SYLVESTER STALLONE SANDWICH
by
Bryan Price
*** you bet ***
9:25 a.m. The Bedroom. The Present:
Good Morning.
Someone is blasting what sounds like Public Enemy out there on the street. It started at nine a.m. They’ve been repeating it for close to half an hour now – perhaps they are narcoleptic. I think they just woke up because it stopped.
The bass rattled my windowsill. It made my penis shrivel. That’s right. I was downright afraid and it made me:
a) Sleepy.
b) Lazy.
c) Lazier.
(choose your letter wisely)
Keep your eye on the ball.
(That last line was in reference to the cup game you see street hustlers play < the kind of street hustler that doesn’t suck cock – in the tactile sense > on folks who want to make a handful of cash (perhaps in front of a young boy with a balloon in need of salve who dreams of – some way some day somehow - owning a monkey.) Some j-hole bites and throws down a ten dollar bill because they believe that the street hustler and his little ball getting shuffled beneath one of the three cups can’t lose em’.
Yes. They believe they can keep track of which cup it is under and they can, for a while because ten bucks is a good take but a few tens more is much better for the one who is doing the fleecing.
(choose wisely)
A
B
C
or the universal D.
*
The windows were rattling and I was considering calling the po-po because in my head, the Public Enemy Sound Scam was a death trap. A rouse to both lure and realize the descriptors bidding.
In my Blight Eye I saw an - almost cherry Mercury – chopped and low - like Sylvester Stallone’s ride in that 1980s movie “Cobra”. Parked with engine running. Inside “they” waited for someone to come outside and say – “seriously?”
My penis shriveled because “they” in the Mercury were shuffling cups and had automatic weapons and I felt like doing something about it to save some lives but I was a, b, c, or the universal d.
I say this because people are getting murk’d here. (Murder/Killed).
Apparently, the most recent goner was an original native who was liked very well by the intermediate inhabitants (they came at least ten years ago with light pockets and bright minds and know a thing or two about the evolution of the price of milk). Then, there is we who came next. Were drink the milk. We are the young ones. And we are young both in space and time, and ignorance).
It’s a sliding scale as far as milk goes. For instance:
The other day – St. Patricks’s day – I told a young lesbian from West Virginia who just moved here and struck up a conversation with me regarding beer prices, nightlife and West Virginia, that everything is going to be okay and not to worry.
The conversation precipitated after I dropped a pocket of dollar bills after my entrance. The stopwatch clocked in at 4.9 seconds.
You dropped something. Don’t worry. I won’t take it. I’m not from around here. i'm from West Virginia. I’m a lesbian.
She kept saying – I’m from West Virginia – I’m from West Virginia – I’m broke and a lesbian and this god damn world is weird and beer is expensive – not like in West Virginia and I don’t know what kind of beer is the cheapest – because everything is so expensive here – hey, are you at the show across the street too – no. who’s playing – i don’t know - holy shit – I don’t care. I’ll listen to anything. Fucking rednecks back home – fuck em’ I’m from West Virginia . . . then –
I told the girl that everything was going to be okay and to look at the price of beer like an asshole tax, and she’d adjust, she’d know the score, she’d figure it out, she’d get a job, she’d hit her pace and not to worry. She’s won already.
She asked if she could hug me. I hugged her and felt like a liar. But I’m not. I made a decision. And I meant it.)
I could see the contact made her feel better. But I may have fucked her over because:
“Believers are easy to deceive because they want to believe” - The origin of this quote is unknown.
As a milk drinker (I’m not young, per say but as far as time spent here spatially I am most definitely) and I like to think I’ve got the lazer beam on things.
I do know that just around the corner from me there is a home full of natives (pre-Louis) and the Sonic Boom Death Trap was a urine and fire hydrant moment for me, you, West Virginia, brick, mortar, pastries, little stories, mother, father, brother, definition, dwarf stars, supernovas, coordinates, hugs, fried chicken, wrapping paper, beach chairs, beads of sweat, and black matter.
Kind of like sticking a wet finger into someone’s sandwich before they can take a bite out it.
*
I felt like calling the cops to warn them – all of them - that something was about to go down. But AT&T sucks balls as far as cell reception goes – the satellites show classic signs of suffering from emotional abuse – and for some reason the boss doesn’t want us to break bread with them.
If I were to warn them about what was about to happen out there that meant I would have to get up and pick up my home phone and dial the po-po on my newly set up Vonage service (a great deal right now) and I wasn’t so much into that because, just in case I wasn’t right about the battle tactics and images in my head – I didn’t want to be the kind of dick who called in a noise complaint.
It’s unsanitary.
*
I wondered about the men in the Mercury. I thought – what dicks. Someone is going to call the cops and when the cops come they’ll walk up to the car and ask the kids in the Mercury with automatic weapons to turn down their music and they’ll say – ok and drive away.
Murk or not – this is America and in the end its nothing but music.
Prove it.
The Murk Merc Argument in a court of law would hold as much weight as this little diddy I’m tapping right here and this observational ten-ner is nothing more than the reality that I’m wagering.
I gotta tell you, sometimes I feel like my writing verges on the kind of writing that accompanies hangover classics like “World’s Most Shocking Car Crashes” or “When Beach Balls Attack.”
*
Quiet now. I wonder if it was Public Enemy. I wonder why it was on repeat. And I wonder if the lyrics had significance.
Comments