Short
Shorts
Interview
with Blue Boy
He spoke in subdued
tones of gray mixed with cool. I had nothing sweet to offer him.
He kept staring at a bowl of plastic fruit. Not real, I finally
offered. He shook his head politely. Unable to resist my own
leanings, I paraphrased Hamlet's Existential question—to
live or to be still? In the silence, I thought about all the
places or items I associated him with: cocktail coasters, N.Y.
Times fashion advertisements, scaled down copies adorning an
abandoned room in a house. I remembered how his image stopped
one show as the tableaux vivant back in'86. His eyes now focused
downward, as if trapping some thought in their blue-tunnel gaze.
I thought about patches of sea-green melencholy. A background
mist. A young girl named Pinkie. There was something about him
that was so intrinsically lonely.
Frogs
We were to meet in
the center of a field, a scatter of fiery blooms,
coarse-toothed, a dry season. I didn't pretend there were frogs
croaking in my pockets. There's a reason, I thought, why they're
so hard to catch. A breeze swept through the tall yellow grass,
and the foothills had histories of stone and dirt, but no eyes.
I thought I'd make this easy on her. I told her that I didn't
love her. There was someone else were my exact words. There was
no one else. Truth was—I
was scared. I wanted to end this sunny day with some sense of
victory, an island of memory resistant to corrosion. My cheap
medals would be invisible, pinned under the flesh.
Looking crushed, she remained standing. There were times when I
wanted to squeeze some dark, pitted part of her, as if an olive,
and the oil would not protect me from being burned.
So I walked away, leaving her perhaps in that same spot. I
imagined her shaking for awhile, but for me, being a good
distance away, it was hard to feel pure about anything. I did
lie about one thing. The frogs. I lied about the frogs.
Something inside me, on the far side of a stream, began to
croak.
Usufruct
I and Princess
Marushka are standing near the rare record shop on Bleecker. She
says she's not doing trade-ins anymore because all their stuff
is scratched and anyway they don't have anything by The Ju Jus,
a 60's garage band that is on the verge of being re-discovered.
According to her. People pass us by in fast streams that diverge
on side streets or gain momentum up ahead. I'm not sure who is
in real time, them or us. I'm not sure who is watching Leonardo
DiCaprio on their i-Pads.
Princess is dressed in the army fatigues of her very late
husband who left this world with an honorable discharge. He was
fighting underground czars disguised as cabbies, but his left
leg went numb after he spoke of a vision of Christ singing Hey
Jude. It wasn't long after that. I met him when he was still a
boy, says Princess, and he gave me the sun. But now he's gone
and the sun is poison. So each day, I take a knife, a wish, a
prayer in Cyrillic, and try to bleed it a little. When it's
cleansed, it will be winter, and we will start cold. A white
sun.
Later that night, after failing to score a hundred faces with
names that never stick, or finding excuses for drowned deals, I
meet Princess in a building claimed by squatters. It's somewhere
in The Bowery. The squatters are mostly crusty Punks, or victims
of nuclear runaway families. You can only see their eyes, the
rest is dark. You imagine a few of them cuddling for warmth, or
they're already dead. It's nice to die in pairs. In a third
floor room, where fall out is more than likely, we exchange
paper rain for paper sun. When it's done, at least one of us has
been ripped off. The other is still warm.
Hydro-matic
This is not your father's Oldsmobile, the one with a
transmission called a Hydro-matic. That car could travel. This
is only a photo, a still of appearances, shades of grey. Time
doesn't lie. But it doesn't tell the truth either. For only one
freeze-frame of time, did you remotely resemble, Liz Taylor in
National Velvet. This is you back when you wanted to be. Desire
was perfect in itself.
While your father was trying to polarize a 6-volt regulator, you
imagined your heart with four terminals. You even labeled each
one with letters. You pictured your father connecting each
jumper wire, alligator clip, to the correct terminal. He could
do it blindfolded. You had a weak heart. He said in time, it
would need a mechanic. What? you said. He meant the car.
The first boy who broke your heart picked you up in a white
four-door bustle-back, De Luxe trim. This is not a picture of
your father's first Oldsmobile or the one belonging to that
tow-headed fast-pitching kid. This is about what remains after
wrong wire to Terminal F. This is about what happens when you
fall for a boy who doesn't give a darn about moving pictures.
You're lucky there's still a spark.
About
Kyle Hemmings, US
