MTMCRHYCCCR

I woke up, still chained around the neck in the parking lot.

Sun starting to rise and the meager dew on the pavement already evaporating leaving a film of filth traced with yellow pollen, collecting in the corners mixed with brown leaves and burned black grass: condoms and dog shit, plastic wrappers stinking of moldy condiments, onion and vinegar,  handfuls of toilet paper, pop and beer bottles, traces of liquid with floating insects, spilled metal containers with strewn plastic lids, orange rice laced with wrinkled peas, befatted and puckered pork and wilted greenery indistinguishable from the nighttime regurgitations of rangers from the saloons and sexeteria, carnal leavings from rebelling bodies, bloodied, genital.

I rake my hair with one hand tracing the contours of my scalp scratching to distinguish between flea-bite scabs and dirt, stuck grit or sand.  Five days since the hose's hot then cold water, when I lay most of the time collecting in the pool, exfoliating layers of scum to be relocated to other tumored sections making way for incoming melanges of putridity, fairly carbonating and tumescent.  I twist up on all fours and retch dryly, violently with a sustained and corrupted belch of carrion feculence and spit a long slender agglomeration, sappy and spoiled, to the drab asphalt.

Seated, I pull at the chain's substance; it drags aridly across the muck, desquamating rusty clods which roll and deposit in the harbor of fecal crud.  It has been re-anchored under the rubberized toe of a hulking industrial behemoth's front-right tire.  The truck looks like some modified paving apparatus with an awkward posterior bucket smudged black, lifted towering over the rest of the vehicle and with two great tar-stained spreader rafts seated low to the ground on each of its sides with ratcheted cables and gears to enable extension and retraction.  It stands tall and fortified, like an alloyed acropolis of cataclysm with a inverted and nippled plow like a cow-catcher painted day-glo green with a grin of white razor teeth in a glare of caution and menace.

I send an abrupt stroke along the length of the chain to the tire and it dislodges throbbing dully against the bottom of the plow.  Down the alley, across the urban fallow and quiescence of brick and weed, through the chain-link fence I can see the progress of runners along the adjacent avenue in marathon competition; lines of men and women, straining in the heat, pinched and confined to their self-inflicted excruciation and blinded to my captivity either by a latent senselessness or by haughty design.  A scrape in the sand on the opposite side of the vehicle broadcasts warning and overstep, signals well-worn lanes of self-loathing against ego and presumption, expected beating for insolence.  I cower instinctively, eyes averted, I trust only in sound and smell to overcompensate every intuition,  debasing myself among the refuse, inviting the sedimentary dung smear of garbage to sanction and endow the evolutionary degradation of my vulgar ignobility in the company of every other living creature on earth, man and beast.

The chain is yanked up and the pull sustained choking me upright onto my feet, hunched and squatting, hands still in the dirt at my side.  I squint into the sun and in a moment a shadowy figure expels a full snotty abundance of foamy phlegm in my peering eye.  I flinch while the greedy bark of dirt along the rim of my upper cheekbone begins to dissolve and smear in the damp mix of saliva and snot.  I clear my eyes and focus only on the bright shine in my field of vision of knee-high black leather boots with elaborate silver metal buckles and catches, steel-cable laces weaving along baroque stitching and embossed symbols and patterns, seeming verdicts of calamity and misfortune.  The boots shift in the sand along with the angle of the chain's draw on my neck.  I welcome the absent-minded press of one heel on the tip of my right index finger, for the gall of my upward glance from before, my wince goes thankfully unnoticed.

I try to keep up with the pull on the chain as we move around the front of the vehicle to a hatch on its left side.  While I am concentrating on looking only at the ground,  I catch glimpses of a tall shadow on the jointed metal surface of the truck, there are weird angles to the shape that leap like nightmare flashes of talon claws wielded threateningly, and the head appears grossly oversized, adipose and swollen with a portent of pus-butter and bloody rupture.  The hatch is twisted open and I am thrust up and into the cab.  A length of chain is tossed in after me.  The end of the chain had been cut off crudely from the wall where I had been anchored days earlier.

The shadow climbs in after me and slams the door.  The cab is shockingly cool and my body shudders involuntarily.  There is an exquisite pungency to the air, an abstergent purity despite the seeming mechanical grime, made more acute by the closeness of the walls, all a stark contrast to the sickly sweet open air of my recent confinement.  A link of my chain is hooked over a handle in the wall and I am forced to stand upright for the first time in more than a week.  My body unfurls unwillingly.  I squint my eyes to avoid seeing what I am not supposed to see.  If I turn my head I can see the runners out on the street through an opening in the wall near the ceiling of the cab.

A button is pressed and the engine outside hums awake with a reverberative squeal of metal and belt and the entirety of the vehicle shudders, enlivened by a short burst on some unseen pedal, but soon collects itself into a single enterprise of vibration as the unadorned steel floor of the cab begins to warm against the abscessed sores and vesications on the undersides of my feet.  Hands encircle my neck from behind, fingers probing the skin underneath the circle of the collar.  The pain is dizzying but I cannot react.  However, before long the fingers are administering a slather of unguent which immediately dulls the burning sting of the touch.  My head lolls dreamily and I moan involuntarily.  My eyes open to the sound of boots on the floor before me.

Despite the healing gesture of the balm at my neck I maintain a subservient obsequiousness and keep my eyes averted even when my face is clasped by the large calloused hand, the fingers crushing the thin skin at my cheekbones and directing my gaze at a covered table directly in front of me attached to the same wall from which my chain was hung.  The cover is removed revealing a body, shockingly white, clean and smooth and bent at the waist to lie face-down on the table, without clothing, its arms spread and hands loosely bound to the wall.  There's a new sweetness in the air.  The smell of lilac and milk.  The flesh stirs and trembles when the cloth is removed and arches its back angling its backside expectantly.  The boots step forward and the large, tanned hands begin to smooth the flesh with a rough tenderness.  The body presses backward to the touch and there is a cooing echoing from the floor.

The fingers have never left my neck and they now begin to enclose themselves in a slow, ever-tightening massage sliding along the balm across the curdling scabs and sores.  Before me the boots are now encircled by black jeans hastily lowered in an urgent, lecherous desire.  The hands press my head against the coolness of the cab wall and the now strangulation at my neck pulses in rhythmic concert with the vision before me.

If I crane my eyes in their sockets I can still stragglers at the end of the race, some jogging, some now giving up and just walking languidly and somewhat uncomposed, bemottled with a soak of perspiration.  One has stepped hastily off the avenue, walking on tip-toe, into the vacant lot and has lowered his running shorts to evacuate his bowels liquidly among the weeds.  A wail like the sunset cry of a loon begins to rise from somewhere.