quarterly journal of poetic and visual art
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Mannequin Envy quarterly journal of poetic and visual art home - submissions - contact |
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Spring 2008
Jennifer VanBuren
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Willie Smith Spring 2008 Daddy Longlegs Today he might be a pimp; walks with a cane and a kind of a limp; but not too long back belonged to the squad. Squatted spiderlike in an unmarked car. Harrassed from the other side what today he owns. Odd how it needs both a cop and a pimp properly to shore up a whore. One gram in a pocket forced him off the force; needed for pain racking his back – shrapnel from that crossroads in Iraq. Defending Our Oil cost him – down the line – a job; so he crossed to this other side to keep a livelihood. Walks around – jilted by the government – stiltedly, head tilted to the left, one good eye on anything – after the government – that's left. Means no harm, which does not mean he walks around unarmed. Can be a smile beneath his shades that might or might not be deadly. Daddy Longlegs, head tilted to the left, walks around town stiltedly.
Fall 2007 I go to the office – take off my coat, sit down, unzip my scalp, snap my skull open. Pop out the brain. Drop it into the dry electric pan. Turn the dial up to fry. Take out my spatula. Start turning to keep the gray that doesn't even matter anymore from sticking. At ten I go down for hot black. Come back up with gut churning. Jump back to it with the spatula. Noon, go out – bloat my belly with baloney, mayonnaise, more hot black, Pepsi, Nodoze, Anacin, devilled eggs with horseradish. Crawling the sahara after one, after one-ten, after one-fifteen, after one-sixteen, the turning slows interminably as the ennui and the angst become a matter for scenarios in a mental ward where gray nurses escort wheelchairs of vomit from where confidence to make it through once was. Privy to the end of endurance and entropy's entry – when scalded brain smells tempting as sandalwood – at three, go down for no donut, more hot black. Come back to attack that spatula with renewed eight-dollar an hour hate. At four fifty-seven sharp, turn off the pan, flip the brain back in, snap the skull down, zip the scalp up, slip into the coat. Retreat home to watch a dinner, eat the wife, metabolize the TV – making love to the death of all of the above.
Spring 2007
This Just In Wife dumps him for her boss. Maneuvers, with the help of the boss' lawyers, to get the house, the kids, both cars. What she leaves him fits neatly into the trunk of the rental he burns rubber in down to the airport. Picks up a whore. Gets a hotel room. And when he impotent passes out smashed then wakes up with a jackhammer hangover, the whore has split in the rental with his cash, cards and checkbook. Leaving him, as luck would have it, the Glock. But he can't even do that right. CPR on the scene. Helicoptered to Harborview. Trauma team saves half
his skull, most of his brain. But his wife took the insurance, because he
never had the insurance, hers all along. And the doctors really do such a
fantastic job – give him a plastic temple, salvage the eye the concussion
blew out – he can't even get disability. Now has a bill for $500,000, a Frankenstein face, a twenty-four hour mandatory suicide watch and me – the Medicaid man – who, only doing my job, tells him because of the job he's still hanging on to by a fingernail and the equity he then owned in the house, as the divorce didn't finalize till the day after he shot himself, he's going to owe pretty much the whole half million; although the State might help out with certain future medical bills, provided they are not psychiatric. When he hangs up, too stunned for words, I thank him invisibly for the flash.
Previously published at Mannequin Envy: Winter 2006 Growing up White When I was twelve and my parents would go away and leave me the house, I’d play Tchaikovsky, tear off my clothes and try to interest the dog in sex. Usually we’d play the 4th Symphony. I"'d eat hot dogs and beans. Kennel Ration and Gravy Train for the dog. She was a two year old neutered German shepherd. The wienies and beans I heated up on the electric stove. Dumped a few cups of dry Gravy Train into the dog’s plastic bowl. Added water. Whacked out half a can of Kennel Ration, T-bone steak flavor. Fresh water in the dog's other plastic bowl. Can of pop for myself. Mom and Pop were off to the Shenandoah for this particular weekend. Turned up Tchai a few notches beyond distortion. Deigned to slip out of my underpants. Pranced nude back into the kitchen to see how the dog was doing. Doing nice, wolfing down the greasy brown with gulping liquid sounds making her whole back lope as though she were vomiting in reverse. Moved a hand to my crotch. The blood down there heavied. French horns echoed in the house like Germans conquering the world and nobody awake enough to care. Deciding to let the dog finish, I drifted back out into the living room. Smiled out the bay window. Felt golden and free. The sun was setting on the hill. Twilight coming in like an extremely distant toothache – vaguely pleasant, pastel, suggestive, mildly interesting. Out in the kitchen, no longer heard sloppy noises. The dog belched. Ambling nude and cock of the walk back into the kitchen, confronted the dog. She looked up at me with a neutral grin. Her snout caked with processed horsemeat. I liked the dog, because she really knew how to get down and eat. The cellos tripped into pizzicato. Flutes and piccolos flurried around them. It was only September, but I wished hard for snow. Then, after dark, the dog and I could run out naked in the backyard – engage in a snowball fight. The dog made a perfect target – big, mobile, stupid, no hands. But it was clear and not nearly cold enough. War was out of the question; so we’d have to orchestrate a little sex. I didn’t know what I was doing, although the dog seemed to have some idea. Tchaikovsky boomed. I grabbed her by the violin. Began applying the rosin of my palm to her string. She rolled over. Showed me her nippled kettle drum. French horns, after a dramatic pause, restated the theme everybody is solemn to remember. Even the dog grunted approval – or was it suppressed lust? Then Tchai got dreamy. Woodwinds tapered off. A solo oboe took the stage. The dog and I became a mythical animal with six legs, two arms and a shotgun for a tail. We went off in search of damsels, and not to save them. We galloped over rolling hills carpeted with daisies. The sun beat down on us like a waterfall of chicken feathers. The animal grew hungry, starved, and still it galloped. At last, under a live oak tree, we found a woman with large bosom, a pretty face and the promise of nice legs under the satin gown she wore. She screamed. We fell to gulping her in a hurry. I started with the nose. The dog ripped off her gown; went straight for the crotch. The snot in her nose tasted delightfully familiar. I couldn’t see what the dog was doing, but sounded like she was enjoying herself because it sounded like she was throwing up backwards again. I was licking out the inner recesses of her sinuses when the dog’s tail went off.
I was back in the kitchen. The dog was panting. The stereo blowing the dust out of its lungs. The entire orchestra gone insane with authority. Then came steps up the porch to the door. Key slotted in lock, turned. My parents were coming home early. I covered the dog up best I could. Then locked myself naked inside the refrigerator. It was dark in there, but I managed to find a pop; also to scrape off most of the doghair. Pop found me while he was rooting around for a beer. He thought it a joke in poor taste. Made me go to bed early. He had killed Tchaikovsky the moment he walked in, of course.
We buried the dog the next morning. To this day Mom and Pop still think somebody drove a truck up her ass. The truth is more boring.
MY PROMISCUOUS BICENTENNIAL I had been told Doreen was great. I had also been told she had the clap. I seduced her with one of my famous homemade soups, plus a fifth of cheap vodka. After, as we lay on the narrow bed, we talked for a delightful hour about what we discovered was a mutual obsession: screwing. I called it, at one point, fucking; but she slapped me, frowned that was crude. So I quietly avoided further use of the unrefinement. She then, as the sting faded from my cheek, petulantly pointed out how her nipples didn’t work. She tweaked both, demonstrating how they refused to erect. I muttered, I wasn’t really a nipple guy anyway. She asked, was I still seeing Faith? “No. She got rid of me.” Into my mind sprang the berries Faith’s nipples tautened into; and those limp dugs perhaps did a bit begin to disappoint… Doreen was glad to hear it, because when she had slept with Faith’s husband, Faith had gotten furious. She didn’t want to go through that again. Faith was the estranged wife of my best friend Jake. He and I never discussed Faith; at least, not Faith and me. It was Jake who had warned about the clap; which he knew for a fact, because, six months before, after that mad night of screwing Doreen, he had acquired a dose. Jake had also claimed Doreen was a nymphomaniac. And when I’d smilingly confessed myself to be one too, he countered, “Yes, but Doreen is no mere garden variety.” I was about to boast neither was I, when the glint in his eye and the sneer on his lips reminded me I was then fucking his wife – however estranged she be – and consequently I should just shut up. I did. It was, after all, such careful reads of Jake’s face that kept Faith and me out of our conversations. Then I noticed Doreen was peering into my face, in her bedroom of deepening shadows, saying, “Jake insists I gave him clap. He’s nuts. He’s not living with his wife. He’s a handsome guy – he’s screwing around; he did not get it from me.” That was a relief. I didn’t care about the nipples. It was OK not to have to fuck my best friend’s wife anymore. I could see Doreen now and then; to see me through. Or maybe just see Doreen. She liked my soup. Was a promising drinking companion. And we were having this wonderful talk, where I was actually picking up a few pointers on screwing. For instance, men over fifty, when they try to seduce you, first take off their shoes; then suggest you do the same. She knew, because she had once allowed one to pick her up. She thought the shoe business was silly; but when in Rome… She had been concerned the old guy would have a similar problem, in a different part of his anatomy, that she had with her nipples. But that turned out to be not true; especially once she practiced on him her oral expertise. He, however, did fall short on endurance. But she in no way regretted the experience. It had been educational. She didn’t surrender her phone number, and she never again visited that bar. No great loss, as she had only been inside twice – counting the night previous to the experiment, when she had ducked in to reconnoiter the oldsters hunched over their cocktails. They removed their shoes first, they could get hard, but they didn’t last long and shot feebly. You couldn’t talk to them – they were bloated with baggage, oozing drivel about failed marriages, children they couldn’t see but had to pay for; expensive girlfriends who left; cheap girlfriends; dead girlfriends over whom they still blubbered… I myself might have stuck with Doreen into my own fifties – another three decades. But the very next day, following a successful experiment with after-lunch sex – the entire joyride me suppressing a fart from my own beef stew – the unforgivable occurred. I excel at forgiving. I like to – easier than getting mad. And getting mad terminates conversation. I love to talk. Or more accurately – listen, interposing the occasional word to keep the person coming forth. I easily forgave Doreen when, the next week, pus leaked from my pizzle. Well, not that easily. Especially after the disaster following our post-lunch session. It was educational, taking the bus down to Public Health. Sitting in the waiting room with the boys; one player flouncing in under a Panama with a pheasant feather, remarking jauntily from below aviator shades, “Here we are again!” And I so much admired, when I finally got to him, the doctor’s technique. How, once I’d obeyed the order to drop pants, he bent over my penis, mumbling, “Let’s have a look here,” and had reamed – using a steel pin hid in his left fist – my urethra quicker than I could say shit! slamming my own fist, in pinpoint-pizzle agony, down on his desk. I forgave her that. I should have known. It didn’t matter. Nine days of erythromycin and it was gone. Herby good as new. Unlike the herpes. Which failed significantly to erupt for another year; and hey – maybe it wasn’t Doreen. Although she was the only one who announced the fact, and there were only two others that year. I admired her technique. She disclosed, at the close of our sex talk, when the room was totally dark and sleep was overtaking our pleasantly exhausted bodies… mumbling into my face, “You might get herpes. It’s nothing. Just sometimes little blisters.” Oh, I forgave her the herpes. I was playing with fire. It was a known risk. An affliction making the rounds of the magazines. And after all, the Soviets, at the time, had the whole town securely targeted with a massive overdose of thermo-nukes; not to mention the sinister coincidence that our President bore the same last name as the tycoon, also from Michigan, who first churned out all the cars. How was I to know for sure I’d live long enough to contract whatever disease? Besides, I more importantly that afternoon should have realized that the unforgivable lurked…. Doreen lived in a swank apartment with Faith’s sister Hope and Hope’s husband – a pleasant enough, intelligent older man of twenty-six (Hope was twenty), who was a well-payed supervisor at the phone company. Hope and Bob were that week on vacation in London. So, after lunch, Doreen and I used her apartment-mates’ kingsize. I figured Doreen guided us into the larger bedroom in order to explore wider maneuvers on the bigger bed. And we did. I also guessed it heartened Doreen to be screwing Faith’s ex-boytoy on Faith’s younger sister’s marriage bed. It probably did. I myself caught a few sparks of vengeance joy. This was all forgivable. All understandable. All human. But none of it touched on the real reason Doreen chose the kingsize. She threw off the sweaty sheets we had just crawled under – sex organs (except her nipples) beginning a gradual and comforting return to normal tension and size. She then wiggled nude down to the foot; reached out over the oak frame; plugged in – two feet beyond that frame – the big screen TV, with already the volume turned full up. Into the room a game show exploded. She retrieved from under the bed the remote. Adjusted the color to perfection. Burrowed back up under the sheets. Slouched on extra pillows, angling head so as to glue eyes to tube. Television – the deadliest conversation killer known to man. She had shepherded me into the master bedroom to experience the paradise of post coital television. Neither of us smoked. Though I would have much preferred she lit up – tobacco stimulates talk. And no herpes, no clap, no venereal warts, no fullblown crab infestation compares in horror to the soul rot howling suddenly from the bottom of the bed. I excused myself. Slipped into my clothes. Muttered something about going down to the corner for a pack of smokes. She smiled at a new deepfreeze touted on the big screen. Nodded vaguely – connection between thought and voice cut. I left her the remainder of the stew. I was sleazy. I was crude. My intestinal gas reeks. I am not handsome. But limits – like everybody insists they have – I do have. To the very writing of this account I have not found it in my heart to forgive that plug. Because it was the plug, it was the switch, it was that sucking-in electronic box I should have spied the moment we entered the room. It was not Doreen. Because Doreen was not. I know she never really was. Because I myself barely – by the skin of my teeth – am. Please – talk. Go ahead – let yourself go; to be guided ever so slightly by my occasional tweak. Forgive me if I, to get comfortable, remove first my shoes.
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