When Blackness Was A Virtue, Coda (When Most I Play The Devil)In a little hilltop village
they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation
and they gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence
and got repaid with scorn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya
Shelter from the storm
-Dylan, 'Shelter From The Storm'
I used to shy away from physical contact as a kid, and still do today to a great extent (at least regarding uncontrolled situations). Was it it the vulnerability of it? Partly.
It may have also been the commitment.
They talk about commitment like one would reference multiple choice (b) in a Cosmopolitan sex quiz. Whether it's Top Ten Ways to Fuck Your Lover; or Fuck Your Lover Over, the following three words are the same:
Fear of commitment.
It's a lash I've labored under in this world of shrinking masculinity; of pluralization and fragmentation and specialization until everything was rendered tiny, kitschy, and ironic. Fear of commitment as I've fled brightly-colored packaging that threatened to engulf me. Worse because of my biggest transgression, that of intellect. Wisdom was a woman, even as far back as the Bible she was a woman who could get you in her mouth and suck out all the fire and tension; leaving only exhaustion, and a rubbery, melancholy soul.
I promised myself I wouldn't lend out any more fucking books. I don't what it is with me. Normally inclined to keep just about every single thing that could serve as a cornerstone to what I do and who I am deep in my pockets, I'll pass out selections from the personal library.
The conversation always starts in total innocence. You really can't get me to un-ass about your day-to-day, and great proclamations of your good intentions will net a crinkling of the eyes out of me, and maybe a nod. Bring up the literary world, and I get all unpacked. It's inevitable that you're going to spill those two or three ideas you keep dear; nobody values ideas these days, they just whore those poor little concepts that are probably three years too early for fucking.
What happens then is sad; you show it, I jump for the bait, get hooked, and a book ends up in your lap.
Now we're connected.
.....
I bang on the door, three quick strikes. It helps soothe the apprehension. One can be assured that the sonofabitch on the other side, who's had all evening to ready themselves for my arrival, is now at least as shaken as me. Having established equal footing, I relax.
The door opens.
Jesus, I thought you were the cops.
You know, nobody ever says the landlord. Or the fire department.
You always knock like that?
You might be taking a shit.
Strategy number Two: Reduce the conversation to a thing I like to call common elements. Rhetoric is always so polished, rehearsed. People walk around practicing their fucking conversations. If you're ever wondering why somebody sitting across from you just said something very vapid, you can bet it probably sounded a lot better a few hour ago, when they played it out in their mind for the twenty-seventh time.
I get past this with a shock crowbar right through the sensibility door. Discussion of elimination works wonders in most cases. A little crazy-eye and a loud WOW with a fist pounding off the table is also serviceable.
With the rattling having stirred up the better part of the girl's character, we may proceed.
Here's another reason I am cautious with physical engagement. I hit hard. I don't pull punches, I don't play-slap, tickle, or poke about. When it's time to throw down, there won't be any chest-thumping from me, or arm stretches. I'm going to close the distance and start throwing left-right-left-right. I'm going to come down the avenue and barrel your fucking ass into the dirt.
My nephew complains when I give him a hug. I pick him up and squeeze his spine.
Ow, he says.
I put him down; rub his head.
That's how the love works, kid.
And that's the other half of my difficulty. You see, when it comes down to skin and bone, it's not fear of commitment that holds my hand back. It's that in that moment, in doing something that's more than invisible brain fingers in the abstract jelly of possibilities that I become committed. Fists don't come back. And I don't care how sweetly the postmodernists play the guiltless violin, neither do fucks.
I do damage. Committed.
So when they sell me sex and security in exchange for being a shaggy-headed hippie brain job with a soft voice and a nervous and fast laugh that does what he's told, I have to tell them no. I'm stuck being a throwback. They ask me why and I tell them: Fear of commitment.
I just don't bother telling them it's fear for them.
From the couch, I take in the kitchen. There's a viney plant above the sink, and wrought-iron outside. There's a thick funny plate in a peach shade that has an uneven surface scribed with thin lines around the edge. I'm eating cookies off it when it occurs to me that this always happens; this demented pre-coital Santa Claus routine where my good sense is plied with baked goods. There's a television and a cable box, and photographs. There's her and her parents, a brother looks like. There's a picture of a down-home sonofabitch all Iowa heartland: blond hair, green eye, white, white teeth and faux-hawk grinning into a camera shot. He had to have been holding the camera chin-level and pointing it up to give him such a long-face look. The man looks goofy but has a strong jaw; a good natured sort of bumbling beer-drinking sports-fan and frat-boy personality that doesn't bother with melancholy beyond what he lost on a football bet. I'm caught standing at the mantle, crumbly cookie in hand pulling recon when she comes out from the bathroom.
Lavender hits my nostrils.
What are you doing?
Surveying the locality.
Her eyes go right to the All-American and I know it then and there.
.....
Here's how it will go: There is the Bukowski film, Matt Dillon doing Chinaski, like I didn't know how this was supposed to turn out. We will go right past the deleted scenes, hit play, sip, and watch, and hear absolutely NOTHING of the fucking dialogue until we are pressing up thighs and I can tell she's about ten degrees cooler than I am through those terrycloth pants. Lavender wafts strong enough to make me tear up, or is that restraint? How long before our hands or eyes intersect? We've got the ingredients in the right places; the movie on, the couch comfy, the lights low, with enough booze to soften the resistance; all its needs now is a fucking flashpoint Hands and eyes will work.
I look at my wrist, no watch to be found on it.
I've got to jump ship.
What, she says, laying down the DVD as I pick up the borrowed book from the couch arm; Already?
Oh yeah. I wasn't staying long. Cookies, sure. But I can't watch no movie. I've got to roll.
Oh.
I slip to the door, aiming to slide out of it, down the stairs and into the car. She catches me halfway through.
Hey, everything alright?
I whirl on full exit. Smile, because i have to tell this lie where I don't want to, and if we're going to have a hypocrisy, let's have a full and complete one.
No, I'm just, and I whirl my hands around in the air, all over the place today.
Nothing to do with you.
The smile works its charm. I could have been reciting a terrorist manifesto, and she'd have eaten it up.
Let me rain check it. Better yet, let me make it up to you later on in the week.
Hand out, no wave, more like a salute, I head down the stairs.
We who are about to die.....
No goodbye, and no waiting for one.
Later I have to resist throwing the book out the window, and burning the rest of its brothers in effigy when I get home.
We can't do that again, I tell it.
First impressions: Just think that your entire body of character has the potential to be judged by a single fragment of broccoli stuck between your teeth. You'll reassure yourself that you're better off having been spared the tyranny of those shallow fucking wastes of skin. Don't pat too hard back there. Do you really think that the pinball and bumper process you title courtship is better served having seen this particular elephant? That you hold a better understanding of it because you've met those bricks that dress in belts and blouses? You don't think that you can be cut by both ends, and that somebody might pick you out of the froth of the crowd because the light just hit at the moment at that time, and the culmination of a hundred fathers and uncles and eighth grade crushes and sitcom stars met themselves in the angles and shadows of your face. Previously a blank oval? Maybe you, in an absent gesture of meaningless charity, chucked a quarter in a plastic MS box at a pizzeria just to be doing something. Which got the attention of the shy pink-haired cashier who wrote her number on the back of your receipt; to later find common ground in mutual consumption of cased meats with you.
If you laugh now, and knowingly, you're as guilty, as foolish, and probably as wonderful as Gemini was, before I hit that door, before that phone never rang again. Who knows what impressions I made in a barstool one night that led me to that apartment; hedged bets against my future conduct until I inevitably took the hard sharp turn off the road that hurt; it lets me know me I could still hold it out over the edge without flying off. Perhaps I am wrong, and there's so much more to be said about what is built upon thin playing cards, moods, and maybes.
However: it isn't the best environment for a fellow who knows how to hit.When Blackness Was A Virtue, Part 4I've heard newborn babies wailing
like a mourning dove
And old men with broken teeth
stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man
Is it hopeless and forlorn?
Come in, she said
I'll give ya
Shelter from the storm
-Dylan, 'Shelter From The Storm'
Walking by the bar, I almost want to sketch a little drawing with my finger in the mist collected at the window corner.
Maybe a question mark, or maybe just a question. If I could think of one.
I pull my collar tighter, walk faster and dip my head.
Another cold season.
Another empty L seat.
On the a pylon on the LaSalle platform, somebody has taken a Sharpie and written the following:
face your problems
I think I've seen this before. Maybe in the summertime. Maybe the subway emeritus wrote something like: don't worry so much, or Somebody cares about YOU. God, I can't even get the sentiment right in my mind. Maybe it's the custard peeling industrial paint slapped on in drippy gobs.
And maybe it's the Sharpie fucking philanthropist.
I've considered a couple of strategies. I've thought about bombarding Chicago's Craigslist until the mystery benefactor steps forward. Thought about catching the train down to Bucktown where they're eating a scoop of bark caramel at the homemade ice cream jerk. I've thought about rolling down to that platform on a slow Sunday night to leave the little wonder-worker some platitudes of my own. Maxims all cooked up in the mad. I'm leaning towards this last option. I'm secretly hoping it will turn into an all-out war for the Hearts and Minds of the LaSalle Street commuters. My cynicism and nihilistic fury against butterflies and rainbows.
I'm gonna torch that golden field and dance a dirge in the fucking ashes.
Perhaps it's because it's always come to me that I don't appreciate it. Through the window I see my stool. I see her standing over in the corner by it, maybe subconsciously. I'm across the street finishing some last-minute banking before I head for the train.
I could just walk in there, I muse. Just start up the conversation like time never passed, like we never talked about any of it. I bet you we wouldn't miss a single beat. She'd jerk just a bit in that opening sentence, just once; right after the Hello. Instead of looking her in the eye, I'd look down at the chipped varnish; like showing my fucking neck for the kill. That would soothe something in her she probably doesn't even know thirsts. Comfortable, the words would roll out atop one another. I'd find the mask I am supposed to wear from those words, and then our dance would resume.
Right from the last step taken, no less.
I would get away with every last bit of it.
Sometimes I wonder about those other guys. No, no: not the crushes, silly. Not the can't-haves; I understand those all too well. I'm talking about those other guys. The job guys. The ones that show up every day no more than three minutes past the hour. She never talked about her job guy; then again, she didn't have to. I knew all about him. He's a good fellow, a beer drinker, maybe the occasional cocktail, or crying drunk perennially. He calls in the afternoons to share the minutiae of the day. He's got no less than six inside jokes they share; things that would make the spit in my mouth run acid. He's the one that watches all the shows I'd piss on. He nods a lot. The job guy.
Am I jealous of the job guy? I don't know. If he met me on the street, would he be jealous of me? Doubtful. Slam a beer or two down his throat and he might allude to the wild hair that's now sublimated hobby. We'd probably get on real well; the man would be laughing at this third-life glued together by a philosophy of fuck 'em. After all, he is, isn't he? I scratch at the back porch door for my scraps. He's a house dog; gets a rubdown, fresh water and his daily dose right in a nice ceramic dish.
I smile thinking of him, almost enough to call him brother.
Almost.
The Sharpie's latest message of hope has been rubbed away; now just a gray ghost on the yellow. Fading is an appropriate fate for the dictums of such a lazy saint. I might have liked her more if she pulled her little two-string cap down around her ears, clicked her Birkenstocks together and belted out her message of salvation.
What a hypocrite, I remark to myself, as the southbound shows up to give me a mirror to address.
Across that street, in the steam of that window in Chicago November, the night drops thick around me and through the fog I fade. It's always come to me; I'd fret about in my isolation, finally frustrated, I'd walk out into the World and get lost. Always, the World had taken pity on the sorry story, and sent me a distraction that I might cope a little longer. Always, a kind face, voice; always a soul running the worst con: Curiosity; eventually lending me that credibility which for a moment gives me legitimacy. Much like Sharpie, I'm part-time, content to string a few words up on a subway pillar and think it enough. Always on the way to somewhere else.
Always smart enough to walk away upon leaving my mark.
I wish something for Sharpie there, instead of the vengeance I had dreamed up: spoken in silent tones like prayer. A job guy for her, as that marker finds the bottom of a purse tossed in a closet somewhere and ends up drying out.
And maybe one day for me where I don't end up getting lost on my way back into the World.When Blackness Was A Virtue, Part 3Don't never follow your first mind, cause that's the one that's wrong. You can bet the Devil gonna beat God to you every time.
-Son House
Well the deputy walks on hard nails
and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much
it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker
he blows a futile horn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya
Shelter from the storm
-Dylan, 'Shelter From The Storm'
I pull the little bottle out of my pocket, wrest off the top, and down six ibuprofen to the dismay of the couple across from me.
It must be Date Night; he's got on a shiny shirt and a shit-eating grin; she's in the chair to his left, with her right hand just dawdling about a cell phone in his lap. They've been eyeballing me all night, because I'm not with six other people, the band, or a woman. I blew in through the front door a black-clad bullet: cold, punchy, and pissed from head to toe. As if the headache wasn't bad enough, the pomade barely keeps down the wild mess up top my head. So I'm telegraphing a mood for all to see.
I knock back those ibus with a gulp of Maker's Mark, choke them down, and spit whatever I got left of the ice chips and bile in me toward their general direction.
I thought Shiny Shirt might get up; I thought I might have had an excuse for once when a bare hip blocks out his face.
I'm pretty sure I'm smelling a run on lavender.
Hello, that smell says, and it beats down all the pills.
I look up into a smile, and devilish, devilish eyebrows.
She looks over at the band.
I thought I'd be late.
I kick out the chair.
Sit down, Gemini.
It was her ring finger that got her named.
Which means a confession is in order.
I don't look at ring fingers, unless I've got one in my face. And usually when I've got one in my face, they're not asking me to evaluate the relative hairiness of their knuckles. I don't look at ring fingers for the same reason I won't ask you about your quiet friend. For the same reason I don't ask for help in stores.
Because I don't ask anymore.
I tell.
There's a whole mindfuck you can work on yourself with body language and verbal cues; you can run a mental masturbation of will she won't she all night until you've got yourself steamed in imagination's lather; until you're ready to bite something off. I can't stand getting that far off track; I like to come out of the corner when I make up my mind in the sixth round and throw a punch then. Fuck the dancing. I'll just take the beating. So I won't look at rings; I'll give you one of those getting ready to compliment your shoes grins, and then I'll ask you where the hell your boyfriend is at.
Or not.
It looked like the pi symbol. Intrigued by mathematics set in silver against onyx I ask:
What's with the calculus and point at it.
She looks at me, confused for a minute, gives me a side-eye and a smirk.
The pi symbol, I say, three point one four.
Oh, oh yeah. No, no that's not a pi symbol, it's the zodiac. Gemini.
I issue forth blank regard.
My boyfriend gave it to me. It's his sign.
Signs. I got some things I can say about signs, I remark internally.
What's your sign?
Guess.
Scorpio.
I bust out laughing.
No. Wait, maybe a moon.
Leo.
Ha.
What is it?
You don't want the answer to that.
Sagittarius.
I lean across the bar.
C'mere.
She edges in.
Gemini; pause for dramatic effect; don't be a detective.
I'm a Pisces, she says.
I raise my glass.
The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Somebody in the bar laughs.
When it comes up, I almost miss it. The pick rolling over the strings, up-down, up-down, up-UP and the singer tries to gravel his voice through the microphone.
I got a letter this morning, what'd you think it read
I'm shaking my head.
What's wrong?
It's 'How you reckon it read'.
You know this song.
She's smiling.
I smile, too.
Death Letter Blues.
That singer, forty going on twenty-two, with a past-your-prime mullet and a paunch puts all of a half-pack of cigarettes he smoked between sets into it, and he wheezes. Date Night is long gone; she's on her third whiskey sour and I work around a club soda and lime. The bassist seems to think an E string is all you need; the drummer at least stays simple, though a few times I have expected him to pull a Whitesnake-like roll. They do Sweet Home Chicago; they do John Lee Hooker, and a couple songs they said they wrote. Some kid in a knit cap and a cotton hoodie bangs his feet and palms against the hard surface of floor and table, running right along. The singer likes it.
She hasn't said word one about the boyfriend, and I haven't asked. She all but volunteered herself to come along on this jaunt; I wasn't going to stand around while she shifted from foot to foot waiting for me to ask her that night. Fuck waiting, too.
We're out on the sidewalk; she cadges a smoke before heading to the train. I'm around the corner, so I linger a bit.
How'd you like your first shitty blues band?
I liked them. After a second, she adds: You didn't.
No. Then again, I know what some of those songs are supposed to sound like.
She gives me the cocked head.
I tell myself: What the fuck.
Well, one of these days I'll have to hear what they should sound like.
I nod at her; she returns it.
Gemini.
She squints her eyes.
See You In The Future, I say, and rear off.
The ibuprofen bottle jing-jangs; I sound like a fucking maraca. The headache is mostly gone; down around a low hum. What was it Son House said; you could sing the blues in church if you know the right words. But it's never the words, that's the last lesson I learned. If anything, the words are the weapon in the crime. Give me Son House up there, drop that eighties reject and his backing-bar-band; lose Shiny Shirt and the fuck in the hoodie; once he starts to pick and warble like he was trying to pick a padlock while being strangled, I could see him throwing his head back and yelling out his last breaths to the Heavens, oblivious to the God who hears it. That fucking desperation in a world doing ten thousand miles an hour around you without your foot on its pedal. They say all you might be able to have in this World is a set of eyes across from you taking you in, maybe a set of arms. You know, I think about Son House, here on this sidewalk doing this half-ass calypso in my pocket and it occurs to me that it's not the World that's got him singing so hard you'd think a devil got on the back of the man to start whipping the skin off him.
Maybe it's drowning in those other eyes.
I get in the car, and I immediately turn on the news radio. I'm looking for traffic times.
Hard numbers; when and wheres.
Otherwise I'm not making it back home.When Blackness Was A Virtue, Part 2And if I pass this way again
you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her
on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death and men
who are fighting to be warm
Come in, she said
I'll give ya
Shelter from the storm
-Dylan, 'Shelter From The Storm'
A couple of days after the election, and the city stumbles back into its rhythm; drunk, bleary-eyed, all off-time. The people I walk by seem to come in two flavors: Springtime and Death.
It's not the loss of the GOP candidate that has invited these extremes.
Some hear the train rumbling down the tunnel and think it's coming to pick them up and cart them off into tomorrow.
Others believe that this tunnel and this train are only one-way runs, and they're facing the wrong motherfucking way.
The other day I was told it was morning in America.
Morning ain't never been a good time to be drunk, I replied.
Off the sidewalk, I step into the mostly empty lounge. They've either over-celebrated or they have nothing to celebrate because they ain't here.
I take my stool.
Slow night.
Yep.
I pull the Reader out from under my arm.
Let's go with uh,; I pause for a second; Stolichnaya.
Throw a wedge in there, I add as an afterthought.
A few paper shuffles, maybe fifteen minutes pass; I can tell she wants to chat.
I look up.
You go to that rally?
No, didn't get a chance. What about you?
You kidding me? I blew out of the South Loop like a bullet.
She laughs; Why?
City inspector came walking into the shop about quarter after four. I had already sent everybody home; gave them a choice. They could leave at three and get paid until five; or they could leave earlier than three and not get paid at all. Naturally, they all stayed until three. So I see this guy come in and I'm thinking it's another problem with the business license; last year we forgot all about it and the sonofabitches did a sweep and managed to catch us. I still think that was an inside deal; but anyway: this prick comes walking in, you know, with his little computerized tote board and an asshole smile on his face and he asks me if I'm in charge.
Fundamentally, I tell him.
Seriously? He came here, too. High voice, squinty eyes?
Yeah; squints. So he asks me if I got anybody working. I explain the three o'clock plan. That's when he tells me that Bob Fioretti asked him to walk around the area and touch base with the local businesses.
Who's Bob Fioretti?
Your 2nd district alderman. He name drops the guy like (a) the fucking Commissar is in town and (b) I'm supposed to give a fuck. He tells me they're advising all the business owners in the area to not have anybody in their buildings after 6 PM. He tells me it's nothing too much to worry about, but they do anticipate the possibility of there being a civil disturbance.
I take a sip.
So I locked up and followed him out the door.
Bizarre.
So what'd he tell you?
Wanted to know what time we were going to be open until.
If I remember correctly, you guys were gonna close at 7.
More like 8. We couldn't get anybody out of here.
No doubt.
I take another sip.
So what did you end up doing?
Went home, opened all the windows, made myself some tea, and turned on the TV just in time to see McCain concede. What did you do?
Went home and went to sleep.
This is a lie.
She couldn't catch it if she tried.
I circle a couple of items in the Reader. Points of interest.
Whatcha circling?
I look up over the glasses for a second, then back down.
Ideas.
Like what, as she leans right over the counter to look at the upside-down print. I am treated to the all-enticing top view of her chest.
I blink back the breasts, shake my head, turn the paper; point out the two that I liked.
This one says Blues Jam, some joint in Lakeview. Familiar turf. Or here over at the Lincoln Park Cultural Arts Center they're singing songs and arias to Shakespeare.
You like opera?
The skepticism is dripping.
I lean in, give it right the fuck back.
Why not.
Oh, I don't know....
She flutters over the words; I smile inwardly; still got it.When Blackness Was A Virtue, Part 1'Twas in another lifetime
One of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness
a creature void of form
Come in, she said
I'll give ya
Shelter from the storm
-Dylan, 'Shelter From The Storm'
Resumption
Maybe it is in here:
A fast car, Billy Idol sneer, cuffed t-shirt and Vitalis leaned against a brick wall were taking fifth place against motherfuckers that could knit their own Middle East hipster scarves. I could fall back on the old Intellect, but should one be using Intellect for courtship purposes? Really? You're better off with a gourd and a sharp knife. It's highly visual work, and everything past the nose next goes through the eyes.
Or perhaps here:
I would wet my pants to actually witness a daring attempt to garner one's independence from self obliteration. Hell, I'd just want to witness the depth of thought (or the inherent development of psychosis) that would precede such an act.
Somehow, I've done something I haven't been able to do in a while.
Remember.
Soon after, I reacquired proper attitude.
Happy hour to me used to be the Latinos in the parking lot around 4:30, case of Tecate on ice in the trunk of one of the cars; standing around, taking off the edge of the workday, one, two, three beers at a run. The Polish I worked with would start theirs at noon; swigs from the unlabeled bottle at lunch, passed around the small circle like a joint, like a shaman-pipe without the slightest concern for hygiene.
And watch out for fucking Fridays. Paydays. Four-thirty across the parking lots of the disappearing American blue-collar landscape, first and second shifters co-mingle; share the small facts of their struggles over 9 proof (4.5% by volume).
I have forgotten this language, or it has forgotten me. I gave all that up a while back, gave up aspirations of reproduction and twenty percent down and dying reasonably old, but not without at least one bypass. I can't join those circles like I used to; bop over into them amid a shower of back-slaps and one-liners as I translated the World into terms of mutually agreeable derision; as we all distracted ourselves together to survive the empty crisis of conscience that passed for our lives.
I found a perfect seat at the back end of the bar that carries a three-quarter view of the room in my 120o. From the vantage I've been ordering simple: Bourbon straight. Vodka gimlet. Gibson.
I like to stop for a one-drink happy hour here; halfway between leaving a ringing phone and a whistling ledger; and getting on that train to head into the otherlife. I am here in this stool a walking, talking transitional being. I haven't had a good goddamned cocktail in a long time. Probably in as long as I haven't had a good goddamned date. The drinks hit back at me hard and I watch the dance, and realize how much I've missed just watching.
I've given a few of them names; an old habit of mine that goes back to the early days of the War; a way for me and the brothers to escape lower middle class, escape anonymity and the fringe (we were just as dumb then). A good name became the man; if he was good he grew into it; and I liked to call a man, not by his fucking nomenclature, but by his name. This is who you are, that name says; don't forget it.
The object of my attention is a streaky-haired wrench I call Twirls. Twirls does exactly that, in a circle, round her three admirers. She undulates in a cross between small hop and twist. And god, her teeth. I hear lasers fix those, eyes, and gallbladders too. I pull at the bourbon (yes, today it was the bourbon). Her teeth mask out the lower part of her face and she bares them in a constant straining grin.
I've thought about going over there; walking right in-between all three frat brothers to grab Twirls by the wrist and offer to buy her a cup of coffee. No, no, it's not what you think, I'm going to tell Twirls, it's not lust in the form of caffeinated intellectualism.
I just want to see a cup of badly-burned twenty-four hour diner coffee wash over those white, white teeth.
Gentlemen, I'm going to say, as you were and walk backward all the way to the stool, tipping my invisible hat.
Something funny?
I must have been smiling.
The first time she came by, she was all business. All Help you without turning the end of the two-word sentence up to form it into an inquiry. She showed the slightest bit of shock at the very plain old-man drink order, an almost-imperceptible blink of the eyes that I thought I was imagining. The second time, she smiled a little bit in the way people smile on seeing the same person in the same seat today that they saw yesterday.
This was the ninth time.
I no longer go in for the conspiracy-theory formation that is the attempt to decipher the romantic intentions of one's object of affection. I won't compile the hundred little analyses of body-language I collect into behavior-prediction patterns that I can color with my own desires. I prefer to act completely blind in such situations, and forthright to boot. The eighth time I saw her, she did something typical. I ordered a gin straight and she said: No frills. Just like that.
Then she lingered.
I looked at her once over the glasses, a good long look right in the eye. She found another customer to serve.
I began to whistle the Cranberries.
Today: Something funny?
Most things, I answer.
Most things are funny.
I sip with poetics.
Like those three over there?
I look over them, Twirls on her twenty-seventh rotation.
They're funny, too.
You know she's never paid for a drink?
I smile.
Nobody ever sees the monkey with the money. Only the organ grinder.
She uproars, I grin; tip the drink in honor toward her reverie and pass judgment:
Funny.ShoeflyNaught loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so.
Nor is it possible to Thought
A greater than itself to know
-Blake, Little Boy Lost
Ghost girl comes up behind me in the late hour.
When we meet, we don't bother with words. She lays her cold hands on my shoulders and I shiver.
Hello, ghost girl.
I turn to my task.
I pierce the blister first just under center and blot away the liquid with a paper towel. Satisfied that the skin is dry enough, I work the Exacto knife around the white edges of the blister; real careful, peeling back the dead flap as I go. It moves through the skin without effort until the limp disk drops off. I blot it again. All the while ghost girl is talking in my ear.
You could get a new pair of boots, you know.
I like these boots. They've been with me a while. They've done one crash with me, and a series of near-hits. They've kicked through their share of ice, plywood, and plaster. For at least a year I left the laces out of them, jailhouse style. Finally I caved and bought them some lizard green and black jobs, heavy-duty weather rated jobs. They're already frayed.
The steel box is showing through on the left toe, and I've rubbed the inside sole raw. It now returns the favor, eating up my socks, leaving my feet covered in a black, sweaty, stinky mess.
And blisters.
I lace them up nice and tight. They thud on the subway platform and drown out the powpow of business heels next to me.
Sean Penn was out of inspiration; out of fists to throw at photographers; out of fire to stoke his Irish rage. Hoping the old samurai would break it out all way from him, remove the rigidity and set him burning again. Heading out a loser into a fucking parking lot of all things, Penn's new shoes bang away on the loud gravel.
What kind of asshole wears new shoes to the horse track?
Bukowski remarks: I'll tell ya; don't ever wear loud shoes.
Maybe ghost girl doesn't like that. Maybe she's jealous that I sometimes get within a foot of other women, and I always keep at least a mile between me and her.
If she walked, she'd have business heels and a rational death-camp lockstep.
I don't know how we met. Probably accidental; I don't ever meet women on purpose, I just run into them. Careen might be a more accurate verb, but even that lends a semblance of control and guidance to the process that would make me a liar to describe it. I went to bed one night feeling real heavy in the stomach and chest; Dickens indigestion. I woke up to her chiding me about buying an alarm clock I never bother to set. I looked around, saw the blind blowing against the window; saw no change in the blue-black room, yet I could hear her clearly over the roar of the fan.
Since then, she tunes in and out; like AM reception; putting your hand on the broken-antenna nub to just get the thirteen-inch TV to come in on channel 2. She smells of burning ozone and hot tin foil.
Tonight she's lively, shaking me up every so often with a cold puff at the back of my neck.
Talking about me, are you: Like we had some agreement, some Boy Scout blood-oath done up in cut thumbs; like I was going to be secret-agent-secret-lover passing hallway notes and keeping up appearances. I half-believe she's from a future I might have accidentally killed off by deciding to hold onto my anger and my vision. Wound around a profound disappointment she comes back to pay me back in small change; a running commentary track on the emptiness of my occupation.
I trim what's left of the rough edges with a cuticle clipper, leaving it uniform and even; daub hydrogen peroxide on the patch, dry it all off, and then draw fresh socks. The soft tissue will harden to callous; the boot will bite into it, or maybe it will settle in and foot and boot will become a single unit, pounding out an attitude of default hostility to a World intent on showing me just how pretty it spins by the whispers of ghosts and the fucking machinegun precision of two-inch twisty Donna Karans. There will be no room in the future World for the throwbacks like myself, who tend to their imperfections with craft knives and H2O2 rather than therapy; who suffer friction's burn for carrying their histories with them, instead of dumping the old one on the basis of some mild discomfort and picking up shiny new approved changes of life on sale.
The best I can hope for in whatever fucking future I have left is to be haunted by my old hopes.
(thank you, ghost girl; XOXO)
When asked what he regretted most, Penn answered: The future. Starting with death.
And Father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?Saw The Blues Walkin' Like A ManPin your ear to the wisdom post
Pin your eye to the line
Never let the weeds get higher
Than the garden
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
-John Hammond, covering Waits' 'Get Behind The Mule'
I'm a fucking dead man, probably just counting days down and it's as if I don't know it.
Some wounds just don't close. You sew them, staple them, duct tape them together, pack them full of gauze and sprinkle dust and footprint water on them. You bleed almost all the way dry, and they still shed little red river tears.
Watching a mother and her child at it in the seat in front of me, absent all that subhuman utterance of baby-talk parents will insult their children with. She explains the wonder of the subway to the little goddess, like I haven't been riding it these last six years, swearing up and down it is the transportation for the Great Despondency of my generation; like I don't wish to walk to stalk up and down the aisles punching every single self-absorbed sonofabitch in the mouth. The Sins Of The Fathers, I'll yell at them, over and over, gibbering madly as they drag me off in cuffs, busted eye, cracked right frontal lobe, blood for eyeshadow.
She has the look of a single mother, hard set; self-contained; bravery fired in the risk and responsibility of the little package of chaos that even now is grabbing onto the seat rail with both hands, sticking its head over, and saying to me:
Hi.
I take one look at Momma, nod to her, let her know that for right now, for this second, I'm vetted.
Safe.
How ya doing, kid, I reply.
How ya doing, kid, a little piping falsetto mimics; eyes all scrunched up underneath the black-brown curls,; the unabashed smile made honest because it's crooked like mine, missing a front tooth, and on display for all eyes of the World to see. Smiling just as hard as she can. Smiling like there ain't no such thing as dying early, only living hot. Daring this man that folks don't dare and happy because of it; braver than any warrior ever tried to take me.
Laughing.
At me.
Momma smiles, too, now; and it isn't the smile with design, it's pleasure at her creation jousting me; joy at the theft of my permission.
Both knives goes right in my fucking chest and turn.
My God is a gold watch in the middle of a sunlit field, dropped by some genius almighty Architect who spat the creativity out of him because it had swollen and pressed out every ounce of his imagination, stole away his deception, his few little comforts; banged at the inside of his walls until he could no longer stand the pounding, throbbing, fucking potential; that split-second before release that is the apotheosis of all sexual congress ever had, scratched into celluloid, or feverishly cobbled together in sweaty neural confines anywhere, you motherfuckers:
There it lies; he left with his mind empty, in the great melancholy that comes after the victory; forgotten.
Today was an old man, similar in senility, pacing the twenty-seven feet between front door and mailbox, most of the way wrecked and gone. Waiting for the letter that doesn't come, he puts the flag up, down, upside-down; different orders, numbers, and cadences of steps to dance that summons into being, the charm of that long-ago golden absent God.
There's another way I see God, and that's in the tightrope between the eye of artist/lover and the subject/victim of their infatuation but I'm not ready to talk about that just yet.
I used to resent the womb: in the midst of all this absurdity, that fading memory of floating somewhere warm and safe; a mother's voice cooing nonsense into comfort from far off as I drifted and dreamt. I was cut off from that cycle early on; left to run alongside the breakdown lane, to try to find a fire in the wrecks my cut-off fathers left ahead of me. By the time I found them, I could only mourn them. There are no more wars or frontiers. All the wrong things have been mystified and the true mysteries destroyed, or worse: ignored. The World has gotten smaller; and the space between people become so compressed and dense that one can no longer penetrate it with sight or sound. All my brothers have left to fight in their cells are the psychotic fugues of their own animal minds, which struggle to wring command and meaning from a body that will soon be three to five percent HDPE plastic.
You can't explain this to a little girl, much less a mother so I bite down hard enough on my tongue to taste blood. Blood's still good for a ritual in today's know-everything World (and if you don't believe me, stand in an emergency room and watch for five minutes). I figure I'll try to think of that field.
It's beautiful here, the grass sways with whispers of the fall coming on and I realize I'm in my favorite dream. There's the old tree leaning out over the field; a warden keeping just enough of an eye over the land so that too much trouble doesn't whip itself up. Were that old warden to talk, he'd tell you a little trouble is just fine for the ground.
I don't hear that warden talking, but I hear a song without a singer coming lightly on the breeze, like an answer to a prayer I don't remember getting down for anyway:
It's a deep song with a deep voice and a steady beat, a beat that could keep feet shuffling long after a light heart quit early. Deep because those are the only cuts you carry with you, and rhythm because that's the foundation that old forgetful Architect built on.
(If you want to know if what you make with your hands and hearts is a right thing, listen for that backbeat. If your work has it, you've bred true. If it doesn't, you have to wait and listen a little while longer. This assumes you don't need be told what's right.)
It's a song with stories of men and women I have never known, yet it's my story, too; all wrapped up in nothing but voice and rhythm; telling me the only why I need is two hands and keep moving. It tells its lesson plain, right up front: No metaphysics; no possible worlds; no propositions of truth to keep a fevered head swimming to the end of its life afloat an ocean of noise.
I realize I am on on my knees, praying a capella before going back to the World where I have to keep running, where these guts and this blood keep churning hard and hot. I want to take something with me.
I never seem to be able to grab that watch.
I'm glad my stop comes up because I want to run away from this girl and her momma at top speed. It's a hard enough fight every day giving myself another reason to get up without being reminded there's still things you can have that are worse than nothing to lose, and that if you're given the choice (or chance, depending on where you find your particular god), that you'll grab it with both hands, and it will grab you and rip your fucking heart out of your chest.
I get out the double doors; the stabbing pains subside.
I look back because I'm an asshole.
The little girl waves. Far off down the other dark end of the tunnel, I hear a fucking blues guitar.PlowsharesI was tapping at my chin considering the all-important first move when it hit me. There was only one thing fit to go in the void between us alien creatures that we would accept without a single ounce of protest and that would be a chessboard.
Maybe it's the even presentation, eight by eight, black next to white like a Pythagorean's wet dream of boy-girl-boy-girl order. Perhaps it's the potential of the business; the cleanliness of the field before the pawns begin their march into doom. Maybe it's the beautiful fable of the orderly beginning, the clearest cause in the old Cause-And-Effect incantation. Empty means you must fill it; space means you must travel through it. And maybe, just maybe it's in the one second before the strategies and calculations start that we are truly equals beyond compare; both wanting to win; absent of our opponent, just a single wish of I could do it. The hope of the charging grunt into immortality and the toothless drunken truck driver spilling out of his belt loops and off his bar stool into love.
It could happen.
And then somebody moves. After that someone else loses.
This has been the way of the World.
We would have framed it better with a chessboard, me and him. Staring down on it, three-quarters of the way through. What did I see that shook me so? Did I see a checkmate coming; renegade rook streaks down to the last row to claim the bishop whose body is thrown in its path in a last-ditch bid to save the King. A knight races three back and one across from the sideline, but he's too late: bound in a linear perspective, he dies by the rules laid down for him before somebody carved him out of the jade. The Queen arrives to deliver the death blow.
Maybe I saw it coming, spent a week trying to figure it out. That rook was initially a peacemaker. A champion of the back row secretly aching to be castled so he could take turns on the throne. The Queen, moving along her diagonals, and then without warning, slicing up half the board to bind the poor knight and bishop to their fates. Perhaps in the end they too are pawns. See: I play chess all wrong; I send everything I've got across the board to kill whatever it can before it goes down in glory. It's either that or I start learning to hide, be cagey, feint, half-steps forward and back. Never should I show a hunger for the target; never should I openly admit how badly I want to stand in the back rows of my enemy, to stomp my muddy boots all through his court and all over his throne.
I saw this coming, and I said: Look, I know how this is gonna end. Let's you and me walk before the whole business goes south. Was it half-steeped in the post-teenage desire for high drama? Theatrics aside, I meant zero jest. It would come crashing down just like I said it would not even thirty days later: the same slicing moves, same rook's desperation.
Boom.
Mated: the King placed on his side; his resignation, exile; the path of many fictional rulers gone before.
Some like chess for life's metaphor; with its laws and orders; other poker, and its reliance on those two tricky tools of men: trust and daring. The creative art of the lie is wedded to mathematics; the rest is left to the brave and foolish. Much like modern-day warfare.
I like solitaire, patience for some.
Virtues: I like fifty-two cards even; and no feats of mentalism beyond that of counting 1-2-3-4 and color co-ordinating. I like that before every game, no matter how skillful the creature, one can lose through no fault of their own. I like that this is a percentage in the Majority. I like that skill can improve your position with no guarantees, while mistakes pretty much guarantee you'll be caught twenty-seven cards in, with no more possible moves to make.
But we couldn't play solitaire in the void between us. We couldn't handle the truth between us that both of us could win, or lose regardless of each other's efforts or desires. We are nothing without the delusion of a contest or the struggle between us (ask any romantic). We could not be ground under the hell of hopelessness; we would rather live under the slavery of rule and rote, finish line and final tote; just so one could be elevated, and one pulled down.
One of us must be overcome, even if it means someone volunteers.
I look in the murk of both past and future, and see that chessboard coming around again. It's no surprise; we people are going to keep running into each other at our prospective crossroads; we 're going to stop and trade a few pleasantries and observations; perhaps suck in two seconds of the scenery and the contests will be sketched right there in the dust, with the won walking off like they were going to to take the clouds two at a time to Heaven, and the lost hanging their heads all the way into premature graves.
The Peacemaker came running after me that night, caught me about a half-block down. I had hit a full stride by that time, the free air loosening me up, making me light. He sang a very hard song, he said: come on back, brother and snared me with an old gambit, still effective even after so many years have passed. He got me to want to want to belong. And so I went back and laid that king down, and took that beating and ten more for it.
If he was here right now, I think I'd knock his dick in the dirt.
He helped me forget how to be alone.
As far as the chessboard from the future goes, I've got a new move I've been working on. You play it right after you choose which side you're going to be on.
If you're a smart one, you choose White.
Then you go first.
 Call Bobby WomackMost fucks are really nothing, they are mostly labor, like trying to climb a very steep, muddy hill.
-Chinaski
Hank Chinaski applies for what is probably the only job he's fit to do: Reporting, and for his trial, he discovers he has crabs.
Upon meeting the pharmacist, he explains: I'm the victim of an inequity.
Finally lunch instead of the lunch crowd? is what I would want to ask Bukowski in his stead.
Hank Chinaski gets the crabs and nearly burns his balls off with the cream. There he is, in Bukowski's made-up railroad apartment, all shirt and no drawers, having his cock wrapped in gauze like a bubonic Mayday pole.
What could be said to this; what words: Bukowski, through the voice of protagonist, says: Get me another drink.
Twenty women on the Blue Line, ten women back and forth in front of the porch. A girl walks down the street in lock step with the chatter she is blasting into her mouthpiece. Forty-five minutes later, she comes back. Same conversation, same person: or does it make any difference? I try to wonder and come up dry.
The men are silent; me on this porch; a row of cardiac graves. A tall fellow next to the doors regards the pixie below him; noisy and insistent. You would think the act of craning one's neck backward and face upward was chiropractic orgasm. She cracks her face with smiles, over and over. These are plastic conversations; I've discussed them hundred of times, and heard them a hundred more times over. Educated noise; maybe it is noise with purpose. Noise cast out to fill up all the space.
I trained early in quiet, and keep my path in isolation. I have mastered silent, long barrels sitting still and being shot underneath the city the way I imagine a digested mess makes its way through intestine; by turns slow and ground out; and then hot and fast. My discipline serves me well. Everywhere around me there is space; I can reach out my arms, and not a single obligation; not one stunted demand, will jump up to hang itself off my bicep. I have space, and tomorrow I can dream of doing nothing without being threatened by its imminent arrival.
My fellow man is not so fortunate. Everywhere there are noise, words, being ran into his ears, being shouted up at him, or down to him; being spit in his face in aggravating sing-song slang, in rotting fish-breath, plastic-jug vodka and yellow smoker-skag. They are pumping it through speakers, and carving the English down to bite-size pieces that require no gestation and no defecation; that's how fast they fly through you. Men with little eyes, and great big wagging tongues have convinced you that clarity is God, to the point that you celebrate yourself the more transparent you become.
There are no trades on the floor, in the street; underground in the intestine; it is all irony; chopped-up half sentences trying to derive poetry from what clearly was a badly-executed amputation. Words just running into each other, rogue broadcasts crossing each other's borders just long enough to harass the enemy; to convince one the enemy is still there before retreating behind the high walls and imposing yet flimsy gates.
As long as you can find an enemy, you can continue the war.
Chinaski watches a stripper at the end of it (even then, still reporting). The scene taken apart the way a private detective might keep notes sipping day-old coffee and rubbing three-day old beer in the front seat of a late model Acura Legend, watching some insurance fraudster walk ten clean strong steps to the garbage can with a wet stinky mess; the same way Middle Management finds himself in a hotel with a loose woman and an hourly rate. It's all going to the judge later, line by line. This is how Chinaski reports in:
Darlene fingered her naked breasts, showing them to us, her eyes filled with the dream, her lips moist and parted. Then suddenly she turned and waved her enormous behind at us. The beads leaped and flashed, went crazy, sparkled. The spotlight shook and danced like the sun. The four man band cracked and banged. Darlene spun around. She tore away the beads. I looked, they looked. We could see her cunt hairs through the flesh-colored gauze. The band really spanked her ass.
And I couldn't get it up.
I sit here on this porch fulminating all of it, all the past weeks, months, a year (I don't bother going back farther, it's just more of the same). I concern myself only with that I can still touch, or lick my lips a little bit to moisten them and then: Remember. There was something profound I expected to say about all of it; about the stripper, and the girl on the phone; the mild shame of the tall man, grinning stupidly in the face of his fate like the fool that laughs at the Tao. I can feel my own noise deep down, words getting ready to form. I choke it back.
It's what Bukowski really said; why so many of you motherfuckers on the Literary diet get down on your knees so fucking fast for sparse prose. I've said enough about the desert; everybody has; that's why all the poetry in the World is written to water that bad ground. It's why fucking is easier than romance, love letters never seem to work, and promises only guarantee heartbreak.
It's Wittgenstein, if only he hadn't taken himself so goddamned seriously.
All the important words of the World can only be heard if first somebody has decided to Shut The Fuck Up.
This is why I practice.
I'll speak if it becomes too painful not to. I'd like to see just how long I can last.The Great ConcavityBeen thinking about writing again.
I had hot thinking once, swinging out of bed at ten in the morning to make my Ethics class, mixed up drunk and careless; nowadays such a thought might as well be a Rule for all the abstraction I've left laying in the dirt behind me:
It was a voice just like that, sometimes preaching, and sometimes just a couple words. Sometimes it was Fuck 'Em but mostly it was Write. And I would, and all that bad shit volume would turn down for a while, and I'd manage to roll out of the bed and catch my left foot on the floor and make my way toward that shower again.
I lost it, maybe back in 2004; maybe longer. I think I lost it about the time I dropped out of college to make money, and that had to be back in 2002. This; this here is a six-year funeral, a eulogy for something that never managed to get itself born. Fuck that: it's still W-R-I-T-E spells relief. I come here after I've taken another beating, when I'm done motherfucking myself for the twenty-seventh time, when I get past all the programmed answers to find myself in that funny state of mind, that floating mind. I wondered once if a man could make a religion out of pain, could use it for more than emasculated athleticism and patriarchal mutilation; if in that moment he could look into the middle of that fucking scream and let it sandblast all that distraction out of his head, and behold there something else.
Lately in these five minutes I have every so often, on the tail end of a day intent on convincing me to take a concrete abutment down at ninety miles an hour, I've been seeing a little bit of that golden ground again, and hearing that one commandment, and it says: Write. (Or Fuck 'Em. But mostly write.)
Fucking writers, man, that was never going to be a crew I was going to belong to. I don't have enough silk panty in my diet to defend my ideas with upturned sneers and quips. I do a lot of wide-eyes, grimaces, and hand gesturing. I swear in between the guffaws.
Man has no nature, what he has in essence-is history was what Jose Ortega y Gasset said. Riding herd on the three-humped back of that name, are you surprised to find out this professor of metaphysics would write with such metaphorical force that his argument would just get lost in his effects? Those folks used to coloring nice and neat in between in the lines (and I knew a kid, who would first trace those lines in the intended color-to-be, without deviation, and then lightly and evenly shade the white. You wanted to stroke it when it was done) get lost easy when the lines get obscured.
When you get over the barricades folks erect to protect those all-too-fragile systems of belief, and you endure the very depressing act of categorical dissembling an individual will do in front of you as a way of communicating to you, you're liable to find about the only thing more interesting that the subconscious twitches, uncontrolled secretions, and pelvic tweaks a body performs in front of you is this history. Pain has a way of distilling whatever wonderful unicorn abstraction you've claimed to be your dream or desire into its actual base hunger. The collection of these hungers on a timeline that disregards death in the first-person?
History.
In this history, teachers were priests to me; keepers of all the doors and keys. Architects of the great ritual that is our procession from shit-pants to shit-heads. I had a romance for a while with the idea of the teacher as priest, but up close I found out that even that holy office could be chewed between the teeth of our lazy appetites along with the rest of those historical institutions, regurgitated into nalgene bottles, repackaged and relabeled as friendly to the digestive system and fed right back to us.
If the teachers were priests at the altars of Man's Grand Dream, writers were its prophets. Half a foot in the exile of the ostracized, and the other buried deep in the ass of madness, like anybody talking through the gods. Perhaps a clever English book will tell you that writers are the keepers of our cultural treasures, the great observers and painters in words. Daring to take the most uncontrollable of our tools, these words, to bend them to their will, with the best and brightest celebrated for their clarity and accuracy. And secretly celebrated for how close they get to our shame and sharp teeth. You've got to know all the shamanic rituals, writer: know your rhythms and alliterations; know how to ring in sarcasm and speak in ten different tongues, three alien, five foreign, and two forked.
This was a lie to me; a pretty one, and thus useful. Writers could no more be keepers than they were watchers. Cultural guardsman; how about a fucking vampire? A leech suckled on the side of the World; an ugly creature intent on sucking it all out of life, and still unsatisfied that it must then chase after its audience. I wonder if it's a sickness that cannot apologized for; like lymphoma; I wonder if it's a condition unavoidable in the womb, or if it has later-onset, as the writer-creature finds a way to drift to the peripherals of its fellow creatures to take them in at a glance and claim superiority in the space between. An iron gut works a steel jaw with spit, making it fit for chewing on all sorts of trash, cleaning the palate for the favorite meal one's own flesh. A narcissistic manic disassociating cannibal masochist bordering on the sociopathic.
Of course we have a little writer in us; we all have words and eyes. We all live with half a head in psychosis. To the man that makes it his craft, though..
Sometimes I think I'll just write me a love story rather than have to deal with the elementals of actually having one. Other times I plot revenge on all my fellow man in prose. Mostly I just cope, and that makes the writer a praying sonofabitch whether he likes it or not, getting down on his knees to his fellow man and talking to that face, even if it's stone, even if dead or never-was, to keep in continuing that tradition: history that's about the only thing we got worth talking about past the pain. The War Will Always Be There TomorrowA man gets on a train in Philadelphia with a hammer. Tells his five-year-old son to sit, and then goes to work on some sleeping sonofabitch. Is there a reason? Money? A woman perhaps. Or does he get up, spread some peanut butter on the wheat toast, mix it later with Vitalis through a greasy mane that he drives back with a comb? Does he call his son Boy, and it comes out pronounced Bwoiah? Does he say Bwoiah, you go git that bookbag an' les go. He feeds his dollar-fifty, his two-fifty maybe round-trip in the farecard machine, grips his hammer, walks in the train, and pays back just a little bit of that hate on his fellow man.
Really: I'm not much for villain worship. For me, it's heroism loosened up, a little shit and blood on its face, in a primal half-laugh half-roar of I want I will without the moral constraints and necessary controls of good guys.
As any tart will tell you, the hero's only flaw is excess boredom.
Maybe it's the cynicism amping up even further, or perhaps I've been the bad guy enough times. A recent memory of a kid with a good heart and loud mouth says to me: What's the worst thing you ever did; leave a bar tab makes me want to take a stroll out the the car in the front, get my short crowbar out of the trunk, and clout him into a whole new realm of understanding. Not for me, but for brothers like Philadelphia.
They say when he got on the train and proceeded to go about his job of work, not a one of those passengers got up.
Watch where you sip, I might say to the mewling broke-jaw at my boot.
Taking in cinema's villains, I find myself fascinated by the their erudition. Mazes of moral choice to rival Kohlberg. And it's nothing new. I've watched it in every epic dark human psyche saga pawned across the cable channels; the same triumvirate riddle of will against victimization, fraud, and complacency. I watch it, mind you, because my alternatives are worse. Should I decide to go get my reality from the tap I will get to watch people fold in on themselves and pull out every last loose bit of gut from them, scrape every ounce of shit from the GI tract, that the casual viewer passing by may magically transform into pretenses toward unachievable sexual gratification OR self-esteem disguised as somebody else's imagined envy.
This is a pump flat tires return to often.
Perhaps I should search out the Philadelphias of the World.
My villains always seem to be small hand-wringing things succeeding on fool-luck and the ignorance of their fellow man; with bulging eyes, fragile egos, and sweaty palms. They are desperate twitchy things yelling too loudly to assert self-deceptions whose validity is arbitrated by shrill volume and finger-pointing exercises. I never find them to be grandiose creatures, bursting at the brim with a vision they want to force on the World like Hollywood sells me. They pick the small, the quiet, the sleeping, the quick-walking stick-figure girl to act their passion plays out on instead. They pick a kid because it's easy to beat a kid at just about anything provided it doesn't run. My villains live in the small spaces they pick out of their worlds that they grow to the size of tumors and then live inside. They spew their shit at a distance, always aiming for the face to disfigure, because they find their stomach turns for the close work. When they're not whining as a form of conversation, or backpedaling and saying three words for every two in order to make sure they don't actually stand for anything they can be held accountable for, they're laughing and it's a laughing you can never, ever fucking believe.
Why can't I see more of this on the movie screen?
I'm tired of witnessing live stage plays of it daily, and reading secondhand newspaper writeups of it later.Hard MeasureFor Wallace
The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with poetry. For all the world's sorrows, it is a hallowed spot. But at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of poetry.
-Camus, 'The Minotaur'
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
-The Waste Land
I had teenage dreams of the desert like any dice-rolling revolutionary does. I believed the heat waving off of the asphalt to be a beckoning finger inviting me toward the purity of an enlightenment brought on by death-heat and thirsty ground. I believed I could walk out onto those flats and grow my mind to the size of the land. In essence, escape.
Like a jailbreak.
I regard it now as one would who has lived on the edge of a waste for quite some time. You ask for directions; like any seeker you hope under the grime and hate lives your mentor. He points one finger in the direction you came from and shouts a non-sequitur at you to send you shuffling away quicker than normal. His breath reeks: part tobacco, part booze, part rot. You wonder later what drew you to him with your question, and the only thing you could recall (in fact it fills your memory) was how hot his eyes were burning through you; the hunger and suspicion in them; perhaps the touch of madness as a sign of cognition. You tell yourself a story about the man to shame Thoreau and the pretension supposed by the creature comfort of an expense report and a newspaper in the face of this unapologetic absolute. The truth of the man in front of you is cause-and-effect, action-reaction unraveling for your comprehension moment by moment while the first of your words fall out of your mouth. He possesses no mysteries of the abstract beyond the dog nestled at his feet, who when kicked will snap at your shin. The rest, adjectives and all,will later be re-invented within the clumsy complications of literature and then struck into religious-style beliefs for consumption by the eyes.
This is celebrated as vision.
Wonder cannot stand myopia. A man scratched into hardness on the edge of such waste has off-the-chart tolerance for pain and can take you hand-to-hand should it come to matters of force. He knows how to live desperately, but was that his goal? Perhaps his goal was simply to survive. And perhaps goal is too strong a word; too wondrous of one, too literary.
Maybe he has merely adopted the features necessary to the landscape as any creature does that lives off its particular patch of ground.
The question to ponder at the end of all this is to ask why Hell has always been rendered in all forms of literature as a kind of desert. Bizarre Love TriangleYou nowise deserve a privilege on earth and in heaven for having brought to perfection your dear little meek sheep; you nonetheless continue to be at best a ridiculous dear little sheep with horns and nothing more-even supposing that you do not burst with vanity and do not create a scandal by posing as a judge.
-Camus, Myth of Sisyphus; Conquest
I gotta bout a thousand dollars
Says you couldn't sit where I stand
-Rhymefest, 'Dynomite'
My experiment with civilization has concluded. In the end I managed to lose two things:
1. A great deal of sleep.
2. My Keys.
The keys were more important. I've collected them since I've been driving, and that's going on thirteen years. Running on an hour of sleep, I had to bolt suddenly to make the LaSalle stop, and I also had the misfortune of sleeping in the wrong set of slacks, whose belt loops won't accept the little carabiner hook I hung them on. I left them there, to ride that train on down to O' Hare, and perhaps amuse some soul for a moment as they contemplated an owner more fitting to the aesthetics of their ten-second fantasies.
History: I must have had twenty keys on there; keys from four of the cars I've owned, and five of the places I've laid my head down in. Plus the shop keys, and a couple of trinkets that every so often did double duty as foci. It's always been Phone Keys Wallet; me pounding out some random backbeat on my pockets until I verify all three are there. With the Phone, Key And Wallet I considered myself formidable enough to journey out into the World to hell-raise at will.
Today I am a little bit less.
A picture of absurdity in its totality can be drawn in the form of a petite blonde, arms crossed, watching intently (and perhaps with a bit of maternal tenderness) while her Labrador takes a fucking shit. There's no mistaking that her gaze is focused anywhere else than on that dog's expanding asshole. Another man could be watching, eyes fixed on breast barely contained in layers of yellow and white tank top, or at a bellybutton ring hinting at riches perhaps a little further south. Perhaps he, too, would have the same tender gaze.
This is how I would explain the beauty I used to see to someone; this strange koan where everyone looks but no one seems to see. The only creature I can conclusively believe to be free of its deceptions in this scene is the dog.
While I am certainly saddened enough by the World some days to burn my ego on a pyre to mourn my youth, I certainly see why one ought to be licensed properly before having the privilege of an ego in the first place.
I know it is Eternal September when I am debating the subject certainty with another investigative soul. The argument reminds me of that kid you know who answers every conclusive statement of yours with Why, not to plumb the depth of your philosophical commitments, but to be an aggravating little fuck. Regardless, any fellow has a right to be skeptical initially; who wouldn't be the slightest bit doubtful having been freed from the pill-in-applesauce-on-spoon approach to education they've received up until now? The idea of Hume asserting that you can't even guarantee that the Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow titillates a climax of teenage rebelliousness like you wouldn't believe. Even in those hallowed and ivory halls of the academic; and in your carpet-wall cubicle, do you think you ever really get out of the High School?
I can almost hear a matronly voice making airplane sounds and begging me to come on and open up the hangar so the pilot can land. You know what I should have done? Bit down on that spoon as hard as I could, dicing up tongue and gum, sent one bicuspid flying, and then, grinning in a mouthful of blood and farina, told that bitch to tell the pilot to bring some fucking truth with him on the next run.
Breakfast of champions.
Certainty evades me for the most part. I never thought I'd lose sight of those keys, but it happened. I never thought I'd accumulate any more than seventeen minutes of dream to be moved at a moment's notice. Lately, I've been thinking about money, though. Creature comforts. Hot water and hot meals on a regular basis. Silence on demand. And enough books to chew on.
Certainty, I tell the young rebel, works. Just like any god in any mythology man's ever written. In other words, don't get too close and don't look too hard. You might see something that you won't be able to un-see later. Hume, smart enough to throw business and professors under the bus to seek knowledge ended up railing against the Sun (and the church directly beneath it). Was he preaching uncertainty in men? Or merely telling you how much you could trust what you only looked for in them?
I look for my keys.
The rest will be creatio ex nihilo.
(and if you believe Tom Waits, that sage sonofabitch: God's away on business).Change of DirectionIf you tell someone that you understand, you are lying. Kindly, but still lying.
Yet, this doesn't matter. Beyond the comfort of one's fears, the truth has no importance.
The rest of living is wrought beautifully amongst the misunderstood. The Sacred and The Profane, Coda (I'm Your Man)I'll be there today
With a big bouquet of cactus
I got this rig that runs on memories
And I promise, cross my heart
They'll never catch us
But if they do, just tell them it was me
-Leonard Cohen, 'I Can't Forget'
Forget how it starts. Nobody knows how anything starts anyway. They never get over the explanations they throw together afterward to make the myth of origin a nice and neat act. At this point, you should be tired of hearing lies. Lies are moral things; necessary to survival (imagine trying to survive without the essential deception of hope). They are thus complex and contradictory things. The truth, on the other hand, is murder. Simple, brutal, consistent. The search for clarity must always follow any job of literary craft; be it in fiction or in vision; just as death stalks one out of the womb. To both, a toast: to the great Editor.
Let me tell you the truth; the part that makes me terrible. Let me tell you how I always win, the part I always get right, that I'll be telling stories about until they stick an aluminum tab between my upper and lower jaw and slam my mouth closed to keep the tag in it.
Let me tell you how it's going to end.
Saturday doesn't know it yet, sitting across from me at the dinner table. It isn't about a refusal to take photographs, or to leave the bar soap behind. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for the argument, for the expectation unfulfilled, for the question whose answer will fall far short of the mark. I'm waiting for an ultimatum, or the opportunity to issue one. I'm waiting for boredom, for exhaustion and overstimulation to couple itself to self-doubt. I'm waiting for the little revenges to start being taken. The asides, the carefully crafted conversations designed to lead me to a trough I won't stick my face into.
All of these will happen because they've already happened, ten thousand times a day, four thousand years and running. Recognizing it indicates nothing other than clear vision; understanding is more the acceptance of an addict toward the power of his fix. The rest is storytelling, designed to keep absurdities at bay.
I need only echo the second of Siddhartha's tenets.
I need only wait.
Some days I drive down 83 and I can almost see the bulldozer presiding over the ruins of the diner. The old guard says it went downhill once it went twenty-four hours.
They're right.
I don't think that's going to be enough, though. I think there's hooks deeper in Thursday's meat than what can be removed by demolition. The question of the next time I see her is tied only to the question of what the fuck remains of all those years ago. I've seen it before; a body shuffling around old ruins reciting old scripture, hoping memory can overcome the insistence of now. Bodies can starve themselves walking around tombs waiting for resurrections, can be worn down by the endless back-and-forth if nothing else.
Can a bulldozer bleed?
Crazy's easy, careless is easy. Brave is easy on a measure of stupidity. You can topple most of the World around you with little more than an absolute faith in your own ability, total disregard for your personage and the consequences, and a unrelenting desire to put one foot in front of the other. Unfortunately, this path is usually taken by those that shouldn't. What I try to get past my teeth to Saturday is that seduction is just power all over again, the old cash-register push-button, pull, and ring up, with pleasure as the currency. The hard fact about intimacy (and perhaps its best thrill) is how hard it strikes us on our tender poles. Sometimes I can imagine a soul that loves nothing more than to hammer down on that giant nerve ending; endless teases and retreats; daring caution to the point of madness. I can imagine a soul that loves nothing more than to collide inside the bottle blown out from one's vulnerability and one's fear.
Admiration is simply fear with healthy self-interest.
The death of fear is the death of love: dying soft and dying hard.
I consider this soul, and my mouth goes dry. I've seen a little bit of what folks secret away to become part of themselves; I've seen how they draw the lines of their worlds; I've seen how much they swindle and how much they borrow. I know that in the end I will have to be a salesman, then the pageboy, and finally, a beggar.
Somebody out there will think that all of this is a good thing.
Grinding all of it in my jaw, I force out a grin in agreement.
Thursday hates cliche, and cliche ought to be our killer. I don't worry so much for her half of the World; the shoe of obligation and attendance will slide much easier on her foot. Of the two of us, she has the better work ethic. Cliche will choke me out. Should I survive it, I'll be a grayed, damaged version of today, every so often training my ears after echoes of these things I used to think as a dog might chase after the phantom rodentia of his youth. An ounce of civilization will render me unrecognizable. I find myself wondering if Thursday can see anything even now, or if we are simply playing a very-well developed game of patty-cake pretend.
In retort, I have nothing to say to the vanguard, to originality, that I haven't already said in my riddle of the Mona Lisa. Expect people to run. We are taught the familiar ways of being overcome in order to make reproduction easier. Fucking is the economy, after all.
Theft by cliche is our fate and it is a just one.
Some days I am covered in the dust of my history, every speck marking a violation committed by another being. I have no absurd pretension toward the artificial and temporary comfort of cleaning. I've taken as much of it with me as I can stand, even though at times it chokes me, clouds my sight, and stuffs my nose and ears. In the morning, I hack up the brown-blackish muck; great ropey gobs of it. The day can't begin otherwise. Every day of the week begins with another mote shining in the sun of that east-facing window that I will have to spit up before commencing the deceptions of the day. Parts of Thursday and Saturday will both be stuck to the sides of the kitchen sink, line the inside of a trash can, bake out on the third rail. I will wash them, and all the Sundays and Tuesdays and Fridays out too, brush them away with hands and lint rollers and featherdusters and dry cleaners, blow at them, sneeze them out, and huff them into Kleenex. They'll find their way across the spines of all my books, damning my ignorance of the tomes. Every time I lick my lips I will taste a bit of them, and will always wipe them out of the corners of my eyes upon coming out of a dream.
They will come back to visit me again and again until at last I imagine the whole World (or perhaps myself) turns gray.
That's when I'll know my time is short.
Yeah I loved you all my life
And that's how I want to end it
The summer's almost gone
The winter's tuning up
Yeah, the summer's gone
But a lot goes on forever
And I can't forgetThe Sacred and The Profane, Part 3A list question on one of those psych profiles they pass off as corporate icebreakers amuses me.
27. Can you describe what personal quality of yours contributes the most to your success and why?
There's two ways to answer this question. Number one would be descriptive, sprinkled with a few adjectives; maybe a little homily forcibly yanked from the past, cleaned up, and made presentable. Number two could be done in one word:
YES.
I'll give them the Deuce, and save the Uno for you.
Think about it this way: What strategy used to answer Question Number Twenty-Seven would be most effective in getting one laid at the lounge on a Friday night? Would it be descriptive sprinkles cooked up in homily?
I'll tell you what's gotten me hired, gotten me through more than a few dustups and out of bureaucratic purgatories, helped me avoid death and dismemberment, kept me entertained enough to avoid eating a bullet and Once In a Great While even put a flush on a woman's face. And that's a little unfiltered and unfettered bit of crazy.
In other words, the answer YES. to all questions numbered, published, or otherwise.
It's raining this afternoon. Easy city rain, all day soak your clothes in ten minutes rain. The gutters are overflowing and the Umbrella Tribe is everywhere. Traffic isn't moving; I count myself fortunate in that respect for staying on foot. Now I don't run in the rain because I don't believe in getting less wet. (I have a story about that that involves two in the morning, candy, and terrorizing some poor twenty-four hour cashier, but that's for another time). In fact, if ever there were a single pivot by which one could understand what irrational psychosis it is that fuels and propels me, it is to understand why I refuse to run in the rain. Or purchase an umbrella.
I probably look like soaked fuck when she comes walking up next to me at the light. I finish the watery Dr. Pepper in one swig and chuck it into the trash can. I imagine this appears quite rakish. So much that I forget myself for a second and laugh out loud.
Jeez, no umbrella, I hear from next to me.
I laugh again. I'm a rebel, I tell her.
She laughs, and the little White Walk Man appears.
You can share mine, she says.
As we walk, I point two blocks down. LaSalle Blue Line, I say. You won't have to tolerate me for too long.
No problem.
Where you going?
Union Station. I'll walk you to LaSalle, she adds.
What can I say? I'm impressed.
I tell her I refuse to run in the rain. She giggles. Tough guy, she says.
The gods bless me with her slow gait.
So what is this, Random Act Of Kindness day? You always help out strangers?
Only handsome ones.
What a fucking flirt.
My mother used to call me handsome; I always figured she was letting me down easy.
Well I could just say I felt sorry for you instead.
Nicely played.
We get to LaSalle's stairs.
This is me, I say, instantly despising the bastardized chick-flick statement staple. I turn to head down.
Hey, she yells after me.
I stop at the third step.
Yeah?
That's it?
The tops of her breast and her cheeks have the same misty sheen on them; some of her eyelash has gotten water in it; catches the light and throws a prism off it. Or maybe I'm just a medicine case. Either way I suddenly understand why they go to such trouble in moves to wet down the streets and have motherfuckers always kissing in the goddamned rain.
Alright, Elizabeth Gilbert, I say, and head back up the stairs in two leaps. I grab her around the waist and plant a short one on her. No tongue, just pressure and suction and a tiny, tiny bit of teeth.
That ought to hold you.
I head back down fast, hearing the southbound rumbling into the station.
You're lying, Saturday says from the living room couch.
She doesn't believe the Umbrella story.
Maybe. Is that really so important?
HA, she belts out, in a perfect imitation of me. You, trying hard to play the romantic.
I come out of the kitchen, bottle in hand.
Is that a scoff I hear?
She regards me coolly.
I hold up the bottle of Stolichnaya, grinning next to the orange collar of the label.
I think I can be very romantic given the right mood, and I begin waltzing with the bottle, twirling and dipping it, hovering over it with a phantom kiss, and then dashing off into a tango with it before abruptly stopping.
Or perhaps I have too much of a taste developed for master strokes of high drama.
Whatever, she says. Where's my martini?
Now, now, and I brandish the bottle again, this here is the Russian Phenomenon. One does not rush a phenomenon or verbally berate it as I strike up a cross between the Electric Slide and a soft shoe to sidle up behind her on the couch, leaning over her upside-down face.
One takes their time, takes in the Phenomenon, inhales its atmosphere; absorbs the character of its ritual.
I move in closer.
You've almost got to let the Phenomenon consume you, overtake you... as I get inches from her face, me and the bottle cheek to glass, drawing out a faux baritone.
She scrunches up her face, laughing.
You're insane, she yells, slapping at me and the Phenomenon..
Don't waste it, I tell her, and head back to the kitchen to conclude my duties of libation.
Thursday will have none of this; it is the great divide between us. She will laugh like a schoolgirl at the many tales of my war against the Establishment (or at the very least, the thought of me suffering extreme hypothermia for naught more than a misguided sense of pride). Yet should I roll the Umbrella story over on her, she'd probably tell me she would have preferred me to take a headlong tumble down the stairs and snap my spine in half.
She doesn't like mush, or homily for that matter. Just grit.
One time at the diner me and a couple of the brothers got there early. As we sat there, waiting for more of an audience, our conversation was suddenly interrupted by a forlorn soul in a sweatshirt.
My friend was hoping she could get your number, she tells me.
Where's your friend?, I asked.
She points across the smoking section.
There, a mousy girl hides herself against the Greek restaurant pinks and browns as best she can.
I wave, pull out a business card for a pool hall, and write down one of the brother's numbers that isn't there on the back.
There you go, I say. Look forward to hearing from you, I add as she goes back to her chameleon friend.
That wasn't your number, the more obvious of the two notes.
Nope.
Thursday never made it that night, but when she did make it, she did not approve. I was shocked. I spent the evening trying to get the answer, but to no avail. The best I was able to garner was that she hated cliches.
What a strange repulsion.
I can't say for a minute I'm not reminded of that long-ago night in the diner when I see Saturday's eyes flash jealous. Knowing better, I don't start up the interview. Back in those days I needed to understand things. I no longer have the control-compulsion. I've found understanding and explanation to have all the thrill of a first-date movie. You sit next to your prospective fucker, staring straight ahead and silent, trying not to grab too much popcorn so you don't look like you feed from the trough. This doesn't mean I don't do the thinking; in fact I think myself deeper into a thing now than I ever did at any time in the past, which is good. I have simply concluded that a good part of this absurd ritual doesn't have thing fucking one to do with comprehension. You throw out your best trick, and hope you don't fuck it up too badly resulting in buttoned blouses and slammed doors.
I don't bother putting forth my best anymore. I distrust it too much.
Saturday nudges me with a shoulder later, in the middle of the program.
Come on, did it really happen?
There's only one answer necessary for a question of that caliber:
YES.The Sacred and The Profane, Part 2I rise to my feet
And walk away from the dross
Towards the doorway
Of our mutual and harrowing loss
The only way I know
To shake myself of this curse
Is to bring myself to something
That is measurably worse
-Assemblage 23, 'House on Fire'
I don't know what attracted me to rooting through the histories to find this particular tale. Maybe I had been through Zarathustra for the twenty-seventh time, and ached for some color to go in between those hard black lines. Maybe it was the questions the picture managed to arouse. Perhaps it was the strange tension that suspended my mind of late; this strange place between the gray heavens of Oblivion and Real Fucking Life, where questions of what I was found themselves entwined with what could I do to you. Either way, I went looking.
Shall I tell you about what I found?
I've always known about Nietzsche and Salome. I'd be a piss-poor student of the old dragon if I said I didn't. And I knew about Salome, the daughter of Death who danced John The Baptist's head onto a silver platter. I've danced with enough of those. What I didn't know was the grit of it, the back-room story, the truth buried past the Sinatra handshake.
There's Paul Ree, looking all the part of a fucking insurance salesman; the sort of bastard who would give you gift wrap or a twelve pack of paper towels for a Christmas present. The sort of bastard that shows up on your doorstep unannounced with a pint of triple chocolate brownie ice cream and a shoulder to cry on. There's Lou Salome. Damn it, how many times have I seen it; that head leaned forward, those eyes, hungry and wide; those corners of the mouth upturned. I bet you, if you gave it just a half-second longer she'd nearly bite through the bottom lip to stifle a vulgar display of joy at being perceived and portrayed perfectly. These two, I understand easily. It's Nietzsche, the sonofabitch, that unravels me. Half between trying to strike a Prussian pose of ultimate command and wanting to slink down past Ree's shoulder, that he might hide his face. He looks, for all intents and purposes, as if he has just committed a very embarrassing misdemeanor.
This is the man that painted such a monstrous picture of saints; that brought religion down from the temples to rub its face in the mud, blood, and shit that was used to mortar its foundations.
A man with enough spine and salt to call his brothers to the carpet, and to show them in a mirror the simpering servile reflections they use to traffic in each other's flesh. A man daring enough to then hold out a hammer to them.
This is the man who wrote the fucking Superman, for the love of all that's sacred.
What did I miss?
Saturday leans over her Thai custard. I commence to pour the rest of the riesling I brought with into the empty water glass. She barely got through a quarter of Opart's Peanut Sauce Lover concoction which I order with both chicken and shrimp; choosing instead to dawdle with her yellow curry for most of the meal. Most of the table will go home with me, and I'll probably end up polishing it off later, before the fridge has any time to congeal it. Whatever I don't eat goes with me to work.
In the meantime, with some food down her throat, Saturday gets brave.
How many other dates have you brought here?
I smile. Curious question.
Not really.
What if I say none?
I'd bet you were lying.
You're the first, I tell her, if you want to bother calling this a date.
I'm telling the truth.
She forks her custard in quarters, gobbles up a bite.
So that makes me the first girl you've ever brought here.
Sure.
She forks another quarter of custard into her mouth.
Does that makes me special? Her eyes glitter.
I smile again, point at my sack of take-out.
You didn't finish your food.
Reading into the six months of abortion courtship that went on between Nietzsche and Salome, some questions are raised. We begin with Ree, the insurance salesman (his actual profession was psychologist, but I think it's apples to apples at this point) writing Nietzsche to come join him in Rome. In his letter Ree writes an unintentional sonnet of a very brilliant little female curiosity he's discovered (Salome); he urges Fred to make haste to Rome at once. In his mind, Ree paints a pretty picture of an intellectual love triangle he hopes to forge between the two great minds (and himself, of course; the lubricant in a very absurd take on the menage a trois). Nietzsche goes,and in doing so, makes his first mistake. Any brother on the street worth the punch-hole on his player's card can tell you what game is being played here: Idolizing yet cowardly sycophant (Ree) wants to impress a girl about ten tiers above his league (Salome) so he calls in his good buddy-ole-pal (Nietzsche), hoping Nietzsche will make him look good. The plan is foolproof; Nietzsche is a solitary soul to start, and quite the intense intellectual. He has no time for the coquette game of Let Me Fuck You For Free, and thus would provide critical wingman support without presenting the threat of competition. Everybody skips down the Roma street hand-in-hand; Salome, happy to have Nietzsche in her clutches, gives Ree a run at the prize; Nietzsche gets to interact with some more human beings and is spared the fate of becoming a deranged mess for a while.
Or at least that's how the ridiculous plan is supposed to come off.
I don't need to go into detail about what happens next. Nietzsche comes, and before anybody can get their hands clasped and a left foot raised to begin the cavalcade, the man who once wrote: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously is proposing marriage. Rebuffed, the circus continues in Germany where similar implosions take place. Finally Salome absconds, Nietzsche is left to wallow and-get this- writes Zarathustra. While Nietzsche makes his slow, shuddering way to his end in a sickbed, Salome manages to tear through a couple of self-flagellating German playwrights, Rilke, and fucking Freud. She ends her tear through the best masculinity Europe had to offer by running off with one of Freud's more promising students. AT this point, I'd like to mention she started her fabulous career at seventeen shearing the testicles off of an allegedly enlightened pastor in her hometown church.
What was it about Salome? I thought I had understood just about every kind of transaction that could be rendered between lovers; sex for security, for prestige, for affirmation, for social adequacy, for financial stability. I understood it in the way any critical eye will understand a contract; in exchange for warding off the deep nights that bite into you and call you worthless, you promise to stay relatively disease-free and loyal. And perhaps fit. The terms change cosmetically, but the idea remained the same.
And that was it right there. The ideas. That's what Salome was after. She didn't have a palate for the simple tastes, as so many of us are taught to chase. She wanted something else of the men she pursued. Nietzsche didn't just land in her lap; she twirled the strings around Ree, putting lines and letters together until she had both Nietzsche and Rome. And then she milked him, man. I fucking know it. I know it because I've been there a hundred times, and I know how hard a hunger it is to want just that one mind across from you, eyes wide open, lips a little bit moist, just wanting to suck up all of it, all the Hell you've got to spare. It's the cathartic thrill of Confession: get down on your knees and pray, boy. And then imagine one fine motherfucking day, under that wheat and blue Italian sky heading into olive night, you get the chance. It's the danger of the desert, man; even as it makes you hard and wise, there's something else it does to you: It makes every promise of water into a fucking demon.
I bet if I had Nietzsche here next to me in the diner, next to this cup of coffee, across the way from Thursday, he'd turn to me, and through that facebush of his he'd mutter that he should have taken that picture laying down in front of the wheel.
I can barely look Thursday in the face anymore; I'm hoping she doesn't see the disdain. I'll tell you why I've kept coming back like some compulsive graveyard-warden, long after the words I had to burn like fire are laying in the ashtray; under the neon in a place that no longer allows smoking. It was curiosity, the same curiosity that sent me riding Nietzsche's backtrail. I've seen the appetite enough times because I appeal to it: that appetite to devour not the straight line and circle games of eyes, penises, and nipples; nor the sparkle of precious gem and metal, or the many flattering colors of one's compliments; but the real blood and guts of a fellow; the courage and shame of his thoughts; dare I say the bones of his dreams. I think if you give any seeker of romance enough time, they get around to wanting to get that marrow between their teeth. Come now, pants are easy to get off, numbers easy to write down on an outstretched palm. A voicemail is available to mechanically arbitrate the severing of relationships drained of all their vitality. At worst, one can send a text message. Pursuing what makes folks tick (their bulging latex fantasies and sheet-shitting dread); what else can one chase that isn't some cooked-up comfort food fairy tale?
So what is it, Thursday, I want to ask her. You waiting for the tank to hit empty?
Or are you barely hanging on yourself?
Nietzsche hrmphs. The coffee gets cold. I break a fresh sweat and try to keep the jitters to a minimum. I let Thursday tell me some more housewares stories, figuring the loose debris being scattered about will hide a light that I think might be starting to burn upward again.
Just now, I've had the first good look at something I haven't had in a while:
An Enemy.
I must begin to take care again.
Meanwhile tell me, Fred: How much of Zarathustra is Lou, huh? How much down over cheap tobacco, cheap food, and whatever the age had as a substitute for cheap neon? How much of this is nothing but your love letter written too goddamned late? When they asked Rilke what was wrong on his death bed he told them to ask her. And what about Freud, who if given the proper time and material, would have framed a gilded-gold penis above the desk, or a finger casually buried in an asshole to the second knuckle? How much of her in there?
A lot of amateur-hour pranksters masquerading as cultured can't help but make the crude reference toward syphilis whenever the topic of Nietzsche comes up. They revel in the organic bliss of it. Yet, I think they err, as they always do, on the biology of the spirochete to play a role in the destruction of one's soul. At best it's a symptom, a little red sore, a symbol of some other poison buried down deep inside that manifest itself in the wanton rubbing of genitalia against all willing (or semi-willing) receptacles without regard for one's safety or integrity.
A better question: Have I been chasing the wrong women? (For I've always considered the intellectual to be womb-dreams and god-urges; and thus: female)
And isn't that always the motherfucking problem?
Maybe I've just been looking at the wrong pictures.
Was this what you were trying to tell me, Thursday?
On the way home, Saturday leans over for a minute, turns down Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials.
You mad?
I chuckle.
No. Why, should I be?
You know, about the food.
What about it?
You said, 'You didn't finish your food'.
I laugh out loud.
Yeah, that was a good one.
She laughs, too.
You're a bastard, you know that?
----
What I don't say to her is that while it was a good one, it was a also close one.
When I saw those eyes glitter, I saw Salome clear as day in them, and I'm sure now that she knows I can see her coming, she's going to start coming down hard.
Because the only thing worse than being interesting is being worthwhile.
I woke up
In a column of ash
While the world came down
In a horrible crashThe Sacred and The Profane, Part 1The phone rings.
I fumble around the nightstand. Knock off the books, send the alarm clock sprawling, choking up phlegm.
Fucking two days early, I'm thinking.
Yeah.
Hey.
Not who it's supposed to be.
There are different guidelines for different people. Some have the 6 PM to 8 PM window; some the 9 to 11. Some are prohibited from calling during work hours; others can interrupt the Production Meeting. Some calls I always answer; others are eternally doomed to have to tell their tales of woe to the Voicemail. There are those who have to drop a line, warning, some sort of EAM flash traffic prior to surfacing; others can call drunk at 2:30 AM drunk with the existential crisis of not having been able to talk anybody into going home with them.
Or they need a flat tire changed.
The end result is the same.
Another phone ring. Having already had the first one off-time, I know who it is.
There is still the fumbling, left forearm wreaking havoc on the contents of the nightstand. Did I tell you I do the first minute to minute and a half with my eyes closed? The routine is always the same. Interesting point: You put a routine in place, two or three supporting acts crop up around it. Thus the simplest of your actions becomes choreography. No wonder change is feared so; change the way you take home, and you could threaten the whole machinery of your existence.
Unless, of course, you're already blind or careless.
Talk to me.
Did I wake you?
You usually do.
You've been sleeping a lot lately.
Nothing important enough to stay up for. Unless you call, of course.
She giggles a little bit.
Your shift done?
Yeah, I'm off at eleven. We could get a movie.
We could skip the movie.
She laughs again.
We could, she says. Real quiet.
We will, I say. See you in forty-five.
Thursday's romance is the crossword; the enticement of figuring out the clues to both seven down and twenty-seven across, one hint obvious, and one mired in obfuscation. You ever see a fellow do a pen in crossword over a cup of coffee? Is he being arrogant, or does he simply like his letters ink neat? Is erasing one's prior mistake cheating?
The neon beats down, and if you take away me burying my head in my hands; somewhere in here you would find someone is drowning their hash browns in tabasco and ketchup; steam rises from their white ceramic cup, a talking head delivers the current politico line to toe. There is the paper folded in half, trailing a crumb as they chew and think.
There are no more puzzles worth solving here. I will tell you that this diner has become a graveyard, a litany of old confessions and old thrills. As I sit across from Thursday listening to the latest line, I can hear them. It's a haunting double-effect, because sometimes she repeats something from back then, out of habit, and I cringe. I listen to all the stories I've conjured up over the last four years, wit and theory laced with the stumblefucks of awkward courtship. Back then I believed I could do it just by talking, magnifying fifteen seconds of back-and-forth, It would take me two hours to get to that fifteen seconds; advance and retreat and advance again, reading Thursday like a book. Back then she was wild, all eyes and something to prove. In short, she could be provoked. You could tell if you got to her, because the easy smile would fly right off her face. The eyebrows would go up, and that bottom lip would set itself in stone. The words that came directly after were run over a block of ice and would cut. Conversely, when she was happy, getting her proper share of attention paid, hands firmly on the wheel, she would gaze downward and smile very little smiles, and occasionally blow a wild lock skyward.
I could play both well, and counted it a good evening if I got around three of each. Now, I couldn't tell you what looks play across her face; directing my gaze to the window instead. I don't want to see those old raw looks I took such joy in once upon a time lost in the cumulative gravity and weight of a World that has done its damnedest to run me to ground and plow me under. Now when I get close to the sensitive areas I remember, I can hear the door slam. Out comes the very small talk, where small smiles once danced.
Any ghost will tell you that if you're grieving in the graveyard, you're a little late. I realize how terrible of a haunt I am.
So I just nod away, keeping time and rhythm through the minutes, concentrating on not remembering too hard.
Awake, I sit up. My hand goes to the back of my neck. All the time, I do this; I have trouble sleeping here; I don't have a fan on full blast next to my head. More routine, more subtle choreography. For som |
