In a dark bedroom, a tormented man files steel. You can hear it, reverberating in the windows, he is fixated, calculating, and fearless. It makes a sound like birds chirping in hell but it doesn't faze him at all. You can hear it, like nails on a chalkboard. Sweat drips down his face, and splashes onto the dusty floor. After a while, we fled to Jim's, but we knew something was wrong. Police cars had been parked outside, vans. We were hiding, all of us, drunk, stoned, terrified. Soon there was a bang on the door. "SEARCH WARRANT!" We scattered and hid. The police busted their way in and found their way to all of us, especially Jim who got blasted with a bean bag because of his smart-ass answer "WHAT DO YOU MEAN HANDS UP, I WAS JUST THAWING OUT A PIEROGIE IN MY ASS!" They eventually made their way to Onyx's bedroom, which was dark. They went in. Onyx was holding a gun to his head. It was the gun that killed Randy, the gun that killed grandpa, the gun the shot Rimbaud's hand, the revolver that mortally wounded Lincoln, Hitler's suicide piece. They screamed at him to drop the gun, not to do it, not to do it, but he just smiled, and pulled the trigger. The hammer limply twitched. He had filed it down to a nub. He threw the gun at their feet, their mouths dropped open. They began to advance and he lit a Zippo lighter, hidden in his palm and smiled. They gasped and he threw it into an open area. Nothing happened. "Guess what," he said. "Paint ain't flammable either." They take us into custody, and into the hands of the courts, the civil servants, the case workers, the drug tests.
I wake up in lockup with no memory of what had happened. I dump the food they give me in the garbage and pound down the coffee, then wait, reading huge time-consuming books about the genitals of aliens and islands with no laws. It's snowing again, and they come to take me to court. "Are you going to court with your hair like that?" I look in a window and my hair is a mash- going all over the place. I rush into the cell and comb it back, slick it back with water. At court I am granted probation for one year and signature bond and am released later that night to a payphone where I call my father. I spent that next year walking. All over. I would walk to Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo. I was sober, it was the cigarettes I couldn't kick. I thought about LSD and booze constantly. I walked over the suicide bridge where junkies came to get their last sweet taste of death with a dive over the side and a few pounding seconds before contact with the parking lot below. I walked over the railroad tracks, through abandoned cities, broken windows, towering buildings where I imagined homeless crack and booze orgies in the dirt, fags grabbing at each other's asses in the filthy used-condom night. I contemplated cutting a lot, as I walked, but instead smoked, burned cigarette after cigarette, and when the anti-psychotics kicked in the probation was finally over. After my final court appearance, I lay on a bed of rotting leaves and stared up at the spinning and twisting flames.
