My head goes dervish derby and
the music takes me to a sad, mourning, world-anchored bittersweet
look back in sadness euphoria...in these throes of wounded despair I
wish to tear my flesh off, break the indifferent membrane of this
dirty, unjust coil, to go where it doesn't matter, won't matter,
ever.....
In dreamland I see it again,
head on, dead on, the image, blood creating a new and growing and
altogether damp and sticky world on earthly, mundane floral pattern
velvet and I am a sprawled mannequin, naked, pale, in a frozen,
silent, muted scream---statue of drained human ash remnant, leftover,
trash----my wrists hold the one semblance of a lifething as they sore
and ooze and bubble---the twin, ragged, furious maws grieve
aloud---bashed, mangled life ebbs away from them, still wet and
blackcrimson and raging as they seem, the clutch of life would still
appear to be upon them----
-----Music is playing closing out the
slothful ignorant parchment world and my dark is a crazyquilt of
mauled emotion; I'm huddled, manfetus, on this carpet and I'm rocking
like precision machinery and somewhere in the haunted back, the pain
attic, I know I'm crying---I can't stop---retreating into my nucleus,
loser again—failure again—the worst man again—booby prizer tot
of the Easter Egg Hunt again and I cannot change it, cannot steer it
in my direction it won't end---
---I unkrinkle my body and try to
heave it into a semi-upright position---I open my eyes and
stare---the first time with open eyes in a sea or so; it takes
nothing to focus as if I've been accustomed to the dark---I stare at
the corner of my room---the space of white (now gray) wall between my
closet and my bureaub and it's there, confronting me, glaring back
eyeless shapeless but it's intent on me....
The black thing. I can't make it
out—an object, a blotch, there sitting, facing me---what is it?
Black----so deeply black it eclipses everything, like a cavity in the
world that threatens to swallow everything, everyone----
Facing me---
No---
The black thing sits,
stationary, immobile, looking at me----a penetrator, a cancer that
poked, violating, thunder, raping this world and it is intent on me,
this abomination......I can't look anymore.....
I fold up, enclose, and shut my
eyes, wrap my arms around my head and pray for the black thing to
leave me. The music merrygorounds again and again---I need it now to
blot out the beckoning, the whisper of the black thing. Sick. I throw
up on the floor. I keep my eyes shut and I try in my mind to crumble
into coal, to unwant, to invincibility so that the black thing will
leave me alone----
At an ageless time I awaken. The
stench of my vomit is incredible and my displaced head feels like a
racetrack-----the black thing is gone, it has vacated the corner.
That's an empty worldsmile---I know with my deep downest that it will
return come nightfall to torment me----
***********
Running, now, downtown in the cold
and the laugh of the springsummer electric Coke commercial
dirt---people laughing and squinting phase in and out of my tear
bleared vision---nine beers plus what the hell ever and I can't walk
a straight line, I can't stop, the Janeharrow is whittling at my
insides---I can't go home; I have to escape the night sit solitude in
my fetal crawl and the gloom and the close and the silent threat and
stare and point of the black thing, the new intruder in my house.....
Outside is a teetering carnival
full of jeering clowns---Emmett Kelly in shadow and cigar and
shitstain and laughing, ballyhooing fat ladies, circus renegades with
pissed-on flower sundresses all bleached and worn---pukes and pugs
congeal and clot on corners, playing King of the Mountain for
bleachy-headed, gum-snapping ragamuffin dumpster porn angels;
yowling, smearingunshaven,, toothless phantoms rove by like obstacles
on a hellish, nocturnal sideways funhouse distortion mirror drivers'
course----they haunt me and chastise me and in the blunt of my blur
and my desperation I throttle among them away as they come too
close----
---the sidewalk, pissing and
shitting, discarded journal rags blow by me and it's all a sewer, a
sewer carnival and every fifth girl I bump into is a Janething, a
giggling, mocking counterfeit Jane, a worm in the mold and disease of
the rubble of that harsh dynasty---the haves, the have-nots, the
you-can't-haves, the golden chalice in chains, the shut-in angels,
away, Tantalus, the little Janes, the inescapable crush of sorrow, of
madness, of hell, of hurt, and it won't stop, it won't stop----
Cal Kelly the remnant crashes,
flaming to earth all ashen and ruined, uuuuuuuhhhhh, I cry aloud,
uuuuuuuuhhhhh, no more, no more, oh, God please no more and I die and
my stomach twists and needles up as I fall, teeth clamping down---I
cry, I taste blood, I smash my chin on the cement...all around me the
gleeing, sneering, roving outdoor den of shambling garbage people
point and laugh at this new spectacle---wiping my chin I turn on
them. “You don't know,” I roar and my voice is fragmented,
teetering out of an even tone, a bellowing, cracked trumpet, “none
of you, not one of you fucks know, goddammit, Confucius say no
problem, but there is a big problem, a big problem, and it's right
here!” I stumble to my feet and I mime throwing rocks at them, all
the plaster-faced, sniggering multitudes. “I look around at all of
you and there's nothing, just nothing!” I shrug my shoulders
cartoonish and bigfoot, and then I start screaming again. “For the
five fuckingb card games you win some sad son loses every godforsaken
day of his life, damn you all, and this, and THIS sorry opus is the
bare-assed crux of it all----who did you forget? No, don't tell
me....ask yourself! What about the forgotten ones?!” Dull faces
stare back----this is the downtown zoo and more and more I realize I
am the panda bear. “She forgot me,” I cry, hands extended, “I
am forgotten.”
They are frozen,
uncomprehending----I give up. Zero. Gone. I turn and shun their dumb
scrape of skeetch this, chillun and I look at the stairs, the
classical, elegant rough bludgeoned railed cement tower thing, the
walkway I cut my burning, babbling, grieving head on---the stoop is
scopeful, architectural refinement and it leads into the church. I
stumble up those stairs and halfway to the summit I crash
splintering to my wobbly knees scuff scrape and bleed cold scorches
like ropeskip asphalt mishap child-manhood---I crawl to the entrance
and I'm muttering every spare despair desperate litany left at my
disposal....the church's dim innards loom, the towering stained glass
robular Sunday School legend hero designs and a hunched, shawled
womanthing putters around inside, painstakingly setting ablaze a
network of candles, all solemnly peeping hotlight in a tangled
assortment of twisting candelabrum; each candle, each atom of
twilight fire represents a Saint, from booming Saints like Anthony
and Joseph and John and Jude (of that Novena fame) and Christopher
and Patrick and Valentine all in their congregation with obscure
Saints----the Saint of mottled flesh, the patron Saint of the
nearsighted, the Patron Saint of Zydeco music, the Patron Saint of
nose hairs, all in a holy jumble and I'm peaking, summitting and I'm
creeping for the Jesusholy refuge sanctuary cavern and now the
Priest, Father Ironclad, Padre McVictory, arrives in his robes of
glory and rebukes me.
“Sorry, buddy,” he rasps,
“we're closed an' we don't take vagrants.”
“I'm lost,” I squall. “I'm
God's Children!”
“Want a medal?” The Priest
snarls. He slams the Cathedral doors in my face and I hear the lock
click into mechanical intercourse with itself---the Heavenly Host
booms in boundless celebration and I watch the iron entryway
solidify, become inaccessible, before my eyes.......
Copyright 1991 C.F. Roberts/2015
Molotov Editions
I went about this kinda in
reverse, or roundways, mostly because it's my fuckin' blog, and I can
if I want. HELLO, UGLY was actually the first Walk, and I wanted to
craft a kind of Dark Night of the Soul where you're literally with
this kid every step of the way as his already-precariously-balanced
cheese is sliding off his cracker.
The Walk in THE EASTER EGG HUNT
is a nervous breakdown on paper....to me all of these bust down into
a sequence kind of like the Stations of the Cross----that, of course,
is my lapsed Catholicism at work.....and the Catholicism in THE
EASTER EGG HUNT is pretty overt. Some of that is, yeah----obviously a
Kerouac ripoff-----but you can take the boy out of the church-----can
you ever really take the church out of the boy? Well, maybe, if you
have a good scalpel.....I don't know if I was following a conscious
motif at that point with the Walks, but it was definitely there......
When I
wrote “The Walk” in '93 or '94 I knew exactly what I was doing
and it was kind of a “Meta” piece where I was going through my
usual messed up pathology and at this point I could break down the
nuts and bolts of my pathology and tell you exactly what the
ingredients were.
I wrote several Walks
throughout the '90s somewhat similar to the ones I've posted in this
little run. Another story I wrote around that time, “Shark's Fin
Slices”(title taken from a line in The Birthday Party's “Six-Inch
Gold Blade”) was very similar in tone and theme to “The
Walk”----in fact, the line in “The Walk”, Not a
bloody lot in the whole sad world, you saviors you liberators you
hawkish mawkish regulators can preserve me from THE WALK---also
appeared in “Shark's Fin Slices”, which probably tells you I have
some trouble telling the two stories apart, but they share lots of
similarities.
Another
big early Walk was in a short story called “The Night is for
Lovers” (The granddaddy of all my Guy Who Can't Get Laid stories),
which was actually based around this semi-spoken word piece I did
with the S.E. Apocalypse Krew. As a spoken word piece it was my
knee-jerk reaction to codependency and dysfunction. The story, which
was from 1990 or so, concerned a socially awkward office drone who
gets passed up for a promotion in favor of a more extroverted,
charismatic co-worker. To belabor the point, the latter also nabs the
protagonist's longtime office crush. The character goes off on his
own brief Dark Night of the Soul, which culminates in him watching
some random couple engaging in a stupid, codependent squabble. He
concludes, “I'll never be a part of any bullshit like that,” and
he goes off, ominously enough, “into darkness”, and that's the
end of the story----the note probably suggesting he might go postal
or become a serial killer or something to that effect----in reality,
using today's Johnny-on-the-Trend vernacular,
he probably goes on to become an MRA, or a MGTOW, or a TFLer, or some
other such asshole like that. In short, he's a lonely asshole who's
very hung up on being a lonely asshole. And he will probably die a
lonely asshole.
I released “The Night is
for Lovers” as a longish chapbook on Shockbox Press. As far as
short stories go it was kinda lengthy and way above the word count of
what most publications were accepting for short stories. And again,
it was my press----I was gonna do whatever the fuck I wanted. That
was the inaugural year for Shockbox Press---I released THE MASSACRE
ANNEX and BOTTOM LEVEL the same year, both of which got a better
reception than TNIFL. Oh, well.
If I were to write another
Walk in the future my goal would probably be to construct it very
tightly around a Stations of the Cross motif and I'd probably model
the various segments around the individual stations. I've got no
immediate plans to do that, but it's a neat literary trope that might
bear repeating in some form or fashion if the right piece of writing
calls for it.
