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Tramp “UNDERCITY pt 3: CHAPTER XXX HEIR of the Second Circle” from the debut novel “Tramp” by poet Joey Cloudy:UNDERCITY: CHAPTER XXX HEIR of the Second Circle” from the debut novel “Tramp” by poet Joey Cloudy: UNDERCITY: CHAPTER XXX HEIR of the Second Circle

chapter 30

TRAMP: UNDERCITY: CHAPTER XXX HEIR of the Second Circle

“I try to say goodbye and I choke/I try to walk away and I stumble

Though I try to hide it, it’s clear/My world crumbles when you are not near”

-Macy Grey

What do you mean you’ve never read Howl?

Just what I said.

But I gave you my collected works a year ago and you carry it with you everywhere.

I’ve never read the poem.

Why haven’t you read it, it’s one of his most important poems?

It’s the most infamous poem of the twentieth century.

I’ve heard of it, I’ve just never read the damned thing.

Why?

It’s too long.

What? No way, dude, I thought you were riffing on it in your new poem ‘Bew’. No, that poem’s more personal. I’m a recovering Baptist.

I didn’t realize that you were religious.

I’m not, but I was raised in the church. My family is Southern Baptist; my Daddy was raised by his Grandfather, who was an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone tent revival preacher. The old man was even a deacon when he was a young man, before he started backsliding. The long line is part of a cultural tradition more spoken than a literary tradition, and the oratory tone is more in the voice of Reverend Mackey or Reverend Pryor.

Richard Pryor?

No, Revered Pryor was the pastor at the church I used to go to with my Momma when I was little, and Reverend Mackey is the only preacher who’s ever done a sermon that I remember to this day. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old it was called its cheaper to keep her after the Johnny Taylor song it was the first time I remember a contemporary reference to a song on the radio it was when the divorce rate first began to go through the roof right after the rest of the states followed California’s example and made it possible to have no fault divorce.

Why haven’t you read it?

I only read the short poems. If I look at a poem and it goes on over a page, then I skip it. It’s too long.

I think you should read ‘Howl’ tonight at Insomnia.

Why?

I think you’re the kind of person who should read it.

I certainly think he can get away with it. Nathan said without ever turning his head from the computer screen.

You have the kind of presence that could wrap an audience around the poem. Nat added. I’ll tell you, I’ve never been able to get into the Beats poetry myself. Being an anglophile, I tend to prefer the classics of English literature by the greats such as William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, and Shakespearean sonnets.

I think you should read it.

OK.

Promise you’ll read it today.

I’ll read this long mutha fucka this morning on my way to work.

Good, I really want to talk to you about it when you get off work.

Aaron gave Mona a look of exasperation before he got up off the futon and picked up his boots, which he had hidden under his pack by the La-Z-Boy so the cat Boomer wouldn’t piss in them. He hoped it was the cat and not Nat. He sat back down on the futon next to Mona, where they had slept after they returned from the regular Monday night Sufi reading at the Cosmic Café last night. They had spent the night quietly screwing on the futon while Nathanial slept alone upstairs in their bed. The taste of her sex was still fresh in his mouth, and she could smell her climax in his mustache and goatee. Mona opened a small brown glass vial, which she held up to her nose and inhaled the vapors for a few seconds before she offered it to Aaron.

What’s this?

Sage oil, it works on the same receptors in the brain as THC. Have you ever tried it before?

Nope, but I’m willing to give it a day in court. Aaron raised the vial to his nose. Mona put her hand over his wrist to stop him.

Listen carefully, sage oil is poisonous if ingested, so don’t get any of the liquid on you and don’t inhale too much, it’s very potent. She released his wrist, allowing him to lift the small brown vial to his nose and inhale as if he were sniffing panties instead of poison. He felt the effects immediately. He wasn’t sure if it was the same highs as the chronic, but it was definitely kicking in fast. He offered the vial to Nat.

Do I look like I’m fucking short bus material? That shit is lethal in small doses if ingested, Dude. I’ll pass. Mona took the sage oil from him, replaced the cap, and put it away with the rest of her recreational pharmaceuticals, a wisp of a smile on her lips. Aaron tied the laces of his steel-toed boots before he pulled on a clean black long-sleeved T-shirt.

As soon as I finish this coffee, I gots ta bounce. If I’m going to get to work on time, I have to be on the next bus. Aaron downed the last of the coffee in Mona’s Starry Night coffee cup before he slung the book-filled Alice pack over one shoulder and headed for the door.

If you don’t mind, I’m gonna leave my stash here in the desk drawer just in case I get another WWB / walking while black, ya’ll feel free to help yourselves. Ciao.

Mona heard the door lock click shut as Aaron bolted the front door from the outside. Nathan had given Aaron a key several months ago at her suggestion. She sat up, quickly hopped up off the futon, and carefully walked the gauntlet over to the five-foot-tall flat black steel and wire tower that held their CDs that weren’t lying on the floor, desk, futon, bar, or wherever else they had happened to be when they were last looked at by one of them. She quickly scanned the CDs still in the tower, looking for something, anything decent to listen to before Nathan started blabbering about his character’s latest adventures in the world of darkness, a modern-day setting for Dungeons and Dragons players. Nathan would spend the rest of the day online, masturbating while looking at Japanese animated tentacle sex on the internet and preparing for his party’s next adventure, when he’d meet with the rest of the gamer geeks this weekend. She had long since stopped fucking Nathan, but she still hadn’t succeeded in getting Trevor to let her move in with him yet, or to talk seriously about marrying her. The situation was completely screwed up here right now with her dating Trevor and living with Nathan, but refusing to have any kind of sexual contact with him anymore. It would only be a matter of time before she would be forced to move out. Mona knew she couldn’t keep Nathan under control much longer, and she didn’t ever want to have to have sex with him again. Things were getting desperate; she might even have to find a real job. She felt suddenly ill at the mere thought.

God damn it!

Nathanial looked away from the computer screen for a moment, glancing over his left shoulder at Mona.

What’s wrong? He asked, not really caring. He wasn’t certain of why he even bothered playing the role of the concerned boyfriend.

I can’t find what I’m looking for. She said after a long pause. There was always a long pause before she answered even the simplest question. Nathanial thought she might be a high-functioning autistic at times. The fact that her identical twin sister was quick as a whip didn’t seem to register with him.

Can I help you find it? He queried without conviction?

Nathanial looked at her for a moment from his seat across the room in front of the desk that held his precious ten year old MAC and sighed softly to himself before he spun his chair around took off his underwear and with his growing erection in one soft hand and the computers mouse in the other he clicked on the tentacle sex animae page he had bookmarked and began to stroke his stiffening shaft with short feverish strokes as he stared at the comics doe eyed heroine being penetrated in every orifice by muscular horned demon with twelve grey, slime covered, three yard long scaly prehensile penis. Mona heard Nathan get up from the computer. A few minutes later, she didn’t open her eyes as she rolled over onto her side, still half asleep.

No! She blurted out the word as she stood, arms akimbo, pouting, looking aimlessly around the room. She couldn’t find what she was looking for in the CD tower. She scanned the room before she plopped herself down on the floor and began rummaging through the cds on the floor along with all variety of garbage; old news papers, hundreds of comics lay strewn all over the stained filthy carpet, miscellaneous high fantasy novels set in the forgotten realms gaming world, old containers of take out; from cardboard pizza boxes to Styrofoam containers from the Greek owned deli across the street from the quickie mart, dirty plates from the last time Nathan had cooked, others from microwaved leftovers, half empty coffee cups, plastic soda cups with stagnant liquid fermenting beneath several inches of blue, black and green mold that grew on top of the remnants of cold drinks, a rainbow colored assortment of four, six, eight, ten, twelve and twenty sided plastic dice for gaming littered the floor like caltrops waiting to spike bare feet hidden amongst the dirty clothes, plastic star wars action figures, moist hairballs, DMG (dungeon masters guide), players handbook, spell books, fiend folios, a vast assortment of gaming books, and Monas black Balh vibrating massager with stainless steel links covering the two thick elastic straps used to mount it to the back of the hand. Finally, she found it on the stereo cabinet under the strap on ribbed anal dildo Nathan liked her to use on him. She put Robyn Hitchcock in the CD player, set it to random, and pressed play. I’m in love with an ant woman played first. Mona stretched out on the futon, wearing only Aaron’s large black Nine Inch Nails t-shirt and a pair of red plaid men’s boxer shorts. She hoped that Nathanial would go back upstairs soon; she was in no mood to argue with him this morning, deciding she would sleep in today.

I just ejaculated he rasped in his slightly lisping adenoidal voice. He kneeled so that his crotch was level with her face as she lay on her side on the black futon. She parted her lips, he poked his wide hips forward, and closing his eyes as she took what little he had into her mouth, each secretly imagining the other was another man.

Aaron tossed his ALICE pack over before he climbed the seven-foot-tall wooden back fence. He wasn’t sure if the front gate was open or if the shorty’s had snatched it off its track again. He looked at his pager clipped inside his front pants pocket of his black Dickeys jeans to check the time and realized he didn’t have time to hassle with doubling back if it was closed, so he dropped his pack over the seven-foot-tall wooden fence and scrambled over the fence, landing in the low-cut grass on the balls of his feet. Aaron grabbed the strap of the pack and slung it over his right shoulder as he crossed the street, weaving between labyrinths of cars trapped in the morning rush hour traffic. He figured he had enough time for a smoke before the bus arrived. He sat down cross-legged on the short mowed strip of grass between the sidewalk and the Chevron gas station parking lot and leaned back against the perforated square steel pole that supported the yellow bus stop sign nestled between his shoulder blades. The Dart bus pulled up before he was halfway finished with the cigarette. He thumped off the cherry and blew the stale smoke out of the cylinder of shredded tobacco before he put the remainder of the square back in the cigarette pack. The bus stopped, the metal and glass double doors opened with a hydraulic whoosh, and he climbed the black and yellow steps as he boarded, pausing to slide two one-dollar bills into the meter. The driver handed him a day pass, pushed a button, and the double doors of the bus closed with the echo of the same soft hydraulic whoosh behind him as the bus took off heading west on Forest Lane.

Aaron eyed the passengers on the bus as he strolled towards the rear, looking for an empty seat. The bus was only half filled with all of the usual low-income housing dwellers, perpetually impoverished, natural born beautiful losers like himself, you saw riding the bus everywhere in America’s cities. Thick-waisted Chicana housekeepers, middle-aged negro women in their frayed polyester retail clerk uniforms, and the poorest of the poor whites in cliché torn skin-tight jeans and the mandatory heavy metal tee shirts. Some sat listening to music on Walkman headphones, a few old timers were reading newspapers, and most of the kids were chatting amongst themselves. An elder Mexican woman old enough to be Aaron’s mother in a thin white polyester cotton blend food service uniform, still the loveliest woman he had seen in quite some time, her black hair streaked with an elegant wisp of grey coiled forming a black crown on her regal skull. She sat straight-backed, chin up, head turned slightly, staring out the smoke-tinted window. He sat on the bench seat near the back door, facing the traffic. He lowered his shoulder and let the army green backpack slide onto the empty seat beside him. He pulled the thick volume of poems from the center outside pocket of the pack, the book that would, for reasons he could never understand completely, change his life forever.

Allen Ginsberg Selected Poems 1947-1995. He looked at the portrait of the old poet sketched on the glossy stock of the dust jacket for a moment before he opened the book to roman numeral page ten of the table of contents at the top of the page on the left the first poem listed was Howl page 49 Aaron turned to page forty-nine and read straight through until he finished the footnote to howl on page fifty seven. The poem exploded in his head like a car bomb. He was laughing hysterically at parts of the purest, most honest irony and crying at the tragedy and compassion in the next line. He finished the poem just as he arrived at his stop, and there was a collective sigh of relief when the crazy black man with the dreadlocks got off the bus that morning in North Dallas without killing anyone. The rest of his work day at the gallery passed as if it were a dream world that he could now see through all of its illusions. When he got off work, he took the bus straight to Nat and Mona’s apartment. Aaron knocked on the door even though he now had a key; he still felt as if it would be rude to enter without first knocking and giving them a chance to get decent. Nat answered the door wearing nothing but his usual red bearded smile and the same dingy plaid boxers he had been wearing around the house whenever Aaron arrived, and he was forced to get dressed.

So, did you read it?

What did you think?

Mona rarely smiled. Her smile was like a sunny day in Seattle. She was smiling at Aaron. He looked as if he were still in some kind of trance.

Why didn’t you warn me before I read that thing on the bus?! The people thought I had gone crazy this morning, laughing and crying halfway to work this morning. Mona’s smile broadened. She had known that the poem would awaken him. She had watched him working on himself for several years now as he emptied himself; he was hollow, an empty vessel, perfect for the poem at this moment in his life.

I think the poem did drive me temporarily insane. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever read in my life. It was like some sort of a spell, more of an incantation than a poem, but it worked. I was never so mentally exhausted as I was when I finished reading that poem.

I want to hear you read it aloud.

You mean tonight, right?

I mean right now.

After I’ve just explained how physically draining it was to read it this morning. Aaron, I need to hear you read it. Now, before you read it tonight.

You want me to read it tonight at Insomnia, but first you want me to reread aloud right here, right now? Aaron sounded fatigued.

Yes. Mona cooed. Read it to me, now.

Too tired to deny her this, a promise masked by the innocence in her eyes, not betrayed by her tone of voice, still, it was a promise that if he did as she asked, there being little he could refuse her, she would make it worth his while. He exhaled a long stream of weed smoke, took a sip of his half-empty Grande caramel macchiato, and retrieved the book from his pack, opening it to page forty-nine and reading all the way through to page fifty-seven aloud.

“I saw the best mind of my generation…” he began,”…

“Pubic”.

What?

You said “public”.

Aaron began the line again and made it through to the end without faltering. Nathanial rose to his feet from his seat in front of his MAC, applauding loudly

Bravo, sir, bravo. Most impressive. I have heard recordings of Mr. Ginsberg himself reading his poem, and I must say that I prefer your reading to his. Granted, I never cared much for his delivery, but that my African American was magnificent. I think I will have to give the Beats another day in court possibly rethink my previous assessment of their quasi-literary movement.

Mona looked at Aaron with a high priestess’ fiery wisdom in her dark eyes.

Do that again tonight when you read it on stage.

Do what?

Read it the same way, but even more. Aaron could not believe his ears. Was she saying not only should he read the monster again, but even more what?

More what?

Whatever you just did right now do it again tonight when you read it.

He looked her in the eyes, and he knew what she wanted. It had always been this way between them; she would look at him, step into his power, trusting he would understand what needed to be done. Nathanial fired up the water bong, took a good hit, then passed it to Aaron, who sat on the futon looking down at Mona sitting cross-legged in front of him on the floor.

Thanks he croaked. His throat was a little dry, and he felt like he had been running through the desert during the Santa Anna’s wind all day. He sipped his coffee before he put his mouth over the top of the purple plastic bong and inhaled deeply. Ain’t this a bitch? I turn myself inside out, and she wants more.

Satan’s bringing my son by after she gets off work, so I’m going to run upstairs and get a quick shower before we have to go.

Ego annihilation, he had been refusing to use the word I in thought and speech, he had taken to wearing a thick black rubber band on his wrist, and he would punish himself if he even thought the word ‘I’ by snapping it on his wrist. He had succeeded in obliterating it in his newest poems. The consequence of this was that his poetry began to take on a mystical element, an almost prayer-like metaphysical quality. “Poem ain’t’ nothing but one man’s soul praying to another.” Trevor Dickson would quote. Satan had never been the most articulate of women, but she could spell words that she had no idea how to use in a sentence. While she knew the rules of grammar intimately, she still suffered from a rather limited vocabulary because, other than computer manuals, she didn’t read. Other than Aaron, all of the guys she had ever dated had been only a few IQ points over being morons. After he got out of the shower, he checked his voicemail. He could hear the distinct provincial twang of the East Texas accent that now coated her tongue since she had moved out of the city. Never the most urbane of the women he had been involved with and always a bit parochial in her thinking, her accent had easily slipped until now she sounded country as cow shit. Once dressed, Aaron went downstairs, and Nathanial told him that his ex-wife had called right after he got in the shower. Did she leave a message?

Yeah, she said to tell you that she was on her way over with the kid.

Aaron felt suddenly buoyant. Although Ahmaad was only eleven, they had become good friends over the years. They shared a genuine respect for each other’s talents, and each enjoyed the other’s company. Aaron felt blessed to have the trust, friendship, and respect of such an extraordinary human being. He was the type of person he would have loved even if he were not his own kid. They would argue about what was the funniest movie they had ever seen, with Ahmaad always choosing ‘It’s Something About Mary’ and Aaron always coming down on the side of ‘The Water Boy’. He devoured every book of poetry given to his father by Trevor and Chad, and they often spent the hours waiting at the bus and train stations reading and discussing the poets and their poems. The nightmare that had been New Year’s Eve 2001 had made their bond stronger. That week, it was just the two of them against all that was banal and hypocritical in the world. Ahmaad, Aaron, and Mona walked comfortably in silence while Nathanial followed along behind them, occasionally quoting one of his favorite lines from Shakespeare.

By the time they got to Insomnia, the place was already packed. All of the Denny’s brats were there already. Kelley, Chrissie, Rebekah, and Bernadette surrounded one of the tall tables in the front of the coffee shop in the middle directly in front of the stage. Aaron dropped his pack in the back corner beside the big screen TV on the stage in front of the glass ingots that gave a fun house view of Elm Street behind it, went over and kissed Bernadette on the cheek. He hated that she did not get his usual booth in the back. He had a routine about where he sat when he could help it, and part of it was that he never sat with his back to anyone if he could help it. Bernadette sat there smugly daring him not to sit with her in the middle of the cafe. The smirking coven greeted Aaron with conspiratorial glances before they dispersed as Aaron sat down on one of the tall chairs beside Bernadette. Ahmaad went to the counter to get a cup of coffee as Nat and Mona found their usual seats in one of the booths in the back of the shop. Desiree and Vanessa came over and each hugged Ahmaad with all of the usual chatter about how tall he was getting. Brandon sat at the table with them, brooding, and Aaron waved hello across the crowded room. Rebekah had already started the signup sheet, and Aaron’s name was already in his usual place last. There were only thirteen people reading tonight, so if nobody ran too long other than Nat, then it should be plenty of time for the poem tonight. He walked out back to smoke a joint with Jester before he went into the bathroom to start getting himself ready to start emceeing the evening’s event.

I’m sorta doing what Trevor did in ‘thump thump thump’ and Chad did in ‘Burning The Effigy Of Kyle Vaughn’ and you did in your poem ‘Prayer’, but I didn’t really think about it, it just sort of happened on its own, you know, you were there, you understand my methodology.

I especially like the way you exploited linguistic ambiguity, and the way you play with assonance and the deliberate misdirection created by your line breaks, the lost and found meter that you weave in and out of as you seem to twist organically from prose to free verse.

I was thinking about how Monk used to play all the wrong notes and make it sound right.

Who’s Monk?

Thelonious S. Monk, the discordant jazz musician.

I don’t really know anything about jazz.

T. S. Monk is to jazz what cats like Bartok and Glass are to classical music.

I’m sorry, but I’m still not really understanding what you’re saying. I’ve never heard of Bartok or Glass.

Mona had observed how he had developed over the last few years since she had first met him. Aaron had come a long way from the reserved, bookish little bohemian painter he had been when they first met. It was the empathic way he seemed to anticipate her needs as if his being and her being were silently ringing in the same psychic key. It was this sensation of resonance that she found so addictively comforting. Funny, she thought, sitting here looking at him, Aaron seemed unconscious of the metamorphosis, and other than in his writing, he wasn’t acting any differently. But, you could sense it when you were close to him in the warmth that most experienced when they were near him. She had read about something like this in the demeanor of spiritual beings, and he did now carry himself with an almost monkish bearing; he’d become the quintessence of the seeker of the holy poem.

Mona had been with Aaron both times within a week’s time when complete strangers had approached him on the street and asked him if he was an actor or a rapper, one was a talent scout or agent for major record labels. The first time was at the Zen Sufi reading at the Cosmic Café restaurant when Ron Williams asked him to come on his TV talk show. The second time was at the bus station at city place a black man in a tailored designer suit walked by them on his way to the underground parking. Mona saw the suit checking Aaron out as he sat there, oblivious as usual, writing in one of his black composition notebooks while they waited on the bus. She had gotten used to people staring at Aaron; he didn’t look like a Greek god or anything, but no matter how crowded the room you would notice him, and you would definitely remember him. She just assumed the suit with the Rolex was gay, the way he slowed and stared as he walked by before he disappeared from sight into the stairwell that led down to the parking beneath the high-rise offices. As the suit exited the parking lot in a brand new burgundy Jaguar, he parked the car in front of the bus stop. The suit got out of the car and came over to speak with Aaron.

Are you a rapper?

No. Aaron replied in a tone smoldering with contempt as he peered up over the top of his shades, obviously annoyed at the interruption. I’m a painter. He added somewhat indignantly. And a poet.

He hated it when people automatically relegated him to the only acceptable position for articulate black men in America: rapper, preacher, and stand-up comedian. She remembered him telling her about the woman in Highland Park who had seen Ahmaad when he was only seven years old, and after asking him how old he was, as Aaron hung a large turn-of-the-century oil painting in her living room. She commented on how tall he was and asked if he was going to be a basketball player when he grew up. Aaron could have spit flames at the condescending cunts remark, but Ahmaad replied without hesitation that he was planning on attending either Stanford or Yale when he went to college, but that he hadn’t decided whether to major in political science or philosophy. The dilettante’s plastic face slid off, fell to the floor, and shattered into a thousand humiliated pieces. Aaron couldn’t have been prouder of his son than he was at that moment. Most of Aaron’s friends had majored in poli-sci or philosophy. Aaron and his ex-wife, Satan, were grooming him for college since birth.

The suit could see that he had said something to offend Aaron, but he continued on undaunted, surprised by the sound of Aaron’s voice. White people were always surprised when they heard him speak, but this brother was obviously well educated and as articulate as Aaron. The suit explained that he was an agent from LA and that he was always on the lookout for talent before he gave Aaron his card and asked him to please call him.

I would like to hear your poetry; maybe we could work together. I represent some of the biggest acts in hip hop.

Aaron took the card, and she knew he would never call the guy.

How do you do that?

Do what?

Get people to ask you to be on their TV shows and ask you if you want a record contract.

It’s no big deal, the guy’s just some slimy fucking corporate suit.

Well, nobody has ever asked me to be on TV, and now you’ve been approached by people in the media twice this week.

Three times, actually, some chick gave me her card downtown the other day, claimed she was a talent scout for one of the big record companies.

Did you call her?

No.

Jeez’ I can’t believe it.

I’m not a rapper.

Well, nobody is walking up to me when I walk down the street asking if they can represent me.

It’s no big deal.

It’s no big deal! I don’t even want to tell you what men say to me when they see me walking down the street.

I know what these people want: idiotic rhymed couplets, the saggy pants, ghetto boy grill, cliché gangster rapper posturing, and I ain’t interested.

People treat you as if you were Tyler Durden.

Aaron didn’t believe in fate; he knew that your life, your future, was in your own hands. And if you ever wondered why your life was the way it was, you need only think of everything that you had done before, because that is what led you to this present where you now stood knee deep in imaginary blood atop the place of the skulls. Life had no meaning except that which we assigned to it. We become our history before it becomes ours. Aaron looked out at the cityscape, the skyscrapers rising up hundreds of babble-filled towers. He saw a discarded lottery ticket on the sidewalk near the bench where he sat. He didn’t play the lottery; he believed that luck was a finite resource like the nine lives of a cat, and he would not waste his on a pile of useless money. He was saving it for the real treasure held by one of the nine muses, the only one of the sisters he knew by name, his sweet dominatrix Calliope.

-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.