MACON SUN

I watched her rip a sample perfume out of a Cosmo or some feminist manifesto and douse her chest. The cleavage condiment was discarded with the empty ketchup packets at the stand. I thought about how funny it would’ve been had she accidentally switched the two, and funnier yet, if a gorging man in suit attempted to assist her with a frank in hand and another perked elsewhere. All messes were avoided and perky friends kept at bay. Well, except mine, and her nipples. It was early. The city may not sleep, but the sun was just waking. I thought maybe they’d soften with the sun, nocturnally bashful. Maybe they were on fake platforms. Maybe I was far too intrigued by this, but puberty is an era of intriguing possibility. I assumed my father was just as intrigued, because he wasn’t at all listening to my mother. We didn’t need to speak, we were having the same seductive conversation with this woman in our respective passion cauldrons atop our necks. 

“Let’s get a couple of dogs,” he said with his dog throbbing in its natural casing. 

“Yeah, with ketchup,” I rang out in concurrence. 

My mother muttered something. I assumed it was something along the lines of I’m already following two around. She just didn’t like hot dogs. 

When we reached the Sabrett’s stand I noticed my father’s interest waning drastically. Conversely, my fantasy was developing into a lascivious rendezvous in my mind. The bra she lacked meant that she was shirtless to me. My father was more intuitive. He also wasn’t getting erections forty times a day, or a month for that matter, but I digress. The bra she lacked meant that she lacked structure, specifically a structure to live in. This object of my juvenile sexual desire was a woman without any objects of her own. She retreated to the bench she seemed to have slept on, without me, to my lament. My father started listening to my mother.

As we walked away my mother tossed a buck or two into the woman’s hat. And to that I thought - what I wouldn’t have given to pay her a buck or two for an hour or two. I suppose I’d gotten enough, no charge. 

A bar has this drink called the Rick James, which is not so much a drink as a warm shot of bottom-shelf gin. I yearn for the warmth. I don’t need to bundle up, and eating a blanket wouldn’t suffice. I couldn’t digest a blanket, and that’s a must. I need something that can fluctuate within, something thats volatility singes but greases out corrosion. What’s the matter - the debris from a mind left to waver trickles down to the cellar of my stomach. They talk about the heart being heavy, but then draw their nausea from the bow of the gut wherein lies the brain’s compost. The fertilizer sits cold, it doesn’t ferment, it just brews a nauseous chill. Veins like cracks on brittle planes of ice. Much like my veins, I am void of elasticity. Rigid and desperate for blood flow. 

Both Bukowski and my old neighbor said to stay away from the bars, and I suppose they’ve got their reasons. Though Bukowski waltzes with the romanticism of booze, my self-appointed mentor would appreciate the reinstitution of prohibition, but it’s not about the booze. They both have their reasons. They’ve worn shoes similar to mine, probably walked in them too. A shot of gin won’t curb my thirst, especially at room temperature. It may jostle up the emotional debris festering in my gut, but it won’t flush it out nor will it really give me the warmth I yearn for. These two men counter my puppy ardor with wisdom from the pound. Rick James, as cold blooded as he is, agrees. 

Today I wrote things down by hand.

I physically scrawled words, you know, without a keyboard. It’s this crazy phenomena they used to partake in millions of years ago when keys were only used for pianos and locked doors. It is my firm belief that they used berry juices and blood to document everything. This was until, of course, the banks took over the world and required a more permanent stain. I believe this was simultaneous with the Injuns being bludgeoned for taking up too much real estate, but I digress.

Fast forward to present, today, as aforementioned. I’m not quite sure what they use for ink these days, likely the fossil-fuel produced by the Natives. It certainly bleeds out of the pen. It makes quite a bit of sense, because one can feel the affliction when writing with their hands. The struggle to get things down, to erase those things, to lace one’s scalp with fingers and dig in, desperate attempts to harvest everything going on. The solemn realization that it’s impossible to do so is followed by a desultory scramble to organize the most ripe. 

My handwriting is poor, especially when emotionally smudging words across a page. I could feel everything I was writing much more than when I type, because everything was visible. The remnants of crossed out ideas, written-over words. 

I wrote things down today, by hand, and it was much more fulfilling than deleting something on a computer, because when I crumpled everything I wrote up, also by hand, and threw it away I was still able to see it. A lifeless corpse, victimized by my insanity. 

There are monsters I’ve yet to confront underneath my bed. They are not physically manifested. That would be too simple, and trust me, I’ve checked. Even if they were tangibly lurking, they’d hardly be physically imposing. Only in sheer numbers do the tiny wreak havoc. Only collectively do miniature monsters torture. A queen sized, glorified cot, only permits a certain allotted amount of real estate for the physical manifestation. Due to a limited housing market, some of the monsters would have to surreptitiously scale the box-spring and sleep on top of the mattress. It should be abundantly evident that no matter how dastardly they may be, even monsters aren’t intimidating when they’re drooling and dreaming. 

The most frightening monsters are the ones that don’t need to sleep, but crawl into the bed anyway. They don’t snuggle up to me one at a time. That would allow enough time to forge some sort of understanding, enough time to domesticate. There’s no reason to fear the things one has control over. Scoffing at docility, they suffocate, like a sleeping bag to a claustrophobic. There is no grace period to relegate each monster singularly. Only collectively do monsters torture. These are the monsters heard, but not seen. They run frenzied circles through the mind. Never in the field of vision, yet they cloud it like London fog. They wrap around me as I drool and dream, the only time I can avoid them. Someday, I’ll drown them in my wake. 

Lloyd the Noid is what they called him back at the pen. It was unnerving, to say the least, to meet up with someone who criminals advisedly steered clear of. Trepidation shook my hands while I dialed him. I hoped with each subsequent ring that an answering machine would interrupt my call; that I would have avoided Lloyd after being so foolish as to seek him out. Lloyd the Noid answered, to my immediate dismay, just as his pre-recorded secretary was coming to my rescue.

“He-hello, Lloyd speaking,” his voice wasn’t at all expected. It was soft, not effeminate by my standards, but maybe in prison. I knew little of his disposition, but from my grapevine biography I assumed that nobody ever poked fun of his voice. Did this make him more dangerous? I chose my words carefully, trembling at the thought of this potentially volatile ex-criminal exploding with anger and embarking on an elaborate personal vendetta against me. It would be the kind of vendetta that could’ve only been contrived in a jail cell. Worse, it would be successful. What was I thinking? Avoid him, they said. Two words shouldn’t be so hard to follow. 

The bedlam within my mind caused me to lose track of the conversation. This, of course, only exacerbated my situation. Not knowing whether or not I had been paying attention to my words, I was sure that he was pulling an old blueprint for murder out of his desk. He was surely crossing out the name of some bastardly prison guard and replacing it with mine. I would try to avoid him at this point, but it would be too late. Maybe it was an ironic nickname, as if to say that avoiding Lloyd was not actually possible. It didn’t matter, this would likely be my last phone conversation, other than a frantic 911 call that would be too little too late. 

“Well, I’m free at any point on Sunday. There’s a coffee place just a few blocks from my apartment. Horrible coffee, but since most people know of this it’s usually pretty quiet,” he said jovially. Despite my immediate relief, I couldn’t help but consider possible ulterior motives for meeting at an empty coffee shop. 

“Is there anywhere else we could meet?” I asked sheepishly. 

“I’m still new in this neighborhood, but I could look into it. Why?” The way he said why caused my stomach to lurch. An overwhelming sense of “Oh Shit,” coursed through my veins. I’d done it now. I couldn’t confess why I’d requested a new venue; the guy had already been accused of murder once. I considered a bogus coffee bean allergy. 

“Maybe we could grab a bite,” I said, adding, “I’ve never really been to that part of the city. You’re new to that neighborhood. We could expand our horizons,” for substance. He’s going to think I picked up on his effeminate voice and am trying to turn this interview into a date, I thought. Was he even aware of the way his voice sounded? 

“For all those years, the only horizon I saw had barbed wire framing it,” he said quietly, mourning a life lost to stagnation. I’d done it. I’d officially said the wrong thing. “I’ll be damned if I let shitty coffee hold me back. I’ll tell you what; you pick a place and get back to me. Just make sure it has outdoor seating, a patio.”

We met up on Sunday at a tapas-type place. He liked the idea when I called him back. After eating prison food for nearly 12 years he would happily try anything. My nerves had calmed upon meeting him. He wasn’t particularly intimidating, nor did he try to send out those vibes. Lloyd was tall and slim, but not by any means gangly. He was built like a baseball pitcher, and his demeanor was just as pensive. I realized quickly why the outdoor seating was his only stipulation; an ashtray was already full by the time our food came out. Lloyd picked up the habit as a means to socialize in prison. He would offer his cigarettes to anyone who looked friendly, for a criminal anyway, and talk about buying them on the outside someday. I couldn’t help but smoke with him, adding ashes of my own to the cigarettes he laid to waste. Tobacco smoke was so stagnantly encapsulated within his lungs, from years upon years of packs upon packs. Smoke seeped out of this gaseous cauldron every time he exhaled, even between cigarettes. He let off decades of steam.

For hours we laughed, coughed, drank, and talked. He had just as many questions for me as I did for him. I thought he might be doing a personal interest story for his own paper that he’d send back to the prison, Lloyd’s Tabloid, or The Noid’s Noise. The whole reason I picked his story was because of his wrongful sentencing. He was convicted for two different murders and various counts of sexual aggression. 12 years into his sentence the actual perpetrator was caught committing nearly identical crimes. Lloyd and I didn’t talk about any of this; he didn’t want to go through the trial again. All he said on the subject was that the other guy was sent to the same prison, and simply added “Let’s just say I still have friends on the inside.” 

I felt like I knew Lloyd like a childhood friend and he certainly knew me well enough after our outing. He had lost most of his childhood friends because they didn’t want to associate with a murderer. Here I was, talking for hours not with a murderer, but with a guy who was ecstatic about meeting someone new, about expanding his horizons. I hadn’t written anything down the entire time, I just listened. About an hour or so before the cafe was closing, there still had been no break in our conversation. Lloyd only had a few cigarettes left and was using the end of the box as a cue. 

Before we parted ways I asked him a question I’d been dying to ask. “So, what’s up with the ‘avoid the noid’ thing?” I asked casually, hoping I wasn’t offending him. 

After taking a drag so long that I thought he’d started a second cigarette, which he did shortly thereafter, Lloyd the Noid sat back reposefully.

“Well,” he followed with a long pause, “The guys in jail like their ears… so they tried to avoid me talking them off.” He laughed hysterically. 

The laundromat is tucked in the corner of a desolate plaza, it’s a bygone plaza even to the suburbanites whose fenced in ideals likely prompted its creation. A Dollar Tree and comparably scanty Big K are the major consumer stores. The nugatory businesses are laughable, in the best light. In the plaza’s true corner, where the angle is formed, there’s a shady billiards hall. Wedged between the laundromat and the billiards hall is a ballet workshop. It’s a pedophiliac’s playground. The Cue&Cushion coughs out its patrons in between games of pool. They stumble out in the clouds of cancer. The layout of the plaza causes all of the garbage in the parking lot to be wind-swept into this corner, one can’t help but notice the irony. 

Some people watch their clothes spin around until they’re dry, dwelling in the cyclical nature of their lives. Some “read,” really just thinking about what those around them would be reading. Children are a good distraction for families, whether as a nuisance or a sign of hope; maybe they’ll grow up and have their own washing machines, maids even. Maybe they’ll just keep screaming at each other and giggling maniacally. The older people reflect. The college kids talk about the night prior, a night that probably stained the clothes they wash. Some laugh, some sulk. Each person has their own inner convictions. Each has their own dirty laundry. I fold my clothes and wonder who all of these people really are, and what brought them here.