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.