BARRIERS, OBSTACLES, TIGER TRAPS

Our theme? Modernity! Pointless, purposeful, impossible and fun and horrifying, slo-mo, sudden, and endless.

SAINT DARLENE!

ALL-OUT WORTHLESSVILLE TEATIME VIRTUAL THEATRE
Cast of Characters:
ST. DARLENE LUSTIG, real estate agent.
OUR SPORTY SPICE, world-class Loser.
The living room of a $300,000 aluminum house. Enter DARLENE
Darlene: What did Sporty say? Oh yes: "I'm the featured player of a thousand snuff films!" [Darlene chuckles]
Enter SPORTY as glowing apparition.
Darlene: Hark! Mine favorite Martian appears to reaffirm mine faithlessness!
DARLENE begins to glow while SPORTY'S halo dims. At the brightest moment, DARLENE vanishes and SPORTY is alone and all too human at the edge of a forest at night.
SPORTY: God knows what's going on. [looks around] This has eternity beat by miles. I could be happy here. [Looks at audience] Get lost. Now. This play is over. [Sporty disappears into the woods]

WEEKEND WITH SPORTY SPICE!

So I've temporarily been condemned to flesh and in Midwest United States no less . Yes, it looks like a time to find knives and ammo and random objects of our disaffection, but this is the Two Thousands, we do acknowledge that fact, so I, Sporty Spice, hereby decree a modified kill-spree where [sigh] no one gets killed.
So! So Posh Spice is so disappeared! [Scary won't return calls and Ginger's busy with United Nations. Baby is irrelevant.] Posh is just gone and she was the best of us five! [Don't even dare to demur! Sporty is talking about her "dead" girlfriend!]

In a random city, my first objective is THE KIDS. I will find a way to win them to Our Side, if not a Rock Star Girl, then a Whispering Campaign: "Your parents are wrong. You don't have to listen to them anymore."
Follow the pretty girls everywhere and eventually you will find the simulacrum of Posh ... she could be twelve or forty or whatever, the important thing is to spend real and intense time with the New Posh, brainwash her with the Truth and when you've accomplished that, walk away, walk hundreds of miles away ... the horrible, useless town is changed for the better, I, Sporty, am maybe happier, and our real power is greater.

PUNK ROCK PRESIDENT IN CRISIS

Flowers are the Flags of God.
And where do I stand with God?
I race to escape His Displeasure.
Or I'm maybe on my Back on a Tile Floor--
Marching to the Corner Store,
Dressed to the Nines--
A living Morality Play all Day.
All my Life. So I breathe,
I tell myself I'm real, I'm real,
I tell myself I love my Life--
On Earth looking at Stars.
On Drugs looking at Stars.
On Eternity We are Stars.
This is not a Secret.
This is obvious to Everyone.

CLAIRE

Claire was given the keys to the cities, designed ad campaigns, topped the best sellers lists, was given her own sitcoms and dramas and variety shows and cartoons and breakfast cereals; standing ovations at the United Nations, recordings on the radio, a daily column, a love life, her friends, all of this, her War Against Suicide.

THE TORRENTS OF FALL

In the late summer we knew the torrents were coming, enough to wash away half the world. We didn't mind. We couldn't stop it. I founded a rain cult. Now we were happy while it rained. We were happy much of the time until the snow came. So alongside the rain cult I started the snow cult. We were happy when it snowed. Later came the cold cult, dry cult, tornado cult, etc. Now we're all happy, all of the time. Happy birthday. Happy death.

ODE TO DARLENE LUSTIG

For her, I'll go to Mars
And name the desert Lustig
And the highest point Mt. Darlene
But this doesn't matter--
Right now she's gone
And this is really an impossible situation--

One night she was in my room, she really was.
There was some risk to our lives
But we slept together like madmen anyway.
We had money and we spent it,
In fact we had the world,
So we used it up.
The world gone, we stood side-by-side
On a summit high on the fact that we didn't care,
Not about anything except each other.
And in the morning she went out into the desolate world
And she never, ever came back.

So, Darlene Lustig, gone a year, feared dead and all that,
I, a useless guy using up his useless life, get this:
I got a phone call from her at 4 a.m. and that was awhile ago
And I still haven't seen her but at least
I have a real reason to live now.
So here's the prayer ...

Darlene Lustig, protector of the defeated,
Raped in a jail, victorious for all time,
Pray hear us.
Except for you we are killed by suicides.
Except for you we are killed by suicides.
Queen of Everywhere, you belonged to us once and
Darlene Lustig, you will belong to us again.

This fraudulent weather is so sad,
This happy day so fake.

SO SAD ABOUT US

I'm forcing myself to send these words out to the world knowing these words don't matter to the world and the world certainly almost doesn't matter to me.
Women dream of rape, men dream of sleep, food's not really worth the effort, and violence is scary. Holding my breath ... it's almost tomorrow.

THE STORY OF ROCK

Buddy Holly said, "I guess it doesn't matter anymore" and he is so correct. I know you're fanatically devoted to "The Day the Music Died", you like to sing along with your good friends while drinking wine and I heard about your heroin abuse episode at this year's Jimmy Buffett concert: "Everybody in my office is a junkie!" Congratulations.
"Rock" is the triumph, finally, of the loser. So there.

LOVELESS

The house wasn't haunted, it was on fire.
Firemen on strike,
All exits hopelessly blocked
--Inside the deep freezer--
So you lived and went on to host my favorite infomercial?

SPORTY DEMOLISHES SPICE WORLD!

If Bizarro Sporty really wants to make a good first impression on her boss, if she believes in the product she's pushing, don't be afeared. I, the true Our Sporty Spice am tuned-in, turned-on, and a drop-out? I am such a drop-out, so much down-and-out that homeless men look like sell-outs next to me.
Someone. Someone please come stand next to me.

EXCITING WHITE

In a pantry, in a parlour,
In a dugout shelled on all sides.
In a good mood, on a crying jag,
On the deck at the railing
On the way to Mecca.
On drugs, of a type,
Of a well-off family,
Of nothing at all. We stride
Down your street, we stand
Outside your house, in the street at night.
We linger, we kiss, goodnight.

POSH vs SPORTY!

In a supertown on a, I guess, mesa, Posh and I are photographed for the cover of Please Kill Me Weekly. Luckily we find the secret elevator, down to the Carlsbad Caverns where we attempt successfully a fistfight which Posh wins. At the end of this ordinary day we fall into a stack of fur coats. We wake up on a jet over the ocean.

IS THIS THE DEMISE OF SPORTY SPICE?

Sporty Spice in a Slum District at 3 a.m. She got lost. She finds cold medicine in her bright white summer coat, washes it down with strawberry milk, and sleeps it off beside a grocery store. She wakes at dawn, mutters "all right" to herself, smokes clove cigarettes in front of the pawn shop until 9 a.m. when she trades her bracelet for five hundred dollars. Later at the bus station, she studies the departure board, the cities representing friendship, love, adventure, the unknown. She makes her choice, buys a ticket, and thirty hours later Sporty Spice arrives, queen-like in her mind, in the City Where Everything Will Happen.

IF NOT THIS, WHAT?

I know you can explain.
Please don't explain.
If you explain I'll die.
I can't explain.
You won't explain.

The science fiction magazine
Helps me to understand ON THE ROAD.
Jack Kerouac is the fastest man alive!
Jack Kerouac is the Flash!

At the end of the poem
Be sure to make an impact on the reader!

PIXIE AKA NADIA

In a shot-up govt. subsidized housing effort
One pro., one junkie, one suburban-type guy:
How many versions of this all-out worthlessness
Do you need to scan before I am credited w/a
Way out? Maybe sharing needles is the answer ...
Maybe unprotected sex will equal success ...
Am I addicted to chlorine bleach?
Yes, I am addicted to chlorine bleach.

Little kids, old guys, last ditch efforts.
Last ditch kids, little guys, old, never a chance at success efforts.
Summer, babe.

USA TODAY

Let's make a movie about how fabulous it is to die for freedom. Let's lie and not tell anyone that the only way to accomplish freedom is to insist, "I'm free." You either have the courage to admit that you are a free human being or you have the right to be slaughtered anytime a boss says it's time to go get slaughtered. Living on your knees or dying standing tall is a fake choice. We die on our knees, all of us. So if you're not into life, good luck with that death thing.

INTERNATIONALISTS!

In a diamond-encrusted cavern-like showroom, in the center of empty space standing on an exploding star mosaic, I was there, I'm still there, the doors are locked, a death squad leader in a speaker truck parked out front on Cheapside, he rants into his microphone: "Kit Kat 66! See him die! The traitor had the gall to say that Universe City was not the world! Kit Kat 66! In a gas chamber! You're next!"
I'm still standing there watching white light in the gloom when a movie star, or at least she looks like a movie star, stands in a doorway half-dressed. She gestures, I approach. She says, "I'm illusion, Kit Kat 66. I'm made of light. Watch!" The words "We love you" and "We're sorry" appear in the air between the movie star and myself. I smile, hang my head, and wait.
A voice from inside the doorway: "Come here, Kit!" She laughs. "Come quick!" I go inside, see her sprawled on a bed. "Illusion?" I ask. "Real!" she says. "Kiss me!" she says.

OUR SPORTY SPICE!

Sporty Spice woke up in the bed of some apparently rich person. It looks like gold-flake paint on the headboard, she thought. I can't believe I'm not dead, she thought.
Dressed in some man's suit, she eventually found her way out of the big empty house onto a sidewalk in an unidentifiable city. Pleasant enough, apparently springtime, little children walking to the park with their nurse.
She found a half-pack of cigarettes with an Ohio tax stamp, cluing her in as to her likely locale. She began to walk in the over-sized oxfords, choosing to walk down the least expensive street at each corner. Destination? Ghetto!
Six months later S.S. was singing for the Next Nothing and soon was paid a record-high advance by Universal Music Group. Sporty quit before the first recording session. She disappeared in the Los Angeles dusk.
She reappeared in London, always talking about Tokyo.

ESTHER & THE DEUTCHER GIRLS

Esther Lustig, modern co-ed in the Fall of 1986, was determined to rush the Psi Delts; she was willing to give all, including her life, to be numbered alongside the sexiest girls at State.
Her friend Dashiell now called himself "Dusk". Dusk worked at the Student Union Information Desk for $3.35/hr. He was not a student, he called himself a "neutral observer", in love with Esther, in love with life and death (maybe) and rock music and whatever. He was 19. The average age of a dead American soldier in Vietnam was 19.

Esther met Dusk at the end of the day at the front gate of State U.:
"Dash! Dash! It's dusk!"
"I'm Dusk, Esther! You're all day, all night, dear Esther!"
"Dear Esther? Dash, dearest Dash ... "
The two of them waited a few minutes for dusk to resolve itself into night.
Esther and Dusk walked High Street. Esther said, "I'm in college in the capital city, you're getting paid to read books all day, I mean are our lives over with or what?"
Dusk answered, "Esther, I'm pretty sure that this is nowhere near the end of our lives."
"I know, Dash, sad and happy and all that--I mean, this, right now forever, right? I'm 21, it's all over, right?" Esther cried like mad, Dusk held her, kissed her face, her mouth, like they were lovers.

Three weeks later on a Friday night Esther was hazed by the Psi Delta girls. The sisters got her drunk and put her through the rituals, the symbolic rape and versions of every kind of horror until Esther fell comatose into a ditch.

Dusk rang the sorority house buzzer early Saturday morning. What a vicious lie, he thought as a beautiful Deutcher Girl opened the door wide.
"You must be Dusk!" she gushed.
"My name is Dash or Dashiell. Dusk is just a stupid nickname from a long time ago."
"O.K. 'Dash'. How about some champagne?"
"At eight in the morning? Perfect! Where's Esther Lustig?"
"She'll be around soon." Their eyes locked. She was beautiful. Dash was unfazed.

For an hour, Dash and the sister (whose name was Trish) sat side-by-side on a couch. When the university bells rang nine times, another sister helped Esther hobble into the room. Trish crossed the room, smiled, kissed Esther lightly on the mouth, and announced, "Esther Lustig, Psi Delt!" Dash clapped once.

The next winter, outside at midnight by Lake Erie, Esther and Dash stood in the snow, breathing in new cold air, looking around in wonder at the new frozen world.
"Are we married?" asked Dash.
"Never. Ever. Never," answered Esther. They turned to face each other, reassurance for now, for then, for the future, for the no future, slow, fast, stop, go, wreck, repair--the snow started up again. They walked back towards the car.
Dash drove. Esther slept and dreamt she was in love with somebody or something.

THE NEXT NOTHING

John goes into a camera store on impulse, finds a pair of binoculars, aims them out the window, and sees Betty for the first time. He whispers to himself, "I belong to you," replaces the binoculars and wanders the city in a daze the rest of the hour until time to return to the tire-burning factory.
Betty attempts to evade an evangelist on the bus, is unsuccessful, so she finally says, "All right! I believe! Go away!" The evangelist adds one to the tally in his pocket notebook and retreats to the back of the bus.
John discovers that Betty lives in a building opposite his YMCA. At first opportunity he approaches her, introduces himself, and asks her to dinner. She likes his looks enough to say yes. The date is fine. Although Betty makes clear that she wants no boyfriend, John thinks of Betty as his girlfriend in his heart of hearts. Betty is beautiful. John has no deformities. Oh, and the world is on the brink of nuclear war. I say "oh" because John and Betty couldn't care less. They don't want to die, of course, who does? But beyond a certain awareness of life being suddenly snuffed out, these futuristic lives of theirs are fairly ordinary. Ordinary in that they go through their days without falling apart.

For their second date, for their third, for every date, every day Betty likes John a little more. John's love is unending.

A friend of John's, Johnny, cowers in a dugout in Central Asia beside Foreign Legionnaire Josette. Johnny loves Josette, Josette loves Johnny, and soon they will be dead. At that moment Betty writes a poem:

OF A SHOOK DIE
I am for sex
I don't know sex
Here comes super sex
I am too pure
Sex, dope, I'll never know
If I was high
If I was always fucking
I'll never know.

And, checking in with John, he stands on a catwalk heaving tires into a holocaust.

Betty's on the telephone:
"John, how is it that I like you?"
"It's just that you didn't hate me straight away."
"This is love?"
"Not at all. You're right to like me, you're right not to like me, Betty. I'm a safe bet."
The phone line hisses silence. Finally, Betty says, "My father died when I was little."
"Then I'm your father for now. I don't know." Not even Betty knows that she smiles in gratitude.

John can't sleep that night, so he listens to war bulletins on the radio, half-praying for an American victory, with the rest of his mind trying to picture Betty. At that moment, Betty dreams of a super-heroic suburban kid named Esther.

John sees stars when a stack of tires overturns on him. He laughs as he climbs out of the imitation of wreckage. Co-worker Josie corners him at break-time against a candy-bar machine.
"I'm into you," she purrs.
"I'm all about that," John replies, uncertainly. Josie presses her mouth against his. Now every break is about sex with Josie.
Three days later, she doesn't show. Co-workers reveal that Josie was killed in a car wreck. John breaks the glass in the restroom mirror with his forehead.

Betty decides to write a novel about her dream heroine, Esther. She keeps her date with John at a drugstore lunch counter. She notices the gash in his forehead.
"So you broke up with a girl?"
"Yeah."
John has taken to carrying a notebook since Josie's death. John notices that Betty is carrying a notebook as well and proposes that they each write a poem. Betty consents. They each bend over their pages.
Betty's title:

SHREDDER SIMPLISTIC
Launcher countdown superslide
At the end of time
For all time, my timeless
Stanzas overcome death.
I am so right, so always
Deceived, so easy
For now, for not yet
Away from the wrong
Toward more wrong.
You thought I knew.
I never knew.
The sun splashes down.
My world ends again.

"I feel like my poem is all last lines," says Betty.
John's title:

COOL TO CRASH
Deceit of a fortune simplistic.
For a girl, for Josie, her shroud.
I wear a black carnation for a worse world
Minus a girl who gave herself to me.
One day, she's mine, next day
She's dead.
Is she dead?
Yes, she is dead.

"Oh yeah, this girl I know died," says John.

Betty wins the poetry contest and pops the prize in her mouth: one perfect cherry.

On May Day the tire-burning factory goes on strike. Instead of arguing with the workers, the mysterious owners shut the factory down for good. Soon enough, John is sleeping in the park, eating at soup kitchens. Betty quits her job and joins John in the park.
For ten days the two of them have been tracing circles around their nondescript city. At last Betty has to say it: "Let's enlist in the goddam army."
John doesn't look forward to being shot in the head, but he knows she is right.

Six rigorous months later, John and Betty patrol a Kashmir village in Occupied India, two MPs in love. In that six months they had slept together at last, John no longer a father or even a brother to Betty, no, now he is her confessed boyfriend! John can't believe his luck.

In white helmets and MP armbands, armed with cudgels, they patrol a weird world, a world away, worlds without end, identical except for sex, automatics in holsters, two army cops in love.

At the end of their service contracts John and Betty are rotated back to Ohio and honorably discharged into post-war boom America. They enter U.S. airspace. John remembers Josie. Betty wonders what television will be like.

Back home in 2 1/2 year-old costume, the two at first sleep outdoors, walk in circles around the city, uncertain and happy. At last John calls Paul, his union rep from the tire-burning factory days.
Paul says that John and Betty could easily get hired as city cops, ride in the same cruiser and all, but John quickly nixes that idea. "Still hate cops," he explains.
Paul arranges housing at a hotel for striking workers. "Take as long as you want to decide what's next for you. Goddam war heroes."

The sun rises and sets and rises, the earth speeds through space in an elliptical orbit around the sun, millions of people are born, die, and John and Betty wait in line for fish sandwiches at a fast-food restaurant. "We won't work here," Betty whispers to John.

On a cold spring day, John calls Betty on her celly: "I can see you."
Betty stops and scans her worldview until she sights John. His heart filling with warmth, a certain heat, John runs toward her at full speed, stops short, and kisses who seems like the only friend he's ever had, namely Betty. She smiles like mad--on the radio, on the TV, over loudspeakers, at that moment Year One of One-Hundred Years of Peace is announced and our heroes want to believe it.
"Happy Century of Peace, John!"
"Fly kites, Betty!"

Soon, Paul pages John with good news: "You and Betty are to report to Supercool Pictures in Los Angeles, next Monday, 8 a.m. A thousand a week to write dialogue for the new Sex Pistols biopic!"
An eventful bus ride later, a secretary shows Betty and John to their windowed office. Two years later, the two win Academy Awards and book contracts, John with Random House, Betty with New Directions. John travels to Texas to write his first novel, The Story of Hate. Betty stays in Columbus to write Fake World Real.

In Texas, John walks from his hotel to the Mega-Lo Mart, to the desert, to the taco stand, to the coffee shop. Every day. He writes one page at each station.
In Columbus, Betty registers in a creative writing class at Ohio State. Her finished novel receives an "A".

Some nights John calls Betty:
"How come we're not married?" he asks.
"We're better than married. We're fated, doomed, stuck, um."
"Um is right. Let's render unto Caesar, go through with the stupid ceremony."
"Yes and yes and yes."

A STORY OF LOVE

Ethan waited for Cal at the Certified Station, the sun slowly sank in the west, a wino begged for change, and little kids were everywhere you looked. The bank clock read "8:01/85*F" when Cal ambled into sight, a smile, a wave, a 40 oz. beer bottle raised over his head. I guess this means we drink tonight, thought Ethan as he entered the gas station mini-mart to buy two more forties.
"Ethan, you goddam Dutchman! How wonderful that we pointless young men are walking pointless drunk to a pointless rock show!" The alcohol was making Cal philosophical already. Ethan decided to join in the spirit though he wouldn't be drunk for awhile. "Yes, Cal, irrelevance is fine. If the rock music moves us, fine, I mean, if a beautiful girl falls in love with me tonight we're all going to die just the same." "Fine," replied Cal.
Ethan took a long pull that finished off his bottle outside the last liquor store before the Chuckle Club. Calvin went inside while Ethan was finally buzzing out front, obscurely inspired and moved by a teenaged gangster, a derelict, an old guy. "Because really we're pussies in the end," Cal said as explanation for the fifth of peppermint schnapps. "Liqueur vs. liquor," said Ethan.
Bottle finished, it was pretty dark out when they entered the Chuckle Club and even darker inside. Ethan stared at a girl and she stared back and forty years later Calvin read the lyrics to "Wild Thing" at the side of Ethan's grave.

ZERO LOVES HERO

She waits in a cement blockhouse (romantic!)
Waits with one signal candle
Lit in an open window.
She has five gallons of gasoline
A thousand packs of matches
Ten lighters and
She's beautiful.
Perfect really.
She spies the shape of a man
Approaching in deep dusk
Blows out the candle
Sets aside oleo-smeared crackers
And watches.
She opens the lid of the control-panel
Studies her options
And waits.
At a hundred yards the man stops
Shines a flashlight in his face.
Two minutes later
The man falls into the woman's arms
Under a starless sky
Two sentries in love
Their kisses like prayers
That this war will never stop.

SPORTY SPICE EXACTS HER POUND OF FLESH!

Stalkers and serial killers are easy prey for this S.S./U.S., mystery men and baby dolls and punks and punk rockers all are dispatched with disarming alacrity, the cute, the lovable, none of you are America's Favorite Pastime (what is? Swinging baseball bats at random skulls?) My loveliness I wear like a death mask and for religion I worship a corpse on a cross. I'm standing across the street from you now. I am Sporty Spice. I fade and glow.

ARRIVAL AT SUPERTOWN

Yes, there was a pretty ice skater in her short dress
Her skates on the floor next to the bed.
Her mouth was cold, of course.
The phone rang, it was a spy, he said,
He told me to take the ice skater outside,
To look straight up.
We did. We disappeared.
We reappeared.
Now she was a cinema star.
I stood beside a movie camera.
Someone shouted, "Action!"
A pretty policewoman was at my side.
She whispered close to my ear, "We love you."
My life in Supertown.

CROSSTOWN: NO FUTURE

EARLY SUMMER 1987
The last Salem One-Hundred crushed
In definite summer, infinite somehow
What-is is at the same time
As what's-going-to-be--
She opens closes a magazine
She lies down, she sees possibilities--
In early spring a punk kid blooms
In early summer in upstairs rooms--
Fast. Slow. Somewhere.

YOUR POEM
The millionth flower flows out toward open sea.
I don't know you you don't know me.
Inside the meat locker tap tap.
I love my trap.
Nothing is wrong nothing is right.
Turn off the lights this is the night.

HELLO, SPOTLIGHT!
You sing your signature tune on a soundstage.
No crowd, only recordings of crowds.
Flesh, cling to it, you've got it.
You've got the beginning, the middle, and the end of fun.
I know you, baby, I know you will.

AIR ASSAULT ON LOS ANGELES

Silvery coins in a slot.
We stand-by, side-by-side
Before the bullet-proof plate-glass window.
It snows.
She wears Trans World Airlines gear.
I have no hat. My suit is gray.
I have adored her for thirty seconds
An adoration escalating fast toward Love
When I say--I say "Hi" probably.

SS IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND!

I know it's not wrong to only feel comfortable when everything is a wreck, but Sporty Spice is vulnerable tonight, she's asking God why it has to be this way and she knows the answer already, she just feels like asking, maybe to get the attention of Someone who never paid attention to us before. Response? The usual nothing.
It's left to Sporty Spice to save Western Civilization (which she despises) and most likely she's horribly damaged in the effort and sadly, postwar, the symptoms of this trauma become the new emblems of female sexuality. Sporty sells it to you for decades, now she's Queen Midas--look around--this is Spice World!

INCIDENTAL

OF A COLUMBINE
"Instead of taking the test/
I took 2 to the chest!"
--"Youth of the Nation,"
P.O.D. 2001
On the news on the radio on an earpiece on the bus, all-out everywhere at once, I'd never been happier, never been happy at all, maybe. It was springtimes ago but that half-second resonates into the Two Thousands and forever.
John woke up his neighbor, near-death narcoleptic, traveled troubled trail to United Dairy Farmers where he emptied a cup of coffee into his gut.
Betty stuns the boys at her busstop, rescues others' days from dullness and that's why I worship her. Johnny's cool, too, I guess. These 2 kids keep exploding onto my scene and I couldn't be happier. Stopped my sobbing.

JOHN, BETTY, AND SADNESS
A loopy, loveless day, Betty by herself in a crowd, dressed to the Nines, born to kill, smiling a hundred different dazzling smiles at her office job. At lunch she places a call to John's answering machine: "If you so much as even dare to let me love you any less it could only mean you're not real and I'm in a hospital bed in a coma for five years." Click!
John, hearing the message after arriving home from the tire-burning factory, cried like a happy man for 15-20 seconds. There were plenty of days coming, apparently, and he was glad of that fact.

INCIDENT
In all-out nowhere for ten thousand invisible reasons Betty walks from coffee shop to apartment house, brave, unaware that she is the Enemy of God. For today God has gone mad.
Ten minutes before the end of the world she finds John sitting on her steps. "Ready?" she asks. "As ever," he answers.
They walk side-by-side to the park where they watch the world come to an end. Betty asks, "Why does this always happen?" John searches for a cigarette. Betty looks at the sidewalk intent on an answer. She's pretty. It looks like rain.

JOHN vs BETTY
Psycho vs psychic for the mass-culture minded, a struggle to see who can love whom best. Maybe it's imaginary, yet John doesn't care if it's illusion and Betty cares even less.
See, everything happens all at once, all over, all of the time, events and my god, the excitement! Or--nothing happens at all (my god, the excitement!) John exists. Betty exists. I call that unbelievable luck.

INCIDENTAL 5
"John was dead, man," said Paul. Betty was nonplused.
In a remote Foreign Legion dugout at nearly that moment John was near death. Josette held him in her arms. Surgeons saved his life and he was shipped home to Ohio where Betty met him at the spaceport.
Betty did not recognize the face beneath the unzipped flap. Lids popped open revealing metallic eyes. Paul slapped Betty on the back, John spat blood, everything at last was set right again.

POST-SCRIPT
In a coffee store in the distant far future John and Betty drink tea in a bright orange tearoom.

INTRODUCING ... SPORTY SPICE!

Sporty was a potential picture star in the distant future. The producers wanted to rape her for her screen test--she said, "No way!" So tall and pale with black hair, she attended auditions, was offered a part every time, she said "no" every time.
Finally it was announced everywhere that the exotic girl from Ohio would play the Anti-Christ. She prepared for her role by rolling dice in a darkened room, muttering into telephones, and posing for unearthly beautiful photographs.
And when I saw the movie she was more perfect than anything else I had ever seen. Outside the theater the city was strange and new and previously meaningless events had new significance.

SPICE GIRLS IN LOVE!

In a random time and place, she never expected anything except maybe a glass of water, across the room she spots a slightly big head and a profile she imagines she'd never get tired of studying, maybe worshipping, and unbelievably thirty seconds later she's talking to this creature, a Ukranian Jew sporting a long-time lived-in new wave look, maybe 25.
Sporty tells her lies about herself, too late! She'll tell the truth next time. Sporty Spice walks home alone.
Another night, an American girl, Sporty sees her off and on all day, a lovely girl, poetic without realizing it. At the end of the night the two stand together at the jukebox. Sporty touches the girl's face, tries to find a new way to say "You're beautiful." Sporty shivers with lust, walking home by herself.
God save Sporty Spice and all her girlfriends!

MISSION STATEMENT

We exist to entertain you, to prop you up in the center of all reality, your little successes, your helpful words, when you walk to your car we watch you get in and turn the key in the ignition, everything you do matters so much.
We notice your hairstyles and choice of clothing, when you smile or frown, we see and our spirits soar or collapse.
Will you wake up early or late? What t.v. show will you watch? Please reveal your hopes and daydreams, we've got to know! It's about you! You are our little god! Just think of your shattering importance! We gaze on your works and tremble!

ILDIKO'S ALL-TIME BEST DAY

Ildiko pulled her car to the shoulder to watch the sun sink behind the cheerfully ugly insurance complex. There were no children in the backseat, no husband in the passenger seat, the radio was off.
She got out and walked a quarter mile, stopped to stand atop an overpass. She wasn't anything anymore, now she was everything. Maybe in an hour she could face her happy family again.
For now, Ildiko watches the water, following some debris with her eye until it flows out of sight beneath her.

SOME POEM AND ETHAN WHO WROTE IT

Ethan wrote "Dead and Sad in Kansas" on the inside cover of a paperback he hadn't read yet. He thought about writing a poem but went to sleep instead. The phone rang. It was Cal.
"Ethan, it's Cal."
"Yeah. Hello."
"Let's go for a drive."
"O.K."
Ethan put the phone back and looked at his broken clock. He called "time", set the hands at 4. No need to get dressed, he'd slept in his clothes. He picked up the paperback. He wrote: "We ended up in Paris Junction or Paris Station, I don't know which."
He looked out his window hoping to see a tragic girl standing underneath a streetlight. No luck. He drank black instant coffee in the kitchen. Cal knocked after the third cigarette.

Driving aimlessly:
"How's the book?" asked Cal.
"I'm not reading it," replied Ethan.
"Daily Donuts?" asked Cal.
Ethan nodded.

Ethan wrote further at the doughnut shop counter:

There was a carnival in a parking lot.
Del knocked over milk bottles with a rubber ball.
Won a plush skeleton.
We drank watery cokes outside the freak museum.

Ethan looked up and saw Cal's white blond hair, studied the angles in his face. Then he looked down again and wrote:

We hitched all night without getting picked up
And all night we discussed the Great Dead and Sad.
Del said it was idiotic.
I said Dead and Sad was my god.
Our idiotic god.

Cal spoke up, "I'm thinking of going to Milwaukee to see Juliette." Ethan asked if he could come along. Cal replied,"Yeah. I'll quit my job. We'll leave tonight."
Five nights later, Ethan blacked out his poem with a magic marker. And Cal never did say anything else about going to Milwaukee to see Juliette.

SPORTY SPICE IS A GUNSLINGER!

Century 21 Realty, Worthlessville, Ohio
I wonder if you'll ever know what I'm sure I'll never know, namely Thrill-Killing(S.S. reserves all rights to attempted murder for her beloved Cincinnati Police Division,) Snuff Film Enthusiasm (S.S. has starred in too many "Real Live Murder" films to consider them anything other than a headache and a paycheck,) and lastly S.S. does not get high off of A.I.D.S. or Genital Warts or Whatever you freaks are into today.
Let Sporty Spice kill at will (you can trust her! Really!) or let Sporty Spice be disappeared!
--Directive One, Death Squad Sporty Spice Ohio, Winter 2006-07.

YOUR ANSWER!

FROM AN EMPTY SKULL IN A DESERTED AUDITORIUM ...
In this atheistic foxhole at the siege of Babylon, of cigarette machine revivalists, all across Homefront Supertown--dogfaces compare wrist scars and arrest records on the sidewalk under my window, I'm under surveillance for suspected crimes against humanity and soon I'll prance, flit, queen my way through deathcamp sweet deathcamp.
Pop an escalator and I'm all smiles for the executioner, pop a decelerator and look out, world! We're avenging ageless all-agers striking hyper-dramatic freeze-tag-like poses (Poseurs Assemble!) Not born to die. Born dead.

INTRODUCING ... KIT KAT 66!

We never existed until now. "Love My Way" on the radio, the number one song for ten thousand weeks; my alarm clock goes off, but I've been up for hours, writing love poems. The man assigned to be my best friend for the day, Jass, pounds my door, screaming, "Cigarettes and coffee! Wah-Hoo! I've got the tickets in my hand!"
Quickly, I hit the closed circuit camera switch instead of "broadcast," check myself on the t.v. monitor, hit "audio record" and announce into the wall mic: "Yes, I am an American movie star. End transmission."

I go out, Jass gives me a coat and hat and we walk to the front where a police cruiser waits for us. Climbing in the back, Jass informs me that I've only been asleep three months, good news when some people in my hallway have been asleep for a hundred years. One of the cops gives us a cigarette to share. The cruiser rolls away.