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"The writing is a mixture of Sumerian, Aramaic, and Babylonian and seems to have been done by either one man over a long period of time, or several men who shared the same suit." - Woody Allen, "The Scrolls" * * *
by Lucas Edwards
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Nineteen * * *
Always ending, always beginning. I forget where I was going with all that but it sure feels good to have explained it that way. What I mean is, "Hooray for Halloween. Bring out your dead." The waitresses in this whore's hell all have V.D. (STDs, I love speaking in shorthand). She's a funny clown. Dracula has no teeth tonight. I am most curious about a man whose name I don't know. He is from the Air Base, his once-stunning eyes tonight are as dead as the dog once attached to ears imagined twenty-five years later to be in his back pocket. His jet black hair he kept greased back, handsome. I wanted him to take my cherry. I chased him one night in my car for almost half of thirteen miles. That Halloween night, though, he came in to the restaurant where I had no teeth and nearly had to be led with a leash. He looked hollow, ready for the ritual killing, already dead. Take this cup of coffee, take this cup away.¹ If I remember right, he was not there while Sheriff Gardner was (midnight). Was his ghost led in before or after? Who is he? Who was he? I never knew. The ghost of the Mr. Handsome sat beside the employee table. He had not been in for at least a year, long before whatever devastation has taken him had taken him. All these years later I realize there may be something sinister about him. It certainly wasn't about me. I sure thought so. I sure wanted it to be about me. I hear footsteps at the door. I feel an icy grip. There has to be a better way to prove you're not a Satanist than this. Wash your feet? Wait until Thanksgiving when I allowed a one-time temp waitress fill-in steal from me within plain sight and said nothing. I waited tables Thanksgiving, an unusual event and one that brought stares and my nerves brought stares. Ed's nerves. My nerves. Dylan Thomas's nerves. Son of Sam had disappeared from the headlines for weeks. I have no more cheeks to turn all these decades later. (I think of the closed rehearsal space for "Cukoo's Nest" and feel like I've been caged for years of silence: none of this has to do with synesthesia or demonology.) The secret part, sex, dismissed in this third printing; this just as Jim Post would wish it. Greg Baysans may still use the F-word:² f...ooled. I do not. I did. And I am a proper fool.³ I can't give you a straight look. The first version of this book had a sex scene that has been removed by the judge. Which judge I'm not saying. It was seen as prurient and catering, not crucial to the work. Even a "Director's Cut" gets input from the studio. I feel my salt begin to gel with eggs and milk and sugar. I'm becoming pie again and I should like it. I fear it because a genetic memory of the fire that fixes, blends. I feel my oats and sow my wild seed on Onan's ground. I should tell you all about dandelions, how they grow in cycles. But I don't. I won't. I cut. I dice. I bingo and jingo and hack. I cough. I love spam. I'm having eggs, bacon, sausage, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam. I can't get out of this jam. I'm on a sesame seed roll tonight. Must be the full lupine moon. I swoon and sweat. I haven't got started yet, just wait and sail the sea. There is only a sea of oats and maybe flax or corn. Whooping cough it is in this late season. Let's get this wheatfield started. Who brought the dogs? But it's only a February full moon, I forget its name. I forget my own. I've sown my barley over centuries. There must be some other way to hack into Edward Lacie's files.... He's found my initial postings and hired a computer specialist to restore his files to the way he first had had them, ha! I write only at night. He writes during the day. Biography of Osama bin Laden, tonight on A&E. Tomorrow night, Martin Luther. The story Blaise Cendrars wrote a poem about colors in which color was not crucial to the object being described, a sort of synesthesia. Rimbaud wrote a poem in which he assigned each vowel a separate color, an almost mystical application. Those Symbolists, those Dadaists, those dream believers. You'd think Bush would be more sympathetic to me, concrete dreamer that he is. There has to be some other way to describe the formula Ed used to arrive at the trans-substantiation: fasting, a hadj, a belief in an imminent savior, a secret, a threat to one's life. What else? Intrusion from outside (as if Buddha would allow that). But it was part of the formula. It is. And the burning bush was mentioned more than once but never a burning radio or boarded up house in which Satan once lived. A last element of the formula: Buddha dreams each night to inform us of personal cosmos history. A second theory.... A third.... Remind me to wipe it off in the cab.
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