Chapter 7

Meanwhile...
Eyes steely grey, The Man peered out of The Bank at the ring of police cars that encircled the building.
“Wagons...” he sighed, “But who're the Injuns?”

Sun high in the sky appley-pie hopes.

Loud speaker blast. “You in there... No one needs to get hurt. Come on out and give yourself up.... We have you surrounded... Etcetera.... Etcetera...”

It was 1pm

* * *

Chapter 6

Lunch Break. A liturgy taught by the ringing bells of our youth. Cutting into pills with steak knives, slicing off slivers of speed and barbiturates that numb and drive the populace. All
you can eat 6 Martini Lunch Special neon bright bulimic projectile vomit spattered stalls.

Rank and file stumble out of fluorescent lit offices into the streets shading eyes with designer sunglasses and hands, it permanently overcast but the light is still to bright white and burns unprotected skin. Vendors sell hotdogs slathered with hallucinogenic oils and pills scooped on like fried onions. The bitter reek of chalky stimulants permeates the air mixing with diesel fumes as drunks swill wood alcohol, long blind their distended bellies straining at threadbare vomit covered shirts. Like above-ground moles they hug The City's walls and follow the scent of their kind.

Smell of retch and mouthwash

An Orca was spotted in the harbour and was immediately set upon by a trio of slant-eyed bloodthirsty men in crimson kimonos. The whale is harpooned and dragged ashore on the beach where with long blades and cleavers it is disassembled, The pink fatty flesh is processed into small cubes which still bloody were served on tight sticky rice packets to a throng of people eager to taste the destruction of something pure and beautiful.

The Whore was fast asleep but slow to dream.

It was 12pm

* * *

Chapter 5

Here's how it was. The Man owes Another Man 10,000 dollars. The Other Man has given him until today to come up with the 10,000 dollars.

Here's how it is. The Man does not have 10,000 dollars.

Here's how it's gonna be.

Crack in the sky. Ashen grey clouds have rolled in pell-mell from the sea. The sun splits the crack open wedging in just wide enough, like when an axe fails to split a log but instead perforates just enough to let a slit of light through. Astringent metal smell mixes with salty ocean air diesel fumes. The clouds bunch up like revelers outside of a late-to-start concert hammering at stadium doors, foam and froth and the words “RIOT” sluicing from damp lips. The sky is a riot.

The Man pulls his collar up as the first stinging drops fall. They smell of failure and fear and ozone. A crack of lightning hangman-noose-neck-snaps across the sky, reminding The Man of the task at hand.

The Man approaches the Glass Building where the Coverall clad Workers chase off a group of pre-teen Boys and Girls pierced through with metal and glass wearing a sheen of leather and Vinyl. Chains and Filth. Spray cans and stencils jut out like cybernetic appendages from too small tiny fists and sharpies and pipes and straight razors are hidden amongst cracks folds and hair greased and glued and held tight by the same chemicals that leave their mark like dog urine on Glass Buildings and Concrete, Chemicals that are condensed into bags and inhaled until vomit and euphoria drive young minds to the edge of psychosis and into the abyss. The mean age of the Street Children is 16 and those that live to adulthood are either incarcerated or babbling insane degenerates writing Thompsonian novels and Burroughsesque poetry in the care of The State. They are instant bestsellers and their authors are lauded and talked about over cocktails and canapés at high end parties attended by Men in Charcoal Grey Suits and Women in Pencil Skirts and Artists in whatever the trend is that day.

This building is a Bank. There may no longer be Summer, but there will always be Banks. And Bankers.

The Man is wearing his least dirty clothes – tight black jeans and a collared cowboy shirt with real mother of pearl buttons- and has slicked back his dark hair with a pomade that causes it to glisten like an otter pulled from Prince William Sound.

The Bank is a Hive.

Charcoal Grey suits and Pencil Skirts rush this way and that passing documents, filing files, authorizing, rejecting, investing capital, investing themselves in a System that fails to recognize them. A System that demands homogeneity and growth. And knives. Sharp sharp sharp sharp knives.

The Man has a gun. He doesn't know what kind of gun it is, only that it was cheap and it is noisy. It is the type of gun with a revolving chamber and a long long long barrel. The size of barrel excites The Man and he maintains an erection whenever he carries it. The Gun holds 8 bullets, brassy and rounded and blunt. The man often wondered how such a dull point could penetrate such dense masses as the walls in the alley behind his Apartment. Flesh will be no problem for the rabid bloodthirsty rounds.

His erection throbbed as he drew the gun from his coat. Of course no one noticed as he wore neither Ivory Prada Suit or Black Pencil Skirt. The roar of the blast however drew an audible silence. A sharp tableau was drawn across the stage of the bank. The aging security guard who was nodding off at his post, awoke with a start, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the floor.

“Well, would yah look at that,” chuckled The Man.
“This here... Is a robbery.” The Man drawled as he approached a tellers window. He placed a cracked and aged leather valise upon the counter ledge.
“Fill it,” he demanded, “and no one has to die.”
Being well insured and trained in how to deal with the demands of a variety of robbers, terrorists and ultra-violent individuals, the Black Pencil Skirted Teller took the valise and duly filled its contents with paper money slipping her slim well manicured thumb onto a small red button and depressing it. The colour of the button matched that of her nail polish and she cracked a wee smile at the thought of it.
“What the fuck are you smiling at!?” demanded The Man, sighing once again. He really did not want to fire the revolver again as he'd only been able to afford 1 bullet and was relying on the fear factor of the massive weapon to get him through this ordeal.
The Teller in the Black Pencil Skirt passed the valise to The Man.
“Have a nice day,” she caught herself intoning and cut her lips shut at the last second. The Man just stared
“You too...”

It was 11am

* * *

Chapter 4

As the stores on Boulevard C begin to open, the Masses began to teem rat like across its sidewalks and into its boutiques and apothecaries, dispensaries and emporiums. The masses, obese and ignorant needed satiation.

Behind thick plastic walls White Coated Pharmacists filled demands, slipping bottle after bag after vial of pill, lotions, tinctures and remedies into grasping hands of moaning come-down-withdrawal-addicts and nubile young post-human Forms. They needed their Breakfasts more than they needed their lovers. The pills were their lovers giving them the energy they needed to continue unabated and driving them to numbness that could only be pierced by the purchase of consumer goods piquing interests and pumping blood through veins weary of life and they had only just come to The City.

Women melded shoes to their feet in fetishistic body modifications as though reenacting Japanese body horror. Tokyo splatter-punk. Pins inserted laterally through their Jimmy Choos and Betsey Johnson's and vertically through the tops of their feet penetrating the soles of their Manolo Blahnick's like entomology pins affixing delicate butterflies to a board. Scalding sheets of molten lead and tin are sprayed, boiling flesh and cooking tender feminine meats. Smell of bacon and perfume, astringent metallic odours. The (a)scent of fashion. Fuck function.

Men gathered speed, smoked speed, popped pills, popped veins and then ran through the Parks, Through the barbed wire and spiked ditches and past dogs that gave chase to them tearing at calves and driving them to heart attacks and aneurysms until right at the point of death they plunged needles head long into hearts, into brains, that resuscitated them one last time (or not) and the rush gave them purpose and they stumbled spent from the parks into the arms of the Women that worshiped them in tin plated stumps and designer drug jackets and then they changed into Suits or Coveralls and dreamed of the next morning in which they could run once again through the park because in the park. They were all.

Equal.

It was 10 am.

Chapter 3

As The Man sipped his coffee in his Grey Tenement Apartment he heard the door open behind him. The Whore walked in and dropped herself down onto the extended hide-a-bed. With one corner of the bed supported by an empty plastic milk crate it threatened to collapse under her tiny frame as the long-shot springs squealed in protest.

“Take it easy,” The Man grumbled, placing his now empty mug on the counter that jut unceremoniously from the wall beside him. Their dwelling is a shared room, 12 feet by 10 furnished by only the hide-a-bed, and 2 more inverted milk crates. One supports a nearly antique television scavenged from behind their building, the other serving as a makeshift coffee table, littered with liquor bottles, drug residue and discarded food packaging. A sink with only a cold water tap is filled with cracked dishware and a multitude of stains, rust blood vomit oil nicotine wash down its inside like a rainbow of failure and entropy. The Man and The Whore are not lovers and to call them friends would be a gross misuse of the term. They are closer to symbiotes, in mutual reliance upon each other for survival. They fuck on occasion but neither gets much out of it.

The Whore turned on the television, ignoring The Man.



Lee Marvin's zombified corpse played poker with Charles Bronson's while Clint Eastwood groaned and creaked like an old staircase. Eastwood looked worse off than either of the other players but neither of them mentioned that he wasn't dead yet. Clint refused to ante up.

The Men drank raw crude oil from chipped highball glasses and smoked cigars packed with black powder with abandon. Marvin spat a gristly gob of blackened tar into a spittoon and a drizzle of high octane gasoline trickled down his chin from wind chapped and whiskey stained lips from whence it had been processed. Eastwood drew his Colt and shot the Zombie Lee Marvin whose gasoline filled filled mouth exploded, bone shrapnel piercing the eyes of Bronsan who continued to bet silently. As the fire spread Chuck grabbed onto Clint's face with his partially destroyed mouth and tore his cheek off. Eastwood still refuse to ante up.



3 nude white women ground their bodies against a Black Man sitting in a park wearing an Armani suit. He was spitting rhymes about the genocides in East Europe while all around him men and women in military garb appeared to blow themselves up. The blood and viscera rained down on The Black Man, bespeckling the ivory skin of The White Women and filling the bejeweld Pimp Cup that sat erect upon the picnic blanket that served as the centrepoint of this Dejeuner.



Sham-what?



“I'm off to work, I'll be back around 6,” grumbled the Man swinging the rickety door closed behind him. He walked down the hall stepping over drunks and inhaling noxious smells of urine, paint thinner and the residue of burnt crack cocaine.
“Dill pickle chips and burnt plastic,” he thought to himself, His stomach grumbled, empty but for 6 cups of coffee.
He greeted the manager on his way out but was unheard behind 3 inches of lexan that separated the managers office from the main lobby.
Exiting onto the street The Man was greeted by the sun poking up above the tenemant housing across the street and he averted his eyes from its accusing stare. He spat a widget of phlegm onto the cracked pavement disturbing an oily puddle of filth, turned to his right and headed to work.

It was 9am.

Chapter 2

Two Men walk towards each other on the street, they are dressed in identical Brooks Brothers suits in Charcoal Grey and share the same smooth features, fresh shaven and close cut, well trimmed hair.

Smell of Hugo Boss and Testosterone

They are neither brothers nor clones yet they might as well be. They nod simultaneously to each other as they pass, each feeling the weight of the large knife that is sheathed within the uncreased depths of their suit jackets. This scene repeats itself all across The City as everywhere the 454 small-block engine of The City Economy roars to life.

The first Man enters into a glass building where an army of Men in identical Blue Coveralls scrub and shine and buff and rinse off the graffiti that has accumulated over the past evening, but by the time they encircle the building they must begin anew for paint and marker and acid have already sprung up in a cancer like malignancy of names and tags and slogans. Cause and effect. Clean and deface. These Men are lucky. They will always be employed as long as there is a system of have and have-not, affected and disaffected. Asocial, anti-social, deviant, miscreant, Youth versus Everyone Else.

The second Man entered a brick building, walking through the lobby he saw a man in a Beige Brooks Brother's suit. Knives out. They fought quietly to the death in the middle of the lobby. No one noticed until a Secretary in a Black Pencil Skirt slipped in the congealing puddle of blood and fell ballerina-delicate landing on a firm gym-sculpted ass. At this point she was helped up by Five (5) Men dressed in Charcoal Grey who then set upon the corpse in Beige tearing it apart growling and screeching like baboons. The Secretary tore off her Black Pencil Skirt and High Collared Blouse and joined the Men who proceeded to fuck and bite and tear at her and each other violating and penetrating. Ripping and rendering until all that was left was a semensalivabloodshiturine soaked mess. The mess was cleaned up soon after by a team of Blue Coverall clad Men. They whistled while they worked.

It was 8am.

Chapter 1

An Urbane tale in 24 parts


Picture in your head if you will... No, you must. A city. The City. Viewed from afar. Viewed from space. Viewed from Space like you're Buzz-Fucking-Aldrin falling headlong towards it. You sped uncontrollably downwards each blink a snapshot of the pavement 700 feet closer to your teary drunken bloodshot eyes. You saw an island, and a coastline, and a dense urban grouping of buildings. Buildings cloistered together like high school students smoking beside the English Wing tight with excitement and rebellion. Your final sight was a weather-beaten tenement, - old, grey and coming up fast. 6 stories you passed before, exploding onto the street, your melon flesh splashing, worthy of Uncle Bob's bellyflops into the pool over summer vacation. Back when there was Summer vacation

Back when there was Summer.

PAN UP to the 5th floor, a grimy pollution and bird shit stained window obfuscates the movement of a figure inside.

CLOSE UP: of a Mans hand, It is hairy and pitted, Browned by the sun. A Workman's hand.. It's gnarled fingers hold a French Press of tar black coffee whose plunger has just been thrust downward.

The Man begins to pour the coffee into a chipped white mug stained with the specks of past drips of java, The dishwasher abraded text on it reads “Insert witty comment regarding coffee here.” As the hot beverage cascades into the mug it makes a sound akin to pissing into a shallow pot and this causes The Man's bladder to contract ever so slightly.

The Man sighed. He knew he had a long day ahead of him and the sun was only just cracking at the horizon, thin trickles of light dancing through the open window illuminating the small single room apartment in which he resides.

Smells like piss and fresh dew.

Across the street a trio of hookers shy away from the coming day, their night just ending as a low rumble of commuter cars begins to fill the air like the uneasy groans of a drunk's stomach as she rolls out of bed. The neon lights that filled the street begin to wink out as the morning light drowns them in golden swaths. One of the whores lights a cigarette, bringing it to chapped lips that look like 20 miles of bloodstained asphalt. Chipped and rugged they have seen to(o) much traffic in to short a period of time. She bids farewell to her compatriots and crosses the still still street, entering her apartment block and climbing the Five (5) flights of stairs to the room she shares with The Man.

It is 7am.