Blood and Guts in High School (8 page)

'You poor baby.' The hideous monster opened the front door, saw a huge brown bear, and screamed. He slammed the front door. 'BEAVER! BEAVER!' He raced up to beaver's room. Beaver was asleep, snuggled under three layers of white satin quilting. 'BEAVER! BEAVER!' He sat on beaver's face and told him what the problem was. The beaver waddled downstairs and locked all the doors and windows securely so no one could possibly get in.

3 The Bear tries a second time to get into the House

The bear's difficulties made the house even more wonderful to the bear.

He decided he'd force his way into the house with all his strength.

Sun was now pouring down, in through tiny closed kitchen windows, and flooding the kitchen.

In this light the monster was frying four eggs in a huge black frying pan. Golden pieces of buckwheat-and-rye toast popped out of an old iron toaster, hit the ceiling, bounced on to the blue-tiled floor, then on to two Dutch china plates sitting on the round red table. Tiny china bowls filled with rose-petal jam, orange-lemon-ginger marmalade, huckleberries and raspberries, chrysanthemum blossoms and guava jellies covered the remainder of the table. The beaver was taking a shower upstairs. He refused to use shower curtains so blue water was going 'plop, plop' and flooding the bathroom. The only thing beaver saw was the white morning sunlight and the only thing he heard was shower water falling like the beating of his heart.

Just as the monster was turning the eggs, the kitchen door started to shake so hard and to resound so loudly with hits and bangs, the monster decided there must be a bill collector at the door.

'Go away, you stupid bill collector!' he shouted. He was proud of himself for shouting.

The bear threw himself even harder against the kitchen door.

'Go away, you damn bill collector: I don't have any money and I'll never have any money. This world is a pit-hole and a garbage dump. It's 'cause of people like you. All anyone cares about,' the monster's voice was shaking, 'all all of you care about is getting as much money any way you can, and lying and cheating and using people, and passing this filthy paper around in devious circles, so it's all power, power power

power and I can't sleep or think or dream of anything else. I hate you and I hate your money.'

The bear raged. Foam frothed out of his mouth. He threw himself against the door as hard as he could.

That didn't work.

The bear forgot himself and threw himself against the door even harder.

'And if I had any money, I wouldn't give it to you. I'd piss on it and set it on fire, I'd bury it under all the ice in the world, I'd sprinkle oil on it and set Con Edison on fire, I'd tear it up and make some new fetishes. I'd feed it to the rats who live in my house, but I wouldn't give it to you. I hate you.'

By this time the bear's shoulders were masses of bruises, his mouth was a froth-pit, his fur was gone, and blood was streaming down his torso so he went away.

4 Betrayal and treachery

The hideous monster had a pet named Fritzy. Fritzy was a red-eyed white rat. As Fritzy was sleepily glomping around the kitchen and waiting for breakfast to get finished so she could get hold of some good crumbs, a big drop of butter leaped out of the frying pan onto her head, so just as the bear gave up and stomped into a nearby snowdrift, Fritzy ran out of her special door into the snow. 'Ah hah!' the bloody bear said. 'Food!' and snatched Fritzy up in his sharp-clawed paws.

'I'll tell you how you can trade me for some bigger game,' Fritzy squeaked as fast as she could. 'It'd be worth your while to keep me alive.'

'Oh yeah?'

'The guys who keep me are bigger and taste better than me. Rats are poison. Just tell hideous monster and beaver you've got me. They love me so much, especially that stupid monster, they'll come running through the walls to save me.'

The bear was so desperately in love with the house, he'd do anything to get inside it. 'Listen you,' he yelled at the house. 'I asked you nicely to let me in. You wouldn't let me in. Now I'm going to get you. I've got your pet Fritzy and I'm going to eat her up in one second flat if you don't let me in.'

'BEAVER! BEAVER!' The hideous monster fainted. When he came to, he stumbled, bumbled up the stairs, and dragged beaver out of the flooded shower. 'That horrible beast has Fritzy. He's going to eat Fritzy up! I'm going to trade myself for Fritzy, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to throw myself into the bear's arms . . .'

'No!' beaver screamed. The monster raced down the stairs, but he couldn't go very fast because one of his legs didn't work and the other

was knock-kneed. 'Monster, I love you. I adore you. I'll give myself to the bear!'

The monster and the beaver rushed down the stairs in a race to get into the bear's arms.

The bear had been waiting for an answer, but no one had answered him. When he lifted the rat to his mouth to eat her, she bit him and leaped into the snow.

By the time monster and beaver got outside, the bear had disappeared.

5
The Bear's defeat

The bear was defeated. There was no way he could get into the wonderful

house.

He couldn't stop being in love with the house. He stared and stared at the house. He saw a white horse pawing short green grass. The magnificent horse started racing without effort, flying, across the sloping meadows, meadow-hills, tiny houses nestling in the hills, patches of all-colours flowers. A long time passed. The white horse was lying on the dirt, dying. A huge open red wound gaped in his right side. Several humans with sticks were plunging their sticks into the wound.

The bear's teeth started moving up and down. Soon these teeth were chattering so loud and fast, the bear got scared he was a chattering skull. All of his warm fur would fall off, his skin and his veins. The teeth kept chattering and biting. He got real pissed and his claws came out, but he couldn't figure out who to claw.

Bear was an elephant. Elephant rose up, mighty mighty grey, on two legs and roared. Roar of Universe. Elephant thudded down a narrow dirt road. Thud thud. Thud thud. Travelled many many miles to find water. His long trunk stuck food in his snake-shape mouth. Every now and then ROAR to tell the forest who he was.

Who am I? he asked. I'm an elephant.

A little boy who was thin and had a crew cut was sitting on the edge of his bed in pyjamas. The bed was as narrow as a cot. Someone had turned the sheets down for the night. Knees tucked under his chin, the little boy was looking directly ahead at a big being who was telling him a story. 'Once upon a time,' the big being said. 'Once upon a time there was a man who roamed the whole land. This man wasn't a giant physically, but he was a giant in every other way. The giant ate ears of corn and, now and then, the heads off of human beings . . .'

The bear's teeth started chattering again and the bear cried. Why wouldn't his teeth stop? Why was he shaking like this, like some crazy woman who's possessed and turning, like a white horse being ridden by

a rider for the first time? The bear had a fever. He wanted to run away, but he knew if he left this bondage, there'd be nothing else left in the world.

6 The Bear's vision of blackness

The night was black and the universe was black. You weren't able to

distinguish any forms in this night. A black band separated the black

earth from the black sky. All over was just blackness, a layer of

blackness.

You, the thing you called 'you', was a ball turning and turning in the blackness only the blackness wasn't something - like 'black' - and it wasn't nothingness 'cause nothingness was somethingness. The whole thing turns up into a ball, the ball's ephemeral, and where are you? Your self is a ball turning and turning as it's being thrown from one hand to the other hand and every time the ball turns over you feel all your characteristics, your identities, slip around so you go crazy. When the ball doesn't turn, you feel stable.

You exist in this darkness. Rebels. Creeps. Outcasts. Loners. People who hate everybody. People who feel uneasy around everybody. People who know everyone hates them. People who hate being tied down, restricted, constricted, and huge whirling snakes. The snakes climb around your neck and arms. The woman who's the mother of snakes takes you in.

You feel very uneasy. You take a step. You don't know what to do cause there's nothing, 'cause there's not even nothing.

7

For some reason this sight of blackness made the bear very happy. The bear began to dance and sing and make all sorts of funny noises. Tears like thunderballs rolled out of his eyes. Sweat-drops like hailstones fell out of his raunchy fur. The bear was causing all the weather. So he sang a song:

Sweet bird in the darkness

you're living in my heart

your wings are my heart

your outstretched

wings are silver, sapphire, and violet

gold and light green you're flying away I'm following you whee whee

the world is

silver, sapphire, and violet, gold and light green

now trees and buds and leaves and streams

are springing up, and nettles, hawks, and wild mists the leaves are dark greens and blues and

light greens I don't give a shit about anything I don't have to do anything everything lives

What the bear sang about was true. The world was incredibly beautiful. All the forms had returned and all the colours.

Then the bear started to move his wings. The wings moved faster and faster and soon the bear rose into the air. He flew away from the beaver and hideous monster's warm house and was never seen again.

Janey becomes a woman

Slums of New York City.
A racially mixed group of people live in these slums. Welfare and lower-middle class Puerto Ricans, mainly families, a few white students, a few white artists who haven't made it and are still struggling, and those semi-artists who, due to their professions, will never make it: poets and musicians, black and white musicians who're into all kinds of music, mainly jazz and punk rock. In the nicer parts of the slums: Ukrainian and Polish families. Down by the river that borders on the eastern edge of these slums: Chinese and middle-middle class Puerto Rican families. Avenues of junkies, pimps, and hookers form the northern border; the southern border drifts off into even poorer sections, sections too burnt-out to be anything but war zones; and the western border is the Avenue of Bums.

A three-room apartment; a fourteen by nine room, two seven by nine rooms, and one more fourteen by nine room which contains toilet, bathtub, and stove. Usually no hot water or heat, costs two hundred dollars a month. Many of the people who live in these neighbourhoods are too poor to pay their rents.

One of the landlords burned down his building so he could collect the insurance money. Two families and one pimp were sleeping in this building when it burned down. The landlord sold the charred lot for lots of money to McDonald's, a multinational fast food concern. This is how poor people become transformed into hamburger meat.

The slum where she chooses to live.
The East Village stinks. Garbage covers every inch of the streets. The few inches garbage doesn't cover reek of dog and rat piss. All of the buildings are either burnt down, half-burnt down, or falling down. None of the landlords who own the slum live in their disgusting buildings. In the winter when temperature averages 0°, these buildings have no

hot water or heat, and in the summer at 100° average, roaches and rats cover the inside walls and ceilings.

Only one hospital serves these people, a hospital which dares to exist a few blocks from the northern border of this slum. The hospital contains lights, needles, drugs which cause brain disturbances, utensils, and almost no beds. Whenever there's a holiday, for instance, when Con Ed breaks down or when a landlord burns down one of his buildings to collect the insurance money, the poor people loot this hospital to amuse themselves.

The only supermarket in this neighbourhood buys the rotting food the other supermarkets in the city are unable to sell and sells this food at double-price.

The local police station contains men who, unlike the people in the market, want nothing to do with the neighbourhood. They're scared of the dangerous streets, the alleyways, and they're paid to be scared.

There are no out-front local crime coalitions because the crime bosses don't consider themselves part of the neighbourhood. These gangsters who run the city have taken a building, no one knows which building it is, in the northern part of the slum. They have torn out its centre, and behind the rat-infested plaster walls that look like the walls of the Chinese laundries, behind closed pet stores, antique furniture stores, tenements, within steel walls, within standard CIA protection systems, built a palace. The poor people don't know if this palace exists. They know there's one expensive Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood which is always empty and two expresso joints where the cops sit around and talk to men who wear big guns.

How Janey and the rest of the people in the East Village feel.
Poor people generally don't feel different from rich people.

Poor people get real happy and run around jumping and screaming their lips off and then they get so down they know everyone hates them and they know everything stinks and they're going to kill themselves just like rich people do. Poor people are just like rich people except a general, not mood-to-mood 'cause everyone's got one mood after another mood and everyone thinks whatever mood is present is the only one that will ever exist I mean if you're sad then the world must be rotten, a general day-to-day depression. Depression meaning the poor person perceives fewer and fewer possibilities.

Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just . . .