Winners - Writers Forum

surfacetoday · 02-10-2008, 05:12 PM

WINNERS

by Jake Harms

CHAPTER 1

The TV was always on in Smokey’s apartment. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; burning bright as a lightbulb from God. It fizzed and crackled and static sparked from its rusty top hat, the antennae.

Smokey drank when he could, and furnished his two-room place accordingly. A small cabinet full of bottles, a moldy couch, a cot in one corner, and then the TV Room. Here, while the old Set glowed and grew hot, Smokey, whoever he was with, and a small cat named Finky would gather to watch old videocassetes and primitive cable.

Smokey’s eyes reflected the hazy euphoria of a man who had found some kind of higher meaning, some message that was only his to carry. Those same eyes were clouded, and his breath often reeked of stale spirits, polluting the stuffy apartment.

Inside the TV Room, the rules stated that “No windows should be opened, no chairs or couches should be brought in – all respect should be left for the Set. Around its light we gather. In its aura we are complete. The Set…” Here Smokey’s eyes would roll back in his head; he would moan a twittering, lucid moan, and curl his frail limbs into a ball and rock slowly to and fro.

But because Smokey had a meaning, a definition and principle by which he measured all things, his mad behaviour and scarcity of companionship (save Finky the cat, and his sometimes girl, the volcanic Ella) was unimportant. The Set glowed. It vibrated good waves through his skin.

Smokey tilted his bottle 7 or 8 times every 15 minutes. By 2 hours into his day, he showed signs of the irratable paranoia that plagues all alcoholics. The birds sang at his windows; they wanted to claw his fucking eyes out. He gnashed his teeth, leaned back with Finky on his emaciated stomach. The TV volume was off, but felt more and more deafening as the floor grew increasingly unsteady.

By 4 hours the lights in the room were dull and foggy.

“19th century London. Jack the Ripper. The menacing ripper hat. Top hat. Dancing girls. Girls in drag. Taped package. Hairy…”
Smokey heaved himself up.
“Clear. My. Head.”

He muttered the hoarse testament and stepped on his cat.

The small creature’s leg snapped like a dry twig, the bone popped through, blood leaked and began pooling, and it screamed and Smokey sat down. The wooden floor panels were undulating.

But the TV Set remained still. Its glow did not dull, either – it remained glossy, in hollywood sheen, and Smokey was grateful for its stolid comfort when his cat just kept “Fucking screaming… shut up! Shut UP! SHUT UP!” Smokey shouted, but his mantra wasn’t true, just repetitive, and not clean nor holy, just wishful, and so made little sense in the basking grace of TV waves, so then he quieted into: “Clear my head; clear my fucking head,” but the ringing wail from Finky’s distended jaw would not quit and neither would the sea his floor had become, so Smokey pounded the side of his head with a leathery oven mitt until he felt a crisp sheen of blood curtain over his right ear. It was 1 of 2.

But the walls now shook. So Ella the Volcano was here.

“Smmmokey! Smokey what have you done to my Finky? His leg, it is in pieces; there is BLOOD, Smokey – look, blood!”

Ella’s catastrophic pile of wiry black corpse hair bounced upon her head and she gestured wildly to the bleeding cat on the floor.

“Ella, dear, I am drunk,” Smokey’s lips here curled back, revealing two sets of gray gums and rainbow hued teeth, “Do not fester… nor pester me with your Greek sensibility. The cat will live. He will be, fine…” Smokey’s lips flipped back to normal as he trailed off and gazed at the floor, eyes soulful and large, with soft black pupils and hints of gold around the rims.

He sat, a helpless child, with his limbs sprawled. The TV Set was playing a black and white cassette-tape – a 1930s comedy act. Three men chased each other, one wielding a hammer, one his fists, and one simply running. The cat’s eyes turned white, its cut frothed, and Ella whimpered softly.

All else was silent, the Set’s volume was off.

Presently, Smokey retrieved his battered leather oven mitt and his bottle from the floor, and stood up. Mitt in one hand and bottle in the other, he stepped toward the TV glow. Ella stared at him. Smokey’s tentative first step had landed his foot in some of Finky’s blood. He slipped and fell. Ass skyward, sprawled stupidly, Smokey grumbled and heaved himself back up. Back to the mission. Though, there was blood on his robe now.

He shook his head, suddenly very sad about things, took another step – and landed at his destination. Using the oven mitt to protect himself, he placed a hand on the metal TV knob to turn up the volume.

Here, so close to the Set, he felt a muggy stillness; a muggy profound stillness – the stillness of God.

He stood until the Set’s heat began to lightly scald his face, then stepped back, back through the cat’s blood and past Ella’s electric gaze. Back through the low volume of the TV and the heavy air of the room, and back into his residency on the floor. There he sat languidly, a child once again, eyes gleaning the information star-like through innocent retinas.
The cat’s dead. It’s a sad thing, he thought, and took a pull on the bottle.
Ella felt the growing numbness in herself also, as if the inner-tape of the 30s comedy had wrapped slowly around her neck until, starved for a lack of oxygen, she resigned to its heat and antique insistence. It was like being raped. The cat was dead…

A blip on her grid.

She moved next to Smokey, and idly tugged on his beard. Then she rested her head on his shoulder and let the glowing Set in front of her sweep her soul like God’s voice, like Smokey’s tongue. The light outside grew darker, the apartment chilled, and the only light in the entire apartment, in the entire city, was the sultry hot, menacing glow of the TV set.

CHAPTER 2

The city where they lived was a cramped, hot place where the streets never dimmed and the public thronged 24 hours a day and the TV screens were a flushed hand in unrelenting presence and the shops and stores had heavy iron gates that covered the windows which were plexiglass anyway, so the whole operation, crowds to windows, was unecessarily reinforced. The smog pulsed above the rooftops and the crowds pulsed on the pavement and the fog rolled in around noon, and the cost of everything was a soul, or an open heart, and the tendons in the public’s arms were the subway rails.
Black men, white men, black and white women, mariachis, R&B’s; all sang below the sidewalk. The professional chorus from Hell. They were grim and resourceful, and self-promoting, but many passengers ignored them and so furthered the consignment of their entertainers to misery, but everyone was miserable and crime was up; it was, after all, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 00s and new materials and ingenious advancements ensured that every last grubbing hand would be happy – if not they could medicate otherwise. There were superheroes and supervillains, but they were blindfolded anyway and remained esconsed and comfortable in their shadows, their denial; their shadows of denial.

But still the public pulsed and thronged and the bars remained open and liquids ran like disinfectant down the gutters which were gold, flanked in crystal, and the sidewalk sparkled so the trees could never bear fruit nor diamonds, only act cold and motionless, covered in crusted coarse beetle-black soot and God looked down with a funny smile and the cabbies looked back with a gleeful sneer and the rich exec’s looked over with mocking appraisal, and if God looked anymore his eyes would hurt so he shut them and let his headache heal while the ground or pavement continued to hum a steady Bb off the chrome sidings on the city buses and off the shiny surfaced buildings and all the people who’d gathered to say hello to God and maybe pray stopped and helped themselves to fresh blood and incense, steaming fresh from the river.

The city was an education. It was climaxing and would continue to do so; it was never spent. It had too much money, too many drugs on salivating tongues and costly shoes to ever get tired of itself. It lived in installments, in newspaper articles, in myth, in legend, in drugged speaking, in lucid dreaming, in cold hands and well made-up men and well made-up women, and less and less in the reality of motion.

CHAPTER 3

Victor Salias stepped onto the street at half past 12 noon. Grocery shopping. For his mother 2 jugs of Sangria and 1 loaf of wonderbread with an accompaniment of peanut butter; for his sister, 1 deluxe size box condoms, 1 bottle nail polish remover, 2 boxes of donuts, and 1 pack of falsies; for himself, 1 pack of Kraft mac ‘n chee, 1 carton of OJ; then 1 vase of flowers for his dead father.

The block was sleepy today – a smooth fog hung over the whole city, highlighted by the fuzzy glow of prematurely lit streetlamps and early car’s headlights, and the shimmer of glass pieces mixed in with sidewalk cement.

12 noon and it looked like deep night. Victor was not very happy about this.

He felt the body-wide longing of a kid ungrown and as of yet unformed, and he wanted. Wanted through the arduous hours spent working waiting tables in the deadbeat swank restaurant where the manager made passes on him and the little old ladies in the corner tipped him well for his mediterranean olive skinned smooth looks. Wanted through the errands he ran for his family, picking up medication for his sister and mother in the form of prescriptions and alcohol and simple foodstufs. Wanted through the time he spent mourning the death of his father, now two years past, with a dozen lilies in a vase that smelled strongly of funeral parlor solemnity and the purple satin lining of the old man’s coffin. Wanted through the time he killed with his kids, his buddies, waiting on doorstoops, in alleyways or Dead End corners for a drop-off pick me up, then lighting or shooting up whatever powder or pill or grass it was and wiling away the night in a crappy apartment where the parents were never home and the floor was littered with a fine dust of cigarette ash and stems and the trash can overflowed with cupcake packages and crushed beer cans, watching TV in a blurry, deep bliss in deep night. Through this, Victor wanted real feeling. Love, maybe.

But now grocery shopping. The items were constant and comfortable, a task to really focus on and make art; Victor snorted at the thought.

His heavy lidded eyes flitted back and forth across the sidewalk as he wound his way through the perfumes of the different shops and people crowding the exhausted streets. The maze was intoxicating: the boutique shops, ethnic restaurants, Chinese grocery stores, clothing outlets, tatooe parlors, liquor stores, guns, people, punks, well-dressed, poorly dressed, undressed; all manners, shapes, sizes and creeds of human and establishment choked the block, and smoke hung softly just above the rooftops.
We are all dying; Victor actually laughed.
Not an optimist, him – he knew it, and knew as well that to say so about himself was a lie. You could not kill the hope he still held as someone unformed. But the evidence all around, it spoke against hope, and Victor knew that. Knew that like he knew his father was gone and covered in wormy soil, rotting back to the earth.

Victor’s cellphone rang. It was Jackie:
“Hey babe.” She said, cutesy.
“Hey,” he said back.
“What’s doing?”
“Nothin’, gotta pick up some stuff for mom and sis. Walkin’ around, you know.”
“Gonna see me today?”
Victor paused.
“Yeah. How’s five sound?”
“Alright. I’m at ma’s. She’s gonna be home real late; bring something sweet for me, Vic?”
“Yeah Jackie. I’ll bring you something.”
“Nothin’ so heavy, baby, just you – I just want you today.”
“Alright Jackie.”
“Bye, Vic.”
“Bye.” She’d hung up.

Fucking Jackie was what Vic liked to do. It was something he thought he was good at.

He liked the way she sighed when he pushed into her.
He liked the way her small back felt under the spread of his hands.
He liked the way she looked underneath him or on all fours.
He liked the way she bit her lip before she came.
He liked the way she worked on his body.
He liked the way she was smooth when she blew him.

But he willed himself not to love her for these things, so he didn’t. Not couldn’t, but didn’t. For reasons of practicality, for peace of mind: he didn’t. He couldn’t handle worrying about Jackie and her herion, and her parents’ divorce, and her school grades – so he didn’t.

Reilly Roark Larson · 02-12-2008, 01:09 PM

It's been a while since I read it any of his work, but this reminds me of some of Burroughs' more esoteric work. (Naked Lunch) I liked, what seemed to me to be, people's disassociation of community through addictions of choice (alcohol, consumerism, sex, heroin) and the shared similarities between them.

The sentence lengths were a bit cumbersome. That could be intent or just your style. By way of intent, I could understand the attempt to create a fluidity or flow of consciousness, but I think that can be accomplished with shorter sentences. Burroughs, as I remember, created intensely surreal, almost idealogical scenes with simplicity.

surfacetoday · 02-15-2008, 01:42 AM

The sentence length thing was intentional; it was supposed to convey the claustrophobia of city living, so I guess it's good that they were cumbersome -- though I'd prefer to have them come off as weighty and not overburdened. I mean I like the length, but if they seem too wordy, I'd love any suggestions as to what I should do.

Reilly Roark Larson · 02-15-2008, 10:32 AM

The only thing I can think of, is to switch it up like the movements of the tide. Long sentences followed by medium sized ones, followed by short ones and work back up to long. Maybe, you could break up a few long ones right in the middle of other long ones. It could give a feel of the back and forth of life in the city. I wish I could help more. I still have too much to learn to explain myself better, I think.