Brent Powers Brento Lives!
Fucking Alone (August 20, 2009. Issue 8.)
I am alone with no one to fuck. I’m sitting here, waiting for someone to fuck with. A guy’s gotta do these things, follow his inclination, his destiny or something, the compulsion of his character. My character is to want things. Women, mostly, who are people, I know, although the philosopher Schopenhaur would disagree . But some asshole film director said there are women and then there’s pussy. Maybe I just want the pussy, the thing which is the pussy in women, only this and nothing more. I’m addicted to pussy says this culo I know whom I want for no reason … well, I mean I just want to fuck her, even though I know from her husband that she hates sex. Still, I want to fuck her, for the science of it or something. I’ve even fallen in love with her from time to time. We don’t communicate often. She is very large and sexy. I’d like to spit all over her body and rub it in. I’d like to put my penis in side her and make the pumping action. I’d like her to want me to fuck her. She doesn’t. But she is neither here nor there. She is like heaven and earth in this way . She is a woman, probably no longer pussy, although I get the impression she was once. Once she prided herself on being able to take on the several men.
I am in love with quantities of women. I am in love with all women. I think I could love any woman on earth. I could certainly fuck all pussy.
Once there was a bloodbank teller. (Is that what they call them?) She asked me a lot of questions. Do you want to withdraw blood? Do you want to deposit blood? Do you want to invest some of your blood in the VAMPIRE Fund? I said yes to all of these, and more. I said yes to everything. Soon she had me on the floor, jabbing me with needles. I was full of needles attached to tubes. She stood above me in such a way that I could look up her gown. Inside was a burning bush. Eternally burning. I imagined fucking this, fucking what lay beneath the magic fire. Yet I am not brave enough to do such things, only imagine.
There are others. The woman called Vesta, far away. Probably my best bet. She is constant, like my wife.
There is another constant one whom I love, want, cannot have. She is beautiful and true. An actual friend. I cannot speak of her now and will not, therefore.
Now this fuckcunt. That’s what she calls herself. A fuckcunt. A cuntwhore. She is sex. All sex. All you’d want in someone you just fuck all the time. I 
will probably continue to fuck her all the time until she kills me. It is her intention to just fuck. To do every possible sex act with me. I don’t know what she engages in between times. She disappears. I suppose she is out fucking for real. The way we fuck is on line. I am too old to fuck the way she wants to. I need the pills. I hate them. They give me headaches. Afterwards I need to take another pill to get rid of the headache. I am a pill head now without the intention to be such. I am an inadvertent pillhead. Many of us older folks are, you see. The Senior Class. The Assholes who fucked everything up for you. George Bush was one of my generation. He ruined your chances.
It is the only chance this girl has in the world due to the actions of my kind is to fuck. She just fucks. I have no idea how she lives. I feel a tenderness towards her. I want to explain to her that making love is not just fucking. When I told her that just a little bit ago she disappeared, probably to get fucked by some guy who wouldn’t talk to her like that. I want to tell her that, though. In person. Yet she is gone. I have not eaten in days. I only type and type, like the great typist, K. There is no story to tell here except fucking, so I type and type. I type sentences about fucking. Whole paragraphs, who knows what it would amount to in pages. I don’t bother to number, just type and type about my fucking and my adventures in fucking, the things that environ the fucking: rooms, events, music, movies. It is midnight at the OK Corral. It is always midnight here, and I am waiting. Waiting for the fuck to happen. Not a gunfight but a fuckfight. At some point pussy will come. Shaved, unfortunately. She shaves it, she told me. I thought I didn’t like that but then I saw a photograph of it she sent me and it is indeed very pretty. I write about eating it and fucking it. It is very young and clean. She fucks for a long time and fiercely. She likes to do everything possible that can be done with organs, holes, spit, cum, urine, shit, various oils, condiments, even mustard and ketchup. She spread it all over a banana. I realized after awhile that it was my banana. Actually my cock. It was covered with mustard and ketchup and she was licking it off. She is also sending in a bloodbank teller to receive instruction in the Art. She follows VAMPIRE Bank. All the kids do. They watch the numbers. Nobody wins. All they do is watch. It turns them on. Makes them want to go home and draw blood. Or fuck. Or fuck and draw blood.
The bloodbank teller comes in and watches us go at it. She performs her work as she watches. When she has taken some of my blood and some of the girl’s blood, she mixes them in a bottle by shaking vigorously.
“You are both addicts,” she says. “You are sex, booze and drug addicts. You should get out of VAMPIRE Pleasure Anex which is for the junior class and used to addict them so they will be obliged to use our other services such as the Famous SexBoozeDrugLove-aholics Anonymous. Get with the Program. It will set you free with a Spiritual Experience. You won’t need all this other jazz. I know a woman can have spiritual orgasm all by herself. She enjoys the Union, which is the best fucking of all. You guys should try this kind of fucking. This is why I’ve mixed your blood. I will deposit your blood at VAMPIRE and have it cleaned. You will soon be free of your VAMPIRE debt. You can start over. I want you to begin by joining the Program I’ve mentioned earlier. There is a meeting at noon in the First Church of Scientologyscientologyscientology on Castro Street. Pay no attention to the picketers. They are only juvenile delinquents with no liquor stores to knock over. Listen to the Warm. To the Voice of the Warm. This was invented by that Great Poet Robert McQueen. He was queer but that’s OK now. They have made it OK now. You guys have no problem with queerness. All you want to do is fuck in the regular old boring hetero way. That’s why it’s so extreme. You won’t allow for variation of generic. Is that the word? I don’t care. It’s fun to watch you fuck, though. I will admit to this failure in my character. The way you fuck makes me happy. I could watch you two kids go at it for many hours of my working day. Soon I must leave, though, because I gotta relate to the Minotaur who is moving his own house on top of mine. He thinks by this means to get into my pants. He will be disappointed. There is nothing inside my pants but a bottle to store my wastes, which is emptied automatically by VAMPIRE Services. The fluids are recycled and used for manuring experience. Some day you will understand. No, you won’t but …. Well, there is hope for the future. In God’s own good time. Good bye.”
We don’t care about this person. We are too busy fucking. We are just fucking and fucking.
Wait. There is email. Is it… ? Is it …?
No. Vesta. All she says is: “cool”. What can it mean? I don’t care. I am busy fucking this girl.
She says:
“Fuck me. Fuck my fucking cunt. Fuck me hard. Fuck me in the ass. Fuck me in the mouth. Fuck my ears and nostrils. Fuck my eyeballs out. Fuck my brain clean through. Would you like some vodka? I would. Have some vodka while you fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me. That’s all I want you to do.”
So. That’s all I do now. My life is reduced to this. I await further instruction. Thank you. Good bye.
Daughters of Elysium (May 20, 2009. Issue 5.)
“Here’s Lotte,” Valery said.
Yeh, OK. She had the suitcase. The one speaking was part of the troupe. I’d wanted her for years.
I took the suitcase from Lotte. “I hear you were bangin some chick in the property room,” she said.
“Monkey’s From Heaven? You know how they jump you. They’re polymorphous. It’s all, it’s all …”
She shrugged it off. I was remembering Carol, the Bowman’s wife. Kissing her, yanking at her clothes.
“You gonna do me?”
“Don’t know if I can here,” I told her. I was gasping, crazy to have her. She was older now but still desirable. Even so, I kept turning back, looking at Valery, who was stretched out on a couch. She was wearing sheer black tights and I could see her lovely muff. She was blowing smoke at me, her eyes all lost to some philosophy of the bedroom. It was she I wanted. Damn. Even so, there was Carol. I was finally humping Carol. Well, not quite. Difficult to keep it up here. All these people. Their baggage and props. I was trying to get it in now, pushing into her. She enjoyed it. She said so. “I enjoy this act.” Impossible, however. All these people. It had been like that all day. Event after event. Sometimes canceled events. People waiting in line for something that wouldn’t happen. “I thought it was going to be a movie,” and my boss walking up and down, smiling with a little V shape, very strange, showing them the calendar. “Here. See. The 15th. The 15th. Wrong day.”
In the big tent they were still doing the Swing Dip while everyone else was sitting around on their baggage like gloomy refugees. There was an opera troupe readying for a show … No, this is before … I still can’t find the suitcase, can’t find Lotte. I’ve just climbed off the Bowman’s Wife. “We’ll try that another time, OK?” She dismissed me with a wave, “Nyah!” It’s always now or never with such women. In a place like this, now or never. The things that are expected of a man. This was before. A dead woman comes up. I knew she was dead, she had told me earlier. No, L had. She handed me some other things I’d been missing. I knew it wasn’t the right stuff but I gave it to Henry anyway. It didn’t matter; Henry was also dead. “Here it is,” I said. He dug through the stuff, pulling out each item. “Yeah. Yeah. Here’s … but what about the manuscript?” “You have the manuscript,” I told him (we were talking about our play; we’d been working on it for months, improvising, recording, transcribing, editing). “I gave you the manuscript,” I told him, not quite sure that it was true. He gave me a bewildered look and was swallowed up in the crowd. He tossed me a jug of some liquor. He’d been giving me liquor all day, making a great show of it for everyone. See. Drunk man. Clear a path. Drunk man.
Lotte wasn’t at all angry. She seemed amused. She had a wry expression as we made our way through the parking lot. I looked back at the others, the straggling parade, Bacchantes, partiers. After all this, still looking for a party. They just can’t let go of Weimar because they didn’t know that it was Weimar.
When we got home I noticed that we’d left the oven on. The whole thing was brown and crusted, fiercely hot to the touch.
“We left the oven on,” I said stupidly. Then I noticed that it was completely ruined, as if it had been on fire all the while we were gone. Then, looking around, I saw that the whole house had burned. It was still standing yet fire had done its work, blackening the walls, fusing all metals, plastics, exploding combustibles having merrily hurled away in flaming gestures of abstract fury. The place was running with this art. I told her, “I’m wrong. There’s been a fire. Our house. Our house.”
“What?”
Then I turned and it was alright again. In fact immaculate. We were home. Home. We had found refuge again from the last great Weimar bash. What had it all been for? Even as we were setting up for something we seemed to be taking it down. “This yours?” “No, that is Henry’s.” “Henry is dead.” “Sometimes.”
Lotte went about the business of returning home, lugging the suitcase upstairs. She didn’t even wait for me to do it. She was singing an aria from some Handel opera. I sat down on the big fur couch and looked around. Ah. Weimar. It is still here. The dream lives on. Valery and Carol. The whole troupe of Monkeys From Heaven. “Chicken in the night,” I sang, remembering one of their numbers. While they sang it they always gathered in a circle with their cloaks thrown back like bat wings, and as they sang they stuck out their tongues and came together and touched tongues, just the tips, pip! “Chicken in the night …” Pip! “Exchanging glances …” Tip! They had dragged me into it. Somehow I had freed myself but even now as I am remembering I can taste all their mingled juices, memories of lemonade, of mustard and gaseous breezes coming off the Rhine, they’ve been breathing it in all day, along with all the lies and swill, the street guk and party food they’ve had. Still I liked them. Made me feel all polymorphous. I wondered if I really was reverting to some wonderfully codified infantile stage the Freud assures us is only a part of growth, the way he talks its merely a passing fancy. The first great mind map still nailed up on the walls of my brain, not even gathering dust, for Anna comes in, every week she comes in, she cleans everything, even the old mind maps, the Tree of Life, the Mandala of Kalachakra, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Anna whose navel shows. Who is cute yet Catholic, and true to her Muslim husband. An insane world. Yet in it remains one sanity: the delusion of eternal love which lasts but an instant, yet it is an instant of eternity, eh? Very cute. So very, very cute what we carry with us: all that crap, the knickknacks and nabobs and chachkas and maps of the mind, all of it cluttering up the mind itself which is now a great antique store full of useless crap. Henry’s LP records, Carol’s diaries, the History of Last Things, in several volumes by different authors from different times, authors who never met one another, authors who all had very different ideas of what was declining and falling, slowly, like a giant clock tower caught in fierce overcrank, creak-creek-creek, where the clock always says precisely 10:19. PM or AM? Who cares. The fall is at dawn, it is in the evening when the stars are coming up and we are all making out in the swing or having aperitifs by the Seine, the Thames, the Colorado.
# # #
These dreams always leave me ragged, they … I try to find meaning but … I feel there is meaning, there has to be. The Woman on the Phone says, “taking out the garbage.” I can’t believe that. The Woman on the Phone has lost credibility with me. She is a dead issue now. Once very much alive. Great Love was possible. Ever hear of that?
(Why are you telling me all this?)
This and that, eh, that’s us. Or I’m that and you’re this. So, this … What can I tell you that you like to hear? From that?
(Can you talk about love without being funny?)
Dunno. Think I must have tried once. No, more than once. But love. Mine. That’s. T’is fleeting as the dawn, a wet fart therein, and just as messy. Watch out for us, we’re errant knaves all. Listen. They are all the same, reflections. Mirrors. The old man says it’s all about looking for Mama. He’s still around. Somewhere in Weimar here. No, Vienne. Surely a crackpot but interesting all the same … So, afterwards Lotte went about her business, a mystery to me and therefore lovable, how she goes about it with such ease, even singing while she’s pounding out some fiercely scholarly monograph or studying Scripture. She was born to be a Rabbitson and yet she chose Harvard instead. She could herself now be a Rabbi in our own faith, yet she remains but a minor light in what is viewed as the Dark Provinces. Well, how else would you describe Weimar? She saw your picture, by the way. She asked who is that. “My young apprentice,” I told her. “Cute,” she said. “Is she a vampire?” “No, a mere librarian. That is, she wears glasses.” She laughed and went back to work.
You described some night we had out on the porch, drinking chai and looking at the stars. You tried to tell me what you were finding there but I didn’t understand it. I said I’d get back, yet will I? Will I ever understand? Will I ever get back? To That? I mean This? Are you not This, I That? Forget.
(Are you afraid to tell me what you mean?)
Me? No. It’s you, is it not? What you mean? For you are not a Daughter of Elysium but a woman of flesh and blood, with glasses, possibly a librarian. I fall in love with you every time I come in here. This morning I rode over on my bike without even showering. I rode crazily through the trash, the piles of corpses being gathered up by the Sanitation Patrol, those fine yellow trucks, you know, with the scoops on the front; they are very funny looking. Often I have to let myself fall from my bike and laugh into the pavement, my nose broken, a taste of limonada fria in my mouth, a sound in my ears as of clacking tongues, a melodius effluvia … what? What could that be? Never mind. Yet I always get back up, dust myself off, and start all over again. On my way to you. Disheveled and ancient, a Monster of Love with lewd death already shaking Her underwear in his face, I can smell it and I follow, once again hoping to get laid.
(Is this your love? This funny kind of death?)
My love is a thunder, my love is an earthquake. I wear all the costumes, the capes and mustaches, colognes, come bearing a gift of Capucino Grande or is it merely a Tall … really depends how many euros I can carry in my panniers. I read to you from Tolstoy. (Why Tolstoy? [is this That I mean This speaking? Answer: no; I mean That] Why not some humping good Romance poet, why not Byron, why not Rod McWhatshisface, the Minstrel of Stanyon Street? Tolstoy? Yes, well, I have the book. I’m bringing it back. Just to distract myself from the embarrassment I always feel in her presence I choose any old passage at random and read with feeling … and you are gone. You’ve left your glasses. They are all that remain of you, smoking glasses melting into the countertop. I inquire of the Second Librarian: “Where is This?”
“Here?” she says. “This is the Provincial Library of Weimar. It is located in Elysian Park off Hollander Strasse. Are you lost? Are you in pain? Do you need an ambulance?”
I smile stupidly, sadly, perhaps with a hint of tragedy, the real thing. “I need an unfunny kind of love,” I tell her.
In the Country of Old People (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)
Bill came by and picked me up, all smug and retrochic as usual. Drove a black Mustang, wore a yellow cardigan, tight slacks, high shoes, shades, cool, very cool. He said the word a lot. Only he said it wrong, like it was a word from some other time. Everything about him was from another time.
He took me over to his parents’ place. He wanted to show me what a poor state they were in, I guess, I have no idea.
His old man sat in a chair drinking a beer. He looked OK I guess. His mom was all proper as usual except I wondered if she’d been hitting the bottle again because she was holding herself up pretty straight, holding it all in from spilling out of her in a guky melange of smarm and movie memories, do-see-does, dry kisses and covered wagons floating among all her past meals.
We walked the old man around the property. He kept pointing at things. Said he needed to paint. Bill agreed, agreed with everything he said. He didn’t bother to argue with him anymore. His father was losing it, why give him a bad time?
The grounds looked good, obviously still kept up by old Manuel, who held himself together somehow, maybe from all that exercise, being outside all the time, I don’t know. I was starting to feel low. I’m not young now any more either. We’re all getting ancient, ancient.
Bill’s dad started painting. His mom came out and watched.
“You mind if I go?” Bill asked.
I said it was OK. I told him I’d look after them. Mistake number one. Or the whole thing was a mistake. Taking his call in the first place: I knew he was losing it; he’d been crazy for a long time now. First his wife left him, his third wife, after she lost the child. He stayed home all day taking Benadryl. Weird. He said he liked the dreams it gave him. He wore shades. He never took them off. He acted like it was still 1965 or something, calling everybody “slick” and dangling his Playboy keychain at the waitresses when we went out (always to the same place, the famous hamburger place where we’d both worked, me for a month, he for years, years, he loved the place … all through school he was making tray after tray of onion rings. Weird). Anyways he left me there.
I got the old man in, seeing that he was making a mess of the painting. He had laid on a coat of white, then put brown over it before it had fully dried, making for a real milk chocolate mess all over the railings, the walls, even painted the windows, the fool. His nice cardigan was covered with huge splotches and his fingers were sticking together. He gave me that blank open look that used to have a scary authority. It was a look that said to his students (he’d been a teacher at a middle school), “Well? Well? Explain yourself, rummy?” only now it was all blankness and empty space extending behind him way on into nowhere.
“I’d like to finish this job, if you don’t mind, sir,” he told me.
I took the paint brush out of his hand.
His wife was disgusted. She’d had a few more. I could smell the mouthwash. Maybe she’d even gotten to the point of actually mixing it with the mouth wash. Bill told me about it years ago one summer as we looked into the interstellar reaches while we were camping out in my back yard for the night because it was so hot, told me the whole ugly tale of alcoholic days, coming home from school with his mom all fucked up, sitting in piles of bedding on the floor, covering herself with socks and shirts and panties, trying to hide. That was long ago, he said, and she was better now but he still remembered. “These things don’t go away; they won’t leave you alone,” he said.
I was in a confusion as to what I was doing there. What did Bill expect me to do? Did he want me to watch over his people while he went out in his Mustang to play like it was 1965 or something? I figured it might be smart to leave soon. But things started cracking at the seams. First the old lady is going from room to room. She asks me, “Where is Louis? What did you do with Louis?” I had no idea. I realized he had moved out of my sight and somehow just gone.
Some moments later huge trucks pulled up, two vast tankers into the back yard, one medium sized rig out in the street and more coming in, a regular convoy moving towards us down dear old tree lined Glenwood Place and belonging there like destroyers and troop transports with full navel crews.
Bill’s mom was struck dumb.
I went out and asked the old man, “What’s all this?”
“We bought em,” he said. “I need them for my business.”
“What business?” I asked him, and he stood there with that open look that didn’t work any more.
Neighbors were starting to sneak in and pilfer. Some were climbing into the beds and going to sleep in their paint covered clothes. The guy next door was preparing to move. He looked at me like it was the end of the world, like the Martians were coming, get with it, get with it.
Bill’s mom was running in circles, going through her coin purses, her tea tins where she had all the money stashed. She held one up to me, demonstrating how empty such a tin could be. Then she ran out to Louis who was standing proudly on the porch, directing the delivery of more trucks.
“You spent all our money!” Bill’s mom shrilled, and she started throwing the empty tins at him.
“Well, I need it, don’t I?” he said with a hurt look.
“This is our retirement,” she accused. She was desolate.
I knew things were getting out of hand. More neighbors were trooping in, offering condolences. None of them were fully dressed. The women had all thought to wear makeup, though. Lipstick enlarged their mouths and their eyes were made dramatic with huge and strangely curved brows drawn haphazardly.
“Bitty? Bitty?” one of them pleaded. “Can I help out here? What do you need here?”
Homeless men were coming in and pilfering, climbing into the beds. They were pulling the insulation out of the walls and dressing up in it. “Get out of here!” I told them and as they ran little pieces of the stuff fell away and floated, gathering into clouds which swarmed around the house.
I couldn’t believe how out of control things were getting so quickly. Someone had dragged the bathtub out on the porch and Bill’s old man was sitting in there naked. I wondered who I should call. Bill didn’t have a cell. He was living back in 65 and we didn’t have them then. How did we get by without cell phones? I couldn’t even remember. I was losing it too. Somehow I’d gotten hold of the Benadryl and I was popping them four at a time. I knew that was a bad idea. Interesting dreams but this was no time to sleep.
The place seemed to be coming apart. Neighbors were in and out. Bitty was hysterical. The huge trucks kept coming in. Amazing chrome plated things. I looked around at the neighborhood and everybody seemed to be moving out. The guy next door said, “This is a country of old people. It smells like piss and old people. I can’t do it any more. Going up to Nova Scotia. Cold but sane. And it’s clean.”
I didn’t know what to do. I could call the cops but what could I say? I’m responsible for these people. Bill had left me in charge. They’d take me in for negligence. I could just leave, I suppose, but Bill was my friend. We’d known each other for years. Somehow I reasoned it out, though. I found a way to justify myself. I did take the trouble to try and lock them all in only the doors were gone. I could see a guy with tools removing the last one. I told him I’d give him five bucks if he’d put all the doors back. He looked at me with bulging, guilty eyes or some fear of world’s end or just a craziness coming upon us all as one generation passeth away and another arises. Let them fuck it up in their own way and in their own time, he seemed to be telling me. I suppose that’s right. I suppose he had taken a right view of it all. I try to keep to that as I go on now, watching it all fly to pieces, watching everything become some other, equally incomprehensible thing.