The Electric Wilderness
51% writer, 49% Lakers paranoid
Monday, February 11, 2013
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Cherry or Grape Langue
Blink twice and tell me what to do
Blink and suck the air, but think about something else—a
time when your mother was naked and her tits were bigger than yours and you
wanted
Your sandwich is fat
Bobba bo bobba ba
Suck my fingerprints with your purple pink
Print “bobba ba” against your outstretched neck
Understand I am here
Or complain I am not
Stop using your voice like an earthquake
I want to enjoy this kitchen in Paris
I don’t want to think about what has been inside of you
Or popsicles
Lets scrape our green wrists against the tile
Use your lips to tell me what color my eyes are
I think I tell you I think
We scrape ourselves, notre dame
You say “donnez moi votre langue.”
I wish I knew
I know
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Teesha Noelle Murphy, Author, Rad
My wondrous wife, Teesha Noelle Murphy, has yet another mind blowing trip of a short story published in the venerable rag "Milk Sugar" this month. Get hip, read more, don't be a TV baby. Check out the current issue here...The Psychic's Teeth
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Apple Pie
We load our rifles and fuck until tomorrow
We have grapefruits delivered to our doorstep
We discover a shell on the moonstone beach
We fall over, laughing at the midget with a lazy eye
You look for apple pie on the menu, but settle for ice cream
You wear underwear today
You pull in your stomach after swallowing the ice cream and
say “I’m fat”
You look at me with your eyebrows and I tell you, “you are
fucking crazy”
I mention something about seeing a dolphin last year about
this time
I care about whether or not you believe you are fat
I don’t care enough to tell you that I care
I become a god in a dress dancing on a unicycle near a
midget with a lazy eye
Everyone tells us we “are fucking crazy”
Everyone smells like jasmine vine and I think immediately of
your neck
Everyone gives blow jobs and you think of me and your knees,
but mostly your knees
Everyone sings like diamonds in the palm of a psychic
Bear tells me to stop punching parking meters
Bear growls when I tell him I don’t buy honey any more
because I feel sorry for the bees
Bear brings me a river in his paw and asks me to smell
Bear gives good blow jobs, for a bear
Where am I?
Where is something to wear?
Where is the house?
Where is the wolf?
I think I hear the piano playing
I wish to god in a dress dancing on a unicycle near a midget
with a lazy eye
I take off my head and ask you to stare because it is the
sky
You are a rose, perfect, without aphids.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The Petrology of South Dakota
Dickwad hadn’t shaved in four days. He rubbed the blonde whiskers on his chin
between his thumb and fingers, then hoisted his beat-up, army-green duffel bag
over his shoulder.
“What’s
with that scrawny little beard,” I asked him.
I wasn’t one to talk about appearances.
I had added twenty pounds to my gut in recent months. I crossed my arms above my gut, and flexed my
biceps as if to draw his eyes somewhere else, just like the roses in a painting
I saw once in a coffee table book.
“It
started raining four days ago.” He moved
past me out the front door of his home in the orange groves of Santa Paula and
into the gray sky as if all questions in the world could have been answered by
that phrase.
“What
the hell does that mean?” I stared at
the orange blossoms, little white petals drooping and collapsing under the dew
of morning. They had no fragrance today.
He
turned around with a smirk, a shy little smile that every girl had fallen for
so far, his teeth perfectly aligned by superior genetics. “After the first rain of autumn, I don’t
shave again until that day the next year. It’s a family tradition.” He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and
stuck out his tongue, catching the first drop of rain that morning. Dickwad had a gift for predicting
weather. It was as if his head was some
human weather balloon, and his brain the helium.
“When
did that tradition start?”
“1892.”
He walked down the creaking wooden stairs from the porch of his little house,
past the eggplant and squash in the vegetable garden in his front yard. He pushed the button on the trunk of his car and
opened it.
His
car wasn’t as old as we were. His
grandfather purchased it the same year Dickwad’s sister was born. I guess his grandfather had forgiven the
Germans by then, or just wanted a car that told the temperature outside.
At
twenty-six-years-old, both the car and Dickwad’s sister were in pristine
condition. The navy-blue paint hugged
the rear lights and fenders of the car in the same manner Dickwad’s sister’s
jeans hugged her ass and thighs. Most of
the times I had seen her, she had a lollipop in her mouth. Her tongue changed colors every day, like a
chameleon covered in saliva and sugar. She sat in the backseat staring aimlessly
through the windshield. She could have
been thinking about losing her virginity that awkward night eleven years
ago.
“What
are we waiting for?” she said lightly through the window at her brother. “You’re always twenty minutes late for
everything.”
Dickwad
nodded back towards me. “He isn’t doing shit.
He’s just standing there.”
I
lit a cigarette and waved at Dickwad’s sister.
She didn’t wave back. She moved
her eyes back to her invisible thoughts in the windshield and gently twirled a
Blow-Pop into her mouth.
Dickwad
came back up the stairs to the porch and grabbed my backpack. “You ready?”
His veins popped out from his forearm, a subtle muscular preview to the
rest of his body that would have been a turn-on to a girl.
“You
look like Don Johnson in Miami Vice,” I said to him.
Dickwad
hated being compared to anyone besides his grandfather, especially Don
Johnson. It was his fault. He dressed up like Sonny Crockett for
Halloween 22 years ago, and still hadn’t lived it down. He wore a pink t-shirt and a white linen suit
with sunglasses. That’s when I first
called him Dickwad. His parents had died
that spring.
“You
look like a chubby coloring book,” he responded.
I
stared down past the tattoos on my arms to the beer belly hovering above my
belt. It had gotten bigger since I
started popping pain killers like Tic-Tacs.
Eleven years ago, my belly didn’t exist.
It pressed up squarely to his sister’s and rode along on it like a pirate
ship on her virgin sea. I flicked my
cigarette at Dickwad. “Whatever you say,
Donny boy.” I was glad he hadn’t said
anything about my teeth. I hadn’t had a
professional cleaning in nine years. I
didn’t have the money. My ex-girlfriend
told me my teeth looked like kernels of corn the day we broke up. I told her I had slept with someone else,
even though I hadn’t.
The
interior of Dickwad’s car was always in order.
His compact disc cases were neatly stacked on the center console, the
floor mats were spotless, and the leather upholstery smelled like it had just
been rubbed with an oil treatment. He
Armor-Alled his dashboard weekly, waxed the paint bi-monthly, and checked the
air pressure of his tires with a small tool that his grandfather had given to
him, his initials engraved on the metallic handle, “W.P.”
I watched from the
passenger seat as he dropped down below the fender of the car. “How’s the tire
pressure, Dickwad? Are the PSI’s in
order? We don’t want to crash and
die. Are you sure we’re safe?” I yelled
through the foggy glass.
“Suck
it,” he said back. He had his
traditions. That was certain.
I
stared in the rear view mirror, watching his sister wrap her tongue around her
lollipop thinking of that night eleven years ago. It was a cold night, October 31st
1999. She had just come home from
trick-or-treating with her friends. Her
tongue, from so many years of wrestling with lollipops, was the strongest
muscle on her body. Her breath smelled
like Peppermint Schnapps.
“Why
are you staring at me?” Dickwad’s sister asked.
I
didn’t answer.
When
Dickwad had finished checking all four tires, he sat down in the driver’s seat
and started the engine.
“Finally,”
I said.
“The
rear driver’s side is a little low.
Let’s say our three Hail Mary’s,” he responded.
Dickwad bowed his head and closed
his eyes. “Hail Mary full of grace, the
Lord is with thee…” The steam from his exhaust pipe
sailed out from the car. We headed west
towards Highway 101, Santa Paula disappearing behind mountains of oak and orange
trees. We watched California pass
through our windows like an unwinding roll of film, the ocean on our left, an
opaque gray seamlessly blending into the sky.
We
stopped once to use the bathroom and get gasoline in San Jose. Outside the bathroom door, I could hear Dickwad’s
sister’s piss streaming out of her, carving into the toilet water. I wondered if she was still shaved down there. The bathroom door opened.
“The toilet doesn’t
flush,” she said as she passed me by.
I
stared into the toilet bowl and added a tint of deep yellow to her pale mustard
aquatic canvas. Like the colors on
Renoir’s palette, our fluids mixed divinely.
If it wasn’t for Dickwad, I wouldn’t have known who Renoir was. I wouldn’t have had anything to think about
staring down at a bowl of urine.
Outside
of Eureka, Dickwad nodded his head at the storm clouds that brought darkness to
the sky an hour early. “It wouldn’t be a
road trip without thunder.”
Thunder
struck a moment later. Dickwad dropped
one of his hands from the 10 and 2 position on the steering wheel and
sighed. “It seemed like back in the eighties
whenever we had thunderstorms the power would go out. My grandfather would light oil lanterns for
us to see by, then bundle me up in a blanket, make some hot cocoa, and take me
outside to watch the lightning.”
I
contemplated the feeling of being wrapped in a blanket. It seemed like it would have felt nice. “My grandfather used to pound whiskey and
tell me stories about hanging Japs upside-down from trees and leaving them to
die during The War.” I paused for a
moment to think about the stinking line of people that had fucked each other
until I was born. We were a royal family
of idiocy. Although they were family, I
didn’t really know any of them.
“We
all have our stories.” Dickwad pushed a
hand through his silky hair.
“You
got any Dave Matthews Band in here?” I asked.
Don Johnson and Dave Mathews were small episodes of Dickwad’s life he
could never run away from. Luckily, he
grew out of both after he lost his virginity.
I lit a cigarette.
“Can you believe
he used to listen to that shit?” Dickwad’s sister laughed, unwrapping another
Blow-Pop and pressing it deep into her cheek.
“My brother used to be so lame.”
“You
can’t smoke in here,” Dickwad said. He
flicked the cigarette from my lips. “I
don’t want my leather to smell like a Moose Lodge.”
Dickwad only said
one word over the next two hours.
“Lightning.” The sky flashed.
At a motel outside
Crescent City near the Oregon border, Dickwad stood before two
doors with the numbers 11 and 12 on
them. “I’ll take this one. You two take that one.”
Dickwad never
wanted anyone around him when he slept.
He had made that error in judgment when we were younger. I had made him pay for his mistake by doing
everything possible to a sleeping friend to make his morning miserable. I never tea-bagged him though. That seemed gay.
“You
want us to share a room?” I looked down
at his sister’s ass from the corner of my eye.
“Yeah. She snores.
I trust you,” Dickwad said.
Dickwad
sat on his bed in the yellow light of the motel room reading a new book. I don’t have x-ray vision. I suppose that Dickwad’s ability to sense
weather was somewhat like my ability to tell you what people are doing when I
can’t see them. For instance, the book
he was reading was by Joan Didion. I
didn’t know who she was. She was probably
some feminist, knowing Dickwad. He was
the smartest guy I knew. If his
grandfather hadn’t died, he might have even gone to college. Being a master electrician paid his
grandfather’s mortgage. Still, I felt
sorry for his brain. It must have been
like being veal.
It
didn’t take long for Dickwad’s sister to turn me on. All she had to say was, “I’m gonna take a
shower.” I could hear her fumbling with
the doorknob inside the bathroom, trying to work the lock. Then she sighed. I heard her bra hit the ground, then a soft
cottony whisper as her underwear dropped to the tile. The shower knobs squeaked. Steam began to pour out from underneath the
door. I wish I could say that she
immediately started masturbating. But
she didn’t. She rinsed her face
first. Then she stared down at her
vagina. Maybe it was too hairy for her.
She washed the crack of her ass, then sat down in the tub and started to think. She could have been thinking about the last
time she saw her mother. She could
almost feel the woman’s cold lipstick stuck to her cheek. She sat there unmoving, taking short breaths.
I
hadn’t noticed the three semi-trucks parked outside of the motel. Looking out the streaked window, I could see
one of the truckers smoking a cigarette and tapping a tire with the toe of his
cowboy boot. He didn’t have a handlebar
mustache, or a mustard yellow trucker-hat on.
Instead, he wore a burgundy tie and a pair of tight brown trousers, his
testicles split in half by the crotch seem.
A neon pink light across the highway blinked in his misty eyes. It read, “The Landing Strip.” There weren’t any windows on the
building. He pulled a small flask from
inside his coat pocket, took a pull, then tucked it back in. He didn’t need to look both ways before he
crossed the wet two lane highway. It was
dark. No one else was coming.
Dickwad’s
sister emerged from the shower with a towel wrapped around her breasts. The towel wasn’t very wide. It looked like an empty banner that hadn’t
been sloganized yet. I tried to think of
something to write across it. The bottom
of her butt cheeks barely dropped out from under the white cotton as she passed
by me. She pointed her ass towards the
window away from my eyes and pulled on a pair of underwear. They were an aquamarine color, much like her
eyes. She slid into bed with her towel
on, pulled the covers up to her chin, then pulled the towel off. “Goodnight,” she said.
I
fell asleep with Dickwad’s sister blinking through my mind. I was no sloganeer. I wasn’t much of anything.
Dickwad
knocked on our door early in the morning.
“Can you get it?”
his sister asked. “I’m naked.”
Aside
from the whiskers on his face, Dickwad’s skin looked fresh, like an
advertisement for expensive aftershave.
He had already taken a shower and held in his hand two pieces of toast
and a cup of coffee. “You kids ready to
hit the road?” He threw a piece of toast
at his sister, then handed me the coffee and the other piece. “It’s got margarine on it already.” Everything he did was just like his
grandfather. Even the way he treated his
sister. She ate the toast off of the mangy comforter just like his great aunt.
Oregon
had a distinct taste to it. I had never
tasted another state before. I had been
to Las Vegas, Nevada, twice in my life, but Vegas had no taste. If it had a taste, I wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I didn’t want it to have a taste. I think it would have tasted like a condom.
I
stared out the window at the evergreen trees and watched as small waterfalls
fell from jagged cliffs. The rocks were
covered in a soft green moss so that the boulders looked like giant
emeralds. My mother told me I had
emerald eyes once. I liked her sometimes. Even though she never bailed me out of jail. “I didn’t do it,” I told her once before.
“You
guys taste that?” I asked.
“Taste
what?” Dickwad said.
“This
state tastes like something,” I said.
Dickwad nodded his
head in agreement, cracking his window another inch. “That taste, my friend, is the taste of
freedom. What the United States used to
taste like.”
His sister shook
her head. “Smells like pine trees to
me.” Her mouth was too full of cherry
flavored lollipops to taste anything else.
“Chem-trail,”
Dickwad said pointing up into the overcast sky.
“Cloud seeding.” Dickwad shook
his head. “Here comes the rain.” He
turned the windshield wipers on, and shot me a concerned look. “Roll up your window. I don’t want the mind serum they put in the
rainwater to touch us.” Dickwad pushed
his hair over his ears, as if trying to block an entrance.
It
stopped raining by the time we hit the Idaho border. At a truck stop in Nyssa, I listened to Dickwad’s
sister unzip her jeans and piss into a toilet bowl again.
“This
toilet flushes,” she said to me. She smiled
this time when she passed.
I looked in the bathroom
mirror while I washed my hands. I wasn’t
a bad looking guy, aside from my teeth.
I walked out of the bathroom without flushing and wandered around the
mart, blending in with the potato chips and novelty shirts. I stuck a package of Crest Whitening Strips
into my pocket and walked out of the market without looking back. Whenever I looked back, I got caught. “I didn’t do it,” I would say. No one ever believed me.
I
watched the sign that read “Welcome to Wyoming” pass by in the headlights of
Dickwad’s car. I thought about the last
time I had read the word “Wyoming.” I
couldn’t remember. Wyoming.
“Custer’s
last stand,” I said to no one in particular.
“Unlucky bastard.”
“Custer
was a fascist,” his sister said.
“The
Battle of Little Big Horn took place in Montana, not Wyoming,” Dickwad said.
“You
barely finished high school,” his sister replied.
Dickwad
didn’t have anything else to say. We all
knew he sacrificed straight A’s for keeping his depleted family together. He turned the channel on the radio until he
found a station playing big band music.
“They just don’t play it like this any more, do they?” The song remained the same until we finally
stopped to sleep.
The
motel that night looked exactly like the one in Crescent City, except for that
it was in Wyoming. The sky looked
bigger. There was a bar across the
street that advertised “Ice Cold Beer.”
Dickwad
read Joan. He kept his socks on and
curled up into his pillows with a smile on his face. He drank a decaffeinated cup of coffee. He didn’t want to stay up all night.
I
watched Dickwad’s sister move around the room.
She seemed like a woman now.
“I’m gonna take a
shower,” she said. Her undergarments hit
the floor. The shower knobs
creaked. She sat down in the tub,
letting the water run down her face like counterfeit tears. She might have been thinking about how lonely
she felt that day she got her period for the first time. Her vagina was hairier.
With
my legs dangling over the bed, I thought about what I would say to Dickwad’s
sister this time when she got out of the shower. That basketball player in high school had
waited for his girlfriend to come out of the shower with a balloon tied around
his dick. But he was a basketball
player. He probably seemed cool.
I
pulled off my clothes and got into my bed.
I hadn’t slept naked since my last girlfriend twenty pounds ago. The shower turned off. Dickwad’s sister came out with her towel on,
steam rising from her skin. This time
she said, “Close your eyes.” I could
hear the towel drop to the dirty carpet.
Then her warm body hit the mattress and the sheets slid up to her
chin. “You can open them now.”
I
opened my eyes. She was in her bed. Her eyes were closed.
“Goodnight,” she
said.
“Goodnight,” I
said back.
I waited for her
to start snoring before I rummaged through my jeans pocket, removing the
whitening strips. I pressed them into my
teeth. They didn’t have much taste to
them. I popped a painkiller into my belly and fell asleep thinking of her body,
sweet, unused, at 15 years old. Her tongue
tasted like a synthetic grape, like a flavored condom. I assume.
In the morning,
the phone rang.
“Can you get that,
I’m naked,” Dickwad’s sister said.
“So am I,” I said.
“Ewww,” she
replied. “Close your eyes.”
I could hear the
plastic mold of the earpiece lift from the body of the telephone.
“Hello?”
There was a pause. I could hear her feet
shift towards me. She looked at me and
her eyes went soft for a moment. It
didn’t matter that I could not see. She
shifted her hips like a woman after a glass of wine. “It’s Dickwad.” She dropped the phone on the table. “You can open your eyes.” I caught a glimpse of her ass as she passed
me on the way to the bathroom. She had
tan lines where her bra straps had been.
“Yeah?” I said
into the phone.
Dickwad
combed his hair in the mirror and slid his grandfather’s wristwatch over his long
slender fingers. “I spoke to a woman out
in Watertown a few minutes ago,” he said.
“What
did she say?” I asked
“She
said she’s heard of ‘a rock out in the middle of nowhere’ before,” he replied.
“Nice,”
I said.
“Yeah,”
he remarked.
“Where
is nowhere?” I asked.
“She
doesn’t know.”
I
stared at my teeth in the mirror. The
only thing separating Dickwad and I from a face to face conversation was a
couple inch-thick pieces of drywall. “Too
bad,” I said.
“Yeah. You want some toast?” he asked.
After
we hung up, Dickwad smiled to himself. He
smiled like his grandfather had been reborn in front of him. He twirled the keys to the car around his
index finger, then fired an invisible pistol at his reflection. He made a sound with his mouth that could
have represented a bullet or a punctured tire.
I
didn’t catch the sign that read “South Dakota 1 Mile.” I was too busy thinking about Dickwad’s
sister. I decided I would go on a diet,
stop taking pills. “I think I’m gonna be
a vegetarian,” I said out loud.
Dickwad
smiled. “I’m telling you, it’s the only
way to live. You’ll feel good again, I
promise.” He dropped his hand to my knee
and jiggled my leg. I felt around in my
pocket for the remaining two whitening strips.
Dickwad’s sister
hadn’t eaten yet that day. “I’m hungry,”
she said.
At a burger joint
off the highway, I ordered a Caesar Salad.
The brown vinyl booth squeaked underneath my palms. I think I was cold. That was why I was sitting on my hands.
“Caesar salads
aren’t vegetarian,” Dickwad said.
“We
don’t have any croutons,” the waitress added.
Dickwad
wiped the bright red lipstick left by another customer off of his coffee mug
and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.
His sister got a cheeseburger.
She ate half of it, bloody juices running down her chin, before I got a
hard-on.
When
the waitress returned with our check, Dickwad smiled. She hated her job, but she couldn’t resist
his smile. His teeth were like white
lotus flowers. His mouth was like a
perfect Hindu shrine. I had seen a
picture of one before.
“You
ever hear of a rock out in the middle of nowhere near Watertown with the name
William Parkman chiseled into it?” Dickwad asked the waitress.
“No,
she said, “I can’t say that I have.”
Dickwad
left her a tip only a dickwad would leave for a lipstick-stained coffee cup and
a sandwich made with American cheese and expired margarine.
We reached
Watertown at around 5 pm. Dickwad insisted
that we head to the local bar and have a few beers on him. Maybe we would run someone who knew where the
rock was.
The bar was
already silent, but it reached a level of silence unfathomable as we walked in
the door. Dickwad’s sister was the only human
with breasts. Dickwad and I were the
only two men not wearing a down vest and a mustache.
I have never heard
much about bears in South Dakota. They
seemed like creatures that remained loyal to Alaska and Montana. Nonetheless, a stuffed grizzly stood in a
large corner behind the bar, a sign hung from his paw, “86 is a four letter
word.”
“Isn’t ‘bear’ a
four letter word?” I said to Dickwad’s sister.
“Yeah,” she said.
“That’s not what
it means,” Dickwad said to both of us.
We
ordered three Budweiser’s from an old bartender who wore a purple heart pinned
to his flannel shirt.
“I
don’t want a beer,” Dickwad’s sister said, sliding between us at the bar. “Gimmee a blueberry press,” she said to the
bartender.
The bartender
didn’t say a word. He didn’t move. It was as if the last five seconds had not
happened. Perhaps the phrase “blueberry
press” was a sort of time machine.
Dickwad and I stared at the head of a stuffed moose above the head of
the stuffed bartender and waited. He
slid two Budweiser’s in front of us and pushed the pomade through his yellow-gray
hair.
“We
don’t have any blueberries here.”
Dickwad’s
sister pulled a lollipop with a blue wrapper from her pocket. “Just make it a vodka on the rocks.”
Dickwad
wrapped his arm around me and took a deep breath. The stench of the brown carpet and faux
wooden walls caked in cigarette smoke and dead skin cells must have burned his
lungs. “This looks like a place my
grandfather would have liked if he were still alive today,” he said. “He was in the Knights of Columbus you know.”
The
white stripes on an American Flag draped above the main wall of the room had
been stained yellow from years of smoky nicotine. The Monday Night Football game on the
television was barely visible between the static. The bartender fidgeted with the
antennas.
“Why
don’t you just get one of them Jap T.V.’s?” someone said. The bartender turned red. His purple heart thumped. It got quiet again.
“Shoot. I didn’t bring snow chains,” Dickwad
said.
We got up to go
outside and catch snowflakes on our tongue.
The bartender joined us in the cold for a cigarette. Out from behind the bar, he looked as if he
would almost smile.
“Where
you kids from?” he asked.
“California,”
Dickwad said.
“What
brings you to Watertown?” the bartender asked.
“We’re
looking for a rock,” Dickwad’s sister said.
The
bartender nodded his head. I think he
knew what we were talking about. But I
can’t read minds.
“Ever
heard of a William Parkman?” Dickwad asked.
“No
sir,” the bartender said. Then he
crushed his cigarette underneath his shoes even though it wasn’t finished.
We
stumbled towards the motel in town.
Dickwad’s sister put her hand around my waist to keep her balance, then
quickly pulled it away. No one slipped
on the icy sidewalk. I thought that was
interesting.
Inside the motel
office, Dickwad stared at the sleeping face of the elderly desk attendant. He gently pressed down on the small silver
bell, a faint chime bringing her back from her travels halfway to death.
“How can I help
you young folks?” she asked.
“We’d like two
rooms for the evening,” Dickwad said.
As Dickwad put his
credit card down, he stopped, inspecting the woman’s wrinkles. Her face looked like a tree trunk that had
been cut in half. “How old are you, if
you don’t mind my asking?”
The woman smiled
and straightened her spine. “I’ll be
ninety-two on Thursday.”
“You don’t look a
day over thirty,” Dickwad said.
The woman used
what was left of her blood supply to blush.
“You ever hear of
a rock somewhere in these parts with William Parkman’s name on it?” Dickwad
inquired.
The
old woman’s eyes blinked slowly. “Yes,”
she said. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
“Do
you know where it is?” Dickwad asked.
She
fumbled around with the room keys. “Oh I
don’t know. I think it’s north of here,
out on the old Barksdale ranch.”
“Much
obliged, my darling,” Dickwad said. He
raised the woman’s hand to his lips, and kissed her varicose veins.
In his motel room,
Dickwad put his Joan Didion book down and laid on his back. He closed his eyes. He could have been thinking about his
grandfather’s home in Santa Paula, moving psychically through each room,
running his fingertips across the man’s big walnut desk, his steel filing
cabinets, the yellow-flowered wallpaper in the kitchen, the brown carpet in the
living room, sticking his nose in the roses in the front yard. Perhaps he had not wanted childhood to end. Maybe
it was only in adulthood that he contemplated what a bad hand he had been
dealt.
I
kept my socks on. I thought it was a bit
cold in my room, even with the heater on.
“I’m gonna take a
shower,” Dickwad’s sister said. She
closed the bathroom door, but did not bother locking it. I heard her bra hit the ground, but not her
underwear. The door opened back up. She covered her breasts, a small amount of
yellow light glowing behind her.
“Will
you sit in here with me while I take a shower?” she asked.
“Sure,”
I said.
I
laid down on my back on the pale pink tile floor, pressed a whitening strip to
my teeth, and pushed a hand-towel behind my head for a pillow. I liked listening to the water fall from the
shower to the tub. It was like an
artificial waterfall. If I closed my eyes,
I could imagine all the places I wished I had been.
I
could hear her butt cheeks splash against the tub as she sat down. I stared at the shower curtain looking for
her silhouette, but found only my shadow.
She ran two fingers down between her legs. I touched myself through my jeans. It didn’t take me long to come, thinking of
the places I had been on her body. The
water turned off. I opened my eyes to a
cloud of steam. She stepped out of the
shower and over my head, hot water dripping from her buttocks onto my
chin.
“Goodnight”
she said.
Dickwad
woke us up at sunrise that morning. We
hadn’t bothered to lock the door the night before. He stood there staring at us in each of our
beds. Maybe he felt like a father for
the first time.
“Up
and at em,” he yelled, shaking our legs with each of his hands. “It’s time to find the rock!” He handed me a beer. “To the rock!” He pressed his bottle to mine.
Dickwad’s sister
sat in her bed, up to her neck in covers.
I took a sip, then passed it to her.
“Thank
you,” she said.
In
the car, Dickwad popped a Mozart cassette into the tape deck and began playing
an imaginary violin as he steered through the melting snow with his knees. I could feel the tires giving way to the ice
as he weaved down the long narrow highway towards the Barksdale ranch. He pulled another beer from the bucket in the
backseat and began to hum along to the piece.
“This
is my favorite,” he said. “Wolfgang.” The back tires swerved a little more. His sister leaned forward, but did not say
anything. She might have been worried
that her words would add extra weight to the rear of the car, just enough to
send us into an embankment of snowy death.
“You
got snow tires on this car?” I asked. I
didn’t want to die, but sometimes Dickwad said he did.
“Nope,”
Dickwad said. “Sun’s coming out.”
I
put on my sunglasses. His sister began
squinting.
The
Barksdale ranch was hardly a “ranch” anymore.
What was once an impressive homestead was now a few splinters of scattered
wood. The only structure left standing
was an outhouse with a rope attached to it.
Dickwad
inspected the frail latrine, opening and closing the limp door. “My grandfather told me that when a blizzard
would come through and you had to use the can, you had to follow the rope from
the front door to the outhouse, otherwise you could get lost and die. Zero visibility you know.”
We
stood staring out across the Great Plains, 325 acres that at one time had
belonged to someone named Barksdale.
Maybe he was an engineer with Great Northern. He probably had a nice mustache.
“Finding
that rock out here is the equivalent of finding that outhouse without a rope in
a blizzard,” I said.
Dickwad
nodded his head. “You’re probably
right.” He picked up the rope attached
to the outhouse and began walking.
We followed along
behind him. I was amazed at how big his
feet were. My little feet sunk snugly
into his snowy footprints, and his sister’s into mine.
“I want to thank
you guys for coming out here with me,” Dickwad said. “It means a lot to me.”
“I liked your
grandfather,” I said. “I would have done
the same thing.”
Dickwad kept
tugging at the rope hoping to find something attached to the end of it, but only
more rope slid through his hands as we wandered further away from the
road.
I turned around to
see if Dickwad’s sister was all right.
She walked solemnly in the snow with her head down, but this time,
without a lollipop. She could have been
thinking about the last time she made love.
It wasn’t her idea. She was too
drunk to stop it.
“Holy shit,”
Dickwad said.
Gray clouds began to
move in. I looked up waiting for
something to happen in the sky, but instead, Dickwad dropped the rope, and began
running towards a large object in the middle of the white field.
His sister and I
ran after him. Next to an abandoned set
of railroad tracks that once led people towards lovers and their future stood a
large rock, the name “William Parkman” chiseled into it, the date “11-04-32”
underneath it.
William Parkman
III dropped to his knees and ran his long slender fingers across the numbers
and letters. A tear froze in the corner
of his eye. “It’s gonna snow pretty
hard,” he said.
I had never seen a
blizzard before. It only took a few
moments for the snow to collapse upon us like a dump-truck full of icy white. We sat down next to each other in the snow,
pressing our bodies together for warmth.
I smiled.
Dickwad’s sister
looked at me. “Your teeth look yellow,”
she said.
There were no
other colors in the world except for my yellow teeth and the stark white of a
South Dakota blizzard. I fondled the
last whitening strip in my pocket. “I
have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Don’t get lost,”
Dickwad said.
I stood up and
began following the rope through the snow.
Dickwad and his sister sat silently, their heads pressed together, their
bodies dissolving behind a curtain of white.
Maybe they were thinking of their parents and their grandfather, how
everyone around them seemed to die.
I opened the door
to the outhouse and pulled a knife from my pocket. I pressed the tip of the blade into the
wood. “Chris Duke 11-04-10.” I wondered if someone someday, a son, a grandson, would care enough about me to come find this outhouse near a rock. I unzipped my pants. It was yellow. I was cold.
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