#Little Blue Transistor Radio.
Text
brought to you by love / 18+
you never actively participated in haruchiyo and friends’ smoking sessions, but august was boring, classes were out of session, you were both 19 and wanted to feel older, and the itch to be close to him — even if during an illicit affair — was strong.
your throat feels dry. you cough, and he passes you a glass of water. you take it with one hand, back snug against his chest. your cheeks warm when a large hand lays itself in your lap, lazily stroking the fabric of your skirt.
“ah — shit,” rindou sits across from the two of you with his brother, hissing a little after his drag, “i don’t even feel it.”
ran chuckles, for no apparent reason, and takes the joint from his brother’s hand. rindou’s scowl fades into a lazy smile at this, and you feel one take over your face, too. you set the glass down somewhere; you don’t care, he takes it and puts it in another place anyways.
you should be scared right now — where did they even get this from?
(truthfully you know the answer, and it makes your stomach twist. he was a bad man with bad company but so good to you). and, despite your better judgement, you feel so warm and light beside him. the beige coloured walls of ran’s bedroom look so much more vibrant. a slow r&b song plays on the portable radio transistor rindou stole from the music store down the street. it’s four years young and the sound quality is less than par but you think the melody is beautiful.
the world has never looked so bright when he dragged you down with him. you never wanted to escape — never felt the need to.
it was freeing this way; no expectations. not when no one had any for you. only him. only ever him.
haruchiyo’s arm reaches out to the blunt ran passes him, and you feel even more protected — somehow. suddenly you sense a chill run down your spine. you can feel your own heartbeat and the reverberations of his own also pound against your back.
you reach for the hand resting in your lap, clutching onto it like a life support. you can make out every one of his rough calluses — can feel his hand tense as your nimble fingers entangle with his larger ones.
“hm?”
he breathes through his nostrils, you notice that every hair on the back of your neck stands up. leaning your head back, you look into his eyes — and find that he is already gazing downwards at you, taking a large hale at the blunt.
he grins a little when he’s finished, and you feel shy. haruchiyo looks prettier for some reason. he blows a small cloud in your face, and you squint and cough while he only laughs at your reaction.
he leans forward to pass the stick back to rindou, and places a kiss on your nose. your cheeks set themselves on fire at the soft affection.
“blehhh,” rindou groans through a mouthful of potato chips, grabbing it from haruchiyo, “get a room.”
a large hand places itself on your cheek, and lightly pulls the skin with its index finger and thumb. you whine and shove him away a little with your elbow, and, like clockwork, he only snickers.
you stare into his viridescent eyes. he has a little bit of blue and grey in them too you realized. he looks into yours. you feel a little lightheaded and the haze behind his multicoloured irises makes your stomach twist and turn.
take me home, you don’t say.
alright, he doesn’t respond.
so he ordered an uber, and you went home. being with him was so easy.
.
.
.
he was in the mood. you felt it the second you walked in through the door. coming down from his high — haruchiyo becomes so honest yet bashful.
it was so lovely.
he lays you down onto your bed. laundry you haven’t done yet is sitting on the corner of your shared bedroom. a few of his shirts, couple pair of his boxers, your pants and underwear. every piece of you fits with every piece of him. you want to give him even more. you want to take even more.
“would you … like to have fun?” he whispers, timorously, as he caresses your hair. you want to cry at his tender touches. he becomes so vulnerable when he is like this — even more so when he is alone with you.
it is rare, it is special. it is only yours. he is only yours: in this moment.
you skim your lips against his own, leaning upwards with your elbows bent into the plush of the worn down mattress.
“you want me, haru?”
“yeah,” he murmurs it with such conviction it makes you weak at the knees, “yeah — fuck — i want you.”
so you give up all your inhibitions and give yourself fully to him; not that you were particularly trying to resist — not that you could deny him, to begin with. not that you ever desired to.
your hand gently brushes his long, dirty blond hair. he closes his eyes and you lightly touch the scar on his temple. he has so many of them — you’ve uncovered 21 so far, and have tended to each one.
growing more daring, your hand decides to trail down, down, down. all the way until you finally engulf his large erection through his pants. he is so much bigger than you are, so much more intrepid, but he becomes like water in your hold.
he gasps and you smile.
“that feel good?”
“yeah,” his lips twitch, and he looks so lovely in the golden light of the bedroom, “yeah — shit, baby, are you sure—”
“i want you so bad.” you cut him off with an honest admittance, whimpering at the feeling of him.
his arms cage you between his body and the bed. you feel so small but so shielded. the fabric of the sheets feels so much more softer.
he twitches in your hands. you hastily play with the belt of his jeans. he gets the memo and helps tug them down, along with his underwear.
you dare look down, and heave at the sight. you feel him watching you which makes the situation even more intense. you look up into his eyes and focus on kneading his shaft.
“ha—haru,” you puff, growing hot and sweaty at the close proximity and your lewd actions.
he all but grunts, spreading your legs with his own when his knees hit the mattress. snaking a sly hand up your skirt, you whine when it prods at your sensitive cunt through your panties.
“this all for me?” he asks, staring at you so intensely.
“yeah,” you breathe out, mouth forming an ‘o’ and brows furrowing when his thumb rubs against your clit, “yeahhh.”
the sound of skin against skin fills the room. you smell of citrus and he of baby lotion; it floods every corner and crevice.
your ears burn, they’re scorching to the touch. his cock begins leaking his cum, and it is sticky in your palm. you whine when you feel yourself gush against his hand. you groan even louder when you feel him shove a hand inside your underwear, fingers teasing your slit directly.
“baby,” he bleats, sounding like you are putting him through great torment, “shit— shit.”
“haru— haru,” you mimic, tears filling your eyes from the pleasure.
you wrap your free hand around his neck in an attempt to stabilize yourself, gaining an even quicker momentum with your other. every little narrow of his brow, every small grunt and groan that he lets go in front of you, makes your pussy twitch in delight.
his lips fall flat, and he lets out a tiny hiss when you start to fondle his balls. you can’t help the giggle that escapes your throat, but it soon morphs into a strangled moan by his next actions.
“s’all mine.” he growls out, finger finally slipping into your aching cunt. your back arches and your tits press against his chest.
your sweatshirt rides up to your mid-stomach, legs uselessly trapped between his own. you wiggle your bum a little at the sheer potency of his fingers, toes curling at the pleasure. you try and copy his ministrations, massaging his length with even more intensity than before.
you cry out for him, “haru, gonna—”
“i know,” he buries his head in the crook of your neck, grumbling into your skin, “fuck — i know.”
you can detect him licking and sucking at the skin of your shoulder blade, but cannot make it out with a precise constitution considering how much of a mess he was making of your pussy. he is no better than you, you realize. he huffs and pants heavily into your ear and it only makes you shiver and feel every thrust of his fingers even more.
“come for me, pretty,” he begs, “shit— come, come for me.”
your hand wrapped around his neck comes to shakily rest on the back of his head. he feels this, and comes face to face with you.
sweaty, teary and red eyed. he looked so beautiful. you lean upwards and takes his lips in yours. he lets you, and you cry into his mouth.
your thighs begin to tremble vigorously around his prodding arm. you can feel every vein of his large cock as it twitches and quavers in your palm.
when you detach from his lips, you burrow your face in his shoulder and come in his arms. you feel his hot seed spray against the skin of your stomach, and his groans fall into small pants as he reaches his own.
as you both come down from your highs, he takes your chin between his fingers and smothers your lips with his, once more. you happily comply, the post orgasmic bliss encompassing your very body and soul.
you sigh into his mouth, hand still around his twitching cock. his hand is taken out of your panties and the slight friction causes you to jump. he bites your bottom lip at this.
as you pull away, you let go of his member. it rests hotly against your tummy and you watch as haruchiyo’s brows furrow when he assesses the situation. when he gets up, you cannot find the energy to watch where he is going. he returns with wet wipes. you smile at the way he cleans you without sparing a single word. he fumbles a little bit but gets it in the end.
you manage to mumble a, “love you,” and relish in the way his lips slightly twitch. haruchiyo is a man of few words, but many, many reactions.
taking off his pants and putting on another pair of his boxers, he helps you take off your soaked panties and skirt. he takes off your sweatshirt, too, in exchange of his own.
and when you are moments from falling asleep with your back against his chest, like you always do — you swear you hear a little, “me too.”
80 notes
·
View notes
Text
Everybody remembers their first...
1971...I had just turned twelve and had to have this as soon as I heard that fuzztone intro blasting through my little transistor radio. Sent chills down my little spine.
Took my 72 pennies (45s were 69 cents each, three cents tax) in a baggie up to the local Gibson’s, and poured ‘em on the counter, and bought my very first record I bought myself.
What Is Life...nothin’ heavy for a 12 year old, right? lulz...this song, along with “The Seeker” by The Who, and “Gypsy” by The Moody Blues solidified my whole take on life by the end of that year. Carved in vinyl for eternity.
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Prompt #12 from the 'nature' section of this (very NSFW) list + Jo/Joe
Requested by: @basilone
Of course Bill had ditched him. This had all been the bastard’s idea, and now he was off necking with Fran somewhere. Somewhere that wasn’t a tent that’d been moldering in the basement since someone’s old man had brought it home from the war. Malark had split too, saying there was a test he’d forgotten to study for. “Good thing it’s June,” Joe had said, bewildered, before hanging up the phone.
It had seemed like a good idea at first, but maybe anything seemed like a good idea with enough boredom and enough beer. Backyard camping, to celebrate, Bill said. Joe didn’t know what they were celebrating. The fact that they weren’t going to get drafted? Maybe that was good enough. The steel plant was still there. Joe figured it always would be, somehow.
None of that changed the fact that Bill and Don had set him up, and now on a balmy summer night he’s stuck in a tent with the prettiest girl he’d had the misfortune to develop a crush on.
Before he’d dropped out, anyway.
They’re both a few beers too far to care about looking stupid by now, or to care about ruining the tent with the smell of the joint she’d rolled and let him light.
Her eyes glow in the deep blue twilight, and now all they’ve got is the tiny ember of the paper, soon to be extinguished. The light catches on the slickness of her lips, that pale Iron City shit that’s all he can afford.
On the little transistor radio, Roberta Flack’s voice distorts and goes dead as the batteries run out.
“Shit,” Jo says. There’s the sound of crickets and other insects chirping around them, the smell of the lawn. Bill had called it backyard camping but none of them actually have a backyard. Technically this is the corner of a park. Technically what they’re doing could get them hauled to a police station.
Jo doesn’t seem to care, though.
Her cheeks are a little pink, he can tell in the dark. She’s got a crochet top on that looks a little like the doilies his mom puts on all the furniture, and cut-off shorts.
Why’s she here, anyway?
Wasting a Saturday night making small talk with him and pretending she can’t notice him staring at her chest.
She takes a last drag before the light goes.
“You can touch them if you want,” she says, and he chokes a little.
“What?”
“I said-”
“I heard what you said.” He coughs.
“Don’t you want to?” Yes. Jesus, yes.
“Not…not like this.” Not like he’s fourteen and sneaking girly magazines in the basement.
His eyes are starting to adjust to the dark. He can see her reach for the tie of her halter, and then pull her hand back. “Probably couldn’t get away with a lot in this tent anyway.”
“Probably.”
She leans forward so her chin is resting in her palm. “Whatcha thinkin’ about?”
Shoving my tongue in your mouth. “Nothing.”
“Oh, come on.”
“How ‘m gonna ditch Bill the next time he gets an idea.”
“Probably thought we’d have a nice little time in here.”
His jaw clicks a little as it moves. “Aren’t we?”
“Are we?”
He feels his whole face screw up, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. “Jesus, Brandt.”
She makes a very loud scoffing noise. “You know my name.”
He puts his face close to hers, but doesn’t kiss her. “Okay, Josie.” He can sense the tiniest reaction at that, the tiniest flinch.
“You wanna relax?”
He runs his tongue over his teeth. “Thought that’s what the booze and the grass was for.”
“You know what I mean.”
He’s sure if the lights were on he still wouldn’t be able to read her face. “Listen, I ain’t got a condom, and you shoulda told me if you wanted to-”
“Where’s your imagination,” she says, and she’s wriggling back onto the floor of the tent.
It’s useless to keep pretending he doesn’t know what she means, like he doesn’t know where this is going.
Right?
Their elbows bump together, legs tangling for lack of space. She doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t try anything.
The blue-black outline of her unbuttons her shorts. It takes him a minute or two to yank down the zipper of his jeans, to believe that this is happening. God, are they going to spend the night here then? He has no idea.
It feels like he can hear everything, in the dark. Her mouth pressing together, the way she rolls her tongue against her lips, pulls her teeth over them. The crickets, something splashing distantly in the pond. Her knuckles rubbing against the inside of her cut-offs. The blood rushing in his ears. Was this what all the girls did, the ones who wore little tops like hers and had protest patches all over their handbags?
His whole body feels like it’s humming, trying to do this with her here. She pushes her shoulders back a little, her hair brushing his own with the movement. It feels wrong to think of her, feels wrong not to.
Fuck, she sounds wet.
He grips himself harder.
The sound of her erases everything in his head. It’s embarrassing, how little time it takes for the mess against his jeans, sticking against his thighs, for the static between his ears. He’s limp, covered in sweat, and he thinks he’s imagining it when he hears her whine his name. It’s enough to send want rolling through him again, to bring a kneading hand to himself again.
Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t, but she stills. He listens to her breathing slow. She rolls over, curls her knees up, her curls brushing under his chin, and her breath. He keeps wondering what she’ll say, but she doesn’t say another word.
#ty eva a. for this prompt b. for the au idea#shoshi writes#jo's tag#smut under the cut#me @ the pairing ive written for [redacted] years: who are you people
6 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Ken Sharp – I’ll Remember the Laughter (Jet Fighter)
Back in the day, when an artist could not fit all the goodies they had stored up on a single slab of vinyl, they would release a two-record set. The latest collection by pop/rock anthropologist Ken Sharp is an embarrassment of riches. It wouldn’t even fit in a two-record set, at 50 tunes it’s more like a three-record set or a box set.
The album title I’ll Remember the Laughter is rather apt because laughter is not the only thing this brace of tunes will make you remember. It is a stylistic traipse through the history of 60s and 70s AM/FM radio (with a little 80s and beyond mixed in for good measure).
Sharp has grown a cult audience for his sharp pop songwriting skills and on-point understanding of popular (and also obscure) music of the past. Taking a sonic trip through I’ll Remember the Laughter is like coming across a transistor radio from the multiverse; an alt-history of songs that could have, should have and would have been hits in the glory days of Top 40 radio, only if they had just been recorded in time.
It is a place where Todd Rundgren rubs elbows with T. Rex, The Knack hangs out with Hall & Oates, and The Raspberries had the kind of career that merited inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The styles of I’ll Remember the Laughter are all over this place – and I mean that in the best possible way. From the bluesy shredding of “No More Silver Linings,” the strutting bubblegum pop/soul of “42nd Street” to the catchy prog of “Halyx Rising (Lora’s Song)” to the sunshine pop of “Dennis” to the soulful lament “Cracking This Heart of Stone,” the album is a primer of musical styles and feels.
“Lightning Crash” feels like an old lost Cheap Trick fave, while “Shut Out the Lights” rides on a Clapton-esque guitar line. “Ghetto Child” (not to be mixed up with the Spinners classic of the same name) does share that song’s Philly International soulful vibe, as does the sweet intro to “Are You a Lover or a Fighter?” which eventually moves into more of a blue-eyed soul feel. “Between the Lines” on the other hand, pulls from the paisley underground school of The Dream Syndicate and The Bangles.
Beyond Sharp’s sharp originals, I’ll Remember the Laughter also offers some adventurous and intriguing covers. There is a swinging version of The Who’s “The Kids are Alright” and two (count ‘em) covers of songs from a semi-obscure pre-superstardom album by 80s pop/rock icon Rick Springfield of “Jessie’s Girl” fame. (Springfield adds some tasty backing vocals to Sharp’s recordings of his songs.) However, possibly the greatest cover is a stunningly catchy version of “Girl,” which is remembered in pop culture as the song which Davy Jones performed in his guest appearance on The Brady Bunch.
So, if you miss the glory days of pop radio, where diverse styles rubbed shoulders in a mind-boggling array of music – with the only true through line being that most of it was one hell of an earworm – you can recreate that sensation with I’ll Remember the Laughter.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2023 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: February 6, 2023.
youtube
3 notes
·
View notes
Video
youtube
I’m kicking off the weekend with a dedication to “The Killer” Jerry Lee Lewis who passed away today at age 87. I was able to see him live once just four years ago at Riot Fest in Chicago in Sept. 2018. This was my Tumblr blog from that experience: RIP Killer
Jerry Lee Lewis (Radicals Stage) Well we had to see The Killer! At this point, running a bit low on energy, we opted out of being near the stage so we could sit and chill for a bit. The show was good, and pretty much what I expected from the 82-year-old rocker. His band played five songs before he even took the stage. (A classic format for early Blues, Country and Rock ‘n’ Roll artists.) He ended up performing nine songs, finishing with his well known hits Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. Given his age, I thought he played piano and sang really well. Two thoughts crossed my mind during his set: The first was that as one of the early pioneers of Rock music, he is one of the reasons why we are at Riot Fest today. The other thought I had as I kicked back under the sky on this beautiful late summer night was about anyone that enjoyed his music back in the 1950’s. I’m sure a countless number of people in the late 50’s kicked back on a warm summer night and listened to Lewis perhaps on a transistor radio or on a car radio. It’s remarkable to think that 60 years later, we are listening to him play a live show. Along with Little Richard (age 85), Lewis is the last of the Rock music pioneers and it was a privilege to be able to enjoy a live performance. (Note: Little Richard passed on in 2020.)
https://chaunceyandchumleysdad.tumblr.com/search/jerry+lee+lewis
#jerry lee lewis#the killer#whole lotta shakin goin on#rock n roll pioneer#RIP October 28 2022#kicking off the weekend
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Starts With M, Part 5
The Moody Blues - The Story in Your Eyes / Melancholy Man
This sounds like a well-loved record, but I get it. "The Story in Your Eyes" drives forward with a lot of musical intensity and romantic drama. Compelling stuff! "Melancholy Man" is a spooky dirge, as you might well have guessed. It sounds pretty clear by comparison with the A-Side, but hazy and haunted by design.
The Moody Blues - Question / Candle of Life
This disc is actually very clear, you can hear a lot of subtlety in the guitar and bass that doesn't always come through in these old records. "Question" is a good song, both before and after it completely changes direction at the halfway point. "Candle of Life" is another spooky tune, like sitting in a wizard's parlor.
Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl / Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)
Kind of sounds like I'm listening to this at the bottom of a mineshaft, perhaps with an old transistor radio. I joke, I joke. A classic song, of course, that obviously got played a lot back in the day. I've never heard the B-Side before, but it is fairly soulful and rad, and the sound is a little clearer than the other side.
Anne Murray - Danny's Song / Drown Me
Just a touch shy of clear as a bell, and a lovely tune. The B-Side is less compelling, but that may just because I know it less well. That's how it is sometimes.
0 notes
Text
(itty bitties thickiodai all a willy wonker could fixate upon
or fuck with or over-deliberate mixes on mixes
glistening kiss wasted time fixes at face value
all under and no rutger delineated richer)
weather pack of marlboro 100’s would materialize
outta of thin air or we just happened upon a gang
of sisters going our way with just enough room for the lot
burbon boon docks out there in the emerald dixies fixities
bonnie & laud whos father was working
wistfully willy with the police k-nine duckdog coppers
robbers too they were
even shaking the bullbury whistlers down
for the smallest nickle of the smallest
bowlpack this side of st.strawberrys
forever wine wis-constainteeming with time
the lost blue barrel-rolls & owsley’s two timings
that we saw back there on vanderbelt & whistley
phantoms in the street flickering light posts
at witching hour once again
osolate accordion gideons copy
in the drawer at the motel six
to which we find ourselves amist
with comradery libation
mixes in with ginger speckled spots of opal rovers
royalties steely as they were bronzen
breezen with the look of a holy man
that hasnt slept in days with cheerful spritzer
up to not sleep again tonight
are you willing doctor?
(15)
not much on the tele
sitting quietly smoking in the deli
last of the coffee
last nickel on the paper
only option now is to wait for the check to clear next tuesday
to the slow dissonant hum
of one lonely saxophone in an alley a couple blocks away
down by the liquor store
when i lived on vanderbelt
the man inside used to sell laced tobacco cigarettes
his iranian family owned that store for generations
& in the basement they would always keep
a small table for the hasiche smokers
as well as the card players
and way in the back
a little broom-closet for the working girls
seasonal caricatures
where is your one room hideaway
your cigarette paradise
where is your thinly veiled chamber
the veneer of shallow lighting
slowly peeling away at the unforgiving day
pleasing the night walks come
still in star-twinkling amnesia like qualities
wandering circles around the corridor
unseen flashing phosphorus crawling in the courtyard
playing with forces and fae by sigil
then candle-light
& smoking mirror
(2)
every pixel transfigured
enigmafied friend
E.T. phone home, do you read me
E.T. completely
infixtured by the night seascrolls
temporarily transported by
the fixtures of light
illuminated in every way
perhaps transfigured
at satiation trainyards
yonder birdlike
secret stations
lord i remember
easy though peezy perhaps
corrosive catering to the trivial
needs & laments of the zeitgeist
rolling thunder as they
were participating in
a protection rite with fire
testing testing one two three
said the operator on speed
here we go again
said the otter to the left
storm cloud tracers
tracy chapman on transistor radios
in the drivers seat on the freeway
back from south jersey
subway skylines
subletting subcities
hiccups from the anonymous hippopotamus
printed and pampered on postage
marked friend of the devil
return to sender
suddenly from stage left
the bender on 8th street
thats a wrap boys- cut
or so says the cabbie
dont listen to him
hes on amyls with a bad heart
spooks from the flop house
all haunt inn
(21)
the house on fire
whisper echoing
green books on green books
can you still believe its all for
green books and good acid
imported cargo
imp imported cargo
starting south
we begin in houston
ending in the mighty
congo river man
a half dozen arabian nights
now we begin the other way back
through caldonia manifolds tanquerayian
blocks and blocks of uninterupted garments
leather satchels containing el supremo
chickens feet for good luck
potions galore tiny inlet dwellings
candleside riddlers
nuancers necromancers
the layaway clairvoyant
bins of fish
every sort of fly ointment imaginable
caskets of dreams
cuban breezes chartreused and succumbed
to the tangier unmitigated lining
however riddled with folly
be it may
handing in stained yellow papers
to a circus in juan paris
stopping by to see johnny paria
at a small roadside attraction inlet
quickly as cowboy coffee induced mayhem midways
& chickens running around with
their heads chopped off
(26)
salmon glue
one of them shouted
a blessing in yiddish
that girl is poison poising itself
on the radio dial
just as we pull up to Tom’s diner
one cigarette for each of us
back at the remote outpost there in the desert
the camel back importers cargo carriers
were bringing a ton of red lebanese hashish
from a trade town just north of the border
we awaited them with mint tea that steeped
deep into the night
as well as
a gang of belly-dancers who’d been
flown in the night before
specifically for this occasion
the arrival of the red leb
patagonia
one of them exclaims
that was my dream lastnight of patagonia
tumbled down shack in big-foots it was
reading five verses of amazonian soplar literature
& suddenly it all flowed back
images of seraphim & sirena approaching
images of some of them muddy
others all dressed well in clean white clothing
down there the fixation then was moonshine
so every friday afternoon we would gather
preferably no less then a dozen of us
& drive out to houston paying twelve a cap
& with that we could haul enough back
to supply the entire county for a week
we did that every weekend for a decade
then reagan got elected and that was that
imported sugar cane or cherry flavored pop
was the only game in town
so the soliders surged on til dawn
when by bask morning-light through
velvet shade they did receive the call they
had been waiting for all this time
on a pink tele- it was louise
they were down at the terminal in westport
approximately 40 minutes by auto-bus
from our remote outpost somewhere in the dunes
between the frontier & egypts southern most point
in the babeloid region, also known as Valdez*
hectares beyond the thresholds of our jurisdiction
thus we were forced to rush in by stealth
(3)
REAL PEOPLE
TRUE STORIES
UNADULTERATED INSCRIPTION
reads the foney tabloid with
a crude pictograffiti of george bush
giving a rub and tug to a martian
on the white house lawn
hey now all good things in all good time
he said sardonically lighting up a spliff and passing
to the left
right in the time net before the scheduled entry
into the trading panel
we had used up mostly all of our uppers on hand
during the brief but intense flash with the pirates
at new guinea
all the variants of drug addled crux dividers walked through
these ports at at some ragged wretched time or another
however twisted or undistinguished from the periphery
slimey toadstools & the barways walked through by tangeria
hotel babblers, mind mice and the seething soup seekers
of muck and littered propheticus
casitas burden the bourbon-bury mind sippers
like the ghosts of amulet bearing pirates
looking lately into obsidian sunglass mirrors
& the cheers-mates divides found in friar field vietnam
sinking ships & brand new quicksilver salamanders
who poisoned themselves back into
the clotted timestream by
hookwink & soft-pond tactics alone
the souls of lost sailors & dead shaman
sandbank dealers & a new orleans maiden-like hierarchy
holy-week brandish of sacred markers &
makers of witchcraft devised by KFC confessionals
with long-lines & tokes of datura in the middle-school-lunch
cafeteria waiting line lego rooms
filled with outrageous
arabic geometry signature
in their natures seething like
broken spanish entities
in subliminal outake
(5)
an outline of hegemony
here in the world as it were
or was back there in the hotel rooms
at san luis cooped up on speed
who was looking out the window
and through the bubble-gummer
or cowboy boot wearer
what have you
but you know
suddenly i felt the sudden urge
to articulate the experience
and thus here we are
gathered around a window
sunshining freshlhy
albiet were all smoking
and talking over one another
how exciting caffeine tends to the nerves
to the ninth degree until second hour
if i wasnt in my right mind
i might say we have a gracyth lace
of the old go fast in there somewhere no?
a tar spirit wedged beneath the tandem spirits
so tender & wavingly at lengthful & grateful
transmigration of a phoenix
involved in certain spiritual states
including psychosis
we decided it was better to disguise
the acid casualties as clowns
to better move them discreetly from
our distant quarters in the non local sanctuaries
of psychotomimetic antiquity vis-a-vis
the grizzled backbury peyote deserts
of the mid classical maya
until recently this was somewhat
of a simple procedure
new blockades were placed at powerspots
encrypted punto tecalotes guarding all
of our most trusted cardinal points
and thus we hired the specialist
el coyote
the modality was as factual as
we could possibly write in
to the bloody script to begin with
gesturing towards the ticket booth
blargzeebubbed both whispering so quiet and free
buzzed of delineated cheap coffee echoing
the ugly whims of burroughs vis a vis
the tangier hashish jelly saga
we made sure to dial in our woes
to the receptor cite
no matter how many times we hit
the croacher as as hard as we possibly could
for days on end unrelenting the charge hold
give it another minute or integer
shell load in undoubtful
smacked the lips of the tender
still sipping on hiccups and barbury fumbling
with banknotes and letters of a long exiled
main street
(24)
loud typewriters clicks designs
im sitting there at toms diner, go figure
the lightning aint so bad after-all
cuppa joe & a side of toast
thanks betty stelmer
we went to high-school together
back in those days
sandstone slippers & a lovely young lady
named sandy preference whisky bourbon rye
so we took our chances in a cadillac
and headed towards tangier way
hashish castles there
so says the latter
black velvet in its entirety
the whole ways home
somewhere in that hotel lobby
smokey as it was blessed
someone complained about the speed jitters
over-sensitized now cant concentrate he complained
whole lobby sweeps silence
a pin drops
stopping for gas they go ahead
& pickup a hitcher
calls himself phantom 309
fits in with our troop just fine
someone call sampson
somebody shouted
from a half a block over
weve got ourselves a real
space-case over here, okay?
(10)
it started as a simple food and whiskey mission
and water too, but we’d forgotten
and soon after would have to double back
but no matter & nobody minded
it was a clear blue sky desert in surround
like the truman show or beetlejuice
we didnt question the script & ended up rolling
with the punches all the way back
to the tellers quarters
riffing off the midlife crisises of the
common-folk
fumbling with pennies & lint-like pocket minutea
pack of zigzags invokes laughter
& then the sound of choppers
war get to the chopper
claus hurry quick get to za choppa
the valley was clear and empty
there we’re people out there though
hiding in the daytime like coyotes
or used car martian lizard salesmen
from dallas
(1)
a private room &
the return to san luis
dreams of blown out station-wagons
on the outskirts of vegas
a jalapeno violin singing us
turpentine blues on a backbury bust
a bus inching towards the edge of frisco
someone asked him for a quarter
digging in pocket past
the lint and detritus
showing them off invoking them
back around he said
here ya go kid ya got a match?
they called him the contrarian
like a wino centaur
like a matchbox forgotten in an
old pair of crusty levis
like elvis’s outdated bottle
of port from michigan marked 1863
we didnt care and popped it open anyhow
one of us decided to take that
88’ oldsmobile down to the drugstore
for a box of vicks inhalers
we snatched up the last one lucky
took out the cotton
& threw it in the fire
blacktop singers
they snap their fingers
to the twinkling
of fallen starts
someone is playing the harp
down there on vine street
in the passengers seat of an oldsmobile
i think of her name was eighty-eight
i think someone stole the
freight-train liner
took it past smugglers cove
the only place they know we’ll never go
(23)
the band was hot so we danced
the famous merengue
then we darted back
now we fade to black
the was the sean shem
brother rivalry all over again
after not speaking for months
after christmas disaster
the mask of hallucinatory worry
and need not to worry
i know how these type of sharks work
and within the fortnight daggers daggard
their way through message totemologies
but lucky for us brushed with sunspots
in legacy power nigredos
sipping stiffly on walkabout cathedrals
and this was known so it as shown
in blows below the gut
the best we can do is an honest mockery
shipping into harbors wherein the lively
about couldnt come or refused to
or took methmolly for seven days
and turned green X
turned off text messages
blocking all archonic disruptions
influctions of geltab jelousies & romances
left back in durango shipping containers
with rapturous ecstasy we knew in our
hurting hearts the compost of
secret legacy lovers and runners
who long distantly woke up like mondo mike
fucking in pools of goats blood at tampa bay
or tagging hater in the first circle k
when you landed in vegas
neon scintilla crap tables abound
first wash was out there at baker
with the green magnet magnesium magnetism
lettered and walked in its way
foretold in sunspot illustration
all vectored solemnly&stiffly taken at face value
unable to domino sphincter cheers californian
her sandmarkers and miles of desert as feverish vision
bequeath riggamarole jerijuana stamp postages
lettering and lockinglitter bitter spitter offers
blotters left in antiquity blessedbe
then gets up to change the cantar
only to forget our placement in
the dreamery reading
or doubt what the hell river it was
that us or quetzalcoatl come here
to speak into existence
in the very first place
cigar breaks & walks around the savanna
layline boundaryside whisping up
memorium of the very first traversals
or the new yorkers dark night
we came here to amnesiate
(25)
it was spring & willy nilly was working with the yacuruna again
it was holy meat week & they required a sacrifice
either swine or foul
one in the same willy thought to himself
cutting off the end of a cigarette & handing it to the priest of the clan
this tradition has long run in the family for generation after generation
he muttered twistedly half smiling
& caressing his tiny precious portion of tobacco
all of the family’s priests & priestesses chanting
the ancient hymn
whoo amei damei yaa
taking turning flipping the dial on the radio
it was the only song that was broadcast for a thousand miles
& they played it on repeat until the morning light
every morning for forty days and forty nights
some of us tone deaf after some nights
not minding whatsoever and eventually
finding the ability to fall into trance
during the deep night psalms
flashbacks to burgers and fries
back there down in the city
the timestreams fanciful dishes
hashish from lebanon abound
martian radio stations dishing out info on
omlette russian-routlettes
taking it all in
willy at once in a buzzing storm
of confusion and confections of the city
wearing away at the teeth
gum-like bedbugs crawling at the skin of
various informants residences
with drugs hidden in baby formula
as the perfect disguise
and a cover up for the vicious gnawing craving for
possesions in pulsating-powders & arms
the screaming wheel of dervish
buzzing religious conviction both
within & exterior to the hypnagogic trances
of dreamlike phanthasma-phenomena
of its constant consumers
building silently
wave after wave of amnesiate understanding
plunders the mind crawling the coils &
a way out of existential invalid litter departments
put on hooks for hoots
& heavy ingestions put towards rethinking
cadavers in caravans
steeping mint tea excursions into the savanna
darkly scanning the midnight horizonal
hallucinatory ambidextrousness
looking into the aether for elephants who
possessed societies secret but learned to live outside
of it they were our masters and to them we would wildly
approach in prayer
veiled by secret integers & invisibility serums
slowly sipping in the cabana, awoken by wind
& the drifting siren of ancient chime and whirling dervish
immensities lost in the bubbling muck of disoriented history
(6)
the lady with the fan
she cools us
lady in the catacombs
zombie siren of kennedys spark
destruction is another form of creation
the immitigate uttered from
the gutteral depths of 57th st
shem dynasties aside
marijuanos on the hillside
god forbid its saints week
we settled up and gathered up
our rationed portions & put them
on the table out front
for everyone to see
five dollars a hit
okay so over a beer
we went there
not to say i feel exactly better
but real indeed alive
indeed refreshed to a degree
boo who
a damaged weakling defends itself
3 weeks after the fact
big whoop big whopper
the brother rivalry
an unmatched dynamic
(16)
asphyxiated on dandelion wine
oh mary oh jesus where do i even begin?
sun setting on an empire is that it?
speaking of instincts
the devils weak
beautiful express faces pass
in all the taxis of the world
back home cascadas, sleeping lamp giants
waiting in the precipice
its just a little ways she assured the others
whilst taking a giant ripper off the
pcp packaged spliff
how strange the scintilla
she barked before cutting
all her ties, quickly skipping town
& heading for the hills
back toward kensington ways
the midst, sand salamanders joking
in the juxtaposition of the roses
faced down and looking lightly through
the window cupboard shade covered veiling
the scintilla awaiting winter kingbury
whos bringing acid whos bringing crumpets
to a maddened tea party in the bushes
sparsely spacing out illiterate tantrums
from dross matter heiroglyphic opinions of our starbound selves
cardinal signal around & bounded to temporal fixies
immensities
heriphanies
lipid
a from riches to rags backstory
the boston ragga
dodging bullets left and right at infinitum
clever fox of the backbury
show your scales
reveal reveal reveal i say
set in holland 1945
ringing any bells yet?
what about saved by the bell? or frasier
or fran to tell us danger dances
apart from the static
there was the overplayed music
downgraded the bandwidth
of what just it was we couldnt say yet
we just had take a hint
then wait the usual 40 minutes for entrance
(19)
*
lets restart
friendly aesthetic near
the hillside depot
as they approach the trainyard hyponogogic
it is more then a hallucination
antiquity
oh my- broken good
who’s expertise?
todo todo bien
todo bien
it was the best we c u in asia
when i come you need
yes it could be okay
Lee RIbbenii
what- great environment
great
la grazia delle parole
yes indeed
yes indeed-
there we go
lets head south baby
(20)
they were cranking out pure kilos of grade A
japanese chach at per kilo pennies on the dollar
there was only one person mr.pink & me knew who
knew what to do with those kinda numbers
unfortunately he was taken out earlier
that december during an incident with the
cartels in a case of mistaken identity
up in reno
so we were then forced to move west
where folk we once considered kingpins
back home that is in vermont
had somehow blended had acquiesced here
like camouflage breaded butter X
fantasy island saloon,
platoons of vigor & servitude
all counted specially & coiled smooth
moves bequeath basket-cased
as it was nior’d
honored and learned nightly by sams steaks
taken up for some and down
for tuesday shmoosday others
rutgers, gushers, marx brothers
& exploding symbols heald
& inevolving within timberside seances
pixie as they were midnight
rose-garden fauna egyptian’d
(13)
Bagwhan shree rajneesh, one of nuns begins to blurt out-
nearly stuttering and other troublesome utterances
A seizure of tounges,
“The Bagwaan she went on,
bagwhaan shree! rajneesh, rajneeshy”
we let her go like this for around 40 minutes
before finally, at our wits end with zero alternatives left
we were forced to tied her up & at
4:30 AM eastern state time Sister Anne
of the Lutheran Church of Nazarene
was given a 500 MG shot of thorazine
directly into her jugular,
unconscious in seconds &
by the time she around rose shortly after
her condition returned to safely back to base-line
( we agreed to keep an eye on her during the
the table session’s with special attention
directed toward not allowing her to drink anymore
then a single cup of daime at a time )
it’s 10 AM on a friday,
new orleans shoppe window open,
a perfumery with side deals,
magic deals,
literal charms for sale as well as jasmine-
smoking in a bed, in a shed,
in a chevy chase canary paced place
some of us are melting in our own juices
who-hooo do you trust? blaring incessantly on the transistor
sitar, overpowering by the psilocybin-
Callet trailed, endless masks made by the scoupel-
written in dragons blood over the doorway
unwritten invisible coffee dates with
phantoms of english antiquity
Australian kangaroo salesmen,
ounces of bolivian marching powder sealed in a locked vessel
headed from panama across the atlantic on a three day journey
2 hostages, one illuminated port
in the dusty backbeat sagas of westports most infamous
& terrible dragstrip
officials crooked for hire, sidewalks in the customs office
we turned our heads to the Gods
a window opened from a black and yellow lit
parlor of the redlight indistinguishment sectors,
just a mile away from our stated destination
at the transatlantic sea-station
positioned in an outpost just north of the border,
we needed to make it past this kurdish checkpoint
before the dawn does-
(4)
these little town blues
these vagabond shoes
calling clown-like ambulances
leaving 17th & 57th
headed towards geronimo blvd
with broken arrow phone calls
glasses of water rusty spoons & Busch
delivery with deliverance
we had to pick up scooter from the lot first
before we caught the itching fix in the gyre
catcher in the ryer
like forever pushing totemic inches
past the blood-brain barrier
down there on 57th where the riversrun
with sludge veins full of muck
mindless scrolling machines allegedly
seen dishing out euphoria by the dozen-fold
so say our critics whos sweet sickness
is an itchy glaze of bologna for 50 cents a pop
all the way down to the houston-river
would we ever make it past
the black growling threshold guardians
of the ciudad or else find ourselves
lying before dumpsters worshipping
the dieties of alleyway
& sky fixture fractions
alike us on our run to score
the perfected effervescent illumination sagas
just west of hollywood
and the geronimo blvd highway makers
who marked a thousand lanes
to the left hand sight
a thousand to the right out of sight
a wad of hash for your time perfectedly churned
& paired with yelping cupful portions of
californian divinatory serums
seances bad sneakers and singers
albeit sneaking suspicions of hefty cuts
of the baby laxatives
within and around the chartreuse variants
of amyl & trimethylated leisure like
substantial inheritances
nuances shiver me timber tumblefuls
whopping past portions mailed from arkansas
to our doorsteps just in time before
the jiminy cricket-like creatures spring fourth
singing a dop-op
whos gonna carry me home?
aint got sense enough to leave that burbon alone
(11)
mixing medley in the middle with moon-light
shakey ground says the batter bear better then burroughs
into the psalmful leavings of arclights unknown
past the platoon stickers,
beyond the trash fences of romantic antiquity
the steam-files bull on and breed
betting 50 on a saulsbury steak
or some sort of chicken cutlet in the runner
left on revenge repeat
we sung ourselves a little song
& then backed away
packing everything neatly in the caravan mirage
in the shade or else taken back by
the ever present hallucinogenic hum
be it frog-juice or pellets
of jacksons best designer brand speed
easy now said the one with the ring
& two left facing shoes
now we dont want to get all carried away okay
but if we just splice out some sort of
small-time portion of the crumbcake
or perhaps make a brew with teatime feathers
oh the trusty teatime feathers
gets the whole gang of em up and atom
when the afternoon sun looms near the horizon
screw it day time or night
whenever she visits its a grand occasion
upwards towards the transmigrational highway
one of them belched
passing the tonic towards his left
picking something up in the periphery
something harbored like jasmine rice
something entangled like
rustys old tape recorder
-we would take it out to los angeles
& sitting by the river all the time
waiting for betty to get off work
then we could come home & show her
with rockabye sweet baby james on
& haight ashbury hashish jelly
of course she assumed
as she always does when we are in those states
trancelike as they were amoeboid
that this was a
perhaps the tangier go away
that would turn itself invisible like the rocks
the moment we arrived into town
shoreside was always the same with
these gingerbread mayhem invested thunderbirders
running around like headless cockatoos
except only this time
they decided to wear dress shoes
back at base they were preparing
for the mumification of who they could
not name in the telegram
none the less we decided to go with our mission
further into the frontier
of white speckled satiations
of unruly divide & conquering
all carefully making sure to
load our canteens to the brim with rum
before catching the ferry over
(12)
turning the gyre ever softer towards
the ridge of aeonic millennia
we gasped at blooming artificiality paradises
instantly upon time-stream arrival indextures
tens of thousands of miles streaming stratospheric
in the butte of a moments quickening
storming us by quicksilver secondaries
the hands of history,
fighting for informational eternity
brask, right up to the gullet in gears
fashioning the work-place
landmarked by leisure
still probing the market for the machina
still glittering down the line totemic
concession stands for the archbishop
at the island for eels
we couldnt believe
that they burnted themselves out so quickly
we all gathering our belongings
proceeded to high tail it
all the way down the line
either oklahomian or mexicana
hows the wife & kids
we meet everyday at the strange cafe
we meet at the strange cafe-time burial
burial time typewriter
typewritten in special membrane
the brain remembers its own name cleary
its wits vastly dialectic & innumerable
keeps encapsulated satiated
heaped on there- gnawingly
senile, almost tumeric distanced
bequeathed beneath the rosebury
sampling simple traces
environs & aardvarks alike
squeaky and tender as the bishop promised
going gargantuately into the gauntlet of life
lamenting over harms done
presuffixed and over time eventually delineated
to the slime like it was carnal
lime-light of west hollywood
with its fits and fashions phoenixed
egyptian magicd like the
chest cupboard kept in the hills
working on tantrums
tidal waves of them raving hysterical
maddened as dawn, streaky pink-eye horizonal
at colt-45 walkers in tango with disco-coppers
hot on the beat and hopped up on a thursday
for almost no real reason at all
as cept to scope, callin themselves the law
vigilante justice my ass
(8)
glamour professionals
by the rivers of babylon, its venice beach baby
writing scripts on napkins in indian ink,
kitchen sink showers (first memories of bathtime)
astoria, a hiccup in the rutter-
via confession by cinema side trails
sipping mango juice under polaris,
are we mister potter?
the imp confessional of antiquity
snicker from the right corner
flying anvils, galaxies of amnyls,
nitrates, glycerides
marketing techniques via tangier
& west congo conch fritter
picking up after dark
theres a fire inside the wind of the mind,
come walk with me alone, it says
now the whole gang of hyperdimensional
cast members gather tightly, close quarters
& hearing upon what has happend
to the old mans leg, he vowed
never to ride a caballo again in this lifetime
or atleast what he spoke before sweet drink
made its way around the table at
the great hall of duke
the cinco minuto exspresso
talking political jargon
supposedly a mexican composition
done from los angeles telepathically
who could say? we had noone on hand
to verify personally, so we took
their word for it and proceeded
to donate the requested $6000 USD
needed for the bond
after growing up
the only way they knew peace
was to return to the chaos
of upbringing circumstance
via bus-station or jukebox circlings
where’s the kid with the chemicals
an entourage of questionable characters
could they be in cahoots with the coca-chewers?
nightingdale
a cross examination
octopi-like tendencies, gallow-like
2,3,4,trimethyloxyphenethylamine
what do ya mean ya dont like me cookin?
just another passing fix, eh?
or does G-d owe you the world?
shady grove, my little love
shady grove I know
(9)
I couldnt vouch for leftie
i told him, look man
if you want to find savage henry
then your going to have
to get out of vegas immediately
past pahrump theres an old dirt-road
with a blown out station wagon
rusted onto the side of the desert trench
about a half mile from the road
its where all the vegans go
and the freakers that couldnt
make it slab-city
you have to go it alone
or they will never let ya in
he stood and thought
to himself for a moment
contemplating the ifs
he’d been up for 3 days
on the way down from tijuana
clasping tight to the leather satchel
cutting his hair first
then secondly make up as a disguise
a paved road pointing west
no money down
it was paid entirely in credit
they packed up the hitch
then stopped at smokeys
we found a stray out by the highway
took her with us
we wanted to name her sally at first
but after some tequila we agreed on darcy
blues players on the am radio
right as we crossed
the county into mississippi
(18)
paying the pod piper
is that it?
is that all you think were doing here immanuel?
siphoning bionical hyponotics
psychotic lovers of sorts
a tangoist
we recoiled & waited out our hunch
disaster letters scattered the garage
stupendous timing, the left one
her stills sitting at home
gathering rootbark
tidying up dust off her pictures
from the guadalajara borrachera saga
now succumb to the twiddling
of thumbs & paperveiw
not so bad after all
taking a drag from the spliff
welcome to the after after hours club
cuddle up
make yourself a drink
(14)
wise men gathering drinking manischewitz
in the circled fountain
at the center of cemetery
down on Lutz & Vanderbelt,
hither here, their betting on something clear
must be some sort of lunar cycle round concerning
the daughter of the rabbi- & whats this?
im getting something, their telling me something
about the queen of scotts in new york
for a wedding,
they were engaged at the pyramids & apparently
the spirits followed them all the way
from those catacombs hibiscus scented lettering
on all postage sent during the brief but intense
time they shared together in giza
we hence fourth proceeded to down and out drown
ourselves in a sort of giant pool of margaritas
ah yes, full gang in company alliance
we couldnt pool it all in without a bbq basket
of easter eggs & pints of aether
some for ourselves and of course
a dashing ration for th fellas back east
(7)
heres a sandian fully
who translates themselves
into gibberish hymns
heres a telecaster with an iron heart
falling again for the damsel in distress
experimenting with cardiac typhic fever
rippling with exponential dopamine hits
oxytocin out the whaa-zoo
a thickening sludge like quality
spills across the temporal landscape
& after some years no effect
at the finger tips & extremities
come the decade and a half mark
sadly no effect at all
packing the bags toward sicilia
where the tormented sagas had begun
back there at bar stool love affair
where whiskey with beelzebub
dressed us tango and took us for
love-fools around the ringer margarita
tri-ad of lux intermediaries
egyptianism believers in crux
& crocadirro headed entities alike
like light fixtures opalescent
by the horizon lines at dusk
woozy and tactile like in their demeanor
never skipping a beat
& darting up the ley lines to latitudes
just south of a texas free for all
(17)
papelito del computadora
honey made me
statues incubating amoebi
sand dollars sand dollars sand dollars
last call no deals
squealing salemen
mile runners hobos
& the elderly
all gathered hastily
in red valley california
we pulled into town deep night
the evening before
woke up by the side of the highway
in an inlet near the woods
some poor fella living in a campsite
not far off the road
comes asking to barter
food if i had it
because they had all the marijuana
they could ever smoke
but were short on munchies
i checked the reserve & did a quick inventory
whilst ransacking the rig
in search for lost totem from africa
which recovered shortly after
however met its fate on
an evening that july in the depths of summer
first pass through taos new mexico
a fare place to part ways i suppose
letting go of sentimentality
ridden objects redirects the focus
on an inner remembering
an inner knowing of powers
easy to say when your free
but upon stumbling one wakes up
to find a wise mans blessing
brought by horseback beneath
a shooting star yet again
granted only of course
on the assumption on the fact
that one makes his way back
casket-cases filled with budweiser
wasted minded billionaires recoil backwards
staggering into the work bench
but not on impulse or to search for
a desire lost in ethers of childhood
back there a thousand lifetimes ago
in the shmegma where we lost our head
my head ended up on datura beside the highway
benzedrine lake and all the hiccup ghosts
we tamed nightly by the cross-reaches
of our hometown & the beach that was
accessible fifteen minutes
small runs down to the corner store
to purchase truckers speed
that same poison of the desert here too
then there too
gigantic myths that we use like
a snake who self germinates
to write the world in its way
to tell our myths
(22)
0 notes
Text
How considerate
Pairing: Jet-Star x [transmasc] Reader x Kobra Kid
Word count: ~ 3 600
Genre: Smut
Summary: Kobra didn't like knowing Jet was having his way with (y/n) without telling him.
Kind of content: Teasing / Dirty talk / Harsh / Degrading / Multiple org*sms / Degrading / Douple p*netration / Manhandling
Requested on Wattpad
[instead of ray, frank and gee, if you could do kobra kid and jet star. (...)]
*not proofread
A shaky sigh escapes my nose as Jet grazes his lips over my neck, hands settled on my hips, and what would just look like he is giving me some love while he watches me work on fixing my radio, but... Fuck, I hum a little when he pushes his hips against mine, hence I need to just pause for a moment so I won’t ruin the radio any further. My knuckles even become tight around the screwdriver’s handle.
“Jet, stop,” I breathe. Even if it’s pretty much useless, I do try to give Jet’s hand a squeeze, only resulting in his grip tightening around my hips. “‘M busy, let me finish this...”
“You have all the time to finish this.” He presses kisses to my neck, each kiss lingering for longer against the skin, turning into soft sucking. “You can use another radio or something. Look at you, do you really think you can go back to work now? It’s funny because I barely did anything to you and I bet you’ve even forgotten what you were doing.”
“That’s a lie!” I slap his hand, lighter than I’d like to, practically just tapping it.
A deep chuckle comes from Jet and sends a shiver running down my spine, even more with how he mouths at the skin lightly. “And what were you doing, then?”
“I was...” The words just escape my grasp, much like the way the information simply vanishes from my mind and I stare at the screwdriver and the open radio without knowing a lot. “I was messing with the, um, transistors,” I swallow, grasping onto the easiest—but vaguest—information my brain can summon.
“Sure,” Jet hums sarcastically—I can’t help but to internally die a little with it. “Well, but you can continue it later, can’t you, baby? The radio isn’t going anywhere while you come with me, right?” The thought of what he can do does cross my mind, and even if he is right in every sense, something inside me still refuses to give in so easily. Maybe it’s just to see how far he’ll go, to see what he’s up to doing to get what he wants. “Are you really going to turn it down like this?”
“Jet,” I groan softly at how his hips push into mine again at the same time his hand hovers over my crotch, with something poking against my ass this time, and just notice he removed the screwdriver from my hand when he is placing it on the table already, glancing around to check if no one is around, but only the two of us are in the former convenience store area with no sign of the presence of anyone else. “I... Fine.”
“Good boy.” The way Jet’s lips linger over my neck makes me squirm a little in his touch, but it thankfully doesn’t take long until he is taking me along with him to my bedroom.
Jet is kissing me right after he closes the door behind me, pressing his lips to mine firmly, though still carrying that sweetness and care of always that somehow has me melting into him every time, making it easier or harder for him to get me whenever he wants. It’s easier this time, with how we start to stumble towards his bed after kicking off our shoes, only stopping when I’m gently pushed to sit down on the mattress.
My lungs shudder with a soft sigh whilst I quietly watch Jet get rid of his jacket then proceed to do the same with his shirt. The sight itself helplessly snatches a quiet hum from me and I would’ve touched the skin, at least holding onto his waist, if he wasn’t quickly moving to unbuckle his belt, so I help him with it instead, quickly undoing his pants, too, so I can mouth at his cock through the dark blue underwear. He tenses up, hands in the air until a throaty moan escapes his lips and one of his palms rests on my shoulder instead while he uses his free hand to play with my hair.
“Eager...” He exhales softly, his fingers gently running up and down the back of my head. “See, there was no use in being so stubborn.”
“You like the struggle, don’t lie,” I mumble before my lips press down to the tip of his cock just to have the pleasure of hearing him moan suddenly and stutter, but it doesn’t take long until he clicks his tongue.
“Doesn’t mean you need to be bad and bratty now.” Jet rests a hand on the back of my head to pull me towards him at the same time his hips push forward. “You were doing so well so far.” He shakes his head, pressing his fingers to the back of my neck in a nice manner before he pulls away. “C’mon. Clothes off.”
Jet only shows me a small smile at how I pout at him, but eventually as told.
“Clothes off means all of them.” He nods towards my underwear, making me blush as I remove it as well, fighting this feeling that buzzes under my skin, telling me to just disagree with everything he says instead just to see what he is going to do. Even if the outcome is predictable—and not that good—something in me always thinks he will somehow have a different reaction. “Now, that’s it. Sit against the headboard, hm? Touch yourself for me. Show me how you do it when you’re alone.”
I furrow my eyebrows, adjusting the pillows behind me so I’m actually in a half sitting up position. “Who said I do anything when I’m alone?”
“So you don’t?”
“No,” I scoff, rolling my eyes.
Jet narrows his eyes at me for a moment before he hums. “Well, do it anyway, it doesn’t matter.” A grin tugs on his lips, dripping that same smugness that always makes me want to wipe that grin off his face, but I’m not able to do a lot, after all. “Go on, I’m waiting.”
My eyes drift down to the mattress as I try to recompose myself at least a little bit, just enough to face his reaction with at least a little of decency. He’s about to say something else when I pull my legs apart, resting my feet flat over the bed as I lower my hand between my legs, sighing shakily while I graze my entrance, enough to dip my fingers into the wetness to bring the wetness over to my clit, immediately thrusting my hips into my fingers.
“Fuck,” I mumble softly as I use my other hand to hold my folds apart—a quiet, deep sound comes from Jet and he noticeably tenses up before quickly removing his clothes.
The mattress shifts a little with how Jet crawls towards me, coming to a stop only when he is kneeling between my legs, hips only inches away from mine, and his hands rest heavily over my waist. Something about the contact has me adding more pressure to my touches, unable to suppress a moan with it, which is unfortunately embarrassing and hotten at the same time due to how Jet observes me so intently and from so close.
“You look all pretty like this, don’t you? But so fucking dirty, even had the audacity to pretend you never touch yourself when you’re alone, but that’s not what I’ve seen already.” He groans softly, stub scratching my chest lightly with how he presses a kiss to it, though easily snatching a moan from me with his words—I trace my entrance lightly, sighing as I give more attention to my clit, moving my fingers faster at his words. “What?” He chuckles. “Sometimes I walk past your room when going to the diner, at night, and it’s so easy to hear your poor little moans with how quiet it is.”
The thought of Jet standing right outside the door when I get needy at night during the nights I don’t sleep at his or Kobra’s room easily has this feeling building in my lower stomach pathetically quickly.
“J-Jet, ‘m close,” I breathe, hoping it would actually be his hand touching me now. He is so close. He is here. Why can’t he just touch me instead? A soft groan escapes my lips with how I slide a couple of fingers past my entrance, muffling a moan by biting down on my lower lip as my other hand continues working against my clit.
“Keep going.” Jet presses his lips to the base of my neck, nipping and sucking at the thin and sensitive skin. “You know I’m going to ruin you later anyways, doesn’t matter whether you come now or later.” The disdain laces his voice as he hums softly, just continuing to nibble down to my collarbones, most likely leaving behind marks on the skin that easily have me moaning and squirming under him while trying to push my fingers in further. “Go on,” he breathes, “show me how much you need me right now, hm? I bet you wish I would be fucking you already, folding you over yourself as you’re barely able to think.”
“Mmph, fuck, no,” I breathe with the smallest bit of strength I still have, cut out by a moan once Jet’s teeth sink harder into the skin, compelling me to curl up my fingers inside me.
“Can’t believe you’re still stubborn like that,” he scoffs, his thumb pressing down to a spot under my jaw and helplessly making me drop my head back—he nibbles down lightly under my jaw, then lets his tongue run soothingly over the bruised skin. “But it’s okay. You won’t even be able to speak anything soon. Look at you now, barely able to say anything and you’re the one touching yourself.”
It’s hard to think about anything else rather than Ray’s touches while his words swim in my mind, all of it quickly making me gasp and jerk my hips into nothing as my release hits me, the tingly sensation running my my thighs as I curl into Jet with a moan, my thighs digging into his sides with my attempt of pulling them together.
Jet sits back between his legs as he pulls my hands away from me, humming as he drags his tongue along my fingers, making my cheeks burn at the sight—even if I can already feel my pulse on the back of my head. His lips press to mine messily, but I do manage to return the kiss, sighing softly against his lips and wrapping my arms around his neck. He brings my legs up, hooking his hands under my knees, and the feeling of his dick pressing my clit makes me gasp, aching my back a little.
“Hey, you left your things...” The voice trails off at the same time a shiver runs down my spine, but it’s not that bad seeing Kobra standing there. A blank expression adorns his face, but there’s a hint of a lack of surprise while he slowly closes the door behind himself. “Very considerate how I wasn’t informed about anything.” He glares at Jet while kicking his shoes off then shrugging off his jacket.
“I didn’t know you needed to be warned about everything.” Jet rolls his eyes, rolling his hips against mine, easily making me whine, sinking my nails into his shoulders.
“Fuck you and get off there.” He clicks his tongue as he pulls his shirt over his head, soon working on undoing his pants to lower them along with his underwear. A sharp sigh escapes his nose with how Jet raises an eyebrow at him. “C’mon, you had your time and you didn’t even tell me a thing, I deserve it.” He grabs his bandana from his pants before he tosses them to the ground, and Jet has no choice rather than to move away at the moment he crawls over to me.
Kobra’s eyes never meet mine while he moves to grab both of my hands, tying them together by my wrist, and his expression doesn’t change even with how I groan softly in protest to the restraints. Can’t he react even a little bit? The way the only kind of attention he demonstrates is towards Jet while trying to push him away further has something sinking in my stomach at the same time I find myself craving some kind of touch again like I never even came in first place, but it’s hard to demonstrate it given how I can barely do anything while Kobra makes me turn around as if I was dead weight, pulling my hips up as he grinds his hips against mine—only his breathing falls out of pace as he gradually grows hard, a complete opposite to the mess I am already.
“All wet already,” Kobra moans out softly, “didn’t Jet take care of you, pretty boy? Bastard.”
Even if I can only see the headboard and my tied hands ahead of me, I am able to imagine the bitter glare they exchange between each other, a image that quickly vanishes from my mind at the moment I feel Kobra pressing to my entrance, enough to make me gasp sharply and exhale with a moan as he pushes in, not too slowly, but not fast either.
“Fuck,” I moan softly, feeling Kobra slowly start a heavy rhyth, making me moan almost every time his thighs meet the back of mine, sending a slapping sound cutting through the room along with our moans and Jet’s unpaced breathing.
Jet can easily manhandle me, as if I was nothing, but he isn’t harsh like Kobra can be, with his nails digging into my hips to hold me in place as he pushes his hips against mine roughly, sending intense pleasure running up my spine, but never lasting too much, just enough so my release won’t build in so easily.
My thighs quiver a little as Kobra manages to go in deep each time, and even if it’s enough to make me go weak, my clit throbs at the lack of enough friction, which only gets worse after I acknowledge it. Kobra’s hold is too tight to allow me to bring my thighs together, which has me tugging against the bandana, only earning me a burning feeling around my wrists and probably future marks that may or may not attract unwanted attention—still, the thought of seeing the marks the two leave behind and remembering how I got them is also so hot.
“Kobra,” I gasp softly, doing my best to push myself back against him even with messy movements due to how my chest is pressed to the mattress.
“What, baby?” A soft moan escapes his lips while he rubs circles into my skin, his hips snapping harshly against mine, hence I’m breathless for a moment, unable to breathe in air properly even to moan.
“Touch me, please...?” I arch my back with a gasp, my moans muffled by how my face presses to the mattress.
“Oh, but you’re doing so well,” he mumbles with a fake sadness that’s dragged out by a groan. “C’mon, I know you can hold on for a little longer, can’t you? You’ve gone through so much worse for us, I’m sure you could even cum untouched if we wanted you to. Be good.” Despite the sweet words, a dry tone lingers in his voice, making me curl up and whine knowing he won’t do anything further.
The lack of touch, however, easily fades away, harshly pushed out of my mind with how Kobra’s hand on my upper back forcer me to arch against him a little more, apparently the perfect position for him to finally stop holding himself back, compelling me to moan and squirm under him. My nails sink into my palms, stinging, but I find myself unable to stop doing it while Kobra continues with such a harsh rhythm. The rustling of the sheets against my cheek almost burns with the way my body rocks according to his thrusts, something that’s barely important compared to how good he feels inside me... just not to last that long.
A gasp escapes my lips with how Kobra suddenly pulls away with no warning, leaving me clenching around the nothing, agonizing with the empty feeling, and almost losing my balance at the lack of any grip around my hips.
Soft mumbling escapes my lips—complaints and curses—while I try to focus less on the intense hot feeling that runs up my spine, pulsing on the back of my neck and slowly fades into need.
Only falling to my side reminds me of where I am and what I’m doing, reducing the pitiful state I’m in due the hand on my hip, before I’m pulled up and settled down again, this time against Jet, straddling his lap and able to throw my arms around his head, not exactly around his neck due to how he half–lies down against the pillows.
A soft sigh escapes my lips as I nuzzle Jet, pressing a few kisses to his neck. “Please touch me, pretty please,” I groan, almost sure he won’t be able to understand what I say since the words sound messy even to me, high-pitched and breathless. “‘Need to cum. Please, Jet.” I rock my hips against his with a moan, feeling him tense up under me at the same time his hands tighten around my thighs.
“Well, I hope you know I’m keeping my promise from earlier,” he breathes and moans again at how I’m once more moving my hips against his.
Despite the whole thing, Jet does let me grind against him a few times, having both of us moaning quietly until he finally decides to bring me a little up, just enough to lower me on his cock, making me gasp and squirm with how he starts moving right away—on an opposite to Kobra, he manages to reach all the right spots at the same time whenever he thrusts in, making me cry softly against his shoulder, barely able to move myself if it weren’t for his hands helping me and guiding my motions.
“Hell, look at the mess we turned you in already,” Jet mumbles against my shoulder with a deep moan that goes straight to my lower stomach. “Doesn’t even look like you were all reluctant like that at first, hun. You were really made for us.”
“Fuck, yeah...” I let out a breathy moan, rolling my hips, and immediately let out a louder moan at how good it feels, easily having Jet tensing up under me as well, but feeling something behind me does make me freeze. A choked gasp escapes my lips at feeling the already wet fingers trace my hole at the same moment a hand is placed on my waist, and it has me stopping even if it’s Kobra’s light touch.
“Shhh, just relax,” Kobra says soothingly, sounding rather distant, which’s quickly explained by how I feel a finger pushing past the ring of muscles.
Discomfort is the first thing I’m met with, making me want to squirm, only to notice how impossible it actually is due to how they hold me in place, somehow making me wish even more that the bandana weren’t tied around my wrists. Even if the discomfort doesn’t fade away so easily, Kobra’s gentle motions do build in a consistent pleasure that continues there and only becomes stronger after he adds a second finger, and I’m actually eager to move my hips by the third.
“Easy,” Jet chuckles as he adjusts his grip around my thighs, but I only groan in frustration—even working a word past my lips feels like too much of a struggle right now.
Kobra’s fingers leave behind almost the same terrible empty sensation from earlier, though it doesn’t last that long this time, with his cock pressing to my hole this time instead.
“Fuck,” I whine, arching my back, and wish I could grip onto Jet instead of being held by these stupid restraints, even if each time I remember about them, something stirs in my lower stomach. “Mmph...” A hand is pressed to my lower back as Kobra slowly pushes in, more careful this time and actually giving me time to adjust before he can start moving—fucking moving.
The air feels thicker, harder to get in my lungs no matter how much I gasp for it, making me let out choked moans and barely able to squirm this time now with both of them fucking me. It’s too much, but in a good way, feeling both of them moving, and it’s so good, makes me feel so full. Jet and Kobra probably say something, but their voices are but incoherent sounds merging with the background, drowned out by all the pleasure.
I gasp loudly—whatever they do, it makes me arch my back, bringing my hands close and helplessly pulling Jet’s head to my neck without much effort. Jet mouths at the skin, tugging on it with his teeth and pressing soothing kisses over it, his grip only tightening around me while Kobra does the same, and at the same time it feels like their touch is fucking hot, burning into my skin, I don’t want them to let go.
“Fuck,” I moan—or at least try to—as I feel my release approaching dangerous quickly, soon having the pleasure running up my thighs, then my spine just to go down again at once, leaving behind the throbbing between my legs as I curl my toes around nothing, a little worried about the pain that tugs on my thigh a little too much. Even if my mind doesn’t go blank, continuing to follow what goes on around me, the exhaustion is quick to hit me a few seconds later, only allowing me to feel Kobra and then Jet finally coming.
Kobra says something, probably to Jet as I can feel him nodding, then the pressure around my wrists is gone, replaced by soft kisses against the bruised skin.
____________________
tagging list: @lubbockshusband
#x reader#jet star#jet star x reader#kobra kid x reader#ray toro x reader#mikey way x reader#fan fic#fan fiction#mcr#mcr x reader#killjoys x reader#imagine#oneshot#x transmasc reader#anystalker707.fic
45 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sunday Morning Programme. 12
Sunday cockcrow nascent
aural essays reveal
laissez-faire raptures.
Enigmatic silken piece compost ushered in by
trenchant trademark tremulous shoo in.
Doe-eyed instrumentalist’s strident brass ensemble, wakey wakey for the pier gazing loiterer whose blasé sashay amble’s out of kilter.
Maverick antennae on a radio safari, hawking hourglass heritage lodestone.
Closet Peter Pan’s astride transistor, literati goggle eyed and glued.
Silhouettes of wistful mint leaf tract navigating hoarse throat shellback allegory. Earnest weekend welcome mat to madcap jester, laureate, bohemian.
Religiously the listener’s transported from a humble tepee sanctum
to alluring levee inundation area, far flung folly edifice, nomad siren hymn sheet to mount Half Dome.
Long wave bounder in my dreams I limb skip oe’r fiction world simulcast entanglement,
snoop beneath rogallo-wing parachute in a Middle East plot,
“twin peaks” would be awestruck by this labyrinthine concourse.
One can flit invisibly round medieval black market cobblestone arcades,
ghost novelist ethereal penchant for a pinch and pilfer retro-fit infringement.
Melting pot cinnamon dispenser, whiff stick fix antidote to kettledrum ennui
the blight of urban jungle setting and rural folklore.
Otherworld contortion with a shard of drama for magic carpet flight of fancy broadcast
Lineage derived from ancient epochs now assumed but for an inkling, icons I become with card shark sly booths legerdemain.
Maybe I’m that fictile clueless hiker, destitute, indigent,
meanderer in nation state colossus whose fiendish tongue’s a wry sudoku baffle
or that moth-infested pillar wreck the thirty year rule.
With a little latitude I’d shadow plot my reverie landing on some poet’s scented flower or just as likely eavesdrop on the mocha sipping Monet, coffee cup aloft,
cast among the butterflies,
harvesting a feast on barren canvass.
Going back in time to famous childhoods
Reverting to an earlier Renaissance I’m some regal mother’s celebrated offspring,
a fragile baby cradled by maternal instincts..
Imagine for a moment me the swimmer,
wallower in oceans Maya blue,
driven by the prospect
of Olympic medal glory,
fuelled by live wire rushes,
or the influential virtuoso sculpting drafts so lyrical they lift the Sony user into orbit.
But alas this Xanadu diversion has a brusque untimely rendezvous with kingpin schedule,
as that trumpet blast alarm morphs and mutes into some vapour strewn amorphous mead.
Of late I harbour thoughts of being an olive branch across the ether that hypnotises
dull remit with lustrous anecdotal caper,
teleporting lives to fourth dimensions.
There’s always hope
Photograph n piece mantrabay copyright protected
Thanks for reading and viewing this story as always
27 notes
·
View notes
Note
Hey, hope you're good. Do you take requests? Could you please do one for robert where the reader is kinda bookish and writes poetry, just a hobby, nothing major and she doesn't really show it to anyone but robert being robert convinces her to show it to him? Thank you so much ❤❤
Hi Anon! I'm good, other than feeling bad about taking so long on this. Thanks for the idea. 😊 I took some liberties, but here you go. (if I run out of space with this answer I'll reblog with the rest.)
Robert left the others talking at the van. He lit his cigarette and began to stroll.
He marveled at how inviting the American college campuses seemed--more green, and less museum-like than the stately old schools in his country. He smiled when he saw a rogue, long-haired professor in discussion with a circle of students in the grass. The professor was not much older than his students, but he kept them in thrall with a passionate lecture, giving the proceedings the vibe of a guru turning a willing group of hippies into wide-awake citizens of the universe.
Robert brushed his hair out of his eyes when the wind tousled it. He was still getting used to his curls being longer. But he didn't mind, with all the American girls who wanted to touch his hair before they rambled on to caress other, more fun, destinations on his body. The thought made him smirk and strut, just a little.
He continued walking and watching the students in the grass, wondering how many he might see at the Led Zeppelin show on their campus that night. He liked the energy of the college crowds, hordes of young adults giving themselves freely to the band's dirty electric blues, fans of their first album, even more turned on by the grass and acid that tended to flow freely at centers of higher education.
He stopped in his tracks when he saw a beautiful student alone on the grass, scribbling furiously in a notebook. She sat with her legs crossed, and her canary yellow t-shirt complimented her deep brown skin. Her lower body was engulfed by her long, patterned batik skirt, and her hair was cut into a dainty afro, a style that Robert was slowly seeing more of in advertisements and magazines.
She was left-handed. It was a trait that had been discouraged in England and the United States, but somehow it hadn't been beaten out of her. He immediately thought of Jimi Hendrix, the most famous lefty he knew, and envisioned him playing his guitar upside down. He wondered if young woman's writing, whatever it was, approached the creative highs of the celebrated guitarist.
No matter the quality of her creativity, her passion was clearly intense. She was single-minded about putting her ideas to paper, unfazed by the other students who chatted happily, danced to music on a tinny transistor radio, or even played catch on the meticulously kept emerald quad. Robert watched her write in a quick burst of inspiration in one moment, then sit still as a statue, pen down, fingers on her full lips in deep concentration, in the next. Her devotion to coaxing out the words of her heart reminded him of how he had been more inspired to write songs now that his pre-Zeppelin record contract had been sorted out. Robert could get credit for his songs on the next album, and the thought excited him. Every time Robert sat down to write he held that vision of his name in the liner notes for something more than his voice and his harmonica playing.
He was drawn to this young woman in yellow, by her interest in writing, as well as his excitement to bond with another writer. It also didn’t hurt that she was cute. He decided to be quick about chatting her up, before G started bellowing for him from across campus.
He approached and spoke softly, lest he would startle her. “Excuse me? Love?”
She looked up quizzically. She blinked and her eyes grew wider, as though she was coming out of a trance. “Yes?”
“Uh…” Robert stammered as he took in the topaz color of her eyes, which were lighter than he’d assumed at a distance. They glowed in an otherworldly harmony with the darker gleam of her skin. “I couldn’t help but notice you were writing? I write, too. Songwriter,” he offered.
“How cool! It's poetry for me." She smiled warmly, then drank in his tall, lithe frame, dressed in a worn white T-shirt and white striped pants, his brown sandals, and his golden cloud of curls. “Are you in one of the local bands?” She eyed her abandoned notepad and pen, seemingly wanting to get back to her interrupted train of thought, even though she also seemed to relish a conversation with the cute stranger before her.
“No, I’m not quite local… I’m here from merry old England,” he said, affecting a regal accent, followed by his lighthearted guffaw. "I’m sorry to drag you from your writing… It’s just that you reminded me of myself."
“Oh…” She looked down again, this time in a bashful manner. “I kind of go off into my own world out here. I can concentrate much better than in my dorm room--my roommate plays her records loudly all the time.”
“Trust me, I understand… I’m Robert, by the way. And you are…?”
“Lillian.”
“Lillian… Beautiful name… Would it be all right if I sat down here with you and get a little sun?"
“Sure, Robert. It’s not like I own this lawn anyway,” she teased.
“Right.”
“I'd love to talk more, Robert, but do you mind if I write while you sunbathe?”
“Quite all right, darlin’. But one question for you… Could I take a look at your writing at some point? Only if it's not too much trouble? I was drawn to you by how excited you were to be writing, and I have a suspicion that you’re a lovely writer. Would you let a curious bloke test that theory out?” He smiled with nervousness of rejection, but soon his eyes conspired to woo her with a flash of merriment.
"Only if you sing me one of your songs."
Her smile was more flirty than defensive. Robert smiled at how the encounter was unfolding. "It's a deal," he said, gesturing for a handshake and grinning at the start of their connection.
40 notes
·
View notes
Link
The call comes sooner than Pam’s expecting, though honestly she’s not even sure what she expects now that a good chunk of her life is back in shambles, just when she thought she had finally gotten her shit together.
She knows it’s a mess of her own making, for once again allowing emotions to prevail over reason, but it still hurts, the pain somehow worse than it was a decade ago. Back then, when she and Ellen first walked away from each other, Pam knew that Ellen would always have a piece of her heart. But now? Now it feels like she left it entirely in Houston, her chest aching and hollow.
She answers the phone on her desk without thinking, on autopilot after a late drive back to Austin, a sleepless night tossing and turning on a motel bed, and not enough caffeine in the shitty coffee from the faculty lounge.
“Pam Horton,” she says in the most upbeat voice she can muster, cradling the receiver to her ear.
“Pam, it’s Larry.”
Breath catching in her throat, she’s torn between dread and hope. She briefly considers hanging up, but Larry’s next words make her hand still.
“She’s a mess. You’ve gotta at least talk to her.”
Tears sting Pam’s eyes and she squeezes them shut. “I can’t do that.” She knows she couldn’t bear to hear the heartbreak in Ellen’s voice, or worse, see it spread across her face.
“Why not?”
“You already know.”
Larry sighs on the other end. “Look, I know you think you’re doing what’s best for Ellen. But she deserves a say. Don’t take that away from her.”
She wants to snap at him to mind his own damn business, irritation spiking. She doesn’t need Larry twisting the knife when he’s had a decade of reaping the benefits of his marriage to Ellen. But she bites the inside of her cheek and manages to refrain. It’s not Larry’s fault that things are the way they are, at least not entirely. Pam keeps her voice steady when she says instead, “Thanks for calling, Larry.”
“Pam, wait--”
“Bye.”
Pam hangs up the phone quickly, already feeling worse than she already had. But she refuses to cry. It’s all for the best, she tells herself as she leans back into her desk chair. For all of them.
She got over Ellen Wilson once before.
She can do it again.
Eventually.
But today is definitely not that day.
Especially not when Pam’s hunkered down inside one of the college’s fallout shelters, breathing in stale air and wondering like the rest of her students whether the next breath could be their last. They’re surrounded by thick slabs of concrete and rebar. In one corner are two massive water tanks that the custodial staff have been trying to fill since the harsh blare of the air-raid siren blanketed the campus in panic and confusion. A few other instructors huddle around a transistor radio, anxiously awaiting any word that the emergency is over.
If Pam could, she’d laugh at the absurdity of it all. Because of course the world could end in nuclear armageddon the day after she left the love of her life.
She knows she should try to comfort her small class of budding writers, who fidget on the cold metal of their folding chairs. Should maybe tell them that everything’s gonna be all right. But Pam knows better than to lie, so she keeps silent, mind zigzagging from one thought to the next.
Pulse pounding in her temples, she wonders if her parents made it to their bunker and wishes that she had returned their last calls sooner. Hopes, with a pang between her ribs, that Elise has made it to safety. Tries not to imagine Flannery, their Maine Coon cat, cowering beneath what used to be their bed.
But most of all, she thinks of Ellen.
Always Ellen.
She allows herself, in a moment of weakness, to envision how the morning would have gone if she had just stayed. Pam would have held Ellen close, forever amused by the fact that the fearless astronaut--the girl who caught the tank, no less--always preferred to be the “little spoon,” back tucked snugly against Pam’s front, their legs curled into one another’s. And before she’d have to slip out of bed to solve the latest crisis at JSC, Ellen would’ve turned in Pam’s arms and warmed her with a gentle kiss.
Regret squeezes her lungs so hard, she almost can’t breathe, and she forces herself to suck in air and push it back out. It must come out harsher than she intends because one of her students leans toward her, forehead creased with worry.
“You okay, Ms. Horton?”
Pam’s lips form a wholly unconvincing smile. “I’m fine, Judy.” Snapping out of her stupor, she reaches inside her messenger bag on the floor, pulling out a small notebook and a pencil.
“What’re you doing?” Judy watches Pam flip to an empty page.
“Pouring out a double,” Pam deadpans. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“How can you write at a time like this?” Another student, Valerie, asks.
Pam can’t tell them the truth. That if she doesn’t do this, she just might break down entirely.
So she merely shrugs as she presses lead to paper. “How can you not?”
Somehow, the world survives.
All thanks to a handshake in space.
When the news breaks over the radio, Pam is weak-kneed from relief, clapping and cheering with her students and colleagues. She wipes away the wetness on her cheeks as pride swells within her, knowing that astronauts she’s known and loved saved them all.
In some small way, it makes her feel justified in her decision to leave Houston. Even though Ellen herself wasn’t on the Apollo, Pam knows she would have been involved in the ultimate outcome. Ellen was born for leadership, and had so much good yet to do. Pam did the right thing in removing herself as an obstacle on Ellen’s path. Right? Right.
Her fellow professors want to celebrate their new lease on life. But Pam’s exhausted and wants nothing more than to crawl back to her motel room with some bourbon and pass out. So she takes her leave, picks up Chinese takeout, and swings by the liquor store where she buys a bottle of Michter’s, convincing herself that she selected it for its quality, and not because it’s Ellen’s favorite.
A shower, full belly, and three sheets to the wind later, Pam finds herself on top of the squeaky motel bed, surfing the late-night news for NASA coverage. Purely as a concerned citizen, of course, and not to catch a glimpse of the agency’s beautiful acting administrator. There’s nothing, though, and Pam lays her right arm over her eyes to block out the spinning room.
She dreams of Ellen.
Always Ellen.
They’re on the gray surface of the moon, surrounded by the twinkling darkness of the star-studded universe. Ellen, in her white space suit, is walking in the distance, her legs skip-floating across the dusty surface. Pam, however, is left exposed in the vacuum, unfathomably alive as she runs after Ellen. Or makes the attempt, hopping in weak gravity. No matter how hard she tries to cross the distance, the farther Ellen seems to pull away.
Her chest hurts, but Pam calls out anyway.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Please.
Her words are swallowed by cold silence.
Pam wakes with a gasp, swallowing air into her lungs, heart pounding against her ribs. Blinking rapidly, it takes her several long seconds to remember where she is, the motel room slowly coming into focus. The television’s still on, now airing the morning news. Empty takeout boxes remain scattered on a small desk. For some reason, the room’s phone is off its hook, dangling off the side of the nightstand to her right.
Pam chokes back a sob.
Ellen doesn’t try to contact her, as Pam feared she might after her last conversation with Larry.
She should feel relieved. It's what she had wanted, and intended, when she left the letter on Ellen’s bed. And yet, she can’t stem the undercurrent of disappointment that lingers.
The news about Tracy and Gordo Stevens breaks while Pam's searching for a new apartment. Sitting in her favorite pub in Clarksville, tucked away on a quiet street in the historic neighborhood, she’s halfway through the newspaper classifieds when a sudden hush descends. One of the servers turns up the volume on the television above the bar. Photos of Tracy and Gordo in their blue flight suits flash on screen, their smiles confident and bright.
A news anchor says something about an accident at Jamestown, and how they and two other astronauts had lost their lives during the repairs. The exact details are lost on a shell-shocked Pam, a pencil slipping through her now slack fingers. It seems like only yesterday that she was pouring drinks for them both. They had been two of Pam’s favorites--Gordo with his terrible jokes and off-key singing, and Tracy with her kind smile and quiet determination.
They had always treated Pam as one of their own, and she can’t believe they’re gone.
It doesn’t feel real, and yet it’s now reality.
A few weeks later, every channel airs the funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. Elise has it on the television when Pam drops by their house to pick up the last of her things. Well, it’s not their house anymore, technically. It’s Elise’s until the lease to the small rambler expires at the end of the month.
They haven’t seen each other since Pam had left Elise for Ellen, and it’s every bit as awkward as Pam expected. Elise has every right to be hurt and angry, and Pam wouldn’t blame her if she felt the need to lash out. But Elise is civil, almost disconcertingly so, keeping her expression neutral as she walks ahead of Pam to the living room.
“I went ahead and packed the rest of your stuff.” Elise crosses her arms, maintaining her distance.
“You didn’t have to do that.” Pam ducks her head. Elise is nothing but efficient. It’s one of the things Pam loves about her. “But thank you.”
“I’ll let you get to it.” Elise nods and returns to sit on the couch.
A suitcase and several boxes are waiting next to the dining table. Flannery greets Pam instantly, curling around her ankles. Smiling, Pam bends down to pick up the orange Maine Coon.
“Hey, little guy, I’ve missed you,” she murmurs into his soft, fluffy fur. Flannery purrs in response.
On the TV screen, the president is giving a speech at the cemetery’s white-marble memorial amphitheater. Behind him are four coffins draped in the stars and stripes, and Pam’s heart clenches.
“Did you know them, too?” Elise cradles a mug between her hands as she watches the coverage.
“I knew the Stevenses, yeah,” Pam admits quietly.
“Guess there’s a lot you didn’t tell me,” Elise huffs out.
Guilt courses through Pam as she gently lowers Flannery back onto the floor. He meows in protest. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hide it from you. It was just a part of my life I wanted to forget, I guess.”
Elise doesn’t respond, her eyes glued to the news coverage, where the camera pans to the crowd. Pam’s breath stills when she catches a glimpse of Ellen in black standing solemnly between Danielle Poole and Molly Cobb. She’s on screen for less than three seconds, but it’s enough to discombobulate Pam, who tamps down another swell of grief.
“I’m surprised,” Elise says suddenly, turning her head to regard Pam. “That you’re not there with her.”
I would be, Pam thinks, in a better world. But that’s not the one they live in, and Pam’s not even sure she’ll live to see the day when relationships like theirs will be accepted or, at the very least, tolerated without condemnation.
“It’s not my place,” Pam says vaguely.
She can’t bring herself to tell Elise the truth of what she had done, how in the end she had let Ellen go for the greater good. The pain is still too fresh. Without elaborating further, she picks up the first box with a slight grunt. It’s heavier than it looks.
It takes only a few minutes to load up her car, both amazed and sad that the tangible portion of a life with someone amounted, in the end, to so very little. Elise meets her just outside the storm door with the suitcase, saving Pam one more trip inside.
“Listen, I just…” Elise bites the corner of her lip, brow pinched. “I want you to be happy. And I’m trying to understand, but…”
“I know.” Pam attempts a smile she’s sure comes out half-hearted and weak. “I want you to be happy, too.”
“Just not together.”
“Elise…” Pam exhales slowly through her nostrils. A car rumbles down the street behind her. “I think,” she swallows against a lump forming in her throat, “if Ellen hadn’t walked back into my life, you and I would still want different things.”
Disappointment ripples across Elise’s face, and another wave of remorse washes over Pam. Children have been a sticking point between Pam and Elise, and it isn’t an issue that would simply resolve itself with time. Elise deserves someone who wanted, without hesitation, to build a family with her. And as much as Pam loves her, she just isn’t that person.
Pam takes in a deep breath. “We were friends before. Maybe… maybe one day we could be again.”
Elise only stares, blinks once, twice. “Maybe. I need some time, I think.”
“I understand.”
Nodding, Elise opens the screen door, but pauses before stepping back inside. “Take care of yourself, Pam.”
“You too.”
The door closes with a soft click that nevertheless feels loud in its finality. On a long exhale, Pam picks up the suitcase and walks away.
Life moves on, as it always does, without a care for tragedy or triumph.
In some ways, it’s easier than the last time Pam put herself through a hard reset. She’s not starting from scratch in a new city, or struggling to make ends meet as she works her way through grad school. She has her health, her career, and her freedom to live her life out in the open.
Pam settles into her new apartment in Clarksville. It’s better than the hole-in-the-wall she had rented way back when in Houston, but not by much. Still, it’s hers and she’s grateful for the distraction of unpacking, organizing, and decorating. Between those tasks and teaching, she doesn’t have time for much else.
But sometimes, in quiet moments alone, usually in bed staring up at her dark ceiling, her mind wanders and wonders--just how different would her life be if she had gone down the roads not taken. What if she had stayed with Ellen a decade ago? Could she have tolerated Ellen’s marriage to Larry? Would she have been able to stand the constant fear and anxiety from Ellen’s stints on the moon, not being able to have the same privileges as other spouses and wives? And what of Ellen’s potential foray into politics? Could Pam have found the strength to support her without resentment?
Pam doesn’t know, and will never know, but she explores the possibilities in poems jotted down in notebooks, stories scrawled in journals, and snippets scribbled on restaurant napkins and whatever scraps of paper she can find when the muse strikes. It helps, she thinks. Or hopes.
And so she pushes forward one day at a time: eat, sleep, teach, write. Eventually, she becomes so engrossed in the routine that she blocks out nearly all else, completely missing the news about NASA’s acting administrator stepping down to the surprise of the Reagan administration.
"Pens down, that's all she wrote folks!"
There's a palpable sense of relief around the room, even as some of the first-year students groan when Pam calls time on their final exam.
"Come on, it wasn't so bad, right?" She smiles from her desk as they turn in their papers. "I'm proud of you all. Have a terrific break."
Pam gets up to erase the instructions she had written in the blackboard. The chalk dust makes her nose crinkle, and she brushes her hands off on the front of her pants. Once the classroom empties out, Pam gathers the exams and slips them inside her messenger bag, cursing under her breath when she accidentally knocks a pen from her desk.
As she bends down to retrieve it, the door opens once again.
"Be with you in a sec." Pam stretches her arm to grasp the pen. Straightening back up, she turns to greet her student. "What can I do for…"
Her heart stops.
Ellen Wilson smiles.
"Hi, Pam."
17 notes
·
View notes
Note
I promised you a song rec list, and I am here to deliver :)
There may be some that you already know, and I suspect that there probably is. But I've tried to avoid artists I remember seeing you mention explicitly or reblog content about. This list is so long that it's probably good there are songs you've already heard anyway lol
They aren't really in any particular order, but I have bolded and italicized and added asterisks * by my favourites!
*Take it Home - The White Tie Affair
Check Yes Juliet - We The Kings
Give Me A Try - The Wombats
Kiss This - The Struts
Never Again - The Midway State
This Is The End - The Maine
*Medicine Man - The Hush Sound
*High Hopes in Velvet - The Cab
Do It Alone - Sugarcult
Hold My Hand - New Found Glory
Let's Get Fucked Up And Die - Motion City Soundtrack
Settle Down - Kimbra
*Nowhere With You - Joel Plaskett
*Dark Blue - Jack's Mannequin
Bones Shatter (Never Say Never) - Hedley
She Left Me - Go:Audio
*Dance Hall Drug - Boys Like Girls
Summer Fades To Fall - Faber Drive
Blame It On September - Allstar Weekend
Four Rusted Horses - Marilyn Manson
Twisted Transistor - KoЯn
Tear You Apart - She Wants Revenge
Girls Like You - The Naked and Famous
Bad Habit - The Kooks
Louder Than Ever - Cold War Kids
Digital Witness - St Vincent
White Flag - Bishop Briggs
*No You Girls - Franz Ferdinand
*Clumsy - Our Lady Peace
This Too Shall Pass - OK Go
Love You Madly - Cake
Gold - Chet Faker
AhHa - Nate Ruess
Dashboard - Modest Mouse
*On To The Next One - Escape The Fate
Pins and Needles - Billy Talent
How I Could Just Kill A Man - Charlotte Sometimes
*Where Our Destination Lies - Ben Gibbard
*The Girl - City and Colour
We Are Nowhere and It's Now - Bright Eyes
Jersey - Mayday Parade
Goodnight Moon - Go Radio
Sweet Disposition - The Temper Trap
*Honeybee - Steam Powered Giraffe
Becky I cannot thank you enough for making me this playlist. I just finished listening to it all the way through for the first time and I love it ahhhh. I knew it was gonna be good, but you still blew my socks off
I’m gonna be listening to it on repeat for a little bit longer and then update you on my favs hehe >:^)
3 notes
·
View notes
Link
It was the mid-1980s, and African American rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and blues musician and activist Daryl Davis had just finished performing a set with his band in a bar in Frederick, Maryland.
As he left the stage, a White man—who would later reveal himself to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan—went up to Davis, put his hand around his shoulder and expressed his approval and admiration for his performance. “This is the first time I heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis,” he told Davis after they exchanged pleasantries. Surprised with the statement, Davis quickly replied, “Well, where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play that kind of style? . . . He learned it from the same place I did: Black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.” The White man was in disbelief and refused to accept Davis’ proposal.
Hearing about this incident on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast made me realise that I had been just as ignorant and oblivious as this man about the extent of the artistic contributions of Black people to American music. The moment also sparked within me many questions about my state of ignorance. Why did I not know about these artists? How much more did I not know? How much of the music I listened to was indeed Black?
As an Indian girl growing up in Kuwait in the 2000s, my exposure to American popular music came primarily through television channels like MTV Arabia (the Middle Eastern iteration of MTV) and MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center) as well as the radio station Radio Kuwait FM 99.7. Hit singles from a range of American artists, including Black artists, were in heavy rotation along with other shows. My favourite was an MTV show called ‘Rewind’ which played classic pop, R&B and hip hop hits from the previous decades. Songs were played in cars and at parties and hummed in classrooms by local as well as expatriate teens of various nationalities who, like myself, were unaware of the cultural and historical backstories of the music.
For example, I heard of Elvis Presley, dubbed the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” on television shows and news media due to his iconic status, but until recently, I had no idea that Presley was profoundly influenced by and “borrowed” from Black blues, gospel and rhythm ‘n’ blues artists of and before his time. He was influenced by radio performances of then local Black disc jockeys like B. B. King (who later came to be known as the “King of the Blues”) and Rufus Thomas (who also became a successful recording artist) and by performers at the Black nightclubs he visited during his teenage and young adult years.
Furthermore, I only recently learnt that many of Presley’s early recordings were covers of original songs by Black artists and that some of his biggest-selling songs like ‘Don't Be Cruel’ and ‘All Shook Up’ were penned by a Black musician by the name of Otis Blackwell. In fact, the first time I heard about it was last year in a YouTube video of a speech that Michael Jackson gave in 2002. While facts like this have now become somewhat common knowledge for most people in the West, my lack of awareness of Blackwell and others like him may be the residual effect of a time in the United States’ past when racial segregation permeated every aspect of life, including music and entertainment.
Dr Portia K. Maultsby is a renowned ethnomusicologist and professor emerita at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and the founder of the university’s Archives of African American Music and Culture. Maultsby took up the study of African American popular music traditions in the 1970s when there was no one looking into it as a valid area of research. She explains that segregation ensured that White Americans remained ignorant of Black musical traditions.
“Due to the segregated structure of the country for years and years, White Americans were kept away from the sounds of Black music,” Maultsby says. During this time, many Black jazz, gospel, R&B and soul artists enjoyed popularity in and even toured different parts of Europe. However, within the United States, Black artists were relegated to the so-called category of ‘race music’, an umbrella term—later replaced by ‘rhythm ‘n’ blues’ in the 1940s—used to denote essentially all types of African American music made by Black people, for Black people. The songs were distributed by mostly White-owned record labels catering exclusively to Black audiences, which meant that the White population remained largely ignorant of the large volumes of work that was recorded by countless Black artists. Black artists also did not get paid as much as White artists or have as many resources, and segregation ensured that their performances were limited to smaller venues.
By the early 1950s, however, a number of independent radio stations (again, mostly White-owned) began popping up, including rhythm ‘n’ blues or “Negro” radio stations. Since it was not possible to segregate radio waves, Black music became accessible to everyone and White teenagers began taking an interest in it. Seeing this, the music industry recognised the potential of appropriating Black music and record companies started making sanitised covers of the music with White artists to distribute to White listeners. But as Maultsby explains, they did so while “keeping the original artists in the background, unexposed” and rhythm ‘n’ blues music, covered and performed by White artists, was now marketed to the mainstream White listener as ‘rock ‘n’ roll,’ a term coined by radio disc jockey Alan Freed.
Record companies and White artists wanted the Black sounds and styles that appealed to the White audience but they did not want the Black artist. American record producer and founder of Sun Records Sam Phillips had been looking for “a White man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel” when he found Elvis Presley. The Beatles got their start by covering various blues artists like Arthur Alexander and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry. Janis Joplin, who was dubbed the “Queen of Rock”, wanted to sound like a Black blues musician and was influenced by Lead Belly, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton. Pat Boone covered ‘Tutti Frutti’, an original song by musician, singer and songwriter Little Richard, and reached 12th place in the national charts of 1956—several places ahead of the original.
Covers like these were made by record companies much to the disapproval and discontentment of the artists. Little Richard, nicknamed “The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and whose style influenced big names like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Prince, told the Washington Post in 1984 that he felt as though he was “pushed into a rhythm ‘n’ blues corner” to keep him away from the White audience. He said that “they”—who he does not name—would try to replace him with White rockstars like Elvis Presley who performed his songs on television as soon as they were released. He believed that this was because “they” didn’t want him to become a hero to White kids.
Little Richard’s statement reveals the racism and the lack of agency that Black artists suffered while under exploitative record labels. Exploitation happened to almost all artists in the music industry, but Black artists were particularly targetted as they would receive very little or nothing in royalties. Forbes reports that Specialty Records purchased ‘Tutti Frutti’ for a meagre 50 USD and gave him just 0.05 USD per record sold in royalties, while White artists received much higher rates—a discriminatory practice that was quite common in the industry. Richard, after he left the label in 1959, sued Specialty records for failing to pay him royalties.
Dr Birgitta Johnson is an associate professor of ethnomusicology in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina and teaches courses on African American sacred music, African music, hip hop, blues and world music. She explains that Black artists were not protected by copyright laws and would often have their music recorded and sold by record companies without proper contracts—in other words, their music would get stolen.
“Back in the day, there was no expectation that the Black artist could fight someone in court even though some of them did,” Johnson says. “If they didn’t have the copyright stolen from them, the record companies would own the music [instead of] the artists, and [the artists] wouldn’t know it because a lot of the time, they wouldn’t have the legal know-how to recognise what was happening in contracts. They wouldn’t get paid royalties . . . even though they were due royalties.”
While this exploitation of Black artists continued, in the late 1950s, after the development of smaller and more portable transistor radios, a wider audience of White teenagers began listening to Black radio stations. This new generation no longer had to depend on the family’s devices and gained more autonomy over what and who they listened to. “Young White people, who would become the hippies of the ‘60s, are the generation of people who started to press for their freedom . . . to [listen to] what they wanted to hear,” Johnson explains.
Listeners who heard the originals would call up the radio or go down to their local record store and ask for the originals, and record companies had to start supplying to demands to stay relevant in the market. “The covers made money but didn’t last long,” Johnson says, “because young White people no longer wanted the covers, the fake versions, the copies.”
The problem was that cover bands and artists tended to simply do whatever the producers asked them to do, which was usually to copy the original artist’s sound, style and moves, and more often than not, it made for bland and inauthentic renditions of the originals. The covers lacked the authenticity that Black artists conveyed in their performance and the young audience who had heard the authentic versions could see this. “They knew what the good music sounded like—it was almost like they understood... they may not have understood the racial dynamics of it, but they knew [the real thing from the fake],” Johnson says.
Moreover, artists who did covers were performing in styles that were foreign to them. “It was outside of their tradition; it was outside of their aesthetics; [and] they couldn’t bring the same excitement to it sometimes,” she explains. The music, performance and singing style had characteristic elements such as polyrhythms (layering of multiple rhythms), call-and-response, dance and improvisation—elements rooted in traditions that were brought to the United States by enslaved West and Central Africans between the 18th and 19th centuries. More importantly, the lyrics of songs by Black artists reflected the unique social customs, trends and living conditions of Black people, and these were not fully understood by people covering the songs. As a result, “[the covers] couldn’t compete with the real thing,” Johnson says.
Maultsby explains that due to the increasing popularity of the originals, record labels soon began recording more Black artists. However, she says, they watered down or “temper[ed] [their] heavy gospel-oriented sound” to make it more palatable for the White audience, and “one way they did [that] in the ‘50s and into the early ‘60s was to use pop production techniques” which meant a “background of strings and backup singers that sounded more White—concert-type singers—to soften the more raspier, emotional sound of the Black singer.”
By the 1980s, Black music gained exposure to an even wider international audience through television channels like MTV as well as broadcasts of live performances. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, collaborations between interracial duos were used as a mass-marketing strategy to increase the reach of Black artists and pop production continued to be used to “soften the Black sound.” Record companies also paired up White artists with Black producers to achieve that ever-popular Black sound.
“Thus, more White artists embodying or imitating aspects of the Black style made it acceptable and soon . . . that Black sound began to define the American sound,” Maultsby explains. However, this imitation and dilution meant that people could never experience authentic Black music.
According to Maultsby, who helped pioneer the academic study of African American popular music, the way non-African Americans experience African American music, even in the United States, is from the perspective of an outsider, and this applies to the international audience as well.
“By and large, within African American communities, music is created as a part of everyday life . . . music is a part of our lived experience,” Maultsby explains. “When that music is then taken out of that context and placed in the music industry, it becomes a commodity for mass dissemination, and it takes on a different meaning and a different function.”
She explains that the live performances of legendary artists like Aretha Franklin or James Brown were very different from the studio-recorded performances because the records were “mediated so that [they] fit a certain format that [could] appeal to a broader audience.”
“Record labels didn’t like recording performances live because they felt the audience interaction would interfere with the performance,” she says. “But that audience interaction [was] very much a part of the way Black music is created and experienced.
The writing and coverage of Black music both in and outside of the United States also did a poor job of representing its true essence. As Maultsby explains, White journalists who covered Black music would write about it from a White perspective rather than a Black one.
“A lot of misconceptions early on had to do with the music being reported by White journalists who reported through the lens of White audiences,” Maultsby says. “When journalists wrote about Black music . . . in the US—and this carried on to Europe and the rest of the world [including] Asia [and the] Middle East—they wrote about it through their observation of performances in venues with predominantly White or all-White audience, or in general, non-Black audiences . . . they did not go into the Black community to see how the music was performed and experienced.”
Writing about Black music and culture from a Eurocentric or White point of view has resulted in early Black contributions to popular music being misrepresented as well as erased from the general consciousness. Black culture was appropriated, exploited and diluted and in the process, consumers were left with watered down, commodified versions of the art that did not represent the people that were at the heart of creating it, and its after-effects have carried over to the present-day, among non-Western consumers.
Black contributions to music are also rarely discussed in mainstream media, which is largely controlled by White executives.
“The influence of Black music in a lot of American music are things that only get discussed in classes or documentaries—sometimes award shows—but mostly in formal environments, unless you’re from that tradition,” says Johnson. “[Artists like] Steven Tyler . . . [have] said, ‘I grew up listening to the blues; I love the blues’ . . . but the people who promote him don’t really have any interest in [promoting that] narrative because it’s really about selling a personality when you think about how the music industry works.”
She explains that though most people are analytically aware that the United States is a diverse country, images that are promoted by American companies are very White-centric. What is sold to the rest of the world as “American” is usually centred around Whiteness, whether that’s through music, movies, television or other forms of entertainment.
“The outside world sees a very limited package and predominantly a White or Eurocentric image . . . people look at America and assume this is basically a White space even though we have all this diversity—we’ve always had this kind of diversity of culture,” remarks Johnson, who often does not get recognised as Black American when she travels internationally. “When I go to China, they don’t assume I’m American. When I go to Thailand, they don’t assume I’m American."
Even though a lot has changed for Black musicians and artists in the United States since its “race music” days, the impact of racism and Eurocentrism lingers on and affects the way Gen Z as well as millennials outside of the United States, like myself, understand pop music in the 21st century. Many tributes have been paid to pioneering and legendary Black artists in award shows, documentaries and biopics and their contributions have been studied academically by scholars like Maultsby and Johnson, but my awareness of Black music and culture as a non-American is not only limited by what’s been given to me in the media, but also by what’s been left out of the conversations around popular music. How do we change this?
As Maultsby expresses, it starts simply with acknowledgement—just like a symphony orchestra’s roots are acknowledged to be European no matter who performs it or how it is reinterpreted in different cultures, or how a sitar is recognised as an Indian musical instrument whether it’s played in a jazz performance or a symphony orchestra, we need to continue to learn and acknowledge the Black roots of the music even when it has a local interpretation or variation.
“We all know [the symphony orchestra] comes from Europe; there’s no question there; we don’t try to claim it as our own conception, but we do participate in that culture. That’s how we have to think about Black American culture,” she says.
We need to recognise African American music for its role in shaping Western popular music, and understand what constitutes Black musical traditions and what differentiates it from the rest of the world, rather than generalise it as merely American music. And while music may have transcended cultural and racial boundaries, transcendence should not come at the price of obscuring and erasing the source.
“It’s fine as long as we keep in mind the source of that music,” Maultsby says. “We can say it transcends race—it just shows how influential Black has been internationally—but at the same time, we don’t need to erase the group that created the music and make Black people invisible in terms of their contributions. And that happens a lot.
“If we are not reminded that Black people are the ones that created the music you love, we question their contributions to society and to the world. We shouldn’t need to be reminded every day. It belongs in our consciousness.”
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
Today marks 13 years since my brother passed away of cancer. When he died neither his wife nor I had enough money for the cheapest burial available (even with the gracious help of a $500 check from a local church) and so we used the money we had for a cremation.
Since he has no grave for me to visit, most years, if I can, I like to visit some place that was meaningful to us when he was still living. Last year I visited a local pond where we went fishing a lot in the final years of his life. A couple of years before that I visited a church we attended as children. Its no longer the same church or even English speaking but the people who worship there now didn't mind me walking around and reminiscing once I explained why I was there. This year I went to a small ravine about 18 miles south of my house.
Locals have called the ravine Tarzan's Hole for as long as I can remember. According to local lore it reminded the original generation of kids who gave it the name (back in the late 1940s), of the jungle on those old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. As youngsters my brother and I and a bunch of other kids would play there, despite all the adults warning us not to. It was dangerous, full of broken glass, bits of rusty metal junk and old tires and because it was so close to the Union Pacific railroad tracks it was a popular camping area for hobos. There was a small stream at the bottom and you could catch blue bellied lizards, crawdads, toads and harmless little garter snakes all day long. It attracted kids like moths to a light.
The place was special to my brother because its where he first met his future wife. He also taught himself to play guitar down there over the course of one summer, strumming a cheap K-Mart acoustic while trying to play the rock songs he was listening to on our sister's transistor radio.
So that's where I went today. I made my way down to the bottom (the stream has dried up) and just wandered around a bit, remembering things and talking to my brother. Mostly about his kids (two are adults now and the youngest is in her teens) but also about all the fun we had there as children - like the time we and about a dozen other kids played the most epic game of hide and seek in history there one humid afternoon in June 1979.
That's why I missed my morning update today. I hope nobody minds. I have my evening posts all ready to go and I'll be updating YDI soon (I'm going to have my supper first, some Panda Express I grabbed on the way home).
- Brother Fred (YDI)
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
My Dad and Peter Stuyvesant.
The Venezia was a much-loved Italian restaurant, with the most delicious ice cream, in Sea Point, one block from my High School.
Every other Friday, I would meet my father there after school for lunch. My parents were long since divorced and these Friday lunch dates alternated with the weekends I would spend with him and his new Austrian wife.
I would order a toasted cheese and tomato, and a strawberry milkshake, he would have something more substantial, along with cigarette after cigarette. I can still smell the acrid burning of his Peter Stuyvesants, a brand named after the Dutch peg-legged former governor of colonial New Amsterdam (New York) until he lost it to the British.
The slogan for this oddly-named cigarette was ‘Your International Passport to Smoking Pleasure’. The cinema ads depicted jet-setters touching down in New York on a luxury airliner in what seemed like some weird modernisation of the governor’s original colonial conquests. For white South Africans, it all made perfect sense.
So, after my father had asked me the same questions he asked every week, ‘how was school/rugby/that friend of yours etc’, things would lapse into silence and I would watch the ash on the end of his cigarette grow longer and longer and hope it wouldn’t fall into his coffee.
His habit was to stare at any woman in the restaurant that caught his eye. He wasn’t subtle, but preferred direct and continuing eye contact until I would tell him to stop, my cheeks blushing and wishing the red leather seats would swallow me up. He would pull his gaze away, mumble something, light another Stuyvesant, and then start staring again.
My Dad was tall, thin, with prematurely grey hair, lots of it. A teenager during the war, too young to join up, his height meant he was handed white feathers when walking in town with his mother by those thinking he was shirking his duty. When he did join up, as a dispatch rider, it ended up with him crashing his bike (allegedly forced off the road by pro-Hitler Afrikaners) and spending a long time in bed with broken legs. He never talked about it. In fact, now that I come to think about it, he never talked about anything much. He was from that ‘action, not words’ generation of men, the bread-winners, the head of the family, the kings of their Castle lagers. A man of action.
He did talk a lot to people in America, though. In fact, he hardly ever stopped. He was ZS1JD, his call sign as an amateur radio operator, or a HAM, as it was known. He bought and built huge pieces of radio equipment, receivers, transmitters, amplifiers, filled with transistors and glowing globes that smelled like burnt dust when they fired up. He would have long chats about whatever men of his 30-something age talked about.
In the age before TV came to South Africa, it was a crackly confirmation that there was another world out there, maybe the same place where the men in the Peter Stuyvesant advert cavorted with young women who wouldn’t mind you staring at them one little bit, in fact, they might invite you over to their table and light your cigarette for you.
These were the days of Vietnam, the Six Day War, space walks, and moon shots, so there was always something to talk about. But really the thing they all loved to talk about was their equipment, which model of this, the performance of that, tech talk turned them on.
One part of his ‘rig’ was the outside aerial that carried their signals through the atmosphere. This was nothing subtle again. In his case, he had a 50-foot iron tower standing on a reinforced concrete base constructed in our back garden, topped with a multi-pronged horizontal aerial.
The radio tower built by a crew of black labourers with a white boss man to oversee it all. As we watched the workers in their blue overalls swarm up into the sky, finishing off this grey metal edifice, suddenly a worker fell. He landed in the deep grass, winded and groaning. After a few moments, he got up and went back to work. Shocked at the violence of his fall, I looked at my Dad for reassurance. “Don’t worry, John,” he said, “you know they don’t feel pain like us.” The trouble is, he believed it. As a seven-year-old at the time, I had no reason not to.
As a travelling commercial salesman, he travelled throughout the Western Cape, hawking watches, crockery, cutlery and jewellery to small businesses. He stayed away for a week at a time, at least twice a month. Then, it was just me and my Mom in the house, and the ‘maid’, as domestic workers were called in those days. Things were a lot more relaxed with him away. We didn’t have to wait till his car finally pulled up outside in the evenings and we could eat our supper, now with meat grey from overcooking and vegetables equally worse for wear.
I don’t remember much about those meals, eaten at the open window that looked over Table Bay, with Robben Island in the distance, with its prisoner who would eventually challenge those who thought ‘they don’t feel pain like us’. I do remember how I mixed my mashed potato together with the gem squash to make something more palatable, and the tinned guavas covered with sweet evaporated milk that would be dessert.
Some nights, after supper, he would pull on a pair of grey trousers and a black polo neck, pack his drum kit and head out to play in various jazz bands. He wasn’t bad at it, he could hold a beat, but I think the point was to get out of the house, away from my mother and I.
It was such a strong urge that not much stood in his way. One evening, he managed to drop a carving knife into his calf, a deep wound that spurted blood, quickly staining his handkerchief and first one dish towel and then another one. Clearly, this was a wound that needed stitching and some rest. But no, the show must go on, so he bandaged himself as best he could and limped out of the house Did he play that night? I don’t know, but he definitely got out of the house.
My Dad eventually left the house permanently when I was about nine, and then it was just me, my Mom, and Elsie the elderly, often tipsy, ‘maid’. She was there when I got home from school with sardines on toast, or baked beans, or toasted cheese and tomato.
I don’t think I missed him really, though I must have felt something. He was just gone, and became the Dad I would meet at Venezia every second Friday.
He stopped playing the drums from what I remember, he remarried (that lasted ten years or so), he built a large sprawling house in the Durbanville countryside, with a swimming pool and a bull terrier, and another aerial, even higher than the first one.
He still smoked Peter Stuyvesants, the butts piling up in his ashtray as he sat at his radio and called out to the world, “This is ZSIJD, how do you copy, who’s out there? This is ZS1JD.”
1 note
·
View note
Text
I.
“What do you think about the Visit?”
“Certainly,” said Valentine. “Imagine a picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …”
“I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”
“Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they’ll come back…”
— Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)
II.
I’ve never really been convinced by those theories regarding visits from other worlds. It doesn’t seem logical. Who would want to come here? What for? I don’t think anyone has ever been interested in traveling to our world and, if some came, it’s easy enough to imagine that they were something akin to mischievous kids. Like boys dressed in black leather jackets riding motorcycles too big for their bodies, popping wheelies (all those reports of commercial airline pilots with too many of those little bottles in the fuel tank), terrorizing and taking advantage of the residents of a small town (all those absurd stories of astral coitus), and ending up crashing on the first tricky curve (oh, the Roswell blues), or more or less clever boys who came down here, to the edge of the galaxy, and built a sand pyramid or two and then went home to their parents when the suns of their planet set. And that’s it. Nothing more.
— Rodrigo Fresán, The Bottom of the Sky (translated by Will Vanderhyden)
#Arkady & Boris Strugatsky#Roadside Picnic#Rodrigo Fresán#The Bottom of the Sky#Olena Bormashenko#m#Will Vanderhyden#first contact#Russian#Spanish#visitation as roadside picnic
4 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
smart-ass-herbalism
Catholic Leaf Juice
frknaltn
Untitled
poselenov-blog
Назад в будущее или снова в школу
coveringthetracks
The Clean-Up Crew
