BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technocolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca ISSUE 7 - The Seven Deadly Sins Issue (all FICTION!) C O N T E N T S - Message From the Editor Facts and Fiction THE (IR)REGULARS IN BOX Readers write: "America impressed, reader hooked, and Vasectomy pix for Xmas cards". Lost and Found Alex Mackenzie rummages in the basement of a British Columbia suburban squat. The Seven DEADLY SINS PRIDE, LUST, ANGER, ENVY, SLOTH, COVETOUSNESS & GLUTTONY Thematically linked FICTION from the Barbed Wire stable: Johnny 'n Me A young waitress meets the man of her dreams in greasy diner." By Cathy Paris The Last Seed of Christian Dandy An intrepid explorer gets more than he bargained for when he pulls up his longboat on unknown shores. By Ridge Rockfield. Frank A computer programmer and a lottery ticket vendor cross paths in a evening coloured by drunken remorse. By Paul Levine Forgiveness A father and daughter meet for the first time in ten years. By Sian Young. Without Official Papers An aging Italian boss muses on his unfortunate family history while lounging in a whorehouse jacuzzi. By Chuck Blade Remembering Claudio A woman leaves her boyfriend in a Thai monastary and finds temporary solace in the company of an Italian traveller. By Meredith Lowe. The Golden Apples of the Trinitron It's not easy being Larry King, particularly since he's been spending his off hours in the company of Tom Synder. By Adrian Mack My Funniest Art Class An artist laments that willfull ignorance is the worst sin of all. By Jeff McDonald. Sins of Omission A couple confess their worst moments to each other. By Laurie Drukier. MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR Facts and Fiction Over the course of the previous six issues of Barbed Wire I''ve encouraged writer's to divulge moments from their own lives to the Internet populus that they frequently wouldn't mention to their closest friends. During this time, there have been those who have come forward to express a healthy skepticism about the factual nature of some of the articles we've included. For these doubters we've put together the current issue - which is entirely FICTIONAL. While we've gone to great lengths to sift out all the facts from the crop of stories in this issue, a few may have slipped through inadvertantly. We apologize for any inconvience this may cause. The theme for this issue is the Seven Deadly Sins, and writers have done their utmost to put characters in situations in which they act out or are the victim of PRIDE, LUST, ANGER, ENVY, SLOTH, COVETOUSNESS & GLUTTONY. We welcome contributions for future issues to paull@istar.ca as long as you keep in mind that we have low standards and if you don't meet them your submission will not be published. Feel free to throw your story ideas in our direction if you're uncertain about their suitability. Writer's guidelines are here. We also welcome your feedback. Please address all correspondence to paull@istar.ca Paul Levine Vancouver, Canada December 1997 -------------------------------------- INBOX UNIQUELY CANADIAN I've been reading barbed wire for hours now. I love it. If I had a site I'd to link it....Your site has a uniquely Canadian feel. It reminds me of parties I went to in Vancouver and people I know in Halifax. Hey, I just proved that export of canadian culture is valued by USAians Treon Verdery treon@gis.net HOOKED I just went and read one article in #1 and I'm hooked. Funky zine, Paul. cheers,jen the jam http://www.thejam.com/ Vancouver's Source for Independent Music XMAS CARDS Just downloaded and printed your vasectomy pictures. Might use them for Xmas cards. Ever' Glenn. Grunt Gallery, Vancouver grunt@bc.sympatico.ca ------------------- Johnny 'n me By Kathy Paris I walk from the women's washroom where I was hiding, to the bus, as inconspicuous as possible. I learned that word from him. Johnny. I learned a whole lot more, too. How to run and hide for one thing. I shuffle to the bus with my head bent and my coat turned inside out so he won't notice me so easy. Diesel smells like freedom as I hit the open air of the bus bays. I don't have any bags, just a pack with my Walkman, a crushed peanut butter sandwich, and an apple, my lunch from yesterday and a People magazine I found in the washroom. I don't even look up. I just get in line. The steps up into the Greyhound inch closer. An attendant hands out cookies and juice as I get on. Stomach acid growls into my dry mouth, and the saliva hurts my jaw in anticipation of the cookie. Not yet. Not until we go. Not until I'm safe. I squeeze into a seat beside an older lady who insists she wants the aisle seat. I shrink down in my seat and peer over the bottom edge of the window glass, looking now, searching for his face. I don't see him in the eternity it takes for the bus driver to get into his seat, start the engine and close the door. I don't see him. Johnny Scott. I loved the idea of him. He was an American war hero, educated and slick. He kept books everywhere, bookcases to the ceiling. Most I couldn't read, they were too hard, but he never made me feel bad about it. Sometimes he would pick up his book and read it to me, just like a daddy would read to his little girl. He would laugh at me when I didn't know the words. "What's that mean, honey?" I would ask, pointing at a word I didn't know. He'd grab my chin and pull my face over close to his and look direct into my eyes. He smelled spicy, exotic, strange. "You can understand the word by the context. Try to figure out what it means by how it's used in the sentence." I kinda got what he meant by "context", but school was never really my thing. He had sweet blue eyes and lots of hair for an older guy. It was brown mixed up with grey and he could make it stick straight up, like a brush. He had a chin like that guy on "Entertainment Tonite", you know, square, with a small dent in the middle. He was handsome. Johnny, I mean. He walked a bit funny, bow-legged with a limp. A "war wound," he said. A friend of his, a mean, scary son-of-a- bitch, told me it was because of a car accident. A broken leg not healed right or something like that. "You're beautiful," Johnny'd say to me. He'd run his fingers through my red hair and whisper in my ear. That was a turn on. How he could see me, so skinny, a pale face with freckles, as beautiful, I don't know. I thought I might be pretty, maybe, but beautiful is for movie stars, not me. I was waiting tables at a grungy oompa pa restaurant. The tips were good if I hiked my skirt and wore a tight t-shirt, but the pay was bad and the food was worse. When I came home I reeked of smoke and grease. I remember seeing a movie where the woman washed herself with cut lemons to get the smell of fish off her skin. I tried that once, but lemon juice got into those cuts around my fingernails and stung like crazy. I lived in a low-rent dump, practically a loading dock, with milk crates for tables and crappy Ikea furniture to sit, sleep and fuck on. I kicked out my roommate the third time he forgot to pay the rent. One day AGT called to track down a bunch of long distance calls made from our phone and charged to other people. Just like him to rip me off and try to say it was someone else. "Can't say I know," I lied to them. "Wasn't me for sure." Not a lie. They cut off my phone anyway. I usually ate at the corner store 'cause I couldn't face another plate of fried potatoes and onions from that damn restaurant, so I'd grab my tip money and pick up some junk at the corner store. Pop, chips, food junk, not junk junk. Drugs didn't do it for me. Not till Johnny Scott. I hate Christmas. It's too hard, with no friends and my family. Turkey sucks, 'though if someone offers, I'll eat it. At the restaurant, the owner had us pretty up the place with crepe paper and a little Christmas tree. He was having a party for his loyal staff. There were a few broken lights in the back that we hauled out, but we couldn't fix the string. I met Johnny Scott at the Christmas party in the restaurant. He was there with another waitress. Johnny and I were just talking and, wham, out of the blue she starts in on me. What a bitch. Yelling and going on about me being a tramp and him being a complete asshole. Well, now I understand what she was talking about, but then, she sounded a little crazy and he seemed so sweet. She stomped out and left him there. He looked a little sad and I did my flirty thing, made a big show of being concerned about him, and he bought it. Seemed like it anyway. I guess it was the other way around. He drove an MG, a little grey convertible. He had to start it with a screwdriver, the electrical was such a wreck. It didn't have dash lights or a working gas gauge. Sometimes, that winter, when a chinook came and the temperature went up 20 degrees, he'd take the top down and we'd squeal around corners and I'd pretend that it was California, not Calgary, and we were Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke, making a run for it in The Gauntlet. "Better put on your bikini, babe," he laughed, the idea defying the pale winter light. "Better put on your seatbelt," I'd scream as we took another corner, ran another light, hanging on for dear life. He told me he had been a pilot in Vietnam. He flew helicopters, big ones. Hueys, he called them. He got a funny look when he told me his stories. "When the engine started turning the blades over my head I could feel the whump of the air pressing down and," he paused like he was telling me some big secret, "I could hear God telling me to kill those people". But he didn't call them people. He said gooks. I thought it was a strange conversation but I made allowances, him being a veteran and all. Sometime after Christmas, the restaurant went tits up. No loss, just another greasy spoon full of cockroaches. Except I didn't have a job, and this stupid recession made it pretty hard to find anything. I remember standing in front of a bank with sign in the window advertising a 22% interest rate. I knew that was bad, but not why, that the paper said people were losing their homes. Times were tough. I felt lucky, though; I didn't have anything to lose. Johnny said he had a friend who worked in the video production business. They needed someone to run errands, file, answer the phone. It sounded good, so I went down to see them, and they hired me. They made industrial and documentary videos, they told me. Could I type? Answer the phone? It looked like an easy job, right up my alley, so I lied and said, "No problem." How hard could it be? It didn't take me too long to figure what kind of documentaries they made. The porno kind. I felt funny about working there, but Johnny said it was o.k. "Don't worry, babe, it's not like you're in them or anything. Don't worry about it." The money was good, and there wasn't anything else, so I stayed. An early summer hail storm pounded the shit out of Johnny's car. The day it came down, I ran outside and watched from under the overhang. Hail the size of golf balls bounced off the cars in the parking lot leaving dents in the metal like a Chinese checkers board. The weather in Calgary was never easy. It was either really fucking hot, unbelievably cold or just plain mean. Like last winter when I saw the hooker downtown. She was dressed to the teeth, spike heels, dress, fur coat and some dangly earrings. Her earlobes were white; frostbitten where the metal hook went through the skin. Extreme. It took me a while to figure out what Johnny did for a living. He had lots of money, but he never went to work. People would drop by his place all the time. They would go into the back room with him and after a while they would leave. They never stayed for coffee or drinks. I finally asked, though I had it figured already. "Cocaine, speed, bennies, THC, whatever comes my way. A little heroin. This and that. Are you interested?" I said no to the LSD and avoided heroin. But I liked the speed, the bennies. I should have said no to the coke because after a while I couldn't say no. I itched to get home at night so I could get high. Johnny had to start hiding the stuff so there would be some left for his business. I went through the fridge one day, pulled out the milk carton, mayonnaise, ketchup bottle and fruit, then dismantled the shelving, looking for the personal stash. For a minute I felt pretty weird, sitting on the floor in front of the fridge with ketchup stains on my arm, a pile of food to my left and shelving to my right. Then I found the envelope taped to the bottom of the crisper. If my mom could see me now, I thought. I felt pretty shitty most of the time I wasn't high. Looking in the mirror wasn't fun except when there were lines of coke to look at. Then I felt great. On top of the world, smart, pretty, funny, till I peaked and needed to feel smart and pretty and funny again. I moved in with Johnny Scott. He asked, whispering to me, moving his lips over the edges of my ear, his breath warm against my skin. At night I floated on his waterbed, smoked cigarettes, drank scotch, and then dreamed. In my dreams I was someone else, a movie star with blond hair, and pouty red lips; then the bugs would come, a hundred thousand bugs crawling in my hair, in my bed, in my clothes, in my mouth, until I woke up, sweating and crazy. Johnny had his bad times, too. He never held his vodka too well, his face wobbled when he drank it, loose, slack. Then he'd slam the walls with his fist or kick over the coffee table. He'd get this glazed look like a junkyard dog tied too tight to a stake, with his dog eyes rolled back, all fangs, growling and snapping at the end of his chain, saliva spraying in a frenzy of frustration. It scared me. But not as much as the time I was coming down from a weeks worth of coke and I thought there was something in my eye. I poked and dug until the socket started to bleed and I realized I had almost dug my eye out of my head with my fingers. I cooled it on the coke after that for quite a while. Johnny didn't make the same connection with the vodka. It made things different between us. I tried to make him see, but he wasn't listening. The dog came out more often after that. In the fall, one of the video girls showed up for work with a split lip and a black eye. She was crying. She rubbed her hands on her bruised thigh and looked at me, angry, like it was my fault. "Why can't you keep him at home?" I could see blood clotted on her teeth. "What do you mean? Keep who at home?" "That blood sucking pervert you call a boyfriend, that's who." Jake'll fire me," she wailed when she saw the producer coming over. "Sweetheart, we'll get you next time," he promised. "Don't ya worry". He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh to the frayed edge of her short shorts. Then he looked right at me. "What? No way. Uh uh." I started to shake. Things were changing real fast. "There's three hundred bucks in it for ya." I shook my head. "Gram of coke, too." He smiled when I hesitated. We snorted a few from the container he had in his pocket. "What about Johnny?" What's going on?" Jake sweet talked me for a while, telling me how pretty I was, and how he just knew I would be great on screen, never really telling me anything I wanted to know. He put on a David Bowie album and cranked it. Fame rocked. Then he asked me to take off my shirt. The coke kicked in and everything seemed ok, so I did. Then he told me to drop my jeans. He had to see everything. My pants were down around my knees when I saw Johnny. He was standing in the doorway, watching, not saying anything and all at once I felt sick. I thought I might throw up right there. I pulled up my pants, and grabbed my shirt and ran out. I caught a cab, the cocaine peak passing, leaving me feeling cold and tired. At home, ran the stairs to the bathroom two at a time and locked the door behind me. I turned the water on in the tub and let it run. I never did take a bath, just sat there, watching the water pool over rust scabs until I felt the door slam downstairs. Johnny came up and banged on the door. "Come on out," he shouted. "We have to have talk." I opened the door a crack and he pushed it in on me. "I'm tellin you a story, so listen up." He knocked over the lid on the toilet seat, thumped down and gripped my wrist. I dropped hard on the edge of the tub. He reeked of alcohol, his skin blotchy red. The mean dog was out. I'm not stupid; I nodded and paid attention. "When I flew those chopper in 'Nam, we played a little game. We'd fly in low over a village and herd those gooks like cattle. They'd run scared and if you could get in low enough, you could drop down like an eagle and spear one right in the back with the skid." His eyes took on this look, like he could see a body hanging off the front of his helicopter, blood spattering the wind screen, hear his buddies laughing and shouting in his ear. Then the mean dog came back, looking at me like he'd explained everything. "I don't get it," I said. I thought my head would explode, my heart was pounding so hard. "We got a problem here." His grip on my wrist began to twist. "You kinda owe me for all that coke, sweetheart." He pulled me off the tub and onto my knees. "You're a good fuck but you ain't cheap. We're going to go back to the shop and you're going to go to work and we're going to make a little money." "Sure," I lied. "Of course. Whatever you say." He jerked on my wrist. "Exactly right, bitch, whatever I say." We got into the MG and he drove me back. I was thinking the whole time how scared I was and how if this was a movie I'd jump out and run away. I never cried, I just thought if this was what danger was really like, it wasn't so cool, it was just ugly. When we got to the shop, I told Johnny I needed to go to the bathroom first. He nodded and let me go like he was the king of all things and I was a little, bitty speck of shit. I had this taste in my mouth, like tin or something. I was so scared, but I knew I had to go for it. I stood on the toilet seat, busted the lock on the window and shinnied out. I ran down a bunch of alleys till I found a hiding place by the back door of a Chinese restaurant and stayed there, late, not moving, even when the cooks dumped the night's garbage. Then I snuck over to the bus depot and bought a ticket for as far as I could go with what I had. Saskatoon. That's what they do in the movies. That's how I ended up in the women's washroom, hiding from Johnny Scott. It was still dark when the bus left town. When the sun came up I was half way to Saskatoon and glad Johnny didn't have a Huey anymore. I'm living with my friend Linda now. She's an science student at the University of Saskatchewan and a waitress, like me. She introduced me to Darien; he's in her class. I like him. He lives with his brother because his girlfriend dumped him. I wonder what he's doing for Christmas? Kathy Paris doesn't do coke out of fear she'll end up in a porn film. ------------------------------------------ The Last Seed of Christian Dandy By Ridge Rockfield One last pull of the oars set the longboat on the beach. The keel hit hard, and struck a clump of mussels to split shell and gut against the cobble. Sir Vere stepped clumsily over the gunwale as the men shipped the long sweeps. The sky was curdled grey and the beach at slack high tide was empty, a narrow strand of cobble between the oily sea and the sudden black edge of the forest. First Lieutenant Christian Dandy cleared his throat. Three men followed the captain onto the beach. "As God is my witness," said Vere, unsheathing his sword and slipping on a smooth rock as he did so. The sailors waited for their captain to regain his footing and continue. Dandy swept an unseen mote of dust from his fine blue jacket. "As God is my witness!" shouted Vere, "I claim this land in the name of his Holy Prince, the King of Sepulter and the Holy Realms." The cry hung from the dead branches of the salt-blasted trees. A raven let out a hoarse croak and fanned out its tail feathers to let drop a lazy skein of shit. Dandy pulled himself out of the boat. "Haney! Take the rifles. Slatwick pass Chapman the phonograph. Sluvell take the keg of brandy." The goods were transferred, and Dandy pushed the boat back into the water looking over the heads of the men remaining at the oars to speak to Barrick the coxswain in the stern. "Stand off and keep an eye on the point. If you see anything, one rifle shot. If you see an armed party, two." Barrick nodded and with a sharp bark had the seaman quickly turn and pull the longboat into deeper water. Turning to Vere, Dandy assumed the pose of one used to awaiting half-considered command. "Captain, I suggest we clear the beach as quickly as possible. Mr. Barrick was quite certain he saw a man towards the cape as we came in. I do hope it was, but I should want, in this case, to observe than be observed." "As you see fit, Mr. Dandy. We have claimed our rights, as his Royal Majesty decreed," said Vere sliding the decorated blade back into its scabbard. The men shouldered their loads, and moved into the forest. They climbed awkwardly over the fallen trees and the dead branches that tangled in front of them, and stepped into sudden pits of black mud. The forest was wet and thick and silent. Clambering over a moss-smeared log, Dandy was surprised to step onto a solid beaten path. He motioned to the others to halt. "Wait here. Keep yourselves occupied, but for God's sake don't play the phonograph!" Vere looked hurt. Dandy signalled Chapman forward, and sent him up the trail as a lookout. Dandy took the path where it bent away from the beach. He moved quickly with a light natural step. He did not draw his pistol, but tuned his body to the listening forest for he felt, and had since he first stepped ashore, that this dark land watched their stealthy approach. The forest along the trail was silent. The trees were thick-trunked and tall, and the underbrush was luxuriant with ferns. Ahead Dandy heard the cracking of a branch being split from its trunk: he slipped off the trail and crouched low behind a spray of thick ferns. Again he heard the whisper of leaves and vines resisting the movement of bodies, but this time it was behind and to his right. Dandy flattened himself against the earth. Five warriors armed with long spears and heavy clubs broke out of cover and quickly dashed by, disappearing into the heavy bush ahead. Dandy had the brief impression that they were naked and that their bodies were striped with horizontal bands of glistening black and red paint. He stealthily raised himself to watch another party of warriors leapfrog past the first and into a thicket. Dandy cautiously followed. He could now see that he was at the rear of a large body of warriors moving through the bush along a broad front in the a series of timed rushes. They passed over the uneven ground with ease and skill and Dandy found it hard to follow and not be seen. They bounded down a wide slope, and from the top of it he watched them ford a clear, shallow river at the bottom, and gather on a wide gravel-bar on the far side. The men huddled together and, after several minutes of conference, split into two groups that moved off in opposite directions along the river. Dandy splashed across the river and went straight into the bush on the other side. It was less dense, and easier to move through, and then it was suddenly clear as he stumbled and fell into a bed of evenly spaced plants that were thickly hung with gourds that spread along the ground. A shout went up from the hidden village. The warriors had crept to the edge of it on the left and swung out of the bush into the surrounding garden in a loose formation of some forty men. They sang a song and stepped to its rhythm, shaking their weapons in beat. From the village an arrow was loosed high into the air, flying lazily until it reached its apogee and then fell to earth with swift speed. The arrow flew into the dancing mass. Dandy heard a yelp and saw a man fall to the ground with one calf pierced by the arrow's long shaft. It must have been poisoned--to Dandy's amazement the man's face suddenly turned a bright purple. A bright spurt of blood leapt out of his nose and then he was rigid, his legs stiffened in awkward angles with the arrow shaft pointing into the sky. The warriors continued to dance and sing. Another arrow and another flew into them. Men fell and each underwent the same awful convulsions the first had suffered. From behind the gourds, Dandy could see in the warriors' dancing the first sign of irresolution-- the rhythm wavered and became ragged, and some men held their weapons loosely at their side and did not swing them into the air. When one man at the rear of the group turned and ran back into the bush, there was a great whoop of victory from the pallisaded village. When two more warriors fled, there was a greater shout, and then the door to the village was swung open and a long- haired woman on horseback galloped through the gate. In her wake a dozen women with bows and spears flew forward to where the men still danced. As soon as the women were clear of the gate, the male warriors quickly fell into a line and levelled their long spears in a sudden show of discipline. The women came on with a war-cry that was terrible to Dandy's ears. The woman on horseback rode down the front of the warriors' line, pounding along just beyond spear thrust and then wheeled her steed to attack the flank. The last man on the line was too slow to turn his spear and the woman spurred her horse into him, trampling him down and driving her spear deep into the side of the man kneeling next to him. She twisted her spear out as he groaned and wheeled the horse again, this time to pass behind the line. Her soldiers were drawing near the line now, and showed no sign of flagging when they heard a sharp cry of distress from the village. From the forest on the right, the second band of warriors had rushed forward in two companies, one towards the charging women and one towards the open village gate. The woman on horseback urged her soldiers on to the line of spears ahead, and when she saw that they obeyed she galloped onto the flanks of the men rushing out of the forest. She knocked one down with her horse, speared another in the neck and clapped a third on the head with a small stone club that dangled from her left wrist. At the village gate, a rearguard of archers levelled a volley of poisoned arrows at the onrushing men and quickly followed it with a second flight, each arrow in each flight scoring a hit. Dandy watched as the women calmly beat back the surprise attack, forcing the men back to the woods where the rider waited to catch the men fleeing for the safety of the forest. In front of the village, the women had broken the line of spears and were pursuing the warriors who were now in wild retreat. Dandy was suddenly afraid. A man rushed by with a deep slash across his forearm. He was wide-eyed and crying: two women outflanked him and jumped upon him with knives which they stabbed again and again into his neck and chest. They did not see Dandy, but the horseback rider did and she flew down upon him with her club cocked. Dandy heard the horse, and raised his pistol as he turned to face the sound. He pulled the trigger and the pistol roared, spitting out the hot bullet in a cloud of smoke. The rider was swept off her mount. Dandy turned and ran back to the river. He crashed through the bush and across the gravel bar: he hit the cold water and ran until the water coursed at this thighs and he was forced to slow his movements. He threw a last look over his shoulder and saw he was not pursued. He turned to take the last score of paces to safety when a woman warrior stepped out from behind a tree on the far bank and raised a blowgun to her lips. The dart flew straight at his neck and hung there like a porcupine's quill. Dandy was too surprised to move or to withdraw it, and by the time the poison was moving with his blood it was too late. He fell sideways into the cold water looking at the grey sky and slept. When Dandy awoke, it was in close, hot darkness. He could not move. Tightly wrapped lengths of root stretched his arms out on a cross: his legs were whipped to the main brace. His fine uniform had been stripped from him and he was thirsty. He was in a longhouse and two women stood before him: he recognized the long wild hair and athletic body of the horseback rider immediately. A redhot crease ran up the left side of her strong-boned face marking the trail of Dandy's wild pistol shot. The other woman was older, and dressed in what appeared to be ceremonial clothes: a long robe of black and white feathers, and a crown of bone, fur and intricately carved wood. In the flickering darkness, she appeared darker yet, as if darkness came from within her to spread into night. The women looked at him impassively, and ran their dark eyes over his body. The older one nodded to the wounded one and left. The woman looked at Dandy's arms and his chest. With one tattoed hand she cupped his scrotum and pulled his penis: she reached around with her other hand and pinched his buttocks. The hands were appraising Dandy: there was no hint of pleasure in her eyes, or none that he could fathom in his tired and thirsty state. He had no sense of how much time had passed since he had been struck down by the dart. The woman turned and called. A girl-child ran into the room bearing a large cup held in both hands. The woman took it from her and raised it to her lips, taking a large draught that caused her to wince. A milky thread of liquid ran down her chin and between her breasts. She shivered and closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were alight with a distant fire. She held the cup to Dandy's lips, but he would not drink. She stamped her feet and two women ran from the shadows at the end of the longhouse. They pulled Dandy's hair back and pinched his nose while the woman put the cup to his open mouth and poured the white liquid down his throat. It was chalky and bitter and did not quench his thirst. When it hit his stomach, he cramped immediately and squirted a hot fecal stream down the back of his legs. He tensed and heaved as hard waves of muscular contraction tore through his abdomen. The room grew suddenly large, and blacker. The woman had a knife in her hand and was coming at Dandy. He tried to raise his hands but they were tied and then she was cutting the roots that bound them to the cross. He slumped into her arms, and she dragged him to a sunken stone floor in the centre of the longhouse. She began to wash him with a sponge that she dipped into a steaming wooden bucket of hot water. Dandy had trouble standing, and the contractions had ceased only to be replaced by the feeling that he was floating half a foot above the ground. She had only to nudge him with a soft hand and he would float away in any direction she wished. She steadied him with one hand and the other moved over his bruised body in strong, arousing motions. He felt he was suspended in a warm dark wind that blew from the unseen end of the longhouse. When she put her lips around him he tried to stop floating, but he could not. The tide turned. The wind was above and below him yet he was not in-between. Her tongue ran upriver in flood and then ebbed beyond the dark edge of the beach he thought he had once stood upon but could not remember. He divided into two, forward and backward, and the current carried him past. Then she was up on him and they rode together. She pushed down to stop him from floating but he was ahead. He looked up at her and she was galloping at him, swinging her hammer and he was shooting her with his hips up into her long belly from the garden in which he lay. Just before he ejaculated, she slipped off him and caught his sperm in her mouth. She turned to a guard who silently appeared with a cup into which the naked warrior discharged Dandy's still-warm seed. END OF PART ONE Ridge Rockfield has been to sea, Billy. ---------------------- Frank By Paul Levine Frank had always hated his name. If he was really to know, it all started just as he was first learning to speak. While his toddler contemporaries - the Mikes, the Steves, the Daves - pronounced their own names with instinctual ease, Frank identified himself as "Fank", "Flank" or "rank". By the time he finally mastered the proper pronunciation of his name, he realized he'd been born into a Frank- less generation. Almost all of Frank's schoolmates had been given short generic names that were fashionable at the time, a counterbalance to the excesses of the previous generation's flirtations with decorative, high-minded monikers like Charles, Edward and Rudolph. "Frank" conjured up a portentousness that was so obviously no longer in vogue that even his first grade cronies knew something was awry. "Frank's not a name; it's a word," one of them had mentioned to poor Frank who cried into his milk that day. _ As time went on Frank came to accept rather than embrace his given name. He particularly resented that he was generally associated with the famous Franks - the legions of movie villains, the cocktail lounge crooner Sinatra or, worst of all, the beach movie heartthrob Frankie Avalon. Yes, "Frankie" held a particular sting for poor old Frank who had been tormented with it throughout his teenage years, bullied by its sing-song corniness by his enemies, and most disturbing of all, delivered by his own mother as a misguided sign of affection. Frank's younger brother Dave had wielded the forbidden f-word when he needed to during their adolescent rivalries and while they were now both adults he knew that, even now, he could cause a minor provocation if he felt like it. "Frankie," said Dave, "you look even more like shit than usual this morning. Did somebody have fun last night?" At the best of times, Frank was irritated by the condescending tone his brother had taken to using with him. Since they'd moved out of their parent's house and into an apartment together Frank had sensed his assumed fraternal authority over his brother slipping. Up to their late teens, Dave had always been the quiet one and Frank, while mildly awkward, was extroverted by comparison. Moving out of the familial home had tipped the scales. While Dave had taken enthusiastically to broadening out his social life - often staying out all night, Frank had scaled down his activities to the occasional after-work drink with one of his fellow programmers at the software company he worked for. Frank was initially astonished by his brother's sudden social success that was clearly correlated with his waitering job at a downtown restaurant. "Those people you work with and like so much must be a bunch of freaks," he'd put to his brother one weekend evening as he watched him preen himself for yet another night on the town. "Another Blockbuster night for you?" replied Dave. "Look. There must be something wrong with them if they think you're such hot shit," said Frank. "Look Frankie," said Dave, "they're not freaks; they're fags. And if you must know, I'm not a freak either." Frank took the news quite well. He had been brought up to think that gays were predatory, but his brushes with gay men at university and at work had disproved this assumption. Either that, or he wasn't sexually attractive to homosexuals, a consideration that both relieved and troubled him. Having a gay brother wasn't what concerned Frank. He was predisposed to a biological view of homosexuality and wasn't entirely surprised at the news. What irked him was that while he found his closeted brother mildly irritating he found the "out" version gratingly ubearable. From the moment Dave dropped the news he took to gratuitous displays of his newly acquired gay persona. He lisped words he had formally pronounced properly, he invoked high camp at the slightest provocation, and he now relished the idea of calling his brother "Frankie". "Frankie," repeated Dave, "Did somebody have fun last night?" "Fuck off, faggot brother," said Frank lazily as he nuzzled his head on the kitchen table. His skull was pounding and he felt sick in a way that conjured up memories of his few lamented high school drinking experiments. Him, a buddy and a bottle of gin in the mall parking lot after dark. Him, much later, coughing up gin-flavoured puke as quietly as circumstances permitted into the family toilet. Since the brothers had moved in together, Frank had kept to the same strict schedule of waking and sleeping he'd developed while living at home. Regardless of the day, he would awake at 8am and be in bed by 11pm. Last night he'd come home at 4am, turned on all the lights, slammed a few doors and fallen into bed fully-clothed. There was a spray of dried vomit on the outside of Frank's bedroom door and a rather large smirk on brother David's face. While he was concerned about his brother's uncharacteristically degenerative behavior, he was also rather impressed and, above all, curious about what had transpired last night. "Spill the beans, Frankie. Were you drinking alone or did someone lower their standards to spend an evening of debauchery with you?" Someone had indeed lowered their standards - and in a way even Frank was sadly unaware of. Her name was Shyla and for the past two years she'd spent her days selling tickets at a lottery booth in a quiet part of a forgotten suburban mall. Before that she'd squandered a couple years in a fine arts program at a local university worrying about what kind of job she'd get after graduating. Now she had no academic credentials and was stuck in the sort of employment she'd initially gone to school to avoid. When she was first hired she enjoyed the pure leisurely indulgence of sitting in a small booth for seven hours watching mall life go by. Only occasionally was her solace interrupted by someone wanting to actually buy a lottery ticket, or more frequently, wanting directions to the washrooms. She had initially spent time sketching the pensioners, the teenagers, the housewives who walked by, but after a few months she became bored, disillusioned with drawing, and would just sit in her chair staring out across the mall. While most grunt jobs that entail large stretches of idle time often involve the further indignity of the employee having to look busy, Shyla had no boss watching her and a face that relaxed into a beaming smile regardless of her emotional state. She'd always hated this aspect of her physiology, particularly since people were constantly smiling back at her or telling her how happy she was all the time. But it came in handy here at the mall, where one was expected to be gushingly enthusiastic about being lucky enough to have the opportunity to serve the general public. Recently, Shyla had elevated the routine of vacuous staring into an art form. She would prop herself up at the beginning of her shift into a comfortable position, take a deep breath, and then relax into what she liked to call "mall meditation". What this involved was a concerted attempt at sensory deprivation, a challenge to filter out the rush of mall ambiance by her own brand of home- brewed mysticism. Concentrating on a small point on the sign above the store she was directly across from, Shyla would adjust the focus of her eyes to a garbled blur. She'd then try to take in all the noises coming at her - the shuffling of feet, the rolling of baby strollers, the random chatter and the ceaseless muzac - all at once, until all she could hear was an indistinguishable wall of sound. She'd spend hours in this self-induced void as her smile propped itself up for the passers-by. She'd developed a skill at quickly snapping out her trance whenever she was interrupted by a customer, a desperate toilet-goer, or the occasional clucky young rogue who thought she was staring at him. "So what's yourname then?" came a voice out of the blur. Shyla had always avoided wearing her name tag; it encouraged people she didn't know to refer to her by name, an aspect of mall culture she always found irritating. Instead, she waited for people to ask for her name and then she'd make one up on the spot to amuse herself. "Sylvia," she said, as a tall, well-dressed young man came into focus. He was cocky and relaxed and clearly interested. Every so often a customer would show more than a passing interest in Shyla and she was well practiced in brushing them off. "Listen Sylvia," said the young man. "If I scratch this ticket and win more than $2 will you allow me to buy you dinner tonight?" He punctuated his question with a smile and paused for drama as he held her gaze. "Sure," said Shyla trying her best to look disinterested. He scratched, won $50, and that night Shyla found herself bar-hopping in a blue Miata with Terry the medical intern. He told her stories about cutting up cadavers, she told him her real name, and then they headed to his studio loft for an all-night fucking session. But after that Terry had never called and while Shyla wasn't thinking further than one night ahead, she resented him not being interested enough to call her and for depriving her of the opportunity to reject him first. "Men are fucking pigs," she'd blurted to a friend after a few drinks in a downtown bar. "Not too loud," laughed her friend, "I'm trying to get picked up here." Shyla stood up and raised her drink. "To all the fucking pigs in here - fuck off!" Her friend grabbed her by the shoulders with both hands, pushed her back down into her chair, and smiled apologetically at a few people who'd turned around to witness the commotion. "Shyla," she said, "it was fucking that got you into this situation and it's fucking that's gonna get you out of it." "Tell me more," said Shyla. "You are going to fuck the next guy that sits on that stool over there by the bar." "I am?" laughed Shyla. "I am!" While Frank usually went straight home from work during the week, on Friday nights he allowed himself the luxury of an after-work beer, particularly if Ann from Accounting would consent to join him, which she almost always did. Their meetings had progressed from bitch sessions about office politics to genuine exchanges of personal intimacies, and Frank was really hoping that they were laying the foundation for something more than friendship. He had spent his last hour at work today in silent giddy glee as he tapped at his keyboard and watched the minutes pass on the office clock. For the first time, Ann had invited him out for a drink. Frank was now nervous about the turn he hoped the night would take and he tried masking his trepidation with alcohol while Ann blathered on about how she hadn't managed to find a single paper clip in the entire office today. "Terrible," said Frank, ordering another beer and doing what he could to resist the urge to peer too obviously at her substantial cleavage, a habit he'd embraced since their earliest liaisons. The drinks were clearly having an effect as Frank found himself focusing more on the movement of her lips than the words she was saying. "Are you listening to me, Frank. You seem distant," she said. "Paper clips," he said. "That was five minutes ago. What's with you?" Frank could sense anger brewing in her, a side of Ann that he'd never seen before. As he thought about it, he started to resent the tone she was taking with him. They didn't know each other well enough to piss each other off in any meaningful way. What gave her the right to presume had he had to hang onto her every word? "I guess I'm a little bored,'" he said, congratulating himself for his callousness and bracing for her reaction. "Well, I guess I'm out of here," she said as she grabbed her bag and marched for the exit, pausing momentarily at the door to scowl back at Frank who met her gaze with a dismissive wave of his hand which, as soon as she was out of sight, he converted into a summons for another drink. There was a hockey game on a nearby television that Frank ha been doing his best to ignore. He hated the way TV drew him in regardless of what was on and he particularly hated bar room TV which consisted almost entirely of sporting events which he detested. Games played by morons and watched by idiots, he thought. Yet, in his drunken state, a few shades closer to idiocy, he found himself strangely compelled by the action on the ice. While he'd always seen hockey as a pointless, awkward scramble he was now sensing a hypnotic, purposeful rhythm in the movement of the players. He picked himself up and moved over to the bar for a better view of the screen. As he sat down a woman approached and sat herself on the stool next to him. "I'm Shyla," she said. "What's your name?" To Frank she looked supremely self-assured but she'd actually required a few more drinks and her friend's constant goading to make the short journey from her table to the bar. Frank's seat had sat empty for almost half an hour while Shyla had taken inventory of all the available men present trying her best to psychically repel the hideous many and encourage the gorgeous few to make their way over to the magic barstool. Frank wasn't ideal but he also wasn't that hairy biker who'd been eyeing her for the past hour. Frank had spent his entire life being ignored in bars - by women, by men, and often by the staff - and he was normally absolutely unprepared for the prospect of any spontaneous affection from a stranger, particularly one so obviously out of his league as the woman who now presented herself. Was there something terribly wrong with her or was he, as he now suspected, actually better looking when he was drunk? He found the effect of her desire initially wearying; was he going to do or say something to break the spell? He decided to be calm, say little and take it as it came. "My name's Frank," he said. He pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to her in a misguided gesture to prove his legitimacy. "Can I buy you a drink?" he continued, amused that their interaction so far had clung so enthusiastically to cheap courtship cliché. "Tequila please," she replied as she turned and gave a coy wave across the room to her friend who gave her a thumbs up and a smile. The drinks came and they clinked their glasses together, quickly disposed of the contents and then ordered more. After three rounds they'd barely exchanged more than a few sentences. Frank was happy to have such enthusiastic company and was grateful to have the encouragement to drink with such abandon. He became quite pleased with himself as he abandoned his fears of saying or doing something that would send her walking. She didn't have much to say and seemed more intent on drinking that getting to know him. Frank decided to take this as a further indication that her attraction to him was physical in the purest sense; she didn't need to know anything else. "Let's go," said Shyla. "Where?" said Frank. "We'll grab a cab to my place." Once mobile, Frank started to discover just how pissed he was. Getting into the cab he'd hit his head on the door jam and spent the short ride with his hand held up to his forehead and his eyes closed. Shyla paid the driver, pulled Frank out and steered him into her studio and onto the couch. "Feel like a drink," she asked. Frank summoned all his strength to compose himself. He sat up. "I don't really feel that great," he said. "It will pass. Make yourself at home. I won't be a minute," said Shyla as she opened the bathroom door and disappeared. As she undressed, she paused at the mirror to take inventory. Yes, he wasn't ideal but he seemed like a nice enough guy. A couple of minutes later she emerged in a velvet housecoat, smiled casually at Frank and went over to the table to pour herself a Scotch. "Are you sure you won't join me?" she asked. Frank was far to busy ruminating on his fate and attempting to compose himself to answer. Yes, the evening had taken some unusual turns and he was in the company of a strange woman who seemed intent on fucking him, or more precisely - allowing him to fuck her. The ease with which he'd got into this situation had him lamening his lackluster social life. Now he knew how simple it all was and at that moment he made a promise to himself to get out more, to spread himself around a bit. He got up and walked over to her and clumsily pushed his face into hers, closing his eyes and pursing his lips. "No kissing," she said. "But I thought we were going to" "Yes, but no kissing. Are you OK with that?" Before he could answer, she grabbed his hand and pulled him to the floor so that they were kneeling at each other. She pulled off her housecoat and reclined on her back. "Do your thing, Frank," she said as she closed her eyes. Frank felt like a diner at an all you can eat smorgasbord, overcome with the options available to him and only slightly disconcerted by Shyla's apparent passive approach to sex. As he reached over with both hands easing his open palms onto the crest of one of her feet, he reminded himself to take it as it came; tonight was the start of a something new. He glanced at her face. She was smiling. Behind the smile, Shyla was surfing an alcohol-assisted void that converted every one of Frank's caresses into a disembodied sensation. She congratulated herself on her versatility. Before tonight, she hadn't tried her "mall meditation" outside of working hours. She now knew that she had the power to take anything life had to throw at her. As Frank moved his hands slowly, cautiously over her body, buying himself a little time to think about what his next move would be, Shyla started to register some sensory leakage and was disturbed to discover that she was experiencing a shadowy sensation remarkably close to what she knew of as pleasure. As the minutes past and her feelings became stronger, she found it harder to maintain her detached composure. There was a stirring in her midsection she couldn't ignore, a warm, luscious sensation that slowly streamed over her waist and around into the small of her back. Frank moaned and she opened her eyes. His mouth was open and hanging from it a few loose strands of saliva clung like little ropes to the mountain of vomit he'd emptied onto her stomach. Frank spent the entire morning attempting to dredge up memories of the night before, and while much of it was obscured by his hangover, he cringed as he remembered Shyla's screams and curses at his lowest moment. Nonetheless, he was quite pleased with himself. Clearly in one evening he had been close enough to two attractive women for them to care enough to get supremely pissed at him. As he set out to prepare a sanitized version of the events he could impress his brother with, the phone rang. He let the machine get it. "Hi, Frank, This is Ann. From work. Listen, I just wanted to say how sorry I was about last night. I over-reacted and I'm really sorry. I hope you won't let this ruin our friendship. Give me a call please." Frank's brother Dave couldn't help but overhear. "Shit, Frankie. The plot thickens. She's on her knees." Frank beamed. Dave seemed genuinely impressed and Frank was clearly pleased. The phone rang again. "Let the machine get it," said Frank. "Hello. This is a message for Frank. It's Shyla here. From last night. I have to admit that last night was the most disgusted I've been in a long time but I think I deserved it. I'm sorry for drawing you into my shit. You seem like a nice guy. I hope you can forgive me. That's it." "Frankie," said Dave. "You did get around last night and look at the result. Two woman are sorry for what happened and one of them is disgusted. Sounds like a successful evening." "I'm going to bed," said Frank. "Nitey-night, Frankie," said Dave. Paul Levine always checks when he feels a stirring in his midsection. ------------------ Forgiveness By Sian Young He sits waiting at the table. He has ordered a coffee, but it hasn't come yet. He has arranged to see his daughter for the first time in ten years, but she hasn't come yet either. He wonders what she looks like now. The last time he saw her, her hair was dyed burgundy, and she wore black pointed boots and braces. That was so long ago. She sounded more confident on the phone yesterday, despite the awkwardness of the conversation. She explained that she had a meeting downtown today, and could meet him afterwards. She said that she usually works in another part of town but didn't elaborate. He wonders what she does. When she walks in the restaurant, he knows her at once. She looks polished, adult. She nonetheless has a slightly nervous look on her face, which he recognizes from piano recitals of her childhood. He had watched her toughen up during high school, develop her defenses. He knew he was part of the reason for that. It had accelerated as the family fell apart. Now, not knowing he can see her, she seems to allow herself to show her anxiety just a little bit. Her eyes scan the lunch crowd, looking for him. It seems to take too long for her to find him, but then he remembers his hair has changed colour. She's probably looking for auburn hair when she should be looking for white. When her eyes light on him for the second time, she starts a bit, but regains her composure and walks over. When she gets to the table, he is still sitting, and he remembers the last time they saw each other. She had stood over his desk and shouted at him, that she was glad, finally, to tell him what a lousy father he was, that she didn't want to see him any more, that she hated him. All he could do was look down at the files on his desk blotter, at the time. He wonders if she is thinking of that moment now, as she stands over him and he sits at a table. But maybe it is his memory alone, of looking up into angry eyes. He wants to get up and give her a bear hug like he used to when she was young. He doesn't. He thinks she might rebuff him, and he couldn't stand to see that, not right now. So he just stands and looks at her, trying to beam his approval of her altered persona. She stands and stares at him, as if she is trying to absorb the aging effects of the past decade in a single moment. He knows he looks a little older than his age. He blames stress, his job, his heart. He worries about his heart. They get past the hellos, and sit down, and look at the menu, and order, and otherwise pretend to be having a normal lunch. He tells her she looks great, and she lies and says the same. She kids him a little about his white hair. They make small talk, about old family friends, about his job, about her job. They are both polite, careful. He remembers to ask her about her trip to Europe. She was about to set off when they last saw each other. She begins to tell him the long version, he thinks, and then cuts it shorter. She mentions the job she eventually took, in Spain, waiting tables, being paid under the table. He figures from the way she explains it that she is censoring information about a Spanish boyfriend. "I guess it was hard to pull that off without speaking Spanish," he comments. "Umm... well, I do speak Spanish. I studied it in university. I boarded with a family when I was there, and spoke it every day..." He is ashamed of the depth of his ignorance. "How is your heart?" she asks. "It's much better, there's this medication that helps, and we've changed our diet, I try to get some exercise..." he lies. She knows he is lying, he sees, but lets it pass. She learned that young, he remembers. Accepting the plausible answer, not holding out for the truth. He had forgotten what a strange mix of her parents she is. He is sitting across the table with the only other living person who also carries his dead father's eyes. It's like looking in a strange mirror that he always knows is there, but just hasn't looked in for ten years. At the same time she has her mother's turn of phrase, the same way of cocking her head to one side, the same way of playing with a ring on her hand when she is talking. He hasn't seen his ex-wife in almost fifteen years. He knows she is divorced again, he knows she lives in the same city. He doesn't ask about her. They eat, they drink coffee, they look around them as the meal comes to an end. It's been exhausting. Finally she leans a little across the table and asks, "So, what is this going to be, Dad?" "Well, that depends on you." "I wasn't sure what you had in mind. What to expect." "I don't know exactly. Maybe just see how it goes." She looks down at the placemat, smoothing it with her hand. "Well, that depends on you. It's been a long time. You don't know me very well any more. I don't know you... Maybe we can try. I can try to ... forgive you." She looks up at him, checking his reaction. "Forgive me?" "Yes," she says, evenly. And here we go. "Oh, for Chrissake, I'm the one who should be forgiving you!" He gets angry, quickly, like he always has. He goes on to say more. Part of him is shocked to hear himself speaking harshly, that he hasn't done anything wrong, that he shouldn't have to be apologizing so many years later. He says he is offering to her to come back into the family fold, to be forgiven. If this is how she wants it to be, then forget it, she is told. Just like old times. His body remembers this feeling, this anger and this fear and this blame. And just like old times, she gets frustrated and stands up. But this time she doesn't yell. She sighs, she looks at him for a long moment without saying anything. She shivers quickly, like a dog shaking off lake water. Decidedly, she grabs her bag, and walks away. She isn't even at the door before he is regretting everything he has said. He tells himself to stand up, to run after her, to apologize for it. He was wrong, he wants to say. But he can't quite bring himself to. He watches this woman walk out of the restaurant and down the street. She doesn't look back. He stares at her as she disappears from view. He pays the bill and goes back to work. He looks around his office at the pictures of his children, both the son he has at home with his second wife and the daughter who just walked out on him. He wonders what to do with the ones of his daughter, that are so old now, and aging as he does. He wonders if he will ever get any more to replace them. He wonders why he keeps them here. He goes home and has a silent dinner as his wife and son circle around him. It's a nice house, he thinks. He looks at the family members there. Nice people. His son is a teenager, and, while he has his moments, he is shaping up fine. His wife is smart, and works hard to make it a good home. He's paid a high price for their partnership, but it has been a success, most ways you look at it. He should be proud, he thinks, as he waits for his coffee. He really should be. Sian Young forgives more than she is forgiven. ------------------------------ Without Official Papers By Chuck Blade It's not like it used to be. Nothing seems to work now. In those days we dealt on a family level. If you wanted something done you knew where to go and who to ask. If something needed fixing you knew what and how to fix it. Nowadays you've gotta think about too much shit. Triads, Societies, Multinationals. Who am I kidding. As if it's all for the worse. Here I am, a dago in an kyke whorehouse getting sucked off by jap hooker and paying in yankee dollars. That's a global economy I can understand. YOU WOULDN'T BE WITH ME NOW IF I WASN'T A FAT OLD WOP LOADED WITH MONEY WOULD YA SWEETHEART ? No. It was when these younger little shits came on the scene all flash with their new information technologies. Selling their sizzle. But where's the steak!? The information snow job is one of the greatest inventions of the last twenty-five years. Fuck it what do I know anyways. My stomachs hanging down to my knees, I got hair all over my ass which I can't wipe myself no more cause my guts are in the way. BUT YOUR COUSIN TAKESHI SHOWS HIS RESPECT. THAT'S WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU PEOPLE. Any race of people who teach their young to respect their elders not for some vague moral reason but as a point of practice so that they too later will be respected by the young shits who'll reap what they've sown. Respect. It was always too fuckin abstract if you thought about it. But if you practiced it every day. Little things. There I go again. It's gotten so the only thing I practice everyday is taking a good shit. Come here child and I'll tell you the story of the 7 Italian Brothers. Come into the bath my sweet soap girl. Bring that martini with you princess. Have you ever seen such a small cock in your life. Maybe you have. YOUR MEN HAVE SMALL COCKS ISN'T THAT RIGHT MY PRECIOUS TOKYO ROSE. That's a girl. Yes. Take it off and come here and I'll tell you the tragic story of the Finzione brothers. All seven boys were born to Augustina Tarterello, my wife, a legendary Italian whore if there ever was one. A sad story as her father tells it. Sex mad the young Augustina was. A nymphoid really the poor dear. She would let the young men in the neighborhood screw her behind his butcher shop. At first nobody talked about what they had done. Only my grandfather would see them fucking while he worked cutting tenderloin and brisket steaks off carcasses of beef. Soon though the boys started admitting it to each other secretly and began spreading rumors about Augustina behind her back. So late one afternoon she invited them all separately to meet her in the field behind the abattoir . There she waited naked for each of them to arrive, telling them all to undress because she was going to do them all at once. But their initial enthusiasm died quickly and then they found themselves standing around with their dicks in their hands, looking at each others limp peckers. She taunted them into humiliation and shame calling them third rate men with third rate balls. After that all they would talk about amongst themselves was whoever had the smallest cock or bullshitting about who had the biggest. The kid took after his old man in a lot of ways. Didn't talk much but when he did you pretty much had to listen. He had a way. The way. That's what your cousin said. Shit I was the one that made him buying him that pretty nip cooze when he turned thirteen and that tattoo of Mussolini on his chest. The way I figured it the sooner you take their innocence the sooner they develop a thick skin. You need that in life. It safes them a lot of grief later on. A BAD BOY MY SON. YAKUZA. BAD BAD MAFIA BOY. ANGRY ALL THE TIME. Our first born was Lusso. He made his mind up for female prey early on and began strutting and prowling his teenage dick at the tender age of fifteen. Gino gigolo cruising the Hilton and Holiday Inn lounges selling his ass to middle- aged female conventioneers and business women. Before he was twenty years old he was commanding his own stable of fifteen belle dames. Hot bitches that'd suck the come out of a buzzard if they could get a dollar for it. A natural born leader the boy was. The stylish one in the family too. Always in the finest Italian vines and a pretty girl on his arm. Our next son Bramaro was the quietest of them all. He showed a peculiar talent by the time he was barely a year old. As a baby anything that was shiny: jewelry, watches, rings, lighters, earrings, broaches, necklaces, cufflinks, handkerchiefs, you name it, he had a baby fine touch and could pull a gold watch off of your wrist while you were playing with him and you wouldn't even notice. Before the kid was a teenager we, I mean he, had amassed a small fortune in rare and exclusive items of jewelry that I stored in a safe behind a false wall in our bedroom. Augustina had no knowledge of this of course. Knowledge. If that isn't the apple you choke on so as not to swallow the worm. I don't know. They've made real knowledge illegal. What you know in your guts. It's too dangerous. It's the look in a man's eye when you call his bluff. It's always their face that gives them away. Face. YOUR PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT THAT DON'T THEY MY LITTLE MISS SAIGON? ONLY IN MY COUNTRY FACE IS ANOTHER WORD FOR HEAD. SUCKING COCK. CAPICE? "You suck want feel good Mr. Finzione?" Yes, precious mother-of-pearl child, slowly, with your tongue and I'll tell you about Invidio Finzone the third born. Third in the line. His mother's son without a doubt but his fathers kickdog. Too short was the distance from his mouth to his mothers tit. The boy grew up as witless as an accountant. If B didn't follow A in a straight line... in fact it was what others had that made a fugitive of the boys spirit. I'd always tell him look at your brother Bramaro. He takes the lead. He acts and gathers the treasures. You lag behind looking for them in vain. Not that there's anything wrong with suffering if it's for a purpose. In the end we're all guilty of causing others to suffer. CHINKS, NIGGERS, WHITIES, JEWS, IF THERES A HELL BELOW WE'RE ALL GONNA GO! You have magic in that mouth my slutty sweet sashimi treat. Do you like natto my genki girl? Where was I? Yes. Right. Nothing ever made the kid happy. He's palmed that rosary of hatred for me all his life. Then came the twins Avarizio and Pigrizio. Who would have imagined a beat up, 30-year old Italian whore giving birth to twins. FUCKING SCIENCE THAT'S WHO. Around that time, uhm, about a year or so after the birth of Invidio, she began to have problems with her sex. Augustina's pussy was bleeding all the time. She had no cycle, you understand. So the doctor gave her a pill to regulate her period or something I don't know. Ah shit there's my Cel. Pass me my phone sweetpea I'm gonna verbally strip a yard of flesh offa this poor bastard. YEAH. HELLO. THIS BETTER BE GOOD YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT CAUSE... Mr. Imamura!!! Hontoni sumi masen. Yes sir. Hai. Yes sir. Hai. Yurushite kudasai. Hai. Hai. Wakari mashita. Yes sir. Hai. Hai. Domo go-shinsetsu ni. I'm glad you are not so easily distracted kawaii but if you persist you'll be rewarded with a mouthful of fermented bean paste, ITALIAN STYLE. GUINEAS, JAPS, WE'RE ALL ALIKE. DEAD EMPIRES OF NOODLE EATERS. The twins. Yes. Avarizio and Pigrizio. From the minute they were both shit out they began eating. Incredible appetites like a pair of hungry cannibals at sacrifice time. They were a couple of butterballs before they could walk. Only, at around the time he entered school, Avarizio began to horde things. His eating slowed down too but his twin brother was there to pick up the slack. Unlike Bramaro, whose eyes locked onto anything shiny or bright, Avarizio seemed to horde things for the sake of hoarding. Spoons, paper clips, pens, lighters, hairpins, toothbrushes, broken glass frames, cans of old paint. For the love of the virgin if your gonna steal then steal something valuable I'd tell him. But human behavior has it's own logic which you ignore at your own peril. Orgoglio Finzione was our next born. A dead ringer for me he was. His father's pride. Everywhere we went I'd dress the kid up just like me. Around this time we ran into some money problems because of some bad investments I made. I told the family to tighten their belts. We couldn't afford new clothes for him but he had five older brothers with plenty of clothes they weren't wearing anymore. Hand-me downs were good enough for me. What do you think! Well Orgoglio refused to go to school in second-hand clothes. He said it embarrassed him and made the family look bad. Our next son, Rabbio, was the one that did Augustina in. The poor dear. God bless her baby-making soul. She died just after giving birth to last born. A brain tumor, some kind of morbid dilation of an artery, were the doctors words. What good would it have done him to know these things. Does he hate me for sparing him the knowledge that he killed his mother? What good is knowledge if you're ignorant of the social forces that will exploit that knowledge. WHAT'S BETTER: TO BE CLEARED ON A TECHNICALITY OR IMPRISONED ON A FUCKING TECHNICALITY?... End of Part 1 Chuck Blade never picks up his cel when he's telling a good story. ----------------------------- Remembering Claudio By Meredith Lowe I left my boyfriend in the monastery. I was standing in the coconut grove when I knew it was time to go. A breeze swept in from the sea, over the rice fields of the southern Thai peninsula, and blew among the tops of the trees. A green coconut gently detached itself from its stem and fell to the ground, giving itself to gravity, meeting the earth with a solid, satisfying thump. I had been watching a beetle. It was struggling to climb over a tall, tight thicket of grasses, trying to get to the open prairie of the path I was squatting on. I was debating whether to give it a bit of a boost, when it was crushed by the coconut's landing. I looked up at the swaying tree, then down at the coconut where the beetle used to be. I pondered for a while. I was supposed to be doing walking meditation, along with everyone else. During walking meditation we went outside to pace slowly, or stand still, focusing on nothingness. To hide my failure at doing that, I usually focused on the multitudes of bugs on the ground. Most of the time we sat in the meditation hall, on mats or stools. All of us foreigners, living in silence for ten days, being taught the principles of Buddhism by a saffron-robed Thai monk. We tried to empty our minds and concentrate on the breath, then on impermanence, non-self and nothingness. It was hard not to fall asleep in the heat. Living in silence, I was starting to wonder if I really existed or not. Nobody talked to me, nobody recognized me. I relived all the bad moments of my life. In the meditation hall, I would break out of a little trance with a start, wondering if I had screamed aloud, or started babbling the words crowding my head. I would look around at all the others, their eyes shut in concentration. No sign. It was my boyfriend, Ben, who had really wanted to come here. I didn't know exactly why he was so fixed on it, but of course like every girlfriend I had my theories. Lacking the chutzpah by that point to make an independent decision, I decided to come along too. We were in the middle of our big Asia trip when it became obvious that our relationship was over. I took photographs in the places we went, and looking at them later, all I could remember is what we were fighting about at the time. We were exhausted, and bitter. Well, I was bitter. I didn't know any more what Ben thought of anything. I wondered whether I cared. At night he would slide his arm around my waist as I lay facing away from him. Some nights, when I was mad enough, I would fling his arm off me to start a fight. Some nights we would have hopeless sex, over before it had begun. It was like burning a sheet of paper while trying to hold onto it. The flame goes out before you can burn the whole thing up. But most nights I ignored him. Eventually he would slide his arm away and I could settle into a light sleep. But I would writhe and turn in our narrow hostel bed until I was trussed up in the sheets like a fly in a web. In the morning he would sometimes slide his arm in again, the spider checking its prey. But mostly he would just get up and light a cigarette and leave the room. In the monastery men and women had separate quarters. I honestly didn't calculate on this when deciding that I wanted to join him in exploring Buddhism. But I was enjoying my cement block bed for the glorious solitude of it. Leaving the beetle to mulch into spiritual oneness with the soil, I stood up. I could see Ben standing a little way off, across the grove. I could see his labored concentration from here, breathing in, breathing out. Searching for peace, presumably. I decided to give him some. I picked up the coconut and took it to the front of the meditation hall where the monks sat, as a kind of offering. I went back to my room, folded up my mosquito net, and rolled up the straw mat I had been using to pad my concrete bed. I loaded up my pack, nodded a silent goodbye to the Scandinavian-looking girl who had been my amicable neighbour for a week, and slipped away. By the time I hit the main road, I was giddy. By the time I caught a truck-bus south, I was exuberant. I swung myself up to ride on top with the teenage boys and let the wind lash at me as we sped along the rutted highway. I had escaped. I first met Claudio waiting for the ferry. I was having some difficulty deciding which island to head for, but finally took a ticket for the furthest one that had a direct boat that day. I had a fabulously paranoid sense that I was on the lam and should lay low for a while. I didn't want to blend into a crowd - I wanted to disappear completely. Claudio was sitting in a cafe next to the port, drinking a pineapple shake and looking disreputable, his specialty. He looked like an Italian Jesus freak, all frizzled hair and rough cotton clothing, but with a demonic smile. "I left my boyfriend in the monastery," I told him. "And?" I raised an eyebrow. A week in the monastery had taught me how not to speak. He grinned at me and bought us both ice cream bars, which we ate in companionable silence. We headed to the northwest corner of the island, and rented adjoining bungalows by a little cove. We spent lazy days swimming, or snorkeling, or just sitting on the balcony, looking at the ocean in front of us. We didn't speak, really. I didn't know why Claudio was so benevolently distant, but it suited me. At night, alone in my little cabin, I would tuck in my mosquito net tightly around my bed, inspecting it for holes carefully. If I found a trespasser inside the net, I had to kill it before I could lie down. Then I would turn on my flashlight and aim the beams around the room to watch all the gnats, mosquitoes, and moths. I loved seeing them outside, trying to get into my fortress of woven mesh. Smug, snug and safe, I could go to sleep, flinging my limbs all over the bed, waking up gloriously alone and unassailable. During the day, I would watch crickets in the grasses in front of my bungalow. They were hard to spot, but once I trained my eye, I could see them everywhere. There were some that blended in with dried grasses, and looked like a piece of straw until they jumped. There were some that looked like a blade of fresh green grass, ready for one of the passing goats to eat. There were some that moved so fast they were hard to get a good look at. Silvery, with slim bodies and bigger heads than the others. It amazed me when all the crickets would jump at the same time. They didn't seem to aim. The new place wasn't necessarily safer, just different. And how did they know when to jump? They would just decide it was time to move and off they would go. If I blinked during that instant I would miss where they went next. One afternoon, Claudio came back from one of his hiking expeditions looking quite proud of himself. He showed me a carefully rolled joint that he had bought further up the beach. That evening, clear and warm and brilliantly moonlit, we walked out to a favorite sand dune right by the water, and started smoking. Once we were halfway through the joint, I was quite stoned. I suppose Claudio was too, because he started to sing softly in Italian, pop songs, by the sound of them. Eventually I guess he ran out of songs, because he was quiet. I decided I had a story to tell him, but the words came slowly. "When I was at this monastery, all silent, I had the job to ring the bell in the afternoons to wake people up from their naps, to tell them to come meditate again...I would climb up this tower and take this wooden mallet and hit this great big cast-iron bell...I had to hit it really hard. It felt great, to be so loud in the silence... "But one day I go up there and I'm pounding away at it, when a huge hornet flies out of it..." "Hornet? What is this hornet?" "Like, um, like a bee the size of a hummingbird." "Oh..." translating in his head. "OK." "So I bang on the bell again, and a few more come out, and they're coming after me. So there I am, running around the bell tower, swatting at them with the mallet... One of them stung me, too. On the shoulder. It hurt like hell." A pause while inhaling deeply, sharing, and waiting for exhalation. "So then what?" "What?" "So then what happen next with this bell?" "Oh... Well, these don't-kill-anything Buddhists had to come up and smoke out the hornets. That didn't work the first time, though, so they had to kill them. I got one with the mallet." A pause. "You know, I think I'm bitter about it..." "Hmm?" "I felt, I don't know, betrayed by that bell. It was so beautiful. I loved it, I loved being up there, by myself. And it was hiding fucking hornets to come out and sting me!" "These fucking bells!" This sounded very funny with an Italian accent, for some reason, and that was it, the spell was broken. We started laughing, helplessly, building up to gales that we couldn't stop. I was rolling along the beach, and Claudio was collapsing on the sand down by the water. I could hear him gasping for air, he was laughing so hard. We both sighed, loud, noisy sighs. At least I did. I rolled on my stomach and put my ear down to the ground, wrapping my arms over my head to listen better. I could hear the grains of sand squeaking beneath the weight of my body. I could hear the soil being chewed and swallowed, by the maggots and worms toiling away beyond the beach. I could hear all the myriad rumblings of the earth, changing the shape of things. I raised my head and looked over at where Claudio had dropped on the beach, about fifty feet away from me. He seemed to be still laughing silently, shuddering to himself. I watched him for a while, like a scientist looking at a specimen through a microscope. Maybe this was what the Buddhist monk had been teaching us, about non-attachment and nothingness. I could watch this image and feel nothing. The wind came down from the stars and blew my hair in my face. It smelled like the forest and the ocean. I felt like it could float me up to the treetops, and rock me among the palm fronds and the coconuts. Time was passing in the strangest way; now slow, now fast. I don't know at what point I realized time was speeding up for Claudio. I could see him shaking still, and eventually realized he wasn't laughing. For a long while I thought maybe he was crying. Then I saw his body jerking as if he was masturbating, but I could see he wasn't, I could see his hands lying on the ground above his head. What was I watching? And how long was I going to watch it? I stared, wondering whether I would get up to find out what was the matter. I watched long after I realized something was wrong. I watched long after I knew he was having trouble breathing. The next day, the English-speaking doctor we finally found told me that it wasn't certain that I could have done anything by that point. Unless I had been right next to him when he started convulsing, I probably couldn't have helped. Unless we had been near a hospital, he probably couldn't have been saved, once he started inhaling sand and sea water. Even so, I think about his image in the moonlight, the shadows quivering on the sand, his shaking silvery silhouette. When I did go over to him, he was very still, very warm, very heavy. I dragged him up to the nearest bungalow and knocked on the door. The Danish couple inside, helpful, efficient, concerned, raised the alarm, arranged the boat to town, made sure the doctor was called, helped me collect Claudio's passport and documents from his bungalow. The Danes and Claudio and I, a silent group, rode with a Thai boy in a little outboard boat. When we got to the clinic in the nearest town, with great fuss and bother, nothing could be done. They asked me his name, his parents' names, his hometown. We filled in forms to label him: an Italian specimen, native habitat Milan, gender male, age twenty-seven, special characteristic epilepsy, condition deceased. The Danes were kind, and very concerned about me. They thought that we had been a couple and that I was grieving. We weren't and I wasn't. I think I shocked them by leaving the next day. There didn't seem to be any point in staying. I went to Bangkok and sat in the tourist cafes on Khaosan Road, surrounded by people just like me, wandering around pointlessly. Together we watched Hollywood movies on video screens, served by Thais who didn't speak English at all, asking us to point at items on the menus that they brought. Sitting in a cafe one day, I was surprised to see Ben. He didn't notice me, even though he stopped at the street stall right in front of me. I just watched him, remembering his face, the shape of his shoulders. His prematurely gray hair, long and curly. His ever-present cigarette, back after the enforced abstention of the monastery. He looked happier, less strained. He looked about as real to me as Forrest Gump on the TV screen on the wall. I let him pass by, out of sight, out of range, and went back to my viewing. Meredith Lowe always checks when she sees people shaking. --------------------------------------------- The Golden Apples of the Trinitron By Adrian Mack Larry King levels his gaze at Greta Van Sustren. Vapour gathers behind his eyes, as if his brain generates a Georges Melies tribute and Loni Anderson appears. "She's the last American sweetheart," thinks Larry, swelling. "I'd like to go balls-deep with that broad!" and he awakens to the sound of Great Van Sustren gasping and surging panic in the control room. Ten minutes later and Larry's head is being massaged by the Floor Manager, who Larry used to call 'that dyke with the hair-lip.' Right to her face, too. Hair lip. And her real name was Helene Lefaivre, if you can believe that. Same initials. One day he said to her, "you should grow a moustache and cover that thing up," and she wept. He explained to her "you have to be tough to make it in this industry and people are saying worse things behind your back anyway." She thought Larry very considerate after that because he took the time to level with her. A few days passed and he took her to a Press Association banquet but dumped her for some blonde chippie who looked like she'd been dipped in flame retardant gel. Not that hair-lip cared. She was busy wheeling Jeannie Moos - but that's all we can say. Larry's been cranky for a few weeks. Going home is like walking into a migraine chamber invented by Dr. Jesus Vanilla Pablo. This uptown bitch from Vanity Fair with an Yvonne DeCarlo hairpiece had soured on Larry's Penthouse gig instantly, telling him and her readers that all the chrome, glass, beige shag-pile and eternal night viewed from the sliding doors tended to have a convulsive neurological effect and she even went to the trouble of suffering a nose-bleed some fifteen seconds after she walked in. Larry gave her one of Snyder's towlettes that he kept beside his bed to cough into - the one's with the little CBS logo for christ's sake - and then behaved indifferently while she cleaned herself up. Not long after that she began to gag on the apartment's systemic miasma of halitosis so Larry had to drag his ass down to Melville's for an hour so she could continue. The interview went very badly. Larry pointedly ignored any questions about his rum financial history while openly obsessing about Loni Anderson, asking repeatedly if his interviewer knew what she was up to these days. Is she seeing anyone? What's the word? When it was published the following month, Brian Poindexter came down and put the muscle on Larry so that he'd take a two-week break and David Frost sat in for him, performing very well except for the time he fell off the chair during the Michael Eisner interview and giggled helplessly through the rest of the show. Anyway, that's when Larry's troubles really began because Snyder decided it would be fun to take off with Larry down to Miami for the two weeks and naturally, he climbed about thirty-feet inside Larry's ass and dug in. If Larry wanted Mexican, Tom wanted Thai. If Larry wanted to take in a flick, Tom wanted to stay in the hotel and pretend that they were in a submarine. They went to this party and Larry zeroed in on some dame with a nice, fat ass, but Tom came jogging over and interrupted with a fusillade of elliptical questions that gave way to pointless asides that developed into meaningless digressions which he would then punctuate with a Dada-ist sound poem that he'd just learned. And if the poor woman got the chance to answer one of these questions, assuming that she could remember what it was, Tom would point to a piece of furniture or a picture and come out with some almightily baffling observation and then laugh with a bronchial gurgle, point to an imaginary camera operator and say, "You know where I'm coming from, Mitch!" "Why don't you shut your goddammed mouth for a minute and let the woman speak, Meathead!" Larry was fuming and Tom was off again, "Laissez-faire! Laissez- faire! I remember having dinner with the Kissinger's once. The only real anti- gravity machine is the floor you're standing on! Haaaaaaahhhhhhccccchhhhh....That's what he told me. Hhhhaaaaahhhhhhcchhhhhhhhhhh......." And he gave Mitch the thumbs-up. The worst thing was, she seemed genuinely enthralled with Tom, if perplexed, and she seemed to hate Larry, whom she'd re-named "Gak". "Back-off, Gak!" She kept saying, sending Tom into another slooshing festival of hysterics. Then Tom started calling Larry "The Captain" so Larry called Tom "Meathead" one more time and slumped into a wicker chair, wheezed to himself grumpily and chewed his cud while waving people off with a limp, liver-spotted hand. Larry wears his pants too high so they tend to hammock around his balls while the hem flaps a good six or seven inches shy of his ankles. He wears black Pierre Cardin socks that would become a younger man but on Larry, contrive to look like surgical stockings. This reinforces the sense one has around Larry that he keeps a permanent reservation at the Hospital; that he is, in some ways, a miracle of health-care. Were he blessed with better hearing, he would know that the dame with the nice, fat ass is ridiculing him on this very subject but Larry, instead, is lost in seething contemplation of Tom's bottom teeth. Tom's botton teeth seem as rude to Larry as a set of toes cast in enamel. This, in concert with Tom's aggravated laugh and his trembling jowls, inspires in Larry a condition of near religious contempt. Back at home now, Larry and Tom unpack in silence. Tom puts a little, brass statuette of the Space Shuttle Enterprise on the wet bar. Larry checks the answering machine. One message, from Entertainment Tonight's Bob Goen, inviting Larry and Tom over to the beach-front apartment that he shares with Dick Clark, host of television's "Bloopers and Practical Jokes", for a loose evening of charades and some easy back and forth. "Like Hell," whispers Larry. "Sounds like fun, Captain," calls Tom cheerily, from his bedroom. That night, Larry dreams that he's giving Ted Turner the old hot-foot and Turner starts jumping around making a cartoon dog sound, "Yipe, yipe, yipe, yipe!" Then a caption comes up reading "Turd Tender" and Larry giggles so much that he wakes himself up. This is the first good moment Larry has enjoyed in six months and he lies there, giggling and feeling unburdened until he hears Tom, in the next room, laughing along too. "What the Hell?" whispers Larry. "Mitch gets it, too," comes Tom's muted voice, "that's a good one and thank the good Lord above we can still find something to amuse ourselves with as this turbulent century draws to it's ever-accelerating conclusion, taking us who knows where...we're on the toll-free...so fire up those colortinis and we'll be back after the break with tonight's guest Henry Gibson..." Larry has found something to amuse himself with as Tom's unwinding monologue shifts down and finally to a snore, which sounds like his laugh. Which destroys Larry's erection - his first since Christmas. Then the vapour clears again and he seems to be looking at a scallop. This pleases him until he realizes that the scallop is in Tom's mouth and Tom is chewing it like bubble gum. Larry goes back to work and scans the guest list for the next two weeks. Jane Pauley, Bob Costas, Charles Grodin, Alan Dershowitz, Tom Snyder...Tom Snyder!!...Fuck, thinks Larry, I can't get away from that son-of-a-bitch and he pictures Tom conspiring with Larry's staff to prise himself onto the show, chortling phlegm and droning about what a wheeze it's gonna be. Motherfucker. Plus he has to do David Frost today as if his millions of viewers need anymore of that smug Limey asswipe and all his inebriated arrogance. Larry's staff back off coz he isn't, as the coded communique puts it, "enjoying Buddha's company today." The Frost interview goes well enough except that during each commercial break his guest leans over and issues a spiteful brandy belch right into Larry's face. It petrifies Larry who wonders how Frost manages to conceal his obvious motor- neurone dysfunction when the red light comes on. Frost's lower jaw has the same pendulous quality that one saw in Dame Margaret Rutherford, due, Larry supposes, to nerve damage. In the final five minutes of the broadcast Frost rallies and announces, "the thing with this Diana thing is, you see, it's the French." "What do you mean, it's the French?" Larry leans forward, gravely. "It's the French, Larry. They've been inventing ways to aggravate the English for decades, now." "I see. The Nazi's, for instance..." "Yes, that's right. Now, the English have really gotten the upperhand recently. A charismatic new Prime Minister and the continued colonization of the world not through occupation, Larry, but through popular culture...films, books, music and so forth..." "Right. You mean, like Lionel Bart and Peter Sellers and the rest." "Well, no...but the French are spectacularly ill-equipped to colonize anything, particularly with their culture, which, aside from being in the wrong language, just isn't very good anymore." "Did you see La Cage aux Folles, David?" "Yes. Many, many years ago." David sighs, "imagine the effect on the average British male, Larry, forced to envision a veritable shower of French surgeons lining up to thrust their hands into the rent thorax of their beloved Princess of Wales." "You refer to Diana's fatally injured body..." "That's right, her bruised breasts uncovered for all to see and her tiny heart beating pitifully from behind an obscene gash, put there, Larry, by the French who massage her organ with their bare hands. Their bare hands!" David's voice has assumed a Shakespearean tremble, "it is the most perverse rape scenario ever devised..." The credits appear abruptly and Larry sits there, staring at David and trying to remember the name of the model that Frost was boning back in the seventies...or maybe that was some other guy...wait. Then David says to him, "Larry, I once witnessed a remarkable episode of bi-location involving the Princess." "What's that?" "I saw her in two places at once. An effect that is conventionally held to be quite impossible, Larry, but I saw it." "You're kidding..." "No. I was interviewing her for Spanish Television and...have you ever met a Spaniard?" "I don't think so." "Well, they're atrocious. As opposed to Canadians, who are delightful. At any rate, Larry, I was sitting with the Princess...who was, in every sense of the word, a Princess..." "She was the best..." "And I looked up and I thought Good Lord she's over there, as well." "In another place?" "At the very same time! Can you imagine? Right in front of me and just off to the left a bit!" Larry chews on this, eventually asking, "Are you sure you didn't just see her in a monitor?" This gives Frost earnest pause and he gazes at his own image in a distant monitor, bathed in illumination. "My God, Larry, perhaps that's it. I suppose, for Media Gents such as ourselves, bi-location...multi-location is quite routine." "I suppose so." "You know what else?" "What else?" "We slip, rather gamely, from past tense to present and then back again," and David Frost leans into Larry's face and belches. The next day and Larry is still pondering Frost's observations...wondering, in fact, what the difference is between a past tense and a present one, when a Science Report from CNN's Walter Dane Krieg catches his eye. An hour later and he's putting a call in to Krieg. "Walter, It's Larry King." "Hello Larry." "I was watching your bit on the Genesis project. What's the skinny on this, Krieg?" "Well, Larry, they're sending this robot craft up there to collect nano-nano- nano-particles from the Sun..." "What is this nano-nano...is this a Robin Williams bit? Walter, how does Williams fit into this thing?" "No...I mean...I think they're called...I dunno, I'm a fuckin' TV Guy...I'm no scientist." "Just get to the answer Krieg..." "Atoms." "Adams? Brooke Adams? Lace?" "No, no, no..." "Charlton Heston..." "No, Larry, listen...tiny particles of matter, called Adams. Remember...we split them." "America did it first." "Exactly. Well you know how small they can be? Sheesh! And then, you've got things that are even smaller than that. Like...uh...Quarks!" "What the Hell?" "Quarks...uhhh..." and Krieg's voice is absorbed by static KKKCHHGHGHGGGGGKHKKKK!!!! "Krieg? Krieg? Krieg are you pretending this is a bad line?" An embarassed beat passes silently and Krieg resumes, shakily, "They're using a robot craft." "Why collect particles from the sun?" "Well, to prove it's there, I guess." "Why, Krieg? Why prove it's there? We can see it." "Not good enough, Larry. Apparently, seeing something just makes it more suspect." Larry's head fills with the sound of a thumb piano and the vapour blossoms again, defining itself eventually into an image of Robin Williams, floating serenely towards the sun, proving that it exists. Later that day and Larry hears that David Frost is moving into a condo in Atlantic City with Robin Leach - this makes him feel old for some reason. Also, Tom Snyder's agent has cornered him in the cafeteria. "Larry, I flew here directly from my Jamaican getaway. We're very concerned about Tom." "I don't give a fishy fuck." "You have to talk to him, Larry, he respects you." "I wouldn't get a goddamm word in edgewise." "Larry, last night he was trying to interview Stephen Hawking but he just kept talking and talking and...Stephen Hawking only said one thing during the whole show!" "What did he say?" "Well, it was a sound more than it was a word. He went, 'Aktch...' But in that robot voice. CBS are livid. And you know Tom. He doesn't seem to get it, Larry. He's very laissez-faire." "Ah the hell with it...." Fuck, thinks, Larry, I need a new room-mate. Adrian Mack would like to be Larry King's room-mate. My Funniest Art Class By Jeff McDonald My walls are covered with pale square footprints, the places where my paintings used to hang. Nothing's left but the hooks, and if I stare at those long enough, they begin to look like eyes. Walls of little eye hooks. So I don't stare at them anymore. I listen to the dog penned up and keening in the yard next door, calling for his pack, any pack. Whoever lives there is away, has been away for a long time. I imagine how I would paint the dog; like anything I paint, I must understand its form, its lines of tension, its power, its fluidity. I must remember to keep painting on the two dimensions that a canvas offers. Go ahead and paint a three-dimensional object, but remember: any attempt by the artist to treat the canvas as three-dimensional quickly turns art into sophistry. I struggle with the notion that three dimensions represent a dream, the complete dream, a place anyone would want to go. This is something that I must learn to unlearn. It's fun, though. I painted that way for a while some time ago. I used to go to this art class. Kind of a group of seven or eight people that came and went. I had been going for quite a while, but I also used to drop out of the group for months at a time. Surrounded by all those people, all that creative energy, all that earnestness, made me laugh. And then I started painting in the third dimension, and it was so funny. Everything I painted killed me. All the images that flowed from my brushes to my paper made me laugh. The worst things I've done emerged onto canvas - and I was rolling on the floor. I tried switching media, but charcoal or pastel or watercolours or whatever, it didn't matter. I was laughing so hard. Most of the things I created during that time are gone now. I should have known better than to try to paint that way for long. It was an unreal way to work and I paid for it. It couldn't be maintained because I didn't have the strength or courage to maintain it, even though I'm pretty good with planar structure, and complexes, and of course I've got all the icons I need. Crucifixions and resurrections and the like. During one of my periods away from the class, I did a series of paintings which I thought were the best pieces I've ever done. Light had become preternatural on my brush, so that my horizons glowed, beckoning, promising deeper meaning to those who would dare journey to them. I painted dark rivers in rain, and they also contained light that called and pulled and drew river trekkers down to some place they knew they had to go. But then I started to paint in the third dimension. I was alright as long as I stuck to things like the screaming faces in Guernica. But I was painting with too much love, and no artist can survive that way. I don't mean sentimentality, or anything so banal. I mean I was too far out there, exposed, a deer in the headlights. Most people don't get that, but some do, and they see it and they want to be there too. For a time, anyway. And then I really fucked it up, by trying a self-portrait. Not that painting myself was difficult; it wasn't. The problem came when I was asked to paint someone the same way I painted myself. I came back to the painting group after one my periods away, and she was there. And she noticed my amusement. After all, it was palpable. And for as many weeks as possible she ignored me. Sitting across and down a couple of easels, my mirth wasn't so hard to ignore. For weeks. Until the night that she put down her brushes, and walked around to where I sat painting and chuckling. We had never spoken before, but she picked up the works I'd done throughout the class. She thumbed through them, and I watched her, smiling, sure that she would find all of them as funny as I did. One by one she flipped through them, until she reached the last painting. Then, as I watched, she gathered them all up together into a neat sheaf and tore the bundle in two. And then she placed a sketch in front of me, on my easel. It was her and me, a tangle of hair and arms and legs and lips and terrified eyes, serene, a swirl of skin, locked together. "Couldn't you have just walked away?" "Sure. I could have done that, and I had lots of chances to, and she gave me lots of chances to. But I couldn't tear myself away. I don't have a lot of experience with serenity, and this was the most serene thing I have ever felt. With everything she told me about who I was, and when she was slowly moving against me, nothing else mattered. It still doesn't, really. Nothing else really matters. Crazy, no?" I look up at the water's surface, which ripples into a hundred opaque panes of light. Each is a swirl of cool color, blues and greens, light that I will take up and softly, gently layer onto my canvas...until I can't bear anymore, and begin to layer the blues and greens onto my dry, cracking skin. I layer the oils onto my arms and draw the thick, cool paints down to my hands, up to my face, working them deep into my skin. I cover my chest and belly and thighs, I paint until my entire body is covered in the cool blue and green, until I can see that I have given form to myself. I can see myself. I want you to paint me like that, she said, and I did. I slipped her shirt over her head, and unbuttoned her pants and drew them down. She slid her underwear off, and lay face up on my bed. I took up my brushes and slowly dipped them into the bright smooth colors on my palette. I began by painting swirls of blue and green on her wrists. I drew the brush up to her perfect shoulders and neck. Her skin was pale satin with highlights of honey and gold. My brush hissed and jumped slightly at each contact with her skin. I filled in the hollows in her neck, and drew the blues and greens down to her belly. By then she was trembling, and I could not breathe. She reached for my hand, and drew it to her slim thighs. "So you never felt guilt?" "I tried to, but I couldn't. I felt like I should. After all, I've felt it before, about things I've done which would have far less impact on other people's lives than this would have. But it wasn't about guilt. I was concerned for myself only, and for her, of course. Now I see what I should have been sorry for, and it's really nothing to do with our relationship. I should have understood how difficult it was to scrape off all that paint between the time she left me and the time she got home." I have only ever stood in this place with your arms around my neck, moving your mouth slowly across mine. I am a wraith, and I have only ever watched you through half-closed eyes as you, over and over, draw circles on your lips with my fingertips. I am a ghost, and I have only ever been a sheathe for your body, a cup you drink from. I understood no words until you spoke them. I saw no place in the order of things until you showed me. I love you, I said. I don't have the courage to put my future in the hands of love, she said. "The human body is a fountain of form and plane. It is an eternal conflict of logic and emotion, and any artist who wishes to paint it must be willing to be disturbed. Rationality and sensuality cannot meet on this plane without clashing, sometimes with terrifying results, and this ongoing skirmish, this constant battle to balance the two, has led to some of the greatest works of art ever produced. But no matter what happens, the results must be accepted, and embraced. To enter the circle is like entering a circle of lovers? No...never. There can be no retreat. 'Heart, I said, what a gift it has been.' Bullshit. Forget avarice, lust, anger, sloth. Far worse is act of willful ignorance." I don't really paint anymore; I've got the tools, but not the strength. Once I tried, and the results were predictably disastrous. When you've tasted the power to create Guernica, anything else is a bowl of fruit. If I ever take up my brushes again, I'll be smarter about it. I'll paint for money. I'll stay within the two dimensions. I know I can't paint courage the way I can paint hope. And sin is something I understand better now that I've seen it up close. Jeff McDonald always paints in two dimensions. ----------------------- Sins of Omission By Laurie Drukier One night before they were in love, they went out to a cozy place to spend some time together. They talked and looked at each other with such concentration they didn't notice when they finished one drink and began the next, or when the room filled with people. It was the kind of night where the desire to absorb every detail is barely disguised in the telling of stories, the sharing of history. They took turns: his earliest memory, her favourite trip, the first time she grieved, the worst lie he ever told. With the sad stories there was sympathy, hand-holding and insights; at the silly ones they laughed and appreciated those bits of the past that led to the present. Delighting in her laughter, he teased gently, asking questions, challenging her to name all the dwarves, the ingredients in a Rusty Nail, all the songs in the Flintstones. She brought smiles to his eyes and mouth, remembering song lyrics, movie lines, sports trivia. The games they played revealed even more about them, little things like neither being able to name the seven deadly sins. That was harder than dwarves and drinks, words that most people didn't use anymore. What's the difference between envy and covetousness, and shouldn't hate be a sin? The evening grew dark, the room louder, throbbing with a steady hum. The flow of people rose and fell around them and they didn't notice anything but each other. Their sins were barely worth confessing. She had stories of baby-sitting mischief, high school cheating, the usual lies to get out of work. She had once lost a friend by betraying a confidence. Not any worse, he had lusted after a friend's girlfriend, treated someone thoughtlessly, stubbornly refused a compromise on principle. They had both once chosen sex over friendship, albeit in vastly different circumstances, but with the same predictable outcome. As they shared and built the collection of details into people, they also both felt the past which would not disappear. -- I think it's only a sin, she said, if it hurts someone else, whether or not it fits into one of the categories. If my action results in pain for someone else, then I have sinned against them. And I can't ask them for forgiveness because I can never forgive myself. I was 13 and pretty good at acting like a grown up. After my mom left I was the only woman in the house. I used to tuck my little brother in at night and read him his favourite stories. He was only seven; I thought if I could do something mom used to I could help him forget how much he missed her. One night I woke up when I heard a noise from his room. I did what I thought she would do: I went to check on him. His door was almost completely closed, not wide open the way I had left it , but with a crack just big enough to look in. I could see Sam's bare feet, toes curled as if that was how he was keeping them warm. I couldn't see his blankets so I pushed the door open quietly, planning to go in and cover him and whisper him back to sleep. Then I saw the back of my father's head and his neck and his shoulders in his pajamas. He was facing the head of the bed, away from me, sitting over Sam. He was bobbing up and down slightly, never completely getting up and never completely sitting down. At first I couldn't see anything else of Sam except his little legs and feet. They stuck out from under my dad under his pajamas as if they were part of him, but too small and stuck on backwards somehow. I could hear my dad's nasal gasps, but Sam didn't make a sound. Then Sam turned his head and I could see his eyes. They were circles of blank colour -- I don't know how else to describe them. I knew he wasn't really seeing out of them until he saw me. Then he tried to cover his face and my father stopped long enough to slap him once. Then Sam closed his eyes and I walked away. I left Sam in that room when I should've taken him out and held him in my arms. I should've screamed. I should've got a knife and stabbed him in the back before he finished. Instead I didn't do anything and Sam and I never talked about it and I eventually stopped reading him bedtime stories. They sat in silence. They had another drink. For the first time that night they found the patterns in the wood more engrossing than the view across the table. She was afraid to speak. She saw the door out of the corner of her eye and wondered if she should run or did she risk tripping on the stairs. She wanted to tell him that if she had it to do over again, she'd do it right. His fingers slowly shredded a napkin, first into long, feathery strips, then into tiny blunt snowflakes. They drifted onto the table, settling in the damp rings left by their glasses. -- I could blame youth, stupidity or weakness, he began. I mean, if sin comes from one of those, then as soon as you're old, smart or strong, you wouldn't sin. But it doesn't work that way. We all have the potential to do things that hurt other people; isn't that what sin is? But is that potential always there? I was in high school. We were experimenting with everything: drinking, drugs, seeing what we could get away with. One of our party games was to sneak up on girls and see what we could touch. I'm not talking about drunken groping. No. We'd do it while we were talking to them. It was simple to brush the side of a breast with the back of a hand while standing against the wall, sometimes a nipple while reaching for another drink. If we were sitting, I could easily slide my fingers up knees, thighs, under skirts; standing close enough, with my hand in just the right spot, legs turned into asses in a smooth, easy curve. Sometimes the girls played along. Sometimes they slapped me away. If they were drunk enough, they'd think we were making out and let me grab them and push my tongue down their throat. Even when they pushed me away, I knew they'd never remember. Most of the time neither did I, really. Only once was the girl actually passed out. We took turns, that's all I remember. We were so drunk and so high I don't know how long it took, but by the end of it the five of us had our pants open and she was just lying there, skirt bunched at her waist, panties still hanging off one ankle, makeup destroyed, someone's spunk drying in her hair. I remember she was wearing a tight black t-shirt from a concert a bunch of us had been to. It was rolled up around her neck. Her arms rested at these weird angles above her head, as if she had just flopped down on the bed; her arms were still caught in the sleeves. Her breasts had red marks where we'd grabbed her. We all just stood there. We could see she was breathing, so we left. No one even covered her up. I puked in a corner of the room on the way out, I remember that. I got home and stayed in bed for a week. I told my parents I had the flu. We never mentioned it, but I slowly stopped going to parties with those guys. We moved the next year anyway and then I went away to university. It makes me sick to think about it, but I can't blame it all on my age or the partying. What makes me sicker is knowing that the person who did that was inside me then and might still be there. Can you be with someone who did what I did? He stared at the table, the empty glasses and the scattered shreds of paper. Her hands moved across the table towards him. -- Can you be with someone who saw what I saw and did nothing? They looked at each other and saw, for the first time, fear. And pain and sadness and dismay. And something else, pity or maybe love. Could it be love? According to the old dogma, there are sins of omission and sins of commission. Is one worse? Is it easier to forgive the doing of nothing, as if we can all imagine being dazed with fear or disbelief or shock, so that action becomes impossible? Is the doing of something, no matter what the circumstances, harder to forgive because action involves will? She thought about forgiveness and penance and goodness. She couldn't get that image of him out of her mind. He sat, not speaking, barely breathing, full of fear, imagining what she was feeling. He knew his sin was the worse one; he had absolved her by the time she finished her confession. He wanted to take her in his arms and banish her fear and uncertainty. He wanted to hold her and soothe her and bring her peace. He wished she would speak. He couldn't move. He was afraid he was going to puke. His eyes said forgiveness but his voice wouldn't work. What he saw in her eyes stopped him. She waited until she was sure he wasn't going to say anything, then gathered her coat, bag and umbrella. And she left, pushing the chair gently under the table. Laurie Drukier rarely confesses her sins in public. ------------------------------ BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technocolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca ."