Author:

By Steve Anwyll

On the platform an old woman sells churros and other fried foods from a cart. I eye them as we hurry. I’m hungry but not. A clear plastic sack of little wagon wheels intrigues me. Announced by the breeze our train comes roaring into the station.  We get on. 

Lindsey and I sit close. Black denim pant legs touch. Her head leans against my shoulder and I rest mine on hers. Perfect fit. Full colour ads of smiling idiots holding diplomas in the sky and dating apps promising a love halal compete for my attention. The noise of it hurts. So I eye the man across from me. 

Big and fat. Dark blue cargo pants covered in grey dust. The name of a building company screen printed over his heart. A reminder this is my last day in town. By midnight I’ll be on a bus headed away from all my friends and a woman who makes me feel like a man. By Monday I’ll be back at a machine printing on shirts for men like him to get dirty in.

Why can’t I be free?

Backpack between his wide open legs his gut hangs over his crotch. I stare as he stuffs his mouth full of the wagon wheels I saw the old woman peddling. Over the clamour of the train on the tracks I hear a crunch. Lindsey and I just came from a taqueria we’ve been to so often we call it our place. I ate carnitas and barbacoa and lengua to the point of discomfort. But still. 

Her and I chat as the train heads into Manhattan. It’s easy to forget where I am though. Subway or the Metro. Brooklyn or Montréal. People trying to get home. Back to the bed they woke up in. All of them thinking of hot showers and a reprieve from the din of being awake. Looking through a crowd and seeing we’re all going the same place in different ways I remember, I’m a part of the whole.

So I renounce my individuality as I put my hand on her thigh, squeeze. She lifts her head and smiles. I wink to hide the deep down dread I feel. Of going home. Me and my apartment and no one to call. The few friends I have remind me of a life I no longer belong to. If it wasn’t for an international border I’d stay. 

Call the landlord on Monday. 

The fat man across from me nudges his friend who’s equally as plump. Shakes the bag of wagon wheels at him. The eyes of his friend are laconic as he paws a few out. Like a pervert in the bushes I watch him incognito. I gain pleasure from seeing him chew. Same as the creep in the shadows caressing himself I wonder, how long can I control my urges?

Lindsey breaks my trance as she asks what time does your bus leave? I remind her it pulls out of the station at one past midnight. I watch her cute face cringe and my heart cracks in two. The last five days passed quicker than we thought. Playing around in a house she’s watching while the owners are away. There’s a fireplace and a yard and a fine old beagle with grey in his hair who barks at the letter carrier each day.

Small things make it harder to leave. 

I’ve lived in Montréal ten years now. Wandered its streets and rode its trains. But I’m a citizen only in address. I was married. A situation that breeds isolation. We often disagreed on what makes a good friend. She liked stability. I craved excitement.

I convinced myself that French was getting in the way.

So here, in a city where English is accepted everywhere, I raise my voice over the sound of so many others, excuse me…my man…what the hell are those things you’re eating?

He laughs. Crumbs blowing all over his shirt and his eyes sparkle blue like Caribbean waters. Shrugging his heavy shoulders innocently he smiles a big silly grin. His voice tinged by Spanish he tells me, I don’t know man…I bought ‘em one time…they delicious…now, you know, I see the woman selling ‘em and I buy another bag.

I smile, nod along as he speaks. Look him up and down. Like all the men I’ve ever known his back is bent. His clothes and boots are filthy. Evidence of long days passed doing something that’s hard on body and soul. I know what it’s like. I’ve been standing twenty years now.

A bag of fried garbage can be exactly what you need. 

You want to try ‘em, he asks. Of course. Spittle flies from my mouth. It’s been watering all along. I watch his fingers as he pulls two wagon wheels from the bag. His skin is cracked like mine. Do his knuckles hurt? Does he wonder if it’s all a waste of time?

This I don’t ask. Instead I politely take the wagon wheels from his hand as he offers them in silence. I remember the plague. Accepting food from a stranger was the same as asking to die. I was certain we’d lose our humanity. It’s nice to see I was wrong, that we can still go out and find a little love. 

For what else is sharing food?

In my palm the wagon wheels are lighter than air. Lindsey watches. Him as well. Pressure as I raise one to my lips, take a bite. It’s sweet but not. Crunchy and airy and reminds me of something I can’t place from when I was a kid and thought life would get easier. 

What do you think? he asks, the blue in his eyes sparkling again. I nod. Continue to chew. When I swallow I tell him he’s right. They are delicious. And I regret not grabbing a sack before the train came into the station. He shakes the bag at Lindsey. 

You want to try little lady?

She declines. I tell her she’s nuts and give her a small piece of mine. Reluctantly she nibbles. Her face shows enjoyment as she chews, nods her head like she’s listening to her favourite song and says yum. I get a rush of happiness watching her. I soak up the experience. In a few hours I’ll be by myself again.

After that the conversation dwindles. Lindsey opens her phone to look up what we just ate. Chicharrones de harina. Fried flour. I think of telling the man. Letting him in on what he’s been eating. But I don’t. No point. I leave him to his bliss. The truth doesn’t always make life better. 

When the train pulls into 14th Street-Union Square Lindsey and I get up. I hold her arm not wanting to lose her. The doors hesitate before opening. I tell the man stay out of trouble. I don’t hear him respond. The platform is filled with the noise of people trying to get home when all I want to do is stay.

I tighten my grip.

******

Steve Anwyll is the author of Welfare (Tyrant Books) and can be found online @oneloveasshole

By Bill Whitten

“I am a miserable fool…”

Blue, blue is the grass along the River Vézère. Above the sound of its rushing water I hear the mechanical cry of a Kestrel. I imagine something small and grey struggling in its claws.

“I have one-hundred-and-sixty pages of notes for a twelve hundred word article…”

I sit with Helen Dentritis – a twenty-five year old Greek with pink lips and black hair cut straight across her forehead – in a mustard Citroën DS in the parking lot of Lascaux II. We are surrounded by black, pine-covered mountains and loud German tourists.

Twenty feet from the Citroen, Johnny, in his butter-colored lounge suit, crunches back and forth across the pea-gravel of the parking lot. Henri-Paul, seemingly ready to be whipped aloft by the flaring tails of his cobalt overcoat, follows closely after him. 

How thin and short the men are. Like rats. Like beautiful, talented rats.

“I am an academic, a translator. Not a journalist…”

I rub the bridge of my nose between my index finger and thumb and theorize with absolute confidence that Johnny is the first person from Jamaica, Queens ever to set foot in the Black Perigord. 

“Self-pity is not charming, Rook. No one forced you to write about Johnny.”  

Of course, she’s right. I accepted the assignment to pen an article about a disreputable rock musician of my own free will. It is entirely due to a weakness of character. My well-meaning ex-girlfriend’s brother-in-law is the editor of the Soho Weekly News. ‘Since you are already in Paris’, he suggested during an all too brief phone-call, ‘I’ll pay you 250USD to meet up with Johnny, pal around with him for a few weeks and then jot down a feuilleton.’

And thus I follow after him like a dog, like a man put under a spell. 

Meanwhile, Johnny and Henri-Paul wait for a man named Swann to emerge from the replica caves where he’s been gazing upon aurochs, deer, horses, scenes of murder and other enigmatic, primordial images.  

The wind blows fragments of the their conversation through the open windows of the Citroen. 

Henri-Paul: My Uncle Auguste saw the original paintings – before Lascaux I was closed in 1963. To him, the reproductions in Lascaux II are no more than shadows of the originals…

Johnny (lighting a cigarette): It’s the destruction of our patrimony…it’s a theft of our…

Henri-Paul: He claimed that when modern men were confronted with the original cave paintings it caused them to lose faith in their way of life. Men would see the images and then abandon their wives, their children…

Johnny:  I knew it…It’s as I’ve been saying.

Henri-Paul: The government shut it down because it was too…uncanny….too destabilizing.

The man named Swann wears a backpack filled with stolen Japanese microchips. He will hand over the backpack to Johnny. When Johnny returns to Paris he will deliver the microchips to an editor at Tel Quel named Alain. Alain is a Soviet agent. The microchips are so new, so advanced, that not even the Americans have seen them. Upon delivery, the chips will be spirited off to the Angstrem factory in Zelenograd to be reverse-engineered. Johnny, for his troubles, will be paid 50,000 francs.

Johnny’s fame, as I have learned over the weeks that I have spent with him, touring France, Belgium and Germany, derives not only from his musical skills but also from his protracted self-immolation. When his fans buy their tickets they expect a human sacrifice, failing that, they will settle for a concert given by a cadaver animated by narcotics.

Nevertheless, under the watchful eye of his new manager and paraclete, Christopher, the guitar-player has quit drugs and begun the long process of putting his life and career back on track. The punters, of course, hope for a relapse. Johnny, exhibiting a fatalism typical of his Sicilian heritage, believes that crime and rock and roll are intertwined and accepts that he will always remain in close proximity to danger. 

His difficulties are endless; jealous band-mates, a hostile press, a vindictive ex-wife, a complement of children that he is forbidden to see, problems with the IRS. 

It all amounts to a shortage of money. One can never have enough money. 

I am not supposed to know about the microchips, but Henri-Paul, an Ecole Normale dropout who grew up in Montignac, tells me everything. 

Johnny’s neck is wrapped in a long violet scarf. He tugs at it as he turns and watches Swann walk toward him. Swann is dressed in a grey blazer, white shirt and blue jeans – the same clothes he wore while working as Alain Delon’s stuntman in the just-wrapped production of Pour la Peau d’un Flic. 

“I’ve seen better artwork on the stall walls of a truck-stop toilet in Texarkana.” 

When Johnny heard that Swann, in transit from Sardinia, wanted to meet somewhere between Paris and the Dordogne Department, Johnny insisted that Swann first see the paintings at Lascaux. Everyone on earth should see them. That Johnny is a connoisseur of the works of the cavemen of Lascaux is surprising, yet when I think of his performances and acknowledge that they are events more primitive ritual than concert, it makes sense. Aesthetic violence is always his goal. Be it in his brutal, minimalist guitar playing or in his impromptu scabrous, psycho-sexual monologues. The same theatre of cruelty that can be glimpsed in the galleries of Lascaux is also on offer whenever Johnny takes the stage at the Gibus Club or Max’s Kansas City.

Johnny smiles. His is the face of a thief. “If you weren’t so stupid, Swann, you’d notice that the painters used the cracks in the cave walls, the flaws of the material, as compositional tools. A lump of anthracite becomes a spot on a horse, a crack becomes an antler.” 

“You’ve been living in France too long, Johnny.” Even with a discolored, split front tooth Swann’s smile is pleasant. 

The men make their farewells and Johnny and Henri-Paul climb into the Citroen.

In the back seat, Helen sighs. Johnny met her on a snowy December morning in the Jardin du Sénat. An intellectual, she’s written for Libé, L’Infini and many others. This enchanted creature, this archetypically Mediterranean beauty displays, despite her enormous mental acuity, a great patience for Johnny’s lapses and idiosyncrasies. 

Johnny, like many rock musicians is a consummate sufferer; he cultivates the deepest level of suffering and has learned every possible way to exploit it. That fateful morning, as he wandered the garden, pale, grim, lost, wearing an expression of a man at sea, Helen hid behind a tree and watched him, unaware of his fame, his notoriety, his moral gluttony. 

Eventually, she left her hiding place and her swift, tiny steps roused him as he gazed upon the Fontaine es Quatre-Parties-du-Monde. It was something like love at first sight. 

Helen, of course, introduced Johnny to Alain.

Château d’Urfé, built in 1224 was once the possession of Cathar nobleman Bernard de Garrel. Albigensian crusader Alphonse de Monsoon took the castle and installed a garrison. When Garrel retook it, Monsoon was strangled in his bed. In later times the castle was periodically abandoned and reoccupied, until those enemies of every religion, the Jacobins, razed it to its foundations. A hotel now occupies the site. It is here we retrieve our belongings, check out and begin the trek back to Paris.

Helen wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil and naturally holds a deep interest in the Cathars. She ignites one of Johnny‘s Marlboro Lights: “Reactionaries like to say that the Paris Commune began here among the Cathars. They accuse Marxists of being crypto-Gnostics, crypto-Manicheans forever trying to beget Heaven on Earth. Of course, Marxists share with the Gnostics a belief that the world is fallen, depraved, obscene and that only a transmission of a kind of secret knowledge can allow for the realm of Satan to be overthrown.”

At the wheel I speak, perhaps only to myself: “We will need petrol very, very soon.”

Johnny pulls a wad of francs from his pocket and passes it to me over my right shoulder. “Here you go, Rook.”

Eventually, Helen continues: “Secretly, I agree with them. Marx, Engels, Lenin belong in the same tradition as Marcion, Valentinus, Mani. I feel a secret thrill whenever a fascist accuses me or one of my comrades of being a Gnostic. Yes, yes, I want to tell them. I am one of the Perfecti and I, unlike you, will receive the Consolamentum upon my death. But of course I can’t say a word.”

Henri-Paul pushes his index finger against the bridge of his sunglasses and sneers. “As Genet said; it is more beautiful to betray a cause than to be faithful to it.”

Johnny stares out the window, Swann’s backpack clasped to his chest in the fashion of a schoolgirl. His eyes are black, depthless. 

I edit my article in my head as I drive:

Before the mutation took place that allowed homo sapien to speak, did archaic humans have a signature recognizable cry like that of the blue jay, the horse or the wolf? 

Johnny’s music is the color of black hair. It is the sound of machines being manipulated by addicts and criminals under conditions of destitution. All love is wretchedness. This music does not impart anything approaching truth but instead offers a profound sense of the morbid, the uncontrollable, the unwholesome….

*******

Bill Whitten is a musician and writer.  He is the founding member of St. Johnny, Grand Mal and currently records under the nom de guerre William Carlos Whitten. His latest album Ecstatic Laments was released in June 2022. His book BRUTES, a collection of short fiction was released in January 2022.