Talk to yourself on the Fictionville blog
I searched everywhere till somehow I found a flyer of Don Xcremento stapled to a light pole and with a low hung cabbie we went looking for him. Drove through wastelands of landfill, cement towers erect all around us the true monsters of this Disney land. Carrion birds, poor people fishing for super dioxin fish in the poisoned bay, people afraid to make out in their cars almost anywhere. (One guy dismantled then installed his 61 Bug in his living room, for the pleasure of a backseat very well upholstered)
The yellow cab slalomed the pot holes and broken bottles and ended up at a bayside hotel in much disrepair confusion a muted excitement – just like me and cabbie were feeling it as we moved warily under low mahogany ceilings and time worn carpets of the Oliver Cromwell hotel.
We got a room then, he and me, and lay down and waited it out for a minute, trying to decide on our next apparent step. Just then the power failed and sounds came up. The machinery went silent all at once just like insects do when the bamboo moves – human sounds began to come back, ready if my ear would only make the shift and give it a listen… Following my ears I decided to return to the front desk via a passageway through nearly dark corridors. In this light the soft carpeting that muted sound by enriching it the beginnings of trance, the hotel became a tunnel, an underground route that I had suddenly joined by my desire to meet Don Xcremento. I was getting close.
I passed opened doors to darkened rooms and heard much confusion among the guests. At the front desk I cut in smoothly on some fey
Europeans and sliding my flyer of Don Xcremento over to the clerk, asked him where I could find the gent. A man standing next to me, shabby in an old pea coat and dirty scarf that he evidently slept in, glanced at the flyer, then eyed me with a piercing gaze, I think he read interest on my mug and I sympathy on his. “What is it you want? he asked. “I need to find Don Xcremento, I’ve been looking everywhere for him, my neck it needs healing.” “It’s too late” he said, Don Xcremento is dying – today. He is here but he is dying.” He looked in my eyes for a long moment (I was sure he saw his own reflection and was studying himself), then signaled that I should follow him.
The cabbie had joined us and we went off after him and his black overcoat down several dingy corridors, out into a trash-strewn alley where things in disrepair were stored, I suddenly caught scent of the bay, the ancient sea water, the dialectic of decay and eternity. The alley sloped downwards toward the water and then we were under a rickety old deck which shielded a muddy approach to the foamy water. Piled up to three high and sliding into the water to float were coffins, painted forest green, bobbing in the brackish water where they bobbed up and down like a garden path that led down into the bay itself.
Our guide started clambering over them and we followed him down under the disintegrating deck and over the walkway of green peeling coffins till suddenly he disappeared into the water as if simply following the coffined path into the water. I lost the path but my driver found it quickly. In the water between several coffins was Dorian’s adolescent face, the little girl from the port, her face floating in water beckoning like a step, inviting my advance so I stepped forward and slid into the water and was carried along
a current down into its depths to another world. This was where Don Xcremento waited, here on the other side of the mirror.