Scrap Paper Review

Issue #56

Thursday, June 17, 2010

 

Exit doors

 

Don’t try to hide away this time

Your box of tricks,

Room-sized,

From which you come and go,

A life-like Jack in the Box

Popping out on a spring

Bursting out

With delight and pain,

Leaving me like Lear’s Fool

Half brain dead from lust

These doors rusted shut these days

Leaving me less relief

And more desperate,

To expose you again,

Aching all over

In my own need

To escape.

 

 

Pull toy (1987)

 

She yanks my chain as if a pull toy and I roll after her, my rusty wheels squeaking as my mind goes out of control.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

It is as if someone has flicks an off switch and the most logical part of my brain ceases to exist.

All these years later and I’m still 17, filled up with a surge of hormones and reckless expectations.

Perhaps this is all a Soviet plot, secret cells waiting until I am most vulnerable to strike, starting a revolution inside of me that threatened to uproot my whole world.

Where is the CIA or FBI to help save me from myself?

I am the spy left out in the cold, swayed by the first warm body I see, willing to convert, subvert my faith for a full fish of her, and this scares the shit out of me.

 

 

Wine from France

 

I drink wine from France

Each sip drips down inside of me

Like bitter lye

Burning me with the memories,

Of lovers I once had

Loves I never had,

People I could have had

Or gave away,

Faces floating out of this one bottle

To never come again

I ache for that ache I so hated

When I was young,

The unrelenting urges

I could mollify,

But never cure,

Shaking them away

After dark

Over a face I can barely see

To a name I can never remember

Lost later to lovers

Who had as little use for me,

Drinking them away,

One painful sip after another

Until there is nothing

Left to drink.

 

Bloody Mary

 

            She says she loves reading poetry at night after she gets back from sucking someone’s blood.

            I think she is joking and buy her another Bloody Mary at the bar.

            She says she’s not, takes the drink, then asks me if I want to come up to her place for a little poetry and a bite.

            Tommy, the bartender, gives me the look he always gives when he knows I’m getting into something very much over my head, and interrupts my talk with her to tell me he needs to talk to me at the other end of the bar, where he promptly claims she’s a dangerous loony, and that he’s stick of losing customers because she’s thirsty for more than Bloody Marys.

            I say he can’t possibly believe she really likes to suck men’s blood. He just shrugs then says he doesn’t know what she sucks, their blood or their dicks, but the men who leave with her don’t come back.

            And this intrigues me.

            Tommy, knowing me far too well, gets pissed, not so much at me, but at himself for saying anything to set me off because he knows and I know I intend to go home with the girl with hopes that after she reads me a little of her poetry, it won’t be my blood she sucks.

            But I assure Tommy I WILL be back.

            And I am. The next night. And he asks what happened and why I look so pale, and I tell him to shut the fuck up and bring me a Bloody Mary.

            He says I don’t drink Blood Marys.

            I tell him, well, now I do.

            And he shuts the fuck up and gets me my fucking drink.

 

 

Sad doll

 

She dresses like a sad doll

Past piled onto her like a wedding cake

Each layer giving her away

Slices missing here and there,

Never repaired,

Sewn shut with desperation

And I circle around her

With my knife exposed

Wondering where to slice next

 

AD’s Journal: Vampires of my life

 

Thursday, June 17, 2010

 

            It is a weird week.

            I can’t stop thinking about the past, decades of vampires who are not vampires who have passed through my life, and I still miss.

            Not all, but most were mysterious women, driven women with a taste for blood.

            Like Sue from rooming house in Montclair who after just turning 18 moved out of her parents house and went crazy.

            She teased men to death at the bar, then called the cops when they – drunk – pounded on her door to get let in.        More than once, Dave – the landlord who lived down stairs – had to run them off with a shotgun.

            Maybe it is because I liked her as a person that she confided in me, talking about things she told no one else.

            Just how I went from ally to victim, I still don’t know, but one day I found her had my door naked except for a hand towel saying she had locked herself out of her room and wanted to know if she could come into my room. She had the thirsty look of the blood sucker she usually saved for men at the bar.

            I told her to talk to Dave and shut the door.

            Then there was the vampire who worked as a breakfast waitress mornings and a high class hooker at night, who I met each morning when I ordered by bacon, egg and cheese sandwich before waiting for my bus. At first, she eyed me the way Sue did, and later, invited me to her house, where she lived without interior doors so that the house madam could keep an eye on her and her male callers, making certain she got the house percentage of whatever business she got.

            I ached so much I was almost willing empty my bank account to cover the cost – knowing I had no business going where mayors and governors had gone before.

            But I held back, thinking that I would become one of the living dead if I did, because this girl wanted more than just another victim, and even asked if I would be her pimp so she could escape this house and the ever watchful eye of the madam, and though I had no door to shut, I closed a more important door on that part of my life.

            There were others, before and after, who still haunt me with “what ifs” and “where would I be nows” and how much worse or better my life would be had I kept those doors open.

            I often wandered dark and dangerous places during my single years, seeking out adventures I had no right to seek, often encountering women who saw me as something different, something more substantial than the run of the mill patron. Several dancers adopted me, especially the older ones, who approaching 30, were already aging out to the 18 and 19 year old college girls – and this lasted right up to the point when I got it into my foolish head that I was going to save one pretty coke head, and nearly ruined my own life as a result, coming into conflict with mobsters like I did when I tried to rescue my one time girlfriend from the LA porno scene.

Two of the more tender vampires I cared a lot about were barmaids at strip clubs, pretty, but not pretty enough to complete with the dancers, searching for someone to hook onto in a while where pond scum predominated. One barmaid and I hooked up because we both loved Yankees catcher Thurmond Munson, and mourned his death. The other barmaid worked at my favorite strip club in Passaic, and would often caution me against some women – which, of course, I went after any way.

            There is something sad in them all, something desperate, too, as they struggle to find importance in this cesspool of mobsters, dirty old men, and angry young studs, women often victimized, but unable to figure a way out of this world, and struggling to make the best of it by finding the most reasonable men to latch onto. While the younger girls were willing to suck blood and let you go, these others clung, hoping that someone like me might be their ticket out of the under life.

            Some men like me tried, but fell into the abyss, becoming one of the living dead.

            Me, I moved through those worlds like a peeping tom, talking to everybody, but managing somehow to slam the door before I got too caught up.

            I remember in college when the most famous vampire of the lot, Susan Walsh – the stripper who later became a sensation when she mysteriously vanished, making international headlines, invited me to study with her at her parents house in Wayne. But she didn’t want to study when I got there, and kept telling her boyfriend on the telephone that we were only friends, even though she eyed my neck for a tender spot to suck blood.

            I even felt sorry for her, but not enough to stay and tempt fate – and now, nearly 15 years since she vanished among rumors that she had been killed by Goths, I wonder about her, and how even she – the child of a fairly successful family – could not escape her vampire fate once she got it into her blood.

            All this, of course, translates well to my current life, where I see a different vampire world, filled with political intrigue and a desperate need to find power – vampires of a different sort feeding off powerful people’s blood, living with the fear that they might lose the vein they suck and get nothing for all their efforts.

            Me, I’m still the voyeur, wandering through dangerous ponds, studying the patterns and the pain, wondering if the victims find any of it worth their effort.