Hey,

here is the typed part of a story I’ve been working on. Just want initial thoughts and reactions. Hope you’re all well. I do want to say of regardless of masculinist and psychosocial and subconscious drives, I think there is always something wonderful about sharing art with other people. Especially challenging, thoughtful art, which is what tends to grace the pages of this website. Definitely print something. You can do eet. Eet’s okay. Love,

JoJo

I

Two men meet on 45th and College Avenue as the number 338 bus slithers around 45th and heads north on 15th. Old friends, their handshake becomes an embrace becomes a bear hug, and the one dressed in black fills his sober nostrils with the stink of the other, who is dressed in a blue leisure suit and effeminate white hushpuppies; the smell that greets his nostril is the smell of camphor oil and dried cum. It is not unlike shaking hands with a skeleton.
The two hominids chatter excitedly: women, “how long has it been?”, cigarettes, telephones shoes exactly what do you mean by that?
Blue is thinner, darker than Black remembers him, and he has a sore on his right forearm that oozes angry, white puss from an angry, red crater. Black can’t remember if he is glad to see Blue or if he’s been dreading it since Blue called last week.

II

The bartender swallows at air with two nostrils almost as wide as Dixie cups; his is a handsomely upturned nose, and his lips are thick and contain a set of teeth as white as snow on Christmas. He has terrific hair, hair like a clamshell but the color of sunset. The overall effect of his body is similar to that of a giraffe. Or else a cobra, poised to spit.
Black shudders as the giraffe-cobra takes his order for two Bloody Maries.
Blue says, “Make it quickish” in an Irish accent.
Quickish sounds absurd to Blue, Black, and the giraffe-cobra bartender—it’s not something people say in this area of the world. Black wonders why Blue would say it; he turns to him in order to study the lines of Blue’s face, which is a handsome, sad, smiling, dark face with an overly bold jaw and a jutting nose.
“Spicy,” Blue says, using the accent again. “And quickish, like.” It’s really quite absurd. Black would feel embarrassed, but…
They have a deeper, more nuanced discussion of “how long it’s been.” The air feels slightly radioactive; it feels like heating up McDonald’s french-fries in the microwave and wondering if it’s true that you can get tumors in your retina if you stare at a microwave.

III

Two Bloody Maries arrive, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
“Cheers,” says Blue, and the bartender sneers as Blue upends the Tabasco sauce and empties a quarter of the bottle into his drink.
In a partially obscured corner of the bar, a rat trap announces success and the giraffe bartender grabs the animal by the tail and tosses it into the trash can by the swinging doors that lead to the kitchen, sowing his movements with enough ambiguity that it is only Black, an ex-bartender himself and the tenant of a rat-infested apartment in Mount Baker, who guesses what has happened.
Blue sips his Bloody Mary, grimaces as sweat leaps from his brow. He has Tabascoed his drink to undrinkability.
“You’ll pay for that,” says Black, “with your ass.” His drink is gone, so he motions to the giraffe bartender for another. He doesn’t mind about the rat.

IV

Another bar.
The bartender is a blonde, blank, pretty-looking woman. She has cruel, squinting pig’s eyes; if she is beautiful, it is a beauty kin to the beauty of a rainbow reflected in an oil spill.
As he motions her over, Blue says, “She’s beautiful like a Monet painted in blood.”
“I was just thinking that,” says Black.
Blue orders two car-bombs, and the pubescent boys at the bar begin to holler excitedly about the car-bombs.
“Lookout, car-bombs,” says one.
“Car-bombs, people,” says another. Somebody slaps Black on the back. It becomes clear to both of them that they’ve wandered into one of the lower circles of hell and Blue’s eyes are pale gray in the dim lights and he grits his teeth and jams his finger into the sore on his arm.
When their drinks arrive, they plunk the Bailey’s in the black stuff and drink their drinks quickly and without relish.
They leave quickly. They walk so quickly away from the hellish experience that they are a half a block down the street before they realize they never paid their tab.
Blue smiles and his tongue darts out from and then disappears behind his broad-toothed smile. Black notes with some interest that Blue’s grin is in the shape of a sickle.

V

It is called an Irish pub, and Blue points out that it is full of motherfuckers.
“Jam-packed,” he says, ironically not using his Irish accent. Their eyes are drawn to a dark corner of the bar where there’s a half-empty pitcher of beer on an empty table. When they’ve taken their seat, Blue discovers a black leather jacket folded neatly on a chair, which he puts on. Black pours Blue a pint and then takes a deep draft from the pitcher itself.
They’re looking as pale now as two full moons, their bodies don’t seem to fill their chairs.
When the man returns he doesn’t seem upset and that seems very strange.
“Please, gentlemen,” he says, “have some beer. And if you’re cold, then please wear my jacket.”
“Sorry,” says Black, putting down the pitcher.
“Sorry,” says Blue, taking off the jacket.
“Oh, no, no. By what right is that jacket really mine, other than that I paid for it?” Blue stops taking off the jacket and examines his knuckles, which are gnawed at beyond skin and muscle and down to the faint traces of a purple film.
“No right,” says Blue.
The man laughs suddenly; it is the exact sound of a spider monkey’s distress call.
“I’ll buy another pitcher,” says Black, standing up.

VI

A boa constrictor is draped over the bar, two or three inches thick.
Black shouts, “Jesus Christ!” and jumps back.
The space around him hiccups—the pubescent boys in the bar turn and stare: the name of the Buddha Jesus has been uttered in vain.
Black watches as the boa constrictor rears up and grows an arm and then delicate shoulders and breasts and a slender neck and a face. The face has hair.
“Your shirt,” says Black, “has the exact coloration of a boa constrictor.”
She doesn’t understand—how much should he explain?
“Your arm has been known to eat men whole.”
Too much.

VII

“Sorry about your leather jacket,” Blue is saying when Black returns with the blackest beer any of them have ever seen. Black notices how much the man resembles something brought up from the bottom of the ocean: a rare fish, something caught off the coast of Okinawa every ten years, all hooded eyelids and eccentric folds of flesh. He is a man from the bottom of the sea.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he says. “You’re o-kay.”
“He bought the pitcher,” says Blue, flicks his thumb in Black’s direction. “Even stevens.”
“Yeah,” says Perry (the man’s name is Perry), shifting in his chair like an oarfish. “I know he bought the pitcher.”
“I’m just saying: we know we were wrong and now you should have some of the pitcher, we can all drink some of it.”
“Yeah.”

VIII

Perry talks about Israel. He knows a man named Leon who has had so many concussions that he retired at age 38. There are certain parallels, says Perry, between Palestine and poor Leon.
“Leon was a dishwasher, a bellhop—like Tel Aviv. How he got so many concussions is beyond me. Not dumb, but slower than shit off a shed. Understand?”
Black and Blue indicate their understanding.
The Man From the Bottom of the Sea continues, “The argument for an Israeli state is ultimately biblical—the bible, gentlemen.”
“I’m Jewish,” says Blue, whose last name is H____, who comes from the row of townhouses named Orange Court (by the elementary school), who once shouted about the cougar in the backyard, and who left the hereditary lands of the Left Hand Arapahoe for the hereditary lands of the Munsee Delaware, and who was obliged by his parents (a surgeon and a psychologist, respectively) to return.
“He’s a zionite,” adds Black, whose last name is in fact H____, who is not Jewish, and who comes from the opposite side of the valley that constitutes the hereditary lands of the Left Hand Arapahoe, and who, for the sickness that he shares with Blue, came to the hereditary lands of the Duwamish, and stayed there, and met Amy. She is the medicine for his sickness.
“A Zionist?” provides the Man From the Bottom of the Sea.
“I just mean I don’t know the bible that well,” says Blue. “If you’re like a Jehovah’s witness or something—“
“Fuck no,” Perry says.
“God, I feel awful,” says Black. All but a few words have crumbled from beneath him.
“No, I’m talking about—“ the man begins. His cheeks puff. Suddenly, they understand: written in the strange folds of his aquatic visage are decades upon decades of boozing.
“I’m talking about a two-state solution. Two states. Israel and Palestine.”
A silence lumbers by. Black and Blue stare at the man, who tips his pint into the dark, final space between a pair of billowing lips.
“Gentleman,” says the Man From the Bottom of the Sea, “I’m off to work.”

IX

Forgotten is the Man From the Bottom of the Sea; now they will play pool with the motherfuckers.