Technicolor Pulp Read online

“Six A.M.”

  “We’ll have to leave at five.”

  “I’ll probably still be up, thinking about how easy life was in junior high. The only thing that mattered back then was the cut of my Led Zeppelin T-shirt.”

  PUIP 4

  I’m laying with my back glued to the green vinyl couch, trying to peel an arm free so I can rest a hand on my crotch like… ALL MEN DO and I hear a phone ring two weeks earlier. I pick it up. It’s Helms in London. He tells me to change my flight. I tell him that my current facade is collapsing at breakneck speed and I’ve got to get out of town as soon as possible. He tells me that Ray, our buddy, drove to a gorge outside of Aspen and hung himself. I meet Helms in New York and we go to the funeral. Oh, the danger that lurks in my head on a quiet night.

  I lay restless, feeling the pain, and the freedom. A deep burning rages silently, until all that’s left is charred and empty. When I feel that emptiness, it soothes me. Sweet peace whispers in the desolation. I see Ray, and I see Lindsey. I hear a song with Lindsey, lying naked on the beach under the sun. And then, life takes its course.

  I have to go to Europe forever, I think. I can’t be back in the States in two months, telling lies and losing jobs all over again. Growing up is bleak. More bills to dodge, less hair on my head, and GRAVITY. The world makes me old. I fight it, and that kills me.

  …. I dream that I’m in the East Village, sitting in a crack shanty with a black guy named Champagne and two nameless strawberries—one on each side, rubbing my cock for hits of rock. It’s the night of Ray’s funeral and I’ve sworn off drugs but HERE I AM. I decide to grab the stash and run. The whole time I keep saying to myself, “Why did you just do this? I can’t believe you did this?” I got no choice but to run once I’ve started… I run and I run… I run down streets and I run up alleys… I run around corners, through subways, and I see people I know everywhere… I wave to them all… Every-time I turn around, Champagne is right behind me with an angry mob, shouting and running faster and faster… Every dealer in New York is chasing me! I begin to tire and I start sinking into the ground with each step until I’m swimming waist-deep in concrete and the mob is on top of me. They’re yelling, “Shoot the motherfucker! Shoot his ass!” And I’m sinking lower and lower, going, “I knew they were gonna shoot me. I fuckin’ knew it! I’m such an idiot!” I can’t believe I tried to run, completely trapped… A gun crackles… Not a TV gun boom, just a clean pop, and I feel a warmth in my back up at my right shoulder… The crowd stands over me, laughing and joking for a minute and then somebody puts a gun behind my right ear… I hear Champagne’s voice. “Do it!” he screams and I feel a click… Just a click, and I’m on a roller coaster, plunging, screaming into a carnival of sirens and lights….

  PUIP 5

  5 A.M. The streets of Boston asleep. It’s quiet, quiet enough for me to ponder the magnitude of my journey. But I don’t have the stomach for it just yet. I need at least two chocolate donuts before I can ponder anything deeper than the paste on the corners of my mouth. I just wanna snooze as much as possible before I get to London, so I’ll have some juice for Last Call. I gotta fly down to New York first, and then catch a jumbo across to the UK.

  The flight to New York is no big deal, just me and a bunch of commuters—corporate hotshots and their oriental counterparts, looking to swoop down on the Apple for a few gold-leafed worms. I’m hungry and all they have on the flight is some second-rate orange juice and some leftover peanuts. I want bacon and eggs. I want danish and plenty of it. I want pancakes with syrup, waffles drowning in fruit and I wanna go back to bed. Slight pangs of fear tickle the rim of my sphincter and I don’t wanna think about it. I wanna think of it… As a simple itch. Christ… I got a hundred bucks in my pocket! I hope I don’t find any bars I like or it’ll be all over in a day! Doobe, friend that he is, told me not to worry, that everything’ll be OK, that all I gotta do is get there, so I tighten my cheeks and squelch the fear as best I can. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. And besides… It’s too late.

  We land at JFK and I find my way to the foreign departures section. It’s about 8, and the crowd’s beginning to buzz. New York’s always good for a shot of chaos.

  I find my gate and check in with the gay KEN DOLL-like flight attendant. The crowd at the gate fluctuates between the waiting line outside a bondage bar, and the extras set of Mary Poppins. Lots of leather and nose rings, sprinkled with a few tweedy british families walking around in order of height, like geese, like geese in plaid and wool. I settle in and a robot marches over the loudspeaker. It’s gotta be a computer. I know things are bad but I can’t believe any HUMAN could own a voice so monotone and soul-dead. Regardless of how long they’ve been on the pension plan.

  “LADIES. AND. GENTLEMAN… FLIGHT. 7.8.1. TO. LONDON. AND. FRANKFURT. IS. ONE. HALF. OF. AN.HOUR. BEHIND. SCHEDULE… PLEASE. DO. NOT. LEAVE. THE. GATE. AREA….”

  I don’t even want to know why it’s late. Each syllable karate-chops my skull. I look for a space on the floor to try’n catch a few winks. Last night’s death dream got to me. I want to sleep but I’m afraid to. How many times can I die in my dreams and not at least wet my pants or drool all over my chest?

  I haven’t even LOOKED at a map of Europe yet. I haven’t even READ one of those thought-provoking books like,” SO YOU’RE GOING TO LONDON.” The truth is that I don’t have much of a plan at all. I figure I’ll get there, go to a bar, get drunk, and things’ll work themselves out. That’s what I do when I’m new in town. It always works, why won’t it work in London? The less I know the better. I don’t want some cheap preconceived notion about the whole thing. I’ve heard a lot about London, but I can’t remember much of it. All the people I know who went there had money and I don’t, so it’s gonna be a DIFFERENT kind of town for me. I wanna forget about Lindsey and Ray or, I guess, DEAL with them, if that’s possible. I’m paralyzed. The sadness is on me like a cheap brown leisure suit with big white stitch pockets. GRAND PICTURES. I got Grand Pictures. I remember it all bigger than it ever was. LEGENDS. MYTHS in my MIND. Lindsey’s a Brigitte Bardot I actually fucked, and Ray is a John Belushi I actually got drunk with. SUPERSTARS in my small SAGA, and each died a tragic death—living or otherwise. Ray’s dead but that’s too real and I’m still too far away. Lindsey?… I can think about her….

  I see her in front of me with those big proud breasts and those round juicy hips, that dark hair falling off her smooth shoulders and that smile crying off her. Those breasts so proud, glowing like they each beat up Mike Tyson. I don’t know where they get their power from or where this woman comes from—otherworldly. And I’m so THIS-worldly. The first time I saw her and that body, I made a sign of the cross. I felt it was TIME to start looking for a god, or at least, a shower with cold RELIGIOUS water. She made me smile, she made me throb. She was the only thing that ever stopped my running. I don’t know what I run from… And I’ve never known where I was running to. All I know is that I never wanted to be WHERE I AM. The fat safe lie of school is over and nothing has worked out the way I planned. The world hasn’t embraced me yet. Instead, I’m deep in debt and out of my mind most of the time. Bouncing around America, chasing Cassady’s ghost and Kerouac’s empties. A sad state of funny affairs. Thinking that life’ll be groovy but finding taxes and insurance and people who’ve given up. Becoming one of those people, one of those lame fucks who sits around missing the Senior Prom. I was born, they stamped a nine-digit number on my forehead, my parents paid for a while and now… THE DEBT’S MINE! The best thing I can come up with is to run to the islands off Cape Cod and hide. Pretend I’ve found Heaven, but I haven’t, not surrounded by a bunch of drunk fishermen with green teeth. All I’ve found is a decent place to wait it out. Then comes Lindsey and now, I’m back on my trusty Palomino of Fear, 28 minutes away from a new beginning and another ending. I got a car that’s hidden from its true owner, the Repo-Man, behind a clump of trees. What do I do? Where do I go? New York’s a big old tired concrete whore that lays waiting
to be fucked, never giving a fair price to anyone. L.A.’s like a big TV that smiles and never believes itself—just a big inside joke. London’s GOT to be the place. I’m lost in this country, too lost not to jump at a chance to get out. I’m on my way over to Europe where it all started for the whiteman. I need inspiration, stronger booze, a change of scene. I need a different world.

  PUIP 6

  I’m laying down along a wall, next to some chick with platinum hair and a pierced tongue that wags its obscene self, every minute on the minute, across the lips and off the teeth. Pale skin wrapped in a black leather miniskirt and fishnets. Both ankles and wrists sport linked chain. I sit next to her feeling like a Peeping Tom in a woman’s prison movie. On top, she’s got a leather vest with nothing on underneath. Her breasts are of the extraordinary nature. How long does it take for a guy to get off the nipple, I wonder? She’s reading an Anne Rice novel. She makes me horny. She makes me wonder what happened to my world that’s got everyone dressing in homage to Bela Lugosi. As a rule, I don’t like a woman unless she still has a hospital bracelet on. This starry-eyed dreamer has a gaze that harkens back to a world I DEFINITELY missed in all my reincarnations. She makes me feel normal. I’m so unintrigued by my OWN insanity. I just wanna lay next to her and purr….

  The next thing I know, I’m being kicked by a simple german girl with dreadlocks and nose ring.

  “Ze blane…” she barks, “Zit’s loadink!”

  I jump up, still in a haze, and bound for the ramp. I finally fall asleep and the next thing I know I’m missing my ride. Dreaming about everyone I’ve ever known, swirling around in a big grey foggy toilet bowl. No big deal? I sit down on the plane and rub my eyes. Europe, no turning back and nothing to turn back to.

  “Fuck it!” I yell loud enough to feel reckless. “I’m going.” I let out a nice morning fart, eggy and wet, just in time to welcome a small bookish woman. Her hair shows signs of the swimming pool wars—green and straighter than Mother Teresa. I have a window seat with no seats in front of me. I’m in paradise. The blonde next to me could be an L.L. Bean poster child, and looks like she knows a thing or two… About everything. She also could use a few meals in her. Earthy widewales, a fishman’s sweater, and not a single pouf of makeup on. Her hair is WAY straight. It reminds me of my college guidance counselor, the one who refused to talk to me after I dropped out one year. Yeah, suspiciously like that bitch! Probably read all those same OLDE english books that even english people don’t understand. We say a quick uncomfortable hello and talk about the awkward smell on board. I look back out the window—one last glance at the States. I feel that feeling, that feeling of triumph from high school when my forged note from home would free me for another day. Nothing left to do but smile and run.

  PUIP 7

  I open my eyes and I see her next to me, pale and shaking. Upright in bed with my fists clenched and throbbing, veins bulging in my forearms. My face buried in the blankness of the wall. Hyperventilating. I try to laugh for a lack of anything better to do.

  “Morning,” I gasp.

  “Call it what you want to.” She spits.

  “Kind of a rough one last night,” I add in subconscious defense.

  “Yeah,” she says, pointing to the mattress. I look down, knowing only too well but still hoping. No Such Luck. Like a little boy… Pissed my bed again.

  “Well… I guess it’s better than blood.”

  “Well, if I’d known that was what you wanted I would’ve brought you into the bathroom with me ten minutes ago.”

  Waking up in a puddle of piss is old hat for us, more like an, “Ah Shucks” kind of thing. There’s gotta be more to this story.

  “Whatta ya mean, Babe?”

  “I mean it isn’t ‘morning,’ it’s the afternoon and you’ve already made a DAY of it!”

  The merry-go-round starts to wind slowly. The music grinding in my skull like a 33 playing on 45.

  “I was in the bathroom a few minutes ago. I got my period a week early. That is… I guess it’s my period. Forty-five minutes of you ripping into me and drooling brought it on early this month. I guess we don’t have to worry about me being pregnant.”

  Some stories have no face, only images, flashes of color, and shards of sound—a merry-go-round, like I said before… Of Shame and Horror. Doing things I never thought I’d do… Things I can’t remember.

  “You came in… I was in watching TV… Do you remember coming home?”

  “No,” I say… But really I do… Just not that much of it… Just shadows, a laugh here and there… Pressure on my eyes… The sweat on my forehead… Some voices.

  “You actually pulled my top down and started sucking on my boob in front of everyone in the living room… You kept saying that you thought it was SEXY… I knew you were beyond stopping… So I came in here with you.”

  The story begins to take horrific form… The shame tightening my lungs making it hard for me to get air… Spinning… I remember faces in the living room… A nipple in my mouth… A hand across my face… Pushing… Laughter… Arguing… Someone cheering… Someone throwing pillows at me… Me like an infant… Pushing with my face against a hand….

  “Your nose was bleeding… You smashed your face against a chair while you were crawling around on the ground… Then we came in here… And you shut down completely… You didn’t even know who I was… You were disgusting… Blood and spit dripping off your chin… Telling me to rub my clit so we could be in love again… Asking me if I liked it… You’re such a pig… Like I love being pounded into until I bleed… Asshole… I gotta get outta here… You said you’d change… But you can’t… You’ve lost it!”

  Listening to HER story… Hearing who I am, or what I can be… I remember the bottles… And the laughter… The sun… Coming home… People laughing at me… And the nipple in my mouth… People yelling at me… Not caring… Not caring what they think of me….

  “I just shut down… Asshole… I died… I let you fuck a corpse… All I could do to save myself… Was to die… It was all I could do… And I let you just rip into me until you finished… And then you passed out… I laid there next to you… And then you starting puking all over the place… Then you passed out again and pissed in the bed… You just mumbled through it all.” She says, looking at me in utter disgust, “Look at yourself… JUST FUCKING LOOK AT YOURSELF!” And begins pounding on my chest. I cover my face and absorb the blows. Each hate-filled blow actually soothes me while my head begins to kick out pieces of the final minutes. The final moments that I remember in bed… Pounding… And grunting… Hoping that an orgasm will bring back our love… Just one more and she’ll love me again… We’ll be happy… I know we will… Rub… Yeah…That’s it… Rub… Rub it and all of this will go away… You’ll only remember the fun parts… Rub it long enough and you’ll only remember the good parts… Gasping… Searching… Trying to find the love again… Her screams… And the fists on my chest… Every once in awhile catching me in the head… Until finally… She stops and begins to cry… I try to hug her… But she recoils… I feel the loathing in her limbs… It’s beyond her… She is beyond me.

  PUIP 8

  We roll over top an endless blue shag. So calm, the ocean, a painting at 20,000 feet. Sharks rip tiny fish into finger foods and all I see is a huge blue pillow.

  “No, thank you. I don’t eat meat. I phoned the airlines in advance and I SHOULD be getting the vegetarian plate. I’ll eat chicken, if I must, but DEFINITELY, NO RED MEAT.”

  It’s the woman next to me. I knew it’d be a matter of seconds before she’d start ASSERTING herself.

  “Hi, how ya doin’?”

  “Hello… Fine,” she scoffs.

  “I couldn’t help but just hear you and I was wondering, are you a devout vegetarian? I mean like izita philosophical thing with you? Or are you just healthy?”

  “Actually, I WILL eat meat. I just PREFER vegetables, especially in London.”

  Very relaxed, no second-guessing words. I
admire that in a woman… Scares the hell outta me.

  “So, you’ve been to London before?”

  “I’ve been studying in London for six years. I’m on my way back to complete my thesis on the Bronze Age. I’ve always been an Anglophile and Archeology is my chosen field of study. It’s been an excellent opportunity for me to fuse together two things that I treasure.”

  “I know what you mean. I always wished somebody’d make a movie where the Flinstones meet the Jetsons,” I say, not quite sure what the Bronze Age is.

  “So why are YOU going to London?” she says.

  “It’s kind of a long story but… Really, it amounts to a basic desire to see a friend and leave a few behind.”

  “Really,” she hesitates, “I thought maybe you were in school.”

  “No, that nightmare is long over.”

  “You didn’t like school, I gather.”

  “School didn’t like ME and I REACTED to it. I weighed too much, in the eyes of my professors, to appear capable of grasping the ethereal qualities of the Classics.”

  “I see?” she says, with a fidget. I look at her hair outta the corner of my eye, greasily tucked behind her right ear, and spot a certain confusion in a fresh bloom of perspiration.

  “School, to me, was more of a sixteen-year seminar in What I Don’t Ever Want To Be—a preventative thing.”

  “I’m not quite sure I follow… The physical weight thing seems kind of odd to me.”

  “I gutted it out long enough to grab my sheepskin, wave it at the family, and run… I’ve spent the last couple of years going to great lengths to forget everything they taught me in school.”

  “Your experience sounds so…” she pauses, “… Unpleasant.”

  “It wasn’t that bad… I read a few books I never woulda forced myself to read.”

  “The Classics?”