238
A pickup truck overloaded with illegal immigrants veered off a highway and crashed into trees in rural South Texas, killing at least 14 people, including a woman who calls herself the “Black Madam” charged with murder in the death of a 12-year-old London girl from a buttocks-enhancing silicone injection at a Philadelphia airport hotel. The 12-year-old girl died after her buttocks exploded, near Buffalo, NY, injuring four others in the home at the time.
237
He was arrested for shoplifting a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce,
He worked as a merchant at several flea markets.
The situation with those dancing chicks,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Made deadly wood of bless’d and living licks.
A congenital foot condition caused him to waddle;
Team members joked it made him look like a duck.
For nothing in this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my truth.
Troopers detected foul odor from the truck.
Twas the love of Dave from Reagan Youth.
236
Dave Mustaine and Kerry King were in a T.G.I. Friday’s in Temecula, California, getting to know each other again. Evening found the two enjoying a glorious sunset over the pacific sharing a bottle of Grand Marnier and swapping stories about mutual friends like Richard Manuel; dinner was bar-b-qued marinated abalone. The feud between King and Mustaine was dropped after a chance meeting at an airport, as King noted that he “just couldn’t remember” what the feud was about anymore. He figured that, even though ]v[egadet]-[ were now religious fanatics (they live in a commune called ‘His House’ in Albuquerque, NM), that, at least Mustaine had not played for the NOFX cover band Sum 41.
235
Oh, dreams of my childhood, who have known me for 23 years, my subterranean nerve-endings from Oklahoma who have known me since I was pregnant with my first child… two years later, I still go to their graves to pray. I saw myself walking down a road looking up into the sky. In the sky I saw a little lamb being led by a dark man. The man led the lamb up to an arched doorway where it ascended a cecropia tree. The man rapped a quick code on the door and the lamb spoke: GO PUT A SHIRT ON; YOU LOOK LIKE 200 POUNDS OF BIRD SHIT!
234
Here a bedraggled gathering of women, children, and old men, faces down-turned, their clothes ragged, waited patiently. There an enervated sex heroine, painted, and spoiled by art, paled at the sight of lions in the amphitheatre.
233
Suki was in his study when she found a book he stole from the UCLA Library sometime in the 90s. The following sections of “The Implied Reader” are stained with the juice of something that doesn’t exist: Sections two hundred thirty-one, two hundred thirty-two, two hundred thirty-three, two. Hey you. Stop right there. I mean it. Seriously. I’ve come down from the violet skies to save the day, I’ve come down from the hills near Burbank, Calif., in which in December twelve persons were killed. I think I can’t be seen and all of a sudden I can be seen. The stupid editor removed my apostrophe just like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France. And I just appeared here, somehow, a week ago. In Burbank, with a fat husband, a son who’s probably going to be fat once his own kid grows up. Pretty much every night he falls asleep while texting me. And then when he wakes up the next morning, he texts me, apologizing a billion times all morning with odd smells stuck to his skin and sick dreams infecting my head. That book he stole from the UCLA Library, not my fat husband, but HIM, is able to lure me back to some alternate numbering schema, where an actual duplicate transaction could be identified, where that fat husband of hers had left off, would secretly read books like Nabokov and composite texts ‘cobbled together’ from texts of different types, as if in his mind there was uncertainty, some indecision or some conflict that caused him to remove his name from the list two days before the trip so he’d have disappeared. We’d have disappeared like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France.
232
Two women were hiking with the dog in the rugged hills near the 3200 block of Canyon Drive, when the dog found a plastic bag in the brush containing the head of an Armenian male in his 40s with salt-and-pepper hair. There are additional body parts in the area. They connected the body parts with wax, and prepared a long piece of linen cloth with spices, which would protect his body from decay, and buried him.
231
His head in his hands, with his jeans pulled up but still no shirt on. It wasn’t the fact that he had just removed his heavy helmet and shook out his shoulder-length blond hair in the freshness of the ocean breeze, but that his turtleneck, curled in a ball at his feet, was totally drenched with sweat. His long face was quite solemn and his big ears hung dejectedly on rusty hinges. Gaping holes in the seam of his closed mouth ran with salty saliva and and the distant singing spun through his head… Adam vomited up his lunch onto the grubby sidewalk. Now dressed in fawn slacks and blue polo shirt, totally drenched with sweat, Mr Santorum proceeded to crawl onto the steel grating that covered the basement window wells, in the middle of the night, and scrape the vomit into the gravel below. “You looked like you were possessed by a demon,” Phineas says.
230
The observations themselves didn’t prove the existence of a ginkgo biloba tinnitus cure. Rather, the idea of a ginkgo biloba tinnitus cure explained observations so well that those in the know came to believe it really existed. Uncovering your anger is like digging for gold. One day, technology might be good enough to allow it to be actually observed. But we don’t need to wait until then before we start believing in it.
229
To be playing amidst the falling shower of Leonids thirty-three and one-third years ago when she was only thirty, and I’ll bet there was no one making her go to a weight-loss camp, which is probably impossible anyway, have her choose between a night out clubbing or watching a classic film like Ghostbusters, Young Frankenstein, The Frisco Kid, or Hot Fuzz. Yet they sang through the sky and the trickle of the water over rocks was mixed with the small croaks of frogs and toads. They sang through the sky and all the angels danced with tears in their eyes but one angel in particular stopped to take a crap. While he was doing his business, I saw something white coming down the river towards him. But lo and behold, ’twas a chariot, steered by a large liv’ried toad with a tree on his head. Hung from the tree was the final piece to the puzzle: a sign that read “Hands Off Medicare and I like being fat and I love fat men.”