Cryptobyrinth (Above all just asking God for something)

 

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.