PERSPECTIVE: Grisly scenes

Key West, March 9. I am awake before my eyes open. Slowly I lift one eyelid and scan the room for signs of a new depravity, ones I have not already come to terms with. There on the wall: someone has stripped the labels off a dozen or so beer bottles and stuck them up in a queer pattern. I study the casual geometry for a moment, but quickly disregard it, feeling too strongly that whoever assembled this wants exactly the kind of confused analysis that I am about to give to it. Of course it means nothing. The air conditioner butting out of the window barks a wretched noise &-&- something is caught deep in its mechanism, but it will have to wait. Slowly, patiently, listening to the fragile cadence of my body, I open the other eye, and then move the arms, and the legs swing off the side of the bed, and I feel the cold hardwood on my feet, and I stand up.

Key West at night is a harem of queer intentions. Drag queens beckon and sausage vendors sing hideous melodies, though far down Duval Street, in the 200 block, you can find the kind of night you’re looking for. A small puppy ran up to us last night, barking like mad, lending to everything an abject cuteness. I had terrible ideas toward the dog. It made me think of yesterday, when a train carrying tourists slid down our street; “The kids paint these Internet boxes,” the driver announced, “but they’re not all sunshine and good things like this one. Mostly they depict grisly scenes of violence. The kids on this island, who knows. . .”

Funny, I thought. For I had not seen a single child since touching down, and such a gross resemblance between their paintings and the feral sensations on Duval reveals much to me: These kids were painting the night on Internet boxes! I bet if you looked down the soiled alleyways at three or four in the morning, you might see them making crude sketches in whatever light they can find.

I can just recall a busty woman named Asia dancing upside down. I saw her at almost perfect intervals of two hours from ten to sunrise. Each time she approached me with a different smile, a different countenance, calling to mind something not quite mythic and not quite pathetic. She came down from West Palm Beach a year ago under the pretense of Paradise and found the whole scene wanting, but is in no position to leave. Even when she was talking to me, even last night, I was thinking of all the guttural words I could use to describe her. She was the perfect kind of currency, I thought, with which to pay the Romantic.

Lines and lines of blenders spun and spun, spewing out sweet alcoholic intensity &-&- we guzzled them down like elephants, neither worried nor totally at ease. Someone splashed me with grain alcohol, and it sunk into my pores like so much sunlight. Crazed, I thrashed after the culprit, my arms swinging around like a wild fire hose. Devastating blows came down hard on bystanders caught in the maelstrom. I looked to the ground and saw what I thought was bright blood but could have just as well been strawberry daiquiri, or both.

We made of the days an extraordinary laze, full of sun-soaking and casual dips, play-acting roles out of early 1960s indulgence. We posed candidly for the roving camera, mimicking spontaneity. If you could see the scene in a diorama, frozen, you’d comment on the careful placement of the strewn towels or the empty beer bottles. You might measure the distance between people and submit the numbers into an equation of your own invention. Later, on the street, a motley band of lobsters saunter toward pulled pork sandwiches and swallow them down like hyenas.

Well, slurp down the oysters until you vomit, I say. Beat yourself into low-grade pulp. Things end. What left to do but unsheathe the celery sword from your Bloody Mary and carve the humid night into shreds. . .

&-&- Evan Puschak, COM “10