Collateral

So this is the quarter that squanders itself
famously across your black metal landscape
a penny here,
two cents there
wherever the coin of the realm will salve the greatest ache

hands slotted deep into pockets I walk
head bowed
there's a pancake house full of caffiene animals
on every sculptured corner of the highway.
The ditches have filled themselves with shiny and mysterious
toys.
They poke and prod me as I slip past
a car built from lost twisted parts
flotsam and jetsam of the interstate
making the infinite payment
from an endlessly empty account

yes, here's the life you've demanded so shamelessly
fifty cents worth of summer
shining hot, round and hard from an empty sky above.

burn me red,
I swear I will see you in hell. In fact, I'm headed there now
leaning back to spit in your burning face
this one last time; listen for the sizzle
as I laugh your golden madness down.


originally published, in a slightly different form, in Peckerwood: Wild Mountain Thyme

"Rose Is Rose", the Demented Comic Strip

The Seattle Times is currently conducting one of their reader survey polls, asking for input on the comics page and its contents. This made me think about one of the most remarkably twisted and sick comic strips out there (and a longtime runner in the Times), "Rose is Rose". Only "The Family Circus" is more subversive and depraved than "Rose is Rose".

Outward appearances of a smarmy and cute "family strip" are quickly dissipated upon closer inspection. Just think about it for a moment: the main characters are a husband, a wife and an infant child. The husband ("Jimbo") is without a doubt the most openly gay married man in modern sequential art. He is so conflicted and bewildered by his plight that his strongest desire, regarding his trim and healthy appearing wife, is that she gain at least 300 pounds. The thinly disguised hatred and self-hatred evident here is incontrovertible. The most masculine act this hillbilly milquetoast sap is capable of is taking the garbage to the curb - and he turns this into some quasi-spiritual and pacifistic cosmic experience that involves a half hour of standing at the curb dreaming of receiving much-needed guidance from the garbage gods. A more pathetic excuse for a man is seldom found, in fiction or fact.

His wife is the strip's title character, "Rose". This bewildered and dizzy "lost soul" can only escape the quiet suburban horror of her existence by frequently lapsing into a decidedly unhealthy delusion wherein she portrays herself as some anti-social and misguided lesbian biker chick who overreacts to every potentially controversial situation with an attitude of intimidation and violence. Otherwise her real world involves imagined conversations with birds and squirrels, and insipid, contrived love notes to and from her covertly miserable hubby.

Perhaps the most tragic character in the strip is the infant Pasquale, who reacts to this hopelessly unhealthy family situation by stumbling through a world of complete and inconsistent fantasy and delusion. His home life is so aberrant and unfocused, so filled with mixed signals and lack of direction, that he falls in love with the school house where he attends grade school - an obvious symbol of some sort of stability and order in his otherwise emotionally chaotic life. Sadly, the only true male role model in his life is his cousin Clem, who is one of the most frightening and horrific characters in comics since the Comics Code Authority emasculated the comic book industry in 1955. Clem is a classic narcissist, a budding sadist and sociopath, intent on destroying his cousin Pasquale, as well as his aunt and uncle, even his own parents, in order to promote his own horribly sick agenda. From him Pasquale learns the most relevant life lesson that is available to him - namely, that he has always been a hapless victim, and always will be - a weak tool in the hands of Clem, who is without doubt a future serial killer and psychopath.

The hopeless and futile worldview espoused by this comic strip is unmistakable - yet it continues in the daily newspaper, unimpeded. I'm not saying I object to this - I just find it interesting, that the subtext here, so thinly veiled below the surface, is never acknowledged in any way by editors or the general reading public. The creative team of this strip is (presumably) husband and wife - these folks must be a real piece of work. I wonder how they ever found each other? I guess this sort of thing has a mental quality of magnetism that is often unstoppable - as evidenced by everything from Bonnie and Clyde to Baker and Stroup. If only "Doonesbury" could cut this deeply.

PINK

she says your hair

wear

something pink in it

tonight you damn

right I will I reply wet

behind the ear

we met

at barnaby's

for cock-

tail talk she screamed

puked

neither steak

nor shrimp

tonight for the man

with the german

shepherd dick

pasted to his neck

check

please

maitre d'

originally published in Feh! #8 (1990)

THE SECRET DIARY OF HUCKLEBERRY HOUND

Day Ten, and again my best moments left to rot on the cutting room floor. While I am down here, collapsed, sweating out blue horse tablets, my green plastic wife is upstairs redly drying her hair with the silver gloved claw of Doctor Doom. It's all part of the four color process. Nothing is real, everything is permitted. Believe me, I have seen the inky knick knacks of God Almighty and the way they clutter the projector room, sticking to your lungs if you dare to breathe deep. To be pastel is to be pain. Face into the wind. The tears dry faster.

Quick Draw McGraw: hung like a horse, but he shoots too quick. If one is truly two dimensional, then three can hide forever in a mirror on the wall. Any wall. But if it breaks . . . El Kabong.

Be careful as you dress. Each time you miss a belt loop, it rains - the colors run, the tall buildings weep; the pain on the faces is real even if the fronts are false. I know how things work in this business. Bullwinkle has never been to Butte, Montana, or seen it disguised as Washington D.C. And Rocky, the Flying Squirrel -- well, Rocky is a girl. Lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

I flicker in the dark like a wastrel. I joined the police force for awhile, to make a difference; but Offisa Pupp had it in for me more than Ignatz, so next stop, French Foreign Legion. It's hard to be openly gay in the talking cartoon animal game these days. Anthropomorphics breed the worst kind of ghosts, the true Children of the Damned. Yogi Bear consults at the U.N. Well, fuck him. Boo Boo blows him in a cave all winter long; if you think that's dignified or glorious, treat yourself to a pick-a-nick basket. And don't call us, we'll call you. That's what they told me, as the licensing agreement ran out.

Pencil thin mustaches, twin cavemen in a boulder car - mute psychopaths thinking with their clubs, and wearing feet like angel leather. Everybody here has an angle except me. I only joined to forget. I only wanted to be pure. Yes. Dreadful sorry about that. Really I am.

Star Garage

I am in a discotheque, back when the whole word was used but years after they fell from popularity. The music is loud; so much so that we strain to hear it but too quiet to hear the words. I use we in the sense of the totality of the place; we are a rhythmic swarm moving pirahna-like across the bones of the building. And back again.

My friend Jim is quiet, unpredictable. Dangerously he rises from the table, smiling as if he alone knows of a wax museum concealing the corpse of Jesus. I see him kissing the bare back of a girl he has never met. Kissing in a soft, widening spiral. Behind each kiss a gin blossom surfaces like a red spider through honey.

On the dance floor I join another friend. This is in the days before AIDS, the days before homosexuality itself. Like old science experiments Mark and I are quietly asked to leave.

Outside invisible clouds offer prayers of snow. Jim first will not and then cannot remove his head from the window of the gin blossom girl's automobile.

At home we dance in the living room, clad in our underwear, strumming tennis rackets. We have no curtains. To us the windows are mirrors but in the night outside cars circle the house. To them we are like carnivorous fish in a tank. To them we are everything.

We, the collective we, slide up and down the skeleton of our home. It is not our home at all.

*Originally published in a slightly different form in TRAMP #10, Spring 1991* Based loosely on events that occurred in Missoula, MT circa February, 1979. Ask Jim - he remembers it.

March 7th, 2010

Even the newly headless chicken knows how to run in an ever tightening circle. It must feel like progress until you reach the center, and then there is nowhere to go but down to the quiet. If you follow backwards along the widening spiral of blood perhaps you will build a whole new chicken in the process. Some say it has happened.
My right leg has been making rumblings; there have been incidents of nonconformance, assertions of individuality bordering on the brazen. This has gone on for some time. It seems to want to do its work under cover of darkness -- during the daytime it plays along, more or less, with what the rest of the body might be doing. I’m sure the frustration is building in it all day. It wants to be on its own. It has plans. The head, the torso, the other limbs, they are all holding it back. There is seething anger in there, a wall of defiance building brick by brick.
Politely describing it as “restless” I have begun taking medication to soothe the leg’s urges. Has this worked? Well yes and no. The medication can induce the desired effect, but the dosage seems to require regular increases in order to remain effective. And each night before I take the medicine, or if I forget to take it on time, the right leg seizes the chance and moves into open revolt. It kicks and jerks, veers off in God only knows what direction and for God only knows what purpose. It refuses the efforts of the brain and other elements of the nervous system, when they try to give it instruction. It does what it wants, until the meds kick in and it is slowly, reluctantly subdued, in the manner of a charging elephant now riddled with darts tipped in powerful tranquilizer.
I can’t help but think that someday, when my guard is down or other circumstance facilitates it, the right leg will succeed in breaking away. It will free itself of the jail of bones and sinew that binds it to its core. Off it will lurch, jerking and jarring itself like some anger powered pogo stick with a faulty guidance system, careening in all directions at once, and giddy with the freedom of it. But somehow going round and round, in ever tightening circles. Heel prints dimpling the earth at irregular intervals, signifying nothing, understanding nothing.
Somehow this will be the sign of progress. It’s something that we recognize when we see it; it is the definitive definition.

First Post

This is my first post! Let's see how this goes.