The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Dee rose. Half there. Half not. They couldn’t tell if he was all drunk or if he spit up on himself some other way. The stuff coming from his mouth was blue, but the bottle was still in his hand. Conscious? They supposed so. Fuck it. It was going to happen anyway. Dean was there, the guy from the paper, or was it the magazine. He lisped around and talked about how he too ran with the angels. The Hells Angels. Right. Let him write. Dee sat back down and took off his pants. His dick was limp and there were bitemarks on it. He looked up at everybody and remembered. There. There. There she was finally, at his command, and then she bit and he figured, oh well, fuck it. Lucky she didn’t bite it off. She screamed something about how he held her head too tight or something. Dean was on his haunches. His camera was down and for this he was grateful, although it didn’t really fucking matter anymore. Stanhope gave him the drug and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t heroin, but something else. Fuck it. Who cares. It was going to happen anyway, this blue stuff, this stuff that would be blue at some point in his life, like death, it was, and that was what it was for, wasn’t it?

In ten minutes he remembered and he looked up and saw the anxiety on several people’s faces. They knew better, but they were talking to him, and he knew, he remembered, and he stood up and he let them take him and finally, he made it to the stage, pushed out there, by Renee, physically, who hated his fucking goddamned guts even though he paid her to be his slave. The rebellion was complete with that shove and she knew she wasn’t going to get fired because he knew there was nobody else in the world who would dare shove him like that, like he was an asshole, which he was, a fact he was fully cognizant of even while letting the blue foam take over the sides of his mouth and the stage lights sock him in the eye like a hater. Renee. He reminded himself to fire her, because it was the first time that he thought a shove is a shove is a shove and fuck all that.

In an hour and a half he was on his back speaking into the microphone about the world as a thermonuclear blanket laying itself over everybody, and nobody was exempt. He talked about the shit in his ass. He talked about the girl, Cynthia, who he fucked the night before and whose boyfriend sat by, with a thousand dollars in his hand and a dead relationship to boot. Another test. Another reason to be considered an asshole. So be it.

William Welkins of Southampton was dead to his family by this time. His mother forgot about him. When she saw his picture in a magazine she told the ladies beside her that he should have been aborted. She hated him that much by the time he was piling it into his veins in the name of love and art and swag and culture and making motherfucking ends meet. But success is funny in certain games and the blue foam which had a pink tinge under the light was a byproduct of that success. Had he really signed on for such a ride? He didn’t think so, but it was there. It was easy too. All the frustrations in his life to be screamed out at other madheads like himself. They pay me for this, he thought once, and laughed. It was actually while talking to Dean, the scrawny wannabe who can only write and nothing more. No fucking. No partying. Nothing for Dean, but that goddamned notebook, tape recorder and look of understanding interest in his eye. The fact that Dean at least smoked pot with the crew was his salvation from total nerdhood, that and the look in his eyes, the slit eyes that had something killer and I don’t give a fuck about them. Dean, who went to journalism school, never fucked his life up for want of some ethereal something else that ultimately could be had just through destruction. Destruction of the vessel. Just like in Bible school. The vessel. And that’s how he thought of it out there as he lay there and went into the fact that his shit was better than everybody else’s. That he could fuck a hamster and do it right and fuck all you people who find that fucked. Fuck You! And Dean would sit there and scribble. He would get his book out of it. Shit, megaplatinum without selling out like the shits. Time would end. Time would end. This was for sure. Time would end. And the blue would leave and the new drugs would come and the ending, the pleading in other people’s eyes would go away. Some people wanted him to be a square, man, a square, but he knew it was not possible because of the screaming in his head that had to come out. Was he insane? He fully believed that to be the case when he pierced his wrist with a large safety pin. He was going to pierce his eyeball, but Mary stopped him. She was the makeup lady. Dee and the make up lady in life threatening situations. About par for the fucking course and Dean scribbles and scribbles and where is mom in all this? With her letter, her ostracization, the disgust. And dead dad? What would dead dad think? And Leila of love and time gone by and hope lost. What would she say now, sitting in the town square with her brood and her good man and never straying into the memory of the filth that he actually was. Nothing. She told him to die. Good enough. The record company is good with it too. Eveybody on board? Everybody want to play the game? Shit. Here goes and there is blue foam as friend and the lights go down and when the ambulance comes it is sorry, but there really is nothing that it can do and the job was done and the show was complete and never had there been a greater performance with such an ending that more people secretly wanted than they let on. In the paper he was turned into a monkey and years later he’d entered the realm of a god. But he’d always known what he was. He was filth. Pure and simple. Filth – and people loved him for it.