Microcosms Wherever The Earth Says Ahh
harley lethalm
PROLOG
“poem writ on my cock before self-vitiation”
when sadness like a riddle burns cigarettes into yer arms
& the wobbliness of space/time is there, too
& cats with meows stuck in their teeth
assemble at the deepest brinks of yer wandr’ngs
its better to hold on to San Bernadino scaffoldings
and accept the earthquakes that form amidst the
sclera & feces compartments of life
the watering hole for sinners in this world
runs deep
and theres never a dry spell but perennially
a draught or two
sailboats in a macabre season
don’t look friendly on the offing of our chests
w/
bologna nipples & paunches fat as submarines
drink drink drink & stay steady
don’t duck for potholes
don’t sample the kool aid if it smells like another room’s temp
and also there is candlelight in the earth of ourselves
but that’s the light that sooner than any other goes out
and you retrace some old ground
so don’t forget a flashlight
sometimes, love gone from too many of us,
it leaves a balance of upsidedownness
and we’re all left poking for real heartbeats
like astronauts delving the clefts and tarn rushes
of infinite old hat moons
(flishflushhhergggghhuhuhguhgh)
~ ~ ~
“Unfortunately, our care – meaning, in essentia, within our facility -- will do you nothing good,” she said, wagging her nose at me, gauging my eyeballs for madness or cataracts; no good, but thanks, hey, for trying, why don’t ya, I thought, or she thought. I thought briefly of sailboats shining like well-bred, old-fashioned coursers through curious English channels, but almost out of some obscure facility of distraction I refocused my hazel specs on the APRN. She probably couldn’t bear to see her husband in bed with another woman on his mind, I reflected. She was directly one of those sorts, or types, you’ll pardon me to understand.
At all events, she had been discussing, rather fiendishly using my patronymic title in this such verbal episode, the consistency with which I’d have to have already had with regard to my status as a mental health candidate in the 4-star living/dining utility hospice at the adjoining big-league hospital, what the educated sick longago and faraway deemed the “policlinic.”
“We don’t believe our physicians would be able to provide you with the treatment appropriate to your condition,” she repeated, her eyeballs poring over the scantily dated calendar or the medical chart, probably to better appreciate the ever-ordinary sublunary fuckjob that all of else had been elected into out of the sheer biology of chance, accident, and (also) stupor.
I pounded my eyelids shut and terminated her from my view; uglier than a silverfish and more or less having the same characteristic incisiveness, the way she scrambled around her notes, or so I could well imagine it, mucous circles around tried-true medicaments; hobbies (if any) of note; employers of previous gigs; the picture there, the rest, you get it, the gist of it, at least.
“In fact, it shows here that you harmed yourself only recently. How long ago was that?” She just did nothing, not qualifying, or anything, the question, which was somehow worse than recommending a deep and explorative response on my end (though I shan’t have given her the full 101 on the Sorrowfulness of [my] Conviction, anyhow, more than anything). Instead I responded to a pamphlet on diabetes which I could happen to barely eke out in that luridness of white drawers and chests and erudition that, yes, I did harm myself quite recently, and I couldn’t put my thumb on it, for thumbs, O high dexterousness, are better adjusted to the seat of a razor or to scratch at one’s genitals, so I deflected, and started to sweat and, yes, eventually to lapse into some throes of dissimulation. “Miss, be not that as it is, understand, but I find myself somewhat startled by the mean concentration of these interrogations,” and “shall I request at this time a colossal vasectomy of sorts?”
“Well, no, I don’t see the use in that, and moreover – to whom would that be a service?”
I turned this over for a few moments until it stopped in my head like windshield wipers defaulting into their little barracks, and I told her that, left untreated, these [my] testes could end up as highly inspired paperweights on the intern’s cutely Polish chin. I gesticulated like an acrobat for want of anything interesting going on, bringing my hands up to construct just such a scene of a sac of testes settling like twin bandeaux on the intern lady’s finely angled phiz.
“I’m sorry, Mr. L---, we simply cannot treat you here. Er, do you feel as though you’ll be in any way an invidious harm to yourself or any other person/persons if we permit you to leave, knowing that we act only in the necessary capacity as doctors, certified NAs, and the like?”
A great boffy candidate for actual, actualized suicide, and but how many cigarettes did I smoke in a day? I told her what I thought she wanted to hear – between five and seventy -five – and she crowded her head around another bit of tabulation and wrote prosperously of my answer. A wide farrago of pencilings and other, discrete entries of misc. pharmacologic pallor.
She had written more words than I had said to her. At this I grew unspecifically nervous – she could be prone to malpractice or fancy or too much invention, and all these things were really just fine, but when I had only said what I had only said, it was scarcely my turn to have to correct her for her excitability, her prophecy, her over-garrulousness that wasn’t at all events mine.
“And alcohol?” I wondered if they had asked Li Po these questions as he bathed in the red-wine sun mornings and philandered with the fishes in the Yangtze River in the evenings, when the moon was a cake of manipulated syrup in the bourdon tower mocking the world. I suddenly felt an urgency to excrete, so I asked the ordinary questions which would open up a dialogue granting me access to the lavatory. “It’s occupied.” Perhaps there was another man contemplating an old Chinese poet. So I was not alone after all.
“Now, concerning your alcohol?” I hadn’t begun to decree that it was anything of a real concern, so I politely nodded my head seven times – that was a very graceful number of repetitions, and I presumed it to satisfy her question.
This turned out to not be the case.
She slanted her head up toward me, blotting out my visions of diabetic convalescence mimeos and other assorted desiderata of that assuming variety.
“Mr. L---I’m going to ask you again; around how many bottles of alcohol do you consume within a one-week period?”
She had not clarified on this point earlier, and I felt a general disruption in the conduct of her inquiries. I explained that eighteen bottles in one sitting would be sufficient to lead to another sitting, usually unintentional, at which point I would either dry up on the floor and await assistance or try my hand again. Still, this did not eliminate her curiosities, which I felt were becoming more and more forensic. I thought to appoint myself an attorney. Was that gentleman done in the shitter, or was he dead? Either was fine, though I would probably require a few extra napkins for sanitary purposes. But I was anxious. “No, he is not done. Can you see the door is closed?” I could plainly see nothing from my present position on my patient’s cot, though I did spy a silverfish flittering about underneath the hand-gel dispenser. And, even if I could see, that qualified nothing, for I had a good point to argue that if all closed doors intuited the act of shitting or pissing or masturbating – that settled it, the man was asked to produce a seminal specimen – then there ought to be more doorknockers; and what about those twin cabinet doors? They were clearly shut. I decided this forced a more reasonable line of discussion, and brought up the issue. She opened for me the cabinet doors, revealing a number of antiseptic bottles, lotions, and other accoutrements. That settled it. I walked over, my bungling ass naked and swiveling mad in the fluorescent carnival, rapped several times on the bathroom door.
“Excuse me!” shouted the old silverfish dangling onto her clipboards by her neck, “I’ve told you enough times that that lavatory was occupied!” And she came rushing toward me, her feet pattering loudly against the linoleum highway. I entered.
She followed me in. I told her that the lavatory was surely much occupied presently, and how impolite it was of the bespectacled missus to go on inside: and even that, without first knocking. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. L---, I was convinced I saw another patient walk in here just a few minutes or so ago. I’ll let you to your privacy.”
It was okay, just okay, I told her, but most felicitously of her to leave, yes, oh yes. She did. I urinated, wrapped my johnson in a sanitary napkin, then wrote a short poem on it. It was an ode to a bedpan, with a meter of some iambs and altogether it proved a predictably lousy poem. I flushed the napkin; it snarled and cluttered the toilet. It must have been a very sorry poem. I walked over and checked on myself in the mirror. My beard was waxen and dry from plain pain and exhaustion; and yet my mouth was too animated with teeth; thirdly observing that: my eyeballs rang out stunningly, like two medium-sized Cheshire shits from a pop-up book of Alice’s hajj to wunderheim.
Li Po, after all these years, where have you gone hiding?
Thenceforth I checked underneath the lavatory sink. Dust motes flowered in that little cramped duskroom, there was the furniture of the septic tank scowling and leaking unutterable excrescences, et c., ethocgenusomne.
I couldn’t wait for another tragedy to even itself out over time and grow dull around my life like one of those pots of Venusian flytraps.
Rather, I butted the mirror with my forehead and, breaking it, in so doing, snatched a somewhat wide shear of cool glass, and opened my left wrist quite effectively. Another person, a patient, knocked hurriedly on the door.
“Occupahdo,” I said.
--man i hear you knockin things, rattlin cubbards what
“This is a space reserved, on general efficiency of platitude, for those for whom the sanctity of the vomitory activity trumps exiguous efforts to deny aforesaid sanctity & attendant elements. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.” With a formula of dissatisfaction I sought, thereafter, to sit down on the meager shit-skuffed toilet and wait out the blood, or wait for it --- all of it, that’s to say; and almost as I had finished the apostolic wringing of my hands together, this I surmised to be a peccadillo of fun, a peculiarity of moral and/or esthetic register: you will imagine pure wavelengthlets of red gossamer positively dribbling out of my wrist like gibberish, but not weary enough yet from this whole gnarly dark horse of a gambit.
--cmahn man you goin on fifteen now
I unhesitatingly replied not.
Some few more minutes elapsed and I felt good. I asked not a few number of times of the raffish lout to consult another bathroom, as the one wherein I was shaky and psychically insipid (dueto/bloodloss, exsanguinity, the like)should not be breached. The fellow had maybe in sooth gone on a good fuck-off and this pacified me the way a hummingbird pacifies the air from the noise of aerodynamics and the chimebox musica always always girding the Santa Monica crap streets with its tinfoilishness and spastic tinsel.
--you fuckin sure can pound one off like that, amigo, todos a siempre ….
The blood like gibberish, gossamer, the guts of guts. Trickling and drooling downward into opaquely obese chunks of ink or filament, or I couldn’t make out just what it looked like, then, as the cartwheels of Time rolled through me like dustbunnies on a “far, Edenic shore.”
The artery, the integument, severed. It all felt alright, even moreso than alright; si, amigo, I didn’t say to the fellow outside the door. Or—wherever he was.
One sure sign of a goof future is a reality (ie, this, now, dernier, on&on) in which even the smarmiest pissflingers of the social rank/file-system wait in an Indian line off Arroyo Seco FW, 101, to honk car horns at each other on an otherwise quiet Pasadena night, and to the annoyed suicide sitting in a cheap unbedight, unbright room three floors up, no give/take, all there is is what there ever was: the beer bottle, the crackfires in one’s lungs that develop to constant wheezing, like trying to cough out a particularly pathologic heartbreak at 19 ys/o. And of course, of course, understand, the violins of Li Po, chirruping softly in a distance of fug and wilderness and total A1 abandon of mind & physiq.
Daath, I think that’s what many of the Torah specialists used to call a sense of in-depthness, or life-wisdom. And sometimes one finds oneself in a blind caper with men who eat too loudly or starve themselves in rooms made of chaste carpeting & seminally clogged kitchen apronettes, all that sort of thing in a constant recycling humdrumness that can last for far too long if one isn’t careful.
I touched the shard of glass to my right wrist with a feeling of ineffability, and with all the sure things in the world mere obfuscations (now) I leaned, going topsy-turvy, off into a private black monastery, and I don’t remember if ever I got the toilet to unstick, but I knew the sound of flushing away a life very well; and as I hit hard, smack-pop, in the middle of that floor, I heard nothing save the scampering about of a silverfish, and the meaty spasms of my body cassocked in the woozy sedentary squalls of stupid fluorescent barlighting, locked in swift paroxysms.
But I could remember more rapping at the door --- urgent rapping, whatever came of that urgent, urgent rapping at that god dammed door.
Whatever the case, I was off the case for good, I decided.
--hombre its time for a zoloft shite huh how boutit
A giant swath of mirror sluiced down to shatter into innumerable white reflecting cells, and that, probably, would delay the man’s expurgations for at least a few minutes. Oh, well, that was sometimes the cleanest slate you could get ahold of.
The next day, a cleavage of pink rosewater colored the shingling of the 101 x-ramp at 6.45 am WST & some girl, Alicia Ramifez, drove her sherry-pink Volks onto Figueroa St. (where were the eldritch Fig street tunnels once upon a time, she had wound down the oldfashioned window levers, her face entirely mascara’d with the sunny tincture and beautiful she was, there, all-Houri, turning the blinker on…) while the gentle highrises and squeaks of LA county proper swam up at her through the tiny footwells of the Volks and she braked easily at the second light, lighted a Kent cigarette, and smoked and smoked and smoked and smoked.
The light signed for her to go on her way as she discarded the butt with a naturally smart flick of her forefingers and that was all that happened that day.
“poem writ on my cock before self-vitiation”
when sadness like a riddle burns cigarettes into yer arms
& the wobbliness of space/time is there, too
& cats with meows stuck in their teeth
assemble at the deepest brinks of yer wandr’ngs
its better to hold on to San Bernadino scaffoldings
and accept the earthquakes that form amidst the
sclera & feces compartments of life
the watering hole for sinners in this world
runs deep
and theres never a dry spell but perennially
a draught or two
sailboats in a macabre season
don’t look friendly on the offing of our chests
w/
bologna nipples & paunches fat as submarines
drink drink drink & stay steady
don’t duck for potholes
don’t sample the kool aid if it smells like another room’s temp
and also there is candlelight in the earth of ourselves
but that’s the light that sooner than any other goes out
and you retrace some old ground
so don’t forget a flashlight
sometimes, love gone from too many of us,
it leaves a balance of upsidedownness
and we’re all left poking for real heartbeats
like astronauts delving the clefts and tarn rushes
of infinite old hat moons
(flishflushhhergggghhuhuhguhgh)
~ ~ ~
“Unfortunately, our care – meaning, in essentia, within our facility -- will do you nothing good,” she said, wagging her nose at me, gauging my eyeballs for madness or cataracts; no good, but thanks, hey, for trying, why don’t ya, I thought, or she thought. I thought briefly of sailboats shining like well-bred, old-fashioned coursers through curious English channels, but almost out of some obscure facility of distraction I refocused my hazel specs on the APRN. She probably couldn’t bear to see her husband in bed with another woman on his mind, I reflected. She was directly one of those sorts, or types, you’ll pardon me to understand.
At all events, she had been discussing, rather fiendishly using my patronymic title in this such verbal episode, the consistency with which I’d have to have already had with regard to my status as a mental health candidate in the 4-star living/dining utility hospice at the adjoining big-league hospital, what the educated sick longago and faraway deemed the “policlinic.”
“We don’t believe our physicians would be able to provide you with the treatment appropriate to your condition,” she repeated, her eyeballs poring over the scantily dated calendar or the medical chart, probably to better appreciate the ever-ordinary sublunary fuckjob that all of else had been elected into out of the sheer biology of chance, accident, and (also) stupor.
I pounded my eyelids shut and terminated her from my view; uglier than a silverfish and more or less having the same characteristic incisiveness, the way she scrambled around her notes, or so I could well imagine it, mucous circles around tried-true medicaments; hobbies (if any) of note; employers of previous gigs; the picture there, the rest, you get it, the gist of it, at least.
“In fact, it shows here that you harmed yourself only recently. How long ago was that?” She just did nothing, not qualifying, or anything, the question, which was somehow worse than recommending a deep and explorative response on my end (though I shan’t have given her the full 101 on the Sorrowfulness of [my] Conviction, anyhow, more than anything). Instead I responded to a pamphlet on diabetes which I could happen to barely eke out in that luridness of white drawers and chests and erudition that, yes, I did harm myself quite recently, and I couldn’t put my thumb on it, for thumbs, O high dexterousness, are better adjusted to the seat of a razor or to scratch at one’s genitals, so I deflected, and started to sweat and, yes, eventually to lapse into some throes of dissimulation. “Miss, be not that as it is, understand, but I find myself somewhat startled by the mean concentration of these interrogations,” and “shall I request at this time a colossal vasectomy of sorts?”
“Well, no, I don’t see the use in that, and moreover – to whom would that be a service?”
I turned this over for a few moments until it stopped in my head like windshield wipers defaulting into their little barracks, and I told her that, left untreated, these [my] testes could end up as highly inspired paperweights on the intern’s cutely Polish chin. I gesticulated like an acrobat for want of anything interesting going on, bringing my hands up to construct just such a scene of a sac of testes settling like twin bandeaux on the intern lady’s finely angled phiz.
“I’m sorry, Mr. L---, we simply cannot treat you here. Er, do you feel as though you’ll be in any way an invidious harm to yourself or any other person/persons if we permit you to leave, knowing that we act only in the necessary capacity as doctors, certified NAs, and the like?”
A great boffy candidate for actual, actualized suicide, and but how many cigarettes did I smoke in a day? I told her what I thought she wanted to hear – between five and seventy -five – and she crowded her head around another bit of tabulation and wrote prosperously of my answer. A wide farrago of pencilings and other, discrete entries of misc. pharmacologic pallor.
She had written more words than I had said to her. At this I grew unspecifically nervous – she could be prone to malpractice or fancy or too much invention, and all these things were really just fine, but when I had only said what I had only said, it was scarcely my turn to have to correct her for her excitability, her prophecy, her over-garrulousness that wasn’t at all events mine.
“And alcohol?” I wondered if they had asked Li Po these questions as he bathed in the red-wine sun mornings and philandered with the fishes in the Yangtze River in the evenings, when the moon was a cake of manipulated syrup in the bourdon tower mocking the world. I suddenly felt an urgency to excrete, so I asked the ordinary questions which would open up a dialogue granting me access to the lavatory. “It’s occupied.” Perhaps there was another man contemplating an old Chinese poet. So I was not alone after all.
“Now, concerning your alcohol?” I hadn’t begun to decree that it was anything of a real concern, so I politely nodded my head seven times – that was a very graceful number of repetitions, and I presumed it to satisfy her question.
This turned out to not be the case.
She slanted her head up toward me, blotting out my visions of diabetic convalescence mimeos and other assorted desiderata of that assuming variety.
“Mr. L---I’m going to ask you again; around how many bottles of alcohol do you consume within a one-week period?”
She had not clarified on this point earlier, and I felt a general disruption in the conduct of her inquiries. I explained that eighteen bottles in one sitting would be sufficient to lead to another sitting, usually unintentional, at which point I would either dry up on the floor and await assistance or try my hand again. Still, this did not eliminate her curiosities, which I felt were becoming more and more forensic. I thought to appoint myself an attorney. Was that gentleman done in the shitter, or was he dead? Either was fine, though I would probably require a few extra napkins for sanitary purposes. But I was anxious. “No, he is not done. Can you see the door is closed?” I could plainly see nothing from my present position on my patient’s cot, though I did spy a silverfish flittering about underneath the hand-gel dispenser. And, even if I could see, that qualified nothing, for I had a good point to argue that if all closed doors intuited the act of shitting or pissing or masturbating – that settled it, the man was asked to produce a seminal specimen – then there ought to be more doorknockers; and what about those twin cabinet doors? They were clearly shut. I decided this forced a more reasonable line of discussion, and brought up the issue. She opened for me the cabinet doors, revealing a number of antiseptic bottles, lotions, and other accoutrements. That settled it. I walked over, my bungling ass naked and swiveling mad in the fluorescent carnival, rapped several times on the bathroom door.
“Excuse me!” shouted the old silverfish dangling onto her clipboards by her neck, “I’ve told you enough times that that lavatory was occupied!” And she came rushing toward me, her feet pattering loudly against the linoleum highway. I entered.
She followed me in. I told her that the lavatory was surely much occupied presently, and how impolite it was of the bespectacled missus to go on inside: and even that, without first knocking. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. L---, I was convinced I saw another patient walk in here just a few minutes or so ago. I’ll let you to your privacy.”
It was okay, just okay, I told her, but most felicitously of her to leave, yes, oh yes. She did. I urinated, wrapped my johnson in a sanitary napkin, then wrote a short poem on it. It was an ode to a bedpan, with a meter of some iambs and altogether it proved a predictably lousy poem. I flushed the napkin; it snarled and cluttered the toilet. It must have been a very sorry poem. I walked over and checked on myself in the mirror. My beard was waxen and dry from plain pain and exhaustion; and yet my mouth was too animated with teeth; thirdly observing that: my eyeballs rang out stunningly, like two medium-sized Cheshire shits from a pop-up book of Alice’s hajj to wunderheim.
Li Po, after all these years, where have you gone hiding?
Thenceforth I checked underneath the lavatory sink. Dust motes flowered in that little cramped duskroom, there was the furniture of the septic tank scowling and leaking unutterable excrescences, et c., ethocgenusomne.
I couldn’t wait for another tragedy to even itself out over time and grow dull around my life like one of those pots of Venusian flytraps.
Rather, I butted the mirror with my forehead and, breaking it, in so doing, snatched a somewhat wide shear of cool glass, and opened my left wrist quite effectively. Another person, a patient, knocked hurriedly on the door.
“Occupahdo,” I said.
--man i hear you knockin things, rattlin cubbards what
“This is a space reserved, on general efficiency of platitude, for those for whom the sanctity of the vomitory activity trumps exiguous efforts to deny aforesaid sanctity & attendant elements. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.” With a formula of dissatisfaction I sought, thereafter, to sit down on the meager shit-skuffed toilet and wait out the blood, or wait for it --- all of it, that’s to say; and almost as I had finished the apostolic wringing of my hands together, this I surmised to be a peccadillo of fun, a peculiarity of moral and/or esthetic register: you will imagine pure wavelengthlets of red gossamer positively dribbling out of my wrist like gibberish, but not weary enough yet from this whole gnarly dark horse of a gambit.
--cmahn man you goin on fifteen now
I unhesitatingly replied not.
Some few more minutes elapsed and I felt good. I asked not a few number of times of the raffish lout to consult another bathroom, as the one wherein I was shaky and psychically insipid (dueto/bloodloss, exsanguinity, the like)should not be breached. The fellow had maybe in sooth gone on a good fuck-off and this pacified me the way a hummingbird pacifies the air from the noise of aerodynamics and the chimebox musica always always girding the Santa Monica crap streets with its tinfoilishness and spastic tinsel.
--you fuckin sure can pound one off like that, amigo, todos a siempre ….
The blood like gibberish, gossamer, the guts of guts. Trickling and drooling downward into opaquely obese chunks of ink or filament, or I couldn’t make out just what it looked like, then, as the cartwheels of Time rolled through me like dustbunnies on a “far, Edenic shore.”
The artery, the integument, severed. It all felt alright, even moreso than alright; si, amigo, I didn’t say to the fellow outside the door. Or—wherever he was.
One sure sign of a goof future is a reality (ie, this, now, dernier, on&on) in which even the smarmiest pissflingers of the social rank/file-system wait in an Indian line off Arroyo Seco FW, 101, to honk car horns at each other on an otherwise quiet Pasadena night, and to the annoyed suicide sitting in a cheap unbedight, unbright room three floors up, no give/take, all there is is what there ever was: the beer bottle, the crackfires in one’s lungs that develop to constant wheezing, like trying to cough out a particularly pathologic heartbreak at 19 ys/o. And of course, of course, understand, the violins of Li Po, chirruping softly in a distance of fug and wilderness and total A1 abandon of mind & physiq.
Daath, I think that’s what many of the Torah specialists used to call a sense of in-depthness, or life-wisdom. And sometimes one finds oneself in a blind caper with men who eat too loudly or starve themselves in rooms made of chaste carpeting & seminally clogged kitchen apronettes, all that sort of thing in a constant recycling humdrumness that can last for far too long if one isn’t careful.
I touched the shard of glass to my right wrist with a feeling of ineffability, and with all the sure things in the world mere obfuscations (now) I leaned, going topsy-turvy, off into a private black monastery, and I don’t remember if ever I got the toilet to unstick, but I knew the sound of flushing away a life very well; and as I hit hard, smack-pop, in the middle of that floor, I heard nothing save the scampering about of a silverfish, and the meaty spasms of my body cassocked in the woozy sedentary squalls of stupid fluorescent barlighting, locked in swift paroxysms.
But I could remember more rapping at the door --- urgent rapping, whatever came of that urgent, urgent rapping at that god dammed door.
Whatever the case, I was off the case for good, I decided.
--hombre its time for a zoloft shite huh how boutit
A giant swath of mirror sluiced down to shatter into innumerable white reflecting cells, and that, probably, would delay the man’s expurgations for at least a few minutes. Oh, well, that was sometimes the cleanest slate you could get ahold of.
The next day, a cleavage of pink rosewater colored the shingling of the 101 x-ramp at 6.45 am WST & some girl, Alicia Ramifez, drove her sherry-pink Volks onto Figueroa St. (where were the eldritch Fig street tunnels once upon a time, she had wound down the oldfashioned window levers, her face entirely mascara’d with the sunny tincture and beautiful she was, there, all-Houri, turning the blinker on…) while the gentle highrises and squeaks of LA county proper swam up at her through the tiny footwells of the Volks and she braked easily at the second light, lighted a Kent cigarette, and smoked and smoked and smoked and smoked.
The light signed for her to go on her way as she discarded the butt with a naturally smart flick of her forefingers and that was all that happened that day.
