Origin Story

Origin Story

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.–Rilke

Jamiroqui Dream Engine was his nom de guerre, his war the days cobbled together into a mysterious, homeless squalor. We met when I tried to hang myself using the soccer netting I stole from the sporting goods store on Broadway Lafayette. I thought it would be a good place to do the deed across from Brooklyn College on the embankment leading down to the abandoned train tracks. Scrambling on the slope, I found purchase on a piece of newspaper and prepared to cast my net over the thickest branch I could find. I was in love with that place which welcomed the wilds of my own sorrow as a brother sorrow. The problem was that there was such a mass of netting it didn't really choke the life out of me but just made it difficult to breath. I dangled and thrashed and the branch broke, sending me tumbling down the embankment. 

 There was a guy beneath the overpass. He had a blond beard and wore a jester's hat. He hunkered low over a flaming red tire, a baking donut. When he saw me he stood, offering me his bottle of Bim Black. "I was watching you do it, ready to get up. But I knew the branch wasn’t right for hanging, and the basketball netting was funny." "Soccer netting." "Well, whatever." He told me a little story: "I used to work at the Fairway Grocery in Redhook. One day, I grabbed a sack of potatoes and jumped into the ocean. I sank to the bottom and just got bored because I can hold my breath for like five minutes. Then I became homeless." He sounded like a surfer dude or ski bum, but when I asked him where he was from, he said Staten Island. A mystery took shape around him. It was the mystery of his existence pointlessly varnishing the seconds. "But then, I made a discovery like the ancient explorers who sailed to forgotten lands. I discovered that when you get really miserable, you can see angels."

"What angels?"

"The angels everywhere."

"With wings?"

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” His voice unmasked itself, revealing inappropriate volume. “Just ordinary people. Snobs."

"Angels are snobs?"

"Yeah, man, it's like they can see you, but they're too busy. THEY’RE TOO BUSY FOR A FUCKWAD LIKE YOU."

"Like regular people."

"Yeah, but psychic. You can talk to them using your thoughts."

It was the germ of an original idea. At the time, before I had experiences of my own, it seemed more like madness’s rehash, scar tissue marking an old wound. Later I recognized that he told me things I already knew but never really allowed myself to think about. We are all high, all the time, on activity and the various chemicals released. Despair is waking to the reality that things are really as bad as you suspect.

"Good riddance is what I say," said Jamiroqui clutching his bottle of Bim Black with sleeveless knit gloves, his eyes a burning city.

"Good riddance in regards to what?"

"Shit, man, does it really matter? Good fucking riddance.” He hawked a loogie into the inner circle of a soul ablaze.

"Why do you think you can hear the angels?"

"The angels? Fuck the angels. Angels are bitches, dude."

"Yes, but why do you think they speak to you?”

"Maybe because I don’t give a shit. Maybe because I know something is going to happen."

"What do you think is going to happen?"

"Whatever it is, it's going to change things. People like me, down here on the bottom: we're going to be on top. And people on top, they're going to be down here. Or we're all going to be down here or up there or somewhere."

We sat together by flaming tires procured from from somewhere up in Flatbush. The evenings after my failed suicide attempt blurred together upon a tide of Bim Black whiskey. Time had reached a saturation point where discreet moments meant less. The days seemed to slide off the table like a mess of egg salad into the black garbage bag of night. And then night came and with it heat and cold measured out in babbling, elemental terminologies. Finally, I had my own experience. Finally, I learned what Jamiroqui was talking about. 

Riding the train my despair cameoing like cheap Nick Nolte knockoff, I had this distinct impression that I was covered in a layer of evil slime. Slime is how it starts. I had been slimed by my reality. Then I saw my first angel, a Muslim girl staring at me. A Russian with spiked blond hair looked at me from down the train car. They did not relinquish their gazes. I felt for my neck, for the marks left by the netting. They had long since vanished leaving me fully cognizant of my years of lonely failure. I had been wrung out and expunged of hope and despair, exuded into the moment. "Can you read my thoughts?" "Uggh, yes? Duh," they said.

"Why is life like this?" I queried.

"You're an idiot," said the beautiful Russian angel.

"Don't even, like, humor him," said the Muslim, also a valley girl.

"Would you love me?" I thought

"You're joking," said the Russian.

"It's nothing personal. It's just that angels only love the void”.

“The void is so hot!”

"So hot."

"They said they loved the void."

"Oh yeah, tell me about it," said Jamiroqui, taking a final gulp of Winter Palace Vodka. "The void."

"What do they mean by that?"

"I don't even know, man."

"Nothingness?"

"Like some gigantic dump." He paused, perhaps musing over his concept of absence, which he figured as an actual place. He snickered, cast the empty bottle into the flaming round.

"How do you survive, Jamiroqui?"

"I dress up in a gorilla suit in Times Square.”

"What gorilla suit?"

"This one?" he said, reaching under his blue tarp revealing black dead-dog fur.

"You're the Time's Square gorilla? I walk by you every day on my way to work." The menagerie of Time’s Square characters intruded as if they had been constantly cloying at the periphery of my thoughts, seeking entry.

"Breeze right by, man! You breeze right by like everyone else."

Tire fumes tied our time together like a carpet making a repulsive room logical. Walking the city streets, I felt myself on the cusp of something just short of death, like Jamiroqui's dump, a bearable, diminished blur. Passing through Times Square, the Apes and Elmos, Cookie Monsters and Chewbaccas held out their jangling bags of spare change. Down a side alley I saw a homeless man emerge from a large cardboard box. In his arms he carried a smaller box, a shoe box. Oblivious to my stare, from the larger box emerged a woman, a dirty visage, a Brazilian rain forest forever burning, forever rejuvenated. She was holding not a box, but a rib bone! They stood there for a little while as if posing for a photograph. The homeless Adam and Eve of the Theater District, dressed in garbage bags slung across their bodies like animal skins.

Taking the Q train back from work, I reduced to null. I could almost feel the serotonin emptying out of my brain, liberating me from chemical slavery. My despair gnashing about me allowed me to break down the barriers between myself and the angelic snobs around me. They were fat or thin, tall and short, and whenever I got down to the bottom, I found them waiting, egging me on for my measly desires. Breaking through to the other side of despair, I felt like a waking agent in a world of sleepers. If I wasn't exhausted from my long day of attempting to please people as a leasing agent, I visited Jamiroqui in the crawl space of the world.

"She was holding a bone," I told him of the homeless Eve

"You'll see a lot of bones," he said. All his utterances had taken on a prophetic quality.

One November day the air turned to ice and winter arrived. Christmas advertising cropped up. I met a young woman in Herald Square and showed her some studios she had no intention of renting. They were too big or too small, with the wrong view, the wrong location. They all had something she didn't like and besides, she didn't even have he money to begin with. I wanted to escape into that other space, like the city's voided bowl, where nature reasserted itself, where you could turn the tables on life and erect an inhabitable twilight. Returning to my neighborhood, I scrambled down the slope. My friend wasn't there. My heart sank. I sat on one of the cannibalized car seats and stared at the opposing wall. Was that writing? I stood. I approached. What I previously took to be soot were actually thousands of words scrawled with burning rubber. A story. It began like this. They come. They put some of our brains in jars. The rest of us have to leave the city.

Then I saw Jamiroqui approach, wearing the bottom half of his gorilla suit, pushing a tire in front of him.

"It's winter now," he said. "This is my protection. What are you doing? Don't read that."

"Did you write this?"

"Yeah, but don't read it."

"A story?"

"It's nothing. It's stupid."

"Brains in Jars?"

"It's a dream I've been having every night for the past 10 years."

"They come. They put brains in jars...who are they?"

“It's like a futuristic alien dictatorship where you have to toe the line, OK? But the line is like the line of your own inhibitions.”

"Do you ever meet any nice angels, Jamiroqui?"

He squeezed a spurt of lighter fluid onto the tire.

"Nice. What's that? Ever notice how nice people are mean as shit?"

As I watched him kindle the flame, in place of revolting against everything around me, my thoughts turned to the dead language of material concerns.

You sit there for a moment like a water strider suspended above a dark sea by the thinnest of biological pressures. Your slime layer manifests conditioning the dive into clarity. You are nothing. Your virtues are lost to be replaced by cosmic virtues. I arose. She looked just like Margaret, the lost love of my life, Sudanese black. She was staring right at me from across the train car. I was returning from an apartment showing in the Upper West.

"How are you today?" I thought.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Not big on the pleasantries? Why don't you just let me love you?"

The angel demurred.

She exited the subway at Columbus Circle. I followed her deep into Hell's Kitchen where, as a trick, she induced a police officer to intercede. The following few days are a blur, entering the penal system, gingerly shunted into a mental institution, perhaps the Bellview, although they called it something else. Here was the inverse of Jamiroqui's imagined oblivion. Here was a totally immaculate terrain of textures and tints, either electrically bright or totally dark. The daylight of health and the night of illness rendered with every spacial contour and protocol. Mushy or crunchy, pissed off or blank, totally silent or way too loud. 

 One day when we had just finished group gestalt therapy, the entire building shook. We were consumed, shot through and wilted by a light that wasn't a light, was more like an invisible blue wave of something flesh and bone is not designed to weather. And then the windows shattered and along with them our ear drums. An obscure but obvious emotional pain galvanized with a marrow level cosmic distress, rippling outward in a sea of golden light. I followed a train of people below ground, into the subway system. It was then that I saw Rose Mitchell, head of the psyche ward. She seemed irrationally swept up in regards to an event which, for me, felt more like a logical conclusion than some fearful aberration. Still doped, I couldn't help but smile and wave. When I did so, I realized I could take her distress in my thoughts, shape it, calm it. Rose Mitchell felt me in her head and screamed.

"Really, Rose, really?" I thought. "The head of the psyche ward?"

We delved deep, a limitless train of us marching into the earth. Some of us panicked while others gave speeches. There were no angels in our midst, or at least in my doped up state, I could not reduce to null to identify them. Beneath the sea and upward, into Brooklyn we momentarily surfaced into an ash storm. It was decided that the best rout was toward the Jersey bridge, to remain on the tracks, under the surface as long as possible.

I returned home, unlocked the doors of my apartment, made myself a salad. Then, I climbed to the roof and caught glimpses of a thunder storm that hung over the crumbling skyline. I did not immediately think of my down-and-out friend, but when I did, I approached the tracks with a mournful certainty that he wouldn’t be there. Jamiroqui Dream Engine, defying expectations at every turn, sat sharing a bottle with a black man dressed in an Elmo suit. I considered interrupting their discussion of childhood haunts, the rail yards of not-so-long-ago where, bearing their precocious burdens, they sought refuge. But before I spoke, the pointlessness of my every utterance peeled back revealing a profound desire for silence.