Patrick
first became aware of the Cryptobyrinth as a viable means of inconspicuous covert
intra-campus transportation while being scootered in his own locker by both
Mario and Aron Prowman one afternoon two years ago in November sixth grade year
in the middle of transcribing Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God for the Coaches Widow whose eyelids seem to have deep thick rather raccoonesque tire marks
always swerved around them from ingesting copious amounts of David Hale ferried
coffee all morning afternoon and evening and after hearing what sounded like
feminine hiccups parachuting from the inside of knock-out student teacher Miss
Lillian Wiltz classroom leaving his assigned post and slinking out in the
gilded hallway, hearing the sound of balls plummeting in the newly refurbished
gymnasium next door, the constant airy whoosh of a basketball breeze through
the bottom net of a hoop. Hoping to espy what Patrick referred to Von B as the
Greatest Mathematical equation of
rack-plus-boobs-equals-if-she-were-any-more-hotter-he-would-have-to-wear-oven-mitts-to-her-classroom
as he picked up his math book Patrick slowly sneaks out from the side of the Coaches Widow classroom, into the blinding light of the central narthex only to
be met with angry paws by Mario and Aron, who hoisted Patrick up in the air and
immediately windmilling him a full 180 degrees upside down, addressing Patrick
as PAM, humming the Brady Bunch theme song as they inform him that this is the last time
he pulls that Yellow Monkey bar shit at recess, shoving McReynolds out of the
blinding gilded light of the Narthex and back into Miss Mooney’s classroom,
where they took great pleasure in lassoing duck tape around his lips, yanking
Patrick’s pants down and trying to wedge what felt to Patrick as very cold and
somewhat dilled nine-inch long cucumber up the old McReynold Bat cave. After
hearing Patrick wail and kick and scream Mario and Aron removed the dilled
phallic object, Slamming Patrick several times into his own locker, which
Patrick had rigged to open with a voice activator, uttering the most beautiful five letter word
starting with a P known to man which Aron kept on calling him, claiming
that Patrick was nothing short of Pussy whipped with his own pinkie, which the
moment the steel locker saluted open Aron and Mario wedgied Patrick and
scootered him, scootering being a variation of the creeper where the assailant
hangs the incumbent creepie by the back of his underwear hoisting him on to a
coat or towel rack or in this case the vestigial metallic hooks that curve out
like talons from the inside of Patrick’s locker, Patrick’s face red and his
breath short and Aron kicking Patrick in his nads before hanging him by his
underwear and slamming the locker door stapled shut with Patrick’s mouth still
heavily ducktaped shut, his wrists duck-taped together and fastened below his
ass, not knowing exactly what to do when
the locker opened immediately twice afterwards when Aron kept calling Patrick a
fucking pussy.
Patrick
spent about forty-five minutes hanging by the back of his underwear, enough
time to contemplate the vindictive ramifications against Aron and Mario’s nut
sac’s he planned on employing the moment he was physically emancipated. Patrick
tried uttering the word Pussy several times beneath his duck taped lips to no
avail. He then batted the inside of the locker several times with his
thoroughly tattered pro-wings, hearing Mario and Aron explain to Miss Mooney
that Patrick decided to just go on and take off, telling a furious Miss Mooney
that maybe a nice cup of tepid coffee from the faculty lounge would relax her.
With both his lips duck taped and his hands manacled and his
entire corporeal abode hanging like road kill in scooter poster-child form from
the metal talons in usually reserved for fielding Patrick’s military coat
Patrick, feeling like he is back in the womb, swaying back and forth and after
what seemed like eons he decided out of the blue decided to forgo his innate
you-could-learn-a-lot-from-a-McReynolds ingenuity and do something he had never
done since his first day in classroom, when he mouthed out the Lord’s prayer
uttering very Coach M’ Jesus-Christ-banana-condom banana’s over and over again
the first day of Mrs. Brackenhardts classroom, not cognizance of Hyacinth being
directly in front of him, hanging there, his limbs entirely tethered and
helpless, Patrick decided what the hell, and prayed, asking his variation of a
non-ghetto God the father to Please, give him a chance, to save his Irish ass,
to salvage him, to give him insight in how to deal with t he Varisty elite, and
if not that, please help him to espy the courage to ask miss Lilian Wiltz
herself if she can flash him the voluptuous bare contours of her rack sometime
in this period.
It was here, dangling from the back
of his underwear, ensconced in his mold riddled locker, that Patrick seriously
bites down hard into his bottom lips and asks God for a chance. Asks God for
change. Asks God for wisdom. Asks God for a tub of Vaseline applied by a bevy
of Playboy bunnies just behind his testicle to ease the searing burn of his
bending rash. But above all, just asking God for something. Something
intangible that he can’t burn into words. Something that doesn’t require Von
Behren or Tim to role a ten-sided dice and then scrutinize character sheets.
Something, in fact, that applied like spiritual gauze across the welt of human
loneliness and pain, could perhaps change the world as we know it forever and
ever. Amen.
In the middle of Patrick’s prayer he
was brushed with the realization that this was perhaps the very first time in
Patrick’s life that he went to God for a reasons that didn’t include wanting something solely for the
benefit of himself. It wasn’t stuttering out a blink of a prayer with his eyes
when Tim was rattling the dice in the cup of his palm.Before
Patrick could properly calculate just what the fuck was transpiring in his
you-could-learn-a-lot-from-the-hardcore-ingenuity-of-a-Mcreynolds-shut-the
fuck-up he feels his hunched over creepered back topple and almost flip in a
fashion which makes Patrick think that maybe he is being born ass-crack first
and breach into this world before realizing that the hooked metal talons have
severed completely into falling fishing hooks, Patrick looks around to witness
that also the back of his locker has almost completely vanished as well. That
he has more or less fallen through the back of it and that his body now resides
in a marble vestibule or alcove riddled with spider webs and stamped out
cigarette butts and abandoned forties, prompting him to think that it’s my kind
of place, out loud into the ricocheting echo of darkness.
Patrick
snaps his Zippo into life and cautiously begins to scuttle into the black yawn,
looking behind him only once, making out the furrowed lighted slits from the
top of his locker giving him the appearance of a ruffled forehead before
vanishing into the abyss completely. The original entrance seems to wend off
into three disparate shafts; each shaft branching off into various serpentine
vectors, giving Patrick the feeling that he his is nothing more than a winged
rodent inadvertently ensnared in the thick wormy locks of Medusa’s tresses.
Another left and Patrick can see that a crawl size sand path compels him to his
elbows and knees where, stumbling near the end Patrick sees a pebble size of
light zipping into the earth. Patrick hears the sound of sneakers screeching
across a sleek gymnasium-like floor accompanied by the gruff monotone of
Marcellus Buck promulgating just how many bitches he plans to have seated in
his “ho-row” come the upcoming game against the Our Lady of Perpetual Peace
Fightin’ Piranhas. Peeping through he can make out both Aron and Mario jabbing
their elbows out heavily into the side of an already thoroughly pummeled DeJuan
Shelby, who has been trying to make the Perennial Cut of the Varsity basketball
team the last two seasons. Coach M supplicating from the side-lines, asking
Dejuan if he can please, puh-lease, at least endeavor to represent the rich
ethnic heritage of his historically suppressed race and try to play God’s game
of Basketball more like a bourgeoning young black-male.
As Patrick
continues to squint he can make out the shocked frizzy countenance of SPERMY,
the Comet mascot that resembles a caricatured sperm. At the end of every comet
home game capital V, Spermy comes out to center court and pretends to hang
himself in commiserating despair as Coach M, sometimes dressed up a la Napoleon
bon apart, steps up to half court and guillotines the head of the Losers mascot
in front of an uproarious Comet home crowd—the fallen visage of the Mascot will
later be hung like a Remington in the golden-hued hallways of Central CLS, as a
Victory token and a testament to the tradition of on-going excellence that is
Christ Lutheran School.
Between the Visiting team bleachers
and the Sky deck central there is a mural of the Garden of Eden featuring a
very male-enhanced African American variation of Adam shooting what looks
like basketball Apples into a peach-bucket pouting out of the side of the Tree of
knowledge like a wicker chin, being thoroughly cheered on by a voluptuous
cheerleader-attired Eve, the voice of God being represented in thick lettered
blocks, conveying that this is my beloved son I am well pleased.
Slowly Patrick scoots back across the
almost sandy desert of all fours, back into the labyrinth where he is able to
stand up and resume his straggling gait, shaking his lighter several times in
jerk-off motions before the flame alights. With less of a caution and more of a
stutter to his step, Patrick takes the next curve in the labyrinth, swerving a
sharp left, swatting his way through uber-thick webbed lashes, trying not to
ponder too far in ahead about either the shape or the sound of the creature
that could have possibly created it.
“The catacombs of the fucking
school, and no one knows it fucking exists except for me.” Patrick notes,
before deeming himself God damned before yelling out the word fuck as loud as
he humanly can, hearing the residual bellow of his vulgarity. Patrick then publicly
clears his throat, imagines both Aron and Mario in front of him and proceeds to
empty his palate of as many vulgarities as he can think of from the top of his
head laughing almost uncontrollably as the word Pecker thuds into the valleys
and chasm of insurmountable darkness. Patrick begins to laugh and, thinking he
hears a feint snarl or volleying snort, precariously shushes before realizing that is was his locker opening and closing in the distance.
“Kay,” Patrick leans into his
shoulder, making a not to self. “When If I get lost, all I have to do is to
yell out the euphemism for vagina and hopefully I can make out the sounds of my locker
opening and closing. That’s easy.”
Patrick continues to wend his way
into the grisly burrows and tenebrous innards of the school, occasionally
clicking his heals together and yelling out the word Vagina, smiling upon
hearing the metallic feint swat of his locker opening and closing in the
background like a dyslexic compass, guiding his orientation back to his place
that will one day be known as home. Still with lighter ahead of his chest
little-light-o-mine-style, Patrick continues traipsing through the interior of
the school, brushing off the sound of distant rattles and grunts as he wades
his way across damp pastures of loose brick, the occasional littered pyre of
crushed beer cans with odd rusty tops and long-abandoned cigarette corks. Every
time Patrick shuffles into a different branch of the tunnel, he finds himself
looking out near a vent or locker leading to a different section of the school.
Twice Patrick clambered up the bottom of a swerved metallic tongue that
resembled the curly slide in the top of Bradley Park only to find himself
peeping out of the vent leading to the Skybox suite or what appears to be the
seldom used Library, the one vector of the school that is even gloomier and
more cob-webbed riddled than contours of the labyrinth Patrick finds himself in
now. A different tunnel had a series of staircases and a quick slime-damp chute
where Patrick then found himself above the stage, squinting between various
rafters, watching Miss Brakenbart spray down into the top of her blow horn into his brother's Allan class. The doled
pipe that seems to be bleeding over with a coast of interior light leads
Patrick to promptly assume that he is flanked behind the blinding trophy cases
of Central narthex. Even tucked inside the veins of the school Patrick still
slates his fingers over the top of his forehead as if stranded in mid-Harvey
Liddles nightly twenty-one gun salute. Perceiving the drilled screwed pegs
Patrick assumes are used to fasten the mounted heads of the fallen mascots
Patrick discerns that three out of every four caricatured mascots heads can
easily be appropriated to fit the gruff almost angular contours of Patrick’s
own face so that he can look out through them like a periscope, garnering and
uninhibited view of the hallway below. Patrick spends a good forty-five minutes
squinting in to the Vent that he is sure is the Girls locker room, a smile of
wicked-wished for adolescent pleasures smeared into his countenance as he
pictures Karen Pinsol and Hyacinth Lionowski undressing each other and somehow splattering copious
amounts of lotion in the direction of his voyeuristic vision in the process is
quickly assuaged when he sees the elephantine ankles of Bev Pinesol waddle into
the hushed pink atmosphere of the Girls restroom, a bushel of tabloids wedged
under the flabby wing of her left arm. The color of Patrick’s face
transmogrifies into one of set-for-life lotto spontaneous scratch-off glee to
one of sickly-sour apple green when he hears Bev breath out rather heavily as
she staples the stall door shut, talking to herself about indulging in some
serious squatting time before ghastly plops and ripples Patrick is certain the
anatomy of no human being is capable of, much less one in possession of a vagina, is capable
of creating. As Patrick takes off running in the opposite direction he comes
across what looks like a thick knotted rope and plummets, hard core, to the
bottom, raking his limbs across a batch of leaves crumpled below. Squinting up
he can make out the neon outline and solid casino bling of the Faculty lounge.
There is a lever shaped like exaclibur lodged in an impenetrable cement slab.
Patrick flicks to life the flint of his lighter and looking up, he can see what
looks like a craps table hung upside down. Looking up through the slight grille
ridges Patrick sees what looks what looks like the quick buff of Coach M’s Nike
Florsheims, saddled around a double C plus plus pink brassiere. From the static elongates quiver their
shadows create it appears that the Coach is receiving a pretty decent lap-dance.
“Fuck,”
Patrick says to himself, chagrined with the disproportionate angle his viewing
neck allows him. “Coach M gets Lilian Wiltz’s Fragina daubed in his face, and
all I get to see his Bev Pinsol taking what looks like a calculated shit.”
At the words
“fragina” Patrick hears the metallic slap of his locker opening and closing,
reminding him that he is not too far from the original entrance of this mossy
womb. The next deep shaft Patrick sees the original wing of his locker and
shout sat the word “fragina” two more times as if waving salutations at an old
friend, shaking his head back and forth astounded at his voice activator
you-can-learn-a lot-from-the-ingenuity-of-a-McReynolds-shut-the-fuck-up
ingenuity. Quickly dodging back in the interior of his locker to grab his
military coat Patrick then glances down at the blinking digitalized lashes of
his watch and realizing that he has just fifteen minutes left until his mom
picks him up at the corner of Starr and Westermoreland, near the drive-by shooting
abandoned Meat Market a.k.a. Loser entrance to the school. Patrick continues
jaunting, upon a heavy russet and gravel path. He removes a filched Benson and
Hedges from the interior of his coat and, momentarily relieving the lighter
from it’s station in front of his immediate vision, slams mid-stride and
crotch-first into another lever, this one activating a solid mechanical shake
and yawn. Patrick stops and pauses, leaps back. It looks like the inside of the
wall is blinking it’s lids inward.
“Fuck,” He
says.
In front of
Patrick is the all-too familiar contours of the green chalkboard he spends an
approximated forty-five minutes a night chiseling highlighted selected portions
of SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD from. Patrick says the word cool and yanks
the lever again, thinking that perhaps this could come in handy someday.
Patrick yanks the lever down like a joystick again. On both sides of the wall
it appears to be a reversible blackboard. As the blackboard flips over and back
again from interior-to-exterior Patrick yells out the word “Fragina” once
again, watching his locker open and close, as if waving to a distant friend.
From the
inside of the catacombs Patrick steps back and smiles.
“Cool,” He
says. “Life is good.”
Patrick
then continued to monopolize the majority of his late afternoons ensconced in a
splunkering dither of curiosity and elaborated awe meandering inside the
purple-walled catacombs of what he would later label as The Cryptobyrinth,
spending the first fifteen minutes of his daily Sinners in the Hands of An
ANGRY GOD chalky carpel-tunnel inducing elbow rant in front of the blackboard
before the Coaches Widow publicly clears her throat in a fusillade of little
grunts and snorts before swiveling her permy countenance and holding up her
jaundice Styrofoam coffee cup and asking Patrick in what classroom David Hale
just so happens to be residing in at this hour and every night, Patrick will
take a deep breath and have to explain to the Coach’s widow over and over again
that Hale is off for the night, leaving a bemused countenance Coach’s widow on
her own, scurrying through the hallways coffee-cup alighted, asking where David
Hale is while sputtering out various
passages of Victorian longing penned by the Bronte sisters.
After purling
his lips and doing a snide high-pitched rendition of the Coaches Widow saying
“Where’s Hale?” Patrick clicks the heels of his tattered pro-wings together and
says the word Fragina, scurrying into his locker, ripping his military coat of
the metallic talons that was once used to creeper him. He rushes past the nest
of beer cans and very old vintage nineteen seventy era porn magazines and yanks
on the lever so that the blackboard folds into itself—the blackboard containing
a previous days sinners in the hands of an angry God so to offer the Coach’s
wife the completed appearance of Patrick’s rote daily spiritual chore. Patrick then smiles, swipes his head back and
forth as if insinuating that it doesn’t get any better than this and makes it
too the voyeuristic grille, just in time to see triple H and Marcellus Buck’s
queen bitch look at her un-brassiered bosom into the mirror and inquire out
loud if she thinks Buck will still want her next season when he becomes the
first ever graduating eighth grader to bypass both high-school and college and
become a top three pick in this June’s NBA draft. For the most part the Varsity Elite
cheerleaders are allowed to wear their uniforms to class on more or less a
daily basis, since more or less each of the twelve Varisty Cheerleaders are
supplied with a credit card plus thirteen distinct variations of the basic
Cheerleading uniform—Patrick’s favorite having to do with the rolled up
coniferous green top representative of a girl scout troop sponsored by a
playboy centerfold or the extremely short-short plaid naught catholic
grade-school garb, which the girls are required to wear Wednesday s on Coach
M’s feisty Let My People Go to Chapel weekly Exodus. For reasons Patrick can’t
quite figure out, the smallest and most petite cheerleader, Holly, always
changes away from the rest of the Varsity Elite cheerleaders, in a vector of
the bathroom that is occluded from Patrick’s vision.
After blowing his wad at the sight
of Gia Walker and indulging in yet another filched post-masturbatory Bensons
and Hedges Patrick skids the purple shafts of the skeleton of the school. Last
week when ambling around Patrick found access to the special vintage wine
cellar slash apparently Nuclear fall out room, achieving access into the cellar
through an empty ten foot barrel. Patrick continues to splurge his palette with
the finest the Coaches money could buy before hearing a rattle and ducking
behind a rack of pinot gris, as Coach M, looking very much like Hugh Hefner in
silk-kimonoesque pajama top and slipper accompanied with two older women whom
Patrick has never seen before clad only in panties and bunny ears. Coach M
places two distinct chalices between each of their ample bosoms, uncorks the
top of a bottle of wine in a way Patrick doesn’t like to discuss in public and
then fills each of the bosom-wedged crystal chalices, filling each receptacle
to the very brim before wildly licking his tongue between bosom and burgundy
back and forth in the manner of a feral-shock ridden cat and a glass of spilled
milk.
Life is good in the marrow of the school.
