2/11/1997 g.g.Ashbrook
Harris laudanum opened up the arcade for the first time in seven star full egg muffins. He cooed at the word "muffin," as he pulled off the head sized lock and placed it over the shoulders of a naked concrete carrot- one of which stood to the either side of all arcade doors. What a surprise this would be. A thousand years of dust turned to toenail-mackinbalm- but who was he to be a shellfish.
The shleperd lip grease from the sky was mapsping along in pares down the long pink tinseled alabaster ally lanes which had railings and planks like a board walk, but which ran between building and over not quite perpendicularly crisscrossing streams of strong acid compound- the rare never to be found elsewhere fish that worbled there Umderlembs so traculently below; both the most savage and well mannered fish ever seen. They can be found escorting eachother in and out of holes, and making play ground devises for the younger fish. But occasionally they will brawl in unequaled fury and tear eachother to shreds over a mispronounced bubble- or nothing at all. Sometimes when alone then will take to eating themselves from the tail on which they can do due to their uniquely flexible necks. The surface of the streams are littered with body parts, burning frogs, the heads of the self eaten, bowler’s caps, hands waving up at the passers by; and all with a smell that makes your eyes water, and makes your hands convulsively twitch, and makes you say things you didn’t mean to say; like "Tootrim wan[t]cromn dob-dibly bowlwratchkits." Or "Palamine in a nester of bovine corto-estra-meskaline." "Can I metal your breasts under a Saturday cow ass?" Or "If your nose was a French fry, I would vomit come. Dance?"
A few phantoms of the thousand year dream walk the streets and the alabaster boardwalks over streams. The buildings are always full and empty. The finest restaurants the news paper printing presses. Come with any manuscript and they will publish anything instantly- the more they like the piece the less you take on the ride and wave to lovers gone by out the window. The shops are beginning to ready themselves for the public after percolating their wears in the finest liquid imagination money can buy. The cobblestone paths clean swept and a thin crystal coat of enamel memories. The lanky furtive Janitors, eyeing the boys and disappearing for needle work. Pick pockets from all of history. At every end of town you can see off the plateau to the building of times greatest empires. Roman Soldiers walk the foot paths and harass the owners of modest bread shops. Each day they switch parts and names and take each other’s memory pills. Fragrance dealers will sell any experience of the mind, any memory, some specialize in false memories for using on others. The venders of liquid identity shoes. And those selling hats that will tell you anything about anyone in sight. Harris looked up and down the streets and paths to make sure it was all what he dreamed it could be. He carried a broom and swept off the sides of buildings. Any surface you touch or brush up against a stone planter and feel it curl around you and soak you in sweet warmth and moist weightlessness- arms and legs of a lover around your gelatin body. Or touch a gate and feel an army rushing it at you. Feel what it’s like to be in the front lines of a land war running brandishing a shovel up against pikes and swords. There is nothing without infectious personality.
But the pieces of sky grew shy, and trotled off on their way back to bits and pieces of grey. Long droopy eyed buildings hanging soggily over- spilling into puddles of pooled fractile intellect. Then the moon stretching out her fine philistine fingers and tapping with a conductors wand in reprimand… the disobedient buildings as such, feeling so bad they would stand up strait and proper and turn their outer skin to a velveteen love juice at once intoxicating to the touch.
"Bring me. And take out a loan. Procter and Gamble. Sasafras. Roy Rogers. Sardines in orange juice. Quivers and shivers in cellophane. Tell me I’ll to your father and a Crosby’s salery. Tella-brigad marching through in tunneled roads and out to back my side of mistering. Walls decorated with the finest children from all over the world. Stone terraced lawns of pills of hydro codine- eukotal, demeral and rectal opium suppositories. Diaphragm trees and fields of freshly mowed genitals. Rolling hills of fluttering purple larynx. Encephelopod prostitution rings. Centers for the cultivation of toxic gargling. Malaboo- as a first born. Clocks. Socks. Pee-cocks. Booming Perry Winkle tiny Belgium. Hooka. Harrisburg. Moma’s boy. Telavangalists. Sodapop. Intravenous soft drink stands. Traveling ice-cream and feeding tube venders. Barbiturates. Barbi dolls. Doris day. Dingo loaded soporifics. Mange. Cloidemnestra. Hermies. Rollos. Clear stick deoderant. Bottachelli. Moxtvactiker." He said, his arms rising and falling with each voiced invocation. Remembering adolescent curly cue shapes, and a thousand years ago with the moon, the old moon that is, and summer vacations on zero gravity golf courses.
"To Cryyyyyy- on a sat pannnnn, to mrover and ending-" sang out a willow tree in memory of Byla Frocktooth and Emar Bragshire.
Harris grabbed the microphone. "Orange hand bag, Mr. and Mrs. Orange hand bag… Phelps. Mr. and Mrs. Phelps. Filch. Mr. and Mrs. Scroudle nub strucker…"
All the wires still checked out. His voice echoed out throughout the whole arcade- crystallizing in the streets into questions like "why not take dancing lessons?" and into the uncles of people who invented variations on previous can and bottle opening devices.
"Oh, what a surprise this will be indeed." It was late at night, and on the outskirts of a small town. Things had been going pretty well on earth. Not too much had changed but for the decision to turn all governments into animal protection posters. So they had to move under ground and conduct their business as transparently as possible. Most people didn’t really believe their was a government anymore. But in the mornings the streets were always paved; The schools funded and inspected and concisely critiqued; The charities endowed; The mail delivered in theatrical processions of old women in historically accurate uniforms and dinner attire. When Harris had built this arcade, it was only a few blocks of rickety buildings, electronic pollutants, places for venders to plop and plot. Now venders sold fine teas for the price of a story, or your first born; or of a family photo taken at a shopping mall by painted phonies. A lot of the shops were now set up to buy things from the customers depending on the value an overseeing syntax-appraisalist decided it was worth. They wanted what you thought the world was like when you were a child, or present opinions on the origin of the universe. Opinions of what things were. And people giving scientific descriptions as answers are taken to decontamination centers, to percolate in the juices of interplanetary kisses. In the town the arcade was built on the outskirts of, on typical days, there was weather. People did things. People said words and make facial expressions, and visa-versa. Boys and girls stepped in out of building carrying things or counting things. Trees grew. Squirrels chased small pieces of foam and radio shows were broadcast and received on radios. In the mornings, it was not uncommon for people to put things in toasters. This setting the stage as it were for later in the day when they would put things into other things. A key. A piece of paper. It was a popular sport indeed to put food into one’s mouth and chew and swallow; and most everyone was good at it.
In the middle of town was a bipolar-blanket factory. But a thousand years ago Harris and when it to be while it and first opened, the arcade that is, and it was there then as he opened it. Then he shut it down, and kicked everyone out. And he decided to go on a little journey.
Taking down to a third of Maddison Belvidor. The long stretches of road between signs and endless fields of wheat. The tall eroded vertical stones that stuck haphazardly out of the ground at any angle and several miles between. The congregations of mulling pecking black birds. The sun buzzing overhead. The green glass of the windshield and the hard metal petals so sensitive to every foot movement. A patch of trees around a low spot where the water had a chance to collect. The sweaty black vinyl seat. Bottles of water on the floor where the feet of an empty shot gun called out at every stop with the childish enthusiasm will bring what for what? No voices. No more harrowing bellcurt. He remembered back to examining Swiss Cheese for the first time. The tunnels all self contained; no, ‘tunnels’ or ‘bubbles’? Slope with Urigard. Rolling down a hill of soft long green pants on your grandfather why he and the wife grab either end of a large hair comb and comb out the grass slow and careful. They have a special tool a kind of bird head at the end of a long pole with a flickering tongue coming out of a filed down beak, and the body an enlarged black ant abdomen. They hold out the pole and the little tongue darts around under blinded eyes- there is only taste left to find and suck in those globules stuck between the comb teeth. Long black tongue always darting. And no end to the appetite. And he would jump down the hill. Surfing on a ripple of wind wave through the strands. Then he would start to sink down under and feel himself moving faster and faster until there was a cracking sound and something all around him would shatter and he would be falling free in no particular direction. And everywhere he looked a different memory running across the surface of almost invisible crystalline food structures. Then he would land on the foot path through a forest of towering vegetables and birds viciously attacking bushes of cotton candy which grew back instantly. Everything shimmered and was partially transparent. Sticking his hand into this or that trunk of broccoli or cauliflower he could pull out balls of stringy fermenting sugar twine. Everything in the forest a vague pastel. And a house of giant bread cubes, and showers of honeydew in the afternoons. Every room in the house lead to every other depending on what you were thinking when you opened each door.
But out for a walk through the prineing brealds, bolwrecking and tap-ferench stems. Polkerast stap partichsters. And Bow legged achta-meract-ables. Broof broof, too rloo proom pooch prack emnit sten-tenimy. Boarded up holes in the high stone wall that you could follow around in the circle. But he never went inside. Today that will change, he said remembering and he did, when the clouds were right, when the moon and the sun crossed paths and zoomed by eachother high in the sky, when the pine trees fell over and ran with long dragon fly legs across the lumps of landscape in packs in search of a pool of water to drink from. The running trees with their small shiny domed heads and flat round hidden mouths. Mumbling lullabies and shaking the ground with their furious dashing. When all this he put his foot down through the soft bellied bottom of the car. The glass in the windshield turning pink and wrapping around his face. The tall grasses sprang to open dresser drawers with a spring bloom of chameleons and iguana reaching up into the sky converting air to sticky strait crisscross strings catching red birds and blue moose heads that went after the leaves that fell into funneling holes in the sky. He kicked down and ripped through the bottom of the car and landed on the floor of the pastel woods. He stood up and dusted himself off and looked around it was just as he remembered it. From one tree to another a stretch like the distance between holidays. The fresh broccoli bloom spilling up all around him. The ground littered with paper shapes cut like the leaves of various trees but thick and soft like felt. Poplar shapes and Ginkgo and Japanese maples and Sassafras and Quaking Aspen and black birch and an occasional pile of coniferous needles made of glass like crackly spines.
He pounded off on a high stepping soldier march. The grey air smiling vaguely in pleasant harmless impotent delirium its personality. Up beyond the tree tops a sky of no difference, raining the felt leafs and pools of needles. Then the world swelled up around him slightly. Everything bigger and farther. Small feet tripping over in large shoes and he had to take all his clothes off. The soft fictional skin of children and a triangular nose of no notable projection and eyes wide apart. Short spiny hair that sticks up, and running now with no weight.
The wall stretching out in either bore down on it. He flung himself at the wall but he bounced off the rocks. He walked around it looking for a gate but where there might have been one he found it bricked off. He tried punching the bricks but it hurt his hands and he didn’t try it again. Then he tried to climb over. It went slow as the wall was very high and the bricks spilling out beginners arguments and questions to the world. Young responses and clouds of troubled thought poured over him when he upset a shelf or a pocket of the dust. But he made it up to the top, and was ready to jump down when he saw it was a solid roof. He walked out on it, and in to the middle, where there was a place some of the rocks had fallen it. He laid down and peeked inside. It was bright inside as it was outside, and looked to be the same. So he poured himself in and landed in branches of cauliflower which he rolled off and bounced down to the forest floor. He wandered why they built all this high walling, but then he thought it might be a trap. As he could never possibly get out. Just like an insect trap with no contents worth the can’t go back out either. But then he saw a door on the side and decided it wasn’t a trap.
He walked around inside for a while as it was very large, looking for something out of the ordinary. He looked through and around the thick trunks and make out a kind of mound of something light grey. He ran over to it and it turned out to be a well. The angled for it roof --complete with bucket and spool-- was lying on the ground and decaying. He peeked in the well. Coming out of it were drafts of hot and cold air. It was dark inside, but it did not sound like water at the bottom. So he jumped in. He fell head first faster and faster until his head was driven into cold sand. He pulled for a while and finally got his head out. And opened his eyes to a bright shiny day in the middle of a street between tall buildings. All the roads were made of sand and carriages were being pulled by giant twelve foot tall birds with their wings amputated and replaced with shiny brass knobs. The birds moved slowly but ran swift and graceful. The sky was a light red and puffy white clouds danced around in it. The air was cold but heat was pouring out from the buildings and pooling around on the ground like the swirls of hot and cold in the ocean. The people walking around all harbored peculiar facial expressions. Always on the edge of something. A fit of laughter. A fit of tears. The wide eyes of sudden epiphany. But no one said a word. Their minds were turning like mills and calculating but nobody spoke to or walked with anyone else.
Harris opened the door of the nearest building, where people were climbing all over a man with a large basket of dinner rolls and licking him. Then horses came up from the sides of the room and vomited honey and mustard all over the lot of them. Harris shut the door. Out of the corner of his eyes he caught sight of a tussle. It was two paper boys who were battling over a corner. They were dressed like samurai warriors and fought majestically and light on their feet like a ballet, a car even dove up along side and played the music to a ballet. But it ended where one boy swung to far and the other boy decapitated him. Then a dozen small squirrels with large dog heads they could barely lift, scuttled up and ate the remains of the looser. Harris decided to walk down the sidewalk. He figured this wasn’t a place to be walking around without the use of clothes so he began looking into shop windows. Up ahead he saw a few racks outside a store and he ran up as fast as he could and grabbed something long and kept on and ducked around a corner and into an ally. He looked down at what he had filched, a long baby blue dress with short sleeves. But too long so he ripped a few feet off the bottom and pulled it on. Perfect, and just the right length too. He peeked around the corner, and saw that the street had turned into a battle ground. When he stole the dress everyone else must have taken it as a cue. People were steering their bird carriages into store fronts. Or throwing chairs, tables, tires, or their children through the windows and running in after. The racks of clothes he had plucked from were festering with the eager and advantageous. Then the store owners rushed out with huge hatchets and starting chopping the looters into pieces. Man, woman, child, the elderly, or the birds driving the carriages, whom ever so was in the way of the massive swinging blades which cut like through butter. Some store owners had a huge mallet in each hand and swung at peoples heads. One proprietor even had an enormously oversized lawnmower and drove around leisurely sucking up and grinding up the swarming thieves. And the mower sprayed out a jet of red sludge coating the walls or jettisoning out into the street depending on which direction the mower was moving in. Harris walked down to the next block of streets.
The streets were all the cold sand and it felt good because the hot gusts from the buildings were so hot. And their seemed to be a parade going on so he went to join in. But it wasn’t a parade a big truck was driving down the middle of the street scooping up the slower pedestrians with a net and everyone was stampeding away from it. Harris ducked into a door way to dodge but the door opened and he fell in backwards.
The room inside was darker then it had been outside and someone ran and shut the door as soon as he was getting up. He looked around and found he was at one end of a long wooden table and already sitting in a chair. The man at the other end started bellowing in Russian and those dozens sitting along the sides began shoveling food into their mouths with a fork in each hand at an alarming rate. Large pieces of pork and lamb- whole baked potatoes two or three hard boiled eggs at a time. Cups of steaming sauce. The people didn’t seem to need to swallow or breath just push more food it.
Everyone was eating now and the large old Russian man more then any of them. Harris tried to lift one of the forks but it seemed too heavy even though it was not very big. Then he notice that right on his left there was a beautiful young girl about his age who too was having difficulty eating as much as her brothers and sisters and parents and aunts and uncles were eating. She wore a pretty dress with frilled sleeves and a red and orange and yellow flower print. Small flowers. She had a soft face and delicate features. Her hair was dark and pulled back into an austere bun. He smiled at her shyly, and tilted his head from side to side. She giggled and smiled back, and put down her fork. But as soon as her fork hit the table clothe her elder brother, an enormous man, grabbed her by the face and pulled her up out of her chair with one arm. He started hollering in Russian in a voice so low almost everything in the room began to vibrate. He began to walk around the room holding her aloft and bellowing. As he yelled he squeezed her head with both hands- the girl was trashing her arms and legs furiously. Then finally her head gave way with a great cracking sound and a dull light sploosh. Then he looked guilty -him standing their sulking his hands dripping and the father shook a finger at him. Then the large boy went back to his seat and began to eat again.
Harris got up ran for the door, which he succeeded in opening and sliding out of, and ran down the street with cold sand kicking up all over his back and into his hair. He stopped and turned around- there was no one flowing him. He began to walk at a more relaxed pace. The town now seemed dead. The buildings all two dimensional and card board. There were a few people, but they were painted on plywood and teetering around usually didn’t get far before they fell over and lay inanimate. The buildings seemed to end up ahead and he ran on to the last on. There he found himself on an enormous desk littered with fifty foot pencils and pens and mechanical and engineering drawling tools. The town was still behind him but he didn’t quite know what to do.
From somewhere in the distance he could hear a flute playing a slow sad piece. He picked up a German bucket helmet from off the ground and put it on his head and crossed his arms and walked around trying to look like he was thinking. He griped his chin between his thumb and the side of his forefinger and tilted his head and looked up into the air. It was an enormous office and a crescent moon was circling around a bare light bulb. Small orange birds began to fly backwards out of the ground around his feet. His lifted both his arms and let himself rise up and off toward the moon.
The crescent became larger the closer and closer. A brown haze swept him up and pummeled him with two dimensional triangles. Then orange balls and they passed right through him. He found himself hugging a straw at the bottom of a glass of lemonade. He could see out the side of the glass between the floating pieces of pulp and it was all going in beautiful way. A sunny day out on rolling green mowed hills spots of clouds shadows playing about. Young masters on horseback being taught how to joust. Others looking into the sky with telescopes at the tutelage of scholars. The girls all sitting under umbrellas in the company of snuggling dogs; to the words of Emerson, Eliot, Stein, Joyce Berkley, Hume. Down in the wooded valleys along the streams the young boys pass the time by abstracting battle scenes by collaging them with excerpts from cooking shows. Games shows. Interspersing great moments in history with stage cuts and advice from the director. They sat naked in circles in the running water and talked about what they would do if they all woke up as girls and that it was the girls sole responsibility to sow tractor parts to the sides of houses. Or to go out into the woods with sacks with no opening to look for perfectly rectangular fish to bring back for dinner. Or how one would wear shoes if they had no openings. "Bobby, if your sister was a balloon and asked you to take her to the country fair where all the events involved pins. Would you take her?" or "Samble Paterson Balachked comb buy way. Coom ba ya and a thousand cricus proformers. Firtle field falagas. Pota Juper Joom atta do ya." Or "Crispo sprinkled it on a fresh juicy field why I had plenty of stories cold down to the end of the cycle any my uncle Ron he’d stand up to anyone even without his wooden legs and glass eyes and porcelain external vertebrae. Why he was the book binding champion of his day -no lie. They took them all down to the side of the river Matatung and pushed them in and laughed and stripped naked and made lasagna in the pumpkin patch. Great old Bartoll with his orange sheet and flock of dead chickens. We used to hide behind the barn and torment the house help. Calling out the names of diseases incurable. Invoking demons over their children’s cribs. We even got this one biddy to give birth to a dromedary."
And in the house up on the hill Monsieur Kelfba would arrange and rearrange all of his lawnmowers all over the house when no one was around. He’d put the smaller ones up on chairs and ask them what they thought of the days politics. The larger ones he’d heft up into the bed and inquire about his marital difficulties. In the kitchen he would hide cogs and springs to keeps a watchful eye over the food and to bless it. He would even go out into the fields late at night and dig great holes in the ground and bury his precious mowers and then cover them up flawless knowing they would protect his children well. Then he would sit down and stair at a glass of orange juice until it was time for dinner. He would do anything for his children.
Harris could hear the screams of peasant women giving birth to post cars and culinary tools. Farm machinery. Emar Gogto had lost three wives that way and all of his children are plow blades. Milfa, Marterchrites wife, gives birth only to children’s shoes and tiny felt hats suitable for squirrels. You can see him chasing around the squires with one of the little hats and a bobby pin, but he has not succeeded in hating one yet.
The lemonade is going to his brain and the girl’s dresses fade out to yellow splotches. The umbrella’s and the dogs swirl together into a muddy pigment smudge. The boys in the woods. The peasant wives. The man chasing squirrels over buried lawn mowers. Then a pail of water is tossed over the glass and all the people wash onto the studio floor in swirls of dissolving paint. Their lives blend together in a loss of line distinction.
Harris is walking, a young man, along a wooden fence stretched across a fallow season field. There is a light rain of sun flower seeds and no clouds to speak of. The earth sighs in lackadaisical resignation and gives birth to a thousand ripe watermelons raising its hands and shoulders in defeat. All the trees fall through the earth’s crust and gravity dissipates. The world is lit by solitary floating light bulbs lit by, and attached to, screaming cows. Office buildings float by swimming pools the employees still hard at work. The back ground of all play grounds is a dark starry night sky but enough cows are zooming by over head at any given time there is ample light for most any government sanctioned recreational activity. Slide up or down the sliding board. Harris throws off the covers and swings his legs out over the side of the bed. He bounces up and down a few times- "this should hold." "Yes sir, this bed will do you just fine." A confused farmer and his wife are standing by the window the wife looks exhausted and is cradling their new born baby. Harris pulls a pair of Chinese relaxation balls out of his pocket and begins to roll them while looking at the ceiling. But his grip is clumsy and they fall making a terrible clatter the baby starts screaming and Harris begins to pace around paying no mind to the dropped balls. "This looks just fine to me." he says, and looks to them for their two cents.
The farmer looks very confused and has a long drooping confused mustache and over sized drooping confused overhauls. "But this is your house," He says to Harris. "I don’t understand this at all," They all start doing warm up neck rolls and the farmer turns out to be a fourteen year old Mexican farm hand well learned in transcendental and existentialist theorisms. He takes off the wide brimmed hat and pulls off the mustache. The girl tosses the doll into the corner of the room where it brakes a vas but nobody pays it any mind. She stands up strait and looks a lively flash in her eyes. She is not Mexican but has just taken a shower and her hands have never known a day’s work. "Good work Punky," Harris says and smiles and tosses the Mexican boy a book of poetry criticisms. The kid’s eyes light up and he runs out the door. Harris and the girl sit down on the bed. "I am a young man, and I think I should open an arcade." He said. The girl looks at him and smiled. She said something quietly, and coming downs the stairs this morning noticed outside the window how usual things were usually. She wrapped her arms around him and he burst out laughing and specking her forehead with kisses and they spent the rest of the day watching the floor boards not move.
Remembering how things begin is a tricky ordeal. That was how he came to start the arcade and how he went on a journey after he started it but ended back before he had left. So he went on a journey, and including having never left, came back late at night. Walking past his house a surprise engagement present for the girl who he always called Ipsy; who said she wouldn’t mind if he left for a thousand years so long as he came back and had something for her.
Harris Laudanum opened up the arcade for the first time in seven star full egg muffins. He cooed at the word muffin, as he pulled off the head sized lock and placed it over the shoulders of a naked concrete carrot- one of which stood to the either side of all arcade doors. What a surprise this would be. A thousand years of dust turned to toenail-mackinbalm- but who was he to be a shellfish.
The sun would be up in a few hours. So he went back to his house. And went inside to find his Ipsy, and show her what he had brought back.