The Day That The FBI Came Knocking
Later, maybe I will look back at this as an ironic rite of passage, and chuckle to myself. It was Monday night around seven in the evening, the summer heat was steaming off the parking lot and into my second-floor apartment. They came knocking with guns drawn, Agents Fox Mold-Her and Damn-Me Skully, and a dozen local police officers. Well, the police did not quite ask me what my story was, but asked a lot of questions as they rifled through my files. Everybody was polite, and doing their civic duty. No one was hurt, and nothing was harmed. I was not Mirandized, and my First and Fifth Amendment bounced around the room like two rubber balls filled with helium. Did I mention that I was masturbating at the time of their arrival? I wonder how long that it will be until I can do that again with a peace of mind.
After being detained and interviewed by the G-persons, the local officials took this outlaw into custody. For the next 26 hours, his life would not be his own. The wanted man finally makes it to the finer institution of the judicial-political machinery, in through the dancing door to jailhouse theatre. Talk about an invasion of private boundaries. There is nothing like a dozen gun barrels staring at you, to force open one’s eyes to the ferocious sublime. The sound of metal doors slamming will never leave me silent, again. All of this drama is in the name of homeland security. Of course, we will sacrifice a few civil liberties, in order to sleep securely, tonight. Now, get me out of this cell!
Slinking from the jailhouse to the dawghouse, he goes into deep hiding, under the futon, with a long breathing straw. The paranoia demons chew at his ankles. Finally, he begins to emerge from the hideout, raped, ripped open and exposed like a seeping scab oozing with puss. Would anybody else like to see my dirty laundry? I guess if nothing else, we have finally chased off the weak-kneed and insincere of the Circus. Send in the psychotic clowns, they are always good for a laugh or two. The thought police arrived a dozen at a time. Talk about a posse for little old me. Plus two. The G-persons- Agents Mold-Her and Skully.
“Stop trying to pick at my bones, you vultures! Can’t you see that I am not dead yet? Would you like me to be a severely mentally ill alcoholic or a terrorist? What is the difference between a radical and an extremist? Which came first, the chicken or the road?”
Left with more questions than answers, more violations than victims, we are resolved to wonder of his demise before the courts. Tell it to the judge. I fought the law, and the law won. I shot the Sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy. Bad boys, bad boys, what are you going to do, when they come for you? Click your heels three times, and say no place like home.
This one big excuse to make plagues the life decisions. He was so hairy that when the hose hit his back, it looked like an Etch and Sketch shaken in slow motion. Ugly is too kind of a word for this gutter serpent. He is a beast, a demon from the netherworlds. Big Brother is watching you, with their thought-police, mental barricades, lock and key. Who is watching whom watching you? Look around you. There is a war going on, and nobody is listening. While Wall Street becomes another Skid Row alley, we wonder what will happen with all the young and hungry. Civil rebellion takes root in the eyes of the people, boiling the blood, igniting the fires and passions of revolution. Mother has come home to take back her own. Mother, do you think they will drop the bomb? Mother, do you think they will like this song? Oh, mother, where did you go with our home?
The fourth wall disappears right in front of the actor’s eyes. For a moment, he cowers in the naked light, and just as soon, he becomes a spy for the other side. He sees himself as the observed, the object of desire.
“What do you want with me?” he asks, and there is no reply. He stands in the light, facing the penetrating eyes of the Gaze. He swallows the eyes, the leers, and the extensive interrogation of his mind. There is madness roosting inside the closet, inside the room on the second floor, just a bit behind the back of his mind. He is probed, abducted and taken into alien custody. The clowns do not arrive to retrieve him until he is already scarred, the damage is done, and his scabs ripped open and left bare.
The dragqueen crackwhore has to be a spy. Her disguise is so bad and without class, walking up Pearl Street at three-thirty in the morning. The jungle is hot, quiet aside from the occasional whistles, and invasion of debris retrieval facilitators with their camouflage-colored mechanized beasts. The outlaw peers from his hideout, looking out at the world that has been confronting him with their hatred and brutality. He calls on the gods to calm the demons, but the gods refuse to answer the telephone, or return his messages. The demons continue to persuade him with their charms of freedom, no more chains of morality and mortality. For a moment, he lost his place within reality, returning only have the post-traumatic stress began to wear off.
“Stop talking to the television. It won’t answer back. Stop reading the newspapers. Close your mind to the intrusions, lie back and float away. It will all be okay, man.” says the Hooligan Dwarf, from behind bars.
The Apocalyptic Hipster-turned-Man-in-Black gloats in his membership, the freedom to shoot heroin and still hold a court translator’s job. The early morning darkness is comforting in its simplicity.
“Would you like to spend your morning courting a pair of superheroes?” She asks, with a faint smile on her face. He misses her for the first time since she had his skinny white ass thrown in the jailhouse. “That’ll teach you to not get drunk, again, won’t it? They are coming to take you away, haha. They are coming to take you away, hehe.”
“I can’t help but to think that you are trying to teach me a lesson with your vindictiveness. You have repaid me, thrice-fold in terror. Oh, man, I had the worst dream. I was in my room, quietly minding my own business, when a weird blue tornado appeared out of nowhere, and swept up everything, including the room that I was in, at the time. It was worse than Oz. I had no identity, no anything. Welcome to living on the corner of Tornado Alley, where the yellow brick road becomes a trail of tears.”
“Did it cause a hickie in the sky?” she asks, then pulls deeply from her cigarette, sucking the life into the cherry ember.
“All I remember is being ripped from the room by my senses. The next thing that I know, I am trying to find out where I was, and can’t prove to anyone who I am. There are two dead horses hanging from a tree, which is in the closet, now. Today, I wake up as a pariah of society, having walked in the halls of the Panopticon, the true belly of the beast.”
Another day in the paradise of freedom beckons, and he watches the sun as it begins its slow crawl across the sign line. He wonders if he is falling through the quicksand cracks of the machinery, and if so, how long the descent will last. Curious, he looks around for snacks during the flight. He gets nervous when those who have food and shelter start pontificating about what the professionally homeless want or need. We plan to colonize the world with abundance!
“I used to know a girl named Rebel. She had a smile that could light up the darkest room, and the most calming eyes in the world. We played hide-and-seek with Reality for a couple of years. They are coming to take me away, hehe. They are coming to take me away, haha!”
“Whatever happened to that girl?” she asks. “It sounds like you were in love with her, for a lifetime or two.”
“She wandered out into the jungle-bound streets, and was never seen again. All of the King’s horses, and all of the King’s men cannot remember her name, ever again. There were rumors that she became a cowgirl, but we divided the town with ducttape, and I didn’t attempt to track her down. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, chasing all the whores with her cat-calls. She went off to save the world, for all I know.”
As I am walking down the alley to the 17th Avenue Liquor store, to visit my buddy Shawn, I run into a sweating man, with piles of coaxial around him. I asked him if he had any scraps, and he hands me about 50 feet of coaxial wire on a reel. Big Brother is watching me watch Big Brother on the 1978 color television, after hooking up the digital cable box, and stringing coaxial cable. I come home, a wanted man of pontification, a momentary lapse of reality for some.
