mah maou

spires of smoke rising beside steeples.
wrinkled maps, rain-spattered and bleeding pen ink.
holy rosemary simmering onions in the pot.
the old man, stealing roses.

Spending so much time with her was making him too soft, or so Abacus thought to himself as he re-entered the cottage. The screen door clapped loosely back against its frame as Fidel came ambling after, hopping deftly through the bottom portion of the screen, which was only stapled to the door on one side. He was focusing too much attention on silly details and not worrying enough about the big problems they were all facing, like what to do about the Turks or how to pay back Mr. French’s money.

There was a long, cluttered shelf on the wall across the room, and Abacus eyed it furtively before walking over to survey its contents. A few stacks of books, some empty candle holders, a cigar box containing a couple of decks of cards and some dice for when Uncle Yunus had his boisterous Armenian friends over. Abacus paused his eyes on a bottle of gin sitting idly against the wall. The bottle was dusty, so he wiped off the neck with his sleeve before undoing the cap.

A few minuted later, sitting out in the Florida room in Honey Bear’s favorite chair, the gin bottle still in hand, he reached over to pick a calamondin from the small tree and pursed his lips as he chewed it, peel and all. Fidel stirred and walked errantly into the kitchen to investigate some sound, then decided it was nothing and returned to the solarium. He made a few circles around his customary spot, nails clicking on the hardwood floor, before settling back down into a resting position.

Abacus began to feel a little bit more relaxed. That business with the Turks had shaken him, but now it seemed far away and things felt peaceful. It reminded him of why he and Honey Bear had decided to move out to the cottage after Uncle Yunus had been locked up. Middle of fucking nowhere old bungalow in the woods. He knew that he wouldn’t be bothered in such a place - or, at least, he knew that if he were, he’d have a considerable advantage due to the preparations he had made with Honey Bear. Most people wouldn’t have kept so many loaded pieces around, but they made sure to have one in every room of the house, and two additional shotguns on the fireplace rack in the den.

Black and white.
The cover of a composition notebook.
That’s how flowers in old photographs catch my eye.

Before the pre-dawn light had time to touch the treetops over Elk Hills, its woods were already in patterned movement, waking up to start their solemn dance to the beat of another day. First were the cicadas, wailing endlessly on to their own secret rhythms and creating a vibration so all-encompassing it seemed like nothing else could cut through the drone. But then came the birds, chiming in at irregular intervals to add their own indecipherable melodies - and all the time blew a soft breeze, rustling the leaves and sending an undulating stream of sound down to the ground.

The forest floor was still clothed in darkness; it nevertheless seemed aware and eager to meet the day on its own terms. A thin layer of dew shone over the moss, which became streaked with silver trails as the slugs escaped to their dark hollows. A warm wind coursed through the air - so thick it could almost be cupped between the hands - and sent the morning mist gliding gently down the hillside to disappear into unseen valleys. Thus did the sun yawn and reach down to meet the earth this morning in the late spring.

A white dog trotted into sight, his nose held closely to the ground, lifting his head up every once in a while to test the air or perk his ears in response to some foreign sound, or to some veiled movement in the brush. The dog’s face was slender - his ears sharp and alert, his nose long and narrow. He looked like a shepard, but smaller than average…maybe a mix, or the runt of his litter. His legs seemed almost dainty as they moved lightly through the undergrowth.

Not far away, there was an old, dismantled railroad. The track was now just a depressed path cutting through the woods, its rails having been reclaimed long ago for salvage value, but its cross-ties were still married awkwardly to the dirt. The white dog jogged happily through this tunnel in the woods, showing white teeth against black gums as he panted and hurried tirelessly on.

Coming around a bend, the forest suddenly opened up to reveal a gap in the canopy; blue skies, now flooded with pink in the new light, overlooked the derelict crossing of a run-down train bridge spanning a rocky creek. The dog turned sharply left, bypassing the trestle and following the creek bank for a ways until it opened up into a spacious clearing, then breaking in an outright run and tracing across it in a broad arc, tail and ears bouncing wildly, bounding through the heather as the faint, shrill reverberation of a four-cylinder mototcyle engine became clearer.

I venture…
are you spitting out watermelon seeds?
or tootin’ on a rusty ‘ol harmonica?

I woke up just before noon and put on a pair of jeans that looked like they could have gotten up and walked away all by themselves if they had woken up first. I felt askew for some reason, as if I had a book of stamps in my pocket and they had just raised the price of postage.

Someone had already made a pot of coffee. I drank some, and the day started swinging like a chandelier.

Our front porch was bathed in golden light, that hazy quality that sunlight takes on when it comes down at an angle through a dusty window. Queitsch was lying asleep on the couch inside, or maybe he was just lying there pretending to be asleep. The sun spread a buttery smile on his face as the facts of morning quickly faded into afternoon memories.

And now, stuck hopelessly in the rut of:
“You are halfway there.”
Frantic and thrashing, you move
from here to there, as if
you have no expectations
of getting there at all.
You might as well not even be
five elevenths of the way there.

Before I knew you,
I didn’t have bucket seat daydreams
hoping to catch a phantom of your essence,
but then you caught me
immersed in the Atlantic,
casting clouds
and billowing potato roll smiles.
Happy electricity flew from your eyes,
and seagulls hung suspended
for eight years at a time
until that chemistry expired.

On a Wednesday afternoon in 1989,
we eloped to under where the pines grow.
The sidewalk cracks were fault lines,
and demons were smiling in the pachysandra.

It was grey and coarse, and it turned his entire mouth into a sandbox about to be rained on. He chewed it like gum, wearing a Sunday afternoon expression and speaking slightly with his eyes about the unpleasantness of the situation.

A greasy bolus of fur crawled down his esophagus like a dying porcupine. It sat down heavily in the armchair of his stomach. The fur was an old Irish grandfather, about to light up a pipe after a dense meal of boiled potatoes.

The rabbit, of course, didn’t mind. He was in a different place. A place that projected the shadows of an infinity of carrots and clover onto the screen of the Void. He didn’t mind that his fur was now an old Irish grandfather. Not in the least.

When I woke up this morning, groping blindly for my cell phone before I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, the clock on it said 7:45. I hit the silence button just as my alarm began to go off, relieved to spare myself a few seconds of its hideous shrieking. A pillar of golden light shone in through the window onto my bed, nicking the plant I have hanging in the window and sending green shadows everywhere. The window was still open from when Sean and I were smoking cigarettes the night before; the air felt soft and encouraging in a not-so-cold, early-February kind of way.

I woke up with still a lot of grapefruit juice and vodka in my blood, but it felt good, reminded me of the night before - of hanging out with Nate and Sean and talking out everything on our minds. Happy, creative thoughts still bounced around betwixt mine ears, and I said to myself:

“This is the type of day where a body can get some shit done.”

A while later, I was riding my bike down the hill into work, carefully avoiding the most stubborn bits of ice that refused to melt. It’s such an automatic action for me now, riding down that hill into work, since I’ve been doing it almost every day for a year or so. I can ride the entire distance with no hands - fumbling in my pockets to retrieve my morning cigarette, and then for a lighter, and then cupping my hands to try to light in the wind (which sometimes works well and sometimes not so well).

Today, my morning cigarette was my last cigarette, so I stopped off at the Books & News stand to grab a pack of Pall Malls and a handful of matches. I always get a handful of matches when I buy smokes, so that whenever someone asks for a light I can just give them a book of matches or two.

Before I could get back onto my bike, I saw a person I knew. This person was saying hello and asking me about the SuperBowl and had I seen it? and I was trying to explain that I didn’t watch it because I didn’t know that it was SuperBowl Sunday, and because I don’t have a TV, and neither do any of my friends, nor would we have been inclined to watch it had we somehow possessed a TV and been aware at the time that it was indeed the SuperBowl. And I went on to explain that, though I didn’t watch the game, I DID eat a shit-ton of chicken wings because I had this coupon at the supermarket where you go grab a bunch of wings and you bring them to the self-checkout line and ring them up as bananas and they only cost like a dollar and some change for many, many, many wings.

So now I’m at work, where I’m writing a lot of this down to keep my mind off the fact that I’m at work, and I keep getting interrupted by pesky customers. Imagine the nerve. Actually, I usually really enjoy talking to the people that come into work - strangers with whom I would normally have nothing to do, and who would normally have nothing to do with me. It’s like I’m wearing a disguise the whole time, pretending to be someone who goes to work every day and is a regular, upstanding citizen.

Recently though, most of the people that walk into the store behave like absolute zombies. They’re all old people and aging housewives, roaming the shopping centers during the daytime, medicated into submission, nothing better to do during the work week than go to doctors’ appointments and get drugged, docile in their decaying fur coats and never laughing at anyone else’s jokes.

Anyway, they’re not ALL that bad. Earlier, I helped out this old lady who looked to be about 80? 90? 111 years old? Her back was so bent that she was literally folded in half. She could easily touch her toes at any time with no problem, and she could only look at the ground. She was completely cool though, laughing the entire time and making me smile because she insisted on opening the door by herself and carrying this package that was not so heavy, but probably more so for a really old person. She walked with a cane, but without using the cane, just carrying it in her hand as she went stepping on into the ages.

I hope I’m still in good spirits and laughing at other people’s jokes if I live to be so old. I’m scared of becoming jaded and mean because of all the fucked-up shit constantly going on around me. Already I’m unable to really enjoy certain things sometimes because of fucked-up associations.

And then I let my eyes go blurry for a moment, and the sounds around me fade into dullness, and my breathing becomes softer, and I hear voices in my imagination talking about comforting things that I can’t remember when I snap out of it - and the only thing to make me snap out of it is the long, slow rumble of the train passing outside my window.

The other night I was out was out buying cigarettes and orange juice with Curly at about 4:30 in the morning, and there was an ambulance parked in front of the store. We’ve been addicted to juice lately, as we try to try to fend off the standard wintertime scurvy with Vitamin C - orange juice, grapefruit, pomegranate, peach lemonade. And, of course, I can rarely go until the wee hours of the morning without a healthy supply of cigarettes.

When I came out of the store, with Curly Jones waiting in the car in her Hello Kitty pajama pants, I saw that the EMT sitting in the meat wagon was checking out his facebook page on the mobile data terminal. I imagined a really gory dispatch coming through on the two way, and wondered if he would update his facebook status to “…is responding to a fatal motorcycle crash” before switching on the siren and booking it to the scene.

I got rid of my facebook account not too long ago, finally having convinced myself that it’s a thoroughly despicable racket…creepy, voyeuristic, Big-Brotherish. Plus, while critical mass allows large groups of people to be connected and old friends to find one another and so on, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t actually promote substantive human relationships.

Anyway, enough of that…except to say that myspace is the same thing. Anyone not yet convinced that these sites are odious in their very conception are advised to check out http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/facebook_bb_with_a_smile.htm (Thanks for sending the link, Keith).

So after a lot of deliberation I’m starting to rebuild my virtual identity, using different tools, over which I can exercise more control, in order to leave behind a different sort of breadcrumb for people to follow.

And that’s part of what this is, with more yet…hopefully…to come (www.mahmaou.com is still embryonic, but keep checking back).

Mah Maou isn’t supposed to be about me writing about myself, although that’s a lot of its constitution. It’s not designed to be the narrative of my life, because most of the stories aren’t too remarkable and because I don’t consider my life to be all that remarkable either. Rather, it’s about evoking a certain feeling, a certain nostalgia that flowers in a display of happiness and sadness and anticipation and wonder, and sends jolts of bittersweet current running through your brain. And it’s about having fun.

So take it for what you will. Read it as fiction or nonfiction or poetry or bullshit or whatever you want. Everything in it is true, whether it actually happened or not. If you know me, you’ll be able to pick out certain people and details and things with which you’re familiar. Some of the names are real, some aren’t. Some of these things happened to me, some didn’t. Above all, I just want to give my friends, old and new and not-yet-existent, something DIFFERENT to look at instead of the same old shit.

OK for now…

Enjoy.

All content is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. I generally don’t give a fuck about you do with it - copy it, link it, distribute it - except to say that absolutely no monetary gain shall result from the use of Mah Maou™ at any time.

You never know who the assholes are until it’s too late, and I’m trying to prevent that from happening this time.

Sorry for shoving your face in it.