Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

"Nobody's going to heaven, just to space." -- T.D.H.

The Flukes had an even stronger animosity toward Freaks than Normals did. We were the new kids on the block, the foreign whores, the black sheep, the heteroclitic Mafia. We stood, chemical pretenders, outside of history and legend and art, we had no overtones and lit no votives to the memory of General Tom Thumb. -- T.D.H.

She handed three singles upfront. On each bill Washington's eyes had been whited out with correction fluid; it made him look pathological, which was the whole point, I suppose. Fucken pro nihilists could be as cutesy sometimes as those sheiks who wore bubble rings filled with crude oil. -- T.D.H.

Reeni was watching a program on television. It was a rerun -- I'd seen it last year -- about dolphins, about how they'd turned misanthropic, were refusing to share any more of their myths, their math or their semisacred medical arts. -- T.D.M.

Nobody. Then somebody: two somebodies: a fox-faced dwarf and a guy with ropy red hair and a gulch where his nose should've been. They stepped through the curtain at the rear of the store. "How the fuck did you get in here?" demanded Gulch-face. I told him: I just walked in, the door was open. -- T.D.H.

He breathed at me, then shuffled across the kitchen, his long, swollen, unserviceable arm dragging heavily behind him. It was wrapped in knotted dish towels and dustrags cinched with coarse twine. The hand was mittened in a tough vacuum-cleaner bag. The bag was polished shiny with dirt. Same as Ma, I'd always wondered how come he refused to have that arm amputated. -- T.D.H

I nosed inside the refrigerator, which Ma had stocked weirdly with beer, frozen bagels and a bag of make-believe corn. -- T.D.M.

The guy was standing there grinning, and his grin was a deliberate forgery of mine. -- T.D.M.

Nothing had been disturbed and Reeni was still dead when I got back. Relief, like soda water hectic in my circulatory system. I locked the door behind me and bolted down salt pills galore. I took Reeni's pulse: the faintest perk. She was beginning to resurrect, still had a long way to come. Thirty, forty minutes. -- T.D.H

Eventually, the market for proletarian Freak portraits withered and Da changed professions again: from photography to larceny, sometimes grand but mostly petty. Dragging that clunky arm of his along from shoplift to highjack, he must have been the most awkward crook in the annals of crime, but he managed. -- T.D.H.

We were delivered by cesarean section (since it was impossible to exit by Mother's birth canal, a gauntlet of razor scales) in a special Freaks-only psychiatric ward at Jersey City Medical Center. -- T.D.H.

"Turn out the light before you get undressed. And don't try anything when it's dark, Joe. Let's have no repeat of last night's little episode." They slept in twin beds, like ours, that were separated by a wall of junk-on-chairs, plastic hampers and teeter-tottering stacks of books and magazines, our mother's early warning system. -- T.D.H.

He reminded us that we'd been conceived (pretty amazing odds: two sperm colliding with two eggs following our parents' inaugural bang) on Caliban's Night -- "that was April the 18th, 1988" -- just an hour before number 221 Blofeld Street, Jersey City, New Jersey, burst into smithereens. -- T.D.H.

The Portrait: The artist admonishes the student: "Be wary how you render the eyes, a demon lies within."

To each his own: let each man mind his own business. So far as I'm concerned, I prefer a man that tells me frankly that he doesn't know anything about art rather than one who plays the hypocrite and pretends to know what he doesn't know and only succeeds in making trouble and being a damn nuisance generally! -- N.G.

He was in danger of becoming one of those strange human beings one meets in such large numbers in our callous world: human beings who are regarded with horror by men full of life and passion, to whom they seem to be walking coffins with a corpse where their hearts should be. -- N.G.

The painter did not know how to disillusion them, seeing that they were so pleased with being deluded. -- N.G.

"You see, I don't want anything that might suggest she is about to go to a ball or some fashionable party or something of that sort... Our balls, you know, have such a devastating effect on the spirit; so demanding, I mean... They destroy all the remains of our feelings... What I want is simplicity, as much simplicity as possible." -- N.G.

He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. -- C.M.

He lay in his chrysalis of gloom and made no sound, share by share sharing his pain with those who lay in their blood by the highwayside or in the floors of glass strewn taverns or manacled in jail. -- C.M.

Mr Suttree it is our understanding... you betook yourself to various low places within the shire... and [spent]... years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, ..., curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, ..., tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. I was drunk, cried Suttree. -- C.M.

Someone was tugging at Suttree's sleeve. A small nun with a bitten face, a smell of scorched black muslin and her dead breasts brailed up in the knitted vest she wore. She tugged with little soricine claws at the bones in his elbow. -- C.M.

Another door closed, door closed, door closed softly in his skull. Light bloomed rose, lime green. He was going out by a long tunnel attended by fading voices and a grainy humming sound and going faster and past gray images that clicked apart in jagged puzzle pieces. -- C.M.

Her hair lay about her head in greasy black clots as if she were besieged with leeches and her eye was bright and inflamed and swiveled up silently to see him. She crossed her arms and held her shoulders and her breath smoked in the cold. -- C.M.

Hitting Rufus: When an impoverished small town can't stand the man in charge, even a hitman can take a charity case.

He felt himself being drawn into modes for which he had neither aptitude nor will. They were both watching him. The tears were gone. Their eyes seemed filled with expectation and he'd nothing to give. He'd come to take. -- C.M.

A room where the mad sat at their work. [...] He'd never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who'd had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late. -- C.M.

In the madhouse the walls reek with the odors of filth and terminal ills they've soaked up these hundred years. Stains from the rusted plumbing, the ordure slung by irate imbeciles. All this seeps back constantly above the smell of germicidal cleaning fluids. -- C.M.

The Wallet: A grandfather’s hand on his grandson’s forehead; the boy looks up. The old man lowers his hand to the boy’s nose, extending his index and middle finger. A gesture superimposed onto a round face resembles what the old man fears most: a clock.

"But why do you want her?" Kino urged. "Because she makes me laugh," Jiya said. "It is she who made me forget the big wave. For me -- she is life." -- P.S.B.