“The Last Pastimes of Major Tom”

Nobody’s price was very high.

What grievous disappointment or superb humiliation first made me a ‘tanist, I no longer recall. Perhaps it was only, living so long in the shadows, one grows to hate the sun.

We all drove great big old gas hogs, decrepit wheels was all we could afford so we made a fetish of it, as was the case with so many of our strange customs. To cultivate your monstrousness, a la Rimbaud, was the game. --One of them.

Against us were arrayed not only the usual economic forces of a harsh crowded time, & the punitive engines they engendered, but also the chimaera of a Loyal Opposition, which we despised even more. In our dogma it was only allowable to seem wretched or iniquitous, & we spent a deal of trouble in that pretence. Of course we did have almost no money. That was hardly the point.

Like the others, I practiced my little sorcery.

In my garret retreat, I had a purloined orange cone, my broken effigies & rescued trash. Smashtannies aplenty, suitably modified. It was enough that a thing should be singular, & useless. We spent much of our days searching.

These gewfgaws formed our map of the world, nor had we another. The riddle they posed was the secret we all knew but couldn’t say. It was manifest, however, at each corroborree.

In my DAV herringbone threads I felt secure. My hat was vintage, my gloves were strictly noveltystore & quite begrimed. I shielded my eyes with tape-repaired shades I’d found on the ground in Prague. (“Pivo” I could say, & little else. But those spires haunted my dreams, & enchanted my wakefulness.)

Tonight I would not read; probably not next time either. The Open Mike had grown to be a joke. It wasn’t that we were unsuccessful poets, I could dig that. But I hated having to talk about it afterwards. My aesthetics were private & sacred to me, more so than my dime life or my sex. When others spoke of magic I simply smiled. This was how I got my monicker.

I wrote of obscure degradations, temping, despair. In my poems I made promises to Death like a sorrowing ecstatic lover. I spilled it all, except for the truth. Who could have handled that?

There were three I respected. I barely spoke to them. It was stupid, I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t let anyone be friends. I guess in the end we loved each other. Our power was pretending, among ourselves, that pity did not exist.

My story only now begins. I was afraid you wouldn’t understand otherwise. A neophyte broke our turf. Usually we just tried to be polite--a deadly insult. But I saw she had potential. She looked gravely ill, or worse. And her poems were about nothing.

Now, nothingness was a subject I was expert on. They called me the Void Kahuna.

“We have joy, we have fun, we have seasons in the sun,” I observed sagely as the ugly yellow rays from a single bare buglight bounced off the surface of my eyes. “Is it always this crowded,” she said. I took off my gloves, then put them back on. (One of the snaps had already broken.) Her tunic was the exact color & texture of a mackerel sky at sunrise. Her bare arms were like birch saplings, & her hair had been done up in a way that suggested drugs had had a hand in the making of it. Or else inordinate haste. Her eyes smouldered, dark, dark-ringed. “Death has undone so many,” I shrugged.

We sat at adjacent tables, each otherwise empty, in a corner my sense of interior feng shui had determined to be almost