AND ALL THAT TOO
272. AND ALL THAT TOO (nyc, 1979):It wasn't about time it wasn't about grief it wasn't about anything really just both the place and the time - the very things which sustained me were just as steadily defeating me - and the entire pinion of what moved was wearing out and running thin : lights in the harbor and roadways along the coast EVERYTHING was changing and being taken away as the awful blot of a generic sterility was slowly taking over and one year on the waterfront the big thing was yet again another murder and then the very next year it was something totally different defeating and stupid : like the floating barge onto which the 'flower show' was going to be held - someone's absolutely stupid idea of some effete gentility parading as a sales-option for the fragrance and color of flowers and would people come ? hell yes and come they did - a few thousand of them for sure gawking and traipsing in over some silly green-carpeted gangplank through an area that once before had grandly transported trans-Atlantic travelers to the spectacular berths on their monumental steamships and NOW only now did I realize that the continual erosion of tradition and propriety had brought us to the present : hordes of societal geeks and razor-wired minds with no way out were intent on attendance at something so unjustifiably stupid as this : watercress and tulips in every direction with orchids and dahlias mixed in and an argument every step of the way in a passion of flowers and floral lore having absolutely no sense nor importance in the face of the indescribable glee of destruction and mayhem taking place right outside the doors - a city flooded with anger and evil falling apart on its very self and on the people who had mightily struggled to stay there and then just given up : piles of glass and broken brick old with I-beams and roof-panels from 75-year old buildings falling apart and crumbling down as knife wielding maniacs and drug-addicted repeat felons lurked in every alley and doorway all along the way to nowhere - whores operating out of the backs of box trucks with matresses lined up under the crumbling elevated highway along the westside piers and trucks turned into boudoirs of a very rough sort with runaways from Minnesota hiding out in their 15-year old fears and anxieties servicing sick men just wanting whatever they could get : and then mayhem itself breaks loose - thousands more gay men and gay women affixing themselves to a sorrowful and acrid prescription for death all along the abandoned wharves and piers up and down the westide of the village and Chelsea as IT DID SEEM the entire world was falling apart - I began carrying a revolver in my belt and a knife in my boot as I went about my own tasks there - working at a taxi-stable changing tires on a rushed timer and draining hot oil into tubs on the slick floors and carrying auto parts a few blocks from across the street to where they were needed and then - adrift myself - fighting off the crazed men and the morons who seemed never to go away and the unexplainable 1970's 'working-class urban priests' - the idiots who would walk along here and try to preach their form of salvation and jargon to people whose ears were dead - and right through the eighties all this went on as the cadavers piled up and the great sweep of epidemic death soiled and sullied the rows and rows of homosexual bars and palaces along the way UNTIL in a great heap of silence sorrow sadness and death no one else any longer could make any sense of any of this and everything just stopped : stopped like that ! like a buck-deer shot stone solid dead with a bullet in his head like a clay pigeon blasted from the very skeet-shot skies above my very head - it just went on and it all was just like that and all that too.
IN PRETTY MUCH THE MOST AMAZING MONOLOGUE I EVER HEARD
271. IN PRETTY MUCH THE MOST AMAZING MONOLOGUE I EVER HEARD - (a jazz story, Jimmy Goodenough, Aug. 1969):
"Well that's an improvement" the old timer said while sitting on a concrete and stone half-wall separating the lawn from the shaded people - it wasn't just the tone of this voice that caught my ear but it was also the accent and his demeanor - both very interesting - so I decided the stop right there and spend a few moments with him as I had the time (I'd been working the last 6 hours or so with Cheng Dao Lee known as Charley an artist who had a huge apartment on W86th where he did his work and this day some of his large pieces needed crating and readying for transportation - which was simple enough work if one could be careful - and it involved building protective transport-frames of 1x2's lumber wood protective covering and nails all the simple stuff to construct around each 8 or 10 foot painting so it wouldn't get hurt during transport) and this guy on the wall looked over to me and said "sit down - what are you doing around here?" and I proceeded to do so as we started talking - this entire area by the 72nd street entrance to the park was always a favorite spot of mine - the geography right there is pretty active - little hills and vistas the wide front of the Natural History Museum and the Historical Society across the street and all those walls and benches and things along the walkway affording interesting views into the park or along the roadway - whichever one's preference - with which to wile away the time or just sit back on a nice day and take it all in : the old guy was just as interested in any detail I could tell him as I'd be in anything he told me - which meant like a half-interest just to help make a human-contact and pass some time - so I told him my current story - the art-school downtown the various little jobs here or there anywahere I'd undertake to get a few dollars and the varied ways and means of my wandering existence (of course I'd leave out the usual jibs and jabs of what went wrong and who did what) but no matter : he said his name was Jimmy Goodenough pronounced 'Goo-den-ow' which pronunciation he said was 'good enough for me' which I thought maybe was a joke but never found out really and he was some old jazz dude from the hep-cat days of 15 or 20 years back and he had for sure a certain attitude of his own to which I listened and was raptly startled and fascinated all together at once and although I'd never heard of him I just let him talk - "...now you've got the opportunity now you're young and should be open to everything you can let's say 'absorb' you dig ? like right so you got to always take a moment and look around - take those moments to boy because they're precious and by God then they just become scarce and just as important it is to listen JUST listen ! no other thing no other sound - just a note like any person would hear if they would if they COULD you see but they never do because the monstrous crossword puzzle of their dull mind won't LET them wherein the wailing and the good sense of all that is and remains hidden by the four-letter word I am thinking of 'MIND' or maybe even 'JAZZ' because they is BOTH you see the very same thing" - I liked the way he talked and it was old and intriguing I thought and hip too I figured probably -strong and enunciated and boisterous and exclamated too all at the same time but sensitive and observantly wise too but I figured not to step in what did I know and instead just let this old jazz guy go on (it did seem back then there were plenty enough of them about - in the waning days of old 60's jazz that I'd somehow bump into them now and again pretty often and it was just like an inner 'urge' or something to come forth and be personified in one of these guys) "and I am thinking of JAZZ maybe again or that be-bop hazing sound of evolution something like what went right past say Louis Armstrong from Fats Waller without anyone really noticing (what am I saying - oh shit they noticed!) until POOF right there was Louie with Lucy Baba Louie ruining the entire sell-out raggedy-muffin scene selling it all out for money and fame CHEAP fame mind you and some backstreet-curb-assed excuse for nigger or hipster of jive or cool whatever right here in black AND in white and the most destructive thing we ever did was the worse move we ever made was to co-opt the voice of the white-man's toady that nigger Armstrong vain ego-bleeding sycophant circus-tent juggler and them ain't MY words neither - they are exact words the words of Mongo Park his'self or someone very much like him - and then we let the whole ship o'shit pass on until now the scene shifts right under us to the ultra-cool hip of cigarette smoke cocaine-induced heroin-rambling spook-faced dead-man sit-up tunes in any smoky New York or Chicago blues parlor jazz club speakeasy big-hit hip tunes and supposed black nigger-tunes and white-man's stupid poetics tripping with the downtown jazz-girls soothing voices talking back ever so lightly to the sex-tinged super-cool waiters working for change or tip or pussy or lip or smack or whatever you want and it was right then as the whole entire major fag scene too erupted on New York's darkest backwaters that everyone finally smiled like even me and down at the Village and the old Cooper Union porch and the Five Spot Corner with suddenly fifteen new kinds of hippie kids a day selling everything and anything they could and it was all laid out on the sidewalk each day just piles of shit : boots records clothes tools artifacts paintings junk coats and you see don't you that the point was to turn one or two dollars a day at least in any way you could so to survive and all that 'angel-headed hipster' stuff made no sense anyway because the only people buying were either themselves back and forth to each other or unwholesome freak-faces from Long Island and New Jersey strolling through this trinket-touristy life like it all already OWED them something and no one made a move and no one knew a thing except that all of a sudden the hinterlands had come home to roost and the best we could do was stay in place and survive while it all wilted : the beats died the Jazz died the real color died and the only thing left was the co-opted motion of small time Jew merchants and beady eyed Italian neighborhood wranglers trying to make a buck off the blood and the spirit of dead kids already dying and struggling - they labeled it this or they labeled it that and tried to make it work : hippy-carnival-fantasy-land : but it couldn't and it didn't and at the same time these very kids were wasting themselves others of them were dying and frying in nowhere's land of fantasy - vision-power-HELL Vietnam" and so it seemed he wouldn't stop and didn't and it was really weird as usually I did hate old people and all their pontificating and bullshit about life's lessons and all that crap they never did and had failed to realize and blah blah they just go on but this guy was different he had an edge he had some freaked out wildman point-of-view about everything and it really did seem he had done everything and been all around - which got rid right away of the fakery and the doubt and made me want to listen at least just for the hell of listening and if I only knew then what I know now I'd have started listening a lot closer right off the bat there and then and how (and it really was the start of something big).
VAGARIES AND INDISCRETIONS II
270. VAGARIES AND INDISCRETIONS II - Mr. Borodin and Hands Together (1967, art loft, the flower wagon):He was a clown but a lackluster clown he was a terror but a poor terror he dealt with sticks and shovels but could not dig a hole and I never wanted to know his name so I never did - one day as I was walking to the far west end of 14th Street to a friend's loft just like that there he was pulling out of some grease-hole parking spot in a ratty Volvo and he smiled over at me and said "Hey Bonko ! Once I was a Swede and I invented Greed and don't you ever forget me or get over that either ! and how you been anyway?" and he was sincere that much I knew so I stopped to chat (I said "how about that!") and I was rolling a tire serenely at that moment down the street towards the loft if I could and I said "this is mine - we're using it for target practice when I get there - the big center hole in the middle is just right for our aim!" and he laughed back and said "what better way to look good!" and I spoke not a word except "speaking of looking good who's the babe who should be mine?" and he looked to his left and said "who her ? that's my new Sally from Oshkosh and she's posing for picture stamps at Roland's Arcade for Fine Art" and I mentioned as an aside that I'd been there before and he stuttered some words about "thought that was you good God" and sped off and I haven't seen him since though I've read his name in a few little this-and-that articles about 'Life in New York' and always do hope to meet him again and life is like that - one grand go-round grand guignol until you meet your own personal devil with his green-gray machete - and then it's coming your way all that way and nothing you can do about that.- And although it was all very strange indeed I let it be and I lived it too - and I mean I'd heard of 'let a hundred flowers bloom' and all that but this was enough to curl the icing on even the most sedate of cakes : and you must see too that going back and forth across midtown like that was always an adventure to me seeing as to how my own personal point of view had become skewed towards the wide-open spaces and non-rigeurs of loft-living and painter parties (14th Street by the way is the longest crosstown street in Manhattan - refer to any map) and painterly types just coming and going at will in their own form and format - dressed like bums or caring nothing about it either way - some were tediously informal while others who'd apparently come from money or of some finer breeding stock of family still bore with them the traces of a certain gentility more appropriate to Connecticut or Westchester or the upper eastside - a sort of noblesse which carried itself along into even the most scurrilous of habits (seemingly out of place) like sexual adventures or repeat yet transient relationships amidst paint-stained piles of rags and turpentined brushes and dripping and poorly-sealed paint containers - these people somehow affected a morality of cleanliness around themselves and even pretended not to notice more so as to be and act the 'truer' bohemian they'd heard of YET no matter what the initial impetus of their personal lifestyles and habits would always come through even if it was simply in the way they'd butter a roll or coat a bagel or drink their coffee - it was always there for all to see : 'you've become a perfect case of crazy' : I was told that once in one of these places by a guy who had a massive bump on his neck and a noticeable limp - none of which stopped him from being cool and hip (like any of those people who utilize their deformities or odd traits to further themselves along on the scale of uniqueness) and both of which came across as totally weird and boho-styled when draped in leather and fabric - he was VERY cool to say BUT Barnum's days were over I always said to myself and as he spoke I was riveted by his presence and just to hear him speak was both forthright and cool let alone hearing his opinion of me : I'd been non-descript enough so that I wasn't sure why he'd said that but then I realized he had in his hands one of my black-bound notebooks (which I'd left as always on the counter nearby) and he'd been reading from it for some time and apparently was taken by what he'd read - conscripted and engaging - enough to blurt out that comment and then he continued "this is some of the fucking weirdest narrative I've ever read and it seems to just go everywhere at a dart-whim's notice like your mind is leading everything along to wherever IT wishes to go - so very great and so very talented too - compliments to you young lad and let me see more!" - I figured 'another fag on the make' too and decided to assume an air of indifference figuring that if Andy Warhol could do it so could I and this guy was effectively silenced by it but he gave me his name card and an address w/phone number to keep and he placed the notebook back where it was found and got up to go but first he took my hand and said "I do know that we'll meet again in much more favorable circumstances for you my friend - Ciao for now!" and he waddled away "Charmed!" I spoke back fortunately unheard for it was actually filled with venom and I couldn't wait to see him fall down the stairway and crumble in a heap at the bottom served him right but it never happened and he got away successfully and without a scratch DAMN! thought I these sorts of people are dangling about everywhere and hasn't ANYONE ever heard of women ! but of course I knew the answer - for there were plenty of them around too but just then I thought back to Richard Meyer at the library and figured if 'vengeance' really does belong to the Lord then what's mine if anything and where do I get it from - but no answers came and the stairway was again creaking with some people who came up to look around and stay put for a while (this was all OK with me it wasn't my loft and I was used to just spending time in places and scenes like this - I figured to wait for the wine or the food or the soon-to-be-proffered pot I was sure but I always stayed aloof and kept away so as to stay straight while they all flopped around and got stupid or dazed) and sure enough right off the bat one of the girls - the one with the black leather skirt - starts grabbing allover this guy she was with and before long she's basically near naked and in his adroit clutches with not a care in the world (nice couch good scene decent view) and the others along with me just ignored it and let go whatever as so many other things were going on : talk viewing art discussing smoking stabbing the air wasting time : and it was like that often in these lofts and painter studios where oftentimes more non-work got done in workspaces that never seemed fully utilized for their intended purposes until much later or in the dark the solitary lunatic artist would somehow manage to get work done in some sort of solitary inspirational moving about with much of the mess from what had just been going on was still all about him or her - it was after all their own spaces and they needn't have cared nor cleaned - SOMEONE would always end up doing it for them.
-And then when I got where I was going I put on the record player some Borodin and sat back to listen : wonderful sound those Steppes made for me : and I wondered what would happen too if I just at that moment decided to put my hands together in prayer and pretend to be once again that simple Catholic lad at play somewhere but I didn't - it was after all long past all of that and my personal jokes notwithstanding no one understood any of that anyway (I'd recently attended - in walking by - a church spectacle on St. Mark's Place where everyone brought in plates of food and after a small procession had them blessed by the priest - it was some traditional Polish parish and it was actually called the 'Blessing of the Food' for Easter or something I forget and somehow right after that I sort of swore never to even bless myself again IT WAS THAT WEIRD and without connection to anything even remotely salvageable as human but whatever)...I wondered what could be blessed here (maybe the riotous rabble along the street would do) but such such were the idle thoughts of a rabid Tuesday late afternoon that I simply stayed in place and listened and watched (I LOVE SPECTACLES) and soon enough someone addressed me anew : "Larry Swenson here hi how do you do?" and I smiled back and he said "this is Myra Wranitz and that's her sister Abbie" and I motioned towards them and said "hi nice to meet you" after which I spoke my name and told them I was friends of the artist here and they said they already knew that and had heard of me before and they knew about the Studio School and knew a few people there too and we shared names and mentioned acquaintances and then he asked if I was looking to stay there for a while or did I intend to move along and study further elsewhere and I told them I was really quite happy with things just as they were and that I'd continue and hope maybe down the line for some sort of a break if it ever came and they understood all that and then this Myra person spoke up "we were just sort of wondering what someone like you sees in all of this" and I said I didn't know what she meant but I saw whatever I could and hoped someday to put it all to use and I told her I'd maybe rather just be a writer I'd seen so many things and liked putting them down with other ideas on paper and that with 'art' and paint and such you couldn't just do that and if I ever got a chance I'd really like to find a way to meld the two together into some new sort of broadside art or message painting or something and they liked that idea but then I said it really wasn't my main concern because I wasn't much interested in getting 'lessons' across as they all usually just turn out to be crap-shit politic things and that was pretty useless and certainly not art the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists had already tried it and it was merely a thought that I'd had in passing and they said they could understand that but did I think there was any value in making 'message' art and I said "not for me I don't think and anyway I don't really have a message I just want to keep doing what I do and it's a pretty singular undertaking and you guys all outclass me by far in money talent and education too - I'm just a fringe character" and they smiled and looked at each other saying "but that's where we come in we'd like to move you up a bit and actually we can see you fitting in to something we're about to undertake called '30 Kids Who Matter' and it's to be sort of a traveling hippie troupe of artists and performers we're hoping to take around the country and show at various venues we'll be sponsoring" and at that point I shut them right off and said "forget it NOT interested - you're already trying to make something fit into a form you've pre-ordained and besides that you're looking to make a killing right?" and they said "yes" and I said "that's not what I'm about anyway and I really don't know how you got my name or what you think I'd do for you but forget it I wouldn't fit in and I'm not interested" - (sometimes now as I look back I think that maybe I was the one being a bit shallow and maybe I should have taken in on it and traveled or at least seen what it was going to be about - actually the only thing to have come of it really was a musical called 'Hair' - but that was another story and another place anyway - plus actually it was me who had just given them my name - though they did say they already knew it) and although they may have feigned a disappointment I didn't really think they cared either way and eventually they just left after a little more simple talk and of course it wasn't much long after that the whole silly scene was consumed by hippie-ania and whatever they had in mind was - for all I know - undertaken and finished : needless to say none of it mattered to me at that point : instead I was remembering the scene from the morning all of which was still fresh in my mind - it was a large flower-wagon being pulled by a horse and the driver was hawking the flowers as he slowly plodded his way along the street and the entire scene was almost breathtaking in that behind him as a sort-of theatrical scrim to his movement was a grand tableau of some of Manhattan's most beautiful buildings along Fifth Avenue and the slow clop-clop of the horse's hooves was like a sound-track to the slow movement and the driver's voice and even though I saw no one stopping the cart so as to purchase flowers it was nonetheless an amazing scene - vivid striking and fresh - and it recalled the many times I'd walked slowly through the 'flower district' as it was then called and witnessed the early-morning tradings and wholesale set-ups of any of an amazing and gargantuan display of plants and blossoms - a veritable full palette of color and hue which always somehow reminded me of an artist's color board all jostling with paint and that memory then brought forth another one of the even older funeral corteges which used to go by these very same streets at the turn of the 1800's into the 1900's as one by one the wealthy of old New York died off - the same slow clop-clop of funeral wagons and their attendees walking or riding their way slowly and with much less color through these old streets and I wondered about the presence and the feel of those passages and those wagons and where they all had gone : I wondered a lot you see about a lot of things : but in no time at all there were other people in the loft coming and going and the two on the couch were done (apparently) with each other and now they just rested while others around them wandered at will - this whole 'loft-living' thing may be hard to understand from a distance but these early-use lofts were quite large and quite open and still very 'industrial' in format and here and there they were broken into walled sections or approximate rooms perhaps for privacy or comfort and each of them - whether artist-studio or not - had massive space set aside for work and I'd been to lofts used as movie sets and lofts used as libraries and meeting centers and lofts used as dance halls too and much of it was always the same - the old columns the stairwells and elevators the plumbing and electric most often exposed along the walls and the blowers and fans used for heating and only sometimes cooling suspended from ceilings and brackets along walls and I'd seen blanketed and carpeted walls and lush floors or wooden floors and good windows and bad windows and I kind of loved them all - let's say I never found a loft I didn't like - even the dingiest and most dreary of them and I just found them to be completely interesting and always subtle and attractive and I thought of them as a perfect adjunct to city living in the same way as the most expensive townhome could ever have been and I liked all the garish and jarring industrial use appurtenances and platforms and lightings and coolnesses and concrete and dock-entries and concrete pillars and the old wooden stairways I COULD GO ON for I was fascinated by these lofts.
