Contributor: George Sparling

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The Man first entered through my nose after he had waited outside the doctor’s office in his truck. I had seen him from the waiting room’s window for 30 minutes, then had a procedure done, and 60 minutes later, The Man’s truck was still parked outside. Clearly, as I soon found out, he was the culmination of extensive surveillance developments, a thug utilizing advances in neuro-technology. My paranoia proved true.

I walked past his empty truck and found him smoking on the sidewalk. The Man, scrawny, in his mid-fifties, casually sucked nicotine, then blew it my way as I jabbed my four-pronged aluminum cane at him. “Get the hell away from me. I’ve had enough of you working-class chumps thinking you’re civic-minded now that you get paid by the cops to track me.” The Man said, “I’m only doing my job.” I wanted to walk to the bus stop but I couldn’t, and stood still like a frozen computer. I stopped operating and would never go through the steps to restart.

The Man’s proboscis, the olfactory nerves traveled from his nose to mine, and I hadn’t power to stop it, his nose goblins, boogers, thickened mucous crept into my nasal passage. I inhaled the odor of hamburger and onion rings he had eaten behind the wheel of the truck. Call it olfactory memory. I now lost my own sensory neurons, my life’s worth of smell erased, The Man replaced it. I saw him waft fetid sulphur to his nose, like the Devil, meaning my nose also. Bright sunshine, blue skies, yet there stood the Prince of Darkness.

Traffic played discordant death metal on the street inches away from us. The Man then raped my mouth, his tobacco, liquor, cunnilingus stench, chewing gum, foul gases and the like disappeared my tongue, teeth, soft and hard palates as he quickly ground down my nubbins and inserted everything of his mouth into my mine. Worse than replacing my teeth with his was that my tongue began to form the very words he spoke to me. “Bret Trumbo’s shit,” I said, that my name. His digitalized voice, sounding as an owl’s call but it was just another surveillance technique I previously heard that bounced off houses, telephone poles, trees, the air in my town 7 miles north…I had become my worst enemy. “What an ugly puss, take a look at him,” I said, mimicking the mimickers who derided me, even the minutest, trivial things I did within my house these terrorists’ voices harangued me.

The Man smirked, his insolence, contempt and mockery towards me shaped his sneer as it wiped across my lips. Though I tried hard to maintain my wrath towards The Man, I hated myself for miming his lips’ expression, its sphincters shaped just as his.

I heard a loud engine pass me, my bus’s noise so fierce as if I wore headphones with the volume turned to 100%, the blare traveling through my brain. The Man had transferred his nerve impulses from both his ears through a cranial nerve and into the temporal lobe in my cerebral cortex. His hearing was as good as an owl’s. I also heard from The Man’s tiny implanted device, now embed in my ear, receiving another’s words, instructions about how best to complete replacement, technical jargon, instructions to complete the steps. It was the 21st century’s version of hanged, drawn and quartered, the medieval victim disemboweled, watching (I believed the dead can feel pain greater than the living.) his entrails burn.

Next: the infiltration of my eyes. That tiny accessory I now heard signaled my coming destruction. My hazel irises now colored gray, his eyes. “The eye sees more than the heart knows,” wrote William Blake: he was partly right, but my heart knew, too. I saw through The Man’s eyes and penetrated his clothes, finding a small caliber handgun concealed in a shoulder holster. I wanted to grab the machete from my backpack and mutilate him, but that was so old fashioned. “It is the human that is the alien,” wrote Wallace Stevens, literally, not philosophically.

Other points of entry: anus and penis. My rectum’s memory ( Don’t all parts of the body have consciousness, recollection and retention? ), now his. I felt all the butt-shafting by convicts while he did time for child molestation. Damn, it hurt. Blood seeped from my underpants and down my thigh. His cock, smaller than mine but with larger balls, had had intercourse with many females and males. The Man psychically castrated me, replacing my genitalia with his. Quite a few Filipino “psychic surgeons” performed operations. Perhaps The Man trained there and equipped himself with better ways to thwart my life, make it unbearable and impossible, my enemies’ by-any-means-necessary policy of murder. A cleaner death awaited me rather than bullets, surveillers selecting The Man to rid the community and the world of me.

He pushed himself forward and grasped his arms around me, all points of his body touched mine, then the final touch, he scooched closer, tighter, and drove himself into me and my mind nearly clicked off, except for my final utterance, “Cops eat shit”: 3 of the most inconsequential words in the history of language. The Man walloped my skull with a sledgehammer, then, groping until he found my amygdala, squeezed it as I released a screamless scream, and I was gone. The Man entered all the hollows and crevices of my body and brain until I no longer existed.


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Author: George Sparling

Contributor: George Sparling

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Smoking black hashish with Mary as we sit on a foam mattress upon plywood held up with cement blocks in a one-room shack at the edge of a hacienda, bathroom in an adjacent white concrete building. I saved money from my American job and then quit. I fled bosses, alcoholic DTs, a woman who may or may not have told cops I raped her, collection agencies, jail time for two bad checks, my infant son taken away by my ex-wife, hiding from loan sharks I owed money.

1968: the army massacred students in the Tlateloco housing project in Mexico City. Mary and I know some of the students but not what happened to them. Who knows the fate of our bones or how many times we’ll be buried.

Shit, I was high. Mary stares at my reflection in the window, hashish made from female flowers of cannabis plants, females stronger than males. I stare at her glassy image too. Mary says, “Take a look at yourself,” and I took my hands off her breasts.

Have I got uglier since we first met? She deflects my potential to verbally or physically attack her, and says, “I know a drummer in San Antonio, let’s hitch there, it’s over 800 miles, here’s the last of my Dexedrine.” I put up no resistance.

We each swallow two tablets and finally make it to a main highway headed north. The truck driver evicts his partner from the cab and he must hang on to exposed cargo. Shaky life being odd man out. Mary chatted a bit in Spanish, the driver pleased to have a nice-looking gringo so near and sometimes he touched her thigh after shifting gears. He pulls over and we get out, the helper climbs up and assumes his rightful place.

Nearer the border, I try conversation but she turns her back. Mary will not have sex with me across the road in well-concealed foliage; we could, and she knows it and looks peeved, her face serious. What’s a reflection mean?

Mary’s stern face, her eyebrows bent low over bright green eyes, her smooth arms hug me out of comradeship, and she spits a thick wad of mango into the dirt and says, “Not ripe.” Fatigued, I want to quit and sleep by the side of the road, hoping some peasants will feed me when I awake and take care of me forever.

Yet it isn’t that bad hitching, especially when we talk about the students and revolution. Mary reads headlines at a nearby newspaper stand and tries to learn more about the students.

“Sometimes I think those students should give up,” she says, “Don’t you ever get that feeling?”

“I don’t think real revolutionaries ever give up. Do you?”

“They should save their lives if they know they’ll lose.”

She gives me $50 so when we cross the border, agents will not consider me a bum.

Neal Cassidy, close friend of Kerouac’s, died on Mexican railroad tracks earlier this year. We talk about the psychedelic bus’s name “Further,” what it means, and how Cassidy threw a 4-pound hammer in the air ad infinitum, catching the handle every time, and Mary tells me her drummer boyfriend had dark skin beneath hollowed out eyes like Neal. A small herd of goats crosses the street with a bearded goatherd.

I see her as she walks fifty feet ahead, standing on a road in position for a ride to the border, while I lag behind watching her black hair blow around her head, and remember sitting in a dark theater and saw Kim Novak in the movie about “The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders” on our first date, my first time with a young Italian woman, how I stroked her hair, its black, lustrous strands in affectionate darkness.

I nicknamed her Moll but she never came up one for me.

Three rides later, we were so near the border that we walk across a bridge at Nuevo Laredo, then into Laredo and at customs border guards separate us, Mary led away and I enter a room with five uniformed guards and show them my passport. They strip search me. For drugs? For guns? For intimidation? For political suspicion? Cannabis aroma? I grab my balls, and one checks my rectum with a flashlight, jokes about my girlfriend, Did I sleep with her? Mary tells me they did the same with her, but brave enough to curse the guard when her rough gloved fingers were abusive.

We wander around the U.S. side, uncertain of the unaccustomed noise. We finally make it to San Antonio, and Mary phones her friend who picks us up. He has an apartment and looks at me as suspiciously as the guards had, and he and Mary talk about old friends, what happened to them. Had they intercourse or just talked, I didn’t care. I flop on thick coats, using a few shirts as a pillow. They stood in the next room as drummer talked about making it someday. “You gotta keep the band together, otherwise the band breaks up faster than one night of quickie sex.”

Later, around noon, Mary tells me she’s not going back, she wants to stay in San Antonio with drummer. Mary gives me another $50 and we hug, bonk fists like revolutionaries do. Too tired and winded for my 26-year-old body, I’m vulnerable and afraid I’ll get busted. Suddenly, it’s like a four-pound hammer hitting my head---we no longer are a couple.

I hitch back to the shack, smoke hashish on the mattress, and see my double stare back at me in the windowpane. After more hits, I see Mary’s face, but it slowly dissolves.


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Author: George Sparling

Contributor: George Sparling

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Two ugly lizards climb my wall to eat sow bugs, flies, and cockroaches. I can direct these glaucous reptiles back into their home, a terrarium, with my pineal gland. I eat human placenta whenever I can to boost my immune system. Red peppers, beets, turnips, dandelion leaves, and fetus-food I mix in a cast iron skillet cooked on a wood-burning stove. My teeth, serrated from too much port wine and bad horse while living in Oakland, yet my words are fluent, so others tell me, thoughts spilled loose from my lips, doves escaping their cage.

It was in the hole in prison that I understood I was a shaman, one who knows. The hole was midnight black, with a concrete floor, a small opening to piss and shit, and I was always naked. Where else would you expect to find a man convicted of second-degree murder? Unceremoniously, without mysticism, spirits tore me apart to count my bones. For countless hours I slept in a half-dream as they meticulously counted all my bones. I had that extra bone. Otherwise, the spirits would’ve killed me.

My body, for a while, was a single diamond, quartz crystals filling my intestines, making me adamantine. When the guard delivered slop to me, and said, “Here’s your food, beast,” I knew I had changed, and I was human.

A saddle-billed stork and three cassowary birds lit up the darkness. The stork had a red beak that burned and suffused the hole with light, while the cassowary birds’ necks, glowing blue, red and blue sheen kept me alive in the pit. I saw the earth held up by a giant mammoth and growing from it was the Navel of the World from which the Cosmic Tree grew. I sang like a bull, and talked to yellow lemurs and dark bison. When they finally released me, I told the guards that I lived in the Tree and played on a drum made out of antelope skin. The men howled derisively, and taser-fired electric currents into me but I clung to that Tree and they looked startled because I hadn’t fallen. They stopped the torture.

After I served my sentence, I went back to my cabin in the wilderness where I wore an antler crown on my head, two stitched bear legs wrapped round my waist. I painted deer’s blood on a shirt: frogs, lizards, snakes, and birds, all crimson, life jittered on my torso. My misshapen past I cast aside, unsheathing my criminal skin. The tranquility of the creek danced through my hands, a counterpoise to the violence calcified to my bones as if to dark impermeable granite.

Dressed in street clothes, the next day I went to a bar to shoot some pool. Within ten minutes, a guy slashed me with a long black knife. “Just a quarter-inch more and you would’ve slashed my jugular,” I said to the idiot, my eyes drowning in hate, But after I got stitched up, my eyes reverted to what they were when the tasers struck me: indomitable. Don’t doubt me, you weren’t buried alive in my soul. Home, I laughed, a delirious, ludicrous roar banged against the walls. The knife reminded me of a silver salmon flashing in a ripple of water.

Now, a beard covers the scar like tough, recalcitrant black moss: unafraid eyes, my fierce beauty I stare at in the reflection of a chipped, cracked mirror. But, that wild thing plays in my being’s jazz, its storm and peace, which makes my life a dream of dance, of blood, love, death. Even murder.


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Author: George Sparling