ALL RIGHTS RESERVED!!!!
(THIS BOOK IS INTENDED FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION. FEEL FREE TO SHARE IT, FOR
FREE. HOWEVER, DON’T BE A DICK AND TRY TO SELL IT, WITHOUT CONSENT, ON
AMAZON. FUCK AMAZON. FREE ART FOREVER!)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent
-
I tried to claw out of my mother’s pussy sideways.
It would be my first failure in life. The first of many stubborn attempts.
This novel is nothing but a diatribe. A meandering account of mental illness, affluenza, drug use, depravity, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and psychosis. It will focus mostly on demons, despair, although it will contain moments of levity and optimism. It will contain triumph.
This is not literature in its pure form.
This book was inspired by Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” and is dedicated to him. It is also dedicated to bad writers, failed musicians, Dada artists, broken actors, and comedians who enjoy being booed...
This book is in praise of hair metal and gangsta rap.
This book is for CTE survivors and strivers, and people in prisons, both physical and mental, and for those on the outside. The weirdos, demimondes, the outcasts. Those unable and unwilling to conform to consumerist society, groupthink, and traditionalist ideals.
This book will not conform to “TL;DR” culture.
And it will not conform to Cancel Culture, a pandemic in which creators are terrified to express themselves, share their imaginations, deepest thoughts…
There will be no self-censoring, no fear of the bloodthirsty vampires of political correctness.
I am not afraid of the vampires and their Stalinism. Twitter Mobs are welcome…
This book is the exorcism of demons, and its stories are written like impressionist paintings. Make of them what you will.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent This book, really, is a time capsule. A collection of memories. An account of a journey. Much of it was written during the time of CORVID, in which there was ample time for self-reflection…
This book is not a book. It is a spit in the face, a kiss, and a love letter to letters. It is a stubborn attempt, coming out sideways.
This book is ugly. It is deliberately imperfect, much like life itself.
The canvass: A hospital in Miami Beach. My mother in stirrups. My mother, a decent, learned lady, was wailing in anguish. Her svelte frame contorting. Her curly, short brown hair sweaty and matted to her scalp. Her almond eyes flashing fire red.
Me: Like Rosemary’s Baby. I’m unnatural. I should never have existed. I’m a demon. Injected like a heroin needle.
You may balk at this, but there was an unholy conception. A train of ghosts and pool of blood.
I emerged from my mother’s pussy, on an unseasonably cold December Miami Beach morning. Labor went through the night where a light dusting of snow caked the swaying palm trees. The blast of polar air trumpeting my arrival.
I was born into a puddle of shit, diarrhea, and bloody mucosa and placenta as my poor mother screamed, and the nurses performed reconnaissance.
A luscious Latina, of Cuban or Colombian eugenics, her voice full of diphthongs, passed forceps to the Jewish doctor, son of a holocaust survivor, and he poked and prodded in between my mother’s legs, into her vaginal lacuna, and with skill, unearthed me, pulled me, slimy, bloody and shit-stained into a slimy, bloody and shit-stained planet Earth.
My father, the bearded man, was berserk, snapping photos. A biologist, a U of Miami professor, he documented every moment of the birth, scientifically, pictorially, hoping to commemorate and eliminate any degree of evanescence.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Of course, nowadays this might be documented on social media, posted about, heralded to the world, accumulating tons of endorphin inducing “likes.”
But this was 1977.
The event was on film and glued into a photo album. A laminated, plastic one!
Those photo albums, now, seem like tubers growing on a potato...
I was a fat and healthy baby. Placed into a maternity ward, farm of babies, screaming, crying, in rows, in the tabernacle, not knowing what Earth had in store for us. Not knowing why we’d been expelled from the warmth of the womb. Not knowing if we’d grow to be millionaires, rapists, teachers, mass murderers, engineers, actors, accountants, lawyers, football players, homeless, veterans, drug dealers, Presidents of the USA, or janitors.
All our various fates. Our alleles. The rows of cherubs, cute as koalas. Us, on the barrier island of Miami Beach, Collins Avenue.
Us, innumerable souls, meticulously placed in oblong boxes, our first box of life, well, second after the one we’d emerged from, and we were given ducal care.
The nurse who’d feed me, a wraith, her olfactory senses, being around all those babies, daily, had to be finely tuned or non-existent.
I imagine her loving care. Her touching us with tenderness. Immutable, as our mothers recovered, got their vaginas stitched up, slept off the pain, trauma and excitement, joy of childbirth.
My father was a pharaoh. In a past life. My first memory is a foggy recollection of him taking me to a baseball game. Orioles versus Yankees, spring training, somewhere in Florida.
When I was a fetus, I moved with my parents, from NYC to Miami Beach, where I grew up, because my Pops had gotten a research position, professorship at the University of Miami.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent My father, the progenitor, the bearded man, was tall and strong, walked in long strides. He was a kind but stern man, of Russian descent. He’d been a hippy in the 1960s, but by the early 1980s, he was a hard-working man, consumed with math and science. Consumed with work. Work. Work.
Every day. He’d rise early, leave for work, spend the whole day there, return by evening with a look of both exasperation and elation.
Often, he’d bring me a present. A toy, a snack or something. And I’d await him with bated breath, running downstairs to hug him, welcome him home.
But he had a dark side to him. His temper. He’d flip on a dime, go from happy to angry. Anytime I’d do something wrong, he’d go ballistic. Yelling, cursing, throwing chairs. He’d slap, spank me.
He was also a maniac driver. Far beyond what was considered normal hostile NYC
driving.
He’d drive at frenetic speeds, cut people off, give the finger, poke his head out of the window and curse at people in his sharp, nasal, honking Bronx accent.
One of my first memories was him cutting off this car full of Latin people, I think in Miami, and my father screaming out the window at them and them cursing back at us in Spanish.
It’s fortuitous that none of those he accosted were armed and that he never had a gun, or else my trajectory in life would have been far different.
However, his driving did in fact change the trajectory of my life.
One dark night, when I was around age 5, as we returned from, something, I don’t know, my father was driving at his usual frantic pace when he nearly plowed into another car. He slammed the brakes, and me, in the front seat, in a loose-fitting seat belt, slammed and banged my skull, around the crest of my forehead, on the windshield, hitting it so hard that it cracked the windshield, though I didn’t bloody my head.
On the top of my head, I’ve got a small dent from the incident, visible only if examining it closely.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I’m sure that this incident left me concussed. With all that has come out about CTE, brain damage in football players, athletes, I wonder if this incident changed me, affected my development.
Before the accident, I’d never been in trouble, was a smart, normal child. But after, I suffered from mood swings, depression, memory issues, and I got in fights, verbal and physical and have had various mental issues plaguing me to this day.
Listening to Rosanne Barr’s story of being in a car accident as a kid and how it affected her, changed her, and hearing of Aaron Hernandez, other football players’ stories, I wondered and still do, if this accident had a similar bearing on me.
Back to the incident itself, I remember after my head smacked the windshield, I saw what was either floaters or stars, and my father, upon witnessing the cracked windshield, told me I was going to the hospital, but I retorted that I was fine.
There was no blood. But it sure hurt. I can’t remember much else of that night.
And I don’t remember if we went to the hospital or not.