The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

I hung up and waited. A half hour went by. I went into the donut shop and ordered a coffee and sat down. There was a cute Hispanic girl behind the counter, a little overweight, but cute. The room was overdone, as all Dunkin Donuts are, with an orange motif of plastic artificiality. The stench from the donuts made it difficult to breathe, and I longed for the girl as I sat there, but I had no words to explain it to her and just watched her wipe and wipe and wipe. It is the lot of man to wipe and wipe and wipe. I was doing nothing but the same in New York City, trying to wipe the world of the fruits of its sins by finding the uncleanly source to clean it. Now I was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, most likely being stood up by Helen Capowitz of Moxy Priestess, who probably knew the truth about my brother Jed, and I didn’t care anymore.
Each minute that passed, thirty-five, then forty, then an hour, I lost my sense of care, the care that holds you up, like the donut girl, when you wipe somebody else’s counter for the equivalence of its crumbs. I could have called back, but I didn’t. I sat there for two hours, knowing what Helen’s decision meant until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Do you want to…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, because I didn’t know what I was trying to say to the girl.
“I’m sorry?” she said, moving up to the counter slowly. She had a name tag that said Liza.
“Do you want to take a break?” I asked her.
“I’m all alone here.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything, and looked at me in such a way that I knew right then that I was in bad shape. It seems that all of it was about me now. Somehow I was wrong. Back home everybody knew that Jed was dead except for me, and this girl somehow understood that now I understood something about my life that I hadn’t understood before I walked in, until I had asked her if she wanted to take a break. I understood that that was all Jed had ever wanted to do, too.
“I can take a short one,” she said.
She took off her apron and filled two cups of coffee.
“Cream and sugar?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
She brought them over to the table and sat down opposite me.
“Stood up, huh?”
“Yeah.”
She just drank from her coffee and looked out the window. Neither of us spoke.
“Well, I better get back,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said.

I had to go then. I threw away my cup and walked outside, adjusting my pack on my back and looking around at the night that held no bed for me, no resting place. My funds were low and I could probably stay in a motel, but there were none around.
“Baby bro.”
A chill went through my very face and up my shoulder blades. I turned around. Jed stood there wearing an old cowboy hat beside the Priestess’ little red Mustang.
“Jed?”
He laughed and flicked away his cigarette and walked towards me.
“Yeah…Jed,” he said, making fun of the way he said it.
Then he hugged me.
“What the fuck, man,” I said, and I couldn’t help it, but I started crying like a baby and couldn’t stop. All the hurt inside for having lost him came up on me and I wanted to kill him, to punch him in the fucking face for doing it to me, but I couldn’t, because I loved him too goddamned much.
“You fuck!” I screamed.
“I’m sorry, bro. I’m sorry, baby. Don’t cry, man. Don’t cry, Albert.”
And I knew he meant it, that he was sorry for making me look like a fool for all those years when everybody said he was dead and I knew he wasn’t, because how could Jed just go and leave me like that, and mama, and everybody, and just fall off the world and not be gone, and not tell anybody because he thinks his pain more important than anybody elses? I stopped crying and wiped the tears off my face and looked at him and to my surprise Jed was smiling, his eyes moist.
“You fuck,” I said again, and I started to laugh even as I cried.
“Yeah, I think you could fairly call me that, Al. I am a fuck. Always been a fuck. You’re fair,” he started laughing with me and our cheeks were side by side and neither one of us knew whose tears belonged to who. My head felt light and I thought I might need to sit down. Jed took me inside and I sat down on a chair. The girl came over and wiped my face off. I couldn’t believe it. It made me a Dunkin Donuts fan for life. Jed sat down across from me. Helen stood by the door. She looked good, wearing something yuppie-ish that cost a lot of money. I thought, oh shit, and was exhausted and numb.
Jed looked at me from under his cowboy hat. Something had happened to his eyes. They were all wrong because they were all right. No more Richard Ramirez, no more tight knot holding him in like a girdle holds in a woman’s belly. I was just confused, holding back from saying anything because I thought that if I did it would be unfair and chase Jed away again because everybody knew Jed was scared and that’s why he did heroin in the first place. I felt I needed to be strong, but sitting there looking at his eyes from under his hat I thought, Jesus, I’m the one who needs help now. Look at me. I’m the one. He looks fine. And he did. He wore a silver earring and feather band around his hat like some fucking Stevie Ray Vaughn or something. His clothes were clean and he wasn’t stoned.

I looked at him, and realized it right then, too, that I was looking at him from the place that he used to look at the world when he was all fucked up. In other words, I could barely see him for what he had become. I had gotten to the place that I needed to get to in order to find him and yet it wasn’t the same place that he was at anymore. I hated him for making me look for him, hated him for doing this to his little brother, for having a little brother at all, and making that little brother love him, yet leaving like that, and not even being dead. I wanted to laugh, but I was too disgusted.
“Why didn’t you call?” I asked.
Jed said nothing.
“Jed, why didn’t you call?” I said again.
Again, Jed turned away. My fist came out so hard from my side that I only knew that I’d punched him after the fact.
“Goddamn you!” I screamed, and I got up and walked out of there, slammed the door of Dunkin Donuts, all the while knowing I loved that girl who had wiped my face, wishing I hadn’t slammed the door, but knowing that Jed would have to come home now.
And he did. And I had enough time to prepare my mother for the visit so that when he finally did show up at our door, with Helen Capowitz driving her red car, and, would you believe it, a baby girl named Minnie, my mama wouldn’t fall down in shock and die. In this way I rescued my family and was able to get serious about my rock opera, Petals.

I walked out of the building thinking about the Priestess, but tired of it quickly. She lived in New Jersey. I just didn’t have the energy to go there and hear her deny she knows where Jed is another time. I got on a bus heading for the white part of town and didn’t get off it until I saw the Empire State Building. I sat on a curb outside a liquor store and smoked five cigarettes. Night was falling fast. The dot went as slowly inside the huge square than it seemed a dot should be allowed. Night fell. No calls were made except one and the phone line was busy again. Slit had plain, flat out lied to me, because that’s what guys named Slit do.
When I called my mama in the morning she screamed and screamed at me over those long- bird perching wires of America that connect our tinny voices with our feeble hearts and the hearts of those we love. I told her that I had a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber about my rock opera, Petals, which was about Princess Diana, a fact I have already mentioned. I reminded her of the validity and universal scope of the work: a) because it was Diana, and b) because I was trying to save the soul of Henri Paul who killed her. I told her Andrew Lloyd Webber was the only one who could understand me putting a flying saucer into a rock opera about Princess Di. She knew why I’d come, but she didn’t let on, and she wished me luck in my meeting with Webber. I’d changed my story since telling her I was going to someday find Jed in New York City. It was easier to concoct a good old lie. I think she feared I would find him then she would have to deal with having her son back with all the problems he’d naturally bring. Actually, it’s because she didn’t want to know that he was dead.

A week went by of wandering. Then two weeks. I visited a few more crack houses, but he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t jamming in any of the rock clubs either. I scuttled along New York City with a bag on my back. My hotel was paid for, and as I left, I knew I’d never be back. I already had my return ticket. It had never left my wallet. I made my way into the big bus station they call The Port Authority and went to a window to find out my gate. It was then that I noticed a sign behind the head of the black woman selling tickets. Fort Lee, New Jersey – C2- 4:30 p.m. On Time. That’s where the Priestess lived. Helen Capowitz. I’d almost forgot.
“One for Fort Lee, please,” I said.
The woman took my fifteen dollars and gave me a stub and pointed me the way. It felt good to get out of the city and see trees again. I never figured out what made people live in a place like New York City, especially all those poor people. It was ugly, and exciting only to those who could afford it. I don’t know how they managed it. I would have killed somebody by now if I had been raised there, I’m sure.

My head felt like it weighed fifty pounds as I watched the world go by through the tinted glass of that bus. New Jersey was a place where people went to get away from the city, but it was just as crowded in its own way. Houses were crammed among the trees. No Indians lived here anymore and all it made you think about while driving through it was that the world had become too much for itself, too crowded, ultimately too heartless to sustain itself in any meaningful way. I thought about Helen Capowitz again. Moxy Priestess herself. I’d never actually met her. I’d only talked to her on the phone. She sounded alright, like she cared about Jed. Now I wondered about their relationship. If Jed was alive who then was this lying Moxy Priestess? After being in New York for almost three weeks and meeting some of the most desperate people I’d ever met, it seemed that anything was possible. Moxy Priestess. What was the Priestess all about anyway? I remember the logo, a woman’s black shoe coming down on top of the world. She fully went for the female power trip thing, applying rock and roll the way rock and roll was meant to be played, what with Jed playing it.
I never thought much about Helen Capowitz, Moxy Priestess. I always just thought about Jed being the engine of that band, the music, the Eddie Van Halen, the thing that would always keep it alive. But I’m wrong about that. Moxy had as much to do with their success with that boot thing and all as Jed did. But who was she? A Jewish girl from New Jersey who’d made the world believe she was something she ultimately was not, a powerful woman. If she had been really powerful she would have been able to help my brother. The whole concept of Moxy Priestess was one of feminine defensiveness and I couldn’t respect that. I don’t respect those who live in fear from others or those who lie, which she did if Jed is alive and she actually does know, like The Lady thinks she does.
But she must have had some kind of power over Jed. I remember watching the videos, Jed standing there under the lights, slouched over, picking on his guitar, his cigarette dangling from his lips, the self-contained rocker. That was Jed. He didn’t give a shit what anybody thought of him, except it seems now, possibly, the Priestess. As I moved over those roads and hills of New Jersey I kept thinking to myself what an idiot I had been. The Priestess was lying. I knew it now. I just knew.
I got off near the Fort, a real army base, in Fort Lee. I went to a phone at a Dunkin Donuts and looked up the number of the Priestess in my book in which I had been collecting numbers for ten years. Capowitz. I called her and she answered. She sounded like my mother.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Helen Capowitz?”
“This is she.”
“Hi, I’m Albert Jones, Jed’s brother…”
“Oh my god.”
There was a silence on her end that I didn’t intrude upon. The length of the silence answered my questions and when I finally spoke I knew that she would have to invite me over.
“I’m sorry?” I said, as if she knew something.
“No, it’s just that, well, I’ve been thinking about Jed lately.”
“Me too. Helen, I’m in town. Can we meet?”
There was another silence.
“Hold on,” she said. She put the phone down and a moment later she picked it up again.
“Okay. Albert?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in town? Fort Lee?”
“Yes.”
Because I was listening for notions of Jed in her voice, I heard the other phone pick up, but only because I was listening so astutely.
“Yes, come over. Where are you?”
I told her.
“I’ll come get you. Wait there.”

When Albert finished the rock opera back before he’d found me, the world was a better place somehow. Without the world’s teardrop there is no demand for investigation. Albert, falling into the placid stream, like a cork bouncing down the rocks and into the river, down and down further, found that to float is the most necessary of detractions. So he kept a steady supply of marijuana by his side as he wrote Petals, but he got further and further away from it. He began to study books about the nature of creativity so that he could know for sure whether or not Petals truly belonged to him or whether it belonged to Bob Hope, that is, marijuana intoxication.

Me and Albert became friends again. I never held it against him for hitting me. I’m glad he did it. It would have taken a long time to get the anger out and a lot of bullshit discussion would have had to have taken place. I’d just as soon be socked once for a lifetime of bullshit I gave him than have to deal with the natural variation of moods one would expect in somebody so abandoned and abused by his, well, I was going to say father and me, but, really, it’s more like God himself if you think about how Albert took it into his soul.

Albert was always a dreamer type. When he was a child he would lie on his bed and shake his head back and forth and sing songs to himself. Those were his first rock operas, I guess. He was always a big kid, but really gentle. Taller than the others, but the last one to be picked because he just looked like he didn’t care, I guess. I was always the first picked. I did the picking. So I was pretty protective of him, but back in the late 70s you had a lot of drugs going around. I mean everybody was doing something. And I was wrapped up in it. I had a connection with a guy from the Mexican Mafia. He connected me with a guy from the Chinese Mafia and I didn’t give a shit about any of them because I considered myself the Tennessee mafia of one. And I was a bad ass to prove it. I did some harm to more than one person and that was still as a teenager.

But then I got out. I realized the music was the most important thing and I got out through sheer will and also through a sort of desperation of needing smack by that time, but not being able to face the fact and especially with my mama on my case all the time. I couldn’t think straight at all. So I walked downstairs, already having put half a shot in my arm and said “Look, ma” and shot the rest in. I’d thought about it for a few minutes after I took the first little bit and it then hooked up to the last little bit that still remained in the needle and I thought to myself that I couldn’t let the show be seen by only myself and then I thought I was floating when I was walking down the stairs and that that was a sign by God that I was to do what I was to do, which was nothing more than exert my freedom by getting myself kicked out of my house. My guitar was already in the car and a moment later I was too. Driving off I looked back and I saw Albert come outside and look at me as I tore off and then he sat down by the gate and petted the dog. That was the last time I talked to him or saw for almost fifteen years.

It’s almost criminal what it seems God will allow to happen in order to teach you a lesson. That’s all I can figure short of God reaching into my head and straightening everything around Himself. But he wasn’t about to do that. They made the Bible to make sure everybody knows that things don’t come easy. Well, I sure found that out the hard way, maybe a little too hard, but anyway, what I’m trying to say is that we’ve all had our moment of doubt when we thought God had abandoned us. I wonder if Teardrop ever had that moment of doubt as he climbed up the wrong side of the mountain to get home to me. And the next question in logical sequence is whether, if Teardrop did have that doubt, why did he still make it? That’s one I’ll leave to the theologians.

Diary,

Page one. I think I’m out of Tennessee. Got a good spot in this freight. A fellow said it was headed to California. Say there is gold there in some places. Not interested. I’m sorry I gave the rest of you away to Jones. Don’t matter. I don’t need to remember much anymore. The words I write here and along the way are new words. The point of all this isn’t remembering what was, but what is and might be someday. The wheels been lulling me to sleep, but haven’t been able to do it quite yet. I got a good view of the stars and even though the wind is cold it’s not freezing and I got me a blanket and a bottle. Got some bread and cheese in my bag somewhere, but I don’t want to dig it out. Just like riding along like this. Wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Couldn’t do it sooner. One thing I’m not going to do anymore is lie to myself.
I got the world behind me now. Cut my losses and went. Not much to think about really. Feel like I’ve done enough thinking to last me a million years. Got enough thinking under my belt to be ranked with the great philosophers, but it ain’t thinking with answers that I’ve had or I’ve got. It’s not that I got anything in my head from my experience of loss that’s going to teach me something that’s going to make my life better. Well, maybe that’s not true. It got me here in this night sky going to the ocean. That’s something.
The girls are in me like those dinosaurs they say walked around the earth millions of years ago. They’re huge. If I tried to look around them i’d fail. I’d just fail. So I’m not going to. If I don’t fight seeing them I see through them and they look like stars and skies and black trees that are passing. Sometimes they look like house lights or cows standing still beside the tracks under the moonlight. If I don’t let them be the world around me then they become the world inside of me and, well, I’ve cried, rather, I’ve tried to cry them out of me at those points but I ain’t never been able to do it quite right, not all the way. They just make me look at the bottle. Gotta get some sleep.

July 18, 1870

Another day. Still the same day since I wrote in you last, Diary, which was about five hours ago. Got a little sleep, but I got cold and this floor is hard. Got a good warm feeling from the whiskey. A good way to come out of sleep to face the cold. Got the stars still and the train’s steady roll, it’s a fufufufu sound and it lulls you. It really does. My head wanders. It’s like I’m sitting here trying to hold on to something, but my head wanders. What does it mean? I can’t place nothing on it that’s meaningful. But I got a hum in me. I’m more of a hum than a man it seems. I lean into this sound in my head and it’s got no real melody but it’s a tune of some sort. Not no tune like I ever heard before. It’s a tune of loss like I never heard before but that don’t matter because it’s mine and mine alone. It’s like the sound of the girls if they have a sound now. I know it’s their memory, maybe their ghosts. I don’t want to think of this. I want silence. But my head turns towards the tune. I feel myself giving into it and I don’t know if it’s going to be my end or not. I feel myself going mad. I have to shake my head sometimes to pull out of it. It’s so peaceful, but it’s the girls. I can feel it’s the girls and every time I do it I miss them and I think that maybe I should jump off this train. But I ain’t dying before I see the ocean. Goddam those forces that would take the ocean from me before I even see it.
I got mad just then. I think that’s good. I need to get more mad more often, but I don’t know how long it’s going to do any good. I feel off. More later.

Now that I think back on it I realize that I wasn’t in my right mind. I realize now that if I stopped the drug I could start my way home to Moxy. Whether or not she would have had me back at that time, this was during our longest separation of almost two years, was the question.

I finally took that step, but the journey towards it was such a one that to speak of it is to put yourself into a predicament, because when you go where I went you put yourself outside of the normal realm. Time stops. Months turn into years. It’s like being in a perpetual dream, but then, after awhile, your dream starts losing power, you don’t have much to think about.

Having forsaken the idea of the future your desires wither, the outer edges of your universe start to crumble and burn. You whittle yourself down to the bare being and at your core you realize that the netherworlds that you belong to are claiming you, that you are mortal becomes a deep seated feeling until you sometimes dream that you are withering, that your face could peel off, that you are already skeleton, that you are already dead.

It is that sense of having reached the point of no return that keeps you within your isolated, protected world. At some point you stop blaming, too. I stopped blaming my mother and even my father for dying. I took it all into myself and realized that I was just a weak specimen of human being. I had lost all will power. Any good thing I had had in my life I had forsaken, like Moxy. When I sat there and thought about these things it was like the thoughts were doing battle with each other, but in some far distant galaxy. The night in which they belonged was peaceful, though, so I tried to look away, but I could always hear them. I could always hear the gods of war clashing high above me, but they became tinny and I would look away again.

I know now that these were the sounds of Moxy calling me. But she demanded so much. She wanted me clean. I wasn’t done at that time, not by a long shot. I felt I was on a journey of discovery. It’s like I was a child playing dead, like I was hunkering down close to the grave so that I could hear its meaning, soak it up. Moxy was all life. We’d taken to two different roads. I was the seeker getting more and more lost. Moxy lived in the real world. I had begun to melt around her, felt inadequate, and yet had determined that my purpose was not wrong, but only different and of the utmost importance. I was simply seeking, trying most of all, I realize now, to find the meaning behind my father’s death. That really fucked me up. I responded to it the way that Moxy responds to the world, but she doesn’t respond out of a sense of tragedy, but a sense of adventure of never having bowed down to an enemy, to always having faced her fears. I thought I was doing that by saying fuck you to the world. And that’s what I did. I said fuck you to the world and I was a bad ass mother fucker for a long time, but when I got the heroin going into my veins full time there with the lady, I started to wither, the defenses that I had made me who I was started failing, they were like muscles that I had spent years building up and then, one by one, they started withering away.

I remember sometimes shooting up and then when I was peaceful enough to go outside, stepping into the sunshine of Harlem and actually having the sunlight frighten me. I couldn’t look anybody in the eye. I felt like I was surrounded on all sides. I was a scared doe, wrapped inside of my leather jackets and behind my shades. I would walk and feel like I wished I could lift up off of the ground and float above everybody else. The soles of my feet contained questions about the meaning of each step. I was jittery and hollow, but I kept up the facade of worldliness so never got hurt. Anybody could have squashed me like a tick.

So that’s where I lived, in incense filled and darkened rooms, the Lady in her negligee beside me, our dancing in wild delirium together to sitars and synths, falling to the floor in each others arms, having tantric sex, just holding each other and staring into each other’s eyes for hours and all the while Moxy in New Jersey, me hoping through all of it that somehow I was just in the middle of a bad dream, that this ecstasy that I thought I was finding with the Lady was just a side excursion and that Moxy’s memory would fail and she would forgive me when I finally got back to her, which, oddly, I never doubted I would even though all signs pointed to the very real possibility that I had fucked things up with my wife for good. No, this wasn’t a possibility. This was a fact. I’ll never understand how facts can become lies. Moxy should have been gone forever. And Teardrop should have been dead. Once again, angels.