The boy walks to the girl. The girl is in the bar, near the bottles and sea of plastic cups. The music plays from the jukebox now called an Ipod. It’s selling like hotcakes, you know? Have you heard what it does? Fat chance the boy will see one any time soon.
The party upstairs is one giant room, almost as big as a two bedroom. The dance floor is covered mostly in girls and a few lucky chumps. It’s bright inside and groups stand alongside, drinking and looking at the dance floor expectantly. Its days like this that howls at the moon over the land of sex and cocaine. Most came out in style, in typical style, wearing the wears, digging the skirts, adjusting the tight tops and loose ends and pouting those lips for another drink, another smoke, another fuck, another snort, another tumble in the concrete jungle. How cool are they? How hot are they?
And the boy? He clumps around in shoes too big for him, in faded baggy clothes that didn’t have the ghetto swagger. A rubber band is wrapped around his head to keep his hair up, and the hair was getting long because the gel just started to dampen his hair, so the rubber band was always in place, like a rat in a cage. In his pockets were his empty wallet (why did he have a wallet?) and emergency bus fare in case he got stranded. Snap, snap, snap… can I get yo’ coat suh?
One step, two step, stumble and fall. The boy does his own dance, his own jig, his own loser jitterbug. Snap, snap, snap… the boy boogies inside with his secondhand soul and pretends to be one of them but the people don’t buy it. No one buys it. And does he buy it? What can he buy with his own wit and his own mind? What is he worth and what good is he to anyone? He never says what you want to hear. He always puts you in the center of your problems. He calls you selfish, can you believe it? He calls you a lot of things and thinks about what you do and why you do it. When no one’s looking, he imagines your most terrible fears, lies, deceits. He reads them like a book when you are around. And you want to think he’s wrong, and you want to scream it at him and do… but why then, oh why, is he so convincing? Why does it stay with you when he leaves? Why is it harder to forget? Seriously who wants a guy like that around? What a stick in the mud! What a buzz kill! What a fucking loser! He’s just sorry that he’s not a better man, a richer man, someone like us! What can we do about it? Why does he blame us? You know what? Take that analytical I’m-better-than-you attitude and fuck off for once in your life! Go analyze your own damned self and see if you can take it!
Do you see why no one buys it?
Stumble and fall, stumble and fall one, two… around the crater, around the mouth of the volcano. The 30’s stand out in jazzy style but the boy knows it won’t be cool for a while. He walks in doing his thing, waltzing in to his tune, snapping his fingers like he owns the place. He’s one sad Nancy and getting bitter like strong coffee by the minute. The crowd doesn’t get it, doesn’t see it. The crowd scoffs, some laugh, other’s roll their eyes. Everyone is dressed properly and looks over his clothes, shaking their heads. His tie is askew, his shirt has missing buttons, his hat is flat, and his suspenders are hanging limp at his sides. Grease stains and sweat stains are all over his shirt. What a drunken, smoked out degenerate! How does he not bother to straighten himself out? How did he not bother with the pretensions? He doesn’t even bother acting like he has a life! Did they know that in the future nothing could be cooler? That people will admire him? Did the 30’s loser even know that? Probably not… and neither did the boy.
What was so cool about this? The boy wondered. He honestly didn’t get it. No one admired him. Some liked him, some respected him even, but no one admired him. No one wanted to believe his words. It usually turned girls off, and his helpless need to say what he needed to say got in between him and his sex life, if you can call it that. Did a 30’s loser get laid a lot? Probably… but the boy couldn’t dare make such a claim. No way in hell.
But he waltzes in anyway swinging his legs in and out, like he doesn’t give a shit. Snap, snap, snap… make way for the court jester resigned to his dated role people! Wow how cool he is! I mean, no one think so wherever he goes, but in retrospect! Always in retrospect! Hindsight wisdom from a nation with their heads up their assholes! And does the 30’s thug think that? Because the 21st century loser does, and most losers don’t know it… but the boy is a different story. Past glam and all that! Look up to the past and look down to the future!
The future is the present always on the brink. I guess after a while, like a scoundrel with life in prison, we have begun to get used to the idea, even like it. While we run our mouths about peace and family and freedom and unity, what we really want is the End of the World, and not just the religious. Everyone wants a piece of it. The Apocalypse has become a standard of the 21st century, and pretty much copyrighted by Hollywood. What a day that will be! But here this 21st century loser comes along and challenges the faded pictures, and the ancient agents of cool. He challenges the God’s themselves, the ones he loves and admires and aspires to. What kind of person is this you ask? He says it’s because he loves them.
Take the boy’s favorite writer in High School Henry Miller for instance. The man just couldn’t keep it in his pants and the boy thinks old Henry was real lonely in his old age. His relationships certainly didn’t last, probably out of his analytical nature, or maybe indifference or lust.
The boy read about his women and couldn’t believe that he could possibly have anything in common with them other than wild sex. The boy couldn’t help thinking that Miller got lost in the admiration of sex that he forgot what he was looking for. The closest girls were June and Anais Nin. June was a woman so ahead of her time that it literally drove her insane. Anais had potential but it was the same, only more controlled, more shallow.
Did I say control? Most important of all! The food sucks but the portions are too small. We want more shit, more to complain about, to feel like a victim over and over crimson and clover. My life sucks more than yours bit. Is that it? No, it goes on.
June and Anais were frauds in the Freudian sense. The boy saw Anais Nin’s frustration in interviews with Miller. He just took the mike. He just took the spotlight. And what about her green eyes that could bewitch any man, even Otto Rank? Neurotic people creating neurotic psychology fascinated by the psyche… where was Rank’s reason? Her jade eyes… her milky skin… her supple body… the boy stops the record.
“Yeah, she’s hot and kind of alternative, but what about her mind? What’s in there? I know you can’t technically fuck it, but does that matter above all? Are you saying Anais Nin is the best we can aspire to with women? What about Mary Shelley? What about the woman suffragettes? I don’t buy it. There are way better women, but they are crushed by the high heel of society into becoming ‘normal’ women in bad relationships to heighten their fake girlfriend relationships. The price is unhappiness, instability, poor life choices… and all for pseudo-friendship? Mary Shelley was right, and the legendary boys were idiots to fall for the great Anais.
The mirror of Miller was a woman named June, and he didn’t mind when she lost her mind, because he had already lost her before. He felt the pain, the betrayal, the hate, the sorrow, became a dog and begged, begged, begged… June was sure something… but she was like bad acid, mala hierba, a walking disaster waiting to happen. Any idiot could’ve seen that, even in those hard times, but Miller didn’t, because he was enchanted, bewitched, wooed, cooed, and screwed royally in both the good way and the bad. He was too busy tweaking her nipples and shuddering on her clitoris. She’s got a screwed up brain, can’t you see that man? She’s pretending to be so many people that she’s losing herself to a padded cell and ill tempered nurses with heavy sedatives. Who was the real June? Not the one of history, but the real person? Did she know herself when she found Miller? Or was it already too late to save her? Late from the start? Damn it Miller it was right underneath your nose the whole time! But he doesn’t read between his own lines because he can’t let her body and her rubber soul go.
June was a doomed enterprise, maybe since birth, a doomed enterprise with a hot body that almost toppled a literary giant. What were you thinking man? You weren’t thinking… you were fucking, and pretending you had more than that. But I still love you and your writing and your books. No one is perfect, I guess, but at least you opened yourself up to the world. You gave more than you took, more than your stupid mistakes. Had I been around, I would have slapped some sense into you. Henry Valentine Miller, a literal fucking force of nature. I hated you being all alone you big old coot. You needed another head, not another pair of legs. But I still love you and owe my writing ambitions to you… but was finding a better woman that hard?”
But that’s just a 21st century loser for you! One World War, another to go, so why not fuck the night away? Bombs are dropping, air raid sirens are blaring, the innocent civilians are screaming, the jet fighters look at the tiny buildings and drop fire from the skies…
Let’s all go to the world below, the one below the belt, and dry hump our way to oblivion. What else is there? The bombs and the unemployment lines and the people with nowhere to go… where do we go from here? We go south of the border, and north of the Mason/Dixon Line. We ignore it and we pretend that fucking is the only thing left.
The boy couldn’t blame Miller or Rank or the people of those times. In the future it’s out of boredom, out of the need to feel something in our technological world of gadgets. No one feels a thing because it ain’t got that swing. Dowap, dowap, one, two, one, two. All that jazz don’t make it to the Top Billboard Charts, but the sex does. Now is the same situation only the bombs are in our minds in our frantic struggle to be interesting and appealing.
We strayed for a while then the World Trade Center fell and America was never the same again. Show me your papers! Heighten security! Protect this country from the evil menace, from the ones responsible for such a crime. Lay that crime on the world outside, on your fellow neighbor, on your grandparents and grandchildren! Will America ever trust again, lay down its guard, or question those in charge? Will it stop suspecting everyone? ‘A House divided cannot stand…’ what does it mean? It means the Nation is broken almost beyond repair. The urge to turn against each other is too great to resist. It calls to us from the graves in the South, from phantom battles of the Civil War. Can you hear the Battle of Shiloh? The boy could, but he wasn’t swayed to join the dead men killing themselves all over again for freedom.
Snap, snap, snap, the boy walks in, infected with the loser gene, the Gen-X Gene. The world outside glorifies the illusion not the reality. The reality is a clumsy boy in clumsy wares with clumsy stares up and down contradictory stairs.
In the land of money and sweet, sweet honey, bullshit walks the line, in Technicolor primetime. HD, LCD, 1080p, surround sound, VR, it’s all there. You just have to look, to give one glance to never be the same again.
DanCarvalloSays 