First Chapters

Chapter 1 AN ASSIMILATED AGENT

It was his feet that drew me, capturing my attention. The sheer size of those decrepit things held me at first glance though it’s no excuse for me following this odd, massive stranger through the streets of Pasadena for over an hour.

The evening started on a positive note as positive notes go, considering the frustration seizing me lately, twisting my innards the way a fierce breakup steals attention and doesn’t allow you to eat. Constipated uncertain energy had me twisted up knowing I needed to get the hell out of my grubby little depressing apartment, so I decided to take myself on a date. Of course I am more of a friend with benefits, hanging out with the knowledge I’ll get a little tug on my pug later, but lately my enthusiasm had begun to wane, with my feelings dwindling having no real love for myself.  

I find no difficulty in being creative, though the ecstatic high of completion arriving from my favorite drug no longer carries the same punch as it used to. Same goes for publishing or acknowledgements, none of which have ever come with money, translating to food, moving forward on the ultimate path to freedom from this daily fucking grind. 

To clarify, I am not under the belief death is stalking me, but I have this superimposed ache of juvenile propensity life cannot begin or continue until I reach some manor of success and yes I know how stupid that sounds, as stupid as my friends who won’t make a move without the perfect first note, or line to begin writing. Reminds me of people who want to give you advice on how best to play the lottery or raise children when they don’t have and have never won.

The ultimate goal is the same as all artists hope being self-sustaining, I believe more than acknowledgment. Then again I think of the screenwriter who got in Uber once confessing he makes a lot of money writing pilots that have never gotten picked up and therefore has never received any acknowledgement for his work. The idea then branches to two extremes do I wish to become a Steven King or Vincent Van Goth.

These are the thoughts worming through my head as I stalk this beast, what I think must be a man, through the streets of Pasadena.    

He is thirty yards ahead, galumphing along, but if he was fifty yards it wouldn’t have mattered. I could spot this giant in Times Square on New Year’s Eve but, all of this began in the contemplative compromising position of a bathroom toilet.

My date with my sexy self, began with dinner, sushi, which has the unforeseen catalytic effect of causing this narrative to be written. It wasn’t forty five minutes after eating before the unpleasant rumbling of bodily disagreement began to offer up squeamish protests from gut and bowel.

I found myself walking through the two story Borders Books on Lake Avenue letting my thoughts wander. I was getting to know me as a date while I relaxed with the idea of taking advantage of myself later on.

A fortunate bit of happenstance had a small concert being performed upstairs by a local singer, Sandy Pimpol, never heard of though I am a sucker for piano and I was lured by the sounds emanating from the black Baby Grand.

In the days before cell phones I always carried a notebook. Moleskin because it was eclectic and cool and I thought shit like that mattered. A thought came as Sandy played the piano, I wrote, “There once was a boy who lived with his mother, in a house, near some woods…”

Something brought the words but, no idea what or where it might have arrived from as is often the case with inspiration. I believe this is with most art. Artists are always artists and wherefore art in the cerebral cortex is found, the chemicals and colors of inspiration, come bursting, interact with the other to give birth to the unknown never before seen is a universal mystery… hopefully, never be solved.

I felt as if the line was the beginning of something, and wanted to continue. Waiting for it to lead me towards… but there was nothing at the moment… I have been living in a word of perpetual déjà vu lately, a part of, but mostly outside myself, curious and frustrated in wanton hope of a glimpse into the next chapter of my life.

I looked at the line again hoping for some inspired direction… but I was blank. It could be forced. Choose a direction and trudge ahead damning the consequences as well as the story. That can work and has at times, but there is something else, inherently creative, beautiful and spiritual about letting a story tell itself… Emotions that arrive when it happens are in fact better than sex, visceral and well beyond the physical, which sex can be at times, though it is rare, to be sure, but pure absolute creative inspiration is far and beyond anything physical or mundane.

I reread the line chewing on the words, seeing the boy, the house, the woods, sounding like a children’s story, which is strange as I don’t write children’s stories. They tend to darken and become twisted in the telling terrorizing my characters until something strikes.

It makes sense as lately I’ve been feeling as if something has been trying to come out of me and something about the line felt different as if it was coming from an elusive and strange place, moving with me, a singular cartoon entity in a flesh world, the child in me hungry with anticipation.

A college professor once explained there is a small percentage of the world which perceives the real world like a cartoon, believing everything around as something to be manipulated and changed as their determination and belief dictate. This conversation took place decades before Neo stepped out of the Matrix, and I was absolutely on board. When my professor asked me what I thought about it I replied, “Who says it can’t be?”

“Exactly,” he exclaimed, patting me on the shoulder and walking on.

I think the comment was in response to the enthusiasm and creativity I displayed in his classroom. Another professor once asked me out of the blue if I had traveled much. I hadn’t and when I told him so he said that I gave the distinct impression of someone who had traveled a great deal. I don’t know what that meant either. Both of these took place years before I even thought about writing. During this time I was an art major and not working nearly as hard as I write now. 

Bookstores had become my refuge of late and I entered Barns and Nobel, moving to the section to find my own among the volumes in my mind, rows of words stolen-bound.

I read like a fiend, another of my drugs of choice of you’re interested.

I passed the metaphysical section, many of which I had on my shelf at home, some of which I knew almost verbatim. I hadn’t read any of the new ones in a while as I have found many were beginning to sound rehashed, trite and overdone.  

I love good imagery in stories, bringing pictures to mind like movies. I love movies. I find it illuminating that individuals passed on from these moments have continued to live. Their essence has graced a bit of celluloid-digital immortality and it a wonder, strange I know but if some bit of them still remains. True death coming the last time you are spoken of or remembered. If beloved they could very well span the race of mankind.

In books, authors adopt images of individuals in phrase-photography, a real of the imagined creation of things and situations, which may or may not exist, though afterwards, the essence of it certainly must, that being in the readers mind. If thought is the basis of reality and on the page they are bound into minds, beyond the pages, into all those who read them.

Imagine ghosts, confined-incomplete, to a place. Holding never, the desire to be a figure in silhouette, spoken about from a detached voice, a never living ghost etched into a page of verse, written with or without, love or adoration by those who tell stories and emotions. Entities of ink-black phantoms, strewn about, running together over dead-leaves of parchment, never wanting to be sentenced to, life extended with a possibility of immortality, long after desires have flickered and life has passed. Shelves of rowed text, modern and old, filled with others who never asked, mingling among new creations spawned from old. A life borne, breathed by pen and type. Stories of private moments, real or imagined unveiled for the world to judge levels of discretion and decency from the now past. Held and cherished until death parts or a match struck, breaches four hundred fifty-one degrees of misery, violated by time. Then, once again, back to shelves to gather dust, lost, then remembered, to be forgotten, over and again… and again.

In Barns and Nobel, my stomach rolled with the meal I had consumed earlier in the evening and I decided I needed to use the restroom before I got a cup o’coffee or found a spot to settle into. There was a thick crowd and the upstairs had an audience watching a woman playing on a shiny, obsidian baby grand. She had a good voice and the piano was hot, so I held for a moment to take in the show. Dressed in black with a ‘Super S’ stenciled in gold on her t-shirt, said she was from Vegas and I pictured this girl as a lounge singer and wondered if Billy Joel once started like this, henna-blond piano woman, Zitto, thick with age, though she proclaimed she was possibly stunning while dropping hints of her enjoying a tickle on the ‘F’ key.

Around the bookstore the wanderers of note, are not the same audience found in a Vegas lounge. In this place I’m sure the microphone smells like old coffee, which saturates the surrounding shelves echoing the tragedies spun into her lyrics. Her persona has me finding her much more comfortable in a Broadway rock opera with Meatloaf and Bonnie Tyler than in this chain bookstore with ogling stares burning into at her ‘Super S’ churning in the caffeinated air of bebop. She spoke of her father as she played a song called “The Preacher” on the Baby Grand, echoing big glossy-black healing tones, with teeth of ivory and obsidian. In my current frustration I found myself wishing I knew her, before she was here, before she was Super, before she played music changing and saving lives, before she grew up, when she was just a girl.

I left in the applause, adjourning to the restroom where I found a short line and waited. The necessity of urinals in the men’s restroom notwithstanding, there is a sense of uneasiness when the urinals are vacant and there is a line waiting for the stalls, especially when you are in that line. There will be, unfortunately, no escape for you or them from the effect a hefty male sit-down could have on the space.

A friend of mine had a joke for moment when you know it’s brewing. He would curl his index finger beneath his thumb to his thumb like the sign for ‘okay’ or white power depending on your preference, then hold it to his nose with the tip filling the hole. “It’s like this, it’s like this.” He would announce to anyone around, waiting until it was time to adjourn to the toilet and “drop the kids off in the pool.”

His sense of humor always had several lines in that particular vein.

He stepped out of the bathroom looking distraught one day and told me, almost in a whisper, “Man I can’t believe those two are still together after all that shit.”

Store gossip always being a grand topic I curiously asked, “Who?”

“My ass cheeks,” he said chuckling as he walked away.

I have come to understand the twisting of the waist helps to get things moving sometimes as it causes the insides to shift and help things along. So one day while sitting in the break room he stepped in announcing, “It’s like this,” he said, his nose pushing through the okay sign.

“Hey.” I said. “Stand with your feet planted and bring your arms around to twist your waist as far as you can.”

He looked at me strangely for a moment, planted his feet and turned and without another word ran straight into the bathroom. 

​

​

Chapter 2 Thinker

The first glimpse I received of the man I am currently following was through the stall break while I stood waiting for my turn. He moved about in the largest stall which is supposed to be reserved for the handicapped, though rarely have I seen them used for that section of the population. I must admit if I have the choice I much prefer doing my business in the handicapped stalls because they are so big, much bigger than the little area where the toilet resides in my bathroom at home. In the big stalls a person can take time, remove their jacket, rather than bumping into the sometimes-untouchable walls of the smaller ones and have a real sit down if necessary.

The people before me in line stepped into the other two stalls as the occupants flushed and stepped out. I waited for the next one to become available which should have been the big one giving the timing of an average individuals business. I was hopeful, but even as I observed movement beyond the door he did not emerge. This effectually caused me even more frustration in my stomach as I mistakenly anticipated my relief coming soon. At one point I glimpsed the top of his salt and pepper head and I anticipated his height somewhere over six feet. 

I must say at this point I had not seen the man’s feet, and I wish to discourage any sort of fetishism on my part, but as I imagined the shoes in the other two stalls, patiently handling their business my mind went to Saturday Night Live for some reason.

There was a skit in a men’s restroom. It showed men’s shoes in the stalls and suddenly they broke out into an acapella rendition of “Under the Boardwalk.” The shoes in all the stalls tapped in time to the chorus except the lead singer whose loafers danced and bopped as the lyrics were sung backed up by the other shoes… It was a funny skit and I smiled now realizing how nonsense it was, of course comedy doesn’t have to make sense, in fact it’s sometimes better if it doesn’t. 

I waited.

The shoes in the middle stall moved, shuffled a bit, flushed, then stepped out, no eye contact of course as he passed and I entered, prepared and sat, thinking about nothing in particular other than my current matter of business, the pain in my stomach and a fuzzy feeling in my head. I read the words scratched into the walls, not graffiti exactly and not the indecipherable wingdings font scrawl of tagging. This stuff was at least readable.  

“Fuck the war.” someone had written.

Below it, a response, “Fuck you I was in the war, WWII, sometimes it’s necessary.”

I find bathroom walls indirectly reflecting the environment and intelligence level of the location they are found. Bookstores for example having a higher literacy record compared to other places like hardware stores, gas stations or malls, with racial epitaphs, gang signs, tags and affiliations.

“In life we dread the thought of death. Perhaps it is that in death we dread the thought of life,” was written in red on the other wall. Yes, environment and education must have something to do with it.

“He is the way and the light, only through him will you be saved.” Response: “If you see him could you have him give me a call.” Another: “This search is yours.” And finally: “Hey I think I found him, look down.”

I heard movement in the handicapped stall followed by a deep grunt and then, the foot stepped into view.

The foot.

The biggest I have ever seen or imagined was held by a few famous basketball players’ whose shoe sizes are on display in a many native sports shrines which I have had the misfortune of wasting many hours in. This one dwarfed them all. It was wrapped in a large black sandal, but the appendage was so wide it spilled around the edges and the base had been squeezed into a puffy cushion of skin framing it with stretch marks as if it were threatening to burst. The owner of the thing must therefore be extremely heavy I surmised. If this had been the only curiosity I would have returned to my business without another thought, but the toes of this ginormous paw were the most interesting of all.             

The big toe of the mammoth pad was like a sausage. It started early and reached out beyond the others and past the tip of the sandal to curl beneath the next toe and a portion of the other. By my word if that failed to strike me on some way, the other toes did it. Each was quite long and knurled with thick nails that reached out and curled down, almost… as one might imagine a claw. Ideally it had no business displaying itself in a sandal of any type, but it thoroughly escaped me as to what shoe would encase such a foot. I was suddenly struck by the image of it not belonging to a man, but some sort of troglodytian creature like the Morlocks from Wells’ Time Machine. It was then I decided I needed to see what a person with a foot like that looked like.  

I doubled my efforts to finish my business which was no small task, my straining causing a headache with the added fear of passing out or causing an aneurysm. The foot moved. The stall door opened and it stepped out. I heard the sink turn on for a moment, before going off. I quickly wiped, buckled my pants making certain I don’t accidentally zip myself into another painful rendition of Something about Mary. Thankfully the drone of the hand dryer said the person was still occupied.

I stepped out.

Chapter 3 Mongo

The man, if I can use the word and not offend him, was two, perhaps three of me wide. He stood, gently rubbing his hands beneath the dryer in textbook fashion, though what air could make it around those manacles I could not tell. The hands were the size of baseball mitts and one could have easily swallowed my entire head. There was no way I could reach the sink as he blocked most of the counter, so I waited, giving him a good once-over. The hair on the back of my neck rose when I looked up, well over six feet, into a face on a head the size of mountain car tire. Calmly he stood rubbing his hands together as he turned around his shoulder to stare down at me through intense narrow slits. I froze, locking eyes with him in that moment before the dryer shut off and he moved.

I jumped, realizing I had been staring. He took a hunched shuffled step away from the dryer and towards he door and wondered for a brief moment how he was going to get through the door. Not only that, but how the hell had he gotten in here in the first place being wider than the door itself. It didn’t occur to me at that moment and would be almost a half hour later when I noticed the strange hunched squatted position he walked in and if he stood fully upright, his standing height would have him towering somewhere very beyond eight or nine feet. I splashed some water on my hands and chased out the door after him. 

Out in the bookstore, I watched as the big man slowly meandered down the aisles through the crowd of people. Strangely, no one took any notice of him at all. Now, I am not one to stare at the malformed, dwarfed, downs or in this case gigantic, but this person was unlike anyone I have ever seen in my entire life and I’m quite certain no one in the store had ever seen anyone like him either. Therefore, a glimpse, or some sort of double take would be warranted in this case, but it wasn’t to be. He simply made his way down the aisles to the front door and exited without stop or notice.      

I am not certain why exactly I decided at this point to follow him. Curiosity was certainly a factor and an easy term to use, but it was something else. Something overcame me, an unqualified silent driven hunger. No explanation. I had to follow, if only to continue observing, perhaps learning more about this being than my current perceptions, which had him stepping from the pages of horror classics, strange tales and circus legend. He was not homeless, of that I was positive. His clothes though extremely large were clean with no foul scent of the city’s undertow. Other than the hunched stature of this gargantuan “Mr. Hyde,” he could have been any person’s grandfather with a bad back and a touch of scoliosis.    

I burst out onto the street, my rush through the bookstore garnering more looks from the patrons than even he did. Outside I was shocked again to see the same reaction by everyone he passed. It was as if the world had been raised in Barnum’s circus and witnessed individuals like this every day.

Ahead of me he turned onto another street. I stalked closer to keep an eye on him and it was at this point I I began to question my own sanity.

Sanity, based on perception, determined only by a given point of view. Whereas everyday people make thousands of decisions in an effort to keep themselves sane, ignore the urge to say “fuck it all,” hop on a plane, away from life, check out, or simply lose it in a person who irritates you, attacking and smashing their little obtuse grin until they will grin no more. Sexual fantasies and urges normal and strange. Road raging your car into some stupid asshole who desperately deserves it.

People who sit on benches talking to lampposts and buildings do not question their reality. The neighbors who believe you’re a prick for some obscure reason are also living in a world of their own point of view. Perhaps the aneurysm brought this on and I snapped. Perhaps I’m passed out in the toilet right now imagining all of this while waiting for my body to be discovered. Or maybe people like this have existed my entire life and for some obscure reason I never noticed them before.

I was just beginning to dread the obvious, that the man before me didn’t exist at all and I was just chasing a figment of my imagination, then it happened. He bumped into someone.

The man he bumped into stumbled backwards. Who wouldn’t, colliding with a six-hundred pound Hulk out for a stroll? There became simply no expression on the man’s face when he turned to look up at what it was that bumped into him. He said something I couldn’t hear, probably “excuse me” and walked on. By the time I passed by him, the man was stone faced and unaware. This left me with the knowledge I was not following my imagination and to finalize my belief, I took a pinch of skin on my arm, squeezed and twisted until I felt the pain was sufficient enough I knew it wasn’t imagined.

This must be real.

Half a block was the only distance I allowed between us, any closer he might take notice, turn and confront me, which honestly terrified me. But, if I allowed any greater distance I feared I might lose him.   

The streets, crowded at first, thinned as the area became less and less familiar. The buildings became more decrepit and rundown, even the people began to… look? No… feel different is a better description, though I was uncertain exactly what the difference was. The shadows began to feel ominous. Every person I passed had me uneasy as if I was not welcome. Nothing held any familiarity any longer and I wondered how I was going to find my way back. With all the twists and turns I hoped I didn’t have a reason to make a quick escape, because now I was getting stared at rather than the big man who, one would assume, was much more of an oddity than I.

He turned down another street and when I stepped around the corner I stopped. It was completely deserted and the air itself felt very wrong somehow. I began to follow and stopped again. There were no cars and no trees and barely any lights. He was almost halfway down the street, but if he turned around there would be no place to hide. The irrational obsession, which had possessed me for, I checked my watch, almost an hour was not going to be abandoned now. I walked a bit down the street then jutted across quickly advancing as I did so, to keep him in sight. A small group of women dressed for the “evening” were milling on a stoop. And they all saw me.

From the looks on their faces my first reaction was to run. My skin began to crawl with a consuming fear as if I was illegally trespassing in someone else’s property, and was about to be reported. The women looked away pretending not to notice. All but one. I hadn’t noticed her standing at the top of the stoop. She was almost completely hidden in shadow and the dim light seemed to help her blend with the building’s column. She was extremely tall and anorexic thin. The light colored sheer cloth she wore, blended with her pasty skin and blond hair camouflaging her against the wall of the building, but when she stepped from the shadows her eyes were focused directly on me.

I shrunk.

Her skin was death. Fragile and taunt like rubber stretched to its absolute limit. All the women looked like this, greasy and pale thin with too much make up and wrong body types slinking beneath lingerie as mannequins in a horror show come to life. She stepped out and our eyes locked, her eyes going suddenly with shock as if she recognized an intruder. She opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing and I decided to take my chances with the big man, re-crossing the street, not wanting to actually pass close by the women on the stoop. I looked back twice to see the woman was still watching me, in silent accusatory terror.

Chapter 4 A Less Traveled Verge

I find it a strange justification, though I was secretly following this man, I felt safer going where he went rather than traversing the strange streets I had never been down before as some sort of reluctant chaperone. Not that he would protect me from what I had come to believe would be an almost certain demise. These streets were not like regular streets and these people were not like regular people.

What exactly was I thinking? I asked myself, and that’s when I realized, I wasn’t thinking right now. I was reacting instinctually, driven. The same instinct which lead me an hour away from my car, outside of familiar areas and now had me walking in some part of the city that, at the moment, I would equate with some of the rougher more undesirable neighborhoods. Perhaps the big man knew this and I was being lured into some sort of ominous trap.

I was far too close now and I watched as he turned again, this time into the pitch dark of an alley. Did he glance at me? I thought I saw him glance at me when he did so… I’m being paranoid.  

I slowed my step and looked back again to the stoop to see if the tall lady was still staring at me. The stoop was deserted now, leaving only the dim porch light illuminating it. I was utterly alone and the street became suddenly very large. I approached the alley where the big man had gone and when I looked down it, the darkness refused to recede. There was a light at the very end and I believed I saw the big mans hunched movement, but I was uncertain. There was no turning back at this point. I had no idea where I was and glancing behind me again I realized how utterly alien the street looked to me. The streetlamps themselves did not shine, but only released a sort of half-assed glow into the air like gas. The few houses with even fewer porch lights nestled in an eerie foreign wilderness like that of a horror movie and everything was alive with its own unnatural anima. And at that moment I knew the very street, the houses, even the streetlights were aware of my presence and were watching me. And as I stared down the street aware of it aware of me, everything suddenly changed.

In the military when soldiers sneak up on someone from behind, they are trained to watch their target’s ankles, not to stare at their back or the back of their head because the target will sense someone staring at them and turn. Just as the blind can sense when there is another person in the room, I no longer sensed the street living. The street… was alive. The trees, the plants and buildings themselves suddenly awoke. Nothing moved mind you, but in that moment I never stood in a more alien environment in my life.

I looked down the pitch-black alley again and could now easily see the big man near the end where the only light shown, but the light too had begun to dull. I panicked, glancing back at the street only for a moment to see many of the lights had now gone dim or been swallowed by the darkness altogether. A few now only appeared as flickering candles in dim black. On the street a breeze started like the moan of breath and I felt my hairs stand on end.

And I ran.

The alley swallowed me as if filled with a thin black soup. Ever try to spank a dog that already knows it’s in trouble and running away? It drops its tale and tucks its ass underneath itself in an effort to evade the strike, sometimes they yelp even if there is no contact, sensing how very close it was. That was me now.

I felt the dark saturating me like a cold humidity slowing my pace and sticking to my skin and somehow I knew there was no longer any separation between alley and street. Animate and inanimate were now one and everything was alive. In the light at the end I saw the big man turn left and the moment he was out of sight I felt the walls began to collapse and I wasn’t even halfway through.

I found another gear, lungs burning thighs cramping as my body half ran half swam through the soupy darkness with another revelation. I was in somethings throat. The wind was not wind, but breath or was I was running so fast it was becoming warm I couldn’t tell any longer. My only thought was reaching the light. I was almost at the end when my tail dropped for the second time and I believe I yelped because the warm wind was now coming from behind me. I couldn’t stop or look back to the enormous tongue and teeth coming for me. I thought of diving through the entrance, but instead, pushed harder to beat the light still fading in front of me and I shot out of the alley across the sidewalk and into the street. Breathing heavy and taking a moment to catch my breath and terrified of looking back to see what might suddenly come bursting out of the alley in pursuit.

Two doors down, people had turned to stare at me. There were four tables out in front of a little café that… I scanned the area to get my bearings, looking for the big man who was nowhere to be found. The street went on a few more doors, but he couldn’t have gotten that far and besides, I was back… I recognized this area.

A horn suddenly blared and I jumped. A car had stopped behind me rather than run me over. I gave an apologetic wave and moved to the sidewalk with a sheepish grin avoiding the alley and a waved the car by. I knew this area, at least I thought I did. The name on the awning read Pantheons. I did know this place, but I couldn’t have traveled this far in all this time. It had been an hour.  I wasn’t so completely twisted I had misread the streets and traveled only a few blocks in a circle, had I?