Armadillo to Zombie

I’ve made vegetarian soup for vampires before. The secret is, don’t tell them what’s in it.

A group of fingerling vampires came to my house this evening. I could hardly overlook them, although they were short. They fastened their tiny fangs to my shins and ankles and sucked vigorously, but even so I felt the blood puddling up in my shoes for as much as an hour after they took their handfuls of eyeballs and werewolf boogers and moved on to the next house – a recently remodeled mausoleum in the cemetery/crematorium across the street from Quarter’s Barbecue Emporium.  

I strapped a tourniquet on my legs to staunch the flow of blood and staggered through the streets.

 

hamburger mutagens

Weak, confused, I stopped for a Big Mac to give me strength, slit my finger with a letter opener and squeezed three drops of blood onto the three pickle slices laid neatly on top of the 100% mutilated cattle patty. 

Feeling much better, I resumed my walk through the city, wanting now to find salvation, some spiritual succor.

At the mall, a group of Hare Krishnas congregated, looking displaced. Their saffron robes hung loosely from their withered vegan bodies.

“Have you seen Little Buddha?” I asked them politely. 

“What? Keanu Reeves? Right!” said the eldest Krishna, whose shaved head sagged at the back of his mottled neck. 

I got a cappuccino and a cherry squeeze at the food court and continued my search for salvation in the city of the damned. The undead crowded the aisles at Walgreens. In Kmart, their faces were ashen and tinted as the voices of demons cried out the blue light special again and again. At Walmart, the brains of the enemy were on sale, writhing in a vat of pickled Chinese torture water. The roast beef glistened; its juices squirmed as tenderizer tore its fibers one by one each from its brother. Dried possum lips hung from the checkout stand rack.  The venom of flesh-eating African frogs was bottled and sold in the sundries department at Osco that day.

I couldn’t stand the sight of them. Sick with loathing, I went to the produce department for yams, parsnips, blood oranges, kohlrabi and teatree oil to make myself a remedy to cure these cursed imaginings.

 At the cemetery, I shared them with a man in black tattered velvet. His headstone read “Justice Not Mercy,” but he would not tell me why.

His hands were long and thin, nails crusted with graveyard soil more than a century old. His teeth were blackened. His breath was foul and sweet. He ate yams and parsnips, but said the kohlrabi gave him gas.

“I was once living, like you,” he said. He scratched his companion, a molding armadillo, behind the ears. The armadillo made a wet snuffling sound, like a pig snorkeling through the carcass of something left dead in the barnyard to rot. The armadillo coughed, and sputum bubbled out of his nostrils and one eye. I offered him a handkerchief.

“I’ve had this armadillo since before I was dead,” the man in the velvet suit said. “My name’s Ned. Ned Hall. He was buried with me.” 

Suddenly, the armadillo began to cry. Green tears the size of quarters ran down his face.

“Armageddon, that’s what it was,” the armadillo said, between huge gulping sobs. “Armageddon, ruination, we’ve all been damned to hell.”

“Give it a rest, would you?” said Ned Hall. He lit a cigarette. Smoke trickled out of his ears.

The armadillo continued to sob, muttering “Apocalypse, death, destruction, second coming – all I need is an open grave,” until at last he subsided, with many hiccups and whimpering sidelong looks at Ned Hall.

“I keep telling him” said Ned. “He don’t have to stay here with me in this goddamn cemetery – if you’ll excuse the expression. It’s no vacation for me either, being buried with this sorrowful dead armadillo. I didn’t know they’d bury the fool with me. I’d a told ‘em don’t bother, if I’d known he was going to whine and moan at me for the next hundred years.”

He pulled an old boot out of the grass on the grave next over and pulled it on, lacing it with a boot hook and then scraping the unhallowed mud off his sole. 

“Where’d that other boot get to?” he said, starting to emit a thick greenish slime that glowed in the darkness as he became more angry. 

“Hellfire and damnation,” he hollered at last. (“Armageddon,” said the armadillo.)

“Resurrect my boot, you bloodthirsty abnormal afterlife pain in the hiney,” he said to the ‘dillo, and the creature did, rooting around in the gravesite with his dead-cold snout.

Leaving the two of them arguing in the graveyard, I went to Smiths, where I found my salvation at last in supersaver double coupons good for anything in the store with an ungodly smell.  I made my purchase and went home alone. Or so I thought, at the time.

Found it!

Ridiculous scary story.

Must go make a living first.  

Back at sunset . . .

Pygmalion Chain

 

If it weren’t for you, I would not have been freed from low hanging clouds, from gumballs, from pity. There but for the grace of god (lower case).

Mercy me, there was the slightest hint of a breeze, not enough to cool an elephant, just enough to make me dream of rain, pitter pattering on the tin roof, through the holes, into the kitchen, making a little puddle in the corner where the wiring is exposed. Then old Boo walking into that puddle in his smelly socks, then a sudden flash and old Boo is carried out, hair fried, eyes popping out, by the best looking fireman this side of Hickory Stick.

If it weren’t for you, god knows where I’d be.

 

Could be there still with old Boo and his mama, Yogi, living in the back woods where mercy rarely visits. I’d be tick infested, nail-biting, slinking around with bad company in the far back of beyond. When Boo was a baby, his mama cut his hair by covering his head with a lead-plated bowl and shaving around the edges. That bowl musta weighed 15 pounds. I always figured that’s how he came out the way he did.

 

 

If it weren’t for you, I might never have learned words like batik, like cardomom, like hover. I might never have experienced freedom from capitalization. I might never have read about haggis or blood pudding. I might never have run off with the circus, either.

 

If it weren’t for you, I might be picking cotton in another century. Who knows where I might be. I might have played a scratch-n-sniff lottery and come up with the smell of bikini wax and a round-trip ticket to the wash-n-wax emporium of my choice. I might still be playing bingo, might still be wearing cardigans (not that there’s anything wrong with them), might still be thinking that there is no such thing as thievery in god’s house, might still think that avarice is only a sin if someone else is doing it, might be a greedy ostentatious self-important genius wannabe.

 

But there you are, and here I am, and now I have secret access to the highly classified world of easements, wizards, lutefisk, pickled herring, and other northerly concepts. My vowels are shorter, tighter, like the calf muscles of runners. I could tell you the winners of the Iditerod, the likely outcome of this week’s political polls, the best way to hornswoggle a semi-friendly strumpet into a guarded pirate’s getaway weekend, make her crumpets and tea and make her see the light coming up over every horizon.

 

She is entranced. A world without capitals. Young face lit and passionate. A world where telemarketers do not expose their intent by Talking In Capitals. What Radio Stations Do You Listen To Regularly? Will You Be Voting Against the Truth in the Upcoming Election? Have You Ever Been Arrested or Convicted of a Felony? Will You Be Ready When the Time Comes?

 

The young girl who learned to talk without capitals sometimes does not move her lips. There is, however, a thought bubble that appears over her head that allows the person she is talking with to see what she is not saying. She is happy to be capital free, happy to be you and me. She has the vocabulary of someone much younger and much older than you might think she is.

 

She starts many sentences with “If it weren’t for you,” which makes me, the me who would be someone else if it weren’t for you, wonder about the chain reaction of people who would be someone else if it weren’t for someone. I suspect this goes back to DaVinci, or maybe his mother – who would he have been without his mother? And was he grateful? Was gratitude as clear to him as the knowledge that fan blades spinning at a fast enough rate could lift a man up past the clouds and into the blue blue sky?

This has been a test*

 I’ve been thinking that the majority of my readers are people who do not know me. Make one sarcastic comment (ok, maybe two or three), though, and all of a sudden the numbers shoot through the roof. So I guess some of my old friends are actually reading.

Hi, guys. I didn’t mean that bit about ghastly. It was actually lots of fun, and good work, too.

Strangely public, though, isn’t it? Makes me a bit uneasy. The world is both large and small, all at once. I suppose it’s a choice — lots of bloggers are fully visible, and that’s what I had decided to do. And probably will continue as I have been.

*Apologies – I broke this post and am retrieving it here – I don’t know how to change the time stamp. It was originally posted on October 17^th.

Take this simple test

How cool are you?

Take this simple test:

Most people are not very interesting.  T    F

People are so selfish.    T    F

I wear only black and beige linen.   T   F

People want me.     T   F

People lie about me.    T    F

Me, me, me.        T   F

Add up your score. Draw your own conclusions.

Little and Chop

Little Orphan Annie was a tiny oversexed hot jazz cat, riding on the steamboat Singapore Sling back when Mark Twain played for love, money, and cigars. She was a – what? – a croupier, a dealer, a singer, a madame?

Nope. She was a riverboat girl scout, eye-batting innocence and quick little fingers in everyone’s pie. She wore a training bra, such as they were at that time, until she was 35, when she graduated to a straight out corset with hemi cups trimmed in red lace.

Little was crazy about Chop Suey, the chef on the Singapore Sling. He made a mean calves brain salad with pomegranate dressing and a garnish of shredded daikon. Little and Chop liked to sit in the hold in the dark after hours, drinking sake mixed with gin and gun powder and smoking the fattest stogies they could win or steal.

 

Little and Chop were underage together in the long ago. Chop was a left-handed blue-eyed china-like who was actually Lithuanian, from right there where eastern Europe starts sliding over into the near east; where even longer ago the winds on the Siberian plains blew Kosacks and Bolsheviks into the arms of stoic bundled Europeans, mixing cheekbones, noses, and eyelids ‘til they were all Polish Eskimos,  crossing to the Americas the long way around, in disease-ridden transcontinental barges in the nineteenth century, instead of walking over the Bering Straits, like any sensible ancestor should do. Little was born seven years old on the doorstep of a nunnery, no history other than a ribbon tied to a cameo of a woman she had never seen.

How many orphans grew up with Little and Chop? So many, as many as could dance on the head of a pin, Chop said. Chop got to play wisdom, and Little, innocence.

But both of them loved to play divide and conquer, conquer and divide, on steam boats and locomotives. Loco motives, that’s what we have, Little liked to say, shooting a long thin stream of smoke out the corner of her mouth and counting the big bills first. Always looking for a way to reach in and pull out a fat plum, a pigeon, a juicy little naïf with a full purse and an open heart.

Little and Chop went to mass together, in that long ago, until they were kicked out of the orphanage for impure thoughts. The priests, not theirs, cause it is well-nigh impossible to prove thought crime; those fingerprints are hard to lift. Little had a carroty head, or ginger, depending on the light and who was looking. She played the accordion and Chop did a clog dance with a cigar clamped in his teeth and one eye pinched shut against the rising smoke.

In the spring of the year they turned 25, they left the Singapore Sling and played baseball with the redskins. Later, they went back on board with more proceeds to donate to their favorite charity, the United Cigar and Related Paraphernalia Clubs of America.

Little was prone to spitting. Thought the humidor was unladylike, so she spit on the floor instead. Old Pythagoras P. Bumstead slipped on her spittle and fractured a tailbone and sued them for everything they’d ever had or were ever likely to have. But they disappeared like river fog when the case came up on circuit court.

There was, some time later, a recurrent rumor of jackrabbits and stagecoaches and casinos with hot and cold running rattlesnakes, where a blue-eyed Eskimo and his elderly baby daughter took all bets, took no prisoners and drank only the finest powdered rotgut in the starry starry night.

They built a gilt gambling hall with a canal running down the middle, handsome men in handlebar mustachios and red-striped shirts sang romantic songs while weeping and poling greenhorns in gondolas into the genuine experience of winning and losing, just like real life, only up there, on the wall, that spinning wheel, until they’re so dizzy they’d click their heels together and say there is no place like home.

A pat on the back

Here was my plan: start this blog (improvisational shorts only), write every day, finish stuff, be organized about editing and submitting.

So far: little bits here a couple of times a week, writing in groups, a little at home, some editing.  

Hmm. Not really finishing. Still not submitting. Nothing since June. The SASE never even came back. That did not help.

I like Cuentas, it serves a real purpose for me and is motivational. Maybe I have a fear of envelopes and stamps? Of editors? Of hard work?

In my always active fantasy life, I am kind of like Grace Paley and Robert Olen Butler, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, with maybe a dash of the beat boys too, but still recognizably me. Do/did they have day jobs?  I guess it’s about discipline.

On the other hand, I am writing more now than in recent years. It was an effort to reorient from my time in alternative theater to words on paper (anorexic drama queens rolling on the floor with videos of ghastly world events superimposed on their bony bodies — gah!!).  But writing for performance and marginal theater companies was always more about sound than meaning, since reflecting on the content was secondary to the visceral (gah!) live experience. Definitely valid, but not sustainable for me, personally.

So I commend myself for surviving (that was harder than I can say), for beginning again, for relocating my sense of humor and allowing the sorrow to have its moments.

Now all I need to do is get out the stamps and the envelopes and keep going. Pretty cheery, eh?

 

 

     

“Tomorrow is another day.”

Scandal

Ever have one of those Kleenex recollections? The kind you don’t want anyone to know you had, but you’re afraid it shows on your face? That people might be able to read your mind? That strangers can tell when you’ve got your panties in a bunch? That sometimes, even on a crowded elevator, the guy right behind you can tell you lived with wedgies all through 7^th grade? Had a crush on Marlon Brando, then Ted Dansen, then Angelina Jolie? That practically everything is an excruciating experience for you? No? No . . . well . . .

Then there was the rest of the time, the rest of your life. When you decided to go to cooking school, to make the most of curries and sobas and deep vats of roasted tomato soup, parting like the red sea, parting lips, tongue reaching out to take it in. Is there such a thing as too much garlic? Too much sun, salt, sex, smoking, drinking? Rolling on the rooftop in a strange tropical city, Bermuda maybe? You lying butt naked on the rooftop singing out loud, happy as an alto in a Baptist choir, but with infinitely better juices? Rolling off later, not alone, caught in a public dragnet for being a doped fiendish impure nasty thing. Might as well be a talk radio host with a life like that.

But back to shame and secrecy. Here it is, time to fast and pray, time to write your confessions on little bits of paper and slip them into someone else’s fortune cookie. Surprise! Marlon Brando, mmmm-mmmm good, a million moments of ecstasy with shrimp on little crackers, pâte on nipples, baguette and crumbs in the bed.

No, no! You, up there, on the rooftop! Come down right now! No more fantasizing!!! Don’t forget morning breath, eye strain, regret, afterglow, smooth skin, all the fragrant rollover happiness of  . . . hey!!

Look, therapy is the logical answer; reductionary but sterile. Close your eyes and picture yourself, a soda jerk in 1950, working at the malt shop, wiping off the countertop. There’s a smell of bleach, a juke box, a ceiling fan and a girl in bobby sox. In walks James Dean, holding hands with Johnny Depp and Marlon . . .

Ok, that’s not what I meant either. What I meant to say is have a healthy lifestyle, live the way your grandmother did. Which is to say that what I mean is we don’t actually know that much about the sexual habits of our grandmothers, do we?

Not that they talked about it. That’s the problem. The problem is in talking about it; that’s my point exactly. Do I wear panties? I’m not saying. And that is the right and moral way to talk about my unmentionables.

So I went to cooking school, learned to make a roux, learned to rue the day, learned to wonder what was under that apron (that one over there), and I learned to stir and be stirred. I learned to admire excess and restraint, the plethora of pleasures, the strong afterbite of surfeit. I learned to admire Kool-aid as much as paella, marshmallows as much as clarified butter. I learned to stand still and smell as the winds changed from season to season, to season with care and without a care.

I learned about seeds, the diaspora, the timepiece of tides, the heavy salt smells. I can pretend in past-tense and in future. I could have pretended in past-tense and future. I could have held my pretense still and rigid, could have had a kiss and tell moment, could have held walnuts in my hand, could have crushed them and watched the pieces fall to the ground, could have ground them and mixed them with dried apricots and cooked them with Turkish spices. I could have, but I did not.

No kiss and lie, no slinking, suddenly revealed succubus draining me, drowning me in shame. There is a difference between a natural fog and a smoke screen.

Ever have one of those moments when you hear revelations and wake up covered in someone else’s soot? No?

Did you hear it?

 

Headlines in the dark forest. Hoot owl calling hoo-hoo, moo-hoon. Did you hear it? Drinking mead, tasting bitters – rumors in the moonlight. Just me and Trotsky’s ghost going on about something theoretical, some ism or other, playing light games, puppet shadows on the wall. Continuity today is overrated and it will be tomorrow and yesterday too.

Did you hear it?

Gasoline, lighting the discontented, writing midnight headlines. Hot lead burning fingers and hooves. The mild mannered sheep, meeting after hours, were organizing, organizing, organizing.

I counted them. In my sleep. The sheep were organizing, 200 million of them, thinking hard. Thinking about lanolin, thinking about their elder aunties in Memphis, in the cold moorlands, in the far distant old country somewhere – it’s a damn jailhouse – damn them damn them said the ram and the gnu. Oppressed by swine, the sheep were thinking hard, chewing things over.

They brought it about, one bleat and then another, the revolution of sheep, separating the wheat from the chaff, the man from the boy, the herring from the smelt. It didn’t smell good, that revolution, that overthrow in their windy green country, but eventually there they were, those liberated sheep, swilling beer, eating pork pie and potted meat food product. 

The pigs always been laughing at us, always, said the sheep, since 1432 if rumor tells it right. And of course it always does.

The pigs took to muttering, talking sideways out the corner of their mouths, at tea parties and slaughterhouse meetings and it came soon, a few centuries or less, that the pigs overthrew the sheep once again.

For awhile, there was peace and plenty and mutton all round, and a certain happy wallow in damp mud, and collective rooting.

Those days, those days. How they did go on, until in the dark a young urchin wrote an essay on the oppression of the deep.

And who did read it but the squid, in the luminous still chilly dark, and the eel, reading over his shoulder, and the octopus? 

Inland, the hoot owl called it again, mooon moo-hooooon, going back to press, moonlight shining off  eyes coming up from the deep, silent and angry and wet.

There was a monstrous haze on the meadow, a grocery list of pig knuckles and savory land treats, squids getting their nets to the ready.

Squids wanted to have a party and serve little bites of land chowder to all their salt water friends, pulling them apart like taffy, chewing them up like grapenuts, crunchy warty snacks.

The penguins heard about it, the stoats too, and they headed for higher ground, risking frostbite and living on canned green beans for what seemed like a fantastically long time.

In Boston, the squids rose to the surface and scattered the peoplesticks ahead of them, looking for exits, finding dead ends.

The media frenzy was brief — it was all over very quickly. The squids had weight gain and collapsed under the burden of their own expansionist tendencies.

The owls reported it hoo hoo hooooo — good one said the owls, always ready for a good laugh at someone else’s expense, never ready to organize or ism with anyone, any time, any where. Medicate that squid and throw him back where he come from hoo hoooo said the owls, silly pansies, more strength than wisdom.

Madame Owl, the only communist owl ever, hence the failure of that particular political dogma in the animal kingdom, made a list of things to save and causes to pursue – right of way, thought crime, the rights of strumpets and minotaurs to cavort, the right of gasoline to burn if it must.

But no one came to the meetings. The squids were back down in the deep, the ferrets were getting hot-waxed and de scented, and the potted plants never accepted any invitations.

The quixotic Madame Owl sat under a willow, limbs hanging in her eyes, wearing violet clothes and lilac cologne, when in came a donkey, all in a gallop, to relieve her of wisdom, to take her reading glasses, to bring her a glass of whisky and rub her feet.

He gave her a velvet box full of ball bearings, a waterfront condo that was not in Kansas, a catamaran named MRI and an open invitation to join him any time in Mexico, any time at all. Then he left, with his number on a post-it note on her mirror, and she saved it for later.

The other hoot owls said hoo hoo hooo in the wilderness, and she said hoo hooo right back, but from a distance. Or so it would seem.