Sepulcher:

Ambrose Story

 

 

“I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My Destiny! Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.” Conrad Heart of Darkness.

 

“Play that Dead Man’s song,
Turn those Speakers up full blast,

Play it all night long…”
Warren Zevon – “Play It All Night Long”

 

“Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; preclusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!” – Melville Moby Dick.

 

They tried to make a brand new map without us,

But the tourists come down and spend too many dollars…
- Lil Wayne “The Sky is the Limit”<

 

 

“Weep, you mortals, fore Death waves its insatiable hand. See before you eternity? That it lies within reach is no accident, but design—design not of man, but your Holy Father! So shed your tears, man, for tomorrow you shall die!” He waved his hands in pompous, egocentric ornamentation. His voice cracked in a self-serving fan of his own piety. “Come Father,” he ejaculated with zeal, “for hear lies you son,” he sought for the name, “Dwain!” There lied Dwain. His hands folded in a servile pose. Here lies Uncle Tom, your domestic bitch. You’ve made worms meat of him. “Ashes to Ashes,” he spread some gray debris, “Dust,” he paused, his great lips pursing like a fish, “to dust.”

            The crowd murmured in respect. Some young women, the flock of DD’s former confidants, wept openly; their tears were met with disgusted, half-concealed glances. Those that did openly protest the burial were delegated to the rear of the crowd. A few thugs, dealers, and overall well-dressed dissenters stoically encircled the mourners. Their nasal protests could be heard where Ambrose sat quietly in the front. No tears fell from his moist eyes. He had lost a brother before to the violence of the streets. This was nothing new. Regardless, his heart throttled violently in its prison. Here lies Ambrose, he thought to himself, the drug dealer, the friend and mystic…the lists of eclectic personas continued silently under his brow.

            Somehow, the minister managed to continue his droning. It was all ritual, Ambrose thought, ritualistic bullshit for a crack-addict mother and her literati son. Ambrose metaphorically held his tongue. He could not utter the blasphemy of his soul, for he had no faculty for it. Instead, the forced pool mollified. He relaxed his head. He had a habit of building tension in his neck and shoulders. Gently, he rocked his titanium and steel braids in a revolution around his skull. His deep black hair shook respectfully; the still noise of obsequies gently promenaded along to the clinking of metal.

            He felt sick. The nausea bled quietly into his detached thoughts. He needed a drink, something strong to kick him in the guts. Most of all, he needed to leave, to rid himself of the mourners. His legs shook in their cotton prison. The cognitive desire to flee had infected his physical being. He stomped his boot lightly, just enough to jar his leg from stasis. He needed to go.

            It was another ten minutes before the preacher’s prattle ended. They stood. The family members took flowers from the ornamental bouquets. The Minster bowed ceremoniously away. They walked gingerly around the stairs, each pompously holding their fall attire away from the muddy grass. Ambrose rose slowly. He followed the line towards the casket. His hand tightened around his leather coat pocket. Within lie several night of restless sleep. He had struggled with himself: “What does this all mean?” The cigarettes, the beer, the poetry, the movies, brought him nothing. It had been a lot of wasted days.

            Obviously, last night was the worse. He smoke enough that his eyes burned from the haze. He drank enough that the vomit burns hurt him still. The entire night, he thought of the burial symbol, that totem which would effectually bury them both. He never solved the conundrum, instead relying on a simple signifier, a thing that would undoubtfully represent his alteration. He grabbed some worthless collection of poetry on his shelf, some half-thought present from a friend. Using a jigsaw from Tully’s basement, he sawed the pages in a suitable shape. Then, after a night of preparation and polishing, he placed his .32 pistol into the book. Carefully adjusting the ivory pummel with it Rosicrucian blazing outward, he stepped back and gazed apathetically at his totem. He was unsatisfied by the representation.

            The hollow nature of the book, despite its new weight, wore on his conscious. Why must he represent their relationship through material? Was there no better way to immortalize a friend? His mind remained vexed as he drilled through the book. Using a carriage bolt and washers, he secured the book closed. This, he thought, was a little better. Then, as a thought rushed into his mind, he quickly unfastened the hexnut holding the book closed. He pulled a metal bead from his hair and tossed it in with the gun. “There,” he thought. “It’s done.” Romantic and melodramatic as it may be, it was finished.

            Now, as the tall gray-haired grandmother tossed her flowers down, Ambrose pulled the poetry anthology from his pocket. No one spoke as he tucked the book inside DD’s blue suit coat. He would later recall the stiff nature of the suit, the way it seemed almost unnaturally rigid against the press of the book-covered weapon. In his mind, he saw it as a posthumous resistance to the symbol. Though concerned, he was pleased.

 

Ambrose turned the radio louder, his speakers barely distorting as the song blared out of the truck. Canned Heat’s “On the Road” sang out as the dully truck tore down the back road. “Fuck Kerouac,” Ambrose thought. So far, the Vietnam collection was the only thing worth indulging; the rest was not but ancient country shit. “On the Road” made him think of tall grass and foreign soil, of real wilderness and real people. He double-clutched; the gearshift hesitated, then slid jarringly into gear. He still couldn’t manage the piece of shit. No matter what boots he wore, he couldn’t get his foot movement down. The truck lurched over the hilltop, bouncing the pvc pipe in the back of the truck. He nodded his head to the music. Even with his cold eyes open, the recording exotically called to him. He thought of m16 and mortars, Kalashnikovs and straw hats, ideological differences and the wars they breed, the conflict between intellect and material. He downshifted for the grade, again ramming the gearshift into place. The pvc pipes slid forward as the truck popped into gear. Looming overhead, the Pennsylvanian woods stretched stoically forward, unconcerned by the speeding vehicle beneath their idle canopy. Inside, Ambrose wished for a world of trees and stone and roadless paths meant for moving…

            He rounded the gravel bend. The Store’s facade loomed above him. Without slowing, the truck flew over the gravel and onto the concrete. He tore up and around the Store, slowing only when he saw the old man starring at him. Ambrose blinked his eyes impatiently. He stopped the truck. The old man approached his window. “What in the hell are you doing, boy?” The old man could never say his name. He hadn’t tried in the last two weeks. “You gonna burn this old thing up! Slow down and for the love of all that is holy, be easy on the fucking clutch.” The old man was a racist cock most of the time. An old-school patriarch, he ran maintenance at the store and worked a local temp service for other farmers. If you were white, he told you laughable attempts at racist jokes. If you weren’t, he simply was a condescending fuckhead. Ambrose noted that the majority of his reprimands started with, “during the war,” or, “My old man said.” Surprisingly enough, he treated Ambrose as a human about fifty-percent of the day. As it stood today, Ambrose and the racist prick were having a good day.

            “Now, get that damn PVC pipe around back—gawd damn it, you cracked this one.” He pulled a chipped piece of plastic out of one of the pipes in the back. It wasn’t cracked, but the old man didn’t take back his accusation. “Go on, pull around back.” he said. Ambrose complied.

            He enjoyed his new life as a goto boy. The pay sucked, but he enjoyed his own room in the work camp provided by a conglomerate of farmers and storeowners. All together, he lived with around twenty people (including families). About eighty-percent of them were Mexican, some were eastern Europeans, and one was a Mexican-American. Unfortunately, he spent the evening alone in his room. The “guys,” as they were called by the old man, watched soccer or drank downstairs; the women mostly went “flea-marketing,” as Ambrose thought of it, or hung out on the porch. Either way, neither parties spoke English. They spoke very little; he spoke none. It was in this comparison he saw himself as being disabled. The word came foreign to him. He had been mute for over two decades, but to think of himself as being disabled was new. He thought of Levi-Strauss and one’s enslavement to language. Worse, he knew it was true. He knew he was disabled, not because he could not function in the world, but because the world thought of him as such.

            “Well, you gonna unload this shit or not? Gawddamn, boy, get your head out of your ass” The old man slid a pipe from the bed. Ambrose popped open the door and moved around back. He nonchalantly began loading up the pipe into his arms, making sure to carry the entirety of what the old man left. He followed the old man as he walked around back. “Put ‘em down here.” Ambrose waited silently until the old man turned around. “What you waitin’ on? Put ‘em down there,” he pointed towards a rather arbitrary spot on the ground. Ambrose carefully dropped them. “Go on inside and see what Jean wants you to do.” Jean was the old man’s wife. A self-proclaimed progressive, she voted for any democrat that showed up on TV. When in doubt, she voted the one whose name came closes to her family’s. Ambrose couldn’t figure that part out. Some strange tribal instinct or something, he thought.

            “Bros,” she whimsically proclaimed, “my special boy.” The first time he heard this, he wanted to punch the ole’ bat, but she called everything her “special” thing. It was some strange colloquial thing. “How’s Hank been treating you?” Hank, or the old man, treated him like he always did. She didn’t wait for the response that wouldn’t come. “Come on in.” he stepped inside the door. “Now, don’t forget to shut the door, honey.” He pulled it lightly shut. “You hungry? Hank and I are having tuna fish for lunch if you’re interested.” He shrugged, uncertain whether to accept the charity or not. It was in his experience charity meant ownership. She walked behind the counter to move a box next to Shana, the Mexican-American who shared a house with him. Shana waved her rose-colored nails.

            “Good Morning, Ambrose,” she smiled sweetly. He unconsciously smiled. Jean picked up some miscellaneous papers and shuffled into the back room. Shana, eyeing her cautiously, leaned forward, “How’s Hank treating you today?” She nodded her blonde-black highlighted hair. “We’re still a condescending bitch in here.” She quickly righted herself as Jean bounced back into the room. Ambrose cracked a sly, “I’m on your wave length” smile.

            “Shana, honey, can you ring Charlie and see if he still wants that straw from Joe?” Shana rolled her eyes. Ambrose watched her intently. Jean waved her hand in a circular motion. As he robotically followed her, his mind slipped craftily back to Shana. She twisted the old-fashioned phone cord around her index finger and softly, though unceremoniously, wound the rotary phone number to Charlie’s farm with the same hand. Ambrose couldn’t help but throw a quick glance back at the high-cut shorts on her dark legs. He shook his beaded head, trying to tame his wanton, salacious mind back into its harness.

            Jean led him through the kitchen. Hektor, a muscular, good-natured Mexican stormed into the kitchen with a large box of melons. Ambrose watched as his taut, muscular arms lowered the box unto the counter as if it was china. “These are good, Mrs. Haskin.” She patted him on upper forearm.

            “Hec, I’m sure they are. You’ve never let me down before.” Ambrose noticed as she slid her hand from his arm unto her smock, wiping the sticky sweat of labor off her delicate hands.

            “Don’t take any less than four, especially this time of year,” he shrugged his great shoulders. “The local crops are gonna kill us later on…” he said, continuing to talk to himself as he turned to leave. Ambrose imagined him in Hoplite attire as he slid gracefully from the Store. Ambrose felt awkward thinking of him as good-natured; yet, he was the only Mexican to speak to him. Then again, he was also the only English-speaking one. Either way, he didn’t like thinking of natural benevolence…

            Jean interrupted his train of thought with one of her compliments. “He’s a good guy, Bros.” Ambrose got the feeling she complimented just to say she did.  “Anyhoo,” she started towards the frig, beckoning for him to follow. With a sad toss of his hair, Ambrose drug his boots across the linoleum…

 

“You ever get that feeling? The feeling that…” she paused, rolling to look into his face, “that you’re,” she opened her fingers, “just not getting it?” Shana rubbed her stomach unconsciously, moving her tanned skin with a solitary fingernail. They were in his room. She lay comfortably on his bed; he sat on the chair, listening intently to her.  “Is this Heaven? I say to myself. Next second, it’s a no,” her smokey accent elongated the syllable, “this, this is hell.” She rocked back and forth on her shoulders before setteling on her back, like a small cat needing a pillow. “Ambrose, this is the hell of our lives.” He laughed at the joke she unintentionally made. “I’m serious and you’re laughing!” she pushed her head against the pillow.

            It was the second night in a row he had seen Shana. This was the second night he dared come up the stairs. Even now, his shoulders shook in remembrance of their gaze. The negro who dared ascended the Mexican stairs. He laughed. Even amongst the non-White, he managed to be outcast. It wasn’t amorous, he wanted to tell them; although, he wouldn’t lie to himself. He wanted it to be. But to silently woo? This, not even Shakespeare could pen…

            She had been starring at him all along. “Who are you Ambrose?” He shrugged his shoulders. She repeated the question, adding a giggling to his name. “This, I ask myself now. Who is Ambrose? Who could have born such a,” she sought for the word, “wizard! You’re a wizard!” He blinked. No, he wanted to say, those wear white spreads and call themselves the chosen people. “A great silent wizard. You know, I knew a wizard once. He walked from the tip of Mexico all the way North  to Dakota.” She made a little walking person with her hand. “They say he knew Pancho Villa.” Ambrose waved his hand for her to continue, eager to hear the story of the Mexican wizard. “No, you laugh.”

            He shook his head again; the multitude of beads swayed about his neck.

            “Fine, but no laughing.” She continued to stare at the ceiling. “The Americans sent their armies down into Mexico to get Pancho Villa. He was a great general. I’ve been to the hotel where he road his horse! He road it right into the doors. A great white horse with a great white mane like a ghost. He reared the horse and yelled, ‘you come for Pancho Villa? Here he is! Now come for him!’ and he road right out of the doors. So, they did, they came for him. Not alone. No, they would not dare. They came with their army. Well, Pancho Villa, he had many great men, but not as many as the Americans could pay. Instead, he turned to other ways. Here comes the Mexican wizard I had met.”

            “The story is that on a cool night, Pancho Villa came to him and said, ‘Wizard, do you stand for Mexico?’ No one knows if the wizard really did or did not, since Wizards always stand for themselves, but he said to Pancho Villa, ‘This, general, I do for you. Go tonight into the camp, but go alone. The Americans will be in a deep sleep. Cut the right ear off of everyone of them, and they will not wake. But, in the morning when they do, they will be so frightened by their ears, that they will run back to America and never return!’” Shana stopped to take a drink. Ambrose forced himself to lean back. Somehow, he had leaned uncomfortably close to her.

            “So, Pancho Villa, who was afraid of no gringos, walked into the camp with a long, curved skinning knife. There were so many tents! But, he started quickly, walking right into the American general’s tent and cutting the right ear from his head. Not only did he just lay there, he didn’t even wimper! Amazingly, Pancho Villa went tent to tent that night and cut every right ear from the American soldiers!” she raised her hands high, “and, when they awoke, they were so afraid of their missing ears, that they ran right out of camp without their tents or their guns or even their horses!” She leaned forward and hit him excitedly on the arm. Ambrose made a little cheery wave with his hand.

            “This man still lives in Mexico now. They say he comes and goes as he please and no one can stop him. He’s not even seen by the cameras.” She threw herself back onto the bed. “But, when I met him,” she blinked her outlined eyes towards him, “I met him, did I say that? He felt like you. He felt cold, far away, ya know?.” Ambrose leaned against the chair back. He knew no magic, nor could he disappear behind cameras. But the knew cool detachment, and it was no beneficial gift to himself or society. He shook his head, “no,” and shrugged his shoulders.

 

Ambrose lit a cigarillo. It was a dry Friday night and the sun sagged heavily in the sky; the stars had yet to creep out, still frightened by the sun’s aura. Ambrose took a long drag of the small cigar. He had liberated the pack from DD’s house before he left. The wine flavored pipe tobacco was rolled mechanically and tipped with an annoying plastic filter. It tasted decent none-the-less. Sitting the cigar carefully on his work pants, he took a sip of some corporation’s idea of beer. It tasted like bad ginger ale. He drank regardless. It had been five months since DD’s death, less days since DD’s funeral, and he wanted to celebrate.

            He felt his obsequies were cliché, that he should have come up with a better way of saying, “Here’s to you.” What were his choices? Read a poem, drink something, find a girl? Fuck, Drink, Eat—yes, two out of three would have to do. He drank and smoked instead. He pondered those trite things a person associated with death and the dying: Are they watching? Is there a god? What denomination is it? What gender is it? Does it weep? Why do we bury/burn/expose the dead? Ambrose took a long drag. He wanted to be dead, to leave the questions for the living. He had seen his share of the walking shades of existence, those spirits which drag their living feet upon a road to damnation. Not damnation in the typical sense, for that was a fallacy, but damnation in the “this is the woeful road to ruin” damnation. He took a drink, wishing to be too drunk to articulate the bullshit in his mind or drown it.  The skunked beer sloshed in his mouth. To be dust, he thought, to be not but secular dust…which remind him of that awful dust in the wind song. He smiled to himself. Oh, the broken synapses are firing tonight, aren’t they? He took another drag and blew the smoke out in a solitary column. The end would be far from romantic, he thought, but it’d be the end.

            The door next to his chair flung open. Two of the eastern Europeans came stumbling out swearing in some language Ambrose didn’t understand. They paused and looked at him. Ambrose noticed one had strange growths on the back of his head. The other one frowned and drug his friend, the growth, towards a car; their drunken shuffle led them to a car, which they promptly fired up and drove down the road. Ambrose watched the car as it faded to black. Five months since DD’s death, and he hadn’t made any new connections with life or anything.

            Part of him missed the adrenaline rush of the old days. There was a satisfaction to breaking the law. God knew he hated the fucking filth enough for it. He hated the scorn he saw inside them; he knew it as a sense of pride, a separation between those in power and those disenfranchised. But they leveled the field, if in anything, through the power of their will. Each bag they sold matter very little in the long run…but in the short, it added up to one more blow to the son’s of bitches. Then, as if buzzer sounded in the middle of the fun, Ambrose awoke to find himself supporting the sonnabitch capitalists. In some ways, he was paying the pigs to chase him. They dumped more money into narcotic officers. The money reinforced the racial profiling, reinforced the bigots as they came down on the neighborhoods. It had only been a matter of time…but they defied it. It became a matter of pride for Ambrose, as if he alone could hold that time, man’s most prominent enemy, back. Each day, each bag, each second he walked amongst them was another moment of life anew. Then…then they got DD.

            He threw the cigarillo onto the pavement, stamping it to death with one dirty boot. He wanted them dead. The night he heard, he ran to DD’s apartment. There, lying dejected on the table, was a stockpile of weapons: all cleaned, all loaded, all ready. He grabbed the .38 and the 12 gauge, threw them into a bag, and reached his hand for the door. He never opened it. Instead, Ambrose starred ahead. The door was void. The door was a certainty: This is DD’s Path. Around him was void, an abyssal playing field swirling towards oblivion. There was nothing, nothing in the apartment, nothing anywhere. Ambrose dropped the bag on the ground and search around. The place was devoid of life, smelted of the end of new memories. Now, Ambrose was uncertain whether he imagined it in a fleet of fancy, or whether the apartment had been robbed, but, back in that sepulcher of an apartment, he had lost control. He threw the bag of weapons violently against the wall; he tore the chair, some lost relic of a dead man, and threw it through the window; he punched the refrigerate door until his hand no longer worked, his swollen knuckles throbbing. He broke the trophies and pictures, all totems of a dead man. Then, in the worst of the frenzy, he tripped over the bag of guns and hit his head off the wall. The night fell upon him.

            The phone was ringing when he awoke. Running his fingers through the titanium beads, he tried to end the throbbing in his head. The phone rang until he answered it. “Dwain! Dwain, thank god. Dwain? Dwain? Is that you, Dwain? Who is this? Answer!” sobbing punctuated every other word. Ambrose hung up the phone. It rang again. “DD? Oh Jesus, thank god. DD?” there was an effeminate, whimpering pause, “Dwain, baby, are you there?” Ambrose hung up the phone. Immediately, it began to ring again. In a tempered fury, he pulled the cord from the wall.  The phone sat silent, its receiver slightly askew.

            Dwain’s—DD’s—dead, he thought. He’s dead. There’s no way to reach him by phone. He felt blank, as if all his pent-up profundities had died with DD. There was nothing left, nothing at all. After the epitaph, what else was there? No contemplation, no memories, nothing. A great void settled behind his brow. The place was a tomb, full of the living forced to flee or be knowledge that one would be consumed by its daft emptiness. With a stark living dread, Ambrose scurried to his feet. He fell forward, pressing his weight on his bad knuckle. His mouth tore into a grimace, drips of angry, hurt saliva falling from his mouth. He stood. He remained standing for a few moments. He started forward. With a reeling stumble, he fell through the door and staggered to his own apartment.

            The agrarian landscape spread vividly before him. On the steep, an obstinate corn field grew about water ruts and broken stone. Down on the flat, potato and soy fields grew strong despite lackadaisical neglect. Rising up the far hill, a bitter old farmer and his conditionally pleasant son fought over a broken sprayer nozzle. Somewhere behind them, he heard the gradual acceleration of a produce truck driving towards the City Strip District to hawk its produce against the local and southern farmers.  Ambrose watched the Canadian geese fly apathetically over. They slowed and landed in a disked field full of geese shit and scattered, broken corn stalks. They gathered in a circle, honking occasionally at each other like an elliptical traffic jam. Ambrose watched them, his mind still reeling around his past.

            The beer lay discarded on the ground. His cigarillo smoldered where he smooshed it. It wasn’t that he missed DD in a romantic, melodramatic sense. He did. He had loved him, and he loved him still. But where to go from there? He had acknowledge it. He acknowledged he was dead. Now, in his mind, he had remembered. Where to go now? Forward? Was that even possible? He reached down to retrieve the forgotten bottle; the stagnant liquid slouched about the bottle’s sides. He sat the bottle on his pants, ignoring the grime and liquid which soaked into them. In that moment, he closed his eyes to the world.

            There was a mechanical humming between his ears. He thought the phantom smells of the world were malignantly growing in his mind. Inside his body, he felt his feet in his boots, the clothing against his skin, the wind moving his arm hair. Translucent energy flowed within his body. Is it is what it is; I am what I am, he thought, nothing more. I am nothing more than alive. That is all, unconditionally guaranteed and sporadically threatened. Fleetly, his mind fell upon itself in a dwindling downward plummet. There, it met with some archaic and anachronistic realm known as the individual. It slumbered, for what else was there for it to do. In the heat of their diametric friction, the friction of the artificial and the natural, life and artifice, death and memory, existence was birthed…

 

Ambrose walked idly through the Store. A month had past uneventfully by. He grew discontent with the steady work. His mind grew dormant. This was not it, he thought. In his outstretched arms, farm-styled trinkets rattled about in a dusty box.  He found himself trying to puzzle out their age. Flowing hand-in-hand with the thought, he wondered at their purpose. Worthless on-the-farm crap, he thought to himself, meant to sell to a rustic, urban audience. He stopped, dropped the box on the counter, and strolled quietly away. Worthless trinkets, he continued, just like me.

            It wasn’t that he was depressed, for there was nothing clinical about his oppressed disposition. Instead, he felt as if a great blanket had smothered his ego. No, he thought, the economic bore was not at fault. It was as if his entire self lay willingly catatonic. Society, he thought, was blamed for so much. This fault was his alone. Stepping out onto the farmesque portico, he lit up a dry cigarillo. With the quick bite of bad tobacco, he placed foot to pavement and walked towards the beat up ole truck. Hektor met him there.

            At first, Ambrose pondered why the large Mexican man paced about the truck. Then, in a moment of primitive realization, he knew the man was waiting for him. Ambrose felt the thin hairs bristle on his neck.

            “Eh,” Hektor said, turning on the heel of his clean white shoes. He flexed the well-defined shoulder muscles in his back. Ambrose stopped, spreading his feet gingerly apart, the slightest spring shuffling within his feet. “Hey man, we got to talk.” Suddenly, Ambrose became aware of three or four heads watching precariously from the window. “You got somethin’ for Shana.” There wasn’t much inquiry in his statement. Besides, even if he had inquired, which he hadn’t, it wasn’t really up to either of them. “You got to let it go, man. She’s my cousin,” he said the ‘s’ with the slightest hint of a gangster ‘z’. Ambrose half-expected him to say “holmes” or “esse” next. Hektor approached him. Ambrose couldn’t help but feel he was doing so cautiously, like how one cat meets another an inch at a time.

            Ambrose didn’t move. He knew that his accusation of Hektor’s nature was accurate. Hektor was good-natured; yet, he was like the local sheriff. He kept the Mexicans in line and kept the farmers happy. Somewhere between the two lie iconoclastic Shana. In this anachronistic old west scenario, Hektor was the sheriff and he was the vagrant man-with-no-name.

            Hektor extended his large right hand and clasped Ambrose shoulder. His fingers tighten down on the smaller man’s clavicle. In the matter milliseconds it took for his right hand to strike HeKtor’s xiphoid process, he found himself inadvertently at war with the conscious recognition of Shana’s naked form and a primordial hatred for invading oppression. In the immediate collusion between the two, Ambrose’s mind fell apart.

 

It began on a cool Saturday night. He sat alone in his room. A worn copy of The Rose that Grew from Concrete sat idly on his lap. Draped rather apathetically on the chair’s arm, a tattered copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet petered precariously. Ambrose quietly tapped out a line:

 

Breaching, a nameless Plant flutters quiet,
The still Air breathes vagrant,

And the wretched Sun doth peak anew.

Then, in the same seeking Silence,

The Totem walks to finds its death.

 

He put the blue-inked pen hastily down, rubbing his hands as a baker might remove excess doe. Was this it? He thought. He had become fascinated with the symbolic rose, the great image of constructed romanticism, well-trimmed aesthetics, and overall sophisticated violence. Somehow, he felt himself unique in its folds. Perhaps amidst the floral imagery and urban, blood-stained concrete, he, like 2pac before him, had found beauty in the violence. Like Bierce, he saw nihilistic life as the fine la femme fatale it was, a bitch no one objected to abusing. Somehow, the aesthetic pedals fell consciously away, leaving only the core completely ingested by Barbauld’s gluttonous worm. Tenderly, he saw to slaushing the natural parasite into his gullet, where it might be digested and rebirthed as some new, though hateful, suppressed misanthrope. He felt the need to eat a barrel, swing by the neck, or vent, in some ungodly way, all the pent up social frustration he could. Instead, he felt domestic, docile, and dumb. Socially constructed, naturally maligned, or personally broken…such was existence for Ambrose.

            But to blame, he thought, was human. He picked up the blue pen only to frantically throw it across the room. He hated writing, hated the cathartic nature of the activity. He wanted to maintain the hate and grief. No, he thought, not hate or grief but guilt, guilt for living. It was the guilt which pushed his pen to paper night after night. Guilt that he had died and been buried and yet still breathed; however, the very construction of the word on the page brought on the painful realization he was moot, forgotten, and utterly worth the as the syllables he sounded. Capable of breathing, it was as if the word and life within language was dead to him. They say, he thought in bitter angst, that poetry was ninety-percent spoken: to speak, to think, to rationalize one’s dumb place in the world. How symbolic? That he himself was an unintentional symbol to so many: the mute, unconscious image of a reoccurring, though silent, nightmare. More aptly, he was the unintentional foliage sprung from concrete, piss, and utter hate. Foliage that was no different than the occasional urban grass unconsciously stepped over, except for when they grew thorns to stab. Only then did an occasional person stoop to vengefully pull the plant from its roots. Thankfully, no other passerby would again be disturbed.

            He needed a drink. As he rose, a contrived knock startled him. He looked over his attire. He wore a yellowed wife-beater, a pair of pseudo-clean boxers, and black socks. He wasn’t certain why he wore the latter, but he shrugged it off and walked to the door. Opening it ever-so-slightly, he peaked a brown eye around the corner. There, smiling a practiced, though natural, smile, Shana tapped her foot impatiently. “Hey,” she asked and put her hand on the door. Ambrose, lacking the words to refuse entrance and the backbone to block her passage, stepped compliantly aside.

            “What are you doing?” she asked, patiently waiting for him to secure the door. He shrugged, quietly stacking the poetry books on the small table next to his bed. “Nothing? They good?” She asked, gesturing to the books. He shook his head “yes” and sat down on the bed. He gestured for her to sit in his wooden chair. She complied, though he could tell she wasn’t conscious that she had. She focused on his bare arms. “What do they mean?” He looked down at the many tattoos adoring his muscular, though thin, arms. He shrugged hoping the gestured would encapsulate the existential angst he felt for each of them, hoping that the ink would poison his system or would somehow completely drop him into utter sensual deprivation. She leaned in and touched the ornate Celtic cross adorned by the burning rose on his bicep. “That’s pretty; we have it in Mexico.” She quickly stood, turning her back to him, and lifted up her shirt while pulling down the ridge of her blue-jeans. An intricate spiral of twisted knots and ostentatious calligraphy adorned her. A gothic script of Mexican was interwoven with the Gordian knot. He traced the weave with a slender finger.

            “It’s from Lupe de Vega,” she answered his inaudible question. He had never heard of the name before and couldn’t read the Spanish. She supplied the translation for him, “Love is deaf and hears no reason. Love brooks no overlord[1].” The romantic credo sprung an immediate affection inside his darkened soul. “It’s stupid, but my brother loved the old stuff.” He watched the denim slide nonchalantly over her bare skin. She sat down and put her bare feet on the bedpost next to him.

            He stood, walking the books over and putting them on a make shift bookshelf compiled of fruit crates screwed together. As he shelved the tomes, he felt an inclination to smoke a cigar, drink something expensive, and take Shana to bed. Part of his crass nature hinged on his being a sucker for a beautiful woman, though the arbitrary nature of his vice always wore on him. More so, the arbitrary definition of sexual desire as sexism often caused him to question his primitive nature. He crossed the room, straightening his back and flexing his arms, and watched her. Did she want him? Could he tell from her hazel eyes? He saw something there, an intelligent, curious light. He had a strange feeling that those will-o-wisps had lured many of men to their painful, though completely wanted, deaths. He felt melodramatic, but there was something about the situation which demanded melodrama. This was the time for reactionary hedonism, the time to smoke as many budz as possible and worry later. It’s all so contrived, he thought as he approached her slowly. She’ll wait, like the perfect succubus, and allow me to kiss her…

            He stopped moving forward. He shook his titanium hair, the black dreads swinging majestically about his head. How like me to blame…Why did the ruined shelter have to fall on one’s head just to get a change? In that second, he thought of DD, thought of the individual’s desires for action: to solve, to fix, to perceive, to rectify all those moments one saw as wrong. Did he seek to be a martyr? To be nailed to heaven’s infallible gates? All things end in death, he thought, and that alone is the objective truth to the world, but life was arbitrary, entropic, subjective, bitter, lonely…and, occasionally, worth a damn. Here—he thought by tightening his fingers into fists—here is the briefest moment making life worth living.

There she quietly sat, small feet pressed quietly on the bed. There he stood, his amalgamating mind molding her into the crux of his martyrdom. He put a foot forward. Though he could never know what crossed her mind, he would forever remember the slow pace by which he led himself to her. He leaned slowly down to her. She looked up at him, purring the slightest sound, “mio.” Somehow, in the merging of their two personas, there was an awakening of an indescribably brilliant dichotomy: she, a foreign connotation of a word; he, the polemic semantics of a syntactically linked series of syllables. Thankfully, his mind shut off, and he lost himself to her compassionate being.

 

Hektor swung a hard right cross over his head. In his weave, Ambrose rose an uppercut into his guts. He slid behind the larger man, bringing his left hard into Hektor’s kidney. An elbow caught him just under the eye, causing Ambrose to stagger off-balance. Hektor turned on him, his almost foot-taller stature eclipsing Ambrose. Hektor took a step back and brought his large right directly into the back of Ambrose’s head, filling the trained swing with his two hundred and fifty pounds. Ambrose fell to his knees. With a quick knee, Hektor leveled Ambrose, whose eyes rolled unconscious.

            A gunshot drug the still swinging Hektor away from Ambrose. Ambrose rose his tattered head, the blood soaked titanium braids limply sticking to his face. The old man stood with a side-by-side pointed in the air. “What the hell’s gonin’on?” A group of Mexicans flanked him, followed by Chuck Blick, an middle-aged farmer from down the road. Chuck slung a single thumb in his tight blue jeans.

            No one answered. Ambrose looked up at the large man panting heavily above him. Hektor alternately rubbed his chest and stomach. Suddenly, the sound of running feet seemed thunderous.

            “Hektor!” Ambrose heard a series of violently spouted Mexican, followed by a stir amongst the Mexicans. Ambrose watched as two smaller men tried to stop Shana, who pushed to get past them. She stood barefoot on the concrete. About her feet, lie the litter of countless cast-aside pop bottles, chip bags, and other assorted garbage. She didn’t seem to notice, he thought, since she started towards Hektor with a tight lip, her eyes ablaze in obvious disgust. In mid-step, one of the older Mexican women caught her by the arm. The older woman shook her forlorn gray hair. Shana looked into her eyes, clear wrath bursting from her mouth, but the quiet elder obstinately held on. Moments past before Shana’s rancor turned to hate, then quietly dissolved into a self-loathing.

            She looked the large Mexican in the face and, though feet away, spit venomously, “You’re a pig, coward.” Ambrose looked at Hektor, whose proud shoulders quivered. Ambrose watched the man as he walked quietly away. Shana turned her gaze down to him. She did not speak, although he did not see compassion in her eyes. Instead, she allowed herself to be lead away by the older woman’s wise hand.

            It was the old man who reached a worn hand down to help him up. Blick strolled over and shouldered the duck gun, rather excitedly ejaculating, “That Hektor’s a big son of a bitch, ain’t he? Boy, you got to have brass balls to bust that son of a bitch. You’re lucky me and Hank were out back or he’d have been fryin’ ya for dinner!” Blick continued even as Ambrose held a hand over his split eyebrow. The old man was stoic towards the whole thing. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you with that hit.” Ambrose limped away.

Somewhere in the back of his head, he felt a throbbing ache that must have been uncertainty. What the fuck just happen, he thought. He thought of Shana, her arm wrapped about older Mexican woman. Why hadn’t she said anything? Behind him, Blick had begun referring to him as “the nigga.” Normally, Ambrose would have stopped and confronted the problem but, given his most recent conflict and the proximately of the duck gun, he didn’t feel it was worth the effort. He was done fighting bullshit for the moment. Society’s champion had already beaten him enough…He wasn’t strong enough nor loud enough; the day had been lost.

The old man fell behind with Blick, the twelve-gauge’s weight silently burdening his shoulder. Those Mexicans that had come for the fight cracked a beer and spoke to themselves. Ambrose drug his feet slowly along. The sun crept slowly downward.

 

He swung the old man’s duffle bag through the back window onto the seat atop a pile of books, clothes, and junk. Contained within was a solid but tattered cigar box with the extent of his pay: a few hundred sweat tainted dollars. He slipped into the driver’s seat. He turned the key. In the gravel parking lot outside the Store, Ambrose patted his VW Corrado. The needles fluttered on his display, eventually settling to their normal positions. He pushed in the clutch and shifted into neutral. Taching out the car, he watched the needle shoot to the redline. Ambrose grimace and dumped the clutch. The tires spun, throwing gravel around the parking lot as he spun the car out and onto the concrete. As the gravel dust swirled, the dark black of his spoiler was seen speeding down and onto the main road.