The Hot Stall

It’s always in the shower where I stand and wait and think. Listening to the beat of the marble beads falling at my feet. I drink wine, sometimes, wasting away. Hoping for some better times, maybe a better day.

But, there ain’t much to be had in a small town like this one. It’s a place to sit and stare and never wonder bare or outward. Out here in the tomes of old, where the purple desert grass sways and the flowers look like yellow grapes on stalks of century plants hung among the other red dotting fins of lithe creatures that mope across this plane of mine, never dropping a dime from their tattered and holey wears – for this is a place of wonderment and money isn’t always necessary, but when it is, no one is tossing it aside recklessly like they would their own bodies – money in this realm is worth its weight in human sweat and therefore given a higher standard than life.

[…]

It rains down on me. And I feel it. Feels like needles and knives sometimes, and soothing orgasms, wet soft hands of a nymph others. In this place nothing creeps along the vines in my mind, and I meditate, like a monk in the Andes seeing God in motion, set apart in Energy, but I’m in a plastic shower stall in the old new west, paralytic in the mists of whirling modernity. I cannot even fathom the grandiose outside where they live in the pockets of the world. Cities. Growing and scandalous.

And I don’t think anyone knows where to go in a time like this. You can’t even escape this madness in the sticks, off the paved road. It’s supposed to be calm here, but this is where homo-suicidal maniacs are born, built in factory houses by heaving women doped up on speed and sperm. Breading like machines.

All can be had in this vast sandy island bigger than a continent, fashioned for the liking of such wondrous tikes as Doctor Moreau and the Marquis de Sade. In this place touched by God all is in vein and the worrisome madness is intensifying under the dark clouds and pounding rain.

[...]

I wrote a book in here once. In the shower. It was a short book in my head, one that I could tell you in a short hour; but it crept to life over the course of twenty-three tireless, sleepless, caffeine and cocaine fueled days – “The man never left a hour loosened,” a friend said to another in that time alone, in seclusion, and… I don’t think I came out of the darkness, the brooding gloom of my own Heart of Darkness.

This is for sickening men.

[…]

I let the water hit my face with the tinge I recognize as the abrasive overload of iron-oxide seeping up from the ground into my well through four inch pipes and into the steel water tank and then pumped at eighty-five psi into my house and through my shower head and onto my head and matted down brown hair and it stings my body and dries me out and I have to use a soft lotion of aloe to better articulate skin over muscle, so the thin cotton skin doesn’t crack and burn under my shirt which sticks, like hot leather in the summer, to my body.

Everything here is laced in chemical deposits, both natural and synthesized. Cardboard stiff.

[…]

Down the road there is a tired hidden park of trailers owned by a couple with wrinkles deep and calloused. The homes are new but the people are old and haggard, meth twisted, running lips torn down by fatigue and sun, and their clothes bore the marks of their lives, like scars mark wounds. There are Mexicans there and often enough they fight with the white boys in the park. The Sheriffs called often. And he gets a lot of collars. And he likes that - good for reelection. There is incest in the park, infidelity, adultery, drug addiction, and open drunkenness; wild packs of pit-bulls maul cats as rampant displays of lewdness pervade the loathsome community of toothless freaks.

Last week a tormented housewife cut her husband’s dick off at the balls and fed it to his dog while he howled and watched it all disappear, hog-tied on the floor. She fed pieces of him to his dog for six days before he died.
It was frantic despair driving all that happened there. Like wind moves a fan.
Other things happen there too.

Go there and watch and it’s the poor guttural orgy that is both pathetic and sick that you will see ad infinitum. But it is a twisted custom there, and people don’t speak about the atrocities except in the proper circles, because when things get out it isn’t pretty. Blood is always let invariably and the product is maimed bodies, lopped limbs, screams, and death in the night…

“They have their own Jerry Springer Show going on down there,” Zach said, on our way to work. There were mountains all around us, full of flowers. There had just been a snow a few days ago, but it was the end of April and the sun was a full bright orb of Energy in the sky. Now it was gone. And all that was left were flowers. Brilliant desert flowers. The valleys, normally dry were full of wild colors passing around, changing daily, redirecting with the sun, moving in their constant motioned beauty, parading out into the lands that I cannot yet reach. They bound beyond all boundary or fence, like a dream of Einstein.

That’s how it is here. Limitless.

[…]

The white plastic stall encrusted in the red muddy color of iron. The old door no longer transparent. And. When the water cools, there isn’t anything to meditate over – I turn the water all the way over. It comes straight from the earth, unheated, untouched, and batters my searing, steaming body, everything shrinks up, except the balls, which hang low, one lower than the other.

[…]

And I think, “Is there anything more?”
But there isn’t and it’s back to the lathe.


By: Dillon Mullenix

Scarification

These photographs are samples from a larger collection of modern floral graffiti art that I am compiling.

Nacho

There was a knock at the door, and I thought to myself, “It’s a beast.” I thought that because I was on acid. Acid was readily available when meth was not. The beast at the door was bearded and wild, stocky like Frankenstein’s younger treacherous brother. He was known to kill cattle at night with a pitch fork and howl at the moon. I personally saw him eat the warm heart of a calf cut fresh from the womb. There was a nagging madness about him and you could see it in his eyes. It freed him. And because of his freedom he was feared, for he knew no fear himself, even when confronted naked by an ork sword in singular darkness of an avocado orchard by a redneck maniac named Manny Williams.

“What do you want?” I screamed looking into the abyss he called his eyes.

He answered quietly like a humble Hulk, “Can I pitch a tent down by the creek for a while.” There was murder in his tone.

“Sure, man… yonder past the shrubs is a good stand of oak you can camp in.”

“Thanks,” he said.

When he walked off into the night, disappearing like a clandestine apparition, something cold and weary, skulking off into the depths like the incorporeal vision of man, I hoped for the best, knowing the worst. He’d told me what he’d do to that man if he ever came back and tried to put his “momma out on her ass.” I feared a good while that that day would come. And by all accounts it had.

The acid rolled over me like waves in a frantic ocean, a painful tide, swelling like God’s umbilical cord unraveled and split to bear. Moon devils danced like lithium breakers on sandstone pillars in acrid typhoon weather – and not a soul was shook free. Lest be the damned. And the world shook with the power of a trillion neutron bombs at the dark center of the molten earth – and the holy light spilt forth with a passion of a million love struck women condemned to spend eternity with a handsome boy, clever of eye, curled and striking, like David standing ten foot tall, untouchable. All of this while the music played. And the stars danced and changed colors in the sky.

Next morning I woke up and drug myself to the General Store. There was word there of malice on the mountain. A man is dead. And he is a tax collector, say some, a vagrant, say others, and still others say the man dead was a man from the bank, come to take a man’s home away from him. I heard the name of the man they all say done it. The man that banker come to appropriate.

“Nacho’s, yeah… that’s where it happened, up at his house. Last I seen him he say he gonna shoot the bastard that fuck with his mamma’s home – she been payin’ on that thing twenty years and then they just come on out of the bricks and mortar and take it back like she ain’t got no right to it, like they ain’t been payin’ all these years, and it don’t make no fucking sense, there ought be a law against shit like that, goddamn, it’s un-American…” and the sympathies went on.

There was a definite conformity of reason amongst the patrons of the market that even if Nacho had done it, it was probably for good reason and for the best anyway. This, however, did not deter them from coming to a second accord, which was rare amongst this crowd who seldom agreed on anything besides a dislike for authority, on the fact that the murder had been particularly gruesome. It turns out that the bank man got his by way of an arrow shot from the hallow darkness of a small tin shed. This, nonetheless, did not kill him. The butcher then took the wounded man back into the chaparral where he cut off his toes first, and then his hands, all of which he cauterized with a cast iron pan. Then he skinned the man’s legs, cauterizing always as he went, and when his bank man passed out from pain and horror Nacho waited, and kept him alive, fed him water and vitamins, and then when he returned to consciousness Nacho would start again, prying off the skin with pliers and a razor blade he kept close to his bloodied reach. After Nacho was done with the body he left it there in the sand to be found by turkey vultures and then a wondering hunter, and left.

Nacho knew the man in his yard wasn’t the Man responsible, at least not personally, but he represented an evil far greater than himself and had to be destroyed, if for no other reason than to be an example, “You can’t just fuck people forever,” he said once, disappearing into the night.

The next time I saw Nacho he was coming out of the brush, out of the stand of oaks down by the creek. I hadn’t said a word to the Man. I was cooking steak instead, eye singed by the glare of the morning sun. I asked him if he wanted something to eat and he said he would and sat down heavily, broad shoulders tight underneath the loose black T-shirt. I had a small cooler at my feet. It was red and I had ice and beer in it. I got one out and opened it.

“You want a beer?” I asked, reaching.

“I don’t drink,” he said.

“How ‘bout a tab of acid?”

He shook his head, No.


previously published in Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review
By: Dillon Mullenix

The New Dream

By: Mullenix Brothers, Dillon & Travis

The Dream Camps

THE low-slung man, hunched beneath pack, made a fast ascent of a hill he felt had beckoned him. All trails led to a seeming darker light. The chaparral, like a maze, surrounded him, and for a moment, the world was large again, this wilderness empty and desolate, except for that one threat, which seemed inescapable despite the hugeness of the place.

At the top of hill he saw the endless flow of the high desert, undulating, dotted by staunch oaks and tired water starved pines. Leftovers from fires sixty years ago. Some bore signs, carbonized reminders of thunderous crackling flame hundred foot tall, emotionless, and sensational. God on earth.

“Shit, where the fuck is the road,” the man said to himself, between deep intentional breaths. “I know it is over this way.” He knew he wasn’t turned around.

“What do you see?” a voice said from behind him. It was Trent. His brother was behind him.

“You two need to hurry up,” Damien said.

“There was so much pot back there!” exclaimed Trent’s brother, Sam.

“I know,” said Trent. “Good thing we have guns.”

Damien gripped his pistol tighter. He’d had the gun for a while. It felt good in his hands. When he bought it new it came with two magazines, a holster for the pistol and magazines, and a lock. Everything but the lock and key were with him now. One magazine was in the pistol, which was a forty-caliber Springfield XD. The bullets were hollow points, and there were twenty-one in total between the two clips and the one he had chambered long before the hike had began, at home. Trent had some old 30-30 lever-action Winchester that had a few of the bolts missing. It fired, but sometimes it jammed, and in a clench, Damien would have rather had a good K-BAR. Sam didn’t have anything. And earlier he had just stood in the riverbed looking at these fresh boot prints running away from them. Damien, seeing that, had gone up into the bushes, he’d seen drag marks earlier, and heard of people getting killed for finding things like this.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Damien.

“It’s that way,” said Trent, pointing in the direction of where he parked his small truck.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

All three began to run through the red shank, shrub oak, foxtails, desert sage, insects, and dry grasses. Red rocks jutted from the ground, sharp edges begging for a good fall. One of their few ways of fighting back. Decomposing granite made sharp turns hard to make in precarious places. Through a few washes, dry and slightly streaming, came and went, sand spread and grew tough and into rocks slabs and talus slopes and soft black dirt beneath shade trees and in stinging nettle and briars, mud and more insects, all in sweat dripping heat of midsummer.

“Holy shit, I didn’t think the fucking truck was this far away,” said Damien.

“The desert plays tricks on the eyes and mind, don’t worry, I know where we are.”

“We grew up out here,” added Sam.

Damien’s adrenaline was going strong. He felt his hands shake. They moved on through the heat. Through the trees and brush and around the poisonous reptiles and arachnids. Maybe this was what war is like, Damien thought. Everything began to look like a person hiding in the shadows.

As Trent had predicted the road soon showed itself and they could see the little truck. The sun glared off the crack in the windshield like a cry for help. Damien eyed the road, trying to see as far down the deserted dirt as he could, nothing, not even a plume of dust or the howl of an engine.

“Looks clear,” says Sam, and walks out onto the road.

Trent followed, lowering the rifle to his side and letting it swing like a brief case.

“Put the gun up, we’re not safe yet,” said Damien in a low voice.

It was June 11, 2009.

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

Damien and Trent followed his gaze, and it fell upon a man in cowboy boots and jeans, wearing a dirty camouflaged shirt, beanie, and sneer. His skin was fair. His hair long and oily, bearded and uncombed. The man shifted his weight into a better stance to shoot. He had a semi-automatic carbine. Trent dove into the bushes near a little culvert made of earth and let out a wild round. The man fired several times, unmoved by the gasp of the 30-30. Damien barked back with his pistol, and was met with a small hailstorm of acorn-sized lead. Other men could be seen bounding through the low chaparral behind their carbine toting compañero.

Suddenly the man fell. A loud report was heard and then nothing more. The other men were hiding. Damien dropped a few more rounds down range and then scrambled over to the truck and jumped in the bed. Sam was lying on the ground, blood coming from his half-open mouth. His chest was also bloodied.

“Get the fuck over here! They shot Sam.”

Damien jumped from the truck and easily tossed Sam into the bed of the truck.

Trent emerged from the brush and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Go!” Damien demanded. “Get the fuck out of here.”

He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. It was white.

His first thought, in his cold sweat, was: It could have been so much worse.
The man’s heart rhythms ran steady after ten minutes on his back coming to grips with his new reality.

“What a fucking trip…” he garbled forth to the empty white room and strangling heat of woolen blankets. “I hope that isn’t a premonition to death by gunfire.” He hacked and then spat green–black slime on the floor near his bed.


first published by PenSpark.com
By: Dillon Mullenix

Cacti

Guided By Moonlight

The road curves in and up around the sloping foothills of the lower desert as I accelerated into the ascent, on my way home. Beside the road, small dry chaparral is throwing long shadows onto the beige prairie grass. Long blue shadows in the white night twilight. On either side of the valley, where the highway trickles, there are tall black mountains stretching for miles, east to west like the backs of dragons.

The stars are high above, and through the television style windshield of my truck, I can see what’s visible of the night’s sky. Obstructing my total view of the heavens is the grey felt liner of the crew-cab. Beyond the cab is the beautiful starry sky of the uninhibited desert, unreserved by lamp cast city light. I stick my head out the window and look up into the warm summer breeze and see the haze of the Milky Way cutting through the crystal clarity of the universe.

I have the windows rolled down, and the A/C off. The music is on, but it’s low, and the mellow whaling of old folk music comes at me from the small speakers in the grey interior doors. Earlier, I noticed that my headlights hid the bright blue hue of the moon, which cast down light upon the desert floor. So, in order to see better I turned them off. Even the dash lights have been extinguished for this forlorn back country ride.

I feel that it is better this way. There is something far more natural about running at full speed in the dark with headlights off and the radio volume down, and digging what is all around. Too many times people get caught in the destination, and the trip goes to shit. That is my main problem with headlights, they only allow you to see in tunnel vision on the road, everything to left and right (and above) are blocked from view – out of mind – and it makes it easier to drone on into the darkness, steadily unnoticing… missing everything.

I come to a stop sign at the T, where all the CHP stop and turn around, and see an owl sitting on a lone pine near the edge of the opposite lane, silhouetted against the bright night canopy. I watch him silently for a moment, and since there are no cars on the road, ahead or behind me, the moment turns into long minutes, that seem to stretch on for hours.

The owl was perched at the very top of the tree, where it seemed that there was no tree at all, but simply a needle point. The owl sat on that needle point, head turned, looking down at me, and around me, for mice and other rodents. It was a Great Horned Owl, and I could see the horns, black, lit against the moonish glow.

Glancing away from the owl for only a second I saw the essence of a small creek winding along with the oaks and cottonwoods down a narrow valley, and disappearing behind a ridge, and continuing beyond it, at the end of a small grass prairie. And when I looked back for the owl, it was gone. The hunt is over, I thought, something is dying now, or being eaten alive.

I continue on up the road towards the solitary cabin where I live, and in winding roads rats and squirrels run their little suicide routes across blind curves, and snakes slither along the asphalt just out of reach of the tires. A few hawks swooped down at prey in the perceivable distance. All of them silhouettes. All of them with shadows long and blue.

I stopped to look at some of them. Sitting in the road, engine off, docile, observing the animals observing me – ignoring me… killing around me. Under the sky and overlooking where from I had come, I found a four-foot long rattlesnake, and for an instant I contemplated killing it. I had a machete in the truck, and a long stick to hold its head down, before I hacked it off brutishly alongside the highway for all who cared to see, to see… but the notion passed quickly, this was his turf and I had no business killing the old man rattler, anyway. There were provisions at home.

I continue on, the headlights off, at 80 mph – smoking a cigarette I light from a pack of 72’s in my green plaid shirt pocket – kicking up some rock as I skidded off. I took a slug from a beer I kept between my legs. It’s cool and clean tasting, Budweiser. The turn got sharper for a moment as I picked up speed and careened, barely in the yellow lines, up the road to the plateau before the long straight drop, where on good days you can get up to 125 mph’s before you have to pull it back and slow down for the long barrel curve that takes you screaming into Oak Grove.

This is normal. I’m a local after all, and obligated to drive these roads aggressively in order to test them for deficiencies and tender corners… they have a few, but nothing I can’t handle as I navigate skillfully in the light of full moons. Out-of-towners always have problems, though. They can never handle the roughage, the tight corners, the gravel, the weaves and winds, the ups and downs, the speed and the G’s.

These outdoor novices wreck their fancy sports cars driving too fast on roads they don’t know at all, on their way to lose all their swindled Wall-Street dollars in Indian Casinos. Burying these opulent jackasses in the sandy Anza Borrego Desert, with its talus slopes and badlands of Carrizo, is a widely accepted solution to problem to us desert folk. And the local Sherriff doesn’t seem to mind either, it is better to see them lost and dead, than to have to scrape their mangled bodies off the 79 at mid-night in the haunting October moon.

They make it hard for the locals who all get more tickets for speeding and driving drunk when the cities strangers make fatal mistakes on these treacherous roads at high speed and under the influence. I myself have been stopped and harassed because of these buffoons driving like mad dogs in heat. Their inability to handle themselves gets the attention of law makers and church groups alike, and then they call CHP to action. Then the CHP, for lack of anything better to do, obliges and runs around half crazy on caffeine and adrenaline, pulling-over everyone and shining their heavy handled flashlights into the eyes of weary travelers coming home. Even if they are tall linebacker types wearing green plaid shirts, blue jeans, and fatigue style trucker hats that say things like, “WE KILL SUCKERS.”

But I always drive safely, watching for them cautiously in my rearview mirror and through the windshield ahead of me. I can see them far off by their headlights, and always I adjust my driving style to suit them. However, on occasion I still get pulled over, despite my best attempts at innocuousness. It is a well understood fact, that when riled up these brutes don’t hesitate to ticket, even without proper provocation. Usually though I get away from these loathsome encounters with only a stern warning, minor background check, and official questionnaire that is typically hosted by both officers using ‘double-talk’ as an interrogative technique.

CHP 1: “Do you have any guns with you?”

ME: “No.”

CHP 2: “Do you have any guns with you?”

ME: “No.”

CHP 1: “Are those dogs vicious?”

ME: “No.”

CHP 2: “Are those dogs vicious?”

ME: “No.”

… and so on…

Up and around the deep curve now, where just last week there was a head on collision that killed a motorist and his dog. Where the bar-restaurant sits stoically bound to the sand in moonlit silence under the closure of dusk. Not even a lamp is on at this time of night.

The truck is humming up the small rise and around a few more curves until I reach the general Store and pass it, and then the Mexican Restaurant and pass it…home is only a minute away… and as I see the driveway I make the hard turn right past the black mail-box, and feel the back of the heavy truck swing, slipping in the gravel, and fishtailing left.

I am on my road now kicking up dust and debris, left over from the high Santa Anna winds that howled through here for most of the week… and on through the first gate, and then the second without slowing down, hit the dip and jump…






…land, and continue on up the small hill, making the sharp left onto the cement, don’t slide this time, but glide in easily and stop, ten-feet from the front door. I get out, close the door, and take a drink from the tall-can I had between my legs, but had forgotten about miles ago with the last slug. It’s still cold, despite the warmth cast off by my legs, gripped tight around the aluminum cylinder.


By: Dillon Mullenix

Today, I welcome you The Beyond...

Dodge Valley Oasis:
May 24, 2009

The locals can hear them.

It’s the weekend
and the warriors are out,
riding fast on esoteric two-lane highways
from Ramona to Julian,
to Temecula.

The saloon is waiting for them,
but the watering hole for wayward riders
is rapidly drying up in the desert;
so they drive faster now.

Above the bar in bold words
Greenback $1 bill speaks
to lethargic drinkers,
“Single white male
seeking single white
or latina female
with low self-esteem.
Call 925…”

All around ale spills from pewter mugs
as pretty girls run drinks and food
from kitchen to floor,
where music,
a generation old,
floats from the black velvet stage,
to sound stage,
to audience,
like radiation.

A drunk man makes a pass at one of the girls;
“Are you lactating?” he says
in a cigarette cackle.
“No!” she retorts,
eyeing her own grease stained blouse,
contemptuously.

And as tattoos
flutter like moths around pool table lights
Cougars are on the prowl for young boys
of lost innocence.

They’re all here tonight.

Out the window I can see a patrol car,
and the deputy writing a ticket
to the bewildered biker who stares at his
$20,000 dollars of mangled
juxtaposed
steel stallion and skid marks –
The unquestionable result
of hitting a turn and sand at 90 mph.

Mary brings another round of Bass
from behind the bar past Samantha,
who is having her customary pint,
and slides through the crowd
to a small group of men in leather and denim
all standing triumphant after a day’s ride.

The language and people are an amalgamation
of old engine oil run hard for a long time
and a glass of elderberry wine.

Outside a ‘For Sale’ sign hangs
despite good business,
and a line of trailers
headed for Anza-Borrego
streak by up the long curve to
The Summit,
The Ranch,
and Beyond.


By: Dillon Mullenix

The World Tree

Echo Park

Echo Park was where I grew up

And where Tom Waits sat drooling bourbon drunk
And cocaine heavy in the 70s
And where in the 90s chinks stood atop grocery markets with AK-47s
And blacks ran down streets in a glorious show of the power of mayhem
And it was like watching hundreds of fingers coming together as a fist
Pulling men from trucks

Echo Park is where my dad ended up after drifting

And getting stone cold drunk on Sunset and Alvarado
And Echo Park is where I saw my first dead body
On Riverside
And witnessed my own friend’s atonic stare burn holes in bodies
with steel and lead

And in that hole there are the only far flung green hills 
 that stand above Los Angeles’ developed basins

Echo Park is where during fits with poverty my mom 
 and I ran food packages to Skid Row

And ventured out to Gorky’s downtown
And Echo Park was where dad bought Fosters beer before camping trips
on which he always found girls
And lost us on granite hilltops for pussy
And tits I myself lusted after

And in Echo Park tired old men begged for whiskey
And coins for “yen”
And doggie bags

Echo Park is what I left
Before I found college

Echo Park is what I remember
On lonely nights when things don’t seem solid, anymore

Echo Park is my childhood
Where ball games and manic fiends were the norm


first published in FORTH Magazine
By: Dillon Mullenix

White Plaster Walls and Ash

When she walked out the door, he was still there, sitting in the small house by the beach. He was in the living room on the couch, staring silently into the white plaster walls. And he could smell the odor of the last night’s fire. He remembered how the smoke had leaked out and into the little room. The flue must be dirty, he thought, looking at the vent’s scorched seams. The man could see the ash in the basin of the fireplace. He looked at it. Wondered about it. Wanted to take it up between his thumb and forefinger and roll it around. Feel the texture. Get the scent.

“Are you going to be here when I get back?” the woman asked him, angrily crying, before she herself left the house.

They had been arguing, the way they did. The man had sat stoically on the couch, staring at the white plaster walls and the ash. And she yelled. Cried. Begging for answers, but he never had any. He kept quiet, the way he knew how. She asked him questions that he didn’t know the answers too, like “Do you love me?” and “Are you going to be here when I get back?” But realizing long ago that he would never be able to answer her questions, he had learned to sit stoical, staring at the white plaster walls and the ash. Sullen and lonely.

In front of the man was a coffee table, and on it were the empties from the nights before, an ash tray full of butts, the woman’s fifth of vodka that was half full, despite the her best efforts to finish it before they had gone to bed, last night. He looked at the bottle now, staring at it as he had the walls and the ash in the fireplace. The TV on, but he didn’t watch it. He looked at the vodka. Thought about it. Wanted it.

So, after the woman had been gone for a while, he made himself a drink. Vodka straight. He didn’t have any ice, but that wasn’t of any concern now. The vodka was cheap, but he drank it anyway. He didn’t drink for the flavor. Reaching over the table he grabbed a cigarette butt from the ash tray and looked at it. The man didn’t know who it belonged to, nor did he care. Many people had been at the little house last night, he thought, and this particular cigarette, as was true for several others, had too much tobacco left inside to waste, a good inch or so. The TV was on, but still he wasn’t watching. Lighting the cigarette, leaning back from the coffee table and into the folds of the couch, he drew in a deep breath. The cigarette burned and crackled and grew bright red at the tip, like they do, and as he smoked, the man coughed, and examined the cigarette, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger as he held it up to his eye. He was looking into the ember now. Wondering about it. Wanting to touch it.

Again, he drew at the cigarette and looked into the white plaster walls and the ash. And he could smell the smoke from the previous night’s fire…

They had lain in bed talking before falling asleep. He said he loved her. Said he would be there, forever. Said that he wanted a family and children and… And this morning, in the midst of loneliness, he didn’t know if any of it was true.

He made another drink. Drank it. And made another.

Outside, through the cracks in the closed blinds, the man could see the sky. It was blue. There was a light breeze and on the horizon he could see the marine layer coming in and it looked like ash. The palm trees were swaying, dancing with the currents of the day. “The whims of depravity,” he said. The man didn’t like salt air mixing with car exhausts and industrial waste and sewage, which flowed freely down the river, a half mile from the small house, into the ocean. You could smell it from the porch. He didn’t like the city’s fumes and sounds. An orchestra of madness is all it is. And it has reached the crescendo of its ill harmonics, he thought, as he simultaneously wished for blinds without cracks to shade his red-eyed stare.

Turning back to the white plaster walls and the ash in the fireplace he pushed those things from his mind. Back to a blank slate. No emotion. He sat stoically skulking on the couch, alone.

He made another drink. Drank it. And made another.

The couch was old, but comfortable. The man liked old things. His woman called him a Luddite. She screamed it. She hated it about the man; nevertheless it made him feel proud to be associated with such fine people.

There were dogs in the house too, but they were asleep and ignoring him, who sat so silently, transfixed by the walls and the ash. He felt very alone. The woman was comfort enough, or she should have been, he thought, but he liked it when she was gone and he was left to solitude. At least that is what he told himself when he wasn’t satisfied with his life, anymore. What it had become was not what he had imagined.

Hours past while the man sat and drank from the fifth and smoked leftover cigarettes, from the ash tray, down to the filter and starred at the walls. He coughed when he smoked, hacking up his lungs, who deplored the tobacco so much, though they lusted after other things.

All around him, there were boxes, unopened and labeled. They said things like “kitchen” and “bedroom.” They had lived there together for months, but still they had not unpacked and around him everything reminded him of The Move. He wanted to move now. He wanted to get away.

He made his last drink with the last of the vodka. Drank it. And put the glass down with a thud…

When the woman got back, later in the afternoon, when the ash colored clouds were overhead and the breeze had gotten heavier, all she found was an empty fifth of vodka, cigarettes smoked down to the filter, white plaster walls and the fireplace. And the smell of smoke.

On the table were flowers. They had not been there before and they had a lurid, yet bent, appeal to them and she picked them up. They had been picked from the yards of working class people who had spent the day off, somewhere else.

The man was at the ocean. In the water. It was cold and late in the day and he was drunk. He couldn’t feel pain anymore. No one else was in the ocean with him. And, again, looking into the west, he ignored everything behind him, silently. The houses and apartments, the palm trees and cars, stores and people, and the thoughts of the woman who was at the little house with the white plaster walls and the ash in the basin of the fireplace and the sleeping dogs. He waded out further. Began to swim out west. It felt like Manifest Destiny must have, he thought, as his long muscular arms broke through the frigid currents of the blue sea. The water was dirty, plastic bags floated by – more trash, debris, elements of production, growth, chemical agents to progress. Industrialization…

At the house the woman, her name was Lucinda, was crying and holding the flowers, smelling them, cherishing them as if they were her lover and not just another reminder of death. The flowers, like the man and her, were dying, plucked from their life source. The end will be coming soon.

Suddenly, out of rage and confusion, she threw the flowers into the fireplace, got rubbing alcohol form the bathroom cabinet and set the attractive beauties ablaze with the flit of a match. She could smell them as they burned orange, yellow, red…blue. The TV was on but she wasn’t watching it. Instead, she sat stoically on the couch staring at the white plaster walls, the coffee table with the empties and the cigarette butts smoked down to the filters and the ash of the now smoldering flowers.

The wind was howling outside. It was raining now and she could hear the sounds of vehicles driving by on wet asphalt. The man was still not home. It was dark. And long into the night she waited, hoping for the man to step through the door and embrace her tenderly. She missed him. Loved him. And he was gone off to be himself, alone.


first published in Relationships and Other Stuff (anthology)
By: Dillon Mullenix

Woman of The Sea

The woman across the street was a dowager,
Her husband had left her long ago on a voyage to the sea
Since then she has sat on her porch watching the waves rise and fall
Hoping for something other than gulls on the horizon.

When they had wed her dowry had been a boat
And it wasn’t that it hadn’t been sea worthy
For surely it was
But he hadn’t had the skill to maneuver the schooner
He was a man
Born not of the ocean but of the land.

After it happened she would hallucinate objects in the distance
Frantically calling and waving her arms
Imaginary men waved back then disappeared
Crying she would sink back into her arm chair
Positioned to face westward toward the coast.

Some said that they had been doomed from the start
Their miscegenation had been the root cause of all the bad luck
They created a half breed and to their peers it was the ultimate sin
To them it was something worth killing over
Not to say that the disappearance had anything to do with their lineage
But it should not be discounted as implausible comedy.


first published by Boho Coco
By: Dillon Mullenix

Thoughts on Judgment Day

Welcome to the Apocalypse bitches!



Well, it is 12:16 a.m., and its all still here. The whole fucking thing. I bought all this ammunition, canned food, bottled water, and not even one fucking zombie in the yard. I got halogen spot lights! Nothing. Armed to the teeth with nothing to kill... but time.

Elusive

There is a new attraction on the back-country roads of San Diego County, and it isn’t the ferocious and hard to kill wild boars (currently en route from Texas), which I’ve been hoping for. No, this is a mutant anomaly far more intriguing, even to a non-scientist, like my neighbor Ed, who finds these creatures fascinating and calls them, “Crooked thieves, locked into a death grip with the rest of the world.”

On countless nights we’ve gone out with flashlights, and one particularly bright strobe light, looking for these strange beasts. It was a misadventure in search of these loathsome men that brought me near them at first, their psychosis engrossed me, and became an addiction so consuming that it’s rivaled the strongest narcotics.

Now, it has to be said that this is a tricky endeavor - chasing the natives - one requiring much skill and patience. All the driving, when you’re out after sunset with your camera, must be done with the headlights off so that the animals won’t know you’re coming and flee into the darkness. Don’t worry about the hum of the engine, though, they usually mistake that for the natural vibrations of the desert, which they are particularly familiar with and attuned to like Aboriginals.

In the truck, or whatever you are pursuing them in, you must be silent and ready, no talking and mundane chit-chat, and for God’s sake keep the speed down or you’ll miss them. Mostly they are found hiding in road-side ditches or roaming through high grass, their black plastic bag slung to the curb as they pick up one can at a time.

If you see a creature as previously described then you’ve probably seen him! The miraculous high desert road tweaker. You are now part of an elite club, my friend, but beware, this person is not to be approached, they are violent and have been known to attack passersby unprovoked. This, however, will not deter you, I’m sure, because this minor setback does not, to the passionate observers of the road tweaker, diminish at all their incredible draw. They are, in fact, akin to Darwin’s finches.

When the road tweaker first appeared they weren’t seen during the day, but now that isn’t the case, they are braver, no longer scared to show their shallow faces, emaciated bodies, hunger ridden bodies, pacing with a quickness not common to normal men along the roadside. They are driven by an incentive to consume and everything counts. They are going green (in the American Business Sense), but they didn’t mean to. It was just the only viable option when it came time to score another hit.

Occasionally, these men of leisure sickness stick out their opposable thumb, in hopes of conning you to the side of the road, like a traveler might, but these transient clones will rob you blind and steal your car, and your woman, to trade on the black market for speed, a small butane torch, and a few good light bulbs. Then they’ll be on the road again, like a run-dry Kerouac going crazy in the high desert of San Diego County.

This is the land of wine and tweak, good old fashioned chemical nuts with guns and flu medicine, cooking methamphetamine in white trailers hidden in rocks and brush. The flowing industrial stranglehold on the economy has made it worse, the rich are noticeably nervous, and the poor are more virulent. The world is different for me today, but history has seen it all before, and is laughing at our short-term memory loss.

If you ever get curious, and you’re already coming out to Julian to eat pie, or Temecula to drink wine, or Ramona to hit the rodeo, or the Salton Sea to score meth, drive a little slower and watch the roads, we’ll be out here, Ed and me, watching for the ghosts of moonless nights and sun beaten days, and if you’re good enough, maybe you’ll see a good example of the Nation in Action also.

The road tweaker is a microcosm, a personification, of the modern America, a keyhole into its paradigm. He’s eco-conscious because it helps to subsidize his dwindling economic resources and make him seem reasonable to those who question him. He has many addictions, none of which he is willing to give up, even in times of drought and economic rancor. He is happy to sustain his incomprehensible lifestyle by stealing and suckling from the tit of other hard working people(s) of this country. He poisons the land he uses, pollutes the air with escaping plumes of fumes, pours toxins into the water supply, occasionally blows things (including himself) up, ruptures the ground he builds on, and creates a bio-hazard catastrophe on a global scale. But, he is private and therefore uncontrollable. He is perplexing… and he doesn’t think. He acts without a thought to what it does. The road tweaker is a total narcissist and he is distinctly American.

For those of you that are scared, don’t worry, they only run wild by night, in the day they are little more docile, especially in the summer months. The sun is baking their brains then, and cooking them alive as they walk with their shirts off – but the summer is a scant season, and nothing much is seen by the weekend-warrior, only the real road-dogs like Ed and me, out here every day & night like hounds, baying when the guttural squeal of a road tweaker is caught by the hot wind and flown across the valley.

If you see this ravenous animal, starved and mangy, you’ll know him by the burnt red color and texture of his skin, thoroughly abused it barely holds on to their corpse like bodies, and his pipe will be hanging out from one of his haggard pockets, ready for use at any moment – but they will act like they don’t see you, staring at the ground. It will look almost like they are buffalo waiting to be shot, huddled in their diminished number that are, now, somehow on the rise like an inflated Titanic rising to the surface. Get a sense of the epidemic that’s spreading across these hills and making us all hunters. In the city no one thinks of the madmen high on adrenaline and crystal, looking like the re-birthed homeless depraved dead who walk around like burnt-out wrestlers on a starvation diet. But here, in Warner Springs, CA, it’s a daily reality, and it’s amusingly caustic.


first published by Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review
By: Dillon Mullenix

Fallen Idols

I was just a child then. Sitting in the front seat of my dad’s black inline-6 Jeep Renegade, the tires locked into four wheel drive and the doors off for comfort, I was a miniature of the man driving. We were mountaineers, a Buck knife on our hips and a can of chew in our back pockets. He chewed long-cut wintergreen Skoal, I chewed Bubble Tape. We wanted nothing more than to be mountain men, living in the wilderness on pine nuts and boiled spring water, a blue tarp arced into a tree for protection against the wind and the rain.

Ascents into the mountains were always at night and it was always cold, but he never put on the cover or the doors. Tonight we also had my younger twin brothers with us, they were fast asleep by now, huddled close together in the back seat.

The air was crisp and moisture permeated the air. The clouds huddled, saturated and grey, low in the night sky. They hid the starry heaven above us, but once you hit 3,000 feet they are gone. All you can see is the black blanket of night shot full of holes, exposing the glistening brightness of another hidden horizon.

We had stopped on the way to get food for the excursion. Dad was a camping gourmet chef who always made the same thing: campfire stew. This consisted of canned minestrone soup, canned corn, canned green beans, top-ramen (4), Tapatio hot sauce, canned tomato soup and anything else that happened to crawl or fall into the pot. We had this and bean and cheese burritos, oranges, trail mix and water/juice. He also bought beer and strike anywhere matches.

He said they were, “essential tools for survival and comfort in any situation.” Why he never mentioned the essential bodily need for water, I’ll never know.

I was asleep when he pulled the Jeep into the camp site. It was the same one we always used. My father knew the Campgroup supervisor and he always saved the spot for us. It was a beautiful part of the Buckhorn, the site had redwood trees two-hundred feet tall and a stream that ran next to it and shrubs that grew all around us and up the hill. To the right of us and away from the creek were more campsites and as we pulled in I noticed, after rubbing the sleep from my eyes that there was a camp fire going and people were singing and dancing in some foreign language.

The car lurched to a halt. I got out of the car and helped set of camp. My brothers, never bothered by the sound of the music or laughter or the movement of the Jeep, never broke from slumber. Finally, the tent was up and the blankets had been set. I sat down by the fire I had built in the steel fire pit in the middle of the camp.

“You’re not tired?” my father asked from behind me in the dark.

“No. I want to build a fire.”

“Alright, you need any help?” he spoke in a West Virginia twang that was hidden by his newly acquired Californian accent. I could see his cowboy hat and long hair silhouetted against the light from their fire and Coleman lanterns.

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“Ok, well I’m gonna go up the neighboring camp, I know a guy there and he wants me to come over and play some music.”

“Alright…”

“You wanna’ come up and watch?”

“Maybe later.”

He walked up the hill in his cowboy boots and tight wrangler jeans. He really wanted to be a cowboy – dreaming of horses and guitars and miles of green grassy hillsides of Southern Texas. He had his nine string guitar my mom had bought for him and a can of beer in his right hand as he strode into the light. I could hear his voice chatting loudly with all the foreign voices and strange dialects. I heard the guitar strum and sound off as it was being tuned by the magical musician, the only thing my mom missed after the divorce last year when I was nine. My brothers wouldn’t remember, only five at the time.

Burning pine-needles was getting tiresome and the melodies of my father’s voice and guitar chords strung out over the valley was putting me to sleep. I slowly walked toward the tent, stopped to piss on a tree and then unzipped the flaps to get in. I fell asleep instantly as my hot head touched the cool pillow case and I slipped into the warm blankets. He was still singing as I drifted away, “Grendaline baby you are safe-ly sleeping, beautiful girl with ringlets and curls…”



I woke up in a panic. The tent had been attacked, by a bear I was sure. I could hear it outside breathing deep gasping breaths and I could see it pawing at the tents rear window. It thought we were prey, I didn’t want to die like so many on the Discovery channel by a hoard of ravaged heathen animals gone mad on bloodlust. The thing was moving, crawling around the tent towards the front flap. There was no other noise outside. No remnants of a party of foreigners, no music to calm the nerves, just gasping and growling and loathsome cries of pain. I knew someone was being eaten alive in the darkness of the campsite, the fires had long since gone out. I looked desperately around for the lump that I knew would be him, my dad, but sadly nothing. The ferocious bear was still there, outside in the dark and violent night. Where was he, why was he not here? I was freaking out, breathing deep to stay calm, but the fear was mounting.

Then the sounds stopped and the bear seemed to lumber off into the dark. Had he eaten the entire campsite above, were they all dead? I didn’t know. I remembered my dad’s Glock, where was it? I would show that fucking bear a thing or two about fucking with people in their sleep. Found it – under the pillow. I crawled out into the night air and silence. I could hear what sounded like piss ricocheting off tin, it had been going for quite a while now; I knew I had the upper hand. I was going to sneak up behind that thing and blow its fucking head off. We would have bear for breakfast and lunch, and boy would dad be proud. I knew he would.

But, I didn’t kill the bear. I saw my father I saw leaning against an old Chevy van with porthole windows, not some wild beast. His pants were around his ankles and he was peeing on the van, muttering to himself. I watched in horror and he fumbled to zip up and then fell over turning around. He was crazy looking, a mad man with a wild grin from ear to ear. He grabbed franticly at the air as he careened into the ground again. I put the gun down and walked over. He looked like wounded animal there sprawled out on the ground.

“Dad, are you okay?” I whispered to him.

“Huh…fuckin’ japs gave me crown and coke, fuckin’ almost died comin’ down the hill there, what the fuck are you doin?”

“I thought you were a bear…”

“A fucking bear…ha ha ha… bears raid trash cans not tenting areas. Besides I hung it in a tree.”

“You peed for a long time.”

“Yeah, your old man is a mighty fine urinator – a fine professional for sure.”

“Are you going to be okay, dad?”

“Yeah, just give me a hand up. I think I pissed a bit in my jeans.”

I carried him to the tent and laid him down. His body warm and his face perspiring he lay there in quite solitude for a moment, not looking but absently gazing at nothing but the grey hue of the tent. That four person, two pole, water proof thing, we had it for five years already. It had been to the ocean and the desert, seen serene forests of green and lame yellow fields or pastures. It had been there when my mom went nuts over a BB gun and Dickie Moore caught a lizard by the tail. It was a big fuckin’ thing, but he held it too long and he finally broke free leaving the tail squirming in his hand.

Once he was asleep I went to the cooler and hid all the Fosters and Budweiser’s he had bought. There were quite a few left and took a while for me to move the load to the creek and send them floating happily downstream. Dad was snoring in the tent and I could hear it as I worked. It was done when the moon was low in the sky; I could see the faint light of the sun creeping up in the east. I couldn’t stand that man drunk and crazy, stumbling into the day-to-day like a fucking gimp. The strong mountain man reduced to a pile of shit rotting on the forest floor, I hated him then, like when I hated him for driving drunk home from a Sushi bar with me in the front seat, or the time he came drunk to a football game and got arrested for a DUI. He wasn’t driving, but sleeping under an overpass near a strip joint with a .357 and a case of beer isn’t really admired around here. I loved my father, but not when he was drunk. I’m sure he didn’t see what I saw, he couldn’t have, but he managed to grasp the picture a few years later. Being drunk and high on cocaine during Christmas and having to buy presents at the $.99 store changed things with my father. But, that was years later.

The next day he yelled about the beer I sent down the creek and he moaned about the fucking Jap’s who conned him into drinking enough to kill a big fucking donkey. He played guitar and we went for a hike downstream, where he found his beer in a pool five feet deep. When he saw them he paused and looked at me. I stood hard and sturdy as an oak there in that dense forested pass, he didn’t say a word, just picked up the beer and placed them in his pack. I could hear him curse under his breath.

“Fuckin’ kids, they’ll never understand…”

“Understand what dad!?”

“What it’s like to be a man who has lived too long…”

Sitting here in this broken down office with a fifth of brandy and a glass bulb of PCP I know what you meant so many years ago, dad. Lived so long you can’t eat or sleep, you just sit wide eyed and helplessly sullen thinking desperately of every way to counter all the terrible shit you did in your life time. Tragic memories of fallen idols and endless nights of intolerable drunken behavior, skinning cats alive, eating raw flesh, hiding in the solstice colored red with mud from the crimson clay – an introspective trip of the worst kind, miserably antagonistic and esoteric. I left that mountain colored a different shade of gloom, watching the hillsides change hue as we descended into the Los Angeles smog and confusion. The traffic could be seen as we winded down the crest, I could see the Shell station where dad bought booze and I once was forgotten.


first published by Common Ties
By: Dillon Mullenix