Little Baby Faulkner

17

Somewhere mid-evening, mid-coke splash, I decided I needed a bath. I stood up from the floor and didn't say a word—I just stood up and tiptoed out of the room. Felt Rambuncto's look: a guy up and leaves his girls behind, unprotected—and I was barefoot, too—no use in that. I remember a Texan from film school who critiqued my use of sandals in southern California, in favor of his own boots: he said he had no use for sandals 'cause he couldn't kick in them or run. After this remark I discounted him as a cheesehead—fucking dick sucker who dated a former Victoria's Secret model. It didn't matter to him that she was 50 when he was 25. All he wanted was to be able to say to people like me that he was dating a Victoria's Secret model. To impress. I felt this type of judgement from Rambuncto. And Kepler and Cujo not only existed to back up whatever Rambuncto said—they backed up his looks as well.

I went out of the room draping my fingers over Charisma's neck and she grabbed my leg, threatening to never let go, and then I went out the door and down the crooked stairs.

In the bathroom I filled the tub with water, undressed, looked at myself in the mirror. I had that same belly that Sashi noticed when I first met her. She said she liked it—it made me look more like a man. She liked my beard for the same reason—said it made me look like the man I was becoming instead of the boy I had come from—as opposed to all the boys I went to school with, the boys I called friends.

I went to the tub and stood in it—letting my feet adjust to the hotness. Once my feet had adjusted, I knelt in the water, my heart beating fast from the coke (scarily so) and I regulated my breathing to slow down my heart. Then I braced myself on the sides of the tub and slipped all the way in.

Nothing would slow my heart. I became worried that I had done too much cocaine. That I would die here in this tub—never even make it back upstairs. I touched my nipples and my cock slowly rubbing for the extra sensation that being high on coke gives you. But also keeps you from cumming so easily. I knew everyone upstairs knew what I was doing (in general strokes) and I did not care. I was enjoying the sensual field, imagining having sex with Charisma, picturing her pussy as it had been. Remembering sliding my index and middle fingers up inside her, nothing about it jaded (as people are now) with extended knowledge that even seven year olds possess: a cornucopia of sex tips and names of supposed positions that no one has actually done. A stinky Melvin, for example—what is that? Just a joke for kids online so they can start to impress each other with the inventions of their front brain 🧠 which will later be used to attract sexual mates. Haven't you ever heard that theory?—That the front brain is in essence just a massive slice of gray matter used in mating rituals. It's just like those birds who build elaborate forts to attract mates—those things are awesome. They tug at the edges of the myth of human specialness. Those birds do exactly the same thing as we do: they build an apartment and decorate it using flowers and stick arrangements to tempt future mates.

Whatever. Those. Birds. Are. Called. They changed my whole image of birds. Creating art—decor—as good as any interior designer does. Designing for the notice of a particular bird (target) designed forth with intentional modeling of others' opinions—all that—every penny of that—falling back from one floor up, leaning backwards, beak of a chickadee, birth of a fine feathered friend, splash down into this bath heat waving all over my skin and the skin bone 🦴 connected to my ass bone my heart bone connected to my brain 🧠 bone the heat bone burns through my conscious-plexus-based deep dive eyeglass spying on me from above everything I do (aside from remaining still) raises the rate of my heart uncontrollably, even breathing (which takes me away from death) burns my brain from the inside out and I'm listening for the baby next door (Little Baby Faulkner) to make a single noise (sound) of firecracker 🧨 loudness in the sky a constellation of impressions looking both at me and at the little baby from above, what we have in common will he run into cocaine (drug abuse) feels by the time he's twelve will I be beside him there leaning over his shoulders playing my fingers 🤞 like spider legs through the thin of his t-shirt burning off him spark ⚡️ the flame 🔥 poof! his entire head 👶 goes up in flames from the pack of matches found between his fingers playing a piano 🎹 which is only a sand pile nothing to see here!—nothing to see, just a pile of sand drawn behind a plastic cover mixed with a magnet pen this is what I thought of while I'm lying in the bathtub the water 💦 running cold and every ice cube the men in black douse me with a "C" drawn over every cube falling diamonds 💎 twisting/turning downward fizzing steam rises from the surface of my bath 🛁.

I sit up. Water rushing back over my skin my whole self sweating coldness and I'm drying my pale skin no pale king here I am more a pale slave reaching to kill myself in professional meanings only create too little too large too hard to understand—I only ever meant it to be easy. Just read every word in order—the rest is done for you. It's the easiest medium in the world to enter/lick/swallow/digest just read every word from the stream and when you're done, reach up and close the handle H close off the stream of symbols being thrown at you at exactly the correct rate. Being written for your head at exactly that rate your head can read them.

I'm drawn to the child in the next room. Wiping off the water from between my toes. Putting on my clubbing pants. Yellow. Tossing my legs into a sideways dance—lengthwise, height wise—busting candy on the dance floor. Memories of dancing in Dayton every Thursday night crossed with little opportunity for a scum like me to enter the club. Only when I sneak in or am invited by my film friends to help shoot something while rich people dance and drink and drive hundred-thousand-dollar cars or SUVs all-white Range Rovers—

I'm washing my face. Coming out of a drug phase. Still high but clean. Ears finally working. Fingerprints apparent to the other hand when touching—hand to hand, fist to fist. The sight of Rambuncto, Kepler, and Cujo sitting on that couch upstairs, Rambuncto interviewing me, trying to prove to himself that I'm not good enough to fuck his girl—he doesn't even know that I fucked her first! you dumb piece of shit! Fucking guy is testing me? Dumb ass bitch motherfucker full of shit is testing me?? It makes me want to walk into a tragedy, go up there and jump into that couch throwing punches with two arms and one leg. (Leaving one leg to balance me.) Let them eat me alive. Let them melt me and burn my heart out of my chest—sound familiar?—let them fucking fuck me blow me up as I rise from my coke bath 🛁 dripping drying staring at my face in the mirror and rubbing the towel between my legs.

Stairwell passing on my left to before upstairs where I imagine Little Baby Faulkner rolling in his swallowing clothes predicting my future standing up impossibly grabbing hold of his cage slats pulling himself up like a king cobra 🐍 rising up through pushing me down my friend Nik's face on the hooded snake before me I'm leaning down avoiding every strike from my friends and enemies alike—indifference, they're the same, equally dangerous to who I might become. The comfortable apologies of my friends are one side of the same coin on which potential enemies inscribe their passages of fear.

In yellow club pants, wandering the halls like a modern monk.

Pushing open the door to little baby's room.

Seeing a clobber of blankets and flesh and listening for his heart rate but hearing nothing—breath, nothing.

I step to the crib, my head going over the gate, saying: "Hello my Little Baby Faulkner. Why did they name you that?" I feel his head and feel his pulse in the tips of my fingers. "Poor baby boy. I hear you had a predecessor who died in this very bed. Can you tell me more about that?" Strains of future come through the vessels in his forehead. I see what he sees. His would-be brother burning and turning, flying his F-16 in that Top Gun movie this version called Top Fun every classroom seat filled with Tim Curry lookalikes—this is what I'm getting from this baby—a total, eclipsing tunnel flowing from Brooklyn's pussy lines with blood I'm the first child who ever got cooked up in Brooklyn's birthing chamber—no hieroglyphs—a totally anonymous chamber. This is the result of my taking a visible coke bath everyone assuming (correctly) I was jerking off down there. But with me it's always so much more. I'm taking on correctional feels naming, analyzing, inventing everything it's inevitable that it should come to this, you—Little Baby Faulkner—my hands one on your tiny belly, the other on your neck—you: too afraid to call out in screams to your upstairs momma she won't even hear you if I suffocate you now I would do this to silence your cries and the channel of futuristic 👽 information you unload on me every time I come into your room.