“Pages thrown all over her. Once again all the books ripped off the shelves…”
“… separated from their binding.” I was turning into one of them. Finishing their sentences for them in the fashion they originally hoped.
“Okay… Farrow let’s get it over with now and not at the station. Tell us everything you know about her.” We were all playing the same game in different ways. Certain facts had to be left out to allow myself the greatest available freedom, which seemed to be diminishing in violent flashes of time. I had to give the cops something.
“She wrote the dark stuff. Her talent… her presence was intimidating.” The more I looked at Gloom, the more I zoned out. The place I entered, I didn’t want to go. I tried to drift back, but it wasn’t happening quickly enough.
“D.O.A. had a reading scheduled tonight on the Bowery.” A random cop appeared to be a fan of Gloom’s schlock. “It starts in a half hour.”
“Get moving then!” Red hair whipped me in the face, nearly stripping me of my unalienable rights.
“Farrow! Let’s get shaking, huh.” Detective Anderson nudged me away from Monika’s body.
“No chance. I’m done with you guys.” Bloody pages of A Greater Truth were stuck to my shoe. It took a few Radio City kicks and half the Harlem shuffle to shake them off.
“Have it your way.” Detective Anderson exaggerated his huffs, theatrically storming off, leaving me in the room alone with Sergeant Powers and Gloom.
“You artists are always broke, but usually can still lose yourself in a good fuck.” She grabbed my belt buckle pulling me close enough that I could smell the napalm on her breath. One hand slid between my underwear and my skin. The other she kept closed in a fist. Slowly she uncurled her fingers, revealing a crumbled twenty dollar bill in her palm. I took it and she pushed me away. Then something hit her. Her brain was storming. Lizardish oracle eyes locked on my belt buckle. Somehow she knew Percy kept my pants from falling around my ankles. Somehow she already knew.
“I don’t want to get involved.” Clearly writer genocide. Slit throats flooding, screaming vowels and owl eyes of frozen cadavers. Burn all books, drain all ink, smash all screens.
“We have nothing. Believe me when I tell you this. Remember you or someone you love will be next. Go to the reading. Just go and see if anything feels strange.” Damn sexy how she mixed her bullshit with sincerity as she found a better grip, stroking me.
{VI}
RUMBLING. A STORM WAS CREEPING up. Not bolts, but white flashes ready to blanket Brooklyn’s bellyland. The first drops sounded like the neighborhood kids were dumping pails off the deserted factory rooftops. Outside Gloom’s house a cop chatted up the driver of a yellow cab. I got in without bothering to say where I was going. It was a relief to be free of the dicks breathing down my neck. Anytime I tried to envision Percy’s ceremonious corpse, I could only see my own.
“Some writer’s bar on Bowery and Houston is where the cop told me to drop you. That okay with you?” The transsexual cabbie’s raspy Macy’s fragrance aisle accent shook with the cab as we rattled through the potholes. Long hair dangled on the divider.
“Yeah, but take your time. No rush.” I wanted to get back to it. I needed to write. Make sense of it all.
“I spit verse there sometimes.” The cabbie took both hands off the wheel, interlocking ten fingers and flexing both biceps.
“Oh…”
“Taxi-poems, I guess you’d call them.”
“Yeah…” My brain was leaking all over its empty page. The chaos crackling above felt right on target. All I needed was the rain.
“I saw you made the news.” The driver turned completely facing me in an effort to engage me. “Curiousity got the better of me and I took a spin to see for myself.”
A small flat screen television was pinned smack dab in the middle of the back of the front seat, strategically below the partition which had a little moveable drawer where you could slide the money through the bulletproof glass like a late night liquor store.
“TV repeats every fifteen minutes or so. Gives me a fucking migraine. Every time I turn the volume off, a fare turns it back on. I hear this city’s sickness in my sleep. It’s one thing to read the paper in the morning… another thing to listen to it for your entire shift.” The cabbie was really able to carry on a conversation with herself. Definitely a writer.
“Wait. This is it… here it comes.” The rain began to come down harder. A smooth layer of careening water covered the windows erasing the outside world. A hotel restaurant scene appeared and disappeared in a matter of seconds replaced by a pearly-smiled reporter who appeared a little too joyful to be reporting a murder. The little screen filled with images of Percy’s townhouse.
*****Today steps from Gramercy Park a typically peaceful street was the site of a vicious, cold-blooded homicide. It was here where publishing czar Percy Featherton was found savagely murdered in his lavish townhouse. The pages from his most recent success A Greater Truth were found torn and scattered over his dead body. The book was a stylish mystery written by his wife and protégé Missy Featherton. Police have taken into custody Michele Giacomo Aurelio Faro who was discovered at the scene in a state of confusion. Bizarrely he seems to be attempting to take credit for a book he didn’t write*****
“That’s some long name you got.” The driver looked back at me instead of the road, bulldozing forward.
“Yeah. I’m surprised they didn’t butcher it. Did it sound like I was guilty?”
“I don’t know I just met you. In this country…”
“She made me sound guilty. Didn’t she?”
“Mr. Farrow it made you sound like a man who’s seen better days.”
“Why didn’t they say I wrote the book? Why did they give Missy credit as the author?”
“I suppose because her name is on the cover.”
“I wrote it.”
“No shit?”
“The cops believed me.”
“You believe that they believed you? You wouldn’t be the first killer to ride in this car… this planet’s outside its head. Just when you let your guard down…. WA-BAM!” Electric sky followed by a thunderous boom.
“I’m no killer. I’m just a… just a friend of the dead.” Construction cranes hung above us. The overseers were forcing futuristic change. A neighborhood famous for its anonymity in the past was transformed see-through. All the buildings going up were all windows. You could see the new neighbors cozying in. You could hear them pop their corks.
“Afraid somebody’s after you in particular or just all the writers they can find?”
“Somebody’s exterminating writers and I’m heading to a room full of them. What are your plans for the night?”
“What do you want to take me out on the town or use me for a shield?”
“A shield from the shield.”
“Gotta keep the meter moving. I suggest the same to you.” The driver shrugged me off, pulling over across the street from the club. I placed the twenty in the partition’s pay slot only to be refused.
“Nothing disgusts me more than a bum scheming to take credit for someone else’s work. I hope you finally get picked out of the crowd.” The cabbie grilled me with a lippy smile through the rearview. I lifted the bill high like a hypnotist. Gently laying the green on the back seat followed with a middle finger.
It was always raining on the Bowery. The door slammed. The cab’s spinning wheels showered me. I was alone for the first time since I stumbled upon Percy’s cold cadaver. I found a seat on the curb. The entire city was just a fucking puddle to make a mess in. I became fixated on a paper coffee cup overflowing water from the storm. The soiled cup wouldn’t fall over no matter how hard the rain came down. I put the cup to my lips and sipped. I was drinking the city itself. The familiar taste of millions of overflowing dreams. It tasted natural, like licking your own blood to stop the bleeding.
{VII}
IT WAS AN ILLUSION THAT I was drinking anything more
than air. I watched the drops build at the bottom of the empty cup, but didn’t have the patience to allow them to grow into something substantial. Crushing the cup, I placed it in the gutter, and booted it into the middle of the street. A few cars ran it over. I waited for the avenue to open up, making a point to step on the dirty flat cardboard before slipping through the doors of the poetry club.
Some people are ghosts… able to float aimlessly without ever truly compromising their ideals to the world of flesh. It was no secret that Monika Gloom chose a spectral image to boost her circulation. Nonetheless, her fans were the authentic living dead, feasting on one of their own. I scanned the room for Detective Anderson and found him talking up a thin woman with huge glasses that made her look like the human fly. There was a buzz in the room and the conversations seemed to blend together into some foul concoction of spirit.
“….who could’ve done this?… it doesn’t make sense… writers feign suicide … musicians get drained by love…. painters turn into vegetables…” The auditory select herd had some interesting philosophies on the final days of an artist. A hovering impatience called for an orator to stand above us and make sense of it all.
“What a bore.” Distinguished and distant, Lars Wildman gave off an air of self-destructive royalty. I should have smelled him coming.
“What’s a bore Lars?”
“This fucking senselessness. The easy ending is death. For once I want to see a story that ends with life.” Lars seemed heavily medicated as always.
“I’m sorry about your father.” I could already picture Percy’s body in the ground, maggots eating his skin.
“You hated his guts like everyone else. It was just a matter of time that somebody dealt with him the way he dealt with others.” Lars was Percy’s son. His real name was Clayton Featherton. He probably picked his last name so the day somebody decided to shade in his past with typeset font and pleasant exaggerations there was no chance the title would get fucked up.
“Now Gloom’s gone too.”
“Last time I saw the dark sorceress she attacked me with a steak knife at Peter Lugers. I splashed her eyes with gravy, but she managed to take a piece off the corner of my ear.” Recounting the story, Lars pulled back his hair so I could see the slight deformity the slain scribe marked him with. A questionable tale to say the least. Waiting for my reaction, his eyes became orbs that turned the world into a giant shadow that only he could navigate aimlessly. It was at that moment that Hawaii appeared wearing tiny pink shorts. I hadn’t seen her in some time. She looked pretty much the same as the last time we bumped into each other, except she was wearing shorter shorts. Every time we crossed paths I noticed that her shorts would get shorter. Shorter every time. Hawaii was the bridge between Lars and Gloom. A couple years ago, she dated them both simultaneously and the discovery blossomed into the scuffle over red meat that Lars had just finished lamenting. It made the papers and I remembered lining my kitchen cabinets with the newsprint.
“Farrow the transient outcast and Lars my bitter love.” Hawaii put her arms around both Lars and I. Hawaii had the habit of laughing after everything she said. It might have come off as an obnoxious or an ignorantly stoned gesture if it came from somebody else, but something about her ways was subliminally seductive. It was a gentle orgasmic giggle that forced you to picture her in scenarios reserved only for her.
“How are the girls?” For some reason it made me relax to see Lars cringe. Despite his open-minded demeanor, he struggled with the fact that Hawaii’s main duty outside of spoken word throwdowns was to help chicks rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies.
“They’re fine Farrow. Thanks for asking.” Hawaii smiled, affectionately massaging both of our shoulders. “Truth is I’ve shifted roles at the hospital. I got a transfer to the neonatal intensive care unit about a year or so ago.”
“That’s nice.” Lars stayed suspicious as Monika Gloom’s latest pet got up on the stage.
Kiko seemed to hover above us all, forcing the entire crowd to start at the pointy toes of her stilted blue leather boots and follow floral black lace leggings to her lunar skin mid-thigh, tangling our minds deep in a short black and white anime maid’s dress, slices of fabric missing which allowed her tattoos to burst through bleeding color. Her hair dyed deep blue where it was not jet black, short where it was not spiked up in a fuck the world typhonic wave.
“Why don’t you all shut up?” The room filled into an immediate hush as Kiko snarled, whipping her neck around jaw first.
“You… you just stand there waiting to hear me read the same words that you read to yourself. The same words that you make mean whatever you want them to mean. You think they’re written for you, but these are my words. Monika used to say… Kiko you’re my porcelain muse, stay near me so I can write. Never shatter.” Kiko licked her lips, fighting the endless desert in her mouth.
“I can’t do this.” Choking up with two fingers inserted past the knuckle, Kiko shook Gloom’s latest novel like it was an extension of her fist.
“Pale skin and pale words.” Lars rolled his eyes, twitching on account of the unwanted attention. The gawkers that weren’t wrapped up in Kiko’s trance were staring down Lars from all corners of the room.
“What do we do now?” I was getting restless, short-attention span and all.
“Listen.” Hawaii used a roguish whisper to undress Kiko on stage.
The crowd cynically dished out unintelligible jeers intended as support. Kiko inhaled deeply, opening the hardcover as she exhaled into the microphone, “This is an excerpt from Viscous by Monika Gloom…” Everyone started clapping like their favorite band finally sobered up enough to take stage. Kiko dramatically stared at a sky blocked by a black ceiling. When she was finally ready her eyes fell back on the page. “The uncivilized fathers of New Amsterdam cannot comprehend the biological clock of the immortal undead. I have seen more sunrises than the city’s bridges have been masturbated by river waves. I have tasted more necks than the soil has swallowed plague ridden bones… that’s it… she’s dead… I’m sorry…” Kiko and most of the Gloom groupies in the room seemed to have the passage memorized. Stomachs grumbled to be fed their idol. Heartbroken fans stormed the stage, prying the book from Kiko’s hands. Ripped pages filled the room, twisting and twirling through the air, landing on candles with poofs of smoke.
I noticed Lars shaking his head and found myself shaking mine in agreement. Whatever happened tonight was over and done with. Hawaii gazed in wonder at the strange man making his way across the room. Detective Anderson motioned to me and it seemed like a good time to get some fresh air.
“It was nice seeing you guys. Give Detective Anderson my regards.”
“Who?” Hawaii and Lars exchanged suspicious glances.
{VIII}
BLACK RAIN. WRITING IS A race against death. The only difference that the present moment had over the day to day was the assassin slicing up the competition and leaving my calling card behind in torn from the binding. Usually when I left a room of writers, a suspicion lingered that my delusions were justifiable.
Cloud sweat pounded my armor chest. I could only march on unashamed to ruin or fame. Delivery guys in their makeshift ponchos chugged forward through the honks. The city was mad with hunger and willing to pay dearly for her secret fetish. It had been a long time since I’d seen or been seen. Seasons had passed since the public success of my pilfered novel. It was no mystery to any of them that I was sitting around chanting obsessed curses of vengeance.
Nude in the dim lighting, Missy moved in a trance of summoned passion. The music was loud enough that she didn’t notice me at first. When she did catch my eye, it was with a gas chamber stare. A metaphoric blade at my throat.
“Practicing for the old man?”
I was staring lost into the East River. I didn’t remember exactly how I got there, but I could remember other things. Spend enough time in this town and every corner becomes stage for a memory. There was a bench at my side that I ju
st couldn’t sit on. Last time I sat on that bench, Missy stood behind me with searing eyes.
“You’re not a man.” Her words were forever etched.
“You don’t even know what a man is.”
“You’re not a man, Farrow.”
“A man survives.”
“What?”
“A man survives. That’s all.”
Missy’s reasoning at the time was based on nothing more than what she wanted me to decide for her. I had already made my decision before I met her. Just the same, she had already made her decision before she met me.
“You’re no writer.” Engorged, her breasts shook as we waited on line at the supermarket. She was pregnant. Hormonal.
“What do you want?”
“I have no idea. I only know what I don’t want.”
“Then what don’t you want?”
“I don’t want you here. I don’t want your baby living inside me.”
“It’s our baby. Not only mine.”
“It’s nothing.”
Missy had room for a dozen razors under her tongue. She explained how she had no choice. We weren’t ready. She had to kill it. Now ghosts of dead publishers and overly ambitious writers were at my sides. I wondered if anything changed. The bench was still there. I wanted to rip it out of the ground and throw it in the fucking river. That’s just what I needed to do, so I did it.
{IX}
THE BENCH DIDN’T FLOAT AND neither did I. Rain arpeggiates the river’s surface helping along the three foot swells. Above the water the city is a shimmering miracle. A rough menstrual drain pouring from Gotham’s luscious lips. The entire planet was spotted with blood to drown in. I was more a part of it than it wanted me to be. The bench was sinking somewhere below me. I could no longer see her, but I knew she… I mean it…was still there.
Lust Demented Page 2
