Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/12
June
11, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the
Generals Hate the A-10
Elaine
Cassel
Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's
Top Gremlin
David Lindorff
The Republican Drive to Eliminate Overtime Pay
Tom
Gorman
Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia: The Most Dangerous Place
on Earth for Trade Unionists
Nnimo
Bassey and Lawrence Bohlen
Bush Must Stop Telling Us What to
Eat!
Julie Hilden
Spike Lee v. Spike TV
CounterPunch
Wire
Blair Bros. Change Jobs!
Eric
Hobsbawm
The Empire Expands, Wider and Still
Wider
Steve
Perry
DHS: As Big
a Planning Snafu as Iraq?
June
10, 2003
Benjamin
Shepard
A Season in the Anti-War Movement
Chris
Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi
Germany
Wayne
Madsen
Weaponsgate
Jason Leopold
Powell's Denials Ring Hollow
Richard
Lichtman
Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World
Domination
Ray
Close
A CIA Analyst on Why the Lies About
WMD Matter
Hammond
Guthrie
Banking on Saddam?
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/10
June
9, 2003
Alex
Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!
Lee
Sustar
Is Iran Next?
Agustin
Velloso
Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many
Poor
Gila
Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
S. Ladah
A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
7 / 8, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
June
6, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Steve
Perry
Greens and
Moore in 04? No
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
June
14, 2003
Midnight at the Apocalyptic
Pancake
A
Novelini
By ADAM ENGEL
"...you must say the words, as long
as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange
pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already,
perhaps they have said me already...in the silence you don't
know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.
"Ah...fuck it."
The Dude, The Big Lebowski
Zarathustra's Dragons stormed the stage like Cro-Magnon
angels, a feral furry crew, too savage for Redemption, too innocent
to Fall. Where their hair ended and their clothes began was painful
to discern. The lead singer wore an ornamental bone through his
nose. A necklace of human teeth, plucked sentimentally, the press
releases claimed, from the jaws of one-night stands, hung to
his navel. The band looked like they had been used to scrub a
large, industrial kitchen.
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake.
The poet, Buxtehude, impatient for a
waitress, reached for my drink. The sting of Brain Death, the
house specialty, a heady maelstrom of herb juices and spirits,
put the light back in his eyes. The Dragons tuned their instruments,
producing sounds like claws on flint.
"I'm lonely. My little lady's left
me," whined the bard. "My woman dances for another."
"There, there," I consoled
as best I could. "Now, now. These things happen. Other fish
in the sea and all that."
Our balcony table overlooked The Pit,
a sunken dance floor nine feet deep, in which a hundred black-garbed
dancers writhed in mindless torsion, bare feet pounding furiously,
despite the conspicuous absence of ...music.
Buxtehude was as drunk and depressed
as I'd ever seen him.
When the tuning ceased, the dancers,
sensing the imminence of art-- or danger--
stopped briefly, and posed. Menace in
the silence. As if the next might be the last noise. As if the
Dragons had come not to entertain their audience, but bury them.
"I am become death..." whispered
the poet.
"Oh, good grief," I sighed.
At last the dark millennial minstrels,
invoking the powers that spin planets and bend light, commenced
to ditty:
"Eat the rich,
Lucretia!
Eat the rich,
With Ketchup!
But don't eat them all,
No, baby!
They're too high,
My Borgia!
In chol-es-ter-ol!"
"I remember her black negligee,
no larger than a kerchief," moped the poet, his voice tossed
like a sparrow in a gale of sound. "The way she'd scamper
across the kitchen on those infinitesimal white feet..."
Buxtehude was, like me, a year past thirty.
His Beethoven 'do evoked the lead gray chaos of a lake storm.
Like nearly everyone else at the Apocalyptic Pancake, he wore
black. The back of his leather jacket bore a meticulously detailed
portrait of Shelley, sporting open collar and wind-blown hair.
Instead of a quill pen, Buxtehude's Shelley held a smoking gun.
The bold red caption across the top of the jacket read "Don't
weep for Adonais..." Beneath the portrait were the words,
"...avenge him!"
"I can't live like you," said
Buxtehude. "Evading issues. Skirting time. A poet is supremely
mortal. He needs a warm body beside him, always. He needs communication.
He needs life."
I crushed an ice-cube with my teeth.
Buxtehude was an old acquaintance, and not a bad fellow, as fellows
went, but poets in general bored me to near catatonia. They made
me numb.
I sell antiques. The walls of my shop
offer photos of a brownish time when even the sun shone sepia
in a dull beige sky. Men in bowler hats and skin-tight vests,
their mustaches like clumps of bear fur bristling with ale; women
stuffed like sausages into dark, double-breasted bodices with
wide skirts and Italy-shaped shoes; quiet scenes bracketed by
leafy-looking frames of bronze and copper.
Among photographs and artifacts and my
elegantly coiffed and tailored clientele I feel most at home.
I do not like loud, angry music; superfluous drama; crowds.
I'd inherited the Time Capsule Antique
shop and the basement apartment beneath it from my maiden aunt,
Gertrude. Dirty Gerty-- she had her own particular, if not downright
peculiar, pleasures.
"People hate poets," Buxtehude
said.
I thought, "A poker face I haven't."
"People especially hate unpublished,
spoken-word poets. How many times in one life can a man abide
the phrase, 'Oh, why don't you just shut up?' Try to communicate
with people, try to reach some sort of accord, and they give
you, 'Oh, why don't you just shut up!' I won't stand for it much
longer. I won't be silenced!"
"But who's silencing you?"
I asked.
Buxtehude laughed, a harsh, empty cackle,
like the rattle of a penny in a can.
A waitress appeared. I bought another
round.
Buxtehude pointed to a table on the Lower
Level, about ten yards from the stage, and not far from the precipice
of The Pit. Around the table sat Bogvonian, the filmmaker, and
two, young, gray-suited lackeys. Bogvonian was an older man,
around sixty. He draped his girth in bright-colored silks. His
rings and bracelets glittered, dense with jewels. The shiny skin
stretched taut over his skull slackened to loose, thick folds
around his collar.
The filmmaker said something out of the
side of his mouth. The gray-suits nodded. He bit the foreskin
off of a cucumber-sized cheroot and searched his silks for fire.
The young men simultaneously extended Zippos.
"It's Bogvonian, the auteur!"
gasped Buxtehude. "He's come to study Kim. He's going to
film her!"
"Here?"
"If not here, wherever. It's inevitable.
He'll soak up every drop of her. Kim's image will be his."
"She must have quite an act,"
I said.
"It's why we're here."
"It's why you're here. Why am I?"
"To bear witness."
"Buxtehude," I yawned. "Why
do this to yourself?"
"I must suffer-- I mean, SEE HER.
I must see her."
The filmmaker's obvious contempt for
his surroundings caused him to expectorate a turd-sized wad of
phlegm. He whispered to his men, then poked the air as if to
tweak a passing fly.
When the Dragons finished their set,
he left his table and stood at the edge of The Pit, gazing indifferently
upon the young people who danced in silence. He flicked a cigar
ash over the tangle of damp, swaying bodies and returned to his
table to find that, in his absence, a waiter had heaped his plate
with salad. Zarathustra's Dragons exited behind a curtain.
"When I first met Tiny Kim, she
was working as a promo-girl for MamaBubba's Mini Donuts,"
the poet said. "They'd decked her in a tiny, chocolate-dipped
bikini. She wore bite-sized crullers round her ankles and a fried-dough
choker. Her hair was honey-glazed, her cheeks dusted with sugar.
She'd come to The City from out West, hoping to 'make it' as
an actress."
"Lemme guess. She only got 'bit'
parts," I said. "'Small' roles."
"Not even in the City of Cities
are there many leads for a woman two feet tall," Buxtehude
said with a straight face.
The poet had rescued the midget from
the sweet exploitations of MamaBubba.
"I took her into my home. I educated
her. I won her heart. Of course, I had to schmooze a little.
Who doesn't? I fed her a saucer of folderol about her being 'pith
personified, God's platinum blonde Haiku.' A tidbit of hyperbole,
an hors d'eorve. Anyway, I meant it at the time."
For months they lived the domestic life,
sponging frugally off of Buxtehude's modest inheritance. But
Kim felt she was made for bigger things, and when the time was
right, she pursued them.
"No one will love her like I loved
her," the poet wept. "No one will feel what I felt
when I rocked that tiny body in my lap."
I nodded mechanically. The poet turned
away. He screamed at a passing waitress for more Brain Death.
She gestured violently, and chastened, he implored.
A new band took the stage. The back-up
musicians of Tiny Kim. Thick, cotton-clad men with black shiny
hair down to their scapulae. They carried wooden Pan-pipes lashed
with gut and sinew and sundry instruments hewn from the flora
and fauna of Peru. They played: the cold breath of the Andes,
fermented in deep, Inca lungs and mellowed through cylinders
of ancient wood, lulled the audience to torpor, loosened eye-lids,
lips, nostrils like the vapors of a precious brandy.
"This music is likeable," I
said.
"They're from out of town,"
Buxtehude said. "Kim plucked them from the Classifieds.
The ink on their green-cards smears to the touch."
A mountain of humanity lumbered to the
stage, buck naked.
"Bruno has barely enough brains
to zip his fly," Buxtehude explained. "He worked in
the Recycling Plant, made his living smashing bottles against
a wall. After five years, he was still only an apprentice. Kim
hocked a leather bound Keats and a hard-cover Novalis to afford
him. I'd given her those books as gifts."
"Doesn't he realize where he is,
and that he's naked?"
"Irrelevant. The man's an idiot.
In previous versions of the act Kim had had him enter in a three-piece
suit. It took too long for him to free himself. His struggles
broke the rhythm of the dance."
Tiny Kim appeared, a pint of Aphrodite
scuttling across the stage. She danced her tiny dance with vigor.
The pace of the music accelerated; the pipers' bronze cheeks
glistened. She orbited Bruno like a moon, moving closer, closer,
until the music stopped and she stood, arms spread, before him,
wearing nothing but Jesus, who died, gnat-sized, on the copper
crucifix that dangled from her quadri-pierced left ear.
Bruno's monstrous member loomed above
her like the bald branch of a Red Wood. He lifted her in hands
the size of hubcaps. Even the most callous ruffians in the audience
gasped as he lowered her to his impossibly enormous bone.
The audience watched, fascinated, as
the muscle-bound behemoth, grunting in frustration, turned Kim
every which way in search of entry, attempting even to twist
her onto himself like a bottle-cap.
Finally, he set her down. Kim stepped
backward. As if on cue, the giant's ponderous erection lost its
wind, drooped earthward, hung limp, like a narcotized ferret,
from his loins.
Bruno, the Apprentice Bottle-Smasher,
lowered himself to his knees. Awkwardly, bearishly, he groped
for her.
He bellowed to the Heavens:
"Mmmmmlvbg....mlubd...mmluh...luh...luh...love!"
He nuzzled Kim's belly, and licked her
tiny triangle of pubis like a stamp.
"I've seen enough," I said.
"Let's get the fuck out of here."
"Not yet," said Buxtehude.
"I have things planned. It's not too late for me to DO."
Tiny Kim, having acknowledged the audience's
wild applause, allowed Bruno to lift her onto his shoulder. She
rode the giant down the steps of the stage and straight to Bogvonian's
table. At a nod from the filmmaker, the gray-suits rose from
their seats and bowed.
Kim's lips molded the word "sit."
Bruno, knees bent perpendicular, naked ass parallel to the floor,
made a chair of himself. The midget descended to his lap, pulling
a cigarette from behind his ear on the way down. Bogvonian lit
her smoke with the smoldering end of his cigar.
"I offered her, what, beauty, truth?"
said Buxtehude. "She opted for...image."
The former Bite-sized Cruller Queen reclined
against the giant's stomach, which was flat and steep and cut
with muscle like a grid.
"The...uh...CONTRAST between the
two of them is striking," I said.
"She doesn't really love the giant.
He's an idiot. She's using him to impress Bogvonian. She needed
an image, or rather, counter-image, worthy of the Master's lens.
She wants to be preserved, that's what's behind it all."
I sensed where the poet's talk was headed.
Perhaps I should have done something to stop it. But I knew from
experience that such manias as Buxtehude's must be allowed to
wind themselves to completion.
"I'm going to raise a commotion,"
he said, grimly. "I'm going to smite the giant, tear him
limb from limb. I'm going to carry Kim up to the stage and triumph
where that lumbering behemoth so miserably fucked up. I'm going
to earn my moments in amber, secure a place for myself in Bogvonian's
oeuvre. I'm going to-- "
Without warning, Zarathustra's Dragons
occupied the stage again and blitzed the Pancake with their second
set:
"Ain't got no love--
Baby!
Ain't got no love--
Baby!
Ain't got no love--
Baby!
Ain't got no love--
Baby!"
It all seemed so ridiculous, so unnecessary,
so...disappointing. One minute Buxtehude was pontificating across
from me, the next he was staggering across the beer-and-vomit-sticky
floor of the lower level, bumping into tables, pushing waiters,
waitresses and patrons from his path, until at last reaching
Bogvonian's table, he stood before the midget, arms akimbo, legs
apart, expectant.
Tiny Kim wrinkled her brow. She snuffed
her cigarette in the ashtray Bruno had made for her of his palm.
The poet launched into a tirade, waving his arms, stamping his
feet. Kim looked to the filmmaker for assistance.
Bogvonian rolled his fat cigar slowly
between nut-brown teeth and eyed the impassioned wordsmith with
distaste.
Buxtehude lifted the nude midget from
the giant's thigh-- not without her protest-- and set her on
the table beside a bottle of Bordeaux. He pummeled Bruno furiously,
cursing at the top of his lungs-- the music absorbed his every
syllable.
Though the poet's doughy fists could
hardly hurt the giant, Bruno's eyes churned huge tears which
tumbled bluely down the parking-lot-sized surface of his face.
He remained in position, like a marble couch, immovable, while
the midget pleaded with the filmmaker for action.
Bogvonian, mouth stuffed to capacity
with tobacco and escarole, nodded to his lackeys. They rose,
dabbed their lips with napkins, folded the napkins neatly on
their plates. Nostrils dilated, cheeks crimson with instant rage,
they converged upon the poet, who was now trying desperately
to strangle Bruno, his wiry arms enveloping the giant's tree-trunk
neck like vines.
"I should do something," I
thought. "But really. Truly. Honestly. What can I do?"
The gray-suits unclasped Buxtehude's
hands, twisted his skinny arms behind his back and pulled. The
pop of humeri wrenched from their sockets reverberated through
the Pancake, causing even the lead singer of Zarathustra's Dragons
to grimace, mid-lyric, and touch a finger to his heart.
Again the music sucked the life from
Buxtehude's screams. I stared down helplessly into the futile
darkness of the poet's mouth.
Swinging him by his long legs and stretched,
useless arms, the gray-suits, with a syncopated "Heave!
Ho! Heave!" tossed the poet high over The Pit. He hung for
agonizing nano-seconds before falling.
The disappearance of a human form into
the jungle of dancers, the spectacle of a body swallowed whole,
had its predictable effect upon the audience. Heads turned desperately
to Zarathustra's Dragons. The Apocalyptic Pancake became all
eyes, ears and mouths which pleaded for the band's electric succor.
Tiny Kim dabbed the giant's egg-sized
tears with the fringe of a silk cape proffered by Bogvonian.
Out of some vestigial sense of duty,
or more accurately, pity-- the weakness that had coaxed me to
the Pancake in the first place-- I descended to the lower level
and stood for almost an hour at the precipice of The Pit, searching
for a glimpse of Buxtehude, or Shelley, in the misty, churning
swamp of flesh, leather, cotton. But the crowd was so dense I
couldn't see the dancers' feet, much less what was under them,
and I resigned myself to never drinking or conversing with the
bard again.
Bogvonian's table was now empty. A busboy
peeled a partially eaten lettuce leaf from the filmmaker's plate
and slipped it into a small, clear plastic bag. A souvenir.
II
I navigated asphalt gullies of the City
under strips of navy sky, breathing, reluctantly, the dense air
of metropolis, cluttered as it was with particles of soot and
rot. I was impatient for daylight and watching customers stroll
among the escritoires and funnel-mouthed Victrolas; the cut-glass
bowls and crystal cabinets; the gadgets, knick-knacks and no-longer-relevant
machines; the musty detritus of strangers' lives.
I entered the Time Capsule Antique Shop,
and locked and bolted the door. I shook the City from my coat,
and descended to the basement.
Alone-- at last!-- in bed, I gazed upon
the bronze-framed photograph of the Flapper, circa 1922. She
wore a sleeveless frock; a string of pearls; stockings rolled
thickly at her knees. A glittering cloche hat capped her shingled
hair. She clamped a virgin cigarette between her teeth, head
turned opposite her outthrust hip, forever young and waiting
for a light.
The usual fantasy. It never changed:
she dances on a table top, wild under the stars, pearls orbiting
her pretty head like moons. I pull a lighter from my white flannel
suit and offer her a light and utter lush, erotic sentences inspired
by her gyrating buttocks and the boomerang contortions of her
limbs.
The faster she danced, the faster the
music played, the faster and harder I plunged myself into my
fist, until with genuine release, I gushed, and whispered "Love,"
and twisted my head against the white oak bed board, and stoically
experienced hiatus, landing. Not Romantic ecstasy, exactly, but
not all bad.
Afterward, the cooling, clammy goo. Oh,
and sunrise.
Adam Engel
probably needs to get away for a while. If you know anyplace
cheap but sunny and spacious, contact him at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Yesterday's Features
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|