Tallon Fassi

I had a King sized bed,
Moreover, my sovereign lost his head
Spoke of subjects ethereal in weight
Dictated Zen in a soapbox state
Sympathizing with leaking eyes
I offered up robes with amethyst dyes
He stripped himself bare
Stepped down off his golden chair
Walked into the forest without a care
I metamorphosed into the Queen of Hearts
Sneakily baking Rohypnol tarts
Sent out spies to lure and ply.
Yet meditating under willows the King simply sighed.
Refused the food, just thought to wait
So I sent a representative who engaged in debate
Then west met east in trees shade
It was pronounced it a love crusade.
Enlightened tongues was laced with hypnotic lines
The King bequeath karma wine,
One by one they marched to fate
And all join under the shade with my prodigal mate.
At last my ivory castle held but I
Smashed all the mirrors but couldn’t reach the sky.

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He pulled out an already stapled packet of paper.  He had a confident smirk as he slid it cross the table to my resting hands.  He had already told me his major was business because his father had reminded him, “He was much too good a writer to need to go to college for it.”  As a general point of reference I found this comment off putting.  I let my eyes stagger down the page.  His words were obscure, I would lend him that, but they were chucky little road bumps that caused more frustration than enlightenment.

            We sat together in the White House Sports Bar half watching the football games, half ordering numerous plates of food to silence the silence.  Around the second plate of bar fries, I began to feel saturated, but the sound of the back of my jaw clicking together was much more gratifying than any quip Jim could tell me about himself. 

            The smooth gasps of smoke inhaled previous to the trip on the T to the bar, had dissipated and I was left to bare the burden of conversation, and quite nearly sober.  I let my thumbs tap dance over the keys of my mobile.  I was on a direct mission to save myself by bringing along a third more familiar party to break up this long, cold November Sunday afternoon. 

            Sunday afternoons have long been my favorite time of the week, meant in my humble opinion as the most relaxing non-progressive reflective periods.  Used as means of constructing a better week, this was not to be a Sunday to my liking. 

            His insistent presence began to irritate me.  I was in full agreement within myself.  House guests are not worth it.  I should have lied and said I was going to Africa for the weekend to find the true location of Pride Rock.  At the moment I missed my long departed companion, the fabrication.  But, like a new aged mother in labor, it was much too late to turn back and call the Anesthesiologist.  So I turned to my favorite of companions, Mary-Jane. 

            I knew Mark would texted back instantly when I asked if he was in possession of my friend.  Mark is no one I would like to associate with.  If not for my herbal needs, I would like to throw him off a bridge, but life is full of relationships continued out of necessity.  So after getting confirmation from Mark, I waved Vera our waitress over.  I give her a ten dollar tip on a twenty dollar meal because not only do I like her service at this given point in time, but her bedroom is one down from mine and it can only improve homeland relations. 

            I have a two foot tall white ceramic milk jug that I procured earlier that day in an Allston thrift shop. It’s with me as Jim and I wait for the C line in the dark.  Boston public transit is much like a love affair with a junkie: turbulent, sporadic and always intriguing.  After an ungodly period of time, a train slides down the track towards us.  I step on and watch the eyes of the train spotters roll up and down my jug trying to contextualize it.

            When we get to Mark’s, there is a full excitement of sports fanfare in the air.  For how much I dislike Mark, I love the masculine pheromones of a great sports game.  Mark shows me the bag of pot.  He doesn’t smoke, only snorts coke so I know he never has a clue to the quality of his own products.  I truly miss college at this point in the game.  “Ya, it’s shwag.”  I take a look at it and it does seem to resemble shwag so I fake disinterest and acquire an ounce for 100 dollars.  I figure for the price it will be a quantity over quality night.

 Jim and I walk down the street. Everything he says melts and blurs away.  I’m thinking of my friend and not his incessant self droning.  I catch a bit of how he sold drugs to his older sister’s friends in high school and find myself transported back to the feeling in the bar, utter distaste. 

The autumn night is dark and the only light is the pairs of beams that cars lend as they pass.  Because of the amount of pot we decide to make brownies.  I have never done this before and because of the intense fullness of uncomfortable eating I wonder how this will go.  After buying oil and mix at the glowing seven-eleven we arrive in front of my apartment building, 65 Terrace Grove. 65 is a shitty number. 

            We let the butter melt into pools then shoved pieces of Mary Jane into the pot.  The seeds crackle.  As the brownies bake, we sit listening to music over my speakers.  Jim likes Fiona Apple too much.  He is again demoted in my eyes.  I put on a movie and we each chomp down a smoldering brownie.  At first I think to myself that the brownies must not be working.  Then I start to take a curious interest in Jim’s appearance. 

His hair is thinning which gives him the appearance of an old man.  His arms are long and dangle from his sides.  Thick black hairs crawl down to the middle of the back of his hands.  Sitting with his arms folded up on himself he looks much like an ape penned up at the zoo.  He starts to fall into himself like an accordion.  I’m now standing on my own planet trying to understand him.  I can’t, I don’t want to.  In fact I have never wanted anything further from me. 

The first night Jim comes to stay with me I am very polite.  I take him out to dinner and although I am extremely exhausted I stay up and watch High Fidelity.  Through the course of the night I had been the bearer of conversation torch.  Asking questions, paying compliments in the name of friendship.  Jim is quick to talk about himself, his likes and dislikes and although highly intelligent the art of conversation is lost in his self satisfying monologues.  He possibly asks me two questions about myself the entire time.  After the movie I make him a bed in the living room.  I stand in front of the mirror watching the strokes of my brush against my teeth.  I enter my room and find him sitting on my bed. 

Why is he there?  I can’t understand.  He stands up and slides and when I go to slide on to my blankets, he mirrors me.  “Oh no!  This can not be happening” I tell myself.  He is not what I want or like and he is here in my sacred place; my bed, trying to tell me more painful bullshit.  I crawl to the other end of my bed.  After twenty some odd minutes he gives up on his quest for possibly more self gratification and leaves my bedroom, giving me a kiss on the forehead that sends my tired skin scurrying in all directions. 

After and hour of the brownies effects, Jim says he is going to sleep in my bed, that he is “too high” to handle.  I am too high myself to tell him how him sleeping in my bed makes me want to scream.  My bed is the only place on earth where I feel sanctuary.  Here, I control who gets to join me.  Not some uncharismatic, self absorbed boy who doesn’t care to know I write as well and even if he did, would always have a feeling in the back of his head, that he was a far better wordsmith than I.  Fuck him.  Jim had spoken earlier about how he was well versed in drugs.  He made himself out to be the guru of drug authority.  I’m not going to deny the brownies must have been laced.  The next morning Jim was in a state.  He claimed he couldn’t feel his arms or legs.  He whined and convulsed like a child.  I tried to coax some sympathy from my bones but I just kept thinking how pathetic he looked.  He was self involved, balding and now he couldn’t even handle his drugs.  It was clear we were about as suited as friends as Hitler and Gandhi.  I worked all that day with my unwanted drug hangover, while I could nauseatingly imagine him sweating out his drugs in my bed.  I came home late when I noticed his stuff was still there, I cringed.  I didn’t have the balls to ask him to leave, I couldn’t bear the thought of Megan thinking I had treated one of her friends badly.  So I decided to wait him out.  At this point I found him collapsed in a chair in the living room, mouth open catching still particles of dust that hung in the damp apartment air.  I gathered supplies in my room. 

Water, books and tissues, I even went as far as to barricade the already locked door with a over stuffed flower printed arm chair.  After twelve hours of self imposed isolation, followed by twenty minutes of ear pressing hard listening through the door for any enemy movement, I emerged.  The living room was empty and the bed I had made for him was made up it a haphazard style.  His bag that had blockaded the television, now just a figment of my memory.  I took a deep sigh and congratulated myself on being a mental survival expert.  Ten minutes later I was tapping my sock coated foot on the kitchen floor as I scooped spoonfuls of soothing Ben and Jerry’s classic vanilla ice cream into my mouth. My eyes bobbled around the room until they came to rest on a unfamiliar object.  Reaching out I scooped up a heavy brown wallet and flipped it up to take a look.  The ape face staring back at me caused me to reflexively drop the Hempest wallet on the floor.  I paced the living room and wondered if people still felt that historical attachment to his identification and wallet.  It wasn’t but a moment after this hypothetical thought that the doorbell rang. 

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My spine wilted over as my chest convulsed in the shower.  The steamy air tried to fight its way into my lungs but months of drug consumption kept it from mingling with my pinkish vessels.  I paused to rub the last of the night’s drinks out of my hair.  In a hacking fit I purged up a school of undulating jellyfish.  As these brainless masses spiraled around the stainless steel drain, the filtered shower light caught the speckled crystals of indulgence on their coagulate tops.  The dull aching between my legs reminded me of my lackluster indiscretion.  I turned to face the water and looking up into the light, slidding down. 

I decided that this soap wasn’t going to wash away my sins, which I reeked of.  I wrapped three plush towels around my body and emerged into the stale air of my room.  My eyes flashed with splotches of light as I braced myself against the wall.  I flinched with disgust as I remembered that I had broken the strap of my new Christian Dior Rasta Settle bag whilst using it as a rope in feeble attempt to scale the bar side.  I had also conveniently earned laughter and bruising as I plummeted, giggling all the way to the pavement.  At the time my cohorts and I found endless amusement in this feat.  Had this been a remote act there could have been some novelty in it, but since I had become an empowered and independent woman it was more of a practice.  I stumbled over to my desk and slid open the large tray center drawer.  My hands chopped wildly through Swarski crystal hair clips, old Chanel maracas and crumpled twenties.  The pills were coated bright orange so intoxicated and promiscuous girls such as myself could discern them in dim lighting from a tic-tac or a lexapro.  After a length of shuffling through my clutter I located them. 

The clothes layered on my made bed resembled a mosaic.  If I let gravity pull my body to mingle with my scattered wardrobe I would never emerge, so I slithered into my Love Sac.  My fingers bounce across the keyboard of my phone.  Apparently Rose was infuriated with me and although I didn’t pray at the altar of hysterics, this would be a time consuming amends.  Three texts from guys who wanted to “hook up” and one from Danni asking if I had enough mental faculties to be the conductor of a burn ride.  My alcohol saturated neck muscles ached and I craned my neck back into the velvety cover of my sac to alleviate it.  In my self inflicted exhaustion I could feel little marbles wedged uncomfortably in my back.  I lethargically debated whether I could conceivably live with the uncomfortable sensation, but there was just too many peas for my princess sensibilities to handle.  I clawed my hand under the small of my back and produced a round little bead.  Upon closer inspection the milky surface looked innately familiar.  My drug snarled wits, rusty from misuse tried to contextualize its presence.  What were these little eggs of discomfort?  The curiosity drove me to action.  I flipped open my mobile and held the glossy bead under the pale glow.  In the light of observance the bead turned out to be in fact not a bead at all but a pearl.  Another short expedition produced more of its compatriots.  It was as if I had all the pieces of a puzzle yet none of the experience necessary to place them together. 

Eureka is usually associated with a brilliant realization.  This case was different.  As I sat in a pile of the broken remains of my departed grandma Betty’s pearl necklace, I felt a surge of vomit and the hot spicy burn of tears.  After a speedy trip to the rest room I vaulted myself to the ground and frantically scramble to recover the lost treasure.  All said and done, I only recovered twenty-seven of the hundred some odd pearls that my grandmother had bestowed on me as a reminder of the love and respect she had for my promising youthfulness.  I sat sobbing with the relics of my keepsake, and let the thick coat of shame dry on my skin. 

I had grown up in the presence of my mother’s proud tales of how her family had survived the Great Depression.  My grandfather was hit with a Ford crossing the street in Rochester New York.  My grandmother was left poverty stricken, a shell of their former prestige.  She sold of all their generational Italian heirlooms, all but the pearl necklace which she defiantly had gone breadless for stretches at a time to preserve for her future kin.  I imagined if Betty happened to glance down now she would want to reanimate herself from the grave so that I could see the tears of hurt in her glassy loving eyes.  Here is where eureka occurred.  On the bedroom floor of my apartment, on 4:20 of a Friday afternoon, hold 72 less pearls of Grandma Betty’s necklace. It was there among the Smirnoff twist bottles and strewn change I decided it was time to start living with some intent and concerted thought. 

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My friend Chris is full of “tall tales”.  Most of these stories I believe to be contrived.   This can be deductively reasoned out, because contrary to Chris’s claims, I have never even seen the caveman he thawed out of a block of ice (According to Chris he  found this pre-historic man in his back yard while trying to dig out a swimming pool in time for his high school graduation).  I have always regarded Chris’s rants as a colorful interjection into his dull  Westport, Connecticut life.  Of all the stories Chris has painted, there is only one I whole heartedly believe.  Not because of its particular content much more because of the piercing terror that crystallizes in Chris’s pupils when he reluctantly recanted it one night.  (While we were all passing Bessie the Bong around.)  I can say I have heard stranger stories; I can’t claim however, that I have felt as much raw fear as I did while listening to the grizzly tale.  So without further adieu, this is Chris’s story as told by Chris and written by Tallon:

One spring night in Westport Connecticut, a high school aged Chris was looking to escape the confines of his country kitchen styled home.  He pondered if he should go in the backyard to smoke a blunt? Nay, he thought better of this after seeing his neighbor’s three kids playing a game of Narks’ and Whores in the adjacent yard (Apparently Grand Theft Auto must have just been released).  Alas, he walked down his pre-planned long country lane in vain, no where looked to be safe from the prying eyes of Connecticut house wives (drink up ladies, pop those pills).  After a two mile wander, down unlit roads, he came upon one of the first graveyards in the country.  Chris’s extensive knowledge of the surrounding area and a large bronze plack mounted on an arch over the entrance supplied him with this knowledge.  Chris reasoned that anyone who would know or visit these people would be dead.   Which was fine with Chris, he had a blunt in his pocket of the finest New York City Mary Jane, and it wasn’t going to smoke itself, God Damn it! 

            The last shafts of sun were simmering out of the sky and Chris walked down lanes of time seasoned head stones.  The outer head stones were modest, yet some wreaked of grandeur.   There in the very middle of the graveyard, between a open armed statue of an Anglo-sexton Jesus and across from a man who had apparently been killed in a Native American rebel attack( ha ha who’s laughing now, there are like 10 of them left), Chris sparked up a blunt.  Now, there is weed and there is weed and then there is WEED.  For those who care to know basically three levels.   To make a comparison for all you Sideways loving, wine drinkers out there (yes that’s right, rock the fuck on grape fiends), this was the 1787 Chateau Lafite of weed.  Now, Chris is in no way a rookie bitch, I have seen him take down a six foot, three chambered bong and do simple math after.  Context be damned, Chris was stoned and actually giggled himself into a stupor, and shortly after in a euphoric coma fell asleep peacefully curled up in Jesus’s lap.  Chris says there is something unnatural about waking up in a graveyard.  I retorted that if your above ground your still pretty okay, never the less.  Chris sat up in a startled manner and actually decapitate Jesus in the process (fear not I’m sure that the grounds keepers were more then prepared to mortar his head straight back on and this wouldn’t be the first time Jesus died for sins.).  It was late spring but there was a perverted chill in the air.  He shivered and stood up rubbing his Jesus hammered head. 

            Now some could argue that it was the knock to the head or the expensive genetically enhanced weed, but the way Chris describes it, delusion doesn’t enter into the picture.  Apparently, just ten yards from where Chris was wobbling there stood two figures.   In the charcoal hues of the night, Chris thought there was a horse standing on its hind legs next to a woman who was dressed in a colorful sweater set of what could have been peach or mango.  After squinting and straining his ears it sounded as if beast and women were conversing in tongues.  Chris had never been to church before, being Jewish but the language did sound much like that of all those Zealots who get “saved” next to snake pits on tv.  Being terrified Chris wanted to run, but being literally petrified he stayed and observed.  The deep throated horse creature’s back was to Chris but he swore he could make out the silhouette of two steely horns atop the head of the beast in the moon light.  The women whose face was obscured by his view got down on her knees and bowed to the massive creature offering up gifts unseen.  Chris was completely dumbfounded.  This interaction went on for a few more moments, then,( and here is the part that Chris begins to weep.) a tornado of dark matter from the sky silently fell over the two figures and when Chris could see again the beast was gone and only the women remained.  By this point Chris was deeply apologetic for beheading Jesus and could only see this it as some consequence.  Balling himself up and repenting in the shadow of the beheaded Jesus, he heard the crisp footsteps getting closer.  He strongly felt that anyone who converses with that sort of beast might find an interloper such as himself to be a liability (clearly before camera phones, because CNN would have been all over this story before myself).  The women stopped three yards from where Chris was shivering in a pool of his own urine.  Then he heard a phone ring.  Without a moments hesitation the women flipped open her mobile and began screeching harpy commands and hurling insults.  This women was truly terrifying, the hot heat of hell was broiling under the surface of her words.  She must truly be the right hand of the devil beast, his ambassador on earth.  Then like finding a sweater you had forgotten you bought, Chris immediately knew the owner of the voice.  He couldn’t believe that he had not put it together sooner, and just as the shrew walked by dictating orders into her cell, Chris glanced up, and there as plane as Snoopy in the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade was the devil dealer herself, Martha Stewart dressed in what was clearly Mango. 

            Martha didn’t appear to notice Chris as see fled the cemetery.  Some time shortly after Chris ran home Forest Gump style and hid under his bed for a day or two.  To this day anyone who inadvertently uses the phrase “And that’s a good thing” in Chris’s presence can detect him let out a series of little whimper.  Some might find this story anecdotal but I find it disturbing.  I went to Martha’s pastel colored blog and it made me think; you can make a deal with the devil but just ask Martha, it might be at the cost of your soul.

After thoughts: The repercussions of this experience on Chris were tremendous.  Chris converted to Christianity shortly after the ordeal. He thanks Jesus for saving him and now only smokes pot from a bong in the shape of a cross filled with holy water. 

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