Richard Allen Story - Lisbon

Lalo

I wake to find my open mouth stuck to that fucking couch.
The one Lalo’s grandmother gave to him.
I pull a piece of fabric from my lip and imagine all the
semen and regurgitated liquor that must inhabit this sinewy thread.
The atmospheric bleach that is the Los Angeles summer
is pouring through the window.
As I scan my surroundings, I realize Lalo is not in his usual place,
sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, doing his wake up shot,
which he boots four or five times,
then squirts Jackson Pollack style on a piece of canvas.
He most likely tipped off to the store for his favorite breakfast,
one can of Kern’s banana juice and two packs of Swirl Danish with nuts.

I head to the kitchen to rummage around for a cotton shot,
which in most addicted households wouldn’t get a fly high.
However, Lalo is a dealer. He’s my dealer,
and what he leaves for dead would overdose the average junkie rock star.
Much to my dismay, and like a strung out Mother Hubbert was here,
the kitchen is clean of any morsel of dope.
Even the spoons, which are normally encrusted with something,
are washed and in the rack.
What the fuck is going on here,
I think to myself, this place is normally a Petri dish of decay and filth.
Well, I have to find something or else I’ll be all fetal and shitting myself.

I walk to my car, hop in, and point it downtown.
Alverado Street, to be exact.
As I sit in the noon sun cramping up in traffic,
I wonder where the fuck he is.
He passed out in his wife beater and shark skin pants last night.
The uniform of choice among
the more Anglofied Mexican dope dealers in Hollywood.
He looks like David Bowie covered in Chicano.
If he wasn’t so strung out, he’d get more ass than a toilet seat.
He has a Cadillac, a ‘62 Coupe de Ville in mint condition,
and a ton of money, always.
He’d have a lot more if he didn’t have two hungry arms to feed,
one of which is mine. I’m worried, but I have to get straight.

As I leave Alverado Street with five balloons in my mouth,
I feel much better. In the church of my heart, the choir is on fire.
How convenient that street dealers in L.A. sell their goods in balloons.
Only once did I have to swallow them after copping,
and then dig them out of my own shit
to find them in perfect shape, ready to be injected.
Who says junkies don’t lead glamorous lives?

Not wanting to go through that ordeal again,
I head towards “Jack in the Box” off the 101.
“Jack in the Box” is a dope fiend’s
bathroom away from bathroom in the Los Angeles area.
One toilet, one sink, one customer at a time, and a locking door.
As I sit cross-legged on the floor, I get my kit out.
A kerchief, wrapped and folded, with one bottle cap,
one fresh piece of cotton, and one very beaten set of works.
So beaten that the numbers and lines can’t even be seen.
Suddenly there’s a knock, followed by a severe pulling of the door.
Not the ordinary customer we have here, I think as I get my shit together,
which wouldn’t have taken as long
if the tar I just shot wasn’t so fucking good.
Finally I compose myself and walk out,
right into the biggest, barrel-chested cop I’ve ever seen.
All yours officer, have a nice day.
I walk with a quickness to the door, trying not to look the way I feel.
As I get to the their, some fat women
is trying to push someone through in a wheelchair,
using one hand to push and the other to open.
I tell her to get back for Christ sakes,
and I’ll do it myself. But, before I can, I feel a dreadful tap on my shoulder.
I don’t even have to look. It was the man in blue,
and he was holding my kit,
my kerchief with all the evidence needed to lock my ass up.
He pushes the door open for the woman and then turns toward me.
Shit, here it comes. Sir, you left this in the men’s room. That was it.

As I high tail it in felonious creepers,
I reach my car, get in and turn over the engine.
My cassette player kicks in the Violent Femmes,
“this will go down on your permanent record.” Not this time, I think.
That cop must be straight out of the academy,
a man on a galloping horse could see I was fucking ripped.
As I leave the parking lot, I spot the woman
with the enormous fuselage and her wheeled companion.
I feel sorry for the man
being pushed and shoved everywhere by that behemoth.
He must be caught in her gravitational pull. I speed home.

I unlock the front door of Lalo’s apartment and head to the kitchen.
I grab a clean spoon, and realize it would be a shame
to shoot such good dope with such an old, barbed up set of works.
So I go next door, to the apartment of this chick who digs Lalo.
I tell her our toilet is busted and ask her if I could use hers.
Thanks, I’ll just be a second.

I open the medicine cabinet. I grab two new sets of insulin syringes,
and as I’m about to close the cabinet door,
I see a script just recently filled for valium. Well, don’t mind if I do.
I wonder if her shrink gave her these for her depression,
most likely brought on by Lalo’s dope dick
and his lack of interest in anything to do with sex.
Thank god for depressed diabetics,
I say under my breath as I leave.

I get back and dump all three balloons in the cooker, and I’m off.
The dream is always the same. Back on the bottom of my personal pond.
It’s warm and safe, and I watch life go by on the surface.
In my fifty dollar cocoon, my womb, my womb with a view.

Being dragged to the surface by a knock on the door.
I open it. I’m shocked to see Lalo’s sister, who I’ve only met once.
Before I can step back to let her in, and with tears falling on her shoes
she tells me Lalo’s dead.
I saw him just last night. I’m in shock.
I snap to like I just got a shot of Narcon in my heart.
She asks me to go down and identify him.
She stammers softly, he’s been beaten very badly.
Will you please do that for me?
I just look at her face for what seems like forever.
Yeah, I’ll go do it. Where do I have to be?

As I am escorted into the room the next day with my guts in a knot,
there he is on a table just like you see on Quincy or some show.
His head is covered, but his torso and right arm
are exposed. I can see his tattoo,
a Germs blue circle with a cheetah jumping through it.
Do you recognize this tattoo?

Yeah, but don’t you want me to look at his face for a positive identification?
Son, the man says to me, he’s been beaten to death with a hammer, a ball peen hammer over twenty or thirty times.
I look down at the cloth covering his head
and realize it shows no contour,
no height whatsoever.
It was perfectly flat.

-Richard Allen

Sighing Down the Wind so Sadly by Richard Allen

The fall rain is hitting the window next to me
And the tangled trees bare of leaves
mock my dread
as the sky slips to night.

The bar I am sitting in is sparsely populated
Mostly drooping men alone,
posted on stools and evenly spaced, for elbow room.

There are two women in the booth behind me
Discussing what HE said
HE said something to the one
And the other couldn’t believe it.

I didn’t notice as my waitress with a belly like the bough of a ship approached,
to take my empty glass.
I was busy wiping steam from the window and looking for her.

In a voice of despairing tone, like bag pipes
She asked if I wanted another
I nodded and she disappeared into the smoky distance.

I started to gaze into the slick and empty streets again
When I was momentarily distracted from my longing
By the juke box, kicking in the Stones “No Expectations”
As it tore through the smoky black sadness of the bar,
I watched as some of the drooping men took notice,
Except for a guy behind me who wished loudly that they turn it down
As I wished I had an EXTRA pamphlet on euthanasia.

It didn’t matter though, all I could think of was my girl.
She was leaving today
Going back to Berlin a night flight to the father land
I wished I was going with her,
returning to that city of sinister kinkyness before dawn like a vampire
I loved that city where even the shadows seemed artistic in expression.

And as much as I denied it, I loved her even more.
I wished I was there leaving her love behind
Instead of her here leaving mine.
New York would certainly take its toll on me this winter.

When the waitress returned
I was once again wiping the window with the side of my hand.
Then suddenly she was there, fumbling with an umbrella
In the street light that revealed the severity of the storm

I lept up banging my knee on the table and shot for the door,
Leaving my waitress confused
As I cut a path through the swirling cigarette smoke.
Opening that door FOR her, I was opening a scar for myself.

We returned to the table through the prying eyes of solitary men
and I wiped the rain from her cheeks.

Christiana Gableman of Belzig Straße, Berlin was beautiful on
Levels too numerous to mention.
She ordered a beer with a curling smile
I looked into her face and felt again that everything was something
Even if in the peripheral, the mud storm,
kept blowing up against the window panes.

Christiana had green eyes of optimistic innocence
And an angular face, full of spirit and expression
Her thoughts were delivered in poignant words through one of the
Most beautiful smiles I’d ever seen,
the slender hand she had used to point at me the night we met,
to say “You like me, huh?”
was now moving her henna hair from her expressionless face.
The way she looked at me was not the same and never would be again
The likeable badness she had accepted when we met
was wearing as thin as the ice I was skating on in life.

We talked about old times avoiding what was happening now
What was happening now was her getting out.
She couldn’t watch me go down
I remembered a year into our relationship
when she uttered those three little words all women did at some point.
“Your’re Killing Yourself”

That was the summer I had spent with her in Berlin,
even Berlin summers were forbidding
We had spent the few days of sunshine at a city pool,
that resembled a Fritz Lang nightmare.
We sat drinking eastern block Champagne while
the ghastly pale residents of that sector dipped themselves.

I came home on a flight paid for by her
missing the fall of the wall by a month.
On that plane ride home I dozed and dreamt that I was a child
taking a train home with the bodies of faceless loved ones in the last car.
Over time, my heart that was soft as flint going into the relationship
had been softened and destroyed by my own excesses
That year we corresponded through letters
and mixed tapes full of Lee Hazelwood.

Then she returned to the city, to me,
and I began to believe that life was possible,
Even though I knew that I always lost the people I cared for the most.
I tried to stay clean and I tried not to push her away,
but, winter was returning to kill me and my nights thundered
with the roar of chemical experiments and over indulgence.
She was always there for me. She loved and trusted me and I her,
but I didn’t trust myself, and so a cornucopia of tragic events
had brought us to this table and smoky bar for the last time.

I paid the check and we walked to my apartment for her bags.
As Christiana walked through the room, she started to cry,
as I put my foot over what looked like a final rent notice slid under the door.
Walking out through the dark corridor of my building
she made me promise to get clean and write her
both of which would fade in time

On a train full of homeboys we huddled with my arm around her
and at HER gate, we kissed and then she was gone

Returning to the city, I wanted only to fall in bed and not wake up
but as I approached my front door I found it had been pad-locked
I banged on the landlord’s door but no one answered.
Hating life, love and myself equally, I reached into my pocket
Counted my money and spent every dime I had on a bundle of dope
When I came to, it was dawn and I was on an empty A train in far Rockaway,
I walked sick and cold to the frigid beach and sat
till the rains came and swept me away.