Joining a Fan Club

I'm sitting in the middle of our back-yard on an old wood stool my Dad put out special  for his "famous buzz-cut"  A talent he says he picked up while over in Vietnam. If he shaved one the guys in his platoon they wouldn't get shot that day. Word got out, but he wasn't around the barracks much because he flew missions day and night shooting up the enemy as a helicopter gunner. When he would return there was a line already forming for his buzz-cut. So, I should be lucky. I guess. To have this edge. But, it was unlikely id be shot. I'm 7 years old. 

We were in the backyard so as not to get "Hair all over the damn trailer"  Clippers to my head and shaved down to the skull. He tore it across until it was flat and smooth,  I feel the heat of the sun on pale exposed skin. There are woods behind us. miles and miles of woods. Crickets, birds,  mosquitoes, saw-grass, and the everlasting Florida heat. Electric cord stretched  through the yard like a fluorescent orange snake. The clippers alive with power, hair falling  in clumps. over and over with razor touching skin. nicking it here and there as he barked for me to stay still. It was just me shaking, me hating this. like the time he threw me in the pool to teach me to swim. the deep end and the sinking down to the bottom. Sink or swim, Sink or swim. All those lessons not taught but forced. Everything black and white. Yes sir !. No sir !  Sink or swim.

I didn't want to look like a soldier. Boys in my school wore long hair and had big fat  combs hanging out of their back pockets. They wore dessert boots. Girls wore feathers in their hair. I had no hair. It was 1976. There was no war and  the only army I wanted to join was the KISS ARMY.

My head wasn't shaved because I had lice like everyone at school accused and laughed at me for. It was because I had no choice. I had rules to follow. Rules that only seemed to apply to me.  Dad took a swig of his beer and placed it in the shade propped against the trunk of a tree. His cigarette dangling out of his mouth as he spoke in deep gruff tones of how I look like a man now. How not to move , " Do want me to cut you?" His shaky hands and shell shock. His screaming and walking around the house late at night. I’m locked inside my head. Inside my little world. I’m sinking. I laugh to myself when I see his beer tip over by the tree. Maybe there is a god and if by some chance there is, maybe he'll save me. 
 

do you like getting dirty teXt messages?

I'm from the generation just before Internet. From just after the fall out of 70's swingers and cb radios to the  apocalypse of divorce. From isolation to connection. Music on vinyl records to the 8 track to cassette tape to compact disc to mp3. the Ipod.  Beta-max video recorders, to vhs, laser disc,  and dvd.
From three local TV channels, tin foil and rabbit ears to OnTV, HBO, ESPN, DirecTV, tivo, Dvr, 60" high definition flat screens. holy shit.
    OMG.dont forget LOL (but thats getting ahead of myself)  The car phone as big and brown as a brick, beepers, cell phones,  text messaging,  and cam.  Overload. Give me back my comic books and flashlight under the covers. but I'm not scared. not really. I was young and looking for anyway to get off and all this new unsupervised time alone with my books was great , but then HBO after dark.  "The Hitchhiker," 'walking a lonely road where terror awaits around every curve. Walk with him, and you'll find yourself in some very dark places...places you wouldn't want to visit alone. That's why he's there. That's why he's always there. He won't hold your hand - but he'll make sure the only ones who get hurt are those who deserve to.'  
    I'm  from riding my bike 8 miles to the flea market just to pick up back issues of Penthouse magazine,  to now having instant porn,  to chat rooms, love@aol, instant messaging, livejounal, craigslist, myspace, tumblr, twitter,  it's everyone, everything - here and now at my finger tips. There is virtually nothing i cant know or have. there isn't a kink or fantasy i cant fulfill with the like minded. Yes, it turns out there are people out there just like me, with similar tastes in art and music and fucking. maybe you? love isn't any easier, never was never will be, but damn if we cant email or text to meet up in some shady motel on the side of highway 1. and damn if i cant place my zappos order for the 25th pair of sneakers i don't need.
The something different is the isolation that i once had and sometimes still crave and at other times don't want to be anywhere near again. i like the unknown and i like the silent moments between them. the sunshine at the end of my street. i like for you to tell me i can have you - if i wanted, if i were closer. oh,  the secrets we keep. and ending the chaos, all this mind fuck pretty picture overload is as simple as shutting it off, saying goodbye. stop writing, stop posting, stop staring at those little icons, stop dreaming, stop ......but now that we've made it this far, who can do that?  promise me thrills, I'll promise you jet-packs.  

canoe, moon, ukelele

1. she's gone-

she'd been swimming, the smell of chlorine in her hair. our mouths sore from kissing to hard, to much and never long enough. bright skies, rose colored cheeks. spiky shadows cast from trees. we carved out our initials into a sideways heart not to far away from her back-yard. I bet it's still there. teen aged scrawl: CB + SL. it will take the devil to replace her.

we swam in her pool at night. her mother worked the late shift at a local nudie bar. serving, dancing- something. on her nights off she'd do things for us like: make drinks in the blender, offer to smoke us out, read our horoscopes under the night sky.

2. destiny -

it's safe under the water, no sound. no drama. the sudden urge to scream.


3. the mistake -

Fuck. I'm caught in jelly fish tentacles. I finally get my older sister and her friend to take me to the beach and now this. stinging fire sticking to my skin. the more i try to move, the more i attempt to free myself, the worse it is. I guess I'll just die here.
It's a pretty enough day outside. I can see it all-I've floated toward the sandy bottom looking up into the sparkling sun. I'm not far from shore but still; have you ever felt a million bee stings all at once, except under the water? that's me.

that's me until she pulled me out, my sisters best friend. colored finger nails grabbing me by the wrist. just when i was getting used to the idea of drowning. the pain like needles shooting through my back and arms. strands of jelly in a tangled mess.
I should have been thinking save me, but all i could see - two wonderful giant breasts. cleavage magnified by sea water and sunbeams. maybe i am dead.
I can see it now- life guards rushing to assist me;
" we need to treat these jelly-fish stings right away"
"but sir, what do we do about his boner?"

gasping for air and fully focused on her chest. A bright red string bikini, i am alive. she stands me up and we are in maybe 3' of shallow water. while she's brushing the "tentacles" off my shoulder.
im frantic "giantboobiessImeanstingggstungbyjjjjjjellyfisshh shsh"
"relax, doofus- it's seaweed."

we start with fuck and end with Kiss

let's start it like this. the fuck with kisses.
and do remember us?
our torturous history filled with goodbyes and returns. me missing the sex and her the love.
my friends think her to young for me although they all secretly covet her.


both hands on the wheel. her driving is slow and steady. mine is fast and all over the road. Still as if teaching me a lesson, we end up stopped at the same red light. side by side, her windows open. Rick Astley's, Never Gonna Give You Up is blasting from the speakers. she is either cool enough not to care or popular enough to have never had to spend the lonely hours i have on the internet. is it possible the unintentional viral plague inflicted by this artist has eluded her? before i could yell over to ask, the light changes. she adjusts the giant bug like sunglasses on her face, flicks her cigarette out the top of her sun roof and drives off.


there was a time when i thought, all i needed was a pretty girl and a bag of Fun-yuns and i'd be be happy. Add to that a 12 pack of PBR and a dog and it would lead you right up to my current happiness needs.

My girl can't stand the smell of Fun-yuns- she'd liked me to eat them out on the porch and if she held that kind of power i might do it. she doesn't, so i eat them right next to her on the couch while we watch the weekly episode of The Office. She'll kiss me if she eats them too, but she likes salt and vinegar chips and I must tell you, it's quite a mix. intoxicating.

I can't shake the fond memories of Elementry school Fun-yuns bring back. My mother packing them tight in a zip-lock sandwich bag, my metal Planet of the Apes lunch box busting at the rivets with items like: Two PB&J sammies, oreos, a jolly-rancher candy and the obligatory fruit, which i would promptly discard. I was given a quarter daily to purchase a 2% Homo milk, but I always got chocolate milk instead. One, it didn't have 2% Homo written across it in bright red lettering, and two, it was fucking delicious.
I was never entirely sure why but the black kids drank the 2% white milk. No one ever called them HOMO either, even though that's exactly what it read on the little carton box. God forbid you were white and they ran out of chocolate. (which often happen) The entire lunch room lit up with chants - homo!-homo!-homo!- the black kids even joined in as if they werent drinking the same stuff. In fact i think it was my friend Roger who started the chant.
Funyons had a hole, i like holes, you could play ring toss or peer through them and creep out the girls lunch table. they were just that fun. Bugels had a charm to them too, you could place them on all your fingers and wiggle them like pointed witch fingers.

Funyons remind me as much about Elementary school as the saw dust the janitor shook out on throw-up or the pee girl who sat next to me on the bus. bus fumes and Elmer's glue, eraser tops, the velcro rip of a Trapper Keeper notebook. single file. heads down. The hottest band in the world- Kiss.
when does summer start?

you got into mine

the last time, a blank stare into the sky.

we laid in bed with my door locked hoping no one would ever come home. I invited her over to listen to records, spinning side one of a Smiths album and when the music neared its end neither one of us got up to turn it over.

lights off and music turned up loud is how she wanted it. instead i saw everything, the scars on her arms, the bruise on her neck, sunlight across her wintery pale skin. naked. as if to make it better, i slipped inside her. easily. she struggled against my weight, i held her wrists down. a game we played or didn't but something we knew, something familiar. pretending not to want or feel or be anywhere safe for to long.

don't ask about the cuts or bruises. I never read the journal she asked me to read. afraid it would have only revealed her a thief, liar and poor speller. I wanted involved with her body. what she knew of me was simple. what i wanted her to know was this- presume everything with me is better. my music and promises, sex with the windows open during the day. say anything, i dare you, say my name with "fuck me" in front of it. panic.

days would go by when we wouldn't speak. love is a beautiful mystery that way, like the car that dropped her off in my driveway and the man who was driving?. school work was secondary to our teen angst and lyrically chaotic sexual encounters. in fact we hardly ever spoke inside school, never held hands, or passed each other notes, we were not friends. to others it would have appeared we didn't exist to each other at all. she would meet me, be with me and it was agreed upon as so. it was a random conversation she overheard, where i was apparently saying i didn't mind making a girl cry. from then on she'd be mine, she said. from then on she'd bother me to come over and listen to records or draw her or read to her. she'd call me asking me to tell her what dirty things i'd to do to her. Im coming over, im coming over so you can hurt me.

I would make her cry and i tell her to go home. she was happy being used and told to leave. this was our sick game. I minded the men who she took rides from, i minded the bruises and cuts that mysteriously would appear and disappear. i would guess i loved her and so I played my part and she played hers.

her bruises rubbed off on my skin, a clever mix of make-up and paint. i wore them smudged like dark tattoos. I'd look at myself in front of a mirror, believing they were mine. i wondered if i could ever be that broken. I was good at making up stories but not as much living them. she was as close as i would ever get. I looked out the window after her, a blank stare into the sky, she was gone.

make me your bruise

I told you to wait until after the rain stopped and then let's meet in the back- yard. we took off our shoes so that we could feel the wet grass under our feet. i took your hand and you thought looking back now, this is bittersweet, sad, this is like some kind of dark poetry in a pale blue light. make me your bruise, a sigh in a warm rain, bleeding. It's bullshit. It's bad fiction.

the fact that we had to wait at all or that i could ever wait. that once could ever be enough. that i would forget any of this. we rode our bikes in the rain, it was warm as blood and everything seemed rusted. the rains come and then the storms. this is our snow: thunder, leaves falling, a break in the sky, summer down pours and lightning.

I told you if it ever got to hard. I told you to tell me your secrets and if it was hurting bad enough I would take you away. I could make you safe from them.

your bike was pink with white streamers and mine was green. banana seat, chrome sissy bar, playing cards between the spokes held in place by clothes pins. Jokers and and aces wild, the Queen of hearts for you, your favorite and the king of diamonds, mine. Our tires rubbed and bumped when we got to close to each other, racket from the cards coming down the street like engines, like machine gun fire. Your hair wet and stringy in your face like spilled ink.


where was it that you showed me your bruises? was it in the woods , was it at your house in your room?. Why was no one ever home? and tell me again where he touches you at night.
we laid down in the bathtub together when the storm came in. I was caught over your house and couldn't get home. the phone didn't work, no t.v. We thought the roof would come off, we thought the walls would cave in. Or was it that you wanted close to me?

I got in first, cold white porcelain touching my back through shirt and then you on top. The thunder made you scared and edgy. your shoulders were small, bony and then i saw the bruises. you shifted your weight, like a whisper and said it would feel better if you moved like this and it did. lighting. crash of thunder. An ACDC song in my head. closer now and the wind, and my promise.

show me where the gun is. I'll do it. So he'll never hurt you again. she only heard the rain hitting the tin roof of the old shed out back.drowning my hearts desire. Bang- bang- bang- bang. she found the spot where shadows hide inside of me. she pressed herself into it, moving, faster and then faster. slow and then slower. a sigh, the warm rain bleeding. she was crying. weeping softly i thought. but now I'm not so sure.

Oh, it's the little things you miss

Tell me a story:

when i was little i had a teddy bear named Cocoa, and once, I forgot him in a motel room. I'm only guessing because it's been such a long time, but i think it was in North Carolina. I remember passing lots of Christmas trees. I rolled down my window so i could smell them. They weren't in vacant lots for sale, like at home, but just growing on the sides of the road and in the mountains.

it was the holidays and we were on our way to visit my aunt. I didn't notice he was missing until hours after we left the motel, and when i did i was instantly heartbroken. how could i have forgotten my best friend in the entire wide world?. I instantly shifted blame to my parents...how could you let me leave him?
I must have been in such a rush. there was a Waffle House right in front of the motel and my mother had promised we'd eat breakfast there before we headed out. we never went out to eat. my mom usually packed a cooler with milk and drinks and brought cereal along with plastic spoons. and you have to understand my love for waffles and chocolate milk.
I must have left poor Cocoa in bed, under the mounds of covers.

We have to go back!!! we have to get Cocoa! my Dad squealed the brakes and nearly drove us off the mountain. He must have sensed the devastation in my voice because we got off at the next exit to call the motel. My mom asked if they had found a bear. No, a teddy bear. I heard her say. Yes, i know you have real bears in North Carolina but this is my sons teddy bear. I caught my father rolling his eyes at this. Did they thrash it or not? we gotta get a move on.

A few minutes later the lady on the phone said they had indeed found Cocoa. He was safe and they would mail it out right away and my mom gave them my aunt's address.

When Cocoa arrived at my aunt's, I opened the box and began to apologized over and over. He just started telling me about his trip. How it was bumpy like a roller coaster and only a little hot inside the box. cozy was the word he used and much needed sleep. He said the motel room wasn't so bad and the cleaning lady was pretty and nice and sang him songs in Spanish. She gave him a bath too and indeed Cocoa smelled clean like dryer sheets and his fur was bright and fluffy.

he made the journey back to me seem fun and exciting not scary like i knew it probably was. I promised to never leave him behind again, that i would be careful with the people and things i cared about. but, he was a bear and even though the lesson i learned wasn't lost on him, he wanted to know how the waffles were and was it the bestest chocolate milk i had ever tasted in my entire life?

Hoping it stays just this broken

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
-Anais Nin

Coke and coke type products were banned from my home as a kid and so to me soda was nectar of the gods. Something one only drank when you went to visit Grandma's. My parents didn't mind the no limit Coca-Cola party there, just so long as I was to be staying with Grandma for the entire weekend. By Sunday night was I wreaked for a week- crashing down to earth in my sugar and caffeine trip. I slept in the car on the way home and had to be carried in. Screw 4th grade. I had now discovered the 2 great joys in life. Coke and masturbation.

Back then it was really Dr. Pepper that was my course of medicine. It seemed to soothe me in ways no other beverage could. Don't get me wrong Yoo Hoo had it's place in my trailer park upbringing as well. I dreamed of jerking off with one hand and sipping a D.P. with the other.
Madness would be if I were to be watching an R- rated movie through the squiggly lines on cable at the same time. ( We didn't get cable until I was 14)

I started cutting lawns when I was 10. I figured if i was old enough to fuck. Which is what I thought I did with the girl down the street. I could start up my own buisness. I tried the lemonade stand thing but, my Mom bitched about me using the card-table. The same table we called "the kids table" during major holidays. There wasn't much money in it anway. Even on the hottest South Florida summer day i was lucky to make 4 dollars. Chump Change.

It didn't take me long to find out it wasn't actually sex I was having with the girl anyway. Fucking, which I called hunching back then was NOT peeing on her while she laid down on top of leaves in the woods?. It took someone much older and wiser than me to set me straight on that. It was my best friends sister. It's where I learned most of the things I knew then about girls and sex. I figured her the expert, being 13 going on 14 and me only 10.
By the way, my friend, he didn't have soda at his house either, but his sister would make us the meanest Kool-aid this side of Belle Glade's Happy Gardens trailer community.

I guess his sister was supposed to watch us, (Their parents were never home) but all she ever did was talk on the phone or have boys come over and then shut herself in her room and play loud rock music. We used to try to listen for them having sex through the wall of his room. We both had drinking glasses to our ears and a hand down our pants. We once saw in the back of a DareDevil comic-book an ad for a SUPER hearing device. We planned on going halves for it once I started making money doing lawns.

If she wasn't on the phone or didnt have a boy over she would hang around us. I liked that. She would ask me all sorts of questions. Things about sex. Did I like listening to her through the wall? If my thing got hard?. How big did it get? I thought it was strange she talked like this in front of her brother, but he didnt seem to care. I mean he was the one always trying to see her naked.

One day I was over there and we were all on a Kool-aid and Tussin high. Totally "tussed" up as she called it. She was always going through her mom's medicine cabinets and taking anything she could find in a bottle. She tried to make us take things too. I never did. I told her I was allergic. Little fucking hypocondraic that I was. I thought I'd probably die. The Kool-aid's sugar content alone made my head spin. We spooned some cough syrup and washed it down with the day-glo liquid. She drank right from the bottle. I liked when she tilted her head back and i could see the muscles and veins in her skinny throat. Things were in slo-motion. I sat closer to her on the sofa, and she started kissing me and then her brother. We were on either side of her and she took her hand and slid it down my pants and started to rub me while her brother played with her boobs. It didn't look like the first time he had done it either. My friend, he goes " Do that thing to him" She smiled and put her face in my lap, pulled my shorts and underwear down passed my thighs and put her mouth on me. Suddenly I was awake and alive and feeling good and feeling sick and and wondering if this was a sin, and wondering if ........
she fell asleep or passed out or something. She stopped. I got up and let her stretch fully out on the couch. Then we both took her clothes off and pet her skin and touched her and looked at girl parts and took turns putting our fingers in some and then out. She was breathing softly and moaning, making little noises.

We never talked about it. I went back to the super awesome sweet Kool-Aid. She went back to her room with boys and loud music and funny smelling stuff coming up from under the door. She went back to the phone and back to teasing me about things I didn't know. Did she know? Does she now?

I did cut the lawns and when I made enough money I bought a fishing pole that I wanted (I still have it). In between I would use some of the money to buy Coke. Ride my bike to the bait n tackle shop a mile or so away and get it in the glass bottle. 10cent return.
At home I would hide it back in the woods. It had been a long time since I had one last. When I finally drank it, it wasnt as sweet as I thought it would be. I went inside my house and took packets of sugar and then went back and added them to the COKE. The weird thing is nothing happened. It doesn't matter how much sugar or aspartame you add to a Coke, it can't get any sweeter than it already is. That's their secret formula. It's not some secret ingredient, it's that they are already supersaturated with sweetners.