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cc&d v178

How to get to Sesame Street

Joshua Copeland

    But: What happened to Pluto? That was the big question. He couldn’t have been kidnapped; that happened to children, not to teens. And he managed his drug intake well, so an overdose wasn’t even a slight consideration. Some people said he ran away, but Travis knew that Pluto liked this lazy, dusty, dirt road town, where the highest building—Highland Plaza—was three stories tall. Pluto left nothing, no clues in his wake, just question marks.
    The speakers leaked out a sad sack Waylon Jennings tune and Travis felt himself floating away toward endless horizons, totally above anyone or anything in the room. He hovered at eye level with the ceiling lights, a holocaust of dead moths heaped about the bulbs. A black, viscous lava oozed out the speakers (All this thanks to Lexus Kane’s mushrooms) and as if to say everything would be OK—which was as far from the truth as one could get—a rainbow arched gaily, high above the living room, where furniture was moved aside for dancing space into which a jostle of bodies mingled, twisted, and touched.
    And then there was Jerry, standing right in front of Travis, squared off to him. “You better get it in gear, Trav!” Jerry yelled over the music. “Finals will be here before you know it! Soon it’ll be too late!” Jerry’s face seemed two inches from Travis’s; beer breath, Travis realized. Jerry’s red hair was turning into embers and melting down his cheeks. Flaming drops of it landed on his black T-Shirt. “There’s nothing worse than regret, Trav! It’s the worst!” Travis felt the light drizzle of Jerry’s spit on that one; he was thankful he could barely hear him. He glanced at the muted TV directly under the rainbow’s shadow. A Seventies Glenn Campbell video was on. Glenn—as always—was dressed like he was going to church, sterling and somber. Paisley shapes swam and spiraled the breadth of his shirt like two dimensional fish. Travis tried to pull himself back to Jerry.
    “I can’t hear you!” Travis yelled, his eyes darting back and forth from Jerry to the TV. “Let’s go into the kitchen!” The kitchen would be a sanctuary from the two-ness of that living room: Those guys would not be going home alone; they would have arms to collapse into. Jerry escorted Travis into the kitchen, and Travis’s ears reached air.
    Jerry continued: “Did you hear anything I said? What I was saying was, you got to hustle, man. You’re going to end up going to a third rate school—fucking Lewis and Clark Community College—with your GPA unless you ace the finals, which, as we both know, is highly unlikely. Trav, I am not trying to lecture you. Not at all. I’m trying to drill into that skull of yours that there is nothing worse than regret.”
    Travis—as if he was deflating—sighed and looked down at the clean white kitchen tiles (Which reminded him of his poem, My Life is of the Floor). “Nobody appreciates me or what my brain can do,” he said. “Read my poems, dude. And you’ve seen my paintings. Yeah, keep coming at me...I will devour your planet whole, and pluck from my teeth the bones of your dead. Ha.”
    “You see? There you go again,” Jerry said, smiling politely. “You want to end up in Mayview? Keep talking like that and you’ll remain chicless and uneducated for the rest of your life.”
    Life...“But wait,” Travis said, his eyebrows raised and pleading, “Whatever happened to Pluto? He’s gone and nobody cares. He was all ready to kick ass as a filmmaker.”
    Jerry frowned. “Get that loser out of your head. He was a little delinquent nothing. Let’s be honest. You were the only one who thought he had any talent. We all saw his videos. They were pretentious and dull and craptastic. He ran away, and believe you me, that’s no loss.”
    “But it doesn’t make sense. He liked it here. He didn’t have the balls to run away.”
    “He was a druggie, dude. Of course he did. He’s probably passed out now in some Pittsburgh alley, choking on his own vomit as we speak. But don’t think about the dead. Think about the living. Think about yourself. Your parents teach at Pitt. You got a free education there, a free ride. Don’t blow it. Please.”
    Rachel Sizeman walked in, her lady cowboy boots clopping on the tile. Travis winced as he noticed that the bright white light of the kitchen emphasized her curvy dyed blonde hair and its dark roots. She opened the refrigerator, then looked at Jerry.
    “I don’t want Coors, Jerry. Do you know what Morris Ogul called my ass? He called it “ovular.” You’ve got to have some Lite beer around.”
    “Right behind the Coors there’s Miller Lite,” Jerry said.
    “Oh, I see it. Cool.” She grabbed it, shut the fridge, and walked out.
    Travis remembered the days before the monolith of college started to loom for all of them, before he got his nose pierced, before he got his arm veins tattooed sky blue. He realized now those were angry actions, the rage and protests of being called, implicitly, an academic degenerate. By doing those things he had given up the magic of fading into the Butler teen crowd, the magic of not being spot lit, of not standing out. Now he had his own personal thunderhead raining on him where ever he went. He saw too late he wanted to be a thread in a cloth, a cloth in a quilt. Before all the tattoos he was part of things, at least more so than he was now. But then he had slowly divided himself from society. He had been branded “Void” and he had no one but himself to blame. The weight of it all hit him. Suddenly he felt heavy and tired.
    “I got to go, man,” he said. “I’m not doing anyone any good staying here.”
    Jerry stood back a bit facially. “I didn’t mean to ruin a decent mood.”
    “Jerry, you didn’t ruin anything.”
    Jerry put his hand on Travis’s shoulder. “Are you OK to drive?”
    The room reeled. “Yeah.” Travis stumbled through the dancing and out the front door. He clambered into his parents’ Camry and pondered a bit. “Back to Butler,” he said to no one. “Back to my upright-speck-of-flesh existence.” Then he started the car, pulled out, and drove off into the night.
    Jerry lived on the outskirts of Butler. Travis knew the land around Jerry’s pretty well, but he quickly got himself lost. No landmarks looked right. He couldn’t even find Pilfer Square or the City County Building. He was making lefts, rights, U Turns, all helplessly. So soon his route digressed. The yellow lined paved road under him turned into a dirt road. Then he made a blind left and ended up on a gravel road, a cacophony of pebbles exploding on the underside of his car as he leaned into the wheel to get any sense as to where he was or where he was going. Anxiety soon grabbed hold of him, and he took notice of the velvety darkness that blanketed the area. He saw nothing to the sides; he felt like he was the only one in a stadium, with huge, yawning spaces stretched out before him, spaces receding into the moonless night. Better pull over, he thought, wait till morning, and drive again.
    He pulled over, parked, and froze: Yes, that was Butler, to his right, sitting miles away, the city lights mere embers embedded in black, sparkling and twinkling. He was farther away from Butler now than he was when he had left Jerry’s. He sighed, shut off the car, and looked up: The stars were spread across the sky brightly, as if neon could be splashed and scattered. He leaned back in his chair, all boozed up, and fell asleep fast.
    Distant carnival music woke him. He weakly opened his eyes and saw the night sky flickering a slight pink. Far away, where Butler should be, a monstrously huge Ferris wheel turned. It was lit up like a Christmas tree: Amber, green, and red scintillated on its girders and hub. The wheel stretched up to the clouds, illuminating them and hiding the top cars. Travis rubbed his eyes. Mushroom trips, however visual, were too greasy and foggy to be mistaken for reality; but this here was no ‘shroom trip: too many details. A ruby-red circus tent was stationed across whole city blocks. A skyscraper-sized roller coaster broke the night air with heavy wooden thunder and high pitched screams (Like with the wheel, the clouds hid the crests of its structure). Three orange spot lights were active, their beams distinct and swerving as they traced arcs and ovals on the clouds. Even through all the distance, Travis heard muffled laughter and smelled cotton candy. “Ah ah,” he said. “No way.” He closed his hands over his ears, shut his eyes as tight as a pinch, and fell back asleep.
    ...The orange of bright sunlight went through closed eyes. The sour, limp swirls and spirals of a hangover. The cramping of limbs stuck in one position for hours. Travis woke and opened his eyes. The dashboard clock displayed a cruel 7:34 a.m. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and squinted out the window and saw he had unknowingly parked on a cliff. Woods and rocky terrain surrounded him to his left, the open air and distant city of Butler on his right. The tiny buildings and houses were black, silhouetted by the burgeoning light of sunrise. No Ferris wheel, no circus tent, no roller coaster, no cotton candied fragrance. He yawned and rubbed his temples, feeling the quake of a massive headache coming on. He started the car and began the drive back to Butler feeling groggy and empty, a lone typed minus sign on a blank sheet of paper.
    His brain scolded him. How many times have I told you: Don’t mix your drugs. So why did he do it? He called himself an idiot out loud. That Coors and Lexus’s mushrooms had coalesced in his head into a merry go round of inebriation. He wondered if the mushrooms Lexus sold him were spiked with anything; Lexus was known to douse his pot with PCP. He’d have to ask Lexus on Monday. All he could think about right now was sinking into his bed. Travis remembered overhearing his father complain to his mother that Travis was “self destructive.”
    Now that he could see, it took him about half an hour to get back onto I-38. Maybe twenty minutes after that he pulled into his driveway. He opened the door to his house (No one kept their doors locked in Butler), urinated, undressed, and collapsed back to sleep in his own comfortable bed, the tinkle and hum of the carnival music still in his head. (Seeing lit up architecture where none existed; surely he was Mayview bound).
    He dreamt he was in Lexus’s living room. Lexus was wearing a black robe and was lecturing Travis on why snorting powdered Clorox would be beneficial to Travis’s health. Lexus exhaled a green smoke as he spoke, and Travis watched it coil and spin up to the ceiling, where it collected as a green smog. Lexus’s teeth were chiseled into tiny, sharp triangles.
    “It’ll burn my nose,” Travis complained.
    Lexus’s doorbell chimed.
    “Get the door, Lex. Leave me alone.”
    “Does it look like there’s a door in this house? Travis, that’s your door, not mine.”
    And so he was right. Travis slowly woke up to someone ringing his doorbell with impolite persistence. Still hazy, he waited for his parents to get it until he remembered they were both at school; both kept Saturday office hours. He heaved himself out of bed, stepped into his navy blue jogging pants, threw on a Pitt T-Shirt, and stumbled downstairs. “Just a minute!” He came to the door, made a half hearted effort at pushing his bushy hair into place, and swung it open.
    A white haired fat man in an apron stood there. A half-circled grin creased his face. “Hello there. No intros needed. You are Travis Milton. Looks like I just woke ya.”
    “Well, yeah, you kinda did.”
    “It’s past two. No offense, my friend, but it’s time to get up anyway.”
    “Waking times are relative. But no, um, that’s OK. How do you know who I am?”
    “You’re too young to remember me, kid. Mr. Hooper would be the name. Scouting for genius, my game.” He giggled. “Sorry, I’m not much good with rhymes.”
    Travis stared. Smudges of brown, red and yellow (mustard?) stained Mr. Hooper’s apron—echoes of mishandled food. The apron itself cloaked an unhealthily large gut. Under the apron Mr. Hooper wore a buttoned down shirt, vertically striped pink and white. Below that, faded jeans and dull brown loafers.
    Mr. Hooper...Where had he heard the name? Travis delved into himself, searching.
    “I got two words for ya, kid: Sesame Street.” The old man looked like he expected a hug.
    “Mr. Hooper, Mr. Hooper...Oh. OK. Uncle Ritche mentioned you once. Aren’t you supposed to be dead? In the Seventies you owned a store or something on the show, and then—in real life—you died of a heart attack.”
    “Well, kind of.”
    “Rich said they even did an episode on your death, to help kids deal with dying and shit like that.” Travis shook his head. This was Twilight Zone material. “Did you just escape from Mayview?”
    The old man chuckled and said, “You are the author of the poem—a ten pager, I might add—titled Sadomascochists Running through a Field of Daisies. You painted a masterpiece called Esoterica which was an eye with different colored numbers all over it. A blue zero in the right hand corner and a pink nine by the pupil, if my homework’s on the mark.
    Homework? “Hey, I never showed those to anyone.”
    “My hired eyes have been watchin’ ya. Doing a little sneaking ‘n peeking. No need to look alarmed, son. I’m here to take you away, to take you away from all the loneliness and alienation.” Mr. Hooper leaned closer. “Right now you’re trapped in a corner, with all these hicks clawing at you. The square peg and the round hole story. But your days of misery are over. I’ll take you to a place where you’ll blend like a tree in a forest, so to speak.” Mr. Hooper looked left and right. “But it’s dangerous to talk here.” He looked at his watch. “Your folks’ll be home soon. So cool it with the questions. For now. I’ll explain on the plane.”
    “The plane?”
###
    The clouds floated under and away. Mr. Hooper sat in the cockpit of the small plane, occasionally glancing at the myriad of dials and taking swigs off a hanging oxygen mask. Travis sat next to him. They were its only passengers. “Will you tell me now where we’re going?” he asked.
    “I got a place to take you, the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Let’s just say, ‘Your talent is needed.’”
    “Huh?”
    “Just you wait.”
    “And how can you fly yourself anyway? Don’t you have a pilot?”
    “Risky venture, kid. Risky venture. Got to have as few people in on it as possible.” He elbowed Travis lightly.
    “So wait...Why’d Sesame Street do a show on your death if you weren’t dead?”
    Mr. Hooper laughed the laugh of an old man. “My death, ah yes. It was faked, as phony as you bud Jerry. The producers wanted me to work in the Cartoons Department. Workin’ for the ‘Tunes means you gotta disappear. So everyone—all the parents, all the kids—had to believe I kicked the bucket. We had a double in the coffin, if you know what I mean. Poor sap...” Mr. Hooper shook his head. “Like me down to the toe nails. OK, buckle up, we’re coming into New York.” The clean white clouds parted to reveal little blocks of buildings and a long strand of runway.
    He went on. “Anyway, I was history as far as the public was concerned. My squad’ll do the same for you. It’s looking like we might pull a ‘suicide.’ You painted and wrote, painted and wrote, and still no one appreciated you or your outlook on life. You were surrounded by Garth Brooks look-alikes. You thought your high school was just an assembly line—which, by the way, it is; they all are—so we’ll either pull a ‘suicide’ or a ‘run away.’ We gotta make that decision. But that’s our problem. For now, just take your foot off the gas pedal, my friend, and hit Cruise. You’re going on the ride of your life.”
    “Why?” Travis almost whispered. “What’s going to happen to me?”
    “We’re touching down. You got your seatbelt on? Get in crash position. Put your head between your knees. I ain’t too good at this part.” Mr. Hooper slowly raised up the U-shaped gear shift. A loud crashing sounded from below. “Whoops. Wasn’t so bad. I done worse. You can pick your head up now.”
    Mr. Hooper slowed down the plane and parked it. Then he looked out the window. “Transport ain’t here yet.” He removed his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. “You see, Sesame Street alternates between three segments. There’s the ‘Real Life’ segments (That’s where you know me from), the ‘Puppetry’ segments (With the likes of Elmo, Grover, Cookie Monster, ole Oscar, etc.), and the Cartoon segments. Your job’ll be workin with the ‘Tunes. My boys have been watchin’ ya. You got talent, kid. It’s spillin’ out your ears.”
    A limousine pulled up, black as a country night. “Wow!” Travis exclaimed. “A frigging limo. I can’t believe all this is a real operation.” They both stepped out of the plane and into the limo. It screeched off.
    “Help yourself to the mini-bar, my boy.” Travis poured himself a shot of bourbon.
    “Christ. I’ve never had an adult push alcohol on me before.”
    Mr. Hooper laughed hard at that: “Just you wait, kid, just you wait...” Travis gulped it down and cleared his throat.
    Mr. Hooper sighed and said, “Now I got something important to tell you, so I need you to listen, and listen carefully.” His smile was gone. “The dorm I’m taking you to is twenty-six blocks from where Sesame Street is taped. There’s no cafeteria or nothing there. Just four vending machines. You guys never eat right anyways. So no going out to eat or ordering in pizza. You are not to leave the building under any circumstances. Not even during a fire. Food and toiletries get shipped in. No clocks, watches, newspapers, magazines, TV’s, or radios. You’ll have to create in a vacuum. All this you see now,” Mr. Hooper opened his hands to the passing urban area and its crowds, “All the shops and cars and people we’re passing, they won’t exist once you’re in there.”
    “That’s more than fine with me,” Travis said, butterflies fluttering in his stomach, “I never needed them anyway. But about not being able to go outside, I might get all cramped up. I’m like that.”
    “Trust me, you won’t. It’ll be like open fields in there.” Mr. Hooper put a hand on Travis’s shoulder and shook him lightly and in a friendly fashion. “You’ll be replacing Eugene, who OD’d on morphine the other week. Now, my friend, his job is yours.”
    About twenty minutes later the limousine parked and they both stepped out. A headstone-gray dormitory stood before them, five stories high. The windowless husk of a building leaned slightly to the right and appeared to have the structural reliability of a house of cards. The front face of it was sooty and smoked over. It stood in the middle of a block of weeds and rubble. Mr. Hooper wrapped an arm around Travis’s shoulder and said, “Say hello to your new casa. Just wait till you get inside. It’s a bit spacey for only nine people, but a little elbow room never hurt no one.”
    Travis’s eyebrows angled up and his eyes darted below and around. “I don’t know...” he said, “...This whole place, this whole deal, seems kinda shady.”
    “What? You want to go back to your old life?”
###
    Travis and Mr. Hooper walked down a dirty and rickety hallway that was vaguely shaped like a trapezoid. Travis stumbled a few times due to the darkness. The floor creaked under them. “This damn thing is too tilted,” Mr. Hooper complained. “We got to get a new place. It’s the Goddamn Sesame Street bureaucracy. You got to go through hell just to get anything done.” He shook his head. “No matter, you’ll like it here.”
    They arrived at the end of the hall, facing a door with a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging off the knob. Voices sounded from behind it; Travis heard a distinctly female voice slur, “It means ‘We came, we saw, we conquered.’”
    Mr. Hooper opened the door to reveal—like curtains drawn back—a corporately sterile conference room with fluorescent lights, an oval mahogany table (glass ashtrays atop it), and bright orange carpet. A leathery brown wheelchair was folded up in a corner.
    Eight young adults sat around the table; none could have been older then twenty-four. Mr. Hooper introduced Travis to each of them: #1: A skinhead with a bullet wound tattooed on his scalp—dark red blood mid-drip, white skull, and gray brain matter apparent. #2: A youngster—obviously still an adolescent with his thin and immature mustache—sporting three earrings in each ear, a chin ring, a nose ring, and—visible with his shirt being off—two thick gold nipple rings. A joint was tucked behind his left ear. #3: A hippie who wore a stained extra long Grateful Dead T-Shirt. His hair shone in the bright light greasily. #4 An anemically skinny kid with an orange crew cut, who said he was a former prostitute in LA until he was “collected” after Mr. Hooper saw his spray painted facades. #5 A girl with a green Mohawk and red cloth around her neck, her face flat down on the table. She refused to stand up for Travis (everyone else had) and kept her head down, only mumbling, “What’s up.” #6 A big, burly ex con, his biceps almost cracking open the sleeves of his pink Izod, prison tattoos all over his arms. #7 A “dirt bag” looking kid wearing a black T-Shirt that read “Redemption Through Death” and showcased a smoking 9mm under the words. And, #8: A scrawny girl—maybe nineteen—with a red and green Plasmatics T-shirt and thickly scarred arms.
    Travis was dazed. He greeted each coworker with a heavy handshake and a wide-eyed smile, feeling life-affirming blood run rapids through his veins.
     Mr. Hooper patted Travis on the shoulder and said, “I’m sure you’ll treat him well, kids. Give him your best.” Then he walked out and Travis sat down in the one empty chair. Drawings with different colored magic markers on white sheets of paper were everywhere: A golden N with wings, a light red, tubular five, a green G with a mouth and a beard, a blue thirteen squared by multi-colored light bulbs. Travis noticed a stained white trickle imprinted on the table before him. It looked like South America. He grimaced at it.
    “That was Eug’s puke,” the Male Hooker said. “We tried to get it clean for you.”
    “Huh. I guess I can deal with it. No problem.”
    “You got no choice. Deal with it,” the Green Mohawk Girl said drowsily, her face still on the table.
    “Don’t mind her,” the Skinhead said. “She’s just hung over.”
    A slouched and shaggy bald man walked in with a protruding gut, a jean jacket, and faded bell bottoms. He looked hung on a coat rack and bent low to the floor, as if gravity pulled strongest at his feet.
    “It’s about time, man,” the Hippie said.
    “So you’re the new fellow,” this slouched man said to Travis. He spoke with an impatient British dialect, his eyes half closed.
    “Yeah,” Travis said.
    “My name’s Sid Barret. Whatever drug or drugs you want for the day, I will get you, through my connections.”
    “Bullshit!” Travis said. “We can name whatever drug, and you’ll bring it here?”
    “What did I just say? And try to make the majority of your order hallucinogenics. Here we are concerned with mind power.”
    “Order away,” the Skinhead said, smiling.
    “OK, I’ll take two dime bags of...” After Travis was through ordering, Sid went on to the Pierced Nipple Teen, and Travis’s stomach squeezed itself in anticipatory spasms. “I cannot believe this is happening.”
    “Believe it” said the Scarred Girl next to him. “But it won’t last forever.”
    Travis perked up. “Why not?”
    “It just won’t. And remember this: Whenever you fly too high and hit a bad trip, that’s what the Thorazine is for, the pills in the mug there at the center of the table.” She pointed to a white mug with “Mom” painted on it in ocean blue. It was brimming with white and green pills.
    Travis awkwardly raised his hand to “hi” position. “Um, what’s your name again?” he asked.
    “Spandella.”
    “Right. How were you, uh, recruited?”
    She grinned. “Mr. Hooper found me on an eating disorders unit in Detroit. See all these scars on both my arms? They’re words and pictures. I drew them with a corkscrew. These are what got his attention.” Travis peered. There were transversals of dead tissue everywhere: One swastika, two lightning bolts, a fish skeleton, and—hard to make out— “Leni Reifenstahl Rules.” (“I used to be racist. But not no more.” She sighed. “I was young and I was stupid. Very stupid.”) Travis took a look at her as a whole. She was stick figure skinny, enough so that it seemed she would have to hold on to something every time the wind blew. And she looked punk. Black bangs hung off her obviously dyed red hair. Like Travis, she had a nose ring. Her red veined eyes didn’t coordinate well with her white, pale face, but she was still pretty. The Plasmatics T-Shirt was tight: Travis felt her breasts looked palmable.
    “Those are pretty neat scars,” he said. “You’re talented. Do we get to meet any of the characters from Sesame Street? I wanna meet Elmo. And Bert.”
    “Nope.” She shook her head jerkily. “We can have absolutely NO contact with anyone involved with the show. Nada, nein, zip. Except for Hooper and Sid. This operation is under the covers. There’d be an uproar from the parents if they ever found out. No one can know we exist. Don’t worry about getting to meet anybody. Be content that you’re here. At least you’re not a prop in someone’s background scenery anymore.”
    “Yeah. Totally true. And good metaphor.”
    Spandella went over the rules and etiquette. They work from five p.m. to two a.m. Lights out at six a.m. Since the whole building is windowless and clockless, they relied on Sid to tell them the time. No interrupting others in the conference room. No wandering the halls when high (a safety precaution). Anyone who either wandered out the building or left on purpose was “taken care of” by Mr. Hooper’s sub rosa goons. No diatribes or negative criticisms about a member’s music, painting, or writing. Anti-smoking comments were forbidden. And finally, no moral judgments about any member—living or dead—allowed.
    Soon Sid lumbered back in with a shopping bag chock full of predominantly illegal pharmaceuticals. “Here’s another order for the day, kids.” He dumped the contents out and the artists lunged at the pile. They sifted through see-through orange medication bottles, stamp-sized squares of paper, small cans of paint, cans of wood finish, white bottles of Elmer’s Glue, eye droppers, syringes, glass jars filled with green powder, boxes of oven cleaner, vials filled with clear liquid, vials filled with blue liquid, belts, pipes, water bongs, crumpled tinfoil, and dime bags filled with either purple, white, or yellow.
    The work day began. It took close to an hour, but soon the Quaaludes sunk in, and Travis felt comfortable enough to participate, his head swirling in eddies of calming mist. “Yeah,” he agreed with the Pierced Nipples Teen, “I think that’s a good idea. The F could start singing in opera format. Oh yeah, and in falsetto, too. Get it? ‘Falsetto’ starts with an F.” He sat back, pleased with his first contribution. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Spandella staring at him.
    The Hippie was slouched so low only his head was visible. “But we got to get that alliteration down,” he said. “Check this out: ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum.’”
    “No way,” the Male Hooker slobbered, wiping drool from his mouth. “We can think of something better than that.” His eyes were thin slits, like his eyelids weighed a ton.
    “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” the Hippie said.
    The Green Mohawk Girl was now sitting up and looking chipper, playing a balancing game with her chair. What’s she doing with that red cloth around her neck, Travis wondered. Then he saw that was no cloth. It was a tattoo of a slit throat, a lip of unzipped flesh with bloody rivulets dripping off it.
    She said, “The screen could keep changing colors, like from blue to white, back and forth, those two go together well. And the F, could, like, throb like a heart, it could dance around the top and bottom of the screen, and do summersaults and cartwheels and shit.”
    “But about the singing,” the Ex Con interjected. ‘The F could form a mouth between its upper and lower ridge when it started to sing falsetto.” He lit up. “Then it could disintegrate into baby F’s.”
    “That’s a good idea,” the Redemption Through Death Kid said, “so write that down. But we can do the visual aspects later. Let’s get back to that alliteration. It’s got to be something that’s going to stay with the kids.”
    “I have one for S,” Spandella said. “Suffer silently while unsewn wounds sequester your soul.”
    Travis threw his pipe to the table, his eyes aflame. “Did you just make that up? That’s really good. You just made that up right now?”
    “Yep,” she replied with a self-satisfied smile.
    “Stop showing off for the new guy,” the Skinhead said in irritation. “You know we can’t use that. This is five-to-two time.” He ran his hand over his scalp and tattoo. Travis thought it looked like someone spilled spaghetti on his head.
    “Hey, all of you, chill for a second,” the Green Mohawk Girl said. “Look at Jay.”
    The Male Hooker, asleep or dead, was slumped in his chair like there wasn’t a single bone in his body. Two dainty quarters of white shown where his pupils had once been. His cigarette smoldered in its glass ashtray, tendrils of smoke rising and dissolving into the air. “Jay!” the Hippie yelled. “Jay!” He walked over and shook him by the shoulders—almost knocking him over—and felt for his pulse on his wrist. “He’s history. Shot up way too much H. We’ll let Hooper know tomorrow.” He walked back to his chair and sat down. “Come on, guys. This isn’t hard. Think. F.”
    “His cigarette smoke as his soul, rising and coiling and billowing itself into heaven,” Spandella said, not unhappily.
    At two a.m. Sid dragged himself in like someone had attached a ball and chain to his ankles to let the artists know their shift was over. They slowly stood up—with little stability—and stretched, working out the soreness that came with sitting for hours. “Does anyone need the wheelchair?” Sid asked the room. “No one needs the wheelchair?”
    Travis stood up, withstood a head rush, saw stars, and looked at the table in front of him. “Holy shit. I did not smoke all that crack and finish all those ‘Ludes.”
    “Yeah, it goes fast, doesn’t it?” the Skinhead said, seriously nodding his head. He walked over to Travis and held out his hand. “It’s going to be a pleasure working with ya, man.” They shook hands heartily.
    “Hey,” Spandella said, taking Travis by the hand and leading him away, “Before you see your room, I want you to come to mine. I have a surprise.”
    The Green Mohawk Girl rolled her eyes and said, “That was fast.”
    The Ex Con smiled and fake-coughed the words, “Loose! She’s loose!”
    The Hippie shook his head at him. “Don’t Bill. Sharon, you too. That counts as a moral judgment.”
    In Spandella’s tiny room the bed was unmade, with Elmer Fudds chasing Bugs Bunnies all over the sheet. The walls were a lime green. Two posters were taped above the bed, one of Lenny Bruce and the other of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A makeup kit with a mirror sat on top of a dilapidated brown dresser with the top drawer missing. A glass jar with three roaches nibbling on a chunk of chocolate bar rested against the wall by the door (“Helps me not eat so much,” Spandella offered.) A stereo was opposite the bed, looking vandalized with wires hanging out its left side.
    “What happened to your stereo?”
    “Oh, they just fiddled with it so it wouldn’t pick up any radio. It can still play CDs, though.”
    “Cool room, cool room.”
    “Thank you,” she said. For a second she delicately fondled his nose ring. He blushed. “And let me show you my surprise,” she said. She knelt down and reached under her bed and pulled out a dinky and rusted alarm clock, silver body with a white face. Its hands pointed to two o’ eight. “Now, how about that? How about them apples? It even glows green in the dark. As you’ll see. Sid smuggled it into me when I was having a bad day. I think someone spiked my crank. Probably Sharon, that whore.” She placed it on the dresser. “Now let me go brush my teeth, so my breath is clean.” Those last words made Travis anxious. He sat down on the bed as she went into her bathroom.
    After a bit she sat back down next to him. Travis tensed. He could feel his heart working overtime, negative thoughts sucking up his confidence. She looked at his arms and smiled, tracing his tattooed veins with her pinkie finger.
    He spouted off: “That was a good alliteration. Earlier I mean. You really look like you’re from the streets it’s bad for me because my parents are so rich they’re professors I’d put on this image of uh uh breast beating machismo but I was so pronounced about it kids knew it was all talk but you you are from the streets you know how I can tell you let it flow up out of you you don’t billboard it you let it seep up out of you but I swagger so much I wouldn’t last two seconds in prison people know I’m a joke it’s not the—” She pulled him to her by his nose ring and kissed him, thick with punker chic passion...
###
    The warmth of two bodies. Hers contoured to his. He felt this. They lay in bed under the covers, his arm wrapped around her tightly skinned stomach. The lights were out and the stereo was turned down to a low hum. A GG Alin CD was playing. Travis and Spandella spoke in whispers.
    “You know, there’s this Puddle Theory,” he said. “Every man is trudging through the desert, thirsty for water. He stumbles across a damp spot in the sand. That’s a one night stand with an ugly chic. Then there’s an oasis; that’s an average looking, loyal girlfriend. The ocean, there’s so much of it, but it’s all salty, so that’s an extremely beautiful dick tease. This man is searching for that infinitely deep lake where he can live forever. You, Spandella, are that lake.”
    She laughed and murmured, “Sounds like you weren’t friends with many girls at your high school.” Her mouth was so close, he felt each syllable on his neck.
    “No, I guess I wasn’t.”
    She looked at the clock on the dresser “Oh shit,” she moaned, “We got to be up in four hours.”
    “No problem. We’ll just order a lot of uppers tomorrow. Today, I mean.”
    “Well, I have to say you’re a much better screw than Arthur.”
    “Which one is he again?”
    “The numbskull with the tattoo on his head.”
    “Oh yeah. I like him. He’s cool.”
    She fondled his hair in the darkness. He felt her long obsidian-black fingernails brush across his forehead. That he could touch and be touched, that there was that assurance of reciprocity...Now he was one of the many.
    “You understand we’re on borrowed time,” she said. “You, me, Arthur, all of us. I almost got a stroke last week off the Crystal Meth, I think.”
    “You think?”
    “Yeah. My eyes went up into my head and I had a seizure.”
    Travis stared at the clock. “But you know what? That doesn’t bother me. My death, I mean. My whole life was a hoard of minus signs. They kept subtracting, like, every year. I was at negative eighteen when I met you. But right now, at this moment, let’s say a positive one hundred just got added to my life. That’s what? Negative eighteen plus a hundred equals...eighty-two. If we never would’ve met, I would have died a miserable old man with a score in the negative seventies or eighties. But now I’m at a positive eighty-two. So screw everything else. Screw death. Soon enough we will feel the relish of the rise, the relief of the risen. How’s that for R?”
    She sighed to the ceiling with its web of cracks and just stared for a bit. Then she yawned, rubbed her hands over her face, and said, “You want to make a pact?”
    “Sure. What kind of pact? What do you mean?”
    “You have to agree to it first.”
    “OK. You got it. I agree. Now what is it?”
    She turned to face him, her flesh vague. “Whoever goes first, the other will off themselves.”
    “Deal,” he said, not missing a beat.
    She draped an arm across his chest and softly said, “Odds are I’ll probably go first, since I’ve been here longer. If that happens, OD on the Thorazine. Take, like, fifty of them.”
    “Won’t the others try and stop me?” he asked, grasping her hand.
    “Nope.” She stepped out of bed naked and walked over to the stereo. She turned it down a notch and settled back in, lightly clinging to him. “Sweet dreams,” she purred.
    “Sleep tight,” Travis mumbled against her bare shoulder.



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