T H E G R A N D
M A N I P U L A T I O N
B e g i n s N o w
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“Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here”
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prefab
Often, the only thing that comforts me is the knowledge of a telephone number,
someone who won't be too long in arriving at a pre-determined locale
to deliver a powdery grey mare,
that will induce immediate soothing crimson inspiration,
though ultimately providing just another bastard brick
in the stepping stone to a nuptual death-knot.
I will in some gross manner always be betrothed.
And at a point pivotal, down some path, must attempt to elope on my own, as, to bring her with me
out the window
in some fleeing escape
would mean a maundered diffuse I've plundered on countless occasions.
There are prayers, seen and felt in astral carousing of late, a kind of cosmos 'round towns',
that I'm not too high up when the next jump comes into play...
1
M e a n d C h a r l e s B .
I first began reading Charles Bukowski right around the same time I was falling off the earth. Hearing that he'd lived kind of a tragic, tortured life made me all the more eager to get involved with his books, to read of his treacherously long, odd soul-searching days at the U.S Post Office. How strange for him to have had such a wide array of untamed characters showing up at his residence, seasoned drifters from far and away presenting themselves at his doorstep posing as fans, people just driving through who thought they'd pop by. This made little sense to him or his life partner Linda, who'd often be on Selective Security Sifting Mode (I imagined this role for her), fielding requests from the front door, bellowing out to Chuck, off hiding in the kitchen, "You have visitors," ultimately telling them to go away and come back another time. The Kerou-wackos scurried off, hustled up more drugs, called it a day, and forgot where old man Bukowski lived altogether. This was the 60's, man. Poor guy, dodging compliments from illiterates who said they loved his words though had read none; pointless people rallying around his noble estate, peering in windows to maybe catch a view of a great writer having a beer and a cheese sandwich. The human race strikes again. These constant ambushes because they heard he represented a generation's rebellious view of society. He was only writing what was in his heart and suddenly he's some sort of spokesman partaking in what by this time had become daily involvement in an unwanted celebrity side show; his reward for being a storyteller with God given grace, a rare voice of highly original creative thought and to the point honest prose.
Recently, I've had my own share of poignant moments and escapades in Los Angeles, more reason to draw comparisons between myself and the race-horse-gambling, portlier, slightly more successful Charles B. Something I don't recall him being famous for was writing bum checks to bookstores and cabbing it to second hand haunts to get what cash he could for them: that was my job. His books always brought in a favourable bounty at the establishments I slithered into. They got some sweet deal off of me. If I had schlepped less, showered that week, came in with less of the Neanderthal-like presence, maybe then I could have kept up a better face for my narcotic fun-run, Chuck B. full of good times I told myself that I was having. I must have been some sight. God knows what the owners thought, not that other humans were particularly high on my list of things to consider. I think they knew what I was doing. I can laugh about it now...a little. It must have seemed sad and obvious, and now looking back, I probably wasn't far off from being just bad news and oblivious.
On a few occasions I'm sure I handed over the receipt just given to me an hour earlier from some unsuspecting three-storey book conglomerate, not yet tipped off to the literary mad genius scam I believed so foolproof, clever creativity, inevitably my demise. My desperation, racing blindly through intersections with stolen words, the soon to be profitable works of literature sitting pretty in my accredited accomplice - the soiled sack; and if the sweat on the brow and the holes in my shoes weren't a dead giveaway, I don't know what was. I'm guessing the bookshop owner's greed overshadowed his compassion, but who could fault him? After a spell I gave up attempting to act cavalier and nonchalant, dumping the books out of the bag, scattering them feverishly on the counter, the way one might brandish a sour attitude, groceries or a gun in a hurried frenzy, "I'm in kind of a rush. You know how it is."
The similarities crossed over into the bizarre, Bukowskally-speaking, as during one of my most recent stints at a recovery-type institution, I learned the distinguished address of 360 South Westlake Boulevard (where I came to call home for a grand total of nine days) was occupied by the eminent author many years earlier, though now was housing many non-writers and felonious finger-painters. It had been magically transformed into a chirpy entity called 'The Royal Palms,' though the furthest thing from some balmy, palm-desert-hallowed-ground the name might conjure up.
*Note: best not to commit to any sort of stay in a rehabilitative place that's located only two alleys up and over from the laundromat where 'Pedro and the Boys' deal quite fruitfully in tar heroin; it makes it doubly difficult to make any attempt at being part of 'the group' or focus truly and clearly on bettering oneself, when on a day-to-day basis, you've learned the exact interval at which to escape between 12 step meetings and 'Life 101 Classes' for your daily jostling.
I was the clock watcher.
Up at 4 A.M fidgeting and depleted on account of not being able to sleep from the same old withdrawal game, I'd sit out there on a blackened fire escape, a solitary spot I discovered up at the fifth floor window to rock back and forth, rattle, and hum while considering various game plans that weren't working. Passing prayers and thoughts came across the board - most devoted to just how I'd ended up in such a hopeless dwelling - prayers and thoughts I was fortunate enough to still own, as most else was sold or misplaced.
"So, this is where carelessness gets you," I mumbled to myself, attempting to diminish and make light of this cold and illogical end-of-the-line scenario. Was this my bottom? Did I have more in store? I had no way of knowing.
I looked forward to clambering out to receive my dose of sanity, an all too sobering symmetry, the twisted station of silence apart from the other court-ordered drug savages; them, a constant static with buzzing backward agendas, their irritating milling about, the rummaging amongst each other's diseased minds that sickened me to see, feel and regretfully be a part of: my home team for the time.
Directly below, fiendishly working 'round the clock, a family business dealing in the brisk sale of crack cocaine, a spiffy, finely tuned operation taking place around all clocks, some freakish after-hours carnival, night after night, ongoing, ominous, never ceasing, not that I saw, anyway. It inspired dread and amazed me, much the same way 'A Clockwork Orange' did as a kid; decadent and intriguing for me, frightening and dangerous, but certainly not enough to scare me off the way it should have.
Addicts don't take breaks.
And sometimes clocks just don't work right, the ones that are hooked up to weird timers anyway, all whacked out, sewn up into distant zones. More to the point, people get shattered and out of order and machines sometimes can't be fixed. There are direct correlations at work here and double that entendre if one scruffy, gloomy-Gus down on his luck, and his knees, works at some all night clock repair shop. There are no holidays from the consistent plaguing pain you find yourself in from self-medicating, punching your own clock and thrashing around. Time doesn't enter into it, though a very peculiar item, there's always urgent stuff to get done - everything, and everyone takes a back seat.
All kinds of shoppers would drive up; everything from high-end, slick subterranean appendectomies, to broken-down Gremlins hobbling relentlessly on their last legs, callous drivers in search and in need, pushing poor jalopies beyond their own wake. Colonel Sanchez (I named him) and his chain gang of feisty fools chattered away in foreign tongues while keeping tiny bindles tu
cked away in their orifices, awaiting any and all characters to pull up. They'd know just when to step into the spotlight, open the gate from the grotty apartment complex, and rapidly conduct a faultlessly orchestrated drug shuffle. They should have had a flashing neon sign that said *ONE STOP SHOPPING * TRI 'N SAVE* That would have been funny. Every actor, every extra, seemingly prepared to play their parts exactly as they'd rehearsed them.
"Yo, dog, why you watch us out here every night, why don't you come down, homes?"
The grand pursuit is going on as we speak and is bleeding waterfalls, spilling frightful shadows into cities across this limitless land of heartbreaking unfulfilled need, the devil's agents always advertising, accepting new asinine applicants, publicly, unashamed, needing participants for an alluring fury and a hunger (tf#1) to survive - an underworld complete with its own set of twisted primordial night rules - fabricated protocol, things you just don't do, murky manners and the ways in which to manipulate the team and yourself...like any other world, be it under or over the boards. There is no jubilation here folks, but enslavement gets to be a cheery upper, always served encrusted and often diminutively awkward. Cheating Death is one thing - to repeatedly laugh in his face, steal his lunch money and perform Oedipal acts with his mother behind his back is another story.
Anything went down.
Occasionally, a squad car would pass by a few streets over and shine a light down the alley. A guy whose job it was to keep watch would yell out, "Buddha!" or whatever the code word was for that special night-shift, and everyone would scatter like crazed centipedes. I'd stretch my neck out, further dangling over the outside landing, inhaling the scent of the filthy devils scurrying to pre-plotted concealed cracks, who'd reappear minutes later to continue business as usual. Different worlds co-existing so close, me too infatuated, too fucking fascinated with my proximity to the psychotic prowling, no one paying me much mind, mostly. It's scary and speaks of uncaring, the inhumane trifling kind, to close ones eyes when others around them are losing theirs, sinking, spiralling south of eye level, to the suffocated soil, and me unable to grow in a much trounced upon earth. Nobody growing here with me at the birds-eye view, the fish-eye-lens, (fish islands?) deserted and unfed, the sweet but sweaty whores lacking manners, (tf#2) their unclassy colognes spliced with remarkably helpful spelling. I knew this because I'd yell occasional crossword questions down to them, "Um, excuse me girls, nine letter word for...you don't say?" screaming in the alley up the way, me paying enough attention to film it all my mind. I'd see the Colonel and his compadres counting out crumpled American bills, elephantitus-like wads that must have been in the thousands. Had this always been 'The Family Business?' Were they putting their kids through expensive private schools? "When I was your age, my father was the vice-president at Allstate Insurance." "Yeah, fuck face, my dad's in a gang and he's going to rip your head off; gimme your cash AND your car keys, teacher man." Most likely just getting more, so as to get more, set-ups laid down by monsters and doom dictators who hold too many cards to begin with on an unavoidable concrete minefield, the un-evolutionary ethics of L.A., always intact and the all too true school of Never Enough. This voyage of the damned, the tireless dawn, my carousel of the macabre holding firm, cinematic cysts, brewing in me for what's seemed like forever, what has infected my form, my infrastructure. I will tell all, as I am told I'm allowed no secrets in this purge pot, this reeling and revealing revelation in and of
c o m i n g c l e a n
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tf#1: as per matter of fact, 'The Hunger', was a moody, sluggish vampirish flick with lesbianistic undertones that crept into me at an early age and still sticks like glue to my psyche. Good soundtrack, too.
tf#2: I wonder if that rule about "No whores in the house, Timothy!" regardless of any kewpie-doll-kitsch-factor, ability to assist mom with the tougher puzzles, or promises to clean up, is still in effect. Did she mean altogether? No sleepovers? Or just that specific time? Lipstick can be a nightmare to get off pillowcases.
Footnote...footnotallry...TomFoolery...Tom was my Dad's name, so let this be...
'TimFoolery' = (tf) from here on in...
Worthwhile Erratum pertaining to the main crux of it all
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All this certainly not to be confused with that 'Tom Dooley' character, who does little else than just "hang down his head and cry", especially at social gatherings: an out of touch gent whose nothing more than an impostor and a snail; he's been known to rifle through unsuspecting guests' coat pockets for change (unforgivable) while wearing only cowboy hat, sandals, dark socks and shorts, while underneath it all, a cream colour silk jumpsuit; an ensemble that might as well be the uniform recognized and representative of internationally-and-confirmed-lifelong-bachelorhood (even worse). I read a satirical piece on him in 'The Times' and I swear it's true.
*
2
F i l t h y C o c o o n o f D a m a g e d C h a r m
This is how you become an addict. You have no inner resources, you drive people crazy with all your neediness,
years go by, you don't grow up, people lose patience, and all that's left is whatever gets you through.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
More, Now, Again, A Memoir of Addiction
I never was taught how to pace myself for such times. Alleys are dodgy and shady.
Crazier and lonelier at night, the scrambled trail less traveled. By making one's way down a darker crevice, say, in the back of buildings running concurrently for many blocks, one is making a choice, taking a risk, embracing it, maybe stupidly and too tightly. The voyage could be continued on the well-paved road more traveled streamlined straightness, but why? I've seen and been all that before. The predictable path is certainly safe, but it is only in the chasm, the face of jeopardy, of risks taken during an often haunting wild ride, when you are cut down, helpless, that you are later rewarded from such confronted challenges, ultimately defining what it is you stand for, what you're made of. (tf#3)
The time was morning. Definitely morning. I befriended a couple that was basically living in this scraggily alley way behind a mini-mall that housed pointless sun tanning salons and unfrequented appliance and wallpaper shops. Palo said that the owner knew they were there, but didn't care as long as they kept their eyes on the place. Palo and his gal, Snaggletoothed
Shelly (I gave her this nickname) were moronic but feisty junkies of the most desperate sort, involved and playing all positions for the team. I'd hear from other similar ne'er-do-well, mendacious characters in that neck of the woods some of the clumsy conduct they promoted, ratty and amuck with double-dealings, robbing and pawning, a good dose of raping and lying, all with the racing to and fro along and against all the obstacles that were, part and parcel of my Game-town. I came to think of them, even affectionately, as just resourceful. If I was unwell and no one was at their usual post, I'd have to pop by and pay them a visit, to see if they were holding or could help me score; them with their schemes and scams and unsubstantiated cat tales, me, the one who still can't manage for the life of me how to shoot up. I liked someone to play the role of a nurse. If I had uniforms for them to change into in my trunk or something, now that would've been funny. Paying strangers to get in my spook-mobile to do the redundant deed, handing them my last 3 or 4 dollars (all monies earned earlier gone to get my treats) had become the norm. What was left went to gas up the car, sometimes food. How I never got stabbed or jacked, I have found no clues to uncover that one.
I'd call out my car window, desperate to hook up with the dynamic duo. "Hey, where the hell are my buddies this morning?" No longer could I pretend I was dedicated to my own highly stylized version of a Kerowackian-participatory-journalistic-field-trip, me on some lost generation monkey-hunt for those missing Bewitched episodes, trying to transform myself into even nobler heroic leads from books I treasured, but too cold and bothered to keep any of it straight, some wildebeest at my hooves, a liar in my own dog-eared notebook of un-integrity, lines having been blown, crossed off long ago and with off-the-scale-uncertainty, at each blink from my still intact eyes, all systems and loved ones, skewed and out of focus.
There were some shaky close calls, little jiffies like that grey-haired, black guy - who looked like a beat up but sinister Ray Charles - with a cane who was hanging on to the door, half in the window, half out, me attempting to flee the scene, him screaming, "Motha fucka, what the fuck ya think you doin', white-boy!?" It took some doing, some 10-15 seconds, to get my 4 cylinder-lawnmower-of-motion-sickness up to necessary mach-speed to jettison all hangers-on back to their appropriate seating by the curb, but I managed. My new colleague finally got dropped off, but there was a wealth of knowledge simmering, that he'd come up again, and have to be dealt with. Later.
There were players like that guy Simon, with all the tattoos, ones that bragged of West Side Boys, names and proud puzzling symbols I'd not seen before...me so unacquainted with but dying to adapt, so very quickly, deathly necessary, careful camouflages. I didn't even know where the West Side was from the East. (Did they have wicked witches, all that, I wondered?) It all seemed like one spread-out, sprawling, fucked-for-life, Freudian-fooz-ball zone: unfree for all and frozen in circumstance. Altered rules each day but the same hazardous hurtful game shrouded in false freedom, all lending itself to making a failure of my home, which by this point was my car.
You tell yourself you have a handle on it, that it's not so bad. You catch yourself looking down at a bleeding, now scarring arm, blisters reddening, a buffet of haemorrhaging I became, sudden precious and rotting boughs far from on the mend, things swelling where they shouldn't, and those twitches you now have...you remember a time when they weren't part of this package.
Sometimes when scoring I'd run into Simon and he'd invite me back to his gang's clubhouse. There was minimal ambiance and most of his associates seemed uninteresting to me, but I suspected that might change the moment he skewered a needle prepared especially for me into my arm. West Side-Simon would shoot me up, and even once had to toss me in the shower with the help of his gang, as it looked like it was curtains for me. This told to me, after the fact, as my lights were dim, curtain concerns being the last thing in my head, me drifting off to that slow, placid town where everything moves intrinsically wicked and soothing, miles from a scathing reality already explored, now deemed unuseful. (tf#4) When I came to, I'd discovered all my money and any dope I had left had disappeared, co-incidentally along with the other clubhouse kids. Considering his professional affiliation, size, stature, plus a nasty and dubious glassy ice habit, I thought it best to not 'do the right thing', not force him to take responsibility or teach him a lesson for such crass behavior. That was a healthy choice on my part, looking back. I guess I let it slide because he saved me from dying that day. Always with the excitement - 'the getting', so long after 'the waiting', then 'the preparing' and 'the doing', the oncoming fierce and racy feeling; the mixed mortar morphing into something special, my soul stirring with that loquacious liquid melted down from sticky brown tar and off-white powder, the cooked-up sparkling bubbles, that had its own running agenda, gearing up in the spoon to take another shot at pacing around my heart, veins and brain to further dictate where I'd land for the night, what I'd be seeing maybe for the last time, every time I did it. There were lots of last times. And I was a pained participant, past panic, yet somehow always willing.
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tf#3: my false romanticism which has never helped me, the poor poet.
tf#4: another timely, lest we forget, frantic, justification.
*
3
S t i l l F i l t h y
It's always obnoxiously hot in California, and in summer, you can get burned before noon. You're going to want to be near to the beach. All Santa's and Ana's were not near the beach. It's concrete jungle, Snake Pliskon ground-zero, Escape from New York vigilante-land, baby: Torn down twin tower-less tinsel town in the rain. And me, with my 'Santa Ana Land Shuffle', even now my survived senses get a whiff of the derelict dancing on windy and weirder days, remembering how I spread myself way too thin, screaming body parts all spasmodic.
"There's gotta be someone around whose got something. Where the hell is everyone this morning?"
"Hey, Gimme me a ride, Remington Steele."
When I wasn't punching The Drug Clock or doing 'The 12 Step', I had a ton of time to conceptualize quirky jazzed-up plot-lines for what was going down. My unemployability, almost impressive, my real position - being accountable to a whole new realm of self-absorption plagued by indecision and low self-esteem, along with my infinite forms of placated self-deception I owned. Plus The Seven Deadly Sins which I wholeheartedly embraced, disappointed when I couldn't pull at least five of those puppies off in a day. This became the real goal and ultimately the real disappointment.
"Got Greed, that's a constant, certainly Sloth is taking shape, Lust is sure coming along nicely...hey, man, what are those other ones...?"
It was fitting that it be brilliantly shining on this super morning, in a kind of pathetic-fallacy sort of way. The rays shooting down far from qualified me from being in the light. They beat me into submission, so dispirited, a sick psyche lost in astral carousing, through the beaming of memories of cottages, girls and swimming pools, tennis courts and love that was miles and miles behind in my mind and getting tougher to place, suspicious as to if any of that occurred at all. There was genuine love somewhere. Buried somewhere around here, I still have pictures and slides of friends and family that sure made it look that way. Does someone still have those home movies, or was all of that just in the movies? I cry and break a little every time I see them, even if they're not mine, me, The Wired Riddler, some deviant projectionist, a joker on the swings of indecision, unsettling.
What to do with all of that now? At this point, what can it be traded for? Having a backwards and persecuted point of reference is top-of-the-pops terrible, as you can't recognize the good stuff if it ever does happen to radiate and beat at your door. It's great to be aware of the pretty pictures, but when you're stuck with a warped perception and that's all you have, then that's where things can get perverse and even gruesome. Don't count on interacting too well, or integrating so hot either, especially when others tell you, "You're not so badly off there ya know, chin up!" You may feel it best just to run them over.
On this morning of questions, Palo and Shelly, my pals, sicker than they were sweet, weren't around - probably off making the world a better place, volunteering precious time for a better cause. I pulled the car around the back of the ramshackle eyesore of a building near a dumpster; "How embarrassing, this cliché parade," I thought, and may have said out loud. Peering over rusty shopping carts, garbage, wrecked toys and burnt-out lighters, the gross soiled clothes piled in lieu of a proper fence, I crawled over the pissed on crud and looked around for my jesterly associates, cohorts from the California Dreamland Of Misfit Toys; ridiculous allies I'd enlisted, and built around me to share in the dreaded and pathetic spookiness, to somehow shelter me from further grave morbidity. They were on a team and didn't even know it, and me about to be sidelined and broadsided. I looked down around my ankles, my socks and running shoes that served no purpose but to assimilate into cigarette butts, pipes and needles, strings and wires, machine parts and gadgets. In and around it all there was this dead kitten: a very off-white kitten, gray with soot and stuff. Longish fur, matted with crusty things in it, bleeding in places, maybe where other animals had picked at it...her head almost crushed, but not past the point of recognizing that was still where the head should be. I fall backwards a little and step on what must have been a cat's stomach, a weird suction sound - like letting the air out of a hot water bottle, deflating both of us. I'm ankle-deep in a kitten graveyard, it seems. Upon closer inspection of this one, some patchy areas where she may not have been able to look after herself properly, due to malnutrition, abuse, circumstances beyond her control. She lay there and stared at me, my losses marinating in this once spry corpse, the good eye sparkling that wasn't ripped open. My furry cyclopean friend, not so funny, staring out into infinite space unaware of her own seeping decay, ripped apart, her legs busted, from what I knew of animal appendages, limbs and such weren't meant to be scattered and twisted, not like that. A voice spoke volumes with static and silence:
"How could you let this happen? I'm no good anymore. But I was. I was good once and I played ball and yarns, games of goodness. I had a mother and brothers and sisters - people took those from me and then this unlucky thing happened and I can't tell you really how I got like this because I don't want to kill you anymore - give you more death than you're already wrapped up in here - not today; you don't seem to need my help in your self-destructive, dripping yoke embarrassing excuse for what you are. These flies all around us - over my once frolicking body, picking me further apart, is death enough for you today, kid."
Something exploded inside me as blood trickled out of her mouth, thick.
I'd not known the feeling of bursting into tears 'til that moment, but I began to develop a taste for it. This reawakened feelings I'd believed were truly lost. Though, Taste was not on the list of senses that were doing so hot, all five of which were, by now, pretty much opposed to interacting in any natural Darwinian forward motion-type-fashion.
"Let me see, there's Sight, Smell, um...isn't there one that starts with an 'R'? Guys?"
Those out of touch entities now being commanded by substances, to fall in line when ordered to do so, to jitterbug beyond the type of life they were built for. Sensuality, all the things I longed for, and once in a great while felt with others, now fragmented and stitched together in the back seat of the roller coaster I'd been flying around on with crappy cheap sutures and uninsured Medicare I'd no doubt have to repay. Later. I jotted this incident down, tears dripping on my notebook, kind of smearing the words, adding this trauma-like-cuddly tale to kindred moments, the multiple times I'd thrown myself at the mercy of emergency-rooms too busy and too involved to be bothered with my unglamorous suicidal cries, sending me right back out the automated doors. But not before I indulged in jaundiced pudding cups and got a good talking to by unfestive, dazed and confused pre-med students on their own dizzying rounds. I got to wear a fuzzy maroon robe a couple times and those comedic but pointless paper slippers, but they made me give it all back and sent me packing, out to battle, with a bill to be paid and my words barely intact. I drove around the next couple hours trying to resist the pull of that handy turn into oncoming traffic.
When the dust clears at the end of the day this might be recollected to tell others, maybe around an open flame, some campy fire, but so much to take in and who'd really listen or take notice anyway? And all this before noon.
*
4
T r o p i c a l T r a v e l / A n A u g u s t S c e n e
I'm drained, sickened and scared of the world and don't want to be and what's worse don't know how not to be that way. I hate myself for not having found suitable tools with which to address daily concerns and those questions no one seems to be able to help me with, and further can't stand this unfestive widowerhood I drag around with me. This doesn't even begin to address my absence of a proper wherewithal or protective force field - others have ways. I seem to have missed the entry deadline, by now far too late to be considered for classes in Proper Guidelines To Live By. I can't seem to hunt down anything that comes close to a relaxed manner with which to handle situations, or a reliable method in which to walk through hours unhampered, not weighed down; I need some time to be alone, to think things through. Isolation does kind of make fo
r a crummy playing-field to bounce ideas around in, so maybe that's the farthest thing from what I need, but that's just it, isn't it? The not knowing, not grasping what works for you. What's worse is seeing what you think could be a satisfying calm ricocheting back and forth in front of your face, but nevertheless always remaining unattainable. It's like being on some outdoor racquetball court where the wind takes hold of the tiny black orb and whips it around too fast for you to ever get a proper swing in. You're never able to stop and breath, or get a good look at how to approach any of this, how to interact with these things that are getting shot at you. No life game plan and crappy strategy, my Play Now, Pay Later Playbook too scuffed up and soiled to read, just hieroglyphics really, and those tennis lessons have never helped much. I have to stick with something and work at that something. My inconsistencies have hurt me...the inability to trudge through, regardless of whatever courage I've been able to muster. Marked with bloodied dullish daggers, endeavoring to come upon some easy way out - maybe using, maybe not - but time and time again, ducking out before I catch the full brunt of my actions. I have got to play a part, as they say, in my own recovery, take action in ousting the drugs and any other evils from my body, my sewer system, what I'm supposed to regard as my temple, but what's really turned into more of a shack for hanging sea bass in. I need rest. Rest that's been put off, and time away from the struggle.
Some good news; I have found some miniscule solace in the wisdom that suggests I should be living somewhere near, if not directly atop Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Capricorn' - a city (or island?) where you can speak your mind, that's still edgy and inhabited by eccentrics and nympho-maniacs, but peopled also by the delicacies of childhood; a place rich, exultant and honest. I could see myself acclimatizing to such a warm, gracious climate.
Now, just how to get there.
I'm frustrated and more than a little put off when I arrive at the airport - You can't leave that car here, sir! - bags packed and excited to begin what I was hoping to be an unfathomable self exploratory journey. To my horror, I am denied information, a coveted schedule no one felt the need to share, just when the next flight would be departing, and at what exact terminal;
"I don't know if I quite understand just where is it you'd like to go, sir?"
My inquiries met with dull wandering monkey minds, concerned only with when their next break would be, eager to resume piling more garbage into themselves and continue gossiping - private pointers on how to remove mustard stains from shocking, pukey pastel golf course costumes, while marveling at their own starry fashion sense, congratulating themselves on black market, pungent perfume purchases from the duty free shop...an all too fragmented, verminish fermented bunch that seemed to share little sympathy with my quest of finding a new home; they didn't know how monumentally important this was to me.
Not wanting their virtually absolute unintelligibility to infect me, I scurried off and took a seat in one of the crappy cafeteria booths and awaited boarding instructions, along the way helping myself to some stale salty peanuts from a mock food stand - snacks I assumed that were - though later was informed, were not - complimentary.
There's been little else to do of late but live in private created fantasies (a kind of hobby, moot criticisms and surreal characters) real to me, bizarre and often alarming to others; this veranda with chimes onto myself where I don't contend and don't get disappointed, a mind-set where a large part of my time is not dedicated to mopping up messes made by me, tired of that regularity. Just having ejected myself from moping round the watery West Coast mine-field, where about the only helpful tid-bit I've picked up is that "You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as an individual" (tf#5) - again, honing this misfitted charmer I can't help but be, this l'enfant terrible I see myself as, so marvelously maladapted to anything going on around me, muddled and beaten, severely starved for answers - I'm all for finding a way to get re-born again, to reinvent myself; I don't much care if it's as a human, an individual, an artist or a gravedigger, just as long as it's not someone who's plagued, made hateful, left hopeless and dismantled by his surroundings. Especially having all this crash in on you when you wake up first thing in the morning - that's the worst, to wake and weep, to rise and fall right away, to have the helpless thoughts pour in and rock whatever faith you have, having the fears show up right there again in your lap, gearing up full-throttle to start over and repeat the cycle before breakfast, is a shitty way to begin the day. Another helpful thing learned during scary recesses: if you're a good listener and can learn from your mistakes, you might have a fair shot at blowing yourself back up when the deflation scenarios stab at you. These hints make for fun and flirty pontificators to use as luring teasers at social events and company picnics (if indeed you're fortunate to have friends with solid jobs who extend an invitation, kind souls who take an active role in the ridiculous ritual of trying to catch you suitable female counterparts who'll put up with your tour de force of nonsense, for any length of time.
"I'm not getting in that potato sack with her, it's smelly and this is stupid, such a mockery of competitive sport. I'm off to get more pasta salad. And wine."
"Oh c'mon, spoiled sport."
I'd like to let you in on some things, confess, to recollect a little may even help me out of this mess.
I sit at this airport and await information that just isn't making its way over to me.
What side is anyone on?
Me, the ungodly unuseable air-strip, some unfresh misplaced runway. (It's healthy I'm not down on myself though.) I see them whispering in delicate tones, no one wanting to set me off. If they would only guide, point me in the right direction, I'd get out of their hair and could jet off on that international flight germane to my new existence, on to the exotic destination where they lie waiting (they?)
*Note: who to speak with about the kosher meal? I'm sure they'll have forms on the plane. It'll work out. (See previous Ibid from Chapter #2)
Come to think of it, I don't have the legitimate ID (ideology?) for this undertaking. I'd better go grab the car and summon the courage to start the trek back east by way of land. A ticket to the Tropics is beyond the illegal tender I've got jingling around in my pocket anyway, so I guess it's just you and me old man. (I talk to the car sometimes.) Also, those unhelpful security fellows have had their eye on me for the last few hours and seem to be taking their own sets of notes.
"Can we see some ID sir?"
"I was just leaving, but thank you though. Are you Mutt or Jeff? You know fellas, it's good we've got you. I've had my eyes on those homeless ladies dressed up like nuns, yes, sitting right over there, pretending. They don't look trustworthy, no, siree Bob. It would be
in our best interest to search them. They appear 'unclean', almost unsavory, and I think I saw one of them neglect to pay for her Orange Julius. Bunch of no-good-niks. You know the type."
Time to strike the set. Now, where did I park you?
I've nearly got a full tank of fuel but somewhere along the way I'm going to have to sing for my supper, that is if I'm planning on eating sometime in the next three days, and coming out the other end of this weird ass parade and wild ride alive.
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tf#5: Henry Miller wrote this and I'm fortunate enough to have lived this little homily. And survived. I think.
*
5
C r o s s e d C o u n t r y
Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and
nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous and patient.
Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
Cross country traveling, so many stories, everyone has theirs, and they're all important. To them. And maybe a few family members well rehearsed in counterfeiting feelings, who put on a caring face to receive drab data at graduations, weddings and funerals.
"Excuse me sir, can you tell me which time zone I'm in now?"
"Look a here kiddo, there's only one REAL time zone; this one." His mid-western droll amazingly helpful.
"Uh, all righty then. Hey, you, um, sell those things that help people when they're driving on long trips?"
"Pepto Bismo? Yeah, right in the aisle over there."
"No no no, the little vitamins, you know, the quicker-picker-uppers? Truckers always take them."
"Bounty Paper Towels?"
Is he kidding? We're not speaking the same language. I'm left to offer mute movements, a charade jiggling back and forth, eyes rolling around in my head, flailing arms and chattering teeth which illustrate what medication I mean. "Oh that stuff. FDA's been on our backs. We're not really supposed to sell dat. We only 'loud to sell it by the case load, ya understand." My look asks for more.
"Well, you see we can't sell it to indiveedual-like single customers. The gov'ment think it'll discourage the buya, ya see if..."
"Yes, that'll do just fine. If you could just bring the crate out to the trunk. Great.
Now, let me see here my good man, I've got postage stamps, food stamps, my Chevron card of course..."
My morally vacant and greasy gas station anthropoid gave me a toothy leer, but accepted my pathetic currency, wished me a bon voyage and I was off again.
I want to stop everywhere and explore. This feeling of freedom is intoxicating: top down, tunes so, so loud, whizzing through states, spun on my own version of speed; these little sparkplugs picked up at monkey boy's pit stop that promise pep aren't hurting any as far as making the trip skate along briskly. (Are these black beauties supposed to make your heart do this? Ask Dr. Dave when I see him. I'm sure it's safe, or how could they sell such things?)
I'm on my own, on my way, and what I say goes. I punch no clock today.
I decide to disrobe entirely while driving: I'm goddamn hot and want to feel the sun everywhere, on me. Maybe it'll help my body repair, all that Vitamin D and stuff, and no one'll see. I joke my car is now a nudy-colony-for-recovering-Coppertone-ingesting-vampires-in-the-Addict-Relocation-Program. (Which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist.)
"Sir, you were driving 165 through a construction zone. I've had the siren on for ten minutes back there, couldn't ya hear me? And in THIS state people wear clothes when they drive."
My dreamy scene (whatever state I'm in) interrupted by some dim-witted Mountie, some open wound needing to fill a quota, robbing me of my escapist nostalgia - I assign him the role of a stark backdrop, a pedestrian panorama (He's Colonel Mustard to me, but less German.)
My friendly banter while unraveling maps from other states to cover up and hide my shame: "Bonjour, mon ami, that is one hell of a scooter you got back there, Deater-Hosen." My vehicle may have flown through their capital a snippet of a percentage north of the speed limit and true, every stitch of clothing I'd put on for the day was tossed in the back seat, but who'd think this act would have brought about sirens and condescending looks from pissed-off patrollers? There were no signs announcing, KEEP CLOTHES ON WHILE DRIVING, no picture of say, a grinning Amish lady with a red X (or javelin) through her, holding up some shirts. Where was that sign, huh? Nowhere. I don't need a lacrosse field of crop triangles or an island of Easter Bunny monsters to hit me over the head with a clue, but a warning would have been nice, speed limit-wise, drive-by-wise, clothes-wise.
I'm convinced there is a spirit that breathes somewhere here, a soul tranquil and untroubled, hidden in these far off hilltops and vistas, but I'm promptly disappointed; they speak to me (and strangely sound like me) these mountains, and concede they are broken, blistered and over-tired from the multitudes of hungry tourists' eyes looking to extract something worthwhile. They declare they are fraudulent and meaningless, standing by, docile, clumped together, having given up trying to be something more than what they are: recipients of embarrassing salutes from Foster-Grant-wearing-fuck-head-Smokey-banditos-of-purgatory. Through trying to explain all this to the reptilian constable, I can see he's not quite getting it. (He's as lost in my international rhetoric as I am.)
"Having a license is a privilege and 'round here, we don't drive like that, mister, but I guess you're a long way from home, eh?" trailing off chuckling, tail in hand, drunk on donuts and the heady promise of sickly-cellophaned white bread sandwiches, leftover from some surreal suburban John Waters-like PTA type deal.
The times I have been stopped by pestering piglets, they're not certain what to do with me. They sure look funny to me though, all portly and packed in, all unaware of what their utility belts are truly capable of. Now, if they had capes and masks, maybe pirate swords, vials of truth serum or MDMA (proper pills) that would be something. But as it stands this one just bores me as I play atop it all, thank myself and speed off leaving Captain Sensible The Fully Clothed Commando behind in a cloud of dust. I love it when others unknowingly make parodies of themselves. I won't do any real hard time for the multiple car crimes, this a relief, as I look (and feel) drab in stripes and bruises.
I've left a few messages back West, the constituents of quickly dimming crevices in my memory now made aware I'm on the wheelchair ramp of life and haven't yet succumbed to the condor devourings so possible in these parched and wicked wastelands. I'm halfway gone, criss- crossing solitarily through, in hopes of making it safely across the border, returning to some sort of home base, some headquarters that may or may not still exist, me, the great divided one. I really can't imagine what somebody would do if they ran out of gas in these parts - flag down murderers and rapists and local-yokels with pitchforks to assist? Just don't let the tank drop below a quarter so I don't have to contend with all that. Being fuelless out on one of these barren but slick seemingly endless highways would drown this whole business of freedom I'm just getting used to. Can't remember if I'm insured. I can find no information in this glove box to tell me one way or another. I guess I'm on my own if I get stuck. Like that's a switch.
Equipped with more to remember and sort out then there is to look forward to, I'm removing the bandages more and more as I feel the Eastern seaboard getting closer to my leaky heart. My companion, the sun, still beats down on me with all kinds of reminders, while I zip through what must have been ghost towns, some boasting of populations in the hundreds, trying to let the car stereo blast away at my own emptiness and solitude, as well as the people who take themselves too seriously - humourless dark dogs who don't know what to do with themselves...this sorry consensus fills the whole continent, no one is immune to the poisons that seep into human hearts and minds from the periphery. Small minded un-musical, non-writer types in front of their cornfields and tar paper shacks motion to me to lower the volume that announces I've arrived, fearful I may stop and ask to stay the night, them putting hands over their ears, hiding rosey-cheeked, all-too-curious daughters back in their barns, returning my wave, their blank empty faces saying, "Yes, hello to you too, Mister-Big-city-fuck-wad, just keep on going, that's right."
This eccentric country which thrives too sickeningly on conformity, shouldn't but still does surprise me. All this I thought of gazing vast and vividly, staring simultaneously at everything and nothing, it seemed, towards the breezy, unforgiving countryside, hunting for answers but finding none, for a lifestyle that would make some sense, still elusive, and me, once again, coming up short, for multiple reasons.
Freedom to me was knowing the nature... the essence, of funny, and I'd picked up a little of that free falling feeling along my life's (dis)course...now with my head flapping in the open breeze, I was unstoppable.
*Note: just what's in these truck driver keeper-uppers?
Where should I lay my head this evening, I wonder? How much longer can I stay alive along this highway, this hotbed of rural activity, before either me or my broken motorized metaphor give out? I pullover and glance at the Helpful Hints Travel Log Book packed affectionately by my latest sponsor. These poor pamphlets are dreadfully out of date and behind the times.
Do you think you may have a problem with drugs or alcohol?
H . A . L . T.
Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired?
Ask yourself if you are any of these: it could be the reason you
are craving your drug of choice.
Let's see now, I'm most of these things a good chunk of the time, so where does that leave us? My sponsor said, "Plan ahead," and as my very best thinking got me in this mess, I'd better heed someone else's words for a change. I should make a reservation; these past weeks of sleeping in the car have saddled me with car-mopius osteoporosis and a whooping cough. Hopefully the worst of me - along with all my long term and recently contracted torments and grievances with just about everybody - is long behind me. Things have got to change. I want to and I can do better. Is that a vulture circling overhead?
*Note: maybe call ahead for a prescription, and a booster shot AND look into hunting down the proper ID required to obtain a membership card at the library.
*
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