agllewis @ 1972-10-29T22:35:00

2009-06-29T20:28:48Z

The painful blues. They whirl past my eyes as I keep legging it, one, two, one, two, at a killing pace to drown out the noise and the damn distance. Navy, neon, cobalt, azure, ultramarine. Gunsmoke blue. Rainwater blue. Angel blue.

My father, who worked in a law firm in Chicago, had a theory about the marriageability of women. It involved seeing their homes. She might smoke, but if she did so indoors, she was out. She might drink - within limits - but if she had bottles anywhere else than the bar, she was out. If her coat didn't hang in the rack, she was out. If she had shoes lying on the floor in the bedroom, she was out, unless she'd just come in with the beau. No champagne - why, I don't know. Blue eyes, out. Fake ones, that is. But wig is all right. Nothing dirty in the kitchen, nothing dirty under the nails, nothing dirty in the breakfast table, talk or otherwise. Philosophy books in the shelf, out. Photography, out. Binoculars, out. Magnolias, out.

My father never married.

Neither will I, or so it feels to me as I beat the morbid rhythm on the pavement at half past three in the morning, the rain falling around me like the flat blade of the undertaker's shovel. I'm washed out, hungry for a cloud of smoke in my lungs, bleeding salt from my eyes, gazing through the cold haze that's stretching from one end of this street to the other, from one end of the horizon to the other.

I spent the night in her apartment. I lay flat on the bed still wearing my shirt - wet then, wet now - and feeling like I'd been wrung dry in some industrial-grade machine, spread out on the steel panes for a final flattening. She sat at the other end of the bed wearing her nightie and smoking a dainty little cigarette. Her hair was undone, ruffled like a raccoon. Her eyeliner had run a bit, and she had daubed off most of the lipstick. If she'd been captive, she would have been dousing her food, that is, me. I wouldn't have noticed any difference in anything. I left because I craved coffee.

Getting off her spell wasn't easy. She undressed me, or took off my hat, coat, trousers and shoes, then pressed me on the bed, undressed herself, got on her nightie, then sat on the bed to smoke and tell me the story of a long-gone summer when she had been working as a shop assistant in some blasted corner of the earth, out by the highway, nowhere in the dusty thin air.
She was fifteen then. The owner of the shop was a mute Canadian fellow who shot his brains out the following winter. Nobody came to the shop but the dead, she said, and they didn't come very often. Except one day, when this fat man in a greasy white sleeveless shirt parked his bumpy Ford in front and came in to get a porno, a case of beer, and a pack of crisps. He had a dog's face, a bulldog or maybe a pug, round and creased so much the human features seemed sucked into the folds of skin. There was black hair on his fingers. She was alone with that guy in the shop, because the Canadian was out talking to the dead. She knew he wanted to make a dirty suggestion to her, but he couldn't. He was too scared. He paid up and left and nobody but the dead came in after that. I wonder if there was a point to the story.

I learned how weak people are.

I cut my hand with the dull edge of a lighter. It was hard work, but I managed it. That woke me up enough to grab my clothes and excuse myself through the door. Never again. Stay out of the dame's way, be safe, all's cool.

My shoes are heavy. The hat weighs down my head and it feels like my neck is going to snap, like the gargoyles sitting on the brim, leering ahead into the night. I don't see where I'm going, this street goes forward, the faces of the dark tenement buildings on either side are like the sheer cliffs of a gorge carved out of rain-slickened glass, black as old death. I put one foot in front of the other because that's all I got, if I stop moving I have nothing and then I'm dead, and I'd be visiting that store out by the highway and be with her again, no. So I walk. Got nothing in this city to look forward to. I'm just a passing noise, an empty coat drifting in the headlights, a corpse-like hand numbly clinging to a glass of whisky. I'm just a pair of eyes and I see nothing.

An Underworld of Dust through the Insane Engine

agllewis @ 1972-10-29T22:35:00