OF GASTON LABRONTE AND HIS MYSTERIOUS WAYS

142. OF GASTON LABRONTE AND HIS MYSTERIOUS WAYS:

One of the things I learned while living here along the streets of the city was that everything was to be determined by learning the timeline of whatever previously had transpired there and my favorite two places - because of that - which weren't really even in today's New York City any longer but once had been well within its pre-geography purview were Black Tom and Paulus Hook - now both respectively parts of greater Jersey City but that never really mattered to me since it was all the same all these places and situations where things had happened in the past - I'd gone to Weehawken so as just to walk and look at the area of the field and shoreline where Hamilton and Burr had had their duel and I was able to imagine the landing and their pacings and situations very well even though most of it was now nothing just some crummy mention of what might have transpired and even the land and geography had been long ago altered but as I just mentioned you can't alter a timeline and its existence is forever and just remains and goes on from some strange geometric point and fans outward and anyway it wasn't like I was going to find drops of blood or old bullet casings or something like that - no real 'evidence' no clothing no scarf no shoe-buckle - it's all in the mind at that point : storybook and historybook melded together with the usual amounts of bigmouths and know-it-alls telling you what you're supposed to 'know' about the accepted storyline and the correct means of thinking about whatever fairytale they're putting across (see above) that's called 'teaching' - and when the 'means of production' of mental picture frames and forms of knowledge are in the hands of idea-managers and fascist-bastard ideology mongers WATCH OUT ! for shit's about soon to hit the fan (same with churches and same with medicine too) and the same went for Paulus Hook and Black Tom (by today's names) where so much of pre-civic Manhattan affairs had taken place - all those old cranky British generals and Washington and Paine and Burr and Hamilton and Benedict Arnold too they were all over this place like flies - and I was always amazed at Light Horse Harry Lee - one of Washington's sidekicks in the Revolution here - turning out to be Robert E. Lee's father and some 65 years later all the Civil War stuff from both sides coming out as an offshoot of all that - lots of that sort of thing never spoken of and left unsaid in the wake of ideology and pure dumb stupidity too - the sort of stuff so prevalent today - and even though you KNOW these things you're not supposed to KNOW them in any sensible manner and the great crazy transformation of everything that had taken place everywhere was already many years advanced and it was already difficult to step backward and re-source everything which had been around before : so as I started to say IF you can get the timeline of a place and the situation which had and was developing from that timeline so many other things become clear - the old forts and redoubts the old farmroads and places and overlooks and views and the spots where the dead and wounded had fallen the places bones were buried the steps of the original tribes and indians and warriors who lived around on everything the marshes and creeks the original old paths of the waterways and all that - some guy named Gaston Labronte I met once started telling me his viewpoints about what he saw as the true historiocity (as he put it) of New York and he said that 'everything that might have happened had happened and because of that every old possibility which was once 'possible' had taken root and been given a chance and the place is because of that filled with ghosts and spirits of everything that was tried and failed - they don't have no tangible places or beings except old ruinations which have passed and been taken down and only that which succeeded was kept - so anything you see around here now is a product of its own success' but he was nothing but some old drunken graybeard who kept hanging around some old dive down by the fishmarkets on the East River and every time I ran into him or saw him I got an earful of almost didactic craziness or - let's call it - wise pedantry aimed at ME and he was never drunk to speak of but always close which became his means of always getting another one or two beers out of me (or anyone else too I guess) for the privilege of hearing him talk - world-weary story-line weaver non-stop talker ace-in-the-hole perfect-aim sharpshooter-with-words that he was - and the best thing I liked about him was that he never drank any special beer - none of that 'on tap' stuff for him no specialty ales and the like just 'gimme a regular fucking beer' and that was that and it always at least gave his words and points of view some better authenticity even though I sometimes always worried about what he really knew and how much into what he said he really was - some people you just never learn anything about and they just go getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser all the time.

MENKOVICH THE MARKETEER

141. MENKOVICH THE MARKETEER:

I was listening to theme music for an imaginary silent film - it sounded good and reminded me of the 1920's right off the bat and it seemed complete with a villain and the sound of a villain in a black felt hat and a damsel tied to the tracks and all the rest and everything that went with it - lawman buffoon laborer pauper and a rich man too - what a concept it seemed : imaginary music to listen to : DISTRESS so enamored and yet I knew somehow just as well that I was the evil twin of genius a maniac gone wild a madman on the loose something stalking stalwart starts and it just seemed as if EACH day was an over-and-over-again affair much without any reason or gain or persuasion but I knew that even bad things get good over time but the seemingly endless performance of day-after-day went really for nothing but to produce experience OR the experience of (instead say) some form of reality and I turned into some tilted church where people were singing - well-tuned girls with mothers and sons - where the preacher was atop his little concrete hill and saying 'these buildings shall not stand for the DAY of the LORD is coming when all these things will fall and all the world will falter - black smoke toil flames and ash - and mankind will wander in pain and danger with Evil unloosed and marauding at will and every brick and every block of this kingdom shall tumble when God takes back His stand!' - the man was nothing if not committed and he could light matches with his incendiary words and he made me want to be a storyteller too and not one who'd merely stopped in to get warm and I wished to be one who was able to mesmerize with words too and to jolt the limited potential of every scheming jerk before me - just as now with outstretched feeble palms upturned and the kiss of peace and all that they sought their misplaced Jesus in some dimension unknown but unable to recognize it when it appears and I saw nothing but wanted everything - or the other way around - but sometimes I was unable to tell or make distinction : lost houses where they used to be and old pilings where a waterfront once was - there were shards of red pottery laying about - broken pieces of some church-formatted Easter worship left right where they had fallen for after all it was too cold for Easter too cold for Hell too cold for anything else and redemption resurrection and all the rest was quite simply out of the question and I listened to the organ I listened to the lyre and I turned about to see the stained glass windows - an industry of light and refraction and money - then I got up and got out of there and St. Jude St. Thomas St. Francis Xavier too they were all too certain of themselves for me to know ! and besides I had something else on my mind and it was all just beginning and I had things to do...
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There's a marvelous beginning to everything once you get it straight and if you can see that right from the start often then you can KEEP it marvelous as you move along but not always and this old Jew guy I once knew Menkovich was his name he'd sell absolutely anything he could get his hands on - marvelous beginnings or not - because he figured he could add a penny or two to most anything he'd salvage and re-sell it at a price higher than for what he got it and every little bit counted and if he could 'market' any of this with manufactured stories or histories he'd surely do that too : 'Menkovich the Marketeer' I called him : and in reality he wasn't anything much more than an auction flea market hawker the type you see yelling out to passers-by for their junk to see (he'd often invert his English in just that old-world Jewish way) but he made a solid living from it for years and he'd buy heaps of things - fabric cloth rope hemp straps whatever - and he'd bundle things tight and put the very best on the outside as he stashed the junk inside unseen and hawk this stuff to buyers and they'd usually buy after haggling for pennies and agreeing finally to some price they never wanted anyway for stuff they didn't need but that was 'Business' in the barker's way - Menkovich was good Menkovich the Chiseler Menkovich the Cheat would have better described the man but he prospered and I'd help when I could - listening to his rant hearing his crap sorting buttons and bolts cotton cloth and old wheels shade pulls and glass doorknobs washclothes and socks hammers cheap screwdrivers mirrors and glass - EVERYTHING was fodder for the Menkovich mill - and at his five feet one inch he made me feel gigantic and that led to pride as I finally towered over something in that stupid little west 17th Street hovel all dirtied glass and broken doorway soiled oily floor and a crammed-in-the-corner desk cluttered with pencils and paper ledger books and glasses of old lousy tea and he had eyes like a blind man and feet like a cripple but his hands were fat and lively little and lithe and he moved like a crane and threw things around in his old battered clothing same every day the gray shirt turned gray from a white it once was or may have been and could have been lucky he never sold that too for I don't know what else he'd have worn and he could calculate pennies like a whiz in his calculating mind he'd break out the figures for hundreds of this or that and say what you're paying per piece and why not and how many and 'what a bargain it may have was been' and then he'd leave it at that and walk away and they'd lunge back after him so as not to lose the deal he'd just described and they'd make the arrangement and pay what they had to and go away happy and satisfied too - it was like that every day Menkovich the Crafty Menkovich the Brave Menkovich the Marvelous Menkovich the Penny-Pinching Wiseman Bastard-King.

LINE-UP OF BLOOD

140. LINE-UP OF BLOOD:

There's a line-up of blood somewhere that's mine - and a headache to go with it - all bulging eyeballs and pounding skulls and letters which were written to anyone who cared : it's all a fate worse than decadence as well and I've found (in small circles of friends) that 'art' is but a lesson in fair symmetry of the shapes and lines of the street in all its endless angles and colors and walls and windows with the shades and the lights of the sun - one large assemblage of moment - and they are all but the wandering scenery of place seeking home RAW and DRAWN and made POWERFUL by all the energy of life itself while THAT WHICH IS is then merely the interpretation of everything else and there is NO envelope large enough to fit my emotions YET 'in my ghost-written nightmare I'm afraid to grow out of my glacier' : and as I land a view and stay on my feet READING 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and wondering why I look towards the hills and dream new circles of dread : the doctor asks back 'but can you talk?' and I nod in affirmation but still remain silent and then he asks 'but have you been here before?' and I nod yes to which he asks 'can you prove it?' and I say 'no' and inside me somewhere wells up the knowledge that it's MY DNA all over these walls and windows and more in sorrow than glee I shake my head and make a motion to send him away and they put me to sleep - sedated I'm told - with some drug made from flowers in milk made from goats and I sleep the new sleep of ten thousand old years - - seeing visions of oaks and mountain pines seeing ancient wizards and fiery crystals seeing small men who live in the trees and the awful smirks on their not-so-human faces and I find myself bowing down to something just before I dream of death and awake with a start looking at children on a ledge far up before me - in singsong cadence like convicts in an exercise-yard line-up - and of a sudden they JUMP! and are gone and I am left again alone dreaming of dreaming the dream of sleep : I hear a man's voice speaking of death and of a someone shooting people from high up on a Texas tower somewhere old some university setting I knew I recalled and I heard his voice saying : 'isn't the whole point of an education to better understand LIFE and thus have an understanding for DEATH ? so that when it comes one just simply goes?' and I sought to say 'what a cheap sleazy point you make' but my mind wouldn't work for my mouth to speak and nothing came forth when I uttered no sound as I heard foggily the doctor say 'this is now very interesting - for he seeks again to speak yet cannot utter a sound' and with that they closed the door and I was YET ONCE MORE AGAIN alone and vacant alone and unsound alone and without recourse to any other man as a great huge tree fell and crushed the ceiling and crushed the room wherein I was but I was there and unharmed and saw myself still watching everything...

A GOD IN WRATH WAS BEATING A MAN

139. 'A GOD IN WRATH WAS BEATING A MAN' - (On Something Written by Rudyard Kipling):

I wasn't meaning anything in particular you see : bald-faced lies are nothing for me : it's merely that a passing array of ten million matters came to be and passing my face and hitting my brow and lancing my boil it all turned to THIS one simple fact - I'd been tracing Stephen Crane (like I said like I said) and I'd pretty much been to each of the addresses JUST SO AS to breath something of the air he'd breathed and see what he'd seen (whatever of it was left was none of it left but anyway) - 14 Mulberry Place Newark New Jersey the old Methodist red brick parsonage the Lakeview section of what is now Paterson New Jersey and also the Roseville section of old Newark and then 1064 Avenue A and 143 e. 23rd Street and 111 w. 33rd Street NYC and other spots too and things I'd not known (but then of course I knew a hundred fifteen thousands of things too he'd never known) and in every spot there was nothing but dust DUST like the ghost of a past with no allegiance to me and the dust was the same dust that gets brushed from the feet but I recognized some essence nonetheless in each place : those old kinds of windows which used to be prevalent the sort that twisted outward for ventilation on a center-mounted spike or nail-post-swivel something pretty ingenious from back when people used to care about air REAL air and wanted still to stay in touch with things outside of themselves in ways that would allow the osmosis and exchange necessary to keep things human and correct but it was all supplanted disgustingly by air-conditioning and sealed and tinted glass windows of the modern designs which somehow steal all the life from what we see - no more wood just plastic around the windows which now can't even be opened and no one wants to open anyway and it's all too bad and too sad too but Nature doesn't wear a sombrero in which to sleep and as they said things keep changing and all around us are the results of that change : I don't want to peddle and I don't want to sell because to me it is all unserviceable nonsense the sort the garbageman takes out and in the same way as trash is removed so should all of this be - let's level something anew let's cleanse the ground let's break down the compulsion of this anything-goes culture we have and reintroduce some severity and strictures to people who need it badly and then LISTEN TO THIS ! 'when you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains/and the women come out to cut up what remains/just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/an' go to your Gawd like a soldier' Rudyard Kipling wrote that and apropos' of nothing I bring it to you but even more intriguing to me in those days was when I found a piece by Crane too which addressed perfectly my then-forming ideas of a world abandoned by God - a God who'd walked away from his experiment and left it all to its own devices to founder and crash or crash and burn : 'God fashioned the ship of the world carefully/with the infinite skill of an All-Master/made He the hull and the sails/held He the rudder/ready for adjustment/erect stood He scanning His work proudly/then - at fateful time - a wrong called/and God turned heeding/lo the ship at this opportunity slipped slyly/making cunning noiseless travel down the ways/so that - forever rudderless - it went upon the seas/going ridiculous voyages/making quaint progress/turning as with serious purpose/before stupid winds/and there were many in the sky/who laughed at this thing' that was Stephen Crane in February 1894 and I always saw that as referring to the vast indifference of Nature and of Creation itself to mankind (or 'Mankind' here) and it's that indifference which astounds us each on a daily level - 'some it straitjackets into an abject fear and a sublimation to groveling hope and prayer/ while to others it emboldens and makes brave every single impulse to conquer and save' - or overcome anyway - but IN ANY CASE and in all ways is NATURE yet indifferent to Mankind and to Creation - and for Nature at any time you can replace the word with God too and it's all the same at that ONE particular level - which is the level at which people live and breath and go on : 'a God in wrath/was beating a man.'

WE ARE STILL HERE AND WAITING TOO

138. WE ARE STILL HERE AND WAITING TOO:

...And then the clock ticks on and we wither as we watch what passes - thirteen old men sitting silently in some fulcrum of a parkside lawn and each of them staring out at something they may see and I turn and say "but I knew you just yesterday when you all were young" and they look back at me and silently seem to be processing something other than what I've said "memories are like this - we have no right to be this old and how did we get to be 84 anyway and why - these are the questions which keep us now as we look back upon all that which has passed" and I realized they were each lost in reveries of their own - with impatience and sadness and confusion too all mixed in as I understood the terrible cataclysm that living in this world really is - some have gone before us purporting to be wiser and have cut off the line that connects but WE are still here and waiting too.

SINGING THE GLASS DOORKNOB

137. SINGING THE GLASS DOORKNOB:

Tacoma Zimbabwe Washington New York and Hartford and Cleveland too are places where deciduous trees have visited and stayed - well maybe not Zimbabwe but then who cares - and every step of the way there's some damned report to fill out or some interviewer's log-sheet to be written and it's all like a forlorn census year again the kind when retirees are hired by the government for two hundred simple dollars to go around and knock on people's doors and find out who lives where and really and how but people are scared and some run away or won't answer the door for fear of being found out - fifteen illegals living in the basement or two extra kinsmen bunking together in the attic while they work two jobs each without papers in local restaurants or something and that sort of thing to be sure scares people turns them white and makes them suddenly mute but the numbers whatever they be have to get recorded and if nothing else then they just make things up : I know because I've seen it : and certain census takers are wily enough to just sit at home and fill out interview sheets and forge names and signatures and numbers just to turn something in and get their payment - and by such false work are we delineated numbered counted and paged and by that too our taxes are decided and tax-districts outlined and whatever else may be said it's fair to say it's all crap and falsified logic to the nth degree just to enforce some graduated form of income-tax slavery and instead of anything why not just make up something and run with it ? OK by me I say.

SECOND RIVER 1697

136. SECOND RIVER 1697:

People walking around like scoundrels zombies mute like lambs giants made out as pygmies and everything all mixed up - Lola Falana lookalikes on the Number 112 bus - leaving from anywhere to get where it's going - guys with turbaned heads talking intensely while they wait on the curb and the looking out the looking out for the bus that's sure to come and sure it will evermore and along the stairways where now only weeds and sumac grow no one anymore takes note of the things of the old days - markers and plaques and history in the mix of what-once-was : the waterfront church by the old ferry port and the depot which once stored grain and is no more and the waterfront too is no longer a waterfront at all but paved like a highway and two levels high and ringed with roadway ramps and weeds and junk and no one there can tell me a thing about the history of the soil and the dirt and the abandoned graves and old pieces of fence and the ancient sign says 'Second River 1769' which was an old settlement by the old reformed church and everything now is empty and dead and hurting my head as I just sit to think and watch the Hispanic congregation come sauntering out from the next church over - some storefront contraption with no name and a big Spanish banner and it's all material for nothing to me and livid as can be and inauthentic too - and the officer nearby turns and says : 'we've buried the old with the dead - we've buried the old with the dead...' and I turn my head from him and just start muttering 'no difference to you I'm sure no difference to you...' and we walk apart as if a thousand years of human consciousness does not divide us : he is walking with rational logic and reason and supposed law on his side and me on the other with sundered and twisted dreams of sedition and revolt illogic and explosive creative thought ready to tear his world apart - the two things never mix of course : the engulfing flames and the water which puts them out - one or the other overtakes the moment and it's like that apparently with the wild grasslands of the mind too and the fight is endless the wailing wall of terror remains steadfast and nothing ever changes in the static stand-off the world makes of our mess : I hear the highway rumble with its nearby cars and I see the ragged trees still sleeping for their winter just now turn from slumber to some idea of awakening LIKE the power just the same of every dream and thought of conquest that's ever passed my mind - and stopped to take root and taking root stayed to blossom and blossoming grew.