Rocket Fuel Rebop

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Patron Saint Of Sleep

1974. It’s a dark, moonless night in my house in Los Angeles. The time is 1:49 am and the silence of my sleep is broken by the sound of my father screaming in his bed. He sleeps in the living room alone. His wife/my mother died four years earlier.

My father slept without a mattress on his bed, a flat surface with blankets and a pillow. When I heard him scream I got up to wake him up.

He laid in bed with his eyes closed and screaming; this happens on occasion but not frequently. I shook him gently.

“Wake up, Dad, wake up, you’re having one of those dreams again”, I said quietly. He slowly stirred and his face relaxed a bit. His eyes opened quickly and focused on me.

“Oh…I dreamt about it again”, he said, exhaling to find some relief.
“Well, it’s over now. Do you want a glass of water?”
“No, but my back’s aching again. Walk on my back”.
“Well…okay, but just for a minute”.

My father spun around, lying on his stomach. I stepped up on the flat bed and got on his lower back, slowly and lightly walking all over his back, getting on the shoulder blades, padding to the sides of his spine, making sure not to step on the vertebral column but around it.

“Oh, that’s good, that’s good, move a little lower”.

I traveled across the topography of my father’s back, following the receding line of his back like some uncharted trail. I slowly treaded towards the sciatic region as he exhaled and quietly sighed. I was getting tired of tightrope walking my father’s back and wanted to get back to bed. “How is that? Feeling better?”

“Yeah, that’s good. Good night”. He rolled around and went back to his customary position.

I went back to bed and thought about the terrible dreams my father had. He was held prisoner in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau during the Holocaust and lost his parents, brothers and countless more relatives in the concentration camps.

He saw small, frightened children herded at gunpoint into poisoned gas chambers.

He saw elderly women tearfully forced to dig their own graves before being shot to death.

My father remembers being lined up along with his fellow prisoners in front of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death in Auschwitz, to be picked for torturous human experiments and was fortunate to be dismissed.

I’m named after my father’s brother, Andy, who was killed in the death camps when he was only 13 years old, and the peculiar thing is when I turned 13 my mother died. George Bernard Shaw should’ve said that death, not youth is wasted on the young.

I wondered how many times his back had been beaten by the Nazis. How much physical abuse did he suffer from them? Memories like that never leave, and even if you choose to ignore them they’ll always return in your dreams.

With my mother dead and his family gone all he had left were his sons and empty nights devoid of dreams. Money is nothing; dreams are everything.

******************

The year is 1996 and I’m living with my wife in a one-bedroom two-bathroom apartment in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles. We survived West Coast earthquakes, make fashions and occasionally play in a band together. We’re always busy in an interior-sort of way.

Our next-door neighbor is Bob, a 79-year old shut-in with thick eyeglasses, a long white beard and a baller cap from Hollywood Park. He loves the racehorses and gets newsletters from the racetrack about upcoming events. He is so rail thin a strong breeze could probably knock him over.

Bob’s very friendly as shut-ins go, however. Once he offered to pick up my wife’s amplifier, which houses two 15-inch speakers, and carry it for her. It must have weighed three times as much as he did, if not more.

If we ever walked by his apartment and he was on his way out the door there would be a struggle getting out, because Bob’s place was so packed with newspapers, bags of untossed trash and boxes and boxes of random possessions. Although no one ever entered his flat, it was said that the place was basically a junkyard that he watched television and slept in.

When the landlady was asked why she didn’t evict him, she said she was told when she bought the building that the proviso in the purchase was that Bob came with the place and couldn’t be kicked out. Since he never complained about anything or bothered anyone it wasn’t a point of contention.

One night at around 3:30 am we woke to the sound of someone yelling. It was hard to understand what he was yelling about, but it was something repetitive and yelled with regularity; something like “NOT AGAIN! NOT AGAIN! NOT AGAIN!”

I jumped out of bed to see what the fuss was about. Bob was yelling halfway out his door into the hallway. He was in the throes of a nightmare but wanted to get out of his apartment. I looked at him and his eyes were glassy, not focusing on anything but looking straight ahead as he yelled, “NOT AGAIN! NOT AGAIN!” over and over.

”Bob! Bob!” I said quietly. “Wake up, Bob! It’s okay. Everything’s alright. I’m here”.
His voice faded slowly into a whimper after I repeated myself until he snapped out of it and focused himself at me. “Oh”, he mumbled in a small voice.
“It’s okay, you had a bad dream”, I said slowly. “You can calm down now. You’re awake now”.
“Oh”, he sharpened his vision at me. “Okay…goodnight”.

I wondered later on if he had a bad dream or had a foreboding of what was to come, because six months later he died when his television set fell on him while he slept and crushed his chest. Apparently his TV sat on a cardboard box right next to him as he slept.

Since he lived alone no one knew he had died and we didn’t realize something was awry when we stopped running into him. And then, of course, the smells wafted through the vents…the smell of death. After a week of the smell we called the Fire Department and he was definitely gone.

After Bob’s death the apartment was cleaned out and we rented the space as a workroom/studio to create fashions. Whenever I was alone in there at night I could feel Bob’s presence and never felt like a haunting. After all, I fought off his nightmares for him.

************

2018. After renting Bob’s apartment as a workroom for 15 years my wife unraveled and left me. I’m now abandoned and alone. I work seven days a week, two different jobs: clerical work on weekdays and delivery work on weekends. I come home late from work and I wake up early the next day.

The money isn’t great, but I earn enough to keep my apartment without suffering the anxiety of a roommate. Unfortunately, anxiety exists in many forms. I live above a pretentious dress shop run by two aging neurotic gay men who constantly scream at each other. They’re old and bitter because they sell granny formals on a youth-oriented shopping street and nobody cares.

One of them is an egotistical Israeli who drives around in an oversized pickup truck and charms elderly women into buying his creations, while the other constantly walks around a whippet who empaths their neuroses and barks constantly.

They’re not a terribly bright couple, so it took them a year and a half to realize she was gone and I lived solo above them. After finding this out they decided to render my ability to get a good night’s sleep impossible. (They liked her but always hated me).

Their workroom is right below my bedroom and they began to work all night with the music turned all the way up. Wired on cocaine to keep themselves awake, they play a non-stop torrent of loud music from 10 pm until 6 am while they work. Manhattan Transfer. Anita Baker. Show tunes. Beyonce. Salsa. Lady Gaga. Sleeping has become non-existent for me.

The music is so loud it fills up all the sound my bedroom. I can’t hear anything from my television because their sound has dominated everything in my room. All I can hear is their horrible music and nothing else.

I called the landlady about it and she rolled her eyes and said, “Call them up and talk to them about it. I’m SURE you’ll work something out with them”.

I called the police five times in one night because they kept promising to send a car over. Nobody came. The police didn’t give a damn. Nobody did.

This never happened when my wife was with me, this was a new attack and they basically had everyone’s blessing. My neighbors didn’t care. I was alone in every sense of the word. Working became difficult; I had trouble staying awake. I suffered from sleep deprivation.

Night after night this endless assault of loud music kept my walls shaking and my floor vibrating with their shitty music. Nobody cared and I had no one to talk to about it. This went on for about a year, and then something interesting happened.

The pilot light in my heater went out. I called the gas company and the gas tech came by and told me that I couldn’t turn the heater on anymore because it was emitting too much carbon monoxide. It had to be replaced. A heater repair man came by a week later and installed a new unit. The heater works even better than before, but with one twist.

My new heater thinks it’s a radiator. It makes banging and kicking noises all night, so while the granny dress couple play their music they hear and endless stream of banging sounds all night. It freaks them out so much they turn their music down and sometimes even turn it off completely.

It doesn’t end there, though. They also hate it when I play cartoon shows on my Bluray player all night, so I put on Rocky & Bullwinkle, Beany and Cecil, Bugs Bunny. Endless screaming, goofy voices, wacky sound effects, Dixieland music with blaring horns, endless cacophony, etc. It makes them mental – sometimes they even bang on my floor to get me to stop. Nothing doing.

They hate free jazz, my favorite kind of music. Archie Shepp. The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Ornette Coleman. Blue Note Records, especially with Elvin Jones pounding the crap out of his skins. I love it, they hate it. It makes their coke ears bleed. They bang on the walls and I sleep through it.

So now I get my eight hours sleep, and yes, I quit the weekend delivery job so I sleep in on Saturday and Sunday mornings. But, alas. The damage is done.

Occasionally the dress couple don’t come in at night and I still turn on the TV and blast it all night. The thought of sleeping in a silent apartment is unthinkable. I need to sleep in my own noise with the television on all night.

There are nights when they don’t even play music anymore, but I don’t care. The TV goes on anyway and it will be loud and stay that way until I get up at 5:30 am. I have become Bob, I am Bob. I’m the crazy old man of the building now and I will listen to my set all night, because it’s the lullaby no one will sing to me.

The Fucking Food Court

The Fucking Food Court

I’m at the fucking food court

Lunch break from work

Tourists doddering around in the worst clothes money can buy

Stiffer and whiter than a George Segal sculpture

Reading the menu boards with piercing concentration

and then wandering aimlessly away

to Johnny motherfucking Rockets

College graduate executives from Iowa City

Roman holiday big vacay to The Big Orange

hot fun in the summertime

next week it’s off to Las Vegas to catch Rod Stewart

I march to the Mediterranean stand

Greek salad like an Argonaut

I take the table next to six children

Six thirty-year old children

They’re not eating their food

They’re laughing at their food

“FRENCH FRIES…I LOVE FRENCH FRIES!” he smiled

“I LOVE FRENCH FRIES, TOO!” she smiled

One of them stared at six packs of catsup laid out in front of him

“I NEED MORE KETCHUP! I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH KETCHUP!” he yelled, smiling. He wore thick glasses with a prescription writ out for a telescope

A very serious black woman in a car coat said very softly, “Don’t yell, Donnie, it’s not polite. Eat up, we only have half an hour”

“BUT! BUT! BUT!” Donnie protested louder than a solicitor

“SHHHH” she shushed

“I need more ketchup!” he whispered oh so very loudly, grinning until his thick glasses tilted crookedly on his face

Small children walked by a few stared at the old children

The old children didn’t notice

They were in their own world

A world of French Fries

The Man With The Silver Wheels

The man with the silver wheels
Sits in his chair with a quiet grunting motor
The wheels sometimes squeak
A general sound to let him know things are moving
The sound of motion
Ambulatory audio
Steel wheels minus DJ
He sits in his chair as it trudges down the broken, cracked, lumpy sidewalk
Cruel concrete uncaring about his disability

How did he get this way? Was he born sitting down?
No, no, no, no, no
Drunken Saturday night in his muscle car
The wheelman and his friends celebrating James Dean
Let’s re-enact the chicken race
The chicken race
Why did the chicken race to cross the road
Camaro flipping like a pinwheel until his tailbone cracked
Ambulatory audio of crushed metal, chrome, glass
Ejaculated gas and oil and burned rubber
Now he’s the man with the silver wheels

One night he trundled down an empty sidewalk
A Dollar-ride scooter stood horizontally before him defying him to pass
Incensed with rage he pushed the poorly propped ride
It crashed down with its little disco lights flickering and beeping sadly
Feeling empowered the following night he went out with everyone gone
And pushed down more Dollar-ride scooters
More tragic beeping sad LED lights flickering
It made him smile for the first time in awhile

It became a nocturnal ritual
The man with the silver wheels
Pushed down Rent-A -Bikes
Unicycles
Scooters
He went on a tear for a week
He got all DWP* (*drunk with power)
Night after night shoving over all kinds of transpo
Shopping carts
Motorcycles

Then a man in a van with two dozen Dollar-ride scooters saw him
Started screaming
The man with the silver wheels ducked out into an alley
Pulled over to a dark corner
Pitch black jet black starless and bible black
Hiding in the red brick wings with slats of lights piercing the dark
Red brick wearing spray paint names
Creeper78
XXX Klan
Hid in the shadows of his crime
The vandal of wheels waited for refreshing silence
He spun around and went home Home to the House of Wheels

God Save The Dogs

What beautiful skin she had. It was so clear and pale, like immaculate porcelain or the most refined ivory. Such flawless pigmenting, why you could see the colors of every vein in her body as if it were some newly printed roadmap.

Her veins were like a stained glass window in a church. It suited her vocation rather well. With her round face and high forehead she looked like The Virgin Mary, and so she was.

Abigail made a living as a model for artists playing The Virgin Mary. She’d arrive at their studio or classroom in her black goth clothes with a suitcase containing her sandals, Holy Mother gown and large plastic baby doll.

The baby doll came with a blanket with the satin seam pulled off for authenticity. Some artists fancied her exposing her boob to show her breastfeeding the future deity. It’s a living.

Like a paid sex worker she’d ask the artist, “How do you want it?”

“Eyes downturned, as usual. You’re doing something holy”, ordered the artist. Hence she complied and the artists industriously sketched away.

So there she was, clutching her cold baby doll to her plump, pale breast, making sure not to show too much and wrapping the sides of her robe to cover just enough from making things too tawdry.

While she posed she contemplated about what club she was going to go to that evening: would it be Tentacles or Eulogy? Tentacles was the S&M-styled club which played industrial-strength industrial music. She could already hear the pulsating bass line of a KMFDM classic in her head and there would be some severe Rammstein to go.

Eulogy was more of a doom & gloom boom ritual, a darkened room with smoke machines pushing out volumes of smoke while you danced to the Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division and Siouxsie Sioux singing about insane asylums.

Abigail Reeves had two profiles on Facebook: there was Abigail Reeves, blessed religious model. Her page was filled with inspirational messages and pictures of her looking blissful in a field of wheat with messages like, “Born To Be Blessed”, “Singing His Praises Every Day”, et al.

There was a separate page dedicated to her clubgirl persona, Paula Punish. Her sartorial choices were a lot different: leather, latex and simply electrical tape, all in black. Whenever it was a sci-fi theme night there was the occasional silver, but for the most part it was all black.

Two hours later: “Okay, that’s a wrap. Thanks for everything, Abigail. Same time next week?”

“Yeah, sure thing”, she’d mumble, packing Baby Jesus away in her suitcase.

Some art instructors would hand her a check, whereas others straight out handed her cash. She liked that the most.

If she got a roll of cash she’d get in her banged-up PT Cruiser and go straight to her connection’s house in Highland Park and buy a balloon. Her connection was gay so she’d cook the works, tie up and shoot her pay right there in his living room. Her last connection was straight and tried raping her while she passed out on the sofa, so she switched to a new guy.

“I love it when you bring cold, hard cash instead of promises”, Brian the connection croaked.
“Yeah, it makes everything easier”, Abigail mumbled as she watched the spoon glide above the BBQ lighter. “It’s just me and Baby Jesus”.

“Hey, listen Abigail. I’ve got company in two hours, so you can get high and hang out for awhile, but then you gotta leave, okay?”
“Yeah, cool. Gotta get ready for Tentacles tonight, anyway”.
“Tentacles, shit, I forgot about that. I told everyone I’m going to Eulogy tonight”.

“Eulogy plays the same shit every month. Fuck that place”, Abigail growled as she tightened a Stevie Nicks scarf around her arm.
“Can I ask you something? Don’t people see your arms when you model?”
“Hell, no. I wear a robe all the time. They don’t know the difference”, she took the needle from Brian and prepared to plunge it.
“Cool. Hey! Can you get me and my friend into Tentacles tonight?”
Abigail sank the needle into her arm.

Then there was the very next day as there always is a very next day in a story. Abigail Reeves got busy with her social networking. The part-time Virgin Mary went to Facebook and checked out her Messenger: the same old scene with random guys she friended posting pictures of their pricks, some impressive but most looking like expired items from a Bait and Tackle shop.

Most of these messages were accompanied with lovesick messages and meager amounts of money promised to her PayPal account.

Her brief attention was curtailed by Chili, her Chihuahua who was trembling horribly. He limped over to her chair as she was finishing her breakfast and proceeded to simultaneously vomit and eject a stream of wet diarrhea out his tiny behind.

“Jesus, Chili!”

Chili whimpered and lowered his bony little head to the floor as his rectal issue continued to stream on her hip parquet floor. Abigail sprung into action by picking up her cell phone and taking a picture of Chili looking sad.

This prompted the quickest Facebook post Abigail ever posted: under the shot of Chili with his head hung down. “HELP, GUYS, MY PUPPER IS SICK, I NEED FUNDS TO GET HIM MEDICAL HELP”.

Many of her lady friends posted crying faces to show they were sympathetic to her plight, while the loyal thousands of men all pledged to PayPal her more money. Penis portraits would most likely follow, as well.

The professional Virgin considered all the men who followed her and decided to open a Patreon account to sell her nudes, as well as a Kickstarter with many portraits of Chili looking happy. You know, there’s no happier looking dog than a Chihuahua.

The men grabbed the drama of a sick Chili to their collective breasts while a few girls trolled her: “Didn’t you ask for money for a new car last year? Well, where is this new car, you fake bitch?”

Abigail took to threatening many of her male followers with unfriending and even blocking if they didn’t send her the required amount to save her pupper’s life.

Well, the money came in small streams. Since Abigail was an addict it was hard to tell how much of a share the veterinarian was getting.

They say that work is the great panacea to a person’s problems, so Abigail packed up Baby Jesus in her suitcase and wondered if she was getting a fistful of cash at the end of the night.