subrosa: the adventures of bill chase chapter_19

Chapter 19


As I sat alone and watched the rain washing the filthy street, I wondered what to do with my life. I was somewhat restricted in opportunity since it did not seem the world had a place for me.

All that is, is what is, and all that was is what was. It was plain enough. As I looked out the window, what was, was that this monkey was not quite the same as the rest of the monkeys hanging around in the jungle of concrete and glass. I wanted to go back to the sea.

Below me, the AM radio vibrated mindless drum rhythms through the floor. One of the monkeys that cut hair in the chemically infested salon below me was a social expectancy performer. She must have thought it was the thing for her type to turn the radio up loud on an AM station. My guess was she also got right drunk on Saturday night.

My head hurt.

I jumped up and down on the floor to show my disapproval, but there was no response. I was forced to turn up Sally’s stereo loud enough to almost drown out the irritating outside noise. I started with the college station. It was commercial free and they played the kind of wretched music that suited my wretched mind. I enjoyed the music but I had no patience for the hopeless disc jockeys when they attempted to speak. I changed to the government-funded station until the voice of the announcer disturbed me. I would have like to have been able to use the turntable but there was no needle. I ended up with the city’s rock station. "It’s a nice day for a white wedding," the singer screamed. I could not see it. It was dark and gloomy.

For me it was a day to sink into oblivion. Back into the sludge of my
preconsciousness.

I dug until I found bits of subconscious which I struggled to pull into my conscious. The only way to know subconscious was to change it to conscious. It was like the opening of the metaphysical cat box. It was safer to leave it locked. I wondered how thoughts where affected when they went from one part of the mind to another.

Eventually, I returned to watching the rain pelting down. I studied the cars. The drivers honked their horns as if it would make the traffic problem disappear if the other drivers were irritated. Nearsighted fish swimming in a mirrored dish. Hiding from fear by being busy being busy doing the things they were doing to distract themselves from not having anything to do. Nothing to associate with. I saw no life in the poisoned system.

Once I saw a fat lady in a library. She was very fat. Although she had surrendered to sadness, she still loved her little girl. But the little girl would be without a mother. He mother had abandoned herself. She hid in her food abuse. She hated to be out of the safety of her house here she was protected from thought by having the television suck our her mind. Books made her nervous. She stared into another space and time, almost crying, longing to go back to a fantasy. There was a soap opera she might miss if she did not hurry. She snapped out of her trance to encourage her daughter to hurry up and find the book she wanted.

Why did I have to witness such disasters?

People walked in and out of the dumpy variety store across the street from my perch. A scruffy fellow with matted thinning hair, helped people get bags of ice out of the freezer behind the store. They gave him a quarter or two when he helped them with the fifty pound bag. I have heard him talk and have tried to talk to him but it was not easy to communicate with him. People like him. He has something gentle about him.

Earlier in the morning, the neighbour upstairs asked me if I would help him put some of his artwork up. His recent art theme had been insults about advertising. He had put many of them on the boarded up building across the street. My favourite was the media cow.

The smell of the hair salon came through the floor with the sound of the AM radio. It was a sickening smell. Why did I feel like I was in hell? I did not like the casual abuse of the environment. They do not seem to care.

The rain is poisoned. The water is deadly. The air is rancid. The land has been raped. Man must have given up on life. He was destroying the planet. His planet, because he assumed he was the centre of the universe. He could do as he pleased. He could make religion to support his myopic assumption that convinced him he could do whatever he wanted on the planet and God would take care of him. If God would not take care of his, then to hell with the planet. Maybe there was no hope for the hairy, soft-skinned lizards. Maybe man had no idea what he was doing. Maybe he thought the money he created from crude production factories was more important than the environment he was destroying with his poisonous waste. His quest to concur and separate himself from the environment was going to void all life.

My mind always wandered when I had nothing I could do. Nothing I wanted to do. I usually watched and criticised; I was good at that. I did not like my attitude, but people appeared so obviously stupid that it angered me. Why did I have to be dropped into a world of self-destructive, blind fools? I had not use for their games.

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man was a dangerous mutant.

The authorities, the self-appointed hierarchy, were the ones that had to stop me from taking part in their farce. They did not want any freaks in the domain. No chickens with red ribbons. They had to stand strong in their beliefs and traditions. Their ancestors and creeds were their roots. The only things they had. I was a mutant without roots. I could not belong.

I wanted to fly over their stable foundationless system and shit on it.

They had no choice. The mutants had to be removed because they only disrupted the system. There was no way to make mutants get a proper job and watch sports on Saturday and Sunday.

I remember reading about Socrates, something about knowing yourself. People were afraid to be aware of themselves. Socrates was a freak because he used some of his brain for thinking. Thinking was something humans were afraid of. Humans were better at being mutes grovelling around in mediocrity. They killed him. Sentenced Socrates to death for thinking. Thinking is heresy.

The authorities assume they know something but their knowledge, without wisdom, will negate survival. The thing they called hell had already found me. I was so removed form the average man and his world of false convictions that I was likely destine to destroy myself with exaggerated concepts of my own meaning.

I was hanging from a rope by my left foot in the jungle, thinking about having to deal with my dirty laundry. What rotten luck. I was always hanging three feet from the wet earth when I had more important things to do. Just before hanging, I was being chased by a tribe of ead hunters. I was starting to get away. But the rope predicament held me up. I heard chattering and thumping feet about two hundred yards away, which meant I had about fifteen seconds left till I faced inevitable death. My knife had fallen to the ground, so I could not cut myself free of the rope. As I thought about the uselessness of the knife that was out of my reach, seven seconds passed by, leaving me with eight seconds left until doom.

I pulled myself up my body and got a hold of the rope that was wrapped around my aching foot. That took four seconds. In the next three seconds, I managed to get my foot out of the rope and crash to the wet ground in a mess.

I heard the hunters’ screams upon me and awaited the blow of crude weapons on my shattered body. A separation of life and consciousness. Seconds went by and I did not experience and new pain. Maybe I had already left my body. Maybe I was dead.

I was not going to discover the answer with my face embedded in the dirt, so I raised my head and wiped the mud out of my eyes. To my amazement, I had guessed wrong. The thing I had not thought of was that maybe seventeen insane cannibals were hanging by their feet from ropes.

"There are more comfortable places to sleep than the wall."

I rolled around and looked up to see Sally and Kathy looking down at me.

"I was not sleeping. I was just examining the way the wall met the floor. Pretty amazing."

"When you’ve figured out how it works, you can join us for some Chinese food," Kathy said.

"I will finish my investigation later."

We went to the kitchen and had a feast of monosodium glutamate.

"Brad said you could help him on the bar on Friday and Saturday night if you want. Someone just quit," Sally said.

"Yes, old Brad. That is a good idea. A chance to get out without being exposed to the outside. Without the danger of appearing out of place. A chance to earn my way in life. A chance to contribute to the working of our great land by investing in government approved savings plans. Even if I am an outsider being pursued for the crime of being born wrong."

"You don’t have to."

"I would like to. If I sit in this chemical saturated cockroach cell much longer I will likely go mad."

"You’re well now?"

"I am like a beaten rat scraping for crumbs of meaning in an empty gas station."

"Aren’t we all. They found one of your friends last night. But he didn’t fit your description of Brian," Kathy said.

"Did they say what they did to him? Did they burn him publicly at the stake or crucify him along the road? Did they remove his brain to do experiments with it?"

"Don’t know."

"I do not like it. This world is ruled by mad incompetent dangerously confused and illusioned men. Any deviation form the rigid system of commerce has to be destroyed because the leaders know that the system is built on a foundation of absurd uncertainties and if there is any unbalance in the superstructure, it could be the beginning of the toppling over and crashing to nothingness. The delusion would be ripped open to reveal its emptiness."

"That wouldn’t be very good, would it?" Sally asked.

"What would not be good?"

"To have everything crumble."

"What is it that we are? I do not see its validity. Maybe it would not be good at the time of the fall but it has to happen. If it takes too long to happen it might be too late to start again. If man could see his way clear of his confused greed-creeds and fear-beliefs and let go of his insecurities of having to belong and having purpose, if he could destroy the myths of the ages, if he could quit killing himself and be honest with himself, the fall of the system would be a healthy and welcome thing."

"You can’t tell people that what they believed all their lives isn’t valid,"

Kathy said.

"But it is not. Living a lie only makes things worse."

"Why is it so bad if someone believes something to help them endure the hardships of life? It gives them hope. We need beliefs to give us strength. We need to have roots," Kathy stated.

"Man has religion because of his fears of the unknown. He uses religion to be blind. Blind to the horror of his confused inability and mental weaknesses. Self-consciousness is a fairly new and unstable condition for man and he is afraid to face it. But it is a waste of a life to hide in a delusion. Life should contain awareness and perception. The hardships in life should be dealt with, not muted by lies about the hereafter. There is no hereafter. It is always and always will be now. Man has to learn to live in the present and assist each other to live in the present. There is no excuse for man’s depraved way of being. Too much time is wasted finding ways to kill each other, to control each other, to slander each other, to wasting, to whatever demented things he does, and it would be so much different if man would only examine his unfounded beliefs and realise here is where he is. Fighting for religious creeds or political ideals is all a lie. If man had power over and control of himself, his own brain and his own thinking, he would not desire to have power over others."

"How are you going to bring this all about?" Shelly asked.

"I have no idea. All I know is that man is on the wrong path, a path that leads to his early demise, a dead end path. Pigs running at a cliff. If he does not start using the brain he has, or she, he will destroy himself and the whole world with him."

"It sounds grim," Kathy said.

"It is not like in the Roman days of slavery and debauchery and murder and no hope and an emptiness that is quickly stuffed up by any religion written by some calculating bastard. Our tools of destruction are more developed. We will take every thing down with us. The planet is becoming a hell hole of death and man is the demon with the shovel of destruction."

"I thought you didn’t believe in all this heaven and hell business," Kathy said.

"You question my free use of them?"

"I wonder why you use them so often when you don’t believe in them."

"I am confined to the vocabulary of the archaic language I have been taught. I am confined to the meanings of words that are available. Hell is something we made for ourselves, and demons are a dimensions of our frail consciousness that seems to dominate the foreground of our nature. We are all full of imaginary monsters. The world inside our head is often full of dreaded phantoms."

"I hope it ain’t as bad as you make it out to be," said Sally. "As a matter of fact, I like to think you are off you nut, flipped, and out of your fuckin’ head. As well as crazy and confused and out of your mind."

"That is the simple way to reject the horrible nakedness of the bare truth. And you can be sure I would love to be wrong; unfortunately, I see beyond the illusions and though I know very little, I know too much."

"You can bust your nut worrying about things that aren’t tangible but I’m going to spend my time not thinking about it. I’ve got enough to concern myself with," Sally explained.

"Anyone else want more rice?"

"No."

"You finish it."

I wanted to go on explaining that I did not think it was hopeless. It was just that it was getting desperately close to too late and if people did not take a change in direction from their quest for self destruction, they would wake up one day with no air to breath. The factories would be running and spewing out poisons into the water and ground and air, and there would be no one there to turn them off.

I might have said something in that direction because Sally was explaining how we would die of boredom if we could not make bigger and faster things and more fun and killing kept us fit and weeded out the week and kept the population in control and we have been doing no bad so far and she did not see a big problem.

"You don’t know what might happen," Shelly said.

I had forgotten where the conversation was. I knew that my fried rice tasted good. I knew that I was in a small room with beautiful women.

"I know that nobody knows. But I also know a few things most nobody knows. And I know that we have very immature, childlike minds and we are playing with bigger and bigger toys of death. I know that if it continues in the direction it has gone since we climbed up out of the sea, we will have to perish and make room for another creature or we will have to evolve into the other creature or we have to destroy the entire planet and declare the game over."

"And I declare this conversation over because I have to go to work now," Sally said.

"Maybe we’ll come by later and visit you, walk you home."

"That would be sweet."

"I think I will walk you to work."

"I’m a big girl. I can find the way."

"I want to make a couple phone calls."

"Isn’t our phone good enough," asked Sally.

"It is the people I want to call. Likely, they have been labelled as criminals because they have been exposed to a mutant. The authorities will be watching them closely and monitoring their phones to compile enough evidence to prove that they have discovered dangerously deranged heretics. With their thumbs up their asses, while patting each other on the backs, the self-righteous zealots will take their evidence, screaming their hypocritical creeds, and publicly accuse, then torture, then kill the chosen scapegoats. That is the way the grain-growing blood-sacrificing system works."

"Okay, I won’t argue," Sally replied.

"You want to come too, Kathy?"

"No. I think I’ll sleep off some of this monosodium glutamate. Come back and get me."

"I will."

Sally and I shared an umbrella on the way to her bar. We talked about nothing important and she told me what she would like to do to me before she got to work. I thought she was joking but we walked into a dark alley. Sally found an opened door to a private garage. With only slivers of light coming through the cracks of the wood panelling, we found our way to the hood of a sports car. She was not long getting my pants down and mounting me. I could only sense the cold of the car hood and the warmth of Sally’s skin as I slipped into a drunken state of sensual pleasure.

"What a beautiful rain. I love the rain," I said as we found our way back to the street. "Even if it is toxic, acid, poisonous filth."

"You’re a beautiful, cynical, mutant freak."

"I am sorry I rave so much nonsense. I think I expected too much."

Sally put her arm around me and protected me from the moment. From whatever it was that was likely to attack me.

When we got to the bar, I went in to talk to Brad the boss. I told him I could not give him a social insurance number and was not even sure if I could remember my last name. I could not remember having one. I told him the police might even be looking for me for crimes I could not remember.

I do not think Bob was paying attention to me. He was concerned about something else. He explained a few things about what I would have to do as a bartender and when I should come to work.

"Okay, until later then," I said.



by Joanne B. Washington

read on. chapter_19_2



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