Merry Christmas!
My present to you is a piece about a man wrapped up in a rug, nestled in the fire of the Apocalypse.
Naturally, all stories are rooted in life, and this one draws from an experience I had, trampling on a man at a place called the Apocalypse Lounge, nearly two decades ago my first night out in New York City.
As an experiment, I decided to imagine the part of Rae’s story adapted from this experience, from the perspective of the man in the rug.
For every point on what appears to be the timeline of linear experience, one could tease out a multitude of intersecting points, so it’s also interesting for me and hopefully you too, to do that, looking from various angles at how this experiment came to be:
Around a dozen years ago, I read Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, a novel important to me for the reason that it made obvious the reason we read any novel, that is to get closer to other human beings by going inside of their heads. Novels can lend us insight into the formulation of reality through another perspective—the wilder the better. Of course, inhabiting another point of view at any depth will bring about a correspondence with one’s own. The narrator of Cosmos is obsessive, deranged and poetic, and his account of events hangs beautifully together by its own distorted internal logic, even if that logic is seen through by the reader.
During Covid, I read Marina Abramović’s memoir about her life and method as inseparable in her performance work dealing frequently with pain. A powerful theme in her oeuvre is no bodily harm can touch the spirit; pain is psychic turmoil mapped onto innocent sensation and, seen as such, a gateway to transcendence. In her retrospective at the shady Royal Academy in London (255 years established and the institution’s first on any female artist), the viewer confronts a reproduction, minus the artist, of Rhythm O (1974), where laid out on a table are 72 objects—a saw, a feather, a bottle of perfume, a rose, a mirror, a pistol with one bullet lying next to it, among them—with the artist’s instructions for her audience to use the objects on her “as desired,” as well as the statement, “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.” In the original work the artist waited for six hours in Studio Morra, Naples to see what happened. It gets one thinking not only about the body but also tension as an artistic medium, how tactile the air must have felt for all those present.
Recently I heard Ken Wilber describe transcendence, or the transformation versus translation that happens in meditation as one looks within and moves through structures of consciousness, in moving to higher levels shedding the skin of one self so that it becomes the object of the present subject (~16.26 remaining).
Opening to the first line of Harry Crews’ memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, I read, “My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.” The author tells us right out the gate he’ll be breaking all the rules, then goes on to detail this first memory he never had, from the close third-person perspective of his father, getting the clap from a Seminole woman.
I heard Helen Keller quoted, “The only thing worse than blindness is sight without vision.”
In terms of plot, Rae goes to a party Elliot has “curated” at the Apocalypse Lounge.
I made a Fauve, borderline abstract painting for this one and have put a recording at the end for paid subscribers.
Merry Christmas!!
The man named Apollo had a dream to be a rug. It was not in his constitution to pine for things that others pined for, though it took some time for his dream as such to clarify. Some trials came before he could access his deepest longing. Society was unkind to him, until one day he released himself from it, spurred by a thought along the lines of, “Trying to be part of something that just won’t have you don’t make much sense. So why bother?” He set out for New York City, all the way from his native Malta, not knowing exactly how to go about finding a dream but having heard that in lower Manhattan plenty hung in the air like fruit from invisible trees, ready to fall and strike your head in the form of a life-changing possibility.
One night, roaming around this fecund part of the City, Apollo wandered into an avant-garde dance performance at an East Village performance space. The show was called “Solo” but the dancer was not alone. She had a dance partner, it just wasn’t human. It was a rug that she wore, or shed like a second skin. She’d let it fall, or wrestle it to the floor, thump, like a lover. Or a child she’d pick up and heft onto her back. Or the weight of life when it got heavy assuming so much meaning she could hardly handle it. It was bigger than her but she’d wrap it around her, or fold it into an origami sculpture unsure of what it was. Flesh and blood-colored it blended into her, the warm tones of her lithe body groping or caressing it. Watching her, and it, had an effect on Apollo like turning a key in a lock tucked deep in folds of mammalian tissue. He felt a writhing internally. The impact of the realization, “That’s it, I have found my calling. Or, it has found me, the thing that will save me.”
In his delirium he did not have the presence of mind to consider, not many would have chosen the path to becoming an inanimate object and so not many would understand. I’M A RUG, STEP ON ME, he scrawled on a Post-it he then stuck to his chest, before lying down in the middle of a busy Manhattan sidewalk. People just walked around him and told others to do the same.
He got depressed and thought about joining the circus but had no exceptional skills, was scared of heights and didn’t even know if circuses existed anymore.
Then in his despair came an epiphany: people would only step on people they could not see! Some dreams you had to go in stealth mode to fulfill. He decided to go incognito, to serve himself up unseen—the calf on a menu listing veal, or something like that—available for a kind of unconscious consumption. Now he just had to find the right venue, respectful of his right to be brutalized as they were negligent in supplying any details of his presence to those unknowingly brutalizing him. Among those knowing in this special place, he would be accepted in the full light of his rugness. He started hanging around bars welcoming outliers and found there was a category of bar demoted from the classic “dive” to one of “sleaze,” where people with open minds hung out.
The first time Apollo entered the Apocalypse Lounge it just felt correct, like coming home. Here the dregs took their rightful place in the new world of no order. Trash saw itself as treasure, piled high and rinsed in a red light that bent and distorted it, casting its wily shadows on the walls. Purifying it in a baptism of fire summoning all of the demons. It was the perfect ambiance for a human caterpillar to hatch from his carpet chrysalis, a bruised and bloodied butterfly.
The management that did not exist in defence of anarchist principles had given Apollo a free pass to come and go as he pleased, and so that is what he did. He did that non-existent authority figure a solid, aligning that sleaze bar with his niche sadomasochistic fetish to make it the sleaziest in the land. And he did this without taking any money for it, because money was dirty.
One day teetering on night, Apollo trundled down the East Village sidewalk toward the Apocalypse, his rolled-up rug under his arm. Behind him, the sun went down in its own flames and bled out into the sky, the horizon line a slit oozing its coppery pink essence into the atmosphere. A chill cut through the air, the sunset a warm pat on Apollo’s back as he walked away from the wreckage. On the ground, dead leaves shimmered like gold coins, only to disintegrate in one’s hand or turn to pulp in his pocket.
By the time Apollo reached the Apocalypse, the sun lay in a pool of vermillion, sunk ever deeper into itself as darkness came to put out the fire. The door was unlocked and he opened it. A half-raised metal grate greeting him shone violet-silver in the coruscating light. He maneovered under it, dragging his rug like a body bag behind him.
The inside of the Apocalypse smelled like an armpit sweating vodka. A barmaid passed a rag over the bar, cutting through ever deeper layers of grime she could release trapped toxins from. She hummed as she was wont to do whenever he came around, that song about magic carpets and letting the spirit take you away.
I like to dream, yes.
He got closer and she looked up. He had forgotten her name.
Right between the sound machine, she hummed.
He wanted her foot in his mouth, on his face.
“Can I getcha anything?” She chose to misread his imploring look.
He knew that she knew he didn’t take a drop of liquor but came to this drinking hole to funnel others’ inebriation, their numbness into his sensation. To be fully present for the moment others escaped into oblivion and hurt him in ways only unconsciousness could permit. Under the scalpel of her gaze, Apollo put a hand to his face—ridges, cuts, bruises, chafing—while the topography of hers was smooth as a desert, save for a tiny pebble sparkling in her nose. His skin puffed less in the manner of a prize fighter than of a Botoxed woman who couldn’t stop doing what she was doing because it felt good, in a way that couldn’t be explained to others.
Apollo shot the barmaid a look like he were all alone in the world.
She returned her attention to the bar as if seeing it for the first time, beset by something no cleaning agent could lift. A renewable resource for disgust.
Apollo had no compunction looking like he had been mauled by the three-headed dog of Hades. Nor could he expect a lady with a face like hers to stomach his vocation calling for disfigurement. He looked around. Some drawings were up that seemed out of sync with the Apocalypse vibe; stick figure women stuck to the walls, their skirts and ponchos twirling, toes turning daintily like they were smashing cigarette butts on the ground but being all ladylike about it. His muscle had melted into folds, and the silicone-coated underside of his rug gripped loose underarm flesh where it would normally have done the floor. He propped up the rug where he could see it spiraling like a Little Debbie Swiss Roll, or a galaxy, then perched his chin on top of it feeling its bristles against his stubble. From there he got to surveying the area under the bar. Where a foot rail should have been he’d instal himself for the night, flush with the overhanging part for maximum “exposure”.
“Party tonight,” the barmaid said.
Apollo grunted, lost in reverie staring at the place where he would be crushed. What she said excited him but he did not ask how many people were expected, or for any details. He wanted pain at unexpected intervals, random and without warning, the way a good stabbing should be done. This was Mother Nature’s way and he was just a collaborator, controlling all of the conditions to ensure he would be left at the mercy of chance. He thought of the boys and girls stomping, maybe bouncing up and down on him. Alcohol would flow, and as many as could would cram along the bar’s length, lining up on him to put in their orders for social lubrication, those woolen rug fibers rubbing every inch of him raw. He could hope for combat boots; stilettos were a pipe dream. Through the rug membrane those heels would dig into him, pinch his nerves and fracture his ribs.
By the end of the night, he would have climaxed more times than he could count.
Apollo let go of the rug, timber. It fell to the ground with a thud, raising a cloud of dust. The barmaid came around from behind the bar. She stood above Apollo as he unfurled the rug, opening like a big outstretched hand, then laid down his body on top of it. For a moment he did not move but lay still, clutching the outside corner of it, watching dust particles like angels float above him. The barmaid saw no angels, only a cloud of dirt. Hovering there she seemed to be forming an opinion about him, pulling the length of the rug tight around him, a big brutalized baby waiting to be swaddled. Probably he’d been neglected as a child and so the only way he knew how to get attention was by turning himself into a doormat. She indulged him with a swift kick in the ribs. Given his sizable girth it took no more than three revolutions before momentum ran out and he lay there squirming, belly up in the dark. The barmaid’s footsteps faded and Apollo lay still, breathing, waiting to be reborn.
It started out a quiet night at the Apocalypse, with people trickling in. They seemed to avoid Apollo as you might do a slug in your path after a rainstorm. One or two nudged the side of him, gingerly, with their toes. Then the revelers seemed to discover, so long as they did not use him as a step stool, he was a hindrance to their drinking.
The first one to mount him was special. She set the night in motion, the others falling in line behind her. One foot came down on his solar plexus, the other on his neck, so a burp rose and he had to stifle the urge to choke on it. His trampler shifted like she were sorry to the ground for stepping on it, her courtesy extending to things she could only imagine were there. He could track her movements while the crowd was still thin. Create a whole profile of her by her footprint, her shoes curved up at the toes so he could not feel their edges. His mind drew a picture of them padding the soft earth, turning it up and packing it around some root vegetable tubers in a field. Then one of the gentle creature wearing them, a minor, far from home, enlisting some old-lady clogs to add on years to her as she tried to act all casual, lunging at the bar before anybody got to questioning her belonging in an establishment licensed to serve liquor.
Apollo settled in to his do nothing meditation, letting passivity take him over, as the drinkers coalesced into a multi-footed lump on top of him. In the basement, a DJ pumped drum and bass into a room filling with bodies, and a steady beat pulsed, massaging his back. Here and there he caught a snippet of conversation, then the din disposed of any language, revealing the words themselves to be made of nothing.
In the blackout obscurity of a rolled up rug, things did clarify. Pain was the mechanism, nailing him to the moment as the hours rolled on. Sensation bloomed in thousand-petalled lotus flowers—purple, red, lime—poof, then another, and another, thousand-petalled lotus bouquets bursting in his skull. Somebody’d come along and know just where to stand, pinning his scrotum to his leg, or bashing in his nose. A cracking sound, things coming out of place inside of him; the nectar of blood dripping down his throat. He was waiting for the blow to shift everything, ‘cause what could be more Buddhist than seeing through the eyes of an inanimate object? Practicing self-less rugness? But it was a process of becoming; he was not there yet. Still desire rushed to parts of him not flat or bloodless. His inner eye ambled up feet, ankles, calves, thighs, upper thighs, and so on, until it burrowed into the collective pleasure center rooted in his pain.
Heat came up from below—the floor throbbing, hmph, hmph, hmph, hmph—and Apollo lay there drenched in sweat, doing nothing, just letting the Apocalypse flames lick his back.
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