I’m in prepeartion to put together some short work as a collection in the hopes of finding a willing publisher. Go me! I wanted to post an excerpt every week of the the work on this El Alto Blog. I’m hoping someone will enjoy it. The work is about 30 pages long, and I’m happy to send it to anyone who prefers not read in this crappy format. Don’t labor to hard today friends.
The Coroners Squirting Flower
By: Domenic Maltempi
May 15, 2009 (begun)
They were sworn enemies. I was called Ray back in college. My name is Chinny Ray. I don’t gamble. I would keep tabs on them periodically in the city of Delphi 2 where we all now resided. I would keep tabs on the sworn enemies. I’m not sure if they swore to themselves that each other was an enemy in the others mind or what have you. By tabs I mean the sort of dead water meditating rewind sponsored and kept alive by difficult to die feelings of pain, anger, fear and so forth. That’s what I mean by tabs.
Oracle Mumbly Square was teeming with the usual zombies in self-surveillance mode looking their best on this perfectly long afternoon. Shadows do give up. I’m not blowing my hankie into the nuclear dust or anything so severe and casual, barbed and balmy; I’m just pointing that out.
Sam, Gary and I did not know we all lived in this overly stitched city, and probably did not even think about it till… I will get into it later. I’ve been unable to get my composure, myself together, since after the restaurant disaster. I would have my rapt moments released from all that, and I would write. I’m trying. Was it such a disaster? Figuring it out is a______.
It was certainly a case where I did in fact gamble, and by that I mean more than courting mere light sweeping chance for loss or gain. So I do gamble. But not like Sam gabled on me. Sam might have been keeping more than mere ‘tabs’ on me. It had been some twelve years since we attended the same two year state university in north-western New York. It was there that I became a victim. I became a victim of a great crime, a crime in which when I realized it happened, it did not affect me so much. Perhaps I was numb and outraged all at once, no feeling or negation of feeling would take the lead, would hold any superior position. Crying… I would cry, as some bloodied nonchalant voice landed in my organ of corti, spewing terribly upsetting news as if they were telling me about an old magazine I left over their apartment.
I gambled with a restaurant plotted and opened with these sworn enemies of past days. I took a risk. That’s more like it. This venture made no sense at all. But it happened, so it did, but it was unfathomable not too long ago, and therefore I say it ‘made no sense. It did not happen so long ago from my writing these words. There would be no way to predict such a venture would happen. But then it did. It ended in disaster.
Who would think there would even be another opportunity to have a terrible experience involving both Sam and Gary? Who would think I would ever see them again? Maybe I did. Things would get dangerous beneath and above all the smothering olive branches and illusions of rapprochement when we would finally, quite oddly, ‘find each other again’ in the city of Delphi 2.
I hardly knew these people in college where we became acquainted during freshman year. We certainly were not remotely close or chummy, but we were all involved in each other’s lives in an odd and powerful way. This is not so odd I know. These things happen all the time…the impact of the seemingly insignificant thing/person, introduced to you in some offhanded way, at some critical time (though it never feels critical at the time.) This alignment between us continued in ways difficult to explain, most certainly mentally… I believe between all of us, after we left each other’s lives. I swear to it. This was later confirmed. Conversations that were shorn of bullshit, that were not manufactured light headed mysticism desperately sought for by someone on a spiritual accelerator plan or something. These guys were not about that at all.
I was joined to Sam and Gary’s acrid hatred for each other very indirectly, and quite innocently. We would continue to impact each other’s lives. So much upset to come, so much rapture pocked woe. But I’m doing fine. Why does life have to work like that sometimes? I fear my life’s most vital movements (too teleological?,) it’s abstract center, it’s ‘force,’ will be tamped down and realigned by something so far removed from anything I might be able to reasonably calculate as having enough significance to me to do so. I’m scared to death of such…what should I call these jolting, light footed, shadow punching intrusions? I’m freaked out here. I’m looking through the crowd at Oracle Mumbly Square, wondering if I should move. Let me catch you up.
Small enmity between virtual strangers with little interaction after some initial incident causing bitter feelings and mild anger, might outlast the world, or the nail salons and constantly chatting cockroaches left after some kind of Light Armageddon– Light Headed– Left Over– Reheated World.
We all listened to the same radio station, WDTIX Norohosquet. We all placed WDTIX bumper stickers on the left bumper of our cars. They were fading in the same way. But who knew? Things are always so less markedly different than we think in large and small substantive ways. We even dated the same controversial Disc Jockey, the emerald brushed and golden brown Heveilah Low of the FLP pills scene at Leg up Beer Garden. I don’t think the dating happened concurrently. I hadn’t found out yet. This was before the joint venture, our restaurant ‘The Oldest Tree House.’ That embarkation failed. That’s a happening still very fresh in my mind. I can’t sleep well thinking of it. I haven’t been to the Leg Up in an eternity. Maybe I’m in a state of depression. Ah bullshit. So what if I have given up on my contacts, friends, whatever they may be called in the not so here and way too numb puckered now to now shape of this whole damn thing.
The wizard is a stiff sentinel, but jovial, so jovial, so forgiving, so stiff, large door, slap-slap curtain, tight moustache, empty heart. I could go for a beer. Get some ideas out, look at a pretty girl, standing by herself, scratching a leg, pretending to have a friend, flipping though the same pictures loosened from a pocket book shaped like a distended planet as me, closed with a copper twisting clasp, observing her breathing with sure footed insouciance.
Make it a Leg up night!
My friend Martin hears slogans in his head, he also get’s peculiar earworms. That is to say, he hears shards of tunes that you can’t but compulsively hum to yourself. I was responsible for him hearing the jingle Make it a Leg Up night! I sang the tune in a lazy derelict falsetto while playing a game called ‘don’t fall off your chair.’ It became one of his very worse earworms. Martin and I rode the train together after work, but never before even though we lived very close to one another. We began a conversation about a guy named Sam that had recently begun working in Martin’s department. Sam was mostly out in the field, repairing juke boxes, gramophones, grandfather clocks, and a few other specialty items that he was the go-to guy if repairs were needed. Occasionally Sam got violent in an uncannily similar way to another Sam I was familiar with from college days. I had never met the Sam that Martin described, but the mere description of some of his flare ups frightened me slightly, corking me into an odd skin of some repeating reverie.
Have you ever recognized yourself in a larger than life cartoon synchronously with a stranger in a public place, espied from a third stranger’s wet newspaper? One wonders how long such a scene would be possible in some parts of the world anymore. I was thinking of WDTIX as the latter happening tossed the ‘me’ I isolate as a particularly vital mode of my personhood’s movement violently aside. There was a queer recognition of the way a certain part of us flees in large gashing moments, into a separate flux. We often don’t belong to ourselves, it happens. We hardly notice…. and I have no idea, no idea who….and memory isn’t the all of us, and will play take away, cut you for that liquor caroming round your gums. Something always remains, no matter how fast a degeneration dances over our palsied hands.
On any given day, the necessary umbrage recall or vitriol re-gurgle necessary to maintain a sworn enemy did not exist between Sam and Gary. Was it in my head…was it me, the enemy of who…me? There was that central event. I was involved, but not involved, not aware of how I was an integral part of their enemy status.
I suppose I’m the average hick Chinese kid who would eventually enjoy repetitive and fairly feminine dance music inflected through warm orange synthesized wet northern fog, as well as undressing my lover with one hand as she read her own poetry about being woken up by things she loved but never wanted to understand. I know, time limits the possibility of this not sounding ridiculous to some other hick Chinese kid, class, or general circumstances, much else beside…yet….
My full name is Chinny David Ray. I grew up in the Village of Chittenango, NY. Chittenango is most famous for hosting the annual Wizard of Oz festival, or ‘Oz festival.’ There is another festival named ‘Oz.’ This other ‘Oz Festival,’ deals in heavier, dark magic rock n roll, newly incarnated. I won’t go into all that. I’m hardly knowledgeable about such things. The ‘Oz’ festival in Chittenango, NY happens in late May or early June. It’s a three day thing that I mostly dreaded going to.
I disliked most of the characters from the Wizard of Oz, some of them I detested. These feelings possessed a serrated hand, collapsing passing thoughts under their distracting motion. It might be easy enough to mock my strong feelings for these characters as childish, or comically irrational, or however some of my therapists put it. But did no one understand that I had to live around those towns people who would so expertly, methodically, unhealthily, imitate these characters, and not simply for the much ballyhooed costume competition parade, the importance of which was frighteningly puissant. All fucking year, especially after Christmas time up to the so called festival, it didn’t stop.
All that imitating becomes imprinted. It grafts itself over and in the epicenter of the towns psychic underbelly. I’m not sure how to describe it, this perpetual mist of spirit sabotaging, this eye blackening mist of tip-toeing Ozerish mimesis, a sapping of vitality, the combined effect on the town, the incestuous interactions of this …. I’m having a hard time…writing about it, helping myself by doing so, as suggested, as …
I mean, for old Jove’s chewy skin, how many people were married because of or initiated a life time fruitless enmity as love or otherwise because of what had happened on the big costume competition day at some point in their youth or later? Yes, I’m still talking about Chitty Chittenango, NY. It became next to impossible to extricate the Dorothy of the film, from the countless contest costume Dorothy(s) that would each sooner or later torch me down to my shrinking cold sinews in a myriad of ways, each contributing to pages of my toxically soured ink in so many spiral notebooks dedicated to articulating my very troubled youth, and all its phantom lost loves. Oh this Dorothy will find me handsome. Oh that winning Dorothy will overlook her inclination to choose someone of her own ethnic background. Oh that Dorothy would love getting dogged by a bright eyed, denim jacketed Chinny Chin, ready to call out (cool susurrations), a list of bad girl names as we reach the summit of coalescing climaxes! Oh sure. Oh fuck.
How I always longed to go to college to get away from all of this! But that did not start out so hot either.
I recall many early mornings in my unfinished basement peeling shrimp for my mother hours ahead of time to retire this quotidian chore, to reap more hours of standing in front of an eight foot swiveling oval mirror with black paint stains along its bottom, making sure my imitation of the ‘heavy moustache’ Emerald City sentinel’s dress, and starched yet saponaceous demeanor, were on target.
Burbly buffoon with heavy laugh that trickled up like gravestone rain to passed out mourner’s flickish consciousness. I would master the sentinel as inept wizard balloon getaway good-guy. How I enjoyed piling up those fishy exoskeletons, washing my hands with vigor, verbena scented and soothing. It would then be time for taking out my costume, piece by glorious piece in the cool dark light from a box as sweet to me as some mewling pet warmly brushing itself against an adoring owner. To go to a dark familiar place, to search for a costume, to be trapped in that time, pretending, keep pretending, whatever you do. I don’t mean lie to yourself or be a fake. I don’t mean that at all.
The rituals of unpacking with strangers, a cool dark place, each summer, each beginning, so powerful, so beautifully together, and alone in that dark cool beginning ready to unpack, how lovely, how fucking lovely. That happened to, our grammar school, in the basement where they kept the sick pianos. But I must return to this reverie. The sentinel as wizard was the only character that I enjoyed from the film, the only one that I dressed as during the costume contest. I don’t think I got too carried away with my perfecting this overall simulation of the latter mentioned character. I didn’t ruin my life like so many of the rest of the town and its smugly quiet pets.
Suffice it to say now, a lot of my dread of this event and the painful memories of it, continue to buffet me hungrily. I lay most blame on certain days to Rabbi Meinhart, who played the Coroner that pronounced the wicketty witch dead, and who would attend the annual celebration in Chittenango, much to the delight of those looking for some authenticity or something. I spell ‘wicked’ ‘wicketty’ because that’s how my little sister would say it, and I loved the way she said wicked. To this day, it gives me so much pleasure to remember this way of saying wicked that my sister possessed and first used when she was five.
Some people take solace in their first kiss, or inoculate themselves against an awful and unavoidable episode in their life they are near, by recalling a fond indelible image, a warming bath drawn by a loved one after a day of chafing rejection and icy drizzle. I took refuge in the way Leda Ray said ‘Wicketty,’ generally followed by sashaying through the streets of our village with a squirting flower hidden in her blouse or pocket, and a smile more powerful than any airy missile defense system, or collection of desperate thugs. No matter…. I miss my little sister dearly.
Sometimes a white nectarine will cut itself…..