Walking on Thin Ice

BEAUTY PAGEANT

BEAUTY PAGEANT

We’re in Mary’s living room. I sit on the edge of the sofa because it creeps me out to touch it.

“Who do you think is prettier, me or Alice?” Mary asks.

I think about it for a while. Mary wears makeup; she looks like a teenager. Alice looks like she should look for a girl her age. Alice has natural blonde hair which is sparkly from being out in the sun, and blue eyes with long dark lashes. Her face blushes easily. I don’t think Mary would be so pretty if she didn’t have all the makeup. She’d look more her age. Still, Mary is probably more pretty than Alice.

“Come on, Becky, who?”

“Well, that’s difficult to say. Maybe Alice,” I say. It’s an act of rebellion. I say it to hurt her feelings.

“You just say that because she’s popular. Well, I’m going to be in a beauty pageant,” Mary says.

“Oh, really?” I say weakly. “What do you have to do for that?”

“It’s not only about beauty. It’s what you wear, and the hair style, and how you do in the talent part.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to dance. I have it all worked out. I’m dancing to Eye of the Tiger. Mom said I’m going to knock their socks off because I dance so sexy. Let me show you.”

The boom box is already loaded with a tape wound to the right place. “I’m going to stand over here. Push the play button down when I tell you.”

The song starts. Mary pops her shoulders to the initial thump thump thump of the music. She walks purposefully, as though on a catwalk. She makes a motion with her hand as though casting something away, then casually looks back, unconcerned, then gets down into some serious punky dance moves.

“Did you see that?” she asks. “When I threw my hand, I was supposed to be throwing my sweater. I’m going to tie a sweater around my shoulders like a preppy, and then throw it off before I really start dancing.”

* * *

Mom and Dad and Mrs. Rumsfeld go to the pageant. I’m in the makeup room with Mary to give her support. It’s a large dingy bathroom. It’s total chaos. Boxes of clothes and props are haphazardly scattered. Moms bend over their daughters. Some of the girls are kindergarteners. Girls crowd to the full length mirror.

Mary’s in the stall again. She has to go pee all the time and I’m always waiting for her. I wait for her by her box. I think It’s strange Mary wants me there. I’m not the type of girl who would enter a beauty pageant and I have no idea what to do to help.

Mary brought her own makeup mirror. Star bends down to fix a curl. Mary slaps her hand away.

“Come on, Mare, be nice,” Star says.

Star wears bell bottoms and a rabbit fur coat. Her hair’s been washed and curled and it looks orderly, like a wig. I think she’s trying to look sexy today but she still seems like a beaten down walking skeleton. When Star walks, she bends her head down. She has thick eyeglasses, so her eyes seem remote, dull. Her face is dry looking. Lines run down from her nose to her chin. On another person, they’d be laugh lines. But Star doesn’t laugh.

“Leave me alone,” Mary says.

“Fine. You can do it yourself. Don’t say I didn’t try to help you.” Star walks out.

As Star leaves, Mary mumbles “Stupid bitch. You don’t help me, you stupid bitch.”

I’m a little bewildered. How can Mary talk about her Mom this way? I think Mary’s a rotten egg.

Mary asks, “How do I look?”

“You look great. Very pretty.”

Mary’s applied thick eyeliner. I think of it as her feral racoon disguise. She wears matte pink lipstick. Her skin is orange from foundation. She never looks natural, but even so, I know all the boys find her attractive. What do I know about makeup, anyways. If the boys think she’s cute, then she must be doing it right.

A pretty brunette comes up to us. She’s not wearing as much makeup, and her hair looks healthy, shiny.

“Becky, this is my friend Ann,” Mary says. “She’s been doing this since she’s little. And she’s won a lot of pageants.”

“Congratulations,” I tell Ann. I look quickly at her face, but it seems so perfect that it blinds me. I feel embarrassed about myself, and I stare at the floor.

“My Mom’s my manager,” Ann says.

“Ann’s been in commercials, too. She never ever eats sweets and she exercises every day.”

“For an hour,” Ann says.

An organizer opens the door. Everyone turns quiet. “OK girls, Moms, you have five minutes.” Door closes.

Mary looks in the mirror. “Oh shit, my hair’s all wrong. These curls have not set right. I wish I had more time. I’d redo it.”

I don’t understand why it takes so much time to do hair. The more Mary looks at her hair, the more she doesn’t like it. It’s like she can’t see herself, or she changes her mind all the time.

“Don’t worry. You’re great.” I don’t know what hair’s supposed to look like, but this seems like the right thing for me to say.

I run out to the audience before the show starts. There aren’t very many other kids in the audience, just parents and family. I sit between Mom and Mrs. Rumsfeld.

“Are you going to be in a beauty show, too?” Mrs. Rumsfeld asks.

“Aw, no. Not me. I’m just here for a friend.” But I’m honored that she thinks I could do this. It seems as far away as the moon to me.

* * *

Mary’s in a queue to perform with the other girls. The queue is organized by age. Her white jeans are very tight, and they do not have bells, because they are new. Her feet are in white cowboy boots. She wears a preppy pink and white dress shirt with the collar turned up. The dress shirt is not tucked in to the jeans. A wide pink belt with a big gold buckle is wrapped around her waist. Big pink oval earrings dangle from her ears. She’s tied a fluffy pink sweater over her shoulders like the preppies.

None of the other girls look as adult as Mary or have as much obvious makeup.

The moms are segregated from the rest of the audience. They’re not supposed to make any noise.

I look behind me and see Mary’s Dad way out standing against the back wall. There are seats up here by us. I wonder why he doesn’t want to sit by us. I’m surprised to see him here. Sometimes he’s not home for weeks and I forget Mary has a dad. He’s not smiling. I wonder if he’s bored. He justs stares at Mary with a blank expression.

* * *

It’s Mary’s turn to perform. She’s shaking a little. She does not look at us.

“Oh boy, look at that one,” says woman in the row ahead of us. “She looks mature for her age.”

Eye of the Tiger starts, and Mary’s activated. The first part looks mechanical. After Mary drops her sweater on the floor, she coyly shrugs it off.

“Ew,” whispers Mrs. Rumsfeld. “That’s way too adult.”

Mary comes to life in the dance part. She whips her head, performs somersaults, and everything is flawlessly timed to the music. Her expression is stern.

I look back at Mary’s Dad. Something about the way he’s standing bothers me. Now it’s the end of the song, and there’s a noticeable silence.

“Woohoo Mary!” Mom yells. She’s broken the silence and everyone claps.

The judges do not have an exceptional opinion of Mary’s performance. The numbers are average.

* * *

On the way home, I listen to Mom and Dad in the car.

“She’s probably living through her daughter,” Dad says. “She wants to make her into a miniature version of what she’d like to be.”

“Well, I think it’s good for Mary,” Mom says. “It’s exciting for her. And she has an aptitude in beauty. Why not use it?”

“Yep. Anyways, regardless of what her Mom’s like, Mary’s smart,” Dad says. “She’s going to find some way to get ahead.”

I’m glad I don’t have to think about ways to get ahead. I’m glad I don’t think Mom’s a stupid bitch, and that Dad’s home at night and he’s fun to be around.

I’m a little egg

From my writing project:

That night, Mom and I took our bath together. I liked this time with her. When Grandma gave me a bath, she was in a hurry, and rubbed my face too roughly with the washcloth. I still feel the harsh washcloth in Grandma’s fingers, scraping my ears. But Mom lingered in the tub.

The water smelled like iron and sulfer. It was from the well. The bathtub was yellow and smooth. I sat between Mom’s stubbly legs.

Mom layed her head back and closed her eyes. I leaned against her thigh. I felt the washcloth float against my skin. I grabbed it and squeezed water out. It trickled and plinked. I put the washcloth in my mouth and sucked it. It tasted like soapy iron.

Mom started to sing an Irish tune in her clear, soft sweet soprano. The steamy air in the bathroom contributed to intimacy, made it a world enclosing just Mom and me. Her voice was a reedy instrument.

When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We’ll give him a hearty welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out
And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.

With your drums and guns and guns and drums, hurroo,hurroo
With your drums and guns and guns and drums, hurroo,hurroo
With your drums and guns and guns and drums,
The enemy nearly slew ye
Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg,
Ye’re an armless, boneless, chickenless egg,
Ye’ll have to be put with a bowl out to beg,
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.

I felt a constriction of my throat, and my eyes burned like I was going to cry. I didn’t know why, but I loved that song, and I loved her voice, her passion in singing it. I thought about the chickenless egg and the bones, about the drumstick I ate for dinner.

“I’m a little egg,” I thought.

“Do you know what the song means?”

“No. I like it.”

“It’s about war. People kill each other in war. Governments send our young men to fight wars and they die, or they come back without arms or legs.”

“Why do they do this?”

“Because some people are bad. There are good and bad people. There are good and bad wars, too. But all war is horrible for the people who are in it. Grandpa was in a war.”

“World War II.”

“That was a good war. We fought against the Nazis in Germany. The Nazis wanted to kill all the Jewish people. Grandma’s Jewish, and her brother died fighting in the war. But there was a bad war just a couple years ago. Your Daddy Wayne wouldn’t fight in it because it was a bad war. That was Vietnam. I met your Daddy when he was hiding out from the war.”

“Why was it bad?”

“Because we wanted to kill people because they didn’t want to live the way we do. But people all around the world are different. They don’t have to live like we live. We killed them even though they’d never done anything to us. Our government was wrong, just like the Nazis were wrong in World War II.”

This was news to me. I didn’t know who Mom was talking about when she said the “government.” I didn’t know who the Nazis were or why they would want to kill Grandma. The world had a darker, serious cast to it.

“But we’re all OK now, right Mom?”

“We’re fine for now, honey.”

SMOKEY GREY and the GREAT RAT MYTHSSSSS

“Off the grid. That’s where we gotta go. Off the grid where they can’t find us and there’s no electricity.” Grey’s in a harrumpf. He sits on the salon couch, raising a puff of dust.

“Why do we have to go off the grid, Smokey?” Polly Pureheart’s voice sounds like Rocky the Squirrel from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

“Well, it’s safer off the grid. As long as you’re on grid, tapping into their resources using their services, they can track you. Know where you are. Know what you’ve used. Go off grid, they can’t find you.”

“This would be hard, Smokey. I don’t know if it’ll have any effect. But mutantkind’s gotta start preparing for a post energy age if the Earth’s gonna survive.” Pureheart snuggles up to Grey’s side. He pats and smoothes her hair.

“Yes, Polly. Sometimes, we won’t have refrigerators. And no hot water. We could dip in and out of the cybercafes, but that still leaves tracks. They can see where you accessed and when. So basically, to go off grid we’d have to shut down our cyber selves.”

“We could access, but we couldn’t send e-mail, couldn’t use blogs…”

“And no cell phone calls, Polly. No long distance anywhere. No airplanes, though boats and trains might be OK. If they take cash, and a smile. No ATMs. No border crossings.”

Pureheart bolts upright. “Borders aren’t relevant. I like the idea of the complete freedom of a human being. Anything that’s administrative law can be discarded.”

“Who decides?”

“All that matters is if you’re a rat who can get out of his cage.” Polly Pureheart the romantic. She paces up and down the salon. Grey’s prone on the couch. He crosses his arms.

“I’m a good rat,” Grey asserts matter-of-factly. He squeaks, “Someday I will make the holy journey to Rodentia, that Great Rat Trap in the Sky Reached on a Stairway of Cheese.” He lisps, “We rats have great mythsss…”

Polly stops pacing, giggles, asks, “What are the Great Rat Myths?”

“One of them is Build a Better Rat Trap and the World Will Beat a Path to Your Door. We got that one started, passing around. Pretty soon everybody’s busy trying to build better traps while we ate all their grain.”

Pureheart sits down, lays her head on Smokey’s lap.

Grey spreads out his arms demonstratively. “And there’s the Great Rat Moon. Once every thirteen Mouse moons, comes Rat Moon. We all go out in the dark and worship this large chromium rat trap that our Great Leader almost escaped. We worship the bits of leader left encrusted in the trap.”

“Oh, dear.”

“We also worship a special clan of rats, the Venice Water Rat Clan. They ate the city’s cats.”

“I hate to think of the kittens vs. the rats here in Morocco.”

“You think the rats eat the sick little kitty cats, Polly?” He tickles her side playfully.

“Definitely.” Pureheart notes her rising nausea.

“Nature’s garbage disposal. Cheaper than an undertaker. More honest, too. Rats should run all our funeral homes. We’d just eat the dead.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s food.”

“Ew! No; I mean why are undertakers dishonest?”

“Oh, there’s been a whole expose on that. They lie about what things cost. They lie about what the law requires, usually something more expensive. They arrange their showrooms and their tours psychologically so you tend to choose another thousand more to start with. They also don’t do very well keeping track of peoples’ bodies and they don’t bury or burn the right body.”

“Oh dear, Smokey.”

“Yes, Polly. Would you want an undertaker inserting things into *your* daughter? I think NOT! How’d we get on to that anyway? Oh yeah, the Great Rat Myths.”

“I think they’ve made off with some of the cats here.”

“The undertakers, or the Rats?”

“No, silly. I was thinking of –”

Grey cuts her off. “Oh, the undertakers were also selling body parts and organs for the medical replacement factories. Only just like used cars, they would roll back the odometer and tell you it was from a much younger person, healthy. They also sent a few diseased people parts out. Quite a scandal. ”

She’s not gonna let Grey get away with any bald assertions. “What evidence do you have for this, Smokey? Is this one of your solved cases?”

Grey ignores the question. “Rats are definitely more honest than undertakers. The rats look at you as you’re dying, as they nibble you, eating little bits and pieces. They look you right in the eye, and say, ‘What do ya think of THAT, buddy’ as they swallow a piece of your cheek.”

“And this is when you’re still alive?”

“Yes.”

“I would think they’d wait until after you were dead.”

“Oh no, they’re more honest than that. All they care about is if you’re slow enough and feeble enough to eat. If you move a little bit, that’s all right. Adds flavor.”

“How do you know all this, Smokey?”

“I used to work with rats. Some called them Collection Lawyers. Everybody hates collection lawyers. Even collection lawyers.”

“Oh dear. So, finish your story. How can we get off the Grid?”

“We have to go to America,” Grey says. “Take all our money out, stop using banks, no more ATMs, no long distance phone calls to your mother, nothing in our name, utilities, nothing. Shut down our Internet accounts. No more e-mail to any of our friends. Drop out of electronic civilization, and stay away from places like England that have a video camera every 20 feet.”

He continues: “Gotta have some sort of population around you, otherwise your body heat would stand out. Misdirect view away from you, camouflage as one of the ants. Or we can just act real crazy and loud and swear on the streets and wave our arms and no one would pay attention to us this way too. Become so obvious they just don’t see you anymore.”

Polly says, “I’m afraid the end point of your logic is lucid insanity, Smokey.”

THE CASE OF THE WET BANDYSNATCH

THE CASE OF THE WET BANDYSNATCH

Reporter Polly Pureheart poses patiently. Private Eye Smokey Grey inserts his key into the door. A Moroccan door, blue. The key halts its turn in the lock. Smokey bends down, rubs his fingers along something on the lower third of the door. It’s a mysterious mark, Arabic writing in chalk. Low, as though written by a child. The author asserted the mark over a film of chalk dust. The film indicates many prior etchings have occurred, and have been dutifully smudged off.

Smokey and Polly step through the dirty blue door into a dark kitchen. The musty apartment doesn’t have many amenities, but what it lacks in comfort, it makes up for in magic ambiance… step outside the door into crooked alley with buildings old and unstraight leaning between irregular stone arches and you’re in foreign movie land. Stay inside the apartment and the city caravans its never silent soundtrack by the blue door, the only door.

Smokey makes a discovery: “Look, Polly, there are panties growing like fungus on the kitchen chairs. There’s one chair, there are two chairs… it’s like the Bandysnatch was here.”

Smokey feels a pair of panties. It’s inside-out, and hung to dry on the back of the kitchen chair. “It’s wet…” He rubs the moisture thoughtfully between his thumb and middle finger.

“The Wet Bandysnatch?”

“Yes. The snatcher of bits bandied.”

“And it leaves panties on the chairs. Ah, the Case of the Wet Bandysnatch… Oh, Smokey Grey!”

“Smokey Grey…” Grey growls. “Ruddy Red?”

“What did you say?” Polly asks.

“You look like a ruddy red lumberjack with your sunburn.”

“I look like a guy?” Polly’s elfin face shows slight irritation, puckering worry lines between her eyebrows. The sunburn enhances the contrast of her skin with the lily whites of her eyes.

“Well, in your case it would be more Limber Jill,” Smokey says.

“Oh, OK.” She follows him into their clammy tiled salon. It’s hung with Pureheart’s wax art. To her dismay, beads of water have condensed on the art. She dabs it with a tissue.

Smokey settles on the couch, unwraps a bar of chocolate. Doses are broken off in a manner so as to round one edge. It is a delicately nibbled candy bar. Its perfume wafts over to Polly. Smells like an orange, she thinks.

“A lot of crazy shit comes out your mouth, Smokey,” Polly reflects. “But you look dignified, somber, composed.”

She settles next to Smokey, sitting Indian style on the couch. She wears a traditional Indian shirt over beat-up jeans. Smokey sticks some chocolate on a needle. The needle is mounted on a makeshift platform, a Philip K. Dick book. He lights the pellet of chocolate. Holds the orange flame eye level in judgement.

“I may look composed,” Smokey says, “but every now and then They look away, and one of Us slips out, dances about. They can’t keep their eye on Us all the time.”

He blows out the flame, releasing a thick white smoke plume.

“Oh yes They can,” Polly says. “They watch you.”

“There are a lot of Us in here. They make most of Us stand in line.”

“I caughtcha. I catch what you say when you think I’m zoning out.”

“Oh, do you work for Them?” Smokey asks, tenderly.

He passes the needle platform to Polly, capturing the smoke under a jelly jar. She tips it up, takes a sip.

“Oh, zone. Ozone. You’re my surrealogram…” Grey waxes.

“What?”

“You’re my surrealogram to the future.”

Polly tries a Dadaist comeback: “Are you going to eat me?”

“No, there were discussions of eating you. but then you came up with the conversations. so we decided it’d be like killing the golden tape recorder goose.”

“Phew. I hate it when you put an apple on my head, Burroughs. I love you.”

“Don’t worry, Polly, I’m just a babbler. I’m a psycho logical babbler from way back.”

The duo passes the smoke cup in silence for a while. They relax in collapsed comfort on their salon couch, watching the intricate riotous tiled wall.

“I know why they have these tiled walls,” says Polly. “They’re like psychedelic bursts.” The tiles explode in firecracker pattern and color.

“Yes,” says Smokey. “There were a lot of drugs in Africa in the old days so maybe after the brown sameness of riding camels through desert in sun, they came to the cities, did drugs, and watched the wall tiles explode. These heavily patterned tiles are rock concert light shows. Toss in some hookas, a few belly dancers and you have a mixed media sound and vision art performance.”

“And I can see how the pattern represents Universality.”

“Repeated patterns symbolize the everywhere-ness of God: God is all, everything, complex, complicated, the core and the source. Rather like the DNA which creates bioforms, or the underlying quarks which build reality. Or maybe the sand scratches their eyeballs and they see a soft unfocused undulating wave of dancing color instead of the thousands of individual intricacies constituting the pattern.”

Smokey and Polly relax without talking for several minutes. The volume of street murmur amps up, permeates the tiled walls, the thin plastic windows into the apartment. Polly loses her focus in the sea of tile. A kitten mews piteously, repeatedly, insistently. The mew becomes louder, finally punctuating itself into Polly’s consciousness, and then she loses it in the rising murmur.

“They’re upping the volume of the street noise again,” she observes. “We gotta start talking; they’re on commercial break.”

“They touch the knobs on people to make it louder or softer,” says Smokey. “They’re listening. They attend to our soundtrack.”

“They touch the knobs on people?” Polly asks.

“Yeah, They nudge the knobs on people. Animals too.”

“Are the people constructs?”

“No, Polly,” Smokey explains. “The constructs are pre-set. So it’s only necessary to nudge the knobs for real people. Sometimes They don’t have to do it manually, because some of people knobs are temperature sensitive, and some of knobs are density sensitive.”

Pureheart thinks of mass psychosis and propaganda. “Why do the knobs sense density, Smokey?”

“Well, Polly, take the Texas Rabbits as an example. When the rabbits fuck too many of themselves into existence they develop a nervous condition. They twitch a lot, die off. So the population density reduces for optimal survival. We need those kinds of switches in people, in case of high People per Construct ratio.”

“OK…” Polly sounds dubious. “Why is it important to have a low ratio?”

“You never know what’ll happen when you get too many People together.”

“Oh, so that’s why They’re shutting down those liberal churches,” Pureheart realizes. “They’re pestering the churches because the churches try to raise awareness to change what’s going on. They call the churches ‘political’ and they remove the tax-exempt status. Meanwhile, they fund churches who promote Their status quo.”

“Good for Them,” says Smokey. “The churches are all dens of false hope, anyway.”

“Oh, Smokey, the Case of the Dens of False Hope!”

“The concept of trailer trash stigmatizes poor people.”

“You and I could become trailer trash, you know. You could swear and get drunk and I could fart a lot.”

“Well, it’s an injustice.”

“Aha! There’s my little leftist radical come out of hiding. That’s alright. You won’t shake my faith in the government, not any more than it is.”

“I notice all the patriotic propaganda Hollywood movies. Hollywood’s just a tool of the State.”

“Tool of the State. You’re becoming radicalized, Polly. Your writing… World Trade Organization, the Dems not being honorable, Global Warming, World Hunger… And now you’re on the World Trade Organization’s Leader. You’ve becomed radicalized. That’s what happens when you get raised by hippies.”

“That’s what it is, tho. I remember when it all changed in the 90s. All these new TV shows, like the fascist COPS show on Fox - they’re saying to minorities - look out - this will happen to you. This is what we do to you… You know, the propaganda machine wants you to be scared.”

“Or sleepy with pleasure.”

“They want everyone to worship the perfect family with the perfect appliances. Meanwhile no one can ever be that perfect family.”

“The plu-perfect Republic. United We Spend!”

“That’s exactly it. We’re all a little too different from the Aryan ideal - no one could fit in perfectly. So that gives us all this shared sin, which tells us that we’re defective and superior at the same time.”

“I’m not defective. I just don’t work right.”

“Like that movie, Enemy of the State, you’re supposed to identify with Smith’s character. Which would seem like a good thing; you’re standing up to the Machine. But actually, the movie makes you scared for the character and scared of the State.”

“I think it’s right proper to be scared of the State, Polly. There’re a lotta weird people in it, and they do what they want. Your only real chance is not getting *noticed*, you know that?”

“No, I think the opposite is true. You want to dissent publicly, and IN WRITING especially. Because if other people know you’ve been dissenting, and then notice you’re MISSING, they’ll know what’s been done. If know one knows, then they can just pick you off. That’s what censorship’s about. It’s got real consequences. I have a lotta theories about this stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The theories just come out when they want to. It’s a kind of constant strategizing I have in my head. I always doing a maximum life optimization.”

“Temperature sensitive…” Polly ponders. “Why do People need temperature sensitive knobs, Smokey?”

“Well, if you want a logical experiment, then you gotta vary the parameters, up the temperature. Run your subjects a little closer to the wire. See what happens when there’s less room to compute. UP the experimental WATTAGE! So, temperature sensitive and density sensitive - there are probably other models but They don’t tell me everything.”

“Who are They, the satellite?”

“Actually, the satellite might be a ‘They.’ I don’t know. I might be a They, who knows? The United Mutants of Smokey. We rule our little kingdom with enigmatic t-shirts.”

He pauses, says, “Most of my me’s keep in touch, get along.”

“Do any go bye-bye?”

“I ain’t seen some in a while. I’m gettin less surprised less often with a new one popping up.”

“I say when they pop up, kill them,” says Polly mischievously.

“Like those little monkey games you see in the zoo? Whap-a-primate?”

“How many me’s you got?”

“Probably seven mes, but somehow they break down into three equal keys, so, I’m not sure quite how that works. Seven’s a safe number. You can get away with a lot with seven. A lot of room to maneuver. And don’t forget Oversoul Seven. Your soul breaks down into seven lives over seven times, but there is no time and it’s all the same soul.”

“That sounds like good rap.”

“That’s Oversoul Seven. Seven’s also four and three so you have four directions and the holy trinity. Bible says forgive seven times seven to the seventh… but basically they break down into the Three: Databank, Desire and Logic.”

“That seems like a good parsing.”

“A parsing in a pear tree!”

“How do you know who’s who?”

“Repetition. Long period of time repetition. Gettin harder to lie to myself. I’ve been around myself too long.”

“It’s been a long time, Smokey, since we’ve been with any other people. It was odd yesterday, talking with that British couple. I felt stilted in my speech. Even though the couple was progressive, I felt like I was talking to Them.”

“Yes, it’s been a long time since we talked to Them. I gotta let you out and play every once in a while.”

“People might think we’re crazy.”

“Depends on who makes the rules. Next time I’ll let you play more. Give you more time. I won’t bite them. Just give them little subconscious snarls every now and then to keep them ill at ease.”

“Yes, you’ve gotta stop biting hands, Smokey.”

“I’ll play nice if they’ll play nice.” Smokey cracks a glinty side smile at Polly.

“Oh, you’re such a creature.” Polly rubs his head.

THE A-1 MOTEL

THE A-1 MOTEL
Smith Story

I think there’re only four things I remember about Phoenix: It was really hot. There was absolutely no rusted metal trash on the streets, because there’s no humidity, no snow, no salt. You absolutely can not get anywhere in Phoenix you have to be by public transportation.

And one of my special memories: The first night I got there, hitchhiking, I arrived at four in the morning. I climbed a hill in a park in the dark. Set there surrounded by the sweet smell of honeysuckle, which I’d never smelt before. Smoked the last of my dope. Watched the sun come up.

That’s about all I remember about Phoenix.

“Why did you go there?”

Cat had no sense about women. His girlfriend left him and got a job in Phoenix in a hamburger bar. So he convinced us to go with him, to win her back.

Jones took one car and another engine, jury-rigged them together. That got us a quarter way there before we blew the rod.

“Jones had mechanical skills.”

Theoretically. The car didn’t make it to Phoenix, though, did it.

“But he swapped out a whole engine.”

Didn’t work, did it. His brother kept trying to synthesize hallucinogenics from local plants, which never worked either.

So we were high on chemicals and grass and maybe mushrooms, going down this long highway hill. Threw the rod. Black smoke billowed out the car. Pulled on the side. Looked down the hill: there’s a state trooper radar trap.

Cops are looking at us. Me being the biggest, the oldest and probably the smartest… I can lie better than they do, I get out, walk down to the cops. With a straight face, I ask them if they can call a wrecker for us.

They ask just enough questions to realize we don’t have triple-A or insurance, so they can call one of their friends and get a kickback. Makes them happy.

So I walk back up the hill. That’s when we start hitchhiking.

“What happened when your brother found his girlfriend?”

We went to where she worked. The other thing about her. She looked, from top to bottom, like Olive Oil. And after Cat died, I saw a nude polaroid of her. Olive Oil may have had a better figure. This woman was one line, from top to bottom, with stick arms, and stick legs.

She fed us free hamburgers. She convinced Cat the reason she left him is because she didn’t want to be with him anymore. So that was that.

We were staying in the A-1 Motel. Drinking cans of A-1 beer.

“Really? You’re shitting me.”

Yes. A-dash-one. The three of us. Smith, Smith and Jones.

“So, Jones again, eh? He must have egged you on. You have some stories with him.”

No, Jones was quiet. Cat and I were the egger-onners.

“Uh-huh?”

There was one bed. An unknown number of large… dry… chittering… cockroaches. They were big. They made noise.

We took turns. One night in the bed, two nights on the floor with the cockroaches.

“Ew hew hew.”

The cockroaches even took showers with us.

* * *

Our second night in Phoenix, we looked for work. Got a job taking the carnival down. We did speed, White Crosses. I love White Crosses. And after we were done, we were told we took the Ferris Wheel down an hour-and-a-half faster than it’d ever been taken down before. They offered us a job. But they were going back the way we’d just hitchhiked, so we said no. And as you know, that’s one of my major regrets in life.

So we went to the City of Phoenix’s employment agency. Got a job putting in sprinkler systems in a new housing development being built in the desert.

“Yuck.”

You really don’t want to dig trenches in hard, baked desert earth. Every lunch, the boss’d take everybody to lunch, and we drank pitchers of beer to replenish our liquid levels. Did that for three weeks. The boss really liked me. Moved me from digging ditches to installing the timer mechanisms for the sprinklers. When we told him we were going home, he offered us more money to stay.

Before we got that job, we were running out of drinking money. So we called Pappy, told him to send us the rest of our money. When Pappy answered the phone, Cat said, ‘Have I got some aluminum siding for you…’

Pappy said, ‘No you don’t.’ Hung up.

That was the period Cat’d read ‘Steal This Book’ by Jerry Rubin. So he followed some of his advice, which is, go into the stores, try their colognes every day, try and smell good.

“Hahaha!!!”

And there was a shopping center next to the motel. And they left their plants out at night. We we stole twenty plants one night. Filled the A-1 motel room with plants.

The night before that, we’d gone through the shopping center and every single decal they had on the outside of the door, like ‘Enter’, Visa credit cards, the hours of the store — anything that was a stick-on decal on the outside of the store — we peeled off.

Being collage artists, we were really skilled at getting *things* off of *things*. So we peeled off all these signs, stuck them on our shirts and pants, went back to the motel room covered in lettering.”

“I’m wondering what it’d be like if you were apprehended in such a state.”

I have no idea.

* * *

There was an American Indian in the room next door with his family… every time he’d get ready to go back to the Reservation, he’d say, ‘Well, back to the Resolution.’

I have no idea why he was going back, since he lived in the A-1 motel. He claimed he used to drive Marty Robbins around before he got famous. Said back then, Marty Robbins was drunk most of the time.”

“Who’s Marty Robbins?”

You don’t know country music, do you. Devil Woman. Ah, remember El Paso? The town of El Paso, the song? If you heard it, I think you’d know it.

“Hmmm.”

His huge hit was El Paso. ‘Bout a guy who was dancin’ with another man’s girl. The guy called him on it, and he shot him down. Then he rode away and escaped. But missed the woman so much that he rode back, and they shot him. And he died in the woman’s arms. And he said, ‘Dying is less pain then being away from her.’ Then he had ‘Don’t worry about Me,’ ‘Devil Woman’, and one called ‘My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.’ Tons of huge hits. And he had a real purty voice.

“Back to the Indian…”

Well, Jones had left. So our conditions improved. One night in the bed, one night on the floor with the cockroaches.

When Cat and I left to hitchhike back to Michigan, Indian gave us a handful of weak marijuana. Somewhere in Arizona, where you could see Shiprock, after a ride, Cat and I left the road, climbed up a butte, sat on the top, our legs dangling over, smoked some of the grass and got really stoned. Came back down and a Grand Canyon river guide picked us up in his small pickup. We shared our grass with him. Then Cat said, ‘That’s all.’

Forty minutes later, Cat said, ‘I lied.’ And we had a couple more bowls. This time, it really was gone.

River guide said he lived in Telluride. It’s famous for the Sundance Film Festival. He said he was going on, he wouldn’t be there, but we could sleep in his place that night. Always amazed me that a total stranger picked us up and let us sleep in his house without him. But since he was going on, we decided to catch a further ride with him.
By this time, I was riding in the back of the pickup. Because without grass, it was too many people up front. He tapped on the back window. Pointed up the mountain, Rocky Mountains. There was a herd of elk going up the mountain.

He let us off. We slept in our sleeping bags, high in the Rocky Mountains. Woke up covered in snow. This was in the summer.

Drank ice cold pure water out of the river.

Our next ride was a van of part-time carpenters. They worked six months a year, took the money, and drove down to South America the other six months a year and smoked dope.

We smoked their dope a couple hundred miles.

Then some *family* picked us up. Had one space in the back seat with the family and the kids and everything, but got us and our bags in there too. Very uncomfortable, but real nice people.

Our last little bit, we *could not* get a ride. So we walked back on the highway where we knew it was illegal and we stuck out our thumbs.

State cop pulled over. While he was questioning us, found out we lived in Brahman, Michigan. His brother lived there. So he drove us most of the way home!

* * *

“Why did you stay so long in Phoenix?”

It was another place to be. We were there. We found dope the first couple nights in a pool hall. The A-1 Motel had some character to it. There were three of us. Ah… there’s one other part to this…

After we ran out of money, before we called Pappy, we were really getting desperate. So we talked about doing another armed robbery.

“Oh no.”

It’d be their first. It’d me my third. But none of us had the heart for it. It never went beyond talk.

So we called Pappy, got a little more money, and then at the last moment, the desert ditch digging job came through. So at that point, we could’ve stayed. But who in their right mind wants to live in Phoenix and dig ditches in the desert?

GOOD COP STORY

GOOD COP STORY

Fueling the car,
outside Brahman, Michigan

Hose breaks.

Gets gas all over my white pants.

I go to the men’s room,
take my pants off,
wash with cold water,
put em back on.

but I don’t wear underwear –
so this isn’t pleasant –

So, driving down road
as passenger,
I take my pants off

Hang em out the window to dry –

State trooper pulls us over.

I’m indignant,
arrogant
and naked.

We haven’t broken any laws

But he just wants to check,
thinks my white pants
are a flag for help

I apologize.

As he turns to leave,
he points at the marijuana pipe in the ashtray.

Says,

Might wanna hide that.

So that’s that,
a good cop story.

And I am an asshole.

Smith & Lady, 2006