Willie Smith

 

Flash

Between commercials, I get bored. So I punch a hole in the wall. Crawl in. Order a ham sandwich. Bite into something reminiscent of cactus, septic mustard, mousemeat. While crunching the detritus, I become interested in a polaroid abandoned on the counter. Through the coffee-rings, I discern skin stretched lampshade-tight over a skull. The resemblance to my ex-wife startles me to look closer.

Actually, it's a mask. We're down in Mexico. Day of the Dead. Taken with a flash inside a bar. Cerveza ads adorn the adobe. Muchachos in the background gobbling chocolate skeletons. A bronze bartender in Hawaiian shirt grins like an Aztec whored into a Catholic. The "ex" is a hairy chested, titless, sunburnt tourist.

He holds a bottle of tequila. If he wants another jolt, he better lift the mask. Beads of sweat pooled in his navel indicate he doesn't need another.

I swallow a mouthful of acrid sandwich. The ex vamoosed because I got fed up watching tv--like this.

She'd ask who I thought did it. I'd shrug, and she'd flip. Televized murder was sacred. Wheel of Fortune and Name That Tune--her Bible and hymnal. When I couldn't produce a quote, she'd pout at the tube, silently accusing me of agnosticism.

I don't know. We lost touch. No doubt she went on to marry an upwardly mobile beautician. Or a truckdriver cramming his way into hotel management. Myself, after a kaleidoscope of positions--clerk, laborer, bar detective, etc.--I've settled into a night watchman career. Reading biographies and travel books, keeping half an eye on crap not mine.

By day, I wait for boredom to tilt the tv into an escape hatch--glowing like a lamp, flitting like a shade, frozen as a test pattern.

I leave the sandwich unfinished beside the snap of the hermaphroditic death. Just because I don't know where I am, doesn't mean I won't return. Exposure won't worsen the taste. And I am thankful for this curse urging me to drift inside the wall.

 

Escape Fiction

I longed to deepen my acquaintance with the Anguish long wedge. Therefore dipped below the belt my lip. Figured there do a number outside the envelope. Word--but a tool. A device apt, once you plant grip, to sprout fresh meaning; but still--a tool. So how--out in the garden--at its own game--lick the tool?

Handle the anvil tongue. Sample the claw groove. Screw, for example, silly (make it blow bubbles!) the mother of all syllables: MA: mammal at the nipple. Signature of the quadruple heart, the very hairy fiat. The name of no bug starts with--lest in uttering--O--in fly the creep.

Such tidbits under my belt, set out to belt the verbal till I set the world cockeyed.

A cinch at the equatorial belt. Anguish down there so copious none cope. Every priest in town wasted on dope. I adopted a keyhole saw to see through that conundrum, drumming digits on the revolution inside the tv.

Lose up to two tons in a flash: the dynamite diet--it's dynamite! When the gun went off, honest: I did not know I was loaded. Your Honor: if so--why not? Given a so long wedge, I'd catapult the planet into God. Here's mud in your eye, Big Guy!

Then Cy clops into the den. I think (if you call mistaken identity thought) it's his twin we call Cy "Attica"--excon Greek with the lumbago. Against whom I hold a grudge because he can't hold a candle to his own twin. The other twin.

I sigh. Reach for the revolver. The tv--exhausted for the moment with hype--unearths this cowboy vacuum where the dude kisses with a sawedoff the horse's tail. Anyway, all the canned gunfire brings to the fore the old psychosis.

Irrelevant whose. Cy being one of these one-dimensional characters fixed on nothing. I let him have it--through the Mobius of his one good eye.

Cy, dying, whispers, "Wedge ain't no lever!"

"It is," I hiss, "if it's a long wedge balanced on the tip of a squat!"

Into a reverse hiccup Cy collapses.

Keeps at it--a gulped bug gnawing itself; in communicable formation breaking in epidemic form down.

I ached to get the word down--on the tufted tough tit.

So I did. As the echo died inside a sound reaching through bathos for profound. Broken on this uncertain shore. Trickled into a warm, wet, white dreamlet: the peace at the pivot of Anguish.

(Or does the dream let in some other angle of the wish?)

Then again off went the piece. Shot me into the blue--high over the sea on which my tongue cut the teeth of what it saw.

 

Gourmet Brain

The waiter--a hawkfaced beanpole with brilliantined hair, corkscrew eyes, Salvador Dali moustache--wheeled up, strapped to a sort of highchair, the monkey. An emaciated squirrel in the prime of his farmed existence.

I examined the glazed eyes of the semi-comatose delicacy. The hollow cheeks. The lips retracted to reveal ground-down teeth. The chewed nails. The scrawny limbs, wasted chest, sunken gut. An adolescent obsessed with paranoia. A being fresh-squeezed by life's lemons. Cramped thoughts of thought trapped in a thoughtless cage.

I nodded approval. The contents promised a delectably sour, saliva-provoking adventure.

The waiter popped off the precut skullcap. I leaned over. Surveyed the pulsing thinker. Aimed at the shiny prefrontal my runcible spoon.

The waiter's lip curled. Above the waxed moustache the beak of a nose wrinkled. His neck arched. He waved me back--as if batting at a gnat.

I squeaked around on the vinyl bench. Repositioned spoon on black crepe napkin. Rolled eyes at domed ceiling of inner sanctum; windowless cubbyhole where were seated--one at a time--patrons desiring the island specialty.

OK--only my fifth brain, this but my first week of exile. Never investigated this particular dive. I'm no expert. Go with the flow. Follow orders. When in Rome roam with the Romans. Although it's my dough, and I'm the one who ordered. Whatever--old Tightface sure not angling for a tip.

He drew from a lapel pocket his own utensil--tiny, bright; seemed for all the world a sterling coke spoon. Dipped it in a mother-of-pearl snuffbox fished into his other palm. Sprinkled sparkly powder over the exposed organ.

Ah, I thought, a pinch of toot to numb the wretch. A humane touch. But the brain, I corrected myself, has no feeling, no sensitivity to pain. Although it contains all feeling, all pain--or so science would have us think. So perhaps it's to craze--as the customer dives in--the animal's pleasure center--further to spice the treat with a last-instant neurotransmitter tsunami.

He tucked both implement and condiment back on his person. The snuffbox in a trouser pocket chinked against keys and coin. In lieu of bon appetit he snorted a sneer lifting one tendril of his lip hair, like a black widow testing a strand some hapless fly tripped.

He then vamoosed--doubtless intent on sucking out his own lunch; perhaps the ichor of some chocolate mousse abortion. In the dankness lingered burnt transformer stink. Precisely the aftershave to expect in this backwater cosmospolis.

I ditched the miff. Hunger shouldered aside pride.

I leaned forward. Dug the spoon into where I spotted on the lobe an unusually thick accretion of scrumptious cortex. Sawteeth ruptured vessels. Divided tissue. Excised the morsel.

But stayed a moment gustatory ecstasy. Endeavored, on second thought, first to feed curiosity.

Raised the loaded spoon to my eye. In the candlelight, scrutinized the scattering of… no, not cocaine, not MSG, not salt (all which readily dissolve). But itsy crystals intact atop the gobbet.

I gazed abstractedly at glittering scarlets, blues, topazes, azures. Rainbows tiny as mosquito buzzes… spectral spectra sensing a sixth. Were these…? Yes--the jagged pieces absent from the puzzle of each cerebrum served unseasoned in those previous cupola-ed cubbyholes--none quite so cobwebbed, obscure, hostile.

I winced. Slipped into my mouth the wobbly spoonful. Nibbled at length the jelly suggestive of green blackberry mingled with oak smoke; vaguely decayed oyster overtone.

Zingy crunches finished. A pins-and-needles acerbity spurted into stings. Yes--silica. Finely ground glass.

Meant to bleed both sides. An artistic aping of the acme of higher intelligence: to perceive--captured through transparent ache--rapture.

I swallowed, while into place fell divinely painful release from banishment.

Then out of meditation I snapped--a knife unsheathed--as the spoon--poised for the next scoop--reflected obsessively the view from below.