...

Smoke climbs up and out from the bowels of moist black pipes, bent all to hell and caked a dull charcoal black, the flume crawling up the flat plane of the building’s eastern face , tumbling skyward and into the deltas of framed windows, squarely tucked in the aged brick-and-mortar façade. The asphyxiating mass moves onward and up, slothlike, it’s fingers in constant outward reach, the plumage of a thousand dusty gray peafowls scouring the air, never grasping. A breeze unseen tackles its edge as it nears the roof of the place, blasting eastward the smoke, away from the residents and out into the already choked air of Echo Park. At street level, the caked iron pipes worm their way flush through the sidewalk’s concrete, down into dank parasitic earth, on and through to a vent yawning out from a bleak corner of an apartment’s basement, the smoke massing out, life-like, from an antique gas stove topped with a frying pan, filled formerly to the brim with month-old Crisco and an easy ten pounds of breaded Louisiana catfish. From beyond the gray walls of the basement a door cracks open loudly, smashing tins of animal urine and disinfectant over, the spillage making for the damp underbelly of the wooden staircase as an aged man with a worn argyle vest fills a bucket sloppily with death-cold water. Fiercely lapping the tapfluid onto the flaming grease, the fire erupts with venomous disdain at the man’s futile efforts. Leaping out and away from certain demise, he makes his way ardently up the stairs and down the hall to send for help. The Pelican State, he thinks. Why the fuck The Pelican State?

A bold fleshy terrier tears apart the opaque plastic lining of a Glad heavy-duty, unbinding fermented treasure of innumerable sorts from the innards of the bag and onto the unkempt asphalt of an oily ancient driveway. Digging deep and lustily further in, the mess leaps in a flash from tenable to outright fecund and disturbing. A black man oils a handful of bearings just down the drive, and, in rage at the storm of waste, grabs a tire iron meant for the clean skull of the mongrel, a hammer-drive’d do it, a hammer-drive’d do it real nice, quick and to the skull, throw the bones in the sack with the rest of ‘im. Aim for the head keep the teeth away from the hands. The dog’s got hold of a half-empty protein receptacle, the lunchmeat kind sliced real thin and stacked, he’s tearing for all he’s got at the yellow lip of the container. The man moves closer, slowly. After a last-ditch push the terrier gives up the meat-grail and, brown spots and all, disappears into the bag. Pulsing outward in long feminine curves the amoebic skin of the sack, a vast new tear rips open, spilling cigarette butts and week-old yogurt and potato chips along with the varied corpses of supermarket commerce. Organ-like, the man thinks. Disgusting. As he inches forward, looking casually for signs of passersby, the tire-iron wrapped up in knuckles and flesh, firmly, he’s halfway ‘twixt the car and the mongrel. His veins curdle ever so slightly: bring to a boil and let simmer, he thinks. Television. Paula Deen.

An elderly Arab woman signals a taxicab as she palms something small in her right hand. Her left clutches the faux-leather handle of a khaki purse fabricated circa ’85 or earlier, tacky as all hell. Underneath an equally khaki set of leggings and thick woolen socks, bathing fetuslike in a sticky plane of sweat and salt and a little bit of blood, lies a Fallkniven G1 with a 3.54 in. double-tipped blade, the end of it nicking her hairspeckled and molecovered thighskin, peeling bits of dermis out from it’s stasis harbor of cellular unison. Fuck, she thinks. Neik.

Inching slowly to a tired haunched stall, a 30-passenger bus filled to the brim with collegiate musicians creaks and moans an enigmatic flurry of wails, coming finally to full rest and mild backward tilt just before the passing of three young mothers, spawn and strollers in tow by the arm and legful, dashing gleeful as can be, never one any one of them to walk a crosswalk cross, shining and summery in wide-brimmed hats and pastel capris, all aglow with the empty joy of leisure. A window near the front end of the bus screeches open as an oblong cranium peeks out for a touch of fresh air, tassels on bandhat swinging, metronomic, golden and sunstreaked. A herd of youngsters call out for a tune, for maybe just a whistle from the band, and the window shuts rightly, ceasing expectation from the unfettered young. Mild weeping ensues, cut short by the fleshy palms of mothers, hush. Hush. As the pride makes gallant their way to the further end of the cross, rubber soles latch firmly to the concrete of the sidewalk, loosing the bus from it’s idle belching as it kicks roughly into gear. A young musician in the very back seat looks out the tempered glass, behind the bus, seeing naught but road and field, and further, the pockmarked white of a thousand cemetery graves, casting dull shadows on the bright sunny grass. He thinks vaguely of home, of Earth swallowing her children whole. A yellow taxicab turns a corner, a block away, tires squealing.

‘You want to know the secret to life?’ beams the man.

Bypassers angle their strides away from the voice, the smell.

‘You want to know? Really, do ya?’

A pigeon shits on a parapet, three stories overhead. A seminary student, stroking the onionskin pages of Luke, with a thumb gliding toward Revelations, sees the bird through a dust-caked window, eyes heavy and focused, deliberate.

‘It’s easy. I’d tell ya if you really wanted to know. I would, honest I would.’

The man’s frothing lips and steel-wool beard curve psychedelic, dancing in the wake of his wide smile. An ancient pair of white velcroed sneakers tap a gathering pool of urban slush.

‘Hardly anything to it, really. I mean it.’