~the anger schedule. lchristopher.

Excerpted: The Anger Schedules Collection [2022]. Excerpted: Tow Man - The Glorious Seams Of One Holy Year Spent In The City Of Roses: A Novel [2023].

~author photo by the brilliant & beautiful photographer/literal artist, Ms. Bee RN [accenture mark missing, so sorry]; Bergen Norway Central Station; Night Train to Oslo.

________

the anger schedule. lchristopher.

I will love you my whole life; you and no one other.

There always had to be a semi-colon in the first sentence of this novel. There was no other way.

My name is Charles Everett Nod.
This is a recording.

***

I do not know the Moulin Rouge. I did not know what an autodidact was until you taught me to write the sentence: I was a polymath in her eyes but I was blue collar then. I liked how her skin tasted like close readings. Like primary school. Over and over again. In unicode. ASCII. 127 character codes, backwards compatible to infinity and beyond. Unix mail manager. University servers the size of a bathroom that could outfit an auditorium. What am I saying? You with your mental calculus and impossible irascible-making habit of decoupling compound words.

I stood at Colette’s grave without knowing who she was or why Claudine was so important to the literature I know and love to this day.
I am a stupid, hateful, ugly American.

And we keep spinning.

***
Donna Tartt, back in the dim dead days of Bennington College’s literary brat-pack
trailblazers, wrote - closed, really - in the preface of her first novel - The Secret History: This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

She lied, of course. We all do. This is a book of lies. All books are blankets of lies woven together by threads of truth. It is like the foundation of jazz improvisation - it is not just the notes one listens for, but the beats behind the notes that are just as critically important for the work to - god forgive me, graduate school brain - make meaning.

History is written by liars. Everything I have ever learned has been from the age of
multimedia scratching the backs of a free and perfect openly-sourced pit of information; a meta-wiki scrolling forever on into the bluebottle dusk-turned American night.

***
Cinéma Vérité

He played guitar at a party one night. Other men got on the stage and picked up the drums and bass. Someone asked me at one point what the name of his band was. What band? he said. Napster had two years to be invented. You had to know someone who really loved music and had the personal capital to back it up to have a serious record collection. Silicon Alley was churning on Williams Street. A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush! Charlie grabbed the man by the big lapels of his military coat and picked him an inch off of the ground and said softly: “No, it’s a vote for fucking Nader.” And set him down gently, like the original moon lander was touted in some book of lies she had read as a child, some Snoopy science reader, that the moon lander touched down
upon the moon more softly than a falling leaf!!!  Those three exclamation marks were real. There they were. There could be no lying in them. She had believed it, because it had been writ down. That made it true, then. The world was changing. Babyland is OVER, to quote her beloved trombone of a fourth-grade elementary school teacher, Mrs. Reagan (That’s REE-gan, she would insist), who would shout those words to the rafters when everything was coming apart at the seams due to a discipline issue, or decorum, or bad comportment, or poor form, or whatever fucking descriptive they were using these days in the ever-flaccid halls of American public education . Conduct, that was it. Conduct. BABYLAND IS OVER.

That was Charlie Nod. He was letting that boy know that Babyland was over.

They were at a party on a rooftop the night before and she had wandered away from the group and found a small alcove to sit in between the bricks and away from the main gathering; all war whoops and whisky bottles passed and marijuana cigarettes long since burned away. The voices carried at 33 Gold Street, and they had made love on the apartment owners bathroom sink on the day of their anniversary, where she was wearing a pair of underpants that were so little and whisper-thin she felt obscene, her 20-year old wet running freely down both thighs long before she pulled him to her and he pushed his way into that other world they both still shared alone.
"I want you in me," she said, a Academy Award speech for her when the bedroom was concerned. I can't think with all that racket, she said once, and he laughed so hard he almost swallowed her clit ring.

Her head cracked the mirror and Charlie had her braid caught in his teeth. There were a houseful of people and the walls were basically loudspeakers, they were so flimsy. And no one said a word. No one dared. That was manhood, to her, age 20 years. That was what it meant to have control of yourself and everything around you. And she was in the aegis of it all, and loved him for that. He led and others followed. The world bent beneath his grasp.

It was 1999. Everything, everywhere was about to change.

***

Charlie has automobiles, dozens it seems. He never pays for anything. It is a kind of urban voodoo. Their apartment is a small attic affair down the street from the large ten-room victorian mansion that the town housing inspectors lanced so hard the slumlord owners went upside down on the mortgage and were forced to sell. They cut all of the climbing wisteria climbing the posts of the front porch as retribution. She loved those fragrant purple blooms; they cut away the ugly ghetto streets and the cloying scent of general urban decay. Not forever, she said. Transitory.  It meant nothing to him, Charlie. He was happy that they had decided on a place.


The Connie, he called it. The Lincoln Continental 1978 Mark V with the Cartier clock and a dashboard that looked as big as an airstrip. All burgundy, all leather. She tried to get him to take her virginity there. Also in the stairwell in the first dorm they shared in college. Also in a haymow off Route 27 between Rutgers College and Princeton University, for which he conveniently had another automobile, this one borrowed from a (complete and total, dyed-in-the-wool bitch) girlfriend that he never mentioned and
she never asked after. It was a sky-blue Aries K. The engine sounded like a sewing machine if a sewing machine had four cylinders. Charlie had said that once. He had said that and she had never forgotten it. They would make out for hours in those fields; three hours, four. They would kiss until their eardrums bulged. They would not
have sex. He didn’t want to or she wasn’t pushing hard enough. Who knows. Who cares, anymore? Zazie thought. That was eleven years ago. Stop acting like a teenager, Zazie Lenore Bensen. Grow up.

But the Connie. A car the size of a boat. It took up two parking spaces in an overcrowded town where parking was at a premium. He would hold the door open for her, they swung out like the side of barn. The hood was as long as the span of an Olympic diving board. It was dove grey and one afternoon they had sex on the hood which had been boiling because the engine - a 460 Police Interceptor, Charlie told her, and she nodded, and knew that the miles per gallon were likely pretty lousy because he had said once, to a traffic cop, who did not ticket him (yes, again), for whatever reason. He got out of the car (who does that?) whenever he was pulled over, and just…entered into some dialogue. Even when it started bad, like dead-black-person-bad, like, hand-on-his-gun, sir, please return to your vehicle, sir…he would just say, h’lo, and kick
some imaginary dust from his boots, chew a nail, take his hat of if he happened to be wearing one.
Evening, officer. How goes the day?

How goes the day. Like it was the magic word. Or he was just magic.

The cop thing was like the car thing. Charles Everett Nod was just charmed, and if you asked him about it he would shrug and wonder what the hell you were going on about. One of those type boys.
Magic boy.
Those type boys, she mused.
Those type boys, they grow up or they get lost. Or they grow up and get lost.

There was an aftermarket Sony CD player slung under the dash next to a hard leather holster that Charlie had told her was something called a “docker’s clutch,” which was a fancy way of saying a support system for a hidden pistol. 
The two CD’s left on repeat that entire summer were:

Billy Idol’s Greatest Hits.
Ice T - Original Gangster.

So the whole of the summer it was the smell of wisteria and eyes without a face/yeux vous son visage (fr) Of no sex and sex. Sex three years later. He tells you later that he saw the couch you had lost your virginity on out by the curb and cut a swatch with his Italian pushbutton knife of the orange amber cloth from the 1920’s fainting couch and placed it in a box he kept in a larger box under his bed with the first wallet his father gave him, his boy scout membership card, his father’s dog tags from Vietnam, and a old military pistol that he had kept in the very bottom of his toolbox when they lived together at college, wrapped in an oilrag. 

When there was automatic weapons fire on Remsen Avenue that crossed George Street late nights he would be up from his computer in a shot and say - no, order her into the voluminous steel porcelain tub in the bathroom that had sold her on the apartment in the first place. She would hear him - it sounded like he was putting the pistol together. She had looked for it once when she knew he was away in New York City for the evening and went to the closet and got out the toolbox and there it was. It was the color of metal and very heavy. CAL. 45 PROPERTY OF US GOVERNMENT. The handle was grabbed so much it looked like it had been worn away. It was greasy and practically wet to the touch with some sort of lubricant but the boy he knew machinery and so she knew that meant it was clean and right and well and such and so. Everything in its right place. She understood that. Dishes on the drainboard, all of her homework done early, bed at 9PM, awakening early with the morning sun, no need for an alarm clock yet in this life. And it had nothing to do with her, and she trusted that Charlie, her Charlie, knew what to do with it. She knew he didn’t walk around with it, the NJ laws were so draconian that he would be sitting in Rahway State Prison for the the next five years if something went awry. But it was like him. It was curled and ready to strike if needs be. For absolute last resort. 

She left the apartment shortly after that. They woke up the next morning in the empty steel tub holding one another. He had already put the weapon away. Zazie supposed he didn’t want her to wake up and see it laid out so nakedly in their home. There were nine neat holes punched in their attic wall. Was it deliberate? Was it to scare? It didn’t matter. 

"Is that from a machine gun?" Charlie of course didn't want to tell her, didn't want to scare her, she supposed; but she cornered him in the kitchen, lifted his chin with her small hands, and gave him the business of her eyes. Charles Everett Nod, you tell me true. He held her gaze. His eyes were intense brown orbs, blazing. They weren't for her. She knew that much. Whoever did this was being added to the most awful kind of list somewhere in the back of his mind. 

An automatic weapon did that, yes. See the neat spacing between the holes in the wall? Like the stitching on a sewing machine. He took her hands. She pulled back a little reflexively and then let him. He rubbed her hands as if he was trying to keep frostbite from setting in. Is it that cold in here? she thought, wildly. In the next minute, she squeezed back. 

I am going to leave, she said, and looked him harder in the eye, the way he appreciated, as it made him feel respected and that he was with the right type of girl, the strong kind. 

He paused and said, All right. All right, sweetie. Sweetie. It was his word for her when she was hurt or scared, worried or upset. She loved him for it, then and now. That didn't change the fact. Ten days later she was gone. He rented the truck that took her to her new home, drove it on the expressway, and unloaded it for her, stacking her everything neatly in the driveway of her new home. Smiled, hugged her hard. She hugged him back. He got in the truck and drove away.

That was eleven years ago.

And she left. That girl I was. Left for the seas like a Kate Chopin novel. Unlike her protagonist,I did not drown. I lived. Like the title of the same work, I was awake for the first time in my life to the world and my role in this world as a teacher, peacekeeper, single ship set loose upon the seas.

And he went away and got lost. And now he was back. This could not be her real life.

***

Are you a cynic or a romantic? Asset or threat? Asset or threat?

***

When I found out she was a cheerleader in high school I stopped sleeping with her.
When I found out she was a cheerleader in college I stopped sleeping with her.
Eventually I just stopped sleeping with all of them.

***
White Panasonic record player white with a black arm, late 1970's. Panasonic or General Electric. Pop always bought American. Where did these thoughts come from?

Sometimes sorry doesn’t help. That was his mother's voice. Had to be. 

Are you a cynic or a romantic?
Asset or threat.
Asset or
Threat.

She remembers the day her mother threw away their albums. It was the 1980’s and everyone had turned over to cassettes. They had some eight tracks but those were mostly in her father’s car, a black steel and chrome Plymouth Barracuda with a rear window so crepuscular and spherical it seemed ludicrous, hilarious to even consider it now.

***

Hikikomori.
The disease came for us, but slowly. [first lines]

***

“Only girls use the wall to brake stand.”  Graffito on the corrugated steel wall of the Halsey Lot Garage, Portland, Oregon. Seven years later.

Sitting inside was a late-model Shelby Mustang Cobra, true blue aluminum block. Came in on a flatbed an hour ago.
Those look like spook wheels.
What?
Spook.
I just…
Spook. Like black. Like nigger. Spook wheels.
They’re Daytons. They were, and tasteful too. One of them cost my rent for the month. In Manhattan.
Like I said. Spook wheels. The old hand was daring the newbie to take a poke at him.
You prefer Mr. Shelby was sittin’ on some stock bullshit, Samuel fired back.
I didn’t say anything. Just that a nigger owns this, so it’s going on the block.
What about the Aston Martin DB7? That strike you as the kind of car they drive in whatever passes for Harlem or Newark in this toy city of yours? 
You got a smart mouth.
And you talk too much and think too little and all of God's little children got wings.
Drexel's eyes flashed then. If there wasn't 300,000 dollars of  British sportscar between them he would have charged. 
It's your bitch.
Excuse me? 
You pulled it. You took the call. Your fingerprints chained it up. You race it. 
You've got to be shitting me. Who pulled the Shelby?
Callas. Montenegro Callas.  He's got odds over you. Window closes in twenty-five minutes if you want to place bets. 
There isn't enough liquor in the world to make this right.
That’s between you and your God, boy. You pulled it. You race it.
Fuck if I will. I've got enough to worry about without losing my goddamn job.
This is your job, the towheaded man in the gold Carhartt jacket said so quickly and without attention that it couldn't be anything but true. What the fuck have you gotten yourself into now? Drexel pulled the paperwork from the windshield wiper. 
Where'd you pull this?
You're not hearing me. It was a police call. The cops *know* we have this car. It should be on its way to Seizure World.  I still cannot fucking believe that the name of the legit hot car chop shop storage outlet is actually named fucking Seizure World. 
Where, I says. He sounded like Popeye the Sailor man. I stands all I can stands and I cain't stands no more!
Lake Oswego.
Lake No-Negro? 
If you say. I'm getting the fuck out of here.
He moves then and he's fast but I'm faster, and I shove him back, slamming my head into his mouth in the process. Blood starts tumbling from his mouth immediately. 
Alright then. 


Jump, he said. Jump, if you’re feeling froggy.
I can’t race, I said. I don’t know the track.
Philo Quinn will go with you.
That’ll queer the weight. Montenegro Callas will have the advantage.
You can ride in the front of the car like a man or Harper will call five or six of the boys to tool you up, truss you up, and suck on the jack in the trunk the whole way. Makes no difference to me.
And just what the fuck is your role in all of this?
I'm the money.
You don't look like much to me.
The man, whose name was Drexel Offreda, took a step forward then. The door rattled up behind them.  The P-Lot gents had just arrived from Portland Metro. 
Later for you.
Tell your boyfriend I said hi, Samuel shot back, ever practicing the fine art of deescalation.
No ese. I will take my primo with me.
I am living in a Burt Reynolds classic, Samuel thought. Yessir, he said brightly. Where’s Harper in all this?

The Driver Manager, Harper, No Last Name Given, No Last Name Needed - he was the everfucking Dee period Em period, DM appeared like always, out of nowhere, his massive scarred hands - burned beyond recognition changing barrels out of a belt-fed US Army M60 machine gun in Khe Sahn, if local legend was to be believed - fell upon his shoulder like a fallen oak.

"I don’t wanna see no brake lights," Harper said, and shuffled the betting chits like a cardsharp on a Vegas run. The cash was in his other hand. He put three thousand dollars of his own money into the pile of the racially backward racing tire appraiser's own hands. Fuck me, Samuel thought. Forget never working in this town again; if I fuck this up he's liable to take the sawed-off in his spotless white F-150 and turn my head into a fucking canoe.

***

Here we go.

***

Look, I’m not trying to crawl up your ass and build a house or anything. Just tell me where you were yesterday morning. We had plans for breakfast; then we did not. That is all.
I was in Sand Town.
What did you just say to me?
I was in Sand Town.
You were with the Chevrolets?
How could you possibly know that?
The Sand Town Chevrolets are no secret in my line of work, kiddo.
Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.
He hugged her, squeezed hard, and lifted her off of her feet.
That too, she said, rolling her eyes. My back, Charlie.
Your back is fine.
And don’t tell me how I feel, thank you very much.
Yes’m, he said, chastened.
Are you sorry, she asked, jabbing the question at him like a hypodermic syringe.
Yes’m.
Good, she said, her eyes daggers of hurt pointing in at themselves. Fuck me standing, she thought, the white flag of her anxiety rising. Twenty minutes and you’re already at each other. Is this going to work? Is there enough left to make it work? Was there ever?
***
BEFORE LOCKING MAKE SURE THAT NO ONE IS IN THIS VAULT. read the sign, which had been made by machine, which he knew because there was a vocational trades program in the reformatory he spent seventh and eighth grades inside. If he had continued on that path into high school, he would have followed the curricula right into Rahway State Prison. There was some other name they kept trying to stick on it it, New Jersey’s Own State Prison, Home of the First Scared Straight Program and Not A Vacation Spot By Any Means; The Township of Rahway tried, anyway - but the name stuck, and would continue to stick. In Jersey Boys they manage to make it seem like a country club for Italian bad boys, but it was and always had been a fuck around and find out sort of place. It still amazed Charlie that this expression had entered the lexicon of college kids and wannabe internet armchair radicals. It was the province of motorcycle clubs and ex-con parlors prior to those days, and limited. Like motherfucking had been once, he supposed. Everything dilute with the strains of time.

You don’t like it when I say fuck.
Charlie lay down his paper across his lap. Columbine had just become a household word and she made him run out and pick up the newspaper and now she was going to shit test him right up until dinner. Mother of Christ.

I don’t mind it when you say fuck. 
You don’t think it’s ladylike.
That’s not it at all.
What then, she said, hands on hips, fine brown eyes flashing like felt razors. He found himself stiffening and shifted the newspaper to his lap. God, he wanted to fall into her when she got like this.

I don’t like it when every other word out of your mouth is fuck, he said, because then I have no yardstick for your anger. When you are truly angry you cuss up a storm and I can tell there is a problem right off and do my level best to make things right for you. For us. It has nothing to do with you being a a lady. I know you're a lady. I've known since the first day I met you. And you know this.

He crossed the room quickly and cupped her left breast, his thumb skating across the nipple sheathed in a thin aubergine wool sweater. Zazie’s aureole was already erect and she stepped back against the wall, moaning slightly. Her body excited him, always. It was animal; chemical.

They were key and lock. Ten years could go by and he would know exactly where her spot was, how to place his fingers curled just so as he kissed her pussy, which she completely shaved for him in the mid-nineties long before it was the fashion to do so, and he taught her, well - everything. Like the song goes. She tasted exactly the same. She smelled exactly the same. She came exactly the same. She swallowed him exactly the same.

I will love you my whole life; you and no one other.  Zazie wondered sometimes if so many of their age had been really been raised by movie screens or if it were just them two. Holding hands in Al Nigren’s Cult Films Course. He had his hand up her dress - she was wearing stockings with garters for him, real ones with thick straps and nylons from the same store in downtown New Brunswick that the nuns used to go to - none of that Vickie’s horseshit that was designed so shabbily it couldn’t leave the bedroom without the crewlwork and the stitching coming undone. His hands were swimming in her unders; her favorite, navy blue cotton with strings that haloed around each of her round hips. He loved her body and told her so regularly; but could he really? He could have anyone, yet he would give her anything. How could she respect a man like that? Her self-opinion was lower than the soles of their shoes. 

On screen, John Waters' Pink Flamingos was playing the scene where two lovers fucked with a chicken between them, who pecked and drew blood from the man's ribcage, then the woman's as they crushed the bird between them. She felt herself swimming over the edge and almost came out loud oh Charlie you are turning me on so bad and managed to swallow her orgasm just as she wanted him to be swallowing her waters, her come - he hated it when people spelled it c-u-m and she guessed she couldn’t blame him; and then the house lights came back up and they were holding hands and she drew a swastika on his, just cos she could. Why would you do that, he asked. Because I'm a Jew, she said. It was a game they played, knees together, her unders sorted upon his departure so there wasn’t a bolt of cloth wedged up her ass, not that she was about to pick her behind in public.

Clean it off.  Zazie went to rub the clumsy broken cross-points. He stared at her. She stared back, then licked the webbing between his thumb and forefinger in front of God, their Modern American Cinema course, and everyone. Zazie Bensen knew what was expected of her. She did not break the eyefuck until his hand was slick and naked again. As she would be in not much longer, she thought, and felt herself go a little. Where could he take her? Their residences were equidistant. Wait and see. Wait and see. It's better that way. The spontaneity, the unknowing. She was nineteen years old. They would be doing this again when she was thirty-seven. She had no way of knowing. He could have told her if she asked. 

***

But she never did, and so we keep spinning.

***


FIN - lchristopher. Sunday November 2nd, 2025; 10:02PM, Fort George, Manhattan, NYC.