Pretty Sascha

Pretty Sascha

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Pretty Sascha was born to a pretty man and his pretty wife – realistically, it was inevitable that the child would be as luminous as the both of them. His father had feared just that – the burden of beauty that would inevitably fall on the youth of the boy who would be one of only two. The son born after pretty Sascha was lucky; somehow, he was ugly. His mother would bemoan sometimes that pretty Sascha had taken the burden of beauty on for the both of them; she believed that he had chosen to be beautiful as a fetus that didn’t want his brother to have the same defect and had sucked all of the loveliness that her womb would ever offer. Pretty Sascha refused to believe this. Not only was it a foolish superstition, but he refused to believe that he would have chosen that cross, even as a remarkably gifted and somehow cognoscente fetus. Pretty Sascha blamed fate, and to support that conviction, he offered the first in a long line of ironies that, like beauty, would never stop harassing him – When his father, a recent Russian immigrant, had held his already lovely baby boy, he had named him what he considered the toughest, manliest name he knew. His father didn’t know that the name he picked was used as a cute, popular name for little girls, and that pretty Sascha’s classmates would always consider him a boy that was named like a girl, versus singling out the female Sascha’s as girls that had been named like boys. His last name was Fyodorov, and it wasn’t particularly ironic at all.

Pretty Sascha’s loveliness was apparent very early on. When they had dressed him in the white gown that they baptize little babies in, and taken him to the church to be consecrated to the God who had cursed him, everyone had marveled at him like a little gem that had been polished to a blinding shine. Pretty Sascha, an innocent babe, had just enjoyed the attention that his loveliness got him, and had squirmed and raised his fat little arms and smiled with his tiny bow mouth. Pretty Sascha didn’t remember it, but when the tale was told to him, he half jokingly called it the beginning of the end. When pretty Sascha’s brother was born, a year and a half later, and had exited the womb ugly and short and wrinkled like a tiny old man, and had proceeded to grow into an increasingly stout and average toddler, his parents had heaved a sigh of relief. His father would always pat the boy’s head and make sure he understood how selfless pretty Sascha had been, to be born lovely enough for the both of them. Their father subscribed to his wife’s superstition, but the second son, like his brother, did not. His name was ugly Mikhail, and he just knew that his father loved his ugliness, that his father felt like it gave ugly Mikhail a chance. It was only later, when ugly Mikhail was a young man, and brokenhearted, that he wished he had been as pretty as pretty Sascha, but he never said it, as he knew that his father would scold him for not appreciating the gift of ugliness. Ugly Mikhail could see how his father looked at his plainness with envy; how it radiated off of him when he had a drink in his hand…

Their father, that is, pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail’s father, had lived in a fierce country in the middle of a period characterized by unrest and war. He had been as pretty as his son would be; except, his curls where the color of copper wire and he had never been told it was a bad to be gorgeous; he was petite and bright and pretty, and it took him from a small village to the big city. As a young man, a student at a conservatory where he studied the cello, he wore his hair long and protested in St. Petersburg, fiercely and fearlessly shouting FREEDOM at the top of his rebellious lungs; people where moved by his beauty and his conviction; his beauty made him well loved and tended to and listened to. His rich, talented friends always extolled him not to risk himself; protesting what would never change; they warned him to keep complacent, to secure his future. Their father, however, was young and would have no part of inaction; his copper curls and upraised fist became synonymous with the brewing revolution, and he was a minor local celebrity.

One night, as he walked the streets in search of booze and women, a group of off duty police in search of the same thing stopped him. They recognized him from the protest, and they wanted to ruin his loveliness; they wanted to posses and soil and shit on it, so they drunkenly molested and raped him until he stopped moving. One of the men had said that he was prettier then any woman they could have found; they called him sexy and fondled his flat chest and penetrated him with their hatred over and over again; they raped him with their anger and their pain and their own hopelessness until he couldn’t walk. And then, zipping their trousers up and leaving him bleeding and destroyed in that alleyway, they hoped that their feelings would die with him. Though no one would ever know, the men who raped their father had blamed anger and inebriation when they had become sober and had to justify raping a young man that, despite having differing political views, still had been a man. The blamed drunkenness, stupidity, anger and the ferocity that they where forced to live with. They blamed society and communism; they blamed war and their upbringing and their military training. They would all revisit that night again several times in their lives; they would drink until they stopped remembering and slip into sleep. They blamed themselves.

But, he didn’t die. Someone, one of his fans or just a good hearted Samaritan, must have found him and taken mercy on him, because he woke up in a hospital. The first woman he saw was the woman who would be pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail’s mother some day; he asked her to marry him before he left the hospital, and she had accepted. She married him because she was certain that a man as pretty as him would never marry a woman for vanity; it didn’t hurt that he was skilled and educated and famous. Their mother came from simple, hard working people and she could give him the selfless, slavish care he would always need. She also, quietly, loved his loveliness, despite the way he cursed it; she loved him too much to tell him. He certainly would have left her; and so she resented loveliness, too.(04)

This was the conflict that pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail where born into. Their father, unlike the police who blamed themselves, always blamed his own loveliness.

Loveliness, he would say to his sons, was like being born with a target painted on your forehead. Loveliness was like being convicted of being a million things that contradicted themselves and always having to convince people they did not apply. He never told his boy’s why he hated loveliness; and neither did their mother. He would just blame loveliness, over and over again.

And this is how the loveliest boy on earth learned to hate his beauty.

This entire sad legacy aside, pretty Sascha’s life was not unbearable. He grew athletic and excelled at soccer; the coach always accused him of being born to play the game, and this made his father very proud, as he valued ‘macho’ in his beauty cursed son very much. Ugly Mikhail showed no inclination for sports, and so he played the guitar; he felt things for the metal strings and amplifier that he knew he would never get from the outdated hollow of his father’s cello. Neither boy excelled at classroom studies.

Sascha’s beauty, the philosophy and theory and fear of his sons loveliness, consumed him. Sometimes, when he would sit and drink and reminisce about his own detested prettiness, he would get sucked into frustrated mulling over the trials he was sure Sascha would inevitably face. Their father had a twisted view of the world; his entire life and value system had been reset and reformed after the ugly thing that happened in that alley way.

Pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail where well aware of how their father felt about the way they looked; he always attached their attractiveness as a sort of prefix, if he used their first names at all. Everyone else, even their mother, called them Sasch and Mike, names that where less foreign and easier to equate with them; all American boys, the athlete and the rock star. (5)

And where they lived, an intellectual suburb where all boys where treated delicately and more humanely then most other places, and they where well fed and well loved, pretty Sascha was not as alone in his loveliness as his father had been. For those few years that he pushed through puberty, pretty Sascha was almost unremarkable. When his mother would point this out to his father, he would just shake his head. “I was average for a little while, too.” He would tell her, “and I know how loveliness will catch up to him.” If pretty Sascha was around, his father would gesture at him accusingly, warning in that seldom used mother tongue, “The best thing you could do for yourself, pretty, is to cut your face off now and burn your skin until it’s like leather. That’s the only reprieve, pretty. Make yourself ugly for loveliness does it for you.” He never said these sorts of things to ugly Mikhail, though, he said something else: “Ugly, you are so blessed. You are ugly like my father and my mother and loveliness had passed you over. No one will ever love you for your loveliness.” This was another irony in the funny story of the pretty Sascha; that the same beauty that had blessed their father when he was young; the same beauty that had sent him to cities and silently enchanted his mother was now considered a curse.

It was also ironic that ugly Mikhail, for his dishwater blonde hair and his dull, phlegmatic skin, was considered much luckier then his lovely brother.

When pretty Sascha turned 17, loveliness caught up to him and the world held its breath in adoration. He, a flower, had opened up fully, and the world buzzed with excitement. His loveliness was welcomed and threatening and magnificent. Pretty Sascha couldn’t go anywhere without being treated well; he was so lovely that people just wanted to be near him; they were bumblebees desperately competing for the pollination of his loveliness. Pretty Sascha was so beautiful that his brother, quietly involved with a girl who played keyboards in his band, found himself entranced with his loveliness and frightened of it. Now, more then ever (though it had always been wondered), people where startled at the contrast between them and confused by it. How could the (06) prettiest boy in the world have such an ugly brother? They started to tell their mother’s strange, superstitious story and people would accept it for lack of a better explanation --They both began to understand their father’s fears. The brothers saw first hand the preternatural prettiness that pretty Sascha had been gifted; they didn’t, however, understand that it truly was a curse.

The third irony, the killer irony, was this: ugly Mikhail’s girlfriend, the first and last one to look past his ugliness, was in love with pretty Sascha; captured by his loveliness and mesmerized by his radiating beauty. This girl that ugly Mikhail had given his whole heart to; this girl that had loved him, too, was suddenly gone; she said, “Mike, I’m in love with your brother. I’m sorry, but he’s so…beautiful. He’s so…illuminating. I really don’t know, exactly, but you’ve seen it, too, haven’t you? The way he just shines?”

There where more words, but ugly Mikhail couldn’t listen; he shut himself away, and his love offered her body and devotion to his brother in ways she, even after years, never had to ugly Mikhail. Pretty Sascha turned her down, and she, wounded and angry, told everyone that pretty Sascha was gay. “Have you ever seen him with a girl?” she would say, and, filled with jealousy and rejected lust, boys and girls would agree with her. He stopped playing soccer because boy’s groped him in the locker room; though they didn’t know it, they wanted the same thing that the men who had raped pretty Sascha’s father had wanted; to soil and piss on and spit on and ruin the beauty that pretty Sascha had been unfairly gifted with. As pretty Sascha grew lovelier and prettier and more beautiful, his brother’s sadness evolved into a cold, hateful jealousy. Ugly Mikhail hated his father’s legacy and he wished that loveliness had touched them both. He felt that pretty Sascha had stolen the only loveliness he had ever known from him, in the form of his girlfriend, and deserved anything that he got. When people asked ugly Mikhail about his lovely brother’s sexuality, he would shrug and he would tell them that he didn’t know. Sometimes, if ugly Mikhail was feeling particularly spiteful, he would tell them it was true.

Their father heard this, and he screamed at ugly Mikhail until he was red in the face; he slapped his ugly son and he scolded him for his selfishness and said nasty things about the girl who had left him in pursuit of his pretty brother. Didn’t he know, his father demanded, what men would do the pretty Sascha if they could only call him a fag? Didn’t ugly Mikhail know that peril he had put his brother in? Disgusted and intoxicated with rage and fulfilled fear, his father, beauty’s victim, threw ugly Mikhail out – he saw, in his callous son’s face, those men who had harmed him so long ago.

Ugly Mikhail could not have known this, and had gone in search of pretty Sascha; a knife clenched in his hand and stuffed in his pocket. He was going to, filled with pain and anger, scar up pretty Sascha and make him as ugly as his father had always wanted; he would make him un-lovely and remove the curse and make them equals again. He would, in making his brother ugly, cleanse himself of whatever crime his father blamed him of; even if he was unsure of what it was.

Ugly Mikhail felt the steely sheen of his hatred and his resolve deep in his heart and he calmly set forth. He would be the ugliness that killed loveliness, he decided, consumed with his ugly intent.(8)

Fate, however, disagreed with ugly Mikhail. He came upon his brother in a clearing; an undeveloped lot behind their house that was filled with tree’s and grass and weeds. The grass, un-mowed for years, was high around pretty Sascha; the sun was golden and bright, and it was kissing and caressing not pretty Sascha, but this boy who had suddenly, in this moment, become most lovely Sascha. In the presence of beauty unfurled and unguarded, the grass seemed to reach up to him and the sun reached down; the entire world wanted to be as close to most lovely Sascha as possible. Ugly Mikhail saw this and he realized it all perfectly; the world ceased to exist outside of the two of them, and the awe that ugly Mikhail felt was only thwarted by the hatred that filled his heart. Most lovely Sascha turned an eye to his intruding brother and he went suddenly cold. Most lovely Sascha rose to his feet and the grass wept (08) in his absence, the sun grew warmer and the birds sang in attempts to make most lovely Sascha smile. He had heard what his brother said; earlier, when a group of boys and girls filled with envy and malice had confronted him and cursed him and tried to tear his beauty down with hate, they had used ugly Mikhail’s name. He accused ugly Mikhail the same way that their father had; of disloyalty and stupidity and pettiness. Ugly Mikhail, still wounded from earlier, screamed and accused him back – “YOU stole love from me!” Yelled ugly Mikhail, “YOU always will! I will never escape my ugliness like you have been enveloped in loveliness!” most lovely Sascha had yelled back – “YOU can have it!” and, “YOU will always have normalcy! I will never escape our father’s curse!” and both of them meant it.

Consumed with pain, ugly Mikhail took the knife and he tried to take most lovely Sascha’s loveliness. Overcome with disbelief, most lovely thought that ugly meant to kill him, and so took his brothers throat in his hands and he wrung the life out of him; he suffocated him and crushed his throat with his athletic hands.

Ugly Mikhail was simply Mikhail in death; the ugliness had only been a reflection of most lovely Sascha’s beauty, and no longer on the level of consciousness, he became more important then their father’s strict understanding of physical attraction. In death, most lovely Sascha saw, Mikhail was a guitarist and a boy and a past and an achievement outside of ugliness or loveliness.

Overcome with envy that his brother, so easily, escaped the curse of their father’s defining pain, most lovely Sascha took the knife that his brother had pulled on him and thrust it into his stomach like a dishonored samurai. This is how ugliness killed loveliness, this was the final irony of his short life, and as most lovely Sascha bled out; and the grass wilted and the birds stopped singing and the sun hid. As the life drained from him, he was no longer the loveliest boy in the world and this suited him, just fine.

Peace

I am I am I am I am I am

the nuclear wasted archeris of a new era; chaos oozes off of me and sticks to the world in a heady syrup of unenlightened goo and challenges the status quo before it quietly irradiates it.

Chornobyl

You are standing in the middle of our home when the reactor fails; and I am suddenly aware of the small things that are dying. Im aware that Im the booze on your breath, Im that strange guitar you play when the alcohol is coursing through your veins. Im aware of that secret angry that no one see's, Im suddenly the hidden sweetness and I have always been the object of posession. I fall out of my brain and back into conciousness and Your pinning my mouth with kisses that alternate between anger and happiness, I cant differentiate, so I simply reciprocate and keep my eyes open so I can watch your face as the radiation starts to melt the world around us. You’re so sleepy; Once aware, you turn sluggish and our bodies gag on the radiaton; Im holding your hands, in the midst of the meltdown, and Im whispering suggestions and salutations in love’s stubborn ears -- you'll never understand what it means to have loved you. You think this meltdown is theirs, but it belongs to us. Outdated scraps of hollow experience; all of the past pains and loves shred in sync with the tender cells of our immune system and our brains slam into full, suffocating realization of iminent death. It sterilizes us and our minds give way to cellular rot and sickens us like dogs and we feel our bodies dying! Over stimulated nerves give way to a flood of endorphin’s as feelings melt away, Our hands melt into each others and we sob in the presence of each other's end; your so beautiful and an ugly death was the irony life perscribed.I am one with the reaper; and I am confronted with a first person viewpoint that serves as a metaphor as well; You got twisted up with an unstable reactor and Im taking us both down in an invisible infatuation of deadly energy. Delirium sets in and a string quartet wafts in as an auditory hallucination…

And we are reincarnated one last time.

Is this how you see me?

Persephone Out Of Hell
“This is how you see me?” Alyssa asked, holding the stiff art paper between her petite fingers. I glanced back at her quickly and gave her half a smile. “Sure it is, doesn’t it look like you?” And it did. The sketch which I had so absentmindedly thrown on paper the night before was a perfect representation of my beautiful friend, from the way her long ash blonde hair falls around her face, to the sharp warmth that appears in her otherwise frigid eyes after she starts to trust someone. I suppose what is so disarming about that portrait is that it is such a rare glance at what she truly is, something that very few people ever get to see, A Persephone riding out of the bowls of hell. Flanked by the remains of winter, and the first sprigs of spring, one thing of beauty melting into another, a cold glare before a warm smile, a constant reminder of the strange harmony that hot and cold can sometimes have.
When I met Alyssa, freshman year, I had already been through a lot. I had dropped out of middle school the year before after the stress of peer pressure and my own neurosis had become to heavy to bear, and I was just looking for a fresh start, a safe place to lick my wounds and get it over with. My first encounter with Alyssa was a week or two into the school year. I had not met her, in fact, I was barely aware she existed. Maybe she wanted to remedy that, because in no time, the word that she thought I looked retarded was an unpleasant stench on the usually neutral conversational flow. I was very offended, especially because I didn’t even know her!
Who was this anonymous girl to be making such vulgar assumptions about me? I was eating my lunch on the sidewalk of our campus chapel when she was pointed her out to me by a classmate. But that was totally unnecessary, I knew who she was the moment I saw her. To say she was a vision is a little bit heavy; she certainly was menacing, though. She wore our regular pleated green skirt and white polo shirt, but she paired it was a glaring, pumpkin orange sweater that buttoned once at her chest, leaving the rest of the very long orange garment open. It blew in the wind behind her, the ends flapping like tail feathers. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a knot, and long silver earrings blew around her long neck. She twisted her thin coral lips up at me and raised an eyebrow, challenging me to take her bait and officially butt heads. I didn’t, but I knew from that moment on that she was going to have a key role in the drama of my high school days, be it for good or bad.
Of course, I was right, and by the end of that year, our initial, non direct conflict was long buried and we had become very friendly. She followed me through every trend I fell victim too, and I did the same. There was always a deep seated inequality to our relationship, however, and it made itself glaringly clear just by looking at us. She was skinny, blonde and breathtakingly beautiful; I was fat, with short, dark hair and no sense of my own appearance.
When I entered my third and last year of high school, the problem fixed itself. My appetite waned, my complexion cleared up, and the pounds started to come off. Slowly, I went from a lifetime of being the ugly duckling to socially acceptable. I had the self confidence I had always dreamed about, and Alyssa had someone to look good with.
Despite the symbiosis we had suddenly attained, as I continued to loose weight, an invisible tension festered between us. Of course we needed each other; no one looked as good together and turned as many heads as us. But there was something that was ready to snap, and I could have sworn I felt it physically when it did. Alyssa and I were sitting together, and I was babbling about how close to being the same weight we were. I was high on attention and energy, and there were sailors in town, which only doubled it. Alyssa stared at me, and everything about her froze instantly. “You are not as attractive as me. Our measurements may be close, but that’s crap. You have much, much bigger thighs then me, and a shorter torso. So don’t even think your anywhere near me.” She stated, as if it was a matter of fact, with a voice so steely that it was as if she was trying to slice through me with it. I was briefly stunned, but I was not hurt. I felt a wave of sadness, pity and realization wipe over me. Her regular mask of complacence and assurance had melted away to reveal all the ugliness and vanity a single girl could hold within her. And for the first time ever, I saw her clearly. The girl I had never quite viewed as being anything more then a beautiful face and body was a full realized sketch of herself that included insecurities just like mine, fears just like mine, and everything else I had never attributed to her.
To this day, Alyssa and I are still close. I learned to accept her as what she is, my best friend, my favorite accessory, and someone with whom I share a kind of relationship that I don’t think anyone in the whole world could understand quite like we do. She is my Persephone, constantly caught between winter and spring, and I am her faithful admirer, the one who is waiting, through the cold, just to glimpse the glory of the spring.

New Note: I wrote this is a college paper in Feburary of 2006. While we are not as close as we used to be (putting it mildly), She is still a Persephone. Just not mine.

What if you got to heaven, and God told you...?

"Your religion was untrue, my child." He says, his ego lighting the heavens. I frown at him. It isn't really his fault; Ultimate power and all.

"Its alright, Lord. I tried to opt out of the judgment, but I was curious. how great are my sins?"

"Not many; You where compassionate, yes, but promiscuous. You endured travesties with grace, but reminisced with a sharp tongue. You read my book, you pointed out editing errors to all who would listen -- And evangelists get a special permit, just because the incurred your damnable wrath. You loved all my creatures, Elle, But I fear twas not enough. If only you had accepted Jesus as your Savior, you would be here with me.You have worshiped falsely, lived by fnords and neglected my teachings as bulldada, and you did not repent on your death bed.

For that I am truly sorry."

We begin to walk towards the escalator.

" 'Twas' Is archaic, lord."

God sighs. "Indeed. I use it excessively, and no one dares to point it out. They really fear the smiting."

I look down the escalator, I peer down at Hell.

"I'm going to go now, God. I think I was correct. This is discord, this is Chaos. After a life on earth, do you think I could settle into this eternity of peace stuff? Im sorry, God. I wish we could hang out more, but the escalator only goes down."

God shrugs. "Heaven and hell must be seperate.Those who believed truely must be rewarded."

God holds out his hand, and a golden apple materializes. I take a bite out of it, and toss it back to earth.

I step on the escalator.

"I have a date with Freddie Mercury." I explain. God nods, and he slowly turns and walks away.

Zombie Love

Its so dark, and I love you so much. Its black and pink, and scrawled across my cheast and your eyelids. Our muscles hurt and our nerves dont work, but we pretend. We asked for this eternity, we begged for this non stop celebration, and we arent stopping now; embalming fluid pours out of
our putrid pores like the sweat that doesnt exist to us anymore. And the rancid stench of death is the price, but Im grinding on your lovely decomposition and it turns me on in ways my body cant reciprocate. What once was living bundles of fat and twitching muscles are no longer
so lucky; sensations are all abstract and bleed into each other. I see the world through the eyes of a modern artist and I raise my arms above my head.
Skin falls down, its sloughing off and falling at my feet. I shake my hair around, and chunks of it fly like mayflys, in a dizzying tornado. Your grabbing me against you, and your so cold I can barely stand it. In first grade, I figured out how to use ING. Sometimes, great expanses of grass blend together in my memories to make neighborhoods that never existed. My mind is wandering for the last time, and the bass is thudding. Its what makes us move. Your face is gone. Your so beautiful underneath your skin, all those muscles and bones, and your beautiful eyeballs. Your the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. We sway to the eternity, and our pieces fall off of us at alarming rates. We kiss one last time, and If I tasted you, it would have been rancid. I love you.

The Illegal Leopards Story

The drums are thudding, the bass is pounding, the guitar is moaning, and I am screaming your names. This is what I live for, The euphoria of preformance, the natural high I get, straddling the audience between my legs and belting out my lyrical heart. The microphone is my chalice, the vocalist is my avatar.
Its a connection you cant possibly understand if you havent done it; Its something enchancted, something that rabbles, rouses and rebels. You didnt have to like me, but I did it, and I fought for every preformance in a sea of much better vocalists and more popular setlists. That was us, though. Pure, roots Rock. We waved one finger salutes to our conformist collegues and played sweet originals and catchy 70's songs that no one needed to know.
I remember how we reached the pinnacle, We jammed on our mountaintop in a steady stream of good ideas and better music. It was powerful stuff, we all loved it fiercly, no matter what anyone says in retrospect. It fed on the vibes, the chemistry, and it was electric, it made us feel like we were changing things, like real rock and rollers. We made music that the audience wasent supposed to like. But they seemed to like it, and if they didnt, we genuinly liked it enough not to give a flying fuck. We thought the odds were on our side. We were all so different, but we had that good old rock and roll, thats all it took, right? But maybe we werent all naive, the bassist played our swan song from day one. He's all I have left today. He sealed our fate between tobacco stained fingers with a first day prophecy, "This is as good as it gets, Its all down hill from here."
We were just so heady from the rush of descension that we didnt know we were loosing altitude. It was popular acclaim, Then it was bad shows, and suddenly, it was the descent into social pariah, and then we were dead. The drums and guitar fled while they could, but the rest of us had no escape hatch. We didnt know it yet, but starting to care had been what did us in. It was the weakness that made us susceptible to breakage, and it was the flaw that shattered us.
Whats left of us still pluck the chords from dead songs in the ditch of lost dream; they are beautiful things that you'll never get to hear, private things that are only ours. They could have been much more. I know we were falling, but we were happy, and when I crashed, I fixed my eyes on the sky, waiting for everyone else to meet me at the bottom.
But they didnt; they were picked up by musical vultures who picked off the peices they wanted
and left the rest of us for dead, manipulating the factors that caused us to hurdle to our demise.
I lay here now, in a puddle of caked dissapointment and dead songs, bruised from head to toe, and I dont know If I want to recover. Im not sure if this is Monte Christo, this just might be Rockeo and Rolliet.

But I was singing.

And If I had to do it over again,

I would.

P.S. I dont think Illegal Leopards deserved anything longer.