THE PRESERVED COWBOY DREAMS OF A CUM-FILLED SKY
by Philip Quinn

A metal-clad house with octagonal edges dripping a wine-red rust. I knew that Stanley LaFonde, the comedian, had once lived here.

The real estate agent was haunted by that knowledge and extolled its virtues.

"I can show you which bedroom he slept in and where he constructed a small stage in the basement."

So we went inside, and surprisingly it looked quite spectacular with its oak woodtrim and gleaming hardwood floors.

"There aren't any side windows," I said.

"Yes, there are," she said. "See these bays, they give the house its octagon shape, and by simply pressing this button."

She picked up a remote control, thumbed it, and these wooden blinds peeled up, allowing sunlight to splash about the living room.

I want to ride the subway past the Kennedy stop to somewhere on the east side of Paradise where the cauliflower is pink and sprays the picker with a delicious sexual scent.

This clever-eyed blonde blows me off whenever I approach her; so instead, I partner up with the Bloor Street whore who sells oranges for sixty cents.

We play cards, games of her invention. She beats me often while offering to read my tarot.

Finally I accept and hand to her this battered deck of cards that once belonged to Longines, a Swedish abstract painter who lived above the Bartholemew Hotel.

I feel the hook in my gut as she slowly twists my anatomical plug. No, not my quartz diabalb, I say as this old lady clicks open her purse, and deposits it for her later consumption.

I trace her to this house on Barton Street, but I'm too late, she has died, and the relatives are already fighting over her possessions.

I cup my hand around my cigarette, remembering the family home on an island near Gander, Newfoundland.

As a boy, I rode a wooden fishing schooner through 20 foot swells, sea sick and ducking flying chunks of ice.

Three of my friends drove their ski doos through a mussel farm. One ran into a rope, losing his head, the other two drove into a quagmire of slush and drowned.

My two uncles were lost at sea, and spent two days riding an ice flow. One would do jumping jacks to stay awake while the other slept. They were rescued and brought in aboard a Danish freighter. The town celebrated for two days. I had my first beer and first woman.

My remaining friends stayed and and became deep sea divers. After five years of nitrous oxide bubbling their brains, they were slightly punch drunk, their island accent weirdly slurred so it seemed they spoke Viking.

A U.S. forces plane crashed near Gander. We picked up body parts for days even from the eavestrough of our house.

The city is circular; forces you run into your former selves.

A phone booth with its phone books torn and scattered stands on the corner of Queen and Woodbine. From here I once called landlords who had apartments for rent.

My apartment past selves disappear. Just like that. A finger snap.

That dead feeling of a city, slapping you awake.

A piece of paper fits my back pocket so precisely and bends when I do.

I want to give it to you if you wish to receive it and when we are both through with it to discard it together in the same recycling bin.

The strip club we visited was called For Your Eyes Only.

My real name is Charlie Bergeron but slightly surreal in this context.

The first stripper had a beak of a nose, was too thin. The second stripper was older, teased blonde hair, inflated tits, the third was almost homely, page boy brunette hair, glasses, but a very natural body. She was the only one who appeared to enjoy what she was doing.

A man at the bar in his 50's with dyed curly hair talks to one of the strippers. He buys her a drink. Later she goes into the back with him, wearing his suit jacket.

The mirror that functions as a backdrop ends up coated with sweaty palm prints as each dancer forces her way into it, and leaves behind a forehead smear.

Coloured strobe lights beam down, dry ice ports pump out steam and there's the silvery, slippery pole that the dancers spin against.

Some look dead but clinically betray nothing with their eyes.

We rent a private room for $25 where touching is allowed and my friend Mas breaks into a sweat.

At the cattle sex club, the seats are like bleachers from a high school gym, the walls are decorated with a mish mash of ruined industrial duct work, bike wheels, a fake security camera, a plastic woman's torso, and a dusty, dented disco ball.

The movie The Night Porter plays on all three overhead TVs.

I own an earring above my brown eye (the other is green), these bright shining eyes I wear and deposit in each purse of silvery, slippery flesh.

The stripper turned newspaper columnist shows up at 11:30, swings her hips as she walks through the bar, thick in ass, hips, top but pretty of face, an air of insouciance to her.

I say to Mas she looks like Marilyn Monroe, that quality. He says she's prettier. I reply, but Marilyn's been dead for almost 40 years...look where we're starting from. He snorts and moves a grease spot further along his cheek with his fat pudgy fingers.

The columnist's voice is hoarse, gland trouble, she looks sweet, naive, a startled, fearful quality to her blue eyes, a painful reminder of a too rigorous shaving.

I'm a spectator in the bleachers, tapping my cigarette, the small actions, movements that make up my working life.

Mas, I can feed off of this for a month. He laughs.

I say hello to Claudia (thick shoulders, arms) her body slack, not toned, and she hiccups when she speaks.

What do you do when you are not writing?

Nothin' or at least it feels like nothing much, sometimes I work at Smitty's to help pay the bills.

The restaurant?

No, the costume rental place. My staff name is Edgar Allan Poe. What do you do?

I design children's clothes; I have two rents to pay, my apartment and my studio.

Her nervous eyes scan the room for the hook, for the play, a slight tingling in my crotch, a warming up to the possibility (probably only in my head).

She has a snake as a pet. I have no problem with garter snakes but the viper-like head of this snake scares me.

It's sliding over her shoes and flicking out its tongue. I ask her if she is not afraid of being bitten, given her hypersensitivity to the toxins already in her system. She says no.

I've watched twenty-five men and women go in and out of this one apartment. They must sleep in shifts though one has gone missing, and her photograph is placed in the lobby.

They are tearing down a movie theatre that was built in early 1960s.

I could imagine from the shell, how it must have concussed those watching the big screen, a slow leak of blood into the brain.

Now it's a dried out skull.

I stay at a rundown motel, the shower doesn't work and I try not to step on the rug with my bare feet.

I buy second-hand books from the medical supply store across the street, a place usually reserved for women who have lost something.

A woman, middle-aged, dark haired, not unattractive (myself actually if I consent to that operation) stands in the park. Her bearded father judges the sailboat contest at the Antiquarian Pond while the gardener Apollinaire plants tulip bulbs in empty artillery shells near where the World War One Howitzer stands.

I finally figure out that every explanation to date that I've latched onto is wrong.

A tiny-brained man in a cowboy hat stirs up the dust inside a glass ball filled with old come. Dry it flakes down like snow.

Thanks, Hank. I say, for the easy line.

Like in a pinball game, once you deposit your money, everything is reset back to zero even your previous lousy score.

You wade into the cold water, feel it approach your chin then dive the rest of the way in until you feel the sharp edge of the rocks with your fingers.

The woman who lives above me begs me to have sex with her, and proceeds to suck my cock, while I watch from a weird, twisted position almost as if I was attempting to see the act in a mirror though even the one in the bathroom is broken.

She crawls around, almost a game of croquet (coquette) as she squeezes herself into tight spaces and I attempt to follow.

Later, I hang from the monkey bars in the school playground, my arms so ridiculously sore but my fingers refusing to let go.

� Philip Quinn
Reproduced with permission

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PHILIP'S 5 FAVOURITE QUOTES

"My god, what happened?"

Princess Diana�s last words

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�I trust you do not permit yourself to be depressed by the partiality of what is called �the public� for the favourites of the moment.�

Lord Byron in a letter to Samuel Coleridge

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�Increase in imagination is always an increase in soul.�

Sir Thomas More

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��Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn�t do than the ones you did do.��

Mark Twain

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��Literature is a belief for one who believes in nothing else.��

Flaubert

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