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TL/DR Nocturnal Theater - Episode #46(C)
Mar. 1st, 2015 03:25 amIt was after midnight when Kid Hemingway and I got Viceroy's text. "PK and I at Ponce City Market". A quick ride in the Kid's Skamobile and we arrived at the loft gutted corpse of City Hall East. We circled around a series of parking lots looking for a bar that wasn't there. Tried calling the Vice up direct and got five rings deep followed by the wail of ten-thousand ghosts floating in a void of static before a lone beep signaled me to leave a message. Called PK instead. Three rings and he answered frantic.
I told him we were here.
He asked where, frantic and distracted.
When I elaborated he thanked Jesus and told us to park on the Ponce side. He would be down in a minute and explain everything. Before I could say another word he hung up and I pass along the instructions.
Five minutes later and we're in an efficiency that, through the black arts of branding and the necromantic chant - "Location! Location! Location!", had been miraculously transformed into a 'flat'.
"'Flat'?" The Kid huffs through a beard as thick as your dad's old GI Joe dolls, "Like we're in Merry Old Fucking England all of a sudden."
It's a narrow hallway eight strides long before we walk into a kitchen/living room with a wall of windows looking out over the flow of Ponce De Leon. It only takes the Kid and I a single glance before we register the SitRep. It's a cocaine soirée hosted by a flock of Millennials who we find out later all work in advertising with the ambiguous titles of - "Client Strategist" and "Vision Guy". None of them offer us any blow. None of them offer us a beer. None of them even offer a hello. Which is odd as for all they know the Kid and I are Red Dog 5-0 rolling undercover. Instead they're all either huddled over a coke dusted plate on the oven burner or sprawled out on a couch in front of a flat-screen television that's locked on a stream service menu screen while they cycle through their smartphones.
Slumped on a stool by the window with a burnt out cigarette dangling forgotten from his fingers, Vice barely registers us with a glance of dead eyes burning through strands of long auburn hair. Above him, circling in a halo loop around his thoughts, a mechanical bird fluttered. The bird was the size of Vice's fist. It's torso was a miniature typewriter, it's wings were folded pages torn from secret journals, and in place of a head a falcon's skull shrieked.
When it did none of our hosts seemed to notice. They continued to chop lines or thumb tap away into a series of tiny screens.
It was Vice's heart, PK informed us, and it had burst free out from its host when it heard the news about yet another beloved watering hole being bulldozed to make way for another slab of mixed use duplex hell. It had been floating around him shrieking all day. Nothing could silence it. Not the company of kindred souls, not contemplative sips of beer, not the enticements of white insect heat coke.
The typewriter keys on the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart began depressing themselves in a machine gun chatter before a tiny little page feather dropped from its ass. Quicker on the draw than your correspondent, the Kid snatched the page mid-air and with a squint at the tiny text reads from it.
"You guys, I don't know what to do. Seriously. Look outside. They're tearing down this city we love and putting up bullshit in its place. And there's no escape. Even if we move to another city it's all the same. Look at what they did to New York. Times Square looks like Blade Runner as reimagined as a Disneyland ride. LA-LA Land, Chi, and even old Rome Town. They're making every city look like each other so that the people who live in them will eventually be the same. They're turning our holy grounds into strip malls and the ghosts of Ginsberg's "Visionary Indian Angels" are laughing at us through their tears. Meanwhile all we can do is..."
And the Kid explained that that's all it said... ellipses and everything.
"Nothing." Vice whispered finishing the sentence.
Above us the mechanical bird shrieked once in agreeance.
We need to get his heart back in him before it just flies away, PK told us but as to how he had no idea.
Shit, I figured with the wisdom of three glasses of Irish whiskey that fueled me up before our arrival, why don't I just grab it and give it to Vice to shove back in any way that he pleases.
But when I tried all I got was a snap of bone mandible to the fingers and a laugh from the Kid.
The Kid had a different idea. He pulled up on his phone some words of wisdom from Saint Hunter to lure or lull it into capture. These reading silenced the shrieking of the heart but at the same time sent it circling wider and higher as it began now to seek its escape.
Then there was a knock on the door and PK ran to it quickly. When he returned it was with his friend G-Force. Apparently when the mechanical bird wrote/shat out its cry for help it appeared as text messages to all of Vice's friends near and far. In G-Force's hands she held a battered top that Vice had worn on the set of his last shoot. It was for a character he had invented in a story that with his friends he had been filming at the Goat Factory.
"Come home now." G-Force said holding the overturned top hat up and the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart soared down into its depths where it seemingly vanished. Then quick as a blink she flipped the hat over and tucked it over Vice's crown.
He blinked once. Twice. Looked around after a shake of the head and gave the order for us to get out of here.
And later at Vice's pad, the Kid and I sat drinking beers with him. He was alive talking about the wild days of Terminus theatre, controlled behind the scenes (literally, figuratively both) by feral artists and bohemian con-men. There was nothing like it and he reckoned there wouldn't be again. The city, the scene, or the people that made it happen.
It was true, but what also true was that it was late, the Kid and I were exhausted so we made our farewells. Vice walked us to the door, the mechanical bird that was his heart pounding wings of fierce mirth and unflappable misery. When he shut the door behind us I heard him laugh once politely before the Kid and I made our way into a city that will one day soon be no different from yours.
I told him we were here.
He asked where, frantic and distracted.
When I elaborated he thanked Jesus and told us to park on the Ponce side. He would be down in a minute and explain everything. Before I could say another word he hung up and I pass along the instructions.
Five minutes later and we're in an efficiency that, through the black arts of branding and the necromantic chant - "Location! Location! Location!", had been miraculously transformed into a 'flat'.
"'Flat'?" The Kid huffs through a beard as thick as your dad's old GI Joe dolls, "Like we're in Merry Old Fucking England all of a sudden."
It's a narrow hallway eight strides long before we walk into a kitchen/living room with a wall of windows looking out over the flow of Ponce De Leon. It only takes the Kid and I a single glance before we register the SitRep. It's a cocaine soirée hosted by a flock of Millennials who we find out later all work in advertising with the ambiguous titles of - "Client Strategist" and "Vision Guy". None of them offer us any blow. None of them offer us a beer. None of them even offer a hello. Which is odd as for all they know the Kid and I are Red Dog 5-0 rolling undercover. Instead they're all either huddled over a coke dusted plate on the oven burner or sprawled out on a couch in front of a flat-screen television that's locked on a stream service menu screen while they cycle through their smartphones.
Slumped on a stool by the window with a burnt out cigarette dangling forgotten from his fingers, Vice barely registers us with a glance of dead eyes burning through strands of long auburn hair. Above him, circling in a halo loop around his thoughts, a mechanical bird fluttered. The bird was the size of Vice's fist. It's torso was a miniature typewriter, it's wings were folded pages torn from secret journals, and in place of a head a falcon's skull shrieked.
When it did none of our hosts seemed to notice. They continued to chop lines or thumb tap away into a series of tiny screens.
It was Vice's heart, PK informed us, and it had burst free out from its host when it heard the news about yet another beloved watering hole being bulldozed to make way for another slab of mixed use duplex hell. It had been floating around him shrieking all day. Nothing could silence it. Not the company of kindred souls, not contemplative sips of beer, not the enticements of white insect heat coke.
The typewriter keys on the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart began depressing themselves in a machine gun chatter before a tiny little page feather dropped from its ass. Quicker on the draw than your correspondent, the Kid snatched the page mid-air and with a squint at the tiny text reads from it.
"You guys, I don't know what to do. Seriously. Look outside. They're tearing down this city we love and putting up bullshit in its place. And there's no escape. Even if we move to another city it's all the same. Look at what they did to New York. Times Square looks like Blade Runner as reimagined as a Disneyland ride. LA-LA Land, Chi, and even old Rome Town. They're making every city look like each other so that the people who live in them will eventually be the same. They're turning our holy grounds into strip malls and the ghosts of Ginsberg's "Visionary Indian Angels" are laughing at us through their tears. Meanwhile all we can do is..."
And the Kid explained that that's all it said... ellipses and everything.
"Nothing." Vice whispered finishing the sentence.
Above us the mechanical bird shrieked once in agreeance.
We need to get his heart back in him before it just flies away, PK told us but as to how he had no idea.
Shit, I figured with the wisdom of three glasses of Irish whiskey that fueled me up before our arrival, why don't I just grab it and give it to Vice to shove back in any way that he pleases.
But when I tried all I got was a snap of bone mandible to the fingers and a laugh from the Kid.
The Kid had a different idea. He pulled up on his phone some words of wisdom from Saint Hunter to lure or lull it into capture. These reading silenced the shrieking of the heart but at the same time sent it circling wider and higher as it began now to seek its escape.
Then there was a knock on the door and PK ran to it quickly. When he returned it was with his friend G-Force. Apparently when the mechanical bird wrote/shat out its cry for help it appeared as text messages to all of Vice's friends near and far. In G-Force's hands she held a battered top that Vice had worn on the set of his last shoot. It was for a character he had invented in a story that with his friends he had been filming at the Goat Factory.
"Come home now." G-Force said holding the overturned top hat up and the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart soared down into its depths where it seemingly vanished. Then quick as a blink she flipped the hat over and tucked it over Vice's crown.
He blinked once. Twice. Looked around after a shake of the head and gave the order for us to get out of here.
And later at Vice's pad, the Kid and I sat drinking beers with him. He was alive talking about the wild days of Terminus theatre, controlled behind the scenes (literally, figuratively both) by feral artists and bohemian con-men. There was nothing like it and he reckoned there wouldn't be again. The city, the scene, or the people that made it happen.
It was true, but what also true was that it was late, the Kid and I were exhausted so we made our farewells. Vice walked us to the door, the mechanical bird that was his heart pounding wings of fierce mirth and unflappable misery. When he shut the door behind us I heard him laugh once politely before the Kid and I made our way into a city that will one day soon be no different from yours.