Matthew Baskerville
Fiction and Poetry Portfolio
Table of Contents
Fiction
1.
A Season for Losing………………………………………………….…………………………3
2.
The Bog People………………………………………………………………………………..23
Poetry
3.
Pacing………………………………………………………………………………………….29
4.
The Lizard Man………………………………………………………………………………..31
5.
Ten Years……………………………………………………………………………………...35
6.
Untitled………………………………………………………………………………………..38
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A Season for Losing
I didn’t want to be here, but I was
stuck, at least temporarily. I was lying on the gray couch in the living room,
which was just slightly too short to be able to sleep on without my legs
dangling off the side. I had my arm draped across my eyes, but the blinking
lights on the Christmas tree were none-the-less irritating, almost painful in
the receding wake of my hangover. The multi-colored lights blinked on and off.
I had the television turned down to a
low grade hum. Voices faded in and out. I had several movies recorded onto a
VHS tape which I had already seen several times: Spellbound, The Swimmer, Rebel Without a Cause, Marnie, and Citizen Cane. I had put the tape in and
turned down the volume in an effort to help me relax. One of the dogs licked my
bare ankle. I opened an eye and watched the scruffy black terrier, Maya, regard
me with oil colored eyes and a runny nose. Maya snorted, and whined, and
trotted over to the other end of the room.
I noticed my mother standing at the end
of the hallway leading into the living room. She had been watching me. Her eyes
were red rimmed and puffy. Broken glass, and shattered ceramic glaze glittered
along the baseboards and in the corners where she had earlier broken dishes and
glasses against the walls and floors. Her hair was matted and oily. I could see
her pale scalp beneath her matted hair. Her eyes were bloodshot. She held a
bowl of weed and a lighter in her hand and an empty pint of Skyy vodka in the
other hand. She walked forward a few steps and set down the empty blue bottle
on the ledge next to the stairs.
“Hey,” she said slowly.
“Hey, what’s up? How are you?” I said,
trying to be tactful.
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“Fabulous, darling,” she said, imitating
the main characters from the show Absolutely
Fabulous. She was trying to be ironic, but as she spoke, she choked a
little and her voice cracked slightly. She wasn’t really slurring her words,
but she was speaking slowly, and deliberately. It was apparent to me that she
was putting forth effort to keep from crying. As I looked at my mother, I felt
a tight tug in my chest. It made my stomach turn a little bit for me to see her
like this. I was also anxious. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was
heading. I sat up on the couch and as I did my head swelled and became
sickeningly lightweight. I felt a whoosh-boom in my head as the Christmas
lights blinked on and off. For a moment I thought I was going to pass out. Then
I recovered in a few seconds and wondered how long this night would last. I
wondered if I could just drink myself to sleep and forget all of this, but
somehow I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be able to fade into the foggy haze
of a flask of bourbon tonight.
“Fabulous,” my mother said again. “Where
the fuck is your father? That asshole, he’s probably out with his slut, whoring
it up. Do you know where the fuck he is? If I find out you knew and didn’t tell
me I’ll kick your little ass. You fucking men, I swear, fucking pigs.” She
sneered and took in a breath to continue in this way, but I interjected.
“Mom, you know I don’t know where he is.
He’s staying at my apartment in Cardinal City while I look for another used
car. I couldn’t tell him not to stay at my place after you all let me stay here
after the accident.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. She scraped
the metal wheel on the lighter against the flint stone until a butane fed flame
appeared and she drew the flame into the multi-colored glass bowl as she
inhaled. She started coughing and nearly dropped the bowl. “Oh, fuck,” she
choked as she bent over coughing. “Fucking ashes, this bowl is cashed. Fuck!”
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“Are you ok?” I asked as she recovered.
“Yeah,” she croaked. “Oh, god, Elliot. What
the fuck am I going to do? Fifteen fucking years of marriage, and now this
shit. Once a cheater, always a cheater. I got chlamydia from the last whore he
stuck his prick into and I won’t fucking put up with that shit again. He told
me it would never happen again. Elliot, you better not ever, ever be a fucking
cheater.”
“You know I’m not.” I replied weakly. I
had never cheated, but she didn’t know me well enough to know better anyways.
She didn’t know me well enough to know that I was terrified of talking to
girls, much less lying to them. She often insinuated that I was gay, but if she
ever perceived that I expressed an interest in a girl, she would tear down what
she interpreted as the sexist reasons for my attraction. She was simultaneously
ashamed of my shyness, and resentful, almost fearful, of my desires.
Headlights flashed through the living
room windows from a car pulling into the driveway. The dogs started barking and
running in circles, their claws and the pads of their paws clicked and slid
comically and ridiculously across the beaten-in wood floors.
My mother looked stunned for a few
moments. She was anxious. She wanted to know where my father had been for the
past few days. She wanted some miracle explanation, but deep down, she knew
there wouldn’t be one. We both knew. I felt nauseas. I hoped they were both too
exhausted to begin another bout of screaming and breaking things, as had
happened a few days ago.
The sound of keys scraping, and jangling,
and then the door opening, filled the house. The sound of the keys and the
barking dogs seemed to hang suspended in the air as if time had begun to
stretch. The Christmas lights blinked on and off.
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My father stepped through the door, onto
the foyer of the split level, into the midst of the barking and jumping and
whining dogs. My mother looked down on him, and as he closed the door, the dogs
calmed a bit. The dogs snorted and whined. The wagging tails of the larger dogs
struck the walls loudly.
“Where have you been for the last few
days?” My mother, Myriam, regarded him, her body stiff. She looked down from
the top of the steps.
Winston responded slowly, “I’ve been out
partying with my buddies from work.”
His voice was raspy, but thin and tense.
His voice reminded me of a cheap, out of tune guitar string that has begun to
rust.
My mother replied, “Out partying for
three days? Why didn’t you call? You couldn’t call?”
My father started climbing the stairs as
he answered, “I’ve just been out partying.”
I regarded my father as he emerged from
behind the ledge and reached the top of the stairs. He looked like shit. He was
a stocky man with broad shoulders. He had begun to put on a lot of weight over
the last few years, but he was still intimidating. His mullet fell down past
the back of his neck and strands of unkempt hair were clinging to his bushy Fu
Manchu style goatee. I had never seen him that fucked up before. His eyes were
the color of a bruised, red, Granny Smith apple. He turned his head and gazed at
me from some numb, distant place. Then he sat down on the other end of the
too-short couch.
“Where the fuck were you Winston? Huh?
Little Winnie?” My father hated that nickname.
“I was out partying.” He repeated that
phrase as if he were a POW resisting interrogation.
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“Were you fucking some other cunt
Winnie? Were you out sticking your prick into some other whore’s cunt?”
“I was out partying.”
My mother stood frozen. Winston wouldn’t
refute her accusation. He just kept repeating himself. My mother’s tone
changed.
“Winston, were you sleeping with another
woman?” She spoke softly, absently, comprehending slowly that this sentence was
her last futile effort to save a piece of what she already knew was lost.
Winston sat silently.
He just sat there.
He stared at the wall.
The Christmas lights blinked on and off.
My mom tried one last time, almost
whispering, “Winston?”
He continued to sit as if paralyzed, and
finally responded, “I was just out partying.”
My mom’s eyes began to get watery, but
her face reflected injury and rage. “You can’t stay here Winston. I don’t care
where the fuck you go, but you can’t stay here.”
My father looked over at me with those
vacuous, bloody-red, glassy eyes. “Can I stay at your place Elliot?”
“No dad, you can’t. I’m moving back in.”
The Christmas lights blinked on and off.
My father looked stunned. He sat
motionless on the couch. He swallowed hard and blinked. The dogs whimpered and
walked slowly from one person in the room to another with
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their
heads down, sniffing and snorting. I sat on the other end of the couch. I
tensely waited for my father to start yelling and screaming, but I was
surprised by how silent he was. I think he was too stunned, too high, and too
tired to be angry.
My stomach churned and growled. I
felt nauseous and hungry all at once. I was beginning to ooze sweat from my
palms, but a chill ran through me and a clammy shiver ran from the nape of my
neck down my spine and arms. My head throbbed from my lingering hangover.
“Where am I going to stay?” Winston
seemed to ask of no one in particular.
“I don’t give a damn where you stay,
little Willie. You should have thought of that before you stuck your little
prick into that whore of yours.”
Winston looked pallid and defeated.
I had never seen him quite like this before. It seemed to me as though he was
too tired to care much anymore about losing Myriam. I didn’t care much either.
I felt emotionally numb, in a vague, distant sort of way. Physically, I felt
sick. The end of my parents’ marriage was something I had been anticipating for
a long time. Mostly, I was angry at myself for letting myself get caught in the
middle of it.
“How does it feel, little Willie,
huh?”
A glimmer of realization seemed to
click on in Winston’s mind. A small spark of anger glinted out from his ruddy,
watery eyes. He realized that he needed to leave right away. He turned towards
me stiffly, with that even tone of voice he used when he was suppressing his
anger.
“I need to pick up my things from
your apartment, Elliot.”
“Alright, we’ll drive over there.”
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I stood up from the couch and then
walked over to the dining room table. I pulled my juniper-green, denim,
Carhardt jacket from a chair-back and then put it on. I took my keys out of my
pocket. I stared out into the cold blackness beyond the sliding glass doors. I
watched the lights from the Christmas tree reflected on the glass as they
blinked on an off. I stood in that spot, with my back turned towards my
parents, with my hands on a chair-back, staring into the blackness, the
blinking lights reflected on the glass, and into the ghost of my own
reflection. I was reminded of a poem by Jim Morrison from his book, Wilderness. A friend, Gene, had given me
that book after my break-up with Marianne. He was a washed up dope peddler from
a few punk-rock scenes on the East Coast. He was a sort of fair weather hippie
from Philadelphia who had spent a few years surfing and doing dope at the outer
banks. He had book-marked this particular poem:
“It’s
no fun/ to feel like a fool-when your/ baby’s gone. A new axe to my head:/
Possession… A dog howls & whines/ at the sliding glass door (why can’t I be
in there?) A cat yowls./ A car engine revs & races against the grain-dry/
rasping carbon protest…”
The dogs in the house always whined
and howled at the sliding glass doors. Sometimes they ran head-long into the
glass trying to go either in, or out. Right now, I really wanted out of this
situation, but there wasn’t any way out. I was stuck here until I found a
cheap, junky car I could cobble together well enough to get me back-and-forth
to work for a while.
“Are you ready Elliot?” I heard
Winston ask.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” I was ready to
get this over with. I wanted to sit down in my own apartment, away from my
parents, and smoke a cigarette, listen to some music, and close my eyes. I
really wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I got to my apartment.
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My father and I walked down the
creaking steps with the dogs scrambling around our feet as we reached the
foyer. The water-damaged, parquet wood floors were covered in tufts of dog and
cat hair. Bits of cigarette ash and dirt were stuck to the piles of dog hair.
The varnish had been worn off in spots by too much exposure to water. My mother
liked to leave the doors open when it rained. She would throw wet towels onto
the floors in front of the doors, but the floors would still get soaked.
“Don’t come back, Willie, you
asshole. Elliot, don’t you dare bring him back here. I know you fucking men
like to stick together. Get out and don’t come back Willie.” Myriam choked out
those last few sentences before turning around and walking back into her
bedroom.
We stepped out into the dim, foggy,
December night. Nearly all of the leaves had fallen from the tress, except for
some of the white oaks, whose brown, colorless, and rasping leaves still clung
to gray branches. My parents’ house sulked at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in a
bland, suburban neighborhood. It was an eyesore. Knee-high grass grew in
patches where there were a countless variety of overgrown vegetation and weeds.
An old washing machine sat outside, beside the house. My mother was keeping the
old machine, because she wanted to make a sculpture out of it. She also planned
to plant flowers in the wash bin. So far, she had only removed the outer
panels, so the interior of the machine just rusted in the shaggy grass.
My father and I walked to the top of
the driveway and got into the twenty year old Toyota Camry. The interior of the
car was similar to the interior of the house. Dog hair and cigarette ash clung
to the upholstery and stuck to the steering wheel and the dash.
My father and I, defeated, started
off towards Cardinal City into the blurry, wet night. We sat silently in the
vehicle as I drove. The sound of the worn down windshield wipers sliding
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across
the mist speckled windshield made a grating, depressing sound. I had never been
anywhere so desolate. The car felt like a coffin that the two of us had buried
ourselves in, the black night, a universe of sod covering the grave of our
relationship.
I pulled up to the back lot of the
old, run-down, Victorian apartment house. I didn’t say anything. Winston got
out of the vehicle, and walked up to my shitty efficiency to gather up his
belongings. I sat in the damp cold, my mind blank. I was gripping the wheel,
poised like a cornered dog, waiting to get hit. I almost began to feel pity for
him, as I sat in there, but I couldn’t quite manage it. I could always hear him
in my head.
“Elliot, you’re a good for nothing
piece of shit. You’ll never amount to anything. You little shit. You fucking
asshole! Why do you have to be such a loser?”
I could always hear him in my head,
screaming at me, leering at me. A part of me hated him. A part of me hated
myself for feeling that way. This shitty efficiency was my way of escaping
after 19 years under my parents’ roof. I was desperately clawing my way out.
Winston got back into the car and
said nothing. I drove him to the convenience store on the college strip and
handed him some quarters to make a call on the pay phone. A bum snickered at
him as he stood next to the pay phone with a brief case and a brown grocery bag
filled with clothes. The Bell Tower across the street sounded its bell. I
pulled out of the lot, grinding my teeth, gripping the wheel with white
knuckles, and staring straight ahead into a cold, wet, black night. Christmas
lights blinked and shined from the windows of closed, empty stores. People
stumbled out of warm bars into the slick quiet shine of lights glittering off
of wet asphalt.
I tried to sleep when I got home. I
collapsed onto the bed in the musty basement room that had once been mine, but
was now just a bare, cold, hollow space.
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I
opened my eyes and looked towards the cracks of light peeking through the
sheets of aluminum foil I had taped to the windows. I didn’t know if it was
morning, or early afternoon. Motes of dust floated through the beams of dingy
light which illuminated articles of clothing strewn across the floor, odd
pictures, and posters on the walls. I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t fall
back to sleep. I didn’t sleep much these days.
After a few moments, I thought I could hear the slick,
sluggish ooze of blood, and bits of bones, through the walls. If I thought such
a sound existed, I was thinking in that moment that I could hear it. I began to
sweat. I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if from heartburn, or as if from a
needle being slowly pushed from the inside of my heart, out through my chest. I
felt for the needle sticking out of my chest, but I could only feel my heart
palpitating arrhythmically. Such thoughts of hearing blood in the walls, of
expecting needles to emerge from my body, were nonsensical. I should not be
thinking these things, but I was thinking them. I felt as if I wanted to rip
away from a part of myself that I did not want to be affixed to; the part in my
mind that imagined hearing blood in the walls, the part of my mind that waited
for needles to rise out of my heart. I noticed that I had soaked my sheets in
my own sweat.
It seemed as though I had fallen back to sleep for a
time, and now, the beams of light cutting into the room through the edges of
the aluminum foil had moved, and they illuminated a dark object sulking in a
slick pool of black liquid. I held my breath and stared at the thing on the
floor. I moved my head glacially, and I held my breath for as long as I could.
I waited for my eyes to focus on the thing. I began to breathe imperceptibly
through my slightly opened mouth. For a while, I thought I could see the thing
breathing, but once I had calmed myself down a little by convincing myself that
the thing did not see me, I realized that it was not living. The swelling
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and receding I thought
I witnessed were figments of my terror playing tricks on my mind. It was dead. It was a dead animal. Its matted
fur gave off a rank smell.
I could no longer lie in my bed. My ear hurt from lying
on the sweat-dampened pillow for too long. I tried to force myself to get up. I
tried to force myself to confront the dead thing that seemed to rise and swell
like the tides of some brackish bay where small, oil covered waves of dead
flesh and rotten blood, lapped an ashen, crushed-carbon shore. My thoughts of
the blood-sea made me nauseas. The dead thing on the floor was not a sea of
dead things and there were no seas anywhere where dead things washed ashore in
tides as endless as the days.
I should not be
thinking of these things. I should be riven from the part of my mind which
conceived such thoughts, but I needed to know what the thing on floor was.
I was on my knees next to the thing. I was simultaneously
repulsed and drawn to it. The thing still had eyes that looked at me and seemed
to move, but there was no life in it. The corpse was covered in blood
completely. The corpse was cool and clammy, with matted, sticky fur. As I felt
its form, I realized it was a dead dog. Its eyes moved, though. It did not
breathe, but its eyes moved, and in this moment, I knew the dog had been
murdered. It was covered in blood. Its eyes seemed to plead for me to find the
killer.
The black, oily
pools that were the dog’s eyes, regarded me from a cool, imperial distance. I
could hear, and feel the icicle fingers of a winter gale screeching over and
under a desolate overpass, under which I had run, like an apparition among the
shadows of a dying afternoon. My fingers were sticking to the long ago bloodied
fur. I could not pet the dead-dog-thing, because of the stickiness of the fur.
I held the cold thing’s head in my lap and I gazed into the eyes. Those primal,
animal eyes carried me to another place…
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Myself as a ghost ran underneath an overpass. I looked
up, into the darkening, rust colored sky, and I gazed at a billboard with an
image cast against the fuming strings of pollution which hung against the rust
colored sunset like the wisps of hair of a corpse floating in brackish water.
The billboard was a weird advertisement: Naked, dead, bloodless, human bodies
hung, apparently, from their feet, which were not shown on the billboard. The
arms dangled into the seas of dead flesh and rotten blood pictured on the billboard,
the same rancid sea which I had only moments ago been thinking of, which I
still, somehow, hoped could not exist. The bodies were hung in a line, the way
a hunter would hang rabbits for skinning. The faces were blurry, but the mouths
moved, and when they did so, small plumes of fuzzy vine and leathery planes of
Kudzu leaves floated out. Some of the vines and leaves floated above the border
of the billboard into the devastated sunset, and they flickered like the pixels
in an old, portable, UHF/VHF television. Some of the fuzzy vines and leathery
planes of Kudzu leaves floated down from the heights of the steel billboard
mast, and those scratchy tendrils, and suffocating leaves drifted in a weird,
ominous, and flickering manner towards me. As I ran, the flickering vines and
leaves entangled me. I was lifted into the sky. I was hung from within the
billboard. My blurry, muted face attempted to scream, but only vines and leaves
spilled forth.
Now, I was back with the dog again. I was sweating, and
gripping the dead, bloody, blackened, sticky, furry thing. I left the
dead-dog-thing on the floor. I stumbled, slipping on blood, into the bathroom
to wash the dog thing’s blood off of myself.
As I flipped on the switch in the bathroom, the lights
revealed bodies hanging from the shower curtain rod. A moving figure seemed
engaged in the act of tying up one of the bodies by its feet. The figure ran
through a doorway at the other end of the shower and I ran after it.
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I emerged from the other side of the doorway and found
myself at the base of the waterfall I had known from childhood. This was the
waterfall I had known from Iowa. It was in a quiet park off of a gravel road. I
remember spending dreamy Saturdays and Sundays here, running on the grass and
dipping my hands into the rivulets of clear, cold water that ran down an uneven
rock face covered in moss. The figure from the dream was scrambling to the top.
I followed it, slipping and scrambling as I went. When I reached the top, I was
able to grab the figure, the murderer. I spun the figure around, and I gasped
for air, as does a drowning man, when I saw my own face looking back at me. I
hurled the figure from the top of the waterfall and watched its head crack open
onto the rocks at the bottom.
For a moment the world flashed and blinked. Somehow, I
was lying at the bottom of the waterfall, with the cold water rushing over my
cracked body. I looked into the sun, and sighed a rasping breath into the air
as birds sailed above. The sky went dark.
When I opened my eyes, I was hanging from a billboard,
above an overpass. I was hanging above a sea of dead, rotting bile. I could see
myself below, running underneath the billboard. I tried to yell out, but only
tendrils and leathery leaves of fuzzy kudzu slithered out of my mouth, reaching
for a runner below the billboard.
I woke up sweating in my unheated
basement room. It was early afternoon. I quietly pulled on a pair of baggy
jeans and an out of date, synthetic, collared shirt. Both articles were threadbare
and riddled with holes. I rode my bicycle across town, to the street next to
the railroad tracks, over to Gene’s place. He lived in an old, two level brick
duplex built in the fifties. Two giant Golden Sycamores swayed in the ruddy
dusk over the patch of dirt, crab grass, and gravel
Baskerville 16
that
was the front yard. The wind picked up a little bit and the tin cover on the
front stoop slapped and rattled against the steel frame.
After peering through a small hole
Gene had left in the duct tape that he had stuck to the small windows in the
front door, he let me in and we both sat down on his couch which was a hand me
down from a thrift-shop in town. He was listening to the Dead Kennedys,
drinking a cheap, watery, 32oz. bottle of Schlitz Red Bull beer, and was
smoking weed out of a dirty glass bowl. Seeds and stems littered the table.
“Hey man, I don’t have to work
tomorrow. You wanna hang out for the night?” Gene said while holding in a hit
of pot smoke.
“Sure, man.”
“hehe… Cool.” Gene rubbed his hands
together and rocked back and forth in his seat momentarily, before walking into
the kitchen. He came back into the living room with two brown paper bags and a
gray, ceramic coffee mug. He poured a shot of Bacardi 151 into the coffee mug and
pulled out a small rectangle of foil from the other bag. He un-wrapped the foil
and exposed small, square pieces of colorful paper, each piece about the size
of a pinky fingernail. There were psychedelic eyes printed on the squares. The
eyes reminded me of the ones designed by Dali for the Hitchcock film, Spellbound.
Gene and I put the papers with the
eyes onto our tongues and waited for our memories to fade as the spell was
cast, binding us to a separate world, a wild, fickle reality. The eyes, the eyes
in
our minds that watched us from the world into which we went, hung from the
ceiling and from the moon outside. My parent’s footsteps and my parent’s broken
dishes floated in and out of my thoughts. Gene put a tape into the VCR and we
watched Burt Lancaster’s character in The
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Swimmer try and find his way home through the waters
and the shadows of a bright valley. He walked through the bottoms of empty
pools and he reeled in the vacancy of what was once his home, now gone.
“Dude, let’s take a walk out on the
tracks, man.” Gene said once the movie ended and the television screen turned
blue. He mimicked the theme of the movie in a clownish, spaced out voice, “The
tracks, they stretch from here to all the way home, making a river, a trail!”
We walked out into the night. The
railroad tracks were just across the street. We started down the street and
walked onto the rails where they disappeared into a patch of woods that grew
along the tracks, between a neighborhood and some warehouses downtown. The
tracks actually did reach from Gene’s place to my apartment in Raleigh, but I
didn’t care to go there. I already knew it was empty. Unlike the men in Spellbound and The Swimmer I did remember, but was trying to forget, trying to
melt into the darkness. I imagined the train carrying me to someplace else, but
there was really nowhere to go.
I kept thinking about my dream, and
as we drank on a pile of railroad ties, I tried to explain to Gene what I
thought about it. “So, this is how I travel in my dream, sometimes. Maybe I
shift from one time to another like a two dimensional man, living on a porous
photograph.
Imagine
there is a film strip of photos on which the man lives. Then, imagine a stack
of these strips of film. The two dimensional man is made entirely of molecules
that can slip through the substance of the film, as if he were a gas, or a
liquid, slipping through pores in a membrane. Now, imagine the membrane, the
film, is time, the background (the picture) is the place and setting, and the
gas, or liquid is the man. Imagine that the man can focus on one strip of film,
and is thereby able to stay on that strip, but if he loses focus, he can slip
from one strip to the next
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against
his will. The man can move involuntarily through time, as if the strips of film
were all stacked on each other out of order. That is to say, the films all
contain similar stories, but the films are endless and without beginning and
they are all slightly out of sync. The further from each other the strips are
in the stack, the more out sync with each other they tend to be.
But the man is not the only entity
that can seep between strips. Other things like trees, or garden ornaments,
cars, tulips, or even planets, could slip between strips at various rates, but
their so-called molecules are of various sizes, as are the pores in each
membrane. Everything is just sort of drifting in the dream world, crashing into
different times.”
I looked up into the sky and the
full moon looked like a wet, shiny disk of divine thigh, glistening in the
holy, pitch night. The moon was so huge, it looked like it was shimmering under
water, as if I could just swim up through the sky and touch its glimmering
surface.
Gene held the flask of Evan Williams
in his right hand. He teetered at the top of the pile of railroad ties stacked
next to the tracks. He had been listening to me in a distracted sort of way;
the way someone listens to background music while thinking of other things.
Some of the railroad ties would rock slightly, because they were not stacked
solidly together. They had been tossed there, next to the tracks, in that
lonesome spot of dim woods, behind a furniture warehouse, like a pile of
diamond matchsticks spilled onto a bar table. Gene took a drink from the flask
and gasped as he screwed the cap back on. Once Gene recovered from taking his
shot of rum from the bottle, he grinned and chuckled a little bit. He arched
his back, and looked into the sky, where the moon was shining down. He howled,
convincingly, like a feral dog.
Gene chuckled again, in a high
pitched, clipped sort of way, “He He. Yeah man, I hear ya.” He slouched over
the flask, which he held close to his chest, and he rocked back and forth
Baskerville 19
slightly.
He continued, “Yeah, that’s some heavy shit man. I don’t know what else to say
man. I mean, the world is a pretty fucked up place. Maybe you were travelling
to some place and time in the future man, like astral projection.”
Gene’s comment about interpreting my
nightmare as an actual place was not especially comforting. He continued, “Yeah man, astral projection.
That’s how the government spied on the Russians during the cold war. I was
trying some of that astral projection the other day, but I don’t think its
right to spy on people. I just use it to keep track of who might be trying to
watch me man. The government can’t spy on you if you create a mental barrier
using astral projection.”
Gene chuckled again, “He He. Yeah
man, the fucking Illuminati, they’re the ones running everything man. They’re
spying on me, they’re filling your head with those screwed up dreams.”
Now, I was the one staring off into
space, “Yeah man,” I commented distractedly. I
didn’t give a damn about the Illuminati, which I thought was bullshit. I started
to feel sick to my stomach. I was gritting my teeth, and I tore the rolling
paper I was trying to form a cigarette out of. Gene was howling softly, almost
humming to himself.
I sat down next to Gene on top of
the pile of railroad ties and started rolling another cigarette. I felt more
anxious and disconnected than ever. I
had begun sweating. I kept feeling as though I was going vanish, like a puddle
evaporating in the sunlight. People who knew me wouldn’t even remember that I
had lived. Sitting here, talking, drinking, tripping, it felt pointless. I was
grasping for meaning in the dark corners, holding onto the shadows. Telling all
of this to Gene had not made me feel better. I thought the bit about the man
moving through time like a ghost through strips of film would come off as a
little bit clever, but now that I had said it out loud, I felt hollowed out and
meaningless. With Gene, it didn’t really matter. We had a kind
Baskerville 20
of
unspoken agreement: we each could say whatever we wanted to each other, and it
was fine. We didn’t pass judgment. Gene was the closest thing to a real role
model that I had, because he was ten years older than me and seemed to
generally accept me for who I was, although I had no idea who I was. Usually,
our conversations consisted of the two of us taking turns spewing out a litany
of some sort of mental runoff. Our conversations rarely carried the arc of a
coherent conversation. At the very least, I could crash on the couch at his
place when I didn’t feel like going home. Crashing on his couch was my plan for
tonight.
The headlight from an Amtrack train
seared the darkness with a beam of light like a small star racing through the
empty ditch of woods. The train flitted by, but as it did so, I happened to see
through the windows of a dining car. That moment seemed to hang in the air as
if I was observing a painting in the gallery of an art museum. A family sat at
a decoratively laid out dinner table. A husband and wife sat at either end of
the table and a brother and sister sat opposite of one another. They were all
wearing formal dress clothes. They ate off of porcelain plates and the food was
served out of silver dinnerware. They were all smiling. The family was
completely oblivious to me having seen them. If the family had looked out of
the window, through the glare of the train car lights, they would have only
glimpsed a twisted, insignificant shadow lingering for less than a second along
a stretch of empty woods. But for me, the image of the family seemed etched into
my consciousness. The metal racket of the train clattering along the tracks and
the rude wail of the whistle died away. I stood still, amazed at what I had
happened to see. Gene
was laughing. He shoved the bottle of Evan Williams into my chest. “Holy shit,
Baskerville 21
dude!
Did you see that? What the fuck!? That was fuckin’ weird man! There’s a piece
of your dream man, floating by like ghosts, or the Illuminati following us man.
Holy shit.”
To hear Gene talk about my dreams
and his theories about the Illuminati together, again, as if they were
connected, riled me.
“My dream is just a dream man, it
doesn’t have anything to do with the Illuminati. I’m just a fucked up dude
having fucked up dreams.”
Gene felt like arguing, “You don’t
know that man. Your mind is just closed off man. Your pituitary gland is
hardened man, that’s why you can’t see with your third eye. How do you know
that train didn’t slip through one of your pores, or membranes, or whatever you
were babbling about. How do you know the Illuminati aren’t the ones making
those damn films you were talking about.”
“Damn it dude! My dream doesn’t have
anything to do with the Illuminati, or the government, or astral projection, or
the Russians spying on me. I was just telling you what I thought about the
dream I had. But it’s just that, it’s just a fuckin’ dream man. It’s not real.”
Gene started to growl and grunt,
like an ape. Acting like a gorilla was something that he liked to do when he
wanted to be ironically threatening. He started shaking his head back and
forth. “Aw, nah dude. No way. You don’t know anything!”
He didn’t like to be contradicted.
Usually, I didn’t care enough to contradict him, but tonight the stress of
participating in my parents’ divorce followed by my nightmare had rattled me.
“The Illuminati is just another scam
dude. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Your dumb ass dream doesn’t mean
anything either!”
Baskerville 22
“I never said it did man, but I also
never claimed it was real.”
Gene started jumping on the railroad
ties. He was grunting and throwing himself around. I got up to leave, but one
of the ties shifted and I stumbled off the pile into the gravel, scraping my
palms and arms. Gene started grunting and growling louder. It was his way of
laughing.
“Man, you prick. Dude, fuck this.” I
said as much to myself as to Gene. I started walking towards the railroad
bridge, back to Gene’s place, where I had left my bicycle.
Gene called out after me, “I’m never
sharing any knowledge with you again, dude!”
“Fuck you, Gene. Push your bullshit
onto someone else man!”
As I reached the bridge, I could
hear another train coming. There were two tracks on the bridge. The ties
between the rails were just empty space, but the space between the two tracks
had occasional, inconsistent planks of wood and metalwork between them. I could
hear the train rumbling behind me. I had often raced the trains across the
tracks in the past, but now, I had recklessly darted onto the tracks without
looking, or checking. As the train was crashing down onto me, I slipped and
fell. I hit my head on some metal rods and bolts between the two tracks. I felt
the train rushing by and I felt a pool of damp liquid soaking my jeans. My head
spun, and I could feel the blood trickle down. My heart hurt in my chest, I
panicked, because I was so out of my mind, and so numb, I wasn’t sure how much
of anything I would feel. I frantically felt my legs, and realized I was lying
in a puddle of rain water.
I lay prostrate in that cold puddle
of dirty rainwater and creosote, bleeding and throbbing. I listened to the
train rumble away. I saw Gene between the rails. He was crossing the street
below the bridge. He glanced up at me through the beams in the bridge, and then
kept walking. The train and Gene both disappeared into the moonstruck pitch.
Baskerville 23
The Bog People
Mallory paced back and forth across
the bare concrete. She did not notice that her bare feet were turning a bluish
color as she softly smacked them over the cold slab. Her teeth chattered. The unfinished, half-basement was littered
with shadows cast from the dim, flickering, fluorescent lights which dangled
from the remaining tiles of the hung ceiling. Cigarette smoke filled the musky
air. Mallory’s hands were trembling as she absent mindedly moved one Camel
Menthol Light after another back and forth from her hips, where her bony hands
dangled, to her thin lips, which sinuously shifted, grimacing over her
glowering face. Sometimes, she just hung the lit cigarette from her mouth
without inhaling. She stared at me crumpled disgracefully against the back wall
of the house. I lied in the shadows, unmoving next to the broken washing
machine which was decades old. Mallory talked to me.
She kept stammering, “Is everything
O.K.? Am I O.K. Lucas?” But, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t breathe. She had some
idea about the bogs in Iowa. She kept rambling on about the bogs.
“I remember when I was a kid, Lucas,
the farmers had to be careful about the bogs. A tractor could fall into one of
those bogs and never be seen again. People have been known to fall into the
bogs. Sometimes, I wonder if they’re still there, like the bog people of
Northern Europe.”
Drifting through the crumbling,
half-finished house was the sound of George Romero’s original, black and white,
Night of the Living Dead. Mallory
played that film every Halloween. She walked to the back door and slowly
cracked it all the way open. Rain poured down into the
Baskerville 24
mud underneath the rotten beams of the back
deck. The scraggly dogs whined, scrambled, sniffed, and fretted around her
feet. Normally, they would have gone outside, but the rain deterred them.
Mallory stared out into the marshy creek, into the wet dusk, into the bottom of
the woods behind the house. She mumbled as much to me as to herself, “I can
hear them Lucas, they’re circling around me, laughing and jeering. Am I O.K.?”
She stared out of the back door for a long while as dusk fell like a smattering
of dead, wet leaves onto bare, cold skin.
I stared at the room in which I was
grimly disposed. A huge, dingy, beige colored couch reeking of pet urine and
covered in dog and cat hair loomed in one half of the basement like a
tombstone. A coffee table sat next to it covered in empty beer cans, liquor
bottles, ash trays, and pot stems and seeds. Nearer to me was a tabletop made
from a heavy door which my father, Logan, had confiscated from work. The door
was nailed to two makeshift sawhorses. Beakers and glass tubing lay scattered
across the table. Beakers and glass tubing lay piled in milk crates next to the
table top.
One of the dogs began to sniff at me
and whine. Mallory snapped out of her daze and lurched towards the dog. She
grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and tried to pull the dog away. She
tripped as she tried to pull the whining dog away from me. She stumbled onto
the dogs paw and leg, and then she cracked her head against the concrete. The
dog yelped and then scrambled out from under her. Her eyes watered. She dragged
herself away from me, moaning as she did so.
She teetered onto her feet when she
heard the front door open.
“Logan? Logan? Is that you? Am I OK,
Logan?” she whined.
“Mallory! Mallory, it’s me babe,”
Logan said in his deep, slow, monotone voice.
Baskerville 25
“Hey, Mallory, I’m here too,” Jack
piped in.
Jack was the connection, sort of.
Jack had jet black, curly hair that erupted from his scalp. The hair created a
garish frame for his gaunt, lean face.
Logan and Jack descended the stairs,
into the basement. Jack ambled towards the beige couch and fell into it,
letting out a sigh as he did so.
Jack remained standing, sort of
rocking from one foot to the next. He banged a black gym bag against his leg.
He talked into the room, to no one particular, “Yeah, this is the fuckin’ set
up. Fuckin’ Logan and his pharmaceutical gig, man. Logan and his fuckin’
hook-ups man. Rock and fuckin’ roll man.”
Mallory stared out the back door.
Logan opened a storage door inlayed into one of the arms of the massive couch.
He pulled out a small glass piece and two different bags of dope. Jack was
transfixed by the bags. He sprang over to Logan and knelt down. He took his
keys out of his pocket and dipped the end of one key into the bag filled with
whitish powder. He snorted in the powder. He coughed, then let out a sort of
disjointed whooping, “Whoo-eeehh! Yeah! Whooo! Fuck man! Rock and fuckin’ roll
man!”
Logan lit his multi-colored glass piece.
He coughed when he finally saw me in the corner. He dropped his piece onto the
bare concrete, where it shattered.
“Oh, God, Mallory, what the fuck,”
Logan groaned. His voice began to slowly rise in pitch as his sense of panic
rose. “Mallory?”
Jack turned around and faced me,
“What the fuck,” he whispered to himself.
Mallory sensed the change in mood,
and then asked again, “Logan, am I OK? Lucas is being mean to me. I know he’s
talking to you about me. What is he saying? The Burkhart
Baskerville 26
bastard,
that’s what they would have called him. They wanted me to have an abortion, but
you were lucky Lucas, I decided to have you. I got you out of Iowa. Now you’re
being ungrateful.” Her voice rose to a yell, “I’m your mother! Don’t laugh at
me!”
Logan stumbled over to my body. He
knelt, and put his hand on my forehead. He felt how cold I was. He turned his
head away from me and dry heaved.
“Oh, Jesus, Mallory, Lucas is dead,”
Logan sputtered.
Jack removed his 9mil from the black
gym bag.
“Did your crystal do that shit
Logan? You told me you had good shit, man. Are you trying to fuck me over? What
the fuck am I going to do with a load of bad crystal man?” Jack was getting
frantic.
Mallory seemed to be oblivious to
Jack’s weapon. She continued, “Do you remember the bog people I learned about
in my class? We can put Lucas in the bogs, like in Iowa, and he’ll be OK. We’ll
be OK. Am I OK Logan? What if the cops come Logan? Oh my God, Logan. The cops
could be listening right now.”
Jack’s face contorted. He was angry,
paranoid, and terrified. “The fucking cops man? What the fuck Logan?” He
clicked off the safety on his weapon. The red dot on the weapon winked open
like the emotionless eye of a reptile.
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead resounded shrilly across the murky air.
The knocking and moaning of Romero’s zombies wailed. Gunshots from the movie
blasted out of the television set. The protagonist of Romero’s film yelled, “I
ought to drag you out there and feed you to those things!”
Jack was too tense. He was waving
his weapon around absent mindedly.
Baskerville 27
“Why the fuck is she talking about
the cops, man?” The sound of moaning ghouls fighting over scraps of entrails
filled the house.
There was knocking at the front
door. For a few moments, everyone in the basement turned to look at me crumpled
in the shadows. They were all frozen. The knocking from the door started up
again, and resonated underneath the flickering fluorescent lights.
Mallory cried out in a crackling,
high pitched voice, “Oh, God, the cops!”
Mallory bent down to try and tug at
me again. She was trying to get me to move, but I could not move. I could only
watch. Jack was too tense. He pulled the trigger on his weapon, and he shot
both Logan and Mallory until they both stopped moving. The knocking at the
front door stopped. Jack packed up what was left of the meth into his gym bag
and then poured gas over the bodies in the basement. When he tried to light us
all on fire, in order to erase us more completely, he was careless and spilled
some of the gas onto his own leg. He tossed his lit cigarette into the
gasoline, but a piece of the cherry fell off of the end and lit his legs on
fire. As he was rolling on the bare concrete, next to our bodies, trying to put
out the fire that was devouring him, the flames spread and an explosion,
followed by a fire-ball, rocked the house.
When the flames were finally
extinguished and the smoke cleared, I thought our bodies looked a lot like the
bog people; the lonesome, accidental mummies buried beneath the ages of damp
death, which rot endlessly; memorials to the grim rituals of primitive man.
Baskerville 29
Pacing
Pacing
It’s
never different
It’s
always the same
The
machines are roaring and clicking and leaking and breaking
The
washing machine clanks and thumps a spinning, crooked drum
The
fridge is leaking melting ice
The
furnace pops a fuse
And
the wind claws through the cracks in
Cobwebbed
sills and through the jambs of flimsy doors
Beyond
my creaking footfalls
Crooked
rims spark on cracked roads
Soot
dreams snow from sagging rooftops
My
floors ooze nails and the clawing of rodents
The
tiger’s panting is a phantom’s sigh on the museum walls
Tamed
virility
Dappled
shadows exhale across cold glass
The
mind tries to forget
But
it’s always different
In
a way
The
same breaking
Baskerville 30
Of
the sameness
Of
every sex
Her
words are so many rainfalls
Filling
the dry brooks where I have been worn down
Her
words release vast tides and swelling streams
Carving
canyons in the sandy rock of my dumb memory
Her
words are damp cloud-hands resting on my moot belly
Her
wet words and my sand memories
Are
eternally trapped in my cluttered shabby rooms
And
in the cages of my thoughts
Her
words shift through my whispering, dry dirt memories
Through
my mind’s moments
Through
the spinning ellipsis of desert scorched eons
Baskerville 31
The
Lizard Man
Gene puts in the tape
Sublime plays part 2 of the Raleigh Soliloquy on the
stereo in the white Mazda pickup
Gene bumps curbs and howls sometimes like a wounded
animal
Gene tells me if the nuclear bombs are dropped from
the
Alpha Draconis Dimension, from beyond the star gates
Hitting the earth as Kris Kristofferson plays the
soundtrack to Armageddon
When the skies fall Gene tells me,
He insists, and it is important for me to believe
He will be the caveman running wild
Surviving the dust scorched millennia to follow.
This is his dream, one dream
Among many.
There is the mythology of Gene:
There is the dream of the vine Gene finds, the vine
of the higher mind.
Gene swings like Tarzan from the jungle canopy of
his subconscious mind
From the deep dreaming found in ten melatonin pills
and a bad batch
Of blotter poisoned and preserved with too much
strychnine, his stomach boils like the seas
Spitting forth hot steam from molten ore and sinking
continents
Gene finds the vine and splits it. The vine is he
and the mind of he unwinds
Back from time and when the he is free he lives
again
Gene wrestles bears and Gene is the corn man and the
Caveman
Baskerville 32
The higher mind of Gene is the mind of primal
finding
The two pieces of the vine do not combine and in his
dreams he is torn in two
The higher mind and corn man, the bear wrestler.
Gene’s home is wrecked with ashtrays and water-pipes
and empty cardboard boxes
stacked around a 30 watt fender H.O.T. amp hooked
into mega distortion and my free guitar.
The cheap mint green Sam Ash semi hollow body
And papers and bills stacked on no less than two
kitchen tables
One table is from my home after my parents divorced
and separately left the state.
The table he keeps. Gene stumbles on cats and
couches and the wrecked remnants
Of an ex-fiance and an ex-wife and his second
ex-fiance chasing piles of white
In circles around the wrecked remains of Gene’s
Deteriorating empire
But the lizard people, the Reptilians of the
Bavarian Brotherhood are twisting their way
Into the walls and through the chopped vines of
Gene’s mind
Gene shows me such internet truths:
“Just another slave on the Marxist plantation. With
the "joint Reptilian-Bavarian Illuminati" crew.”
The reptilian bloodline
43 lizard men presidents, five lizard men prime
ministers, three British and two Canadian
A hollow earth
And a Star gate in the Middle Eastern sands
And Gene shows me that I have betrayed him
Baskerville 33
Gene tells me
that the colleges have brainwashed me
and the military has hardened my pituitary gland
with
Food additives and indoctrination and fluoridated water
I can’t see the truth
I am lost
I am the Lizard Man now and Gene wrestles his bears
in a different place
Away from the closed doors of my third eye
Beyond those doors is a a place I can no longer
travel
I can only remember…
The two of us wrecked on a pile of railroad ties
watching the moon melt
And drinking pints of gin and rum and bourbon
Howling with the whine and whistle and the rumble of
the trains raging, hulking past
I used to play chicken with the freight trains running
on foot over the railroad bridge in the darkness
Gene’s house is the Red House
And there is no way back from where I have come
From washing dishes and smoking American spirit
tobacco next to a dumpster
Behind a strip mall façade,
Leased boxes where people trap themselves in neat,
desperate corners.
The roaches running from one dark hole to the other,
from one drain to another.
There is no way back to the old life,
Baskerville 34
Not that I want to go back,
There is no way back from the mythology of Gene
There is no way back from losing a friend
There is no bridge between myself and the man Gene
sees
When he sees me
There is no way back from
When I became a man
When I became the Lizard Man
Baskerville 35
Ten Years
summer died
like an acid sunrise
since then, the years
and leaves have faded
like the primary colors
on the brittle petals of a cardboard
flower
she gave to me then
ten years ago
which I have since taken
from its shoebox tomb
and put into a beer bottle I emptied
in that dim room where I looked out of
the long window
which framed the cool, empty evening
Tom Waits played from the cheap stereo
on the mantel of a walled up fireplace:
a fireplace replaced by a broken t.v.
on a stack of tan encyclopedias five
decades old
and the color of deserts in washed out
photos
I drank bourbon
from a stolen stolen rocks glass
Baskerville 36
and chased it away with the pumpkin beer
with the orange and blue tiles
like the petals on her cardboard flower
I rolled and smoked cigarettes
with the window open
listening to the sound of A Grapefruit
Moon
and the rustling of the branches of the
trees
I drank down the
bourbon-pumpkin-beered-loneliness
framed in my mind
by the black and white bathroom tiles
the black and white,
the hot and cold moments of myself
my 21 year old rages and devastations
framed in shadows and smoke
the green denim on my jacket with the
brown collar
and the frayed sleeve cuffs with brass
buttons
and my blue jeans and my blue eyes
like wet marbles
were proof that I lived too
as did the squirrels, or the rats, or
the mice
who clawed in the walls
as the thoughts of my mind
Baskerville 37
clawed in the walls of their cheap
rooms,
but
I was lucky because the cool air
and
the bourbon helped me
to
go to sleep finally...
after
the three months I had suffocated
in
the hot haze madness:
an
entire summer wherein I never slept
insomnia
leaked in like beads of acid sweat
and
burned the insulation on the wires in my brain:
one
dead summer was finally buried
with
the desperation of night
in
the hideous soil of an acid sunrise
the
humid ache of church bells ringing
the
singing I listened to at the city recycling dump
where
I swept broken glass off of the scorched asphalt
the
broken pieces of the bourbon-pumpkin-beered-drunkeness
the
glittering prayers of an entire city
swept
into my dustpan
alone
in
the hot circada sunset
Baskerville 38
Untitled
What
of
October?
What of
intuition?
And, then
So
How
When
Dreaming
Do
We
See?
And then so
What of souls?
And what of pieces
Missing. Spinning. Drifting
Cosmic bodies whose dimensions, drowsy
orbits
Our
souls are merely
leaves
in
only planets have their
seasons
only this
one has the colors of our leaves
Baskerville 39
I
find in light that shines upon you.
