THE OPPOSITE OF FATE

122. THE OPPOSITE OF FATE:

All I can say is don't go racing for conclusions before all the information is in - you'll be fooled like a fool and look like one too - and there's a supple movement within the mind which knows just what's about to come and come it does - one way or the other down up or over sideways or frontal silent or loud : step aside or it shall run you down : and in his book entitled Social Contract it was Rousseau who stated 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains' and so is his language and all his deeds and words too for the reflection of one thing strong is in everything else and what is it that keeps MANKIND shouldered with the yoke of burden and responsibility THESE CHAINS so beforehand mentioned ? one is not fit to know but the soul sacred within the place would attest and know distinctly 'these chains are the heart and the heart of toil and sweat as we strain beyond compare in attempting to see all of that which we cannot see' - such a quandary within a paradox of time and material energy perhaps it is THAT which keeps men working - pouring the concrete for bridges and roadways building schools and enforcing their rules erecting to the sky the structured heights of room and office where others so glibly fit in and take their place nodding beneath the lights of some broken-spaced and artificial nonetheless GLOOM - 'but this can't last can it - it all must he dissolved away' (some guy said that falling forward from the roof nearby) and the tin-can collector man alongside me too had just uttered this exchange : "Mister whatever can ya' spare me some change?" and he said that with a nodding head to me of course unknown to him and I whipped out a twenty and put it at his nose and said "see what this is it's yours if you just tell me you believe in something" and he smiled like a slave right back to me and said "yes sir well right now I do believe in you quite well" and I gave him the note and said "be careful with this it might be your last" and he smiled and sauntered away and I figured why not what else should I tell him who wants to hear my fraggy story of woe - no mother no father a life like a horse two trips 'round the world and a passle of learning of this and of that - why begrudge the man his simple pleasures and don't I know I've got the money to expend so IF I DO what of it now and then? (but a part of me wants to say right back 'then why not die while the living's good why just stay and waste it away?' but I shrug and find a stairway to hide in).
-
537 Park Avenue : this doctor had a catharsis and was taken from his office on a stretcher being rolled by two men while a female EMT with a plasma bottle held high walked alongside them and they were all chattering strange numbers and words I could not understand nor recognize but I knew the situation as well as any other for it isn't always that the 'Doctor' of the house goes down as the patient and gets taken away by the ambulance himself and (I wondered) 'where to?' does one go in such a case - the light blue flicker of a computer screen illumined the interior rear of the medical wagon as someone else was crouched at a keyboard plotting in numbers and information and - I'd supposed - awaiting results or instructions back and all this even before they entered the flow of auto traffic which whizzed the street and not knowing where they'd be headed I understood all too well the haste but the same would be said for anything along Park Ave's majestically reputated denizens and doctor's offices and psychiatric couches and chairs : everything medical was here pronounced real and sure and true and actual while to so many others everywhere else in the city it remained a distant fantasy a glimmer of something else a chimera one hoped never to need to face - that chasm that yawping hole that gaping wide-eyed destination DEATH that which slaughters us all - and with no one speaking I kept a watch at the least at what I saw (the langorous rump of the female assitant held the allure of assertion that - to me at least - proved still I was alive!) and they entered their wagon and slammed shut the doors and a siren pronounced its intention to garner attention and away OFF! they sped (sprinkling in between some cars and a lone workman's truck) while faces looked up - that old gent by the median's flowers the woman in a gaudy hat punishing her dog with a leash while looking back to what had occured - but they all still passed as moments and people do : some tidy assertion of sidewalk and premise or occurence and chance or doubt and dishonor and 'there but for fortune' go you or go I.
-
Whatever that all was SOMETHING I knew wasn't right and it seems that - in spite of everything - I've become a man somehow that even I wouldn't like (and this is myself I'm talking about after all) for the lot of other men is beyond me and I therefore remain alone and aloof : I couldn't care less if someone died or was run down by a truck nor would it matter to me if some pernicious plague at this moment came through and wiped out an immediate sixty percent of the world's population especially including all those around me - it simply couldn't matter : for I refuse to believe in the material of this world and the sights and sounds which come with it nor the flagging annoying flapping and cloying tongues of those fellow creatures ceaselessly yowling around me and I read the signs as best I can IN FACT I read everything - William Carlos Williams and his stupid red wagon to his stupid cold plums and Blake and his idiot 'tyger' and Poe and his stupid bird to Whitman with his everyman vague banter and homo-erotic elan FOR NONE OF IT STANDS and it's all filled with crap and perdition and calculated stance and raw ambition - nothing graceful nor meaningful in any of that Emperor of Ice Cream included (and those who insure it too) and just like every koala bear is a girl's cartoon of gentle ease and every pirate or star-warrior marks an aggressive boy's future - so too (for myself) I mark the pages with bookmarks of blood and spots of bile and spittle that dry yellow on the tendentious pages I've read - pencils and pens and the desperations of men - AMERIKA! : for that's what the supermarkets sell and that's what the idiots buy.
-
Sometimes I've got nothing to say and other times I do - not much of a position and pretty useless too.

THE RICOCHET STORY

121. THE RICOCHET STORY (Eddie Zupan, 1968)

On that day the sun rose up behind white cottony clouds and I saw an Irish guy with bullets flying all around - in every direction cops were firing and hiding behind cars - and this Irish guy was short stubby mean and dodging everything and I thought - amidst the flying bullets - 'a real Rick O'Shea this fellow' - and that was the same day I ran into Eddie Zupan a little further downtown - he was a total chain-smoking son of a bitch from Somewhere Falls Somewhere (a place I could never remember) and to me he was just like a Julian of Norwich a crazed saint of the Heavens from the world of a runaway Pascal all sorry and seedy and I always did like the guy and I said "Eddie man what the hell's going on with all the shooting and cop cars and stuff - who's getting the rap for what?" and because I knew he too probably had to hide or was in trouble I waited to see what he'd say and he looked over at me with a cigarette dangling from his lips and the coat collar turned up around his neck and said "listen you didn't even see me and don't know a thing the shit's about to hit the fan and the entire phalanx of bullshit's coming down on us - so forget you saw me OK?" and just like that I realized he was in trouble too and I said "what's up though who did what who got caught?" and he said "the money was bad and they caught the lousy quality at the first place we tried and the stupid fuck was trying to buy a car with cash - a fucking car ! can you believe it?" and I knew what he meant because until then all I'd ever heard from him and his type (including way back up to Tony Main) was that the bad bills they tried to spread were only good if spread sparingly - a ten here a ten there whatever - but now someone had wrecked the whole show by trying to buy something big in one shot with a bunch of bad bills and it was like a reverse bank robbery or something so the cops must have been called and came right down and now the whole rat's nest was infested with flames and bullets too and I decided just to keep on going and the less I stayed around the better it was for me and anyway he didn't want me there - and I never found out right off what happened from that but it was a while before I saw Eddie Zupan again and when I did he was pretty mum and all he said was that 'Rick O'Shea' - that guy I'd seen - was in the clink and clamming up and he'd been given a good beating besides and now the heat was off at least for a while and they were staying real quiet and careful about the money but it was with stuff like that you could never be too careful because once they got your scent there'd be treasury agents everywhere snooping around and watching everything and following up on suspicions and the rest and the best thing was for that guy in prison to just die or get snuffed because the 'less he's alive the less he can talk' - which is the way they put it - so I was never too sorry for any of them and besides they'd never thrown any real dough my way either so tough on them whatever happened and Eddie Zupan no matter he stayed my friend and we talked and I hung around but he was working too at some electronic warehouse mess of a place along Canal Street where he could look responsible and do regular stuff and sort of blend in yet still keep his contacts too - as anyone could 'visit' him in the store and pretend to be doing business - they sold wires and relays and lights and brackets and transformers and all that sort of electronic stuff that never made too much sense to me anyway but it was right along Canal on a big corner and it got lots of people in everyday - cheap prices cut rates and the rest - and at that time there were many early-on electronic hobbyists making prototypes of things - scanners radios computers and all that - so there was always a ready audience and I wouldn't bet it too far from Eddie either to have given out plenty of bad tens or fives or whatever for change too and these people would never know the difference - which was another great reason for working there however he managed it - but we never really talked about that stuff anyway and the most I knew about him was he lived alone somewhere down by West Street or somewhere and his contacts were many but his contacts were few (if you know what I mean) which is how these guys liked to keep things and I always figured him a con-man criminal type anyway but that was OK because he was fun too and the little numbers racket down along there that was going on had him right in the middle of it too and they'd send bums out and old-time losers from the Bowery to carry chits for them and take bets or whatever and I never did know how much of the money bet was really delivered back as winnings but I figured it wasn't much and most of the nearby bars and taverns and barber shops and such they all had people in on it and took bets on numbers and sports and horse races and most anything and kept little record books and the like and there was always someone on the phone about something but nothing bad ever came by and I guess nobody ever had to pay up for anything or get caught either and if it ever was trouble it just some bum or hobo who wound up taking the heat and nobody ever listened to them if they started to talk - not even the cops - because they were just already known as drunks and dazed dumb over-the-hill guys always in trouble over something and never telling it straight : and then I noticed it was the 'Tetrahedon Brass Ensemble' or something like that playing tunes out on the sidewalk in front of Barney Liven's Green Frog Ale House which was a place frequented lots by stockbrokers and those types after market hours and they always threw money in the hats on the sidewalk and all that and the band there was struggling through some sidewalk tunes and most of the people passing just went by - never even looking up - and that made me feel a little bad for the guys but people were always too busy even to notice and they were on their way to or from and going for trains and appointments and stuff or office-to-office and door-to-door with nary a word spoken between and that awesome silence that goes with the tracking of thought and purpose seemed almost breathless in its holy presence but I saw it all as through water and I watched with teary eyes as those same people - over and over - came and went and came and went again and I thought - 'you want to run out and paint like Paul Gaugin ? a way can be found to do that - something like the shedding of skin on a fading horizon which constantly stays ahead and away from you and the closer you think you are getting to it the more it fades and that horizon's one rub is that it's therefore 'always out there' no matter how hard you try to reach it and that quest for it stays steadily ahead of you no matter what but if the end of the world was 'the end of the world' by dimensionality's definition you'd then fall off BUT that is not what happens that is NOT the way it occurs at all and the speeding bullet of experience re-writes the code as quickly as we are running it : time speeds past endings and beginnings alike and there's NOTHING necessary to its form or substance except something more like empty music in some empty wind and God is an empty chair while concept by concept by concept we slink along - investigating the cracks and the absences and the voids while filling them with myth and legend after first finding literally over and over that there's nothing of substance upon which any of it stands and Mythmaking is our flying carpet and it's the basis of all faith too' and I really wanted to say all that to the people passing by but I couldn't and didn't and I knew no one would listen anyway.

A NEW WORD FROM MR. DAEDALUS

120. A NEW WORD FROM MR. DAEDALUS:

- ALL OF THIS WAY TO HEAR MY PALE WORDS (Toynebee's April Gazette):

"['Some people go to school to get strong some to get weak and it makes a big difference for the rest of your life which of those two options you select - if either - because the structure you're about to build gets built around that' - so said Mr. Daedalus on the fifth day of the week and if there was never anything else to balance the wheel there was always an incessant jabbing with the sword of one thing or another - a poke in the ribs for good measure and a look up the young girls' dresses too if it became possible : a long week in the mountains with a stablemate of Jeffrey Kahn and all they ever did was talk about girls and tits and how to make out in the back of a car 'some say that foreign cars are too small for that and you know man it's been PROVEN that a Renault 4CV is by far too small to have sex in' but of course trying to tell that to 50,000 citizens of France would get you nowhere but laughed out to dimanche and beyond and the only thing that works is comedy - one joke after the other - just like the mime who plays endlessly over and over in Central Park - one or the other mime anyway they're all so much alike - all you can do is shrug and laugh it off while parlaying some inoffensive smirk into a circus act of wonder and awe and even if they DO mean to be tragic like some stupid clown it's always one way or the other you're going to feel something for what they've done and I myself have seen people in groups of ten and more huddled around these crazy fools laughing or crying together - they actually react to all this play-acting stuff open-air bullshit in the park and I always figure the way they hand out holidays nowadays there will soon be a National Open-Air Bullshit in the Park Day and it'll be made into a 3-day weekend too just you watch and see - that's how strong these fucking unions are especially the teachers' union and the municipal workers' unions and all that crap they want time off for pissing for Christ's good sake and they want double-time for that no less but it's like that wherever you go - people with their hands out wanting this or that demanding something from someone else just like extortion or whatever it would be called in an any other context but for this for this they claim to teach your kids or take your garbage away or arrange your government paperwork and so much more but every union master living like a king on a hilltop estate somewhere has done all that with stolen money and the bribe-graft-corruption of lucrative double-dealing and falsehoods and lies but that's always been called GOVERNANCE and so what else and every so often they say they 'let you vote' yeah well so what here put your fucking hand down my pants and vote for this how's that why don't 'cha and the whole fucking liberal world's a slime-hole of cum and corruption so what else can we do - take your clothes off and lay flat down you flea-bag two-fisted cum-guzzling whore (that's the way you might as well talk to the world and to every freaking person in it) AfuckingMen!']" - and so said Mr. Daedalus on the fifth day of the week and I noticed too that he had a brown stained charcoal/sepia portrait of himself pasted to the wall and it looked so old and yellowed that I'd not have been able to place a date upon it if I had to but I was sure it had come down through the centuries and I figured just as much that he was probably three hundred years old himself and in his fifteenth consecutive lifetime or something talk about reincarnation and karmic effect and all that he was putting out some great lessons to the world if anyone would listen but it was worse than deafness this stupidity I sensed and the reflected glaze of frozen eyes in window panes just seemed to be as immaterial and dead to me as stories of the flood or any other ancient tale no one wishes to prove or believe in anymore and no matter how many times it dawned on people that they may have been here before and may have been responsible themselves for all the fossils of the past they still took no note of anything other than the end of their capricious noses : bridgeweed catdump horseplop bullshit all together one two three : and listen to the pundits talk about the pundits if that's what you want to do but I've got better things than that to do and I intend to do them and I'll build me a parakeet bridge by the Sermon on the Mount and cross over to the other side LA DE DA to you ('consider the lilies of the field - how they are poisoned and mowed and shackled and killed - and then look at your fallen brothers all dead on the field and counted as yield and corpses and death') AH the manuverability of wartime and all that IT brings - blood on the cots and death in the springs and I waited a long time for him to come out and I said back to him "sir what did you want to do by your words and to whom you addressed what you said?" and he replied "my sovereign my soldier my legal my son I wish not for anything and I'm sorry you've come ALL OF THIS WAY to hear my pale words - for nothing was meant nor nothing deserved" and I figured if that was considered humility today it was good enough for me so we both sat down together at the outdoor cafe and had coffee and wine and tea and more and all he could do was to keep me from crying and keep himself from trying to placate the ornery crowd which had built - arriving en masse like some privy lord's possee - and soon enough someone else popped up (a reporter she said for 'Toynebee's April Gazette' and she asked us both if we "preferred to forget or to dwell on philosophy's horrors " and "was the twentieth century worse than this?" and then he stood up this Mr. Daedalus fellow and coughing up blood gave a long-winded speech about captives and cavaliers and the difference of each from the other but all that was over before I realized a thing and then he sat down and HE started to sing 'I want an old-fashioned kitchen where I can sit by the well and look out the meadow and see clear to Hell - it's not that much I'm asking and my father had more but I sure would be willing to take it I'm sure - and the wind in the meadow may whisper my name but I'll pretend I don't hear it if it's all the same' - and with the end of that wonderful tune he stood up to bend and the whole place applauded as he sat down again.
-
I found out the Death Maiden wears gloves and strangles the living slowly and every graveyard across the land has a place or two dedicated to her - though they may call it anything else they choose 'Comfort Grove' 'Way of the Manger' 'Palace of Violet Roses' whatever they choose - even 'Chapel of Heavenly Rest' - but they're all the same in being a place for people LIVING people to sit and dwell upon the dead - those they've put in the ground before them and marked the spots with bits of granite engraved with names and dates and there's always the Hands of Mary to comfort them some flickering candle of light a few rays of golden sunlight breaking through the clouds a long hilltop vista with a Heavenly City off in the distance but NO MATTER it's always the same and whereas in the old days a cow may have grazed on the graveyard lee or some sheep chipping hard on the grass kept it low nowadays by contrast there's the miserly drone of a drumming tractor to tear up the earth and pull out a hole - and into that hole's where they drop the departed and fill it back up and tap it down hard and the widow or kin or family or brother comes by now and then to think of what was : nothing but sadness and she always wears gloves.

I USED TO LIKE TO TELL STORIES AND LISTEN

119. I USED TO LIKE TO TELL STORIES AND LISTEN:

E flat hep cat Charlie Mingus Parker Monk whether invert or not 'Rise and SHINE!!' I heard it said : the stated reply was 'easy for YOU to say you don't have a dick' and William Burroughs told me - in speaking about his wished-for paradise and the 'past' one can never get back he said "what I want for dinner is a bass fished from Lake Huron in the 1920's" and somehow I knew EXACTLY what he meant (but all I could do was nod and bait the hook) - an amazing and instant regard for nostalgia and for a time that can never be had again - and then he sat me down and nearly spitting into my face said "and FURTHERMORE trying to learn things about the world from reading a newspaper is like trying to tell time by reading the second hand on a clock - recurring constant and shortsighted over and over as hell would be if you let it be!!" (that's the way he talked to me).

ONCE THAT HIPSTER FEELING

118. ONCE THAT HIPSTER FEELING:

There's only a small passage between the distant past and the today we've brought upon ourselves and like the seven sins of anatomy there are many differences in approach and in effect and these are things we all partake of : one night I was sitting around the basement at the Studio School by myself and in one of the little cubicle-like areas where I sometimes slept and which a long long time ago were used as copy and storage rooms for the Whitney Museum when it began there - a lot of the old paper and cuttings was still around as odd pieces of this and that color and texture of cut-sheet paper always interesting and always odd and I was there one night just reading as I often did (for this location afforded to me total privacy and solitude) and I came across the to me startling Frank O'Hara poem entitled 'The Day Lady Died' which was included in a volume called Lunch Poems which had been published by City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti - it was a poem I at first wasn't sure of and then after I learned what it was about and who (Billie Holiday) I found totally caught and captured that ultra-cool New York hipster feeling - in this case that of the writer in the midst of all his usual NYC activities stumbling across the tabloid headline and photo of the announcement of Billie Holiday's death and remembering in a completely soft and natural manner the things it conjured up for him and the simple memories which came forth recalled as they were amidst all his other activities : it was a wonderful poem for those few minutes in time it took to read and think of it and I reveled in that sensation too 'It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I.......I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly 'New World Writing' to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days....' and it goes on but go look it up if you want more because it encapsulates what I'm saying and the heck with all the rest (I met Frank O'Hara once he was five foot seven and walked on his toes and stretched out his neck and angled his head all to look taller and he was quite thin and wore collegiate white low-cut sneakers and was quite homosexual too a 'charming madman' a 'woosh of air sometimes warm and pleasant though sometimes so gutsy you closed your eyes and and brushed back the hair the whoosh had disarranged' - to almost quote Larry Rivers) and just knowing I was in the middle of all that at any hour elated my spirits - it's difficult to say now or to get across now the sort of strength and bravado this sort of thing brought to me and it was lamost as if I'd entered royalty in a realm of some new way of life - I'd met many people and lodged and visited and hung about with many others and I'd gone from the sorts of Tony Main and Andy Bonamo types to the austere cerebrality of Mr. Munching and some of the others and I'd walked and talked with Philip Guston and Morton Feldman David Hare Charles Cajori and Mercedes Matter and others too just to namedrop and the sudden rise in feelings and a certain esteem all this brought forth is difficult to define but easy to peg - suffice it to say I GREW and I LEARNED and the sorry world-ago from which I'd come was far behind me and (nearly) forgotten.

AN AMAZING AND INSTANT REGARD

117. AN AMAZING AND INSTANT REGARD:

I often set myself off alone and singularly to basically disappear or at least remain invisible to any who might know me and in that manner very many of the best things were done and came forth - anonymity as a great gift - it seemed like some grand ancient Mitzvah of giving parlayed to a gift of presence turned into the legendary and more grand gift of total and sincere ANONYMITY : I wanted no thing and no one and had neither (thankfully) to badger or belabor me with the shadings of opinion truth judgment or choice : I walked in masked as a masked man walks and the great trains of my mind ran on time and the boarders all had passes wherein the travel was free and swift and far and no mishaps ever occurred - I became a SYMBOLIST with the symbol of my own lighthouse acting as a charm on rippled waters and when I entered other realms of experience I often thought it rare and rare again and if ever the long knives came out I'd be ready for the slaughter for I knew as good as anything else that words were the key to whichever infrastructure I'd find and beneath every action of all mankind there was a story and a distortion and a huge pile of words to find - somewhere in my foggy memory even NOW are things I barely recollect but the after-images and shadows of these things linger on and I somehow KNOW they must have occurred or been there but the distant unconscious fog of my memory allows me to remember so very little - YES there was a record store somewhere in which I worked for a few days or a week or so - something on Bleecker or McDougal somewhere and this record store became a goldmine for Andy Bonamo and myself - him for cash transactions and me for the occasional record pilfered and if so then so it was as I recall easy and smooth and delectable at times the richness of choice and the flavor of freedom we enjoyed (he's gone I'm not and know not how or why) and other times in some strange daze I remember walking past hundreds of windows - each an apartment each a room and not being able to tell between the lights if what I saw was a fish tank or a television or whatever source the jumping light may have had (for here and there fish tanks abounded and actually could be seen from the street : the slow foppy notion of tired fish trailing slowly through turgid water - something like life I thought something like life) and in those winsome moments of unhinged walking the very lights of the sky were in my hand the very pulse of the planets and the depths of the moon and its light amidst the shadows and planes of surface Earth - this descendant place this ante-room to something this outage of another past - I walked in secret profusion rich and filled and overflowing with everything somehow right and appropriate and secure and solid - and I walked amidst men who knew nothing of me as I knew nothing of them.

A SHORT HISTORY OF HOPE

116. A SHORT HISTORY OF HOPE - (Life at the Bottom, 1967)

The main question for me at the time was exactly that : IS THERE life at the bottom ? and I'd attempted hundreds of times to answer that question for myself - sullen slovenly sleepy and alone and whatever and however any of it came to be there it was presenting itself right before me in some cultural cross-hole of double-vision in which I saw two or more versions of everything and whether I was walking under the old bridges of the east side or sitting with thought at the Hudson's edge by the big old Superior Ink factory or the old Nabisco building up by 14th I realized thoughts I'd seldom appreciated before and I realized as well that you can't think about God all the time - as much as you'd want to if you did - because it gets you nowhere and fast and Jesus Marconi himself couldn't communicate with the spirit world under the stern conditions I'd been setting for myself and (as Mr. Munching had said to me) 'sunken treasure never lies at the bottom of the sea' I knew that no matter where I'd be looking it would be somewhere else [the way he'd emphasized that phrase put across the point that at the bottom of the sea what you get is what you get - the 'treasure' never lies - it was all some weird double-entendre wordplay thing he was fond of doing and in this case it played the idea of a fib or a misrepresentation against the raw fact of there being 'there' - at the bottom of the sea - whatever treasure it was that was there and once found you couldn't any longer LIE about it for it never lied about itself and at the same time it also showed that wherever you looked for 'treasure' and most especially in the places you looked where it most certainly was supposed to be it NEVER was there] - it never 'lied' at the bottom of the sea but elsewhere - where you'd been led NOT to expect it - and what I'd taken from that was not to look in ordinary places or expected locations for the enlightenment and the elevation expected but instead to go out and FIND it in the charming and quirky places where it really was : so all of it as spoken was part pun part message and both rather complete and obvious anyway - Munching died in 1975 or maybe '76 I can't exactly remember though it was during that strange post-Nixon time when everyone was still in some form of silly political shock and Gerald Ford aka Leslie King was some sort of mistaken President with the most mangled and ordinary of tastes and absolutely nothing creative or with vision - in fact a 'functionary' extraordinaire in the most Soviet politburo sort of way which was odd considering all that was going on but once the dull and flat functionaries begin taking things over you know for SURE - as did Irvington Munching - that for all practical matters all grace and magic is gone from everyday life and the country coarsened because of it (though it appeared that no one mattered about it) which to me seemed a real shame as I'd begun to be able to observe and just 'see' the demise of anything basic of what once was our country and as I said Munching died about then - a sudden stroke and then bleeding and then heart stuff and a rather quick death and Warren stood to gain something by it but I never much heard from him again either and the old building itself over time I noticed bore the signification of something still having to do with Munching or at least some form of his foundational monies - it read 'Global Fiduciary Assurance Fund : Foundation Project Advancement' and to the bottom right of the glass it also read 'Theodore Fenert, Counsel' and I knew nothing of either of these things or people and it didn't take long after numerous after-death visits to the place for us to be told that the library was closing and ceasing to grant access and we were allowed if we wished to take a few books and things as we selected and about a year and a half later a message reached me at the Studio School saying that my presence was sought for a meeting in some lawyer's office after which meeting I was given a check for $6500 dollars which I'd been told had somehow been granted to me free and clear as remnants of a will stipulating such were being distributed - all of which was fine by me but trying to cash it was another story and in order to do so I had to actually open an account at some bank along Sixth Avenue at the corner of 7th Street and once it was opened I then was able to withdraw by passbook amounts at will - it worked for a while and provided me much as that sum in those days was much more than it seems to be now - except that there were tax things and stuff to do which I ignored but I was told that once a 'paper-trail' was established of these sorts of transactions it was hard to ignore NONETHELESS I did so and never was checked for it so whatever and over time - reluctantly - Irvington Munching became a memory for me but one I treasure forever and which I re-live as if it were yesterday everyday and as someone once said 'I'd trade a thousand tomorrows for just one yesterday' or something like that I sort of understand the meaning of that perfectly well and let me interject here too that obviously a great amount of time has gone by but I am still as fresh and ready as I was ever then to undertake the feelings and intensities of the days I am here writing of and if any conceptual idea of 'relativity' exists for me it is the very one which can place me at the scene relative to a 'now' still purring fuzzily alongside me and the 'now' pales by comparison to the 'then' I step into proving multi-dimensionalism is the truth from which one can never leave - I step with time in all its encumbrances and pretty much go wherever I please by that - backwards of course - until I have achieved and set up a 'future' tense based on the fastening of the past to the present and all of that - no matter - Munching lives on : Bethlehem Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Phillipsburg New Jersey the old mining towns of Ogdensburg and Franklin the sunny hilltop resort religion of Mount Tabor and the flat expanse of Morristown proper to Denville - all a startling Speedwell Kingdom to one Irvington Munching and these are but a few of the wonderful local places he brought me all the while at the same time opening up for me the vaster Kingdom of Manhattan and Company all filled with thrill promise and random joy and it all really amounts to a SHORT HISTORY OF HOPE were I to write one but the most exciting of all the aspects to me was the intellectual aspect which brought with it refinement and awareness that I could not have done alone and Mr. Munching always said to me in effect 'you can rely on yourself - you can learn all you need to learn about American History by reading Henry Adams - ALL of Henry Adams and then reading Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson as starters - they're available anywhere before this society crumbles away forever at least' and by his presence and grace I DID read and so by that became enlightened (as he said 'for starters') - Art and Technics Brown Decades - a study of the arts in America 1865-1895 The City in History - it origins transformations and its prospects The Condition of Man The Conduct of Life Culture of Cities Hermann Melville Highway and City The Human Prospect (that's all Mumford) and then Edmund Wilson with his great 'decade' books - the 60's / the 50's the 40's I Dream of Daisy (with the greatest 'till then description of the female genitalia ever) Axel's Castle American Earthquake the Bit Between My Teeth - on and on it goes I read all the careful early twentieth century poets from Hart Crane to Ivor Winters and the rest I retraced the city steps of Eugene O'Neil Edgar Allen Poe the founders Thomas Paine and I STOP here for this is but a few but the point I make is that through Munching and brought to him by myself - a curious and meandering almost destined-to-be course through time - I was able to attain places and realms I'd never before imagined mentor tutor whatever you'd wish to call it a young person would have no better means than to follow this way all the while maintaining and preserving his own solitary self in the main - I was alone I stood alone and I went alone all through this and I marveled in waves as I set forth in each new foray : the boroughs the ferries the fishmarkets the meat houses the art scenes the factories the hotels and eateries the schools and museums and galleries shows theater people dives ailments treasures riches and crap too - every church pealed an organ ripe with meaning every word led somewhere else and much of these years were years in which too the city itself around me was literally falling apart - trains were dens of violence and theft a parked car was an invitation to breaking in windows were broken and smashed doorways were covered with graffiti vermin ran freely people were regularly accosted murders were high entire neighborhoods and sections of street were off-limits to any but the bravest the cops were useless the sirens wailed for nothing drugs were rampant and an entire secondary commerce of the illicit went on everywhere - even the whores and hookers I'd known and gotten used to seeing blazed forth in less glory than before and whenever I'd see one worth a look I'd mutter something about 'her half of the yellow sun' to myself as a version of my own 'Hail Mary' to live by and right behind the library at Bryant Park (now choice then not) one of the most fearsome collection points for junkies murderers thieves and tramps underwent its daily transformation from day to night and day again and my only religion stayed in the closet then as I walked with the worst of them and alongside the best of the worst too but parallel lives could never be so secret nor different from each other as those I lived - east 11th Street to east 65th Street to the west side piers and east side dives - all as one and all together - and 95th Street was a killer's lane except for the Spanish in me (none) and everywhere else I went there was always a dime-store Mafia of gangs and cheats waiting to take advantage of a 'New York minute' as quickly as they could - but you learn to live with stuff like that and you learn to just get by.