the fool’s back pocket…

“Alright; let’s do it this way. Can you front the money for about an hour, let me turn it over, then get you back?”

“Naw man, that won’t work. I’m busted, barely got enough to re-up for this week. Bunch of bullshit, fucking time lag between one and the other, know what I’m saying?”

The look on his face was sorrowful, but I knew enough to be pretty sure he was full of shit. Still, it didn’t pay to get anything started over nothing. Not like it mattered anyway. The only thing as dependable as human greed is human stupidity, and with enough care, both can be manipulated with ease. Everyone walks away happy, so no harm, no foul.

“Yeah, sure enough. I was thinking, can we find an investor who’ll pay up front? It’s gonna shrink the weight, but any port in a storm, ya know?”

“Fuck man.” The face contorted in thought. “Can’t fucking win this thing, can we? Now I know how Oswald felt after he got out of the depository. There has got to be a better way. Lemme think a sec.” He looked down and spit through his teeth for emphasis. The point wasn’t lost on me, especially being that we both wanted the same thing and faced similar problems in paying for it. If guts was money he’d be fine, but like I said, I was a coward, and worse, a broke coward.

All of a sudden, he broke out smiling. “Fucking A right, I got it. You got a few bucks in change, right?”

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? “Yeah, maybe ten bucks in nickels and pennies in the car, maybe a few more in the couch cushions. Not enough to make a damn difference though.”

My pessimism was countered quickly. His whole body was moving around, radiating his excitement at having found an answer to our vexing funding issues. “Look look, go get it. I think I can dig up enough matching silver that we’ll be finest kind. We’ll take it over to the bank and turn it into folding money, presto change-o, blasted. And hurry the fuck up, it’s almost five already. If we miss the damn bankers we’ll have to go deal with the green grocer, and that greedy fuck takes fifteen percent.”

His solution wasn’t elegant, but it was workable, and let’s face it, guys like us don’t need theory nearly as much as practice. After enough years of scrounging around and mixing and matching whatever could be dredged up from couch cushion philosophers, I knew how to play this game. Shit, I might not have known much else, but it didn’t take much brains to follow the gravitational forces. Just keep doing whatever you think it means to walk straight down.

In the meantime, I had to run out to my car and pry every last nickel from the cup-holders, floor boards, and seat cushions. Like the man said, if we were gonna get some paper money from the bank, then every bit of silver counts. At this point, I couldn’t even disdain the brass. I brought the loot up the stairs and back into my friends apartment for a quick count. Turned out I had nearly twenty bucks in change. I’m as shocked as you. Shit, twenty bucks buys enough cigarettes for almost four days of smoking.

My buddy threw down a sack of change that tripled our combined wealth, and we were off and running. There was a minor scene at the bank when we found ourselves in line behind a skinhead, but I managed to head off anything major by convincing my friend that even nazi’s had to cash paychecks. You might as well try to achieve photosynthesis in human skin cells as fight what amounts to the way things are. Especially us, the brotherhood of the bottom of this mighty empire. Stupid fuckers. There’s no such thing as race. Just a few rich assholes on top of a lot of poor motherfuckers. Everything else is semantics and bullshit made up to smell like lilac.

After escaping the encounter at the bank, we rode back to the apartment in silence. It wasn’t out of embarrassment, or anything like that. If anything, form the amount of finger rapping on the side of the car and toe tapping to the beat of a drum, it was mostly nervous excitement. Everyone with a yen for changing perspective feels about the same way, at least as far as my experience goes. By the time money has changed hands, you’d think Marilyn Monroe was waiting at the tip of the needle or the end of the pipe (depending on how you get off.) In our case, it was no different. This may not be our first time at the party, but turned on is turned on.

“OK, you gonna go meet up with the guy? Try not to take too long. I’m not trying to sit here staying sober and pious the rest of the afternoon.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch. You sound like that little girl who fell off her bike in the parking lot a few days ago. Can I get you a tissue, or is the end of your sleeve good enough for that shit coming out of your eyes?”

Nothing like a little competitive jabber to get the blood flowing. “Just go you fucking mongoloid. Grab the shit and meet me back here. We need anything else? I can hit the store while you’re running off with the guy. We got a fresh blade?”

He looked around the room as if considering the question. A smile crossed his eyes and he licked his lips. “Better go get a new pack. Also, can you pickup a some soda or maybe a bottle or water or something? I can already feel the cottonmouth. Shit, while you’re there, grab a Tombstone. If I eat one more delivery pie, I’m gonna shit a pepperoni kitten. Store bought is cheaper anyway. We’ll call it even for the heehee.”

Worked like a clock as far as I was concerned. “Sounds good man. Now get the fuck going, we ain’t got all day. See ya in a bit, and try not to crash your car and die on the way back. I’m trusting you with my last dub.”

He walked towards the door muttering about being unappreciated and was gone. In the sudden silence of the empty room, I was grinning from ear to ear. The rapture ain’t got nothing on me. I found my keys and smokes and walked out to my car to take on the rat bastards at Wal-Mart. There would be no stopping this mission, except maybe for interference from the law. Like Bruce Cockburn says, you pays your money and you takes your chances.

At the store, I collected a dollars worth of razor blades and a frozen pie. I considered nabbing some cherry jello, but there was almost no chance it would get made before it became too dangerous to play with boiling water. We’d already had a few accidental injuries involving common household chemicals, there was no need to tempt fate. Some situations call for compromise. (Some don’t, but that ain’t the point.) With any luck, my friend would be getting back home around the same time as me. I might have the tools, but he has the talent in his back pocket. There might even be some hope of an even split. Not much, but beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, if he really fucks me over, I’ll just cut him repeatedly with one of these razor-blade until he’s dead and then I’ll take the talent from his back pocket and use it myself. I can be subtle, when I try real real hard. I’m fairly certain he knows this, and will choose to act accordingly. That’s true friendship right there, lemme tell you.

We met up back at the apartment ready to rock. Between the two of us was everything we were living for set up on the kitchen table. The mirror reflected the last light of the day, bouncing it off of the clean razor blade poised to cut, scrape, and scratch powder from a rock. This wasn’t high class in the least; there’d be no hundred dollar bill rolled into a tube for these humble nostrils. If either of us had even HAD a hundred bones, it probably would have been turned into cigarettes or dope or used to pay the light bill or the water bill or the rent instead of being turned into an unsophisticated insuflatory device. When we thought about extravagance, when we let ourselves dream pie in the sky kind of things, it was always a rolled up hundred dollar bill. Always.

Once everything had been evened out and settled, we were just kites waving in the air. No pleasure such as feeding that horrible monster that lives a few inches from the tip of the nose. Into the exuberant evening fell all the minutes of the night. I took my leave to go outside and smoke a cigarette and to feel the clear evening beating down from the starry night above. Even three sheets to the wind, I couldn’t let go of general hangups that were slowly strangling the burnt out parts of life not already inhabited by the junkie mentality. The ground and the sky seemed to look alike, and for a moment I couldn’t figure out where I was. I dropped my lit smoke on my foot and let it burn for a moment before my foot kicked out in reflex to knock to heat from where it landed. The skin wasn’t badly burned, just enough to feel something through the heavy layer of steam blanketing my senses. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I was still alive.

Back in the house, my good friend was staring at the ceiling, seemingly engaged in some fierce mental exercise. I wanted to ask him if he was OK, but I couldn’t find the words. Most of it came out as laughter, but he couldn’t hear the joke. I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t know how. The things we do to ourselves; I was laughing so hard I nearly fell over. Maybe I did. The ceiling suddenly felt a lot higher than it had a few seconds before, and the couch towered over me and shaded a pattern that crossed from rug to skin with the greatest of ease. My phone sounded like it might be ringing; the lights flashed and there was the tinny sound of music playing from small speaker in the earpiece. Instinctively I grabbed the phone and answered the call. “Nothing going on” I screamed at the top of my voice. Somewhere I heard a thump. I was worried until I figured out it was just my pal falling off the couch at the sound of my voice. I let loose another scream. “Can I help you figure out which way you want to go? No? Have you thought about playing in traffic?”

With a flourish I hung up. Well, lets hope that was a telemarketer or the credit card company and not a parent or acquaintance. I walked past an incoherently jabbering figure laying on the couch and made for the front door. This might be the end of the night, but I was pretty sure that nothing had changed, nor could I reasonably expect it too on the next 24 hours. Tomorrow we wouldn’t have to find shit. It would be right there waiting in the back pocket of dirty jeans. That is, if it lasted through the day. Driving out into the night, I was already licking my lips with the thought of feeding the habit for one more day. What are you trying to do, live forever?

You’d think it would be easier to breathe in here. I swallowed the whole tale, barbs included and started laughing like a fiend. I saw colors and other things I didn’t understand like tie dyed shirts over electric blue jogging shorts. In the middle of a walk around the neighborhood with the funky colored cars and motorcycles leaning at precarious angles threatening to fall over and wake up the neighbors is the sound of a dog barking that echoes across a man made pond. The whole story is unknowable, and I only saw the middle of the movie. What I can tell you is just the bare bones recollections captured during flights of fancy down the stairs of a dive bar with old ripped up fliers still clinging to the walls and a greasy handrail that’s seen more hands than the average book at the public library.

Like I was saying, you’d think it would be easier to breathe in here. Raw-clothed tables holding up candles lighting rooms bouncing back to the hands and lips and shoulders and hair that is under or around those ears that I’d hope could hear the song that was playing in the background. I played it just for you my dear with a thought towards getting you to say yes to a question that’s mostly an assumption about the things you said you’d do if the situation were reversed. I can’t help it I’m a fool who’s bag of tricks consists mainly of movable type and occasional misspellings, some kind of disjointed chemistry and the under-appreciated history of conquest in the midst of the most vile conditions that fail to arouse the finest hint of come hither in your eyes. It ought to be easy to breathe but I’m gasping rubbing together red hot dirty lungs that taste like soot in this small room.

Outside, I can breathe like a man, shit, I can pretend a lot of things in the clear air cleaned by rain that fell after waiting for almost three months spent suspended above this town. Maybe someone found the spigot or maybe it was just the right time for a three day storm to clear the debris from air and push the pathogens down to a level of exceptional excitement. Far from my original thoughts on the subject of rescue it still appears to the unaided eye as a miracle cure awaiting verification from the usual suspects. When we question the verdict they reply in mere words, as if something so technical could ever capture the magic of transferrance, like passing along a memory over a large geographical distance. I can only see the flags destined for collection in the Boy Scout bin at the local grocery store as waving proudly strapped to a tall pole. You could see them for miles on a clear day.

Lately poetry is outstripping the prose I’m trying to compile and generally ensuring nobody is having much of a time. There is the concomitant swings in value as exchange rates mitigate the peace that was slow growth and steady love. The issue as a whole needs more study, and not that collegiate reductionist bullshit kind of phallic interlude, but real thought, the kind that comes from the cistern of the mind; saved for drought like conditions when things are dry and the mind gets stale from under-use. All of the folks I already miss, and they’ve really only been gone for a few hours. This summer night caught me off guard, all those demanding questions and equally laborious answers; all those lyrics to interpret and remark upon; the hellacious desire to see some good come from what feels so bad.

I was hoping it was going to get easier to breathe by now. After the clearing of the smoke and the flame from the source of the combustible material, shouldn’t we see some tangible gains in the rates of exchange and the pace of respiration? When I’m looking into a two dimensional mirror that reflects the lights in the bathroom and waiting for a sign from someone wiser than myself, which truthfully isn’t very wise to begin with, I’m really desperately demanding the release of information relating to why the night sky is in a solo mood on a night as vibrant as this; then the fallacies of the evening knock on the front door and demand to be let into the house. They’re going to come in whether I OK it or not, so the door is of course opened and a bunch of lies walk in like prostitutes dancing on a street-corner. I appreciate the movement after all of this slow burning, but can tell by the looks in their eyes that they just need a place to recharge before heading back out and doing it all over again tomorrow.

Those twiggy little sentences don’t even have the energy to turn a trick or two, they just came to be safe here and now from whatever it is they ain’t safe from out there. The couch is crowded with all them cute little pixie dust angels and the ashtray is full of smoldering butts from hands that were too tired to crush them right and with proper feeling. I have to hide my scissors (because somethings you have to keep for yourself) in case the carload of lies tries to lift them for an easy way out somewhere way down the line. I couldn’t testify to the effectiveness of these lies, even if I wanted to, and I don’t. Somewhere, during one of those introspective interrogations, I decided to let the bastard bleed out but then later changed my mind and relieved him of any and all responsibility for the mess he’d caused. With not inconsiderable sadness, I swept up the room and cleaned off all the fingerprints to ensure a clean getaway. I must have missed one, or we wouldn’t be here having this chat.

Right?

Anyway, I can’t disentangle the singular event from its pool of string and yarn and felt; we’re left holding the remains of a waking dream pushed by until now unquestioned loyalty and patriotism for the cause. “All in the greater good!” you scream in your orgasm voice. For a moment fear turns to anger turns to laughter turns to high comedic concepts like falling down over and over and Abbot & Costello and old time things from when I was a kid. Locked in my remains long before the event in question, it would be a bad joke or maybe just some cultural value that stops the scratches from spreading to the other arm.

And then I’m healed in the image of incandescent waves of light; they reassure the child in me that we are far from harm and soothe the younger man’s memories of the night we went drinking and you stole plant off of your neighbors front porch. The joke was just a joke. The plant was just a plant, and now they’re stuck here waiting on a punchline that might not come, or worse, might not be very funny.

The whole issue is settled in the brief instant that all this has taken place during. I can catch my breath on the hope that underneath all the complexity and permutations of what might have gone wrong is the more basic premise that for a short period of time, something went right. The sliding timescale style of assiduous thought isn’t against the law…yet. There’s been hands that slap or tickle, depending on what we wanted at the time or what we thought we deserved from those daft provocations. I’ll never scream like that again except when I really mean it. All of the tinsel wrapped veneer sparkles and blasts the light back at your smile that’s broken only by the laughter over my shoulder in the mirror. For whatever time is just long enough, I’ll know I’ll be forgiven my frailties and still have my hunger for what you have to offer satiated.

The room clears easily like blood flowing from an open wound. Now I’m breathing again. No torture quite like holding it in for as long as you can…until the exquisite jewel of letting it all out. Tranquility wrapped up in skin and bones and cut-off jeans. I can breath just fine, thank you very much.