Close to the Knives (5 page)

We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and in that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching peoples psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government—they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot and pus and blood, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities: “Raise Ole Glory while we do it to them again …”

Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or
hope
—hope as a chain of submission. Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society's deep sleep. Day after day they experience waking nightmares but they've either bought the con of language from the tribe that offers hope, or they're too fucking exhausted or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world.

There are other tribes that experience the X ray of Civilization every time they leave the house or turn on the tv or radio or pick up a newspaper or when they suddenly realize their legs have automatically come to a halt before a changing traffic light. A civil war and a national trial for the “leaders” of this country, as well as certain individuals in organized religions, is the soundtrack that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. Some members of the tribe understand the meaning of language. They also understand what
freedom
truly is and if the other tribes want to hand them the illusion of
hope
in the form of the
leash
—in the form of
language
—like all stray dogs with intelligence from experience, they know how to turn the leash into a rope to exit the jail windows or how to turn the leash into a noose to hang the jailers. But when the volume of that war reaches epic dimensions, and when the person hearing it fails to connect with another member of the same tribe who can acknowledge the sound, that person can one day find themselves at the top of a water tower in suburbia armed with a high-powered rifle firing indiscriminately at the ants crawling around below. That person can one day find himself running amok in the streets with a handgun; that person can one day find himself lobbing a grenade at the forty-car motorcade of the president; or that person can end up on a street corner, homeless hungry and wild-eyed, punching himself in the face or sticking wires through the flesh of his arms or chest.

I left one town and headed for another on the available interstate that led through sections of burst red earth and cables and tractors and pickup trucks and workers in dusty clothes running back and forth. It was a couple of hours before dusk and as I turned onto a lesser used road, the landscape grew more quiet and the car radio had navajo language chittering through waves of static. There were no other cars but mine and the one I was in didn't like mountains so I had to drive with the heater full blast to cool the engine down. Big goofy cactus grew in the shapes of people only green on the roadsides among burned patches of sagebrush and the occasional shock of rows of some kind of produce in long irrigated stretches.

Last night I felt unbelievably sad and sometimes it happens that way: a sensation comes out across the landscape into the cities and further into the window of the car as I'm coasting the labyrinths of the canyon streets. It feels for a moment like nothing more than wind; it's something I don't see coming and suddenly it's upon me and my eyes are blurring with tears and fragmented spills of neon and ghostly bodies of pedestrians and smokestacks and traffic lights and I'm gasping from a sense of loss and desire. I can't think of anything I am truly afraid of and I'm trying to give something unspeakable words; some of us live in big cities so we can be alone, so we can avoid ourselves, and yet by living within massive populations we can have help or love within reach if necessary.

I am fearful of something more than fear: it's something in the landscape surrounding the cities and smaller towns between here and the coast, something
out there
that feels so empty and it is not made of earth or muscle or fur; it's like a pocket of death but with no form other than the light one might cast upon its trail of fragments. For a moment I think it's just the unfamiliarity of the landscape's agenda, what it contains in the future of its emptiness. I mean, out there I am in and surrounded by a void, a “natural” counterpart to the industrial void of the cities. Out there I can feel buried under the dome of the sky and feel claustrophobic in the heat which is like a plastic cushion pressing unseen against all the surfaces of my exposed body and in all that dizzying stillness I feel like my soul and my flesh will suddenly and abruptly be consumed within the civilizational landscape or else expelled off the face of the earth. What troubles me is that I might not mind.

When I was a teenager I had a recurring fantasy that began after my first motorcycle ride. This was shortly after waking up one morning and realizing that government and god were interchangeable and that most of the people in the landscape of my birth insisted on having one or both determine the form of their lives. I recognized the fact that the landscape was slowly being chewed up and that childhood dreams of autonomy in the form of hermetic exile were quickly becoming less possible. (I was also in the threads of a childlike crush on a guy I'd met in a times square movie house who'd taken me home for twenty-four hours of sex. He was a college student who looked like he'd grown up in some part of the country like kentucky and in the angles of his chest and abdomen and face, I'd gotten him mixed up with the characters in the movie we were watching when we first noticed each other in the dark seats of the balcony. It was a movie about sexy moonshiners who walked around half naked and eventually died in a shootout with the federal authorities. After carrying on a secret affair with this guy for a number of weeks, he broke it off with the explanation that I was too young and when I got old enough I would understand the range of possibilities for different lovers and that at that abstract moment of time I would leave him.) I lay in a hotel room one night after selling my body to a customer who had gone back home to his wife and kids, and I wished I'd had a motorcycle and that I was in a faraway landscape, maybe someplace out west. I saw myself riding this machine faster and faster and faster toward the edge of a cliff until I hit the right speed that would take me off the cliff in an arcing motion. At that instant when my body and the machine cleared the edge of the cliff and hit the point in the sky where I was neither rising nor falling—somewhere in there: once my body and the motorcycle hit a point in the light and wind and loss of gravity, in that exact moment, I would suddenly disappear, and the motorcycle would continue the downward arc of gravity and explode into flames somewhere among the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. And it is in that sense of void—that marriage of body-machine and space—where one should most desire a continuance of life, that I most wish to disappear. I realized that the image of the point of marriage between body-vehicle and space was similar to the beginning of orgasm. I may be living a life that is the equivalent of a ride on an upside-down road but it is only to shake all the ropes off, even the ropes of mortality. Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom.

So what is that feeling of emptiness?

Maybe it's that the barren landscape becomes a pocket of death because of its emptiness. Maybe the enormity of the cloudless sky is a void reflecting the mirrorlike thought of myself. That to be confronted by space is to fill it like a vessel with whatever designs one carries—but it goes farther than these eyes having nothing to distract them as vision does its snake-thing and wiggles through space. There is something in all that emptiness—it's the shape of a particular death that got erected by tiny humans on the spare face of an enormous planet long before I ever arrived, and the continuance of it probably long after I have gone.

The Indian kid and his camaro got picked up by the cops in a suburban section of town and the interviewed neighbors could recall nothing more alarming about the kid than that he had an obsession with keeping his car cleaned and polished. One neighbor said that the kid loved to peel out from the gravel driveway sending cascades of stones into the air. I read all this in the local paper in the curtained hotel room just before leaving town. Outside the window of the balcony room, three Metal guys were building a new patio for the defunct pool. The pool was slowly filling with red dust carried across the roads by intermittent breezes. At some point I stood up from the table and pulled back the curtain a hair and watched the half-naked bodies of the guys climbing in and out of their truck for tools or to turn the volume of the music up. I watched them leaning for extended moments in various positions creating sexy tableaus like museum paintings, like bleached out Vermeers and Rembrandts in all that hot sunlight and shadow. I felt like a detective with only the window glass and the curtains camouflaging my desire. For a moment I was afraid the intensity of my sexual fantasies would become strangely audible; the energy of the images would become so loud that all three guys would turn simultaneously like witnesses to a nearby car crash.

Out the side window of the car I see the thick whirling vortex of a red dust devil on the plains. I abruptly pull the car over and grab my super-8 camera to film it and it disappears. I stare at the place where I saw it, waiting for it to reappear but it doesn't so I drive on. My balls are sliding in lonesomeness. The windows are down because of the heater and the motion of the vehicle brings a false breeze onto my face and bare chest and through my scalp. For one brief moment in time no one in the world knows where I am. Not family, friends, nor members of government and that causes me to drift, gives me room to experience charges of frustrating sexuality. Turning the radio knob I come across a seductive country song. I close my eyes for periods of time as I drive on up into the mountainside, listening to the sound of the singer's voice. In fact, I turn up the volume so I can hear the reverberation of sound in the man's throat—that way I can better imagine him whispering sweet things in my ear as he fucks me, holding firm to my hips with his calloused hands. I was lost in the heat of his torso and the taste of his tongue unreeling behind my closed eyelids when I felt a bump and a pop as I knocked over a cactus on the roadside. I twisted the steering wheel in a hypnotic daze of calamity and thumped back onto the asphalt roadway leaving a scattering of surprised buzzards shifting into the air like umbrellas. The sun was slipping toward the edge of the world when I pulled over at a highway rest stop on the crest of the mountain. No one else was around so I kicked about in the red dust for a while among the various species of cactus and tumbleweeds. I took a piss behind the adobe outhouse pointing my dick in different directions so the urine formed a dark outline of a face in the dry earth. I felt sad and exhilarated simultaneously. I walked around watching the light fade over the curve of the earth, creating krazy-kat silhouettes of the cactus and scrub. Occasionally the twin beacons of light from a distant car or truck coming from the direction I was heading would float across the folds of earth and the silence would be broken by the hum of the motor. One flippy bat came out early, a baby one, wobbling through the gathering breezes under a roadside lamp, getting knocked around by the currents as it tried to catch the insects attracted by the light. Over by the drinking fountains a bunch of honey bees trying to drink water from the steel rim of the flooded basins fell in and were drowning. I spent a while picking them out one by one with a soda straw and laying them on the concrete walkway where they stumbled around in stupid circles. At the sound of each approaching car my dick grew more hard but each car continued without stopping. I wanted to run out into the dusk and throw myself headfirst onto the earth and then roll sideways for miles until the sun came back. I remembered a friend of mine dying from AIDS, and while he was visiting his family on the coast for the last time, he was seated in the grass during a picnic to which dozens of family members were invited. He looked up from his fried chicken and said, “I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth.”

Sitting on the warm hood of the car as the temperature fell, a sixteen-wheel rig pulled through the distance and entered the parking strip. With a compressed hiss of brakes, the cab door swung open and a young guy swung out. He was shirtless and covered in marks of sweat and dirt. As he rounded the side of the truck he nodded: “What's up?” and proceeded to walk around the entire truck kicking each tire a couple of times while I held my breath. Then he climbed back into the cab, shifted gears and drove out of the lot, taillights blinking. Darkness had completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead.

I'm in a building, a high-rise building resembling the interior of an enormous ship, middle-aged sailors all around, guys that have been working on the oceans for up to twenty-five or thirty years. At times it's a building I'm standing in, at other times it becomes a ship with long rolling motions, then it becomes a building again.

I'm walking down a hallway and come to a room where this young man is standing and beginning to remove his clothes. Next to him is an open door where clouds of steam are billowing out as if a shower is running. On the floor is a newspaper with a story about the navy trying to give a dishonorable discharge to a guy because he was a homosexual. There is a photograph accompanying the story and I realize the face in the picture is the same as the guy undressing. I look up from the paper just as he drops his pants to the floor and steps out of view into the clouds of steam.