Porcelain Girl: A Dream

I forgot exactly how it happened?

My apartment was sided in white and the Midwestern sunshine was young and clean and ready.

I went across the street and a few houses down, to a white townhouse with half of a white-picket fence.

I was there to buy drugs.

At least I think I was but I’m not exactly sure… A bombed-out dude in his thirties with a three-day shadow and a Jansport backpack waited for me on a gray-striped couch.

No one spoke.

A white staircase corkscrewed above and behind me, flashing the sun from a five-storey window that ran the length… There were no decorations, but blank huge walls, but nevertheless, it looked lived in. The place felt very empty—but only since recently. The whole thing had the feel of an unfinished basement.

The transaction took place wordlessly, I think. Nodding. Hand manipulating.

A dark-haired girl peered down from the floor at the very top of the corkscrew and I caught her eyes as I opened the screen door to leave. She wore a tank top with two spaghetti straps that exposed gentle, unformed shoulders. She must have been in her early twenties, but in her eyes there was a sadness, a vulnerable beauty, that aged her beyond her years.

When she didn’t smile, I left.

When I returned another morning, my burned out, bearded friend was absent, but for some reason I was not surprised and I was not disappointed. I wasn’t scared. Still, though.

I had planned this, hadn’t I?

She found me on the couch and we connected in a perfect, blameless, wordless moment before I kissed her and parted the straps. In the bedroom we did, and afterwards we spoke.

Her chest was tattooed blue and white like a porcelain bowl. It was carefully lined with portraits wherever previous works would accommodate the new ones, each one of a perfect, but unique hand. They were photorealistic in detail of human faces, human bodies, some complete, some abbreviated, some merely alluded to… Blue pools in the cheeks of an Indian chief. A man leaning with one hand on the butt end of an axe while he smoked a pipe with the other. A woman wearing a bonnet curved in an L-shape on a loveseat with a string of pearls around her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. In the blue whorls near her upper thigh a thousand unnamed faces lurked, exposed in all their exquisite detail only when then sun hit her thigh and caught their features at the proper angle.

With bated breath she allowed me to examine her. Was she humiliated? She was not…

I went to the bathroom in a room down the hall, questions gathering in my head, when a large black man arrived and said she had to go. The door remained ajar. There was a mirror at the foot of the bed. Through it I watched him fuck her hard on the floor. She emitted no sounds of pleasure, nor did he. Exchanges took place. He left. I returned. She cried. The sheets were rumpled and twisted from months of neglect.

“This is how I decided my life would be after I died the last time.”

“Oh. You believe in reincarnation?”

“I actually already have been reincarnated.”

She looked down at herself while I played with her nipple.

I let it drop.

Sun streamed in. She was still crying, now hysterically. Our legs tangled. Semen came out of her nose in clotted strings. It was coming apart. How I wondered but did not judge, anxiety growing inside of me. Her face changed. A bulging purple vein split down the middle of her forehead and her eyes bulged.

She was in pain from inside.

I looked away.

I fucked her quickly, yet lovingly…

When I looked up, I found in place of her eyes and her nose one giant, orange eye with a reptilian pupil surrounded by red-hot veins that popped and hissed.

I screamed, just as you would, wishing myself elsewhere, and awoke in a clean white room in a Spartan apartment, where I slept alone amid clean white sheets.

One Long Digression?

A big problem for some people is the inability to distinguish attention from affection.

I think that Amanda was one of these people. Maybe it's unfair that that's the first thing to spring to mind. I'm probably one of them, too.

So much for not saying too much too early with Beth. I cannot participate in type-written conversations of any emotional kind with anyone, I feel, because when I'm writing my thoughts don't have the same filter that they do when I'm speaking.

I guess what's more likely is that it adds a certain filter and adds a certain time to think and devise a well-thought response. Maybe sometimes, in "matters of the heart," a well-thought response is not what you want. I'm more willing to divulge. Even though I understand that the person who I'm typing with is there, somewhere, alive, and processing what I'm saying, there's no visual contact of any sort, and the desire to say whatever the fuck comes to mind, without having to attempt any kind of affect of face or speech (or being able to) to color it.

Watching the Devil's Advocate last night, which stars Al Pacino, playing Satan, as the nefarious head of a major midtown law firm involved in--it goes without saying--very evil things, begged the question: is what I'm doing evil? Is it evil of me to work for a law firm? Are lawyers themselves evil?

My first instinct was to say back to myself that the question was so absurd that I won't even dignify this thought with an answer.

To circumscribe the argument a little bit though, I feel comfortable saying this: even if there were such a thing called "evil," and even if this "evil" did resemble the evil a typical non-Heathen (Jew, Christian, or Arab) understands, the lawyers who I've met are not evil.

Not a single one of them.

Not Christine Chi. Maybe especially not Christine Chi. It actually frustrates me that I've been unable to connect with the Chi, because I feel there's a lot to be understood and learned in that crazy dome of hers. But digress.

Unsurprisingly, the movie paints the conflict between good and evil in pretty black and white strokes, and the legal industry appears to come out on the "completely evil" side of the balance. Meanwhile, the crazy evangelistic mother of Keanu Reeve's wife, who warns him, cryptically, zealously, "I send thee out as a sheep among the wolves," along with the wrist-slashing wife herself, are the saints of the movie. Those who have seen that episode of Upright Citizens' Brigade cannot help but think "A river of lamb's blood" when they hear the mother say this. Funny stuff. Here, the writers make the audience's choices pretty damn easy, as Reeves represents the a womanizing wife-murderer who is unrepentant and a liar to boot.

The tax shelter industry, though--which apparently I'm a part of, in that I'm helping a prominent international bank to retain the profits in made in these legally and ethically questionable transactions--has its own sinister moments. There can be no doubt of this. These were concerted efforts, it would seem, not to break the law, and certainly not to flout it, as has been suggested by some Senators--but merely to circumvent it. Which is something like ignoring, but requires more effort and less respect for the thing being circumvented. And here, of course, there is a substantial component of exploitation of the common American taxpayer who pays H&R block a larger percentage of income they're working to produce to knock a couple of percentage points off a rate that saps their paycheck at a crippling to pay for a bunch of things they can't see for people they don't know.

And this is not a mini-rant against the bluebloods of this country. For a good number of these, I think, contribution to society and community really has become a priority, and paying their way, whether in taxes and tuition, is a badge of pride, and of course, of worth. Rather, it tends to be the nouveau-riche of every stripe, first generation millionaires who all are richer than they ever thought they would be, and want to keep every stinking penny they possibly can, however they must. This is how most of them have made millionaires of themselves. There are dot-com entrepreneurs who created some bogus company in their garage and sold it for millions before the bubble burst. There are people who distribute pork bellies. There are world-class professional athletes. I've seen fortunes that have been made in both boxing and baseball. We're going against the owners of professional sport teams; we're going against the guy who pay the baseball players. These are the same people, though I won't name names--who rename the Anaheim Angels 'The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim' in order to gain merchandise revenue, despite the fact that, as many have pointed out, Los Angeles and Anaheim are, um, not the same place. These people are trying to make that money, and they're willing to stretch the fabric of reality, if they have to, to squeeze out every last drop. And the tax code is built to drip, just as it's designed to retain water.

Inefficiency and corruption are built into every economic and political system. They are themselves industries within every industry. Without them, we'd be lost. They generate a lot of money and, one could argue, distribute more evenly and completely than a system that was perfectly efficient. What would we do without inefficiency and corruption? Unemployment would skyrocket! We'd have somebody like Ken Jennings running the country. Money would only get spent on things that are boring. No more missile defense here. More homeland security. More fourth of July. Fewer fireworks. Presumably, this lack of inefficiency and corruption would spread to the religious sector, being as close at it is to the political and business sectors, which, presumably, are the first to be infected. And then Americans would head back to churches and temples in droves! There would be fewer tort lawsuits against priests. There would be fewer abused children. Lawyers would make less money. Insurers would make less money. Very scary stuff, man. And, oh yeah, everyone would take Ritalin.

Thanksgiving

On his 40th birthday, which fell in late November, Lester went turkey hunting in the relative wilds outside of Kansas City. After a few shots of off-label whiskey, he found a turkey hiding in the branches of a low tree. He squatted and fired a blind shot at the balding branches, at which point a 20 pound bird fell, hit him directly in the face, and broke his nose.

Ward's Island

It's interesting that they continue to use two different names for this landmass of two former islands. Randall's and Ward's. I started out at 125th and Lex in Harlem, where a McDonald's taunted me a for a minute before I realized, decided, that I was over an hour late already and in a bad spot, and should just wait in the long line against the warehouse outside of the subway exit.

The M35 bus took me across one leg of the Triborough Bridge, which leg I'm not quite sure. After no more than ten minutes of travel and our progression through the EZ pass section of what must have been a Queens toll booth, we arrived on this underdeveloped gray and green chunk of land where the roads were chunked in asphalt. The first sign had a list of seven destinations with trailing arrows that pointed towards directions in which there were no roads. My hopes were raised somewhat when I saw that we were [apparently] heading in the direction of Ward's Island, where I expected this rugby match to be taking place.

Our first stop was the Randall's Island Psychiatric Hospital, where approximately one dozen passengers, some obviously and visibly ill, some clearly employees of the hospital, exited the premises, none of them with a facial expression that suggested happiness or eagerness. There was a woman with chemically straightened hair, a shirt that said FUCK ME, and a hunched back, whose disturbed gait looked to be unrelated to any kind of physical impairment, and an elderly black man in a powder blue button down shirt, carefully polished black wingtips, and hair like James Brown, who took the stairs with a look that straddled some line between determination and disdain. A white man with one leg and arms full of crutches shifted off with much difficulty and eyes that bespoke much experience and little love. I crossed my legs the other way and texted Doug: which stop. The bus was now notably absent of females of any shade.

Numerous passengers broke from their respective mutterings to eyeball me as I placed my iPod into my backpack surreptitiously and opened up my late model Verizon cellphone to inquire, in what I hoped was a casual whisper... "Which field, Doug, exactly. and how many stops is it." No longer a question.

When the bus made a U-turn back towards the highway I got a little jumpy and texted Doug with an increasingly urgent For real what stop this bus is the scariest and for that I had to type on Abc and not T9EN.

Still, I had to call to get a hold of him. I got of at the section of the fields that are maintained by the veterans, an inordinate number of whom lack limbs. I cut a wide angle around them and walked down the strip of broken sidewalk between the two bridges. To my left was a great red bridge that was cantilevered, elaborately buttressed, with ten foot cones that looked like Eiffel Tower miniatures holding up power cables along its upper outer edges in intervals of twenty feet. On my right side was a bridge whose upper car section was painted in chipped green and was supported at regular intervals by giant, inverted tridents made of concrete. The sky was notably grey. Later, Doug asked me if I was sure that the green bridge wasn't light blue. At the rugby fields that, was the way it looked. Not so near the psychiatric hospital...

When I passed a rusted chain link fence just beyond a NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT sign that appeared to relate to nothing in the visible landscape, three twenty-ish kids emerged from the woods opposite me. One was a girl with severe features awhose uniform and muscled calves made it clear I was headed in the right direction. Two of them boasted patchy facial hair; one of them carried a frisbee.

It turned out, though, much to my surprise, that my destination was not, in fact, the busy green patch to the right of the bridge, which blasted Barry White from an invisible set of speakers and which was littered with multi-colored triangular flags and human-sized white tents, but the much less busy and much less colorful field down the hill and next to the river...

You Don't Like Pop Culture

Tonight I found out that it is common for people to have favorite commercials.

Sherien likes the Paxil commercial: "all these people are like at this conference table and their faces are like" and makes this sound like a more nasal wow or whoa and she makes cones of her hands at her ears and winces to signify a face that has been distended graphically on the commercial. I tell her that I am familiar with the drug but not with the commerical. I admit that my favorite commercial is the Levitra commercial with the hot middle aged wife who certainly seems, with her constant coquettish glances and full, glossy lips, to love the cock.

I guess I realized that there are some people who actually do, consciously, enjoy pop culture, like whatever it is you throw at them they'll respond to amusedly, and satisfied, and they think it's weird that I don't respond the same way. Sherien was getting ready to emote about some recent episode of some show that she likes to watch and was about to turn to me and ask me things about it before she said, "Oh, yeah, Deuser. You don't like pop culture." Almost in the same tone as like "You don't like girls," or, "You don't like babies," or something. I didn't really know what to say. The only things on television that can hold my attention are the commercials. The frequency of the flashes on the screen and the energy and mood of the commercials on television demand and reward one's attention much better than does the majority of the programming. Perhaps this is a sad point. Perhaps I'm watching the wrong shows.

Last night I dreamt that Richard took me aside for a moment to discuss the professionalism of my beard, implying but not explicitly saying that it has to go. Without many words or the threat of discipline he conveyed great disappointment.

I also had a dream of an armless hand forcibly breaking the resin cap molding from my eye tooth with a dentist's plaque hook while I screamed in horror and felt the grit fill my mouth.

A month ago I had a dream of a dark haired girl whose breasts and chest were tattooed blue and white like porcelain with the half shadowy faces of babies and politicians and Indian chiefs.

Most nights I dream nothing.

At least I'm not a fat slob who the lawyers look on as a subordinate--because you are--who is still a paralegal five years later because he can't get into law school. [Pause]

I could not have endured the karmic hit associated with dropping that bomb. Even if he asked for it.

I'd say upper Ohio. Like you might have chopped wood in the sticks to fight your way up here and here you are.

They sell advertising everywhere. In New York, storefronts are usually advertisements for the stores themselves. About a quarter of the buildings in midtown are scaffolded at any given time with the usual POST NO BILLS stenciled scaffolding. Right now there is a large advertisement for The Shark Tale on the construction scaffolding of a prominent corner of a building whose name has been obscured. It is a fully functional temporary billboard with full color and even a special triangular plywood addition to the scaffolds upper edge which, when painted gray and bolted flush, resembles the continuation of a shark's tail.

Good evening I'm Joe Buck and Fox would like to remind to you grab a Budweiser: it's Game Time. Yanks-Sox. The Yomiuri Giants are advertising in Chinese and English on an orange patch on the left field gap where the GAP signs were in '98. In the seventh inning a ball off the bat of Kevin Millar bounces off of it.

Bush Fundraising Stomp

Word on the street is that GW is in town today for a fundraising jaunt. There are uniformed officers, some on motorcycles, lining the sidewalks along 6th Ave. 52nd Street is essentially completely closed off to foot traffic; I went out the side entrance to meet Doyle and Sullivan for an anti-cigarette and the place was like a ghost town. Apparently, they asked all those who loitered too long to go back inside. I had been outside for about five minutes when three all-black Explorers with blue sirens drove past quickly through the traffic on Sixth.

Apparently this, too, is the reason why traffic was so devastating this morning, why I couldn't get one single cab to stop all along my York-to 86th-to Park route, which is usually money as far as cabs go. I finally flagged one going north at 70th Street and made him turn around. He looked earnestly back at me and said, "The traffic today is really really really bad." I nodded. "Are you prepared for this?" He said.

It bothers me somewhat that I have enough disgust for Bush and his policies that I will toss about threats of leaving the country--which relatively few people would be especially sorry to see happen--but that I don't, apparently, have the actual energy or determination to do anything more than download an ironic AIM icon to express my anti-Bush views. This is lower than buying bumper stickers. Although my icon is actually just a pro-Bush icon that advertises America as being safer, stronger, and something else positive that begins, I believe, with 'S', it is not substantially more clever or incisive than those buttons that The Nation is currently selling in packages of twelve that bear catchy slogans like 'W' is for Wrong, sometimes with an additional note below that details exactly what, in this case, Bush is wrong on. Almost as inane as 'W' is for Women but perhaps even worse for having been pilfered. Bonus points, however, for correctness.

I wish that my peers would show more interest, as well. But the protest during the RNC was hardly a great advertisement for popular demonstration: it wasn't bad, it wasn't violent--it just wasn't impressive. There was no anger. There was no vitriol. There was no emotion. These are things I feel conservatives have more readily at their disposal, to summon when the mood to argue or denounce strikes, as it so often does.

At the same time, Sonia, one of our younger associates, is on sabbatical until the end of November in order to volunteer [I assume she's volunteering] for the Kerry campaign. She speaks many languages, Larry says, and therefore she is very useful to them. She will make contacts that will help her professionally in her career and will make many contacts that will be beneficial to the firm. She made a decision that this was something she wanted to do and we support her in this.

No one's facial expression seems to indicate that they disagree with her particular political stance, which is somewhat surprising. Then again, most of them wear Casio watches.

Is this the answer? If nothing else, I have become very good at determining those courses of action that are, definitively, not the answer.