The line of mopes wraps around the warehouse hidden in the Valley’s North Hollywood. It moves, I take a step. These men are not the chiseled, two-hundred pound studs with eight-inch-plus penises of the A-list. They will never get the call to work with even passable looking woman in a scene for a mid-tier studio, [...]
Archive for December, 2009
1978
Posted By Tyler Knight on December 29th, 2009
Waiting on the bus at the edge of the apple orchard,
I stick my tongue through the mouth hole of my plastic Spiderman
mask.
Mist sprays the crisp air from
my mouth.
There’s a key tied to a worn, dirty string around my neck.
Mom and dad on their way to work in the City.
Shuffling down the bus aisle, I pass a glorious display of
mermaids, pirates, and super heroes.
It’s magical.
I take an empty seat.
Next to me, a kid in heavily soiled, shredded clothes with
miss-matched shoes.
The ends of the shoes are open, peeled back exposing his toes
like sardines in cans.
In his lap, a jug with the letters “XXX” on the side.
In his hand, he is holding a tree stick.
Tied to the end of this branch, a red handkerchief stuffed with cans.
His face is smeared greasy black, lips colored an exaggerated pink,
and looked too big for his face.
“I ‘m Spiderman” I say to the child. “What are you supposed to be?”
“I am a nigger,” he says, “My mommy made my costume.”
“What is a ‘nigger’?” I ask.
“One of you.”
I sit in the darkened house eating a sandwich mom left in the
refrigerator, when a car pulls into the driveway.
Daddy!
I’m dressed and ready for trick or treating,
dropping my sandwich on my
plate I bolt towards the door the door and hug his
legs.
Dad joins me with a sandwich in the kitchen. We eat
as threads of gold light filter through the blinds;
flittering dust hang in the beams
to dance for me.
Fairies.
“Daddy.”
“Yes?”
“What is a ‘nigger’?”
My ears pop, and the side of my face
feels like it’s stuck in a barrel of tiny bees.
I didn’t see his hand.
My cheek is hot, and suddenly wet. I heave my
chest to catch my breath.
“Better not cry. Stop crying.
A man never cries.”
I turn my face so he does not see.
The clock on the wall ticks.
“Ever,” he says.
We walk along the fresh-paved road following other
kids and their mommies and daddies, sometimes in groups.
I do my best to understand the lesson in
the kitchen the way the ant
understands the magnifying glass.
We are all knocking on the 10 houses in our brand new
housing development built in the middle of the apple
and peach orchards.
When we exhaust the last home in the development we follow
the other groups to the old
farm houses.
Dracula and a pirate get their goodies and move on.
Laughter,
parents chattering.
Dad and I reach the first farm house
the other groups have just left, we knock on the
door.
Cars drive by. The red feather in the pirate hat
gets smaller and rounds
a corner.
The door does not open.
In the window, people are looking at us, not
concerned that we see them.
We leave.
Dad does not speak.
He does’nt have to.
I follow my daddy
the way a jellyfish feels the pull
of the tide.
The plastic costume pants whisper
hushed prayers as my legs rub with each step
in the Autumn night.
Dad and I walk past the rows of the orchard trees.
In one row, a rusted bi-plane turned into a tractor
soaking the glow of the moon.
A death machine,
re-purposed.
The next morning, I’m determined to make this kid
feel the pain on my face, and the disappointment
from his old man like I felt from mine.
I practice slapping, trying to make my hand invisible
while I wait.
Except in the same seat, there is no kid with
a shoe-polished face.
A freckle-faced kid in a stripped green
shirt.
“Hello, I am Danny Morton,” he says.
My first friend.
Posted in Poetry
The Rise of the Mech-Peens accepted by Ronin Press
Posted By Tyler Knight on December 25th, 2009
Submitted the series four days ago to Ronin Press, a lit-mag based out of the United Kingdom. They want to make an e-book as well as a chap-book version.
Posted in Published
FACEPAGES
Posted By Tyler Knight on December 22nd, 2009
A girl I dated for half my life
just got married.
We have not spoken for equally as long.
I know she is married because upon impulse,
I typed her name in “search” while
on a social networking site I never visit because
last weekend was her
birthday.
Kitchen knives sewn up inside my gut.
She most likely gives me zero thought at all.
Her husband, a younger looking, much more handsome
version of me.
We were together forever. It ended badly.
I was as bad to her, as she was to me.
Probably worse.
No hope of it lasting, this I know logically.
Yet.
It’s Summer, birds sing for them. Her dress is white,
they are both smiling by the Sea.
A snapshot of perfection
and the people are cheering
like a God damned commercial of how life
should be lived by the beautiful people.
and I am anonymous coward-fuck.
for peeking in on their world.
Telling myself that I should be happy
or at the very least
not care fools no one
especially myself.
I’m not thinking, “I’m glad she’s happy.”
It’s a curiosity of what the right man at the right time
looks like.
Well, now I know.
It is not what I expected.
That God damned photo.
And closure.
I do not know what I should
have expected.
The movie reel of our memories edited over
as if I never happened.
Except as a warning. A lesson.
My current woman whom
I love dearly asks me what’s wrong.
My face betrays me
I see my old life lived in by another man.
My old dreams are now dreamt by
someone else.
The woman I planed our kids names;
her eyes glassy with rapture by another man.
I sit alone in my car, and I think
how blessed with what I now have
and the woman who now shares my side and loves me
when I do the exact same things to fuck up
this relationship also.
She too deserves better.
I know that one day
she’ll move on as well.
My lament, tearless;
blunted through the passage of time.
sears my soul all the same.
Why do I do the things I do?
I always know when I make poor choices
but it never stops me.
The same fuck-ups over and over.
Aren’t I clever?
Posted in Poetry
Inside The Box, Part Two
Posted By Tyler Knight on December 19th, 2009
I feel the color of bliss; it’s red. Like the touch-sensitive optic nerve that flashes the light I see when punched in the eye, the last pass of tongue from the x-rated, wide-eyed Disney princess sends flashes of crimson rippling across the synapses of my God-Rod.
I’m wearing that black cube around my torso like a barrel as if I’m a busted banker from 1929. Dick sticking out of the hole, I’m a man-dradle on its side with cock-as-stem.
Candi works my wood like a beaver on speed. Her work is the sound of slurped hot-coffee drifting up in cherry-flavored waves from below.
Magenta!
Her tongue is a pink chamois soaked in hot bath-water but it’s my dick she wrings with her two-fisted squeeze-and-twist action, slippery with saliva.
Knees buckle, no words. She knows I’m hers.
The room of whited-out of space-time tumbling on to infinity before my eyes does not help with the onset of vertigo.
Carmine!
Needing a focal point, I choose my signature dildo-toy peeking out of the milk crate behind the director. Like I said, this is the first good look I’ve ever had on the finished product. This one flawed because on its side where the dye didn’t quite take looks to be a case of intergalactic space-herpes. I don’t know what’s worse; this mutant replicock or the time I saw my grandfather’s member doing the swing-along when I walked into the bathroom without knocking. That ruined my Christmas.
Swell, now I have both images fucking with my head, chopping down my wood. A master class of self cock-blockery, my penis goes insta-Nerf. I got an impossible choice. Look away and let Candi pop me like I’m a fucking amateur before the scene is done or focus on Pop-Pop’s jingle-balls and get an incomplete for the day. I split the difference. I look away and–
Coral!
–when I get close to coming I let visions of grandpa-beefwhistle dance in my head. The gambit is working. I alternate from:
Garnet!
to…
You’re A Pervert, Charlie Brown!
then…
Maroon!
back to…
Rudolph The Choad-Nosed Reindeer.
Then it happens.
—–
The dildo hops out of the box, falls on its side and does a lopsided roll toward me, stopping at my feet directly underneath Candi, just within my line of sight if I strain my neck to look over the edge of the box I’m wearing. It stands itself erect.
The replicock says, “Greetings Eric Reese!”
I look down at Candi who is still sucking away, then to the director crouched to the side filming it at eye level, then back to Candi. Both oblivious.
“Only you can see me, Eric,” it says.
“Who are you?”
“I am number 17,391 off the line. I was manufactured in the year 2012.”
I say, “That’s seven years into the future. You’re telling me you came back in time?”
“Correct.”
“Bullshit.”
“You are having a conversation with a model of your penis. And you find the fact that I came back in time implausible?”
I try to pinch myself but with the cube around me it’s impossible. I settle for closing my eyes and digging my fingernails into my palms. When I open my eyes it’s still there “Fine,” I say, “what do you want?”
“In the year 2009, you will be encouraged by many people to start a blog–”
“What the fuck is a ‘blog’?”
It says, “Web-log. Blog. It’s an online journal. You will write stories to help you deal with your pent-up angst as you try to make sense of your place in the world–”
“HAH! Me, a writer? Some douche that spends all day at Starbucks with a laptop and a chai-latte? Like hell, I’m not gonna be that guy!”
“Please do not interrupt me, Eric Reese. I do not have much time.”
“Okay,” I say, “continue.”
“Remember this. You can get away with entertaining with superficial anecdotes and lowbrow humor that appeals to the lowest common denominator to get a cheap laugh. Or, you can choose to and challenge how people view things by opening up and showing what’s inside of you. To humanize a people seen as expendable, voiceless cast-offs.” The latex penis falls on its side and rolls back toward the milk crate. “It will not be easy but your biggest breakthroughs as a writer will be the direct result of how willing to be naked, stripped and raw with who you really are. As Eric, not Tyler. Do not shy away from showing your flaws. You will grow from this.”
It hops back into the crate. “Finally, in 2009 you will write a story called The Rise Of The Mech-Peens where you will sit in bed with writer’s block for two full days, working on a single sentence. You will want to smash your keyboard on your front steps. Don’t. The answer is, Bitches and Bubbly.”
“Bitches and Bubbly. Got it,” I say.
“Farewell. Remember. Read widely and keep fucking!” It is quiet.
I think, What the fuck kind of send-off was that?
—–
“– because we have enough footage, Tyler.” The director/boyfriend says, “It’s up to you to pop whenev–”
Floating.
A bio-luminescent jellyfish, my ghostly glow blasts fuchsia and cuts the thick black of Challenger Deep.
I drift.
“We got it, that’s a wrap,” says the boyfriend, “Let me help you out of this box.”
After he helps, he hands me an envelope “Here is your check.” and walks away leaving me alone with Candi.
I say, “Man, that was only the second time in my entire career I was able to pop on camera from a bj.”
She snatches a baby wipe from a packet in the milk crate and wipes her face. She says, “You should feel honored that I chose you. I never work with black guys.” She walks away and out the door.
I stand there facing the door the way an abused foster kid waits for his real parents to walk through it, hug him and take him home. Time does what time does best and moves on by.
I remember the envelope in my hand and open it. The check is for $150. $150 short of the promised amount. A little bit of my spark is chewed up and doused by the porn machine.
—–
The Larchmont Swim Club is a private pool where all the other neighborhood kids hang out. This is the day! I mowed lawns the first two and a half months of the Summer to save money for my membership. The pool will close in just two weeks on Labor Day weekend but I don’t care.
I’ve never been inside–not even with a guest pass but it’s all the other kids talk about around the way, well into the Spring until it’s time for the other kids to create more memories.
The stories are legendary. Richard Federico get’s all the pretty girls in their little bikinis to make out with him. He chooses a girlfriend of short blonde hair named Dale who looks like she was drawn by a super-hero comic book artist. Fables of Jimmy Ziats doing back-flips off the high-dive and losing his shorts. The girls love Jimmy because he makes them laugh. And he has a car. It’s never a complete Summer it seems until so-and-so sneaks beers inside brown root-beer bottles and the spin the bottle games begin. Stories like that.
No more trying to peek through the slats of the high, wooden fence hoping to catch a glimpse of Heaven! No more having to read those stupid Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books in my room alone while the other kids show off their tans (direct “I was there, fun was had” proof)! I’ve got my money and I’m getting in!
The man at the office looks down his nose at me and points at the calendar to inform me that I have less than two weeks left in the season. I tell him I don’t care. I’m not going to be left out of the cafeteria table conversations for another year. Hell, even the other black kid, Mark Hopson has a membership.
I shove my crumpled paper and coins–mostly coins to the man, my picture is taken, and in a few moments a laminated membership card to coolness is in my hand. As I am about to spring out of the office the man stops me by grabbing my arm. He explains that the rules say no skateboards allowed inside. Safety reasons. I don’t have enough money for a locker I tell him, and he agrees after much begging to keep it in an unused employee cubby. I can get it back when I leave, he tells me.
I walk around the club like a tourist who awakens to find himself on Sean and Madonna’s living-room sofa. So what, the snack bar isn’t manned by a staff of cool robots and the slide isn’t made of peanut brittle, I’m in!
I see Chris, Jimmy and Richard hanging out in lawn chairs with a bunch of girls by the deep end of the pool. The stories I’ve heard about the deep end, it should be The Deep End. Richard and Dale are playing grab ass. I walk over. By the way my heart is working, I should be sprinting with a piano on my back. Jimmy and Chris are sipping on a “root beers” while the girls giggle-talk. I’ve known most of these kids for years but in here, they may as well be Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Esteves & CO.
Eric, you made it, Jimmy says. Chris nods that cool nod like you do when you know you are a cool sonoavabitch whose dad dropped him off in a Vette. Richard is discovering the freshly budding topography of Dale’s body with his hands. The other girls chat.
Noone is really talking to me but who cares, I can say “I was there”, right?
One girl, Gina, is coming back from wherever girls that look like Gina go to whenever they feel like flaunting their new bodies with power too great for them to wield with any control just yet. A person with a rudimentary grasp of algebra when God tosses her the keys to a red Lamborghini, she lays waste to the other less popular groups she passes, razing Earth along the way. It’s all the boys in the lesser groups can do not to touch themselves on the spot.
Gina reaches our group and sits on a lawnchair. She’s got this tiny rose-colored bikini on that looks like it was bought for her when she was nine. It is failing spectacularly at doing anything but calling attention to the job it is not doing. The fabric of her bikini-bottom strains over a cleft in the front and when she squats down to reach into her bag, it rides up in the back.
My poor body is overloaded, I fish my Rubik’s Cube out of my pocket and squeeze it with both hands because it’s either that or I’ll drown in lungs full of testosterone.
Richard and Dale are flopping fish, dry humping in the grass. Jimmy is clowning around, Chris is just cool while the other girls treat them like the gods they are by fighting for attention.
Gina’s hands glide slow over her body as she oils up her golden skin. She and another girl, a pretty blonde named Jenny, are talking. Gina exclaims that she wants to get much darker. She says this with such an air of importance, it’s a wonder the gawking b-crowd boys don’t stand on each other’s shoulders and rearrange the cloud coverage just for her.
Eric, a voice says, and I realize not only is Gina talking to me, she remembers my name. She wants to know, Will you oil my back?
I wish I can say that this rubbing of the back will turn into an epic memory of my hands caressing her gorgeous flesh, resulting in my own little story for the cafeteria tables this September starring me as the hero, but the truth is I’m doing my best not to black out. A mini lake of oil forms in the cup of where her lower back mounds up into her ass. Peach-fuzzy sun-bleached hairs as palm trees jut out of little bubble islands. The ill-fitting, brick-red bikini back is wedged up her cheeks forming a triangle–an arrow to where great things can be found. I rub now, knowing I will be rubbing quite a bit later. Although she does not say anything, I stop. I leave the oil oasis on her back.
This place is better than I could have ever imagined, I think as I lay on my belly watching a group of kids splashing around The Deep End.
“Oh-My-Gawd,” Gina says from behind me.
“What’s wrong?” asks Jenny.
Gina’s voice says, “I feel like a greasy nigger.”
Laughter all around.
The sun sizzles at my back.
Gina says, “No offense, Eric.”
I roll over to my back pretending to be playing with my Rubik’s Cube. “What?” I ask, “I’m sorry, did you say something? I wasn’t paying attention.”
More laughter.
I set the Rubik’s Cube down and watch the gulls pass overhead, willing them to swoop down and lift me into the sky. I want to roll into The Deep End with a splash and stay down there. My heart squeezes off 300 beats in the time it should take to pump out 70.
As I lay silent on my back, a moment later I’m looking up into a smiling sunflower. It’s Jenny. Her golden tress cascading down over her face, tickling mine–she’s back-lit by the sun; rays of light peeking through strands and fuzzing out her locks like those hazy Playboy centerfold pics we stole from our dads and hid in the woods to look at by flashlight, when we can remember where we hid them. She smiles and washes the acid in my chest away.
Jenny says, “Hey Eric, wanna walk with me to the snack bar?”
Saying nothing, I get up and walk, no, I float by her side to the snack bar. She buys a single can of Coca Cola and pours it into a paper cup half-filled with ice. She puts a straw in the cup, takes a sip of cola, passes it to me. I place my mouth on the same spot Jenny just did and in my mind, it’s the same as if I just kissed an angel.
We sit, side by side. The cup of ice-soda passed back and forth between us. Kids in the shallows splashing about, too young to care about magic The Deep End are laughing. When the straw brings up more air than soda, Jenny pours the rest into the cup. Our knees touch.
I point my face up into the sky and shut my eyes. The end-of-Summer sun warms the back of my eyelids pink.
End.
Posted in Creative Memoir
Inside The Box, Part One
Posted By Tyler Knight on December 13th, 2009
“–Providence. . .” says the voice born not of woman’s the womb but from the cleverness of man.
My eyes snap open, the first breath of the day draws across my windpipe like a steel rake on a sidewalk. A swallow to wet my throat pushes my heart back down to its proper place from where it was sitting between my ears; when the thrumming fades to tolerable I notice the cellie ringing. I paw the phone off the night stand and onto the bed as the vestiges of the dream blow away on my neighbor’s Regaeton music. I missed three other calls but I snatch this one by the tail before it gets away.
I start the day off with a lie, “Good morning,” and re-close my eyes again, sifting through what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Futile, don’t have the tools; I catch and release a thought back into the stream and pick up her words buzzing those little bones in my ear.
“– next week, and she said she would really appreciate it.”
I say, “Who?”
“Candi Stix. She’s on the agency’s website. If she wasn’t one of our girls I wouldn’t even bother to ask…are you having a party?”
“No, it’s my neighbor. Look, Cindy, you guys know I don’t fuck with blowjob scenes, and I sure as hell don’t wanna commit myself to a full day for only $300 when you’ll most likely get another call for me to do a regular scene at my full rate for the same day.”
Where’s that other slipper, I gotta take a piss.
“I know, honey. It’s her boyfriend’s first directing gig and she especially wants to work with you in an interracial scene. She never does interracial scenes! Aren’t you excited?”
The cell is pinched in the crook of my neck. “It’s a blowjob scene–” I toe the toilet seat up and pee. “–and no, not really. I’m not gonna dance like Snoopy and frankly I’m getting sick of this “I-don’t-do-black-guys-but-you-don’t-count, Tyler” policy these bimbo’s have. But what the hell, I’ll do it for you.”
The tooth-rattling bass from next door stops right as I pin the words, “for you”, to the back wall as they say in theater-speak.
“Thank yoouuu!”
I shuffle to the kitchen. “Yeah.”
A screaming rips the air from my primary-colored id; Carlito, my parrot, reminds me of how he feels about me as I pass his birdie apartment. You can fool people but you can’t fool animals. I grab a slice of provolone from the fridge for me, a strawberry for him. The raptor ignores the berry and takes a nick from my finger. I negotiate a trade–my flesh for fruit–drag my feet back to the bedroom.
“Okay, sweetie. I’ll e-mail you the info!”
“Uh-huh.” Back in bed, cellie still between my shoulder and cheek. I don’t bother to hang up.
I drift.
——–
“Thanks, for coming, Tyler. This will be…interesting.”
She’s how the Swiss Miss would look if she paid her way through shrink-school working as a dominatrix. Her face, metric and precise is a world-class diamond etched by laser. This rivaled only by her delicious cunning. Formidable. Pussy does strange things to a man; stories of men doing stupid shit for the favor of a woman like her in history books are legion.
“Sure thing,” I say, “what’s the set-up?”
We are inside Rustler’s studio deep in Porn Valley. Specifically an all white room, the absence of delineation from floor to wall to ceiling robs the eye of sense of depth or focal point and is disorienting. In the center of the white room sits a toaster-sized black cube on a white stand. If I didn’t know the stand was there I’d think the black box is floating. A floor-safe sized cube is on the floor next to the stand.
She says, “Think Kubrick’s 2001. The idea is for us to establish a master shot with this small box here and–”
Her words are severed mid-thought, she looks over my shoulder and smiles. Feeling the vibration of the foot falls, I turn.
He moves with the grace of Big Bird lumbering down the catwalk in Jean Paul Gauthier swimwear; heels punch the concrete with each step. He stops in front of us and drops the plastic milk crate he is carrying on the concrete with a tympanum-rupturing slap.
“Hey babe,” Candi says to the boyfriend, “why don’t you explain the shot to him.”
The man looks me up and down. He looks disappointed. “Yeah. Right. So the idea is to shoot the small, black cube in this white room as if it’s floating. Candi slinks up to the little box and traces a finger on its surface. The black box senses her beauty–and who wouldn’t, right?–and gets an erection!!”
The excited director dives into the milk-crate and rummages around, tossing out bottles of douche, lube, and a packet of baby wipes. I got my usual wisecrack ready but it falls dead to the floor from my lips because…
“And this is the box’s cock!” He yanks a flopping, rubber dong out of the milk-crate and thrusts it into the air with the hyperventilating exhilaration of King Arthur freeing Excalibur from the stone.
…he’s waving my dick in ecstasy like trailer trash holding a winning Lotto ticket. Yes, my dick. Well, my signature sex toy, anyway. This is the first time I’ve seen the finished product. Intentionally (read The Rise of the Mech-Peens). Their angle, why Candi is making this racial exception, is immediately clear. I say nothing. He may as well have taken my dildo and slapped the clever right out of my mouth.
He takes a deep gulp of air before continuing, “This beautiful black cock will just materialize from the box and Candi will suck it off!! We then fade out and when we fade back in, it’s you inside this big box–” he tosses the dong into the milk crate, trots over with astounding grace to the larger of the black cubes and hoists it over his head. He looks like a caveman poised to smash a rabbit. He sings his next words, “–with-your- real-dick-sticking-out-of-it! Forced perspective! See the hole here? Anyway,” he drops the box, “Candi sucks you off and then the cock–your cock– retracts into the cube!!”
I stand there. My eyes dart from the little box on the pedestal–the “Tyler Knight Vibrating Dildo”–the big cube–back to the phallus. Candi walks up to me, drapes her arms around my shoulders. Our pelvises touch; I feel her heat.
She coos into my ear, “Just think about your pulsing dick between my lips. My tongue is sooo soft.”
It’s as though a flashbang grenade has gone off at my feet. My mind is a virus-riddled PC stuck in infinite loop struggling to reset. All kinds of shit swirls in my head. The supa-fly Tyler inside me wants to tell them to kiss my ass, but the warmth from her muff transfers through her pants into mine, baking my penis like rising bread. She plants a one-sided kiss on my lips, her molten sex buckles my knees, and Candi and the director leave me alone with the props. A black guy in an all white room.
Decision time.
In the end, I’m no less doomed than any other man beguiled by a femme fatale. I get in that fucking box.
Continued…
Posted in Creative Memoir