This is worth reading. It feels good to have finally created a peice of writing that I can tell you is worth reading--it's been years. It's nothing new for me, I've covered this territory before, but it's back.

A bum, Charlie, and Scott, a Brown University student, are squatting on their haunches in the abandoned masonic temple in downtown Providence (before it began to be renovated). Charlie is wearing a coonskin cap. Litter is strewn about the floor and the walls are covered with iridescent graffiti. Scott is shaking an orange spray paint can.

Charlie: Ya know this is my home, kid. Ya taking an adventure, right? where ya live, kid? ya go to school?

Scott: I live in a dorm, meeting street. Brown. sprays a long orange arc on the floor

Charlie: lotsa girlies, upa there at brown, eh? a daring exploration offa campus. mumbling: intrepid he's a motherfucker, intrepid intrepid adventurer, mah house, mah home. you got tobacco?

Scott: Nope.

Charlie: listen, kid, ya got no spirit, no character. ya cantt go through life a-likea that. ya know me, i been surviving for thirtyfive years, out cold in tha world, survivin by mah self, that takes spirit, ya know? ah got mah eyes failing on me, and ah got nuthin to live on, and sometimes ah dig through the trash and ah make mah belts out of the 'lectrical chords, ah ain't like you, goin to sum Brown University. ah know mahself, and ya ain't gots no idea who you are, do ya? ya have a purpose? Eat these. he takes out three little white squares—blotter paper. Here, put this unda ya tounge

Scott: Spraypainting, hell no.

Charlie: Ah, ya know ah wouldn't do anything to hurtya. Ya need this, ah see it, ah knowed it when ya first came heah. stands up, advances on Scott. We see that he is quite large

Scott: Stay away from me

Charlie: eat this. Ah'm givin you a present, heah, ah ain't got much to mah name, and ah'm tryin to sacrifice it tah you, don’t be ungreatful, prick

Scott: What is it?

Charlie: spirit-medicine. your eyes ah hungry, empty.

Scott: get away from me! Charlie advances on him, then suddenly knees him in the stomach, grabs his neck, forces his mouth open and inserts the blotter paper. Scott splutters. Charlie hits him across the head and Scott is knocked unconscious

The camera cuts away, and then slowly fades back in on a dark room. It’s the basement of the Masonic temple. There is a foot or so of dirty, murky water with an oil slick flooding the room. Scott is sprawled out, half in the water against the wall of the room. He begins to come to. Music plays: The End by the Doors

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

Scott spasams, hits his head against the wall

Scott: Wha? whathafuck? ooohhhshit, ohgodogadogod. help! meekly help? something's trying to crawl up my nose

Charlie emerges from the darknes. Now he is wearing a raggedy narrow-brimmed fedora, and his voice has changed; now it's crisp and clear

Charlie: Your journey has now begun. You must trust me, or I cannot help you through it.

Scott: You asshole! what the fuck you doing to me? Stay the fuck away from me, I’ll hit you tries to stand up; he is very unsteady and looks nauseous uuurgh lurches toward Charlie as if to attack him-raises his fist scott tries to attack Charlie, but he is too unsteady and Charlie grabs his wrists and physically takes control of Charlie. He lays Charlie back down.


Charlie: You need this, I'm doing it for you, and I'd guide you through it

Scott: Things are moving in the darkness flying at me.

Charlie: What I gave you, three hits of pure LSD. Have you ever tripped before?

Scott: mushrooms.

Charlie: listen. if you fight the drug, it will kill you. If you fight the trip, it will kill you, or at least part of you. if you fight me, I will kill you. I am forcing you to have this experience, and I am guiding you through it. To survive, you must trust me, you must let me in to your mental space, to share in your trip. I have also dosed myself.

Scott: Your face…it's moving, spiraling. it's it's liquid, your nostril is growing, oh, god. I’m going to be sick.

Charlie: Stand up. I got something to show you Scott cowers in fear. You scared of me? You should be. Feel the fear enslave you, drive you, let it fuel you. Ride the beast. Ride the beast. Don't fight it, Scott. You are afraid, let yourself be afraid, if you fight it, you’ll get brain bubbles. Now STAND UP

Scott jerks to his feet, begins trying to run away from Charlie. His feet slip in the water, can’t find a purchase. He runs away, and Charlie lets him.

Scott: after some time running through the muck, stumbles, slows down to a walk breathing hard. what's happening to me right now? where am I? How did I get into this? I'm afraid. It’s ripping me apart, fear. I've always been feeling like this, I've felt this before. I've felt like this every day of my life. How do I know that? I've never known it before…but, I never thought I was feeling this, I've always known it before, never, I've never known this feeling before. But I know I've felt it every day of my life. Where is he? He? Who is He? Where did He disappear to? monsters…animals, what is that? peering into the darkness I think he’s trying to kill me. he's trying to kill me.

Scott trips on something. It is a stray dog, a big one. It growles and menaces, but does not bark

Scott: Oh, FUCK

Dog: growling rriide the beast, riiderrrriiide

Offstage Speakers whispering below the sound of the dog: ride the beast

Scott turns and runs the other direction, runs until he enters a sewer from which the murky water is flowing into the room.

Scott: tripping hard; he has a sickly, unmoving smile glued across his mouth ooohh, tunnel. tunnel. túnnel. toonell. tunnel. sewerspace…..a period of silence in which he walks forward through the sewer ohshit, he's still trying to kill me. he's still behind me, isn't he?...... I feel the tunnel breathing. in and out, breathing. deep, gratified sighs. sounds like a woman, after sex, in and out, afterglow, and I am in her tunnel, breathing. that makes sense, now, tunnel. I am in the tunnel of the city, penetrating it. hello providence, i penetrate you, i fuck you. afterglow. the sewers are veins, with shit for blood. it feeds on providence's shit, and lord knows, providence is shitty. i've known that providence is shitty since I moved here, and now I’m penetrating it’s shithole. our sewers hide what connects us, in our solitary backroom dreaming. our sewers allow abstraction in human encounters, allow us to disappear from ourselves. I can't look at your face, it overwhelms I and I. . our sewers wrap us together in dreamy abstraction. our faucets rip our outer skin off every morning, and pure waterfall flesh cannot hide behind dirt reality. my skin. he is trying to kill me, I’m going to die, I and I. I am plural, I am talking to myself because it needs to know what I am thinking. I am I abstracted, I and abstracted I.

Scott comes upon a ladder, and climbs up it. he opens up the manhole, which is just too small to climb out comfortably. He pushes his body up into it, gets his arms head and shoulders out and tries to squirm up.

Scott: The sewers give birth to I and I. the sewers birth me, fallopian tube shithole.
He emerges into the main hall of the Masonic temple. There are high ceilings, and light from the setting sun streams in through windows near the ceiling. On the wall he faces, there is a giant throne statue with a giant Masonic G symbol and other impressive shit. On the wall is a giant expressionistic representation of a nude woman, sexuality emphasized. Or whatever the set designer wants to do.

Scott, still on his hands and knees from climbing out of the sewer, looks up, awed, quivers, and falls on his face. he lays there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling.

Scott: I've hit the main nerve, I know it, command central, you understand. Men become gods in this room. I am god, god of this moment, god of myself. I am holy, my life will be eternally holy and I will be worshipped as Jesus. this is my burden, this is my burden, this is my duty. The price you pay for being god. ohshit, it's terrifying—I can’t do this, you know I just can't do this. Am I alone? he is trying to kill me, he is Satan, if I am god, but everyone is god, I am everyone. I know I am going to die at the end of this, this is it, the culmination of everything. this is the end. I'm scared to die. where is he? coming up behind me, always, he always has been, always will be, sneaking up behind me. Begins to jolt his head around and back, jerkily looking over his shoulders. Brie appears right in front of him, a girl with dark hair, his first girlfriend. It doesn't matter if she's real.

Scott: Brie! Brie Lehman? what are you doing here? oh, god, am I imagining you? you...you’re beautiful, you haven’t changed.

Brie: I'm here, take me

Scott: my taste in women has gotten worse since you, Brie. Touch, my touch, my feel, I never stopped feeling you, Brie. Sex, love, my body egresses and entrances, I become a worm eating the soil of human flesh and leaving behind me a trail of the same. I become eros. You want me.

Brie: fuck you. narcissistic prick, you have to self aggrandize in order to justify yourself. fucking parasite. you march toward the death of the masses, you and every one like you are small time hitlers doing your part in the holocaust of time. You are a parasite of sickness, a flying demagogue of capitalism. You have freedom, your parents bank accounts and your shiny degree guarantee it. Do you know where I am? Do you smell the vomit on my breath?

Scott the acid is beginning to peak: uhhh….vomit? rooocket. oh god. can I touch your arm?

Brie and Scott suddenly and very jerkily kiss. Suddenly a wheelchair rushes up (can it rush up from beneath her), and she sits down in it suddenly and hard. Her head rolls to the side and rests on her shoulder, and her eyes look vacant, as if she just passed out. Charlie appears behind her, cleanshaven, wearing a bowlerhat, carrying a briefcase, and smoking a cigar, maybe.

Charlie: Is that your thing? would you have sex with a girl in a wheelchair? A fucking gimp? Is that what you’ve come to?

Scott: whimpers why am I sitting in a wheelchair? where did this come from?

Charlie: You are encased in cement, in the navel of urban desolation. You are a shard broken off from a long lost humanity, you are alone. this room was built right before the stock market crashed in '29, it was built in loss, suffering for some mystic elite, the kind of guys today who lock themselves in sportscars and jerk off in their pinstripe suits

Scott: I feel myself vibrating.
Scott: I gotta get out of here, I’m going to die, I gotta get out of this.

Charlie: don't fight it, kid. Don’t fight me. You want to go somewhere else? you want to go outside? I got somewhere for you, you'll fell better.

Scene changes. Now Scott and Charlie are standing on the roof of the temple. Providence is in the distance, sitting there and being shitty as it tends to do. Charlie has changed hats again. He’s wearing a felt long-brim brown fedora.

Charlie: You are talking to a human being now. I exist. Do you give a shit about that? does that enter your narcissistic little universe?

Scott is way beyond words, looks at Charlie.

Charlie: I've been where you are. You know you're here still, you'll listen to me. Do you give a shit who I am? I asked you to trust me earlier. I worked in providence, I wore a white shirt every day. Sometimes I wore khakis. Sometimes black pants. When I felt wild, I wore a Looney Toons tie. I had a boss. I had 'supervisees.' I wasn’t sure if that was a real word or not, though. By real, I mean noncorporated, unamerican. Supervisees. They were peons. I was a peon. I think they may have done something all day. Made things. I’m not sure. I know I didn't. Sometimes I came by their cubicles and 'reminded' them about that report. I smiled, which made me insecure. I have bad teeth, and every time I open my mouth, I feel like eyes are in my empty gullet looking into my blank, 8 ½ by 11 soul. I clean up a little bit. Some people, some people should have the right to decide who deserves the privilege of living, you know? I got a good judge of character, and I know what we need, as a society. I ain't gonna breed, because I know that's what we, as a collective, need. Me, I'm celibate. I skullfuck the American Dream. My testes are lit up green. I kill the already dead. The faceless. The middle managers like me.
Someone reached down my open mouth with a pen and drew a picture on my soul. It was just a pastoral landscape. And when they took their hand out, I went to get more orders from my boss, and I let his eyes into my mouth. And the fresh ink, the nice landscape, reached out, grabbed his eyes, and doused them in stomach acid.
What I'm trying to say, is I shot him in the face with my shotgun. And now I’m an angel, a killer. And now here you are.

Scott: aah, shit.

Charlie: Now I don't know you, and you're just a kid. you're an arrogant prick who doesn't appreciate his own privilege, a sucker on society, maybe, but maybe you'll get out of school and use your degree for something meaningful. maybe you'll do someone some inch of good. is that your plan, punk-ass kid?

Scott: Scared i'm worthwhile.

Charlie: You're tripping face, and you're oozing mendacity. you can't hide from me.

Scott: I have all the power, right now. You are fear, you are my fear. I own you.

Charlie: Feel the fear building in you, ripping away at your consciousness. I feel you fighting me. You can not beat me.

Scott: I cannot overcome you. I'm going to die…I have to resist…I'm dying. Scott utters a grunt that turns into a guttural scream, and launches himself at Charlie. Charlie attacks low and Scott ends up on top of him.

Scott: Ride the beast

Charlie stands up suddenly, launching Scott over the railing and down, falling the six stories down to the sidewalk next to the mall. Charlie stands silhouetted in his hat, while The Doors song plays.

Silhouette: This is death, the drug does not lie. My spirit is broken. I must go west.

Jim Morrison: The west, the west is the best.

Silhouette: Deep in the west, where daily God died, where daily the imperialism of fear ran men's lives, where the middle passage reaches its end in eternal slavery.

Jim Morrison: This is the end, the only end, my beautiful friend.

Slowly he turns around, and we see that somehow it’s actually Scott wearing Charlie’s hat. He turns to walk out. He leaves the rooftop and walks through the anteroom where he first met Charlie. There is a figure huddled in the corner of the room, a bum wearing a coonskin hat. It is, of course, Charlie, passed out in a drunken stupor. Scott exits the stage, and the real Charlie stirs himself

Charlie: now, where did that fuckin kid get off to?

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 1:19 PM ] [ ]