OLIVER'S ILLUMINATIONS

A Child's Guide To American Empire

Written and Illustrated

by

Rick Hill

2010

copyright

PART ONE 

 

1.
   I dreamed I was at the edge of the sea. Heavy clouds shut out the sun and tossed a few showers in the distance. I walked toward a group of people standing at the end of a pier looking into the water below. I moved through the crowd of men and women, young and old. There was no railing. I balanced nervously with the shifting crowd and looked down. Women rolled in the water. Their glassy eyes stared deep into mine as their serpentine hair waved around their faces. There was a bad taste in my mouth. I turned away and walked back. When I cleared the crowd, cries of alarm stopped me in my tracks. Dark forms rose out of the water. The people rushed at me. I saw a large brick building on a hill and ran for it. I pounded on the door and bolted past the woman who opened it. I ran through rooms full of people, dining rooms, cocktail parties, boardrooms, dinner parties, saunas. I bolted up a grand stairway and into an empty bedroom with a window that looked onto a balcony. As I lifted the window, the screams of the dying echoed in the rooms below.   I awoke to the sound of rotten fruit falling on the floor. My eyes snapped open. The screech of an angry wasp’s nest made me sit straight up. I stumbled out of bed to the drunken moans around a piano bar after midnight. I wandered toward them in the darkness full of curiosity and fear. They grasped at me. They grabbed hold of me.

2.
    I shuffled out of the bedroom. My legs seemed unsteady, my balance tricky. I moved awkwardly through a dark hallway hung with dim landscapes and gloomy portraits and into another room. The furniture seemed huge. The chairs and tables dwarfed me. My feet caught on the rug. I glanced down at them. They were tiny, like the feet of a child. My limbs and fingers were small and pudgy. I was wearing some sort of overalls.

   The moaning danced around me in the darkness like bats. It wavered in volume and tone like a radio searching for a signal. I had to turn on a light. I peered into the shadows looking for a lamp. There was nothing. I searched the walls looking for a switch. Then something caught my eye. I could just make out a light switch high above me. The ruckus dimmed and swelled. Its source seemed to move in the darkness, now in a corner, now next to me, now trailing away. I clambered onto a chair. My legs swung in the air. A chill went up my spine as imaginary hands reached out and grabbed at me. I pulled myself up on the cushion and balanced on an arm.    

   The moans rushed toward me. I reached for the light again. They doubled in volume. My arms were covered with goose bumps. My fingers found the switch. One more stretch balancing on the arm on tiptoes and I had it. I heard it snap as I pushed it up. I collapsed into the chair. I was blinded as the room was flooded with light.

  

4.
   I felt sick. I clamped my hands over my mouth. I stood speechless in the chair staring at this crappy animation hopping and jiggling, croaking and squeaking, twitching and stomping. The monkey bounced up and down in mindless ecstasy. He stared into the empty cup and turned it over and over. He leaned down to the tramp. He moved his quivering face next to hers. His thin lips puckered. The tramp's mouth exploded into a lascivious open-mouthed grin. Her tongue poured out over her teeth and flapped in the air. She bashed her fists on the keyboard again and again. She threw her arms over her head, lifted her legs in the air and wiggled all four limbs like snakes. A gurgling cackle crawled out from the depths of her soul. The thug spun in circles. His arms stretched out and flapped frantically like a fly caught in a spider's web. His broad ass swayed and bobbed. He threw his head back and bellowed at the ceiling.

   They mooed like lovesick cows. They screeched like a startled flock of crows. Then all at once they pressed their wobbly heads close together. They were no longer vomiting noise individually. They let loose a long, low growl. It was as deep and coarse as a Mongolian throat song and got lower and lower until they sounded like idling Harleys. The rumble went up my spine and into my brain where it boiled and belched until I could stand it no longer.
   “Stop it!”, I screamed. “Stop it right now!”

  

5.
   They were jolted out of their trance and the caterwauling came to a halt. The tramp's arched fingers were suspended over the piano keys. Her necklace stomped still. Her curdled yellow eyes narrowed. She snarled. The thug stopped in mid twirl, arms outstretched, fingers shaking. His thick neck pulled his head back up slowly like a crane righting an overturned bus. His empty eyes searched the room. The monkey put down his cup and stood up. His lips pulled back exposing his horrible teeth. His eyes uncrossed. His tail lifted straight in the air. A long, slow fart escaped his ass. The three of them turned and stared at me like rats in a kitchen. I felt very much afraid. I could smell their stale sweat. I could feel the sweat running down my face. The tramp let loose an angry hiss. The thug joined in with a low growl that sputtered and popped and shook his cheeks. A high-pitched whine beamed from the monkey.

   Then I got angry. How dare these assholes threaten me? I gathered my courage, pulled myself up, pointed towards the door and ordered them out.

 

6.
   That was a mistake. The creatures rushed forward in a mob, their legs clattering like a tarantula. They leapt on the back of the chair and looked down at me with ravenous grins on their faces. I tried to put on a strong front but my shoulders hunched and my knees weakened. My resolve bled out of me and shrank away. I began to shake.

   “Look at the pretty little boy, so pink and plump!”, wheezed the tramp. “Hello, little one. Would you like some candy?” The corners of her mouth were plugged with expanding and contracting webs of yellow saliva. Her hair seemed frozen, never moving as her head wagged like a signal at a railroad crossing. “I like you, little one. You’re so cute. Will you be my friend?”
   The stink of formaldehyde billowed from the thug’s mouth. His eyes squinted with delight behind the thick, greasy lenses of his glasses. His fat fingers clutched the chair. “Soft and round.”, he gurgled, his lips curling and flapping around his broken teeth. “Juicy and tender. I could pan fry him with a little lemon and butter. I could roast him slowly over hickory wood. I could pull off his arms and legs. I could twist off his head. I could -”
   “Pretty boy!”, the monkey chattered as he jittered and jerked. A string of drool slipped between his teeth, hung in the air swaying back and forth then dropped on my head. “Pretty boy! Pretty boy! Pretty boy!” His eyes crossed and focused over and over as his concentration ebbed and flowed. He slowly lowered his clammy face down to me. His skin boiled. Suddenly a filthy paw crowned with cracked, gray claws shot toward my face.

 

7.
   I woke up terrified. My eyes darted around the room. A sickly light peed through the window. I let out a yell and waved my arms. I jumped up from the couch and scared the hell out of Birdie who had been sleeping next to me. He shot straight up in the air and came close to hitting the ceiling. When he fluttered down and landed on the arm of the couch, there was a scowl on his face. I clutched the couch and stared straight ahead as the dream rolled around in my head. It had been more horrible than ever. Each time it got worse, more vivid, more real. I was dripping with sweat. The sweat turned cold. I grabbed my arms and shivered. The room came into focus. It was small and claustrophobic. The windows overlooking the city seemed blurred and cheap like scratched Plexiglas. It was as though the dream had infected reality. I ran my fingers through my hair, and they caught in it. My clothes stuck to me. I itched all over. My head pounded. I felt like I was going through some sort of withdrawal.

   Birdie was staring at me with wide eyes. “Come on back home. It was just a dream. You’re alright now.”, he said in a calm voice heavy with concern.
   Slowly the empty flatness of the sounds of nightmares began to fade. Their carnival ride images began to flicker out. My pounding heart calmed. I was breathing easier.

 

8.
    I was back in my apartment and reality. The sun had set and a new moon hung over the City. Birdie saw that I was coming out of the dream and was relieved. Then he was pissed off. I had to calm him down. I had to calm myself down. I told him the dream.
    He breathed a heavy sigh. “You’re so obsessed with that monkey, you’re dreaming about it again, aren’t you? George Bush is a wind-up toy bumping against the furniture in the oval office. He’s scarier than Howdy Doody with a chain saw. That thug Cheney is Regent and his strings are pulled by corporate America. They say he sings tunelessly at the top of his lungs when he’s sitting on the can. My God, that’s something straight out of Suetonius. And the tramp? How did Condoleezza slither her way into your nightmare? I get a headache just thinking about her winy, mousy voice and those watery eyes of hers trying to cover up a temperament that would as soon plant a knife in your back as serve you a cup of coffee.” He paused for a moment, reflecting. “I have to admit though, they’re quite a triumvirate: idiot evil, insane evil and smarmy evil. And what about you being a little boy? Were you innocence in the face of evil? What’s with the women rolling in the water and the dark forms slaughtering rooms full of victims? Ah, the subconscious, it's a feast for the conscious. None the less, you are wasting your time sweating bullets over all this.” If he had a finger, he would be waving it at me. I could see a frown under his feathers. “Now come on, take a deep breath and fix yourself a drink.”

9.
   His expression warmed. He offered me a winning smile. “What the hell are you going to do about it anyway? Everyone is pissing and moaning but nothing is being done. Why don’t you take the night off and relax? Try that new place, Le Soleil. There are bars, cabarets, galleries, shops all under one roof on the fifth floor. Lose yourself in the crowd. Fill your mind with the nothing of now.”

   I decided to take his advice. As I dressed in front of my mirror, I studied the carved sea creatures swimming around the frame. They were looking back at me that night as though they wanted to tell me something, warn me about something. I brooded over Birdie’s words. Insane evil I could understand. Insanity cancels morality. Smarmy evil works. Smarmy people are manipulators. But an evil idiot, that was truly frightening.
   Birdie continued his concerned admonition while perching on my head. “What’s with the recurring nightmares? Are you yearning for the good old Weimar days? Everything was just peachy under Clinton wasn’t it?”, he continued, his voice dry with disgust. “Free Trade, the end of big government as we know it, NAFTA, GATT and the Dotcom bubble, a blow job away from handing Medicare and Social Security over to Wall Street - if ever there was an example of ‘if you can’t beat’ em, join ‘em’, Bill Clinton was it. Tired of those pesky regulations that held Wall Street in check since the Great Depression? Tired of paying those spoiled American workers a living wage? No problem. Bill, your friend in the White House will fix things for you just fine. And you’re worried about Dubya? The rot beneath this canker is bottomless, do you hear? Go out and get drunk and bring me back a bottle!”
  

 

  

10.
   The night was sultry. The streets were busy. I fell into the seething swarm of humanity and reflected. We were at war. We were at two wars. Young Americans were dying and being mutilated every day. They spent fifteen months in hell without a break only to be sent back over and over again but there was no draft, no pictures of home coming coffins, no more than sixty seconds of war on the fifteen-minute nightly news so who cares? And what were people on the home front doing? Buying houses, lots and lots of houses. Are you down and out, unemployed with a lousy credit record and on the verge of bankruptcy? Who cares? A million-dollar loan on a fifty-dollar house will make you feel better. If that doesn’t work, there’s always the latest Hollywood scandal, the Christmas sale on talking stuffed animals, the Rapture.

   Birdie was right. Nobody was doing anything. Everyone was throwing up their hands. What could we do? They were just laughing at us. They were bankrupting the country and shoving the heel of their boot on our necks. Every phone call made, every email sent, every web site visited was recorded and nobody seemed to give a rat’s ass. ‘I don’t care if they tap my phone. I have nothing to hide.’ Get high on their radar screen and you’re on the no-fly list. Get higher and you might just disappear. And torture? Yawn. Habeas Corpus? What’s that?
   Two little dogs yapping hysterically at each other dampened my mood even further.

11.
   I found Le Soleil and took in the fancy sign, the red carpet, the doormen holding open etched glass doors for me and only me. The logo was a stylized sun with a histrionic look on its face. Its eyes and mouth were wide open as if someone had yanked it out of the nineteen fifties and dropped it down right here in the year of our lord, 2006. I looked into its astonished mug and sighed. Weren’t we supposed to be shopping and shopping and filling our empty little lives with cheap, slave labor garbage? The great majority of us were barely scrapping by but no worry, the ruling class has given us the interest only loan, a tabloid press and the mega store.

   Ah, the mega store, that great, gray morgue. If ever there was my hell on earth it would be wandering the bottom of a giant, soul sucking cave like an ant numbed at the sight of row after towering row of identical detritus as you fill an enormous cart with the empty shells of things, corpses of merchandise all wrapped in miles and miles of plastic.
   And now they give us this, this cabaret where life is beautiful, with all the trappings of an exclusive club to make us feel like rich celebrities while we charge, charge, charge our way to heaven. What the hell? I was obsessing impotently on my fate that was completely out of my hands. I was a fly bumping against the window not knowing if I wanted in or out. I needed to be around other little people. I needed to be around a double scotch on the rocks. The doormen pulled the doors open wider. The elevator across the lobby beckoned: Le Soleil, fifth floor. I stepped in and pushed the button.

12.
   The elevator doors opened and I stepped out. I looked across the lobby to the grand mall only to find that Le Soleil was closing early! The lustrous displays under drooping palms were disappearing behind closing doors.

   What kind of tease was this? I had caved in. I had given up. I had thrown myself into the sordid pit of cheap thrills and bitter denial. Now a wall of shoppers marched toward me, their Xanax glazed eyes looking right through me as they clutched their shopping bags full of plastic dreams. I had dragged myself in from bleak reality and offered myself up to the great American sideshow and I get this.
   The mob pushed amoeba like past me, pulsing and throbbing into the elevator, Ritalin addled children and more yapping dogs in tow. They had their fill. They were satisfied. They were somebody now, each and every one. Their credit cards glowed stiff and hot in their purses and wallets. They had strutted and swaggered their way through the halls of the American raison d’etre. They had purchased fabulous things, as colorful and bright as they were utterly and totally useless, wondrous things that would line their cupboards and fill their garages and last hundreds of years. They glanced at me from the corners of their eyes as they passed me, marching proudly in their glittering couture from far off exotic places like China and India and Indonesia and Haiti and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. I was a pitiful thing, really who had come too late only to have the doors of power and beauty and all that is good close in my face.

13.
   The elevator filled to capacity. The mob stared back at me like fish in an aquarium, not so powerful now, not so graced with the majesty of important shoppers, but they were happy, their children were stoned, and the dogs were having fun with each other as dogs will do, screwing away in front of God and everyone.

   What a marvelous menagerie of bright colors and blank faces they were, a peaceable kingdom where lambs lay down with sheep. It took so little to make the middle class happy. All we really needed was a cheeseburger and fries, church on Sunday and a 45 under our pillow.
   A little monster, her paw in her mother’s hand stared hatefully at me. She was the one who was supposed to be looking down at me. She saw the cynicism hiding behind my bland expression as only a child could. Rage burned in her eyes. Who was I to judge her? She lived in the greatest country in the world. She would have had me crucified in a New York minute if she could. She had a rose in her hand, a gift no doubt from some quivering saleslady in the foundations department or from some haughty maitre d’ staring at the ceiling with a handful of menus rammed up his ass. She stuck out her tongue and threw the rose at me. The mother quickly replaced it with some sort of high fructose lollypop bomb. The elevator doors closed, a welcome curtain on a pathetic Everyman Tale. God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world. My mind filled with listless applause.

14.
   I looked down at the flower laying at my feet. Hallelujah, a free rose. Look on the bright side, I thought. I had something to go home with, something pretty and alive, if only for a day or so. I snapped off the stem, slid the rose into my lapel and called the elevator.

   When the doors opened, I was surprised to see it was full again. The occupants were dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns, three important looking men with important looking dates all with cocktails in hand and definitely a cut above the last bunch. The irony pissed me off. I came to this dump yearning for the support of the unwashed masses only to receive their dismissive disdain. They had rebuffed my advances and left me standing alone. So I grumbled and whined and tried to make the best of it. Then the real people make an appearance, God’s chosen, on their way upward to a party in the heavens. They had made a stop to taunt me, to point at the monkey in the cage and laugh.
   The largest one, about three-hundred and-fifty pounds large clutching a woman with hair piled higher than her attitude motioned me in. I was stunned. ‘Once bitten.’ , I thought for a moment but only for a moment. They were all quiet, half smiling at me with open expressions. The elevator doors started to close and the man slid a Fratelli wingtip out to stop them. He smiled warmly, extended a hand and waved me in again. I smiled back. It didn’t look like a trap. What were they going to do, offer me up for sacrifice, throw the peasant into the volcano? The second act had promise.

15.
   I stepped in. Everyone had a rose in their lapel and I passed muster. It seemed more than a little strange that a rose could make up the difference between my rags and their riches, but they looked like a happy group. You can’t turn down a well-dressed person with a drink in their hand. One of them pushed the button for the eleventh floor. A party on the eleventh floor? Why not? The elevator doors closed.  The crowd gathered around me smiling and chortling. They shook my hand and patted me on the back. A woman with huge breasts touched my hair. “What a nice-looking young man.”

   I gave her a winning smile. Maybe something was going to come of this evening after all. What a remarkable coincidence. A tossed rose gets me into an exclusive party. My spirits lifted. I offered smiles all around and introduced myself. “What’s the party about?”, I asked.
   A young man with apple cheeks took a gulp out of his drink. “We’re going to give the man upstairs a present!”
   One woman’s hair looked like a pile of figs. She squinted at me through thick glasses. “You’ll make him happy!”
   I’ll be damned, I thought. Rich people with a sense of humor. This was going to be fun, a chance to meet the elite, nibble on caviar, sip the best scotch. If there were drugs, they would be the finest drugs. I might even take one home or better yet be taken home by one of them.
   I caught a glance of the two dogs from the previous crowd screwing away in a corner. One of them looked me right in the eye.

  

16.
    When the doors opened, there was no eleventh floor. I was standing in front of a mock Crucifixion with the pathetic trio from my nightmare back with a vengeance. It was a dirty miracle floating in space. The monkey coyly posed on the cross with a vapid smirk on his face and his cup balanced over his head. The tramp played the virgin kneeling in mugged agony looking up at the cross and the monkey’s crotch. The thug was a sentry leering and drooling though crumbling teeth as he lasciviously clutched an assault rifle with one hand and luridly stroked the cross with the other. It was a party alright and I was the guest of honor. 

   This was a trap and these assholes weren’t kidding. The elevator doors had opened onto a dream, an ugly, familiar dream. The crowd screamed in ecstasy at the disgusting sight. They raised their hands with joy. They were pilgrims at the end of their long voyage staring into the face of the savior. Power and wealth threw up their arms in supplication to power and wealth. I backed into the elevator. 

   I looked around at the wild-eyed crowd frothing and foaming in almost sexual abandon. I tried to reach the elevator panel in vain. I turned around and looked for a way out. There was nothing but the obscene sideshow. I focused on one of the idiots who was staring mouth open and empty headed. A full drink was hanging precariously from his fingers. I instinctively reached for it, grabbed and downed it. Oh my God, brandy and coke!

  

17.
   The crowd forced me out of the elevator. Gagging on the brandy and coke, I stumbled over the dogs who seemed blind to the repulsive scene in front of them. We lurched toward the cross. I spun around and tried to run back into the elevator but the men grabbed me. The women jumped around us squealing and hooting and tearing off their clothes. Frocks and purses, blouses and bras flew around me. The monkey dropped down from his perch and danced frantically with the thug and the tramp.

   Holy shit, I thought, was I in for some sort of sadomasochistic orgy? I pulled and shoved and swung at the men but they were too much for me. The big one grabbed my legs, the other two each arm. They lifted me onto their shoulders.
   One of them leaned close. “We’ll reap great rewards for this gift.”, He whispered.
   I couldn’t believe what was happening. This looked less like an orgy and more like a sacrifice. “What the hell are you doing?”, I screamed.
   “To the wall!”, they all chanted. “To the wall!”
    The cartoon jackasses on the hill screamed their response. “USA! USA! USA!”