California King

Our hero, a scrawny, bristle-haired man, softly sings a song he wrote when he was fifteen as he gives himself a new tattoo. He no longer remembers the verses, but the chorus goes something like: "Nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck, I'm the king, nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck." Even after all these years, he finds the hook sort of catchy. His raspy tenor smoothes and deepens as he embeds dozens of carefully-spaced puncture wounds into his skinny right arm with his long, sharp knife, stealing the voice of the unconscious man upon whom he sits.

This will not be a big tattoo, we realize, for the real estate on our hero's right arm has become quite crowded. Someday soon he'll have to move on to his unmarked left. As he rubs a hanky soaked with berry juice and coal dust into the bloody scratches, we watch a thin line of red trickle from the mouth of the motionless, waxy-skinned man beneath him. We see the scuffs and the ruined soles of our hero's black boots, so recently applied against the skull of the man under him. But what we cannot see is the tattoo being made. At least not yet.

We call this man, our hero, the California King.

He is blonde, of course, bleach-blonde from the sun and surf, his hair standing in stiff tufts. Rail-thin and muscular as a whippet, our hero smiles with sharp white teeth as he rubs the dye into his self-inflicted wounds. He has finally caught his breath from his battle with the man under him.

We inch closer to steal a glimpse of the tattoo-in-progress, and we are not surprised to see that the King has taken the greatest asset of his foe, who is better known as the calling man, and cut it into his arm in the shape of a mouth pursed into a treble-clef kiss. The calling man will never speak again, at least not to girls under eighteen who answer the phone while their mothers work second shift.

Around the King rises a world of ten-story apartment buildings, giant waffle-iron edifices surrounding a maze of clotheslines. Projects, they call them. The King thinks of himself as a project, too, every step of which he's recorded in ink and scar tissue on his legs, his torso, his right arm.

He looks around. Whitey-tighties sag in the damp air. The California King has nothing against Oregon, or, for that matter, any parts north, east, or south of his home land. But he misses his own deserts and beaches and slums and sparkly hillsides.

He leans over and reaches for his battered blue suitcase, sets it on his lap, and retrieves a roll of gauze. After wrapping a quick dressing around his arm, puts away his dye and slips the knife in his belt sheath. Looking away and blinking his faded blue eyes at the big communal lawn stretching out in front of him, broken only by ugly red brick buildings, the King sighs.

Because his vision is better than perfect, better than 20-10 -- he drank a lot of organic carrot juice in his homeland -- he is able to see what's really happening behind those TV-blued-out windows. He sees the pain and the sorrow of lives misspent here in the Burnside neighborhood of Portland.

The man underneath him starts to shift and move like too many books stacked on a sloping hallway when a trilling sound fills the air. At first the King thinks it's the calling man's cell phone, but that can't be, as it's less a cell phone now than a loose collection of cell phone parts on the sidewalk next to them, and then he realizes it's his own phone.

"Fuck," he mutters, digging into his suitcase. He was hoping for an hour or two to wander around Powell's, read a couple books in the aisles, maybe get a cup of coffee.

He finds his phone and hits TALK. We can only hope that the King doesn't slip away before we can buy him that coffee and at least offer him the shelter of our umbrella, because the chilly spring rains look like they're about to begin again. But we know we can't interrupt him, this man, the King of California, with his unrelenting momentum. We step back to a safe distance, watching and wishing the King well.

Continued...