from Visions Of A Mexican Wrestler

This soliloquy that seems to have been second-guessed exactly as it is delivered propagates through you, your allowances jam nothing. Are these words frank? Do they seem to want to usher in a discussion? These sensible sounds which Drew’s mother simultaneously mouths and masticates as if as they are as spongy as the fried beef or “Wonder” bun that in some less bizarre whenever she rejects, raises objections against, in Dallas, TX no less, are nevertheless less gross than fast food to even a dyslexic such as yourself. The words are abscissae and ordinate for another whenever in which both you and Drew are absent if not free to pursue whatever it is you agree to wish. Holy shit. Your innocence that night is not newly departed, have you heard her correctly? How does your dyslexia confuse the figure of her literal meaning with the ground of those words’—“I let my genie out of his bottle”—emotional inflections? If there is a solecism here, does it belong to your laziness or is it, dearly, its speaker’s? Or: always or: the algebraic equivalent of desegregation: does Drew’s mother say what she says in the way of a complaint, brushing its husky connotations of true hurt and distress away like the corners of cheese and gristle, her Tassajara vegetarian’s horror in abatement now suddenly at the post-witching hour under the influence of something more languid and vampiric—the late show’s masked hero El Novillo swats not at the boundaries, slightly concave and beveled, of the Zenith cabinet’s screen, though, at that time, that is a joke you would have nudged into Drew’s ribs, if his mother had not just slumped into the room, as it is, all El Novillo forearm shivers are the rubber bats, but as if under instructions not to sever the illusion of their strings—and a schmutz of fancy catsup? Is she mourning in the way an adult that cannot stand to have her adulthood undressed might mourn? Her husband, Drew’s father, is gone, as if into one of those long hesitations which seethe along the directrix of a typical spousal argument. Or is Drew’s mother merely peeved, cross with herself for bending to a flashing willingness to break down to a confession if not of responsibility then tampering compliance, but with what insanity if only her own ability to and for a split-second of bottomless, bottomless? or calm?, sadness shut her baggy and cold-cream-encircled gray eyes to her lone son’s high callousness. What does she want in return for harshing your buzz? You are sitting in a cold pool of your own congealing panic. Holy shit. “I let my genie out of his bottle.” In time, but after the year 1975 has carried its load over the mountains, you will learn to just what an extent your curiosity is seldom a careful attribute. For now, in this time, not the time itself, but the time before times, like the waters, undergoing division, Drew watches the Mexican Wrestler, this El Novillo, on film stitched out of 525 horizontal lines of resolution, with you pocketing smoke and his mother drawn up into her halved self close by. There is a perfect, twinned second of broadcast silence and darkness following “I let my genie out of his bottle”, no CRT voltage brightens you or Drew or his mother or shortens an ache which arrives in your tired eyes with this respite from the television signals’ relays, a new switch initiates from the inserted fade of B-movie scene-breaking to the calligraphy of tar underneath the hard brown Tony Lamas walking toward the best value on the lot. Is this when whenever all begins? Is the room full of red and yellow feathers, dahlias and geraniums? You want to stretch out with clenched fists for a yawn but your friend’s mother brushes in bursts of piezoelectric admission on the sofa where you recline with her and her adroit but not deft son within her family’s strains, hassles and fatigue made strangely mechanical by your friend’s self-same and particular adroitness at avoidance. One of Drew’s fondest sayings: “Danger is a line of tiny black ants marching into the live slot on an electrical outlet.” You are stoned that night but abstracted, lucid above all, and you can be certain that to move would be to tip some acknowledgment, to reach out risks offering prongs which Drew’s mother can plug into her “I let my genie out of his bottle” and charge it with conversational capacity. Still, you hear no sobs converge upon where you are, which is occupying the sag of the middle cushion and not so suddenly in too proximate an affinity to Drew and especially his mother. When it was not this time that will elide all eventualities but that time, 1975, Drew’s mom said her saying, and Drew at your other elbow does not agree to be implored or provoked at all, a pincushion-distorted test-pattern misfed by NTSC standards flips through the used car dealership commercial the way a PONG “ball” (CPU-generated pixels are square) breaks the line of the goal that earlier that week you are pivoting your wrist to protect from Drew’s nonchalantly malicious aim (no horn ever blows but Drew scoots another quarter into view, you, wordless and prickling all over with the damp of defeat, perform the insert, too hurriedly trying to redeem yourself, and the wobbly green of your Coke bottle is full of cigarette ash and butts that still do not prevent the last bit of soda from spreading its stick across the traffic light linoleum parquet of the Stop N’ Go, and the clerk knows what those rattles mean, his nose and his scowl are pointed at you, the apron-y sponginess of his employee blouse balled in his fist) and no Birkenstocks worn by Drew no matter the weather flop down from the rattan coffee-table to walk behind the couch and with his thin but very hairy arms fuss up the parameters of so much as an embrace, even a retaliatory or subduing hug which might bind his mother. So she had let her cynic out of its bottle? You understand yourself too hastily. Nor does your apostate friend have elicited from him a glance of cooling concern his mother’s way, across the umber and topaz of the toppled circadian ripples which shackle you zonked out on red dirt weed and buoyant worry. Whenever a week then passes from that night and you step out of Drew’s baby-blue 2-door Ford Torino 500 to the cement of the grid on which Corbusier-esque (which if you only knew how “dadgum antiseptic... but not clean,” as your father seethes in drives north and west, intending with his animosity towards certain developments to teach you something about the environment emerging around you, but all you recognize is his mood, not the style, not yet) public storage sheds are upside-down hung, dawn is not too far away and you need to take the worst imaginable leak. Drew, if he at any time in this assortment of whenevers had ever been that El Novillo of toning oil and perspiration and deltoids and not just a sarcastic kid who once donned the flamboyance of a nearly Zoot Suit’s lamé as bronze as a flyweight wrestler’s skin, could confide in you about his father: “Es como si se lo hubiera chupado la tierra.”