By Hart
“Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy. Jimmy this, Jimmy that. Jimmy’s a weirdo. Jimmy’s a boooob.” I know what everyone’s thinking. I know everything. I know the truth, high on Ritalin, an olive sucker roaming the streets.
When I was a kid I tried making a grilled cheese by putting the bread and the cheese into the toaster together. The toaster began smoking as the cheese melted around the coils, I ran for the back door screaming, it was a sliding door, only it wasn’t open and I ran head first into the glass. When I came to later the room was filled with smoke, I inhaled deeply and immediately passed out again.
There was no fire luckily, but when my mother came home she found the room filled with the smoke from the toaster and me lying on the floor. In a last effort to keep myself awake my body had redirected my blood flow. My mother found me with a large boner unconscious on the floor, the Great Dane Steve licking at this new foreign object in the house trying to wake me. “Wake up Jimmy, wake up…” And so began the downhill tour that was puberty.
I had more in common with my mother than I cared to admit. She was a ghost hunter. The occult is like a wisdom tooth in the mouth of sanity. You poke it with your finger nails, try to reason with it with your tongue while your jaws ache. Love is my ghost.
I sat alone in the restaurant like a fool waiting for her. It was our first date. I could hear what the Japanese business men to my left were thinking… “What a chicken hearted fellow this wimp must be. I wonder how small his asshole is?” Perverts, all of them conniving. I took more Ritalin. What must have possessed her, Janet. I knew all the terrible things people thought about me, and like a fool she waded through their thoughts and had approached me. “Hi, my name’s Janet…” Who just approaches someone like that? And someone like me! How can I ever trust someone so touched. What sick game is it, to make a fool of me. Does it make her feel better about herself, to pluck at my nerves, to have me sit here alone while tipsy Japanese business men mock me with their foreign tongues.
I looked around the dimly lit room. Young women sat at the bar and necked like swans happy to forget math. Men stroked their blossoming bodies with soft hands.
I pulled out a copy of a book that I was working on. It was about a vampire in New York in the seventies. He did drugs and hung out at the zoo. I pulled the papers out and began to read a passage, blocking out the thoughts around me…
An excerpt from ZOO.
“One time I did LSD and looked at a Rhinoceros’s dick for six hours straight, and when it finally urinated all of the golden secrets of the universe were revealed to me. Immortality affords time for the simple pleasures in life. A politician’s blood tastes the best. But high ranking people draw the most suspicion. There is an odor to blood that arouses me. I peer out my window stroking, praying to see a knife fight. Any blood. It is a beautiful gift to be able to make love to your food before you eat it. Jeffrey Dahmer, you were misunderstood. I remember as a boy watching a rabbit getting skinned. It’s hard for me to remember if my state of perversion came before or after I was a turned into a vampire. Am I so evil? I enjoy the zoo. The monkeys are my only true friends. The voices in the night that scream at the moon. No words, just pure emotion from deep inside. The sound of suffering, joy and pain. The great trumpeting call of animal madness. The fanged baboon, now that I can relate to.
I am the missing link between man and ape, the way forward is back for man. Like the quiet genius’s suicide, never known, forgotten, I stalk the night. A memory in a black cape, high on LSD with ill intentions. Somewhere between god and ape. Somewhere between man and his potential I float, dripping blood from fang with my baboon brothers. The zoo is my home. The Earth turns as the sun inches over the horizon. I must flee.
I smear antelope blood on my cock as I ease into the confines of my tomb. The scent of baboon pussy ripe upon my pale fingers. I will never be able to sleep tonight. Insomnia ripened by the cocaine. Staring at a wooden ceiling with a hard on. In regards to life, cocaine is the best thing that ever happened to humanity, my appetite shrivelled by the hand of the white powder. But it is no use, there is no hope for you. It is not nutrition that my numb teeth desire when I search for blood. It is the death it carries with it that I yearn. Is it only the lust and homicide that I truly hunger for? Often I forget, and in all my years I have realized, desire and reality are one and the same if given enough time. 12 more hours, then I’m going ape shit! I’m going to snort cocaine off a baboon’s tit, hit the center of the road and suck every neck in sight. And I can see for miles you wretched tramps. The streets will run with blood as I suck pulsing necks and spit into the sewers of this ugly town. The rats will fatten as I sniff.”
………………
You always put the best of yourself into your own work. I looked around the restaurant pondering all the flowing blood. Watching it move through these chimps masquerading as men, watching it dripping from the plated pork and beef. Sensing it in the necking gypsies. I sat nervously, my chair a cage, a torture chamber.
I watched Janet come into the room and look around. I stashed my papers in my pocket and leaned back in my chair trying to act casual. I sweated profusely. What brazen harpy would bring this feeling upon a man could be no less than the devil. The great thing about a fantasy is that you can pick and choose within it, relating the best parts to yourself and setting the rest aside. But real life seemed so eager and adamant about pointing out the worst parts of yourself to you. But even that is really just fantasy I suppose. The constructs of a nervous mind. My fantasy was crumpled in my pocket, bulging like a demon. Reality was on me as Janet approached smiling. I could hear all those around me thinking “what does she want with that weirdo Jimmy? Doctor Doctor, what is he doing out in public like that, isn’t there an operation to fix his eagle nose?” Humph I snorted loudly.
Janet came up to the table smiling, I stumbled out of my chair. She hugged me, still smiling, holding it too long, like a mask, hiding her true thoughts. She was obviously thinking, “is this possible, is this a man I’m hugging or a sack of antlers? He has the mouth of a crocodile.” This hussy with flowing hair. This diabolical tramp! I pulled away, slipping free by the aid of my sweat soaked body now eager for the seat I had hated only seconds ago.
She sat. “How’s it going.” “Fine” I replied coldly, my fingers tapping my pocket as the Ritalin coursed through my blood stream. I watched her eyes dart around the room. Large beautiful beacons, mirages set forth disguising her diabolical mind. Judging me. “What are you drinking?” She smiled. So it begins, only a few minutes in and she was insinuating I was nothing more than a lush. So the truth comes out. This fish! I should knife her right now and mount her on the floor of a garbage disposal with her uncle the rat. But no, play it cool. Don’t sink to her and her family’s level. But it didn’t stop there.
“There was so much traffic, I’m sorry I’m late. What a terrible first impression,” she giggled. And so on the raven harps. So confident with her words.
The waiter came over. A snake in the ass of this shit hole. “Are you ready to order?” This man smelling like a urinal cake, speaking as though we were an interruption, an inconvenience upon his time, eager to get our orders so he could run back to the washroom to wash his face in piss. “What do you think Jimmy, I like the lobster.” You would, you sea serpent. I began to speak but everything came out wrong. A victim of a set up. “The lobster, ha, no no, I, I don’t know, do you have steak, wait, of course you do. Who is the chef, not that It matters, I don’t know anything really about food. I’ve eaten it for most of my life, but you know…” I stopped and stood up, my eyes bulging and quickly ran to the bathroom. I could hear Janet calling after me. “Jimmy, Jimmy, what’s wrong.”
I stood alone, listening to the toilet water run through the pipes, the same water that was used to make the ice cubes in my drink. People like you more the less you say. I learned that from my Great Dane, Steve. That dog didn’t say shit and everyone loved him. I licked a tramp in the park and everyone called the cops. Steve the Great Dane did it and the whole world slobbered and cheered, babbling idiots. I splashed water on my face. Once a chameleon had sucked me off. It turned instantly into a liar. The coolness of the water on my face was exhilarating. Fuck it, fuck Steve, fuck the cops, fuck…
I walked quickly back to the table. “Are you ok?” Janet truly looked concerned; I nodded quickly and waved the waiter over to order a drink. A man is nothing more then what he covers up and what he uses to cover himself up with. I prefer a phosphorescent blanket of alcohol and all of its entrails.
I ordered three drinks. Janet looking on uneasily as the waiter walked away, she was still smiling trying to hide her concerns.
“So I’m ready to order,” she said. I looked around nervously, the Japanese businessmen laughed hysterically. “I’m going to smoke in here,” I said as though replying logically to a nonexistent question. It’s so much work and lies, so much exaggeration just to be half of yourself.
I pulled a smoke from my pack. “I really don’t think you can smoke in here.” Janet was uncomfortable. That made two of us. I could sense the waiter’s eyes on me as he approached with the drinks. He put two down in front of me and one in front of Janet. I took the one from in front of Janet, they were all for me after all. Why should my good planning be punished?
“Sir, you can’t smoke in here.” “I know that, is it lit? I can’t piss in here either, but I’m still carrying around this full bladder. Is that such a crime? No, Mind your own business.” He stormed away.
Janet began to rise. “I’m sorry, Jimmy, I don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I have to go.” Just as I always had expected. The rat is out of the bag, her uncle is on the table belching these cruel statements at me, against this patron saint of truth. Obviously everything is wrong. Only now she realizes it? What sort of innocent mocking front is this? What would have driven her to approach me in the first place, speak to me, drag me to this dinner. It was obvious something was wrong with me from the beginning, why play this game, this game is a joke to me. Like a chess player I sit, the next moves so obvious. Before I even came I knew how this night would go. I am the predictor of the future. “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy” she is thinking. All of them are thinking it.
I lit the cigarette and coughed. “I’ve had enough of your drivel you shitty old goat.” Have you ever seen eyes turn off, the light and joy in them burn out. I have, this very night as Janet rose and turned towards the door. I watched the waiter begin to make his way over out of the corner of my eye as I blew smoke into the air. I could sense what the Japanese businessmen were thinking. “I wouldn’t dream of hiring a dull turtle like that.” But I didn’t care about them any longer. I called out after Janet “I LOVE YOU,” knocking my drink to the floor. But the senile trumpet did not turn back. I still had one drink left, luckily. A man of preparation. The waiter stood beside me, his face red, speaking between clenched teeth. “You shitty little creep, I told you that you couldn’t smoke in here.” He dragged each word out. “So, call the cops. I’ll smoke as I please,” I screamed while blowing smoke in his face. “Oh don’t you worry.” He stormed off to the back. Everyone was staring at me, thinking about me, focused on me, forcing their thoughts upon me just like I knew they always had been. Why couldn’t everyone just leave me be?
Some people say the world is what you make of it. Sometimes it is impossible to live in a world filled with so much hate. “Back to your plates, you mountain monkeys,” I screamed. All of a sudden I heard a siren outside, or maybe it was a phone ringing. Either way I leaped up and ran like a girl for the door. I ran for five blocks, my arms flapping in the wind like a bird before finally stopping. The streets were empty and dark. I walked panting, contemplating the time. Tonight had not been a success. But perhaps the pound was still open. Why was I fighting it? Perhaps I would go get a dog, pick up where my puberty had begun. Pour wine upon matted fur, stinking of fun I would coil around a broken lonely pup. I panted heavily still out of breath and slightly turned on as I searched for the pound, or at least a stray cat, a raccoon, something. I was a gentleman in the land of bleach. The most eloquent soul on the lot. A kind man, misunderstood, unable to express myself. Poor, poor Jimmy. Nothing but skin and bones, bones and hide. Poor, poor, poor Jimmy.
Hart is a filmmaker painter and writer. He has self-published two books of poetry, a novella and is in the final stages of his first novel. He is also wrapping up work on his first feature length film. You can see more of his work at tawdryproductions.com and tawdryproductions.tumblr.com.