I Burned Your Dinner

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Lil’ Jizzer shoots up from the place he had been resting in the corner.

“What’s going on!” He shouts, swiveling his head around like a top, “Was somebody just here?”

“Yes.” I respond. “The Master.”

“Did he give any new instructions?”

“Yes. But I haven’t interpreted them yet.”

“Are the fries ready?”

“Fries?”

“Yea, I thought you were making the fries.”

I stare into the oven, studying the blistered and bubbling flesh of my face.

“They smell so damn good.” says Little Jizzer. “I usually don’t even like store bought fries.”

“The fries are off.” I reply. “They’re overcooked.”

The Smell of a Home Cooked Meal

Suddenly, from beneath the frumpled bed sheets, the spectre of the missing child pops up, naked but for sweat and ruffled hair, saying, “I really need you to be more respectful. I go through all this labor to provide for you the best possible life, and all I ask is that you acknowledge my presence.”

“Musette?” replies the investigator. “Where are you?”

“Here, dreaming.” she replies. “Or at least trying to. But it infuriates me, waking up to find you sitting there, burning the light into my eyes like that.”

“But I am trying to save you.” I say.

“Save me? From what? I’m the one who’s sleeping, in the middle of the night, like a normal person. How long have you been sitting there like that, hunched over, without moving?”

“Well, it’s hard for me exactly to remember, but I’ve been looking for you. Where have you been all this time?”

“I’ve been right here where you left me, of course.”

“In the fridge?”

“No, the oven, silly.”

“The oven…”

“You don’t remember? Don’t you smell that, or have your nostrils completely burned over?”

“Smell what? The fries?”

“Those aren’t fries sweetheart…”

The Report

ZURBARÁN – AGNUS DEI, CA. 1635-40 II SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

I’m a West Coast prodigy,

Rocking your biology,

Spinning all these rhymes like I’m a master of mixology.

 

“You better shut that face before I shut it for you.” says the investigator to Young Jizzer, the little rapper of the town, who says he saw something the other night.

“Why don’t you just tell me what you saw, son.”

“Well, I was sitting in my apartment, playing with myself like usual, when this knocking starts from across the hall. I look through my peephole and see that it’s the woman from 327. She’s knocking on 329 and nobody’s coming. Eventually she goes back to her apartment. About an hour later, she returns, and starts knocking again. Still no response. A few hours later and my dog’s jumping all over my girl, waking her up, and making her be all like, ‘Can you take him out to piss and shit or something!?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure babe, just hold tight.’

“So I stuff my schlong back into my shorts, strap my dog up in his noose, and let my throbbing boner cut a B-line to the courtyard. Carlo does his business, everything’s cool, but then as I’m trying to get my door unlocked, the woman from 327 comes out into the hall. She approaches me. I have never talked to her before. She’s frantic. She tells me how 329’s been blasting his music all night long and asks me if I can hear it.

“I tell her that I can. She’s like, ‘It’s been vibrating my wall for the last five hours.’

“She tells me how she doesn’t normally come out and knock on people’s doors like this, but she misplaced her phone, and can’t call apartment security. I take this as a passive request to use my phone. I hate letting people use my phone, but I feel so trapped, standing outside my own apartment, with Carlo, my pup, lunging at the lady’s ankles, strangling himself for a little attention. So I give her my phone to use. And right there, directly outside the offender’s apartment, she calls security.

“‘He’s a deviant!’ she says, telling me about how he’s done this before, and how every time he gets a complaint filed against him he plays it off so sweet, pretending like he didn’t know he was upsetting anybody, and being so apologetic.

“I go back to my apartment. From behind my door I have a perfect view of the proceeding moments. A security enforcer comes. He’s red faced and bald. He tells the lady that there is only so much he can do. He says he doesn’t even think the music is all that loud. He knocks a few times before giving up. The woman then complains to a boy sitting out in the hallway waiting for his laundry to be done. The boy calls the police. Another half hour goes by. The police officer arrives and opens 329’s door, which happens to have been unlocked this whole time. He enters the apartment with his flashlight on, being all like, “Portal Valley Police!” He finds 329 passed out on his floor or bed or somewhere I can’t see. He turns the music off, and it doesn’t come back on for the rest of the night.

“There was something not quite right about that lady though…” continues Little Jizzer.

“What do you mean?” asks the investigator.

“Well, she told me that she sleeps with pepper spray between her pillows; and that she’s hesitant to install a home security system in her apartment because of the electromagnetic waves it will emit. But the worst thing is she is planning on getting a dog, and when I asked her which type of dog, she said, ‘a mix between a rottweiler and a pitbull.’ Some people just shouldn’t get big dogs! You know what I mean? This lady can’t even handle herself. And she’s getting this dog to deliberately fuck something up. It’s a living weapon that has the potential of getting way out of her control. I’ve seen too many gruesome pictures of dogs torn in half by other dogs, the skin of their snouts dripping from their noses like massive snot rockets; it’s horrible!”

“So you think she’s overly paranoid?” asks the investigator.

“To a dangerous degree! But I also can’t be sure that she’s lying about 329. He might be a deviant, and if he is, then I’m really in trouble; because I’ll be completely surrounded by lunatics, all sucking me into this dangerous web they’re spinning!”

“Calm down.” says the investigator. “We’ll handle this together. Now that I met you I won’t forget you. What you go through, I go through, understand?”

 

The Preceptor’s Warning

ALEARDO VILLA FOR MELE DEPARTMENT STORES

“What’s your problem?” asks the preceptor, grabbing me by the jowls and slapping me across my face. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

I reply that I am just trying to be honest.

“Don’t you know that your life depends upon saying the right things at the right time, at digging deep and finding forgiveness rather than further faults? If you keep this up you’ll be out on the streets, a bum, dead to rights, with a signed confession written in the blood of your own vanity, lost of all the good in your life, incapable of forgiveness, with the whole world bearing witness to your badmouthing? Don’t you know that there are some things which should not be said? Some things which you should cover in mystery and allusion rather than brutal truth and epiphany? You are writing your own eulogy; treading on thin water; inscribing your tombstone. You have already gone far enough; reel it in and move onto something else before it’s too late.”

The Ocean

JUNJI ITO’S TOMIE

Bills and financial matters; to-do lists and holding each other in bed – these are the things I know her by. That spot on her cheek and on her breast; the chestnut of her hair; the way she dominates me towards a higher light – if I could only motivate myself to more mindfully maintain our mutual living space, then these tokens of her glory could be mine to greater possess.

But even beneath my fingerprints she is ephemeral, because my life is dissected, with a brain bashed to bits beneath refrigerator thoughts, my flesh mingling with the other ingredients of this confusing and too brutal life. I chill with them, the same, towards death where once had been teenage glories, honor in late night drives to abandoned complexes and bridges to jump from; tingling beneath the inexperienced lips of other sparking nerve bundles; prom night dates, and brothers who believed we would remain so forever; lovers who believed they were my soulmates; companions in this war, convinced that our careers would run parallel and that the pain would be righteous, not stagnated within cardboard cubes and gorged beneath the fat of hours lost.

The ring around my finger should mean nothing, but my brain is delusional and wrought with superstition, causing my finger to feel like my neck and my engagement to feel like a sentence.

The Gauntlet of His Eternal Soul

“Do you have your bags packed?” asks the preceptor.

“Yes, sir.” replies the inspector.

“Did you remember granola bars?”

“You know I don’t eat, sir.”

“Did you pack multiple pairs of underwear?”

“Yes, sir. Just in case.”

“Are they sacred garments?”

“Of course.”

“Are they ten seal or eight?”

“Ten, sir.”

“Do you have your consecrated oil?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your digital library?”

“Always.”

“Tool kit, blade bag, weapons cache, and mana repository.”

“Yes, sir; all here.”

“Then let us ascend.”

 

The preceptor pulls back a flap of shattered skull, sending a warm, hissing, pocket’s worth of maggots toppling to the floor. Patches of mold flake into the fibers of the inspector’s clothes as he follows the preceptor into the cranial tunnel. The smell of neglected rot is more than a normal person would be able to bear.

“What is this, a calcium deposit?” he asks, knocking his fist against a stone like impediment.

“It’s writer’s block.” responds the preceptor. “We are going to have to break through.”

The inspector slumps down the moldy tissue.

“I still don’t think I am good enough for this.” he says.

“I am here to guide you to your success; all you have to do is keep following me. Did you bring the dynamite?”

“I said I don’t know anything!”

“Well search for it! I’m not going anywhere, and we are stuck here until you find it!”

 

The inspector yanks his toolkit open like a temper-tantruming toddler. He rifles through exclamation marks; colon conjoiners; less than half-assed Wikipedia pages; five scoops in the french press please; masturbation reward sessions, delivered directly through Tumblr after a hard day’s work, as reward for my continual dedication to literature, instead of love through my lying corpse of a bride; injestable novels, assigned by college professors over video recordings leading to further lectures and more assignments; a pain in the neck, enlarging and spreading into my back and brain as I plow with pickaxe chinking through hunch sessions of staring, repetition, and distraction, towards a beating heart of warm, relieving red blood, vivid with the grandiosity of Mexico’s flag, whipping the orange hues of Revolution Avenue above a crackling kindle and a mania of soul.

“I think I found a stick here…”

“Place it in that notch there above your head. But realize that one stick is not going to be enough. For this is a powerful tumor, one which has spread through the entirety of your relationship with God and this girl. It is going to take a thorough examination of the facets of your relationship. This is not an overnight jaunt, remember? This is the gauntlet of your eternal soul.”

Inspector Meet Preceptor

There is a knock at the door. The inspector scampers from the corner.

“Hello?” He says, holding his ear to the door.

“It’s me.” Says the Preceptor.

The inspector undoes the lock, opening the door just wide enough for the preceptor to enter.

“Where is she?” asks the preceptor.

The inspector leads the preceptor through a blood smeared hallway, into his room, and then into his closet. A fly hive’s buzzing and the smell of expired meat greets them at the door.

“There are no lights in here.” says the inspector.

The preceptor sighs while massaging his temples.

“This is going to take a lot of effort.” he says.

“What do you mean?” asks the inspector.

“We are going inside of her head.”

The inspector falls backwards onto his bed.

“I don’t know if I have the concentration for something like that.” He says.

“You should have thought of that before you killed her.” says the preceptor.

Health Inspection

While he has his back turned to the sink the dishes multiply. The best thing for him to do in this situation is to deliver the dishes personally. He stops spinning his glass, and turns it into the first delivery. It clasps to the counter by its daiquiri residue, being magnetized to the sink’s overflowing girth.

He stares from the kitchen’s boundary line, chewing the filter of his cigarette like a pencil top. The dark neglect of the kitchen has chilled him tighter in his panic. With a tourette swirl he turns back towards the living room. More dishes are waiting for him there. They surround his bed and cover every surface. They have combined into molecules, bonded together with syrup and peanut butter, and sprouted little trash flora of paper towel wads and crinkled candy wrappers through the interwebbed spaces between their parts.

He comes up with a strategy. Every act he undertakes, besides cleaning, is to be interspaced with an act of cleaning. A point system is devised wherein if a certain space has, let’s say five dirty items associated with it, each item then holds twenty percent of the action’s success.

Every action is unique. For example, if I have a box and a few of its contents have been lazily left sitting on its lid instead of inside the box, then I have to make sure that all of those pieces fit cozily within the box, because bad qi, such as cramped qi, or blocked qi, equals a bad score.

The point system even applies to the inspector’s interactions with Charleston. Such as when he bends down to pet him and notices a nest of human hair wadded up inside his mouth. At this point the inspector must remove the hair before doing anything else. So he grabs it with his fingertips and starts pulling, stringing it out like a magician’s hanky line. It is stretched so deeply down his throat that the sunken end has become frothy with saliva bubbles. Removing it he makes his way to the kitchen. The garbage is stored beneath the sink. Here he is presented with the possibility of bonus points. Because if the trash bags are full, then additional actions may be necessary. If a bag can be pushed to the back and reinforced by a new one, then it probably should be; because there is room under the sink for a total of four bags. If nothing smells, and no bag has been seeped through with liquid, then the trash doesn’t need to be taken out. Sometimes it is possible to fill all four slots before needing to take it out. Which has its benefits psychologically. Because a person can become too wrapped up in cleaning – the inverse of the inspector’s current situation. Every ounce of every day can be squeezed into cleaning. One scrubs a corner so vigorously that a nastiness worse than grime or mold cuts omnipresently into one’s life, engulfing one in an eternal and insatiable bang bob.

The hair is insubstantial enough to lay atop the trash mound without danger of tipping anything over. So the inspector does that, reserving any bonus points for a time when he has more energy. He then sits back on his futon, choosing to watch a television show instead of continuing cleaning, claiming mental health benefits as his justification.

 

Creature of Heaven

She said that Mozart and Van Gogh were heaven creatures. That got stuck in my craw. It has been stuck up there for a while now. Every time I get stuck up there it comes and meets me.

“What matter is a dirty room to a legend?” it asks. “What value are roots to a star traveler?”

“One thing’s for sure; having a tower of dirty dishes sure smells, and becoming fat and bald is not the most graceful thing to do; nor is it a legendary way to live life. Not to mention that in order for my story to progress there must be conflict.”

“Is not she conflict enough!?”

“I don’t know if she is.” I reply. “Tis’ life in general which has my goat, or the shadow Death. The girl is an angel, a mentor, a vessel, and a blessing. It is kind of her to alert me to realities. for I must remain balanced to keep floating…”

“Explode to soar!” says Van Gogh.

“Soar to transcend.” says Mozart.

“Jump in, to be ripped apart!” screams Shakespeare, or as I like to call him Macbeth: the rampant minotaur, merged with the magic of Lilith, permanently fixed within the chambers of Castalilia, terribly frightening now, a god.

My human lightning is dim in the presence of divinity. Hermann Humbert stands beside me, adding kindling to his own murder. I can’t tell if he is stoking the fire or smothering it, but I think he is stroking it, taking advantage of my naivety, as they all do, within this whirlpool of pain, and insult, and horror, bad smells and bad sounds, gut drenched night, streaming graveyards of insects over my road glazed eyes.

“Is that even tangible sir?” asks the squid stomping cleat.

“My God where did that come from?” asks my sister.

“The stars, my love. Heaven above. This ultimate grandiosity I have attached myself to instead of you is taking me over and pulverising my guts.”

“Well, grasp onto me quick!” she screams.

“I am already married.” I say, holding up a true certificate of devotion.

“Then we are damned, the both of us; for you have crushed my dreams as equally you have your soul. Tis’ you who are Macbeth, not he.”

And the cleat keeps clomping, grinding my life into the grass, grating me through a pebbly lithosphere; a continuous clacking of beetle feet pattering my gored skull, planting maggots with their dance moves, to squirm nightmares through my infinite sleep.

The Messenger

We are sitting in the tub when she spurts out inquiring whether I am still interested in going back to school.

The switching of tracks is palpable.

“No.” I say. “Being that I couldn’t even keep up with my online education. I am wary of devoting myself contractually to such a costly time depriver. For it is time which does the artist most need and breathe. And it is time, which even now, in the throes of such complete obsession, I find myself still curiously too short of. I think the best thing for me to do is wrangle myself back tighter, fix myself into personal regulations, keep an eye on my health and happiness, and above all write even more regularly than I am doing at the moment.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“Well, Mozart, or your little Van Gogh.”

“I’m trying to have an adult conversation with you!” she says.

“And I’m not angry with you for that, just struggling to stay on that side of the fence.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are angry with me or not.” She says. “For I am only the messenger.”

“I should have recognized your face.”

“Isn’t the change in the tracks palpable?” she asks.

“Yes, but oftentimes it is difficult being aware of the sensations we are feeling.”

“That’s why you have to be in control of every situation.”

“Or you do.”

“Being such the case, we’ve chosen to reveal to you our nominee for this moment’s life alteration. I believe that you see as well as I the emptiness in your life where should exist a purpose and a propellant. College could be the perfect peg to fit that notch, or a job, with a down to Earth organization. Have you ever considered volunteering?”

“Who sent this message?” I ask.

“This message has been sent from area code eight zero zero nine four seven thirty, written by UNKNOWN CALLER on June ninth, eight seven zero zero at four thirty AM.”

“I would like to add this number to my do not call list.”

“Your request has been acknowledged.”