Fun & Folly-- "The
Lynching
of Andy Kaufman"
The slurp of Mountain Dew, the grease of pizza sliding on your slippery palms as you jerk the joystick and slam down the buttons on the arcade machine faster and faster at 10 'o clock in the evening-- that was the sort of monument to "low culture" that spoke to me deeply.
You see, "high culture" was for pencil-necked "wienies" who spent their few spare moments sawing a bow back and forth across an oaken cello. That is, after brushing up on their SAT study guides so they could get "early admission" into Harvard like Bill Gatesian wimps. As you make fun of them with deep, barreling laughter, they race at you with their tiny little fists balled up and you merely hold them back with one hand as they swing at empty space. What did they know about anarchy and wildness and merriment that cycloned higher and higher in a neural quick-release of "pleasure chemicals" as you zapped the button over and over. . . . . much like a lab-rat wired up in some kind of crazed pleasure/reward experiment in front of a flashing video monitor of pixilated explosions?
God, there was nothing so glorious as "The American Cheeseburger", so long as they were good cheeseburgers sputtering on the grill and handed to we grunts on wax paper on a warm summer's night, hanging out by the tables like a pride of lions. It was the same mentality that shook its head, or even snarled when cornered, if some know-it-all social engineer brimming with horn-rimmed alacrity and peskiness counted off all the logical reasons why our students' math scores would be lifted if the country put an end to "summer vacation", or outlawed "Crackerjacks" because the nation was too fat. If they kept it up, they would be conducting their slanted "opinion-surveys" from the bottom of a fly-swarming trash can.
I only wished that I could be paid to savor this corner of the American zeitgeist like a connoisseur of neon lights, of the electricity found in 20th century slack and JFK girl-in-the-Ferrai dreams, instead of having to get an education like a kid who didn't want to go to school and dull his nimble reflexes with useless crap. In this sad, slow world full of gray, crowing school marms with buns in their hair, brandishing rulers at an unruly classroom of elementary school students, I would have never believed it unless I got my mitts on the promotional literature myself: A VIDEO GAME MUSEUM. Yes, an interactive gallery of near-recent whimsy right here in our own stodgy St. Louis, carved into the rolling hillsides of cobble-stoned Laclede's Landing down by the Arch to rake in the tourists' money. Like a hook reaching into their pockets, rustling around for their wallets, I probably couldn't see the whole picture at the time.
To a 10 year-old, it was the most glorious thing I had ever beheld. Reconditioned arcade games and pinball machines packed wall-to-wall, a backdrop of crumbling brick, and stained glass lanterns hanging from the ceiling like something out of an early '80s pizza parlour.
Classic.
Placards hung from the ceiling above each "artifact", conferring righteous legitimacy upon this cultural institution that the snooty academics of the world and mentally-scummed-over editors of "Harper's" and "The Atlantic Monthly" would only turn up their nose at insufferably.
This was "the people's museum", man!
Hired help in a "National Video Coin-Op Museum" cap sat perched on a stool behind the glass counter-- filled with unsold souvenirs-- and watched the occasional guest enter through the swinging doors like scuzzy pilgrims. Taking in my exhilarated surroundings, I simply could not understand why there weren't velvet ropes, paparazzi, promotional lights swinging back and forth into the night sky, news choppers "whomping" overhead, and rioting lines of gamers. Was the world immune to pop culture glory, this den to all of a 10 year-old's realized fantasies?
Well, the concept first began as "a paid admission museum". A rocky endeavor, at best. Eventually they crossed that out, threw open the doors in desperation, and turned it into a free-spending arcade. But can you really pay a pricey lease on quarters alone? The museum limped along for a couple of years, then was no more. I was understandably quite crushed. . . . .
But that was the way of the world. . . . . and the unsympathetic action of the free market, though in my heart I was a sentimentalist of the worst sort who absolutely hated change.
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The camera in bleeding, 1960's Technicolor shows a little boy fishing in the country. A kindly old gentleman with white hair, a white beard, a white suit, and glasses shuffles over like a grandfather and toussels the boy's hair. The colonel has providently brought a bucket of "Kentucky Fried Chicken". They eat it together, and walk down the country road-- a fine piece of southern Americana. Forget Vietnam, forget the Black Panthers, forget "The Weather Underground" stashing bombs in buildings, but this was a filmstrip that reaffirmed one's faith in the slow-moving system.
One saw this flickering filmstrip one day in the 1st grade when the teacher randomly ran an assortment of old footage on the projection screen. Just why she did and for what purpose is a mystery left to the ages but probably shaped me with a deep, abiding conservatism for how, perhaps, things never were.
Something I never had for too long was what I'd call "a wide-eyed, moon-eyed sense of credulity".
Say it with a country accent, a southern drawl, and you'll get the honey-cured flavor. The idea that you could believe in good things, wonderful things, fantastic things, and cross your heart with faith that you'd encounter them. . . . . if not tomorrow, then some time soon.I got this feeling the time I visited "The Elvis is Alive" Museum about 50 miles outside of St. Louis.
For miles and miles the signs announce the 12 foot high Elvis statue, and there it is-- made out of painted plywood and flecked with bird shit. Elvis in a white jumpsuit sauntering toward the dirty shack of a landmark. Junk cars sit outside, and wooden signs with red lettering lead the way sensationally-- nailed to a thirsty-looking tree where crows roost in judgment of Great Depression-era style poverty. The screen door knocks in the desolate wind as you push your way inside, crunching down on dead autumn leaves.
In the restaurant a chunky eleven year-old in a white apron brings you a menu, sprightly bustling about with the ignorance and inattention of the young. Indeed, a jolly little one, perhaps oblivious to the poverty of his father's withering circumstances. . . . . It used to be that you PAID to view the museum; now, it's a little room in back and free to the public. You can look over the evidence, hear-say, and speculation yourself-- just like a rube chewing tobacco-- and decide for yourself. The owner standing there with the audacity of the gimmick, the outlandishness speaking for itself as you look down at the floor or up at the ceiling as if someone had died.
The establishment itself is an expression of zany, lowest common-denominator bad taste. There is a sign that reads, "come this way and see something that you've never seen before", and leads you to a trough of unopened peanuts. You open the shell and. . . . . well, you "get it". Evidently the kid's been in them, and hasn't swept away the broken shells.
There's a speaker device over the restroom door that hollers and complains in a high-pitched redneck voice to grant the disembodied, "boiled egg" absolutist a degree of irritable privacy like a holy roller wafted up to heaven. That, with about seven or eight "rank" lines that don't warrant repeating here. The kid opens and shuts the door endlessly, never getting tired of it.
Then the owner walks in.
A heavy presence hangs over the air, one of the weary "showman". A circus barker collapsing onto a red stool, amid the straw, buckets, and whips. He has to be in his late '50s or early '60s, with black mutton-chop whiskers and
hair that's obviously dyed, a former Elvis impersonator whose gig has run its
course. Shoulders slumped, expression sour, he seems absorbed in his own problems.
In a sweeping gesture of charity, you announce that this place has the best food. The owner stops and stares at you, to see if you're lying, then turns away. Ask him if Elvis is really alive and he'll direct you to the fine gift shop where you can purchase a spiral-bound compilation of typewritten medical documents for $12. Don't ask too many questions, don't intrude on his space. Over the years he has had his merry fill of naive city dwellers and doesn't particularly want to be your friend.
This is the edge, the semi-twilight of the dark underbelly, where dust was plentier than pleasure, and mild amusement plentier than money. Then the son came up to the table and remarks with complete innocence that "he's for sale". You do a double-take, and get the joke.
It's a PG-rated world, after-all.
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This is part of why I find John Hagee's televangelism outreach so hilarious. There he fulminates, out of his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. . . . . completely blustering and unapologetic for what he is as a package, an over-the-top caricature of a 19th century Texan pastor who would be standing tall with God alongside Sam Houston and telling "Yosimite Sam" to fall to his knees in repentance, coming to peace with all the characters in this bizarre cartoon world of draped bunting and white Stetsons.
Nevermind that the Anglos snatched the good land from the Mexicans "and had their way" with the slave women, nevermind the bloody transgressions of the Crusaders during "The Holy Wars" who ultimately got driven out with a blond-bearded yowl, nevermind that no truly intelligent, thinking person who is honest with himself and the overarching silence of the cosmos can be a fundamentalist THIS SELF-RIGHTEOUS, but the show is charming for its "suspension of belief" that would have appealed to me a long time ago as a child comforted by certainty.
Yes, all the big-talkin' adults in charge. . . . .
The precious belief of others who look on is so wonderfully innocent and awe-struck that you wouldn't think of spoiling it by tearing down the illusion. In this world there are realists and pretenders, and sometimes those with greater insight walk a fine line in either maintaining a fiction, spinning off a fiction, or even falling prey to their own fiction with disastrous consequences.
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In those splayed-out and winning days of the 5th grade. there was a sense of easy congratulation in the air-- we had won the Cold War, the showdown in the East with the no-nonsense Slav poking his head above a tank in a Russkie hat, and life for we kids was pretty easy at the age of 11 years old as we thrust headlong into the '90s. All we had to do was salute the flag and say "no" to drugs; the routine had become so rote that we could just mouth the words with obnoxious Bart Simpson irony and get away with it. Laughably uptight school marms may have deemed our antics as "inappropriate", but clearly they were on the wrong side of history. There was a sense of decadence in the air, of easy coasting-- yet the breath of change and inevitability that would require the mustering of courage and leadership. That was for adults, or older kids at least, as we played kickball.
There was a popular girl in the grade I had a crush on, brooding on my predicament like Richard Nixon pondering down at the ground with his hands in his pockets. Little Amy lit up my heavy, constipated, and dark life. Yes, like no other. She was like a ballerina in a music box that twirled on one slipper and warmed my tired, young heart as I stared at it with a slight smile. It was a sacred, protective assumption that saw her as a sentimental ideal-- almost as if she was locked in a single pose. But Amy would wander out of this pose, and I would feel consternation, pulling back my head with surprise.
I was no leader. . . . . I was not "jiggy" with people. Instead, I would retreat into the world of old comic books: the stuff of space-blasters and moon-girls, and dream of better days to come. But that world was rapidly receding, like the rain forests getting cleared away by the roar of bulldozers, and I could not hide forever.
I joined a public-speaking class, mostly with the aim of grabbing the doughnuts that I thought were going to be served every morning. When I learned that they weren't going to be served until a big party at the end of the season, I sheepishly dropped out. Inside I felt scaly and loathsome and intuited that I would never amount to anything. But yet there was Amy, sunny and bright.
I took those thoughts, and shelved them away. . . . . for I was a failed young man. Others would take the mantle of leadership, while I would brood by the fence. Only by great anger would I ever be arisen out of this slump. Now you know more about me.
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Yet there
was a time when it was easier to complain than to do anything constructive. I think that came around the age of 12 in the early years of middle school. While good little girls worked on their penmanship, neatened their binders, and kept organized, the young romantic men were off on another plain entirely. The ideal of clashing sabers, cannon fire, grand proclamations, and social upheaval. At least that's the way I liked to think of it-- the simmering revolutionary movement of youth. But no one would join me in my works of sabotage, and I was an atom in ritualized, cosmopolitan chaos.So one lapsed into utter cynicism about the potentials of their comrades, and the corruption of adults in general. It seemed a token of sophistication and higher intelligence to walk around with an pessimistic attitude that presumed fault towards all societal structures.
Religion was "the opium of the masses". The media was "a clearing-house of false propaganda". Government and big business "composed the iron heel crushing down on the worker" even though Bill Clinton was in office.
It was all about "attitude", after-all, as if striking a pose would make you worthy of cutting you slack in your meaningless studies. But sadly it didn't, and the friction increased.
One stood there outside the school and asked, "would they really throw all they
knew away?" To behold
some fish-lipped American leftist creeps circa 1960 doing a Cuban mambo, switching their arms back and forth in revelry as a subversive alternative, had a certain allure.
. . . . even if it was godlessly uncanny. The communal distribution of the work sounded just fine
so long as I was either a soft-bottomed intellectual, or a table-pounding
apparatchik. Let someone else work in the spark-shooting steel mills with a hammer after-all, or thresh the endless plains of wheat with a sickle. I'd be about ready to go home, however, once pushed around by the Statsi secret police, or imprisoned in a gulag for not conforming to the party line.
For what was my youthful radicalism but a petty, decadent excuse?
On some deep level, I fundamentally understood this
and think all I really wanted in the end was a nice girl to care about me. . . .
. . and fortunately no one ripped open my secret like a bag of Valentine hearts. Forget revolution, forget upheaval, but I would sell out for a little bit of warmth and decency in this cold, cruel world. Together, fighting for a little bit of balance in this sphere of unfairness and insanity. And that's all. To be vaguely on the side of what's good, and I think I could have really become an optimist!
But the one thing I had in the world that made me feel "in-the-know" was my "Alien 3" cap, a promotional hat that came from the film series that I found in a thrift store, 'po folks pushing around little orange shopping carts and rummaging for clothes. In fact there was a 'Po Folks restaurant right next door, so homey and marginal I was ashamed to eat there. Leave it up to my Dad to act 'po, driving around in a beat-to-shit automobile as if he only earned $12,000/year.
It seemed as if "The Golden Age" had passed forever, and all we were left with was a mediocre sequel in these wasted times of parking lot emptiness where there were no desirable girls to be found, at least ones fascinated by my juvenile obsession. It made me feel like I was part of something greater, like I was somebody practically important, because I could rattle off facts and speculation about the "Alien" series. The "Predator" franchise too.
The cap let me hold on to the last fading vestments of glory. . . . .
It seemed a whole sight more appealing than what adults thought was "appropriate" for children, namely Barney the giggling dinosaur leading his cult for pre-schoolers. Kids my age found it particularly funny that the guy in the Barney suit turned out to be a pedophile. One time in St. Louis, there was an opening at a ghetto K-mart where "Barney" would make an appearance for the kids. Well, "The Crips" jumped him like a pack of wild dogs, bums raising their malt liquors and hooting.
That summer I was packed off to a camp in Colorado, courtesy of my mother who definitely wasn't poor, and found myself up on this three-day caving trip up in a national park without a sleeping bag. It was a long story, but I had it in my head that it was going to be sprightly afternoon affair.
How I fooled myself, even as they dropped us off at a supermarket with $12 each to buy snacks as I capered around the aisles in my "Alien 3" cap. How I fooled myself, when we drove for two hours. How I fooled myself, when we drove up into the mountains where there was snow on the side of the road. The tents went up, then it hit me as I was crunching on "dum-dum" pops. I knew now if I pulled on the sleeve of a counselor and whispered in their ear they would go apeshit, and thus intuited that since I had made my own bed, or lack thereof, I would have to lie in it.
That was masculine honor.
But crimping on my masculine honor, was this female counselor named Valerie. 27 years old, tanned legs, blonde bangs, prominent overbite, speaking with a lisp, her perpetual state of mind seemed to be something approaching premenstrual bezerkedness. What made it worse was that she was beautiful when she was angry and that she'd never fuck a 12 year-old. That was so completely out of the question, that if you even voiced it she would rip your vile little scrotum off and feed it to the bears. I always seemed to be making her angry-- getting a rise out of her was my version of "flirting"-- and in Freudian terms this was like poking her with a penis-- but yet at a certain point you concluded that it was better just to stay out of her storming path.
I was off reading a book a quarter-of-a-mile away when the sun began to set. I was walking down the horseshoe path, when it occurred to my pig-like 12 year-old consciousness that I could save time simply cutting across. All was smooth sailing for about hundred feet until the ground started to get mushy and wet. But yet I continued. About fifty feet ahead my foot "sclorped" down in two-and-a-half feet of marshland water. I figured that it couldn't get any worse than this-- if one leg was filthy, soaking my shoes and shorts, why not continue?
And I did. . . . . stepping into deeper water and getting the very bottom of my shirt filthy. But still I continued, taking off my cap and beating the reeds and dragonflies out of my face until I finally reached the other side. I made it, but then realized that I had absentmindedly dropped my special "Alien 3" cap somewhere in the muck! I went sloshing back in there, practically until dark, futilely looking for it but to no avail, stifling back tears. Now I would face a long, cold, damp night without any consolation whatsoever, that I was even "somebody" in this wretched year, 1993 A.D in this shitty, right-wing state.
When I got back to camp, I went straight to my canteen of Pepsi. I had taken the entire six-pack and poured it into there as an experiment to see if I could ration it out more effectively But the soda was just flat sugar water. I drank it all and polished off all my snacks, feeling deeply nauseous with all the grease and starch. That night, I sat as close to the fire as possible in the best attempt to dry off but didn't succeed very well.
As the counselors started suggesting that the campers go off to bed, I was the last one sitting by the fire. They kept telling me to go back to the tent. But I kept demurring.
"Just 10 more minutes". Finally the counselors began snarling. In my fantasy life, Valerie would rush to my aid and sob out, "he's just a child" with a lisp before secretly inviting me into her tent where I would be initiated into her vagina and share her warm sleeping bag. But it was Valerie, actually, who threw the biggest shit-fit and hollered at me to go to bed like an irate teenaged babysitter.After an endless night shivering with my hands between my legs in order to conserve heat, and another night that wasn't much better, we stopped off in "Goldmine", Colorado where gambling was legal. Through the windows we watched senior citizens with dead, lizard eyes line up at nickel poker machines with cups full of coins and play again and again like obsessive-compulsive mummies. Valerie shrieked when some campers made a single step inside the parlor of sin because the policy was
"no one under 21". There was no reasoning with this iron-clad law In the Year of Our Lord, 1993 as enforcers in cowboy hats shook their heads at the door. She shrieked again when I picked up a copy of Playboy and held it up triumphantly, an image of vacant-eyed men jerking off across the land like porno-zombies.What a rotten time to be 12!
What a rotten time to be alive, period!
To compensate for such rottenness, I listened to heavy metal music.
Smart kid.
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So it was at the little pill-box "bunker" on 7222 Manchester in the heart of a run-down neighborhood. One car for delivery service, and a waiting area where customers sat. There was the red gum-ball machine where you could deposit 25¢ and get a handful of "Chicklets" in the interest of helping stop child abuse. "Zim-Zum" the gray-haired hippie in a headband worked in the kitchen. A snowy television on top of the shelf broadcast the baseball game.
This was life at it's truest, away from the flash & filagree of whatever who wanted to think about what. But yet one had their romantic streak. . . . . about skulls, for instance, and the kind of bad-ass marauder or biker character or even "grave-digger", who might be wandering around this town with a scrappy Metallica shirt on his back, shivering like a jaundiced, shaky, gray-skinned confederate among the death and rubble of a post-industrial landscape. Crucified dogs and split-open cats as he lodged down a knife in a grinning human skull and smacked down on gray, scavaged flesh like my cream cheese-savoring, coupon-clipping, liberal Jewish mother's worst nightmare. Yes, the 12 year-old of the apocalypse.
Yet "a heavy metal wild
child" who had to put up with the stolid misgivings of his father, also a
social worker, overcome with the image of his sheltered son becoming a neo-Nazi
teenaged Satanist sacrificing animals up to "the horned one"
with the spread arms of black magic.
In Metallica there was the love of aggression, the mythical, the battle-cry of
freedom against
"Little Richard" or "The Beatles" could never anticipate this and now was my time as I tried to explain this all to my Dad while my brother doodled around with a roller-ball game, a piece of yard-sale junk that was supposed to keep us forever existentially satisfied.
Greg looked up from the register. 5' 7", with a receding hairline, he was just a merchant. A merchant of pizza.
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In order to feel like I'm part of the cultural conversation-- at least, that
I
WOULD have been part of the cultural conversation-- I used to watch Oliver Stone
movies or films of that ilk. Maybe I was more gullible to self-proclaimed liberal saviors of the nation who had lived through the '60s,
who had been there, and actually had the confidence to make
statements like egomaniacs "holding forth" at the public town hall
meeting with "the sincerity of their character" on display in
sympathy with a Vietnamese woman stretching her arms toward the sun on the beach
of existential thrusting for all the crimes of "The Establishment", if not being
born white and graced with a multi-million dollar budget from his fellow
attitudinal backers, or maybe I just should have told him "to go fuck
himself".
At the time I was looking for a reason to be morally
self-righteous, if not indignant about the plight of our society, or maybe I
just wanted to feel "more grown-up" as an angry young man. Pretty heady stuff for
a young teenager. It bespoke to my eyes-widened world, that life was harsh and adults were scheming liars. You know, trying to take "the groove" out of things.
Would you grow up to find other young, conscientious people who shared the same interests-- who liked to talk about issues? Beautiful girls, maybe? Who would I find waiting at the table of cultural conversation?
But there was no one sitting at the table at my time and age and station, and I
was a man of one to ponder on "my screeds of injustice". No one "wanted to
hear that shit" and I was a man without a country.
Then summer vacation came.
Home for three months, reading novels on the back screen porch as a youth of leisure. The couches were damp after rainstorms, wind-blown water misting through the screen mesh with the torrent, sideways. Outside, the blacktop of Jackson hill. Tree branches rose and fell ever-so-slightly, almost perfectly still, the leaves shading my eyes as the sun peaked in and out with kaleidoscopic wonderousness. Clear on the other side was the white siding of the Disney's house within ten feet of us, separated by a bed of curling ivy.
Why, if there weren't chiggers, I would have just as soon lain out flat on my back, the dew cool and moist against my skin, with the spicy ivy pungunce tickling my nose. Like a thirteen year-old kitten in the grass, batting at a butterfly in blithe, care-free ecstasy. Then I walked through the postage-stamp size kitchen, happily reunited with the air-conditioning that pleased the sweaty virgin skin. From white grates at knee level-- embroidered with French designs not unlike curling ivy-- cool air blew in a draft. In the winter, hot air blasted out: dense, with the unmistakable dank breath of a gas-heated furnace.
What I remember about life at that age other than these bright moments was how degraded it was. It was all about "the cheap laugh", "the cheap fuck", a state of restless boredom that headed toward a vanishing point with the fear of annihilation and being afraid to apply oneself. Investment seemed so shaky, effort so futile in a world where "all the money had been made", and all that was left was something so useless as scraping pennies off the cracked sidewalk when the lure of "instant gratification" was so much more inviting.
Whether out of boredom, or searching for a sense of streetwise "authenticity", there were some kids who reveled on the edge of danger-- the license for edgy MTV/Nike brand sociopathy. Here was a skinny, 15 year-old young man named Mark who made the black cause his own. The worship of brutality, as in the broader sense of politically-correct social justice. Riots were permissible, beat-down's were fine, so long as it was in retaliation for "racism". "Racist" mall security guards who wouldn't let gangs of marauding black youth get too large for fear of boisterousness and looting. "Racist" people who were skeptical if a million black men really did show up at the "Million Man March", whatever the pump-fisted insistence that claimed Cleopatra was black and that Louis Farrakahn really boarded a UFO in 1985 with his "Nation of Islam" loopiness.
(Of course, this student went to my sheltered liberal arts alternative school so the
blacks wouldn't tear him to pieces in the city)
One time, he got into a quarrel with a stony black girl with a personality
disorder and called her "a bitch". He sat there with his arms
crossed, a slight smile of satisfaction on his smug face. Well, she got up
and decked him right there with a sinister mean streak that would have clawed at
people's faces like a rabid panther, if there weren't laws against murder. He
got up and ran out of the room with tears in his eyes with the sudden shock of
violence, the eruption of black hatred as smooth and sleek and efficient as
volcanic glass and not a jangled "put-on" by someone "trying too
hard". It was like standing out in the mean
prairie winds when death or something ominous passes you by, when you panic or
shudder or start crying. If there was the notion of being a 100% square-jawed
man, those values didn't add up and he found himself a humiliated kid who
couldn't "step up to the plate" and do something Roman and impossible
because he was overextended and essentially human, taking the creeping and
subterranean way out.
Yet this is natural law in action-- metaphorically speaking, the workings of
the market-- the consequences when people make bad decisions, and the price of
doing business. . . . . hell, even of being alive. If you leave an unwrapped cake
under the sink, your kitchen will soon be swarming with cockroaches. This is why
I find it amusing when liberal idealists go on with the notion of a return to
"good government" in these lost, wayward, and cynical times but can't seem
to understand how if you don't pay attention to what people are actually doing
out of a sense of high-mindedness, then "water", hence corruption and human
folly, will inevitably find its own level.
(For what is a liberal but a conservative who hasn't had their face shoved up against a wall yet?)
I
remember attending a school-sponsored event at the repertory theater downtown, a
drama about a big city paper with the backdrop of 1940's liberalism being the
theme. The reporter snaps his fingers--
(These were the days when "urban" meant populated stoops, boys climbing down airy trees, a bowling alley down the street, and when radio orchestras were still conducted by men waving horse-hair batons. When a city was a bustling place, a simpler place, and one was free to dream of an even better society down the road-- built on the shoulders of this one. The actors and repertory company had a yearning for liberal goodness, here in these burnt-out times)
(Sitting in the audience I too yearned for simplicity. When you could tell a girl that you liked her with courage, without fear of shame. This was before "urban" had a darkened connotation of crime, drugs, welfare mothers, and a meltdown of confidence. If only FDR was here today, a "fireside chat" voice that spoke to a more naive age. These days, one's urban company was a negro working behind the counter at Wendy's, looking around a bit cluelessly when you ordered a 99¢ double-stack plain-- with cheese)
During the intermission, in the lobby, a fund-raiser of sorts. A warty matron, wide and hoary as a barrel, drags me into the service of charity.
Someone had to hand out drinks to patrons and university folk. Placating, pacifying, soothing palates so dry & irritated as the desert; being the glue of behooven-ness that keeps small, private schools together.
My body moves. . . . . stiffly at first, but now with a smoothness of action now that I have a clear-cut purpose. Arms traveling over and under, rising up with a gentle swoosh of air, an intricate dance, to meet the rims of clear, plastic cups with bottled Pepsi. To me the patrons look like a feeding frenzy of sharks. . . . . gliding over and underneath each other with the social game, a shiny wake of water, their jaws open for chunks of pig meat (-- the hors' oeuvres).
Another old dowager, wider than the first one, with brown frizzy hair, laughs in a separate conversation. She tilts her chin back with mirth, mouth slightly open, laughing with a short series of throaty barks. Moving with the heavy step of a university administrator-- the "clip-clop" of high heels on the brown-carpeted floor. A fat green dress, with pearls. Her fireplug of a little nose. She probably went to college in the '50s.
Her burly spirit was the stuff of apples. . . . . polished and waiting on the teacher's desk. A printed graphic of a "bookworm". . . . . a smiling insect holding up a nondescript volume. Or the breath of a nutritious brown paper bag lunch. The soughing of wind through St. Louis city trees, the clammy shawl of autumn weather.
Finally, one would look down at their watch-- the intermission party winding down-- and figure they had a whole lot of reading to catch up on. The comforts of doing so in a warm bed. A history assignment, perhaps. Reading about times
a whole lot more bustling then these, in order to make us "better citizens", no matter how pointless this endless succession of school years appeared to be. One yawns and stretches their ribs, as people file back into the auditorium.
I took another glass for myself and downed the drink in one gulp. Surveying the red carpet, the gilded chandelier, the warm padded-ness of the room; feeling expansive, giddy, fragmentary, and just a little bit sad, I ventured back into the theater and waited for the lights to dim.
I look for something to say in the presence of polite company, so begin with an outrageous comment; good-natured and irreverent. A woman with a drawn face, evoking the one of a penitent French Catholic (-- brown hair, brown eyes, a face smeared with village dirt, a silver crucifix pendant, so dainty) listens to my drift while not necessarily "getting it", her head tilted up to meet my lumbering height. I hold a drink in my hand, dropping in two ice cubes, laughing like a squirrely Britishman at a party.
She was a rook,
the short, fat, conservative walls on the chessboard of non-controversial administrative policy. At this point in her career, her job seems like a breeze, the tidy paperwork and college-admissions process that would leave other people choking it down like a handful of dry oyster crackers. A figurehead at cultural events, like fund-raisers such as these, the happy generalities. 
----------
The white, colonial order of old has lost its grip-- its will to survive-- when the planet seems to be slowly handed over to the rising black and brown and yellow peoples, first co-opted by the twin super-powers, then melded into a transnational free market globalism that respects no borders, no right to ethnic self-determination though there's certainly going to be friction, a world out of the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" movies if we're not careful.
The power structure is undergoing rapid, degenerative change. Our society has little respect for the law, few standards of excellence-- the government fears its own citizens and has just about lost all moral authority and credibility with the people it governs. Fewer and fewer people vote, and if anything they have long ago voted themselves a share of the public treasury with "entitlements"-- leading to a bloated, incompetent system that works like a "spoils game" to various interest groups all jealously holding on to "what's theirs". Great howls arise when officials talk about making unpopular decisions, and careerism prevents the government from facing the problems head on. The government and media increasingly supply "bread & circuses" to a populace almost like "a Roman mob" in scope, unwilling to sacrifice anything for flag & country and just about ready to riot over the slightest provocation.
We don't produce anything anymore; everything of value is on paper-- and our financial system is collapsing. We're slowly and inexorably turning into a third world nation, and men are scrambling to load up on "the winning team" which only makes the problem worse. Conservatives are deliberately wrecking the government-- selling it off piece-by-piece and cutting all regulatory functions that keep the system from overheating. When the government does get involved, however, it seems to be in such a stupid, piddling, incompetent way that folks back home want it abolished altogether. They are outsiders, permanent revolutionaries, next to a snobby, liberal elite of bored intelligensia and hipster kids who turn up their nose at the hoi polloi with no sense of loyalty to masculine values as they gather around the most rootless, degenerate things.
These days, "a new marketing strategy" is supposed to be the save-all solution. . . . . the "Arch-Deluxe" from McDonald's, basically a "Big Mac" with mayonnaise on it. Katie Couric as a primetime newscaster. . . . . a trend that is fizzling. The hope around Barack Obama, the "trans-racial messiah" who people romanticize because he's black but act like they're not and what he'll be up against, when meaningful change is impossible. . . . . except for the worse.
Call it. . . . . "the price of doing business".
Knowing how the world worked, I was not too surprised of how things developed out on 9/11. I was shocked, certainly, but it was not the end of my world. New York and Washington were very far away from St. Louis, and I never felt in any personal danger. No one I knew was injured or killed, so my life went back to normal very quickly. America wanted to take the stand, "we're all selfless victims" but that's 100% bullshit. Whether it's a crime of omission or a crime of ignorance, our fate is our own responsibility for the most part. Like it or not, we have a controlling stake in a lot of the world's misery and to the enemy, what they did was striking deep into the evil heart of hell. This is about power, and the President said that "the terrorists must be brought to justice" because such a large swath of the country can't face up to the hard truth that they must either be captured or killed. There is a picture I have saved, a helicopter shot of all the smoke covering "ground zero" on that fateful day that reminds us what happens if we don't "keep it real".
As a rule, it's perfectly acceptable for women to be swept up in their emotions, a slave to their passions, a little bit "daft" even. But not men and boys. In our culture, males are supposed to be square-jawed and strong and "firmly in control of themselves". If not, they're seen as pathetic or unmanly and fit for scorn in situations where it really counts, such as in business or war or courting a woman. These days, the rules still hold firm, but many men have found crevices in our society where they can live without higher standards.
You can see the Blackberry geeks fiddling away with the tiny buttons as they walk around the malls, the end result of "The Gameboy Generation"-- such as the oft-told story about the man who took the thing to the opera as his date looked on mortified with her palm to her forehead, the sound of "Tetris" playing from the rows. It's as if we've grown up to become a nation of little, round gnomes with their toys, like a bunch of 13 year-old's who never found an incentive to mature.
What I was reminded of was the time a student at my school died, Sam. A bare wisp of a 7th grader, a good-hearted soul. A brain aneurysm over the weekend, rather unexpected. It happened when he slept over at a friend's house, after a Saturday at an amusement park having the time of his life. My consolation was that he died happy and painlessly, the eternal memory of a nice, shy young man. No one would have missed him otherwise, or would have cared much, except for the fact that he was dead. They called in the entire 7th and 8th grade and announced the news to great disquiet, kids sniffling and holding their heads in their hands, even the black girl who was ready to claw out that other kid's eyes. Classes were called off that morning, as the students wandered around outside in the warm spring sun, pondering on the meaning of it all.
The whole school came out to the funeral
the following night, and some of the more public-spirited older girls in the elder grades I had crushes on--
quirky and beautiful little mascots-- threw themselves weeping on the closed coffin. And I certainly knew in my heart of hearts that now was no time
"to put on the moves". Just stand there with your hands clasped before you, and stare on with deep regard. . . . . it was all any 13 year-old could do under the
pinched-yet-expansive circumstances.
The school raised $4000 and bought a special edition of "Hoop Dreams"-- the documentary biopic about inner-city youth reaching for their dreams on the basketball court-- in his cherished memory. Funny thing was, Sam was half-Iranian and didn't play basketball. But in a heavy-handed, schmaltzy, liberal way, it somehow worked out for the sentimental better. . . . .
----------
Because this is not the 19th century, children are pulled along on their parents' coattails and are forced to go to their far-flung parties instead of reveling on top of a trash heap shoeless with buckets of beer like vile imps avoiding the lecture of the social reformer. As I was to learn, parties for grown-up's had lost about all of their sheen. . . . . especially if the adults in question never had that much sheen to go around in the first place.
Hosted over at Carolyn's, a 350 pound computer teacher at an elementary school who heaved her bulk around with dogged determination-- her thick arms pumping at her side like a Mach truck-- and her husband Frank-- a wild-haired audiophile who worshipped his sound system like the Druids at Stonehenge lighting candles in homage. Here there be the stern, modernist composers: Mahler-- Schoenberg. When I suggested "Metallica", he panicked that the heavy metal would blow out his precious speakers, running his thumb over his bald pate, what was left of his hair flying around like a dyed Einstein's. No, that would not be happening as he wandered off into the next room, presumably to go manage his CD collection like an obsessive-compulsive wretch.
So it was at their square little brick cottage, located next to a Jewish cemetery. The dry whiff of Motzah, the rasping hands that flipped through the infinitesimal minutia of the Torah that gave no answers, a secular-humanist life packed with perhaps too much brain that latched on to gnarled obsessions like technical equipment before the spade piteously shoveled earth into the open grave. The honking, nasal voice of the socially unfit that dogged the life of Frank as he twiddled over his stereo. As for Carolyn, a meaty fist reaching for a coffee and a fat lap-full of cats as she sat in front of her Apple Macintosh.
Deutschland über Alles.
So it was on New Year's Eve '94/95, sitting around with a bunch of uninspiring adults with party hats on, occasionally blowing into noise-makers like putzes. The ethos that saturated the occasion was an air that was outrageous, but not-really-outrageous. The brisk laugh behind the notion of a 350 pound computer teacher playing strip poker, but that really wasn't going to happen. On the mantle was a picture of her down in the Yucatan wearing a giant Mexican sombreo. The idea of a woman like this ordering a bottle of tequilla with her feet up on the table and chugging away in pure "outlaw" revelry in defiance of her station. It had all the same flair of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" gatherings outside the movie marquees in the early '80s and the legends and folklore among friends which turned out not to be based on much, the story recycled so many times that it reached mythic status.
But this held no currency for me, who was sitting around stone-cold bored as a 13 year-old in a grisly heavy metal t-shirt. My party hat was drooping with fatigue and I was blowing on the noise-maker at inappropriate intervals to the point when my Mom knocked my knee with a smile. My brother was up stairs on the Apple Macintosh playing computer games. He was always the gauche one who sized things up early and got away with it because he was four years younger.
There was a grim personage with gray locks, sitting there with a frown on his face, his arms crossed, who informed me that he played air guitar. Why that sure was one outrageous dude! Another woman laughed, a red-head and got up to get another Coca-Cola, her ass sagging through her gray pants as she tossed her head like a horse. I figured it was about time to bring out the fireworks. I had brought a sack over for the celebration, intending to light them this soggy night as a means of entertainment to spice up things. Frank gnawed on his fingernails, paranoid that the cops were going to speed up hard and issue tickets. But I begged to light a few, and Carolyn gave her assent, studying her fingers arched in a cat's cradle in the near-silence.
So my younger brother and I were outside on this dark, shiny, rainy night, lighting firecrackers with the sound of staccato gunfire, as Frank looked around with cagey paranoia, ready to dodge into the house at the first sign of trouble. The time was fast approaching midnight, the "Witching Hour". We were raring to go inside to watch the ball fall on television from the swelling streets of New York City, 100,000 in Time's Square holding their breath in anticipation for the platinum moment of purity, of awesome transcendence but a family friend insisted that we stay outside and clean up the smoking paper in the hissing rain.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS?
We came back inside just when everyone was celebrating the birth of the new year with sips of champagne in the brightly-lit room of warm, padded carpet. It turned out that we spent the first minute of the new year picking up trash, a superstitious portent of what was to come in the next 365 days. We threw a screeching hissy-fit and upset everything.
Indeed, that was the worst party I had attended in my life. Share in my sorrow.
Deutchland über Alles!
But to the extent I humored my mother, and my mother's friends, squinting at the swamis n' nudist crowd and taking her smattering of Taoist homilies lifted
from ancient cultures to be paper-thin & about as transient as a plastic bag blowing through Forest Park like a blowing whiff of birdseed you fed the fat geese with. Nothing weighs it down but a handful of nuts & berries. And old moldy granola as you hankered for a "Snickers".
A card? That would require work! Just like Bart Simpson we demurred, stalled, and laid perfectly still on the couch with our belly bulging out like the epitome of sloth. We knew not of that dutiful "Silent Generation" that did things without question, like a "Lil' Lulu" comic out of "The Saturday Evening Post" with an utterly straight-faced Norman Rockwell illustration. Nor did she approve of us scratching out "MERRY CHRISTMAS" on a blank piece of paper as a big joke to Nancy's "ex-nun" consternation.
In relatively recent years we made cards on the computer and print them out. They are fueled with prominent "gists" from over the course of the family zeitgeist. I had a theme up my sleeve for Jesse, my younger brother. . . . .
A cat's head, enlarged from the image library, pixels granulated like the old 8-bit Nintendo system, gray-scaled by a computer program, thundering out of the clouds like a Norse god. Below, a twin pair of bookshelves fall on the scholarly form of my younger brother-- face frantic with surprise-- as Boo-Boo swats vengeance. The cardinal sin; doubting his guile, his genius, his divinity!
It refers to a game we play, joking in high, squeaky voices that all the majestic powers of the universe resides in the scaled-down mightiness of this cuddly little beast, ready to be unfurled with limitless violence.
Smitzey Boo-Boo stalks around the Christmas gathering. He bats at newsprint and drags it unavailingly forward. With his bulk settled on the page, he is getting nowhere fast. He studies the problem with an exploratory paw, head cocked. ("Whisk, whisk, whisk". . . . . the papery "whack!")
Nancy is not the easiest "aunt" to shop for-- outside of turquoise jewelry and galleries outside of Taos, New Mexico-- but the muse came knocking. I found the most garish-looking water jug on sale (-- because EVERYTHING is on sale at "Big Lots"!) and pushed the orange cart down aisles of squalor looking for more gifts. It was a jug pasted with ceramic cactuses-- oasis-blue skies-- orange mountains-- and crosshatched with coucaracha rattles the hue of roadside kitsch.
"Right up Nancy's Alley" the scrap of paper read.
The water jug does not sit in the bona fide alley, the one shared with neighbors and passing pick-up trucks behind the garage. More like, "the narrow thoroughfare between two houses" because a stray dog might piss on it. No one leaves much of value in the alley because, in the witness of chain-link fences, backyard swimming tubs, and rumbling cars full of can-tossing Mexicans it's just not a good idea. Most of the neighbors don't know what to think of "Gladys the Goose" in the front window, a lamp of dove wings made of molded plastic.
The house is brightly decorated like the New Mexico sun. There is time for repose-- the living room painted eggshell blue, a faded
circus poster hanging in the humid garage, the recycling bin ethically filled and awaiting trash day. The rustle of lilies, the breath of paint, the cool shadows beneath Native American art. Seemingly, even the cooler recesses of air conditioning trickle with perspiration, the afterglow of the working heat. Confetti festoons the ceiling fan, a chain of electric hot tamales traces the chest of drawers like Christmas lights.
The spice in the life of a former south city German-Catholic nun. Broaden your
horizons!
When you return to Mom's house after a long, hot afternoon of work over at Nancy's, Smitzey reclines on his back in the office. His attitude toward the golden tassel I bought him for Christmas can best be described as indifferent. Too lazy to stretch, he flops over like a fish; his belly heaving, his arms curled before him like a greedy fetus, a yellow ray of sun glinting off a tooth, pupils narrowed to a speck as he tracks your movements-- staring, and staring-- and one questions where the line between soul and shuddering protoplasm begins.
Closer, closer, his unblinking eyes don't leave you with the horror of the universe. It was the same jellied mystery that gave both my cat and Aunt Nancy cancer and brought sorrow to the meditation circle-- a women's gathering. Crushes on Daniel Day-Lewis, scented candles, Yanni tapes, taken in by pyramid schemes and chick lit and boxes of wrapped chocolate they eat over at friends' houses in mumus while watching Jimmy Smits on "NYPD Blue"-- coming up with insane names for cats, no more insane than the crazy woman who christened our tuxedoed pet "Boo-Boo" and his sister "Ding-Ding" who we had to give away because she kept shitting in the plants. Whales weep, cattle die. . . . . with their outstretched vegetable tongue in these famine lands.
Certainly things were not always what they seemed. . . . . with the whirl of tissue paper and low-key festivity in the air. My mother always berated the fact
"how good help was hard to find", having a way of drawing the most flighty, unreliable, alcoholic contractors around her because though she knew how to assert herself with New Jersey yiping, she didn't know how to kick them off until the bear was long since gone with the side of beef. Then she told her story with wonderment, how she stood up "to the hungry animal".John the Handyman avidly listened to her stories and backed her up with an eager nod before he went back to work, a bottle of Lipton Iced Tea in his strong hand. Tall, with iron-gray hair and piercing blue eyes, he attributed his limitless energy to Yoga and vegetarianism in his satin voice that the New Age women loved. If he was clear, wholesome mountain spring water then I was sludgy diet cola with preservatives and artificial sweeteners as I did my homework back in the swamp of a time I'd rather forget. The whole New Age thing was something I just couldn't lower down the barriers of my masculinity to do, letting all flow past like an Taoist wind. Testosterone wouldn't stand for it, and notice that all Shaolin monks are without body hair and knew not of angry, masturbatory air-guitar-shredding with bared teeth like your Southern Californian idols in concert.
Sometimes I'd work along with him as his assistant on the menial, repetitive tasks like painting the basement or raking leaves on some of the rental properties for extra pay during the summer. As I'd get to know this man more, he'd share with me some nuggets of manly wisdom like a surrogate father figure, away from my other one reading a book who never had discussions quite this frank. One time when he saw me hurrying too fast, he grabbed my shoulder and told me the story about the two bulls: the old bull and the young bull standing on top of a hill overlooking a field of cows. The young bull said "let's run down there and screw some of those cows!" while the old bull said, "let's walk down there and screw ALL OF THOSE COWS". John nodded with a devilish wink and it seemed almost as if he sprouted horns. It seemed strange; certainly that was not the side of himself he showed to my mother and I knew to keep quiet.
Another time he was frustrated about something, I can't even remember what, and he was talking about
"the bat hitting the ball" and "following through with something". Like a time in the future when I would be sitting in a car by the lakeside and "trying to get into a girl's pants". I was shocked and mortified, put on the spot as if he assumed that I would ever be slick and socially-adroit enough to con a girl into that situation like any 100% meat-head instead of a shy, halting lad who would offer her up poetry if he wasn't too nebbish and self-conscious to recite it.His lecture made me feel alienated and out-of-place. He would talk about how as a teenager he would go diving into the lake at a golf resort and recover balls and resell them for extra cash. That only worked if A) you lived near golf country B) you could swim C) you weren't too self-conscious about your weight to take off your shirt. For where would an undashing kid like me"fit into the picture"? The answer is, he didn't and mostly stayed alone by himself up in his room.
What I did not like was the undercurrent running through John's thoughts that "women were naive and stupid", and could be exploited like cattle if you sang in the right key. Fool 'em and fuck 'em, after-all. If he touched upon something "a little bit true", then women needed to be protected-- if not warned. I had a feeling that this is what a lot of New Age movements came down to-- power, sex, and the better orgasm-- not enlightenment.
And my mother was tragically unenlightened, thinking that she formed "special connections with people". That she read them clearly and saw down to the bottom of their souls. As informal business partners, she and John started investing in properties where she'd buy them and he'd rehab them and they'd sell them and split the profits. She even designed a cute sign, "J & J Development" for Jane & John that hung in front of each "project". That worked well, until the housing market collapsed and they were stranded with an unsold monster that no one wanted. Finally, my mother sold it at a vastly undervalued loss and it was understood that they would split the disaster.
But John subtlety extricated himself by withdrawing to somewhere in Illinois and would not return her phone calls seeking a payment plan, even in free labor. . . . . ticking endlessly over months and years until the debt was "squared away" like a worker ant under the dutiful load of obligation for a silly, naive Jewish queen with an eggplant-dildo scepter.
For that is the way of the world. . . . .
----------
Ape-like aggression. Chemical-induced heaviness. The pot leaf, revolving pentagrams, and screeching harmonics. But the fans come, they do. Lined up at record store signings with wailing toddlers-- from the Midwest, Sunbelt, and South.
I catch it all on the home video release, a rolling montage of pranks and stunts. As the disclaimer reads:
Warning: This video contains nudity, violence, obscene language, music with explicit lyrics, and material of a graphic nature which is intended for mature audiences only. Notwithstanding anything said or done in this video, neither Pantera nor any of Pantera's representatives encourage, approve of, condone, sanction, or recommend any of the actions or activities depicted in this video. Further, neither Pantera nor any of Pantera's representatives assume any responsibility or liability for the actions or omissions of any third parties as a result of viewing this video. Many activites have been staged for the sake of entertainment, and are not really what they seem.
In other words, anyone by definition who was "mature" enough to watch this video would have absolutely no interest.
What summed it up was shirtless long-haired men idling around in lower middle-class suburbia, jerking in surprise to the rocket-like explosion of firecrackers and laughing with hilarity at it's aftermath. Or standing around in an open garage at 1 AM with camouflage pants and a slung Confederate guitar, fully intending to jam with the possibility of it all. Or daring fans to drink a whole bottle of Tobasco sauce on a bet, huge amounts of money changing hands for a marginal lot of know-nothing roadies.
Then there was the ritual carnage backstage. Simply smashing stuff. Knocking things off tables, or slamming them with a 2X4 and cheering raucously with their arms up in the air while nodding their heads in destructive abandon.
"Big Val", a giant steer of a man and the director of security, didn't intervene. He looked rather like Bluto from the old "Popeye" cartoons-- portly girth, black hair as his eyes would narrow-- low-down and literal-minded. He could flip a lit cigarette in his mouth and juggle.
Even as I was howling in front of my television and recycling the two hour tape in an endless loop of debauchery and senseless destruction they went laughing all the way to the bank, though.
As I wondered around this post-industrial wasteland as a guarded figure I thought of Charles Bronson-- the action picture "tough guy"-- and how he was a street-smart creature of few words in all of those "Death Wish" movies. How his character walked around the desolate streets, "packing heat" beneath his clothes as the urban vigilante against young street punks and those who would steal "what little was his". But no more!
Yet there was another side to him as well. . . . . He always behaved civil, immaculately polite, at candle-lit dinners (-- setting up the crowd-pleasing contrast later as the smooth guy we all wished we could be) and kissing his WASPy girlfriend who always turns out to be a breathless "liberal lawyer type" drawn to his mysterious "lone wolf" qualities that could have only been dreamed out of a bad "pulp novel" and turned into one of my "cult film" rotations like a keyed-up half-Jewish kid's fantasy life on vicarious over-drive. Even as I loaded up on books and tapes and CD's like "there was no tomorrow".
And now my Dad was putting his foot down. Like an Indian chief instilling the dreaded fear of budgetary winters, he laid his hand on my shoulder like a sachem and said:
-- "He who goes through his money like 'shit through a goose' in golden opulence shall have to live on nothing with equal and opposite ease"
Or something to that effect. Now he was out of town and I had
11¢ to my name. It looked like it would be a bitter winter at "Valley Forge", left with frozen pizza and spooning peanut butter out of a jar. And my soda supply was dribbling away to the very bitter dregs. That was the last straw!
Halfway considering turning the house upside down to find the old man's
secret money stash like an ancient tomb robber jimmying open the
You had to scrape together the motivation to pack about six or seven bags in the car up to the point where you could barely see out the windows, and motor down to "ACE Salvage & Metals", a big mint-green corrugated warehouse whose namesake was the fifty foot "Ace of Spades" logo like a giant white playing card. I had done it before, harvesting from this wealth of precious metals like an old man from the Latin American highlands descending down from the silver mines with burros laden up with baskets. That's what it felt like, at least.
Clattering by the shed, I kept an eye out for Norma-- my hefty, elderly, hobbled neighbor with a bun in her gray hair who stepped outside but rarely. A true St. Louis German Catholic, she could probably remember a time when the neighborhood kept chicken coops-- bartering eggs when money was tight. Norma, having few people to talk to, would tell drifting stories of her girlhood over the fence, how her brothers would catch butterflies and frolic in the pastoral lands over at her grandmother's farm. Too bad that fewer people stopped to listen to her stories. I found them charming if generic, fanciful if sappy, but it was important for her that someone nodded along.
She had a niece who was roughly my contemporary, growing to resemble Norma more and more every year. Heftier and heftier, less and less attractive, a skull like a whopping squash, Anna was an aimless pothead with dyed, pink hair and a half-shaved head, who made a scrounging existence selling t-shirts at the concerts of her brother's punk band. They all lived together at her parents' broken-down old shack a few streets away.
I remembered her from "teen therapy" seven or eight years before, when I was in the 9th grade and vaguely dissatisfied with things as they stood. By then, she stopped going to school, period. Anna was bright-eyed, out-of-control, dumb, and outrageous. . . . . filling the carpeted room with spirited anarchy. The participants had slunk down the hallway of Barnes-Jewish hospital, no parental supervision in sight, and sat down on couches with reserve-- mostly a preserve for alcohol and drug abuse problems. My problem was boredom and nagging problems with social insecurity, taking into account the bottomless wound of my self-esteem. . . . . not this shit.
And sometimes I would glance over and see Anna climb the back-steps all this time later. Even more infrequently she would turn her head and make eye contact. She would give a long sniff, and we would carry on small conservation. On the opposite side of the emotional, economic, and psychological spectrum, yet both wretched and wallowing on a marginal level of existence, we had nothing in common except for those eight weekly sessions back in 1995 when we were nothing but pure, flawed potential. However, were we recycled low-grade materials or just toxic sludge?!
I
asked no questions about what I was carrying around inside this ripped shit-bag
of self
as
I backed up the
car to the davenport, caught between two unattached truck trailers, and pushed
the bags up on the warehouse landing. I walked around a trailer, up a few grimy steps, and waited around
with preposterous circumstance as a young can-monger "on the move". Through a gaping entrance, you could see far back into "the belly of the beast" where beat-up forklifts wheeled around deftly with screeching beeps. From there on, a sallow-faced monster of a man emerged from the pit and took over without a word, pulling the cart of emptied cans onto a scale to be weighed. He wore stained overalls, was bald as a rotten squash, and was a triumph of pitliess
evolution as he scowled like a sodomite in the hold of Botany Bay.
Then a dapper little guy named Darryl with a bowl-cut, a blond beard, seedy eyes, and a blue shirt came hollering over, slapping backs and braying with camaraderie. He went into the little cluttered room beyond the scale--
hacksaws hanging everywhere-- and read what the '70s-era computer monitor said (-- with the jumbo red LED lights)
and announced my cans weighed, minus the bulk of the cart. He worked a manual register, jerked the lever, scrawled out something on the receipt, and bit the check between his teeth before slapping it into my hand. I lumbered after him, Darryl swinging his arms with purpose, past the door that led into a narrow hallway. Down we went. I leaned against the cashier's window, handed the paper to the secretary behind the desk, and left with cash in hand
like a man of the world.
Back out on the davenport, I balled up the plastic trash bags and stuffed them into the rusted trash can. The smudged monster with the speech defect wheeled the cans back out, and climbed inside the open truck trailer
where they formed a sloping mountain. He emptied the cart, and kicked them back with his massive feet.
Then an old black dude in blue coveralls and a dark blue uniform cap came out to
smoke. His face was worn, his teeth yellow stubs as he took out a cigarette and
lit it with a red 79¢ lighter.
"What's going on?"
I asked in salutation. His eyes narrowed in distrust, then took on a far-off
expression, and he looked away. People who talked around here were trying "to
rip you off", he figured, and he didn't say much.
----------
The stuff that people want-- sugar, honey, sex, gold, hijinks, adventure-- you don't necessarily get so readily, not with how "this world is known to work". . . . . and if it comes to easily without any kind of effort, then usually that's a sign that trouble is afoot. Resplendent happiness is not the normal state of affairs for any of us unless we're actively engaged with life and have our pistons working like a machine. . . . . call it sugar highs, withdrawal lows.
And it was endlessly fun to fuck with people.
"The efforts of the capitalists to cut education can not go forward!",
the shrew-like French nationalist slamming her fist down on the table. Clearly the fact that the incompetent St. Louis school board somehow had to clear away $90 million of red ink had international implications. "If this domino falls, than so do all the others!". It was a chest-thumping gesture, and some of us in the movement certainly had a flair for the dramatic.As did the voiciferous black church ladies, heckling the proceedings to the point that the moderator's gavel head went flinging over the school board's table behind him. One woman was arrested for assault for fully splashing an outside consultant with a pitcher of ice water and threatening to send a voodoo curse on the mayor's office through the fax machine. One councilwoman, in order not to give up the floor of a fillbuster, squatted down and urinated into a plastic wastepaper basket.
As many a county spectator hath concluded,
"Leave the rats to St. Louis!"
But you had to feel sorry for the teachers, and especially the kids who had nothing to do with this bureaucratic idiocy. So that's why I volunteered to ride a chartered bus down to Jefferson City to attend an education rally outside the statehouse at 7:30 on a frigid Monday morning in January of 2003.
So there it was. . . . . out on the vast, wind-swept parking lot of Forest Park Community College. Bus engines roaring, Jim met me and my father in his felt Russkie hat like a comrade. The black activists and their children who showed up here knew nothing about the Trotskyist 4th International, but Jim figured they were brethern in the worldwide struggle anyway.
A stocky, rotund black woman in a sweat shirt waddled along with her arms at her side, shrilly telling people to get on the bus before moving on and repeating herself in utter single-mindedness as she lunked along like the fattest pygmy of a drill sergeant in sweat pants and a blue parka ever.
Steve's blue eyes bulged out of his head, white hair brushed across his forehead, as he subversively remarked in a satin absent-minded professor's voice that Dad should shack up with that woman-- give her a saddle and a riding crop to beat him with. Meanwhile, another portly black woman sitting across from me snuggled down in her seat and beat her fist against the metal ceiling, chanting "I want to GO" in a sleepy voice repeatedly, the nasality of her lard-squashed sinuses speaking wonders for the caliber of common democratic protest.
Evidently it was how the sit-down strikes achieved victory in days of yore, because the busses took off. I struck up a conversation with a 14 year-old black Muslim, all but lighting a cigarette with all the gregarious worldliness of G. Gordon Liddy. He was impressed with my different way of seeing the world and was eager to hear my stories.
At Ponderosa, we sat down at a table and I looked through the window to see an apparition walking lazily up and down the highway. I rubbed my eyes, elbowed my new friend beside me, and asked "Do you see what I see?". It was a man in a "Little Caesar's" suit, a gimmick to pull in cars as the underpaid drudge listened to music through headphones all day.
The rally was huge. Protestors on the statehouse steps, a huge banner. People cheered and raised their signs on cue, as giant speakers pumped out glorious, triumphant music. I saw a man dressed up in a "Cat n' the Hat" suit and wrapped my arms around him with a "HAAAAAAH!".
A teacher from middle Missouri, painfully earnest and resentful, went into a populist speech and even took out an acoustic guitar to play a song-- like a frog on a log. I figured it would only be inappropriate to get up there and jump off the steps, shouting "MOSH PIT!" like I was at Anthrax's 1987 "Among the Living" tour. Pity the poor fools who don't know how to party!
----------
The secret was, I was turning into a druggie.
Whatever the hokey "Reader's Digest" generation wanted to think, that "good kids don't use drugs", it was always a hopeless task trying to "break out the facts" to some half-deaf hen of a busybody neighbor that her precious 12 year-old grandson is a juvenile delinquent who vandalizes cars and shoplifts candy. Yes, along with 50 million others in this putrid generation of pill-popping, rock-smoking, porn-surfing little hellions that respects "old-time authority" even less than the last batch did, ever since parents stopped "using the switch".
My mother would always "hush us down", as if we should never confront anyone with unpleasant truths-- especially the old and foolish as they continued to waddle off on their aching corns, oblivious to what they were doing wrong, presumably to the very grave. I think it was the hand-holding liberal therapist in her that overestimated the ability for patients "to magically discover the error of their ways and change". But that is seldom the case. . . . . . because little problems, when they're not addressed, keep compounding with greater and greater complications until they blow up in just about the most rotten way possible. Only then do you realize that you can't escape what you've been "putting off" because now it's worse. . . . . much worse. All because you weren't absolutely honest with yourself in the beginning like you should have been.
A couple of years before, I was faced with a project as daunting as the
construction of "The Great Wall of China". . . . . building a website from
scratch.
It was like
studying the Kabbalah, back in that summer of 2004
when I began as a complete amateur studying basic
HTML programming like revising a dead language of an ancient race of space
aliens to whom computers made perfect sense like the burying of Atlantis. It was all Greek to me, like I was
"Conan the Barbarian" flipping through the ancient, evil pages of the "Necronomicon"
for spells as he stroked his chin and looked up at a sheer wall rising into the
night of mystery.
What lay on the other side. . . . . . Fortune? Fame? Winona
Ryder? The mighty Cimmerian furrowed his stern brow and studied the text
further, trying to understand the secrets that would levitate him up & over with
adept magical concentration. I was a man possessed, and I knew it was going to
happen even though the tools in front of me were so pitiful-- a "hammer &
chisel" when what I needed was a jackhammer and dynamite. . . . . and as time
went on, earth-moving equipment. If composing your vision wasn't hard enough,
there was programming it. . . . . once you made the decision that the official
world of publishing would probably not want to take a risk on such a radical
project that needed more work.
To make a confession-- the lot of we Adams'es have never been technology sorts, let alone detail-oriented engineers and tinkerers of fine, exacting little complications that would have the effect on our brains of apple strudel being spit out of a kooky, farting apparatus at a carnival as "ooomp"ing music played in the background, emblematic of the zany, zonked out world of Attention Deficit Disorder. That is, when you're overwhelmed by a torrent of information that causes us to half-way "shut down". With depressive tendencies and slow metabolisms to boot, perhaps I was "barking up the wrong tree". Like a black bear trying to get at a cluster of grapes, angling around a wide trunk then slipping back down. Then trying again. With some new medicine I was taking for anxiety and depression, I was pretty logy and unable to do much except lay around in a haze that might have been pleasant, if I hadn't been so ambitious and eager "to get back to work".
Finally, Dad-- ever the concerned parent and amateur home remedier, come over with two mystery pills in your standard orange prescription vial and said, "Here, Michael-- take these. They'll perk you up". If asked "was Ritalin a drug?", I'd shrug and suppose it was. But not "that kind", the stuff of cops n' robbers and big busts on the local newscasts. With a prescription, you pick up your bag from a pharmacy with all the other drugs that were legally available. You might even call Walgreens "the drugstore" and I'm sure there's been a whole lot of snickers and miniature armchair discussions about that common phraseology over the years, especially since the 1960's of 10-penny parlour games and libertarian screeds.
But what I do know, is that when I swallowed those two pills that within thirty seconds I was up and alert and chipper as a randy chipmunk on cocaine. The black bear burst out of its stupor and humped up that tree that was giving it so many problems, knocking down those clusters of grapes and living an existence that would have been previously UNTHINKABLE.
I was "a high-roller", plush with grandiosity and my imperious will to take risks. I was "Long-Dong Silver" in a white Panama hat and a seer-sucker suit, ready to sweep the actress, Winona Ryder off her feet with a tip of the hat and the slick, dime-store antics of the southern gentleman. Does this man have delusions of grandeur?
If you look at the chemical name for Ritalin, it's called methalamphetimate-- which is to say it is a mild form of meth, which by itself is a powerful stimulant. But the problem is, to maintain that outrageous effect you always need more. I took additional doses, and added "No Doz" tablets to the regimen like a man driving around in "Hell's Taxi" in service to my habit. My massive sense of self-importance required it, my addiction to power growing in leaps and bounds like a swelling ego trip. But what I did not seem to understand was that the pills were the one that had the power over me, because my whole existence revolved around "getting my next fix"-- quite literally watching the clock for hours until it was "super happy fun time". Without them, I felt tired and shaky.
It came to a point where I couldn't really remember a time when I wasn't using them, how it would have been possible to get anything done without it. I secretly knew I was an addict, but at least I was being PRODUCTIVE. For me, that was the running egotistic justification. My one consuming fear was that without it, I'd be nothing-- that it gave me "my superpowers", even if you had to fight harder and harder to get that same magical feeling back like a man sucking harder after an ever more scraggly, measly joint as the risks and trepidations became greater and greater.
Then came the
horrific realization-- that all of this pill-popping was actually making me
TIRED. The only way to lift myself out of this swamp of debauchery was to either take more or to quit. My doctor was crabbing at me. My prescription had run out.
"Dear old Dad" was upset with my
"screaming-at-the-ceiling" mood swings, carrying on like a yowling cat
with it's butt scraped with sandpaper when he tapped on my shoulder and suggested that I may have some sort of problem with this. My choices were rather limited. . . . .
forge a prescription with my shaky handwriting, "stick up" my local pharmacy
where everyone knew me by name, or to buy it off the street. . . . . . where I
didn't even know where to go. Or better yet, I could quit cold turkey! I laid
around with a headache for a couple of days, feeling groggy until I shook out of
it. But for me, the nightmare of addiction was over. . . . . even if it was over
something so "Mickey Mouse" as Ritalin.
But it all went back to that idea that it's simply UNNATURAL to feel that good all the time and to get "something for nothing". But it would still take me a long time to learn. . . . .
----------
The cat was stretched out beyond the drive-thru lane, a tabby on an asphalt divan like Cleopatra herself. It's tail curls and uncurls with leisurely majesty. It darts away as I put the car in neutral and approach the "nice kitty". No amount of cajoling or sweet talk will call it out from evening's purple shadows. It stares wide, as if this high-pitched giant constitutes a threat who only wants company away from the existential emptiness of modern life.
A van-load of kids rock the vehicle on it's springs and shout at the kitty, not calming matters any. I get back in the car and watch it return to it's spot on the asphalt, whence it's tail flicks again. There is a whole world beyond the blocky obstruction of this Church's Chicken, to the left, down Delmar.
Bright lights, neon orange and hot green. The air is electric, the possibility of sex, yet as empty and desolate as a Jägermëister bottle rolling to the inert curb. The people sit outside on plastic chairs, awash in orange streetlight. College girls, blank to the hilt. Blond heads, dumb bunnies. A mixed drink-- exotic dishes-- a tanned thigh soft with skin emollients out of the incomprehensible world of the bath & beauty industry and models squinting with "attitude" on the box.
A smooth conversationalist, male. Short hair, bony bodies. Caught up in the hip cultural reference of the day-- a Frank Sinatra manifestation of "swing", pelvis thrust forward, in a '90s suit of neon colors. In real life, no one looks quite like the "Absolut Vodka" adds on the back cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine. What you will find are white hats. . . . . khaki shorts. . . . . and gray eyes staring on with blank equanimity like the smoothest of polished stones "without grit". Watching the motions of the bunny girls, elbowing one another as she gets up to leave.
The party girl-- vapid, swinging her boobs from side to side, trading saucy innuendo with the seated young men that really goes nowhere.
"I'm available to play"; enter the vision of a bathing beauty. . . . . kneeling in the sand on all fours, a beach ball before her like "cooked wienie" dreams.The men would go shirtless on the beach, standing around with their skinny shanks, arms at their sides like interchangeables, the palm trees and brush of cove accenting the struggle to come out on top of the mating game. She runs down the beach, her graceful legs splashing in the surf, and the guys pursue after her with a jogger's gait. To lay in a hammock together, watching the sunset from the window of a tree house. Room for two in this advertiser's dream of consumption to the under-30 crowd.
Another young woman enters the scene, milder than her cheeky sister. She slides into a chair next to a young man whom she shares a friendly acquaintance. They speculate on what they want to do after their '20s.
No one knows.
By day he's a sales assistant to a telecommunications firm. A coat, a tie, trim sideburns, and hair run under a faucet; brushed back in streaks. And cologne, sickly sweet. Sickly sweet as his assurances that the average man really needs all this wireless technology, these Blackberries promoted in the magazines like "in-the-know" technophiles with i-hip mentalities.
She's still in college, majoring in psychology, doing her residency at a university hospital. Not the deep ruminations of Freud or Jung, but the statistics angle-- handing out pill samples with
little paper cups of flavorless water as neutral as the pharmucutical industrial
purports to be. She checks off ink boxes on a plastic clipboard, her blond hair tied back, and feeds data into the green hum of a computer. To figure out, once and for all, the empirical question if there's an inversely proportional relationship between medication and the relief of allergy symptoms. Variance, covariance, causality, sampling, standard deviation, histograms, and cautious conclusions
that inevitably lean toward the favored direction of whoever is funding the
study. The ethics are absolute, but the floor is slanted.
Night life is the counterpart to sleepy jobs. The guy mentions he always wanted to work with animals-- a calculated move to curry favor. The girl deals with white lab rabbits. And mice. The guy makes a cutesy comment, leans his chest to the table, and wiggles his fingers. She laughs, sips her drink.
The couple leaves the outdoor tables and head over to Blueberry Hill. A raucous place of tipsy laughter, clinking mugs, wooden booths, dim atmosphere, and wiry bartenders with Japanese animè tattoos. What else can I say-- but darts, beer, and guarded promiscuity? And rowdy, drunken, lapsed Catholics.
The management checks all ID's at the door-- people filing in and out-- but for all these individuals passing through, don't think you can filter through without a driver's license gripped sharply in your palm. Turned away if your license is expired, no matter how you protest that you're a consenting adult over 21. Even as liability insurance-- the laws, the regulations-- get tighter & tighter, there seems less & less to hide from today's astute, horny youth.
Along the wall, past the old-fashioned phone booth (-- a scratchy wooden enclosure, that coin slot a veritable black hole of 50¢ phone calls if you should choose to make them) a cabinet of sorts. Surrounded by framed photographs of rhythm & blues guitarists, and behind the polished glass, a shit-load of "Howdy Doody" memorabilia. That infectious grin, that constellated forehead of freckles, and those eyes giggling with mirth.
In a cabinet across the room, a "Pee-Wee Herman" collection. Probably the
crowning touch of inspiration-- Paul Reuben's and Blueberry Hill's-- how this
man prances about in laced high-top shoes, a gray suit, and a red bowtie like
the most sexually-conflicted 13 year-old you could imagine.
But this establishment runs on more than just camp value. The real matter at hand is socializing. . . . . great if you know somebody, tough if you're an outsider. It feels like a bunch of elephant seals recreating on an ice flow, flopping into the ocean, but mostly laying still and semi-watchful. Your eyes can travel around the bar-- to the phone booth, the autographed picture of Chuck Berry, the Galaga arcade machine, that empty piece of green wall-- still trying to decide if you should approach an attractive female gathered around her clucking friends. The one fear persists: making a bumbling fool of yourself. A bumbling fool of a stranger.
You get up to leave. The guy and the girl had a good time, though.
Later, the guy and his friends sit under the stars, splayed out on the hoods of their red Jeep Cherokees, philosophizing over the meaning of it all. None of them got laid tonight. The young salesman had walked the pharmacological statistician to her car-- a fireapple red Camaro-- and uttered "good night" through the passenger-side window. She smiled a vapid smile, shifted to first gear, then left.
Out here, he can't get her face out of his mind-- a white tank top hugging her breasts-- and thinks her name blindly, led over mountains, deserts, and seas just to sit by her pleasant form again. Easy laughter, smoking a cigarette, and crossing her leg.
This for them, a light interplay of first names and innuendo, while the rest of us grow fatter, uglier, and more risk-adverse. As the world turns. . . . .
Certainly she's out there somewhere! Someone who's intelligent and humorous! Someone who will graciously understand my jokes and my need to constantly condemn liberal-arts hypocrisy!
Ultimately, the more blond-haired and blue-eyed they are, the less I have in common with them. Take "Jen-X" for instance, a clerk who used to work behind the counter at Vintage Vinyl. A skinny, blonde, little lark, her dècor was "tortured industrial goth", in ripped spandex and half-dyed hair like a sleazy post-punk Japanese anime character. Post-human too, though she stank of cigarettes and negatavity. At a punk rock show she poured pixie-stick sugar down her mouth, flailing around in hyper-active abandon, and collapsed on stage when her blood sugar level took a dive. Her chest rising and falling, two bouncers took her outside to "cool off" before she did it again.
She said I wasn't "her type".
It was certainly a jungle out here. . . . . such as the world of fetish. Like on "The Jerry Springer Show", the pair emerging from stage left-- a domnimatrix riding the fat, hooded man like a saddled horse as he bumped out on his hands n' knees. Leisurely swinging her whip in a circle as the audience hoots and shouts like a German butch cowgirl. On command "her beast" is ordered to attack her detractors. He obeys, tramping after them like a "wulfing" dog, heavy and cretinous in his degradation like a GWAR video or something with giant Styrofoam maggots on "This Toilet Earth".
You had to be there. . . . .
It couldn't be any worse than my "child of the night" years watching the "Danzig" video over and over, all but wearing a pair of shades like a dark twist on Satanic southern California metal instead of being the wretched 9th grader I was.
There was the evil, darkly-charismatic allure of Glenn Danzig & his band--seeming to be in on some kind of "secret" that eluded me in the pathetic world of daylight school hours. Why, every day was Halloween with "his gimmick", an obsession that went back decades into comic books and B-movies and horror memorabilia. It would only be years later that I'd look back and figure that such interests were kind of dorky, that he was the one who was the gawky teenager practicing before the mirror like a vampyric bad-ass.
I watched their "home video" over and over.
There was "John Christ" with long black hair and Satanic goatee, sitting on a chair in front of a white plaster wall and demonstrating his virtuoso abilities on the guitar, racing up the neck with utter even-handedness.
"I sweated blood to get this here guitar. Everybody I know, know I call it 'the bitch". With that, he grips the body of this righteously expensive instrument and holds it up, eyes narrowing with emphasis like a lynx as he thrusts it forward twice. "All my girlfriends are jealous of this guitar!".
"How many girlfriends
do you have?",
the narrator asks with solemn, distinct disinterest. John Christ holds up his
fingers helplessly in feigned exasperation-- as if tallying up a countless
plunder of hot babes which whirled in and out of his life in endless succession--
and replies "I don't know".
Then he starts jamming again.
Next there was "Eerie Von", who came across as a talkative, gangling bassist of self-destructive tendencies with his long, curly black hair who disclosed his frank habit for idle surliness. In one interlude between the music videos on the tape, he wandered around the gothic ruins of Italy in a black leather jacket while being filmed with pretentious, grainy filme. The 35 millimeter shots were interspersed with concert footage showing him in the thick of things, before featuring him wandering around in absolute shell-shock.
Next was "Chuck Biscuits"-- the legendary drummer from the early '80s Los Angeles punk scene whose band-mates walked barefoot across broken glass in the Penelope Spheeris documentary, "The Decline of Western Civilization". He was the deep-voiced jester of the bunch who didn't take things all-too-seriously as he fooled around with a box of cereal, showing off samples from "my vast cellars". "Count Chocula", "Frankenberry", "and the rare & elusive 'Boo-Berry'" he says with slurring, mock portentiousness.
"What about this cereal, Mr. Biscuits?", the cameraman off-screen handing over an orange box of Wheaties in hokey naivetè.
"What? WHEATIES?!" Chuck holding up the box to his face, his voice rising up an octave in spurious surprise. "Let me tell you something, and I'll only tell you once," pointing his finger at the camera in a righteous lecture. "All breakfast cereals-- ALL BREAKFAST CEREALS-- should have SUGAR. And LOTS OF IT. This. . . . . DOES NOT!", and he threw the box off the set, eliciting an off-screen yelp. "Now GO AWAY!, I'm eating!", flinging his hands up in the air and going back to breakfast.
You could say I lived
my life through this video.
Towards the end of the 45 minute presentation, the band sweats it out backstage as the audience shouts for an encore. "DANZIG! DANZIG!, DANZIG!". Glenn, John, Eerie Von, and Chuck debate what to do, the whole lot of them sitting shirtless in the holding area. The gangling, loquacious bassist barrels forth with how hot it feels back here.
"Yeah, let's go out and do one more!" Glenn says with tough-guy, Lodi, New Jersey brio. He pours a box of Milk Duds down his gullet-- his hair stringy with sweat-- flexes his muscles, and goes out through the door with a pitcher of ice water like a world-weary man tiredly pacing outside a hotel room on a balcony at 2 AM. The crowd is pressed up against the barricade, smoke and sweat drench the darkness, and you can see the exits lit in the very back by the glowing cigarette machines.
The bouncers and security look over their burly shoulders, to see that he indeed is back out there. He picks up the microphone, attached to a long black cord, kicks around a little bit until his band-mates join him, and says with weariness: "We're going to do another one for ya". And with funereal ominousness, announces: "This one is called 'When Death Had No Name'".
The chords blare out with pure, cartoonish, heavy metal evil, and in my Jewish mother's living room (-- "why don't you listen to Simon & Garfunkel?") I bang my head while making the sign of the devil. Afterwards, I ride my bicycle in the night, searching for truth like a bat out of hell flapping it's leathery wings. Down to "The Loop", where kids and goths and stoners hang out at all hours like "Children of the Night". Whatever it was that I was looking for, I didn't find it then and I don't find it now as I circled my bike around a few times then went home.
And here I was at the record store 10 years later. . . . . taking in the post-enlightenment "enlightenment" of its customers and employees.
"Oh. Whatever, man". And there was Corey, the girl behind the
counter who shared my interest in heavy metal music. . . . . "Danzig" in particular.
There always seemed to be something a little detached about Corey, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. A certain allure for the darkness, for extreme stuff.
She was wearing a "Misfits" t-shirt, the leering skull, and wore an outfit attired with the usual buttons of pirated heavy metal imagery. There was even Metallica's "Kill 'em All" in there someplace, a hammer thrown down in a spreading pool of blood.
This was about a week after "Dimebag" Darryl, the ex-Pantera guitar player was gunned down on the stage in the opening 30 seconds of his new act-- "Damage Plan". A deranged fan rushed out from the back exit and shot him in the face five times at point-blank range, killed a roadie, a manager, a member of the audience, shouted something inaudible over the screeching guitar feedback, before he in turn was shot in the head by a State Trooper with a single shotgun blast over the screaming, fleeing crowd's heads.
I asked Corey if she heard about "Dimebag".
She held up her laminated employee card, with "Dimebag R.I.P." in silent homage.
What I notice about heavy metal fans, especially the ones into the heavier, more extreme stuff, is that there is always something insubstantial about them in the end.
Outside of a Danzig concert I went to once, I remembered the sound of tittering laughter-- like some caped effeminate fluttering off into the night. What they are is VOYEURS flirting with evil, and if you haven't outgrown it soon after you left your gray, dismal teenage life then there's something wrong with you.
I imagined taking Corey out on a walk in the moonlight across the ramparts of some Gothic Transylvanian castle under a haunted full moon. A werewolf howls. Un-nameable things thrash in a bog. Her eyes would go wide, and this wouldn't be the least bit cool in her eyes. Evil is neat so long as its a controllable commodity-- and nothing more.
And there's always safety in a remote control. . . . .
----------
. . . . . and the girl wished she could have made me go away with "the change of a channel", pathetically enough.
Armed with my "secret weapon", I had approached "Blueberry Hill" boldly. Well, with
caution. Like football players galloping down the grid-iron after the kick-off,
I was off to a roaring start.
There was nothing more all-American than picking up women in bars, after-all. You would think this at least, if not for the flora & fauna that habitated this sleazy stretch of dubious urbania.
There they were, like something out of a grotesque Mardi Gras carnival. The Latin quarter, perhaps? Almost like they were wearing masks, or were painted marrionettes rattling on the end of strings. Intelligence did not prosper here, not with the laughter of abandonment, the violence inherent in the Weimar carnival. On bar stools they nodded along and smoked, a parody of the human character.
Through the course of the evening, my eyes fell on a pretty girl with black hair & a black jean jacket who sat aloof from the depravity like a lump of coal, simply not reacting to the noise & din.
Michael wasn't stupid, he knew
this would probably be unavailing but before the evening was out he would
congratulate himself for his sincerity of effort.
I flashed my laminated "Flirting 101" card, my ingenious form of an ice-breaker. She first looked at me with flat disbelief at first, practically with a gogged expression, smiled, and rolled her eyes as she allowed me to buy her a beer.
"Tell me that I'm not the most pathetic excuse of a man you have ever seen!" I said with self-deprecation, meeting her eyes squarely and smiling with warmth even though inside I felt like Andy Kaufman's shy, halting "Foreign Man".
"I've seen worse" she replied.
Now, I considered myself a master conversationalist, able to engage anybody on practically any subject with humor & wit-- providing that they cooperate to the slightest. But her answers to my questions were noncommittal, bemused, and evasive.
"Nothing". "Oh". "Whatever".
Whether or not her life was really that blank, or if she was trying to tell me to "get lost", I have a feeling that it fell somewhere between those two goalposts. It led me to conclude that so far as "Blueberry Hill" went, she was just a stray mulberry rolled up against the curb and I was probably bending down way too low "to pick this one up". I thanked her and left.
----------
For once in my life, I was a very important person. With someone like Janie on my arm, I knew this for certain. So it was, outside "clubland" in the meatpacking district of New York City where a drag queen with a clipboard and a pissy attitude inspected the line for those who didn't belong. The throng, the grasping throng, desperate to get in the avant-guard vanilla spiral where it was not necessarily who you let in but who you kept out, panting, on the other side of the maroon velvet ropes like horny dogs.
I waved up $1000, sneered like Elvis Presley in my Indiana Jones hat, and they waved us right in with Janie on my arm. As we bobbed through the crowd-- myself in a "Batman" logo t-shirt and hiking boots, and Janie with a iguana-like expression-- revelers just stopped and stared. Open-mouthed, might I add.
"Hiya, Hiya", I glad-handed, carrying on like Groucho Marx. They were pop culture junkies, scene-makers, and now so was I.
"Hey buddy,"
I pointed cutely to a hipster in sunglasses.
"What do you think of postmodernism?".
"How 'bout that Nietzche?", I asked a young goth wearing a Marylin Manson t-shirt that read
"Hey, anyone remember 'The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse'? Cool Saturday Morning kids' show. Ran on CBS from '87-'88. I got most of 'em on tape".
"Well, then. . . . . no one's very talkative. How 'bout I wet my whistle? Two
beers!".
"We don't serve beer",
said a saucer-eyed waitress.
"Then what've you got?". No answer.
"C'mon Janie, we don't need this treatment".
But I turned around, and Janie was gone. And there I was in the din. . . . . the
up-to-the-minute dance music, the shimmering identities, and the violence
inherent in the Weimar carnival. This was global youth culture, man. That
elusive ether of glamour that escaped this otherwise shy, overweight Missouri
boy in a previous life. Lounges, VIP rooms, coke whores, and a realization that I had been had.
Goodbye Janie, and may your iguana-like soul grow less scaly. ----------
The telephone rang.
"Is your father home?" old man Mathis all but whistled through his teeth. It connotated his 64 years of south St. Louis Catholic vinegar, verily weaned on a pickle like Calvin Coolidge himself.
"Yeah. . . . . he's laying around in his underwear as usual. 'Antiques Roadshow' is on PBS". This from me, with typical disrespect for my elders.
"Oh", a raised inflection on his part. "And how have you been?".
"Idle & surly as usual."
"I used to be that way when I was 23. Thought I knew it all. What have you been up to?".
"Working on my website", all but rocking my head from side-to-side with facetious irony.
"A website? Up on the internet? Well I'll be darned".
"What do you think I've been working on for the last five years?".
"
O.K." he breathed. "What's the address?".
. . . . .
At this Leo was
stunned. . . . . the fact that I was anything other than a blinking, passive reciprocal to his hard-bitten stories of growing up at a time
"when things were different".
It all seemed to come down to crew-cut seniors in high school squatting down on the green
expanse football field circa 1960. And the virtues of military service--
seen through the indulgent mists of time until it becomes something soaring &
glorious, like Donald Rumsfeld snapping a salute at attention.
Oh, he tried to sell me on the army but I all but tipped my hat like Charlie Chaplin, twirled my cane, and waddled off. There was always the navy, but I remembered the quote by Sir Winston Churchill that it all comes down to
"rum, sodomy, & the lash".
But he saw in me a grasp of history, an appreciation for his stories like an
acolyte. I had imagination for how things must have been-- a time when paved-over urbania was just chicken-scratched rural land, when factories were converted into the war effort. How the town idiot fell into a molten vat of iron
and was simply no more.
Sometimes we'd be awful close, but this was still the man who wouldn't take out an ad in my yearbook for his old dry cleaning business. He counted off the frugal reasons on his hand why it made no financial sense even as I wanted to slink off in embarrassment
and die. Papa John's Pizza down the street had taken one gander at my offer and wrote a $40 check on the spot. For a while there I considered myself to be the master salesman,
when everything would fall into place "convenient and easy". . . . . but Leo dashed that notion
of leisure to pieces as he always did.
So much for selling the Brooklyn bridge. . . . .
All & all he had no comment to why my folks' parenting was a failure and his was a success.
His kids worked as literal-minded engineers for the military or otherwise, while
my brother had turned into an Ivy League intellectual, a politically-correct milksop who couldn't shoot, skin, and eat a rabbit. And
who got into a tiff when Leo used the word "Jap". The boy simply couldn't understand the reality of the Pacific theater.
Leo would pinch a penny raw, infuriate his ex-wives with his monastic asceticism, but Thailand was his overdue correction. With an asterisk (*) of course-- because everything there was 1/10th the price!
"But Uncle Leo. Aren't you afraid your dick will rot off? You could catch a nasty disease from those winsome, giggling man-traps!".
"You must have been listening to your mother!", he said with an explosion of indignation, a wave of his hand. "More people die everyday in auto accidents! You never hear anything about that epidemic on the news!".
He clicked around on the computer-- sitting around in his spare office with a giant map of the world behind us-- and brought up the picture of the lovely Thai woman he had been seeing for the last three years on his sexual forays that stretched into months at a time.
"Why, Leo! Surely you are robbing from the cradle! She's half your age!". A note of defensiveness rose in Leo's voice. He repeated my name back to me, tipped his chin back, and asked rhetorically what his options realistically were for an old duffer his age. Sitting around a church function playing bingo with an old bag, probably. I told him to scour the funeral homes.
"At my age I want to have fun. I want my speed boat, my motorbike. What should I be doing?".
"Why, praying in a dusty vestibule."
"Nayahh", he said with a wave of his hand.
I mentioned off the cuff that John Rambo in "Rambo III" had settled down in Thailand. . . . . before Colonel Trautman recruited him to fight alongside the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan
against the Soviet occupation. Needless to say, they didn't show that movie on cable these days.
"The worst traffic snarls in the world, but no one honks their horn and goes 'fuck you!'", Leo shaking his middle fingers for salty, speech-impedimented emphasis. "The kids are respectful to their elders. We were touring a Buddhist temple and a school group came up with their little hats and each one bowed to us, one after the other".
"To what cultural factors would attribute today's wayward, clueless youth?"
"I don't want to get into that," he said with a brisk laugh. "I could go on for hours!".
"Hmmmm" I nodded.
Then he showed me footage from a digital camcorder of some reckless Thai trainers handling caimans, relatives of the crocodile, and I was surprised that it didn't turn into a snuff video.
"Gee, I hope they're insured!" was the only thing I said.
"You can get away with just about anything in Thailand. Just don't insult Buddha or the king and you'll be just fine".
Obviously, they do things DIFFERENTLY half way around the world and we closed the night sharing a laugh about how they sliced in half a live water buffalo at the end of "Apocalypse Now". Like veritable cosmopolitans.
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Radio D.J'ing. . . . . a dummy act.
The awful truth about the business is that no one is really paying attention to what's on as the listener hand-tosses pizzas or drives delivery trucks in the work-a-day world. The music offers a nearly mindless rhythm that gets folks shuffling through their service sector routine on the job, responding mechanically to the blatting voice of fat-assed customers demanding extra salt on their fries as they're chained to the counter in proletariat misery. Or they're listening at home, hoisting a brew to their lips on the weekend as they hold a cigarette from a drooping wrist in weariness to alleviate the numbness of it all.
Heard or half-heard, radio is a paint-by-the-numbers formula that doesn't demand intelligence, per say, but an ability "to whip up" artificial enthusiasm in order to keep listeners in the spirit as much as possible, ingratiating the senses with "the party" in the background, before they shut you off with the
"thud" of the off-switch or even something so traitorous as changing the station with the brush of white noise.
My radio dial was regularly tuned to KSHE
95, "Real Rock Radio" their slogan,
and their mascot-- tellingly enough-- a pig with headphones, goggle-eyed sunglasses,
and a joint in its mouth to be "underground" and subversive.
Nevermind that they've been on the air for 40 years. The rock n' roll buffet. .
. . . the "WE GOT WHAT YOU WANT"
attitude that said "fuck you" to your boss as you stood on the back of
your flat-bed truck in a denim jean-jacket and a t-shirt, rocking back & forth and
playing air guitar like a cheesy relic of the 1970's. Rebel against authority,
rebel against your Catholic high school education and chase down those girls in
their pleated uniforms with your long hair down-to-your-ass like the
Vandals, Teutons, and Saxons sacking Rome. . . . . your pants around your
ankles as you entered the temple of the vestigel virgins with a torch. Disco beware!
Of course, the real purpose of radio was selling advertising-- casting out as wide a net as possible for that all-mighty 18-45 male demographic. From beefy construction companies offering to jack-hammer your driveway, to the mild-mannered ingratiation of a jewelry merchant stroking your wife's hand felinely as you buy her an anniversary ring, to a loud-mouthed, spike-haired bozo with a hoop through his lip going on about the virtues of muscle-building Creatine (®) (--
"there was just one problem with the old formula. . . . . it tasted like crap!"), it was one flushing toilet bowl of time & money suckage that stripped the soul of the finer things in this vale of turn-of-the-millennium greasiness.A war in Iraq, the economy in tatters, a chimp in the White House being chased around by handlers who didn't seem all that higher-evolved (-- "We're Christians!"), if not grid-locked traffic belching out fumes as maniacs in SUV's swerved their vehicles out and crunched into the poor sap one lane over in dashboard-pounding "ROAD RAGE", and here was this detached, prerecorded voice on KSHE before the set kicked off that sounded mechanical and monotone and post-human uttering "CRANK IT UP, BITCH!"
and only increasing the heat in the pressure cooker.It was tragic. . . . . it was inhuman. . . . . it was. . . . . it was. . . . . my stillborn career? American life was a stalemate. . . . . as I eyed around half-bemused, half-in shell-shock like either Don Quixote or Andy Kaufman doodling off in the corner with meaningless pranks.
Folks always said that I had a hearty, resonant voice that would sound good in radio. At least my probation officer said so, after I got into a legal fracas pulling a prank on a cruel-eyed, pony-tailed former teacher who had belittled my shaky, colt-legged foundations of self-esteem when I was struggling along in the 9th grade like a tower of jelly. It was time for ironic payback. . . . . like with a TIRE-IRON, maybe!
The
cops were laughing down at the station-house when I was arrested, once they saw me standing there in a "Wayne's World" hat
and a "Free Winona" shirt.
"Radio in, we got a live one here",
one spoke into his palm, index finger extended like an antenna. They figured I
had to be either psychotic or
psychotically funny to be who I was, raising my manacles in lay-it-on-me salutation.
Surely, the wretched annals of St. Louis city jurisprudence had never seen anyone quite like me as they rubbed their jaws with their palms and launched wads of paper across the room towards the wastepaper basket in order to break up the tiresome routine of crime-busting. Why, I might as well have threatened to rape Granneman's dog, and I don't think I could have gotten any more of a jester's welcome. . . . .
Needless to say, "The Great Aryan Beast" kept his trap shut as they locked him in a cell with car thieves, drug dealers, and drunks-- all black. The arresting officer told me just to tell them that "I got into a fight with my old lady". However, he didn't tell me what my "bail" was supposed to be and I struggled along with this fiction as the inmates looked me over as the lone "sweet-meat" curiosity. . . . .
A love of pranks, good jokes, and swigging from
that dark, intoxicating brew of "pushing the envelope too far"
would
have briefly summed my surreal life on this North American continental land-mass as I
roamed around the backyard of St. Louis city like a shaggy bear foraging for the
sugar-high of berries, stirred into the sweet wine of putrid-breathed
self-indulgence like a hobo. Almost like a snaggled-toothed Charles Dickens character sidling up to a low
haunt with preposterous circumstance.
That, or the wild antics of Mötley Crüe when they all lived in one communal heavy metal house full of busted plaster, covering "a Christmas tree" with panties, syringes, Twinkie wrappers and snot and lightning it on fire out in the front lawn.
Life felt like a burning trail of gunpowder in an old episode of "Bonanza". Somebody lights the black powder, it spits up, and off it goes like a sputtering snake. Finally someone stamps their boot down and that's it. Mortality as "Gunsmoke".
ricchochet!
So much for "the big bang", the trail leading up to the powder keg and blowing up the bank where the yipping outlaws can descend down and run off with sacks of cash with the dollar signs printed on them like in the television shows. Unfortunately, we're stimyied by the laws of life that always cut us down in our tracks before we ever make "the big score".
Yet the fantasy is alive and well as fellers like us work in the metaphorical stockyards, shoveling manure for a pittance. Just keepin' one eye out on that bank, shaking our heads at our lot or even shirking work all together and dreaming up "short-cuts" that border on the criminal.
Then
listen to KDHX 88.1, your
community radio station when you get home and collapse in a chair after a long
day's work. The motif always seemed
to be the bleakness of the city, the flairless acquiescence to our impending
demise, or
almost a gnarled obsessiveness for the small things in everyday life. Once,
there was a song by a blues player slavering maniacally over his "collard
greens", an image of an evil-looking Negro with big white teeth who has green
bits of vegetable matter sticking out of them, drinking from a jug of whiskey
and making deals with the devil.
"Whut the FUCK?", we figure-- cocking our heads, disbelieving what we just heard.
But the D.J. was a flat-affected soul who was utterly unmoved by all this unhinged INTENSITY, and seemed to take it all at "face value". It was the elevation of the weird, of the sick, when the same D.J. was exhorting the audience to tune into his radio show and "get your booties shaking" in that same flat-affected voice-- a revelry of awkward creeps making robotic-like movements like something out of the Weimar Republic.
Perhaps alternative culture is a little wan and offish. . . . . post-Marxist notions that drift along with sadness, what they won't do for themselves and ending up in this snail-eyed venue.
The stuffed moose's head at "Scholotzzie's Pizza" did it for me-- protruding out rudely over the blue-collar diners with a beer cap and sunglasses as if to say, "you got a problem with me?". Life up here is mammalian, not like some kind of strange jellyfish or Haikaki sea crab that's been washed up on the beach. Others of its kind may mourn it, and say it's beautiful in rigor mortis, but we fellow mammals look at it and go "Whut the FUCK?".
It was no consolation, when my website-- which I hope aimed for "a third way"-- was reviewed by the alternative newspaper, "The Riverfront Times". Alternative or mainstream? It is owned by a chain and has enshrined moral dubiousness into corporate form. The reporter who interviewed me over the telephone asked questions in a huffing "wiseguy" voice that sounded like a scallop at the bottom of the muddy, brown Mississippi, the kind of guy who'd take your teenage sister's bra & panties off the clothesline, sniff them, and jack off. In the yard adjacent to yours. In full daylight. It was a voice of mud, shit, and piss.
Assuming that I EVEN HAD A SISTER, I wanted to jump over the fence and boot him in his bare white ass, his pants around his ankles when he purposefully misrepresented my work.
So it was back to 88.1 KDHX. They may have been weird, but they weren't like THAT.
So it went. . . . . Rock n' roll every night and party every day. . . . or what was left of the day, as I rolled out of bed at 3 PM and nuked a pizza for breakfast in my "Blues Brothers" flop-house. I figured that I ought to be paid to be myself, a fine art cultivated from years and years of sullen "overthinking" when life seemed like an Indian-faced proposition where you pondered on the kaleidoskopic nature of yearning. Now, there was nothing left but for the masturbation as you whooped it up like a cowboy firing his pistol at the ceiling. Why, in a white Panama hat and a seer-sucker suit, I'd sweep the actress, Winona Ryder off her feet with a tip of the hat and the slick, dime-store antics of the southern gentleman. Just call me "donkey-dick", but it all worked up in my imagination somehow as I drunkenly typed away on my website and raised hell online. . . . .
I'd puff myself up and think of myself as the natural successor to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, twin windbags who got ahead with glibness and a fast right hand as they crossed the boundaries of good taste and aimed their imaginations toward the golden microphone. This, my ticket out of the slug-like world we lived in and into the big time. . . . .
----------
"The Broadcast Center" was the sham "hands on" site for my bogus degree in "Communications", whatever that was supposed to mean, But I wasn't particularly listening. . . . .
One teacher was a canary-shaped "human resource" type going over the most general niblets of forehead-slapping common sense as she sipped a wholesome gulp from a bottle of Evian water in her tiny fist, the ultimate
"whoo-woo!" girl seen at a "Hootie & The Blowfish" concert. Women like this are noted for their lock of irony. And brains. Can frequently be seen rock climbing and jogging with featureless expressions like a contestant on "Survivor!" carrying a spear.Another was a Darth Vader overlord who paced around the classroom in an old man's plaid shirt and bared their teeth in smarmy anger like a horse with a burr under the saddle. Guys like him were thrown on the scrap heap, although they didn't want to admit it and made up for their insecurity by acting like Donald Rumsfeld trying to follow the dynamics of X-Box tournaments. They don't really understand, but latch on to the rhetoric to resist being sold to the glue factory like an old horse that had seen it's time. The moment they admit they're "out of touch", is their mental picture of a nursing home and a colostomy bag. They're on the run from their mortality.
It all seemed kind of theoretical and useless, because you wondered why
these professors didn't actually have jobs outside the university. With the
titanic, leviathon consolidation of the media companies-- that sounded like
something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, with huge, horrific beasts sloshing
around. . . . . leaving man to shiver in a cave like a naked mole rat-- it
seemed like these professors were mere driftwood on the cosmic scale of things,
washed up on the shores of existential uselessness and putting on a show for a
bunch of gullible kids who mostly didn't have futures.
There was a certain downward evolutionary logic that weeded out "the unfit", though these teachers were the ones "shoved out the building" by the sternness of unforgiving reality, ending up in this coddled university that defied market forces, red in tooth and claw. You were either a flake or a relic. . . . or didn't have that true "killer instinct" that shrugged at the fates and accepted reality for what it was.
Or you were crud.
"The Broadcast Center" seemed to attract characters who were down on their luck and adrift, men who never had "that fire in their belly", that essential spark, and in another age would have been a traveling salesman living out of a suitcase in a lonely roadside motel. It was an empty, stooped-back existence of answering to white-collar management, the puffed-belly blandishment of car-dealerships, and failed flings with secretaries-- who scowled over their computers with catty, mean-spirited expressions and worked up a friendly veneer for the occasional visitor who came through the double-wide swinging doors before returning back to their hateful computer screens.
Meanwhile, I was oblivious as ever-- living out my Don Quixote shock-jock fantasy as someone inherently outside the mainstream market. My chances in the corporate world were nil, yet they were shaping us for the red-blooded, white-bread, blue-condom market that didn't wander that far outside a box of conventionality, of what the average work-a-day person hand-tossing pizzas or driving delivery trucks could understand. It didn't strike me how hopeless this was until I met some of the personalities who had really worked in radio.
They were heavy, morose characters with sallow countenances and pickled livers who were mostly silent, until the impulse came over them to bark on command like seals and lend to the impression that they were hot, happening individuals "in the thick of things". Otherwise there was this eerie lack of movement as they sat around like statues, utterly without passion. Life was a mechanical proposition, where you sat in the booth and sloughed off skin cells and left a trail of slime.
This was the unforgiving boulder of fate, and miracles weren't going to move it on my behalf. . . . .
Take the network show, "Saturday Night Live"-- how the format bills itself as outrageous and "ground-breaking", the "Young Turks" of comedy "sticking it to the man"-- but by now has all the audacity of some rich old lady's shivering pet chuawalla passing gas in the corner putridly. The comedy dares "to have an attitude" but never agitates for we "lifers" down here below to flip over the study hall table and "overthrow the state" like communards in orange sack-hats waving the red flag, if not executing the bloody czar with the crack of rifle-fire.
Then you had the creator, Lorne
Michaels. You would think that he would be a real funny guy, having overseen
this program since 1975, but on he stares
You could try contacting him with brilliant skit ideas from the earnest Midwestern heartland with a handwritten letter sealed with care, but no, "that wasn't going to happen" as he'd squirrelishly take off down some NBC office hallway in complete businesslike disinterestedness.
"Hey buddy, I'm talking to you!", you could holler at his retreating back, but on he'd go. There the vicious cycle was. . . . . the more it wasn't going to happen, the faster we'd chase our tails like puppy dogs on meth. My parents would never understand that young, impertinent adrenaline rush in a million years!
----------
In my life, it was like waiting for "The Great Pumpkin" on Halloween night instead of "hoofing it" around the houses like anyone else for a hard-bitten reward that required "knockin' on doors".
The Virgin's Spring
Hair streaming behind me, standing on a mountaintop is messianic robes, I launched "Dear Winona" & Other Stories from St. Louis! back in December of 2004-- waiting for the stampede of viewers to come rushing to the foot of my edifice of cackling mad science, lightning cracking across the sky with portentious fate. Winona fans, St. Lousians, the "literari gliterari", come to see MY PERSONAL VISION. Text, pictures, and music so folks could see what was going on up inside this tempest of a mind I called "home".
The Booty
The booty should have been the tip-off. A woman's derriere clad in jeans, swinging back and forth in one short cycling graphic that repeated itself over and over when I visited the "Yahoo!" search engine on everyday business. It was a commercial for an mp3 music site, pushing forth vapid, lizard-brained dance beats for drooling ecstasy users "kicking it at da' club"
against civilization's hard-fought mores. The internet had begun as such a noble venture, with predictions of greater knowledge and the common betterment, and here was this booty swinging back and forth like a "come-on" for a depraved gathering of 21st revelers lurching forward and backward in the thrusting, humid darkness like the wicked legions of Sodom & Gommorah. The ad was casting a net for a wide demographic that would no more appreciate my website than a pigeon would comprehend Tolstoy.Knock, Knock
And then the people did come. . . . . but not for the stories. Some online pirates had figured out a way to link to my site so a bunch of punk kids could grab the free mp3's that were meant to be sampled here and there to enhance the "reading experience", like visitors politely leaning over a buffet and nibbling on a bit of wine and cheese. 100,000 pigeon-headed advantage-takers were gate-crashing this place a month, but don't give a fuck about the whimsical voice of one (1) Michael Adams as they drive up my "catering" bill. What else can I say to this, but a clown weeps on a table like something out of a 1920's French art filme.
----------
Having the condition known as "Asperger's Syndrome" is no walk in the park.
When people think of autism, they think of screaming, leering, grotesque masks of their former children's faces stolen away who are completely lost to the world and are running around acting "bonkers"-- as if they're possessed by demons. The truth is, those who live anywhere on the spectrum tend to live very much in their own world. . . . . up in their head, a condition that can be likened to "selfism". Whole, vast, creative systems can flourish up there that might never be discovered or even heard from if they're never given the full flower of expression.
What you have to understand, is that the entire neural wiring is different and unconventional next to others, like a separate culture compared to your standard Western art-deco "United Nations" building sitting there like a modern rectangle that presumes to speak for universal human values but just can't "take account" for the unique way that others "piece things together".
What we are like, in comparison to a skyscraper, is a temple off in the South American jungle covered with vines and rot that suggests something totally fabulous and alien compared to the world of constitutions and forged metal and jet fighters and "Donald Rumsfeld on speed" standing astride the world like "Colossus of Rhodes" in our consolidated media paradigm.
It is simply a different breed of culture-consciousness that can engender surprising results, if one would care to listen. Imagine a car produced in Latin America. . . . . it would probably be stuffed with leaves and mud and sticks and roll on wooden wheels, but by God, it would work in its own screwy way! What would it run on, magic mushrooms?! Indeed, "The Food of the Gods" as a chieftain sips cocoa from a crystal skull that modernity in all of its arrogance cannot explain. . . . .
In my experience we tend "to find each other" subconsciously in the trickling river of life and many tend to be math n' science oriented. . . . . lecturing on charmingly like "little professors" to the ends of the earth. God forbid if there's a gap of silence in the conversation, which they fill with dorky jokes! To a fault, they're absolute whizzes with logic and systems and "little worlds" that have their own internal, consistent ways & means although they may be somewhat dense in their perceptions and lack the ability to take a step back "and look at the whole picture".
Many have "a stubborn streak" that would make a mule blush because they are "set in their ways" but remember that "not everyone can be Gallieo" nailed to the door of church orthodoxy like a human sacrifice offered up to "truth". What you gradually find out is that no mathematical model is big enough to map out the entire world and that the more you know, the less you can truly understand. . . . . and let that "punch through" for all time.
On the flip side, they tend to be "collectors"-- whether in comic books, pop culture memorabilia, or whatever requires a slightly obsessive bent which definitely pays on scientific expeditions on obscure topics. Of course, "good taste" is questionable as they rake it in like a praying mantis clicking its jaws over a tasty treat. It's probably where the idea of "geek culture" came from, though it's certainly nothing to revel in as people find themselves in an ineffective state, unable to make their dreams come true. In turn, all of this energy is once again directed back into their hobby, which makes them even less "with it". All of it becomes a rather predictable "replacement" for the wild & wooly world "out there" which can become very overwhelming in short order if you don't come across like James Bond, though we can certainly fantasize.
I think I grew up around too much media-- too many cartoons, movies, and fluffy children's shows on publicly-funded television that always had a happy script with a kindly cast of characters "where good won in the end" and evil was consigned down to the darkness, vanquished from the set. But the problem, alas, is that a great deal of human interaction does not run with an elaborate script and comes down to a bunch of nitwits standing around, all looking out for themselves without a sense of grand, unified purpose. And with the fault-lines of negative human psychology, especially during adolescence, it can become downright-diabolical.
No matter how much a sentimentalist and a romantic, you have to learn that out in the world simple "feeling", projected outward, is but a rather feeble lever with which to overturn the immutable laws of the universe, which can be rather pitiless unless you begin to let the actual winds of the world lift your wings. I've figured that out. Some people never do. . . . .
Sometimes life can feel a little bit like a carnival, and you're the country cousin looking at all of the lights and movement with a bit of a dropped-jaw while others take it all for granted. You have a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm for what's happening, but you're at a bit at a loss.
The booths are open where you show off your skill "to win prizes". You step forward and put down your money, your social capital, taking a risk, but never really quite grasp how the game is played. Someone explains it to you and intellectually you understand the principles of "how to lob a dart" but you don't know how to throw it with any effectiveness to hit the balloons.
Your hand is shaky, your grip uncertain because your relationship with the outside world isn't very good. . . . . you're a genius internally, but the interface without is clumsy. You fail, swooping down with the inevitability of gravity and the consequences of natural process and there the divide sits like a gulch-- the zero-sum game between winning and losing and you feel like a golden retriever stabbed in the belly by the porcupine of fate.
Fate and consequences play big in our lives, with boulder-like heaviness.
You lay down more money, but don't improve and bystanders are looking on, wondering what's wrong with you. Some laugh with scorn, others turn away at this embarrassing spectacle because it reminds them too much of what they fear themselves becoming. You can see only what's in front of you, and you vaguely hear people making their comments, but your peripheral understanding is bad as you find yourself getting more and more flustered. . . . .
You walk away from the booth and behold clowns and acrobats performing where not everything is what it seems, and because you're woebegone-looking they make you part of the show-- and you can't quite decide if you've been crowned "the king of fools" or "the toast of the town". All you can do is stand there and "look for cues" trying to make sense of their gestures as if you're being pulled along by a script you're struggling to understand. You try not to presume too much and be too suspicious, because one doesn't want to be "a poor sport" and misread things, lashing out and looking like "a real heel" in front of everybody. But it's as if they're talking in a foreign language whose inflections you only know the basics of, and many of the subtleties elude you.
If too many outsiders are talking too fast for too long, you feel as if you're walking underwater and drifting with the currents-- like a zoned-out space cadet on a moonwalk where everything is reduced to slow motion, like a bouncing astronaut, because there is so much going on, and the mind can not interpret all this information through overloaded circuits. You're in a hypnotic "dream-state" when your head is only half-working and you're running on auto-pilot, nodding and agreeing pleasantly but not really "all there".
Sometimes you have "to run back to the cave" in order to sort everything out and let your mind reorient itself, but you leave feeling drained and empty as if you had been shot up with penathol and had your soul sucked out through your eyes and ears and senses.
In my experience, I've always looked to books and movies as "an escape" because it showed, to me, "life as it should be" with a clean-cut script where everything makes sense. However, in life oftentimes nothing makes sense and you find yourself at a complete loss. And the more you ask around, then the more ridiculous you look as people take it all within the margin of the inexplicable that they don't bother to understand "what goes unsaid".
There is always a big difference between what man wants and what man needs. And it is said that "the key to happiness is a high threshold of pain". Crown me "the king of fools", and I'll make you "the toast of the bonfire" with my scathing wit. You have been warned. . . . .
----------
But I wasn't coping well. . . . .
Depending on how you look at it, mankind is either a sophisticated spirit capable of higher thought or not a whole lot more than somewhat-elevated slime sucking for sustenance on a rock, splashed with acid and steam even. You can go 'round and 'round about this forever, but the conundrum I suppose, is called "the human condition". Man is neither one nor the other. For every spark of inspiration that comes along, like a "flash in the pan", there is a residue sulfur stink very much rooted in the limitation of the natural world. Yes, the stink. We can't shake the fact, that we piss, shit, slough off skin cells, age, die, and finally decompose. In other words, we stink of flawed mortality.
And that's how it is with ideas and ideologues. The initial idea may have a flash of something noble and/or significant, above the dregs of the indifferent universe which has no comment on what we should say or do or believe, but ideologues rigidly guide themselves by the stink of the sulfur instead of the actual flash of inspiration. And it's very foul. Just look at the kind of faces and personalities that gather among the hardest of the hard-core and you won't see reasonable human beings. You'll see caricatures of shit, piss, darkness, and death.
Take "The Theater of Ideas". On cable news shows, on talk radio, on the newsstands, it's a veritable shouting match. . . . . and it's usually the conservatives doing the shouting. Blustering, indignant, charging across the forum like barking elephant seals guarding their "embattled" territory while liberals (-- moderates?!) raise a finger, something like an asterisk of cautious interjection (*!) before being shouted down by the immensely self-satisfied right. In the theater, players will make immense, titanic, absolutist statements to "cover their bases". Winking, guffawing, chortling like insiders, spelling out what's feasible or possible upon this limited planet like guardians of the "proper" political process. Perhaps it's a show. . . . . perhaps it isn't.
The average man is a stranger to "The Theater of Ideas". You have the "Dirt Cheap" emporium, a squat white-painted bunker of a brick building where average Joe's go to get their discount smokes, beer, and liquor. They don't care about much else than their paycheck, their woman waiting for them at home, and their handful of lottery tickets. The shouting goes over his head as he shrugs and shakes off exhortations to vote either way. Listening to them mutter as they walk off to their beat-to-shit automobiles, and watching the emptiness of the parking lot as a couple of Twinkie wrappers go fluttering past like tumble weeds, you would wonder from whence the ideologues formed their elaborate clockwork conception of how the universe works.
In "The Theater of Ideas", the most popular ones-- the ones most zealously fought over-- are the ideologies that appeal to institutional self-interest.
"I can sleep easy with my head on this silken pillow, and my Brooks Brothers suits in the closet, and my Rolex watch ticking away in the soft, quiet night as a uniformed security guard gently sweeps past my gated community in a scooter".
Young Republicans run rampant over the college campuses with belief systems of extreme individualism and snottiness, the greediness of one's own buttered bread. The public-spirited movements that don't promise back much of anything get the least current of electrified fervor. Take the National Humanist Association. The idea behind this organization is that in a godless world of endless suffering, you work toward the betterment of humanity without expectation of reward in this life, or any kind of compensating existence after you die. No glory, no illusions, no otherworldly comfort. This is it, and a good deed is supposed to be its non-equity-yielding reward before you're snuffed out forever.
In other words, your best hope for immortality is having children and setting up massive human colonies in outer space that rely on enlightened vegetarian lifestyles as these incubated "earth ships" soar to some new home planet over thousands of generations because our own Earth will be too sulfurous and polluted with toxic waste. A conservative will immediately tell you how ridiculous that plan is, while the average Joe outside of "Dirt Cheap" only cares about his cigarettes, his booze, and his lottery tickets.
What is the most tragic, is when the flawed discourse in "The Theater of Ideas" is attempted to be translated into real life. Since the premises that the ideologies were based on in the first place were flawed, than it can only result in unintended consequences-- which usually means disaster. But the ideologues are so wrapped up in their ideas, their priceless system, that they can not accept the fact that they lost everything to an illusion. It's called "cognitive dissonance", and people will invent all sorts of rationales to cover up inconvenient truths for bruised egos, if not the wrecked lives of others that they had a hand in ruining.
"Pull the curtain!", after-all.
And as long as it serves the institutional self-interest of wealth and privilege, and they keep the public diverted with hollering distractions, they'll get away with it in their lifetimes and ours. The only sulfur smell they should know are the flames of hell.
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I've known men who liked to play the "psych-out" game of alpha domination in a "poker's face" kind of way. They have a manner of asserting themselves in a room as "the chief" with nary a muscle moved, but tripping the young and inexperienced up with their young pup vitalism that lacks perspective and vision as the older cracks the whip and "puts them in their place".
A card game.
They cut the deck like a cardsharp, toss out the cards, and you play the game as a man in training is ought. Not quite sure of the rules, you make a blunder and watch them rake in the chips of one's youthful self-regard. Watch them blow easy rings of smoke from their cigars as they don't even tell you what you're doing wrong, but crush you lower and lower as they deal again and again.
A "Zero-Sum" game of masculine honor is in play. Somebody loses, somebody wins as the pile of chips on his side of the table gets higher and higher, switching the cigar around in his mouth and tapping out the ashes on the floor with barely-concealed superiority as you're made to look singularly ridiculous. It was fully to gratify the dark side of their personalities.
This man in question was a professor-for-hire was an "old pro" in the media business who had worked in several fields of the enterprise, a white-haired 60 year-old "all-American" type whose facial expression seemed to be smarmy, teeth-bearing anger. Life had "put him out to pasture", apparently-- because those who can do it, stay in the game and don't pontificate on and on to putrid little shits who don't have a future in anything. Guys like him were essentially "on the scrap heap" although they fought it kicking and screaming and followed all the latest developments, pretending like they were still vital-- like they were still relevant-- because in their mind's eye it would otherwise it was the chattering teeth of the death's head. Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. Like Donald Rumsfeld being infatuated with the high-tech military as if it held all the answers, but being unable to comprehend what was happening on the ground.
As you raise your hand to ask questions, making assumptions that he didn't cotton to, he'd dip his forehead down and stare at you agog in disbelief in an effort to make you look ridiculous. The point was to make you slink off with a hangdog look, so you'd be broken into the way he saw things.
I came from a household where fathers and sons had give-or-take discussions and went out of the way to understand each other, usually the younger having his outlook shaped by the older and wiser. That was how I received the cream of my populist education, and a surefooted distrust of the media and big corporations and the crazy influences perpetuated on society by the unholy feedback loop of both, knowing not to trust the latest fads and "buzz-words" of the day. This, the son of a social worker who had seen the ragged edges of society beyond the newsroom and knew enough to have the skepticism not to trust the sniping on the streets.
The more this professor spoke, the more kooky he sounded. All he seemed to understand about the media and fetishize was the infrastructure-- like Donald Rumsfeld hugging his arms around a huge nuclear warhead with bolts around the middle and an American flag painted on the side. He gives it a kiss, bares his teeth over his shoulder, then polishes the warhead with a cloth. He's aware of the destructive potential, the radioactive death slowly leaking out, but the implications don't faze him as he talks about tonnage and megadeaths and leveled cities.
It flies completely over his head. . . . . WHOOOOSH!
He also seemed at ease with the cynical manipulation of the media, how the public face was charming and friendly but-- behind the scenes-- it was scurvy and cut-throat and ruthless. It gave him a sense of superiority above the average drudge buying "Bounty" paper towels with much mean-spiritedness. Like "Rummy" hiding in the bushes and laying a trap with a strained-lemon grin on his face. . . . . a cute "Associated Press" photograph of an adorable little girl with her puppy, the picture laying on top of a pile of leaves. Middle America coos and bends down to pick it up. With a cry of
"SUCKER!", "Rummy" pulls the rope and the hidden noose grabs his quarry around the leg and dangles them up in the air where he then proceeds to give them an "All-American" sales-pitch for something they don't particularly need. The professor didn't seem to understand how that would make a lot of people angry if they only knew how they were callously being moved along like cattle to slaughter.On the issue of our media's failure to do its job in the build-up to the Iraq war, the professor could only shrug. For that was outside his understanding. He felt that the media should have been more responsible, but with the cartography of the media landscape and where he fit into it over a lifetime as a blind partisan insider, that simply wasn't going to happen. He only bared his teeth angrily when I pointed this out, at a loss for words when I told him the process was irreversible with current trends before he changed the subject.
"Media! The future!",
he pointed up at ceiling symbolically. A messianic believer in a multimedia lecture experience that would replace the chalkboard entirely because of young peoples' shortening attention spans. I told him that "Junior" has to learn to sit still and "tough it out" because he'll soon have to contemplate his future flipping burgers in our hamburger stand economy as all the jobs are shipped off to India and China where Gupta and Chang will patiently do drudge work for pennies, becoming the new superpowers of the future. Life is not like a video game, and feeding the monster of hyper-stimulation is not helping the problem when "Junior" crashes headlong into unforgiving reality, most likely selling apples on the street corner as we become a woebegone, third world nation because of globalization and the stratification of wealth as warfare breaks out in the streets.Upstaged, he threw me out of the classroom with a roar.
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Of all creatures put to pen & paper in the cosmic sketchbook of divine cartooning, "Porky Pig" is a recognizable trope with which few of us choose to identify, yet do. Part of him is a "little slow" on the uptake, awkward with a bumbling stutter that "can't say what it means", and perhaps a little bit too "square-headed" as Daffy hoots around in manic circles.
He's repeatedly "made the fool" by swifter, cagier forces as he holds up his hands with an angry "now, wait a minute!" to reclaim something of his tattered dignity. Perhaps there is something in his habits that sets him up for failure-- for example, not setting up "clear boundaries" in the beginning as others run "rip-shod" over him later. He grumbles; he complains; but perhaps he was "too soft" for his own good. And by the time Porky begins to really fight back, the cartoon is nearly over and the kids watching at home see him for the fool he is.
If this overly sounds like your life, then we have a problem.
There was a girl who limped along with developmental disorders who I was drawn to initially, but the revolving key of her life was "buttoning-down", limping along with pinched, hobbled steps of mental and emotional confinement because that's all she reckoned that she could "settle for". My free-wheeling ways made her deeply upset because it rocked her conservative Catholic boat that was "just so". She took to withdrawing from me, even though I tried to feast positive attention upon her and make this girl "part of the show". There was another girl named "Alice" who took a few steps in "The Wonderland" I built for her with her hand up to her chin in bemusement, but she had no interest in making this place her home.
It's what happens when you feel as if you're walking through a cave, a giant shadowed vault that reaches high up to the ceiling, and zombies of people walk by-- neither hearing nor seeing as you attempt to talk to them, getting them to hear about your plight. But alas, they "shake you off" and continue on "their dead sleep" of work, life, raising a family-- neither noticing nor caring about your increasing desperation as you struggle like a drowning victim, petrified by your own abundance, too scared to move "and break through walls" like a self-actualized human being.
On some level, our smarmy Donald Rumsfeld of a professor was a sentimentalist in a flat-polishing way and he talked about the increasing cynicism of our age, how the advertisers "poke fun at belief" and sometimes come outright close to ruining a child's vision of Santa Claus around the holidays with their snarky ads.
That got a discussion going, when I somewhat bitterly-- looking over the course of my own life-- came to the conclusion that it would have perhaps been better if I had not been raised with the idea of Santa Claus, or magical thinking, or the idea of "getting something for nothing".
The professor frowned and all the students looked at me aghast, not quite understanding. "Let kids be kids" was the consensus but here we were, a bunch of grotesque, emotionally-stunted Americans attending class here with the polite fiction that any one of us had a future with our present course of MySpace, Sony PlayStation, cable programming, and lisping Rolling Stone commentary which reveled in the most superficial of shitting, pissing, and sloughing-off-of-skin-cells contradictions that was passed off as apparent "brilliance" in our postmodern, materialist age where "hard truths" were disregarded with the click of a remote control.
In the sketchbook jungle, characters clash. And one time "Porky", so to speak, was up against a caricature of something completely outside the world of "Looney Tunes".
If you can imagine an ornery cuss from the glossy, hard-bitten "Entertainment Tonight" veneer of beach balls, Donna Summer songs, "Hit me with Your Best Shot" playing endlessly on the radio at a driftwood wienie roast, "The Osmonds", ski lodges, "the mile-high club" on airplanes, polyester white suits, disco medallions, lines of coke, throwbacks to the 1980 film "Caddyshack", and a cardboard standup of Princess Leia from "The Empire Strikes Back" with a set of tits taped on leaning against the wall at a loud frat party, then you'd understand.
A conflict was brewing like a rumbling volcano. And under this volcano was squared Porky Pig and this saber-toothed tiger in a radio engineering class.
Porky struck first, poking at the cat with a stick:
"Ah-blee-blee-blee-blee-blee-suck-my-dick!"
The saber-toothed tiger pounced, the two rolled around with the stronger on top, and the carnivore disemboweled Porky.
The pig lay there, blood tricking from its lip, as the saber-toothed tiger paced around and then licked its paws. The volcano was bursting, casting down chunks of flaming rock. The forest was on fire.As Porky lay dying, he lifted his chin and shrieked: "T-T-That's not all folks. . . . . I ought to skin you alive, you rotten cat!".
The saber-toothed tiger paused. There was something in that pig's squeal that unnerved him. He considered "finishing Porky off", thought better of it, then scurried off into the underbrush with a rustle.
Porky lay there for a while in excruciating agony, then piled his guts back into himself and crawled away with his rump in the air-- leaving a bloodslick through the jungle.
The whole place lit up.
Porky escaped and got mended, a long scar running up his underbelly. What happened to the saber-toothed tiger, if it perished in the inferno (-- and lost its job as an instructor) no one can say.
I think back to that experience and second-guess myself. If only I had been a warrior with a spear, instead of a soft, gullible porker then I would have stood a chance. Honor in strong, noble manhood standing guard instead of Saturday morning diversions, eating cereal and snuffling away like a kid.
Because this ain't no cartoon. . . . .
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Essentially, the character in this story had been tied to a fence and sodomized, like one of the rafters from "Deliverance". Well, emotionally at least when his more glaring faults were ripped into and a man held up a mirror and showed up to be exactly the wretch he was secretly running from. Addled to be sure, but made more grotesque when his pleasure-reward center had been massively screwed-up and he essentially went wondering further and further through "No Man's Land" because "he didn't know when to stop". And you can bet that he paid for it.
We piddle over the day-to-day peripherals that don't mean much, not able to step back and see the big picture. We get bored, or tune out, or become occupied with the posters slapped on the fence that promise "the circus of tomorrow" that seem quaintly antiquated years down the road when we have a moment to think back. We hop on "the band wagon", not wanting to be left behind, but eventually find out that we were suckered into going down the wrong fork in the path when an excess of reality rears its ugly head. Some people are against capitalism just to be bitchy and petulant, but miss its good side. Others say that religion is nothing but a fool's game, but miss the point that a myth is about what's true on the inside. Can we be half-right with bad intentions but wrong with good intentions? What we have. . . . . is the beauty of perspective. And that is the price of doing business as people either figure that out or don't.
The fact that egomaniacs get behind causes for self-serving reasons, and so-called "betterment" organizations are mostly set up so the bureaucracy can "get their cut"-- as it plays out over time-- and how even in this post-truth society life is about upward-funneled energy and frustration and struggle and the
fact you can't have what you want today. That we're inadvertently the accessory to a lot of bad things by just being alive and paying taxes here in the United States, if not standing around with our arms at our sides, and how responsibility dissolves with distance from the problem. The planet will go on, regardless-- even if life has to start all over again, evolving one more from cockroaches and the impulsive grasp of Kudzu weed that can't be beaten back with the blind instinct of life. Get out of your "comfort zone" where nothing is constant, not even "the rate of change" and how "immortality" would really get quite boring after a while. Proof of this is the arcade emulators on the computer where you can play your old favorites with a limitless number of "continues" which takes all the fun out of it when victory is "too easy".About a year later, the developmentally-limping girl and I ran into each other in a bookstore and she apologized to me fervently for what had happened to "Andy Kaufman". . . . . laying in a pool of his own blood, head blown off, face down. . . . . But strangely the boy without a face got up and grinned grotesquely with what remained of his public persona, shook her hand, and straggled off through the night like a man risen from the grave, soldiering on. He could not be killed. . . . . nor his spirit broken, as he quite literally rose from the dead beyond our world of "camera phones" and geeky, clueless expressions of a nation in moral and racial decline as he stands before you is a walking miracle and a living legend of triumph.
He laughs at nerdy technology and the turkey-brained offering up trendy solutions like supplicants and stares down hard at ruthless pretenders until they finally look away, cast of inferior steel. He tells the gobble-voiced protestors changing in the streets like geek-monkeys, pumping their fist in a putrid version of left-wing slaughter to act like men instead of a crying wind through the universe whose only company is the empty, rattling tin can and the cold grave. I offer you wisdom. . . . instead you take a dick up your ass in the cell-block of life. Warrior or bitch? The choice is yours!
Entrepreneurs, pioneers in days of old, left the village because either it was struck by lightning & burned down, was sacked & pillaged by marauders, or there was so much crushing poverty that there was "but no choice" to leave and break ground in new frontiers. Otherwise, there would be no incentive to be heroic, cut brush, or a hack a trail through the untamed jungle with a machete. But whatever you do, don't linger around, needy-- like either a whipped dog or "a bad fart".
The processing end of the self-publishing industry is like a livery stable where a couple of hard-bitten cowboys keep their meager tools of the trade, and where a starry-eyed pilgrim sees lassos of gold and rusty old gelding saws of silver as he thinks about taming the bucking bronco of wildcat publishing yore. Off to the side you will find spider-gray antiques split-open and rotten with time, gone bad like over-fermented beer along with a splay of reddish autumn leaves in the corner, cruddy and withered like an old apple core. A fool would pay $50 with an eye of having it appraised for the old "one man's trash is another man's treasure" switcheroo, though it isn't even worth throwing it in the fire as the old hands shrug and surely find themselves nobody's fool.
On your dime, these grizzled ropers will set up the festivities for your big debut, throw tulips in your wake, and have a release party with-- you guessed it-- a table of picked-over cold cuts and a rusted keg of rotgut beer with a dead rat floating in it. From there, it's up to you to push your book onto polite friends or puzzled neighbors who don't read anyway. . . . .
And here comes this neophyte who thinks that just because someone has made it to the top of the New York Times' best-seller list, that he will. . . . .
Out of a haphazard mess of spiral-bound notebooks (-- frequently lost and then lost again in the clutter of his nuked apartment living room), an illegible scrawl that might as well have been caked in blood for all the hassle and trepidation. Of course, it's always easier to be "a talker" than "a doer".
Break that bronco of your own undirected energy and drive it toward a purpose "and be a hero"! And men may sing about your legendary exploits with a guitar around a campfire under the stars. That's all a bard can really hope for. . . . . to be sung about himself and to live forever in old cowboy songs in the race-soul of his people. Even if he was a half-Jewish bullshit artist!
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
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