Sleeps Never That City

By Gabriel Leif Bellman

Sleeps Never That City involves a year in a relationship unfolding anachronistically in New York City. It is written in vignettes, detailing an urban struggle to make peace with a girlfriend (Q.) and a life in a city on a planet that is always in flux. Following in the tradition of bohemian city-dwelling writers and poets, Sleeps promises to provoke introspection into our purposely busy lives and purportedly cluttered relationships. Sometimes the only beginnings we have are endings, and the only way to clarity is for life to unfold backwards...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462824649

Gabriel Leif Bellman

Gabriel Leif Bellman was born in Eugene, Oregon. He was awarded a Bachelors from USCs School of Cinematic Arts (95), a Masters from New York University (99), and a Juris Doctorate from U. C. Hastings ('05). He has been a high-school teacher; MTV producer; umbrella salesman; restaurant host; dishwasher; lumber feeder; assembly liner; slam poet; warehouse stacker; SOMA magazine correspondent; opera composer at Juilliard, groundskeeper; and Playboy assistant. He has worked construction (Mexico); lived abroad (Spain, Ireland, Holland); and devoted extensive time to traveling (Europe, North Africa, the United States, Middle East, and Caribbean). He directed a film while traveling with the circus in Ireland (Duffys Irish Circus 2005). He has worked with female prisoners in California. Currently, Mr. Bellman lives in San Francisco where he is an attorney. One of the underrated 3-point shooters of his generation, Mr. Bellman won the Los Angeles city hoops championship in 1995. His agent gladly fields calls about his NBA availability (he will only sign with a title contender).

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Copyright © 2001 by Gabriel Leif Bellman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

THE RUNNING TREE

THE MAN WHO FILLED HIS

BRAIN UP

This book is dedicated to J.

You were the first one to show me exactly what the heart does.

It’s a muscle, indeed, that expands and contracts. As it expands,

blood is pushed through the body and warmth through the soul

and you never feel alone. When it contracts, it is a sad lonely

horrible thing. The beauty is that in its contraction, it remains

stretched. You are to blame for some stretch marks. They

remain.

Also, to Baudelaire, Bukowski, Miller, and any writer who takes

a tattered soul and cuts into it with the blade of a large city.

I was just minding my own, reading about the Indian boys who have their genitals cut off in the woods and then have their skin turned inside out to resemble a vagina in a ceremony called nirvana. It’s a totally different idea of nirvana than the one I had before.

But I guess fucking fake pussies reduces the risk of AIDS. This is what the article was saying, but I think I’ll bide my time for an enlightenment and skip the nirvana gig altogether.

On the train, all kinds of bodies rubbed up against all kinds of fabric, but what really got to me was that my friend had just sold a book and she was getting fifty-thousand dollars and buying a house. Grown-ups have taken her pea-pod and replaced it with their tax-conscious heads.

My other friend got engaged over the weekend. He got a job (he calls it yuppified) flew to meet his girlfriend, gave her a ring, and in a couple of years (what’s the rush?) they’ll get married, after she finishes school.

Meanwhile, I was picking my nose and wondering if every booger that I pull out is replaces by an even bigger one, kind of like when women shave their lips. I wonder if I never picked my nose to begin with, would I have boogers at all? Or maybe I would have just had tiny ones that needed waxing when bikini season came along.

Yeah, around the turn of the century is when Gay-dar was invented.

Gay dar?

Yeah, you know that sixth sense that homosexuals have that they can pick each other out of a crowd.

Are you coming on to me?

Maybe.

What’s the catch?

Well, the catch is, that it doesn’t really exist, the gay-dar was just a few things, like eye contact that you didn’t break, or you broke and then looked back and held, to cue people in to the fact that you were with the scene.

What scene?

The sodomy scene.

What exactly is the sodomy scene?

Well, it had to do with men in the bushes, in hotel rooms over Times Square, in storage rooms at closing time . . .

And?

And nothing. Oh, and there was butt sex.

Aha! I knew there was a catch.

Are you busy later?

Wow, Forest People, great book. I totally wanted to be an anthropologist when I read that.

So why didn’t you?

Man, she had me thinking. Real hard. Oh, ‘an jus’ case you hadn’t a noticed yet, when I think real hard-like, I develop a southern drawl in ma’ thoughts. Don’t worry, remember King Solomon.

Do you remember him? He was the biblical one with all the gold mines and stuff, but the part that matters to me is the part that Q.’s Jewish colleague related to us over the Sabbath dinner last week as we chewed on matzo and hoped that God wasn’t as law-damning, but that Jews were still happy, as it says according to Isaac, her colleague.

"Solomon, he had . . . (Isaac had trouble talking in English, but that’s okay because he was about, with his son and wife, to be deported) . . . a golden ring . . . you know what is a ring? (you see, Isaac spoke six different languages: Russian, oh, you know a bunch of middle-eastern ones, and here I’ll just take over, les’ this relay take’a tha’ whol’ darn day:

Solomon had a gold ring with three Hebrew letters on it. He was King over the entire domain of God. When he got stressed, he looked at those letters on that ring. The Hebrew letters, the 3 characters, stood for three words.

This is the important part, because it matters to everyone, even a 9 year old Indian boy with his penis turned inside out.

God told him this, or maybe it was a favorite uncle, or his own brainchild, but the point is this:

All Things Pass.

Believe it, brother.

Blading around in the park on wheels and wind cuts through the body like a blunt butter knife slowly scraping off a possum’s meaty tail. And we’re with French people.

Did you get any good cheese anywhere?

No, I didn’t. I have brother coming from France and I tell him to bring.

All of us on wheels, barreling through the park (where did the term barreling come from? was it from people going over waterfalls at Niagara in a barrel?) and it’s sunny but cold, we’re happy but bored, it’s life but good.

We do not have sex because I scrape my ear off talking on the phone as Q. falls asleep so then I have to rack my brain for images to masturbate to but I’m too damned tired and that’s something you and I have in common.

In the morning she is rubbing my naked body and it is sleepy outside. It is sunny and sleepy. She is dressed for work, very professional (for a girl), and I am naked, very unprofessional (for a guy). The whole universe turns over on its axis and I open my eyes. It’s a terrible thing to live in fear, but the night is over. I hope. Do you?

A big fat slob ugly man playing a flute on the subway singing mickey mouse club:

Mic . . . c-ya’ real soon . . . kay, eee, why? Why? because I’m just a fat old man playing a flute, and I’m ugly too . . . he is talking to nobody in particular, but he may as well have been sitting next to a ventriloquist and made out of wood. As soon as we saw he was fat, we made him our dummy anyway. God bless him if he already knew what we had him saying in our silent minds. He passes with C-minuses.

I am a bachelor (eligible?) in classic literature, he explains to the seat next to him.

Does that make you any less fat and offensive to our skinny sensibilities?

A girl said to me once: How can you be so skinny and live such a fat life?

Later on in the week we are flying to Jamaica to smoke ganja with all the illegitimate Marley children we can find.

I still have not lost my feet to gangrene, or had to have an appendectomy. These are just two small things, but until just now, I hadn’t thanked anybody for it. Thanks, chief. Glad to have the feet and the appendix, well, better inside my body than laying in a landfill next to a two-thousand year-old hotdog somewhere.

I find that I don’t appreciate things like this nearly enough. Appendix, I hardly knew ‘ye.

I wouldn’t mind having sex but I’m going to fall asleep really soon.

She tells me this. All night long. I just finished typing up a letter for her and now I’m worried I’m going to die because of glass that is stuck in my foot that she broke and I still haven’t soaked it like the doctor’s said. And she says she is going to sleep. Jesus.

Disneyland has a secret underground entrance for its employees. You have to be in costume to go above ground, and I guess it gets so hot that people pass out in the animal suits all the time, so there are strategic trap doors all over the place, like they go on a big Mickey Sweep through the jungle of Frontierland, picking up unconscious Mickey’s and dumping them in the nearest trap door. Like ‘Nam, baby. So maybe, this is the whole idea of garbage. Like we need to wrap up our trash in mouse eared bags and keep it under ground, and if our orange juice comes out of the bag we drop it in the underground trap door so that it doesn’t shatter our Disney perfect image where nothing every gets dirty or spoils or dies. We need to keep the passed out Mickey’s out of sight and out of mind, and with each trash bag we have our own little Mickey collection. It’s a small world, after all.

The porn professor tells me I need to see someone to help me with my writing.

You know, I think they told Einstein he was stupid as a child.

This is the kind of stuff I tell myself to get by.

On the subway home, there is the girl with the body pierced in 18 places again, with longer, greener, hair and a dog and a boyfriend.

How is the city treating you? Did she say that or did I?

Not bad. And you?

Blah-blah-blah. And they all went to bed with a hangover.

I tell the doctor that yes, there is ringing in my ears and yes I had a tetanus shot and yes there’s a piece, I think, of glass in my foot, and no I don’t want to get an X-ray at the emergency room.

Well, I can’t see anything. She has on strange glasses, like super duper bifocals. I wonder if she can see my erect penis through my clothes with these things.

I coax her into numbing up my foot and digging around with a small knife.

After about a half-hour of pain and discomfort, and tiny diamond shaped piece of glass comes out of my heel.

Oh! Yes!

Yes!

Another doctor walks by, sees the doctor on her hands and knees, and starts laughing. I guess it sounded kind of funny out in the hall, but I don’t know what’s funny about a blow-job or a piece of glass in your leg, but maybe that’s because I’m more worried about the ringing in my ears.

There’s a little bell in there.

What? I am worried. I missed another joke.

A little bell, it’s right in here, peering, stretching my ear-lobes around like rubber balloons, but I can barely crack a smile.

Is it infected?

I don’t think so. Use some blah-blah-blah.

I stop listening when something isn’t infected.

That’s true for everything, not just medical stuff.

If something is infected, you can cut it off or burn it out or something.

If it’s just irritated or acting up, what’s the use? I learned long ago to view the world in two categories: cut it off or leave it be.

My ears, I decided, were to be cut off, but not so much like Van Gogh as figuratively, in the cerebral space and time that I allow my conscious days to be spent.

Ears, I’m phasing you out. You want some attention, you better go ahead and get infected.

Oh, and ask not, when my ears are ringing, for whom they toll.

They toll for me.

The menage turned into a troix and the troix turned out to be an escapade in embarrassment.

Part one: the ding (no dong). The girl shows up and Q. is still out so I have to sit around blah blahing about new apartment blah and how was D.C. blah and the more I look at her the more I think-do I really want to associate this girl with my penis in its myriad of shaped and forms. Her mouth? Her, gulp, pussy? And the very thought of it, festering and sweating behind her lairs of clothes (she tells me she is wearing long underwear, wool long underwear, and my already shrunken penis climbs further into my body. Anything to escape a sweaty stinky woolen covered vagina with an attitude.

part two: here comes trouble. Q. shows up and starts talking I hate New York talk and she doesn’t have condoms and so I turn on the television and a forty minutes later the three of us are naked.

Not entirely, we still have our underwear on, thank god, even though the girl was lobbying (I will if you will) to take off our underwear and sit with our genitalia flopped against the hardwood floor. It was about as sexy as an old dog being neutered by a school principal.

So I figure, get to the bedroom, for Christ’s sake get to the bedroom, it’s safe in there, you know what to do, it will be okay.

And then Q. throws a curve.

Let’s pretend you are fooling around with her and I walk in.

So I’m stuck with this girl in the bedroom, limp as a war veteran, and I call out to Q. to ask how long she’ll be but she’s out of earshot.

This girl says to me: It would be fun if she walked in while I was going down on you.

I offer up no objection, and so she stuffs my limp mush into her mouth and pulls and stretches it with her lips and tongue until it eventually begins to resemble a penis. For some reason, looking at her mouth and my penis, I remember back when I was a young kid and I used to get hand-me-down shoes and they didn’t fit because my feet were too small and I had to grow into them.

So the real issue is I think of my dick like a foot (long) and this girl is about as appealing to me right now as a hand me down shoe.

Still, for no real reason, I climax and squirt all over the both of us before Q. even has a chance to bust in.

Oh, Jesus. Will she be mad?

About what? I inquire, wiping it up with a sock.

Well, I mean . . .

Q. comes in.

About time. I already came.

She looks baffled, disappointed, confused, amused, bored, happy, angry, neutral, and pensive. She tells me to leave the room so she can climax.

I guess hand-me-down shoes gives her oral sex because when I come back into the room twenty minutes later they are holding hands and making fun of me . . . no, wait, I mean when I come back into the room five minutes later they are having female sex and they invite me to be the honorary cock . . . no wait, I mean that at the end of the night I held Q. tight in my arms.

A television was playing and we were talking about what had happened.

It was fun because it was so wacky and perverted.

It was okay. It wasn’t the best three-some.

No, I answer, it certainly wasn’t, and I smile like I’m about to laugh about it, but then I think, aww hell I let her down, I let both of them down, my manhood isn’t manhood enough, but on the other hand I just fucked two women in one night so maybe I’m just feeling a little sensitive, but fuck off if that isn’t the most important way to feel.

I see a pair of my old shoes next to the television stand. My basketball shoes, old and smelly: they’ve been there a long time, but I only just noticed them. Quietly, as Q. gets ready for bed, I take the shoes and brush them off and stick them in the closet behind everything else that I’ll have to deal with some day.

What do you sell the most of?

Yeah, we sell. Here, you want?

No, no. What do people usually come in here for?

For?

Yeah, for.

This, this is four hours. 19.95.

I walked out of the porn shop and a woman with long lickable legs strolled by and made eye contact with me: you loser.

The city was warming up, it happens in the spring they say. They also say it’s so different here than everywhere else, but from where I stand it’s not all that different. It smells bad, there’s lots of crazy shit in the papers, but it’s still people going shopping in department stores like everywhere else. I was expecting the Village to be a bohemian orgy. It’s mostly pretentious artists, like me and you.

Come and eat some of this Chicago pussy, the song beckoned.

I thought: man, this guy, the Arab behind the counter selling NYC t-shirts, forty for ten bucks, man, this guy has good taste in music.

Q. was on the phone: Did you get some?

Some what? I feigned.

You know, if you want to, you need some.

I pretended not to know what she meant, but she was referring to prophylactic devises, condoms, which I needed to purchase if I wanted to fuck Nancy.

Nancy was coming over to lick Q. and I was going to watch.

Then, like last time, Nancy would suck me for a while, and it would end up with me fucking Q. and Nancy licking my ass and balls and Q.’s clit as I went in and out of her.

But this time, to mix things up we thought: how about if I fuck Nancy?

We hadn’t asked Nancy, but people are so sensitive these days. All of society says: here is what you want (do it) here is what you want (do it), but when it comes time to doing it everybody is plastered against the walls staring at everybody else waiting for something to happen to make things easier so nobody has to think.

We had figured this would be me . . . WAIT.

That was the doorbell.

Gotta’ run.

The most disturbing thing I have ever seen. A smiling dog, tongue wagging and ears perky, eyes full of love . . . it is severed and being held up by and ugly bearded man with glasses and the smile that is forever etched in my mind. They are offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the man. It seems he developed the pictures at K-Mart, and besides the dead dog, there were photos of a nekkid woman. The employee at the store ripped the photos back and returned the negatives, true to company policy. They never got his name or anything, and all the police have is the photo. So, a ripped up photograph, taped back together of a smiling man with a smiling head of a happy dog, blood dripping and a sickness that digs deep into the stomach.

people are murdered every day, but I’ve never been so sick as to see a ripped up picture of a ripped up dog and a white man smiling.

White men have no right to smile in times like these.

To cleanse my soul I read about the human soul. How can it exist? All I see is the smile of that terrible man, but is he so terrible? Cats take mice and torture them with their paws until the mice die. Is it any more disgusting for a man to cut off the head of a puppy? I think so, but can I prove it?

Snow flakes fat as June bugs pummel the window and I am still shaken. That poor animal, and I mean both of them, the dog and the man. How sad that a man had to do that to feel that he had some kind of agency, some kind of power, some strength, so that he wouldn’t die a weak, weak loser. I know, in my mind, that Christ preached forgiveness, but I know in my gut that man will die a weak, weak loser.

And the soul of the puppy licks my face as I drift off to sleep in a snowflake night.

It’s a new year, whatever that means. No, not whatever that means, because it means that it is the same year as another with different numbers and the same people and we play the guitar and brush our teeth with the same intensity as hockey fans camping out with cowbells on their necks.

Hey man, cheers.

Hey, man.

Happa’ new yea’.

Bob Marley would be his birthday today, Mon, a cab driver tells me, running a red light and grazing the body of a scurrying briefcase suitor.

Hey, do you think Jamaican music is less political today than it was in the 70’s?

"Hey, Mon, git’ uhp, stan’ up? You see none of dat to-day, Mon. Is difrent. Nowaday is all gangster gun play rude boy, no more political, no more one love git together, mon,