I NEVER WOULD HAVE KILLED THIS JULIUS LAROSA ROSENBERG GUY

224. I NEVER WOULD HAVE KILLED THIS JULIUS LAROSA ROSENBERG GUY (the ‘new stranger’ you just have to meet):

The word was this : ‘whadd’a fuck you talkin’bout?’ or however that’s said nowadays in the rattle-staccato runabout that people say things by and I never saw such a speedcar of words whiz along so fast as what I hear in the street but no one knows anything really and amazement is the moment I realize my past no longer means anything to the current crop of contemporaries around me : ‘Juliusfuckin’whoo?’: call it contraption call it schooling call it contraction distraction rejection projection whatever you will – it’s a sad sad symbol of a day long gone by : ‘I want to carry your carriage and lead you along I’d like to walk you home or take you to my home at the seashore : ain’t got no house at the seashore so just wann’a sit on your floor and do you some good – we can chew gum together you can kiss my eyes and I can touch your things : however you’d like to arrange this – holiday-on-ice or riverside jaunt in my cardiac cadaver - abstract features played out on the cell-block wall and Nikos the Greek guy who owns the diner on the corner by the firehouse comes over and says “Ah! The best thing in the world – to meet a new stranger!” and I couldn’t tell what he meant maybe some weird Greek logic or something or maybe just a newer discomfort with the same old language he’s learned “aren’t all strangers new after all?” I replied and he smiled back and said “yes but not new of course like a new stranger is” and bewildered or befuddled or betwixt and between (I couldn’t ask him which one because he’d say ‘you mean bedazzled?’ or something) I just let it go – the King Street Diner had nothing to say for itself anyway except the traditional Greek coffee cups which somehow they still used – the kind with the urn and the Olympic discus statue and some God or two piled up in blue before the columns of one or another version of the Parthenon or the Acropolis and like mighty words from mighty Mount Olympus the inscription reads ‘it is our pleasure to serve you’ – which always reminded me of that old movie where the aliens come to Earth to ‘serve Mankind’ ostensibly to help but what they really meant was they were running desperately low on food supplies on their own planet and wished to take a few specimens of humankind back to propagate as a new food supply on their own planet - thus the ersatz interplanetary motto of their assistance here ‘to serve Mankind’ of course misunderstood and misconstrued by all those stupid dangling Earthlings who fall for the ‘we want to help you’ story line until they realize it’s too late : or I don’t know MAYBE that never was a movie maybe I made it up or maybe it was a Twilight Zone storyline or maybe Herbert Huncke himself told it to me at Barrister’s the sleaze-ball homo-bar he once frequented on 38th Street between bouts of pneumonia and cocaine fixations – he was the first really fucking maniac I ever met but nothing went nowhere so it all just ‘was’ or as he’d say ‘boy you can’t have zero until you figure out what the other numbers are’ and even if that was never really true it stood him in good stead with any Arabs he ever met (Arabs invented the concept of ‘zero’ a long long time ago – thus you know WE have Arabic numbers) – oil barons from Riyadh and Rapallo who swept in in 1956 Chryslers and under their robes were as gay as Zorro anyway : Herbert never minded he just ‘went with the flow’ which was another of his oil jokes : the lady with the mole on her ear was the one I always fell for – she was darn nearly as ‘purdy as a cracker’ I’d heard some cowboy say and all she ever did was sit about and talk to anyone who came by and she was like the traveler’s best friend and non too shabby for it either : her name was Marnie McKay and she’d been hanging out on the Westside since before the last of the Hudson Dusters (the old waterfront gang) put his final gun away - she’d had mentions in a few movies and bit parts in this or that but none of it went to her head “they’d like an old whore like me in any movie they make – adds ‘local color’ you know what I mean – and as long as they pay something ANYTHING I’ll do it for a few hours” she reminded me of anyone’s dumb aunt the kind you had to go see when they were visiting and she’d dote on you just for being someone new or the neighbor’s boy who’s friends with little Johnnie - and then as I got to thinking about it maybe THAT’S exactly the kind of thing Nikos meant - certainly fits the description of a new stranger you have to meet.