Inverted World

-Excerpt from the novel Vegetarian Pornography

The attorney had dropped me off far from my home. There was no use in walking back for I had an appointment with some friends of mine down at the police station. I took a long path through a curly neighborhood, devoid of any femininity. Anyway It was a queer place.

Tarantula skin shadows as you come closer to the more natural earth, you feel so small. Then you elevate yourself to the level of white washed houses with garage windows parallel to a street, and realize you can’t do it, they’re set upon stilts so they tower above any entering thief. The stilts are blocks of concrete stacked and taken from the martial arts studio just west of here, where the top of the class stared at them in silent argument while nobody cared if they broke their way into a new belt or not. Shortly after the fire consumed the students, the studio moved to this neighborhood, sharing itself completely with its neighbors.

Chalked paint flows as invading spores from mail boxes hanging from spools of industrial wire when no wind and no sticks ever poke at it. A missing tooth and a bracket stuck to a mile of the same industrial wire sit below the porch and call for the black dog and his straw bed. Curtains are bent out of shape, tired bicycles lay rusted in the midst of a drought lasting before they were born. Inside the rooms towering above are perfect items and accessories everything a Christmas carol could hope to include in a thousand years, but stuff was completely useless. They were dried up wild pumpkins on preservation land, the never coming rain would tear and lay waist to everything anyway. And the irrigation that was supposed to be, the veins and blood that was supposed to attach itself by way of figures and calculus and surveys you want but only hear; where went all these predictions. Like a mechanical sprinkler head, each individual pulled himself underneath the ground searching for brothers who dug their selling out holes long ago. And charisma and phone numbers and pretty pens can’t uncover their tombs.

I think I see trees rooted in the sky above me. Inner Mongolia, Pakistan and Lebanon are above my head. The inverted world revolves in culture and chaos beyond the translucent barrier of my brain, and rolls around in landfills and order in the parking lot I wade through. A mirrored boy of my height walks the frame sidewalk of street lamps and filler made from jet exhaust, and he looks troubled to find a small girl using the power line swing set. Offering candy to the girl he is electrocuted and falls down into my world, where his only hope in life is to join the chained janitors who clean up this walking path.

Extract of imitation root beer radiates from white orange blossoms, the scent of skim ribbed discolored scum of tin soup cans blends. Gas stove top at dinner time clicking as mother whines at the delay of having aged machinery but no aged cheese. The kids kicking the habit use the high head markers to graffiti monitoring boxes for state of the art family underground cable, power, and relative remnants. Their sore for living under power lines, and swinging on jet lag before morning walks to school.

A rusty pick up truck is covered by wild vines. During fall the plant has supposedly psychoactive seed formed in a deceiving covering of peanut paper lighter than air. The valley morning glory turns a rusted truck a deeper blue, maybe longing for the owner to come back, maybe basking in triumph of never being cut back.

Hernandiz once owned a truck like the one holding the seeds. He was a fourteen year old boy when he owned it, and no seeded plant was in the fashion when he parked in his area. Only white oozing snail prone shrubs took the ground. In autumn nights after school, Hernandiz and his halfway decent to be called disciples numbered beneath the green piece of baseball turf covering the back of his pickup truck. As soon as dusk was hit, and before brilliant street curtains could be drawn to a voltage, it was a race for the numbers to attack the cups of beer left out in the hearts of the oozing plants. A race not only against each other, the kids had to find the plastic containers before the slugs got to them, and before the light was so dim that slime was unfilterable from beer with eyes.

One of the smaller kids, twelve, leapt onto the graded hillside of a known drunkard, thinking the beer cans in the exposed recycling bins was enough evidence to act upon. Gulping down the especially large cup of fluid first, then telling the others where he found it, the smaller kid was ridiculed for being so ignorant. Apparently drunkards are too cheap to waste real beer on the slimy creatures. The cup the smaller kid drank from more than likely was pissed in.

Despite being grossed out, the kid really did win over the others. The urine of the drunkard contained more alcohol by volume than most brands of beer. The kid never tasted real beer until he turned to the age of fifteen. Three years of being corrupted with a process most relative to breast feeding, the kid became an alcoholic. Corrupted cells longing for dry boiled malt and hops, a feel good soap fed wash, brushed off the rest of the decaying drunkard and waited hopefully in the glasses for the kid to come along with his revitalizing youth.

The other kids turned out to be all right in the end. Smaller boys always get screwed out of the good life. Yet the larger ones just as well squandered their share to join their parents burrowing beneath the earth in search of their sprinkler systems.