Man Ray

The static on the Tv flickered chaotic static and commercials for car insurance and sleeping pills. The blue gaze of the television set was beating against the white walls and brown window shades, drawn past the edge of the sill. Except for the anonymous cracks from the wood floor expanding into the frigid air, the apartment was silent. But it was that vision on the Tv that perpetrated my sleep.

I sat up from the couch, unwrapped myself from the blanket and chugged down a glass of water. The cold liquid streamed into my stomach, electrifying a shiver throughout my body. I jumped into bed with Michelle and pulled the covers over us.  Her body felt cold, too but Michelle’s eyes were shut tight against the arctic temperature. The covers had gotten away from her throughout the night. I reached around her waist to pull her into my warm body. The clash of skin exploded through my circuitry, initiating a response of a warm trace of capilaries and veins that began at my sternum, ending at the base of my testicles like a long red river.

I swept the sinewy dome of her breast into the cup of my heand, feeling the hardened nipple like the copula of an ice tower. With the other hand I moved down her smooth stomach, over the belly button. My hand crept like the devious snake of lore down through the entrance of her cotton sweat pants, feeling her bristled pubis and then rubbed her latex clitoris.

Like a newspaper press, I began working both of these erogenous zones, reporting the story of my desires that were printing on my enlengthening penis. I pressed myself against the back of her thigh then dipped a finger into her but my digit reported dry lips; my efforts didn’t arouse her sleeping body. I pulled her pants off anyway and turned her onto her stomach. I began working into her, taking my veined apparatus, poking through her cleft to drill myself through the arid mine of her reproductive system. She didn’t move or even twitch, providing me no assistance for this arduous job. After these  efforts, I pulled her pants back up to her waist and turned onto my side to gratify myself and sleep.

The next morning arose without Michelle because she was still lying in bed, legs akimbo from the assorted positions I had arranged from my failed attempts. I awoke to the bleeting alarm clock in a contorted pose of a miserable masturbatory romance. In the shower, I thought about the day ahead; I imagined my fingers flying at the keys with mechanized precision. It wasn’t a job where thinking was valued. I kissed Michelle’s forehead and went on my way.

I returned later that evening, retreating to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. On the concrete embankment was a disembodied head. It looked a bit like Michelle. I grabbed its hair and took it into the bedroom. There Michelle was, still in her provocative pose — although it wasn’t her fault since I had left her that way. Her eyes were open, jaw slacked in an unintentionally suggestive manner.

Joel Peter Witkin

“Hey look what I found, love,” but her eyes were trained on the arcane pattern of moldy stains on the wall. I shrugged and carried the head into the kitchen, laying it on top of the counter. I looked out of the window for clues of the giftbearer but found the usual suspects posed in different positions inside the apartments across the way. There was the young girl who showered without curtains to conceal the prize of her youth. Another woman washed dishes beneath phosphrous lamps; and yet another sat near a window reading a book. I suspected neither of them had known the secrets of this head.

A coma is all I had considered of Michelle’s condition, which wasn’t so bad since people awake from those…The hadn’t said anything either. Its two hardened eyes were forged in terror sockets as if the refrigerator had been an assailant from its past. Maybe it was the steel door frame that had reminded it of the diagonal edge of a guillotine. I always felt at the edge, too as if my life was the razor end of a decapitation machine; my teeth red with the blood of kings, queens, and mistresses. Michelle was neither of those figures. Sleeping all day was just another expression of her unremarkable existence.

Without a captial figure, a head of government, or moribund plight it had always been difficult to make a decision between the two of us. Michelle and I didn’t have a head of family so we made no decisions together. On the Tv, fictional characters moved freely in elaborate homes inside the black box, wearing exquisite makeup; fucked beautiful bodies. On the tip of my finger, I would feel the rubbery sinew of the remote control’s directional button; designed with the razor angles like an arrow of a dubious compass — up and down.

Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton — next show.  7:30; suffer unto a coda of so many evenings of silent wails of boredom and self-destruction. On the screen, bacchanal cartoon characters danced, singing praise for toothpaste, laundry detergent, toilet paper, cereal, drugs. Then static flickered on the screen with a scrambled fury: 7:30. 7:30. 7:30 — next show. Every night followed this moribund routine.

I later purchased a flight to Jacksonville for the next evening. I went to work and notified no one of my destination. There’s no good reason for Jacksonville except that it’s only an hour drive to St. Augustine, which had always been for me a mysterious bastion with a violent history and a haven for terrible colonists from another era.

At work, I suffered bleating chest pains. My heart thumped in my ear and I was consumed by the blurry vortex of unconsciousness. I opened my eyes again to an environment of manifold cables and machinery attached piecemeal to my body. The whole room was alive through me and the lights flickered with the steady beep of my heart beat. A tube ran from the pale visage of my arm into a sack of clear fluid, presumably water.

A nurse entered. Her Russian features told the story of her migration. “Good morning. My name is Natasha.”

Joel Peter Witkin

Of course your name is Natasha.

Her non-regional accent gave away no secrets of her heritage. “You’ve suffered a mild heart attack. We’re going to keep you here for a few days for observation then you can go home.”

“Impossible,” I croaked. “I have a flight I must be on this very evening.”

“You’re going to have to make other arrangements.”

When she exited the room, I disconnected myself from that milieu of death, gathered my belongings and snuck away.

I continued buttoning my shirt outside of the hospital, dangling a lit cigarette from my mouth and then vomitted against the side of a parked ambulance.

…to be continued.

the hdtv screen stains with the tears of multi-racial mothers,
mourning their lost sons;
soldiers who didn’t make it out of iraq or afghanistan.
The acrid residue stings my eyes, too.
their grief prevails as seinfeld reruns entertain obese audiences.
i can’t bring myself to change the channel
while they continue with unimaginable despair.

in one sequence a father sleeps on his belly above the grave
of his uniformed son;
his hand rests on the cold marble amidst an indifferent autumn day.
an older asian couple spread an uneaten thanksgiving meal
over their sleeping son.
his father’s broken english is caught in the tumor of the raging sadness of his throat.
there were young wives, too — lots of them
and with madness rattling in their young hearts.
i think their best years shouldn’t be consumed this way
but it’s anyone’s best years lost when they’re missing a physical embodiment of love.

i can’t explain it, really;
the guilt from protesting this war among millions in rallies
across the cannon-ways of new york city.
i took up stones against the police before going back home to my nestled life.
my generation’s war and i’m getting fat on beer and wine.
the best years of my life expended in the manner of a young man.
bodies of unmet friends freeze beneath the solemn tundra
of arlington cemetery.
i don’t think it’s fair but these are the choices we make.

i share my grandfather’s regret, now
for smiling and laughing in black and white photographs
while young men and women take rockets to the stomach.
against all of my being is a war without merit
but against all of my merits i’ve sacrificed nothing.

Claude Cahun

the sound of nickel articulates the depth of the abandoned well. jesus dives in to snatch the coins. then he ties up each of the eight pieces in a web of chewing gum, twisting the tacky fibers into a noose, then tosses the lasso around the moon to tug the satellite planet into the earth. it’s pulled so close that the darkness has nowhere to run. it’s the armegeddon sunrise but no one wakes to bear the poisonous moon rays.

all remain asleep.

yet another disappointment.

new york to anticipated nowhere.
pills.
hallucinogens.
controllable substances.
cigarettes laced with strychnine.
puffing the weeping willows;
smokestacks form the dark tracts
where sunlight pokes rabbit holes
into the clouds
of an industrial and commercial complex.

old dogs shuffling to ancient territorial grounds;
a man stands against the train’s door,
peaking beneath his douchebag sunglasses,
identifying perpetrators.
lumps of pride for all that should be protected.

then it’s back to work to the women
speaking with obscene west indie accents.
stairs crumbling before my feet –
each step heavier than the last.
promises of an early release;

jets writing in cuneiform;
the contrails expand into the blue sky.
the ocean — great mirror of the sky,
great reflector of the spirit –
blue highways on the water,
running the timeless current
from the gulf of mexico;
the waves descend into
intricate, elegant curls,
washing the basin of man –
the sounds distinguished as
vernacular for primordial soup.

airplane drops landing gear
in sharp angular increments
until fully unloaded
onto the screeching tarmac.
collect heavy luggage
with the instruments inside;
artifacts from my closet
indicate a long ago wish:
bo diddley as my uncle.
necklace full of small plastic skulls
like a cobra snake for a necktie;
crossing 40 miles of barbed immigrants,
beautiful, exotic –
mojo rising.

into the arms of a city
i can’t ever win.
there’s always
a triumphant embrace
but i manage to slip between pale fingers
to stare up at
blue necklaces, black hair, yellow eyes,
sandy breath, hour glass swagger, neon spotlights.
miami suction cup of nothing.

My thumb was sliced against the jagged teeth of an expensive bread cutting knife, so now I look at the bite marks hoping they’ll open again.

The lateral wounds — four of them — resemble the bars of a jail cell. The fifth bar has already healed. It’s what I got for procrastinating the completion of the first draft of my book. That’s what I get except I finished the book anyway; even increased the size of the font three-fold for the final words: The End. These words are sorta funny though. It denotes the last touches for a sequence of time entombed in my imagination, stumbling through the dark labrynth; a doubt leapt at me like the manic Minotaur but then escape. The ruins seen from a distance as my invented characters were consumed by the conflgration. Still it is not finished. Not until I sliced myself could I seriously consider the first draft as a conclusion.

I want the blood to gush from the wounds again, fresh ink culled from the epic of my cardiovascular nightmare. There are many more dreams to go, equally hideous and beautiful; each with its own Frankenstein.

October proved to be a successful month for The Whiskey Dregs. It was a great pleasure editing the publication and strapping on my amateur splicing abilities, looking for stories, meeting new writers, and improving my surrealist nightmares. I was unsatisfied, however, by my lack of fiction or creative non-fiction that was written — almost nil. Fast forward to November and the vigorous exploration of my fantasies.

I made up for the sequence of zeros by beginning a book that, for now, I’m calling Into the Flood. It’s a hypnogogic story about a vicious tsunami that has engulfed New York City, carelessly gifting the industrial complex of Long Island City with a community of ghosts whose bodies were taken quickly by the disaster. It’s a strange amalgam of a ghost and love story in which the terrible existence of the living still haunts the departed spirits. It’s essentially a book about attachments.

While alive, the main character, Nico, continues a labored life, working day and night to support his pregnant girlfriend. She’s a layman’s philosopher who believes in the sacrosanct acts of violence and sex. If it sounds like there’s a hint of Georges Batailles in here, that’s because there is. Her role in the book is that of a practician of the Batailles’ dark philosophy — a doomed world dictated by carnal forces, psychologically founded in human depravity — aka human nature. Nico, her beau, is intrigued by her but eventually disconnects when her art goes too far and she begins to cheat on him with a mysterious man.

I guess like most books, it’s steeped in the author’s philosophy or at least his curiosity of subjects he doesn’t understand. There were moments, while writing, that I began to feel as if I went too far; maybe too dark, maybe too light. It’s not something I would show anyone right now because, well, that kind of exposure of my vulnerability is frankly embarrassing.

So while I spend Thanksgiving, gorging on food, stabbing my ham turkey with cranberry and stuffing, I’ll be thinking about the next phase, the more arduous phase, that I’m told is more exhilarating and more defeating than the actual completion of a first draft (sounds like a paradox to me). I’ll keep a notebook by my side while back South, in Florida visiting friends and family. I’ll write down those terrible dreams that’ll pull the second draft together and I’ll try my best to enjoy this wonderfully gluttonous holiday.

I’m looking forward to my monthlong break to catch up on other projects. The first one is The Fly. It’s a short story I wrote about a year and a half ago about a threesome that amalgamate into the face of a fly at the moment of the main character’s orgasm. I’ve been meaning to revisit this story all of this time. It’s been published once but the second incarnation will be more detailed and more experimental. The idea is to contain it in kind of like a black scrap-book, plastered with abstract nude pictures of women who have been so kind and generous with their bodies to photograph them. The story will be physically pasted onto these pictures. Think: children’s book meets Hans Bellmer meets J.G. Ballard (only by style and not gifts. These artists are clearly masters and I’m definitely not).

That’s what I’ve been up to. The purpose of this blog was to write about all of my interests to create a character and story based on all of these posted topics. This has been done so now it’s on to the next phase of this blog where I bore you with the details of my efforts. I’ll try my best to make it interesting but most likely you’ll be disappointed. In the meantime, check out The Whiskey Dregs here and there. This year was dedicated to the website — the next, 2010, will be devoted to producing books and other forms of media for your consumption. All of this is done with a lot of passion and hard work — not just from me but also our uber-talented and inventive staff.

Thanks for reading. It’s all appreciated.

 

Click me to find your way

 I’m taking a break from writing in this blog for about a month to focus on the Halloween issue of The Whiskey Dregs. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time so I hope that it’s as entertaining and insightful as it was for me to edit and write these stories. A lot of writers have been hard at work to make this all fancy and pretty for you.

We’ll be advising you on what to do, listen, and wear to celebrate this all time greatest holiday with plenty of stories, poems, and articles to fill your pretty heads with. Keep an eye open throughout the month.

So drink up to Elizabeth Bathory and to all of you. May your Halloween be as macabre as mine. We’ll help you find your way.

Skip ahead to click on any photo to enlarge

Old Dutch Graveyard

It’s no secret to most of my friends and family that I can’t help myself around a cemetery. I have taken trips on the MTA North in the dead ass sink of winter just to snap photos of luxurious tombstones in off-the-beaten path towns such as Mt. Kisco. Going to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with my camera was a realization of childhood imaginings of the fabled village graveyard

Washington Irving lies eternally in his family plot (the one with the cleanest tombstone).

Many will be surprised to discover that Sleepy Hollow wasn’t made up by Irving in his classic short story. Yes, it does exist and it’s beautiful. It’s not quite the bonnet and tri-cornered hat kind of place that it used to be but the village still retains the mood its name implies.

Sleepy Hollow is only 40 minutes north from New York City on the Hudson line and the cemetery is a quick walk from the station. Make sure to also visit Philipsburg Manor — a property that has been around since the mid 1600s and continues as a living history museum.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

What luck is this moment?

The Old Dutch Church

This is approximately where Ichabod Crane was chased by the Headless Horseman.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean but I’m sure it’s important

Old Dutch Church

Love this angle.

This is the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier.

The back of Old Dutch Church

Washington Irving

“That pencil’s gonna give you lead poisoning,” said a kid from a long ago memory.

I sharpened the number 2 again — nice sharrrp number 2.

I pressed it to my finger until it popped the skin.

Dirty graphite blood percolated from the thumping digit.

I found another finger and did it again

Then fell asleep for a hundred years;

When I wasn’t old enough to mix my semen with art,

I mixed art with my sanguine nectar.

I didn’t know it but from then on I had no choice but to write.

There are worse things to fear than lead poisoning.