Bitches Go Forever.

     She came to me one morning.
     "I can't go home until I figure out what I am gonna do."
     So we went to the shooting range. A few days later she decided and then she left.
     She went to a motel then filed for a divorce.

White t-shirts hand-Washed In the Kitchen sink. Hanging from the High Cupboard Doors. Who Needs Washing Machines?...We don't.

goddamlifeisfuckinasitshouldbe. and we all agreed.

      Salty Dogs and Codeine and I'm about to shave my legs on the kitchen counter. Sit on the counter and flick it into the kitchen sink. Into the in-sink-er-ator...which I have repaired twice this month.

And I think that these are all animal hormones and shit but it's too much to pass off or up but then i think he may know what he is doing but i can't really decide yet. "I've been so broke that i know everything means nothing. It's all just stuff." I said. And he said that was beautiful.

I thought I was doing well. And I thought that I was hiding it...at least more than I was.

I took a piss upstairs. I said i would be right back and he asked where i was going. I gotta take a piss i told him.
Looking in the mirror I saw my pupils. They were in a state of excitment and then this excited me more. They were big. Adrenaline is my stimulant. I didn't wash my hands. There were no towels. It was a "tom Waits day", twofold.

Cadaver: Someone please call this...we look ridiculous. Official Time of Death...And then we put down the defibrillator for the last time.

      I remember not sleeping and then laying in the lawn-chair in the backyard at 8am to smoke a long cigarette butt from the ashtray. They staggered out of the Champion in proper fashion and lit cigarettes, too. She found her dog in the car in the middle of the night with a tin can stuck on its head. There was shit strewn about the lawn. Chair fragments mostly.

     "You tried to John Cena him?!?! Oh Shit," followed by laughter from us all. My feet were still bleeding and my eye wasn't quite black yet but it was in the mail: postmarked but the carrier was talking on her phone taking her fucking time again. The seat of my jeans was ripped as we sat out back of that yellow house and the grass was wet with dew. They weren't ripped a little. 

     "Oh, Jesus Fuck! I wish someone was videotaping that! I bet it was a fuckin hoot.” The furniture was sideways and missing screws.

     I can walk through doors. 

     I remember going into Wigg’s Country Store later for cigarettes. I pulled up my Wayfarers and the ladies saw it all but I had a big smile and they never said anything because the ladies in there know what it's like. But I bet they never wanted it or started it. I couldn’t have hurt him but it was hard to restrain me. 

     "If you can't feel what you did to me emotionally then you're gonna feel it physically," and you couldn't have poked out my eyes with a blade. They were hard and so fucking open when I said it. 

     "Where's __?!" I slapped him across the face. "Where the fuck are you, __?" slapping his face hard. "This isn't the real __! Where the fuck did you go?!" And then he slapped me back half-heartedly and I full-heartedly didn't flinch. 

     "You can break every bone in my body and I don't care,” tear streaked. “I won't leave you alone. You have to feel this. You don't getta choose."

     He was a wrestling champ in school and he had some moves on me. He got me in the headlock and then I had no good moves left. I tried some self-defense shit I learned in high school and, fuck, if I didn't have sciatica it might have worked. 

     "I could kill you right now," he said. I felt my face getting red. My eyeballs felt bulgy but I didn’t blink. 

     I resigned to loosing that finger when it was between his teeth. I couldn't see it from the head-lock I was in. "I feel like blood is pouring down my finger...it feels like it's hanging...is there blood?" I choked to him from the headlock. I didn’t want to look at it yet.

     "There's a little blood." he said almost sweetly, still restraining me. Now it's hard to hold the strings down on my guitar. 

     "The feeling will probably come back after awhile he said. That's what happened with mine.” He hit his with a hammer at work building barns.

     After he left I packed up the house...without sleeping. 

     I could hide a lot of it but I couldn't hide the hand-prints around my neck. Not in the summer; too hot.

     I instigated the violence.

     Intermittently that day my smile was big when I thought about my endurance and my perseverance and my PCP-like fervor and I had the bruises and the scabs to prove it. 

          And then we drove out to the river in the morning sun with music and the windows down to get my sandals that we left in a wine-drunk stupor the night before. I was eating raspberries in the backseat and then I ashed into the empty raspberry box.

Last night they jumped off the pillar while I jumped from the highest point of the bridge into the creek where it met the river. Again and again we walked back up to the bridge and whooped and jumped off after we passed the jug around.

            We stood on the bank. We watched her jumped off the pillar for a morning swim. We watched the gars swim around her. Then we drove back into town and went to work ‘cause we had jobs to do.

Lorn and the Troubadour and those feelings of Grandeur.

     I looked down and I was standing on a Hollywood star. I didn't give two fucks. And not even one, in fact. I didn't care who I was standing on. I was standing impatiently. But then I made sure to stomp on a bunch of them really fast. Pissed-off hopscotch while I was waiting for her to be done. I just wanted her to get her drunken face out of that jeep window. She kept remembering that she was married and then kept not remembering. 
     "Hey, Jeramy," nonchalantly while I poked at him. "We're standing on the stars." He looked down then I think. I also think he said something about it. I pulled her away and led us across the street. Jaywalked across the street to The Frolic Room. I needed a drink and didn't have time for falls-down-a-lot-Ashley. "Goddammit Ashley! Come on! Thanks for the ride guys. We gotta go. Nice ta meetcha."
     The wallpaper inside was hard to look at. Double vision at close proximity. 
     It was dark. It was late. I wanted to stay.

The shooting range at dawn in the spring after a night at the river.

Shoot Into The Mountain

     "A thousand things just poked my stomach!" 

     I was on my knees in the brush and my hands were in the frost. She wasn't a-lyin' but we roared like gorillas went we got to the top of the hill. When we found ourselves back down at the bottom she was bleeding. No one could say we didn 't do it right. And there were bruises and scabs to prove it if anyone ever doubted it. But most people probably wouldn't even care.       2010

Pray-ri-land should have burned down that day after we were there.

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM -from "The Incarceration Papers" 01/2007

     I laid in my bunk and read a magazine while some of the other girls played spades in the commons area. I could still hear the pre-game show from the network station they had on as background noise. It was muffled and I blocked it out along with the card-game noise but I still heard the National Anthem clearly at the start of the ballgame.

"Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming...'

Ahh, beautiful, I thought. Could this be any better? I wonder if anyone else in my cell block or anyone else in this jail hearing the pre-game show even recognized the Classic Fucking Irony of the song and our situation.

...And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there...

(crescendo now)...OH, SAY DOES THAT STAR-SPANGLES BANNER YET WAVE O'ER THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE...(crowd cheers)

"No, sir. It does not. The flag still waves but I'm not free and people are cowards."

I went back to reading my Time magazine. It was the first issue of the new year; the issue with the reflective Mylar cover that you look into and see yourself looking back. The cover said that the 'Most Important Person of 2006' was me. Me. I thought, "sure, why not?" as I laid in my jail-cell bunk on that January evening.

The Incarceration Papers 2006

BLOCK F, CELL 3, BOTTOM BUNK

--originally written with a pencil that I stole from a girl in my Block and guarded with diligence.

EXCERPTS FROM PAGES 4 & 5 OF 24

...I always feel like the anomaly here. I have all my teeth and a college degree but then I look again and my teeth are nicotine-stained, too, and we've all got tatoos that our friends gave us with bare needles and alcoholic gusto. We've probably all been pregnant and not quite sure who the father was and all any of us want right now is a cigarette.

     I feel like an alien because I have proper grammer and connoisseuristic tendencies but I also feel that all we need are some Marlboros and Pepsi or some rum and all-night card games on the outside, and I could connect with these people.

EXCERPTS FROM PAGES 9 & 10 OF 24

     "Do you know how to pluck eyebrows with string?" -Jessica to Tae (a serious question)

We were eating supper Monday night when a woman from cell 1 asked everyone if she could have the plastic-coated paper lids from our single-serving butter tubs.

     "What do you use them for?" someone asked.

     "I floss my teeth with them," she replied with the air of a woman who was sentenced long-term and had carried a baby to term in jail then was sent right back to finish her sentence after the delivery. She had this air because it was true.

OLD INNER MONOLOGUE-Last Lunch with Miss Marie 2006?

            "Look at that hat."

            I turn and look at a finely dressed older gentleman just stepping into the place. "Nice. Look at that whole man." I replied.

            She tells me a story about an old charmer; a wealthy gentleman that she used to wait on at the upscale restaurant she worked at, a story involving after-hours with martinis and tongues. I told her sixty-five or older is a goal of mine; at least once.

"Make sure they are very charming…and rich," she instructs me. She takes a drag. I take a sip of coffee.

I ordered an appetizer sampler-platter, grapefruit juice, coffee with cream, and Genuine Conversation on a scotch stomach.

She looked at me the night before as she was getting out of my car. We were drunk. "I love you," I said. "Don't say good-bye like I won't see you for two years. Just say ...'I'll see you next week when we'll meet for lunch.'" And when I see her in a couple years we'll pick up where we left off that day like it was just last week.

 I wouldn't see her next week for lunch. I wouldn't see her for a long time.

We were just two gals; two young ladies in a booth in the midst of small-town stale-mate. Both wearing boots to our knees and baited eyes; we lift our chins to smoke.  She's just visiting but I live here. She's saying her good-byes. She's off to be a linguist; I'm destined to get colon cancer.

We were just two gals, sitting in a family restaurant. But I drive a Yugo and she has 'Monarchy' tattooed on her left tit. Led Zeppelin makes my chest tight and she had a baby once. She likes to hoola-hoop fire and I like to sing. We're both heartbreakers. We were just two young gals in a restaurant in our hometown on a very-cold November day.

Black Paper, Golden Glitter. She may know more that I thought. Probably just an accident though. 2008

     We were relaxed in the South office. I was typing in Excel at the desk; she was playing with paint and glitter on the floor. She was making valentine hearts for all of the employees. She was going to tape them up on the wall in the kitchen. She was trying to bring the staff together. She's the politician of the management dichotomy. People need to like her. She wants people to like her. I'm the enforcer. I'm feared and hated. I like it.

She laughed as she turned the page on the black paper. She turned to the bright blue and pink constuction paper.

"What?" I turned to her. She was sitting cross legged on the carpet, her back against the brick.

"I probably shouldn't make anybody's heart black." She laughed again. Her tendons show in her neck when she smiles.

"Oh, Please, make mine black. And don't let anyone else have a black heart." I was laughing...hard.

"Okay, I won't." She was laughing, too.

She posted my black heart on the kitchen wall below everyone else's. It was bigger than all the others. It made me smile everyday. I was waiting for someone to write "bitch" on it. No one ever did.

Weeks later I ripped it off the wall. "Michelle! I'm taking my black heart. It's not valentine's day anymore." She was washing dishes.

Now it's on my kitchen wall.

On the last beer. 2008

     I took his last cigarette while he was sleeping. I wish I hadn't. It was the least satisfying cigarette of the night.

Do you really practice? Or is it just your lineage? 2008

     I was trying to create an order-guide for the coffee inventory.

     "So, does this list start from the top and go down?"

     "I started at the bottom and went this way." She used her index finger and waved it in the air right to left.

     "Jesus! You are Jewish, aren't you!?"

     I meant it as a joke...at first. She didn't get it at first.

Her face was Crystal and she was mine. 2008

     She crocheted me an afghan. I was red. She was black. And brown was dirty, dirty life. It kept me warm on cold nights. On very Cold snowy Nights.

Officially Sworn 2008

She vowed to 'Uphold The Border, Draw it where we Please', til her 'Drunken Death'. Fuckin Fists Across America. Signed, A.M.V.Z.H.

"Money isn't real and tomorrow doesn’t exist"...but I don’t own anything expensive. 2008

     "Three dollars for lunch tomorrow. Five dolars for supper." We were preparing for a Night. "Four for cigarettes and ten for gas." He laid each dollar bill down on the coffee table beside the pipe as he figured each expense. He was high and still able to count. He was high as hell and still able to know that there was a tomorrow and that he needed to budget for it. He would put each dollar bill down as he counted them out loud. Then he sat a lighter on top of the pile. Those dollars were for tomorrow and the rest went back in his pocket of his his $300 dollars jeans. The rest in his pocket was for the night. And we spent it well. We bought nights of pleasure. Jesus, we enjoyed it.

     He always left one cigarette for the morning. That morning cigarette. I was never able to do that. That is why he lives in the fifth largest city by population in the United States. That is why he owns shit in the fifth largest city in the United States. That is why he is suing his employer because they lowered his bonus. I think about him every night when I am smoking my last cigarette. I think of him every morning when I am wishing that I saved that last cigarette. And I think of him on the rare morning that I wake up with cigarettes. I make coffee and smoke that first one and think of him and of Ashley sitting on her porch in C.R. smoking that first cigarette of the day. Then I shit; and drink more coffee. When my stomache starts to pang I am ready for the new day. I am ready for the overbearing brightness. I'm ready for the sharp immediacy. If it's a good day my stomache pangs all day. It's a good day and I forget to eat.

Fuck. I just smoked my last cigarette. And I spent my last dollar.

The day I learned that healthcare was a commodity I saw everything. Customer Service. 2008

The Sheriff was in Town with Border Patrol at Her Side

     I inquired about United Airlines flight itineraries through the bathroom-stall divider. "Damn, you're across the isle from me. That's okay, we'll ask someone to move."

     Two weathered-well looking females strut onto the plane, sunglasses everywhere; deep sunburns, one with a High Pomp the other with sparkling eyelids. 

     "Can I get either one of you to move to the other side?" with pleasant gusto. We were looming over two elderly people in seats 6A & 6D. Disgruntled nervous stares were the only response. They hadn't been prepared for confrontation. We, on the other hand, were wired for weird interface. Come out on top. Rows of boarded passengers behind them wathcing this confrontation; front row seat to the Showdown. The Sheriff was in town with border patrol at her side. They were watching in real-time two cocky cunts who weren't accepting any answers but the ones that worked best for them. Stuttered half-sentences were their best response. "Please, this is my sister who I never get to see." She gestured at me leaning over her shoulder with a toothy smile. "She lives in D.C." I lived in D.C if she needed me to just like she lived in L.A. if the story was right. 

     The elderly gentleman reluctantly creeped out of his seat and across the isle.
     "I don't know if he wants to sit next to me," grandma said to all of us, sneering.
     "I gaurantee you'd rather sit next to her than me." I grinned at the old man. We took our seats.
     An hour earlier we had talked our way out of two-hundred dollars worth of flight-change charges at the United ticketing counter.
     The flight attendent came through the isle after ascent. We ordered whiskey and lots of ice. The Southern California Sun was still bright as we took every last thing from it before we flew East across the country into night-time thunderstorms and I put my mirrored, rose-colored lenses over my red eyeballs. Then Ashley promised not to spill her drink on her seat-back tray-table this time.
     "Ashley, never take the first offer and stop apologizing." You never did anything wrong.

"Eat a good breakfast, you're gonna need it." (original) 2008

     "What did you learn, Crystal?" She asked me like a mother as she was getting into the Driver's seat. She had sunglasses on her head and a Red Bull in her hand. It was midnight in Los Angeles. "What did you learn?"

    "I don't know, Ashley. What did I learn?"

     We were en route to O'Connell's Pub for Cocktails. "Don't look people in the eye. Jeramy taught me that years ago." She said it with her head cocked the was that she cocks it with a Big-T.I.P. sensual smile. She lowered her shades to her eyes and we were off again down Pacific Coast Highway.

West Hollywood, I guess. 2008

     I remember ordering hamburgers on Santa Monica Blvd. Hamburger Habit I think it was. I had had too much Phentermine so I wasn't really hungry but Ashely told me that I needed to eat and i knew she was right. We split a hamburger. I remember the place was leaning. Ashley doesn't like leaning. She had something to say about it but I ignored her. I was high on pills and anticipation. We were sitting in plastic patio chairs and I liked that. Mexican burgers and patio chairs in West Hollywood. Holy Shit I was amped and the burger was good. When we ordered the burgers they gave us playing cards. The Troubadour was a couple blocks west. We had passed it earlier along with all the of losers in the Will-call line. We didn't stand in lines, though. We wanted hamburgers.

I'm hungry. 2009

     Normally I would not have eaten that cookie after it rolled across my kitchen floor but I was listening to old-OLD-soul gospel music and I didn't care anymore what it touched. I picked it up and put it in my mouth.

How do you know when The Casherman has a moment of clarity?

Copy of a message to Ashley Marie (my border patrol).

Ashley! I just had my first True mad max moment. It's three thirty in the morning and I was digging into the depths of my purse for I can't remember what and I found my travel-bottle of aerosol hairspray. I'm fucked-up but I still know it's hairspray only I have a verrrrrry overwhelming urge to spray it in my mouth like it was breath spray. I'm still resisting the urge. In fact, if I had a black and mild within my reach Right Now I would deffinately eat it.

"She has my name tattooed on her arm,"she tells everybody with that look. 2008

Setting: Coastal Motel, early into the night, saddleworn. Hot night, motel door propped open with upright fan. Windows open. There's a party in the rooms upstairs.

     (C) is lying on one bed talking on the phone. (A) is characteristically moving compulsively about. (A) pours a drink at the bedside table and carries it with her as she makes a round of the room and her luggage. She exits the bathroom with a proper stir stick. (T) is on the other end of the phone inquiring about our evening.

     "...and (A) is stirring her drink with her electric toothbrush." (C) says to (T); (A)now standing at the foot of the bed.

     (A) promptly corrected her, "I'm stirring Your drink with my electric toothbrush." 

     And then she made one for herself, too.

Dr. Ismail walked in without looking at first and then looked at me. "Wow. Your hair…" was the second thing he said after ‘Hi'. 01/2009

     Waiting for the nurse to take my blood I grew restless in the plastic chair and the table that was covered with a terry-cloth towel that had been taunting me which I had resisted for my own self-gratifying reasons but I eventually gave into just before I was bored with it and almost forgot about was fucked with speculums. 5,6,7 of them. Did they expect it to take that many on me? I smiled and held back my laugh. The sight of me peeking under the white towel like a fucking criminal made me laugh. Then she came in with a fat needle that I couldn't wait until she stuck into my arm so I could Feel it. I told her that 'they' usually have better luck on the left side. That's the side I wanted her to use. She put it in completely painlessly and I hated her and couldn't believe her for that. She was pregnant...highly. 

      Mrs. Butler told me that I could write an almost-run-on-sentence like a mad bastard but not quite in those words. I write stories as I tell them with a thousand almost-run-ons.

The Internet is telling me to ’Repent & Turn to God’. 2009

     "...If The Sheriff can take it like a Man!" Ashley taunts me with that fucking gap in her teeth. She knows what she wants me to do and she knows how to make me do it.

entaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCarRentaCa

Anticipation: 
    I turned with a smile that you couldn't beat out of me when I heard the back door open. Anticipating you I was disappointed. But the blues are playing now and my drink is finally filling me and finally now you are here. You came in the back as I was smoking out the front.
------------------------------------------------------------
"Excuse, me. Have you seen a girl who can't pay for her drink?"
"Yeah, she's sitting over there."
"I'll pay for her's and have one more of the same."
-------------------------------------------------------
     Before she found me she kicked through the bathroom door exclaiming my name like a drill sergeant--last name only. She kicked through the front door and then she found me--like a private I awaited her word.
"Drinking doesn't help," Russell told her. I don't trust him.

Down on River Road Thats How We Were. 2008

     Look at those two pieces of unrepentant white Iowa trash. Drinking beer in a busted jalopy down on River Road. Pissing in the grass in the middle of the daylight and listening to Lynard Skynard. Lets not forget the cheap cigars. They might be my heros. In fact, we were and that was the greatest day. We may as well have been a thousand miles away.

He hates her more than he's ever hated anything in his life 2009

     I will make you drink too much. I will make you stay up all night. I won't sleep and then I'll go to work. My eyes will be crazy. I will drive hard and if you want to get out it's up to you. You gotta say something because I probably won't ask. You better have a nonchalant demeaner when Johnny Law is in our window because I am The Sheriff. "Have you been drinking tonight?" And without missing a beat,"No." And he believed us. You better believe we are right. We have done no wrong. I want some amphetamines and I want to drive loud. A want a big machine. I want some fucking hot sauce. Because we are vibrating and we have beautiful eyes and we are everyone. And we walk tall and bound and rebound. And sometimes we have credit. We labor for the fun. We labor tall and proud. We walk tall and proud. I might be a grizzly bear and she is a lizard. She can grow a new tail. And he is a ghost or some kind of presence.
     You don't get that from being born. Oh, no you don't get that from being born Abby told me. With a hand on a jutted hip I am your instigator in snakeskin boots. Be there soon. And then Willie said, "Til I can gain some kind of control again." And I thought it was the best damned thing he could have said.