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I get on the bus and I sit down. But within a minute I bang the back of the old lady’s chair in front of me, demanding, “Is this lady bothering you?”

“What?” says the chick next to her, turning around to face me. She’s so surprised, her face is completely blank.

“Get the fuck up!” I snarl at the old lady. “You’re getting off here!” I hoist her by the back of her blue coat and spin her a few feet up the aisle. Then I get sick–big sick–the hurl comes out of my nose and from between my teeth. My eyes fill up with a stingy, refractive fluid, like liquid crystal, and I can see everything all at once, 360 degrees, like I’m living in a ball and everything in the ball is within my reach. And then the ball is walking, and I’m walking… everything’s walking.

I get back down the aisle to the girl, who is quivering but also somehow very calm. Nimble, like a scared rabbit, she reaches up and grabs my shirt at the collar and pulls herself up, hectically slinking her torso towards mine as our eyes meet. She savagely sticks her tongue into the pit of my throat then licks upward slowly, antagonistically, until she pushes it into my mouth. I feel okay, I’m okay. I can breathe again, and the world is settling down, back onto its three dimensional skeleton again. I want all these people to pay, I want them to suffer because I love them so much.

The girl passes out, she can’t take it any more. I am hijacking this bus, I don’t give a shit. We’re going to Oclaya, Washington. I hear they have dog racing there now. Nobody say a word, I have the power of suggestion. I can make you think you’re Chinese for week. Nobody can stand to be Chinese for that long. We’re going to watch the dog races and I’m going to get high and sit in a big metal tub full of rum and punch and ice with a bullhorn. Don’t look at the race, stir the punch goddamn you! I’m freezing in here.

It’s uncomfortable. You feel good for a while, you’re getting healthy, but then suddenly all your old symptoms come back in a swift deluge. You feel like you can’t stand it, but it’s okay, really–it’s a health crisis. You get so tight and high that you could split your skin. This feeling of sickness, all your sickness at once, it’s just the body flushing itself out, renewing its tissues. Now you’ll never be sick again.

“You have a phone call,” they say.

“Yes, what is it? No, Bill, I can’t talk to you now, I’m a little ecstatic. I’ve been checking out all the chicks on the astral plane. It’s so much better than this place, all the old people are so insistent here. I can’t talk, though. I owe the electric company $800,000 for my electromagnetic field. Apparently I’ve been sapping energy, my electromagnetic field has been, from the dynamos in Newark and Long Island Sound without even knowing it. The energy just comes to me and I fall down.

The payment plan is this:

I have to perform. For every action, like if I flip my bangs or stick out my thumb and forefinger like it was a gun and I put the hammer down when I’m pointing at you, as if to say “hey buddy, what’s happenin’,” I have to pay $100 interest on my monthly payment of $2,456.32. For every extravagance, every affectation, I pay extra. I used to have a lot of affectations, I used to wear these bangles and I’d snap them and they’d clang, and that’s $100 for each snap of each bangle, so that’s not going on anymore. I can’t be myself, I have to act like a guy that isn’t sharp, no rhythm, can’t get his swing loose. It’s like I’m me, but I can only express my feelings on an abacus or some other crude computational device. I can’t get weird or little upset anymore–this affectation tax is crushing my warm, loving mood.”

“But I can’t talk right now, I’ve gotta be careful now because I’m tired, I’ve been thinking too much. Just before getting on the bus I was singing a Bee Gees song to myself, it doesn’t matter which one, it was Jive Talkin, but I was keeping an eye out, sweeping my eyes back and forth at about knee level to keep the jukes in check. But just as I got to the turnstile this guy shimmies under the bars, stands up and continues onward, like he’s not even going to break his stride. I have to think fast–I could ignore it, but instead I slap my forearm across his throat and throw my other hand into his right lung area, hoisting him back over the turnstyle. He’s breathless, his feet tangled up on the bars. I slide my card through and kick him square in the junk. N-S-A special agent, fucko–get up and spread! I say. He spreads. It’s repulsive to me and I’m not sure what to do. Go pay the lady, I say. It’s a fucking outrage, but I don’t give a shit. They’re like animals, unthinking neanderthals. I hope they never learn. When the squirt is paid up, I punch his head into the plexiglass booth like it was my timecard. I’m sorry, he says, all mumbly.”

“Are you though…? I ask quietly, thoughtfully. I’m trying to get through to him, to show him I’m not such a bad guy, that I care. Are you? I ask him.”

“It’s always been like this, Bill. But right now what’s important is that we get this bus to the races, which are to start on Thursday if I recall correctly, so hold on…”

You, in the short pants–do you know how to mix a martini out of WD-40 and windshield cleaner? Get on it. Driver, speed up–I want to know exactly what “ramming speed” is for this thing. I’ll need a racing form, some frozen pizzas, and a map of Korea. I want all of the tributaries to the Adriatic Sea drawn up on that map. I want every route to that sea highlighted and plainly visible on that map. I need to know exactly what we’re dealing with here.

Categories: New York, Prose/Poetry
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