The Little Tapes Warbled

Those tapes and tapes and the mud beneath the tarp. She slept on them every night when she slept. She would’ve traded her life for a little sleep. The rain tiptoed it’s ballet across the tent, stars pushed out of Heaven, never getting any bigger, remaining pinpricks as they fell closer.

Desolation is nothing new
It's a perennial fashion of youth.

Everyone agreed the world would end soon but they maybe expected it would be beautiful. The land a cookie crumbling in milk. The mowed sea, jumping into the air in decapitated blades. Mother Earth and her tits of fire, her volcano tits gushing hot milk. Angels lowered down on strings of flame, running through devils with long, thin swords. Operas of light deafening the trees. Skyscrapers bursting in ecstacy. Skulls dashed against the sidewalks. A lovely choreography of total destruction. She and he will dance ring around the rosy as the meteors knock off their limbs. This was what Wally thought. His dream. This is what Wally thought she wanted. The end.

But the world would not relent. It kept looping the same path it had been since the sun hugged it into orbit and wouldn't let go however many millenia before. It retraced it steps like it had lost something, left something behind. The hula hoop of years. They survived. How boring. How tiresome. The whole thing should just shut up already. She and he hated everything and that was their bond. She’d rather be a crusty husk dead on a tree. Ideas are dumb. None of them are right. In a land of gas stations and boutiques and ring tones and buckets of chicken and beer pong and toilet plungers and whitening strips and condoms and corsages you were either dainty or rough and she didn’t want to be anything at all. She wanted so badly to hear the sound shelled in her own heart and she wanted it to be true and not like anybody elses and purely her own. She scoured the air with strings, trying to make out her heart. Her breath went into the tapes and came out but the life was gone. It was her voice and no life. The little failures hit the tarp.

How to shoot into the Heavens
and become a pulse of light?

A voice in your ear becomes your mind. A song pumps your heart with its fist. Wally didn't really care. Grace cared of little else. Wally wanted to breath the sky and taste the flowers and prick the skin of the lake. Wally dipped his hand in the sun and poured it in his cup. Grace led him there. She was his path, his ladder. She didn’t want the responsibility of him. His jello heart wobbling on her dish. His little guppy heart crawling through her stream.

He was nothing.
He was no one.
He became his responsibility for her.

The bird tied to her wrist flew away. She let it loose, he suspected, leaving the rope still taut, dragging on the ground. Grace decided to crawl into her grave and sail out a butterfly. She sunk the proboscis in her arm and sucked. She traded blood for joy and the pain went with it and it seemed like a great deal.

Please don’t do it, he thought.
I just found you.

He thought with all his heart. Surely she had to hear him he was thinking so mightily. Grace could always hear the words volleying against the ramparts of his skull. The words lying like balloons waiting for his lungs to inflate them. Grace blew them up, read their messages, and popped them with her needle. He coughed and coughed. That was almost like talking. The sentences that surfaced herked and jerked their way up his windpipe through a slalom of detours, never arriving where they were headed.

Please just get in bed. Stay in bed.
I’ll take care of you. I want to. It’s all I want.
I could be proud again, preserving you.

Something was spoiling. Everything he said made her nauseous. He drove wooden nails into her stomach. The flies piled up, fat and happy. He rescued what he could. The tapes. Wound their tongues back to their teeth. He couldn't stop the flow. She became a stone. She turned into flowers.

She left.
His eyes had nowhere to rest.
Her vacant chair
was lonely with air.

Clumps of grief shuddered through his body. Reverberations through a world wrenched of a soul of magnitude. Waves passing from the new absence of a stone plunged through the threshold of water. She wasn’t supposed to leave him here. They were supposed to go together.

She was sleeping now. He was wide awake.

The little tapes warbled.

The Girlwatcher

This is a short video, followed by the story which it was based on.



I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.

She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.

I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.

I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.

We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.

I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.

I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.

I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.

When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.

I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.

The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.

“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”

I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”

I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.

“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”

I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.

“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.

“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”

She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.

“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.

The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.