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January 17, 2005

The shopping spree - dead engine

Haven't you seen us?

Haven't you seen us crumbling thru Lou, Red, Muse and me, in the barrier, outside of the bunker, making jokes and faces, making noise. To the square in front of the Cathedral I tried to kill Lou in the fountain. And when a blond haired policeman shook his hand and said: "Don't you, guuuuys, peeeeople, you'd better go".

High.

Gumshoe, bring bills along. Machines on auto-respond, hail the crew in, hang on, shut up, park kid, enjoy a few faces, vespashooting, polished faces of pink churches, a few stars, stoned angels sharing sympathetic fears from higher grounds.

Deploy.

Lou bought the future in his hand, by the square, and he closed the door behind him for a week, and I: "I've told you stupid, that guy here or what doesn't looks like being comfortable". And he yelled out a: "But it's true, stupid!" We played with the guys and it was beautiful and Red and the guys.

Down and up, checking paperbacks, magazines and the panels they set, out, and I told you, colorful, slim, not a solid scene, but nothing and proceed onto Benetton's new color matrix which was 012 colors last year and the persistent cork-full high-heels migrating to men's. Watch your steps, Red, isn't that disgusting? No, but up, higher, take a left, rushing the line, buy America, fold down two buttoned-up immaculate white shirts, low collar chinese, Muse says Calcutta, minimal for the masses and 3 pairs of linen pants 3 different colors just a little too long. And down, get those wet-orange pants, which is a double, and carry em all on your chest like an infant, and thru a pile of black ties, all black and all shiny dipping in big blue bags, printed and glued in Manila. Can we add a few more? But higher? Lou? No. Down, slowly, chasing jewelry now and making up some. A bellybutton thing, I pause, or a umbilical cord I call it, that is crazy? I know shoes are getting less pointy this year neither they are getting round and men's still on ephedrine, redbull for free for all. Ice cream, fast, leave chocolate dripping to the birds, flying low and I get a scare when the bird's eye darts 2 inches out of my shoulder and I go down. Down and up. Stretched-up underwear on display, pink, green but faint, the t-rex is missing, can catch a UFO if I want to. Drop a few on black bulk sunglasses I look good in the glass, I dunno, and Red's browsing to find the match and she doesn't. Hair color comfortable, 1973, smiles my babe. Jumping from the sun side to the shade SIDE and tip-tapping and I'm in deep, touch a few bottles, thinking of the one we're working, classy, classic, tall, fat, transparent? Anything, no, down. Translucent! Laughs. The line at the cosmetic's ward is a waiting room. Dykes get full consultation on issues the least likely and screening on shades and tints, related, unrelated and color-coded, mode d'employ, bon jour Coco. Browsing Chanel, laughing at Kenzo's boxes. Giant eyeliner, blue, floating. Decompressing, wake up on the stairways. Enough with the charm and in the sun again, up.

Bo took me to McDonalds because she likes hamburgers, lazy by the window, her fish untouched, Italian restaurants and people and the streets, lonely men white like blankets beyond the walls, bleached bones, the metro unfinished and the neon lights, taxi drivers.

And down.

A phone, I don't want one but slow down, target the table right, a shiny metal oasis by the door with the palm tree, coffee time. We are sitting down, scanning faces, drinking water and talking about umbilical cords made of silver, gold, white pearls and black pearls. Will suit the dying trend of low ass pants and hair shirts. Laughs. Two more summers? Tie it to your 501, add tiny cowbells, make a mess. Black out shoes, orange, low ass boots, comrades getting high.

You haven't seen us.

Up? No, down, down fast for a dip into the fish market mess, blood everywhere, lambs sliced in halves, chopping pig's head with the chainsaw and is full of tourists taking photos and smiling at the slaughtering. Observations, exotica, the med's photo album. But flowers come first. We get 5 fishes, one is smiling, the others crying to be done for good, money passes by, coins shimmering, it's spring's, lemons, prepped up lettuce and more of the guts. I carry my dead boys thru faces perplexed, tired, crying kids in tow of bigger customers. Wait, up, no. Down, my salad man smiles and we get 3, pistachio, nuts, some more, more and pine nuts. Where did I drop them?

And I got this thing, she said, that we're off-center and we feel good wherever it's not home, On the metro again, a line to the other, marking the time, tracking down.

Second floor at the bank, she was afraid she could stumble at each step, but I could see everything and I covered her eyes with my hand. Killing time at the Yamamay shop-front aNd it was as if there was nothing better than ice cream. Turn left, watch the water, while the dead stones by the bridge, the trembling lights, surrounding And the students, inviting you to come visit the university, explaining with their broken English how funny the students are and how beautiful the town can be with the good friends and you cannot be sad because it's home.

Walking in the park under the bridges line, silver sparkles in the waterway, down, down to the bridge. And high and Red was giving away beers, we all got drunk and had fried fish and meatballs and wine, and Kelly was shaking the money yelling "Ehi, should have seen the bus skipping like a stone" we screamed out louder, and I didn't know what he was talking about.

You haven't seen us, and drank again. I smiled to Lou 'cause he told me my name gained a Whoopee from the crowded hall. Kudos our hero.

Wait, up.

Kids start pouring out of schools everywhere, waves of little bodies scattered and noisy, laughing and phoning to locate cars, parents. This is the slow ride.

up, take a left now and take a break now, sit, scream, scare two with the evil eye, have a cigarette, talk of the weather. Things are now almost getting better. Nothing, crashing, undoing and dressing up, tossing sugar-cubes and smiles over my shoulders.

AND I was somewhere else all the time and now I'm still somewhere else and Muse, she got her job, she gets tired, lazy and sweet as she is.

Here comes the kid and everybody smile again under a light shower of invisible raindrops.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at 02:57 PM

Sub Rosa - dead engine

We were at Con Station: Catherine was doing PR because sometimes that's what she does, and I was there because Cathy was there and she was awfully pretty.

Cathy was parading Paula Doves around, a chinless and evidently noted pop-art historian, walking in under a floating neon light flashing “Raining to beat”. Love is there, it’s all right. I disconnected my phone as sis had spent the day hammering me. Red was hysterical, half lost on some faint kids fantasy.

Paula was a small woman, blond, smooth, straight hair streaked with premature gray and flashing at tan like crazy.

We were hanging out at the bar and around the corner with a couple of empty drinks and Cathy was smiling or doing a thing she must have thought was like a smile, the expression appropriate to the situation, nodding in time to the girl’s slurred inanities and I knew something now. They were both human in a way I hated myself for admitting.

I think they saw me as I left, I was practically running. I never saw them again for the rest of the night. Bets were being made and being covered, sis restarted the whining on the wire.

I thought myself into Paula Dove’s favorite examples of style, she had sent some books on Thirties design, photo of streamlined buildings, stadiums, ephemeral stuff distilled of broken dreams, semiotic platforms of cultural imagery. I watched the moon for some time and decided to go to sleep, which I’d intended to do for years. The light came from somewhere behind me and then the voice. Red was in the room, screaming and in tears.

“You let her go?”
“That’s right”, I said, “this lil terror with Tan giving you a hard time?”
“Yes, Indeed”, she answered, and laughed. Just the right amount of laugh.

She went to the bathroom and splashed her face with water then she turned back with something different in her steps passing thru a reflection in the Art Deco mirrors in my corridor and sat beside me. Her lips did not move till she was within earshot.

“... do you like Paula?”
“Sure, but in the sense that... she is a lot of a human fixture or something”

Thru a sweeping sense of relief, I had a strange kind of admiration, a strange pride.

I did not feel like making small talk but we drank and drank and went laughing, just the right kind of laugh.

It started pouring and then raining.
Red shifted into sleep quickly, pupils sealed beneath the faint shades of neon from the window.

The phone rang again.
She just said “Thanks” and then the dial tone when she hung up. She said it right, like a real human being.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at 02:53 PM

Red vs. Tan - dead engine

When they were 18 inches tall, and head perimeter was 13, on the 4th week of their life, they started to smile to mum and follow with their eyes the little toy bears hanging above their bed.

Now they are tall, standing close to six feet. Two women standing close in a yard, fence and tree in the background, wearing dark hair back in a ponytail with the bangs falling down around their chin.

Red has pale green eyes, large, blending with her pale skin, Tan has dark brown eyes.

Clothing gives a nod to the conservative, mostly pen stripe suits and earth tones mixed with white. Around the neck gold scrolls work choker bearing a knot. Hidden within the knots are several seals.

Around each left wrist is a silver charm. Red, an extra button undone, a small chain ending in a coil. The only thing that seems to clash with her beauty is the heavy shoe, doc martins.

Smiles light up the room, and laughing is contagious.
Driven and serious among good friends, lighten up on the inside, no one would know they relax. At heart they are both fanatical.

Red loves Steve and Frank, they are brothers, and will do whatever needs to so that they remain safe. Frank loves Tan, which he calls Cathy.

Their speech patterns have changed in the past three years and now are diverging. Red’s words are clipped and the pronunciation precise. When excited this is so apparent that she sounds like a typewriter near a deadline. Tan enjoys her seductive voice, it conveys that she knows what she wants.

They were both born to an upper-middle class family on Long Island. Mother was a professor of Journalism at a small liberal arts college.

Once one of the playmates from around the corner died, probably of leukemia. Mother took Red and Tan to the funeral and up to see Rachel. Rachel's hands clasped over her chest, and her face was bloodless, and her hands were flat. Mother leaned over to both and she said, "This is what happens when you don't listen to your mother."

After elementary school the girls began to flourish. Legs lengthened, and began to loose baby fat. Maybe it was sports and the roughhousing that did it, but soon they were tall and slim, with tight muscles. Both were also very popular.

Things changed when they were sent to a private boarding school. At the school they were not popular girls. They were teased for being independent and forced to spend free time in the library, with nose in books, or in the forest, with feet in mud.

It was during these times when visions occasionally came to them when alone in the woods, and dreams began to disturb by their accuracy. One night one dreamed that the school nun was making love to the Headmistress. Three days later were delivering a package to the chapel and came upon the two kissing. Hours in the library turned from schoolwork and they began to research psychology looking for an explanation.

They graduated with high marks in sciences and mathematics and scores were high enough to earn a scholarship to NYU. They continued The search and took classes in journalism because of the emphasis on research. Not much party girls, but when roommates dragged them to clubs and parties they reverted to tomboy self and drank with the boys.

Red got a job with the New York Post after taking an internship there. She fought with the editors for a little more leeway in her coverage, and they allowed her some, but she was consistently passed over for raises.

Tan was taught to be aware of herself, her inner desires, her strengths, and what made her weak. She was schooled in philosophy, and got exposure to Greek, Latin, Arabic, French and German. She lives now in New York. Sometimes it confuses her when people take her in the eye and call her redhead. At age 27 she feelS as if life has just begun.

I watch them dancing on the sub floor in their vintage clothing and tell myself that everything has a skin that both reveals and conceals.

© Fortunato Caragliano, Published by HandToothNail, 2005

Posted by lck at 02:47 PM

Chance meeting... - dead engine

At a dinner table with the six-fold Chinese-speaking girlfriend.
Big brown eyes, dress-dress like the wing boy, I hear the dead engine talking. The danger people give themselves for feeling awkward. Dead ducks can't whistle, can I?

Tracing a line on the tablecloth with the tip of one lacquered nail while the speaker cuts a bit of morphology.
I get scared every day.
Sucking the charming and fresh little caramel feel, a selection of grains, give yourself time to get used to these wrinkles.
I may be assisting you.

Anytime people take an interest in me, if not their actual interest, extolling the dangers of uncontrolled run-on sentences by tempting to find, after the dinner, the last-known address on the principle of sharing the pain.

I plunk the brush down on the dressing table, stuck her tongue out at the reflection in the gilt-edged mirror. Looking into the mirror, two fingers crossed at the distant drive, pulling together a unified and blissful explanation.

With a reflective sigh, with few dangling bonds, she reaches for her notebook.

Push the plate from the edge of the table and trace a star on the white linen named Sunshine. I can finish glancing up quickly, pull the plate back down to cover the stains and try to think of something to do.

A stretch of regret and then she pushed out, sitting, in denial, envious, a little startled, reaching outward, looking for breaks and kinks of curiosity out of the growth chamber.

Turning to the left, and then the right, Catherine checked her hair in the mirror, and then took another swipe in a nearly comatose state of depressed sleep. After rising out the knife, closing the door of her apartment, Catherine waited patiently for her romantic shortcut to turn into a professional relationship.

Thread the fishing line into the sewing needle and push the needle through the hole in the bottom, wander at your 25th high school reunion, wave back the cravings for nicotine, drop off a song request at the online store.

Just outside the lobby, head buried in jacket, gloves, I tapped out a cigarette, shifted to block a stirring breeze and over the spurt of flame, straining to deeper questions. I knew there were troubles.

Along the front rows of parked cars and into an SUV, slammed the doors, sitting together in the back, nodding at each other to shatter some terrible pressure.

After one last soulful drag, Catherine had shaken her head. "Not as much as I deserved to become the victim of a starring role. I haven't yet determined why that is."

I grumbled under my breath at her failure of fabricating a Byzantine conspiracy.
Okay.
I sipped from a brown paper bag crimped around a Johnny Walker bottle.

"Frank?”

Funneling the paper bag into my pocket.
The real story only revolves when there is some nucleation site.
It doesn't melt, it rather sublimes.

"Frank, enlighten me, what's new with you?"

Receptive and ready to be sacrificed, absorbed, and devoured. An illusion, complementary and dissociated. This climactic "death,", an unraveling hand. "My divorce is finally legal," “Same difference”. "I am celebrating my freedom."

"There's little love lost between us"
I agreed.

"You were smart. I wasted fifteen years as a human to learn it."
A memory charged by domestic violence, short of breath, I stop when the phone rings, marry pretty faces and, involuntarily, shiver.
Without trying to arouse sympathy and curiosity, we are finally back in the present.
Present.
Wrapped.

Refugees, secrets, costal water jobs, memories.
Now.

About you?

Catherine speaks of the “nostalgia for paradise”, of the dangers of non-hypnotic rape, gracefully and insistently with no threat or fear, grabbing her hand as if trying to stop a tree branch from falling.

I pull the door open. Catherine is purring softly.

Tilting my head towards the stars I raise my arms up to my head closing them together until my hands meet.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at 02:44 PM