Vegetables And Art

Chaz stepped off the train from New York.   We decided on a quick visit to the Art Institute.   He was infatuated with Pablo and Vincent, I was looking into Grant Wood and Otto Dix.   I looked at a Wood painting and scribbbled a poemthought.

Two gorgeous ladies looked over my shoulder as I wrote.   Chaz watched, amusement dancing in his eyes.

"Are you famous?" hooter heaven asked.

"Ever hear of Bukowski?"

"He's nasty and our favorite," they both squealed.

I fondled them both to Chaz's amazement and slipped them the poem.   They gave me a C-note and a boner.   Unfortunately I had no time to bury it.

Under the elevated tracks we ate chile rellenos and talked writer trash.   When the trains rumbled overhead the stems of our stuffed chiles shook like rat's tails in a Mexico City earthquake.   Picasso's sculpture and the Sears Tower were shrouded in fog.

Sipping double martinis in the marble slabbed station, Chaz and I waited for the train to Kansas.

Exiting the train, after an uneventful trip, except for the peyote and the hillbilly woman going down on me.   A man picked us up and blindfolded us before he drove us to our destination.   Escorting us from the limousine into a building, he removed our blinders.   Leading us through animal skin covered hallways, we entered an oak walled dining room.   Bear, deer, mountain goat, lion, rhino, giraffe, moose, bobcat, and a giant stuffed catfish all stared at us with their lifeless eyes.   Fractured light reflected from crystal and silver eating utensils.

An eyeglassed gray man and a thin wildeyed man sat at one end of a long mahogany table, they were smoking something that smelled like opium.   Two places were set for Chaz and I midway down the table.

"Have you ever known the ecstasy of having your anus penetrated and stretched by carrots and cucumbers?" the gray man asked.   Neither of us made a comment.

Thin man had three pistols lying next to his plate.   Drinks were served by our chauffeur.   Every so often thin man raised a pistol and fired it into the stuffed moose head on the wall behind us.   Every time the guns went off, gray man would smile at our discomfort and squirm his butt around.   It was unnerving to say the least.

The first course of dinner arrived.   It was carrot and cucumber soup.   Chaz and I both declined, claiming we were strictly carnivorous, trying to offset the trend toward vegetarianism.   Both of our hosts grinned at our obvious prevarications. They winked suggestively.

Excusing myself, I climbed out the bathroom window and escaped across the plains of wheat.   Chaz also extricated himself from the queer surroundings.

Chaz departed for the city of seven hills. I returned to the land where rivers join.  Winter is approaching and the devil waiting, but I am not afraid everyday is a good day to write, live, or die.