Prime Time
Sometimes, a lot of the time, when Stringer closes and me and some of the local mutants find ourselves standing on the corner at 3 o'clock in the morning full of this weird energy, all messed up and nowhere to go, we all head over to Johnny Eyes' place.
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Prime Time
Walking The Dogma
Richard C. Walls
by
Sometimes, a lot of the time, when Stringer closes and me and some of the local mutants find ourselves standing on the corner at 3 o'clock in the morning full of this weird energy, all messed up and nowhere to go, we all head over to Johnny Eyes' place. It's not that it's the only television around but Eyes is a timid soul so four or five of
us can burst in on him in the middle of the night and literally take over his apartment until, one by one, we pass out and then, one by one, we crawl out to go be wherever the hell we are when we aren't around. It's a tradition.
One night Apeshit, Simpson, me and this guy with a hairlip who was so intense he didn't have a nickname (we were all a little afraid of him) are standing on the corner feeling bewildered that the bar had closed and passing around a bottle of Roller Derby when all of a sudden Ape sez "Johnny Eyes!" and the hairlip yells "Fuckin' Johnny Eyes!" and we're off.
When we get to Eyes' place we start pounding On his apartment door yelling "Gestapo!" and "Bring out your dead!" and other witty stuff until the wimp opens the door and gives us that half smile that sez "Walk all over me, I'm used to it" which we proceed to do.
Simpson plays the TV like it was a pinball machine, a twist of the fine tuning, a slide of the antenna, an ungodly whack on the side while the rest of us sack the fridge which is kept stocked with fine cheap wines, malt liquor and occasionally something exotic like whiskey. Eyes keeps his fridge humming 'cause he knows that as long as he appeases us we don't remove his face. Another tradition..
The three of us tumble into the living room with glasses, bottles, and.cans ready to try some new combinations while Simpson, satisfied that he's tuned in Detroit's one and only all-night station the best he can, sits crosslegged on the floor and starts to roll an elephant joint. We ain't snobs.
Simpson exhales a cloud of marijuana smoke so dense that for a moment his head is lost behind the effluence. He passes it to the hairlip and begins his rap. "This is the one", he sez speaking directly to the TV, "where Michael Redgrave takes over this dead guy's identity in a POW camp, starts writing letters to the guy's wife, falls in love with her, and it has a happy ending after she gets over the initial shock.
Only it's ninety minutes long plus commercials." He knows almost all the flicks they show by heart and usually talks thru them all, talks to the television. Nobody cares. Apeshit is in a half nod tho he's still scarfing down the booze and, as usual, every few minutes he mutters "Oh shit", no doubt commenting on some interior monologue 'cause it never has anything to do with anything Simpson is saying or anything else. Me, I've given up thinking with the booze and the dope caressing my brain and I'm staring at the TV set wishing (and some nights I manage to talk the guys into it) the volume was turned down because I'm so totally and uninhibitedly
involved in the sheer idiot pleasure of watching the images on TV.
Eyes sits in the corner watching, quiet. It's a normal night. Except for this hairlip whose eyes keep bouncing back from the TV to Simpson like he's at a tennis match and doesn't seem to be anywhere near the point of relaxing which is the whole idea.
After the plot synopsis Simpson goes into a fantasy rap about a POW camp which is pretty funny because he can never remember the names he gives his characters so he keeps changing them around, then he goes on about what a "complete and knighted asshole" Michael Redgrave is and how the only good flick he ever made was Dead Of Night and this leads into another fantasy rap, this time not funny but really bizarre, about Vanessa Redgrave stripping and cleaning a PLO machine gun without using her hands. His monologue ends about the same time the movie does.
It's around 4:00 a.m. now and I'm completely locked into the grey shapes on the tube, behind the booze, behind the grass I watch the fluid motions of the images and the random rhythm of the scene changes with mindless rapture. The light from the tube attracts me, soothes me, lifts me. At four in the afternoon I'm as painfully lucid as the next person but in the dead of night, sitting in front of the tube, full of the national drug, I'm insane.
My rapture is shattered, rudely. The second movie has begun and Simpson has begun on his second monologue and all of a sudden the hairlip screams loudly "DON'T YA EVER SHUDDUP, YA GODDAM MORON?" and extends a stiff arm and flat palm in slow motion and hits Simpson on the side of the head "thwack" like that. Simpson starts to get up from where he's sitting on the floor but his legs buckle and he wavers a few feet and then hits his head hard against the cutting edge at the top of the TV set. It looks like he's crouching in front of the set with his ear pressed close and listening—his eyes stare straight ahead, and he listens. Then I see two trickles of blood start their slow journey down the TV screen. Purple blood, illuminated by a bright grey light. It's impossible to tell how badly hurt he is but I don't care. My connection has been violated.
Staring at the phosphorescent blood I hear this unearthly sound coming from a dark corner of the room, a sound like a wounded animal gasping for air and for a moment I'm afraid to focus on where the sound is coming from 'cause I don't want another bad image to carry around with me but when I manage to see thru the darkness all I see is Johnny Eyes. Laughing like a maniac. sm,
