No stopping – by Jacob Murray
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
, done and dusted, you’d laid him out in the entryway of the parking lot, the one in the city, the one with the grime and the whiteblue neons and the words NO STOPPING printed in a fat red on the garagedoor, you were panting like a hypertensive dog, Paulie laid out on the concrete, your buddy Paulie from way back, from the Mums and Sons yoga class, Paulie with the lisp and the cervical hypolordosis, that Paulie, goddamned fool, miracle his mother didn’t disown him, child who couldn’t do child’s pose, and all these years later he still couldn’t crabwalk to save his life, look, look at him, barely moving, barely getting anywhere, just slipping around in the bloodpuddle and the tequila, the Prospero Blanco from that fat hexagonal Prospero Blanco bottle you’d cracked across his jaw, the jaw that had never ever grown even a single beard hair, here in the night in the city, vomitchunks sneezing themselves out of Everywhere’s nose, and
you’d made the whole mess, the mess that laid Paulie out, those Prospero bottleshards bumblebeeing however you willed them to, like that bloke Prospero with that tempest in that Shakespeare play, yeah, now YOU were Prospero, like a master yogi Prospero, like Prospero if Prospero knew how to do the scorpion pose, and he was Antonio if Antonio had gone bald and couldn’t do a fucking catcow, laying there, laying there and mouthing something about the rarer action, that beardvirgin jaw hanging open like an emergency exit door for his beardless soul, and it was his fault, Paulie’s fault, like a modern Doctor Frankenstein or Doctor Jekyll but without the postgrad degree, mhm, MISTER Paulie (DipArts) was a victim of his own creation, since
Paulie got you onto Reds in the first place, he’d told you all about the Reds, told you they were great, secret to his success, he owed everything he had to those pills, those gentle loving little pills, even one a day and you’d get shitloads done, every second dilating into a minute and every minute into an hour, like a dahlia, he’d said, every moment blooms and bursts with COLOUR, colour and LIFE, and you liked the sound of the life and the colour, but Paulie didn’t tell you that it was only one colour, just red, and maybe you shoulda done your own research but, fuck, you hadn’t written a single good sentence since never and Paulie was on his second book deal already, and you hated that fact, Paulie doing better than you as a writer, Paulie, come on, PLEASE, Paulie wrote like McCarthy and McCarthy wrote like Faulkner and reading Faulkner was like watching grass grow even if you smoked some meth beforehand, holy canNOLI, every sentence Paulie wrote was a life sentence and yet he had it all, home and car and life-partner and a Pomeranian cross, and
you were getting nowhere, had nothing, were nothing, all the stuff and things and bobs and bits bloodletted into a grey deadness, shrivelled, wilted, wisping up into Nowhere’s very large pores, fuck that, you needed MORE, more of anything, write more, hold more, shout more, buy more overnight oat sachets and more products from the La-Roche Posay Rosalaic line so your skin quit being so red, you were desperate for more, more than Paulie had, so you started taking Reds and
the Reds made you perfect, first pill hit like the Big Bang, it was all gogogo, no sleep, no mental blanks, every thought a live round, and instantly you became better than everyone else, the flaccid people, the people who fish and cry and make homemade yogurt and look at the moon, who collect old coins and browse around Peter Alexander because it smells good in there, pathetic, like statues, or rumours, yes, rumours of statues hanged by windsorknots, they couldn’t hear the music like you could, the way it pulsated in your ears, skull, hands, around your lungs, like a hug if hugs were interesting, they couldn’t hear the music so they didn’t dance, they just statued and rumoured and talked about how one might grow a SCOBY at home, and
suddenly you could WRITE, by god you could, you were some kind of demiurge, full of rough magic, creator and creation, the second coming, like TS Eliot but with regular-sized ears, and Reds were everything, those beautiful ovate pills with the little flame imprints, they were the everything that everything else existed for, they made everything happen, yet on Reds nothing had to happen for everything to be happening, and you realised you could smell the roses without ever stopping to smell them, so
you threw out your La-Roche Posay Rosalaic moisturiser and cut Paulie off and moved closer to the Reds, moved in with the dealer guy Paulie put you onto, far away from the beaches and the churches and the Mums and Sons yoga classes, and you started taking more, way more, more than Paulie EVER could’ve, and soon it was all red always, gogoGO, write in red pen, always one big sentence, the ETERNAL life sentence, no stopping, all your veins turned into arteries, crimson sun round the clock hemorrhaging all over Everywhere, perpetual dawnsprawl, and you started dealing Reds, yes, amazing, dealing Reds to fund your own, sort of like if an ouroboros found his tail especially yummy, all your nights spent in the red light district outside the clubs selling Reds to the redcheeked gogo dancers so they could gogo without ever stopstopping, and it was beautiful, beautiful like the word of god if god could write like you could, and the word unbecame flesh when
one afternoon the dealer guy told you Paulie owed him a couple grand, and he needed you to collect, he’s got some signing at a bookstore til 8, he told you, so ya should be able to grab him on his way back to his place on Pitt, you know where, door next to that parking garage, with the blue neon lights, blahblahblah, so you left the dealer guy and went there and waited in the shadow and the citystink til Paulie came skipping down the lane holding a bottle of Prospero Blanco, and you saw his right hand all clawlike, fingers ribcaged, sore from all the autographing, and instantly you knew
you had to kill him, money or no money, who cares, can’t buy happiness but can kill Paulie, it was somehow very important that you kill him IMMEDIATELY, cuz it didn’t matter that you could write now so long as Paulie could write too, that DOG with his cautionary tails (ha-ha), and it didn’t matter that ‘Prospero’ and ‘Faust’ mean the same thing neither, so you jumped out, out into that neon buzzblur, and you snatched the bottle and struck him with the heel of it hard, it smashed, and you knew then and there, here and now, you knew he wouldn’t make it upstairs, up to his Pomeranian cross, up to the Deneroll cervical spine traction device he used to restore the gentle backwards curve in his neck, no, he’s dying, dying with a fucked up spine, like King Richard III, or Kurt Cobain, and he fell slow and dumb to the ground, and that was that, done ▼
Image: Shvets Productions - Pexels
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