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Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
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4:53 pm
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Dude Cop
Dude Cop yawns and stretches, drawing in the air around her, then spits it to her partner in a flourish of condensation. Her partner finishes the coffee dregs, and lights another cigarette. The table is opaque, cold and glass. Coffee spills and wayward fag-ash do not budge in the morning still.
Her partner’s name is Jenny and she’s twenty-four years old. It’s far too early for her type. Her type wake no earlier than ten in the morning. Jenny is hung-over and she lights another cigarette. Dude Cop scoffs and shuffles once, twice, in her chair. Jenny is wearing a holey wool shawl. Dude Cop’s wearing a long black robe.
“Shouldn’t smoke, it’ll fuck you right up,” says Dude Cop quickly, “nothin’ but trouble.”
Jenny ignores her then discontent, sighs. Her eyes roll.
“All eyes on me, then.”
Dude Cop is on the edge of her seat.
Her robe is caught at the foot of the chair and the fabric is taut like a tent. Dude Cop leans over the table, with her elbows, with her elbows, on it. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth almost smiles.
Jenny finishes her cigarette.
“Shouldn’t smoke, it’ll fuck you right up. My dad used to smoke,” Dude Cop offers.
“Yeah?”
Jenny thinks about Italy and gouache.
“Pap used to smoke a bunch of cigarettes. Fucked him right up. Used to have one in the mornin’ before his shower, one after breakfast with the newspaper on the couch, one feedin’ the ducks the leftover bread from breakfast, one in front of the wireless listenin’ to the eight o’clock news, he’d give one to the milk-man, one to the paper-boy…” Dude Cop’s face goes blank and her mouth is still and fat.
“How long have we got?” Jenny asks.
“One time he even gave me a puff of the thing. Worst fuckin’ thing I ever did taste. Like a cow came in and done a shit on my tongue. Right there on my tongue. Had to wash out my mouth with some OJ… Why’d you start to start smokin’ cigarettes?”
“I’ve never really thought about it before. It was just a natural thing, I suppose. I used to take little sips of gin from the liquor cabinet when I was twelve. It seemed like a natural progression, I guess.”
“You guess? Wrong fuckin’ answer. You guess.” Dude Cop’s face seethes, “Cigarettes’ll fuck you right up. I know it, I seen it. Now I don’t wanna see none of that guesswork no more, you hear?”
Dude Cop puts on some sunglasses and rises. She walks away without looking back, her cloak hugging her fat frame tight in the icy morning still. Jenny pays the bill and grimaces.
Dude Cop works with facts.
current mood: late
current music: nothing at all
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
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5:38 am
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Adrian Trajstman
“A Sick Story”
People like you make me sick. You are asleep and I know what you’re thinking. And how you eat your greens. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to stop apologising. Scissor your hair and face. Cut your hair.
I was watching you drown, worm, watching from a distance. You sang ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ in the shower, scumfucking yourself under the downfall. I was waiting for your downfall.
I saw you cut yourself shaving. You should shave faster. When you brush your teeth you should spread your mouth wider. Don’t ever wash your hands, you’re insulting water.
Don’t ever kiss girls. Don’t roll their stones, don’t stroke their vines. Stay awake always, always alert – don’t shut your eyes, Adrian, everything you sleep insults a dream. Wake up to yourself.
I remember last year when you rented Dirty Dancing. You’re no cowboy, Belle never wanted you anyway. Anyway, I remember when you put baby in a corner, drunk and honest and upchucking praise. I remember you put on a brave, ugly face, gimpish under disco lights like a boy in an oversized man-suit. I laughed at you sitting there in the heart of the jungle of limbs, heartbroken. And Belle walked away and you sank deeper into that filthy chair.
I always know what you’re thinking. Speak up, hotshot, and smoke more – it’s good for your lungs. Stop shaking. Stop thinking about ways to please Lisa. You’re scaring her. I love her so much more than you ever could.
You wake at three and murmur to the television, gummy. I’m watching you squirm. Tiny birds herald the start of your day, teasing on branches, mechanically bleating. Miniature horses in nests and they’re pecking at holes in the oak to discover the centre. Out of bed, you fall to the bathroom and squat in the shower. Your dick is hard and caked in cum. I’m glad you’re uncomfortable. You know you’re being watched.
After your shower you creep to the kitchen and steam from the kettle burns moist on the window. I know you want a cup of coffee, and so you make it slow and strong. Take some pride in your work. Put on a shirt. You suck back your snot and your day disappears.
I love twilight. I love twilight so damn much because I know how you detest it with every ounce of your being. A milky and overcast sky dies like a fading bulb. Your weak and unfaithful friend, The Sun, dips over and away leaving you cold. You belong in the cold. Toughen up. The night belongs to the witches. The night does not want you, Adrian. It is the realm of silk-webs and secrets and feminine magic. It is a realm that was never designed for you. I know you feel at home under bursting golden-blue skies and clouds shedding their elephantine skin. That is why I want you etched into the night, whether the night accepts you or rejects you like a foreign body. You pick at your scabs and I hope you get sicker.
When you were very young you lay in bed with the television on as thousands of insects made meals of your skin. Day through night, you’d lie on your side with your hands on your ears to block out the hum that faded closer then further, then closer to kill you. Airborn enemies with knives and forks that would kiss your cheek lightly with dusty wire feet and then slit through your skin and start spooning out blood, growing fatter and fuller so that you could almost see them. When you were very young you would rip at yourself as Aladdin steered a soiled rug through jade courtyards, picking pockets and anointing the feet of olive-skinned girls. Little Aladdins made dunes on your skin, that swelled faint and red as they zipped from room to room savouring different kinds of summer, all Persian and deadly. Your mother would bring you plum jelly and they’d decorate its surface like footprints in sand. You felt so sick, like a shaven lamb-baby, covered in cool, cracking lotion. You should shave faster.
Now you are sick again, and I’m following behind you as you go to meet Lisa. You walk past a carpentry shop where, in the window, a neon fool in overalls repeatedly hammers and strikes at a hot pink nail. You walk past the town hall as spacemen and rabbits crowd up on the steps, giggling with their parents in preparation for this evening’s pubescent pantomime. You suck snot. A clattering chariot stops then continues as pig-nosed youths in singlets and baseball caps scrawl on its walls and dart spit through their buckteeth. It is so damn dark and the night makes you so damn cold.
Lisa is waiting on the street-corner, spinning and singing around a lamp-post. Her eyes meet mine and then they meet yours. She is clutching at herself to keep warm – her shirt’s off her shoulder, her shoulder is shivering. You approach her then hold her, your head on her shoulder. Your kiss on her neck makes her colder. She breaks the embrace and you take her hand tightly as I watch you together making plans and drafting decisions. You conclude you’ll get coffee, then pause, then continue. Everybody likes coffee. Nobody likes a boy who can’t make his mind up. Leaders are made; leaders aren’t born. You’re not a leader; you need a hand to hold. You can’t rely on luck, but lucky you’ve got one. Take her hand tightly.
The café is imposing and I’m glad that it scares you. Thick, grey walls trap you in towards the centre. Lisa’s sitting opposite, her eyes flicking left and right and back to you, and back to me. Her nails trail down the menu. You fish inside your pocket for the coins that you can find, before you slip them on the tabletop, pathetic, kissing air. A lithe schoolgirl jots your order. This café only employs pretty girls. I watch your hands on Lisa’s hands, your fingers solving mazes on her palm. You’re embarrassing yourself. You show Lisa your half-finished story and she reads it but says nothing. Coffee comes and every girl everywhere smiles simultaneously. I watch you drink, Adrian, I watch you make quips and finish the black-hot mess all too soon. Lisa asks you why you’re staring at her mouth. You insist that you’re not doing it intentionally, but I know that you are. I know that you want to kiss her right here in this sprawling room, bodies pressed hard on some table, elbows flung to plates of salad, wine-glasses kicked to a sharp, wet death in a fit of passionate, ill-timed lust. Get some tact. You’re making her scared. You go to the bathroom to cough up phlegm.
Out in the street you give Lisa your jacket. You think you’re a gentleman. There are holes in your shirt where the wind can sneak through. The nighttime wind is cunning and quick-moving. It finally tells you its feminine secrets and it’s so cold that you wish that it kept its mouth tight-shut. Lisa surges into oncoming traffic, dragging you by the hand like a pet on a leash. You make it to the other side of the road and I see Lisa, erratic and heavensent, skipping from here to there, lit amber under streetlights as you attempt to keep up. She stops by a shop window and peers inside with curiosity. You lag, Adrian – you are like a disease impossible to shirk. Lisa shrugs around, smiling. You painfully force a sneeze back into your sour throat.
I remember when you were very young you never had enough breath inside you to inflate birthday balloons. You’d huff into rubber and splutter saliva as the balloon touched your teeth, pink and powdery. Your lips would buzz with spittle yet the impotent toy would never expand. I remember you throwing streamers down stairwells, your mouth young, loud and red. Your tongue examined the taste and the texture of wayward candlewax complementing sickly, soft icing. I can see you now, one-tooth, screaming Christmas carols and chewing on the edges of books about dinosaurs. I can see you now, minus two-teeth-up-the-front, dust from your fabric-faced friends making fragile supernovas in your stale bedroom air each time you touch them. I am about to form another indelible memory.
I watch you hold Lisa at the train station. Your arms are too tight. You’re hurting her. She’s going to go back to her apartment and think about me. My scent’s in her bed. It sets her sailing. It sends her to sleep. You always hated saying goodbye. You always hated yourself. I always hated you.
We look at Lisa’s wintry eyes and kiss her on the cheek. My kiss makes her sigh. Your kiss makes her cold. A droplet of clear mucus weeps from her nose and it is only then that you realise that you are an utter failure at everything you do.
current mood: headache
current music: "one light flashing i love you" - swirlies
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 6th, 2004
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12:55 pm
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Crack sticks his dick in giving pain like a pin.
Nice Girl heaves and Zippos his chest in places - this makes Crack flinch.
current mood: hyper
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 20th, 2004
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2:31 am
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A Small Story
Adrian Trajstman
I remember Janet stand back, black on the porch, a lone needle of smoke flushed angular outwards from her bottom lip. I remember her shoulders against the wall, covering up the hole between the bricks where I once saw spiders do small things. I remember extending my arm and I remember her looking disgusted. And I had to fix up the things inside she tore down and threw around. I remember not a lot at all.
We met by chance in the dark, very close by where I am living now. Hot summer. I was walking (to clear my head) down streets drab and dusty, sweating hard and persistent through the network of backways and places that cars couldn’t go. She was there the whole time, step-toeing tentatively behind me like a lost cat. Sixteen paces, I turned and we spoke, heads tipped like blushing hats, all “what-are-you-doing-in-a-place-like-this” and so on and so forth. She led me home.
We got busy in the dark – as we were complete strangers we had so much catching up to do, so much filling in. I remember her darting about piles of books and bedsheets to the bathroom as I cloaked myself in the covers like a snail in a downy shell. Her silhouette dissolved and as she flicked with switches her bedroom was heated by half-light. I saw her as a round red lantern in the doorway, tiny feet disturbing puddles on the floor near the bath. When she returned, her wet feet touched my ankles and I liked it. It was impossible to sleep. We made a tender cave under the blankets, soft and special and she held me hot.
I found her hand on my heart at daybreak, the open window hushing in breezes, so grassy and crisp all over us. Outside I could see sprinklers make filmy rainbows and small, smiling dogs play leapfrog, licking about. I traced spirals on the back of Janet’s hand until she made a faint syllable and curved up towards me, edging back into consciousness. The tiger chain around her neck slipped undone and between the sheets. Breaths became words.
“We have hearts,” Janet said to me.
“I know,” I replied, “I feel yours.”
The walls of Janet’s room were adorned with Miro prints, curling and torn. Every dresser-top and bedside table and cluttered corner contained a secret - sideways coffee-cups spilling to saucers and bundles of photos, strewn unsorted. Janet lay in the bed as I showered and shaved and shat and did things that make bodies look horrid. Upon returning, I found her cradling a coffee cup, naked and curled, all vertebrae and shivers.
“Your coffee’s there,” she spat and flicked her fingers to the floor.
I sat on the bed and Janet’s cup fell onto the linen, bleeding black and soft in a ghost-like shape. We ignored it. I put my hand on Janet’s back.
“We should walk,” I said.
Janet vaguely nodded and began to get dressed.
It was around midday, but we walked the backways to avoid the crowds. Heads down, feet forward, hands held tight, we surged past the sports oval where I’d seen boys at night, clasping red in their outstretched fists, wishing on stars for perfect love between clumsy gulps and mysterious bruises and sobs. Thoughts to ourselves, we continued, feet forward, hands held tight. The light was intense, the sun flaming proud above and searing down, making us moist and human. Small hands held tight until the late afternoon.
Feet lagging snail-trails, we reached the porch of my home and rested on the wicker seat at the front of the house. Janet flirted with the button on her shirt-cuff, nimble fingers toying ‘til it came unstuck. We made eye contact for the first time in what seemed like forever and Janet smiled an exhausted breath.
“Sometimes I’ll walk for hours,” she said, “to clear my head, but I often end up thinking more instead.”
“It’s funny like that,” I agreed with a smirk, and her hands on my hands throbbed her heart-beat, perspiring.
We sat there in silence as the sun went down, Janet’s head on my shoulder lulling me as streetlights fizzed amber, the breeze coloured by distant car horns. A moth danced white and perfect at our laps before gliding below, where it settled like a triangle of light by Janet’s feet. Janet shuffled and murmured a little, half-asleep, as wings became earth and a thousand gentle vertebrae cracked away beneath her toes. Conscious, we cried.
I remember holding her up to my chest, close and careful, as precious streams passed over us, cleansing and unifying us. Her palm to my lips, fingers balling and then away back beside her and then a breath of cool black air. Mouths salty and smooth, arbitrarily blessing each other in silence.
I remember wild, fiery skin absorbing the night as our bodies separated and resurfaced.
“I should go,” I remember Janet say, attempting to compose herself as we stood, “I’m no use here. I’m no use to anyone. All I do is break things.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “I’m thankful you found me. I might not know much, but I know I feel at home with you.”
“You don’t know what love is,” Janet denounced with pity, “You’re so naïve. Love is such an incredible thing – it protects small kids when they’re out in the open. It colours outside the lines and saves so many.”
She looked at me.
“You’re a beautiful boy, you really are, you know that? I want you to know that.”
I couldn’t bring myself to smile - I just gazed at my shoes and nodded. We lit cigarettes as a train of ants ran the porch like thread unraveled.
I remember Janet stand back, black on the porch. My disheveled hair gave me rabbit ears. Janet dropped her half-finished cigarette and killed it with her foot. I remember stepping towards her for one last embrace, but she turned her face and waved me away. Tiny toes making Morse code into the night, far walking.
current mood: hungry
current music: "theme song" - charles bronson
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 8th, 2004
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4:19 pm
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ADRIAN TRAJSTMAN - "AN AIRPORT STORY"
There was no stopping from the get-go, when I got on my bike and started to the airport. The whole endeavour began smoothly - my bicycle is truly a charm snaking through the traffic, so hectic that the planet seemed static. My bicycle sounded like a whirring, stirring sewing machine, the wheels with their spokes throwing stones and spitting tiny rocks at the gutter and whatnot in my wake.
Beyond the automatic doors and inside the airport, the arrows and signs and women in uniform directed me forward and up the escalator to the next floor, where a kind-looking woman with a red scarf and a stupid, stupid hat was sitting alone, knitting on her own. Her ugly husband choked up and out a coffee scroll. Fat kids ran. I arrived at the departure lounge. I flicked through my notebook to see what I'd got in there. A man coughed a lot. I'd already forgotten where I'd put my bicycle. Muffled electronics powered the loudspeakers with dead chimes, followed by the English and then, of course, the French. Of course I couldn't have cared less - not in that felt and rubber room, full of a whole lot of losers with nothing to do - coming to wait, waiting to go, never funny or engaging. I flicked through my notebook to see what I'd got in there. A man coughed a lot.
And then I spotted Belle on a graceful wave - a kooky cornucopia of colour, smelling of apples and smiling in my direction. Little sordid pictures in my head - my hands on her body, her body on my body, twenty toes tapping in time marking out our territory on the dance-floor, hands clapping. Cooking drunk and happy love in her room. Discussing ice cream in the morning, me laughing at my own jokes like a goofy dickslap, her voice dull and sweet on the intercom.
"What's up, Panda?" she'd say.
"Nuffin', Puffin." I'd offer back.
This was how we lived way back when, and now I missed what we had back then.
Over and away, Belle sat down without a sound - not even a word (not that I would have heard, as she was settled over past the coffee machines pretending to ignore me). I couldn't help watching her twitching uncomfortably, hating this room with a view over nothing but planes upon planes and a trolley, a tourist. She looked in her notebook to see what she'd got in there. Belle smiled a lot. She tore out a page and she fashioned a paper-plane, sent the plane gliding direct to my hands. On it: a sketch with my name in a love-heart, and arrows and sparrows and angels around it. Out of my chair with my hair in my face and my shoes shedding pieces all over the place.
I ran to where Belle was, my heart where my head was.
"If a finger-pointing street-preacher accused me of witchcraft I'd burn happy," I said, overzealously stuttering, "knowing that you at one stage loved me as I love you."
"Dickslap," she said with the smokiest smile, "believe me, I did, and believe me, I do."
current mood: grateful
current music: "single girl" - lush (in my head)
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
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1:50 pm
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This is you, in the dark, darting about piles of books and bedsheets to the bathroom, while I, once stretched out on the bed, am now cloaked in the covers all soft and warm like a snail in a downy shell.
Your silhouette dissolves into the distant darkness and as you switch on the light the bedroom is flooded with a dull half-light. You are a round red lantern in the doorway and I can hear your hot little feet disturb puddles on the floor near the bath.
When you return, your wet feet touch my ankles and it’s strangely comforting. I get an itch on my chest but leave it alone. We have so much to do it is impossible to sleep. The room breathes.
current mood: optimistic
current music: "three-dee melodie" - stereolab [[in my head]]
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 5th, 2004
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3:41 am
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i got hospital cornered and forced into having the operation
i felt a vagabond with the traveler
the glass mirrored my every move
groove is in the heartache
they pushed me into a hospital corner
how do you manage
current mood: drunk
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004
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3:22 pm
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She slid red now, to the very edges of the room now, along to every edge of the room now, ensuring that she was safe and that not a soul could see her. Now, as she fell back and down and hard and fast against her favourite wall (the least-threatening wall she could find) she bit her bitter lip, sobbed very fast and all-at-once and realised all-at-once that she had no choice but to kiss the prince, marry the frog, thwart all step-anythings (mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers) and use up her three wishes on living happily ever after or something iforgettherest crystal palace holywater glass-slipper OK.
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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11:50 am
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the curtains will stream down your neck like the boys you let spill down your throat
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(comment on this)
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