A HalfMan Dreaming

Book I. Exit Chino

1 BOOK I| Exit Chino I was used to seeing the factories. The scrubbed clean ones with low roofs where you needed a great-grandmother from the American Revolution to get work clearance. You got to put together torpedoes and missiles with atomic and nuclear warheads, take your time, microtune those fuckers so that they wouldn’t even leave a stain. You could come home to your girlfriend. Have her wrap her legs around your back in the back seat of your Dodge Hemi and know she couldn’t even begin to ask how your day went, that it was “Top Secret ” installing gyroscopes the angular rotation of your nighttime hours and their pitch, yaw, and roll. Maybe you could do it eight hours a day, get to love to drop DMT, tell your head it steadied your fingers, sing the same little rodent song that Annette or Darlene sang and have that girlfriend strap on a Mickey Mouse hat, suck and pull your nipples raw, stretch your anus with her hungry wanting fingers, and if you let it become an image where would its eating stop or begin what with those industries surrounding the death of being being another gold rush, and moving between that flow of money and how it could customize a car, buy inboard race boats with blown injected Chryslers and the northwest wastes of the Mekong Delta where cults and prophets seemed to appear out of a nowhere equal to any Southern California parking lot, the mutual power of incantation licking, calling everyone to a passage and whether it was beyond cure only death’s part of the rescue’s price would tell. Ripened. Who can be ripened as the moon is eaten. And may never come back. Warped maze of swollen earth one finger tall. Hell particularly stinks they thought. In all their scrolls the dead in the land of the dead are represented by a fart. And there the most beautiful jewelry to be worn are the freshest eyes of the dying. And the witch in my world was a plane. What it gathered at that time just after World War II, more than anything else, was the dust of insecticides. It ate our childhoods. But we didn’t know it until the onset of our becoming men. 2 It ate sex, it ate the world, it ate the nation; a below radar feast no one’s caught up with yet. We didn’t know that either. The world surrounding that plane was slow. No one could say it was sticky ’cause the air was too dry, too hot. The Santa Anas came and drained everything . Squeezed the air a fine, thin blue, squeezed the distances so you could see a hundred miles, sometimes more, and if we asked that ole Kiowa, Tom Green, he’d say look out far as you boys can but don’t concentrate on the farthest edge, other ocean’s there and you might drown. That kind of story spooked us. If I was to say we had a childhood and what accompanied it it wouldn’t be the Nation’s though that’s what all the adults seemed to want to believe in those years. Uncles came back from war ready as hell for cars, kids, houses, paychecks that looked like pan-fried gold; aunts ready to get drunk fall ass first into anything that’d make them feel alive and leave a beautiful twist of lipstick, a smear of perfume. The escort of our childhood was that plane accompanied by kids who came to school with black eyes and bruises, people still hungry and vagrant from the Depression, pregnant mothers collapsing in potato and corn fields, and warnings over radiation storms collecting over the San Gabriels, having the breath of extraterrestrial onions we’d whisper to each other on our grammar school playgrounds not knowing any other way to hard polish the expensive menace; the way we saw our mothers and fathers were inventing a tolerance for those facts that hallowed them more remotely than the small tree-killing temblors offering a complexion of shadows to the after-war prosperity of our valley and watch it the fuck out that none of it comes to your nighttime window, forget to slam it shut and you might turn into some sort of wart never seen on no generations of anybody. Me and Wesley were born in 1944. Makes us a year older than the Bomb. We knew...