I woke with the taste of Jameson’s still in my mouth, overstaying its welcome like a corpulent mother-in-law four days after Christmas who still can’t get the hint. I sat up from the couch I’d been sleeping on, feeling a sudden kinship with that sorry sap Lieberman. Now we both knew what it felt like to have been thrown under a bus.
It was a new day for some, but for me it was just November 5th and I was just trying to stay clean in a dirty city that never sleeps or picks up its trash on time. There’d been a lot of talk about Change last night, Change I could believe in. But the only kind of Change I believed in was the kind that came out of the end of a .38 I kept underneath my pillow. It wasn’t the kind of Change you’d want to be on the wrong end of either. But I had to hand it to Obama. He’d been cool as a cucumber in a springtime salad the entire campaign. The best man had won, but that didn’t say much when your opponent was a beady-eyed cripple ready to take a dirt nap any day now. The grizzled, hollow-eyed mutts on cable had said it was a landslide, but a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was more like it.
I lit up a cancer stick off the burner on the stove and my mind went to the Alaskan dame. She was pretty, fresh, like freshly fallen snow. But the kind of snow conceals something icy just below the surface, something treacherous. Something that can make your boots lose their grip on the asphalt jungle, sets your arms and legs windmilling until you faceplant in some frigid sidewalk filth-slushee. Women like that are trouble. I guess McCain learned that one the hard way. I’d like to say they were finished, the lot of them. But Republicans are like genital herpes, no matter what you do, they always come back, they always flare up and ruin your night just when things seem to be going well. This wasn’t going to be no honeymoon for Obama, that was for sure.
I looked out my window, the Lord of Flatbush, surveying my kingdom of perpetually sagging packages stores and mealy-mouthed barbershops. McCain was snuffed, we had won. This was finally ours. Obama and his gang would be stomping into the White House any day now and Bush would be out faster than a war criminal dodging a subpoena. It should have been a time of celebration. A day to put on your best suit and drink mint juleps until the room spun like a carousel.
But me? I was sober and wondering where my next paycheck was coming from. Because “recession” is just another name for nothing left to loot.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Tri-Hyperbolic Exploration Of The New Era
Scenario A: Obama Wins.
Scenario B: McClaw Wins.
Scenario C: Bush Declares Martial Law.
A. Thermals luff full the tender flaps of skin that have, overnight, in the midst of all drunken Bacchanal, grown from elbow to knee. I am sailing the hot wind of Change down Flatbush, towards the Russian projects and then to the omphalos of the hotdog, Coney Island--sailing over Brooklyn roofs and parked colorful cars the way pterodactyls perhaps sailed off littoral cliffs, down into the hot waters of the proto-ocean, long before institutions and thus long before Bush's institutionalized psychopathology...
Elsewhere, in the middle of Prospect Park, my girlfriend is spontaneously healing the earth via a series of rapid, targeted winks. She looks at a dying ailanthus: BOOM. Fresh green finger-leaves twist down from its decayed upper reaches. Children smile. Balloons burst in a fungal show of love, as more balloons appear and swell out of the zuzzing, jauntily-ragged flesh of their mothers. The balloons remind one man of Pallas-Minerva, bursting immaculately from the head of Jove, taking with her all the sophia (loving wisdom) of the otherwise maltheistic universe, expiring as she is born into the minds of the men who posit her. Someone else sees the continually autogenerative/suicidal balloons as what they are: Smile-worthy.
B. In France, in a town whose name I will not reveal, a lone moustachioed man consults a dictionary and attempts to order a nerve-calming Pimms-&-limon. The barkeep, a round woman in her forties with a mole above her lip, shakes her head. It is not that she has misunderstood the man's ridiculous Yank accent; they are simply without liquor of any kind. "The rioters took everything," she tries to say, giving up halfway. He consults his dictionary. "Okay no cash, pay super watch-style!" he says excitedly, flashing her a fake-bronze timepiece decorated with a tiny Czech flag. "Got barter super merde, just only drink of my name is Anxiety."
Down the street, a worried woman with light brown hair pours over the imperfect few remaining bananas in the market. They only left these because they couldn't carry any more, she thinks. The rioters will find out we're not Canadian. They'll deport me and execute Wythe. She shakes her head. A nearby cat, a Bombay-Burmese mix with a sinister cleft tail like the devil's tongue, looks up stoically at the woman and the bananas. The cat did not read at the airport that theirs was the last flight allowed in from JFK by way of Paris-DG. The cat thinks nothing of their plan, neither that it is adequate nor savagely underthought. The cat farts slightly, then slinks from the woman's sight, somehow concluding this, her second hour in Europe.
C. From your "bunker," "Agent W" looks out onto the shattered remains of the fallen M. "I never liked that train, anyway," he says to no one in particular, smoothing rubble off his shirt. The bodega is quiet except for W and you. Half of Bushwick is at home, hiding around the TV from the Freedom Choppers buzzing darkly through the air like last night's bad news: Did you hear the final poll close, at 4 a.m., in a bar near Grand Army P., or in the City, slugging back too-early victory-Jell-O shooters with your other Captain Planet-looking friends, some now dead, many fleeing, in futile cars and on bikes and by kicks, toward shut-down overpasses, blown bridges, jammed tunnels, mysteriously missing points of egress. Suddenly it's like the end of Cemetery Man: Everything in a bubble, in glass, with no point beyond, no "out there" beyond the Wednesday spires of gray glass. You wish you had gone with W's girl, Agent K, to Normandy. Or with a friend of a friend's mom, two nights prior, to New Hampshire.
The bodega is no bunker, and when the Freedom Enforcers arrive to suspend Bushwick's increasingly isolated, desperately militant democracy, you will let yourself be zip-tied without a fight. You will not look W in his mad eyes or try to explain. He has a snake of bullets wrapped around his chest, and he's squinting through cracked Britpop-ish spectacles out of a window that, to the outside world, only twenty four hours ago, said simply "MI-DEL DELICIOSAS GALLETAS GRAHAM!" The Mi-Del Galletas-Graham Bunny, Mi-Ga, peers with cartoonish feminine long-lashed charm up from the street. You close your eyes. A whistle, seconds later, beckons you to open them. W is cursing. An RPG explodes just beyond the window, tattering the sidewalk and sending Mi-Ga flying back at you with the speed of deadly glass. Your hand covers your face as you vault or are vaulted, it's hard to say, back onto a black wire display shelf full of Wise chips. Nobody likes Wise chips. Frito-Lay or Mr. Pringle only didn't buy-out Wise out of pity. And then the economy crashed. And then Obama couldn't lose. And then...
The first Freedom Enforcer--the one who finally took down W, who was screaming something in unintelligible dog-Latin--was very courteous and named Steve. He let you take some barbecue chips with you. You learn this, of course, much later.
S.O.S.
Dear People,
Is my internet connection working? Help. I’m trapped in a red room six miles beneath the Grand Army entrance to the 2/3. My AM New York got caught in the train breeze and I chased it. The rest is kind of a blur. I woke up here, alone, and thought the world was ending because those trains were so damn loud. I thought I was in some emergency bunker. Maybe I am. I’m not entirely sure. It’s weird. There are directions written on pieces of masking tape. In the mini fridge stocked with Rolling Rock ponies, there’s a note that says “Help Yourself”. Not my drink of choice, but hey. There is also a stock of big grab bags of spicy fritos that I’ve been rationing. So don’t worry, I’m not starved. The thing that sucks is my i-phone is all fucked up. There’s no freaking service down here and Ms. Pac Man won’t work. I’m bored. All I’ve got is this stupid paper. I’ve read the damn thing front to back a hundred times. And in case you didn’t hear by now, Guy Ritchie and Madonna are on the rocks.
What else? Oh, I have no idea how to keep track of time. It's like I'm living in freaking China or something. I turned my iphone off to save battery power and when I turned it back on it couldn’t pick up a signal so the time just started from there. January 1st. Year 0. Today, according to my phone it's the 11th day. So I’m guessing it's like November 5th or something where you guys live. Which I’m wondering, is there like some kind of holiday? I haven’t heard a train in a while. Maybe that means some sandhogs are digging for me?
Or track work?
God, I’m getting so sick of the same damn meal.
Louise
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