BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD

31. BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD :

---THE KILLING -
And if bad drives out good which it surely does than we’re really in trouble deep (‘do not move let the wind speak THAT is Paradise’) or as Hemingway his’self said : "Posterity can take care of herself or FUCK Herself" but why the little plane overhead was dragging that along as a banner in flight was beyond me low flying plane in beleaguered airspace and all that and then I remembered again something old Ted Meaning had said to me that night after we ran from the pier where there had been a killing he’d turned to me I remembered out of breath and all as we had just sat down on a park bench along the Hudson River there somewhere towards downtown sweating and nervous and all and he simply turned and said (and I remember it reminded me of Nick Tosches a kid from Blair Road out by the Jersey junkyards I used to know) he said : "I was eleven years old the first time I killed somebody and I remember it like yesterday and it’s never left me little fucking dumb bastard that I was and the kid was maybe two years older than me and on a rainy and overcast afternoon I was walking near the glass factory on a deserted street but the old factory was more like a glass dump with high rusted corrugated tin fences swelling and sagging from the big heaps of shattered glass that had long ago burst and overflowed from them and no one ever seemed to work there and there were no signs of industry just the endless slag heaps of waste and abandonment and the windy and driven junk that got blown around and twisted and left wherever it ended up until that next time it was blown around or twisted even tighter onto poles and objects and everything had lost its color and shape as I guess sunlight fades even glass over time amberyellowbluegreen like some apothecary nightmare of the mind but we always called it like everybody else still ‘the Glass Factory’ and those were the good old days too when you could look downtown to the farthest ends and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age when urban blight was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a picture-book and that blight consisted happily of abandoned or bustling warehouses with trucks coming or going or left there leaning on broken chassis and flattened tires and decrepit looking busted-out windshields and broken doors and vacant lots and decaying piers and alleys and the endless treasure-trove of everything but now that whole downtown vista idea has been destroyed and dominated by immense structures and buildings and spires of absolute corporate ugliness or bureaucratic blandness and that mediocrity rises upon landfills and the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories either way have become luxury properties with 'living spaces' and the vacant lots have been filled with more of the same and the alleys have been blocked off and the piers and waterfront decay have vanished and been replaced by 'friendly recreational spaces' and dismal 'esplanades' and even the children are no longer children but blobs of New York Times 'Living' section papier-mâché cut-outs a mush-product of 'parenting' amidst 'living spaces' all leashed and tethered for 'quality time' in 'correctly structured activities' and there’s nowhere to prowl nowhere to run no imagination to do any of it with anyway and no freedom certainly a lifeless sterility straight from a fit and proper womb so anyway this kid came up to me and took out a knife and put it towards my face as he said "hey kid wanna’ die?" and I could tell he meant it so in my own way answering that taunt I’d decided maybe NO I didn’t right then care to and only having memories of uncles and brothers with stories of thuggery and pay-backs in the family-way of doing business as such I lunged at the kid knocking him over and grabbed the knife from him and plunged it deep twice into his chest and as he fell screaming and bleeding to die I ran like the Devil myself and threw the knife into a nearby sewer and ran home to my uncle’s butcher shop and never said a word again even after hearing of the dead kid they found down along Walston Street by the big gate and I’ve found over time these many years now that you really can bury things deep inside and put them out of mind and even though they’re always there as a ghost of memory or some engrained reference the rest of your life CAN go on all around it silent and strong and aware" and that’s what he told me as I remember it all and it didn’t make much sense to me then and makes only a little more now and I really didn’t know whether to believe him or not but it reminds me of something else I myself did.

---I ASK YOU NOW (Poetic License) -
‘I think I am therefore I am’ it was something close to what Descartes said but it wasn’t for sure exact however it made good sense and I’d always wanted to DO a mercy killing that is a KILLING with a better reason or a killing wherein like in old Hebrew law a man was allowed to take vengeance upon anyone under his own roof and that included killing the ‘other’ in your own house which is the point of view I’d taken with Aryundhati Roy who was an Indian writer of some note with very pronounced left-wing leanings who went about spouting various anti-American vocal sanitations and intonations and prevarications and whatever else you want to call them NOW none of that stuff normally bothers me since as I am already being one of those who harbors vast and varied suspicions myself about the treacly tendentiousness of this vaguely myopic Amerikan experiment founded as it is on the THREE L’s they being lucre lies and deceit and I know that’s not three L’s but I can’t very well use something that doesn’t make any sense merely because it begins with an L for it would have to have some bearing and meaning on the concept and I ASK YOU NOW of the following do any ? longevity latitude lamenting lounging lugubriousness lying (of course a repeat) lamentations liberty (which doesn’t here fit) and anyway if I looked upon this entire thing as a nation and viewed it as my ‘roof’ then I was entitled to take action in my way against someone who offends or defames or declaims against it RIGHT so I did but the story is much longer than that and has to do with the United Nations and the headquarters building at east 42nd Street and a conference at which she was speaking and the comments which she there spoke and the walkway I got her at and the ‘Swords into Plowshares’ sculpture across the street at Dag Hammersjkold Plaza and the elevated stairway right there and the open expanse of sight which I utilized etc. and let us not forget my fleet and swift escape running carefully along and through the area along Tudor City to make my getaway and the means by which I re-integrated myself into the crowds in midtown and slowly and gently made my way back towards Union Square along its upper end and the way in which I found the empty loft to be still empty and which thereby allowed me entry into it and a place to lay low and hide out right afterwards BUT I’LL GET INTO ALL THAT soon enough if you just listen up and let me first do my open-air homework for if all of this is a confession than I might as well confess and liberally apply quotations and stories along the way so as to keep this interesting and intelligent and uplifting at the same time RIGHT! and if as I said before the BAD DRIVES OUT THE GOOD as it always does than it is all the more certain that I must tell you and share with you all these activities and imaginings which have made up my latter life and another thing about that bad driving out good is that like the least common denominator of anything it always happens that way and it does most certainly destroy the life we lead or try to and the certainty of a ruined and fallen culture with but so little time left is and can be seen at every juncture we go for there is nothing left of any value and even the good is no longer good but soured by rage and I attest hereto that had Mr. George Washington ever lately returned he’d most probably fight for the other side and had Mr. Abraham Lincoln ever returned he’d restore some form of the Indian Nation instead of ripping it up and over in his native Kentucky thought of even though he is as an Illinoisian which only came later WOODSMAN INDIAN SLAYER and everything else (but not against Aryundhati Roy for that’s another kind of Indian you see) and I stand up whenever I can for Amerika for this is the land where it all happens and even the land of the free gets the KGB when they flee (poetic license).