Long vicissitudes of snapped memory swirling into the ongoing flux of the here and now....

 

 

Partrick continues to pedal, coasting into the nesty lip of the Nuclear woods. Lately Patrick has been paying less attention to the ghastly dirge of the inscrutable freight train racketing past in the late evening hours and devoting much more attention to the lionized roar of airplanes screeching the sky overhead in a thunderous bellow—almost like a cannon, the sound of a plane—the overhead hustle of steel and metal and aviation ferrying human beings around patches of the globe, Patrick thinking about Warren last Sunday when his dad specialty rigged a look-alike verisimilitude mannequin of himself with something cranberry and explosive planted inside so that when French Luc prances across the tapestry of the McReynolds front lawn, telescope underarm thick copy of the Sunday Urinal Jar, the same Sunday Urinal Jar fraught with female underwear adds Patrick doesn’t mind feeling like an adult as he scoops up a scattered bushel of ads promulgating sales and discounts and pours himself a generous cup of coffee, locking himself in the bathroom for hours on end and leering at the slender beautiful mystery of that which is the half-naked female form, swearing he can see hinted traces of the feminine secret which Patrick thinks about alone when he scales the interior of the ‘byrinth as well as especially in the tunnel, wondering what it must be like to have better purview access into the locker room of the Varsity elite cheerleaders where he imagines Holly and Karen splattering copious amounts of lotion over the others shoulders while simultaneously helping each other undress—Patrick, becoming oblivious to the gavel-rattle of knuckles, requesting that he hurry up in there, using his father’s verbatim, ordering the overflowing bladder of the supplicant to quiet, he’s on the throne.

 

            The joke went better then expected, Warren releasing a mannequin of himself replete with ruffled hair and three day no-where-near-the proximity of a razor blade goatee, an emerald leash fastened around his ersatz neck in the fashion of a noose and a fresh suicide, cackling with sealed lips as Warren launched the mock suicide into the direction of an always seemingly disconcerted morning eye lidded French Luc like an out of control pendulum, the mock mannequin slicing past Luc’s blurred morning vision about two feet ahead of him, before ramming into the same tree Patrick first met Von Behren clambered in the top tree branch of weeks before he ever heard the words CLS and Coach M. The dummy seemed to emit some sort of electrical sparks, like the time Patrick shoved a penny in an outlet when he was four and the juice for all of West Bluff seemed to take one long elongated blink before the power resurfaced and Warren marched up the stairs leading up from the McReynolds dungeonesque basement on Cooper, his hair resembling something like a petrified scared shitless yucca plant, little black tendrils of smoke billowing out from his earlobes and nostrils, looking at his four year old son without saying a word before pointing at him and telling him to come here. Patrick, being only four, somehow still seemingly realized that he was in deep shit, swiped his head from horizontal shoulder blade to horizontal shoulder blade and took off running, ended up hiding behind the deep mattress of his mother’s mahogany oak bed that has a wooden picture of a for some reason kilted and brazenly red-haired Irish Odysseus returning back to a buxom potato peeling scarlet haired Penelope vignette carved into the headboard which later Patrick can remember his parents having to sell in order to make ends meet before moving to Downs Circle. It was here, four fingers old, Patrick discovered his mother’s pack of Benson and Hedges, the size of a pocket book, reclining as if half-wounded on her night table—Patrick figuring then, why the hell not, he was already apparently in deep shi so sitting back and firing one up for the first time in his four year gyrating cycle around the sun, coughing at first but still, Patrick remembers in his smudged crayon grade school colloquial, trying to be nonchalant as fuck as he inhaled, losing himself for a moment in the wooden fresco of the headboard, wondering what it must be like to come back to someone you have loved so much and haven’t seen for so long and have her accept you for who you innately are as a human being. Patrick equates his virginal run-in with tobacco as instigating his first formative philosophical thought and instilling in him that perhaps there is a place he has been before where he is incessantly trying to get back into—waking up finding the proverbial girl of his dreams waiting for him, a smile in her face, ashing the dregs from a cigarette from the tips of her dream fingers.

 

                                

 

            The mock-suicide gag worked wonders, Warren, having stayed up three successive nights tinkering with his blue-prints which Patrick has yet to fully understand since he changed the verbal voice activator to the trompe o'oeil garage. Warren, perhaps getting bored with all of his deep scientific jargon and mathematical extrapolations that he, around 2 am that Sunday morning, decided to have some real fun by tormenting French Luc, the paperboy, whom Warren refers simply as that fag from France by making a mock effigy of himself. French Luc, used to Warrens shenanigans apparently went apeshit at the sight of his patron swinging down from the titanium apocalypse-proof shingled roof of casa McReynolds like a Tarzan committing suicide with an emerald glen almost tentacle in nature and shape, watching with still life eyelids as Warrens’ shadowed suicide doppleganger swung straight into the tree which, somehow Patrick thinks reflecting on it, was the tree which more or less changed his life, a  botany surrogate for the Yellow Monkey bars and the frustrations and joys which were to come. After bleeding snapped-morning glory fourth-of-July sparks from the side of his neck, the cranberry almost Jelly coating interior Warren filled his interior lining with erupted in a sanguinary swan-song of gore, leaving Warren in stitches as he watched a pool of urine form in the crotch of French Luc’s pink knee-high sweatpants as he took off running, abandoning his bike and satchel of thickly rubber band trussed Sunday papers on the McReynolds front lawn like some sort of Aztec offering seconds before the sacrifice. Warren, cackling to himself so hard that tears begin to dampen the lower blacks of his eyes as he damn near almost falls off the titanium coating of his own roof, slipping once, yelling out the vowel o and the word shit as his body sleds off the front of the roof, sliding down as if his entire body were one giant lounge shaped vessel saved only from following the exact same trajectory as his whipping boy body double when he grapples the gutter which bends into a perfect V as a sleep deprived Warren is hoisted down to the earth, staring at the crimson innards of his own dead mannequin at 4:30 am, thinking he has just enough time to go down to Mickey’s Irish tab, which is really a tavern in some guy named Mike’s back garage off the corner of Rohmann and Cedar, where Warren can indulge in a concoction he refers to as an Irish Sunrise, which includes three shots of Jameson, a spoon dribble of Baileys and just a hint of Tabasco sauce. Warren, feeling the way he felt when he read Tom Sawyer at a formative age, wondering how many other geniuses have been privileged enough to witness their own death while scaring the androgynous shit out of the newspaper carrier at the same time.  Warren smiles to himself, admiring the way his body looks in death, like an Einstein kamikaze pilot, as his knuckles straddles the curved handlebars of French Luc’s flamingo-hued ten speed wondering just how the fuck any male with a healthy set of twins dangling below the belt could sit on that banana seat without harboeing a severe level of discomfort. For a moment Warren feels like he is back in ye olde country as his body rattles back and forth in middle aged ached-limb sway pedaling the bicycle down the parabolic curve of Downscircle, the home his family moved into after leaving Cooper, the bike coasting into a steady wobble as he gradual curves on to Sterling, heading the opposite direction of the Nuclear woods, veering left, cutting through the driveway teller, scurrying behind Haddads where it appears a homeless vet has been living underneath a blanket of bubble wrap. It is spring and the world feels brand new to Patrick’s patriarch—spring, a week earlier his sons arriving home with Von Behren, the three of them dressed up like native Americans, Patrick trying to explain to his father that they attended the local pow-wow while inside Lynford was teaching Amy how to belly dance while holding a cucumber a certain method between his lips which make Warren uncomfortable to think about.  His sons, arriving home, looking as if they have just trekked through their own trail of tears, Patrick holding a tomahawk in his hand in the fashion in which a novice wields a wrench under the hood of a car, before walking inside the front door and falling into the davenport, a cut-out fire range silhouette wreathed around his shoulders, along with a few scattered feathers.  Allan immediately jumping up and down at the presence of Lynford, trying to tell him something that he doesn’t want his father to hear. Hale, walking over to Patrick and Von B, whose face is the color of pea soup and acts like he is about to hurl when Misses McReynolds asks if she can fix him a toady. Hale then hands Patrick triangular relics he says is called Yorrick and then asks what do you mean you don’t get it. At the moment Patrick didn’t know how to break it to his old man about the Thruster—about the failed coup, wishing he could just pull him aside and explain to him all of the contorted fucked up shit that has been going on at CLS. Looking at his son not even fully in the lids of his eyes, Warren somehow becomes aware of all this, realizes the demolishment of his own creation in an effort to save a life, and more importantly, to somehow change the world.

 

 Warren pedals, into the direction of the east, the sun bleeding over the golden fast food arches ahead as he parks the bicycle down next to the fizzing domestic bowtie configured beer signs which reminds him only too much of the Guest First sign hovering above his fake fireplace in the McReynolds living room. Warren then tosses a couple of his signature Irish Sunrises down the hatch while devouring  steak and over easy eggs cooked with potato onions which the weird self-proclaimed hunchbacked psychic Warren spoke briefly to at the buffet line at the Paradise once claimed was Napoleon's favorite dish, before telling him something about slot number 167, Warren, wishing he had heeded his advice instead of going off on a mental tangent about how his psychic ass isn’t worth two shit-stained British pounds and how if the good lord would have wanted his family to have the money it would have arrived already, on the front porch, in a baby basket; a la in the fashion of Pharaohs daughter examining the hovering wailing sound in the floating basket only to discern a pyre emerald stash of brick heavy 100 bills clomped together, a light shining between bolls of gray clouds like a angelic stalk, God, wedging his thumb in the fashion of a movie critic up in the air, signifying to Warren that for once, he, is part of the good lords holy race. Just as Warren was reveling in his here-God-take-that fantasies, strutting over to the booth ferrying copious heaps of steaming dished mashed potatoes and prime cuts of pork and steak what sounds like a police siren goes off in that background, followed by the hailing-outside-sound of tokens pummeling through a metallic chute—the concierge of Paradise who always wears three piece outfits and walks like he has a perennial creeper pinned to the inside of his arse with something Warren would rather not dwell over as he consumes his steak and Irish eggs, thinking about how fat the overweight winner was who ended up pocketed the largest single slot jackpot in casino history-an estimated 750 grand, and all Warren can do is comb through the crowded buffet din and search for the psychic asking how he is aware of such life-altering premonitions, to which he will find nothing, only once, years later, swear that he sees him putting up a fence with a tye-dyed shirt pony tail kid in the house where Nate Lockwood’s grandfather used to live, only before doing a double take and seeing absolutely nothing at all.    

                                     

 

Next to Warren inside the pub sits Toby Barnacle (who is somehow related to Hale) who fills his pipe with some thick tobacco alloy where the smoke looks like it is forming a thick whorls of ominous smoke which makes it look like a demon pairvel will scoot out from between the mist as he chugs shots of Jameson with Warren and occasionally breaks out his melodica for a killer rendition of 'What do you do with an Irish sailor?’ which Warren will claim makes him feel twenty years younger, or more apt, the same age he was before his thirteen year old self-proclaimed oldest heir to the McReyonold’s throne and prodigy entered the planet. Toby looks just like something you would find sitting on a ceramic mushroom in a perfectly manicured front lawn—once even, after a three day drinking binge Meredith-Elise and Cabbages found Toby stationed outside cat lady Ethel Sparks house on Cooper and decided that he was a full like gnome before hearing a pulse and drunken rattle when they tried to pick him up. Warren, tossing back shots of Baileys and Jameson and the occasional Oatmeal Guinness down the old Irish hatch, making a refreshed ah sounds with his lips and saying the word damn after every individual swig, before stumbling out of the pub at high noon, feeling like one of Plato’s manacled cave employees being blinded by the overhead light as he steps out on the corner off Rohmann and Cooper fishing around the back of the garage tavern in hopes of discerning where he stashed French Luc’s gay-ass flamindo ten speed with handle bars that look like they were usurped from the horns of an effeminate mountain ram. Warren finds the bike lying like road kill down the alley three garages down, covering a gray meter which makes him think of a fat woman trying to jig. Lums is only a stone thrown away and Warren can sense the church clad families rowing into Lums parking lot for their Sunday brunch. Warren’s sense become alerted by the thick waft of Mister Donuts coffee sifting above his olfactory organ in a plume of awakening aroma, as he saddles his limbs around the flamingo banana seat cushion of the bike and begins slowly to pedal back in the direction of Down’s circle, his home, passing what looks like a zipped drunken blur of ambulances spilling past him on Rohmann, exhaling over the flannel shirt which he holds up to his lips, pedaling one handed now, taking a thick whiff of his previously exhaled breath, hoping to Mary mother of God that Helen and the youngin’ don’t get the wrong idea about the familial patriarch not having a valid excuse not to knock a few fold ones back every now and again after three days straight of incessant blueprints designed for a new cosmic variation of the Thruster baby, Warren will absolutely make sure the innocent and dearest heir to the McReynolds throne of hard core no-non shit ingenuity will have absolutely no method whatsoever of getting his royal palms acclimated with the handlebars thereof. Looking down at the sewer opening at the corner of Rohman and Waverly, cross the street from the Japanese tanning outlet that got busted when the cops found out that one of the geishas working had a penis, Warren looks down and sees an overturned confetti of expired cigarette butts, indicative of a passing car halted at the sprouted cherry Octagon reading STOP, taking the momentary pause to open the side door and an overturn the ashtray in the car. Looking at the cluster of burnt crks Warren is reminded of the second time he caught his oldest son firing up a cigarette. Patrick was six years old and had been trying to concoct some sort of aerial hang-glider with CJ next door in hopes of swooshing past Martha Thomas’s window two houses up and two to the left late night hour, camcorder in paw, hoping to film his first ever bona-fide McReynolds documentary—trying to sound precocious when he tells CJ that a money shot is a scene in which the girl gets naked and then pays you for watching her undress—realizing years later, over late night green-nipple rigged satellite show time porn that he wasn’t really all that far off from the truth. Warren remembers finding his eldest son pensively holding a cigarette, eyesight adrift, lost in the in the wooden topography of Odysseus returning to his beloved after what appears to be one hell of a very long day after Mister Lontelli next door found his beanie hated son crying in tears, stating that the mean kid next door wouldn’t give him a round filming amateur voyeurism cinematic scenes Patrick refers to as a reconnaissance mission of the heart. Mr Lontelli then looked up and saw Patrick and CJ circling the sky on what appears to be some sort of aerial panty raid, camcorder shuffled between them, a variegated assortment of bras and panties hung from the center of the vessel Patrick calls CODE:PHONEIX, ironically being that, old man Thomas, upon catching the two lads hovering back and forth filming his second oldest daughter in her scanties before she showers and Patrick, dressed all in black, somehow told CJ he was entering the house to look for firecrackers and ended up going through Martha Thomas’s underwear drawer, raising his eye-brows into bushy little pyramidal tips, asking a bemused mouthed football helmeted CJ waiting in the window opening if he knows just how much these are worth on the first grade market. Think about it, he’s talking five bucks a whiff after school behind the dumpster, a curved serpentine green money-logo snake reflecting future riches and outerworldly teenage accolades pending for Patrick as he begins to hand Martha’s undergarments to CJ, hanging them like a Victoria Secret suicide over the central beam, taking one final shot on Martha’s bedroom using the camcorder which will one day belong to Allan, focusing a close up of the shut bedroom door before it is abruptly knocked open and the camera titters and shakes as old man Thomas rushes in, wielding a flame thrower he procured from lord knows where firing at will just as Patrick and CJ push their hang glider out of the window just as a blaze of fire erupts catching the left wing of the bra and panty adorned hang glider—the alighted hang glider which in terms nicks several skeletal late-autumn tree branches as it is launched through the window, causing an incendiary inferno in both Martha Thomas bedroom as well as in two flanking nearby sweet gums before toppling on top of a beanie clad Joey Lontell abandoning priceless feminine cargo, not paying attention in the slightest as future friend and vicarious gaming monarch Tim Branagan, clad in purple, all eleven years of age, motoring his purple prince-flavored bmx a block past Patrick's temporal abode in hopes of spotting Holly Turner perhaps in bra and panties in her own window when he mistakes the firebomb landing of CODE:PHONEIX for one of the flailing four horsemen of the apocolapse as it lands, almost directly on top Mr. Lontelli and his beanie hated brat, engulfing them in a shock of flames, Patrick, grabbing CJ’s arm with his left hand and the camcorder plus pair of Martha’s white cotton Christmas tree dappled knickers in his right, tugging CJ into the green street isles separating traffic on Cooper as the caterwaul screech of sirens slowly begin to sear the late spilled lavender of the early October sunset, Patrick, realizing that when God sends you manna from heaven don’t pitch about being hungry, quickly yanks off the snakes-eyes mask he was wearing in an effort to curb his true identity and switches his camcorder on, not paying attention to the slightest at the purple sunglass-wearing kneeling boy bowing in the direction of what he mistakes for being east, running across the street near a hubcapless chevette with  dual overlapping bumper stickers reading LITHUANIANS DO IT BETTER and I LOVE FISH TACO singular. Patrick, adjusting the zoon lens on the camcorder like he will someday rev up the engine on the handlebar Thruster, getting a close up zoom of Martha Thomas as she runs, totally naked out of her house, arms akimbo, modest c cleavage flouncing in the air with such grace as is poetry. Seconds before the fire trucks arrive and Martha is clad in a thick fireproof blanket (an overweight slightly balding Russel Bieneman, community volunteer fire fighter taking a double take and then whistling before cladding the blanket around her). Between sprinkled flashes of neon red which reminds Patrick of the atmosphere of Mars, Patrick overtly begins tipping toeing down Cooper as he hears old man Thomas detail to the police about the ninja who broke inside his daughters bedroom on some sick sort of panty raid—stating that surely, the Delt house down the street, with their incessant noise and keg stands and nude midnight runs he called the cops on once must have had a hand in this.

 

            Once Patrick arrived home he didn’t feel like watching the in slow motion the re-run of a show-us-what-your-Mama-gave-you Martha Thomas flailing her limbs running outside naked. Nor did he feel like keeping the errant pair of panties he purloined from the panty raid to get rich on, which he opened his bedroom window, in the fashion, holding the cotton aquatic undergarment out in front of him in the fashion of a sling and releasing the strips of panty, flinging it from a crooked thumb in front of him, not watching as the panties ricocheted into the squinting purple sunset, completely unaware of a one kneed Tim Branagan across the street, head bowed into his nipples, BMX bike reclining next to him like a hushed shepherd staff in a nativity scene, supplicating, praying for a sign from God that the apocalypse is yet to come when the errantly flung panties of Martha Thomas lands on his angular head like a dove, Tim, misintuiting the panties as being an emblem for the Holy Spirit at first, looking up and saying the words AMEN and THANK YOU to his very extremely WASPish variation of a Godhead before hearing the voice of Mr. Thomas promulgating that there-he-is, flame thrower in the hand, county police directly behind him.

 

Patrick then found himself once again on his mother’s mattress, lost in the wooden-carved fresco of Odysseus returning back to his faithful wife and emerald continent, which, in Patrick’s memory, Penelope seems to resemble Holly Lyons just a bit more every year. Warren then found his oldest son, flicking the stem to a cigarette out as soon as soon as Warren entered the bedroom—Warren, walking with a tandem stride Mr. Lontelli vehemently claiming that his son was a bad influence on the human race as a whole and surely had more than just a hand in instigating the affairs of the day, and then opening the bedroom door and seeing Patrick, all six fingers old, pensively smoking a cigarette and staring at the top of his mothers bed as if he harbored some sick sort of Oedipal complex, literally blew up, his body a cross between a frazzled bowling pin and an electrocuted exclamatory mark claiming that Warren McReynolds himself was just a phone call away from DCFS for losing both his so called sweet and innocent progeny as well as his property to the likes of the government. Patrick contorts his lips in the fashion of a llama, releasing rings of smoke as his general direction while still being seemingly unaware of his presence in the room, his vision absorbed in the wooden headboard. Instead of holding out his unsplayed palm and demanding the cigarettes, informing his progeny that he just quit as he would do later in life, Warren decided to employ a little no non shit reverse psychology, sitting down next to his six year old son and inquiring about his tobacco usage by saying the word so and then taking an elongated pause and slapping the thigh of his standard corduroy trousers, reiterating his query, asking Patrick if he really wants to be a smoker, lifting up his eyelids in a certain way at the end of his inquiry—His son, no higher than the size of a corner mailbox nods his head back and forth as if considering the query before looking at his father and saying the words no duh. Warren then saying the words okay, leaving the room without slamming the door shut, strutting outside, twisting down Cooper, noticing that the streetlamps have just commenced with their staticky overhead illuminated yawn , paying no attention in the slightest to the smell of smoke and wood or the thick what almost appears to be sluicing puddle of black smoke spiraling upward form the back of the Thomas’ residence—nor does he pay any attention to the slow escape of the fire engines moving as if under water away from the scene of the inferno or Mr. Lontelli and beanie clad progeny Joe stabbing the charcoaled remnants of the hang glider with a shovel, offering hard core grunts after each stab as if they are performing some sort of exercise in releasing their own aggression some middle-aged yuppie with a phd in counseling such as that new teacher who wears a mullet and jean jacket and only ingests plants of a certain shade of harvested green would endorse. Warren looks at the flickering globe of the streetlight adjusting his gait, thinking a bit of reverse no-non shit psychology might work on his son as well as he passes what appears to be a purple clad soldier holding a pair of panties up to his nose so deep that it looks like he is using it as some sort of breathing apparatus, offering out the words hallelujah. Warren turns on Laura, walks half a block, passing the Gyro, the Egyptian half cripple who walks with two crutches and always ferries a plastic bag of crushed aluminum over his shoulder in multiple white garbage bags that slightly resemble poms. Warren takes a right down the slicing tongue of gravel unfurling eastward between Lara and the traffic flush of Western Ave, struts up near the locked bulletproof window at the gas station, handing the Pakistani electrical engineering grad student a twenty, telling him that he wants smokes, as in carton. Warren pockets the change, places the carton of smokes under the armpit like a baton or a loaf of French bread, returning to his autumn constitutional strut, his corduroy jeans making little ruffled almost fart sounds from his crotch as he walks the reverse route home, telling the purple clad disciples to can it with the panties in public all right, mama’s boy, before walking past the charred skeleton of what once was the espial voyeur hang glider, listening as the screen door to the front porch snaps shut like a bullet before marching straight into his own bedroom, his son still paralyzed with toddler like awe staring at the wooden return home voyage of Odysseus, paying no attention in the slightest as the closing Next Generation credits trumpet across the screen in a heralding brass fugue, slapping his hand across the corduroy topography of his own thigh once again like he is telling an old barroom joke and then rhetorically hitting his son up with the so, you-wanna-be-a-smoker-do-you? Before handing Patrick the carton of Benson and Hedges he has been keeping behind his back as if it were a bouquet of petunias for Helen back in their courting era, informing his oldest son that if he thinks he has the mental acumen plus elongated lung capacity to be a bona fide smoker rebel  than smoked if you got ‘em. Warren, more or less a chain smoker back in Nam, showing Patrick how to spank each individual carton on the back as to pack the tobacco deeper into the cylindered paper. Warren then distinctly recalls how he shut the door into his sons face, going out to congratulate himself on his reverse psychology parenting that he himself went out to the front porch and fired one up. The purple lad, kneeling next to his bike was pretty much genuflecting at the panties as if it were some sort of religious relic. Warren, not paying any attention whatsoever at Misses Eunice Lontelli as she continues to talk to a note-taking cop in a voiceover that is just plain way too feminine and hi-pitched and way too annoying, pointing her hand and fingers in the direction of the McReynolds abode in a way that looks almost like she is placing an curse on the house for eternity. Inside the room a resentful Patrick was presented with the epiphanic realization that not only can beggars not only be choosers, but when God gives you Marlboro mana from heaven don’t bitch about being hungry—or in Pat’s case, don’t bitch about having anything to smoke. There was something that seemed to be perfect in the fashion in which the late autumnal sun seemed to dip into the pocketed east potions of the sky in a long nod, batting concentric ripples of deep azure and lavender—the air brisk smattering a furry leaves and random debris across the ground in a healthy rattle. Warren kisses Amy on the cheek as she quickly stampedes down the stairs, hair black and swaying, earrings in little pink loops, off for another night out with her high school beau. In the back yard Allan seems to be doing something involving plugging an extension cord coated in serpentine foil into the socket branched out of the Lontelli’s back porch light leading up to the tree house both Patrick and Allan furbished themselves in the back yard.  Even the aroma of burnt wood and smoke drifting in tuft heaps from the Thomas’ residence three houses down and to the left seems perfect. Warren remembers how he lost almost all track of time, staring out from the horizontal helm of his front porch, feeling like everything single atomic particle drifting in the vacuum of the universe as a whole was it’s own little planet, fraught with subatomic civilizations and technological advancement, vegetation, evolution—drama, death and light, all convening in a matter of micro-seconds, until that atom is split and the microscopic worlds begin again. Long vicissitudes of snapped memory swirling into the ongoing flux of the here and now and the biting eternal when Warren sees the encroaching shadow of an overweight Eunice Lontelli waddling up the McReynolds front sidewalk in a rash gait, flanked by one officer in uniform and another, whipping out a badge  stating some acronym about child safety. Warren, making the sound of the worlds smallest violin of commiserating sympathy with the rubbed prints of both his thumb and pointer finger as Eunice begins her harangue about Patrick’s progenitors being rather uncouth in their methods of parenting—coughing every time Warren tries to intervene, making little “ahem” sounds with her throat and curved fingers, so as to purposely interrupt his own gruff assuring monotone, wedging her arm and elbow in right angles as to half-way pry inside the door, assuring the shadows the two authority personal that the precocity of his sweet and innocuous offspring’s had nothing whatsoever to do with the cataclysmic inferno transpiring next door, and that, both Patrick and Allan have been nestled on his property the entire afternoon and that, if they insist on snooping around his personal property just go right on ahead and see for yourself—Warren, still lost in the panoramic longing of the sunset and the waft of burnt autumn odor in the air, Warren, forgetting that he just offered his oldest son progeny a carton of Benson & Hedges finest, walking the black attires strangers plus a portly Madame Lontelli up to the almost crawl space like attic where he says his son does the majority of his thinking, showing them sketch boards the would make Leonardo de Vinci look like a Leonardo de novice, watching as the two shadowy figurines nod their head and offer out an contemplative hmpf   without noticing his second son dragging the coily silver tentacles of another extension cord into the back tree house, Miss Lontelli pontificating that there is no way a six year old would be able to do shit with math like that and devise sketches of a panty-snatching hang-glider uncannily resembling the  incendiary aerial device which landed in the middle of her drive way, burnt, Martha Thomas’ undergarments hanging from the cross bar like tinsel on a Christmas tree—Warren, thinking himself how his sperm clad in cap and gown flagellating towards Helen Ovum which, in his imagination, is covered completely in Ivy coated earl-gray architecture cosigning university prestige, a dignitary chorus of pomp and circumstance playing in the background as the droplet seedling enters the university in a firey and supernova explosion of pending glory. The shadowy arbiters opening up a clip board and making quick long elongated v-shaped check signs on their boards which look like they can seriously wound somebody before inquiring if they could personally meet this little man tate, who they anticipate is wearing a monocle and tweed coated jacket with elbow patches and reading the Talmud.

     

 

 

 

            Descending the stairs from the almost crawlspace like attic of Patrick’s bedroom which Warren refers to simply as the genius deck, Warren feels that he is surrounded by heavily voluptuous Swedish speaking long blonde haired lab assistants in the middle of Stockholm, Warren dressed in what appears to be a white tie, top and tails prom rental just a little bit tight around the torso, awaiting to introduce the budding progeny and willing recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, his oldest son, heir to the McReynolds throne, Patrick Aloysius McReynolds, “the great,” waiting to present the world with academic paper simply titled, “E= M(C)y hairy Irish Ass: How Einstein got it wrong.” A brilliant scientific exegesis scribed in crayola by his six year old son that would change the discourse of humanity as we know it, a crooked smile teeming with humility and genetic pride sketched into Warren’s rugged paternal countenance as he ushers the clip board toting dignitaries as well as Miss Lontelli into hallway just right outside the master bedroom, paying no attention to the diminutive tail of smoke leaking under the bedroom door, Warren, turning to the crowd saying that he had to place his son in time out, henceforth there was just no possible way that his little Irish-angel could have been affiliated with the pending fracas ensuing in Old Man Thomas’ property as well as the bon fire in her driveway, Warren, seemingly oblivious to the mist of wafting nicotine as he brushes the door open to hard coughs as Warren’s love nest master bedroom has seemingly been transmogrified into an impenetrable dense curtain of cigarette smoke—one of the social workers fainting, the other yelling fire, Warren, jumping to the fog with his hands outstretched as if trying to hug someone with his eyes-closed finding his son with raccoon eyes and corky-orange teeth, three cigarettes burning at once in his mouth, Patrick’s mother, upon hearing the word fire, runs into the bedroom with a kettle of tepid water she had just begun heating for her semi-hourly Bailey toddie, heaving the water into the room unaware that it splashes straight into the coughing visage of Miss Eunice Lontelli— running out of the room, into the back porch saying simply that she plans on suing. Once Warren was able to drag his son out back, Patrick looking glazed red-eyed and extremely relaxed as he states very simply that he’s on his ninth gratuity pack of his punishment, informing his father, in the backyard, Patrick firing up another cigarette in front of a damp haired Misses Lontelli, promulgating to both the strangers and father that he’s been a bad boy and needs to be punished by chain smoking another carton of cigarettes while in the background a social worker furiously dashes off a stream of checks with her pen, asking Warren in an almost grade school-teacher-caught-red-handed monotone, raising her voice in such a manner that it’s hard to decide whether she’s asking a question or admonishing him in a skeptical sort of way when she inquires that he gives his son cigarettes as a punishment—which of course Warren’s first response is to tell the social worker about tough love and just how there was no way in the planet that he thought his son could smoke so many cigarettes all at once just like that and that in the back of his mind he more or less had a framed mental Polaroid of his son getting nauseas and sick after taking just two drags off of the cancer stick. Patrick, interrupting his fathers response by stating yes, in a very jittery needing-more-of-my-substance parlance, that yes, his dad just gave him a whole Carton of smokes, and he needs more, he’s been such a bad boy, before turning around and offering his corduroy McReynolds rump in the direction of Miss Lontelli, rephrasing again about just how much of a bad boy he’s been that he needs a cigarette and a spanking, pogoing with the caps of his knees, pounding the flatness of his palm into his bottom multiple times, announcing that he needs a spanking telling the social worker, his father and miss Lontelli to spank me naughty mama spank me. Just as Patrick is finishing his Spank me naughty mama I need another smoke, whining oratorio, Warren begins pouring the social worker a double shot glass full of recent medical blather about breakthrough scientific datum correlating the results between single digit prodigies and smoking, titled culled from something Warren pulled out of his ass and is thinking about having it patented someday called the “Marlboro Mozart technique.” The social worker grapples Patrick by his spank me wrist and turned to Warren, telling him that she thinks that maybe your so-called “gifted” son should be taken out of your custody and come live with the state, not responding in the ill-timed slightest when Patrick inquires if the state’s house is a smoke friendly environment. Miss Lontelli, rubbing her palms together as if she is expecting a healthy paycheck with thoughts of settlements and alimony, Patrick, whining, saying that he is in dire need of another smoke before he goes anywhere; Miss Lontelli publicly aheming again, saying that she believes Warren claimed to have fathered two so-called male geniuses, rhetorically asking in a superficial full-of-it monotone that wouldn’t it be nice if the so-called authorized shepherds of our states feral youth could meet the next in line as well. Warren, just a tad aggrieved at the whole situation, angry that some novice short-haired dyke who looks just a tad familiar would have the gall to grapple his sons wrist and yank him out of his domestic McReynolds custody, simply shouts out the first name of Patrick’s younger brother, as if he is in trouble, Miss Lontelli publicly tisking swiveling her chin back and forth stating something about it being a shame these days that family values are no longer what they used to be when a hi-pitched overhead buzzing sound is heard emanating from the tree house, gradually accumulating in pitch, coercing everyone in the Mcreyonlds back yard with the exception of Warren and son into muffling their palms over earlobes, Warren mouthing the word fuck out loud and to himself when he sees the two long extension cords coated in aluminum foil. There is what looks like several shock riddled blinks from the interior of the tree house, Allan stating the words “it’s alive” before swinging from the tire-rope like a glen and urging everyone to run. At the exclamation of the word “run!” the illuminated white noise halogen lights in both the McReynolds and Lontelli residence flicker several times, the window frames, vacillating from darkness into light, blinking in the fashion which reminds Patrick of how his oldest sister Chris blinked her eyes in an incessant stutter the first two weeks she wore contacts lenses only to realize later on that she had placed them in backwards, in opposite eyes. The lights blink several times and for reason no one can validate everyone has heeded Allan’s advice and is running past the tree into the direction of the garage when the next thing everyone realizes there is a blast that sounds like nuclear clap with windows from both houses shattering, glass hailing down on the entire party, Misses McReynolds walking outside with a plastic jugg with Mister Kool*Aid nose and lips carved into it, mixing a little Irish recipe she hopes will loosen the crowd up, toppling the jug of SuperSolvent Oblivion mix into the air, hauling some serious Irish ass as well as glass seemingly erupts everywhere mixed with the overhead wooden thunder of tree house, erupting in a bang so cartoonish that it looks like it could be described in the old batman sitcom in large exclamatory letters heralded in a cloudy bubble of portending doom. Warren remembers the fog of smoke lifting, seeing planks of wood and glass every which way direction but, trying not to cackle to himself as he spots Miss Eunice Lontelli with her head stuck inside Mama McReynolds errantly tossed Kool*Aid jug. Employing a grip he learned from a shogun in Nam, Warren hoists both of the social workers by the back of their necks into the air, explaining to them that none of this wouldn’t happen if they would refrain from trespassing on his property, stating that it is well within his right to torment unwanted academic wannabe fungus such as themselves especially if they decided to skirt across his property without a warrant, saying that if he wanted to, you’d never believe how much he’d be able to sue for. Warren then tosses both of the badged governmental social workers onto the sidewalk, stating them “…and stay out,” which had always been a covert personal fantasy of his to say upright and forthright like that before grabbing a misses kool*aid helmeted Eunice Lontelli, dragging her through the house and tossing her out too, amidst plastic muffled harangues that the next time she sees any of his progeny floating around the heavens on some juvenile engendered vessel the whole family is fucking dead. Warren then got carried away with his death grip, dragging Allan and mom half-way through the house, a hymn of old country whistled through his lips before Helen slapped his corduroy knee cap and told her hubbie to get a hold of himself. Warren, then wondering what could have happened to his oldest son after the explosion, yelling out his name several times before holding out one finger in elongated pause and saying the word, “wait,” tilting his head back and offering the word in several hamster like sniffs before strutting into his bedroom, finding his son, eyes lost in the he mahogany wood of the bed frame, cigarette in hand, taking long drags into the carved pasture of wood, as if the foibles and follies of the day had led him back to this place, to his mothers bed, to the headboard of a man’s individual sojourn, and what it might pray tell be like to come home to someone who loves him.

 

            Warren thinks about this as he skids down Waverly, past the purple gazebo with spray painted VICE LORDS insignia on the back, thinking about how perhaps he did really have a point  with his “Marlboro Mozart,” thesis, not listening to the sound of the train screaming from the direction of the Nuclear woods in the slightest as he pops a left on Laura, chuckling to himself, as he skirts the flamingo bicycle into the driveway of French Luc’s house thinking, why the hell not, the day is young and he sure as shit fire isn’t getting any younger, thinking to himself to have some fun, as he jumps of French Luc’s gay piece of feminine shit the way his son always leaps off of his own bicycle, allowing it to crash into any random object before boasting about the number of times the vehicle has survived as accident. Warren hears what sounds like glass and garbage cans clanking followed by a chorus of neighborhood mutts barking as he snoops up to the window and sees a rather wan faced alter-boy haircut French Luc tittering and wallowing in post-mock suicidal shock— his a sweet,  rather moustached looking mother blanketing her arms around him. Luc is still tittering beyond belief, his shoulders seem to be inhaling with his entire body as he snorts tears. There is a lady next to Luc commenting something about how it is not his fault at all. Warren begins to heckle to himself as he jaunts up to the front door, remembering the Halloween in college he wore just a trench coat with nothing but his birthday suit underneath and walked up to an Octongerian Hazel Cunnignsworth who lived four houses up, rang the door bell and spread his coat like batman and his cape when she entered the door with a plastic pumpkin full of hard yellow lozenges for the kids. Warren, surprised, hoping she would faint, instead, Hazel grabbed the top of her wig and hoisted it off in a quick display of aged ardor. A naked arms akimbo Warren finding both glasses and dentures floating past him as a hair-less Hazel leaped into the direction of his chest, coercing Warren to catch her, his trench coat falling off in the process as he begins to plant what felt like sandpaper kisses on the bottom of his neck. Warren, naked, taking off running down the street, holding what looks like a transvestite leukemia patient in his arms, screaming out for help, cutting between screaming  hydrant sized toddlers clad in masks ferrying bags coughing out ghoulish screams as Warren can feel Hazel’s paintbrush tongue slowly lick up the left hand side of his  face. Warren hopes this prank transpires better than the last one twenty years ago as the swirled tips to his fingers press into the illuminated nub of French Luc’s doorbell reminiscing where the fire department, half of local squad 78 and two trick-or-treating moms had to use a crow bar to pry Hazel off of Warren. Warren slides to the side of the door, which, upon opening, blathers something so his mother fat Colette about being from the states department and needing to talk to his son outside, immediately. Warren, laughing, removing his entire body out of the periphery of the screen door vision as Luc jaunts onto the porch where Warren turns around as says “boo,” laughing to himself as French Luc’s entire body forms one stiff exclamatory mark of shock, the whites of his eyes eclipsing into this skull as Warren is greeted with a limp thump in front of his Velcro rockports, laughing to himself, slapping Colette in her elbow as if they were old absinthe buddies, asking her if she just so happened to see the look on his son’s face when he saw him, reenacting the expression. Colette and the social worker who Warren could have sworn he has seen somewhere around CLS before looking at Warren the way Patrick claims the majority of the varsity CLS cheerleaders looks at him, arms crossed so tightly they look like you could measure the latitude and longitude of their disgust by them. Warren, cackling, a little too drunk to realize that he is the only one who finds this scenario damn near hilarious, before he sees Mme. Collate reaches behind her in an all too unassuming manner and lifts up some sort of basin which Warren mentally classifies is a wok seconds after it makes contact with the front of his cranium, Warren, looking out, seeing a carousel of stars float past him like a mobile over a crib before taking a step back sucking up air and sprinting for thirty feet into the direction of casa McReynolds, into the direction of his home, stopping once to suck up air, turning behind and yelling out that Colette’s son will always be gay to him, making a rhinoceros face with his thumb and jittery fingers before sprinting again, hoping the three foot high barbed wire fence concealing the patch of earth behind the Franscecan center on Heading Avenue, ripping a long fissure in the corduroyed topography of his jeans so that now Warren feels rather like the wooden carving of Odysses his son was obsessed with returning home tattered and wary to his wife greeting him at the doorway to his casa with a pitcher full of cranberry cherry schnapps super solvent, a vintage patched reserved almost solely for Holidays—his son Patrick, perhaps firing a cigarette, holding a wrench, tacking on the latest thermonuclear addendum to the Thrustrer as Warren trods into his palace and sits on his throne, groping the baton and turning the television set to MASH, laughing his ass off and pointing to the static glow of the screen, thinking about a day well spent.

 

            As Warren treks across the field, hurtling over the barbed wire fence in a fashion that would make Von Behren, Patrick’s supposed athlete friend envious, he reaches Downs Circle, the afternoon sun over head golden and autumn, seemingly bringing out the hard candy colors of the earth as Warren struts, resembling a wounded civil war vet, the scatter and thud of the cannon ricocheting inside his head, offer a swiped two finger temple to belt buckle salute to Crazy Hoof, who seems to be doing some sort of keening chant in his front yard involving massive amounts of incense and smoke so that as Warren cuts directly into the center of Downs Circle, arriving at the domestic podium of his lawn it as almost as if he is waltzing out of some kind of spiritual mist, doing a double take as he sees yellow geometric DO NOT CROSS police tape forming a pee-stained fence around his property, crimson remnants of the cranberry-filled blood surrogate still staining parts the sidewalk as Warren passes an outlined chalked body of himself—paying no attention in the slightest to the chorus of kazoo wielding clown dressed all in black humming out a rather nasal version of “Oh Danny Boy” as a eulogy, firing out one of their red-froed youngest out of some sort cannon  which in terms leaves Harvey to rush out on his porch and start firing at will. A hail of birds and squirrels tumbling down in the process— Warren laughing to himself as he envisions the inadvertent hell he must have seemingly put his family through the last couple of hours as he opens the screen door, twists the knob shaped like a lions head and says simply honey, I’m home. It’s been one helluva day.

 

            Patrick remembers trying to sprinkle water on his Mother’s face after she fainted and then trying to keep his Aunt Flo from battering Warren over the head with a rolling pin when he confessed that the joke was meant only for the paper boy, Warren, reaching for a thick Sunday Copy of the Urinal Jar, kicking his chin up high and offering out a grunt, as he says now hear this, reading a story about a west Peoria paper boy like french Luc who just apparently won a so-called “trip of a lifetime” to France. Warren, calling it a crock-oh-shit, ruffling the paper as Reverend Morningwood, called in to lend a comforting shoulder to a shocked Helen, stumbles out of the downstairs bathroom where he has spent the last forty-five minutes throwing up after drowning 15 straight shots of single batched Super Solvent—the good reverend prying his elbow out in a triangle, telling Warren in his sloshed spittled drawl that he really though he had a chance with his wife, if you know what he means, since everyone thought you were dead. When Allan peeps up, inquiring to the stumbling pastor if his father being back among the living is some sort of a miracle sent from above, Reverend Morningwood just publicly belches and tells Allan that he shouldn’t look so shell shocked—death, resurrection, dying—birth, it’s the point of all this shit.  Patrick remembers his family that night, hearing the inscrutable bellow and mystical chuff of the train echo on his front porch, Patrick thinks about the Columbus winner who isn’t worth two shits anyway, and what it must feel like to be above the ground in a plane headed somewhere far away from p town, away from the carousel fracas of Downs circle and never ending tyranny of CLS—some place just away, where he could lift up into the clouds and become more real than anything he has ever known.