RETORTMAGAZINE.COM

Yesterday’s Drug

I quit my anti-psychotic med and found out that the world actually was undermining
me. The nagging feeling of going to prison and not getting Deadazine, the guards not
handing out my usual nighttime dose, afflicted me with raging paranoia, even more
than total withdrawal in my small house at the edge of town. Denial of the drug, after
years of Deadazine, especially by strangers wearing uniforms and packing Tasers, wasn’t
like withdrawing from it gradually under a psychiatrist’s script-wring hands.

“Forget prison talk. Take the med, sit there in your underwear and read those litbogs
with their lists of best gritty-cooking-noir novels of 2008,” Nan said, her eyes rolling
back, remembering how she used to snort Kleenex-soaked crank. Now she never had to
blow her nose, just lets the booger-clogged nostrils absorb her snot.
“What’s that white thing sticking from your nostril?” I asked, swiveling around,
online clicking AnotherVomitTimeInNoirville. The essence of noir was death, con-
fabulating prison and Deadazine withdrawal, visualizing myself shackled, walking to the
snuff chamber, inmates shouting, “Die, scumbag, serves you right for thinking about
characters from the mind of that suicidally hanged writer David Foster Wallace.”
Yeah, I hated to admit it but Infinite Jest pushed me over into imagining every word
was scanned by Watchers Inc., a privately funded organization dedicated to humiliate me
after discovering I downloaded a litblog, eyeballing their best all-time list of writers
beginning with W, then reading Jest.

“It was either from the bloody nose when I slammed into corner of the car door
or that love tap you gave me last night, thinking I was Girls Wanna Get Knocked Around
But They’d Rather Be Shopping For Dildos With Jagged Sharp Points To Inflict Bodily
Harm On Their Drugged Boyfriends,” Nan said, pulling a foot-long horror film alien
tentacle out her nose, rolling it up and dropping it out the window onto magnolias, seeing
them wither a bit, making a sort of frosty poppy-filled glaze in front of my house.
“I’ll have white things, all kind of things coming out me, if you know what I mean.” I
never told Nan the terrible bouts of suspicion, normally called RPHS ( Raging Paranoia
Horse Shit ). Shrinks who actually knew from which they speak, ones like mine who
admitted she used to work the prison library, redacting and/or scissoring out vicious and
unpardonable passages, all suggesting even ambiguously a taint of Wallacism, which I
too knew felt shocked that I’d read the biblical length Jest.

My usual soup de jour were novels of garroted bodies floating in ooze, slime dripping
from detectives who’d gone over and into the black arts as Mr. D. Cheney used to orgasm
about,  perv, ex-apparatchik voyeurs spunking their dicks in cold fondue, and at least one
dominatrix telling off a would-be assassin sponsored by the cereal industry, a man so
loathingly evil his task was to kill as many consumers of natural and/or organic breakfast
food as possible, he had the list. Ms. Dominatrix then raised her skirt, showing off gams,
then taking a full-fashioned seamed stocking and wrapping it around his nut bag, telling
him he should’ve been around when she’d panty-hosed strangled a hitman even worse
than him, a man who used to eat half-cooked penises of fallen clergy, his own dick
just sucked off by a senator’s mistress, herself deeply involved with organized hacking of
corporate execs, gaining access into their secret bank accounts supporting draining
oceans of high-conductivity saline, as yet unstudied by scientists, except those
underground ones known as Water Jammers. Yeah, deeper and deeper, multiple narrators
lounging in wine bars and electronics shops, I could go on but it’s all derivative,
booktalk, the boredom I do so well would only irritate Nan, so I said nothing, except,
“I should’ve stuck to absinthe, Deadazine RIPed me. I’m shafted by Watchers Inc.,
they’re doing saturated bombing techniques, old Vietnam War strategy, quaintly shelved
until Watchers used digital intrusion, I tell you Nan, it’s worse than mind-reading with
Braille.”

“You’ve done worse stuff, like howling, laughing like it’s 2010, thinking about cops
who have the sickness, going boldly and archaically into murder, arson, raping
Dobermans, selling pirated Froot-Loops laced with LSD-drenched cranberry juice to
seniors,” she said.
“Life’s not about reading, it’s about unraveling spools of paranoia, commonly known
as thought,” I said. Nan chewed red licorice, pulling it out, somehow making it look like
the inside of my tomb, I meant, brain.
“You always sound guilty. It’s another way to say I’m sorry, I guess,” she said.
I cogitated, zooming in my depleted happiness quotient, the days when birds used to
perch on my shoulders and head, walking to the subway, feeling proud of myself that the
birds never shat on passengers, riding to my job as a strip club bouncer, even though I
wasn’t at all tough or muscular, I just stared them down and sent them out pissing in their
athletic supporters. In those days women wore them, too. Now, I often wore them,
clicking blogs, popping Deadazine, multitasking, thinking about those strippers,
most wearing clothes, ex-English professors, former entrepreneurs, ex-ministers and out
of work farm historians, so cerebral that men never had to yank, it just happened, internal
nocturnal emissions, sucked inward toward their guilty yet deserving minds.
“I’d like to travel somewhere, but seeing how you’re the only one I know, I’ll
stick here it until hell freezes over.” “Hell freezes over,” an old Adlai Stevenson line
at 1962 UN, when missiles and troops mobilized for doomsday, back when burlesque
queens took it off without a jockstrap, showing only bodies, exact replicas of unemployed
B-movie actresses, even their faces wore look-a-like masks of their more luminous and
famed sisters.

“You sure know a lot for someone in your condition. Should be on a game show or
something. You’re pretty farsighted for a Deadazine guy,” she said.
“It’s sub trivia, a mind fit only for one big thought. Hedgehog philosophizing,”
I told her, letting her absorb my self-depreciation, knowing the one big fear, the prison
gambit, how Watchers Inc. will make me pay for that D.F. Wallace encounter. Maybe
they are actually litbloggers, helpfully critiquing outmoded word conglomerations.
One site I found compelling was called Back Alley Noir, hundreds of noir trailers,
photos of actor/actresses, thoughts on neo-noir plots, some online films—forums, too,
though I’m too backward and shy even to participate. Plus afraid of being called out:
Hey, dummie, who wanted you to butt into our grand theater fantasies; you have to know
what you’re doing before we accept you into this club. More intellectual noir websites
existed but even Back Alley wouldn’t accept me, that I was certain. Shouldn’t have
branched out, should have read slowly monographs about D.F. Wallacism written by
PH.D candidates from slim academic zones.

“Still afraid of prison, I presume,” Nan said, her filmic Ann Savage resemblance,
strangled with a phone cord, how Tom Neal grabbed the line beneath her bedroom’s
locked door and yanked her dead, accidentally, thinking she’d blow the get rich scheme.
Sort of erotic when I thought of telephone cords, millions of voices passing through
them, how the extension cord connected her with all the guys she’d ever screwed or
sucked or spanked, the telephonic goo making her, at least back in those days, a tramp.
A re-make should be made, maybe Nan, now taking acting lessons, though doing
occasional cameos in slasher horror movies, even “chick” films, maybe Nan could reprise
Savage’s role. Pissed me off that cops in original movie caught Neal on the night
highway. Should’ve been last seen hitchhiking, getting into a car heading back east to
resume his musician career. Nan undoubtedly would request that version in a new script,
her peek-a-boo hairstyle overwhelming them: Veronica Lake nostalgia triumphing over
blockbusters. Then she’d appear in semi-nude photos, maybe a sex tape, jettisoning her
into celeb world.  We’d live in Capri-like island, resting bods as I and agency read
scripts, all of course having Nan’s character dying in end, or maybe, surprise, in mid-
film. Then follow up movie casting her in high-budget movie as either zombie or
vampire, whatever gaudy trend ( or trope, a very intellection pleasing word these days )
was happening.

“Here’s the bottle. Take one and forget about that prison fixation,” she added, handing
it to me. I threw it against the wall, never wanting to re-live the Deadazine past, sitting in
front of screen in stinking underwear, re-running yesterday’s litblogs. They changed daily
but never got to the heart of the matter, e.g. the inevitable doom and swift death. But
decline ain’t so bad, though, a long and slow ending—credits scrolling down for eons—
so soft the landing wouldn’t be felt, soul of course drifting upwards if not to heaven then
re-birth as a nanotech particle in Zeus-like hero’s limbic system  back on earth.

Present story shifts:  Guards, sophisticated now it latest biochemical manipulation,
create a more profound, deeper life than I ever could imagine during lifer-type litblog
link clicking. I’m in webcam room, getting asked questions and told off about everything
I’ve done in my life, every scintilla of experience dissected continually. It’s impossible to
fake it, lying or concealing thoughts in maze brain.

Watchers Inc. initiates interrogate me, challenging all I’d read or seen movie-wise. It’s
all uploaded to every URL in the world. Trust me, it’s possible. Nan isn’t the promising
actress, but an informer, now a Watchers Inc. member, no longer a noir fantasia. I’m an
unpaid reality performer, trafficked plunder, in the most viewed ongoing film in 3-D
cinematic history, scrolling through eyeballs, every world citizen needing only to blink
their eyes revealing my pre-determined destiny.

The kicker is when a cord gets wrapped around my throat, gouts of bloody sperm
occasionally exploding volcanic and painful. This, a torture fad, blending pleasure and
pain until there’s no difference.

A facilitator informs me Deadazine is yesterday’s drug. Downloading my brain is first
successful effort at a prison-less world: I, a sucker for liblogs, their historical firsts lists.

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© George Sparling 2010