Plot is a character - TLC 34

 “I will tell you the secret,” said a silver shop owner in Istanbul. “Be honest. If you rip someone off, if you cheat them in the slightest, you will lose them and then you will lose others.”

“Thanks,” said Lucky, “it’s a karmic lesson. I will share life’s secret with you. Laughter.” Wind-spirits howled.

“I am a gelotologist,” said Bamboo conducting a careful study of laughter. Ha, ha.

He wandered with Leica and Nikon tools. Visual experiments. Shoot through things. Breathe and squeeze. Smile and sit still. Patience. Dance around your subject. Focus on spectators at an event. Move like a ninja. Geometry. Spontaneity. Hunt and trap. Embrace extreme situations. Be an invisible non-shadow.

The Museum of Archeology in Istanbul offered historical perspectives of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian sagas singing civilizations.

Cuneiform writing symbols told Sumerian stories. Scribes etched symbols in wet clay with narrow sharp reeds.

Greek and Roman statues surveyed visitors.

Greeks idealized the human form.

Romans focused on realism.

Bust heads.

Apollo, Aphrodite, Pan, Marcus Aurelius, Sappho the poet.

* 

Human-propelled factory buses roared around Bursa collecting worker aunts and uncles intent on daily toil and simple job satisfaction inside production and consumption machines. Rusty neighborhood loudspeakers imported from Hanoi exhorted:

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Turkish/French car companies and textile factories proliferated with a bumper crop of shirts and pants.

Asian babies had babies.

Fat happy housewives dusted, mopped, moped, morphed and scrubbed lives. Simmer tomatoes. Women rolling grape leaves filled with their husband’s crushed nuts gossiped in alleys near crumbling stone and thatch homes below the Ulus Roman citadel overlooking the Plain of Jars laid waste by relentless U.S. bombing in a nine-year covert war.

They destroyed lives to save them from future suffering.

TLC in Bursa made arrangements for a new teacher. TLC went through teachers like a hot knife through butter or a serrated scalpel through cancerous tissue.

“To cut or not to cut,” is the literary polishing process, said Omar.

“Caress one line of sharp description,” said Zeynep. “I love divine details the reader can visualize or imagine. My job is to give you the situation. Your job is to experience it. Recreate the human experience as truthfully as possible.”

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals,” said Bamboo. “Plot is not something that happens to a character. Plot is a character dragging others around.”

“Save the strong, lose the weak,” whispered a word surgeon walking their rounds from Tibet to Sichuan to Fujian to Ankara before Bursa along The Silk Road with Doner and Pide, surviving on handfuls of Lao sticky rice, iced java, dreams and sliced diced tomatoes while transporting Bamboo baggage filled with laughter’s fugue as Amnesia, smashing chopsticks wrung out wash and wear drip dry holidays near flashing factories before zooming along Metro subway tracks where world weary pedestrians completed a simple sentence with a full plate of shopping nouns dancing inside fire breathing verbal ovens stoking blind love’s fire feeling fear and inevitable death closing in for the kill before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother, and grandparents decked out in traditional morals, values and ethics strangling medicated ma-scared necks before handing someone life’s spare change by showing a gentle reader’s fragile receipt after paying at the Cosmic Bowling Alley for strikes and spares dude, and were you aware Ataturk the great father liberator of Turkey in 1923 has a green train carriage car parked at the main Ankara station?

It was a gift from Adolph The Further, everything surreal and imaginary in Turkey where idle men stood around bored, unemployed and uneducated drinking brown tea massaging a microscopic silver spoon around a rim swirling deep into a universal void of sugar stars clanging scrap metal against fractured glasses destroying perfect mathematical cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so a female inspection engineer with a Masters in Food Quality Control and a TLC student whispered, “don’t use the sugar” to Lucky in strict confidence across a plate of Alfredo pasta one winter night a traveler before they attended a wedding in an underground Ulus cavern filled with Roma Gypsy musicians playing illegal anvil hammer and dulcimer music as wild free dancers and families celebrated an arranged marriage near testosterone driven shy lovers grasping hands below tables craving privacy as their short flaming life illuminated fatal attraction desire passion lust suffering loss courage joy gratitude and grand illusions.

Two elderly women in silk floral headscarves smoked exploding droplets plummeting from icicles on tiled roofs above the cafe where Omar released indigo ink flowing from his 149 fountain pen magnifying shadows seeing with a blind why eye.

L(if)e. No why.

Falling water molecules was music to his ears. If only it were true, he sighed.

The Language Company

I lost one day - TLC 31

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.5 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Chinese locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, “Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.”

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

“What do you mean, said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”

“Yes, but I lost one day.”

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

My name is Tam - Erotica

Someone called the bar wanting one or more girls. Miss Tan sent us out.

We went to private homes or hotels. It could be one man or many men. My only rule was no condom, no fuck. Sometimes men would gang-bang me.

The first time this happened I had no idea. I just did what I was told. I was their play toy, their tight little piece of ass and I had a tight little ass. With my legs in the air one man pounded my honey pie with his drumstick, another one sucked my breasts, someone fingered my clit while I gave head to a hot horny stranger.

I loved giving head, licking, tasting the pulsating penis in my mouth, swallowing the blast of hot sticky sperm deep in my throat. Someone finished the business in my wet vagina and another animal climbed on their fuck mama. They enjoyed rolling me over, getting me up on my knees so I could suck off a man below me while they took turns fucking me in the ass.

The first time I took it in my tight sweet little ass was a new sensation. It was tight so he couldn’t ram it home. He had to work it in sweet and slow. I had a hard dick in my mouth and almost gagged feeling his cock penetrate my anus. My ass expanded to accept his penis inside a hot blast of tissue. He grabbed my hips and ass pumping away as I caressed a pair of soft balls licking a penis fast and furious until I tasted sweet milk.

He throbbed in my ass, tight and deep and then wham, I brought the man to orgasm just as the guy behind me blasted his juice. I thought I’d died it felt so good.

One down, one to go. Easy money.

I really enjoyed the fucking show with my best friend. She had deep black eyes, long legs, big tits and loved sex. We’d do a tag team guy fuck. Double the fun double the money. It was always a wild unpredictable performance.

We’d do a slow strip as the guys watched and they couldn’t touch us. Take off your clothes, I said. They did. Eat us with your eyes. Don’t move.

Watch this. I greased her down sweet and slow with oil, tonguing her nipples, rubbing her sweet shaved pubis slow and easy. Come over, she told one guy with a stiff purple hard on. She stood him up straight performing fellatio while I opened her vulva, masturbating the other one until he was primed to give me his high hard one. I slid on him taking him deep in the bucking pony as I ate my girlfriend’s pussy and she’d get fucked from behind. We switched partners, I’d lick dick, she’d fuck me with her finger and the men satisfied their desires.

We made good money doing the team routine. A penis a day keeps the debt collectors away they say.

Sperm in the condom money in the bank.

Some were gentle. Others were drunk animals and beat me. I put up with it because I remembered my mother’s beatings. 

Before fucking a stranger I’d take a shower, come out, drop the towel so he could get an eyeful, throw a condom on the bed, lie down, open my legs close my eyes shut down my feelings and let him have his fun. I dressed their hard sausage in a sock. The rest was easy.

They paid for my time using my body. I gave Miss Tan her a share. I learned about business. I learned how to gamble. Bet big, win big.

For two years I worked hard and saved money. I sent money to my mother every month like a good daughter. I told her I worked in a hotel.

My Name is Tam

Ice Girl in Banlung - Sapa - Chapter 13

After Saigon, Leo walked to Sapa in northwest mountains.

Talking monkey tourists from Hanoi are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance/screw and buy cheap Chinese plastic products, said Mo, 10, H’mong cloth seller.

They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes. They run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore us.

A woman tourist slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at Mo’s work: a handmade belt, a colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl.

She’s surrounded by a chorus, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers selling fake watches, cheap pants, shirts, hats and knickknacks.

Eyes scan colors, fabrics and faces.

A park has baby red roses. A dusty historical statue stares at brackish fountain water. Six Red Dzao women talk with bags and threaded samples spread on the ground.

“Do you want to buy from me?” said one smiling with gold teeth.

“Yes. I want to buy the mountain.” Leo pointed to the rising green western forest, steel gray granite slabs, deep shaded valleys, and gray clouds skimming peaks around high deep edges.

“Ok,” she said. “I will sell you the day mountain for 10,000 and the night mountain for 10,000.”

“Ok. It’s a deal.” They laughed.

Red communist scarfed school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs fuck on the street in front of the church where tourists gather for a photo shoot.

Local Vietnamese women armed with cameras rented by the day selling images, memories and dreams poke and prod women, husbands, boys and girls into manageable groups for the moment.

The decisive moment they will remember forever.

Memories of their life will be framed on a family alternative votive candle altar near burning incense feeding, appeasing dead hungry ancestral ghosts.

Caught in time.

Frozen alive.  

Possible signs of intelligent life in Sapa.

Rumor control reports.

Ice Girl in Banlung 

Bamboo - TLC 27

Reflects vigor, life, energy, zeal, endurance, integrity, patience and resilience.

Lucky carried small strong Bamboo to Bursa.

Freezing January snowflake feathers fell. Adults in the Ankara bus terminal stared at thin green life floating through their transition zone.

Luminous leaves remembered spring, soil, light and resilience. Smiling children understood Bamboo’s natural motivation, intention and freedom.

He propped Bamboo into a meshed container, fronting seat sixteen. They travelled west for six hours.

They passed glittering snowfields. Solitary brown-feathered Winter Hawk rested on ice-crested branches above frozen animal tracks. Silver-white trees sparkled crystal diamonds under a blue sky. 

After winter they scaled steep mountains into autumn. Bamboo witnessed silent snow peaks. Late afternoon light played in red wispy clouds.

Descending they departed seasons. Winter became fall in reverse, green moss, summer fruit trees. A farmer on a tractor plowed spring soil. “Ah,” whispered Silent Spring, “I am ready for my turning. I feel blades in my furrows dancing with roots...”

Bamboo pressed green leaves against a window.

“Where am I going?”

“Yes,” said a leaf, “it’s an amazing Zen meditation in a long now.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a leaf turning a page.

They reached Bursa on the western edge of The Silk Road. Bursa began in 200 A.D. below Uludag (Mountain of Monks) 2,543 meters high, edging snow stone above forests toward Roman thermal baths and mineral rich waters.

They found a temporary room at Achebadem, a private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care visual spectrum color theory filled with young lovers living emotional zombie lies of healthy doubt and uncertainty.

Downhill from the hospital a crying middle-aged man holding an orange hospital folder waited above groundat a Metro subway station. Folder contained papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis and a definitive medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying - a wife, child, uncle, someone he loved.

He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to transport him down the line to his 700-year old Ottoman mountain village of Cumalikizik.

Sharing his tale he’d spill the unabridged package of loss and memory on a hand-hewn oak table surrounded by friends and relatives. Say it’s not true, said a grieving ancestor thumbing medical leaves. It’s a true fact, he said, they left us, alone, we are grateful for their love and our memory. We cry for the living, not the dead.

Hypodermic needles named Pain and Pleasure sharing fabulous silent conversations laughed on life support.

Walking past the hospital Lucky smelled red, white and yellow roses. A bird pressed itself against a rose thorn to make her self sing. He whistled hello. Bird’s refrain was a short sharp interlude trilling a deep symphonic vibration-throated free mystery with harmonic warbling scales.