The wax dries the skin of my fingers, large cracks etch towards my palms. It appears I will live forever. At night I chew the dead skin off and spit it onto the floor. I no longer sweep so the mice eat the pieces during the night. They shit in my kitchen. Today’s weather has rendered me lazy. I drink heavily. I slur insults at the television, the women’s asses smudged and unnatural. I drop multiple candles in the dirt and don’t bother to pick them up. When I try I fall. There is a sharp pain somewhere.

My son visits unexpectedly. He brings guests. He carries a leather bag. He stands over me, tells me he has brought me a woman. My head lolls. She is not the woman I have been dreaming about. She laughs when she tells me her name is Oksana, but doesn’t smile when I choke on a figure skating joke. She kneels in the clay, kisses me. My mouth is too wet and slides all over hers. She knees me in the groin. I am too drunk to be scared. We wrestle for about four minutes. She spits in my face, smacks my head against a stone wall. It is almost my birthday. Three men move further into the shadows.

I say nothing. I see very little. The pain somewhere has spread to my throat. Oksana is gone. My son is gone, my wife is gone, my gold fillings are gone. They have taken my rings and the fingers that wore them. I will not make another candle. I will not squeeze soft wax like breasts. I am sure I am crying but have no idea if I am awake. I lay in the wet clay outside of my front door and wait for nothing. Nothing comes, then dusk.

Demi Moore says things to Patrick Swayze who turns and says things to the friend who kills him later on. Obviously someone dies. I ask her, the one who always needs to go the bathroom, if Patrick Swayze already died and she says it’s too bad he already did.

Outside the sun is real bright which goes real good with the haze and dust that Demi and Patrick are moving through. The friend focuses in and out. This is how you know he’s bad. This is how you can tell someone dies by his hand. But Demi and Patrick seem real happy so it’s easy to not notice because mostly, you just want to know where all this is going.

The walls they tear through take them somewhere hollow and wide. They’re happy in dust masks. They could be happy in anything because they’re movie stars. For a moment everything in the room feels exactly the way they do. I start to feel like all of them on the TV. Patrick’s tanned abs glow. I think Demi’s tits perk up. No one cares about the friend’s cock or shy parts because most of him seems unfocused and sketchy anyway. I get up and try to move the curtain over the window because it’s a little too bright for a sexy scene.

The brightness coming from the TV seems heavenly. The heavenly brightness is glowing from the nineteen nineties. I sit back down and look over at the one who always needs to go to the bathroom. It seems brightly clear she has not really aged since at least 1990. I look at her every time something sexy happens as a way of getting over a weird shy thing starting to harden in my stomach.

I think Patrick Swayze is the only real thing we have in common, hardly Demi Moore. I wonder if it’s a younger and brighter Patrick Swayze that makes the situation of being here a bit more interesting and tolerable. Obviously there are things, like nostalgia and death, that can lighten or darken any situation, but those things are too awkward to talk about with someone whom you have to take to the bathroom so often.

I think Patrick Swayze died to her and me in 1990 when the movie first came out.

I text someone asking didn’t he die already even though she already told me he did because I need to include a caption beneath a photo of the living room where the TV has the movie playing. Of course I took a cell-phone photo of the situation where there are ghosts that appear from different angles.

Now Demi can’t sleep and she’s alone in her studio. It’s grey on most parts of the screen. It’s grey throughout the new loft apartment she and Patrick live in, even in the spaces and rooms we cannot see. I wonder what the grey looks like and feels like to the one who always needs to go the bathroom. Breaths from an oxygen tank fluff up and down and nothing moves.

Patrick comes down to Demi’s studio. I don’t know why it feels like he walked downstairs from something but the thing hardening in my stomach goes soft.

And he’s got his shirt off. Her legs are wide open with a chunk of soft clay spinning between her thighs. He sits behind her, hands over hers while hers are wet from shaping a grey figure and the one sitting next to me is wet too, but for reasons that have no control like old age.

A record stops. More things shuffle past; men in an office, a life-size angel-sculpture swinging upward several stories, a beaten neighborhood in Brooklyn, and finally we reach Whoopie Goldberg. Patrick Swayze is dead by now and needs Whoopie’s help because being dead he gets to find out all sorts of things.

Some other ghost shows him how to knock and move objects around without a body. That other ghost was weird and jumped into the ditch of an incoming train and I thought of a friend of a friend who dropped his cell-phone and died that way too. The one sitting next to me that always needs to go the bathroom is already asleep.

Whoopie doesn’t want to help Patrick probably because he’s a rich dead white guy but I can’t tell. It’s funny to be racist toward a ghost. He keeps her up all night singing Henry The Eighth I Am. Whoopie is real good at being pissed off and so is the one sleeping, especially when having to get out of a chair and onto the toilet. Most of the time we’re successful in moving between the bathroom and living room and all the time she says is it cold outside and where’s the sun, I love the sun.

But who needs the sun when the TV is real bright and it makes us mostly happy.

I go back and forth between the window and TV feeling the same light and brightness from both and it seems colder in the TV not because Whoopie and Patrick are walking around cold wind in downtown, but because we are indoors and Demi won’t let them in and the one that needs the bathroom often says how cold is it outside.

The weather is a miraculous thing like God because everyone knows how to talk about it and everyone has heard of God and most miracles involve the weather somehow.

A crucifix hangs on the wall by the TV. Whoopie is screaming from Demi’s window to please open the door. I get up to lock the door by the kitchen because I don’t want someone to walk in and see what we’re doing. It’s a little embarrassing because what if the one that always needs to go to the bathroom already went in the wheelchair while asleep and what if someone finds out I let this happen because I wanted to keep watching the movie, wanted to see Demi let them in at the expense of a wet diaper.

No one tries to open the door by the kitchen.

By now, I just want to see the penny already. It happens in exactly the same way I saw it for the first time in 1990, except now it’s a little more miraculous and the one asleep is now awake. Light outside is clouded over and the TV glows copper and pink.

Whoopie slides a penny beneath a door where Patrick is on the same side as Demi.

Patrick concentrates hard with his index finger. The penny slowly slides up and whatever was hardening and softening in my stomach isn’t there anymore. Of course I am reminded of a few things like the Eucharist and those tiny round hosts at Mass and wonder if pennies function the same only because they’re both round and hold some form of currency like survival and faith and now Demi is crying and so are we.

Someone is trying to open the door by the kitchen. Demi lets Whoopie in.

I wipe my eyes to ignore the miracle on TV because no one would believe it, not even if you paid them.

Half an hour goes by.

I turned to the one asleep and said, wake up you’re not dead yet, this is the part when Patrick goes to heaven.

He feels the efficiency of laying down without any thought or feeling obliged. His face is against the cold tile.

B Boy Darkness says, I am sinking.

I am sinking because I am happy.

He extends his hands and meditates. His body is a star. He weighs less than a pound on the plain tile. The room turns blue when the sun sets and a strange unknown sound like a growl perhaps from the pipes vibrates the ground. For a moment he falls asleep.

–

There is an unknown disaster happening down hill. Small great fires. All the cars drive in unison with red ambulances together on the visible highways away from the cities. She sees people collapsing in clumps down the hill on the streets. B Boy Darkness feels a scream as though it were coming from his own throat coming from someone down the hill. A few people are screaming faintly at arguably the same thing. They are all feeling arguably the same way, in a minute widespread panic. He stands next to the girl on the train, together with her looking at nothing but city lights. They are holding hands. Each finger has an independent tremble and coercion. He says, I am going to see what’s happening. He says, I can dance so symmetrically for so long it can feel like nihilism. I can make my body a catastrophe.

–

He sees her every day when he rides the trains to practice. She tells him she admires him in a low dress. In his head, there are only a few things worth living for. He can no longer describe why the weight of his gym bag on his shoulder makes him feel good and intimate and tapped into the world. He explains to her, My hands are veiny from routine. He says, There is something peaceful about routine and letting go over what comes back to you. When the train car slowly brakes, and the automated female voice bleeds over the intercom from passenger car to passenger car, he feels unbridled glee when she comes a little closer to him. She moves away from the horror she sees from down the hill in the window, where the people are obviously stressed or screaming or afraid of death and she says, I was scared but now I’m better. I was scared but now I’m better.

–

The mess she leaves is all in his head. She is amassing, still waiting on the train car in her own afterglow where he just left her, right next to the automatic sliding glass doors. She is holding the plastic railing with her might. Her body is getting smaller and smaller in the distance while he paces his breath and heads down the hill. B Boy Darkness is running down the hill in the middle of the street since no traffic is coming even through the tunnels. He runs until he gets there.

–

Sometimes the crowds share one mesmerized face during a B Boy show. He has danced every day for the past few years with a signature presence. All the muscles in his arms glow in open tension. It’s as if his body grows heavier after a performance when he is being watched but lighter when he is touched.
It will dawn on him to stop talking about love over and over again and rather just sit across the table from her in silence or stand closely next to her for a minute. He feels both. His face is still when he imagines the future with the girl from the train car, staring out her window down the hill.

–

Right away he starts breakdancing in his running shoes. There are some people lying on the pavement unconscious in the sunlight. A fire hydrant is one giant geyser of water. He finds his center of gravity and starts to spin around and around again on his palms. While more red ambulances continue to arrive, and heat shimmers in the air in ribbons with black smoke and nearly blinds visibility, the scene inside the noise is calm and simple: Everyone is watching B Boy Darkness breakdance in the street, clumped in dozens down the hill, unable to describe how they feel, but they are all together. They are dozens and hundreds feeling emotional for once. Every window in the buildings all around them has a face.

–

“I think the biggest misconception about breakdancers or B Boys with the people out here in the world is that, they’re not dancing, that everything they’re doing is just happening at the moment. And they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just doing it. They just going crazy.

Breaking is a legitimate dance. As legitimate as any other dance that has existed.”

— Ken Swift on a megaphone, standing next to B Boy Darkness while he dances down the hill.

Snickers. Twizzlers. Candy Corn. Gobstoppers. Goobers. Skittles. Milky Way. Payday. Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. Reese’s Pieces. Jelly Bellies. Bazooka Joe. Almond Joy. Mounds. Baby Ruth. Charleston Chews. Bit-O-Honey. Butterfingers. Twix. Crunch. Starburst. Sweethearts. SweeTarts. Fun Dip. Tootsie Pops. Chuckles. Nerds. Kit Kat. Sugar Daddy. Razzles. Gummi Bears. Junior Mints. Jujyfruits.

COSTUMES

Monsters. Superheroes. Zombies. Humble mummies wrapped in toilet paper, slowly unraveling as they trick-or-treat. Vampires. Ghosts. Adorable dinosaurs looking both ways before crossing the street. Princesses. Witches. Robots. Demons. Teens too cool for costumes, drunk and stoned and horny. The Boogeyman. The Babysitter.

SETTING

Evening. October. Midwestern suburbs. Dead leaves. Tee-peed trees. Egged houses. Jack-O-Lanterns dashed against curbs. Orange brains splattered over asphalt.

KNIFE

Forged. Stainless. Eight inches. Satin finish. Full tang. Ergonomic handle. Breakproof. Razor sharp. Dishwasher safe. Lifetime warranty.

VERBS

Stalk. Hunt. Hide. Watch. Follow. Sneak. Stare. Strangle. Murder. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Cut. Slice. Hack. Poke. Chop. Slash. Slit. Thrust. Gouge. Rip. Dig. Tear. Bury.

SMELLS

Sticky candy. Burning leaves. Rotting pumpkins. Teenage pheromones. Cheap beer. Dank pot. Vanilla candles. Latex condoms. Pungent bloodlust. Impending doom.

HOUSE PARTS

Doorbell. Windows. Bricks. Pipes. Drywall. Closets. Grout. Tile. Sinks. Stairs. Furnace. Floorboards. Screws. Nails.

BODY PARTS

Entrails. Hair. Blood. Bone. Bile. Skin. Fat. Cartilage. Spleen. Ribs. Eyelids. Trachea. Vertebrae. Cornea. Cuticles. Knuckles. Knees. Nipples. Toes. Ass. Elbows. Brainstem. Tendons. Teeth.

PLOT POINTS MIXED WITH CANDY

Twix. I stalk Babysitter and her two friends as they walk home from school. Payday. The teens are so young and pretty. Mounds. I want to kill them all. Skittles.

One of the friends I strangle from the backseat of her car before slitting her throat. Snickers.

The other friend fucks her boyfriend in a neighbor’s house. Sweethearts. When the boyfriend comes down to the kitchen, I lift him off the floor and impale him to the wall. Jujyfruits. Then I costume myself with a bed sheet and head upstairs. Chuckles. The girlfriend thinks I’m her boyfriend, being silly. Nerds. I strangle her with a phone cord. Gobstoppers.

Babysitter is disturbed by the moaning, dead sexy phone call. Jelly Bellies. She comes to the neighbor’s house and discovers her friends’ dead bodies. Starburst.

I attack. Kit Kat. Babysitter falls down the stairs and escapes back to the kids. Fun Dip. I like it when women play hard to get. Goobers.

I break in. Crunch. Babysitter jabs a knitting needle in my neck. Bit-O-Honey. She tells the kids to hide, then locks herself in an upstairs closet. Gummi Bears. I tear down the door. Reese’s Pieces. Babysitter sticks a clothes hanger in my eye. Tootsie Pops. I drop the knife. Butterfingers. Babysitter stabs me in the chest. Twizzlers.

Psychiatrist sees the panicked children running from the house. Junior Mints. Still I rise, resurrected behind Babysitter. Baby Ruth. I begin choking her. Sugar Daddy. Psychiatrist fires his revolver, sending me crashing through a window. Bazooka Joe. Psychiatrist tells Babysitter that I’m the Boogeyman. Razzles. When he looks outside, I’m gone. Kisses.

“Cluck,” I say. I don’t try to sound realistic. I just say, “Cluck.” I mean I have some faith in my audience. They can tell I’m a chicken. They know what I’m going for. The yellow suit, beak and arm flapping ought to clue them in.

“Cluck,” I say, rubbing my talons along Bill’s shin.

He leaves. Has no patience for my chicken musical/play. Motherfucker doesn’t believe in me. He’s not willing to suspend his disbelief. He tells me I look silly and no one wants to see a musical about chickens. But fuck, if people are willing to sit through a musical about CATS they’ll do the same for chickens.

I’ve asked Kentucky Fried Chicken to be my sponsor. I went to the local KFC in costume, but they wouldn’t even let me speak to a manager. The cashier laughed and some kid threw his mashed potatoes at me. I hope that kid has nightmares. After I chased him through the parking lot yelling CLUCK and CLUCKITY CLUCK I feel certain he will have those nightmares. My behavior will have had some effect on him. I will have mattered, at least to that kid. So anyway, I emailed the corporate KFC and asked for their sponsorship, but I’m still waiting to hear from them. It’s only been a week and I imagine they have hundreds of emails to sort through before they find mine. I’m confident.

* * *

The beak I’ve made for my costume is fairly impressive. It’s painted orange and is much sharper than my steak knife talons. Whenever I put it on, Bill goes out to the garage to have a beer. Sometimes I follow him to the garage and he goes for a ride in his truck. Some nights he doesn’t come home. Those are good nights. I rehearse my dance and practice clucking.

I quickly mastered the funky chicken and I’ve been working on a more sophisticated chicken dance. It involves techno music and glow sticks and a series of high kicks. Have you ever seen a chicken do high kicks? It’s impressive.

* * *

My chicken costume is not awkward or gangly or unwieldy. It is a slim-fitted affair with baby-soft feathers. It’s tight over my chest and around my waist. My chicken musical/play is highly sexualized. Not lewd or pornographic, but highly sexualized. I high kick, my body arches and you can see the chicken inside me about to spring to life.

“Cluck,” I say. “Cluckity Cluck.”

When Bill gets home from one of his nightly joy rides, I’m waiting for him in the garage, but behind the extra fridge so he can’t see me. He gets out of his car and I wait a few seconds and then step between him and his truck.

“Cluck,” I say, shrugging my shoulders and dipping one wing toward the cement.

“Cluckity cluck,” I say, walking toward him, swinging my hips and occasionally flapping my arms. “Cluckity cluckity cluck.”

Now here he is, and I approach him and he does not seem to recognize me at all, which seems odd, because last summer we spent a lot of time together and he often referred to me as his best friend, though I’m nearly certain he never fully learned my name. I sit with him at a table on the sidewalk. I wait for our friendship to renew itself. He says he needs a driver. He asks if I have a driver’s license. He says he has a van. He asks if I’ll drive to Denver the following morning. I agree, without ever having seen the van. We arrange a time and place to meet.

I arrive at the meeting place at our scheduled time, and meet the person I’m giving a ride to. She’s a companion of his, I don’t remember her name. She sits in the back of this van while I drive and Grandpa sits in the passenger seat. I immediately realize this van is not well. Firstly, the brakes don’t work. I need to press the brake pedal much sooner than is normal. There are maybe certain other problems I don’t remember. I drive very cautiously, and my passengers criticize my technique.

We are on Highway 36 en route to Denver when one of the tires blows. The van stops in a small area between the highway and an exit. None of us has a phone. There is a shopping mall nearby so I walk to it and call AAA, then walk back to the van.

I tell grandpa I need to smoke, which they’d been doing all along but hadn’t let me because I was in charge of driving the death machine. He gives me his pipe and bag of marijuana, but I can’t smoke there due to the likely possibility that a law enforcement officer will show up and start asking questions. I go away from the van, away from the highway to a sort of unkempt area where I feel safe. I am not very far away; I can still hear the traffic but I am out of sight. I smoke and wait. I do this more than once, returning to the van then returning to my hideout to smoke again.

I’m near the van with Grandpa when a cop arrives, and the paraphernalia is in my backpack. The cop asks routine questions and I stand there quietly while grandpa answers. I try to not look suspicious. Before he leaves the cop asks if we have any drugs, Grandpa says no, the cop asks if he can search the van, Grandpa says yes but we haven’t anything. The cop enters the van, which is in a state of disarray, and finds nothing. He departs moments later. We continue to wait.

Eventually the tow truck arrives, but not before I flag down a car and ask to use their phone. There are two women in the car, the driver has a tube in her nose and looks like she’s attached to an oxygen tank. I use their phone to call AAA and ask how soon the tow truck will arrive, because it’s a hot summer day and we are dying out here. The women offer me an opened bottle of water, and I take it, but I feel uncertain if they mean for me to only take a sip or to keep the whole bottle. I keep it, but I feel awkward, because I think I maybe just stole a bottle of water from a cancer patient.

As the AAA truck arrives, the woman I had given a ride to had somehow ordered her own tow truck, and there is some confusion about which tow truck will be towing the van, and to where. She wants to go to Denver and that’s all she cares about. The van belongs to Grandpa, and I belong in Boulder. She tries to commandeer the van with her tow truck in order for her to get a ride to Denver, then she comes to some sort of arrangement with the driver of her tow truck, that she will get a ride without taking the van. Grandpa tells me he thinks she offered her driver sexual favors in exchange for a ride because he has knowledge of her prostituting herself in the past. She leaves, and we stay with our tow truck.

Our tow truck has two men in it, and only fits three passengers. Grandpa remains in his van and I sit in the tow truck. En route to Boulder the two men in the truck ask if I want to smoke, I say yes and we do. I keep thinking about Grandpa back there in his van, wondering about him. We arrive in Boulder and the tow truck drops me off at my apartment, where Grandpa wants to leave his van because he hasn’t anywhere to put it. I enter my apartment building and two of my neighbors, the couple who live directly below me, stop me and ask about the van, I say it belongs to Grandpa and he wants to leave it there, to which they strongly object. I tell Grandpa and the tow truck driver that my neighbors won’t allow this broken vehicle that doesn’t belong to me to be parked in our driveway indefinitely. They take Grandpa and the van and drive him somewhere. I still have his pipe and marijuana. I smoke it.

The penis hardened as he thought of chopping his family into bits and pieces, how he had ground them up and served them as little sausages to the village people, how he could hardly tell the bits for the pieces, how the village people had brought toothpicks to the feast, and how, over time, they became wary of our penis’s claim that the entire family was vacationing in Wales.

The village people put down their toothpicks. They had questions. First of all, vacation? You’re a potato farmer! Second of all, Wales? Seriously? Lastly, Why would anyone want to vacation in Wales? So our friend the erect penis had to slaughter the village people. He chopped them up into bits and pieces, and made a lot more sausages. But he couldn’t think of anyone to serve them to. He was a pretty lonesome penis. So he sat on a large flat rock shaped like a vagina, and thought on what to do. The year was 1938. And he was coming to America.

He came to avoid prosecution. Because he misunderstood what people said when they said persecution. The truth is the erect penis didn’t speak much English. In fact, he didn’t speak much at all. Mostly, he spat a lot. All over everything. Including the deck of the Queen Elizabeth as it came into port. Later the penis would recall that he had simply attempted to scream, Land ho! Land ho! But what came out was . . . himself.

When the Queen Elizabeth herself walked across herself to greet the Americans, she slipped and took a spill off the side of herself into the sea. Some seamen fished her out and toweled her off. It was a huge embarrassment for the Royal Navy. Our antihero was apprehended by a couple of assholes. Jerked off to a sketchy prison cell inside Queen Elizabeth, he was tortured for hours by a live baroque band, given nothing to eat all day but full English breakfasts. Animals.

As it turns out, William Randolph Hearst had a soft spot for dickheads. After photos of the affair were printed in practically every newspaper in all 48 states, the penis became a nationwide symbol of resistance. Resistance to what, exactly, remains unclear. Luckily (or unluckily (depending on how you look at these things)), the event coincided with the taking of Canton Island, a British territory, by the United States—in spite of which fact FDR was, at the time, protesting the Nazi invasion of Austria—so, as often happened with these things, the American government sided with the plight of the dicks. A deal was struck. And the penis was set free. So they sent him on a tour of America’s ample spread.

On tour he had many, many women. And one or two dudes may have slipped in there from time to time, to pass the time. You know how it is. The penis lazed about and drunk of America’s silver dollar teats for many, many months. Finally, exhausted from reenacting the affair so many times, the erect penis asked the American government for a spread of land to plow. Just a modest nook, he spat, smaller the better. Somewhere nice and cozy for me to stretch out. A place where I might make a home, he said, somewhere to drill . . . he looked around through his one moist eye . . . for oil, he whispered dramatically. They sent him to Southern California, which was (pleasantly) not yet referred to as ‘SoCal.’ Don’t do that.

In Southern California the penis found everything he had once been too embarrassed to dream of in the Irish hinterlands: a nice, narrow (but not too narrow), grassy (but not too grassy), deep (but not too deep) valley; a valley nestled below a pair of firm (but not too firm), perky (but not too perky), round (really damn round) hills; really damn round hills topped with rose-covered peaks. He referred to the hills fondly, and often, as ‘the twins.’ His face curled a little about the cheeks, as though he had dimples. A little precum rolled down his face.

He planted seeds in the valley and built his embarrassed-dream home. Unsurprisingly, it looked a little like a penis. Okay, it looked exactly like a penis. So the guy built a goddamn penis house. Whatever. He hammered every nail and screwed every screw with the tender care of—I don’t know—an erect penis. When the penis finished his house, he hung a hammock on the porch and took a nap. He awoke from the nap to find his balls had dropped. It’s time, he said. To himself. Because no one else was around.

The penis drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and took a nap and drilled and drilled and drilled and made some nachos and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and churned some butter for a while and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and ate a banana or something and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and bought a chicken and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and choked the chicken and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and bought a goat and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and choked the goat and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drank sarsaparilla from a homemade crazy straw and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled some more and drilled and drilled and drilled and went night fishing on the beach with no water socks and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and took boxing lessons from a cad and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and finally found some goddamn oil and boy did he find it it came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and came and then it seemed like it might stop but then it just kept coming and it came and came and came and sputtered and came and came and sputtered and came and came and came some more and finally it stopped.

He dreamed the dreams of giants.

It’s not important how the erect penis met his wife (plus it’s not hard to imagine). Also, she’s not important . . . to the story . . . But let’s just say she was quite fond of giving the slip to his slide. And so she squeezed out a few tikes, all girls of course—the bitch—and somehow the bitch convinced the erect penis to buy a weenie dog. A damn weenie dog. For a goddamn erect penis. Ridiculous.

Although the penis didn’t want the damn weenie dog, he did want to keep his slip satisfied. And so he bought the damn weenie dog. And then of course he grew quite fond of the damn weenie dog. And so while the women were inside doing something or other the penis spent his evenings in his hammock on his porch below ‘the twins’ with his damn weenie dog, both of them nodding out, watching the oil rig drill and drill and drip and drip and bleed along the rim of the valley as the deep orange sun dipped from sight like a glazed donut beyond the edge of his Irish coffee. It was all his: the coffee, the whiskey, the valley, the rig, the metaphorical donut, even the goddamn sun; he claimed it all for himself. He was very happy. He even smiled a little as the moon rose. Even then.

When his baby boy was born there began a change in the erect penis. Most notably, he was getting a little soft. And smiling more. Bad news for a dick. The slip to his slide was not quite as pleasant as it once was. And yet here he was, smiling. When the erect penis gazed at himself in the mirror he didn’t know who was gazing back anymore. Who the hell is that? he asked the reflection. Who is that smiling dickhead gazing back at me? He bought the fastest car he could find: a Silver Arrow. He raced it up and down and all around ‘the twins.’ But it didn’t make him any harder.

He stopped at the edge of an ocean cliff with his damn weenie dog in his lap, his wrinkly old sack. Dust blew into the car like pieces of smoke. The damn weenie dog coughed and coughed and pulled off his goggles and got out of the car and slammed the door. The damn weenie dog turned to the penis and said, Got too much to live for, dog. He cried a little and said, Goin on home now. Don’t try to follow me. The damn weenie dog began burrowing in the dirt. He made it a foot or so, then fell fast asleep.

A single tear rolled down the now-semisoft penis as he glided out of sight below the steering wheel. I’m melting, he said. And he was. As his foreskin slapped the floorboard, he stopped shrinking. In his final moments he thought about his oil rig and the valley and ‘the twins’ and his damn weenie dog and even his wife. Even her. Unfortunately (or fortunately (depending on how you feel about dicks)) the semisoft penis got a little excited. His smile disappeared. And he flew headlong into the gas pedal.

At night everything gets wet. The ghost of Big Bopper appears, menacing and silent, next to my bed. I don’t like these hours, beggars on every street corner and in front of every church.

2

I start my day with a pill, sometimes two. He is not a great man, you whisper as you read the paper. I don’t know who you mean. I think for a moment there’s a tiger in the hall and that it will eat me.

3

You call from a dingy bar in a foreign port. Somebody you just met is convinced Buddy Holly looked right at him three days before the plane crash. I can hear voices cross voices in the background. It’s raining where I am. You smoke your last cigarette.

The cabin I lived in was made of sticks. The cabin I lived in was made of twigs. The cabin I lived in was made of bricks and mortar. One little piggie busted his ass to build that cabin and I took it from him by force. A pair of gardening shears cut his little piggie arms and legs off. Then a pair of gardening shears cut his little piggie head off. Then I huffed and puffed on this sparkly bong I had and ate myself some bacon.

I delight to come to my bearings—not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe.

The cabin life was a lonely one. It was like Walden without the introspection. It was a means to an end. The end was my sanity and a hate for the whole human race. The means ended up not as well as I had planned, but what are you gonna do when you’re young. Youth is wasted on the young, and I was no exception.

At first my brother came with me. To the cabin made of twigs, sticks, and bricks. He didn’t help kill the pig—that was my doing. But he did profit from the bloodlust. It was all very Little Red Hen and the bread-baking thing. I loved that story. Fuck those animals who wouldn’t help. You eat your homemade bread Little Red Hen, let those lazy shits starve the fuck to death. Except in my case, I gave my brother the cooked pig. It was mostly because, unlike those other animals, my brother could rape me.

It would be of some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them . . . For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence.

In those days I learned to live off the land. My brother laid around the cabin dreaming Atari visions of fingering Sandy Hess who lived down the street from us when we existed happily in our former life. The cabin had no electricity and no Sandy Hess. Sometimes he’d go get messed up on these wild roots we found and come stumbling back to the cabin and finger me. In the asshole. That was fine and all, because I liked it much more than getting raped. Except for that one time he infected my chocolate starfish with poison oak. Oh my lucky stars . . . why are you so unlucky? I bathed my asshole in cold creek water for hours at a time. It was torture. He stood on the shore and tossed rocks at me. Like I said, he was bored and resentful to boot. He lasted 3 years in the cabin before splitting wood, metaphorically.

The solitude and lack of rapesex was a welcomed respite.

I never knew about Oprah. I knew Phil Donahue. I knew Big Time Wrestling and Superfly. I knew Barry Manilow. I didn’t much miss them. Or him. I went about my daily life. Which was basically trying to survive. I had penned many a wild animal and tamed them all and taught them to fuck for my protein supply. You may think this an easy task. But try first to build a pen from which both small and large animals cannot escape. I wished for a while I hadn’t killed that genius, that carpenter pig, let me tell you.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will only live simply and wisely.

So after the incredible pen was built, I had to lure and trap the wild animals. Raccoons at first. Then opossum. A deer. Squirrels. Rabbits. Frogs. A small bobcat. Now, this trapping stuff was hard. I ran naked through the woods, my body caked in mud. Camouflage. Hunting. I loved it and hated it. I hated the hunt, I loved the catch.

I especially loved the kill.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make life of equal simplicity, and if I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

You should’ve seen all the freaky animals birthed in that pen. I had to grab them before their warm, wet, deformed selves hit the ground or the other animals would eat them up. I’d take them and put them in my Freak Pen. I swear, some of the combinations that grew up in there would’ve rendered me a millionaire back in society. I probably would’ve been on “That’s Incredible” or in Ripley’s Believe it or Not, staring into space at the circus freak show or something. Too bad I simply waited around until they were big enough to slaughter and put in my belly.

I had no cares, no worries. I had my protein in place and a fire in the hearth.

Eventually I made a pair of pajamas out of all the freak animals’ skins. When I wore it, I looked like a Sasquatch. See, I was 6’8”. Lucky for me that pig built a huge cabin.

I’d wear the hair pajamas out in the woods and in time discovered that the animals weren’t afraid of me. They would see me as their kind, or at least that was my opinion.

One day I ventured far very far so far off from my cabin and came upon some humans in bright orange vests. I say “humans” because at that point I had been living nine years in the cabin, alone, raising freakish animals, eating their flesh, and dreaming of my brother, whether or not he was fingering Sandy Hess, getting jealous of that and actually missing his cock his rooster his thing tearing up my rectum while he bashed my face in with twigs, sticks, bricks, wall of clean cabin blood and all. I forgot to speak. I could sing, unintelligibly, but no words. I pissed and shat where I wanted. I ate dirt. Didn’t bathe. Forgot who I was.

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both.

The humans shot me. Yes they did. I couldn’t blame them really. I was a Sasquatch, of sorts. They thought so too. Until they discovered my hair pajamas were removable, the flaps at the front and back upliftable, and that I wasn’t a Sasquatch at all. They had shot me in the back. Missed my lung. But I could feel it I knew that I was torn clean open inside out. The blood mixed with dirt smelled like newborn freaks hitting the ground of the pen and suddenly I wasn’t scared.

Funny what smells can comfort you.

When they turned me over they exposed my ass, spreading my cheeks they spat, I closed my eyes and thought of my brother and smiled as my eyelids slid back as the pounding started everything fading slowly gray becoming grey becoming whatever.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.