Stripped and Pistol Whipped (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Chypre Sultan Maroke no Kō, by Ensar Oud
Jeezers. Wow this is moss indelibly imprinted on bark. The moss element of Qidori, the only other Chypre Sultan I have smelled, is just as strong but here the wood element is ramped up. Of Wolves and Men is just as much if not more an oud fragrance as a musk fragrance. Likewise, Chypre Sultan Maroke no Kō is just as much an oud fragrance as a moss fragrance. This is earthier than the last, dark—stepping into Aguru territories. It is almost as if the wood and moss together make a minty-chocolate patchouli accord. While the Yuzu is there, it is drowned in dirt—and the mongolian musk only makes it darker, chocolate bent enough that the whole feels like worm-casting soil that is dirtier than the same fresh soil we get in Terre de Ensar. The mineralics are there from the start but in the dry down,as the mints recedes, the mineralic oud glints like the facets of an emerald. Best mineralic oud in my collection. The fragrance vibe fits in there with Layers of Jade and especially 1984 and Terre de Ensar. 1984 is smokier and more indolic. I think Terre de Ensar might be better than them all. I need more wears to know.
*Let's workshop this poem about a fed-up landlord who endures months of a squatting tenant's abuse and the legal system's indifference, until the whole ordeal finally boils over inside him.
Stripped and Pistol Whipped
Rubber meets road in the behavior beyond the brain. His track record was good, considering his circumstances and the fantasies they catalyzed. The worst perhaps was his response to a squatter problem some years back. The tenant had been trash from the start, living month to month with her teenage daughter in the studio he had stretched himself thin to buy. She would only crack the door when he came to get the rent. But from the gamey pudendum aroma that would rush out like HVAC air (tart as fermented vinegar, sulfurous as reamed-out onion, acrid as burnt tire), mixed with the way of life in the area (boasted through every car speaker and sung by the children waiting for the school bus), he could not shake the idea of her turning tricks in there. He looked the other way until the neighbors started complaining about people coming and going, noise at all hours of the night—lots of different men.
She ignored his first notice to vacate. Then she stopped answering the door altogether. When he filed for eviction, the court rejected his petition: improper wording on the notice, try again. He stayed polite, too painfully polite for himself to bear. Killing with kindness did not work on her kind. It involved category mistakes, like trying to reason with a bear. She called him a “pussy-ass white nigga” from behind the window and each time he walked away without any money it was hard not to feel like one. The New York system, which treated possession as nine-tenths of the law, did not give a damn about his deed. Before he could even get a hearing date, she had been there over thirty days. This meant the court would treat her like a legitimate tenant with full legal protections. She was not a squatter in the eyes of the law.
The backup in housing court (he was told it could be up to eighteen months) he figured was the cherry on top. But there was more. The neighbor in 2B was calling him daily, threatening to break his lease over the “parade of men” and the shouting at the witching hour. The city started sending letters with his name on them, all addressed to him as “landlord of record” (a phrase that, like the word “white,” sounded like a slap): a Notice of Violation from HPD for “inadequate heat” (she had called 311 claiming the radiator did not work); a Class B Violation for “unsanitary conditions and vermin infestation,” with thirty days to correct and $50–$150 daily fines accruing after that; a Notice of Violation for “failure to provide access for inspection,” citing multiple unsuccessful attempts to enter the unit; a nuisance-related violation citing “illegal commercial activity or transient use,” prompted by neighbor complaints and a police referral; a follow-up compliance notice referencing “patterned complaints” and advising that “failure to abate conditions could lead to civil penalties or referral for enforcement action.”
His tolerance for having his boundaries pushed was pathologically high. Radical insecurity plus radical discipline to fulfill his artistic calling made for radical ability to make do—to endure what would send others running, their skin crawling. That superpower had enabled him to work twelve-hour days, seven days a week, for nearly two decades on scholarly drudgery—fueled by library air and peanut butter sandwiches. But even he had a breaking point.
That familiar stomach-sinking feeling came over him—the anesthetic rush, the full-body wave, that used to terrify him as a kid. He pictured her laughing at him, telling the men she brought over how “This soft-ass landlord ain’t gonna do shit!” Turning up the volume on the Blade Runner ambiance that throbbed synth focus into his noise-canceling headphones, he tried to shoo away the intrusive thoughts. But there she was: bragging how she had been living rent-free for months, how she would milk it for another year easy. The images made him lean even harder into his chipper demeanor.
“Tamisha,” he said through the door one morning. “I won’t pursue any of the money you owe me. Forget the back rent.”
“I been done forgot it, nigga,” she said.
But he ignored that and ignored the chuckles inside. “It’s not about that. I know you have a daughter. I’ll help you find another place.”
Such gentleness, such water-under-bridge gestures, only brought on more disrespect—the whole thing unfolding almost as if by the booby-trap design of some hulk within him. “Go on with yo white nerdy ass!” Her cackle cut through the door. “You can’t do shit, oppressor-ass nigga.”
“Mama, don’t even talk to that nigga,” her daughter said.
“I let you stay here to help you out,” he added into the silence. The heel of his fist meeting the door made no sound.
He hated fulfilling the script she voiced. But he did exactly what a white nerd would do. He wrote, each line making it clear—no matter the bitter fury it betrayed—that she was right: he could not do shit. All he could do was wait—wait for the judge, wait for the marshal—while the violations piled up in his name.
Heart in his throat he suited up in an orange ski mask and biked over there, loins swollen in fantasy of exactly what was going to go down. He kicked in the door without a thought. Her nasty ass was right there on the couch and he drew on her like SWAT—only he beelined the muzzle right into her head, which sank into the stinky couch as he pushed deeper.
“You wreck my fuckin place bitch?! You ain’t paying bitch?! You fuckin whorin in my fucking place bitch?”
The daughter had been cooking in the kitchen, her head wrapped. Both mom and daughter were in a sleep shirt.
“So bitches want to whore, right? On the fuckin floor!”
The mother went down.
“You, get the fuck over here.”
“Don’t hurt my daughter,” the mother said.
“Get down there. Right next to your ghetto-ass whore mother.”
His eyes conveyed it all. “Let me see what we working with.”
The mother pulled up her night shirt.
“That shit all infested, huh?”
He leaned in, muzzle resting in the hollow of her throat. She was shaved. One side was tucked up like when a dog’s lip gets stuck on dry gums and it looks like it is snarling out the side of its mouth.
“You thinking Imma fuck that?”
Mid-sentence he heard the code switch people often commented on. That reflection drained some of his fury. But his desire both not to see himself and to keep his fury righteous counterbalanced the loss, adding a secondary fuel to the fire—sunk-cost fallacy in dysfunctional action.
“Nah I want that fresh shit. Yep. Little bitch’s turn.”
She looked at her mom.
“Lift it! I think she needs your help. Show her how a slut mom does it. Tits too.”
But even here, in writing, he felt like one of those rapists who goes too soft to surmount the kegeled clamps of even the easier hole. With other characters he was able to push farther. But in his mind this was explicitly him, not someone else. The framing restricted him even more. For in a way—and this does present at least a slight hiccup for any apologia of the man conducted even by those willing to think ethical lines anew (instead of just sticking with the all-pork-is-bad script of the unthinking)—this was less literary in intent (although part of him sensed he would later mine it for material) than a plan, sort of like a suicide plan (an escape hatch), he could fall back on if the months were going to extend over a year. He folded, he went limp, even on the safe-space of the page because it was too real.
The girl barely had her feathers and her nipples were still the tightest of tulips. But it was her tears that had him default back to the pushover. His plan going in had been clear. He was going to shoot his load all over the incestual unit of liver lips, the mother’s mouth sucking the little girl’s clit (kryptonite in image)—the gun pressed to the mother’s skull the whole time.
He was oozing but he said, “Now get the fuck up, both of you! Pack your shit cuz you out now: not a week from now, not tomorrow—now!”
He stayed there watching them pack. He eyed the girl’s ass in the night shirt, biting his lip. He thought about jerking off and having her at least spread for his climax. But all he did was watch.
The same chest thumping inside the man on the page propelled him into action by month seven. But he drove there in the daytime, in a U-Haul. He did kick in the door. In a time when the oppressed—backed by both Disney and HR—get all the entitlements, that was equivalent of shooting his gun. But he never even pointed it. He simply lifted his shirt to show what he had, and only to the mother. He demanded both of their phones and then sat on one of the big paint buckets as they brought out their stuff. And even then, Mr. White Man unable to help himself from being white, offered to help them. Then he drove the two, the mother stinky in the middle, to her mother’s house.
Their level of ghetto, he figured, made legal trouble unlikely. But he knew Instagram could give them ideas—at least ideas on how to weaponize against him a culture in which people of his optics did not even enjoy the same freedom of expression as hers. He waited, writing out scenes of shootouts with the cops at his door, until it was clear nothing would become of it.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
