Review Summary: The title of this album is important, please remember it
The giving and receiving of pain is just one guise of the mouthtailed eternal serpent. People say that we’ve all got a bit of that wyrm coiled up inside of ourselves, but Whitey and I pay our taxes peeling back other people’s skin and we’ve never seen much proof of this until lately. I’m a giver, no blowback.
Come to think of it, my life is practically painless compared to the people we deal with. Worst I can say is that my girl hasn’t been so good lately. Hard to get a handle on why: she speaks with her mouth closed and wears sunglasses over her headphones. Those phones need recharging from time to time, but the shades don’t come off no matter how dark it gets. Maybe she’s waiting for me to make a move, but whenever I try I slip over the bottles she leaves like toy mice all over the floor, and it’s over before it starts.
How does she get so many of the things? Where do they come from; she never goes out? If I make a bad landing, I throw them all out in spite, but they’re back again before I know it with different labels and the same scent. Don’t even read them anymore; there are only so many mixers you can find for preemptive tactics. Trust is a fragile thing: her friend Karen is my friend Karen, and so on. We used to share everything, but there was too much information and none of it was good for us. Now I’m out of the great loop, but she’s still in there. I can feel her eyes turning circles around the insides of those frames. If she lets me hold her, I let my breath match the speed of her blood and wonder about that snake.
Whitey on the ride home said that you have to be creative if you wanna get good at torture, but I disagree: if your first step makes a crunch, you’ve got your second one readymade etc.. Those steps are real enough - from all I’ve learnt splitting bollocks, I could daub you a map of neverland in the pearliest incandescence. Whitey definitely enjoys it more, but I think I’m better; as subway partners go, we’re a decent match. We break more than other people’s balls, too: the one time I was sober and confessed how his piercings gave his face the semblance of a bulletin board, he grinned like a horse and let me hang my longserving Nirvana poster from his brow studs and his labret. That yellow sinwave-mouth asserted a new grimace as he sucked it through his braces; the transformation was more than I could bear. A moment later and he had chewed it down: nothing satisfies the wyrm, all-devouring distorter of our heartbeats.
Karen makes wonderful lasagna and she is my friend. We hardly talk about my girl anymore, just one advantage of trusting one another. There are downsides too, of course: I can tell that she trusts me not to add to her worries. There’s been unrest in her saloon and she’s changed more than she’d admit; once, she was one of the clean ones, but now it’s Sematary this, Sematary that, and skid marks under the table. She struggles to keep her mask on when she ***s up the stereo and obliviates nutmeg in her coffee grinder. Her roux has become so rich that I think she thinks she’s spoiling me, and because I’m not a worry-friend I chew up and make polite compliments about her manicure. Not that she can hear a word I say; that unlistenable filth pounds out of her speakers and overrides the most heartfelt of token courtesies. Christ. When I learnt to trust her, it felt like our exchanges were umpired by Joni and cheered on by Buddy Holly. Was that all just a tutorial for these solidarity dinings.
Help me catch up with my clique, I cannot bear this stereo without you? She reads my mind and shows her Spotify: “SHOTGUN FT. GHOST MOUNTAIN”, only two more to go. I eat up.
It comes to a head before anyone knows it. Whitey plans something big for the weekend and tells me I’d best be somewhere else with a good alibi just in case he goes down and he catches the kind of blame that needs an extra set of feet to fill its shoes. My idea is innocent enough: take her to Central Park and give Karen a call to show she’s needed by the right people once we’re there. A good start?
It is not to last. Far across the city, Whitey shears through his heart before they can take him in, and a thousand cop cars rain from the sky like striped tombstones shat from the god of justice, sirens screaming his name as they bury him in blue. Some fucker blares an air horn somewhere. Karen loses her temper and lunges for the sunglasses, but they won’t come off and our girl can’t take it. Suddenly twice her normal size, she steps back and blurts big, lips wide and red enough to consume a whole menagerie. As though summoned by the thought of this, the eternal worm bursts through her mouth and spirals into the sky. It is bigger than any of us knew. Karen takes out a flare gun and shoots it like forty-seven times in every single color until enough time has passed and it is dead, a rigid technicolor arc brushing against the heavens, its tail in my girl’s ventricle, it’s head down some cunt’s toilet miles away. Silence and noise, noise and music, music and speech, speech and trust, trust and dissociation, dissociation and silence: all have become one and none and I do not understand what to do. It is too obvious to understand. I take Karen’s hand for the first time and she removes my face. No secrets between friends. Someone in another room smashes her stereo into a million unloved pieces. How can there be love? An album is over.
