Customer Service Call #7
“There is no heaven or hell; there are just these lives we make here, the things we do and are; and all that we love is all that we’ll ever own.”
Hello, there. So, this call may be recorded for quality-control purposes. This drizzle might be untended for the distillation of what so-called bearers of litigation might come to process and control — outright, that is.
Hi. I am not your voice. Tickled with charm, there you go. Sip and dress down the options, sycophant. Let restrictions ring. Give what’s not taken away, too. The willing go swoop-and-buckle towards intermission at the crucial moments in banality, in effect what’s hastening to the balances of checked positing or rough-and-tumble ahems and ums before the crowd’s sourced and seized and chilled to leftovers. Always running out with a bleep-worthy word on the tip of your tongue. Howdy, here. A quick blurt from the bearers of deeper cups: “Séances loosely based on idiophone solos, lost teeth, and the ways it takes to be right down or ready to do some pushups. We humans are capable of many things. We can throw knuckleballs and send crafts into outer space. We can write checks to pay off our debts. We can clean sinks; harness electricity with alternating currents; bury our fiber-optic cables and our dead; get married and clean toilets and drive tractors through intersections. So, press the pound sign to cast a copycat artist as the blanched horror of clawing back into the gist-and-guff stuff that never gets taken comically. Hip but do not hooray.”
For the second to last time, hear me in. End over, firstly, and then the delight will take the pie. Shallows full of swallows, breaths like mud and gravel, a caduceus hatpin, lines like lives chalked to dustier paths. Withering into the truth like Yeats would’ve, a brain that’ll only do what’s good for the genes getting passed on and on. A trill’s cut like a Denver steak through night’s phony cover. No more sure things. No more superconductors or tungsten-filament bulbs or antimatter. Just a curse word and a cracked egg. Play mean.
A far’s slight, slopped by the forkful, as the night’s long grieves, getting dressed, attaching wishes to the message, gathering a hunch to hunt the heart’s horse thieves, humming the penitentiary blues on the other wider side of the law. It was during the snow-bright afternoons when she turned into the sort of sly and gutsy woman who drinks from the bottle and punches first. And she knew everybody’s name by heart. To wind up complicit in the top’s bottom-down slaughter, and raising a fist in murderous weather before the beef gets gone, she’d moan, “Sturdy’s finish-line wavering beguiles morality’s evolving as a survival instinct. Top down? I’m guessing that we’ll all be shitfaced before tomorrow knows any damn thing at all.” I called her Lady Lament and stole pencils for her. All we had was a buckboard wagon somewhere near Placerville. It wasn’t much, and it was nowhere. As I waited (as I always was — as her, “Be right down,” usually meant you had some serious time to kill) I noticed myriad dust-mote speckled bands in the pale-yellow crinkled sheets of crepe-rubber sunlight beaming through slits in the curtains. The going rate on the ideology of “being here” compensation was less than meeting my needs, and I lay on the bamboo mat she had spread over the gray whorls of carpet there in the dying room, and I happened upon a distant relative of “live or be lived” as I feigned ease and calm while in the throes of some downright Dionysian life of the mind. She’d rumble down the stairs at last, blaming entropy for her struggles: “Yes is my last why. I know. I’ve been beat and the office is closed for the weekend. My voice is tapped. Don’t listen. What’s in my head stays there, for good or bad or whatever spoon shines through it and lies. Don’t hear me. Practice the distinguished and indistinguishable art of washing dishes before crossing yourself in the shade there. What I see’s just that.”
Please hang up after the tone. The terms will be yours. Speak coherently and clearly into the microphone. Say only, “Yes” or “No.” There is no maybe, Baby. There are only higher weeds to grow over what the garden of you never gets to know. Put the receiver down. Hit the kill switch. We’ve grown apart as enemies. Stay parched. Turn that raised middle finger toward the heavens. Goodbye. Talk like a little kid. Repeat. Pause. Repeat. Do not get comfortable. Grouse about it all over baked emu entrails and blackberry wine. Tell them that those were days of expensive limes and preached habits with only that turmeric-flavored coat of lassitude left to taste. If another farewell is breached, so be it. This call has been disconnected for better reasons than you’ll ever guess. So, kill another moth and get on with it already. Falter. Steady. Push back and forth and fall back all over again. Keep moving. After all, nobody lives the magic long; and perhaps this is the point, no?
“I’ll show you the life of the mind.”
Sometimes a late-night phone call to India is all that you’ve got left. Sanding down the rougher parts, elsewhere, smoothed to a casual deliverance. Exceptions grassy and wormy. A disservice to the familiar. That crying silver-streaked window-flanked pyramid extending skyward farther than most notice, checked blankly, roomy enough and still you go begging on a center divider in a t-shirt reading: “Change Is Good.”
Please turn off all devices connected to the…
Due to late conditions of armed dismissal, the regular voice-activated operators will be on sabbatical until this notice is given: this call will be casually recorded by somewhat nefarious and/or legal means for what shall now be referred to as the enigmatic training purposes of another corporation’s nationals.
Curse the names of the hosts and harlots watching parlor TVs on camel-hair divans. You need people speaking with French accents around sometimes too. Nobody’s hunting around for toothpicks in your breast pocket anymore. The neighbors have all gone insane. Sheltered blockheads ruining the landscape with horrible noise all the way to Yonkers and back. A couple breaking their handhold in the wind. A mute dwarf who eats nothing but chocolate and smells so sweet. The milk’s gone sour for the evening. Buckets leaking spoiled curdles of drip, contaminated water, and the last reason left to fall out of love. Care’s coming cheaper. And the curses just aren’t getting any better by the dozen. Seeing’s in what you don’t. Let the pace setters leave for the country. Have a pickle-juice cocktail. Take truck with the under-dressed, and don’t forget to darn your dreams. It’s like waiting for the mail gal to show. An amorphous window of beleaguered time. An edgy way to twiddle along.
Sorry. I did not recognize that response. Please try again.
Poolside’d be better. Drink in hand. Umbrella. Dark shades. Shoeless. A hint of calm flavoring everything. Twenty to none. Introducing people by their full names. A real tossup. Bloops before the blasts, not the other way around. At ease with heavy-set thoughts. Brainy waiters taking the brunt of it as they hop gingerly between the palms. Coasting, really. Dreaming about that grand and weary old Shenandoah, some soft spot in the imagination, carrying on, bolder now, more uneven though, bopped and treading ever so murderously over the hot pavement. Punched out. So-so. Dinner-table manners on a deck chair, lounging, mustering a cricket of loneliness in the bones. On hand and delivered like some Tupperware salesman would. Got figuring to do. As per the unusual effect of normal events, occurred or not, and the darker feel of softly lit things catches your guard up. And of course you’ve got yourself here supremely relaxed, some whim of lassitude honeyed slow and sweet to all get out. Shame? Guilt? Nope. Just a mulish sort of indifference, caught biking around with no hands, no punctual habits to deal with or do without. Craning your neck over it? Not a bit. Keeping those eyes unpeeled. Sloughing off all those dreams of who you were, puttering along still, as always, a tad dippy and myopic, strange and unkempt.
So, the hangdog countenance gets counted out, as the world tilts to the music your memories make. “Please, listen clearly, as our options may have changed.” Warmer nights behind. The best of all these handouts, racy justifications, and tuckered-out times. Jumpier. Halved with made-up eyes, lashes like thorns.
Voices Doppler through commingling with echoes from above: “She had a wig she called Matilda, a Smith-and-Wesson style to her. Let me tell you, it was a real Kodak moment. Oh, and that’s a flight that’ll never leave, huh? Well, the riled piss what’s off into today.” That will be $19.99 plus all taxes and applicable fees. You can hangup, or press #1 to return to the previous menu, or say, “Begin again,” to repeat the list of options 1–7.
Getting’s its own going, for now. And the punches sleep without a wearer. The scratchiest swimsuit south of Antarctica. Your promises as bad a bronze, subtler when made boozy and disgruntled. A lone hardly kept soft in the highest places. A bunt’s trouble. For the giving, and then you could use a lift. Getting cuter by the second, with all the help and the chancy tidbits of sorrow like dropped flowers or jealousy’s out-of-court settlement. Treading gets the worst of you. Obstructed and obvious, some of those heart-rending darts just miss the target. Aiming’s a delicate art. A certain gaminess about this stuff, something withered before it blooms. You look good in mirrors. Rest on. Bound to fail. Parked in the white zone of the world. Just before you tossed a candy cigarette at a cop who couldn’t find his ass with a bell on it. Who looks better without a shirt? All the way down to 144th Road and 5 years off your life. Be back in the winter, Bandito. Tell the souvenir sellers to get found. Out’s your only in. Be dumb about it, in a sec’s “be back, soonly.” And then move on to the next affair.
Your confirmation number is blank. Please keep this number handy for your records. Have a nice day.
A bit tight, struck with awe, and the credits roll only to omit your name from it all. Time for a change. You’re soaked. Some hero called Coward, decorated like an x-mas tree, doused with bourbon, and he clears his throat to some piping up, such as, “Heaven’s just a beer bar with a good jukebox and a bartender named Dutch, or maybe Suzy. Bilious regards, sent or not, sweep away the leftover attachments that might form a struggling stymied bond twixt the pukers and the pet rattlesnake owners. Blah is my disposition. Pride without courage is for sissies. Guaranteed. Plan behind. I live in my own time zone.”
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