FICO/ENDO/LANDLORD/CRESCENDO

Cocksucker. Perfume. Long Wooden Box.

(Cool ass painting from I don’t know where, the internet, memed by me, Emil Ottoman, for Cult of the Rainbow Rat, 2018? shit I don’t know.)

Whatever this ends up being, it is a product of the three word prompt “cocksucker”, “long wooden box”, “perfume” from

Edith Bow

and her

Stream Of Consciousness POV

workshop. A must attend.

(Buy me a coffee)

---

Stayed up late last night trying to clean up the refugee camp chic of the apartment, put away the clothes and did your socks inside out and rolled, took the brush and scratched a clone of the cat out of the runner, but couldn’t get the glitter and leftover star confetti from Charlene and Christmas out of the heavy pile round red rug from IKEA. They had to pull it down and it came with a hefty discount, but all it had done was hang like Mussolini at the end of the war, and no one had even stepped on it.

But this doesn’t calm anything down. The kitchen is still a panic attack, the Mexican roofing crew that’s on the roof tomorrow morning clomping around, probably no contractor’s license, friends of the landlord’s chef, from the restaurant. They showed the Oracle the video from the roof after they climbed up the day before when late night you’re trying to recontextualize the hell you feel like you’re in by rearranging your flaming shit and they said oh see, roof very bad. Not good. And the Oracle had asked this little man with the camera if they were going to do the ruined and molding ceiling, the thing hanging above life in the house, the reason for evac, and he shook his head no, no, we no do inside.

Turns out they’ll patch the ceiling in 14 days. But you wake up today after that late night and the last business day for processing the apartment application for the nice spot on Botanical with the reasonable seeming landlord, after you record some thoughts into your phone and shoot them off in an email the plink of an email hitting the inbox goes off, pop, and there it is. Rental application canceled.

Fucking cocksuckers. Money in the bank for a move, constantly depleting, needing refilling, only so many hours in the day, and now a thank you fuck off thanks for the fifty dollars eat my ass and hey yeah I know your FICO score is fucked. High earner in the household and the Oracle is aging, so now the primary lessee should be you and the fiancee, Oracle cosigning your horrible mistake of a grief credit extravaganza.

But it’s not like you really meant to move right now in the middle of winter either.

And it’s not like you’re going to be able to raise that credit score high enough for anyone to give a fuck. And you’re self employed and a private person because you’ve had what, three, four stalkers? Half past one, something December, and one of them is going to do Fed time for showing up on your porch when you weren’t home, scared your mom into staying at Bam’s house.

The purple pills run out but then in the early evening the Oracle brings the prescriptions home like they always should arrive and the countdown to blunting the panic begins. But it’s not even blunting the panic, it’s just keeping violence at bay.

Dreaming of the past because it’s levels it’s layers so pray for the players, and the Mexicans who live downstairs are shady as fuck in that too many Texas license plates in the hood all of five minutes ago in January with them either fixing a hole the drunk young buck punched in a wall or building a fake wall. And who the fuck makes that much noise or moves that much furniture in the downstairs unit, that was until they peeped that the camera pointed right at them and lit up every motherfucker who stepped on the porch. Not none of that Ring shit because they have a deal with the cops and you only roll with them if they’re in a pine box and you’re shoveling cow shit in the grave they earned for being the bootlicking shitheel class/race/pick a card any card traitors they are. Big man with a gun in a city with four federally partnered Drug task forces with no oversight and they’re glad to just let the criminals pop each other. Christmas Morning 1991 and you were lucky enough to get an NES, fuck Mario, you’re playing Duck Hunt with the little pistola.

The perfume in the kitchen is growing mold with subtle notes of rot, catches in the lungs because it may have asbestos fibers in it. If you’re happy and you know it lawyer up. First thing upper middle class white families teach their kids soon as those bone headed little fishsticks get close to the BMW mom or dad or meemaw or papap gonna give ‘em at graduation, or whatever, 16,

“Don’t talk to the police and always call our attorney.” And they hand the kid a white gleaming card to stick in their wallet.

They don’t teach you this shit when you’re poor like they don’t teach dope boys what to do with their money so it all ends up shot out a cash canon into the void. This press conference is over.

911 never did shit in my hood.

Cocksucker. Rolls off the tongue easy, in the head again and again. Long wooden boxes lines up in shallow graves covered with quicklime and tarps. Fortunate Son blaring in the background. In the apartment though it’s still Christmas.

You go from room to room sipping coffee and chewing more and more Xanax, high agitation, hopes shattered for another day, knowing that compassion fatigue for giving in a situation that has rolling needs beyond the scope of what you can do in sixteen hours or monetize fast enough along with the cognitive load of even doing the work. There’s always the work (and the work is never finished.)

Start to decontextualize and anonymize the walls. Down comes art and silly little things you got to decorate from Temu, you know, little metal plates. Marla Singer as Mona Lisa smoking a cigarette where it was placed with such care on the Hanged Saint’s door. Still decorating for a dead woman with a knife in your side, bleeding all down the hallway, pulling down Red Tara, The Buddhist protector of hell, both of Magritte’s Lover’s I and II, a real cheesy fuckin’ piece of AI art on canvas with her blonde perfect soft mid century model features looking to bright blue sky with sparse puffy clouds, raining pills, yellow, red, oblong, a rainbow of them. Earlier in the month in a fit of morning mania you notice you’d scrawled a line from Event Horizon across the ADHD GOD YOU’RE DUMB dry erase calendar on “Libertate Me” Now if only you could scratch out your eyes. The hall looks like a refugees live there.

We hollowed the walls in backs of bodegas, the song, just the chorus, Pusha T stuck in your head.

Easiest answer to the whole problem is dirt work, long wooden boxes. In the city somewhere is a stash house, in the walls of the stash house are drugs and money. Logistical nightmare. Potatoes and Glock 43X ghosts. Associated costs. Risk benefit analysis bends the wrong way aging out to old head but god. How much is a human life worth? The US Government did the job for you on that one. Call it Statistical Value of Life, differing across several Fed agencies for various p oses, but if you average the number you come up with from those numbers it says your average SVL is $10.875 mllion dollars.

Back of the napkin math on past sins says if Samsara exists you’re never escaping it and next time around you’re going to have a really bad time because none of those licks from the sticks in CA to the backwoods of GA was anywhere you walked out of with a 10 mil split on the work after leaving tribute for the authorities. House full of long wooden boxes and drugs, but no money, no questions, no investigations. Out of towners run operations like high speed operators, some of them vets unemployable and bloodthirsty, split it all at the nearest highway rest stop and burn out. Leave the work truck with the keys in it, it’ll be gone before they find the stash spot.

Them boys hoppin’ out that big black Tahoe, they may have on DEA jackets and all the right gear, but they’re not there to take nothing into custody but money in the walls that you’re holdin’ because it’s just easy, let us put this here, sit on it, don’t steal from it, and we’ll be through on a rotating schedule that nobody’s going to tell you because the cartels are full of former Mexican military and they know what opsec and infosec are just same as you know that feller down in Mississippi lives in the backwoods with the CNC mill, the engineering knowledge, and the grudge against god and the FED to have him get a potato ready to go over the end of an AK in about two weeks.

$522 million give or take? But who’s keeping track. You’re not playing darts. So you start to put up Christmas because you ordered ornament holders that were cheap shit from China like everything else on Amazon you could have got cheaper on AliExpress but you wanted it now.

“If I came home and the lights weren’t up in the hallway I think I’d have a breakdown.”

The Oracle Said.

The last perfume you bought was from Lush. Approved by the Saint, who smelled it on your wrist and said she liked it. You said it was named “The Palm of God” she smirked her little trademarked smirk cocked her head a lilt to the side and said “Well of course it is.”

But she’s dead, hanging silent in that crystal moment of contrition that you return to every morning.

And you’re sucking cock and tearing down two years of work getting this apartment anywhere near how you wanted it to be.

And you know everywhere you walk for the rest of your life, you’re walking on the tops of those long wooden boxes. Those pine caskets. Dreaming of the past. Scared of the future. Drowning in the now. Numbing what you can. Scared if you move her essence won’t follow you. All you’ll have left is shit, things devoid of spirit. The mold in the kitchen makes it hard to breath. That sinus infection isn’t getting any better.

What was the biggest split down on a run in? 750? Yeah, 750 bands would solve this problem pretty fast. Landlord isn’t fixin’ shit fast enough. Ceiling gets patched instead of a tear-out and full fix, all it is, is more mold. Kitchen so dirty it wouldn’t be worth it to whip hard in it.

Homie out west just hit you up with units for 650 and a menu. Ten on the cuff multiplied by three to five if anything goes wrong. Haven’t done any handoffs or small sales since COVID mixed no touch and ouncing out pounds of Gelato 45 showed up in gun cases packed legit as fuck, before the genetics got out and everyone wanted gelato, when it was a hard sell because no one heard it in no fuckin’ songs yet, but brother got it from the geneticist, mad hatter. Grs of light running a thousand but sheets only go for 250 and that’s the end of it.

When you take this much Xanax, you can’t cry.

Cocksuckers. Who said a FICO score should eliminate an earner from competition.

The prison industrial complex wants everyone it has ever let go back.

The ICE roundups, all this shit about deportation and where’s the labor going to come from. Dumb motherfuckers, prison labor, the return of near chattel slavery. They already make components for the military, Nike, what the fuck do you think they’re going to be doing next? California inmates already fight fires. Next they’re picking your fruit for twenny five cents a fuckin’ hour. Quick math, two million in prison, top out estimate for illegal immigrant farm workers is around a million. Short timers will churn through the system and come out knowing how to sew one line in a pair of Jordan’s that’s gonna turn into a bigger all American statement of slave labor than it already is, they just haven’t caught up to it yet.

When the walls of the apartment are empty, the hall denuded, the cheesy canvas above the toilet in the bathroom with words scrawled over a classical painting of a woman that was poorly printed, decidedly mids, and said please don’t do coke in the bathroom, after all the decorating you’ve been doing in the hanged Saint’s room because you feel like it wasn’t done, it was a work in progress, the holy and the profane in equal measures, one wall covered in Italianate Catholic crucifixes, the other covered in smut, her altar that you refuse to touch yet, it’s obvious your life was held together by hopes, prayers to gods you don’t believe in, and extra strength command hooks.

Depersonalized the apartment, void of all but the essentials to support life, nothing where you can find it but the Christmas lights, bookcases and all the memories and pain and grief to keep 4 more .5mg Xanax XR getting chewed up every thirty minutes. Pavlovian.

Open Signal. Beethoven’s 9th, 4th movement, the Ode to Joy swells internal and you sit on one of the water damaged wobbly fucked up IKEA chairs that go with the table to be written off on the renters insurance claim.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen
Und freudenvollere

In the dark, the fluorescent stick lights turning off one by one as you sit in still silence with a head full of noise.

Freude!
Freude!

Scroll through Signal.

Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium
Wir betreten feuertrunken
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt

You were dreaming of the past. The levels, the layers, now pray for the players. hit the name and set the disappearing message timer to two hours. Tulsa never sleeps.

Wem der große Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Tapping a finger dance of felonies in the dark. I’m looking to buy a painting.” Money in the account is supposed to be for rent, moving. Late 20th century, Russian? Romanian? Maybe a little German piece too. No pause, three dots jiggle on the other end.

I have Palmetto 9mm AK subs, put actual folders on instead of those bullshit fake stocks, and I’m trying to dump some, get 4 boxes of wig splitters and two boxes of rip rounds with the deal. Man this isn’t ten years ago, this encryption isn’t broken.

How much will a Glock 30 two threaded barrels extra firing pin and some .45 ACP hollows run, let’s say four boxes? Oh, and potatoes for everything.

I’ve known you too long. You picking up or is this shipped?

I’m in Misery. The state and the state.

Shipped it’s. There’s that silence of the illegal arms dealer doing mental math. 3750, expect multiple crates and some electronics.

I know how it works.

Send a safe drop spot on this line with a 3 hour vanish tomorrow at 11am Pacific. I’ll have payment instructions and invoices and papers worked up by then.

Heard.

You’ve been out forever brother, why the zero dark thirty order?

You sniff the ruined air in the kitchen. The smell of mold hits your olfactory bulbs and smells like the perfume of fresh blood and hundred dollar bills.

Desperate times. On some mob shit. Gonna go knock on a few doors.

I didn’t hear shit.

“Long wooden boxes,” you say and pop off Signal, click off the phone’s screen, leaving yourself in the dark. Numb to your bones. The air, cold and damp. Sinus headache looming. Back down the naked hall into the room, where there’s still signs of life. Fiancee is done with Psych homework and watching anime on her phone. It’s late.

Tax season is coming.

Suck a FICO score like a big wet cock.

Fuck an apartment you didn’t get.

A book on the shelf about St. Louis’s spine reads “The Broken Heart of America.”

Pop in the Pixelbuds.

I had a vision that Mary of Magdalene
Saw the future that awaits just before good Friday eve
Figured the wages of salvation were a little too steep
Said no one's fucking with my baby, lord, and got on to the teet

Cleaning up,

skip

Yeah
Uh-huh
Beautiful evils
Yeah
Check me out

Crutches, crosses, caskets
Crutches, crosses, caskets
All I see is victims

skip

Banana peel AK, I'm lookin' real extra
With the top keys, the money green Teslas (skrrt)
Told Virgil, write "Brick" on my brick (write "Brick" on my brick)
Write Brick" on my brick
Told Virgil, write "Brick" on my brick
Ayo, Amiris filled with cash, I'm in the fashion district (ah)
Shoot your momma houses for a half a bicken ot)

skip

Oh, the year was 1778
How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now
Well a letter of marque came from the king
To the scummiest vessel I've ever seen
God damn them all! I was told
We'd sail the seas for American gold
We'd fire no gun, shed no tear
But I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers

That’s the one.

The song you cried through three states and seventeen hours on repeat driving back after the saint hanged herself. Your song.

She didn’t deserve to be in that cardboard box, cold, countdown to burning, 30 minutes, 29, 28, say your goodbyes.

Put the whole world in a Long Wooden Box for her. Lean back at the keyboard, open a sugar free Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and do what you always do. Lie.

And behind you, just past the edge of vision out of sight, nevermind. The Saint Hangs Silent.

XXX

(songs in order of appearance, Beethoven’s 9th symphony, 4th movement, Ode to Joy. Father John Misty, She Cleans Up, Mahashmashana, 2024. Pusha T, Crutches Crossed Caskets, King Push — Prelude The Darkest Before the Dawn Prelude, 2015. Griselda, Dr. Birds, WWCD, 2019. The Real McKenzies, Barret’s Privateers, Westwinds, 2012.)

Written beginning to end in two hours and change. Prompt courtsey of

Edith Bow