Fiction, Very Long (for this context), looking for feedback. (360 hits)
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Submitted by CrumbleBum <piperatthegat13.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2004-01-19 23:41:22 EST
This is a bit of fiction I wrote about a year ago. My freinds tell me it's good, but one can't really trust there frieinds for objective opinions. But you guys don't give a fuck about me.
Yes, given the context, it's long as fuck, and I won't blame anyone who really dosent feel like reading it. That said, here we go.
Part 1: The Blue Moon Cafe And Diner
I sit in the Blue Moon Cafe and Diner, scratching at the little bits of crap stuck to the tablecloth. I do this impulsively, I scrape at anything that protrudes from an otherwise flat surface. My wounds rarely heal well, as I cannot keep a scab. I've had the same scrape on my forearm for the past six weeks, and I doubt it will be going away anytime soon. This might be significant, or it might be one of the many various things I sit and think about to convince myself that I am profound. Either way, I get a lot of shit under my fingernails.
So I sit, and I stare blankly out the window, sipping my Cherry Cola, and occasionally lighting a cigarette. I have several hours to kill before my bus arrives to take me away, and I don't know anyone here. So I sit, and I wait. I count cars. I count the minutes. I correlate the data to arrive at an average of fourteen cars per five minutes over a thirty minute period. I wish I'd brought a book.
Occasionally the waitress passes by and asks me how I'm doing, if I need anything, if I need to use a phone. One always seems to get extra sympathy from the workers of an estblishment if one appears basically stranded there for a while. Eventually they get to know you , and they seem to become freindly with you. Even though you will be leaving in a matter of hours, you have suddenly become a regular. I suppose this stems from some kind of commiseration, as you have begun to understand the kind of misery involved in spending large ammounts of time here. The more someone thinks you understand there suffering, the more they seem to like you.
I am reminded of when I was sixteen and my father died in a freak car accident. I got the news during art class, and I burst into tears. I left school, and spent several days out on account of the wake, the funeral, and so on. Shortly after coming back to school, I found out that a boy I had hardly ever talked to named Derick Feldman had also lost his father the previous year. We became freinds, and spent a good deal of time together. We rarely, if ever, argued about anything, as we didnt feel strongly enough about any related topics to have any kind of fuel for debate, and at the time, this seemed like a good companionship. I haven't seen or spoken to him since High School. I suppose the relationship had served it's purpose. We had helped eachother cope with the loss of a father, and there was no more need for further contact.
A lot of relationships, even freindships, are like this. A bond is formed in a time of mutual need, and is abandoned when the need is fulfilled. However, the final seperation is not always a mutual one, as sometimes we forget that, while our own requirement of the relationship is satisfied, our companion may remain unfulfilled, and furthermore, some people just have a problem letting go. Some people are very hard to satisfy. Not all relationships are of this nature, mind you, but a good many are, and this fact can sometimes lead to pain and disillusionment.
It's not always fair, but that's how it works. One example, you get into some kind of mishap and injure a leg. So for several months, you work with a physical therapist. Over the course of your relationship, you get to know one another, and you get a pretty good grasp of all the surface details; likes, dislikes, names of siblings and parents, etc. But the primary focus of your relationship is making your legs work again. Once this issue has been taken care of, you part ways. You don't set up coffee dates. You don't go to concerts together. The leg is healed, the relationship is completed, and no one is terribly hurt by this process.
However, there is another example. You find out your girlfriend or wife or whatever is cheating on you, or doing something else that hurts you on a really base level and generally injures your sense of humanity and trust. At the encouragement of your freinds, you attempt to "Get Back On the Horse". You go out looking for love, and find yourself an absolutely wonderful woman who is warm, compassionate, honest and trusting, and who seems to care for you deeply. For a few months, you bask in her warm embrace, and she soaks up your pain and wrings it down the drain like a motherly washcloth. Your pain is over, and you have coped. And thus, as far as your heart is concerned, the relationship is over. It has served it's purpose. This is where it gets really tricky, because in the world of romance, no one really likes to be used to clean up a mess and dropped like a disposable, moist towlette. And thus, the little lady who set out to find Mr. Right is now looking for someone to help her cope. See how that works?
Sorry, I tend to wander off on tangents sometimes. Well, most of the time. So here I am, watching time pass in a little diner in another of many anonymous cities. I chat with the waitresses about common things like politics and literature. We both make sure to express opinions just strong enough to show that we actually have them, but just weak enough as to not lead to a protracted discussion, as we are both well aware of the temporal nature of our relationship here. And where temporary freinds that you really have nothing in common with are concerned, a cluster of light conversations is often better than one, giant, heavy debate. To be honest, neither of us really want to risk being partially affected by the other. Strong exposure to the opinions of others can be a dangerous thing if not moderated.
As I see the long Greyhound pull up in the street, I worry for a moment. Has this place become important to me? Will I leave a piece of myself here, and in exchange, take a piece of this place with me? Or will it slip into the oblivion the moment I step onto the bus? In a month, will I remember Estelle, the skinny middle aged woman who shared with me her views on racial profiling, pop music, and the situation in the middle east? Will I remember the way the rain outside looked like a waterfall coming off of the gutterless roof? Will I take all this with me? Yes. Yes, I think I will. And just to be sure, I pocket the ashtray and slip it into my lugged as a memento.
Goodbye Estelle. Goodbye shitty tablecloth. Goodbye amber hued transparent glass of Cherry Cola. Goodbye Blue Moon Diner and Cafe. I will remember you always. But for now, I am done waiting for my bus, and therefore, out relationship is finished.
Part 2: A Bus Ride Into the Void
I sit on the bus, and I stare out the window. I like to be a passenger, as when I'm driving, I can never really take in the landscape. It's just getting to dusk now. I won't go into describing all the colors and how pretty it is and all that. It's really hard to come up with an origional, non cliched description of dusk, what with every poet that's ever lives having taken multiple swings at it. There are a lot of things like that, human experiences that are either so beautiful or horrible that it presents a massive challenge to transmute them into any kind of medium, be it visual, aural or textual. Because of this, everyone tries. It's like nature challanging poets.
That being said, the landscape I am passing could be prettier. It's mostly filthy land, trash and unevern, haphazard landscaping; some mud with some dead trees sticking out of it, and a few splotches of brown grass. The only buildings I see passing me by at sixty miles per hour are half torn down factories, burned out trailers, and a general assortment of the low end of the spectrum of human architecture, and in it's worst condition, to boot.
Still, there is something beautiful about it. Not "Wrap myself up in it and roll around for a while" beautiful, or even any kind of beautiful that would make you want to be near it or touch it. Instead, it's an odd kind of cohesive chaos. Pop art, the true face of America. The depressing, sarcastic kind of art. Black and white photographs of migrant workers in some intellectual liberal magazine asking you to donate to some kind of fund to help the amazingly poor become less so. We often assume that if people don't consume as much as us, they must not be as happy as us. We can't buy happiness, but we'll be goddamned if we aren't going to have a go at it.
Not that I'm some kind of commercialism hating elitist smelly hippy, mind you. I like money, just like everyone else. It's just that these little green etchings of grim faced, long dead politicians haven't lived up to there full promise. Money will get you stuff, but once you have your membership to the Cult of Stuff, can you ever have enough Stuff? Money can't buy happiness, but a lot of us have gone way past trying to buy that. Now we're trying to get Identity with our Checkcards, Individuality with our ATM Cards, and Freedom with our Mastercards. Dignity is bought with Visa. Hopefully, we have enough left over for a few tacos and the water bill.
I've always wanted to ask a hobo if he is happy where he is, but I have never had the gall. I mean, it seems like an obvious question. No, he is not happy. He has no stuff. He is homeless. He has no home. He has no television. He has no food. He has no safety. And that's really the ultimate ideal, isn't it? Money buys safety. Still, I'd love to find the hobo's that were willing to sacrifice safety for freedom. But they'd probably think I'm an asshole. I mean, I love my TV.
I suppose that might be a lot of what's wrong with us. We want freedom and safety at the same time, and you just can't have that. Freedom is fucking dangerous, because when you let go of the edge of the pool, sure, you are free to swim around and dive for pennies that your grandparents throw into the pool. But if you fuck up, you're gonna drown. So there it is. You can creep along the edges, clinging to the tiles for dear life, circling the edges and waiting till you're pruney enough to get out. Or you can let go, push away, and test yourself to the might of the chlorinated depths. You might end up getting CPR from a kind of pimply, teenaged life guard. But you might just find out that you aren't such a bad swimmer after all. That's life. You'll find me clinging to the tiles, waiting till it's time to shower, dry off, and go home.
It's dark now, and I look at the stars. Again, I won't try to give a description of them, save that there are a whole fucking bunch of them. Surrounded by blackness. The void. Oblivion. Vacuum. The idea of void really troubles a lot of people. An area of space where there is nothing. As I sit, and I stare into space, into the void, somehow, I can feel it moving closer to me. I don't literally mean the vacuum of space beginning to encroach on the atmosphere of earth. Just....
Just the concept of it. I start to think about the size of the planet I live on as compared to the rest of the available space. The more I think about it, I can almost feel it. A tiny speck of dust surrounded by infinite void. Slowly, the void creeps towards me, until it surrounds me. An even tinier speck of dust, sitting on a tiny speck of dust, surrounded by void. I shudder. I can't stop thinking about it. The only thing that seperates me from the infinite void around me is a centimeter or so of pink, pale, quivering flesh. No matter where you go, that's all you are. No matter how much you own, you are still only a bag of skin, a hundread pounds of water, and some other various tissues to fill in the gaps. You, versus an infinite void. On a percentage basis, you may as well not even exist. Agoraphobia. Fear of wide open spaces. I like to sit in little rooms with no windows and well defined walls sometimes. There's too much water in the pool, and not enough me.
I try to shift from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm, and I swallow deeply, looking at the people around me. They all look like aliens. Strange, faceless people that I have no connection with, and probably have very little in common with. Even if I knew a few of them, what would I really know about them? Maybe I'd know what they liked and disliked. Maybe I'd know kind of all about them, their family, where they grew up, and all that. Maybe I'd know how they might react to certain stimuli. But really, what would I know about them? I can't feel what they feel. I don't even know that they do feel. For all I know, they fake every emotion to encourage me to keep doing so myself. That's the problem with lines of thought like this. They only lead to trouble. There is no warm, gratifying resolution. Not only is there no simple answer, there doesn't even seem to be a complicated one. It's best to just avoid the whole issue. Think about something else.
Okay. Shift gears. Think about something else. Anything else. I lean back, and set the search engine in my head for "Pleasent". The first result returned is the time I saw one of my roommates girlfrends naked. She was really hot and thought I was asleep. That's kind of an uncomfortable, guilty thing to think about, seeing as how she died of cancer a few years later and he hanged himself over it. Second result. The time I told off my boss at one of my many minimum wage jobs, and explained to her that she was powerless in this scenario, as her firing me wasn't really a threat, because there were a dozen other jobs in this town just like this one, except that none of them involved working for a fat, ugly, evil cunt like her. Apparently she started crying shortly after I walked out, as her husband had given her a similar speech as he walked out on her two weeks before. Later that night, she died in a car accident for which no direct cause could be found. It was suspected, though never confirmed, to be a purposeful act. I don't like this game anymore.
Fortunatly, I am pulled out of my mad dash for distraction gone wrong when an elderly woman with fluffy, almost snow like white hair sits down next to me. She wears a sky blue sweater and black stretch pants, and she has a giant purse that could only possibly hold candy for grandchildren. This woman exudes matronly love. I have to restrain myself from simply leaning over and weeping openly on her shoulder. For the first time in as long as I can remeber, I find myself trying to make conversation with a woman that I don't want to sleep with. I open my mouth, ready to spit out some witty comment, a sarcastic remark about conditions on the bus, and so on.
"Hi", I say.
She looks over to me and smiles. This is it.. She will speak to me. She will be my salvation. She will show me the greatness of human kind. She will restore my faith. She will love me as only a grandmother can. I wait for her responce. She lifts a long, metal rod from her purse and presses it to her throat. In an growling, electronic vibrations, sounds that might equate to "Hello Young Man" emit from her lipstick smeared, wrinkled mouth. I don't like this game. I'm going to go to sleep now.
Part 3: The Taxi of Ultimate Satisfaction
I wake up about ten minutes before we reach the bus station, and the old woman and her total lack of a larynx have found somewhere else to sit, thank Christ. I look out the window, and I am relieved to find a city swarming about me, large buildings, well defined, all man made. Everything nice and secure. Then I get a whiff of myself, and I know why I have a seat all to myself. I seemed to have sweat a lot as I slept.
As the bus glides into the station, I stand and retrieve my lone suitcase from the racks above me, and I make my way quickly out the door. The source of my discomfort has switched from a general dissaproval of all those around me to a sudden self consciousness about the amazing body odor I have produced. It's strange, how quickly I seem to have gone from looking down on this hive of disfigured and deformed travelers to trying desperatly to escape there scrutiny and judgement. I am very smelly. And I'm sure my hair looks like shit.
As I hit the sidewalk, I quickly hail one of the many cabs milling around the area looking for fairs. I bumble my way into the back seat, awkwardly trying to stuff my luggage in first, taking it out, entering, trying to drag it in, and so on. I'm still a little groggy. I give the cabbie my address. He warns me that the fare will be a bit steep, and I acknowledge this.I live quite some distance from here, but during my trip I got a call to let me know that my car had been stolen, so it wouldnt be any use to just hang out in the parking garage waiting for them to bring it back.
I consider for a moment trying to apologize for my smell, and explaining that sometimes I sweat a lot in my sleep. But why bother? It's there. He isn't going to bring it up. Why should I? Instead I space out for a while as the city passes by and slowly decays into suburb and then countryside. I think about my trip. I think about getting a new car. I think about how much I smell.
Country roads can be kind of pleasent. For some reason, I have always liked the look of big, wide open fields. I don't really like running around in them or anything, mind you. Just the look. And mostly, only if I see it through a car window. It seems there are a lot of things like that. Very pretty if seen from behind glass or on television, but I don't really want to go fucking around in them. Explosions, for instance, are great for television and movies, but having a nearby building or vehicle erupt in an ejaculation of force and heat is startling and unpleasent, to say the least. Snow is also pretty, but I don't really like to play around in it. It makes my mittens wet.
Eventually, I get tired of staring out the window at the passing kudzu and corn fields, and once again, I wish I'd had the foresight to bring some kind of reading material. It feels like I spend a lot of time waiting. In fact, it feels like I spend nearly all my time waiting. I wait for a phone call so I can wait for someone to pick me up so I can wait to get somewhere so I can wait to leave so I can wait to get home so I can wait to get tired enough to go to sleep and wait to wake up and start waiting for things again. I wonder what it is I'm waiting to do.
Right now, I am waiting for the godamned truck in front of us to turn off the highway, or something. We've been behind in for the last 10 minutes at least. He's going about fifteen under the speed limit, and there aren't many places to pass on the winding country roads. I stare at the back of the truck, burning the clay company's logo into my retina. He seems to slow down even further as we start up a large hill. I ask the cab driver if perhaps he thinks this might be a good time to pass the truck, and he shrugs and roves into the left lane, revving his engine to gain speed as we approach the hilltop.
It's a somewhat stunning moment when I see the hearse in front of the clay truck. It's always troublesome to find out that whoever you have been blaming your current state of inconvinience on is innocent of whatever crimes you have charged them with, but this seems somehow symbolic, or poignant. The stream of my life has been slowed by a dead man. There seems to be some kind of revelation here. Maybe that's all I'm waiting to do. Maybe I'm waiting to be the next to slow traffic down. Maybe I'm waiting for my procession. Maybe I'm waiting for the day when everyone will pay attention, when I'll be able to go through red lights, when all the people I know will speak well of me, and gather around to cry and mourn my passing for a few hours. Somehow, it seems like this will be the only accomplishment of my life. R.I.P. Now wait to decay.
As the cabbie picks up speed over the hill, it occurs to me that we are still in the passing lane. Somewhere, deep down, I feel a wave of relief. Things are about to get better. One way or another, things are about to get easier. As the headlights come over the hill, I sigh a little. And if anyone was looking, they would have noticed a very small smile creeping onto my lips.
I might just be done waiting.
Part Four: The Quicker of Two Evils
I imagine, from a profile view, and slowed down to about an eighth the speed, what happens next seems very peaceful, especially if the camera is rotated onto it's side. My head glides forward, a look of stupid silence gleaming out from my shadowed face. In a gentle drop, like a parachutist onto an ocean of feather beds, my grinning mug slaps into the cushioned back seat, and a wad of spittle escapes my mouth. After this point, it's not so cute. If you don't turn it back to full speed now, you get to see part of my skull caving in, along with my jaw popping out of place, and just a whole fuckload of blood.
For all intents and purposes, we'll just assume I go to sleep for the next several hours. We won't bother with flashy visuals of paramedics and impaled children and screaming. I just go to sleep. Not the good, restive type of sleep. The System Shutdown kind of sleep, where you dream a dream that feels like being in a lot of pain, tastes like blood, mucous and vomit, and smells like burning rubber. In fact, you might even say it was just the eyes and ears that went to sleep.
I am choking. Someone is choking me. I try to stop them. They tie my hands down. I am an organ donor. Someone is choking me. They aren't going to save me. I was in an accident. I am being harvested. I pass out. I am in blackness. Laying in blackness, it becomes very apparent that someone has kicked the shit out of me. I stop fighting. I step out of the fight. I lay down. I give.
Laying there, in that dark world, letting the pain thrust it's way through me, I had a lot of time to just stare off into the distance and think. I am like a timid young whore to the pain now. I understand my role as subservient, and I merely look off into the distance and let it get it's fuck on. I lay back, kick my legs up, and sling my arm over my eyes in a dramatic pose, and I try to think of warm baths and cherry mentholated cough drops. Meanwhile, the pain prepares for a climactic money shot.
After a while, visions of this dank flop house in my subconscious are obscured by visions of a television and middle aged women in shirts that look like curtains. Gradually beeping noises and antiseptic smells start to overshadow the humiliation and depravity. Finally, the pain gets tired of me and my tears of surrender, and it shoves me onto a hospital bed in the intensive care unit of a large inner city hospital. Apparently I was airlifted here. Apparently I survived. Apparently it was a miracle. Damnit.
Five people dead in a matter of seconds. And I was not one of them. The driver of my cab was skewered by the steering wheel column. Both cars simultaneously flew into the air on impact, ours flipping end over end back the way it came, and there's flipping upside down and sailing above us for a moment. Everyone dies on impact. Except me. I fucked up when I put on my seat belt. It wasn't in all the way. I was whipped out the rear window like a stone from a sling. I broke almost everything, but they managed to save me. I swear, I could throw snakes at my grandma.
It all just leads me to further confusion. The boys we killed, they were a musical quartet on there way to a recording studio to cut an album that probably would have set the pace for the rest of there live. They had passion. They were interested in the world around them. The cab driver was an immigrant who was saving money to move his family here from some god awful little third world country, so they could all start a better life. These beautiful, impactful people, full of the very essence that makes the world good and interesting, they are all dead. And I'm still here. I have no passion. I don't really love anyone. I have never really been in love. I mean, I love my mom. But I have no message for the world. I have no great gift for the community.
It's like I was given a second chance at mediocrity at the cost of people who really wanted to be alive. It's a very simple dilemma. If this is the result of an ordered universe, then the order is really fucked up. Basically, God has said "I understand that you have spent your lifetime waiting to find your purpose. That's really too bad." It really shakes the ego to have ones role as Lead or Supporting role rattled. Are you a star? A walk-on? A Cameo? And if there is no order in the universe....
Well....
What do I do about that....?
Part Five: Good, Evil, Truth, and a morphine drip.
I have always hated the phrase "The Truth Will Set You Free". This is propaganda espoused by people who want to know where you hid all the drugs. The fact of the matter is, most of the time, the truth wants to elbow strike you in the face, pin you to the ground with it's boot heel on your throat, point a loaded revolver in your face and refer to you as a "Cocksucker." I have similar feelings about the bit of poetry that goes "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty, Truth, and this is all yea need know," or some other idealistic piece of trash like that.
The truth is that a handful of Gods happiest children sleep the sleep of the mangled in a morgue 3 stories beneath the bed where I now sip apple juice out of a little plastic carton with foil half peeled off the top. While I watch television and click a button to feed morphine into my system, somewhere four mothers are howling in anguish and beating the calloused hands that have spent a lifetime raising there perfect children against any surface that will absorb there agony. While I nibble on salisbury steak and check out the nurses tits, a young mother a thousand miles away from here living in a single rat infested room and washing laundry to scrape together enough money to buy her growing child an occasional snack or toy is now learning that her husband is dead and the checks he sent to support her will never come again.
The truth of the situation is that all this has happened because a hearse wasn't moving fast enough for my tastes. I wanted to get home 3 minutes earlier so I could settle down into an easy chair for the night and fall asleep watching Survivor: Where-The-Fuck-Ever and petting a cat that probably didn't even miss me while I was away. In my mind, it all boils down to the glaring fact that five people are dead and at least a dozen lives are shattered because I simply could not wait to get home and start waiting again. If only I'd slept in the cab instead of the bus. I am a worthless human being.
Instead of freeing me, the truth cripples me. Well, mentally and emotionally, anyway. It's the 28 individual broken bones in addition to various forms of organ damage that cripple me physically. My mother and two of my friends have tried to visit me twice, and I have turned them away both times. I gather that my mother has been sleeping on a couch in the waiting room, waiting for me to call for her. She'll have to keep on waiting as I don't think I could look her in the eyes. I have never felt so guilty, or so damned. The Chaplain has suggested that I view this as a new lease on life. He suggests that this is Gods way of reminding me of the value of life. I hope the Chaplain dies. Shit, forget I said that. I hit the button for more morphine, and I pass into dreamless sleep.
So thats all I wrote. Five parts. They were written kinda far apart, so they don't really connect perfectly. It was more just an excercize in writing.
Thoughts, comments?
User Reviews
Submitted by CrumbleBum (user info) at 2004-01-20 02:05:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Care to elaborate? What do you mean by
"Let what you write have it's own rhythm. "
I follow you on the "Overly verbose and clunky" issue, it certainly is.
Submitted by Hairsphincter (user info) at 2004-01-19 23:45:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Your friends are good to you.
What you have written is overly verbose and clunky.
Let what you write have it's own rhythm.