A light
lit
seen from the street…
Not Piercing The Darkness
or Shining Down On
anything

Just a light
Just there
somewhere…
Kansas City.

“Why there?” she asked
and I said
“Why not?”
“That’s ok, too”
said the Truck Driver
as if to voice the opinions
of the truck.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

toot toot an idiot’s horn

an ambulance screamed by.

the people stared for a moment

gripping hard their candied pleasure

dirty warm ice cream

sticky hands.

An ugly sight i thought, as i walked away

up the street penniless and ice creamless.

the idiot followed me tooting his horn all the

way to the edge

Everyone just went about their business and the man continued to read his flaming paper, though by now it was just a mass of smoldering black embers burning in his hands.

I couldn’t understand… I looked out the window then back to the man in front of me. The newspaper was nothing but grey ashes floating in the air and now his hair was on fire! I listened to it sizzle and pop and burn. The stench was overwhelming… But still he just sat there looking straight ahead like nothing was happening.

People sat in their seats talking naturally, casually, calmly looking out the windows. Meanwhile the bus was getting hotter and hotter and hotter.. I had to get out. I stood up…

I reached up and pulled the cord. It fell off right in my hand… Burned in two.

I walked quickly down the aisle to the door. I could smell burning flesh and hair. Droplets of sweat drenched my body. As the bus pulled up to the next stop, I pushed the exit button and glanced across the aisle. A chubby young woman with long dark hair noticed me looking and winked… Then her hair burst into flames! She started laughing. She kept staring at me as the door hissed open… I could feel her eyes burning after me as I staggered out onto the wet pavement.

I stood there and breathed and l watched the bus roll off. I could still hear her awful laughter rolling away with it… I stood watching the bus until it turned a corner and disappeared.

Then I felt the first drop. I looked up and saw the rain suddenly coming down over my bare head… I looked around. It was suddenly dark as night and the streets were deserted. The pavement was slick with rain and it reflected a beautiful shimmering greenish blue light… A neon sign blinking steadily on and off halfway down the block.

I pulled my thin wet jacket up around my neck and walked down to where the sign was. It said BAR.

I pulled the big wooden door open and stepped inside.

There were about fifteen men sitting around at different tables in sweaty undershirts and short sleeves. I sat down at the bar and ordered a double bourbon. As the bartender made out my change, he looked up.

“Hot enough for ya?” he said.

I ignored him and sipped at my drink and he walked off down the bar, polishing a glass.

There were two men sitting at the other end of the bar drinking beer. I watched them distactedly. One man turned to the other with a cigarette in his hand.

“Got a light?” he said.

“Sure,” the other man said.

I watched as he reached into a briefcase sitting on an empty bar stool beside him. He pulled out a huge blowtorch and aimed it at the other man’s head and turned it on full force. There was a big whooooosh as flame consumed the other man’s head.

I looked down and drained my glass. I heard what was left of the man with the cigarette say “thanks, pal.”

I bolted for the door and ran off down the street into the rainy world.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

“It’s raining again today,” someone said.

Raining, I thought. Yeh. Raining. Right. Raining P’s a Q’s all over the world. Cats & Dogs. Cadillacs and Spaghetti Westerns. Whatever…

Actually, it wasn’t at all the kind of day you’d expect any talk of rain… It must’ve been over a hundred degrees in Downtown Los Angeles, and if it was raining anywhere, I sure as shit didn’t notice in the surging heat of the moment. I’d already set fire to my bathroom earlier that afternoon, but that’s another story…

As if that wasn’t enough, Wilshire Boulevard was absolutely glowing now, completely bathed in this terrible apocalyptic red hot mist shimmering from building to building like a mirage all the way down the line.

As I stood waiting for the bus, every breath I took was like a burning dry gasp of Moroccan desert dust. Armageddon… And some idiot on the bus stop thinks it’s raining…

“Well, maybe it is,“ I muttered to myself, handing the bus driver my two bits. Maybe it is raining in Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong or Madagascar…

The driver flashed me a strange glance as he handed me the ticket and the bus took off into the traffic. I walked up the aisle and sat down in an empty seat near the back by the window and waited.

I didn’t think of rain anymore as the bus rolled along the hot shiny black asphalt. I looked out the window. People scurried about like flaming red ants. It was quite a spectacle. The bus rolled on and it seemed to get hotter and hotter as I sat there watching the world burn outside.

People got on and off at different stops. They sat talking and reading newspapers as it got hotter and hotter and hotter in there. Pretty soon the heat was absolutely stifling. It began to make me nervous. Suddenly, FOOOF! A newspaper flares up in a man’s hands right in front of me, burning up as if a torch had been set to it from below.

to be continued…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

“There is a principal which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance- that principal is contempt prior to investigation.” -Herbert Spencer

by Jonathan Shaw

One day he decided that the room was too much for him to take anymore. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on his part; he just woke up that morning (afternoon really) and scanned the bile-colored
peeling green walls and something quite apart from his rational mind said “Enough.”

A half an hour later he was walking quickly down the busy street he’d come to know so well. Little suitcase in hand, he knew exactly how far he was from the bus station. And he was feeling better already. Lighter somehow, and more awake than he had felt in months. Months and months. The months were suddenly and quickly buried behind him like a serial killer’s murder victims now, and he was glad as he strode into the little Greyhound Bus station on Vine… Behind him, his room with two months rent unpaid, his cheap Salvation Army typewriter and twenty pounds of paper: aborted short stories, unremarkable poems, rejected novel… all behind him now.

He sat down in the small dark bar across the street from the station, waiting for the bus that would take him away. Away from his one dirty window’s view of the alley full of trash and rusty shopping
carts and broken bottles and grey, wandering winos. Away from the lonely nights of cheap wine and impossible dreams and the peeling wallpaper that had been his life, his entire stay in Los Angeles.

And he felt glad as he sat there sipping his bourbon and water. Glad that he was getting out at last. Glad that he wouldn’t have to listen to the landlady screaming and her husband’s lumbering drunken curses as he beat her late at night. He was especially glad that he’d skipped out on the rent, the typewriter, the whole fucking show. It was over now and he was very very glad.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim, morbid lighting of the bar, he could make out the figure of a young Mexican girl standing by the jukebox, lingering like a shadow. She looked crazy. Like all the girls he’d known in Los Angeles… He gulped down the rest of his drink and slapped some change down on the counter. He took one last glance around the bar, the dirty mirror and the rows of watered-down rat poison, the crazy girl, the monkey-faced bartender…

Then he got up and walked to the door. The smell of stale piss and dried up death lingered in his nostrils as he hit the street, smiling.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

by Jonathan Shaw

The first time I saw the kid, he was sitting in the front row of the smoking section of the midnight AA meeting downtown. The only reason I even noticed him at all when I walked in the door was probably because he was sitting there, legs sprawled across the floor, leaning back in a precariously arrogant slouch in the hard metal chair where I usually sat.

I’d showed up a few minutes late for the meeting, so I could hardly blame this odd looking newcomer for occupying what I’d always thought of unconsciously as ”my seat.” So without giving it another
thought, I quietly stepped over his long legs and Gucci shoes and slid into the chair beside him. There was a certain tacit animal-like acknowledgement of my presence which belied his arrogant demeanor. Just the slightest, almost imperceptable little nod of respect which would have been all but invisible if it hadn’t registered itself as a predator’s response to another one’s presence.

He sat there the rest of the meeting tapping his Gucci-clad feet on the dirty wooden floor and drumming nervously on his knees with twitching, slender, carefully manicured fingers which seemed to dance to some manic little tune that played inside his head.

Every ten minutes or so he would suddenly lurch up from the chair as if propelled by some unseen force more compelling than gravity itself and stomp noisily and crookedly across the room like a demon on some unholy mission, only to come crash landing right back into the chair a few minutes later. Then he’d sit there some more, fidgeting and slouching precariously, almost painfully in the chair, twitching like a big cat with too many fleas. This kid had some serious ants in his pants. That much was clear.

But being at an AA meeting, and an after-hours one at that, I just shrugged philosophically as I remembered the old saying. “We’re all here cuz we ain’t all there.” So i just sat there listening to the other last gasp alkies ‘’sharing,” rambling and spewing about this and that for the remainder of the meeting. Mostly I just sat there basking in that strange protective warmth of being in a room full of fellow shell-shocked survivors, breathing in the collective air of gratitude and faith we all somehow shared there, having all gotten a second chance at life. It was a good warm feeling and I hardly noticed the kid again as he sat there twitching and chain-smoking nervously in the
seat next to mine.