Western palaces, p.1
Western Palaces, page 1
WESTERN
PALACES
a follow-up to ENJOY ME
Stories
By
Logan Ryan Smith
Transmission Press
Chicago, Illinois
First Electronic Edition
Transmission Press, Chicago 60625
© 2016 by Logan Ryan Smith
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Cover art: “Knee-Slapper” © 2015 by Matthew Arnone. All rights reserved.
For more on Matthew Arnone visit:
www.instagram.com/mstevenarnone/
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.
Western Palaces is a work of fiction, as should be exceedingly obvious. All names, characters, and incidents are inventions of the author’s imagination. If you really believe you’re a part of any of these stories, or that anything within them truly happened, please seek psychiatric help or dial 911 immediately.
stories
MOLOTOV COCKTAILS
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK
SERENE MOMENTS
PICTURE THIS
LAST CALL
CHRISTMAS IN TENDERLOIN
WE HAVE BREADSTICKS
THE GIFT
SAN FRANCISCO BEACHED
GLASS EYE
NOT SYD
FUNEREAL
WESTERN PALACES
for Jack, Karen, Samuel, Natasha, and Harold
“Young man, I tell you, arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak…
—Luke 7:14—15
I love you
You love me
We’re a happy family
—Barney & Friends
MOLOTOV COCKTAILS
Damp stair, yellowed ceiling, splintered railing. Damp stair, yellowed ceiling, splintered railing. The world’s spinning, tumbling, and every time the world makes a complete revolution I taste piss on my lips and bile at the back of my throat.
THIS SCENE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY the grainy, filmy afternoon light through the window up above that distracted me when I looked out it and saw myself in it, completely skinless and toothless and with a giant gaping wound in the middle of my chest that fluttered like an asshole passing gas.
Pitiful.
Halfway down, I vomit and it spews from me like those pinwheel fireworks and halfway through the revolution I laugh and choke on it.
Kerplunk.
I hit the bottom and the force jars the meat from my throat (it was actually a finger bone) and I’m able to breathe. I’m at the foot of the stairs, on my back, sinking into the piss-soaked paisley carpet. The spinning doesn’t stop, though, for I don’t know how long, and I’m not feeling terribly interested in getting up, but I am feeling pretty sorry for myself because the only reason I’ve fallen down the stairs is because I stormed out of Cameron’s apartment, pissed at her for hiding my coke and doubly pissed at her for telling me she did it because she loves me. What a crock of shit. What an everlasting flaming crock of shit.
Love.
Oh me oh my.
The world slows and I’m amazed to find that besides the bits at the corners of my mouth, I managed not to throw up all over myself (a first time for everything). There’s splatters of it along the yellowed wall and the burgundy, paisley carpeted stairs, but it’s really unnoticeable amid all the other streaks of vomit, piss, and shit that had already stained the walls and carpet and pretty much the entirety of the Tenderloin here in San Francisco.
“Cameron?” I ask, turning my head and looking up the stairs, thinking I’d heard some squishy footsteps from somewhere. But, she’s not there. I feel even more sorry for myself and I’m about to cry when Cameron walks into view up there, next to the window blasting her with the brownish yellow light of late afternoon.
“Luke?” she asks back.
I grin at her and shake my head “no” and laugh, then wipe the vomit from my mouth and pat my belly, still on my back in the urinal carpet.
I’m glad to see she still has all her fingers.
The old broken elevator off to the side of the little lobby shudders and laughs at me. I reach up toward Cameron at the top of the stairs like a child and say, “Momma,” and now it’s her turn to shake her head.
Before she shook her head she was this gorgeous, petite brunette with big almond eyes and a pleading pink mouth that begged to be plugged up. Now that she’s no longer shaking her head, she’s completely unrecognizable. She’s some old hag with giant drooping tits and wrinkled flesh hanging from her heavily made-up face. Cameron had been wearing black skinny jeans and a black LCD Soundsystem tanktop. This woman’s wearing a dark red tracksuit, its top unzipped dangerously low, those deformed melon-babies hanging from her ribcage threatening to rip themselves away from her and come straight for me to suffocate me to death or rip out my eyes and eat my tongue.
“No. No, you’re not Cameron,” I say, though I’m feeling unsure of myself.
The woman with angry, pockmarked, one-eyed aliens ripping out of her body shakes her head once more, says “pitiful,” and gives me her best look of disappointment before pivoting on her heels like a runway model and disappearing from my sight.
I think that woman might just love me.
I may or may not have been living in her apartment for the last few months.
But, no. No, that’s not Cameron. Of course it’s not.
But someone up there has my goddamned coke and so I’ll be back for it, and I’ll sleep with whichever one is here by the time I do, if that’s what it takes.
Or, maybe I’ll kidnap her kid, Toby, and hold him for ransom.
My coke or the kid fucking dies!
Nah, I’d never do anything like that. That kid’s like a son to me. I taught him how to tie his goddamned shoelaces, brush a batter off the plate with high inside heat, and throw flaming bottles of gasoline through the windows of those that fuck you over. So Toby and I have bonded over the busted windows and burning apartments of my so-called friends Wilson, Sanchez, and Russ, all of whom refused to give me a place to stay for a bit when I was evicted from my apartment a few months back. Or was I just locked out?
It doesn’t matter. Because of them and their lack of pity I’ve been stuck living with Cameron, who is sometimes a thin and pale hipster sexbot, and sometimes the Tracksuit Monster with purple lips and a furry tongue. Are they actually two people? Or just one? Fuck if I know.
I was thinking of heading over to Kevin’s tonight, pockets stuffed with swishing beer bottles of kerosene, and Toby in tow, until Cameron admitted to hiding my coke, or maybe throwing it out. She wouldn’t say. All I know is I need a little something to take the edge off before I burn my friend’s fucking apartment building down.
Really, I’m not sure why I haven’t already burned Kevin’s place down. That motherfucker not only chose to pretend he didn’t know me when all I needed was a floor to sleep on, he also stole Christy or Carol or whatever her name is right out from under me.
And I loved whatshername.
She had this yellow wound on the side of her head. I liked to stick my nose right in it and take big whiffs. No, that was a flower. She was a hippie and liked to wear a big yellow flower behind her ear. She always smelled of pollen and new sweat and her cheeks were always ruddy and her eyes always enormous. Cartoonish. She was like an inflatable doll and I wanted to pop her, catch hold of her pinky toe as she quickly deflated and shot off the ground, and then just hold on tight while she flew me all over town.
She could have given me a whole new perspective on Mother Earth, or Gaia, or whatever that fucking hippie called this feces-filled, warted, foul, and festering thing we all cling to day in, day out.
Pitiful.
Christy or Carol or whatever her name is was a very active person and a positive influence on my life. She helped me curb my drinking by getting me to smoke pot instead. It turned me fat and lazy and helpless and completely harmless. It also ruined my taste in music. She’d play Counting Crows or Phish in her little apartment in the Haight-Ashbury and ask me if I liked it and I’d roll like a harpooned whale toward her and mumble something that was damned near “Sure, I like it.”
I’ll never forgive her for that.
But she’s now living with Kevin in that apartment across the street from Aberdeen Tower, where I still spend countless hours over glasses of Jim Beam whiskey and Lagunitas beer, talking to the bugs that fall into them, asking them if they need help or if they’d like to drown and die like I’m doing. They usually just grab their crotch and flip me off before sinking into the amber that I eventually drink down.
That’s all just a half block away, but everyone Toby and I have firebombed is in this neighborhood, actually, and that makes me think: Should I get out of here? Not just out of the Tenderloin, but out of this whole fucking city ripped apart by zombies and stinking hippies with funny walks because their pockets are weighted down by ginormous trust funds. Even if I moved to another neighborhood in this tiny city, we’d still all be living close enough to reach out our apartment windows to rip the other’s arm or dick off.
But, yeah, I should grab the kid and take him out for another bonding session over a good old-fashioned firebombing.
Then I remember that I can’t take Toby with me to firebomb Kevin’s apartment because Toby’s dead.
Cameron aborted him
No. No, that’s not right. Toby’s eight-years-old now. He was born. But he still died. What happened was, he and I were ready to torch Russ’s fucking place down and Toby was holding his beer bottle of gasoline and I lit the soaked rag stuffed in the bottle and Toby went to throw that thing like I’d taught him but it slipped the grip of his tiny little hand and fell right behind him and a liquid pool of flame spread out around him in a giant circle and turned him into a three-and-a-half-foot tall flailing sculpture of black ash.
Wait. No. That wasn’t Toby. That was Bob—Russ’s midget friend heralded for his acting prowess around the underground theater scene. I can’t remember, now, if he was helping me set Russ’s fucking apartment building ablaze, or if he was just collateral damage. Maybe he was trying to throw that bottle at me?
I hope he’s OK because I was really looking forward to his interpretation of Ophelia in the sci-fi rendition of Hamlet (In Space) bound for any playhouse in San Francisco smelling of stale beer and french-fry grease.
I’m about to pull myself from the sopping wet carpet at the foot of the stairs and march into Cameron’s apartment and grab my boy, Toby, so he can join me in another night of brushing opponents off my home plate with the high heat when I think: No, Bob’s cremation should be a lesson to us all.
No one under four feet tall should be handling molotov cocktails.
He can stay home tonight with his shape-shifting mother that wanted him aborted but slept in and missed her appointment at the clinic and got lazy about making another one and so missed the cutoff date.
Pitiful.
***
Speaking of cocktails, somehow I’m in Bourbon Bandits now and Stan’s pouring me a giant glass of whiskey and soda water and I’m watching myself in the mirror grow horns and fangs, but mostly I’m watching Peter Murphy, who’s sitting next to me, singing “Cuts You Up” to me with very old, sad eyes and a wide clown mouth. He’s still skinny but apparently pregnant with a baby bowling ball. I wait for him to pull out his switchblade and slowly saw my head off but he doesn’t because he’s too sad. When I take my eyes away from the mirror and off my drink, I find the stool next to me is empty and I’m feeling sorry for myself again. The song goes on though, telling me how this world cuts me up, takes me in, and spits me out.
“It takes me in, cuts me up… and… and… spits… it spits me out,” I tell Stan, who’s kind of moving his hips to the music and gently snapping his fingers and looking around the bar, which is filled with hipsters that were twenty-two yesterday, but are all over thirty now and looking pretty pathetic and pitiful.
“What? Luke, what’d you say?” Stan asks me, twittering on his skinny cricket legs before me.
“Nothing,” I say.
“So, you’re, uh, living with Cameron now, huh?” he asks, and winks at me, and pushes a lock of curly brown hair out of his face and I nearly vomit just thinking of that one greasy lock of hair of his—how he probably sucks on it in his sleep.
“I’m… I’m not sure,” I tell him and ask him to turn on the Giants game but he tells me the Giants game was over a long time ago. That the Giants may never play another game as long as I live. And he winks at me again and I’m starting to feel really weird about it so I stumble away from my stool and find someone that looks like Eric, my drug dealer, in the back of the bar near the pool table, and I ask this guy that looks like Eric if he can give me some coke and he says sure and gives me some coke and I give him some money and I go into the bathroom in the back, which has no toilets, just a purple concrete floor with drainage holes in it. I stop in front of the mirror over the brown-stained sink and watch myself shove white powder up my nose and I’m pretty sure I feel a heartbeat.
Pretty sure.
Hmm.
Not too sure.
So I shove more up my nose and HOLY SHIT there’s my eyes. They’re bright and beautiful and boy am I gorgeous and alive and HOLY SHIT do I want to burn Kevin’s fucking apartment building down. Fortunately it’s just two or three or four doors down from Bourbon Bandits, so there’s no rush and there’s no anxiety despite all the coke coursing through my veins, which my face is currently full of. There are webs of red and violet across my entire face.
I’m beautiful. Like the ass of a jellyfish.
I wish Cameron was here to see this.
I wish Toby was here to help me burn Kevin out of house and home.
But, right now, this—this is all about me. This is not about family. This is not about sharing.
I spend the next ninety minutes watching Stan make cricket music with his cricket legs while I drink three more pints of whiskey and soda water and listen to Peter Murphy—who’s back in the mirror—sing me classics such as “She’s in Parties,” which unfortunately has me thinking of Abigail and her flaming licks of red hair and how she’s dead but not dead because I see her all the time and she accuses me of killing her and that always makes me sad because, honestly, I haven’t killed anyone.
And that makes me sad.
Abigail, that fucking poltergeist, is now tipping over my glass of whiskey and pushing me off my stool and Peter is doing nothing to help me and I’m on my back and Abigail’s looming over me, her face full of fury, spitting at me and slapping me and telling me to leave her boyfriend, Eric, alone—that if I ever touch him again she’ll saw my fucking head off with a switchblade, good and slow.
Then, in slow motion, her red hair flailing, she’s pulled away from me as though on a bungee cord and she flies, still in slow-motion, out of the shotgun bar, backward. The black front door opens and lets the black night in and she goes out that way before the black front door closes again.
Regaining my stool, Stan winks at me and says, “Women problems, huh?”
“She thinks I killed her boyfriend, too,” I tell him, losing the plot, but he doesn’t hear me over Peter—who’s sitting straight up, palms on the bar, wide-eyed, staring straight ahead—screaming, “ARE YOU THIRSTY NOW? DO YOU STILL FEEL… DO YOU STILL FEEL THIRSTY… THIRSTY NOW!?”
I order a shot of Jameson and tell Stan to close out my tab and he tells me he can’t believe I ended up with Cameron and I tell him I can’t believe it either because I hardly recognize the girl most days.
“No, really,” he says, rubbing a glass with a dirty dish rag. “I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a word you say or have ever said, Luke.”
“Uh, OK,” I tell him and throw back my shot and scratch out my name on the credit card slip and stumble out the way Abigail went.
Outside I bump into a couple zombies who leave me alone, giving me a look like I’m one of them but I’m not one of them because I have all my skin. It’s there. What I saw earlier was a hallucination. I’m prone to that. But I’m fully skinned, unlike these fuckers now lumbering past me with eyes popped out of their sockets and blue blossoms of dying muscle exposed because their skin’s peeling off.
Fucking monsters. Fucking pitiful goddamned monsters.
I stroll out into Geary Street aglow in the city light-pollution that’s killed the starlight that actually died a couple hundred thousand years ago, and I nearly get hit by a dozen speeding silver foreign sports cars driven by nose-ringed rhinos and minotaur and other basic yuppies on their way to blow the mayor and design new street-sweepers for the specific purpose of keeping minorities on the edges of the city only.
Peter’s stumbling after me right now wearing only a trench coat and tidy whities, crooked and spilling a pint of vodka and screaming, “I am your slice of life! I am your slice of life!” before getting hit by one of those speeding silver foreign sports cars. I can’t stop to mourn for him, though, because I have things to do and though his death will be memorialized by Brandon Flowers I have to carry on with my life because I know how indignities never cease, whether you’re alive or dead.
***
Suddenly I’m at a payphone—an archeological find—at the corner of Geary and Van Ness, a few blocks away, transported.
“I hold these truths to be self-evident,” I’m saying into the phone, though it’s more like I’m watching myself from the outside and listening in, “that I am not born of woman. These cleaved hooves hold me upright, but I bark when spoken to and I know God is a suicide. Or, an abortion. I think I was aborted. No, wait. That was Toby. Maybe. Maybe it was me. Or, wait… operator, can you please connect me to 415-555-2009?” and he does. The line rings a dozen times before Kevin answers and the operator asks him if he’ll accept collect charges and when he guffaws and says no I scream into the phone “I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll burn your goddamn building down and skull-fuck your still-flaming corpse, you gangly limbed clown-bitch!” and hang the phone up, slam it down, and then slam it down a couple dozen more times until the plastic shatters and the phone stops accusing me of meaningless violence.
