'THE IDEA WAS TO MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN THAT WOULD NEVER GO AWAY' (NYC, 1969)
247. 'THE IDEA WAS TO MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN THAT WOULD NEVER GO AWAY' (nyc, 1969):'When you've got your own time to make it work I always thought a person should be able to ride freely between whatever impulses came to them : running between museums and galleries or car dealers and doctors whatever got one's fancy' - a droll report if I ever heard one but this guy Billy Fargo just talked like that - 'Billy Far Gone' he was called' - and when he wasn't talking like that he was reading fantasy books he said were based on reality - 'Stranger in a Strange Land' 'Hobbit' a bunch of Arthur C. Clarke stuff - the sorts of reading I never did : I found fantasy insinuatingly boring and always felt that to be a really weird conclusion especially since as the very fact of fantasy was supposed to be exciting but a person had to have only a certain kind of brain or thought-process to get all taken up in that stuff and I never had that - I could never let go long enough to go along with the program figuring that the author in each case was merely having a go at it at my (the reader's) expense by setting up all these fake situations and expecting everyone to fall for them so he or she could then absolutely control and cherry-pick the words and events to make up and manipulate a false world - much like the movies and TV and stuff where people raptly go along with whatever ridiculous plot twists and character turns happen only so as to promote or advance whatever stupid plot had been out forth : anyway I could never stay with that stuff ('suspension of disbelief' I believe it's now called - like you have to 'suspend' your impulse to 'dis-believe' what's happening (since you already know it's all false and made up) in order to go along with what occurs) and fiction fantasy make-believe call it whatever you want it never worked for me but now that's not to say I didn't enjoy good reads with a chattering intellectual basis - stuff I could pick apart and ferret out - things like Bellow was doing in Herzog as a simple for-instance : fictional material and made-up stuff perhaps but at every step it was filled with and based in referential material and intellectual citations that could at least take you back into other things - look-ups and further studies to figure out the sources and such : I liked that and there was plenty of it in addition too to all the Joyce and Dos Passos and Williams and all that I wanted : I loved those guys along with about fifty others from Lawrence Sterne to T. S. Eliot too and it was constant for me all this go-back-and-forth between authors and writers and sources and real heavy non-fiction and scholarly stuff (which I really liked) but at any level I kept things hopping to myself so I was never without a tome or a source to go to - so anyway Billy Far To Go or whatever his real name was he kept busy with his endless plot twists and decadent musings about his fantasy worlds (words coming out of wires and phones with consciousness and all that) and maybe just maybe I could give it to him on 'Childhood's End' - which I kind-of liked - but I rather shied away from a full reciprocation and considered it actually more of some hippie-fantastic-cartoon-balloon kind of thing instead (I saw those people everywhere and I knew them and watched what they did but most of their stuff was so utterly without substance and airy and gauzy that it nearly drove me crazy to see so many people falling around themselves with all that 'new-consciousness' ultra-spaced-out 'cool' stuff which kept them so busy for so long making plans about flowers and colors and smoke) and the more I made moves towards intensifying whatever it was about myself that was calling out for attention the more alienated anyway I became : a couple of guys on a rooftop over 5th Street smoking Cheroots or whatever those little cigars the Spanish guys used to smoke were called and they'd sit up there throwing dice and yelling down to the girls below as they'd pass - the usual lewd comments filled with indignity and indecorum too but nothing ever came from it and I'd assume they all went home and made love to their big old wives anyway but it was of no matter to me - these guys were mindless and shapeless with faces that bent like the breeze which pulled them - any which way and everywhere too - no jobs no income and nothing to understand the very plight of their own lives either and all they knew of me was to see the kid from 11th walking by again maybe a nod or a wave on my way to somewhere - to 1st for the little janitor job I had or over to 8th to play at being my own fractious Rembrandt and dizzy as all get out too : buses slugged it out on Broadway and nobody ever won and secretaries plodded home in skirts and jackets looking for all the world like tired schoolgirls or inactive whores caught quick between chores and the stately gents with the tophats and briefcases in their pegged-pants suits and funny fedoras looked for all the world like retired baseball players from some place far far away and long ago - so long ago it might all as well have been in black and white.
ALL THINGS NOT KNOWN
246. ALL THINGS NOT KNOWN (nyc, 1972):Not necessarily the finest but who cared; the man was throwing garbage down from a second level and as it hit the walkway below it made solid thuds sometimes and lesser thuds other times - filled as it was with basic construction junk of insulation tiles plasterboard cutoffs and the like - and he was yelling loudly his commands and construction oaths to his workers - the glass had already been broken and shards still were strewn about and pieces of lumber and broken lathing were everywhere and as I'd seen all this before (in that both construction and deconstruction were everywhere in NYC as even the oldest places became or were deemed at least 'no good' and ceded to what the industry strangely called 'rehabilitation' or 'rebuilding for newer purposes') - it never made much sense for me to see things go as I was totally and always in love with the oldest and the most quaint of whatever I'd see - even the old leaky places the old haunted booklofts and musty bent and twisted stores tippled with brown light the old stables and dairies and taverns and bars and all of that ancient crumbling old housing now so quickly being lost or gobbled up by cranes and backhoes and wrecking balls and their crews - men ferociously going about their assigned tasks as all about them things fell and tumbled and were crushed or crashed on their own - it was sometimes a nightmare circus underway at all hours with klieg-lights and artificial lighting pushing a workday into a true 24-hour situation and the solid world melts away and is NO match for the brawn and holler of man's best work : union wages or slave wages it all came out the same and at every moment a new pyramid of Cheops was apt to appear anywhere one looked - it was late 1966 or so and most of the rampant destruction had already happened - the old train stations and platforms the wrecking of the old El stands the doddering and twisted huts and wagon sheds which once dotted everywhere along both coastlines and waterfront - all that was already gone in a million pieces and all those grand old granite and stone stauaries and pilasters and monuments of the past were recklessly cast-off dumped and forgotten to who-knew-where except the mobsters and the salvage racketeers who'd find ways to make money of that too and all-in-all I knew it was a pretty miserable and shocking world and one which the crazed and vile construction guy throwing stuff down to the street knew little about or - by contrast - knew maybe far more about than I myself would ever know : from experience comes knowledge but it never works the other way around : and I'd once asked one of these guys if they ever found 'surprises' as they dismantled buildings and he looked at me and 'all the time brother - happens all the time' and he walked away so that I was never able to clarify what he meant - bags of money dead bodies old bones stashes of jewelry or the more mundane idea of unexpected passageways old interior walls thick stairwells and hidden rooms but whatever he'd meant he wasn't talking least of all to me but just the wondering was fun and the old white building was slowly being sanitized to the present day - from which it would vacate and disappear in an actual and complete 'sanitation' which would replace it would something else again and I felt sometimes as if the entire city was coming down all around me - like the day a truck fell through the elevated West Side Highway and some crazed driver limping and livid came out of his truck and in a mad and furious manner began cursing the streets the city the state the world right up until the moment he passed out from shock with a broken shoulder blade and a broken leg and some ribs - things he'd not even known about at first.
- It seemed like that everywhere and if crime wasn't rampant than for damn sure death and destruction - each in their own way - were.
SENTIMENT KILLS
245. SENTIMENT KILLS:I was out standing by a doorway and thinking of names and remembering places and all the things lost when I realized that for moment after moment there'd never again be another voice being sent my way another word of any sort NOTHING that I'd have to recreate textuate orchestrate - Althea Goodyear Wetz herself the girl I used to know the one sitting in the front seat back seat wherever and the big guy walks in with the stupid flower in his hat and sits down right next to her then he begins some trance-talk pretending to know what he don't know and the afternoon goes on like that for too long a time while talk turns to Ireland to where he says "I'm going back and never coming back" and silence is the watchword buzzword of that day but then I realize if there's no way to get back what once was yours then life itself has no meaning or not that much anyway but for whatever purposes that can be made of it we live it anyway nothing ventured nothing gained - and as I remember it Althea turned to him right then and in another language they both understood began telling him of the story of her old Grandma Weenah who 'ran for years the village potato storage facility in a shed behind her country-barn' and I wasn't sure I'd heard the comment related back to me correctly so I said 'you had a grandma who ran a potato collection building?' and she nodded and said 'yes but not really too' and later again when I asked about it after the guy had left she said 'it's just my way to do that - I felt sorry a bit for the fellow having to pack it up and leave and all that so I made up a story about a Grandma that maybe he'd find some solace in or at least something to think about when he got there' and it was almost funny but that's the way she was - always trying to serve others or put a good gloss on things and I began thinking that of all the many people I knew she was probably - because of that trait too - one of the saddest people I knew and she was always nervous-like and overly concerned with how people felt or what they were about to experience and because of that I felt she really did nothing for herself except just wallowed about in other's people's projected misfortunes and those were the same sort of people who ended up like having ten cats or too many pet birds or who took in stray dogs and lived in a mess both cluttered and stinking of pets : but they seemed always to get by even though they were always strung out on someone else's bad situation (like it really mattered to them) and I decided right then and there to understand forever that 'SENTIMENT' is the killer - that no mater what goes on once 'sentiment' enters into it it's all over and one can do nothing to evade the dumb consequences which come from it : after all WARS are fought and bombs dropped and people killed and land ruined and defoliated and burned and all the rest because of 'sentiment' - as a cause or a credo or a commentary and you never read about any heroes having sentiment - they wouldn't because they KNOW it kills them and you never read about no GOD having sentiment - no way no man - plaques and locusts and fires and brimstone blah blah and all that ! Sodom and Gomorrah be gone and you too to a pillar of salt - so anyway 'no matter what confusion befalls one no matter how bad the situation gets - don't fall like rain for the drop of a tear and have no concern for the rest.'-It all sounds so funny now but back then it was a real big time : you think Harry Truman flinched when he dropped those two bombs? and when you start feeling bad for other people's misfortunes you've taken your first fatal step down a slippery slope leading to nothing but trouble.-I'll take my chances riding coach and I'll leave the good seats for the rabble - the ones who don't mind paying for the chance to better see things first-hand : the way the priest is dripping wet with his own holy sin the way the athlete shows disdain for the fan the way the mean-dog at the base of the ramp snaps at everyone's feet just the same - Anyway - I finally gave it all up and Althea too and just marched back to my little room in the basement of the building and found a place to sleep.
YOU GOT FLEXIBILITY IN THOSE THINGS YOU DO
244. 'YOU GOT FLEXIBILITY IN THOSE THINGS YOU DO' (nyc, 1966):
It seemed like it anyway - matters taken in one's own hands - like the lumber-yard guy on the westside throwing his hammer into the air and catching it while walking away - pretty cool trick for a novice or a first-time viewer but anyone in the know would have remembered the time the claw-hammer had actually landed on the guy's head instead and ripped out a good chunk of scalp and it was funny to see him wriggling around while blood gushed because all the time he was nonchalantly pretending it wasn't hurting and wasn't a mishap rather just something sort-of planned that fell short - yeah man on that one - but it all passed and he never clonked his skull again : I spent plenty of time around there - even lighting gasoline puddles up once or twice as they'd pool beneath an old in-use lumber-truck which has leaked and once the truck was gone for a delivery the little puddle left was too easy to not pass on and torch : it would burn for a few minutes until it just burned out and left a slime of melted tar - nothing special but I guess as much fun as beating yourself in the head with a hammer but hey who knew ! you've always got flexibility in the those things you do.
THE SQUARE ROOT OF OLAF PALME (mainly a fantasy)
243. THE SQUARE ROOT OF OLAF PALME (mainly a fantasy):
It was never about anything really and if I had to tell you you wouldn't get it anyway : (piece-post pell mell snackinfoo and the reddle from quark o'mania province) : when I'm in a roomful of people I'm an instantly dangerous man looking around for the one with the gold and seeking to find the girl from Mysteria Weems Ohio the old rubber town : 'we make nothing anymore' the old-timer says 'this fucking country's so far down the tubes they can't even flush it away...and when I was a boy...' someone else cuts him off 'shut up you old bag of shit ! I'm sick of hearing you!' and the guy walks off with the handle to the counterpunch cabinet that held the weekly list : so we had nothing more to do and were able to just sit there - of course some jerk soon brought out a deck of cards (I fucking HATE people who play cards) although I never minded them before the first but no matter because whenever they park their cars they right away start talking about their daughters 'I'd never let her go out with THAT slimeball - fer' Chris'sakes he THINKS with his dick I've heard it said' and then the door opens and in comes Sant'Erge the minister's kid and he quickly says 'over here ! my father's dying of the flu!' and I ask 'well can't he freaking pray for something new?' meaning what the hell - he's the minister not me - but the kid didn't get my meaning and started screaming instead - yelling about his mother being dead already and he'd be an orphan so I slapped him to shut him down and I said 'man shut it ! you're only talking 'bout the flu' and he said yeah but he'd read somewhere that in like 1918 it had killed lots of people real quickly and I said 'yes but that was long ago - now the lines are shorter and news travels quicker' and that shut him up so he went away - but anyway when I really did check I found out that the flu among all those 1918 people was in reality (medical science now says) an endemic reaction by a sort of mass-hallucination to the myopic crazed psychic fear and displacement caused by WWI amongst an American populace un-used to anything like that before and although this all may SOUND weird it is really true and documented and a reputable point of medical view (see Harvard see the CDC in Atlanta - see whomever you'd like to see but DON'T see me) - then the fire-bell tolled and the harbor-wharf was wiped clean with some sort of Windex slime rolled over by wheels and a couple hundred fish swam up and began licking the wood with their crazy fish tongues and then they all rolled over and got washed out to the harbor again with the next splash-wave of wake and wind together (something I'd not ever seen before) and the beautiful girl on the trundle-bed nearby was playing Hoagy Carmichal on an old Victrola and it all sounded so nice I wondered how but I didn't say a word instead : watching cartoon characters take naps and watching Lindy Boggs (I think it was) eating cereal on the rim of the edge by the two window panes at the shaftway - she ate like a pig but kept it all clean : and then I remembered that dead Mayor of Princeton - the woman with one eye - and I thought maybe that was her name too but really couldn't remember and promised myself to go look it up next chance I had (got a map of the graveyard and know right where she is) and then I saw the mutant go by (he was 'lazy good-looking and aristocratic' as my mother used to say) but there was nothing but marbles in that cheesecake and I knew it too - he was brutish and in reality as short as they come with an even shorter attention span (and my sister used to say 'something shorter than that too') so let's just say 'GENIUS HE WASN'T' and leave it at that : heroes in my life come and go - Glenn Gould or Dicky Betts it hardly matters - and I could talk to anyone if they would just hold still - long enough for a riddle long enough to fish long enough to whittle long enough to piss - but whether or not it makes any sense never matters and is never brought up and this is the age of wonders but I wonder if anything will last and that does it for me - evergreen trees are drying up dead - climates which change take old trees away and the world heaves and moves in mysterious ways - but never mind that anyway and truck farms grow no trucks so don't go looking just ask anyone who knows because those kinds of people just love to show off and tell everyone what they know BUT AS FOR ME I've taken forever a vow of shady silence and a nodding acquaintance with it all - so I won't even point : in Germany they train bears and in ancient Greece an idiot meant someone who did not take part in public life : now of course it means just the opposite and how's that for banana-cake?
THE DECLENSIONS OF AUVRE
242. THE DECLENSIONS OF AUVRE:He was swinging that stick like a cabbie drives and as he walked he was hitting everything in his path - this crazy guy walking along the street while passers-by gawked and trembled and ducked into any alcove or entryway they could find so as to get out of the way - he smashed glass he smashed car windows bus-stop glass-frames advertisements a barber-pole a light stanchion a mailbox and lots more - he was just wildly hitting anything along the way and finally the police got there in two blue and white cars which stopped askew at the curb and the cops dashed out with their own billy clubs and just got right up to the guy from behind and took him down as they were beating him with their clubs - restraint it was called - about as randomly as he had just been hitting everything else and it lasted about twenty seconds - a lot of noise and yelling too and then they had topped this guy over and had him pinned flat on the ground face down and head bleeding and his arms they cuffed quickly behind him and then they tied his legs and pulled him up like a sack of some still-wriggling potatoes or something and I saw they tied a rag over and partially into his mouth too and his tan pants and flannel shirt both were splotched with blood as well and they managed to heave him prone onto the back seat of the police cruiser and I saw them then lock him in the cage and get back in and drive away quickly - lights flashing and sirens blaring and it all happened so swiftly that I wasn't sure what I'd just witnessed but everyone else around was relieved and the suit who was left behind - some plainclothes fancy detective sort - was asking people questions and jotting things down on his notepad and I heard the usual snippets 'outt'a control just crazy man this guy was waltzed the street like he had a pick-axe just breaking things up' and another said 'I was fearing for my life and he looked just like he was looking for heads to cracks - one crazy guy he was' and 'I saw him swing that once and I watched that whole window over there just crackle and burst apart like it was smashed' - which only made a little sense since I guessed it actually WAS smashed and that's all that really had to be said instead of all that dramatically cinematic stuff but I chuckled just figuring it was a film-student talking or something but I never saw or read anything else about it so I never got to know who it was or what had precipitated the crazy attack or why and what happened to him I never knew.
