Category: Uncategorized (Page 330 of 1031)

The smoke alarms were sacred, untouchable, and entirely off-fucking-limits at the Hotel Synod. Everything else was negotiable. A man named Mellow West who liked room 323 once paid four months of back rent with a stolen piano. Francie Brush stabbed her boyfriend to death in 106, but the jury found her not guilty and she moved right back in. The other residents threw her a party with a cake. They used to listen to him beat her through the plaster walls. No one did anything at the time, but now they bought her a cake. Sex in the elevator would get you yelled at, and repelling from the roof to avoid paying rent would warrant more yelling, but if you touched the smoke alarms, then you were gone, because Frankie Teakettle would know if you’d touched them, because he personally inspected each one weekly.

A complete, but temporary, détente occurred during the detector check. Frankie Teakettle would not berate you for the rent, nor would he notice any obvious crimes. Perversions would be ignored, and so would messiness and stink. He would announce himself, unlock the door with his master-key, check the device that went BEEEEEEP to show its batteries were still good, exit without comment or eye contact, relock the door behind him. All of man’s happiness begins with his house not burning down, Frankie believed. And the Hotel Synod was the type of place prone to that sort of thing.

It was a candle-lighting clientele; it was a candle-forgetting clientele. Folks who stayed at the Synod smoked in bed, or they crawled under beds holding lit Zippos. Freebasing was popular.

Frankie Teakettle may or may not have owned the place. The lobby had glass doors that opened onto Clarke Street, and a threadbare green carpet. Art was crowded onto the walls, all from the hotel’s residents in lieu of rent. Some of the paintings were worth much more now than the rent had been, and some were worth nothing. Ratty yellow couch with plump buttons in the upholstery. The Christmas tree was fake, and left up all year but only turned on in December. The desk was made of oak, wide, and to the right of the doors. Frankie sat behind it, and behind him was a wall made up of cubbyholes that were full of letters and small packages and messages. Two elevators, the old kind where you pull the scissored door open and closed.

There was a dentist in 401, Doctor Horse, who engaged in an elaborate web of barter with the rest of the hotel. 401 was a large corner suite, and he had not left the hotel or used cash in twelve years. His office was in the living room: he had a chair and drill and lights and all that bullshit, and a junkie hygienist named Shirley Early who made extra money at night dominating men in the chair. Doctor Horse traded prescriptions for groceries and laundry, and cleanings for the rent. One time, he exchanged a root canal for a Rothko.

Rates were variable at the Hotel Synod. Painters with potential and drinking problems paid a little, slumming rich kids paid more. Movie stars would come up from Hollywood (a certain kind of movie star at least: the kind that mumbled and did not bathe) and they were charged double the rich kids’ price. Some of the rooms were a bed, a chair, a toilet without a shower; others wrapped around the corner of the building and had bathtubs. Long-timers and overnighters.

Johnny Mister liked Room 212. He was a Guitar Hero. He played for Little Aleppo’s own The Snug, and  he stayed at the Synod in Room 212 when he was not on the road; everyone hated him. The residents at the Synod did not instinctively loathe the rich. Some people just had the bad luck to be born into money, they figured. And they did not despise the poor or the broke, because most living at the hotel were poor or broke. But everyone hated the cheap, and Johnny Mister was cheap and so everyone hated him. He was a junkie who fainted around needles; he was always ripping off his neighbors. Smoking everyone’s cigarettes, and drinking their wine, and suddenly appearing when you’d ordered a pizza. Then he’d start trying to fuck your girlfriend (if you were a man) or you (if you were a woman or teenaged girl). Frankie Teakettle loved Johnny, though. His management paid his inflated rent six months in advance.

Room 109 no longer existed.

Boylan Burcke (pronounced burk-ee) had occupied 203 for years. The Beats all thanked him in their books, or fictionalized him, and the Hippie writers, too. Academics wrote theses on his poems, and the occasional article would call him a genius. When these articles came out, Boylan would take them to his dealers. Surely this kind of coverage, he would bullshit them, means a payday is around the corner. He had one slim collection to his name, The Hospitallers of the Downside.

Manky and overdrawn, these wobbling saviors!
These scarecrows on the sidewalk in afternoon’s lie!
Fortunata
–You bitch–
I fucked you in a diner bathroom
It was in Omaha
Your creamy asshole winked at me

It was about 120 pages of that sort of thing.

Boylan Burcke had a necktie he claimed belonged to Gerald Ford. It was burgundy with thin yellow stripes running diagonally across its face, and he said that President Ford’s son Jack had given it to him. If Boylan liked you, he would tie you off with it. If he didn’t like you, he would tie you off with it and swipe your dope.

There was always dope at the Hotel Synod. Waves of it. White that you mixed with water, and brown that you mixed with lemon juice. Lucy Twigg had the dope. She lived in 104, which was in the back and had a door that led out to the alley, and sat at a massive desk in her room with an apothecary’s cabinet behind her filled with pills and powders and liquids and occasionally suppositories. Lucy sat at her desk all day with huge rock and roll speakers pointed at her playing her latest obsession. She was small enough so that her feet did not hit the floor when she sat in her chair, but the shotgun under her desk was quite large, and so was the guy who stood behind her named Klaxon.

The door to Room 201 was always open, and lentils cooked all day and night. There was bread, too, and everyone was welcome except for Frankie Teakettle, who was not permitted in the room by court order. The rotating cast of robed residents called themselves the Holy Light Family and called Room 201 their ashram; they had never paid a dime in rent. Immediately after moving in, they sued the Synod claiming that charging them rent would be akin to taxation. Most will realize this argument as “not even terrible,” but the judge was drunk and found for the plaintiffs because she thought it was funny. The case was appealed, obviously, but Frankie quickly realized he was paying more to his lawyers than the room was worth, and so he dropped the case. He did get fucked up a couple times and go up there looking to beat some ass, though, and hence the restraining order.

In the morning, the pipes and the drunks would shake in just the same way. The sign by the elevator said No Overnight Guests.

Credit cards cutting lines on mirrors sound like CHAK CHAK CHAK shlip shlip CHAK CHAK CHAK and then shhhNORF and another sound, a human sound from a coated throat sticky with speed and mucus. Longtime residents could recognize each other by that sound, the little exhalation after a rail, sometimes it was ka-HAA and others went BROKH-bukh. Johnny Mister said “Rock and Roll” every time. You could tell the rich kids from the poets by what they snorted their coke with. The rich kids used hundreds. If the poets had a hundred, then they would have spent it on coke, so they use cut-up straws from the taco joint.

Slowest way to get high is via your stomach. Lot of absorption to do, gotta get through the liver’s five-hole. Your asshole is quicker: no matter what you shove up your ass, you’re going to feel it toot sweet. Faster than that is inhalation or insufflation, which the common folks call smoking or sniffing.

But nothing beats the needle.

Teachers and preachers don’t know this, but nurses and junkies do: there is more to the needle than the movies show. It is versatile, and it is a triune god like the Christ. Subcutaneous injections are used by diabetics to administer their insulin into the fat directly under the skin; intramuscular injections are for flu shots and antibiotics; intravenous injections are a sharp lever that opens the inside of your body up to the outside world just like your mother explicitly told you not to do. If you were going to use needles outside a hospital, then you needed to know this. Cocaine could be skin popped but not shot into the muscle. Some opiates could be delivered by all three methods, but some could not, and people had lost arms over the difference. Amphetamine should not be injected into either fat or muscle; it will abscess in both.

Speed is for the mainline, and Frankie Teakettle had no problem with that. It was his blood-brain barrier, and he’d cross it if he wanted to. His body was a free country, he thought, and so be it if its sovereignty be invaded. The problem some run into when injecting speed is the ratio. Thicker your paste in the cylinder, the harder the rush is going to hit and you’ll have a high like a black-body curve. This leads to the chasing of dragons. (People misunderstand that phrase, Frankie thought. Wasn’t that the dragon was fast and could fly away; it was that it would kill you if you caught it.) Three points in one milliliter. Nice and smooth. Keeps a man going on the long day’s journey into the next day. It was sustainable if you weren’t a pig. New point every time. Saline solution, not tap water. Swab the skin with disinfectant every time. Rotate sites. Don’t tell anyone where you keep your stash.

Time would win the war, but the battle could be yours. It would always be a Pyrrhic victory, but you could take the day if you were prepared to pay the price. Or if you did not know there was a price to be paid. Fatalism and stupidity are kissing cousins.

Frankie Teakettle sat behind the desk and vibrated like he had for years.

The Porters could handle it. The hotel’s porters had unionized long ago, and one of their demands was the capitalization of their title, so now they were Porters; they could handle it. The Porters picked up laundry and made introductions, and they chased off the Taft impersonators before they could hurl themselves into the bathtubs. They delivered drugs, for a price; pizza, for a slice. They were Montagnards and all of them answered to the name McGeorge. They had black uniforms with gold piping. Some of the guests fucked the Porters, and some got fucked by them, and others just tipped. No one knew exactly how many there were.

The doors opened outward onto Clarke Street, and the Porters would take your luggage if you had any. Many didn’t. There was a bed for you, though the room surrounding that bed could not be vouched for. The thin runners on the hallways floor were fraying and torn, and so was Frankie Teakettle at the front desk, but they would hold up. You could put off tomorrow, at least for today at the Hotel Synod, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Cannot Swim stared out at the lake and wondered how he got there. It was still and there was a moon in it, and there were fish below the surface. Crickets were somewhere; their song was everywhere. Behind him were the kotchas that the Pulaski lived in, and before him was the lake and then the harbor and then the sea. He was tall, and his posture made him seem taller. His black hair was not tied back, but falling loose around his shoulders, and his feet were bare. He was sixteen.

America invented the teenager, but Cannot Swim was not an American and so was not a teenager. This mythical creature with no body fat and spending money–the teenager–was created on Madison Avenue to sell records and skirts. The teenager is the ultimate manifestation of capitalistic surplus: a demographic whose only purpose was to consume, and hang around outside convenience stores. The Pulaski had no convenience stores, and therefore they had no teenagers. Cannot Swim was still a boy until he completed the Assignment.

He did not feel like a boy at the moment. He did not feel like a man, either. Cannot Swim felt too big for categories, and too small to need defining.

“Why are you naked?”

Cannot Swim was also naked.

“What?”

“You’re naked, cuz,” Talks To Whites Said.

“Where did you come from?”

“Same place as you.”

“Then you are my landsman.”

“Wow. What did the witch give you?’

“Tea.”

“And?”

“Yes,” Cannot Swim said, and waded into the lake with his arms stretched towards the floating moon.

The Pulaski had three names in their lives. The first was their family name, and that was generally indicative of when they were born or the weather at the time or the length of the labor. The last was their secret name, and this was given by the gods and would sometimes never be learned. The second name was their village name, and that was the name most went by throughout their lives. Your peers gave you your village name, and the Pulaski did not name people ironically. Cannot Swim couldn’t, and so his cousin followed him into the water and dragged him back out.

A hundred-pound hunting dog called Black Eyes watched the boys from the shore, thought about helping, didn’t.

The cousins laid on the wet, silty shore of the lake. Cannot Swim had been sure that the lake held meaning within it, and had struggled when Talks To Whites pulled him back. Dirt clung to their naked shoulders and legs.

“There was a hill,” Cannot Swim said.

“There are seven hills.”

“Not like our hills. Four flattened sides that came to a sharp peak. In a desert. It was the brightest white I’d ever seen, and there were kings inside. Do you know what they did to their kings?”

“No,” Talks To Whites said.

“Scraped their brains out through their nostrils. There was a long, skinny tool made from bone with a hook at the end.”

“They must have hated their kings.”

“It was the highest honor. There were streets made of even black rock. Thick and unbroken and uncracked with gargantuan buildings on either side. Up into the sky. And carriages that did not need horses.”

“What happened to the horses?”

“I do not know.”

“Did someone scrape their brains out through their nostrils?”

Cannot Swim was too high to understand sarcasm, so he said,

“I don’t think so.”

“Just checking.”

“And a field made of dead men. Smoke in the air and blood. Rifles that were a thousand rifles in one, spitting out bullets so fast you could not hear them individually. I saw the grand death, cousin. I saw that day is the dream of night, cousin.”

They were on their backs; Talks To Whites reached across his chest to pat Cannot Swim on the arm and said,

“Okay. Sun’s gonna come up soon.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

There were students along the firetruck’s route; they pointed and waved them towards the small Victorian house with two gables tucked away in the northeast corner of Harper College’s campus.

“Thanks, assholes. Thanks for pointing out the fucking house fire in the fucking dark. Didn’t see it ’til you pointed,” Flower Childs said from the passenger seat of the pumper truck.

“They’re trying to help,” Dwayne McGlory said as he rode over the curb and across the manicured lawn.

“I was talking to the dog.”

Ash-Nine was a dalmatian, and sat in the middle of the front bench. Her tongue was out, panting, and she was not paying attention to her humans. She was going to the Thing. Ash-Nine did not understand what fire was, or what a fire department did; she just knew that at random intervals, the people started running around and she got to ride in the truck, and then when she got off the truck: the Thing. It was always in a different place, and there were odors and so many people, some that were sad and some that were angry. Sad people smell different from angry people.

“Dog’s deaf.”

“Smart dog,” Flower Childs said. “Holy fucking shit.”

The glow of the fire had been in the front windshield, but as the truck crested a small hill they could see that the house was engulfed.

“What did–”

Pep Oneida was on the desk when the call came in, and he had the clipboard with the 302 on it. He thrust it over Flower’s shoulder, and she grabbed it.

“What the fuck is this, probie?”

“I wrote down what I was told,” he said.

She swiveled around in her seat to face him.

“You wrote down ‘Small fire.’ Four minutes ago.”

She checked her watch.

“No. Three minutes and 45 seconds ago. Does that look like a small fucking fire to you?”

Cespedes Bobble was the Dean of Harper College, and so he lived in the small Victorian occupied for so many years by Carter Spants and Molly McGlory-Spants. They were not using the house any more, as they were dead and buried out back. Cespedes stood watching  the fire with his boyfriend Alphonse, a disgraced mailman who now made handcrafted espadrilles. They were both naked.

Dwayne shoved the truck into Park and the everyone clambered out in their gear, except for Ash-Nine, who was not wearing any gear besides her collar.

Flower towered over the two men; she was already sweating. She asked,

“Is anyone in there?”

The two men shook their heads. No.

Fire Chief Childs made the call. Fully involved. Defensive approach only. The windows had already blown, and a roar was coming out of the Victorian. Fire was already too big to enter, and the structure was lost. Her man would stay outside. Surround and drown: put as much water on the house in as little time as possible, and from as many angles as you had hoses. Nearest building was Harper Hall, only 200 yards away, and if the Victorian was allowed to burn then the roof might send out flaming shards.

She did not need to yell orders. That was the point of training, so you didn’t have to tell people what to do when you got to the job. She figured that if you’re yelling, you’re fucked. Connect the hydrants to the truck. Hook the truck to the hoses. When the lines charge with water, they will try to fling you into the air. Tuck them under your arm and lean forward. Lean into the fire.

“It happened so fast,” Dean Bobble said.

“Whaddya mean?”

“We were in the kitchen having tabbouleh when we smelled smoke. So we checked all the burners to see if one was still on, and by the time we were done looking, the whole ground floor was on fire.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. It was terrible.”

“Everything we own is in there,” Alphonse said.

“Yeah,” Flower Childs said. She was not very good at comforting people, but she figured: putting out the fires is my job; taking care of fire’s victims is someone else’s. “You were in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” Dean Bobble said.

She checked her watch. 9:07 pm.

“Dinner?”

“Yes.”

The Chief looked the men up and down.

“You’re naked.”

“We have a naked home. No clothes inside.”

“At all?”

“No. None at all. It’s a cleanliness thing.”

Flower Childs scrunched up her face in confusion.

“Naked isn’t clean. You’re putting your assholes on stuff.”

“Clean assholes,” he said.

“No such fucking thing.”

Pep Oneida was on the south corner of the house, Dwayne McGlory on the north, and Pedro Sanpedro was to the east. Each of them wrangled their hoses: Pep was shaking and shivering under the slippery power; Dwayne held the hose in one hand and directed the probie with the other. Ash-Nine protected the truck.

Cespedes and Alphonse were still naked.

Chief Childs said,

“You guys want some blankets or something?’

“We’re fine,” Dean Bobble answered.

“The human body is beautiful,” Alphonse added.

Cespedes Bobble had the body of a 51-year-old academic. Alphonse had the body of a disgraced mailman.

“Some. Some bodies. Not every fucking body.”

Dean Bobble tried to look outraged. He flared out his nostrils and puffed out his chest, but this had the effect of making his dick wiggle like a fisherman’s bait and undercut the seriousness of the posture.

“Chief Childs, our house is burning down.”

“Yeah, and all your students are standing right the fuck over there and you two got your cocks out.”

Human beings have invented 3D movies, and musicals by Stephen Sondheim. There are roller coasters that grant weightlessness, and men who have tamed lions. Most likely, a minor league baseball game is taking place somewhere near you. People come up with all sorts of bullshit to fend off boredom.

But nothing draws a crowd like a fire.

The whole campus was out and assembled in a broad semi-circle behind the truck. Dean Bobble turned around and shouted to them,

“The administration has nothing to hide from the students!”

They cheered.

“Who’s with me?”

They disrobed.

“Fucking perfect,” Flower Childs said, throwing up her hands and walking back to the truck. The gabled roof collapsed inwards. The fire swelled and burst into the air; all the naked people went WOOOO.

“Woo!”

“Stop it.”

“Woo!”

“Dude, you’re gonna wake everyone up,” Talks To Whites said.

“My voice slaps against the lake,” Cannot Swim said. “It bounces on the water.”

“Awesome. Let’s try that out in the afternoon when the whole village isn’t sleeping.”

The two were still boys, but they were the size of men–Cannot Swim was the size of a larger man than Talks To Whites–and the sky had begun to turn indigo. The stars were fainting and the full moon was low in the west. Behind them was the village and the Segovian Hills, and beyond the hills was America.

Talks To Whites wore a tunic made of light, thin deerskin. His moccasins were also made of deer leather, but thicker than his clothing. There were bracelets on both his wrists, and his chin was cleft. Teeth a tiny bit too big for his mouth. Cannot Swim was naked and his feet were covered in mud and grass. Neither had a single hair on his face.

“They were visions, cousin. Not dreams.”

“What did Here And There say?”

“Nothing. She listened.”

“Really? She never shuts up,” Talks To Whites said.

“She listened in between speaking.”

“You’re talking about a conversation.”

“You do not know what happened. You were not there.”

“Dude, you don’t know what happened and you were there.”

Cannot Swim threw his head back. The Milky Way was a diffuse blurry wound across the night, and the Morning Star was in the east playing herald for the sun. His eyes watered, and tears ran back and hit his ears.

“Something happened. Something that was really something.”

“Okay, cuz,” Talks To Whites said.

He put his hand on Cannot Swim’s shoulder. There was a large hunting dog at their feet, snoring.

“You wanna put some clothes on?”

“No.”

“Everybody’s gonna start waking up any second.”

“I have nothing to hide from my people,” Cannot Swim said, and then he spread his arms like the Christ and walked into the lake again. Talks To Whites blew a breath out, put his hands on his hips, considered letting his cousin drown. Then he took off his tunic and breechcloth, kicked off his moccasins, and waded in after him.

Part of the gear was a camera; it was stored under the back bench in the cab of the pumper truck. Flower Childs checked in with her men, and eyed up the fire–it was dying–and she took out the camera and began taking shots of the crowd. She was methodical and used the whole roll to snap everyone present. There were the students, naked, and the Dean and his boyfriend, also naked, and lookyloos from town, some naked and some not, and a group of preachers and priests from Rose Street, none naked. Chief Childs photographed them all while her men beat down the blaze.

It was midnight before they got back to the station. The trip was not four minutes long, but Ash-Nine still fell asleep on the naugahyde bench seat of the truck.

Dwayne McGlory hit the garage door opener, and the massive rolling door started upwards. There was a white envelope taped to the metal, and the Chief poked hard at the opener to stop the door. Once again to bring it down. The truck idled outside the house as Flower Childs climbed down from the cab and ripped the envelope loose. Held it in front of the pumper’s headlights to make sure it was not a letter bomb. Opened it.

The paper read : THE NEXT ONE’S GOING TO HURT – THE J OF I.

Flower Childs looked up and down Alfalfa Street, and then up at the video camera she had installed after the last note like this.

Pedro Sanpedro leaned out of the window of the truck and asked,

“Him?”

“Or her,” the Chief answered. She stepped out of the way, and Dwayne hit the opener again. The slatted door rolled up and then 90 degrees back against the ceiling, and the pumper truck fit in just perfectly next to the ladder truck. The Chief’s car was in around back in the parking lot, and the men and Flower Childs peeled off their stinking gear and dripping tee-shirts as if they had nothing to hide from each other. There was a 302 to fill out, and equipment to replace, and filth to wash off, and then there would be time to deal with the something that was happening in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.