Patrick Fealey's Blog, page 18

up in berry creek

i recognized the black box angela was carrying into the kitchen. it was the same case i once had for my 1940’s smith corona clipper (r.i.p.) i said something. she smiled. “i found it in my grandmother’s closet.” the case was shiny black and unmarred. its perfect condition was the one thing which gave me doubt. all the typewriter cases i had known had been beat to hell. this looked like a thing just bought at woolworth’s in 1945. we set it on the counter and opened it. it was a black 1940’s smith corona looking exactly like the one i had destroyed while typing 4,000 pages, 2,000,000 words about 10 years ago. it did not have the “clipper” decal, which meant it was several years older than mine. the typer was flawless, as if it had never been used. it appeared that the first ribbon was still in it: smith corona. it typed a little stiff at first and the ink was faint, but it warmed up to us nicely. it was the best typewriter i had ever touched and i wanted to bring it home, but i didn’t say anything. i’d let angela decide whether her grandmother’s typewriter came home or stayed at the cabin. we left the typewriter and paper on the counter by the refrigerator, under a fluorescent light and we both went to it when the mood struck. one of us was at it often enough to suggest there was a writer about. we would write a fractured chronicle of our stay at the cabin in berry creek with sascha the german shepherd as our disinterested editor.

welcome cabin this typewriter sure does stick. this is a very old thing. happy new year it is snowing.

things to do in the cabin in the snow:

build a fire.

keep a fire going.

add wood to the fire.

get wood from pile.

remove ashes from fire.

add paper to increase fire.

dampen wood stove.

open stove door to increase fire.

cut kindling for fire.

squirt lighter fluid on fire to keep going.

put kettle of water on stove for humidity.

recheck fire.

add more wood.

we were working with damp wood and the fire would not burn the larger logs. i depleted the wood pile of manzanita kindling and small logs. i dried them on the floor and on top of the woodstove. california had received record rainfall before we decided to light a fire. by the last day we had bought split logs from the store and they burned very well. the stove kept us warm for five days, during which time it caused too much anxiety for a fire.

mountain silence contains no hope. mountain silence trumps conflict. it is not like ocean silence, which is not silence. mountain silence highlights your breathing. it breaks out action. you are on the couch reading your life to the vision of dropping snow. silence is not science. the science of domestic abuse. science sweetens war. science will stop science. silence is arrival without need or promise.

peter died. his liver and kidneys failed and he blew up. i talked to his aunt this morning, joan, my former landlady in maine. angela had anticipated his death. you don’t enter a nursing home at 53 unless you are a goner. peter came to visit six months ago while i was living in maine. he was thoughtful and kind, introspective and spiritual late in his life. he told me he had been sober for 20 years, but his liver did not agree. peter was on the u.s. national shooting team in the 1990s and he could split an pencil eraser head at 30 feet with a pistol. he took shooting up late in life and excelled. he did not see his target, he knew where it was. peter had an exquisitely arrogant tone when we met. i ignored him and scorned him in the beginning, ice to his approaches. it was classic alcoholic arrogance combined with los angeles superficiality. within days i brought him down to the ground and stripped him naked. our fraternity was honest. before he left back for los angeles, we drove to the cemetery and he left a golf club on his father’s grave. his father, a baptist minister, had given him the club before his own death. the reverend was a fine golf player too. we sat in the cemetery that rainy day and drank. peter knew he was dying. on his road trip east from los angeles, he bled from his mouth, ass, and penis. his liver was failing. despite his sickness, peter looked good and handsome, tall with a full head of dark hair. he was animated, funny and fun, and very generous. he bought food for the house. we cooked together, laughing over sliced onions and roasted chicken. we cooked seven course meals in a ballet which required little discussion of the food. i got a bad tooth ache and he persuaded me to see a dentist and he drove me an hour to bangor, where after my exam, we sat in the lot cracking beers and watching the women. at home he drank white zinfandel, trying to go easy on his liver, but it kept him in bed sick on some days. there were days when peter did not emerge from his room, yet i still wondered how sick he was, hoped that he had time. when peter left to return to los angeles, i was not certain that i’d ever see him again. i believed there was a chance. he said he would come back.

burned my fingers on the stove handle.

sascha drinks toilet water while his bowl is full of fresh water.

the wooden handle came off in my hands. i use my handkerchief to open and close the stove.

cold rain laughs/german shepherd ears/kermit ass makes popcorn. kermit ass is angela who has been wearing lounge wear the color of kermit the frog. i can’t stand it.

angela and i are working on this together. satirical remarks about me are a result of the y chromosome. kermit ass just sneezed into the popcorn bowl.

question: can this frog sit on your log? : )

what do you call a frog’s home? not a den or a nest or a hive . . .!

snow falling around the cabin in the woods . . .

deer have owned this place until sascha.

sascha melts to our legs like warming snowdrifts.

pat tending fires like a father.

unsure and constantly checking, adjusting.

perfecting and perfect.

he is worried about being awake for the fire.

so i tell him he is like a new father and he laughs it off.

sascha looks like a fruit bat. the fruit bat dog thing on the couch, black face leaning into humanity. ears erect, muzzle hanging dozing nostriles.

rain deer: the deer created in your mind by the sound of rain falling in the woods. kermit ass got a photo of real deer this morning at the bottom of the driveway in the snow, a silhouette slipping behind the snowy redwoods and manzanita. the photo came out black and white on color film, except for the brown leaves on a tree in the foreground.

that early lucidity is lost by years, experience, alcohol, the collisions with love and death. by the time you know your craft, you are losing your edge. like all journeys, it’s about your gait. five years is what you get – the open window you walk through on air. you know it when you’re hot, but like an animal, you don’t see your death.

paper plates. sascha with his toilet bowl. angela walks away and excludes me from her anger, even though it can’t be done. this morning i cleaned the ashes out of the bottom of the stove and put them in a plastic five-gallon bucket. i didn’t know they were still hot. i put the bucket on the rug in front of the stove and forgot about it. it had looked like inert gray ash, so no hurry to dump it outside. a little while later i moved the bucket and when i lifted it, the ashes fell out the bottom, right though a hole melted through the plastic and into the synthetic rug. the heat burned the finish off the linoleum floor. it was my fault and angela says that will make it worse in her parents’ eyes. angela doesn’t know what to do. accidents happen, but she doesn’t know what to say.  she walks off.  i know she knows what to think, but she will resist thinking it until her tour of self punishment is completed.

retreat into the angry cell. flow stopped. no omniscience. no sharing. i know you’re writing about me, she says. you’re damn right. i check to see if i’m alive hourly and you’re hung up on tainted linoleum. where does this love of garbage come from? we all must now contemplate the status of an inanimate object. this chick really drags me down sometimes with her material commitments. i’ve been nearly beaten to death in the street and gave it less time than she’s giving these plastic squares and rectangles. i can’t be bothered by her superficiality and family dysfunction. i can be bothered by her disregard for me.

yes, please don’t be bothered. thank you.

it’s not the slaughter

of

pigs

cows

turkeys

fish

that is the sin

it’s raising them

the bullet and net

take them

out of the

pathetic existences

we gave them

hitching up the mountain was easy, i thought it would be until half-way to the store on foot, when i doubted. that’s when a tan guy with a bushy white mustache stopped. a cigarette hung from his lips. he was fine, but in the seat behind me was a growling rotweiller. “i don’t know,” he said as i climbed in. “yeah, maybe we better not,” i said. the dog had already growled at me through the open back window when the guy had pulled into the sand on the side of the road. as i leaned into the truck, the threat was more imminent. i had had a girlfriend with a rotweiller that was sweet and goofy, but this one was unnerved and defensive. i climbed in. the dog was a large male, “still a pup,” he laughed. it must have divined something acceptable about me and we spent the ride with him sniffing my shoulders and the back of my head. maybe he smelled sascha and knew i was a dog to respect. the man drove a white toyota pick-up, beat.

in a smile she said i want to fuck you and i like you.

i buy the beer and hit the windy road, down the mountain to my wood stove or bust. here comes a blue caravan making the curves . . . the guy is young with a clean-shaven face except for his handle-bar mustache. he has coils of waxed hair on the sides of his face and a bible on the dashboard. he is the youngest person i have ever seen wearing a handle-bar mustache. he tells me his name is ron. i tell him my name and we shake hands. he is headed to walmart, he laughs. he tells me he is from pennsylvania. but he was from tennessee first. i say my grandmother was, is pennsylvania dutch. he asks me what town, but i don’t know. he tells me there are a lot of them there, the dutch and the germans. same thing, he says, but there is a difference between the germans and the dutch though neither of us can think of what it is. ron is gay. “but tennessee,” he says, like he loves the state and misses his home. i don’t mention that angela and i and derek are going to tennessee in the spring. sun records. graceland. the gibson factory. the blues. it just would have been too much of a coincidence to talk about. i ride in wonder that this van is on the road. it is dirty as an engine compartment and the side is dented deep. it is an absolute piece of shit that could break down before we reach the cabin and i would be entangled in automotive repairs. i look at the bible again. i look at the guy sitting next to me, a gay doc holiday. he takes me past our place because i miss the gate and driveway, which are invisible coming down the hill. i get home with the beer and sascha is happy and the stove needs more wood.

 

spoiled

by the fire, i am rereading a moveable feast. it’s all i can do to read this bullshit without vomiting up the oysters and white wine . . . let me have a shot of rum and then a beer and then a shot of rum and then a jim beam and a beer and where did i put those psilocybin mushrooms?

a moveable boast

he hung his worn

felt hat

on the hook

inside the clean

well-lighted café

he liked

and sat down

to work on his

suicide

he was poor

and struggling

compared to scott

and was on

his way

to see gertrude stein

when he ducked

out

of the paris winter rain

to have

a couple of rum martiniques

and write

one true sentence

he finished his story

and ordered a plate

of oysters and

white wine

that washed away

the metallic taste

he and hadley

must go

to austria

to the mountains

for a few months

where there is no rain

only sun and snow

they’ll keep

the paris flat

in the hotel

where verlaine died

and rent a place

in the mountains

for more money

but he has the money

because

he just sold

three articles to Toronto

(& hadley inherited

a fortune)

in writing, he said

what you leave out

is most important:

-         his family is rich

-         hadley’s family is richer

-         he grew up with

five servants in the house

and has one in paris

for six months

in a rooming house

i lived on ramen noodles

writing my first novel

and contracted

scurvy

and eight teeth fell out

what i wish to leave out are:

-         the ramen noodles

-         the dealers

-         and imbeciles

-         and my most

frequent caller,

a guy who murdered

his best friend

trout fishing

i’m too malnourished

and tired

to pose

outside shakespeare & co.

i just sold

three articles

to the boston globe

paid rent

on this room

and put the rest down

on a life raft

i’d gather hemingway knew it, but would never credit that masculine prose to a woman. in the beginning, hemingway was a hack who got his newspaper jobs through family connections. his letters, hadley’s letters, while he was a reporter in kansas city and toronto, reveal she had the “mot juste” before earnest ever heard of it. her writing is lean and rhythmical. she was a keen observer and expressive. she wrote in a human voice that evoked. i have read hemingway’s short stories from those days and they are unevocative and journalistic, egotistical ramblings. hadley did him a favor when she left the rest of them on the platform at the train station. the other writer who preceded hemingway and who he never mentions is jack london, the first writer in history to make a million dollars from his writing. london accomplished this during hem’s young adulthood. london wrote of courage. london’s “to build a fire” is a veritable template for hem’s best work. hadley and london. the lean, “right word,” belonged to hadley, who was much less innocent than hem depicted her in a moveable feast. it always takes two, love the accomplice of art: hadley was the brains without ambition and hem was the marketing man and thief. his depiction of her comes across as an intentional marginalization. hem’s writing career depended on nepotism. first the newspapers, then sherwood anderson, whom he fucked good and well when he no longer had use for him, and then scott, his ticket to fame. the best book he ever wrote, the most revolutionary and daring, was in our time, his first, when he was with hadley. for the next 30 years he jerked off on his roof. in 1960, hem was bitching. he wasn’t making any money. he was bringing in only $100,000 a year in royalties. the poor writer was acting poorly. in the early 20s, writing in our time, he uses a sharpener on his pencil because a knife is too wasteful. in the 1950s he is bitching that he got only a hundred grand from hollywood for the old man and the sea when he had previously gotten that amount for a short story, “the snows of kilamanjaro.” when he was with hadley, hem said “never complain.”

i walk out the cabin door singing the theme to “sanford and son” and a woodpecker picks up the melody and rhythm almost note for note.       

 

 

October 22nd, 2012

i really blew it. i was a reporter and barbara eden was in town. i interviewed her and we really hit it off. she invited me to dinner. but, i had this edior, a pretty redhead who had a crush on me and wanted to come along. she was my boss. what could i do? i don't know if my editor was playing resistance and interference as so many women do, but i was trapped between a date with eden and a talk session with two women. as it turned out, i fucked my beautiful editor and blew off eden. i am sorry, barbara. it would have been nice to talk with you some more and maybe even get a kiss.

the erotic prophet

 

maybe one hour after supervising the morning execution of eight members of the french resistance (seven men, one woman), a nazi captain takes in a copy of picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, guernica, which depicts the slaughter of civilians in the spanish civil war. then picasso sells him the painting. maybe art would help the nazi? it paid for picasso’s paint and cigarettes. if you allow that picasso was beyond good and evil and selling art to nazis was an act beyond ethics, morality, politics, and religion, then you must allow that guernica lacks the emotional commitment many attribute to it. the artist is actually beyond feeling. the artist as the beneficent sociopath, improving our lives while serving himself. at best i sit here and think of the creation of guernica as an emotional lapse commissioned by the spanish republicans. yes, picasso did not paint guerica of  his own volition in response to his feelings for the murdered in his native land. guernica was painted by a cold man - the spiritual elite. 

a firing range meets the noise requirement in the age of reason. i’m over here, downwind, eating slugs. i had in mind a semen-infused transmission from planet guernica, but what i got is america, which is as alone as it gets.

and frantic plastic bags. avalanches of crushed cans. pots punching pans. sounds from this new apartment splinter my nervous system. last night was my first night. after the shooting stopped, i left the window open with the fan on. one sheet and a thin blanket and i shivered in and out of a nightmare all night. we have crows here. they’re small, maybe fish crows, coastal crows, beach bums. they talk less and make flight look difficult. vultures spiraled down upon the doves and small dogs yesterday. i counted five gliding down on adjusting wings. their goal was on a hill above me. they reached the earth and fell out of rotation. their necks were drawn in so tightly they looked headless. headless and covering their necks, they go in circles and pray for death. i’ve known a few.

dogs bark most of the noise here. everyone in this town has a dog, six chickens, a rooster, two goats, a llama, a horse or mule, and a cow. only the ocean fog reminds me this is the california coast. the bitch down the street has dogs. that’s the most i can say for her. they spend their days in the sun jailed in a wire cage on her front lawn, which resembles a permanent junk sale. i can’t say she waves the white flag of trash, more like a patchwork of neuroses. one dog whimpered and cried in her front yard for three hours today. i walked by and closed the window.

a natural response to infinite change: i’ve been protected from my environment. i deflect over-stimulation. i do not want contact. that thing, the human element, which we can’t count on, i can count on to ruin my day. when i say i want kids, i mean the kind who grow horns. luck: there’s a desk built into my back porch. plywood. i forgot to pray for it,  had not conceived of it, and here it is. i lean over it. i sit on it and eat solar flares. to be an artist, one must be objective about oneself. no one else can be as hard on you and that metal is essential to forming an innate sense of what is freed and what is enslaved.

painful and inconsequential things have happened. i’m not talking about my swollen liver or shrunken brain. sorry to be vague, but one rite in moving on is forgetting. i live in a land that is so conscious of protecting me, i can’t toast an english muffin.

  “we don’t like how you depicted us ‘making love all over the house’ in that short story,” my mother says.

  “it’s fiction.”

  “well, we’re very embarrassed.”

  “you two have never admitted to having sex.”

  “what are you and your sister, then?”

  “evidence of two fucks.”

  “just twice.”

  “two for two.”

  “we’d expect deference.”

  “from me?”

  “you were a precocious youth.”

  “i was the worst you ever saw.”

  “your father thought so.”

peter is missing. prolonged silences among the terminally ill are unsettling. last i knew he was in a hospital 80 miles south of palos verdes, where he had been living in his sister’s waterfront house until she kicked him out for buying a band aid with her credit card. i’ve left two voicemails and written his aunt, joan, my last landlady. peter spends a lot of time in hospitals. i’ve known him a few months and he’s been admitted for long stretches at least three times. blood fountains out his nose, his eyes, his mouth, flows brown from his dick and seeps out his ass. peter knows he’s alive. he drank himself into this. he’s 53 and quit drinking for 20 years. but the liver does not regenerate. we trade stories about our ailing livers. i breathe in pants as fluid from my liver fills the peritoneal cavity and presses on the diaphragm. i don’t drink for fun. sober, the pain is unsustainable. the last time i was sober i bought a .380 automatic and went into the woods to end it. i sat on a rock and put the pistol down and opened one of the beers i’d brought with me. by the second beer, my ideas were changing. i finished it and walked out of the woods with the gun in my front pocket. beer had saved my pathetic life. i think i have a weakness in the blood. maybe i have seen too much. i have let peter know he is welcome to stay here. he said he’d give it serious thought and that was the last i talked to him. into the hospital he went. when i first saw and heard peter at joan’s house, he was a con-artist in love with his own ucla disc jockey voice. the record playing was “i drove my porsche as fast as it would go and i built a mansion for my mother.” he was also religious. it should not surprise anyone, especially me, that the less righteous person emerged after two weeks in the same house. people can’t hide and the exposed often flee in hatred and fear- or attack. peter and i peeled potatoes together for the family and sat together on the front porch, discussed our lives while we finished them off, mulling over the capriciousness of internal organs. we are unlikely friends and some people tell me this. one thing i was reminded of by peter is that we are all working through our arrogances. marilyn, my lover, says peter lacks someone to live for. she is right, but peter had it and lost it and cannot be forever blamed for his suffering. he now has himself to die for.

the apartment is big. i am opening beers faster than i drink them. i open a beer, drink, then set it on the counter. a few minutes later i have forgotten it and open another. i just downed three opened beers i came upon around the house. when i lived in rooms, such oversight was impossible. i guess this is what it’s like to be rich: distracted, overwhelmed, conspicuous.

the sound of rusty hinges, the piggish bite as the barn door opens and closes. teeth grind. facial muscles contract. my hair turns white. it’s a barn and i must suspect, am obligated to conclude, that some ass is doing it intentionally to interfere with my mission, the same hard dissonant noise i get from agents and editors on both coasts. “avant garde!” “not for us!” opposition to my writing began when i was 12, as soon as i switched my focus from science fiction monsters and cowboys onto my classmates. i had believed they had warm blood in their veins. my first artistic blunder.

to the things themselves. where there is no explaining. tis a gift to be simple, a miracle to be moment-to-moment, live . . . where do i stand? now depends on seeing this. even if only inside my small and private context, i must have light.

on campus at the respected but uninspiring university back east, where the ivy is thick as cash and nobody is serious, talking to a blonde accounting major between classes. she is in a thin red dress and the sun in her hair is nice to look at. undergraduates sweat up the academic mountain while we stand on the summit and look at our last days. she says she’s got a job in boston after graduation, fifty grand a year. we’ve been meeting like this and i will get a night with that smile and body, only to discover she needs 50 cocktails a day to sustain her pleasantness. you’d never know talking to her. i was hardly touching a beer then. i wanted to graduate. i was writing for a weekly and surfing. the newspaper wanted me and was willing to pay $15,000. miranda would walk over to say hi. she had a class across the street. the blonde was friendly. miranda was the virgin who tasted like copper daisies. she was not shy, but she was afraid to get in the shower with me. she feared her virginity would be compromised and that she might get pregnant. miranda gave the finest head, but she made assumptions about my lifestyle. people had said things about me and she believed them. a mouth full of semen, but our genitals could not touch. our loss. because she was afraid. we remain friends, unconsummated lovers. we’re old now and have lost our nudity. she dresses to earn her house. i dress because i don’t want to go to jail. she is terrified that i am writing about her. she says she will lose her job and house. fear still, though my writing has lost politicians their jobs and homes.

lacking reference here, the detached modern man, fragmented by his shower of experience. his great sickness defines the borders of his small health. we’re all here somewhere, looking for the answer: the lottery! aliens! war! marijuana! (scraggly young motherfucker, with a wiry red humboldt beard and an audi, a miracle of laconics and hair braiding, paying the cashier in pennies, a seven-minute bitch holding up the register and running the stop sign a block away with sheepish arrogance. from his grave, bob marley is trying to pull his music from this kook’s cd player . . .  roaches in the ashtray of his self-absorbtion . . . ) these new hippies fall into a fashion that was yesterday. they are worse than the first time. everything happens twice, the second time as a parody of itself. self-indulged in a corner of life, rabid capitalists in dreadlocks, they have not shed egotism. hippies did not end vietnam. political activists did. abbie hoffman, bobby seale, and john lennon put their necks on the line while hippies gorged on the revolution in the air, much like ramoras, and got sick. hippies and music did not end vietnam, they were a soundrack. social change through music is fallicy,perpetuated by musicians who make reputations off the herd. political change happens in the realms of politics, dirtier than woodstock, more complex than three chords, and deadlier than a bad record and bad acid. for personal sacrifice, look to kent state. those murders changed minds. these kids now are average. unwittingly conservative, they are happily inert playmates. they want to be high and fuck while mom and dad pay tuition, spinning the same elitism as their brothers and sisters at duke and annapolis. they conform. i was at woodstock – a bunch of babies in a traffic jam. where there is a crowd there is untruth. kierkegaard said that. where there is a hippie, there is money to be made. i said that.

the neighbor’s telephone is ringing across the sand alley. machine. leave a message. leave something . . . a putrid odor on the windy alley, all-american, the detached odor, penetrating the moment with roaming, flight our common fact. the neighbor is a cop and his son’s name is dylan. he acts about 10. the cop rides a motorcycle to work. it’s inescapable. the cop shaves his head and does not look at me. i see him every morning and night and on his days off, when he welds and plays with his motorcycles. he works sunday through wednesday. he is forty feet away and his silent engagement is conspicuous. dylan and his younger blonde sister, who calls him “brother, brother,” won’t look at me either: instructions: that man writing at the desk is evil. i once heard them shove christian rock out their windows like long division. but his gorgeous wife looks at me plenty. she comes out to water the grass every day – only the grass in front of my perch. she’s looking because he’s looking. when i laugh at her kids, she smiles. the married couple – so young, so dissolved. she’s stranded on his motorcycle obsession, the cock feathers he waves at other women. she will never break, but she’s got motorcycles of her own. i don’t look at the kids too much. it’s dangerous to look at kids in america. when i see the daughter i immediately think of prison. funny how most molestorers are people parents trust their kids with. the media-consuming populace seems to forget this. they consume the fear, but not the facts. me? i must want to throat-fuck your 8-year-old daughter because my hair is wild and i have paint on my jeans. just being near these people gives me dry-heaves . . . marliyn wipes my tears.

. . . it happened at the beach today. i’d gone there to check out the surf. there were about 20 guys out. the waves were small, three summer feet. i walked to the water. there was a kid skimboarding in the wet sand. he was trying, anyhow. he was throwing the board and then running after it. the board had slowed down or stopped by the time he caught up to it and jumped onboard. he travelled nowhere and usually fell. he was a chubby kid in long blue trunks, maybe 11 years old, with mud and enthusiasm on his face. i sensed that he had not spent much time by the ocean. i wanted to help him out, so i started a conversation. “you cold?” i asked. “no,” he said. of course not. kids are never cold at the beach. i suggested to him that he run first, then throw the board into the water and sand while running, and jump on it. he didn’t seem to understand me and continued falling. i told him again, in-between laughing at his spills. he was confident and determined and he casually adopted my method like it was his idea. he would learn. he had little inhibition talking to me. then we were swarmed by his father and his brother and his sister and some other guy smoking a cigarette. they rushed down to the water. they stood between us, their backs to me. they were obese people covered in tattoos. the father, 350 pounds of him hanging out over his trunks, cornered the boy and let him have it: “what do you think you’re doing coming out here alone without telling us?” the kid listened. he didn’t say anything. i stood there wondering at how integral it is that fear be embedded and fostered in american children. i stood by as the various family members took turns falling into the mud. i stayed 15 minutes, watching, and not once did any member of that family acknowledge me or even look at me. my role was established from behind, as i stood on the waterline talking with a kid who needed a little help.

yesterday i was writing at the plywood desk on the deck when i heard two men talking in my driveway below. the deck is zipped up to the belly, so i couldn’t see them without sitting up in my chair. they were talking about a ghostly scallywag. they knew where it lived, but did not know if it was home. “i saw him walking down the street,” one voice said. i looked over the deck rail and there in my driveway were the cop and the neighborhood socialite. they looked up at me. “there he is right there!” the socialite said, pointing. i felt like a chimp who masturbates with frogs. the cop covered his eyes with one hand. i’m not joking. the cop covered his face.

my neighbor to the right is a black woman. she is the one with the plastic bags and pots and pans. short, crumpled face, narrow hips, always wears a knitted hat on her large head. when she opens her back door and sees me on the back deck, she slams her door closed and deadbolts fly into place. it isn’t fear. it’s insult. when she walks to her jeep, she is a slow, silent, avoids eye-contact. i said hello once, but the more distance she can maintain between us, the freer she is to hassle me through the walls. a tow-truck driver came up the back stairs and knocked on her door last night. “do you know if he’s home?” he asked me. “i thought he was a she,” i said. he looked at a paper, said, “i think it’s a he. i’m not sure.” he shuddered, his arms laughed down to his fingers. all i lack is a shave, so why do i feel so isolated?  i have logged 45,000 miles in america and so often i meet the same crap. i was brought up to believe in something better. your cities and towns are getting tiresome, america. i will resist the idea that it is me, however embedded it is in my psyche.

the things we do to confirm our existences to ourselves. how one struggles to exist defines his essence. wanting to stay alive has become man’s greatest imperative. in it’s absurdity, the question is greater than the struggle to stay alive. a harley does not count. a harley is a condiment. the condiment race, more insecure and separate than any race before. the man is so alienated he doesn’t want to live beyond biological function. he’s put himself in the category of “other being” or “default man” and mounts the nearest machine. he lacks the cognizance and support of what he means to others because there are no others. at night he prays he can become a tree. the nihilist wants to become a rock in a zoo pond because he’s too egotistical to eat. summoning fortifications for the false, he makes a mark we must contemplate for angelic legitimacy! “i don’t know i am wrong, but if you told me i had a soul, i’d believe it and say, ‘who cares?’” man and his pull towards the abyss, his version of sainthood. the things we do to confirm we do not dream.

you don’t need to be a mathematician or philosopher to see that logic works for itself. logic is a lack of faith. man has pinned his hopes on a belief that favors zero. logic kills and logic saves evenly. it shines brightest when man is committing suicide.

“what are you doing in california?”

  “i’m in love.”

  “do you have a plan?”

  “getting here was the plan.”

  “and?”

  “and i don’t know what to do.”

  “so you’re just sitting here in love looking dumb?”

  “yes.”

  “you’re a success.”

  “thank you.”

most great artists are conservatives: they are interested in conserving life. the typical person we call conservative, is interested only in conserving his own money. art battles greed with faith. given man’s tastes for killing and stealing, artists should be more ready to pick up a gun,

a rare and impossible moment of honesty from an italian-american novelist

i learned that if you want to talk to vinny, you must lie to vinny: his ego demands that his elaborate and perverted truths and overblown self-image become your own. if it threatens his ego, it must be denied. there have been things i wanted to say to danny, but i couldn’t because i wanted to preserve our friendship. here, i say them because there is nothing to lose; i am done with him. this dialogue is a fictional portrayal that would never happen in life because vinny lacks humility and has strange self-relations. part of vinny’s denial is the non-recognition of mystery, which you see in his writing. his work is mired in the superficial consciousness of ego. if he can’t know it, it doesn’t exist. he will not allow for the fact that man does not know everything about life and the universe. he is walling himself in. in his jealousy of other writers, his controlling of loves and friends, and his denying of anything greater than himself, he is the woman in the wall. as with dogs, minor artists will have their day, even if they write like geologists, or cartographers mapping out a crater. they can’t get past their hatred of life – and fear of it.

vinny says, “my friends cause me only grief.”

  paddy says, “i admit i’ve brought you my share, but most of it has been fair and truthful.”

  “i have many friends,” vinny says.

  “that’s because you’re a walking public relations firm,” paddy says. “they make you feel big, don’t they?”

  “i want them and collect them like books,” vinny says, “but they make me feel miserable and guilty.”

  “you create guilt and roll in it,” paddy says.

  “how do i create guilt?” vinny says.

  “you treat people like shit,” paddy says.

  “i don’t know why,” vinny says.

  “it makes you feel even bigger,” paddy says.

  “are you saying you don’t take me seriously?” vinny says.

  “you are interesting and a genius, but no, i don’t,” paddy says. “i think you’re lost and your exaggerated empathy is a form of anesthesia and self-destruction. you’re the most selfish, self-centered person i have ever encountered, and that includes the women.”

  “i wall myself in with lies,” vinny says.

  “because you expect lies yourself,” paddy says.

  “and i get what i want,” vinny says. “don’t i?”

  “ego.”

  vinny says, “i am inflated by guilt and lies.”

  “birds talk to one another in the morning, expectations low,” paddy says.

  “birds are taken seriously.” vinny says. “why can’t i be alone?”

  “you lack humility,” paddy says. “you are diffused.”

  “my first novel was great,” vinny says. “you said it was the funniest thing you’d ever read.”

  “it was, but comedy is not an expression of man’s highest aspiration,” paddy says. “humor is nice, but it’s avoidance, a retreat before man’s condition. your novel appeals to professionals and the righteous, just like the stories you send to the new yorker. you obscurify to the delight of the upper middle class and merchants, professionals. you are a bourgeois writer. you write for boring people trying to escape.”

  “if that is true, i am playing a big joke,” vinny says. “i’ve become a jester.”

  “you play it best on yourself. at best, you’re a moralist. you are always trying to be the best. thing is, the best don’t try.”

  “i’m always trying to be cool,” vinny says. “that’s why i wear a leather jacket and motorcycle boots, two-hundred-dollar custom-tailored shirts.”

  “i thought you were trying to be taller.”

  “i’m taller than faulkner.”

  “have you ever stood next to him?” paddy says.

  “some critics might think so,” vinny says.

  “you mean the critic who compared you to walt whitman?”

  “one of them,” vinny says.

  “you think whitman ever abused a woman or anyone else?” paddy says.

  “fuck you.”

  “have you ever apologized to your wives, girlfriends, or friends who you treated like shit?”

  “no.”

  “but you admit it?” paddy says.

  “yes.”

  “why haven’t you apologized?”

  “i don’t believe in regrets.”

  “even if you have them?”

  “that’s right. don’t look back.”

  “you don’t subscribe to the golden rule.”

  “you get less out of people that way.”

  “remember what you said to me when my life was destroyed by manic-depression, when i was suicidal and paralytic, when i lost my job, my girlfriend, and my house?” paddy says.

  “i don’t remember.”

  “you said, ‘light bothers my eyes too.’”

  “i was jealous and self-centered,” vinny says.

  “remember when i gave you that nude, one of my best, which i could have sold but gave to you – and you loved it? remember what you said?”

  “i told you that if i put it on my wall i wouldn’t look at it, so i was putting it in my closet,” vinny says.

  “you wanted to reject me.”

  “i was afraid of it,” vinny says.

  ”remember what you said when i sent you my first novel?” paddy says. “you read the first few pages and said “i wouldn’t change a word, but i can’t read it because it might affect my writing style.’ after i read both your novels twice – and gave you input you used.”

  “i wanted to deny you,” vinny says.

  “i overlooked your slights for years, one at a time, but recently all your bullshit crowded my mind at once.”

  “what bullshit?“

  “the final straw was when you said my long-distance relationship with marliyn ‘wasn’t real,’” paddy says. “despite that fact that that was how you met your wife, and then your lover, and then your next lover.”

  “i have always tried to take you down.”

  “you’re a dunce.”

  “i don’t know why i oppose you.”

  “you affront what you love,” paddy says.

  “i try to be good,” vinny says.

  “we had a decent friendship despite it all. you were a sort of mentor to me in the early years.”

  “now you’re mine,” vinny says. “but i don’t want you. my ego will not allow it.”

  “you were my friend, but you didn’t like me,” paddy says.

  “no. i was just jealous of your creativity,” vinny says. “i am threatened by it.”

  “quit trying,” paddy says. “do you want to be a writer or a socialite? a seer or a joker? do you want to be an artist or live inside your head?”

  “i want to be cool,” vinny says.

  “you haven’t been beaten down yet,” paddy says. “that’s the most i can hope for you. how’s the writing?”

  “a paragraph a day,” vinny says.

  “that’s an occlusion.”

  “i’ve never been a fountain,” vinny says. “not all of us can finish two paintings a day.”

  “you’re too polluted with yourself,” paddy says. “you can play with words. you’re an outsider trying to write about the inside. you hide behind artistry. you do not want to reveal yourself. you may not be capable. at best, you don’t want to risk yourself. in a way, you are the perfect american writer, a mirror of man’s pathetic stance – arrogant.”

  “i strut myself because i am afraid,” vinny says. “you’re up there in the sails with a knife clenched between your teeth. everything you say rings true, yet i can’t listen to you.”

  “is there any thought that runs through your mind throughout the day?” paddy says.

  “’what would bob dylan do?’”” vinny says.

  “what would bob dylan do?” paddy says.

  “he’d try to use you to make himself look good,” vinny says.

  “’how do i look?’” paddy says.

  “it’s a hang-up.”

  “’said the joker to the thief.’” paddy laughs.

  “i’m ruined for life,” vinny says.

  “we’ve been through that,” paddy says.

  “not me,” danny says.

  “you care for yourself more than a man should.”

  “at least i am not antisocial,” danny says.

  “no, i’m just alone,” paddy says. “it’s a loneliness i carry with me honestly. how’s it going at time magazine?”

  “editing stories all day long,” vinny says.

  “you’re great with grammar,” paddy says.

i saw the sandinistas as an army of freedom fighters, rebelling against a homicidal regime in nicaragua that the united states supported. i had seen capitalism birth sociopathic behavior, laziness, anxiety, stupidifying wealth, paranoia, alienation, and immigration by the greedy. capitalism had also proven to be the most efficiently homicidal philosophy to ever exist. i was not a communist and i don’t think anybody is, but to the oppressed it’s promises are a cause. you’d pin your hopes on mist if you were surviving on ketchup and murder. i was recruited by classmates who’d seen my journalism. i’d written: “who cares if a peasant wants to be a communist? he still needs to milk the cows.” i devoted myself to protesting against united states policies in central america, i remember one protest on the steps of the capitol. it was organized and activists at hundreds of universities knew about it. thirty people showed up. americans were distracted by the trickle-down voodoo and fantastic debt that would plow them asunder. they may have also been distracted by cocaine and new wave music. a woman played guitar and sang folk songs on the steps of the capitol. the guitar was a feeble ancillary. it offered no hope for el salvador, sounded more like a requiem for our freedom and conscience. in a nation of 300,000,000 people, just 30 showed up to protest the slaughter of thousands of women and children. (none of them were hippies.) dean’s list engineers and english majors, musicians and the undecided travelled hundreds of miles in vans to state their case to the state. when we arrived, serious men in badges greeted us and said we had to move our presence from the front steps of the capitol to the back steps. reagan was forcing his will upon el salvador and had americans diffused, scattered and afraid. reagan stoked paranoia so he could put billions into the pockets of a few friends and had given the press an orcheotomy. of course the press laid its balls on the block voluntarily because it was drunk on cash. what’s a little country in central america matter? let ron play out his cold war paranoias. let him out-shop the planet for guns with our money. thirty-five of us protested outside the providence journal. the providence journal, in its editorials, was engaged in obscene pandering to the right, essentially saying “please let reagan keep killing children because we are making money.” there were photographers in washington and providence. at the journal, a young staffer came out the front door in a leather jacket to shoot the gathering. in washington, he was straight from quantico. he stayed a long time, unlike the newspaper photographer. he shot all of us from many angles. i had an uneasy feeling about his mission, but accepted the risk as a means to our goal. i asked him what paper he was from and he didn’t say a word. no other photographers or reporters showed at the protests. they were certainly not competing for a story. when el mozote went down, two reporters were there. the new york times and the washington post reported the massacre our contras had committed against a small village in el salvador. reagan said it didn’t happen, said it was sandinista propoganda. time magazine and the wall street journal joined reagan and attacked the reporters. they were communists. they were incompetent and not credible.  the reporters were run out of town until a few years later, after reagan was out of office and his mind, when three-hundred skeletons were dug up at el mozote – men, women, children – all shot. america’s contras had come into town, decked out in justification. reagan wanted his own private vietnam, he wanted a second screening of the war he had lost to john lennon and students at berkeley, he wanted to make things right with the peasant farmers who dared to dream of food and free elections, to live in peace. america, your apathy is complicity. you have destroyed fidelity. wonder why nobody talks to his neighbor?

el mozote was a small rural hamlet in the el salvadorian countryside. there were about 20 homes, a school, and a church. the first day the contras forced the citizens of el mozote into the town square and made them lie with their faces to the ground. then they were locked in their homes. the next morning, the men were brought out and interrogated. they were accused of collaborating with the fsln – frente sandinista liberacion nacional. the men were tortured and shot. america, the barrel of your m-16 was shoved up the ass of a man who milked cows, up the ass of freedom while you stood browsing in a new car lot. his heart exploded. hope for life bled onto the white house lawn. every man at el mozote was executed, except for one man who hid in a tree and watched. the women were taken into the town square, except for a nun who hid in a bush. they were interrogated. they were beaten. they were raped. the girls down to the age of 10 years old were raped. then they were all shot. the cia provided the ammunition. now only the youngest children remained. they were locked inside the church. the contras insulated themselves from the ultimate crime by shooting down the children through the windows of the church. the church was then set ablaze. time magazine and the wall street journal were not there, but were ambitious enough to call the nun, the man in the tree, the reporters from the new york times and the washington post, and the 300 bloating and blackening corpses, liars. the contras returned to the scene to collect the skulls of the dead for candle holders and good luck charms. the bodies were buried, but it was too late: the world knew what reagan was determined to be, relying on men whose minds belonged to no one. a soave guy who murdered people and made the rich richer; america bought it. i can’t be artistic about it. there is nothing sacred here anymore. el mazote is man at his sickest. ideas infect a man, he gets sick, and he can’t shake his idealogical fever. he becomes too enthusiastic. machine-gunning babies cannot cure it. blowing the head off an infant is temporary solace. to look for rationality or love in man’s actions is masturbation, however much man clings to the rational. here, man, chaos is your fantasy. your mind breaks apart on our ideas. you have no control. i’ll repeat it, your mind belongs to no one, firstly to yourself.

50,000 died. next time you’re in a large football stadium, america, look around. in the end, the superpower met the tortilla and the tortilla won. blood on the palms of a nation drifting oblivious to mass murder, baby-killers . . . baby-killers dispatched from santa barbara, baby-killers dispatched from greenwich village and omaha, baby-killers dispatched from studio 51 and ford motor company, swimming in unearned hatreds and ignorance and viciousness. john lennon knew and reagan knew he knew. assassination most always comes from the right. where does an unemployed schizophrenic get the cash to fly from hawaii to new york twice? if you can slaughter babies, a real problem is not a problem.

the summer has the kids. the summer gets the kids. summer as perennial and everlasting, here before the kids took it off. dogs around here, a lot of them, and i am not without one. everybody once had a horse and a dog. now we have dogs. dogs work less and are more potent. i have a dog at my lover’s. sascha, the sleek black german shepherd who believes in food, comfort, affection, beer, wrestling, and revenge for perceived slights. he must be seven feet long, 105 pounds, with sad brown eyes. he is clumsy. he trips when running and bumps his head on deck rails and bench legs. marliyn calls him a “goofball” and i call him “the buddy.” if you ignore him when he bumps your arm, he’ll immediately take the head off your favorite zinnia. if you don’t share your beer, he’ll strip your favorite rose bush. if you don’t let him inside, he’ll crap on your jasmine. sascha and i have an understanding and dependence. he tells a gentle story with gigantic teeth. i pin him to the ground and he bites my hands. when i scratch his hairy belly, he is helpless. i knew german shepherds were the smartest of all canines, and he is sensitive and giving and expects the same from his humans, whom he respects and would give his life for. for two weeks i fucked this british girl so violently i plunged her into re-evaluation: how could a poet ream her out better than a soccer player? “you mean . . . ?” she said, pointing to a jock in the bar. don’t ask me, a job’s a job, and there’s nothing better than getting it done while upholding standards.

a lover says,“make love to me.”.

  “okay.”

  “that was nice,” she says, “make love to me again.”

  “it was very nice, but i need to catch my breath.”

  “i’m so happy anyway,” she says.

  “i am too.”

  “i feel so satisfied,” she says.

  “so do i.”

  “i love you,” she says. “i feel empowered.”

  “i love you.”

  “don’t talk to me now,” she says. “i’m high in my own head. i’m courageous.”

  “you’re somewhere else, baby.”

  “please fuck me,” she says.

  “you need more?”

  “i feel depressed,” she says.

  “i thought you were high?”

  “i have a headache only you can cure,” she says.

  “i thought you were satisfied.”

  “time has passed and i am miserable,” she says. “please fuck me.”

  “i think i must.”

stories and novels stuck at publishers who receive one-thousand submissions an hour and one great novel every 100 years – during which time publishers let slide 3.5 million abortions for people who need to have their ways affirmed in print. they do not publish for people who have made it through intact. i am somewhere in the queue. i’ll be read in three years by a distracted editor, her ivy league engagement versus my charmed disaster and chain-smoking, her curly black hair versus my immortality and decay, her five-star dinner dates (with a guy whose glasses have narrow black rectangular frames) versus my soup kitchen, her bulova and pomegranate martinis versus my natty light, her bausch and lomb versus my drift . . .

i write with so many distractions, in so many places, in so many states, in the car, on the deck, at this table and that desk, at the beach and on the bus, on different paper, different pens, computer crashes, dozens of typewriters, sober and drugged on heroin and morphine and drinking beer, deranged by manic depression, one day maine, the next california, making notes walking down the street, crawling out of bed to make more notes, rarely sitting for more than 30 minutes, building homes out of manuscripts tied up with string . . . publication has become just one more distraction. i write outside with sascha standing up like the sunflowers, as far from bifocals and and st. mark’s as you can get.

california divorce law will take care of him, but he remains my problem. marilyn’s mother compared me to her hated ex because i am “depressive and smoke and am introverted.” this woman could be my mother-in-law someday. i can’t deny that i am depressed and smoke but i am not an introvert. i have been singed by the human race and been humbled by the human experience. i am reserved. i can talk to anyone anywhere about anything. if i am silent, well, now, then, there, all things tend toward silence. i have arrived. it’s distressing to have your girlfriend’s mother drawing heavy conclusions about you after your first meeting, comparing you to the tranquilized ex who didn’t look at his son for 10 years. yes, i am just like her ex, who was strangling her to death when the cops busted down the door, i am just like the ex who was pulled over for driving 100 mph with his infant son in the back seat on his way home from buying a $3,500 mountain bike he would ride once, i am just like the ex who pointed his .9 mm automatic at her forehead before firing it in this close neighborhood, i am just like the ex who fired two bullets through the wall of the study into the kid’s bedroom, i am just like the ex who fired his .9 millimeter through the garage door and into the side of the neighbor’s house, i am just like the ex stoned on valium and crashing cars, i am just like the ex who brought home a $75,000 bmw he bought with marilyn’s credit without telling her, i am just like the ex who spent his salary on himself and contributed nothing to the household, mortage, kid, food, i am just like the ex who stepped over his kid and never talked to him, i am just like the ex who abandoned the german shepherd he had to have . . . marilyn assures me that her mother’s comparison is not an insult. she tells me there are big differences between myself and her ex. “you are a genius and i want to sleep with you.” i say, “geniuses are a dime a dozen. the other thing might be rarer.” (11 months later and marilyn’s mother treats me like the boyfriend she wants to force out. she read this story and was furious, said she didn’t hate marilyn’s ex and she accused marliyn of betraying her by telling me what she had said about me, smoker, depressed, introvert, etc. after 11 months, mom has finally said one sentence to me: “do you want more whipped cream on your strawberries?”

marilyn says: “in the 80’s, people were thin. now they’re all overweight.”

  i say: “you can do something about that.”

   marilyn says: “i wasn’t talking about myself. i’m fine. thanks.” she slams the slider and retreats to her bed. i thought i’d been gentle and her reaction too heavy.

even idiots can speak seven languages . . . the italian-american poet from the 21st century tells me:

  “sex is boring.”

  paddy says, “your dreams must be boring.”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  “proclamations are boring,” paddy says.

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says.

  “laundry is boring,” paddy says. “sex is unnecessary, sometimes disgusting, but never boring.”

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says.

  paddy says, “if you’re a nihilist, sex, reproduction, is a means to extend senseless misery, but many things without purpose are compelling – like writing. myself, i prefer writing, but sex is an exciting intermission. sex requires a certain playfulness”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  paddy says, “you mean sex is beneath you?”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  “it isn’t what it was when i was 22,” paddy says, “and i don’t need it as much, but it’s never boring.”

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says. 

  paddy says, “maybe you’re bored with the dance?”

  “sex is boring,” says the italian poet.

  “sex is like everything else, exciting in the beginning when everything wants to thrive . . . it works in the middle, like not wanting to die. the sex impulse is the life impulse, a blind imperative . . . pleasure and immortality . . . the climax is a passing on, better expressed by women.”

the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

paddy says, “you sound like a dried-up sensualist and burned-out fornicator.”

the italian poet says, “fuck you.”

greg called. two hours. what did we talk about? if i tried to remember, i’d be dishonest. women. insanity. women who are insane. how we’d rather be killed than paralyzed. brains on the street, faces ground off, it’s better than living with a manipulative borderline holding a can of gasoline and a zippo to your balls. greg sustains a monologue about himself that is difficult to interrupt or contribute to. he’s moving to the florida keys. he’s getting a harley 883. he is going to try to love the chick he’s moving in with. he’s bringing the beagle. my contributions are rushed and trampled opon. we do not have many silences, greg and i. we have problems and they are all our fault.

i have found peter. he is bleeding in a nursing home near van nuys. he was on his way to see a gastrointestinal specialist when he texted back. he doesn’t answer questions about his condition. i don’t know whether he will die tomorrow or is just using the nursing home as a free hotel. he is homeless because he bought bandages and ointment for his infected foot using his sister’s credit card, which she had given him to feed her two brats, whom he was watching while she was out of town buying and selling real estate. then, though peter allowed the kids to have parties with their friends while their mother way away, and though he cooked dinner for them and their friends, the rich little brats ratted out his rotting toe. peter’s niece, a college student, then saw a yellow convertible volkswagen bug she had to have. she already had an suv her mother had bought her, but she needed a summer car to work on her tan. that’s what she said. she needed the volkswagen for her tan. her mother, the millionaire real estate wrangler who wouldn’t pay for a tube of neosporin, had peter go look at the volkswagen. he was limping.

man’s thirst for completion, the depression on plato’s grave  – logic – will complete him.

to live is to rebel. the grass and the trees sing revolt. this is why we love them.

end

mostly madly, the novel

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the tragic artist

this one is by my late friend david ryan, a native san franciscan. it is one of his later works, when he resumed drawing and painting after a devastating blow to his career and life. one day david was working in his studio aparment and the next day he had a nervous breakdown which left him unable to pay the rent on his place. he moved himself and his cat into his big old american car and lived in it on the streets of SF. he endured gunfire at night while his paintings sat in a storage unit downtown. he collected welfare, went to soup kitchens, tried to stay afloat until he could get into a section 8 place. in addition to living in his car, he jumped couches. eventually, it came down to food for himself and his cat or the storage unit fees. he was unable to pay the fees and four huge boxes containing 20 years worth of paintings were either auctioned or thrown out. he mentioned this to me once and that was it. it was too devastating and disturbing for him to dwell on for a second. he stopped drawing and painting for what would be years. he eventually did get into a section 8 building on 6th ave and mission, the place you are most like to be murdered in the whole city. david didn't care who shot whom as long as it was not him and he used to be amused when he had to step over a dead body to get into his new home. not long after he moved in, he inherited $120,000 from an aunt who liked him, loved him. she was the only one in the family who had not dismissed him because he was a gay artist. i met david through the owner of a used bookstore and was eventually invited to visit his house. up to this point, he had not even mentioned that he was a painter. i walked into his flat and was overwhelmed by the paintings he had strung up on a clothesline, drying. the guy was good, i mean great. a year later i left san francisco for the east coast and we kept in touch. as was his way, he never told me about his paintings in storage and did not ask for money when he was about to loose them. after inheriting the money, david thought about what he should do. the first question was should he get off 6th street and into a better apartment. the benefits were obvious, but there were two things holding him back. with section 8, his rent was paid and he was assured of a home forever, whereas he would eventually run out of the $120,000 and be in a tough spot again. as he vacciliated, he test drove new cars. and then something unexpected happened to david. he began drinking for the first time in his life at the age of 60. his mother had been a terrible alcoholic and he had sworn never to touch booze. and he hadn't his entire life. the night i met him was at the bookstore. i had dropped in with my girlfriend and other friends and david was there talking to the owner. i had a flask of scotch on me and offered it around. david declined. i know david had "reasons" to drink later. he lived in a hellhole. but it always came back to those lost paintings for me. he had lost his life's work. it would be like a writer losing ten novels. as it turned out, david was a great drinker. twenty shots of irish whiskey and he was just getting started. he had inherited a capacity from his mother. from zero, he was drinking amounts that would have killed me. i know he was not trying to kill himself. he was having fun. as he sat in the bar, casanova, night after night, he began drawing the patrons on napkins and sending them to me. eventually, the napkins evolved into the drawing you see above. he had started again. he was drawing. he did not move or buy a car, but chose to drink his money. he died of a botched hernia repair. the surgeon sewed him up with a cut intestine. at the time of his death, he had maybe 20 finished paintings. a bartender named margarita took those and his sister wrote me to find out where all his money was.

jess, kaleigh, & cody OR all's fair in love . . .

                                          

 my last semester at the respected but dull and stifling university back east, my last semester of college altogether and forever, ten days after my first date with the girl i had loved at first sight, kaleigh showed up.

jess and i had been looking to one another for three months across the table in our small anthropology class. we’d started with a few awkward words after class and had met once at a bar, after i casually recommended the music and said it would be nice to see her there. a local blues guitarist just signed by atlantic records would be sweating out his thursday night whiskey. jess showed late with her girlfriend. i had given up on her, sort of forgot and was drunk and couldn’t really see. some broadcast major would not let go of my ear. jess and her friend stepped out of the crowd to say hi. it was too loud to talk, but she had come. when they went over to the bar, the broadcast guy said, "you know her?"

on a sunny day in april we walked miles of sand in narragansett. the waves were thunder and spray, but i could not go to them because i was with jess. she was wearing faded levis with a black belt and a beat leather biker jacket with torn seams held together by safety pins and a dangling belt. we agreed to hitchhike across australia together. soon after, we went out to dinner at a café in newport. i was in love before i had ever spoken to her and a dream was unfolding for the first time in my life.

kaleigh arrived wanting to get laid, but fast realized what she had flown into. she said she had no idea that jess even existed. she said she would not have come. she had planned this surprise with my friend and housemate cody’s help. he told her “‘it’s a great time to come,’” she said.

great for cody.

kaleigh didn’t know much about cody. she had heard stories i'd told in humboldt a year ago. kaleigh didn’t know she was calling into a spoiling friendship. she didn’t know she was talking to a cody who could use her.

kaleigh was true lucky.

cody: “it’s a great time to come. c’mon out!  he'll love it! he won’t have a clue. i promise i won’t say a word. i’ll pick you up at the airport.”

kaleigh could not have known that cody was losing in his play for my new girlfriend. his pursuit had begun the second i had mentioned jess at the beginning of the semester and now what had been a contest, as he perceived it, was looking lost. our relationship had been tense for months while he tried to score a chick he had no chance with. kaleigh was perfect.

jess locked me out. the beautiful new days were things i’d just seen. jess and i had been sleeping together at her house, but we had not made love. we were riding around on my friend bob’s honda and drinking coffee, going to the beach and to shows. it was spring - and it was love- and sex was there but we did not hurry to it for knowing put us before it. jess had no idea of what my relationship with kaleigh was or had been. she knew about my year of school in california, didn't know many names, didn’t know what to believe. she had to protect herself. she feared deeper involvement with me meant pain. her disappointment and doubt were shown by silence and withdrawal. affection was gone. i was in love with a girl who didn’t want to know me. we’d finally moved into the open, out of the looking and into the touching and talking, and now this.

it was spring break at humboldt state. kaleigh had become inspired. she was a vagabond who had never been to the east coast, had never tasted new york pizza, and she was horny. possessing a blind spot toward womanly excursions in my direction, i had never considered, or accepted, that kaleigh liked me. she called cody, who she knew of from my stories. she told him she wanted to surprise me. cody left out jess, whose house i had been sleeping at for two weeks.

cody and jess were both anthropology majors and after i had seen her in my class, i asked him if he knew this chick. i described her. he told me her name. he didn't know her, but he agreed she was gorgeous. she was one of the hottest chicks on campus and she was a presidential scholar. then cody began to pursue her. he had access to us both individually. both jess and i knew this, but he relayed nothing positive. later, he tried to make it appear to her i was not interested. of course, he was not subject to the field when we were near one another, the kinetics of affinity. jess was never interested in him, but she used his interest to get closer to me. she used him a little better than i did, naturally. his disrespect through those months was a discovery to me, but all is fair. now, even in apparent defeat, he either hadn’t stopped trying or maybe was in it for vengeance and destruction. i don’t know when or if he saw or accepted that jess didn’t want him. his ego may have lifted him out of reality.  but kaleigh was a chance to cause trouble and maybe wreck things for jess and i. kaleigh’s arrival would only have been worse if humboldt state had had its spring break a week or two earlier.

i recalled cody asking me who kaleigh was, not long before she arrived. the question had come out of nowhere, as i was heading down the front stairs and out the door. “who’s kaleigh?” he asked. i turned. “who?” “kaleigh. the girl you knew in california.” “oh. kaleigh. she’s cool, one of the gang.” “is she hot?” “she’s alright. why?” “just curious.” i had forgotten his inquiry immediately. i figured he had just read a story or letter with her in it. i had written a lot about humboldt when i was there, letters to him and articles for a newspaper. i don't know why he asked if she was hot. was he assessing how much damage she’d cause? did he want to import her for himself? no, he wanted jess and showed no interest in kaleigh while she was in rhode island. if he had, it would have lessened the impact of her presence. he left jess out and let kaleigh fly 3,000 miles to be the outsider, to be used, while jess was plunged into doubt about her new boyfriend.

in the days when i was pursuing jess, there were senseless and ugly fights with cody. he screamed on the side against love. meanwhile, he was making the most of the classes he and jess shared. jess knew he and i surfed and lived together. she let him into her life. she was genuine and friendly with cody, who was amusing, but he saw the talk as more. one time jess mentioned a party to cody, expecting the two of us to show. she knew that he knew i liked her. she figured he would tell me and i would come.

i would have come.

but the night of the party, when i let cody know i was coming, he blew up.

“they invited me! not you!”

i let it drop and went to practice my horn. before leaving, he knocked on my door and said, “you can come if you want.” he’d come around because he had seen the piss yellow light he was going to be under. one of our housemates, randy, had been out there on the couch for the screaming and thought cody was stupid. maybe cody realized that, but his change of heart was mostly damage control. that is how cody thought. always politically.

i sacrificed the opportunity to see jess and left cody to finish painting himself into his corner. when he arrived at the party, jess asked him where i was.

  “he didn’t want to come.”

  she was disappointed and so was i, but i was less worried about her than about what cody had become. the truth with jess and i would out. i felt an inevitability about her and i was sure of my slow approach. jess and i had come upon one another at the right time. cody was damaging and that was his choice, but his jealousy and character gave me more reason to count the days to graduation. i had to live with this guy who had set himself up as an enemy. in the end, he left himself standing before jess as an idiot and before me as a friend who had thinned himself beyond trust.

i was not home the afternoon kaleigh arrived, so cody drove her around town looking for me. the sky was cut blue and it was in the high 60s. i 'd taken my friend’s 450 cc out for a tour of my thoughts. i had a future. it was in my blood. i stopped at this surfer’s cottage, but he wasn’t home. i sat back on his front grass and watched the ocean. then cody cruised up in his 4-wheel-drive subaru and released kaleigh, dropped her running with open hands. “isn’t it amazing to see me? are you surprised?” cody swung around and bolted, didn’t open his door. he was gone before i could lie to kaleigh. i didn’t see him for a week.

kaleigh got on the back of the bike and i showed her my spring places.

i knew kaleigh. she was the chick embracing me. she was the girl who had moved into my friend molly’s apartment spring semester, a year and a half ago. when i was at humboldt, kaleigh was dropping acid with her boyfriend, learnman. then she was molly’s housemate. she didn’t talk to us and neither molly nor i said a lot to her. she had learnman and her ventura friends down the block. ventura, camarillo, oxnard, acid and crank. kaleigh saw our drinking system, but never drank. she didn’t talk to us until most of the ventura gang had split. during my recent visit in January, eight months after i left Humboldt and days before i first saw jess, i’d taken kaleigh to the somoa cookhouse with me for lunch. my true date was molly, but she was in bed with the unspecific ailment a bastard had given her in a monterey motel room on a rainy winter’s night. kaleigh had invited herself.  kaleigh always liked molly’s food. it didn’t occur to me that she wanted anything more than to eat more of molly’s food. i was the guy who missed everything, or didn’t care. i had forgotten about january, but now i remembered how kaleigh had been changed when my ex, marilyn, called the restaurant. she became sulky. i had not given kaleigh any thought. i had been thinking about how hurt molly was, about how she was not the one sitting at the table with me. and about how i wanted to fuck marilyn. now kaleigh and her bean salad moves were in rhode island and i was thinking about jess. i was on a motorcycle. there was a girl on my back. it was the wrong girl. her name was kaleigh. again.

jess assumed kaleigh was a lover from california. maybe an ex, maybe a chick i was banging up until the night before our first anthropology class.  jess knew some about my previous year at humboldt state. she didn’t care to think about it. i had also mentioned the january trip, so she might have suspected kaleigh was one reason i’d gone. who but a lover would fly out like this in surprise? or was it a surprise?  maybe jess suspected i knew kaleigh was coming. that would be very bad. jess had known me closely for only a month. so little time for trust to grow. i could have been lying the whole time. and even if jess did not read deception and insult into the situation, she still had intimidation on her hands, a chick who’d known me much longer than she had, a chick whose presence required me. jess would have seen the truth if she had more faith and maybe self-confidence. what she did not know, she imagined, created, filled in. she did not have much faith. she backed off. it was the silence of conservatism. my lack of interest in kaleigh was slow to impress her. kaleigh’s looks did not help. i was not attracted to her psychologically, but she was fine and she was sleeping in my house.

this was our first bad time. jess didn’t walk out of the picture and i was not going to let her. but i had to take the initiative to see her, talk. she drifted neutral on my reassurances. kaleigh had to be a lost love. i was holding something back. jess’ girlfriend advised caution. i was losing  jess to imaginary causes. while jess hid a heart, i played host to kaleigh. i was talking to her and thinking of jess. i was not present anywhere. when i left to see jess, kaleigh sat in a strange land with no transportation. cody was invisible that week. he went missing. i thought about jess every minute of kaleigh’s stay. it was unfair. kaleigh cooled. jess was in doubt. the frustration, the lack of options. beginnings are so fragile. it had taken months for us to begin and so soon we were marred by mistrust.

the first night, jess seemed fine. we shared a burrito kaleigh had smuggled from hey juans, the burrito joint in arcata. we ate at jess’ house. jess laughed in the moment, but eventually i had to bring kaleigh back to my place. since it was her first night, i would sleep at home. it was the first night jess and i would be apart in awhile, but i didn’t see how this could be a mistake. i was confident in jess, us, and i was a host. on the way back to my place, kaleigh asked about jess. i told her it was serious, that we were taking it slow.

kaleigh and i sat on my couch. kaleigh was in another time zone. it was late for me. the house was quiet. kaleigh asked for my feet. she took my shoes off. i was lying back with my feet in her lap. she held a foot. her touch moved me and the erection came. she saw it and continued massaging. it felt like cheating. it was the warmest i had ever seen her . . . . i could only think of jess. jess was at home, maybe hurt and wondering, doubting and maybe unable to sleep. writing me off was the only way to save herself. i had gone home with this girl she didn't know, right away, the first night she was here, and what was this girl doing here anyway? kaleigh’s massage distracted me from some frustration, but when her touch found me where i lived, i was just a guy who was failing to relate to two women. i told kaleigh i was tired. she followed me down the stairs. i showed her a bed in a room downstairs. she fell onto her back and bounced. smiles at the ceiling, then at me. i stood in the doorway. she stopped bouncing.

kaleigh said she would not have come if she had known about jess. she left no doubt about what she wanted. her attraction to me has never registered, as if she did not send off the signals i expect. kaleigh’s week passed without romance and she got less attention than i gave her. she became aloof and more independent, which i encouraged. she was almost a bitch, but she’d walked upon a scene that was complete. she took responsibility for her presence. she settled and gave us space, was not catty, but was stranded.

i remember the three of us landing at some outdoor market in soho. bricks. a clear spring day shining on silver jewelry. here i am, new york city with two sleek girls, neither talking to me. wandering around while they shopped until i paid. nightmare companions, who, whenever i looked, were off in separate directions, to the same purpose: tell him, avoid her.

going down i-95 south in connecticut, jess had put in a tape mixed for her by her ex-boyfriend, the front-man to a band which damn near made it and should have . . . the guy before me was enough trouble with the stereo off . . . a band with a sound that was more than a good idea, dirt in words, ahead of its time and maybe on the wrong coast for the time . . . this bitch’s music. if it gets you through the ride . . . i didn’t know the singer, jess’ ex. she had started in with me after she had broken up with him. this singer seemed always present, on posted bills, on people’s tongues, on the radio. early on, i “wound up” at two gigs with her, a club where she watched him spit rolling rock into the pit and a festival deal where they were the headliner.  “his pants are pretty low,” i had said. “his weight goes up and down all the time,” jess had said. the guy was a charged front man with presence. odd good looks, different, smart. he had let go a ways back and was decaying at the edges, stirring it up with groupies and coke. more pussy than an nba star, a drummer from another band told me. jess? pussy? pretty much . . . in the car with kaleigh,  jess made a point of letting me know it was his band before she popped the cassette in. she showed me what he had written to her on the insert, something like, “why do you look down? what are you waiting for?” on the cassette he’d written “this side” and “that side.” his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter had apparently stalked him and his pussy so effectively that it became misery for her to see him. and jess did not want to be the mistress, the groupie, the pussy. i didn’t want to think about her loving him. this is the story jess told me. she had reluctantly broken it off. fucking while the girlfriend waited outside the door with their crying baby was his idea. if he had not been him, she would have been with him. get it? jess would hang onto this fantasy, carry a torch she couldn’t lose, her first love that wasn’t, whenever she needed it. so far as fighting off me and my other woman, bringing this tape along to new york was a good move. i could see her pulling the tape off her shelf before we left. it was a defense and retaliation. the music got to me. some of it was the idea of him and her and her lingering feelings. but mostly i could not stand to see her feeling like this. her move showed me how she worked as an opponent. her defense was passive but hard, she believed in an eye for an eye. but jess had also been offensive, dragging me to those gigs without telling me who was playing. kaleigh might have helped  me (to your beer-spitting wannabe rock star in dropping pants, i raise you one live hot california fox who wants to polish my knob) but i didn’t need her help. kaleigh sat in the backseat, smiling in the wind, no idea who we were listening to, who we were. she had not caught on to her impact on jess and i yet, probably because there should not have been much of one. her vacation plans were changed, but kaleigh was headed to new york city. she had never been there. her nikormat was at her side. she took one great shot of jess and i that day, stepping off a curb downtown. jess was smiling, but she had her arms around herself.

heather, newport, ri

the guards

 

one day codylude showed up at my beach to substitute for his sister. we had gone to the same high school and knew of one another, but had never talked. i played trumpet in the pit orchestra for music man. he was the lead. we transposed for him because he couldn’t sing, but he was a good actor. we wound up in the same lifeguard chair, where we discovered we were both idiots. that week we spent our hours trading time on the long red rescue board, surfing small waves and haphazardly navigating through the swimmers we were being paid to protect. i often did this on slow days, but with the both of us surfing in shifts on a sunny saturday, the offense was constant. swimmers looked up to see the red board with the white cross honing in on their foreheads. there were consequences, for me. my surfing performance was judged.

at the beach that summer a guatemalan got out over his head. he was drunk and he couldn’t swim. he yelled for his life in spanish. i didn’t know spanish. latinos did not come to our beach. latinos did not come to our town. they must have been lost and now they were drowning at the far end of the beach where the fuck-ups went to drink beer and try to launch boats. at first it sounded like they were horsing around. it was almost 5 o’clock and the water was flat calm. maybe five people were standing together in the water about 200 feet down the beach to my right. the lifeguard chair down there was empty, so they were mine.  another lifeguard, orphan tammy, who i will tell you more about, was in the chair on my left. she was also attracted by the shouting. we didn’t know what was going on. i did not see anyone struggling. what was going on was another late-afternoon pain in the ass, when kids came to party because the beach was free. i climbed down and jogged over. the group became more focused seaward and they got frantic. i ran into the water. i reached them, but i wasn’t needed. one guatemalan had his arm around his brother and was walking him in. the guy was in terror. i took an armpit and we brought him to shore. he was coughing. i checked him out for shock. he was fine, just reeking of booze. he was glad to be alive with his brother by his side. i joked about how he almost didn’t make it to america. i regretted not getting to him sooner, but how could i know? they were horsing around the whole time and drowning sounded like more of the same. the guy was drowning in spanish. we were short a guard and i had no binoculars and they were drunk.

nobody saved anybody that year, but i was the worst at it. at this beach it was important to look like you were protecting swimmers who were all excellent swimmers. an upper-middle class need to construct something formal which appears to pre-empt death, cut out risk before it can happen with rules and a highly visible security force composed of well-connected gods and goddesses. people feel better saved in advance. they lie down with the sand fleas and tampon applicators and burn fearlessly. it’s called stability and the need for it is a neuroses i usually avoid. but i faked it because i needed a job and too often the money is nesting in the assholes of the dead, who as a requirement, must look carefree. any of a thousand swimmers or city employees could have complained about my surfing on the job.

next summer, i was not rehired. i found another lifeguard job in newport. it was a small state beach at fort adams, where i slept when nobody was in the water and listened to the iran-contra hearings on the radio in my jeep. what punishment that summer. a wet fog outlasted justice. it was just me and admiral poindexter and a fog everyone talked about. i never fell asleep on the job. i woke up. i didn’t know for sure if there had been anyone in the water before i awoke, but i did have a way of waking up to see people just going in. of course, others may have gone in and come out before i woke up, but i like to doubt it. and there was never anything in the papers. i lifeguarded using extra sensory perception. i saved three kids and i’d say those kids were fortunate i was such a surfer at the other beach, where codylude, my fellow surf idiot, had replaced me as a full-time guard. the three black kids could have been saved by any passersby, but there weren’t any. one of them had fallen on her face in less than a foot of water and could not get out. she was about 3 years old. her mom was not on the beach and i was informed a park ranger had found her at a picnic table  on the other side of the hill drinking beer with two guys. no fear, roosta is here, his love of surfing having turned him into a babysitter. i was unprofessional, a fuck-up,  fired by an affluent island town which had done the right thing to preserve its grave atmosphere. there were other problems at that island beach. i ate too many sour kraut hot dogs and i didn’t do my daily work-outs. there also was the time i left my post and jumped in the bushes with a long lost girlfriend. and then there was tammy, poor orphan tammy.

she was an all-state gymnast and in position to whine. her step-father’s company had contracts with the city and her boyfriend was the son of the city council president. she was fowl-mouthed, dull and loud. there was no affinity from the start, but my natural attitude toward ignorant bitches blew up in the heat. she came onto the beach late that summer and began engineering a scene in which she would be the social center. since she was stupid and we worked more as individuals, her talk was noise, except to codylude’s sister deborah, who recognized the political advantage in being her friend. tammy was short and muscular, a great build for drowning. her hair was long and almost black. she had been adopted at 12 and i guess it was in the places she had lived that she had learned to be, and was allowed to be, loud, vulgar, and a good person.

she was bitter about something. i didn’t know what. she was entitled to something. i didn’t know why. okay. i can guess. it was one response to her life in foster homes without her biological parents. she had been abandoned. that might have been it.  then newfound privilege had warped her and she wasn’t made to straighten out. she was not grateful. and she was indulged. her adoptive mother was a well-known gymnastics coach, with an accomplished daughter of her own. maybe the adoption was a merger, or an acquisition. tammy’s gymnastics abilities were supposed to be exceptional. her name was not her name but the name of someone in the sports pages i did not read. her name was in the air. her character was on the mat. i can tolerate ego when there’s a greater perspective and humility, but in tammy i saw destruction, a moment to moment vacuum which menaced the sea and sky. it was all about her and avoiding her was only possible on the days she was not working. when she was at the beach, she made demands over chairs, she liked to be close to the facilities, argued over her break time, and about when we should take in the torpedoes, rescue boards, and boat. if there was one thing she could fight about and exert power over, she was on it. the environmental impact of her mouth was turning the sand red.

one day i was walking by her chair. she was saying something. i stopped. whenever i showed a hint of friendliness toward her, tammy acted friendly and happy. while she continued saying something, she had her legs spread for someone. i noticed she was bleeding through her speedos . . . i was dense, but i caught on. the one foil to her bitching was to pretend i found her attractive. i discovered that our misery was all my fault and that life for the staff would be better if i whipped it out and succumbed to her entitlement. word reached us that her boyfriend was having doubts. their relationship was shaky. in addition to being a bitch from hell at work, she was not much more at home. her romantic difficulties were ours and our one shot for peace was a truly self-sacrificing lifeguard, a man who would plug up the boat in order to save eight people. i was the candidate for this selfless hero and i did not step up.

i was aware she was connected. i didn’t care. it might have helped if i knew more about her connections and did care, but i didn’t follow local politics on any level. i didn’t know the extent of her network until after i was canned. she was somebody. she was this important guy’s daughter and that important guy’s maybe future daughter-in-law. she had money and she had the acclaim of a local jock. i should have guessed she was maintaining a log of my disprofessionate activities, her roosta dossier, but i was just living. i was unprofessional, no doubt, but i was very philosophical: the well-being of our charges first, but freedom: we had to be loose to survive the stresses of watching out for what came once in 3 months - while acting as law enforcers, tourist centers, babysitters, and oceanographers. the staff shares a joint on a cold rainy day when nobody is at the beach? codylude’s sister passes, tammy passes, most don’t. who cares? we catch a few waves to break up the monotony and revive ourselves? who cares?

good people care.

i have a memory of a fight in the guard shack in which i threw something at tammy. it was a rainy day, we were all trapped together, sitting on guard equipment. it was cold and we were talking.  i don’t recall what she said or what i threw, but it wasn’t with any force or intent to hurt her. it meant, “shut the fuck up.” someone had to say it and she took it like she deserved it. codylude’s sister was stunned and then condemning. throwing things was not something i had done before or since. i would have been better off if i had had more patience, but she could not swim and she had been forced on us. i heard about all of it next spring when the city’s director of parks and recreation told me flat-out no way i could have a job and when i refused to leave his office, he told me it wasn’t his decision. i waited while he called the mayor, who gave him the no again. later, word from codylude was that tammy had told her parents and the city that she refused to work with me. i don’t know if scorn was a factor, but she was in, so i was out. the parks and recreation director said, “the mayor doesn’t want to have any more of what happened out there last year.” his eyes went to the ceiling, the mayor’s office. tammy worked two weeks into the summer and once sure of my excision, quit. i was by then in newport, fast asleep. codylude took her job, which had been my job.

a couple years later i was a newspaper reporter and my beat included that island, that mayor. i had heard of poetic justice and believed in it, but my wrath was more like something out of the old testament.

Marrow Editions: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry of Patrick Fealey

karen