In August, the sun is unbearable to most folks, excepting Maurice. The bright, flattening heat is no problem for that raggedy son of a bitch. He is comfortable and protected, is swaddled in a dirty green blanket and beige ski parka. The jacket is leaking goose feathers like an old boy scout sleeping bag. It is stained with brown streaks which sort of look like filthy little comets spun outward from the mysterious Oort Cloud, complete with muddy heads and wispy tails.
Maurice says that is from the time he was taking a shit in the alley behind the Albuquerque Tennis Club and got himself caught up on a chain link fence. He tried to make a run for it but for a bright nemesis, angelic in crisp white clothing and heavenly shoes with new laces, who ambled casually up to that rattling-in-the-wind, galvanized barrier with his voice raised and his racket arrayed before him like a conquering war club.
In the resulting chaos, a fancy graphite implement of leisure got bent out of shape; a prized possession stolen at the bus station from a battered Nordic housewife on the lam from the icy north and squinty foreclosure men was torn, becoming a thing that would ceaselessly bear bird down all over that dusty town.
After all that action in the alley, Maurice's intractable diarrhea left its putrid mark, equally and with ironic justice, on prince and pauper, alike. The spiffy gamesman retired to the lounge for a martini and a warm napkin while the dude in the leaky winter coat ended up beating it all the way up Indian School Road.
Maurice turned his pata-mobile south onto San Mateo Boulevard. He ran, nearly blind from the vomitous influence of wood alcohol, until all the hooting and hollering emanating from the spacious confines of suburbia were drowned out by the sound of jet aeroplanes coming and going, just out of reach. Inside those beautiful and brutal mechanisms, the pilots practiced for perpetual war, wagging their tongues against specially designed oxygen masks with the delightful anxiety of seasoned warriors or hungry lovers.
By the time he came across me in the parking lot of John Brooks Supermarket, I was busy counting pigeons and waiting for a special time portal of my imaginary devising to appear.
I had it in my head that the luminous and dream-like machinery I contrived out of the loneliness and perpendicular isolation particular to Mexican-American writers whose parents and favorite dog had disappeared into the earth would give me access to prices on groceries that were common in nineteen hundred and seventy-two. That would be back yonder a ways, when mommy and daddy danced through the produce aisle and the dead dog was still floating in the ether of the future, waiting languidly for the suffering of life to commence.
Maurice crawled over. I was sitting in my twenty year old Saab trying to coax the engine to my way of thinking. He told me he had rounded up about three dollars and twenty-nine cents and figured he was gonna to use that feria to get downtown. He planned to buy a double-stacker at the Burger King that sat beside the railroad tracks with what remained.
I told him that was a good idea, but that I'd launch a fiver his way if he told me a little bit about his day and let me write about it later. He looked up at the sky, sniffed the air, delicately removed a putrid green booger from his left eye and said the offer was mighty kind, that he would start off by telling me all about his jacket.
It turned out the time portal thingy I was hoping for never slithered out into that burningly dry afternoon because I had accidentally set the quantum timer for the year two thousand seventy-two. In that future, there aren't any goddamn groceries, or parents, or fate-fucking dogs, anywhere at all.
So I sat back and listened. When it started raining, Maurice sprouted wings. He said he was tempted to follow the clouds, but then disappeared into the grocery store for a bottle of Thunderbird. The awful sun came back out and I dug around in the back seat for a typewriter.
Rudofo Carrillo's work has appeared in a wide range of publications. His experimental writing website, Infinity Report, was recognized in 2007 as one of the best blogs in New Mexico, and has been graciously linked to by Internet poet laureate Ron Silliman on Silliman's blogroll. In February 2012, he presented his work at the 33rd convocation of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association.
Additionally, Carrillo is the Managing Editor of Things in Light, a hep and expansive blog about New Mexico that he co-authors with his wife, Samantha Carrillo, a local music critic and American Studies scholar.
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