NOTES AT THE TRIPWIRE (THIS ABSTRACT DILUVIAL WORLD)
13. NOTES AT THE TRIPWIRE (This Abstract Diluvial World):
Male and female he made them (you'd better be ready) to eviscerate (the word is related to viscera) WBAI 'News From Nowhere' (back in like 1966 they were playing on the radio a non-stop and endless reading of this book over and over seemingly forever) I sat and listened too [ 'News from Nowhere' (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The remainder of the book explores a number of aspects of this society, including its organisation and the relationships which it engenders between people. The book offers Morris' answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underlines his belief that socialism will entail not only the abolishment of private property but also of the divisions between art, life, and work. In the novel, Morris tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism, the supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist society. Morris' response is that all work should be creative and pleasurable. This differs from the majority of Socialist thinkers, who tend to assume that while work is a necessary evil, a well-planned equal society can reduce the amount of work needed to be done by each worker.] : and then I heard someone say : 'I can hear him right above my head' : but I didn't know what they meant so I took it as Theology for sure and someone else I heard was talking about politics and the voting process and campaigning against Johnson with Gene McCarthy and the rest and he verbally scoffed at it all by saying 'that's the Sturm und Drang of Process nothing more and nothing by that means ever gets done YOU NEED THE GUN!!!' and that's the kind of revolution that was talked of in the streets back then and today by contrast no one says a word - two media hacks I used to really hate were 'the Davids' (I called them) - Susskind and Garroway - both true assholes and blowhards to boot : and another time I learned the meaning of 'sui generis' by listening to someone ask why people die by suicide and I turned and said 'because it's suicide stupid and that's the meaning of the term and the MEANING comes first and if they DIDN'T die then it wouldn't be suicide - and 'sui generis' that's the meaning of the term (and if at first you don't suceed try try again!)' : I see their eyes creeping across space and I carefully watch their gaze as they take in by every glimmer and glance anything about while determining (I think) quantity and value need and effect like a townsman showing a stranger a shortcut through space (town) March 1968 Johnson on TV bowing out dropping out of any race for re-election and Marlene a blond girl from Newark with her '67 Mustang and very short black skirts sitting so as to let anyone who cared to look up her legs and see simple white panties and like Johnson and his war I never knew if any of that was planned or happenstance - but it made little difference to me ['standing in the shadows of love/I'm getting ready for the heartaches to come'] - a short skirt and a long story : little did I realize how that strange quirky man would eventually be my undoing and there's more to a bad cough than a congressman or a reformer would ever know so that as I walked the corridors of these man-made tombs and rough-hewn buildings suited to no one (the exteriors were monstrous and granite or marble with facings of barred windows and barricaded doors welcoming no thing and no person for sure) and like Alfred Kazin himself (1915-1998) I wanted to become a literary landmark or at the least something referred to through not so much 'precise argument' as instead 'neither close argument nor precise analysis but rather an evocation of the feel of of a book and a lyrical and mimicking response to the distinctive sensibility of the author' and I always liked his quote about Socialism (the socialism of his cohorts Irving Howe Sydney Hook and Norman Podhoretz) from which he actually did keep his distance 'although I was a socialist like everyone else I knew I thought of socialism as orthodox Christians think of the Second Coming - a wholly supernatural event which one might await with perfect faith but which had no immediate relevence to my life' and during this time I spent many nights (and days) reading two books in particular which kept my attention well and expanded my horizona - The Brown Decades by Edmund Wilson and On Native Grounds by Kazin himself - 'Deafen the Maiden' was how I misunderstood 'Death and the Maiden' by Shubert in its predatory theme-shift from major to minor (D minor) - surely some theme about poking a girl's eardrums to deafness with some odd medieval poker-rod (Alas ! Again I was wrong!) - (written between 1938 and 1942 On Native Grounds remains one of the few genuinely exciting books about American Literature as it brings a motley set of novelists journalists and radical pamphleteers under the banner of a tradition identified expounded upon and culminated practically on the spot) and speaking of Spot trying telling that to a dog but there really wasn't anything more to do from thispoint on : walking in a daze studying and reading writing and painting I as a one-made scholastic wrecking crew careening from pillar to post all through Manhattan : the old Indian Museum up on the westside was another great haunt all those great statues and the grand stone concourse and old buildings and it was all padded in together with ten thousand forms of Puerto Rican and Jewish cohorts denizens haunters and relics of the mad mad city around them : pickle-delis powder shops santeria stores drug stores grocers old wheedling book merchants pants and shirt emporiums with piles of shoes outside marked for cheap sale and only matching if you pick through to find the match the ragged sound of buses and trains and the circulatory offal of hundreds of people gorging themselves and evacuating their premises and then the big old graveyard owned by Trinity Church and facing the hill high above the Hudson and Audobon's grave in the old church yard across the street - minions of the dead and obelisks and mausoleum and crypts and pathwats to nowhere except more dead where the random living sometimes slept as well : Mr. Pimlico and Harry Hollywood and Awesome Josie and Punch-Bag Pete were all people I knew uptown losers with big enormous souls and I'd sometimes eat with them at the little kitchen dispensing free food under the Audobon Church whatever it was called (I now forget) and John James Audobon was a naturalist and and avid bird artist famed for his paintings and drawings and catalogings of American birds and the nations ornithology everywhere and he once lived here in a vast strange rambling mansion he'd had built for his wife and children and where they lived while he was away (traveling kept him and until late in life he was never really 'home) and where he lived at the end and this vast estate overlooking the Hudson was now gone and the land had been given over to Trinity Church's graves and the old Polo Grounds and apartment buildings and wild wild strecthes of trees and underbrush and growth but amidst all that was all this : and I'd walk for hours just thinking - his grave was there - another obelisk with inscriptions and a remarkable likeness of him on a plaque with dedication and the grand church was there and with everything esle the area - though strange and foreboding - was present at all times and a safety-valve-parity for the heart and mind and it's all still there and still filled anew with people of every sort : the stranger now the better and the poor and the loud and the lame and the indigent still each do it up big.
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Great notions come and go sometimes with absolutely no reality to them at all but it's the nature of a good life to have them nurtured and watched and developed as best they can be and such was the manner of my waking hours and a person can find what is needed if it is sought out but the difference of that to a regular job and salary is pretty big and any work I did was on day-by-day format twenty dollars for this ten for that - carrying packages unloading stuff breaking down pallets painting things changing oils and liquids cleaning out old dwellings - and of that stuff was available most everywhere when needed and once I got established by name with a few of the certain people who did this work it was always easy to arrange one or two days here or there to jump on a morning truck and go to a job or just walk towards the wharves or lofts and get work and face it I didn't need much and wasn't concerned with saving or building a nest-egg and all that stuff so it didn't matter - food was everywhere and I never went without I technically had two places to stay when needed (509 E11th and 8W8th) and all of that was good enough for me as my life congealed around various things (slow things fast thing ordinary things and the dangerous too) and of course survivors have the stories and those who don't survive have nothing to tell so HERE I AM to tell you see and whatever that means to you it can mean.
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Old hands hold secrets and the moon is another planet and I once knew some new-age creepy girl from western Pennsylvania who thought she had the world but all it was was her most-lame magic and a not very insightful fantasy of mind-playing-games and interpretive fluff based on immense self-absorption but whatever with that she played a bar-bass riff with faux wisdom and taste so I let it be and I walked away not the worse for wear and over that for sure ('seems like there's some girls you just gotta' have you can hear the tune of their panties for sure and others you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole' Ricky Shendowa said that to me one afternoon at Patrick's another place where the fishmongers ate and we were just watching the girls going by from the window with a beer in each of our hands) and I even forgot her name before it was over but some poster on the back-end wall reminded me of what I'd missed (they were playing the following night for the minions of bar-mooching fans - not listeners just fans) but I really hated that kind of music so made sure not to go yet the faint memory lingered of something I may have missed and then I realized if it was ahead of me - the music date - and hadn't happened yet then how could I have missed it and how could a 'memory of something be in my mind - something that hadn't yet happened - but that's the way this life goes with the mind playing tricks and us all re-interpreting by degree whatever we want and by that defining our own lives and reality in any way we choose to do so : it's like that over and over so that if you dig down really really deep (deep enough to get to the essence of everything) you see that nothing really exists at all and life itself is a fragmnented illusion and no material splendor has any basis in reality and it's all in what we imagine so I walked around and around for days after that point CERTAIN that nothing existed and all life was an illusion running slowly through time (which itself didn't exist).
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Pulling immense hairs from the snout of a lion (or something like that) was how it had been explained to me - this philosophizing about things in the face of adversity and it was always said the detachment was the very real key to everything but how could you tell that to someone who was just gung-ho over everything around them : the seventeen-year-olds I'd see lined up to enlist in the Army knowing full-well they were sooner or later going to end up in Vietnam like some buttoned-up boot of of a warrior hanging on the wall yet they did it elatedly and busily talking to one another about what to expect and where they were going and they left behind also the most ridiculous things : 327 Chevrolets and brand new Malibus and Thunderbirds and Corvettes and slap-dash Buick Regals with performance packages and all that - they'd buy these crazy cars and end up putting them away in the garage or something for the long years of their service or you'd read in newspaper want-ads often 'must sell - going in service' and all that sort of blather and then the next thing you'd see was a picture in the newspaper of the dead Marine or Army guy killed in Vietnam 'son of Mr. and Mrs. Harlan B. Jenkins of Loganville Springs' and the story would go on with testimonials and remembrances by friends and neighbors and school-pals of the guy but no one ever connected the dots to see the real story of someone DUPED and more stupid than the guy before him : assaulted really by a complete LACK OF REFLECTION and an ignorance of matters which mattered : and that's what did them in one and all - the girlfriend left behind more confused than anything but able at least to move on and the family still reeling for years over what had occured but the overall atmosphere of supporting the troops and backing the war and supporting AMERICA first and foremost no matter what was all in all a pretty disgusting manuever no matter how you loooked at it and it still goes on I guess in the same way and the only things which have changed are the contents and the means of the communication but the communication itself is pretty much the same (after all it IS only human) and the same old shouted-out crap goes on - sentimental clap-trap soft-core pornography twisted sensationalism and out-of-bounds moralizing without any basis or foundation in morality itself or life or even ethics - all esle be damned - they still die and they still babble about the death but the ghettos all are the same and the ignorant denizens of streetcorner and tavern still hobble around like the ignorant jerks they are and somewhere SOMEWHERE now at any moment are 160,000 boys and girls learning to kill and maim and even die and then preparing to bring all that twisted and morose carnage back home with them 'bringing iu all back home' as would be said and it's all just as disgusting as that and as ever too.
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Nothing ever made sense to me and that was just fine because I wasn't really living between the lines of that notebook paper anyway - watching what transpired in the orderly rows and situations of the hourly determinants I'd see everyday : statues to Admiral Farragut and Benjamin Franklin did nothing to deter me from my errant ways because the only thing those guys did to my mind was highlight the perverse duplicity of all the lies and bullshit which had been peddled at me all the previous years : I knew there was no truth to the effect that rightness and work can make one FREE (there was none of that anyway) or any of that boilerplate stuff they'd throw out every Independence Day and Memorial Day all those sinecures for suckers I'd watch - the Veterans on parade all wizened and wobbly on their bad legs and broken frames and the ancient and pathetic charms of military suits and uniforms of death as they showed them off with medals and ribbons all made me puke and drool at the stupidity of these oldtimers who'd never gotten over anything except their own good sense and the armed elites of cops and soldiers and marine guards and political types filled with their own gut-level ranks of bullshit and squalor and all this everyday military bigwig stuff - General Hershey and Westmoreland and McNamara and Johnson and all the rest - just made me squint my eyes in hatred and wish them dead and twisted and burned over twice : bastards all : and yet the streets were rattled with both sides every day and placards were waved and people stormed and marched and walked all the while shouting their sides one way or the other - no alternative allowed thank you - and the nightly news made its mad-clamp dash for stardom by showing the names of the dead (I watched all this once twice too many times over public-space areas and large-screened enclosures set up as shanties and small towns for the indigent where harried hippies hung and hectored whomever passed) - it was a wild and weird world then so different from anything else and there were folk songs and speakers and preachers and the lost and the lame and those who'd 'been there' and seen the action as it went and they told tales of death and destruction and themselves maimed and twisted they groveled and cried before captive crowds and traffic was stopped and buses and taxis waited while cops kept steady lines or tried and the 'amalgamated fisticuffs of brotherhood workers' sometimes struggled with the crowd (union workers waging for wages the warfare they were told) - it was all dark and maddening and useless and bad but it seemed to go on for a very long time.
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Sometimes what made it all worthwhile was the glory of smut the glory of the hasty exit the slapdash effort at concealment while the taxi waited and all of that - there was a movie about this time Midnight Cowboy about the same sort of rental stud service I had gotten to know of through others and there were truly all along the upper eastside 60's and 70's streets small groups of this sort of afternoon and evening escort activities to be had - the bizarre women fucked liked ponies and always wanted it and their doormen and their rich-while-working husbands went along in whatever way needed with the charade - doormen would keep it all discreet while for the husbands it would untie their dandies for the little squeeze or two they'd get down at the office or in the financial district - assignations and dalliances of their very own done in the calm knowledge that someone else right then right now was taking care of mama's needs in their own way - everyone walked away sated and satisified and pretended none of it was going on and the interloper to boot got paid ! there were so many oddities and kinky things going on in these formats that only an unabashed shamelessness could keep it all together - threesome anal sex bondage food-sex mutual masturbations tie-downs bindfolds orgies and the like - so much so that it all could have gone unremarked but for the actual spectral beauty of so much of it all : bodies in motion beautiful women young girls in their primes breasts and buttocks audacious and stunning profiles thighs and backs and contortions and the rest - truly amazing and without taxation and without strings and if any of this took place amongst the 'society' types of the upper east side fundraisers and benefits and the causes and the rest it always stayed discreet and (as I mentioned) unremarked except as notes were passed and compared and names and numbers got around and you'd be surprised and perhaps embarrased too at how these women loved sending their latest plaything over to their friend or neighbors as a next meeting - so as to acclaim or compare and both share in the basked glory of such sex sex appeal good glory masterful intercourse and highly acclaimed pleasure and it all went too smoothly done a lonely life once twice three times a lady and all that...
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There are so many things I never knew that I just began trying to catch up on some of them - I made my own curriculum of material to search out and the rest be damned and by that I simply wandered and went everywhere in search of things to study and see - endless art spots and shows and galleries and all of that constantly under changing and altering so that it was never the same and the contless libraries that went with it all the Morgan Library the Frick Collection the Ethical Culture Society Lincoln Center Baruch College City College the NYU and Columbia Libraries and many others and each spot held its own fascination for me much as did the main NY Public library and the Studio School library both of which I've already written about and it was all endlessly fascinating and vital too : but one has to be fearless in such a quest and one can never stop when expectation are exceeded or presuppositions smashed and it's important just to keep going and stay moving straight along - some guy named Abraham Lincoln Polonsky a Hungarian filmaker or something whom I'd met outside NYU one afternoon told me something like this 'movies are irrevocably and richly rooted in kitsch in childhood in storytelling in the rubbish of paperbacks and sitting under the streetlights while off in the zoo across the lots flowering with burdock lions roared out their fantasy of freedom.....for me it was a great pleasure to make a movie again after the uprising and nothing is better except perhaps a revolution but there you have to succeed and be right - dangers which never attach themselves to making movies and dreaming' - I don't know how we'd ever gotten on that subject or why he'd decided to say that to me but for whatever reason I was able to tell him that I'd always hated movies and never had any real interest in them and never could 'suspend disbelief' (I think they called it enough) to fall for whatever artificial premise and all its artifacts was being presented which really just meant I could never go along with the storyline like going aling with the party line in some stupid political skit or something and movies never git my attention as to me they were all artifact and premise and I knew that (like everything else) it was all illusion and set-up and that all it really took was one quick glance to see what premise was trying to be created and in discovering that it became equally easy to see really what hang-ups or presuppositions or preoccupations the directors and actors and producers and all the rest were trying to work off and I always felt that all of that was THEIR problem and not mine so whatever it was they should work it out themselves thank you and leave me along - I never liked artificiality or falseness or fakery or pretense and all of that was always pretty evident and plentiful too in movies and moviemaking and in fact the entire industry was blind bullshit in fealty to a false God and that was how I'd always felt and had told this guy through the means of essays and stuff in a film course and then he starts telling me how nothing's better than making a movie except maybe making a revolution and I thought to myself 'what the fuck?' bit I excused him his point on the basis of his life and let it go at that but any memories of movies I ever had were bad ones and crappy ones too - dreary crap of course as always Ben-Hur the Nun's Story Anatomy of a Murder Lolita the Pawnbroker the Ten Commandments the Lost Weekend On the Waterfront Mutiny On the Bounty Splendor In the Grass Postman Rings Twice and all the rest of that B-level caterwauling crap that passed for culture in the 50's and 60's - of which these were but a measley few - and then all those 1940's and 30's movies which had twisted people's heads all up and presented stories of guilt hang-ups psychological trauma and bad self-reflective stuff and I always figured it just HAD to be stopped but somehow never was and it just went on and on and then to boot one had all those pretentious critics and talking heads who went on and wrote on and on about movies and the industry and always wanted to tell people somehow what they had REALLY just seen - another point I never got for if I'd just SEEN the film who was someone else to tell me WHAT I'd just seen but that's the nature of all that and in fact that's the entire nature of education too which is all the more reason I'm glad I never got heavily involved with it : artifice and blandishment I always saw it.
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But all that was then and long ago and this is the now and no one ever talks to me or seeks me out so all of this life is an intense monkish study for me still to this day but tough as it sometimes is I get by and get by with my own thinking too and just as Andre Breton used to say that surrealism would someday abolish the barriers between sleeping and being awake I think I've at least achieved that for myself and if my life sometimes approaches a 'watercolor in tones of gray' it's always more than that too as it's been always about displacement and observation and Walter Benjamin-like discoveries of detail but I'd always harbored a need to delve deeper and deeper into everything and that over-the-top frenzy of excess was always my undoing too because I always went too far and never knew to stop and maybe something like that after time really does twist up your head and make you something else and IF that was the case and I say IF as a conditional than I was able nevertheless to get by and find my way : but anyway at this particular time the snow was piling up and I could see it from below as I peered from the low sidewalk window in my basement Studio School room and watched once more feet pass by as they each left their own little pigeon-like markings in the falling snow upon the whitened sidewalk - Eighth Street in all its glory back then somehow took hundreds of people to and fro somewhere and back each day - briefcases and boots scarves and hats everything all at once - and I noticed the cars which had slowed down to a crawl beeping and honking in a certain impatience as the new snow held them up a minute or so at the intersection : District 65 trucks and union-labor warehouse workers in their ghostly garb and whited-out jackets and hats (I'd gone outside by this time to watch the real-world proceedings) and the girl came up to me just like that and said 'can you help me cross?' so I did and we walked slowly across the avenue past the little piles of scraped snow which already had been dumped and she said 'thank you' as I let go of her arm and replied 'no problem Ok again my pleasure' feeling stupid but complete and knowing I'd never see her again but feeling princely - she had on a magnificent long tweed coat in black and white squares and her hair was perfect and crested with new snow around a small hat of some sort and mostly but MOSTLY it was her eyes that did it that did me in and it's said when asked what drives people to people that some say face some say personality some say body some say hands and all that but I say 'eyes' point-of-fact and simply 'eyes' - corridors to something transferers to another place communicators of transcendance and understanding unifiers and that-which-draws-one-in and so it was here that we said single goodbyes and inconsequentially walked away from each other in the newly fallen snow.
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"It was just a bit of dust in my fucking marigold yet the more I carried water in that pail the less it seemed I used" : and the end of the sky was late in coming while something green meandered along the path wrenching and twisting its eyes and ears - a truly funny sight - for if the turtle isn't slow that neither is the fox swift or sleek or foxy take your pick (two men who'd spoken this near me were still sitting along the bumper of the truck half in and half out of the workmen's garage where three other cars - quite old - were written up for sale with grease paint in their windows telling year and price and mileage and all of that but no one seemed to care nor give a second glance and the garage brothers 'McManamee' was the name - still sat there oblivious to anything else and threw cards down on the ground in some crazy form of 'throw-out poker' I think they called it where you lessen your hand by throwing out the cards you didn't want and the gamble of the game is to determine if or not the card thrown down was really the one meant to be discarded - never made any sense to me and still doesn't - but that's the sort of trenchant crap that keeps these garage guys going and when they ever lookaround it's only to check out some girl or maybe a car but they overlook always their sister LuAnne whom I'd seen sitting there right with them a hundred times and looking better than a derby trout and better eatin' too (I'd thought to myself) and she had these wonderous long legs on a skinny frame to boot which just made me about to clamour whenever I'd espy her form and shape - lustrous lips alike to kiss and wondrous perky tits - something I'd drive a million miles or more just to glimpse again and over - her name was LuAnne (I'd told you that) and she was the half sister to the older one who was the half-brother to her son or her mother's son or something (I never listened enough to catch it all just rather the watching of seeing LuAnne try to tell me again and again what it all was) and one day I caught her staring at me like I was green and that was the first time I'd seen her actually as I came up on the brothers and asked them simply quite what they wanted for that '51 wreck of an International pick-up truck sitting out back of their yard and they said 'thirteen hunnerd fer you and that's a bargin too' and then LuAnne said 'Henry Perle Gutter what kind'a answer is that for this nice man - he'd only asked a question fair and square and jes' yestirday I'd heard you tell Barry Malcom Furst that it wasn't a'worth four hunnerd dollars' and with that she winked at me without them seeing and I did see her little shirt jump up (I swear) for a moment too and I was hooked as well as any other but the brothers would never let go and wouldn't budge done past 'twelf hunnerd and niney nine dollars y'see' and then he said 'for another two hunnerd you can have her too' and he pointed to LuAnne who wasn't watching and I said 'a sweeter deal ain't never been had but I only got nine hundred' and they left it at that and it's been some time now trip after trip we've haggling but it's always good to go back and see LuAnne again and I'll go back tomorrow for just to check the price once more.
Male and female he made them (you'd better be ready) to eviscerate (the word is related to viscera) WBAI 'News From Nowhere' (back in like 1966 they were playing on the radio a non-stop and endless reading of this book over and over seemingly forever) I sat and listened too [ 'News from Nowhere' (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The remainder of the book explores a number of aspects of this society, including its organisation and the relationships which it engenders between people. The book offers Morris' answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underlines his belief that socialism will entail not only the abolishment of private property but also of the divisions between art, life, and work. In the novel, Morris tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism, the supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist society. Morris' response is that all work should be creative and pleasurable. This differs from the majority of Socialist thinkers, who tend to assume that while work is a necessary evil, a well-planned equal society can reduce the amount of work needed to be done by each worker.] : and then I heard someone say : 'I can hear him right above my head' : but I didn't know what they meant so I took it as Theology for sure and someone else I heard was talking about politics and the voting process and campaigning against Johnson with Gene McCarthy and the rest and he verbally scoffed at it all by saying 'that's the Sturm und Drang of Process nothing more and nothing by that means ever gets done YOU NEED THE GUN!!!' and that's the kind of revolution that was talked of in the streets back then and today by contrast no one says a word - two media hacks I used to really hate were 'the Davids' (I called them) - Susskind and Garroway - both true assholes and blowhards to boot : and another time I learned the meaning of 'sui generis' by listening to someone ask why people die by suicide and I turned and said 'because it's suicide stupid and that's the meaning of the term and the MEANING comes first and if they DIDN'T die then it wouldn't be suicide - and 'sui generis' that's the meaning of the term (and if at first you don't suceed try try again!)' : I see their eyes creeping across space and I carefully watch their gaze as they take in by every glimmer and glance anything about while determining (I think) quantity and value need and effect like a townsman showing a stranger a shortcut through space (town) March 1968 Johnson on TV bowing out dropping out of any race for re-election and Marlene a blond girl from Newark with her '67 Mustang and very short black skirts sitting so as to let anyone who cared to look up her legs and see simple white panties and like Johnson and his war I never knew if any of that was planned or happenstance - but it made little difference to me ['standing in the shadows of love/I'm getting ready for the heartaches to come'] - a short skirt and a long story : little did I realize how that strange quirky man would eventually be my undoing and there's more to a bad cough than a congressman or a reformer would ever know so that as I walked the corridors of these man-made tombs and rough-hewn buildings suited to no one (the exteriors were monstrous and granite or marble with facings of barred windows and barricaded doors welcoming no thing and no person for sure) and like Alfred Kazin himself (1915-1998) I wanted to become a literary landmark or at the least something referred to through not so much 'precise argument' as instead 'neither close argument nor precise analysis but rather an evocation of the feel of of a book and a lyrical and mimicking response to the distinctive sensibility of the author' and I always liked his quote about Socialism (the socialism of his cohorts Irving Howe Sydney Hook and Norman Podhoretz) from which he actually did keep his distance 'although I was a socialist like everyone else I knew I thought of socialism as orthodox Christians think of the Second Coming - a wholly supernatural event which one might await with perfect faith but which had no immediate relevence to my life' and during this time I spent many nights (and days) reading two books in particular which kept my attention well and expanded my horizona - The Brown Decades by Edmund Wilson and On Native Grounds by Kazin himself - 'Deafen the Maiden' was how I misunderstood 'Death and the Maiden' by Shubert in its predatory theme-shift from major to minor (D minor) - surely some theme about poking a girl's eardrums to deafness with some odd medieval poker-rod (Alas ! Again I was wrong!) - (written between 1938 and 1942 On Native Grounds remains one of the few genuinely exciting books about American Literature as it brings a motley set of novelists journalists and radical pamphleteers under the banner of a tradition identified expounded upon and culminated practically on the spot) and speaking of Spot trying telling that to a dog but there really wasn't anything more to do from thispoint on : walking in a daze studying and reading writing and painting I as a one-made scholastic wrecking crew careening from pillar to post all through Manhattan : the old Indian Museum up on the westside was another great haunt all those great statues and the grand stone concourse and old buildings and it was all padded in together with ten thousand forms of Puerto Rican and Jewish cohorts denizens haunters and relics of the mad mad city around them : pickle-delis powder shops santeria stores drug stores grocers old wheedling book merchants pants and shirt emporiums with piles of shoes outside marked for cheap sale and only matching if you pick through to find the match the ragged sound of buses and trains and the circulatory offal of hundreds of people gorging themselves and evacuating their premises and then the big old graveyard owned by Trinity Church and facing the hill high above the Hudson and Audobon's grave in the old church yard across the street - minions of the dead and obelisks and mausoleum and crypts and pathwats to nowhere except more dead where the random living sometimes slept as well : Mr. Pimlico and Harry Hollywood and Awesome Josie and Punch-Bag Pete were all people I knew uptown losers with big enormous souls and I'd sometimes eat with them at the little kitchen dispensing free food under the Audobon Church whatever it was called (I now forget) and John James Audobon was a naturalist and and avid bird artist famed for his paintings and drawings and catalogings of American birds and the nations ornithology everywhere and he once lived here in a vast strange rambling mansion he'd had built for his wife and children and where they lived while he was away (traveling kept him and until late in life he was never really 'home) and where he lived at the end and this vast estate overlooking the Hudson was now gone and the land had been given over to Trinity Church's graves and the old Polo Grounds and apartment buildings and wild wild strecthes of trees and underbrush and growth but amidst all that was all this : and I'd walk for hours just thinking - his grave was there - another obelisk with inscriptions and a remarkable likeness of him on a plaque with dedication and the grand church was there and with everything esle the area - though strange and foreboding - was present at all times and a safety-valve-parity for the heart and mind and it's all still there and still filled anew with people of every sort : the stranger now the better and the poor and the loud and the lame and the indigent still each do it up big.
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Great notions come and go sometimes with absolutely no reality to them at all but it's the nature of a good life to have them nurtured and watched and developed as best they can be and such was the manner of my waking hours and a person can find what is needed if it is sought out but the difference of that to a regular job and salary is pretty big and any work I did was on day-by-day format twenty dollars for this ten for that - carrying packages unloading stuff breaking down pallets painting things changing oils and liquids cleaning out old dwellings - and of that stuff was available most everywhere when needed and once I got established by name with a few of the certain people who did this work it was always easy to arrange one or two days here or there to jump on a morning truck and go to a job or just walk towards the wharves or lofts and get work and face it I didn't need much and wasn't concerned with saving or building a nest-egg and all that stuff so it didn't matter - food was everywhere and I never went without I technically had two places to stay when needed (509 E11th and 8W8th) and all of that was good enough for me as my life congealed around various things (slow things fast thing ordinary things and the dangerous too) and of course survivors have the stories and those who don't survive have nothing to tell so HERE I AM to tell you see and whatever that means to you it can mean.
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Old hands hold secrets and the moon is another planet and I once knew some new-age creepy girl from western Pennsylvania who thought she had the world but all it was was her most-lame magic and a not very insightful fantasy of mind-playing-games and interpretive fluff based on immense self-absorption but whatever with that she played a bar-bass riff with faux wisdom and taste so I let it be and I walked away not the worse for wear and over that for sure ('seems like there's some girls you just gotta' have you can hear the tune of their panties for sure and others you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole' Ricky Shendowa said that to me one afternoon at Patrick's another place where the fishmongers ate and we were just watching the girls going by from the window with a beer in each of our hands) and I even forgot her name before it was over but some poster on the back-end wall reminded me of what I'd missed (they were playing the following night for the minions of bar-mooching fans - not listeners just fans) but I really hated that kind of music so made sure not to go yet the faint memory lingered of something I may have missed and then I realized if it was ahead of me - the music date - and hadn't happened yet then how could I have missed it and how could a 'memory of something be in my mind - something that hadn't yet happened - but that's the way this life goes with the mind playing tricks and us all re-interpreting by degree whatever we want and by that defining our own lives and reality in any way we choose to do so : it's like that over and over so that if you dig down really really deep (deep enough to get to the essence of everything) you see that nothing really exists at all and life itself is a fragmnented illusion and no material splendor has any basis in reality and it's all in what we imagine so I walked around and around for days after that point CERTAIN that nothing existed and all life was an illusion running slowly through time (which itself didn't exist).
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Pulling immense hairs from the snout of a lion (or something like that) was how it had been explained to me - this philosophizing about things in the face of adversity and it was always said the detachment was the very real key to everything but how could you tell that to someone who was just gung-ho over everything around them : the seventeen-year-olds I'd see lined up to enlist in the Army knowing full-well they were sooner or later going to end up in Vietnam like some buttoned-up boot of of a warrior hanging on the wall yet they did it elatedly and busily talking to one another about what to expect and where they were going and they left behind also the most ridiculous things : 327 Chevrolets and brand new Malibus and Thunderbirds and Corvettes and slap-dash Buick Regals with performance packages and all that - they'd buy these crazy cars and end up putting them away in the garage or something for the long years of their service or you'd read in newspaper want-ads often 'must sell - going in service' and all that sort of blather and then the next thing you'd see was a picture in the newspaper of the dead Marine or Army guy killed in Vietnam 'son of Mr. and Mrs. Harlan B. Jenkins of Loganville Springs' and the story would go on with testimonials and remembrances by friends and neighbors and school-pals of the guy but no one ever connected the dots to see the real story of someone DUPED and more stupid than the guy before him : assaulted really by a complete LACK OF REFLECTION and an ignorance of matters which mattered : and that's what did them in one and all - the girlfriend left behind more confused than anything but able at least to move on and the family still reeling for years over what had occured but the overall atmosphere of supporting the troops and backing the war and supporting AMERICA first and foremost no matter what was all in all a pretty disgusting manuever no matter how you loooked at it and it still goes on I guess in the same way and the only things which have changed are the contents and the means of the communication but the communication itself is pretty much the same (after all it IS only human) and the same old shouted-out crap goes on - sentimental clap-trap soft-core pornography twisted sensationalism and out-of-bounds moralizing without any basis or foundation in morality itself or life or even ethics - all esle be damned - they still die and they still babble about the death but the ghettos all are the same and the ignorant denizens of streetcorner and tavern still hobble around like the ignorant jerks they are and somewhere SOMEWHERE now at any moment are 160,000 boys and girls learning to kill and maim and even die and then preparing to bring all that twisted and morose carnage back home with them 'bringing iu all back home' as would be said and it's all just as disgusting as that and as ever too.
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Nothing ever made sense to me and that was just fine because I wasn't really living between the lines of that notebook paper anyway - watching what transpired in the orderly rows and situations of the hourly determinants I'd see everyday : statues to Admiral Farragut and Benjamin Franklin did nothing to deter me from my errant ways because the only thing those guys did to my mind was highlight the perverse duplicity of all the lies and bullshit which had been peddled at me all the previous years : I knew there was no truth to the effect that rightness and work can make one FREE (there was none of that anyway) or any of that boilerplate stuff they'd throw out every Independence Day and Memorial Day all those sinecures for suckers I'd watch - the Veterans on parade all wizened and wobbly on their bad legs and broken frames and the ancient and pathetic charms of military suits and uniforms of death as they showed them off with medals and ribbons all made me puke and drool at the stupidity of these oldtimers who'd never gotten over anything except their own good sense and the armed elites of cops and soldiers and marine guards and political types filled with their own gut-level ranks of bullshit and squalor and all this everyday military bigwig stuff - General Hershey and Westmoreland and McNamara and Johnson and all the rest - just made me squint my eyes in hatred and wish them dead and twisted and burned over twice : bastards all : and yet the streets were rattled with both sides every day and placards were waved and people stormed and marched and walked all the while shouting their sides one way or the other - no alternative allowed thank you - and the nightly news made its mad-clamp dash for stardom by showing the names of the dead (I watched all this once twice too many times over public-space areas and large-screened enclosures set up as shanties and small towns for the indigent where harried hippies hung and hectored whomever passed) - it was a wild and weird world then so different from anything else and there were folk songs and speakers and preachers and the lost and the lame and those who'd 'been there' and seen the action as it went and they told tales of death and destruction and themselves maimed and twisted they groveled and cried before captive crowds and traffic was stopped and buses and taxis waited while cops kept steady lines or tried and the 'amalgamated fisticuffs of brotherhood workers' sometimes struggled with the crowd (union workers waging for wages the warfare they were told) - it was all dark and maddening and useless and bad but it seemed to go on for a very long time.
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Sometimes what made it all worthwhile was the glory of smut the glory of the hasty exit the slapdash effort at concealment while the taxi waited and all of that - there was a movie about this time Midnight Cowboy about the same sort of rental stud service I had gotten to know of through others and there were truly all along the upper eastside 60's and 70's streets small groups of this sort of afternoon and evening escort activities to be had - the bizarre women fucked liked ponies and always wanted it and their doormen and their rich-while-working husbands went along in whatever way needed with the charade - doormen would keep it all discreet while for the husbands it would untie their dandies for the little squeeze or two they'd get down at the office or in the financial district - assignations and dalliances of their very own done in the calm knowledge that someone else right then right now was taking care of mama's needs in their own way - everyone walked away sated and satisified and pretended none of it was going on and the interloper to boot got paid ! there were so many oddities and kinky things going on in these formats that only an unabashed shamelessness could keep it all together - threesome anal sex bondage food-sex mutual masturbations tie-downs bindfolds orgies and the like - so much so that it all could have gone unremarked but for the actual spectral beauty of so much of it all : bodies in motion beautiful women young girls in their primes breasts and buttocks audacious and stunning profiles thighs and backs and contortions and the rest - truly amazing and without taxation and without strings and if any of this took place amongst the 'society' types of the upper east side fundraisers and benefits and the causes and the rest it always stayed discreet and (as I mentioned) unremarked except as notes were passed and compared and names and numbers got around and you'd be surprised and perhaps embarrased too at how these women loved sending their latest plaything over to their friend or neighbors as a next meeting - so as to acclaim or compare and both share in the basked glory of such sex sex appeal good glory masterful intercourse and highly acclaimed pleasure and it all went too smoothly done a lonely life once twice three times a lady and all that...
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There are so many things I never knew that I just began trying to catch up on some of them - I made my own curriculum of material to search out and the rest be damned and by that I simply wandered and went everywhere in search of things to study and see - endless art spots and shows and galleries and all of that constantly under changing and altering so that it was never the same and the contless libraries that went with it all the Morgan Library the Frick Collection the Ethical Culture Society Lincoln Center Baruch College City College the NYU and Columbia Libraries and many others and each spot held its own fascination for me much as did the main NY Public library and the Studio School library both of which I've already written about and it was all endlessly fascinating and vital too : but one has to be fearless in such a quest and one can never stop when expectation are exceeded or presuppositions smashed and it's important just to keep going and stay moving straight along - some guy named Abraham Lincoln Polonsky a Hungarian filmaker or something whom I'd met outside NYU one afternoon told me something like this 'movies are irrevocably and richly rooted in kitsch in childhood in storytelling in the rubbish of paperbacks and sitting under the streetlights while off in the zoo across the lots flowering with burdock lions roared out their fantasy of freedom.....for me it was a great pleasure to make a movie again after the uprising and nothing is better except perhaps a revolution but there you have to succeed and be right - dangers which never attach themselves to making movies and dreaming' - I don't know how we'd ever gotten on that subject or why he'd decided to say that to me but for whatever reason I was able to tell him that I'd always hated movies and never had any real interest in them and never could 'suspend disbelief' (I think they called it enough) to fall for whatever artificial premise and all its artifacts was being presented which really just meant I could never go along with the storyline like going aling with the party line in some stupid political skit or something and movies never git my attention as to me they were all artifact and premise and I knew that (like everything else) it was all illusion and set-up and that all it really took was one quick glance to see what premise was trying to be created and in discovering that it became equally easy to see really what hang-ups or presuppositions or preoccupations the directors and actors and producers and all the rest were trying to work off and I always felt that all of that was THEIR problem and not mine so whatever it was they should work it out themselves thank you and leave me along - I never liked artificiality or falseness or fakery or pretense and all of that was always pretty evident and plentiful too in movies and moviemaking and in fact the entire industry was blind bullshit in fealty to a false God and that was how I'd always felt and had told this guy through the means of essays and stuff in a film course and then he starts telling me how nothing's better than making a movie except maybe making a revolution and I thought to myself 'what the fuck?' bit I excused him his point on the basis of his life and let it go at that but any memories of movies I ever had were bad ones and crappy ones too - dreary crap of course as always Ben-Hur the Nun's Story Anatomy of a Murder Lolita the Pawnbroker the Ten Commandments the Lost Weekend On the Waterfront Mutiny On the Bounty Splendor In the Grass Postman Rings Twice and all the rest of that B-level caterwauling crap that passed for culture in the 50's and 60's - of which these were but a measley few - and then all those 1940's and 30's movies which had twisted people's heads all up and presented stories of guilt hang-ups psychological trauma and bad self-reflective stuff and I always figured it just HAD to be stopped but somehow never was and it just went on and on and then to boot one had all those pretentious critics and talking heads who went on and wrote on and on about movies and the industry and always wanted to tell people somehow what they had REALLY just seen - another point I never got for if I'd just SEEN the film who was someone else to tell me WHAT I'd just seen but that's the nature of all that and in fact that's the entire nature of education too which is all the more reason I'm glad I never got heavily involved with it : artifice and blandishment I always saw it.
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But all that was then and long ago and this is the now and no one ever talks to me or seeks me out so all of this life is an intense monkish study for me still to this day but tough as it sometimes is I get by and get by with my own thinking too and just as Andre Breton used to say that surrealism would someday abolish the barriers between sleeping and being awake I think I've at least achieved that for myself and if my life sometimes approaches a 'watercolor in tones of gray' it's always more than that too as it's been always about displacement and observation and Walter Benjamin-like discoveries of detail but I'd always harbored a need to delve deeper and deeper into everything and that over-the-top frenzy of excess was always my undoing too because I always went too far and never knew to stop and maybe something like that after time really does twist up your head and make you something else and IF that was the case and I say IF as a conditional than I was able nevertheless to get by and find my way : but anyway at this particular time the snow was piling up and I could see it from below as I peered from the low sidewalk window in my basement Studio School room and watched once more feet pass by as they each left their own little pigeon-like markings in the falling snow upon the whitened sidewalk - Eighth Street in all its glory back then somehow took hundreds of people to and fro somewhere and back each day - briefcases and boots scarves and hats everything all at once - and I noticed the cars which had slowed down to a crawl beeping and honking in a certain impatience as the new snow held them up a minute or so at the intersection : District 65 trucks and union-labor warehouse workers in their ghostly garb and whited-out jackets and hats (I'd gone outside by this time to watch the real-world proceedings) and the girl came up to me just like that and said 'can you help me cross?' so I did and we walked slowly across the avenue past the little piles of scraped snow which already had been dumped and she said 'thank you' as I let go of her arm and replied 'no problem Ok again my pleasure' feeling stupid but complete and knowing I'd never see her again but feeling princely - she had on a magnificent long tweed coat in black and white squares and her hair was perfect and crested with new snow around a small hat of some sort and mostly but MOSTLY it was her eyes that did it that did me in and it's said when asked what drives people to people that some say face some say personality some say body some say hands and all that but I say 'eyes' point-of-fact and simply 'eyes' - corridors to something transferers to another place communicators of transcendance and understanding unifiers and that-which-draws-one-in and so it was here that we said single goodbyes and inconsequentially walked away from each other in the newly fallen snow.
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"It was just a bit of dust in my fucking marigold yet the more I carried water in that pail the less it seemed I used" : and the end of the sky was late in coming while something green meandered along the path wrenching and twisting its eyes and ears - a truly funny sight - for if the turtle isn't slow that neither is the fox swift or sleek or foxy take your pick (two men who'd spoken this near me were still sitting along the bumper of the truck half in and half out of the workmen's garage where three other cars - quite old - were written up for sale with grease paint in their windows telling year and price and mileage and all of that but no one seemed to care nor give a second glance and the garage brothers 'McManamee' was the name - still sat there oblivious to anything else and threw cards down on the ground in some crazy form of 'throw-out poker' I think they called it where you lessen your hand by throwing out the cards you didn't want and the gamble of the game is to determine if or not the card thrown down was really the one meant to be discarded - never made any sense to me and still doesn't - but that's the sort of trenchant crap that keeps these garage guys going and when they ever lookaround it's only to check out some girl or maybe a car but they overlook always their sister LuAnne whom I'd seen sitting there right with them a hundred times and looking better than a derby trout and better eatin' too (I'd thought to myself) and she had these wonderous long legs on a skinny frame to boot which just made me about to clamour whenever I'd espy her form and shape - lustrous lips alike to kiss and wondrous perky tits - something I'd drive a million miles or more just to glimpse again and over - her name was LuAnne (I'd told you that) and she was the half sister to the older one who was the half-brother to her son or her mother's son or something (I never listened enough to catch it all just rather the watching of seeing LuAnne try to tell me again and again what it all was) and one day I caught her staring at me like I was green and that was the first time I'd seen her actually as I came up on the brothers and asked them simply quite what they wanted for that '51 wreck of an International pick-up truck sitting out back of their yard and they said 'thirteen hunnerd fer you and that's a bargin too' and then LuAnne said 'Henry Perle Gutter what kind'a answer is that for this nice man - he'd only asked a question fair and square and jes' yestirday I'd heard you tell Barry Malcom Furst that it wasn't a'worth four hunnerd dollars' and with that she winked at me without them seeing and I did see her little shirt jump up (I swear) for a moment too and I was hooked as well as any other but the brothers would never let go and wouldn't budge done past 'twelf hunnerd and niney nine dollars y'see' and then he said 'for another two hunnerd you can have her too' and he pointed to LuAnne who wasn't watching and I said 'a sweeter deal ain't never been had but I only got nine hundred' and they left it at that and it's been some time now trip after trip we've haggling but it's always good to go back and see LuAnne again and I'll go back tomorrow for just to check the price once more.
posted by gary j. introne at 7:24 PM
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