American Escalator

“Alright, thanks,” the coiffed young guy with his sparkling suit and tie still on mumbles to the disheveled older man. With his manicured, hairless fingers, he gingerly places into the outstretched older man’s stained hand the long slender teal Erazer, in exchange for the line placement ticket for the party bus. Quickly retracting his hand, the business man flicks open his heart-shaped locket-watch and pops a shiny red pill between his surgically-colored and resized lips.

“It’s charged, right?” he gruffly shouts up from his hunched over position from his open tent door flap on the sidewalk, but all he sees is the back of the suit bouncing onto the bus and speeding off under the elevated railways.

Roger crawls into his tent, hopes he is aiming the laser at his lesioned eyes, and sighs as it begins to beep.

Quickly a crowd of people hearing the beeps gather and jostle for position closest to Roger’s tent door.

“Don’t use it all, Rog,” shouts his sometimes lady friend, Smurf. She is short and bluish from years in the chemical factory, and leans on a stair baluster for support.

“Hey, man remember your Uncle Ben,” barks Ben, with his face so bloated it nearly suffocates his eyes. He wheels backwards with his wheelchair into Roger’s zent made from reinforced recycled electronics stitched together with liquefied farmed zebra bones, knocking off a slab of board nailed to the tent with ‘All welcome except Dirty Blue’ painted in crooked letters on it. Drawn in pen in the corner of the sign are two pigs wearing cop hats, one mounted on the other.

Roger was presented the zent by Fresh Baldy himself, CEO of Slamzon, after he signed a pledge to meditate daily for peace and to end world hunger. Then while in prison for a year for Moral Disobedience, his second incident at the ALL-you-can-eat-UNTIL-we-tell-you-to-STOP Buffet, he actually did meditate as documented by the feeling and seeing-eye walls. FB himself was so impressed with what he viewed he took his lunar escalator down from the Slamzon Moon to bestow the temperature-regulating, pulsating zent, which makes ‘living much more enjoyable’, upon Roger. Now, he meditates as the lesions burn and disappear, returning him to the sightworld.

Seeing himself working for Slamzon as a licensed CloudWaterer, Roger allows his thoughts to entice him. Then, he lets them go. Balloons floating lazily across an endless sky. He remembers and smiles with a twinkle in his eyes.

Smurf’s and Ben’s eyes are, of course, coated over with oozing lesions. In fact everyone’s under the EL are like this. They scratch at their burning, bright red eyes incessantly.

Thousands of people scuffle, crawl, hop, and roll in and out of their tents, shacks, lean-tos, mattresses and plies of cardboard lining the sidewalks in the shadows of the gears, beams and pillars where legions of pigeons roost and coo, adding to the symphony of trains rattling overhead and the roar of music and slurred laughter on the buses cruising by continuously twenty hours a day.

The other four hours a day privileged Lesionaires get to scrub and replenish these party buses with hundreds of gallons of booze and plates of babycell edibles. Then, they electrically charge them for the next party for the city’s cultural, athletic, political and financial elites. Though, to be fair, City Grand Leaders, respectively declare each New Year’s Day that every citizen is allowed to partake in the ‘Parties of 20 for All’ but unfortunately there are not enough buses for all of us due to the ungrateful drones striking and halting production.

We need more happiness, Less drone greed, boom, boom, boom of the bass drum, crash, crash, crash of the snare, trill, trill, trill of the pennywhistle blares from omnipresent speakers like late 20th century television ads laced with 22nd century prime spacid. Overloaded with seething, knowledgeable stimuli.

In their enchanting bejeweled and sequined headwear resembling a mosh up of medieval royal crowns with post-pandemic Christian church bell towers sewed together by Himalayan Buddhist seamstresses, our fearless leaders promise from video screens hung like garland from each corner seeing-eye poles that the bullying to cut in line for the buses by a mischievous few will end very soon if it has not ended already. However, Lesionaires don’t seem to mind taking home leftover drinks and half-eaten edibles for their weekly wage.

Wink, wink. Oink, oink. Klangcoin, klingcoin. Swipe, stop, insert, frisk. Order to change without notice. Notice to order without change.

Our Grand Leaders graciously bow to us via the video screens, shaking their jewels and bells to emphasize their importance as they exit their Vast Nest of Security. Pigeons coo. Trains rattle. Buses cruise. Lesionaires scrub. Roger beeps on.

Long ago, when the Riot$ of the UN4GIVEN ravaged our great country, law fled and order countenanced. Math and Music cartels roamed freely, suffering us badly. But no more! Lesions appeared like gifts from vengeful gods, restoring us to equilibrium.

Breathe deep and smell fun. It is good that we each have our place for that is how each achieves a party bus line allotment, except for those mischievous few. Meanwhile more of us just need to gird their loins.

Roger sees the flyer on the pole next to his tent, wondering why someone would post it under here where so much blindness abounds. Why not on the never ending buses, or up above on the rails?

On it, there is a young woman with long flowing hair. Roger can almost feel the breeze. “Seeking my daughter. Last seen leaving Spacid Little Cave #638, two divisions ago. Pale as light, heavy as a river, trusting as bright eyes. Please deliver if found to…”.

Roger looks away from it when Smurf jabs him with her cane.

“Does it have any juice left?”, she pleads in her begging voice.