JUST LIKE THE GUY FROM THE CIRCUS
42. JUST LIKE THE GUY FROM THE CIRCUS (the Puck Building, nyc, 1988):
Here we go just like the guy from the circus had said - I knew him only a little and his name was Alan and he smoked pot like most people drank water - on again and off again but always and wherever and this particular day he'd been out in his mother's convertible K-Car with fake wood siding and it was a real joke a crazy junk car of any but his mother had recently died and willed it to him and he figured so why not I'll take it and run it out for a drive and he hardly really ever drove anyway although he'd gotten a license from when he was in the military in Kansas or somewhere - he'd say he was some stupid military police guy or something who never really ever had left the base except to chase AWOL runaways and petty crooks sex thieves and things like that - never had to do any real action or go overseas or anything and the boredom he said the military-base boredom is what drove him to smoke almost lethal amounts of marijuana and he'd said how it was almost currency on the base - used about and moved about like small change in a pinball arcade - just all over the place and once the habit had gotten into him it never left and now he just liked it and it took constant efforts on his parts to stay high all the time and that's all he wanted : circus life regular life and the rest be damned and that day he'd taken the car with some girl he knew and they'd driven out to the Jersey shore to see what the ocean thereabouts was really like and instead of that mostly he said they'd just ended up in the worst places and never really had much to do with the ocean though they had seen it and they smoked and stayed as high as they could the entire day : which day he said meant first a trip to the Sandy Hook lighthouse and the old officer's homes along the bay side of the post and along the ocean side he said there were these major big time old battery emplacements which once had great guns and cannons and stuff on them in the old days when they actually guarded the harbor and the entryways to NYC but now that was all over and everything there was abandoned and they were able to get into a few of the empty gun emplacements and of course all they did was fuck and he said it was a few times anyway even if he was usually gay and sought only guys she was pretty cool and she liked a good slamming and they had gotten high enough where nothing mattered anyway and it was all fun - she enjoyed it and he was just practicing was how he'd put it - and to Alan anyway nothing much ever mattered and he once told me the sign of a true friend was in how that purported friend reacted when asked to 'go out back and have a smoke' and that's how he judged people - no matter what else the trust-factor of a good friendship or any friendship meant not saying no - however let me point out that pretty much probably sealed my fate (and I never did much see him after that and now not for years) for the one time I said a simple 'no' to him was I suppose the one-time that was all he need but the fact of the matter was that I couldn't particularly stand this person and the less I was around him the better it was for me and my 'no' was more the result of simply not wishing his sole and undiluted company 'out back' for even a minute but of course he misconstrued it all as a refusal to smoke with him - which was a secondary matter to me for sure and screw him then I didn't care he just really bugged me and I found him annoying and one who really really just talked too much never shutting his trap just flapping on and on about this and that and he had this very annoying flippant character-quality which drove me nuts and it was like 'why don't you just shut the mother-fuckin' up once in a while because I don't want to hear you' and he was all fake and stupid anyway - all caught up in those stupid cultural things of the moment the stuff I hated and the stuff I sure as hell didn't care about nor have a opinion of and anyway even his fucking Jew-frizz black-haired Israeli sometimes girlfriend named 'Ruda' or something like that well even she got on my nerves and her manners were nasty and cloying and I don't think she ever laughed or even cracked a smile it was all business business and serious and dour all that black dark existential New York City Israeli east European dank dark philosophy-in-action bullshit which was really an excuse for doing no fucking thing at all except fucking and nothing together which to my mind amounted to fucking nothing and I was glad to be rid of them : the funny thing was they'd ended up at a 'beachfront' sports bar in a certain hell-hole known as Keansburg NJ which isn't even on the freaking ocean but instead fronts some stupid rank bay Raritan Bay or something and the only wave that water ever sees is when boats distant go by or fat people jump into the water and I'd bet money the fat people do a lot more jumping in than the boats do the passing by - the place is rank and foul and infantile and disgusting yet there they stayed an entire afternoon and into the late evening drinking and smoking and staying high around some gross outdoor bar cabana-type thing with big TV screens blaring and bunched of knot-faced and probably inebriated locals from the town staggered stupidly along and by and in : the bar itself I forget the name but it's still there and still seems as foul as ever but I don't think Alan and Ruta or whatever her name was have ever gone back but then again I don't know either if he's still with that NYC Big Apple Circus back routine he was with back then (back when the Big Apple Circus was still out on the old dunes and sand-holes where the lower westside lingered and now all that wild-west desolation stuff is gone and it's all fancy housing and condos and all that stuff with every little hole filled in by rich-ass stockbroker and rich-ass little family types living in a golden land of their own devise and now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall or something like that) - but bullshit I don't care about and really don't wish to know about either : one of the troubles I've noticed with people like this who talk endlessly and prattle on so much is that they never really even understand what it's like and why other people hate it so much because they really just never shut up even to let other people do it to them - so they never experience what it's like and it's a form of total self-centeredness and a purely controlling tactic to stay on top of other people and I'd bet it probably was rooted in a complete lack of self-regard as odd as that seems in fact as paradoxical and backwards as that seems that's probably what it comes down to - if they ever shut up they'd have to have others see exactly how feeble they were and how little real estate their mind really takes up and anyway having an absolute opinion on everything and then feeling that one has to glibly talk about it and talk about everything that comes to mind even in the most random manner is just stupid and annoying behavior but this was Alan's forte and probably Ruda's too or Ruta whatever it was except she never even liked anyone enough it seemed to even give that a try - everything was so alienating of course that that had become her equivalent to talking - complete and utter distance and disdain - so as you can see they'd both achieved the same ends but from two complete and different angles and I was glad when I finally had no more dealings with them let alone that they had dealings with each other (for all I know they still do if one or another isn't already dead) and if you think about it it's seems like there are always certain people who can keep themselves at one remove from things so as to smirk and nothing much better than that it's the wicked pose of irony and it ruins everything and these same people - just like Alan - seem to think the world exists merely for their commentary and judgment and even if that is at some level OK or the way things are this person much fabulously go on and on about everything to others : things and words which after a while just grate - the massive annoyance of interacting with all this and anyway that's what finally drove me crazy about Alan Carabal and I tolerated some of it for a some-time brief episodic friendship but I knew it couldn't last and it wasn't just this it was Ruda and that whole day I had to go through it was his crazy ideas and opinions upon everything of no substance - all that moving diorama of crap and bullshit with which he commingled : he was a writer for the NewYork Press also with a maybe weekly or sometimes every other week column in this little paper - one of those New York City rags which purport to cover everything hip by covering nothing at all except the snide and the stupid - it's given out for free at newsboxes and manages somehow and did then as well to outflank or at least equal the Village Voice which still (they both do) does the very same thing - movie listings sexual ads by the ton escort whores massage real estate crap reviews parties clubs bands and all that in the back half of the paper and a few lead-in articles of some particular local interest in the front and on the cover - that's where Alan came in - he'd write articles about this or that which weren't really too bad always interesting and informative and colorful but never really pertaining to anything of value - but whatever - one time he took me to a staff party a sort of inter-paper awards dinner with speakers and fancy food and all that and the entire time was mostly spent up on the roof smoking or drinking while down below in the main Puck Ballroom the neorific band just went on and the tight people mingled and talkers talked and on the whole it was quite and unusually uptown for this rat-infested downtown crowd of hipsters (the Puck Building itself wasn't so bad - a leftover relic from the live-newspaper days like the old DeVinne Press Building a bit farther uptown and it had as its claim to fame that big old fat golden statue of the top-hatted Puck himself atop the frontspiece and a mighty and grand elevator within as well but whatever use it once had was long ago superseded by these sorts of ad hoc uses by paragons of efficiency and style representing the paltry present - too bad but there I was atop something unknown and mysterious) - and anyway all that's pretty much how things go all filled with spirits and whirling globes of the past spinning right around our (mostly unknowing) heads and it's only when we can tap into that or when exceptional souls find a means of tapping into that and then writing or painting or perhaps even singing about it that it comes forth - which is what creativity and the muse and erato and all that ancient crap is anyway but no one ever really knows and they skirt around the issue almost out of fear and they do all these distracting things essentially to keep away from it - things much like this : the self-congratulatory and self-absorbed forms of partying and patting on the back which goes into much of this exemplification : localized mostly Jew boy scribblers writing about fashion and gay tides and trims and theater and style in a cheesy little weekly rag desperate to keep itself going - so there I was stuck on an outpost of a roof with this craze pothead down my sleeve all night good for nothing and nothing for the good.
Here we go just like the guy from the circus had said - I knew him only a little and his name was Alan and he smoked pot like most people drank water - on again and off again but always and wherever and this particular day he'd been out in his mother's convertible K-Car with fake wood siding and it was a real joke a crazy junk car of any but his mother had recently died and willed it to him and he figured so why not I'll take it and run it out for a drive and he hardly really ever drove anyway although he'd gotten a license from when he was in the military in Kansas or somewhere - he'd say he was some stupid military police guy or something who never really ever had left the base except to chase AWOL runaways and petty crooks sex thieves and things like that - never had to do any real action or go overseas or anything and the boredom he said the military-base boredom is what drove him to smoke almost lethal amounts of marijuana and he'd said how it was almost currency on the base - used about and moved about like small change in a pinball arcade - just all over the place and once the habit had gotten into him it never left and now he just liked it and it took constant efforts on his parts to stay high all the time and that's all he wanted : circus life regular life and the rest be damned and that day he'd taken the car with some girl he knew and they'd driven out to the Jersey shore to see what the ocean thereabouts was really like and instead of that mostly he said they'd just ended up in the worst places and never really had much to do with the ocean though they had seen it and they smoked and stayed as high as they could the entire day : which day he said meant first a trip to the Sandy Hook lighthouse and the old officer's homes along the bay side of the post and along the ocean side he said there were these major big time old battery emplacements which once had great guns and cannons and stuff on them in the old days when they actually guarded the harbor and the entryways to NYC but now that was all over and everything there was abandoned and they were able to get into a few of the empty gun emplacements and of course all they did was fuck and he said it was a few times anyway even if he was usually gay and sought only guys she was pretty cool and she liked a good slamming and they had gotten high enough where nothing mattered anyway and it was all fun - she enjoyed it and he was just practicing was how he'd put it - and to Alan anyway nothing much ever mattered and he once told me the sign of a true friend was in how that purported friend reacted when asked to 'go out back and have a smoke' and that's how he judged people - no matter what else the trust-factor of a good friendship or any friendship meant not saying no - however let me point out that pretty much probably sealed my fate (and I never did much see him after that and now not for years) for the one time I said a simple 'no' to him was I suppose the one-time that was all he need but the fact of the matter was that I couldn't particularly stand this person and the less I was around him the better it was for me and my 'no' was more the result of simply not wishing his sole and undiluted company 'out back' for even a minute but of course he misconstrued it all as a refusal to smoke with him - which was a secondary matter to me for sure and screw him then I didn't care he just really bugged me and I found him annoying and one who really really just talked too much never shutting his trap just flapping on and on about this and that and he had this very annoying flippant character-quality which drove me nuts and it was like 'why don't you just shut the mother-fuckin' up once in a while because I don't want to hear you' and he was all fake and stupid anyway - all caught up in those stupid cultural things of the moment the stuff I hated and the stuff I sure as hell didn't care about nor have a opinion of and anyway even his fucking Jew-frizz black-haired Israeli sometimes girlfriend named 'Ruda' or something like that well even she got on my nerves and her manners were nasty and cloying and I don't think she ever laughed or even cracked a smile it was all business business and serious and dour all that black dark existential New York City Israeli east European dank dark philosophy-in-action bullshit which was really an excuse for doing no fucking thing at all except fucking and nothing together which to my mind amounted to fucking nothing and I was glad to be rid of them : the funny thing was they'd ended up at a 'beachfront' sports bar in a certain hell-hole known as Keansburg NJ which isn't even on the freaking ocean but instead fronts some stupid rank bay Raritan Bay or something and the only wave that water ever sees is when boats distant go by or fat people jump into the water and I'd bet money the fat people do a lot more jumping in than the boats do the passing by - the place is rank and foul and infantile and disgusting yet there they stayed an entire afternoon and into the late evening drinking and smoking and staying high around some gross outdoor bar cabana-type thing with big TV screens blaring and bunched of knot-faced and probably inebriated locals from the town staggered stupidly along and by and in : the bar itself I forget the name but it's still there and still seems as foul as ever but I don't think Alan and Ruta or whatever her name was have ever gone back but then again I don't know either if he's still with that NYC Big Apple Circus back routine he was with back then (back when the Big Apple Circus was still out on the old dunes and sand-holes where the lower westside lingered and now all that wild-west desolation stuff is gone and it's all fancy housing and condos and all that stuff with every little hole filled in by rich-ass stockbroker and rich-ass little family types living in a golden land of their own devise and now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall or something like that) - but bullshit I don't care about and really don't wish to know about either : one of the troubles I've noticed with people like this who talk endlessly and prattle on so much is that they never really even understand what it's like and why other people hate it so much because they really just never shut up even to let other people do it to them - so they never experience what it's like and it's a form of total self-centeredness and a purely controlling tactic to stay on top of other people and I'd bet it probably was rooted in a complete lack of self-regard as odd as that seems in fact as paradoxical and backwards as that seems that's probably what it comes down to - if they ever shut up they'd have to have others see exactly how feeble they were and how little real estate their mind really takes up and anyway having an absolute opinion on everything and then feeling that one has to glibly talk about it and talk about everything that comes to mind even in the most random manner is just stupid and annoying behavior but this was Alan's forte and probably Ruda's too or Ruta whatever it was except she never even liked anyone enough it seemed to even give that a try - everything was so alienating of course that that had become her equivalent to talking - complete and utter distance and disdain - so as you can see they'd both achieved the same ends but from two complete and different angles and I was glad when I finally had no more dealings with them let alone that they had dealings with each other (for all I know they still do if one or another isn't already dead) and if you think about it it's seems like there are always certain people who can keep themselves at one remove from things so as to smirk and nothing much better than that it's the wicked pose of irony and it ruins everything and these same people - just like Alan - seem to think the world exists merely for their commentary and judgment and even if that is at some level OK or the way things are this person much fabulously go on and on about everything to others : things and words which after a while just grate - the massive annoyance of interacting with all this and anyway that's what finally drove me crazy about Alan Carabal and I tolerated some of it for a some-time brief episodic friendship but I knew it couldn't last and it wasn't just this it was Ruda and that whole day I had to go through it was his crazy ideas and opinions upon everything of no substance - all that moving diorama of crap and bullshit with which he commingled : he was a writer for the NewYork Press also with a maybe weekly or sometimes every other week column in this little paper - one of those New York City rags which purport to cover everything hip by covering nothing at all except the snide and the stupid - it's given out for free at newsboxes and manages somehow and did then as well to outflank or at least equal the Village Voice which still (they both do) does the very same thing - movie listings sexual ads by the ton escort whores massage real estate crap reviews parties clubs bands and all that in the back half of the paper and a few lead-in articles of some particular local interest in the front and on the cover - that's where Alan came in - he'd write articles about this or that which weren't really too bad always interesting and informative and colorful but never really pertaining to anything of value - but whatever - one time he took me to a staff party a sort of inter-paper awards dinner with speakers and fancy food and all that and the entire time was mostly spent up on the roof smoking or drinking while down below in the main Puck Ballroom the neorific band just went on and the tight people mingled and talkers talked and on the whole it was quite and unusually uptown for this rat-infested downtown crowd of hipsters (the Puck Building itself wasn't so bad - a leftover relic from the live-newspaper days like the old DeVinne Press Building a bit farther uptown and it had as its claim to fame that big old fat golden statue of the top-hatted Puck himself atop the frontspiece and a mighty and grand elevator within as well but whatever use it once had was long ago superseded by these sorts of ad hoc uses by paragons of efficiency and style representing the paltry present - too bad but there I was atop something unknown and mysterious) - and anyway all that's pretty much how things go all filled with spirits and whirling globes of the past spinning right around our (mostly unknowing) heads and it's only when we can tap into that or when exceptional souls find a means of tapping into that and then writing or painting or perhaps even singing about it that it comes forth - which is what creativity and the muse and erato and all that ancient crap is anyway but no one ever really knows and they skirt around the issue almost out of fear and they do all these distracting things essentially to keep away from it - things much like this : the self-congratulatory and self-absorbed forms of partying and patting on the back which goes into much of this exemplification : localized mostly Jew boy scribblers writing about fashion and gay tides and trims and theater and style in a cheesy little weekly rag desperate to keep itself going - so there I was stuck on an outpost of a roof with this craze pothead down my sleeve all night good for nothing and nothing for the good.
posted by gary j. introne at 7:31 PM
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