raw food tapas bar, because the bathroom sink counter had the name of a different god/prophet painted on every fourth tile and “ALL IS ONE” inlaid around the basin. Then I called all the strip joints that charged a stage fee. Then after that, the human resources department of a popular Vietnamese restaurant chain, demanding an end to bubble tea as the hyper modern equivalent to absinthe and a barrier to real revolution because the equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.
I threw that phone in the trash and boarded the Number 22 to Pretty Little Hopes.
Eartha Rodere
When the heart opens, the hands follow:
191292309.24
Up ahead was Brass Ring Employment Solution, a temp agency shaped like a refrigerator and built out of concrete and torque. Their motto was “Every little bit helps.” Flocks of men in white shirts, crisp sleeves rolled down over their tattoos, kissed ass daily just to work for nothing. Hostages taking each other hostage. Jazz hands. Out of respect for the relationship between war and commerce and the necessity of cheap labor for both to thrive, I let Aries Rodere make the call.
Good Afternoon! Brass Ring, where we know that every little bit helps…(maintain wage slavery).
How may I direct your call?
Bombs, I told them, blast coronas the size of Texas. Bone fragments like chalk dust staining the sidewalk and washing away in the rain.
I heard building alarms. The bus driver closed the doors. I got off at the next stop, leaving the raspberry cell phone under my seat pinging towers all the way to Pretty Little Hopes.
I was only halfway through my list. There were so many facets. Redbird Square for being named after a bank and recasting cultural geography as a proprietary object. The central library for being a defunded sham, a gutted shell, a hope crime. The Cine-Tower for having 20 theaters, 10 levels of parking and playing Christmas music year round. The golden oldies station KGOD for being a mask of Christianity formed from revisionist musical portraits of the past. And for sending nostalgia into the valleys of the scurrying poor to get them through the work day then giving them a god to go to at night when they’re tired. Me, third. 8, 8 and 8. The FM repeaters chattering like cats, selling bobbleheads, pushing mad cow meat and formula on babies so their mothers don’t have to keep up enough body weight to nurse. The Happy Day Corporate Charity Center? O let me count the ways… IKEA monkeys, urban yogis with real estate kriyas, manifest class destiny—each target was a jewel on the web, a dewy gem reflecting the Grand Ravage back to itself.
When it got dark I stopped to organize my notes and get food. It was raining by then and I was in line at a falafel stand with a newspaper folded over my head. A small radio was playing Egyptian disco. Suddenly it stopped and the emergency broadcast signal came on. The falafel man turned up the volume. Crackling, competing with the slap of raindrops on the tiny tarp, the words “explosion,” “dog track” and “panic” emerged. The woman next to me turned gray. The falafel man started packing up and dumping fry oil trays into the gutter. A bomb had gone off at the dog track and another at a parking garage downtown.
But I saw satellites in the terrorsphere and put my list away. No one had claimed the New Land Trust bombing. Superland™ was still generating bumper text even though nothing had happened. Is it safe to shop? And now with the new threats? If there was one thing I learned from Credence, it was how to redirect messages—the New Land Trust building, the dog track, the parking garage—their violence, reframed with a new message. Talking points for the Blackberry Massacre.
I was close to the cemetery on the border of New Honduras and that’s where I went, deep into the acres and tall trees, past the new gravestones in Chinese, Cyrillic and Tagalog, and into the oldest part where it’s nothing but flu babies and second sons by the statue of a mermaid. Under her bronze arms, I called in and claimed the real bombs as mine.
“Cultural obsolescence impeding the flow of fresh commerce,” I told the police operator, “that’s why we blew up the dog track.”
I gave different reasons for the other bombs because Citizens for a