"Snarling Lost Times"
(A Sinner "Too Smart For His Own Good" Howls with
Despair)
"Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas-- of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks"
-- Marvin Minsky, American Cognitive Scientist
There comes a time when a young man rolls out of his parents' hayloft and takes down the road like a Medieval peasant sleeping in ditches and generally being a ner'do'well "up to no good". There you behold him shuffling along with a sack over his shoulder, dodging any kind of responsible apprenticeship and playing petty tricks on housewives to beg, borrow, or steal a crust of bread (-- if not "a roll in the hay") like a knave. And here in the late '90s, the time was never more ripe for such rotten attitudes, such thieving shenanigans. . . . .
If the country only a few short years before had been like a steel girder, many riveted together and rising in the sky to form a proud, mighty super-structure-- an armed-to-the-teeth fortress of 20,000+ nuclear warheads pointing across the Atlantic at the Soviet Union as if poking a finger in their adversary's chest to say, "YOU. . . . . we're not like you, we stand in opposition to you, and soon with the imminent close of "The Cold War" we shall stand triumphant as a McDonald's opens in the streets of your dark, snowy capital", now the old certainties were loosing strength, peak, and definition-- like a bodybuilder's physique going "soft" and melting away because there was no tension to keep him courageous.
Nothing was really left but for "capitalism", the self-seeking interest that didn't feel a need "to pull itself together for the greater good" and frankly didn't care as the population got decadent and sloppy, its elite preening and effete like sinuous Siamese cats eating from golden dishes and waving their tails at the feast of snobbery.
And here I was, straddled between the line of childhood and adulthood-- where frankly the world doesn't give a shit about what you think, only to get you through the door and sell you a product, a world-view, "a system" in this grasping pigsty of mud-slinging absolutism that fought desperately for "the sale", no matter what the price. It was the Western duality of either/or thinking that could only see the absolute of cash, bodies, sex, power-- total victory or Luciferian defeat as you struggled for the advantage over "your adversary" like so many stacked blocks of dead, useless, or hostile matter standing in the way of your single-minded pursuit, in search of hard-bitten ecstasy for the least outlay of effort yet having to "fight for it" like two brutes in a boxing ring.
Market forces were just as inevitable and sure as the downward drag of social Darwinism, and struck cruel bargains of "Supply & Demand" interplays. In other words, the woe-faced predicament of desperate straits, if not unmoved merchandise, as the wolves circled around-- waiting to bury their snout into your soft underbelly, tear into your rotten guts. Become the competition, slough off what's holding you back. . . . . . or die. If you couldn't adapt, it was a whole lot like the peasant girl's dilemma in the old fairy tale, "Rumplestiltskin" where this crafty trickster stroked his beard and quite literally gave her "a bargain she couldn't refuse" for the price of her soul.
*******************
You have to ask yourself. . . . . do the ends justify the means
-- resorting to blunt subterfuge for the good of our immortal essence?
The locus of this unholy enterprise was something called "The Current Issues Discussion Club" down at the local college where the pastor tried to insinuate himself, buddy-buddy, with more-alert-than-average students like a CIA operative dealing with the Iranians, trading in the hostage of mutual interests while leaving a cake and a Bible for the Ayatollah himself like someone's bumbling version of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North tucking files into his jacket. Knowing of course, that he was completely justified in the name of God, State, and Ronald Reagan as his witness.
I was a very unlikely candidate to be tapped for "The Kollege Kristian Kidz Klub-House", embittered as Nietzsche and about twice as crazy. The gooey, happy, and mutually-exclusive façade of high school had left me crawling off in the gutter to die, "a misunderstood genius" laughed at by his idiotic peers dancing on the roof of cars with a beer in their hands and hailing my weighty pronouncements with replies out their dropped britches.
My youth had disappeared in a smoldering firestorm of bad feeling and back in that morass I had turned into a teenaged ultra-conservative who would advocate "the tightening of the screws" in order to extract a toll on "the little people" I despised. Truthfully, I was like "Donald Rumsfeld on speed" and believed that the solution to social problems was thrusting a fist of iron in "evil-doer's" faces, jammed like a squashed meat-pie. Youth left to its own devices was dopey, depraved, degenerate, and useless, and here they were like so many chess pieces that I pushed around on a board like a sly politician plotting the overthrow of liberal social democracy. Well, I had yet to learn that humanity doesn't like being treated like chess pieces, like expendable dupes, and wandered around the checkered squares on their own free volition like grazing cattle immune to my version of reason.
Of consequence, this ruined my strategy for becoming "Commisar of the Universe" and "God on Earth". All but flapping my arms in a tantrum, I would try to force them back on the "proper" square. You yank on their tails, and they turn around chewing cud as if to say "what's your problem?". Then they kick you with their hind leg and knock you on your pratt.
Rubbing your bottom in baffled malice, you become even more crotchedy and hard-core.
Perhaps you fancy yourself having class, inherent class-- like a born aristocrat. Like an Eastern European count with wide, staring eyes and a stiff demeanor as he looks over the crowd of simpletons aghast. You turn away from this cafeteria of sniggering teenagers with the whirl of your cape, but you trip over it and fall on your face. Kids are laughing at you. Mustering up all the indignation you can muster, you come up with the most extreme thing you can say:
"I will CRUSH YOU!".
But you end up sounding like some kind of villain out of a 1930's science fiction movie. The teenagers are laughing harder. If this happens enough, you lose so much face that you eventually slink off.
It is said that spirituality is about "submission" and "letting go", but my ego was far too big for that-- flying around the room like a punctured balloon that still had a lot of "fight" left in it as this blood-red "wild-card" cut a swath of destruction like a wounded animal.
And here I was, gazing around the dregs of the known Western world where there is no such place as Heaven; only a view of the gray, meaningless purgatory that humanity creates for itself. Outside this miserable state-funded dump, the icy winter landscape was sopping with oil slicks and salt water from the heaping dump trucks. January asphalt was a particularly lurid manifestation of decaying North County urban sprawl, of wide open spaces and abandoned lots that the working poor traversed in rumbling, beat-to-shit cars.
There always seemed to be the hum of a diesel generator somewhere, the sooty suffocation of fumes that made you sweat and then take off your coat. You'd get the chills, then you'd have to put your coat back on. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Out here, it always seemed like there was some huffing Christian doofus in a stocking cap holding up a cardboard sign by the roadside or a clueless gang of them handing out literature in the campus hallways with constant cheery "God bless you's"-- quite literally forcing themselves upon your person as you shuffled miserably to class. Many a time I had to resist punching them in the face and watching them scamper off like fat possums.
That was my worldly attitude-- the cynicism, the bile that ate away at my soul like chewing vermin-- and it is said that mirth is but the counterfeit of happiness. Scathing irreverence was the piper's song I played, probably to cover up deep sadness, as the three of us sat around the empty conference table to talk about current events, the fucked-up state of the cosmos. . . . . endless, nameless, and purposeless.
There it was-- dark blue, neutral in its state-funded pragmatism as the
sun streamed through the windows and reflected off its surface with a white-wash glare,
the tragic indifference of nature to human affairs in this commonplace world
where naked girls and filthy lucre did not drop from the sky and into my lap
like moanin' jinglin' rain. Apparent was the constitutional separation between church & state, the endorsement of anything other than secular, duly-appointed non-comment on such
fanciful matters of the simpleton's heart, full of fairy tales and bedtime
stories of how the world never was. Yes, an unoffending table-- and nothing more. But freedom of assembly was also protected, the right to reach out across the table with lurking motives. If one assemblage of people could gather around it, then any group that masqueraded as a club could do the same.
And that's what we called ourselves. A club. Out of a state campus of 25,000 only three had shown up. One was an adult, obviously the sponsor, and the other a teenager who looked a little young.
The man, attired in a gray suit, tapped his knuckles on the table
(-- "Is this ALL who chose to show up?")
and asked me about my religious background for starters.
A bemused smile on my face, wrapped up in a superiority far above the opiated masses, I tersely explained the fact that it was lapsed Lutherans on my father's side, secular Jews on my mother's.
His face split into an astonished smile. . . . . a new respect, a new significance dawning, a tinge of awe-- the transcendence of American/ Israeli destiny and a guiding star in the heavens. He repeated my words back to me, to sum it all up for clarification, and I wondered what the hell of it. He seemed to grin a lot-- like an overworked dog-- and I figured that out real quick. The eyes of his teenage co-conspirator, a humorless bumpkin straight from "The Andy Griffith Show", flew to his mentor, and deep within I knew they were eying me like prize beef.
"Of course I would help her!",
I blustered, taking cosmopolitan observance, an easy tolerance for world
cultures, and knocking it right off the table with shocked outrage.
"Why?"
The question hung, the pure abstraction of logic, like chess pieces suspended in theoretical black space. The ponderous eternity of the ticking clock, of space/time, demanded
an answer for why I thought as I did.
"Just what would you do if you were in India and saw some townsfolk dragging a kicking, screaming woman fated to be thrown on her husband's funeral pyre, as was the custom?"
"Because I would want someone to do the same for me".
Rick (-- that was his name) seemed pleased, nodding on before I even completed my sentence; like my inelegant,
sputtering defense of "the golden rule" was the profoundest thing ever muttered by a 17 year-old.
(-- I couldn't help but wonder if there was an ulterior motive
lurking
somewhere, a sales pitch coming on, because the cold, cruel world frankly didn't give a shit about what I thought--
never did, and never would).
"Wow", pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose in abashment.
"You know, Mike, out of all the college students I've ever put that question to, you were the only one who answered the way you did. The rest had said something like 'who am I to judge other cultures?'. It makes you wonder where this country is heading. . . . .".
What could I say? My brand of social conservatism was roughly congruous to theirs, if 10 times as snide and far less less merciful. Like on the way to the cafeteria, when I stopped to point and guffaw at the AIDS quilt on display, telling the forces of conscientious political-correctness, always holding some kind of "Amnesty International" rally or another, to go shove it up their meek candle-holding asses. When would they ever pay attention to "RED MEAT" concerns like the rest of us and live in the real world of hard, iron-stiff considerations where the universe was pitiless. . . . . instead of snacking down on pita bread and tofu as some kind of progressive "statement" of withered self-abnegation? Yes, only getting mowed down by the righteous bulldogs of the state swinging truncheon clubs-- not unlike passive Buddhist monks blown to bits by strafing Japanese zeros machine-gunning the mountainsides for the titanic, expansionist glory of "The Empire of the Rising Sun" that only met its match blow for blow, and ultimately with a mushroom cloud or two? Where "MIGHT" decided things. . . . . and not "New Age" trinkets or Kabbalistic rituals?
*******************
(-- We don't know anyone like that, do we?)
Even as we transposed this weighty conversation to the cafeteria, Rick seemed awfully eager to buy me a soda, sitting across from me with his funny grin and formal suit. He certainly was odd, his hair a wiry orange nimbus and his sea-water eyes meeting mine intently.
"But don't you think Congress has the moral and legal obligation to follow through on this?",
Rick angled reflectively, frowning slightly at my
contradictory response to the Clinton impeachment hearings. After all, this debaucherous President had lied under oath
and whose sleaze was oozing across the nightly news like a cracked jar of
southern-talkin' marmalade. Wasn't "the rule of law" at stake?
"Sort of, but what would the Republicans say to a kid selling lemonade on the street corner?", I quipped. "I mean, he's not paying taxes, his stand hasn't been inspected by the Food & Drug Administration for cleanliness, and for that matter he doesn't even have a vending license. No. We let it go".
"Hmmmmm", Rick smiled, sea-water eyes focused on an undefined point in space. Agreeing to disagree, I suppose. Mark's eyes were elsewhere, namely on the Heinz ketchup bottle and tray of Sweet N' Low packets. Where they had been. Where they stayed.
(-- What a decoy!)
So what are your interests, seeing that you're a bright guy and all?", Rick inquired, paving the way for less contentious matters.
"I went to 'Slaughterfest' last week",
I mentioned
with offhandedness,
"bunching up" my tone to explain further, like a titillating information booth of puerile thrills. So I filled him in on what, for ten bucks, was twelve consecutive hours of carnage and excitement-- twelve consecutive hours of death metal. My voice jittered with electrifying reminiscence as I chronicled the perils of the mosh pit, Rick's good-natured expression furrowing with disbelief at the violent abandon.
"Wow, what a crazy world", rubbing his temples with the potential headache of it all, unholiness made manifest in this foreign city of mind: of sinners, maned marauders, and leather-clad guitar players wearing wrist sheaths covered with ten-penny nails, if not crowd-surfing among death-worshiping ghouls milling about like the nihilistic young. "What is it that you like about the music?", he politely asked, a nice man who would never understand.
I paused, grinning, and remembered a chorus from the band, "Venom".
Something pagan and guttural.
"LAY DOWN YOUR SOUL TO THE GODS ROCK & ROLL!!!!", I growled and hailed like a thrashing demon. Indeed, a captive of sin.
Frame and brick, the building looked more like a nursery school than anything else. But the parked red school bus, stenciled in white lettering, told otherwise.
Faith Community Church; this was the place.
Rick had seemed particularly eager and manic to write down the directions to this location on the back of an index card. He seemed to keep a lot of them handy as he mentioned something about coming here on Tuesday or Thursday nights to talk FURTHER about current issues.
And what
would I find when I opened the cartoonishly red-painted doors, but a cavernous
room blossoming before me like the rotting meat of crackpot religiosity-- swaying
seas of suits, suspenders, lawn-mowing shirts, prim dresses,
and wedding rings. Thirty standing parishioners. Heads bowed, taut
mouths moving, facing the pulpit. It was covered with an ocean of red carpet
with a jumbo golden cross hung up on the wall in sheer evangelical garishness,
the antidote of simple, tasteless answers that couldn't take account for
everything in this increasingly complex, rotten world that seemed evermore to
have an unpleasing reality bias that could not be easily boxed within simple
solutions and sold to anyone with half-a-brain, with a healthy circulation of
thoughts.
And there he was, this
curly, red-haired jack 'o lantern of goofiness
in a blue suit, standing before the audience-- possessed of the spirit,
possessed of SOMETHING as his hands raised up and down and captured the balloon
of an idea, his voice rolling with sanctimonious certainty that swelled louder
and louder with righteousness and destiny this drab Tuesday dusk that looked
more like a shit-storm than a miracle. Eying my uncomfortable appearance he smiled to himself, not missing a beat on lambs, kings, and praise. Not forgetting, of course, the covenant, sword, and the arm of the
Lord. I leaned against the plaster wall, hands in pockets, and waited for him to
finish with rising wariness, beginning to understand his intentions.
They had faith and they had community. No small few mosied over to introduce themselves with firm, desperate handshakes-- meek, nebbish, halting churchgoers grateful for another ally in a crumbling world that would soon plunge into an eternal lake of fire with the tribulation. This was their crummy raft, loading aboard like some cut-rate version of "Noah's Ark" before the end came.
"Mike, buddy!", Rick called across the room when he spotted an opening, ambling over to slap my meaty,
reluctant shoulder under a t-shirt.
"Glad you could make it!".
"That was quite a sermon you gave",
I conceded, somewhat miffed for his trickery.
"You and Mark want to go to Dairy Queen?". Mark? Whirling around I saw him, also in a presentable suit. We nodded our stodgy greeting.
"I don't have any money though. . . . .".
"Don't worry, I'll cover for you!".
"Mike, why don't you become a Christian"
was the subject of tonight's discussion. Glad-handed and folksy, as if I was
being asked to refinance my home or buy a riding mower on "lay-away" in these
times of late '90s credit boom prosperity.
What a question. Er-- ah, like them?
I fidgeted in my chair like a man accosted for life insurance, ice cream smeared on my mouth, mumbling something unintelligible, taking sudden interest in the customers ordering at the register, if not the drudges scraping the crud off the grill. Or even the pimply teenager swabbing the floor. Eeeeaaggggh.
"No really, go ahead",
Rick said with a shit-eating grin, leaning forward on his elbows in eagerness,
prepared to chisel away at my boulder of doubt until our views were of one. He
was the modern version of a Fundamentalist, selectively merging
undeniable scientific laws and historical precedent with a biblical world view until it became something
rubbery, resilient even. No matter what polite doubt I voiced-- muttering down
at my folded hands like a moral apostate-- he paddled it back
until I seemed to be the unreasonable one.
"Come on and jump aboard!", he seemed to say-- even as he sketched out the plain of existence as he saw it on napkins, pushing salt shakers and pepper tins around the table like a medieval cartographer whose conception of the universe you knew was plainly wrong.
He outlined the procession of major faiths (-- omitting Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and the Navajo medicine horse, of course) and narrowed it down to the convergence at Palestine.
A triad; a trinity; a trilogy; a triumvirate of "Holy Lands".
Judaism first:
Abraham working out the original covenant with Jehovah. Charlton Heston throwing down the Ten Commandments in wrath. A youth in a tunic, slinging a stone at Goliath. The temple of Solomon rising and falling with the centuries. The sacrificial lamb at the altar. Clay tablets in Hebrew. Israelites carrying the Ark of the Covenant on shoulder poles. Herding goats, drawing water at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Humbly rising, staggering forward in a daze toward the first installment of godly destiny.
On a lesser tangent, Islam came next:
A crescent moon, a raised scimitar, the sword of Saladin. Midnight. The hushed whisper of jewel thieves beneath the city walls. The marketplace. Veils. A desert father sitting cross-legged on a rock, wrapped in a sheet, his sandaled feet hanging above the sand. A bearded cleric studying the Koran by candle-light. Wisps of smoke rise in the air like an Arabian dream.
Then came Christianity:
Soaring past its defective brothers with cloud-bursting glory; a jumbo golden cross emerging between them, past them, and right up to your unenthused face.
And as someone who was technically a Jew, the gradual conversion of my people would signal "The Rapture", "The Second Coming" (of Jesus), and "The End of All History". His words hung in the air, an ineffable contentment before he tacked off on a different course.
I listened. . . . . and said little.
Though Rick was gung-ho on fighting "the beast of liberalism" in all its forms-- hacking away with a sword at this snake-head like some kind of nefarious prophesy out of "The Book of Revelation"-- neither he nor I at the time had the distance to step back and realize that this monster was part of expanding human freedom, whether in social rights or free markets that mutually fed off of each other since the decline of popes & kings. It's very difficult to celebrate one half of the equation, while not noticing how the other half works. . . . . and keeping it all in mind that conservatism has a pessimistic streak that believes the world is fallen and that people generally won't make the best choices. And who said that corporations ever behaved particularly Christian, as they're only out for themselves? Without a coherent, accurate outlook, semi-intelligent men dabble over the peripherals but not the essential heart of the matter "and keep missing each other".
Mark in the meanwhile was only half-looking on, caught in a funk, and I could not readily identify with this "decoy" laid out like a wooden mallard in a duck pond. Teenagers caught in a plastic, stultified world either went "bustin' out" in a fit of rebellion or fell into a deep torpor. I couldn't imagine that my story could be all that much different. . . . .
*******************
My mother was a high-strung Jewish flake of the haggling New Jersey persuasion, a throw-back to the early 1970's of rainbows, "Earth Day", and hand-holding holistic therapy. There she would sit in a restaurant, her eyes traveling around with a vague, antsy smile on her face and compulsively twisting around a napkin. She was the stuff of bagels and cottage cheese blintzs and "kibbitzing" with her New Age meditation circle, smearing on extra jam when she thought no one was looking. Calories don't count when there's no second observer. . . . . as she'd "foo-foo" the notion of plunging your face down into a table of cocaine like a depraved comic fiend.
My father was the very opposite, slow-moving and tired who laid around in his underwear mulling on a history book, who would set to task fixing dinner at the kitchen stove-- stirring a huge steaming pot of curry-- with the lethargic practice of an elephant giving itself a dust bath, flapping its ears in the swirling earth. Life tended to be staid and predictable, and you didn't aspire to much else than finding a cool place under the shade to rest. That was the accumulated inertial wisdom of a 100% frozy Missourian, who didn't see castles in the sky. He'd just lay there, close his eyes, and grunt in non-committal at your immature, far-flung notions.
Variety was what I needed, not the sameness of my parents who were quite literally rolling the boulder in front of the cave, pulling the lid over the coffin. And here was this rigid fundamentalism Rick offered, a greasy fried-chicken lump of rural Protestantism sitting in your gut that made you queasy and sick and sleepy. What I wanted was the forces of movement, of change, and not this minister grinning at me "like a possum eating shit" telling me"to cash in my chips" with a self-assuredness that I could not readily accept, not with all the things I had seen and inherent with the blinders of such an outlook, whether mine or his-- this man could not know.
We lived in an age of cynicism-- conservatives damned people to the gunk, Christians believed you could transcend the gunk like "true believers", and liberals-- being the fools they were-- denied that there was any gunk.
Whatever we fall for, I fell for my
ex-French
teacher-- a crush, sweet and oppressive. If she had left teaching and was
sitting squarely on the tech bubble in a rented office suite, then I was wrapped
up in the fantasy that I would elope with her. In this cellblock of life filled
with crazy funhouse mirrors, party lights revolving from the ceiling and advertising jingles piped in over the speakers promising
perfect happiness in this speculative economy of "Tower of Babel" ego, you might actually get carried away with the hype of your own
magical thinking. She was a perky woman, the kind of "go-go"
cheeseflake found
in movies with far-fetched plots and long odds laid before you. . . .
. starring a cynical hero who perhaps only needed to show a little bit of faith.
In the end, they'd be together and have great, bed-breaking sex with a magical
conclusion.
Well, the paper-thin illusion breaks and there we are struggling in a reeking tar pit, all covered with filth and screaming at each other in bitter recrimination for ever having been so stupid, for having fallen prey to the lie. She for her naiveté, and me for ever having believed. You can always turn around and tell her how dumb she was for falling for "tech stock" messianism, when it was all just a poker game-- a pyramid scheme, and how she lost her ass. And then she calls me a loser, a depraved bastard for going after a married woman with kids. Then I tell her that most husbands walk out on their wives anyway. . . . . so screw me before he screws you. And so on, and so forth.
The feeling was like a torn-out stomach lining, like rotten grapefruit juice and bad gin as you sleazed around like nobody's business. And here was this namby-pamby Church that tried to feed your hunger with apple juice and animal crackers when what you wanted was a god-damned steak like a man pointing his finger down at a plate, not this cruddy offering of the feeble-minded who would never know more.
So I left them. . . . . spread my bat-wings and flew away like a demon seeking "truth".
******************
DEPRESSING CODA
They seemed like a swift bunch, all right.
Here I was, 17 years old and flappin' like a bat-caggle, hopped up like an angry, young Che Gueverra on the piteous, withered pacifist writings of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn's righteous "A People's History of the United States" and sitting in the pawned, public access room of the St. Louis county library to take up arms against our nation's draconian and ill-fated "War on Drugs". N.O.R.M.L-- or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws-- was the front line of the passionate resistance. Our existence was barely tolerated by the cop, the judge, the preacher, if not the scowling librarians shepherding the children away.
There would be no punch and cookies served by these old marms.
This, as I sat down next to a lanky, pop-eyed fellow with bad hygiene and a dirty white t-shirt, who didn't turn his head so much as swivel his entire body in constricted myopia. Blind as a bat to what made this meeting so "far out" to the mainstream, that is.
It was
a conspiracy-minded, liberal, egotistically self-justified "Oliver Stone" view of society that reveled in the
darker extremes of human experience. The CIA selling crack to the inner cities
in order to raise money for the Contras to fight the Sandistas. Brutal
right-wing dictatorships. Political activists and left-wing journalists framed
and murdered in jail. The military/industrial complex. Ronald Reagan. George
Bush. Life sentences. Prison rape. Blood on the floor. Amid the hypocrisy,
violence, and lies, the ecstasy of hot Latin sex somewhere down in Central
America on a crying floor mat.
"Fuego,
fuego",
for fire.
Most people didn't want to hear that or know that, but go about their business.
The massive cannons of the government shelling us, this was our little hill with the petty pro-pot flag like "a confederacy of dunces". And the folks who gravitated around here were either stoned out of their gourd or shell-shocked Green Party activists with skittery dispositions who reveled in horror. Or those who stood firmly in their off-kilter beliefs like dead-eyed turds. Wave your hand in front of them, and their eyes wouldn't react. Observe: The leader of the St. Louis N.O.R.M.L. chapter, flanked by a moose-like representative of the American Civil Liberties Union in a tie-dye t-shirt, equated President Bill Clinton with Adolf Hitler for the rash of drug laws passed in his term.
(Ole' Bill?!)
It occurred to me, while they were passing out yellow cards with squint-print information entitled "What You Should Do if You're Pulled Over by the Police" was that you wouldn't have anything to worry about as long as you stayed within the bounds of the law. I voiced this out loud, and got only pop-eyed stares. Clearly I hadn't been "let in" on some kind of secret ritual, like a cloaked order of squid-eyed, stick-legged brothers making their way among a grotto as a grubby, persecuted sect.
But either because of my naivetè, my gung-ho passion, or the fact that I wasn't high on paint-thinner, the fragmented, skittery organization dispatched me out to a a pro-N.O.R.M.L. fundraiser at a party-pad on the tawny, ruined floodplains of western Illinois to lecture about civil liberties. At a place called "The Grasshopper" no less, named after a hash-house in Amsterdam. I thought of Dutch youth in stocking-caps speaking in happy, well-adjusted European accents lighting joints and drinking coffee and planning marches on the behalf of Amnesty International like some kind of curio of warmness and good humor.
But I was greeted by a shirtless kid with blond dreadlocks and a goofy overbite. . . . . his ribs sticking out as he scratched his behind and sniffed the air like a hapless primate gathering food. This was the party-pad. . . . . a cinder-block garage with Grateful Dead psychedelia, giggly stoner graffiti, and the "drip, drip, drip" of leaking pipes. His fat wife, the breadwinner, sat on the floor and wove hemp clothing that she sold on the internet like a Medieval cobbler.
A little toddler girl carelessly ran around naked like somebody's fuck-toy. . . . . this would turn out to be a ten-hour party because time had no meaning around these people, and I thought they should have kept her covered in the presence of whomever drifted through the door like the refuse of society, the self-justifying fringe who sided with anything so long as it was against "The Man". The chalice, the matriarchy, the tooshie-shaking misfit, the cretin cutting a line of cocaine with a tarot card while listening to "Black Sabbath", the clicking insectivore feasting on beans and lentils, if not the excess of a society gone mad with plentitude, as empty as a can bonked off the head of my dreadlocked stoner buddy squatting down to light the charcoal for a barbeque with a row of coolers full of soda and beer adding to the good times, the spirit of back-slapping beneficence to the mostly apolitical collective.
Amid the thirty or so 16-24 year-old's who came and went throughout the day and into the night, talking amiably about nothing, I was a mental Mozart with my GED and 10th grade education, a revolutionary brined in Marxist doctrine because I sat around with a vague sense of purpose, that I should be lecturing about civil liberties or something.
The only thing the mass could agree upon with appetite was the scurrilousness of the local police who shut down their monthly parties. Once, my dreadlocked buddy with the itchy behind had mounted up a hidden camcorder in the rafters to keep tabs on the illegal raid and had rather pitifully neglected to remove the cap from the lens. Such was life among the booted stoners.
There was a leggy, blonde girl who was kind of attractive, who I halfway wanted to romance, until she began talking in this vaguely Sesame Street-like voice about her daily adventures on the tawny flood plains of "Trashville":
"One time I pee'ed in a bag, and put the toilet paper in the bag, and carried it around with me".
"I sat up in a tree and saw my friend go by. She stopped and looked around and had no idea that I was looking at her. Then she walked on".
"Ha! I wanted to throw the bag at her, but I didn't because she's my friend!"
Three shaven-headed dumb-asses sat on a broken-down couch, a noise-core band that drove all the way down from Cleveland and sat in the corner like an out-state tribe. Later that night, they put out music that sounded like a sagging rectum getting shredded with a chainsaw. With thumping drums.
"They suck!" was the fist-clenching consensus as some big ox in a 4 XL t-shirt bonked his head up and down alone on the dance floor.
The
only one who threw a gamble at my money was the Manson-like figure who billed himself as the owner
and ringmaster of a traveling freak show circus. Sword swallower's, fire eaters, and the triple-jointed-- the
sort of figures that langoured outside of canvas tents on carnival midways and
had a smoke in really horrible gothic movies, reveling in the seamy side of
life where sex was furtive and iguana-like and taken up with complete
abandonment.
32 years old but not looking a day over 27, he had a mystique about him-- one that leaned back and spelled out bleak, feasible reality with a world-weary air. Doubtlessly, he had been hustled along by the unfriendly local authorities before as he took over my job of explaining civil liberties like a street veteran of poetry and Ethan Hawke-like performance art, the girls sitting at his feet like he was Charlie himself. I think he said that he wrote and starred in several independent films. . . . .
He made me feel inadequate.
What was I-- come to think of it-- but a lame, lost, half-Jewish upper middle-class kid whose crime was not being made of the stuff of the dubious arts? Having parents who cared for me and never gave me the opportunity to morph into a wild latch-key kid hanging out with meth-addicted skate-rats listening to "The Red Hot Chili Peppers"? And the bottomless sin of all, not having the soul of a fly-zapping gilla monster who could "front an attitude"? It was so unfair!
So when some veteran N.O.R.M.L. members suggested that
"some of us go for a ride" I leapt at the chance, having a feeling that if I stayed for much longer I would have began muttering in a hoarse, guttural German."Great! A Ride! Where we going fellahs? To get a hamburger? A milkshake?" But lanky and pop-eyed, wearing dirty white t-shirts, they wouldn't answer. . . .
So we loaded up in the kind of beat-to-shit car that only an impoverished member of the Green Party would drive, and roamed among the back roads of Western Illinois. Whether Clinton was in office or not, or had been for the last six years, this part of the state was still a godforsaken, unincorporated shit-hole that no amount of folksy "big government" could quite touch, and the pittance tossed at the problem was like a half-eaten cheeseburger that the locals "just kind of stared at" in the dirt before a scavenger ran off with it, licking its chops like the hyena of corruption grinnin' on. And on account of gang activity in Chicago, the drug laws were even more strict and draconian. . . . . a looming graveside where stood "The Gangster Disciples" like "The Nubian Brotherhood of Eternal Sleep".
So it was to my dismay when they lit a joint and passed it around from person to person, front seat to backseat in communal ritual with shaking, skittery fingers. I didn't inhale. . . . . because with rights come responsibilities, and if you wanted to keep your voice credible as a law-abiding organization you don't flout the law. especially out in state trooper's grounds coming from **WHERE ELSE?!** but a pro-marijuana party sponsored by your very glue-huffing organization of clarinet-voiced losers.
A once vibrant left-wing movement from the 1960's had turned into a pummeled caricature of itself-- gray and stringy like rat meat. A dumpy apartment, a sink full of crusting dishes, a huffing doofus of a man with his chin cast down giving you undignified "pairing up" prison bitch tips for surviving in the state's custody, wearing a makeshift bra and lipstick in a cell as a 400 pound "Bubba" ordered you around. Posters of "The Dawning of Aquarius", Wiccan spell books, UFO videos, and a rather tasteless exhibition of sex toys paraded out like a 1930's stamp collection as he and his lover nodded on with the cloud-eyed variety.
I needed this like I needed a Democrat in office and went home.
*******************
"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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