Way Past Midnight On The Other Side Of Real Estate

Bob Biegston, business editor of the local newspaper, says I should buy land. Lots of land way out in the sticks and in the middle of this big city. Land all over. Be a land owner and a land rover. I read the papers at the Union Station when I ask bus riders for 35 cents or 47 cents in change. But that was this afternoon. Now it's the full moon's time to bring out the werewolves - or maybe just the wolves. Or, as it is now, the canine shadows of the wolf boiled down to domesticated vegetable shortening with a side of hash browns.

Dogs howl and hurt my nostrils and ear-candied naïveté’ with their wheezing, sleazy, nasal-haired noises. I don't like dogs to be that intimate with me. Sure, I like them, but I don't want to have a fucking mutt as an (almost) lover. Do you know what the Old Testament says about humans having sex with animals? Death to both animal and human, that's what.

Muffled like murders from the deep, dark stretch of time way past midnight and far too early for sunrise, where all is bad and all is heard like poltergeists and their diseased passions steaming on the supernatural buffet table like little tuxedoed sandwiches all disarrayed, disassembled and falling, falling apart so crumbly and deliciously as mouths water and saliva runs rampant like little creeks through a quaint little subdivision named "Pheasant Run," or "Timber Creek," or "Sun Chase."

I once saw a stripper wear a tuxedo. But she didn't have it on long. That was in better times. That was when I was a bricklayer and all these things in my head weren't there. Yet. I remember I got really drunk that night and that burly-que dancer waved all her little nasties in my face. I put dollars in her garter like she was some fantastic slot machine. Boy, did her eyes light up when I shoved those ones, tens, twenties and fifties into her garter belt like she was about ready to explode into a jackpot. Later, I went home and made love to her time and time again, but she wasn't there. It's a riddle. How could it be? And how could the stripper have a tuxedo on one second, and nothing on the next? It's a riddle. Bet you can't get these riddles of mine.

As my homeless debacle continues at 3 in the wee and I don't have a soul, not one, not two, not three. . .The dogs are straying from their nucleus of canine bravado and arrogance, looking like brave, macho ghetto kids in the barrio in some big Western U.S. city, like Dallas, or Houston, or hey, maybe even L.A. They look to fillet a cat with their sharp fangs. Maybe a mouse or perhaps even me. This August is the third day in the year (sometime after Christ) that I decided to change almost everything about myself and soar like a noble bird of prey on the southern urban plains of indifferent Confederacies & lotions sublime, but trapped within the contents of time. Robert E. Lee sticks to my deep-stomached "I-can’t-believe-this-is-fucking-happening & why-didn’t-I-stay-at-the-Mission-tonight instead of this gosh darned junkyard that's being run by the Devil & Co.?!!!" My man at the mission always criticizes me for using this negative mind masturbation that usually precedes my own pathetic attempt at self-abuse and self-gratification. Boy, I forget what that stripper looked like. I wish I had taken a picture of her in that tuxedo - or better yet, without it.

I hope to get up enough courage to continue my early morning/late night walk back to the next block. There, there are not any canines but homo sapiens, cavemen. Urban gringos, not stray, inner-city dingos, wearing black leather jackets and face silver. They're so thick in my section of the planet that it can't even be seen as lingering or loitering. To be honest, they look like they want to riot all over the real estate of the lower East Side, which is nothing but a zoned light-industrial area with some sections also reserved for warehousing. But there's a house around here and there. Most have all the windowpanes broken out of them. They look like skeletons of fabricated wood and brick. I spend most nights in these junks. Funny, nobody ever robs a vacant house. Few even bother to go near it. 

Somehow, a silhouette of one of the beasts corners something wicked and gruesome in the night. The wilding takes place near a wire fence with razors on top, wedged neatly all over the cyclone fencing that's meant to keep out everything from insane burglars to Patriot missiles. That area where the two animals fight - jaws snapping and saliva-foamed mouths sapping like maple trees - is prime real estate for Old Ned and all his henchmen from Hades, way down there below somewhere. That is, if there is a place. Good Lord, I hope you keep us from going there. Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Can you, just can you believe dogs can act this wildly and wickedly? But who is here to tame them now? Who is their master besides total anarchy and black & blue anger? I crawl between two cars, open the door and lay inside. There’s a pillow there, like some guardian of ghoulish guarantee left it there for me and only me. I think for a second, in all my stoic religiosity, that my Guardian Angel came down from heaven to put that pillow there for this righteous, homeless king. But then I realize that some crazy bag lady left it there, because there's garbage all over the place and most of it is definitely female garbage! Yeah, she left it there, just for me. A pillow and beside it, some girly things that are all rolled up, frilly and nice - except they're dirty and probably filled with lice. If they stay there much longer, they'll be full of mice. I’ll count down the silly sunlight between snores and panic attacks. This wild-dog wrath leaves me feeling as I did when I was a schoolboy, playing hooky all during the ninth and tenth grade at St. Aloysius Catholic High School in downtown Detroit. Being Catholic made a difference.

 I love dogs. I really do, but not right now. Dogs have a devil's side when the moon is full and they're hungry, angry and all alone together within the confines of a junkyard. Right now I want to see the sunlight. I want to find that hole in the fence where I crawled in here right after dawn. Then, the mutts will lie down in beat up old jalopy remains and snore the heat away into the cool wickedness of the night again. I'd like to see the sun level everything that dark instinct grooms in the heat of this evil night. Give me light; give me sight to see all in the day. Lord, bless us all in your own good way.

Sam Vargo has an MA in English from Youngstown State University in Younstown, Ohio. He has worked most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. Today, he makes his living as a public school teacher in an urban school district. He was fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years. He has had poetry and fiction appear in the following: Red Dancefloor, Verve, Reed, Clark Street Review, Connecticut Review, Licking River Review, Higgensville Reader, Lynx Eye, Poetry Motel, Late Knocking, Ohio Teachers Write, Small Press Review and other presses and literary journals.

Email: Sam Vargo

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