HELL

"I put the Heretics in the deepest part of hell, though Dante had them spared, on higher ground.
It is heresy, against one's own sources, running in terror from one's deepest responses and insights . . . the denial of feeling . . . that I see as basest evil.
We are not talking about beliefs, which are later, after the fact of feeling. A flower, turning from moisture and sun, would turn evil colors and die."
-Amiri Baraka

Koukla

Koukla

Sevasti sat calmly at her kitchen table, her worn and sun stained skin lightly tinted by the reflection of the dim sunlight on the bright green counter tops, and watched the dog piss on her floor. It bothered her no more than usual, since she had felt a sort of reflexive animosity toward the animal since it had entered her life and home. While it was now still a puppy, and such blasphemous behavior would be considered far from unexpected by the average pet owner, the maelstrom of exuberant, unwanted affection, wiry black hair, and unrelenting shit and piss that now trounced around her house all day and night had brought her no comfort, only dull irritation. As she watched the urine form a small pool in the little circular divot of the linoleum tiling and rivulets start to rise free and roll toward the crack beneath the stove, her mouth filled with the hot tasteless air of disgust, but she did not move or call out to the dog.

After the funeral, Sevasti had been rendered paralytic. She had suffered no sharp fall shattering the fibrous tissue of her brittle bones, and the sinew of her spinal cord, while weak and relatively distended, had not been severed—but as she sat staring at the urinating dog from her kitchen table during mid-day, her face half-illuminated by the intrusive, presumptuous light sneaking in through the unlit room’s single window, the absence of meaning or intent in her sterile expression clearly demonstrated her position trapped in the cold lethargic grip of non-movement. Now, she was forever static.

At long last, Sevasti had become a widow. Her husband’s death a few weeks earlier had been neither surprise nor tragedy. Just two weeks shy of his 96^th birthday, Tassos had decided to die. His death was peaceful and pleasant, occurring in an adjustable bed in a well lit bedroom in their daughter’s house, and devoid of the antiseptic air of hygienic, systematized death in hospitals. The room had been stripped for his arrival, and was clean and bright. There hung an icon of Saint Nektarios, patron saint of travelers, above the bed (which did little to comfort anyone except the daughter) and the gold leaf of the icon glinted obnoxiously reflecting the bright sun from the picture window, which also cruelly exposed crags and deep blotches on Tassos’ aged arms and face. During his last two weeks, he was accompanied at his bedside in the bedroom at all hours of the day by either his daughter or eldest grandson, as he slipped through an increasingly hazy effluvium into total unreality. Every chance was afforded for last testaments and final goodbyes.

While the hushed dramatics of natural death played out in the bedroom, Sevasti sat in either her daughter’s kitchen or family room inventing meaningless tasks for herself while episodes of Bonanza or I Love Lucy played on the television at a low volume. Sevasti could not follow the episodes’ plot lines if she tried, but it did not matter; at times they convinced her that someone was muttering to her softly. For awhile, she drew elaborate charts detailing her pharmaceutical regiment, with columns and rows to denote, times, days, quantities, types of food eaten before ingestion, liquids consumed with ingestion, and even a concealed column to record frequency and consistency of her bowel movements. This column she wrote in Greek, so that in case a passing stranger might happen upon her charts she would not be embarrassed. Once they were completed, there was ample room to document the ins and outs of the two pills she took daily: one half milligram of Lorazepam for anxiety (a small grey pill not much bigger than a pin’s head with a series of microscopic numbers imprinted on it,) and Centrum Silver Complete (large, oval, and brownish yellow.) When not engaged in some labor, she liked to look out the window onto the pine tree in the back yard, and think how if she only had some nice sharp pencils, it would be a scene she would love to sketch. She had always wanted to sketch, though she never had, as she had never had any nice, sharp pencils. The week leading up to the death she realized that she didn’t know how long the events in the bedroom would take to reach their inevitable conclusion, and that she was still paying for the utilities at her house while it remained empty. Shocked and horrified by this, she endeavored on a crusade to rid herself from the wasteful burden, and with repeated phone calls requested that the services be de- and then re-activated for free at the proper times. She failed in this, even after repeated cries that her husband was at death’s door. Not once did she sit by her dying husband’s bed, but her absence was not felt on either side, for neither of them thought it necessary.

After a visiting nurse was unable to find Tassos’ pulse on a balmy Wednesday morning, and the family at last accepted the finality of his state, Sevasti busied herself with the tasks of the death. Under the weight of emotional fatigue, the daughter and eldest grandson had simply collapsed for a while to regain their strength, and they handed all responsibility for the funerary arrangements and all other immediate business to Sevasti. This was her single greatest triumph in sixty-two years of marriage.

There were financial matters to be settled: social security, his machinist’s pension, and veteran’s benefits. Also the handling of a meager amount of Annheiser-Busch stock which had been purchased 30 years earlier with the winnings of a lotto ticket and now had to be sold, as the company had been bought out by Belgians a few months prior. There were disconnected relatives and friends to be called, the matter of alerting the priest so a notice could be placed in the next church bulletin to make the local Greek American community aware of the news, an obituary to be written, and money to be unwillingly pried from government organizations. Sevasti executed this work vigilantly and efficiently, with an unwavering and calm determination, sitting at her daughter’s kitchen table. She spoke to all in a clear, stable tone, and attached emotional significance or humor to her words only when both necessary and prompted. This was not hard, and emotional outpourings of any kind were rare. Not only had everyone been expecting Tassos’ death for years, but the few still-living acquaintances he had were shallow at best. As for family outside the immediate, there was only one nephew/godson living outside of Athens, Greece, and Tassos’ relationship with Sevasti’s family had always been tumultuous. While outright hostility had broken out between them only a few times in their sixty-odd year relationship, they could never effectively conceal their distaste for each other.

While Sevati’s family had been refugees from the failed Greek expansionist attempt into western Turkey and the subsequent 1922 Treaty of Lausanne and population exchange (a series of events that Greeks still refer to simply as “the catastrophe,”) her siblings, all American-born, and their desire for complete American cultural homogenization was not lost on Tassos, nor was their contempt for him as a low-born orphan immigrant. They had refused to speak Greek to him, and although they all lived in Toledo, they had seen each other a rarely as possible. Sevasti’s family had even refused to visit Tassos in the hospital when he suffered a stroke twenty years before.

The only genuine sense of loss that Sevasti encountered when doing these chores came from Haralambos, the Athenian nephew, whose distress poured through the earpiece in a series of trebly cries which strained the mechanics of the device and seemed to threaten to crack the phone’s plastic.

The funeral had been pleasant. As Toledo’s paunchy and balding Greek Americans meekly filed into the church Sevasti sat in a high-seated chair next to the coffin while they passed by and offered their condolences: the pursed lips, shallow nods and darting eyes that second generation Greek Americans offer up to a group of elders they neither care about nor are able to understand, a hushed disinterest that masquerades as reverence or respect. Once the ceremony began and Sevasti was no longer being bathed in pleasantries she became slightly irritated, and her exhaustion began to show in her squirming and the distempered look on her face. She knew the service would be long (the Greeks failed to wrap up any ceremony invoking the almighty in less than 60 minutes,) the incense stung her nostrils, and the mournful bellowing of the chanter made her anxious. Although it was a secret she would take to her grave, Sevasti had always detested Greek Orthodox chanting and its whining, strenuous tone.

While the pomp of the ceremony unfolded around her, she let her eyes wander and survey the decorum of the church. There was red velvet and gold-plated, starting-to-tarnish brass everywhere, garish candles burning offensively bright and illuminating the rank purple smoke of the incense, and icons depicting bible scenes, feast days, and saints painted with the taught, angular Byzantine style that makes every turn and fold in every image forced, struggling, and painful. On the other side of the coffin was a table displaying photographs from the many important turning points of Tassos’ life. Him at four years old, dressed for mourning with his siblings, on the day of his mother’s funeral. A portrait of him at nineteen in his Greek naval dress, shortly before being exiled for participating in a failed coup de tat. Him in his U.S. infantrymen’s uniform before discharge. Finally was a picture of him on his wedding day, the only one in color, which was a fortunate coincidence, because showed the bright pink Johnny Carson line suit he was married in. It was also the only one wherein he was bald, and though Sevasti personally remembered him looking much more youthful on their wedding day, in the photo he looked weathered and fatigued, as though he’d already fathered and raised many children and grandchildren. Finally was a painting, recently done, of him as a young man in the harbor of Piraeus, his native city. It was one of two portraits and one carnival caricature which had been painted of Tassos during his lifetime. I’ve lived 84 years and I’ve never had my portrait painted, thought Sevasti as she looked on it.

After the funeral, normalcy set in again with a rage. Her daughter’s husband had insisted that she immediately leave his house after the final arrangements were carried through and the extended family left. He could not tolerate her stuttering, high strung speech anymore, her fidgety busy bodying, her relentless need for explanation of the simplest scenarios and tasks. She returned to her home, a small brick one story with red carpet and green countertops and trim, with her eldest grandson and his little black shit machine. Her relationship with her grandson was strained, but functional: he cooked one big meal every Sunday for the two of them to share throughout the week, and did all petty chores he was asked to, but she had always found his nature brutish and his company obnoxious. He was short tempered and selfish, he refused to speak to her conversationally and seemed to make sport out of engaging in various petty addictions, the signs of which spread themselves about her house, carelessly left on nightstands or stashed away in drawers. He seemed to rush in and out of the house in a flash, not a presence, just a series of quick, dodging movements, leaving her only constant companion the dog. Most of her free time, which was ample, was spent in moments such as this, sitting silently in the dark, and watching the animal slowly destroy her home.

When the dog had finished emptying his bladder he looked up to her briefly, with a disconnected expression, but after a few short moments he realized she had no response to his action, negative or otherwise, and trotted happily out of the room, probably to defecate on something else of hers, she thought. Sevasti remained at the table and turned her face back toward the window. The snow was beginning to melt, and the few plants foolhardy and arrogant enough to not to go into dormancy in the neglected flowerbed outside showed their battered, wrecked leaves. It was still too cold to go outside. It would be so for some time.

She looked down at the table where she kept the “things she worked on.” Once all bills for funeral services and condolence cards had been answered, this was reduced to the daily mail, usually nothing more than an assortment of advertisements, which she sorted and dealt with accordingly. Today a small sheet of paper with coupons for Arby’s had arrived, and now she endeavored on clipping them neatly and adding them to the paper clip stuffed with fast food coupons. As these sorts of advertisements came daily, and she and the grandson had not eaten anything purchased from anywhere other than the Save-a-Lot down the street since Tassos’ death (him lacking an automobile and her lacking the mobility to leave the house,) the stack was swelling and the paperclip was overwhelmed. With precision, she led the scissors straight down the dotted lines separating the coupons, her attention always focused sharply on the line, never drifting to the visual temptation of heaps of steaming roast beef. Even though her attention did not wander to the pictures of food, she reflexively thought, oh, that looks good. Upon finishing she took the stack of coupons from next to her, and shoved an eighth of an inch more into the strained paper clip. It was bent now at almost a complete ninety degree angle, making it functionless.

After she finished with the mail, she looked down sharply at her thumbnail, and pressed it hard against the table until it began to discolor a bit. After finishing a job, she liked to bask in satisfaction.

A few more moments passed before Sevasti hoisted herself onto her walker and began to hobble behind it toward the family room. She wanted to check on her new TV. Tassos had been an incredibly tight-fisted man, and his death had liberated the funds to her. She could now indulge in all of the repressed spending of sixty-two years of marriage. First she had bought the television, a flat screen Vizio that awkwardly bulked over the frame of her broken, 40 year old television stand. It had cost five-hundred and sixty-two dollars. Next she had gotten cable, the most basic available: fourteen dollars per month for all free network channels plus the ABC Family Channel. Later tonight, as every night, she would turn on the television for exactly one half hour, from six-thirty to seven o’clock, to watch the NBC nightly news with Brian Williams. This was the only television she ever watched. However, she had taken to walking into the family room once every forty minutes or so to make sure that the television was still in its designated spot, that silent burglars had not somehow broken in and taken it while she turned the other way.

Finally, she had purchased a new seat for the toilet, a large rubber donut three feet high designed for the handicapped which made the seat into a booster seat. This was her favorite of her purchases. She sometimes had trouble climbing atop it, and had to pull all of her hefty weight up with her brittle wrists, but she enjoyed an immense feeling of satisfaction while sitting on it with her feet dangling carefree below her. She got to see a whole new perspective of her bathroom, and it overjoyed her to see such a familiar scene with fresh new eyes.

After checking on the television, which remained steadfastly in its place, she turned with her walker to go to the bathroom. She noticed the unusual sensation of not being bothered, and realized that the dog had gone off somewhere. Her grandson was off, she had no idea to where, and had closed his door before leaving with the express intent of keeping the dog out and letting it do all its damage to her things instead. She stopped in place briefly, to wonder where the dog had gone too, but quickly realized that she didn’t care, and continued on.

She reached the bathroom, with some effort pivoted left, turned on the light, and saw her throne awaiting her. She began to undress, to take off her skirt and slip, as the danger of wearing these while mounting the toilet might cause her to slip and fall onto the harsh linoleum and suffer a setback from which she might not recover. Once undressed, she sidled up to the toilet, reached out with her right hand to get a firm supporting grip on the towel-rack, while her left pushed her up from the sink. After a few quavering moments of uncertainty she managed to position herself securely, and surveyed her surroundings with a slight smirk on her face while urinating. She looked down to the floor and it’s the differing glazes of its stains in the fluorescent light, to the bathtub and the deteriorating plastic grip pads stained pink with soap-scum, to the bathroom scale, the delicacies of the rings holding the shower curtain in place, to the light dusting of pubic hairs lying along the caulk of the tub on the floor, to the blotchy orange and yellow floral patterns of the towels. She felt her height, and noticed for the first time her close proximity to the light-piece above.

Taking it all in, she noticed an incongruity. From this angle the light shown differently on the shower wall, and it seemed to be highlighting something etched into the grout. Sevasti again gripped the towel rack, and leaned forward to try and make out the etching. She strained her eyes and posture, squinting hard and contorting her face while leaning forward at such an angle that she was in danger of plummeting from the top of the toilet. She leaned further and further, over the edge to the closest position that gravity allowed. Squinting even harder, Sevasti thought she could make out two words. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as though someone, using a safety pin or maybe a paper clip, had carved “FUCK YOU” into her wall.

south end shuffle

- the speed starts to bring me back to a more solid reality as i listen to the sound of his piss hitting the toilet water in short irregular spurts and begin to realize the full horror of my situation - i know he'll probably be in the bathroom for at least another 5 minutes before he returns to this congested 10 by 10 foot plaster box and i'll be forced to engage in some inane prattling about how his prostate is fucked up from all the drugs - as if throughout all the ages and turnings of centuries there's been no greater travesties or martyrs more worth lamenting than his broken dick - my house is only a short two miles away but i'm pretty sure that by this point there's a recent graduate of slippery rock high school with a $29.99 pixies hooded sweatshirt and a squeamish virgin laugh splayed out on my bed waiting to be consumed by a sweaty italian alcoholic who'll probably take her for someone else as he peers out at her young vulnerability from a splintered confusion of lust and wounded rage - i suppose she'll have to grow up sooner or later and can't think of a better place for her passage into womanhood - i hear the door swing open and announce his return but i don't even bother to look up - the sight of him slack-jawed and red faced is one i'm more intimate with than my mother and i don't really find it necessary to accent the tired absurdity of this post-adolescent druggie nightmare-i think about a possible exit strategy until i realize that there's nowhere else to go and the worst part is that all the powder is gone so from here on out it's nothing but water bumps and listening to this narcissist asshole contemplate the suicide he may have the vanity for but not the balls - i know i won't last long locked in this room with no further stimulation beyond being coerced into expressing some sort of pity for this train wreck of a human being in front of me but i can't possibly leave now - to make a quick, smooth exit with a tip of the hat and a cordiality as if i had been there for a sunday dinner or quick chat after putting away two of his grams would clearly be bad drug etiquette and i'd hate for my name to be smeared among such illustrious an group self absorbed sociopaths and half wits - i don't need yet another bad stat added to the back of my trading card-but still it escapes me how making a simple request to benefit my health and sanity would be bad manners while this jackass subjecting me to his little white-washed hell and bathing me in gallon after gallon of his verbal ejaculate is not - he's going on again by now but i can't even decipher what he's getting at - probably another long, trailing monologue with precariously arranged awkward pauses separating descriptions of past traumas where i'm supposed to place my nurturing encouragements and assurances that everything is all right and one day the world will take him for the truly delicate sensitive artist only i and the others in his “inner circle” know him to be be - playing the role of sycophant he's awarded me in his brain - i remain locked in my position studying the grain pattern on the floor like the second coming is unfolding there in the stain in front of me and do my best to hold the silence - he's arrived at one of his pauses and as he stares at me hanging out there on his words like a hummel figurine that will fall to the floor and shatter if the firm grip of my encouragement doesn't rescue him and i realize my way out-in a wavering falsetto i give him a spiel straight out of some shitty teen drug movie about how i'm 'freaking out' and 'can't be around people right now' and 'seriously need to get inside my own brain and work some shit out' - the kind of banal garbage that has no place in real conversation and would make even a hack screenwriter cringe - and he nods to me – as i get up to leave i look at his face-he's wide eyed and shaky and i can actually see his bloodshot eyes start to water up with tears and muscles in his face involuntarily twitch - i feel a pang of guilt for not having more remorse or even second thoughts about abandoning him but fuck it's just a drill i've been through too many times and my sympathies have either gone numb in repetition or ditched the scene screaming in the face of actually getting to the bottom of him and realizing there's not much more there than an echoing of the vanity and impotence in everyone else - i put my jacket and hat on and practically dash out into the street and for just a minute the light dusting of snow on the road and the soft textures that it's making reflecting the streetlight make me feel half human again-i waver only a minute before making the decision to start hoofing it back to the south end to get more blow - even though i know that getting more at this point could only lead to one of two things - either a possibly disastrous explosion of tension at the end of the night-the kind of thing horrific fables of braggadocio are made of like some jackass breaking into a walgreen's for a pack of cigarettes or laying down for an attempted suicide in a burger king drive thru lane-it's either that or a stretching of the night into days and from days into states and places where time doesn't really exist just sort of melts away and is replaced by emotion and memory and sensory figures that can't be distinguished from each other in the influx of shapes and lights that all come in a solitary moment that never expires exists in eternity even if only in the dark recesses of your brain and the moment won't end or at least recede until the body finally revolts and the muscles throw themselves down and refuse to be utilized and the mind goes into a period of panic like a displaced politician groping madly for support soliciting each nerve until it finally accepts its undoing and lays down tranquil to end the whole debacle never knowing how much irreversible damage its done to itself during its brutal reign - i know that neither avenues will posit anything but calamity but the simple truth is that i need something to occupy my attention and can't think of a better quest - that's the real trick with cocaine - its not a drug you can do and just sit back and enjoy - pop in some shitty movie and 'zone out' or roll around in your bed sheets giggling-you need constant outside stimulation - some well defined purpose or mission - a steel hard resolve to distract your attention from the tempest of panic and fear churning inside your gullet that flings itself upward so its dry brittle crest scrapes the lining of your throat and sucks all the moisture out throwing your body into violent convulsions of coughing and your mind into convulsions of fright - as i walk through soft snow hunched over under all the familiar stoplights and awnings i'm attacked by another one of these coughing fits and i have to sit down on a wall in front of a sorority house for a minute to catch my breath-i can feel the small beads of sweat emerging from the pores on my forehead and the immediately chill and a weakness washes over me - i survey my surroundings while waiting for my body to cede power back to me - the street is practically abandoned - it's three thirty by this point and all the bar traffic is gone cops not even hanging around the bust the few cranked out townies and other well known faces still milling around-all the powerbrokers of tomorrow have retired an hour ago - dicks buried to the hilt in fleshy orange dolls whose minds are swimming in sugary malts their bodies creating clouds of thick odor from the mingling of chemical perfumes and sweat and the dank odor of sex - the kind of awkward fumbling sexual encounters that will be recounted tomorrow afternoon over greasy pizzas and retardedly large submarine sandwiches with such charisma and gusto that even the girls who had been left bleeding in the beds will have no other choice than to quietly smile or offer some 'oh you naughty boy' coquettish glance in complicity with the tale - i begin to realize that this sort of scene is unfolding everywhere around me including the veritable bastion of cooze directly behind my back and a driving urge to get back to the south end returns - it's only about eight blocks away now and the thin blanketing of snow that's collected on my hair has cooled me enough to allow me to regain my composure - i'm up again fast and shoot into a hustle that's so frenzied i almost break into a run a few times-before i know it i'm back on the south end standing in front of tania's house which looks like a norman rockwell painting with the snow flurries swirling about it - all white and serene with yellow light emerging that promises comfort stability and love - tania's is always really well kept up with a neatly trimmed lawn and some seasonal decorative crap like a plastic sunflower placed out on the front porch and if it weren't for the constant stream of gangly fiends and older black hustlers swathed in thick coats with contorted cruel faces constantly flowing through it you wouldn't even know it was a crack house - my place is right next door and i think about going in trying to sneak my way into some floor space unnoticed to curl up in my cold sweats and terror to stare at the ceiling and ride this shit out but the prospect of waking up one of my guests for the evening and having some bullshit conversation filled with giggles and a gross overuse of the word 'dude' turns my stomach even more - i can imagine the place now - pabst cans overflowing with cigarette ash and ironic trucker caps strewn about everywhere and that idiot naif girl in my bed - these were the kind of people who took nothing more out of their 'college years' than inside jokes, stories about smoking weed and some dumb white boi fashion sense and now my house was crawling with the lumbering giants by now deeply asleep exuding noxious odors from the plasticy nacho cheese and steakums they regularly consume at their parent's houses - the image makes my decision for me and i walk around the block to get to tania's back door - avoiding the cop who stakes out the fortress from the church parking lot across the street - i climb the steps of the back porch knock on the screen door and wait - i can feel my skin tighten around me as i listen to the bustling in the kitchen - being one of tania's few white patrons i always worry about being taken for a cop and shot - especially coming over at four in the morning but my need outweighs my fear and i hold my ground firm and steadfast - her mother, a little hunchbacked chocolaty troll answers the door - her eyes are swollen almost completely shut like usual and she strains to look up at me - “who der?”- “hey pat, it's me” she never remembers my name but always recognizes my voice - she's so twisted from the drugs i hardly think she can see at all - or do much else for that matter she's more just a consumptive drone that wanders blindly taking whatever's unfortunate enough to be in front of her nose at any give time unable to realize her instincts and needs as an animal or recall the memories of a time when she was actually a human being - her bedroom window faces mine and in the year i've lived there i haven't seen her light off once- “who is it?” i hear tania from the kitchen- “it's the white boy from next door, the one wit the fucked up clothes”- “oh, come on in baby”- i walk in and see tania next to the counter, grasping it for support looking all warped and lopsided barley able to stand making a sandwich with white bread mustard and six kraft singles - the sight of food sends a cold rush up my throat and i look for something else to fix my eyes on while expressly avoiding the rough landscape of tania's face - the sight of her has always frightened me - she's at once emaciated and grotesquely fat - her sharp high cheekbones sticking up through curds of flesh with bilious breasts that hang over a strained exposed ribcage and a lumpy sagging belly being mercilessly squeezed out from it - her appearance is about as confused and wretched as the product she pushes – looking at her is like the next day and i can't think of a more appropriate ugliness for her - “i ain't seen you in a while, baby, you been locked up?” - i remain standing tensely by the doorway, trying to dodge any expected social interaction- “now, i was outta town for a while” - she looks me up and down and gives me a terse expression, seeing through my lie - the truth is that i hate buying drugs over here and only knock on her door when it's too late or too dry to call anyone else - she does all her shit right out in the open - slinging rocks while her seven and nine year old daughters play with plastic trucks on the kitchen floor and there's a seemingly endless parade of two hundred pound black males - all either her brother or cousin her family is like a fucking clown car - who mean mug me wondering who this faggoty white kid is and just what the fuck he's doing there - “well what you want baby, powder or rock?” - “give me a gram of powder” i say pulling a greasy wad of crumpled tens fives and ones from my pocket - “alright but don't be givin me no change this time motherfucker i know you got the bills” - “it's all there” i say in whisper that's barely audible, marked with the fear and shame that plagues all white suburban kids interactions with black people - she goes into the other room and i stand there watching pat sit at the table her eyes wandering independently of each other not fixed on anything with a bottle of gray goose in front of her sucking her gums loudly looking like a cow chewing cud - tania comes back with a twisted crinkled baggie – the corner of a sandwich baggie probably the same ones she packs her kids lunches with and puts it in my hand “der you go baby, one point two, i even hooked it up fat for you” - “thanks tania, i'll see ya” - “uuuh hu” i hear her groan as i jut out the back door and take a quick bump from the bag with my key - i know it's the stupidest possible thing i do in that situation and tania would have one of her millions of brothers 'waste' me if she knew but i need the jolt of strength to prolong this sick episode – the impulsive urge for more hits me faster than the buzz does and before i can swallow the first drip i'm on my back porch dumping the whole pile of white on the old broken washing machine that resides there – i peek inside the house and can see ass to mouth flashing on the television screen and a pair of sauconies protruding up from the end of the couch – fucking morons – cupping my hands around the pile to protect it from the wind i lean my face down and attempt to get the whole gram up in one sniff which i come pretty close to doing before my head starts reeling and i feel that dry tightness in my throat and the storm in my gut swells out of control sending me toppling off the porch into the thin layer of snow where the carlo rossi from earlier made bitter by all the cocaine starts hemorrhaging out my mouth and the pressure of my muscles on my skull warns me that it'll soon cave and my forty dollars are flowing from my nose like a slot machine mixed with cartilage and blood what's worse is that now there's nothing left nothing to do but lay in this frigid field and feel my various fluids harden and encrust around me pinning me to the ground like guliver but without any meaning or significance beyond my own idiocy and now i realize i have to escape here too even if it kills me i have to go somewhere - so i get back on my feet and drag myself to the nearest grouping of lights - water st - i think the burger king – and i stagger on not knowing why or where i'm going just knowing that its away and that's enough – and i'm right by the street where i grew up and even though i'm not coherent enough to think about it i'm engulfed by a flood of emotional memory by the same houses and shopping plazas and fast food restaurants and decaying side walks that have watched my passage into adulthood and looked down on me scathingly - taunting my every failure reminding me that i will never exist in a place where they won't be my overseers and even if i'm too intoxicated to actively recognize their existence they'll stingingly let me know they're there - i pass through the drive thru lane at the burger king in front of a young black woman who looks at me quizzically as i wander across her parking lot vomit covered and bleeding from my face and i can't help but notice a certain sympathy in her expression and i know deep in my heart that some day she will open to me all the tenderness of her love and take me to a warm shelter where i will be accepted by her family after an initial tense reaction from her parents and we will write chapters of each others lives together our bodies continually intertwined radiating emissions of pure forgiving love – past the parking lot i reach the old field where we used to hide stolen shopping carts from apples and i take off my jacket and wrap myself in it – i don't know why – and i sit down on the ground that's cold but not yet frozen so it's sloppy and it seeps through my clothing and i sit down and think that soon it'll be six thirty and i can get more alcohol and maybe i'll get a bottle of champagne -

NONSTARTER

This is how it started. One day, a young American girl, with a milky white complexion, strawberry blond hair, and smooth, graceful curves casting seductive shadows on the undersides of her breasts and the clefts of her ass, lay down on a strip of grass between a poorly maintained sidewalk and a strip mall containing a Dairy Queen. There was no one around. She laid in a rigid pose, arms squarely at her sides, mouth shut- not relaxed though not tightly pursed, eyes open. She peered at the sky, though not focusing on anything, instead her eyes gazed up at the vast blueness above her in a glazed over periphery. She laid still. From the south two men approached, carrying between them a large blue plastic tarp, pulled up at the corners to serve as a sac, and containing in its paunch pound upon pound of white, finely rendered lard. The men wore neither masks nor robes, for this was not a ceremonious occasion nor was theirs a ceremonious task. They were naked, but not aroused, and the listless look of their singular dull, gray flesh denied any hint of sexuality. If they had once, on some distant, near forgotten occasion, engaged in intercourse, it would have been without any fervor or animal passion, simply another contrived mechanical process in the monotonous daily routine of an automaton. They approached with their heads bent, though not in meekness or subservience. They instead showed the sort of weariness that is, while deeply felt, just slight enough to not reveal itself as weariness, nor fuel frustration. When they reached the girl, they laid the tarp routinely at her feet, and each assumed a position squatting on their haunches on either side of her. They then commenced their work, scooping up large handfuls of lard with both hands, and shoveling them upon her. At first, the landscape was inescapably gray. The sky, their transient fading flesh, the parking lot, even the grass held the same low muted timbre of color. There was action, but the scene was at once almost featureless. All that stood out was the vibrant blue of the tarp, the red of the Dairy Queen logo, and the small patches of orange of the girl’s head and pubic triangle, but these soon vanished under piles of white-gray lard as her head and crotch were the first to be covered when the work began. They covered her handful by handful, laying scoops on her breasts, the delicacy of her shoulders, the promise of her small, slightly muscular forearms, the innocence of her pale belly. While they worked, they did not speak, and if their eyes accidentally met with each others they did so only long enough to recognize their mutual fear and then retreated quickly downward, back to their work. The girl lay still, offering no resistance, not moving, not even in the most involuntary of ways- with the flutter of an eyebrow or the twitch of a muscle--until the whole of the front side of her body was emerged, covered. She lay there for some time- maybe it was an hour, maybe it was ten- while the workers remained squatting at her side, remained patient, remained silent, remained expressly avoiding each others glances, maybe pretending to twirl a blade of grass around one of their fingers now or then. Then, after this time had passed, this time neither short nor significant, she stirred, and then turned herself over, exposing her backside. She did this not voluntarily, not from a though process resulting in a decision resulting in a course of action, but more out of what stirs an invalid to move, not in an attempt to change from one place to another, or to stimulate some long sleeping muscle and achieve some form of freedom, nor to wake, but out of a minimal, unconscious effort to not suffer a bedsore. When she turned, the men resumed their work, and began covering the fresh skin of her backside, until it was completely submerged, and she was firmly encased in a thick casket of lard. She did not notice throughout the whole process of her burial. Not even when the cold of the lard hit the warm flesh of her vaginal lips and rectum did she react. When the men finished their work, they again gathered up the corners of the tarp, this time significantly lighter, and began walking back toward the south, their heads still bent, their bodies still weary, their resolves only slightly hazier than before. Behind them they left only a high pile of white, curdled, rendered fat, quite mundane and uninteresting to any human who might happen to pass, for any unlikely reason. They vanished, disappeared easily into the monochrome landscape. She remained there, still not moving under the pile, though it was quite malleable, and it would have been quite easy to rise and free herself. No tubes had been placed in her nostrils or mouth to facilitate her breathing. She continued breathing, despite being buried underneath the heap, in her natural manner. She drew short, shallow breaths at her normal involuntary pace, with her normal involuntary pressure. She did not suffocate. She continued breathing, without passion, without struggle, until oxygen mixed with fat and oil crept up her nostrils, down her trachea, and finally oxygen was again allowed to reach her bronchials, but only mixed with heavy oil and salts and fat that would soon congeal there. She remained there, under the pile, with thick fats hardening around her drawing breath after breath of lard into her lungs to choke the air but forever allow it to pass.

This is how it started. A young American and young Bulgarian are sitting on a city bus after freebasing a gram and a half of speedball from a singed, worn piece of aluminum foil, in a country where neither of them belongs, and regards foreigners, drugs, and any behavior outside of established cultural norms with markedly venomous suspicion and fear. They are both sweating intensely from the opiate, despite the fact that it is only 9 degrees Celsius on the bus, and they have opened all of the windows near them. The Bulgarian breathes heavily and frequently falls into violent coughing fits, as his lungs are worn out and have begun to crystallize after years of freebasing dirty, cut heroin from old, singed pieces of aluminum foil. They have spent the last two hours in the Bulgarian’s opaque, almost ludicrously well furnished and antiseptic apartment smoking the powder while the Bulgarian tearfully recounted to the American in broken English and a painfully strained voice the tale of his drug addiction over the past six years, his struggles and frequent relapses, his inability to return to his own country, his own town, out of fear of his lack of self control. The American feigned sympathy, offered some clichés of support that would have, had he been listening to himself, made him cringe in embarrassment and self-disgust. (“You can always call me when you’re freaking out” etc. etc.) But he could not hear himself any longer, could barely even feel the presence of the Bulgarian or the Bulgarian bearing out this horrible, screaming, frustrated child of anguish and regret stumbling on the floor in front of him desperately grasping for some contact with a benign human creature or reality and falling, falling. All he could do was stare at the lime green wall in front of him and briefly entertain some vacant, empty thoughts about the design of the apartment or the next chance he would get to masturbate. Now, on the bus, they sit on the back bench seat, attracting more and more curious stares and thinly veiled scorn from the locals on board. The Bulgarian again is speaking, but he makes even less sense now, the heroin has shattered his attention and the cocaine has wrestled control of his jawbone from him. He makes sounds from which the American cannot distinguish words, only yelps of emotion, and now almost the entire bus peers back at them with a mixture of fear and disgust. It is very likely that soon a discreet person will make a discreet phone call, and both of them will be arrested, very possibly deported. The American knows this, but does not think of it in detail, in reality. He can no longer sense any firm outward reality or even hear what might very well be the death rattle of the fellow human next to him. He only thinks of the Bulgarian in the context of after his death, after his inevitable overdose, of how the American might benefit from writing yet another sentimental article for one of writing classes on how pained he was by this deadly succession of events and their outcome. The Bulgarian is worth more to him dead than alive. He is not disconnected because of the drugs, for they can no longer even touch him in his ivory tower of detachment. They may storm it with all of their unfocused shaky intensity, leave their fingerprints at its base, but the prints quickly fade and the tower remains unscathed and unshaken. The Bulgarian begins to peter out, and they sit on the bus, the American stock still, past the next stop, and past the stop after that.

This is how it started. One morning in a small town in southern Greece a woman is climbing a hill on a gentle incline to contemplatively view the ruins of an ancient city on the periphery of her town. She is rapidly approaching thirty and still has no consistent man in her life much to the chagrin of her parents, for they fear that the entire stability of the Greek patriarchy hinges on her inability to make this one simple decision and if she fails and is condemned to become unattractive before she is paired all of the blood, sweat, tears, centuries of machismo, horrid jealous crimes, sexual repression and wasted ejaculate of this grand institution will teeter into oblivion and be lost forever, the single greatest fall back to the Greek people since the loss of Constantinople. This problem used to feverishly occupy her attention as well, but she has long ceased to panic in the face of her inevitable situation and resigned herself to being comfortable in solitude, her sexual appetites being fed instead by her enjoyable position as a respectable socialite. She decided to climb the hill and view the ruins out of simple boredom and a chronic inability to focus her attention on anything productive or even enjoyable to her. The ruins are nothing new to her, for she has lived in this town her entire life and is by now almost too familiar with them. The only form of entertainment or new interest they provide to the residents of the town is the passing pleasure of seeing occasional roving bands of German tourists, always traveling in packs, sweating heavily under their German khaki flustered by heat and struggling with maps but always still wide eyed with bewilderment and grinning like idiots. She sweats only slightly on her long journey up and has a slight headache, the result of having imbibed too many glasses of dry white wine the night before. She knew this was a mistake, and was usually careful to limit the amount of carcinogens she in took, but sometimes she lost control. She briefly ponders this, but does not entertain the thought too long, dismissing it in her internal monologue with the lighthearted thought “Well, after all, I'm just a girl.” When she reaches a satisfactory viewpoint she perches herself at the end of the road, looking out onto the ruins, her mind little more than blank, stigmatized by the heat and the light hangover. Suddenly, a string of words enters her mind, not assembled in any particular order which would allow anyone to derive any particular meaning from them. If the words had been properly assembled, and delivered with the right level of condescension in the voice to the right group of self-aggrandizing fops under the right circumstances they would have composed a great symphony of a witticism, and she would have been temporarily triumphant, temporarily impressed with herself. These words pass through her in a wisp, and she begins to laugh a light, contrived, throaty laugh. She laughs and laughs, laughs for some time, not hardy but continuous, until the frame of her body is shaken and she has emptied herself completely of this vacant noise, her mouth still open, her lungs empty and now paralyzed, unable to draw in fresh breath. Then, frozen in her position, seemingly careless to the outside world she turns to hard, durable, white plastic. She is to remain there for some time, ephemeral but long-lasting, still but not rooted to the earth, until she becomes too weathered from the elements and actions of animals, and begins to deteriorate, or a great wind sweeps her away.

This is how it started. It started when Toby. None of us were surprised when it happened, none of us who watched his staggering development, his slow decay. After he lost his mind, we knew that this turn would be next. But when he lost his mind, no one worried. I mean fuck, whole generations, whole nations lost their minds together, with no further cause than a mere whim of some ludicrous international force or the introduction of a comforting sentiment that’s attractive bate to weak minds. In fact, we had all already lost our minds or were on the fast track to losing them. Some of us relished it for its cheap transient romance or the selfishness it afforded us but that’s the most thought that was ever put into the notion. Losing your mind was like losing your virginity, a crossing over into a new phase, perhaps a minor setback or perhaps not but for better or worse it had to happen eventually. No, nobody worried when Toby lost his mind. But it really stung; it really stung all of us when he lost his soul. We had all seen it coming, watched the presence fade from his eyes, the cold sharpness from his breath, the urgent rhythm and cracking intensity from his speech. Maybe some were mildly taken aback at its abruptness, but then they just relaxed, as we all did. We were definitely wounded, but on the one hand we felt relieved that it had happened and we wouldn’t have to wonder “when” anymore. Everyone knew that sooner or later the holes in his memory would grow too large, too large to avoid, and with one surefooted drunken misstep he would plummet through one and vanish forever. Then there would be no more Toby. The fall would have stripped everything from him on his way down- his curious affections, his bright almost childlike demeanor that was always present somewhere in the pasty landscape of his pale and acne scarred face no matter how marred it had become by frustrations and confusions and accidents of sex- and all that would be left would be a stack of bleached bones smelling very faintly of chlorine, or maybe diluted lacquer, and this white chalky mess of bones would lumber around blankly not even aware of its own numbness until its transience begins to affect the very color of the marrow itself and the little flesh still sticking to the surface turns white and flakes off. But now back to the beginning, to how it started.

I'd known Toby since I was the age of nine and in a curious way I'd always sort of admired him. He'd been a train wreck of a human being since as long as I could remember. As I'd eavesdrop from the landing of the stairway to the festering teenage girl powwows in my older sister's bedroom I'd be secretly regaled with tales of him getting arrested for trying to sneak forty ounces into high school football games or causing ridiculous confrontational scenes in Deny's or local Chinese buffets- the type of stories that woe a child who's naïve in his very character and is desperately searching for any sign of fervor or life or genuine raw passion in the bleak landscape of small town Ohio. I would look forward to the mornings he picked my sister up for school in his tiny red Honda civic and came to the door with his crooked mouth pasted on his face halfway between a smile and a sneer always wearing the same ratty black tee shirt riddled with food stains and cigarette burns hanging off his skeletal frame like a black sheet caught in a tree after a windstorm and reeking of cigarettes. (All teenage smokers smelt of cigarettes, but Toby's tobacco odor was particularly pungent. It almost stung the nostrils, as if he had his pockets stuffed with butts, and it mixed with his other fragrances of marina sauce, teenage hormones, and just a hint of stale cum.) On those mornings he was always kind to me, even though my sister's other friends (and my sister herself) chronically dismissed me with the same air of petty annoyance, and he would give me a little appraising look up and down followed by a slight smirk of approval and then rub my head without saying a word before my sister trounced off to his compact car in a pair of jeans she had far too much ass for and low cut Ramones tee shirt she had far too much breast for. When he came to the house in the evenings my eyes would be glued to him, to his shaky but firmly intentional style of movement, and to the light that emanated from his face- at once scathing but horribly bright, wounded but cocky, sure only in its confusion. I tried through observation to find just what this kernel was that could produce such a complex and maniacally simple human, and just where he kept it, and although I never figured it out, the process of watching Toby made him somewhat of a giant to me. A vibrant, tangled mess of flesh and muscle standing tall against a monochrome town- which skies retained no sun but only the lingering stain of vanished smog- horribly alive and capable of proving it, gallant in his will to exist.

When I reached the age of thirteen and my sister went off to college I started sneaking out of the house at night to go see Toby’s band. They were god awful by pretty much any measure of aesthetics and the most painful aspect of their noise was Toby himself, whose vocals sounded like a parody of the pains of puberty, his voice consistently out of key and frequently cracking, despite the fact that he was in his early twenties by now. Still, as a live show they were impressive, and their energy onstage was usually matched by the crowd. They almost always played last, when everyone was at their drunkest, and for their sets I would perch myself on the stairs of whatever basement they happened to be playing in to watch the melee of kids all writhing and smashing against each other, each one to his own independent beat, spilling malt liquor and burning each other with cigarettes, maybe the occasional elbow being thrown but almost never out of malice. You could see Toby literally washing himself with the spectacle, contorting his small bony frame and beating his body against the ground, often losing the mic but scrambling to retrieve it in time to dash off some half-assed anarchist lyrics like “we got hope and aggravation/now all we need is some agitation” out of time with the music. The band was stately political even though it would’ve been near impossible to hold a serious conversation about politics with any one of the four members- all high school drop-outs. Still something in the band’s performance, and even in Toby himself, held a politic which needed no expression in words. There was no manifesto to it, such a thing would have been useless for us anyway, it was just a display of pure, uncompromising humanity, and if such humanity could exist in such a potent form with freedom and honesty of expression, then humanity could triumph. Our collective and individual frustrations, causing muted explosions in rust belt basements had created an area where spirit and truth, no matter how beautiful or ugly, reigned free. It was as if the revolution had already been fought and won, because we had secured our independence- we had created an area where the derelict were welcome, where we were free. If we had the fortitude to take it to the streets, and in the middle of those quagmires of pure energy and benign, co-operative violence it often seemed as though we did, we could actually win and not build a new society, but abandon the idea of society all together to focus on bathing in the light of truth and honest and purity with no gods and no masters. Of course a thing of such young idealism and naïve beauty is beyond words, even if any of us had been capable of staying sober long enough to attempt surmising it, but there was something in those smashed basements that was not concrete but very real.

It was in these scenarios too that I first saw Toby’s dark side. Most of the time he could drink anyone at the show under the table, and acted as though he were on mission for self-destruction with a steel hard resolve, going through a metamorphosis each night- passing through stages of drunken emotional confusion. At the beginning of the night he was lucid, enthusiastic, often erupting with odd expressions of affection for those around him (licking some one's face, forcing a friend to match him shot for shot on his bottle of whiskey, etc.) If his band was playing later, he checked himself to be at least somewhat coherent for their set, but if they weren’t, all bets were off and he’d usually reduce himself to a state of pure fury so raw that his very form itself seemed to recede until he was nothing more than a shapeless cloud of churning emotion. The second phase was a period of comatose, and he would sit on a couch or stand propped against a wall with a black, vacant look in his eyes, dead to the outside world, slumped over and enveloped by an odd transient haze and it was often hard to distinguish him from the crumbing drywall or stained upholstery that supported him. During this period he was usually forgotten excepting the occasional concerned glance thrown his way, and since he was all but passed out only those of us who knew him well realized his presence for the night had far from faded. It was when his consciousness returned that we had to worry about. After comatose he would usually vomit, and then his eyes will be filled again in a torrent of emotion. Sometimes simple desperate horniness occupied him, and he would spend the rest of the night approaching old girlfriends repeatedly telling them he loved them, often falling into slurred refrains of “you’re great” while fighting gravity to keep his head from bobbing and struggling to stay awake. These were desperate, often pathetic scenes, but Toby had reached a point beyond the possibility of embarrassment, where words like these held no meaning, so his exes usually patronized him or even offered him some coquettish peck before turning around and fleeing the scene of his sweet yet vitriolic spew. Other times he was lifted back into his surroundings by a solid rage and wouldn’t relent from needlessly obnoxious behavior until someone in the room (usually him) hurt in a very serious way. I once saw him punch a fifteen year old kid in the stomach merely for the smoking the same brand of cigarettes, his reasoning being, as he explained later, that the fucker could have been stealing smokes from him all night and he never would have known. But this was par for the course with him. One couldn’t be that human without frequently relapsing into the most brutal of human vices and insecurities, and although Toby was often dragged home from shows, thrown out by friends as he threw lose, sloppy punches and spat shallow insults at them, or simply ignored while he bled into the snow after being knocked unconscious, he was never socially ostracised, for this ugliness was just another part of his brilliant honesty. For my part I worried about him, but at the same time I romanticized his recklessness and ability to fight; admired his brazenness, the fact that he’d often fuck with guys who were twice his size and whose demeanours reeked of machismo and cruelty, that he actually knew how to fight and never carried any weapons or used bottles, and most of all that he wouldn’t stop until he was either dragged or knocked out. After all, what’s a boyhood hero without some characteristics from the scrambling cult of rust belt manhood? It wasn’t until he lost his soul that I could really recollect the pure horror and emptiness of these scenes, and cursed myself endlessly for ever thinking them anything but terror and desperation.

Time went on like this for a while, with more shows, new bands, more tales of drunken heroism and idiocy: a legacy being built around a group of brash youths who were by no means exceptional in their musical ability or grand feats of alcoholic glory but were somehow fancied the new American libertines by a small cult of Ohio naïfs, sociopaths and drug addicts able to recognize humanity only in rage, but not in its cause or intent. And for a time Toby remained an important part of something he liked to think of as larger than himself, even if he knew not how or why it was so big. But as happens with most small town punk scenes it fell apart when most of its active participants poured out of basements and into bars when they reached legal age. We stopped playing in bands (with the exception of a few who climbed their crosses and picked up mope singer songwriter routines) and centred our the bleak ends of our remaining social lives around committing ourselves to perpetual disappointment from local losing sports teams and preying on newly-legal girls impressed by limited musical talent and bullshit shtick at the town’s hipster bar. No singular explanation for this exists, for their was no common change in thinking, it was more that youth was simply fading in us, while all of its inherent vices remained. We lost all of the passion of youth but retained its ego-centric blindness, its overindulgence, its cheap selfish romanticism, and most of all its substances. We still had no real futures, we were still too drunk and too high, and we were still the bottom rung, the embarrassing shit and horrid by product of the failed dream of American industrial capitalism, but what had been the source of outrage quickly became a bleak reality, and a reality that we played up so much in our self pity that we could no longer even conceive of fighting it. So, although still angry, we resigned ourselves. We stopped reveling in our ugliness, and our ugliness began to revel in us. Many gave up on Ohio and tried moving to San Francisco or New York (often returning within months with little else to show for it than fancy new big city drug problems,) others stayed here and continued working shitty jobs at pizza shops and shittier jobs at other shittier pizza shops, and our frustrations fermented in cheap beer until they turned to self-pity, and finally, apathetic complacency. A willingness to go on just so that we would never be forced to think about our lives, to see our stagnation, to recognize that the world was turning around us, that we had aged, and that things had indeed changed. So the shows stopped, the amps and guitars were often hocked to meet the needs of rent or opiate addiction, and the sense of camaraderie faded. We were no longer punks, simply a group of overgrown idiot children who hadn’t sense enough to escape in time, and now we were the heirs to a dead town and the dying legacy of the decaying rust belt.

This transition jolted the hell out of Toby, who could simply not adopt. While those around him had burnt out, he was as vivacious as ever, and when he went out with old buddies to that bar, to engage in their nightly routine of anonymous sleaze, he simply went insane. He got in fight almost every time he stepped through the door, and with even less justification than he fought with before. A few times he blindsided the same tame effete hipster for no conceivable reason, and by the time he earned his lifetime ban by throwing the popcorn machine out of the second story window everyone knew it was only a matter of time. I didn’t see him for almost two years after that, and stories of his existence were hard to come by. His name was mentioned every now and then, we heard about him when he went to jail for his third DUI, when he went back for breaking parole, etc., and we all knew he still worked at the same pizza shop, but that was about it. The greatest relief I experienced in this period was when it reached us that the owner of his shop, an old childless alcoholic who was fast on his way to the grave, had willed Toby ownership of the place upon his death. At least he would survive, and although marred, at least he would still be Toby.

I saw him for the last time a few months after he had resurfaced, after it had happened. No one knew where he had gone, but he had been run into enough to know that he was back, and that he was different. No one talked about, not because it too painful, even though it was, but more because, like many things about Toby, it couldn’t be vocalized. We always knew where to find him more or less any time of the day, (one of the town’s three most hostile and terrifying redneck bars) and he, or whatever he had become, could be witnessed, but it could not be spoken about. Word had it that his father had finally completed the suicide he started twenty years prior with Stroh’s and Old Crow Whiskey when the Youngstown United Steel factory closed and he lost his job in 1983, and Toby suffered a sever identity crisis as a result which was responsible for his current situation. Maybe that was the reason for it, but I like to think it was inevitable, that he was too bright to last longer than ten years. When I heard, I went to see if it was true, and when I walked into Michelle’s Cocktail Lounge and saw him sitting upright in the bar stool, nose flushed red, eyes wandering independently of each other, grinning at the neon Bud Light clock on the wall in pure horror, I barely had the courage to approach him. Even though it took him almost half a minute to recognize me he received me warmly, gave me a hug and accidentally drooled a bit on my shoulder. The reunion got many disapproving glances from the patrons, especially as I, wearing painted clothes and my grandmother’s costume jewellery, was the only thing clashing with the bars “blue collar comedy” motif. Toby fit right in. He had grown sideburns and a handlebar moustache, was wearing a jean vest which looked like it had been washed too often, and even donned a netted foam baseball cap, as if he were trying to appear a parody of himself. He bought me a beer and we sat for twenty minutes trying to have what might be termed a conversation. He asked me repeatedly about my sister, even though I told him over and over we hadn’t spoken in years. Even as he sat beside me with his very presence fading I could feel him turning in his now taciturn and vacant skin, still confused but by now mostly exhausted, and quelling this confusion and desperate need to try to make some clean sense of things with willful ignorance and stale draughts was the only way he could now conceive of finding relief. I could sense him trying to fight it, struggling to recall memories, to form thoughts that were in some way pertinent, but again and again I watched his face turning with the expressions of this internal process, and again and again he failed, would look at me with a sort of confusion, as if he were trying to see in me where he had placed his affection, and then back to staring in his beer, or be distracted by some noise from the bar television and his coquettish attention would leave. I tried to help him recall himself, but whenever I brought up anything about when we had known each other, about our glory days as free youth, the same would happen. He was somewhere in there, but he would probably die trying to find his way out of the quagmire he had made of his surrounding flesh. I finished my beer quickly, hugged him, told him I loved him, and left. There was no reason for me to be there. The idea of trying to help him was ludicrous, and there was nothing I could learn from being with him. He was just going through the motions, acting out the end of a script that I head a read long ago, if not envisioned and wrote. The real travesty in the whole thing wasn’t the loss of Toby, it was how the whole fable lacked a moral, a purpose, a meaning. His life was now no more than one of the tales which were product of his new culture- vacant, diluted, euthanizing. Maybe that’s what out culture had been too, no matter how mistakenly we construed it through our idealism. Maybe we couldn’t avoid it. Maybe Toby was, after all, still being too human.

This is how it ends. It ended for Toby in Michelle's Cocktail Lounge on a viciously cold February Ohio afternoon. He sat in a corner booth fighting the obnoxious neon lights of Nascar and MGD signs as they tried sucking the moisture from his eyeballs, seething in rage. He'd been drinking since he woke at 11 that morning, which was of course nothing new for him but today was radically different. He'd been drinking with a lost purpose, the lost purpose of subduing his rage; something he hadn't done for some time and he'd known since 15 it never worked and always led to so calamitous end but at least it offered some release conveniently paired with excuse. The night before as he ended his twelve hour shift (lately he'd taken up the practice of trying to work away all of his time, simply out of an inability to find anything better to do) at Bellazoni's Pizza with his eyelids almost glued shut to his cheeks from layer upon layer of thick grease the drunk guid owner ambled through the door in his trademark stumbling waddle. He'd come after a painfully embarrassing scene of sexual inadequacy with a local Austintown prostitute, a fresh import from Indonesia, to make himself a pizza before he rolled home to gorge himself and pass out in the midst of his third failed attempt at masturbation of the day. He didn't even offer Toby a nod of recognition as he emerged into the one-room shop and his disgusting strained and over-tanned flesh made tasteless art against the yellow grease-stained wall. Toby was weary, but not mad, and he figured it would be the perfect chance to ask for the fifty cent raise which he figured was past due, and merely a matter of mention. After all, the shop would belong to him in few short years, and there was no way that even a pig as indulgent as the owner could blow through that much cash without killing himself in the process, so the money he was asking for was already his, in a way. He approached respectfully, meekly, and asked for this consideration in a muted, kind timbre. The pig simply scoffed, and when he looked up from the work of his cheese pie to see Toby still standing next to him expecting a response it honestly surprised him. Here he saw his opportunity for needless cruelty, as is the only real earthly joy for such people, and took delight in offering the sardonic response “Just keep up the great work. Kid.” Toby was shocked, had no idea of how to respond, quietly finished closing the shop, got in his car, drove home, and drank three quarters of a fifth of Old Crow before his mind caught up with the situation and he'd be forced to think about it. Luckily, he finished the fifth in one half hour and beat the clock to pass out.

The next day was a different story, though. He woke with it on his mind, and no matter how much he drank, how many false internal trails he relentlessly pursued, or how much he paced, he couldn't shake his rage. Where the fuck did this fat cocksucker get off? He was 34 now and he'd panned most of his fucking life away peddling this fucker's poison food and choking on his grease. All this to be a “kid.” By 11:30 he'd punched so many holes through the first layer of drywall next to his bed that it could barely be called a wall anymore and pieces of it stuck in the skin between his knuckles which had grown tender from disuse. Then he decided to go to Michelle's, where he might be offered some distraction, but when he got there he was so irritated by the redneck pederast twits and empty vessels he had claimed as “his people” for the past six years that he took the corner booth to ferment his rage and try to think of a way out. But it was inescapable, something mattered now, and something had to be done even if it killed him. No. It had to kill him. That was the only way.

He sat in the booth thinking of his plan, visualising it, conceiving of how it might happen in reality, not just in reality, but that night, as he sucked down whiskey so fast he might've used a siphon. Everyone stayed away from him, the energy emanating from him was alien, harsh, intense, had no place in Michelle's Cocktail Lounge. At seven o'clock the sun was set and it was time, and he left without paying, which no one questioned. They all knew something bad was going to happen and it was better just to leave up to Toby. You can't keep a man from proving himself. It was Wednesday, his day off, and the pig would be working. He walked across the street to Bellazoni's and saw the fat fucker's Ford F-350 parked outside. He made a bee line for it, his movement smooth, intentional. He wasn't shaken by rage, for it had reached a volume in his mind where it was now consistent, a resting place, an asylum, a pure white noise. He threw back the bed's blue tarp and removed the bucket and hose he knew would be there, just as he imagined them. When he siphoned the gas he spit most of it out before putting the hose's other end in the bucket but a few drops trickled down his throat and he fell into violent convulsions of vomiting. He hadn't thrown up in years, being such a hardcore alcoholic had ruined his ability to do so, and his head split with pain as he broke out in cold sheen sweat and convulsed. But it was okay. He could feel again and the pleasure he took in this pain was purely transcendent of physical pains. He splashed the gas from the trucks mammoth tank all around the foundation of the shop, and when he lit it only the left side went up because of the snow but it was so beautiful, so entrancing, a melee of such movement and carelessness and color so bright that he was locked into staring at it, and didn't even notice that his left pant leg was on fire. He looked down only when he smelled the stench of his own flesh singeing, but he didn't move. He knew that the fire would not spread, because he would not run he stood stock still, watching a scene that was the single manifestation of his entire life, and deeply, until it stung the bottom of his lungs, inhaling the smoke.

This is how it ends. A group of young, disaffected American youths walk down a strip of grass between a poorly maintained sidewalk and a strip mall containing a Dairy Queen. There is a sense that more are coming. There is a disturbance on the landscape in front of them that from far away looks quite obscure, and cannot be seen to be the monumental horrid ugliness it truly is until they are right next to it. At its base there is a high pile of black singed flesh, very stingingly present, very stingingly ugly. From it grows a structure that slightly resembles a warped and twisted tree, though there is nothing natural about the thing. It is fibrous, thin, brittle, sharp, and though huge looks to be easily breakable. Nothing about is natural, logical, or in any way “right.” It's twists are cruel, confusing, its protrusions are sharp and covered in some sort of chemical rust, and if one were to stare at it too long it would cause a sharp headache which stigmatizes both thinking and movement. They look upon it, and each other, attempting to understand why such a thing should exist. Naturally, they come to the conclusion that it should not, and that if it can exist with no connection to any logic, science, or single grain of earth it can be wiped from the earth is has no connection to and a better, natural, honest and beautiful thing can be built in its place- with or without structure, with or without a single defining idea, as fantastic as they care to fancy. They come to their conclusion singularly, out of a natural human instinct of love and survival and desire for harmony which has only recently been allowed to reawaken within them, only when they could see this wretched structure in front of them in its whole and true nature, and together, they commence their work.

This is how it ends. One day a man playing a saxophone makes a sound so bright and true, so full of the entire spectrum of human emotion, human dreams, and human wills, that the saxophone and the man himself both vanish, and there exists only a singular and all encompassing sound, which grows large and visual, all filling, and then is bright in silence forever.

This is how it ends. It ends when we realize that our needs are not outlaw. That our dreams are not committed to ephemeral plastic disc nor printed on tee shirts. That our identities are not preconceived. That our attitudes are not results of market research. That we have sovereignty in our bodies and minds. That expression and honesty are our rights. That the only universal truths are pain, thirst and hunger, and that the only “right” is that these things should forever be abolished. That our culture is not consumable. That beauty is not mass produced. That our lives are not the products of, nor are they subject to the whims of, forces and structures which have been built around us with the purpose of containing us without our permission. That we are made from the ground, we are not handed down to ourselves. That there is indeed a policeman inside all of our heads, and he is so deeply implanted in our beings that he has gone through our hearts to our very fingertips, but that it only takes a heart beating at a fast enough pace to drown him in blood forever.

Formulary for a New Urbanism

This is considered by many to be the founding (and best) document of the Situationist International. For more Situationist texts go to www.bopsecrets.org

Formulary for a New Urbanism

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Saint Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres.⁽¹⁾ The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.

We propose to invent new, changeable decors.

* * *

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

* * *

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.

Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

* * *

A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization (it is clear that there has been neither civilization nor architecture for centuries, but only experiments, most of which were failures; we can speak of Gothic architecture, but there is no Marxist or capitalist architecture, though these two systems are revealing similar tendencies and goals).

Anyone thus has the right to ask us on what vision of civilization we are going to found an architecture. I briefly sketch the points of departure for a civilization:

— A new conception of space (a religious or nonreligious cosmogony).

— A new conception of time (counting from zero, various modes of temporal development).

— A new conception of behaviors (moral, sociological, political, legal; economy is only a part of the laws of behavior accepted by a civilization).

Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I’m not satisfied with that word; I mean that it will be more flexible, more “playful”). (For a long time it was believed that the Marxist countries were on this path. We now know that this endeavor followed the old normal evolution, arriving in record time at a rigidification of its doctrines and at forms that have become ossified in their decadence. A renewal is perhaps possible, but I will not examine this question here.)

On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.

* * *

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

* * *

Guy Debord has already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for total creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space. One example will suffice to demonstrate this — a leaflet distributed in the street by the Palais de Paris (manifestations of the collective unconscious always correspond to the affirmations of creators):

BYGONE NEIGHBORHOODS
Grand Events
PERIOD MUSIC
LUMINOUS EFFECTS

PARIS BY NIGHT

C O M P L E T E L Y A N I M A T E D

The Court of Miracles: an impressive 300-square-meter reconstruction of a Medieval neighborhood, with rundown houses inhabited by robbers, beggars, bawdy wenches, all subjects of the frightful KING OF THIEVES, who renders justice from his lair.

The Tower of Nesle: The sinister Tower profiles its imposing mass against the somber, dark-clouded sky. The Seine laps softly. A boat approaches. Two assassins await their victim. . . .⁽²⁾

Other examples of this desire to construct situations can be found in the past. Edgar Allan Poe and his story of the man who devoted his wealth to the construction of landscapes [“The Domain of Arnheim”]. Or the paintings of Claude Lorrain. Many of the latter’s admirers are not quite sure to what to attribute the charm of his canvases. They talk about his portrayal of light. It does indeed have a rather mysterious quality, but that does not suffice to explain these paintings’ ambience of perpetual invitation to voyage. This ambience is provoked by an unaccustomed architectural space. The palaces are situated right on the edge of the sea, and they have “pointless” hanging gardens whose vegetation appears in the most unexpected places. The incitement to drifting is provoked by the palace doors’ proximity to the ships.

De Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)

In De Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums. De Chirico could have been given free reign over Place de la Concorde and its Obelisk, or at least commissioned to design the gardens that “adorn” several entrances to the capital.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities bringing together — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.

Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal “cathedrals.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.

This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens that create optical illusions — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which (height of absurdity, Ariadne⁽³⁾ unemployed) is the sign: No playing in the labyrinth.

This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.

Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a Planetary Garden along the lines the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” Saturation of the market with a product causes the product’s market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, children would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.

The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING.⁽⁴⁾ The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation.

Couples will no longer pass their nights in the home where they live and receive guests, which is nothing but a banal social custom. The chamber of love will be more distant from the center of the city: it will naturally recreate for the partners a sense of exoticism⁽⁵⁾ in a locale less open to light, more hidden, so as to recover the atmosphere of secrecy. The opposite tendency, seeking a center of thought, will proceed through the same technique.

Later, as the activities inevitably grow stale, this drifting will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation.

Note: A certain Saint-Germain-des Prés,⁽⁶⁾ about which no one has yet written, has been the first group functioning on a historical scale within this ethic of drifting. This magical group spirit, which has remained underground up till now, is the only explanation for the enormous influence that a mere three city blocks have had on the world, an influence that others have inadequately attempted to explain on the basis of styles of clothing and song, or even more stupidly by the neighborhood’s supposedly freer access to prostitution (and Pigalle?).⁽⁷⁾

In forthcoming books we will elucidate the coincidence and incidences of the Saint-Germain days (Henry de Béarn’s The New Nomadism, Guy Debord’s Beautiful Youth, etc.).⁽⁸⁾ This should serve to clarify not only an “aesthetic of behaviors” but practical means for forming new groups, and above all a complete phenomenology of couples, encounters and duration which mathematicians and poets will study with profit.

Finally, to those who object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to recall that in every group certain characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing various tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the dual mechanism of projection and identification. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.

The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.

IVAN CHTCHEGLOV⁽⁹⁾
1953