short fiction: Green Christmas

 

Green Christmas

 

Otis Wilkins was coming. He'd been gone for ages, and was borrowing some coed's Dodge Dart to make the trip to Erie. Cub Bartholomew dissappeared for four months, and came back to town by bus, via forced exodus or jail. Coming home to Erie is better than making a new one someplace steel. Matilda Chortleman was acting as social director. Dean Gibson put out the greenbacks to rent the hotel room. This was to be a green Christmas, even in a snow squall. Thus far there was four feet of anal retentive water piled up in drifts on the sidewalk. But this was to be a party for people with imagination, and no respect for the truth. It was passe'. Inconsequential to them. To "all the young dudes," as David Bowie put it. Viva Bowie. They have effrontery.

"We don't let concrete stay solid any too long" was their collective watchword, when they were students at the state college I find distasteful to mention. They were the avante guard and the underground and elite, some of them former members of a punk band. People wove baskets. Did ceramics. Copped a look. Gell-mousse slashing forelocks. At times, glitter. That was 1981-1983.5, before they scattered. For a while. There's been reunions.

The importance of having a green Christmas was to deny a deep shitload of snow in 2012. Going on a bell-ringing 2013. Creepy number. Not that your new friends upstairs are superstitious. Some people are, hint.

Green is a liberating color. Lets you cross the intersection. Makes oxygen. Earth Mother shit. Thought you'd like the image. Gazongas on an earthy fertility fetish. Green is a durable symbol of youth, envy, fertility, and take a powder, the whole green Earth. Money, too. Forgot to say 'money.' I could load myself with female hormones at any moment. I had college courses in feminism. For some reason, I may not be conveying the spirit I'd hoped for. A green branch is more bendable.... Enough. It was the symbol of the new way for that spot and time slot. And not only green.

They discussed at length the stupidity of worrying about doofy Judeo Christian ethics, without which any putz can prosper in mother US. But since then all have, some how or other, found civil obedience. Some. Good-o.

Cub was an original member of Howling X, Now one of Howling X works as a drummer in a cruise ship band. Otis was a bass player, big dude, real easy, likable, in and out of rehab. Currently hoary and bloated. Left a half-way house. Stayed with Dean, earning his keep like a geisha. For a big, physically wasted man, he is graceful moving. Looks nice serving tea.

Well did I forget to say that that ding-dang party had something cheery-special in store for everyone, in a clean, warm hotel room off Peach Street, down the row from squatter's heaven? Love that place. Free digs. Chilly surfers with grunge gear for cold nights in a frame with no windows, just entry ports. Hard years. Hard times. Spiritous cliches of specters on equine transport galloping at us till the end of time. Hallaluja. Had to wing that in. Sorry. Forgot to say I'm a dime store minister. Damn near deserve to preach on radio.

Took Otis some lively cavorting to find someone on a university campus who was not too attatched to the material. His fine presentations in the coffee shop nearest campus mirrored the current trend in metaphysical philosophy. Shit. There's beauty in that. It doesn't change much in 30 years. Assholes are still selling revised books they force kids to buy each year, new, since the old edition is unrevised rat shit. Cute book racket. He had his Dodge in less than two days of stalking the campus. "I'm needed at a peace convention," Otis convinced the maiden he palavered with after crashing a frat party. "Be back with your car real soon." For a man to accomplish that, at his age, takes pinache. He dresses college. Like it. Good choice of glasses on Otis. Slide down his scnoz like he teaches something that fucking matters. Deep. Arcane. Matter is incorporeal. Can't own it. Only fuck with it.

Pikers Ale. Dean. Dean. Did I forget Dean. Dean promised to supply mega-cases of Pikers Ale. It was a favorite in the days when Howling X ratted out their curt punk anthems. In a roadhouse just outside the legal limitations of a teensy rural college town that deserves a lite chin chuck from someone fucking smart. A fucking hell hole for higher learniing. Guests at the Christmas party should start banging in after six pm tomorro! Have to snooze. See ya' soon....



...Awake. Took a shower. Or didn't. You can't care. It's the day of Green Christmas. With enough snow outside the hotel room to make Greenland go, "Hey! We sure could use some of your snow up here, assholes." I fucking near forgot to discuss Matilda.

Matilda turned out swell. A career woman. Communications. In the dwindling field of tele-communications, now so barbed with punky no-call lists. Fuckers. They shouldn't do that to someone as comely and generous as she. She was the tall thin Earth Mother to most of that gang. A procuress. She was loved at that nameless college. Damn good earner on the phone. She's assertive on cue. Dean was already at the hotel cause he rented the fucking room. Matilda got there early because she has responsibilities. Just like at work. She's keen like that. The cases and cases of upper-crust cabin-by-the- babbling-brook type ale were stacked by the wall that served as the bar. The simplicity makes me go loosy goosy. Fuck it all, it's Christmas.

Now everbody who mattered worth a shit back at that slum state college in Nowheresville has finally arrived. Hooray. Let's party. I mean them. I heard about this shit. Maybe I was there. I'm not at liberty to be horribly specific. Was I remiss in saying that Matillda saved her shekels for some time to be ready for this extravaganza. Generous, inherritted greenbacks, Dean chipped in for the goodies. Too. Green Christmas! Blasting a punk favorite from back when they all were rad....here we go.......on a silver platter someone stole from a Tupperware party back in Kansas,......... an ounce of blow. A whole fucking ounce! Can you believe that much could be had? Cost a shit load. Everyone gathered for the viewing in the center of that clean, lovely-warm hotel room. Matilda had the baggie covered with an embroidery, beaded like royalty, that some one stole from some other social venue somewhere in Texas. There were tales to be told of everyone's travels. More gifts from residential/commercial places they stole shit from. Later on. When it kicks in. It will. Oh boy. Tick, Tick, Tick...



...Green Christmas. Matilda had laced the blow with a harmless green coloring agent. It was forest green cocaine. Can't bring myself to list specifically, by name, how Christmas-happy everyone was! The gifts they stole from all over the place, the green lines of blow on the Micky Mouse hat mirror Dean's mother bought him for his confirmation, so splendid. It was once viewed as an honor to receive such a mirror. Helped good Mouseketeers keep their hats on straight. You didn't get to see that blow-mirror any too often, I can tell you. Special occaission. More special to come. Holy fuck, dear sweet Matilda looks out the motel window and shits a post and lintel. There's a shit-storm of ugly green slime falling from the sky. Going greasy hideous kersplat, with force, on the four feet of snow on Peach Street. LIke in that Dr. Sues book. Except his green slime from outer space was gooey and comical. The grean shit that just started falling, like nearly now, like a plague, was really, really putrid. Worse than the green shit in the kid's book by Dr. Suess, who everyone still loves the way everyone was loving Matilda. Till she went frozen. Everyone rushed to the window to look at the horrible green shit coming down. Powerful green shit-storm. It stopped. They resumed enjoying the blow.  Except for Matilda, who was now a pillar of frozen green slime.  People serving as den mother to a pack of evil cub scouts deserve it for enablling a band of antisocials to feel so fucking good about their miserable selves.  On the other had, you don't kick a starlet out of bed for eating lime jello, and that hill of tainted, tinted  blow was too wonderful to waste on sentiment.

Past, Present, Future. It's against house policy to lock into time frames. Eastern. Hall of mirrors. Like some fake-ass mystic peering in his smudged, finger printy, blueberry muffin crumb specked crystal ball. That was the Apacalypse. The whole fucking Apacalypse. The four horsemen are economical, budget-constricted big fat pricks! They just picked their spot, and did it. Blew green slime on Erie, Pennsylvania. No reason for it. Threw a dart at the map and pulled a prank. That's all the Apocalypse is. A prank. Not that it ain't for good it happened. It's a message. There's a moral. And it's a really, really cool gag. Fucking Merry Christmas! Green Christmas. Write some songs about the event. Go over like Silent Night or White Christmas. But we're green.

Podcast: The Not-Too-Social Hour

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Itsy Bitsy Fiction

I'm emotionally fragile and could crack at any moment. Be gentle. Please. I'm wearing a brand-new tie, what I think is tasteful solid color gray silk, and what I think is a crisp white shirt. Looking for opinions. Gentle, gentle please. Other people dress up like this. I think. But it's like there is a curse that hangs overhead. It's dangerously close to Holloween. All right. I'm masquerading as a white-collar professional.

This is part of a plan. I came in here dressed to the nines (funky odd number) in an attempt to interact with a better class of people. That's not a value judgment. If you happen to be an out of work so and so, dressed in the clothing your mother bought you for Christmas, please disregard this appeal for help. And don't take it personally that I'm no longer open to friendship with persons in positions as low as mine. This is a mission.

The bartender is taking forever to wait on me and there is hardly anyone here. The few people at the bar are twice my size, have sway with the police, and the gift for conspiracy. I know most of them are wealthy, and they're all effecting the grunge look. And they seem to all know each other.  They have signals.  It's a fern bar. Well, it's an upscale sports memorabilia bar. But it's not full of sweating jocks. It's an upscale bar in an embattled Pittsburgh neighborhood. Dangerously close to nice.

The bartender is approaching, finally, with a mean sarcastic smirk on his face. Perhaps people already know me here. I can't help looking Middle Eastern. Succeeded in buying a bottle of Rolling Rock. A cold one, as the hoi polloi calls a beer. Lifting it up to drink, condensation drips on my lap. On my shirt. On the conservative solid color necktie. A book of matches in my pocket spontaneously combusts. Smoke is coming off the pocket of my black polyester slacks. People are looking at me.

Seven Piss Tests

 

My brood sack is fully extended with the wiggling offspring of joy. And not for nothing. My most favorite dollar store is rocketing into medical curative science. The magic number alone drowns all lassitude, while breathing life into a paper bag of exuberance. Seven. Seven things you can find out about yourself by peeing in a cup and dunking, like a doughnut, a paper strip. For one dollar a whiz, you can test your water for drugs, alcohol, pregnancy, menopause, ovulation, glucose, and urinary tract infection. These are the seven dwarfs of need-to-know. Should you test positive for something you wish not to be, you can always ask the clerk at the checkout counter for a second opinion.

Buttholium and Diddlium

Bastards at the New York Academy of Science won't even look at anything I mail them in a wooden box, ensconced in wire and paper penny wrappers, like my last invention I sent to them, much less read my tracts on natural science. It's a damn shame for humankind. It's their loss. Them pointy-headed fart-biters wouldn't know genius if it walked up their ass in snow shoes. I been on the cusp of discovery, and those nerds is just letting the eye tooth split my ass. And speaking of assholes, one of my discoveries could turn Charles Manson into Albert Schweitzer.

Buttholium ain't on the periodic chart yet because some jack-off in New York been sending my discoveries to the FBI. People who are assholes have a higher concentration than normal of buttholium inside them. Collects in the ass. Causes people to have a personality disorder. I come to this discovery fair and square. I run tests. Diddlium, on the other hand, shows up in people who can't hold a job. If the scientists in New York could find a way to drain the diddlium out of these poor folk they all could find themselves a marketable skill and prosper. That can't possibly happen though till my work gets recognized.

 

The scientific method ain't but a mite different than panning for gold. That's a metaphor. One day I was pouring down some moonshine with kin, and realized that the whiskey affected some people different than others. Why is that? It can't be the whiskey, because we was all drinking the same rot gut. You can't put it down to ethnicity, because we're all related by blood, out here in the boondocks, where it gets so cold at night you can't help but snuggle up with close kin. In any case, being a patriotic and unselfish cuss, I'm giving this information away for free. It's the only right thing I can do.

Flash fiction flatulence

Oh, I don't know how I got on this tangent, or maybe I do know, and I'm not ready to say. I read one book by Melvin Mason and simply went bananas over an economic theory. This could possibly explain the changes that have taken place inside of me. It is as if it was possible to swallow business and industry in pill form. Or to speed read the Bible, and thus create a parallel universe using the blueprint. Maybe it was the day I read in the news that an American diplomat had been sodomized before being murdered, as if it was a trick-or-treat prank, on an anniversary of 9/11, that Melvin's masterpiece meandered up a neuro-pathway. And maybe this should be narrowed down.

People are always talking. Half the time when you tell someone to shut up, they will invoke their constitutional right to free speech. I have been beaten up, and have beaten people up, for saying things either they or I didn't care to hear. Melvin Mason's theory is, in part, that the Constitution is there to protect your right to earn money, and neither truth nor beauty is allowed to reach its greasy fingers into your personal money stash. Of course people are allowed to say anything they want to express. And it's illegal to beat or torture people for expressing themselves. Yet I don't recall anyone so much as paying a fine for an act of violence. The drive to silence people enjoys silent legitimacy with police and judges, so long as the victims are poor enough, or the perp rich enough. When all things are equal more or less, it is often concluded that the victim should have eaten his Wheaties. The trend of the past decade has been less and less wealthy people, and more poor folk, dirt poor, while constitutional freedoms for the masses get more and more like abracadabra, with the outcomes compatible with Open Sesame. Rabbits don't come out of the top hat. Doors stay closed.

The important thing is that I feel both energized and empowered for having read Melvin's book.

Mirror Chat

I am always cheerful, always pleasant. Informal and elegant is the way I like my friends to dress. People who can do both crude and advanced at the same time should be chiseled in between big guys on Mount Rushmore. I am like the Washington Monument when I'm chubby. I'm a glutton for contradictions.

I have my living room closet packed with the least costly office supplies available on both the Internet and the network of dollar stores that I frequent. I have a system in place for purchasing the least costly staple foods available, with an emphasis on maximizing physical prowess. "But why do you have office supplies in the living room?" Someone in the audience is asking. Because I work in the living room. It's not the living room any longer. It's where I go to work each day. I wake up each morning, roll out of bed like a Vietnam prisoner of war and go directly to the keyboard. Would you believe ordinary clerical work is the new pole vault?

The new urban Batman comic in the flesh substitutes fiscal conservatism in extremis for the camp muscle mass popular in the 1960s. They were just beginning to understand latent homosexuality at the time. This just now is damn near 17 years past the expiration date on postmodernism. Modern man should be a Giacometti sculpture with a Porfirio Rubirosa dick. As in bisexual, and I'm not referring to a 10 speed. But for now it is best to limit the little man to insertion in normal grown women. Weenie whacking, solo, is venerated.

So it's been thinking about a young Hispanic woman and her memories. "It" being the smart-alecky homunculus in the jockey shorts. All right I remember her as a young woman. She remembers me as a young man. Of course the media was as active in the 1970s as a lizard on amphetamines, but it hadn't yet turned its attention to the frailties of men. It is been so cruel since the Inquisition, beginning with the Ronald Reagan presidency. Oh, you name your conspiracy, I will bruit the one that is nagging my psyche. Manhood has been under siege like by Gertrude Stein with a pair of poisoned pinking shears. But that does not mean that some where a 55-year-old Spanish woman doesn't smile when remembering a quickie that took place no place special. Back when our skin was olive. The blood was still cherry ice cream.