alors, et toi?

Jack & I

By Adam Luebke

Almost immediate this time. He blows a great puff of smoke into the air. I cannot take my eyes from his face, bloated and soggy. This isn’t what I wanted, billows inside my head. I look to the cloud of smoke. Something safe. Neutral territory.

It’s just smoke.

Held within that fraying gray bubble is the caricature of a monkey. That’s not real. The table we sit at has become green. The monkey’s not real.

Start over.

But when I look again, the smoke has retreated into a seamless circle around the monkey. Outside, past a dirty window, I read the words You’d Better Believe It ripped apocryphally into the blue skin of the sky.

I look again at Jack’s face. Better. It’s thinner, younger. Jack, pre-booze. He doesn’t look at me. His gaze is weighted to the burning cigarette between his fingers. The smoke is gathering into a tight square above the glowing tip because that’s how cigarettes burn. I watch the smoke, each tendril lying flat along the bottom of the smoky square, adding to the whole.

I think about crying. Then I laugh at his open flannel button up. I can see his fat pasty belly. His face is tanned and youthful. I understand it to be the alcohol, and it’s working its way up.

On the table my hands are playing with a pile of guts. They are Jack’s intestines because they smell like liquor. The heat rises from the guts in clumps of steam. I see small pieces of white tape placed randomly along his tubes. They are wet, and now my hands smell like meat and booze. With insides like that, I wonder how long he can hold up.

The smoke is gone. Jack doesn’t smoke. He never did. A monkey catches my attention, hunched over behind his chair. It’s short and brown and beats

beats

Beats his fist on the kitchen’s linoleum. Hanging from his mouth, draped onto the tile, are Jack’s patchwork guts. Upon them the stooped creature chews maniacally. With each slap of its balled primate hands, a wave jiggles through the reeking mass of coiled entrails.

“Jack,” I say in tremulous tones. He looks up, eyes swimming above me. I wait. He waits. “Jack?” I say again. I keep a watchful eye on the monkey, who lies on the kitchen carpet.

“I’ve never been much for talking specially after so long hard on the throat you see and it don’t come off as enlightening to have to answer questions you understand how abouta drink?”

Your face, I almost say, will be like your belly.

“A drink...” I desperately think of where I could get a drink in this place. Most hotels aren’t this nice, but I still don’t see a refrigerator anywhere.

“Most important part of every man’s life,” he says, drinking something clear from a tumbler.

My hand is cold. A tugging on my leg reverts my watchful eye back to the monkey, who is soaking into the hotel’s cheesy carpet. A puddle of hair and liquid with waving arms.

“I'm holding a drink. We sit on the double beds, facing one another. My drink looks like Jack’s. The monkey gurgles at my feet. Jack’s face is bloated. On the road...to destruction. The tugging persists. I strain to concentrate on the situation at hand.

“The essence of a poet a writer any recorder of the life of miserable man needs to have the essentials firmly based in and around his life understand?”

I shake my head and snap my fingers. A tugging on my leg brings my focus to a stringy black snake who is coiled up in a gray-brown slush. The monkey couldn’t handle the hotel. The serpent has its teeth latched onto my pant leg and shakes my denim like a puppy playing with a rag. Thank God for pants.

“It’s dead can’t hurt you,” he says, gazing off to my right. His fingers are bleeding.

The snake is dead. But my pants are poisonous.

“Washem when you get a chance but don’t forget to take out any notes you might have scribbled down in the haste of following practice of poet astringency everywhere everywhere there lies an answer to another answer until there isn’t anymore you understand.” He drinks through a straw, painted in Day Glo. “Be like Proust. Don’t herald Plato. Tell it like Faulkner, except don’t fuck it up. Follow the greats with their unspeakable visions like Saroyan and Wolf they got itches in their chest you need to understand which couldn’t be scratched with any of life’s subtle contours.”

He takes a breath and breathes out smoke. Jack hurls the bright straw past my head into the wall behind me. A drop of blood leisurely rolls from his nostril. He takes a drink. The colored straw is in my left hand. I insert it into the plastic cup gripped in my right. I’m drinking the monkey. Its hair sticks to the roof of my mouth.

“Accept your losses. Picturepen your novel ideas which you will find to nobody’s chagrin but your own that they are not novel that you are not novel but novel can only be contained in a glass with drink and certain death.”

He wears a dusty jacket and brown corduroy pants with holes torn in them. I watch him pat his arms and cough at the clouds of filth rising from his sleeves. The dust attracts itself to the puddle of monkey and soaks up the mess. Some of it sticks to his smeary red fingers. I’m craning my neck, looking for Jack’s leak.

“Keep count of...every day and date...lest you lose track.”

I smile. Jack stares at the kitchen floor. I forget why I’m bobbing my head.

“Don’t use punctuation shun structured prose fuck what those idiot savants told you think in pictures not words there isn’t one outfit hasn't ever been just one to clothe writing eat big meals drink your organs to mush tell your mother to fuck herself and recall crazy saints before you who knew better but adhered to strictures en masse glorification.”

Jack holds a knife. I still hold my drink.

“Find your form to form your find or form none at all for in no form there lies a certain form so peculiar to yourself you can’t worry bout them cause the reader sees what the reader wants to see and’ll take what they wanta see anyway it’s for your thoughts jot the brain don’t use sentences let’em figure it out but don’t let’em understand.”

In front of his face, Jack saws the knife back and forth.

“Why do you,” I clear the shit from my throat, noticing a few tiny, black typed letters escaping between my lips, then finish, “so much.” I hastily snatch at the fugitive letters, which threaten to float away forever. I collect a

d n r i k

and hold them tightly in my hand. Jack understands the question. His ears grow on the sides of his head as they try to pull in my lost letters. I put my clenched hand underneath the table to keep them safe.

It’s windy in the kitchen. Jack’s big ears, I assume.

I stare into his eyes, which have placed themselves onto the ceiling fan spinning on the wall next to the table.

“I’m a Catholic,” he starts, holding up the knife.

Doesn’t understand.

Jack places the blade on his finger, where it connects to his hand. The brown of the table cooperates with the knife and pushes upward on his finger. With a grunt, he puts pressure on the blade. I watch it work through his flesh until it stops at the bone. Another grunt, he lifts his shoulder and pops the finger loose with a crack. He continues, speaking to his detached digit.

“Who loves his family in a sort of revered way found only in the Bible not all the books but a few like Buddha loves the One the grass the trees the leaves the lost crazy confused dumbfounded people around him the animals and the soul of Nature you understand. Like I said to Neal one day told him I wasn’t one to take it as it comes came and am in no shape way or form ready to handle this societal web of degradation or endure its burning searing fingers see there isn’t a way out you see until your page is written out my case it’s a hell of a knockout that page and it’s turning itself into one goddamned long novel it won’t stop writing it won’t quit going on you understand. I’m looking for the end. The End,” he draws onto the wallpaper with swatches of loose light. It shines at me, my cue to smile.

Jack’s finger is rotten. It’s in my hand, spongy when I squeeze it. Jack’s not missing any fingers. This one is mine. I dip his fingernail into my mouth and nibble lightly on the finger pad. Who can say they have ever-

“I’m a Catholic,” he begins again. “Therefore the end comes when The End is written at the bottom of your page but my end I can’t see the end of it yet and the family they care too much so naturally to shrivel naturally would be natural in the larger Buddhist Nature sense.”

He pours himself a cup of coffee. “Goddamn hot coffee nothing ever did it better.”

I sneeze into my hands and find a tangled piece of meat stuck to my palm. I can’t find Jack’s finger anywhere.

On a notebook I write: dinner with Jack?

“Can’t do with meals much ask yourself what’s the antithesis of drink you most heartily will answer eat.”

Jack’s eyes are bloodshot. “It’s nothing disagreeable to say something isn’t like t’other and yet enough uvem’ll crank their tones right into your face and we aren’t talking bout nice colors here no but dark souls those kinds of colors black ‘cept black doesn’t bill it but maybe it’s a starter you understand the initial is the final if there ever was finality...tha’ss why writers worth a shit don’t put answers in the last pages of their books cause life ain’t like that never has been won’t be either so where should you put the answers everybody wants to know geographic locations on which flat plane do we place the answers to the relative questions,” he takes a breath, “so if not the back, they assume the front.” He pauses. “No answers at all if they’re worth a shit.”

I write: what’s it like to be

“Write for the world to see pack em a punch blacken their eyes you’re the director of one earthly movie it’s the only one you got to foster and promote embrace the grave intonations of generations past cause I’ll tell ya there isn’t one goddamned thing in the future worth waiting for.”

I spit ink onto my notebook paper and it says Jack will stay for dinner.

Someone has painted a picture onto the wallpaper behind Jack’s head. The artist wishes it to be called Suspense.

I spit again but release a puff of powder into my face.

The dust is thick where he sat. I’m coughing. It dissipates throughout the room; its granules stick to my wet eyes, tickle my nasal passages, crunch between my teeth.

My smile between hacks is huge, showcasing black-inked teeth and dark-stained lips. The notebook crumbles in on itself and starts on fire. The flames hold no heat. Jack’s dust settles in piles among the kitchen, specifically where he sat.

I am weeping because I know water will cleanse this mess. And now it rains through the ceiling, pouring my tears, calming the dust.

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