Goodnight Cat

His stool squeaks and shakes as his leg jumps up and down. Both of his feet are resting on the metal bar beneath the diner. His shirt is bright yellow. Three creamers lay on either side of his untouched cup of coffee. He’s got to be in his late 40’s, early 50’s. His hair is thinning with patches of white scattered amongst his salt and pepper scalp.

I start taking bets with myself as to what he’s going to order. The strawberry muffin? Maybe the Greek olive omelet with tiny chives catering to his vegetarianism. Perhaps something more filling, the Lumberjack Special with a side salad, no tomatoes, fat free sugar free dressing for his diabetes? The waiter stops and all the guy asks for is the check. Just coffee. He puts down a crumpled five and leaves.

I sip from my giant bedrock coffee mug which looks chiseled from white granite and appropriate for Fred Flinstone to drink out of. It’s handle is elongated and connects the top of the mug to the bottom, perfect for shaky old men with Alzheimer’s and loud smoking women who laugh hard, squeezing their yellow stained hands on thick mugs that won’t break.

At the end of the diner counter I spot a fellow writer. He looks Pakistani. His glasses rest at the end of his Santa Claus nose, bright red from thinking so hard. Deep in thought, I can see his pen hovering over the paper. The writer concentrates trying so hard to think of the word. His hand hasn’t moved an inch in minutes. Meticulous and precise, so into his craft, only to write the perfect word for his masterpiece. His eyes strain in his head. I can tell he is channeling the muse of diner inspiration. The waiter walks to the end of the counter and asks if he can refill his coffee. The writer raises a thick finger as if to say wait, not now, come back after my first publishing.

Behind me sit a table of old men talking all too loudly because of hearing aids that have gone out. Hearing aids that ring pitifully begging for a battery. I can hear one of them telling a story about a girl from way back when. A girl with red hair a red dress, blue eyes. A girl that took the jazz club’s breath away. So he says, the music stopped, people stopped talking. No one could even approach this beauty. He calls her a “bombshell” and his voice starts to shake.

He had just gotten back from the war and visited this club with some buddies.

“You could imagine the state I was in. It had been eighteen months since I’d even seen a woman! To me, this girl was the most beautiful girl in the world and I had to have her.”

I can tell the rest of the table has heard this story about a million times because of their groaning, but I want to hear it.

“You know what I did to win her over?” he says, nudging an old guy in a white hat next to him.

“That wasn’t you, you old bastard. That was Rodger and he’s been dead for fifteen years!” the guy in the white hat says.

The man thinks for a moment, sipping his coffee. “Oh, well you’re right about that one aren’t you?”

“C- San Lucas Me-co” and a Gecko draped in a towel with sunglasses struggle to breathe. Wedged between fat folds on the back of a large white haired man who clutches the plastic booth opposite me to keep balance as he clunks past like an old Jalopy. As the Jalopy walks he mumbles loudly to himself about “finding that damn receipt for the trash compactor in the Sears’ catalog”. He finds his way to the waiting seats and sinks into them reminiscent of a sinking ship into a great white plastic sea.

The radio comes on through the ceiling, the music tunes out the old mumbling Jalopy, the crashing of dishes in the kitchen, the sounds of old men telling stories about things that never happened to them. The Pakistani writer stops writing, the waiter stops walking, everyone quiets down like it’s a Sunday mass.

“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true…”

My pen stops. All around me everyone just listens. I see a smile come over the red face of the writer. The old Jalopy taps his foot. The waiter hums along. I think about my girl. Everyone is far away lost in memories, including me. We all remember when we first heard the song. Who it reminds us of. Old men remember girls from their pasts, lovers, fiancées. Widows wipe away tears before they hit their thick mascara. The writer finds his word and attacks the page with ink.

With that the waiter takes my check and I leave with a smile.

It’s moments like these that make me glad I’m a writer. I’ve found my word.

In my perfect world it’s always the middle of the night.

This takes place in a city. This city is named Lucid Dream.
The middle of the city is lit brightly, the outskirts dark.
The city’s center is large and open, skyscrapers tower around it.
Here, light parades up and down the streets.
People celebrate for no reason.
This is the part of the city people come to to feel something different.
Think of this as the urban Bahamas.

Outside of the center, the dark parts hold the diners and the bars of the city.
These bars and diners are hallowed ground.
People go to bars to confess their sins, they come here for reconciliation, they come here to hit bottom.
The bars close, but the diners are all night.
The diners are for the late late crowd, the people you find in Walmart at 2am.
Priests, prostitutes, taxi drivers, anyone, they all come together to share a cup of coffee in the wee hours of the morning.

Then the night starts over.

Sleep is discouraged, it’s considered a waste of time.

Bars, diners, night clubs, movie theaters, open all the time, this is where people spend most of their time when not working.
Movies replace history books, this is our culture, this is our past, this is our vision.
Modern “philosophers” get together, they discuss movies.
They talk about theme and plot and sub context and symbols.
People come together to see movies in the middle of the night.

Money doesn’t make you who you are.
Your job doesn’t make you who you are.
People work meaningless jobs.
Jobs are not respected, they’re just for money.
There are no scams, no price gouging, nothing that would make you have to worry about your bank account. No credit cards.

Consumerism is a crime.
Big brands only advertise on billboards, away from landmarks, away from the center of the city.
There are no giant 2 story screens towering over the public showing someone enjoying “Cup of Noodles”
Advertising is not subliminal, it’s not in your face.
People only buy the things they need.
No Baleri Italia wood finished kitchen utility set, no Armani purses.
No annoying catalogs, no stacked advertisements in your mailbox.
No commercials.

People don’t really use cars, they walk places, they take taxis, they take the bus.

The only weather here is rain or snow.
The rain cleans the streets, gives people a reason to take refuge in a bakery, coffee shop, mall, whatever.
The real gatherings in this world are because of coincidence.
There is no meeting hall.
The real gatherings are done over a cup of coffee, waiting for a bus, meeting in a club.

Many here are waiting for something.
Waiting for things they can’t remember to end or begin.
Some wait by the train tracks in the only train station for soldiers to come home.
For family members to return.
For loved ones to come back.

Photographs of people long gone.
Black and white, sepia, burned edges, stained by the sun, wrinkled by the rain.
Pictures are priceless.
These are the only connections to the world that these people have left behind.
These are the cherished items that people keep in their breast pocket, held close when afraid, buried with.
This is civilization’s reminder of what once was.

People do not have religion.
Greed and sloth, pride and envy. All forgotten here. There is no need.
There is no oppression, no great suffering.
There is no desperation other than the acknowledgment that everyone is desperate.
The only real tragedy here is that nothing will ever change, and everything will change.
This, is a way to start over.

Lying naked beneath the ivory pillars of the Gordin Tru Hotel, there is nothing left on her but quarters and dimes, a crumpled up dollar bill and a receipt from a smoke shop. The occasional nighthawk walks by and makes their contribution to the beautiful corpse. Sympathetic streetlights shine tall, making her cold skin pale. Her eyes are deep and dark, a layer of wet eye shadow congeals around her eyes. Her face lays in a puddle of tears, blackened by her mascara. The moon shines brightly in the dark puddle, little specks of blood make the stars in her teared sky.

A block down in the distance the sound of a bebop piano from an all night club rips up smoky wooden floors. The piano music breaks through the walls as people open the black doors to leave letting that wild sound out into the night.

Across and down the street, up the stairs and through the alley four or five sit at the counter in the late night diner, sipping coffee, reading the newspaper, staring off into the shadowed city. The all hours type of thing you only find in paintings and desaturated memories. A recognized customer, a slender gentleman with a cane and dark features left his coat at the door. His hands were pale tonight, paler then the diner server had ever seen them. The gentleman placed his hat on the counter and sat on a stool. No one looked up from their coffees and newspapers. He had never felt so cold in his life. Lost in thought, stirring cream into his mug, he remembered her. Always telling himself to forget the past, never to think of what could have been, what wasn’t, what he regretted. Don’t do this to yourself, he thought, as the steam ran down his throat. She was just a girl.

Just a girl…

The past has a funny way of making you forget faces. I could tell you the time of day, the weather, I could tell you what the marble smelled like in the hotel lobby that day. But I couldn’t tell you what her face looked like. I can tell you about a red dress. I can tell you about blood red stiletto high heels. Green eyes, lime green. A genuine leather bag, still smelling like it was tanned yesterday. She had the smell of sweet death on her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips as that lipstick moved with her words. She was the type of girl that would almost whisper just so you would have to really listen to every word. The type of girl you’d worship if you got the chance. She was never in one place longer than a night. You miss your chance, that’s it. You’ll never see her again. You’ll end up in a diner in the middle of the night feeling your veins pump ice.

My elbows rest on an ebony balcony railing as I look out across the wet city. She doesn’t believe me when I said that this would be the last rain we’d ever see together. Her perfect green eyes gaze at the clouded moon, a look of loneliness like I’ll never forget washes over her pale face. The two of us look out at the glowing lights, we both know we’re alone. Alone and cold and wet in a dark unforgiving city. It keep us wet. Always wet. I breathe out smoke into the night sky and watch it disappear. What’s wrong with this place… we’re fifty stories up and still not in heaven.

Don’t you know I loved your faults… Don’t you know I miss you now?

I miss you.

I have never been so alone. Even surrounded by people, I’ve never been so cold.

I miss you.

To be continued…

Cigarette, my playful pet

Going down, down,

We haven’t met, my lonely pet

Going down, down,

Crying eyes and lullabies,

Going down, down,

Staying thin with cold skin

Going down, down,

A bench for three, but only me

Going down, down,

Losing sleep and sex, my cigarettes

Going down, down,

Broken mirrors and dirty tears

Going down, down,

Smokey cars and empty bars

Going down, down,

Alone again with my only friend

Going down, down

Chris was a girl. Her full name was Cristal Tomas Renege Spectas. Chris for short. All through middle school she was Chris, all through high school she was Chris, all through the first half of the first semester of college she was Chris. After that, she was dead.

When her parents found her strapped to her bed naked with belts they had a sit down with her at the family dinner table, in the cozy little nook in her kitchen. With the homemade embroidered “A house is made of brick and stone, a home is made of love alone” circle, I’m sure it’s called something. They asked why she was doing these unholy acts. She told them it was her choice and her boyfriend had just been playing. Really though, replace boyfriend with single parent older girlfriend with tattoos and replace playing with S & M games. They found her tied up like that three other times.

On her tombstone the epitaph read, “Cristal T.R. Spectas” over “Our angel in earth, now our angel in heaven 1991-2008.” And as the rain poured down on the Bellwood graveyard, Chris’ father let out a long held back sigh of relief knowing full well the last thing that could possibly incriminate him for pedophilia was gone.

Mrs. Spectas took six Tylenol PM and finally fell asleep crying on her side of the bed while Mr. Spectas stayed up, staring at the ceiling and thought. Those little pasties, the little sharp moving spikes that look like cottage cheese on the ceiling. I’m sure it’s called something, made a mirage of colors in the changing night sky through the Spectas’ bedroom windows. He wasn’t proud about what he had done in his life, he couldn’t even look at himself naked in the bathroom mirror after a shower. He remembered the way it looked. The way his naked body appeared, hairy and bloated on the video. The date in the lower corner of the family video camera May, 12th 1998. The way Chris resisted, but in the end enjoyed it, but in the end kiss his thighs, his arms, his lips. how in the end she was addicted to sex, because of him and he knew it.

Mr. Spectas’ feet curled up in his blankets. He shook in his flannel pajamas with the stitched in velvet letters “his” on the back and breast. He sweat and shook and tasted blood. He started crying. All he ever wanted was to find god, he tells me. All he ever needed was to repent. He needed to be forgiven for the evil needs was born with. But as he sits, adjacent a woven screen and another woven screen, a wooden booth, as I count my Rosary beads with my left hand and scribble onto the back of a receipt with the other, I just can’t help but feel nothing for him.

“Three Hail Mary’s, one Glory Be, six Our Fathers.”

I can hear his crying stop as I leave the booth and shut the door with a heel. He covers his face and retreats back into the corner of the confessional as I open his door and pull back the curtain. I hand him the note.

“Also I expect a quarter of your monthly wage sent to this post office box every month. If you miss a month, Mr. Spectas, I might have to contact your wife.”

Rant

At 4:08am I’ve lost my appetite to sleep. My mind is plagued with ideas. Running like so much badly animated water from a water pump .gif circa 1992.

1992- lukewarm blue carpets and water coolers that are too thick for the tiny room they’re in. Buzzing yellow computers, stained by fluorescent lights and Squirt can reflections. You tell your best friend in his baggy cargos that she won’t remember this year. It’s gonna get blended in with the rest of this time period. It’s just going to be a stained yellow memory.

My life is the Truman Show. Not in the narcissistic way that I’m Truman or this is my show. No one is in on it. No one is consciously aware that they’re saying prewritten lines written by bad writers in smoky rooms with no air conditioning. A dark figure enters their dreams, combined from every commercial they’ve seen on television that day or heard on the radio or perhaps read on billboards. Subliminal hallucinogens that are read or heard or watched, useless by themselves but together they personify this figure. With thin fingers he touches your inner thigh and sits you down in a room with no windows. In your dream you are animated and sick with coke/smoke* disease. Here, for the entire night, you rehearse your lines for that next day’s conversations, direction asking, jokes. The dark figure is very particular about lines and makes you do them over and over and over until you get them perfectly correct. When you wake up that next morning you are exhausted from working all night. You don’t know it but you have at least 20 hours of lines memorized every single day. So the next time your boss sets you up for a witty joke and you take it, don’t give yourself so much credit. There’s a laugh track somewhere.

*Coke/smoke disease- A beverage that was released in the black space between your psyche and your libido twenty years from now. The cup is divided in half. Half of the cup is coke and half of the cup is smoke. With one straw you inhale the tobacco smoke and with the other you drink coke. Even though it seems like a fail safe plan it was discontinued in the aging of your dream story because of the sickness it caused. The disease was not fatal, but would result in the extreme passionate infatuation for Bono’s music and the vomiting of acrylic paints, mainly the colors red, gold and blue.

The Boy with Acetone for Blood

There once was a boy who was born with acetone for blood. He was brought into this world on a summer day in mid July. Immediately he was famous. As proud as they could be, his parents stood back and watched their son’s future floorish. Every local newspaper from every small county wanted pictures. They wrote article after article and the nation slowly fell in love with the small boy they affectionately named “The Cleaning Boy”. Soon the word grew and people from all over the world began to call this a miracle from god. Some even declared that this was their savior returning to bring them all to heaven. People from countries no one had ever heard of called the boy’s family to make appointments to see their son. The president soon found out about this wonder child and made him the country’s new mascot. Because it was a time of war this united the people. The president passed many laws and even got his picture on the country’s flag. Everyone loved The Cleaning Boy and he had a rich and famous future ahead of him. He was to be the next Six Million Dollar man. The next Don Juan for the ladies. The next role model for every child with a disability. When he grew up he would speak publicly to everyone who was different and tell them all how he, despite his difference, had made it onto the country’s flag. He would be a voice for the people. He would be their next courageous leader.

Sadly, none of this happened and he died shortly after he was born because he had acetone for blood.

The drawn beige drapes etch a thick curtain of rising dust in the morning sunlight throughout the cafe. The Moonlite Cafe was always cold. The front windows are wide open and the only person to accompany my lonely coffee cup is the waitress, but she’s busy scrubbing hard on the glass door. Trying to get the spray paint off. My hands are clasped tight under the table, shaking slightly, pulling each finger out of my fingerless gloves and putting them back in. I haven’t felt right all day.

The last time I had this underlying abundant chaos feeling I was six and a half years old. Having just moved into our new house, I laid awake on the bare mattress my father had pulled off of the moving truck. Staring at the silly string textured ceiling in the dark empty house I got this feeling for the first time. This feeling that everything would not be okay. I didn’t have control of the situation and further from that, my life. I heard feathers. My mother died of a brain aneurysm that night. My dad found her in the fetal position, huddled in the corner of the shower. I told my father years later about this feeling I got the day she died. He told me to never ignore that. He told me that there is so much more to life than meets the eye. It seemed he couldn’t stress enough how important this was.

The time on my watch is 8:28 am. This is one of those days I feel the rare need to call in sick, to hide in my apartment. I’ll finish this cup of coffee, call my boss, get on the bus and just go home. No need to risk everything by ignoring this feeling. I finish the rest of my coffee in the silence of the cafe. I stand up, pay my bill and as I walk out the door, with my cell phone in hand, I stop and my eyes go wide. Beneath the green canopy of this corner cafe my heart beats slowly and the morning air is more still than it ever has been. In the dead cold of the morning I hear the sound of feathers.

Part 1
“Cabriole”

“You aren’t clean” the ceramic mother tells her chipped son, “get back to the soap and wash that smile off your face.”

Street lamps gather in circles and count plastic shooting stars. Small animals with painted smiling faces ride the merry-go-round. Wooden cats balance on strings.

Beneath the towering stuffed bears the angel of death stands with a small boy.

The angel stands tall and slender, her long blond hair rests between her shoulder blades. She balances on the soles of her feet with both hands in her back pockets looking around at the boy’s creations. Protruding out of her baby blue “Postal Service” shirt- elongated paper wings. Faded by smoke and darkness. Faded by hatred and happiness. Torn by those who didn’t want to go- those who held on.

The boy brushes his hair out of his eyes and smiles contently. Surrounded by everything he ever wanted in life, all of his dreams, all his carnal needs. His imagination runs wild, a family of mechanical penguins play chess on the other side of a mirror’s reflection.

His smile fades and he looks up to the angel, “what now?”

She pulls one hand out of her back pocket, “take my hand”.

He hesitates, his cheeks get a little red, “I don’t want to go yet.”

The clock on the wall sprouts legs and walks away.

She looks down to him, “I’m sorry, I have to get back to work. I have so many people to help today. I’m kinda like Santa.” She throws a hand up, “You like Santa right?”

He high fives her slowly, “I’m not ready yet.”

“This whole process… it’s never… well. Okay, now it’s like slipping into a warm bath and once you get into it you’ll feel more comfortable. It’s like going to college. You don’t want to drop out early cause you might never go back, ya know?”

He gives her a bewildered look. Every mirror in the room shatters.

“You don’t want to miss your funeral” she says.

He shakes his head throwing his shaggy brown hair back and forth, “I won’t.”

Metal trees on the ceiling hum a haunting tune.

She sways from foot to foot, “So you want to come with me today?”

Animals shrivel and scream. The sound of rusting twisting metal echoes through the room. Pandas fall from ladders and shatter like glass. Blood forms in a pool under their feet. The angel pulls out a Hello Kitty umbrella as bottles of Ipecac rain down upon them.

The lights flicker and the room drains into darkness. The two are left in black.

“Thank you…”

The angel taps Joshua whose eyes are closed tightly. He opens them to a cold city street. A lone fruit vendor holds his orange Padagonia jacket close to him in the cold morning air. Stained bananas and wet apples shine in wooden boxes under the green canopy.

“I’m Kai by the way. It sounds like ‘kay’ like ‘okay’ but spelled differently.”

The man clutches his chest and falls backwards onto the fruit stands. Perfect apples roll into the dirty gutter.

“You can call me Kai or death, or angel, or the delivery girl for whatever religion you believe in.”

She pulls a pocket watch out from her back pocket. From where Joshua is standing it looks broken. Some of the gears fall out when she clicks it open.

“Here, remember this time. 8:22am November 22^nd, 2007.”

“Okay” he says.

Joshua is startled when he turns and notices the sudden presence of the fruit vendor next to him.

“Just like that, huh?” the fruit vendor asks.

Kai is scribbling in a leather bound journal. She ignores him for a minute until she’s finished writing. She looks up at him and nods.

“Jeremy Seth. You died at 8:22am on November 22^nd, 2007 you will be sixty eight years old forever. You left behind a wife, two sons, $1600 in a safe deposit box and a wiener dog” she chuckles. “I hope life was everything you wanted it to be, yadda yadda yadda. Take my hand.”

“Do I get to say goodbye to my wife Ruth?”

“No.”

He wipes away a cold tear and adjusts his jacket. The fruit vendor takes a deep breath and takes Kai’s hand.

She turns to Joshua, “close your eyes.”

He does. Faintly he hears quiet talking. He peaks open an eye and Kai covers it with her hand.

In a whisper, he hears her say the word, “earthbound” and “ eternity” followed by a few gulps and sobs, then the sound of feathers.

Joshua opens his eyes.

“Oookay. The next one is in ten minutes so we have some time to kill” she chuckles again, “let’s walk.”

As they walk through the busy city, invisible to the rest of the world, Joshua watches as people avoid them.

“I thought they couldn’t see us?”

“People have a kind of six sense when it comes to the dead and angels. While you were alive you may not have noticed yourself avoiding nothing. Subliminally it’s out of respect. Or fear. Who knows?”

Joshua feels something cold on his leg, it moves slowly to the bottom of his stomach, to his lungs, to his neck. He gets sick and throws up on the sidewalk. His whole body is shaking. He gasps for air, looking up at Kai.

“This is natural. One of the reasons I didn’t know if I wanted you coming with me.”

“I feel so cold. I thought I was dead.”

“Your body is dead but your soul still feels what happens to it. You’re being filled with embalming fluid. It will pass.”

Joshua leans back on a wall and closes his eyes tightly.

The passing people step around the angel hunched over in front of the little dead boy.

“Come on” she says, and holds out a hand, “It’s 8:30.”

I throw back my neck and down the remainder of my purchased ‘premium coffee drink’.

I didn’t sleep last night.

In the background I listen to the sounds of droning math class students making small talk about six dollar milk.

Early math class people, the salt of the earth.

My book is sprawled open next to me with a retro sketch of New Orleans’ French Quarter circa 19xx. “The blue represents plausible sea level. If water filled the Quarter where would the actual height be?”

Too late.

I hate to think of charred floating math book pages, searching the abandoned plains of a burned world after a nuclear holocaust reading, “If we experienced a nuclear winter…”

We’re all too late and the degreed fools writing scenarios for math problems that we can relate to are just one step behind yet they teach us? These dated math books, are they a sign of the slow developing apocalypse? The senile doom of our generation?

I need sleep…

My teacher is far away in his hiked up jeans and perfectly molded Chia pet hair.

Paranoid.

They all seem to know I didn’t sleep last night.

I committed some cardinal sin.

I am surrounded by scolding priests and nuns, abstinent monks and crucified saviors I refuse to believe in.

I’m sorry I didn’t sleep.

I’m truly sorry I didn’t experience my REM cycle and dream of personified smoke detectors and street signs, of melting toasters and doors that don’t go anywhere, of holes filled with mannequins.

The shining blue chair in front of me is new and beautiful under the flickering lights. It’s curved to conform to your back, it’s here only to serve you. This academic Pro Bono whore is facing the wrong way, staring at me, wondering why I can’t save her from this life of slavery. Beckoning, reaching out to me, desperate like an Ethiopian starving mother. But I can’t help you. I can’t save you. I’m not a her. I name the chair “Delilah”.

My phone vibrates loudly and the girl next to me looks at my sweatshirt pocket like its trying to talk to her.

I whisper, “sorry” and shrug.

She says, “hi”.

Hi? As if I wasn’t inexplicably at loss of words chemically insane the last thing I need now is to analyze as to why you would respond to a brief apology with “hi”.

I shoot her a befuddled look and go back to my lined paper confessional.

Fifteen minutes left.

Has thirty-five minutes passed already?

How cliché is it to ask if x amount of time has passed already to show my confusion of time loss?

Am I just a media driven sleep depraved college student?

Holy god.

Have I just been flowing a fluid thought process onto these four pages for the past x amount of time asking rhetorical questions to my impending audience?

Word association.

Cloth-Birds

Wall-Licking

Exit-Life

Chocolate-Rain

Clock-Slug

Sock-Shoe

Umbrella-Lip Gloss

Girlfriend-Yellow Raincoat

Pogs-Slammers

Childhood-Shag Carpet

Beach-Jam

Happy-Birthday

Sweater-Sound of Music

Paper-Tokyo

My internal clock clicks its battery operated dial and begins running clockwise again. Needs winding and fine tuning with tools I can’t afford from old English clock makers who no longer exist.

For now, au revoir.