Posthumous butt-fuckers, the gaily-straightened Reich are, and tonight they’re all slab-reeled and dolled up with black eye liner, rosy blush, bulbous noses, hooped earrings and pale flesh. Paulker, the youngest and smallest of the Fairy Gang Trees, is standing over the sink, naked except for his red banana hammock and slopping enough gel into his lice-infested hair to freeze it mid-explosion with the help of a hairdryer. Near the refrigerator, Rodney’s gliding a razor over every last spot of his wrinkled and liver-spot littered scalp, not stopping until his rippled crown gleans under the kitchen light, hairless though not as smooth as a baby’s ass. Satisfied with the scalp, Rodney proceeds to shave his unibrow clean off, which makes it so that the only remaining hair runs along the wispy waterfalls of his auburn side burns that plummet with a suicidal vigor from his ears to the pointed knob of his chin. The troupe’s only excuse for a mother, Tonya, is also in the kitchen, six months pregnant and counting. She waddles to and fro in a ragged balloon of a maternity blouse, swigging from a flow-heavy fifth of Scotch and coating its rim in purple lipstick, much to the delight of the gaily-straightened Reich.
She puts the bottle down with a resounding thud on the kitchen table and, raging drunk, lights up a doobie. “Lil’ Paulkner,” she wheezes through the first drag’s coughing fit, “Where we a’goin’to dis night?”
“Dis night,” Paulkner returns, studying his mug in the espejo and gently patting the shrapnel sides of his hairdo, “We’s a’goin’to fine ourselfs a noo breedin’ ground, dat’s whut we’s a’goin’to do.”
“She ass’d where’s we a’goin’to dis night, nawt whut we’s a’goin’to do dis night, fuke’in’butte’fuke’r you,” sneers Rodney, “You’s sound-honing earrangs ain’t help shite, now, are dhey?”
“Eh, you ‘eep out of dis, you’eer?” says Paulkner, turning from the espejo to wag a fat, silver-ringed forefinger at the aging Rodney. “I say whut’s’whut, fuke’ing’butte’fuke’r you is, n’ I say we’s a’goin’to fine ourselfs a noo breedin’ ground, no matta where’s, you’eer?”
“Aigh, n’ fuke youself whil’ you’at’it . . . n’ you’s fuke’in motha, you fuke’in’butte’fuke’r.”
Paulkner slams the hairdryer, still whirring and sputtering its hot breath, down in the sink and tears himself angrily away from the espejo. He walks up to Rodney and jabs a fleshy, indignant and silver-ringed index finger into his flabby and drooping pectoral, saying quietly, his voice controlled with a strength anchored deep in his rotten heart, “You’s fuke’in’ knows di closes’ I gots to a motha is dis’ere Tonya, n’ she’s shite, fuke’in swollen wit’a’rat in ‘er belly, I tell’s you, so’s you bess keep yo’fuke’in mouth clamm’d’all’ham, or I’s a’half’feelin’ we’s a gonna knock yo’fuke’in teef cleeee-” Paulkner takes good care to draw the word out a good mile and a quarter for measure, “-eeeen out’yo’mouth.”
“Aigh, you’two, shite di fuke’up,” crows Tonya, “Yeez givin’di’rat in my belly an ear’s’ache n’ it’s’a makin’ me ooterus ache’too, so pleez, shite di fuke’up.” She drags on her doobie, then takes a quick swig of the Scotch before exhaling.
Paulkner gives Rodney one last sneer and turns away, saying “Aigh, well let’s’be’on’wit’it, weez a’need’ sume breedin’, and weez be on wit’ it, weez bess be a’goin, fuke’in’butte’fuke’r’s.” He heads for the door, snagging a black satin robe off the coat rack on his way, which he drapes over his bony figure like a vampire.
Tonya extinguishes her doobie in the bottle of Scotch, raises the bottle to her lips for a good luck swig, taking the doobie butt down with it like a tequila worm, and slams the bottle down on the kitchen table with a contented groan. She tosses a glassy-eyed glance around her, then waddles after Paulkner.
Not blind to his fear of being left behind, Rodney mutters under his rancid breath “Fuke’it,” and follows the two out of the nest, complicit now in the gaily-straightened Reich’s search for a new breeding ground.
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Junkyard Daisy is quietly enjoying his usual supper at the Flop-Bar on this tender night, alone in his usual booth and hunched over his usual plate of heavily-salted beef steak, sided with the usual peppered string beans and chunky mashed potatoes. He maneuvers his fork and knife with the unhurried movements of a surgeon looking into a cadaver, working to sever the steak into twenty-four neat, little, juicy and still steaming pieces. Finishing the process after several minutes, he leans back into the mahogany booth with a sigh, his fork and knife angled up at the ceiling.
He has come to the Flop-Bar tonight, as usual, wearing his khaki space-pilot jumpsuit, which he has worn everyday for the past six years. He’s worn this uniform in every mode of life, whether endeavored in business or frolicking in play, whether reading a book in the quiet of his living room or haggling for a piece of furniture at the bazaar. He has enjoyed turtle-coitus in his jumpsuit numerous times and can point out the stains to prove it. He wore the jumpsuit to his mother’s untimely funeral and graduated from university in it. The jumpsuit is so covered with the toil of the past six years, it never being washed outside of the showers that he sometimes takes in it, that it lends itself to a camouflaged appearance, which most mistake for its original design. Its only adornment is a weathered patch over the right breast that depicts a lamb devouring a lion. Tonight, the suit is only zipped up half-way his bared chest, revealing a black jungle of sinewy hair and a thick-linked gold chain necklace. The necklace he has not removed from his neck in an upwards of twenty years, twenty years being a little more than two-thirds his life at the time of this tender night.
Still poised as such, Junkyard Daisy surveys the smattered crowd of the dimly lit Flop-Bar this tender night. A couple booths in front of him, a couple is performing a dramatic conversation in subdued tones. Behind him, he can hear three men sharing travel stories and gossip, creating the overall effect of a ramble with their loud laughter and smug renderings of the outside world. A waitress moseys around from table to table, then back to the bar, wiping her hands as she goes with the cloth hanging from her waist. Bob Dylan’s scratchy voice rides an idiot wind that originates simultaneously from the four points of the compass, the four points represented by an identical speaker placed in each of the large room’s corners. Junkyard Daisy, with the speed and patience of a praying mantis, leans back over his plate and harpoons the first neat, little, juicy, and still somewhat steaming piece of beef steak and shovels it into his handle-bar mustache-framed mouth. He straightens his back and chews slowly, staring straight ahead with empty eyes and mechanical movements of his jaw.
Time moves at an incredible dawdle for Junkyard Daisy. It always has. His expression hardly changes in his perpetual opium-high. One would think he has more in common with the cow he’s chewing than the humans that surround him. While he chews his dinner’s first bite this tender night, he thinks to himself that he may have consistently consumed enough steak over the course of his life to be mostly composed of cow by now. He thinks this would make him holy in some parts of India, though the cause of this holiness would also render him a decrepit thing. He thinks this without twitching a single muscle outside of the ones that cause his mouth to chew.
When he finally swallows, his eyes tint a deeper and glossier green, like emeralds under a subtly waning moon. Junkyard Daisy leans over his plate again, no more or less hurried than the first time, and shovels a second piece of steak into his mouth, which he begins to chew slowly as he straightens his back. Though he may not look it, he is desperately trying to reign the spanning time into himself with the ultimate goal of not taking several hours to finish his meal, as he sometimes does without meaning to. Bob Dylan has closed his song with a shrill scuttle over the harmonica and Bessie Smith’s voice, singing Dyin’ By the Hour, now swoons out from the four points of the compass. Chewing his second bite, Junkyard Daisy loses himself in the song. He thinks to himself that if on this tender night he could manage a bite and a half every song, he could be out of the Flop-Bar much earlier than usual.
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The gaily-straightened Reich, dolled up in garb hardly suited to the night’s bitter cold, is now slinking in a very cretinous line down the boulevard, which is quietly enduring a softly falling snow. Paulkner is out in the lead, bent over with his arms bunched up in his black satin vampire robe and holding forth a barely intelligible monologue with the pavement, which sparkles with the diamonds of the snowfall underfoot before Paulkner’s tread churns it in with street dirt to make a brownish wet slush. Behind him waddles Tonya, tipping this way and that and cradling her pregnant stomach like a bomb concealed under her balloony blouse. She keeps her blood-shot eyes trained intently on Paulkner’s back. Rodney is bringing up the rear, a bonnet strapped around his head to keep his ears warm and hobbling along with curses under his breath, “Fuke’you’s you fuke’in’butte’fuke’r, yous . . .”
Paulkner, hopelessly trying to keep himself from succumbing to the cold’s numbing effect, slaps passing trashcans and streetlights and erratically aims kicks at the homeless covered in bug-ridden blankets and crowded up against building walls, seeking shelter from the snow under protruding cornices. “Aigh,” says Paulkner in a bleating sheep’s tone as he stops short at a streetside kiosk, “I’m a’s’goin’to get meez sume voozy ‘ills, I’m a iz,” and he begins to haggle with the merchant who is bundled up behind the kiosk counter.
After a general confusion, what with Paulkner yelling unintelligible nonsense and poking his finger into the merchant’s heavily padded chest, compounded by Tonya and Rodney’s yells and jeers as they move in and join the melee, the gaily-straightened Reich somehow procures a packet of woozy pills without having to pay a cent. Paulkner takes four of them out from the packet, two for himself and one each for Tonya and Rodney. Putting his fat finger to his nose, Paulkner rockets a yellowed glob of snot out of his right nostril before jamming both pills deep up there, cackling shrilly as he does so. Behind him, Tonya and Rodney are greedily chewing their pills into a chalk like substance, which they eventually gargle then stomach. “Aigh,” says Tonya through her broken teeth, “It’s jeez whut di rat’in’mi belly wunts, it’is,” and within seconds, they begin to feel the warmth of the pills spread through them as their spirits move into relatively better, though still quite heinous, zones.
“Aigh, I’s a’feelin’oung fo’unts,” says Rodney, smiling like a gnarled and weathered Buddha through his bonnet. “Where’is’t weez a’goin’to agin?”
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Junkyard Daisy is chewing his second to last piece of steak and the Flop-Bar’s late night crowd is beginning to trickle in. As he moves his teeth up and down, exercising his limitless capacity of patience, he is aleady thinking about the last bite, which sits cold between the lumber pile of green beans and the mound of mashed potatoes. He must, however, make it through this piece before he gets to the last piece. One at a time, he thinks to himself. To the passing observer, he looks like a snail making funny faces as he finally works the piece to the top of his throat. He slowly swivels his head to take in the new scene. None of the diners, or even the drinkers, that were here when he had arrived are still present. In fact, two generations of clientele may have come and gone since his arrival. He broods on this as he works the second to last piece of meat down his esophagus. Precisely and slowly, he reaches for his glass of water, his hand approaching the glass as if it were attached to the arm of a prototypical android. Around him, the crowd is moving into their third and fourth rounds and a chaos begins to wiggle its head out of a wormhole originating in some back alley of the universe and into the moment’s space.
The Flop-Bar’s speakers are letting loose the torrent of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man. The overall noise level of the place is beginning to exponentially increase. The waitress is moving from table to table, a foot per nanosecond less than a jog at this point, hurriedly bringing around pitchers and jotting down more orders. The second to last piece of meat plummets into Junkyard Daisy’s stomach. He can’t help but smile as his right hand inches the glass of water toward his face.
