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When the letters stopped comming
Jimmy Frankenstien
Dear Julia,
sweet sister of sunshine and frisbee eyes.
i've gotten myself into something.
the pockets had holes big enough to find me not halfway through the american mountain morning,
with 15 cents to my name and a brown leather sachel filled with butterfly wings, books and 3 apples standing guard over a half pound of fresh grass and a once eaten, once resumed loaf of bread.
i sold the weed for the back of a motercycle and found the swamps of louisiana.
the deep, hard south.
a hitch hike away from the french quarters.
i bummed around untill i met a girl named faith.
she led me through the streets and drunken stumbles of masked men,
the howls of pregnant woman.
she had black hair that hung like she just washed it,
big lips that pouted through a fence of straight teeth
and smears of glitter from eye to ear.
we sat on the docks at midnight, flicking rocks into 3 am waters
and our clothes were off.
african jungles over took us with passion and guirilla cries.
her snatch tasted like malted milkshake or the undercooked meat of jesus, fresh picked from the cross.
and she knew a man with a job and a car and a house,
so that's how this all came to be.
now you're with me, you've seen this scooby doo mystery unfold
and i can tell you just how things are.
things are like this;
i'm living with a man named Dick Imposible,
a fitting title for such a fellow.
he has an apartment above a hairdresser in one of the less friendly parts of town.
the windows are all lined with plants and spray bottles,
jamaican music filling the flower cups.
he stays inside and learns the art of herbs and acids,
spilling over books and clhorafill.
i drive a taxi cab and learn the street names,
routes to the airport,
train station
and aunt laurienes house.
one night after a bottle of whisky and a pipe of jungle hash, he set about teaching me the forgotten language of Chazucha.
The ancient medicine men of Pau Pau New Guinee would utter strange, untranslatable sylabols
before dining on the flesh of their dead,
absorbing their countless memories,
energies
and mcdonalds happy meals.
another time we drove around in my taxi and he read me the aura of street lights, front lawns, and bar stools.
in tern i showed him how to speak to dogs and whistle the theme song to gilligans island.
i've made enough money for a Las Vegas rulette wheel
and my toes are getting itchy to stir the sand of indian reservation sun rises.
so my journey will begin at the post office,
with all the drunk post men and lines for stamps, or boxes,
and will inevitably lead me to eternity.
i haven't seen faith again, so if you do,
give her my thanks, and all the baseball cards i left behind.
with love,
peter van der summer
the only man the natives trust.
///
she was 5 again. back home on christmas morning, folding his letter like wrapping paper mom said she could use again. she looked at it for a while, turning the ever browning page in her hands, and she smelt it. sucking in the smells of old libraries and hot dog buns, the smells of swamps and cities and a cat named Dick Imposible. Eyes closed, nose burried deep in the folded paper, she laughed.
she wasnt laughing at the letter, at herself, or at him, she just didn't know what else to do. cosmicly compeled, one could suppose.
a long time ago she'd found an old shoe box. 12 markers and 4 ziggy marley songs later, the box was dripping with love and spirit. she changed the Zeeta to a Peeta and scribbled words all around it. he'd kept his notes, pictures, mail of importance, and magestic sawdust in it right up untill the day he'd left.
she opened her door on a rainy night to find it sitting on her stoop like an orphan in a cookie basket. there was a note scrawled in rain drop dotted ink that told her of his plans, his adventures and his love for thai food. by thai food, he meant her, and she knew it. he knew she would.
so now she opened the box, spoke to the crumbs inside, and dropped his letter in. soft and alone.
she closed the lid and lit a candle.
///
they met in high school. he was 16, she was 18. he was a sophmore, she was a senior. he loved her before she loved him and she realized she loved him just after he was done with love all together.
timing was never their thing.
she went off to college and learned everything in every text book she was given and he stayed back, watching the grains of SAT sand dribble down the monitone hourglass. they saw eachother on thanksgiving and winter/spring breaks, summers, leap year weekends and in dreams. then he graduated.
she didn't hear from him for weeks, months, it all ran together.
time was never their thing.
that's when the letters started comming.
she'd take them out to moonlight meditation, contimplation, and read them aloud to south carolina beach fronts. The stars alwayse answered in haiku and broken poetry, which she scribbled in sloppy blue behind the beaten cover of a hand-me-down journal she bought on a typical summer day at a typical zen lunatic botique. it came wrapped in silk ribbon with most of the previous entries ripped out in a hasty forget-the-past fit.
they'd forgotten one.
perfectly printed in solid letters and I's dotted with nebulas.
"Kirstins hair melted with the trees."
she'd written a story about it on the back of the page. a girl in the rainforest with dreadlocks and a day pack. a bird toot, the rat-a-tat of unseen life. kirstin had found herself that day, and posed for a picture, quickly turned to words, to be left behind in a ribbon wrapped book.
Julia was a writter. An artist, a lover of children, animals and everything containing the letter Z. she was the only straight haired wizzard ever to be born without a penis.
she'd taught him to write, back in spanish class, when things were simple and easy and ignorent. he read her glowing words, watched her wide eyes as she sketched cows or light bulbs, and he was inspired. love and inspiration are one in the same to all true artists.
so he began to write, started spinning words into poems, poems into stories and stories into wispy clouds of passion and drum rolls.
that's when things began to unfold. he decided college wasn't for him and after graduation, disapeared into city ally ways, breaking into drugs and selling cars to earn enough bread to buy money. he learned the ways of the world by reading the lyrics of bus smog, translating the wisdom of sidewalk-crack grass. countless hooded figures were met, their lives drained by his pen and their minds changed by his guitar riff stares. everybody knew him, no one could find him and only the negros in the park understood him.
but that was then, and everybody knows that 'then' doesn't mean a god-damn.
now he was writting letters to a starry eyed scholar, a mystic cowboy poet.
she wrote him letters of her own, falling her days into sentences of rock ink, saved in a stack of adressless envelopes on her bohemian beaurau.
she had green eyes (as all good wizzards do), dark hair that was once much lighter tyed behind her head by a hat that'd once been likened to Mount Vesuvius. Her lips were a cool pink and her skin a wheat cracker tan. she spoke with sparks of laughter, her eyes grew to unproportional sizes every time she stumbled upon amazement and she was alwayse dressed for running.
once they sat in her driveway, drawing from a plastic box of stamps and pens on torn sheets of paper. she said she was hungry, rubbed her stomach with a giggle and looked into his screaming hands. he reached into a sunglassed back pack and pulled fourth a single fortune cookie.
the fortune said "You are beautiful in every way" and after she read it she put her hand over her heart, diving into his.
the cookie was stale.
///
she opened the box again, dropped in a salty white envelope, post marked in Florida.
she didn't open it, she had to draw. she had to do it now, the ninja shadows were whispering to her and she was riding high on the letters peaking strong and hard like an african basketball team from under the pink flamingo stamps. her name, her adress.
master pieces unfolded under her fingers as she sat at her desk, surrounded by paint splatters and scisor blood. she let out a burp, a giggle, and fell into a sleep full of snores and funk.
///
dearest Jewlia,
my cat whiskers, my lava lamp,
the last of the great thinkers has died
and i've found myself in Florida
due to some unfortunatness with bus schedules and tide tables.
after a few drinks, a few packs of filtered this or that,
my bank was back to the clothes on my back,
the nickles in my hair
and the golden eggs that stuffed my shoes.
so despite my loathing for work,
and vows to silent protest of said non sense,
i again checked my coat at the table of employment.
i got a job.
a man needs a job.
i'm working under an old jamaican cat named Napolean
who wears a leather hat,
answers "okay" to every question
and plays soccer like a brazillian bumble bee.
we're janitors at a private school,
cleaning up honorably after spoiled youths and wiping the toilet bowls of young princes.
one night, i found an empty room with a broken light blub,
mounds of donated clothing and art supplies.
i sived and sorted untill i happened upon a silver set of markers
that swept through my soul like a mop-headed break dancer.
when i collect my first paycheck i plan to cake the hallways with free form be-bop art.
and hit the road till my knuckles bleed Mexican beaches or Californian coastlines.
but untill this jazz all unravels
it's chess with the english teachers,
coffee with the smoke stained astronimee nut
and brass to be polished
untill an endless labrenth of teeth gleam back my smiles of you.
my love to the frogs, fishes and firehydrants.
peter van der summer
king of interplanitary funksmanship.
///
she read it twice, folded it into an oragami envelope, and frowned.
she wasn't frowning at the letter, at herself, or at him, she just didn't know what else to do. but there was nothing cosmic about it this time.
it was something in the air, a sensation of a sick uncle or the oder of off pitch melody.
she closed her window, read a book on Puerto Rican tree frogs and danced herself into a yogic Salvador Dali landscape. it was cold, the moon was an oblong orange, the stars pinholes peeking through a mesh of cancerous black. she walked silently to the dorm across a highway of sidewalk, listening to the echo of her footfalls on the energies of the evening.
there was a party with red plastic cups and sticky beer music. she found someone to kiss, but her thoughts were in Florida, with a janitor in sandals.
she woke up in a twisted bra next to a snoozing black beard and checked her mail box three times in a row to make sure a James Bond messanger hadn't bamboozled his way behind her, stuffed a letter through the rusty black door and disapeared into the walls.
"i think i'll go to the woods." she said.
and she did.
she'd grown up with a mother who read her journals, and brought her to a psychiatrist to exercize the dinasaur deamons that beat beneith her rib cage. her father would get yelled at for comming home from racketball, stinking like cigars and sour mash. she was the eldest of three and her house stood like a thumb tack on the conquored map of corn fields and forest.
when fate didn't feel like cooking, brought her only luke-warm leftovers, she'd strut out into the woods, hands in the air, shouting rhymes to the tree tops. camp fires would blaze umbrella circle light, shielding her from the rain drops of dark. she'd whistle martian hymes and tie sea shells to winter-time skeleton trees.
so granola, M & M's and polar bear pajama pants all stuffed into a wrinkled purple nap sack. she found a twisted soul of bark, snapped it to the perfect length for a wizzard, and disapeared into the trees to speak to the night time, sing to the morning, and win endless staring contests against the days.
3 of them to be exact.
///
she came out of the woods tired, dirty, but beautiful as ever; aglo with new found questions to long held answers. she sat down at the breakfast table, ordered a stack of boizen berry pancakes and spoke like a waterfall on the past times of the gods, the deeper tenures of eye colour and her love of the janitorial.
her friends all nodded, stunned and deep in dig of her words, bouncing between the rythem of her stories, pausing for breath as she chewed flapjack syrup and berry juice tounges.
after she was done, she asked her companions what they thought was the most important part of life.
a man across the room, burried under a tweed hat and yesterday's newspaper, without looking up said, "one can not properly underestimate the importance of a little mystery."
"exactly" she said, and giggled lightning.
///
she picked up her room mate's guitar, pulled the strings in a chinese polka and looked at the clock as though she knew the exact time his letter was to arrive, waiting like a baby sitter. sitting patiently with purse in hand, watching cerfew creep closer.
she rose with a smile, godzilla strolled to her mailbox and blindly pulled fourth zip codes and a misspelled name that made the butterflys in her stomache long for the leather sachel filled with their wings.
skirtting waves and invitations, she walked towards the sand and sea. it was windy, so the spray bounced off shell walls, shot into her eyes causing her to taste salt and star light every time she licked her lips. the letter sprung open like an ancient iron gate.
she unfolded it, holding it proud against the night as it lit up like a day-glow whitewall of words.
///
Julia,
messanger of the far east, Mahatma Ghandi of the beach front,
you're lovely, i presume?
i'm doing lovely, but still in Florida,
the lovely part this time.
it's all beaches and kids with blue hair, pierced unmentionables.
everyone here's lost.
one night i borrowed a car
to visit a friend.
i spent my hours searching for a place i never found,
but found 200 more instead.
i'm living with a surfer named Darien.
he drives a parasailing boat,
and stays at his grandma's house.
you remember grandma's house?
all milk and cookies, that smell in the air.
his grand mother's a far out chick.
she speaks tibetan tounges,
dances on the stove top with soul food
and southern cooking.
life here's drunken afternoons
and rock star nights.
alwayse Midal mornings,
Asprin doesn't cut it.
but i'm twitching here,
there's an uneasy spirit in the air
and california's still calling.
so here's to finding out of Florida,
orange groves or spanish markets,
ghosts hidding under every tourist hat.
the cocaine deamonds are abound.
love to you,
stunned one.
peter van der summer
master of all lost arts.
///
the wind blew his letter into the ocean just as she read the last of the words. she watched carp and sea bass suck it down into whale stomaches or fishing nets.
///
she was at the store, trying to buy cigerettes with a palm-full of change and a tenacious smile. way gave way to way and she ended up outside in a tee shirt, flicking ashes into parking lot shrubbery with Frank Sinatra singing to her from suspended speaker boxes. she'd been waiting for something, standing with purpose. and something came when the milk of clouds floated down sewer grates of star patterns. the moon winked and whistled to her from its bird pirch.
she'd charted moon movement ever since she was old enough to make words speak through microphone pens and tonight was a jelly doughnut of round power. she had watched the bubbles of his letter rise from sea spray before running against licking winds to a store in the middle of tango streets with more stores and bendy ally ways between. each one she half expected to hear him calling from, rapping with a dumpster, learning the secrets of recyclables and crushed cardboard boxes.
she howled, lit another cigerette and fell into a friends car full of wine and bass to end up at class early the next morning after doing drunk loads of wash at a late night laundry matt.
///
African studies was her favorite class. "Africa is just a state of mind," her teacher would say. An old, loose lipped black man, with wisdom hidden behind chronic back pain. He had a squearly, red haired teaching partner that played the bad cop in an ethereal situation.
she was alwayse there five minutes early, stirring with antisipation for stories of aborigonies, elephant tusks and jungles.
charleston was a happening town. Alwayse something kicking, calling the ants to a new colony of parties or beach blankets.
she spent her nights sipping beer from presurized spaceship kegs and inquiring into the past lives of drunk football ears, makeup coated madonas.
so the next few days were physics tests, phone calls from jamaicans in jazz clubs and a jug of rum her room mate bought with her fathers latest instalment to liver problems.
and then another letter came.
///
she was sitting on the beach, watching surf boards carve the mountains of rushing white foam. her friend Morgan, a girl with the most tremendous laugh american evenings had heard since the stumbling crackle of great Indian war chiefs, was recounting her days in spanish rain forests, looking down the soup bowl of volcanoes.
"it came to me one day, you know? just, bam. my roots, my soul. i can feel brazillian churches in my blood, costa rican crab grass in my hair."
Julia smilled a deep toothy smile and rose as though an internal alarm clock was shouting a four am wake up call; she could feel his letter speaking through the girls words.
she was getting good; made a deal with a bored angle who whispered the moment her mail box tickled shut.
so she grabbed her friend, her towel and a hand full of sea shells to tye to trees along empty stretches of highway and read the letter in a voice so quiet and mystical, that the whole world bent towards her with ears perked.
///
Julia,
loop hole adventurer, queen of the fine print.
Today I made it to mexico,
That’s mex-eee-co.
Oh yes, I crossed the border in a boat,
journied with Neptune
god of sea,
buttered bagels
and boarder hopping.
a spaniard with bannana hands helped me onto land,
told me i had river rocks in my eyes.
we sung along to slow guitar songs,
ate peyote while we bounced in his truck
and howled like wolves under a sandy moon.
there are steamy borritos behind every street corner,
dark skinned, horn blowing, wow faced children
running around in clothes the color of easter eggs
or victorian cape cod summer homes,
skinning their knees and taunting the donkeys.
everything's true here, alive and fresh and in season.
mango salad with juice dripping down like a beard,
calamari, linguini and sexy.
Mexico’s fresh in my mouthe,
The taste still tickeling the depths of my bronchial anatomy.
I don't have much to tell
but i fianlly did it, i'm sending for you,
there's a ticket in here and you need to take it.
Kicking it in hammocks of the hopefull,
Peter van der summer
secretly captain desepto, frog man AND the great avenger.
///
"Mexico, oh yeah. The million times i've been there."
Morgans eyes were big now too, they met Julia's half way down to his foreign scenes of bottle caps and wrist bands. she went on and on about those little spanish kids she knew a few life times ago, the ones awash with sandals and hopskotch.
they drank tequila that night, just those two. they stayed in Julias room and tried to speak to the spirits of Aztecs, breaking their sentences with spanish nueonces.
Julia decided she'd go down and swing from palm tree eyes with her letter writting love. spring break was creeping closer, a time for freedom and the road he was blazzing for her. she saw a life for herself in every zip code he spun through. she saw them in Mardi Gras, wearing American flag jumpsuits, chanting with the masses. she saw them on florida freeways, and now in mexico. it sounded so distant. right across the border, a whole new world.
they read the letter again through the drops of an empty bottle, searching for a phone number or encoded adress. they wanted to talk to him, see through his eyes, learn outside of text books about the world going on beneath their feet. and Julia wanted a kiss.
her maps of Africa buzzed on the walls.
///
she got up early the next morning, ran along the beach. it was hot out and the sun knew it; light rimmed the water as her feet pressed messages into the sand.
she found a bench to sit down on and brush the loosened hairs from her shirt. she thought about her life.
Mexico. she decided. she had to go and meet him, this was it.
PART II
the sky was painted in murder; mango blood covered the clouds and peach/rasberry fingerprints smeared the violent skyline. as he sat watching nothing become nothing the sweedish starlight maid mopped the crime scene into a haughty, thick black. He walked up and down the rails looking into the night, wondering which platform she'd climb down.
and when she finally did peel off that train,
when she stood there with that smile on her face, beeming all twenty thousand volts of it straight into his eyes, pumping him full of that electric energy and that soft careful love,
well...
That´s when the letters stopped comming.
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snailsandjazz's journal