'NONETHELESS BY GOD THEY TRIED'

250. 'NONETHELESS BY GOD THEY TRIED' (nyc, the Bowery, 1971) - The Naked Lunch Cafe:

Writing is a place to live : I felt as if I was in a curious place where nothing happened - try as I might I couldn't find Goodness in either direction - and such findings then made it difficult to go on or at least to forge ahead : I had somehow moved into a mixed place wherein both the glare of the supposed felicities of a good life as seen in the hundreds of people always milling about the colorful shop windows the jewelry and shoe assortments the girls misting perfumes towards the passing crowds and (for contrast) the dark lines of Bowery people and their tired bent-over outlooks and crazed prancing fantasies as they shuffled around in their own half-light (a dimness and sadness which belied all the happiness and glare of the shops just mentioned) BOTH these things rolled into one another and instead of clashing they simply and silently merged - so that at any moment a wealthy shopper loaded down with happiness and goods could turn a corner and come face-to-face with any denizen of the dark whose outstretched hand and crumpled hat would be asking for something 'small change spare any food for a good decent man I got nowhere else' - but no one listened : no one heard : and me that was somewhere mixed in between the two like a soiled shoelace running discreetly at a low-level pace between hundred dollar shoes on their way to somewhere else - actually I kind of liked the Bowery back then when it was just getting around to somehow re-branding itself from the hell-pit of despair into something more approaching just a forgotten blackhole into which everything had fallen - all the desperate storylines and booze-tales of murder death and mayhem had been slowly transformed into the same sort of broad and guttural decay which had taken over most of the other parts of the city - or at least the parts where any modicum of money no longer reached or if it did reach brought anything worthwhile : there were new layers of decay and rot everywhere - 15-year old junkies and Puerto Rican cross-dressers dying on door steps one after the other in a weird melange of punk-era desolation and ghetto black militant ranting - men would throw old sheets down on the sidewalks outside the Bowery Hotel or any of the old corner mission or food-joints and you'd see for sale the junkiest refuse of any trash-yard anywhere and it was all being sold somewhat incredibly by crazed and drunken or spaced out and violent bums black-militant hipsters drug-addicts or people with par-boiled complexions slowly dying of something in a mist of alcohol pot acid and rage - they'd start screaming and ranting at will even at passers-by who'd be their supposed customers if times were gentler (perhaps) - ten-cent piles of old lamps and bad shoes twenty-five cent luggage with broken-down snaps and locks - it was anything and everything all together at once and the screaming fierceness of the 'Bowery approach' was - if nothing else - some twisted new approach to marketing that somehow never did make it off the ground...and then these same people would slowly drift off - leaning against a building (the same spot where they'd just been raging) they'd sleep the slobbering sleep of filth and unconsciousness that any liquored-up bum had ever slept and just like that someone else would step in and take over the sales-pitches for them and it went on like this all day and into the night - bottles of booze and cigarettes passed from hand to hand the same queer words used over and over the loquacious and foul-mouthed denigrations of some subculture of a nervous underground which was in itself a subculture of something else - and it all went on into a broken social-fabric of nothingness hate angst and fever-pitch anger with everyone so caught up in their own personal poverties and situations that no solution ABSOLUTELY no solution could ever be forthcoming and all the missions and prayer-meetings and cheap meals in the world weren't going to solve the situation but nonetheless by God they tried ! shawl-driven preachers down on their hemware walking straight into little crowds of bums and down-and-outers to spread the Word of some ghoulish ghastly deliverance offered up as grace or sacrifice or treasure - and if you wanted to eat you had to listen to the 'God spiel' for at least 15 minutes in any style you chose - dozing gnawing on wood spitting up picking your nose scratching your head or milling about but you had to be there and be seated at the least for a few moments - easier for God's own Grace to seep in - and the lawyers with gold watches watched in case any one fell or got hurt on the mission's watch (God's money as good as anyone else's you know - so said to me by Leroy Lokum Lench Armitage III 'Lawyer to the Poor and Indigent' his card read) and it too was all bullshit just like the rest but people had to eat and needed bathrooms and all the rest so they went (along the street at any time the dark brown of trucks and cars and wagons and barrels and the men who worked the street knew every nook and cranny) and the old opera company over on the side street tried thriving but ended up barely surviving and the 'Naked Lunch Cafe' (named after a Bill Burroughs book) over on 6th and Second Ave - for the most part - took the overflow crowd and fed them well - but this bunch paid after they ate.