THE JINGLE MAN FROM TOFFENETTI'S

149. THE JINGLE MAN FROM TOFFENETTI'S:

He was tall enough for a madrigal singer (I thought) but he moved stiffly as if some mistake in the wiring had thwarted his ability to gracefully connect one effort to another and - as his head was high above everyone else's - he stood awkwardly out as very tall people do and had that somehow alarmed-at-something look in his eyes : he turned and started speaking some gibberish in the doorway - "you're allowed in here for one or two hours at the most the very most and after that of course we'd expect you to be finished and gone so as to free up a table for another set of patrons and I hope you understand this is a business and the idea here - besides service and quality - is to turn tables over and make money - that can't be so hard to understand right?" and we nodded as one - the few of us waiting - and as I stayed around he started again talking specifically to me "I only like intensity and white light and I do have trouble with any of the idleness that most men go by but nothing of this leaves me happy nor gay nor do I find it worth any whimsy for this is all after all a job and nothing more (they've asked me to be 'strange') and you'd never find whimsy in a fire would you ? nor is there much comedy at a funeral but distraction is what people want anyway - we get a lot of theater people AND theater goers at once and the two crowds don't usually mix very well so I must of course too keep my eyes open for trouble and it's trouble only when the lights are down really but as an austere person I guess I know I must deal with it all and entirely and the only real 'underworld' left in Manhattan is the 'Theater' - in actuality it's nothing but a large criminal activity (did you know that?) and money is washed passed and laundered on ridiculous budgets and enormous loss factors in plays and productions that last two or three weeks and are gone...but which leave a trail of both cash and expenses which the insider mind can deal with very well and which criminal connections sniff out like a dog does meat" and then for a moment he turned away and the silence as he stopped talking was just as fearsome as the noise he'd made when talking and I couldn't quite figure out if he was paid to be a raconteur of blarney or perhaps to make stuff up to entertain the crowd or what but he was soon enough back to his post of scanning the meager crowd at the doorway - which doorway was composed of two fashionable doors leathered in some form of red and brass with two large adjoining gold-lined and decorated windows through which some portions of the dining area could be seen (and from which I'd supposed diners too could - if they cared to watch plebeians - view those taunted and belabored souls awaiting entry - some odd form of class warfare pitting the 'in' against the 'out' in a social register comprised of fame digestion and shame all at one time - and I thought to myself 'such are the vagaries of New York' where it seemed at every turn there was always something in front of you to taunt your presence or your very being - the person before you with the six-hundred dollar coat scoffing back (you knew) at your thirty dollar castaway the Rolls or Lincoln nuzzling up against your Nova (so to speak) the trip to Paris up against your recent struggle to view Pennsylvania in person - but one of the seven deadly sins as I recall was (and is I guess) 'envy' so far be it from me to worry on that count and at the same time I've never walked a graveyard yet in which it was listed what apparel the deceased was buried in - so any of that only goes so far - but this guy again (back to the doorway) was making it a habit to scan the crowd and do the occasional turnaround to check behind him as if he was some sort of performance artist himself and actually the only reason I was there was to watch - for I couldn't have cared less about entry or seating or any of that and my closest approximation to the ins and outs of what was going on would have been George Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London' a great book by the way which takes the reader on grand and royal tours of kitchen areas and restaurant staff happenings and conditions in ways that would bleed an eyeball dry - so for me all of this was but one huge joke at the expense of the idiots struggling to get in so as to pay something like $27.95 for a questionable piece of meat and some potatoes to go with it but they wouldn't know - being ensconced as they are in the dead-middle of their own wild and varied fantasies - but this doorman guy I remembered had once told me that long ago he'd been the 'jingle man' as he called it a place along Times Square in the grander old days called 'Toffenetti's' some place long gone and unknown now to me but what he meant by 'jingle man' I'd never gotten from him and really would have liked to know (but this was better) - his name was Gerner (and that was a first name) and the last name sounded like some Saxony royal name or a line of princes who'd been convicted of crimes against the people and beheaded with malice or the kind of name in old Europe which had laws named after it (actually I forget what it was but will here call it 'Mannhein Ober-Mueller') but in reality if he was so proud of himself why would he ever get set up in a position like this - 'doorman par excellence' perhaps) and the kind of 1960's cars parading by gave him away anyhow - he was nothing more than a crack hired hand to deal with the normal debris which New York City produced as well as deal with the stupid dumb marauding sorts of appetites which suburban mental cases in the city for 'theater' produced and it was all a ridiculous scam an endeavor no better than purse-snatching or theft and he probably knew it and he probably was sunk so deep in the muck and crap of stealing or setting people up for being stolen from that the warlords who'd hired him were amazingly happy to have such a gendarme on their side - as I saw it he FRONTED for the Mafia Game which went on within the building and in him they had at the least a first-line of defense against whatever and whomever could be coming in or at them through one of the main entryways - but it was a good living in the old sort of way (no pucker-faced ghetto gangs demanding their own extortion) and he did seem to do it well but you had to be 'inside' this stuff for a really long time before anyone trusted you but once they did you were set up real good - and no one ever asked me about any of that nor offered a career option to me for this sort of thing (not the doorman stuff for I had not the size nor presence for that) but if they'd ever done so I would have jumped at the chance to do some 'insider trading' or back-stage wizardry myself and the way it usually started was you'd be asked to carry a message or take 'this' or 'that' out to the trash or bring a 'package' somewhere and return with something else and that was the first start and if you did that well enough they'd show you the sort of rewards possible so as to whet your primitive appetite for the next level and then they'd ask something else of you another task sometimes involving travel or night hours or another person BUT all the while you KNEW you were being watched and evaluated and checked out for smoothness and reliability and connections and all that and then they'd (of-course) throw sex into it - figuring every man (as they were) was always interested in pussy as a wedge and since most were it always became a reliable factor in pushing the product along and slowly and gradually over time the options would get more and more criminal or outside the ken of regular and licit activity that eventually you knew you were sunk and committed and most of the time it was (hopefully) only 'up' from there and the option of failing was usually death (bullet in the brain East River car accident thrown off a building poison whatever - there were a million ways).

THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

148. THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH:

How lonely is it at the bottom ? I shan't say but I was sure alone and underneath everything else but did anyone ever tell me it's 'lonesome' at the bottom? never ? and so I'm gonna' be a no-name back-scratching cowboy for the rest of my days and get buried in some paupers' graveyard with no one to save and those are now MY plans for the future and AMEN to that - leave my toes pointing up and let buzzards feast on my face for none of it will matter to me - ('and that moment when the bird sings very close / to the music of what happens') : the 'music' here might refer to a hidden mystical system of high order (Seamus Heaney) OR to the music of the arbitrary (as John Cage would have it) but personal form is a personal solution and the rest doesn't matter ('I watched just today some swooning hawk rise high and up and swoop and dip and within it I sensed that motor of all nature and everything natural running on without sense or governance in the speeding fabric of ALL THAT IS and I saluted - for lack of anything better to do - all that which I saw) and it's at this time that I deign to take routine and make a magic from it : strawberry jam in dollops on vanilla ice cream or a headless nail hammered perfectly into a highly polished piece of molding and the 'Loneliness' I mentioned before then pales when compared with perfection (the ART of doing something perfectly right and with all the proper steps and awarenesses of doing : the ART which goes into the ACT) - oh bury my heart on the lone prairie oh bury my heart on the lone prairie.
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When the BIRD sings very close to the MUSIC of what happens.

THE MADMAN'S STORY - AVENEL NEW JERSEY 1958

147. THE MADMAN'S STORY : APOPLEXY : 'WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM ? GONE MAD ?' - ENDLESS SQUARE STREETS USELESS STUPID PICK-UP SHOPS:

"What's the value of anything anyway and I can't get started and I just want to throw everything away start over begin anew and make my own definitions for whatever I damn well please and it's all for nothing - endless square streets useless stupid pick-up shops where poison is sold as food and the pimp-ass whore behind the counter can't even speak correctly let alone get off the phone and that's what we're reduced to listening to this rubbish all the day long and then taking sympathetic steps to emote when we decide something goes wrong - yeah like the dead kid in the bathtub or Shamika's boyfriend stabbing her in the face and all the rest of the garbage that passes for news until the goons on the TV screen come back again with some stupid new fucking idea and what do we do ? we do nothing we kill NEITHER the messenger nor the message - which is where we go wrong because THEY BOTH SHOULD DIE - but for saying that the Shudder Brothers will have me put away so I'd better shut up if I know what's good for me but I won't never will never shall AM NOT going to and rolling down some Montclair hill with fiery brakes and no way to stop - I'll be sure to run over YOU" and they all said "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he said "I soaked him and I'll soak all of you just as well because at this late stage of the embargo'd game there's no room for wiggle so wiggle I'll not and if I had a gun it would bear your name and without that I'll just have to get by and the man with the silver wallpaper is gleaning carrots from the trash but even he won't touch some of the shit you all eat and the biggest mistake ever made was in bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima and leaving the American industrial plant alone and letting it thrive instead WE SHOULD HAVE NUKED THEM ALL and right now out behind the pale schoolhouse doorway where they connect with the concert hall there are twenty-five kids smoking a new kind of dope and fucking each other heartily up the ass and exchanging partners twice to boot" and they all turned about and said "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he said "I've told you once a million times the end of YOUR world is coming soon and the end-result of lassitude is the loss of ample altitude and you're coming down fast but don't let me stop you for only your prick-face irony now can save you and I should have killed you all the first time you ruined my world because by the tenth time it was already too late - sitting at eleven years old in some stupid barber's chair watching the old men fart while they read the sports pages and hide the nudie magazine behind the pilot light where the 'kids won't see it' and Louie Gallo the tiny Italian barber who owned the joint had a three-foot model of a Cunard liner set up under glass on a pedestal in the middle of the place - ah I remember it well - and I never knew what the fuck it was doing there except it might have been the means of his coming to America or something he never talked about - can you believe an Italian immigrant apple-picking wop taking steerage on a Cunard liner or something like that - total bullshit story for sure and I bet he never picked an apple in his entire life either - not even off a grocer's shelf - the little scissor-midget was even too short for that and he cut hair while standing on a step-stool and he never shut up either - some imperfectly inflected Italo-English tongue what never made no sense to me or no one else but I had to let him cut my hair because he was the Italian barber and my father made sure of that shit - 'no O'Malley or Henson or Braun's cutting my kid's hair' - so what if this was the porno-barber shop to boot and the gambling-numbers den as well HE never knew the difference because HE went to his own barber down the street 'Frank's' it was called and it was across the street from the school and Frank and his son were there all day long and when they weren't cutting hair they'd stare out the windows and BY THE WAY the word around town was that Frank was OK but the son was a fucking perverted weirdo who couldn't cut hair any better than Nicola Tesla could sing (but what the fuck - who knew?) and who had too many extra fingers in too many extra ladies and every once in a while some floozy bimbo blonde would come screaming around the barber shop wailing at him about something about cheating or whatever and she'd swear she was 'gonna take those fucking scissors and snip your tiny dick off you BASTARD!!' and she'd scream and holler and they'd take her away and then the place would get all quiet again and nothing was ever said about it until the next time and Frank used to have clear bottles of colored water in which he'd soak the combs - some kind of disinfection stuff - and every time I went into that place or passed by it I SWEAR I always checked out the disinfectant to see if his kid's dick was in there yet but I guess it never made it that far and one day the kid just disappeared stopped showing up lost his job whatever and was never seen nor heard again" and they all looked up and said "what happened to him - gone mad?" and then he said "when I lived in the country the outhouse was the whirlwind of pride and we filled it with water and set it afire and then the 27th declension from the Sun opened and the fabric of reality was shown to have a portal and a hole into which I was allowed to enter at will - so of course back and forth and in and out I went all while the fire burned and it turned out it was eternal and never did nor could go out and my personal Archangel was always present and for me his name was Jae-Ril-Paimael but I very seldom addressed him by that or needed to for most of our communication was non-verbal and he could make things appear at will change shapes and the shapes of things twist dimensions so that I was all around and over things remove obstacles and change the orientation of what was about to happen and the trumpeter next to him was the small image of a monkey'd blind man walking into himself with a furry hat atop his head always lit with brilliance - it was sort of a totemic symbol which I'd begun to see in place of other things and that's how I'd know I was getting close once more to transformation and I would just start 'seeing' that little trumpeter thing in the weirdest places - regular spots I'd never expect and that was my signal for change and the alteration to come" and they all said "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he returned and said "the oldest street in the town was paved with pebbles and tar and the useless parade of motivation and blight took place there each year when the new sun first bowed and each person came out in their own way to watch - clowns fiddlers jugglers horses fire-eaters twirlers and singers - and they'd parade through the street for hours in some medieval Dance of Death which twisted like a snake through tavern town and home and everyone needed to take part or they'd die within the next year - for some far-advancing plague was over the land and the traveling horsemen were setting fires all along the way just to cleanse the land of the human stench and with such an apocalypse present each person was - at the same time as happy - just as scared and they looked to the sky for Deliverance but nothing ever came ('just the tired wail of fifteen thousand infants screaming for milk and sustenance') for the Devil your adversary like a roaring lion walks about seeking whom he may devour and such a one as this Evil will never show Himself unless it is to HIS advantage so BEWARE! my pretties and hide your new daughters away for the Devil's seed seeks entry and devours through that coitus everything from within and then brings it back forth as a new tender child - which then walks and thrashes and devours the land!" and they said "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he said "by Nature sin is dark! and loves the dark still hiding from itself in the gloom! but don't listen to me take your own plans and read them over upside down and from the back and see what YOU get for the huntsman comes home with NOTHING if his quiver has no shafts and he that beareth lightning now will one day be merely ash and old debris and the cartwheels of the children shall have more sense in that day then the foundations of the land - locksmiths shall lose their hands and ballerinas will perish while yet still standing on their toes and when I was seven years old there was a great collapse and the red bricks of all the powerplant dwindled and it collapsed upon itself and I watched from the sidelines with my father as everything burned and he lifted me up for water but the man in the polio brace stopped us and said 'don't drink this for already it's close to a boil' but we drank the warm water anyway and then so did he - and I watched as he was healed of a sudden and threw down his braces and cast and we became the best of friends for that moment while the island burned and consumed itself in a fury I am STILL living with while all the fireman have perished long ago and the wind was wearing down the windows along the deadened street - burros were eating oat-mash and two Mexicans still clutched their ancient Bible while speaking of the Sun and some ancient NEW arrival but the Heavens opened up and a light glowed brilliant which had a fissure which made a wake which split the world as it came forth - and anyone left went in one of two directions but I never got the difference between the two before I was taken away by a Golden Hand which held me gentle but with the sternest grip I'd ever noticed in all my Earth-long days - which days were now quickly coming to an end" and they uttered as one "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he said "I tried to write this down but the pencil turned to fire in my hands and might of every Atlas dwindled to nothing by daybreak and all along the curb were men - men crying over the loss of all they once had but they were DOOMED now and they knew it - having cast their lot so long ago with wealth and riches and the world but the all-consuming fire consumeth all that too and the men were sent to wither SLOWLY as flesh would rot and fall from their bones which would rot and turn to dust and ALL this before the men were dead and they would witness this dwindling and diminishing and feel its every pulse before they were sent to die - and that's the ending of the world - a cry a whimper a setting forth with nothing to with nothing a return : AND THE PERSON WHO WON'T BE ADVISED he cannot be helped" and they fell down and said - as they got up - "what happened to him - gone mad?" and he said "the will to power is the essential force of Evil and the transformational Ego of each of the Madmen of the world has mirrored the urges of every singular person as well - watch the maelstrom on the hilltop coming down or witness the silly boys playing ball in their made-up teams on the field and realize it's all the same and that no difference exists between the temperature of time and the temper of Mankind and it's all been played out before as NONETHELESS we go on" and they said "what happened to him - gone mad?" yet he said "once this was wooded land and pleasant and proud and grackle hung with deer and the ground animals lived in their sequences with not a care between and the small rivers ran to the large and the oak bark sang forth to the owl and the sky was all pure and when a 'Mankind' came to be it partook of that same harmony and entered its place within the circuit and stayed and went without altering what was around it and it knew no difference between the Good or the Bad AT FIRST and only at first for as quickly as things prospered so they tumbled down too and the entered element of bravado and doom took over the land and the feelings changed the face and seasons of growth came to be seasons of wither and Man took the axe then to whatever he wished and the animals fled in a fear of their essence and the life they had known was soon over and fires burned the land and things fell and waters ceased running where once they had been and the sky changed its shape and all things closed up and Mankind was ALONE and thought - because of that - he was singular too but mistook the aloneness (which was really abandon) for a particular and in that erred and faltered along on his own faulty course from that time forward and THUS THIS is the world we have learned from these lessons - wrong and errant and enfeebled and bad - and now you have heard but still you do nothing and I guess that's all right too because you cannot do what you CANNOT do and the works of the world are illusion and falsity anyway" and they said "what happened to him - gone mad?"

ANNE CARTER PINKERTON

146. ANNE CARTER PINKERTON:

A. THE DRAMA SUITS THEM:
I was talking to Anne Carter Pinkerton at the edge of the woods where we’d somehow arrived after walking the very long ways diagonal across the park from top to bottom from very top where the Conservatory Gardens comes down from the Lake and then over to McGowan’s (now a disreputable and ragged pile of compost and waste foliage and cuttings) and down across the center past the pool past the Ramble and the caves and the rocks and the bridges past the insanely lyrical deep center of the high park with its cavernous deep trees and respectfully silent bridges and coves and she talked just about nearly the entire way going on and on first this then that in a strangely civilized yet disheveled style of scattershot speaking which somehow almost represented a distorted mind : "Rupert Brooke expressed a wonderful concept of war and war’s dead in a short couplet he wrote about World War I truly fine words – ‘If I should die think only this of me / that there’s some corner of a foreign field / that is forever England’ – and you know that has always been to me amidst the carnage and sadness of war a quaint evocation of the peacefulness of a soldier’s soul a sort of resignation about death and living and place and worth and the lost value of life that almost saddens me each time sort of like a ‘ours is not to wonder why / ours is but to do and die’ which is another Briticism by Kipling or someone about the Boer War or death in the Indian Service or something it hardly matters it’s nearly all the same but it’s always made me think of that especially weird way the English have always had of identifying with their native land or their country – that’s really something we don’t do here or have never yet done for as fleeting as all this American living is we very seldom or never properly get a foothold on it with the powerful strength and homiletic nostalgia that these others have had but maybe that’s only for reasons of the swiftness of our time and deeds and the accelerated way we’ve accommodated and absorbed everything here – so different as I see it from the time I spent in Britain where I often watched the slow and even presentment of everyday continuity and the scheduled comity of things and I’d really hate to see that go from England or anywhere else for that matter for you know when they say things like ‘America’ is taking over the world or that the United States and all its ways and products is suddenly everywhere it makes me quite sad really to think of all that’s to be lost - much like that British sense of ‘proper’ – that I truly almost wish the failure of purpose which some say now haunts America really does succeed and stop all this nonsense and Sigfried Sassoon also said something like ‘battalions battalions scarred from Hell’ in a piece called ‘Prelude: The Troops’ which he wrote to honor those men – and we can debate the definition of that word ‘honor’ all day can’t we for what really is honor ? is it honorable just to let a country or a cause just churn you up kill you or despoil you for the rest of your days and spit you out like rubbish or isn’t honor really a higher calling to object or refuse to argue against or defy such silly means and motives as rabid men just yelling off to war ? and yes of course it is but for the many many who do not object then they will almost gleefully march off to their deaths and escaping that fate they will then instead live the remainder of their lives as if they had already died anyway for they become valueless and embroiled only in the bravado and continuation of that ‘war’ within them by a mental means of some same sort of paucity some pale vagueness they never manage to settle into and the real enemy to them becomes the world they must live in and at that point – sadly enough – I say ‘let them die’ for that is truly what they’ve wanted and the more brutal the death the better FOR THE DRAMA SUITS THEM."

B. HATE MISTAKES ALL:
"And I can go on like this as I will even as we pass these old places here long gone – you know this park wasn’t always a park – and even right here as we walk we’re passing old military installations and lookouts and battlements and bunkers for even this here was a commanding height for occupiers and soldiers of either side to use as lookouts and keep watch on the advancing enemies whether or not known and before that the marshlands and the highlands you must understand were places of paradisaical Indian natives the local people we now know as original Americans even though they weren’t and wouldn’t understand that name if we etched it on their foreheads and they’ve all moved on they’re as gone to us as their once-stable local civilization is and what replaced it all by turns was the commercial and merchant class which moved in first AND ALWAYS FIRST by guns and armaments and such are the lands we walk today – they ALL are the results of fire and brimstone fighting of death and its temerity and anguish and abandonment and beneath our feet somewhere are the bones of very very many men no matter where we walk and these same men EVERYMAN as they are are the same men who today march willingly along searching and claiming an allegiance to that something unknown and for every clerk or cashier kid you see today standing lamely behind a counter somewhere well in that same young face can be the seen the hardened arms and faces of the other thousands at siege and learning to understand evil fire death and flame but I cannot look any of this squarely in the eye AS YOU SEE I am not enamored of any of this and would just as soon walk blindly on remaining in my own small and more delicate world and WELL I MAY if I so choose for all the rest of it just disgusts me badly and the world as we have it now is run by simpletons but simpletons are always so good at convincing others of the rightness of their foul simplicity but ALAS again nothing is ever simple and we burn truth off in layers – one layer past another – until what’s left at the core is a mere montage of death and destruction and then we clean up and pick up the pieces and build it all again - look at how many times this all has been done before - let’s even think of the first war The Trojan War was the very first world war between Europe and Asia as then it was and it was marked not just by ‘heroism’ as we now say but also by catastrophic mistakes and poor leadership and something the Greeks called ‘ate’ which is really the intoxicating pride and overweening arrogance that sometimes clouds the minds of the strong and even when one has legitimate grievances war is not always the best solution – as The Trojan War teaches us – for the Greeks themselves were firmly divided about whether to attack Troy with even heroes like Agamemnon and Odysseus reluctant but the argument which won the day went like this : "if we let the Trojans get away with kidnapping Helen then they’ll steal women again and if we don’t fight them now we’ll have to fight them later – when they’re stronger" and as Achilles said ‘many lives were lost in this insane voyage fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes’ and in whatever way then that you wish to connect this to the modern day it’s all the same and we’ve not gained an iota of good sense in all these years only increased power and strength of arms by which to go forward and fight for the sense of whatever it is we fight for which of course no one ever really knows because it’s different for each man who fights and it’s all about memory and vision and some weirdly distanced glimmer of the past or of childhood or dream-sleep the sort of things which entrench themselves silently deep in the recesses of a mind and are never really heard from again and these same men who fight become the ones who age bending a wicked elbow somewhere atop a beery bar and having others listen to them and even today some Cassandra wailing ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ would go unheard and so misunderstood and a Trojan Horse today perhaps becomes but another meager toy in a long and varied history of false fun and anguish and toil and hate - MISTAKES all.

'BORN IN COTSWALD'

145. 'BORN IN COTSWALD':

I was born in Cotswald near to Acrasfordshire by the Tillihanney River where it bends around the gorge and I never saw my mother or father again and I get tired therefore of people complaining and thinking hardly back at anything they've said and the darkest fear of my own sweet life is the fear of running out of time - for money I have - literally millions - yet all I do with it is stash it away and worry about time (it's something - after all - I've found I cannot purchase) but oh don't get me wrong for I can rent a girl for a few hours or so I can buy off a policeman if I must I can silence a prosecutor and a judge by whipping God's cash in their ever-sniveling noses but there's nothing I can do about running out of time and even Denmond my valet knows there's no way out - and he keeps stealing from me so as to forestall his own doom but little does he know right now even as I type that I've got a killer out after him - with instructions of two bullets to the head and then three more to take out his family; which shouldn't be so difficult since it's just a wife and one kid and there's nothing worse than trash to screw up a wonderful day.
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But like they told me in school : 'Just because you're taking up space, doesn't mean you're studying astronomy.'
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My father - I was told - wore two suits of armor : one made of lead and the other of glass - and he sailed the sea in Summer whenever he could which meant leaving my mother alone for weeks at a time on some land-leased raft of flower shop drudgery (roses and peonies and daffodils and thyme) and he was Tirana-born a scion of old Albania crossed to Bari on the old Italian coast and like some wayfaring Greek Odysseus of even older time found himself washed up one day so many years later on some Albion coast riven with fever - from where he took better and was cured and met the mother and they had me and then they both dissolved from this Earth's face to some simply conjoined deaths apart I never knew and here I am with nothing to do and money a'plenty to do it with and whatever else has befallen me (Aunt Dodgy Uncle Jeda and the beautiful cousin Marnie my age) I'll never know nor tell nor even understand.
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Over the years it's become difficult for me to make sense of much of the old - now that I am here in America living in New York City - and of any of the things which once mattered and only after time have I realized (exactly) that I can predict events tell the future understand exactly what's about to happen before it happens and otherwise predict occurrences : this skill has NOT enamored me in the minds of many people and that's probably the exact opposite of what you'd think but it's the truth though there have been by contrast a FEW who have been quite taken by this - followers in fact and acolytes and those who really believe in me although I'd hardly call that belief because after all what sort of belief can there be in something or someone whose only claim to fame is prescience and the many intangibles it brings and for others to believe in someone merely because of that is suspicious - as if the only reason they do so is to be in on any action before it occurs - but nonetheless that cannot stop the reality of what occurs : 64th Street as a good example - I told the old man to walk closer to the storefronts and not so close along the curb as he was doing in his slow feeble and hobbling way and BAM! next thing I knew he's smashed by an errant taxi swerving up onto the curbing right about where he was and all it had taken was perhaps a minute and a half AT MOST walking before it occurred after my speaking and another time after I mentioned to grocer Tony Kerakis that if he continued to take such high doses of medication he'd be dead before he knew it and WHAM! like that next morning I'm told he'd died overnight - now of course it can be argued that I really did NOT have foreknowledge of these events just lucky surmises or even lucky guesses or inspired conjectures based on evidences apparent before me - and that might be - but really what's the difference anyway it's not as if I'm stopping or starting world wars by these surmisings nor am I defining life and death or matters of same for people involved SO I figure thereby I can call it as I wish it to be and besides who really cares ? I don't.
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I've also been told that I embody the bitchiness of wealth (and that may well be true) and others have said that I am haughty cavalier and uncaring towards them or towards the well-being of the mass of my fellow men and THAT too is quite likely true - for I abhor my fellows I detest the crowd and I cannot stand the laborious principles and polite patternings of the globular mass of messy stupid people I see about me - storekeeps bankers solicitors attorneys doctors and all the rest (let alone the smarmy blood-fetishes of the turgid low-class of those who dutifully 'serve' in positions of assist to their fellow-men : livery people haulers clerks doormen teachers laborers manufacturers sellers and the rest) : dour pigs all I'd say ! and this has nothing really to do with the supposed glamor and exclusivity of the rich or their habits their homes or their dining it's rather (again I'd say) just an innate sense of some finer form of breed or awareness - some regal ripe slowness of nature - one which takes in moments for learning and education and observation : let's say 'allows for a certain fine distancing' unlike the lumpen proletariat who act as slaves to their immediate whims and urges and desires and who speak talk spit and spout with nothing much to say yes as if the very world depended on it (which it might) - they inhabit nothing they dwell in a no-place of faddish mob-rule and a pestilence ruled by entertainment amusement and gratification - the basest instincts honed by the most base people ever imagined and I MEAN just look at what they've engendered ! an absolute conundrum of falsehood and lies and a culture of dominance by the loud and offensive a compressed embodiment of crude theory mis-labeled trickery foul mistakes and evil events all mixed in a grotesque atmosphere of un-learning and no-culture and a fearsome nihilism of the no-mind to no-ends - and if you ask 'them' to quote something they'll quote a clown or an idiot if you ask them to say something memorable to themselves they'll mouth the words or the tunes of a moron and if you ask them for a moment's grace or a soliloquy of their intelligence they'll babble inanely about village-goods or water-cooler opinion and vague mis-matched fantasies of sentiment or religion or magic and art - the grossest drivel of the grossest civil disorder that's ever existed no ends omitted and no ends extended.

THE PILE-DRIVER HAZE...THE BROKEN WING

144. THE PILE-DRIVER HAZE THE MOTHER OF INVENTION THE CHILEWONT WITH THE BROKEN WING:

Up top the rocks were massive and etched with what appeared to be lines made eons ago in some weird extra-terrestrial way and they were piled as they grew from the earth just where they stayed and paths and trails went right over them whenever they were in the way - I imagined the Native Americans of old walking these very rocks as they passed along the high palisades and checked out the river beneath them and the far-distant other shore - lush and dense and rich and green - teeming with silence in the riches of things unseen and overgrown NOT a word to be heard not a noise out of place just the usual warble of birds in the Spring and ice floes in the dead of Winter the hush of snow the hiss of hot air and I could see the huge markings on the faces of the rocks and wondered about them in silence (for apparently Americans took no heed of this at all and they cared less about any of it either) for nowadays nothing comes from the sky - no riches no money no special things from on high - so that there's really little to be gained (it is thought) by the caring either for or of it and if you understand the thinking which produces something like that you'd probably understand a million other things which I myself noticed by being here : on the northern bottom of Newark along what is now Route 21 and by something called Mt. Pleasant Avenue is a massive cemetery dating from the old original founding days of earliest Newark and in this location are to be found to be precise most of the people whose last names have now become or were already the names of streets in old Newark (there's a distinction to be made here because there have been essentially two Newarks with one on either side of the societal divide which strangely divides America in these parts - that is the original OLD inhabitants and their being replaced (once they essentially gave up on the cities in question) by the newer and much-lesser mentally fit secondary groups which came after and still are coming and breeding and adding great numbers and hordes to these already miraculously decayed and forgotten places which have in essence become mighty new engines of social engineering AND socialism of a sort which never was supposed to happen in the USA at least by history's standards and which today's Americans conveniently forget all about) - but so be it - and a friend of mine just yesterday commented upon seeing this cemetery - 'so this is where all the WASP's ended up' - and he wasn't that far from the truth and all one sees here are the collected remains and remnants and memorials for all of that which has passed - an entirely 'other' way of American life and one composed of names reeking of old England and old Europe and the many places from which these early settlers of Newark and environs came and the whole place (once proudly athwart the bountiful river) is now busted and truncated and made noisy by the howling thread of highway traffic which rudely trounces at its end at the exact spot where the most forgotten and most luxuriant remnants of the old are - concreted mausoleums closed forever now by poured sealings to thwart vagrants and the old and crumbling red brick tombs with monumental tops and grandiose architectural renderings now crumbling in a powdery mass of old red brick and broken stone covers and ancient iron rusted away to a mottled mesh with broken windows which here and there may still reflect the fleeing sun and inside of each of these tombs - redolent of the past and the past again - are perhaps still the bones and shards of the original tenants the ever-owners the long-lost-last resident of each : formally named crypts broken now by time and exquisitely carved memorials forgotten now by every weather and air and awareness of any nearby human anywhere and I visit these places myself as a spectral figure and I find myself there seeking my own bones and my own reasons but the place is awesomely inspiring and the entire idea of the present and the modern makes my heart ache and hurt and seek ceasing to pound as a solace for I know that this has fallen and fallen again BETWEEN places between times and presences and no one is aware of the loss and no one cares but HERE are the original causes and names and people and dates the ORIGINAL marks of everything AMERICAN which here once was and here now is despoiled lost gone and forgotten amidst the noise and wail of stupidity amidst the noise and wail of crazed local populations of indigents voting and screaming while they vote and falling and swooning to their God meager great God Mammon and succor though it may be and alongside that everything else pales and should for truly THIS this is the city of the dead the sepulchral presence of death and ALL its varied minions with the noise and smell of the modern about them (whilst I walk alone and silently among them - in some evasive semi-dark of time and theme and air) - and I like to think I am better for that.

TRUMAN CAPOTE'S MASKED BALL

143. TRUMAN CAPOTE'S MASKED BALL:

I became for a while infatuated by Penelope Tree who was like a seventeen-year-old girl in 1966 at Truman Capote's Black and White Masked Ball - that famous soiree he threw at the Plaza Hotel on November 28 1966 and as I watched all or many of those crazy lunatic crazy wealthy people being ushered in up the stairs and out of their limos I finally did see her coming across the fountain area - amazing graze unusual demeanor stunning Betsey Johnson outfit in fact something never before seen and just designed out of the working Betsey Johnson collection and seemingly made from scraps and sheer scraps at that from the very trendy 'Paraphrenalia' the oh-so-hip 1960's Carnaby influenced fashion and designer accessories shop and all that had by this time - along with this amazing 'dress' catapulted Betsey Johnson anyway into the new stratosphere of chic designers but SHE wasn't invited you see it was only Penelope Tree who was ushered in and photographed in this amazingly elan something-fashion faux seductive almost lingerie-like 1960's outfit - causing paroxysms and despair and shouts and squeals from those present and the photographs flashed around the world too just then made Penelope Tree's reputation too forevermore as Model Grande Moderne - I have no idea where she is now alive dead or in-between nor on which continent or in what space but I'll always remember everything around her from that time - the crazed sickening people and the crazed sickening me and everyone was really an incestuous insider and nothing more and they each knew each other and their places and their fortunes and this clan-gathering was taking place in the middle of the Kingdom which was theirs and all ostensibly for the purpose of celebrating a book about a dead murdered farm family and two executed killers written up by some fledgling half-writer along with some To Kill a Mockingbird inward girl too named Harper Lee and everything together was a strange mix of people and occurrences as I watched and yet in a way - to the rest of the world - it was like a finger poked in the eye but I didn't care : of course I hadn't then realized that the line in the sand was drawn in the same sand that I'd later be sinking in but that had not yet occurred because at this point to me the world was still small and merely composed of perhaps a hundred very small places and I'd see the daily newspapers and see people moving back and forth with their own papers black inky fingers contorted and folded papers on seats and benches but all that was reported was the same fifteen situations and they each revolved around personality and not issue which was really the forerunner of the way the world would be turning and before long it was as if some separation anxiety was out and about and people could not for long (as in this present day) be without their connection to something someone a name an issue a situation and all the professionals bravely say the world is global and has widened and broadened so everyone is not connected but in reality the world has shrunk to inestimable small proportions and each little microcosm now is the same cell of local bacteria swimming in a much larger cup and even back then in 1966 all this Truman Capote elitist brouhaha pretty specifically reflected that idea - the people I watched the proud the austere the wealthy the made - strutted gainfully for their own selected audiences so that they could be seen and imagined and even as I saw Penelope Tree I at once realized it was another planet-world entirely and one I'd never set foot upon.