SHUT INS

#1Inventory of Items recovered from a locked bedroom closet, March 5, 1995:
A small oil painting of an American flag in shades of brown
A ticket stub from the 1989 Westminster Dog Show
A signed copy of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul
A mason jar full of expired condoms
A map of DisneyWorld circa 1969
A sketchbook filled with drawings of pirates, Jesus, and anthropomorphic mice
A complete set of Hardy Boy mysteries
A stack of empty pizza boxes – 4 feet, 3 inches high
A photograph of a dead pigeon
A worn, featureless stuffed animal – species indeterminate
A plastic tiara with pink rhinestones
A Super-8 film reel of Return to the Planet of the Apes, part 4 of 19

He likes to watch Chinese television with the sound turned off. He flips on the TV as soon as he gets home, turns to channel 26 and hits the mute button. He likes the historical dramas the best. The colorful costumes make him smile. There’s always someone wearing a big hat and someone made up to look like a monkey. He likes the game shows as well. Everyone seems so happy and excited. He orders pizza and flips the dial.

He puts aside a special hour to watch the Japanese soaps. He’s in love with the young tomboy who lives in the guest room of the old professional couple that has been on the show for years. She has a sweet face and she laughs a lot. But she has a hurt look in her eyes that makes him think that she’s been through a lot and that maybe she’s not as tough as she likes people to think she is. Like she’s an orphan who was hurt bad by the nuns at the orphanage and she’s been rescued by the old couple that run a kind of rescue program for abused children.  But she still felt sad about it, even though the old couple are nice to her. They can never replace the parents she never knew. They can never give her the truly unconditional love the she needs. She has a boyfriend on the show who works at a noodle bar and sometimes meets her at the flower shop where she works and brings her dinner and they talk. Sometimes it looks like they argue. The boyfriend is clearly not good enough for her. She can do better. Sometimes he tapes the shows so that he can watch the when there is nothing else on or when the programming ends for the night. He doesn’t watch the Spanish language channel because he thinks the programs are indecent.

#2 A receipt from Rite Aid - September 3^rd, 2002:

4 rolls of Heavy Duty Grey Duct Tape, $15.80
1 extension cord – grounded 50ft, $14.95
2 25ft coils of White Twisted Nylon Rope, $7.54
Right Guard Right Guard Xtreme Sport Power Stripe Antiperspirant, $5.59
Out Spot! Stain & Odor Remover, Citrus Scent (as seen on TV), $6.25
1 Plumbers Helpers toilet snake, $6.99
1 large bag of “bite size” Butterfingers, $3.25
1 bottle of Excedrin Migraine Pain Reliever, $14.95
1 bag of cat litter, $11.95
TV Guide – September 2002 issue – Jennifer Garner of Alias on the cover, $4.35
4 quarts of household bleach, $ 6.75

Note taped to the garage door of an apartment building on upper Market, September 6^th 2002:

To Susan:

Contrary to what you seem to think, I was not the one who notified the super about your cats and the noise. Nor was Gavin responsible for informing the city about your rodent problem. I’m not the type of person who goes sneaking around behind people’s backs. If I have a problem with someone, I tell them to their face. I have tried on many occasions to discuss this with you but you refuse to talk. I know you’re home. I almost never see you go out. I know it was you who killed Gavin’s rose bush.  I know it was you who stole our doormat. I know it was you who called the police on Gavin’s homecoming party – even though we notified you in advance. Even though you were invited. I am not the only one who is upset by your behavior. Just because you have lived here longer than the rest of us does not give you the right to do whatever you please. You are not the owner. You are not the super. Do I even have to remind you of this? We’re tired of cleaning up after your cats. Your apartment attracts rats and we find their stiff little corpses all over the laundry room. On top of this, the noise from your apartment is deafening. I shouldn’t have to bang on your door just to get a decent night’s sleep. I almost put a hole in the ceiling with my broom the other night. Who’s going to fix that? Things have not been so easy since Gavin came back and your behavior just makes things worse. Your husband was a good man and I have no desire to get you kicked out of your apartment. But this has got to stop. My patience is wearing thin. If you can’t hear the TV then for God’s sake, get one of those amplifier things from Radio Shack. I’d buy one for you myself if I thought you would use it. I think that you’re doing this just to spite me. I know that you have a problem with Gavin. I never ask him to move back. But he’s here now and he has nowhere else to go and I’m not going to be responsible for putting him out on the street. Surely you can respect that? I know you think that I’m out to get you. I know you think I killed your cat. Believe me, that thing was sick to begin with. And she had been dead for some time when I found her. If you can’t take care of them you shouldn’t keep them. It’s cruel. I’m writing this for your own good. You’re only hurting yourself.

Simon

#3 Things for Sales on eBay, 15^th April 1999:

An amateur porn video called “Fucking the Third Rail”
A stuffed pony named Brittany
A 1995 Honda Civic Hatchback painted in the manner of Van Gough’s Starry Night
A collection of scabs
A candid photos of Beau Bridges “flipping the bird”
A box of human skulls candles
A Hello Kitty vibrator – used once

Out of bed by 3pm and a quick cup of coffee before getting to work. The market never sleeps. 24/7 ecommerce starts at home. 50 new items to list by lunch. Photograph, catalog, upload, process, box, and ship. Scan the open auctions. A toaster, a bobble headed Pete Rose doll, 3 DVDs of hardcore anime, a garden gargoyle, a 1936 postcard of the Grand Canyon, a bright orange beanbag chair. No one’s bidding more than $20. Motherfuckers.

Someone finally places a $125 bid on a limited addition musical Princess Diana doll. He digs through a box full of magazines and broken toys. “Might have more of those somewhere,” he thinks. He clears a path to the kitchen. It’s getting dark.

Time to log off for lunch. Mac and cheese and 2 cans of Code Red. Getting dark outside. Log on lube up. 10 new pics from Jan in Prague. 3 shots of the blonde with the pigtails. Someone’s been a bad girl. Daddy’s little treasure won’t do that again. Auctions start to heat up by midnight. He transfers a grand to his offshore account and plays seven card stud until the money’s gone. Losing makes him hungry and horney again so he makes himself a sandwich and logs onto rapeme.com, high heel sluts and www.tentaclesex.net.

Pop up chat from Jorg in Grozny. “Have you seen the photos from Jan” says Jorg. “Yah” he says. “Ja” says Jorg. Back to the auction just in time to see his signed mounted photo of all three stooges go for 250 bucks. He celebrates with a beer and decides to call it a day. Shut the curtain to cut out the morning light. Another day on Internet time.

#4 Items found by the cleaning staff at 700 South Hope Street, October 31st, 2000:

An empty packet of Mild Seven Japanese cigarettes – menthol extra lights.
A memo warning staff to refrain from leaving personal items in the women’s restroom
A diaphram
A stack of 1999 motivational wall calendars
A jumbo sized box of Altoids and a tin of wintergreen Skoal
A performance appraisal defaced with a crude sketch of a man receiving oral sex from a midget
A cardboard box full of glow in the dark yo-yos embossed with the company logo
500 packets of Sweet and Low
250 miniature plastic cups of hazelnut non-dairy creamer
2 executive stress balls
A book entitled “Secrets of Successful Sales: How to Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul”

“I can’t start soon enough,” he thinks. In London, they’ve been at work since midnight. The New York staff has been awake since three, three thirty. It’s six thirty in California and already he’s in his car. He’s halfway to work. It’s dark out but the roads are thick with vehicles, sleepy drivers thawing in the steely pre-dawn. He drives a leased silver Lexus with tinted windows, a sunroof, a ten CD changer, Bose speakers, and an on-board computer with a global positioning sub-system. He steers with one hand gripped high and tight on the wheel and uses his free hand to check appointments on a Palm Pilot clamped to the dash. He grips a mobile phone between his ear and shoulder and embraces a vente caramel machiatto between his thighs.

“I understand… No, you’re right. It’s a disaster, it’s… Of course not. I was never told… No. Never. It won’t happen again… Hello? Are you still there? I think my phone’s cutting out. I… I’ll call you from the office. Shit.” He slaps the phone shut and tosses it onto the passenger seat.

“Fuck Brill. Fuck Peralta,” he rasps in a voice still thick with sleep and coffee. “I’m not taking the heat for this. I’m not. That’s bullshit and it is not acceptable.”

His face is burning now and his armpits are damp with nervous perspiration. He holds the wheel with both hands and takes a series of quick urgent yoga breaths. He repeats this staccato ventilation several times and quietly mutters a personal empowerment mantra he picked up once at on off-site management seminar in Napa.

“I am an efficient, multi-skilled manager. I am a pro-active rule breaker, an adaptive lead taker, a change-managing team maker. I will thrive in uncertain times. I will tame chaos, I will improve the bottom line and become a better value creator.” He repeats this to himself several times until the blood begins to drain from his face his pulse returns to normal.

He’s at the office by seven. A red light on his phone throbs petulantly. London wants to know what he intends to do about the Parsons bid. New York is wondering what happened in Valparaiso last week. The development team in Bangalore is concerned about the requirements for the Kingfisher project. And, of course, Global Sales wants to know who fucked up the DuPont deal.

He docks his laptop and launches his mail program. The gray progress bar creeps across his screen as messages dribble in from London, Chicago, and New York. 2 from Brill, 1 from Peralta, 3 from sales, 1 from his wife. Meeting requests, product announcements, earnings reports, press releases, hires and fires, recriminations, confessions, panic attacks, and witch-hunts. He deletes them all without reading them and shuts down his mail program.

He sits silently for a moment, staring across the immaculate expanse of his desk. He makes a point of clearing it off every evening before leaving work. The morning light cuts a swath across his office and glints off the golf ball clock his wife had given him last Valentine’s Day. Twin golden clubs holding aloft a glittering crystal ball.  A small plaque on the base reads: “Our aspirations are our possibilities.”

Lately his possibilities have been falling far short of his aspirations. He used to feel so excited about going to work, but not any more. Maybe he just needed to re-connect with his inspirations. What was it had heard in school about Alexander the Great? "He wept because there were no more worlds to conquer?" “Well, it feels more like the world’s about to conquer me,” he thinks.

But the thought of Alexander snags on a jagged corner of his brain. When confronted with the legendary tangle of rope tied by King Gordius, Alexander knew exactly what to do. The complexity of the Gordian knot did not phase him. He drew his mighty sword and cut it with a single stroke, thereby ensuring his dominion over all of Asia. Many before had tried and failed, thinking that with skill and patience, the knot could be untied. Only Alexander saw that a single decisive action was all it would take to move him to a higher plane.

This Alexandrian reverie makes everything fall into place. He knows what he has to do. Nothing has ever been clearer. He re-launches his mail program and begins to craft a poisoned string of messages, each one designed to link with the others to form a complex web of blame.  Each one designed to point the finger of culpability squarely at that fuck head Brill and that ass packer Peralta. “Read ‘em weep,” he thinks, “Read ‘em and weep.”

Hearing a rustle, he looks up to glimpse his admin rushing past his office door. “Susan, come in here for a second,” he shouts. She ignores him and continues down the hall. He gets up and looms over her from the entrance to her cubicle. She sits with her back to him, pretending to be engrossed with a stack of expense reports. He stares silently at the nape of her neck for several moments. “What did I tell you about being late?” he asks at last. She turns around and opens her mouth to speak. “And I don’t want to hear that you were out late last night. I’m tired of that excuse.” She returns to her paperwork. He pauses. “I don’t care who else you’re fucking, OK, I just don’t want to know about it. From now on I expect you here by 7:30.”

It’s almost noon when Brill calls. He landed in Singapore twenty minutes ago and checked his mail on his mobile. London wants him to explain how he managed to fuck up a five million pound deal in less than 24 hours. How did it happen? Why didn’t they know? Who dropped the ball? Procedures were violated, etiquette ignored, revenue targets shot to hell. “Tough break, Brill,” he says. “Of course I went to bat for you. I always do. It’s not your fault. That cokehead Peralta let you down again. I told you. He’s unstable. You should have a talk with him.”

He eats at his desk and has quick cigarette before his meeting with the Mitsubishi delegation. The key to successful sales is to make the unreal real, to manifest the unspoken aspirations of the client. People aren’t interested in features or benefits or even “certified value propositions.” It’s much more basic than that. What matters most in business is what matters most in any sphere of human society: relationships. Real person-to-person contact. You gotta get them to join the family. They’ve gotta drink the Kool-Aid. It’s about selling the invisible and no one sells nothing better than him. “I’m the fucking invisible man,” he says. His admin sticks her head in his office. “What did you say?” “Nothing,” he says.

His phone rings at a quarter to one. Peralta on line 4. He puts him on speakerphone and lets him rant for a few minutes while he finishes his sandwich. “Calm down. It’s not your fault.” He says.  “Don’t listen to Brill. That cock sucker has his head so far up his ass, he... I know. Look. I’ll talk to him. I promise.“ He hangs up and rings his assistant. “Susan, tell Mr. Akito and Mr. Miyaki to wait for me in the main conference room. Give ‘em anything they want.”

Call on line 2. “No Hon,” he says, “Not this weekend. I’ve gotta be in London next week and I leave on Saturday. Come on. That’s not fair. You know I love your mother. It’s her that doesn’t like me, remember? Yeah. Right. Uh Huh. Look, I’ve got a meeting. I’ve gotta go. Tell the kids I love ‘em.”

The Mitsubishi delegation is growing impatient. But he knows how to deal with the Asians. He took a five-day training course in Hong Kong last summer in Asian business practices and cross-cultural sensitivity. He heads into the conference room and feels no fear, only a warm, confident benevolence. They share the formal bows. The two-handed business card handoff. The stern handshake and the tight little smiles.

“It’s all about the brand,” he tells them. “It’s all about trust.” The words spill out of his mouth with practiced ease. We’re old friends. Trusted confidants. We’re co-conspirators in a shared vision of a better life. Starry eyed idealists unafraid to reach for the heavens, to trust in a better tomorrow where all our desires are satisfied and prosperity flows like a mighty, unstoppable river. The wonder of the free market is its ability to breath life into the desires of mankind. Our wish is its demand. It is the hearth fire of the global village. Stoke its flames and it warms everyone, neglect it and we all freeze. “I’m not here to sell you a product or a service, gentlemen, I’m here to sell you our commitment, our passion, our distinction, our shared humanity.” “It’s not just about money or image,” he concludes, it’s about community.“

He sends the Japs home happy and returns to his office glowing with the inner flame of accomplishment. He passes Susan on her way out the door. “Hey not so fast. I need your help. We’ve got to finalize the Mitsubishi contract before London gets in. Oh come on. I’ll make it up to you. Do this one thing for me and I’ll buy you dinner. Please. There’s something I want to tell you.”

He steps outside for a smoke. It’s dark now and the cool ash light makes him glow like a copy machine. He pries open his mobile and tucks it between his ear and his shoulder. “Hey, just checking. Yeah, the meeting with the Japs went great. Oh, really? No, I didn’t realize. I’m sorry to hear that. Brill’s a good guy. Our wives are good friends. It doesn’t surprise me about Peralta, though.  He’s been looking pretty stressed recently. He could probably use a rest. Oh well. Talk to you tomorrow.”

#5 Items required for a successful channeling:

One vintage (pre-war) William Fuld Ouija board
Three Rose quartz channeling crystal
Edgar Cayce Channeling Your Higher Self – 6 audio tape set
One Merlin’s Magic Chakra Meditation Music CD
Wiccan Pagan “Black Diamond Sun” Celtic Scrying Mirror
Copy of the book: “Operation Terra: Messages from the Hosts of Heaven, a new revelation on Earth changes, ETs, the end times, and the journey to the New Earth, Terra, Volume One” by Sara Lyara Estes
One bottle of Gallo Sonoma Stefani Chardonnay

“Wayne? Are you home?”

Cassandra stands in the doorway on the rag rug mat. Her hair is dripping from the rain and she’s clutching a sagging brown grocery bag, holding it close to keep the bottom from dropping out. She wears a modified, midriff baring sari and a jeweled butterfly bindi on her forehead. The wind blows the smell of pine needles and wet mulch into the room, disturbing the otherwise turgid air, thick with smoke, mildew, and cooking smells. She shuts the door behind her and clicks home the deadbolt.

A heavy bass thumping resonates against the closed bedroom door accompanied by a keening, blurting saxophone. She recognizes the song, “I Live Off You” by the X-Ray Spex.

“Hey Wayne, come out here for a second. I got something for us.”

The apartment is austere and prefabricated. Thin plaster walls, low speckled ceilings, dun colored polyester blend carpeting with mysterious stains, and a tickey tackey uniformity that no amount of accessorizing could ever disguise. The windows are covered by bright blue batik prints of elephants and one of the bulbs in the overhead light has blown out again.  A pumpkin colored couch sits the middle of the room next to a an old TV and a glass-topped coffee table spread with beer bottles, scented candles, and a handful of spent EZ Whip canisters. A ceramic bong in the shape of a rampant dragon crowns a stack of old Yoga Journal magazines. The only other piece of future in the room is a round satin pillow surrounded by a tall copper cage.

She drops the bag of groceries on the kitchen table. The soggy, overstuffed sack bursts and disgorges most its contents onto the scuffed linoleum: fresh herbs and packaged teas, organic kale and beets, temple incense, assorted crystals, a home colonic kit, and a small jug of a cloudy, yellowish liquid labeled Herbal Cleanze Detox Drink, Guaranteed Effective.

She gathers up the scattered groceries and lays them out in an organized queue across the adjacent kitchen counter, smaller items on the left, larger items on the right. She crosses to the bedroom door and taps tentatively on the thin veneer paneling, taking care not to further damage its already scratched and pockmarked surface.

“Wayne, shut that off and get out here.”

The music stops. “In a minute” croaks a muffled voice.

There is an expectant silence that lasts for several moments, replaced by “Aloha from Hell” by The Cramp’s. Lux Interior’s punkabilly take on the King’s Blue Hawaii.

Cassandra pulls back the batik curtains to let a bit of grey rain-filtered sunlight into the room and returns to the kitchen.  Several minutes pass as she busies herself by rifling through a deck of dog-eared Tarot cards wrapped in purple velvet. She mechanically lays out a variety of spreads, quickly analyzing the results, and pulls the cards back into the deck. Eventually, the music shuts off and a slight, pale man emerges from the bedroom. He has his long brown hair tied up in a kind of knot at the top of his head and wears white briefs and a black Misfits T-shirt.  He sports a wispy beard and mustache, the result of several years of dedicated follicular effort. The overall impression is of a kind of debauched Ho Chi Minh, wasting away in opium exile, lamenting his unfulfilled desire to meet Lenin, and masking his bitterness behind a haze of alcohol and punk rock.

He rubs his eyes and closes the batik drapes before crossing to the kitchen.

“Morning Cassie,” he drawls.

He opens the fridge and takes a long drink from a carton of soymilk.

“What time is it?”

“12:30”

He nervously eyes the objects on the counter. “What’s all that?”

“I’m putting us on a on a detox fast. Padme at the Wellness Centre recommended some things for us to try.” She holds up the jug of the cloudy yellow liquid and shakes it for him to see. “I got this for you… For your test tomorrow.”

“Oh... Yeah,” he says.  “I was going to tell you about that. I changed my mind. He places the carton of soymilk back in the fridge and walks into the living room.

“Why, this is a great opportunity.  You’ve done this kind of work before and John seemed like he really liked you.”

“Yeah, but It’s not going to work,” he says. “Anyway, I don’t want a job that requires you to piss in a cup. It’s fascist. And I’ve got better things to do”

From the kitchen, she hears the hollow gurgle of the dragon bong and his slurping inhalations. She slams the jug down on the counter and follows him into the living room. “God damn it Wayne. Why do you keep doing this?”

He’s slumped on the couch with his mouth still attached to the back of the dragon’s head. He cranes his neck to look up at her and exhales a long cloud of smoke. Doing what?” he says.

“Forget it. I’m going to meditate.”

She opens the door of the small copper cage, ducks her head, and squeezes inside. She sits on the prayer pillow in a perfect lotus position and shifts her behind around until she feels comfortable. She lights a stick of incense, strikes a small Tibetan gong and begins to chant under her breath.

He stares at her apprehensively and listens to her quiet mutterings for several minutes, still holding the dragon bong in his left hand. Eventually, he puts down the bong and tugs on a pair of battered jeans that he had left bunched on the floor the night before. He slips his feet into a pair of Converse All Stars and heads for the door. “I’m going out.” He says. Her back is to him. She doesn’t hear him leave.

Wayne was an original Texas punk. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1963, he’d moved with his family to Austin in 1981, and had discovered punk rock and crystal meth simultaneously one night at Raul’s on Guadalupe. He started out as a roadie for The Big Boys and played bass with the Butthole Surfers for a couple weeks before they were famous. In 1982, he formed his own band, Razor Blade Dance, named after a song on the first Dick’s album. They were the house band at Club Foot for a while where they built up a strong local following. It all came to an abrupt end in 1983, the year of their first US tour.  Their lead singer wandered out into a blizzard in Minneapolis in search of a liquor store and was discovered frozen stiff on the sidewalk the next morning. The band drifted apart and Wayne eventually found himself in San Francisco, crashing on the floor of a friend’s apartment in North Beach.

Cassandra had bought the astral cage at a Psychic Fair in San Rafael the previous summer. Originally, she just wanted a private, sacred space to meditate in. He spent most days at home and the apartment, which she paid for, was increasingly his domain. The cage was designed to operate along the same principles as a Faraday cage, a device inspired by the great 19th century British physicist, Michael Faraday, which uses the principle of static electricity to shield its contents from electromagnetic interference. In alchemy, copper is one of the seven key metals and is associated with the operation of conjunction, the coming together of the opposing archetypal forces of the Sun and Moon. Cassandra polished it daily to avoid verdigris and enhance its power.

Once she began sitting in the cage, however, something extraordinary had happened. She began to see lights and hear faint voices. It began as a low, barely audible whisper. She had never taken drugs nor was she prone to experience hallucinations of any kind, so at first the experience was extremely disturbing. She would stop her meditation abruptly, stick the cage in her closet and cover it with a blanket. Eventually, however, curiosity would get the better of her and she would drag it back to its place in the corner of the room and begin meditating again.

Over time the voice grew louder and more discernable. It was a pleasant, resonant voice. It told her not to be afraid, and to her surprise, she wasn’t. It reminded her of the voice of the dermatologist she had seen when she was in grade school and suffered for three months from a fierce rash that no one could cure or even accurately diagnose. She decided to embrace the voice and accept it for what it was, whatever it was.

The voice explained that his name was Ashtarok. He was the spokesman for a race of advanced etherc beings known as the Ushtari and he was the commander of a hyper-speed vessel called the Ishtar. The Ushtari are immortal beings that wander the universe in the fifth dimension, offering divine guidance to mortal creature with the potential for true enlightenment. To Cassandra, however, he mainly offered relationship advice.

They talked about her conflicts with her late father and the fact that she had never really forgiven him for his alcoholism and the way he had treated her mother. They talked about her problems at work and her decision not to back to school to finish her degree. Most of the time, however, they talked about Wayne.

Ashtarok did not approve of Wayne. “Your consort is an unsuitable mate,” he would tell her. “When the ascension comes, he will not be able to join us on our voyage.  Besides, his personal hygiene is atrocious. And he does not respect you. You would be best to seek a new companion.”

Cassandra was taken aback by this advice.  She had known Wayne for years. She had read his aura at the free clinic when they had first met and she had never seen such a warm, compassionate light. But Ashtarok was adamant. 

She had tried to tell Wayne about Ashtarok on several occasions. He acted apprehensive and uncomfortable every time she brought it up and she soon stopped talking it altogether. She confided in her friends at the Wellness Center where she worked, however, and eventually the word got out – Ashtarok did not like Wayne.