It’s been a while since I’d skipped rocks on any substantial body of water, and it showed as I struggled to get much of anything across Hilo Bay. But as my shoulder flared it occurred to me that rocks can teach you a thing or two about what it means to be an upstanding member of a society.
Getting hit in the head by a rock teaches you to work on your agility, and that standing your ground can be a painful process.
Maybe it’s not that simple…
With little else to do but let my mind roam free in the face of next-to-no-business at the Lomilomi tent for the first annual Hilo Bay BBQ Team Cook Off I tore through an autographed copy of the Bikram guide to yoga which had been left to me as a parting gift from my previous life as a semi-unwilling gigolo.
This was a “Will work for food” engagement in a somewhat tainted sense of the term. There would be a bill attached to my services, but half of the contract stipulated that I be allowed to consume all the grass-fed beef, chicken, pork-butt, rib tips, corn, kalo, uala and lau lau I could pack away for the duration of the event which went down between 9am July 3rd and 4pm on the 4th.
Bay-front Hilo has lost some of its spectator glimmer at least in the eyes of the locals since camping out at the bandstand has been outlawed by the Gestapo, and burning of over-the-counter ordnance in the public parks mercilessly cracked down upon. But the cops left me to myself for the most part after they walked by the tent as I crackle-popped the cervical vertebrae of a dirty redneck refugee of Guam—a victim of a malady I can’t pronounce he blamed on military-based side effects of either nuclear testing or Vietnam—with my bare hands. It was hot and I don’t remember the details.
It’s the rocky and treacherous sound of moving bones and joints that inspires fear and/or awe in the hearts of people. It’s the common dread of personal paralysis I think. Though as always I was there to do a job and as a genuine professional, I was not there to prey on public fear. I was there to prey on pain. Though after this dry run, it seems that bodywork and barbecue may be mutually exclusive as I only worked on four people over the entire event including a huge pregnant haole woman who saw my table and tackled me as I was heading off for the day.
Even the Team, “From Hawai`i,” who had commissioned me in the first place only sent their leader Joe to me. My work—as ever—was flawless, but as I sat there hour after hour, thumbing through the gospel according to Bikram, and a spinnakered galleon fired empty mortar blasts from the bay building up to the 8pm pyrotechnics, I took a minute to wonder if my own negativity was influencing business.
This is a foreign thought process to me for the most part, but I have been depressed. And the Kohala coast was the last know sighting of my dignity which vanished rapidly at the end of one of those long weekends you might see in a romance film where the girl has to make a choice after being told that the boy didn’t put his life on hold, jump on a plane and hitch-hike up the Queen K just to crash her hotel room and sip Tropical Itches poolside.
There is a great deal of rock between Hilo and Kohala. Massive jagged peaks and valleys full, and raging streams of smooth volcanic afterbirth which I hoped—along with the petrifying amount of meat and kalo(and maybe even Bikram) might serve to strengthen me, my head, my heart and whatever else is kicking around my insides these days.
The Lomi deal was contingent on me finding a suitable place to stay as “From Hawai`i” would be camped out at ground zero for the duration; no place for a working journalist trying to maintain top physical health for a grueling schedule of four customers. No mere parking lot would do.
Fortunately for all involved—the four customers, The Team, various onlookers, etc—I had a standing invitation to visit the Enocencio clan, sturdy Hiloians and militant Mormons firmly dug into the landscape like the double fist-sized kalo they farm from the ground 100 pounds at a time amid the goats, chickens, pigs and constant threat of foreign invasion.
They take the kids direct from Alu Like right out of the projects and toss them headlong into the fields, forging a hybrid respect for labor and authority with a god-fearing Latter Day Saint. With the debut of Michael Bay’s spin on Transformers looming on the July 4th horizon, the kids were begging to be released from lo`i duty to which their master “Mr. James” replied with a dismissive grin, “I think you’ll have plenty of fun. You’re going to transform taro into poi!”
This is tough-love Hilo style circa 2007. That awareness of earning every scrap of food, water, clothing, pride and self. And every mixed moment of humor and pitiless resolve that you might not recognize for what it is until much much later that has carved—at least in this case—a family in stone.
While Bikram is preaching his backward bends, these people are perpetually going forward, pulling roots from the soil, harvesting and epitomizing the true heart of “busting ass” and “living off the land.” If the millionaire yoga guru showed up in Hilo, they would calmly listen to his banter, explain to him the error of his thinking and then shoot out his tires if he didn’t leave.
They fully support the visitors, as long as they stay visitors by leaving. And these guys might floss their teeth with Bikram’s ponytail and make a chicken coop with his bones as soon as his welcome wore thin.
As evening faded and the children screamed on subjects as varied as who got to ride who’s bike and why did Makana piss on everyone? a run down hippy woman with a face as creased and worn as the lava flows made her way through the small crowds accompanied by a man dressed hotly in a white full length chicken suit, both of them preaching and clucking animal rights and ecology distributing non-biodegradable fliers which littered the grounds later when the rains came. The clan mentioned that maybe they ought to be up in the mountains protecting the rights of living animals butchered senselessly rather than chatting up a pack of indigenously conscious carnivores devouring chicken long rice next door to a BBQ convention. Their propaganda came down hard on slaughterhouse conditions of course, but fell even harder on the deaf ears of a huge family of 3rd generation farmers with no shame and no compulsion to stop raising three more on anything that moves.
There is a strong sense of a stand taken a long time ago that won’t be changing anytime soon. Like outcomes, or at least paths determined well in advance. Walking in the footprints of ancestors on heels calloused by the land and never stopping to even think about fixing something that isn’t broken.
Those were my stones of wisdom or inspiration from the latest and maybe the last Hawai`i excursion before the Superferry springs from the closet, bringing unity to the islands and opihi pickers to Hilo. Where the Enocencio’s will be on watch with Blue Pit bull determination and Winchester firearms: Strength in muscle and intensity. The land may be changing slowly, but the foundation remains. These old rocks and the ones beneath will always be around in one form or another, long after all there is for us to know doesn’t matter any more. We could learn a good deal from them.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Ocean of Wisdom
It will please you to know that I have recently resigned my commission at the 4 seasons Lana'i due to an overwhelming amount of tyranny.
That being said, I have a belly full of antibiotics addressing my latest bout with what local medical gurus are telling me is in all likelihood the clap (further tests are pending), and am standing by for the 340 flight over to Maui.
I've stopped taking these STDs personally because of the "all business" society I'm locked up like a Hindu prank monkey in. And just in time. The freaks are descending like a plague upon Kahului eagerly anticipating laying eyes twinkling with visions of enlightenment upon the bespectacled visage of the Dalai Lama himself.
For years, Maui has been a hotbed for those international goons on the blind trail to total consciousness and the meaning of life. So it's no wonder, with that much vibe clogging up the spiritual airwaves not to mention the vog steaming in from Volcano, that he'd be making a stop to personally straighten them all out once and for all, Buddhist monk style.
I imagine quite a few heads will roll for this one. All of them, especially upcountry, have been abusing the system for years and the time for compassion may be swiftly coming to an end.
The room mate, a devout Lama groupie and 6 months sinfully pregnant tried to get me to fly over yesterday and walk on as a volunteer, but I'm not dumb enough to stumble into that kind of bees nest. The volunteers will have it worse than any; the first to bear the brunt of his wrath.
I don't know much about this guy, but with the kind of stroke he wields in the physical and metaphysical world, I imagine over the course of 14 lifetimes, he would have had to survive some serious knockdown bar fights with ornery sherpas or otherwise kicked ass in the name of religious tolerance. No one comes by that kind of street cred without getting their knuckles bloody.
I do know that he bears resemblance so striking to the late author Hunter Thompson, that one would be a fool not to trace the genes back to the source before making any wild claims against either. But I'm sure I'm not too far out on the olive branch to speculate that Thomson himself wrestled a few yaks into submission in his day.
Were circumstances different, I might be inclined to challenge His Holiness one on one to either a banana eating match or a battle of wits, no holds barred, but due to the heavy medication and current trade embargos, I think I'll take this one in from the sidelines with cranberry juice and an open mind.
Which is best I'm sure. This will be a three-ring circus of the highest degree. Some will be blessed for the being there alone, while others will scoop up the red dirt he walks on, either keeping it for posterity, selling it to the uninformed masses or devouring it outright on the spot for reasons even the craziest of us will not grasp. Power of any kind is a weird thing, especially out here at the edge of the world and doubtless you are all thankful that the vigilant are always standing by in sickness and in health keeping one paw at all times on the circuit breaker.
That being said, I have a belly full of antibiotics addressing my latest bout with what local medical gurus are telling me is in all likelihood the clap (further tests are pending), and am standing by for the 340 flight over to Maui.
I've stopped taking these STDs personally because of the "all business" society I'm locked up like a Hindu prank monkey in. And just in time. The freaks are descending like a plague upon Kahului eagerly anticipating laying eyes twinkling with visions of enlightenment upon the bespectacled visage of the Dalai Lama himself.
For years, Maui has been a hotbed for those international goons on the blind trail to total consciousness and the meaning of life. So it's no wonder, with that much vibe clogging up the spiritual airwaves not to mention the vog steaming in from Volcano, that he'd be making a stop to personally straighten them all out once and for all, Buddhist monk style.
I imagine quite a few heads will roll for this one. All of them, especially upcountry, have been abusing the system for years and the time for compassion may be swiftly coming to an end.
The room mate, a devout Lama groupie and 6 months sinfully pregnant tried to get me to fly over yesterday and walk on as a volunteer, but I'm not dumb enough to stumble into that kind of bees nest. The volunteers will have it worse than any; the first to bear the brunt of his wrath.
I don't know much about this guy, but with the kind of stroke he wields in the physical and metaphysical world, I imagine over the course of 14 lifetimes, he would have had to survive some serious knockdown bar fights with ornery sherpas or otherwise kicked ass in the name of religious tolerance. No one comes by that kind of street cred without getting their knuckles bloody.
I do know that he bears resemblance so striking to the late author Hunter Thompson, that one would be a fool not to trace the genes back to the source before making any wild claims against either. But I'm sure I'm not too far out on the olive branch to speculate that Thomson himself wrestled a few yaks into submission in his day.
Were circumstances different, I might be inclined to challenge His Holiness one on one to either a banana eating match or a battle of wits, no holds barred, but due to the heavy medication and current trade embargos, I think I'll take this one in from the sidelines with cranberry juice and an open mind.
Which is best I'm sure. This will be a three-ring circus of the highest degree. Some will be blessed for the being there alone, while others will scoop up the red dirt he walks on, either keeping it for posterity, selling it to the uninformed masses or devouring it outright on the spot for reasons even the craziest of us will not grasp. Power of any kind is a weird thing, especially out here at the edge of the world and doubtless you are all thankful that the vigilant are always standing by in sickness and in health keeping one paw at all times on the circuit breaker.
Animal Rights: An Open Letter to Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts
With the Halekulani knocking Four Seasons off the Hawaiian Travel & Leisure throne in 2007, I find myself thinking about drooling dogs.
In 1965 researchers conducting studies based on Pavlovian conditioning hoped to show that when administered an auditory stimulus coupled with an electric shock, the behavior of dogs could be manipulated. This didn’t exactly go as planned. What the studies ultimately showed was that these dogs learned helplessness. When they were left in a small and easily exited cage, the conditioned dogs would not move even after the administration of multiple shocks. Unconditioned dogs leapt quickly from the cage while the rest lay down whimpering under shock after shock, accepting their fate. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.
It’s now 2007 and learned helplessness flourishes at the Four Seasons Resort on the privately owned island of Lana`i.
I was hired as an independent contractor and signed an agreement to earn 40 percent commission plus tips as a massage therapist in the spa. This is great money, especially coming from Oah`u where it’s hard to get that kind of scratch without strong political backing and consecutive happy endings. This was based—I was told—on my “skill” relative to other therapists in the spa who made the same or less. The week before I turned in my uniform the same person told me adamantly that I was in fact a mediocre therapist hired “in hopes that you work your way up to Four Seasons standards.” Other contractors told me repeatedly that this was done “just to get to you.”
And there in both the nervous acceptance of such bipolar reasoning and the source of it is where the dog has its day. Upwards of 30 therapists have exited in the span of the approximately one year tenure of the reigning manager. Begging the question: Where does the problem lie? But this isn’t a psychology tirade or a rant about percentages or money even, though it might seem to be on the surface.
This is for anyone who gets $8 taken from their paycheck for every 25-minute service performed to replace no more than an ounce of oil and to wash a few sheets, and is then “asked” to fold that laundry. For anyone with the balls to question that fiscal logic, told the issue was not to be revisited and later labeled by management reactionary, arrogant and a planter of “ideas.”
For anyone who had to travel—by boat or plane—to work and found that their schedule was changed or that they wouldn’t be needed after all and in lieu of an actual explanation, told to deal with it.
For a wife and son and daughter recklessly threatened with homelessness after their father’s twelve years with the company was dashed in an instant without warning following his termination and consequent expiration of employee housing.
This is for the receptionist 7 months pregnant with incapacitating back pain who limped out of work for emergency care barely able to speak and was told. “If you get finished before 4, come back.”
Dogs do what dogs do and given the right motivation, humans are as predictable as any dog. When you can work three days out of the week and come home with $1500 that makes you motivated. And apparently in the eyes of this hotel, expendable, easily replaced and open to the kind of abuse that if applied to a unionized workforce might result in a fistfight.
This is also not a shot at an old boss by a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s a question to an entity that allows the kind of free form tyranny that traumatizes people on a daily basis to the point that they dread, not only their work environment but also the threat of having to leave it.
The question is: Why are people in 2007 treated like animals were 1965?
In 1965 researchers conducting studies based on Pavlovian conditioning hoped to show that when administered an auditory stimulus coupled with an electric shock, the behavior of dogs could be manipulated. This didn’t exactly go as planned. What the studies ultimately showed was that these dogs learned helplessness. When they were left in a small and easily exited cage, the conditioned dogs would not move even after the administration of multiple shocks. Unconditioned dogs leapt quickly from the cage while the rest lay down whimpering under shock after shock, accepting their fate. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.
It’s now 2007 and learned helplessness flourishes at the Four Seasons Resort on the privately owned island of Lana`i.
I was hired as an independent contractor and signed an agreement to earn 40 percent commission plus tips as a massage therapist in the spa. This is great money, especially coming from Oah`u where it’s hard to get that kind of scratch without strong political backing and consecutive happy endings. This was based—I was told—on my “skill” relative to other therapists in the spa who made the same or less. The week before I turned in my uniform the same person told me adamantly that I was in fact a mediocre therapist hired “in hopes that you work your way up to Four Seasons standards.” Other contractors told me repeatedly that this was done “just to get to you.”
And there in both the nervous acceptance of such bipolar reasoning and the source of it is where the dog has its day. Upwards of 30 therapists have exited in the span of the approximately one year tenure of the reigning manager. Begging the question: Where does the problem lie? But this isn’t a psychology tirade or a rant about percentages or money even, though it might seem to be on the surface.
This is for anyone who gets $8 taken from their paycheck for every 25-minute service performed to replace no more than an ounce of oil and to wash a few sheets, and is then “asked” to fold that laundry. For anyone with the balls to question that fiscal logic, told the issue was not to be revisited and later labeled by management reactionary, arrogant and a planter of “ideas.”
For anyone who had to travel—by boat or plane—to work and found that their schedule was changed or that they wouldn’t be needed after all and in lieu of an actual explanation, told to deal with it.
For a wife and son and daughter recklessly threatened with homelessness after their father’s twelve years with the company was dashed in an instant without warning following his termination and consequent expiration of employee housing.
This is for the receptionist 7 months pregnant with incapacitating back pain who limped out of work for emergency care barely able to speak and was told. “If you get finished before 4, come back.”
Dogs do what dogs do and given the right motivation, humans are as predictable as any dog. When you can work three days out of the week and come home with $1500 that makes you motivated. And apparently in the eyes of this hotel, expendable, easily replaced and open to the kind of abuse that if applied to a unionized workforce might result in a fistfight.
This is also not a shot at an old boss by a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s a question to an entity that allows the kind of free form tyranny that traumatizes people on a daily basis to the point that they dread, not only their work environment but also the threat of having to leave it.
The question is: Why are people in 2007 treated like animals were 1965?
Celebrate With Us
The Wednesday night guided meditation and healing service sounds a little too Fight Club for much of the non church crowd, but being holier than them, I have a high tolerance for both healing and mortal combat.
The man had the worn look of old and poorly maintained leather abused by the trail as he stumbled from his crimson Toyota, wife trailing behind him as he pulled on a Trilogy sailing shirt to cover the uniform sunburn of a broken down first mate. They made their way to the back entrance of the church as the Preacher sat in front of his piano banging out a quiet version of Om Shanti. They sat two pews in front of me.
I like to sit near the back to keep my eye on things. As part of the volunteer agreement the Healing Arts Center practitioners use the last half hour to offer services to anyone who can make their way to the front pews where they all convene patiently throughout the service in their green fuzzy leis waiting to dispense therapy.
But not me. I like to come from the back like a porn star. A grand entrance from the Ti leaf blessing station directly across from the communion wafers. It’s my own personal arrogance hard at work, but at least I don’t come in the middle of a song.
Drunk in church is a sure way to write your way into the collective consciousness of a congregation. And the sailor had plenty of ink. Thinking of drunken churchies, I picture an indigent man stumbling in on an icy night at a church sandwiched uncomfortably between a Persian deli and a methadone clinic on the dirtiest streets of wherever, USA. But this one rolled up stupid in a red flatbed, straight out of Kihei in the heart of Kapahulu.
After the singing comes the prayer requests. When you hear about everyone’s dying relatives or missing children or any manner of the Lords will personified. The sailor wanted none of it. As the deputy pastor walked from person to person, listening and broadcasting their prayers to the group over the wireless microphone, he became increasingly frantic, raising his arms in fury and exasperation each time she picked someone else. At one point, his wife had to pull him down like someone restraining a pit bull.
But his time came.
Just as the woman behind him leaned in telling him to be patient, the pastor spotted him. She walked up and held the mic forward for him to speak and he boldly tore it from her grasp.
He was out of the pew and into the aisle with the grace of a seasoned televangelist, his head cocked backwards and a dramatic drunken sway to his frame. He alternated between a two hand prayer grip on the handle of the microphone and one hand raised for either calming effect or balance.
“I’m going to do it,” he announced to us softly under the soft glow of the high ceiling lights with the grim determination of a plumber. “It’s been my lifelong goal to move to O`ahu. And now. Here! I! Am!”
He paused for emphasis, nodding his head with subtle arrogance. He assessed the unresponsive crowd who had never seen anyone with the mic other than the mikanele. You could almost hear the unison whispers from the gray hairs that this was not the reverend Sky St Jon.
“Today I did it. I finally enrolled at the UH. Just under the deadline with less than 20 minutes to spare. And I’m going to do it!”
At this point all heads were down. He had the feel of a snake that might strike upon eye contact.
“See… I’m here tonight,” he bent his knees to meet the downcast eyes of the congregation as he balled one hand into a fist, “to receive your prayers for my prosperity.”
He let this sink in, standing back up and pointing a thumb into his own chest.
“For the prosperity of me, my wife and our two children as I complete my schooling at UH Manoa which I enrolled in today.”
Just under the deadline. Yes. We were all clear on that one. He flopped his arms out parallel to the floor and dropped the mic. The deputy pastor scurried to grab it as the bounces echoed to the high ceilings and back. He sat down with a piously superior nod. His wife patted his back nervously as the pastor asked for his name to properly invoke the prayer.
“It’s Bryce!” he shouted in disgust without the benefit of the amplifier as if his name had been Jesus or Mohamed or Kamehameha I.
“Let us pray,” she began, “for Bryce and his family embarking upon this new journey and know that god wants us all to prosper in all of our-”
“Celebrate with us!” He was up again, the wife pulling at his shoulders and the gray haired old ladies disabling their hearing aids under the pounding waves of his verbal diarrhea.
We work on the people in the front pews as the group is coming out of guided meditation and some are dropping satchels containing more prayers into a wood chest on the front stage. It’s a relaxing time. There’s a song droning on in the background about healing or love, I can’t remember.
I had my eyes closed and my hands around the back of the neck of a lady from Baltimore, feeling for tension in her cervical vertebrae when Bryce was able to sneak up on stage behind me. His voice boomed across the church and I nearly ripped her head off in alarm.
“Love is the way!” He bellowed with arms up again. “Love!”
And then he was gone. He came in late and he went home early. And I haven’t been back there since. He left his mark like a careless Picasso and now he’s free somewhere up in Manoa terrorizing the business department with drunken theories on capitalism and the global marketplace I assume. Because he’s the kind of thorn-in-your-side hit-and-run artist that you have to give a sort of grudging respect to if for nothing else his calculated sleaziness, which leaves no time for someone to catch up with him in the parking lot and give him the kind of healing he really needs and truly deserves.
The man had the worn look of old and poorly maintained leather abused by the trail as he stumbled from his crimson Toyota, wife trailing behind him as he pulled on a Trilogy sailing shirt to cover the uniform sunburn of a broken down first mate. They made their way to the back entrance of the church as the Preacher sat in front of his piano banging out a quiet version of Om Shanti. They sat two pews in front of me.
I like to sit near the back to keep my eye on things. As part of the volunteer agreement the Healing Arts Center practitioners use the last half hour to offer services to anyone who can make their way to the front pews where they all convene patiently throughout the service in their green fuzzy leis waiting to dispense therapy.
But not me. I like to come from the back like a porn star. A grand entrance from the Ti leaf blessing station directly across from the communion wafers. It’s my own personal arrogance hard at work, but at least I don’t come in the middle of a song.
Drunk in church is a sure way to write your way into the collective consciousness of a congregation. And the sailor had plenty of ink. Thinking of drunken churchies, I picture an indigent man stumbling in on an icy night at a church sandwiched uncomfortably between a Persian deli and a methadone clinic on the dirtiest streets of wherever, USA. But this one rolled up stupid in a red flatbed, straight out of Kihei in the heart of Kapahulu.
After the singing comes the prayer requests. When you hear about everyone’s dying relatives or missing children or any manner of the Lords will personified. The sailor wanted none of it. As the deputy pastor walked from person to person, listening and broadcasting their prayers to the group over the wireless microphone, he became increasingly frantic, raising his arms in fury and exasperation each time she picked someone else. At one point, his wife had to pull him down like someone restraining a pit bull.
But his time came.
Just as the woman behind him leaned in telling him to be patient, the pastor spotted him. She walked up and held the mic forward for him to speak and he boldly tore it from her grasp.
He was out of the pew and into the aisle with the grace of a seasoned televangelist, his head cocked backwards and a dramatic drunken sway to his frame. He alternated between a two hand prayer grip on the handle of the microphone and one hand raised for either calming effect or balance.
“I’m going to do it,” he announced to us softly under the soft glow of the high ceiling lights with the grim determination of a plumber. “It’s been my lifelong goal to move to O`ahu. And now. Here! I! Am!”
He paused for emphasis, nodding his head with subtle arrogance. He assessed the unresponsive crowd who had never seen anyone with the mic other than the mikanele. You could almost hear the unison whispers from the gray hairs that this was not the reverend Sky St Jon.
“Today I did it. I finally enrolled at the UH. Just under the deadline with less than 20 minutes to spare. And I’m going to do it!”
At this point all heads were down. He had the feel of a snake that might strike upon eye contact.
“See… I’m here tonight,” he bent his knees to meet the downcast eyes of the congregation as he balled one hand into a fist, “to receive your prayers for my prosperity.”
He let this sink in, standing back up and pointing a thumb into his own chest.
“For the prosperity of me, my wife and our two children as I complete my schooling at UH Manoa which I enrolled in today.”
Just under the deadline. Yes. We were all clear on that one. He flopped his arms out parallel to the floor and dropped the mic. The deputy pastor scurried to grab it as the bounces echoed to the high ceilings and back. He sat down with a piously superior nod. His wife patted his back nervously as the pastor asked for his name to properly invoke the prayer.
“It’s Bryce!” he shouted in disgust without the benefit of the amplifier as if his name had been Jesus or Mohamed or Kamehameha I.
“Let us pray,” she began, “for Bryce and his family embarking upon this new journey and know that god wants us all to prosper in all of our-”
“Celebrate with us!” He was up again, the wife pulling at his shoulders and the gray haired old ladies disabling their hearing aids under the pounding waves of his verbal diarrhea.
We work on the people in the front pews as the group is coming out of guided meditation and some are dropping satchels containing more prayers into a wood chest on the front stage. It’s a relaxing time. There’s a song droning on in the background about healing or love, I can’t remember.
I had my eyes closed and my hands around the back of the neck of a lady from Baltimore, feeling for tension in her cervical vertebrae when Bryce was able to sneak up on stage behind me. His voice boomed across the church and I nearly ripped her head off in alarm.
“Love is the way!” He bellowed with arms up again. “Love!”
And then he was gone. He came in late and he went home early. And I haven’t been back there since. He left his mark like a careless Picasso and now he’s free somewhere up in Manoa terrorizing the business department with drunken theories on capitalism and the global marketplace I assume. Because he’s the kind of thorn-in-your-side hit-and-run artist that you have to give a sort of grudging respect to if for nothing else his calculated sleaziness, which leaves no time for someone to catch up with him in the parking lot and give him the kind of healing he really needs and truly deserves.
Dumbing Down
Michael Vick Buys Place in Florida -- Bankruptcy Coming Next? Michael David Smith sports.aol.com/fanhouse
Look to who benefits most. Who benefits from the fall of the high and mighty poster boy black male? Definitely this society in its racial rainbow of deluded hegemony. To paraphrase the immortal words of Tony Montana, we need someone to point the finger at and say "that's the bad guy." But do we need that? The finger. The guy. The horror. The revulsion. The hate, lies, truth and redemption.
Do we need the distraction? Over what? Dogs?
Pile a high profile human drama along side or on top of a million trivial others for what? So we can ignore real issues like CFCs, the ongoing US genocide against indigenous cultures, and of course how the latest terror threat to the homeland is being dealt with by Jack Bauer.
You love your dog? So what? The thing barks all 10 hours of the day it's neglected, in a language few can take the time to hope to understand. This is not a security measure. That one is a line born and bred, most likely by dogfighters. Because what criminal worth his weight in Iams Original Biscuits is afraid of a dog? Angry dogs are nothing more than ignorant bullies, their teeth sharpened on charging meeker targets their whole life with no built in response for what happens the day something stands its ground with a harsh command, sledge hammer or a piece of poisoned meat.
Subscribing to any other point of view is simply grazing with the herd. Or in this case running with the pack. Who let the dogs out?
When Vick is released, I plan to have a guaranteed and unrestricted contract good for the remainder of his life to act as a new symbol for PETA. We will call him the Black Falcon of Doggie Death and he will be the canine equivalent of the boogeyman; the first face of fear for all dogs and dog owners with animals chained up in bondage and barking at the slightest breeze. We're regulating noise pollution here for one. Keep your dog locked up, muzzled or otherwise sedated or the BFODD will descend from the heavens with a burlap sack full of nooses, bats and shovels. He'll kick in your front door as the children scream and take your gnashing bag of teeth, hair, ticks and fleas straight to doggie hell.
Now that we’ve settled that: Forget about down to earth when you talk about cruelty to animals and the culture of sport. The deified goliaths of gridiron navigate a completely different level. This is a fact that media fed mortals will probably never grasp. But it remains. Why hold them to a higher standard? If anything you should hold them to a lower one. These are your gods. The will of gods is not questioned. You have given them the keys to your stolen kingdom. You and your children emblazon your bodies with their names and worship at the limitless altars made readily available 24 hours a day by your blatant need to believe in something larger than you. You support war, and savagery and the capitalistic acquisition and abuse of land and these, your heroes personify the spoken and unspoken desires of your pagan hearts.
You've given away your right to judge these people. They make you millions. They make you believe. They help you to conform to what passes for culture in what is at its best a borrowed society. Where the only true culture is McDonalds, limitless debt and slavery. And you ask them to lead a dual life.
Yes yes. But to the point already. The benefit lies in the black hearts of white men who count on these cultural tragedies to illustrate how a hundred billion dollar franchise like Las Vegas or online gaming is tame by comparison. Casino owners. The college campus bookie. The sportbook snake oilers and of course networks like ESPN who pimp them out to you the people. The degenerates in their garages hunched over a screen, ignoring the call of collectors. The wife who squandered the college fund on the first three Notre Dame games. The list is endless and filthy and ripe for a natural disaster. Or a reality show. We’ll put them all on an island with nothing but coconuts and machetes and a tribe of Maori nationalists and see who comes out with perspective.
The benefit lies in the plausible deniability of the savagery that fuels the collective hopelessness in the cultureless wasteland. In the end we’re all dumber for participating. For listening. For taking the time to judge. For giving a damn and being distracted by it all. I’m still going to pay Vick that money, not because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s revolutionary. And it’s time to complete the circle
Look to who benefits most. Who benefits from the fall of the high and mighty poster boy black male? Definitely this society in its racial rainbow of deluded hegemony. To paraphrase the immortal words of Tony Montana, we need someone to point the finger at and say "that's the bad guy." But do we need that? The finger. The guy. The horror. The revulsion. The hate, lies, truth and redemption.
Do we need the distraction? Over what? Dogs?
Pile a high profile human drama along side or on top of a million trivial others for what? So we can ignore real issues like CFCs, the ongoing US genocide against indigenous cultures, and of course how the latest terror threat to the homeland is being dealt with by Jack Bauer.
You love your dog? So what? The thing barks all 10 hours of the day it's neglected, in a language few can take the time to hope to understand. This is not a security measure. That one is a line born and bred, most likely by dogfighters. Because what criminal worth his weight in Iams Original Biscuits is afraid of a dog? Angry dogs are nothing more than ignorant bullies, their teeth sharpened on charging meeker targets their whole life with no built in response for what happens the day something stands its ground with a harsh command, sledge hammer or a piece of poisoned meat.
Subscribing to any other point of view is simply grazing with the herd. Or in this case running with the pack. Who let the dogs out?
When Vick is released, I plan to have a guaranteed and unrestricted contract good for the remainder of his life to act as a new symbol for PETA. We will call him the Black Falcon of Doggie Death and he will be the canine equivalent of the boogeyman; the first face of fear for all dogs and dog owners with animals chained up in bondage and barking at the slightest breeze. We're regulating noise pollution here for one. Keep your dog locked up, muzzled or otherwise sedated or the BFODD will descend from the heavens with a burlap sack full of nooses, bats and shovels. He'll kick in your front door as the children scream and take your gnashing bag of teeth, hair, ticks and fleas straight to doggie hell.
Now that we’ve settled that: Forget about down to earth when you talk about cruelty to animals and the culture of sport. The deified goliaths of gridiron navigate a completely different level. This is a fact that media fed mortals will probably never grasp. But it remains. Why hold them to a higher standard? If anything you should hold them to a lower one. These are your gods. The will of gods is not questioned. You have given them the keys to your stolen kingdom. You and your children emblazon your bodies with their names and worship at the limitless altars made readily available 24 hours a day by your blatant need to believe in something larger than you. You support war, and savagery and the capitalistic acquisition and abuse of land and these, your heroes personify the spoken and unspoken desires of your pagan hearts.
You've given away your right to judge these people. They make you millions. They make you believe. They help you to conform to what passes for culture in what is at its best a borrowed society. Where the only true culture is McDonalds, limitless debt and slavery. And you ask them to lead a dual life.
Yes yes. But to the point already. The benefit lies in the black hearts of white men who count on these cultural tragedies to illustrate how a hundred billion dollar franchise like Las Vegas or online gaming is tame by comparison. Casino owners. The college campus bookie. The sportbook snake oilers and of course networks like ESPN who pimp them out to you the people. The degenerates in their garages hunched over a screen, ignoring the call of collectors. The wife who squandered the college fund on the first three Notre Dame games. The list is endless and filthy and ripe for a natural disaster. Or a reality show. We’ll put them all on an island with nothing but coconuts and machetes and a tribe of Maori nationalists and see who comes out with perspective.
The benefit lies in the plausible deniability of the savagery that fuels the collective hopelessness in the cultureless wasteland. In the end we’re all dumber for participating. For listening. For taking the time to judge. For giving a damn and being distracted by it all. I’m still going to pay Vick that money, not because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s revolutionary. And it’s time to complete the circle
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Domestic Tranquility & Equestrian Logic
With the rampant psychosis stinking up the spa and the island of Lana`i as a whole like fertilizer, I have taken to disappearing to mainland Maui on my day off. The ferry ride is generally smooth unless we smash into one of the many humpbacked menaces currently inhabiting the channel like fat koi in a barrel. We need to start eating these whales, but that is a discussion for another day.
I had generously accepted the invitation for beer in Pa`ia and horse whispering from Sera, the former outside center for the WAZZU Women's Rugby team. I still have no photos for you but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that in itself is far too much talk.
I'm back on Lana`i now, suffering from no sleep and perched on a dock, I can feel the earth rotating on its axis. This is an unnerving and painfully nauseous experience that is complimented nicely by the pork sandwiches I've been eating all day. But I cannot vomit or these carp will go crazy, riding the steam of puke like lightning into my mouth and down my gullet where they will spawn until my intestines rupture with their foul offspring.
The horsing about proved to be fine. I had never personally been atop one of these beasts, but have since cultivated a somewhat more profound respect for Zorro and other pertinent swashbucklers. The animals are not to be trusted. It tried repeatedly to buck me into the pineapple fields and I sustained superficial back wounds from the multitude of low bridges it attempted to peel me out of the saddle under. In the end it all came down to kicking the brute in the side and making that clicking sound between the teeth that gets large animals moving.
The dancing in Pa`ia was sub par. Unrecognizable tunes and samples and DJs growling into rotten microphones about god only knows what. The two $14 double Jager shots were the final straw.
We fled back to her studio where she smoked a hand rolled joint of pure nicotine venom the proceeded to do crotchless hanging ab lifts from the 3 in 1 tower of power. She then hung upside down on inversion boots until I lost interest and started tearing apart her stuffed animals.
It was all a whirlwind 24 hour period and I had to be back in Lahina for the 6:45 boat. So we pawed at each other until 5am when her ex boyfriend walked through the door in direct violation of his restraining order.
Right away I could hear the teeth start to grind. This would obviously not go as he had planned it and being a thuggish Brit he would be an improvisational cripple outside of anything more cerebral than a duel in the yard.
He had some kind of eerie red light and I figured he must have rode his 10 speed in and snaked the tail light off at the last minute as a symbolic gesture that perhaps the red light express was making its 5am stop in Makawao.
The light did nothing more than illuminate him, blinding him as she yelled at the light repeatedly to leave. He muttered pathetically, fumbling at the light switch.
The 80 watt halogen at the top of the high ceiling was like an awful premature sunrise, illuminating her draped over me in her PJs as I yawned casually in a borrowed pair of women's underwear. I stretched lazily looking at him with one eye, taking time to flex the biceps.
A cheap parlor gag, but it was early and I didn't have time for yard brawling. It worked as effectively though as a punch to the nuts. He backed slowly out over the threshold like a freshly buggered British gelding as I made that clicking sound between my teeth that gets large animals moving.
I had generously accepted the invitation for beer in Pa`ia and horse whispering from Sera, the former outside center for the WAZZU Women's Rugby team. I still have no photos for you but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that in itself is far too much talk.
I'm back on Lana`i now, suffering from no sleep and perched on a dock, I can feel the earth rotating on its axis. This is an unnerving and painfully nauseous experience that is complimented nicely by the pork sandwiches I've been eating all day. But I cannot vomit or these carp will go crazy, riding the steam of puke like lightning into my mouth and down my gullet where they will spawn until my intestines rupture with their foul offspring.
The horsing about proved to be fine. I had never personally been atop one of these beasts, but have since cultivated a somewhat more profound respect for Zorro and other pertinent swashbucklers. The animals are not to be trusted. It tried repeatedly to buck me into the pineapple fields and I sustained superficial back wounds from the multitude of low bridges it attempted to peel me out of the saddle under. In the end it all came down to kicking the brute in the side and making that clicking sound between the teeth that gets large animals moving.
The dancing in Pa`ia was sub par. Unrecognizable tunes and samples and DJs growling into rotten microphones about god only knows what. The two $14 double Jager shots were the final straw.
We fled back to her studio where she smoked a hand rolled joint of pure nicotine venom the proceeded to do crotchless hanging ab lifts from the 3 in 1 tower of power. She then hung upside down on inversion boots until I lost interest and started tearing apart her stuffed animals.
It was all a whirlwind 24 hour period and I had to be back in Lahina for the 6:45 boat. So we pawed at each other until 5am when her ex boyfriend walked through the door in direct violation of his restraining order.
Right away I could hear the teeth start to grind. This would obviously not go as he had planned it and being a thuggish Brit he would be an improvisational cripple outside of anything more cerebral than a duel in the yard.
He had some kind of eerie red light and I figured he must have rode his 10 speed in and snaked the tail light off at the last minute as a symbolic gesture that perhaps the red light express was making its 5am stop in Makawao.
The light did nothing more than illuminate him, blinding him as she yelled at the light repeatedly to leave. He muttered pathetically, fumbling at the light switch.
The 80 watt halogen at the top of the high ceiling was like an awful premature sunrise, illuminating her draped over me in her PJs as I yawned casually in a borrowed pair of women's underwear. I stretched lazily looking at him with one eye, taking time to flex the biceps.
A cheap parlor gag, but it was early and I didn't have time for yard brawling. It worked as effectively though as a punch to the nuts. He backed slowly out over the threshold like a freshly buggered British gelding as I made that clicking sound between my teeth that gets large animals moving.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Fifteen Minutes of Shame
"I went from Phoenix Arizona all the way to Tacoma."
-S.M.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Putting the Mean Back in Meaningless (Part 2)
They told me it was BYOB. So because it's what Jesus would do, I secured the last bottle of merlot from my last trip to the continent along with a huge corkscrew bottle opener concealed in my beltline like a weapon. I jammed the wine in my front pocket and wandered around like it was perfectly normal, daring anyone to question my reasoning.
We were greeted at the balcony by Chris after passing an unconscious hippy with a plastic rubbish container bound around his neck, dripping vomit from his chin and looking ready to be tossed curbside for a morning pickup. The sharpie marking on his hand read, "don't ever do this again, it could have been much worse. -CC"
In a t-shirt and tie he hugged me with obvious love, demanding to know where I had been and babbling on about another 80s party. I told him I'd been hiding from lawyers in Nogales Mexico for obvious reasons. But never mind, here I was now full of righteous anger with a bottle of red wine that I would either open when I was seized by inspiration, or use as a weapon. At this point it didn't matter. It would be hard to resist tossing it down to street level unopened just to see the explosion.
Chris' tie and t-shirt set off one of Alvarez' people immediately like a police siren in a bat cave. That sort of unkempt metrosexuality was more than the redneck could handle in one gulp at the first onset of a Friday evening. But I told him not to worry about it. Shut up and blend in, or someone would surely find the means to toss him to the street where the urchins would empty his pockets and make off into the night with his slippers. The metrosexuals were as ruthless as any gang and always waiting to make an example of an enemy.
"But he's gay!" the boy spat at me, his lips blubbering with cottonmouth terror and pure ignorance.
I slapped him hard across the lips twice. Left and right with grim determination that I would only have to make this point once. "What do you mean by that? You're upset that he's limiting himself to one sexual preference? Unlike you, so obviously highly evolved in your own bisexuality?"
"But I'm not-"
I growled at him from my gut in complete frustration, pulling the corkscrew from my pants and ready to spear him in the hand and uncork a metacarpal when Chris grabbed me from behind, wanting to know the story behind the wine in my pants and leading me off to the dark side of the roof.
"Look who's here," he said to Christa who I had evidently not seen since December. She was busy with a crowd of Japanese businessmen obviously negotiating some kind of merger for Jewish/Japanese control of Oahu.
I let her have it for her newly bleached blonde hair, recalling the last time I'd seen her when she couldn't stop berating me for shaving my own skull. And told her she ought remedy it at once before some right wing WASP coalition descended with barbed-wire bats and chainsaws and tried to adopt her as their poster child. I wasn't here for the fashion show, but fair was fair. I never claimed to take criticism gracefully. An eye for an eye.
Evidently it was someones birthday, and the boss had given her the keys to the office. I surveyed the roof area looking to the left just as someone made contact with a huge pi�ata shaped like a dogfish. The pink eyesore exploded right in front of me like a roach bomb and the air was snuffed in a deluge of flying vials of designer drugs and pez dispensers. The frenzied mob scrambled like eels from all corners of the deck squealing in feverish glee hoping to get their hands on the worst of it, trampling awful holes in the illiterate along the way and not bothering to pause for things like good form, safety or reason.
I dodged several waves of crazies and reached the parapet wall, wiping someone else�s blood from my forehead where I spotted a known and foul import/export tycoon camped out nursing a surgically enhanced hip, with a black steel cane and what I assumed was his wife. I slapped him on the shoulder and shook arms demanding to know her name. Right away his eyes went glassy and evasive at the question and she giggled and blushed.
"You son of a bitch!" I barked, grabbing him by the collar insistent to know where were his wife and kids, how much had he paid for this Thai prostitute, and what the hell was he doing pinned to this wall. The hooker howled in protest but the tycoon grinned at her, shaking his head to let me go. I told him it was a wise choice to keep her silent, if I could remember in the morning I would report him directly to the right people, after all I told him, our children went to the same school. I wandered off to the toilet listening to him asking a small crowd if I had any children and how did I afford to send them to Waldorf?
"He does it by extorting guys like you!" I heard someone shout. It was Jack the Mormon who had arrived late. As I turned I saw him grab the hooker in his huge sunburned meat hooks and plant a kiss on her face, harshly smearing her lipstick then lumbering off in the other direction, leaving her clueless and forlorn.
In the toilet my phone rang. It was someone from the student loan society named Guido. He wanted to know my current address. I laughed at him asking if he had the right number but drunk beyond reason and incapable of real deceit. He assured me that I just confirmed my own identity and where could he send my statements. I told him it would be paid in full at once, grabbing a business card from one of the architects from the rubbish. I had him send a one-time payment option directly to Smith Street and we would take care of this thing right now. In the heart of my lie, I noticed I had inadvertently pissed down my own leg from crotch to boot heel like a fool. I cursed absently and kicked through the crowd of women assembled at the door.
Alvarez was waiting, sobering up and sipping at some kind of carbonated pink cup. I confessed my dilemma to him at once. He laughed and dumped the drink in my crotch, drawing an immediate gasp from the crowd. I believe for effect, he slapped me in the face and folded his arms. It was quick thinking though and I appreciate that. Problem solved.
Somewhere on the dance floor Major Tom (Coming Home) by Peter Schilling started playing. I decided this must be the moment to open the wine before it bore a hole in my pocket. I demanded Alvarez sing the chorus with me but he looked at me with all the grim understanding of seven dwarves in the way of an avalanche and turned the other way in shame.
I struck out for the center of the commotion, jamming the corkscrew in and opening the bottle in under 3 seconds, a personal best. No one near me understood the reason for the wine. Was it new years or some obscure eastern holiday? But they went along like dumb beasts, and while they nodded, dancing along stupefied, I topped off their mai tais with several ounces of vintage red until the smart ones started shrinking back in horror and I was forced to toast myself straight from the bottle.
Gagging on the rotten wine I made a mad rush to the ledge where the Tycoon was still camped out immobile with his prostitute. I barked a horrible garbled Japanese battle cry and smashed the bottle over his surgically repaired hip, showering us all with wine. He crumpled to the floor at once, grimacing in pain asking why had this happened to him as his hooker pounced on him, a weeping and jumbled mass of misplaced emotions.
"I hate that question. Just accept your fate." He writhed on the ground more in humiliation than actual pain but I felt a little bit bad for him. "Hmm. For the record I just wanted to see if you could move off that wall. You make a horrible wallflower by the way, but a fine step-stool for anyone brave enough to think they can fly."
The last words he could get out before surrendering to a monsoon of wretched sobbing was something along the lines of how I smelled like urine. But I cut him off with a wave, telling him to take his hussy home and go feed his kids.
Because I've seen it all, it's all bad, and it never ever gets better. We learned this the hard way making a dumb pilgrimage to Lulu's for nachos and heartburn where I passed out at the table only to be woke by my phone at an empty table where they had left me. A cruel joke to play on such a good and humble person especially this far past last call. I staggered outside where the pack had assembled, laughing like hyenas at my expense. Jack the Mormon crammed me into his car like cream filling and returned me to Chinatown where I collapsed in the $5 parking, a prisoner of Friday night and my own horrible filth.
We were greeted at the balcony by Chris after passing an unconscious hippy with a plastic rubbish container bound around his neck, dripping vomit from his chin and looking ready to be tossed curbside for a morning pickup. The sharpie marking on his hand read, "don't ever do this again, it could have been much worse. -CC"
In a t-shirt and tie he hugged me with obvious love, demanding to know where I had been and babbling on about another 80s party. I told him I'd been hiding from lawyers in Nogales Mexico for obvious reasons. But never mind, here I was now full of righteous anger with a bottle of red wine that I would either open when I was seized by inspiration, or use as a weapon. At this point it didn't matter. It would be hard to resist tossing it down to street level unopened just to see the explosion.
Chris' tie and t-shirt set off one of Alvarez' people immediately like a police siren in a bat cave. That sort of unkempt metrosexuality was more than the redneck could handle in one gulp at the first onset of a Friday evening. But I told him not to worry about it. Shut up and blend in, or someone would surely find the means to toss him to the street where the urchins would empty his pockets and make off into the night with his slippers. The metrosexuals were as ruthless as any gang and always waiting to make an example of an enemy.
"But he's gay!" the boy spat at me, his lips blubbering with cottonmouth terror and pure ignorance.
I slapped him hard across the lips twice. Left and right with grim determination that I would only have to make this point once. "What do you mean by that? You're upset that he's limiting himself to one sexual preference? Unlike you, so obviously highly evolved in your own bisexuality?"
"But I'm not-"
I growled at him from my gut in complete frustration, pulling the corkscrew from my pants and ready to spear him in the hand and uncork a metacarpal when Chris grabbed me from behind, wanting to know the story behind the wine in my pants and leading me off to the dark side of the roof.
"Look who's here," he said to Christa who I had evidently not seen since December. She was busy with a crowd of Japanese businessmen obviously negotiating some kind of merger for Jewish/Japanese control of Oahu.
I let her have it for her newly bleached blonde hair, recalling the last time I'd seen her when she couldn't stop berating me for shaving my own skull. And told her she ought remedy it at once before some right wing WASP coalition descended with barbed-wire bats and chainsaws and tried to adopt her as their poster child. I wasn't here for the fashion show, but fair was fair. I never claimed to take criticism gracefully. An eye for an eye.
Evidently it was someones birthday, and the boss had given her the keys to the office. I surveyed the roof area looking to the left just as someone made contact with a huge pi�ata shaped like a dogfish. The pink eyesore exploded right in front of me like a roach bomb and the air was snuffed in a deluge of flying vials of designer drugs and pez dispensers. The frenzied mob scrambled like eels from all corners of the deck squealing in feverish glee hoping to get their hands on the worst of it, trampling awful holes in the illiterate along the way and not bothering to pause for things like good form, safety or reason.
I dodged several waves of crazies and reached the parapet wall, wiping someone else�s blood from my forehead where I spotted a known and foul import/export tycoon camped out nursing a surgically enhanced hip, with a black steel cane and what I assumed was his wife. I slapped him on the shoulder and shook arms demanding to know her name. Right away his eyes went glassy and evasive at the question and she giggled and blushed.
"You son of a bitch!" I barked, grabbing him by the collar insistent to know where were his wife and kids, how much had he paid for this Thai prostitute, and what the hell was he doing pinned to this wall. The hooker howled in protest but the tycoon grinned at her, shaking his head to let me go. I told him it was a wise choice to keep her silent, if I could remember in the morning I would report him directly to the right people, after all I told him, our children went to the same school. I wandered off to the toilet listening to him asking a small crowd if I had any children and how did I afford to send them to Waldorf?
"He does it by extorting guys like you!" I heard someone shout. It was Jack the Mormon who had arrived late. As I turned I saw him grab the hooker in his huge sunburned meat hooks and plant a kiss on her face, harshly smearing her lipstick then lumbering off in the other direction, leaving her clueless and forlorn.
In the toilet my phone rang. It was someone from the student loan society named Guido. He wanted to know my current address. I laughed at him asking if he had the right number but drunk beyond reason and incapable of real deceit. He assured me that I just confirmed my own identity and where could he send my statements. I told him it would be paid in full at once, grabbing a business card from one of the architects from the rubbish. I had him send a one-time payment option directly to Smith Street and we would take care of this thing right now. In the heart of my lie, I noticed I had inadvertently pissed down my own leg from crotch to boot heel like a fool. I cursed absently and kicked through the crowd of women assembled at the door.
Alvarez was waiting, sobering up and sipping at some kind of carbonated pink cup. I confessed my dilemma to him at once. He laughed and dumped the drink in my crotch, drawing an immediate gasp from the crowd. I believe for effect, he slapped me in the face and folded his arms. It was quick thinking though and I appreciate that. Problem solved.
Somewhere on the dance floor Major Tom (Coming Home) by Peter Schilling started playing. I decided this must be the moment to open the wine before it bore a hole in my pocket. I demanded Alvarez sing the chorus with me but he looked at me with all the grim understanding of seven dwarves in the way of an avalanche and turned the other way in shame.
I struck out for the center of the commotion, jamming the corkscrew in and opening the bottle in under 3 seconds, a personal best. No one near me understood the reason for the wine. Was it new years or some obscure eastern holiday? But they went along like dumb beasts, and while they nodded, dancing along stupefied, I topped off their mai tais with several ounces of vintage red until the smart ones started shrinking back in horror and I was forced to toast myself straight from the bottle.
Gagging on the rotten wine I made a mad rush to the ledge where the Tycoon was still camped out immobile with his prostitute. I barked a horrible garbled Japanese battle cry and smashed the bottle over his surgically repaired hip, showering us all with wine. He crumpled to the floor at once, grimacing in pain asking why had this happened to him as his hooker pounced on him, a weeping and jumbled mass of misplaced emotions.
"I hate that question. Just accept your fate." He writhed on the ground more in humiliation than actual pain but I felt a little bit bad for him. "Hmm. For the record I just wanted to see if you could move off that wall. You make a horrible wallflower by the way, but a fine step-stool for anyone brave enough to think they can fly."
The last words he could get out before surrendering to a monsoon of wretched sobbing was something along the lines of how I smelled like urine. But I cut him off with a wave, telling him to take his hussy home and go feed his kids.
Because I've seen it all, it's all bad, and it never ever gets better. We learned this the hard way making a dumb pilgrimage to Lulu's for nachos and heartburn where I passed out at the table only to be woke by my phone at an empty table where they had left me. A cruel joke to play on such a good and humble person especially this far past last call. I staggered outside where the pack had assembled, laughing like hyenas at my expense. Jack the Mormon crammed me into his car like cream filling and returned me to Chinatown where I collapsed in the $5 parking, a prisoner of Friday night and my own horrible filth.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Putting the Mean Back in Meaningless (Part 1)
My first Friday back from the continent, I was brimming with hate and bad habits. And the stink of the valley of the sun and Mexican whores clung to my clothes like kookaburras and one week on top of the roof on my latest project for Chevron had my face blistering like corn tortillas.
I was busy in Kailua, studying for a midterm on the endocrine system with several of my peers. They all look up to me like a cultural icon and I feel that it's all I can do to show up on a Friday evening once a month to grace them with my knowledge. I don't necessarily know that much about the endocrine system, but I can lie with the best of them. And after all it was Friday night and a good idea to touch base with them as far as The Plan.
Coastguard Joe was nursing a hangover like a mangy dog lapping its own wounds after beating day and crazy Shane was headed to Kaneohe for god knew what kind of freakishness with his people back at the commune. Everyone else was either pregnant or locked in to study for the night. So with lack of better prospects I dialed local thinking globally for jack the Mormon. One of my estranged contacts and current treasurer of the local rugby club. He answered the phone sounding of death but explained that it was just the surf, jammed in his nose with sand and nori. He demanded that I meet him and his people at the green room of Indigos with Alvarez and Tim the social chair for some weird architect party on the 4th floor off Smith Street.
For some reason I'm always the first one to Indigos. But I had no room to complain. Five dollar parking until 6am and red stripe bottles on special, I ordered one for myself and set about looking for Alvarez near the remnants of devoured happy hour pupus.
Someone reached out touching my red QN Electric shirt, looking like she'd just made contact with complete enlightenment with a glazed look that positively screamed of over-the-counter narcotics. "Sorry," her friend said, "She just thinks you're hot."
"Huh. Thanks," I grunted pleasantly. "But I'm not really and soon I'll be drunk and not even recognizable. Don’t waste your time with me."
I wandered away from them looking for friendly faces but finding none I headed back for the green room and took a chair at the bar hoping not to be spotted and labeled a social leper. The mood was calm for a first Friday with the art walk remnants drifting through and the happy hour delinquents sauced to the rafters glaring at the green lanterns and wondering where the time went.
"Could you hate this place anymore?"
It was a blonde woman easing onto the rail in tall black boots and leather mini skirt looking for all intents like some kind of artist ran off the main drag of first Friday and caught up in the frivolous maddening concept of too many martinis. She glared a hole through me to a gang of dopey looking goons of six foot plus hovering in the entryway.
"Are you kidding me?" I replied already regretting joining the conversation, "I'm capable of more hate than you could ever imagine."
She giggled sheepishly and covered her mouth.
One of the apes grabbed a steel chair and smacking it down in between her and me picked her up and plopped her down saying, "It is chair. You sit." In a dirty eastern block accent. He loped away and we exchanged names. She was a German mobile correspondent for the New York Times called Annah. Apparently she had accepted the wrong drink from the wrong guy and now the goons were closing in
"What do you do?"
"I am a project coordinator. I coordinate the rape of the land out here for the Chinese." I explained, knowing I might have to do it several more times depending on how much longer she stayed on board.
"My husband owns marks garage." She announced for no good reason at all.
"What does that mean? That he can have me killed? You don’t scare me. Is he some kind of Joey Buttafuoco mechanic?"
"It's an art gallery."
"Don't lie to me. I know what a garage is. Is that him? The one with the chair. He seems like a real gentleman. Well spoken and cultured to the yellow teeth."
No she said. Those were some Russian mobsters. She couldn't get away from them. They felt they owed her a little something after the drink. And I told her I had to agree. Nothing is for free young lady. Obviously they knew this brutal truth. Chivalry is a long dead pastime of fools. We are all thriving in a give and take ritualistic society and to buck the tide is like standing in the way of a train. Better to get in line for it, grit your teeth and have your ticket punched.
She laughed again and told me to stop making her do it on account of she just had gum surgery. I shook my head and dared her to repeat what I'd just said.
"What do you do?" she repeated with chemically induced amnesia.
I’m a massage therapist specializing in the removal of evil spirits from your shoulder blades and also hand and foot reflexology. She nodded and gave me her hand then wanted to know what I was drinking. Couldn’t she read? It was right in my hand in front of her. Why so many questions? How many fat short brown bottles are there in this place? Where was Alvarez?
Red Stripe of course. It was on special. It tastes like steel drums. She headed for the bar for two more, dropping her martini glass with a crash that silenced the crowd. I brandished my beer at them and they went back to murmuring at the lanterns.
The Russian mob moved in on me. The ring leader approached with a loping gait, semi threatening and steaming like hot vodka.
"What do you think about staying away from her?"
I couldn't help but laugh. "What do you think about the rising cost of mail order brides out of Moscow?" Was the only reply I could muster. “I think its stupid personally, but I'm just sitting here. Leave me alone.”
He laughed and stuck his fist out for me to smack my own against, nodding his head all the while in some kind of twisted show of communist brotherhood. I responded by grabbing his wrist and planting a sopping red stripe kiss on his knuckles. He shrieked and fled back to the breezeway.
Just then Tim showed up with his blonde woman bursting at the bra seams. I introduced them to the German reporter and explained that I may have drawn unnecessary heat from Russian gangsters, but that it was nothing I had any fear he couldn’t handle. Sick your military goons on them and be on your way…
Alvarez was in the next bar where the atmosphere was cooler and better to curb my hot blood for the moment. I told Annah she could stay here or come. It didn’t matter to me. She struggled from the stool and followed us next door where Alvarez was seated around a table with several of his fresh faces smoking dried apricots from a huge glass hookah bong with rose inlays and devouring a mountain of French fries he had apparently lifted from the kitchen on his way back from the toilet.
“Where is your husband anyway?” I wanted to know finally, “I keep expecting some huge deranged mongrel to spring from the shadows with a monkey wrench and massive bleeding hemorrhoids.”
"No, we're separated."
I see. You say you're married to keep me honest when I’m minding my own business and saving you from the Russian mob, but get a few red stripe in my stomach and the truth is revealed. A mistress of deceit.
I headed back to the Green Room, leaving my phone with Annah to field all calls, to fetch one more round of the fine Red Stripe and close my tab before things got out of hand. I got two for the road, as Tim was itching to leave and get to his roof party. He had provided the sound system and was showing obvious signs of concern. I returned with the brown bottles, stuffed with maraschino cherries only to find Annah gone with the wind. Alvarez explained.
“She started telling us we were all stupid compared to you. I told her you would probably kill her for saying it but she wouldn’t give up. She said she was off to find you and take you home. I said it was bullshit, it’s only 8. but there was no talking to that bitch. She’d made up her mind. So I said you went out the back way for a chew.”
I knew the rest before he finished. The Russians were lying in wait like serpents in the muck. They snatched her up in their talons and bolted for higher ground. Even as Alvarez wrapped it up, we all knew exactly what cruelness was befalling her as we spoke. It was the law of the jungle, which we weren’t here to enforce or practice. Just take note of. We’d done all we could to protect her but there comes a time to let all things go. And that time was now. We exited onto Nu`uanu and scattered in the hot evening trades to our vehicles to retrieve the second B in BYOB feeling better than everyone, unfaltering judgment and the blasé arrogance to do or say just about anything to wash the horrible memory of Indigos, the Russians and criminal intent from our heads.
I was busy in Kailua, studying for a midterm on the endocrine system with several of my peers. They all look up to me like a cultural icon and I feel that it's all I can do to show up on a Friday evening once a month to grace them with my knowledge. I don't necessarily know that much about the endocrine system, but I can lie with the best of them. And after all it was Friday night and a good idea to touch base with them as far as The Plan.
Coastguard Joe was nursing a hangover like a mangy dog lapping its own wounds after beating day and crazy Shane was headed to Kaneohe for god knew what kind of freakishness with his people back at the commune. Everyone else was either pregnant or locked in to study for the night. So with lack of better prospects I dialed local thinking globally for jack the Mormon. One of my estranged contacts and current treasurer of the local rugby club. He answered the phone sounding of death but explained that it was just the surf, jammed in his nose with sand and nori. He demanded that I meet him and his people at the green room of Indigos with Alvarez and Tim the social chair for some weird architect party on the 4th floor off Smith Street.
For some reason I'm always the first one to Indigos. But I had no room to complain. Five dollar parking until 6am and red stripe bottles on special, I ordered one for myself and set about looking for Alvarez near the remnants of devoured happy hour pupus.
Someone reached out touching my red QN Electric shirt, looking like she'd just made contact with complete enlightenment with a glazed look that positively screamed of over-the-counter narcotics. "Sorry," her friend said, "She just thinks you're hot."
"Huh. Thanks," I grunted pleasantly. "But I'm not really and soon I'll be drunk and not even recognizable. Don’t waste your time with me."
I wandered away from them looking for friendly faces but finding none I headed back for the green room and took a chair at the bar hoping not to be spotted and labeled a social leper. The mood was calm for a first Friday with the art walk remnants drifting through and the happy hour delinquents sauced to the rafters glaring at the green lanterns and wondering where the time went.
"Could you hate this place anymore?"
It was a blonde woman easing onto the rail in tall black boots and leather mini skirt looking for all intents like some kind of artist ran off the main drag of first Friday and caught up in the frivolous maddening concept of too many martinis. She glared a hole through me to a gang of dopey looking goons of six foot plus hovering in the entryway.
"Are you kidding me?" I replied already regretting joining the conversation, "I'm capable of more hate than you could ever imagine."
She giggled sheepishly and covered her mouth.
One of the apes grabbed a steel chair and smacking it down in between her and me picked her up and plopped her down saying, "It is chair. You sit." In a dirty eastern block accent. He loped away and we exchanged names. She was a German mobile correspondent for the New York Times called Annah. Apparently she had accepted the wrong drink from the wrong guy and now the goons were closing in
"What do you do?"
"I am a project coordinator. I coordinate the rape of the land out here for the Chinese." I explained, knowing I might have to do it several more times depending on how much longer she stayed on board.
"My husband owns marks garage." She announced for no good reason at all.
"What does that mean? That he can have me killed? You don’t scare me. Is he some kind of Joey Buttafuoco mechanic?"
"It's an art gallery."
"Don't lie to me. I know what a garage is. Is that him? The one with the chair. He seems like a real gentleman. Well spoken and cultured to the yellow teeth."
No she said. Those were some Russian mobsters. She couldn't get away from them. They felt they owed her a little something after the drink. And I told her I had to agree. Nothing is for free young lady. Obviously they knew this brutal truth. Chivalry is a long dead pastime of fools. We are all thriving in a give and take ritualistic society and to buck the tide is like standing in the way of a train. Better to get in line for it, grit your teeth and have your ticket punched.
She laughed again and told me to stop making her do it on account of she just had gum surgery. I shook my head and dared her to repeat what I'd just said.
"What do you do?" she repeated with chemically induced amnesia.
I’m a massage therapist specializing in the removal of evil spirits from your shoulder blades and also hand and foot reflexology. She nodded and gave me her hand then wanted to know what I was drinking. Couldn’t she read? It was right in my hand in front of her. Why so many questions? How many fat short brown bottles are there in this place? Where was Alvarez?
Red Stripe of course. It was on special. It tastes like steel drums. She headed for the bar for two more, dropping her martini glass with a crash that silenced the crowd. I brandished my beer at them and they went back to murmuring at the lanterns.
The Russian mob moved in on me. The ring leader approached with a loping gait, semi threatening and steaming like hot vodka.
"What do you think about staying away from her?"
I couldn't help but laugh. "What do you think about the rising cost of mail order brides out of Moscow?" Was the only reply I could muster. “I think its stupid personally, but I'm just sitting here. Leave me alone.”
He laughed and stuck his fist out for me to smack my own against, nodding his head all the while in some kind of twisted show of communist brotherhood. I responded by grabbing his wrist and planting a sopping red stripe kiss on his knuckles. He shrieked and fled back to the breezeway.
Just then Tim showed up with his blonde woman bursting at the bra seams. I introduced them to the German reporter and explained that I may have drawn unnecessary heat from Russian gangsters, but that it was nothing I had any fear he couldn’t handle. Sick your military goons on them and be on your way…
Alvarez was in the next bar where the atmosphere was cooler and better to curb my hot blood for the moment. I told Annah she could stay here or come. It didn’t matter to me. She struggled from the stool and followed us next door where Alvarez was seated around a table with several of his fresh faces smoking dried apricots from a huge glass hookah bong with rose inlays and devouring a mountain of French fries he had apparently lifted from the kitchen on his way back from the toilet.
“Where is your husband anyway?” I wanted to know finally, “I keep expecting some huge deranged mongrel to spring from the shadows with a monkey wrench and massive bleeding hemorrhoids.”
"No, we're separated."
I see. You say you're married to keep me honest when I’m minding my own business and saving you from the Russian mob, but get a few red stripe in my stomach and the truth is revealed. A mistress of deceit.
I headed back to the Green Room, leaving my phone with Annah to field all calls, to fetch one more round of the fine Red Stripe and close my tab before things got out of hand. I got two for the road, as Tim was itching to leave and get to his roof party. He had provided the sound system and was showing obvious signs of concern. I returned with the brown bottles, stuffed with maraschino cherries only to find Annah gone with the wind. Alvarez explained.
“She started telling us we were all stupid compared to you. I told her you would probably kill her for saying it but she wouldn’t give up. She said she was off to find you and take you home. I said it was bullshit, it’s only 8. but there was no talking to that bitch. She’d made up her mind. So I said you went out the back way for a chew.”
I knew the rest before he finished. The Russians were lying in wait like serpents in the muck. They snatched her up in their talons and bolted for higher ground. Even as Alvarez wrapped it up, we all knew exactly what cruelness was befalling her as we spoke. It was the law of the jungle, which we weren’t here to enforce or practice. Just take note of. We’d done all we could to protect her but there comes a time to let all things go. And that time was now. We exited onto Nu`uanu and scattered in the hot evening trades to our vehicles to retrieve the second B in BYOB feeling better than everyone, unfaltering judgment and the blasé arrogance to do or say just about anything to wash the horrible memory of Indigos, the Russians and criminal intent from our heads.
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