URBANGRAFFITI11

May 2011 Urban Graffiti is an irregularly

published litzine of transgres-
sive, discursive, post-realist writing
concerned with the struggles of
hard edged urban living, alternative
lifestyles, deviant culture - pre-
sented in their most raw and
unpretentious form. We accept
unsolicited submissions of fiction,
poetry, essays, manifestos, comics,
b&w artwork, and photography;
though we are particularly interested
in new fiction. Submissions must in-
clude a plain text file of the piece, a
creative biography that includes your
email and any relevant web-links,
and a portrait of yourself. Please send
all correspondence, submissions,
hate mail, and letters of devotion to:
Urban Graffiti c/o Mark McCawley
[ gse.mccawley@gmail.com ]
The litzine pays in copies and
retains the right to reprint accept-
ed submission in anthology form,
the right to reprint the zine itself
electronically in pdf form, as well
as the right to reprint excerpts of
the litzine for promotional purpos-
es. All other rights revert back to
the individual authors and artists.
Copyright ©2011. ISSN #1192-6554.
The Coriolis Effect.
by Amanda Earl

Beer Mystic.
by Bart Plantenga

Numb.
First.
Hole.
by Catherine Owen

Crimes Against Humanity.

Still Life.
by George Amabile

Blue Rhinestone Ring.

by Mandie Lopatka

Gerry Corrigan - an absurd

contemporary working man.
by Matthew Firth
 T
THE CORIOLIS EFFECT.
he woman holds a lotus position on the
couch. With eyes closed, she chants to the music
by Amanda Earl
on the radio.
“Take a seat, Milicent,” she says.
I hesitate, then sit down, inhaling her scent. I cast
my eyes about the room. My eyes take inventory:
a cat, a side table, a vase with a flower, an incense
burner, bookshelves, and a creature in the corner,
wearing a shroud over its body.
She pours chai into three cups. I plop sugar cubes
into mine, splashing brown liquid onto the table-
cloth. Even in long velvet gloves and a high-necked
vintage teagown, I am still clumsy Millie.
Our hostess clears her throat. The body in the cor-
ner is silent. The woman pulls out a handkerchief
from the pocket of her dress and soaks up the
tea. A spot on the handkerchief forms and grows
larger.
“I didn’t realize the undead drank tea,” I say, not
being able to use the word ‘vampire’ quite yet.
“The tea warms me,” she says as she curls her
hands around the cup, but doesn’t drink. “Let’s
begin. Open your dress.”
I let my cup drop. With shaking hands, I undo
each mother-of-pearl button on the high neck of
my dress, exposing my throat.
Her hand closes around my neck,pressing a thumb
against the hollow of my aching pulse.
She runs her fingers along my collarbone. My
breasts feel tight in the corset beneath the dress.
I tense my body.
“Take a deep breath and close your eyes.” She
bends toward me.
•••
Milicent is an Ottawa hi tech worker for a west-
end firm. Every morning she rises at exactly six
forty five am, showers, dons the unofficial uniform
of pants, blouse, and jacket, leaves her downtown
apartment and waits for the number three bus to
transport her to the enclave of boxes within boxes
where she toils all day long.
She is what is known in the computer industry
as a trouble-shooter. Customers call and ask ques-
tions about their computers. She answers them.
Not her first or fourteenth choice of career, but it’s
where she’s ended up after completing a degree at
the local university.
Like many of her generation, Milicent has sim-
ply given up. She’s not sure why she’s bothering
to work, probably wouldn’t if she didn’t have a
staggering student loan to repay and middle class
values inculcated by parents, who believe hard
work, marriage and children are the answer to
everything.
So Milicent tries. She works. She dates. She
comes home every night exhausted and empty.
Eats cereal for dinner and reads Bridget Jones
novels during the commercials of reality tv shows.
Time flies when you’re having fun.
Somewhere along the line, five years have gone
by. Each year finds Milicent in similar jobs with
slightly more money, in apartments at higher rents,
on the same dates, and eating the same cereal for
dinner.
At some point, the anaesthesia wears off.
Milicent becomes unpredictable. Her co-workers
and former university classmates notice:
“I saw Milicent Bradley today in the lingerie sec-
tion of Sears. She had a black teddy in her hands.
She was heading toward the change room. I’m
pretty sure it was silk!”
“I swear that was Millie Bradley coming out of
Fireflies last night. You know, the gay and lesbian
bar?”
And the most damning of all…
“Did you hear the Bradley chick is hanging out
with Ruth Verdigris?
•••
Verdigris: from Old French vertegrez --green of
Greece; powder used as pigment and fungicide;
a green patina or crust formed on copper, brass,
and bronze exposed to air or seawater for long
periods of time.
In the Middle Ages, the colour was made by at-
taching copper strips to a wooden block with ace-
tic acid, then the sealed block was buried in dung.
A few weeks later the pot was unburied and the
verdigris scraped off.
Artists used verdigris over lead white to form a
deep saturation of green.
Glaze Ruth Verdigris over Milicent Bradley and
what do you get?
•••
I’m in a club, dancing with emo kids. In my khaki
cargo low riders, a tight Hawthorne Heights tee
and purple highlights in my blueblack hair, I
convince myself I fit right in. My Chemical Ro-
mance’s ‘Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’ is play-
ing. A twenty-year-old with pierced lip and green
eye shadow dances beside me. I’m not sure if it’s
a boy or a girl and I don’t care.
We both move off to the side. Eyeshadow asks me
if I want a drink. I nod as I catch my breath, feel-
ing the sweat soak the crack of my ass below my
thong underwear. We drink syrupy liquid, it looks
green. Eyeshadow tells me it’s a faerie drink. I
ask no questions, just take a big gulp. Eyeshadow
places a hand on my shoulder and I let the hand
move down over my breasts. Suddenly we’re
pressed against the wall.
“I dig older chicks,” Eyeshadow whispers, then
puts my hand down to the bulge between black
and tattered jeans. A male? I think I’ve figured
it out.
“Why don’t we go back to my place?” I say, liking
the look of his hazel eyes and the thick pout of his
lip as he kisses me.
“I can’t go anywhere without Ruth,” he says and
then lets go of my hand and wanders off.
“So long and good night,” I say, hunch my shoul-
ders and head for the exit. My body brushes
against the concrete stares of the black clad kids
slumped  against the club’s walls. A Harley idles
in front. The rider lifts the helmet visor.
“Hop on, I’m Ruth.”
“But what about….” I realize I don’t know Eye-
shadow’s name. I say nothing, just get on and put
my arms around the heat coming from Ruth’s
black leather jacket. We roar away. I look behind
to see Eyeshadow jog limply after us, disappearing
in a cloud of blue smoke.
•••
Ruth takes my hand and leads me to the cage.
It’s an elevator. The black iron doors close. I can
see every floor, and all the details of the building’s
pipes and construction. At one point, it could have
been a factory maybe. It has that industrial feel
to it.
She doesn’t say anything, so neither do I. What do
you say in situations like these? My Miss Manners
etiquette book is sadly lacking on such occasions.
We both stand far apart. I watch her out of the cor-
ner of my eye, note the close cropped short brown
hair, pale skin, the zippered collar of her jacket,
her delicate jaw bone. She’s completely still.
The elevator creaks upward. The copper needle
ticks out the floors like minutes on a clock. My
hands sweat and my gut clenches in anxiety. I
have no way out. She’s not bigger than me, but
she looks as if she brooks no argument.
The elevator stops and the iron doors open. I’m
reminded of those old steam trains and arriving at
the station, except there’s no one to greet us. Ruth
walks out and I guess I’m expected to follow. I
could press the down button at this point. It’s my
chance, but instead I follow her down the hall of
broken tiles and exposed clay. My 70s Puma run-
ning shoes are caked in grey dust.
Not much lighting here: a few bare bulbs strategi-
cally placed to show off the dirt and
cockroaches?
I make out Ruth’s ass as we
pass by a bulb. She’s got a
I make out
nice one, firm but not tiny.
It looks good in leather.
ruth’s ass as we pass by a
Wonder if it likes to be
spanked. Weird thought.
bulb. She’s got a nice one, Smiling,
Never spanked any-
one in my life, or been
firm but not tiny. It looks fingers.
spanked for that matter.
My face is warm and
good in leather. Wonder if licent’s milky
likely beet red. My hands
are clammy and that sweaty
it likes to be spanked. given the girl a scarf toShe’s
thong feels cold now. Must be a
draft coming from somewhere. My
foot brushes up against something and
I scream.
“Oh. Are you afraid of bats?” Ruth says.
•••
Bat wings are folds of skin with long finger and
hand bones, membranes on the sides of the body
and the hind legs. Little brown bats, typically found
in Canada, roost in old buildings. Bat. Chiroptera.
Winged hand. Some cultures believe bats are souls
that have been separated from their bodies.
•••
We’re standing on a rooftop balcony. The air is
filled with the scent of night blooming jasmines
and tobacco plants. Pots full of cacti and agave
make me feel as if I’m in a desert oasis. Ruth has
me in a corner and she’s kissing my neck.
“You have the most graceful neck I’ve ever seen,
Milicent, do you know that?”
I’m squirming because no one has ever kissed my
neck before. It’s not that I don’t like it. In fact, it’s
surprising how much I do like it.
I feel something brush against my ear and it’s not
Ruth’s hand. I jump and almost break my elbow
on the railing. I howl.
Ruth laughs.
“That’s Ferdi, or Ferdinand, if you prefer. He and
the other residents of my bat house are the reason
behind the delightful fragrance of my jasmines and
nicotiana sylvestris. He’s normally so shy around
strangers. You should take it as a compliment.”
She grabs me by the neck again and pulls me
forward, kissing me full on the lips. Our glosses
smear together. I let myself fall, forgetting com-
pletely that this woman has bats in her belfry.
•••
From the balcony,Ruth uses binoculars
to watch Milicent, the responsible
worker who must return to
her own apartment, wander
through the dark alleys
and streets.
Ruth holds
Milicent’s cum-stained
thong between her
Ruth imagines
the cool breeze on Mi-
white skin.
It’s a chilly night.
pro-
tect that gorgeous neck. She
thinks of the way the neck holds
vessels, filled with blood. The way the
blood moves. The jugular vein. Full of blood. How
it bulges.
The bats squeak and fly about. She sets down Mi-
licent’s panties on a low table and goes to feed her
little friends. Reaching in to a locked cupboard,
she pulls out a bag full of live moths, beetles and
grubs and tosses them in to the trough in front of
the bat house. From a distance, there is the sound
of wing over wing. Twenty, no fifty, no a hundred
wings beat the midnight air.
She sits on the lounge chair, picks up Milicent’s
musk-and-sweat-scented underwear and licks at
the crotch. The bats land and devour their prey.
•••
I can’t sleep. My pulse drums out her name. It’s
all I can think of. I get up, take out a sheet of
paper. Scrawl the name with no interruptions. Let
the red pen flow over the blank page. I should
have stayed. I still have to work in the morning. I
need to keep my job. Ruth asked me to meet her
again. Tomorrow at the club. We’ll dance, she says.
She’s older than me. What makes her hang out
at that club? Even I feel old there. Maybe Eye-
shadow will be there again. What should I wear?
Ruth says I should show off my neck. I never even
noticed it before. I look in the mirror.
Yeah, I guess it’s longish. Pale like the rest of me.
I’m told I don’t spend enough time in the sun.
Probably true. There’s a bruise starting to form on
the side of my neck. I touch it. Lick my fingers,
touch it again, feel the saliva move slickly over the
spot on my neck where Ruth’s mouth has sucked.
I reach down and touch myself, obeying the sug-
gestion Ruth whispered to me as she kissed me
one last time, the taste of me on her lips. Imagine
her fingers there again, commanding me to come,
insisting on it. I wonder what she’s doing with my
underwear. Is she masturbating herself with the
evidence of my surrender to her? I’m not even
sure now where she lives. Maybe I dreamt the
whole thing up.
•••
Milicent is tired. Her superiors are starting to no-
tice. Her work habits are sloppy. She’s even more
aware than usual of the noose around her neck.
Feels it tightening. She’s just told some customer
his computer is likely to set on fire. She meant to
say that it wasn’t likely to set on fire. The customer
hung up with a shriek. Milicent’s eyes close. She’s
counting the minutes till break, then lunch, then
afternoon break, then quitting time.
The guy at the cubicle beside her is humming some
annoying 80s tune. Makes her think of dancing.
She wants to see Eyeshadow again too. What was
that bulge? Something real or synthetic?
“Pardon me? What do you mean by ‘bulge?” a
customer says in her ear.
Oh god, now she’s saying things out loud. She’s
going to have to focus on her job. Ruth is too much
for her. Too intense. Milicent is overwhelmed by
her need to give Ruth everything she wants, no
matter the cost. She can’t see Ruth again. She’s
going to have to cancel.
•••
“So what’s the deal with this Milicent chick? Why
do we have to hang out with her?”
“You’ll see, Lou, you’ll see.”
“She didn’t even ask my name, you know. Just
danced with me and then took off on your bike.
She seems selfish.”
“She is just right, Lou. Just right. Now bare your
neck for me and shut up.”
•••
When you suck a neck, do suck the blood out
last?
Do you lick it very slowly, or pump it very fast?
Eat that crimson-coated corpuscle, but tell me
when I ask?
When you suck a neck, do you suck the blood out
last?
•••
Cereal is the perfect dinner for singletons. It’s fast
and lasts forever. All you need is milk. Milicent
kids herself that she’s eating it for its fibre content.
She’s chosen Red River tonight, otherwise known
as Red River bottom because it is said to contain
the weeds and grains and other dubious vegeta-
tion found at the bottom of Manitoba’s Red River.
Milicent doubts this. It’s warm though and tonight
there’s a chill in the air.
She thumbs the pages of the latest Mojo Magazine
and watches the clock on her wall. It’s almost nine
pm. She knows she can’t go to the club. In her
closet there’s a red leather mini skirt that would
be perfect. She bought it on a whim on the way
home from work. It was in the window of her
favourite vintage clothing store. She tried it on. It
was meant for her. Even the clerk said so.
She’s just going to put it on, just for a second. She
pulls off her flannel pyjama bottoms and squeezes
herself into the tight leather. It smells delicious.
She rubs her hands over it, then turns to see the
back view in the full length mirror. Her ass looks
good. She bends over. Thinks of Ruth’s hands on
her. She undoes the top button of her pyjama top,
then the next, then the next.
In her closet is a diaphanous white top with ruby
beads that would shinkel so prettily on the dance
floor. She pulls out a low cut red lacy camisole
from her lingerie drawer and puts it on. She just
wants to see what the blouse will look like with
the skirt and camisole. She’s not wearing a bra.
‘Might as well add stockings to the mix and high
heels, just to get the whole picture,’ she thinks.
She brushes back her long hair. The cut of the shirt
compliments her neck and boobs. She touches the
hollow at her throat. A siren wails. Light from an
oncoming ambulance colours her bedroom wall.
She sees herself in the mirror, glowing red.
She grabs her purse and rushes out the door be-
fore she can change her mind.
•••
“I dunno why I thought this was a bad idea,”
Milicent says, drunk on faerie drinks and slam-
ming bodies with Eyeshadow, who she’s found out
is really Lou or Louise.
Ruth sniffs at her bloody mary and admires the
dancers. Lou and Milicent take a break. While
Milicent is in the bathroom, Ruth whispers in
Lou’s ear, her hands pressed against the back of
Lou’s  neck. Lou tries to touch her but she shakes
her head and laughs. They’re arguing about some-
thing. Then Lou frowns and crosses the dance
floor to join Milicent again.
•••
Lou grabs the collar of my shirt, trying to get at
my neck. She licks and sucks my throat. I get
goose bumps down the length of my entire body.
God. It feels good. I’m so wet.
“You smell delicious,” she says and moans as she
rips off my shirt buttons then tears my camisole
right off my body. My tits are hard. She sucks at
them like she’s starving, wraps her hands around
me, then I feel her fingernails scratching my na-
ked back. It’s like she has hands everywhere.
Suddenly she’s got my skirt off. Suddenly I’m
standing there in nothing but my stockings and
high heels. She pushes me down onto the bed, on
my hands and knees, pulls off her pants.
She comes around to me with this dildo in her
hand and a harness, which she straps on and then
makes me suck. She coats it in the baby oil I keep
on my nightstand and then walks behind me. My
body is wet, taut and excited.
“Relax, baby. Just relax,” Lou says as she rubs
my shoulders, back, buttocks, calves, heels and toes,
then puts her hand between my legs.
“Open your legs,” she whispers, then traces the
outline of my cunt with her finger.
“Bet you wish Ruth was doing this to you,” she
says as she leans her body over mine. One of her
fingers strokes the curve of my ass. I moan as I
hear the slick wet sound of a finger sliding into
my asshole, writhe in time to her slowly pumping
fingers, and wish she’d speed up. I want to move
now, want to be taken. And yeah, she’s right. I
wish it was Ruth doing the taking.
The unremitting regularity of her body on mine
drives me insane.
“This wouldn’t be enough for Ruth, baby. She
needs more,” she says quietly as she pushes the
dildo in, inch by excruciating inch.
I want to dwell on what Lou’s saying but my need
to let go and be totally fucked takes over.
She drives the dildo deep into me. Fuck. It feels
good. She’s fingering my clit at the same time.
I’m wet and hot and swollen. My tits rub against
the sweat-soaked sheets as she plunges deep into
me. “Imagine Ruth is sucking at your neck now.”
I remember the feel of Ruth’s lips against my cool
neck on the rooftop. “You can hear her breath-
ing heavily into your ear,” Lou says as she moves
her body slowly and steadily against mine. I feel
the dildo push into me, triggering a tightness in
my cunt. “Ruth needs you, baby.” We’re moving
faster now. “She wants to bite your neck.” I’m so
open.  Lou’s finger enters my cunt. “She needs
your blood.” That’s enough to set me over the
edge. My fingers grasp the sheets and I cry out
as I come.
•••
Jeezus I have a huge fucking hangover. That shirt
I was wearing is all ripped up. Lou was an ani-
mal. Never had a lover like her before. It was like
we were two wild creatures fucking. And that wild
fantasy about Ruth sucking my neck. Fuck. What
a turn on.
I have to get to my stupid fucking job. I’m late
as usual.
•••
Milicent’s supervisor calls her in to her office.
“This is your second warning, Ms. Bradley. If
you’re late one more time, if I hear one more com-
plaint from our customers, I’m going to have to let
you go. Do you understand?”
•••
Fuck. No more clubbing. No more Ruth. No more
Lou.
•••
I’m spending the night painting my toenails red.
I picked up Interview With A Vampire from the
library. Never really been into vampire stories be-
fore, but those ideas of Lou’s have got me going.
I hear a car stereo, the bass line humming in a
steady beat. Geez, what I wouldn’t give to be danc-
ing out of control right now, following Ruth across
the floor. I take my red nail polish and paint my
Ikea pine table with the words ‘I hate my job, I
hate my job.’ I feel like Jack Nicholson in the
Shining. All work and no play, makes Jack a dull
boy and Milicent a dull girl.
There’s a power outage. I swallow dark. No can-
dles or flashlight. I bump into the coffee table.
Mime my way through the hall to my bedroom
like a bad Marcel Marceau wanna be. I climb
into bed, try to go to sleep. My closet door is open.
I can see shadows. Maybe they’re bats. I get up
and close the closet door.
•••
Milicent sleeps. Ruth’s fingers are pressed against
the back of her neck. They’re in the middle of the
dance floor, moving to the groove of Rufio’s Out
of Control
Milicent is trembling and bouncing around. Ruth
taps Milicent’s chest over and over. It’s like an
emo mating dance. Suddenly My Chemical Ro-
mance’s ‘Vampires Will Never Hurt You’ comes
on and everybody hits the floor.
And if they get me and the sun goes down
And if they get me take this spike and
You put the spike in my heart
Ruth laughs and kisses Milicent over and over,
happy, delirious, feverish. Ruth sinks her teeth
into Milicent’s neck and the two crumple up in
the middle of the dance floor.
Ruth’s eyes fill with red as she lies there and her
heart beat goes back to normal. Milicent watches
herself, unconscious on the floor. Similar acts are
going on all over the room. Milicent hears the
sucking sounds. The smell of iron wafts through
the air. An arterial map of crimson flashes
through her mind.
She dreams of lit candles scorching skin, an in-
travenous needle injected into the radial artery,
where the blood runs thick. It stings. A sea anem-
one floats. Gentle waves loosen its petals. A wave
takes it, sucks it down, down, down. Centrifugal
force spins it round. It lets go and spins, a cy-
clone in the water. Milicent is a particle within a
column of air, accelerated, pushed down, dragged
along sea bottom and drowned.
Drowned and lost. Annihilated by the force of
something stronger than herself. Ruth Verdigris
has taken a lot of blood, but not all. Milicent
wants it all gone. She wants to cycle fresh.
Ruth gives her a long, deep kiss. Milicent  realizes
she knew it all along. Knew what Ruth was.
•••
Ruth Verdigris holds a lotus position on the couch.
With eyes closed, she chants to the sitar music on
the radio.
“Take a seat, Milicent,” she says.
I hesitate, then sit down, inhaling her scent of pa-
tchouli. I cast my eyes about the shadowy room,
watching as particles of dust colour the air. My
eyes take inventory: a Persian cat, a high oak side
table in front of a mirror, a vase with a single
white orchid, a brass incense burner, and two
bookshelves,filled with large volumes whose spines
communicate in languages I don’t understand, and
Lou in the corner, wearing a black shroud.
Ruth pours chai into three cups. I plop sugar
cubes into mine, splashing brown liquid onto the
lace tablecloth. Even in long velvet gloves and a
high-necked vintage teagown, I am still clumsy
Millie.
Our hostess clears her throat. Lou is silent. Ruth
pulls out a burgundy handkerchief from the pock-
et of her dress and soaks up the tea. A spot on the
handkerchief forms and grows larger.
“I didn’t realize the undead drank tea,” I say, not
being able to use the word ‘vampire’ quite yet.
“The tea warms me,” she says as she curls her
hands around the china cup, but doesn’t drink.
“Let’s begin. Open your dress.”
I let my cup drop. With shaking hands, I undo
each mother-of-pearl button on the high neck of
my dress, exposing my throat.
Her hand closes around my neck, pressing her
thumb against the hollow of my aching pulse.
She runs her fingers along my collarbone. My
breasts feel tight in the corset beneath the dress.
I tense my body.
“Take a deep breath and close your eyes.” She
bends toward me and sinks her teeth into my
neck.
•••
Milicent relaxes. Her cunt aches and her body
trembles.
She can hear Ruth’s heart beat and her own,
syncopated tablas beating out a rhythm as old as
time. Her temples throb and she weakens. Ruth
sucks deeply. Milicent can feel the blood leaving
her and rising in Ruth, making her strong. Her
body arches to give Ruth everything, everything
she wants. UG
 a novel of in
BEER MYSTIC.
by Bart Plantenga
The Beer Mystic is Furman Pivo, a dreamer inhabiting the NYC of 1987. One
night, like many other nights, Furman is drinking to slow the world down. He
discovers himself drunk under a streetlight when suddenly this streetlight goes
out, on the blink, extinguished – Poof! – it’s dark. In the ensuing weeks the same
phenomenon occurs again, then again and again until the unusual becomes the
uncanny, and perceived synchronicity is interpreted mystically – he begins to
believe that he is the cause of these streetlight outages. And somewhere in the
psychic seam between identity and delusion the Beer Mystic is born. Furman Pivo
is inauspiciously called upon to become the Beer Mystic and beer does battle with
light – beer vs. light, him vs. cars....

Furman’s life changes, gains substance, focus – a sense of purpose. He believes
his new (in) sight empowers him to convert beer and loneliness into belief and
respect, a parapsychological alchemy of quasi-religious fervor. His mission: extend
the boundaries of fecund darkness, constrict the fields of light, those arenas of
control and paranoia. Everything can be explained in terms of light and dark, beer
and lust.

M
•••
e and Kelly [ask him call yourself a New Yorker is a gray area
again if his real name is with a slippery sliding scale. Move into
Adam Horowitz and he a pad in the fashionable downtown area,
responds “Ja, mucker!”] go to Tish & Snooky’s Manic Panic to
tromped uptown to crash get properly outfitted and hang out for a
the “Downtown Goes Uptown” Neo-Dada- month at a dive called Fuck You [formerly

Hip-Flux-Schlock-o-Pod Art Show. We
wore shades and English black boots with
bulky but functional buckles and match-
ing leatherette codpieces singing “If I
can’t get drunk / I don’t wanna live.” We
looked like ex-members of the Velvet Un-
derground singing Flipper. We looked like
lifers because we had ironically absorbed
our squalor and wore it like a chest of
medals. Kelly carried his guitar. Like bait
on his rusty hook. He could play it alright
and did most days busking around Mid-
town.
He’s a native New Yorker – living
in Bensonhurst until he fled a dysfunc-
tional family for Astoria to live with his
aunt and uncle. The issue of when you can
What the Fuck] and pretty soon – within
6 months – you get your license to com-
plain about bridge-and-tunnel interlopers
and tourists. Kelly was about as New York
as you could ever hope or fear. This means
steadfastly never partaking of any of New
York’s many attractions. This means be-
ing 30 and proud of the fact you’ve never
been up the Empire State Building. He
also sutbbornly denied being a New Yorker
– except when he was somewhere else. A
New Yorker can hate New York, somebody’s
who’s never lived here cannot. This is a
universal law of nature.
Those are them of entitlement
who can afford to just pick a neighbor-
hood like others pick a tint of wall paint
nebriation & light
and move in with professional movers and
wear hip Hünd dog-walking outfits and
have a reserved spot in a parking garage.
These types become some the most vehe-
ment anti-interloper settlers. They had the
most to prove and probably the most to
lose if too many more people just like them
moved in from Connecticut and began no-
ticing their matching two-car-garage eyes
and disproportionate enthusiasms for the
green market in Union Square and plea-
sure boating and straw picnic baskets
[never mind the intellectual superiority of
wooden toys for their kids and their SAVE
FAO SCHWARTZ tee shirts].
So, the beauty of impermanence
that the neither here-nor-thereness lends
your persona mystique, the constant
housing uncertainty-anxiety quotient, the
constant flux of new unfamiliar faces, al-
though charming for a week or two, quick-
ly emerges as mentally exhausting routine
unless you can chant or drink or work or
talk or draw or fuck your way out of these
worries. By becoming totally post-punk
[punk but not punk, hippie with sneer re-
placing whine, hopeful even idealistic but
in a nihilistic stylee winkwink], by imitat-
ing one’s surroundings by dressing exactly
like one’s environment – let’s say stylish
dénouement – one could ironically and si-
multaneously be and not be a product of
one’s immediate surroundings. You laugh
but you are not quite laughing, you play
guitar but not too well because not too
well [even if affected] is more real than
too well; you sneer in a good-natured way,
you drink to modest excess, you inject but
not all the way, you write but then erase,
OR you see lights that fall victim to your
presence – your vibe literally puts them
out – and you make some big story up
about why it happens and why it needs to
happen… And so, here we were.
Three corpulent cops [who could
only have garnered any swagger at all out
of life from the patronizing perks accorded
their uniforms] approached and barked
“DUMP DUH BEE-AHS!”
“Why? They’re in paper bags.”
“No fuggin’ lip from you, faggut.”
And their pronunciation seemed uncannily
similar to that of gangster goons they’d
seen in movies. It makes you suddenly re-
alize that there are only a few degrees –
think a pizza slice – of separation between
cops and criminals, that one is merely the
failed obverse of the other.
“And we don’ wan’ yooz gettin’
stoopid on us.”
“Stoopider than yooz?” Kelly was
a master negotiator. He had manned the
barricades and had tasted the nightsticks
– and had lost points of I.Q. this way.
I courageously gave them the finger from
inside my coat, and stared at them in a
fearless way.
“Hey, FAGguts! Dump duh BEE-
AH!”
“Or we dump what’s left uh yuh
brains on duh sidewalk.”
We dumped the beers, mere malt-
liquor decoys for our better clandestine
stash deep inside holes in our pockets with
tattered passages down to the bottoms of
our coats. As noted I was – we both were
– brave, as I may have mentioned, in a
discreet, concealing sort of way. And along
our way we copped attitude, knowing at-
titude to be an ambient form of spiritu-
ality. This purposeful grim-edged attitude
brimmed with pose – so in opposition to
fashion, the entire package became a sort
of higher fashion.
Kelly, skinny guy: “They’re just
worried about getting’ their pensions at
40 so they can become bored vicious peo-
ple.”
“They’re also concerned about
losing control of us like Popes in the 14th
century got worried when monks began
brewin’ brew for everybody including the
peasants...”
“Yea, givin’ the rabble and goat-
herds too good a glimpse of ecstasy.”
“Heresy, the Pope calls it.”
“Disorderly conduct’s what the
pigs call it.”
The opening was in a formerly
shuttered building lent to artists like
crumbs to the starving along 42nd Street
while they contemplate the future of Mid-
town. The entrance looked like an archi-
tectural representation of Shane McGow-
an’s smile but we shimmied through to
where the free libations stood and fell into
our Verlaine-Rimbaud snarl of political
dissipation. Snippy and Snipey: everybody
there was a fake but us.
“See that guy with the Asian
chick?”
“Yea.”
“She’s slight and tight, right”
Drummer in the Noh-wave [Japanese no
wave] band, Yosoyososhii, which means dis-
tant. Or to us, simply Yoso, which was also
the name of their first album on red vinyl,
99 Records.
“I’m no gynecologist but so
what...”
“It means he’s got a... small p-u-
u-ud.” I suddenly thought about Rita and
did all men and women on the battle scene
see it the same way? No, no, don’t accuse
of being teenagers, we were astute and
hardened social critics.
“Oh.” Esteem thus works its own
thermodynamics. “I’m no gyno, I’m no
gyno…” Was there a Ramones-Devo-like
song about to burst forth?
From the bustle emerged a bubbly
woman with blazing red ponytail wearing
an aluminum-foil coat. She wondered if it
was true that the eyes of guys who have
too much sex become ultra-sensitive to
light.
“Definitely!” We removed our
shades and did the old druggie squint.
“In fact, I live in a cave.” Kelly
was glad that you could now be proud of
what you once had to be ashamed of. Kelly
was more than willing to talk about how
he had lived in a funeral home, in a closet,
which reeked of embalming fluid, and in a
basement with rats, dreaming with a ham-
mer in his hand – images of Elsa who had
it actually happen and then had night-
mares and couldn’t sleep and then lost her
job at a medical magazine publisher. Kelly
let me try on his pilsner-tinted sunglasses.
Gave everything an amber tint.
“This is what utopia would look
like. Dju see how she winked at me?”
“Sorry to bust your beer head
man, but I’m pretty sure it was me she
was winkin’ at,” Kelly corrected. Kelly
had spent years outwitting society by be-
ing its main satirist but all from inside the
confines of his closet. Andy Kaufman with
a chainsaw. He had spent days and years
becoming Johnny Cash and then years
more becoming Elvis, a Jewish Elvis [He
and his band Jewrusalem set out for Vegas
on a Saturday morning and broke down
two hours later somewhere outside High
Point, New Jersey, where their van broke
down and they realized they were headed
more north than west.]
He sang songs [his rhyming personal ads
in search of the perfect lady partner] in D
instead of G, and dropped his voice an oc-
tave. “I wore black [underwear]. I drank
whiskey before the sun went down. Maybe
you’ve become Johnny Cash too. Maybe
this is happening all over the world. Peo-
ple are waking up and becoming Johnny
Cash.”
“Or Elvis.”
“We are not alone. Maybe there
are support groups for people like us,
meetings where strangers get together and
introduce themselves by saying ‘Hello, I’m
Johnny Cash.’ And everyone in the room
heartily bellows back ‘Hello Johnny!’ And
then ‘Johnny’ – that’s me – tells complete
strangers personal and intimate details
of his private life. And girls line up for
autographs and ask to sleep with me im-
mediately.”
“Talent goes in one wound and
out another.”
“Listen. I know what you mean.
Jesus was a Jew! A typical exchange
might go something like ‘Hello, I’m John-
ny Cash.’ [‘Hello Johnny!’]. ‘I fell into a
burning ring of fire.’ If the universe is
truly infinite, then somewhere, there is a
planet where this is taking place. I call
that a good reason to shoot all space aliens
as soon as they land in your backyard. I
spent a few hours today becoming Johnny
Cash.”
We hit the gratis libations like
two-fisted frugalcratic imbibers, like char-
acters erased from the margins of a Dick-
ens novel. It’s important to know what,
if anything, they’re serving at an open-
ing [opulence factor] before trekking off
somewhere. And Kelly knew like no one
else. It was Kelly, after all, that turned me
and Jude onto the frugal furtive pleasures
of gratis indulgence. And this I was learn-
ing. He actually “lived” off Soho and East
Village art openings for a year or two,
shoveling grilled and baked morsels into a
section of his rucksack especially designed
to facilitate this. Keeps a shirt – only one
– clean and neatly ironed on a hanger for
the fancier ones. Has a pair of jeans full
of paint to fit in.
“Hey, you ain’t him, are you?” I
recognized him as D.A. Levy, fringe cul-
ture writer for the East Village Eye. “If
you are, then I wanna interview you.” He
pulled out a spiral notepad from Wool-
worth’s.
“Uh, I could be. If you want. If
yer here to punch me I ain’t him...”
“No, no, I like the blackouts.”
“I got nothin’ on me.”
“No, it’s yer... Outages, you
know.... I talked to Eunice, she’s a friend
of my....”
“Dick? Sorry, I’ve been instructed
not to speak to reporters. Word is and has
been that the liberal media is crawling
with spooks, with agents and the like.”
“Paranoia is what they use to
neutralize us. I like what I hear. The en-
ergy feeds me. And I used to be a man of
light.”
“How’d you know I was or think
that I’m that somebody?”
“You just smelled right to my
sixth sense, man.” He gave me his card.
“Besides, she showed me your picture.
Gimme a call some time.”
“Yer phone’s not bugged?”
I heard someone over my shoulder
talking about white supremacist groups
like White Jersey and just at that moment
I was scarfing down some flaky-dough
spinach and feta finger food thing and
quaffing my Iron City beer when I saw
someone had incorporated tee shirt pack-
aging into a collage that said “100% cotton
White Jersey.” The concerned person went
on to recommend that members of these
groups be sterilized and then dropped into
the heart of Bed-Stuy or East L.A. then
film them trying to get out. “Like rats
in a maze. You show this on TV I’d start
watchin’.”
I spotted the hyper-voluptuous
and incredibly well-preserved Madame
Lock, Siglund, Sig, my second NYC “love
affair” – “domin-ART-rix” is how she
sometimes described herself – was comb-
ing the hordes for new blood. The more
we averted one another’s anxiety-hidden-
behind-impertinence stares the more we
saw what it was that irritated us about
one another. I was young and skinny and
she loved that tension of someone about
to squander talent. So much so she was
willing to aid and abet that dénouement.
She is a celebrity. People film her, people
ask her about art. She’s famous for no
one knows what exactly but nobody wants
to take a chance of revealing they do not
know why. She is simply famous [and thus
powerful] because everyone has forgotten
that she was once not famous.
“You’re like so skinny. Like a jack
knife. Like a kite. Like a keel.”
“Lean, mean writing machine
and all that?…” And with that we parted
ways before the disappointment rained on
our evening.
The artists, standing near their re-
spective naughty works, righteous and ca-
reerist with cassettes, elaborate PR folders,
and hologrammed business cards, were not
that different from the country kids stand-
ing next to their 4-H blue ribbon pork-
ers. Except here they proudly displayed
the cow plop and “doodoo truffles” as the
apotheosis of their work. “This ain’t shit,
this is art.” Comments like that made you
think you were an extra in a scene even-
tually cut from a Woody Allen movie or
something.
“This ain’t the fun freedom’s
s’posed to be about,” Kelly hissed. [Hakim
Bey would later “borrow” Kelly’s obser-
vation that “Freedom is a psycho-kinetic
skill – not an abstract noun” for a greater
good. There’s something feeble tingling validated by Interview which told them
in our sleeping limbs, something foregone that they had all the features required to
in all the clatter and bluster. Art: each become someone. All to appropriately deny
scream of terror at the thought of being any expression – in fact, to remain granite-
alone and forgotten was met with a louder faced, dead – that might expose the fact
scream. that you had come here to temporarily feel
As I hung a found street-bent alive – and drink free wine/beer. While
fork from a dirty piece of string the nouveau quiche nibbled away
and pinned an actual Bag- at the soggy six-grain trian-
gie of dog truffles to gular sandwiches until
the wall between a They stood around they were empty-
frame that held
shards of bloody
the gallery/demolition handed and did
not know where
broken mirror site displaying full to turn next.
and an S&M
dildo wired to
labial pouts, working the Check our pock-
ets maybe, hehe
a police siren, crowd, promoting their [6 beers and
the aluminum- latest single “Labia is various snack
foil lady asked, items wrapped in
“What kind of dog Liability to a bar napkins].
was it?” Dyslexic.” This season it
“I dunno.” was Soho art galler-
How long had I carried ies from the East Village going
this Baggie around with me so I could uptown. Boredom as source of seasonal
perpetrate this sophomoric terrorism? I do diaspora. Three years ago, it was the third
not want you to even contemplate. I had comeback of cowboy chic. Two years ago:
lost the explanatory text. Something to simulated S&M weight-loss junkets. Last
the effect: Dogs have stolen human hearts, year: Pygmy encounters in rain forests.
the very hearts that were destined for the And next season? Maybe dining in close
lonely. More dogs less human happiness. proximity to the homeless. [Ed. note: This
Or something like that. has actually happened with the (re)open-
The Boho-ettes, a blond cartel, ing of the Toolshed, which had been nothing
comprised of arrogant and spindly limbs, more than an old no-nonsense and grimy
snuff-faced strategies of avoidance and Bowery hardware store for plumbers, elec-
full-blown hair, had their objective – fame tricians, and mechanics for 40 years. But
[the only currency left] at any cost. They now, Malcolm Forbes, owner of “capital-
stood around the gallery/demolition site ist tool” Forbes, had purchased this prime
displaying full labial pouts, working the corner in the Bowery and converted it into
crowd, promoting their latest single “Labia a slum-chic hangout for the glitterati and
is Liability to a Dyslexic.” They were big others who were nothing until they were
at Area and Michael Musto column regu- gawked at.]
lars. It somewhat answers the question “They’re like locusts – instead of
of whether there can by prudery dressed rubbin’ their hind legs together they rub
down as wanton exhibitionism. Periodi- credit cards to make their mean mating
cally they’d cluck their tongues in disdain music,” Kelly sneered as he flicked his
and renegotiate their quick glances in a lighter with that mischievous face as if he
mirror. Half of them had already been was about to torch the place and he prob-
ably was because whatever it was school
was supposed to instill in a future citizen
[civic duty?] had actually been snuffed
long ago. This gave me more ammo for
thought: celebrity as the fleshly manifesta-
tion of harsh blinding light. That is why
celebrities cavort in flood lights. White
heat white light is right.
Kelly replaced the good pair of
art-designated [neo-post-Duchamp] socks
stapled to the wall with his own pair full
of stinky holes – an improvement on both
ends! “The secret to the success of any
such infiltration is unself-conscious audac-
ity. Just act like you’re s’posed to be doin’
this. Like it’s your work. Like you work in
the gallery. Like it’s a performance in an
installation. This effectively eases the fears
and suspicions of all witnesses and they
show their gratitude by ignorin’ you.”
Kelly sat on the faux marble floor,
put on his new socks, grabbed a tray of
hors d’oeuvres, and shoveled them into his
special pack pouch. He watched me scrawl
grafitti on the main wall right next to a
colorful Kenny Scharf piece: THE GOV-
ERNMENT URGES YOU TO REMAIN
CALM [Ed.: Discovered this quote coinci-
dentally and much later in Artaud’s There
is No More Firmament].
Kelly grabbed my marker and
scrawled JOHN BELUSHI + KAREN
CARPENTER DIED AT 33 FOR THE
COLLECTIVE SINS OF TEENAGE
AMERICA.
We eventually departed when we
noticed no more imbibing substances were
forthcoming. We exited without fanfare
[no one noticed – luckily we disdained
all fanfare anyway!] triumphantly head-
ing downtown. We tromped with glasses of
wine in hand and pilfered Old Bohemian
and Iron City brews [the cheapness of the
brew was but a small detail of the elabo-
rate slumming style called “inverted blue-
collar chic”] in breast pockets – close to
our hearts.
 In the hallway Kelly scrawled
33JFK = 11MONTH + 22DAY.
“It woulda been righteous...”
“Wha’...?”
“To torch this fuggin’ dump. It’s
the only art form left. Torching galleries.”
Kelly could have been good at being some-
one. “I’d wait so that nobody gets hurt.”
“Don’t worry. Hurtin’ people’s
not my MO.” ...
We gloated about saving on to-
kens by walking the 60-some blocks back
to our territory, and joked about our coat
pockets stretched and bloated by pilfered
cantaloupes.
And then, out of nowhere at Union
Square and 16th, right in front of the Cof-
fee Shop [formerly Jason’s], I appeared to
douse a pair of streetlights. Yes, it comes
when you least expect; expectation only
hinders one’s agency. Or was it that my
person had managed to gather the mys-
tique of serendipity to some advantage?
“SEE?”
“Yea,” Kelly says, “Yea! Tha’s
some dark shit awright.”
“Colonizing lights’ve gotta go.”
We stood there for a moment gazing into
the dark hole formerly occupied by inva-
sive light. Chanting “Gotta go. Gotta go!”
like 2 second-string Ramones.
In Union Square we bowled our
cantaloupes into the grumbling tangle of
homeless humans near the amphitheater.
This is our way of offering them some of
our spoils while maintaining a safe dis-
tance from these raggedy hosts of lice and
fleas.
“Fleas can jump up to 10 fuggin’
feet, man. If they need to. So keep your
distance, man.” Kelly’d seen them. “Any-
way, that guy’s me in 20 years.”
“I say 15.”
“I didn’t wanna brag.”
The man in Army fatigues [the
bullet holes lovingly accented with color-
ful yarns] ducked into shadow, thinking
the cantaloupe was a bomb – the kind
he’d seen in Nam. Another “soldier” gave
us crisp military salutes – over and over
until he took a sledgehammer to one of
the cantaloupes. There’s the madman they
call Santy Claus declaring that the night is
a big parking lot in oblivion. He’s just the
kind of madman you come across during
your life where you wonder how mad you
are for not thinking him mad at all.
And here we are suddenly availed
of the ineluctable connections between
vision and inebriation, enlightenment
and obliteration, light and beer, the way
thoughts sometimes swirl in total harmony
with the whirlpool action of a flushed toi-
let. And this is how logic careened and
blundered into the derivation of the term
“light beer.” And for some portion of a
minute we knew absolutely everything
there was to know.
We parted ways at Union Square
– he heading to his closet at the mortuary
where he sometimes sleeps in an upright
position. I wandered out into traffic and
into store windows, where my dodgy re-
flection can be rendered almost charming
by its refracted obscurity. Another window
on Broadway displays dusty kung-fu video-
tapes. I stop because something grabs my
attention. The recommended video on a
pedestal was Game of Death. The carefully
hand-printed recommendation read as fol-
lows [I was so spooked I had to write it
down]: “Starring Bruce Lee, Kareem Ab-
dul Jabbar, Chuck Norris and Gig Young.
This 1978 film appeared 5 years after the
death of Bruce Lee in 1973 [age 33]. Lee
plays Billy Lo, a Hong Kong movie actor
and big box-office draw. His girl friend
Ann is a promising singer. The mob wants
them to join their management firm. Lee
smartly refuses and the mob tries to co-
erce him to. That having failed they unsuc-
cessfully attempt to murder him, everyone
thinks he is dead, so he fakes his death,
changes his looks, and decides to go after
the syndicate; taking them out one at a
time.”
Next to the film recommendation
was a photo cut from a sports magazine
with the caption “Jabbar, the famous 33,
goes up for a sky hook proving he may
very well be the best basketball player of
all time.”
We will roam the dusky fringe
with purloined emotions, concealed hor-
rors, latent apophenia, and clinky green
bottles in sagging pockets as we dart
from dirty light to dirty light. I am anx-
ious to again hear the lovely voice that
emerges from the papillion lips of Nice
ponounced “Nees,” short for Eunice as in
“you Niece.” Her voice from wherever sus-
pended on “my” answering machine like
little butterflies pinned to velvet in a little
museum in Switzerland: “Sorry, I been at
the library.” I was becoming addicted to
just coming home, opening a beer and lis-
tening to her voice suspended like water
lilies on a pond. I listened and listened
and then listened again to the message.
When WHEN!? What branch? “Some
days I just watch the silverfish devour the
books on the shelves. Today I discovered
that space is curved! Curved by huge
dense masses. Super-massive black holes
deform regions of space as they spiral in-
ward to finally coalesce into an irregularly
shaped, spinning black hole. Sounds like
we’ve been there – CLICK, Please insert
– oh, my quarter’s run out, goin’ back
to...” Where!? WHERE WHERE!? UG

Numb
THREE SHORTS.
B
ut what if she hadn’t felt any-
thing then, even then. That’s
by Catherine Owen
really, when she thinks about it,
what worries Zita.
Andrew is sitting up in bed, hair crumpled
up like the draft of a mediocre poem, smok-
ing, staring at Zita from time to time with
the weariness of a primordial creature.
“It’s because of all you’ve been through
that you want...that”
“You think so?”
“Well obviously. No real rocket science
there. Cause and effect.”
She isn’t so sure. Maybe that’s just the
way she’s always been, the way she’s put
together, a watcher on the edges of horror,
pleasure, whatever, and now she simply has
an alibi, an excuse for the men in her life
to rest their sense of inadequacy on like
an IKEA pillow, uncomfortable, reassur-
ingly bright.
“Tea & cereal, a movie?”
Andrew’s voice has lightened. They have
had the talk again. He has obviously at-
tained a satisfying conclusion and now, by
placing the familiar stamp of routine on
their interchange, can look on Zita once
more with what, in a man’s mind at
least, passes for love.
• flowing.
Zita has been told by sundry lovers over
the years that she clings to morbid fascina-
tions. What this means, she has deduced,
above and beyond the dead things she
keeps in her freezer: a mouse stiffened
into a moon shape, a sparrow her cat got,
even past the beaver, turtle and cow skulls
she keeps on her bookcases, and the piece
of art she’s been working on for years –
images of junkies shooting up set in dip-
tyches with slabs of raw meat – is her
elusiveness.
Her lovers know she is preoccupied, al-
ways, with something outside of their liv-
ing bodies. Such distractedness defines
her morbidity for them - as if she were
always listening for ghosts, voices from the
spirit world, things unfleshed.
Has Zita always been like this though, a
rare glass ornament as she likes to think
of herself, opaque and unshatterable, yet
so finely blown that she holds the light in
unforgiveable proportions?
Or is Zita, in fact, defective, as so many of
them have raged at her while scrabbling
on the floor for their clothes before slam-
ming out into the night and its silences.
Either interpretation can be readily drawn,
dependent on whether one is enchanted or
disillusioned.
Andrew has stuck around for a while
though.
He wants to get to the bottom of it.
•
On Sundays, Andrew & Zita take their
bikes down to the river.
Even when it is below zero, they ride, mus-
cles blooming beneath Gortex and fleece.
The river with all its mouths of ice still
•
What it comes down to Zita thinks, is that
Andrew likes a good mystery. Likes things
that are initially complex to reveal them-
selves, eventually, as only tidy formulas.
Weekdays, he drives a truck. On Saturdays
sometimes he’ll help people he knows
move house, people who pay in pizza, Pil-
sners. For an abstract kind of satisfaction
more than anything, the wierd thrill he
gets of fitting their domestic fragments to-
gether in his vehicle: bookcase alongside
couch, entertainment unit by end table, a
solid puzzle of angles.
“Physics is what it is,” Andrew likes to
crow after the job’s done, when he’s back
home with Zita, scorfing down the noodles
she’s boiled up for him with hoisin, sesame
seeds.
“Everything’s really just a math problem”
“Even love?” Zita just has to prod him,
though what love is or isn’t scarcely ever
concerns her.
“O yeah. That too,” Andrew plonks his
tumbler of Beaujolais down like a gavel,
“A mere equation when it comes down to
it, a biological adding game.”
“Well!” Zita feigns shock. “And you call
me frigid.”
• me up dammit!”
Not that Andrew has ever used that word,
its silly Freudian syllables conjuring up a
scraped-back bun, spectacles, primly fold-
ed hands, a dimity blouse.
After all, Zita has had lots of sex.
• he says. Zita is his project.
The first time, Zita was thirteen.
The boy took her to his house.
His father was mowing the lawn, wearing
only a cowboy hat and shorts with the
American flag on them.
When the boy stuck it inside Zita, she was
listening to the sound of the motor as it
rowed its long lines through the summer
grasses, and when he came she was water
for a moment.
Then she noticed that the boy was now
wearing her lipstick, the frosty pink glis-
ten transferred to him through all those
little preemptory kisses he had bestowed
on her.
They were the same person, Zita decided.
Zita One and Zita Two.
Therefore, she had to conclude, nothing
had happened.
Zita bought licorice on the way back to the
busstop, ropey, red & sweet.
• lizard in the light of all those steel tools.
Andrew is under the covers again. Andrew
is between her legs.
He doesn’t give up easily, Zita thinks.
They have been living together for nine-
teen months now.
“Bite me!” Zita hears herself saying, “Tie
Andrew has learned to ignore her by now.
He loves Zita, he says.
He doesn’t want to hurt her.
His tongue persists in its slow damp cir-
clings. Andrew will teach her how to feel
But if Zita’s always been like this, then
there’s no breaking through all the dam-
age of the past, no chance of that victory
cry erupting from the gentle battle An-
drew is having with her flesh.
She was so flat at thirteen, she remembers,
that her and the boy’s chests squeaked
together, popping and farting sweatily as
he moved inside her. They were only ma-
chines then, already gone wrong.
Hole
S
eeing Johnny bleed was about
the hottest thing Megan had ever
watched. The gang in the livingroom
playing Rock Band til 4 a.m., noodling for
bright plastic fame - “Hella hella hella.
Fuck!” all juiced up on Jager & popsicles
and he suddenly wanting another hole.
The girl knew how to do it. She did.
Had the gloves, antiseptic, measuring
stick, Vaseline, needles. Professional like.
Rigged up a spot on the kitchen table,
sweeping off ketchup chips, dog kibbles,
Johnny plonking himself on a chair in
his skin-tights, stripping off shirt, socks,
She popped a dot beneath his lip, its hard
snarl, the strip of hair below that, sharp
runway, he only 15, her daughter’s age for
Christ’s sake, shit, and how she couldn’t
lift her eyes from the bright tip as
it tapped his flesh, slid in - “Just a jab,
good kid” - then the blood released
its streams - “Damn damn” - the girl
trying to stopper it with tissues, plug the
wound, red over Johnny’s chin, down his
violent-white chest, one trickle making it
to his navel, the early curls of pubes crisp-
ing up from his waistband and that brutal
silk of belly. No one else was watching.
She didn’t move.
“Hit a vein. Sometimes it happens.” The
girl, marking for another hole, a breath to
the left of the first - “True that.”
Johnny’s lids dropped, lashes gating his
pale face as the needle entered him again,
Megan hoping for another mistake, she
could watch him bleed all day, shudders
puncturing her like love.
 First
T
he epitome of being human, Dahlia
thinks, then and afterwards, is to act
consciously in ways one will later re-
gret. While, at the same time, ratio-
nalizing, as she has, that regret is not a word
in her vocabulary, that it just might turn out
otherwise, even given a vast array of contra-
dictory evidence. Who, after all, can anticipate
the entirety of factors in any given situation?
That has always been her problem. Sharing
this trait with so many other hapless humans
in the universe is no real consolation. In fact,
it makes things worse. She has not proven
herself better, wiser, less susceptible to memo-
ry’s sweet lies. She is only one of them, power-
less against the haunting what ifs in the mind,
willing to make a mess of everything good just
to see if acting disastrously really will prove
disastrous once again.
• tirely reckless gesture. She had only left Vin-
Is it you?
Three little stinging words.
• freedom, made her feel owned. Human be-
Dahlia is already on her third marriage. A
certain restlessness, combined with the built-
in temptations of her profession, have made
her seemingly incapable of staying with a
man for longer than six years. Each relation-
ship begins differently of course. Her first
one started out of curiosity, a teen girl’s ill
defined penchant to shack up with any man
who brings her roses and doesn’t expect sex
until at least the third date. Her and Vinnie
had even procreated, a daughter named Lila,
twelve now, still living with him in the fixer-
up house they had bought together off 6th Av-
enue and Victoria Drive. Barring an opening
or a gala, Dahlia tries to visit Lila every other
weekend.
The second man, Chas, was, still is, in the same
profession as Dahlia. They met when she was
playing Lucky to his Pozzo for the Driven The-
atre Company. One of those cramped venues
in the basement of a cafe. The run had been
extended though and by the end of it she was
relishing that whip, Chas’s pomposity, the way
he stomped around back stage, tossing black
jellybeans into his mouth as if it was an en-
nie a few weeks prior. A relatively calm agree-
ment. At the time she had been living in a
grimy pad by the Broadway Skytrain and was
all too ready to explore other options.
Lila had been two or three when she split
from Vinnie and Chas made it clear that
he admired her maternal nonchalance, the
dedication she showed to the vicissitudes of
live theatre. When they ran short of cash,
as frequently happened before their Fringe
run began, Chas would do light construction
work for his father’s company, Dahlia would
waitress at Slickety Sue’s, a breakfast joint on
Main Street where all the menu items were
named after Elvis tunes: Blue Suede Benny,
Jailhouse Crepes.
For at least three years, her and Chas had
been “Smokin’ Hot,” as their regular director,
Bill Lahey, jazzed out whenever he saw them,
shaking his hand about rapidly as though just
the sight of them had set it on fire. Yet, with-
out warning, Dahlia began to feel that distinct
sense of becoming indistinct again, as if the
relationship had ceased to have the power to
define her, propel her in the world, the com-
fort of it turning her nebulous, wavery.
Affairs resharpened her psychic contours,
tautened her physical sensibilities. After
reading Sartre’s biography, obviously none
too closely, her and Chas had given open mar-
riage a go, but becoming transparent, to the
point of telling each other everything had,
frankly, become exhausting. Further, such
revelations, instead of increasing her sense of
ings feed on secrecy. That was the central joy
in masturbating, Dahlia thought, one needn’t
tell anyone, the essential solitude of the act
intensifying the pleasure, indeed lending it a
kind of meaning.
Telling Chas all about her dalliances with Jay
the lighting guy, Susan, the girl who worked
at Booster Juice and Miguel, the devastatingly
seductive shoeshine kid, had only puffed Chas
up to patriarchal immensities, enabling him
to gorge on the once enticing sadism of his
nature until he was more a grim confesser to
Dahlia than a collaborative partner.
And then she had met David.
Do you remember how we were, you my first
girl, my first love?
She’d known he was her first, but not that it
had been a reciprocal loss of innocence.
(He had lied at the time, told her it had hap-
pened with a girl at the trailer park, such
equality of experience too intimate a concept
to him).
That was what had clinched it.
She had to see him again.
• she with her wholesome mother, her subur-
David, like Vinnie, worked at a more stable
trade than theatre. Plumbing. Vinnie had been
his uncle’s lackey though w hile David owned
his own small outfit - “I Plumb Forgot.” Vin-
nie had once tried to understand Dahlia’s wi-
erd world, quizzing her about mnemonics and
blocking over tea after they’d put Lila to bed.
David, however, scoffed at her profession, in a
lovingly jokey way - “Hey you aren’t gonna
call Shakespeare when you need your biffy
unplugged are you then?” With his benevo-
lent ignorance, he bequeathed Dahlia realms
of silence and privacy to practice her art in.
She owes him for that, at least. Is determined
this time to work things out, if only for the
sake that, in her nearly-late thirties, she is
beginning to lose interest in starting all over
again, recounting her weary and lengthening
tale of failures and bit parts to new men. Da-
vid is like a pot roast, a cosy blanket, uncom-
plicated, swaddling. Then that email had to
arrive, out of nowhere, from that two decades
dead ghost.
• upon herself readily until the day when he
Dahlia had scarcely known him, in the way
that children take up friendships in elemen-
tary school based on the palest of resem-
blances and teenagers lock themselves into
high school obsessions concocted from little
more than the sight of a compelling forearm,
a congruent scent. J was tragic, motherless.
To her adolescent romanticism, that was suffi-
cient. When he asked her to have sex with him
in the last semester of Grade Nine, a query
couched in the cursive desperation of notes
passed to her during English class, she felt she
had no choice but to acquiesce.
That day, they met behind the school and he
hadn’t said a word to her until they reached
the basement room where he lived with his
foster parents. “Take off your clothes,” he
told her with what she imagined was honed
authority and she had stripped out of her
blouse, her skirt, lay goose pimpled on the
single bed, her body a band of light. As he
entered her and she became juice and aching,
she had gazed up at his beautiful unknowabil-
ity, grieving for losses she couldn’t fathom,
ban home, adopting him with her cunt like a
saint, pledging to herself silently, “With this I
will heal you.” (she might even have thought
“thee” as it sounded more apropos).
And so began two years of illicit fucking, mostly
half-naked encounters that ranged across the
majority of Greater Vancouver’s parks, public
washrooms, school gyms and laundromats. J’s
favorite ploy though was to pursue her to the
bus stop in front of Angel’s Packers, snatch
her transfer away like some urban Pan and
hold it hostage until she’d sucked him off.
He seemed to derive the most pleasure from
this tiny act of vengeance and lust, stroking
her hair with a sweeping hand, saying he
loved her as she opened over and over again
to his frighteningly tumescent cock. After he
came however, he would retract everything
he’d said to her, tossing the transfer back
as he tucked himself into his jeans, laughing,
“Just said I loved you then. You know that’s
not true, right?”
Interpreting the grace in this, the balm, was
difficult for Dahlia, but a challenge she took
and his foster family had moved to Fernie.
They were sixteen. She had lost sight of him
for twenty years.
• What could be more terrible, more reassuring
They arranged to meet at Languor, a new can-
ape and pastry joint that had opened up at
the corner of Main and 25th. Neither of them
mentioned its proximity to the bus stop that
marked a primary site of their dalliances.
David never asked questions. A good thing
in Dahlia’s mind, but one that also inspired
guilt. “If I gotta ask, it means I don’t trust
you baby,” David would say, cracking another
beer and settling down to watch the game.
But did he recall so little of her past (she
had disgorged all the major details on their
first date). An actress, a negligent mother, a
repeat offender between the sheets, she was
obviously up to no good. Maybe he doesn’t
care, she convinces herself. Perhaps as long
as she is happy that is enough for David. Is
she happy?
Full of anticipation, nerves, odd hopes. Not
proud of herself for setting this up though.
No.
It would have been so much cleaner had she
written to J:
“Thanks for looking me up. Good to hear
things are going well for you (he’d been mar-
ried nine years, no kids, owned a bricklaying
business in the Kooteneys). I wish you the
best.”
And that would have been that.
But, along with telling her she had been his
first lover, he also revealed that he had almost
OD’d a few years ago, junk (coke was too
common to yank her heart strings), that the
great passion of his twenties had committed
suicide, pregnant with their baby. On top of
all this, he had even apologized for the cold
way he had used her body, promised her an
orgasm this time if she would just give him
another chance. She hadn’t agreed to this
part though, said they would only meet on
a platonic basis, that seeing him would be an
act of closure, personal growth, moving on.
Language. How generous its lexicon of self-
deception.
•
than the resumption of patterns.
Dahlia considers this as she takes his
cock into her mouth, cold in the al-
leyway, twenty years older. UG
TWO POEMS.
by George Amabile
Still Life
an old man in a loose coat
smoking at the guard rail
in river wind, a dog
with no leash beside him.

who can predict what happens

next? parallel futures remain
theoretical until he turns
back toward the streets

where the same fires will burn

in rusty oil drums, night
after night, before sleep
in a cardboard house. Everything

about the life he left he knew

was wrong, the malls, the
theaters, even the sprawling book
sales, wrong and blind.

but this is wrong too, empty

daylight, rucksack trips
to the dumpsters behind
good restaurants, church

basements, magazines

filled with the usual

faces and lies. tomorrow
and the day after that, nothing

to do but parse through

the same jungle of hustings
and fuss, trusting
only the company

of an unlicensed
animal, or answer the call
of water as it rides
left, then right to the sea.
 Crimes Against Humanity
They are only crimes if you lose
the war. If you win
they are courageous decisions
like Hiroshima, Nagasaki. No other
country has ever exploded nuclear weapons
of mass destruction among civilians before
or after the U. S. A. This is a sign
of our time-tested genius
for innovation, which we’re proud of, also
it saved lives. How many lives
did Osama bin Laden save by destroying
the World Trade Center? If he stopped
Commerce for even one day
it was thousands, but they
don’t count, they’re invisible
like “the disappeared” in San Salvador,
Guatemala, Panama, Chile, like the victims
of our friends, those defenders of freedom,
those strong leaders, Baby Doc,
Papa Doc, Pinochet and Marcos, Mobutu, Batista
and the War Lords of Afghanistan, the ones
who reminded Reagan of our founding fathers,
and made The Taliban look like saints
or saviours. Then there’s our old pal, our buddy,
Saddam Hussein, whom we armed to the teeth,
and the Shah whom Democracy died for. The list
is a long and revered Who’s Who of celebrity
terrorists we have loved and admired for half
a century and more. Not only for their style,
their impeccable manners at Summits,
but for the absolute honesty
with which they administer programs
of patient but resolute genocide, also
their take charge ability to extract information
with the most up to date technologies,
both physical and psychotropic,
from those who can’t read or write, and don’t
know anything. We’ve already begun
to emulate their firm commitment to political
stability, and have taken steps
toward a more open and widespread employment
of threats, illegal confinement, invasion
of the home, the telephone, the doctor’s office,
deadly force and its power to clear the air
of dissident voices, though we are still a bit
squeamish about these things after all our talk
in public about civil rights and the pursuit
of assets. No one believed it for a minute,
but it sounded a lot like the lies our fathers told,
and we would never contradict, even implicitly,
those giants of history who are credited
with so many deaths and so much misery, they must
be seen to have transcended the merely human.
As we contemplate these things, it becomes clear
and to our credit that The Axis of Evil has always run
through The White House, its deep
thrill charging our bones through our pockets.
UG
 you threw a sheet of orange roses and white gardenias

RING
BLUE RHINESTONE
like a parachute over the love-seat,

by Mandie Lopatka
fluffed two feather pillows, set a long t-shirt and a stack
of clean folded towels by my feet

you can stay the night

i have an extra toothbrush and

the good kind of toothpaste,
the kind with micro-scrubbers and whitenol,
the good kind of tissues, the kind with lotion in them
i have a few lou reed records, a bottle of riesling
and a frozen black forest cake

stay the night, she says

you can snot on me
like a floppy-eared bunny rabbit
hang on to me like
the side of a mountain
hold my hand to your luckless heart
i will run you a bath that smells like bubblegum
comb your wet hair, i can read to you from
the tropic of cancer, please

and a cherry falls from my king-sized cigarette

i have been travelling from town-to-town

a bluebird on one shoulder and kerchief
tied to a stick on the other, the train
is always late and the bus never comes
it’s true, truckers make better lovers
we’re all a little sweet and we’re all a little sour
i have been rolling through town after town
and there are cracks in every sidewalk
there is love to be made in every flophouse and roach motel
and every castle and at some point,
we might all stop believing in walt whitman

i live in a bullethole
full-blown, like the sunrise
i live in burnt out star,
just west of hollywood
i live in a half hour
i live in my dead father’s wallet
i live in the mouth of a whale
i eat pints of pinocchio ice cream to stay alive
i might be dead, i’m not entirely sure
i tell a lot of lies, but only to myself
i’ve felt dead so long, it’s a wonder
my fingernails still grow
i live and i glow
but not here
you slip into your jammies
and i pretend not to notice
it’s just us girls, after all – your body
is immaculate, like the prototype woman in
grade six sex education videos,
the princess in fairy-tale coloring books,
the archetypal eve in illustrated bible stories,
an ivy leaf over a smoking pistol
my body is a bullfrog, it hurts like the splitz
my body is like a trash can fire
it smells like newsprint and banana peels
my body is like the divine comedy told
in the rhyme scheme of aba bcb cdc ded
my skin is like a floor rug, i’ve swept too many secrets under
it’s lumpy and deceitful, you can ride it like a magic carpet
but i promise you it will take you nowhere
stay the night, stay the night
you know, on a good day i feel like edgar allen poe
like i am treading in a navy sea
full of floating candles and long-legged water spiders
and when you hold my hand
i feel like a flaccid old man
maybe we could go to nashville, or graceland
and maybe we could marry with a blue rhinestone ring
in lace leotards and leopard skin dresses
we could unpin our beehive hairdos and
slip inside each other like folded notes
thank you for your hospitality,
sweetheart, the night, indigo and starry
you are like wild peppermint in the mouth
of bad man with rotten teeth on death-row,
there is a daisy chain growing between our throats,
you are sweet paraphernalia, a fainting spell,
you are shirley temple at twenty-two,
you tap dance on my rooftop and it sounds like rain,
you are a marchino cherry full of vodka
a topless thunderstorm
tonight, be a sleeping pill
give me sweet dreams
be the spinning bottle that lands on me
the blind dormmouse at our mad tea party
that gives me wisdom, contradicts plato
give me the good kind of stomachache
the kind that let’s me know we are in love
shy violet, you bloom and you bloom
our lips waltzed once, you were
honey drizzle on my tounge,
but we are just sad lonely girls,
i don’t want to touch you,
but i think i need
to see how it feels UG
 G
erry Corrigan is running the room.

man
CORRIGAN
late. He grabs a bundle of Gerry gets up and goes to his office
papers, two pens – one blue and looks at images on his computer

by Matthew Firth
ink and one red ink – a cup of large women and then gets down
of coffee and bolts to the meeting in to work, finishing two reports before
room 421. lunch.

an absurd contemporary working

His colleagues have started He decides to leave work
without him. Gerry makes apolo- early. He complains to Mary, his ad-
gies, nods, gestures at his clutter. min, of a headache. He thinks when
He finds a seat next to his director, he tells her this that his head would
the only one not taken. He sweats. ache less if she would only drop to
He can smell it. His colleagues can her knees, pull out his cock and drill
smell it. A woman he’s seen around it home into her mouth. He thinks
the building but whose name he he’d cum pretty much right away if
doesn’t know pauses briefly from his director walked by at that exact
talking, then starts up again. She’s moment. After he cums, he’d rush
making some sort of point. She over, stick his hand down his direc-
thinks it’s critical. She wants Gerry tor’s pants and rub her wet cunt
to settle down so that not a sliver of right there in the corridor while
her brilliance escapes. Gerry slurps all the office minions cheered and
his coffee, ruffles his pages, uncaps shouted. Then he’d leave the build-
his blue-inked pen. She goes on ing as an orgy roared to life behind
– she goes on and on. Gerry puts him in the meeting rooms, office
down his coffee and stares at her kitchen, print rooms, spilling even
mouth, her lips, the flashes of teeth into the toilets.
and tongue. She doesn’t stop. She
won’t stop. How does she like to At home Gerry drinks five
fuck? Does she like to suck? Ger- beers and watches porn on his com-
ry wonders. Her mouth opens and puter. He jerks off, then has dinner
closes and then opens again and – spaghetti in a pesto sauce with
it’s cum he sees. He doesn’t hear diced tomatoes. He drinks another
her words any more. There are no beer, eats a slice of pie, watches tele-
GERRY

words, just gurgling sounds as she vision and then goes to bed early.
struggles with a gob-full of spunk. He has an important meeting in the
Gerry’s cock stiffens. He shifts and morning.
knocks legs with his director. She
leers sideways at him. Gerry reach- Gerry makes it to the meet-
es under the table to push his hard ing on time. His presentation is
cock so that it points in her direc- ready, bullet points firing. He hands
tion. He wants to take it out and out back-to-front copies. The col-
ejaculate on her pleated skirt under league with mouthful of cum is not
the table so that when she stands there. His director looks dashing in
everyone from the department will a smart red sweater. She has enor-
see it, smell it and marvel at it but mous breasts and beautiful brown
of course he doesn’t. He just takes hair. But her face seems flushed.
notes and finishes his coffee and Gerry starts his presentation, then
waits his turn and makes an inane sniffs the air and can smell that
interjection rather than a glorious his director is menstruating. Maybe
ejaculation. Then Gerry sits back her red sweater is a giveaway. He’s
and notices his sweat has dried. The like a Komodo dragon. She’s off her
-

meeting is over and he’s alone in game and doesn’t say anything after
Gerry’s presentation. Some asshole
from the next office asks Gerry in-
sipid questions, even more obvious
and banal than usual. Everyone in
the room knows it. Gerry wants to
change the bullet points from his
presentation to real bullets, load
them in a gun, then fire them into
the imbecile’s head. Catch him in
the temple. Blood flows out, temples
of blood. Sacrificial blood. His di-
rector would climb on the table,
take down her pants and add to
it in her own special way. Gerry’s
front-to-back copies would be awash
in blood and the meeting would
be over but it would be a success.
The chatter throughout the building
would be like this: “Fuck, you hear
about Gerry Corrigan’s presentation
– bullet points and blood? Made his
argument beautifully. I wish I were
there. I wish I coulda pulled that
off. That fucker will get a promotion
to Level 8 for sure.”
Gerry takes these reassuring
thoughts with him to the washroom.
He shits while reading a five-page
progress report that is nothing but
headers, footers, dashing subtitles
and firing bullet points. He wipes
his ass and goes back to his office
and calls Sally. Sally works for an
insurance company, writing pro-
motional material. Sally is a fuck
buddy. He met her through an on-
line listing service in the personals
section. Sally was looking for a fuck
buddy.
“How’s your latest fact sheet
coming along?” Gerry asks.
Sally groans.
Gerry goes, “You wanna meet
after work?”
“Sure. What can it hurt?”
“It might hurt, you never
know.”
Sally giggles.
They sort out plans to meet
for dinner.
Then Gerry says, “I’m hav-
ing a hell of a day. A long day. I’ll
need a few drinks right after work
to wind down, to get back on level
ground.”
“Sounds perfect,” Sally
says.
Gerry and Sally meet at the
Boar’s Ass pub and start with pints.
They eat and drink for four hours.
Gerry says, “Will you be coming to
my place?”
Sally goes, “Sure. I’ll
drive.”
“No, no. Let’s take the bus.”
Sally makes a face but she’s
drunk and agrees with Gerry’s
plan.
They hardly wait at all. They
grab a pair of open seats towards the
back of the half-empty bus. After a
couple stops, Gerry reaches under
Sally’s skirt and puts two fingers in
her cunt. She pushes his hand away.
The driver calls out stops. Kids
chirp on cell phones. Music buzzes
from personal electronic devices. No
one notices Gerry’s fingers. He tries
again and Sally glares at him.
“You’re pushing it, you know
that.”
“Of course I’m fuckn push-
ing it,” Gerry slurs. “Pushing it is
what I do best.”
Sally rolls her eyes.
Gerry can barely stand when
they get to Sally’s place and their
fuck is under-whelming for both of
them.
Later, Gerry gets up in the
middle of the night to piss and de-
cides to leave. He walks fourteen
blocks to his apartment, makes a
pot of coffee, throws open a window
and waits for the sound of birds.
Before he hears anything, he col-
lapses from exhaustion, sleeps past
ten and wakes with a jolt. His head
aches. He calls the office and lies
about a doctor’s appointment. He
turns on his computer and watches
porn. He eats buttered toast. Gerry
vomits, shits, showers and shaves. He
makes it to work for one o’clock. He
avoids all of his colleagues and stays
slumped and depressed in his office,
experimenting with different styles
of bullet points.
Gerry is revived by the time
the workday is done. He catches a
bus at 5:15 but can’t find a seat.
Gerry’s face is about six centime-
tres above the head of a university
student, a young woman who smells
like raspberries. Gerry breathes
deeply and sighs. The woman moves
away. An older guy on a cell phone
takes her place. He talks loudly to
what must be his wife or husband
or fucking life-partner – whatever
it’s called these days. He gives an
update about where he is on the
bus route, how long it will be before
he’s home; all of it crucial informa-
tion. Gerry is disappointed and tries
to look past the fool for the rasp-
berry girl but she is gone. All he
sees instead are three or four sullen
women, office workers who look so
exhausted having survived another
day of the mundane and ridiculous
that their heads must surely be
flooded with perverse plans for the
evening. Gerry looks at their dead
eyes. But something glimmers un-
derneath. He imagines the woman
can’t wait to get home to strap on
their strap-ons and fuck their silly
husbands’ asses. One of the women
looks over at Gerry with a horrified
look on her face.
When Gerry’s stop comes, he
gets off, walks to the corner grocer
for milk, butter and pears. But when
he gets home all he feels like eating
is buttered toast. So that’s what he
does. Then he watches porn on his
computer.
Gerry wakes up with his
pants open, cum dried on his
knuckles and his Internet browser
blanked out at a page that cannot
be displayed. His neck aches. He
goes to his kitchen and takes three
Advil. He goes to the front window
and throws it open. It’s dark and
quiet; no birds anywhere. He lies
on his sofa, pulls his knees into his
chest and falls back asleep. Gerry
wakes up when a crow perched on
his windowsill calls out. Gerry is
not surprised by it. He laughs and
retreats to the kitchen for coffee.
When he’s done his shower,
there are three crows in the win-
dowsill. They look almost stuffed.
They look larger up close.
“What’d’ya want with me?”
The crows flap away.
Back at the office it’s
Wednesday. Some people call it
hump day. Gerry goes to the wash-
room at 11:00 with a pornographic
magazine tucked inside a quarterly
report. He sits on the toilet with
his pants on, flipping through pages
cluttered with vile images. He likes
the still images for a change. The
clarity. The moment captured. But
then the falseness of it puts him off.
In the faint shadows unsuccessfully
airbrushed away, Gerry can see the
camera crew, the fluffers, the direc-
tor, wardrobe staff and even the
cleaner whose job it is to wipe up
the spunk, drool and sweat. It really
puts Gerry off. It’s about as real and
convincing as his latest bullet-point
presentation.
Gerry stands, leaves the stall
and goes to the kitchen, tossing the
magazine on the lunch table amidst
office-working women. They recoil.
One stands and charges at Gerry,
barrelling him over, pawing at his
crotch. Another jumps up and joins
the fun, tugging at Gerry’s trousers.
Gerry grabs one by the hair, the
other by the neck and mashes their
faces together. The women kiss.
His cock springs out and he mas-
turbates, cums and then goes back
to his desk to answer voicemail. At
least this is what Gerry imagines
when he skulks back to his office,
hiding the magazine.
Gerry finds it is difficult to
concentrate after lunch. He eats a
chocolate bar but that just leaves
him drowsy. He steps out of his of-
fice, down the stairwell, out into the
street. He walks aimlessly, letting
the dirty city air mug his face. He
ends up by the river. He pisses into
the water. When he’s done, he just
stands there for a bit, feeling the
air on his cock. He turns and walks
back to work. He goes up the stairs,
through the door and bumps into
his menstruating director. Gerry
smiles.
“Stepped out for a smoke,”
he says.
She grunts and walks past
him.
Gerry goes back to his of-
fice and slumps on his desk, barely
able to stay awake. He’s so tired he
doesn’t even want to go home. The
thought of boarding a bus, jockeying
for position in the aisle and trying
not to touch another human being
puts him off. Gerry goes and buys
a sandwich and eats it as he walks
all the way home. It takes an hour
and a half but it revitalizes him. He
drinks six beers and calls Sally. She
comes over dressed like Little Red
Riding Hood. She carries a bas-
ket of scones. Gerry takes one and
eats, stuffing the entire thing in his
mouth. Sally sucks his cock. Gerry
spits up crumbs, then wheels Sally
around, lifts her red coat and white
frock, pushes her panties aside and
fucks her from behind. They fall
over. Gerry bellows. Sally comes.
Gerry pulls out and spunks on her
ass. They sleep on the carpet in the
living room of his small apartment.
Sally and Gerry take the
bus to work the next day. Gerry’s
mind starts shutting down. He hates
Thursday. He talks to no one, sees no
one at work all day. He goes home
and watches porn for hours and
then takes a hot bath and sleeps.
Friday brings thoughts of
weekend murder and mayhem to
Gerry. He bounces into work wear-
ing a bright red T-shirt and tight
black jeans. He sneers at women
he works with. He mocks the men
from the office. He wags a finger
at his director when she walks past
him with a sticky cinnamon bun in
her hand.
Gerry goes out for lunch and
gets shitfaced and returns to the of-
fice belligerent and brash. He fucks
off early, heads to the ripper bar
and orders a lap dance. He blows in
the stripper’s ear. He thinks about
phoning Sally, having her over and
asking her to dress up like a peel-
er.
He goes to a quiet corner of
the bar. When he calls, Sally turns
him down.
“What’s up with that?” Ger-
ry asks.
“We’re seeing each other too
often. It’s not how it’s supposed to
go. Remember, I placed the ad. I
call the shots, not you. Plus you’re
just not doing it for me any more,
Gerry. You’ve been acting like a
fucking psycho lately.”
Sally hangs up on him.
Gerry is momentarily dis-
traught. Then he remembers that
he got paid yesterday. He leaves the
ripper bar, heads out to the street.
Gerry finds a prostitute and pays
her eighty dollars to suck his cock.
But he can’t come with a condom
on, so he pulls out and pulls it off.
She recoils.
She goes, “What the fuck do
you think you’re doing?”
Gerry pauses.
“I don’t know. I can’t come.
I always come.”
“Look, I don’t do fuckin
nothing without a condom. Even
hand jobs. You’ve got five seconds to
put another on or I’m outa here.”
“Will you help?” Gerry
pleads.
“No fuckn way. You think
I haven’t fuckn heard that before.
Put it on or I’m gone.”
Gerry looks down at his
wilted cock. He pulls on it likes it’s
taffy. He looks at the prostitute. She
is not sympathetic. She walks away.
Gerry calls to her, “But I paid. You
can’t leave like this.”
She calls back, “Look, fucker,
it’s not my problem you can’t get it
up or keep it up. You paid for time
and I gave you time, now fuck off,
you little man.”
Gerry cries. He drops to his
knees and weeps. Rejected again.
He falls asleep by the curb.
Later he awakes when neighbour-
hood punks tease him.
“Fuckn loser, fuckn sleepin
on the fuckn street.”
Gerry finds it hard to argue.
He gets to his feet and stumbles to
the bus stop. Gerry vomits and then
looks down the street for signs of
light. UG
CONTRIBUTORS.
Amanda Earl is a polyamorous love
anarchist, ethical slut and a badass
who channels Cleopatra, Mina Loy,

In Order Of Appearance
Medusa, Kiki of Montparnasse, Elea-
nor of Aquitaine and Janis Joplin.
Her poetry, rants and smut appear in
the soft and hard corners of Google
and beyond.  You can find out more
if you dare at www.amandaearl.com.

Amanda Earl currently lives in Ottawa.

Bart Plantenga
(US/Nd)
www.wfmu.org/~bart
or google “Bart Plantenga”
or “Beer Mystic”
or “Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo”

For the past 20 years, Bart Plantenga has been

producing his mythic radio show Wreck This
Mess in New York (WFMU), Paris (Radio Lib-
ertaire), and currently in Amsterdam (Radio
Patapoe). Plantenga is the “nonfiction novelist”
of Beer Mystic and Paris Sex Tête and recently
published YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret
History of Yodeling Around the World, the first-
ever global history of this mysterious vocaliza-
tion. He is also a founding member of the New
York writing group, the Unbearable Beatniks of Light.

He currently lives in Amsterdam.

Catherine Owen is the spawn of a nun and

a truckdriver. She was born sick with the
flu and spent much of her childhood ma-
lingering with a strange illness known as
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. This allowed
her to pass many days in bed thinking about
poems. Since becoming a teen parent, she’s
been ravaged by guilt, a poison which has
spurred her on to her two degrees, a smat-
tering of metal bands and a half dozen
books. She currently lives within the view
of a berm with four furry beasts and one
silken man. Her latest book is Frenzy, out
from Anvil Press in 2009. You can find out
more about her promiscuous elaborations at
www.cathowenpoet.150m.com.
Catherine currently lives in Vancouver.
 George Amabile has published his poetry,
fiction and non -fiction in the USA, Canada,
Europe, England, Wales, South America,
Australia and New Zealand in over a
hundred anthologies, magazines, journals
and periodicals including The New Yorker,
The New Yorker Book of Poems, Harper’s,
Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review,
Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The
Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday
Night,, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires),
Poetry Canada Review, Canadian Literature,
and Margin (England).

Mark McCawley arrived na-

George Amabile currently lives in Winnipeg. ked, kicking and screaming into
Mandie Lopatka is an Edmonton poet and the cold war world on a Tues-
radical confessionalist notorious for her ex- day morning in January, 1964.
cessiveness and her inability to keep anything Shortly thereafter, he had a
to herself. Mandie’s poems have appeared
in Blood Ink, Fait Accomplit and Notebook revelation that if one of those
Magazine. She has a complete manuscript strange smiling faces looking
of her work called, loose moral people, that
she has no clue what she will do with. A few
down at him in his crib got close
years ago, she released The Architecture of enough, he could actually smack
Language, a video poem produced by Mi- them right in the kisser. Since
chael Hamm of Frame 30 Productions. You
can find it online here: http://www.youtube.
then, he has discovered that the
com/watch?v=M6CuepzEg5Y pen is truly mightier than the
palm. Founder of Greensleeve
Mandie Lopotka lives in Edmonton. Editions, and editor of Urban
Graffiti.
Matthew Firth has been a cook in a soup
kitchen, a garbage man, and an asphalt
He lives and writes in
raker. He currently edits Front & Centre Edmonton.
Magazine. He is the author of Fresh Meat
(Rush Hour Revisions, 1997), Can You Take
Me There, Now? (Boheme Press, 2001), and
Suburban Pornography & Other Stories
(Anvil Press, 2006). He was born and raised
in Hamilton - which might very well have
something to do with his transgressive liter-
ary tendencies.

Matthew lives in Ottawa.