'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.