Episodic

Opening my eyes, the view of a decrepit urban landscape encloses me instead of the everyday entrapment at the monitoring room.  Cognition in my brain waves asks how, why, when, where in the same blur of thought. Looking down my body sits in a wheelchair, underneath me debris stagnates on sidewalks with weeds growing through the cracks.  A loading dock of an abandoned building stands before me. Buildings of six to twelve stories high lurk in the near distance.  A cold cloudy day today, but the time of year escapes me, but late fall a good guess, when the tragedy of a looming winter sets in. Attired in pyjamas, other than the briskness of the air I hardly notice the new surroundings, just numb to the situation.  Numb in senses and outlook to all the disruptions my escapades inflicted on others. I can never go back, me a tarnished ill-repute good for only sorrow man, and not even a man but seventeen.  The crack-whore I saw yesterday that looked about forty asked me to guess her age. When I answered wrong she bellowed, “eighteen, a lot can happen in a year.” With that remark, I knew my life took a fast digression with the only direction being south until death. Music hardly audible starts to this landscape, a soundtrack if you will, and I recognize it as the beginning of the album Illmatic, by Nas.

       Subtle catchy loops and samples telling of the street life, black street life, take me back to summer. Driving in cars, on the walkman, on the stereo, or viewed on cable. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, Pharcyde, Cyprus Hill, Wu-tang and others filled my auditory senses.  White America listening to hip-hop because of the new sounds. People coming of age in the mid-nineties shall remember this and alternative music.  So, now listening to Illmatic I embrace the beats forgetting my doom, not rejecting or disliking the sound like people of my physical description just a few years older.  Skateboarding, skateboarders embrace it when the last generation Metalica, Circle Jerks type music dominated the scene. Was the skateboarding lifestyle the cause or reason for my fall? Hip hop music amps you, my agitation flares to a good sensation. However, recently while listening to songs the lyrics change up, to bombard me, to ridicule my existence highlighting my follies and disappointment.

       “Nas should be locked in a cell,” and so should I. Spreading disease by living, thieving loved ones, and doing acts inappropriate to society. Being a free citizen in America one must abide by clear rules, regulations, and the laws of the land.  I got carried away, things escalated, and I can’t escape the severity of the situation.  The government, either the CIA or the FBI caught me, and with the upcoming civil war they unjustly accused me with igniting the flame that will burn the flesh of many. They don’t believe my innocence but want to protect the American people from the upcoming onslaught. Rwanda type brutality will arrive soon. On the other hand the revolutionaries are not savory spirits, mostly consisting of drug dealers, money launderers, and the whole sick lot of sinning for money enterprises.  A common knowledge persists that these bandits force crooked coat hangers into women’s wombs to discharge unwanted fetuses. They grab middle school kids and force injections. Been going on forever, but now this underbelly of America got itself organized and in battalions will charge the whole country. By the year 2000, every one will be hooked on hard drugs and our collective productivity will be less than Europe. I want nothing to do with the narcotic revolutionaries, but since I partook in drugs myself the American Authorities consider me suspect, and locked me in the monitoring room. A back stabber told the government lies about me, I heard the conversation miles away. Basically they think I’m the one, the Capa Don, who organized these thugs into a powerful entity.  They will torture me, including sodomy with instruments, to settle information they need that I don’t know. My constitution no longer yearns to fight, I’m sick.

       An itch on my arm bothers me, so I look down, and the pajama sleeve covers my limb. With my left arm I attempt unbuttoning my sleeve. My hand works slowly.  My breathing escalates with effort awkwardly forcing the button to release. Folding the sleeve upward sends shivers throughout my arm. About three quarters up my forearm the ease stops, the sleeve caught. I start tugging. I’m weak, spent but curious to see my itch, how my decaying body shows visible deterioration. I tug harder, heaving up and up until I hear a rip and my arm becomes exposed. A bandage attached itself to my arm cradle which I pull until it comes off. A needle is there, attached to it a tube. Slowly my left hand feels the tube underneath my pajamas up to my shoulder, to my neck and up.  I bend uncomfortably in my wheelchair gazing upward at a big bag of fluid about a foot over my head, attached by a pole to this mobile contraption. This concoction feeds the poison directly to my veins, a slow, but sure assassin.  Ghetto eyes stare down from the buildings calculating when to destroy, to kill.

       How did I get AIDS? Not HIV, but AIDS, giving my death pal quick happiness, instead of waiting sixty odd years. As a child a blood transfusion saved my life, this circa 1984, when tainted blood became the status quo. I remember waking up from that operation, and the nurse pulling the tube out of my chest. The tube stretched infinite, a tube full of blood, never sure if it contained my blood or the tainted blood. Another reason for my infection involves an escapade about a month ago, yet time again escapes me. One sunny day I skateboarded downtown Toledo by myself, straying from Portside, I ventured west. Past the Subway eatery I went and found myself in the warehouse portion of the city, looking for skateable concrete objects.  All the sudden I saw a lanky man dressed up Beastie Boys hostile wearing baggy khakis, an oversized rugby shirt, and a ball cap with a straight brim.  I saw his skateboard by the side of the building and went up to him deciding to go with the flow. Talking did not happen; he simply gave a gesture with his index finger to the alley. In this alley two picnic folding chairs were set up, I sat in one and he sat in the other.  Opening a bag quickly he took out a syringe and plastic cup of fluid. Pushing up the sleeve to his rugby shirt he got fixed. Then he drew the fluid from the plastic cup into the syringe, and passed the needle to me, which I injected. What I do not know. The guy just smiled, and that’s what I remember. Rape could have occurred. I woke up in the monitoring room. My life changed with that mistake, my already existing HIV sped up, graduating to AIDS status.

       “Life’s a bitch,” track three fills this urban landscape. Nas and an unknown by me cameo produced a song of mellow aggression. The chorus chimes, “life’s a bitch and then you die/that’s why we get high/cuz you never know when you’re going to go.” This anthem portrays people escaping with narcotics to ease legitimate pain. But me as a suburban boy am a shame.  Parents trying to provide a future and I crushed my own by the here and now. The sounds, the appetite, and the yearning for experience got me into a hazardous lifestyle. All started almost two years ago with a couple of puffs of weed without getting high. The next time I got high.  Eventually I cared more for the parties than skateboarding. Who needs activity when you can achieve bliss sitting in a chair? For over a year and a half I kept it to booze and weed, but in the past month or so my constitution changed, my restraint fled me, and I took what I could get.  A dude gave me pills and I took them. An hour later I presented the philosophy of Wu-tang’s chess boxing to my mother. ‘The game of chess is like a sword fight/you must think first before you move.’ Analyze the operation of tactical warfare in everyday life aggressively seeking the dominant position to prevail your cause. Riddles in these rhymes, and as a listener you need to figure them out. My mom told me to go to sleep. They pushed drugs on me, to con me with the blame for society’s desperate ways, before my confinement to the monitoring room.

       Did you ever notice that photographs tell immense stories.  Moving picture films tell what actually happened, but still-shots needs to be deciphered or decoded to know the reality of the scene.   Case in point: that depression photograph of a woman sitting outside. Before reading the caption you realize trauma, hardship, starvation, an unsettling nerve of turmoil, and so forth. A woman who looks lost, without resources, and with no grain of hope left in life. The photograph taken in black and white, but time does not register until you read the caption. This woman was an unemployed migrant worker out in the western states.  After reading that information, one thinks more, the life she lead, the restraint of everyday essential commodities by an unseen force taking work away from her.  Even though taken in the depression the photographs possesses a timeless representation of human suffering. Today kids complain about not purchasing brand-name products, not the lack of products, but in the past month I saw the crack-whore, who carried the same look of deprived desperation on her over aged face. So suffering is timeless, a percentage of humanity gets screwed by a reaction to a shitty life.  Photographs of humans are timeless, take away a distinct clothing style and you get beautiful, ugly, privileged, deprived, intellect, stupidity all in the facial expressions. Looking at a photograph a viewer must conclude attitude, ways of speech, ways of walking, and personal interests.  But no one analyzing a photograph can actually tell the date until told or read.  Listening to One-Love, selection number seven on Illmatic, in this New York City type landscape, let’s discuss the cover of the album.  A photographed face of a youth, about thirteen or fourteen takes up a large portion of the cover art.  This teenager fumes in his photo; mad at something, mad at the world; a black adolescent with short natural hair. Hostility, anguish both amply describes his expression.  Hatred of what one asks, of the forced street life, not attaining the American material ideal? Hard to tell, and like the depression picture, it possesses timelessness.  The viewer and potential buyer can not logically guess the date of the photograph. Photographed during pre civil rights, the turmoil NYC experienced in the seventies, the early eighties with the birth of hip-hop aggressiveness, or recently? I never read the credits, so I may never know. But the Illmatic album cover provokes more thought in this cassette and now CD era.

       Surveying the scene before me of urban shambles I strangely feel that I’m in the ‘it ain’t hard to tell’ video, the one video getting television play off of this album.

       Over the past month or so, somehow like a Star Trek movie, my body teleports to different scenarios and locales always returning to the monitoring room. Like the time that I met the Beastie Boy junkie I awakened on a skateboard riding away from portside and dreamily glided meeting him in an alley. My prophecy by the crack-whore unfolded at night with my having no knowledge of how I got there. I thought my encounter took place in Toledo, but the landscape had qualities of numerous cities Americana. How I think of these random explorations, when I lay on my bed in the monitoring room, with the needle in my arm attached to the tube that connects to the bag of fluid that feeds me the poison. The government caught me, recording my death to send as a warning to the revolutionaries. Why they put the television set and radio inside the monitoring room telling me directly minute by minute the latest updates on all the catastrophes is a question beyond my capabilities to answer.  My guess would be scare tactics, to show outside this room on the forth floor carries more degrees of dangers to me than a slow monitored and recorded death. Out there, a Rwanda type machete will chop off my head, or I’ll be the first crushed in the human stampede. Scare tactics must be the reason why, to keep me here to document my death by poison, by my heightened AIDS symptoms, by if I had the courage to wrap that monitoring microphone wire around my neck and lynch myself, or if I majestically jumped out of the window with a triple flip flourish. With death my struggle will be over. But I feel my impact on planet Earth incomplete, so my body resists these government forces and criminal dangers, by taking these unexplained teleport vignettes. However, each vignette contains a moral. The Beastie Boy guy vignette told how a childhood passion can lead to the perils of America’s underground, and the crack-whore vignette foretold my very own upcoming road to doom.  Sitting in a wheel chair at the remake of the ‘it ain’t hard to tell’ video must be for a reason, it must mean something, a clue my damaged mind tries to convey.

       Back to thinking about my stationary dwelling, the monitoring room.  They, the government officials, ask me questions.  They ask things like the current year and name the president of the United States. I answer correctly, 1994 and Bill Clinton. Seemingly similar to scribes they take secret notes; dismiss themselves to go plot with the other agents. One time, as if rising from a blackout, I arouse to a monitoring room full of agents. Like a live photograph they all sat or stood with their faces directed to me. But these men lacked faces: devoid of eyes, nose, and mouth they appeared to be smooth angular wood carvings with varying tints of color. Dim lighting captured the monitoring room on that day giving me a personal engraved visual memory. I imagine an incense candle in one corner, one of the mannequins smoking a cigar, and other foreign and timeless attributes. I don’t remember the artist, but the painting featured an assortment of dog breeds in a pool hall filled with smoke acting like humans. Taking the basic living characteristic of decadence with dogs as the cast. My government agent scene reminds me of that painting but without the gaiety. Something sinister underlines the monitoring room, all the observation of me, and the secrecy. They do not want me to know the reasons of this confinement, and all enlightenments come from my own thought process which might be flawed.  At first I enjoy the departure from the monitoring room, but they all end with me doing a disreputable crime or finding out discouraging facts.

       “I’ll leave you froze like heron in your nose, Nas, I rock well, it ain’t hard to tell.” This gym of lyricism and others amplify the last song on this album.  Now it fills this landscape, the volume turned up supernaturally. The Michael Jackson sample mixed with other loops makes this hit hip hop single memorable.  To hear a song, and then have it repeated over and over in your warped mind, makes it on a personal level, a gym.  Then one buys the album, now CD, and repeats the song selection numerous times.  As a listener you concoct your own day dreams or possible delusions involving your own being doing impressive actions with the song as a soundtrack. Skateboard videos always include a soundtrack, music to the trick sequences; the selection alluding to the rider’s personal interest or lifestyle.  Before this year, I wanted a rock song to accompany my first pro video clip. But now I want this song, ‘it ain’t hard to tell.’  I know that this New YorkToledo scene but I like the sounds. Years from now, I will still enjoy this song. Currently I’m trying to come to terms that because of my illness, my skateboard video part will never come to fruition, but I can always listen to music until my death, and maybe even after that natural indignation. melody does not fit the

       Near the loading dock, a door opens, and out walks a seventeen, to my guess, black male teenager with a green parka jacket, and a green backpack. Standing about six feet tall, he looks a healthy skinny, not skin and bones like me because of sickness. The backpack shows scholastics, which I’m probably done with. Numerous differences must exist between me and this guy, but surely we share similar components. Living here I can assume he displays some game in him, of the party, narcotics abundant in the urban downfall. The Nas song blasts and he walks in my general direction, but veering off center as if his destination differs from my location. Thirty paces off he walks slowly with earphones on his ears. Should I summon him as he gets closer, ask him of my whereabouts. Am I really in New York City? A city that fascinates me and maybe this guy can inform me on many things. I also think of the similarities, people the same age are universal; near the end of high school, the future vast.  But news clips highlight the disgusting living in urban ghettos, dangers around every corner. In the past month I’ve been planted into a strange world of hell, but this guy my own age may have had similar but stronger experiences his entire life. I will die soon, but he will continue to live in hell. Finally he gets close enough to gesture to and I wave my arms and he notices and alters his path to my wheelchair. In short time he stands in front of me and I search my brain to formulate a question, with death the only concept on my mind.  After a minute of awkward silence I ask: “are you positive?” His face turns into a timeless grimace, gives me a cold stare, and quickly resumes walking in his intended direction. I realize I questioned the same person with the grimace on the Illmatic cover, four years older, and unlike me, he does not have AIDS.

       The music stops, I open my eyes and am alone in the monitoring room. And I must ask myself this question: What’s going on?