~eight rooms. lchristopher.

i remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet/giving me head on the unmade bed as the limousines wait in the street. but those were the reasons and that was New York

~author photo taken by the author, badly. in his WC before his entire world became SK’s 1408.

***EIGHT ROOMS. LCHRISTOPHER***

I have only fifty minutes and we are just about out of time.

That is the beginning and the end. The middle is easier, for it is now, and we are the
inbetweens.

***

Listen to me:

The first room was green and trimmed in white oil lacquer, on the Longest Island, New York State, 11790. When I think of how it began, in 1978, it is amazing to me now.
He thinks to himself: I was learning how to read when she herself had just been
born. Lupus. Wolf scars. When she cut her face on fingernails and wouldn’t stop crying
for hours. They found her years later, next to the bathtub, writing in French upon the bone white tile in her own dark blood.

What did you say?

Her room was green, on the Longest Island, New York State. She had painted it at
the age of fourteen. Six years before we were to meet, she was covering her walls with latex and primer and fill. This room, all worlds, was green. Rooms of emerald and time.
He was born in a hospital, thick blue walls, gold lettering. The town was Passaic,
NJ. The Native Americans who christened it slept on the riverbanks that would become industrial chemical spillpans and used-car lots.

Charlie Nod used to walk down the semi-urban streets that had been glossed over in sheets of slippery grey ice, holding her bagels to his chest to keep the creamed cheese from freezing. It was not the time of the year when the sun was quite just up, yet. The stationery store had been built on an island of garbage and concrete. And the fountain downtown was drowning in itself, its pipes had long since burst from the onslaught of black ice and snow.

Charles’s hair was trimmed close to his head and sheathed in a nightwatchman’s cap he had found in a gutter whilst walking home. It was swollen with rainwater and as opaque as a cataract. He thinks to himself now as he smokes a cigarette on the slowly decaying porch, weighed down by a hundred hyacinth blossoms: I was a polymath in her eyes, but I was blue collar then. I liked how her skin tasted of close readings.

The white throated Decemberist. Jane had written that once. It was a cull, a slip of
the local socialist newspaper, a scrap torn from the poetry section. He nailed it to her door. Before they attended they went off to work, they had lived off of the turnpike - near the industry and the gaslights, the constant smells of turpentine and methane. Like fiery jack o'lanterns, and she has written that too. Jane has notebooks. All of their covers are red and blue, the paint spackled to the cardboard, the ink drying on the pages. Everything they do has been recorded. From the suppers they cook to the places she shaves, to words whisked behind paper curtains in the middle of the night. There are shouts from the sidewalk outside 53 Morrell Street. Tin pans and blackened spoons litter the alley. All of their nights together are that tarnished silver color. It is a busy street outside, and the neighbors play their car stereos loud enough to rattle the windowpanes. Jane wakes in fits and starts these nights. 

“Shh,” Charles tells her. “It’s all right. We’re still here. Go to sleep.” And she does, her snores light and delicate; her fine brown eyes flirting with the REM there, letting themselves be hurried away.

She had left him for the first time in 1997. It was a beautiful day outside. She was
crying and I asked her why and she turned, her eyes bright and whole and wet and said: “There are hundreds of offices to be filled. Don’t let me go. Please.” But he was poor and therefore did not understand.

He dreams that he is on a train to the South of France. He is hanging onto the
flatcar tarpaulin. The snow is piled man-high over the steel rails. The year is 1948 and the Germans have been routed; there is still the sweet smell of pork overhanging Poland and summary executions everywhere, everywhere. A girl is thrown from the steam engine as it rounds a curved bend of track. The girl is torn loose, her ringlets are inbetween the days - black. Her coat is torn and blue. The color tears a hole in the white night. He lets go. He stands out against the white like holly berries smeared across the canvas. He can’t find her and the black curls of ebony lace are burning their way up to Northern Russia without him. 

He awakes sweating in bed, Jane’s arm curled fast around him. “It’s almost time for work, love,” she tells him. He is glad to go. He fixes himself an apple and a cup of warm cider, belting his ten-year old chinos to his skinny frame. She has pressed them for him, not because it was expected of her, but because she knew that all presentation is important. Outside is a river of frozen asphalt and gas stations burned out for the insurance money; Jane slips her stockings on and lights him a cigarette. They pass it back and forth until the digital alarm reads ten minutes to eleven. It is ten
minutes eleven in numbers of bright red LED. He touches her cheek, her thigh. Charles kisses her forehead, her hand. Outside is a frozen waste. He can’t help thinking about World War II, and of the roosters and V-2’s blowing apart bombast, breaking crowholes in a masterful dawn.

It is morning and the heavy oak door clicks open downstairs, swinging on its own
internal pendulum. That door was handmade, he had told her. Some fellow owned a
woodshop downtown and carved it out of six hundred pounds of trees. She thinks, That door weighs a quarter ton, but somehow the bad thoughts get in all the same. His name was George. Named after the street, just a lock between us and Georges Road, one double yellow Victorian, a bed tossed upon the floor, and us. She turns into morning, her eyes opening to the sunscript sweating in through the
blinds and onto the pillow.

She stitches his face while he smokes marijuana from a pipe he had bought in
Boston, their first vacation. Their neighbors bring it over in exchange for tuning their car. They cannot afford a hospital. They cannot even afford whiskey and so they disinfect the cuts with salt-water. When she folds herself against him later that evening the pain lifts itself away, a window shuttering open. And it is in that openness that he finds the strength to dream, not knowing how it is he will have the energy to get to work by 11pm - but knowing that it will happen, and that is all that matters. Eyelids flirting with REM, pushing reality into hindsight with the smell of barbecued pork drifting in through the window and the blue-smoked hope rising past the second floor, getting entangled in the the municipal trees.

Jane doesn’t ask why he did it, just as he didn’t ask why she wore her dress if it
brought them this sort of grief. Cos sometimes it feels good to be feminine, and sometimes it feels good to be masculine. As baser instincts, there’s no good reason why a dress should make one happy or a fight should make one feel better about themselves, but there it is. Life continues to distract. The feminists burn their bras and marry right out of college, misogynists continue their rude awakening into society. A shadow on the wall. Green, our cat, licks his travels away from between his claws. 

~clavinnorers out everfresent brash___..__.._.____.. Nuremberg Station, Hotel Bloedel.

Cradle songs in Hebrew. Something about Warsaw. She sings it one time as they make love. He is utterly flummoxed and she envelops him and he finds himself not caring again. He comes home late. She doesn’t complain. The time is hers to think.
She smokes his cigarettes when he’s not there. Blue and white packaging, curled up
on the tapioca comforter. Her nipples are the color of tapioca. He sees the world in. them, such bright blue eyes.

They take pills late nights and into the early morning. Sometimes they worked and
sometimes not. Late nights when the lights seemed to change and the birds flew into their heads.

“Don’t touch my breasts,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Cos they’re not for you.” And her hand would lead him to her center instead.
Every time he enters her, new microbes are splitting her scent in twos.

That morning he took Ecstasy and went walking two blocks to the left of white
civilization. His girl was slowly slipping into respiratory failure and the Projects were red and brick and burn and bright. His eyes were dazzling, fine violence. She likes to burn the inside of her thighs with cigarette embers, he is thinking. Winking and slow orange in the moonlight, and sometimes the radio would be transfixed on the local blues/jazz station. He does not hear it now, nor can he see. Tumbling to the floor of the graffito hallway. Crawling his way out on to the basketball court.
“Hey, white man!” every window on the projects opens up; it is a harangue of children, a kindergarten of hate raining down.;

Her chest is heavy and expanding now; Anna’s heart fills up with daffodils.
Watching a sun the color of sienna twisting into coffee and cream and all that ever
was or should be. Dazed and beautiful and his skin glowing on the dark asphalt. 

Madras fills the air.


~~n e c e n .fapeptoss! n e l. __ ..___... >>..wireless morse transmission Krakow, Poland 194-


The Philco radio in the kitchen is on, and there are songs about talk show hosts and
murder. The millennium is not yet here. She has a blue satin kimono with a dragon print that she has picked up thrifting in Greenwich Village; in a time when she called herself fifteen. Jane walks through where Tabernacle Way becomes the housing project, through the basketball courts, then home. y Loons Her eyes are a thick brown; her legs shapely. She walks to the refrigerator and pours herself a glass of filtered water. She has two rings dangling from her inner labia. They are parallel to each other.

“Do you want to talk about it?” She is sitting in the sun room, her pale legs curled
catlike underneath her, for warmth. The hem of her torn black slip is missing the dust on the floor by millimeters and inches. Jane looks up and folds her book. Gobbels.
The Ministry of Illusion.

The years are later. I couldn’t quit smoking I don’t pretend I cannot hear my wife,
Jamie, crying in the next room. Our sun room. It is Rosh Hashanah and Israel is on the
news, Palestinians toppling some synagogue, some war. Building blocks that lean as
children. Circles locked into shoulders where once there were only the soft flesh palate of skinned knees, whole and only. But I have a drink. I smoke my cigarette. I don’t think of the annual report, or NASDAQ, or the catalytic-converter that’s going on the aging Plymouth sedan rusting slowly to iron oxide in the driveway. She’s crying. She wants to talk about it.

“L. shorn sill” __---..__.-..-.--...

I am thinking on how things change. Catharsis.
I am thinking of Jane because I miss societal tea. I miss not getting up mornings.
I am thinking of that octet of ragtag, seamy rooms, the timeline - from conception to
abortion, of our moments together. Two years, eight rooms. She sends a letter from Paris.

The first room I needed a corkscrew and a cigarette. You had neither but listened to
me anyway. Your patience was strong.

The second room I remember the amber shag rug, the green walls. Notations of
Shakespeare on the walls and the warmth spilling out of the heat register that winter. I was evicted then. You were someplace to go.

The third room had no door, and our neighbors saw us naked and we them, in the
summers when the heat was sere and flat and cutting through us. The building wasn’t wired for air conditioning. We were not old enough to run so fast so far for so very long.

[to t r d the l a s t u n b e a r a b l e “]. __..-...wireless cryptograph, Calais station

The fourth room, the biggest bed, the most lovely year. We cavort through the afternoons. We arrange soundtracks on the stereo to accentuate our naked love.

The fifth room was in the City. We watched taxicabs and played cards. The world did not end then.

The sixth room was a hospital bed after I had dropped my motorcycle on Interstate
495. You would bring caramels and books. You blew me in front of the nurses station for wrecking a perfectly good brand new motorcycle and for whatever reason no one came to break it up. I loved you for that.

The seventh room we are kissing in reverse because you have met another boy, and
he is quiet and solemn and more youthful than I, and I want to believe you when you say that you love him but just can’t quite do it. He is fat and smart and will take you South where you will live and post no return addresses to me on the cards you send for the birthday and the holidays each year.

The eighth room I came back I came back to nothing. 

We never spoke of it. He could not stay, is all. Sometimes at night I dream of a world where my son and I play catch in a field of green that goes on for miles, in a world that the horizon just cannot contemplate. The ball does not stop and we do not tire. His mother, faceless, waits back at our home in a world where no clocks tally the descent of the sun, and while I cannot see it, or feel her, it just my son and I, and there will be supper waiting for us, not because it is expected of her, but because it is there and there is plenty. 

This is an America not known to anyone my age, bracketed between yellowing elementary school textbooks, ancient, the type handed to inner city children as the publishers continue to bloat the numbers so necessary for capitalism to continue, these textbooks, wrapped in brown grocery paper and forgotten instantly after as reality sets its hold. This is a life I had never had a chance to know, in a world where pro-lifers shall continue to throw their blood and refuse to accept that pro-choice is really no choice at all.

It was a room I never saw — all surgical gloves and white gauze, and it was that room
that turned us apart. The eighth room. Her windows were open and a letter was on the bed. The paper was blank, and I like to believe that is how she felt. Starting anew. Slates and cleanliness and low brass notes, lungs without nary a sigh to carry them. The first kiss was like that. It was given. Everything since has been taken away. These are things that adult books have always been ignorant of, of old 45’s spinning on turntable platters bought at the local thrift for pennies on the dollar.

A pack of my cigarettes are on the bed. A decanter of bourbon. She hated the rasp
and the burn of both. Something had changed irrevocably, and she cannot hear me whisper her name. It was not my child and now never would be, her hand drawing a indelible line in the sand of the bed we chose together. But she is growing pregnant and her New York accent is waning slightly; slowly.

I am growing older without you; I am growing distant.

I hear that you don’t like British radio anymore, that you’ve become political, that
you’ve grown, that you’re at your most beautiful. And I will always be two years your
senior, yet it is I who is struggling to catch up. 

Just sitting in a phone booth in Rural VA with a local telephone book opened to your house and lot, telling myself to dial her house, to say her name. Enter this last into evidence and affix signature here:

I remember Charles from mornings spent after working all night in the tobacco shop. We would go to his place on Harold St and watch Diane Rigg cavort around in her catsuits, watch pornography. He would keep his roll of thick bills in the top left hand drawer of his dressing table. He had pasted sheets of magazine paper to block out the sunlight that was just breaking through December.

The white-throated Decembrist.
He couldn’t keep ashtrays for any length of time.

They thought we were skinheads, white violence. Inspecter 7. The blacks and whites shoulder to shoulder, HCS. Every man's fist a chin rest; throwing a boot party, y'all are the guests of honor. The Court Tavern. McCormick's Pub. When Worlds Collide was the title of a book written about in early 1971.

Charlie’s eyes didn’t stop. They didn’t stop looking. There were homosexual undertones but I was never quite interested. He was big but slow and in those days I carried a 11-inch switchknife with a jet black handle; if he had moved on me I would have opened him up from asshole to appetite and buried him beneath the crawlspace in the basement. 

Men are born unto the Earth not being able to lift a No. 2 pencil. They grow older, and with them comes the hate — and with the hate spins the roulette. From fist to pipe, from pipe to knife, from knife to gun, from gun to cannon, from cannon to ICBM. This is cyclic. It is syphilitic. It is a disease that runs forever, like current. Up to and including the atom bomb. We balance them on each shoulder, blowing hydrogen-firey kisses into the third-world, the corner shop, etc. et. al.

He has the same first name as I. This post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis is growing cold. The air-conditioner neatly dusts the beat around me, places it aside. But I am here, cogitating, locked into some kind of overload, self-destruct, misanthropic side-step that has led me up to this point in time. Where there was pain, there is hate. Where once was hate is a curious yearning to destroy, to obliterate, to make vacant. I dislike betrayal even more. 

When I leave, will the memory leave with me? Cannot say for sure. There are no M.D.’s, no psychic lines, no possibilities. We will bury it like our elderly, our infirm, our dead. We shall leave it to rot in the annals of a mind and a life that has since left me. The light is out now. The white noise and the air-conditioning do not continue to annoy. We leave all doors open. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.

FIN -lchristopher. Wednesday, November 18, 7:32PM/Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.