High Horse

TO FITCHBURG, WISCONSIN; & THE ODYSSEY

(Still Life of an Iris in Spring; Ouristoprous)

By Ouristoprous

1

It was two parking lots away, what was last to be done. I lit a cigarette leaning over the railing on my pitiably narrow balcony on the second floor. The iron of its make looked so black against the functional white of the apartments, their walls of cheapest vinyl, but it matched the black of the winter sky like they were kin. The one starry and untouchable, and the other corrugated and indomitable. Split off and WRENT and soldered to it, my iron balcony, soon to be abandoned. A fine chunk of night. My left hand almost fused with it in the cold.

Did nature, too, want me to stay?

I thought of the eleven hundred dollars it cost to live a month here, smirking. Once a month, like the rent, my alarm was an hour earlier than I usually set it. Blaring, swiveling red and blue, maybe a dog barking – the police dog? A neighbor’s pitbull? – and a megaphone, the shouts of the evicted or the criminal, just and unjust alike packaged so very kindly in this hour of the early morning. The sounds of domestic unrest I preferred, because they typically were confined to the later hours, when I was home from the bars, processing the world through a thick, goose collared haze of drunkenness. I was unusual in that I didn’t go to bed until around five in the morning anyway, and then it would take another hour for me to fall asleep, what with all the whirling thoughts that like to roost in the brain right before sleeping. It’s often faintest blue, replete with minor mayhem by the time I’m slipping into unconsciousness. If red and blue bars of light sideways slitting my eyes through the tall living room balcony blinds were my wild card alarm,– an alarm to go to sleep – the shouts of women and men in love and non-love and post-love, in hysterical Spanish and shattered, sobbing Wisconsin English, was my dark North lullaby. I cherished it so, I could even fall asleep on my back, despite my broken heart.

Like I said, I am unusual.

I was leaving behind nothing but the mattress, which never had a bed frame to begin with, and  was leaving it in that living room where anyone could tell I had, in fact, obviously done nearly all of my living – and a pair of elven leather boots in the closet by the front door. On the top shelf, above eye level. Why? Humor. I have a penchant for leaving shoes beloved to me behind to mark the end of a season in the television series that I imagined was my life. It adds mystique to the event of my absconding, I thought. So would the footprints of blue and pink paint I stamped in a night of tribal fury to the rhythm of Japanese jazz, hot peach fire feet a la Ryo Fukui all across the ceramic bathtub – echoes of my art in a dilapidated apartment in black nowhere in the middle of Wisconsin. A lone bathtub of warm damp indigo blue tucked away in the snow. And you’d never know it. But I do.

For three months, I had paid no rent, and had done nothing with my life but lay in the bath with the lights off and the door a touch ajar nursing hangovers and writing poetry, until approximately four or five in the afternoon, a gear would click and I would leap out sopping wet to the bedroom, which was actually the paint room. Opening the door meant taking to the face a sledgehammer of unctuous fumes: the ashes of desire, rancid imagination and linseed oil. It seared the nerves in my nose but it made my heart sing. Carpeted as it was, I was considerate enough to shrink wrap its insides in Visqueen. I painted naked until somewhere near 4 P.M. Then, making a big to-do of my dress, as though I were a gentleman dandy of considerable ethics and not a youthful vagrant tight-walking eviction, garbed in my iconic tan peacoat I went to the neighborhood bar.

Tonight was to be my last.

The spirit of the times I bestowed this place! There were little maddening flecks of paint all over. The safety deposit, I’m sure, was to go to good use.

2

I had had a job, mind you, and quite a decent one at that. But a tad whacky, I’ll admit. It was a software company owned privately by a billionaire who happens to share her last name with the greatest Southern writer of the 20th century. That there was no building dedicated to Absalom, Absalom! is a real shame, but what is true is that she had constructed for her company a campus totaling dozens of buildings, each of them networked together and individually designed, architecturally and aesthetically, according to her favorite stories as a child. My office happened to be located on the third floor of the second wing of the Wild West offices. There were statues of bison woven out of straw next to paintings of Remington Cowboys. The basement that led to either the parking garages or to HR’s Dungeons and Dragons’ box set department, had a life-sized Oregon Trail style wagon glued to the wall. I’ll let that sink in.

My preferred route to lunch was first through the sky-bridge over to the Alice and Wonderland block and to take the Rabbit Hole slide down to the first floor, take a right at the upside-down room, and down a staircase into the Tokyo Subway. The subway led directly to the train station from Harry Potter, King’s Crossing, which incidentally was also the company lunch hall. The menu would flicker its individual letters on a digital screen, forming out of a sea of golden alphabeticals with a soothing stream of clicking sounds for each letter arranged to spell out “tomato bisque” or “shrimp tempura sushi.”

That was charming.

It lasted exactly a month before I couldn’t take it anymore. Not the infantile scenery – that was indubitably awesome. But as it turns out, even when a childlike spirit has been woven into the very fibers of the architecture, it cannot purify office work of its banality. As much as I really did love my complimentary morning chocolate milk, or the long, windy bus rides at dawn’s rosy gun shot through perfectly round hills of snow: rolling hills bedecked with equally sharply shapely Christmas trees, and an office with a window full to the brim with this dreamy scenery – I had meetings every five minutes, delegating between people who loved the strict logic of computer speech, and were immediately disagreeable the minute they had to participate in communication with people who preferred to speak like people, that is to say, with verve, allusion, and open-endedness.

I knew there was something more than just the standard fare office malaise. Everyone acknowledged it. But what everyone also acknowledged was how little I seemed to belong. Not in a direct way, mean like a school bully, but incredulous, as one might be seeing a work of postwar abstraction on a wall next to George Washington and Paul Revere in the wing of Colonial Art. Believe it or not, I’d tell stories to my coworkers at lunch, and they’d look at me as though I were a monkey in the circus. I’d smile and talk about the time when I was living out of a van, I allowed myself to be mugged taking urban photography in Minneapolis, and it would go quiet — except when the vice president dressed like Tarzan poked his head through the double doors of our conference room and asked if we would like any fresh hot popcorn.

That the walls around their grainy faces, represented in the tiny, chattering block of their camera feed on my own reciprocal virtual cage of a computer screen, were ripped from the pages of campy childhood memories and stapled au collage into saccharine-jocular white-washed renditions of originally black humored German fairy tales, the intercellular overlap of the literary and the programmatic, was an irony that did not fail to cramp my sense of well-being. That they were fifteen feet down the hall in a cubicle of their own talking to me through a computer also didn’t help.

When I came aboard, I had six months of intensive training looming over me – I spent three out of those four weeks stealing every box of thumbtacks I could nab from the office supplies cabinets of several departments and instead perfected on my huge cork bulletin board a panorama of a Dutch windmill in primary colors. When I had put the finishing touches on the rays of sunrise dappling the contours of the green hills atop which the windmill was perched, I sat back in my chair and sighed with post-coital relief. I then gathered all my things, left a voice message for my supervisor explaining my resignation, and walked out of the Wild West into the snow, never to return.

The place was best deserted, at night. The campus swelled its luminance inward, creating a bare glow along its lengths like an electric eel at the bottom of a mossy lake. The sky would be blue and starry in the distance, empty overhead. The hills, spectrally white at the foot of the complex, receded into a crisp shadowy oneness, ribbed with the bristles of pine trees, spaced out like teeth in a shark’s mouth. I had walked it endlessly, like it were the engine of a dreamscape. I especially enjoyed taking a quick dive into the galactic auditoriums, where panoramas dedicated to Andromeda and our own Milky Way had been constructed through its deep entrails. I would acclimate myself with these elaborate and detailed representations of far away space time, swimming intellectually through it like a bioluminescent river of knowledge, before emerging again from the underground, perhaps in the entrance to the hall of video games, or to the building of mathematics, where there was the huge spiral staircase with the curve that rose at the rate of Fibonacci’s sequence – up, up, up – until I was again level with the huge square glass windows of the sky-bridges, and the scrunched infernal rug of snow and darkness endlessly beyond.

I tried, I did. But I could only play so many midnight games of night-tag with the custodial staff before I had had enough. I wasn’t suited to the work, and the money they were paying me, while nice, didn’t make up for the compression of my soul. So, after only a month, I quit. Then they asked me to repay them the money they had gifted me up front for relocation. I told them to think of it as an investment in their advertising.

I did not follow up with their reply.

3

I didn’t have much money. If I had stuck it out for a year, I would have had a good deal of money, but my stupid ethics and my wise impatience had gotten in the way of that whole business of “planning my life out rationally.” I had made a little money gambling in the stock market, and that was about it. It was going to pay my way to California, though I didn’t know that yet. In fact I wouldn’t know until I got there, actually. It kinda just – happened. All I knew in that moment was that I had just quit my job. Three months later, I was leaving to go work with animals on a farm in Kentucky.

The friend who had set up the opportunity for me had worked there last year in autumn, staying to buffet the terrors of Winter. I was going to replace her in the time after, when the world is in the waiting room nervously listening for the crowning of Spring. When I had agreed to the arrangement and told her to confirm the deal, that I would work for room and board and food, she had only these words to give me: “Be careful. When you believe Ted knows what he’s doing, you’re in danger.”

Ted was the owner of the farm. I would later describe him (accidentally) to his twelve year old son as a modern day version of a tyrant in an Ancient Greek tragedy. A New Jersey-New York-L.A.-Kentucky Jewish Willy Loman. A Creon-of-Antigone type. Best way I can introduce his story without going any farther was that he was shot in the stomach with a hunting rifle point blank by the older brother of his childhood best friend when he was a mere twelve years old. This was just the beginning. Excluding some major details, including some frankly rapey ones, he had spent time in New York as a sound engineer, then worked for FOX in L.A., switched to becoming a yoga guru after a near-paralyzing motorcycle accident, and now was trying to build a 67 acre doomsday plot with his Japanese wife and their three children halfway between Richmond and Lexington. I had the impression she was something of his prisoner by circumstance, and I eventually left because I couldn’t hide my contempt for the way he regarded his eldest son, Kenji, a sweet and precocious if not also whiny and begrudging boy of twelve.

Anyway, her words were not exactly words of welcome – though I’d be remiss if my devilish heart did not prickle itself with romantic fancy at the sound of imminent jeopardy – but, regardless, I couldn’t stay in Wisconsin any longer. I was still running after the poverty of great dreams with a comically large butterfly net, then. I was willing to take any ticket — plane ticket, bus ticket, ferry — that came across my way, simply by virtue of it being a ticket.

I was a whore for tickets and travel fare, if you will.

4

Sick of reminiscences (and logic-of-narrative dissolving omnisciences), I flicked the cigarette out into the lot below, where it fought on valiantly. The cherry ember’s hiss of defiance exasperated me. Through the bite of the cold, I could feel it locked there, the stupid guilt. The stupid dread. It was time to go.

I gave one last look of goodbye through the shabbiest of doorways. But it was my doorway. I threw the keys onto the dingy carpet floor behind it, closed it, and went my way.

The walk to the bar down the road was a leisurely five minutes, but spotted with black ice like a jaguar, and about as nippy. Stepping inside, the hot breath of it rushed up to meet me. So apropos the bar’s name, “The Thirsty Goat.”  It kindly assaulted me, drying my hair with its tongue of stale beer smell, as I kicked the snow from my shoes onto the shoe mat. I could almost hear a bray in the cumulative noise of the crowd around the corner and down the hall. I flung the jacket and scarf from around my body like they were trying to suffocate me, and slung them over the back of the empty chair next to this old woman at the bar. She was hardly larger than a garden gnome in her perch on the stool, had a neat bob of platinum hair, and bifocals which paradoxically jumbo-dwarfed her eyes. She also had the grandmotherly face of a Hans Christian Anderson folk tale.

She was living a lonely life. Many evenings she spent recording messages from the television in crayon on scrap pieces of paper and whatever else she could find. She thought she received codes from infomercials at four in the morning. Not from God, per se, no divine authority, although frequently she attached to her shadowy missives quotes from the Bible which had meant a great deal to her when she had been more – lucid. Four in the morning because her downstairs neighbors were often violent until after midnight and it wrecked her nerves.

Her consciousness wasn’t totally senile. She could hold a conversation decently, and remembered your name if she liked you or if she really disliked you. Whatever she said about decoding secret messages, it was harmless. It was like the brain explaining why it conducted a reflex. All after the fact, all ad hoc. She was just trying to deal like the rest of us. Childless, she had a lot to give and nowhere else to put it. It was the acid reflux she secreted from her imagination to wash out the loneliness.

How did I know this? Because she was my friend.
“How are you this evening, Iris?”

“Oh!’ Iris exclaimed in her raspy voice. In my mind, hers was the voice at the heart of every hard candy.

“It’s so good to see you. I had thought you had gone to Kentucky already. Jim, Jimbo, look who’s here!” She wrangled a bony finger from her fist and waved it at Jimbo, who was at the corner of the bar.

“SERPICO!” He raised a glass and shouted, already drunk. He yelled “SERPICO” at the top of his lungs whenever he saw me because of my winter beard striking a resemblance to Al Pacino’s in the titular film. Then he went back to his sudsy, solemn forgetting. He was my ride to the bus depot later. He was nursing his hurt ahead of time.

“Iris, I brought a surprise for you. Something to remember me by. It’s out back. By the way, what are you drinking?”

“A – surprise?” Iris was astonished. Her mouth was open, and then she made a big show of closing it with her hand, because her life was, for better and for worse, a never ending vaudeville act. She was theatrical in her marrow like that. “A PBR would be fine!”

While we waited for the drink, I held her hand and complimented her style. Innocuous things, really. We were girly together, you could say. I wouldn’t deny it. I wouldn’t deny her. Her only other friend was Peter. They sang karaoke on Fridays. Aside from karaoke, Peter was incoherent by ten p.m., sharp, drunk on, of all things, peanut butter whiskey. He liked to pick unintelligible fights with people he didn’t recognize, mumbling aggressive comments so slurred they bordered Orcish nonsense — only to see them again the next day, himself not remembering a thing, not a care in the world, nothing but that same expression hung on the hook of his hook nose that said, “I never once was visited by true love.”

I gave a salute to Alex, the bartender, and winked at Brenda, the barmaid.  Alex had already been fired four times for sleeping-in and missing entire shifts after cocaine binges and bar-hopping up in Madison. But they were hard pressed for labor and he was good for business. A fine looking fellow, cut muscles and a round, boyish head and light hair. He looked a bit like a children’s cartoon brought to life, as if Sir Topham Hat were ten years younger and suddenly proud of his physique. His head was round like that, very round. There’s not much else to say about him, except for that look in his eyes, the blank vault door behind which was the degenerate carnality he kept locked up nice and docile during work hours. He was a fine enough bartender. He wished me good luck.

I was closer to Brenda. She hand rolled her own cigarettes and even personally ordered her papers. Her initials were branded on every sheet in turquoise. It was my delight to sneak out with her on her breaks and trade gossip like we were spies on assignment. I’d be reading a book, finally cozy with the heat and my White Russian; but then I’d look up, and see her smirking at me with guile, holding a blue initialed cigarette vertically between her fingertips. It was her way of wagging her finger. With winters like those, it wasn’t difficult.

The night did not withhold Her elemental infinity in that part of the country. It’s what defined the North as more than just an arbitrary direction. It was the forehead of the earth, leaning hard into the starry abyss. Brenda had just started dating Kyle, the line cook, but she still lived with her ex-boyfriend, a manchild and a petite psycho. She also had some daddy-issues, so the prospects were grim. I thought they were a cute budding couple, if a little awkward. Saccharine, almost. Like berries, vulnerable to mold and the pecking of birds. Not for my taste. But each were kind and their kindness complemented one another. At least while the Earth was starting to thaw. I liked the image of them. I didn’t know how long they’d last, or if they’d ever really begin to start. Ambling in love like newborn deer learning the use of their legs, stumbling, innocent, while the ice-cube world around them slowly melted and the bears awoke from their slumber. I was only sad that I wouldn’t be around to witness in the aromas of Summer the mystery of their outcome. Comedy? Or Gore?

I walked Iris to the back of the bar and out the back porch. I wanted to say goodbye properly to Brenda, but the look in her eyes was too wet with pity to bear addressing. We both waved weakly to each other.

We found Chef Jeff outside, only wearing a t-shirt and shorts in the unbelievable cold, drinking a blonde beer from a mug and nursing a cigarette. The puffs of smoke that left through his foamy beard were like the life force of a gnomic walrus. A breeze blew in from the ice capped reservoir at the bottom of the hill below us and it carried his sagacious puffs away in silvery increments.  With a monk’s all-knowing squint, he was observing the voluminous gift I had laid there against the railing to surprise Iris, and basically afforded me the introduction. He was my happenstance showman, my blubbery arctic curator. Without even turning to me, but with a protracted boom, like a gong, he goes:

“This is beautiful, man.”

He spoke in a baritone of laconic elegance. It warmed the cockles of my heart.

The four corners of the world should know, Jeff was the first person to believe in my talents, and until recently, he had been sneaking me excesses he had clandestinely ordered to the kitchen. In private, when I first told him of my plans for Kentucky, he told me he would go by the bookstore every week in search of my name. He shook my hand before embracing me, smiling as he did it. And I knew he was true at heart. No man that husky ever shivers because of the cold. How a man whose father never respected him could be so kind and noble to a degenerate like myself, I struggled to understand.

“You wouldn’t believe,” I started to narrate with feverish excitement, re-living to Jeff my Herculean labor. “Even just a few blocks, trying not to slip on black ice, two-handing this huge canvas, trying not to crack my skull. It’s like five feet long! What’s your wingspan, Jeff? I don’t think you could fit it across your belly, you giant, you! And you wouldn’t believe how particular I was synthesizing the exact right shade of purple. Vats on vats of paint, vats! I’m talking about – Iris? Are you crying?”

Iris was dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her little mitten hands. “No, it’s just that damn cold,” she said. Then she stared at the painting with her glasses on. You wouldn’t know it, but once upon a time, she was a local legend. Watercolors. She ran her own print shop and everything. The State of Wisconsin used to issue their licenses and diplomas under her hand-drawn designs.

Iris leaned in closely to the painting, and I saw my colors and the waves of my impasto in all their intimate little heartfelt details in the harsh white lonely light explode reborn across her Coke-bottle lenses.

After what seemed an interminable while of basking in the painting’s glow, she didn’t even have to say it aloud. None of them did. Not Jimbo drowning with his nose in his beer, not Brenda with the tears on her chubby cheeks, nor Jeff with the stifled sobs stuck like an errant fishbone in his throat. A switch had been flipped. Reality had shifted. The dread came, in oily sloshes and lacquered thick.

It was as if the whole world had froze over again, Spring had miscarried, had froze deathly still – I was on one side, and every one of their faces were looking at me through the impossible mirror of uncertainty, and the frigid air, with the sickly green solemnity of corpses. In a resounding silence, like that of a cemetery, mouthlessly they all begged me to do what could not be done.

To stay.