FROM THE 3-DAY NOVEL CONTEST, LABOR DAY WEEKEND 2009 (c) All Images, Writing by Vance Feldman all rights reserved.
light on the horizon, I felt the cold metal of the door handle in my right hand. I knew the
sandblasted glass had a well balanced representation of wild bamboo stenciled on its
surface.
I wish I could go back to the day of stonecutters. I mean before these locals show
up to chisel Rocks for a retaining wall that faces these mute-colored yet glossy cars. They
are out there every morning at seven. Most of my neighbors are in their late twenties.
Many, I imagine are bartenders, hostesses or strippers.
They don?t like the noise this early. I stand on my porch, my back porch. It stands
up high overlooking a parking lot that has been empty for years. I get a kick out of it
when they tow the occasional car at one in the morning. They park in the lot and go to the
bar next door not realizing that the Sergeant?s Towing Company, LLC is lurking in the
dark backstreets, waiting for the next prey. Usually they illegally hitch-up the car and pull
it around the corner before popping the lock to tie down the steering wheel so the car
doesn?t wobble on the street. Now its full of dumptrucks.
?Why do you do it?? She asked me outside of the Lebanese joint. They had
fermented ketchup on every table. And it was far more delicious than Ho Ho?s. I ate at
Ho Ho?s Dollar Scoop maybe twice a week. They closed down so the new hangout was
in front of the Lebanese Place. Mere used to work in the shop a couple units down. She
must have increased their business at least threefold. I know I bought a Biscotti I really
had no intention of eating, many a time.
A month later I was browsing the Denver Post and noticed an article about the
shutdown of Ho Ho?s. Apparently my cohorts and I had regularly eaten a pound of cat the
entire semester. My cat was safe except he was missing the ability to ejaculate properly,
however he probably didn?t miss it.
It was ninety-eight degrees and one hundred percent humidity in Miami. I saw
Strato-Cumulus thunder clouds hovering offshore as the plane made its final descent. In
my arms was a computer the size of which nobody had the business of carrying on the
plane. We had spent 400 dollars on a sturdy Pelican travel case for the computer. But the
two combined would have ?strained the workers? backs.? I ended up carrying the
computer through security like some backwoods dipshit. The hotel was in the distance?
my arms were about to give out. I tried to set the bulky CPU case down on the sidewalk
gently, but it slipped and scratched the bottom handle.
I?m still not sure why this Santa was not sweaty. I did the control valve version of
a double-take. In full Santa garb, this man sat on a park bench, a green-painted steel park
bench in the concrete-laden strip of South Beach. Pillow on his stomach, boots on his feet
and a felty hat?yet not a single bead of sweat. I leaned down and kicked the computer
case up with the counterweight of my back. As soon as I cought it he sat up from his
drunken sun-drenched bliss and exclaimed,
?One Day!?
Chapter 3:
Saw Sparks
It was two hours until Dom?s dentist appointment. I had just embarrassingly hung
up the phone with my grandmother. I had suggested the entire family have a ?naked
party.? Immediately Dom slapped me with his left hand. ?Dude! What the fuckin?
Christ?? I hung up very quickly?in fact I don?t remember doing so.
I brushed that off and continued to hypnotize him with the fresnel lens from an
overhead projector. I suspended it from a wire, it was pinned to the wire with a large
black document paper clip. On the end of that wire was a dissected toy from my
childhood. I think the idea was to let the vibrator in the pen?s cavity, opposite of the tip,
take control of your creative juices and let the uninhibited mind make off with your
intellectual desire to filter most primal urge, to create.
But what fucking seven year old gives a shit about the higher level operations of
the brain, let alone care why their god damned pen was vibrating in the first place or why
the white girl on the television set convinced his mother to buy a vibrating piece of shit?
Nonetheless, this vibrating piece of shit made a damn good hypnotic device when
attached to a fresnel lens in front of a burning hippy candle. This vibrating purple pen had
one mission in life:
PREVENT DOM FROM GOING TO THE DENTIST AT ALL COSTS
Needless to say, getting hit square between the eyes with a brick-message not to see the
dentist?he didn?t.
This was the second known instance of a human becoming addicted to something
his body was unable to detect. The same thing happened about four billion years ago to
the earth. Just sparks between tiny rocks floating in space?these creatures were
completely undetectable by the simple inert compounds. Here in the sea of strong and
weak forces they escaped detection.
Just like the constant flow of lysergic acid supplied to this Dairy Queen sundae
attendant, the particles went undetected, yet the simple matter suddenly found itself in the
form of complex protein strains. These tiny yet indecipherably confusing carbon chains
ultimately prevented the dental work that was necessary from Being Performed.
The trucker that killed Mere flew to her service in Colorado from New Zealand.
So did ten villagers that only knew her for four days. So did Jane Fonda, though they
didn?t speak much.
All the way to Seaside we saw sparks in the power lines. This was a normal
phenomenon as the salinity in the coastal air made the water a great conductor of
electricity. Some forms of life make easy business of electricity. To them it is like early
man when he held up a rock and said to the beast with a stone in his hand:
I HAVE A FUCKING ROCK ON A STICK.
WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?
Cro-Magnon didn?t stand a chance against our most brutal ways. Jerod met a brutal fate
close to that of our friend Cro-Magnon. TO his parents he might have well been a chimp
swinging frokm the trees.
We were 12 and shared a bus stop. It picked us up at the grade school. Rainbow
letters with trails spelled, ?welcome!?, ?willkomen!? , ?ˇbienvenidos!?
?Why don?t you just smoke the whole cigarette?? Jerod had noticed my tendency to only
smoke half a cigarette and rub it out on the oak tree right before the bus came. His
demise was a swifter demise than I will take.
It was a Saturday morning. It was four AM. It was a cold Denver night. Jerod had
seen his time with the garden over. Like the Nude Saint, he sat motionless in the middle
of Interstate 70 just past the Purina Dog Chow Factory my grandfather wired for
electrical forty years prior.
This was the same horsemeat processing plant that used to emit the foul stench of
horse anus every morning?it drifted into our classroom. It was our coffee. Grandpa said,
?Yeah, after about ten minutes you don?t notice the smell anymore.?
I had to use what little of the valve I had left to see this for myself. It was four O
one AM. Jerod sat full lotus stark naked with a smile bigger tha?well, is it more
important how big the smile or how far the effects of the smile are felt? Anyhow, it was a
big fuckin? smile.
He was decapitated at four O four AM. In Mandarin the number four is a
homonym for death.
I?ve never been the same since my grandfather four.
OR
Yeah, take the elevator to the death floor, its room death-eleven.
My grandfather always said he was going to four. He did not speak or read a single word
of English. I called him Gong Gong. Always he said, ?Wo men de Jiu Cai shi tai lao.? He
said this to me while holding a knife. I eventually learned that what he was really saying
was that the Onion Grass in the yard was too old to make a tasty dish?it was worn out
from the season.
If I had known that when I was two, it would have made me sad. My mother
frantically rushed home. I was going to die. ?Ta Bu Chi Fan!? Screamed Gong Gong into
her phone. As far as she was concerned, I was diarrheic and not eating. Gong Gong had
gambled his life savings from General Cheng Kai-Shek?s campaign against Mao on
Mahjongg and Pool. He left my mom in an orphanage where they stole her shoes.
I found this notebook while doing a routine storage unit cleanout of an orange
Public Storage unit. I worked for GOT JUNK which is surprisingly not an
international heroin franchise. In this particular unit a story formed, almost too cohesively
for me to admit.
Clue One: the owner of this $6/month storage unit has defaulted for three years.
Clue Two: Yearbooks revealed an upstanding Christian youth in private school. Clue
Three: There was a plastic bong. Clue Four: There was a box of muscle building
magazines. Clue Five: There was a bench press in the corner. Clue Six: There were
pictures of him kissing other men. Clue Seven: There was a box full of estrogen and
shaping pantyhose.
Conclusion: An oppressed Christian boy discovered pot and henceforth
bodybuilding. The buildup of hormones made him homosexual and his Christian guilt
made him slit his wrists after he finally became a woman. Clue Eight: the opening page
of this notebook reads:
LIFE: The Expensive Opinion
DEATH: The Cheap Compliment
Unrelated Clue Drafted By The Gentleman Next To Me: Mysterious paper substance
found in dishwasher filter; and a sticky goo under faucet lip.
PLAY IT FULLSCREEN
