Filth

Dee rose. Half there. Half not. They couldn’t tell if he was all drunk or if he spit up on himself some other way. The stuff coming from his mouth was blue, but the bottle was still in his hand. Conscious? They supposed so. Fuck it. It was going to happen anyway. Dean was there, the guy from the paper, or was it the magazine. He lisped around and talked about how he too ran with the angels. The Hells Angels. Right. Let him write. Dee sat back down and took off his pants. His dick was limp and there were bitemarks on it. He looked up at everybody and remembered. There. There. There she was finally, at his command, and then she bit and he figured, oh well, fuck it. Lucky she didn’t bite it off. She screamed something about how he held her head too tight or something. Dean was on his haunches. His camera was down and for this he was grateful, although it didn’t really fucking matter anymore. Stanhope gave him the drug and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t heroin, but something else. Fuck it. Who cares. It was going to happen anyway, this blue stuff, this stuff that would be blue at some point in his life, like death, it was, and that was what it was for, wasn’t it?

In ten minutes he remembered and he looked up and saw the anxiety on several people’s faces. They knew better, but they were talking to him, and he knew, he remembered, and he stood up and he let them take him and finally, he made it to the stage, pushed out there, by Renee, physically, who hated his fucking goddamned guts even though he paid her to be his slave. The rebellion was complete with that shove and she knew she wasn’t going to get fired because he knew there was nobody else in the world who would dare shove him like that, like he was an asshole, which he was, a fact he was fully cognizant of even while letting the blue foam take over the sides of his mouth and the stage lights sock him in the eye like a hater. Renee. He reminded himself to fire her, because it was the first time that he thought a shove is a shove is a shove and fuck all that.

In an hour and a half he was on his back speaking into the microphone about the world as a thermonuclear blanket laying itself over everybody, and nobody was exempt. He talked about the shit in his ass. He talked about the girl, Cynthia, who he fucked the night before and whose boyfriend sat by, with a thousand dollars in his hand and a dead relationship to boot. Another test. Another reason to be considered an asshole. So be it.

William Welkins of Southampton was dead to his family by this time. His mother forgot about him. When she saw his picture in a magazine she told the ladies beside her that he should have been aborted. She hated him that much by the time he was piling it into his veins in the name of love and art and swag and culture and making motherfucking ends meet. But success is funny in certain games and the blue foam which had a pink tinge under the light was a byproduct of that success. Had he really signed on for such a ride? He didn’t think so, but it was there. It was easy too. All the frustrations in his life to be screamed out at other madheads like himself. They pay me for this, he thought once, and laughed. It was actually while talking to Dean, the scrawny wannabe who can only write and nothing more. No fucking. No partying. Nothing for Dean, but that goddamned notebook, tape recorder and look of understanding interest in his eye. The fact that Dean at least smoked pot with the crew was his salvation from total nerdhood, that and the look in his eyes, the slit eyes that had something killer and I don’t give a fuck about them. Dean, who went to journalism school, never fucked his life up for want of some ethereal something else that ultimately could be had just through destruction. Destruction of the vessel. Just like in Bible school. The vessel. And that’s how he thought of it out there as he lay there and went into the fact that his shit was better than everybody else’s. That he could fuck a hamster and do it right and fuck all you people who find that fucked. Fuck You! And Dean would sit there and scribble. He would get his book out of it. Shit, megaplatinum without selling out like the shits. Time would end. Time would end. This was for sure. Time would end. And the blue would leave and the new drugs would come and the ending, the pleading in other people’s eyes would go away. Some people wanted him to be a square, man, a square, but he knew it was not possible because of the screaming in his head that had to come out. Was he insane? He fully believed that to be the case when he pierced his wrist with a large safety pin. He was going to pierce his eyeball, but Mary stopped him. She was the makeup lady. Dee and the make up lady in life threatening situations. About par for the fucking course and Dean scribbles and scribbles and where is mom in all this? With her letter, her ostracization, the disgust. And dead dad? What would dead dad think? And Leila of love and time gone by and hope lost. What would she say now, sitting in the town square with her brood and her good man and never straying into the memory of the filth that he actually was. Nothing. She told him to die. Good enough. The record company is good with it too. Eveybody on board? Everybody want to play the game? Shit. Here goes and there is blue foam as friend and the lights go down and when the ambulance comes it is sorry, but there really is nothing that it can do and the job was done and the show was complete and never had there been a greater performance with such an ending that more people secretly wanted than they let on. In the paper he was turned into a monkey and years later he’d entered the realm of a god. But he’d always known what he was. He was filth. Pure and simple. Filth – and people loved him for it.

Published in: on May 10, 2012 at 3:16 am  Leave a Comment  
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But a Glimmer in the Eye

Under Alex’s skin was the dullness again. The sound came from outside. Kids playing their tunes probably, little nothing sounds unaware of themselves that ruled anyway. He went to the window. Not kids, he realized, but the neighbors, people he didn’t like because he didn’t know them and they didn’t know him. By now, after seeing one another for two years, no one cared to bridge this gap.
He closed the window. There was that man who always walked his dog, talking to a woman with blue veins on her temple, a talker, her, one who spoke of things like friends and who gave little notices via her eyes about real meanings that had no importance whatsoever in the world of thought, of ideas, the things that Alex prided himself as having embraced like a lover. He had closed the window so as not to hear the tinny music that the lady always carried with her when she walked. The man never walked, but stood and watched his dog. He was old, too. There was no way to know about them, except that he was not a talker and she was. Did he put up with her as Alex had put up with her briefly before closing the window and going back to his computer? He had 134 Facebook friends. Yet nobody ever called.
He remembered the laughter of the woman. Over the many years laughter seems to lose its luster. It seemed fake to Alex, too loud, too loud to be real, for very few things caused so much laughter to occur unless the person wanted laughter to occur. You could not have real laughter through mere want, he knew. He looked at the happy people on Facebook, hoping that they were not as happy as they seemed. He hadn’t posted in several months and had considered getting off, but his computer was too old now and it wouldn’t let him. He was a slave to Facebook and friends who didn’t write to him, formerly good friends, friends that mattered. All avoided him and his only solace was in thinking that they avoided everybody else, too, that they were philosophically against Facebook so were off doing something else. They probably hoped the same thing concerning him, if they remembered him at all.
Alex had recently quit reading the newspaper in hope of gaining a little bit of solace. He had taken up reading again, novels: J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Russell Banks, only the best of modern writers. He was going to inject the best of thought into his overly worked brain from now on. Everything else had somehow failed him. He had been like those Indians whose sole purpose is to make sure the sun goes from East to West every day. By reading the news he was a watchdog. Nothing too horrible could happen if he was on the job. In the end, he realized, this was a false notion. He had written letters to editors and politicians and had never gotten a response. He had protested the Iraq war. They killed anyway. Everybody does everything anyway, he realized. He had zero impact upon the world by fretting over it. Besides, now that he had let the world go, there would be more of a chance that it would hasten its own destruction and he would be forced to move on, to Argentina or Ecuador or the southern tip of Spain. The nuclear bombs probably wouldn’t go off in these places.
Alex could no longer hear the tinny music of the woman who laughed like she didn’t want to. Janie Frieberg was doing lunch with her sister and she was really excited. He couldn’t put Facebook away just yet. He kept going back to it. Janie was the only girl he had ever dated who remained his friend afterward. She seemed so dull to Alex, viewing her life on Facebook, so much so that he wondered what he had ever seen in her. When she left him, she had been talking about spirituality and politics and religion and sex. When she walked she would sometimes twirl. She was bright-eyed and ambitious, but when she saw him it always seemed like she was looking around him, like she was looking to see if there was something better than Alex. This eventually led to the inevitable breakup. One knows when one is not loved.
Now Janie was married to a man named Styrong. Alex couldn’t place the nationality of that name. Perhaps he was Asian or Scandinavian. It would have fit Janie to go after an international type. She was a romantic. That’s why they originally clicked. She went by Janie Frieberg Styrong on Facebook, proud of herself and her marriage. She was a regular gal now, wasn’t straying that far, was capable of being married and having kids while keeping her individuality which was always very important for she and Alex way back when. She looked better now than she did then, but Alex figured that was just because he still missed her. He loved her then and he loved her still, but now he had to face, everyday, that it was an illusion, that their relationship was a brittle husk at best while it was going on and now was a visible memory anytime he went to the computer. She was making vegetarian tacos for the kids. She got a new shawl that was wonderful. Does anybody else care that meat is murder?
Everybody on Facebook had become a caricature of who they really were, but that was all that he had of them anymore. He had no way of going back to them. He was a failure in this world, living on food stamps, nursing a painful tooth badly in need of a root canal, working at a job that had no interest in his Bachelors in English Literature with an emphasis in Poetry. Poetry. It had failed him. The words had not been enough. The world didn’t want them. After awhile the bitterness seeped into him like the rot into his tooth. More than once he cursed the gods of poetry, those same gods that he saw in the eyes of Janie, that he heard in the music of her voice. He knew what mattered and he was forced to question himself and his choices. Had he majored in poetry because he was lazy? Was he a failure in the world because the inner world really was not as important as the outer world? Had that been a lie? Why did the guys who never bothered going to school do better than he did in the minute intricacies of life? They all got married. All had children. All made upwards of 50 to 100,000 dollars per year. Alex realized that it was willful ignorance and lack of introspection that had saved them. They had not tried to trace the intricacies of God’s grand design and the universe rewarded them for it, like a bunch of Adams before the original thought.
Alex went down the row: Stan Villon, now a professor in South Carolina. Stan was a friend during his post-college days in Chicago. A guy who reminded Alex of Gandhi, Stan had been a student at the University of Chicago. Of course he would now be a professor. Alex sat with these University of Chicago students in old houses while snow fell outside, drinking coffee while reading to each other. They were equals there. Nobody cared that Alex had graduated from a small state school in California of little significance. He sat and listened mostly, always somewhat in awe of the intelligence of his fellows. They liked his poetry, but he always wondered whether he could ever be an intellectual peer to them. They had been vetted by the system and they could take that with them anywhere they went. He had gotten into college easily, for all that had been needed was a C average in high school. Everybody got into his school.
He had watched as these diverse human satellites in the world of the University of Chicago pulled in close just briefly and then veered away into their proper orbits. These orbits were distinctly different from his. Their orbits allowed them to be paid for subtle thought simply because they had also been practical. Many had been groomed. Now he felt that he had simply been allowed to view the subject matter. Nobody ever had any intention, he felt, of letting him also thrive by concentrating on the barely visible truths, pulling them up further and revealing them for the good of all man-kind. He thought of going back to school, a graduate school where he could study philosophy and psychology and poetry and fiction and write essays and treatises and be listened to. Perhaps that was what was needed, to be allowed to be one of the vetted ones, to push it forward, get the title behind his name and just go to work, get paid, get a family, a home, a life. But the brain was dulled by now, at 38, too dulled to forget the pain that he had experienced holding on to a dream made of vespers and silence. He had come to know the realm of poetry, but by this time, the sadness of getting there had chased him away. Half of him no longer respected something that could keep someone from having a family through its virtual insistence upon poverty in order to stay true. This rebellion pushed him back to Facebook. He scrolled down.
A slew of faces, some of them from his time attempting to solidify a weekly poetry reading that fell through. Once again, the real world trumped the inner world. He found that there was petty competition even in the realm of high spirituality. Life always seemed a balance between the animal and the spiritual and the animal always won. God Sex ruled, of course, perhaps because of the spirituality involved on some deeper level, but with it always came the baser power structures, the evil little victories, the savoring of the defeat of others. Once again, the poetic ideal was corrupted by two little things called hope and belief. There was Roger Milens and Fay Disiwala. They were good poets and went on to be in a theater company. He never really knew what they did with the rest of their lives, but they drove nice cars, had mates, were nice people, but aloof. Everybody was aloof. Poetry was about intimacy with others. You could play it, but Alex found that few wanted to live it. God Fun was really the key here. Fun was the ideal once people got together. The urge to laugh became a sort of religion. Perhaps if people couldn’t laugh after every sentence then everybody would have to cry. Everybody would just break down and cry. As people age, the idea of tears became the enemy. No matter what everybody was doing, no matter what a group believed in, the idea of fun always reigned supreme. It was the same on Facebook. Everybody was putting on their perfect face. In the meantime, nobody communicated anymore. Nobody cared anymore. They had all virtually laughed themselves to death.
Brent Helow, Slim Fawaskawa, a Japanese dude who was really funny. Another one Alex didn’t really know. Slim was one of those guys who was in and out. He had an invisible wall around his head, a perpetually smiling head, a mouth of perpetual wit and glee, but a wall nonetheless. He was just another who came out and then went back in where Alex could not go. The death of intimacy, Alex thought. Facebook was becoming a symbol to him of the death of ever being able to connect on a true level with somebody ever again. All of his friends were on it. Every friend that was listed he now knew did not want to know him anymore. It would have been better had he not initiated contact at all. They would have been better off left in the warmer clouds of memory. If left there, there would have been a hope of contact once again, real contact, and it would have held surprise and the memory of the more authentic moments of the past, the true laughter that had simply had to stop. Alex understood having to move on, but he couldn’t quite understand coming back in such an impersonal way. All reunions had been wasted. He would never have a reason to really see these people ever again. They were Facebook friends after all.
Julie Lowe, a model and actress, a stranger; Giselle Luidi, an intellectual from college who laughed like a hyena but behind her glasses possessed one of the finest noses he had ever seen. She was a beauty that didn’t know it who became a business-type, he thought, wasn’t sure, stocks and bonds. Smart girl. He had re-united with her without a word, a simple acceptance of the other’s existence, an acknowledgement that the one is happy that the other is not dead. They had once found themselves alone together for four hours, and talked about everything from politics to the Miami Dolphins. There had even been a chance at love, but it fizzled. Both held back. Both had a feeling about the other, that it just wasn’t that way. They were right. A hello without a hello was in order. Strike Giselle. Tom Julienne, Ty Uflado, a true laugher, a big smile, outdoorsy, probably not at the computer that much. Alex envied him. Jim Lowry, Hillel Lowenberg, Gail Stormer, the list went on and on. All happy. All knowledgeable of him, always would be, none of whom really cared. He hadn’t gotten a personal message by any of them in over eight months.
Alex closed the lid of the computer. Perhaps he could go to the library and use one of their computers to cancel Facebook. He would do it soon, but there was always a waiting list at the library. Outside he heard more laughter. He went to the window and a couple of middle-aged women had joined the dog watching, radio-listening group, whiling away the hours with innocent banter. The middle-aged ladies were loud. They were big lunged laughers who found everything funny and yet had nothing at all to really say. This was the way of the world. People as they aged had gone back to the placid non-thinking of who they really were after all of the bravado of having to be the hero to insure themselves food for their gullets in their old age. At a certain point the hero is let go and the simple, gurgling stream is taken back into their hearts and minds; simplicity and laughter and mere feeling of presence without any impulse to dream forward a finer existence, a more poetic existence, one that magically transforms others while transforming oneself. The idea of a spiritual utopia had been replaced with a toaster and cream cheese reality.
Alex watched the group talk below him for a little while and then went over to the dresser and opened his book. He had picked up, once again, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After only a moment he closed it and picked up a pen and a small personal journal. In it he wrote:

Ever long the day
Not knowing then
That I would never know
Having sought solace
Where solace dare not dwell
I roam still ever inward
All the people gone
A few old faces
Remembering me -
A flicker
Before all – we fly

#

Published in: on December 16, 2011 at 11:38 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Eastside All-Star

I lost the game. I lost the fucking game for ‘em. Jim Buckley came up to me and said it best: You lost the fucking game, Chatworth, and he was right. I lost our team the championship.
Five years later I was walking around the high school hallways all stoned like I usually was and I ran into this kid named Ripley Knox, a bigger stoner than me. He showed me what he had in his bag and I told him I had two bucks and he said that was enough to get a little buzz anyway so we went to the park, just ditched school like we did all the time anyway and sat under a tree and he lit up a joint and we passed it back and forth and when I tried to give him the two bucks he said fuck it so we enjoyed the joint together on this the first sunny day of three weeks when I finally said to him,
“Ripley, you remember that game I lost for our team back in the majors?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Well, it just don’t seem right that one person can lose a game for a whole team does it?”
He looked at me all stoned and shit and just nodded and then said,
“Yeah, why not?”

I agreed enough with him, but I was suddenly angry that he would believe something could be so, then thought again of it, and remembered that day and how it was all my fault. There was no question about it. But I wanted to ask Ripley now that we were more grown up and shit. Ripley played right field more than me back then so he would be honest with me. His mother grew his pot. So I say to Ripley,
“Yeah, I guess so.”

I know so, but I say it that way. Sometimes one guy can screw it all up for everybody. He had me at second base because Ricky Tynesdale was out with the flu. Ricky was good, consistent, but he wasn’t the star of the team. Right off this kid hits me a grounder. It goes through my legs. That’s cool. Shake it off they tell me. But I could see that the coach was pissed. That kid finally made it in on a triple hit by another kid. 1-0.

Then we got a rally and tied the score. We were doing good when I get up to the plate and take a walk. That’s good. That loads the bases and this kid named Kenny was up who wasn’t too bad, but batted seventh. There were two outs and I was leading off a little bit when I see Cindy Miller. I’ll never forget the moment. Because just as I stepped off that base there was Cindy in her little junior high cheerleading suit bopping up to the stands. I think her brother played on the other team. I just got a real quick look at her tits when all of a sudden I hear “bam!” and this kid playing first base just smacks me right in the chest with his glove and then sticks his hands up in the air and gives out the biggest “yeaaaah!” I’ve ever heard. He was like some sort of Viking warrior or something. We all trotted in and I sat down on the bench. Nobody said anything to me except for one kid. Vincent Trollo. I think his family was in the mob. I don’t remember what he said except that it included the fictitious name “Wackworth”and it was a direct allusion to my own name of Chatworth.
I went back to second base and prayed nothing else bad would happen. But God had taken a little vacation for those two hours I would soon learn. Another ball did come to me which I fumbled. That man on base did score so that we lost our lead. The next kid up hit it to center field and he got on first. The next kid hit it to the shortstop who lobbed it directly at second base because he was unable to call it back after it left his hand. He had just assumed I would be there.

For some reason and to this day I still don’t know why, when he hit it to our shortstop, Randy Valasquez, I knew, I mean, I really knew where I was supposed to be at, but the trouble was that I was right in the running path of this kid going to second and I jumped back because I was scared and he passed me. The next thing I knew I was trying to beat this kid who had been running hard for a good three seconds. There was no way. When Randy threw that ball to me I wasn’t even close to the bag yet and it bounced on the ground and this kid just kept running. I couldn’t believe it. He must have thought he was like the big running guy on that team so he just kept running and finally I threw the ball to our third baseman, Vic Green, but the goddamned ball just twisted or something and I threw that thing about ten feet over his head and this kid just kept running all the way home. The kid who hit the ball made it to third and then someone knocked him in. When we got back to the bench I sat down like usual and didn’t say anything. Vincent Trollo was all belligerant then.
“You oughtta take that glove, Wackworth, and whack with it because it ain’t doing none of us any good out here.”
Then the coach cut in and told Trollo to shut up and sit down. I wasn’t afraid of Trollo. He could kick my ass, but first he’d have to kiss it. It didn’t matter much. The coach took me out for a few innings. The score was five to three. I was involved in every one of their runs and every one of their runs shouldn’t have been a run. I was ready to give up sports. I was twelve and soon to be thirteen. My big brother smoked cigarettes and I would too. He told me about this girl who he made out with in the back of his Blazer. How her tits just popped out of her shirt and then just sat there bouncing around and around like a couple of water balloons. That’s what I’d do. So I sat there and waited for the game to be over and for me to be thirteen and then fourteen and then maybe fifteen and by then I’d have watched more water balloons bounce around than Trollo or anybody on my team. But sitting there thinking those thoughts, trying to rescue myself from my low opinion of myself, I knew I’d just about lost the game for us and I prayed the coach wouldn’t put me back in. Then came the fifth inning of a game of seven.
“Chatworth, right field.”

I was back. I was back in right field. Nobody hit the ball to right field. They took out little Jimmy Grove, a kid whose hand was backwards so after he caught a ball he would take it off, place it on his backwards hand and throw it. His good hand was his left one, but I think he was a natural righty because where Jimmy would throw nobody would feign to know. He once threw a ball behind himself, over the right field fence. Before anybody could tell him not to climb over to get it he had already done so, failing miserably yet in an original fashion because on the fall to the other side his belt got caught on the chainlink and the umpire had to unhook him. The kid who hit it to him got a home run. Our coach protested, but he lost the argument. It was just not worth pursuing really. It’s one of those arguments that because it had to become an argument at all we all stopped and thought about what we were doing out there in the first place. It was the most absurd thing we’d ever seen, any of us, except perhaps for the day when I lost the championship for us.
So I was in right field. The fifth went by. No problem. Then came the sixth. We got a run. They didn’t. Then came the seventh and we score two on a home run by Vincent Trollo. I was closer to being able to go home. It’s six to five. Us. We get up again but we don’t score. It’s the last at bat for the other Tigers. My team, the Giants, hadn’t won the championship ever as far as anybody can remember. And that’s how it was, but then I saw Ripley lighting the roach and thought to myself even if it was my fault it couldn’t have been completely. We were a team. The other guys could have hit more or done more of something good but they didn’t. They just didn’t make as many errors as me.
“You believe that, Rip?”
“Yeah. You lost the game for us, man.”

“And you didn’t? You only played two innings before your dad came and got you.”
“So. At least I didn’t make any errors.”
“You didn’t play, man!”
“I played.”
“Right field.”
“Yeah, but I played.”
“I just don’t know anymore, Ripley.”

It’s not that I wanted to vindicate myself to Rip. Rip was always a bigger loser than I was. I was ten times better than him and there he was sitting all smug smoking the last of his joint like he was Mark McGuire or something. This little runt made me sick. But, you know, I couldn’t shake it. He was right. I made too many errors and therefore I had to take blame for the loss. I remember it differently now than it actually was. After so many years you turn events into happenings. It’s like your first kiss. You remember every moment. Every sensation. Unfortunately, that ball was like that. That ball was like a big sailboat floating over my head. I remember my hand reaching out for it and then suddenly realizing it was easily ten feet away from me. Why I reached for it I don’t know. I can imagine what I looked like as if my memory of the situation included a camera angle from the benches. I saw that thing up in the air so high and I started running in. I was running in because I was going to catch it. It was hit so high and I would get that thing so I ran and ran until I started feeling this weird something in my limbs. It was like my limbs were calling me stupid or something. I didn’t feel right. I felt like I was being torn in two because I’d run way too far in and I was suddenly aware of this ball coming back down to earth behind me. I know I should have run sideways, but I didn’t. I started running backwards as fast as I could. By this time Tim Rowe had started running for it and he was calling me off but I couldn’t tell where he was so I just kept running backwards as fast as my waddling little legs would take me until I plowed right into Tim and our heads knocked together and I knocked him out. Swear to God.
I remember seeing that ball rolling away from Tim and Tim’s eyes sort of rolling up in his head a little bit. I remember turning around and looking at that kid running those bases, heading for home and then back at Tim and then back at the ball which had stopped. Vincent Trollo was running out to right field from first base so I knew I was going to be in deep shit, but I still didn’t go for the ball. All I could see was Tim’s little white boy face, the nose all upturned and red and a little snotty with those eyes half open and his arms spread out to his sides and suddenly I didn’t care about that little ball standing there in the grass like it was. I understood better the absurdity of the game, why God would make a child like Grove, with that one arm, want to be equal to the Vincent Trollo’s of the world and I thought just for that moment that if that ball never moved again then the world would be a better place.

Then David Rice got it from left field and threw it to Vincent Trollo who was about two feet from me and he threw it way high over the catcher. The kid had gotten his home run already. It was a waste of time. We’d already lost. I remember Vincent Trollo then. It was like he wasn’t even aware that Tim was knocked out cold. He comes up to me and pulls me up by my shirt and looks in my face and calls me the worst thing a person can call another which I won’t repeat here. And I look at his ugly face and the next thing I know I’ve spat in it and he’s on top of me hitting me and me looking over there at Tim all knocked out as I tried to block the punches from my face and then the coach stopping Vincent Trollo and a bunch of people trying to revive Tim, including Ripley.

“You were there,” I told Ripley.

“I know.”

“You know what happened.”

“Yeah. Tim got knocked out and you got beat up and you lost the game for us.”

“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”

But I was through arguing with Ripley. He’s just like everybody else in this world who thinks that winning is the only thing in the world that matters.

Published in: on December 1, 2011 at 5:29 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Bus Route 270

Bus Route 270

The mind is a vast sea, her turbulent waters formless, yet there is form. The road there, his hands there on the huge bus steering wheel, the twelve people sitting behind him on this lonely-ever ride from East Taylor Avenue all the way to Stearns Mall and back. Clive was only 33, but he felt 40. He was too fat for 33. He had found solace in food, and the sitting, of course, led to 150 pounds too many. The solace he sometimes found was a gift, seeping in from the edges of life. Then there were his nightly bus dreams, so random. Half the time he was at ease but then he would flit into a tense and shaky world.
Had there not been a barrier between he and those four million people he knew that he would have lost it long ago. He wouldn’t have been able to control yelling at the masses that do the stupidest things: bring cigarettes on to the bus, become belligerent, or do things like talk uncontrollably while hordes wait to board. Stupidity was so prevalent among his riders that he gave thanks to the Almighty for the barrier. The payment system was automatic and flawless. The only ones he had to worry about were those who didn’t pay, but most paid. Few feel that they can scam a city bus and get away with it. The bus driver was always right there.
But Clive wasn’t right there, not really, for he was too much aware of life. His thoughts were his burden. He could not pull himself from feeling the wracking yet silent storm that doctors call the unconscious. While others go through their lives in basic, outward ways, Clive lived as a true introvert. He made friends with moments, friends or enemies, that is. Unlike others who looked forward to the future while holding tightly to the present moment, those heroes, Clive’s present moments were always things that grabbed him, or perhaps he them, and he was whirled upwards, this way or that, or even all the way down.
Perhaps he was bi-polar, an ex-girlfriend had told him that, but she had been angry with him. He didn’t think so. He was a man who felt as deeply as any woman. He just couldn’t stop feeling the show, the movement of the inner realms. He never made a show of his inward confusions or expansions. Never rambled or raised an eyebrow. He betrayed nothing, but he traced and remembered every colored mood, often perplexed by how things he didn’t even know he was thinking about made him feel.
“You’re too sensitive, Clive. Why don’t you be a man about it,” once said Nancy. Nobody had ever taught him about this unseen ocean inside. He had never sought help. He was simply its chained perceiver, living in an unlikely way, dismissed by most as emotionally void, as day traded day. He didn’t like it, didn’t like living in what he once thought to himself, driving the bus down 12th, a “poetic” fashion. If he could communicate what he felt people might sympathize with the death of his upward mobility, his petrified potential, but they wouldn’t understand him. No way would they understand him. It would be like a foreign language to them, nothing but symbol and fateful, invisible causes; hurts and answers all wrapped up in a cloud.
He couldn’t help attempting to follow the logic of his personal chaos. Sometimes the unconscious river would rise and he would feel a certain emotion that would provide an explanation pointing at actual forms, reasons for his existence and state, like a bottle suddenly visible bobbing on top of the placid movement of the water. These realizations could carry him if only briefly. It would perhaps be a discovery concerning something somebody had said; a relative in the past, perhaps an injustice recently survived that would give him peace and a sense of forward movement that he felt might possibly lead him away from hopelessness, which was the number one thing that kept him driving the bus and not taking chances.
The flow went on and on as he drove these manic streets and he knew about it mainly through his moods which he studied like a scientist, hoping that some final redeeming, life-giving truth would be released and end the process once and for all. He hoped, and there was a lot of hoping, that he would be allowed in on the true story of the process of what he was, because it held secret promises of safe and happy dreamworlds into which to escape and rest.
To live in dream, to bathe in fantasy, with its smooth edges and lifting truths, was the only thing that would budge him out of his chair into a better future. Non-interruption of the dreaming flow could provide the initiative to find more practical truths, things you can take to the bank, like finding that first bit of gold in a giant unseen vein beneath you. To live in dream would be to live easily without first having to wade through those fetid emotions that Clive ducked like incoming fire.
He turned on 7th again and then scratched himself under his thigh ferociously. The itch was a spike, as though his body were revolting suddenly. When he turned he noticed the woman sitting there. She sat on the side seat reserved for the elderly, of which there were none, and when he turned he found that she was staring at him. He smiled faintly and then turned back to his job. The feeling of the woman stayed with him. She was also an African-American, 30-ish just like he was, and pretty, much too pretty for him, but plain enough that he entertained the idea of halving the window down and speaking with her, just for the hell of it.
He felt her while he avoided looking at her. Once again the feeling led him directly to all things past and present, the whole morass, necessary to deal with first in order to attain some better future. The process, so only his, frustrated him. He hated himself. He thought of Nancy and her way of being that was so other than his, then the way that she looked when he first met her at the bar on Tally Way back in Swiss Township, Maryland, where he grew up. Always Nancy, at first, then at last, for Nancy loved him and then ceased to love him.
Already this woman was painted with the color of Nancy so that she was really only half woman to Clive, half stranger and half Nancy, and therefore the mere idea of her was already polluted by the million thoughts that he knew he would have to endure if he were to actually pursue her. He pushed the dream of a new beginning away by snorting out through his nose, a push of air that he tried to cover up by wiping his nose as though he had had a natural impulse, a little sneeze. Aware of his odd reaction, his head naturally turned to the side and back at the woman. He was already tagged when their eyes met. She was still staring directly at him.
Perhaps she wasn’t staring at him but was only looking in his direction. Of course this could be the case. He turned nonchalantly and looked, this time straight on, just to answer the question for himself. She smiled at him and then lowered her eyes. My god, he thought, she likes me. She likes Me! But then he clammed up. The engine roared as ever. Of course, she doesn’t like Me! He quickly reasoned it away. When he looked again, she was no longer looking, but staring out the window just like all the others, watching the city go by, probably feeling what he felt every hour of his day. Of course she had disappeared. He wasn’t sure, but he had perhaps furrowed his brow. Or it would have been the distance that he could put between himself and another in a millisecond without knowing he was doing it. She was probably just like him, he thought. Life was here and now and if we cannot get away from the ugly and dull realities by making our lives better, then we are simply left with ourselves. But he doubted that she had ever gone as far as he could. He couldn’t conceive of such a thing by another, for Clive felt that we are left hanging by an unexplainably strong thread over a million-foot drop. What skill can keep you safe from the unseen world that wants to take you as its own, use you as its sustenance, yet lives unmolested inside in the guise of a perpetual flow of questions, beliefs and fears? We fear the silent monster of who we are behind our eyes, under our skins. In that space that made up Clive’s monster there were too many variable truths swirling and floating and begging for release. We humans, Clive felt, were here to provide that release, but the release is not for us, it is for it, the monster, the sleeping monster whose body is thought buried and pain unrealized yet fully anticipated. It is a ghastly thing, but Clive danced with it anyway, like dancing with a skeleton even while he knew that a woman would be a better dancing partner.
He had no other choice but to abandon her immediately. Nobody but he knew about the battle and, to be honest, he didn’t either, for he didn’t have the words, but he felt it, always felt it, and his belly grew fat in an attempt to appease it, his belief in it ever going away diminished with each passing day. For this reason, Clive had the feeling that he was on the way down. Although still relatively young, he was going down and away from the sweet oblivion of innocence and would soon be saddled with a knowledge that was not knowledge, but only ferocious reality, pointing only to the death of things, the end of things, the reality of hard social stratifications, the idea that there truly is nowhere to lay your head. He could not do harm to such a pretty woman and he knew he wouldn’t talk to her.
The woman got off of the bus without looking at Clive. She hadn’t liked him. He knew he had made sure of that. He did not have the energy to take on such a thing. Why would you go out there and find someone else not down here, the monster inside seemed to ask. Why would you try and escape the world that is more real than any other real because it is a part of you and the other is not? Why do you think that you could escape my knowledge ever? You must come back down and rest. All of everything inside of you will float you forever, take you from here to there. You will be pleased to be with me because I am what you would call “no more.”
More added complexity and confusion. No more gave hope that things would simplify, that Clive’s sensitivities would shrink. He would man up. It was this shrinking that he actually sought, but to go there just fed the monster in that it was also the reason he had put on the pounds. With the daily giving over of himself to the monster he had tried to replace himself with food. Unconsciousness seemed too much like death and he filled in this gap by eating as much as he could.
The incidence of food was perpetual. He ate a big breakfast, a bigger lunch and, of course, a huge dinner, a buffet if possible; The King’s Corner or Madame LaWang’s on 17th street. In food there was once again color, lightness and substance that seemed to bring on forgetting. It was a tangible act that reminded him that there was more inside than just a dark, swirling cloud of need. Hopelessness was briefly stayed. It was a clear marker of where the future actually lay, a real truth, physical. The future became the moment the food hit his tongue. The chewing sent the pleasurable real form into a pleasant real place that allowed him to revel in his body. He ate fast, he ate hard, like a man. He ate with style. It was always good form. But he also only ate alone, ever.
The thought of Madame LaWangs was pulsating inside of him now. It was 4:53 in the evening. In seven minutes he would wrap up this day’s work and someone else would get on the bus and take over for him. There was 9th to 15th left and he had a pretty full bus. The thought of Madame LaWangs eased him. He always got a little bit anxious towards the end of the day as the bus filled with people going home from their long days of work. There was more stupidity on the other side of the barrier toward the end of the day too, maybe because he had less tolerance for it, but still he believed it to be true. He would hold the angst inside of him and try to contain it at this late hour, but he knew it would only exit once his feet hit the pavement and he was on his way to Madame LaWang’s Buffet.
This day was like most others. There had been a few problems where he had to open the window and speak to someone in a tone he despised. He would slam the window shut and it would be gone, but it would have been an extra something to add to the swirling world inside that owned him. Clive knew that he would have a heart attack after awhile if he kept on this job. He understood about stress and its deleterious effects on the human body, but he had no choice. He was a bus driver, fat and too old to do much else anymore. There was 13th Street. Eight off, six on. Of course, he wasn’t too old, but he had accepted the notion that he was.
Nobody knew how much Clive felt relegated to what he did, how he himself insisted upon his career without wanting to, how the monster inside insisted upon it. Nobody was going to cut him a break anymore. He had lost his beauty and his personality, given them up willingly for a paycheck until he perceived himself as everybody else did who got on the bus, as one of the unfortunates in the world, someone whose existence was relegated to going round and round and round on the same track day in and day out not unlike a rat in a cage.
Clive knew he was an object of pity, not scorn, he didn’t warrant that, but pity was just as bad as scorn. It is something that you cannot address with your fellow man. It is one of those things that people live with silently until they break down and cry silently to themselves, usually for other reasons. Tears are for when the monster gets too big and in order not to kill its host allows a venting of steam. A dead host equaled a dead monster. The pity of others was one of the things that made Clive want to melt.
He saw the last stop. He would get off here and take the system to the restaurant and then back home. He didn’t have to pay, of course. He just got on across the street, transferred once, and the next thing he knew he would be outside Madame LaWang’s, and then, after that, his apartment complex at 28th and Fairfield.
He pulled up to the last stop and there was Rachel, also African-American, who once opened her window and threw her shoe at somebody. She was aiming for someone far at the back of the bus, but instead hit an old man sitting in the third row. She had lost it, gone crazy, been suspended for six months, but returned because she was really a charmer, a really nice girl, and the bosses liked her. That’s Rachel, they all said, but that man in the third row wasn’t thinking that when that shoe hit him in the face. Clive made the stop, but did not open the door. He then motioned to the customers who wanted to get on that there would be a change of drivers. When Rachel was at the front of the row Clive opened the door and she got on. He quickly closed it.

Hey, Clive, the demon-children out today for ya?
Nah, not too bad today. How you doin’ Rachel?
I’d rather be on the French Riviera right about now, but I think I’ll do this instead. God, I hope they’re nice tonight.
They’re okay today. The full moon of the last few days not got them riled up about anything too much.
The moon don’t know how to act during the day. You got the sun. Them people sing songs to themselves in the daytime. That moon you talking about is on my shift, the moon and a bottle of Jack.
You deserve a medal then. Remind me to get you one for tomorrow.
A medal? Shit, I need a shrink. Once Robert’s settlement comes in I’m cutting back. Waaay back.
Maybe I should try and get a settlement.
You wanna have a bad back for the rest of your life? Shit, I’d still take this crummy job. He cries out in the night sometimes. He’s earned that money coming to him.
Keep her light, Rachel.
You too, Clive.

Clive stepped out of the bus and waded through the people all the while saying “excuse me.” There was only one thing on his mind and that was Madame LaWang’s. Being on a bus all day is like living in a rolling cage. Once Clive got on the ground things changed. The monster inside of the cage with him shrank a little bit, disappeared a little bit with the power of its host suddenly surging forth. That’s why they named these buffets fancy names about Kings and Madams, because when you’ve decided to go there you are in a position of power, you are tossing caution to the wind since too many instances of eating at buffets can kill you, and you, for a brief moment in time, stand up for what you want and go out and get it anyway. After a hard days work there was no hesitation. It’s the poor man’s simulation of a rags to riches story.
He got on Route 62 and made it to Madame LaWang’s in fifteen minutes. It was different as a passenger on the bus even though he was still in his uniform. People see you more as a person than an unfortunate automaton. There was a nice elderly couple sitting side by side in the elderly seats in front of him. They smiled at Clive briefly. A quick smile to someone on the bus was like a pot of gold. You would think that it would happen more, but it was really a rarity. Most smiles on the bus were defensive, but then again, you never know who you’re smiling at and Clive was no different than anybody else. This was a different plane and Clive relished it. To sit in the drivers seat is to sink into a vortex and do all that you can from going all the way down. Here was calm flight that made him know that the day’s battle was over. He had won another day’s pay. It was a small victory, the only kind he knew.
He got off of the bus a block from the restaurant and walked the rest of the way, passing a motel and a Circle K. The place was hopping. Clive forgot it was a Saturday evening, which brought him down a notch, because he used to plan every Saturday night by the middle of the week. Now Saturday had all the panache of a Tuesday. He went inside and the young girl just inside the door, Chinese, smiled and took him to a table. He didn’t wait. He went to the buffet line and grabbed a plate. First it was a little salad, a little thousand island, egg. Beside it was the Jello, which seemed wrong, but he knew he would come back for it. He moved on and went straight for the meats: chicken and noodles, beef and broccoli, chicken on a spear, beef on a spear. He piled it up on his plate beside some rice and then smothered the entire plate with sweet and sour sauce until he had to wipe the edges with his fingers and then embarrassedly lick them there in line.
He went back to his table and ordered a soda from the waiter. The waiter was good and quick and Clive drank a good portion of his soda before digging in to his food. It felt good. It was right and good. There was a God. When he finished the first plate he went back and got some of the things he had neglected the first time, the pot stickers, a little cheap sushi and some more barbecued pork, chow mein and rice. This would be it except for the Jello. He devoured the second plate almost as fast as the first. By the time it was clean he knew that he was done. He wouldn’t go back for more although he felt like he wanted to. The eyes are bigger than the stomach they say. After sitting there silently for a while, nursing his soda, he got up and went for the Jello. They had green and red, as always, and he grabbed the red for the hell of it, no other reason. He went back to the table and sat down and that’s when he felt the first pain.
He thought it was from sitting down too hard, but there was a dull yet distinct pain just underneath the rib cage on the right side of his body. He pressed his fingers into his belly right there and tried to relieve the pain by diverting his attention from it more than anything, but it did not go away. It was dull, but it was real. He couldn’t figure it out. He’d never gotten food poisoning before, ever. He put the Jello aside. He wouldn’t eat it. He’d had enough. He stared down at the remnants of his feast. Both plates still lay on the table. He studied the outlines of the plates and even the knit weave of the white tablecloth, something, anything, because this pain was growing stronger and stronger. After ten minutes he knew he was in trouble and he got up and paid the check and left. Outside, he went to the bus stop again and waited for the 270 to come and take him home. He would get in bed or take a bath and then watch TV in bed.
“Goddamn,” he said to himself, pressing down into his side, feeling for what was going wrong inside of him, but not knowing what he was feeling for, not knowing anything, but that he also sort of wanted to vomit now, too. Two minutes later after making this realization he did just that, sending a healthy Chinese dinner into a monstrosity that somebody working for the city would have to clean up with curses on their breath. Nobody was at the bus stop but Clive. For this he was grateful, but soon a young girl, about seventeen, white, walked up to the bus stop, also waiting for 270. Clive was in obvious pain now, but the girl said nothing. They stood there for a few minutes when she spoke up.

“Are you alright?” she asked him.
“No, yes, well, no, I’ve got the worst side-ache of my life. I just ate Chinese at Madame LaWang’s and I think they were trying to kill me.”
“Where is it at? Your stomach?”
“Yeah, sort of right here,” he pointed at the spot.
“Yeah, that’s your gallbladder. You got gallstones. My dad’s got gallstones and when he has an attack he’s curled up on the couch for hours. He says that taking a hot shower sort of helps, but really the only thing that works for him is pot. You got any pot?”
“No, I can’t smoke pot because they test me. I drive a bus.”
“Oh. Then take a hot shower. I don’t know if the gallbladder can bust or anything. I don’t think so. I think it’s your gallbladder.”
“Okay, thanks, my gallbladder. Jesus…”

They stood there quietly for a while as Clive moved from here to there, anything to keep the pain away. The girl said nothing more, fully comprehending the severity of the pain, her father after all. All Clive could think as he looked for places to press on his body that he hoped would trigger some sort of pain relief was “why?” Why me? Why now? Why not some other way that wouldn’t have led to a defective gallbladder, gallstones, whatever this girl thought it was? Why would God put all this fat on my body? Why wouldn’t God just tell me to stop it all, to stop the torture, the permanent ruminating over things that are real only if you allow them to be so? Why would God be invisible so that we all think that invisible things are good things, powerful things, things worth listening to? Why? Why? Why?
The bus came for the crowd. There were eight or nine of them. Clive got on last, gave a brief hello to Shari who was driving, but nothing more, and went and got a seat in the back to be alone with his pain. Everything was luckier than him. All of these people lived their day to day lives so sweetly. They lived in another world because they did not have the pain that he felt. They were rich and didn’t know it. The pain had escalated to twice what it was when he first felt it. It grew steadily, getting worse and worse even when he thought that it could get no worse. He considered going to the hospital, but he hated hospitals. It didn’t sound like it was life-threatening according to the girl whose dad gets rid of it with hot water and a bong hit or two. He’d ride it out. Besides, something inside of him was taking a whipping and the feeling, akin to anger, was actually somewhat delicious.
The monster that lived inside of him, lived on him, feasted on him, was screaming in pain just as Clive wanted to but didn’t because of the people on the bus. Lost questions were instantaneously asked, sudden deeply embedded angers were thought of and expressed through quick movements disguised as pain. His hatred of the inner world that had come to control him was gaining an upper hand through this painful episode and if he could, he would have killed it completely. He would have made it so that he never thought about his thoughts ever again. Then he would walk through the world proud and strong, and do only things that he was called upon to do, things that only had their place in the outside world, and he would gain traction and be bolstered where it counted and he would be a hero because his enemy would not be inside of him anymore, but out there, a simple place really, a place where the eye can see the situation and the brain can tackle it. No more full-body angst, wordless questioning, wordless answering, eye movements that are furtive because totally uninformed. He was sensing just how he was controlled by a million past experiences that had all sunk down deep into him and formed a coalition to resist ever facing the open day ever again. These were Clive’s failures. Clive’s. And Clive knew it now.
The dialogue within was a one-sided conversation about every failure that Clive had ever known. School, where he dropped out. He was going to be a doctor, yeah right; Nancy, a failure, because she loved him and yet he wanted to go out on Saturday night and bag a few blondes while he was still filled with his youthful vim and vigor; work, where he was afraid that the corporations he could have joined at one or two junctures would never let him become what he wanted to be, one, because he was black, and two, because he was uneducated, although everybody told him that he showed real aptitude at what it was that he had the opportunity to do; to be a psychological aide. Who knows, he might have become a psychologist. Instead he called it poetry and it almost killed him, but no more.
This poetry was being confronted with a steely gaze now by Clive as he sat in the back of the bus quietly boiling over with anger. It was all self-directed, an acknowledgement of his pitiful state, the monster he was realizing that he just perceived as “God.” He had never really done that before. Had he been wrestling with God every day in his cage of the bus? Could it have been that it was God that hated him so much, needed him so much, that he had lost any semblance of his former self? Once again, why? Why would God do that to me? What did I do? Then, where will I go? He knew it now. There was no way for him to stay. The pain was getting unbearable. He decided that he would go to the hospital. He screamed out.
“Hurry up! Hurry the fuck up!”
Shari looked crossly at him through her mirror.
“I’m not going to hurry up and you, of all people, should not be yelling at me from way back there. I’ll come back there and kick you off the bus and report you. You’re an asshole, Clive, I never liked you!”
“Yeah, why don’t you shut the hell up, man. Leave the lady alone.”
It was a long-haired hippie type sitting just in front of him wearing ear buds and reading a book. He was standing up for something. Here he was, in pain, dying possibly, not really, but it might as well have been since he had been dying slowly these last six years anyway, and this college kid was telling him to shut the hell up.
“You don’t know who I fucking am, do you?” said Clive.
He relished the way he said it. It was unlike any way that he had ever spoken anything before.
“No, I don’t know who the fuck you are and I don’t care. That lady didn’t deserve your shit. You’re just drunk anyway.”
Clive stood up and immediately started hitting the kid on the back of the head with his fist, just his right fist, over and over, a clumsy punch from an overweight man who wasn’t anything near to being a fighter.
“You don’t know nothing! You don’t know nothing! You don’t know what I got in me! You got nothing! With your book and your white lucky skin! You know what I got in me! I got God in me! God! God!”
Upon this realization, coupled with the fact that he was watching his hand hit the curled up young man’s covered head over and over, Clive began to melt. He sat back down. The pain was just about gone or he’d forgotten about it. He knew he was crying in front of everybody now.
“I got God in me. That’s what it is.”

#

Published in: on May 6, 2011 at 10:23 pm  Leave a Comment  
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A&P Now

The language of blue meep meowed for living. Food lines were shorter and we had less to choose from. Cheeses were cheeses and everybody thinner and the non-competition, contrary to what we all thought should be the case was better than competition except in the death scheme of things which we knew little about from day to day anyway.
There was no post-modern for everything was modern and of course all literature was simply something others did who didn’t know about warm carpet and doorways and other rooms. We talked to the girls who would later become ugly or mean or old and they talked to us and we wondered if by our talking to them they would become nice later. Those who were nice then are nice now and those who are lost then are also lost now for still, everybody has to die.
As we age we get more words and more thoughts, but everything stays the same. We meet those who gave birth to our icons and they ask us for imput because we seem wise. We can’t draw yet, only think, so we offer a promise of help, but don’t understand the primitiveness of their calling cards. M&M’s have phone numbers to rooms above you. Hotel rooms that may promise anything from sewing to massages. Fat people you knew are thin. There are fewere butters and fewer breads in the supermarket and you see an original Buddha, the one that you lost that says “The Gold Coast” on the bottom, but is on the desk in the supermarket next to the artsy people who are paying for their food, waiting in a slow area for food while others move around the rest of the supermarket which is just as slow, but not quite.
There is no fear here of disappearing. You remember the girl who stopped you as your car was parked outside of the one family who aged. You forgot to bring in the fifty cents you needed to get a soda out of their soda machine. They are all in the pool like always and when they see you they are not happy to see you. They are ashamed. So you go back out to your car and pull it into a better place beside a trailer whose occupants you don’t know. Then you pull it up further to be avoid being splattered by a rain bird. They they stop. Two girls. Hispanic girls and they stop in front of your car and start talking like they are stopping for you to look at them which they are. They are young and have make up and small tits and they talk and you are interested until the black girl comes out and she starts talking directly to you. She says that these houses are all in and of themselves (or something like that), like “***** are you up there fucking?” And of course, she says, she is. And sure she could go out and do whatever she likes, but it was the jealousy and all that (or something like that) which made her stay with her boyfriend. She had a bright pink face and lips very large and red and she wasn’t pretty, but she was young and although her own future seemed bleak, being big lipped and saucy and therefore ignorant he hoped for the best for her, at least until she disappeared, which she did of course since she was black anyway and he was white.

But the main thing was that there was less in the supermarkets back then and that was a good thing. There was less to choose from and therefore there was less excitement. Everything was calmer. The good looking one said something ugly about an ugly job. You can hear the bitterness but when you attempt a joke, your brother and friend Hendrick beside you, Hendrick much thinner than he is now, of course, you find you smile widely, a real smile that you don’t remember being able to smile in a long time and she beams and all of the ugliness that you thought, or would have thought now would be impossible to remove, fell off of the pretty girl’s face (who had the body I forget to mention) and she smiles back and you know that you’ve made a connection, but there’s no way to reconnect so you walk a little bit faster and perhaps you’ve reached the sprout where Hell may be if Hell still be possible which it isn’t since walking on is of itself proper and right and therefore Heavenly and sane.
Hendrick had earlier pushed the shopping cart of a lovely and tall girl who he could never push the shopping cart for now and when he was done they hadn’t said nary a word when she went on pushing the shopping cart herself and they’d had some sort of communication which didn’t need anymore depth. I had taken to smoking the three joints all at the same time by this time, but after awhile I needed them to go out and they were all lit and when I put them in my pocket I hoped they were out completely which they were.
But it was the slowness of the day that mattered. The little inside of the store. The fact that I was aware again and nobody demanded anything of me like they do now. Since then the animal that we call society had grown long, mean, tentacle-like arms with fingers. Each tip had a smile and a reason to buy something else which you did or else be strangled by philosophy which stated: Buy me or seek another way of living. Of course, nobody would consider seeking another way of living so we would buy and buy and buy. But there bread was bread. Buddhas were Buddhas. Light orange wrappers. M&M phone numbers. Young men not surprised by it all. Thin friends we hadn’t seen in years. Artists creating 80s phenomenon cartoon characters.
And as we wind down our belief in anything other than the way that we are now. As we remember our breaking bones and newer smells, our failures and our hopes, and the way that we think we must buy in even further to the world of more breads, more Buddha’s, we learn that we don’t learn as we age, but we forget and if we are wise we learn that to forget is the antidote to less warm aisles and girls who never regain the ability to smile. And we forge ahead and a crust of ten years doesn’t seem too bad, but the crust of 20 seems interminable and irretractible and all simply because we have known of our histories, felt the warm butter of life on the bread of colored and fading carpets of warmth, walked the linoleum seas whose lines were still etched with black tiger lines, and looked around at awe at all the things that were no longer in the supermarket, and unless we did something about it, would be.
But to dance and not apologize for the loss of the tippy toes until we find them again when they’re not in ourselves, but within the thought of them and the thought of them is locked inside another place because we can’t be in the place where the original thought originated and instead we become a loner and we create a new product for the shelves that reminds us of something that is wonderful and new and something nobody’s ever had before and by the time it is over and done with the shelves are covered with such like ideas and when we go to the store all that we see are faces of people who had failed to find that one thing that they were looking for.
Then they go home in their cars and stand in traffic and see the new styles of cars in front of them. The exact style of car when they dreamed of cars as children and other children were dreaming of cars as children and then all of the children grew up and the smarter of those children realized their dreams thinking if only they could be on the highway then those other children who dreamed of the same cars would love them and respect them and play with them at recess, but by the time recess came along there was no such thing as recess, only class differentiation, and the children who didn’t make the cars went to work elsewhere and none of the children ever played with one another again so the dream was a waste of time and vision ultimately and didn’t produce the required result because of the ten thousand realized dreams keeping the other child from their bread and butter at home.

And somewhere the mechanisms for making all of the money must stop and when it does we will think to ourselves that the end of the world is at hand, but in reality it will only mean nameless bread and re-valued Buddhas. We’ve let the monster grow ten million hands, 100 million digits with 100 million faces on each which now scare us. They are our masters. They used to call it keeping up with Joneses. It is simply and actually perpetual motion. We’ve relegated ourselves to the position of the ants.
And to do this our pride must die, but it is through pride that some of us only know how to receive love. We do something well we are to feel proud and receive smiles from significant others. We feel proud so we do more things well. Needs become opportunities to contribute to the good, but as the world spins up out of control and we all lose our footings and become weightless inside of gravity, bolted only to our roads and our jobs, we start to wonder, we start to philosophize anyway until something hits us, be it dreams or memories, and we know again we have feet and we remember the way others used to have good, heavy, weighted strides in the supermarket where we would buy things, but only what we needed and then go home through the desert or the hills or even the city and live, our eyes wide open, our ability to connect intact, everything about us welcoming of advancing age, but feeling none of it and nobody insisting upon it under the guise of forever.
I push my cart and I see you.

Published in: on January 26, 2011 at 11:47 pm  Leave a Comment  

Eastside All-Star

Eastside All-Star

I lost the game. I lost the fucking game for ‘em. Jim Buckley came up to me and said it best: You lost the fucking game, Chatworth, and he was right. I lost our team the championship.
Five years later I was walking around the high school hallways all stoned like I usually was and I ran into this kid named Ripley Knox, a bigger stoner than me. He showed me what he had in his bag and I told him I had two bucks and he said that was enough to get a little buzz anyway so we went to the park, just ditched school like we did all the time anyway and sat under a tree and he lit up a joint and we passed it back and forth and when I tried to give him the two bucks he said fuck it so we enjoyed the joint together on this the first sunny day of three weeks when I finally said to him,
“Ripley, you remember that game I lost for our team back in the majors?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Well, it just don’t seem right that one person can lose a game for a whole team does it?”
He looked at me all stoned and shit and just nodded and then said,
“Yeah, why not?”

I agreed enough with him, but I was suddenly angry that he would believe something could be so, then thought again of it, and remembered that day and how it was all my fault. There was no question about it. But I wanted to ask Ripley now that we were more grown up and shit. Ripley played right field more than me back then so he would be honest with me. His mother grew his pot. So I say to Ripley,
“Yeah, I guess so.”

I know so, but I say it that way. Sometimes one guy can screw it all up for everybody. He had me at second base because Ricky Tynesdale was out with the flu. Ricky was good, consistent, but he wasn’t the star of the team. Right off this kid hits me a grounder. It goes through my legs. That’s cool. Shake it off they tell me. But I could see that the coach was pissed. That kid finally made it in on a triple hit by another kid. 1-0.

Then we got a rally and tied the score. We were doing good when I get up to the plate and take a walk. That’s good. That loads the bases and this kid named Kenny was up who wasn’t too bad, but batted seventh. There were two outs and I was leading off a little bit when I see Cindy Miller. I’ll never forget the moment. Because just as I stepped off that base there was Cindy in her little junior high cheerleading suit bopping up to the stands. I think her brother played on the other team. I just got a real quick look at her tits when all of a sudden I hear “bam!” and this kid playing first base just smacks me right in the chest with his glove and then sticks his hands up in the air and gives out the biggest “yeaaaah!” I’ve ever heard. He was like some sort of Viking warrior or something. We all trotted in and I sat down on the bench. Nobody said anything to me except for one kid. Vincent Trollo. I think his family was in the mob. I don’t remember what he said except that it included the fictitious name “Wackworth”and it was a direct allusion to my own name of Chatworth.
I went back to second base and prayed nothing else bad would happen. But God had taken a little vacation for those two hours I would soon learn. Another ball did come to me which I fumbled. That man on base did score so that we lost our lead. The next kid up hit it to center field and he got on first. The next kid hit it to the shortstop who lobbed it directly at second base because he was unable to call it back after it left his hand. He had just assumed I would be there.

For some reason and to this day I still don’t know why, when he hit it to our shortstop, Randy Valasquez, I knew, I mean, I really knew where I was supposed to be at, but the trouble was that I was right in the running path of this kid going to second and I jumped back because I was scared and he passed me. The next thing I knew I was trying to beat this kid who had been running hard for a good three seconds. There was no way. When Randy threw that ball to me I wasn’t even close to the bag yet and it bounced on the ground and this kid just kept running. I couldn’t believe it. He must have thought he was like the big running guy on that team so he just kept running and finally I threw the ball to our third baseman, Vic Green, but the goddamned ball just twisted or something and I threw that thing about ten feet over his head and this kid just kept running all the way home. The kid who hit the ball made it to third and then someone knocked him in. When we got back to the bench I sat down like usual and didn’t say anything. Vincent Trollo was all belligerant then.
“You oughtta take that glove, Wackworth, and whack with it because it ain’t doing none of us any good out here.”
Then the coach cut in and told Trollo to shut up and sit down. I wasn’t afraid of Trollo. He could kick my ass, but first he’d have to kiss it. It didn’t matter much. The coach took me out for a few innings. The score was five to three. I was involved in every one of their runs and every one of their runs shouldn’t have been a run. I was ready to give up sports. I was twelve and soon to be thirteen. My big brother smoked cigarettes and I would too. He told me about this girl who he made out with in the back of his Blazer. How her tits just popped out of her shirt and then just sat there bouncing around and around like a couple of water balloons. That’s what I’d do. So I sat there and waited for the game to be over and for me to be thirteen and then fourteen and then maybe fifteen and by then I’d have watched more water balloons bounce around than Trollo or anybody on my team. But sitting there thinking those thoughts, trying to rescue myself from my low opinion of myself, I knew I’d just about lost the game for us and I prayed the coach wouldn’t put me back in. Then came the fifth inning of a game of seven.
“Chatworth, right field.”

I was back. I was back in right field. Nobody hit the ball to right field. They took out little Jimmy Grove, a kid whose hand was backwards so after he caught a ball he would take it off, place it on his backwards hand and throw it. His good hand was his left one, but I think he was a natural righty because where Jimmy would throw nobody would feign to know. He once threw a ball behind himself, over the right field fence. Before anybody could tell him not to climb over to get it he had already done so, failing miserably yet in an original fashion because on the fall to the other side his belt got caught on the chainlink and the umpire had to unhook him. The kid who hit it to him got a home run. Our coach protested, but he lost the argument. It was just not worth pursuing really. It’s one of those arguments that because it had to become an argument at all we all stopped and thought about what we were doing out there in the first place. It was the most absurd thing we’d ever seen, any of us, except perhaps for the day when I lost the championship for us.
So I was in right field. The fifth went by. No problem. Then came the sixth. We got a run. They didn’t. Then came the seventh and we score two on a home run by Vincent Trollo. I was closer to being able to go home. It’s six to five. Us. We get up again but we don’t score. It’s the last at bat for the other Tigers. My team, the Giants, hadn’t won the championship ever as far as anybody can remember. And that’s how it was, but then I saw Ripley lighting the roach and thought to myself even if it was my fault it couldn’t have been completely. We were a team. The other guys could have hit more or done more of something good but they didn’t. They just didn’t make as many errors as me.
“You believe that, Rip?”
“Yeah. You lost the game for us, man.”

“And you didn’t? You only played two innings before your dad came and got you.”
“So. At least I didn’t make any errors.”
“You didn’t play, man!”
“I played.”
“Right field.”
“Yeah, but I played.”
“I just don’t know anymore, Ripley.”

It’s not that I wanted to vindicate myself to Rip. Rip was always a bigger loser than I was. I was ten times better than him and there he was sitting all smug smoking the last of his joint like he was Mark McGuire or something. This little runt made me sick. But, you know, I couldn’t shake it. He was right. I made too many errors and therefore I had to take blame for the loss. I remember it differently now than it actually was. After so many years you turn events into happenings. It’s like your first kiss. You remember every moment. Every sensation. Unfortunately, that ball was like that. That ball was like a big sailboat floating over my head. I remember my hand reaching out for it and then suddenly realizing it was easily ten feet away from me. Why I reached for it I don’t know. I can imagine what I looked like as if my memory of the situation included a camera angle from the benches. I saw that thing up in the air so high and I started running in. I was running in because I was going to catch it. It was hit so high and I would get that thing so I ran and ran until I started feeling this weird something in my limbs. It was like my limbs were calling me stupid or something. I didn’t feel right. I felt like I was being torn in two because I’d run way too far in and I was suddenly aware of this ball coming back down to earth behind me. I know I should have run sideways, but I didn’t. I started running backwards as fast as I could. By this time Tim Rowe had started running for it and he was calling me off but I couldn’t tell where he was so I just kept running backwards as fast as my waddling little legs would take me until I plowed right into Tim and our heads knocked together and I knocked him out. Swear to God.
I remember seeing that ball rolling away from Tim and Tim’s eyes sort of rolling up in his head a little bit. I remember turning around and looking at that kid running those bases, heading for home and then back at Tim and then back at the ball which had stopped. Vincent Trollo was running out to right field from first base so I knew I was going to be in deep shit, but I still didn’t go for the ball. All I could see was Tim’s little white boy face, the nose all upturned and red and a little snotty with those eyes half open and his arms spread out to his sides and suddenly I didn’t care about that little ball standing there in the grass like it was. I understood better the absurdity of the game, why God would make a child like Grove, with that one arm, want to be equal to the Vincent Trollo’s of the world and I thought just for that moment that if that ball never moved again then the world would be a better place.

Then David Rice got it from left field and threw it to Vincent Trollo who was about two feet from me and he threw it way high over the catcher. The kid had gotten his home run already. It was a waste of time. We’d already lost. I remember Vincent Trollo then. It was like he wasn’t even aware that Tim was knocked out cold. He comes up to me and pulls me up by my shirt and looks in my face and calls me the worst thing a person can call another which I won’t repeat here. And I look at his ugly face and the next thing I know I’ve spat in it and he’s on top of me hitting me and me looking over there at Tim all knocked out as I tried to block the punches from my face and then the coach stopping Vincent Trollo and a bunch of people trying to revive Tim, including Ripley.

“You were there,” I told Ripley.

“I know.”

“You know what happened.”

“Yeah. Tim got knocked out and you got beat up and you lost the game for us.”

“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”

But I was through arguing with Ripley. He’s just like everybody else in this world who thinks that winning is the only thing in the world that matters.

14

15

Published in: on January 2, 2011 at 4:55 am  Leave a Comment  
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Follow Yer Dreams

“The trouble with being a writer is never being able to find the ending of a story so as to start fresh the next day.”
Albert Jones 2010

The trouble with the mirror is the reflection of course, the close ever close and coursing circle of you within you. They never promised you’d get a rose garden. But it’s not the end of the world. On the expansive superhighway there are your speeders and those you have left behind. The art of destroying the competition. It’s the game, I guess. It’s not real. Numbers. Before they could teach me about numbers they had to sit down and talk to me about how in the hell A could become a herd of buffalo. They never did. Oh well. I didn’t become a doctor nor a lawyer.

Most would call me stupid. No money. No name. No family. The no’s could go on forever. Regret? Sure, you betcha. Plenty of regret. Oh well, what are you going to do about it…Gain? Weight gain. What then? What’s left? What’s left for me to not to have gotten to have? Just about everything I’d guess. Oh well. Yeah, a little regret.

The sun was down now. Night again. Always night and nowhere to go no one to talk to. It’s going to be a modern hipsterevening because they’re the only ones who have the chance of being future readers after everybody has disappointed them later in their lives. But maybe that’s just the regret talking. I wish everybody well including myself and the more I let myself just be stupid like that the better I feel. That is intelligence that they can’t give you a diploma of in college.

I’m a post-modernist myself, a latent hipster myself. Diggin it. Studied mysticality and mythology extensively, at least a little bit more than normal. When I got my doctorate I told the world that it was great, that I now had a license to be nuts. Heheheh.

Susie says I’m bi-polar, but I don’t think so. I think I am something for which a name has been give only once. I would hate to think that I spend my life on a bi-pole contraption where my thoughts swing monkeylike back and forth until I am so compartmentalized in my explanation of myself that I forget that I’m the color blue. I’m not blue, but for instance. Does it matter anymore that I am the color blue? Maybe I am blue because there is a reason to be blue. That would mean I would have a whole new section of the ship to tend to to take the ship home and I’m just standing at attention all the time. Is Bi-Polar designation too unmythological? Maybe. That’s my formal education talking. You’ll have to forgive me at times.

I couldn’t make it at their cocktail parties. I didn’t feel inspired at that school either. I was meant to be a writer and researcher. Sam says he could get me a few speaking gigs on my whole Foller Yer Dreams shtick, a comedy bit, that I do about following Yer dreams. A lot of guys are trying to use this right now and it’s as good a shtick as any, Thomas in Vegas, Barclay over in London, a few others. Debbie…who is another story. Debbie and I had a fling. I hate to say it. But we had a fling. Bad on both our sides. Oh well. Like I said. Oh well. Turns out she’s a hessian or is that hussy? She’s got these claws that go out and scratch you as though she’s just trying to keep you next to her. She’s a big Jaglom film lover, but doesn’t ever get it that guys are as good as chicks. She’s like totally nothing I do and when I broke up with her she called my girlfriend who then broke up with me. Debbie. I think there’s a magician in Australia who uses it too.

The thing is that when you start telling your story because you want to you’re good, you don’t worry about others. But when you think that you enjoy it enough to want to do it all the time, even to make a living at it, you start wondering what the world was seeing and you slow down and are like the rabbit in the headlamps. We all have that aspect of ourselves. We hate it because we hate to think that we would stand there in the road staring at those headlights until it was too late. Snap out of it they say. Snap out of it. Well, you’ve got to if you are in it. But if you’re not then you shouldn’t be thinking like you were going to go back to it. That’s back rocking horse seesaw stuff.

Okay, I’ll tell you about Follow Yer Dreams. Follow Yer Dreams was something I used to say a long time ago back when you could say something and carry it around with you like a sign, before the internet. I was a dancer for a local club, a dude dancer, the kind that rocks out with the women and makes them think that not every man is a shmuck and at least one can dance and they’d gotten their money’s worth and all. When I got my Ph.d from the Oceanic I’d learned one thing. That it was mine. It was a piece of paper that I was lucky enough to be able to afford through debt and it stated that I did the work. Now, whether that institution is considered valid by those in positions of authority would be another matter. I’m not saying that the The Institute of Oceanic Consciousness is not a good school. It is, it is one of the best in what it specializes in: psychology, mythology, mysticism and the like. Highly regarded in fact within those “circles.” But it is a small world, too few dollars for every subject. Mysticism would often go out with barnacle bending and buckling.

But mysticism was where Follow Yer Dreams came from. I don’t know nothing. I don’t even talk like this, but I feel like I speak like this. You know what I mean? Nah, you wouldn’t. It was just that I was interested in the subject matter and then suddenly poof I was in the academic realm. Barkey was scratching his tit under the t.v. But when I got out of Oceanic I couldn’t parlay nothing into nothing except the university gig and that was an accident after seeing Bette Sue over at the Domgarten. Spaaten. You know what I mean.

People don’t much want to make their living like me using words and thoughts well enough to get bread and butter through them. Real bread and butter. I did. Like I say, I’m hyperactivementalogistically and that doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I am not on some radical and bad end of some pole, come to think of it, do they mean the actual pole or the two poles, or staffs really, on the opposite ends of the earth? Questions.

To be honest, to this day, I still don’t know what Follow Yer Dreams means, except now it’s out there and I make usually anywhere to four to five thousand dollars per month from it. Then the talks at the bookstores and all that and I got me this house overlooking the ocean, and it’s all good. It’s done. I’d followed my dream and gotten this house overlooking the ocean. When I suddenly looked up and wondered if I was possibly staring into the headlights. What was I doing here? What now? I had no love in my life. Single. Looking, but feeling ugly compared to past evaluations. I didn’t know what to do. I went to page 192, it’s a long book, and saw what I wanted to see:

If you follow your dreams you will not be left alone to the hounds of the world. The hounds of the world are the same hounds that you would find in hell but more real world, not as evil. But still they’ll nipping at your heel. Why? Because you wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t. You’re human. Things chase you in your mind or you chase things. It’s a give and take, a big game of tag you’re it. So go out there and Follow Yer Dreams, because what else you gonna chase?

There it was, right there, as clear as your dreams. I’d capitalized Follow Yer Dreams. I’d trademarked it. That’s what I mean, there’s a few guys here and there using it, Thomas, Barclay, Debbie till she petered out. But I did it first. Yup. I capitalized the three words first and got the big bucks. But I didn’t mean to take away from the other stuff by doing it, but did. You see? I put a big sponge in the bucket of thought and it took everything else away. Why? Because you brought money into the equation. It’s like being at a cocktail party and suddenly saying excuse me and then whacking off right there momentarily until you are re-fastened properly enough to join back in the conversation.

That was the rabbit in the headlights as I looked out my wallwindow of sea.

I don’t like to say it destroyed me, but I will say that it is something that took me away from my original goal of really following my own dreams and doing some good work in my field and not worry about books, just publish them and be allowed to be left alone with my ocean’s hum and write.

When the capitalizations stop is when the original works begin.
So I’m there. I’m really there. That’s what I saw, what my rabbit stare turned into. It turned into a real pathway, but one thing I hadn’t really thought of was the letters. They never told me about the letters.

To Kleven Benjamin
From Lisa Wentworthy

Dear Mr. Benjamin,

I too have flown from a mountain, sailed, as you say, the way that you saw the world there blue and waiting and you yet had your wings and yet you went anyway, soared, sailed, sprouting your wings as your faith first lifted you. I too have experienced this.
I was wondering if perhaps you would like to speak at our gathering this coming Friday at 7 p.m. We are a light hearted group with mystical leanings. We are not naïve, but we do believe in what we believe. I am single and within birthing age.

Thank you,

Lisa

See what I mean? Everywhere you went there would be another one. Just when you loved them there would be another one and then they would start adding up on top of each other, but some of the things that they said. Lisa wrote back three times and by the third times I wanted to marry this girl, but then there was that weird statement about being of “birthing age.” Who says that except someone being held in chains somewhere. She seems like a Quaker. I got all the high flying ones for sure. Those were my specialty and I should have known it, but it’s the field too isn’t it? Isn’t it just that I no longer believe? Maybe. I stepped out of a lot of things on this little journey and accepted some new roles the most enormous being that of the role of “father.” An archetype. I didn’ t have any kids. I was always too screwed up to mate well. Yet there it is. It’s what paid for the view, the need of the people to have a surrogate father for 16.95 from the bookstore.

So I guess that’s why I slur back into stupidity. Why not? I’m not the story that they wrote about me. I’m just me. I was glad that I wrote Follow Yer Dreams though because I still believed it after all these years. But where does the end of the story begin? Even that doesn’t make sense.

Published in: on December 22, 2010 at 6:23 am  Leave a Comment  

The Overshoot

Ronald Kranski sat a table at his coffee house next to an outlet where he could plug in his computer. He had his book open to the Pequot Massacre. His hair was rumpled up from his hand running through it over a hundred times that night. He was tired. He had studied for this test for three days already and wasn’t nearly done. It was the most important test of the semester.

As he read, a man came down the aisle toward him. Ronald quickly glanced up and then back down. You may pass, he thought. The man was disheveled, a grey sport coat that was soiled. A tie, checkered. Perhaps he was a professor, but in all probability he was one of the crazies that roamed the streets around the university. He pulled in tighter as the dark ship passed. But it didn’t.

“It’s the overshoot.” The man had just stopped right there. Ronald looked up and saw a scraggly philosopher. He knew he was a philosopher. He called them philosophers. The last philosopher he spoke to had admitted that the CIA was hot on his trail. Another philosopher. Oh, God.

“It’s the times when you go over the end of the tunnel or the end of the cliff or whatever and it happens. It’s the overshoot, man, when you’ve got nothing inside of you but you go over anyway. You must think I’m crazy, like I know what “it” is, this thing, this thing that is always there, the moments. Then you’re alone, man, but you’re in the world, but not in the world, the way that we all are, really, that stuff we try and drown out, the invisible swirling oceans we’ve got inside of us, the unknown and unnamed seas that we think that if we could only name we could float upon and not fall over and out and down.”
“Hey, man, please, I really need to study, “ Ronald said.
“You need to study?”

The man actually looked a little angry. It confused Ronald. Ronald didn’t know why the man was talking to him. He was grungy, dirty, his face marked with lines like a wooden cutting board or a crumpled lunch bag, his hair thick as strings, gray and black, a hooked nose, black glasses that covered only slightly an earnestness that exasperated Ronald from the moment the man opened his mouth. His test was in two days and he had no time to spare. Could you ever find peace?

“You know what I mean? Over and out. But nobody is telling us nothing about what it is that we’ve got going on inside of us. How could anybody? If they do they’re making money or they’re trying to figure it out for themselves. They get fast cars and their wieners grow large and they think that’s it. So they tell us, get your souped up Chevy and take it for a joyride and you’ll know what “its” all about. Or they’ve got a big book binge going on and they’re going to let you know that Freud said this or Freud said that, but you know they can only tell you that because their belly is full of Chardonnay and raw French steak. They can’t tell you nothing.”

Ronald definitely didn’t need this. Ahmadinejad was screwing shit up again. Sarah Palin was ever calling her soccer moms to arms and their men were following because they didn’t want to lose the sex. In the 1630s the Puritans slaughtered the Pequots of Connecticut and almost wiped them out for good. People hadn’t changed and now this, this guy, sitting there telling him this same old shit from the same old store of used up loser thoughts that Ronald ever tried to escape. Everywhere he went there was another and another and another. Always another wordy answer man waiting to take up his precious airspace. This exam was huge, Colonial history in America. It would be a bitch and he didn’t need this. He didn’t Need this.

“Yeah, so what’s your point?” said Ronald, kicking himself instantly. It was 9:25 and he only had 35 minutes left before they kicked him out of the damned coffee shop.
“Well, this, young man.” The man took the response as an invitation to sit in the chair across from Ronald. “You don’t know shit! Excuse my French.”

The French. The French! Ronald thought. He would have to get back to the French too.

“That….book, you got there. What’s in there? Let me see…
He tried to turn Ronald’s book around.
“Hey, hey!
“Well, whatever you got in that book, look, it’s not going to stay in there.” The man, about sixty, pointed to his temple. “It’s in here and then it’s out here.” He pointed to his ass.
“Look Mr. I don’t think you’re right about that. I’ve put so much of this in my mind over the last few years that they’re going to give me a piece of paper proving that it’s in there. They’re going to stand me up on a platform and a genius in a robe is going to hand it to me and it’s going to be my proof. Then employers are going to look at it and it’s going to prove it to them too. Everybody’s going to know that it’s still in there. Please, will you just go back over there?”

The man just stared at Ronald. It wasn’t a hurt stare as much as a stare of disbelief that somebody would question his wisdom. His crooked, grey teeth poked out at him from a tilted smile that Ronald could see was definitely going to let him hold on to this thing that he was trying to do to him. Ronald didn’t feel like being mad.

“Look, I’ll let you go. I’m just passing through here anyway. I’ve got me a business in Lisbon, Spain and it’s going through the roof. It’s in the mental arts. You don’t know what that is. Well, it’s not that.” He points at the book. “It’s not in your words, your knowledge that you think you’re getting from it. It’s from the all-knowing wisdom factory that you’ve got up here. “ He points to his head. “That’s connected to this here.” He points to his heart. “ And comes from everywhere.” He runs his hands around his whole body as if outlining his aura.
“New Age,” Ronald said simply. “And Lisbon is in Portugal.” Christ! Even he couldn’t let this just die.
“Not new age. Not exactly.”

He moves in a little closer. The snake in the man was getting closer and Ronald wasn’t going to push him away just yet for fear of getting bit.

“It’s New Mind.”

Ronald involuntarily rolled his eyes. Great. The snake recoiled. The man leaned back a little bit. He’d thrown his pitch. A ball.

“You’ve got a mind,” the man continued. “ In that mind is a lot of stuff. In that stuff is everything you ever experienced. I’m not talking about actions. I’m talking about emotions: love, hate, envy, greed, goodness, love.
“You said that.”
“Yeah, I’ll say it again because it’s a big one. Love is a big one because we think that it has to come from outside of ourselves, from a pretty little thing, and that’s where we get lost. We don’t need to have love from others to feel love for ourselves.”
“Not new age,” Ronald said.
“No! What’s new age? Look, there is you and there is me and…
“No you look, I’ve got to study.”
“What are you studying?”
“I’m studying the massacre of the Pequot by the Puritans in the 1600s.”
“The Pequots?”
“Indians. They killed all the Indians because….” He stopped. He really didn’t know why, not really. That’s what Ronald was really thinking about before the man interrupted him.
“They killed the Pequots because it’s in their nature to do so, “ the crazy man said.
“Yeah, I guess so. It’s in man’s nature to take what he wants.”
“And you say that it don’t matter what’s in here all swirling around all nameless like I’m saying? You say that it doesn’t matter that you are going toward the outer region every day of your life and when you come to that cliff that you better be able to fly or else you will flail all the way down to the bottom and will grab anything (or anybody) you can to break your fall. You’d take your own mother down with you if you thought it was going to keep you from hitting the bottom. That’s what they did, isn’t it? They picked on people easily picked on to get further ahead. Great warriors for God, I imagine. You’re talking about the Puritans.”

The man lowered his eyes and searched the table for something, some formerly forgotten roadblock to his understanding from the past.

“Yeah, sure, the Puritans,” the man continued. “The Goddamn Puritans. Not so pure the Puritans. Still got ‘em today for sure. Still on their rampage in the name of God. Christian Puritans. Muslim Puritans. Doesn’t matter. They’re the holy ones, but really they’re the most afraid. They’re the ones who won’t listen to what I have to say. They won’t listen to me when I tell them that they’ve got a wild storm going on inside of them that they got to ride through or they will go over the edge of everything and take everybody with them. Then there’s people like you who don’t believe in the invisible and you stuff everything in your head for God knows what reason, but it doesn’t help you. You’re not strong enough to do anything about what the dummies of the world are working for night and day, even in their dreams. You’ve got nothing but a few dumb words on the page about some Indians and Puritans and that’s all. You got nothing at all about the fact that you’re a monster and you don’t even know it!
“I’m a monster?”
“You’re a monster.”
“A monster monster?
“A monster monster. If you’re unconscious. It’ll suck you down the moment you get weak. Then you’ll take others down with you and then those others will take others down and then you’ll have your history, all the history that you need from any book. All these history books are documents of the ways that people were so unconscious that they chain- reacted their lost-ness all the way across society. The blind leading the blind…and we’ll all go down together…”

He actually sang this last bit loudly and an old couple just across the way looked up from their meal and stared. Ronald smiled at them embarrassedly.

True, true, true, Ronald thought, true all of that. But you can’t leave out the particulars. Got to keep moving with the facts. He felt an uneasiness, that same uneasiness he felt when he thought in class that he was missing something, missing some crucial point that mattered. This old man was going there, but it made him feel weak. If he gave in to the man’s ideas he would be the man’s victim somehow, that really the man was just shrewder than he was and that he’d better be careful on these craggy peaks.

“You’re still not saying anything, Mr., You’ve got nothing to give me here. I know that man is shit to man, always has been, but you’re pointing me to some nebulous shit and I don’t need it, okay? I can’t see me and you can’t see you. Nobody sees themselves yet we all stand up for who we are. True. That’s true. We can only guess about the reasons we’re making our decisions or what we believe in and all that. But we can be on top of things. We’re not all lost in a cloud of unknowing like you say and sometimes what we see is what there is. A lot of times it is what it is and that’s it.”

Ronald already felt defeated just by falling into the discussion. He had been on a track and he needed to circle the truth ten thousand more times to eventually get to a morsel and know it as truth. He was prepared to stay on that track until he had all the sustenance that he needed. He wasn’t just going to jump off the rails and stand firm that everything was bullshit because everything was bullshit.

“You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” said the man.

Oh, Christ. Great. Complete failure of understanding. Now, daddy, tell me what it is I need to know.

“Dude…” Ronald said.
“Okay, okay, I’ll leave you alone. I can see that I’m upsetting you, but let me finish. There is an answer. No, listen to me, don’t huffaw like that, listen to me, son, listen to me!”

He grabbed Ronald’s arm forcefully. Ronald pulled back from his rebellious stance. The man was serious. Saliva dripped from the side of this maniac’s mouth.

“Now, listen to me! You are going to face great trials. One day something will go wrong. Things won’t ever be the same after some of these things and you’re going to have to deal with them. You’re young yet, you don’t know, but I do. Something will happen. Something major. Major things happen to all of us and they have happened to me and I want to tell you what you’re in for, but you’ve got to take me seriously for just a minute. Okay?”

Ronald nodded unintentionally, nodded to the angst in the man’s eyes if nothing else.

“Now, you’ve got an ocean inside of you as do I. You’ve got no way of ever knowing the breadth of that ocean. It’s too big. It’s you. Do you see? Don’t ever think that you can know the scope of who and what you are. It’s too vast. It’s too deep. But you’ve got to make it anyway. You can drown at anytime.
Now listen, when you feel that you know something remember, just remember, that you don’t know all of it. You don’t know what you think you know because you’re just coming at it from one angle. There’s a million angles and not all of them are coming from you. A lot of them are coming from others or others before them or others before them. Society, belief systems, everything, but at some point you’ve got to know about something that you got inside of you and it’s this: you’ve got a core. That’s right. You’ve got a middle, a center, a place where you can’t be pushed any further, where even confusion can’t go. You’ll have been through too much by the time you find this core of yours. It’s really something that we don’t want to have to know about. We all wish that we could always just live right from this core like we did when we were children, but we can’t, not when the world has taken a hold of you and taught you a few things about human nature and this goddamned world. You’ll be sent sailing on that stormy sea and you’ll be looking for a port and it’s your core that you’re looking for. Dry land. And it’s in you. It’s always there, it’s just that, well, we’re all lost at sea sometimes and you can test the winds and all that (he points at the book), you can throw Jonah over the side and have an argument with God or whatever, but you’re not on dry land until you’re on dry land and you can get to that because its there, right now, its right there, there!”

At that the old man leaned forward and slapped Ronald hard on the chest. Ronald was in shock so said nothing. He wondered whether he’d been assaulted. The man got up from the chair he had never been invited to sit in and walked to the exit without as much as a nod of goodbye.

Ronald watched him go through the glass door and saw that the man had kept a shopping cart outside and it was filled with odds and ends. He was your average bum. Ronald put his index finger to his lip and looked down at the book. Word after word after word. Each word pointed toward something else, some other fact, some other monstrous fact which led to a monstrous idea, each large enough for its own book. It seemed the more that he learned the more there was to learn. It grew exponentially this thing. It was an ocean, just like the man said, and he was on it, but the waters were as yet serene and he was as yet able to believe that he would sail smoothly through it for the rest of his life, pick up his treasure where he may, and live happily forever after and onward.

But there was the idea still of the ending point, the end of the world, the place where the waters fell down the sides of a flat earth into an eternal void where nothing could rescue him. It was what he didn’t know, and was he fooling himself in thinking he ever could?

Ronald closed the book and found himself staring at the old couple sitting in front of him. Neither of them spoke. They just sat there, one looking a little this way and the other looking a little that. Their eyes were flat and peaceful in a way, but blind too, as though something had been cut off from the inside. He wondered if they had fallen off the side of the world, had overshot their boundaries and didn’t know how to get back. This time he did not dismiss it. He did not retreat into the luxury of his youth. This time he held inside their vacant gazes and allowed them to teach him something, something, something utterly nebulous that perhaps a book, he realized, would never be able to do.

Published in: on September 26, 2010 at 6:06 pm  Leave a Comment  

Nobody Hit Harry

Harry Blankenfeld sat on the ground in the middle of the street and waited for the cars to come and run him over. The light had turned green and one by one they went around him. Jerry had come out of his office just a moment after Harry sat down in the road. He saw Harry and went to the side of the road and motioned for his attention.

-Hey, Harry, what are you doing?
-I’m sitting in the road waiting for a car to run over me.
-Why are you doing that?
-Well, you know what, Jerry, it’s not all that easy to say, but I can tell you this: life sucks.
-Fair enough. Why does it suck? Hey, Harry, some more cars are coming.
-Excuse me.

They stayed silent as the cars roared toward Harry. One by one the cars swerved around him. None of them stopped.

-Anyway, Harry said.
-Yeah, anyway. Look, Harry, why don’t you come to the side of the road. You don’t want to do this.
-No, I do. I do.
-But why?
-You really want me to explain?
-Yeah, Harry, I’m the guy whose gonna have to scrape you up.
-Okay, then if you’re the guy whose gonna have to do that then I may as well tell you my story.
-Thanks. Hey, Harry, the light has turned green.
-Excuse me.

The cars once more swerved around Harry one by one. A couple of people honked this time, but nobody stopped.

-See, Harry, nobody is going to run you over anyway. It’s easy to avoid somebody in the road. I do it all the time. It’s easy.
-I’ll keep trying, anyway.
-The police are going to come for you.
-Then I better be quick, I guess.
Jerry nodded and gulped. He was getting really nervous as this situation truly sunk into him.
-Jerry, you’re an alright guy. You’ve always been good to me, but the rest of you…are shit! Shit! You see, I’ve got it all figured out. It goes like this. You’re born, right? You’re born and then you’re a kid. Everything is good so far, right? Then you’re a teenager and a young adult and then a real adult and then this portion of the show goes on a little longer and a little longer and then a little longer until you run out of portions of the show. You’re always an adult. In the meantime everybody is either new to the process or just like you, in it for a while. It’s when they’ve been in it for a while that it starts to hurt. People don’t care, Jerry! People don’t give a shit! So you always have to be on your guard. You say the slightest thing wrong and everybody is suddenly Steven fucking Seagal. They’re samurai! They’re suddenly out to prove something because, oh, you expressed your opinion or you asked for something. They’re fucking samurai! That’s because they’re so little. They’re peas. Little peas that don’t know that they’re peas. They’ve been shit on too. Everybody has been shit on and they don’t know that they’ve been shit on. So what they do is this, they take that pain of having been shit on, remember it real good, and then when they get the opportunity, you know, someone doesn’t do something they want, anything, any tiny little thing, they shit on you. Get it? Since everybody has been shit on they all go on to shit on everybody else and the ones they shit on are the ones easiest to shit on, the nice guys, the guys who don’t ask much out of life, but when they do, oh boy, watch out. Fucking Hitler is in the room for these guys and let the shitting begin boy. Wonderful way to steal shit. Believe that you are being attacked over some tiny detail and go all the way. Fuck like a fucking Mongol. Well, I’m tired of it, Jerry. I’m not going back to the office to let those people shit on me. Those people. These people in the cars, they can have me. Just take me once and for all. So I quit.
-You quit? You can’t quit. You only have a few years left till retirement.
-Jesus Christ.
-Harry, the light turned green.
-Excuse me.

The cars once more roared by Harry. A couple of more honks, but nobody hit him.

-This isn’t going to work out for you, Harry. Nobody wants to run over a guy in the street.
-Oh, yeah, they do. I’ll get one. Maybe one out of ten would see this as the opportunity of a lifetime. You see, they shit on all the little things. Get all the little perks from shitting on little people for little things all the time, you know, save money here, save money there. They’re always looking for ways to steal a little bit more to maybe get a little more ahead in this RATRACE we call life. It’s the perfect opportunity for someone. He’ll come along. Or she. Doesn’t matter. At least one in ten are looking for the perfect opportunity to take that all encompassing shit.

Jerry didn’t know much what to say so he said nothing and just tried to look sympathetic. Harry got the look and almost stood up, but instead, his arms and torso just sunk deeper into the road.

-Look, Jerry, I know. I know. This is stupid. I should get up and just go back to the office. But you know what? I kind of like it out here.
-You’re getting your clothes dirty.
-Let me have this, okay Jerry? Just let me have this.
-Alright…the light just turned green.
-Excuse me.

Once again, nobody hit Harry.

-It’s competition, do you see? It’s all of the competition. Everybody is screaming about socialism because it is against the American way, the human way. Human nature tells us to kill each other so that we don’t have any competition for our food and women and all that. Jerry, we’re dealing with animals here. Do you see? Look at me. I’m wearing this fucking suit. Look at this tie. And I’m a FUCKING ANIMAL! An animal. I defy you to prove me wrong. But we’re not honest animals. We’re fake, pseudo animals that like to kill each other slowly for the most part. We’re evil animals. We fuck each other strategically. The end result is the same: to destroy the competition. And us guys, us nice guys who thought that we weren’t animals, who are we? Well, we’re the food. We’re the fucking prey, Jerry. We’re very accommodating. We seek peace and solutions and the liars toy with us until we’ve given them everything they wanted to steal and once they have that they let us go. If we don’t give it they attack. It’s the American way, Jerry, and I’m done. Fuck America.

Suddenly Harry got to his feet.

-Fuck America.

He had a strange look in his eyes. Suddenly both hands shot out like flagpoles. Intensely true fuck you birds extended with every ounce of Harry’s strength. He started turning in circles as he fucked off the world.

-Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America!
-Harry, just come back to the side of the road.

The cars were coming. Harry had gone mad.

-Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America!

The cars whizzed past him. Nobody hit him. Jerry went to Harry and first touched one arm and brought it down and then the other. Harry let him, slowly waking up. Jerry gave Harry the only real hug he had received in 12 years.

-C’mon, man, let’s go. Fuck America. Let’s just go down to C.J. Murphy’s and get a beer. I’ll call in and tell them you got sick. Fuck work. Fuck America, man. Let’s go.

Jerry led him by the arm and Harry let him. He would let somebody control his life this one more time.

Published in: on September 8, 2010 at 5:18 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Forgotten Man – Albert Jones

Skid row poor. Beat down. Nothing but. Black. Wandering some, purple power. Lost souls. Of course you’d say that. Wanna know the real world? Can’t get away from it. Have to talk about it. Nobody wants to know the real world. It’s all bullshit. And you’re there whether you want to be or not.
In our world we see nothing but chain stores, fancy shops, people who did good, young people who walk down the street oblivious to us. The walls are harder for us. There’s much less hope. We see everything but there isn’t any beauty in it. We catch highs where we can because we know the Christian right would kill us either way with their chewing tobacco, their church going blondes and good jobs where they make upwards of 20 dollars an hour or more. We know all this as we ride our bikes or walk down the street or look for something to eat. Some of us have money. Some of us don’t.
I’m talking about the socio-economic class of nothingville, where the older guys sit around and think they’re involved, but they’re pushed aside because they’re too old to make new. We know what’s going down. How everything is based around sex and beauty. You see a young average looking guy walking with a beautiful blonde and you know he’s a lawyer and you understand something about the world in that everything fits together. Money and blondes and their kids and the way they think it’s supposed to be and the way that it is and how they’re walking on tightropes and dare not fall off. And all the girls rub their noses when you walk by. You don’t know why really except you’re ugly and dirty. It’s a natural reaction, but you get sick of seeing them always referring to snot whenever you’re around.
When you were younger and more innocent they used to lick their lips when they saw you. They couldn’t help it. Now they rub their noses and they can’t help that either. Did the world change or did you? You think about this all the time. You figure it’s you then you know it’s you and eventually you drop out completely, stop looking into the doors of the bars and clubs because you know that the girls want someone who doesn’t stink and if there’s anything that you do it’s stink. You stink to high heaven as they say.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. You used to have a talent and you used to believe that there was something in the world for you because you had a talent, but that talent fell away when you saw that the people that the talent is for were fickle and meaningless and you’d wander away and pretty soon you didn’t care anymore. Without an audience there was no reason to have a talent. To have a talent for money was just as meaningless as having a talent for the people who just didn’t care. After awhile you stopped caring yourself. Stopped taking care of yourself until you walk down the street and it’s obvious, everybody knows, and the girls rub their noses. The girls rub their noses.
Thought never ends. This is something you realize from your philosophical days before you realized that Camus was right that the only legitimate philosophical question was whether or not to kill yourself. Nothing matters out here. The world is pitted inside of a corporate monster. Architecture is the same. It’s purpose regimented and intact. There is no store-keeper, there is no love for you or anybody outside of money, but you don’t have that. There is no love. The world is a piece of shit and that’s as un-poetically truthful as you can get. You can’t gloss that up.
People live with their institutions and glass walls and revenue streams while you live outside of it all. You’re not clean enough to join them and the something inside of you that won’t mend won’t allow you to fill out a resume anyway. You know you would quit after a short while because you would feel like a slave and this form of meaninglessness is even more meaningless than simply walking around and seeing these places that provide jobs. You’re not a slave. You don’t have money, but at least you are you and it is it, but the hunger and fear and bullshit of not having a job hurts and after awhile wears you down, but you still can’t go to the other side. It’s hell there.
Hate. Hate of yourself for every mistake you ever made, for every bridge you ever burned. Hate. Pure un-adulturated hate. The eyes fall numb forward in the eye socket, not wanting to close, hating being open, but you got sleep last night so you’re awake. Doesn’t matter. Better to be asleep. Don’t have to be here if you’re asleep. Drugs are the only salvation for you in the city. Drugs lost s of drugs. As many drugs as possible. Because it steals the time before you have to die. It’s much grander than a 9 to 5. Drugs take the bite out of this American wasteland. It teaches you that you have an essence worthy of an emotion, even if the emotion is fake. You’ve got memory and you’ve got a little bit of hope when you’re on drugs because your mind takes you to places that you wouldn’t go otherwise. It at least takes you out of your depression or makes you forget about it.
Everybody is on drugs in the big, big city. What the fuck do they expect? These Kentucky Fried Chicken corporate lords in St. Louis, Missouri or Chicago, Illinois or New York City sucking down their ten dollar martinis and chomping on their 50 dollar steaks as they think about who they’re going to fuck next or how their kids are doing. We don’t have kids around here. We are the kids. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you are around here, of us, you are a kid. You were left out of adulthood. It just passed you by and you are a kid. Now, kids can be ignored. The Christian right does a good job of that. They do their tough love on the kids and they don’t even know them personally. It’s all a scam for Jesus freaks to have more 50 dollar steaks and more kids.
You see them in the glass windows eating two together, sometimes three or four. They’re fashion conscious, they’re even liberal, want to see good come of the world, but they’re ordering those Tom Collins’s anyway and that special dish they heard about then they’re going to their little art functions and eat cheese and wine and then back to their lofts and watch television and maybe make love or read or do something intellectual.
But the kids aren’t. They’re left to their own devices to die if need be. To be the representatives of the darker corners of society and everybody lets them, just watches them go. It’s ingrained in the society. It’s ingrained in the churches who blame and blame and blame so they won’t have to care. These churchies who backed lil’ Hitler in Washington because, and they won’t tell you this, they make shitloads more money through him than they do through more Christian like democratic candidates. Money trumps the real Jesus every time. Shit. There is no meaning when Christians aren’t even Christians. Then it’s ludicrous. They should go to churches that worship money instead of using this guy who was hung on a cross to do their business for them. It’s hypocritical and ultimately evil. If I were Jesus and I was with God I would be doing a lot of spitting out of my mouth with these “Christians.” It’s stupid how evil they are, how self-deceiving. I wonder if there are any real Christians out there. Maybe one or two, but I haven’t met them.
But smile! Everybody smile because if you don’t they’ll shoot you, at least lock you up. Try not to smile too much when you’re on drugs or a yuppie fuck will come after you and stick his nightstick up your ass. Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…
Whatever happened to witnessing? There’s a question for you. They know they won’t make it very far with their modern philosophy of Jesus, the modern American Jesus who will kill you if you look at Him funny. I don’t like this Jesus, in fact, I think that this Jesus is the Devil in disguise. Isn’t that odd, how the devil can impersonate Jesus? But he does.
All things are turned around for me. Jesus is evil. Everything is weird. You’ve dropped everything that you had. All hope is gone and you realize you did it out of anger. You said enough things unthinkingly that you will never be able to return to an older part of your life ever again. The words were too strong, the impression made too great. Friends that fell away will never return and you know you can’t make new friends because you no longer care. Even words. I gotta go…

Published in: on October 2, 2009 at 10:25 pm  Leave a Comment  
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