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.