The Art Vibe - Guest Writer

Scott Hirschberg

In his dream,

The desert is blind like ink black glass, impenetrable and mute. There are no stars, just spacelessness and the pound of blood in his ears. Suddenly a piercing light flashes at the horizon and the earth shudders with a dreadful moan. He loses his balance and falls. He feels the warm sand quake as a tremendous chasm tears along the dunes. Gurgitating oil erupts and gushes across the desert. Hordes of people in turbans and veils are driven before the flood, their drowning screams obscured by an apocalyptic rhythm rising from the earth’s bowels. The air becomes greasy with death. The sky bellows and a thousand blazing crucifixes gather in the sunless heavens. They swing slowly like evil axes. They descend to the vast desert floor, to the turbans and veils bobbing in oil. On each cross is pinned a dancing W, El Presidente himself, Plenipotentiary Extraordinaire and Captain of the Free World. Wearing a grinder monkey’s cap and jacket, he cockily purses and unpurses his lips until the dreamer has to look away. He just can’t handle it anymore. Not even in the dreams. Especially not in the dreams.

It is nighttime now in the desert.
It is always nighttime now in the desert.
And the W has come to take what is his.

Devul is jolted from the dream by Tarzo, who opens the door and hoists his obesity into the driver’s seat. The truck pitches violently under the weight, causing Devul to jerk his right foot, almost kicking over the brown-papered bottle of PatriotVodka®. He lurches for it, and is relieved to find that somehow he twisted on the cap before passing out in the passenger’s seat the night before. Tarzo’s holding a white paper bag full of jelly donuts, his favorite kind.

Parked at the forsaken terminus of Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, Devul stares through the windshield at the world un-dimming. The crucified W’s fade into Enviro-Park’s forest of smokestacks, gathered like sooty penises along the opposite bank of Newtown Creek in Queens. He rubs his stubble and stares through the waves of turgid heat ascending from the stacks to heaven. The abandoned U. N. Headquarters in Manhattan wobbles beyond. Yesterday’s rust-colored layer of smog sleeps yet gently on the city’s floor. It is 6:45 AM, May 22nd, in the year 2014. It is 89° F.

“Thanks for another nightmare, Dubya,” Devul says out loud, pronouncing the president’s name in the vernacular. Tarzo fires up the truck and turns the AC to blasting. He is sweating from everyplace. Devul counts out the 11 years it’s been since the first W nightmare, starting back in 2003, every night for 11 years except when he gets too drunk to dream, which is pretty damn drunk. He coughs. The sun’s corona crests Brooklyn and Manhattan flashes metallic orange like a phalanx of flaming swords.

“D’ya want a donut?” Tarzo asks gleefully, opening the waxy bag and peering with newly-stoned eyes at the coagulation of deep-fried cakes inside. Devul doesn’t answer. He slumps against the door and imagines that the trickling sweat is a cold shower.
“I want coffee and the Times,” he says.

“OK,” Tarzo mumbles through the half-donut in his mouth. His tongue maneuvers it past the epiglottis and into the esophagus while his teeth tear off some more. His brain, sloshing around in the THC loam of a habitual pot smoker, craves the refined sugar rush. Devul rolls his head against the back of the seat and looks at his friend. He remembers when Tarzo was just a thin white guy from upstate with slightly uncontrollable hair. Now he’s a 46-year-old, 350 lb. behemoth with sagging man-tits and pinball-sized welts on his neck and forehead. His hair has an odor which Devul doesn’t like, and his mouth is a colony of herpes sores always re-infecting itself. Devul, on the other hand, looks like a discarded version of Robert Duvall.

A blob of jelly rolls down Tarzo’s chin and onto his damp, sugar-covered t-shirt. He stops and goggles it, mouth agape and drool pooling on his lower lip. Devul notices that the shirt has an iron-on photo of a naked black woman on all fours, viewed from behind, and below her the words ‘ALL I NEED FROM BITCHES . . .’ spelled out in crooked iron-on letters. He squints his eyes to make sure he’s seeing it right. Tarzo remains transfixed on the fallen jelly for what Devul counts to be more than ten seconds. Finally he loses his patience.
“Would you stop staring at that fucking jelly and finish your donut so I can get some coffee?”
Tarzo is again, chapfallen.

“Now I have all this shit on my shirt,” he moans, the movement of his mouth causing even more drool and pieces of fried dough to fall.
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Devul yells, even though he doesn’t give a spit for Christ. He’s just impatient for his coffee and the Times and to get on with the delivery before traffic backs up too much at the Pulaski Bridge TerrorStop®.

In a huff Tarzo shoves the rest of the donut into his mouth and struggles his fatness back out of the truck. On the reverse side of his t-shirt, Devul sees another iron-on of the black woman, this time with a large penis in her mouth and below that the words “…IS HEAD”. In his own head he puts the words from the front of the t-shirt together with the words on the back, and can’t really believe it.
“What the hell is that thing you’re wearing?”

Tarzo tugs on the shirt-tail so that the jelly rolls over the black woman and slumps to the dull pavement. Then he tries to brush off the sugar, but the jelly on his hands smears right into her butt.

“Ffffffffuck!” he screams, raising his hands and eyes to the sky like a figure out of a Caravaggio. He climbs back in the truck all frustrated, making it heave around on its suspension. Devul instinctively stabilizes the PatriotVodka® again, then decides to unscrew it and take a gulp. It burns like usual.

“It’s clean,” Tarzo swears at him, slamming the truck into drive. “It’s a clean shirt. Or at least it was.” Devul shakes his head like ‘okay, whatever’, and turns on the radio. It’s set to NPR, which is broadcasting some news story about the W’s proposal to eliminate 11th and 12th grades from the nation’s high school curriculum to help close a $14 trillion budget gap for fiscal year 2015. Devul is immediately agitated and wants another shot of vodka.

“He just doesn’t stop, does he?” he whines out loud.

Tarzo doesn’t know if he’s talking about him or the W, so he doesn’t answer. Besides, the W stuff confuses him.

“Where in the world did you find that thing?” Devul asks, switching back to the t-shirt.

Tarzo ignores him.

“It’s embarrassing to be seen with you wearing that thing,” Devul insists, starting to get angry.

“So don’t look at it,” Tarzo defies. “It was clean, a clean shirt, that’s all.”

Devul shakes his head again and turns up the radio.

Instead of attending their junior and senior years of high school, teens will instead join the newly formed Young Patriots Brigade, where they will undergo pre-military training for the War Aginst Terror.

“Never before ever in the history of our Nation, will a generation of children be more better prepared for the draft for the War Aginst Terror, God save their souls,” the W says at a Rose Garden news conference.

Tarzo rolls his eyes in absolute disgust. He hates NPR. He likes Howard® but doesn’t get to listen to him until Devul has his Times. That’s the agreement.

They follow Manhattan Avenue to Dos Amigos Café. Devul goes in, comes out, complains about the heat, tosses the Times on the dashboard, and takes the lid off his coffee cup. Tarzo turns left onto Green Street. The little paper cup has pictures of Homeland Security’s Ten Most Wanted terrorists on it, but Devul can’t make them out too well on account of the cheap printing. “They all look the same anyway, God bless’m” he quips to himself, quoting the off-color joke the W accidentally let drop near a live microphone in Illinois, two weeks before. Devul loves when the W slips up like that publicly, even if nobody else notices. He blows on the coffee to cool it off, and vodka-tinged morning-breath rises with the steam.

Tarzo takes a left onto McGuinness Boulevard and grabs another donut as the truck ascends onto the Pulaski Bridge. Below them the Brooklyn Environmental Processing Facility fans out to the southeast, its oil refinery and water treatment plant pumping and churning in tandem. A gargantuan sign reads “Brooklyn: Where Oil and Water Mix!” Devul unfolds the paper. The headline reads: ‘U.S. Threatens To Invade Iran’. Tarzo changes the radio to Howard®. One source close to the Pentagon reports that over 250,000 additional American ground troops have been gathered at three military bases between Kizyl-Arvat and Aschabad in Unitedstan , within a few days striking distance of the recently discovered natural gas reserves under the mud and salt of Iran’s Dasht-e Kavir desert. At the United Nation’s headquarters in Paris, Iran’s Ambassador is livid. Howard®’s on-air minions are chanting ‘bitch! bitch! bitch!’ as they hurl mayonnaise and artificial feces at a naked 18-year-old paraplegic woman who is screeching ‘Stop it! Stop it!’. Howard® is making wet farting noises into the microphone while Robin, his female sidekick, is ejaculating ‘You guys are terrible!’ while giggling and giggling. The Iranian Ambassador is demanding the immediate removal of all American troops from the region, as well as the dissolution of Unitedstan, the return of Iraq and Saudi Arabia to Arab rule, the elimination of the United Coalition of Israeli States , etc., etc., etc. ‘Show some respect!’ Robin ejaculates while giggling even louder, ‘my gawd!’ Howard® continues with his wet farting sounds.

Devul shakes his head. He’s seen the W march across the sands in his dreams, and on TV. Iran’s fucked.

1 Formerly Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.
2 Formerly Israel, Syria, and Jordan

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