I remember a
Hannibal Lechter movie, with Giancarlo Giannini,
where a character is
disemboweled and defenestrated, and he goes out
a window with a liana
vine on his ankle, like a bungee cord, and his guts
spill out in the
street, on the cobblestones, the splash, the odor, the reds
and yellows, the
purple, twitching, hideous, I almost did that to a co-worker
with a No. 2 shovel,
his small and large intestines steaming in the sand,
it was on a burial
mound, I was shovel-shaving, and he was teaching me
a lesson, like Harry
Andrews and Sean Connery in The Hill. He got right up
in my face and spit
on me. He called me mister. He was trying to
provoke me,
like Vince Lombardi
in spring training. Fuck you,
coach. Who do you think
you are—Richard
Nixon? Adolph Hitler? I can take anything you can
dish out, grinning
my death’s-head grin. The SS looked down
on Nazis.
The Nazis were a
bunch of bleeding amateurs. The SS were
cadremen.
I was my own
cadre. My own antihero.
Immobilized in
Panacea.
I hadn’t even
started
writing yet. I was
in training.
Nobody knew it.
I knew. One is enough,
if it’s the right
one. I knew
I was going to be a
writer,
and this was a
test. It wasn’t
the last. Little did I know
it isn’t over
yet. It doesn’t end.
Why would it
end? It continues.
It’s a never-ending
soap opera.
It’s not
subtle. It’s obvious.
Tighten up. Here they come.
I hear
footsteps. I feel tellurian vibrations.
Sons of the Shaking
Earth. An offshoot of
the Buzzard
Cult. An early version.
I was a dirt
archeologist.