What Was Her Name?
What Was Her Name?
I sat behind her in Math class,
or maybe it was Social Studies.
She had red hair, but not red, red.
Not freckles on your whole body red.
It was more like the hair on an Irish setter.
Her ears stuck out kind of mousey.
She had tiny teeth, but straight and white.
Her smile was crooked and looked kind,
but not sweet, sort of wise.
She always smelled like cotton candy or juicy fruit.
I never talked to her.
Sure I spoke to her, passed papers to her,
maybe she borrowed a pencil from me.
But I never really talked to her,
never knew her.
What was her name?
Hot and Bothered
Hot and Bothered
I am in the second story Chemistry lab of Herbert H. Hoover High School. I’m sitting at my spot at the third row of lab tables. My teacher, Mr. Reade, is giving some instruction with his back turned to the class. He is scribbling something on the blackboard. His white lab coat is frayed at the bottom and it makes him look sloppy. He has a shiny bald head and he wears thick glasses, with side shields, that make his eyes look like they are too big. When he speaks to you he always looks surprised. He is detailing the Lewis Structure of Acetone. To me it is just a bunch of dots and lines. I could comprehend what Mr. Reade is telling us, if I wanted to, but I don’t. I don’t care.
I am fixated on the new arrivals, evenly spaced out across the shiny black lab tables, one at each station. They are Bunsen Burners, and they were not here last week. They are here now because, this week, we are to begin doing distillations as part of our introduction to Organic Chemistry. I cannot concentrate on the blackboard. I barely hear Mr. Reade’s voice. I cannot think about anything except those little, silver, slightly phallic pieces of lab equipment. Bunsen Burners. Burners.
I hear little of what Mr. Reade is talking about. I take no notes. I am just staring at the burner, inches in front of me. Thin, brown tubing connects it to a metal fitting that comes out of the table. I reach out, as Mr. Reade’s back is to the class, and feel the tube. It feels a like a snake. I imagine it pumping life into the burner, feeding the fire that will erupt from the top. I pull my hand back and close my eyes. I can feel my heart beating in my chest. I try not to think about the fire.
Mr. Reade tosses his chalk into the tray and turns around, clapping his hands together, dusting them off. He has assembled a metal and glassware structure on the front table. It consists of a thin metal pole that rises above a small platform. Clamped to that pole is a metal ring that holds some sort of flask. That flask is connected by a glass tube to another piece of glassware.
Mr. Reade is going to demonstrate how to perform a distillation. This will involve the boiling, evaporation, and condensation of a liquid in order to separate it into parts. He will demonstrate the proper technique and then we will perform our own distillations.
This is actually pretty interesting, or it should be. I want it to be. I don’t want to be like this. I am nervous and starting to sweat. I try again to focus on the lesson, but all I hear is that we are going to light the Bunsen Burners.
He has the glassware in place and the liquid in the boiling flask. He slides the Bunsen burner closer. My mouth is dry. I wish, for the first time in my life, that I was seated closer to the front of the classroom.
He opens the valve and I can hear a faint hiss, as the gas flows to the beautiful little device, the tiny rocket, the metal dick that will spit fire. I lean forward and sniff. I wish I was closer. I want to smell the gas. Mr. Reade picks up a tool called a flint spark lighter. It looks like a pair of tongs with a round metal cap on the end. I have played with this tool, earlier in the school year, when I found myself alone in the lab. You squeeze it together and it shoots out a beautiful spray of sparks. The smell is like burnt metal and it is intoxicating.
Mr. Reade is speaking, describing his actions and detailing the safest methods to light the burners. I hear none of it. I hold my breath as he squeezes the lighter. Once, twice, three times. On the third squeeze there is a small puff and the Bunsen Burner comes to life.
It is a small flame, blue and yellow, but it is lovely. He turns the tube on the burner to adjust the airflow and the flame changes shape and color. It is hypnotizing the way he can control the flame, the beast.
I feel my dick grow semi-hard and press against the zipper of my jeans. STOP THIS, I tell myself, THIS IS NOT SEXY. But as my lab partner and I are setting up the glassware I pull the lighter to my side of the table, hording it. I will be the one to ignite the flame.
In my haste to set up the experiment I nearly drop the flask. I look around the room. My face feels like a stoplight. I am flushed with excitement. Take a breath, I tell myself as I look around at my classmates. I feel queasy and desperate. I don’t want them to sense what I am feeling, but I feel like it must be obvious to everyone in the room. I don’t want them to see me, the sick, disgusting, crazy-ass pervert that I am. SICKO! PERVERT! CREEP!
I feel like I have the word Danger, or Toxic, or Warning tattooed across my forehead. Or I feel like I should have it tattooed there.
We have a fireplace in our house. It is a regular wood burning fireplace, and we have fires five or six times a year. Those fires are beautiful to look at, but they don’t really excite me. They are safe, and boring, because those fires burn where they are supposed to burn. I still love to poke around in them. I could prod the logs and hot coals, shaping and reshaping the fire (the beast, the toy, the slut), for hours, but I don’t even get hardons anymore from fire place fires.
I don’t look at candles or zippo lighters and want to jerk off. Campfires are more exciting, but only if they are real bonfires, the bigger the better. If they look like they may flare out of control and burn the forest to the ground, that is hot, so to speak.
The beast is most exciting when it is where it should not be. It is most sexy and enticing when it is dangerous, and secret, and escaping my control.
I try not to think about the other fires. But my mind is drawn back to the ones that I set in the filthy trashcan behind that old warehouse. The first was such a rush. What was that – four months ago, or was it five? How many fires since then? Too many. Not enough.
I would fill the can with paper and lighter fluid and set it ablaze. I stood beside it with my pants around my ankles, jerking off furiously. I ran my free hand over the flame, then pressed my forearm to my nose and smelled the burnt hair. I would run my crotch along the side of the can and feel how hot it was.
I felt so alive, so horny, during those fires, like there was a fire crawling inside of me, just under my skin. Then the trashcan grew boring. It was too safe, too easy to control. So I set some fires in the woods behind the warehouse. Then I set fire to a shed in the yard of an old couple that lived five blocks from me.
I was terrified all of the time – that I would be caught, that I would hurt someone, that I would burn someone and love it. I was scared of myself. It was all getting to be too much and I stopped for awhile. But I couldn’t sleep. I mean I could not sleep. Picture seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, longer, and not a wink. I was a zombie, and I was in pain. And that fucking bitch was calling me, coaxing me to come and play, telling me that it would be alright. We would just play the safe games, like before. There was no need to escalate. That’s what she said to me – no need to escalate.
So I started to play again. I started small and I kept it under control. The games were just a relief valve, a safe outlet for all of the pent up shit inside of me. I kept it under control, just like I wanted too. I didn’t escalate – except for that stray cat. God damn it don’t think about the cat.
My partner and I are done with our setup but we have to wait for the other groups. You fucking dullards, I think, hurry your asses up, it’s not that hard. I am trying to stay focused. I am trying to will my boner to die.
I don’t exactly know why the Bunsen burners are affecting me so much. Maybe it is because I didn’t know that we would be using them so they were a surprise. Maybe it is because I have not started a fire in nearly a week. Maybe it is the fact that we are going to light so many perfectly tiny fires in one room. This is being done under close supervision and the apparatuses are completely controllable. We are all wearing goggles and using safe procedures – but I know the truth. I know that our flames are hooked up to one huge-ass gas tank and they are dangerous. With so many fires, even tiny ones, something could go wrong. And there are chemicals in the lab, flammable chemicals, lots of them. It would not take much for the whole lab to go up one terrible explosion.
Maybe it is the fact that we get to play with fire, as a class, and I will be doing so in such close proximity to all of these girls, my classmates, that I have lusted after since puberty. They are going to be so close to me and my fire. Angie Tidwell is right in front of me, barely more than an arm’s length away. It would be nothing to lift my burner up to her head and light her hair on fire.
So here I sit, legs crossed, lighter in hand, hard as a rock. I look around the room. I look at all of the young, beautiful girls. I remember when I thought of them and got excited. I pictured them in bra and panties. I fantasized about them in the big, communal shower after gym class. My mind’s eye saw, savored, agonized over the imagined image of a dozen smooth, naked, wet bodies. What I wouldn’t give to be turned on by that now, to be a run of the mill perverted adolescent, lusting after every halfway pretty girl in my class. Oh those girls.
To my left is Lisa Babbitz, Babbtits to some of my cruder classmates, and she indeed has huge breasts. They are so firm under her t-shirt they look like you could bounce a quarter off of them. I should be imagining what color her nipples are but instead I am thinking about how a rayon bra would melt into her skin.
Across the room is Evelyn Lee, a tiny Asian girl who gets straight A’s. She has almond shaped eyes and hair so shiny black that it looks like spray paint. She is the embodiment of an exotic, pubescent fantasy, but I am wondering what the tops of the lab tables would look like in a fire. Would they burn or would they melt?
Michele Himple sits next to Sarah Lauderdale. They are both cheerleaders. I stare at their smooth legs and short cheerleader skirts. So muscular and athletic. Part of me, a fading part, longs to run my hand up under those skirts and explore, both of them together, two at a time. But a different part of me imagines how the right kind of explosion, in this lab, would suck a blast of air in from the school hallways a moment before it blew out the second story windows and erupted in glory. I am looking at those long, silky thighs and thinking how quickly this classroom, this one confined space, could be turned to hell on earth.
I turn around and looked at Tina Shoenberg. She has the prettiest face of any girl in our class. Her teeth are so white and her mouth looks so fresh, like a toothpaste commercial. Her lips are so full and pouty perfect that I should have been fantasizing about kissing her. I should have been thinking about what it would be like to run my tounge around the inside of her mouth. She must taste so good. But instead, I am thinking how I would like to stick a book full of burnt matches in my mouth and suck at the charred paper.
I look to my right at Samantha Pavelshky. She’s a big boned girl but she has the most beautiful skin. It nearly glows. I bet she could fuck like an animal, backing that big ass up on my cock. Riding me and smothering me with her big tits. Down from her is Dawn Neely. There is nothing pretty about Dawn. She is gangly with bad teeth and acne. I guess that she has awful breath, but in the past that would not have mattered. The me from four years ago, just getting my first armpit hair and boners every five minutes, would have taken Dawn or Samantha. When puberty hits a young man, full force, it is a powerful, all consuming thing. During that time there are few things feminine that are unattractive enough to be dismissed without at least considering what it would be like to put the wood to them. Yes in the past, given the private chance, I would have fucked Dawn or Samantha or any girl in my class.
These days I have a new obsession and only the most agonizingly beautiful girls, the most hard core, explicitly sexual images and thoughts can get me aroused. I still fantasize about girls. They are still in my thoughts when I am pleasuring myself, but now they are always accompanied by the beast.
They are naked, just out of a shower, trapped and calling for help from their second story window as the house burns beneath them. They are tied to a tree with a forest fire racing towards them. Fire is crawling up their arms and legs, eating away their clothes. They are burning. They are screaming, even as their flesh is melting and peeling off of their bones.
When I look back at Angie Tidwell, sitting right in front of me, a tear appears at the corner of both of my eyes. Angie, with the pale skin and freckles, she has the most beautiful red hair. Surprise, surprise – I have always had a thing for redheads, fire- crotches. Since third grade I have been in love with Angie. I have always been so attracted to her red hair. I would love to run my hands through it as I kiss her, deeply and passionately, and like a normal person.
I close my eyes and I try to picture this. Holding her close, feeling her long, firm body and small breasts against me. What would she smell like? Would she be timid, or would she suck back at my mouth with enthusiasm? It could feel so good. I hold this image in my mind with desperate tenacity. I squeeze the muscles in my stomach and try to make my erection twitch at the thought of sweet, redheaded Angie, but it does nothing for me.
I am left wondering what that red hair would smell like if it was burning. I am left picturing how she would run around, panicked and crazy, after I doused her head in lighter fluid and lit it on fire. How she would grow more crazed and desperate as she beat at her own head and chest, trying in vain to put out the spreading fire.
My lab partner looks at me, sitting there in a trance with a tears rolling down my cheek and pooling in the bottom of my lab goggles. “Dude?”, he says, “Hey, you alright?” I snap out of it and look up at him. Eyes red, I tell him, “Yeah – no problem.”
“What the fuck man?”
“Shit, I think I’m allergic to some of these chemical”, I say.
I hand him the lighter and tell him to do it. As I turn on the gas I am still silently weeping a bit, but I have my head turned down so no one can see.
I am crying because I am going to let him light the burner. I am crying because I am not going to light Angie Tidwell on fire, but I know that someday I am going to do something. I am going to burn something big. I am going to burn someone, probably someone that I love or want to fuck. It will happen and it will happen soon.
the Machine
The Machine
See the cashier standing like a cow,
In the long, long line of consumers.
There is an abundance of fools.
They trade their free time for mountains of stuff.
Stuff they don’t need, don’t even want, not really.
They sell their labor for false, fleeting joy,
Gained through purposeless purchases.
An impatient, piggish group they are.
In such a hurry to feed the machine with their souls.
The cashier watches the clock,
as her hands do their automatic slide over the electric-eye,
tallying continuously the profit of the retail barons.
Beep, beep, beep.
The cashier watches, and waits, and waits
For her smoke break.
A cloud of joy.
A poisonous orgasm.
She waits, like Sisyphus – as the line of cattle
Regenerates over and over and over.
Pig Man?
Pig-Man
Last week I’m at the mall. I do not enjoy the mall, or stores in general, unless they carry a very specific range of products that cater to a rather exclusive cliental. This was not such an establishment.
It is a clothing store and it is way too bright. The walls and ceiling are covered with seemingly random and unrelated paraphernalia. Filled with mannequins and way too much color, I don’t understand the first thing about the happy ass patrons or the useless merchandise they are inspecting. To me, it all seems like a huge waste of time, effort, and money. It is an ugly place for someone like me – ugly and confusing. I might as well be on another planet for how alien I feel in this store.
This store has racks and racks of clothing – kind of like a maze, causing shifting lines of sight as you moved around the store. Think of a paintball course.
I am meandering, not shopping for myself, basically just bored and following the person that I am with. I am paying just enough attention to avoid accidentally stepping on the heel of her planted foot, pinning it to the ground, and causing her to step half out of her shoe. Or to be accurate, I am paying almost enough attention to avoid that. God she hates it when I do that. The same thing goes on when we go to the grocery store together, but in that case I am ramming her Achilles with the shopping cart.
I’m following, hands brushing absently along the sale items, eyes moving lazily from one stupid thing to the next – not focusing – trying to stay unfocused. I am passing time until it is finally time to move along. I am telling you, it is a dead time in my life. It’s probably a half hour that I have sacrificed to the Gods of banality. It’s time that I am not getting back. I see it as not exactly wasted time, just empty.
Then I look across the store, not a large store mind you, but as I said in not so many words, cluttered. Out of the corner of my eye, walking away, at such an angle that I can only see the back, side, and a fraction of the front of his (it’s) face, I see ‘something’.
I am not going to try and be fancy with words or bullshit you – it looked like a ‘Pig-Man’. Yeah that’s right – a PIG-MAN, not the body, just the face. No kidding.
This all happens very quickly. I am at the back of the store looking at what I, in my ignorance and lack of interest, would call women’s petticoats, and the thing is way up at the front of the store, (an entire store away). I am stuck in the back, in the petticoat section, and the thing is on it’s way out the front.
The mall is busy. Just as it is leaving the store, turning to merge into the stream of shuffling shoppers, it turns both halves of it’s disparate face towards me. It might have turned to look at me, but I don’t like to think about that. I get a good look, or a pretty good look, at it.
The skin is leathery and, if I am being honest, more red than pink, the color of a bad birthmark, which is why to this day I tell myself it was my eyes playing a trick on me. But the thing is there is a snout, or snout-ish nose. The patch of skin under the nose is too short on one side, so it pulls up on the lip, but just on one side, forcing a permanent sneer. I see some of the teeth.
They sure as hell do not look like people teeth. They are brownish and too flat, made for grinding is what I think. There is a large, blunt incisor poking up from the bottom row. People don’t teeth like that. The fat, green pig things, carrying the battle axes, in Star Wars have those, but not people. Those teeth looked in my imagination, like they had spent years nipping off tasty bits of things. I was sure that, if I saw this man/thing eating, it’s lower jaw would be moving in slow grinding circles. Grinding, grinding, grinding.
So the pig half had reddish blistered skin, a deformed lip, teeth that looked like they were made for chewing cud instead of gum, and the eye on that half was also piggish. Because of the distance I could not really see it, but it looked beady and squinty and it sat beneath a thick and prickly brow.
I could not see the ear on the ‘pig side’ it had grown it’s hair long. It hung low, hiding that almost certainly monstrous canal. I bet that side of the head had disgustingly acute hearing.
There was a distinct difference in the hair, even from the back. Normal, if greasy and snarly, hair covered the entire head and hung down past the shoulders. But on the pig side, there was something more. Under the greasy, greyish hair you could spot patches of thick, dark bristles poking out. It seemed that the man/pig, pig/man had tried to trim and flatten the patches, so they would be hidden under the normal hair – but you could see it. “My God” I thought, “why not wear a hat?” For that matter why not wear a mask? Why even leave the house – and I am not proud of this thought but I did think it – why not put a shotgun in your pork skinned mouth and pull the trigger?
I am not a cruel or prejudiced person. I am, in fact, fairly enlightened. I watch TLC. I have seen ‘tree-man’ and ‘mermaid-girl’. I understand that we live in a world where unfortunate people are born with abnormalities, or have horrible deforming accidents. I am thankful to live in a culture where these people are free to walk amongst us. While they certainly endure, from time to time, awkward stares and inappropriate questions from children, they are not outcasts. The word “Freak” is now accepted only slightly more readily than the word “Nigger”.
In our enlightened society everyone, Pig-Man or not, lives their lives to whatever fullness their situation and ambition allows. That is all great. That is the way it should be. God knows that our country is someone unique in this attitude of tolerance and compassion. History shows that it has taken people here and everywhere a long time to get to this point. The world is much less grotesque than it used to be, even if grotesque things still exist in it.
But I am fairly certain, and I can’t tell you exactly why, that this was not someone born with a birth defect, or a man who was maimed in an accident. This was an honest to God “Pig-Man”. A monster, a freak, a whatever you want to call him. Right or wrong, cruel, politically incorrect, barbarous terminology – I saw what I saw, and those are the correct words.
The other strange thing is that I am not sure anyone else saw what I did. Once spotted, his appearance so captivated me that my eyes were immediately glued to him. The words polite and subtle ceased to exist in my brain. I watched him. I watched him, walking away from me, only a sliver of his face visible. I strained and shuffled to get a look and gain an understanding of what I was seeing I needed to clear up and eradicate the trick that my sick brain and eyes were playing on me so that I would be able to sleep that night.
Then I saw him turn full on and face me, and I will never forget. I watched him walk out of the store. I watched him merge into the busy mall traffic. No one, not a single person, turned to look at him. No one, not even a child, and believe me I would have noticed, did a double take or gave him a sideways peak. It was as if, to everyone else, they only saw a man.
And I am telling you, not everyone is that polite, that subtle. This was a freak, a monster. This was not someone who was “disabled” or “injured”. This was a fucking Pig-Man and he had looked at me.
You won’t understand because you will think: it was my imagination, he may have looked horrendous, but he was a person, not a monster or freak. He was in an accident, or born with a birth defect like I had alluded to. I am the monster for judging him so harshly. But it is not true.
His red blistery skin, his snarled lip and grindy teeth, his beady pig eye and bristles were one thing – but they only covered one side of his face. The other side, from what I could tell, looked like the face of a normal, pudgy, middle aged man. All that says, “Oh how sad. What a sad condition. A deformity that makes the poor man look porcine”.
But there are two things: One makes me think he was not just an innocent with a ‘swine-ish’ appearing deformity. The other makes me hate him.
- His snout. The rest of his face seemed to be half man, half pig in appearance, but that freak had a snout, a real life snout. He should have been on all fours scouring hedgerows for truffles.
- You did not see the way he looked back at me, that fucking disgusting Pig freak.
I did not even try to signal my shopping companion because it all happened so quickly I never would have gotten her attention in time. I was left knowing what I had seen. I know that I saw the Pig-Man, which is ok. What is not ok is that I also know that the Pig-Man saw me.
You will all probably read this and judge me as crazy and or cruel. But I am telling you. I saw a Pig-Man, and he was not funny like the ‘Pig-Man’ character on Seinfeld. That fucker was scary.
Skull-Vain
Skullduggery [skuhl-duhg-uh-ree] noun – Deceitful doings; dirty work.
Vainglorious [veyn-glawr-ee-uh s, -glohr-] – Boastful or vain; ostentatious.
The Last Gyspy Poet
I’m the last gypsy poet.
Try not to be frightened.
Try not to run.
I’ll fill your mind with filth.
It’ll be ever so much fun.
Just a tiny step inside.
Then we’ll take a ride.
I’ll fill you till you’re full,
And then the ride is done.
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thomson
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
