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ooooo ooooo .oooooo. oooooooooooo HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #696
`888' `888' d8P' `Y8b `888' `8
888 888 888 888 888 "One and The Same"
888ooooo888 888 888 888oooo8
888 888 888 888 888 " by Vlaad
888 888 `88b d88' 888 o 6/18/99
o888o o888o `Y8bood8P' o888ooooood8
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As consciousness begins to seep in, he is aware of a quickly moving
landscape of gray through the window just below his shoulder. It had been
a few hours since his body had crawled from the futon in the dark,
reassuring basement. The liquids, dark and sluggish, had not yet flown
freely through his limbs, or to his brain, which lay idle behind cold,
opaque eyes.
There was a middle-aged couple in the seats with him, entertaining
two of the most beautiful children, no more than two or three, a little
girl with golden hair as from a fairy tale, and a little boy with a learned
but unsubstantial look of jaded distance; a reflection from the eyes of his
father. "Such a diabolical beauty" he reflected, gazing at the corpulent
gemstones on the mothers' fingers and her short, trashy dirty-blonde bangs,
"to create an entire being, and watch it grow, from a single desperate
act.. abandoned moist suction filling the sinister horizon between the
legs.." He wondered, what would his son be like -- would he see the world
in the same fucked up manner as his father? He wanted to give his child a
better life than he had had -- not to disrupt his fragile mind with
alienation and taught expectations, but to teach his child about life, and
learn himself -- to break the endless chain of hatred, the heirloom of
shame that is passed from generation to generation. He tried to imagine
what it would be like to posses that kind of bond: in vain. Instead his
mind was pulled beyond the thin pane of plexiglass as he began to identify
with the cold, lonely vacuum a few inches from his face. He felt the same
way staring into the dim, empty sky, a few thousand feet from the earth, as
he did feeling alive, at a party with his friends back in Coventry, engaged
in a futile embrace with a passing lover. The closeness he felt to them
was the same he felt to the outermost stretches of the dead sky. "I am the
father of nothing", he said to himself, playing the Thrill Kill Kult song
on his brain's stereo. "I am the father of nothing..."
He awoke at last to the chatter of the children, the boy chanting
and his sister repeating; "Dis-a-ney-Land! Dis-a-ney-Land! Chop-off-your
hand! Chop-off-your-hand!" The boy then repeated the chant, replacing
"hand" with every body part in his vocabulary, with some help from his
sister. His parents smiled proudly at the perverse gore. The awakened
twenty-something boy by the window giggled. He loved the way little kids
think. After a few bloody marys, the children's' mother had introduced
herself as Mrs. Jacques and was talking to him. She was telling him about
how she hoped her children wouldn't miss Barrington, the intent being to
let him know that she lives in the posh town of Barrington. She was
telling him of the big house they own just outside Orlando and how she
wished Southwest Airlines had first class, all the while in her thick,
moronic sounding Rhode Island accent which made him smile and seem
interested.
[-----]
Swallowing the first foul gulp of his eighth cheap beer, he regarded
the solid line of smoke distantly as it lilted its way from his cigarette to
the aluminum roof of the trailer's porch. He should really quit some day,
he thought, but couldn't the lazy trail of smoke take him to such places as
he had never fathomed..? The moment was broken for a second at the
reverberating laughter of his friends and cousins inside the trailer,
eating, watching television, a reverberating dull sound like canned laughter
on an antique wireless. He found himself once again at a premature end to
an otherwise fair evening, halfway believing that there was still something
sacred out there to find. All at once, he perceived the sounds of each
individual insect crawling up the sides of his room, across the roof,
through the plastic carpet. He heard their powerful, wet jaws ripping
through leaves. He could feel the pain as the bright yellow and orange
skins of fruits were violated by millions of noisy parasites of all shapes
and sizes. Their sweet insides would be infested, their sugary flesh
feeding the insects' nubile young, baby's milk for a new generation of
fragrant fruit blossoms as their blackened bodies fell with a sickly thud on
the screened-in porch. He crushed his empty beer can on the table, savored
the dramatic effect, and wandered through the screen door and into the
darkness.
Walking in the same direction for a half hour or so, he found himself
back at the beach, now closed. His face was skimmed with wave after wave of
cold, wet mist, made razory by the salt and minerals of the sea. The waves
seemed loud and he heard thunder in the distance, felt it vibrate in the
sand. He decided to walk toward the thunder. The storm could be anywhere
in this place so foreign to him. If it pleased, it could take him out into
the unknown sea. It could take him out past the flashing green light at the
end of the pier, which caught his glance through the corner of his eye as
the wind carried the right locks of hair away from his face for an instant.
As he walked he could feel his life energy surging, leaping from bone
to bone, through his groin and up to his brain, exploding through his
neurons and into his hair where it would get lost until it found its way out
into the open. His legs began to tremble against the black wind.
He was suddenly filled with an overwhelming feeling of distance. He
began to think of his friends in Coventry, how they would join the
atmosphere of chaos in his basement, his art and his things, how the black
nylon curtains he had sewn would catch the breeze as The Forbidden Zone
played on the VCR, feeding some of their drunken fancies. But he was
starting to lose his footing, and his loneliness began to dissolve into
bliss. Feeling so removed, he was somehow closer to whatever it was he had
sought all his life. Something sacred. He felt it as he felt with the
bottoms of his feet the different textures and wetnesses of the sand: Some
of it was dry and found itself caught in the wind after it fought against
his steps; some of it was soft and pliant, coated in a supine forest of
decaying seaweed and rotting mollusks, discarded with their broken shells by
unsatiated gulls; and some was wet and empty and hard as rock; but as he
tried to steady himself, he found an overwhelming closeness to the sacred as
he thrust his toes under the cool layers, sliding them as far into the sand
as they would go. "This is what it would feel like," he told himself.
"Yes. Love would feel just like that."
He walked for what seemed like an eternity under the influence of the
alcohol. He was getting severely disoriented under the unfamiliar stars,
which seemed to dip down and circle around him like vultures as the growing
gusts of wind tried to force him this way and that. The angry peaks of the
black water were crashing closer each second. He fancied in his confusion
the waves spinning around the distant green light as though it were the sun
of their small world, a fancy that just disoriented him further. What
appeared to be a flat concrete structure on top of a nearby dune seemed
something he might level himself on while he could regain his balance.
Planting one step firmly before the other, he made his way closer.
As he approached, he made out what appeared to be a granite
gravestone set in the center of the slab. He tried to fathom what it could
be doing there.. was it a drowned surfer or some sort of boating accident?
was it a swimmer who had been torn to bits by sharks? Trying to position
his body in the center of the flat monument, he grasped for either side of
the slab, gritting his teeth to try and stay conscious in the violent wet
dark. As a sudden strong gust of wind threatened to do in his efforts, he
froze as he felt a presence violently surge through his clutching fingers,
swim up through his veins and smash right against his soul. For an instant
he was confronted by every waking second of an entire human life. Every
perception, every thought in an entire human world that was not his own
thrust against his consciousness at once. The awesome sensation was more
than his mind could handle. Brilliant images burst through his brain and
blocked out his intense surroundings. The flashing green light from the
distant pier was all that managed to set into his field of vision, swooping
toward him, fading.. The light exploded with a massive bright electric
tremor as the wind took his body at last, and he felt a distant dull
pressure as his skull smashed into the side of the grave.
[-----]
When he awoke at last, the storm had long since left the beach. All
that remained was a gentle mist that drew him from his fateful sleep. He
opened his eyes--shit. He must have been asleep all day. His head still
pressed against the hard concrete, he gazed forward from an awkward angle,
level with the earth. This was definitely a new night. The moon hung high
and fresh in the sunsetting sky, and there were no signs of unusual weather.
As he tried to bring his eyes into focus, he did notice that the sky seemed
unusually larger. It seemed as though the earth had gotten just a bit
smaller and the sky dipped down just a bit closer to his feet. For a few
seconds the green light, now lighting a newly calmer sea, seemed to light up
the bottom half of the sky with each flash, the part of the sky that seemed
to have grown larger.
Suddenly, his heart sank. He could not quite understand why, but out
of nowhere he was overcome by an overwhelming sense of mortal regret, of
fear. He decided to raise his head, and there it was. Perched on top of
the hill he rested on, sitting indian style, was a girl. He didn't really
notice the oddness of someone he didn't know keeping vigil over his
unconscious body, he didn't seem to notice that she seemed slightly younger
than him--in fact, her image had his mind captivated in a way not entirely
unlike being unconscious.
Her twisted shoulder-length hair seemed to blow around in her gaze,
as it escaped through the deepest light eyes he had ever seen. One eye
seemed to hold a millenium of wisdom and knowledge, of cynical coldness as
it gazed straight through him and into the distance. The other eye was
considerably brighter, and it shone with a certain flair of mischief as it
gazed directly at him. Her dress was ornate. Long lace works adorned her
shoulder lines and traced the path of her corset. Her makeup held a
conservative beauty, her pale rouge casting an image of dust in an ancient
cathedral. Without warning, in one swooping motion, a motion she seemed to
have been playing out in her mind over and over, she was off the ground and
hurrying--in a very knowing yet rushed strut--away from the beach.
Without much deliberation, he decided to follow her. He slapped
himself in the face a few times, made a few futile hand motions through his
hair, lit a clove, took a deep drag and leapt off toward her.
As he reached the edge of the beach, he saw her several telephone
poles ahead of him. Leaping over the makeshift wooden guard rail, he darted
down the sandy street toward her, but as he moved faster so did she.
"Umm, hi, who are you?" he yelled, but she pretended not to hear him.
"Is she afraid of me?" he asked himself, walking faster, marveling at
the sunset in the supernaturally wide sky. He acted on a clever thought,
and found that as he slowed to a natural walking pace, so did she.
After walking for almost an hour, the sky had grown completely dark.
He was comforted as he began to see city lights in the distance. Within ten
minutes, the city lights had taken on the forms of light posts and store
fronts as he entered the warm city of Delray.
He kept her in his view as he strolled onto the main drag of the
city. She was a few blocks ahead, stopped at a park bench and talking to a
boy who was half playing his acoustic guitar and half twirling his
dreadlocks and eyeing his collection cup. It must have been a scorching hot
day that he had missed. He felt the day's waves of heat as they rose from
the street and warmed his bare feet as they touched the smooth cobblestone.
It felt like a driving wind, pushing him forward through the air just above
the sidewalk. He was intoxicated by the imagery of the dark but very awake
city. He joined the ranks of tourists and college students, wealthy locals
and the usual city freaks as they flowed through the streets. His senses
were assaulted by a myriad of art, bright paintings and antique mirrors and
picture frames, beautiful dresses and burning candles in endless art
galleries and stores. There was incense floating into the air from tarot
reading parlors and new age stores, and there was the sound of jazz and
metal and ambient music, all floating together and keeping beat with
brightly backlit neon pink clouds as they passed overhead.
He was still amazed by how warm and hospitable the streets were at
night. He could not even feel himself walking. It felt as though his legs
were moving of their own accord and he and his head were along for the ride,
feeling a slight breeze on his face as his body edged forward. An
intersection he was approaching was suddenly crossed by railroad guard
rails, and the crowd gathered, waiting for the train to pass. He took his
usual leaning stance against the metal pole that supported the guard rails
and looked at the faces around him.
A boy around his age appeared from the crowd and stopped next to him.
He lost a breath as he saw how beautiful he was. He had long, wavy hair
tied in a pony tail, he was tall and slightly muscular, and had a very pale
and almost androgynous face. But there was something else to his beauty,
something he didn't quite understand but somehow perceived. He
instinctively tried to draw something from his mind, to get an idea of who
he was, but didn't have much success. He probed with all his mental energy,
but found nothing. The train still was flowing by a few feet away, the red
lights were still flashing, the varied crowd still growing.
He decided to try more traditional means.
"Hi," he said.
The boy regarded him with distant, cold, beautiful green eyes. His
pupils were like tunnels to a void, his head may as well have been gauzed up
and attached to a mummy, for there was absolutely nothing inside him. He
was a facade. He was a breathtaking temple built to no deity--a brilliant
metaphysical novel, a work of genius, written in a non-existent language.
"Hi. I'm Jim," he said.
He remembered to look for the girl, and saw that she had made it
across. She was on a fire escape on the second floor of the white building
directly on the other side of the tracks. For some reason he didn't even
think to try and understand, she looked completely different. She wore red
stockings and a lacy black garter belt and a black body suit. A green aura,
dark but vivid, seemed to emanate from her form. Her hair was tied in a
French braid and she was bent over the side of the rail holding two crossed
pieces of wood. Attached to the wood by four plastic strings was a wooden
marionette, and he danced in the air below her. He felt so full looking at
her. Everything else around him was becoming less impressive. There was
only her intangible presence, and the warmth inside him which he couldn't
seem to control...
"Do you get high?" asked Jim.
He was startled for a second as he remembered Jim. He looked at
Jim's face and visualized the marvelous expressions that those eyes were
capable of. He thought of what fun he would have with them if they were in
his head and smiled. The train ended and as the last car whipped itself out
of sight, and as the guard rails at last lifted, he walked with Jim and the
crowd across the tracks. The fire escape was now empty, and the girl was
gone.
"I live in that white house across the tracks," he said, "on the
second floor."
He followed Jim into his apartment.
The apartment was empty except for a few years of cigarette ash and
spilled beer, dirty clothes, and mounds of twisted, mangled metal bars which
seemed to have at one time been soldered into more defined structures. He
was in what seemed to be a living room, and there was a closed door in the
middle of the wall that appeared to lead into a bedroom.
Jim motioned for him to sit on the floor and walked through the
closed door. As he sat, Jim emerged with a flat black bong. He sat down on
the floor and packed the bowl expertly.
"Shit, I lost my lighter. Shit. Shit. Shit.." Jim said nervously.
"It's ok," and the visitor procured his Zippo. They both had a
couple tokes.
A few tears flowed from Jim's eyes.
The visitor leaned back and collapsed on the floor. He felt the room
spin, felt the thick, filthy carpet seem to stretch its fibers to caress his
back and scalp.
"Can I ask what's troubling you?"
"No man. You seem like a good guy. You seem like a very good guy
who was in need of getting stoned. But there's nothing left here. There's
nothing left in this living fucking corpse, you understand? Nothing. So
don't even fucking bother."
"Yeah, I gotcha." He wanted to cry he was filled with such sadness.
He could see a past etched into the sides of this boy's exterior like rings
in a severed tree. He perceived a past of intangible love, of splendour.
He wondered what could have reduced someone of such beauty to this.
"So where you from?"
"Rhode Island."
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
He shrugged.
"There's a concert at the Squeeze on Angell Street in an hour or so.
Deep Dark Undulating Spooky Angst are opening for the Bloody Vampire Vixens
of Satan. Should be a cool show. Just to let you know."
He walked over to a pile of dirty clothes in the corner, dug through
it, and procured two bags of white powder, a razor blade, half a plastic
straw, a metal spoon, a candle, and a syringe. He lit the candle and tossed
the Zippo to his companion.
"If you don't mind, I'd prefer to be alone now."
[-----]
The city of Delray was overflowing with magic and art and culture,
but it was packed into a relatively small area. It didn't take him more
than an hour of wandering and drinking at various bars to find Angell
Street. The club was just another door in a long row of doors, but it was
painted a very original black and it had a small compressed-looking neon
sign in front that said 'Squeeze' with an arrow pointing down. He descended
the narrow staircase. The only piece of the crowd, the music and the
atmosphere that it allowed to travel above its stairs was the
indistinguishable thundering bass which rattled the boy's rib cage as it
went by. Normally it would have slightly raised his adrenaline levels, but
right now nothing could phase him. It felt as though everything around him
somehow originated in his own mind. The black paint on the walls was
lively. Thousands of wads of bubble gum of all different colours were
scattered in a private pattern of stars and constellations. There were
flyers and ads dating back a few years, and vacant staples from some of the
older ones. Four strands of yellowish green christmas lights guided him to
the landing, where he was confronted by a rather large bouncer.
"You drinkin'?"
He handed the bouncer one of his many valid licenses, and with the
bouncer's practiced suspicious nod, he entered the club.
The air was heavy and damp.
His mind was filled with the presences of swarms of people around his
own age, and the way they moved and touched and related with the music. The
lead singer of the VoS screamed into the microphone and licked it a little.
The thick smoke from the mouths of the crowd made a few neurons in his head
flicker as he drew a clove from his pocket and lit it. He worked his way
around the crowd and found a table and sat. Out of the corner of his eye he
saw a girl as she seemed to float toward the area where he sat from the core
of the cloud of humans and smoke. It was the girl he had followed. She sat
next to him. He did not look at her nor she at him, but their souls reached
from the confines of their bodies and wrapped around each other in an
embrace which seized their minds as strongly as a thousand orgasms at once,
the peace of being back in the womb, the thrill of all the power and beauty
of music itself as they sat and stared blankly toward the stage. He lit
another clove and placed it in her mouth, and slowly reached his hand toward
hers. But as their hands touched, his guts seemed to twist and flail in
pain. It was too good, it was too real, and his soul was rejecting it.. She
was up from the chair all at once and disappeared back into the crowd.
He went to the bar, ordered two long island iced teas, guzzled the
first and took the second back to his seat. The buzz set in quickly, and he
felt a beautiful delicious thrill from the illegally loud PA in the concert
hall, the pain as the VoS's music pierced through his sloshing brains.
There were people around him who tried to taste a little bit of death
so that their own sense of life may be heightened. There were those with
cluttered minds who were there on dates, or in search of one for the rest of
the evening; and there were those few in the world, but less few in places
like this, who had inside them absolutely nothing at all. He saw one such
boy, Jim, crouched in the corner behind a Space Invaders machine. He walked
over and offered him the rest of his drink.
Jim tried to look up at him, but his eyes were so glazed over they
seemed to have the cataracts of a hundred year old man. His skin was
purple. He touched his fingers to Jim's forehead and it was icy cold. He
moved his hands to Jim's shoulders.
"Jim. Jim?"
"I saw you watching her. The girl on the balcony.. do you know her?"
"Umm, no, she looked like she might be going somewhere interesting so
I followed her, but it was nothing..."
"She's my best.. my only friend in the world. She always used to..
be there for me... when I was in pain."
"I really wish you'd tell me what's wrong with you Jim.. maybe I can
help, maybe not..."
"Have you ever been in love man?"
"No, I don't think so."
"You bastard, you know you haven't." He started trembling, and
spitting a bit with every forth or fifth word, "His name was Shay. His
beautiful name was Shay. We were together for years, man, years that seemed
like days. We would walk on the beach together, his eyes were the colour of
the ocean you see, his hair was the colour of the sand, and we would walk
and speak poetry to each other. The poetry would come from nowhere, from
the foam on the sand and through our heads because we were so into each
other man, the poetry musta thought we looked pretty, you know? For years,
man, for years. We could sit together on a hard wood floor forever and we
were little kids in a playground! Little kids.."
"You were in love?"
Jim broke into hysterical laughter. He grabbed Jim's shoulders
tightly, keeping his drink in one hand, and swooped him up off the floor and
dragged him into the crowd before the stage. The evil guitars, the
liberating voice echoed through the bass as the group performed their cover
of Bela Lugosi's Dead. He held Jim close to him as he danced. The music,
the music is what it was that soaked into Jim's head, and he began to dance
with him. He danced with Jim, sipping from his glass and suckling Jim with
its straw. He felt Jim begin to melt into the crowd, as he danced with
rough joints from the embrace of his friend. He touched Jim's hand, and
their hands pulled further apart, and as Jim disappeared he gave him a
smile. It was the smile of a toddler who smiles at you, a stranger, for no
reason, and it made him feel the same way.
The visitor wandered back to the bar and ordered another two long
island iced teas. He returned to his corner, put down his drinks and
started dancing slowly by himself. The green christmas lights were tacked
in spirals and streams all over the ceiling, and they seemed to blend
together the faster he spun. They wandered all over the club and seemed to
disappear over a closed door between him and the two bathrooms. He started
one drink, and paused, regarding the closed door while the cool liquid in
his cup sat expectantly upon his closed lips. The door looked like it had
been long since forgotten, and it seemed to be more than a closet.
His eyes scanned the ceiling in his dark corner, and they caught a
folded up piece of paper stuck in a sprinkler on a water pipe. He looked
around, put his drink down, got up from his seat, reached up and quickly
snatched the paper when no one seemed to be looking. The paper was covered
in cobwebs and what looked like twenty years of dust, and as he unfolded it
he found a single shiny silver key. He wondered for a moment what the odds
were that it would open that odd door, and he decided that he was going to
stay out of trouble and not try and find out.
Just then, the girl from the grave, the girl from the dream wandered
from the crowd and back into his world. She walked over toward him and
looked into his face with an expectant glint in her eyes. His heart sunk as
the terrible beauty and love and warmth he felt from her simple glance
seemed too wonderful, too good to be real--but he was full of passion, and
he needed to do something--anything--so he took her by the hand, and she
walked with him as he made his way to the door. With his back to the knob,
he slipped the key in--and it turned. The girl moved her hand to the knob
and turned it, and she stood in frond of him as she held the door open for
him. In a matter of seconds they were safely away into a landing before an
old staircase, bathed in a very dim green.
Hand in hand, the two made their way up the stairs, neither cautious
nor quickly. The stairs creaked as their disembodied legs carried their
souls through their mutual destiny, up four or five dusty flights of
stairs, until they reached a single, dark, featureless landing. The lights
had stopped at the top of the stairs. A hovering darkness just inches from
their ducking heads showed a very low ceiling.
The boy lit a clove, and as he inhaled, the extra flash of light
revealed nothing but two dilapidated old chairs set in the middle of the
room. As soon as they saw them, they were upon them. He inhaled a second
time; and the gentle surge of light shone in each others' eyes as in each
others' eyes they stared; and their souls seemed to twine somewhere between
the wisps of smoke, somewhere along the paths the reflections of light from
their pupils took. In the same silent motion, their hands reached toward
one another, and were upon one another. Trembling, overcome with
adrenaline, they leaned closer, clawing, nails sunk into flesh.. touching..
teeth upon necks, piercing thin, white skin... They made no sound but the
occasional whimper of ecstasy as they sat, sharing pain and sensation, in a
warm bond of flesh and consciousness, caressed more intimately than a swim
in a warm sea.
After an unmeasurable amount of time, they opened their eyes in
unison. The room was more defined, brighter in the dim green air, as their
eyes had fully adjusted. The girl looked up, and her eyes lit up as she
reached toward some kind of latch. She pushed, and he saw that it was what
looked like a small attic door -- but as it swung open, the space it had
taken was full of stars. They stood up between the chairs.
The view was incredible. The boy slowly moved his head from horizon
to horizon as the wind cooled his warm forehead and once again took its
place in his hair. He felt as though he could see the whole world, as
though he could count every light on every distant skyscraper.. His mind
began to reach out to the world before him... He lit a clove for the girl,
and placed it between his fingers and into her mouth for her... but he
misjudged the distance to her lips, and for an instant, an imperceivable
instant the tips of his fingers brushed the infinitely soft flesh of her
lips. The touch was so infinitely light that it may not have happened at
all.. but the feeling was incredible as it rushed up his spine, shaking his
body, and as he saw the same tremble wind through her body as well. She
took a deep drag, and as he cradled the base of her neck in his hands, he
knew why everything that was happening no longer seemed to be from a
script. As their lips touched, he knew why the world suddenly faded away
into the past -- for all the world that was out there, for everything there
was to reach for that may never be reached, there was the same world,
complete and whole, resting on the palms of his hands, kissing his lips --
one world, one soul -- One and the same.
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[ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS! HOE #696 - WRITTEN BY: VLAAD - 6/18/99 ]