budget press review #5

Daino

Cover—Philip Taylor

budget press review #5

johnnie b. baker editor/publisher

featuring michael andre stephen t. brophy daino kevin l. donihe alina fox kelly mcclure crystal powell jennifer stoever-ackerman patrick killpatrick strong philip taylor and johnnie b. baker

summer 2012

budget press 3620 keating st. san diego, ca usa 92110

In 1995 I had moved back to my hometown of Rivercide from San Francisco to go back to school. I moved into a building of art studios downtown and fell into a small but young and energetic artistic community, an island of freaks in that conformist, Christian, conservative Southern California suburb. That was when I became a zinester, and started Budget Press. First I published the people around me, and distributed the pubs around town. Then people began submitting contributions, and I started to get connected to the larger zine world. I got my first computer in 1997, and immediately set up an internet presence. Soon I was publishing people from all over the country, and I was being published in various zines. After I graduated college and moved to Prague then Russia, I published a few European writers. When I lived in Russia I started my first Budget Files, which was a weekly (or so) email list where I wrote about my travels and politics and Budget Press and whatever else. Altogether, I published over thirty chapbooks and zines.

In 2000 I started grad school, and I put aside publishing Budget Press, it was time to focus on bigger things. In 2006, when I had my research year in Russia and Azerbaijan, I started up the Budget Files again, this time as a blog. But other than that, Budget Press was on hiatus.

And I say hiatus because I always knew that one day I’d do something with Budget Press again. And now, as I enter middle -age, I have decided to resurrect Budget Press with this Budget Press Review #5.

Enjoy!

johnnie b. baker budgetpress.net

For Rachelle

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL “the dept.”

Stephen T. Brophy May 17, 1945 The Bugatti Grand Prix racer tears across the French countryside, seeking a distant freedom. Behind the wheel, Hugo Jass, resplendent in his leather racing helmet, goggles, and brown scarf, confident in his mission.

The Spanish border is barely a mirage, some fifty miles distant, when he encounters the GI’s. Just two of them, not exactly a roadblock, but they do have rifles. As he slows the car, one of them swaggers menacingly into the center of the roadway, weapon at the ready, cigar clamped in his teeth, grizzled and battle-hardened but bearing the false bravado of last-minute victory. An American cliché.

Everything Jass can’t stomach about this miserable turn of events.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he says amiably, in flawless Northern-accented French.

“Papers, Pierre,” the swaggerer mutters. Whisky thick on his breath.

He hands them over. According to the ID, he’s Guy Clement, a reasonably obscure Grand Prix driver with ties to the French resistance. He certainly looks the part.

The swaggerer fumbles with the paperwork, obviously having trouble focusing on the tiny print, much less deciphering the foreign words.

The other GI, younger, less swaggery, just as drunk, is eyeballing the car. Hard. He steps forward, places an uninvited hand on the royal blue hood. Jass winces imperceptibly.

“1930 Bugatti Type 35B,” the young GI says admiringly.

“You know your cars,” Jass/Clement responds, this time in French-accented English.

“I’ve been following the Grand Prix since I was a pup. My old man’s a nut for it, too. Why I requested the Eastern Theater when I enlisted. Been a dream of ours to get over to France since the year this car first was raced.”

The swaggering, and slightly staggering GI hands the papers over to his young comrade.

“So maybe you heard of this guy?”

The kid eyes the typeface and scribbling and his eyes widen, going from the papers to the faux Frenchman’s face and back again.

“Guy Clement? Sure, I heard of him. Came in third overall in the ’31 race, right mister?”

Jass begins to get an uneasy feeling. “That is correct. So nice to meet a true fan. As you know, the war years have not been easy on my chosen profession.”

“Oh, I’m a real big fan alright.” The kid lowers his carbine, slowly tightens his grip on the stock. “Now, Mr. Clement, maybe you’d like to explain to me just what the hell you’re doing hightailing it for Spain in a car that don’t belong to you?”

“Is there a problem, soldier?”

“Geez, Hawkins, what the hell’s goin’ on here? His papers don’t check?”

“Oh, they check out fine. Or they would, if Guy Clement hadn’t died in a time trial accident in ’38.”

Jass can’t believe his luck, the odds of running into an American rube who just happens to be thoroughly versed in the sport of his carefully selected alias. Then again, considering the way things had turned out for the Reich in recent months, he should’ve been able to predict it.

“Gentlemen, I assure you, there’s been some mis…”

“Get on the ground, you Kraut son-of-a-whore!” Obviously, Jass’ assumption of Clement’s tragic identity has raised the kid’s ire to a whole other level.

“Calm down, Hawkins,” Sgt. Swagger chimes in. “Just ‘cause he’s got some phony ID on him doesn’t make him a full-blown Natzee.” That’s how says it. Nat-zee. Like a board game or a brand of potato chips. Jass resists the urge to spit into the dust at their feet.

“If he ain’t he’s one of them Vichy sympathizers. Look at him. He’s got the cold eyes of a murderin’ dog.”

“They’re blue, same as yours.”

“You keep an eye on him, I’m searchin’ the vehicle.”

“It’s a one-seat race car. What’s he gonna hide in there?”

The kid points his rifle barrel at a blanket on the driver’s seat.

“What’s under there?”

“Just a picnic basket. I was going to take my lunch in the countryside. There’s a very fine Bourdeaux if you…”

“Shut up.” The kid uses the gun to pull the blanket aside, and sure enough, there’s the picnic basket, like something from a postcard or a still-life—de rigeur loaf of broad, wheel of cheese, selection of cold cuts and the promised bottle of wine. The kid roots around

inside until he comes up with a Luger pistol. “And what’s this for, shootin’ turkeys?”

“Just for protection. Not everyone realizes that the war has ended, do they?”

“You’re so full of shit I oughta dig a latrine for ya.” Then, meaningfully, “Maybe we will.”

Hopped up, anxious, the kid begins banging on the sides of the car, determined to find something. Near the rear of the Bugatti, he hears a hollowness not customary to the vehicle and frantically searches for a latch or something that will open what must be some sort of secret compartment. Frustrated, he whirls on Jass and sticks his rifle barrel in his face, seemingly unaware that the blanket still hangs there.

“Open it!”

Jass sighs resignedly and steps gingerly toward the car. “By all means.” He releases the secret catch, disguised as an ordinary bolt, and the compartment pops open. The kid shoves him aside roughly and begins fumbling in the small, dark space.

“The hell?”

From within the hollowed-out space he retrieves a glass jar, no ordinary Mason but a large, heavy thing with pressurized metal caps on either end, with dials, levers, switches and wires decorating their surfaces. He holds the container up to the mid-afternoon sunlight and tries to get a look at what floats in the milky, viscous swamp-green liquid inside. It’s a pinkish-gray mass, striated, organic, split in the middle, with a clump of tendrils dangling from its underside, and in at least two places, perforated and terribly damaged.

“Is that…a brain?”

Jass hasn’t figured the kid for an anatomist, so he’s mildly impressed that the GI has landed right on the money. “Most of one, yes.”

By now, Jass has let the French accent drop and is speaking English with a harsh Teutonic cadence.

“What the hell you doing with a thing like that?” the swaggerman wants to know.

“Just a souvenir. Of the war.”

“Open it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The jar. Open it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Open it or so help me God I’ll smash it to the ground.”

“Fair enough.” Jass gingerly takes the jar from the young soldier’s hands and begins to fiddle with some of the dials on the lid. “I

was afraid of this.”

“Of what? Gettin’ caught?”

“No. You see, they haven’t provided me with the proper code sequence. I literally cannot open this container.”

“Well, then, smashy-smash.” The soldier reaches for the jar and as he steps in close, Jass takes the opportunity to grab the blanket dangling from his rifle barrel and yank down hard. The rifle butt whacks the kid in the chin, stunning him, and Jass continues his brute fluid motion, pulling blanket and gun from one GI’s arms and swinging it around to connect with the side of the other GI’s head, catching him thoroughly off-guard.

As the grunts attempt to re-gather their wits, Jass kicks their weapons away into the ditch along the side of the road and plunges his hands into the compartment in the Bugatti’s side, returning the container to its resting place and coming up with another item even more bizarre in origin and design. Resembling nothing so much as a harpoon gun with an aerial antenna for a projectile, the blitz-rifle has a raw, handmade, but not entirely artless appearance, a prototype designed just a touch too late to turn the tide of war.

The GIs wince in the strong sun and against the pain of their minor head traumas, trying to focus on the source of the sudden electric buzz and crackle that fills the air in Jass’ immediate vicinity.

“What in the name of all that’s—“ the swagger-man manages before a bolt of pure blue lighting shoots out of the trident-tipped weapon and reduces both men to a pile of ash, cloth and metal.

Jass glances around, the cautious gesture of a man used to more urban environs, but the only eyes bearing witness to his selfpreserving crime are those of a lone cow, contentedly chewing its cud and strangely unspooked by the miniature man-made climate phenomenon that just occurred in front of it.

Jass nestles the blitz-gun back into the compartment and before shutting it, gently pats the jar-ful of human brain.

“Soon, mein fuhrer. Soon.”

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman like weapons gasped out of our dead children’s sleep— by her hands, whirring, moving like comets my ragged eyes ate big granite boulders, for miles. Only the thrumming of my head against the frigid window kept me awake Aunt Patsy was always waiting up, scowling at the dog for barking at phantom coyotes, a cigarette desperately clinging to her lip. we groggy refugees in Holly Hobby pajamas grabbed watermelon slivers and worn Uno cards as the bedroom door snapped shut and voices escaped through the slit

How could anyone but what about what possesses him, why won’t he does he think but but what about goddamn him I can’t keep what am I supposed how can I even the girls but sucking our sticky fingertips, what could we do but Skip and Draw Four, swinging our legs under the table like weapons

how I read your birthday card silent indictments swelled from each irregular letter, traced carefully but carved broad and crooked like the leer of a jack o’ lantern. god your pen must circle over and over again trying to wrangle the shapes into something round and beautiful— but each time the inky ring just widens. it’s just like that damn story mom always tells, about how you would circle our cul-de-sac every day, around and around, training wheels click-clacking on the cement’s seams, circling and circling, hoping each trip would be the one to finally conjure me up. i wish i remembered coming home, even once.

in los angeles we call it lipo

as many round, hearty odes I write to the fleshly splendored wonderland of womanly curves and cushy thighs

i just can't seem to shake my love affair with sharpened clavicles, that delicious feeling when loose jeans hang off hipbones

and i have been a good good girl.

tONEdeaf head cocked arms folded legs wide planted firmly.

I even try to keep my knees from snapping compulsively along.

I used to dance volcanically, sweaty hair-plastered red cheeks pounding in time.

Go Go music really makes us dance the record spun in my room Do the pony, puts us in a traaaaunce I used to be up front all fists and pushing, my hair pulled and twisted in the grinding rub of a hundred shoulders, My feet lifted from the ground, the crowd carrying me.

And then I was backstage primed preening plaid mini-skirted.

My shiny bare legs occasionally bounced and bobbed but my body rarely strayed from the sidelong glances you might sometimes shoot me.

now I just can’t move anymore, even my muscles remember how washing dishes messed up “your vibe” and I now hear in chords strummed from stranger’s guitars, the dead air stretched too long between Boise and Bozeman, Amsterdam and Berlin (no one knows how to work the phones here, you say, eventually) and the cold morning silences resentfully preserved sliding on my panty hose in the hallway, sneaking out of my own house to make sure it still stood.

Crystal Powell

Philip Taylor

A Room with a Jew Patrick Killpatrick Strong Part I – The Roommate Lottery: Shirley Jackson Style I realize that I play the lottery today for one simple reason . . . to not have any room-mates. I used to have glorious lotto dreams of mountains of cocaine and porn hookers just like Charlie Sheen. These days, just a nice quiet house by myself for once would be enough of a dream come true. I laugh when people talk about their roommate dilemmas: “Well, she keeps using the decorative towels, and then she doesn’t put them back up on the right towel rack properly when she’s done.” Oh the fucking horror: shades of “Sleeping with the Enemy” here. These people have never really had a bad roommate. A bad roommate uses your bath towel to mop up his vomit and or piss off the bathroom floor and then hangs it back up, chunks and all, for you to use later, and you’re happy he did that much.

I have many not so fond memories of past roommates and their idiosyncrasies: One example is The PB&H sandwich. A “Peanut Butter and Hatred Sandwich” is the same thing as a PB&J without the jelly, and the jelly has been replaced by hatred because your tweeker roommate (who looks like any number of characters from the Dance Macabre paintings) ate the jelly in the middle of the night, probably with a spoon that he had used to shoot up meth before, and you are too poor to afford another jar of jelly. The PB&H goes best with room temperature tap water.

Food theft aside (which I’ve been on both sides of the issue), cohabitation generally requires cooperation. This cooperation many times leads to sharing the load not only on the rent and bills, but on the sundry items like cleaning products and toilet paper. I’ve actually gotten into what I call Toilet Paper Wars with past roommates. A toilet paper war is when each side of the roomie equation decides to one up the other by buying the thinnest and most abrasive TP available. It gets to the point where you scour the local area trying to find a janitorial supply place that reloads public school restrooms, and you both end up bleeding from the rectum and walking around bowlegged and with your ass up in the air like you just played pigbottom boy at a post pride parade all anal gang bang.

Part II – THIS IS SPARTA! Now Bend Over and Take It Like a Man. Over the last couple of decades, I’ve lived with an assortment of freaks, tweekers, sex-fiends, drunks, cutters, junkies, strippers, excons, a married couple who were both blessed with Italian blood, and I even tried out living with a couple of homosexuals. I took the joint with the gay couple because I thought, “Hey, it’s a big house, gay people are obsessively-compulsively clean, and my bedroom is far enough away from theirs that I won’t be able to hear them going at it over the Techno-House music.” WRONG! First off, the house was only clean because they were looking to rent a room; once they had my cash and I was moved in, the cleaning stopped. The only plus side was that I had my own private halfbathroom with a toilet and a sink, but I had to go into the other bathroom to shower. It started off okay, but then I realized these guys wouldn’t clean the joint if you put a shotgun to their heads. I kept the shower clean, because I had to use it, but I didn’t touch that toilet, not once, and neither did they for the several months I made it through living with them. That toilet gathered up so much pubic hair on the rim that it was starting to get a goatee. It was a black beret, turtleneck and Ray Ban sunglasses from being some new Sesame Street character. “Hey look kids! It’s Two Snaps the talking beat nick toilet.

Come on Two Snaps; give us a poem about being neglected in a cruel world.” By the time I got out of there, the toilet actually had so much hair on the rim that it went from being a Beat Nick to Billy Gibbons from ZZTop. They could have entered that disgusting shitter into the World Beard and Mustache Competition in Norway and won.

And as far as the fucking goes, the only way to not hear two or more full grown men humping gladiator style is to be in another house down the street. At first, it just sounds like a men’s tennis match with a dance beat in the back ground and no applause. Eventually, it sounds like a prison rape scene that gets you curled up in the corner in a fetal position hoping they don’t kick open your door and yell, “THIS IS SPARTA!!!”

Part III – Of All the Fiends I’ve Left Behind.

These guys weren’t the worst roommates by a long shot. The few tweekers I’ve lived with have really been an experience that psychology books can be written about . . . if the authors wanted to make a dark comedy. Let me state for the record that I never knowingly cohabited with tweekers that were out front about their drug use. They were either concealing it or were “in recovery.” To say one is “in recovery” is a just a nice way of saying that the relapse is inevitable and will be epic in scope. Here’s a hint that things have gone south: when you notice all the light bulbs and then the spoons start to disappear, you need to pack up your shit and split before your TV, computer, stereo, appliances, tools, CDs and DVDs, your bike, and any jeans you own begin to disappear as well. And even if the tweeker you live with isn’t a thief, then one of their tweeker friends will be. And they have friends because who wants to stay up for three weeks straight all alone?

One of these scum-bags that I let live in a converted laundry room decided to pay back my charity by stealing all of my porno mags and giant bottle of extra virgin olive oil to beat off with. I didn’t notice the porno mags gone and only figured it out when I went to cook something and couldn’t find the oil. I kicked open his door to see a lifetime collection of porn sprawled across the floor in front of his mattress . . .all of it covered in yellow oily stains. I'm sure many of the pages were stuck together, but I didn't touch the things to find out. I can still remember his ferret like eyes and him crying that he couldn't help himself and that he was going to get better with the help of Jesus. I guess Jesus must supply free meth, porno and lube these days.

I always got the jacker speed fiends who would hole up in their rooms for a week while beating off. I could never luck out with the hot, sexcrazed, nympho stripper who would come into my room every once in a while to borrow a cup of penis. Due to the wonders of methamphetamine, I actually ended up living with a guy who was a bigger loser than I was. He got tired of beating it and ended up falling drunkenly in love with a punk rock girl. And I mean a real punk rock girl, not some tarted up preppy chick playing Hot Topic punker, but a true blue, Mohawk sporting, shitty tattoos, non-bathing, crusty horror show. She probably would be okay looking without the Mad Max clothing and bathing schedule, but this grrrl was rank. You’d smell and hear her far before you saw her, and not just inside a closed space, and

he moved her in on the quick. It was like living with the homeless.

When I finally got her to agree to bathe at least once a week, the fallout in the bathroom was horrible. When she got done, it looked like someone skinned a pig in the tub. There would be hair everywhere, clots of blood, chunks of skin and meat. He got drunk one night, and told me that he would kill me if I ever tried to get her in the sack. I laughed and said, “I’d kill myself if I ever got her in the sack.”

She was gacked up too. He’d go off to work and leave me with this ball of sunshine, who thankfully was out the door right after he was.

She’d prowl the streets begging for money to score 40s and teeners’ of speed, come back to the house a couple of days later and accuse me of spying on her. Yes, while I’m working for a living, I take all the spare time I can to follow some spun monkey around the town to see what glorious malt liquor and meth adventures she’s on. What a total loss. The quality of one's drug fueled, paranoid delusions have a direct correlation to one's intelligence. Smart people believe that the CIA is tasking spy satellites toward them, or the local fuzz is putting surveillance gear in one of the tater-tots in the freezer. Dummies just blame the closest people to them for spying on their insignificant ass.

I’ve dealt with such a malignant menagerie of mental cases that my most recent roommate is one of the better ones I’ve had, but he’s no joy either. Before I moved in, he told me, “Now, you talk a bunch of crazy shit, and I don’t want my daughters exposed to that kind of stuff.” I told him that I could watch my mouth around his teenage daughters. The moment I moved in, Mr. Morality is on the couch drinking a twelve pack a day, doing bong loads and listening to Howard Stern at full blast. There is a porno chick having phone sex with a retard ringing out loud enough to be heard across the street, and I have to watch what I say. He also has some anger issues, sleep apnea and falls asleep in the living room with the TV blasting. This is all great until prime time turns to Skinamax. There's nothing like grading papers at midnight with a sound track of chainsaw snoring, soft piano and string quartet synth music and the petulant porno yelps of B-level booby actresses. We have our problems, but that’s the case in any shared residence. At least I don’t have to worry about the light bulbs and spoons coming up missing . . . for now.

Michael Andre

Old Tune

What old tune? Who you kidding?

Old age begins too soon.

Humbled, we begin to mumble And know we will not heal.

How you feel? No cure For age can long endure.

Nervous pandemic

To worry is to fear the worst.

A bad marriage is a joint disease.

Arab horseman with his sword Mounts a jet plane, flies

Virus

Confined to bed Better off dead.

Stolids and Fluids

He’s hard-hearted and don’t care He never asks -- what’s fair?

One shoe’s in the closet

Standing Start

Stay and study what you see Then repeat this behavior, resting

Watchful. Stop. Wait. Call this work?

Read a book. Then another. Then repent

Re-claiming St. Patrick’s Day Kelly McClure Up until about a month ago, when I thought about St. Patrick’s Day a very short list of things would pop into my mind: 1) The dying of the pretty much already year-round green Chicago River.

2) Shamrock Shakes, which consistently taste like garbage, but I buy themanyway because I’m a sucker for seasonal things.

3) Drunk assholes of every creed, color, financial background, and age.

Now when I think of St. Patrick’s Day I think of: 1) My lesbian girlfriend put a man’s erect penis inside of her vagina on March 17, 2012 while I was in bed sleeping, thousands of miles away, on a business trip. She did this in Brooklyn, NY. I was in Austin, Texas.

Facts about me: 1) I am a 35-year-old lesbian woman who writes filth and smut full-time for a magazine.

2) I currently live in Prospect Heights, which is a part of Brooklyn, New York. At the time of the aforementioned incident, I lived in Williamsburg, which is another part of Brooklyn. My apartment was right by the waterfront. The waterfront features a few small wooden benches where people like to sit and watch the boats go by, or kiss. “She” and I had our first kiss there, and then had our first sex roughly 45 minutes later. These are things you think about after the fact.

Too late. Much too much later. After the fact.

Facts about the girl who did this to me, now most commonly referred to as “she” or “my ex:” 1) She is much younger than me. Her exact age is 27-years-old

and a few months.

2) She is in the medical profession. This tricked me, and I will know better from now on that just because someone’s job is to care for you, does not mean that they will not hurt you, or “care for you.”

3) She has never been in a monogamous relationship and told me this on our first date but I didn’t listen. Hearing something like that on a first date should, in hindsight, be similar to hearing someone say “I can only orgasm when my mouth is filled with fresh blood.” But I heard this thing about not ever having been in a non-monogamous relationship and then tried really hard to un-hear it. But I never really heard anything else for the rest of the time we shared together, which was just under four months.

4) She was, and is, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in real life, in my entire life, and it was her beauty that made me forgive and look beyond things I should not have. This is the oldest mistake to ever have been made. When a human’s bare foot first touched soil on this earth, he was already forgiving a beautiful woman for hurting him. Even before he knew what “woman” was. One was out there in thought, in idea, preparing to make people cry.

5) I have changed her name in my phone to Voldemort. So if she should ever text or call, it will say that Voldemort is texting or calling, which will be true. This will make me laugh.

Current status of things: 1) We have not had any communication with one another for quite a number of days.

2) I am trying very hard to not look at her Internet things, because when I look at her Internet things I feel an anger and a sadness that makes me not like myself. There’s no cure for this type of heat. Chewing on the wall is a solution that has come to mind, but what sort of person would I be if I just started to chew on walls to make myself not want to desire seeing someone I used to be gentle with swallowed whole by an active volcano? I mean. Really.

3) I hate her. It’s funny. A lot of people say that hate is the opposite of love, but it’s not. You can only really hate someone who you used to love. This is how the devil happened. The opposite of love is not giving a shit. Which I very very very much do.

This is it. This is what she did to me: On March 13th I flew from New York to Austin, Texas to attend “that one music festival” and cover it for the magazine I work for. It was hot and sweaty and I worried about my hairdo almost the entire time. I hate being sweaty and frizzy. In my mind I’m cool and sleek, and if reality interferes with that, well, things become uncomfortable.

I thought about her the whole time. I like to have sex. A lot. But I never once thought about sex with other people. I thought about her. I missed her. She would text and say she missed me too. She was lying.

She would text and say she was horny (I hate that word) but “saving it for me.” She didn’t. I would go to bed thinking about her, and wake up thinking about her. She only thought about herself. She’s out there right now, only thinking about herself. Go see.

The festival happened, and was over, and then on March 19 th I flew home. I took a cab from the airport to my apartment, which was roughly $70, and then an hour or so later, she came over. We ate hamburgers, chicken fingers, and chocolate shakes. We walked through my neighborhood to get these things, and held hands on the way there, but not on the way back. There was always something about her that sort of annoyed me. I write this hoping she’ll read it one day and that it’ll make her sad, but chances are she won’t. Either of those things. She just won’t.

The two days following my return home we spent the night together and had sex. I actually said out loud at one point that the sex we had during one of those two nights was my favorite out of all the sex we’d had together. I meant it. Something about those two nights felt very intimate. That fact will be “the problem” that I emotionally take away from all of this, because now I’ll never trust that again. It’s all just chemical lies. They lie to us, and our own bodies lie to us, so what’s the point in doing anything? I know. It’s a lot to think about, so most of us just don’t, and that’s probably for the best.

On March 22, 2012 I asked this girl a question I already knew the answer to. On March 22, 2012 I cried a lot and thought horrible things about this girl in my head. In case you don’t know this about people, or yourself, we’re our maddest when we’re hurt, and to deny this only makes things worse. As I write this it’s April 22, 2012. It’s raining outside and it’s a Sunday. It’s 1:49pm and I’m drinking a beer. By the time it’s dark I will have had a few more. I will not be talking to her. And tomorrow I won’t be talking to her. If I were to talk to her I’d tell her that I never really loved her, and I know she never really loved me either. I’d tell her that that’s not the point. The point is that we keep doing this. Opening a door to let fire in. Opening a door to salt water floods and enemies walking slowly towards us from behind not too distant obstacles. Why? Why do we do this?

These are all things that don’t have answers, but what I do know is that next St. Patrick’s Day, and for many to follow, when I’m maneuvering a crowd of green capped, beer drenched fools, I’ll think of you and I. This is what you’ll always mean to me. (*pinch*) A lot of other people’s “she’s” are out there too. A big green ouchy parade. And we’ll line up to salute as it passes us by.

Alina Fox

Daino

A LOATHSOME JOB Kevin L. Donihe I loathe work. My boss, M. Makulahbaum, is supposedly a dentist; I’m supposedly his assistant. I don’t know a damn thing about dentistry. I don’t believe he does, either. He’s never filled a single cavity or capped a crown or shoved things into sleeping and/or euthanized patients. In fact, all he does is float around in the form of a red mist.

A sign above his door says: M. Makulahbaum, Dentist Where nightmares of flesh and bone collide *** I enter the foyer to his office and take the steps up. A song plays on the intercom. Makulahbaum blasts it each time an employee walks through the door.

I reach the final step. The chorus gets so loud it penetrates me.

My body ripples with data and pulses to a synchronized beat. I slam my head against the wall, harder and harder, until my brain rock n’ rolls right out of my skull and into a deposit box by the door.

Makulahbaum refuses to let employees carry brains to work. It used to bother me, but I’ve gotten over it. Mine usually is riddled with little holes, like something long and hard has been rammed into it, perhaps for hours, but I don’t need a brain when bathed in the light of Makulahbaum’s office. The light infuses me, reaches into my synapses, finds the soul inside the machine and has its rough and tumble way with it.

Inside the reception area, I adopt the customary tone and greeting one uses with underlings, fellow employees and higher-but-not -too-higher ups.

“Baby, I’m back! Use me!”

The secretary and a passing custodian drop what they’re doing and clamor towards me. They run claw-like fingers over my body and use words like ‘ripe’ and ‘succulent.’ I brush past them, entering the office where Makulahbaum waits.

He’s a man of Spartan taste. There isn’t much here apart from his desk, though he has a rather impressive wall-mounted face collection. I’ve yet to see one quite like it, and don’t think such a thing can be bought retail.

Miniature manatees swim in a tank by the desk.

I take my seat as Makulahbaum floats from his. His soulbody enters mine, producing a sudden electric tingle and the bite of copper on my tongue. He says nothing, but that’s to be expected.

He’s not the talkative sort.

Behind his desk are two identical white doors. I’ll enter one or the other; the morning routine never varies. Makulahbaum lets me know, in his special, silent way, that I am to enter the door that opens into the bad room.

His mist-body pulls away and floats back to the desk. I get up and head toward the door like a gas chamber gurney or an electric chair sits behind it. In truth, the door leads to an office almost identical to Makulahbaum’s, only smaller and without the neat wall-faces and mini-manatees. It’s a drab, boring place— painted all in white—and sunrays streaming through the window look gray even when it’s night.

The clock says twenty minutes have passed. They rarely stay hidden this long.

Not seconds later, something flaps against the window.

Great. They were waiting for me to think about them...

I turn, not wanting to see the wing that made the sound, but knowing I must. It’s their customary way of announcing arrival— the penguins that waddle out on the ledge and, on bad days, hover above it.

There are only two of them, regarding me from behind the window, eyes looking past my flesh and into my soul. They hiss—I almost thought ‘jizz’—at what lies within. I always thought hissing was a trait reserved for cats, geese and certain reptiles.

The first penguin’s eyes turn red.

“Stop it!” I bang my fist against the window. “I will not accept this!”

The second penguin’s eyes do the same; an ethereal flipper curls around my skull.

“Get out of my mind, you ball-gnashers!” I clutch my swelling head. “Leave me be!”

They refuse; three more waddle into view. The ethereal flipper curls tighter. I grab my head, screaming as my brain breathes.

I ram my head a few times against the filing cabinet before realizing there’s no filing cabinet, but notions of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ don’t concern me, not when those birds fix me with their fucking graveyard -all-night stare-a-thon gaze.

I’m powerless. I can’t shoo them off, not when they see past my mask, not when they know who I really am. (Hell, I don’t even know that!) Any attempt would be feeble, impotent, and the penguins would surely laugh.

I imagine the sound of penguins laughing and my ears bleed a little. In desperation, I launch myself at the window, smacking my body against it so hard the pane rattles. Then I repeat the process, twice.

More penguins. The world becomes a black cave.

Everything’s dead here. No light. And, god help me, I think I’m dead, too. I’d hoped to make it longer, but I’m going out now, baking under the wilting stare of urban penguins.

It’s time to go to my Happy Place and observe events from there. Goodbye.

My watch beeps. The world sucks me back in, and I’m not dead. It’s just lunchtime.

The penguins waddle away from the window. They know the drill.

Zip lock bags filled with brown, pulsing blobs lay on a table in the employee’s lounge. A piece of scrawled-on tape on the front of each bag reads work food. There’s no drink, but the food is moist and soppy so I don’t need water.

I take a bag and walk up a stairwell to the roof. The penguins are there too, swooping across the backs of weathered statues, roosting in the mouths of gargoyles.

I don’t remember the roof having statues and gargoyles. No matter. I sit down by the door and hope the penguins understand I’m on break.

They don’t bother me on the roof, but are waiting at the window upon my return, dozens of them, plastered against the lower half of the window, red eyes aflame, fixing me with their stare.

I face the opposite wall and don’t think about them, but feel a presence nevertheless, like a huge and terrible monster standing behind me. I turn around. One of the penguins levitates at least a foot above those plastered against the pane.

“We are inside you, Brian,” it says. “We are you. Let you become us.”

“I will never become you!” Then I hiss at it. I’ve never before been so bold, especially not so soon after cowering. It gives me a frisson.

It hisses back, and I return the favor. I refuse to let it have the last one. For hours, we hiss in turn.

A Makulabaum flunkey enters the room. I call him “Dickey” because he wears a necklace of dried, severed penises. I don’t know his real name and never see him—or any flunkey—unless I’m needed.

“Makulahbaum says you’re free to go.” He faces the penguins. “And you guys did an extra good job today, so you’ll get a raise.”

“Thanks, bub,” one of the penguins says through the pane.

“How about me? Do I get a raise?”

Dickey cocks an eyebrow. “Why ask, Mr. Cocks?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve been taking it up the ass for five years now?”

“Broach that subject with Makulahbaum.”

“He doesn’t speak!”

Negotiating with flunkies is useless. I face the penguins.

“Damn you all to hell,” I shout.

They ignore me, put on tiny hats and coats, and float off, heading north. **** I almost forget to pick up my brain at the drop box. When I return to get it, there’s a new sign taped to the door:

NEW COMPANY POLICY: Effective next Friday, leave your heart as well.

THE END

Megan johnnie b. baker It was 1989 and I was 23 years old. I had been living in San Francisco for a couple months, working at a place called Blondie’s Pizza, and there was a girl who worked there named Megan. We had an incredible chemistry, and all we did at work was flirt.

Just down the street from Blondie’s is the Warfield Theater, and on a regular basis the Jerry Garcia Band played there. And where ever Jerry was, there would be some good drugs. One night at work with Megan, I told her I was going to take a pizza down to the Deadheads and see if I could trade it for some LSD, and asked if she wanted to do whatever I get after work, and she said sure. So I wandered through the heads saying “pizza for doses.” Someone tore me off like twenty hits from a sheet, handed them to me, and took the pizza. Now that is a whole lot of acid for two people, so once the last customer left, we took 3 or 4 each and went to her house in the Haight.

Megan lived with a bunch of girls, five or six of them from Provincetown, Mass, so many that Megan slept on a futon mattress on the floor in the living room. We got to her place and storm in loud, glowing with drugs, and immediately Megan has me hand out the doses to everybody. There was only one other guy there, someone’s boyfriend.

That night, we grooved on Love and Rockets, screamed to Iron Maiden, sang the Pixies. The girls rolled around on the floor, the walls gasped for air. Then, at one point, the girl with a boyfriend spilled a big glass of water on him. He disappeared, coming back a few seconds later with a water balloon and threw it, soaking her. Everybody shrieked as she got up, ran and got the balloons, and started filling up a bunch herself. Very soon a compete water war broke up in the flat. Everybody started to grab anything that could hold water glasses, pots, buckets. There were fight over control of the kitchen things out. As we all relaxed and listened, me and Megan lay back on her mattress on the floor and shared a smoke. The couple in the room began to dance to Dylan, slowly. Completely soaked, they started to caress and stroke and rub each other, moving with the music. Right in

the middle of the room they danced and teased each other, rubbing their bodies together but still holding back, creating a sensual tension that permeated the room. It didn’t take until the end of the record for them to hit a bedroom. With the first ones gone it didn’t take long for the others to fritter away, going to bed or going to get something to eat or whatever, and Megan and I were alone on her mattress on the floor.

Finally alone, still damp, on the tail end of a wild trip, we start to touch, caress, kiss, maul. I rub my face and my body in her hair; I chew on her lips, her ears, and her nose. Every part of our bodies’ hyper-sensitive, I worked my way over every inch of her body, feeling the flesh in my hands, biting the bones under her skin. The culmination of months of sexual tension finally being assuaged. But I couldn’t get it up. My mind was so fried out of my brain my dick wouldn’t respond. So I worked my face, slowly but surely, until it was between her legs. And I went crazy. I licked that pussy, I kissed it and suck it and flicked it with my tongue. I tried to bury my entire face in her wet, warm heaven. My nose, my chin, until my entire face was covered in her juices. I concentrated in a manner you only can while on drugs, paying complete attention to every bump and fold and valley.

Time disappeared, only to come back when she exploded. Satisfied with my manly duties, I crawled up and held her in my arms as she hyperventilated, and as we faded away and I thought that this was one of the greatest nights of my life, and that I would be in love with this girl forever.

I had to actually be at work the next day. When we woke up we realized that I was late, that I had to go straight to Blondie’s.

Then Megan noticed that I was purple. My face, chest and arms were the same color as her hair, the dye had run when wet and I had been all over her and her hair. Megan freaked out, because we worked at the same place and if I showed up purple people would know it was Megan’s hair color and know we had hooked up, which she wanted to keep secret. She got a steel-wool pad and started to scrub my face and my arms. That was not pleasant, but I didn’t care, we were laughing and I was in love. She soon realized that she wasn’t going to scrub it all off, plus my skin had just become too raw. Besides, I then put on my Blondie’s t-shirt from the night before and it too had purple hair dye all over it, and I didn’t have time to go home and change. Off to work I went, walking on air, purple. It took about five minutes for someone at work to put everything together.

That was the only night Megan and I ever hung out.

When I got off work I went back to her place and she and some friends were piling in a car and off to Berkeley, see you later!

The next day, at work, she told me she was going back home, and didn’t want a relationship. For the few weeks she stuck around I moped, stuck in that youthful melancholia of heartache. But soon she was gone, and then another new girl arrived, Hillary the college drop-out from Sacramento, but that’s another story.

Credits Michael Andre lives in Philadelphia and is the founder and editor of Unmuzzled Ox. MAndreOx@yahoo.com Stephen T. Brophy is the LA triple threat: writer/performer/ sociopath. facebook.com/Stigmattellite Daino is a Southern California graphic artist and editor/publisher of Plastic Water. plasticwater.us Kevin L. Donihe has written the novels Space Walrus (forthcoming), Night of the Assholes and others from Tennessee. bizarrocentral.com/312-2/kevin-l-donihe Alina Fox is a Vermont artist, writer and farmer. cowbird.com/author/alina-fox.

Kelly McClure lives in Brooklyn and is the Music Editor for VICE. vice.com/author/kelly-mcclure Crystal Powell is a San Diego oil painter. indirecteffectsart.com.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman lives in New York state and is the editor of Sounding Out! soundstudiesblog.com.

Patrick Killpatrick Strong is a writer, comedian and musician from Rivercide, California. facebook.com/patrick.k.strong Philip Taylor is a Santa Barbara-based artist and musician. thebandoso.com johnnie b. baker is the editor/publisher of Budget Press.

Budget Press would like to thank these people for their generous donations to the cause: Morgan Burke. Lawrence Chit, Jennifer Cline, Craig Colorusso, Shane Convery, Peter Duong, Renee Gurley, Larry Hauser, Tim Hickey, Shannon Hughes, Kelly McClure, Gina Nielsen, Kathy Reeves, David Schuster, Kristin Stadum, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, and Kelly West.

Z He drove around Looking to die But to his disappointment.

Reached home safe

Michael Andre

Back Cover—Alina Fox

Crystal Powell