy! It’s the scene of an accident! Just sit tight for now!”
“But I need to get off here,” I told him. “I have the chalk.”
“Sorry, bud. No can do. Just wait till we get a little further ahead and I’ll let you off then.”
I returned to my seat, dejected. This small humiliation would not stand. I began plotting my revenge. My next chalk outline would encompass the busdriver. I will do him in blue.
I always carried a knife for protection.
–END OF PART 1
Crumbling Asphalt 