I flew back to America the other day. My name is Ryuichi. The trees and
gophers looked familiar. Outside Sideys I smoke a cigarette. Inside, a donut
and Sidey's shitty coffee. Sidey, little more than a two-bit. Like me.
Day-olds represented fresh, as Nancy knows and points out. I know
Nancy to be a good American though she works for Sidey. Why, I don't
know. Sidey shot a nail gun at me and hit Nancy in the thigh. She
cried and bled. That's Nancy. "That's Sidey," said Nancy. And you
sense the defeat of foiled expectation emerging in a deflating
American moment.
Chapter 2
In America you drive to work 30 miles in a Marysville Honda. Jim Beam
and cough syrup in the glove compartment. Sometimes you nearly black
out as the trucks pass you by. Or a Lexus. Blood in the back of your
throat becomes panicstricken recollection or a foreboding and you drink
the Jim Beam and cough syrup without pulling over. It makes it hard to drive.
But not harder than blacked out [joke].
Out of country, you say you work in America everyone around you shuts
the fuck up finally. They know when you work, say, at the American
Post Office, chances are good you'll kill your boss one day. American
supernatural flying across the wires in endless loops feeding on each
American's perception of himself as a rightful boss.
Chapter 3
For Sidey, Nancy's boss, time's running out. He's got a disease but
says he's not a faggot. Nancy lets him rub her ass to prove it. She
wears short skirts that hike high above Sidey's nail gun scar, a small
hole. Nancy lets you put your tongue into it. It's like finding the
detent. The night I took Nancy to the Radisson for our last
drink came to an end in Nancy's cramped bedroom. She wished to sit and
pour drinks while I smoked all of her pot and bore down into the night.
Nancy and her period, crying and bleeding, dwarfing expectations like
a Langley shredder room.
Chapter 4
You meet Nancy at a party where she gets into your impressions.
Your notes. Each lost in a private desert. In the new way of being.
"You look like the lost Japanese Beatle." I agree. [I smile and nod with
untrustworthy overeagerness I'm told.] I ask her then please hold my hand.
[Joke.] Condensation from beer bottle flicks at my head. Next to a
refrigerator will piss people off. Discuss subjectivity. Also pisses
people off. Agree it was going away; losing to the object. To
unstoppable masses of excess production. Snuffed out with the ends of
dialectical history. Consider object transcendence. When nobody
gives a shit about difference or getting snuffed out, she says, it
makes for an interesting game ethos. Sex that can still thrill and
make you feel your cells. Sensation of sympathetic vibration; San
Francisco, city of orgasm and earth quake. We laugh. Ha. But how? Not
the same as subjectivity. There she loses me. As an illustration
handles one bare breast from out of her blue v-neck for inspection.
Yes. Then I see. My note: "This then, the shiny breast!" Others in the
kitchen see, too. Plus her skirt hiked up high [but no detent yet].
Consecrate by eating psilocybin. Experience us in Mexico. Five in a
cab. "Sir, take us to where you drink." Seeming to drive direct over bridges
and through dense woods with unflagging purpose, dodging trees, into the
longing midst of a celebration, centered in simulated tribal music.
"Naked men yelling at sequoias," laughs Nancy. Buffetted about. An
outdoor bar. A small glass of a clear liquid. A mist forms in front
of my eyes.
Chapter 5
Nancy's clothes off. Which happens quickly and makes her
simultaneously more certain and supernatural; plus larger, hard-baked,
an inexplicable depression in the midst of the blown fluidity of the
western desert. Men in loin cloths and war paint pluck her from my
feckless arms. The Anti-Sequoia. A writhing dance. A mist forms in
front of my eyes. Nancy and I and several others in some water.
Someone's cock in my mouth. Maybe Nancy's. Her hand steering
the cock into my mouth. In time you become your own grandfather.
Chapter 6
Sidey's is a breakfast joint with a dart board. Sidey shoots it with a
nail gun from behind the counter. By the time we woke on our fateful day
Nancy had missed her shift. The phone seemed to ring for an insane hour.
"I've gotta check in, Bob." Over night you become "Bob". You note such a
change with sadness. Sad to be so awake, so vulnerably pleased.
Chapter 7
Sidey's large front plate glass window is completely occluded with a
giant sign: NO SMOKING! THAT MEANS YOU! Lit cigarette fuming
behind a red circle and bar sinister. Nancy and I share a cigarette on the
sidewalk out front. I drop it. Nancy crushes it out. "Don't, Bob," she says
into one of my two fine ears.
Chapter 8 (Epilogue)
Why would Sidey blame me for everything? I feel safe only once many
patrons have wrested Sidey, a "Poltroon," from off of my back and behind
his greasy counter, holding onto a piece of my ear. Nancy and I stand
at a table. Jeannete seated. Jeanette's napkin on my bleeding ear
stub. Sidey nailing his piece to a door jamb. Nancy's hatred of
Jeanette. I try to remain polite but monitor for Sidey, positioning
my body to let my head nod assent without hampering my monitoring of
Sidey; without turning my head. When he disappears at last I sense Sidey
and I becoming One - aware of the pleasure of the patrons at our
interactions: delight at my ear blood; counterfeit asian grin; bleached
face; lip sweat; hideous doubt. An ecstasy of stimulation. Sidey
laughing away in the back room, ha ha, plugging in the pneumatic nail
gun. Yes. Much to laugh about. Old struggles. Gods at war. The rage of
dreaming sheep. Terra firma waiting around like a floor bound hound beside
a broken record and Judge Bork thinking various things in connection
with More's 'Utopia'. "I can't remember what the hell I was thinking
of in connection with More's 'Utopia'," thinks Langleyite Bork in
paranoid abstraction. "What what the hell I expected." "Stop fucking
flanking me, Bork!," Sidey screams at me. "I know where you live,
you CIA fuck!" The American Century. At the end of the line the circular
dreams of raging sheep.
