|
Cerebral Contents: Update for 05.13.08: Backsliding by Cynthia Ruth Lewis 05.05.08: Five Feet and Building by Joel Van Noord Grocery Aisle by Richard Lighthouse Cross the Road by Ashok Niyogi 04.29.08: The Modern Covenant by Daniel E. Wilcox Death by Onions by Michael Frissore 04.21.08: Future's Children by Kimberly Raiser Identity Theft by George Anderson A Great Deal of Money by Justin Hyde 04.14.08: Mr. Papaya and Dale by Eric Suhem California by Caroline Imreibe Aftermath of Vehement Argument #1,068 by Cynthia Ruth Lewis Trip-Hammer Vitality by Lisa Nickerson 04.07.08: The Florence of Basel, or Why Readers of Nietzsche Need to Read Burckhardt by Jeff Crouch Friends of the Poet by Sean C. Bowen Picture Perfect by Leah Baldwin 03.24.08: Staring Down a White-Tailed Doe by Aleathia Drehmer 03.17.08: The Hairbrush by Vernard Kennedy Dog Days of Winter by Niall Berkeley Poem From My Grave by Michael Lee Johnson Mashed Potatoes and Hamburgers by Matt Finney 03.10.08: Hard Work by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal Jetty Cake Pigs by J.D. Nelson |
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake by Adam Engel
Zarathustra's Dragons stormed the stage like Cro-Magnon angels, a feral
furry crew, too savage for Redemption, too innocent to Fall. Where their
hair ended and their clothes began was painful to discern. The lead singer
wore an ornamental bone through his nose. A necklace of human teeth, plucked
sentimentally, the press releases claimed, from the jaws of one-night
stands, hung to his navel. The band looked like they'd been used to scrub
a large, industrial kitchen. Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake with Buxtehude, proprietor of the
Time Capsule Antique Shop and amateur "poet" (though, to be
fair, all poets of the Nation are amateurs). An old acquaintance from
my college days, a lonely man, not of his time. Certainly not the kind
I'd choose to waste a night with, but he invited me to drink, "for
old times' sake." How could I refuse? Impatient for a waitress, he reached for my drink. The sting of Brain
Death, the house specialty, a heady maelstrom of herb juices and spirits,
put the light back in his eyes. The Dragons tuned their instruments, creating
noise like claws on flint. "I'm lonely. My little lady's left me," whined the antique
dealer. "My woman dances for another." "There, there," I consoled as best I could. "Now, now.
These things happen. Other fish in the sea and all that." Our balcony table overlooked The Pit, a sunken dance floor nine feet
deep, in which a hundred black-garbed dancers writhed in mindless torsion,
bare feet pounding furiously, despite the conspicuous absence of... music. Buxtehude was as drunk and depressed as I'd ever seen him. When the tuning ceased, the dancers, sensing the imminence of art —
or danger — stopped briefly, and posed. Menacing silence. As if the
next might be the last noise. As if the Dragons had come not to entertain
their audience, but bury them. "I am become death..." whispered the antique dealer/bard. "Oh, good grief," I sighed. At last the dark millennial minstrels, invoking the powers that spin
planets and bend light, commenced to ditty: "Eat the rich, "I remember her black negligee, no larger than a kerchief," moped Buxtehude, his voice tossed like a sparrow in a gale of sound. "The way she'd scamper across the kitchen on those infinitesimal white feet..." Buxtehude was, like me, a year past thirty. His Beethoven 'do evoked
the lead gray chaos of an ocean storm. Like nearly everyone else at the
Apocalyptic Pancake (besides me in my "Topiary Techniques" T-shirt
— I'd come straight from work), he wore black. The back of his leather
jacket bore a meticulously detailed portrait of Shelley, sporting open
collar and wind-blown hair. Instead of a quill pen, Buxtehude's Shelley
held a smoking gun. The bold red caption across the top of the jacket
read "Don't weep for Adonais..." and beneath the portrait were
the words, "...avenge him!" "I can't live like you," said Buxtehude. "Tending plants,
evading issues, skirting time. A poet is supremely mortal. He needs a
warm body beside him, always. He needs communication. He needs life." I crushed an ice-cube with my teeth. Buxtehude was not a bad fellow,
as fellows went, but poet/antique dealers in general bored me to near
catatonia. They made me numb. The walls of his shop, which I'd visited once, offered photos of a brownish
time when even the sun shone sepia in a dull beige sky. Men in bowler
hats and skin-tight vests, their mustaches like clumps of bear fur bristling
with ale; women stuffed like sausages into dark, double-breasted bodices
with wide skirts and Italy-shaped shoes; quiet scenes bracketed by leafy-looking
frames of bronze and copper. Among photographs and artifacts and his elegantly
coiffed and tailored clientele he seemed to feel home. "I do not like loud, angry music; superfluous drama; crowds,"
he said. He'd inherited the Time Capsule Antique Shop and the basement apartment
beneath it from a maiden aunt, Gertrude. Dirty Gerty — she had her
own particular, if not downright peculiar, pleasures. "People hate poets," Buxtehude said. I thought, "A poker face I haven't." "People especially hate unpublished, spoken-word poets. How many
times in one life can a man abide the phrase, 'Oh, why don't you just
shut up?' Try to communicate with people, try to reach some sort of accord,
and they give you, 'Oh, why don't you just shut up!' I won't stand for
it much longer. I won't be silenced!" "But who's silencing you?" I asked. Buxtehude laughed. Quite madly, actually. A waitress appeared. I bought another round. Buxtehude pointed to a table on the Lower Level, about ten yards from
the stage, and not far from the precipice of The Pit. Around the table
sat Bogvonian, the filmmaker, and two, young, gray-suited lackeys. Bogvonian
was an older man, around sixty. He draped his girth in bright-colored
silks. His rings and bracelets glittered, dense with jewels. The shiny
skin stretched taut over his skull slackened to loose, thick folds around
his collar. The filmmaker said something out of the side of his mouth. The gray-suits
nodded. He bit the foreskin off of a cucumber-sized cheroot and searched
his silks for fire. The young men simultaneously extended Zippos. "It's Bogvonian, the auteur!" gasped Buxtehude. "He's
come to study Kim. He's going to film her!" "Here?" "If not here, wherever. It's inevitable. He'll soak up every drop
of her. Kim's image will be his." "She must have quite an act," I said. "It's why we're here." "It's why you're here. Why am I?" "To bear witness." "Buxtehude," I yawned. "Why do this to yourself?" "I must suffer — I mean, SEE HER. I must see her." The filmmaker's obvious contempt for his surroundings caused him to expectorate
a turd-sized wad of phlegm. He whispered to his men, then poked the air
as if to tweak a passing fly. When the Dragons finished their set, he left his table and stood at the
edge of The Pit, gazing indifferently upon the young people who danced
in silence. He flicked a cigar ash over the tangle of damp, swaying bodies
and returned to his table to find that, in his absence, a waiter had heaped
his plate with salad. Zarathustra's Dragons exited behind a curtain. "When I first met Tiny Kim, she was working as a promo-girl for
MamaBubba's Mini Donuts," the poet said. "They'd decked her
in a tiny, chocolate-dipped bikini. She wore bite-sized crullers round
her ankles and a fried-dough choker. Her hair was honey-glazed, her cheeks
dusted with sugar. She'd come to The City from out West, hoping to 'make
it' as an actress." "Lemme guess. She only got 'bit' parts," I said. "'Small'
roles." "Not even in the City of Cities are there many leads for a woman
two feet tall," Buxtehude said with a straight face. The antique dealer had rescued the seductive midget from the sweet exploitations
of MamaBubba. "I took her into The Time Capsule, my home. I educated her. I won
her heart. Of course, I had to schmooze a little. Who doesn't? I fed her
a saucer of folderol about her being 'pith personified, God's platinum
blonde haiku.' A tidbit of hyperbole, an hors d'oeuvre. Anyway, I meant
it at the time." For months they lived the domestic life, sponging frugally off of Buxtehude's
modest inheritance — the shop made little money. But Kim felt she
was made for bigger things, and when the time was right, she pursued them. "No one will love her like I loved her," he wept. "No
one will feel what I felt when I rocked that tiny body in my lap. Now,
alone, I wander asphalt gullies of the City under strips of navy sky,
breathing, reluctantly, the dense air of metropolis, cluttered as it is
with particles of soot and rot. I wait, impatiently for daylight, so I
can open the Time Capsule and watch the occasional customers stroll among
the escritoires and funnel-mouthed Victrolas; the cut-glass bowls and
crystal cabinets; the gadgets, knick-knacks and no-longer-relevant machines;
the musty detritus of strangers' lives." I nodded mechanically. Buxtehude turned away. He screamed at a passing
waitress for more Brain Death. She gestured violently, and chastened,
he implored. A new band took the stage. The back-up musicians of Tiny Kim. Thick,
cotton-clad men with black shiny hair down to their scapulae. They carried
wooden Pan-pipes lashed with gut and sinew and sundry instruments hewn
from the flora and fauna of Peru. They played: the cold breath of the
Andes, fermented in deep, Inca lungs and mellowed through cylinders of
ancient wood, lulled the audience to torpor, loosened eye-lids, lips,
nostrils like the vapors of a precious brandy. "This music is likeable," I said. "They're from out of town," Buxtehude said. "Kim plucked
them from the Classifieds. The ink on their green-cards smears to the
touch." A mountain of humanity lumbered to the stage, buck naked. "Bruno has barely enough brains to zip his fly," Buxtehude
explained. "He worked in the Recycling Plant, made his living smashing
bottles against a wall. After five years, he was still only an apprentice.
Kim hocked a leather-bound Keats and a hardcover Novalis to afford him.
I'd given her those books as gifts." "Doesn't he realize where he is, and that he's naked?" "Irrelevant. The man's an idiot. In previous versions of the act
Kim had had him enter in a three-piece suit. It took too long for him
to free himself. His struggles broke the rhythm of the dance." Tiny Kim appeared, a pint of Aphrodite scuttling across the stage. She
danced her tiny dance with vigor. The pace of the music accelerated; the
pipers' bronze cheeks glistened. She orbited Bruno like a moon, moving
closer, closer, until the music stopped and she stood, arms spread, before
him, wearing nothing but Jesus, who died, gnat-sized, on the copper crucifix
that dangled from her quadri-pierced left ear. Bruno's monstrous member loomed above her like the bald branch of a Red
Wood. He lifted her in hands the size of hubcaps. Even the most callous
ruffians in the audience gasped as he lowered her to his impossibly enormous
bone. The audience watched, fascinated, as the muscle-bound behemoth, grunting
in frustration, turned Kim every which way in search of entry, attempting
even to twist her onto himself like a bottle-cap. Finally, he set her down. Kim stepped backward. As if on cue, the giant's
ponderous erection lost its wind, drooped earthward, hung limp, like a
narcotized ferret, from his loins. Bruno, the Apprentice Bottle-Smasher, lowered himself to his knees. Awkwardly,
bearishly, he groped for her. He bellowed to the Heavens: "Mmmmmlvbg...mlubd...mmluh...luh...luh...love!" He nuzzled Kim's belly, and licked her tiny triangle of pubis like a
stamp. "I've seen enough," I said. "Let's get the fuck out of
here." "Not yet," said Buxtehude. "I have things planned. It's
not too late for me to DO." Tiny Kim, having acknowledged the audience's wild applause, allowed Bruno
to lift her onto his shoulder. She rode the giant down the steps of the
stage and straight to Bogvonian's table. At a nod from the filmmaker,
the gray-suits rose from their seats and bowed. Kim's lips molded the word "sit." Bruno, knees bent perpendicular,
naked ass parallel to the floor, made a chair of himself. The midget descended
to his lap, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear on the way down. Bogvonian
lit her smoke with the smoldering end of his cigar. "I offered her, what, beauty, truth?" said Buxtehude. "She
opted for... image. How can a poet compete with the sound and motion of
film?" The former Bite-sized Cruller Queen reclined against the giant's stomach,
which was flat and steep and cut with muscle like a grid. "The... uh... CONTRAST between the two of them is striking,"
I said. "She doesn't really love the giant. He's an idiot. She's using him
to impress Bogvonian. She needed an image, or rather, counter-image, worthy
of the Master's lens. She wants to be preserved, that's what's behind
it all." I sensed where his talk was headed. Perhaps I should have done something
to stop it. But I knew from experience that such manias as Buxtehude's
must be allowed to wind themselves to completion. "I'm going to raise a commotion," he said, grimly. "I'm
going to smite the giant, tear him limb from limb. I'm going to carry
Kim up to the stage and triumph where that lumbering behemoth so miserably
fucked up. I'm going to earn my moments in amber, secure a place for myself
in Bogvonian's oeuvre. I'm going to—" Without warning, Zarathustra's Dragons occupied the stage again and blitzed
the Pancake with their second set: "Ain't got no love— It all seemed so ridiculous, so unnecessary, so... disappointing. One
minute Buxtehude was pontificating across from me, the next he was staggering
across the beer-and-vomit-sticky floor of the lower level, bumping into
tables, pushing waiters, waitresses and patrons from his path, until at
last reaching Bogvonian's table, he stood before the midget, arms akimbo,
legs apart, expectant. Tiny Kim wrinkled her brow. She snuffed her cigarette in the ashtray
Bruno had made for her of his palm. The poet launched into a tirade, waving
his arms, stamping his feet. Kim looked to the filmmaker for assistance. Bogvonian rolled his fat cigar slowly between nut-brown teeth and eyed
the impassioned antique dealer with distaste. Buxtehude lifted the nude midget from the giant's thigh — not without
her protest — and set her on the table beside a bottle of Bordeaux.
He pummeled Bruno furiously, cursing at the top of his lungs — the
music absorbed his every syllable. Though the antique dealer's doughy fists could hardly hurt the giant,
Bruno's eyes churned huge tears, which tumbled bluely down the gridiron
surface of his face. He remained in position, like a marble couch, immovable,
while the midget pleaded with the filmmaker for ACTION. Bogvonian, mouth stuffed to capacity with tobacco and escarole, nodded
to his lackeys. They rose, dabbed their lips with napkins, folded the
napkins neatly on their plates. Nostrils dilated, cheeks crimson with
instant rage, they converged upon Buxtehude, who was now trying desperately
to strangle Bruno, his wiry arms enveloping the giant's tree-trunk neck
like vines. "I should do something," I thought. "But really, I'm just
a horticultural technician, a Plantman. Truly. Honestly. What can I do?" The gray-suits unclasped Buxtehude's hands, twisted his skinny arms behind
his back and pulled. The pop of humeri wrenched from their sockets reverberated
through the Pancake, causing even the lead singer of Zarathustra's Dragons
to grimace, mid-lyric, and touch a finger to his heart. Again the music sucked the life from Buxtehude's screams. I stared down helplessly into the futile abyss of his mouth. Swinging him by his long legs and stretched, useless arms, the gray-suits,
with a syncopated, "Heave! Ho! Heave!" tossed the antique dealer
high over The Pit. He hung for agonizing nano-seconds before falling. The disappearance of a human form into the jungle of dancers, the spectacle
of a body swallowed whole, had its predictable effect upon the audience.
Heads turned desperately to Zarathustra's Dragons. The Apocalyptic Pancake
became all eyes, ears and mouths, which pleaded for the band's electric
succor. Tiny Kim dabbed the giant's egg-sized tears with the fringe of a silk
cape proffered by Bogvonian. Out of some vestigial sense of duty, or more accurately, pity —
the weakness that had coaxed me to the Pancake in the first place —
I descended to the lower level and stood for almost an hour at the precipice
of The Pit, searching for a glimpse of Buxtehude, or Shelley, in the misty,
churning swamp of flesh, leather, cotton. But the crowd was so dense I
couldn't see the dancers' feet, much less what was under them, and I resigned
myself to never drinking or conversing with the antique dealing "poet"
again. Bogvonian's table was now empty. A busboy peeled a partially eaten lettuce leaf from the filmmaker's plate and slipped it into a small, clear plastic bag. A souvenir.
______________________________________ posted 12.17.07. |
Emergent Properties: Archives (alphabetical) Links - Updated 05.05.08 Books - Updated 05.05.08 |
Site founded May 7th, 2003,
by Project Catalyst.
All written material is the copyrighted property of its respective authors.
All other elements can be blamed on the Cerebral Catalyst Editorial Board.
