Daiquiri by Jay Passer

The music pounded through the floor. It was a constant. Up through the floor, down from the ceiling, 1990, Seattle, Casa del Rey, Broadway, Capitol Hill. I was fresh as a steaming a.m. turd, relocated from San Fran, 24 years virile and ready to fuck the world. Tattoos on the fingers and all. I'd been inhabiting the studio apartment all the way in the back on the first floor with avocado green walls and view overlooking the building's garbage receptacles and the Seafirst bank parking lot for several months - with time being non-linear and such, the struggle to differentiate is palpable - head in the clouds, or buried underground - brain like fried fish, or submerged in a public toilet... I only knew a couple people in the building. Cheap rent, wastrels, subverts, a carnival lodging splat in the thick. The I-don't-know-who up there hammering at his drum kit day and night, like a series of earthquake tremors… I run up the stairs ready to raise hell, bam bam bam! on the door, which after a beat flies open with a Rastafarian linebacker filling up the doorframe, and I'm all uh, yeah, so you're a drummer, huh? Cool, like, holy shit and stuff, you hit really hard, man, like John Bonham on steroids, I mean, uh, y'know? Shaking a bit, I must admit. The dude was a fucking leviathan. But apparently with the power of Jah running through him. Yah, man, no problem, I can tone it down some. Peace. And he closed the door so gently you'd think a little infant baby was asleep in there. Well fuck me, I thought. I went back to the avocado walls and the desk scavenged from the alley behind Broadway. And my ancient 1940s-in-the-Bowery manual typewriter. Because I was a poet and I had to make my own noise and as unmusical as it was clack-clacking away like a tiny locomotive in my head it calmed the demons and lubricated my ego like Crisco on a stale biscuit. The swish across the hall aptly cracked, oh, that's just Monsieur Ivan hard at work on the next Great American Novel. That's ATM, girl. Party every night at mi Casa es su Casa, ATM the unofficial aficionado. A tall thin Greek specimen with the blackest, longest, curliest tresses I'd ever seen on a man. Oh, honey they're not real, he lisped. They're extensions! It's what he did, his active career. Apparently, a vast percentage of the heads of the early Seattle grunge movement were the product of ATM's hair-tying abilities. You actually make money doing that? I make bank, little man, as he reached out to finger my side-locks appraisingly. What I could do with your pe'ot, sweetie... Dude! Get the fuck! ATM whinnied. I vowed to shave my head as soon as I could get my greasy Sephardic hands on some clippers. Later in the night, after several beers and multiple hits of pot, I asked ATM why his parents named him after a cash machine. You poor thing, he pouted, it's Etienne, EH-TEE-EN, get it? En francais. You vulgar little man you. Etienne had a nice friend that lived in the basement apartment right beneath mine under the stairs. Her name was Daiquiri and in the same sentence with the straightest face imaginable Etienne added, and her sister's name is Brandy. You gotta be fuckin kidding me I said. Welcome to Seattle, Monsieur! Daiquiri was the first bona-fide grunge groupie I'd come across. Repurposed print dresses from Betsey Johnson's, honking Doc Marten's, kinky hair past her waist of every conceivable tint and pigmentation, expertly tied by the deft digits of St Etienne. Not to mention generously doused from head to toe with patchouli oil. Daiq, hot street-smart cross between Raggedy-Ann and Barbie. I didn't want to love her because she stank and treated me like a little brother when really I was probably 3 or 4 years older. Oh Eye, she sighed, oh Eye, you're such a good friend. She'd try to read one of my skittish ditties, her eyes attempting to focus with great pains. She simply couldn't. I’d read it out loud while she, happily relieved of the effort, lit a cigarette. She'd light a joint. She'd sip a fruity concoction. She'd light a pipe. Several pipes. Weed? Kif? Dank? Why not? But Daiq preferred crack. Her patchouli aroma was amply spiced with acrid permeations of tart, chic, swank, chi chi, decay, decomposition, death. Oh Eye, she'd sigh. Up on the roof, on dilapidated lawn furniture, we partied through the summer - in the pit of the avocado, at Etienne's replica of a Salvation Army thrift store's window display, on the granite stoop of the Casa del Rey - the carnival of our nation's happening musical hub bopping by on Broadway. I was the good friend who naturally wanted to fuck my good friend Daiq who was naturally a fucking junkie. But did I really want to fuck a junkie? Granted, Daiquiri had all the requisite hotness covered: length, curves, youth, hipness, surface gaiety, childlike naïveté – attributes to exploit and annihilate. Such traits in the female species, presented on a silver platter, perhaps in a state of delirium, or altogether unconscious... I could just… I would just… ahem. But to repeat. The music pounded up through the floorboards, up, through my thin futon mat, into my earholes and sonically attuned body, with a thick thumping bass that vibrated my bones. I leaped up despite the time - day, night - I was as unaware as a temporarily unemployed person could be, attuned not to the cosmos but to depths of shadow, incomparable values, black ‘n fucking white, drunk-ass plaid, bleak and snap, dying, crying, wiggling, cumming, bleeding, vomiting, dreaming. I leapt up across the room out the door down the stairs. At Daiq's door I pounded. If I couldn't pound on Daiquiri I sure as shit could pound on her door. Daiquiri was dead to the world. I tried the knob. Unlocked. Well, shit. I pushed it open and entered, shoving aside piles of clothes, shoes, smorgasbord of bric-a-brac, made my way to her bed, a palatial wrought-iron contrivance in the vein of Cleopatra or something. I spied a naked, pale white foot with toenails painted canary yellow. I clutched. I shook. I pulled. I yanked. Not dead. Undead. I mounted the bed and crawled across Daiq's inert form to the headboard shelving where the boombox was booming. Daiq never knew I was there. What did you expect, darling? Etienne simpered, a come-hither look and honey-pot gift-wrapped in Victoria's Secret? You silly little man you.

Jay Passer's poetry first appeared in Caliban magazine, alongside the work of William S. Burroughs and Wanda Coleman, in 1988. His work has been included in numerous print and online publications and several anthologies. Passer is the author of fifteen collections of poetry and prose. His work is featured in 3:AM Magazine, Asylum Floor, Beatnik Cowboy, Don't Submit!, EKL Review, Fixator Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, Mad Swirl, Poetry Super Highway, Silver Birch Press and is forthcoming in Chiron Review. A lifetime plebeian, Passer has labored as dishwasher, barista, pizza cook, housepainter, courier, warehouseman, bookseller, and mortician's apprentice. A native of San Francisco, he currently resides in Los Angeles, with a legion of imaginary cats and some very real houseplants.