Above my couch is an aurora shaped like a brain. A connectome so bright and silky its light slips under my eyelids and into my pores. Like oil.
“Fuck off,” I say taking a pillow and placing it over my face. It’s too early to wake up.
But the morning doesn’t listen and now I feel shame. Starting in the spine and diaphragm, it radiates, turning all bones and meat soft. The pelvis goes gray. The ribs and humerus shafts wilt. It’s a shame without bottom. Yet again I have drank and drugged myself into this beautiful state.
After about ten more minutes of wallowing, I get myself propped up on the couch. I light a cigarette and tap the ash carefully on the rim of an empty wine bottle. Here in the midmorning of the midweek, I have the ability to reflect in the purest and harshest way possible. It’s quiet.
I start fishing out pieces from the black goop. A street. Dirty gum-spots on the street. Sodium-vapor lamps. Squeaking. The memory comes to me.
Last night before I was drunk, I was coming home from the bodega with chips and 40s for after the wine and coke were done. There on the street, a man tried to mug me for my phone. He snuck up on his bike from behind and tried to snatch it and pedal off, but somehow, my body reacted and I clamped down and he was ten feet ahead by the time he noticed nothing was in his hand. He stopped and his shoulders slumped in failure. He turned wobbly on the children’s bike—which I could now see was the thing making the squeaking noise before—his knees up by his shoulders, and started back at me. When he got back, he put on a mean-looking face again and pretended to retrieve a gun from inside his jacket.
“Give me the fucking phone and your wallet,” he said.
Instinctually, I started right at him. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there, but my body seemed to have a plan. The mugger’s eyes went wide, and, jostling around like a boner in sweatpants, his hand kept searching for the gun. But then nothing emerged to blast a hole in my chest. My body was right to charge—he was bluffing.
“I’ll fucking get you, pussy!” he called squeaking off down the street and turning at the corner of Flatbush. “Fucking little bitch!”
My cigarette is done now and I go to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Ham and mustard. I try to eat, but can’t get the mugger out of my head. His lack of resolve makes me lose my appetite and I throw the sandwich in the trash.
What has happened to this city? Muggers and stick-up boys used to have finesse. There was an art to it. The good ones even had catchphrases. “You know what it is,” they’d say pressing a gun in your back. And people knew. They knew to give the money over.
I get dressed at about one-thirty and go to my interview at San Remo pizza. I turn down Cortelyou and walk past 13th. Without threat, the city has been taken over by far worse creatures. Men in Dockers and Nike Monarchs are hanging out at the train stop, not a care in the world. Picking flecks of chain restaurant food from their teeth with their fingers. Goddamn whistling. There’s fat women waddling like penguins. It’s become a village of pus. Oysters vibrate in their shells as my hungover feet lump past people eating outside fancy restaurants. It’s a beautiful day! Pink-gray in the sky. I lumber and look, look past the safety and shine and into the entrails of this world, carefully massaging and getting them to spurt out all the beer and the bologna and strip clubs and script-writing docs and ulcers and paranoia. The intestine world-tubes swell and pop as I mash them with my big fat feet. Out spills genital growths, warts, coffee enemas, and pancake houses where murderers plan and smoke. And now I zoom out from the entrails and look over the entire body, the thing. All of this juice and muck has been stuffed inside a casing of skin. Sewed up nicely in the body. And this is where the new creatures live. On the skin, in houses filled with lavish Neon-Beethoven frill. The world has become a Frill. Smoke and harpsichord psychedelia and green liquors poured into crystal stemware. People drinking with heavy carefree eyes. Here even the muggers, the criminals, stroll on top of the nice slick skin of the new world and whistle. No one ever has to get smart or sharp. They’ve all turned into pus-filled file clerks. Better maybe for crime rates, but surely horrible in the long run.
To live through what is coming, we need to be ready. We can’t get complacent. We need the drunken micks and the empty coke bags on the street and thuds of fists and taxi crashes and metal and glass monstrosities and dripping little cellars where everyone is talking about revolution and bodegas filled with brine and libraries where junkies sleep over computers of porn. A place where three-eyed fish are cut up and served. Where nutheads nut. Now it’s just dry cleaners that stretch out for a hundred blocks, their chemicals fumigating the minds of everyone on the way to Wall Street. The skin sew-ers want that. They are cold surgeons. They don’t want joy or despair getting in the way of perfection. They just want flat nice skin and nothing else. Everything clean and neat. No gutter. No butthole. Not even a belly button. Just a clone freak of a world.
And now I see a toilet seat. I see vomit swirling down and the porcelain becoming clean. I am sucked out of my thoughts and placed firmly in reality again.
After storming in and running to the back and throwing up in the restroom of this pizza place I am applying to work at, I come out and the owner looks a bit upset with me.
“We’re not going to take a drunk like you,” he says proudly.
“OK,” I say. I look down at the display of pizzas, then up at him. “Can you make me a slice?”
I come out of the Chinese food place with my Chinese takeout and head back home. I am not mugged, or yelled at, or anything. I’m like a brand new baby without an immune system.
