Riding the Centipede Page 6

  Nonetheless, the note of revulsion at Solon’s words, misunderstanding mutating within the minds of the few who’d read the stories, triggered something in others as well. The death of a few of the more well-known writers, a reviewer. The “sordid” influence acknowledged by a few writers. Pity they didn’t all take it for what it was and allow the words, the letters, the symbols, goddamnit, to take the putty of their mind and perhaps set them on a similar path as mine, as I had and I thought you might—wishful thinking: a palm full of steaming shit.

  Not the path to the Centipede, though. This is my trip.

  Now. Here. Coming to wakefulness on a hardwood floor littered with toys for toddlers that squeaked and rattled, presently stoic in silence. My brain a flood of contemplation derived from thoughts of Solon and Burroughs and all the Gods of the Word. My vision spiraled outward from the cranial cinema, my spotlight eyes brightening the dim room.

  A familiar sofa decorated with flowers in hues of sienna and gold materializes firmly in front of me, with a figure perched against one arm. Flickering into permanence. No, two figures. A mother and child. The mother bone skinny. The child latched onto a sagging, stretch-marked breast. The tattooed words arching above the sucking maw: Trey’s Honey, wrapped in roses that look more liked squished ladybugs, Trey no longer in the picture.

  The mother’s name is Tricia. Her glazed eyes settle on me.

  “Daryl,” she yells.

  “Daryl,” again, and I hear my buddy, Daryl’s, clipped reply as he unfolds from the nowhere into shape on the opposite end of the sofa from her.

  “I told you this was gonna happen. Let me fuckin’ deal wit’ it.”

  A tectonic sound like mountains groaning into a vast gunmetal gray sky fills my ears. I sit up, left hand a kickstand propping me up, and say something that I cannot make out, yet it’s met with a response from Daryl.

  Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.

  I laugh, though not sure why, feeling uncomfortably numb, body hitching but still no sound or real sensation. I watch him tap his cigarette into a beige ash tray with red and black trimmed stenciled letters signifying Holiday Inn stamped on the side. Sunlight pulses like orange neon from between the slits of the cat-clawed, drab, pea-green curtains and I sit up all the way, vertigo finally making an appearance, bouncing me to this position. I feel my gorge rise, yet nothing comes up.

  I think.

  “Fuckin’ get him a towel, Tricia,” Daryl says, and I am aware of the warmth on my chin, my ratty The Doors T-shirt, and his voice, sucked through a straw through the black hole hologram solidifying—me solidifying—and I smile as he shakes his head. He doesn’t look too pleased.

  By the way, Jim Morrison is not the Lizard King. I’ve met the Lizard King, and it is not Jim Morrison. Anyway, it’s the Reptile Queen who has all the power, as I break on through to the other side, sensations and sound finally zooming into prominence…

  “We’re gonna make this as quick as possible, Marlon, so’s you can get on your way and we can get on wit’ our fuckin’ lives”—me rudely thinking, this is living?—“and no one’s the worse for wear.”

  I’ve known Daryl Jackson since I left dear old Dad’s place. You remember Daryl, toward the end of my stay, don’t you, dear sister? The son of one of father’s accomplices.

  Daryl has always epitomized cool, never one to let the deteriorating world he lived in—like yours, but trimmed in mine—sway this always eminent air of cool, until now. It was probably the hours and days spent in a pot haze, sure, though here he taps just a cigarette again as he watches Tricia, still with the kid clamped to her breast, lean down to me and start to wipe the mess up.

  “He’s not my fucking baby,” she says, dropping the already stained Mickey Mouse hand towel to my lap.

  “Thanks,” I say, as Daryl stands and hovers with pissed-off orangutan aggression at her. She doesn’t back down. She stares right back, her intensity a fist brandishing a claw-hammer. The stare beneath drawn on eyebrows lights her olive skin, so he turns back to me, to the task at hand.

  Their heat and psychic struggle makes the walls shake. Then I realize it’s not them, it’s the music, the four-by-four rhythmic thump of Rap music squeezing the walls, every one.

  Something old school by Public Enemy stands out, marches to the forefront of the brutal, decibel crushing volume that surrounds me.

  Turn it up! Bring the noise! Turn it up! Bring the noise!

  “The Centipede. I don’t know what the fuck it is. I don’t know nothin’ and don’t wanna know nothin.’ But I got a call—”

  “A call?” I say, wiping the rest of the bile from my chin, my shirt. As I glance at Mickey, his smile almost brings up more.

  “I got a call. Not the kind of call you can fuckin’ ignore.”

  “The Godfather?” I smirk.

  Daryl’s stare could cut steel.

  “A call? Who was it?”

  If this was the next step of the Centipede, I didn’t know what the hell was going down. I just had to pay attention, take it in. I feel the blood in my veins or perhaps the drugs that share the confined space throttle up a couple notches, as if circling the extravagant NASCAR race course within my body.

  “Look. I don’t know who the fuck it was, I just know by what they said, I was to give you some info and this rig. So’s that’s all I’m gonna do. Then you can get the fuck outta here and leave us be.”

  A fully-loaded syringe lays next to his thigh on that grubby sofa, nudging an empty baby bottle next to him. Dried milk collected along the curved angles at the bottom of the bottle, white tinted green.

  Rising up, I stretch my legs and kick a rattle that plays a percussive rainfall tune for the extent of its lazy tumble. Public Enemy has given way to Tupac. More old school jams. I live the life like a thug nigga, until the day I die. Another gem, damn prophetic: All Eyez On Me. I may dig classic rock the most, but Rap’s got balls enough to leave an impression I don’t mind. Especially when it’s cranked to brain scrambling volume. But you already know this, dear sister. You know I dig it.

  “Why are you so on edge, man?”

  He snickers, a cough of derision.

  “You do know you just materialized out of thick, smoky fuckin’ air, on the fuckin’ floor of our livin’ room, don’t cha?”

  He had a point. It was weird. But his brusque attitude seems more a product of—

  “And I don’t know about you, but receivin’ phone calls like the one I fuckin’ received an hour ago, with specific, bizarre fuckin’ info to relay to you and only you, and made to understand the imperative nature of makin’ sure I got this info to you ASA—fuckin’—P, so you’d be dropped into the lap of shithouse luxury here,” he mockingly opened his palm and swept his arm with a flourish to the disarray that is their apartment, “and we’d get you on your way with real urgency ’cause that’s what the fuckin’ voice said. That’s what it impressed upon my wee drug-addled mind made sober by the tone, the words, the implications, the fuckin’ threats.”

  The stale air in the room crackles as if struck by lightning. Daryl barely looked at me as he spoke. Tricia seems chiseled from a hole in the hollow, the baby still sucking on her depleted breast. Her cheeks deflate even more as it feeds.

  “Everybody’s gonna want somethin’ from you for their services.”

  “What?”

  “Just pay the fuck attention, wouldja? Everybody, along each leg of your trip along the Centipede, to the ultimate experience of Ridin’ the Centipede, is gonna want somethin’ for their fuckin’ services.”

  “If this voice is so threatening, why would anybody want to mess with it with idle requests? I’d think those along the path—”

  “Leg. The voice said leg. Each leg o’ the Centipede.”

  “Leg. Path. Does it matter? Alice called it the first step. Does it matter?”

  “The voice said leg. So leg it fuckin’ is.”

  Daryl fidgets, unsure of what to do with his hands, his body,
before finally looking up at me.

  “I think everythin’ the voice said matters.”

  He turns to Tricia, who looks as though she might fade away if she keeps feeding the baby and, really, what more could the baby be getting from that drained tit?

  “Get me a beer, baby.”

  “Get your own beer,” she says, as her too red lips stretch thinner.

  “Fuckin’ get me a beer and take the fuckin’ baby and your skinny fuckin’ ass to ’nother room. I got business to deal wit’ and I don’t think you really wanna know any more than what I told you already. I will deal wit’ it. Let me deal wit’ it and get it done. So, get me a fuckin’ beer.”

  “Asshole. Piece of shit. Limp dick motherfucking loser,” Tricia says, as she gets up on cranes’ legs to wobble into the kitchen, grunting something about the dirty dishes, I do everything here, don’t know why I stay with such a limp dick loser, before coming back, handing Daryl a beer.

  “Thank you.”

  “Fuck you very much.” She grabs the packet of cigarettes, peeks inside, and crumples it in her thin fingers. “Fuck.”

  Daryl wags his tongue at her, a strange reaction, before he sticks the bottle top into his mouth and uncaps it with his teeth. A quick twist, spitting the cap to the floor. It rolls in circles as we watch it before it deflects off a pacifier and rolls all the way to the hibernating heater.

  He takes a long swig, the bottle almost completely drained, just like Tricia.

  “Down to biz’ness. Down to biz’ness,” he says, belching.

  “I don’t really know what the fuck this is,” he says, holding up the syringe. “I normally would have taken a hit, y’know? But not of this. Not after that phone call and you poppin’ up here just as the voice said you would.” He finishes the beer, lights up another cigarette, one he had tucked behind his ear. His hands are shaking. Cool Daryl is really freaked out.

  “Fuckin’ Alice, that decrepit bitch, whoever the fuck she is, she was supposed to relay this info. The voice told me this. Made my skin crawl, the owner of that voice, man. So that greedy fuck gave into her kinks above what the voice had told her to do.”

  He shakes his head hard, eyes focused somewhere else. Somewhere beyond the assaulting smells and sounds and clutter of this place.

  “I can only imagine what grim fate awaits her for divertin’ from the path the voice laid out. Anyway, here’s the lowdown.”

  He hunkers down, set to divulge information and set me on my way. Me, sure, I know the info is necessary, but the twinkle of a sunbeam shimmering off the syringe has my deepest attention, so Daryl snaps his fingers in front of my face.

  “I don’t wanna have to repeat any of this. Pay the fuck attention.”

  My attention is his, though my veins chatter much as I expect the unnamed narrator of Solon’s explorative tale chattered to him, though mine have yet to find their tongue. Solon’s did, in telling the story.

  “First, as I’ve said repeatedly and you just gotta understand, everybody is gonna want somethin’ from you, as payment for their services. For being a leg of your journey. The voice told me this much. Even if they don’t want to take somethin’ from you, they will. Payment. It’s human nature, the voice said. The voice demanded.”

  I notice, even with the cigarette in tow, as much a bad habit as a calming crutch, his hand is still shaking.

  “We’re all to give you the rig, but…but the voice insisted on playin’ on both our needs, as if we need somethin’, though I suppose the voice understands what type of individuals it is dealin’ wit,’ as well as what it demands. If the others are like me, they will simply want it done and get you gone and never have to hear the voice again. Services rendered, connection clipped off like a fuckin’ hangnail. But I expect some are more…I expect some are more deeply entrenched in this wretched lifestyle.”

  I think of Alice and her acquisition of my tooth.

  “Don’t question, just give and receive.”

  The ash from his cigarette glows red as he inhales, and breaks off, crumbling onto his lap. His fingers have somewhat steadied, now that he is passing on the info. He wipes the ash off his lap nonchalantly. As if it is a regular thing which, with the burn marks scattered throughout his clothing—one on the hem of his shirt; one higher up and larger; another burned all the way through the pocket of his jeans to the flesh beneath, a still raw scab filling the hole—it’s obviously true.

  Daryl is primarily into pot. He’s dabbled with harder stuff, but pot is what he and Tricia live on. Though with her present skinny bitch condition, I expect she has moved up the self-destruction ladder, unless it was the baby’s addiction, its need for milk, which was drying her up.

  She just doesn’t know how to handle her drugs, like me.

  I’d been over here countless times, crashed on that stinking sofa after we all vegged out and dropped with lit joints or cigarettes clipped between fingers set like a vice to hold them. Hence, the burns. The holes. The hope draining away in those holes, except for those like me, who dug deeper and found our true paths. Something more. Not wallowing, moving forward.

  “So, how many steps…how many legs, to my journey?”

  “How the fuck should I know? As many as it takes. Perhaps it’s a twelve-step course to oblivion.”

  Fine. Though I know it’s not oblivion I am headed for. Riding the Centipede promises so much more.

  “Each leg, each passage through an invisible doorway, like you did here, droppin’ into the apartment as you did, is triggered by the drug in the syringe you are to receive at each leg.”

  “The drug itself creates the doorway.” I kind of know this from what I’ve heard on the dark frontier grapevine. When Grimes legitimized Riding the Centipede, he only told me it was real, and how to get it rolling. Daryl confirmed what he implied.

  “Look. Don’t ask me questions. I have no clue. I am only the fuckin’ messenger.”

  He drags hard on the cigarette. I think he might inhale the whole thing as more ash flakes onto his shirt.

  “Along with triggerin’ the doorway, each leg’s drug is…different.”

  “Different?”

  I almost ask how, but he doesn’t know anything. His angry piranha stare at my question lets me know that much. He is on a mission. Let him get on with his mission. It is food for me to mentally masticate later.

  “Each leg takes what the previous leg has done to your blood and enhances it.”

  Building blocks, that’s what it makes me think of. How you set a few down, and then start building up. All pieces needed to construct the whole.

  “Therefore, this ride, somethin’ only set in motion once a year, is your ride and only your fuckin’ ride. Nobody else can take it. Burroughs allows only one Ride on the Centipede a year and whoop-dee-do you’re the lucky bastard this year.”

  His eyes are rimmed red, but the blue core is brilliant and piercing as he stares at me.

  A lot to think about. Why only one ride a year? Why am I allowed to be the one this year? How was I chosen? Who is the voice? Is it Burroughs? How does this person, the voice, fit into the whole picture and what is he or she getting out of this? On and on, I’m sure there will be more questions, but at this moment, I do not care. I don’t want to waste any more time.

  “What am I supposed to give to you as payment?”

  I expect he wants money for pot, or money for cigarettes, not that I have much on me, but one learns how to get by on little when living in the margins. Sleight of the empty hand and a purloined wallet to fill it.

  He looks confused.

  “Haven’t had time to think about it. The call only came through about an hour ago.”

  “What day is it? I ask, before realizing it doesn’t matter. Time does not matter. It is later, that is all.”

  “Today,” he says, laughing as he scopes out the room.

  “What do you want as payment?”

  His focus slows down, narrows. His head hangs loose as if he is thinking hard. Rodin�
�s The Thinker, without the fist as prop.

  “Tie my shoe.”

  The white shoelace of his right shoe, a knock-off black Nike with an illegible basketball player’s name stamped in cursive on it, dangles to both sides of the shoe. One tip kisses a rainbow colored ball.

  “Tie your shoe?”

  A ridiculous request. I’d actually rather give him a couple bucks for whatever he really needs. Pot, cigarettes, perhaps food. Mickey D’s or something from the taco truck that usually sets up roost in the parking lot next to the Liquor store around the corner.

  “Gimme a break, I’m not your bitch.”

  He stands up and spews saliva with shotgun force.

  “Tie my shoe. Tie my fuckin’ shoe. Tie it so’s you can get your fuckin’ drug and that voice will never intrude on my life again. Tie my fuckin’ shoe, you son of a bitch. Tie it.”

  His reaction shocks me. Cool Daryl spilling completely over the top into Angry Daryl. A side I have never seen. Even his attitude toward Tricia, until today, has always been more aloof, not knotted with such ferocity.

  He is shaking again, not just his hands but his whole body. The Rap pummeling the walls has nothing on him.

  So, what am I to do, dear sister?

  I kneel forward as he stands there staring down at me, take the shoelace into my unsteady fingers and twist and lace it, knotting it tight, all the while thinking, what voice could inspire such fear? Whose voice could bring a man like Daryl to his proverbial knees while I rested on mine in front of him.

  I stand up, had to ask the question again, this time more directly.

  “Did the voice say who he or she was?”

  All Daryl did was sigh as if the weight of our world and perhaps Mars, Venus, and Mercury, has been lifted from his shoulders. He slumps to the sofa and holds up the rig.

  “Here. Do it. Take this and do it. Use the bathroom. I don’t want to ever fuckin’ see you again. Go. Do it. Now.”

  My question fizzles like a dead phone connection, passing down the back of my throat as I cough and snatch the rig from his hand. He sighs again and seems to droop, to melt. His eyes are moist.