Fiction 1: Sci Fi Noir Dream of Lost Youth

SCI FI NOIR DREAM OF LOST YOUTH

This is a dream I had. Seriously.

I mumble a prayer to Nothing that the long shrunken face in the mirror — the face of a broken dwarf maid who’s seen too many days in the freakshow — is just looking at me through broken window glass and I’m fooling myself again. But somehow I know it’s not,  and I’d just as well rather be back in the constrictive little shower, like an upright casket, peering into that mirror at the emerging inches of scalp that I swear were just yesterday neatly covered by a respectable gnarl of brown hair.

Going bald was surprisingly traumatic for a guy who figured he’d pretty much wiped away everything in the world he ever cared about.

Anyway, it was all the big broken blonde’s fault I’d ended up there.  Overmuscled and desperately adorned with faded tattoos. With her slanted mop of boyish hair — the same cut she’d had since she was thirty and on that TV show about the lost space colonists, when she meant something to somebody — all slung over her brow, hiding nothing nowadays but crow’s feet but once a haughty veil over a mischievous dancing sparkle of youth in eyes as blue as the sky in a child’s dream.

I met her early tonight, on the beach. (Mistake number one: I hate the beach.) Brown Charlie, whose racial origin was guessed at by half the people he met but nowadays pretty much just the ones looking for a stupid reason to fight, drove me in a haze of homemade amphetamines right off the pier and up to the edge of the shoreline, where the water kissed the left front tire like a dying dog being obvious about the desires of its ridiculous heart and asking to get kicked for it. I stumbled out swearing and for some reason decked out in an old-school cloak stained with the-devil-knows-what.  There was a cord sewn in where the hood should have been and that was tied to an ancient Darth Vader helmet with a few of the insectoid-mandibular slats knocked out like the old cartoon Bad Guy had breathed on the wrong bat-wielding felon and ended up with his pale sagging mouth full of blood and wood and cork.

Why I was wearing this absurd get-up you’d never get me to say. Mostly because I had no idea and, if I did, would have been off to do my own little nasty bit of revenge on an evidently suicidal tailor.

Brown Charlie took off pretty quick up the beach and slid between the sagging slats of a tired old wooden shack, where little particles of sand glistened from moonlight as they crawled through the half-shorn boards all spiked with nails so black and knotted they could have been made by some industrious pre-human two-leg just before his world got swallowed up in one hot sullen day by fire or earthquakes or some other kind of expeditious evolutionary toilet-flush. God’s birthday party game.

I drank at the seashore a while, seeing the occasional glimpse of my hopeful youth out on the black horizon of shifting time, and then smashed the bottle over the head of a kid in a similar costume to mine who wanted to argue sci-fi semantics.

I hate science fiction.

Eventually I wound my way inside the shack, where Charlie and fifteen or so twenty-somethings dressed like Halloween children were attached by cables playing some extinct video game where you were avatar’d as a popular fighter from an earlier millennium and you had to figure out the sequence of punches your opponent was throwing — a lascivious brown-black sea-rock of a creature that likely was more interested in what sexual atrocities he could commit on your corpse than how to knock you out, exactly. I got lost in the game a bit and then the ragged Blonde threw a leg over the side of the collapsing old armchair she was sitting in and I caught a glimpse of a part of her that had somehow escaped the landslide of time the rest of her body had acquiesced to, and like all men with some memory of a beating heart, forgot myself.

Her ex-husband was tied to a similar chair by his own sloth and about eighty gallons of bathtub scotch, and helpfully told me “We’re not married anymore — but look they built a character out of ‘er in the game” and when I looked over there was a second TV where a pixelated model of her youth was driving some kind of go-kart, fat lurid thighs all cramped up under her sharp smart chin, and yeah I’ll cop to the turn-on.

I got distracted from The Blonde for one brief moment when a different kid wearing the indicia of another fiction of space and technology tried to rope me into an argument. I got the stupid cape I was wearing from around my neck and was testing the strength of the cord when her hand landed on my shoulder — plump, pink, smeared with rainbows of tattooed butterflies — and I dropped the cape and let her ease me out into the salty night with that crooked fishhook of a smile.

She still had perfect teeth, a remnant of the Hollywood makeover or an example of lucky genetics I couldn’t say, but it was enough to get my feet moving in my battered pointy Italian shoes I somehow had the wherewithal to add to my stupid space-boy get-up.

She told me I wasn’t allowed to smoke out here on the sand, something about the owners of the joint next door, and I looked over and there was another seaside atrocity, a Cony Island redux so revoltingly Disneyfied it was like honey poured over heroin and served to fat kids at a camp promising rejuvenation and friends not just in it for the mockery. I put out my half-smoke and lit another just to be difficult.

This must have turned her on because the next thing I knew we were over next door, passing through a candy-colored turnstile and promising a wary-eyed retail clown we’d be good — “or at least memorable”, she said. Then we were racing through racks of overpriced nostalgia, T-shirts with cartoon icons so old and forgotten that people barely remembered their names. (Most folks I knew bought ‘em just so they could think up new and foul sexual horrors to perform while wearing them — for the ‘irony’.)

But damn me if the chubby bitch with her flushed youthful cheeks and bare feet, her carefully ripped jeans in all the right places, her smile like a motorbike handle with the ignition forever gripped, and the dark carnival sparkle in her eyes didn’t have me by whatever remained of my youth and wasn’t pulling me into this happy nightmare of childish mirth wearing gangland blacks of adult irresponsibility.

All the fucking way.

So we tore the half-ass little playground store to shreds and fled from and chased the employees, madhouse monkey-handlers, half of them ‘rehabilitated’ ex-cons and the other half with one foot in eternal druggy sunshine and the smiles to match. And we swung from brightly colored ropes that hung from the rafters and slid through slidey-slides slicked with something less expensive and more viscous than water but similar-looking enough to fool vast fat families of rubes. And we pushed merry-go-rounds at speeds faster than their axes could handle and left the still parade of daydream horses broken and wheezing. And we made the whole world our drunken laughing tilt-a-whirl and finally

and finally

I got in close enough for a kiss, and pressed against her, and tasted the sour-candy sweetness of her salty lips painted with the new addictives of womanly science, and then she was off me, her dirty spray of blonde mop shaking slantwise at me over her shoulder as she bounded into the dressing rooms, which I could see were marked with a little unisex figure: something wearing a dress and a fat old-school barbell mustache.

So I followed her in. Thinking? Not thinking at all.

And I wound up in the tiny shower, looking up at a cracked mirror painted with dirty brown streaks, squinting in surprised surprise at splitting strands all clumped together but not together enough, half-ass horrible wet natural dreadlocks, not hiding at all a raw pink expanse of head-flesh, like a deteriorating starfish drifting away into strands on a rotten tide, protectively in its dying moments covering an anemone scalp just pink enough to further surprise you with a vibrantly bitter emotional memory of what it felt like in your heart, in your soul when you believed in such things, to be young.

………..

I take out my razor and chop the remaining hair roughly, my eyes growing dimmer by the second, the lines around them cutting in like a venomous sealant made of time and fantasy and bad decisions. Shutting them up from ever allowing the sights or sounds or feelings of youth or hope or stupid fatal whimsy to damn them ever again.

Newly bald except for a faint sheen of blood rising from aggravated baby scalp-skin, I return to the store and the seaside and the night.

The girl is gone. I’m looking for nothing.