The Sponge Diver's Game
From Plastic Tub
Text by Steven Adkins, circa 1994, just after commencing his first forays into AA history with Tim Wilson. In addition to the mention of Yon Milhaus in the second half of the essay, note the many references to his Mexican voyages.
- The Sponge Diver's Game
Cast off remnants of notices, bills, post-notes upon hasty scribbles--the pillar of gold in the glorietta still remains despite the glow and deep r-rumbling hum of the city--biggest on the planet-- and we come in over a carpet of milk, molten light rippling like "tendrils" of kelp. A favorite author rues that t-word--I cull-tivate the excessive bandying of a playful new and rarefied term. But like I said--we came in come and flew wheeling over the mumps of D.F. and smogged collateral. (Pointing: "You will remain swampy, 3rd world friends of Mahantla.") Like I said back in twelve--"sing loud!" I'm lost now.
:Twelve weeks later I returned home from my labyrical meander--my post adolescent dream time on "the other side" of "the other side"--so-called--with an inspirational mug of thick crockery to place next to my writing space. It says "CLASS OF 1988 THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD OF YOU...Don’t blow it!” I worry about blowing it and think very concretely in terms of "days."
:went flowing gladly until :"gong! " As I stepped out onto the porch I knew I had arrived cause I smelled the peaches, pussy, and spices of my east-indian hotpants from Decatur, GA. What hammy beasts, like german army helmets defying gravity with a facile and no-nonsense grace, brown exotic nipples, with the nicest caste-dot I ever saw--pure harlot. I actually brought her back home in a time-machine (see iss. #6, ed.) but hell-fire, son, that's a totally different credibility issue altogether.
:I sense a rapid disintegration from an (at best) nebulous gun-shot runners take-off like jackalopes to an as yet undefined destiny. That's the freedom we here at Balo Co. affirm--come buy into our myth we just love you. Your ritalin-laced spawn and that whore of a wife of yours. Just you watch as we stuff lil' Dot's hand in the Dispose-All; and Bobby, a scarred eunuch in the corporate choir. No continuing your gene-line, bub, you've been cancelled, and won't be returning to join next season's lineup. Perhaps the syndicate veteran's association'll pick you up but frankly, dear, you just never were there but by the grace of our media pyrotechnicians and Agents of Mass Ledgermain--we found out long ago that having more observers at every angle muddles not clears the consensus of truth in an industrial info market such as the U. S. No sweat or condemno, rifle-boy, just some resigned sighs. Don't shoot up my prenumbrance. :The phone rings. Mother Marga in bun, tight-shit for breast expansion--guns of navarrone more lighke it--The dialer, a young mother of 6: "Say Mother Marga, could you still use some help on that committee?"
:M.M. "We sure could, we've still got a big smoking problem." As this senseless formation defies itself in flesh, the cam-pan reveals a ribald party scene thru the smoke glass next door. In silhouette we see a top-hatted man whipping a shapely woman, bone in mouth, collared to an unknown anchor. 3 spectacles (pairs) and note pads look on in conference. The earth is spinning of its own volition, or so it would seem and it's up to this trio to prove otherwise. Detailed analysis of the Peking Butterfly Phenomenon has led mankind to focus upon this very act as the answer, the magic 8-ball of its collective fate. The Women's Science Caucus, NOW, and various other political and social groups are outraged. :So what is a man supposed to do? How is the slippery slope of Millennial Armageddonism to be shirked off the oxen and thrown back up into the farmer's face? I've been to Armageddon, folks, it's a harmless green field with a cul-de-sac for toub, and placid viewing by busloads of pilgro-tourists. Masada. Float in the dead sea. The charm of Jerusalem's sirens and mosque calls in the night air over the mount of olives. Remember--when we kissed beneath the smoke of the exploding gas canister, that unprovoked salvo which jogged our adrenals? War and religion often suck one another out in the parks like diseased homo hustlers and nobody cares but us chickens. More than one reason for that one, my friend, my scared pieces of meat for sale--we ain't buyin' either--though we prob'ly would. Maybe an applause for the Unabomber is in order....But pardon me, I feel venom for other, hidden reasons.
:ESSAY ON UNCLE TOM.S CABIN :Uncle Tom's is really one of the first tryly feminist real heroes people like Cassie, Mrs. Shelby, Chloe, Clair, and and, of course, Eva who clearly outdoes whom one call really feminine his nobility of spirit, think? If why does Eliza to change into the a pretty man to make escape to Canada?
If I can achieve the door, the part of the story where I get up the seven lucky steps and onto the porch, where I open, finally got home to face myself, after twelve weeks of meander, before which I used to say: "sing loud" but now meekly tend towards the opposite proposition....So I open the door but nothing changes, as if there is an invisible barrier in the door which translates, tinges with haze, and otherwise willynambers. I step thru a urine-warm mist and come thru drenched and offensive-selling. The windows were filled with artificial light as though if yellow opaque panels backlit by fluorescent tubes illuminated the scene. “Gosh it was freaky" squealed freckle-girl, who was with me, and who rubbed her slug along the floor and ground her teeth. Her legs were stumpy thighs-mute sausage pegs--and her knuckles bled. Her height, gusto, and professional demeanour were just right for fellatio, and together we marketed this skill across the country, she, the savvy blond, the legless fellatrix and I, the carny barker in bowler derby and striped trousers. We entered this golden home warm and damp and the smell! I dragged along as though gravity had been exaggerated, and my sideshow queen stumped along, thrashing about with incredible slowness, grunting words low and terrifying in crocodile lumps....She began to fall but hung suspended in the air--as if this was not enough to assault the fortitude of my heart, there were from the extremities of her "limbs" blurs of motion which stood captured like brushlines of acrylic fixed upon a canvas. I didn't have the energy to observe further, and I felt myself being pushed on thru air of wet cardboard, straining into a splintering sudden corkpop motion and the air crashed about me as I fell into the room, dry and ruffled, on the floor aching with a flacotti itch, and confused pulse of thud, and awakening.
:(Then, perhaps, we can sell ourselves even shorter by listening to the radio, our friends' opinion, or the vitupe of our enemies. Heartbeat, breath pattern, fart communiqués: these are the short stories we need to learn to translate. Fart 101, yes, and spirit. Acrylic. Ink. Rubber cement. Backlog of idiom; fornicators of various formats; short knobs = giggles. Glad I'm not in that club!)
The world still seemed young then in those incredulous, innocent times. The sadness of pooches, woobies, and shag begs to spend the night in the woods, and I think of hanging-trees and means of jettisoning myself safely into an imagined stratosphere of a gentle tumult to the desert floor of my impish choosing....at the corner--the shape junction by which definitions are made, I give pause and consider a few things. :The first of these things, the internment camps of my conflicting ethnicities, cannot be differentiated between what is second, third, or thirtieth. It is tossing about the bed, it is spasm and yellow coating on teeth seen smoke and whiskey--rot and the low-veg. decompo which afflicts tasty gentlemen and low-born scale-guts of the city's less desirable barrios 'hoods and suburban blights. This is L.A. This is not Tokyo. It is also the majority of the east coast. This is the end of something, if only--to paraphrase Churchill-the beginning. Looking around, with onions and seepage from airlocked pinastrates, 1 must force optimism upon myself for fear and disgust--yes, pardon me again, though I'm sick of apologizing and don't care for these bungalows of courage hiding yr. rocksalt, your, buckshot, and your goddam childish tantrums. Guns and buckets, riddles and britches, dollar for dollar the market so rudely considers me a poorer value than the gigantic buttock which blazes the suck-cess trail, the honeybee gathering of hummm which praises the squares and circles of the Sterility Suite at the Hotel New York. Sad but true, I reach two arms, one for each comrade, and feel my way thru the grooves of movement and metal scrapings from a tight squeeze. Look to the glow in the east, the run always rises. Friends, the salad days sit wilted on the plate of nostalgia, and we go hungry looking at the prize-winning squash We forgot to plant in our gog-eyed stupor. Throw off the yoke the yoke the burning lifeless yoke in pursuit of the newest non-commercial success story. Consider me buggered by unseen phallic entities. Then consider yourself. Any difference? No one will listen to god revelations now that the market's been saturated.
:And that brings us to the apex as it were, the rod along which our conclusion's monorail is traveling.... Palm trees glisten tapioca (without lumps, ea.) by the concrete guide walls; earthmounds fall from them to the indentations in the earth where collision is revered and scrap metal the iconography--graphing slowly, charting my course, a lone pilot sits winging and singing war hymns into the echoes of cockbelly throttle, and when she saw me after twelve months of meander she wasn't sure 'twas me....bearded, rank, glaze like pottery--a pot handle for a worrystone--whoever heard of such a thing?
:And then we sang, warbled and haze filter makes us more desirable because we're mysterious. And now I can tell you that the red-suited man is the Hero's father. Adner can tell the red-eye couldn't tell what man warrants heroism.
On the part of life-saving, we are weak--but on cutlass, or halberd, or claymore, we go in big numbers. The creation of our mythos is thus encapsulated in terms; octagons spread connective mantra-ray wings and form hypnotic patterns--repetitions--and hums....wait a minute, the flicker of lightning has distracted me, and a walk is begged of me. My attitude of maladjustment grins at an irritating bass movement which enters the schema, and the snare mantra perplexes joyously, and the blank four.... (?) yes, I am always getting lost in large chambers and their small corners. Truth Junction, Fla. Crazy death-suits on the screen confuse and make disconnected interjections: before you know it--the janitors are getting the special keys, where the leaky pipes cannot get to them, and the old boys are pissed. Balding men show off to overcompensate for weaknesses and bad self esteem....Why couldn't such freedom ring?
:Diana, a huntress, a gammy lass, a disturbing slant, and jolly old England bewitched by the principle in stout druid form: A Bentley, an apparition: The Exmoor beast, squatting, half-monkey, half-cat, slaughtering sheep, rewriting textbooks wif an Aussie accent--glow glorious, asking for a sign, a baby cold and still.
:"Been....gone....wild....": scrawled in a hermetic workbook--a rock and roll harmony shattered, a poet larking in the pop world, dancing like a spastic gibbon, a rat in white robes--the psychedelic pusher--disaffected, speaking in democracy-flavored "wings." Wings!? Wingie Wingie Wingie! Flying doorways drinking highball afreets--love visions of flying again flying and sun-drenched fields, stalks and bramble hollow spots, an entire summer of jumble butterfly flightpaths, dizzy-headed and flowering among peaceful. As dangerous implantation of ideas begins to get me just over those infamous leafy poles and soaring into the downsite zone where the fields are a blanket: a kind of Americana quixote-type bee where the grey-labe pubes get together for gossip, craft, and old secret lesbo fantasies. Sounds infamous? Racy? Male chicanery on my part? Anatomy of a confession. According to the gimp history, a smashing cultural milestone of muddy and incidental ganges, goddam!
:Je suis le roi. The King turns about the festival site. The royal jesters prance, the great unwashed teem (very smelly) and the youths shout "show us yr tits!" There are cheers of approval -- a skirt flies up and underneath a light fuzz get a bombfull of baleful cries, rending of shirts and there's a smokecloud tumbling with tits, a dirty sock fluttering, a generation of disparately desperate kids stuck on tubes, video games, and sad potheads, the abortion gig--killing babies in the eyes of the "righteous."
:The King, his messenger, his pal, a shadowy double agent called-duh--Janus, R.R. Pvt. 1 st Cl., working for both fornicators, exemplar images of the "open" and "closed" binary proposed by Yon Milhaus at the A.A. Convention, 1994, Suitcase City, Fla.
:Said officers at the scene: "Tear it up, right now. Get out of here. Go." They ingratiate themselves to the family....his wife. "Gimme a shake, pard. " (To the child). What an outrage, clearly over the bounds of decent behavior, a deliberate provocative attempt at humiliation. With a gun, a power to arrest, and a crime, what is our deacon of misdemeanor to do? An enemy creation of myth and cower, floating arclites of justice sweep....just doing it. :A karst system of sinkholes and cool limestone lakes, subterranean, white blind fish, a question of Trust. Sticky yet fragile. Hindlegs sticking out of a savage landscape, a frightening violent history of red grass, thumps and deep killing in one step--a Louisville or Tampa--but not an L.A. People fall thru here all the time, disappear with a great suck--like a sloshing vaginal penetration--into thick milk of minerals in ooze. An accident in one town killed two school boys. A friend of mine killed himself about the same time. So the incidents are intertwined in my memory and I've become weary of the disappearances and the decaying smell of tannin in the leaves. At first, this design pleased me, but not now. Not after my drumbeat heart calibration to the Western Rhythm, the Space and newness, the conventional wisdom. Failure upon failure to integrate--the wasted slippery, the pale remembrances, sadnesses, humiliations. Coming here--no mystery--has deadened me and electrified me alternately, and the rug has spun, and the willow burnt. What now seems trivial is later revealed as being important, and so forth, so "e'va ne plus" as they say, usually with a flippant twist of a cigarette, drink sloshing, nothing really happening, sad and drunken woman in the corner reeling. :Soon, very soon, now, comes a creeping "skrit" noise outside, a relaxation technique beloved by the fancy skipwillies convinced they have problems; hence, they do. People get skittish, unwilling to stand for the wily inroads the complainer makes to bring his troubles into conversations--downright pernicious--and, and, we were all tired of his shit by this time, when he got into eating feces and dead things found at roadsides. There you'd be, watching baseball--a 2nd-base slide: U lookit that slide" and it'd be "Yeah, I been slidin' lately" or other such maudlin leaps of good taste into the department of Bitch--the rodent sandwich he had the other day, something like that; "yeah' sideout we got lotsa befuddle and love at the factory but the job sucks anyway, yeah" he lowers a dark stubbly head and dark circles--he strike a disgusting poet's pose: "is that sexy?" he asks....(well, if ya gotta ask....) The Crowd goes wild anyway, the list of hlaleed i fanwar is read, but back to random screeching, an impulse to be resisted, the world sees an impotent face: a whimsical satire takes a turn for the worst, a black moment in an otherwise "sporty" confraternity of millionaire sons--luminaries whose futures are otherwise written--stone cold, baby--a pop-top of clarity with stimulant properties--some strange chemical CONfluence, the soft porno sensibility of an early older acquaintance, the one with the pedophile vibe upon more jaded perusal--in retrospect, yeah, but there was nothing, just jokes and the zoo, a few beers and once a joint, but the....(my memory fails me, this oyster-myth for virility thing enrapt me hold, gone now for hug, an encase of a sordid grace, long burst liquid by the opposite trail of what they call "evil" in the churches and books about dwarves and elves on quests or fighting a new horde of Darkness to reclaim a legacy, a homeland, a driving relentless matter of pride upon which all of the given race will sacrifice their lives, their honor, the solemn progeny--the " next generation" that will ultimately last gasp into vengeance or genetic oblivion--the last mutants dragging along separate ignoble and lonely family paths--drug fiends, dirty cigarette-stained colonial furniture, etc.). :Thanx for the reminder--the beautiful possibilities in the dessert, rolling in poppies, a scarab-blue shirt in silky rhythmic folds blazes against the terra--sky also aflame--in fact just a general sense of combustion, of heat: the shape of humanity to come....why so droll? The same game, japanese berries: at 8 AM we were again drinking icy gin and tonics, the family had been strafed at our encampment along the dark-waved beach, I had already caused a scene when I took umbrage at a sarcastic and unnecessary affront to my sensibilities by a mob of blank stare, tipped a glass and out into those shifting streets that twist as if alive, inconstant to the point of being really mad--deliveryboys known to break down and cry on the seat of their frustrated pants, taxi drivers of course high-paid--ne plus ultra--the <ejaculate> SHE bursts in, wigglin' up like a packa the good stuff, nipples winking like frenetic eyelids--and she opens up something tasty and over and across the magnetic fields, pylons rising ringed by pulse. Yes, a shout-out to the Nueva Yorx, the allied O-Team and the cackle of old withered woman, a songstress of slow ease, into the wizened and loose flesh of a faded feminine charge, no lack of grace, but a roughing up of the threads: the porcelain smoothness eradicated by years with thank. Some fall slack, wear it well on accepting shoulders. Others deny, seem like sad old actors in commercials.
:A quiet plea for justice by two enamored with the potential of manipulating a system to their own advantage, duking it out under the carved woman, whose granite thighs yet yield to my pliant inquiry. It comes down often, to this, my masthead muse, scaly-tripped beauty of the oceans of passage, and I never just reach out and grab- just sit and stroke languidly, and hand an elongated hand to the floor, a creaky glass, morning sun, and I'm thinking of twelve long weeks during which I found the Beautiful, and became impressed with a lack of personal autonomy bordering on he pathetic. Drawn sunward by long shadows, I pause again to reflect upon the sundry particulars of my collected foibles: there's always something lingering around here; if I don't exploit it, lancet it, it festers. The hypochondriac smile--the charade of the perverse: there's something unwholesome about a person always in fear of getting "found out" in some ambiguous way; I try to let it ooze a bit, but all that I said earlier--well, most anyway, is all crap....
:LAND OFFICE. It has been here, very concrete, upon which it happens--a slanted knife, and edge to keep the youth reeling = "Gee, man." A folk hero with a gun--an outlaw--cringes: "Don't shoot." Another contemplates the other side, the ditch of green sludge where our children mingle--"our babies"--slaking off their thirsts with long draughts of cerveza--a promised land of space, heat, and light, vast triangular views over flatrock and cactus, dry lizard when the lawmen are villains, and the clouds rise--makes me happy, I hum and grin, shape soapy guns, cannot stick to the electric transfer process--sent the young singer gibbering in terror with a head full of chemicals....we'd just love to end on a rise, a powerful rush of emotional, a smack of angry wit--but we wind on, leave, nod.
