The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  It was as if Angel Father had visited me in the night with a reminder of my role that left me feeling hot, swollen with the crawling nausea of an all-over mosquito bite. I feared I would soon begin to rot. That spurred me on, all right.

  Early one morning I sat at the edge of a truck bed in a maintenance yard in some green camo sunglasses I got at a Halloween store. Seth said stop clomping your feet against the bumper, “It’s making me crazy.” Instead we walked on the train tracks leaving a trail of beer cans and sweaty footprints. I sat outside and smoked while Seth bought a car for fifty dollars at a police auction. We drove back to the camp in this piece of shit Chevy Celebrity. He kept saying 50 bucks, 50 bucks, and all this bullshit about it only having 48,000 miles on it despite it being 18 years old. Nobody’s fuckin buying it but at the same time most were slowly crawling inside to go to sleep.

  Rummaging around in the trunk Seth clicked into his Bird Mind. This whole car thing has made him more Bird than usual. He could be overwhelmed but also fuckin ruffled like an uptight parakeet. It starts when he gets a crazy gleam in his eye, they half-close like he’s going to sleep but instead he goes into a neurotic trance. That night while sitting on the hood of the car Seth pointed to his chest, “You can get away with anything if you’re wearing an apron.” He was very convincing because “it’s a proven fact,” people wearing aprons of regulation colors like red, blue, or green are beyond suspicion when walking up to a store, for example, and taking off with a couple plants or a case of water bottles. “Think about it: go to an elementary school, hang around the hallways in your apron. Did anybody care? Go to a motel, take all the brochures from the front desk, nod to the office person and leave. If there’s trouble, point to the apron and bail. See a golf cart? Jump in cuz you’re wearing an apron. Go to a busy intersection, put black bags over the parking meters, paint the curb white — no one will stop you cuz you’re wearing an apron.” He ran up to the Safeway entrance and came back with armfuls of flowering plants. He put some in the back seat of the Celebrity, others he just left on the hood. It was a repossessed car, in police storage for 16 years. The only residue of humanity was a heavy metal tape I found in the glove box. We drove it for three days then the alternator went. We left it in the Safeway parking lot after it wouldn’t start again and I use it to crash in when I’m tired.

  Our town is doomed. We’re just hanging out waiting till it turns into the next thing, then we’ll go to sleep. Just build your shit around us, we’ll only go out at night anyway… The town slipped in and out of consciousness, depending on where you went. All the little twigs scraped at the ground like lace fans spread at the sun.

  I was down wading around in the creek washing my dishes when a lady ghost walked around the corner of some musky foliage, a kind of rough police sketch version of Kim, effervescent and fibrous, like the most exquisite Christmas tinsel. She appeared to walk down to the creek to meet me but then she fell into a hole, or fissure, into some kind of unexplained absence in front of me. It could have been that she stooped down into this hiding place on purpose — to be looked for, discovered — but she never emerged, striking the coyness of that kind of gesture. By the time I got back to the trailer a neighbor cat had stationed itself on a rough-hewn piece of scrap wood next to the door, sitting upright in that wedge-like way on a section of beam the size of a suitcase, waiting for me, staring straight ahead like a sentry. I picked it up and put it on the ground in front of me because something about the tidiness of that stance bothered me. With low broken squeaks the kitty cat passed itself back and forth across my bare legs, its tail sticking to the cold, wet skin. I had a feeling that Kim once had occupied my trailer, hanging thick and low like propane hemmed in by the bowed enamel walls. It’s a small town, so there’s the coincidental inevitability of that, but then again I just always knew she had lived there before me. I felt her resting her tired bones here, in my bed, a toxic plume of smoke that comforted me a great deal. The air swirling around above me while I slept spoke to the dreadful circumstances surrounding her disappearance. I read her all over that small space as there had been one night months ago when her man hoisted her out of the tiny shower stall and, in one sweeping motion that spoke to the concentrated size and locus of energy of their trailer, carried her to the converted bed. He set her down still damp on the sheets and she immediately fused with every drop that remained. Here every pore was sealed, her body swollen with moisture, but he found one at the center of her being and began working it with his cock until it defined a furrow, then sank into an ecstatic inroad and he too fused with the girl, being satisfied to simply hold himself suspended in this pore — afraid he might dissolve at once completely into her, her force was so great. Her spell… how sticky and elusive at times like these, when she was neither awake nor asleep but in some otherworldly place of toxic splendor he’d never know, being left to deduce its mystery from the slight, forceful sounds she made as he prodded at her site of controversy… I was told that while I was passed out, Seth, Knowles, and Josh carried me over to a trough in the ground at the edge of a junkyard and placed me next to a bloodied bus driver who was also passed out. I unfolded myself from the mazelike dream, waking with a shallow pulse crossing my forehead, eclipsing my view. The rest were several feet off drinking and screwing around. They turned and each knelt down to where the bus driver was lying unconscious and sucked a hole in his neck; but instead of blood, Robitussin came out. After they had their fill Seth waltzed over to me in the fog and kissed me but instead of love, Robitussin came out. Knowles, Murph, and Josh laced their hands together and hoisted the bus driver up onto an awning, out of sight, but the force of his lame twitching caused his body to fall down and roll off into an embankment by the freeway. The rain, coming down even harder now, begins to eat away at these remains, sealing the ports where they had sucked, filling and widening into gaping craters of fluid. I stood up some hours later and found Josh lolling around on the sidewalk, but when I went to help him stand up my foot went into a patch of mud and matted hair and I couldn’t wrest it free. I bent low to scoop away the obstacle but I fell in the process and soon discovered I was under a series of beams, in a basement perhaps, stacked with sacks of flour. I tried to stand but had worked my way only deeper and deeper into the pile. I pushed through the cardboard wall and then crawled from a door at the end of the hallway out into a lot behind the shopping center where the others had reconvened. I couldn’t tell if I was screaming it or miming it but I recall asking if they had bothered to look for me while I was gone before picking a fight with one of them — Was it Knowles? — for “trying to unbutton my shirt without my say-so,” but instead I only clawed lamely at his face. I noticed a half-eaten bag of chips on the ground and when I stooped down to pick it up it appeared to emit a low hushed tone like a shell. I gradually became aware of blood and flecks of skin under my fingernails Knowles, damn it, I’m sorry but when I turned around he was cowered over in a fit of sobbing and screaming. Suddenly, one by one, tiny bloody scratches popped up on my skin all over, as if carved out from the inside. I clasped a hand to each in turn, but more crept up in shiny black beads in its wake. Devour him back Kim sobs, and I’m wrenched awake. I open my eyes in the afternoon. It’s hot, which gives me the grey brain of a hangover. I see that the cat’s been sneaking around under the stairs because it came back with dust balls on its eyebrow whiskers. All these boys with their handmade clothes! Why they insisted on sewing their own pants I’d never know. They zipped everything up so tight — everything was sutured to their bodies, collars and cuffs sealed against the cold night. They locked everything up, packed themselves away, buckled up their cocks where only they could unlock. They mended their boots with tape, as boys like them had always done. They sealed the seam between their boots and the hem of their pants. Nothing’s going to hang over and snag on some piece of razor-wire or chain link fence. No guard dog is going to hook his claw in there… Mysterious pants-making guys, these forest soldiers — male and a couple of female
ones too — with shanks hidden all up and down their bodies. Always sitting low and close to the ground, always crouching down below the windows of supermarkets or 7-Elevens or diners. Their freckles and clear eyelashes made them even more exotic, like red warriors — fetish objects who breathed and stole. Their utility bodies hid blades that came out of nowhere. They could fold their bodies into impossible shapes to fit up into the crevices they’d staked out in a squat, where they lived on bags of chips they’d stapled to the wall, on soup made of pond water and lily pads. Others slept all folded around each other in a nest of ground-scored clothes and dreamed one collective dream. Morning came and I found them once again perching on low items of refuse, on a towel or a pizza box. Their hands in paper bags or dipping into a cupped palm a few sunflower seeds; sitting on their boots staring at the sun through a crack in the clouds — wondering if it was going to come out today. Sniffing at the air. Sweat smearing like a dark logo down the fronts of their shirts — the only logos in the camp… I surfaced at a senior center pancake breakfast where the server-to-guest ratio was wildly in my favor. It was basically five grandmas waiting on me, all poking at my plate, pressuring me into finishing the first pile of grilled dough so they could heap it on all over again. Meanwhile one played the piano in the corner and others circulated around with trays of Dixie cups filled with colorful old-people juices: tomato, grapefruit, pineapple… Looking outside chemical-smeared glass I peered out into the street at some vagrants. They didn’t see me watching them the whole time. The opposite is looking at old photographs. I always thought old pictures of pets are some of the strangest things. Long dead animals appear oddly tainted by time, maybe because they’re so set aside from it. It’s the unspeakable pull of those glassy eyes, that jolt between two worlds so familiar with the pin-prick of only half recognition. I wondered about old pets and their manners, how their dispositions had been shaped by the sensibilities of the day. My mind wrestled with the image of pioneers flogging their animals but I knew this couldn’t really be all there was to it, and tried to shake it clear.

  Down by the creek there’s a small town by the name of Irondale, a single lane of highway tacked down right in the middle of a lush forest wilderness the likes of which would do Marty Stouffer proud. I found the rest of my hobo buddies camped out among a few modest houses and sheds situated on a dozen acres littered with mobile home trailers and smelly Meth accoutrements , a display resplendent of the region’s claim to fame in the local papers: seedy clusters of mutant skinless stripped-bare mobile home trailers. This was one of the famous Meth squats of Irondale, a real mustache on the face of depravity. The Jefferson County Leader routinely sent out reporters to lurk behind some crap-filled bathtub, taking notes. More than one soul had been absorbed. Irondale stood as a living monument to Meth dudes who had casually reached a level of ingenuity whereby — after selling the metal siding off their trailers for scrap — they found themselves with nothing left to practice tagging on, so they put the word out, soliciting others to haul in something to fill the void. A yard full of wrecked shit fulfills many needs, doubling as shelter, jewelry, target practice, and…? Some neighbors were once baffled to see a Meth squatter hauling a boat filled with garbage on a trailer with no wheels. When the trailer couldn’t be coaxed into going any further it was unceremoniously abandoned out in the middle of the road, which even by Meth squat standards is pretty resourceful. The garbage that actually did make it onto the property was cast off behind some trees, or used to prop up one of the corners of the skinless trailer, or else dragged off by wild animals for use in their own squats. Very little could grow on Meth squat land and what did was burned down. Massive jamborees were held around giant cauldrons of altered medicine that bubbled delectably away at the fire. Fizzle… hisss… Sick with the indulgent atmosphere we hopped a train to Portland a few days later and in the middle of loitering here and there we happened upon a free show at the teen center. It seemed like the same bag of bagels was following us all over town. The show was put together by friends of those riot grrrls Josh and Knowles picked up in Olympia last month, the book-smart ones with sour old letterman jackets. The door was open to all walks of life: panhandlers, veterans, Vag Warriors. Pamphlets were piled next to uneven glances at the door. We paused underneath a sign proclaiming “Ladies! Chart Your Mucus!” over a crude pictogram showing four skirted stick figures dancing in an agrarian netherworld of crosshatched crops. Murph wrinkled his nose, “Too much information!” A woman in a paisley vest came up behind them. “Bite the apple, babe,” she said, not stopping as she walked by. “Ooh, seeecret knowledge,” Josh hissed. Too much info, too much info they chanted in unison.

  Those two riot grrrls weren’t even there but their friend’s band, Touch Boob was. (About Touch Boob: Totally chilling all the time up in Tumwater, they spoke often of life “in the middle of [their] new magical, mysterious, mind-blowing bio-dome. It’s full of various independent stoner-friendly ecosystems. Some are jungle habitats, [others are] enchanted forests filled with endangered mythical beasts and/or creatures… we smoke weed.”) They sucked and it looked like it was going to be a long, tedious evening, so we poked around in the storage rooms in the rear of the hall, filling our pockets with small stuff that caught our eye, only to return to see a band called the Slaves in pressed street clothes, sticky blooms of sweat heaving, gobbling at the air cuz they could barely breathe. The singer was all laid out on a giant platter at the base of the stage. It was clear that something strange was going on. Sure they were from the same school of overcompensating, guilt-tinged showmanship as the DC scene, where efforts to make a safe haven turned rock shows into public displays of group ecstasy, but something bright and adorable shone in their eyes. When he looked down at me I felt sure I was not returning the gaze to anything alive. He seemed shut down for the duration, and that made it okay okay to do or say or think all sorts of strange things.

  All the girls piled up in front of the stage to face the spectacular god of rock presenting himself like a stuffed, glory-basted offering in front of them. They hit him and kissed him and toyed with his cock and balls. After the band finished their set, in a silence like death, drenched in sweat he finally lay: on the floor, on whatever, lay pretty much passed out while the girls did whatever they wanted to do to him; he was a passive observer to his own evisceration, spread before a haunted, hunted clutch of demon pervs, girlvert witches. They just dug in. Took his shorts off, had sex with every part of him, whatever. He “slept” through it, locked in a post-gig trance, his body a human sweat lodge fueled by self-pity. Numb to all the voices but his own, the pounding in his head, stained voices of headache after headache. He had beaten so many, pummeled them with his fists: “You wanted me, this is me,” he said… The riot grrrls ran around yanking down banners and sweaty shit, chanting I see a punk club, he sees a strip bar! over and over again. Okay okay, I understand that the stage can be a very strange place to be a girl. I thought originally that this is what men talked about when they waded around with that stabby-serene look at the girls on stage with no clothes on. I will never be able to get my mind around strippers and their kind — they are intangible beings. But if you’re not, if you’re a boy up there on stage rocking out, well then I might perv out on you. Don’t be scared it doesn’t hurt. It’s just me looking, eyes as big as dinner plates… I see a punk club and I see a strip bar. (Rock ’n roll is stripping for girls; DUH! it’s the secret history of rock.) Take for instance: Seth and I are not even at the same show right now. He has no clue. I want to grab him and point and yell, “Look at what’s happening all around you!” Look at her eyes bugging out of her head as she gazes upon the moistened god of war onstage, in full attack mode! (no jangly bullshit) She’s begging him with her eyes! She’s perving out on him with the dead face of the preacher afraid of looking possessed, or of the con man who can’t give it all away…

  A couple girls with college accents are doing a research project about local gangs of bloodsucking delinquents. T
he next day they came out to our camp and talked to Knowles and Josh, then seduced them. Ahh they’re a dying breed. Not many girls out there anymore who wear big shirts with stretchy skirts, boots and a bob, barrettes; eyes crossed like a Burmese cat. Their politics are evaporating faster now that the wind is blowing so much, and the day will come soon when they’ll end up mere rockabilly chicks, their obsessions waning into topics of mall shoplifting, puberty, teen cliques, high school, guns, male criminals, whores, and ’60s French pop. But they remain very resourceful, and like us, will create what they want if it’s not already there. They have their organized shit together, unlike us. We’re just DIY perverts. DIY dirt, DIY death. We do it ourselves oh yes. Seth put my shoes back together with tape. We make do with slipping into unlocked cars, motel stationary, and eating off open plates at the mall foodcourt. We circle around the fire perched on abandoned furniture, or other objects found on the street. Scrounged is better than bought. Sponging is better than working. Our hands are frozen in scooping gestures and our pockets are just big flaps, permanently stretched out by being filled and emptied so many times. Most nights our campfires looked like a crap convention. It’s dumb but it’s true. A huge cardboard cutout of a beer cheer-leader in a cowboy hat had been creased and “seated” in the Best Comfort Chair by either Knowles or Josh. I said, I’m throwing her into the fuckin fire! and sat down.