I am numb. Drained. Today was super long. Went to a memorial service for a friend of mine. I’ve only been to one other memorial service my entire life. Just as I walked through the doors, that rich perfumy smell hit me – an abundance of floral scents. I really didn’t know what to expect. Most of the people there I did not know. Seeing my friend’s baby pictures in this collage friends put together was quite sad. At age five you don’t know where life will take you…….photographs always creep me out. His leather jacket was displayed and I remember the few nights we hung out in bars him wearing it. He was my age. When i saw the years 1976-2005 next to his name I freaked out. LIFE IS FUCKING SHORT. That’s what I’ve been thinking. But maybe to him it felt too long, I guess.
Afterward me and treason went to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Great film. Whoever played Emily Rose did an incredible job.
The whole waking up at 3 am thing bothers me to a profound degree. I’m glad it’s almost 2 now, cause I’m not going to bed before three. This is why:
When I moved to Chicago in late October of 1996 I arrived just in time to help my sister move into what was going to be our new apartment. It was on the third floor of this building in Rogers Park, the far north end of the city. Upon moving in we discovered what the previous tenants left for us to have – an American flag, a Marilyn Monroe framed picture, and a voodoo doll. The voodoo doll hung on the wall in one of the bedrooms. It was made of clay, about the size of a cabbage patch doll, with wide droopy eyes and a strange dress. Three white pins stuck her – one in the heart, one in the crotch, I don’t remember where the other one was. She hung on the wall above the radiator slightly crooked. No one – not me, my sister nor our other roommate – dare touch it to straighten it out.
I felt uncomfortable in that apartment from the beginning. Not just because I didn’t have my own room, and I was given a mattress found behind a dumpster and slept in the living room, but I always felt a strange unhappy presence. When I did the dishes and I was alone in the house I felt someone standing behind me, watching me. Then I started waking up every night at 3 am. One night I woke up and I could not breathe, as if somethng were choking me. Another night my boyfriend at the time said he felt someone sit on the edge of the bed at three am. He was homeless and would rather squat somewhere else than sleep there, and fuck it, so would I, so that’s how my homelessness eventually began………there was another 3 am incident that occurred after I moved from Chicago but I’m too tired to get into right now. I leave you with more “Demonic.”
Sleep well. I don’t know if I will. Maybe I’ll just write. I’m working on a collection of short stories, The Return of Saturn, one story will be about the above 3 am thing…..

“The Boys of the Demonic Hermitage Kaleidoscope”

***Marhollow***

MARHOLLOW

I was over it all. I was ready to go to New York. I had been ever since I was a sophomore at Nicolet. I kept my distance from everyone. I hated cliques. I hated outsiders, too. They were a clique as well. I paid no mind to anyone until I was walking passed the gym one hazy afternoon to my old shitty car. I just used all my resources for my last cigarette. I made myself feel good by thinking that it was May and soon another shitty year of school would be behind me. I also just made a pretty cool mix tape and couldn’t wait to drive around listening to it. I was trying to plan out the Friday night ahead. Did I want to go to Jacksonport and start shit with the usual punks waiting to bang heads or go home and take shit from my old man? That’s when I heard someone crying from somewhere, I thought the locker room. That day the row of tiny shoebox-shaped windows of the gymnasium was wide open. The cries emerging from the dusty windows were desperate pleas, the kind so intense that the person in pain had to take some time out to catch their breath. I stopped, not really wanting to. Like I said I just wanted OUT of anything going on at the stupid high school. I flipped burgers at a shake joint in Little Hut, the go-between of Baileys Harbor and Jacksonport. I tried to save every dime I made at that hell hole for New York. I only wanted one plan, one goal; no distractions. Fuck it, I said, and started toward the parking lot again. Another cry slipped out, though, this one so heavy I was convinced if I didn’t step in whoever was being hurt would die. I was too late to interrupt whatever was going on. By the time I trudged over to the front doors of the dark gym; five jocks came running outside. They were all laughing and slapping each other with sweaty t-shirts. They came charging like wild horses, running into me then they kept going. I wanted to turn around and leave. I was going to be late for my shift at H.R.’s anyway. That was the burger joint. H.R. stood for Hunter’s Results. My boss was a member of the N.R.A. He hunted everything I grilled. I hung around him sometimes on my days off and he took me hunting. That’s when I realized how much I wanted a gun. He had all these gun magazines stashed in his pickup truck. His name was Jimmy. Jimmy was pretty cool.
The cries turned into sobbing. “Mmmmm,” I heard the person moan, as if they meant to scream but it was trapped behind someone’s hand. I thought maybe the person in trouble was a girl. I rolled my eyes and licked my lips, feeling committed to the mystery. I walked into the gym. The light in the small closet space of an office where our coach normally hung out was out. Normally at this time the light bulb would still be gushing light over his unorganized desk and some girl would be leaving the locker room, happy to be out of her skimpy required uniform and back inside comfortable jeans. I guess all of that had already happened. I entered the sweat dome, the place I hated most, the fucking basketball court. The wooden bleachers were pushed against the wall. The floor was as glossy as any page from a fashion magazine. The only things on the floor I could see were a few abandoned towels and an empty sprite bottle. I almost turned around when someone cried for help. I looked back and saw a pair of sneakers. Scrawny legs sprouted up from them. A face was covered in jet-black hair. A hand moved on the floor, fingers bending, bloody knuckles lumping up. The hand was reaching for a pair of glasses. I tilted my head to get a better look. The boy’s gym shorts were pulled down to his knees and his shirt was twisted up around his neck. I looked away for a second. It wasn’t hard to tell what happened. Jocks cornered skinny art fags all the time at Nicolet. I’d seen this boy pass by the art bridge a lot. The art bridge was between the cafeteria and the parking lot – a shabby construction of joined walls where the sewer ran. Juvies in turmoil met there with spray cans and littered the so-called bridge with thoughts and images that portrayed some part of their unappreciated and darkly fascinating existence. I’d seen Jesse there a few times, in his baggy jeans, shaking his can so it made that pearl lost in a hollow pipe sound. I wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed that I found him or if he wanted my help. I walked over and kneeled down by his side. I picked his glasses up and put them in his hand. He slipped them on and rolled over so we faced each other. He placed a hand over his face and sobbed, but he wasn’t crying like before.