Sunbathing underground.

I wipe my brow and hold the pole like everyone else, (how many people’s sweat do I have on my hands?) and it is slippery (what hand cream did they use?) and warm (isn’t hepatitis catching this way? …I have to wash my hands!) and I search for a place with a cool breeze. After all, the air conditioning has to come out somewhere.

Turning to face the door, I lean against the glass. I refuse to look at my own reflection. It’s my vanity that stops me, really. I am "cute" and admiring myself would only ruin the opinion of any that happen to be surveying me at the moment. I never admire my reflection in public. I do that on my own time.

So the train rattles and hums and sparks, and I start buscando el tracks for a sign of Life. It’s like a scavenger hunt for me, seeing a rat would be good luck, and I watch for those legendary Subway Rats. The conductors tell me they can be bigger than cats. I’ve never seen any, but I look anyway, and I’ll make sure to buy a Lotto ticket if I see one. Plus, there’s bigger game…. I look for people.

"People" could mean several things, like a graffiti artist tagging his (or her) ritualistic 4-letter code. "SANE" is a big one here, his/her tags are all over the place, even deep-deep in the tunnels. It makes you wonder exactly how sane he, she, or it really is when having your name seen is more important than hanging off the side of an overpass, or being hit by an oncoming train.

I think people have a tendency to think of trains in two dimensions, back and forth spread out horizontally on a map. It’s easy to forget they go down as well. I can see the levels as I look out the door, a train passes below us to our left for all the world as if we were flying, and when it’s gone I can see –

--What? More graffiti?

There is a limit to where even a tagger will go. They prefer not to get too far from the safety of the platform. Some will venture as far as thirty or forty feet, but paint starts getting pretty thin out there (if you’ll pardon the pun) and competition for tag space isn’t a really big issue. The art I see is a hundred feet out, and twenty feet down. In order to paint that, somebody actually had to scale a wall. It’s detailed too, in reds and blacks with highlights of white and yellow. We pass it so fast, I can’t see what it is, and then the view of the lower tracks is obscured by wall. And legs.

There are three pairs of legs laying over the track, still wearing pants and shoes. There are no torsos, no blood with these legs, and they are spread out over the track as if they were relaxing from the heat.

And my God, the heat is baking through the glass. No one sees it but me, no one cares and we pass the legs as swiftly as we had passed the paint. Only me, buscando el tracks, too vain to stare at myself in the glass, too restless from the heat to close my eyes, only I see.

They looked as if they were cut in half.

When I was younger I worked in a stable. One of the stable cats (every stable has several) came trotting in with a mouse. I wanted to do the right thing and release the mouse, so I caught the cat and pinched its mouth open. I pulled the mouse loose gently by the tail so I wouldn’t get bit, but it had no head. It was just….missing…pinched off neatly at the neck with no blood. I gave it back to the cat, which looked at me like I was an asshole and walked away.

These legs were similar in that there was no blood, they seemed to be pinched off at the waist. And they were dusty, almost white, like they had been there a long long time.

Well, I’m no dummy. Dust means they’ll be there tomorrow, and then I’ll get a good look at this nonsense. Everyone else may be blind, but I’ve never been interested in being like everyone else anyway.

And may it go from my mouth to God’s ears, because for the next two days I am totally blinded by a non-window seat in an air-conditioned car. Bliss! Does life get any sweeter than cold a/c in a heat wave?

Day three, however, and I’m back at the door glass, buscando el subway when I suddenly remember and I notice the tags more. They were always there, but I see them more, etched onto the glass, maybe with keys. "THE SERIAL KILLERS 3" is a new one. I picture three fourteen year old boys struggling desperately to be cool, smoking pot, crack, and cigs, and wheezing like old men by the time that they’re twenty. Tough break, mon. The city can be like social Darwinism for teenagers. They’ll shoot each other and themselves I’m sure, hopefully before they do much damage to the rest of the world.

…Hey…maybe that was their legs on the tracks…wouldn’t that be a hoot.

"BAAL" is a relatively new one as well. Now that is funny. Picture a Lord of Hell in saggy baggy jeans and a backwards baseball hat. Interested in graffiti nonetheless.

Well, I look out of the glass with a purpose now. I can see the paint again, finally, and it looks like a mass of tangled lettering. Some tags are excessively hard to read. I mean, really, they might as well be a 3-D rendering of spaghetti.

However, though the artwork is illegible for the 1.5 seconds I have to observe it, it is exquisite. The shading and the scrollwork are impeccable. A real artist did this, someone with a gift, not some sorry-ass punk with no future. This one needs to get into advertising and design and have a life.

Then it’s gone, and I don’t even realize I’ve been holding my breath. I know, random acts of senseless beauty and all that crap, but this goes above and beyond. I want to burst into applause, but the rest of the passengers would get a little edgy. Besides, it’s so hot in here, and didn’t I take this car for the air conditioning? What happened to it all?

I’m fanning myself when we pass the legs. They are definitely dismembered, but in a bizarre, peaceful sort of way. (Oh yeah….if there’s a peaceful way to rip your legs off.) What happened to the torsos anyway? Are these things trash or sentinels? And who would do such a thing?

Just as suddenly, the temperature drops. No one seems the wiser. Unfortunately, I’m used to that. I call it my "Witchy Sense" or my "Radar", but it usually picks up NON-mundane things, like other people’s thoughts, "good" or "bad" energy…what’s with the heat? It’s like a furnace there, but only there.

Well, I kind of figure the whole things moot. There’s no way I’m crawling down into the tunnels to find out. No fucking way.

You know the creator, right? Same Great Being that brought you Loki and Coyote, right? And Boazado, if you believe my friends, the Great Clown God. Real Pie-in-the-face kind of a Being. Mark my words. Never Swear.

The Creator loves to make a liar out of people.

So here I am, drunk off my ass, and crawling through the intestines, or perhaps the Gastro Intestinal Tract of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Honest To Fucking God Subway System.

My clothes are covered in all kinds of shit, and its not pleasant at all. If I wasn’t drunk I’d go mad, not crazy, because "crazy" is so damn cliché that it doesn’t even touch the edge that I’m on.

I was out partying, right? Minding my own (and several other peoples) business, drinking myself into a good stupor. I was hoping to hook up with some hotty this evening, and if life was fair, I’d be pulling some woman on top of me while we laughed alcohol-breath kisses into each others mouths.

Thanks, Loki. Thank you so much.

She was a little too sick for company, (read: "puking her guts out") and I, knowing that going to another bar and finding another girl was the better part of Valor… split. She’d probably blame it on herself for being so sick, and the next time I saw her I could pick up where I left off anyway. So the Gods, in their oh-so-ironic senses of humor---

--Broke down my train.

Hey, I got a forty in a paper bag, I got a knife tucked into my bra (snikt—"Wanna party?") I’m drunk off my ass, and there is no fucking way I am sitting in that powered down train in the dark when I could walk my way to civilization if I just avoid the third rail. Piece – O – Cake.

Or so I figured.

Thanks Loki…no really. I mean it.

C’mon girl, head up. Head for the light. No sweat. You’ll come crawling up onto the platform and people will scatter as you climb forth, grease smeared all over your face—

--When suddenly my brain says, "Oooooo! Shiny!" and I see the tag.

No, it’s not a tag. It’s a picture. I stare long and hard at what I’ve only seen for a second or two at a time until now. I search for the patch I must have seen so many times (it feels like so many times….Why does it feel like so many times?) and I trace the letters with my eyes, the letters that aren’t letters but—

--Limbs? What kind of fucking picture is this anyway? People don’t look like that, they don’t — they…

There is a woman being raped by a thing. If the thing looked real I would probably puke right now, but it’s stylized, like Keith Haring used to do. It’s a man, kind of, with the head of a dog. (It’s a jackal, I know it’s a jackal….man I HATE fucking Satanists.) I hear the "ssss" of a leaking steam pipe and it’s so hot and humid I can’t breathe. The woman looks real, on her hands and knees trying to crawl away. Her eyes are wide and bulging as she turns to see the thing behind her, it’s tongue lolling out of its mouth and it’s smiling, its claws sunk deep into her hips making her bleed and I hate this, I hate looking at it, IhateitIhateitIhate—

So I spin my back to it and uncap my forty. I take a long drink and wipe my brow, and thank God that I am as drunk as I am. The heat is terrible, the hissing of the steam is so loud, and for a second it pauses and is followed by a rattling sound like—

--Oh Fuck.

I snarf my beer and start coughing, and the spray paint noise stops. I know, this time I really know in my gut that I am probably going to die. My only surface thought is that I hope I can do it as quietly and as graciously as possible so I can deliver as little satisfaction as possible. Pleasepleaseplease God, don’t let them do anything to my eyes, and I turn to see.

If I weren’t so shocked, I’d be laughing.

It’s a demon. I’ve seen them before, I know how to recognize them but usually they’re naked. This one seems to have a city-surfer look to him, like one of those skate rats in the park. He’s wearing baggy overalls with no shirt, and he’s got his hat on backwards. His skin is red, almost maroon, and his eyes are black balls in his head with no pupils….or maybe all pupils, I can’t tell.

Thank God. If it was a Satanist, they’d be firing up the ‘cue right about now. I might make it out of this in once piece. Please don’t let me fuck this up.

O.K., no fear, No Fear…Indignance, maybe, or respect, but Never Fear…then they have you.

He tilts his hat back and scratches his head at me, confused. God it is so fucking hot here! Even he’s sweating a little.

"So you’re Baal, huh?"

He smiles and laughs a little, spreads his hands and bows slightly. His hair is thin along the temples, and I think he might be bald under that hat. His smile would be really nice if it didn’t have so many pointed teeth, and God DAMN if that isn’t the hottest body I’ve seen since High School. I love ‘em long and lean like that…

…Ahem…back to business.

"I somehow pictured you a little bit…bigger…you know?"

He gets annoyed for a second, and then laughs, waving his hands in front of him like I’ve got it all wrong. "Ooooh! You mean THAT Baal!…Nonononono…I’m not THAT Baal…." He stares at the floor for a second and says, "I wouldn’t be if you paid me…I’m one of his kids."

"Baal has kids?"

"Oh yeah. Hundreds. Maybe over a thousand."

"Oh." There’s an awkward silence for a moment, and again I am struck by the blackness of his eyes, and his surfer mentality. I can get out of this, I know I can. If I play it just right.

He must feel awkward in the silence too, because he breaks it by stepping back and pointing at his newest creation saying, "You like?" It’s just his name this time, done in greens and yellows and blacks. H really did pull out some wonderful shades there.

"Yeah, I do. I was going to say you should go into advertising, but you probably already have."

"We all do a little. Kate Moss was my cousin’s idea. Between the dissatisfaction that women have with their bodies and the glorification of the heroin culture, she was brilliant. I never think of anything good like that. She alienated the entire female population and made them think it was their fault, can you believe that? People are so stupid—no offense, Mowgli. I can call you that, right?"

"How do you know that name?"

"Easy, you’re my job. I know all about you."

"I have my own personal Demon?"

"NOT!…Sorry, you aren’t that important. I’m in charge of the Pagans that commute from Long Island to New York for work every day."

"That’s ridiculous!"

"It most certainly is NOT ridiculous! Fastest growing religion in the world, right? Save the Planet, right? Why wouldn’t we want to keep an eye on that? Besides, you’re someone else’s job when you’re in Manhattan, and another’s altogether when you’re at home."

"Then you must be slacking….I’ve never been tempted on the train."

He looks affronted. "I’m working on it! You think it’s easy? You don’t tempt easy, you know….with those fluffy New Age Pagans it’s easy. Throw a battered friend at them who doesn’t believe, they’ll do a healing spell without their permission. Next have their lover leave, maybe take some of their stuff, they’ll magick it back. Then try a begging best friend with a broken heart, they’ll do a love spell. From there it’s a very short walk to magicking away everything and removing free will." He walks closer to me, so close that he’s almost up against me. His red skin smells vaguely of cinnamon, and as he speaks I see there are three rows of teeth in his mouth. "….But you know all about that, don’t you Mowgli?" Suddenly, he is not a stupid surfer boy, he is Predator, Owl to my Mouse, Snake to my Frog. His breath smells like raw meat, and he pins my arms to my sides so I cannot move. I try to twist away, but he holds me with almost no effort at all. His words come faster and faster, and my face is whipping back and forth like I’m being slapped.

"How did you do it Mowgli? We almost had you, didn’t we? Didn’t we?" He shakes so my teeth rattle and I scream trying not to hear anything he says. "All that anger, all that exquisite pain, Five suicide attempts, five of them (and that last one with the broken glass in the playground, that was Art, Mowgli), drug addiction, bad debt, abusive childhood, rape, abortion, incest—"

He releases me, and I rub my arms. I know I’m going to bruise.

"—Mowgli, we gave you everything! Where did we go wrong?"

It’s a trick of some kind, to humiliate me or intimidate me, I know that. I reach back into my mind trying to figure out, where did they go wrong?

"I think it was the nightmares. I distinctly remember one of you betting on me. He said he would give the Souls of three priests to the one who could corrupt me. That’s when I knew I had value." The sweat is stinging my eyes (is that tears?) and I am desperate to change the subject. It is so hot, SO FUCKING HOT, and it slips out of my mouth before I can stop it. "Why do you guys have to keep it so fucking hot anyway?"

"Oh. That’s not me. That’s Hell."

"Well tell them to lower the thermostat!"

"Tell them yourself! It’s right down this tunnel!" The thought pauses me. He’s not serious is he? "Oh sure, you’re all mouth until you run right into it—"

"Hell is here?"

"Yeah. You and your fucking subway construction. You went too far this time."

"You’re kidding me."

"What? You think because Hell is a religious thing it’s not a geographic place? Wake Up, Baby, it’s underground, it always has been, and the heat is from the planet’s core. You fucking humans and your overpopulation, always digging and searching! How would you like it if one day you were kicking back, watching TV when—"

"I don’t watch TV"

"—I know, but pretend you did-- and then one day some asshole knocks down your living room wall to lay down some train tracks!"

"You’re saying that Hell is suffering from the destruction of its habitat?"

"That is exactly what I’m saying."

"Next thing you know you’ll be saying you’re an endangered species!"

"No. Enough of us can pass as the homeless for us to survive."

I think about it, and it’s not impossible. How many of us actually really look at homeless people anyway? I’d notice the red skin right off, but I’m sure they can disguise themselves…"Really?"

"Absolutely. Why do you think crime is so high in Manhattan? And where do you think all the homeless came from? After a while, some of them don’t even remember us anymore…they think they’re really human. It’s terrible really, but a little Demon Blood might do you some good."

I’m insulted. The retort comes out before I can stop it. "Oh Yeah? Well a little Human Blood might fix you right up!"

He smiles, and all three rows of teeth look excessively sharp. "Oh, you’re right, Mowgli," he whispers, and when he licks his lip his tongue is pointy and thin. His nostrils flare with my scent as he steps closer and whispers again, "It might fix us up just fine."

NoFearNoFearNoFearNoFear….I grit my teeth and dig in. When I ignore the fear, it’s not so hard. I’ve been doing it to men all my life. I step closer and smile. "So what’s your dad think of your Art? Is there more? Can I see it? Feel like taking me on a tour?"

He lights up and agrees. Love ‘em dumb. I ask for someplace cooler and he still agrees.

Heeeeey….Is he a sucker? Or am I getting played here?

We walk upwards and he is my escort, my arm linked in his. There are no trains, and as we rise it gets cooler and cooler. I finish my forty and leave the bottle somewhere on the ground among the other trash. He shows me several pieces, and I "oooh" and "aaah" in all the right places. I offer some criticisms too, (hey, I’m no kiss-ass) when we come to something really ancient. I mean, the art itself isn’t ancient, but it’s a reproduction of something ancient. It’s a spray-paint rendition of some seal or another, not the seal of Solomon, I’d recognize that, but some of it actually appears to be angelic in overtone. I smirk at him and point my thumb at the painting. "Homesick, are we?"

He shakes his head sadly, "That’s an older piece. I was trying to impress my father. He’s very ‘old school’, you know? ‘We have TRADITIONS!’ and ‘We have RULES!’ He didn’t take it very well. He said he wouldn’t accept art in such a modern media, and then he said, ‘Now get that piece of shit off of my wall.’ He’s really in denial right now."

"About what?" This was genuinely interesting. "I thought you guys just ran around waving candy at people or something. I didn’t think you had any family dynamics…?"

"We didn’t until the subway came….it’s kind of hard to explain….Look, do you know any of the rules?"

I assumed he meant the rules of dealing with humans and vice versa. There are rules on both sides. As far as Demons are concerned, most of those rules involve what you are and aren’t allowed to do to corrupt somebody’s soul. For instance, if they physically torture you into relinquishing your God, then they didn’t really accomplish anything, because you would admit to being a tiny ball of phlegm if you were being tortured. To corrupt you, they have to have your ‘permission’ in a way. It’s a weird system, but it makes total logical sense. "Sure. Always be polite, you won’t lay a hand on us unless provoked. You don’t win unless we give in from temptation. Physically killing us loses the soul before corruption. Torturing us means you lose. Breaking the body doesn’t break the spirit. Stuff like that."

"Right. But the last two generations of Demons don’t know that."

The ramifications of that thought are just too huge for me to deal with right now….I have to deal with Baal if I want to get out alive. C’mon Girl. Stick to that subject! "That’s just common sense!"

"I know, but they don’t have any. The subway broke into our world, and the children were too busy watching T.V. through your windows, trying heroin or crack, possessing the homeless and having sex with their bodies. They have no discipline! It’s as if all they want to do is have a good time….they don’t understand the order of things, and they don’t care. Some of them really do forget where they come from, I’m not kidding. They don’t respect their elders, they always cut class—"

"Class? You have school?"

"You aren’t born into this world corrupting. It’s an art, you have to want it. In my day we’d be flayed for cutting class, but now…well…you can’t flay everyone…"

He rambles on and on, and I’m simultaneously horrified and amused. He sees my smirk as we get within running distance of the platform. It’s pretty deserted except for the standard homeless and he snaps at me. "What’s so funny?"

"That Hell has a Gen-X problem."

"Jennex? What’s that?"

"Not Jennex. Gen X. Generation X. The term refers to our latest generation. Inflation has caused both of their parents to work. The ease of divorce has had them split up while the children were still growing up. Technology has caused them to be raised on television and computers. Their parents don’t understand them, and they seem to have little respect for authority or tradition. They have short attention spans, and the incidences of violence among them appears, at least to me, to have skyrocketed."

"Generation X….," he rolls the word around a bit to see if it fits. I can appreciate that. I like my words to be accurate, even if they are coming out of a mouth with so many teeth. I seize my chance and run like a bitch.

"Mowgli! Wait!" he yells, but I do NOT wait, I am focused on one thing, and that is living to see another day. Adrenaline kicks in and I MOVE my chubby little body, cursing every day that I stopped my martial arts training. The platform gets closer and closer when I run right into him, his long lean body so much younger, healthier, and faster than mine.

And of course, now he’s angry. His teeth (so many teeth!) bare when he speaks. "I told you to wait."

"I’m sorry. I didn’t know Free Will was in short supply this week. Did I use up my quota?" He raises his hand to slap me, the nails aren’t claws but they are thick and pointed and brown. The cinnamon skin with the bulging bicep is beautiful and terrible with force. I flinch and block instinctively.

The blow never comes.

I look at him and he is sitting on a raised section of the floor, head in his hands, hat in his lap. He is speaking to the floor, weary, and I can see he is bald, hair only at his temples, dark brown spots like freckles on his head. "I can run faster, Mowgli. I can teleport if I want. Don’t run. Tell me the answer."

"To what?"

"Tell me how you are solving your Generation X problem. If I could bring an answer to my father I could redeem myself. I could—"

"We don’t have one."

He looks stunned, then suspicious, then confused. If his eyes weren’t solid black balls it would probably be very cute….or at least appealing. "We don’t have an answer. They have raised themselves, they respect only themselves. Only time can show them the error of their ways. They don’t listen to advice, and they only want to be entertained. The average job doesn’t do that. I don’t know what will happen to them."

He nods his head. He looks a little broken, and that is sad. He gets up and dusts off…then surprisingly, he dusts me off too. "Let’s get you home," he says, "I can take you to your platform."

"You’re going to let me go?"

He laughs at that. No, he laughs at ME, I think, I have amused him. "I was never going to keep you. What would the purpose be? What would I do with you? Besides," and he smiles at me sideways, "We’re neighbors now, whether we like it or not…can’t we all just get along?"

Is he flirting with me?

We walk to my platform and wait for the train. Nobody looks twice at my red-skinned, pointy-eared escort. I asked him why, and he shrugged it off saying, "They just see something else." He wouldn’t explain any better than that.

My train was coming, and he touched my cheek like a lover. "Good Night Mowgli, Child of the Lord and Lady, Daughter of Eve, She-Who-Speaks-The-Truth…I will still be after you, you know. But you are blessed with true-sight. Have mercy on our children, or we will be exterminated."

I smile and touch him back, searching for the words. "Good Night Baal, son of Baal, Rider of Subways, Creator of Art, He-Who-Hears-The-Truth. Have mercy on our people or we will, indeed, exterminate you. May you always be level-headed enough to hear that which will help you." I get on and sit down, and watch him through the glass until he’s gone. I sleep on the train for an hour, then I get off and wait for the bus for a half hour. I sleep on the bus for half an hour, and get off at my stop, walking home. It’s already pretty light out, it’s been quite some time. I’m half a block from my house when I see all the colors in the street. I see reds and pinks and blacks, and I think to myself, "Oh no he didn’t."

But he did. In front of my house on the street there is a giant tag.

My first thought, of course, is, "What will the neighbors think?" But if what he says is true, it’s only a short matter of time before they are my neighbors. And what did hey say…that Rodney King quote, "Can’t we all just get along?" Wouldn’t that be the only way our mutual species could coexist? By trying to not kill each other?

I don’t understand the tag. It says "I DID IT!" and the exclamation point is a bright light bulb, like a bright idea. He did what? He thought of something? Underneath it is the word "campari". Is that foreign? It sounds so familiar…

It’s not until the new ad campaign for Campari (Rum? Gin? I can never keep those two straight) hits the subways that I understand. I see the girls with that strange orange tone of skin, and I wonder if they, too, smell of cinnamon. I know also, that when they finally make an appearance somewhere, they will be thought of as a publicity stunt, and nothing more. Everyone I know will want to bang them…myself included. I stare at those red-orange curves, and I wonder if she fucks better than I do.

I laugh a little at that. I’m so vain, and it occurs to me that Baal may be onto something.

Perhaps the way to reach Generation X is to go through the only thing that they listen to.

The media.

That’s assuming, of course, that this isn’t all lies. Demons are BORN to lie, it’s what they do best, (except fuck, of course…..I’m pretty sure about that.) Maybe this is all my turn on the wheel…maybe Baal couldn’t tempt me any other way.

Maybe he just hit me in my big ol’ Pagan Soft Spot – The endangerment of a species and a lifestyle due to human stupidity.

I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure of one thing.

Confusion must be the first step of the corruption process.

What did I say? "May you always be level-headed enough to hear that which will help you."

My God, what have I done?

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