Saturday, May 29, 2004

From 100 Words, April 2004

April 2, 2004
My left hand smells like your perfume. I have no clue why. I wash it five or six times a day. But when I sink my head into my palm, there’s that goddamn aroma again. I can’t sit still. I get up and pace, up and down the L car. I’ve been torn to hamburger by this unreciprocated crush. It turned on me like a demoralized guard dog. I don’t know when I’ll see you again. When we share oxygen, I’m happy. When you’re out of sight, I smell you everywhere. Your cigarettes, your sex, and that maddening girly perfume.

April 3, 2004
Punk Kid is clearly fucked up on something. Punk Kid asks if he can come over to Ripped Hose Girl’s place. Ripped Hose Girl believes this would be awkward. Punk Kid addresses Pink Fishnets. Pink Fishnets: “Just because we talked at the bus stop doesn’t mean we have to keep the conversation going.” Punk Kid offers Pink Fishnets 20 bucks if she’ll let him sniff her feet. She accepts. Punk Kid: “Sooo bad… meaning good.” Pink Fishnets offers the 20 back if Punk Kid will use her foot as a phone. Punk Kid accepts. “Hello?” The bus stops. They scatter.

April 5, 2004
“IF IT CAME TO THAT.” I’d strip down, turn the shower on full tilt and place the gun on the soapdish. I’d crank up the hot water, steamy as I wanted it. I’d feel it soak in my hair and skin, hear it hit the floor. Stand there and ponder. Let it blast my face and rinse out my eyes. Fog up the mirror. Steam up this li’l houseboat cabin apartment. Stand there until my fingertips shriveled. Until the hot water ran out. Then pick up the gun and stick the barrel in my mouth. Maybe puke out the memories.

April 12, 2004
I met Little John at the Village Tap. He described, to an audience of three or four, the Donut Game. Something he did in the navy. A group of enlisted men would jerk off toward a donut, and the last one to cum would eat the donut. I saw him again on the train the next day, tweaked out of his skull, headed for a drug test. He said I looked like I needed a vacation. Gave me a brochure for a hostel in Boulder. Told me to tell them I know Little John, the Russian Jew from the navy.

April 22, 2004
You seem like you’re worn a bit thin. Tired. Disconnected. You’re yawning a lot. Yawning more than talking. Outside of your aggressive flirtation with the smug bartender, you don’t seem invested in anything. You give me the balance of your last beer. I walk you to your car. Then I walk back over the bridge. I have some more beer at my neighborhood tavern. When it closes, the barkeep and I hit two 4 AM joints. I’m pants-pissing drunk, ranting and rambling. I wish you were here. You’re gone. I amble home, prepare some food, and puke my guts out.

-Emerson Dameron

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Decades of Debauchery & the Human Animal

by Steve Kostecke

I made it once again unscathed on my motorbike through the irrational, messy, dismemberment-just-waiting-to-happen traffic of Chiang Mai and showered the day’s sweat and grime off me. I wanted nothing but a peaceful night. A couple stiff drinks, a recent VCD release, and maybe even half a tab of xanax, if not feeling mellow enough near sacktime. I’d had far too full-on of an eve the night before—involving the typical bar-hopping, binge drinking, bar-girl macking that this city makes possible any night you wish—and knew I had to take things down a couple notches tonight. The cycle of insanity-sanity-insanity needed an ebb.

But then the phone rang.

“Yo,” I answered.

“Kid,” I heard through the static of a cell phone. It was Rusty.

“Yeah.”

“Come meet me at Jon’s Bistro,” his worn-out voice cracked. “I got something I guarantee you will not believe.”

“Be right there.”

I’m easily swayed.

I hopped back on my bike and followed the moat around the Old City to Taa Pae Gate, the main tourist ghetto. Considering that darkness had just recently descended, the nightlife was coming alive. Strings of Christmas lights were flashing in front of dim-lit front-wall-less bars; in some bars were pool tables, middle-aged foreign men drinking beers and shooting pool with bargirls half their age; the boom-boom-boom of the go-go bars vibrated into the ears. It was the beginning of yet another night on the east side of town. To the tourists—the sex tourists—it was oh-wow-yeah-ho! To me, all the sex for sale, all the sleaziness, all the patheticness: I was barely even aware of it anymore.

I found Rusty at a wooden table in front of Jon’s, amongst an archipelago of tables, many of them occupied by aging men and tiny tawny-skinned Thai girls. This atmosphere was Rusty’s natural habitat. He was in his late sixties—bald, with a dirty gray beard, plus facial skin that looked both acid-burnt and gauged with a chisel—and had been debauching himself since his discharge from Nam however many years ago.

What sparked his mode of life, as far as I could tell, was that Rusty had gotten married soon after his discharge to a Thai girl who, once he bought their house (in her name, since foreigners couldn’t own land), divorced him. She then sold the house, pocketed the cash, and ran off. Rusty never heard of her again. One result of this, he has never had an unpaid-for “relationship” ever since. A second: he’s hasn’t gone a night without drinking, either. These things—Nam, the cheap whores, the endless booze—they all twisted him into one hell of a piece of rot. I would have had nothing to do with him myself if I was not so personally terrified of ending up like him—and studied him to figure out how not to live my life.

“Rust,” I nodded as I joined him at his table.

“Get a goddamn beer,” he told me in his raspy, destroyed voice. Two empty big bottles sat in the middle of the table. He was clearly on his way.

A waitress had followed me to the table and was standing next to us. I told her one big beer Singh. Rusty told her sweet ass. She gave a forced laugh.

“So you got me to weave my bike through death-sweetly-smiling all the way round the moat to meet you here. What’s next?”

“You and the goddamn traffic,” he crackled. “Would you give it a rest?”

“Some of us care if we get dismembered.”

“You get dismembered, you don’t gotta pay your student loans,” Rusty stated.

“Some of us care if we die,” I re-attempted.

“You die, you won’t be able to care.”

My beer arrived and the waitress filled my glass. I drank it half-down gazing at Rusty. Then I spoke: “You make it all seem so win-win.”

“Better than your loser attitude.”

I drank the rest of the glass.

“So what’s with the paper?” I asked. Rusty had that day’s The Nation folded open to a section in front of him on the table.

“Listen to this,” he triumphed, as if I had said the exact correct thing. He lifted the paper up and recited: “TEACHER DIES SUDDENLY.” He stopped and glared at me. We were both teachers, both teaching at the same cheesy language school.

“Someone we know?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you staring at me?”

“Just listen...”

He read the article to me slowly, not necessarily for effect, but since that was about as fast as he could read on two-and-a-half big beers and in dim light: “Police suspect heart failure caused the death of an American English teacher who died in a hotel room with a 19-year-old prostitute in Chiang Mai early yesterday.”

“Who—who?”

“Relax. I’m getting to that… Louis Walters, 44, a lecturer at Bangkok University, was found dead in a room of Golden City Hotel in the Old City district at about 3am.”

“Golden City Hotel. Where’s that?”

Rusty cracked into a grin.

“Right behind you, Kid.”

It was true. Right next to Jon’s Bistro, in the southward direction, was the Golden City Hotel. I had never noticed it before. Chiang Mai has over a hundred hotels and guesthouses, and my braincells only so much interest.

Police said they found heart medicine and three Viagra pills in the room.”

“Again,” I gasped. “It’s amazing how many times that’s happened here now. You’d think these guys would understand that heart meds and Viagra do not mix.”

“The guy was just 44,” Rusty grumbled. “He probably thought the warning was for other guys, older guys, like how we all think warnings are for other guys.”

“Could be. But you know how when you enter Malaysia, they’ve got that big sign that says: WARNING, DRUG TRAFFICKING MAY LEAD TO DEATH? They oughta have one of those signs in Thailand saying: WARNING, HEART MEDS PLUS VIAGRA MAY LEAD TO DEATH. After all, this is the Brothel to the World, as you know.”

Rusty scowled at me. “You finished?”

“Yep.”

They said he had taken the girl from a go-go opposite the hotel.”

I twisted my head back to the Golden City Hotel; then I twisted it to where “opposite” might be. This led my eyes directly across the lane from us. Cozy Corner. Two scantily-clad girls were sitting on tall stools on both sides of the opened door, waiting to greet customers. Inside, I could detect the motions of girls standing on stage and writhing their hips, which was reflected along the wall of mirrors.

“Ho god,” I said and had to laugh. “A nineteen-year-old from Cozy.”

There were three go-go bars in Chiang Mai, Cozy Corner being the worst. Back in the days before the “Social Order” reforms—when the girls could go topless or completely naked—it had been the second best, with a special plastic shower box above the stage where two girls bathed together while the dancers did the Siam Shuffle beneath them. Now, with the morality crackdown of the past year, the place had become transformed. Without the shower show, the quantity of customers had significantly decreased; and soon after that, the quality of the dancers.

Lt-Colonel Something-Something of the Chiang Mai police station quoted the girl as saying that the American collapsed on top of her. His body was sent to Chiang Mai Hospital for an autopsy.”

“Right on top of her?”

“With his dick still stuck in her,” Rusty delineated.

“That’s awful.”

“Awful? The numbnuts! He mixes meds and dies while fucking some cheap whore, and it gets printed in the newspapers with his full name and where he works? This guy has got to be a candidate for Joke of the Year.”

I killed another halfglass of beer and slowly shook my head.

“Think what it must have been like for the girl,” I ventured.

“Fuck the girl!”

“No really. Think what bad luck that must be to her. The spirits and bad karma and all that. I bet she truly must feel herself cursed.”

Rusty put the paper down and leaned in towards me: “Cursed or not, if her ass is good enough to send some schmuck to his grave, I gotta have me a piece of that.”

Realization came crashing down on me.

“Is that what this is all about?” I asked.

Rusty grinned snakily and took a large swig from his glass.

“I got no idea why I hang with you,” I told him.

“What would I do without you, Kid?”

Rusty and his “Kid” stuff. Always acting like I was some kind of surrogate son. Maybe I was, but in a sick twisted way. Maybe in reality the one thing Rusty would want to do to a real son was send him to hell in a handbasket. That was most certainly what he wanted to do to me. Believe that.

“You got me,” I admitted. “I do want to see who it is.”

“Let’s do this.”

We called the waitress over and paid the tab. Rusty grabbed her ass. She force-laughed again. Then we sauntered across the lane to Cozy Corner. The two sexy girls sitting on the stools smiled cutely, put their palms together and wai-ed to us in unison as we passed between. You have to love that: we’re foreigners entering into an establishment where men pick girls by the numbers attached to their thongs and then pay to have sex with them, and we get the most culturally polite greeting possible in Thai culture.

The customers in Cozy Corner were, as usual these days, sparse. An elderly pigfat man with thick glasses was nursing a drink while a girl pressing up beside him was stroking the crotch of his slacks. She had a drink: a two-dollar “lady drink,” good enough to get a man caressed in various fashions for at least fifteen minutes. A couple of touristy-looking guys were seated together along the edge of the stage, their heads resting on there hands, seeming bored, or maybe just quite drunk. There certainly wasn’t much to look at on stage. Since the shower show days collapsed, Cozy seemed to attract the highest percentage of post-30 single mothers. The stomachs sagged; the faces looked grim; there was a general sensation of this being one of the two armpits of the world.

We sat stage-side. A waitress brought us drinks, but none of the girls came over and forced themselves on us. I knew why: Rusty had already forced half of them to have sex with him, and he was a sadistic fucker. He bragged to me as much as possible about the ways he could make the girls cry. That seemed to be his biggest thrill in existence: making little girls cry. It frequently involved nonconsensual backdoor action. Or maybe I should just call it anal rape. The girls knew to stay as far away from him as possible. The only way he was able to secure one of them—and I had seen this securement several times—was by grabbing the mamasan and shoving money in her face and telling her which number he wanted. Being what places like Cozy Corner truly are once you’ve torn through the illusion-layers—cages of sex slavery—the mamasan, with that cash in hand, would order the girl to go.

Finally a girl sat down next to me, on the far side from Rusty. We did the usual of what’s-your-name, where-you-from, how-old-are-you. Her nickname was in Thai was Gaew, or Crystal in English, and she was thirty. Definitely not the girl from the newspaper article. I bought her a lady drink and engaged in the usual bar-girl small-talk. Basically, I was waiting for my chance—the proper mood—to ask her who the girl was in the article. I knew that bringing the topic up would be considered bad luck to Crystal and thus culturally rude. I wanted to gently ease it in. Eventually the mood seemed right.

--I heard a story about Cozy, I told her.

--What story? Crystal asked.

--About a girl that works here, and about the Golden City Hotel.

She gave me a reprehensible look like: you bad boy!

--Why do you ask me about that?!

--I didn’t ask anything yet, I answered.

--Why do you talk to me about that?!

--You want another lady drink?

--Yes.

Crystal quickly shot up and marched away to order it. She was wearing a pair of black short-shorts, high heels, and a type of tight black tube top. Human interaction of this sort is always so weird. I glugged from my beer bottle.

“Any luck, Kid?” Rusty inquired.

I shook my head.

“I feel like a Fed paying off an informant.”

“Because that’s what you fucking are.”

“Well I bought her the first drink—you’re paying for the second.”

“Only if you find that killer ass.”

Crystal strutted back with a small plastic cup of soda. She sat down next to me and crossed her legs. Then she looked at me seriously.

--You want to know which girl it was? she told me more than asked.

--Yes.

--That one, she said and pointed to a girl on stage.

I had not noticed the girl before because there was not much to notice. Her general sadness fit in too well with the bar. She was standing on stage in her black bikini-esque go-go outfit, grasping a brass pole and wriggling her body hypnotically to the music. She was short, definitely looked young, but also definitely looked Central Asian.

--She’s Hill Tribe, isn’t she?

--Akha, Crystal informed me.

This was extra bad for the girl. She was selling her body to stinking fat foreign men, plus she was living in a country where her race of people were, at best, treated as outcasts. She was nineteen with nothing.

--She probably thinks she has very bad luck, I said. (The word I used for “very bad luck” had more of a cultural undertone of “bad spiritual luck affecting the future of this life and maybe even the shape of the life to come”.)

--She went to the temple and made merit.

--She’s Buddhist?

--A little, Crystal told me, whatever exactly that meant.

--So she doesn’t have to worry now, right? I tried.

--She still worries.

Rusty nudged me suddenly.

“You find out, or what?”

“It’s that girl on stage.”

“That little Karenni bitch?”

“She’s Akha.”

“Like it fucking matters, Kid,” Rusty groaned.

At this moment I realized that I should not have told him. But it was too late. Rusty snapped his fingers at the mamasan—a rotund, meanspirited-looking woman standing along the wall of mirrors behind us—and she stepped towards him, fully frowning. Rusty pulled two 1000 baht bills out of his pocket and thrust them at her. The money equaled about fifty bucks, more than enough for the total cost of “short time.” Rusty knew he had to pay more than enough; he was in no way being generous. (Rusty was incapable of such an emotion.) He had already argued with this mamasan about the price he had to pay at Cozy Corner long ago. There was no need to utter any words. Just thrust the money at her and point. The mamasan looked at where he pointed—the sad Akha girl—and smiled back. When mamasans like this mamasan smile, it’s sheer evil expressed.

At the end of the girl’s set, mamasan approached the Akha girl and informed her of whose lap to sit on and act happy. This the girl did. She sat on Rusty’s lap and he immediately slid his hands up under her top and squeezed her small breasts and laughed his sand-papery eery-assed chortle. The Akha girl pretended that this was okay with her. After all, he had already paid in full for her: everything to come was forced without choice. For the next two to three hours she would have to earn her $25 (assuming that the mamasan kept half of what he gave her, more than she should) in the most humanly degrading method possible.

Feeling depressed, and having served my “purpose,” I told Rusty I was leaving.

“What? The fun’s just beginning,” he rejoiced, pulling the Akha girl’s top down and exposing her tiny maroon-nippled breasts to me. “See?”

“Good-bye everyone,” I announced and stood up.

“Fine, be that way,” Rusty spat. “Just meet me back at Jon’s tomorrow at noon.”

“You got it.”

I left. At least the traffic wasn’t bad now, since the three hours of rush hour were finally over. I was able to ride my motorbike at ease, freely.

Next day at noon I coasted back to Jon’s Bistro and found Rusty sitting at a table out front again. It was Saturday, noon, thus he was already on big beer number two. He was the only one sitting out in the islands of tables. Not even any bar-girls had reported to work yet. But Rusty looked particularly happy.

“So,” I said, while joining him at the table. “Looks like you’re still alive.”

“Ho yeah,” Rusty answered, barely able to keep back laughs. “That bitch didn’t kill me, that’s for sure.”

“Was the ass as good as you thought?”

Rusty broke out into his rough, phlegm-clogged laughter.

“Listen to this, Kid,” he said, leaning in, and all excited about what he was about to relate. “I took that Hill Tribe whore to the Golden City Hotel…”

“Oh man. You didn’t.”

“Fuck yes I did. Where else were we supposed to go?”

“What did she say?”

“Say? You’re talking like these bitches have the right to say anything.”

“My mistake.”

“The damned thing was, I couldn’t ask the clerk which room that putz croaked in, since the girl was right there with me. I didn’t want her to know that I knew. But it would’ve been much better if I’d gotten that room.”

I didn’t understand exactly why, but was too uneasy to ask.

“Go on,” I said.

“Get a god damned beer,” Rusty told me.

“Is there even a waitress here?”

“No, I’m sitting at a closed bar, and brought my own.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” I told him.

Rusty broke out into raspy laughter. He was in one hell of a good mood.

“It’s too early for me to drink,” I said. “Just talk.”

“Aw, fuck you.” Rusty pounded his glass of brew. Then he creepily chortled again. I was getting a very bad feeling now. “So I get the bitch in the room and we do the usual. She showers, I shower, I shove my cock in her mouth, roll a rubber on, mount her ass…”

“These are far more visuals than I need.”

“Geh cheh guh chuh!” Rusty gurgled.

“Is this all going somewhere I need to go?” I enquired.

Rusty settled down. “Just fucking listen, Kid… I get on top of the bitch and start fucking her the way she needs to be fucked, and I’m fucking her and fucking her and fucking her… And finally I get to the part where I blow my load and I yell out as loud as I can and…” Rusty started choking on his phlegm with laughs. “And…”

“And?” I said, with mocking, bored tone.

“And I close my fucking eyes and collapse on her!”

“What?”

“Kid, get it? I fucking die right on top of her!”

This was the realm of anti-funny.

“You did not,” was all I could say.

“Of course I fucking did! What do you think this was all about?”

He kept choking on laughs.

“I die right on top of her… Eyes closed, arms stiff, holding back my breaths, cock still inside her, crushing her beneath me.”

“And what did she do?”

“It’s the best part, Kid. The very best… She actually believes that she’s killed me! I’m not looking at her, but I hear her scream and she pushes me off of her… And I just lay there like a beached whale on the bed. I’m totally fucking dead!”

Rusty broke out into so much laughter at this point, that I thought he actually was going to keel over. But unfortunately that did not happen.

He gathered himself up to continue. Tears were streaming from his eyes.

“So I’m totally dead, and she starts pushing my body like I’m gonna wake up, but I’m not gonna wake up… I hear her scream again and then she starts breathing really hard, like I’ve never heard any girl breath so hard… She keeps pushing me and pushing me and trying to turn my body over, but I’m not letting her…She does this for like five full minutes… Then all the sudden she stops pushing me, she gives up, and I don’t know what she’s doing since I’m keeping my eyes so closed, so dead and all… But I keep hearing her breathing hard and having these really big heaves, like the deepest heaves you can imagine… And I still got no idea what she’s doing, but I can hear her right next to the bed… Then…” Rusty cracked up in uncontrollable laughter again. He was beside himself with glee. “Then I countdown in my head: Three, two, one… And BAMM! I flip my eyes wide open and stick my arm out and point at her and start laughing as loud as I can… And the little bitch, she’s crouched there on the floor next to the bed—you know, crouched like over a squatter—and she’s got her two hands over her ears, and there’s so many tears going down her face that her make-up is running all over place, just a total fucking mess… But Kid, I tell you, not ever in my whole life have I seen so much pain and terror on a girl’s face… I, I…”

Rusty couldn’t go on. He had about as many tears of joy streaming down his face as that girl must have had tears of terror.

“I think that’s enough, Rust,” I suggested.

“It’s not e-fucking-nough!” he shot back. “It’s never e-fucking-nough with these bitches!”

“Isn’t forcing it in the backdoor enough?”

“Oh no… No siree… This mind-fuck stuff is gold.”

I didn’t bother saying anything.

“Just let me finish, Kid. Just let me fucking finish.”

“Nobody’s stopping you.”

“That’s right they’re fucking not!”

Again I didn’t bother saying anything. Rusty continued:

“I open my eyes and point and laugh at her, and she screams… Not like she’s scared, or like she thinks I’ve come back to life, but like she can’t take the misery of… I don’t know… Everything… And then she jumps up, grabs her handbag and clothing, and runs out of the room with nothing on!”

Rusty cackled and choked so hard he couldn’t speak another intelligible syllable for the next three minutes. I ended up ordering a beer. As I drank it, and as Rusty retold the story to me, furthering every detail—me just being an echo board for him to bounce his story off of, to hear him speak it to his own ear—I drifted off on a tangent, contemplating about what horrible thing I must have done wrong in my previous life, or maybe even in this one, to have ever come across someone like Rusty, let alone allowing myself to have become, how could I say this, his “friend.”


[WARNING: GUYS LIKE RUSTY ACTUALLY EXIST IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.]










Sunday, May 23, 2004

The Stain

by Patrick King (fiction)

VII
And then on the loudspeaker: "All Crawlworms with any stains on their formal dinner jackets must exit the Cathedral at once, through or not through the sliding glass doors."

I waited for any sign. The corridors of the Cathedral were long and winding. To see these things! Strange wormish creatures known only in the Cathedral corridors. To mine eyes be seen only that I might see......and throughout.

VIII

Hickle accompanies me again. True, the bastard doesn't like it. The trick is to make him think he's getting something out of it. But Nick Greek is out running about the town looking for acid and Hickle and I sit outside his apartments digging on the craziness. What does Hickle think he's getting out of this? The stupid redneck thinks there's going to be women and a party and a whole big deal going on at Nick's apartment when he comes back with the acid. Me: Just in need of company. Any will do, Hickle, any will do.

Lorna Road. Hoover. They call the place Little Mexico. Good reason for it. Great truckloads of Mexicans laboring for the day and coming back to their apartment for some tequila and beer and a joint and coke. Not my scene, man, though I used to live in the very same apartment complex as Nick Greek.

And the pebble being thrown at my head.

"When's this dude coming back?" Hickle says.

"Hickle," I say, "fuck you. And fuck you. And by the way, fuck you."

"Fuck you," he says.

I can feel a doomsday cloud. The panic is coming.
That last post

was by ULAer Wred Fright.

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Stolen from the mountains of Africa and trained for spaceflight in The Soviet Union, Yuri Gorilla was just another godless communist animal cosmonaut in a diaper until a freak accident sent him crashing into the fertile fields of Ohio USA, now he makes the starways safe for The American Dream as Astronaut Urine Gorilla!

Bob Socha Presents another thriller of a gorilla story rescued from top secret government files, only in the 21st Century can the truth be told, the moon landing wasn’t faked but it wasn’t one small step for man, it was just all in a day’s work for . .
Astronaut Urine Gorilla in The Return Of The Mullet Maguires!
by Wred Fright

April 12, 1961. Florida.
The gorilla sits in his cage in Hangar S watching television. The show about the dog is his favorite but it isn’t on so the gorilla shuts off the tv, bends the bars of his cage, slips out, ambles down the corridor, grunts at the six chimps he shares quarters with, and climbs into the Mercury space capsule in the next room.
He is ready for bed, all comfy in the narrow but cozy confines of the spacewomb. He settles in and looks out the window, through the skylight, up into the stars. For a mountain gorilla, the only place higher is space.
There is a commotion. The chimps are chattering. The gorilla hears the screeching of human voices.
“Fooking A! It fooking stinks back here! Don’t these whitecoat sumbitches ever wash out the rectal thermometers after they’re done sticking ’em in the apes?” the first voice says.
“It ain’t that. It’s the chimps. They shet everywhere,” the second voice says.
“You’d think that if they could teach these fooking things to run a Mercury capsule, they could teach them how to use the fooking toilet!” the first voice says.
“I’ll show the gorilla tonight while we’re at the bar and tell him to show the chimps,” the second voice says.
The gorilla pokes his head out of the Mercury capsule and looks down the corridor. Two astronauts are looking at his cage.
“Fook! Where’d he go?” the first astronaut says.
“I knew he was a commie spy!” the second astronaut says.
“How can he be a communist? He’s a fooking gorilla!”
“That ape’s smarter than he lets on. Don’t let him fool you.”
The gorilla climbs out of the capsule and drags knuckles up the corridor. Maybe the astronauts bring bananas or Cosmic Cola.
“There he is!”
“Be careful, I don’t care what they say, even if he’s not a pinko, he’s still a wild animal. Look at those arms, he’ll tear you apart.”
“Fooking-A! I’d kick his ass! Anyway, he wants to be my pal, right buddy?”
The first astronaut bends down and sticks out his hand. The gorilla sniffs it.
No bananas.
“Anyway, good for him he busted out of his cage, shet, we were going to sneak him out anyway,” the first astronaut says, “Sumbitch went all the way up into space to test a rocket for us and they don’t even give him a parade. Shet, that Ham chimp at least got his picture in the papers.”
“That’s because the gorilla’s top secret, pudknocker!” the second astronaut says.
“Well, I don’t understand why. Shet, we got Nazis building our rockets, who’s gonna get their pecker enflamed over a Russkie ape,” the first astronaut says, adding in a bad German accent, “Heil Kennedy! I vant to do more tests! Send up the gorilla!”
“Let’s just get him outside before I remember what a dumb idea this is,” the second astronaut says.

A gorilla walks into a bar . . . “And he’s not even drunk yet,” the first astronaut, now wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, says to the bartender, “Better start him off slow, just give him a shot of rocket fuel and a beer.”
The gorilla follows the astronaut back to the table where five other astronauts sit, also all wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts.
“Where’s Glenn?” one of the astronauts says.
“Probably crying in his pillow, or running a few laps,” another astronaut says.
“It’s not like him to miss a seance though.”
“He disapproved of the location.”
“And our special guest.”
“There he is.”
“He looks like he’s in pain.”
“He’s probably never seen so many blastoffbimbos in one place before.”
“If he got laid, he’d be more fun to be around.”
“If he got drunk, he’d be more fun to be around.”
“Hey, at least he doesn’t smell like piss like our special guest.”
“Spill some beer on him, then he’ll smell like the rest of the place.”
The last astronaut strolls up, wearing a jacket and tie, “Hi fellows! The bartender wants to know if we want one of those newfangled pizzas and I said I’d take it up with you.”
“You’re drinking?” an astronaut says, pointing at a mug in the new arrival’s hand.
“Root beer. Now I propose a vote on pizza as our first order of business.”
The gorilla hoots.
“I’ll take that as affirmative, and roger that to the bartender,” the newcomer says as he heads back to the bar.
“Whew! I thought he was gonna have another shetfit and start preaching again.”
“It’s the news, it’s gotta be the news.”
“I can’t believe that it’s Wednesday, and the first man in space is a goshdarn commie.”
“Hey, we’ll get up there, our boy Urine Gorilla just proved that.”
“Who gives a shit? It’s fooking over. The Russkies beat us.”
“Ah, it’s like a relay race, they just won the first leg.”
“Quite a relay, all the way around the world.”
“Well, technically, it wasn’t an orbit as he landed 200 miles west of where he took off.”
“That’s some fooking small consolation.”
“And he landed on the ground too, we’re going to be floating like a beachball in some fooking water. Nice bunch of rocket scientists we got!”
“That’s because they’re all Nazis. Didn’t the brightboys in the Army think maybe they lost the big one for a reason?”
“Nah, they’re all right. Apple pie and sauerkraut now.”
“Tell that kraut we don’t need any more tests, if the gorilla could do it, I can do it, just stick a candle up my ass and send me up.”
“They’ve been sweating our balls off trying to get things done. At least the gorilla showed the Kennedy administration we can do it.”
“I hope they don’t shut us down now that the Russians beat us.”
“Beat us? Don’t worry about the Russians, we’ll kick their ass, still.”
“Fookin’ A, we will! Yuri Gagarin can kiss my red, white, and blue ass!”
“Yuri?” the gorilla says.
“Did that ape just say something?’
“Never mind, check out Johnboy, he’s having to fight off some blastoffbimbos.”
“Those aren’t Star Whores; those are those commie motorcyclists again!”
“Dudes, they’re not communists; they’re just like beatnik bikers!”
“Shet, I don’t care what they are; I’m going to kick their ass!”
The last astronaut says, “I’ll take that up with the other fellows,” and wanders over with a pizza.
Upon reaching the table, he says, “Say, those fellows over there seem to be a bit unpatriotic and challenged us to a race. Since we lost the one in space, they said. Normally I don’t approve of drag racing but I think those fellows need knocked down a peg or two.”

Outside, on the beach, a biker with long hair and a leather jacket with a shamrock on it revs the engine on his bike. Next to him, an astronaut sits in his Triumph with the gorilla riding shotgun. A girl in a bikini waves a flag while a group of German scientists clink glasses and sing Bavarian drinking songs.
“Get a haircut, pinko! Real men wear crewcuts! You look like a girl. An ugly girl!” the astronaut says to the biker.
“We told you that we’d return and we have, you spam in a cans will rue the day that you interfered with the Mullet Maguires!” the biker sneers back.
“You miserable pudknocker!”
“Yeah, when some boys in Akron wanted a raise they made you visit the factory and talk a lot of nonsense about how important the space race was to our country, you guys are nothing but lapdogs for the military-industrial complex. We got problems down here we need the money for like improving your horrible fashion sense! That shirt you’re wearing makes my eyes hurt!”
“I’m going to kick your ass, fooking yeah!”
“If you guys are so tough, why’d you send the monkey up first?”
“Your little bike’s going to go kaputnik when you face off against my wheels. Can’t take my Triumph baby!”
The flag drops and so does the top of the flagdropper’s bikini. Engines roar down the beach, sand flies, crocodiles run for cover as the race is on.
The gorilla sticks his head out the window and hoots. He climbs onto the roof and surfs. The crowd goes wild and a rock band starts playing surf music through electrical amplification. Oh no, a hapless drunk rocket scientist has wandered in the path of the race! The gorilla hops onto the bike’s handlebars and with his amazing agility and strength snatches up the scientist before he wipesout daddy-o!
“Vat ist dis?!” the scientist shouts as the gorilla tosses him safely into the ocean.
Sobered by the near disaster, tempers and engines cool and the race is forgotten.
A beach party breaks out as rocket scientists, Mullet Maguires, blastoffbimbos, astronauts, and even the bartender play the bongos and have a cookout. The gorilla wonders why it couldn’t have been this way from the start. What’s wrong with these humans? Why the needless conflict?

After his fifth pizza, the gorilla goes for a walk with the buxom flagdropper.
“Four down, three to go!” her friend says.
“Do you think she’ll make it with an ape?” another blastoffbimbo wonders.
“King Kong, baby! He had a thing for blondes too!” an astronaut says and they dance to the rock and roll band under the moon tonight.
The flagdropper holds the gorilla by the arm when it’s quiet and they stroll along the beach in the moonlight. “I like you, you’re quiet,” she says, “Some of those other astronauts are real full of themselves and never stop talking about how great they are.”
The gorilla grunts and looks up at the stars. He remembers Yuri and is happy he made it up there and back. Why are the astronauts mad at Yuri? They don’t even know him. He’s a nice guy. He used to give him bananas. “Space is infinite, isn’t there enough for everyone?” the gorilla says aloud.
“Oh my Gawd, you just talked. I can’t believe it. You’re a guy in a gorilla costume, aren’t you?” the flagdropper says, “That’s the gonest. You had us all fooled.”
The gorilla pisses in the ocean after hot monkey love. Maybe these humans weren’t so bad after all.

Lakewood, Ohio USA 20 December 2002

Thursday, May 20, 2004

The Stain

by Patrick King

(fiction)

I

To be young and talented, yeah, that's what it's all about. Or what it would be about. Or, actually, what it would be about if I was talented. Other people are all about being young and talented, because, well, they are. But me: just young.

Saturday morning on a park bench and I swear that she's being raped by the devil. He's got his big red cock inside her from behind. He's grabbing her ass as she hangs onto the swing post for dear life.

But is the devil real or is it the girl? Or are either of them real? I realize that this is strange, but I really don't know. Been up all night eating acid. My friends drank beer instead. Passed out long ago. And here I am at the park. Saw a sunrise, though. Ain't often I see a sun rise. But the devil-Jesus Christ, he's really wigging me out.

II
I entered the Cathedral not quite sure where I was going or why I was there. I let the spirit of the place guide me along. At that moment the only thing I could think of was becoming a swinger-marrying some beautiful chick and settling down and having all the sex I wanted to on the side. There was something reassuring about a crazy scene like that as I walked along the corridors of God's palace. Enter here and forever fuck and be fucked. Kingdom come. Let no man forget carnal desire in the house of the lord. At the moment I looked through the stained-glass window and the light shining through and knew that the light was God himself looking at me. In the name of the father. In the name of the mother. Go onward from my castle and sin again.
III
Even still, I'm always Danny Sullivan. I'm always going to walk through these Southern streets and look on toward the silly people and their silly lives-the peace activists holding a rally near the fountain in Five Points. The counter-protesters holding up their signs. "We support the troops," they say. And the protesters with their signs that say "No blood for oil." Mob vs mob as I walk by and smoke a cigarette and dig on the entire scene. No, no buttons or signs or bumper stickers for me, thanks. The world can go to hell for all I care. But as long as I have cigarettes and chicks, I'll be just fine.

IV
Sure, you're right. I used to be sober. Kicked the booze and the drugs and started going to school. But there's where the problem was. See, it's well known that one can not at the same time be a twenty-something college boy and sober. I share a dorm with Scott Hickle. From out in the sticks. Guntersville, I think. Decent guy, I suppose. Maybe not. Once he told me a story about his ex and how he caught her cheating on him. Or so he thought. The guy was leaving his girlfriend's apartment just as Scott was pulling up. Did it matter to Scott that the guy was leaving in a cable van? No. He smacked her around anyway. And now he lives in the dorm. With me.

Bastard loves to drink, though. And I like to drink, swallow or smoke just about anything. So we get along on a superficial level.

V

It's also true that I'm a rapist. Never convicted but a rapist just the same. I was married. Young and stupid and married. And on a binge. I came home and I took it out on her. I never saw or heard from her again except through lawyers.

An incident like that-something that turns you into a raging monster-you carry with you for the rest of your life. If you have a shred of decency in your body, then the guilt and the sadness will drive you nearly insane. Yeah, but what of it? Death is always following, his sweet, soft hands around your throat. And to live: Yes, that's the thing to do. Just live.

So I quit drinking and borrowed some money from my folks and went to Europe for a while.

VI

Among other things God told me in the Cathedral: Go to school and smoke cigarettes and remember the Sabbath. Fuck often and with gusto. Never mind the voices in your head.

I sat through mass. Be with me now, I chanted under my breath. Be with me now and now and don't forsake me. A church. A bell in the distance. A bell overhead as I sat outside the Cathedral long after mass had ended. Just to feel the sweet palm of death on my neck and sit on a spot in a place an ocean away from the land I call home. This world is madness. And only the mad are in love.

******************************************

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

On Movies
By Pat King

Forget that the studios have controlled the movie industry since movies have existed. Forget that this won't change. Forget that, for the most part, "independent film" simply means "produced by a smaller studio."

This is a new century and we're hungry. We're hungry for movies written and shot for this new generation, by the starving, angry artists who produce movies not with large piles of money but within the slim budget of their wallets and savings accounts (and credit cards...). We're hungry for art and literature in films that come from the streets of America and the world.

And we're doing it too. We're using old camcorders, digital and or not. We're using super-8 equipment found in yard sales and thrift stores.

And I say: Make movies on film and video. Make silent movies and sound movies and movies featuring the Los Angeles yodeling choir. Make movies about you and the movies that speak to you and movies that speak to no one. Buy an expensive computer and edit on Final Cut. Edit with VCRs. Cut film and put it back together. Or don't edit at all.

Have dancing and violence and sex, yes, plenty of sex. Have love and war and atom bombs and reptilian eyes. Have greed. Make art.

And make movies.
A New Direction

For this blog. I'm going to put a bunch of my creative writing as well as essays and writing from other ULA members up on this blog. Frankly, being a news guy bothers me, and I haven't been that good at it. So, today I'm posting a rant I wrote on DIY movies. Tomorrow, a short story of mine and Friday I'll post excerpts from Bill Blackolive's newest Last Laugh zine. Hope you dig the new direction this thing's going.

Friday, May 14, 2004

The ULA Store

One should think of the ULA as a fledgling little store opened for business on the main street in town. The "products" inside are underground writers and artists. Our goal is to get them attention. Considering that we're competing against giant department stores further down the block, we haven't done a bad job of getting the word out about our operation.

Our "store" is run like a standard anarchist co-op. All we ask from the writers we seek to promote is that they help out with some of the work!

The trick, nowadays, in marketing anything-- even artists-- is, first, that you have a well-read web site, and thanks to the publicity we've received, we do. Second, that if you can't afford ads in major publications, that you receive free publicity. We've done well at that also.

Would any writers NOT want people to find out about them and their work? Would this be the case in other fields? Would a rock band insist, "No, we don't want any publicity? We're content to play only for ourselves in our basement or garage"? The idea is ludicrous.

We have a lot of talented writers already part of our cooperative group. Check them out!

-King Wenclas

Thursday, May 13, 2004

The proof of the ULA's viability is the hysterical reaction to its very presence.

People read things into it that aren't there. They also show a vast misunderstanding of the nature of our society and our culture.

What we are is a voluntary association, open to anyone willing to support it, whose purpose is to get attention for overlooked writers and artists. Is this bad? Media is power in this country. Those who control the media, or have access to it, have leverage to get their ideas and talent into the mainstream of society. I believe that every artist ultimately desires an audience. The ULA is pursuing one way, one strategy, to find or create said audience. There are other ways, and people are welcome to pursue them.

-King Wenclas
Hi all! This is my first post to a blog. Apparently it's a big scene somehow. I understand it little. But here goes! Thanks, Pat, for putting up this one for the ULA. So here's my news:

I just launched a massive campaign at Amazon on behalf of the ULA. I put up the last two issues of "Slush Pile" along with Pat's latest "Cathedral" (not fully up yet there).

Everyone here MUST understand Amazon and most probably post reviews there, but offhand it seems like few realize its potential for uplifting or FOCUSING attention on indy literature. I declare this to be chicken.

All we have to do is post reviews and make lists and homepages there that mention the *ULA*, zines and indy lit, and I daresay we'll have the NYC scene running scared. --Especially if a dozen people each put up a dozen reviews---pro or con, about anything---mentioning the ULA. You can even sneak in the ULA's url. We'd be in like Flynn.

Ya know, they don't seem to let you sign your actual name. They've deleted mine a couple times. But they let you show your email and homepage.

Anyway, Amazon is a HUGE forum. Where we can freely approach today's lords and masters and challenge their work and what they're doing. And where we can promote whatever we like.

It also now offers 3 lit-zines. I do believe the ULA is the first lit-zine on that block. And basically one of the only zines there. (All anyone has to do is know a small press person and they're in.)

--Jeff Potter ULAer and publisher of OutYourBackdoor.com

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

The value

of the horror/sci-fi anthology, The Urban Bizarre seems to be dropping....Frank Marcopolos is offering copies free on his website The Whirligig.com with the purchase of a three dollar zine. Hey, why not? I dig the zine. Just don't expect too much from the anthology, though. My overpriced hardback copy is collecting dust on my bookshelf right now, after reading just a couple of the stories. A formerly talented writer, Anne Sterzinger, wrote a completely juvenile story with a predictable ending. But that was a highlight compared to some of the other stories......still, it's free and The Whirligig, for the most part, stands out as an exceptional literary zine.