Sign Your Name Here

I

Go ahead, breathe it in.

No really, smell the new paint. Look at all of that cupboard space! The closets are pretty big to. You can almost see it now. The window faces first light so the bed went in that corner, opposite the window. The kitchen interrupts the living room, but it’s a studio apartment.

You really did well for yourself. Sure, it’s sort of small, but this is your first apartment all by your lonesome. Don’t you feel proud? Fresh out of college, you barely remember those days. Maybe you didn’t do so well then, maybe you did. None of that matters anymore, because you’re off to a brisk start.

You had to have the apartment on the top floor. There is this window just above the kitchen counter that overlooks a beautiful bright green garden, complete with a solemn bench under a terrace. It’s like being on a turret, high above your castle.

The landlord had shown you into the room, unlatched the door, and named his price as you walked in. He sounded less than enthusiastic, but you were excited as hell. It was heaven. You began piecing it together in your head. Posters on the ceiling of your favorite bands, artwork on the walls, and your own photography too. You still have some of those shots from class packed away. You’d been saving them for an occasion just like this. You’ll post those up. Bind them to the wall with putty because you don’t want to have to pay for them to Spackle when you move.

The couch is here, you ought to have a seat, you’ve been moving all day, and you’ve got to rest up for the gathering tonight. You’ve already got three friends confirmed, and two of them are bringing beer and liquor. You tried to keep things balanced between male and female. You like a good mix.

The sun is setting the sky on fire with a thin strip of paper, and everything glows a half-assed orange. The dust particles floating around the room shine an eerie white, like diminutive snowflakes, and you recline on the couch smoking a cigarette, or not. Maybe your head swims, maybe it doesn’t. You breathe it in, take it in actually, you still can’t believe it.

You’re doing it.

After a few minutes, you pry yourself off of the couch and start messing about. You have a lot to do before people get here. You start unpacking your clothes and folding them up. Some will go into the drawers, some on hangers. You take your tops and face them all in the same direction on hangers like grandmother taught you. You slide that aside, and fold your pants and underwear.

Maybe it’s a tad on the small side. Maybe, you could see things possibly becoming problematic. For instance, the way the cabinets jut out two feet from the wall and decrease the size of the kitchen. For some reason a piece of wall protrudes from the west side of your room in the most inopportune of places. Your sink is a dull stainless steel, and the water spigots are rusted at their bases.

You are getting this place for dirt cheap, and it’s only going to be a year. How hard could that possibly be? This is an in-between so you can bring potentials somewhere without fear of them seeing your parents. This is your place to drink. You can smoke inside here, or not, and most importantly no one is around to bitch at you for lighting up in the first place. No roommates, no family.

This is it.

The drawers are built into the closet like a pharaoh’s tomb burrowed into a cliff face. You open the drawers and start placing clothes inside them. The top drawer holds your underwear and socks, and the middle drawer holds your pants. The middle drawer is a canyon, a veritable black hole of space. This place is pretty great.

You get sidetracked folding clothes and look over at your stereo. Look at it, the poor thing, all useless and bound up in the corner. Put it together, you ought to listen to some music; it will help spice things up a bit. Go ahead, put on that really hopeful album you like. The birth and death of the day cycle through, and looking out your window at the garden below, you can think of nothing to fear.

Minutes go by like glorious hours and you float along side a stream of notes and chords thrown together and tossed around like an ocean of color.

You go back to folding clothes again, humming along with sanguinity. When the pants fill up the second drawer you open the third. The third is shallow, much shorter in depth, and apparently already full. Would you look at that?

A composition notebook.

You haven’t seen one of those in a long time. Gosh, since freshman comp, when they made you take notes in one of these and hand them in at the end of the semester. You take it out apprehensively gazing at the nonsensical speckled black and white spots all over the cover. You place it under the coffee table and go back to putting your clothes away.

Just then, your stomach reminds you that you require sustenance. Mom gave you a bunch of stuff suited for moments such as these. Top ramen to the rescue! The sink spews rust-colored water into the washbasin, and you are tempted to gag but it clears quickly. Whatever, you’re hungry. You pop the ramen into the microwave and you can almost smell the MSG you’re about to gulp down. Somewhere around, you have chopsticks for that authentic feel, but in a time of deprivation you go for the closest thing to you, a plastic Spork mom and dad gave you. Part of the plates, cups, and various party supplies designed to have you wash fewer dishes.

The impromptu dinner is over, and your stomach still rumbles. There will be consumption of alcohol this evening. You are out to get hammered. The best course of action is to cease eating, and start consuming water. The fridge isn’t full and nothing is cold, not even lightly chilled. Water is water? Certainly not from that spigot.

There is a forgotten half-full water bottle on the windowsill, looming large and casting muddled rays over the white face next to the stove. They slosh around as you lift the bottle and uncap it. Your stomach slakes that familiar cold casting itself down to quell your creeping craving.

You light another cigarette, or don’t, a victory cigarette, or not. Either way the day fades to a playful grey thinning off into purple mixed to blue, a deep azure.

People start arriving.

Hello Max. How have you been? It’s been a while. Are you still playing guitar? I always liked that one song you used to play.

Frank! It’s been a dog’s age. Gosh, I thought the real world had long consumed you. Funny seeing you here, give me a hug.

Why hello there Karen. Is this your husband? Boyfriend. I’m quite honored to meet you… You live together? How long? Oh how nice.

Susan walks in. She’s wearing jeans, and a sash that have seen the inside of too many shaded jazz clubs, cloth dabbed with the smell of cigarettes and liquor just enough, so that when you get close to her she holds the aromatic essence of jazz. She never says anything to anyone unless they say something to her first. That’s typical Susan. You’ve always liked Susan because it took you time to get to know her. She’s one of those people that you really had to work for. You remember nights with her: drinking beer while suddenly finding everything much more profound, journeying to her house for the first time, and sitting on the hood of your old car with her during the summer months talking about the future, about life, about the sky.

Sure as sunshine, she plays Lady Day and hides herself off in the corner. You two exchange glances, she smiles.

Jenny, Bob, and Gerri trickle in fashionably late, and the party officially kicks. It’s a Holliday affair, music playing second to lingo, and everyone seems to be getting along. You have a few beers, nothing too big, but you’re starting to feel it. Look at the way Max plays air guitar in front of Frank and Jenny, who seem to be awfully close; Susan chats with Karen, the perfect conversation connoisseur, and Karen’s befuddled boyfriend. Do you even remember his name?

Bob and Gerri have been together for years; Bob is as plain as his name, and Gerri is a big shot in real estate. You’ve known Bob for years, you went to grade school with him, and it so happened that the two of you met again in college.

What a party this is. Like a farewell maybe, simultaneous salutations of both hail and adieu. As the host, you walk around providing for the crowd, making jokes, being happy, witty, drunk, and occasionally flirty. You have been waiting for this moment, a chance to really show yourself off. It’s not striking it rich, but perhaps they’ve not much more than you. Well, Bob and Gerri are pretty successful, but they’re boring. You’d never tell them that of course, but it’s true. Always asking about your plans for the future, we’re so happy, we’re so happy! We got a new car last week, a fucking Ford, or Chevy, or Toyota. Looking for a down payment on a condo are they? No, not that, Gerri says condos are such a waste of money. Everybody knows there’s no equity in a condo, a house is where the money is at, not that this isn’t a lovely abode you have. It’s so… Cozy, yes that’s the proper word¾ you contemplate tearing her throat out¾ oh what’s that? Someone needs a drink?

Why yes, you are available. Would you excuse me Bob and Gerri? I have something I need to attend to, I’ll make my way back though, it’s always such a pleasure. Now that you’re rid of those two, it’s time to fix drinks and mingle some more.

Karen’s boyfriend strikes up a conversation with Max as the two share a musical interest. They put on Led Zeppelin. You don’t mind, Led Zeppelin is ok. They set a good mood, everyone is a little more open, better than the blues Susan had on before.

You had managed to bribe mom into releasing some of her threshold of liquor. She supplied the rum, one bottle of clear tequila no one has shot a glance at, and a twelve pack of generic cola; Max brought beer, and ice ¾ resourceful Max had even bought a Styrofoam cooler. Bob and Gerri brought champagne. Bob nurses the bottle buoying next to Gerri atop your midnight blue ocean. You fix a few rum and cokes, and pass them around. Gerri wants a cosmopolitan, but you don’t have the mixers necessary. Instead you offer her coconut rum and pineapple juice, courtesy of Frank. She begrudgingly accepts, but when the alcohol hits her, the levee breaks.

Dim lights cast shadows of furniture, and the moonlight fills them in with speckled white light, you sit on the countertop surrounded by bottles staring at your floor and its “your name here” visage. A few people take to the couch, and with their drinks safely on the face of the simple black coffee table, their dialogue grows. You are floating, everything a blur. No, maybe not. Don’t bother me¾ get your own drink¾ float with me. Look how pretty the garden is. Imagine that table, the moonlight speckling pale white through black shadows cast from trees, on to Susan’s naked flesh. Her body flaunting its “your name here” visage.

You stammer a moan, barely audible. Someone hears you, someone ignores you; who are these people? The party continues, feel it draw a vague impression like a watermark on your soul.

You are getting sleepy, or maybe that is the alcohol. How many have you had? Who knows? You float on the counter, look at how full it is; look at your friends, how they enjoy themselves. You want them to go, so you can be left alone to your thoughts.

Get out of here. Just go.

That’s what you want to tell them, these friends. You love these people. Love them like kindergartners love cupcakes, no, like security blankets. Night sky stars cast luminous tacks on a tack board, a cosmic tack board. Hands move like waves and you flay them, stretch them out, make them faster, don’t hit Karen. Look at Max and his guitar. Do you care? Do you really care?

It drags like cigarette embers tracing down paper, consuming this party. Give me a cigarette.

No one? Give me a goddamned cigarette!

Someone hands you a cigarette. Calm down, they say.

Steal a glance at Susan, snap back; what? Calm yourself douche bag!

Does the counter shake?

Footsteps outside of the door, someone is coming to shut you down, this party is over. It’s only eleven thirty; it’s quiet. The footsteps grow faint as they pass your door. Someone abound at this late hour? How remarkably strange, but surely they would like to meet you. You run, stumbling over the coffee table, toward the door.

Watch yourself now don’t bump into my boyfriend!

Sorry. (No, not really, what’s-his-face was in the way.)

Open the door, out in the hallway there is someone unlocking his door. You flash him a grin, he sees. He glares at your smiling face, nice and bright¾ you’re friendly, he is not¾ he locks his door. You catch a whiff of your own breath. That pickled essence. Taste it, really taste it. You feel it in the pit of your bowels, nascent in your esophagus. As you stammer a belch, you feel fire all over your chest. Clearly, it’s time to sit down.

Take a drag of that cigarette, or let it burn in your fingers, the smell so enchanting, so strong, you breathe heavily, or don’t.

Are you excited? Horny? Yes, that’s it, alcohol always does have that affect, like an enchantment straight to your head. How it feels: hands like palettes thin and wide, scrape shapes sharp shifting hands like paper, thin and wide. Hands open to expression, fire, and passion. Your foot falls asleep but that is far away now. The counter is so hard. Do you feel the way your bony ankle presses against the pressboard surface? It stings at you. Continue to get lost as minutes give way to hours¾ we are here, you think, together for just a bit of time and ours is a wonderful bond¾ melt away time, over the stove the way you light cigarettes when there is no lighter to be found.

Small flecks flake away as everything blurs this feeling, this light-heartedness. In the morning you will feel it creep up your guts with that ugly warble and bubble. Place yourself mentally in front of your porcelain shrine. How beautiful this all looks.

These friends, these marauders; invading, sacking, taking, raking up what they can before shaking off to kick rocks as they stumble and tumble to their cars, home, loved ones, equity, sleep, peace, night outside seeping into the room, its darkness overcoming your own. This party with its dim lights, and dim wits putting you to sleep. Do you force them out?

Leave me be, you want to scream, let me go, give me peace.

They leave. People vanish like water down drains. Rust colored, like disgusting vomit on the bathroom floor.

The shower with its glass doors seems so inviting. Highly aroused, you contemplate climbing into the shower, letting the water wash over your body, and down your waist. You masturbate, or don’t.

You masturbate in that shower. Do you moan, doesn’t matter, but do the neighbors hear?

II

In the morning you feel it. You feel it creeping back up, rumbled from guts churning like soup, some sick witches’ brew burns, tracing itself in lines up and down, up and down.

You masturbate in the shower.

The water feels good, as the water trickles down. The toilet runs, the water turns hot to cold and back again¾ do you moan? Doesn’t matter. Morning’s flow of sunshine rays through shutters flayed over the foggy glass window, frozen with cold, shivering your space.

There are cans everywhere, the ashtray is full, and the trashcan has overflowed onto the linoleum floor. Morning spills onto the carpet, a soft baby blue in its radiance. Your bed, that pitiful thing, like a Siamese twin separated from kings and queens¾ are you too big for it? Maybe not quite so big as to be problematic, but, you could see problems: people scrunching up, swamping corners like posters plastered against walls, trying to chat with bent necks and knees squatting to fit. They had fun. You did a good job. You entertained them, you’re quite proud of yourself. Your mouth tastes of vomit, and your hands are soaked in oil. Water runs through hair. Your thighs quiver, your legs buckle, and waves of morning pleasure through you.

The shrill squeaky creak of metal on metal rings out in a claustrophobic echo as the water drip drips to cessation. The loose bathroom doorknob doesn’t budge at first, and there is a terrible sense of panic, as you fumble the rickety brass piece. Steam surrounds you, and you flush crimson. The knob finally gives.

Outside birds chirp, you hear them through the screen over the window. You never did care for them as alarm clocks, too high, too low, not like the appeasing predictable drone drone drone of your alarm. Wake up! It’s time for work, no time to fuck around! Don’t your hear it screaming at you?

Work…

The simple black coffee table is the centerpiece of this centered place, your room growing from it like a vertex, the couch your own point of origin, the length between you and that table the radius of it all with your arm as the compass needle. Stare at the coffee table for a moment, think of ways to cover up the scratches adorning its face, and ponder pasting pictures from a calendar of 365 sexual positions onto it. You will call it the Kama sutra table, and it will give you many ideas.

You arc out at the air, at the dusty old air. Feel the flakes, how they twist and writhe and wriggle. Look behind you at the closet doors. Those thin paper doors, pressboard like your cupboards and table. This place is cheap.

Damn right it is! How else were you going to get your start? Living here has its white bare walls. You should put posters up, and place photos. You remember things in moments, Max and his guitar, what’s his face and his girlfriend, Gerri’s prattle, moving things up stairs, up creaky forgotten neglected impartial stairs.

After you toss on a set of comfortable gray and black speckled jogging pants, and a white undershirt, begin tacking photos to the walls. Move things around, stand there for a minute, and really review the situation. Stand with one arm folded under your breastbone, and the other hand pointing directly at the wall. Pivot your head like a tank turret, and survey the next bare piece of wall. Blast it with your own personal touch of creativity.

Morning hours fade as coffee bean scent trails with lingering reminiscences of cancer stick smoke, or not. There is much to be done and not nearly enough time before Monday to do it. Begin rearranging things, set up your television¾ never watch your television. Set up your toaster, your tabletop grill, and your microwave oven. Stand wine glasses up on their heads, and wash dishes.

Pace back and forth, and stop every few steps order to document where you are in the room. Follow your footpath, retrace it, now you are in the kitchen, now the living space, now your bed(room). The closets are huge, inviting even, but those pressboard coffins hold clothes dead till the work-week comes again. Sit on the couch and wriggle around while you adjust your back. Prop your feet up on the coffee table, masturbate on the couch. Sweat drips from you. Get up and put on the air conditioner, that little tab on the panel behind you. Flick it, and feel the cool air sweep dust particles like smoke clouds in a cartoon film. Smoke drips from you. Take off your clothes and feel naked on that couch. Recline and get comfy. It’s your room.


You have a nice desk. Sit at it for a second, go on the computer and look things up on the Internet. Read the news, check times for movies you’ll never see. Stare into space, illegally download music, or don’t. Turn the TV on¾ never watch it¾ turn the TV off. Vacuum your room.

The top floor, as it turns out, is pretty quiet. It’s a piercing kind of silence, a loud white noise that you hear in the back of your head. Nervously fidget your foot, feel how you shake the coffee table. Run your feet across the plush blue carpet, and dig your toes in. Smoke a cigarette, or don’t. Walk back and forth, back and forth. Exhale long trails from your nostrils, of cold dusty air, of thick cancer smoke. Reach one end of the room, and then count how many steps it takes to get to the other end. Lose count when you notice the couch is off center. Slide the couch slightly left, no slightly right, now back a little, that’s good. Perfect, dead center with that wall, next to the drywall erection out of nowhere, for no damned reason.

Lie down in bed, close your eyes, and try to dream of dreaming. Fidget some more¾ your leg shakes the bed. Your eyes open, and you can’t hold them closed. Stare at the ceiling, and let your eyes fall naturally from one blank space to another on walls you haven’t decorated yet.

Get used to prowling. Crawl on your hands and knees while you run your face over the plush carpet. Ignore the crap clinging to you. Vacuum your room again, and mop the kitchen floor¾ this is the cleanest you’ll ever be. Clean the bathroom.

Rolling stones, like rolling stones rumble through brick white walls. Paint them black, you want to scream. This will be a trend, Rolling Stones for fucking hours. The sun goes down, and the Stones play on, the concert lasts for hours upon endless hours. Slam your hands against the walls, pound like it’s a prison cell, and someone is bound to hear you. Call the police, you scream, I’m locked in my room! The walls close in. Breathe heavy, smoky lungs. Feel them quiver, struggling to inhale through their dusty lining.

Sit upside down on the couch and let the blood rest in your brain. No homework. That feels strange, doesn’t it? Did you really do it? Is this place really ready to be lived? The room shakes with footsteps and Stones. Windows rattle, and the air-conditioning lacks endurance as it struggles, like your lungs¾ or not to blow air everywhere, clean air, moldy air, air that tastes of something. Smoke, no, the smell your car makes when the AC kicks in before the long drives up North you take to see your grandmother.

The sink is still spotless, maybe you should cook, like Emeril, like Clint Eastwood in the sun while Eli Wallach leads him on, like fried eggs on a grimy car motor. Greasy food slides down your maladjusted throat. Absorb the grease on your taste buds. Smell your shirt, that still stale thing clinging to your sweaty body. Turn the TV on¾ do not watch it, in fact, unplug it. TV rots your brains anyhow. Turn the TV off. Hang photos there, above the bed, over on the broad side of it. Hang a few from the ceiling to, plaster them with museum tack¾ now don’t forget that. Remember your little deposit, they rake in your money¾ where does this go? Hmm, put that one near the window in the kitchen. The room has color now, black and white on white on blue on shit-stained brown, couch next to the erectile dysfunction wall. Horny again? Not really, bored, maybe…

Maybe masturbate on the couch? Already this is problematic, yes, this room is too small.

No, it’s small but it’s yours goddamnit. You paid (are paying) for this shit hole- this room, this oh so peaceful room, no sound but Stones warbled through that erectile dysfunction wall.

Sigh.

Smoke a cigarette, or don’t. Lie down on the shit-stained couch, run your fingers through the plush blue carpet, like hairy water it swishes with your touch. The sunshine is fading again, a Zippo flame stifled out by the steel shield. The night barges in unannounced, but nevertheless welcome. Turn on the lights that shine orange to white to¾ neon green. Catch the green with your eyes, stare directly at the light until you notice a flicker so fast you almost never caught it.

Stare at the cottage cheese ceiling, notice the rusted, water-stained outlines of sewage pipes, and imagine what the room would be like minus your roof. Turn on music, anything to stem off the boredom and the fucking Stones blasting through fucking stones. God this place is ugly, dreary even.

You try to sleep.

When trying fails, you take some sleep aid, to feel drowsy. Smoke some pot, increase this sleepy high. Do you have any? You selfish little prick, why didn’t you share with people last night? What is this… who do they think you are? Hey, nobody asked¾ you inhale sweet smoky sanctification¾ tastes of pine, smells of pine that thin green blow like hookah from the lips of a sultan. Lie back, relax, and get comfy. Don’t watch TV.

Instead, look at that notebook you found yesterday. Funnel through its pages. Thumb them like a book waiting to be read. This is your story, the notebook says. Come, it beckons, write in me.

I’m too tired to write, you give it shallow validation. It sneers back at you through speckled eyes flaunting its “your name here” cover. Personalize me, it begs, come on, it’s your new room, first time on your own, write in me. Remember this with me.

Argue with it some more, and set it down on your bed stand (floor).

III

Alarm drone drone drone’s onward and you are off. Down the home stretch it’s coffee in the lead followed by breakfast and shower. Masturbation coming in at dead last, and then suddenly, a surge, frustration hears you cum. Hop out of the shower and get dressed¾ quickly now, there is not much time. Fry eggs, oops… egg, make toast. Pour coffee, spill coffee, clean up coffee, smell coffee, and breathe.

Breakfast smells so good as your eyes drag themselves awake.

Place the egg on the toast, slice into the toast, and watch the egg bleed its plasmic yellow cholesterol all over your plate. You’re so hungry, you’re practically foaming at the mouth. You dig in, and from first to last bite, it is a five-minute masterpiece. Chug coffee as you race for the door.

Don’t forget your keys.

Drive safe, come home…


Work passes, another boring day at the office. Now you are in the sanctity of your room. Stop lying to yourself and get real. This place is great. (Great… mighty, massive, awesome?) Hardly, this place is a dump. Look around at those whitewashed wasted walls standing there.

It’s evening already, and the Stones roll on. Have they stopped since they started? Never mind that now, turn on something you like. Turn on: blues to rock to dance to classical to new age to atmospheric to death metal to any fucking thing that will blot out the brown sugar ever presently flowing through the mouth of your ear.

The night drags, like eyelids, like cigarettes. Everything’s that sickly orange-to-white-to-green-flicking color from those wretched lights mounted to the rust-stained ceiling. You wait. The music stops, and you wait.

Waiting turns to minutes turns to hours, and the notebook calls.

Or not?

Perhaps you were just hearing things, after all, it couldn’t possibly know your name. You have not even put your mark on its speckled face. You want to though. In point of fact, it’s been the only thing you’ve thought about all day from the moment you walked in until the moment you punched out, your every thought consumed like a cigarette burning. That speckled notebook flaunting its blank cover, blatant with its barefaced pages, that fucking¾ no, that sweet¾ no, that open notebook, so very open, in point of fact, like a hooker’s legs. Just humping full of possibility.

Do you descend into its depths? Open it, go ahead and thumb through its pages. Pick it up, that’s right… It’s like the pages never end. They just keep going and going as you flip through them, thumbing them like that animation book you made in middle school, never-ending rendering of images into thought, you can see them now, these pages filled with your thoughts. Yes, you will do it. You will put pen to paper; this room deserves to be remembered. This is the first time out on your own, you should be so proud. You go for a pen¾ thoughts already flowing through synaptic gaps, toying through your forebrain, employing every method, rhyme, and reason on their perpetual pursuit to paper.


Write in the notebook seated on the floor next to the coffee table. Write this in the notebook¾ write every word of it, because it’s the only way for you to remember your own greatness. Write in the notebook; write well into the night, until the moonlight fills in the shadows cast by your furniture with its speckles through leaves. The whole room seems different now, a little more personal. So easy to get lost, centered in a room. The thing about a room is that it holds everything.

Seriously, look at all that cupboard space. The middle drawer is a veritable black hole. Pressboard closet tombs hold clothes hanging like the condemned, the ragged, bleached with sun and buzzard bites. The coffee table really draws it together, don’t you think? It is the perfect spot, the best possible place to trap you.

It’s always easy to get lost in the center of the room when you really think about it. So many places to go, like being pulled everywhere all at once¾ feel carpet against your face, and ignore the crap clinging to you. It’s quite peaceful in its own way wouldn’t you say? Think about it, your own music, that hopeful album you like¾ anything to block out the fucking Stones. You would go to work, but this room sort of grew on you. Things are not so problematic as to be loathsome, but definitely cramped. Someday, bounce off walls, tear out notebook pages, and scream until your vocal chords taste of blood. The notebook will just keep calling.

Yes. This room holds everything.