PISCADORO! book 1: the book of exodus

Piscadoro!  Book 1: The Book of Exodus

      

By Piscadoro King Fisher

 

Spring 2020

1.

Their Cars Shimmering With Bad Vibes As They Pulled Away In The Overdriven Sunlight

This is all true, first of all. I mean, it isn’t entirely factual, it’s fiction, but it’s pretty straightforwardly autobiographical. I changed the names and other details about the people and the places and events, as well as many of my thoughts and feelings on them, but it’s still basically true. It’s subjective but authentic. It’s meant as straight up spiritual autobiography. Sound pretentious? Fuck you. This is how I’m spending my June 2020.  

I’m at my friend Badger’s house in North Carolina writing this up after traveling during April and May. Once it’s done I’m going to try and find the one right person to read it. If that’s you hit me up: I’m Piscadoro Fisher, @Piscadoro on Twitter and Instagram. Full name Piscadoro “King” Fisher. My parents actually gave me King with the quotation marks for a middle name; it’s my legal name. My parents were weird. I grew up in the Fisher crime family in New Jersey. You’ve never heard of us. My mom’s been dead a long time, I still dream about her. My dad’s still alive. He’s an old gangster. I don’t talk to him. I still love crime with all my heart. But organized crime with violently enforced tribal tribute structures? No thank you. Anyway though let me start.

I’ve known plenty of regular people. I’ve experienced normalcy. Normal people. People with tolerable jobs. People with happy families. People with resumes but without criminal records; with bank accounts and driver’s licenses, but without personalities formed by repeat trauma and perpetual displacement; with all their teeth, or most of their teeth, or like over half their teeth; who actually do their laundry regularly; who vote. You know, regular people. Aunt Debbie on Facebook. Her ilk. People who say shit like “I majored in that,” or, “I’m not afraid to acknowledge my privilege,” or, “I love police AND black people and you can unfriend me if this offends you.” But I’m not here to talk about them. Let me tell you about the other people. From the in between spaces in the spring of 2020. 

That spring was a time of plague and riot during which people commonly invoked the apocalypse and the end times in conversation from the most casual to the most serious. Things had changed. People had stopped going to work and school and out to eat and drink and shop, and now they stayed home and learned to hate their families, succumb to addiction, spend too much time online, and get fat. But some of us were out living on the streets because we were poor, or homeless, or crazy, or criminal, or maybe just bad as fuck at life, or abused, or oppressed, or lost, or some combination of all those things. Soon the protests would come, and some pretty sweet riots, but I’d be out of the city and here in the sticks by the Great Dismal writing this book by then. 

Back in April I’d been living in Tucson working as a caregiver for my friend Denise’s disabled son, Mikey. Denise was letting me live in the shed she’d converted into a tiny house. I was on call at the residence and also did shifts I got paid cash for. I didn’t have my certification so Denise had to pay me out of pocket. If I’d had my certification I could’ve gotten paid with state funds through the agency she used. I’d done caregiving for Mikey before though and we got along really well. I had been like family to Denise and Mikey for years really. Denise had worked smuggling drugs for my family in the 80s and 90s. Now she was my landlord and employer. 

She got the quarantine madness pretty bad. She became increasingly panicked, paranoid and authoritarian. Every single day she complained at length about how nobody else was doing enough. She called her own son a parasitic retard. I think she was constantly afraid she was doing everything wrong so she had to criticize everyone around her. That seems common, I don’t know, maybe I’m projecting or whatever. Anyway I was living under strict regulations, isolating myself and doing the full quarantine bit with mask and gloves and social distancing and the rest. Mikey had a seriously compromised immune system so he was at increased risk of death if he got The Rona. The Covid 19. I sometimes call it The Rona. Mikey had a rare genetic disorder. But he wasn’t really Denise’s main concern. She was convinced she was going to get it and she got increasingly paranoid and panicky about it. The vibes got bad. I made some bad decisions.

I ended up losing my shifts and getting kicked out at the ass end of a vodka bender that had come on the ass of a bout of dopesickness that had come on the ass of a bout of morphine and Valium that had come on the ass of a bout of heroin that had come on the ass of a bout of bad vibes right. I’d stolen Denise’s morphine and Valium murder-suicide stash. The suicide stash had always been very important to her but had become even moreso now during the pandemic. She was terrified of hospitals and believed the world was ending. She couldn’t entirely help it, she’d been shaped by repeat trauma and perpetual displacement and becoming single mom to a severely disabled kid at 19, among whatever other challenging things. (I on the other hand could’ve helped it, but did not.) For decades now she’d been keeping end of the world kits (she always had at least one) and always had several different plans for where to flee when society collapsed, which she’d been kind of obsessively anticipating her entire life. She’d showed me one of her end of the world kits the last time I’d lived with her before this most recent time. She’d kicked me out that time too! That had been in 2015. 

I ended up there again in April 2020, in the shed. I just wanted to wait for my stimulus money but it didn’t come in until after I fucked up and got kicked out and moved in with Trinity, a prostitute and meth enthusiast twenty years younger than I am. I’ll get to that. But so I ended up on the streets a few days again, for the whatevereth time in my life. It wasn’t too bad. Trinity had already told me I could crash with her. When you have somewhere to go a few nights on the street is more like urban adventure camping you know. Trinity liked my music. She’d found me on Bandcamp and then on Twitter and she’d followed me and atted me and such. I’m a bard. We’d been talking for a while online and I knew she lived in Tucson too. So I moved in with her. That was cool until I met Angel. I left Trinity and stayed at a seedy motel for five days or so before catching the Greyhound east to Badger’s in North Carolina where I’m writing this now. 

I feel like I can’t tell this in the order that it happened. My memory of the events is more spiral shaped. It’s all very vivid but it’s jumbled and swirled, intense yet fragmentary. Hard to think about the charged parts. The chaotic intensities. I’ve always been too sensitive; I’m working on it. My memories re order themselves according to some more important internal principle than simple chronological contiguity. My issues. The internal principle of my fucking issues is kind of what ties it all together. These memories are overwhelming because of the guilt about having been bad, the trauma of having bad stuff happen, and my inability to tell the one from the other. Memory is just too much in general I think. But so the guilt and the trauma both have the same effect of fragmenting and re ordering my memory according to the internal principle of my fucking issues. 

So this is out of order, but I’ll start with the memory that burns most brightly in the dream of it to me now. A month ago, in May, in 2020, the year of plague and riots, during the plague but before the riots. Denise had already kicked me out, and I’d already left Trinity. I was now leaving Tucson. I mean, I never really leave or stay anywhere, I’m like weather, I come and go and live all over. But in a more literal sense I was now leaving Tucson. 

So was Chloris. Chloris had been homeless in Tucson and now she was heading to Florida. She’d leave her husband behind at the Greyhound station. He couldn’t afford a ticket. She’d gotten travel money from a church on account of she was pregnant. She had family in Florida. She was 8 years younger than I was but looked 25 years older. She loved cigarettes. She smoked a lot. She asked about smoke breaks a lot. She wasn’t real healthy, Chloris. She was cool though, I liked her. She’d had a rough life. She and her husband had been living in their car but it had broken down so they’d been living in parks and vacant lots. She told me the Arizona National Guard had been raiding the main homeless parks, like Armory Park and the park at 6th and Speedway, because of the Covid. 

She already had grandkids at 37 and was fixing to have another regular kid. She smoked too much for a pregnant woman in my opinion. She had blood clots in her legs and lungs caused and aggravated by smoking. When she first told me she was pregnant she was smoking outside the bus and I didn’t say congratulations, I smiled and said “Oh, nice,” nodding vacuously to hide the sense of dread I felt for the future kid. He’d probably end up like me. That’s no way to go through life.

We helped each other travel. I watched her stuff when she asked me to and we vetted the other passengers and tried to figure things out together. She’d really wanted to get a ticket for her husband. They hadn’t been apart since they’d married ten years before. She’d been clean off heroin three months. I hadn’t been clean that long yet at this time. I’d lost my damn home and was out on my ass in the plague and riot vectors. 

Because of The Rona we had to wait outside the station in the southern Arizona heat until it was only two hours to departure before we could go inside the building. Once we were allowed in we’d have to wear masks. We were also supposed to wear masks on the bus. Most people didn’t stick to that program. So it goes!

It’s been long enough now that I know I didn’t get The Rona during my time in the plague vectors. I’m writing this sentence in mid June a full month after boarding that bus in mid May. I’m in rural North Carolina, I just bathed in the rain with some cute little cats who like water. Man these two cats love the rain it’s wild. It’s so wet here. The contrast with Tucson is stark. Water and fire. 

That reminds me of Dolores.

Before I’d even arrived at the Tucson station, this obviously disturbed and strikingly pretty young woman, fresh out of 72 hour psychiatric hold, had, Chloris would later tell me, falsely accused Chloris’s husband of rape, and the cops had come. I arrived at around three in the afternoon just as the cops were pulling out, their cars shimmering with bad vibes as they pulled away in the overdriven sunlight. 

That’s when I met Dolores. She came and sat down next to me. I didn’t yet know that the cops I’d seen leaving had shown up because she’d been yelling and screaming. I’d been sitting peacefully on a bench keeping a safe distance from others per standard social distancing principles that were popular at the time, and I had all my worldly possessions with me in my two bags: my old black leather messenger bag and my fly new Adidas duffel bag that this rich Asian chick from Seattle had given me back in March. Dolores walked up and stood in front of me, close and awkward, so that her crotch was kind of in my face.

“You look generous,” she mumbled disjointedly. Seemed hookerish. She sat down next to me and immediately started touching me, putting her hand on my shoulder, then my elbow. “I see fire and water in you,” she said. “They come together in a snake hiss rising.” 

“People always tell me that,” I said. 

“No they don’t,” she said flatly, then laughed quietly, putting her face close to mine. I could smell her breath, I could not smell if the virus was in it. It smelled hot yellow. “This is the year,” she said ominously. It was all extra weird because everyone else outside the station had been pretty conscientious about the social distancing and such. 

I tweeted about her touching me and breathing on me. One of my Twitter friends told me I had to get away from the woman. She had a point but I didn’t listen at first. 

She asked me: “Can you take me to a liquor store?” 

“It’s too far to walk with all my stuff,” I said. “You can take the bus a few blocks and there’s a Circle K and a Seven Eleven right across from each other though.” 

“The bus?” She shrugged. She seemed discouraged. She stared at the sky and I saw the sky reflecting in her eyes and in the reflected sky I saw a flock of birds but then I turned to look at the sky itself and there were no birds. 

I turned back and said: “It’s free, because of the virus.”

She touched my face. I didn’t pull away. She caressed my cheek and my dick twitched in my shorts. She had disturbingly perfect skin; it glowed softly as if with some inner light. She had beautiful bone structure and natural facial contours. She had longlashed, almond-shaped eyes, big and strikingly bright green like polished agate. Vivid. But as vivid as those eyes were they were also somehow simply not there. Her soul was lost on some plane between this one and somewhere wholly other. In those eyes I saw that she was lost and suffering and would be difficult for others to deal with her entire life, but that none would have so much difficulty with her as she would with herself. She stopped touching me and stared off into the shimmering heat. She talked to herself loudly. She spoke in a weird, disturbing way, very disjointed and volatile. Brimming with pain and anger. I started messing with my phone.

“Be careful!” she urged me, regarding the phone. 

“I am! I promise,” I said. That seemed to satisfy her. She started looking at her own phone and talking as if carrying on a conversation, but the phone was off and the screen was dark. She was psychotic, and not in the cool way that we all love and enjoy. The vibes were bad. Sometimes on journeys like this vibes are what you go on. That and people online telling you what to do. But so I took all my possessions and fled courageously, perhaps even heroically, first to a nearby Del Taco, then to a solitary spot behind some dumpsters where I befriended a mourning dove. Before long dolorous Dolores was yelling at some new police who’d shown up for some reason. It hadn’t been long at all since the police from before had left. But here we were. I didn’t watch directly but I listened from my spot tucked away in the shade of the dumpster.

“Hey! I got a big pussy! You wanna fuck this pussy?” she yelled. I was impressed at how loud she could yell. The cops fled immediately. Completely understandable in my opinion. She hadn’t actually seemed like she had a particularly big pussy to me. And she hadn’t actually been offering her pussy to those police men. She was going through some shit. She had some fucking issues. I reckoned she’d had some serious trauma in her life and would, sadly, experience more in the future. Chloris’ husband hadn’t raped her, but bad things had happened in her life, and more bad things would happen. A lot of people out there are beautiful and broken, but few so strikingly as Dolores.

A little later I saw her notice me when she came out of the Del Taco, which was take out only because of The Rona. Anyone coming out the side door had a straight on view of my spot. She saw me sitting against the wall taking pictures of that beautiful mourning dove as it strutted through the shadow of the dumpster toward the light. Thankfully she ignored me and walked back to the station. I breathed a sigh of relief. 

The dove is a symbol, perhaps even the very vessel of, the holy spirit. People say this about a few other birds too. The blue tit is the real one according to an old orthodox monk I once knew. That guy didn’t know blues or tits like I do but I think he was onto something. You ever seen a blue tit? A beautiful bird! But this dove was the one for now. The symbol, or even the very vessel, of the holy spirit. Dolores, she was the symbol or even the very vessel of something else. 

So we get inside the station and things are chill for a bit, but just before boarding, this scraggly woman a few seats down from me confronts a man and loudly accuses him of using her credit card to buy a bus ticket. He says his boyfriend bought it for him. They start cursing each other out. She gets in his face and pushes him. He punches her across the face hard. She’s no rookie to getting punched and takes it like a champ, refusing to fall down or even briefly shut up. An uninterrupted flow of colorful invective pours forth from her in a cataract. As impressive and reassuring as that part is to me, I find this situation unacceptable. He should not have punched her. I get up and yell loudly at them to stop. The security guard in the station just watches and  chuckles. He’s seen worse and knows not to get caught up in physical disputes because of the liabilities and such. So the cops showed up again but this time they did not flee. They tried to take statements. It was hard to make sense of at first. Everything had been caught on the security camera but we’d never get to see that. 

Chloris told me later on the bus that the woman had bought the man’s ticket herself but then accused him of fraud because her husband had unexpectedly shown up at the station fresh out of prison a little earlier than expected. The man who punched her had been her boyfriend on the outside while the husband was inside, but then once the husband showed up she tried to set the side piece up for fraud. It was like she was doing a prison exchange program with dick, trying to send the side dick up the river now that the main dick had come back down. Lmao. I’ll never see them again. Though our time was brief I won’t forget them. Some memories just burn more brightly and fade more slowly don’t they. Tucson Greyhound mid May 2020. There were no regular people left. They’d been filtered out. Here were only the homeless, the criminal, the strung out, the insane, and me.

 

2.

People Are The Trip

Chloris, Dolores and I all boarded the same bus. Dolores would have crying fits in between bouts of loudly sassing the bus driver, who’d understand that while difficult she was a child of god and did not need harsh discipline but genuine compassion. He would not kick her off. Eventually she’d disappear into the streets of El Paso in search of heroin. This dude Whitey, who I’ll get back to, whose phone I think Dolores stole, would joke that she was definitely going to get human trafficked into Mexico. 

I sat next to a friendly Native American dude who said his name was Red. Just a nickname he said, but he liked it. Seemed problematic to me, an Indian calling himself Red. Like a black guy saying oh hi my name’s Nigga. I don’t know, maybe not. Sorry. I don’t know how to talk or behave. I shoot dope and sleep in parks. I do crimes. I love the silent roar of death around the corner. That silent roar is my wife. She is with me when I see the holy spirit by the dumpster in the form of a friendly mourning dove and it makes my soul swell. She is with me when I wander the scrapyards, the cactus patches, and the far orbits of the strangest planets, in search of new forms. She was with me on the Greyhound bus.

Red had a broad thoughtful face and shoulder length black hair. Red had blood clots in his legs and lungs same as Chloris. (They took the same kind of  blood thinners, it turned out, though she took more per day.) Red was real big, he’d been a star quarterback playing at the Circle of Tribes high school up in Minnesota. Body of a once great athlete gone to seed. Fifteen or so years ago he’d had a full scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. The Sooners. A good division one team! But he got kicked off the team for drugs and not long after that he ended up in prison for five years. I didn’t ask what for. My guess was interstate drug stuff. Weed probably. You never know though, five years could be something like aggravated assault. Coulda been racketeering or bookmaking or something. He was a gambler, he loved gambling on sports. He didn’t dress fancy but he did wear a gold Rolex that he mostly kept concealed under the sleeve of his hoodie. He was really nice to me right away. He was generous to both me and Chloris. He bought us both food and cigarettes.  

I could tell he kinda liked me sexually but I wasn’t into it. Later, after we’d friended on Facebook and he’d seen my pictures he’d ask why I hadn’t told him I was gay. I wouldn’t feel like going into detail about my gender and sexuality but I’d say yeah I’m queer or whatever. Queer can be almost anything. He’d tell me he was bisexual and wished I would’ve told him when we were riding together. I apologized. I wear pretty nail polish and I’m part chick but I present as straight masculine mostly, which is how I like it. He wasn’t my type anyway. He was all grimy from being on the bus so long. He had acne on his lip, I didn’t want that. He had borderline personality disorder too, per his own words, and had been involuntarily committed and done a 72 hour hold not too long ago after ingesting way too many of his Seroquel in what other people called a suicide attempt but which he described as “just trying to get to sleep.” Seroquel is a pretty powerful antipsychotic. There were no regular people on this bus. I have nothing against psychotics and people with borderline personality disorder (I probably have most personality disorders, we’re all walking personality disorders here, we all have some fucking issues) but sometimes I don’t want someone getting too into me because we might end up hurting each other. But I liked him. 

We were bus buddies, we stuck together. It’s good to have a bus buddy among all the other criminals and psychotics just in case. I like the in-between people, they’re my family: addicts, beggars, prostitutes, thieves, wanderers, psychos, parolees, escapees from hospitals and rehabs, people with track marks and tooth gaps and no more septums; the post traumatic, the mid traumatic, the always about to be traumatized; the poor, the ungrammatical, the oppressed, the outcast, the disabled, the desolate and the lost: all my family. But I mean I don’t trust my family not to rob me or hustle me or sucker punch me or stab me out of nowhere. That’s just not how our family is. We’re not regular people.

Red and I talked about sports a little and then about trying to sleep with people from online. That’s usually pretty fun though it can be trouble. I’d recently fled from that kind of thing with Trinity before leaving Tucson. I guess I don’t really do stuff where I can’t get in trouble. I like the delirium where the fire and water come together in a snake hiss rising.

Chloris got a little weird when I said I was a writer collecting stories. She unleashed a barrage of traumatic biography, just an utter hurricane of human suffering. And while I value people’s traumatic stories I’d rather that all emerge organically within the course of more relaxed anecdotal conversation. I mean people unload I get it. Like this one time, my dude Hoppy back in Tucson, gave me mad detail on when he accidentally called an airstrike in on himself and his own men and killed two of his own and lost his leg back in 1969 in Viet Nam. I think he was known as Hoppy because he hopped a bit when he walked. When he told me I was high on lsd and he was drunk. There was a nine year old kid with us who found the traumatic details thrilling because he didn’t understand the pain and loss of it all. I miss Hoppy. He lived in a trailer out by the wash at Ajo and Interstate 10. 

Chloris had kids by a man other than her husband but she’d left the baby dad on account of he’d been fucking her mother. She’d walked in on them in flagrante one time and she told me all about it. I wonder if Chloris is ok now. 

Red eventually checked in to a hospital in Florida because his leg got hard and swollen and he got worried the blood clots would break up and he’d die of an embolism or some shit. I can’t tell if that’s a huge risk for him but he always seemed kinda fixated on it. He smoked a lot too. He told me via Facebook Messenger that at the hospital they told him they couldn’t do much for the blood clots  if he was on his meds already. 

He was trying to meet up with a woman in Florida. She was very pretty and they’d dated previously. They’d met in a psych ward in Minneapolis. She’d been involuntarily committed for stalking a boyfriend. She’d lit many candles in his driveway, she’d gone to his church and confronted him loudly. Those seemed like red flags to me but Red seemed to like her. So it goes! 

I haven’t even told you about Whitey and Yolandi yet. Real meth people. Whitey was about 5’ 6” and 120 pounds. Very energetic. He was just about the palest, blondest person I have ever seen. Not albino, just freakishly white. The finest blondest blonde hair I have ever seen on a grown man. He was covered in bad tattoos,  just a terrible mess of poorly drawn blue ink that looked like it was done by someone in prison who hadn’t gotten good at tattooing people yet. Shitty pentagrams, a blotchy clown, a pathetic flying dragon. Like hurried etchings in a bus station toilet stall. I guess they kinda worked on him, but still. He vibrated with amphetamine energy. He would’ve been scary if he were bigger. He and Yolandi were both convicts and had gotten out fairly recently. 

Whitey was a traveler, a petty criminal, a seasonal worker and day laborer. He’d been a smuggler, a dealer, a general purpose petty criminal, a landscaper, a roofer, a carnival worker, a pimp. He was from Arkansas. He identified as poor white trash. He’d eventually tell me his own family was worse than he was, that they were too trashy even for him. Yolandi’d say people in Memphis say people in Arkansas all marry their relatives. Whitey had grown up in Little Rock, the only white kid among black folks, which helped to explain why he talked like one of those white guys who talk real black, you know. He was actually really entertaining when he wasn’t annoying or acting extremely suspicious. Yolandi had a black-sounding name but she was pale as porcelain, which made sense in a way because she talked like a toilet. She looked like Yolandi from the band Die Antwoord, if you’ve seen her, but that was just a coincidence. She’d died her hair pink, purple and blue, like Harley Quinn from the comics and movies, and tied it back in two festive buns. 

Whitey’d been in prison just recently. I didn’t ask what for. He’d been caught in Minnesota and extradited to Louisiana at some point, but now he was traveling out of California to Arkansas. I don’t know man. He was going to see his mother. He was supposed to be trying to mellow out and come off the meth. Yolandi had also been in prison fairly recently. She had stories about her celly or cellmate talking in a funny way. 

She was doing a better job of coming off the meth than Whitey was. He was obviously still hitting it. He was clearly too agitated on the bus. She was getting cold and tired. She and Whitey seemed like an item but she was traveling back to her husband in Memphis. She was in trouble with the husband and was sure he was going to beat her ass when she got home, but she had to go home anyway. She Facetimed her girlfriend and asked her to get her some purp. 

Whitey was saying that he was not afraid of Covid 19, Covid 19 was afraid of him; that he would lead the army of the apocalypse; that he was a professional ass eater; that he had invented breathing; and that he thought someone had hidden his phone in the seat behind him, which he was dismantling in search of the phone he’d never find because the beautiful and sadly destroyed Dolores had swiped it. Chloris would say later that she’d seen Dolores with 4 phones in her hands, clutching them to her breast as she wandered off into the El Paso night in search of heroin. Whitey joked that Dolores would be kidnapped and human trafficked and laughed at his own joke about it, and then commented on his own wild sense of humor, but then finally became serious and went on to say that he didn’t believe she took his phone even though Chloris said she saw it with her own eyes. He dismissed her assertion and got all into talking about working as a gigolo and making pornography. He said he knew how to give an orgasm through anal every time no matter who the partner. 

An old Navajo woman seated just a few rows back, across the aisle from her young grandchildren, who could hear everything, asked him to keep it down in front of the children. It didn’t work. He was too agitated. All twitchy and sweaty and talking constantly. Yolandi would chime in with impressively filthy rejoinders, which were entertaining, but I felt bad about the kids and grandma.

Whitey’s father had been a meth cook and Whitey first used methamphetamine at the age of ten. Whitey described his dad as sleepless, crazy and violent. Said he let livestock live in the house with them. Even hogs. Not like cute pet pigs, not Vietnamese potbelly pigs, but real Arkansas hogs. He let other livestock live in the house too. Goats. A damn mule. Animals like that are beautiful in their own way but, among other things, they are not often housebroken. 

Sometimes Whitey’d joke about “home cookin.” That usually means a meal from mom made just for you or some shit, and implies hominess and comfort and a loving household; but the joke was, when he was growing up, “home cookin” meant making meth. That one cracked me up. I would not have trusted Whitey around my valuables or my girlfriends or anything I cared about at all really, but we got along alright on the bus. He talked a lot. 

I mentioned heroin at some point and told me of an abandoned house in Fresno California with a ten pound brick of black tar heroin in it. He said it was still there, I told him no way, heroin doesn’t just sit around. He guaranteed me it was. I asked when the last time he saw it was and he said three years ago. I laughed at him and he became indignant. I didn’t worry about angering him, he weighed 120 pounds at most and his weapons were under the bus, and he had hollow bones like a bird, and most importantly of all, he wanted me to respect and admire him. He looked up to me for some reason. Dudes will do that sometimes. It’s weird.

Before prison Yolandi had been a stripper. She had a nice petite yet curvy body and really nice nails and a crazy filthy way about her, but she had the kind of face that looked wrong. The proportions were all off, the nose and chin too small and the eyes too sunken and strange. Perhaps she’d been exotically beautiful at one time but now she seemed like a meth goblin. She kept asking the bus driver to turn up the heat, said she had rheumatoid arthritis and it was cold and making her bones hurt. She literally had layers and a blanket on her and I was sweating in my gym shorts and T shirt. Skinny girls coming off meth get cold easily. 

Whitey said again: “I ain’t scared of Covid, Covid is scared of me!” but that was the meth talking I think. He wasn’t as fearless as he presented himself. He was scared to see his mom because he had guilt and shame about his life. Rightly so I imagine. For whatever cool crimes he told me about in his braggadocious manner I surmised that there were much less cool crimes involving the kind of predatory sadistic acts that men like that won’t always speak of as readily around someone like me who, while of these spaces and by no means a straight or a square, has the aura and demeanor of someone who does not think, for instance, that rape is cool and worth bragging about. But Whitey had those vibes ok. But he grew up in violence in a meth lab with hogs and goats and has probably been violated himself his whole life in various ways. Those vibes don’t happen in a vacuum. 

Have you read the Book of Revelation? Do you think these are apocalyptic times? Do you see apocalypse and revelation as more of an end or a beginning? They’re both. It’s all happening every moment, the flaming swords and the demons, Gabriel’s horn and Satan’s pride, the testing of the human soul and the love of Christ shining through and always and ever returning like the sun. I mean I’m not a Christian really, but I exist in the revelation and I see the fire of spiritual becoming and the battle of evermore in even the tiniest and lowliest of things. I’m aware it’s because I’m insane. I’m not regular people. Not “mentally ill,” mind you. I live on a different plane between the mundane and the utterly transfigured, where truth and beauty converge in the unbelievable and unbearable, where the terrifying and the miraculous copulate and breed, and where enlightenment gestates in passion and violence, and is born wailing and gnashing its teeth. 

 

3.

Angelology at Trinity

Allow me to explain.

So I Left the land of needles and dust, of dry heat and drug smugglers, of ultraviolet radiation and desert drifters; I left the city of Tucson, Pima County in the Sonora desert, the state of Arizona. The bus pulled away and things moved forward but my mind was in reverse. I remembered back to before the Greyhound trip when I’d lived with Trinity, in particular this encounter with an aspiring pimp named Angel who’d challenged me to a fight. Kind of a crazy situation I guess but also kind of normal for my life at the time? The previous few years had all been crazy. I’d been getting in and out of trouble at an alarming rate. Disaster and redemption were always just around the corner.

But so in April I’d moved in with a prostitute named Trinity. That’s a biblical name but also a trashy whore name, as happens. She let me live there for free. 

One day as I’d washed her feet and begun to shave her legs, she’d explained to me: “The real holy trinity’s these three holes baby,” and opened her legs briefly, suggestively, but then gracefully returned them to the right position for me to groom them. Like a butterfly briefly adjusting its wings while perched on an enormous flower growing out of a septic leach field. (This bathroom was certainly no garden! I mean, there was a pile of dirt with a small plant growing out of it in the corner behind the door, but that was filth. That was no houseplant! She neglected and killed her houseplants without exception. She lived in utter squalor, it’s part of why I found value in carefully grooming her. )

I told her to sit still because I was about to work her cuticles with the dentist tools. I used her name as much as possible when I spoke to her. I loved her name so much. Something about that double sense of it was so beautiful and true. Yea though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death the whore is my shepherd I shall not want. This is how romantic I can be sometimes from within a situation that I just know will wilt as suddenly and impressively as it has bloomed. We were lovers but it wasn’t serious, we were more close friends who fucked sometimes. She let me groom her. I finished her cuticles but would not paint the nails until I finished everything else and she did her make up.

She was sitting on the toilet and I was sitting in the bathtub with her foot cradled in my hand as with the other hand I ran the razor down the lather on her shin, shaving her. I always did the shin first to get it out of the way. I like the backside, the calf, the gastrocnemius, so much more than the shin on the front. The shin is flat and bony, the calf is fleshy and curvaceous. 

She was special, but I knew it couldn’t last. We’d hung out a lot and had gotten very close very quickly, which had been foolish. She told me to stay as long as I wanted and not to worry about rent. We both had SNAP benefits so food was plentiful. We had wifi. We had weed. 

When she had to use the apartment to fuck for money I’d go out and wander the streets, maybe get a snack or a drink and sit in a shadow with wifi I could use. It was already hot in Tucson, this was late April early May, a hundred degrees by noon was pretty normal. There was an LA Fitness gym just down First Ave from the apartments that was closed because of the plague but still had wifi. There weren’t a lot of other people and nobody ever hassled me for loitering. I  always looked fit and well groomed. Being fit and well groomed gets you preferential treatment. But so while I was fucking around online sitting on the sidewalk outside the LA Fitness, Trinity would trick in the bed we usually slept in together. I liked sleeping in that bed and I never felt bad about her working in it as long as it didn’t smell. I don’t know how she kept it from smelling, she didn’t wash the sheets much, that’s for sure. I didn’t think about it. I liked the bed. I read her Aeschylus in that bed. Aeschylus is real. Aeschylus is truer than the newspapers, Aeschylus is truer than science. This story is true in that sense, the sense of Aeschylus. 

But so anyway I went out one day so she could work. It wasn’t bad out, it wasn’t overly hot. I liked visiting my spots, like the dove who sat in a nest in a tall saguaro outside the Circle K down the next block, and the dusty lot where prairie dogs played among prickly pear in bloom. Plus I had fun chatting with friends online. They were surprised that I’d gone from lockdown level quarantine life to living with an escort and wandering the streets every day. 

So that was all pretty cool. Then one day I get home and there’s this guy still there. He’s a big fella, bigger than I am. His name is Angel, he’s in a red track suit with a Chicago Bulls baseball cap with the brim flat. He’s a low level gangster and pimp, he’s smoking meth with her. They have porn playing on the computer. These are bad signs. When I first moved in with Trinity she was mostly off the meth and trying to stay clean and I told her if she got all tweaky I’d jet. 

Now here she is with this dude. He’s polite at first. He says he likes my music, which she has played for him. Very nice of her, I think. Personally, just speaking for myself here, as an artist it always feels good to experience appreciation for your work from an unexpected source. The thing is, I can tell, like, she actually loves the music and played it for him, but he’s telling me he loves it to play her, and to play me. It’s disappointing, when you realize just five milliseconds (I can swing from naïve to cynical and back in five milliseconds) after you thought you were experiencing appreciation from an unexpected source that some hustler is just trying to play you. But what still warms my heart and to a lesser extent my testicles about it is that regardless of this other guy it was still nice of Trinity to do and it came from her heart. 

The vibration in the room is just terrible though. This fuckin guy. I really don’t trust him. Trinity is looking at me all hangdog and apologetic and yearning for forgiveness, and I realize that Angel probably bullied her into letting him stay. He won’t leave. She’s like… it’s so weird how she can swing from so strong to so weak, so genuinely confident to so genuinely self loathing, in the space of five milliseconds. She was high as hell too, her skull was crackling, her hair was at a rolling boil. It made her expression of contrition all the more moving, and made all the more moving the realization I had that I would soon have to leave her and that if all that happened was the discomfort of trying to get a big dumb bully on meth to leave the apartment by way of my trademark conversational unction and sewer poet charm, then that was a small fee for a big lesson, and that I should thank the archangel Michael.

This Angel, unfortunately, is not Michael. I mean, Michael could kick his ass. Michael is the greatest warrior in this or any world. Michael could easily defeat Chuck Norris for instance. Michael expels Satan from heaven every moment of every day of creation and handles other things all the while, etc. But an angel who respects both you and his own Lord will not just save you constantly, for that is the Lord’s and the Lord’s only, and yours is only to gape your own heart and let the light pour in. Michael will like, associate with you if you are always wandering around his workplace, which is the revelation, the apocalypse, which I am, but he will not just swoop in and save you from human sin or suffering. 

This Angel, the one in Trinity’s apartment with me, is big for a Mexican. They tend to run smaller in my experience. He’s as tall as I am, 6’ 1”, but thicker. He’s doughy, especially for a tweaker, but I can tell he’s strong. He acts tough. He has a good bit of swagger to him. It isn’t artful or subtle, it isn’t cool like when a popular musician does it. It really just ham-handedly but effectively communicates to you that he thinks he could beat you up and dick down your girl if he wanted. It doesn’t seem fake, but he’s on meth, which makes losers confident. 

I’m tryna figure out if he’s armed. I’m almost sure he isn’t. He’s a dealer and a tweaker so I figure he has that kinda stuff in his pockets, like an extra glass pipe and an extra lighter and maybe some little bags. But I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a gun or even a knife. There’s nothing heavy in his clothes except his body. Maybe he doesn’t want a weapons charge if he gets busted, that makes sense. He’s big and if he likes to bully whores he can just do that by hand or verbal intimidation. But so I determine he’s not armed and I take my own force capacity into consideration. I’m pretty sure I can get to the fire extinguisher about ten feet away on the kitchen wall to beat him with if I get the jump on him. In the course of doing these things you need to keep a part of yourself that thinks clearly up in the foreground of your personality as fear scratches furiously at the door like a panicked animal in the background. 

I stay cool. I’m sitting crosslegged on the flat futon. I can spring into action from sitting crosslegged as I am something of a yogi but it’s not really a good position to get in a fight from. You can’t hit well, you need to pull the other guy down and switch places with him and kick him. That’s my method anyway. That would be tricky from this spot I’m in now though because of the low ceiling, the clutter and the close walls. I hate fighting, I don’t like that energy on an emotional level ok. Fortunately I am something of a thug whisperer and can use the force aka language to just talk a better situation into being. He’s big and acts tough but he’s not that smart or sure of himself. Like the meth is doing the heavy lifting I think. He’s probably punched more people than I have and to greater effect, but I am less lost and more lucid than he is at this moment in time and I can tell he’s basically a loser even if he’d very likely dominate me in a physical confrontation. 

And there’s that smell of meth. Like the gears grinding at the heat factory with the mad scientist locked in the main office twisting all the dials back and forth. That smell specifically. 

But so he comes on friendly first, which I distrust immediately in a manner that I hope is subtly visible to him. He’s a goon but goons can have impressively doglike sensitivities to nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body language. And of course some people are fully used to being distrusted immediately. 

He smokes me up with some weed oil, tells me to smoke as much as I want, so I smoke some and like, it’s supposed to be some wax and I can taste the thc, but it doesn’t really make me more agreeable or easy to intimidate. It just makes everything seem a little more dangerous and disturbing. Like it’s plague season, the Covid done infected America 2020, and this man seems to me like a walking disease, and I’m putting my mouth on the small, dick-like mouthpiece of his vape rig. So be it. So it goes! Everything now with more frisson, jouissance, thrill, risk, precum. 

But I don’t get carried away. He’s trying to loosen me up and get me nice and high so he can be in control, I can tell. It’s in the air, that’s the vibration. And only now does it dawn on me: He wants to fuck me too. He wants me and Trinity at the same time. He doesn’t overtly ask just yet but I realize that he will. No thank you, good sir, I find you disgusting. 

He talks about how he’s going to fix Trinity’s life up, says he’s gonna move in and clean up and help Trinity make money. Make pornography with her and work parties and such. This guy has some dreams. I can tell he’ll never actually help Trinity clean up anything about her life. 

I actually helped her. I cooked for her, I helped her sleep, I’d kept her off the hard drugs for two weeks. I’d cleaned the kitchen and bathroom when they were at legit hazmat levels from decaying food, standing water, clogged drains, even sewage. Eventually I hit a point where it was fine with me even though it was still a mess. I can handle some squalor. I just told her to clean when she complained about being bored. But when she said she was bored she meant she wanted fun, like to play a video game, or get paid five hundred dollars for a half hour of labor, or get high. 

She wasn’t bored or having fun now at all. She was genuinely upset. She came and sat next to me and put her arms over my shoulder. She was hot and sweaty from sex, amphetamines and fear but she still smelled nice to me. I thought I’d been making things better. I’d even helped her file her taxes so she could get a fat refund and a stimulus payment. I’d been trying to get her to take this programming job she’d been offered. I wasn’t even talking about stopping hooking, but like I thought she could be safer and less insane, and that getting paid to program would help her self esteem. She’d been the one who first brought it up; she’d said she wanted to do it and I’d encouraged her. I don’t think sex work is inherently bad or anything. But this life. This life… I’ve known plenty of online sex workers I guess. I’m a perv, yes, thank you, but that’s immaterial here. Tricking with randos in your apartment, getting all into meth and heroin, well, that life is a little different than the online stuff. There are serious risks and tragedies, and while it can be thrilling to make your way through those risks and tragedies and come close enough to smell them without getting sucked in and devoured, it can be very dangerous. And if you really do get devoured, you don’t even die in the teeth or the bowels of the beast, you just get shit out and have to keep going.

So I try to charm this terrible fellow, Angel. I make a funny joke, which is a great way to charm a fellow. I just quote, or sample if you will, some old lyrics from Pimpin Ain’t Easy by Big Daddy Kane. I situate the sample well within the conversation so there’s some art to it, but I don’t think this fellow recognizes the song. I get a smile and a nod. I’m trying to get him to admire me so I can get him to leave. I ask if he knows the rapper Big Daddy Kane and he says no. So this dude sees himself a pimp but does not know who Big Daddy Kane is. I realize that he is an even bigger loser than I am. I pity him briefly, and think, maybe I should just offer him a free punch outside, like ask him if he wants to hit me in the face if it will help him feel better about himself as a person. But that passes. 

Trinity and I are messaging each other via Twitter on our phones. She’s like, are you uncomfortable with this guy here? Bitch of course I am. But I say it nicely. She isn’t regular people, she lives in between, and in some profoundly disturbing and strangely poignant way, she doesn’t get how bad this guy is or that I have no interest in him and disliked him the moment I became aware of him. He brought her meth and she wants to fuck him. That’s fine. He can schedule an appointment and pay like the other guys. But I’m not going back out unless she asks me. He’s not paying her, he wants us to be his sex buddies. I don’t want to be Angel’s sex buddy. I want some peace. I’m a 45 year old sleaze monk who needs his quiet time. 

So she finally tells him: “Ok homie we gotta kick you out now, we want to have some alone time. Sorry!”

But he won’t leave. 

“Alone time with me,” he says, poking himself in the chest with his sausagey thumb just so we know that by me he means himself. “Let’s all fuck each other,” he grunts bluntly. This is the revelation.

I’m like, “No. Nah, man. No dude. Sorry bro. Kindly sir, I cannot. I willn’t. She might like you, but I’m not into the threesome thing. We’re just gonna chill here by ourselves. Also I don’t like big fat sweaty rapists.” I didn’t actually say that last sentence but I thought it pretty loudly I assure you. 

But so he starts talking about some other stuff you know, he’s like trying to run the room or whatever. I’m sure he’ll ask for or demand a threesome again. A guy like this will just ask over and over and grind people down by way of hamhanded brute force rhetorical repetition, with his intimidating physical presence lending its full weight so to speak to the speech. 

He says he’s gonna move in and set Trinity up and make a bunch of money with her. She seems charmed but I’m just picking up mad rapist vibes. 

Suddenly he tells me I’m a loser because I don’t pay no rent and I don’t fuck Trinity enough. These things may be true, but still, it’s very rude of him to say them in my opinion. Then he says other things that go beyond rude to being genuinely hurtful, like private things that I told Trinity and that she told him. Like that he couldna known unless she told him. Like she told him intimate things about me and now he’s trying to mindfuck me with them! The sense of betrayal and violation is overwhelming. It was true, I didn’t fuck her enough. She wasn’t good at kissing and she wasn’t always clean and she said mean things to me. I knew she couldn’t help it but we didn’t always have the best chemistry. Sometimes I’d make her pay me, I got off on that. Sometimes it just happened natural and was as great as any love I ever had. I miss her but I’m glad I left.

But so Angel tells me she thinks I’m a boring old loser. Again, this is especially harsh because it’s true. 

So I say, “Yeah I’m kinda boring and uncool, but she  asked you to leave twice and now I’m asking you to leave too. We need our intimate time you know. To be boring together.” Before he can respond I flatter him, asking how is he so fly that his sneakers match his track suit so perfectly. I realize he’s just wearing the pants and jacket and nothing underneath the track suit. No t shirt even.

But so then he’s suddenly very nice, like, “Yo I can get you sneakers and gear, here try on my jacket.” He unzips this track jacket and he’s just fat and hairless and sweaty under there, he’s like a giant larva, and I try on the jacket and it’s got all this fat larval meth sweat on it and some of it got on my neck arms and shirt. He probably got some kind of sexual satisfaction from getting his sweat on me. I’m completely disgusted but I don’t let on. I’m tryna charm this fellow. I tell him I’ll talk to him about gear later, like tomorrow or something, and I try to get a fist bump but he refuses me the fist bump, which is like, a clear signal of dislike and disrespect on the streets. So I’m like, oh shit.

He scowls clumsily. He asks me: “You wanna step outside and decide who gets to stay?” He’s challenging me to a fight for ownership of Trinity. He doesn’t get that she can’t be owned and I don’t own her. I might be her pet. I might be her intimacy dealer. But I’m not her pimp. I’m a fake pimp, not a real one. I’m a ho’s ho.

But so I’m like, “No, I won’t fight you, I‘m not tryna do fisticuffs right now bro,” shaking my head and acting more disappointed than afraid, though I was pretty afraid.

It just keeps getting more tense. I start pleading, but in an annoyed rather than submissive way: “Dude, just leave please, I don’t want to fight.” I tell him I’m not possessive and I don’t care if he wants to date Trinity, but like I want to chill and read some Aeschylus and go to bed. He doesn’t know who Aeschylus is. Can’t fault him that. No clot in my milk over that. But I mean I’m just trying to get to my peace. 

He shifts gears and starts pushing for a threesome again, but his language is more forceful, and he says he knows Trinity likes it rough and I’m never rough enough for her. I can tell this part actually turns Trinity on and I start to feel like a sucker who has played himself, and then I almost laugh at myself for being a jackass, but I keep it internal and don’t let the laughter come out through my body. Then out of nowhere, like five milliseconds later, I’m like, is this fellow gonna try and rape me in front of the gf? I don’t know, I can’t tell! This is the edge! Fear broke in. He was running these headgames you know. So I’m sitting there eyeing the fire extinguisher in the kitchen from the far end of the futon. 

Then, in what strikes me as an unexpected twist, Trinity turns off the amateur pornography that has been running this whole time and says she’s going to put on some music. The tension breaks a little. She asks what we want to listen to and we all agree on hip hop. I tell Angel I’m a rapper and he says he is too. Trinity suggests we freestyle. I’m hesitant but we proceed. She starts nervously seeking a beat appropriate to the occasion. Trinity has never seen me rap, she does not know I have mad bars, that I spit pure energy.  

But I don’t even need to be good, because he goes first, and this guy, this fucking guy, his flow is as limp as a wet noodle and stagnant as the Great Dismal. And I have bars, I’m whiteboy but I can freestlye, I can rap, I love rapping, so I spit mad fire and suddenly, finally, miraculously, I win his respect. 

It would still take a good forty five more minutes to get him out, but at this moment in time, in a rhythm and a rhyme, I felt the moon shift and the tide change; his tide had crested and would now pull back into the sea of dust that that Tucson night can be. This all had specifically to do with my use of Christian imagery. 

I had not yet revealed to Angel that in strict gang terms I was officially affiliated with the Archangel Michael, leader of the most powerful fighting force in all being material and spiritual. No, this was all about J to the mf C. I’d used lyrics from a song I’d written in 2007 that I thought might work as a freestyle, and they worked very well in this Angel situation, though I’m not sure how fire these bars will strike the reader as being:

“Bleeding like birth and

cheating the netherworld weatherman

spitting out riddlebits for all the misfits

and telling them listen to this, it’s mysticulous

my teeth are on fire and

my mind is an island

floating on fluid thoughts

glimmering in the dusk

I have been spewing loss

Down from my crooked cross”

Seems so weird to me now still, but what happened, or seemed to happen, was, the mention of the cross got Angel talking about His Lord Jesus. He explained that he was a devout Christian. Of course! God bless America. So he was a bit of a demon, like myself I suppose, but he was religious, and probably knew the Our Father and Hail Mary in two languages. This was not trivial. This was my in. I had to use this frame of reference to talk him the fuck out so I could get a good night’s sleep and then leave Trinity and eventually catch the greyhound across country from the irradiated desert city of Tucson to the drenched green swamplands of the inner banks of east North Carolina. People on hard (or even just good) drugs can become very suddenly religious and their conscience will emerge from the context of their sudden religious feelings. It can be surprising until you’ve seen it a bunch of times but even then it can come out in new forms when you least expect it. The truth is, there aren’t as many psychopaths in this world as people posting online about their exes would have you believe; most people who enjoy being bad also enjoying being good, and the common conception of evil is often a simplistic wish fantasy. Love is scarier and more difficult than outright cruelty, and true love for another is harder to feel than disgust, malice, fear or pity. That’s why it’s more common that we need to try hard to be good but can just let go when we want to be bad. Maybe that’s just my life though. Maybe it’s only in my life that the light of the soul shines through the darkest cracks when you least expect it; that the beast splits open and the love shines through in new forms, in rebirths and spiritual transfiguration; I don’t know.

But so this fuckin guy, this Angel, whom I did not love, or like, or accept, and only wanted to get rid of without the situation devolving into a melee or some kind of traumatic sexual assault; I didn’t like being around this guy, and I didn’t like him being around Trinity, though she didn’t seem to me to understand just how bad he was. Like other lost and troubled people I know, addicts and prostitutes especially, she had trouble seeing predators and hustlers even when it seemed very obvious to others. And this guy was predatory make no mistake. He wanted to own her and to use her. 

But this idea of Jesus Christ slipped in through a crack in the crazy dark weave of it all right, this idea of Jesus and this notion of salvation from sin and being a good person even though you’re a bad person. This resonated with him, which made sense to me. Because I too am shameful and lost but want to be loved and to find my way home. Times like this what matters is not the literal truth about Jesus but the idea of Jesus in this mf’s head that I can leverage into getting him out of the damn apartment. I told him that love and forgiveness are real, and that even a bad man can do the right thing from the depths of his darkness. I preached to this motherfucker. These bars were even more fire than my freestyle. He’s all yeah yeah yeah, crossing himself with the meth pipe.

I round off the sermon by telling him that he should love his neighbors by getting out of our apartment in a mash up of all the classic biblical thou shalt nots and such, during which time he eventually comes to tell me that he looks up to me like a big brother (I’m about ten years older than he is) and wants to earn my respect. This seems good, but like, he wants to earn it through beating someone up or having sex with someone in front of me; but it’s like, no, man, no. I have to gingerly yet confidently ask him to earn my big brother respect by leaving my personal area and calling Trinity tomorrow and not tryna hustle her. As this is happening I realize once again that I have to leave Trinity. 

After all that he finally left but I couldn’t talk to her. But then I couldn’t not talk to her.

I was like, “Why did you tell him intimate shit?”

And she was like, “He twisted my words!” 

“You shouldna given him anything to twist even!” I yelled. She hadn’t realized he’d say the meanest shit he could think of. 

It wasn’t until I talked to Mary Magdalene that I realized just how important it was that I leave quickly. She was an online friend. I almost ended up just smoking a bunch of meth with Trinity and fucking the night away. Sex on meth is fun. It’s very pleasurable. Of course some of the more pleasurable things in my life have been stairways to hell and I knew this and had a firm grasp of it by this time. I’d been dopesick just a few weeks before. I was determined to stay clean and be wise and I was sticking to it for now somehow. I did have going away sex with her but I stayed off that meth, and in a quiet reflective lucidity bred of sexual exhaustion I found someone who talked me into leaving as fast as possible. 

That was Mary Magdalene. We’d only really just met online the night before but I like…. I knew she’d seen the in-betweens you know, I knew she’d known that life. She’d wandered the dark and climbed out. I didn’t know exactly what it was (besides heroin, she’d told me about that, but there was much more, there always is) but I felt like I could talk to her. She tried to get me to leave immediately. I told her I would wait until the next day. She told me to tell Trinity right then. I told Trinity and she said she understood but  she didn’t want me to leave. After I left she would beg me to come back. Why? Because I’d made her feel loved and we’d had intimacy. The very intimacy which she’d unwittingly betrayed! She had sex all the time, she liked whoring, getting paid to fuck turned her on, she had a lot of free time and drug money when she wasn’t working. But intimacy was harder for her to come by. I cared about her and treated her like a real human being. We’re all real humans etc. and some of us really need someone when the night is dark and the heat is on and the predators and police both have it in for us. Some of us need someone when our families and old friends just give up because we can’t keep our shit together. Some people like that, who have the most trouble finding love and acceptance, are the ones who need it most.

When in June I tell Mary Magdalene I’m writing the part about her convincing me to leave she asks me if I’m going to mention her butthole. She’s very scatological, she loves telling people online when she’s taking a shit. She’s into piss, like, romantically. She’s also a mother of two who lives in Iowa City. Her husband is older and scooped her up at a young age. She’s four years clean off heroin. I think the day before I told her about the shit with Angel and Trinity she asked for a video of me urinating, which I gladly provided. I’d never done that before, it was fun. I fell in love with her in that way that I do with some internet women. She was stunningly beautiful and very funny. Such a gloriously filthy mouth! 

I haven’t met her, though I do sometimes meet people from Twitter in real life. Sometimes I sleep with them or move in for a while. That’s what happened with Trinity, and before that, in 2019, with Nina. I still miss Nina. She kicked me out, and with good reason I suppose, but I still love her. I love a lot of women though I guess, I’m incontinent in my heart and soul. 

But so Mary Magdalene was the one I told about Angel, and she told me I had to get away from there. She was emphatic. She was right. She’d told me to leave right away, which was wise, but I wanted to get some sleep and leave in the morning. I knew I was at risk of hitting the pipe and then not leaving, and just like, falling into that life, which happens. Meth and sex go well together. Meth and me not so much. I have trouble stopping, as with other things. I mean, not with like, employment, or romantic commitment, but with drugs and self destruction and shit. 

But Mary Magdalene cared about me and was real with me. Not everyone in life will be real with you, but if you recognize those who are, it can be good for you and them both. So we are friends now, she’s my friend. We mostly talk on Twitter. Twitter’s fun, you just have to navigate it right or the vibes stress you out. But I mean you can log off. It’s opt in. 

Free choice is funny though isn’t it. We get attached to each other. The forces involved are powerful and mysterious. Everyone else online can seem like phantasms, and sometimes we tell ourselves that it’s all fake, but the truth is we often believe in phantasms without consciously choosing to. People fall madly in love with phantasms, and while there’s an illusory aspect, perhaps ten thousand layers of illusory aspect, what with all the people and the emotions and the powerful mysterious imaginations at play, underneath it all, it’s real people. True story. 

But how true can a story be? How real is language? When are words “just words” that disappear as vapors in the air? Sometimes words are the realest thing. If you learn a loved one is terminally ill, or if your spouse of ten years tells you she no longer loves you and is leaving town with your best friend. Or if someone you look up to ridicules you, or if someone you look down on humiliates you in front of others who laugh and say more things that hurt. Or when she tells you she loves you for the first time. Or when your parents say they are proud of you, or when your children say they want to be like you.

True story. 

 

4.

The Archangel Michael

The Archangel Michael comes to visit me in or through the mirror. He looks like me but different. He’s in better shape. His pectoral muscles are more developed. He has no belly. He does not slouch. His hair is thick on top, and it is every color shining at once like sunlight. There are no trackmarks on the pale parts of his forearms. He has no scars whatsoever. He has no navel. He has no pubic hair or genitals. Enormous wings, white as clouds in sunshine, shaped as a swan’s. He holds them heartshaped behind himself. He carries a sword. It shines with the fire of Heaven and the infinite love of His Lord. With it he commands the holy host and army of angels who fight in each and every moment shining through from eternity into time as the revelation unfolds continuously as the process of time itself. He is the engine and energy of things happening.  This year has been more apocalyptic than others, yes, but every moment is conceived and born of something even crazier than plagues and riots: that fire whose burning is time, whose light is consciousness, and whose heat is generation. 

That’s what Michael tells me anyway. Sounds like fancy talk. I am a man of the streets, sir, and am suspicious of fancy talk that sounds like church or college. 

In The Revelation Michael commands an army of angels. In my mirror he looks outward from some other world within the reflection. This other world is phantasm and word. It is meaningful, mysterious, miraculous, terrifying, beautiful and true; though it’s really just some bathroom mirror in a cheap motel. It’s my imagination. But so Michael looks into my eyes and he tells me: these are the times that try men’s souls. These streets, these people, this plague, the news, dope sickness, weird dreams, seas of blood, black moon, respectable white people, fire of dawn, smoke of night, police brutality, swine in the house, homecooking means meth, black tar matters, fentanyl death overload, skulls packed with shit sludge, smoking slag heaps of irradiated afterworld, skynet self aware, robot rapists, demonic angels, endless screams of lacerated faces, death alive, bad Facebook posts, infinite racism, war everlasting, fire and flood, cruel laughter, phantasms, words, your wife doesn’t love you, she’s leaving town with your best friend… 

This terrible list washes my brain away in a flood of savage light and as I stare at him in a daze he tells me that I’m strong and that my scars do not divide me, they hold me together. He commands me to practice compassion in the in between spaces among the lost and the suffering, the grimy and the afraid, the dopesick and the sexually abused, the brutalized, the psychotic, the meek, the poor in spirit, and the lame.

But I mean I’m going to be honest with you; I really don’t always listen to people who talk to me like that ok. I mean I listen to Mary Magdalene it’s true. I’ll listen to any old rando off Twitter half the time. But listening to Michael is harder. The guy is demanding. 

I walk away from the mirror to the bed to lie down and reflect on recent events. Trinity had begged me not to leave at first but then said she understood why I was going and that she felt bad for screwing up. She’d given me a hundred dollars cash. She’d thrown it on me while I was lying down in bed. She’d “made it rain” on me. I’d been the real ho the ho time. I’d left with my messenger bag and my duffel bag. Everything I’d owned was in them or on me. I’d been lucky I had my stimulus money. I hadn’t told Trinity I had it because I’d known she’d try to get at it. But so I’d left with $100 cash and $1200 in my bank account. 

$1200 was more money than I’d had in my account in years. Four figures! I thought about trying to go back to Nina. Maybe I was respectable enough now with my four figure bank account. No. No way. Nina would refuse. She knew I wasn’t good for her. I had to admit that to myself. She’d stopped talking to me months before for perfectly good reasons. 

I caught a bus across town. The bus was free because of the plague. You had to sit in the back and stay a safe distance from other riders when possible. Essential trips only. These were the days of figuring out who and what were essential. April 2020. I took the 6 bus down First across town to the south side where there were some cheap motels. 

I got there early and needed to kill time before check-in. I wandered around drinking energy drinks. I didn’t have phone service, so I couldn’t call or text anyone, but I could access social networks when I got wifi. That was good. I could talk to my friends. They were supportive. I told people the Angel story. I entertained the men and worried the women. I would stay at the one motel for almost a week before I got the Greyhound east. 

I saw this guy in hospital clothes. Not scrubs, like those papery patient clothes. He still had the bracelet on too. White dude about six feet with thick blonde curly hair. Far away eyes. I knew the hospital he’d come from. I don’t remember the name but it was known for it’s wacky and terrifying emergency room waiting room. It was over down Ajo past the big Veterans’ Assistance campus, some cactus strewn desert past my dude Hoppy’s trailer. Out among ball fields, carnival grounds, scrap yards and body shops. I reckoned that was where this young man with the far away eyes had come from with something bright in his hand with something dark in the brightness of it. The same hand with the hospital bracelet still on. The bright thing was a square of aluminum foil and the dark thing within it was a chunk of black tar heroin. 

He saw me looking at it as he walked up and a crazed grin crept across his face. With the other hand he held out two cigarettes. He asked me if I had a lighter I was willing to trade for two cigarettes. I said yes, but could he return it when he was done? He looked at me like I’d asked him directions to another planet. He asked me if I wanted to smoke with him. I was tempted. Tar heroin tastes bad but you get high and your problems disappear as vapors in the air. The euphoria is a loving mother you know. But I declined and traded the lighter for the cigarettes and went to the gas station and got a new lighter and a beer and started drinking and smoking and talking to friends online as I waited for check-in time. I’d quit smoking fairly recently but I started again. Since that time I’ve quit again several times, I’m getting pretty good at it. 

I’d found a nice wifi spot just off the sidewalk in some gravel under a big pistachio tree by a big tear in the chainlink fence around a vacant lot full of the remnants of old homeless camps. I was using the wifi from the Extended Stay Suites on Park Ave by the I 10 overpasses, where homeless people often slept. There was always evidence even when no actual humans were visible. Sleeping bags, litter, etc. Tucson has a lot of homeless, especially in the winter and early spring, when the nomads and drifters head there for the warm dry weather. Everything was changing now because of the plague. As everyone else felt stuck more and more in place, homeless folks were becoming more and more perpetually displaced. 

I conjectured the hospital guy with the black tar had gone behind some old vacant buildings and the ghostly closed down gas station, under some big creosote bushes, to smoke. But this was conjecture. When I thought about it I could taste the ugly smoke and imagine the beautiful euphoria, the daydreams and visions. Daydreaming about having better daydreams. I wondered if I could still find him and maybe get a hit. But I didn’t get up. I stayed under the pistachio by the prickly pear and the hole in the fence. It was late April in Tucson so it could get up to a hundred degrees before noon. Heat vibrates in hallucinoid waves off hard urban surfaces. I wondered if the hospital dude had given me the Covid when we did our street bartering. 

I stared out into the hot dust and I thought about Trinity. She had a medicine cabinet full of antipsychotics she never took. She was crazy. Not just depressed or anxious like half of America, but like, crazy as hell. The heat shimmered over the asphalt before an old El Camino drove through it. I never saw El Caminos anywhere but Tucson. El Camino is an in betweener. It is gender nonconforming, it is nonbinary.

An El Camino is a car

An El Camino is a truck

In the front is where you drive

In the back is where you sleep

She’d had so many strange tics and tendencies: the compulsive insults, the attraction to terrible people (I know I was one of them but I was at the good end of that spectrum!), her unfortunate love of the n word. I think she might have had Tourette’s in addition to the paranoid delusions, velociraptor noises during sleep, difficulty focusing or feeling peaceful in any way, inability to form lasting relationships, intense emotional volatility (crying fits, laughing fits, tantrums, mood swings, being really mean then really nice then really happy then really sad then really nice again but then really mean again) and the rest. She just spontaneously said weird nasty shit all the time and had these striking nonverbal tics like loudly clearing her throat repeatedly in a way that seemed Tourettesy.

I’d tried to get her to take that job. She could’ve worked from home and still tricked and smoked as much meth as she wanted. But the truth was she hated straight work and didn’t want it. She hated normalcy. I couldn’t argue with that, I’m similar. Some of us end up in the in between spaces due to forces beyond our control but some of us also continuously consciously choose to do bad shit every day. I gazed blankly out into the heat at the abandoned structures and the strange desolation of that spot, from my little nest by the prickly pear in the warm dry breeze, with my two bags full of all my worldlies. Trinity was probably leaning into her psychotic tendencies. I knew she might try and find me, especially if she got really high and paranoid. 

She’d done something once before I’d moved in with her. I posted a picture of the view from the front door of the apartment where I was taking care of Denise’s disabled son Mikey, and Trinity had sent me a picture of the apartment next door, nearly guessing the address. Pretty stalky! I don’t know how she did it. I recognized the red flag. But I liked it. It meant I could probably sleep with her and crash with her if I wanted to. 

Memories don’t happen in a straight line in my mind. There are parts I can’t even think about right up until I can’t not think about them. Guilt and trauma make the echoes of experiences recur in vivid fragments in an order seemingly independent of their contiguous chronological arrangements; shaped instead by contiguities of sensation, emotion, desire and suffering; pulsing with the rhythms of some life system we still don’t really know much about. Trinity and I were both just a couple of weird lost hustlers passing in the hot night. I was glad we’d had our time together now that I’d escaped without anything catastrophic happening, though I did feel bad about not being able to stay and help her. I didn’t even want to talk to her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. 

She’d been a musician too, she played keyboards and wrote songs. I’d wanted to make music with her but we had trouble collaborating. She made fun of me. She was cruel about my ideas.  I don’t think it was malice, I think it was a kind of nervous compulsion and defense against her own sense of worthlessness, which sometimes threatened to swallow her whole. Probably compulsive and hard to control. I don’t know where that came from. People just happen you know. She’d always said she’d had an easy life and no serious trauma or adversity; that she’d been a regular person most of her life. I didn’t believe her. She saw herself as never having truly suffered. I saw this itself as a form of suffering that had to do with seeking escape from pain by not acknowledging it, compounding the original suffering and binding her the more tightly to her own pain thereby. Maybe this was wrong to think. I thought there had to be something she couldn’t acknowledge even to herself because it was too much. Sometimes when she got paranoid delusions there were signs of a fear of some terrible event repeating itself through her mind, though they were suggestive ambiguities at best and I couldn’t really know. But I did know she’d probably try and find me and that I had to conscientiously conceal my location. She was familiar with the spot. She’d lived at the Extended Stay Suites when she had a programming job before she’d been fired for heroin. We both had dope issues. When I’d first asked if I could stay with her I was coming off being dopesick and confessed I’d been kicked out for stealing the murder suicide stash. Trinity thought it was cool that I stole it. We’d talked about it, we’d both been sober.

“Denise was my best friend but I burned her. When she confronted me I was drunk and I called her a dumb rich bitch, which was wrong to say even if she is.”

“That’s hilarious though,” Trinity said, slapping her thigh, which had a well done tattoo of a moonflower on it. 

I was bitter. “She doesn’t just own a house and a guest house and a trailer and a tiny house all in a compound on the same lot, she has an apartment complex. So, pretty rich compared to me!” I was really feeling pretty sorry for myself. “But who isn’t? Do you have any idea how little a sleaze monk makes?”

“I know you’re broke, baby. You’re my pet.”

“I shouldn’t have done any of the things I did.”

“Can’t undo em now.”

“She was always tougher than me. She came up hard. Crazy violent father. Schizo affective disorder. Maybe that’s what I have. I don’t know. Diagnoses aren’t true stories. I believe in the revelation and the Archangel Michael and the ultimate power and beauty of love and the human soul.”

“How do you talk like that sober?”

We laughed. She asked me to take her to the bathroom and groom her feet and legs. I lived with her April into May 2020 before my journey east to where I bathed in the rain and left the desert behind. I’m writing this here now in North Carolina in June. The front yard is full of water, the water ripples in the wind and light dances on the ripples. Ten thousand bright green frogs sing from the woods by the lake of the lawn. Badger is out and I have the house to myself. I still sometimes rationalize stealing Denise’s dope by telling myself she shouldn’t’ve had it for murder suicide purposes. Use it to get high like a normal person you coward. But I know I shouldn’t’ve done it, though the misbehavior did lead to the social rupture that opened up into an adventure. 

I only saw hospital guy one more time, after I’d checked in later that afternoon. He was sitting on the wall around the gas station parking lot and he angrily demanded I buy him a drink. I asked him if he still had my lighter and his eyes flickered and he said no. I usually buy people shit with my EBT if they ask but I told him I wouldn’t buy him a drink because he was being a bitch. He stood up angrily and I laughed. I kind of wanted him to make a move so I could hit him but in retrospect I’m glad he did not. He just slumped back down. 

So I had a room at the cheapest, worst motel. The rooms didn’t even have garbage cans. No shampoo for the shower, just three thin hard bars of soap. No phone. No coffee machine. Just the most essential essentials in this time of essential essentials: a bed with a sheet and a comforter (undoubtedly littered with millions of tiny crust-bits of semen from thousands of men at least, what can you do), a bedside table, two lamps, controls for the air conditioning (it’s Tucson so even the $35 a night places have a/c), a television on the wall and a bible in the dresser. There was a security guard who checked your receipt and a sign that said No Guns, No Hanging Out, No Visitors After 9 PM. 

The other guests were mostly poor and seedy like me but I thought I might have been the only white guy. Everyone else was Mexican, native or black. I like being the only white guy sometimes and I thought I was, until I met this nervous crazy-eyed hippie who was always saying god bless you. This dude was so shifty. The kind of hamhandedly deferential motherfucker who is so cloyingly overnice that you just know he’s trying to get away with something. He had wire rimmed glasses like John Lennon and he dressed all in white. He put his palms together in an overtly religious manner when he said god bless you. He did not walk, he sidled and scurried. 

He was in the lobby while I was heating up an enormous burrito in the filthy microwave they had. This was not even the main lobby, like the front office. The main lobby was closed off. This was the night lobby, which they did all business through because of the plague. I’d been tweeting like a champ but I put the phone down on the table next to the microwave when I got the burrito out. The shifty god bless you hippie had been kind of hovering behind me after silently sidling up and I almost bumped into him when I turned around, whereat he apologized profusely and asked if I’d seen the manager. I said no and he thanked me in that cloying treacly way he had, and he said god bless you and put his hands together and nodded his head deferentially. 

I went back to my room with my burrito and I wanted to tweet about it, as sometimes in this life it is important to tweet about eating a burrito, as even the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, would gladly confirm. But I couldn’t find my phone. I realized I’d left it in the lobby on the table by the microwave, so I hurried back to the lobby. The manager was back in the office behind the glass partition but the weird hippie was gone and the phone was not on the table. I never saw that phone again. It had really not been worth stealing in my opinion. I’d bought it for $60 in 2018. The sim card didn’t work, it didn’t have calling or texting capabilities. But I was worried about someone accessing my various accounts through it. So I used my computer to change my passwords, access my Google account and remotely lock the phone. Maybe hippie motherfucker thought he could get my stimulus money or maybe he wanted to jack off to my picture roll. I had myself a good healthy laugh when I realized that the last picture or video I’d taken, and therefore the first one that someone looking at my phone would see, was the piss video I’d sent Mary Magdalene. 

The next time I saw the disgusting hippie vermin was a couple days later. It was early and I’d once again gone to the lobby to microwave a burrito. I’d been avoiding leaving the room for too long because my key card had stopped working and the machine they used to program the key cards had broken, so I couldn’t unlock my door without help from the manager, so I couldn’t lock it if I just stepped out for a bit. It was early yet and nobody was at the front desk. This would be resolved in a couple hours once the manager was back and the key card machine was working again, but in order to go heat my burrito in the morning I had to leave my door ajar so I could get back in because my key didn’t work. But so the burrito took two minutes and when I got back to the room the damn motherfucking shifty hippie was right at my door, which was open just a crack, and he was peeking in through the crack. I said excuse me in a low manly voice and he jumped and said he’d gotten confused and thought my room was his room, apologizing profusely, putting his palms together, nodding and saying god bless you before hurriedly scurrying away. 

I don’t really have anything against thieves; I am one, and think of thieves as my people; but I had a problem with this brother in the family of the lowly targeting me twice. Also, I suspected he was more than just a thief, and may have been a pervert as well. Again, I don’t think this is per se bad; I am a pervert myself, as well as a thief; but I try to be ethical and principled in my way. I rob people and businesses who have more money and stuff than I do. I rob upward. This guy was robbing the poor; namely, me. And I do perversion with other people who are into it. But he seemed like a low level predator. But I shouldn’t pretend I’m any better. I disliked this man as a matter of personal animus because he fucked with me direct. That was the basic principle he violated, most of us go by it, where if someone fucks with us we dislike them and sometimes fuck with them back. I never did anything back before this guy disappeared, but I’d seen enough that I could tell that he probably caught hell on the regular in his life because of how he was. Guys like this are just one of many reasons why if I’m in the in between spaces and I’m the only white guy among poor minorities, and I meet some other white guy, I immediately become suspicious of him. 

I asked the Archangel Michael about it in the mirror and he said he didn’t know, that it didn’t matter, that I had to try to be good and to love people, which I understood and agreed with, not just based on ideas but on real experiences involving life and death, violence and generosity, malice and hatred, passion and compassion; beatitude, forgiveness and apology: all profoundly affecting even in the grittiest of places; even in the  purgatories and hells of earth. To feel the presence of genuine love is to recognize that we really are potentially divine. But I realized I only felt this because of the good deeds of others and not because of any good deeds of my own. Others had loved me genuinely, and actively, not just as a matter of emotion, but through acts of compassion, generosity and even forgiveness. Others had repeatedly saved me from myself and the darkness into which I all too often stumbled. Perhaps I’d done this for others but I was not aware of it. But I knew I’d received it more times than I could count. It can come from strangers as well as family and friends. It can even come from enemies, haters, users, abusers and predators. It can come from anywhere because love shines through all things from some place beyond the divisions between individuals. At any of these divisions there is a crack, a crevice, through which the light shines through. 

And yet. And yet. And yet that means it should shine through me; I’m cracked as hell, I am creviced as a motherfucker. If it does I have trouble seeing it. I worry it’s because I don’t know how to love. 

I told the Archangel Michael I needed to go to the Walmart down at the Tucson Marketplace just past the underpass, and that I was thankful that my friend Hex had sent me money when he saw me tweeting about getting my phone stolen. I’d known Hex over 30 years. He knew of how fucked up I was. One of the few people I hadn’t burned the bridge with. I told Michael I could probably get a new smartphone for sixty dollars or so and he nodded and gleamed. I told him how despite the damn shifty hippie god bless you guy taking my phone and tryna violate my space, I loved having a room to myself and my own bed and internet, and my full allotment of SNAP benefits and over a thousand dollars in my checking account. I hadn’t had that much money in the bank in years. Four figures bitches. So I was gonna buy more beer, and I was going to get some of the strong craft beer shit, like some of that 8% alcohol by volume shit, like some pale ale. I told Michael I’d be back later. He nodded as if he’d known that already.

 

5.

Veracity

Sitting on my bed drinking beer fucking around on Twitter enjoying all those other people’s thoughts and desires. Smart, attractive, funny people, joking, flirting and fighting. There’s something safe about it compared to other things I get into. Of course, it becomes unsafe if I get too caught up, because giving a shit is as dangerous as the streets and can happen to the best of us. It can seem fake, people be role playing, but artifice and illusion are essential realities of human experience, and other people online are as real as we are. I get that there are bots and catfish, and that hoaxes are common. So much trickery in general. But that’s such a human element! People be tricky. Tricks are the oldest profession. But underneath all those layers like clothing it’s all flesh, blood, sex, sweat and death. Things shimmer and shift; cracks and crevices open and close between layers moving in different directions, simultaneously and continuously both concealing and revealing real souls. So that can be fun to swim in, and I was enjoying it.

But then Trinity started messaging me claiming she had an emergency. She said someone kidnapped her cat. She begged me to come back. I couldn’t believe it. I figured the dang meth was aggravating her crazy. I disliked the conversation. I felt powerless and I hated having to treat her like she was trying to play me because she was suffering in a way that most people don’t understand and never seriously contemplate.  

She kept asking me where I was and I replied repeatedly that I was staying with my friend Christie. Christie actually did live near the motel, but she was closer to the hospital, across from my dude Hoppy, out by the wash. I’d done caregiving work with her in years past. I’d stayed with her before. She was a single mom of two twelve year old twins and she smoked mad weed. I felt like I shouldn’t actually ask her if I could stay with her at this point. I knew Denise must have told her what I’d done. I felt bad about asking anything of anyone who knew Denise because I felt guilty, and so, deprived of more genuine human connections, I’d resorted to a motel. I couldn’t tell Trinity because she might show up. On the other hand I kind of wanted her to come with some meth and fuck me until the break of dawn. But I was somehow keeping a sense of self control about that. I tried to be attentive to her messages and reply quickly and be compassionate while maintaining a safe distance. Eventually she stopped messaging. I wondered if her cat was just in the closet or under the futon or something. I felt terrible about how she’d begged me to come help and I’d refused. But I also felt I’d done the right thing. But I also tried not to think about it anymore.

There came a sudden knocking. I jumped and cried out like a scared girl, then became quiet and stared at the door. I heard someone whimpering on the other side, begging: “please help,” and knocking frantically again. I felt like it just had to be Trinity even though I couldn’t figure out how she might’ve found me. She was really good at computer shit, very cunning and street smart, and might’ve somehow managed it. But as I listened to the voice through the door more I realized it wasn’t her. It was lower and kinda drawly. Kinda like a gay dude instead of a woman. Maybe a trans woman. The knocking became more frantic. 

I knew it would be trouble if I opened it. If I just didn’t do anything it would all go away. I have paid for a room, I don’t need to be a part of anything. That’s how the system works. So I could’ve just gone with the flow and not given a shit, but I wanted to help someone else and practice active love because I had this terrible imbalance in my life where people had saved me and loved me but I’d never really loved anyone properly. 

So I opened the door.

“Please,” she said. “They’ll kill me.” She was trembling and seemed crazed. She looked Native American. She seemed like a prostitute. The dress, the shoes, the make up, the smell. Everything. Oddly, sleazily beautiful. Trembling with fear. Looked like she’d been hit in the face. I heard some men coming from the area around the corner, the rooms along the parking lot. I let her in and closed the door. I realized she was transgender.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Vera.”

“Vera.”

“Yeah, it’s short for Veracity.”

“Veracity?”

“Yeah, because I’m the truth, baby. You just call me Vera though.”

“Okay Vera, what the fuck?”

“Those three men want to kill me.”

 “Did you rob them?” I asked bluntly.

“No. Well kind of. Not really though, no. I mean, yeah. Yes and no.”

“Alright.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I actually teach hard to explain at confusion university.”

“For real?”

“No, but try me.”

She laughed and gave me a look as I finished my beer. “They said they wanted a chick with a nice dick. I am that.”

“Nice.”

“Thank you. But so these are military guys on a lot of coke. They wanted a gangbang with a hot shemale. That was cool, I was into it, they’re all hot and the money was good. But before it got serious, but like, after they’d paid and gotten naked —they all stripped really quickly, they seemed pretty gay for each other—the vibe changed and it got evil. Like violent right. They wanted it to feel like rape. What’s the deal with men?”

“Well,” 

“One of them hit me pretty hard, here.” She showed me the swollen red mark on the side of her eye. It hadn’t yet turned black and blue but it looked like it would.

“Damn girl.”

“He would’ve knocked me out if he’d connected better. He was pretty wasted. The other guys cheered.”

“Where’s the security guard? Aren’t there multiple guards here? Are these dudes gonna come break down my door?” For the record I dislike security guards, they are one of my natural enemies out in the wild, but I was already tired of trying to help someone else and be a good person. It was stressful and I felt strongly that someone else should do it.

“I think they bribed the one guy on their side of the building, the one with the big arms and the tattoos.”

“Good grief.”

“No visitors after nine.”

“No hanging out!” in a quiet but comically emphatic voice. 

“Right,” she laughed. “They don’t let hoes work unless we cut them in. There’s a system for tricking and drug dealing here. You can work things out if you kick up and don’t attract the wrong crowd. This place is cheap and shitty but it’s a pretty successful front and they’re making a lot of money under the table. Did you notice everyone pays cash here?” I was impressed by Vera’s criminal acumen and I realized I wanted to kiss her but I didn’t try.

“I did, yeah,” I said. I became achingly nostalgic for life before the plague. I remembered back to Albuquerque in 2019, when I’d lived with Nina. I missed her, though I didn’t miss our neighborhood. I continued: “I’ve seen motels where they operated more openly. Back in Albuquerque they didn’t have tight security, like gates and paid guards on watch around the clock. The g’s just paid the manager and worked out in the open. You could get coke and meth and heroin and hookers and guns all at one motel. They got busted though.”

“I’ve heard Albuquerque’s worse than Tucson.”

“Depends on the hood and who you are.” 

Just as I was getting comfortable talking to her someone started pounding on the door. Deep voices on the other side. The damn war pigs who wanted to gang rape my new indigenous transgender prostitute friend.  

“Don’t answer,” she whispered heatedly. “They didn’t see me come in, I’m positive.”

“This is stressful,” I said. “I’m going to chug one of these expensive and powerful craft beers. You want one?”

“Yes,” she said. 

“She’ll rob you too brother,” an angry voice growled from behind the door. It was mad funny because the guy sounded like Hulk Hogan to me, which helped defuse the mounting fear, even though it seemed like he knew she was in my room. I giggled quietly but intensely to myself before drinking my beer. 

I heard someone yell something at the men from a distance. 

One of the men yelled “go fuck yourself!” Someone banged on the door a few more times but I didn’t answer. Finally they gave up and moved one door down, where someone, it sounded like an old man, answered and began yelling at them and screaming for security. 

“I am security,” one of the voices said. Then there was a general commotion as a woman yelled “this shit is loaded and I know how to use it, you motherfuckers! Now be gone!” Then there was the sound of a siren somewhere nearby and voices swearing, scattering,  receding.

I finished chugging my beer and opened another. Vera was still drinking hers. Her soft smooth hairless Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

When she was done I asked her: “So wait, did you rob those guys or not?”

“They paid me,” she said. “They paid me seven hundred and fifty dollars, two fifty per, but I canceled the date early because it got mad rapey ok?”

“Alright,” I said. “Sorry.” I felt bad. I said nervously: “My last ex I lived with and just broke up with was an escort.”

“’Escort,’” she laughed. “I’m a hooker you corny white bitch”

I laughed. I didn’t trust her not to rob me, but I liked her.

“I also stole their cocaine and threw the one guy’s gun in the pool. Fucking jackass left the gun right out.” There was a disgusting pool in the courtyard outside my room. It was closed because of the plague. It had garbage and algae in it, as well as, if Veracity was indeed being veracious, at least one gun.

“You want a line?” she asked. 

“Yes I do. We should get more beer though.” 

“I’ll buy,” she said.

“Alright.” This was partly why I’d originally asked if she’d robbed them. Not because I cared to judge her morally as thief or non thief but because I wanted in on the take.

“But you go to the store and let me wait here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You stay out of sight for a while. I’ll keep my eye out for those guys. Ima take my computer with me in my bag, it’s the one thing I have left that I can’t allow to be stolen.”

“I don’t steal computers,” she said.

“That’s how computer thieves talk,” I said. 

“Bitch,” she said. “Get that beer and a pack of Newports and keep the change.” She threw five twenties at me like I was the ho. Like Trinity had done. It was funny and poignant to me that Vera did it now too. A pang of electric sadness pulsed bluely through me as I walked out into the heat.

By the time I got back from the store with more beer just ten minutes later, a fire truck, an ambulance and two cop cars had arrived in the parking lot, and there was a body on the sidewalk outside one of the rooms. A young black man. Dead. Blood on the concrete spread out under the body in a sad stain. I was curious but didn’t want to attract any attention as I was already involved in some foul play and had to stay invisible so I hurried back to my room. 

Veracity had pulled the bedside table away from the wall and was cutting some lines on it. We did lines and drank beers and got to know each other as whatever was happening outside continued. I couldn’t tell if it was somehow related to Vera’s situation or had happened independently, but there was no more yelling or knocking going on. 

Our mutual mood got good and time passed quickly. Eventually she put her face close to mine and asked me to kiss her and I kissed her. I couldn’t taste if she had the virus or not. She tasted like cocaine and sin. I liked her. She grabbed my dick through my pants and said she wanted to do real sex with me, the intimate kind, with kissing and no rubber. I became apprehensive. She said she desperately needed me to cum in her ass. She said it was because she really liked me. It reminded me of Trinity in a strangely moving way. So I did it. Vera had been doing hormone replacement therapy for a year, so she was real soft and feminine, but she had a big dick and no vagina. The sex smelled different, that’s how it is with a t girl. But the ass was tight and I came really quickly. She demanded I go again but I needed some time to reload, so I fired off a few amazing tweets from the old computer, drank a beer, did a few more lines, and got back into it. Afterward we lay in each other’s arms and talked about the plague and she said she’d been working a lot since the stimulus payments started coming in. 

Around three o’clock in the morning she got a text and said she had to go. She asked if she could use the shower and I said ok. She had to work. She told me her number and I told her I didn’t have a phone and she told me her Snapchat and I said I didn’t do Snapchat so she gave me her Twitter but asked me not to judge her by it. I had a good laugh at that. She left me some cocaine and another hundred dollars and I realized with a kind of perverse amusement that once again I was the ho’s ho. The hoes’ ho. I give that boyfriend experience. I’d eventually message her on Twitter and she’d tell me she really missed me and offer to buy me a guitar, and I’d say ok but then never hear back from her. She’d deactivate her Twitter and disappear. Good old Vera. I kind of love you still, Vera, we saved each other in that way that sometimes happens in the part of the gutter where flowers appear in the muck.

I’d been confident about keeping moving until I ran out of cocaine after drinking too much beer too fast and got really depressed for a day and so lingered at the motel. I wanted to leave quickly because it was costing me money, but I’d made some money hoeing, which felt kind of cool. I felt virile and attractive. I was fortunate enough to have stumbled into pay situations that weren’t dehumanizing or degrading from what I could tell. It was exotic and adventurous, especially as there was a plague and people were avoiding contact. The plague and the sense of looming death and societal collapse charged everything with intense erotic energy. 

When I woke up the next day I contemplated my existence from the points of view of simultaneously being thankful for where I was because of how interesting my life had become and being completely immobilized with acute drug and alcohol induced depression and anxiety. Maybe that’s too diagnostic a way to put it. Maybe diagnoses are deadnames. But what wasn’t dead anymore? Death was more alive than life itself. 

I could feel death’s body on mine like a kind of air pressure made of shadow in the room; an abundance of shadow that I could feel pressing on my body and my mind, that I could feel sitting on my chest looking down at me smiling darkly, eyes like holes, mouth like night. I felt myself detach and drift through cold empty vastness of interstellar space. I realized that I was dead and about to be born again according to some primordial vibration that has breathed through me from before my birth out of the mysteries of ancient time. There are painful passings from darkness to light that are natural and unavoidable, and genuine spiritual rebirth might first appear as trauma and indeed leave scars and echoes. Sometimes one world is merely the womb to another and we get born bloodily into the next whether it causes us to scream and cry or not. 

I told myself it was ok to wait and rest a day. I waited as long as I could before buying more beer but eventually I got a six pack of some Hot Shemale India Pale Ale and two microwave jalapeno burgers. This was straight up masochistic as I was already having terrible shits and my asshole was raw meat, but I create myself through self destruction sometimes I guess. Pain can really make you feel alive. Sometimes the light comes through right at the crack of the wound you put in yourself, after the intensity of the pain but before the scar tissue fills in. Sometimes, in the interstices and the fringes, the margins and penumbras, at the borders of other worlds, I see the wholly sacred and the wholly profane fused into a profoundly meaningful if confusing vision of reality. After a few beers and a languid grey journey over a vast expanse of nothingness to a leaden ocean of dull ache and slow drowning for like a day, I eventually managed to sleep for a long time and woke up feeling much better. 

I gathered energy from friends online. Some I openly asked for encouragement and emotional support. I have women I talk to about my emotions. A decentralized distributed support network where my intensities are diffused enough that my neediness and narcissism are spread between many hands, making light work, and not overwhelming any one friend. I don’t bother a lot of my guy friends with these things. I might tell male friends wild but true anecdotes, or ask them for money, but they didn’t have the replacement mom energy I got from women. 

The people I talked to were far away and we didn’t say that much to each other. I kept it real. I believed in something beyond the layers. Some firm and final nude body of flesh and emotion under the maddening strip tease of it all. The conversations were little more than small cracks and thin crevices, but the light that shined through was real. We navigate through oceans of dust by constellations of souls, through all our lives and loves, passions and compassions, dreams and desires, successes and failures, trials and troubles, sexes and deaths, all woven up in one another in a grand spiritual fabric whose weave is such that an event at any one point vibrates in every other and the fabric entire resonates and reverberates with every action, every thought, every emotion, every dream, every word, altogether composing a music that is utterly terrifying and overwhelming, and beyond that a higher truth even more beautiful than it is terrifying. The terror is but the tip of the beauty that we are so very afraid to let penetrate and engulf, kiss and digest us. It’s like intimacy, where the fright and the beauty seem to create and amplify each other. It’s like how the terror of death and the beauty of life grow out of each other. It’s like how the beauty of lilies is borne in the inevitability of their decay. It’s like how the plague of 2020 makes me horny.

 

6.

Amelioration

Amelia helped. She lived in North Carolina, not far from Raleigh, where I’d take the bus to. Badger’s house was east of there, in the inner banks region by the Great Dismal. It’s mostly farmland, pinewoods, waterways and wetlands full of endless, teeming life. So different from the desert I’d leave behind. I’d miss the saguaros and the other beautiful cacti and succulents. I’d miss the warm dry dusty nights. I’d miss the prostitutes, the heroin, the morphine, the Valium, the Xanax, the cocaine and yes even the methamphetamine. And I’d miss the friends I may have lost by my actions and didn’t feel comfortable reaching out to. I was shiftily scurrying away from all that like the god bless you guy. 

But I had other friends. I thought maybe Amelia could help ameliorate the situation in my heart and the greater life around me. We’d been talking about meeting up in Raleigh for a while. I’d tweeted about plans to go to North Carolina previously. That had been back when I was with Trinity. (Trinity had seen me talking to Amelia in a kind of flirty and affectionate way and she’d gotten angry and denied me sex that night and called me names in her sleep.) I did want to sleep with Amelia but she wasn’t into it which was fine. She had mad mom vibes and was really supportive and nice. Mom vibes are very special to me. I’m a drifter, a bum who can’t keep it together enough to hold down one job and live in one place for longer than six months. 45 years old, no kids, never married. For decades now I have been smart enough to know better but bad enough to do worse. I’m as infuriating as I am lovable, the two grow out of each other, the charm and betrayal amplifying and emphasizing each other. I still need to learn to love as I have been loved that I may live how I want to live. But I can be a bit of a rascal! Maybe a bit of a slut. But more a slut of the heart and soul than of the cock and hole. Like ok fine I’m horny and perverted but I’m even more attracted to affection and emotional warmth, to the light that shines through when there is a sense of tender loving care. There’s something very real in it, very true. My own mother died long ago. I haven’t had any roots for a long time. I drift between ephemeral situations that bud and bloom and wilt and disappear. I shed more possessions than I acquire, I sleep on the street, at parks, in squats, or in spaces that others lend me before angrily or disappointedly demanding that I leave. Can’t blame them really, I get it, I shouldn’t pretend I’m not drifting from petty hustle to petty hustle proceeding through a series of dubious and ignominious low points as some mostly blind varmint tunneling in the dirt eating grubs. 

Maybe I should’ve enjoyed it less, or at least pretended to.

Nina still wouldn’t talk to me. She was the one I missed most. From 2019. I’d known I was ruining that relationship but I wouldn’t change my ways. My life can change radically in terms of where and how I live and who with, but some parts of me stay the same very consistently through the course of all the changes. I don’t let anyone see too much of me for too long and don’t always face up to bad habits and flaws that re emerge and recur. They seem to have a will of their own, even though when I reflect on my own actions and motives I often realize that I do freely and consciously choose the wrong thing in the moment knowing it’s wrong, that I know better but choose worse. Does this make me more criminal or mentally ill? Any deviant behavior, not just illegal but anything nonconformist or non normal, ought to be classified as either a crime or a sickness. Right? I actually prefer the concept of sin. I’m a sinner. A drifter and a bum and yes a criminal in the legal sense, and probably ill in some medical sense, and kind of a broken weirdo sometimes and a superhero others. But really just a sinner. A man with demons who sees angels. The mom energy of certain women can make me feel saved and at home when I have no roots and wander in sin. Like home isn’t just a physical dwelling, it can be something you feel. Sometimes you can make yourself to feel it, but sometimes someone else, a kind heart, has to give it to you. 

Amelia had a kind heart. She was married and had young kids. She’d worked as a teacher before having kids and now she was taking university classes online. Classes were online everywhere because of the plague. Amelia was really pretty in a girl next door kind of way. We talked a lot online sometimes. She helped me feel. She helped me muster up the energy and optimism necessary to get out of bed, get dressed, go to the Walmart and get a new phone. It’s rare that I have so much trouble just getting moving. Keeping moving is often what I’m good at and do by default. But things had been more troubling and strange than usual recently, and craft beer and cocaine had laid me low in the aftermath of their pleasures. I realized I had to stop drinking eventually. 

(The last time I’d had to stop drinking had been in April after Denise but before Trinity. Woke up on the sidewalk in a neighborhood you don’t want to do that in. I mean, most neighborhoods in most cities you don’t want to drunkenly pass out on the sidewalk with everything you own. There’s no real good place to do that. But this was a pretty rough neighborhood I’m saying. Concrete is hard, it bites your bones when you sleep on it. I woke drunk at dawn craving pizza. I grew up in Jersey and pizza feels like home. I made it to a park not far from a pizza place. I still had vodka. I drank and dozed as the morning warmed around me. I listened to the various people who came to the park in the morning for various reasons. Early on a woman called out to me, “hey,” and I said, “yeah,” and she asked me, “are you ok?” and I said, “yes, thank you.” That was nice. Thanks mom. The park was quiet and I was the only homeless sleeper there. Cops had been aggressive about keeping homeless people from sleeping at parks because of the plague. I expected the cops to wake me eventually. But cops didn’t wake me up, an adorable husky puppy did, leaping on me and nuzzling me and such. An attractive and scantily clad young woman came over and apologized as she came close and bent over to gather the puppy up. She smelled clean. I was clearly drunk and kinda grimy but after saying there was no need for an apology and thanking her for the uplifting experience, I asked her if she wanted to sit and drink vodka with me. She laughed at me and ran off with the puppy. I headed down 4th Ave. Before getting pizza I sat on the sidewalk against the outside wall of the 4th Ave Coop, which had wifi I could use, so I went online to talk to friends including Ameila. But I’ve digressed. Anyway I had to stop drinking for a while after that and never drank while I lived with Trinity. Circle back to me in the cheap Tucson south side Motel hungover and depressed talking to Amelia about getting a new phone.) 

She helped motivate me out of my hole to do basic shit with some kind words. Thanks mom. I went and got the phone. Once I got the phone set up I got a ticket to Raleigh, North Carolina, leaving a few days later. I told her I’d be there in a few days and we decided to try and meet for lunch in Raleigh. This was auspicious and made for positive vibrations, which I would need because I’d pass through some strange and dangerous worlds along the way.  I was excited to meet Amelia and move back in with Badger.

But I was still nervous about the trip. I had the depression and anxiety. I was hungover. Everything was uncertain because of the plague. There were always changes that you understood once you saw them but could not predict and were initially surprised by and had to adapt to. Reality in the dusty desert streets of Tucson had been even shiftier and shimmerier than usual, shifting and shimmering on heretofore unknown levels. It was disorienting and created a general sense of chaos and danger. 

Arriving in Raleigh seeing all the water and green plants reaching and flowing I realize that everything grows into everything else including my own ideas of different people in my own mind. There was violence at the Greyhound Station. The Sheriff’s Department came in in body armor and military style green fatigues with assault rifles and such. They were catching a fugitive, they were loud and rough, it all happened very fast. It felt like a military thing partly because the clothes were green and not blue. Dude was trying to get out of Dodge with an open felony warrant I’m guessing. Can’t say I blame a brother for trying that! I might try it myself some time. That was all pretty intense though. 

So the station had some vibe issues and I wanted to find a better place to meet Amelia for lunch. It was rainy and places were closed because of the plague so we didn’t know where to go. I had to try and find a spot. I wandered out. In a nearby dormant strip mall I found a craft beer place that was open for people who wanted to buy beer to take away. It was 2020, you couldn’t even go sit at the damn craft bar and pay $6 for a seven ounce flute of some unremarkable India Pale Ale anymore. I realized there would be no new normal and I had not even experienced the old one that much. I’d spent too much time not being normal before the old normal collapsed. But fuck all that. Here’s what I say: why give a shit about these normals, old or new or whatever, are normals your parents or something, you baby, you clown, you piece of shit? 

But so they had some big heavy picnic tables over on the side beneath an overhanging roof. Plenty of room. My squatter’s sense had served me well, I love finding the little worlds in the cracks and crevices. I was glad I’d found a spot quickly. My possessions were getting heavy. It wasn’t that bad because I really didn’t have much, but still. I was tired. I was glad to be done with the bus ride, which had taken the greater part of my life on earth. 

I hadn’t realized, had not even suspected until we finally met in person at that big picnic table, that Amelia would  look so much like my ex girlfriend Nina from 2019. It was shocking and strange. It colored the entire conversation and experience in an unexpected way. What does it mean to feel something because one person strongly reminds you of someone else they’ve never met or heard of? As we sat and spoke of other things—which I enjoyed of course, as she did too from what I could tell—I felt this recurring desire to tell her that she looked like Nina, and to talk to her about how Nina wouldn’t talk to me, and why. 

Eventually I told her. I ended up crying. It wasn’t just that I missed Nina and she wouldn’t talk to me, it was that I felt guilty because I I’d been bad to her, and on some level I wanted to tell Amelia what I’d done and like, confess my sins against Nina, because I superstitiously believed that they were spiritually or magickally connected, Amelia and Nina, because they looked so uncannily alike. Maybe It’s because all women are the same to me or I have mom issues or whatever, what can you do, but I deeply desired to have Amelia tell me it was okay, feeling that if she did so, that that would partly be Nina telling me that she forgave me. I was tired from my journey and the sense of fatigue and having traveled a long way contributed to my inclination toward superstition and mysticism. 

“You should try to talk to her,” Amelia said. 

“I did, I messaged her again just recently, when I was leaving Tucson. She didn’t message back. She just won’t talk to me. She tweets about me though, she sad tweets about me still, and she broke up with me December of last year.”

“Wow, she must still love you.”

“She does! I think I still love her. But she knows she’s better off not talking to me.”

“Were you really that bad?”

“I used her, Amelia. I didn’t admit to myself that I was doing it while I was doing it, but then, when she broke up with me, I knew.” 

“You wouldn’t get a job and you didn’t make any money.”

“Well yeah. But it was also partly internally ordered by my fucking issues. Like I was afraid of the intimacy. The commitment.  I’m brazenly lazy, yes, but that’s not all. I’m also emotionally stunted. Who cares, though? Not me, that’s who. I should’ve just moved on sooner, but I fell in love with her and then proceeded to ruin it. I was like, I wasn’t in a good place when I got together with her. Am I ever ‘in a good place?’ Sometimes! I’m actually in a good place now on a personal level, which is good, but I’m not that great by her standards I don’t think. Maybe I never will be. But I have conversed with the commander of the army of angels who create time by warring in heaven and I have changed for the better as a person in my way.”

She cocked her head and squinted. She pursed her lips. It looked pouty and sexy but that was unintentional. She just had really nice lips so they could just seem that way. At first I thought she was puzzled by the part I said about the angels warring, but then I realized that she was just being thoughtful and reflecting on what I’d told her about myself and my relationships. We were in the south now so talking like a religious wacko was normal. 

She kept the focus on my relationship with Nina. “Maybe you can tell her you’ve changed? Be like, ‘Listen I want you to know that I’m sorry and that I’ve changed and I’m not the person I was back then,’ something like that?”

“Well I could, but that would imply that I changed in the way that she’d wanted me to. Even if I’ve changed in good ways, they aren’t really the ways she wanted. I’m okay with that. I miss her but I can’t pretend I’ve turned into what she wanted. I don’t want to play her, that’s what I’m trying to atone for or whatever, what I’m irrationally seeking to ameliorate through Amelia.” 

She smiled warmly but backed away perceptibly, widening her eyes a little, making an o with her mouth. A mixed gesture. She saw me noticing and leaned back in. I was worried I’d frightened her so that was reassuring. We were on opposite sides of a broad picnic table so our faces were never too close, but that was the body language of the situation. 

I continued. “It helps just to talk even though I can’t tell Nina ‘I’ve changed’ in that special way. I shouldn’t really try to go back to her anyway I don’t think. But I want to feel less bad about missing her and having wronged her. And I want to be friends with her.”

“You don’t need to be an angel in the eyes of everyone…”

“I’m definitely not that!”

“…But if you do too many things that you feel bad about, your conscience can get blurry and sore, and you can get lost in your own sense of guilt and see yourself as a bad person in essence,  and doing this can cause you to be worse to both others and yourself.”

“That’s true,” I said, lowering my face and laughing sadly, shaking my head at myself. 

“Gotta keep a good relationship with your own conscience.”

“I’m a bad person.”

“Oh come on, you’re being very dramatic right now.” 

“I have nursed a serpent at my breast and now my own son has come to murder me.”

“Wait for real?”

“Nah.”

She laughed and took a sip of coffee. The rain was green. Everything grows into everything else. 

“Sometimes,” she said, “You have to reflect on and recognize why you think you’re so bad and really decide if you wanna change. That’s what I had to do when I stopped doing gangbang and bukkake live shows.” 

“Wait for real?”

“Nah. But listen. Try and be good to other people and you’ll feel better about yourself.”

“A lot of times people say it the other way around: you have to love yourself so you can love other people.” 

“I bought the sandwich. I say try the first way.”

“I will. Thank you for the sandwich.”

“You’re welcome.”

 

7.

My Astrology 

After lunch with Amelia I had to kill time waiting for Badger. I had a sense of hope for the future, and relief at having left my most recent troubles behind. That is one of the pleasures of the vagabond: I got away.  

Now, getting away from the city of Tucson, or any city, while it has its challenges and obstacles, is relatively easy. But you can’t actually flee the city of your own conscience, because it’s you, you’re the city of your own conscience, you take your conscience with you everywhere you go. Things get weird, and the self itself is sometimes wholly illusory, but something in conscience remains authentic and rings true through all the wild shadowshow and swirl of echoes. I know this might only be for me, and that I’m half saint and half psychopath so my experience of conscience might be anomalous, but this is my wholly subjective spiritual autobiography. Sound pretentious? Fuck you.

I saw as if connected by thin threads in a vast shadowy space my soul and my conscience and the people from my journey all arranged, distant from each other, but very big if made small by distance, and burning brightly if made dim by distance, like stars. 

The Raleigh Greyhound station had grown quiet and was almost empty, but there was one loud crazy person who talked to everyone. We ended up talking outside as I smoked a cigarette I’d found in one of the outdoor ashtrays. The fact that the cigarette was a potential disease vector made me feel more like Keith Richards for smoking it, which I enjoyed. But so she was a sassy southern young black woman with bright green nails and a really nice bubble ass. She came outside and started talking to me.

“You a hiker?” she asked unexpectedly. I was in good shape and had hiking sneakers on so this seemed like a smart guess on her part. 

“Nah just a traveler. I like your nail polish.” She had bright green nail polish on her fingers and toes, it looked really nice with her skin like soft coffee. 

“Thank you baby,” she said, smiling. She held out her hands for me to look at. The violation of social distancing rules in place for the pandemic gave the gesture of her putting her hands near my face an erotic charge. I felt alive. “My name is Princess, Princess Finisher.”

All names are fake, but hers seemed moreso than others. Princess Finisher was the fakest sounding name I’d ever heard aside from my own, and based on the coincidental similarity in our names, having the same initials and some very similar sounds, I figured we were probably kindred souls meant to meet each other. She was like the princess at the last castle in Mario Brothers, that adventure among sewer pipes, reptiles and fungi. Made sense. 

“Well I’m Piscadoro Fisher,” I said.

“Sounds fake,” she said.

“It’s my performing name,” I said. “I’m a stripper and an Instagram influencer.”

“For real?” she asked, putting her hand to her chest. She emoted a lot, she was very expressive. She smiled, raised her eyebrows, and looked me in the eye. 

“Nah, but I’m a bard. It’s similar.”

“I was going to say,” she said. “I’m that too!”

“A bard?”

“No, those other things.”

“I do my nails too,” I told her, and showed her my nails. I had some darker blue green polish still on, but it was chipped and my nails were dirty. She was amused though and asked what other kinds of nail polish I had and if I believed in astrology.

“I’m a Pisces,” I said. “So like, yeah, even when I think I don’t, I still really do believe in astrology. I have some other colors in my bag, here.” I was wearing my old leather messenger bag over my shoulder and I swung it around front of myself and started digging through the front pocket, which contained mostly pens, guitar picks, and make up. I showed her my hot pink nail polish and my cool green nail polish and then some transparent topcoat with little colored dots in it. She liked that one. I asked her if I could put it on her hand. This was another time where because I was knowingly violating social distancing measures and putting myself and others at risk of plague, suffering and death, I got an erotic thrill from it and felt very alive.

“You wanna do my nails, baby?”

“I do, yeah.”

“You wanna trade for my green shade?”

“I do, yeah.”

“I’ll take that other one, the one you got on.”

“Okay, sweet.”

So we traded greens and I started doing her nails, adding a topcoat of the colored dots. She complimented my skill at applying nail polish and told me I should be a professional. She was prone to flattery. It’s hard for me to bask in flattery without keeping in mind that someone is trying to play me or rob me or whatever, but I let my guard down and just indulged in the lavish emotional fabulousness of the moment. And we talked about astrology.

“Like I’m a poet, so—“

“Recite me a poem,” she said, talking right over me.

“I… Okay, this is the poem, just how I’m talking now. 

I believe in poetry, 

in truth and beauty through poetry,

but it isn’t the same as factual truth, 

it’s more like astrology, 

or alchemy, or magick.”

“I don’t fuck with magic,” she said. “I had a tarot deck in my room, and a bat kept flying into my room, and no matter what I did it kept coming back until I burned the tarot deck outside, and then I never saw that bat again.”

“I’m not done with the poem.”

“Oh shit I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay Princess.”

“Thank you daddy.”

“It’s like magic though, or religion. It’s real.”

“Of course.”

“It’s not literally true though.”

“Yes it is.”

“Trying to recite a poem here sis.”

“Sorry. I love how these dots look, and how you talk well while keeping a steady hand. You’re good with the mouth and the hand at the same time.”

“Yeah.”

“Finish your poem then.”

“I forgot.”

She laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “Some shit that people believe literally can be like, proven untrue, but continue to exist in a poetic way. Someone who is really good at astrology can actually understand some deep complex shit about people, but it isn’t connected to the actual positions of celestial bodies during someone’s time of birth.”

“Yes it is.”

“Princess please.”

“No nigga you please.”

“Okay.”

She repeated what I had just said back to me in a corny white voice so I had to call her a bitch just to salvage my credibility. Any time I talk to a black person I try to prove my authenticity and garner their validation and approval. It’s racist in some weird way but I still do it. I just want black people to think I’m down with them. And that is why I had to call Princess a bitch. It worked. 

She was all, “Friend me on Facebook right now, I’m going to Dallas but I’ll be back here soon unless I go to Vegas. We are friends now. Are you gay?”

“I’m het plus.”

“What?”

“I’m into everything.”

“Oh alright then.” She smiled and chuckled to herself and waved her hands in front of herself in a nail-drying motion. “Me too,” she said. “Take a picture of my hands and post it to your social media. I’m going inside to talk to my other friend.” She made suggestive eye contact with me as she walked away.  I felt validated that she’d thought I was cool. I had become horny but did not think it wise to try to smash at this time.

“Okay,” I said, and smiled at her. I laughed, I felt happy. 

I stood around reflecting on how people had been approaching me whenever I just stood around, and as I was standing around reflecting on that, a man approached me. He was sixtyish, white but with a sun tan, and short. He had a clenched mouth with a carefully trimmed thin moustache above it and a little soul patch beneath. He had a teardrop tattoo by the leathery crease at the side of his eye. He dropped an envelope he’d been handling and asked me to pick it up.

“Ah can’t really bend well, Ah’m all screws and replacements on mah left side.” He talked kinda like Foghorn Leghorn, the rooster from the old cartoons. Slightly less cartoonish.

“Damn. Okay.” I picked up the letter for him.

“It’s a card from mah grandaughtah,” he said. “I’m illiterate, I just got out of prison.”

“You have anyone who helps read things for you?”

“Mah wife. Mah daughtah.”

He said he was out on a five year parole and he’d been working on a road crew when he got hit by a car that veered off the highway. That broke most of his bones. I wondered at his illiteracy. Did he use a smartphone? Was he on Facebook? The literacy requirement for participating on Facebook is comically low, but still. He looked like a character actor who would play a klansman in a movie, the Grand Kleagol or some shit. That naturally angry scowl of the dispossessed poor white ruffian. But he was old and fragile now. I asked him if he did smartphones and if he did Facebook and he said his wife and daughter helped him do Facebook. I asked him about his accident and he told me in detail and then he said he didn’t want anything from anyone even though he had no money. He said he loved the birds and the trees in a way that most people wouldn’t understand.

“I hear you,” I said.

“No you don’t,” he said, and laughed bitterly, and went back inside. Good old what’s his name. I wondered what he’d been in prison for. I reflected on how my journey had involved so many criminals, convicts, addicts, homeless, and crazy people. My real family, the ones I end up with by default when I fall out of grace everywhere else. I shook my head and laughed to myself. 

Badger finally pulled up in his truck with his big beard and his large skinny dog named Skinny and some old golden age hip hop playing. He had wild hair and a big white beard and was very emotional and expressive. I felt so happy to be leaving all the bus stations and that underground world for the time being. I had to settle down and write the story of the things that had happened, and like, to try and make something that would affect other people for the better somehow. Something with some higher truth. To make more of my life and the lives of those who share in my life and those who share lives with them. Also all the animals and plants and the spores molds and fungi, and minerals and dirt. Fuckin… the air. Something from the mind that reverberates through to the most mindless things. To the deepest darkest trenches at the bottom of the sea. 

We talked about the plague. Badger was a teacher and a nurse so he was an important part of the rural community where he lived, an essential worker whose life had been seriously affected by the pandemic. We both wore masks. We were going to visit our friend Billy. We’d have to keep our distance from Billy and talk to him through the screen door in the back. It was rainy outside but he had tree cover and an umbrella on the small back patio of his two story townhouse. Badger had to be especially careful because if he transmitted Covid 19 to the nursing home he worked at he could kill everyone. There were very few cases in Hyde County where he lived, it’s very diffusely populated and far from everything. But if I brought the virus in I could infect the entire region and cause suffering and death to others. That’s life in 2020 for you I guess. On the one hand the risk and constant nearness of death charge everything with a thrilling erotic energy, on the other hand I have a conscience that is charged with other, possibly more powerful, kind of less erotic, depending on how you measure it really, energies. My individual conscience is connected to the collective in terms of a genuine sense of social responsibility toward others, so it has a kind of centrifugal, extroverted element; but it also comes from so deep within as to feel like my inmost self when it gets a hold of me, so it also has a centripetal, introverted element. Maybe because deep down we are other people. Maybe everything really is made of everything else. Anyway though I was glad to get away from the risky transgressive stuff and have some peace and quiet so that I could write. 

After visiting Billy, on the ride back to Badger’s, we spoke excitedly about music and our lives. I told to him about this idea that I’d had when talking to Princess Finisher. 

“Wait,” he said, before I could even get into the story. “Pisc.”

“What?”

“Was  her name really Princess Finisher?”

“Well that’s the name she told me and it’s the name she uses on Facebook, but it’s a stage name I think.”

“Finisher,” he said, and cackled with glee. Das Efx came on the system and he started rapping along and I figured he was going to do the whole song, which was full of 80’s kid east coast pop cultural references, and in my head I thought about the astrology of the constellations of the people I met during my unexpected adventure in the spring of 2020, the year of plague and riots. How everyone was connected and how each personality shaped me in different ways. How each of us reflected and refracted and compounded and even constituted one another, how we formed a weave. A few key people were nodes where many threads overlapped at many angles, so that vibrations from those spots spread more rapidly and powerfully through the entire tapestry and resonated in each other soul in strange and mysterious ways. It was a web of symbols that could serve as a microcosm of the greater world of my experience in the future beyond this story, which is true. I mean, the shit that happened didn’t happen in words, only words happen in words, and in doing the word version I pretty much had to leave everything out. Also I made a bunch of it up. But still, true story.

Anyway, after Badger had finished rapping along with the song I asked him if he believed in astrology and tried to explain what I’d been thinking to him, but he didn’t know any of the people involved, so when I said stuff about like how I got to know Trinity through Angel and Chloris through Red and Yolandi through Whitey, and how I knew all these people through Nina and Denise because it was in losing them that I wandered into everything else, and how it was through Amelia as Nina that I unexpectedly experienced insight into my own conscience and the meaning of my life, it didn’t really resonate with him. He said something but I wasn’t listening. In my mind I saw constellations made of other souls in the sky of my own soul. I drifted through a reverie about Nina, Amelia, Trinity, and Veractiy, then kind of snapped out of it and realized I should’ve been listening to Badger.

“Anyway though,” he said, “The kid’s gonna survive, they managed to reconstruct his face using skin grafted from his ass. That sounds weird I guess but the ass has the best skin.”

I didn’t know who the kid was or why he’d needed a skin graft to reconstruct his face, and I didn’t want to ask for fear of being caught at not listening.

“I’ve heard that,” I said, nodding. “I think I have ass skin in my face somehow.”

“Ey what’s up dere ass face,” Badger said in an NYC Italian voice, like a Jerky Boys character. 

“I’ve been so ass-headed for so long now, I can’t tell if it’s congenital or I picked it up somewhere along the way.”

“Really?” He suddenly became serious. Badger was a little older than I was. It was like he hadn’t realized I was joking and was concerned about this ass skin problem I had with my face, and he’d taken something more literally which I’d meant more figuratively you know, and I mention this because the dynamic carried over into a conversation about astrology that I segued us into, hoping that it wasn’t disrespectful to the kid who’d had his face reconstructed. Badger didn’t seem to mind.  But as I tried to talk to him about astrology he was being kind of literal while I was being more figurative and there was a little dissonance.

“I’m saying it can be true like poetry,” I said.

“I just can’t believe in that stuff,” he said. “It makes me feel stupid.” Honestly how can I argue with that. And yet I did.

“But like, it would be a beautiful poetic figure I think. Where it’s like, these people are connected this way and it makes this shape and refers to this myth.”

“I dunno man, you’re the writer. When are you gonna finish that other book?” He was referring to a book I’d started when I’d lived with him back in the fall of 2018. That book had spiraled out of control and I’d stopped working on it and decided I might never finish it. So many words! I’d been telling Badger about that unfinished book for the past 18 months. He always tried to encourage me to finish big projects and try ambitious things.

“I have a different story I want to write, like a long story or short novel, about everything that just happened. I don’t know. I can get back to work on the other one too.”

“We gotta work on the house,” he said. “But we should get beer and not worry about anything yet. I get the constellation thing. It’s a good vision. I can’t believe in astrology though.”

“Poetic truth, bro,” I said superstitiously. 

“Shit! Fuck you!” he shouted.

“What?”

“That guy cut me off!” he explained furiously. 

“Nobody respects anything anymore,” I said oldly.

“Now you’re making sense,” he said, nodding. “Did I tell you about the kid who tried to light the principal’s house on fire?”

“The kid who got his face reconstructed?”

“No, dude, this was this other kid who tried to light the principal’s house on fire. He’s like, very fucked up, he tortures animals and can’t make friends and he tried to light the principal’s house on fire. He’s adopted and there are rumors about his birth family being all deviants. He seems like a future serial killer.”

“Does he really torture animals?”

“Yeah but like, people don’t have hard proof on him, just circumstantial evidence and suggestive stories. But like someone was poisoning and torturing cats, mutilating them as they were dying from poisoned food. There are lots of feral cats and strays in the woods and by the docks.”

“But so he didn’t burn the house down?”

“No, he started a fire with gasoline, rags and wood, but the principal’s brother in law is a state trooper and he was stopping by and caught the kid right as he lit the fire. Radio’d the fire in and apprehended the kid and helped the principal get the fire out before the fire department even got there.”

“Why’s he burning the principal’s house down when there isn’t even any school?”

“I don’t know, it’s all pretty crazy. Kid claimed he had the Covid and bit the trooper and the trooper beat him up. Kid’s only 14.”

“What  a year.”

“Word. I think when we go to Billy’s we need to make sure we do social distancing and shit.”

“Alright.”

“We need beer.”

“Nice.” I looked out the window. Everything was so green. I’d been living out in the southwest long enough that the humidity and greenness of east North Carolina seemed exotic. Everything was so watery. It was raining and the plants and trees were kind of glowing in the gloom. It was like I’d gone from the land of fire in the Sonora Desert and hot concrete of Tucson to the land of water in the wetlands of the inner banks of east North Carolina. It reminded me of what Dolores had said to me at the beginning of my journey, about how she saw fire and water in me and they come together in a snake hiss. That had seemed like crazy talk but now it rang in my memory as prophetic. I thought about trying to tell Badger. Then I realized he’d been speaking and I paid attention to him.

“So he ended up in prison and will be on the sex offender registry for the rest of his life, but the townspeople think he’s innocent and they all hate the alleged victim now. I had her in my art class, she tried to get me in trouble for swearing.”

“Which town is that?”

“Swannhaven,” he said. “For some reason they have more fucked up shit like this. Some of their kids go to our school. That’s the town where they had the scandal about the teen who took video of himself putting his dick in his dog’s mouth and posting it online.”

I laughed loudly. “How old is the kid?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oy,” I said. I was three times that old but I could not actually claim to be more mature or less perverted or foolish. “Poor kid. He’ll probably do dumb shit his whole life and end up like me.”

“His dad recently got in trouble for trying to rob a store by coughing.” 

“He really tried to do a robbery with a fake Covid cough as a weapon?”

“True story, bro. And not true like poetry or tarot cards. True like facts.”

“Damn. Facts are messed up.”

“That family is messed up but the mom and daughters are all really smart and athletic. The mom’s sister is a lawyer who helps poor and fucked up people. Apparently the dad was a highly respected war hero but he went downhill after the oldest son died of a heroin overdose. He’s a surly broken alcoholic now.”

“Where do people get heroin around you?” I asked.

“I’m not telling you bro.” 

Sometimes other people be your conscience for you.

“Wise.” 

“I finally got off the oxy and xannies and I need you to help me drink less and fix up the house. I still need to replace the windows I punched out. I’ve mellowed out the past few years, I don’t punch things anymore.”

“Good dude. You’re like 50, age should be taking the edge off of your insanity.”

“It has,” he said oldly.

“Oh shit I love this song,” he said. It was Cosmic Slop by Funkadelic. Badger loved Funkadelic. Badger played drums, was a funky drummer, like James Brown sings about. His leg work on the bass and hi hat were off the chain. He turned up the music. We continued talking, but we basically had to yell over the music.

“This song,” I bellowed, “is a true story.”

“I see what you mean now,” he yelled. “Let’s get that beer.”

“Okay,” I hollered. “I will help you drink less later, some beer is ok for now.”

“Thank you!” he shouted.

I checked the passenger side mirror on the side of the door and I could see the archangel Michael traveling behind us, not too closely, but near enough that I could see that he could see me. He was flying above the traffic and shining with dazzling colors in the sky in the mirror. I turned and looked without the mirror and in the sky behind us he was not visible. I smiled. That’s truth for you. Veracity. 

I looked over at Badger, who was now singing along with the Funkadelic song. His cheeks glowed above his bushy white beard. He looked like Santa Claus. Angelic in his way really. Saintly. And who among the many I had met were not? The god bless you guy maybe. He was terrible, never trust the only other white guy. Angel, the guy from Trinity’s, the pimp with the limp bars, was terrible, of course! But I had learned a lot from that experience. Having made it through I can see them as all having taught me valuable lessons. I’d come near my own ruin and skirted the abyss and looked down from the precipice into the nothingness of it where, deep down, miles away downward, so deep in the vertiginous depths that it seems small and subtle but is frightening to behold from such a height, there is a little light. It’s visible at such a distance because it would be very large and bright up close, like a star. Down in the sewers on the other side of the gutter there’s an abyss seven miles deep. You can see a light twinkling down at the bottom where there’s a crack that opens into another world. We call it a star. It’s both. It’s more. It’s a fuckin metaphor. It’s a true story.

“So then the people of Swannhaven actually found the guy and lynched him! They literally fucking hanged him from a pecan tree, for what they say he done to those girls,” Badger said. He’d actually turned the music back down and was talking at a normal volume now, but I’d been lost in a reverie which had been very vivid but which now receded now back down into the abyss of my interior, until it was so far away that it was just a tiny, twinkling light. 

“Wait, what?”

“True story,” he said. 

“I wasn’t paying attention,” I said meekly.

“Bitch I know,” he said. “I realized you kept drifting off so I wanted to see just how crazy a thing I had to say to get a reaction, or just see when you’d start paying attention to the wild details I made up.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“All made up.”

“Even the kid who started the fire?”

“No, that was true.’

“The dog dick kid?”

“Also true.”

“The ass skin?”

“Also true. But you know,” he said, raising a finger, “there’s a higher truth to why I made most of the other stuff up. Like about the lynching and the other thing.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “I see what you did. Okay, thank you. That’s how I’m going to end the story. I need to try and be a good person. Also I’m gonna bathe in this rain when we get to your house.”

“Oh word?”

“Word.”