others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so
generously to the majority of the world's populace that was
indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee's shoes, here
they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what
he assumed was his own--the little that he knew of himself.
It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a
concoction of family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and
the tangles of neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with
old travail at every turn: memories that they couldn't free themselves
from. Within this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive
chemicals and suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly
world. They were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating,
destroying, and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim.
Here he was with a new family--a mosaic of complete strangers who were
not related to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other.
Still, it was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite
current of darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways
they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made
one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew
that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were
all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent
in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the
course of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten
excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic
appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be
forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of
cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were
the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those
who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of
scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the