I enter the Crash Zone as if it's
some sort of garden party, which is to say uninvited but accepted
nonetheless----the whole process very democratic in nature. Quotas
have become difficult to maintain and they are willing to spill
anyone they can into their wastebasket.
It's a siren night and the sky is
as ever endless pitch black yawning over downtown like doom. Neon
wails hell in pink, blue, yellow and red, most of all red, and I hear
my mother's voice.....
It's all nightscream manic
beating delirium as usual on the weekend and the sights and sounds
ring immortal...the Stagnant Brothers are on their day in day out
shit the overalls rage in the punies' faces bender having raised
their routine hell by the Soup Kitchen for supper and now they pursue
their bully act by the railroad tracks—I saw them bashing---they
had Johnny the Owl Boy trapped in their brutal circle and now he's
screwed because he has no friends at his back----the Stags kick the
piss out of him and once he's a ragged, unconscious moppet he's just
no damn fun to 'em anymore and so they leave him there as if he were
naught but discarded furniture---Old Ben and the Preach come along
and hoist him vomiting and spitting teeth he is carried his poor
sorry beaten carcass home and at one point they're literally having
to peel his face away from the pavement-----
The bell in the faraway tower
factory industrial clock bongs ten ominously the bloody scenes segue
in and out an off-duty traffic cop appears, admonishes the lot of
them drunkenly and then vanishes; I feel my wretched hands cramp up
and icy pain inches up my wrists. The wigged-out Mariah in her
funeral lace her hair flung wildly as she shrieks in terror---I watch
her face redden, burn, then crumble like an overcooked, failed
ceramic object----
Misbegotten and used up on the
corner of Main and Atrocity there is a sexually abused childrens'
choir all bruised and in mourning---they weep spring showers and a
random co will pause every rotation to shake his club at them...their
tears shower and river into the gutter into the sewer and tiny
streams traverse the complex body-work of pipes around the underside
of the city....the tears spill out amongst the piss and shit and
bleach and waste of the whole population, curse the waste, damn the
waste---tears flow down the solemn, violated river intermingle with
the sewage and out east toward forever...
Meanwhile, topside, all lights
blazing in storefronts flicker a tiny second and my eyes and my
nerves explode. Broken glass flies and dances—my hair
instantaneously goes gray and peels exitedly from my scalp and
temples like porcupine quills of fable and all is a careening
negative lightning image----
A child is running sideways and
reckless up the street, pointing, “the angels are dying,” she
yells, “the angels are dying!” I believe her. She and several
hundred little friends charge up the street in careless flocks.
The whole street seems to tip
diagonally and tons of garbage and paper and debris sail off along
the axis to oblivion----cars smash left, right and sideways----
The huge crystal angel sculpture
in the center of town explodes and sends itself everywhere in
fragments---some several green bystanders are decapitated. Couples
and stray dogs fuck and defecate wildly on park benches---quote one
witness to the action, “it got real hard to tell the humans from
the animals. All had shit all over 'em, but that was, like, beside
the point.”
The great titanic angel figure
shatters with a great noise and rains its silvery, ragged spore all a
kaleidoscopic apocalypse where is my angel? Where is the cataclysm
blizzard from whence it came? There is snow in the gutter and the
cripple sleeps crutches by his side in an eerie, singing brick and
snow revelation wonderland dream silent yet wailing out in the
towering, menacing black----
I hear the choirs singing and
buzzing off into nothing like transistorized flies emitting
telepathic deathscreams. I can't stop any of it. Worlds, entire
worlds snuff out under my eyelids and it is all too crowded too
much-----in the oriental bazaar rope bridges collapse sending
hundreds of hapless consumers plunging to their deaths the flimsy,
ornate paper pagoda lamps floating down the ugly stream dampening and
shorting out, the only sign that anyone had ever been there to begin
with.
Everything's dying in a mournful,
contorted collision---my head involuntarily draws on an old
playground rhyme cartoon fairytale slice of imagery the stately
loving angel I kneel before reaches over and draws a circle on my
forehead....
Neon blasts and sparks and the
black claims another mechanical victim and the fairytale sprites
follow the angels all exploding into falling crystalline ash----
The bald woman yelps like a dog
and tears down the street Olympic and hypermotivated because her ass
is on fire. Her pillbox hat flies off and tumbles in the opposite
direction.
Cletus storms past looking
hatefully through everything. He kicks a child and spits at nothing
in particular—up the street towards certain oblivion he goes surly
in his muscle shirt and looking for a war. Good luck, Cletus---I'm
sure you'll find a few.
I'm crawling the sidewalk, now,
so low I can taste the ghosts of the whole town's shoes. If there's
anything Christ alive in this place where is it? Can I touch
something that won't draw blood? I grasp and clutch at singed air...I
think my thumb is broken and there's a sharp pain in my stomach that
makes me frightened to look down there. I gotta puke....
Ambulances and fire engines and
cruisers scream by in a blaring cacophony—I can see the woman over
there doubled over grieving---she's belting gospel lugubrious agony
like a tortured Mahalia Jackson black armband shatter mercy poster
child of woe----she screams in synchronization with every siren
shrilling in this shit city---my mother often told me the sound of
sirens distressed her; she said it always reminded her of the pain
someone somewhere was going through and I know what she meant---the
shrill makes me shiver in the strange, dark warmcold and I wish I
could hide. My mother said, “God, how those sirens disturb me. They
sound like people crying.”
Published 1993 in FAIRY TALES FROM
THE URBAN UNDERGROUND (Yorkville Press)
