I tasted an orange- tiny, a tangerine and it, I swear, tasted me. Oh the spring carried sunshine down to me, yet all I remember is rottenness and disease, but everywhere one looks they find spring. Spring means sex, and me, well I’ve still got winter’s hold over me.
I walk down Manchester towards Lincoln and pass the corner bar on my way. The drunks look untouched by the change and slumber in winter’s refrain. I hear em marching in a shuffling gait. They move like graceless dear, beautiful each one of them. I want to call out to tell them, “Hey! Your beautiful each one of you!” But the groans from their sick, starving homeless mouths keep that smile from coming to pass.
Me, I keep walking because L.A. has a lot to dig, in that grimy, frantic, L.A. kind of way, and I don’t wanna pause too long looking at desperate drunks. Those boys have found in bottle the fix that’ll make them forget and scream with their existences that they need nothing else. Outside things are silent.
Lincoln sidles up to me like an old pal and I eye the groceries. The wind teases my hair but it’s so mopped out anyway that that tousle don’t make no difference anyhow. A white man appears on a sign where the hand was red and I’m walking. Its spring and the sun is shining so we want to get down, though some of us totally can’t.
Across Lincoln I’m on Lincoln and I think to myself about the babes walking the streets. My phone hangs silent suspended by pockets in what would have been my lap. It sings nothing at me and I’m all the fuck alone. Cars cruise, it’s a Los Angeles day and they all pass away.
Inside the grocery store is like walking in a dream. Carts glide over tiles like drifting clouds sliding over sky. People man their check stands like puppets of industry and meat sits in piles or swims in lobster tanks nearly everywhere. One of the lobsters eyes me and looks desperate like the outdoor corner shop drunks. He clicks his pinchers free and motions over to me,
“Click Click,” translation: Yo bub, what’s up? Wanna set me free?
I look at him and nod but my eyes sadly say: “I’ve got no money left to take you, and if I did you’d be boiled all the same.”
Click Cluck Click he says and does a flip. The lobster doesn’t get it, or maybe he does and wants me to steal him free.
I walk away and leave the apparition to wither and die.
“Don’t eat me, man, I’m a pig.” The pork chops are calling me. I pick one up and its styrofoam squeals warnings.
The pork chops don’t know I’m not Jewish. I quietly tell them we’re in Westchester, not Hollywood, they shut up for a second as though that was their best defense, but when I put em down they squeal again.
“Just remember I got friends all over this eisle.”
I move to the beef and ponder the tri-tip alongside the pre-packaged hamburger patties. I’m staring at em hard, half expecting the same response I got from the dead pigs.
“If this shit speaks again, it’s cheese and bread for three weeks.”
The lady behind the butcher block looks at me and my dirty Whitman’s fro, pauses and then decides she has the gall to speak.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“You could spray less sarcasm on your meat.” I mutter
“Pardon? Sir, your in the organic section.”
“You eat here much?”
“What?”
“Cause I smell the same all over your breath.”
I walk away and leave the meat to make up their minds on me. As for myself it’s time for rice and beans. Maybe chili is still safe, maybe the bastards can’t talk through cans… It’s just as well though. I’d not more than ten on me and tri-tip in adequate quantities was probably out of the question.
“Besides,” I said to the baked beans, “I can’t afford the talking kind anyway.”
They quietly understood me and had the grace not to complain when my hungry hands grabbed not one but three of the miraculously marked-down cans.
I picked up a new journal next, after I’d grabbed all the ingredients to home cook chili (as home as a dorm room crock pot can be, anyway). The thing was black and hard (the journal). I figured it might impress my lady friends and counter the effects of the beans; but then again I’d already picked up more than my fair share of cucumbers and hardly needed more to gather up my own little garden.
The journal didn’t say nothing about nothing, least not to me. But I told it a couple lies, just for fun while I was away from myself and softly scribbling. I told it my name was acid trip O’Brien and that yes the fourth messiah had indeed come again. The journal kept silent, no responses, no replies. He was like the Buckingham palace guard of my mind.
There I was scribing and having a good time, half ignoring the growing choir of cucumber complaints, when I smelled woman go strutting by. I stopped in my tracks, stood tall and erect and sniffed around for the source of the babe. Her scent was sharp but then I lost it-
seekingstories 