Evil satin saunters that start on windy mornings when Bostonian leaves fall against the rain and into the streets as if the World were that good that they need one more chance to be a part of it that they peel away from the tree and cascade down into the thick of it through the gusts and gale, down through the progression of Autumn to Winter, the fetal impact of frost and fuck - imperious kamikaze impedimenta.
Clarinets and saxophones coax in a PBS day where WBZ can only hide briefly in it’s neon red buzz pass the screen as the heavy bell ride skip tingle silver cymbal shower pierces the ear so sharply that you can simply breathe in the reeds and the pianos shrill monotonous dance of tempo and tonality reflected in the pounding of it’s percussive nature, the hammers smack black ball blissful like asses coated in Bain de Soleil in the sun; the sun that does not even show hints and signs of existing on this day down Massachusetts Avenue, degradingly shat out as 'Mass Ave'.
Navy blue and black pea coats. Duck umbrellas. Gutters with water that run faster than you walk. Cigarette smoke taking on that moldy, musty smell that can only make you think of sweaters and High School football games that you attended before you even knew what High School was. Walks with a proud smile given by that alligator on the breast of that collared shirt. Tree umbrellas that replace ducks. Courderoys. Golloshes. Simplicity. A Victrola roll away. A dark wood dry sink. A screened in porch that has wet oranges, damp yellows, and soaking wet reds smeared and splattered with big stretched faces against the multiple midget windows of rain pelt push that have forced themselves like leaf suction grabbers forming panes between the flimsy four walls of mottled mesh.
Wrought iron fences lined high on brick bases that have pale red dust that moistens in the fall and droplets hang on each spaded tip of the fence post pikes as if to say the walls inside are more secure than the nomenclature cross that hangs high in gabled eves that dominate the underneath of the vomitous, ominous clouds as they excrete more of the day upon us in lieu of the sun and it’s rays; it all seems 'ok' though, while walking past the iron spines. The iron goes red like the brick in the rain of the day as the tower tops pivot and melt in the water’s drops and shades of green coat like moss or baloney from a lunch bag forgotten in an Autumn gym locker and found the following spring - the mayonnaise had already melted but undetected by the solder of sickly sock soldiers.
Painted-in Hopscotch lines hold a revered reverie of resilience against the impending chalk that tends to modify the rules somewhere between the tether ball and the four square hotlines of children that play their recesses away inside the walls filled with construction paper production lines and craypa creativity; a day to hold warm next to the billowing bellows of heater slit slot vents that churn, chum, and chide the heat up from a belly that no one ever sees - not even the janitor with the tracheotomy that speaks from a hole in his throat underneath the cover up medicinal white throat mask that appears to have been stolen from the prop closet on the set of the original Star Trek.
The chalk melts in the rain as if to acknowledge a greater good. Law suits of nature vs. avocation are settled. None to one. One to none. Hold up strong and flex the hat bill right to reflect the rain into spurts at either end of the bent hat brow that remind you of a leaky faucet drip on a sink that was never leveled by the initial installer plumber who had smoked to much Northern Lights for breakfast that day and thought that ‘guess-ta-mation’ is an actual science through his bleeding ocular orbs; the water dances around and out of the way - a Drain-O commercial played backwards, in one and half speed, on hits of mescaline, in the night when it matters not one wee bit anyhow.
It is wet. It is cold. Children giggle and hold their smelly little ragamuffin palms of street urchin application to their mouths and giggle and point as you walk by. Smiles, bearing far less teeth than are necessary to actually smile, gaze down on you and chatter as Mr. Pointer points at you. Damn that Mr. Pointer, damn him to all hell; straight to Hades anus. But I guess it is ok. It is just enamel deprived children, bribed away from their teeth with pillow money, giggling at the rainy results to a walk that makes the satin stain and the kids need social workers at the very best anyway. Too much rhetoric behind the brick. Too much brick behind the brick. There must be something coming up from the vent. Somewhere hidden and dark, the custodial engineer laughs through his throat; he can smell two of them smoking in the bathroom. Air vents are in code with Patriot Act laws. Breathe in. Breathe out. Rain down and walk on.
You look down to notice that you have not walked. Your legs, firmly astute in their khaki pants, do not even buckle (or belt buckle if Roxbury would apply; hell, maybe even Somerville or Chelsea) in a direction that could even remotely be considered forward, never mind motion. Yes, that’s right; never mind motion. Motion pays no never mind to you; and it is quite aware of that conscious decision it makes to leave you in a state of derision and rescission. Motion is even pretty pissed that you have not found your ever-bitching gut to a beef place to throw down an order of ‘two juniors with extra mayo, extra cheese, and pickles; two pizza rolls and a spinach roll to go’. Motion hates when your stomach grinds the schedule out in a grumble that no one can not notice. Motion is a drag, not in drag - but a drag none the less. It would appear that you still are not moving. Rawhide!
As the chalk lines evaporate like lipstick on a joystick nod for 50 bucks in the Combat Zone, you move forward and the kids are ushered back via shrill cries involving Shelby and her missing finger nail and why there is blood near the bubbler and which little heathen has stolen the first aid kit in the confusion; as little Mr. Muse dances shrilly with chance, clutching the eye wash and screaming, “The rain pissed that woman’s pants, pissed ‘em real good, dude. It’s a real pissa-aaaaaa!” - the last part hung out like a love note from a song that Frankie Vali wishes he could have participated in during some wet dream of Columbian nights and Brunei whores but was never allowed, or allotted, during his days of falsetto jean cream.
You cross the street in front of a Volvo that never new safety from the commercial that proclaims it until your impulse made it find the rain to be safe also. Skid. Screech. Slide. Done. And the thighs of your pants scissor out in dampened stride and sound like 'pipe cleaner love', all while it continues to rain, the leaves still blow, your hat still hover covers you, and ducky umbrellas grow ever more impotent and flaccid (in an upside down sort of way) in the métier of their cause. It becomes an existence of folieaudeux; rub my __ and I’ll rub yours. Wet thighs and rubbing and crosswalks and Volvos and Autumn and, and, and, and … something got you safe to the other side. You look back over a rain pelt shoulder fuck of behind and see only the teacher (in her faux angora sweater that is probably a puked out, black tar heroin smoking, labor camp sweat room of vaginal Gifford quality and requirement; assembly AND manufacturing) looking down at the screech while the kiddos go back to huffing paint pens, eating glue, and shot-gunning eye wash fluid behind her rip off swap meet booth, street vendor, hairy ass sweater back; drolly, rolly-polly fat finger children still point at her as if they are in a time warp and not ever were notified of the time sequential happenings of classroom conduct in the fourth grade. The biggun kids are still wondering what the fuck the ink well on their desks are for, they still say ‘ain’t’ and ‘gotten‘, they don’t know that it is “*___* and I” not any other variation (including “*___* and me“), and still think that a ‘root word’ is a hip band with a female singer that does rap-pop concept albums that no one other than them and their mother’s will listen to.
The curb is found of granite and cold. The step up is slippery at best and certainly not safe if your shoes are leather soled or your boots have heels - any heels are bad in this weather; how do they do it, especially with a wind whipping scarf tangled to and fro in the breath of the clouds' driven belch? Up and on down the asphalt travel path that ultimately leads to somewhere just as exciting from whence you came. She is up and strutting and the camel hair coat continues to soak in the distrusting day’s doings. The wind. The water. The wind up. The wistful whimsy. The wanton want. The wily wastoid. The wiggle waggle. The worthy wavos. The wind up. It is all the same, but more so when you are stepping up on the curb, stepping up to the plate, really feeling the walk ahead even if it is almost done and too wet to wonder why one might wonder. Oh, to wonder ‘why‘.
Cigarette smoke still hangs about as if the whole damn city was post coital expressive and the streets, the planters, the curbside was an ashtray that invited us all to light up and hold in deep a big hairy chested drag of drudge and deviancy. Pierced vagrants scatter from side to side across the streets and back again in some sort of manic, bi-polar, game of pinball that never knows flippers, just curb-to-curb cacophony and catastrophe, like atrophy for the random, like seizures for the streamline; little silver balls with little silver piercings. Silver is a wonderful dream held in little pouches and evaluated and appraised at a little more or less than what they could be if the day was good or bad depending on the weather, and the weather today is not so good; so it is all left as a mute and moot crap shoot of never here or in-between, never the twain shall meet and certainly not here at this time with all of the curb jumping, the rain, and the finger pointing complete with fake angora and such; never.
Walk, strut and find the rain to find itself without a sense of being and thus the let up begins and vaguely, very familiarly, you find yourself not knowing where to go. The CD shops and bondage stores. The clubs filled with puke and piss, the vile little apartments that would be hotels of hot love in any other metro, the dealers, the squealers, the little women in little hats laying down big tickets, the big tickets that no one pays, the ball game dwellers, the meth head sellers, and all the fragrances that the public garden could ever want tucked underneath a Citgo sign and a Kenmore nightmare. Denny’s may be calling and the rain is picking up the call.
Your heels hurt more than death itself and silly little boys in black suits that do not fit anymore wander back and forth and wonder in a part of their brains that won’t be active for years if they are doing right or wrong while playing tag at the burial bedside of earth bound boxes found in the break up of day’s rain, and even the wind seems to smile now that the teacher has kept on teaching and that damn kid has put down the eye flush that he insists got him high.
She sits down in the bar and wipes down the brow shoulder flare sweat of her pale plaid lined extra tan exterior coat from Bass and shakes her umbrella down with a fiercely, fiery, ferocious direction (a cummulative emotion only found in angry hand jobs by sober dates at their drunken beast date's requests; angry, swift, shaft snapping).
From beneath her frock, in a pocket that has spent too much time next to her volleyed and valleyed breast, she pulls out a leather sheath that covers a silver case from deep within it’s walls; she extracts a smoke. She filters that bitch up like a Delano or a Thompson and orders a Bombay Sapphire martini dry and straight up with about 7 olives. She even orders an extra dish of them to nibble, gnash, and gnosh as she sucks down her rain sauce. Bite, bite, devour. Chew savor, swallow. One after each previously just-as-green predecessor. Each little pimento happy to die in her throat.
To wonder what the afternoon may have. What may it have in store for her? Who could she be? Has the rain stopped outside, through the windows that no longer share and show the outside with us all as the fog builds deeper and thicker in the midst and mist of the condensation on the windows? Glass fogged up. Cigarettes stink the air like unclean crotch at a swinger’s party. The gin slides down across the olive shrapnel. The day, the afternoon, has now found a beginning.
You can hear the reeds from a day away.
The rain still baby steps with instability through a maze of recognition and gummy smiles indicative of youth, of beginning.
The smells of day are fading into the stale perfume of early morning after a long night of distinguishing the difference.
She thinks back to the children, the fingers, the puddle at the other street side; another cigarette gets jammed into the cold marble filter that is now hot with the flame of previous injection.
When she leaves the next morning, with far too many olives and way too much gin, she wrist snap shackle whips that umbrella out to the world as if it is a jackknife and she is a Jet.
The fingers snap; the song begins.
The walk home is wetter than the journey there, even though it has stopped raining.
The school bell rings in just two hours …
