LOVE BUNNI PRESS is a loose confederation of painters, artists, writers, photographers and designers. Love Bunni Press started in 1988 photocopying paper. The photocopying continues.

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2.15.22 Ginsberg In Four: A Zombie Romance

I saw the best minds of my generation eaten by

              mad, starving hysterical naked zombies

       dragging themselves through the smoldering streets at dawn

              looking for an angry fix,

                   - HOWL, 1956.

1.

The end of the world was downright evangelical. The oceans turned to fire, the skies were blocks of ice, and the earth ejected corpses. The whole affair was real Revelation style - a fundamentalist's wet dream. Only the faithful weren’t raptured. Unless by “raptured” you mean slaughtered by the mass of horrible zombies. The zombies were really, very nasty. And mean. They crawled and scooted and teetered, as they searched for their next living meal.

The whole affair from first encounter to last stand happened in under a year. Closer to six months. The world went up like a kid magician’s piece of flash paper.

Soon after that I met the other Ginsbergs. 

2.

Allen Three’s hair looked wet. Salon styled, slick. He was a picture of 1953 Ginsberg standing on a New York City rooftop. He refused to roll down the back seat window. A rolled up window was prudent when the car crept around city blocks at a strolling speed, but the car now sped along on an open road, the needle popped at the red line. So that rolled up window was a just dick move.

I suspected, but never asked, if it was, only, about the hair.

Allen One pulled off the road. 

It was late Tuesday afternoon, we were parked in the middle of a gas station island for about a half an hour. Allen One leaned over a fold out map, he had draped over the hood of the car. 

Allen Two emerged from the gas station’s convenience store, “Pump’s on!”

Allen Three grabbed the nozzle to let forth a gush of gasoline that spilled over the sides of our various containers and plastic tubs. 

I ran my fingers over my bald head and pulled at my dyed gray and black beard. I stared out over the brown field across the two lane blacktop. I tapped a cigarette against the dented side of my lighter.

I lit the cigarette then took two steps toward the field. I drew the smoke deep and listened. Then I saw them, a line of three tractor’s guzzled toward us, a dust wave crested at their empty hitches.

“Company,” I growled.

“What did you say, Number Four?” Allen One said.

“Company,” I said again.  

The exhaled smoke swirled around the overgrown hair wildly covering my ears, I turned toward the other Allens, I pointed over my shoulder to the yellow tractors that crawled over the field.

Allen Two slid his black plastic rimmed glasses to his forehead, lifted the binoculars to his naked gray eyes, pursed his lips then frowned. He lowered the binoculars and took his glasses off his face. He pulled out a yellowish handkerchief and started to clean the lenses. He stood and leaned against the car. Casual. Perfect.

“Lennons,” he said. 

“Johns or Vladimirs?” Allen One asked..

“The Beatle,” Allen Two sighed, “They got Brownings, though.

“Really?” Allen Three said and slammed the trunk.

The sun was setting, the orange dusk darkened and brightened everything. The tractors growled to a stop, fifty or sixty feet from the road. The four of us stood fanned across the road’s yellow dividing line. We held our weapons at the ready. Displayed, not aimed.

The Lennons had an impressive array. Their farm tractors were modified with cages, metal sheeting, and a bright Bob Mackie inspired paint job. Each tractor was equipped with an increasingly powerful ordinance. The Lennons had bigger guns than Jesus.

A skinny guy with long, straight and greasy hair, which perfectly framed his face, emerged from the side of the leading tractor. He adjusted his little round wire rimmed sunglasses. He looked at us, pinched at the front of his white ringed NYC t-shirt, then climbed to the top of the cab. He stood with his arms crossed, in a perfect imitation of that iconic John Lennon photograph. His posture was perfect. 

We were impressed.

“How goes it, Lennons?” Allen One asked.

The lead Lennon nodded and said something into a small walkie talkie. The wide barreled anti-tank guns, mounted on the tractors, went limp. I swear I heard a disappointed sigh from deep inside their repurposed metal.

The lead Lennon motioned for our leader to approach. Even though I was certain it was not my turn to go, I released the grip of the gun slung across my chest and stepped forward.

The lead Lennon and I stood face to face. He reached into his back pocket to pull out a perfect crumpled cigarette pack.

“Good to meet you, guys,” Lennon said in a bad Scouse accent, that was mostly Midwestern De Niro. 

He snapped the cigarette pack on the back of his hand. His thin index finger and thumb pinched the pack hard. He brought the pack up and two cigarettes slid, filters up out of the pack. He held it out to me with a little wave. I could tell he practiced this move a lot.

“Don’t smoke,” I lied.

“Smart. You’ll live longer,” he smiled. 

“Heard about what you guys did in Salt Lake,” he exhaled a flawless straight plume of smoke into the air, his chin tilted back, “Damn impressive.”

“We got lucky,” I pinched my earlobe.

“Should we all be so lucky as to have the luck of the Ginsbergs,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful dream, this nightmare.”

We both chuckled.

“So where you lads headed?”

“Greenwich Village. We hear they got some secure blocks up there. Real far out scene. Like gone.”

“Heard about that, too,” he shot me a look over his small wire glasses, “we did.”

“What you got keeping you here, then,” I came off irritable and it made him nervous. I’ve only been shot at by nervous people.

“Oh you know -  just a little compound, some farms,” he thumbed behind him, “called PHANTOM V, if you can imagine that. Though mostly, we just call it home.”

“Sounds nice.”

“You Ginsbergs are welcome to stay on for a bit, if you wish.”

“That is a very tempting offer, but we have a schedule, you know.”

“Trains do have to run…,” the lead Lennon said with a sadness that spoke less to what we lost, than what we were forced to keep.

A few minutes later, the Lead Lennon flicked his cigarette butt off into the dirt field. It landed in a burst of sparks.

The Lennons’ churned up their tractors, honked a few times as they started the wide arc back toward their camp.

“They heard about Salt Lake,” I said.

Allen Two walked toward the car. Allen #1 watched him, “Oh yeah?”

3.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open

             their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-

          Nation?

- Howl, 1956

Three days later. 

We stopped at a hospital. Always dangerous, always worth the risk. 

It was morning, a slight breeze came off the sea. The air felt of salt and smelled of fish. 

Allen Two pulled the car up the loading dock. He perfectly positioned it near the doors. We locked and we loaded. 

Allen One superstitiously twisted his wooden prayer beads. I tapped the extra cartridge against the butt of my gun then shoved it into my front pocket.

“Lessgo,” Allen Two shouted. 

We spread like spilled mercury. 

The loading dock doors were not barricaded. In fact, the place looked untouched. This strangeness put us all on edge. 

I felt the other Allens share that moment of desperate relaxation - which swelled through us like it was the first day of a new school year.

We crept along slower than normal. We hugged the walls, guns pointed, nerves taut, and hands sweaty. I stopped my hand before it touched the spotless white wall. I did not caress the unbroken glass windows. I did not spread out on my back across the debris-less hallway floor.

“Guys,I got a bad feeling about this,” I said. 

Allen Two stooped down. He shouldered his rifle, squinted into the telescopic sight aimed down the hall. 

Allen Three groaned, then, hunkered down and started to inch forward again.

Allen One ran point. He always went first.  He stopped at the doors near the end of the hallway. 

He pushed his fist into the air to order a full, immediate stop like they used to do in action movies. I lifted my pistol and aimed at the doors.

We waited. The silence rang like a school bell in my head. Allen #1 slid his hand up the door, his gun followed. He pressed his shoulder against the door, it swung wide open. 

Nothing.

Another pristine corridor stretched on, anticipating the return of the doctors and patients.

Allen One let the doors swing shut, spun on his heel and walked back toward us, his gun relaxed and lowered, “There is shitall here.”

“This place smells like an airport.”

“I bet the shelves are stocked,” Allen Three exhaled a deep lungful of cigarette smoke.

“Split up. Meet back at the car in half an hour,” Allen One barked.

Fifteen minutes later, I leaned back on the metal ladder bolted to the naked concrete. I pushed my shoulder up against the roof access hatch. It squeaked and hissed as the rubber seal sucked apart. I held the top rung with white knuckles, my ankles laced around the lower ladder bars.

The late morning air swept down a warm gush that smelled of daylight and tar. I clambered out of the hole in the roof, I emerged in a rolled embarrassment to agility. A glorious cloudless blue sky stretched above me. I leaned back on my forearms and marveled at the day.

I was purposefully being purposeless in this mission; I chose to scale to this height instead of scouring the lockers and offices for fungibles. I nursed the resentment at being outvoted.  I wanted to bail on this place and I still had that bad feeling.

I heard the soft report of rapid gunshots. Sporadic then sustained then continuous then frantic. I raced across the roof, hit the low wall with some force, an immediate bruise grew across my hip. I leaned over the edge to look down the thirteen stories on a real bad scene. Hundreds of skinny zombies moved toward our car.

I was disadvantaged. The angle of the roof left no subtlety to any shot I tried. My fire landed wide or dangerously close. I was of no use to my friends at the car. So I fired blindly into the wave of monsters, slowed a few but stopped none.

Allen One and Allen Three opened up on the approaching horde. Allen Two tried to get the car started, but I could hear the futile whirling clicks float under the popping gun fire and hungry zombie moans. Then the first monster smacked the driver’s side window.

Allen Two panicked. He forced the door open. The zombie bounced backward. It fell back on stiff knees, then straight on its ass.

Allen Two leaped over the monster’s uplifted hands. He slipped along the side of the car, just as another creature lunged. It hooked onto Allen Two’s backpack which exploded like an addict’s busted birthday piñata. Prescription bottles, cream tubes, and rolls of antiseptic bandages popped into the air. 

Allen Two was knocked off balance. He hit the concrete with a rattle, clawed at the ground as he tried to make it under the car, but the horde closed over him in a splatter of gore.

Allen Three retreated to the shipping doors. He yelped meaninglessly for Allen #1 as he held the door open. But when Allen Two went down, Allen One jumped onto the hood of the car. Allen #1 fired carefully, then wildly, as he tried to keep the zombies off Allen Two. 

Before he could fully react, Allen #1 was outflanked. He leaped to the roof of the car. Immediately, he was surrounded, then a few seconds later, swallowed.

Allen Three had disappeared behind the closed shipping doors. In anger, I emptied a clip over the side of the roof. The monsters that fell were quick to rise again. I slumped against the wall, held my warm gun to my chest. I stared straight ahead, paralyzed by angry disbelief.

4.

Allen Three stood hunched at the end of the hallway. He was wet. Wet like he stepped out of a sweat shower. His soaked clothes hung off him. His eyes were wild and wide, squinted without changing shape.

He started to speak but instead of words, his lips squirted out a stream of bloody phlegm and dark saliva. Allen Three quivered in the bright florescent light, joints twisted in unnatural spasm. The hole scratched across his jugular was just an open slit, it no longer spewed blood.

I lifted my pistol and shot him in the head. His horn rimmed glasses snapped in two, each lens shot off in opposite directions. I watched as he slumped backward against the doors, his shoes squeaked as he slid to sit down on the floor. 

5.

By my calculation, those monsters stomped around outside for nearly two months. Then they stood and waited. They oozed and dripped. I did not put much thought into it. I didn’t spend much time checking on them. They made no attempt to get into the hospital.

Most of my time I spent in preparation for the day the generator would conk out. I worked to reconfigure the insides of an ambulance.  I put chain link over the windows. I created a livable space with enough storage for a considerable fuel reserve. I lived on vending machine food and nitrous. I stockpiled enough amphetamines to keep me awake for months.

One morning, I looked out the window and most of the monsters were gone.  A couple loitered around, but the horde had moved on.

“The migration habits of the North American Zombie,” I scribbled on a dry erase board in the corner of the office I used as my apartment. Later that day, or maybe it was the next day, the generator stopped.

After the hospital went dark, I spent two more nights. I burned the paper in a file cabinet for light and heat. It took a few hours to load up then pulled out on the third afternoon. My plan was to continue with the plan – I headed for Greenwich Village.

The ambulance was a lot slower than our old car. I feared pushing it too hard. It was the only lifeline I had, my only chance. I needed to keep it running. I drove, a week or so. The interstate highways were clogged with wreckage and unstable bridges, so I used back roads.

Around dusk each day, I pulled off the road and looked for a sheltered place to park. Somewhere just far enough off the road to get a running start from whatever might come along. I ate sparingly and slept lightly.

I think it was a Wednesday, when I pulled to the side of some cornfield access road. I sat with the back doors open and enjoyed a cold hot dog. A tiny whirlwind of dry husks and dust spun in the distance. I swore I had clear sight lines, so I was flabbergasted when I found myself surrounded.

A group of five skinny, pale men materialized out of a turnstile of wind. They stood in a semicircle around the ambulance, arms folded, in the loitering lean of disaffected cool. They all wore white shock wigs, precariously sitting on top of their own dark hair.

Two of them wore black ribbed turtlenecks, pinched at the elbows. The others donned black leather jackets like insect armor. They peered at me from behind wide lens glasses, cocked high on and perfectly fitted to their tiny faces.

I hopped down from the ambulance. I bit a cheekful of hot dog, then  lifted my .357 Magnum out of my shoulder holster. I held it low down by my hip.

“Warhols,” I said.

The lead Andy Warhol stepped forward, he floated like a marionette. He did not breathe nor did his marble eyes blink.

He said with the slightest deadpan twill, “Gosh, that is a nice ambulance.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Wherever did you find it?” he asked, his hands never moving from his side.

“Made it myself,” I said with a flirtatious smile, then took a bite of the hot dog.

“Goodness,” the lead Warhol said in a soft breath, “It is quite good.”

“Take a look inside, if you want.”

“Gee, really?”

The Warhols sat in the back of the ambulance, perfectly erect, hands folded in their laps. I drove as the  lead Andy gave me one word directions. As we pulled up, I saw that the Warhols had been busy. They had repurposed school buses, sunk them up to their wheel wells in concrete, then covered one side in steel plating. The bus walls’ hammered and dented metal circled a large courtyard encampment. A shanty town of hobbled together structures, shacks, and treeless treehouses.

That night, I parked the ambulance in the middle of the Warhols’ camp. It provided a sort of marvelous novelty, constantly examined and boarded by drag queens with day-old beards and skinny women of indeterminate bruises . A few  leather jacket hipsters sat on top of it running the siren during static-laced guitar solos. Finally, a few of the more robust Warhols took paint brushes to the ambulance’s side. Mostly they repainted the existing graphics in new day-glo colors.

I sat with three of the Warhol elders around a large campfire. We ate tomato soup straight out of the can.

“Gosh, we are glad you are here,” the lead Warhol said.

“Thanks”.

“Where are you headed,” asked the middle Warhol.

“Mostly East. Mostly,” I said.

“East is so nice,” remarked the oldest looking Warhol.

“Have you been to Pittsburgh?” asked another.

“Can’t say that I have ever been to Pittsburgh,” I said.

“Well, Pittsburgh has...had everything.”

I nodded. A few minutes passed in silence.

“You know who you kind of look like?” asked the oldest Warhol.

I did not look away from the fire, “Nope. Who?”

“Allen Ginsberg,” he said, “You sort of look like Allen Ginsberg.”

There was a pause as the others examined me in the firelight. 

“Allen was such a great person and really great poet,” a Warhol said.

“Yeah, I guess he was,” I said and smiled.

7.26.20 Portland Hockey Stick Brigade and Wall of Moms

The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. - Situationist International, The 1965 Watts Riots.

The performative nature of our street protests has overtaken the revolutionary message. Aside from the absurd displays of riot LARPing that the Portland Anti-Fa are constantly engaged in, with their duct tape shields and Mad Max Gas Masks, the recent appearance of the color coded Walls of ... (moms and dads and teachers and veterans) borders on cos-playing.

I get it the Trump Admin is using racist and fascist shock troop tactics to illegally arrest and detain, but defending the right to protest is fundamentally at odds with the messaging of the original protest. In other words, there is a danger of creating a new hashtag Black Lives Matter Protesters Matter. Or, at the very least, accepting the re-emergence of the "Law and Order" chant of a Trump Rally.

I get that "suburban moms" showing up to get tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets exposes the police brutality that is currently being protested. I get, too, that the more people showing up to Police Riot Summer is moving the white society's needle, ever so slightly, to reassessing police violence.

And I understand how "the media" (whatever the reason you distrust the NYTIMES) seeks out the freshest wounds and most bloody pictures to lead the narrative of the Revolutionary Moment (whenever it appears). A night of burning cars and smashed windows is the perfect backdrop for the corpses of Statist Stasis to lean against - moaning their antiquated justifications for further dehumanization. The reduction of protest, to the most muscular and visceral, makes for good horror programming.

But, I worry that while the despotic creep of the Sex Offender-in-Chief deploying Homeland Security is undeniable, it is, also, intended solely to SHOCK the narrative back into Trump's Hands. It can be wrenched away if we focus less on how the Feds invaded Portland and more on the fact that these fucking cops are the same dickwads terrorizing immigrant communities, detaining and disappearing People of Color (latinx - documented or not) and locking kids in cages. Abolish Homeland Security, ICE, et al. Bring the focus back on how cops are punishing and targeting, not a progressive city, but people of color. We are letting that narrative overshadow or re-code the territory of the moment - Black lives ended by Cops.

Those deaths are consistently dismissed because we live in a White Supremacy. A system that first dehumanizes, then undervalues, black lives to the point of non-people. Instead of a citizen with inalienable rights, the murdered black life is transformed into a list of delinquency, criminal intentions, and finally disobedience that justifies and excuses their extrajudicial death sentence (“see they were guilty! He had drugs and an arrest record”).

But now Black Lives are screaming, louder, in defiance. And a Wall of Moms isn't as amplifying as we would hope.