Joey Cloudy online

Tramp chapter 1 Deep Ellum Blues

“I was dreaming when I wrote this,

forgive me if it goes astray.”

‘1999’

-Prince

Mona was nothing special. If you saw her on the streets, you’d think she was just another Goth girl from the badlands, as unremarkable as Norma Jean before she discovered Marilyn. When she wasn’t on campus, you could usually find all 5 foot 5 of her at home reading over some metaphysical tome or naked napping lazily on the ragged black futon with a copy of ‘Memoir of a Beatnik’ curled up beside her and Queequeg, the black and white sentient Japanese woodblock print of a cat. A well-worn copy of Wallace Stephens’ collected works lay open to ‘The Blue Guitar’ and ‘Cosmic Trigger’ lay open, face down atop the pile of dog-eared books that surrounded her. Most nights she was here, sitting in her brown metal folding chair, behind a battered secondhand card table covered with the handmade jewelry she fashioned during the day and sold each night here, at her regular spot, in front of the pulsing red neon and jaundiced fluorescent lights of the tattoo shop. Here is where, weather permitting, she came to sell her jewelry.

While the beautiful people drifted by insentient smoke without ever giving her a second thought. She preferred it that way. She had been practicing for a lifetime the art of making one’s self small. Shrinking herself within herself, until she seemed to be…or rather seemed not to be. It was no easy feat for an apex predator to disappear in the midst of their prey, but she’d had years to practice her craft, and now it worked effortlessly. It was an illusion, like Marilyn’s persona, only a simple glamour after all.

She was just another falling angel dressed in black. Wearing nothing but steel-toed combat boots with the metal on the outside of the leather, unlike the military issue, her steel toes shone silver beneath a priest frock, minus the white collar. To most, it looked like a black trench coat, but the observant would notice the dark cords looped around the large black linen-covered buttons, the banded waist, the flair of the dark linen as its hem hovered holy only a few inches above the metallic glint of the steel caps covering the toes of her Doc Martins. A recovering catholic would recognize it immediately.

Her downcast face pale rectangular, always obscured in the hovering shadow of bangs and dour black hair that fell straight to her shoulders. As easy to see as déjà vu, she appeared perpetually unfamiliar, and eventually, you figure that you had to have seen her here over the years hanging out on the strip. Still, you could easily miss her; she being painfully shy around strangers and quiet even in the company of old friends. But, if you could look closely into those hoori eyes, you would see something brilliant burning fiercely, hiding in the periphery of beauty.

Mona sat on the flat grey planes of sidewalk, stringing beads of semiprecious stones that she fashioned into simple necklaces and bracelets, and rings. There were mostly hematite beads of various sizes in the dingy yellow tackle box at her feet. On the black cloth that covered the cheap folding table, along with a small reading light, were her books and a paper cup filled with gourmet coffee. The rest of the table’s surface was covered by her jewelry. Her wares were laid out haphazardly in a half dozen black suede-covered display boxes. Next to them were a few pieces she had purchased wholesale for the perpetually high club kids, the drunken frat brats, and their silicone-enhanced future trophy wives, the sorority sluts, who were her regular customers, along with the occasional lost tourist or adventurous local.

There were stainless steel skull rings with bloodstones set into hollowed eye sockets, alongside gold and silver rings with small daggling crosses, and a few long metal sleeves of sterling silver designed to slide over a single finger like a gauntlet. She also displayed an eclectic collection of pentagrams, peace signs, an ankh, and an assortment of West African mystical symbols. The majority of the jewelry she made was purely decorative. But not tonight, tonight she was pushing her strongest metal thread through small holes drilled into tiny sterling silver skulls with hematite and other sacred stones between each one. Mona knew the protective ability of each stone, and she understood the influence of using silver instead of the cheaper soapstone or camel bone skulls. If she thought about it, she would have realized that this was going to be a very expensive necklace when she finished, but she didn’t think about it. The cost was irrelevant since it was a gift for a new friend.

Aaron Moore entered the classroom dressed head to toe in their favorite colour, black: bandana worn like an urbane pirate, shades, tee shirt, baggy denim shorts, and all black High-top canvas Chuck Taylors Converse sneakers. Even then brace wrapped around his right knee was black. He wore his hair in medium-length dreadlocks, and when he pulled it back into a ponytail or flipped it all to one side, you could see the sides were shaved, so he was also wearing his dreads in a Mohawk. He was densely packed, 5 feet 9, lean, 140 lbs, athletically cut from years of manual labor as much from working out. He had large brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide but rare smile. The neatly trimmed mustache and goatee failed to disguise his childlike appearance.

At thirty-seven years of age, he was in fact closer to the professors in age than most of his classmates, who were in their late teens to mid-20s. He was the kind of guy that always got a second look. He was neither handsome nor ugly, but somewhere in between, a bit odd or off, a bit of his internal geekiness, or perhaps it was just a bit of swagger. He possessed a quirky charm. He didn’t talk much, but when he chose to speak, he made an impression. He was the sorta’ guy that would have stood out even if he wasn’t the only black guy in the classroom. She watched him as he checked her out, peeking over the rim of the wrap-around shades before taking a seat in the front row of the class.

The next time she entered the classroom, Aaron was there ahead of her, sitting nonchalantly at the desk next to the one she had sat in previously. Mona smiled as she walked down the aisle between the desks and took her seat beside him. The two black clad loners exited the classroom together, meandered down the campus hallway’s lockstep, lost in the excited energies of each other’s conversation. Twelve years her senior, he was the first one like herself she had ever met. She had met others, empty vessels that professed to walk the path, but when she stepped into their power, she saw that they were shadows without substance.

Initially, she believed his interest in metaphysics had been purely academic, nothing more than intellectual curiosity. But now, after perusing his collection of grimoires, she realized that he was no naive acolyte and that his interest in the cryptic arts went far beyond the casual acolyte. Unlike the poseurs she usually encountered, he never talked about such things, preferring to converse on more conventional subjects that also held his interest. Paleontology, astronomy, and modern art were among Aaron’s preferred topics for small talk.

He, like her boyfriend, also collected comic books the jewel of his collection being comprised of the complete first edition of all of the books published by Milestones a subsidiary of DC that featured black heroes, the rest of his collection was comprised of Heavy Metal magazine and an eclectic collection of graphic taboo novels by Neil Gaiman whose gasmask adorned Sandman greeted you from the wall where the 32 by 46 inch poster hung in a back metal frame to your right as soon as you entered his 2nd floor Northside apartment, Frank Millers ‘Martha Washington Saves the World’, ‘Sin City’, Mike Mignola’s ‘Hell Boy’, and sitting on the tippy top of the dozen or so books displayed on the living rooms rectangular ecru coffee table as if he could read her minds most secret thoughts was Grant Morrisons ‘Kill Your Boy Friend’ topping the stack of books not in their sleeves with linen ph. neutral linen backing board and on the bookshelves that lined nearly every wall.

An alphabetically arranged row of classic Sci-Fi I novels ran the full length of the credenza beneath the monochromatic gas masked gaze of the Sandman poster. If he had ever allowed a therapist to analyze him, they would have diagnosed him with any number of mental disorders, such as manic depressive, neurotic, Insomniac, megalomaniac, ptsd, a well camouflaged sociopath, a psychopathic antisocial deviant disguised as an artist. All of which could have been true at any moment in time, depending on when and by whom he was examined. For now, he was striding safely along the middle path; however, circumstances sometimes conspire with fate to push one off the path, and when you are gravities whore then the only thing you can do is fall.

Immediately, Mona decided she liked him. Which was strange since she disliked most people. She was glad that he had not turned out to be just another predatory macho prick like most of the guys she had hooked up with in the past. Intrigued, she couldn’t quite figure out what his deal was, and let us be honest, most men just aren’t that complicated. Usually, she hated talking, but quickly found that she truly enjoyed talking to him. He was the only man she’d met who actually gave her time to talk and really listened to her. Like herself, he often took long pauses to think about an answer to what someone said, rather than replying with a glib canned response. He would wait patiently, however long it took, for her to formulate a reply. He looked her in the eye when she spoke, leaning imperceptibly forward. It felt nice to be with a man who really listened instead of just waiting for you to shut up so that they could talk. Or worse, the ones like her boyfriend, who did all of the talking without ever giving her a chance to say anything.

Aaron always looked at her the way someone looks at a real human being. Even when she was posing nude for his paintings, she could see that he was after more than mere nudity for its own sake. Aaron wasn’t interested in wasting his time painting pedestrian pornography; he was trying to capture that luminous beast he saw sliding around behind those wild eyes. It was so strange the way that, even when she stood in front of him completely naked, talking, he looked into her eyes. Behaving as if he were so accustomed to being around nude women that it was hardly worth noticing, other than when he was actually painting.

It was as if her naked body was of no more significance than a landscape, a cathedral, or a still-life with flowers. Once he was finished painting, he no longer felt the need to stare intently. Mona found this way of compartmentalizing his thoughts remarkable; few men that she knew of were capable of exercising such monkish rigor and self-discipline over their most primal desires. Most, when presented with a naked nubile, couldn’t think straight because of the distraction of their crooked erections. Aaron seemed to view his erections while painting as nothing more than a physiological response to visual stimuli. And nothing to be concerned with while there was work to be done.

She was curious about what he had done in the military, so she asked him if he had been to any foreign countries. He laughed as he told her he had been a cook and that the only time he had been out of the country was when he had been stationed in Cuba. Mona had a hard time trying to imagine such a sweetheart of a guy as a Marine. He just didn’t seem macho enough or dumb enough to have ever been in the Marine Corps. He didn’t seem to fit anybody’s stereotype of a lot of things. Aaron had expressed mixed feelings about the military. He didn’t like to talk about it too much; other than the fact that he had done a tour in the military, he never went into the details.

Occasionally, he mentioned the Mojave Desert, or pointed out the Big Bear Mountains or Needles, the long stretch of desert highway flanked by solar panels he recognized in movies was the same highway he had ridden his own Kawasaki 550 across at 125 mph, going nowhere fast. Ultimately, it had proved to be a horrible but necessary experience, and now he was embarrassed because he had only been a cook. The only reason he enlisted was to get the fuck out of Texas and save money for college on what was left of the GI bill, but they screwed up his paperwork and never deducted the money from his paycheck. The military, with its ideas of order, like the church, ultimately was just one more institution that he had become disillusioned with as he grew older.

Everything in his personal experience told him that you could depend on no one for anything in this world. Loyalties were reliable as long as they went untested. Nothing was as useless as your woman’s word. And love was a form of delusion for the weak-minded and self–indulgent, a colossal joke. True love was a sick fiction, a fairy tale like good government and god, it was a lie perpetuated by singer-songwriters, soap operas, Hollywood chick flicks, romance novelists, and those goddamned poets.

There was a wildness that pulled her into him, and that made him potentially dangerous. But she sensed that there was also an ember of compassion stirring within him that could temper the more chaotic elements of his character. Something in him had just…awakened; she had witnessed it herself, along with everyone else in the classroom, as he gave his final speech to the class. Something invisible but real as gravity erupted out of him as he spoke, and a type of transformation embraced him, or perhaps it was he who embraced the metamorphosis. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew enough to know that this was something more than the power of the Alpha.

Once Mona finished stringing the beads, she would purify the necklace with the smoke of burning sage and prayers to silent gods. This piece was important for reasons she did not yet fully understand; perhaps she might even use a little of her own blood. She smiled, but you wouldn’t have noticed as she sat there with her head bowed in earnest concentration, for this sort of work required not just quality materials and the labor of her hands, but, like the thousand-fold technique of forging a samurai’s sword, this called also on the power of prayer. Her straight, black number one, Alley Sheedy ‘Breakfast Club’ hair hung down, obscuring most of her face from view. The passing sounds of the buyers, the sellouts, and dance music being pumped out onto the streets by the clubs, bars, and passing cars made certain that only the mute gods heard her one hundred and eight prayers.

Since so many of the Deep Ellum business owners had hitched around when they were young, they possessed a benevolent empathy for the little hobos, gypsies, and runaways that drifted through the derelict, strewn edges of downtown, new to their freedom, searching this strangest of landscapes for whatever redemption, salvation, deliverance the urban streets had to offer. If you were cool, some of the owners of the myriad of clubs, coffee houses, and swag shops would let you crash on the roof of their buildings in the summer, insisting you sleep inside those winter nights when it was too cold to think about camping out. Most of the proprietors, being from that generation of searchers that had come of age in the sixties and seventies, had a soft spot for the street kids with vagabond hearts since they retained a little of the gypsy spirit in their anemic blood.

These aging outsiders, having read too much into Kerouac, spent the following decades in a cultural time warp where the wilted flower children listened almost exclusively to the poetry set to music of Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors. They suffered from a kind of collective nostalgia that bordered on full-blown dementia. These things conspired within their drug-addled minds to romanticize life on the streets. They, having smoked so much high THC marijuana for so long, never quite understood that the summer of love was long over. But so long as you didn’t rip them off, trash their shit, or kick their asses, they, with Bedouin graciousness, cheerfully offered the fallen sanctuary within the modest confines of their small shops, where they treated these discarded children tenderly as a surrogate parent with their genuine southern hippy hospitality.

Psychic anarchy ruled the three block wide, half mile long strip of dilapidated office buildings, where third wave white suburban punks squatted on the decaying roofs of abandoned, nearly century old Art Deco and Art Nouveau two story brick buildings over storefront shooting galleries in whose black painted, ultraviolet lighted back rooms the heroin chic chased the dragon or mainlined black tar Elysium. Where vanity is punctured as the needle plunges through a few layers of epidermis until it finds ore ore-rich vein where it delivers the mother lode, the illusory escape, beyond the willful self-delusion of unanswered prayers, praying for what? When there is no answer from heaven, this is high enough. Freedom from the treachery of their own flesh, prepubescent orifices prematurely penetrated, adolescent hymens destroyed.

The streets of Deep Ellum offered its wards asylum while they still intact clung to the jagged remnants of their fractured sanity. The new breed descended like a chimera, as we traveled in each other’s godless shadow without our dreams to eat, to prey upon the pretty ones with blackened talons, pouty mouths filled with broken bones and ultra-virulent blood, who ricocheted through the labyrinth of back alleys, side streets, passing invincible beneath the street light moon.

This was back in the bad old days in the late nineteen nineties, when punks and thugs still ran through the streets like packs of abandoned dogs gone wild. The streets were rife with a sense of anarchistic hope. Everyone silently believed that at any moment, anything might happen at any time here, and sometimes it did. Mother fuckers strung out on China white, staggered, disoriented through the streets, everybody but the straight edge minor threat, American hardcore neo-Nazi, soon to be young Republicans were high on anything they could find to drink, smoke, snort, or somehow ingest. Why should we feel comfortable here, surrounded by the witless idiots that inspired Dostoyevsky? Amongst the remnants of failed armchair revolutionaries, reduced to a footnote in an aged history book, a pop music phenomenon, and a fashion statement.

The night air was a screeching cacophony of discordant noise as the techno-music of the dance clubs crashed into the gangster rap of basing cars as all fought for dominion over the shrill voices of jangly guitar-playing street musicians singing for tips behind open guitar cases, empty as Zen masters, beneath their street corner spotlights. The smell of sweet sticky weed crawled into the nostrils to swirl within the caverns of stoners’ skulls as we walked down the street smoking as if it were legal. At any moment, you might look down an alley to see a girl with fuchsia liberty spikes in little more than Doc Martens, stoned out of her mind, bent over the hood of a parked car doing a rail. Turn the wrong corner while the all-American boy with an electric blue Mohawk on bloody knees beside a dipsi-dumpster sucking a cock on a back lot.

All the while, the moneyed elites held tight rein over the city’s dream machinery, dug in, preparing to wait out the speculated Y2K apocalypse. Hiding behind the high brick walls, within their gated communities, awaiting the rapture behind their stony facades. Their positions secure in well-stocked McMansions. The Kevlar-coated keystone pawns that made up their private park cities within the city police farces patrolled Paradise’s second perimeter in carrion circles looking for strangers, cravenly praying they would never find them.

Mostly, the old moneyed elitist hid behind electronic distractions along with their progeny, who majored in amusement, squandering their lives looking for digital treasure, trying to find hidden character to compensate for their lacking and secret levels. Cyber junkies bingeing on a seedy diet of internet porn and conspicuous consumption, hoping the freaks would not crawl in under the razor wire tripping balls with daggers in their yellowing teeth to murder them after they closed their lazy azure eyes one by one and climbed into the dream machine, where they all had the same recurring nightmare and they awakened perpetually panicked, covered with sweat soaked high thread count sheets listening to the enveloping darkness hoping it wasn’t justice. Repeating “it was just a dream”, praying no one was hiding in the soulless shadows chanting… “One of us.”

We traveled this way for some time, sniffing one another’s asses, each, the others dog. Each following the other, crucifying our grand mal delusions of consciousness before we impaled ourselves on the other’s illusory ego. We awaken at the dusk of the millennium in this city that rests like a gaudy jewel on the buckle of the bible belt. Before the inevitable devoured the sacred, and the place was infected with suburban Christians’ missionaries emboldened by greed as the usual suspects assumed the downward doggy style position over their cash registers, and the cities coven smelled the money in the pockets of perpetual tourists.

It happened in the last nights of the bad old days when people like you were still afraid to even drive through here in your Mercedes, Porsches, and luxury SUVs after dark. Before the arrival of Starbucks, before the Southland Corporation invaded our sacred space with their Seven-Eleven and the place died of respectability. It all went down in the last days of the millennium, before the cities cloaked council killed the strips vagabond magic, it was over, even before they erected that retched sign and drove a corporate spike into our chest with that gigantic illuminated sign that read; “Deep Ellum” and the scene died a vampires’ death with a neon stake through its heart.

-about the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.