novela sample #3

 

I killed a man when I was fifteen. It bothered me for a while, but then I got over it.

People get over things. Only the very malignant types get stuck. When you do something wrong, it’s never okay, not for anybody. But some people crumble, and others get fixated, and some others walk away like breakfast and coffee.

Now I’m not saying I’m a villain. Because nobody believes in that fairy tale stuff anymore. But without a few tales tucked under the belt, nobody would know how to build stories.

My story begins under the belt as all good things do. I was born in a nunnery in New York City to a fine and noble lady who used to be a whore. And in that nunnery, they really knew how to make a good belt; I know this for a fact because I was subject to quite a few. I mean, what they had us do was fix belts every single day out of old leather and clips, delivered on Monday mornings in giant garbage bags by the Salvation Army. There was no point to the task really. I think the head nun, Mother Beatrice, simply felt that rosary beads were a bit passe and so she decided to give us something practical to do while we prayed.

I was a pretty decent catechism student, though I can’t say I ever tried that hard. I memorized my passages as I was told and always showed up more or less on time to all my lessons. I learned early on not to talk too much because talking wins you enemies, and the last thing you want in the House of God is an enemy.

I had a best friend named Elizabeth who had a severe hearing disorder. It wasn’t that she couldn’t hear, it was that she didn’t hear correctly, and so she always found herself in all kinds of wrong situations because she didn’t get the facts down straight. And everybody felt bad for her because we all understood she really tried.

One time Elizabeth found herself in the back of a truck with a naked Salvation Army man because she thought she had heard him tell her to remove his belt and bring it to the nuns. The way I see it, she might have heard correctly that time.

Silly me, that morning, when I found that Lizzy wasn’t in our room or in the dining hall, I decided it would be nice of me to pick up her chore for her, as her best friend and all, and grab the garbage bags from the truck myself, which had been parked outside for so long it got strange. Of course, I needed some help, so I brought Mother Louisa along.

Needless to say, when we lifted the truck door, and saw in the dim April light, the gray and red panties of a frightened Elizabeth dangling over the swinging headlamp, we felt a little bit shocked.

All the nuns got horribly busy that day. Mother Beatrice stormed into Lizzy and my room and threatened to kick us both out. She brayed for an hour that it was all very unacceptable, and then she and Mother Louisa bolted us in, to have a serious meeting outside with all the other nuns.

That was the first time Elizabeth and I kissed, and it was my very first kiss ever.

…to be continued…

scraps of unfinished poems in my subway scratch book…

the professor sits his broad bottom
    on a poor, delicate text
that snuffs away under the odorous
     remarks of his fat strokes of genius 

—-

become as sharp as a single point, piercing through the economy with such exuberant specialization, as to make pin after pin until every invisible hand is applauding. dear adam, what world did you be-smith when you allocated all the fruit to the woman?

the bells chime, the school day starts, and the current of bodies push from room to room all packages of skills and capital, in neat rows, eyes lower to the books, heads bow and lips chant. a child stands up and immediately crumbles to salt. red-faced and dishonorable.

the bells chime, the school time is over, stand in neat black lines, shadows of shadows, to receive your shadow book. today we are released upon the world. once a haunting of europe, now shiny in robes, expensive with proud crying faces.

a bell will chime in my woman’s body and i am to resign this labor line to make room for another. but my ears ring as i exit the mosh pit, this metal industry i prefer, and spin/smash into conundrums of illusory choice: one life over another, thinking over feeling, analysis over experience, the specific over the general, the general over the vanquished. i do.

i will not be a loser in this game, i murmur to myself, as i put on my bra in the sweaty locker room.

—-

like a thick, knotted noodle
   I tore my clothes to rip my roots
and found it too greasy to break
   into open mouths, laughing
tongues that push through brains
   and stray chemicals flittering like snowflakes
all winter, full of unique and slush

square gentlemen with metal cases for wallets
   clink around the place, shiny-eyed
and greedy me, all high on my chopsticks
   pick the sushi off the rice
to lay in black black sauce

—

there is  in living quickly
    a quick rotting of memories
wasted fragments lose their links
   and solidity erodes, erodes

—-

wisdom is the pearl of someone else’s suffering. the wise are cowards. the fools are rich with life. those who live richly tell wise tales at the end to young travellers who can also choose wisdom or folly. but those who live wisely from the beginning are not so fooled in the end, about wisdom.

—

How two healthy, wealthy kids could squirm in that smelly bed, I don’t know. All’s I know is the girl had a vaginal infection you can tell from across the street, and the boy didn’t seem to mind none.

There was a whole house full of strange children like those, and they all made a lot of noise. Some days, I’d wake up at four in the morning because I’d hear some racket in the back yard. I’d open my window and a whole tribe of them’d be popping out my garbage can. But why, I don’t know. My granddaughter is five yeras old and she’s curious; wants to find out about that wrinkly lady in the big skirt is doing with all those dusty bags! But me? I don’t ask no more.

One time, in the middle of the night, three ambulance cars came by and dragged ten white bodies clean out of the garage. That was the first time I took a peak at the inside of that house: it was a bitter jungle in there! Nothing but.

Half-an-hour later, a fancy Manhattan car pulled up the driveway and a skinny lady all in furs came rushing at that house, yelling so the whole block could hear:

“Where’s Perry? Where’s my Perry?”

A little Asiatic girl with blue hair poked her head out from the second floor window:

“Oh shit! Are you Mrs. Medici? Wait, wait, wait a second.”

With a quick hop, the girl disappeared and soon after, the front door flung open. A small, sticky hand grabbed at Mrs. Medici’s leopard print.

“Um…P-man is in the hospital,” it said.

“Yes, I know, my husband told me. But that old bastard won’t tell me which hospital!”

“Woodhull Hospital. On Flushing Avenue. It’s that way,” she pointed to the left, and then pointed to the right. “I mean that way.”

” Oh, sweetie, won’t you just come with me please?” Mrs. Medici sang sweetly, “I really don’t know Brooklyn. Thank you, dear.”

“Um…I can’t. I don’t believe in hospitals.”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Medici stared blankly at the little girl. Her sunglasses dropped down her face, and she peered down threateningly.

“I’m sorry,” the girl squeaked.

“TAKE ME THERE NOW!”

But the girl shook her head and looked up resolutely, proudly. Mrs. Medici began to tremble violently and shift from heel to heel.

“My son is in the emergency room, and you’re going to take me there, you little geisha!”

“No. I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t. I really really really don’t believe in hospitals,” sputtered the girl.

Just then, a greasy-haired man in a ripped leather jacket poked his pretty nose out the door.

“Is there a problem here?”

“YES!” Mrs. Medici exclaimed, “My son, Perry Caesar, is in the hospital!”

“Very well, but everybody is sleeping right now. You’re making a racket, ma’am.”

“It’s three in the afternoon! I want to see my son!”

The woman looked hysterical. Every hair on her fur coat seemed to stand up straight. She peered curiously into the leather man’s eyes. No response, not even the slightest sign of self-subservience. She began to cry.

“Oh, you want to go to the hospital now, is that what you want?” the man began to croon. A smooth smile spread across his face, and he glared at her for a moment. “Of course, baby, I’ll take you there! I’ll take you, Mrs. P-Man; I know Brooklyn like the back of my ears.”

Mrs. Medici smiled a coy little smile, “It’s Lucile for you, young man. And it’s the back of your hands.”

“Oh?” smirked the man, greasy from temple to temple, “What about my hands?”

novela sample #2

The Bohemia train stops off in North Brooklyn, once upon a time. Spin out beyond the metal turnstiles, and it’s a nuclear playground of factories and giant children. The Korean grocery store on the corner is all filled up with vegan beef jerky and organic cigarettes. Party fliers and rolling papers line up and pay for their beer. Then they walk out to a tree-lined sidewalk, stopping to chat with one another, and disappear now and again, weaving in and out of lofted art communes and shaded Anarchist collectives. The twin galleries in the middle of the street both feature pop surrealism, and around the corner, the socialist café is eternally going out of business. Up and down the road, at all hours of the day, skinny maidens on skateboards roll by wearing sunglasses and big candy headphones. And every night, at 3AM, monumental garbage trucks storm the same street at 120 miles per hour. Here, on this happy block, in a converted paper factory, next to a gangster motorcycle store, lived my love, Nicholas Bent.

Nico was a noise musician, a runaway. He’d been all over the country with his dirty dog and his skinny black jeans, jumping rails and hopping trains, not stopping for anyone. He ate shit and sold it too, a survivor and a hater. I loved Nico like a pigeon loves the street. I held him up with my high-heeled wage, bought him cigarettes and coffee, and when that failed to keep him up, bought him Adderall and coke. We made red the nights, screaming lullabies, tossing instruments, and loving voraciously. I gave him a recording studio in my bedroom, and a house full of friends and weeds. Because what I adored most about Nico was his big dreams that he’d talk me into, till I was with him.

Nico lost his mind.

We lived in a little half-sized house in the basement of that communal perfection. I, in a pile of philosophy books and sex toys; he, with his crates of records and analog recording equipment. We’d sit together for days at a time in that tiny, smelly room, like the 13.5 floor of John Malkovich, permanently bent over each other, making tons of art, whatever.

“That’s so John Cage,” he’d tell me, about the doodle I’d be scratching on my denim skirt. “No, it’s totally Marquis de Sade,” I’d retort. I didn’t listen to much John Cage. He didn’t read much of anything that was written before Allen Ginsberg.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah?”

And then we’d start making some collage: spray juice and house paint onto scrap wood stolen from the dumpsters of Chinese factories. Screw on magazine cut-outs with murderous drill guns. Nico loved collages of girl-bodies, no head, usually just tits and odd parts. I used to get mad at him about that. Said it wasn’t feminist. And then we’d argue, and get pissed at each other, and pretend we cared so much, about the politics of the matter, the aesthetics of the thing. We’d never finish, and sooner or later it’d become another casualty in my room, rotting creatively. And we’d be stuck having to keep looking at it all the time, waiting for inspiration.

The day Nico died, I was listening to John Cage, his String Quartet in Four Parts. I was up to the fourth part, “Quodlibet,” when my old girl Carla from back in those days texted me to let me know:

Nico passed last night. Jumped off the roof. Sorry for your loss. Please come by house for police report.

I looked down at the cracked screen of my Nokia. Fuck; he what? And I couldn’t see or hear anymore. The rubbed out numbers on my keypad were like the rubbed out signs in the subway tunnels, the time Nico and I got lost searching for mole people, afraid they’d invade if we didn’t pre-empt our introductions.

——

Nico and I met kissing, in between the subway and the tunnel walls. I was drunk and he was drunk, and I guess we were both curious and impatient with the train and what not, so we ran into each other, mouth-first, as a train roared by, nearly killing us.

I was dressed up as a tiger for Halloween, with a tail and ears, and a ripped spandex outfit that was supposed to resemble stripes, but looked more like Edward Scissorhand’s teething toy. My best friend Karmen had allegedly spent the whole day making my costume. She had decided ages ago that she was going to be Princess Jasmine that year (she was a different Disney princess every year) and so had asked me in mid-September if I would be a cartoon character along with her, and accompany her to this party that our mutual friend was throwing. I was having a cinema-triggered fling with Catwoman and Halle Barry at that time, and told her that’s what I wanted to be. She said that since she was taking a class on sewing and costume-making at the School of Visual Arts, she would be delighted to make my costume for me and have it count as one of her school projects. So I said cool, why not.

On Halloween night, about an hour before the party, I went over to Karmen’s loft on the Lower East Side, and there she was, still snipping away on the floor, in her lovely Jasmine dress.

“What’s that?” I asked her about all the fur on the floor.

“Um…that’s part of your costume.”

“Oh. What part?”

“That’s like the stuffing.”

“Stuffing?”

It turned out Karmen had decided that since she was Jasmine, it would make more sense for me to be Raja, her pet tiger, which was close enough to Catwoman, since tigers are like big cats.

To add insult to scrap, she had also purchased several tubes of orange body paint for me to put on -

“Underneath the costume! Like lotion,” she nodded and reassured, “And then you can have all the colors of a real tiger!”

Except that the colors were somewhat reversed. And only the stripes had fur. I was hesitant.

“Put the costume on!”

I pawed anxiously at my scarce costume, wondering if all the essential parts would be covered. Jasmine smiled and skipped happily into the bathroom. And so it was that half an hour later, I ended up at a crowded Halloween bimbo-fest, full of happy whores and hellish nurses, in my own slutty nightmare of spandex and polyester fur.

We fit right in, and there were boys who didn’t seem to object. They crowded around Karmen as custom dictates, cooking in an angry soup of their own testosterone, warding each other off with their monkey scents. And as their anxious jokes began to spill over the pot, they realized that I was the only other female there to catch each drop, like a good pet tiger, licking them dry and keeping their egos in tact. So some of them became very grateful for me.

Luke, my ex-boyfriend, among the surveyors, eyed my costume suspiciously, then patted me on my semi-naked ass.

“Nice tail.”

“Thanks.”

By the time Karmen was incoherently drunk, which was fortunately not too long a time into the party, I had become thoroughly embarrassed and was quite stably entrenched in my second-class status of excruciating boredom.

…to be continued…