I wrote two novels in the late
'80s/early '90s, both of which are presently languishing in
Unpublished limbo. First and foremost there's HELLO, UGLY (excerpts
of which have appeared in this blog before), secondly there was THE
EASTER EGG HUNT. Given the opportunity to publish HELLO, UGLY today I
think I'd want to overhaul it and rewrite the living shit out of
it---I could probably cut 2 or 3 hundred pages out of the damned
thing and have it not suffer much as a result. I'd be happy to do so,
though----in fact, in recent years I rewrote it as a screenplay and
still want to go back and overhaul THAT.
I dunno about THE EASTER EGG
HUNT, though. Not to disparage it that much----my first published
story, CLAW MACHINE BLUES, was published in 1991 in a little
newsletter out of Grafton, MA called THE BLOATED TICK....it was
several paragraphs from THE EASTER EGG HUNT with a little extra text
tacked on to make it a stand-alone story. TEEH definitely had its
problems, though, chief among them being that it was derivative as
hell. Any way you choose to slice it TEEH was a complete Kerouac
ripoff. I wrote the damn thing, usually loaded to the gills on
coffee, bouncing off the walls and listening to Jazz, over a few
short months (HELLO UGLY took me a couple of years between
drafts)----a friend wanted, at one point, to start an argument with
me by suggesting that Kerouac and his ilk basically destroyed
literature...I don't think he was ready for my response when I told
him that Kerouac simultaneously created and destroyed the idea of
“Spontaneous Prose”, because it's impossible to write it, per his
directions, without writing like Kerouac. THE EASTER EGG HUNT was a
total Kerouac ripoff, from the run-on, rambling sentences to the
butt-hurt romanticism to the alcoholism to the Catholic Mysticism.
But I got a few publications (including my first) out of it and so
maybe it's worth noting for something. You be the judge.
PROLOGUE/EPILOGUE
Big Chuck's is
busy-but-dying---Bradley Sykes and I have assumed our side-by-side
slot on the dead end of the bar, shunning the casuals, the shopping
mallers, the regulars----everyone, we the taciturn pocket in the
hallowed Saturday Night well of gaiety and seesaw social girl and boy
drinkjoy; I'm trashed, like post-work trashed (tho more to the effect
of post-Jane trashed, a prevalent state these days which I can't for
the life of me escape), barely out of the cook's whites and checked
ice cream man pants---my hair is matted, post-hustle sweat like some
follicle mutant banana peel---it's sticking to my forehead, my face
and I can't envision it ever having been any other way.
Sykes, here with me in the great
drain spin spiral down, is seated on this stoolthrone to my left (he
is seated at the left hand of Cal and he shall come again in judgment
of the living and the---but blasphemy is strictly Sykes's department,
not mine) and he's firing down highball-things-----mixed drinks are
enigmatic to me----simple, bread-alone beer-and-wine man that I
am---what's it he keeps ordering?--a Radiator or a Ventilator or a
Dehumidifier---something, anyway, something with Vodka, a sure sign
of trouble, especially where Sykes is concerned; our meeting here
tonight is blameless coincidence---Sykes, my old long-gone friend,
co-artist-writer-madman-mentor-antagonist-partner-in-crime-brother-in-booze---he
and I live on different ends of town, work different jobs, different
shifts and so have drifted apart somewhat....it's always good to have
a run-in with him, though tonight, as is frequent these days, there's
little need in my wash (not my life, but my wash, my deluge, my
storm, my dribble) for his static or anyone else's---my head's
packed, stacked and like a burgeoning box of fuzz----no room, ye
sluggards, yurches the mad hatter, roiling and catching his seat
cushions in haphazard hindsight, no room at the Inn, no room!
The bar is a teeming, swaying
terrarium, kaleidoscopic with mahogany and glass, all stout and
narrow, that glass, laced with varying tints---the room is filled
with happy, sappy, yammering smiley-face dressups, the lighting is
semi-dim, fake-dim, fake-intimate and fake-electric candle-lit, a
fake home, home two familiar face atmosphere I have no gizzard to
object to excepting the environmentally controlled safety rock audio
wallow---Air Supply to Eric Carmen to Kenny G to Melissa Manchester
to Whosis Whatsis brain sedation control backseat
hold-hands-sing-along-faking-the-funk sterility...control is here and
as usual nobody's objecting to it, but it's not a part of control,
it's not stability, it's part of the wash, the contained, turbulent
sea in my cranium, slogging and sloshing sluggish and even hurtful in
a now-vague way, dancing, like the sting, like general sensation (
touch, feel, see, smell, taste, hear, perceive, depth, width) back
and forth on the periphery, the big tightrope, the perimeter of my
consciousness (cursed thing)----in and out like your perceptions of
highway commotion, driver's seat stuck on a rainy day—my awareness
is dampening, gallivanting in and out of fog patches....I reach for
the fork, miss, laugh to give it inconspicuous credence, reach again
and I pull it off this time and I stab away at the sorry, cold fajita
remnants----a slice of bell pepper, soiled and dull, once marinated
and crackling; I decide I don't want it—once more beer on draught
and Sykes is squawking again---he's TV Land, white noise, wall paper
semi-existent and I've already missed half of what he's said. My
brain is muffled, mercifully, saintfully,
anesthetically—something---Sykes in a mocking, alleygutter prince
lout fatman slob ten o'clock shadow slur, a garbage gruff
dialect---something about slouching.
“Huh?”
He imitates me. “Huuh?” The
long, lurching slug vowel—Sykes's abrasive brand of jest, jest
kidding, folks, jest kidding....
“What'd you say?” I don't
have the virtue in me tonight to be made punchline by Sykes and his
sarcastic, superior awareness.
“Nothing,” nonchalantly, Sykes
isn't cooperating and I return the favor by paying him no mind. The
Big Chuck's weekend circus dusk death retirement continues, couples
familiar and new roll on home to their beds, friends embrace, joke,
wise out, seeya Monday, take care, stragglers turn up, gaggles of
comrades congeal heartily at tables and it all meshes and masses
together in a yelping, slopping, bailing gang's-all-here auld lang
syne this week anyway pile, everything and everyone
overlapping---lives in bubble existence, removed, shielded, mystic,
shallow, foreign...”don't say hi,” a girl squeals, ebullient,
snide, joyous, friendly, loud, admonishing, home to some part of the
parade. I stare bitter holes into dark mahogany, wishing it away,
wishing me away, away to the sky or the stars or the ground---wishing
electric wooden buzz pisswater glad oblivion soft, waving roar
nirvana upon my head, the vibrating, laughing delirium, test pattern,
the void.
Sykes is going on again and I
catch it this time, corner of my brain, back end of hearing, caring
range: “Buncha slouches,” in his city sidewalk scrape shitgod
dialects, not Noo Yawk, not Bahstin, just some generic junkheap
chewing tobacco rangy, cancerous cityspeak. “Justa buncha slouches.
Yahearme? I tolya, don' go bodderin' wid dem, they's justa buncha
slouches.”
Fine, as it all sails over these
woefully melted peripherals, any entertainment value is mildly
appreciated but slightly lost, so sorry, so sorry----Sykes is not for
me tonight, nor I for him---we're both clean and without blame in our
own drive-into-a-wall ways; it's all a wash, dissipating, like a
weepy, short-lived raincloud, here and gone, away, a wash, yes, a
blur, a wipeout—the corporeal form doesn't remain cohesive—it
crumbles, the insubstantial veneer breaks down to its abstract,
building block, atomic elements....
Brown-on-white, fake-formal,
standard-issue and sad, brown puppydog eyes whose doe-sincerity can't
be questioned—Denise, sweet gal, isn't serving them up; she's on
the yapping, clapping business side of the barn and Sykes and I are
in the boonies—she's just helloing. “Hi, Cal!” My eyes turn up.
“You Okay?”
My pokerface kisses her heroic
sweetness blank. “Uh-huh.”
“You work tonight?” In
answer I scoff up my cook's jacket and brandish it, demonstrative,
deadpan, deadfaced, heavy lidded, matter-of-factly. Oh. She asks me
if I had a bad night and I shrug my bar arm shoulder, careless,
offhand, familiar, distant---no reason to add Denise to the wash or
drag her into my emotional cobra pit.
Paul, in his screaming, jumping,
scatting star worker house jester personality parade wall of
enthusiasm barback regalia roars by my backside, circus-balancing a
few orders—good, prosperous night for him, it would seem---”ahh,
leave him alone. He's in the shitter over some hussy he works
with”--gone---
Scenario Reaction # 359: Denise
waxes sympathetic. “Oh, Cal, that's a drag, but buck up! You know
there'll be other...”the strategy handpicked situation—I'm sure,
in her disassociated way, she means every word but I've got no cheer
for the obligatory rote selection paint by numbers response—I don't
stop her from saying it—she can waste her breath if it makes her
happy. She shoots the noise and I stare at nothing and fuzz her out.
'Bye. 'Bye.
Denise rounds out her
condolences, the well-meaning readyspiel, and she hustles off to
other things—the tug and the pull of the paying customers, the tab,
the rage and the lure of the tippage—I'm Alice's boy tonight and
Alice, big and gregarious and rough-edged, clonks past, grabbing
those empties.....
Sykes is squuinting, now, and
doing his best Popeye. “I hates wimmens,” he grumbles. Aaahr,
Brutusk, yer moleskin me goil....
“Hey, pal,” budges Alice, on
her way by again....good naturedly, but she knows Sykes, and like
most, she finds that he pushes a few too many bad buttons.
Sykes steps out of Popeye and into
his own sickwitty, conversational, snide thought provoker brainshoes.
“Ever notice something about men who hate women, Alice? They're
called misogynists! What do you think they call women who hate men?”
“I don't know,” half-caring,
trying to busy herself with other chores.
“Nothing,” smiles Sykes, smug,
smirking, triumphant, King Shit with his crown of turds, “they
didn't even bother coming up with a name for 'em! What do you think
of that?”Sykes is in steamroller form, snotmeister, intellectual
with teeth, gloating his gloats.
To his left are two
roughhouses---men to the bone, blue collar, mustached, tattooed swill
water swillers, real Marboro Men, it doesn't get any better than this
boys on a fishing trip at-'em-boys-kick-ass tank top types skeetching
Sykes and his rap. One pipes in, “they godda name for him, guy,”
super wiseacre, he wants to best Sykes, get one up, cash those two
measly cents in---”they call 'em Dykes!” He and his friend,
buddy-buddy, arm wrestle, so ditch shovel trench callous-handed sweat
brow laugh, getting that one-up, that lowbrow one semi----no dice
with Sykes, who reviles such pedestrian scoffing.
'Some of us are very wrong,” he
rebukes with his King Shit grin. The boys leave it alone, having had
their say. I turn my attention to the Grand Tuneout, the washout, the
buzzing, seething wall of ambiguity----I don't require this
camaraderie, this slap on the back/slap on the ass pile of chortling,
mastubatory manhood affirmation bonding one'o'the club yuk it up
theatre. My head, flesh-toned, sleepy-eyed, lopsided bobbin, is
gaining its sea legs---the yapping and slapping and crazed armpit
sexdrink bapping, this railroad crotchpower handshake bogosity, the
comfort of the great, jowly tradition---the odor of the linked,
burly, beefy arms in sea shanty unity and the gaggle of raving,
fist-tossing jollies; get it away from me, the hell away....more
space-filling mahogany wood vision in my hollow, sad pasty face---I
try to utter (quietly self-contained, my insidevoice) the Novena to
St. Jude Prayer again---halfway through I botch it, start again,
forget what I'm saying and toss it all over for naught.
Concentration fails me...in my blurred, scattershot folly I
contemplate the idea that I might have an easier time of it would
that Big Chuck's only looked more like a Church...the wheel of
thought rolls over me and leaves me wooden-headed, dully perplexed,
yes, but stoically so.....
“Cal, buddy.” Paul, still
throttling in kick-ass motivational fly-boy mode, claps his hand on
my shoulder for a private word. “Hittin' the sauce pretty hard,
huh?” Drilling me on the obvious---I raise my eyebrows and
apathetically shrug. “Nine beers in an hour, y'know, Alice is gonna
have to shut you off soon, guy.” I nod---fair enough, I
suppose---you can't blame her and I won't give Alice a hard time.
“Ah, leave 'im alone,”
cracks old Sykes, being a pal, “he's just wanting for The
Blackout.”
“I dunno,” Paul sneers, “I
think it's kind of a waste to see a pair as brill as you two piss it
all away for The Damn Blackout. Life's worth a little more than that.
Anyway, cold day in Hell before I let some hussy put ME in the
shitter like that...” and he's off....
“Fuck's brilliance worth,
anyway?” Laughs Sykes. He goes back to his drink.
I've had it with this
crackerjack fest for the night and so slap goes the cash and
overtipping aplenty....I stumble and shamble and I make a diagonal
stroll to the exit---Sykes hasn't got a clue---”cal. Hey, Cal!
Where ya goin'? Cal! Cal!”
All the hubub the people the
squash of faces recede---Paul's back and he's talking at some new
foil, “those hussies. They can wreck your ass...” door closes,
merry go round dead battery, repetition, I know---I've had it,
though, with everything---the biz, the boys, the girls, the lies, the
failsafe gear, cosmetic hell....all too much----
The sky vooms and whirls like the
brooding underside of an apocalyptic top---empty can deposit hell,
vacant, rattling, and all the stars are seive holes...it's like a
mottled space shell---you can see your soul reflect in this decaying
glass cosmic dementia sardine can.
Lustre gone, putrid, dead and it's
all spinning dull, insane, lost and oh shit I dream of the minute
soon I hit homeground, collapse on my bed and laugh and cry while the
passionless, straightfaced ceiling damn it rotates. The shutout, the
cowardice becomes a thing of pointed beauty—these scars made me a
Shell Man. I totter over an expanse of hottop drawn, dissected and
linear, but equal fools into composite compartmental subdivision
sectors----the newest replay of the Easter Egg Hunt beats down most
heavily in my floating, matted meathead----the claw machines----the
Novena, the Prayer, my deepdown guthurt, the unstitchable rips in my
heart and my mind----Jane Kochanski.....
Tripping up on my feet I laugh
hacking, terminal barks into the faceless, defiant black.....
Published in THRUST Vol. 1 No. 1,
Fall/Winter 1992
