We Go Way Back

SCENE: The Conversation Pit/ Rehearsal space of a campus house. The furniture is soiled, any ornamentation, carpeting or furnishing has been stripped, the windows boarded up, to make the space more amenable to loud rock and roll and sloppy drinking. Amplifiers line the walls. Vintage recording equipment, Guitars on stands, a half-dismantled drum set. The room is lit by a neon "Miller High Life" sign.

Yogi and Taylor - Early 20s.

Henry and Fitzy- Mid-20s

*******************************************

Fitzy, Yogi and Taylor have just returned from a bike ride, sweaty and clothed appropriately.

They all drink Genessee beer out of cans.


Henry: Are you guys brothers or...?

Yogi: Pretty much.

Taylor: We go way back. Way back to sharing women and...

Henry: Oh yeah.

Yogi:... drinking whiskey.

Laughter.

Taylor: I'll never forget that, dude. We're riding our bikes though, we were like, what, 14? Riding our bikes in Grove City, just ridin' around and then Yogi's like, "Hey, look girls, you want me to rape you?" They're like, "You can't rape the willing." Dude, we did U-turns...

Yogi makes the sound of screeching tires.

Taylor:...got their numbers, she was at my house the next day...

Henry: How old were they?

Taylor: Fuckin' Yogi was like, "Hey loosen her up so I can fuck her next." All right. Fuckin' popped my cherry on this bitch. Then I'm like, "You gotta go, I got plans today. I think Yogi wants to see you." She goes down, wouldn't fuck him cause she was sore. I was like "Yeeeeaaagh!"

Laughter.

Taylor: He fucked her, what, two days later?

Yogi: Yeah, we banged. She's hot.

Taylor: She was.

Yogi: She's like two years younger than us.

Fitzy: So she was 12?

Taylor: Like 8th grade.

Yogi: Like 13.

Fitzy: Oh, that's good.

Taylor: It was sweet.

Yogi: It's what I-- Dude, I been, I've been hittin' it since I was 12.

Taylor: Yeah bro, every time I get this chick, like I'll meet a chick at the bar. I'll be like, "Hey, you remember such and such from high school? Yeah, I just banged her last night." Yeah it's like, "yeah she sucked my dick." I'm like Mutherfucker.

Laughter.

Taylor: Every time.

Yogi: Every, every girl, like he he used to like these girls and like, he like, "Hey man, I'm talking to..." I was like, "Man, go ahead, I fucked her."

Fitzy: Remember them--

Yogi: Every time.

Fitzy: Remember the postal hoes?

Yogi: Dude, yeah, I fuckin' rode butt naked in front of'em.

Henry: Who are the postal hoes?

Fitzy: These, these trails out, out on the West Side we grew up riding at. There's all these, In Lincoln Village, There was all these... girls, these hoes, would just hang out, like groupies.

Yogi: Us dirtbag BMXers sweatin' our balls off, would get our dicks-- Like I remember Fat Steve gettin' his dick sucked by that girl and she threw up all over him.

Fitzy: Oh yeah!

Laughter.

Fitzy: In the back... It was so funny cause like Westland is just down the street and all the football jocks would like come by and they'd be so mad that us dirtbag shitheel bike riders are getting all the trim. And they ain't gettin' shit.

Summit Chase

Summit Chase, the luxury high rise,
was squarely framed in my bedroom window.
The only building bridging hometown skies
enchanted me with its heavenward flow;
The space-man John Glenn lived there, or so we heard,
and everybody dreamed of the roof-top pool,
high above with the singing birds,
too high to hear as we walked home from school.
Writing a story for the school newspaper
they let me inside. The basement was dark.
The power was dead. No elevator
could raise me. I heard a hidden dog bark.
On the ground I saw a pool, cracked and drained.
The lights leapt on above, the sky was stained.

The Black and White Ball

The guests have all almost arrived.
The men in black ties
cross names off the list.
Soon it can begin
to end.
A Man
is shaking hands.
We file
down the line.
His smile is so big
I can see the silver in his teeth.
His hand is warm and strong.
We have cocktails with the men
who will kill us.
They are not doing it for them
they tell us.
I believe them. I thank them.
Men have been trying for centuries
and they're going to do it.

We'll rise to the sky
without having to climb.
We'll appear there,
lifted like rain.
The last guest arrives.
He’s already dead.

The Guf

A FATHER, 60, long hair, wearing a bathrobe. A SON, 25, on the couch. They are watching a giant gray television. CNN or the History Channel. The Father is putting a golf ball across the carpet at a little machine that spits it back at him. He may be smoking a joint. The Son may be playing with his Cell Phone.

DAD: So when we gonna get out and play some golf?

SON: Shit. Too goddamn hot.

DAD: When'd you play last?

SON: Your birthday prolly.

DAD: You gotta get out there so I can give you an asskicking. (pause) I went out to Walnut Grove the other day.

SON: Who'd you go with?

DAD: Just by myself. It's in pretty good shape for this time of year. The greens are nice and smooth. Ball rolls where you hit it. Ground's so dry it bounces for a hundred fucking yards after it lands.

SON: Yeah it needs to fuckin' rain already, seriously. This shit's getting ridiculous.

Pause.

SON: Change the fucking channel. This shit's depressing.

Pause.

DAD: You ever hear of the Guf? You know what The Guf is?

SON: Nope.

DAD: What the Hell are they teaching you up in that college? The Jews have this idea that there's this chamber in Heaven where all the souls are kept before they're released into the world. Supposedly birds can see the souls coming down from the Guf and that's why they sing.

SON: Mmm.

DAD: Sounds nice, right? Well, when the Guf is empty, when all the souls have been released, that's when the Messiah is supposed to come. Supposedly, Adam, the Original Man, was as big as the universe. When he was cast out, or maybe when Eve was created (they didn't really explain that shit but it's religion what the hell do you expect), his soul was shattered into a bunch of fragments, which are us, or we carry them around anyway.

SON: We're sub-leasers.

DAD: Yeah right. All souls are only fragments of some great "World Soul" and when the Guf is empty all the souls will be back here, back on the earth, and the "World Soul," the soul of Adam will be whole again. That's when Jesus, the Messiah will come back.

SON: Maybe that's metaphorical

DAD: Sure, yeah, but, I've been thinking about it and, okay, good story, sounds nice and all, but when the Messiah comes, from what I understand, he's not gonna be pleased. Ain't happy about the "way things been going."

SON: Right, Revelations and all that.

DAD: Right. In Re-

SON: Revelations is a, I read it a little while ago, it's pretty grim.

DAD: To say the least.

SON: It's quite vivid, actually, the way-- Whoever wrote it seemed to enjoy finding unbelievable, spectacular ways to kill us. Like, Jesus has a giant wine press and he squashes people like they're fucking grapes and there's blood spewing everywhere and he's got flames coming out of his eyes and a sword for a tongue.

DAD: Yeah, real merciful guy.

SON: Right.

DAD: So, anyway, I've been thinking, well, there's, what, 7 billion people on earth? 8 billion people on earth? More people alive than at any point in history. What that says...

SON: Ahhh.

DAD: What that means...

SON: Uh-huh Yeah.

DAD: What that says, to me anyways, is, well, where are all these people, these newly-minted souls coming from?

SON: The Guf is empty.

DAD: Right. Or getting there anyway. Shit, you can't hardly turn on the TV without seeing floods, tsunamis, Biblical shit. The Oil Spill. I watch it right from my living room every day. I got a front row seat. Every day there’s a new catastrophe.

SON: Well, if you watch CNN all the time you can't.

DAD: The "Fertile Crescent." That's everything between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers-- Iraq, essentially. The Christians believe that when the Fertile Crescent is returned to the Jews, when the Jews have been restored to their "Homeland", that's when the Messiah will return for, for...

SON: For...

Dad: For "The Big Showdown".

SON: Yeah.

DAD: Right. This war, this war, people think it's about freedom or oil or killing Saddam. It's not about any of that shit, and oil, which is what everybody on the left thinks it's about, that's just sleight of hand. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". It ain't about oil. It's about returning God's Chosen People to their Homeland.

SON: Well, I don't--

DAD: 'Course you tell people that they think you're nuts. It's about-- Bush and all his, his, the people that have been in power, on and off, for the last thirty years, that whole regime, they actually really believe this shit, and they are doing everything they can to see that it comes to pass in our lifetime. They wanna secure the good seats in Heaven, you know, near the front.

SON: But--

DAD: And they're doing a pretty goddamn good job of it.

SON: Well, but Obama's not--

DAD: Obama doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He's never even been in office hardly. They're incompetent. Obama is a placeholder. Bush did the heavy lifting. It's already been set in motion. It's too late to stop. It's like dominoes. First it was the Afghanistan and Iraq, the Stock Market, the Economy. "The Graveyard of Empires". You ever hear that? That's what they call Afghanistan.

SON: No.

DAD: The British, Alexander the Great, The Russians, if you look at history, they all went into Afghanistan and that was the last place they fucked around with.

SON: I did not know that.

Pause.

SON: So, what do you suggest is going to happen?

DAD: Well... 2012. The Mayan Calendar. Revelations. Dr. Strangelove.

SON: You believe that?

DAD: You can't hardly look at the news and not believe it. This country is bleeding to death. It's only a matter of time before the federal government is bankrupt. Pretty soon we won't have anything left except a shitload of Nuclear Bombs. And you can't eat a Nuclear Bomb. You can't do anything with it but blow shit up.

SON: Yeah... Yep. Well that's... I thought maybe the Mayan thing referred to something, uhh...

DAD: A change in consciousness?

SON: ...Yeah.

DAD: Yeah, well, all you gotta do is turn on your TV...

SON: I don't have a TV.

DAD: Well then you won't have to watch. All you gotta do is turn on your TV and-- Two years from now, what seems more likely? That suddenly everybody's gonna wake up one day and be enlightened or that there's gonna be worldwide suicide?

The Son laughs.

Pause.

SON: I just, I can't, uhh, I can't... believe that-- It's-- In a... In a-- (he sighs) It seems to me that, I mean, this isn't the first time we've been close to extermination. Everybody has always thought we were gonna die. A thousand years ago people were saying the same shit. I mean, it's a fairly easy thing to predict. The world is here. It could just as easily be gone. "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished," you know. And certainly, it is possible. These days especially, it's getting to seem more possible. We could definitely blow ourselves up today quite easily, on accident even, and that possibility probably wasn't there a hundred years ago. BUT...

Okay, there's forces of good and forces of evil, maybe, in the universe. At least there are things we call good and evil. Or maybe, let's say, there are destructive forces and creative forces, to be more impartial. The struggle, the friction, the conflict, the way these forces pummel and wrestle with each other is what drives life forward somehow. To me, I think, these forces are not exactly balanced, it seems to me. It seems to me the creative force has the smallest little sliver of a slice of an advantage over the destructive force and that's how life has been capable of proliferating itself. That's how there can be 7 billion people when 300 years ago there were only 750 million or however many.

Now, momentum does seem to be building in a possibly sinister way. Time does seem to be speeding up. Things are-- advancement, growth is happening twice as fast in half as much time. Mathematically this appears to signify, Casey Jones, you know, “Ridin’ that train/ High on cocaine”.... It's impossible to sustain. Technology is more powerful and more destructive, but, I believe it is concurrently also getting more effective at sustaining us, or helping us to sustain life. We are getting better at surviving and reproducing, I mean, 7 billion people!, which is basically the objective of, umm, living, so far as we can tell. Maybe, I guess, maybe the whole purpose of life is to get better at reproducing so that, like you said, the Guf can be emptied. Maybe that's all we're here for; to spit the 10 billion little shards of Adam or however many there are out onto the earth so they can be put back together. And, you know, in that sense, we are succeeding. Maybe God, or whatever it is, sent us here to empty the Guf, to restore the original harmony, the World Soul, so that it can die. So that it can destroy itself. So that it can rest. So that we can rest. Maybe the universe opens and closes just like a flower. Maybe that’s all it does. Maybe we’re just held here in the bloom and we get to live for a little while and that’s it.

On the other hand, maybe when the Guf is emptied it won't mean destruction, but, I don't know, Peace. The Music Of The Spheres. A change in consciousness. A release from these petty, umm, worldly concerns that we think we care about, or we force ourselves to care about. Maybe there'll just be, I don't know, a hum. A resonance. A connection between us, such as would not be possible UNTIL the guff is empty. Maybe the incompleteness of the soul is what keeps us in disorder, keeps us squabbling over bullshit.

I, personally, hope the world doesn't end. Life is wonderful, in nearly equal proportion to how shitty it is. Every time it looks like humanity is fucked, like it's curtains, some bit of ingenuity springs up and alleviates our struggle, just enough so that we can squeak into the next, more fucked up situation. And we have to live in a constant state of danger, of extinction, of the possibility of being destroyed, otherwise, somehow, life wouldn't be worth as much. I mean, if we just kept inventing all this awesome shit that solved all of our problems and made our lives better, well that'd just be too easy. With every added convenience or progression something is lost. It’s like if you divide a number by two, you can just keep dividing it and dividing it and you will never reach zero. You’ll never solve it. There has to be a, a, a... I ran out of gas.

DAD: A balance.

SON: A balance, yes-- I mean, part of it, you know, I just got here. I'm not ready for it to end.

DAD: Yeah... (sighs) Yeah. I've been around for some time now.

SON: Yeah but you've still got... I mean, Jesus, you're only middle aged really.

DAD: I get the senior rate at the golf course.

SON: Shit, they start giving that to you when you're 50.

DAD: Yeah.

SON: 50's not a goddamn senior.

The Dad sighs. Pause.

DAD: You know how when somebody hears their voice on a tape recorder they hate the way it sounds? That's how I feel about myself all the time.

Pause.

SON: You don't have to, Dad, you're... You're the only fucking... holy person I know, really.

Pause.

DAD: I feel like I'm trying to construct a kind of a, a... psychic ark. Something that'll keep me afloat on all of the, the, fucked-up-ness.

SON: That's all you can do, really.

DAD: If you look at the evidence, if you simply just objectively look at the record, objectively, I mean, if it was you or I and it was our job to be God and we were doing what he's doing we'd be fired. We're supposed to think he's merciful? I have a hard time digging that, you know? In my experience, He's been a mean motherfucker. If anything God is the ultimate destructive force. It gets to be... I don't know that I'd want to go to Heaven if I have to be around somebody like that, who's blatantly abandoned and ignored, tortured, "His" so-called children.

SON: Well, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.

DAD: The lord giveth and the lord fucketh you over.

Pause.

SON: Fuck, I don't know... You wanna go play golf?

DAD: Sure.

SON: Not so hot in the evening.

DAD: I should probably put some pants on I guess.

SON: Might be a good idea.

They start out.

SON: Only so many days left to play before the world blows up.

They exit.

The Stage is empty.

Fade to black.

4th of July

I live near the underpass
Where I crashed
my car. The hill
hurled me down through the rain
into the concrete wall.
It didn’t cause me any pain.
I walked away.
I didn’t change.
I slept that night.
I lived.
I still live.
I drive.
I live
nearby
Where I nearly
Died,
the hill
that tried to kill
Me. Isn’t it wonderful
To feel nothing at all?
The sky is blue everywhere,
empty
Ready to be filled
with fire. Tonight
explosions will hatch
over the underpass
in the sky,
And here below too.

Happy America Everybody

This is how I explain fireworks: When you're little they're cool cause you haven't seen that many explosions, but when you get older, you realize explosions are only cool if they destroy something. SO, if they exploded airplanes with fireworks, they'd be cool to watch again.
-Overheard at Red, White and Boom