Dead Lamont, Page 3

  The father would come out in the mornings and scatter them with the garden hose, but they would all return, and in raincoats.

  He even set up a record player near a window and tried to chase them off with Serge Gainsbourg or Vashti Bunyan; this, too, failed.

  The children only returned, wearing German helmets, closer still to the tree.

  Are they planning on annexing our tree? said the father to the mother, making a reference.

  The wife said nothing, only went off in the family car to buy a trashcan.

  After two weeks a policeman came into the backyard asking about the tree.

  That's the one, said the father, pointing to the tree.

  The mother ceased immediately the adjustments she had been making to the straps of her bird-watching headgear. She sighed.

  The policemen arrested the tree.

  He knocked it down with a club, dragged it through pea gravel, threw it into a police department’s only pick-up truck.

  The mother held out her hand to the truck as it diminished in size and proximity while the children blinked at each other, of course, realizing that they understood very little of trees, how they screamed like men.

  Stasis

  For the tenth time in a row there was a silent muster of sophistry and all select statements failed to obtain, or, rather than case states, there was an achievement of nulls aggregated in such a manner as to make a cloud that those not in attendance could not scarcely have been expected to breathe, see, otherwise react to in manners comporting to the horrors of slowly changing dims. Salesmen marry, metastasize, die of malingering want having abstained completely from appearing in the minutes of every meeting of the committee for the advancement of stasis; everyone went home as per habit and in lieu of choice on Tuesdays meander their way through the streets like denormalized tuples; Benjamin , though, worried at the sleeve of a mummy the keynote speaker brought with him in a Samsonite action sack to the meeting and there was a tulip in the collar of a handicapped flaneur crippled and seated ineptly in a sunless flowerpot from the waist up wizened by time of day, sunscald, the wither of tungsten bulbs. Lucius all gapemaw with indifference and in the nape of a vocabulary that in all respects failed to categorize the southpaw onanism of the congregants for whom the transubstantiation involved wavelengths of canned beer, close-up magicked spring messianic quivering hands that would hold your cheeks like a chalice of scrapple wondering just how the glow of complex joins could accommodate surrogate keys or your wide bottomed advocacy of diet pills and gaudy Jordache memes.

  Yaphet Kotto

  visits St. Paul

  You buy one dashiki at the Mall of America and suddenly you are the Yaphet Kotto of the fifth floor; he presses my palms together.

  “Namaste, motherfucker.”

  St. Paul snow banks lack white; children topple from summits; an airbrushed crescent-mooned candy van explodes into forty-eight milk cartons.

  Yaphet Kotto reminds people from Egan of the snow; he spreads open his hand with misplaced arrogance, as if to say snow, and then he uses his words, languid purple phonemes concatenated into shades of intention.

  Yaphet Kotto wears a lemon colored fedora to the A&P and floats in on broken teeth and the insincerity of parking lot heterophobes; hello, Yaphet Kotto, shouts an avuncular pederast in knee-socks, the prices are sure-as-shit low here in this here store; the produce section evinces qualities seldom seen in modern food.

  The teeth, Mr. Kotto…mind them.

  “Namaste, motherfucker,” whispers Yaphet Kotto, opens his palms towards Minnehaha, a fine emergence whitening wide the canvas of creation.

  Alcohol Rodents

  Mirror neurons account for simpatico backslapping and bandana gang puffery but Crabbe said to Crabbe that instability is what many amnesiacs consider reckonings of desire which are really hunger pangs and vague hippocampal Uzbek anagrams; normal perhaps, but Kagan heard murmurs to the contrary based on evidence springing from the hirsute groin of his own laboratory, the one nestled in the foothills of great industry and trees, the one whose brochures we misread. Feed a man to himself and he will grow resentful of the man who knew better. Shoot baskets with Manute Bol in an afterlife of netted public rims and priapic meatball grinders and know how it feels to be happy and sad and nostalgic and inferior.

  Twat

  And why would you think it didn’t matter, you giving the front of our house a Brazilian? I fail to niggle at the niceties of truant vanity, like any other, but I fear I was most ungracious in my compliments; you see, I am from Brazil where the air is candied punch and pant fronts squeak like bus wipers. You wouldn’t know, being from Brazil’s opposite: Scranton, PA. You borrowed hedge clippers and iced tea recipes and wild success was anticipated when they appeared on the porch, faces smeared with overbites and skin tonic and you doubted my skeptical bent at the insurgence of vanity concomitant to the planning of the thick ladies inaugural dundrearie contest. Phipps bested Jennings, naturally, and there was much prefrontal mirroring of inducements spread out on tables and pie boxes, yes? Demur if you’d like, Phipps was spot on and you were scarce in shoulder rubs; this, not going unnoticed, proved embarrassing for Jennings who disported much against the hems of the benefactors. I stood on the front lawn assigning abbreviations to my problems and writing them as best I could on the most effaced stones available, gathering them into a great pile to throw at the great loose drum skins of you broad laughing women and of course at the prize winning Phipps.

  Dirge

  When Lamont died Gladys fell an oak, slapped a john, and uprooted crooked patter from the Bowery harelips.

  Chim-rickety-bloom went the pram to the staircase…

  ” (….) “went the staircase to the pram.

  Egad, who will underwrite the euphemisms now, the talk that isn’t necessarily the embodiment of the recidivistic chaste, but something?

  Watchtower Johnson, Christian name, benevolent suitor, the orchestral anti-honky, yes, he will.

  Gladys cries into her wig, throws it, laments, stands, looks for the baby.

  The bears have absconded, you see that?

  #1 –

  Don’t talk to me about a woman’s curves. Thanks. Chocolate milk and hernias, thoughts induced by my smile as perceived, anecdotally, in the reflection of a car door, if caught sidelong by someone hungry for aggravating pain; to wit, you, you and your sway bellied semantics. Place a sell order on the venture liens, the ones in that suitcase, no, that one, the one with the severed hand attached to it. No, the Italian looking severed hand. Wrong again, that one is a contractor’s lunch pail, but you are getting warmer. Give it here. You watch me throw an empty attaché case into the river and it floats off dragging a hand behind it, as if a businessman stood on his tiptoes below the surface trying to keep safe his collection of paper cranes. Enough sentiment! The conversation turns to talk of avoiding type-I error. The null hypothesis is bowling allies; the treatment variable, me. Your marriage, it would seem, in response to varying levels of the treatment variable, has suffered in statistically significant ways. I discount the effects of your tendonitis and league night torpor, discount completely; all variables are controlled in the regression model, yes? You blame yourself, Wednesday nights, and pill bottles. You efface pride with hair jelly, wave about your divinity book like a strange disembodied duck-billed phallus, the one visited upon deprecatory sinners wont to deviant cryptozoological fantasy. You ask me why I bite my hands when I pray and I tell you that I do not; this is a pretend sandwich and it will give me the heart disease required to hold hands with you-know-who. I have been long wondering about how I came into possession of this shopping cart with its variegated packages, handles, desperate clasps, and ruby rings. You watch as the day spins into continuous charming sunny clouds of light and optioned banter. I wipe my mouth with my tie and as blood drips from my fingers you begin to see for yourself, in ways undisguised by the apocryp
ha of reckless luncheons, that you are not ever really alone.

  Windbreaker

  If you are going to wear a windbreaker to a bar then you had better push your sleeves up because there is work to do and I don’t mean the casual sort popularized by the members of your club, The LaPaz Aficionados of Maudlin Chiascuro Porn; rather, the earnest lifeblood of choral pleasantries echoing Charlie Brown instrumental Spanish canister reverb. Fashion mandates dance, but you and I, regardless of tethered animus, dissuade precluding and so advance a mild theory on whether falling down alongside an Eagan school bus constitutes a true and resolute petition for hot lunch equality; maybe not, you retort, all snapped sleeves, and your mild rooting forestry puts me in a nostalgic fervor for wicker vests and pantomime fisticuffs. You look down at your wrists and realize that the cuffs of your windbreaker are merciless.

  Y_hat

  I wondered driving swerving and my teeth hurting from fistfight dentistry if the statisticians who had built busty econometric models considered whether controlling for those having had grandfathers participate in World War II Pacific Front impromptu Japanese corpse puppet shows would have any effect on the logarithm of wage when controlling for other factors such as education, ethnicity, gender, 4-F uncles, etc..

  I suspected no correlation with the error term while Lamont’s regression models reeked of endogeneity and pool hall sophistry. Lamont’s granddaddy could tell tales, boy, about the tensile strength of Jap shoelaces whereas many could not due in part to stress chemicals preventing synaptic transmission during the giddy courtship of working memory and long-term potentiation, or maybe it was that meaning had been gutted by the fish knife of lost days. In any case, though, I reminded Lamont to ‘fuck-off’.

  If you are going to keep mis-specifying your functional form, I said, we just might as well go shoot some baskets or something.

  Basket

  She lifted her shirt and showed me her belly which bore the languid lightning bolts of quick weight gain and childbirth. I demanded no explanation, only imagined her children likewise bundled and peppered about town, infants whose hasty unwrapping would bear similar hardship; a fontanelle open like a hungry flower, a flipper here, a hare-lip there, and somewhere else, nearby probably, one misrepresented placenta emitting a plangent eyeglass-fogging steam.

  S_Beta

  There is a lucent gild to shower curtain mold that refracts shadows and bends them into draconiform templates that she smears with soap to clean in a pattern that threatens what remains.

  Stop it, you malaprop Chinaman, I say.

  This discomfits her faux Midwestern Tiananmen way of dancing over my small talk and then she swats at the air with karate chops she could have gotten from any misprint picture book on stage combat and I dance, my eyes focusing on the space in between her lips where the yelling comes out.

  stunt drivers

  the pilots fly into the jeep and kill every one of the stunt drivers and an actress casts maudlin panties and pipe smoke at the hunch back torero and speaks into a boom she seemingly strokes

  from a cloud while the director stands there dour as a hospice mop and yells 'cut' five more times until a perspicacious caterer drops ice swans onto the improvising wreckage and insert conjoint variable here and obtaining flames lick at the sound trailer as key grips swat out extemporaneous sleeve fires if and only if x where x is the remark halibut futures are risky so say Nigerian stockfish analysts from another movie who are really aspiring stockfish brokers from Conshohocken and so while sunlight is affable to the pigmented a sweet rolling propinquity in the form of an auto fire is insalubrious but who is going to sleep with me tonight shouts the director now that all these goddam harlots have learned to fly and disjoint to the daydream that even flat topped breast doctors are heroes in the victory forest or it is said with a peremptory shake this scene is over or give me a name of a stunt double with quiet demise or candied hair and the fire crackles and out leaps a helmet bedazzled in streetlight or hair but it is nobody he recognizes but still.

  Peeled

  Five cupped integers, breasts out, primes unfit for the inside

  of hands struggling with leftovers. How lost she felt and losing her footing she fell, evincing as poor a footing as footings go, barefoot on a beach where the apple bags had been dragged off to sea; they're clean, then, am I to wonder?

  Clean then, howled the dreams of the pattering sailors, clean as nunnery hand jobs!

  To apples, then, let us turn our thoughts, as time allows, I said. She then,

  she a prime larger, as widths recommend, ventured a comparison, hungry as five hells, she whispered, and I am up, too, without reliable synapse, absent the NMDA receptors of hard recall.

  I watched as she fed and she ate and following that was the post-prandial then of things.

  The beach was clean again. Hello.

  It is gone and back, gulls, dead bears overturning in the

  breakers from the capsized bear barge. Relax said the man to the fish with a condescending eyebrow. 'Apples,' they yelled. They hoisted the bobbing sacks onto the boat and the captain fell overboard and likewise took his ursine cargo. Witnesses laud the security tether.

  Goodbye. Sniffing and not between apples, she said, saying, "Quiet, bears."

  She and I looked at the matted hair, sitting, I, me, I'm never going to, out of respect and a great sense of loss.

  I consider telling them apples things about the seaside, but I do not care to and so I do not; time off, get, just go and she stands facing the broker and peels Jacksons into his hand, cupidity usurped by a hunger, hunger undermined by decency. The seaside, somehow, reeks of doctors' gloves and pee, but description is trivial and I'm lost in the economics of island commodities, not knowing anything, ever. I reluctantly bite into bear flank to test whether my teeth still stand well-gummed; they do not, and it is with more encouragement that I breech apple skins with my thumbs. Get in, she yells, jumping now in the waves. I shake and seek a more concise syntax, one that could parse new meaning from her dog eared morphemes. Hello and goodbye. I imagine a flare gun boat breaking apart on the reef because we are optimists and still have our strength. We would swim, certainly, and with long, studied, ironic strokes. Still hungry, still carrying the circusy taste of apple-bear in our mouths, we wade into the water up to our knees and dance. We dance for what seems like forever.

  St. Cloud

  We are and shall not, you aberrant cockstraw; she won’t though, and so the bulk of St. Paul chokes on a hat found in a Sturgis travelette. A man worries that hanging words lump matrices without letting on of kernels and so he says saying rather than forming wincing gerunds that progressing nothing sans Windsor knots and a fusillade of punchless whoring is scarce and takes poor notice of conventioneers and St. Cloud birdwatchers. You didn’t say, Lamont? Lamont, dead or alive, Lamont, toothsome catawamp or man walking, Walking.

  There walks Lamont. Slipping on the unkempt walkways of coffee house adjacencies and pauses to fall on a patch of banana ice or as locals might regard grass. SHitFUCK, MaN.!! Proceeding periods added to exclamatories allows one to transform the structure of the string; building into a right to left reading an added level of extraction, such as might warehouse a meme, or, at the least, an idiomatic thing regarded in ESL classes as an aberration of even remote fluency. Well, well, there is that, thinks Lamont, not at all well after having fallen and the coffee girl bustling tits and biding time and taking orders and wondering in an ascertaining cadence of renaissance Spanglish whether Lamont took cream and sugar or cream and vegan milk or a slumgullion dairy monotone rainbow of various dairy powders and pasteurized hypotheticals.

  Well, yes, and he said yes.

  Sirs, ma’ams,

  if there were ma’ams

  here; good day.

  What they were doing was neither walking nor standing: what they did was die in my anteroom in accordance to the height/weight specifications of my admixture of turpentine, Ginger beer, and semi-gloss e
namel floor wax. It was the mugs with the umbrellas that did it, ingratiated themselves with a where-welcome charming air. They even cheers’d me with ribald back-slapping and their once famous and underwhelming sterile chatter.

  Guys, good day, guys, welcome, guys, I know, right, kind of a sudden thing, this implementation of ego? I’m sorry, Maurice; no, could you repeat that? Nevermind, it turns out.

  Oh shit, Günter, you bastard. He topples my umbrella stand and renders a feckless self-defense with what against my poison might as well have been a paper pimp aimed at stormy whoring.

  And where do you think you are going, Jeff? Hiding under Raj won’t stop poison. After all, I am not a goddam tiger or a zombie bear. It’s me.

  I imagine the ghost of Maurice guffawing like mad in his Lee jeans as Günter presses the button on the umbrella handle-- rather than extending the umbrella, it forces him into the corner, further from mind and neatly against my rubbers.

  Lamont and the

  Sporting Ladies

  or S_squared

  I make rainbows on the malacoid filigree of her thighs which she then effaces as she sleepwalks away without vocabulary, but, nevertheless, I gave her a wobbling bag of martlets for our six month anniversary; I thought she might use them for that ‘coat-of-arms’ shadow box she’d been mentioning.

  Her hand whistled ungratefully as it threw every one into the closet, for later.