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My friend, Alex, had been drinking full time in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We used to call him baloney turntable because there was a warped round of sun-cured baloney on his turntable. Everything in his apartment was at crawl level, the mattress, loads of to-go bags and empty pizza boxes, and pictures he’d ripped from hardcore-and-industrial music magazines to tape to the wall. His drinking progressed until his family put him on a one-way flight to a long-term rehab in Boulder, Colorado. That’s when he started calling me and leaving me these incendiary voicemails. Why I felt the need to transcribe and make audio renditions of them I still don’t know, except for finding them utterly compelling.

Two men. Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. They veered off road somewhere in the Sonoran desert. South of the border. They crashed into a saguaro cactus. Over twenty feet high. The top swayed and dropped like an alien green chandelier. The rooftop buckled. The windshield cracked. Steam hissed from under the engine hood. Orson’s silver hair was askew as he stumbled out of the baby blue Coupe DeVille. A trickle of blood trailed from his eyebrow. He shouted out into the desert plain.
 
“Kiki!”
 
His toy poodle, black as the night. She was somewhere out there. She had bounded fast as a jackrabbit out the backseat window soon as they had crashed into the saguaro. Again he shouted her name, his voice booming out among the cacti and desert scrub.
 
Brando was outside the Coupe DeVille sizing up the damage. The saguaro, pronged with a hefty multitude of spiny arms, would take at least five men with push brooms to prod off the car. Then Brando gawked up at the starry night sky as if the galactic sprawl was from where the saguaro had crash landed. He swept both of his hands over his thick white hair as he continued to gaze up into the cosmos, the Milky Way a phantasmagoric spunk on all of outer space. He remained in awe.

I had the pleasure of reading with all these talented writers a few years back. It’s funny, the majority of what I read is no longer part of the finished story, but there was so much to this passage that I really liked and feel represents my more semi-autobiographical work. Click the link to listen: The Self Portrait. Hope you enjoy!