Narrative of Our Life in Hell

I woke up with a lead pipe in my bed; it was as though it were beating me in my sleep, infecting my dreams. Gasping for water but soaking wet, I wondered how you woke up similarly, without pants. I had had a lot to drink. It seemed important. I went back to sleep as though the answer were buried there.

Sleeping with an open knife can break your heart. I don't understand why we got so many of the dates wrong. I still get sad when I think of the sonogram. I'm sorry.

Queen Says No to Pot-Smoking FBI Members

The biggest hypochondriac in the West Village, expediting stigmata with a corkscrew, asks entirely from the larynx, no diaphragm air at all, “From what stars have we fallen here to meet?”

“I don’t know if I want to answer that.”

She’s very pretty and she gets prettier the more she laughs; good vibrations and good energy, but she keeps on about the idea of her boyfriend as “impediment”, this in the Heartland of harassment, the opposite of complicating my life, I figure. Streamlined and pink-faced from the San Diego sunshine, she strikes me in hilarity, “What is someone like me supposed to make of something like that?”

Tipping the uncertainty principle sipping alcohol, Parallax walks a tightrope across your garden-variety yawning chasm, your everyday great falls. Eschewing all suicidal ideation.

Not as voluptuous as once, I may have said blood was sexier than phlegm to provoke her marsupial laughter, but I cannot be sure. “Attractive people must accept responsibility for the feelings they arouse in others.” That’s one of her rules.

Looking in the mirror deeply, “You glassy-eyed motherfucker, what is your story really?”

Little use for the monogrammed ice-pick - the taste of raspberry is the taste of death in this civil twilight; I think and drink solutions mislabeled elixirs that throw me into the throes of a crepuscular love. “You’ve pulled the pin from this hand grenade, my heart.” I stammer with the high moral tone of a fingerprint or snowflake.

Look above, a mottled bruise, the purple and flesh-tone sky stinks like florescent mud, no analgesic on a night like this in March, like an unoriginal thought. My hairdresser brags of her sexual prowess and I believe her. “I know it’s personal, Mint, but jeez your making me nervous and not a little nauseous.”

Among various primitive peoples, including those of the European race whence we ourselves spring, the most solemn form of oath was sworn by placing the hand on the testes, dimly recognized as the most sacred part of the body. Hand on heart, that philological pyromaniac walks over the hot coals like a Nijinsky of phrase-coining, such audacity of metaphor, “I am the issue of a torrid love affair.”

Cotton-picking and pirouetting like an octopus with six legs, an avalanche on Mars, she mispronounced Anne Boleyn and falafel and she did something like touching my leg, when she wasn’t bumping into me. “Even now it is so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.” As soon as she walked in I was dead.

Once More Unto the Breach

For so long or most profoundly, not smiling was the defining characteristic of my social life. “Why are you so sad?” I was pressed time and again. “You’re so serious,” I heard. I didn’t realize I wasn’t happy. I thought I was going along with the flow, following the fun if circumspectly. I thought I was invisible
The land of indifference, the purgatory of unloved souls, is where I was raised. Boo-hoo, I conjure no tears for my past. Rising with the sunrise, scheduled by a Farmers’ Almanac and a radio alarm clock playing “Here Comes the Sun”, is a sort of coping mechanism or therapy, like masturbation or narcotics. Innocents like me have no bearings by which to navigate the feeling universe, indications like smiles are important to the young. Of course, there’s a specific purity in my kind of inept. Emotional morons strike the collective consciousness at random and strangely provoke latent depths and surprises. Our interaction is a sort of primitive poetry.
Adolescence and its extensive modern afterworld ordinarily grind these idiosyncratic features or characteristics down into the manageable gravelly personalities you find in rehab or sales positions. The glacier of the masses, our icy but hollow democracy, glides over every generation and smoothes all but the sharpest and most profound crags and boulders. Rebellious and lackadaisical offspring of negligent though intelligent moia, like me, struggle with the apparent nobility of mediocrity left in the wake of the latest ice age.

.

Of The Few Legitimate Sons of Adam

Real-life, purplish grandma dressed all in a purple purfle asks politely after double-barrelled air kisses, “And how was your summer, dear boy?”
“Full of self-growth and wonder, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, my” doing her best Little Richard, “Do tell. I’ve been receiving such curious reports by satellite in my aerie, I thought you had gone crazy or maybe to rehab.”
“Not me. I’m through with professional care. Harkening back to the middle ages, I’m not planning on living much past forty.”
Grandma, 89, looks up and sidelong simultaneously, leathery and quizzical, “Inhabiting reality, are we? You haven’t been talking to your brother. . . I mean your father again, have you?”
“Is that fucking Freudian? Tell me the truth, lady. All my life, people’ve been referring to my mother as my sister and my father as my brother. Gets on my nerves. I know they’re my parents! Shit. The genetic puzzle, and the timeline’s pretty elaborate. So what’s the deal? You can tell me.”
At that she blows her rape whistle and, I swear, makes a deke for the one-shot pepper spray at her ankle. I move my hand to the knife my father gave me in my pocket and consider killing his mother with it. Thankfully, we neither draw. She takes off like a sparrow in search of nesting and returns with a highball glass of ice and scotch which she thrusts in my hand, a jar of cold brass, pennies a ton, the holy grail. She watches me until I sip, compelling as medicine.
“Johnnie Walker Blue?” I venture.
“I taught you better than that. This is aged in Cuban rum barrels.”
“Oh, really. What shall we talk about next? The wallpaper? You know, I think I’ve got a little piece of cotton stuck in my ear. I’m not interested in doing the same old St. Vitus’Dance to your same old Chivas lullaby. Spare me the rodomontades and panegyrics. What’s next, “be strong like the acorn?” I am the fruit of the oak.” Understand, I make very casual use of my fingers for emphasis.
“Be quiet! For one single moment, will you?” She flaps her hands at her waist, pantomiming extinguishing a small, slow-burning flame. “I’d like to play you a song. Will you listen? Have you heard “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger)” by the Doors?”
“Yeah, grandma. I’ve heard the Doors. Everything they did, the whole box-set.”
“Well, I think it’ll be good if we give this one a listen. Now. Together.”
“Ok, but only if you promise I can play you “Riders on the Storm” right after.”
“We’ll see.”
So my grandmother got me stoned in someone’s garage on some really good medicinal shit ferried by the blue-hair mafia in from San Francisco. Dynamite stuff. We listened to the Doors and she danced and then I put on some Steve Miller Band because the moment just seemed right and she danced some more. To stay “hydrated” she started drinking Bud Lite. Obviously, I wasn’t about to let this little octogenarian put me to bed, but I’ll tell ya, it took all my concentration not to pass out. Finally, must’ve been near 5 a.m. she starts stretching her legs and saying how she can’t understand how I can stay up so long. Thankfully, I taped her entire routine on my little mini-disc recorder. This shit’s better than a Taxi marathon. I’m still waiting to have it transcribed. Look here.
Needless to say, the next afternoon, I didn’t need much more than a ride to the train station. Let’s see, the schedule, ah yes, the local train to nowhere, weekend schedule. That’s me on the platform in the sweatshirt with the chain-link fence pattern. Best in show, bro.

Reflections on a Sine Qua Non

I went to Queens to visit a turbid, depressed friend, as one does, and returned home a changeable man. A purely social call, I had essoined myself past exhaustion and could no longer avoid his pleading invitations. I adjusted my spine, cracked my knuckles and waited for the subway. Like watching an expensive flat-screen television in vivid color through a telescope far away in space my convoluted train trip through the undercroft of NY didn’t make much of an impression. I was pretty well absorbed in the latest issue of London Review of Books, I mean Mad, and for the record, “If There Is Something” from Roxy Music’s first album was playing in my head the whole way. I got there in about fifty minutes.
Exiting the heavy weather and entering the vestibule I stepped up to the quaint buzzer and retrieved the script I had prepared from my ass pocket. I perused the not-quite-alphabetical list of the ghostly tenantry and found my friend’s apartment’s button. I cleared my throat.
“Who goes there?” the metallic parrot croaked.
With the utmost sang-froid I clenched my speech in my left hand like a firelock and assumed my most persuasive angle of incidence. And I spoke, “I can feel the everwater through the crystal sunlight fly with the mindblown priestess in the early twilight.” This was met with silence as usual. I went on, “The rain is coming done with the force of adolescent ejaculate, tin bullets shooting holes in the pavement. I’ve come from atop my impenetrable martello, neither farouche nor by phaeton, no lingworm or limax. I’m here for the lightning chess.”
“You’re not tracking.”
“Hoydenish! The sky is marmoraceous with clouds of blue stone, I come to return your dog-eared enchiridion with amendments and addenda. Let me in asshole.” The parrot seemed to consider this in silence for a moment and then the lock clicked.
You enter his apartment and are immediately hit by the frustrated scent of smoldering marijuana seeds blown in the air conditioned breeze and find him ensconced on a red suede sofa snipping roaches with the broken scissors of a Swiss Army knife his father gave him and piling up the petrified guts of smoke saturated pot. Oddly he’s playing Free’s Heartbreaker at low volume. We execute the secret handshake of our covert brotherhood but otherwise exchange no words.
Time passes slowly. After a while he puts on a record by the Beach Boys. I notice an olden volume on the floor goldleaf entitled The Science of Fortification. I peruse this ancient book for some time reading only the footnotes.
“Have you had breakfast yet?”
“Lunch too.”
“I may’ve been born yesterday,” he says rather stertorously, “but I’ve been up all night.”
“Easy on my soul, friend. Is this narcomania I see before me?”
‘The opposite actually,” and with that he pulls a fake plastic penis from behind the couch.
Sincerely speechless, I praytell with my right hand forefinger.
Excited: “The Wizinator! This whole “rut” thing is merely a transient subluxation of the soul due to fatigue. Comes with freeze-dried astronaut urine and an apparatus to maintain a temperature commensurate with, you know. . . real piss.”
“Having to wear a strap-on to keep your job is a compromise of your civil liberties.”
“I know I know.”
At this point his fiancée, an actual secundi gravida with titian hair, emerges from the gynaecum, her softly lit suite, and offers us Drake’s Cakes and Kool Aid and makes me feel uncomfortable. She has a naïve way of talking about nothing. Her manner sort of instigates the opposite of a panic attack. Suddenly Robert Hanssen’s predicament comes into clearer focus. He tells her to blow and after rearranging the pillows she leaves.
“When do you penetrate enemy lines?” I ask as casually as I can.
“As soon as I finish the book.”
“Oh yeah, how’s that going?” I do my best to look like I’m trying to look interested.
“Slowly, but slowly.”
“You want for ice cream and cake money. Consider me your amanuensis. Go ahead, tell me. I’ll write it all down.” Troubled minds in a troubled world need trouble shooters, is what I was thinking. My friend, the spy, would-be-author of the originally imagined summer novella which had, now in September, expanded into a Buddenbrooks-like chronicle of several generations minutely observed, had only recently begun to trust me with his chrysaline prose. Entitled “The Art of Swatting Flies”, the work grew fat in the face of forest fire, jailbreak, train wreck, and wildcat strike, and each added disaster germinated a further freakish outgrowth of subplot. I’ll paraphrase his ranting as I see fit.
“I am trying to develop a coarser slang, peradventure, a thieves cant. Lots of “fuck” the verb. Other words unavailable to Shakespeare; the dagger means obsolete, right? Yes, the most drastic of the symbols, a knife of a taxeme. I’m going to slit my fucking wrists, man. This is becoming the Magna Carta of stupidity. . . I appreciate the extremely influential attitude of skepticism you’ve been able to adopt in response to what clearly seems like a waste of time to you but that’s just your traditional passive attitude. . .” At this point he begins to get heated and pull on his collar. I adopt a non-threatening cross-legged posture and a look of concern trying to write as fast as I can.
He goes on, “Fuck legends. Me? . . . I live my life here! You’ve read The Da Vinci Code. Do you watch cartoons? The shadow of the gnomon tells us it’s high time. Your suaviloquence won’t keep you afloat out on the Mississippi of Broadway. You’ve got to connect your brain with your body, your brain with your dick. Take up ikebana or something. When was the last time you visited someone in the hospital?”
“Recently, actually.” This is true.
“And?”
“There’s a peculiar ballet involved with that. I get it. I like to bring along some vodka and ice in a thermos. All those eccentric pedestrians and nobody smiles or looks you in the eye. Contemporary masterpieces, every one.”
“Wow. It’s stressful, I know.”
“You’ve been smoking too much hyssop, that’s your problem.”
“Nah, it’s bio-diesel, sincerely. This shit is the only thing keeping me alive.” With that he hits his rainbow swirl bong and passes it. “May I offer you a goblet of black velvet?” “Why, thank you.” The conversation rapidly devolves into convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories. Jack Ruby Baby! Paranoid Polaroids, favorite-son movements, rapes by apes. . . that sort of thing

As my friend’s writing is extremely scarce, it may not be unacceptable to the learned reader to see the specimen of a few pages of his original; I will make no reflection upon it, but that his story-telling is much more concise than his philosophy.What follows is a generous approximation of said work compliments of the reticent parrot and furious scribbling:

The Art of Swatting Flies

Once upon a time a tripping to Montreal to see Olympic Stadium before they tore down the Expos very early in a misty May morning of the new millennium hallucinates three Roman Catholic schlemihls driving up a sort of spinal cord running up the straight back of a New York State which looks West, ignoring New England. Erik drove his car along this route. The trip was his idea. He had picked me up early on a Saturday and we had stopped in Yonkers to pick up Dean who now slept in the backseat in silent protest of the early departure and his skipping breakfast. As we drove North in that first hour Erik started laying a sturdy wall of banal comments and borderline moronic questions for which it was much too early. The sports talk radio station signal grows fainter.
“Should pick up as we approach Albany.”
“What?”
“Is it?”
Erik scans the dial to find the same program bright and clear out of Albany. Joe from Bayside, Tom from Weehawken, and Don on his cellphone, amongst others first time, long time for the next hour as we ascend into wilderness waiting for a lucky looking Burger King rest-stop as the sun comes out and burns off the mist.
“Should we wake him?”
“What’s he going to sleep the whole way?”
I shout turning around in shotgun to punch his lazy knee, “Food, dude. Next stop.”
“Huh?” Blearily comes to as though he hadn’t been asleep but only daydreaming out the passenger window or betting on raindrops rushing back along the glass.
“Hungry?” Erik adds unhelpfully.
“Yeah, sure, I could eat.” He sits up, squares his knees, cracks the window and lights a cigarette.
“Not in the car. Wait till we stop.”
No response but he lowers the rear window more, looks in the rearview. A fast food paradise promptly appears in the distance. We catch a glimpse from the hump of a hill. It’s mirrored by a twin on the other side of the highway servicing travelers going towards home, wherever that might be. Pull in and park at the far end of an immense lot.
Stumbling out of the car behold a rainbow over the pine trees up the rocky face out of which blasted the highway. Stretch your legs while I check the cooler refrigerating the donor organs.
“Everything OK?”
“Oh, I forgot the fucking cigars.” Dean rolls his eyes at me as Erik shuts the hatchback.
“Let’s eat.” I’m not about to eat fastfood. The idea turns stomachs.
“I think I’m gonna stay out here with the rainbow. Not hungry.” Dean throws me a look of disbelief. Erik throws me the keys.
Meditating upon Dr. Pepper and root beer, I spark the thin, toothpick like joint I’d been saving and smoke it alone on the bumper watching the cars and trucks speed by. Dragonflies make love hovering in the breeze. Fugitive knowledge swirled all about upper New York State as though it was a foreign land like Egypt which had seemed interesting, and Saudi Arabia which had not. To live in the apple of the empire with chains at West Point for a tourniquet around the carotid Hudson during major surgery, Revolutionary War. Finger Lakes tickle a distended belly while the Erie Canal, the inevitable good idea that was bound to come, is towed by mules along a path through turnpikes. This is all indistinct and I could never remember names of the lakes or what the Adirondacks were for. The rainbow was forgotten. The rest of the West of the state rests on Pennsylvania; a drive to Chicago, a carful of Jesuits who once flew small regional airlines to outposts in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo where they call soda “pop”. Nothing like sailing from Martha’s Vineyard with a sparrow restfully perched on the halyard, Oak Bluffs crumbling and pink in the sunset or even piloting home with waves trumpeting astern, corposants in the shrouds, and everyone else below deck. Some beautiful country up there, bombing up scenic highways, the Taconic or 684, in an old German car, doing 105 in an SUV. Our geography is the whole world and our maps limited to backyard shortcuts, the twists of the brook, and maybe out to Scotch Caps. I smoke till I burn my lip and when I’m sure I pop the roach in my mouth and swallow it like aspirin the way the Marines taught me one night in Newark.
“Ever been up this far past Albany?” I’m driving now but Erik’s still doing most of the talking. I fidget with the Volkswagen’s controls trying to get oriented. Cruise control occurs to me for its novelty. Ergonomically speaking driving on a day like this is an intuitive dream eating miles like the Millenium Falcon.
“New Volkswagen’s are a lot like old B.M.W.s. I wonder how new B.M.W.s drive.”
“All the same shit. V.W., Audi, Porsche.”
I master cruise control, lock it in at 79 M.P.H. Using the buttons on the steering wheel I tick the digital accelerator up until the digital speedometer clicks to 83. I consider enclosing the adjacent cells of the three to be like the eight with a mere finger, but figure instead hold steady. We pass four speed traps without incident. The road unraveling relaxes before the middle class of German engineering, the hills rolling softly and a thousand songs beginning to play and educate us.
“A thousand songs neatly arranged, driving tunes to keep you awake with their surprises. Seeing old friends in new lights, new friends in no light. Consider: How often can you listen to the likes of Sandy Bull, Gabor Szabo, Korla Pandit?”
“Hmm.”
Dean seems on the verge of dissertating. For the sake of him embarrassing himself here’s the first installment of the all important thousand songs in his neatly arranged head:

ZIPOD1
Song:Artist
The Warning Talk (Part I) David Axelrod
Berimbau Dion and the Belmonts
Get On Top Buckley, Tim
All This Is That Beach Boys
Musical Tribute To The Oscar Meyer Weyner Wagon The Baroques
Grey City Day Tokens
Give Him A Flower (Mono) Brown. Arthur
Walkin' Thru A Rainbow Buzzsaw
Light Blue Darin, Bob
Mistake No Doubt Grease Band
Lazy Afternoonn McGuinness Flint
Out On The Side Dillard & Clark
Stories We Could Tell Everly Brothers
A Long Way Down From Mobile The Frost
An Added Attraction (Come And See Me) Beau Brummels
Forgive Us Vinegar Joe
100 years from now Hardin & York
Boots 'n roots Family
Trial And Judgement Keith Christmas
Song of the Ages Harper, Roy
To Love Somebody P.P. Arnold
Turn Out The Light Kippington Lodge
Reflections Of Charles Brown Ruperts People
One City Girl Les Fleur De Lys
Lovely Rita Fats Domino
Everything I Am Plastic Penny
Bless The Executioner Kaleidoscope
I Won't Hurt You West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Of All Sad Words A.B. Skhy
Gotta Be Free Flowerpot Men
A Place In The Sun Jason Crest
Across the Universe Beatles
Going With The Flow Neon Pearl
You Really Got Me Mott The Hoople
The Width Of A Circle Bowie, David
Magic Potion Open Mind
Unidentified Flying Object UFO
Planet Caravan Black Sabbath
No More White Horses T2
Monkey Man Rolling Stones
Must Be Something Else Around Reg King
Cocaine Andwellas Dream
Wide eyed girl on the wall Small Faces
Midnight Moses Harvey Alex
Seem To Have The Blues (Mostly All The Time) Procol Harum
Cries From The Midnight Circus Pretty Things
Here I Lived So Well Spooky Tooth
Niagara Megaton
Oh I Wept Free
Where Are They Now ? Kinks

Part 1 Part 2

“College, fall weather, junior year, that poetess from Sleepy Hollow got her father’s new Limited Jeep for a weekend and I mesmerized her into driving North to hunt for J.D.Salinger,”
“Black with gold trim?”
“Gabor Szabo.”
“No shit.” Enjoying the tunes, “Now he wouldn’t’ve given her the jeep if he knew I was going to be around, so we concocted this fiction where she was going to visit some friends in Worcester. So we leave late on the Friday, I remember making an illegal turn trying to get the hell out of there at the beginning. I can’t remember what was playing. I was pretty far gone at this point. Must’ve been October. Her family was going apple-picking at Notre Dame or something. You know, expand her social horizons or some shit. Manha De Carnival.” I point to the dashboard for Dean’s benefit. He eyebrows a mere shrug. Means nothing to him.
“So that one Friday the stars lined up and, even I wasn’t so out of it not to take advantage of such an opportune sequence of events, so we took off. I’d had a hankering to go North, I don’t know New Hampshire, Vermont “Live Free or Die”.”
“If you say “druthers”. . .” Dean pokes me in the arm. “Fuck you, I wasn’t about to use the word “druthers”. It would’ve been implausible in terms of the narrative. Really, somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to hunt down Salinger. Everything’s amazingly unspoken when looking at the world through a pinhole.”
“Does this one end badly?”
“Of course it does.” I’m trying to remember the name of Salinger’s town.
“Double-f to the fucking,” Turns up the volume. “I remember that nimble minx.”


Let’s stop the man who would be king of Queens’ tale at this point as good as any to do so. I’m sure the optical character recognition software has grown weary of wondering, among others, when do the flies get swatted? To quote one of our characters from another context, “If it did, it wouldn’t have ended badly.” Why not take a long drive through a rural area?

I Have Been Seeking P.F. Sloan

This is a story engraved by the fingers of cherishing generations, each strengthening hand leaving its design like a common fingerprint. They met in steerage crossing the Atlantic, a profusion of stars in their immigrant eyes, the lovely daughter of a lovely mother and he, an orphan, bound for Buenos Aires on nothing but a hunch. The cosmic impulse: a conquistador of coincidence driving Pacific way, but they reunited in San Francisco and he proposed upon the bay like an escapee from Alcatraz. They married in Denver where his business was booming, shovels for miners and other equipment. She worked in the store while he peddled his wares up the mountains to one horse mining towns appearing like capsular fruit in Spring. Eventually he returned with a pound of gold in a sack on the donkey and they moved back to California where the sky is always blue.

“See them move along the road
In search of life divine:
Beggars in a goldmine.”

My eyes on a permanent roll (stuck that way, I’m afraid) I cling like petrified bubblegum to the Third Flatiron beneath a semen sample sky. I should leave town more often, I say to myself trying not to look down. The physical exertion, the rarefied air at altitude, the custom fitted psycho-sexual turmoil I find myself in, all these combine to inspire an incessant stream of snatches of song remixed in my head, a soundtrack only I hear. No reception up in the mountains, but this iPod up my nose is driving me crazy. With bloody knuckles lying doggo at the summit, the biners sing, the girls’ hair stands on end, and Bob Dylan plays harmonica breathing in and out with Richard Fariña on dulcimer. (My only printed credit, “Kazoo – a friend.”)

“I’m only just a pillow, honey
And I belong in bed.”

What was it you wanted? The songs playing in my head? Well it sure ain’t Woody Guthrie, I can tell you that. Descending like the media upon Boulder and no, it’s not just a clever name, I had the sense I’d have to keep on my toes, eyes peeled. I was poring over a class of 1955 yearbook from Abraham Lincoln High School on the flight over, but that didn’t do any good. It had been seven days since I last used. The songs in my head grew more tolerable, the fidelity of the recordings improved. I learned to relax and sing along to myself. I thought for a moment maybe I was indeed picking up some groovy broadcast through the metal in my mouth, but I never caught any call letters, no station identification, and no disc jockey introducing songs and pattering interesting factoids.

“Ain’t gonna trade with the pain of the New York Dolls.”

For me, as for many others, listening to a certain kind of music is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are manifold and varied. Shortly after my return from the mountains, in search of relief, I sped downtown to see P.F. Sloan play a supper club down there before baby boomers in ponytails with hamburgers on their plates. The specialness and irony of these things inspired a mild nausea but I didn’t feel truly sick until I bought a round of drinks from the bartender in training. (“Would you like to open up a tab?” Uh, what kind of interest rate are you offering?) My date sprung for the second round and it must’ve been strong because shortly after the show she completely lost her cool. Not that I blame her, it’s just I wasn’t feeling particularly gallant on this particular night. I had intended to ask Mr. Sloan if he’d help me flesh out (specifically: write songs for) an idea I’d had about some uncommon crustaceans in the shells of which the close proximity of two astaxanthins changes the orbits of the electrons in the molecules, causing them to absorb red light and thus appear blue. You had to go through the kitchen to get backstage and I wasn’t about to do that.

“Line me up and shoot me down
I’ll never come back to this town."

He wore sunglasses he might’ve stolen from Roy Orbison. There was a lot of love on the stage and the band played the songs he had written for other performers and some of his new ones and then for an encore they came back and played the rest of the songs everyone expected. I only know this because the people around me kept muttering titles, swallowing their words, trying not to disturb his concentration. It was a sight to behold and I only regret I wasn’t able to bring more people who would’ve been able to appreciate it, but no one I knew had ever heard of him. Yet another theurgic tatterdemalion of my rock and roll hagiography, who I had naturally assumed was sitting cross-legged atop a hill of smack in some dark corner of heaven, perhaps bellowing for Nick Drake to come join him, “Come on over Nick, it’ll do you some good.” So I’m listening to the music and then I’m gazing back on the tessellated memories of an otherwise forgotten summer as hot as this one. I soon become fixated on the lyrical developments of a song I hadn’t noticed and this goes on until the song ends in startling applause.

“Old Chivas and women
Killed a friend of mine (killed him dead)
But if I remember right
He took a long time dying.”

“This is when things start to happen,” says the drunk psychiatrist softly but clearly. “Can I ask you something? Is there anyone back home to care for you?” I wasn’t sure what to say so I just held her gaze. “No? I thought so.”

And then someone plays the Dug Dug’s unjustly overlooked “It’s Over” very loudly.

Midgets On Maneuvers

I’ve tattooed an ‘M’ on each buttock. “You don’t know your ass from a hole in the wall,” sings the freckled, red-headed Dadaist. Backed by Maddox and Sears, house band in said hole, and oblivious of the few ambivalent hecklers, he scats like Van Morrison minus the virtuosity (not half bad now I think of it). With one ear on the clock and a fat tuna on the hook, I kill time feeding the meter and imagining greater acronyms. “Upside down you spell WOW”, she informs me in a voice just above a whisper.

Can’t you hear the gears grinding lubriciously somewhere behind my teeth? Must we hang around for the results of our competing apathies? Are you measuring the immobility of these indifferences? Are your insecurities so sacred? When will you embrace depravity and make it your own?

“I see you’ve matriculated, uh, procrastinated. . . I mean procreated,” I stutter absurdly, blocked by a mammoth stroller hauling the fat babies of my former concubine, apparently now a tugboat pilot, sensibly flanked by the paterfamilias of this brood. All this occurs along the curb on my mistaken second troll of Bleeker Street. “Good for you,” I sidestep, not truly meaning it.

Yesterday. . . No. Excuse me, it’s already tomorrow. Two days ago rather, (how the hours cram themselves into these congested rails of consciousness,) every other phrase carelessly uttered, every idea spontaneously sputtered, each forgettable comment forgivably muttered, was echoed, or seemed to be alive, within the confining parameters of coincidence, impregnations of what was to come. The flow described an untranslatable pattern I was only beginning to commit to memory. I was half-expecting a heavy safe to fall on me, or maybe an anvil.

Morphing paranoia into death-wish, (wouldn’t that be less confusing?) I waited, sweating prolifically, two stories below Greenwich Village, somewhere underneath a subbasement on Patchin Place, alone. Anonymous save for DNA swabs.