Leave Her To Heaven was on TNT this morning. It's on my mind as I get in the Shadow with a Twinkie I bought at the bodega.
On Labor Day I went with Scott to Bear Mountain to dump Egan's ashes from a Flyboy remote control plane. Scott told me that the way I looked holding that remote reminded him of Gene Tierney in Leave Her To Heaven when she rode a stallion through the painted desert and dumped her father's ashes.
All I could say in response was, "Remember when she watches that boy with Polio drown?"
Scott didn't remember that part; he likes the movie because he thinks Gene Tierney is pretty. She's pretty if you like the brunette, Irish, bucktoothed, Bugs Bunny type; I tend to go for the feathered look.
I roll down the window, throw the Twinkie wrapper out, and roll it up again. I always roll the windows up when I blast Mazzy Star.
When I was in high school Mazzy Star was big. I used to listen to my favorite song on repeat. It's called Fade Into You. I know the names of all their songs even though all I ever had was the unlabeled Maxell tape my ex-girlfriend left in the backseat of the Dodge Shadow I still drive now.
I drive it down Queens Blvd. to school and try not to think about sitting in my office all day fielding the troublemakers the teachers send to me.
I keep getting caught behind the lights and I see this hot Puerto Rican girl walking past the Burger King but I don't look too long because for all I know she's fifteen. As I get past her I notice these two black kids in Knicks jerseys riding freestyle bikes, like the old Mongoose kind they had when I was a kid.
They stick out because they keep stopping and starting and almost losing their balance but they are laughing hysterically the whole time. They have determined looks on their faces as if they were playing some sort of game like knocking a ball between their two bikes while riding but I can't see what it is because of all the cars parked close together making it hard to see all of the sidewalk.
One of them notices me staring at them and mouths the word "Bitch," or at least I think he did. So I give up trying to find out what they are doing and focus on the traffic. Queens Blvd. is always backed up but it still manages to be the most dangerous crossing in the city.
On the news they call it the Boulevard of Death because a lot of elderly people get run down. A lot of community advocates say the Boulevard was poorly designed but how come it is only old people who get hit? They get run over everywhere.
I don't mind Queens Blvd. so much, I don't mind anything that delays me getting to school and having to deal with Mr. Marlowe the asshole math teacher. He sends kids to my office for every piece of crap offense he can think of. It's not my fault he drives a blue Nova and his wife sleeps with Mr. McCord and he's too much of a pussy to do anything about it, don't take it out on me and the kids.
My job's not so horrible and as a guidance counselor I'm what they'd call a hot ticket. I'm fair-minded and I know how to talk to kids. I don't play games with them the way Mr. Marlowe does. For example there's this football player, Keith, he was always calling me a faggot behind my back after I told him to lay off the sports and bring his grades up.
Some guidance counselors might have taken the first chance to fuck the kid over, I mean it hurts to get your good intentions thrown back in your face and it's not like the kid is a star athlete. He needs something to fall back on. But I had the chance to screw Keith and I passed.
It was a hot Friday and Mr. McCord had taken a sick day to go coochie surfing with Mrs. Marlowe so I was stuck watching the detention room fourth period when I'd normally be in the teacher's lounge watching Major Dad on USA network's afternoon laughs. I was sitting at the desk skimming through a copy of A View From The Bridge.
Keith was there and so was Jana in her cheerleading uniform. She was pretty ugly and all the kids called her steak belly but glittery stockings are glittery stockings and I peeked over my book and noticed that Keith was fiddling around with something in his pants pockets and as the movement got faster and faster I didn't have to worry about him seeing me watching him because I looked at his eyes and they were focused on Jana's fat glittery legs.
I could have called him on it right there and got him suspended, even arrested because masturbating in public is a sex offense but I didn't.
I hear a horn honk and look up just in time to stop myself from crashing into a gypsy cab double-parked in my lane.
I pull around the gypsy and see that I've been going so slow that the two black kids have caught up to me even with their stop and start bicycle game and on this block which has a post office on it so I can see the sidewalk without the parked cars I can see what game it was the two boys were really playing.
They were knocking something back and forth between their bicycle wheels but it wasn't a ball it was a fluffy white cat, almost a kitten and whatever part of its fur wasn't fluffy and white was red and matted down with blood.
I don't know how and I can't react to this I slam down on the accelerator and run the next red light almost hitting this Korean lady who was just standing around aimlessly in the street and by the look on her face I can tell she thinks it's my fault and I guess it is since I ran the red light and pedestrians always have the right of way, even if they are standing around in the street like stupid assholes.
This is exactly the reason I need to skip school today; the fifth time this month, this October. Don't get me wrong I'm a good guidance counselor but some mornings I'm so overwhelmed by thoughts of Mr. Marlowe and whining kids saying, "I'm sorry Mr. Peterson," that I drive around for a while and listen to Mazzy Star. The tape hasn't worn out yet. Sometimes I drive to Long Island, to Glen Cove, and look at all the pretty high schools they have out there. The pretty high schools that pay their guidance counselors enough so they don't have to live in some shitty apartment in Sunnyside where all the filthy off-the-boat Irish are.
I drive around a lot since Egan was murdered.
She was my pet eagle.
I raised her from an egg.
Before she died Egan lived in a nest perched three stories up on the ledge outside my bedroom window.
I saved her egg from the psychotic bird murderer Cordeliers Briana, who has since gained some small amount of notoriety from his crimes.
Cordeliers Briana broke into my apartment about a year after I found Egan's egg and drowned her in bleach. To Briana it was the most important thing he ever did. As a guidance counselor I know something about minds and his mind is completely abstract. No concrete thoughts can exist in his head outside of a desire to murder birds and to never leave a bird murder incomplete.
Egan was in a green Tupperware bowl in my kitchen; her feathers all mushed up and white and her blood was so diluted by the bleach it didn't look like blood it looked like strawberry milk and even her beak was bleached and her Lauralei wig which had been brown was white, I focus on the concrete when it comes to Egan's death. All the far out stuff, like where do birds go when they die hurts too much to think about.
I look out the window again and I'm way past where those boys were and I can't see them anymore but I can still see the dead cat.
I still see Egan dead but it doesn't hurt because I watch it autistic like a horror movie, over and over in my head but I don't ever want to have any more movies like that filmed inside my brain.
I can only imagine how that poor cat felt and I wonder if those boys felt like Cordeliers Briana did when he tortured animals to death. I wonder if that cat was somebody's pet just like Egan was my pet. I wonder if that cat felt terror.
Terror surrounded Egan since her mom laid her. The day I found her egg I'd been hiking through Bear Mountain state park with Scott.
Scott's the only teacher at the school I like that much.
We were in the middle of the woods enjoying ham sandwiches when we saw this guy who looked like James Dean except he had these big nerd glasses on and a crooked bowl haircut and he was wearing a brown forties style high school basketball uniform with the number 42. The guy was fighting off two bald eagles that were attacking him.
When Scott and me came on the scene we realized that what was going on. The birds were only defending their nest from this guy who was no guy at all but the demon I now know as Cordeliers Briana.
Cordeliers was pressing on the trigger of a Raid bottle filling the air all around the eagles with poison. Scott always carried a metal baton that extended out from the handle. He brained Cordeliers with it and we both went to investigate the nest and left Cordeliers lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.
When I recall most of the events in my past the images are hazy but for horror I have the unfortunate gift of eidetic memory. I know photographic memory's been proven a myth but I can't forget the sight of crushed baby eagles. Do you know what baby eagles look like? They are tiny and covered in downy gray fur and I saw Egan hatch and she hatched with her eyes open ready to love.
And I still can't tear up the pictures of the mommy and poppy eagles suffocating; their lungs filled with poison, circling, turning blue and crashing into the branches of trees.
Cordeliers Briana gave me those pictures; he created them like some deranged digital camera. But there are also the special pictures, I have those too, like the way Egan looked the first time she flew. The way her face looked the first time she swallowed my cum when I fucked her beak; the understanding, "We're gonna make it through this," look she gave me when the vet broke it to us that because of the "games" I played with her she would never be able to lay eggs of her own. But most of all it was the first time she flew.
When an eagle flies it looks different than any other bird, when an eagle soars its feathers spread out and bend up at the tips like soft fingers. Loving fingers that touch you sometimes at night when you need it, when you need to feel the brush of a feather against your dick; the hot August nights when you just want to lay back with a cold Sunkist and a nice sandwich and watch your cum dribble through the little peaky holes in the sides of your sexy eagle's beak.
All the sexiest motherfuckers on all the streets of all the cities in the world couldn't feel the heat of me and Egan's love. You know something funny? This is something I think about a lot when I'm driving or I can't get to sleep. It was that sometimes during games with Egan I would think that I wanted to call her some kind of nickname for the way she was so good at pecking out the perfect spots on my dick. But for some reason I could never think of any famous people that were famous for being trackers.
If you asked me now I could tell you what her sexual nickname was. But what's the difference?
The Last of the Moheagles is dead.
I turn the next corner and make a U-turn after waiting for two lights. I want to get that cat. I want to find out who it belonged to. I want justice.
Briana didn't even get jail time for Egan's murder. He was charged with one count of animal cruelty and fined two hundred fifty dollars. Me and Scott both testified at the trial but it was pointless.
If people ever knew what went on between me and Egan I would probably be in jail. According to the laws in this state you’re better off murdering animals than making love to them. People always favor violence over affection. We are such a cold Puritan country that we are more comfortable dragging a cold knife blade across someone’s throat than we are putting a warm hand to their dick or eagle vagina.
Cordeliers even wrote The Birdler, a best-selling book based on the murder. It was classified as fiction for legal purposes but it wasn't. It was a first person novella, from Cordeliers’ point of view. The story started from him first killing a few pigeons that landed in his yard (he was from Ohio) and then going to New York and murdering millions of pigeons and then finding Egan's nest at bear mountain and killing her family and he documents the year he spent tracking me and Egan to my apartment which mostly consisted of him procrastinating for ten months and then looking me up in the phonebook. Even though the book was "fictional", it had a real picture of Egan on the cover, dressed in the same Lauralei Gilmore wig she wore the Halloween she was murdered.
Today is Halloween. It was so clichéd of Cordeliers to murder Egan on Halloween. Don't half the horror movies that come out take place on Halloween?
I forgot it was Halloween because nobody's dressed up. Most kids don't dress up around here. There are a lot of foreigners in Queens and they don't celebrate Halloween. I see the white cat though, still where the boys left her and she's dressed in her matted blood costume.
It reminds me of my last costume. The one I wore the last night me and Egan ever spent together.
I was in a red dress and a long brown wig. I walked around like a hunchback. I was Rory Gilmore, the daughter from the Gilmore Girls.
Egan was dressed in a pretty blue dress and a curly brown wig. She was Lauralei Gilmore the mother. I know it would have made more sense for Egan to dress as Rory but eagles have this obsession with posture, it affects their ability to fly and they take a lot of pride in it. She just couldn't bring herself to hobble around with a crooked back.
Scott completed our little Gilmore trio as the backwards hat man. I can never remember that guy's name but it can't be that important considering the show's writers never bothered to develop the character beyond his backwards hat and flannel shirt. We got the parts for our costumes from one of those temporary costume stores that open up in the city a month before Halloween.
Me and Egan had to dig through a pile of wigs and search pretty thoroughly to find what we needed. It helped that Egan could fly since she could reach the stuff that was stuck up near the ceiling and we didn't have to bother any of the employees for a ladder.
Scott had a pretty easy time with his costume. It was already prepackaged, complete with a backwards style hat and plastic smock with a picture of a flannel shirt and a cup of coffee printed on it. It wasn't officially licensed as a Gilmore Girls product but it was just like those unofficial Austin Powers costumes that obviously look like Austin Powers but are labeled, "60's Cool Guy" and make no actual mention of Austin Powers. Scott's costume was labeled "Backwards Hat Jackass".
It was a perfect coincidence for a beautiful Halloween. The last night I ever got to spend with Egan.
We spent the night drinking at this Irish pub called the Shillelagh that's near my place.
We entered the costume contest and lost to this guy dressed as Bono.
I hadn't planned on dancing but at one point this girl put Fade Into You on the jukebox and I picked Egan up and held her close to me. I pressed her breast against my nose and breathed her feathers in.
I wanted to hold my arms inside her, like the song said, I looked to her and I saw nothing, I looked to her for the truth. She dug her beak into my neck and I did fade into her, she was my bird, my neck bled and she nibbled the wound.
She lived her life, she went in shadows, I came apart and I went black. That eagle was some kind of light into my darkness...
There wasn't any dance contest but we would have won and I felt as the song faded out that somehow over those minutes snuggled together in the warmth of that haunted melody that our hearts had melted into one.
Scott wanted one more round and convinced me even though I was already drunk enough. Egan was tired and I told her she could fly home alone.
Fly home alone to where Cordeliers Briana waited for her with a jug of CVS flower-scented bleach.
I pull my car over and leave it double-parked with the hazards blinking just like the gypsy cabs. I walk down the sidewalk over to the dead cat and I hold it close to me and close my eyes and I dance because I've left the car door open and the music is playing. The same song, Fade Into You.
I hold Egan and I laugh because Cordeliers Briana is such a stupid asshole he really is. Did you know he copied his costume from an old picture of James Dean? I found it in a James Dean picture book. He just steals what he likes from other people’s lives. He's like that because he never loved anybody but himself, he's just like Gene Tierney in the movie because she thinks that nobody ever goes to heaven if somebody loves them because they will always live inside the person's heart and nobody loves Gene Tierney so they leave her to heaven. I'll leave Cordeliers Briana to heaven. Leave him to hell.
He can't take any responsibility for anything he does and he always feels sorry for himself. The Birdler is a tome to self-pity.
There have been people who died from having their dicks cut off and they didn't even cry about it. They took it as the course of war or life or whatever. So what's so bad about getting stuffed in bleach? At least it's interesting.
Some people die from tooth infections. In the end Cordeliers Briana's nothing but a tooth infection gone too far. Everybody dies and all Briana is an agent of death. He's a function of life and he's pathetic because he even failed at that.
Because I hold Egan here and I kiss her white feathers, which are fluffier and stickier than they ever were before. And all the people on Queens Blvd. stare at us because they just don't know. But anyone who's ever had a heart would know.
They would look at me dancing with Egan and see that I belong to no one else.