The End Of The Rainbow

Don’t tell me about Frisco’s Castro, clean cut, bright lights, pink houses, serviced in hot pants. I can hear the tourists: “Let’s go to the Gay Village!” craving strawberry daiquiris and Long Island iced teas, listening for the idiotic rhythms of Eurocircuit trash, to which caged men dance go-go, the disco ball’s reflection caught in sweat, making the bodies golden. Instead bull dikes sell bitter glares in the dark levels of Le Drug Store, where you can catch a picture of Belleguelle Rouse for $10 even – neon lit beggers with earrings, working class saleswomen without. Further down the stretch, the streets get this industrial atmosphere, like a flickering light bulb hanging from a corroded wire; in the incoherent light whiskey-soaked ghosts and rough sketches of men float down the side streets, dressed to beat the cold winds and le grand gel. Hey monsieur! Avez-vous une cigarette?

-Tabernac!

Open blue flannel shirt, and underneath he’s got on a stained wife-beater that tightly hugs his mononcle-belly, his hairline recedes in grey, pulled back into a slicked ponytail, and a thin little pencil moustache hangs neatly on his heavy French face. Of twenty or so keys on his ring, none of them budge the lock. -Le fucking lock guy fucked up la door… come upstairs, I show you anot’er apartment — same t’ing.

I follow his clumsy frame up several flights of a narrow stairwell, each landing greets a new sound or smell: first floor R&B music blares through the door, second floor the rank scent of fresh marijuana, third floor there’s silence and the enertia smell of stale tobacco; there’s a captain’s bed leaning against the wall beside the first door. -Where are you from?

“Kitchener, Ontario.”

-Meh. I not know where t’at is.

“It’s not noteworthy.”

-Est-ce que tu parles français?

“A little.”

-Comprendre?

“More than I speak.”

-(He grunts something that I don’t get.)

Door 10 opens into a small white room with linoleum floors, spotted with white paint. To the left is a small, dirty bathroom, to the right is an antique fridge and a gas-stove that advertises its shortcomings in user safety, there’s a small closet and a large window that’s perched above alleys and industrial wasteland. “Is there hot water?”

-If you want.

“I’ll call you tomorrow after I’ve given it some thought.”

-So you are done here?

“Yes.”

-Goodbye, he says locking the door as we exit.

I see him two days later inside his apartment to pick up the keys. On his couch sits an effeminate male, wearing a black bandanna adorned with skull and crossed bones emblems, at least twenty years his junior. The young man grins at me; his smile is innocent in the most Burroughsian sense of the word.

-You have money? the superintendent asks.

“Yeah, cash.” I say and start laying out my rent in stacks of twenty. They shoot each other lecherous little smirks.

The superintendent speaks to his young friend in a rather distinct tone of voice; you can hear it when he answers his phone or when he delivers a report, every man’s voice has a specific pitch that’s reserved, like occasional vintage, poured only in small quantities when talking to a boss, a mother, or a lover. The young man melts proper French back to him with a gentle smile.

-I write you receipt.

“I’d hope so.”

He leafs through a mass of papers looking for his booklet of rent receipts. He finds two empty booklets, curses en francais and pushes a whole stack of important looking documents off of his dresser, scattering them across the floor. -Here, he says holding a fresh book, Now I write you receipt.

On the way out a large stack of books catch my eye, red and black decorated in iron crosses and swastikas.

ROOM 10

“This isn’t working, let’s go to a bar.”

“Just wait it out. Let’s smoke a bowl to tide us over.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I’m game.”

“You’ll pass?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, I’m feeling a little down — nothing serious, just seasonal depression, I think.”

“You gonna be alright?”

“Consult the old earth.”

“I’ll be fine; the herb tends to compound these things for me.”

“If this is bad, I say we kill Tragic Jones.”

“If it turns out to be bad, then yes, we can kill him. Jesus Christ, just have a little patience.”

“We can always just get drunk.”

“Backup plans are good.”

“I think I feel something.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“O.K., let’s just get drunk.”

“How long has it been?”

“An hour and forty minutes.”

“Let’s just wait a little longer.”

“Does anyone feel like painting?”

“Paint if you want to paint, Waldo.”

“Well, I don’t want to be the only one painting.”

“I’ll paint when I feel it. I’ve got my eye on this one section right there, beside the closet.”

“Go nuts, I want some art on my walls.”

“You doing alright Wynd?”

“Yeah, I’m fantastic.”

“You get so quiet.”

“Lights have become so very bright.”

“I think I want to paint. Where’d you put what we bought today?”

“Just over there — got anything to mix it in?”

“I’ll fix up some jars of water and a paint tray.”

“Do you think this will work on the fridge?”

” I don’t think — something smells off. T-Bone! I’m such a stoner!”

“What?”

“I bought oil based paint. We really shouldn’t paint with this, not if there’s going to be five of us in this cramped room.”

“Oh well, what the hell.”

“No, Waldorf, the fumes would be really unhealthy.”

“Fine… Hey T-Bone, can I draw in your sketch book?”

“Sure.”

“Actually drawing’d probably be real fun right about now.”

“Sharp, can I draw on your wall with pastels?”

“Go ahead.”

“I still say we kill Tragic Jones.”

“It wouldn’t pain me horribly.”

“If it’s shitty we kill him, if it’s good we kill him for being too powerful.”

“What’chu drawing, Waldorf?”

“Just designs and stuff.”

“Those look pretty cool’ I like your drawings — no homo.”

“I feel really good about this, but I think I need to add something other than red.”

“Yeah.”

“What colour is this, Sharp?”

“It looks kind of green.”

“But it also looks blue.”

“Yeah, it looks really blue, but also looks, I don’t know, some really intense Persian green.”

“How am I supposed to see what I’m doing when the colours don’t stay the same?”

“Feeling any better, Lurch?”

“Yeah, I’m feeling a lot better. I was worried about that depression thing for a little bit, but now I’m cool.”

“Now it wants me to do something else to it; something other than red or blue.”

“Try this.”

“That’s not red or blue. Thanks.”

“T-Bone, your painting is really intense. Mind you, I’m hallucinating.”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

“I’d advise against that.”

“Things always seem so much more manageable than they are.”

“We should stay in here at least for a while longer. I don’t think I could handle cars and people’s faces going woom-woom-woom right now.”

“But I need some air.”

“Open the window.”

“You heard about what happened to Wynd and I?”

“It was a damn parable–”

“Don’t leave the forest, or the room, or whatever.”

“That was terrifying.”

“Braving the world in this twisted consciousness–”

“–on a highway overpass–”

“–Hey, are you kids on aciiiiiiiiii—- screamed from a car, the voice getting sucked into a vacuum.”

“Exciting until I realized what I was doing and how it looked.”

“It’s always nice when it’s over, and you can do real people things again.”

“Like leave your house without paralyzing fear of bad things happening to you, like walk the streets without everything being perceived as an immediate and very real threat – things become too real.”

“Oh to be human again.”

“My shirt is so yellow!“

“I feel like I should be hungry. Maybe I’ll die of starvation.”

“It takes three days to die without food.”

“It takes 30 days to die without food, it takes three days to die without water.”

“Crisis averted.”

“I’m going to take a break from this painting, see if time will tell me where to take it.”

“Waldorf, draw something funny.”

“You can’t draw funny faces — they’ll just turn out being scary.”

“Well of course they’ll be scary now that you’ve said that.”

“Wynd and I have very gargoyle highs.”

“You are kind of gargoylean, just kind of sitting there smoking one cigarette after another.”

“Gargoyle’s are strange things — these stone monsters that just are, hideous, terrifying, being gargoyles.”

“I’ve always liked gargoyles.”

“You remember the gargoyles cartoon?”

“Stop saying gargoyle before the word loses its meaning!”

“I have smoked a lot tonight though.”

“I think I’m sobering up.”

“It goes up and down, one minute you’re hallucinating, the next minute you feel calm and clear, but bounce on the devil and you’re hallucinating again.”

“You’re gone.”

“Wishful thinking, I suppose.”

“Not having fun?”

“I’m having tonnes of fun, I feel really good. I just didn’t sleep the night before, I worked eight hours today and now I’m in for the long haul. I kind of wish I could sleep.”

“Sleep, and eat, and things that real people do.”

“It’s nice to be a real person.”

“Fuck, this is scary.”

“I told you it’d be scary.”

“It’s only scary because you told him it’d be scary.”

“Man, you can’t draw funny things on psychedelics!”

“T-Bone, you don’t mind if I trip out on your face, do you?”

“Um, not at all Sharp. You can trip out on my face as much as you’d like…”

“Don’t want to make you feel self-conscious or anything– I can see your skull superimposed over your face.”

“That’s nice. I think this painting needs green.”

“Waldorf, do you see the rifle in T-Bone’s picture?”

“I do. Like, right here is the cartridge, and here’s the butt.”

“I see it– wow, that’s cool.”

“It’s turning out really well.”

“I just wish I still had red. The top part is yearning for red. Orange doesn’t have the same effect.”

“Draw a skyscraper– I saw one bud out of the tree branch.”

“Buildings are hard to draw. There’s entire degrees dedicated to doing it properly.”

“I can give it a shot.”

“I see a lantern.”

“I see a meat stack.”

“Now I see the meat stack.”

“That felt like hunger; that’s a visceral process, right? Maybe my body’s coming back.”

“I prefer the lantern, or, you know, what it’s supposed to be. How’re you doing, Wynd?”

“Smoking is a funny thing — combustible image; the cigarette is a fleeting accessory, this defining part of the smoker’s aesthetic that slowly slips away becoming ash and smoke, the remaining image that just kind of looms there or blows away.”

“Can we still kill Tragic Jones?”

“It’s too high up now, it needs red that I don’t have; I’m finished — make room for me.”

“Will this sun go down?”

“No; probably not for a while.”

“But it’s below the horizon, right?”

“It’ll bother you and then you’ll wake up and it’ll be daytime again.”

…

In my absence the window blinds have been hung, lopsided, by my screaming body. You never become accustomed to the stretching and re-stretching that comes with the thaw; there are these aches in every muscle; I imagine a feeble whine, like the failing start of a diesel truck, that accompanies every rigid movement I make. I give up struggling with the blinds, and throw my new body, still adjusting to this awful gravity, upon the mattress thrown across the floor, still kind of expecting to hear the haunt of midnight voices.

My ceiling and walls were rushed white with frantic brush strokes, a tactless job that fails to create even the illusion that someone cared for the apartment or the tenant living there. Ceilings are important, I think to myself, and through years of insomnia I’ve become quite intimate with them all.

In my mom’s old house they were all painted white with a sponge, dabbed individually. This simple technique would create an intricate design that forced the impression of a lot of work. I’d lie across my bed every night and I’d place blame, debating the nuances and injustices of my young life, searching for the conviction to defend my faults (back then I didn’t know that to have conviction is to be convicted), giving up to yearn for loe or lust or something like it. When that became too hard I would trace the patterns in the ceiling, memorizing the ins and outs of the least important facet of the room. There was this one spot, directly above my bed, where the painter fucked up – probably just touched the sponge to the ceiling without any pressure, so the paint didn’t flatten out into some pattern, but instead formed hard little droopy pockets with the gravity; a harmless mistake and easy enough to make, but it was so maddening! I couldn’t look at the tiny imperfection without grinding my teeth, but in my attempt to avert my eyes I’d always catch it in my peripheral and let it distract me, so I’d close my eyes and think of the profit and loss. My mom would often find me on the couch by morning, or shivering flat on the living room floor.

My present ceiling is bland, my walls are white and much too close together. I can’t look directly at the exception: a pastel mural has materialized beside my closet — it’s too much, the gnarled nerve in the back of my neck is too much, the subjective solitude is too much. Am I sober? How can I tell all alone – I can retrace my mom’s ceiling but I can’t retrace the lines of straight thinking. What I would do for a real person, a person that lives by odds, some advanced probability system instead of reality; the kitsch-makers who invent past and future commonplaces so they never live the present.

A knock at my door interrupts–

“Good afternoon.”

In my doorway is a middle-aged Japanese woman, dressed entirely and elegantly in white. She takes my hand and shakes it gracefully.
“Um, hi.”

“You have problems with your toilet?”

“Yeah, I do.”
She starts removing her shoes at the foot of the door. “That’s not necess–” I don’t have the time to finished before she’s left her shoes there and has made her way inside.

“I am your landlord. My name is Joy. You told Jacques you had a toilet problem?”

“Uh, hi Joy, my name is Michael, and yeah I do–”

“Oh, you have painted the walls?”

I glance at the chaotic root stretching up from Hell to infinite, “Oh, that; yeah.”

“No good, no good.”

“I’ll paint over it before I move.”

“It done with wax? You cannot paint over wax. How long will you live here?”

“Like, a year or something.”

“I hope so.”

“I might get some kind of stripper before I leave…”
She hurries past to look at my toilet. She lifts the chain, and floats the ball, and pulls the lever and fumbles the doo-dad.

“The pump does not work. It is mechanical problem, you will need plumber. I’ll call for plumber for two days.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“I can get you bucket to fill tank while you wait.”

A couple seconds elapse staring at the sudden movement in the painting before I respond, “Um, no, it’s alright; I have a cup.” I display the mug I keep my tooth brush in. She paces out into my living room and looks around.

“I think you will take good care of the apartment.”

“Yeah.” There’s a moment of complete silence, both of us awkwardly looking around while I anxiously anticipate her leave. She takes first initiative.

“Nice to meet you, Marko.”

I nod and she bows and heads for the door, but before leaving points to the blinds.

“I have same blinds at home — very nice.”

Fuck real people; I’ma go see F.