So this blog is basically defunct. However, I’m now posting all the photos I take that aren’t actively displeasing (actually, no promises) to the aptly named Try Ream! .  I started taking photos literally last Saturday, so don’t come looking for artwork to mount on your hallowed walls. Come for ocular titillation and maybe not even that—more like the visual equivalent of eating pasta without sauce.

On the left we have a pack of hyenas tearing at what looks like a wildebeest carcass, though it’s hard to tell because they’ve somehow removed the horns and what’s left is more like a bloody taffy. I don’t have a headset and I’m not saying this out loud, because this is an unguided tour predicated upon the concept of proto-viewing: approaching wildlife without auxiliary knowledge the way you would as a native in a dik-dik loin cloth. This is a serious marketing point for our tour company. My employment interview covered ground like would I consider myself introverted or extroverted and am I comfortable with prolonged silence in a social setting and do I consider my own opinions worth sharing. The jeep is at three fifths capacity today. The back seat is empty while a middle-aged couple sit in the jump seat. A pudgy man rides shotgun. All three are wearing clothes with crisp fold lines. Off to the right, a trio of giraffe nibble on acacia growth, and through the veldt haze they resemble cave paintings made with broad strokes of clay pigment. The middle-aged couple are dressed in a sort of designer adventurewear meant to look fashionably rugged. They each sport thick-soled boots with unscuffed leather and gleaming eyelets, the man with argyle socks creeping vine-like up his shins. Above these are nearly matching sets of shorts and shirts, the kind of heavily-pocketed, khaki stuff you find standard in outdoor supply stores or decaying photos where men stand next to a slain elephant with hands grasped proudly around the giant twists of ivory, except the couple’s are immaculately cuffed and figure-accentuating with the faintest hint of floral patterning. They wear the shirts open down three buttons where in the rearview mirror I can’t help but see the man’s dark chest tuft and the woman’s copious breasts. The African heat beats down, stifling, and though it quashes sound and the wind carries speech off with the jeep’s exhaust I can hear the middle-aged man mutter low through clenched teeth. “The leaves giraffe eat contain a natural muscle relaxant. That’s how they get such long necks.” “Oh dearest,” the woman says, and pecks him on the cheek. The pudgy man has a Nikon Digital SLR with a telephoto lens as long as his forearm. He holds it with the lens clamped between his thighs and the screen on the back of the camera angled towards him as he thumbs the menu buttons and rotational dial. I turn the jeep slightly to follow the deep ruts that inscribe our ten-mile loop. A thin cloud of dust is still visible from the jeep ahead of us, though it’s now just a fuzzy cube in the distance. We send the jeeps around the loop at five minute intervals to keep them well spaced, like pirate dinghies or fiberglass caterpillars at Disneyland. The sun is turning the plasti-leather of the steering wheel into a heating coil beneath my gloveless hands. Ahead in the distance is a small watering hole with antelope and rhinos scattered around the pool of water and more antelope grazing not far off. The pudgy man lifts his camera and squirms around in his seat to aim through our dust at the receding giraffe. The camera makes a loud and two-staged click, and he tilts the screen up to look at his shot, wrinkling his nose then returning the camera to the spot between his thighs to continue fiddling with the settings. “Rhinos use their horns as a sexual tool. As a manner of dildo. They’re the only mammals besides humans that enjoy rectal stimulation.” I can see in the rearview that the man still has his teeth clenched, though he’s sneering smugly. The woman leans against him and rests her head on his shoulder. “Oh dearest,” she says. Then she tilts her head up and sort of kisses him on the cheek, moving her lips in an expanding pucker over his brillo-pad stubble until she’s encompassed one knob of his cleft chin. She holds this for half a second and then retracts completely to an upright position jiggling with the rutted dirt. Though still a ways off, the trees and lazing animals around the watering hole are larger and unobscured from our vantage, meaning the preceding jeep has moved on around the acacia grove towards the turn off for the crevasse and Julio’s wreckage. The pudgy man lifts his camera and shoots at the watering hole without sighting through the viewfinder. He again wrinkles his nose and returns to thumbing buttons on the camera body. As we near the watering hole the dirt ruts become less even, shaking and rolling the jeep from side to side. Sun visors clap against the windshield, internal door mechanisms rattle and lock, the blazing steering wheel oscillates in a jerky period; in the vibrating rearview the middle-aged couple jostle off each other’s shoulders with hands clenched to the bases of their seatbelt-less jump seats. The pudgy man absorbs most of this with a gradual sway. Amidst the upheaval his camera rides safely against his thighs. Each bump sends it deeper into one thigh or the other where it nestles gently in fatty tissue. The telephoto lens presses in and the thigh gives and deforms, the lip of flesh curling around the lens and rising up the cylindrical body then back down as the lens rebounds into the other thigh. This continues, the man intent upon the camera screen, clicking and spinning adjustments, the thigh flesh rising and falling like Atlantic swells. Ngumbe said the first wrong sign was that Julio’s jeep was still idling by the crevasse when he pulled up. An interval violation. Then Julio’s jeep backfired and the tires spun out until the tread caught hold of the packed dirt. The jeep shot forward, the suspension getting pummeled with the speed of the oncoming ground, until it cleared the edge and did this almost somersault catapulting the jump seat passengers out into rag-doll flight while the jeep and remaining crew tumbled away below. They said it must have been a stuck accelerator. The heat of the steering wheel is such that my palms feel like they’ve partially melted and fused to the plasti-leather. We’re idling now for a short photography period a little over fifty yards from the watering hole. A breeze adds the soft rustle of veldt grass. Two antelope by the water pool approach each other until their faces touch, noses grazing back and forth, and they press their foreheads together as if trading thoughts. The pudgy man is still focused on the glare-blinding screen of his Nikon, clicking away. “AIDS has become an epidemic in the African natural world among antelope and other grazing mammals, transmitted through residual saliva and mucus found in these pockets of drinking water.” “Oh dearest.” I’m starting to get an acidic taste in the little pouches between my jawbone and my cheeks. The woman again takes fish lips to the man’s stubbly face. They move like jelly over his chin, enveloping and incorporating each prickly hair until she resembles a firmly attached barnacle or remora fish. Then, as she withdraws, each facial hair flicks out from her slack mouth like music-box tines, a hundred tiny filaments glinting in the sun. I tap the gas, and we start off for the acacia grove and the crevasse turn off. The thigh wave action continues with the pudgy man hunched over his camera. The acid taste has become an intense twinge in the muscles of my jaw, and I have to repeatedly open and flex my jaw to dissipate it. When I look closely I can see residual drops of saliva clinging to the scruff on the right half of the middle-aged man’s jaw, refracting yellow rays. The acacia hums and buzzes with a dull insect sound as we skirt its edges towards the turn off. When I peel my hands from the steering wheel to reset my grip they come away with an adhesive tear, and the palms are bright red.

Mother Margaret’s one of the enterprising homeless she says if you aint got nothin nice to say then smoke crack she’s an upstanding community member which means consistency of moral fiber like how all her maxims end then smoke crack not bad advice I’m thinking might I get my hands on sprinkled loose change because it makes sense that Mother Margaret of course sells it good stuff at an honest price yeah sometimes asking is the best way to go about it in my spot on seventh ave plus there’s like mad exposed cooch overhead smoked my last rock this morning you could say I’m jonesing but I’m not as bad as that fool Slobbery Edward the damn fool but I got my grate staked out it’s good because of proximity to Penn station without attracting pigs what I do is stick my lips puckered up to the grate and whistle songs I remember from school example The Saints Go Marshing or Twelve Nights on Christmas they work better with religious themes because those kinds of people throw more change when it falls through the grate usually it lands in my Twinkies box but the coins that miss I’ll spread my fingers through the sludge like a garden rake sometimes it only takes three or four songs and I’ve got enough I’ll head to Mother Margaret where she’s on the street but you never approach Mother Margaret no her son sets up in this nook across the street he’s got the goods because Mother Margaret has her street stand selling miniature ivory statues is what she calls them tiny carved statues of liberty and Empire and Chrysler buildings these bring in steady cash you can believe Mother Margaret’s green rich with the crack profit on top what they are is actually people’s teeth she buys off the people seriously jonesing then carves herself but today it’s just a stream of stingy suits above my grate the kind of people that shit on religious iconography though none so far of the worst kind because to get my pucker up to the grate I have to put my fingers through and lift myself a couple feet the worst kind have clacking dress shoes and aim for the exposed maggot of my fingertips yeah after fifteen songs I’m jonesing for real now still not like fool Slobbery Edward enough to take my own head to the rail in the Amtrack tunnel I’m trying now a bit of my extended repertoire example Harvard Nagila he took his head like a hammer against the steel rail of course he probed hypotheticals would Mother Margaret accept it and he dislodged his whole fucking jawbone which netted him easily thirty rocks and you better believe the next day he was hitting me up for small change

Sometimes what I like to do is dial up AMEX and zero through their automated system until I get a representative, at which point I’ll say something like “I’m calling because I’d like to cancel my—oh, just a second” and put down the phone and shuffle off as if to attend to a pot boiling over or a dog shitting in the apartment, and I try to see how long they’ll stay on hold.  Oftentimes I’ll go back into my room and string them along with mumbles about notification letters or misplaced statements, and I’ll shuffle some of the papers on my desk to feign directed activity; then very carefully I’ll pick up my phone and hold the mic away from my mouth and nose, angling the phone sort-of the way a doctor holds that ear-scope when checking for inner ear inflammation, and I’ll just listen.  I like to call AMEX and not Mastercard or Visa or god forbid Discover because with those other companies it can take a good five to ten minutes on hold before you get a representative who ends up being some Indochinese teenager following a strict protocol where if I’m silent for more than a minute they ask “Sir, have you abandoned the call?” and then they hang up.  And of course I could keep them going by saying something like “Oh, of course not.  I’m just trying to find my—hold on,” but there’s something depressing about stringing along these Indochinese whom I imagine are set up in a humid tropical warehouse for minuscule pay, maybe it’s just my 1st world guilt but I much prefer the customer-service-oriented mid-westerners at AMEX.  They have those professional noise-isolating call-center headsets, but if you listen closely you can pick up their breath or the traces of other representatives blathering away in the background or the rasp of a casually wielded nail file.  From time to time they’ll probe with a “Sir?” or an “Are you still there?”; and with the latter I swear one time I got the same woman who recorded the automated voice message system for Verizon.  But after one or two of these probes there’s often a pause in the breathing or the nail filing and they’ll let out this sigh.  It can be quick, with real expulsive force, or the more dragging, raggedy type like when you’ve got a sorrow fist clenching your windpipe; and I’ve noticed that I do this thing that’s totally instinctual where I inhale right as they sigh, as if I’d captured the cloud of air from their lungs in my own, sucked it through the tiny mesh speaker of my cell phone, and it feels like a warm balloon in my chest.  What happened is I just recently got serious about my finances and discovered that I was paying a yearly fee of $85 for this platinum mileage Mastercard that was a total pain to actually get any rewards from, so I decided to apply for an AMEX Blue Cash card and input the short history of my financial achievements into this webpage that has a pixelated icon of a lock as assurance that my personal information won’t be mishandled; and as a final step someone from AMEX gave me a call as a further security measure and to confirm my application, and would you know it it was the exact lady who must’ve I swear voice acted for the Verizon automated voice message system.  Except I had just a week and a half earlier listened to her file what sounded like plastic nail extensions, and this time her professional greeting was lethargic and atonal.  I felt I could hear bags under her eyes and her hunched posture over a chipboard desk, and beside her elbow an empty double espresso with lipstick on the plastic cover.  Something about this experience was deeply frightening, and I think I felt a little offended or maybe discouraged that she obviously didn’t remember who I was, though of course she wouldn’t, but I don’t know.  After that, listening in while I rustled paper or dragged and tapped my shoe on the floor of my apartment wasn’t the same.  I’m not saying I expected the representatives to recognize my absent breathing or forge some telephonic bond, but all the same my synchronized inhalations felt dry and raw in my windpipe, so I started leaving the phone alone in my room while I made dinner, just letting them listen to the sounds of my pot on the stove grates and wooden spoons in the pot.  When I came back in I could see from the call durations that representatives had waited for three or seven or even eight minutes and forty-three seconds.  The long ones were good for a laugh of sorts, and I started to become like a sprinter obsessed with record breaking in small increments.  Going for 8:45 then 8:46, and each time I reached the next impossible number it seemed unimpressive, easily beaten.  But then I got a little too carried away and wanted to micromanage, to check on the progress of my hold time; I would let my food stew and creep sock feet into my room, and from the distance of my doorway I could hear this noise coming from my cell phone, what sounded unmistakably like weeping.  But in picking up my phone I could see the flashing “Call Ended,” and the little mesh speaker was silent.  The thing is, this keeps happening, and it makes for short call durations, which I figure is something related to the bit about a watched pot, but what—am I supposed to not go in there when I hear it?  It’s gotten much louder now, to where it’s audible from the kitchen while I’m cooking soup: the cadence of sobs and sniffling and inhalations caught in the chest.

And I can tell I’m not the only one sorry about my destroyed wingtips, this straight-lacer with parted hair and eyes flitting from all the shiny shoes staring where my right toe-cap is clean gone and shaking his head and bending down to retie his polished semi-brogues, double knotting, and still shaking his head for the ruined Belgian hand-made on my foot like how I would be reacting, shaking head and whatnot, to reflect my own sadness in this regard if it weren’t for the extremely painful bleeding out of my metatarsus.  The way I’m making along the concrete is how you see soldiers do in movies, when they’ve got enfilading fire coming at them like three inches above their heads from the direction they’re crawling toward, and I suppose this might not be at all the way it’s done in real life, because I’m just going off what I’ve seen in the big screen shows we steal into when Buddy chats up the ticket chick at AMC, though I guess it’s the same crawling motion as in those boot camps, so maybe this is true soldier fashion, even though the only boot camps I’ve seen are also movie ones, so what to make of that.  In either case, on the subway platform the bubblegum discs spread out like flowers or fungus that you don’t notice make these patterns until you’re down with it, you gotta be flat on your stomach and I’m not saying the strings in my vision from the pain don’t add some effect, but the point is these gum patterns dance off and I can see new Zodiacs up in front, where I’m going now slowly, by this bench and even back behind though my blood went right over this shape, I’d say it looked before like a celestial skyscraper.  I can say yes it hurt like shit and now the platform is gradually repopulating for the next train, and on the bench I’m headed for is this old lady sitting there with these paper bags and this knitted like gross-looking saggy beanie which gives her an appearance like the woman I originally jiffied the wingtips off in the first place, imagine my surprise, when her bag’s got these hand-mades with an upwards of four-hundred dollar retail.  Keeping them myself as windfall loot is how I looked at it, because the original beanie lady probably jiffied them in the first place, which for a second I’m thinking maybe this bench lady is the same as the other might she recognize me if I get close like I’m doing slowly and administer some opportunistic repercussions?  Thing is I knew it was happening as it was happening, the way really fast movements get stuck sometimes and you watch your foot move too far forward in this extended half-nanosecond just too far, when there’s nothing you can do about it, and when they first implemented the doors it was against the crazy delays from people clawing in like newborns into a womb, even though you’ve got trains coming again lickety split, and so they announced it and a grace period and everything like you better start taking this shit seriously or else, because the or else was when the grace was over and this man up by 96th still acting self-centered, like as we all, tried to squeeze in and took the new glinting doors on either shoulder and got like cross-sectioned, which is what the MTA was saying yeah would happen so there.  Which of course I’m no fool about because one reason the Belgian wingtips were an extra good haul was they came steel-toed, and what when you’re travelling uptown to unload another jiffied haul at Buddy’s three times daily maybe four if you’re lucky then time becomes as they say money and you develop this maneuver where you point your toe and kind of ballet jab it between the doors, the point being that the steel cap is now like a pre-requisite, but slip up once and here I was in that stuck time watching the pincer steel cut like you do butter through my metatarsus and leaving all five digits inside their little wingtip cave riding the express train uptown.  I can see now the beanie on this lady’s dome has got big stains on it like maybe she dropped it in grease or something else on the platform and now that I can reach out my hand and tug on the fabric on the knee of her pants feebly, the way small children pluck your clothing when they’re ashamed or sad or wanting to make apologies, tugging in this manner to convey what I can’t get out in words because they’re all sinking away from my throat down toward this leaking throb, but she does the practiced look in this city where even though you’ve seen a wretch you don’t look because eye contact is this sort of acknowledged invitation to more personal interaction, and out behind me I’ve got really a pretty long trail from my bleeding foot where if you look just right it’s starting to look like some sort of map.  I bet she’s thinking I’m affecting a bit of melodrama here laid out on the concrete because what it’s not like I couldn’t be hobbling on my heel, but I’ll tell you it’s harder than you think without any toes and the main reason is the sort of pain that turns off your muscles so you get so weak, it’s just hard to keep my grip on the thin wool of this lady’s pants of course she’s ignoring but she kind of looks around now trying to spot an official of some sort to deal with things the way everyone in this city expects the bureaucratic grid to keep things copacetic, and what I’ve realized is that the trail behind me, except for one spot where someone must’ve shuffled through or dragged a trash bag or something to smudge it, makes the exact path of the 3 express train like you see on those maps, the way it slaloms down the island and swoops east into Brooklyn all the way to Flatbush.

Smoke another one into your head.  Let the chemicals dance a frenzy and here we are, oh my.  Tumble, somersault, falling backwards and lying supine on your carpet.  There are different fibers in your carpet: something plastic, something arboreal, something animal—grown on the hide of a mammal on another continent, then clipped and treated and shipped and woven and dyed and rubbing against the back of your neck, itch itch.  The feel of the space around you.  You can feel the contour of the apartment surrounding your starfished limbs, the rough rectangle of walls and tables and a chair, the crannies and recesses created between things that don’t quite touch.  Everything is defined by this space.  Your daily motions are linked together like segments of a worm that crawls out into grocery errands and sports bars and part-time retail jobs, but always returns here, bringing these external things to be given meaning within the context of your living space.

      The numbered aisles of the supermarket make sense in the shelves of your fridge.  Belligerent customers who try to outspend their anger make sense in the flakes of dead skin that build up in dark corners.

      The space is buffered by the fuzz of lives filtered through floor and ceiling, hints of discourse and joy and financial trouble and procreation.  Outside, broken machinery plummets and whines down the garbage chute of the adjacent factory at regular intervals.  This sound percolates through your window and fills the apartment like a pleasant mist, and you forget about it.  Then every once and awhile you find the sound condensed in a way you can’t ignore, in wet droplets hanging from the underside of your bed, in damp patches of carpet under your neck.

      Someone knocks on your door.  You feel the shockwave carry through the room, hitting the soles of your feet and rustling the hairs in your nostrils, tickle tickle.

      “Hey Jamie.  You in there?  You asleep?  The missus and I are frying up some all-beef dogs.  Wanted to see if you’d join us.  Free dinner and hospitality, eh, and you get to see the new kid.  Cuter than the last.”

      You are hungry and it doesn’t make sense to you.  You can’t understand how food becomes energy—what energy is or how it would get you up off the carpet.  But Hannah and Mark make great hotdogs.

      “Ye.  Ah,” you say, almost a whisper.  Then again, faster.  “Yeah.”

      You find slippers by your chair and shuffle shuffle to the door.  Shuffling gets electricity running through your toes.

      “You look cozy,” says Mark.

      “Hehe,” you say.

      Next door, Hannah is ensconced in the kitchenette, a curtain of heat rising from the oil in the pan and giving her face a waterlogged appearance.  Mark walks up behind her and squeezes her shoulders.  He reaches around her with one arm and wafts the smell of cooking hotdog over her shoulder and up his nose and makes a face of eager anticipation.  When he pulls his arm back it bumps into Hannah’s right breast, depressing it like a button, and she grins.  You wonder about the synaptic connection.

      On the floor, next to the table, the kid sits playing with foam blocks.  He has the look of a two-year-old, his head still a tad large for his torso, legs fully extended against the floor in a V-shape, the baby fat around his fingers compressing and deforming as he manipulates the blocks.  You stand three feet away, towering over him, shifting your feet back and forth inside your slippers in inch-length oscillations, matting the imitation wool.  He keeps manipulating the blocks, doesn’t look up.  It’s like you can hear the fat on his fingers squishing.

      “Here you are.  Do you want relish?  Sit down.”

      Hannah hands you a plastic dish with a hotdog on it and pulls out a chair from the table, motioning you into its comfort-molded seat with a show-room arm sweep.  You shuffle over and sit down and there’s a bun around your hotdog.  You want purity of flavor.  It feels important to your GI-tract.  You decide against the bun and extract the dog with your fingers, which is painful and hot in a way you notice.  Hannah and Mark bring their own dishes and the relish, and they sit down across from you.

      “So, what do you think?” says Mark.  “Cute yet dashing, is he not?”

      Mark and Hannah get their kids from a company.  There are a few companies to choose from, but they all sell the same thing: manufactured children ranging from the neonatal to about four years old.  You get to customize their appearance and to a certain extent their personality, then you’ve got a perpetually cute child that doesn’t need to be fed and in the contingency that harm should befall it can be easily replaced.  Ideal for busy parents.

      Everyone takes a bite of hotdog.

      “It’s all about the hair, was my thought,” says Mark, mouth brimming with relish.  “It doesn’t grow, you know, so the hairdo you choose is basically the one.  Look at it.  You see the cowlick?  The spitting image of my grandfather Julius.  They even got exactly the right amount of pepper shading in the blond color.  Quality work right there.  We also gave him a hint of those distinguished flared nostrils.  All that wisdom and grandeur of old gramps captured in this tiny face.  We left out the blue eyes though, gave him nice hazel ones instead.  Figured we could do without Gramps’ anti-Semitism, you know?  Adorable, huh?”

      The kid has these three primary-colored blocks that he is stacking and unstacking.  He puts them in a little tower, red on yellow, and blue on top, then disassembles the tower.  You watch him do this five times.  You take a bite of hotdog.  You like the crispness of the hotdog’s skin and the disparity between that and the homogenous pliancy of the center.  You tongue the border between filler and skin.

      “Hehe,” you say.

      Mark and Hannah smile at each other, then they both turn and smile at you.  The synchrony makes you blink, and you’re aware of the machinery falling down the garbage chute, over and over.

      “So,” says Hannah, “how’s your job?”

This makes you think of price tags and handbags and corduroy blazers and halter tops and imitation-leather boots and more price tags.  Customers ask to trade in imitation-leather boots for genuine-leather boots, which you don’t carry, and you tell them that and they leave in a huff.

      “The new winter line.  Is coming in,” you say.  “Next week.”

      “Bet it looks suspiciously similar to last year’s,” says Mark.

      He laughs.

      “Well that’s good to hear,” says Hannah.

      She takes a bite of hotdog.

      “So I bet you’re wondering what happened to the previous kid,” says Mark.  “Little Rudy.  What a cute little dude he was.  That red shock of hair always made me think of a torch roaming through our apartment whenever he toddled around.”

      “The Toddling Torch,” says Hannah.

      “Yeah.  That’s what we called him.  It was affectionate, but like that’s also what he became.  This little torch of destruction, metaphorically.  Because he wasn’t lighting things on fire, just breaking them.  He broke the TV remote.  We got a new one and kept it on a shelf.  He broke two of table’s legs.  Wrenched out one with his like robo-strength and used it like a bat against the other one.  See, both the legs on your side.  Darker wood.  New legs.  So I start reprimanding him, getting a little physical so he knows I mean business.  Didn’t work though.  He shattered our coffee-table vase.”

      “He ate two of my favorite necklaces.”

      “Ate Hannah’s jewelry, and these kids don’t have a whole gut system, so those necklaces weren’t coming out.  Probably chewed up in some gears or something.  Anyway, then he broke the DVD player.”

      “I’d just gotten it for Mark.”

      “Brand new.  My birthday present.  Rudy somehow got his hands on our metal kitchen tongs and went to town on the thing.  Beat it to bits and even scratched up most of my spaghetti westerns.  I was so angry, I felt like I was going to have an aneurysm.  Standing there vibrating and I thought, ‘OK.  Enough.’  So I went and checked our policy, because we had this sort of all-inclusive insurance on Rudy that covered anything that might happen, and I saw that the replacement deductible was only a hundred dollars.  So then I stormed back in here, grabbed the metal tongs out of his hand—because he was still digging into come classic Sergio Leone—and I just let loose on him, no holds barred.”

      “I helped, too.”

      “Well by that time there wasn’t much of the head left.”

      “Still I had my go at it.  What was it I said, again?”

      “This is for the pearls.  This is for the gold chain.”

      “This is for the pearls.  This is for the gold chain.”

      “But wow, it felt so good.  Incredibly therapeutic, you don’t even know.”

      You don’t even know.  Your feet are warm, rubbing back and forth in your slippers.  You’ve been watching the kid and his blocks, and he’s done the same stacking routine thirty five times now.  You’re beginning to wonder if maybe he’s short-circuited or his software has crashed, leaving him stuck in this loop.

      “What, you think that’s a cigar?” says Mark.

      He laughs.

      You hadn’t noticed, but you’ve stopped eating your hotdog with a good half of it sticking out between your teeth.  You let it fall into your hand, and you put it back on the plastic dish.  It’s tepid now and has this slimy meat-sweat collected in little beads along the skin.

      “Not hungry.  I guess,” you say.

      Then the kid cocks his arm back and launches the blue foam block in a vicious pitch at Mark, where it strikes his thigh and rebounds harmlessly onto the floor.  Mark grins.  You blink.  It feels like a slide projector.

      “Well, it’s about time to be tucking this guy in bed,” says Mark.  “Little Julius needs his beauty sleep.”

      “Goodnight,” says Hannah.

      “Goodnight,” says Mark.

      You shuffle back down the hall to your apartment where the lights are off and the carpet awaits.  Your familiar space.  Your digesting space.  The hotdog visit scurries off somewhere underneath a bookshelf, rolling itself in dust bunnies and making itself at home, occasionally reaching out and leaving fingerprints on the surface of your thought.  If you lie just right you can find the depression in the fibers left by your previous residency on the carpet.  You can almost feel the remnant body heat.  Draw your arms and legs out as if making a slow-motion snow angel.  There it is.  Your groove.  And it pulses with each piece of broken machinery down the chute, in synch with the waves on your eardrum.  That high whine speeding past your third floor window like an avian dive, like sexual release, like the call of broken children—assemblies that failed to meet standards, with severe facial tics and gyroscopic balance issues and hideous amalgamations of customized features.  Refuse bodies tumbling towards the dumpster, their dopplering whimper strobing like a heartbeat.  It divides things, measuring equal quantities within the space of your apartment.  This is how you count time. 

Greasy dreads blowing past this asshole’s face and I’m like, “Yeah, bet that’s the last time you cut the good shit with baby powder and try to sell it with my name.  You on Dr. Cane’s turf now.”  And after falling halfway, so he’s like right outside Crabby Jenkins’ 2^nd floor window, this asshole’s face gets this hopeful look on it, prolly thinking, “Hey, it’s only 3 floors, maybe I’ll survive.  Break a leg or something, but maybe I’ll survive.”  Course, I specifically push them with the aim of making them land on their head, and even if I’m off my game there’s always Erve, waiting for them with his switchblade to finish them off.  So I hear the crunch-thud and Erve yells up, “Nice one boss” and starts swabbing down the concrete, which I know he says gives him some crazy jeepers at night, so I make sure to give Erve a little extra of the good shit, uncut, and that keeps him happy.  In fact, I give all my men a little uncut good shit.  Dr. Cane’s one benevolent mutherfuck.

      “Crawson,” yells Ma.  “Come get your damn macaroni.”

      I’m up off my bed like a quick slap, cause damn I’m hungry, but I keep my eyes closed all the way to the door of my room, staying just a bit longer in my imagined world with Erve with his broom and the red pool.  I always get real hungry for dinner because I’m afraid to nag Ma and bring more shit down on her head.  That’s what she always saying.  Shit falling down on her head.  And if you get too close some’ll land on you.  I keep my distance, nowadays, but sometimes she still brings the shit down on my head—like when I track in dirt, or I forget to put the TV on her female channel—and it leaves me blue and sore on my scalp.

      The macaroni’s cold like usual, but whatever.  I take it back to my bed and chow down, huge bites.  I swear Ma cooks the macaroni and lets it sit by the window for an hour before she lets me get it.  It’s like she’s trying to say, “the macaroni’s this close to not even being there for you, so don’t take it for granted.”  Every once and a while Ma’ll make some macaroni hot and with stuff on it, like cheese or cream cheese, and she’ll bring it to me like nice, showing all her teeth.  This is always one of the times Pa shows up.  And she’ll close my door saying, “You even think about leaving your room.”  I’m always like, to myself, “No problem, Dr. Cane don’t need to move one inch.  His musclemen bring him all the good shit he wants and people to knock off.  Like Patriarch power, bitch.”  One time she forgot to cook the macaroni, it was just these brittle elbows in the bowl, and I learned this trick where if you suck on them long enough it’s kinda like weak candy.

      Next to my bed this arm sticks through the hole in the wall and gives me the fuck-you finger.

      “Hey, Cross.  What the shit’s up with you?”

      It’s Bubis.  He lives in the apartment next door, talking through this hole he dug in the wall with his dad’s switchblade.

      “Dinner, man.  Cold mac,” I say.

      When Bubis first dug through the wall I freaked a bit, figured the Landlord gonna skewer our asses, fried ass-cheeks over a bonfire and inevitably more shit landing on Ma’s head, but Bubis was like chill, chill.  His mom said, The only time the Landlord’ll give shit about the condition of the building is when they tearing it down and some corporate man’s handing him a fat check.  Still, I showed Ma, saying, “It’s OK, right?”  She was like, “So long as it ain’t no fucking glory hole.”

      “Hey, I got something,” Bubis says.  “Just wait.”

      I hear him get off his bed and walk out his room.

      Dr. Cane runs this neighborhood, unquestioned.  Does what he feels, kills who he feels.  Like, I see the Landlord sauntering by and all I gotta say is “Get that asshole up here,” and muscleman Jones goes and gets him.  I like the way dudes have to trudge up the stairs to get to my pad, that way when I push them off and they fall back down its like they killed themselves, did all the work.  So I can have this Landlord standing in front of me, his back to the edge where the wall’s blown out, the wind licking his balls, and he don’t even ask why.  Knows I say why and that’s that.  “You been ripping off one of my dealermen,” I say.  And muscleman Jones goes and puts a bag of the uncut shit into the Landlord’s shirt pocket and pulls it back out, plain as day, like where’d this come from, eh?  And the Landlord don’t even question because it’s fact: that’s the shit he ripped off.  So Jones puts it back in the pocket, that way Erve’ll get it, and I take my cane and jab this asshole right in the ribs, right over the edge.  The cane’s a precaution I established back in the early days, just in case some crazy’s thinking about pulling me with them, or some shit.  But it’s like tradition now, and my fucking moniker.  I love the way they walk up the stairs and fall down, and all I gotta do is say “him.”

      “OK.  Got this from my dad’s box,” Bubis says.  “Check it.”

      He sticks his hand through the hole with this glass tube and a little plastic bag full of these like chunks of cheese.  Bubis is a couple years older than me and knows some stuff I don’t, but it’s embarrassing so I don’t ask.

      “Man,” I say, “Your Pa know?”

      “Nah, it’s chill.  Two rocks each.”

      He pulls his hand back and I hear him messing around.  Some clicks and sound like one of those airy farts.  Then his hand’s back through the hole with the glass tube and the bag of cheese and a lighter.  It’s really starting to smell like Bubis ripped a huge rubbery-smelling fart, which is the same smell that’s always coming through my door when Ma and Pa are hanging out.  A lot of times I hear Pa raising his voice at Ma and hitting stuff, and I figure if I were him and Ma were always ripping farts like that when I came home, I’d get pissed too.

      “Hey, Cross, man, shit shit, yeah.”

      I take out two of the smaller cheese chunks and put them on my bed.  They’re hard but kind of flaky, and I pick one apart with my thumb.  I taste a flake and it’s gross, like weird soap.  I brush the flakes onto the floor and put the other chunk on the shelf behind my bed, next to this cement brick I found that had a naked lady graffitied on it.

      “Shit, man, shit shit, you dig?”

      “Shit.  I dig,” I say.

      I pass the lighter and the glass tube and the bag back through the hole.  I can hear Bubis with his back against the wall and tapping it really fast like bullets.

      Sometimes people come to Dr. Cane of their own will, looking for aid.  Like this man brings his woman, says she always farting so bad it burns his eyes, so bad his eyes are crying like all the time now.  Tried reprimanding but she don’t stop, can he get some aid.  So what I do is I give her the cane, and off she goes, prolly farting her way down past Crabby Jenkins’ window if this asshole’s not lying with a bald face.  And now he’s standing there all lonely and I think, Let’s have some fun, why not.  So I have muscleman Jones do the whole bag-in-shirt-pocket thing, and the man’s face gets like “Oh,” and then he gets the cane too.