Saturday, March 11, 2006

Up the gallows stairs we race

with faces caked with death and aching for its taste. Tipping and slipping our heads through the open loops, tasting the knotted portals as they tighten against our necks, we accept the invitation into whatever follows. In the westerns they hang a man at dawn, but here it could happen at any moment deemed uninteresting enough to warrant such a brief but satisfying diversion. A double hanging on a Sunday means nothing but a busy Monday for the shovelers and pine box builders and the insatiable alchemists of the flesh. Does it matter what we did? Does it matter what we did? In both senses: no. But it should be mentioned that while doing it we felt that life and its opposite were not opposites at all but merely the a-side and the b-side of a one-hit wonder from which the labels had become unglued before we were born.

Copyright 2006 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.

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With pockets as empty as my soul I stomped

my feet into my steel-toes and strolled down around the cul-de-sac where the tattooed girls stood. Bakelite baskets with golden clasps wrapped over their inky forearms. Illustrated speedbumps separated and sculpted into deep and geologically improbable bluffs. Lips lathered with poppy-colored puckerpaint from a burned down drugstore. Dresses uninterred from the long-coveted closets of widower's wives. From their mouths poured vanilla pantomime and licorice and there was little for me to do but inhale and succumb to the numbness. One of them grasped my hand and slipped it within the folds of her purse and it made it into the third verse of a forgotten song about the darkness. On the carhood it happened as it should have, and again in the dirt. As the earth spun around towards the fire again it all disappeared, like a cut you had as a child.



Copyright 2006 Max Jukes/Brian Edward Hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without permission from the author. Illustration by max jukes/brian edward hack.

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All That Jizz

wasn't the first adult film I directed, but it was the first I directed based on the choreography of Bob Fosse. There were others, of course, with dramatically different plots--three women spend a few sweaty hours trapped in an elevator with an enthusiastic and open-minded great dane, a bespectacled library patron pays for her overdue book fines the hard way, etc, etc--but with surprisingly similar endings. It was after my eighty-fifth film, Hairy Bottom and the Chamberpot of Secrets that I finally decided to abandon the world of adult films altogether and search for something truly meaningful, some career that would affirm my faith in something or someone besides money shots and fluffers. And so with the residuals from Willy Wanker and the Cocklick Factory I opened an exotic pet store, Bestial Alley, which closed one day and reopened the next as an exotic cuisine restaurant. Have you ever eaten an ocelot? [Hint: Don't.] Then I tried the next obvious career path: ventriloquism. Six nights a week at the Day's Inn in Kankakee, Illinois, opening for Dexy's Midnight Runners, which was quite ironic, I thought, as my first film was called Come on Eileen. My dummy (sorry--they prefer to be called 'vocally-manipulated mannequins') was a puppet I named Misty Fisty, who I found in one of the aisles at the Safeway. Someone had just left her in a shopping cart, which I thought was strange, but hey--free puppet. Just as the act started to catch on, so did Officer Rhodes of the Kankakee Police Department. A simple mistake, really. After prison I considered joining the National Guard but figured on the safer alternative of working at the Laura Bridgman Memorial Target Range for the Blind in Hanover, New Hampshire. I changed the targets and filled the clips, but mostly I just took cover in between dressing wounds. And then, of course, it dawned on me that amidst all this skeet shooting was the perfect porn scenario and the resultant film classics Lust is Blind and Hell in Color signaled the glorious and triumphant return of this most lost and lurid soul.


Copyright 2006 max jukes and Brian Edward Hack. No reproduction or other use of this material without the expressed written permission of the author.

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Sadly I was never kidnapped

while lost in the aisles at K-Mart or while looking under rocks in the stream behind the Esso or while waiting in line at McCrory's 5 & 10 to buy a baby turtle. I've waited for decades to be kidnapped and it's never seemed so distant a dream. Sometimes I stand by the ATM an extra few minutes, flipping through a thick stack of twenties. Nothing. What has kept you so long? There were a few times when I thought I had been kidnapped, after I had fallen asleep in a car and awakened somewhere else. But then I always came to my senses and realized that I hadn't been kidnapped at all but had been dragged to some godforsaken tractor pull or greased pig chasing contest or the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show starring some death-defying dipshit in a Dodge Charger soaring through a ring of fire on two wheels. Real kidnappings seldom progressed to this degree of torture.

Sometimes I go to the airport with an empty suitcase and tell the chauffeurs holding the little name signs that "Yes, I'm Smith" or "Over here, I'm Malapropodov." And when we're stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway I inform the driver that I am not Malapropodov and that he has kidnapped me. "What are your demands?" I ask. "You'll never get away with this." But then again, the demands for my ransom would probably something far too embarassing. "Put me on the cover of next month's Tiger Beat or I'll slit this jerk's throat," the scraggly voice would snarl over the phone to whichever loved ones the police could muster on such short notice. Or else: "Fuck money. All we want are dental dams. Send a crate of them or we give this guy a Happy Ending. And you wouldn't want that." Click.

And of course you're never kidnapped by the people you'd most want to be kidnapped by--women with few morals and even less resistance--so perhaps it's all for the best. Most of all, I had hoped to get kidnapped by visitors from other worlds who--in their lack of famiarity with the species--would mistakenly think me an adequate representative. They'd transport me to some intergalactic wildlife habitat that would, in their eight eyes, be the perfect replication of a typical earth environment. Twice a day I would be thrown a bucket of Halls Mentholyptus, the "food" they pried from my mouth after I was kidnapped. Later they would return with a mate for me, although I'm not sure Linda Lavin was such a sound choice. But as you might well imagine I wasn't kidnapped at all but left sitting on my back porch on a lawn chair, staring up into the starry black clusterfuck of the universe.

Thirty years later I still hope to be kidnapped from whatever this is that my life has become. So if you happen to see me being pushed headlong into the side door on an idling van by strippers, or aliens, or alien strippers, just turn your head, whistle, and walk the other way.



Copyright 2006 max jukes and Brian Edward Hack. No reproduction or other use of this material without the expressed written permission of the author.

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I Cast My Own Death Mask

this morning and every morning until I finally get it right. Amidst the prisons of thought and action there is little left to do but stir the embers from within until the spark spurts and fizzles and sends me headlong to the floor. Hard to convey such notions in three gnarled fingered chords but there is a song of sorts there. How to convey a kind of Sartrean quietism with a I-III-IV progression? How to thump out the music of the spheres on the rusty strings of a beat-up Stella? I asked the organ grinder on Lorimer Street if she knew. She opened her lips and the answers dripped down her chin down her neck down her knees. I heard no words, so undeterred was silence in its wake.



Copyright 2006 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.

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A Guitar Strung with Barbed Wire

is easy on the eyes but a bitch on the fingers. When I open the case the mouths gape like carp in a bucket. "You're really not going to play that, are you? Are you? Really?"

Strapping it on is not as sexy as it sounds. The barbs glisten as I slide the cord into the jack and thrust the other end into the speaker. Flipping the switch I sense the implications of all this. I twist the tuners in vain; the barbs grind against the frets and someone calls out, "Play it, you crazy hillbilly Joseph Glidden sonofabitch."

There was nowhere else for this story to go: I julienned my fingers on them damned strings.

"Play 'Mobile, Mobile Alabama,'" she said as the crimson ribbons drizzled into an Autumn Rhythm at her feet.

"Now play 'What Difference Does It Make." My hands are stumps at this point, and with a smirk she tosses her Stoli on the wounds. I burst like a Buddhist, and nothing can surprise me now.


Copyright 2006 max jukes and Brian Edward Hack. No reproduction or other use of this material without the expressed written permission of the author.

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