Makecity

Road kill.

That was the first thing I thought in my new life; in the anti-life of this after-birth. The first thing I saw, the thing that made me react by thinking, was my own body, cast off and slumping to rest in the cramped, brown and red toilet stall of the FCC.

I knew it used to be me. I am Howard... Howard Hurlothrumbo of the raw head and bloody bones, bete noire, enfante terrible, wearing the favorite cardigan sweater with the top two buttons missing, dark plum with gold piping, bought from Walmart. And I recognized my hands: thick fingers, no rings. Of course, I couldn't see much in the way of face. All that was left after the big move was part of my left cheek, my smiling jaw, my left ear, and a bit of brown hair. And then there was bone, as white and bloodless as eggshell, surrounded by folds of red meat, white skin and yellow fat.

Placental.

I was spread all over the men's room wall; all over the whores' phone numbers and the foul words. I often think of it that way. For some reason a vision flashed through my fresh, new mind. It was a vision of a doe I hit with my truck early one morning, a week before. This doe sprang into the road, glancing over its shoulder at me. The look in the eye, just as I slammed head-on into it, was like I had interrupted it on some inane errand, on its way to a Seven-Eleven for a dozen eggs, or a nice Sunday brunch; cut down on some trivial little task not worth dying for. It seemed surprised. The doe rolled around under my truck for a hundred yards. I pulled over and walked back to check the damage. It looked like a big, brown, hairy ball with bones sticking out, their edges creamy-opaque and bloodless. So the first thing I thought, floating there above the red mess and sexual scrawls, was: Road kill. Wrong place, wrong time.

And as I rose I saw you, Tod, smiling through the hole in the door....

Of course, the last thing I saw in my old life, in the physical world, was the shabby, brown toilet stall door, just a few inches from my numb face. Colitis, you know. I just barely remember the transition now; outside the door your voices were hushed and furious. Intent. And then the explosion of light and sound, a sunburst of little prickles on my face.

Nativity.

I think there was a second in between. Who can be sure? Death was sort of like a hiccup of movement through free-floating, insentient space. And now... I think here, The Fowler Cove Club.

Invaginated.

But that was a long time ago.

That was when I was a small body, a tiny mind, isolated, polarized. Now I am a force, your subconscious. You are my consciousness, owning and ruling the FCC by day, but I rule the night. This building is our head, and we three are centered here.

I am a lover of words. What else do I have? I remember a man I knew in college, a writer, a roommate. He told me he wrote so he wouldn't loose his mind, so the stories that were inside him could flow out and release him if he released them. He went insane anyway. That's why I chatter lipless talk all the time. It hasn't helped me either. If he were me, my old roommate, and he were finger-less in this lucid, typewriter-less world, he would be mad here, too.

I have a story to tell. The story of Howard and Tod and Cal. Our story. Listen closely. I tell it again and again to your sleeping brain, every night. Even now. Here in the ceiling, malignant plum looking down at you asleep there, we are tied. And not just the two of us, there is the third.

Cal.

When I could sleep like you are, safe in my drunken slobber, I sometimes dreamed. When sleep is a deep breathing death, dreams are a flickering hell... My brain used to ferment in a liquor blood soup as I slept in my car after last call, until I was safe to drive. I was like you, except I had a home to go to, when I wanted to.

Dream Tod, let me show you a dream....

A middle aged man, a grinning head wedge of cheese, broad forehead, pointed nose, narrow jaw, dimpled chin, eyes oddly round with long, thick black eyelashes, stands at his urinal. You scowl and grind your teeth up at the sports page hanging over you, behind a sheet of plastic. In the plastic you see your reflected face, bent and fuzzy. You are drunk, invariably oblivious.

"Howard!" a voice whispers to your brain; a tiny voice, quiet. It makes the wedge man jump, makes you look about for the source. You find it. A new face is in the plastic, where your should be. A young man with a flat top crew cut and big flapping ears stares across onto your round little pig-eyes, connectedly laughing across from the dull plastic sheet.

Tod, it is me, I say, Howard. You don't want to see me, do you, Tod? You sneer at the little fool. You don't even really know how it happened. You don't want to know the name Howard? Well, this ought to be fun. I laugh.

I never killed you! you slobber, turning, staggering across the empty men's room to the mirror.

Tod, my old friend, my fine comrade, my Brain! I say, looking out from the shiny glass, join me, won't you? And my head explodes. Blood sprays. Placental brain muck splatters all over the eternal side of the glass. And you pull away, shielding your face as if the same fate might befall you. It does, in its own way. And a smiling jaw says through smears of blood, you can never escape the Censorious.

The mirror vision disappears like a nightdream, leaves nothing but the echoing sounds of dripping, you wonder....

Censorious.

You stumble out, pulling up your fly, move back to the bar. Already my name dissolves in your brain. You stagger behind the bar. Entrepreneurial after hours bartender of one to one, to self. Above serving others. You pour another 151, corrode the past.

Solvency.

Howard! You jump, but you try to ignore me. This happens so often now, every night. I sit Indian-style on our mahogany and marble bar. All the dancers have gone home, all the women, the local pros and the suits. It's play time for us now: Tod and Howard and Cal.

You're getting slow, Tod, I say, you seem to have lost that reflex edge, your trademark, the will to pounce, or duck. Anyone can own a nightclub, but not everyone can duck.

You wave your arm at the antagonistic night, stagger to your place by the gas fire. Slump into your chair and stare into the flames. Stare into your glass. Watch the golden liquid, plasma, swish. Look closely. There, in the ice, see them? Tiny jaws laughing, flapping ears, up and down, lips that say, Howard, Howard. And you raise the glass, never taking your eyes from the ice. You drink.

And I rise in the air, flow through the loft ceiling and the mirrors and the stuffed heads and the couches at the fireplace, the brass gas-fixtures and railings. I am here. I stink with the smell of burning cedar and old leather, low glow mood lighting over our antique back-bar that encloses so many glowing bottles of me, so much rich, knowing blood. My face disappears in the stained glass windows. I am here. The loud speakers creech and moan, wail the song of secret bastard children. I scream the pain of still, trapped death, the tears of ensnared ageless-ness. But it is lost on you. You sit alone at the fireplace, numb on the hearth, a cuckold stump slumped still before the flame. Oblivious to the sunburst you let into my head....

Sunburst.

The dream ends....

You gurgle, ferment, sit up on your sleeping couch, blink at the gas fire. Sleep, Tod. Take a little rest, Tod. Welcome back, there is so much more to see.

I ask you. Why couldn't this have all happened in a building that faces the sun? In a building that has more than two windows and swinging doors neatly covered by a smothering green lattice? I can't remember the last time a ray of real sunshine fell on me....

Sometimes I smash myself up against the inside of our building, in the front room. I pretend the building front is my face. It is nice to have a face again. I sit squat on the sidewalk, my broad double-door nose slit up and open, long eyes on either side, just a little higher, unblinking. Who needs a mouth? A dark green lattice overhangs the front of the building, shading. I must look like some hot, risqué gambler, I imagine sometimes, darkened eyes smoldering like fortuitous black stones beneath a green visor.

And they come in me, the crowd, which I used to be a part of. They pull open my nose, crawl through my face and look out through my eyes and buzz inside and out and never, never suspect that I haunt our head. Except for when there's a full moon. Mix the knowing blood with moonbeams, the moonbeams in their eyes, and that's when some can see me. The full moon mixed with blood makes them demented.

And they crawl around inside our head, worms, maggots, and all I do, all I can do is watch, floating. They swarm over the floor boards and the bar top and the tables and the dance floor and my death womb like a virus, drinking and writhing and vomiting in our head. I can't stop them. I could move a dice cup on the bar inside our new head about as well as I could have clapped my brain hemispheres together in my old head.

Thwop.

My old head was diagnosed as having a tumor, as bad meat, just before you helped in the big move. You removed it. I replaced it.

When the moon is full it is always ominously haruspical and oracularly fatidical, not to mention vaticibnal, prophetic and all around big with the fate of omens and so on and so forth. And somehow the they can always see then. It was full that Friday. There was full moon trouble when you staggered in that Friday night, our special night. Big Daddy, ready to fire the first screw-up. You had an emptiness that hurt. Nick was the cause of your hurt, but you didn't know it yet. I never trusted Nick, but what does it matter now?

Road kill.

Hands are the doers. That is what it amounts to. A brain is a glob of muck in a box that sits jealously conscious of the thrills of the hands. I wish I had hands. Not the nightmare hands that I fondle your dreams with. Real hands. Feeling hands. Feel my shadow-hands, Tod, hands as light as air, lighter than fire, lighter than a hiccup floating in senseless space. Hands tell all, show all. Watch my dream-show hands. Return to our joining day in your dreams....

Nick, the dragon prince of greasy pick-up lines and bondage politics, leather and lace as sharp as tongued scalpels; watch his wide hands probe, watch them know. When he came in that first time they were stuffed in his pockets, remember? He hid his taste for buxom dark brunettes with shapely legs and hourglass curves, for your wife, Joyce. The local women hated him, but she drew naively near. The local women knew his hands, knew how they used and used, plied and tore, bruised thighs. But you knew those hands as something else, short and square and strong and fast bartender hands, they poured drinks and cash into your pockets, they poured 151 down your throat. Watch as they pour pleasure and pain. Watch from the end of the bar that Friday as Joyce leans over and whispers in his ear, offers her cleavage, her full lips wet and whispering as she strokes his fingers....

Epiphany.

A catalyst comes, huge, drunk, college student, Coke machine body lumbering through the door; round, fat fingers full of beer and spit and football. After a while those fat hands give those square fast hands so much cash, and the square fast hands pour so much wet knowledge that the fat hands become thick and loud and stupid. Nick's fists are full of little white pills, fuming, they always are. He follows the big hands out, out of your bar, out of the FCC. They crash together toward the parking lot.

You got-damn hay seed son-of-a-bitch, the college hands say, let me get my friends, let me get my coat.

Nick, in his black leather Harley vest, thick arms, he rips the kid between the legs with his knee, drops the huge kid in the rain. Ryan and Carlos and Big Mike back into the door, protecting Nick, wearing their slate blue jerseys, giant happy laughing door-Smurfs spitting hate and fear as they pull it shut. But that big hands is dense, he rushes the door. Big hands do that kind of stuff. And as soon as he gets his head and shoulders through the door, Nick slams it shut on his face, knocks the wind out of him, breaks his teeth, his nose. The big hands staggers back into the parking lot and Nick follows him out again, to finish him off. Nick likes that.

Don't hurt him, he's just a kid, someone yells. That was me, way in the back of the crowd. I was alive then, but you wouldn't have noticed. No one listened to me. Still no one listens to me.

Thwop.

You think you're bad, lose the muscle, man, come out one on one. Big hands has liquored-up blood all over his face. Come on, leather man, he says. So Nick saunters up, drop kicks him one in the chest.

And Joyce, thin hands cover her mouth, flutter like moths, hungry and vicious. Her eyes gleam as she looks through you, blue-black curls swirling. You are dead then, Tod, to Joyce. Nick kills you with his boot and a sober, artful drop kick on a fat guy's chest. Joyce waves you off with her thin white hands. You are gone. You know it.

But I know a secret. His name is Cal. He is the third. We are all linked, tied.

Triad.

And you try to corner Nick in the john, try to get him alone, try to cut out the disease that is spreading in your staff, in your wife. You follow him into the john and face him down. And I hear you, on the other side of the toilet stall door. And I sit on the dumper, colitis, watching the whores' names blur whirl, nursing my fatty liver and my plum tumor with its gold piping eating up my glob of muck. And I listen to you fighting, accusing. I can imagine your hands, soft and wet, hear them reaching for his throat, I hear you through the door. Screams and a blast of sunshine through my door. You remove my tumor, one of you. And do you know what I think? There she is, my doe pouncing through the dusk twilight into my useless high beams, glancing at me through the windshield like I am some Peeping Tom. And I think: Road kill. Wrong place, wrong time.

And Nick runs for his life, stuffing his hands into his pockets, hiding as he smashes through the door. We haven't seen him since. It's not fair, but he was a wanderer, no good to anybody. And you, you just look in through the hole in the door, smile a big old wedge head smile and laugh and laugh. Peek-a-boo! I often guess the reason you laugh is that our little drama played out in the men's room and Joyce couldn't see, she couldn't be a part of the thing she helped set in motion. She and Nick and Cal. I often think of it that way. And all the dancers go home, all the women, the local pros and the suits. The party's over. It's the three of us: Tod and Howard and Cal. Nick was just passing through, he never counted.

Other hands come along, rubber gloved hands, finger condoms keeping the spatter of suspected AIDS away, wiping death back on the dead. Good Samaritan hands that wipe up drunken blood and muck and eggshell, mop my muck into the same bucket you use to mop up vomit. They take me away in a zip-lock bag and I watch from atop the jukebox. See me there? And you watch from a table, alone, smiles and laughter long gone; I didn't know you well, then. It was before we were a triad.

I lost my family too, Tod, the moment they lost me. Like you, I think of them often, those I can not have.

I was nearly married to a certain miss, her hands hard-grasping, sexless, pulling cruelly, knuckled, grinding lovelessly as a faithful shirt-wringer Doberman. A shadow with the depth and feeling of a paper cut. Oh yes, you're right. I am bitter. I'll be the first to admit it. How she would have gloated now, if she could see me here. How she would have laughed to know how much time I will spend here, after she sermoned her ultimatum on tolerance. It or me! Sit! Stay!
Control.

Her reptilian claws would have reclined so calmly, self-righteously, in her bony lap, motionless stone geckos poised hungrily listening to the derailed blathering of scorned love. But those hands were more quick and sure, adept at child-proof caps and greedy for sleep and revenge. If fate is a dispassionate and forthright and nonpartisan censorious, then my near Mrs. sits even now on her childhood bed, eternal resident of her father's home.

She made her point.

Road kill.

Our women were singularly alike, alike in their compulsive idiosyncraticity. Free-floating atop the fire of obsessive passions and anal fixations, both singularly concerned with the off centered vortex of self. Of that similarity I am sure. Perhaps that is more a similarity between us....

Free-swimming sperm is one side of the equation, the politically incorrect side. A head, one eye atop a squiggling uncommitted curve. Yang. And out there, Yin cruises, polarized, legitimate, absolute, hateful and clinging through the sterile vacuum that joins us in a loveless misogyny.

Too much Yin.

But what of it, I never cared. You don't now. How can Yang ever understand Yin? Especially when Yin's yinfriends keep saying, do what feels good for you you you. Me me me.

Yang.

I miss my hands and fingers flipping quarters' thumping dice boxes and friends' flanneled shoulders, hands thick and smooth rubbing binge whiskers in the spotted death womb's mirror. I miss hot and cold and sweets and stinks and sights of baggy eyes and bushy-brows and frowns in mirrors now vacant of everything but the other side of the room no matter how close I look.

Thwop.

Of course, you never met my bride-to-be, Tod. You never met any of my flock. You hardly knew me, before. But I can show you them, now. I can flaunt them nightly through your captivated subconscious: shadow-puppets prancing around your drunken dreamscape. Shadows only tell of outlines, in every deep a deeper depth....

I am truly sorry you must live here with me, exiled in our head; and Joyce is exiled too. Polarized, at home alone, waiting for her fugitive, raising Nick's oaf daughter in your once-home. Laura, feeling Laura, your daughter, your own flesh and blood, your vicarious link to young youth-now-eternal-victim, she is helpless in her sharing.

Advice: Face destiny head on.

My college writer friend told me a story once. A man hears from a drunk that if he steps on a bus uptown, a chain of events is set in motion; and if he misses that bus, his destiny is forever altered. Suddenly the man's life changes. A specter hangs over him constantly, waiting for the moment to alter his path, to shake his tree. He starts to get strange. He rises to leave a room and then jumps back into his seat and screams, Ha! As time goes by his behavior becomes more and more random, more sporadic, as if he feels he is in control by living in a state of fixed turbulence.

Chaos.

One day he is on a cable car (he lives in the roily city of San Francisco, isn't that convenient?). As the car crests a hill and starts its shaky descent he jumps from the car, fearing the beast destiny. He slips under the sharp, round wheels, which naturally slice his legs clean off above the knees. As he flails around on the ground his severed stumps spray rhythmic streams of blood in the faces of the shocked tourists out for a day on the wharves. His life ends, needless to say, and the chaotic chain of destinuous events comes to a crashing continuance for the tourists, distracted forever on their way to gulp shellfish and pop ogle wax celebrities. The chain has just begun. And who's to blame? A loud mouth drunk! A casual conversation inspired by the flow of hot, knowing blood.

Of course, my writer friend was crazy when he told me this story, sitting on his hospital bed, foaming at the mouth, gaggling and sputtering, looking up at me and saying with absolute conviction and the intense strained concentration of the insane imposed dis-symmetricity over and over. How he loved those words. This was his punch line.

It was just another story that he couldn't get away from, that trapped him as it bubbled through his glob of muck and made him mad mad mad.

Captain's Supplemental: If I had bubbled this story, I would have emphasized self-restraint, not manipulation. Looking into destiny aware aware aware.

Advice: Eat, drink and be watchful, for tomorrow breeds betrayal.

Sin's monogamouscidal penetration.

Cal.

At that, you gurgle, pass a bubble 'tween the cheeks. Yes, very wise.

Soon you will awaken, Tod, drag yourself from your hard place of sleep in front of this warmth-less phony gas-fire. You will lumber down to the little kitchen in the basement of our head. I watch you do this every morning, Tod, a smiling deaf man doing silent food, prayer make it stop make it stop make it stop, starting your morning ritual of blood-purging and muck-ache-repairing with cholesterol and starch. And all around us I will scream the thing I know, the secret of Cal. He is to me what I am to you, triad.

But there is time still tonight, before you awaken. Breathe deeply there before the fire, I will tell you again. I will tell you the thing again, of Cal. Roll into a ball, pull your legs up tight to your chest and we will take another trip. Dream another dream.

That Friday night, the same as any other. I was as sloppy and stupid as the rest of them were, as you were under that big full moon.

Two young men are sitting at the downstairs bar, next to the wall where your office is. One of the men is nicknamed Otis, dressed like a golf pro, big nose huge and dark Italian eyes. He is just divorced, days away from bankruptcy. He slams a dice cup.

The other is a big-eared fool, a face familiar to you now. You flinch in your sleep, good. They are alone, sitting together up against the wall, the other side of which is your office. These men are engrossed, slapping down dice boxes and discussing in low voices the self-induced death of floppy ears' beloved. They're not playing each other for money, just passing the time in an increasingly drunken stupor, forgetting. None of the boys are in yet, none of fishermen or the construction boys, the farm hands or the business men and their women. Your bread and butter, who love to raise a little Hell after work, before going home and single-handedly dealing with their kids. Most are like big nose and floppy ears there; sold the family wagon for drunken, childish freedom on the make, filling some loss or need with knowing blood, being single again after so many years, plastering over new herpes sores, learning the new dangers and relearning how to be sexy, how to bait and capture.

Make City.

The day flirtations are subtle, more complex than the night crowds' drunken thigh-grinding. If a man and a woman want to be alone, they go through complex, enjoyable, levels of flirtation/counter-flirtation, send each other a drink, make remarks to their friends. And before you know it you may have something going where you'd least expect it. That's how this chain of events all started. And that's why I'm here, why Cal's here.

So, through the wall comes this rhythmic screaming and howling. The two men look at each other, smile.

In a ghost voice, deep and fuzzy, big ears grins, That Nick is an animal.

Must be that new waitress, they laugh, rib jab.

And they continue their games; a long time they wait to see who it is Nick is nacking. Finally Nick comes out, nods and smiles at the two young men, bounces up the stairs, little jingle change crib ringling in his pockets. The two laugh and jab rib. A few minutes later, Joyce comes out, your Joyce. She pleat sleeks and gown fangles a hip swish across the room, makes an innocent, arrogant dash for those stairs. She doesn't even look at the young men, who follow her with wide eyes.

I don't know what Nick is thinking, says Otis.

Maybe that he owns the place, says I. Maybe that he owns everything.

A tiny voice screams in the night, screams betrayal just moments before the roar that takes my life. From your desktop this scream ripples through the universe, a tiny glint lost to the passionate grind throbbing of its conceptual cyclops Judas Kiss.

Float with me, Tod, here in Joyce's duskiness. Twist and twirl in her warmth, the real fire, nutrient rich. We are sperm. Swim with me. Swim for her womb, through the black soup. Send us, light one, bright one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, light one-- Stop! Wombtumor! Wombtumor! Tod, we are not welcome here. This is the enemy's land. Nick's spawn is here. He floats. His seed beat us, contaminates, sucks from the walls all to which you lay claim. Defiled penetration. Damned procreation. Perverted. Nick has faulted her! Your whole family. This stew was once friendly, allied, pure, but now there is this seed, soul-damned bastard. Joyce carries it, a sin bubbling and foaming inside her like a rabies virus. It is deadly. It killed me, all things considered. Laura has a brother, a little Caligula malformed. Caesar Ovarious, I pity you, little Cal, little pestilent dead-womb-invaginated bastard.

Caligula.

Legend has it you buried a baby you personally murderedisfigured under the floor tiles of your father's temple in order to drive him mad mad mad. You were only nine at the time, ambitious youth. But this time around you are more complex, dual, both child monster and buried victim, waiting to bring misery. So much heaped on an innocent head.
Prenatal road kill.

Wrong place, wrong time.

Caligula.

It is done.

We are three. The faulted, the sin, the holey ghost.

Make City Trinity.

I don't want to hurt you, Tod. You are only stupid. A cuckold. But I must protect my subconscious. Of course, he is really mostly idea. I don't know if Joyce is pregnant. Who cares? Tomorrow, I'll change this all around. That doesn't matter. Cal is to me what I am to you. You can never see me, but I am here. I can never see him, but he is here. We all affirm each other. If I didn't exist, what would drive your guilt? If he didn't exist, what would be the point of my existence here?

Reason.

Yes. When Otis and I watched Nick and his goons kick out those football hands, kick him around, and you pushing through the crowd and Joyce afraid for her man, which wasn't you, we knew. We knew. It was all the same day's festivities. Well. All the excitement got to me. The affair and the fight and the crowd milling about seething for blood, it all got to me and my drunken body. My tumored head throbbed and my colitis kicked in and I made a dash for the dumper. You always seem to see things too late.

Do you ever watch the bands or the dancers out on the dance floor? No, you never care about that stuff. Money money money. $. You should. On our full moon Friday Vomit Rush played. They're bad, crazy as nut house rats. I have to admit now, some of the shows are pretty entertaining, now that I have to watch them. You should have spent more time here, watched more. So much might have been avoided. Oh, well. My favorite bands now are out of Newport, Rhode Island: Rat Masochist and Eurorectal Septum and The Fiddle Goobers. I often float behind the drummers and watch the punkers bash into each other, a mass of waving fists sticking out of brown hair and black leather, waves of heat rising steamy above dark glistening leathered bodies, cartoon-cricket-people, hop-writhing victim-youth, one giant mass of sweat and limbs, brown with bones all sticking out waving and waving. If you saw them today, I know what you would say, I know now what you call their green dance--the vermin scurry. I was part of a crowd once, and if I were a tad more tangible, I would have been a part of this one. They remind me of a tale. My grandmother told me this, long before I was a building.

A little boy once lived on an island, far away from cities and people who could make him grow bad. He lived there alone with his father, a tall man with a broad forehead, pointed nose and narrow chin, and his little, bookish brother. At first he was very sad on the island, but as time went by he grew to be contented and confident in his paradisal home. He was a cute little boy, tending his sheep in his bright cotton vest, the outfit of a sheep boy. Finally, he reached the age when he could discard his little vest for boys and wear the clothes of manhood, leather. And as he grew older, he saw the pleasures and possessions of the father and desired them. The father watched his boys and saw a change in the elder. He noticed that the boy stretched the truth and lied, as boys at this age will.

Never fib on this island, little man, the Father told him, for this is a magic place. We are in the realm of the Censorious, and he will come for all the liars and bad boys of his Kingdom and make slaves of them, or worse, kill them.

The little eldest was afraid at first, but after a while he became comfortable again on his island home. The threat of the Censorious became weak and diffused through time. He grew tall and strong and soon thought himself a swagger of a man.

One day, while out on a stroll, he happened across a beautiful woman with ebony hair sitting on the side of a road. He could see she was a woman, for she was very full in figure, with full red lips. She was weeping very sadly next to her carriage and was in need of the boy's help. The young boy did help the woman. He lifted her carriage from the ditch, for he was very strong, and fixed the dented wheels and helped her into the cab.

Lifting her skirts as she climbed in her carriage, she said, Won't you come in so I may give you a ride home, young man? He could see her shapely legs and woman's curves and quickly said yes, for he decided he loved the woman. On the way home she pulled off the road and took the young man to her cottage, for she lived very near to his home. She took him in and showed him a great many things: sweet sins a woman knows of, things a man should only know with his wife.

As time went by, the father noticed that his son was hardly ever around anymore. The sheep would stray all over the mountainsides, and sometimes the boy would be gone for days.

One day at dusk, the boy arrived home late with the woman. He swaggered from the carriage up to the front door and sauntered in. The father and younger brother watched from their chairs and could see the woman watching after him from her carriage as he walked into the house. The Father was a wise old man, he could see that the boy had changed again. He looked over, past his son, at the woman outside in the carriage, and he knew.

Boy, he said, did that woman bring you home?

Yes, the boy said.

Did she bring you straight home, or did she bring you through the forest first? he asked.
We never were in the forest, the boy said.

At that moment the sky exploded in a sunburst of light and sound. From the sky fell a great beast, a fury of brown fur and grasping arms sticking out at all angles. The Censorious rushed up the walkway and pounced on the boy before he had a chance to turn away. Many arms grabbed the boy's head and twisted and tore most of it from his body, only leaving the left ear he should have listened to his kindly old father with. And as the virtuous, if a little slow, old father and the innocent little son watched, the Censorious rushed off into the sky, in search of other pejorative malignancies to remove from his Kingdom.

I think this story illustrates one thing pretty well; my Grandmother was a disturbed, unbalanced old woman. I marvel at the nightmares and horrors inspired by dysfunctional antediluvian authoritarians in the name of moral purity. I offer it to you for one reason; sometimes, in the big cruel world, the criminals and the victims get transposed. We both know who should have been your holey ghost. I offer it to you, Tod, and more. You have enthroned your very own Censorious. Never sleeping, never feeling, never hungering, vigilant. Forever reminding. I will be your Censorious, guardian of your family's sin. Eternally installed in your dreams. I am imprisoned here, tied to you, tied to Cal. And I will be all things here, in my realm; I will oversee the blood that flows, the gold, the melodies and passion, the soul of the FCC living on, persevering through a Hitlerian millennia, timeless.

And if time and the wreckers should come and attack my fortress, my sanctuary, crush our head, I pray they scrape my remains, heap me into large orange trucks and haul me respectfully away, carting the mighty, fallen king off to his tomb; a tomb magnificent, stretching through the hills and mountains, long, black, curvy as sperm. A road, a mountain road, crossed daily by all forms of humanity and life; maniacs and wanderers, doe and gecko, zealots and prostitutes and drunkards and bookkeepers and artists. Humanity with its Caligulas in tow.

Little Caligula.

The sun rises, I see its rays on my neighbors' lucky brick faces, glowing stupidly there across the street. You gurgle, foam. You must rise now, Tod, we are done for tonight. Stagger into my men's room and wash the drool from your face, hide from your employees before they unsuspectingly arrive. No one will find out about our little reality, our little secrets. And as you rinse the slick, dusty cords from your face, I will fade, my voice will dim to just a strange feeling lurking in the quiet recesses of your troubled subconscious. The sum of my existence will be a mere persistence of bad dreams, dull remembrances of some unnamable guilt or pain that bubbles through your glob of muck, doing its damnedest to make you mad mad mad. I will retreat for the day into the liquor, into my blood, where I will not be forgotten, held up in sad toasts by friends who slowly forget my details and hang on to fuzzy outlines. And later, after all the dancers go home, all the women, the local pros and the suits, it's the three of us: Tod and Howard and Cal. You will collapse into the drunken void, where we will be waiting. Once you are breathing deep death-dream, sleep seamless, I will unravel this again, my cryptic triptych. You will have no choice. Trapped, there is only this recurring fate for you. Listen closely...

Road kill.