Remember Sammy Jankis

2007-08-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

Three

The Captain’s Log

The single consistent aspect of Burns’ life was that it mimicked a series of Twilight Zone episodes, usually the ones with William Shatner as the lead. Burns was always either stuck in a nondescript Midwestern town, the slave of a diner’s bobble-headed fortune telling machine, or trapped on a plane home after a nervous breakdown, convinced that the Grinch was trying to monkeywrench the engines. Either way, Burns was Shatner and the only way to deal with the situation was to overact.

In his extended absence, the Waffle Shop devolved from a gone-to-seed diner to a gutted abandoned hulk. The front door was bolted shut, a sad murder of Iowans in identical “Up With People” t-shirts milled outside and stared blankly at the handlettered signs that promised steaks, two eggs, toast, and coffee for five-dollars and change. Their thin lips moved as they spoke the daily specials that no one would ever taste again, then sadly moved on to find a Starbucks or Panera Artisanal Cruelty-free Toasted Asswich shop. Burns took the back alley to the service entrance. Two movers in wifebeaters loaded a vintage Frialator onto a flatbed while a third leaned against a stack of waffle irons. They paid no attention to him as he chewed his urine cigarette and slid inside like he owned the place.

The air was 8-months pregnant the with aroma of ancient dislodged grime, stale sweat, rancid fat, and about to give birth to a sanitized office cube farm. The venetian blinds would gather grease and dust no longer. The midday sun flashed prison stripes through the Waffle Shop’s bay windows, creating a check pattern of dust swirling in midair. The orange fountain drink dispenser sat motionless on the counter, a pool of orange languidly swelled within to the rythmic motion of the construction equipment like busted lava lamps. The breakfast hum of refrigerator compressors, sizzling griddles, rustling newspapers, and splashing coffee was replaced by the irritated honk of afternoon traffic. The linoleum counter where he’d spent countless hours puzzling cases was smothered in a blanket of forgetful dust. He ran his hand beneath the lip of the counter. The three-inches of chewing gum was still there, bumpy amber Braille for anyone who wanted to read it. Amid the decay, uselessness, and anachronism, Burns felt like he’d finally come home. He felt something else… down there. Doubled over, he plowed through the fetid dust in his mad dash to the crapper.

The bathroom squatted like a double-amputee vet between the busted Kelvinator and the musty pallets of Squirt sodas that propped up the waterlogged ceiling. Burns had to hunch down to enter the stall. The Kelvinator was doing a Van der Graaf generator number onto the Squirt cans, arcing yellow and purple bursts of static. It was like a chance meeting between the sulfur pits and the northern lights for a nooner in a phonebooth. Inside what barely passed for a toilet, Mr. Bowl was brimming with “tadpoles,” “lazy susans,” and a swirling whirlpool of “oil slicks.” As he dropped trou, gripped the rails, and thrust, Burns waxed nostalgic on the “pile” of enemies he’d dispached into the sewer system thanks to the Red Chinese hyperflush system.

Burns yanked the crapper chain. Somewhere far off, he heard the sound of children laughing to the accompaniment of a twinkling toy piano. As he pulled up his drawers, he stared at his reflection in the bowl that slowly morphed into a Munch scream. As many times as he’d found his head in a toilet, Burns knew when it was for real and when someone had slipped him some blotter acid as a prank. There was definitely a head in this crapper, and it wasn’t his. It started talking in a voice like the Magic Mirror from Sleeping Beauty.

“O perfect master, bringer of the cleansing waters! Thou hast freed me of my putrescent bonds! What is thy bidding?”

Burns sniffed. “Look buddy, I talk to toilets all the time. This is the first time any’s ever talked back. Make with the backstory.”

The Toilet Head rolled its vacant eyes, continued. “I am the Oracle of Delphi, banished for a time for prophecies that came to pass that were not heeded wisely.”

“Sucks for you. So some high-steppin’ tart stuck you in a fastfood crapper, huh? Just because they can’t figure grammar. Or irony.”

“And this wretched commode hasn’t been flushed in years.”

“That’s YOUR problem, jack. So do I get three wishes or what?”

The toilet head shook. “I am an oracle, master, not a genie. I know the future. I know the past. I can also read the bumps on your hind quarters. I also have a lead on the trifecta at Pimlico. This can be of some worth to those who heed my prophecies.” The toilet head started whistling Peer Gynt and staring off into space.

Burns didn’t truck with sorcery, alchemy, posterior phrenology, or augury, unless it involved reading pigs entrails that had been barbecued over oak charcoal with a good Memphis dry rub and a vinegar applejuice mop. Whenever he was drunk or stupid enough to mess with the foul arts, he always ended up naked on an altar at a black mass with his ass packed to the rim with communion wafers. But his ass was empty for now. He was feeling lucky.

“Alright, I’ll bite,” Burns quipped, rolling his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “Read away, o moist one.”

The bowl spiraled counterclockwise and scenes from Burns’ past flushed before him like a porno tape on fast forward: long-shuttered diners, juke joint shootouts, back alley abortions, vinyl-clad nurses administering barium enemas, prison rape, monkey butlers with guns blazing, scrimshaw dildos, the Sonny Bono assassination cleanup. The oracle spoke like the Guardian from that Star Trek episode where Kirk watches Joan Collins get run over by a truck. “You seek a hidden truth, one of loss and redemption. Your thoughtless rush forward sends you deeper into your past. The truth lies in front of you when your back is turned. Beware! Beware the monkey on the pier!”

“Wow. Just…wow.” Burns tossed his pee-soaked cigarette in his mouth, struck a match on the crapper rim. It still wouldn’t draw. He threw the butt into the toilet. “You have got to be the shittiest oracle I’ve ever had to deal with. And I’ve done the Carnival Cruise Greek sex tour of Crete.”

“But…but… I am a condemned toilet! One cannot expect Nostradamus!”

“I ain’t no plumber, and I don’t expect much from a busted crapper. But I sure as hell don’t expect it to throw shit back at me. Fuck was that about? I’m thinking maybe I can get a lead or two as to why my shit got fucked up in New Orleans. Hell, if you’re a stoolie, maybe you’d give me some bullshit leads to throw me off the trail. Bitch, you ain’t even trying! I’ve had better fortunes told by googley-eyed sock puppets in carnivals for four bits.”

The head was losing its audience. “Have pity on a poor soul, doomed to inhabit such a wretched abode!”

“I’ll help you out.” Burns grabbed his dick. He was riding this for a lark. Now his game dick was telling him the toilet was setting him up for a frame. “Fucking smartass crapper. Tell your friends upstairs that Dick Burns is fucking coming. TELL THEM I’M FUCKING COMING!” Burns yanked his wang out, peed on the rim, lit an M80, and flushed. He ducked outside, slammed the swinging door behind him, and braced himself for the backwash from the blast. The resulting eruption released a hail of swamp water that drizzled down the door like stinky tears from a brown-eyed Cyclops. Burns tossed his calling card over the stall door: a lime wedge.

Burns brushed the chunks of poo off his lapels, spotted the manager taking inventory of five-gallon drums of Lachoy Chop Suey and Admiration Brand Mayonnaise.

“Pol Atreidies! My main man!” Finally, a friendly face that wasn’t telling his fortune, spewing feces, or playing a banjo. Burns threw a thumb back at the so-called toilet. “What gives with the pay crapper? If you’re gonna go coin op, at least put a condom machine in there.”

Pol screwed up his face. “Dick Burns? What are you doing here? I thought you were in hell?”

“Now here’s the man I need to talk to. If I’m sposta be in hell, what am I doing talking to the Waffle Shop toilet? Spitting out riddles like Frank Fuckin Gorshin in a pea green faggot-ass jumpsuit. ‘Spect that nigga to be bouncing offa the walls sayin’ ‘Riddle me this, Batman!’ Shee-it.”

Pol shook his head, went back to his inventory clipboard. “Yeah, somebody screwed up alright. You don’t belong here, Burns. You need to talk to Sherrill. She’ll set you straight.”

“Finally, I’m getting some service. Sherrill’s it is. She still peddling those Bavarian Crème Belly Bombs?”

Pol turned his back to Burns, continued logging his stockpile of canned goods that no one would ever order. “Sherrill’s Diner is gone, Burns. But she still haunts the place. Nothing better to do in her retirement, I guess. Could be worse. Look at me. I guess she didn’t have anything else to do with herself either. But she’ll set you straight. Now, git outta here. I gotta get this logged before closing time.”

Burns was used to getting the cold shoulder from Pol Atreidies ever since he tried to lay pipe on the man’s common law wife. Burns waddled back through what was left of the Waffle Shop. He had a hard time leaving. Soon the walls would be divided into office cubicles, their owners lingering outside over cigarettes, shrink-wrapped foccaccia sandwiches, frappuccinos, complaining about how they wished there was a decent place to get breakfast in the neighborhood. Then they’d shrug and buy a nine-dollar breakfast croissandwich from the Korean convenience store clerk. And when they got back to their desks with their meal, if they listened carefully, they could hear the faint weeping of a lonely, bitter detective. And if they looked closely, they’d see the ghostly image of a diner whispering a little prayer over his toast, grits, and eggs over easy.

“Mother, forgive them. God, forgive them!”

2007-08-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

Two
The Big Cock Candy Mountain

What was left of Canal Street was choked under forty feet of slopping floodwater, a dingy roux of untreated excrement, floating garbage, and that stuff that Emeril sells. It was like what happened to Atlantis after they stopped paying their sewer bills, only spicier. The rain was slashing sideways in cold stinky sheets. Burns kept the extinguishing lights of the French Quarter to his back as he rowed south towards the hobo jungles of Metarie.

The freight yards were boiling with railway bulls and linemen, rigging the last of the boxcars by flashlight in a desperate race to get out of town before the last railway trestles were washed away. Burns ditched his corpse raft in the weeds, swapped his hospital garb for the dead orderly’s. He heard the diesels turning over in the distance, followed by a rapid fire of clangs as the boxcar brakes disengaged. An eighty-car Burlington Northern was crawling its way out of the yards like a poorly lubricated butterfly out of a rusted cocoon. The last of the cars were hauling out. Burns hustled between two dead reefer cars, hauled his deadwood carcass through the open doors of a boxcar.

Burns was a janitor’s mop that slopped into a corner bucket, collapsed in a sad pile like a marionette that’s had its strings cut by an indifferent child more fascinated by scissors than puppets. Between the hollow clang of the narrow traction bogies on the rails and the soggy roar of the storm, he almost didn’t notice the ocarina coming from the far end of the car. Between flashes of lightening, he saw a familiar form with a banjo strapped to his chest, squatting over a bindle and trying to tune.

Burns fumbled a smoke out of his soaking orderly’s togs. “Sing us a song, Sam,” Burns screamed over the storm. “”You can play it for her, play it for me.”

Sam “Balls” Jones had been riding the rails back when it was a legitimate alternative lifestyle. When they weren’t getting their poop chutes de-coked in Boys Village, Burns and Sam would hop boxcars off the 14th Street trestle and ride to the Florida Keys, Saskatoon, Gila Bend, and any points in between where teenager girls were loose, stupid, and easily impressed by marginally retarded city slicker Yankees who still had all their teefers. They made a good living with their “scat” routine working both the Southern chitlin circuit and the upstate New York borscht belt resorts. Burns would put on burnt cork blackface, Sam would strap on a clay nose, and they’d both do renditions of Billy Holliday and Al Jolsen tunes to ocarina and Theremin accompaniment. An unfortunate incident at a segregated waterfountain in Clifton, Tennessee ended the promising but short-lived career of “Dick & Balls: The Menstrual Brothers.” Sam hesitantly worked the chords to an off-key version of Sweet City Woman.

“Been a while, Burns. Nobody requests The Stampeders anymore.”

“Not since Celine Dion started making the airwaves smell like shit,” Burns quipped. He fumbled for a lighter and gave up. The cigarette wouldn’t draw. It was soaked full of pee. He started chewing it. “There’s always Gordon Lightfoot, I guess.” Burns stabbed his jaw towards the sky. “Some weather, huh?”

Sam reached into his rucksack, pulled out a cowbell tied to a drumstick, slid it across the floor of the car to Burns. “Nothing I ain’t been through before. Didn’t figure on seeing you this side of Norfolk, Burns. I thought you was a DC man.”

“Serves me right going on vacation. You leave town for a Foghat/Grand Funk Railroad reunion tour and wake up with a turd where the back of your head ‘sposta be.” Burns rubbed his skull. It still had an owie. “Been sleeping the big sleep for a while. Mind telling me who’s running this fucking country?”

Sam tried to tune his banjo, but could barely hear Burns yelling at him. “Dick Cheney, but if you mean who the President is, that’d be Bush. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I get all my news from restaurant placemats. That cocksucker still running this country into the dirt? I suppose Dan Quayle’s still on the ticket somewhere. Scullery maid, craphound, Secretary of State.”

“You have been out, Burns. It’s Bush Jr. what’s president.”

“Well, corn my pone! I guess that Silverado Savings and Loan shit is all you need on your resume.”

“Wrong junior, Burns. I’m talking George Junior. Shrub. You know, the one what looks like a monkey?”

Burns thought about that, decided to save the sewage cigarette for when he got to DC. It would taste better there. Sewage usually did. “Okay. I’ll bite. What year is it?”

“Thought you’d never ask. It’s 2005.”

Burns farted. “That sucks. So I’ve been out for about fifteen years. Well, those IRS cocksuckers better not try and make me pay taxes on that shit.” Burns picked up the cowbell, started clanking. “Only one thing left to do now.” He cleared his throat, hocked one on the floor, started to “sing.” “Well I’m on my way-ay…to the cit-tee lights…”

Sam joined in on the banjo. “To the pretty face… that shines her light on the cit-ay nights…” Sam’s E string snapped. “So, headed back to DC, huh? Town isn’t what it used to be, Burns. I guess you figger you got some score to settle.”

“I lost 15 years worth of drinking. Goddamn right I got a score to settle. Got any corn likker in that bindle, Sam?”

“Maybe you ought just let it go, Burns. You can’t talk, fuck, or shoot your way out of this one.”

“You started telling fortunes on the side, Sam? Your mojo bag talking to you?” Burns grabbed his dick reflexively. It was hard. He didn’t know what to do with it. He just got a dumb look on his face and kept rubbing his wang.

“I see things, Burns. I see things that come to pass. You’re going back to the old town, looking for who done you dirt. But it ain’t the same town what you left. Things is changed. You’ve changed. But you’ll dig up your dirt and it’s all going to fall apart in your lap. ‘Cept this ain’t none your stripper friends with jiggly po-pos. This bitch that put you in your place is large.”

Burns scratched his noggin, kept stroking off. “Last thing I remembers was ordering a Sazerac with my pommes de terre souffles at Galatoire’s. The fat frog waiter said they didn’t serve jews, so I took a dump on the floor and headed over to Antoines before the chops showed. Had me two… no… three Beef Wellingtons and pompano en papillote and a bottle of Chateauneuf. I washed that shit down with a couple of Pimms Cups at Napoleon’s. I was still feeling pecker-ish, so I got a muffaletta and bag of Zapps at Central Grocer. Went to waterfront to fuck it when I spotted a sweet lil alabaster goth chick…” Burns got a far away look on his rainsoaked pan, like the kid who shows up at the school bus stop an hour late because hasn’t quite figured out daylight savings time yet.

“And you wake up on the menu.” Sam busted his A string. “What is it with you and pasty face skanks? Don’t you throw a sista in the mix just to break things up a little?”

Burns thought about that one. He went all soft down there. The gaffer was right, all his ladies were whiter than Elmers Glue in a runway model snot storm. They ended up twice as sticky when he was done with them. He made a mental note to take a crack at the first JAP hairtree with a spray-on tan he made eye contact with.

“Maybe you’re right, Sam. I’ve got a known predilection for pasty jailbait with trimmed hedges. If someone wanted to fuck my shit up, all he’d have to do is send some jailbait my way with a halter top and a sap. Next thing I know, she’s shoving my shoe in her pussy while I’m banging her ass. My pud goes all sore like, and everything goes black after that.”

“Yo, man. Why’s it gotta go black?”

Burns shook that one off, rubbed the back of his skull. A flash of pain shot from his head to his dick. “I’m losing my edge.”

“Cain’t lose what you don’t got, Mista Ginsu. Ever thought of retiring?”

“But people need me! Who’ll get sapped if I’m not around? Hollywood? Those fatcats in Washington? Besides, I raided my 401k to buy stock in some Internet company. What’s their name… Netscape? Pets.com? Iomega?”

Sam gave up tuning and started slapping his banjo in time to the wheels clacking on the rails. “Well, I guess changing your mind is pretty hopeless. So, who you think but the hit on you?”

“Jeebus, who wouldn’t? Half the intel industry hates my guts for ratting out their sources. Half the porn industry hates me for giving them the clap. Anyway, that’s their problem. My biggest problem now is finding someone who’ll sell a handgun to a convicted felon.”

Three days later, Burns hooked up with a teenager in Mount Pleasant, bought two Czech 9mms, and three-hundred rounds of armor-piercing ammo. He’d been in town less than 20 minutes. Burns said a little prayer, thanking the Almighty for banning handguns in DC, stopped by a corner bodega for some limes and rock salt, and took the X2 bus to Metro Center.

2007-08-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

One
The Secret Power of Iniquity

Dick Burns was behind the wheel of a dunebuggy, roaring down sanddunes in the Gobi Desert, trying to keep his cigarette lit. He’d raided every tobaccanist in Tibet and finally found the cut of tobacco from the Russian steppes that he preferred. He wasn’t going to let some goddamned stinking pile of mongoloid sand put it out. A bullet chipped his rearview mirror. That made him angry. Tibetan car rental agents were notoriously bitchy about returning damaged property.

He fumbled in the rumble seat for spare clips for his Czech CZ75s. All he found were crushed cartons of cigarettes, empty Parmalat milkboxes, used porn. Behind him, La Petomane, the anarcholesbian epidemiologist, Murder Boy, a pack of CIA monkeybutlers in jetpacks, his third wife, Fleegle, Beagle, Drooper, and Snork were in hot pursuit. They were maniacally careening over the dunes in dirtbikes, Sopwith Camels, HIND attack helicopters, and that pink racecar Penelope Pitstop used to ride in. He remembered that he’d slashed Snork’s tires in a pique of rage at the Teen Spirit Awards, but everybody else was supposed to be dead. Except his third wife: he’d killed her with his bare hands years ago. Then it occurred to him: what would his wife’s corpse want with him in Tibet?

Burns’ buggy sailed over a sand dune ramp, down a valley of crags, and onto the edge of a frozen lake. The lake was split by a rickety pier. It looked as if the pier was trying to make it across the lake, but gave up midway in disgust at its own ineptitude. The horizon was burning the last of its orange, going grey and blank, and Winter was hard on its heels. Soon, everything would be buried in forgetful snow. Something drew Burns to the end of the pier. He squinted hard. It was a chimp in a fez whittling crucifix out of a bar of soap. A limp cigarette dangled from his lower lip. The chimp looked at Burns, then at his pursuers, handed Burns the soap cross, motioned at the lake.

Burns dove in.

He came up in a darkened hospital room, spitting rainwater and what tasted like smoked ass. Not the quality pubescent ass, either. It was that rank homeless ass that’s been stinking up the public library for months. Frantic orderlies wandered from bed to bed, euthanizing patients with whatever they happened to have handy. The lucky ones got massive doses of morphine. The unlucky ones were smothered with pillows. The really unlucky ones were garotted with cinammon dental floss.

Burns’ Young Pioneer training kicked in. He grabbed a heavy bedpan that was full of something and brained an orderly. Grabbing a bundle of catheter tubing, he bound three bloated corpses together, made a makeshift oar out of an IV stand, his bedpan, and a bedside copy of The Nanny Diaries. He shoved his death raft through the shattered remains of the first floor window, out into the raging storm. Somewhere far behind him, above the roar of the deluge, like soft music from a distant room, he heard the faint strains of Led Zeppelin’s cover of When the Levee Breaks.

Burns rowed out of the Ninth Ward as fast as he could. Never cared for that fourth album.

2007-08-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

What if the afterlife was just like life, except more crowded and more hopeless because you wouldn't have death to look forward to because you're already dead?

And what if Heaven was acquired by Hell in a hostile takeover so that they were practically indistiguishable?

And what if a conspiracy of famous dead people wanted YOU to lead a palace coup and lay siege to HellVen, Inc. to restore balance to the Force?

Your name is Dick Burns. You're a dead shamus. You get $25 a day plus expenses. This is your story.

2007-02-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

Act One:
I Am Lashed to the Hull

The only way to barrel down the New Jersey Turnpike is at 2am on a
Friday morning. The white lines in the asphalt race to greet you at 80
mph, like friendly little white bullets racing past. But they never
hit you. There's no impact of lead on flesh, no hydrostatic shock, no
shattering bone, no blood spray. Just you and the backseat and the
streetlights and the white noise drone of rubber on pavement. And you
think for a moment what it would be like to just go ahead and jump the
median and plow into oncoming traffic, but some smart monkey thought
ahead and put a cement wall between you and the northbound lane. But
then you think, it would be so easy to just pull open the door and
slip out into the night air. No more spa vacations with the in-laws.
No more delayed then delayed then cancelled connecting flights in
Newark. No more screaming little bastard in the backseat making
demands without the balls to back them up in a fight. Hell, his balls
won't even drop for another 10 years. Most importantly, no more
barreling down the New Jersey Turnpike at 2am in a rented minivan that
stinks of Subway tuna fish with another couple from your cancelled
flight and their aforementioned grandkid in the backseat.

This is your vacation, and it's ending one second at a time. The
difference between this vacation and a nightmare though is that a
nightmare isn't real and you know it will end at some point. That's
not an option when your flight is cancelled and they're holding your
luggage and you're a 4-hour drive from home. At this point, the
journey isn't the reward. It's punishment for a crime that no one will
explain to you.

A single bright point in this blank grey ocean of a waking nightmare.
When my calcinating bones are rotting in hell, and they give me a day
off for bad behavior, I'm going to get a fifth of whatever liquor they
make in hell and give Heather a call, because I know she will fucking
get in her car and pick my ass up at the airport and drink it with me.
That's just the way she is and we're very lucky to have her. Next time
she gets picked up on a DUI or disturbing the peace or manslaughter,
she knows I will pay her bail.

Act Two:
Among the Living Dead

Fred Allen said that Los Angeles is a great place if you're an orange.
How much truer is that about the orange's other favorite State? If
you're an inanimate object or a piece of fruit or a mortician, the
Geritol Belt is the place to be. Everyone in Florida is rapidly
approaching a vegetative state anyway. Everybody drives like they're
lost on their way to a funeral, and they probably are. The obit
section of the paper is bigger than the classifieds and almost as
entertaining.

DC and Florida share an aspect in that they're both brimming with
death. If DC is an empty sarcophagus, Florida is a stinking shallow
grave covered in driftwood artfully painted teal and salmon. You have
only to look at the museums on the Mall and the cemeteries and the
marble statues and monuments. They may honor a life well-lived, but
they're all about the death. The reason Japanese tourists all wear
suits in DC is to show respect for our ancestors. And Florida is where
Americans go to die, and not well. No Viking funerals here, just acres
of waterfront real estate and bungalows and trailer parks gone to
seed, scattered beneath the shadows of the elms and Spanish moss and
palms. The stench of Ben Gay and Old Spice and suntan lotion struggle
with stale sweat and b.o. and that old people smell that you can't
quite put a finger on and wouldn't want to if you could.

Everyone's either sick or getting sick or just getting better. And
everybody else looks like they're made out of leather, cut from the
same cowhide of suffering with a crookbacked geezer-shaped
cookiecutter.

Is there nothing at all to recommend about Florida? Well, there's
plenty of lonely, scantily-clad members of the opposite sex walking
the beaches, their nubile flesh aching to be touched. But of course,
once you touch it, you have to talk to it, and then they crack a smile
or stroke their mullets or pull out their cellphones and unzip their
mouths like firebuckets, and the spell is broken.

They sell a lot of seafood, so if you like that, you might have a good
time. Then again, it all comes from South America anyway, so you're
better off going there instead and cutting out the middle man. And
that dead fish smell beats the Ben Gay/b.o. smell by a mile.

Surely you could relax and get a good spa treatment? Not when you have
two kids and there's no childcare available and their grandparents
spend all day at tennis camp or in ultra-low-impact water aerobics
where you just sort of bob up and down in a tub like a sad little
buoy, convinced that this is somehow healthy for you.

How about just hanging out at the poolside bar? How can they fuck that
up? Five words: five dollar Bud Lite Ice. Mixed drinks? There's a
reason we drink scotch on the rocks out of a glass; plastic that's
been left in the sun just doesn't taste right. After drinking the
stale of horses, Hannibal would have spat this rotgut out and cleaved
the barkeep's head in twain.

The highlight of the stay was a nice Cuban sandwich purchased at a
stripmall convenience store squashed between a 25-hour laudromat and a
gas station. And if that's not the saddest thing you've heard in a
weak, you are a lucky little person, yes that's what you are.
Basically, its a flattened sub made of roast pork loin, baked ham,
genoa salami, provolone, spicy mustard, and pickles, between Cuban
bread (kind of a thin baguette, with an ultrasoft crust) and pressed
on a pannini grill just enough to melt everything into a soft gooey
mass. Twelve inches of heaven wrapped in wax paper; enough to dull the
pain of existence for a few fleeting moments. The problem with your
most toasted or grilled sandwiches (I'm looking at you Quiznos and
Panera) is that they cut it across and do it open-faced, exposing to
bread to high heat and basically creating a mouth-shredding asswich,
burning the roof of your mouth and searing your flesh. If I wanted a
mouthful of blood I'd go down on my wife during her monthly visit from
Aunt Flo.

Ever waited in line for tickets to an aquarium, only to have the
ticket guy disappear with no explanation, leaving a long line waiting
for nothing? Then you ask the other ticket guy what happened, and she
says he went on lunch. So you yell at this stone face what the hell
kind of operation is that and she just sort of shrugs and ask blankly
how many tickets you want. So you go to your "customer service
representative" (i.e., oily portly teenager straight from central
casting) who just says that he's SUPPOSED to say he's going to lunch
but that he has to go to lunch, because, it's like, lunchtime. At
which point you're hitting the counter with your fist and the
"manager" shows up and offers FREE TICKETS which to you is about as
useful as nipples on men because you're flying out the next day (or,
at least, you think you are, [see Chapter 1]). So you write a tirade
on their How Are We Doing? form letter including expletives about
humiliating pets with whisky bottles and toilet plungers and that
makes you feel a little better.

So, no, there's absolutely nothing to recommend about Florida, except
to stay away, if you value your emotional health and want avoid
banging harangues out on your keyboard.

Act Three:
The Man Who Killed Vacation

The essential part of "vacation" is the root "vacant." Vacations
aren't about going someplace new and doing different things. It's
about escaping the loneliness and emptiness and despair of our
workaday lives. The problem is that it's still there when we get back,
waiting for us at the door tapping its feet, its hair in curlers,
glaring at its wristwatch, holding a rolling pin.

Raymond Chandler said that there's nothing as empty as an empty
swimming pool. Tom Waits said that there's nothing as lonely as a
parking lot after the last car pulls away. In my more lucid moments,
I've been known to say there's nothing as lonely as a monkey on a
pier. But I top them all when I say there's nothing as lonely as a
baggage claim conveyer belt when the last bag is pulled off and you're
standing there staring at it as it comes grinding to a halt and your
luggage is nowhere to be found. It's just you and a dozen other people
looking at the machine blankly as if it were an indifferent chrome
god. If there were a little altar that you could burn incense and
claim tickets and rattle chicken bone rattles, you could at least feel
like you're accomplishing something. Instead, it's just you and these
strangers and the circular chrome god, and the "customer service
representative" with an indecipherable accent thick enough to spread
on toast. We beg her to intercede on our behalf, but her only reply is
that they baggage unloaders can't unload during bad weather, to which
we reply that it's stopped raining an hour ago. She decodes an even
more indecipherable muttered squawk from her walkie talkie. The
priestess has conferred with the luggage gods.

It's like you're those Papua New Guinea aborigines who build straw
airplanes on mountainsides to lure the flying white gods back to
return with their precious cargo. You both have tattoos and you both
have stupid haircuts, but you have a steel piercing instead of a bone
through your nose and even though your technology is marginally better
(can't turn off the annoying new message chime on your Blackberry,
though), you are in the end worse off. The aborigine at least knows
how to hunt with a stick, gut a fish, and start a fire. Without a can
opener and a supermarket, you will starve.

The vacancy extends to your home. You go in order to return, and in
your absence, your house drains itself of what the French call
"presence;" the psychic footprint you leave behind where you live,
breathe, sleep, and eat. So that when we get home, we can go back to
filling it up with our own particular brown aura, that flavor of wet
ashes that poisons everything we touch. But it's your aura. It doesn't
have to be great, or even very good. It just has to be your own. And
that's what it comes down to: vacation isn't about you getting out of
the house; it's about your home getting away from you.

It's been said that the American dream is a labyrinth with no center.
I have no idea what that means, but I think it's a great way to end
this pointless little jeremiad. It also reminds me of a story about
the Zen master Dokuon. Yamaoka, a young student of Zen desiring to
show his enlightenment, said, "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings,
after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.
There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is
no giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quiety, said nothing. Suddenly, he whacked
Yamaoka with his long bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"

Long story short, in the best of all possible worlds, you wouldn't
have to choose between between emptiness, pain, and anger. But if
you're looking for a hot deal on all three, a spa trip to Florida is
the best value for your vacation dollar!

2002-09-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Outside, a warm September afternoon blurs into evening, another Sunday lost. You're listening to the same chill piano piece. You found it on vinyl back in the college record exchange? You've put it on nearly every weekend since, remember? Cool washes of piano chords seem to go with the lazy atmosphere like wine and bread. These moments come fewer as the days seem to drag on before they slowly fade on the edge of memory.

2002-09-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

You're on the road to Connecticut. A baby shower. Yours. The Manhattan skyline creeps along the horizon towards you slowly. But there's something different about it this time. Something's not quite right. Something's missing.

Jersey. 95. A stretch of highway you've humped every other year, the same truckstop diners, the same median strip urinals packed with the same sweaty tourists and crying kids and lines to the women's room. And they never make them bigger because they don't get repeat customers and the locals don't give a fat rat's fart about the median strip urinals that they have the good sense to never use. It's not like they're competing for your urine.

New York. The Deegan Freeway. A right, a left, a cloverleaf, and the skyline fades into the rearview. You're in Connecticut. Again.

2002-05-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

You're waking up in another hotel room. You can tell it's a hotel room by the smell: antiseptic bathroom cleanser, dust, and the cool recycled smell of the air conditioner. There are the same thin drapes, the same square fireproof ceiling tiles, the same gold-toned desk lamp. The mattress squeaks a little as you get up to go to the window. You pull the plastic drap rod and outside it's bright and hot. It's hot, summer probably, and a thin layer of condensation fogs the view above the AC unit which hums relentlessly. You turn the dial to Fan and go to the bathroom. It's still you in the mirror. There's the neatly wrapped, single use cake of soap, the toilet seat sanitized for your protection, the tightly folded bathtowels, handtowels, and floortowels.

A clanging comes from outside, down the center of the street, closer as you approach the window and pull the drapes apart. A streetcar. It creeps along deliberately, pausing at every intersection, blocked by a car trying to cross its path. Tourists (or people playing the part of tourists, complete with video cameras, plaid shorts, and straw hats) huddle around a patch of dead grass and dirt next to the trolly stop. You've seen this before. You've been here. You've waited at that stop, catching the trolley in the opposite direction, towards the university district. That's when you remember. You're in a hotel in New Orleans. Saint Charles Street, because that's where the streetcars run. Now, you only have to figure out why you're here.

Next to the remote control, on top of the laminate cabinet, is a schedule. Music. Jazz Fest. The schedule is thick, fifty pages on newsprint, four color, stapled. But you don't like jazz. Food? You like the food here, but you don't like jazz.

Someone's knocking on the door.
-Yeah?
A woman. You open the door.
-Hey, ready to hit the Quarter? I'm about ready to eat my left leg.
Tall, slim, early thirties, Foster Grant wraparounds, wide brimmed straw hat.
-You ok? You look kinda flushed.
-Took a little nap. The weather...
-Yeah, the heat. So, what'll it be?
-Hm?
-The Quarter? Let's get some lunch.
The French Quarter. They have food. They have booze. Yes. You want to go to the French Quarter.
-Gimme a second.
Keys. Wallet. Sunglasses. Polaroid. Don't forget to slam the door on the way out.

2002-05-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

How can one person cough so hard and yet still show up to work? She sneezes so hard, I expect to see a piece of brain matter fly over her cubicle wall. You could tell her about this thing called “sick leave.” You could leave a note saying that you don’t appreciate having to live in a Petri dish with a floating all-hacking, all-spraying diseasebag. It’s bad enough you’re stuck in a sealed environment with her for 8 hours a day, breathing the same recirculated, sick-building syndrome air. On top of that, there’s the vacuous phone conversations (“How are you? Not much. The kittie did the cutest thing this morning!”), the constant diet soda consumption, the incessant whining about the latest syndrome she’s convinced she’s suffering from which just happened to be on the cover of this months Popular Hypocondriac. The least she could do is offer to pay for the Lysol.

The worst is the nausea inducing infant talk that passes for conversation (loud) with her main pimp daddy. Sicky sweet with just the hint of pedophilia on his part. Much as you try and eliminate the image from your mind, all you can think about as the two of them playing an erotic round of “goldilocks meets the construction worker.”

There’s always been a sickly one. In gradeschool, it was the girl who threw up on every field trip. You could set your watch by it. In college, it was the anemic Deadhead in the food co-op with the “vegetarian” can who died of malnutrition. Today, it’s the neurotic twelve-stepper with the husband 20-years her senior, and the half dozen cats.

Privatizing public space. It makes you want to just stay at home rather than deal with a world of individuals who all act the same.

2002-05-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

You check your bank account and find that you have $912.72 more than you had the day before. Three weeks later, you get a phone call.

-An erroneous deposit was made to your account on April 2.
-That's nice. I suppose you want your money back.
-We will be debiting your account.
-So I guess I'll need nine hundred bucks to cover that.
Silence.
-So, when will this debit happen?
-Uh, hold please.

You check your bank's web page. You have $62 left to last you two weeks. You will have to eat beans. Fortunately, you really like beans.

-Sir?
-Yes?
-When we debit your account, you balance will show a negative.
-Looks like you already debited my account. You always call your customers up after you take their money?

Silence. You tap your desk with your ballpoint pen twice. You imagine what it would be like to shove the pen in the bank teller's eye socket. The car would have to be waiting outside the bank, ready to make a run for the border. It would have to be a good car, an early model Barracuda or a modified Olds 442, something that would leave the unmarked Caprice Classics in the dust. But before you crossed the state line, you'd plow through the tire shredder stretched across the two-lane blacktop. The car screeches to a halt just beyond the roadblock, a cloud of grey rubber smoke and blaring sirens linger in the air as you open the driver's side door and chamber a round.

-Sir?
-Hm?
-I apologize for the error.
-Don't worry about it. Listen, what color eyes do you have?

2002-04-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

Your identity has been reduced to a series of small plastic cards you keep in your right front pocket.

A driver's license.

The head that stares back blankly was yours but isn't yours now. (Did I really have a beard? Was I always clean shaven?) Issued 5/14/99. May. The weather was changing and you were in another line waiting to have your picture taken. You'd spent the morning in another line, just to take a test to prove you knew how to take a test. When your photo is done, you wait in another line for the privelege of giving some ambivalent worker a check. That was you then. Who are you now?

A credit card.

Vacation in London: $1374. Laptop computer: $2275. Fourteen years of revolving credit payoffs at 18%: Priceless. Where did the money go? Where did the stuff go? You should find out.

A money clip.

That was Harry's. Stainless steel with a nail file and cuticle knife. You got it when you helped clean out his place in Connecticut after his wife died and he moved down to Virginia to spend his last days with his daughter. You used to hang out with the old man for lunch. Brought him a small cheeseburger and talk about the goddamn taxes taking a bite out of his ass. Then you'd leave him alone to watch tv and read his Zane Grey novels. He's gone now, buried next to his wife in Connecticut. You haven't had a cheeseburger since.

2002-04-04T20:29:00.000-08:00

You're in a long hallway, seats on either side, staring at the wall.
You have a suit and jacket and tie on. The hallway is crowded with people reading the morning paper or talking on their cell phones or staring blankly at the wall opposite them. Men and women who look like lawyers pass, carrying thick leather portfolios, checking their day planners and handheld computers and cell phones. Their shiny shoes click and echo down the long corridor. All of these lawyers deliberately avoid eye contact with you.

Why are you here? What have you done? If you were under arrest, you'd be in a cell or handcuffs. You would have some sort of police escort. So it's not you that they're after. You're worried about what you've done, but you don't have to worry about THAT. Not for now, at least. But you still feel guilty, just like you did when you were a kid. All that your father had to do was stare at you with that thousand-yard stare and say, "Alright, I know what you've been up to. I'm giving you a chance to come clean." You'd confess to the Lindbergh kidnappings and shooting McKinley, anything, just to avoid having to deal with that stare. Is it any different now?

Obviously, they want something from you. You have to be here, in this place, for a reason. So, it's not what you think it is. It's something much more trivial: a lawsuit maybe, or testimony in a trial. Ridiculous. You can't even remember why you're here, let alone what you think happened. What's the use in calling someone in your condition to give testimony in a case you know nothing about against someone you don't remember for a situation of which you have no memory? Does it even matter? Whatever you say, the lawyers will twist it around to mean what they want it to mean. That's what they get paid to do, manufacture truth out of fragments of memories and scraps of facts the cops dredge from the river with grappling hooks, or that they find lying in the backseat of cars.

You've been here before. Maybe not this place, but this situation. Waiting around with strangers for something to happen, something legal, someone to pass judgment and say you're innocent or you're guilty. Those are pretty big words. This is the place you come for the big words, the final words, the concrete words that make sense of everything. The words that absolve you of your sins or pass judgement on your actions. You will hear these words, but you will have to wait for them.

Maybe it's just a parking ticket. You always appeal parking tickets and moving violations. Half the time, the issuing officer doesn't show up, in which case, the state offers no evidence and you are free to got. Half the time you can bluff your way into having your fine reduced and your points eliminated.

Something's stabbing you in your chest. You fumble for something in your jacket pocket. It's a piece of paper that says you are to report to Room 3130 for jury duty.

2002-04-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

It's like waking up all the time.

One moment you're typing at a flickering flatscreen and the next you're driving down the highway screaming a Grand Funk Railroad tune at nobody in particular because your radio was stolen last week, and yet it's still there like a phantom amputated limb. The gaping hole in the dashboard makes you uncomfortable, so you stuff a small furry parrot puppet into it. You take some solace in this, replacing a gaudy mechanism with something more inviting, trading a wire monkey with the bottle for the fuzzy monkey without. Your life has become a series of such tradeoffs, compromises which you accept with quiet resignation because you've rationalized it's not worth getting upset about.

There's a line from a movie where the old man says that money and time behave like quicksilver in a nest of cracks; when they're gone we can't tell where or what the devil we did with them. He knew whereof he spoke. So rather than look back and wonder, you will reconstruct what little you've kept in mind, assembling this account from scraps and notes that you shore against your ruin. So let's start at the beginning.

You're holding a scrap of fading paper says that you were born on November 5, 1967 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC. That would make you a Scorpio. Your familly lived at 3953 Alabama Avenue, SE, in a three-bedroom detached house. Across the street is Fort Dupont Park, a Revolutionary War-era fort which protected the District from the invading British. When your family left in 1975, the park became a dumping ground for victims of gang slayings.

Your family left for the same reason every middle class family leaves the city: the crime, the taxes, the schools. Later, you would watch the great black flight, as middle class African Americans flooded into Prince George's County. They left for the same reasons. Twenty-five years later, the crime is creeping up, so are the taxes, and the schools consider it a noble achievement to go from 60 percent illiteracy to 30. Six out of ten murder cases are never closed. You can't own a firearm. You were part of the great white flight. Now you're part of the scourge of reverse white flight. You have nowhere else to fly to, so you stick it out and wonder how you ended up here.

There was a basketball court across the street in the park, but nobody every played there. Kids older than you flew motorized model airplanes tethered to a wire. Standing in center court, they'd fire up the gasoline engines and spin in circles while the airplanes, a cross between a sewing machine and a chafing dish, belched smoke in concentric circles. The pilots would stop after half an hour, obviously nauseated by the spinning and the smoke.

Of all the things to remember, why the smell of gasoline engines, the cut grass, dogshit stuck in the nooks of your sneakers? Why the lawnmower buzz, the screaming in the street at midnight, the jackhammers digging up the sidewalks again? They rush at you like the ranting homeless man on the corner, begging your attention because he has to warn you of something vital to the nation's security, but he can't make himself understood. You can only turn your back on them and keep walking, but the more you ignore, the more persistent he becomes. You continue walking and his screaming recedes into the distance.

But there he is again the following morning in the middle of the road with a squeegee.