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the archive(s):
issue no. 6:
Prairie Cybernetics / Frank Schneider
Burlington, Iowa. A town like a car on blocks. Women so over-nourished that they appear to be members of some third sex, swollen and flatulent. The wholesome scent of anomie. Yard dogs throwing themselves against their cages as I walk by, every day the same, almost heroic in their persistence.
In the gully on the way to school is a burned-out house. The middle of the structure has collapsed, from the attic you can look all the way into the basement. You once catwalked that void, quivering across a creaky rafter, as the neighborhood kids whooped like cowhands. The story spread fast. You coasted off that one for a long time.
Also deep in those woods was a swamp, in which was a rusted, half-sunken Model T. Even now, people don't believe it when you tell them. A wretchedly poor family who lived in a shack on the edge of the woods had built a makeshift picnic area in a hidden clearing, complete with tables and benches, even a trench dug to use as a toilet. When the two brothers your age caught you and your friends snooping around, they came after you with baseball bats. Homicide narrowly averted that day. Those brothers were picked on mercilessly at school, tortured really, though in retrospect they seemed no different than anyone else. So much of everything back then was arbitrary. Once someone tripped the younger one as he was going down the marble stairs, and his kneecap swelled up as big as a softball. One night a few years later, in middle school, a six-month old cousin he'd babysat wouldn't stop crying. They took her to the hospital and the doctor found she had been fucked torn apart inside. In your mind, the two incidents are indelibly connected ...
The fat kid who lived across the street, Jimmy, with his curly blond mullet, his shirt perpetually plastered to his back, transparent with sweat. He was convinced you were a genius, that you were destined for greatness. He let you win at video games, swallowed your rantings whole-hog. You repaid his devotion by taking his mother's vibrator from her sock drawer and putting it in the mailbox. You were barred from his house after that one.
The beautiful home-schooled girl who lived only a block away, like a coin from heaven, eager for any social contact. Her parents forbade her to talk to you after only a couple weeks, but not before you got a little squeezy-squeezy, tee hee hee!
Always the threat of violence in that town. It's probably the same everywhere. Sunlit, narrow streets to the trained eye, their emptiness is ominous. Misanthropic man-children drifting about, their minds blown out by Tecmo Super Bowl and Stallone movies, eyes peeled for that solitary, vulnerable figure. Those early humiliations shaped you more than a million parental lectures. That red-haired, freckled kid who hit you in the face with a metal pipe, breaking your glasses, while his friend held your arms. The paperboy, a full foot taller than you at age thirteen, riddled with acne vulgaris - an obvious pituitary case who ended your one-sided scuffle by dropping a knee on your chest, cracking your sternum and leaving you gasping for breath on a stranger's driveway. The vicious stomping you took at the feet of that legendary Mongol, Arturo (who not only beat your friend Troy's ass, but, when Troy ran home to escape, followed him into his living room, continued beating him, and then beat Troy's dad's ass when he tried to intervene). When you went looking for him a few years later, tough enough (or so you thought) to dole out some payback, you learned that he'd gone to jail for stabbing someone in the face.
Eventually you started winning fights, some of them in an almost spectacular fashion. The fat Chinaman who insulted your hair in a bid to humiliate you in front of that Danish chick you both liked - you punched him in the gut so hard he wet himself a little. Maybe that's when it started, with that bowl-cut simian's pissy drawers. It was easy to impose yourself on the world, if you knew how. First physically, and then socially, roaring across the landscape like some Nietzschean muscle car, a sociopathic debutante. Rollicking through lunch hours, the chicks had learned your name before long. People will love you if you confirm their own inflated self-images! And most beloved of all is the clown! Squeezing an economy-size bottle of Elmer's between your thighs in the middle of an art class lecture, the white glue arcing across the classroom, it was a double entendre to bring the house down, one of many. Eventually you could do it with just a gesture, a wink. They waited for it, openmouthed and slack-jawed, like dogs in summer. That time some girl walked into class wearing Daisy Dukes, and you turned to the peanut gallery with a bug-eyed leer on your face to this day, you swear that Eddie Murphy himself never won such laughter!
Of course, the laughter of imbeciles is cheap. As in most things, it isn't long before you lose interest. In a remarkably short time, you recede back into social obscurity, though you hardly notice, much less care you've seen what's behind the curtain. Rather, what isn't behind the curtain. The waiting begins, for the day you'll finally pull the ripcord on that town, at which point your "real" life will begin a life you only vaguely conceptualize as some form of existence free of the misery, futility, absurdity, and superficiality you've endured so far. It will be many years before you finally manage to murder that unfortunate delusion ...
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