MY DREAM OF THE LINGERING PARIS

85. MY DREAM OF THE LINGERING PARIS:

I crossed the border with a certain boredom - as if one place or the other wouldn't really matter - and this particular crossing was funny in that MOST people otherwise would think nothing of it but my mind was racing as if in wartime at the very end of WWII when fractious border controls were everywhere in flux and people were running scared between provinces and towns and areas of one allegiance or another and everything crumbling around them and Liberation was coming and everyone soon would have to pay for the actions they'd taken during occupation and all the rest and by contrast this stupid little passage from one place to another was actually nothing and had no consequence and was done constantly all the time and no one said a word and because of that I decided to WALK not ride over the bridge just to see what the feeling could be like and to mingle with all the others doing the same and I quickly got to the other side and the sign said 'Welcome blah blah' like usual and then it said - facing the other way - 'No Horses on the Bridge' by which of course I was greatly relieved and then it said 'Walk Bicycles do NOT ride on Bridge' which in turn confused me as there were cars endlessly driving by slowly and people walking to and fro and what difference would a few bicycles make ? but I soon learned the reason was that there was really no place FOR the bicycles to ride and the tendency was for groups of bicycle riders to come all at once - part of group rides - and it often really did cause problems so now the policy was that the bicycles needed to be walked across with the rider also (of course) walking alongside the bike (which actually doubles that little bit of traffic each time but whatever) and it was all getting way too complicated so I let it go at 'glad for horses' and walked on and then I remembered pictures I'd seen of the Post-Liberation Paris crowd and the groups of women with shaved heads whose heads had been shaved precisely because they were partisans or traitors or whatever and had been found to be commingling or sleeping or whatever with the Germans the Occupiers the bastards the late LOSERS of this war and so much for COLLABORATORS they should die and all these women had their heads shaved and were marched like prisoners themselves across some Parisian bridge and into the town- square with people jeering and local villagers from other places shouting and spitting and I figured how weird that must have been - violating something crossing borders of the mind making the wrong choice (like bicycling over the bridge) and getting caught because of it but - I also figured - it couldn't be SOO bad : after all hair grows back they were probably lucky to have sex during wartime and were - at some point - all the happier for it too.
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And then also the smoke lingered everywhere and the ruins and the crumbling battered buildings still smoldering with pockmarks and bomb-craters and the open ruins of walls and doorways stairways and alleys - everything all messed up and almost but not quite rubble and it went on for street after street in city-centers and town-squares and churches and graveyards and memorials to this or that previous carnage and the parklands turned to waste and people sleeping wherever they could and everything together resembled anarchy but in some ways a GOOD anarchy something without any rules and references and with the past all gone and no 'return to yesterday' on everyone's mind just instead the mindless wide-open space of the NEW future or whatever it was to be and the old bridges if still connected to something went to their other sides which were sometimes still in place and other times rubble just the same and where there were no bridges left the people improvised and rafts and barges and boats and anything else was used to cross and the passage was whatever it needed to be - free or a fraction or whichever came first - but all of that was then and today's little bridge crossing BY COMPARISON A JOKE acts as nothing so much as a spree a welcome walk to something else and that's the way it is these days HORSES and BICYCLES be damned for no one makes a move nowadays to do anything out of the ordinary ever at all.

SO MUCH FOR THE FIREMAN'S PICNIC

84. SO MUCH FOR THE FIREMAN'S PICNIC:

Lady MacBeth Clara Barton and Abigail Adams I SWEAR they were all there but in the pouring rain everything else was cancelled and the truck from the caterer with its two attendants was being re-packed with all the provisions they'd earlier taken out and the beer truck just idling never opened a tap and I figured maybe they were all rescheduled for another day or tomorrow or NEXT week whatever - for as it was only three cars had shown up - but whichever it was the picnic never got started and everything was soaking wet in a current downpour set to last for hours and the all-day rain was the forecast to beat and not just today but like for the next three and a few women were talking with animation but laughing too - they were the ones who'd arranged everything and the ones too who'd made the decision to cancel (what else could they do?) and now in their shorts and flabby arms and leisure clothing they found some pleasure at the least in being together and making light of disaster - seeing as money was at stake entry fees pre-registrations food outlays re-scheduling fees and all of that let alone the resubmission of a raindate for the use of the park grounds - IF there was no conflict with some other group - it all had to be considered worked out re-done and carefully once more publicized so everyone knew : "rain is such a pain in the ass" one said and then another said "well it's one of those things - what do we do now ? what are you going to do today?" and a third said "back to the usual for me - taking care of my mother SHE'S got Alzheimer's - it's horrible you sit around watching someone turn into someone they never were" and someone else said 'yes I know it's always so sad..." as she stared off into space.

DOWN BY THE OLD POOL HALL (NYC, 1967)

83. DOWN BY THE OLD POOL HALL (NYC, 1967):

Her name was Carla Manners and I don't think she had any and she had an Oedipal flash with the pool cue (it was said) but I never knew what that meant and most of the other fools misunderstood it anyway and they always seemed to think - as they watched her contort and stretch over the table to make various shots - that what it was was that she had an 'edible ass' with a pool cue or something and NO ONE ever got to the bottom of all that and it was usually decided anyway that girls and women weren't meant to play pool but since they couldn't accept that why not let them and that was enough for all the lechers to just sit and gawk - and it never made sense to me and I never liked pool let alone watching it but this place was a haven in its way for the sort of distorted fools I'd taken to being with and it was winter time and all - and I always figured what the philosophers of the pool room were trying to say was that maybe she wanted to KILL her daddy with a pool cue but I just never asked and let it go at that and right next to this place up the stairway and next door over was a jazz loft which was always frequented by be-bop types and slick black dudes and wan white (and I mean w-h-i-t-e) dudes with a terrible pallor and their music was slick fast and progressive too and it always made me nervous to hear - as did any jazz - with all that peripatetic staccato flash and speed notes and crazy drumming on half-beats and all that and I never enjoyed jazz in any way especially when they mangled and speeded-up and twisted-up current pop standards - it just never made sense to me - and I always thought (much like in pool when someone 'cleans the table') that someone ought to have had 'cleaned the slate' too with all that jazz crap but it never happened they just went on and on and some of them did get famous a bit or for a while at least until they died of something stupid or horrible or whatever and others lingered a tiny bit and died right there never leaving the loft - so to speak - and their sound was just as quickly diminished but you know then how JAZZ acquired its legend and without so much as a definition or a credo it became a reference point for hipness and music and coolness and score - and that too was all stuff I never understood if you can dig me daddio there too - but the days of real jazz were numbered : short sweet stiff staccato and soon severed but the stupid pool table lingered and even into the late 70's they were still making documentaries about pool halls and the real leftover remnants of real old life and living New York in them and NO MATTER WHAT it was all bullshit and crap because most of the time there was someone getting their face or ass pasted or whipped in one of the corners or some two or three guys forcing someone else to jerk them off or blow them or some girl to let them fuck her over and over on a rotating basis while the hustler's game of filthy pool went on in the center rooms and everyone occasionally visited the side office where Carla or Marlene or whomever was sure as shit stretched out like a turkey and getting her rock solid cunt fucked to smithereens for 85 bucks or whatever it took and that's how it went and that's sort of what the documentary Jew bullshitters always avoided mentioning and the crap they peddled about NYC and its wondrous underground of pool halls and jazz dens was always pure bullshit death crap lying mother-fucking greed merchants errands to Hell but it went on and I was here and there privileged to witness whatever of it I wanted 726 W. 29th Street 1812 W. 31st Street Porcine's Palace 41 W 21st - I can name you ten places just like that and all the same and they're ALL gone now probably wiped and finished and coated over in today's plastic muck of daring and derring-do and bullshit some more but WHATEVER the sailors are the same the hookers the whores and the runaways too and 'nothing ever changes either in Hell or Hades or Harlem or here' as Eddie Brinckmann had been heard to say cleaning up tables ten times a day.

THROWING UP FROM THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

82. THROWING UP FROM THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND:

"I can get myself up but not up off the ground and if I did you'd have to know anyway that I'd support your cause the way a tree limb supports a rope at a hanging - all that and not much more" I said that to the guy at Union Square handing out leaflets for some cause or another – something about ending war stop brutality bring the troops home now and all that crap without meaning and he just looked at me squarely and smiled some stupefied dumb ass smile the sort of smile these people always make the Union Square Time Killers I call them for that’s all they are – wasted young stupid kids irresponsible and waiting for some more of their support money to come from one or another or both parents so they can continue their respite from real life a little bit more and then they all turn out anyway to be huge corporate wastes-of-time ladder-climbers ass-kissers lovers of procedure anyway or if not that then vapid archaic advertising whores people selling shit and talking the same and I’d have much rather punched the asshole right in the face but figured he’d cry : and then – again just like that – I turned around and went right back to him and said (just before walking away) "did you know that Aristophanes’s Lysistrata said that women do so well at logic because they have all that experience detangling and delousing – whereas men (who are after all impatient creatures) just like to wave their shields around…"
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Mother Mary Mathilda McCree – if she were running for President – herself couldn’t do any worse than what scenes I’ve seen thrown up on the moving screen of circumstance lately – they’ve taken down the oldest wall in Chelsea and painted the remnants pink they’ve shuttered the back doors of the old hotel and barricaded the loonies inside and the guy behind the counter at Quixote still grimaces every time someone new comes in BECAUSE in his mind he’s supposed to believe that HE knows everyone or believes that he’s SUPPOSED to know every one - which concept by the way is outrageous and cuts one out of a really lot of chance happenings in a city like this - closed mind shuttered brain little grasp of reality and all that…BUT no matter there because that’s what’s ended up of the society we once had and if it weren’t for anything else I’d just shut my eyes and coast out to sea from some eastside pier but the problem now is there’s not so many of them left anyway and the sea has started to stink (and speaking of stink listen to this litany) : SECTION A SUBJECT 7 - [things I've heard in passing] : A. 'if wishes were horses beggars would ride' B. 'all energy is of a sexual nature - not mainly but EXCLUSIVELY - and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing it is absolutely no longer good for anything' C. 'consumer capitalism has turned youth into a supremely desirable commodity and has little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors - inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth and the pleasures associated with it' D. (an explanation given by someone of the reason for his nausea at the sight of a seedy street whore at his ready) 'overwhelmed by the pestilential odor that rose from between her thighs - a mixture of the musty smell of shit and rotten fish' E. 'you are a near autistic container of affective emptiness' : and the sea really HAS started to sink - shoals turned to flamed piles of dead shells huge fish washed up with enormous eyes slowly blinking in some wonder of a strange circumstance horseshoe crabs in lots of twenty dead and dry on the white-hot sand and flies in hundreds buzz in for the carcass field and all the while - at the Yacht Club atop the bluff - people sit at tables drinking cocktails in the open-air and gazing out to sea they wistfully speak to each other of things which have passed or their deals yet to come and the frequent sea breezes soothe their faces and the swirly gulls go swirling by while down below others walk along the walkway - stern or easy - looking out to sea themselves or watching jellyfish and schools of fish below the water line - just almost opaque - invisibly scurry through green-grey water and still no matter what else I can sense I am in a foreign land some place of another accent and another people altogether and it's all about seeing and it's all about hearing and observing that which is and it's MAYBE MOST all about BEING somewhere I have chosen to be.

THE AGE OF IRONY...

81. THE AGE OF IRONY HAS TAKEN AWAY FROM US CANDID MOMENTS (my slice of life story):

“Show me the girl whose pants I can see and the waistband of what’s underneath” – that was all the guy said but he meant it and I thought to myself ‘he’s pretty damn sure of that which he wants’ and I chuckled just the same as I was walking through a huge yard of old statuary - markers and angels and little lambs and fountains and everything made of some concrete or another and taken from ruined homes and statuary gardens and put here all for sale so everyone could browse (in some pestilential town of arts and crafts and food and wine) and cars slowed by and someone was looking and two old gents ambled off together talking in earnest about whatever it was they were saying - the one guy with a big white Panama hat and the other with only white pants and some expensive pink shirt which showed off his chest - it was funny in a way to see to two of them together there - and like funeral markers in a tent-meeting of long ago it was as if everyone would be willing to sing if someone had only asked – but no matter for I wasn’t lonesome nor sorry for anything right then and I too watched myself watching and knew just what they meant by whatever they said : the Grand Marshall of the whole shebang came forth to see who needed help (she wore broad khaki pants and a shirt like a farmer) and in her big black workman’s boots she stepped right over the rocks to where the other lady was who wanted the sunburst ‘for my alcove on the eastern wall where it will catch the rising sun’ and they talked about how much it cost and how to transport it wherever and agreement was reached and they both walked away - one digging though a handbag while the other scribbled a note.

SHAD FISHING IS THE ERRONEOUS TOPIC

80. SHAD FISHING IS THE ERRONEOUS TOPIC:

Most often you don't find people in the city talking about fish or fishing - as sport that is - not that they don't for sure jabber on and on at Citarella or Balducci's or wherever about this or that fish to eat or cook or prepare or enjoy : Fulton Fish Market itself be damned : it having left the East River like the Dodgers left the streets of Brooklyn back in '57 or '58 whichever it was but so what who cares everything else has left and the only battering ram left is some rotten Brooklyn Ale or Junior's Cheesecake or some such crap the stuff that people talk about the legends of food the doyennes of flavor and aroma the slob-fed fist-fighting food of all New York and FISH like the Bible mentions is nowhere to be found - other than simply FOOD it's not anything else and said without saying it's eaten without thought and the people milling around Barry's Canisteo Fish Hut were talking Shad and how they're running and where the Narrowsburg waters meet the best spot along the Delaware for frothing the schools as they come by and then it's all trucked on ice we're told for the trip quick into Manhattan to be sold like gold or any other slimy minion of the watery way and God Himself were he to stop here along the way to look back (just once) would utter something like 'what have I done' were he to see the rotten mess that's been made of things : and Hammurabi would also most certainly be ready to talk and eat reed-fish or whatever the catch is in the dreary dens and swamps of old lower eastside waterways ('didja' know he lived here once ? had a shack by 9th Street along the oldest waterway in town and spent many a day sucking for porgies at the old Collect Pond - back in the days when it was really big before the blocks and city streets came in') and anyway I once saw twelve men fishing at that very same spot and they were fishing for soles but came up with nothing but shoes and later they each became fishers of men and we all know that story - voracious with appetite and sorry of state too and then they tried to walk on water but wound up drowning and the fire brigade had to fish them out of the very sorry waters before they were washed into the East River and then to all oblivion too but we saved them by word and by right and they're now are enshrined somewhere up in the high Bronx at the Hall of Fame - really just a walkway with about a hundred busts of once-famous NY people but that's how things go and that's how they are: and everywhere too.
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(Some guy who killed a pumpkin pie - and he had broad shoulders too - was running from the scene and people were running after him yelling 'he's a murderer!' and as they ran they were throwing piles of carnations and flower petals leaving a wreckish wake of color and scent behind and all the while heading right for him was a large truck which ran right into him and ran him down and he simply then got up and began reciting - mantra like - 'I will never do that again I will never do that again I will never do that again...' and the crowd cheered wildly).
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"They'd never lasso Sue like that or leave such things in doubt either for really who WAS that masked man who said he was a doctor and took the ropes away and I never really have liked the circus anyway nor clowns but they never bothered me either way - neither scary nor sad is the best way to put it - and I remember a guy once named 'Dr. Freshman' too he played at being a clown at kid's events and parties and stuff but he ALWAYS smelled badly of garlic and I could never figure out why but if someone like that could get close to kids than think what an impression he might have made on hundreds of little lives but when you're a doting mother or parent you never think of that stuff for your kids - you just want the entertainment but none of that stuff ever works out anyway - think of the killers and weirdos you've known" and of course someone had to say "I've never known any so what's that say about me?" and the speaker nodded gracefully and said "you're just lucky I guess".
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'This is way too fast for me.'

START SMALL

79. START SMALL:

"I'm giving you a hundred dollars and I'll sign it for you - like some anybody famous bullshit nothing I'm offering you the future or at least the idea of the future as you buy it - I'm an artist and anything I do can be made to work for you for money fame or the most egregious tactic of all - notoriety and if you believe in me this can all work" and that was the essence of some putrid form of conceptual art back then whenever it was - wall hangings with rope and lights and pencil drawings scribbled into a scrawl with horoscopes and birthdates and newsreel images of Cambodia and Ankor Watt and everything like that while chocolate-covered music (I'd guess) sounded from the yellow amplifiers and a few skinny girls danced near naked in flesh-colored mesh from two pedestals set high and any man in the room if you could see them would only be seen from under their chins - as their depraved voracious heads were pointed up and watching pussy on parade and dancing high above their heads : artscene 101 artworld as it is today mother's milk of inspiration and every man (in some oblique reference to Islam itself) intends to get a virgin before he leaves for home - and then this artist guy comes over and with papers in hand says "I profess to tell you here and now that if you buy something today and sign right here I can guarantee you a forty percent return over the next five years - as simple as that - on any art you buy today" and I told him I was 'fucking astounded' at all that because I'd never figured art could appreciate so fast and that "I always thought art was to BE appreciated and not bought to appreciate" or something like that but he didn't understand either and the point was lost but I couldn't stand the guy anyway mainly because he was wearing leotards for NO reason I could see and they were colored with printed 'paint-splashes' as a motif and the entire thing looked pretty sick and the guy himself was no one I'd care to lunch with anyway so I said (with some affected drawl) "I'm gonn'a hafta' pass because I can't find anything I like" which was - by the way - as true as one can get without lying and so it was and he smiled back and said "suit yourself there's a lot more where you come from and by the way your eyebrows should really be trimmed" and then some girl came over and she was wearing furs and I said "is that stuff real?" meaning the furs but she opened the coat and - wearing nothing underneath - stuck her tits in my face and said "if you mean these honey they're just as real as anything else and they'll probably last longer too" and I said "thanks for the info" and kept on smiling and then she bent over slightly and took my hand and kissed my face and licked my cheek before leaving and if that was some new form of high-art style I figured to have it framed ONLY if I could but she was gone - into a reverie of smoke and noise and alcohol too - and only much later did I actually see her talking deeply with someone else (a 'fur merchant from Bratislavia' I was told) and then I figured that if one doesn't have a head for business one also probably doesn't have a head for art either (but maybe that's why dollars are green in a monochrome way) and I really didn't want to talk to anyone any more so I sat down by the broad-cloth-covered window where it bayed above the street and sitting there like Poe himself I rifled through the pages of some guestbook to see if I'd signed in (had not) and so I did - Edgar Alan Poe was what I wrote - to be sure they'd know I'd been there.

EVERYTHING SEEMED ABNORMAL

78. EVERYTHING SEEMED ABNORMAL:

"I wasn't trying to do everything right and I made every effort to be strange and distant but the people around were all able to tell nonetheless that I really was from distant and farther places and I went to the public reading of the Book of Job (staged by The Redemptorist Players of Leyers Green) and they were wearing period cloaks and garments - which was crazy in itself as what 'period' exactly is Job? - and the audacity of them just even saying that stuff threw me for a loop because it wasn't like a fashion set-piece and the people who come to this stuff could care less too and some guy I heard said 'I much prefer my Job in a suit and tie or - if you must - a farmer's costume' and I laughed that one off because even HE was wearing any old clothes and didn't seem to concern himself with that - so I just sat there and watched and it went off OK almost like some Shakespearian play or something even though I knew it was all made up" now the guy saying this was talking to a girl sitting across from me at some downtown station and I do often manage to overhear the darndest stuff but these two I figured to be Hoboken-bound theater arts types or something because they certainly didn't look like summer tourists or winter soldiers either and she was mildly attractive actually and as I watched I was able to sense (I thought) her place her age her youthful story-line too and her name was Mellicent (the notebook said) and she never said a word back to him just nodded and he seemed to go on but with that body-shop air that a man shouldn't have - in some way indeterminate - which is I guess (along with the subject matter) where I got the idea of theater-arts types because who else would care about that stuff except maybe some proselytizers or walking Jesus people - which type one meets often enough on these sorts of platforms anyway and they're always handing out flyers or pamphlets with this or that summation or Bible-lesson and it always seems distracting to me but there are other sorts of people who seem to think this was selected JUST for them by Jesus himself and they then feel personally enriched by the time and the place of THAT person finding them with THAT particular message (in that respect too it's no different than the fortune-cookie crowd which can always be found swooning over the 'precise directness' of that pointed fortune-cookie lesson as it relates to THEM alone) but anyway that's the way of the world no matter what else and most of those people are the types of people sorely in need and pretty recognizable for that anyway - indigent nearly wasted useless burned-out or tired and unsound don't you see - and one night I remember I was dreaming of a gas station and at that gas station there were lots of cars awaiting service and gas and every attendant at this place - working feverishly to keep up - was someone I knew or had met and therefore it was a huge knot of people working and each turned a face up as I saw them and they were exactly themselves whoever they were and at that moment each of them was dispensing gas or whatever to a 'vehicle' which - rather than actually being a 'vehicle' was really instead a something which contained for me their entire life-stories and every attribute of themselves by which they were recognizable to me and it was funny because everyone wore at the same time their 'perfect face' and 'perfect' color - the very hue and being by which - deep in my mind - they were made up so as to be perfectly themselves : and much like these two they were essentially 'fueling' themselves so as to go on and continue within my recognition of them too so I just let it go and I watched and they were still there some fifteen minutes later and he was still talking "the idea was that we were supposed to not be able to recognize the emotion involved just hear it and respond only to what we heard - with you know facial muscles and reactions and such and it worked out pretty well except right then is when John spilled the milk (which he was supposed to bend over with a give to the imaginary cat in a later scene) by hitting it with his arm and it went all over his face instead but we weren't supposed to laugh even though none of this was in the script so we couldn't understand how a 'preordained' reaction to something unusual occurring was supposed to have been figured out ahead of time..."