Salvation Lies in Baraboo

Chester Chuckles’ size 37 shoes, once shiny and red, were covered in fallout dust as he waddled across the post-apocalyptic wasteland. He finally emerged from his car weeks ago and had been walking ever since. A clown car is a pleasant place to pass an apocalypse if you are well-provisioned. Also, if your car seats 21 clowns, as Chester’s did, it offers ample room to stretch out if you are alone, as Chester was. When finally, he emerged from the lowest depths of the car’s labyrinthine interior to the outside world, all had changed. He found himself alone in a post-apocalyptic hellscape that had once been the beautiful palm tree-lined campus of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida.

Also, the paint on his car was scratched.

At first Chester did not know what to do or where to go, but after he sat and thought for a moment, he knew that if there was hope anywhere for a lone clown like him, it lay in Wisconsin. For, tucked away in the quartzite hills of the ancient Baraboo Range from which the great Ringling Brothers sprung to spread the gospel of Circus to the all people, were the Circus World Museum and International Clown Hall of Fame. Surely salvation lay in Baraboo!

Now hundreds of miles into his journey, Chester shuffled through the red-gray dirt and thought about how it had all come to this. In the years before the end (though at the time no one anticipated a real end) there was a something in the air that could not be measured by any barometer or Sunday morning news shows. It was not something simple and nameable like political unrest or climate change, nor anything in the usual catalog of historical forebodings long compiled by historians reviled by those making the history. It was something subtler: a pervasive trembling beneath the irritated skin of ordinary life. Shelves were stocked, the airplanes arrived on time, screens glowed with appetite-inducing advertisements. And the good people of earth moved through their routines as if performing them for an audience they could not see. But though they could not see it for themselves, humanity at large was seized by a quiet dread: they required some proclamation of worth, some signal that their lives were anchored in something sturdier than awards shows and bull markets. Being no longer felt self-evident. It felt provisional, contingent, as though the veneer of the inevitability of experience was peeled back and, to everyone’s horror, there was nothing underneath. The horizon seemed suddenly closer, far too close. A few people gradually sensed that history had begun to slope, that time was leaning forward, that everything was about to tip under its own terrible inertia. But most people simply turned the other way, or at least looked down at their phones. 

The world had become a dark and impenetrable obstacle to the transparent and ephemeral souls that inhabited it. Those afflicted with ontological clarity suffered most acutely. They were not superior in intellect, nor purer in motive, but they were constitutionally unable to perform in the play in which everyone else had memorized their lines. To pause, to ask foundational questions, was to risk exile. They were accused, subtly or overtly, of ingratitude. Depth was recast as morbidity, introspection as self-indulgence. The ultimate accusation was wickedness: that by declining to participate in the communal theater, they endangered the fragile coherence of the whole wide world. 

The machinery of distraction hummed with increasing efficiency, insulating the populace from silence, but the signs of an approaching threshold intensified. The markets fluctuated, the climate destabilized, alliances shifted, but these were symptoms, not causes. Beneath them lay a metaphysical unease: a suspicion that the current being was unsustainable. Still, children were born, couples married, people commuted to work. Continuity was the order of the day. Yet in private journals and late-night conversations, people confessed to a peculiar anticipation. It was not despair, it was the intuition that the present form of things could not endure indefinitely. Toward what end were they marching, moving, slouching, creeping? No one could say what would come. But many felt deep in their marrow, that something fundamental was drawing near—not a spectacle, but a revelation. But it was not revelation. It was rupture more than anything. 

Chester was suddenly torn from his philosophizing by a chortle that ran down his funny bone like ice water. He had been so absorbed in his own thoughts and narrative exposition that he didn’t realize he had nearly run right into another clown. Ordinarily Chester would have been overjoyed to have stumbled upon a fellow clown, but at the appearance of this strange clown he could offer only a hesitant ‘how-do-you-do’ wave. 

The new clown’s greasepaint smile was carved too wide—much too wide—splitting his face into a permanent rictus that showed far too many small, needle-like teeth. His white makeup was cracked over sallow skin, and his eyes, ringed in smeared black, glinted with predatory amusement. A faded patchwork suit, once obviously bright but now stained and frayed, the ruffles stiff with grime, hung from his large but emaciated frame. Blood dripped from his red nose and lips. 

Chester held out his hanky. “You seem to have a nosebleed.”

“What’s your name, pal?” asked the stranger.

“Chester. Chester Chuckles. And to whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“They call me Gristle Splitgrin.”

“I see. What kind of clown are you?”

“The evil kind.”

Chester Chuckles’ face took on a dour look. “I thought that kind of clown only existed in the movies.”

Gristle shrugged and held out his hands as if to say, ‘And yet here I am.’ “And yet here I am,” he said. “What kind of clown are you?”

“Mostly a happy clown. A grotesque whiteface carpet clown, I suppose, if you were to be being taxonomical about it. What’s your bit?”

“Destruction,” growled Gristle most malevolently.

“You wanna see one of my gags?” asked Chester Chuckles. “It’s a pretty good one.” Gristle didn’t say no, so Chester stretched his arms as high as they would go, then plunged them deep into his suspendered wide hoop pants. There was a loud clanging noise as if a whole workbench of tools came crashing down. Then, his eyes lighting up, Chester exclaimed “I got it!” Gristle leaned in closer and Chester triumphantly yanked a machete from his hoop pants and thrust it into the air where the sunlight glinted on the razor-sharp edge. “Snicker-snack!” he halooed as he swung it wildly before him, slicing one of Gristle’s suspenders on a forehand and the other on the accompanying backhand. Gristle’s pants fell to his ankles. “Shall I tickle your entrails with Johnny Corkscrew?” Chester turned the blade in a deadly imitation of twisting it in a wound that he had planned for the middle of Gristle’s belly. Gristle pulled up his pants and ran for the hills. 

“See ya, friend!” shouted Chester after him. Chuckling merrily, he continued down the path.

***

On a forest path, Chester stumbled upon a mime. 

“Hello, there,” Chester chuckled.

 “Hi!” the mime mimed.

“What’s your name?” asked Chester.

The mime mimed a look of barely hidden judgement of Chester’s powers of intellect.

“How silly of me,” replied Chester, barely registering the insult. “Let me guess.”

The mime mimed a greatly exaggerated rolling of the eyes.

“Let’s see… Is your name Arlec?” 

The mime mimed shaking his head, meaning that his name was not Arlec.

“Is it Aurelio?”

It was not.

“Bellrose? Corvin? Lucern? Lune? Malvo? Marceau? Orrick? Pierre? Theophile? Valentin? Vespertine? Virelai?”

In addition to not being Arlec or Aurelio, the mime’s name was not Bellrose, Corvin, Lucern, Lune, Malvo, Marceau, Orrick, Pierre, Theophile, Valentin, Vespertine, nor was it Virelai.

Chester lifted his cap, then another smaller cap underneath the first cap, and scratched his head. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…” he pondered. “I supposed I will just have to call you ‘Mr. Quiet’.”

Mr. Quiet mimed sticking his tongue out with disgust. 

“Tell me, Mr. Quiet, how did you get here?”

Mr. Quiet mimed a thermonuclear explosion, hiding in a basement for three weeks, digging himself out from the rubble, being set upon by a pair of radiation-mutated looters, killing one with his bare hands and ripping out the throat of another with his own teeth, then stumbling, terrified, cold, and hungry through the woods in which they now stood.

“I see,” said Chester Chuckes, nodding, smiling, laughing, and crying all at the same time. “Will you come with me Mr. Quiet?”

Mr. Quiet mimed shaking his head again. He mimed the glorious Land of the Mimes, where it was always sunny and everymime had their own invisible box to lie down in.

“That sounds nice,” said Chester Chuckles. “Well, it was nice meeting you.” He put out his hand.

Mr. Quiet clasped Chester’s hand to shake it and jumped as the hand buzzer Chester had concealed in his palm buzzed him.

“Hyuck! Hyuck!” chuckled Chester Chuckles.

Mr. Quiet mimed giving Chester the finger and stomped away toward the Land of Mimes.

***

Chester Chuckles stood on the bank of a great river, wondering how to get across. With great joy, he spotted a rowboat with two oars tied to a tree and made his way down to untie it.

“Hold it clown,” said a familiar voice. “That’s our boat.”

Chester looked up toward the source of the voice and was unsurprised to see Gristle Splitgrin emerging from behind a tree. “Oh – hi, Gristle,” said Chester.

Standing at Gristle’s shoulder was the most physically ravishing female clown Chester Chuckles had ever seen. Her hair was cardinal red, at least three feet across, and bouncy—nearly as bouncy as her breasts, which were stuffed quite precariously into a harlequin-patterned latex bralette. She wore a multicolored rainbow tutu, thigh-high black-and-white striped socks, and ruby stilettos. A very beautiful Gerber Daisy was pinned to her top. Chester leaned in close for a sniff and a surreptitious peek at the soft flesh upon which it was perched it when it squirted right in his eye.

“BWAH-HA-HA-HA!” laughed Gristle.

“Who’s the girl?” asked Chester, wiping his face.

“This is my gun moll, Slaughterbell.”

“What kind of clown is she?”

“The sexy kind.”

“I can see that,” said Chester. He reached into his pants and rummaged around for some time (actually, quite some time—perhaps too long—and even Slaughterbell’s confidently sexy, smug, heavily-painted face began to waiver at how deep and actively Chester’s two clown hands were working inside his oversized pants; she felt suddenly cheapened by the vigorous, drawn out motions of his hands in his pants) and finally pulled out an old-fashioned klaxon horn. “Hold on a second,” he mumble-chuckled as he shook the bouncy balls out of it. “There,” he said, satisfied, and began cranking the klaxon as fast as he could.

“Aaaaahhhooooooooooooooooogggaaaaaaaahhh!” said the horn.

“Enough!” shouted Gristle

Chester sadly let the klaxon wind down. “…oooooogaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh…” it moaned.

“What should I do to him, sweetie?” purred Slaughterbell. 

“Kill him,” growled Gristle. “But in a fun way,” he added.

Slaughterbell slipped two fingers exquisitely manicured in a domino pattern into her cleavage and pulled out an unreasonably large and (presumably) heavy 69-cc chainsaw. With one practiced pull, it roared to life.

“I wonder where she found the gas for that,” wondered Chester to himself. “It’s probably a two-stroke,” he reasoned, “and can run on degraded gas.” Then, aloud: “Wait!”

Slaughterbell paused just long enough for Chester to dive back into his pants and bring out a sawed-off shotgun. “Boom!” he shouted each time he pulled the trigger and sprayed buckshot everywhere. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” 

Gristle and Slaughterbell ran screaming along the riverbank while Chester stepped lightly into the rowboat and began pulling swiftly for the opposite shore.

***

Deep in a wood, Chester Chuckles heard a beautiful sound, like angels singing. He stopped to listen, then followed the sound. It grew louder. He was getting closer, and he ran faster. Turning a corner around a large boulder, he came to a natural amphitheater worn by mother nature into a rock hillside and, arranged within, a boys’ choir. 

“Beat it, clown,” sang the boys. 

“I’m just trying to get to get to Circus World,” explained Chester.

“Sing, damn it!” sang the boys beautifully. “Or this will be your end.” They started into the “Kyrie” from Hayden’s St. Cecilia Mass and drew switchblades from under their brilliant white choir robes.

Chester chuckled nervously and loosened his collar. He pulled a white hanky from his sleeve, then another hanky (red), and another (blue) and another (yellow) and another (green) until he finally wiped his brow with the last one, which was purple. The castratos’ angelic voices soared as they sang a terrifyingly gorgeous descant over the melody and fitted brass knuckles to their small, white, feminine hands.

Chester mumbled “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite,” but the boys hit back hard with “Carol of the Birds.” Chester tried “Entry of the Gladiators” and the choir countered, seemingly without effort, with “A Birch Tree in the Field Did Stand.” Chester changed tactics and hit them with “Baby Elephant Walk,” but the choir boys were too quick. They executed an adroit key change to G major and launched into the “Benedictus” from Mozart’s Pastoral Mass. Chester could feel the press of their beautiful harmony and sought through his own admittedly small musical catalogue for his big guns. He landed on “Merry Go Round Broken Down” and quickly launched into a rollicking rendition, but the clever boys brought him down with “The Prayer of Francois Villon.” Desperate, Chester tied “Hungarian Rhapsody,” his last best hope, but the boys were ready and the choir struck out at him viciously with Monteverdi’s “Tancredi and Clorinda” madrigal. 

Chester knew he was beaten, but there was one hope. He began humming “The Major General’s Song” as he danced a little two-step and tossed two Mk 2 pineapple grenades into the choir, one for the trebles and one for the altos. Before they could react, he opened his umbrella and huddled under it as the blood and gore rained down upon him. When the bloody shower stopped, Chester peaked out from under the umbrella at the 24 left feet and 24 right feet standing alone where the choir had once threatened him. He chuckled and shook his umbrella and went on his way.

***

About seven miles south of Baraboo, Chester Chuckles picked his way carefully through the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. “How ironic that the last stretch of my journey through this post-apocalyptic world is through an ordinance works where the instruments of our own destruction were created by our own hands,” he said to himself. “I wonder if there’s a thematic reason for that?”

“There isn’t,” sneered a voice with a sneer.

Chester stopped and rolled his eyes. He knew already to whom that sneer belonged.

“Happy to see me?” asked Gristle Splitgrin.

“No,” said Chester, who was always honest, sometimes to a fault. “Not particularly.”

“Well then why are you smiling?”

“I’m always smiling, you assclown. It’s painted on. I’m a happy clown!”

“I don’t particularly care for your tone,” said Gristle. “Boys!” he called. “Let’s teach Chester Chuckles some manners.”

From behind Gristle’s tall but not particularly wide frame fanned a half dozen clown lackeys: two whitefaces, two Augustes, a rodeo clown, and a Pierrot.

“You there,” said Chester, pointing at the Pierrot. “What are you doing here? You’re better than this.”

The Pierrot just shrugged his shoulders. “Le travail est difficile à trouver.”

“Hmm,” replied Chester. “I don’t know what you just said.”

“Lucky for you, you won’t need to speak French in Hell,” laughed Gristle.

“Wouldn’t it be more fitting if they only spoke French in Hell?”

“Shut up!” roared Gristle. “Get him, boys!”

Once again, the clown hands at the end of Chester’s clown arms plunged deeply into Chester’s oversized clown pants. He grunted as he bent down to get a better grip, reaching so deeply that he disappeared into the wide waist of his pants and it appeared now to the savage clownish horde that there was but the lower half of clown left standing before them. 

“Hey!” shouted Gristle. “Come back up here! Stop clowning around down there!”

Chester’s head popped up above his waistband and he smiled. “Just one second, buddy.” He looked at the advancing sextet of murderous clown lackeys: “Can you all hold on for just one more second?”

Chester dove down again, completely disappearing once more into his pants. Then, with triumphant music swelling in the background, a high-explosive anti-tank rocket emerged, followed by the muzzle of an M20 Super Bazooka, then the rest of the bazooka, then Chester’s huge, ecstatic smile, and finally, the rest of Chester. 

“Sorry, boys,” said Chester, taking aim. “At first I thought we clowns were an endangered species—you know, with the apocalypse and everything—but now I see there are just too many bad clowns. Well, goodbye!”

Gristle Splitgrin and his six accomplices blew up in a spectacular display of high-explosive anti-tank technology. Chester Chuckles tossed the bazooka on a pile of unexploded ordinance and walked off to the north on the homestretch.

***

Huffing and puffing, Chester Chuckles pulled himself to the summit of the Devil’s Lake West Bluff and stood, letting his vision sweep the Baraboo Valley that stretched out before him. 

“Shit,” he said.

Directly north, right where Baraboo should have been, right where it had been the last two hundred years, was a huge Baraboo-sized crater. Around its edge, a few buildings and trees that survived the initial blast smoldered. Nowhere to be seen was even the slightest hint of a circus: not a single big-top tent, no circus trains, no elephants, and certainly no clowns.

“Shit,” he said again. Chester sat down to think. “Maybe I could try miming.” That sounded nice.

The Kaiju Queen of the Mean Streets: A Kandy Fontaine Mystery

The streets in West Hollywood had that particular late‑night sheen they get when the neon has been burning longer than a whore’s nightstand cigarette and the air has grown clotted with the residue of too many unfinished, blood-adjacent conversations, and as I padded along the curb — because yes, I am a cat, though not the kind anyone would mistake for ordinary — I could feel the story tightening around me like a coat someone else had worn first, carrying the faint scent of their intentions. I should say this plainly: I am not merely in the story; I am the story, dressed in the sleek, amused body of Burroughs’ shotgun’s cat, which is to say I move with the casual authority of something that knows it could rewrite the entire night with a flick of its tail if it felt the need.

Kandy Fontaine pushed open the door of the convenience store with the kind of weary grace that belongs to people who have outgrown their own silhouettes, leaving them behind like vapor trails in sinister Dutch bars, her trench coat trailing behind her at a 45 degree angle in non-Euclidean memories, and Joe Oroborus, Soft Detective, followed her in with the splotched expression of a man who had misplaced his last good idea somewhere between Sunset and La Brea but was too tired to retrace his steps.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the nervous energy of a philosophy student who had read too much Sartre and not enough La Fontaine, and the aisles seemed to shift slightly, weave themselves through bad wormholes, as if preparing themselves for a narrative turn they could sense but not yet name.

Kandy paused, sensing something in the air — a subtle rearrangement of the moment, a quiet intake of breath from the universe — and Joe felt it too, though he would never admit it, because soft detectives in this city survive by pretending they don’t notice the metaphysical drafts that blow through the cracks in reality.

I felt it most of all, of course, because stories always know when they are about to change shape. We’re born like that.

The rustle came first, a soft metallic whisper from the alleyway, followed by a flicker of chrome and a shadow that looked like Pirandello’s farts, and then — with the kind of theatrical inevitability that only the truly mythic can pull off — Kathy Acker sprang up from the alley, dressed as the Eiffel Tower’s motorcycle cat, her chrome‑slick fur catching the neon in a way that made her look like a monument that had decided it was tired of being stationary and wanted to try being alive for a while.

The miniature Eiffel Tower perched on her head tilted slightly, as if it too were curious about what would happen next, and her eyes beta-glitched with the mischievous intelligence of someone who knows the rules and ignores them out of principle.

“Kandy,” she said, her voice carrying the faint clatter of a typewriter dreaming of Paris’s asshole’s distant cousin Sam: “you’re late.”

“For what?” Kandy asked, though she already knew the answer in the way people know things they haven’t yet admitted to themselves.

“For your own myth,” Kathy‑Cat replied, stretching with the languid confidence of a creature who has never once apologized for existing.

Before Kandy could respond, the door chimed again, and this time it was Time — badly disguised as Kathy Acker’s motorcycle wearing the Eiffel Tower in drag, a look that might have worked on a different night but here only made Time seem like it was trying too hard to blend in with a city that had long ago stopped believing in subtlety. The chrome still gleamed beneath the cheap metallic paint, the Eiffel Tower wig kept slipping sideways like a landmark with stage fright, and Time — well, Time has never been good at pretending it isn’t Time.

Heisenberg, the clerk with the nametag H. Berg, didn’t bother looking up from stocking gum. “That’s Time,” he said, as if announcing the arrival of a regular customer. “Don’t let the wig fool you.”

Kandy stepped forward, unafraid, because she has always met the universe head‑on, even when it shows up wearing impossible drag not so subtly Susan Sontag.

“Why are you even here?” she asked, her voice steady in the way only someone who has already survived several versions of herself can manage.

Time shifted, the motorcycle frame creaking like a confession, or fart, it had been holding onto for too long.

“To be seen,” it said quietly. “To be something other than inevitable.”

And that — that was the moment the story finally exhaled itself the way a self smoking and self unarchiving French dab wax adjacent Kaiju Queen always do, and revealed its spine, like a greased and nameless asshole because Kandy’s Kaiju Queen transformation was never about spectacle or destruction; it was about recognition, about stepping into the version of herself that had been waiting just outside the frame.

The moon tilted, the air thickened, and Kandy grew — not violently, not monstrously, but with the slow, deliberate inevitability of a truth expanding to fill the space it had been denied, her shadow stretching across the aisles, her scales shimmering like unresolved feelings, her eyes glowing with the soft light of someone who has finally stopped apologizing for her own magnitude.

Time stared up at her, wig slipping, chrome trembling like several monster bugs in a cyclatron smoking acid winged acid. “You see me,” it whispered.

Kandy nodded, her voice low and certain. “I see you because I’ve been you.”

Kathy‑Cat curled around Kandy’s Kaiju ankle, purring like a small motor of rebellion, and Joe let out a long Bataille-infested, Genet infused, ghastly-grommet vapor he hadn’t realized he was holding, while the neon outside flickered with something that might have been respect or might have been relief.

And I — the narrative dressed as Burroughs’ shotgun’s cat — stepped forward, because this was the moment where the story folded back into itself, where the teller became the told, where the myth recognized its own architecture, and I rubbed against Kandy’s enormous neon foot, claiming her the way stories claim their heroes, and the mean streets softened just enough to let the night breathe again.

Roadkill

“No one will ever love me!” Isabel intoned, giving voice to the image of a bright-eyed fat girl smiling at us from a bus-stop advertisement. She puffed out her cheeks and let rip a raspberry. I was drinking a milkshake, and pink goo ejected from my nose. I decided to give my heart to her then. When later we kissed, I learned that hers was the most aggressive tongue I had known.

The last thing we spoke of pertained to baby sex, as in people having sex with babies. She heard an infant had been hospitalized. It gave me the icky shakes—and right before I had to step into the great wide world, full of all those strangers with their secret minds. How many people on that morning bus had been asleep just an hour before, dreaming up some truly unsettling imagery, only to ponder in horror the extent to which they might take responsibility for all that? Then out the door, wearing faces of common decency, into dangerous proximity with other silent nasties.

Would I have said something romantic had I known she would be dead before lunchtime? Certainly, I would not have gone to work. Certainly, I would have stayed home and tickled her, fingers trespassing the boundaries of her granny panties. I would have reminisced and caressed. But if, for whatever reason, I absolutely had to leave… I just don’t know what I would have said. 

Men often die first, worn by years of secretly expending the energy required to repress sadness and rage. I would joke that if and when I died first, I would have her lean in close over my death bed and I would whisper, so tenderly, the word “shart” into her cute little ear.  She would poke me hard in my belly when I said this. She would often poke me in the belly or punch me in the arm. Consequently,  I would cower and yell “domestic violence!” which would prompt further assault. 

“I love you” was said at the beginning and end of every day. It was sprinkled generously throughout. An abyss of love-yous. Sometimes, self-awareness would lead to the most inane of conversations. “I love you. No, I mean I really, love you. I mean it. More than you comprehend. I really, really love you. You are so loved. God it’s frustrating that I can’t explain it to you.” Blandness via repetition. 

“Goodnight. I love you.” 

“Goodbye. I love you.”

Our earliest impressions of one another were constructed via the joyless toil of cleaning up nice. Such theater is tricky. One wants the camouflage to fulfill its function of deceiving the potential mate, yet the intended object of affection must recognize that this image of perfection is maintained at too high a cost of energy and is, ultimately, false. Metabolically, ugliness is more efficient. One hopes to be found out.

The big breakthrough in our getting to know the ugly truths came when she showed me the picture of thirteen-year-old Isabel. What a dweeb. What a complete vacuum of sex appeal. This is no insult. I, too, was a goober at that unfortunate stage in my life. I think we wore the same fuck-me-not glasses. That a thirteen-year-old should lack sex appeal is appropriate. However, retroactive vanity produces bizarre desires. Isabel would love to know that gown-man-I would have let thirteen-year-old her bounce on his leg (yee-haw). What am I to do? Hurt grown-up Isabel’s feelings by refusing her imagined advances?

When she was fourteen, a chatroom stranger requested photographs of her feet. She obliged. She told me this story with a subtly hint of pride. If only she could be longed for as she was by that internet pervert. That was all she wanted. 

Did I adore her feet as did that stranger? Did I know her as well as I could-have-should-have? Did I give her my true self? I hate to think I hid a secret hubby the whole time. A stranger in her bed…. 

Never. I was an honest grotesque, like those who hang about the churches.

Yet neither truth nor love did save her. 

Never more shall Isabell and I bear our uglies. She was crossing to get a pint of ice cream from a 7-11 and was hit by a car. As she died, sprawled upon the pavement as the inconvenienced driver tried to force her to accept his apology. 

The call came when I was at work.

”My wife is dead.” I told my boss. “I need to leave.” 

“Aw no,” said he. “Sorry to hear that. You can go. Just make sure to clock out.” 

Besides having killed my wife, the driver was quite upstanding. He donated to feed hungry children in war-torn countries—he made sure I knew. 

Because Isabel was too busy bleeding out in the street to reassure him that it was obviously just an accident and that he remained new-born innocent, the responsibility fell to me. I pardoned him. Why not? I did not like the man, but it occurred to me that he really was too new-born stupid to be evil. Isabell and I used to make fun of men like him. McDingleberry: a character I would perform for her benefit. I would never have imagined that McDingleberry would be responsible for her death. 

Before McDingleberry was taken away by a cop, I asked if Isabel had shared any final words. He told me that she did but, he couldn’t make them out, as her mouth was full of blood. What he thought he heard made no sense.

The next day, I saw a rat lying in the street with its intestines spilled over the blacktop, gushed open. There was nothing to be said about it, nor anyone to say it to. No way to transform the obscene into its opposite. The eviscerated rat was simply what it was, like a fact. It was ugly. It was honest. It was what it was.

Constrictor

I am dangling a small rat above Sidney, my Ball Python. I have moved him into a separate enclosure to feed. This helps in the taming process. They associate the second enclosure with meal time so they are less likely to bite your hand when you reach in their terrarium to pick them up. The rat is squeaking desperately, flailing for its life while Sidney slithers forward and waits. 

I drop the rat into the box. It scampers around the edges of the enclosure, hugging against the walls for a way out. Sidney is motionless. He patiently watches. When the rat draws near, Sidney lashes out with one strike and has the rat’s head in the clutches of his jaws. Within a split-second Sidney’s body is wrapped around the torso of the rat, squeezing the life out of the creature. For a while the rat doesn’t move. It is struck with fear and lost for breath. One might think it is already dead. And it might as well be. Eventually the rat kicks it’s back legs in desperation. Sidney constricts tighter. 

The rat chokes to death and Sidney begins the process of swallowing the body whole. It can take up to ten minutes for this to happen. Sidney slinks forward and opens his jaws wide. He takes a minute to fit the rats face into his mouth and begins to choke the body down. His neck expands, stretched by the body of the rat. You can see it slide back beneath Sidney’s skin as it goes further and further towards his stomach. Soon all that is left is the pink of the rat’s tail jutting out of Sidney’s mouth like a surrogate tongue. 

I am standing in front of the terrarium watching the heat lamp glow in the dim of my bedroom. It illuminates my face red and casts jagged shadows up the wall behind the enclosure. Sidney curls around my limbs. Slithers across my arms and silently flicks his tongue. I can tell he is very happy. I like to keep people happy. Generally, I consider myself an introvert. But I am outgoing in this way. I think of how Sidney kept the peace within the box until the rat fucked up and drew too close. I relate to it. I respect it. Sydney slides down my shoulder, forearm, and wrist, and slinks under his log where he watches me from the shade. I am imagining him smiling behind his beady eyes. But Sydney has no way to smile.

I am walking down Leavitt Street. Late September in Chicago. I pass the liquor store on 21^st and a voice calls behind me. “Ey brother!” Three old drunks are across the street on a stoop of a condemned building drinking malt liquor out of brown bags. They are ex-gangbangers. Old heads of the neighborhood now wasted away on booze, drugs, and lingering traumas. “Come here brother!” the man in the middle of the group yells to me. “It’s been a long time! I’m glad you’re alive!” 

I approach and bump their fists with mine. The man in the center has two faded blue tear drops tattooed in the wrinkles of his leathery cheeks. His beard is grey and white and scraggly. His eyes are glazed over and look past me. The man to his left is curled up with his knees to his face backed up against the brick wall. He doesn’t look at me but occasionally lifts his head up to drink. He has symbols tattooed and equally faded on the crease between his thumb and pointer finger on his right hand. He grunts along with what we are saying. It is unclear if he is agreeing with or protesting the conversation.

The man to his right is in an oversized hoody soiled with dirt, the hood pulled over his head. His brown eyes are mourning. He looks like he is going to cry. I remember that the last time I saw these men their friend had just been murdered. Shot in the street in the night. The SD’s had shut out all the street lamps on the block and when he came stumbling through the darkness, they gunned him down and escaped into the black. I remember the prayer candles glowing on the corner. The empty bottles and smashed glass. The destitute men drinking and crying sad songs on a half-busted guitar long into the night. I had heard the sound of sirens. The shades of my apartment window were flashing red and blue. Yeah, there used to be four of them. These old drunks. Now three. 

“Be safe out there, papá,” he says to me. “It’s no life to live…” I nod and walk away. The man with his knees to his face appears to have fallen asleep.

I am at Martin’s Bar now. Home away from home. My second enclosure. This is where I eat and drink with my friends. Ernesto is there. My girlfriend, Nadia. And Chuy, too. Modelo is on tap. Hot wings and their bare bones sucked dry of meat fill our plates. The Bears’ game is on television. In the far corner a group of young Mexicans sing Vicente Fernandez songs acapella over the narration of the football game from the speakers. They are drunk, proud, and deeply saddened. 

“Por tu maldiiiiiiiiito amor! No puedo terminar con tantas penas!” They sing.

“He was El Rey,” nods Ernesto. He pulls his glass of Modelo up to his sagging cheeks and pouting lips. On television a Bears linemen sacks Aaron Rogers. The announcer’s excitement is drowned out by off key singing.

“He lived a hard life.” I say.

“So does everyone,” Scoffs Chuy. He looks to Nadia and she laughs.

“All we can do is appreciate the beauty while it lasts.” I look from one to the other.

“To Chente!” says Ernesto. We raise our glasses to toast. The group in the corner cheers with us. The bartender turns off the volume on the television giving way to customers playing classics on the jukebox. They have had their say.

“Por tu maldito amor!” I nudge Nadia. She rolls her eyes and I smile. I think about the sadness of this song. The music is religious to us. I buy my companions another round of beers and shots. They spout fair-weather rhetoric and drunkenly sing while I ponder the religious cult of sour love. The temptation of snakes. The fleetingness of paradise. The forbidden apple’s desire burning behind all of our eyes. I hear the hiss of a serpent but it is just the sputtering of the soda gun pouring a vodka tonic. I look at Nadia, mi novia, and Chuy, my friend. I see the way their eyes meet when they sip from their glasses. I see the way their hands graze when they reach for the plates I have put in front of them. I see their comfort in each other’s smiles and comradery in their laughter. I say nothing to them. I am calm like Sydney presented with a rat. And I know they have been unfaithful.

When their glasses empty I have them refilled. I let them drink on my dime. I keep their pints as full as mine. The beer in my cup has not dipped an inch in two hours. They are too self-involved to notice, indulging in their feast. 

A scrawny white art student type with green hair and black painted fingernails sits a few stools down drinking a Topo Chico Hard Seltzer. Chuy is eyeing them up. He scoffs once more. His eyes are sunken. His skull is heavy. 

“I remember,” he begins to say. “I remember being on the block as a kid. Riding my bike. A gangbanger motherfucker walked into the street and punched me right in the face as I rode by. Knocked me off my bicycle. He got on it and rode away. This neighborhood was something else back then. You couldn’t walk here. White motherfuckers didn’t come through here unless they wanted to lose their life! They move in here now and live in our buildings, drink in our bars, and eat at our spots, but they don’t know what this place was!”

“Back then I seen a dude get shot for a pack a smokes just right across the street!” adds Ernesto.

“These kids don’t know. They don’t know,” Nadia says shaking her head. Chuy rubs his hand on her knee and thinks that I don’t notice.

“Who fucking cares anyway?” I ask.

“Strike a nerve, milkweed?” laughs Chuy.

“Pinche güero!” jokes Ernesto. Nadia rubs her hand on my shoulder and clenches her nails in twice.

“Ey! Bartender! Another round for my friends!” I shout, snapping my fingers at him from down the counter. He shoots me a glare and slaps the bar in front of the woman in which he is having a conversation with and comes over to replenish our pints.

“You’ve hardly touched yours,” he nods to me.

“Please,” I tell him. “My friends are thirsty.”

“You’re too kind to us!” smiles Chuy. I hold my glass up and stare into his eyes.

“I’m getting tired,” Ernesto admits, “I’m too drunk to drive my car home.”

“I’m hardly even buzzing,” I tell him, “I’ll drive you all home then park at my place. I’ll bring your car back in the morning.”

“This is why I love you, Milkweed,” says Ernesto.

“Looks like we have a designated driver,” laughs Chuy.

“Baby, are you sure you’re not too drunk?” asks Nadia, rubbing my shoulder with her free hand.

“I’m sure baby,” I say, “It’s really no problem.”

I drive Ernesto home. He sits in the front. Chuy and Nadia sit in the back. On the way we listen to Molotov rap over rock anthems. I watch Nadia’s facial expressions from the rearview mirror at every stop sign and red light. She laughs as Chuy enthusiastically mouths the words along to the songs and bangs his head. By the time we reach Ernesto’s apartment in Back of the Yards, Ernesto falls out the side door, and self-consciously fumbles to pick himself off the ground, his body overwhelmed with alcohol. 

“Thank you, brother,” he tells me, digging his pockets for his house key. “Goodnight.”

“We’ll wait until you are inside,” I say to him, “You can never be too safe.”

“Not like anyone’s comin’ to rape him or nothin’,” Chuy jokes. Neither me or Nadia laugh. Ernesto is in his apartment. A yellow light turns on behind his blinds. 

I put the car into gear and start driving towards the highway. I flip through my phone and play slower, sadder music. The kind where the singers croon to smoke filled lounges lit by flickering neon lights, holding rocks glasses of Jack Daniels in their hand free of the microphone while a stoic bartender rubs a glass with a pale gray rag, and women with diamond earrings, pearl strings, and men with bow ties sit at circular tables covered with white cloth, enchanted by the haze of jazz age romance. By the time I hit the on ramp, Nadia and Chuy are passed out snoring. The heavy food and alcohol have equally done their jobs.

On the side of the expressway a car is flipped and burning. A miniature inferno. The flames dance like cobras. Black smoke coughs into the cool of the breeze. I can almost feel the heat on my face as I turn my head to keep my eyes on the crash. In the rearview, blue and red apparitions wail, growing brighter with the passing seconds.

Sometimes everything plays out like a dream. High keys of a piano cascade on the stereo and what’s left of the constellations, not brutalized by urban light pollution, shine dirty like blood diamonds in the bastard black of God’s vapid galaxy streaked with gas.

Not much longer and I pull off at 87^th Street and Lake Michigan. Steelworkers Park. I drive down the access road towards the parking lot by the lakeside. The silhouette ruins of the old steel mills stand like rotting tombstones and mausoleums under the orange glow of the autumn moon. I park in front of the bronze statue of a faceless Union steel worker with his arms around his family, fronted with a plaque reading “A Tribute to the Past”. Nadia and Chuy are still in a daze, hardly recognizing where we have driven to.

One thing I know about my friend Ernesto is that he keeps a Smith & Wesson 9mm Luger in his glove compartment at most times. Living in Back of the Yards hasn’t been easy for him. He gets fucked with a lot. Thugs, bangers, dope fiends, petty theft. He likes to have protection. I pull a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of my jacket and slide them on my hands, snapping the ends at the wrist as each fist fits in. I reach for the glove compartment and pull out the 9mm. Then I call back to my two companions, snoring on each other’s shoulders to the smoky reverberations of a saxophone blazing a solo over delicately swinging cymbals and popping snare.

“Wake up guys. We’re here.”

“Wuh…argh…Whuh? We at the lake?” Chuy mutters, stretches, yawns.

“There’s a full moon out,” I tell him. “We’re going for a swim.”

“What the fuck?” grumbles Nadia, opening her side door. “Which beach are we at? You’re fucking funny man. I thought we was going home.”

We are all standing outside Ernesto’s car when I flash the gun. Chuy grunts and charges me and I whip him in the face. He falls back into the dirt holding his bloody cheek. Nadia screams and curses desperately but there is no one around to hear. 

The two snivel in protest as I lead them towards the concrete walk on the lakeside which drops off into the icy waters with no ladder to get back up. “Take off your clothes.” I order them.

“Fuck you!” shouts Nadia, cracking her voice in anger. I put the 9mm up closer to her head. Chuy jukes like he is going to charge me again and I whip the gun towards his face causing him to flinch. He staggers back, and with a feminine bay, trips off the concrete and plunges into the lake. 

“Help! C’mon! Help me!” Chuy treads water in the tide of the lopping waves. His clothes are visibly weighing him down. There is nothing to hold onto. 

“Pinche cobarde!” Nadia weeps. I see through her crocodile tears. She sounds straight out of a telenovela. Like Soraya Montenegro or something.

“Take your clothes off!” I command, shaking the gun at her in my right hand. She does not budge. She is scanning like a rat for a way out of her trap. Chuy sloshes in the water, crying for his mother while the current bobs him down beneath the surface. Mami! Mami! Mam- Oof!

Nadia reacts to this by turning towards him. Without a word I lift my leg and boot her in the back. Her body crumples like a cheap toy. She briefly shrieks and splashes into the lake. 

My heart is racing. I am surging with adrenaline. But I know to be patient. I know this adrenaline is a bodily reaction. I feel like I might explode. I might cry. But I have to meditate in the moment. In real time. Keep a sharp mind. I have to know that things are going to be okay. And as my two old companions asphyxiate in the water, I have to constrict them further. And I have to do it in a focused calm. 

Nadia is a better swimmer than Chuy. She makes it to the edge of the concrete walkway and scratches at the wall, trying to hold herself above the water. I think fast and grab a loose cement chunk scattered on the ground with the trash and empty liquor bottles. She cries out as I drop it down on her. It hits her head and she sinks below the surface and does not come up. I pick up a glass bottle and look for Chuy, but he is long gone. All that is left are the rolling waves and the glow of the moon on what’s left of the decaying steel mills lurking off in the dismal expanse of the industrial park. I sit by the lakeside for another half hour watching the water. I listen to it lap against the concrete and I breathe in and out slowly, to bring my heart beat down. I do my best not to shed any tears.

Life to me is all about control. If you don’t have control then you aren’t truly living. And really, most people don’t have control. They are raised to be the controlled. I was like that once. But I had a burning desire to be alive.

“Ey’ papá! How are you?” the hooded old drunk asks as I pass 21^st and Leavitt. He is drinking Cuervo from the bottle. I have parked Ernesto’s car on a side street. I walk home like I never left the neighborhood.

“It’s cold.” I tell him, “September never gets this cold. My friends, they wanted to swim in the lake. But I said, ‘Nah, you guys can though! You can go together. Me? I’m going home.’”

“They swam in this weather?”

“Nude as a full moon. They’re still swimming there right now.”

“A la verga. Is crazy!”

“Stay warm, brother.”

“Stay warm and stay safe, mijo. Be careful out there. I tell you, always. This life…This life… It’s no life to live, my friend. There is no way…”

I bump his fist and make my way down the block to my apartment building. In the distance I can hear him singing his own wisdom to himself, off key, and mellow, his voice gritty with tequila. Despite the events of the evening, I feel good. I contemplate this good feeling. I step towards home with swagger and confidence. The conversation with the old man has brought my nerves back down with a sense of normalcy, a display of routine. 

I enjoy my relationship with this old man. I see him on the street and we catch up. It is nothing more than that. It doesn’t need to be. In this sense I often appreciate my vague acquaintances more than I appreciate my closest friends. But in this moment, I mostly enjoy the thought that Nadia and Chuy are floating together. They are out in the open. Where they need to be. They bit the hand that fed. Got too close and paid the price. Constricted. Asphyxiated. Shed. There can be nothing more behind my back. I can finally get some sleep.

Some men charm snakes. Some snakes charm men. I think to myself, turning the key to the front door of my building, imagining an old Indian market, a Sapera man in robes, playing the pungi for a dancing cobra rising from the lid of a bamboo basket. Like most of life, it is all a show.

The snakes can’t hear the music, but they’re intimidated by their perception of the instrument. It’s a predator to them. Their dance is a balance of fear and aggression. 

Most men can hear but don’t listen. They see something beautiful, are intimidated, and are unable to understand it. They can’t admit this to themselves, and likewise respond in fear cloaked in an expression of hardness. In this way many men are just like snakes. Many men that I know. They slither around me thinking I can’t hear the music either. It’s best to keep them close. Tame them. Feed them by the hand. Toss them rats to keep them happy.

Sidney is soaking in the pool of water I have placed in his terrarium, next to the wooden log which gives him a dark place to hide. This soaking will help in the process of shedding his skin. He has outgrown his old body. It is time to move onto something new. My bedroom is shadowed with the light of his heat lamp. I too like to lay in the darkness. It gives me a place to reflect. To meditate. To reject the skin of past sins and move onto a better life.