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?"