Biscello Ink

Happy in the Dark

2010-08-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "My Life in Movies," a work-in-progress)

I take my seat in the mostly empty theater. Outside, it is a bright windy day, but I am happy to have had the brightness and wind eclipsed when I walked through the doors of the movie-house. There is something perversely satisfying about the disappearance of the daybright world, particularly when it is a movie-house or bar that is responsible for the hijacking.

This is my third visit to the movie-house this week. The movie-house, located in the Mission District, San Francisco, is one of those classic movie-houses on the verge of becoming an endangered species. There is no stadium seating in this theater, no obnoxiously amped sound system, no franchise-tendered popcorn shrimp or breaded chicken strips available at the concession stand.

The screen, like the theater itself, is of modest dimensions. The concession booth offerings, modest as well: a half-dozen different candies, popcorn served with real butter, soft drinks, coffee and tea. When I entered the movie-house I ordered a coffee and small popcorn with extra butter. The young man behind the counter served me and said—Enjoy your movie—and I could tell he really meant it. The young man struck me as a movie buff who was absolutely thrilled to be working a concession booth at a classic movie-house.

Young man, you are snug inside your dream, stay there as long as you can—I wanted to say to the young man, but only said thanks and went into the theater.

It is a Tuesday and I should be out looking for a job. That’s the reason I am here, in San Francisco. My wife and three-year-old daughter are presently living with my wife’s mother in Baton Rouge, waiting for me to find a job, then send for them, so we can start our new life in San Francisco. Until I found a job, one that would support all three of us, our new life, together, would be on hold.

I am staying with friends, who live five blocks away from the movie-house. I have been in San Francisco three weeks, and the first week I looked for a job with determination and enthusiasm, and by the second week my determination and enthusiasm had waned, or rather had been redirected to other areas of interest: mostly bars, and the classic movie-house.

When I talked to my wife on the phone to report my progress, I made sure to omit the frequency of my visits to the bars and the movie-house. Mt wife had lived in San Francisco once before, as had I, and she said: San Francisco can be a tough place to find work. I had her sympathy, for a while anyway, which was good.

On this day, the movie showing was Prozac Nation. Christina Ricci was playing the pill-addicted, suicide-fringed writer, Elizabeth Wurtzel. I hadn’t read the book, but I enjoyed the photo of Wurtzel on the cover. She reminded me of a lost waif, , a Sylvia Plath pin-up girl, and this photo of hers had inspired a number of fantasies, always set off by the line—I want to fuck Elizabeth Wurtzel—as if the green-light cue voiced from off-stage. The sad girls, the ones with the gummy insides and rainy mirrors always got to me. This may or may not have been Elizabeth Wurtzel, but the fantasy surrogate I had spawned from the “idea” of Elizabeth Wurtzel was the one with whom I conducted my shadow-play affair.

The lights in the theater go down. I notice that the young man from the concession booth has taken a seat in the back row. I am tempted to ask him if he’s read Prozac Nation, and what he thought of the cover photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel, but the urge flits past and I remain seated, munching my popcorn.

The movie begins, and with it arrives my temporary pardon from the daybright reality outside the movie-house.

I’ll look for work as soon as I leave the movie-house, I think, then remember it will be happy hour at Jelly Roll’s, the bar across the street, when the movie lets out.

Tomorrow. I’ll definitely look for work tomorrow.

No Runway Required

2010-08-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

crapshooting among the stars,
the supermodel impressed her peers
and public-at-large
when, suddenly,
out of runway
to strut upon,
she began
walking on air,
solidly,

a minor miracle
of resourcefulness,

for without a runway
to support all-she-was,
her steps
would have fallen
without an echo,
nor applause—
and then what?

The Double-Crosser

2010-08-10T15:17:00.001-07:00

One day, while lost on a trail
in deep, dark woods, I met my Double
and his cross, and they were heading back
to the place
from where I had come.

Where are you going, I asked him,

and he shook his head, then thrust out his cross,
which I was reluctant to take,
but he stuck it in my face,
so I took it and walked on,
with my Double
following closely
behind.

Knocking on Silence

2010-08-10T14:49:00.001-07:00

Writing often feels like knocking on silence. Like, I’m at some mysterious stranger’s door and it is raining outside and I am wet and rumpled (inside and out), hoping the door will open and I will be let in.
Knock-knock.
No answer.
Knock-knock-knock.
Still no answer.
Knockknockknockknockknock.
Great sense of urgency and desperation.
And so no-answer stings just a little bit more. That is, the more you want in, the more no-response stings.
A little bit of ache, a little bit of longing. What can you do?
First off, you can stop knocking, you damn fool.
Who’s that, where’s that voice coming from?
No answer.
Goddamn, the entire tiny universe you seem to be trapped in is loaded with silence. It is a timeless place of hard knocks and no-responses.
What kind of place is this? Is this the tower, the tenement, the universe you’ve created?
And so I ask myself a lot of questions myself and I write. I knock on silence, religiously.
Silence is my big brother—my big and sometimes overbearing and monstrously invisible brother.
Come on silence, let’s sing together. Let’s dream our little dreams under a big black dome of an umbrella, and listen to the rainfall repeat-pelting its nylon skin.
Let us recount:
Something precious, something borrowed, something blue, something lost, something true.

There has been so much knocking on silence,
it has become the ultimate knock-knock joke.

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Writer.
Writer why?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Writer.
Writer why?

And on and on, endless repetitions and ribbons of silence.
Like razors.
Like boils.
Like blisters.

Like the means by which mercy tries and tries, and fails, to relieve itself
of dreaming.

Pink Sweater

2010-08-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Skinny on faith and far-fetched of heart, he petted the dog, realizing that the leash around the dog's neck made it as if he were touching her, the owner.

She was lonely. He could tell. He was always good at sniffing out people's loneliness.

The more affectionately he petted the dog, the more the woman felt touched, needed.

I can't believe there's a dog between us--an overpuffed cloud of a wall wearing a ridiculous pink sweater. Is this what human connection has come to?

He had to laugh, though he didn't.

ancient chinese love song

2010-08-03T15:18:00.001-07:00

if i were
an ancient chinese poet
carting a rain-flooded wheelbarrow
or rowing a boat
across a wind-tunneled lake—
things would be different

i would be ancient
and chinese
and would eat
heart-shaped poems
and the poems i wrote
about my sorrow
and my longing
would make my sorrow
and my longing
into something different
than what they are now

something greater

and i would be different
from what
or who I am now
i would be ancient
and chinese
i would be a special kind of river
singing myself to sleep
every night

i would be
the moon
dreaming of darkest mists
to lose myself
and my shine in

i would be ancient
and chinese
and so full of poems
i’d pop
leaving behind only
a pair of floating lips
with a sad easy smile
so as to show the world
just how much poet
the air can hold

Cadillacs in Heaven

2010-07-29T12:16:00.001-07:00

He’d be there, day after day, all summer long: Old Man Red in his baggy trousers, and short-sleeved button-down shirts, seated on his beach chair stationed on the top of his stoop.
The brown-banded, beige fisherman hat that he wore would be pulled down low, half-screening his eyes, and his bushy white moustache looked like a small animal presided over by the stand-out feature on his face: his bulbous, pastry-puff of a nose.
We, the boys of summer, would be in the street playing wiffle-ball. We had spray-painted bases and foul lines, and every year, as part of our opening day ritual, we would re-do the bases and foul-lines. We’d buy our wiffle-balls and plastic yellow bats at the pharmacy around the corner.
The plastic white wiffle-balls came in black-and-orange boxes and the image of a famous pitcher would always appear on the box (back in those days: Jim Palmer, Nolan Ryan, Mike Scott).
The wiffle-balls had slits cut in a circular pattern around the top half of the ball, and we would execute all kinds of curveballs, sliders and splitters, by shifting our arm angles, with vigorous plasticity, and applying various grips. When it came to the bats, we would cut a hole in the top of them, then stuff the hollowed-out insides of the bat with newspaper, adding density. Then we would cover our bats from top to bottom in black electric tape, giving them a menacing look.
Old Man Red was a “regular” at our games, and was extremely vocal. He would heckle us in his gravelly, good-natured tone, often shouting through cupped hands: Come on, you bum, you want me to get up there and show you how it’s done, or, Are you a pitcher or a belly-itcher … you a batter or a back-scratcher?
Yet Red’s most famous line, the one which he said at least once a game: You hit a home run and I’ll buy you a Cadillac.
We never knew which one of us he was going to say it to, nor when he was going to say it. And if you did hit a home run in that at-bat, which only happened several times over the years, and asked for the Cadillac, Red would say something like—Forget the Cadillac, you hit two home runs, I’ll buy you a limo!
When Old Man Red passed, there was a silence to the games that was noticeable. Season after season, there was something about counting on that never-to-be-fulfilled-promise of winning a Cadillac from Red that added extra zip and crackle to our games.
One game, when I swatted three H.R.’s in three successive at-bats, Andy said: Red would’ve got you an airplane, Pips.
I smiled, rounding the bases.

Ella

2010-07-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Just Another Hero," a story-in-progress)

When I found out I got the job the first person I called was Ella. She had gone back to Baton Rouge to stay with her mother and that’s who answered the phone.
I don’t know if Ella’s available, she said in a clipped tone, and as I waited on the line I heard the two of them, their voices distant and muffled, arguing about something.
Ella was very close to her mother, who had raised Ella by herself. Ella’s father had left with another woman when Ella was two and she had never heard from him again. Her mother refused to talk about him, referring to him only as The Bastard, and Ella had no memories of him. There were several photos of a tall man with a brown moustache holding a baby swaddled in a pink blanket, but Ella felt no connection to these photos. The man could have been any man, the baby any baby.
I hadn’t known my father either—he died from a heroin overdose when I was one—and late at night, in bed together, Ella and I had often played this game where we’d imagine our Other Fathers, the ones whose histories and characters we would invent. We created many variations of Fathers, depending on that night’s mood and desire.
Anyway, Ella told her mother everything, even if it meant criticism or chastisement, which it often did. Suffice it to say, Ella’s mother thought very little of me. A grown man without a proper job and without a sense of responsibility was no man at all, in her mother’s estimation.
The voices stopped and I heard the phone being lifted.
Hello, came Ella’s voice.
Heyyy, I said, with warmth and good cheer.
What do you want, Ella said, minus warmth and good cheer.
Instantly I felt discouraged but kept on.
Nothing, I just wanted to . . . I don’t know, catch up a little bit. How’s it going down there?
Fine, Ella said, which came across—Faiinn—and I said: I see your Southern accent’s come back.
Yea, she said softly, without interest.
There was a tense pause and I felt unable to bring up the job.
Are you working, I asked her.
Yea, I got a job waitressing at a diner. A place I used to eat at a lot when I was younger.
When I met Ella she had been working as a waitress at a trendy New York diner. I had been working a temp job doing a flyer mail-out for a restaurant chain, and had gone to the diner to eat after work. Ella was my waitress and I was instantly magnetized to her. I felt her in my gut right away. She was tall with long dark hair, a dark uniform, and sad eyes that were yellow-green.
I went to the diner every day after work, blowing all the money I had on overpriced meals, just so I could see her. And observe her in action. One element of attraction for me: Ella always seemed preoccupied with something that had nothing to do with whatever was going on around her, a subtle fixation on something hidden and remote. There was that and the fact that her left eye was a tick off to the left, what she considered a defect (Ella was relentlessly self-critical when it came to her so-called defects: her skin was too pale, her breasts too small, her thighs too thick) and I considered a point of intrigue and arousal.
It was about two weeks later, the last day of my temp gig, that I worked up the nerve to ask her out. Her response, which we’d often laugh about later on, when we were a couple, was somewhat surprising: You want to go out with me?
It was almost as if it were inconceivable to her that someone would want to go on a date with her. Ella possessed a haunting beauty, the kind that allures and intimidates, yet she didn’t see herself that way at all. She hated mirrors and tried to avoid ever seeing her reflection. On the flipside, she had come to New York to become an actress, to be seen as an actress, and was consumed with becoming a great one. By the end of our relationship, though, she had mostly stopped acting and had been working full-time as a sales rep for a health and beauty magazine.
You coming back to New York at some point, I asked her.
I don’t know she said, sounding tired, as if the very mention of New York instantly drained her.
I didn’t know if it was because Ella was talking to me, or if it was because her life had gone full circle in a way that was vicious and disappointing—having to return home at age thirty and work at the same diner where she had often eaten as a young girl—but I could tell that she had withdrawn into one of her brooding melancholy states. The gravity of Ella’s sadness, which at times seemed bottomless, had worked like a drug on me from the beginning: it made me want her, made me worry about her, made me crazy and weak and desperate—it was as if Ella’s sadness was not her own, but mine, reflected back to me through this woman who wasn’t there at all. Now that she had withdrawn, and was far away from me, I felt responsible and useless. I was a voice running on empty and all the words I spoke lacked the power to change anything.
Yet I couldn’t hang up and was about to continue with my superficial investigation when Ella suddenly spoke, sharply: Why are you calling Emilio? We’re done with. What do you want?
I don’t want anything, I said.
Yes, Emilio, you always want something. You’re a taker.
Maybe that’s what I wanted, I thought, for Ella to tell me off, for her to give it to me.
I wanted to tell you I got a job, I said.
Good for you, she said, with pointed sarcasm.
I ignored it and went on: Yea it’s a pretty cool gig. I get to play Spider Man. That is, I’m gonna be Spider Man in a toystore. Until Christmas.
I waited for Ella to say something—nothing, air and silence—then: Did you keep the apartment?
No I’m staying with Gus for now. Just for a little while, y’know.
Um-humh, she said. Well good luck with the job, Emilio, and tell Gus I said hello, and . . . I don’t know what else . . . I guess take care.
Not a trace of warmth or interest. I felt like I was talking to a soul-less facsimile of Ella.
Ahrite, good luck to you too. Oh wait, Ella . . . you still there?
Yea.
I forgot to tell you. Yesterday I passed this guy on the sidewalk selling books and I got you a copy of Chekhov’s Collected Plays. I know you probably have all his stuff, but this is a really cool dog-eared copy with lots of character. Where should I send it?
Ella thanked me, gave me her mother’s mailing address, and hung up.

St. Augustine's Dog

2010-07-28T13:33:00.001-07:00

“All writers of confession, from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins”—Anatole France

What about the fact that you’re homeless and you’re about to lose your daughter?
Alice had a good point and I liked the fact that she got that point across without sticking it in too hard. There was a diplomacy in her tone, an easy half-smile on her lips.
I was two days removed from my bender and had the frayed nerves, the haunted feeling, all of it. My friend Max called it The Spooks. My friend J.C. called it Getting the Ghost. Everybody had their own name for it, their own take on it, but what it basically boiled down to: you felt like you were walking around with your skin inside-out. In that respect, Alice’s presence was comforting.
She had arrived fifteen minutes earlier at Global Joe’s, our coffeeshop hangout, in her piece-of-shit, rust-acned Ford. She finagled around the motorcycles, which colonized the parking lot. Sundays at Joe’s was like church day for the bikers. They’d gather outside on the benches and drink their coffees and smoke their cigarettes and deliver sermons about their bikes and the rides they had taken and the rides they were going to take and their talk was charged with religious romanticism. I’d watch them in the parking lot, circling around and weaving between bikes, revering the sleek body of a Kawasaki or salivating over the classic make of a Triumph. The look in their eyes, their slow, soak-it-all-in movements, reflected their secret hard-ons. These bikes were their other women: mistresses whose noises and outbursts they could control, whose gears they could manipulate. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if one of these men unzipped in the parking lot, stuck his dick in one of the curvier tailpipes, turned the key, and revved the engine until his fantasy was sucked right out of him.
What are you thinking about, Alex, came Alice’s voice, bringing me back.
Men and their bikes. It’s like an orgy out here, isn’t it?
Alice scanned the bikes then said: Which one would you fuck?
Bikes don’t do it for me.
I know, but if you had to fuck one. Which would it be?
Drunk or sober?
I’ll assume if you’re fucking a motorcycle, you’re probably drunk.
That one.
I pointed to a candy-apple-red one.
Alice nodded. Nice. So red does it for you?
Some red.
Like the red of, let’s say, Ella?
Alice smiled. Ella was my ex-wife and Alice’s friend.
In her most natural state, Ella’s more of an auburn I’d say.
You’d know better than I would.
Alice gave a short laugh and circle-rubbed my back. Her hand on my back felt good, as if her palm was secreting a tonic directly into my nerves.
Alice and I had been friends for several years, though in the beginning I didn’t like her. I thought there was a fakeness to her, a put-on version of herself that she was trying too hard to sell. I was not a fan of the hard sell so I hung out with Alice without giving away any parts of me. Then, over time and in bits and pieces, Alice revealed what or who was behind the salesmanship, and in bits and pieces I revealed myself and in this way we became real friends.
Alice was known for her nice tits, ultra-sharp wit, and for talking too much. Obviously there was a lot more to Alice then these things, but at Joe’s, where everyone idled away time in the morning gossiping and bullshitting, these three came up often in relation to Alice. I felt lucky to know Alice for other things as well, such as the bigness of her heart. It was a warm and accommodating heart that could be cave-like, if you needed sanctuary and refuge, or an open kitchen if you needed feeding and nourishment. It could also be a roller-coaster, still waters, or a hall of mirrors in which you could get lost.
Big and varied as Alice’s heart was, I thought it matched nicely with her tits. I liked things in threes, and Alice’s two tits and a heart obliged my fetish. I imagined them as a trinity rich in symbolism, ripeness, and mother’s-milk. Or fixed points of meditation through which a trance-like state could be attained.

Mini-movie played out in my mind

Are you staring at my tits, Alex?
No, Alice, I’m staring at your heart. I’m staring into it.
Very Nietzche meets Hugh Heffner.
I was thinking the Tin Man meets Russ Meyer.

—End of Movie—

All Things Considered

2010-07-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

I would like to write the way Chaplin slapsticked.
Or the way Lady Day slow-jazzed: fine razors slicking velvet.
An uncorked combination of pratfalls, banana-peel splits, pathos,
mournful crawls across cold wooden floors,
and laughter and love and awe.
I want to write the way the moon
smiles down golden-milky benedictions,
the way the moon grins in the shape of a sickle,
I want to write the moon in the way the Romantics romanced it.

To write like this, I must return time and again,
to the creed: Play is Serious Business (see: Children).
I want to write
the way the writing takes me over,
the happily possessed scratching glyphs in hard earth.
My nails should get dirty, very dirty, and crack.
My cuticles should turn to tan-brown moons.
The skin on my knees should tear. The blood
from my torn knees should wind up
commingling with the dirt on my
dirty cracked fingernails.

It should be like playing a baseball game, all-out, nine innings.
It should be like the halcyon days of sandbox paradise.
It should be, as the song said—christ on crutches—
and seeing this crippled son-of-god, propped on crutches,
struggling to get up and over a hill,
should prove inspiring.

It should be light, playful, hard, jagged.
It must contain joy.
It must contain sadness.

I want to write in the way Chaplin slapsticked,
or the way Lady Day slow-jazzed:
I want to write as if forever
and ever
paying tribute
to all things considered.

Buffet

2010-07-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

I
stare down
at the cold crawfish
lying on the edge of my plate,
pretending to enjoy a lunch date
at Louisiana’s voted best buffet
with my pregnant ex-girlfriend.
Neither one of us
has much to say.
She scribbles notes
about next semester’s school curriculum,
while I write lazy poems
about salad forks and belligerence.

A child will come between us:
any day, any moment now.

Head down, she continues writing.
I stop
to spear a crawfish
with the middleprong of my fork:
cold
and metal
charging my tongue.

Legendary Filmmaking

2010-07-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

"I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life--This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours"

Kerouac, "Tristessa"

Doorway (or, Which Way Out?)

2010-07-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

She had all the trappings
of a doorknob glazed with honey,
so when he touched her
and turned,
he couldn’t remove his hand
from an object of desire,
signaling
entrance and departure.

The Bartender

2010-07-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

I'm just a bartender, he told me.
I like to drink and shoot darts and get laid. That's what I like. I'm a bartender at the Angel's Vice Den. You know the place?

I shook my head. Yea I know it.

Yea, I bartend there. I drink when I work, the owners are cool as shade, they don't give a shit, long as you're doing your job. I work and I drink, then when my shift is over, I drink some more, and if I'm lucky I get laid.
Almost all women are beautiful to me. Almost all of them.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

2010-07-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Anne Sexton: tall and lovely and dead,
and I, turning the knob, want to get in
and fuck her, but cannot,
because she is dead.
So really, I wanted to, past tense.

The point being:
how I wanted to fuck her, how—
Now, telling you about the biography I just read
on Anne Sexton: a poet, tall and lovely, who chain-smoked
and is now dead (by her own hand,
proving we claim stars when we can)

and why can’t I stop thinking about
how I am alive, how,
and she, the poet, Anne Sexton is dead,
and if we traded places—
a gravesite for a clean silver spade:
would she be the one
reading a biography about me,
and mooning for a twilight lay
with a dead writer?

These are the sort of questions
which keep me up at night,
and keep me reading biographies
about writers
dead and open to whatever.

Next?

2010-07-16T13:44:00.001-07:00

A dancer's sad dream:
a flight, short-lived,
returning to earth, sharp teeth.

Crack Whore Blues

2010-07-16T13:19:00.000-07:00

Through the rain
I heard her cry:
Lawd, I tried,
you know I tried
to keep the Fates
out among the Mist,
but now, look at me—
corpse-drawn lips,
cartoon-popped eyes,
and a stuttering gait,
she walked along Mission & 16th
then took hold of a blind man’s arm, whispering:
Five dollars, daddy, and I’ll suck your dick.

Last Thought, First Thought

2010-07-16T13:03:00.001-07:00

Lying on his death-bed,
about to breathe his final breath,
Mr. X thought—I’d love some chocolate ice cream—
and thus, set himself up to be reborn,
and suffer for the sweet he desired,
presently,
melting.

This Just In

2010-07-16T12:41:00.001-07:00

“To go out strolling these days, while puffing one’s tobacco, while dreaming of evening pleasures, seems a century behind the times. We are not the sort to refuse all knowledge of the customs of another age; but in our strolling, let us not forget our rights and our obligations as citizens. The times are necessitous, they demand all our attention, all day long.”

(from, a Paris newspaper, Le Flaneur, the first and possibly only issue, May 3rd, 1848)

Basho in the 21st Century

2010-07-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

bold frog jumps into pond
—SPLASH!—
makes the front page
as he stars
in his own blog
read by millions.

Nobody's on Second

2010-07-13T14:06:00.001-07:00

She told me I was crazy.
It would be like trying to have your shadow arrested for following you, or taking out a restraining order against it.
Then Edie made her voice baritone-thick with authority: Shadow, you have been court-ordered to not come within fifty feet of this man. Izzat clear?
Edie laughed. I loved when Edie made fun of me. It made me feel closer to her, and less alone.
Well what can I do, I asked her.
Edie’s eyes ballooned with disbelief: Are you serious? There’s nothing that can be done. You know that. Need I remind you that you’re the one who engaged him in the first place.
Yea, yea, I know. I guess … it seemed like a good idea at the time. No, not a good idea … a necessary one.
Well, Edie said, now you’re stuck with him. You said the assignment was a lifetime commitment, right?
Do you remember everything I tell you?
I listen.
In a world of me-me-me gabbers, a most excellent quality to possess.
Thank you. And … you repeat yourself often enough. Especially when it comes to him.
Well, if you had someone following you around 24-7, marking down every move you make, recording every gesture in a notebook, watching you, watching with those eyes—
That dark penetrating gaze of his—
What … you in love with him?
In love? I’ve never even seen him. You’re the one who goes on and on about that dark penetrating gaze of his.
Yea, yea. I guess you go for the dark, mysterious type, hah?
Like any other living, breathing, hot-blooded woman.
It’s weird, Edie. I feel so small and so insignificant in comparison to him, yet his entire existence hinges upon me. Without me, there is no him.
That seems to be the way it’s set up.
What do you mean … seems to be?
I don’t know. Do you ever consider that it works both ways. That without him, there’d be no you.
That’s not possible. Is it? I mean he exists sort of like a … what is he … a stalker, a witness … or a recording device. That’s all he is, all he does. He has no other interests, serves no other purpose.
And you, what purpose are you serving?
I don’t know. C’mon, Edie, you’re getting all back-alley existential on me.
Back-alley existential. I like that. Well said, well said. But you’ve got to admit, Alex, this foray into back-alley existentialism began with you complaining about being tracked, harassed and followed by … who exactly?
Yes, Who.
Is on first?
Yes.
Who is on first?
Yes, Who.
Is on first?
Yes.
Who?
Edie pretended to strangle me and started to laugh.
It seems, Alex, you’ve got two options. Either, A. You learn how to laugh your ass off about the whole thing, or, B. Drive yourself completely and irredeemably mad.
Why can’t it be both?
Nobody said it can’t be both.
And is Nobody the one who’s on second?

Why So Sad, Cuckoo Bird?

2010-07-12T20:17:00.000-07:00

“What I possess, I see as in the distance,
and what is vanished becomes my reality.”

—Goethe, “Faust”

Ever since I can remember I’ve been affected by what I call Premature Nostalgia. A definition of Premature Nostalgia: mourning or grieving, or experiencing a deep sense of loss, a profound wistfulness, either before something happens or while it is happening.
Example: I am involved in a lovely affair with a lovely girl and I know that our affair exists within an abbreviated time-frame. So while we are in the midst of our the affair, its trembling center, while I am loving her or holding her, kissing her or deep-sea-dreaming in her eyes, I am, at the same time, missing her. She is already gone while she’s there. It is a presence which simultaneously contains absence as part of its ghostly groundwork.
I grieve for what is gone, what has left me, while I possess it, yet perversely enjoy what I possess while grieving. None of the feelings are mutually exclusive, they’re all bound up together in a quivering bundle.

Many years back I remember eating a sandwich—turkey, cheese and mustard—that my grandmother had made for me, when I was traveling from New York to wherever it was I was headed.
I was in Penn Station, sitting down, propped against an iron pillar, and I unwrapped my sandwich from its tin foil casing(the sandwich now smooshed up and bleeding mustard around the edges), and before I even took my first bite—just holding that sandwich, feeling it in my hand, staring at it—the sandwich was gone … my grandmother, gone … and suddenly a wash of tender sadness, a liquid lament, coursed through me, and when I took my first bite of that sandwich, it tasted so good, good in a way that made me feel grateful and happy and want to cry.
I had often asked myself: What exactly was this curious sensation that touched me in what felt like a deeply profound way?
Then one day I discovered the term—Mono No Aware—and realized that this was the spiritual counterpart to Premature Nostalgia.

Mono No Aware is a Japanese term, not so much a creed or concept as it is a sense-of-life. Here are several definitions:

1. Sensitivity to the sadness of impermanence.
2. A gentle, sorrow-tinged appreciation of transitory beauty.
3. A sense of Beauty intensified by the impermanence of things.
4. An emotion of tender affection in which there is both passion and sympathy … in such moments the sentiment is instinctively felt, for in them joy mingles with a kind of agreeable melancholy.

I was struck deep-down and flush when I first read that—an agreeable melancholy. Not sad in a bad or negative sense—a sadness born of being human, of feeling human—tender and resigned, supple and bittersweet, the twilight of one’s inner nature, a choir born to sing the blues.
The following are some examples in Japanese literature which characterize the spirit of Mono No Aware. The first is a passage from “Essays in Idleness,” a fifteenth century work penned by a man named Kenko.
“Are we look to at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be aware of the passing of spring—these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. In all things it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”—

Next up a poem from Zen poet, Ryokan.

“Early summer—floating down a clear running river
in a wooden boat,
A lovely girl gently plays with a crimson lotus flower
held in her white hands.
The day becomes more and more brilliant.
Young men play along the shore
And a horse runs by the willows.
Watching, quietly, speaking to no one,
The beautiful girl does not show that her heart is broken.”

And lastly, a creature and its song, emblematic of Mono No Aware.

“The song of the hototogisu, the little Japanese cuckoo, is usually heard at dusk. It is considered not only beautiful, but also slightly sad; other names for the hototogisu are—“bird of the other world,” and “bird of disappointed love.”

Cat's in the Cradle

2010-07-09T17:21:00.001-07:00

You can’t be a pussy in this neighborhood. If you’re a pussy, they’ll sniff you out and fuck with you.
I wondered what I smelled like. I sniffed my skin all over. Did I smell like a pussy? Was I one? How could I tell? What could I do to de-pussify myself?
I never asked my father these questions. I figured silence was the best way to go. As long as I stayed silent, stayed inside myself, either, A. I’d eventually learn things by listening and watching, or B. I wouldn’t find out much and would stop caring.
I’m not even sure what it was I was hiding. It always felt like I was hiding a lot. I couldn’t detail each thing, I just felt … stuffed with secrets. You keep stuffing everything in the trunk, time passes, and you don’t know what’s in the trunk anymore, you just know there’s a lot of shit in there, it’s overstuffed. Simple as that.
That was one thing, not knowing if I’d qualify as a pussy or not, so I did what I had to do to avoid sniff-detection. Sometimes getting into fights. Sometimes tap-dancing my way into and out of and around things. Avoid pussy-sniff-detection at all costs. These are dogs with hyper-sensitive schnozzes. They’ll find you and tear you to pieces. And there was writing. Where I was nothing and everything all at once. There was that.
Again, my father: They’re all the same these women. As long as you’re bringing home money … once you’re not, you never hear the end of it.
And: They’re all the same if you turn ‘em upside down.
He had said that in front of my girlfriend at the time, Jeannie. She didn’t say anything to him, but when we got home she said to me: Your father is such an asshole. Did you hear what he said about women … if you turn us upside down.
Yea, I said, then confessed: I don’t even know what he meant.
What he meant was, if you turn us upside down and our skirts are up….
Yea?
What are you dense? We’re all just holes. We’re all pussies.
Oh, I said.
Everything seemed to revolve around pussy with my father. Don’t get sniffed out as a pussy, don’t act like a pussy, all women are pussies. Pussy, pussy, pussy.
Which might explain why, when he left that apartment (after my mother had left him), he left behind our cat, Misha, to starve and fend for herself.

At No Extra Cost

2010-07-09T15:53:00.001-07:00

In my well-ordered mind, I am a famous writer living in a famous room, and I have a famous table and a famous lamp with a very famous light bulb screwed into the lamp.
My girlfriend is not-so-famous, or rather my fame overshadows her fame, which is the direct offspring of my fame. In other words there would be no fame for her if not for me.
She tells me, time and again, that would be perfectly fine with her, perfectly fine.
Perfectly fine is one of her favorite phrases and she uses it quite often. Like: this chicken is perfectly fine, or, tonight’s love-making was perfectly fine. You’d think in my well-ordered mind that my not-so-famous girlfriend would say something other than—perfectly fine—but it goes to show that even well-ordered minds are not failsafe.
Anyway, because of my fame, I go out to eat at nice restaurants that serve excellent food—I eat Italian, French, Moroccan, Greek, Ethiopian—I eat and I eat and my not-so-famous girlfriend is usually my companion at these restaurants, and she eats and eats—oh, that lamb was fine, perfectly fine … the babaganoush, fine, perfectly fine—and even though I eat and eat there is a hunger in me too great for food, too great for fame, too great itself, too great, too great—and I know that in or out of my well-ordered mind, I will never ever be satisfied, that satisfaction is the most brittle of pipe dreams, possessing a thin, reedy quality.
No satisfaction—never, ever—and that has become my nature, both in and out of my well-ordered mind, and this strange dissatisfaction keeps me: A. Yearning, B. Longing, C. Desperate, and these three things combined form my Holy Trinity, a golden rod with a serpent’s head and a faceless prostrate man, naked and arthritically twisted, my holy trinity which I bless and bless and bless, amen.
And what of my fame, and my not-so-famous girlfriend, and famous lamp and super-famous light bulb illuminating this well-ordered room which I inhabit, which inhabits me … what of it, when I am away, when I am not able to immerse myself, fully—where does it go, what of its value, if any, what becomes of its alleged significance?
These questions I ask myself only when I am outside of it, but when I’m in, when I’m good and deep and in, I simply enjoy the fringe-benefits of a well-ordered, imperfect mind.

Hemingway in the Rain

2010-07-09T15:24:00.001-07:00

The first time I saw Hemingway, he was seated at a table on his terrace overlooking the train station. It was raining that day and I was waiting on the platform opposite the terrace. I chanced to look up and saw a man—firm and solid in his movements, sporting a dark moustache, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe—slide open a glass door and step onto the terrace.
He removed the newspaper, which was tucked under his arm, and umbrella-held it over his head as he made his way from the doorway to the table. Later, upon reflection, I found it strange that a man like Hemingway—a bruiser, a tough guy, a man’s man who consciously promoted his machismo—would place a newspaper over his head to avoid getting wet. The walk from the doorway to the table was less than five feet, meaning he would have gotten rained on for a second or two: why so careful?
The raindrops came down like dashes, like finely rendered slits in the air. In between these slits, I saw what looked like a torn picture: a man seated at a table, beneath the dome of green umbrella, reading the newspaper, unfolded, held at a distance from his face, staring solemnly at the print—no sign of emotion or shift in his expression—just a stoic, dead-ahead gaze.
Before flipping to a new page, he would ruffle the paper a few times, what seemed a habitual tic. I stared at this man and didn’t know it was Hemingway until Hadley came out carrying a tray with food, and she made her way from the doorway to the table without covering her head. She gave Hemingway a nod and slight smile and set the tray down on the table, as Hemingway set down the pipe he was smoking, rose, and pecked Hadley on the cheek.
That’s when I knew it was Hemingway, not sure why it came to me in that moment, but I knew for certain that it was Hemingway and Hadley who, inexplicably, had wound up out of time and place, and were occupying an apartment that flanked the 18th Avenue train station, where I caught the train every day. Seeing the two of them, together, in the rain, on the terrace, gave me a quiet hopeful feeling.
I savored the scene, as I waited for the train which would take me to my girlfriend’s apartment in the city, if indeed she was still my girlfriend. She had told me that she didn’t know if she could do it anymore, if she wanted to do it, and I told her that I understood, and in a way I did, same as in a way I didn’t.

The Shirt On His Back

2010-07-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

She began,
without looking at him,
to straighten his shirt,
fastidiously shaking it
right
beneath the collar.
This action made him tremble,
nearly weep.

Once Bitten, Twice Removed

2010-07-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

The tiny speckle-backed black spider
dangled acrobatically from a transparent
thread.
The boy set down his pen
and studied its graceful descent,
and when its spindly legs touched
down
upon his desk,
his mind raced back
to the first time
he had been bitten,
and he wondered
where she was now.

Kristy's Cunt

2010-07-08T11:13:00.001-07:00

I began thinking about Kristy’s cunt as a disembodied entity, an isolated source, because of what she had said to me.
We were in the room in the hostel we were staying at (in New Orleans), getting dressed, about to go out for an afternoon stroll, when Kristy said—Do you want to fuck my cunt?
I turned around and said, what (the kind of what when you’ve heard somebody just fine but want to buy a few seconds so as to shift your sensibility accordingly), and Kristy looked at me, glaze-eyed, the beginnings of a smile (her wicked one that connoted ephemeral demonic possession), and she said, moving several inches closer—Do you want to fuck my cunt? A little rumble in the hay, if you will.
It felt as if Kristy had seized me by my shirtcollar (I was shirtless at the time, so it was more the pinched tug of the skin on my neck), and even though I had bought myself a fraction of time with my, what, I was still tonguestruck, and Kristy must have sensed it, because her smile grew wider and more wicked, and she moved in closer, the prowl-step in her eyes, and I stood my ground, feeling my throat’s mixture of moisture and balm, burn and cool, and standing centimeters from me, her toes bracing mine, the tip of her nose nearly kissing the tip of my nose, she said, in a drawn-out whisper—Do … you … want … to … fuck … my … cunt?
Then Kristy moved lightning-like-quick and gripped my cock, and already at half-mast, the blood rushed to the head of my penis, which swelled into a brass knob, and I was fully hard, locked in Kristy’s vicegrip.
The words—fuck my cunt, fuck my cunt, fuck my cunt—blister-repeated in my mind as I kissed Kristy roughly, matching the intensity of her vicegrip, biting her lowerlip and holding it between my teeth, and she tried to pull away, and sensing that I now possessed her, she tore away fiercely, bits of skin from her lowerlip left as fleshtraces in my teeth, along with the slightest sodium tang of her blood.
I stared at Kristy, her face out of proportion, as if I were seeing it through the lens of a funhouse mirror, and I tore her blouse from her shoulders, and she drew her face to my chest and bit down very hard, stars and the smell of what was to come.

Barstool Haiku

2010-07-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

She talked a lot,
then sipped Maker's Mark,
chased by water.

The Circus

2010-07-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

And on a more tragic note . . . Last night at the Parly Durnham Circus, a crowd of nearly one thousand children and adults bore witness to a horrifying spectacle, watching a clown car explode into flames. The tragedy, later confirmed as a ritual suicide, had been planned by Parly Durnham’s beloved unit of clowns, with the death count totaling fourteen. The popular stunt of magically cramming an inordinate amount of clowns inside a small car started off in typical fashion, with the clowns piling inside, followed by a madcap drive around the arena. Moments later, the car parked itself in the center of the ring, and as the audience cheered, breathlessly anticipating the car’s next move, a deafening explosion rocked the arena, the vehicle then a fireball of raging flames. The statement being conveyed by the ritual suicide was underscored by a message, or rather question, which flashed in red letters on a teleprompter rigged near the roof of the tent: What happens when the fool stops playing?

The Source

2010-07-06T17:03:00.001-07:00

the magnet's flicked match
sparks
a swarm of speckled wings,
faith-filled paper-floaters
brushing glass
with delicate frenzy:
one by one,
amassing,
receding,
vagrants straddling
sibling polarities

horrorshow

2010-07-06T16:59:00.001-07:00

the cries of a child.
in the other room
i drink red wine.
silence.
dead from neglect?

A Fledgling Amputee

2010-07-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Abyssinia")

Dearest Isabelle,

The operation was performed yesterday. The Doctor, one of those self-satisfied idiots with a grin to match, declared it a success. Can you imagine that? Nine-tenths of my leg amputated and this butcher pats himself on the back while his harem of filthy nurses take turns jerking him off. I could go on about the follies that make up this Modern Medicine Show, but will spare you the ramblings of an embittered invalid.

The doctor says I am cured. Whatever it was inside of me, eating me up, has been excised, and he expects I will make a full recovery and life a full and functional life as a one-legged gimp. Any carnivals hiring in your area? I am sorry. How are you? Are you and Martin getting on okay? How are the children? Please come visit me soon. I very much need to see you. Until then, my heart against yours.

Your brother, the Invalid.

The letter, finished and sealed in an envelope, will go out with tomorrow’s mail. It is the first letter Arturo has ever written to his sister, Isabelle. Not only has he never written to his sister, he has never written about her. He has written about nearly every other person, real and imagined, who’s come into and out of his life, has written about every family member, real and imagined, but never, not once, has he written to or about his sister. Why is that, he wonders.
He knows that he is writing because she knew him when he was young, as he knew her, and he couldn’t write to his mother because she was dead, though, truth be told, even if she had been alive he wouldn’t have written her—the matter of her death was an airtight alibi—and he never knew his father and there was the how and why of writing someone you don’t know (though one time, many years ago, he drafted a letter to his father, as if he had known this man all along, and solidified the fantasy of his reality by tearing up the letter after it had been written, thinking—I can’t send this to him. It will hurt him too much.)
So he wrote to his sister, who knew him as a little boy, once.

Arturo was, and still is French, but the man translating this work for us is not French and doesn’t speak French, so we are receiving this work and these words and Arturo himself, in English. Such is the power of creative conversion.

Arturo is lying in his hospital bed, a fledgling amputee, on an unspecified date, let’s say a long long time ago.
At Present, they are staging a play about Arturo’s life, or as it reads in the lower left hand corner of the playbill in italics: A play liberally inspired by the life, poetry, and myth of Arturo.
Yes, he was one of those who had gotten so big that a great many people knew him on a single-name basis. Arturo. Like Madonna like Shakespeare like Napoleon. It was like that.

The hospital bed on which Arturo lay, recovering, was a rusty steel-framed cot. Arturo’s head was propped on two off-white pillows. The pillowcases smelled vaguely of plastic roses. This unsettled Arturo deeply, knowing that real roses give off a clean slightly spiked scent, and fake roses give off a cheap plastic scent. And so sniffing the pillowcases, a habit which Arturo had developed in the past week and showed no signs of breaking, bittersweetly reminded him that real roses reflected Nature and fake roses reflected Artifice, and the world could be divided that simply.
The blanket which covered Arturo was no blanket at all but a coarse burlap sack that scratched and irritated his skin. He didn’t request a softer, genuine blanket because he wanted to secretly savor and quietly internalize the blemishes attached to the hospital. The hospital where they stole his leg was the same hospital where the pillowcases smelled of cheap plastic roses and the blanket was coarse burlap sack that scratched and irritated his skin. He wanted to despise this place as deeply as he could and remember it with only bitterness and disdain.
The name of the hospital is, or rather had been, the Hospital de la Concepcion. The translator of this work has chosen to rename the hospital: the Hospital de Augustana. He made this change for reasons mysterious and all his own. Such is the power of creative conversion.

The play about Arturo’s life, titled Nocturne Dials, opened to favorable reviews and the producers have already talked about extending its run. The success or failure, or partial success or partial failure of the play can have no impact on this work, same as it cannot impact Arturo, lying in his hospital bed, one-legged and morphine-doped.
Arturo had been a poet, once upon a time, but that business ended at 19. Or so they say. If it is true, it is interesting to note that he stopped being a poet when he stopped being a teenager. That may or may not be pure coincidence. Historians cannot say if there’s a significant connection between Arturo’s renunciation of poetry and the loss of his youth.
In Nocturne Dials, they treat the matter with delicate ambiguity and suggestive parallelism. That was one aspect of the play that many critics went for in a big way.

As a poet, Arturo was best outlined by Plato’s tiki torch: “And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations. But he who without the divine madness comes to the door of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen.”

Before allowing the scene between Arturo and Male Nurse Fred to materialize and play out in the course of regular time, we will skip what is popularly called foreshadowing and tell you this: Arturo will be visited by three Fractals. In Nocturne Dials, the Fractals are called Specters. Right before the play opened, the Director said—We’re changing Fractals to Specters. He never told anyone in the cast and crew why the change was made, and since this man was an intimidating Director who didn’t like having his motives questioned aloud (or, for that matter, in private), nobody dared ask why. In the play the Specters exist as interior narrative devices. In Arturo’s life, at the Hospital de Augustana, the Fractals exist to make him crazy. Yet we’ll tell you in advance: you do not need to worry about Arturo going crazy. There is no danger of that, and this all happened a long long long time ago, once.

Truck Driver

2010-07-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

He’d wake up every morning at 5am. He always woke up with his hair wild and mussed, and on those occasions, when I also woke up at 5am, his partner for the day, I’d be scared when I saw him. His eyelids were pink and puffy, he’d totter about awkwardly, a lead-footed trudge into the kitchen, where he’d pull out a chair, sit down, yawn repeatedly, and wait for my mother to make his breakfast.
My mother would wake up every morning at 5am along with my father to make his breakfast and iron his clothes. She’d go about her early-morning ritual with somnolent efficiency, and would field my father’s questions, declared in a gravely howl: Marie, where’s my shirt? Marie, where’d you put my work jacket? Marie, where’s the brush? Marie, Marie, Marie.
My mother would respond in a flat and disinterested tone, and if he still couldn’t find what he was looking for, he’d snap—Marie, it’s not there!—his irritation bordering on rage. She’d leave the kitchen, go into the bedroom, and return several seconds later carrying whatever it was he had been looking for. Sometimes he’d snatch it from her hand and say—I don’t know why you gotta hide everything—other times he’d chuckle and say nothing at all.
What I remember best: the smell of fresh coffee brewing, and the steam hissing from the iron, two elements of warmth co-mingling to make me feel fuzzy inside. At those times, I wished I was old enough to drink coffee, as it smelled so good, and I wanted to be part of this lovely morning ritual.
On the days I went to work with my father, my mother also ironed my clothes, and as soon as she was finished with my shirt, I’d snatch it from her and put it on, immediately feeling its toastiness against my skin. When I first woke up, those very first seconds, after my mother’s voice, which naturally had a naggy tone to it, roused me from a peaceful slumber, I didn’t feel particularly excited or inspired about being my father’s helper. Yet once I knuckled the sleep out of my eyes, smelled the coffee, and heard my father’s shouts, the great day which lay before me took shape in my mind, and I felt privileged and happy.
It would be me and my father hanging out, driving around in his truck, dropping off cases of Budweiser to different stores and bars in the city, and I couldn’t imagine anything greater happening to me. We would drive his car to the garage, which was located on the other side of Brooklyn, pick up the Budwesier truck, and carry out his eight-hour shift.
The day my father got fired for stealing cases of Budweiser, I felt very sad, as if something great had been taken away from us. My father’s Uncle Jack was one of the managers at Budweiser, but he couldn’t get my father his job back. Jack had said, as my father often quoted bitterly: “There’s nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”
When Uncle Jack died my father didn’t attend his funeral, and that’s when I realized how much he had loved that job. He never found another job as good as that one.

Trees and Three Old Men

2010-07-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Beneath the trees, stood three old men. I looked out the window and wondered what they were doing there. It was the front walkway of the apartment complex I had just moved into. New city, new life.
One of the men was holding an umbrella, or rather it seemed the umbrella was an organic extension of his hand. It was very sunny out, as it had been for the past three days, and there was no sign of rain.
The three old men stood beneath the trees, yet visually, at least from my perspective, the old men fused with the trees. The old men’s treetrunk bodies were thin and brittle. When a wind passed, they shivered. Thin and brittle and trembling.
The old men’s collectively entwined hair was wild and shagwooly, sprouting indiscriminately in various directions. The old men’s beards were cloudlike shadows, falling to just above their feet. On their feet, dusty brown sandals. The old men’s fingers were spidery, brittle and spidery.
Their arms branched out and were gnarled in an arthritic way, and their elbows were stubby knots or knobs. Only one of them had an umbrellahand. Spiderfingers and an umbrellahand.
The three old men stood there, still save for the occasional wind which caused them to tremble, and I waited for the rain which I never expected would come. Yet after an hour of watching from my window, the sky turned—light blue to brooding gray—and the rain fell in silver needles. I watched and saw that the old man’s umbrella didn’t open. It rained and rained but the umbrella remained closed. The three old men grew dark with wetness, and I wondered if the umbrella was broken, or maybe a useless prop.
When it got too dark out to see, I stopped watching.

Entering Wonderworld

2010-07-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Just Another Hero")

When I got off the train it was a little after eleven. I had not planned on a formal look, but as Gus had said: Say you’ve got fifteen, twenty other people going out for this Spider Man thing. You want to be one of the ones that sticks out, you want to look sharp, you want to leave an impression.
So I dressed up. Charcoal-gray blazer with dark blue pinstripes, almost-matching gray slacks, honey-colored buttondown, buffed black shoes, black socks.
When I left in the morning it was snowing and I took that as a good sign, why I’m not sure. Perhaps because, Ella, who had grown up in Baton Rouge, first experienced snow when she came to New York, ten years earlier, and it was a love-at-first-sight that had never gone away.
I weaved my way through the bustling crowd in the subway, climbed a short set of stairs, and surprisingly, at the end of the corridor, there it was: J & Bee Wonderworld. It was one of those subterranean stores, just below street level.
There were two glass doors and posted above the doors was the sign—J & Bee Wonderworld—which was made up of tiny multi-colored bulbs. The bulbs blinked and flashed in a syncopated pattern, which reminded me of blood flowing slowly through the anatomy of the letters.
Here goes, I thought, and I pushed open one of the doors and walked in. The place was a madhouse. A cross-current of voices competing at different volumes. Bodies, pocketbooks, oversized shopping bags, boxes stacked on boxes: it all came to me at once, a blurred and overwhelming Big Picture, no one element standing out in a singular distinct way.
I felt anxious, as I often did in crowded places, but took a couple of deep breaths, rehearsed my planned opening line—Can you tell me where I can find Arnold Kornish—and elected a young copper-skinned woman as the person to whom I would ask the question. Her back was turned to me and she was marking up items with a yellow mark-up gun. She carried out her task with a listless efficiency that made me feel drowsy.
I came up behind her, trying to make enough noise so she knew I was there, but she went on marking up items, her back still turned to me.
Excuse me, I said.
Nothing.
Excuse me, I said again, a bit louder, and she turned around, backing me up with a hard glare, chewing her gum as if she had lockjaw.
Yea, she said, thick with attitude.
I was wondering if . . . do you know where . . . Mr. Kornish . . . I wanted to see Arnold Kornish.
At first the girl—and she was a girl, about 17 or 18—didn’t say anything, just exhaled through her nostrils and kept chewing her gum with severity. It was obvious that my very existence, as something she was forced to acknowledge, fatigued and annoyed her.
See someone at the front desk, she said, then turned her back on me and went back to her task.
I nodded to the back of her head and walked away, not wanting to ask her where the front desk was. I wandered the store, which was quite spacious (later on, I would find out there were two more floors: one above and one below). I made my way through the aisles and realized that J & Bee Wonderworld was well-prepared to grant any child’s consumer-related Christmas wish. The shelves and racks were overpopulated with merchandise, so much so that there were as many items on the floor—forming a lower-tier colony of dispossessed products—as there were items properly stocked.
In one aisle, the one devoted to Sesame Street merchandise, I saw a young blonde girl poking Elmo’s stomach and when Elmo squealed—Ah-hah-hah-hah, stop, that tickles—the girl clapped. She repeated this several times and her mother, standing over her, on the phone, was seemingly oblivious to the effect that Elmo was having on her daughter.
En route to what I imagined was the front desk, in an open circular area, I saw several children, parents in tow, huddled like munchkins around The Transformer’s Optimus Prime. Prime’s right arm was extended outward, as he seemed to be demonstrating how the rocket launcher set on his arm worked.
I made my way past the group, careful to avoid Prime’s line-of-fire, and came to a boomerang-shaped white desk with several people stationed behind it. I chose the person who seemed the least busy, a frizzy-haired woman with glasses (who reminded me of a character Gilda Radner used to play on Saturday Night Live). She didn’t glare at me, wasn’t chewing gum, and was briskly polite in pointing me in the direction of Mr. Kornish’s office.
The hallway, which led to the public restrooms, kept on going and at the very end of the hallway, on the left hand side, was the door marked Human Resources. Except when I looked a little closer I noticed that, written in pencil in small letters, was the word in before Human: inHuman Resources. I wondered if somebody had scribbled that today and management had yet to notice and erase it, or if it had been there for a while and nobody in management cared enough to erase it.
I pushed open the front door. A box-shaped room with chairs lining the walls, every chair occupied. A rectangular wooden table was set in the center of the room, magazines spread upon it. When I opened the door all eyes were on me, briefly, then once I registered as—Just Another Applicant—everyone went back to their respective magazine, conversation, or inner activity.
I went to the reception desk and said—I’m here to see Arnold Kornish—and without raising her eyes from her paperwork, the receptionist handed me a ledger with a document attached, and spoke in a sinus-challenged nasal twang—Fill this out, bring it back to me when you’re done, make sure you don’t leave anything blank, then wait until your name is called, okay?
Okay, I said, took the ledger, leaned against the wall next to a tall potted plant, and filled out the paperwork. After handing it in, I went back to my spot and furtively surveyed the room, wanting to see who my competition might be. There were about two dozen people, a third of them women. I crossed the women off the list, knowing that they hadn’t come out for Spider Man. Then, based on the stated prerequisite—at least six feet tall, a good build—I crossed several of the men off the list.
I visually sized up the remaining potential Spider Man candidates, and fixated on one man in particular, seated in the far corner, headphones plugged in his ears. He seemed to be in his late twenties and had the look of a pretty boy surfer. I couldn’t tell how tall he was, but if I had to guess—6’2—and since his clean white T-shirt was tight-fitting and short-sleeved, I could see that his chest was well-formed and his biceps clearly defined. He had a chiseled jaw, light blue eyes, and blond hair that seemed to have seen its share of sun and peroxide.
I watched the way he bopped his head to whatever music he was listening to (Skinny Puppy? Sublime? Primus?) and felt a strong instant dislike for this guy. I imagined his speech patterns—Dude, that’s some sick shit . . . Right on, brah—and also convinced myself that he knew nothing about Spider Man. I wanted to confront this poseur with a pop quiz: So, Dude, who was the first artist, after Stan Lee to have drawn Spider Man? What was the name of the football team Flash Thompson played for in high school? In the issue when parts of New York City were turned into gold, what “golden” item did Spider Man steal then later return due to pangs of conscience?
Yes, I had elected Dude as my direct competition, my enemy. I needed anger as my motivation to transcend my fear and anxiety, needed someone visible to rail against, and that Dude, would be you.
Ten minutes later the receptionist called the name—Chad Grayson, Chad Grayson—and Dude raised his hand and baritoned in a well-trained voice: Right here.
Chad Grayson, I thought to myself. That might be the name of a soap opera actor or a gameshow host, but that was not the name of the man who would be Spider Man.
I waited. And waited. I leafed through a Cosmo and after completing one of their quizzes, found out that I was lonely, frustrated, and in need of an affirmative outlet. But since the quiz was intended for women, I disregarded the results. I moved on to other magazines.
Three and a half magazines, or a little over two hours later, my name was called.
Emilio Martinelli, Emilio Martintelli, paged the nasal twang.
Emilio Martinelli, I repeated to myself, that’s a good name for the man who would be Spider Man. Emilio Martinelli—the wild card, the dark horse, the X-factor—that Chad Grayson, a.k.a. Dude, hadn’t counted on.
I gave the lapels of my blazer a firm tug and went to see Arnold Kornish.

Minor at Best

2010-07-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

She was the smallest midget I had ever seen. Nowadays I think the PC term is vertically challenged. Sounded too scientific, too formal, and my mind quickly rejected it. I looked out the café window and saw her standing on the sidewalk with a group of friends, laughing at whatever it was the tall one had said. That is, the tallest one in the group.
She couldn’t have been more than 3 feet tall. Her head and shoulders came just above the point where the window cut off. She wore dark eyeglasses, had fine dark hair cut in a bob, and Asian features. I wondered what it would be like to have sex with her. I couldn’t help it, that’s the way my mind worked. If something mentally registered as odd or unconventional, it immediately triggered sexual thoughts.
I began to imagine a series of dynamic sexual positions with the midget and felt myself getting hard. That’s when my wife came out of the bathroom. She was rubbing her hands together.
What are you doing? she asked in a way that made me wonder if she saw something different on my face. Had my midget sex fantasy bled through?
What am I doing? Sitting here, waiting for you.
She nodded, accepting my answer. I now saw my wife’s face before me, and over her shoulder, through the window, I observed the midget, still laughing. She seemed a pleasant and cheerful type. I wondered if I’d be cheerful if I were a midget. I was of average height and often melancholy. What if I were smaller? Would size make a difference in proportion to my happiness? Would women, or men, stare at me through windows and have perverse sexual fantasies?
In my mind I began to shrink myself down, but my wife’s voice returned me to my regular self.
Do you think we should call?
Call? Why?
I don’t know. Just to check in.
No, don’t call.
It was our two-year-old daughter’s first night with a new sitter, Joy. Joy was an acne-flecked teenager who was the niece of our friend.
It can’t hurt to call.
I took my wife’s hand and gave it a little squeeze.
There’s no need to call. She’s fine.
I think the tone of my voice and the way I squeezed her hand convinced her. She nodded. I went back to imagining myself as a midget.
I pictured myself, between my wife’s legs, fully standing, eating her out. I pictured the hardest of hardons being too much weight for my little body to handle as I tipped over. I pictured other things, each one getting more and more absurdly extreme. I laughed. My wife raised her eyes from the Home & Garden magazine she was reading.
What’s so funny?
Oh, I was just picturing what it would be like if you were a midget.
If I were a midget?
She shook her head, not wanting to indulge my fantasy.
You think of the strangest things.
She went back to reading her magazine.
I looked out the window and saw the midget, smiling, waving goodbye to her friends. Then she toddled off.
I smiled and secretly waved, sorry to see her go. Then, out of the blue, the sadness came. I thought of my daughter and her new babysitter, Joy. I wondered what they were doing. I stood up.
I’m gonna call home.
My wife lowered her magazine and raised her eyes.
Why?
No reason. Just to check in.
Worry crept into my wife’s tone.
You think everything’s alright?
I squeezed her hand as I had done earlier.
Everything’s fine, just fine.

Spider Man, Jr.

2010-06-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

(Excerpt II from "Just Another Hero")

Male needed to appear in-store as Spider Man through the holiday season. Must be at least six feet tall, possess a good build, and available to work no less than six days a week (including weekends.) If interested, please apply in person, Monday, 10-4, J & Bee Wonderworld, located at ______. Ask for Arnold Kornish.

At first I read it, and as if wired to a circle-and-move-on program, I skipped to the next listing, then paused, thought about what I had just read, went back, re-read it, and thought about it some more. Spider Man had been my idol and hero since I had started collecting comic books back when I was eight or nine. I had collected about two thousand issues covering a cross-section of his series: Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider Man, The Amazing Spider Man, Marvel Tales, The Web of Spider Man, etc.
From age eight to about age fifteen, all I wanted was to be Spider Man. There was the period in my life when I used to catch spiders in a jar, then let them crawl along my arms, hoping that one would bite me, and also hoping that the one which bit me was radioactive and would infect me with spider-powers.
When that didn’t work (not one of those spiders, radioactive or not, ever bit me), I decided to go it my own way, minus spider-powers. I created my own version of a Spider Man costume: a hooded black sweatshirt, the hood pulled over my head, the lower half of my face covered by a black bandana, black Reeboks, black sweats, with two patches—featuring glow-in-the-dark spider emblems, stitched onto the left thigh of my sweats and the right breast of my sweatshirt— and my versions of webs, spring-loaded rubber-suction darts that shot from gadgets attached to my wrists.
I’d go out at night and make my rounds. I’d walk through the schoolyard, the park, go up and down blocks, and make sure everything was on the up-and-up.
The only conflict I ever engaged in, sort of, came on a night when I was patrolling the park, and in the back, near the monkey bars, I saw one boy backed against a fence by two other boys. I moved in quietly, not recognizing any of the boys, all who appeared older than me.
The boy backed against the fence kept flinching as one of the other boys, the taller of the two, kept threatening to slap him in the face—his hand lunging forward, then stopping right before it reached the boy-against-the-fence’s face.
I didn’t know the story but this two-on-one scenario was injustice, I thought, and inducting myself into the scene, I spoke what I thought would be a classic Spider Man quip: Hey, boys, now that Webs is here, you two ready to tangle?
The two boys, the villains, looked at me, then looked at each other and laughed. The boy against the fence seemed confused about who I was and what was happening.
I stood, poised, slightly bent at the knees, my fingers curled back and resting on the triggers that would launch my darts. The taller boy walked up to me, grabbed me roughly by my sweatshirt, and snarled: You better get outta here freak, before you wind up like this punk.
As if punk were the cue, the shorter boy hit the boy-against-the-fence hard in the stomach. The boy-against-the-fence grunted and dropped to one knee, spitting several times.
When the tall boy released me from his grip, I left, quickly and quietly.
During the walk home I realized, with humbling sadness: When confronted with genuine conflict, my lack of superpowers would prove a greater deterrent than I had imagined. Which, I guess, in an indirect off-centered way, was one of the reasons I wrote out and signed my pledge to avoid work—at least work in a conventional, consistent, day-to-day sense.
As a kid, all I wanted was to be Spider Man. Later, when I realized it wasn’t going to happen, I adapted my desires: any super hero, any super power would do. Flight, invisibility, super-speed, undersea-breathing, whatever. Unfortunately, I never acquired any of these powers. I think I was about sixteen or so when I begrudgingly said: Fine then, I’ll be part of this world without being part of this world. I will give very little of myself to the world commonly regarded as Reality. Or, I would give part of myself, but not the secret essential parts of myself. Those I would save and cherish. Those I would let incubate, among shadows, over a long period of time. Those would be the choicest grapes crushed and sealed in a cask entombed in a cellar.

Working Class Hero

2010-06-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Just Another Hero," a story-in-progress)

Ever since I was a little boy I had wanted to be Spider Man, and now, for $10/hr., the opportunity lay before me.
Since Ella had left me three weeks earlier I had been staying with my Grandpa Gus in Brooklyn. Me and Ella had a studio on 12th Street and 3rd Avenue in the Village, but once she left I knew I couldn’t afford the place by myself, or rather without her steady income, and moved out right away. Gus said I could stay with him as long as I needed to, but there was one condition: I had to work.
You’re not gonna pull the same shit on me that you did with Ella, you know that right?
If someone would have heard the way Gus barked that statement, they would have thought he was angry with me, but Gus sounded that way all the time. Gus, along with his late wife, my Grandma Mimi, had raised me, and I knew every nuance of every inflection of his voice. He wasn’t angry but I knew he was serious, and if he didn’t see me putting forth sincere effort in finding a job he would show me the door.
I had been at Gus’ for about a week, and whenever he got home in the evening (he spent most of his days at the Scaccia Social Club, where he and a bunch of other old Italian guys played cards, chess, smoked, listened to Italian records, and bullshitted the hours away), he’d ask me about job prospects. We’d sit at the dining room table, where he’d light up his Dutch Master cigar, fix his teal-gray eyes on me, and give me the third degree.
How many places had I called? What kind of businesses were they? Had I faxed out any resumes? What about follow-ups?
A cloud of smoke between us, I’d answer Gus’ questions in an even-keeled and cooperative manner. It helped to keep my hands folded and to smile before answering.
Even though I knew what Gus looked like, it was during one of those Q & A sessions when it struck me, for the first time, who or what he reminded me of: a ravaged Santa Claus, a hobo St. Nick. He had a wild shock of white hair, lightly ashed with gray, that billowed from the sides and top of his head and appeared to have been electrically seared at the fringes. His wino-bulbous nose seemed a slightly chewed-through pink marshmallow with two gaping black holes, from which nose-hair like wire-bramble sprouted. His jowls sagged, his beard was an infinitely textured whipped cream cloud, and he wore rectangular black-framed spectacles. There was, and had always been, something formidable and reassuring about Gus—if Norman Rockwell would have painted a picture of Zeus, Gus might have been the result.
After a week’s worth of questioning, Sunday came. I woke up late, ten or so, and I saw Gus seated at the dining room table, various sections of newspaper spread out before him.
Welcome to the world, sleeping beauty. There’s a bagel and coffee for ya.
Thanks, I said, and took a seat.
The bagel was still warm, the coffee perfectly sweetened.
Here, Gus said, and slid the classified section toward me. Before I could ask he handed me a pen.
As Gus read over the stock market (he had no money invested, he just liked to be in-the-know), I made my way through the classifieds. With perfunctory listlessness I circled jobs that might be okay, then I saw it:
Male needed to appear in-store as Spider Man through the holiday season. Must be at least six feet tall, possess a good build, and available to work no less than six days a week (including weekends.) If interested, please apply in person, Monday, 10-4, J & Bee Wonderworld, located at ______. Ask for Arnold Kornish.

My Name Is Sand

2010-06-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

Strolling in the Village, I saw Sand, propped on his rusty metal cane, tottering back and forth, shaking his I Love NY Coffee cup, issuing his customary modest request: One penny, just one penny … all I ask is one penny. One is all I need to make it.
Sand’s voice was scratchy, filled with phlegm and fuzz, and when I caught him on his bad days, his words weren’t much more than mouthwash gargle.
I walked over to Sand and coming up alongside him I patted him on the shoulder.
Hey, Sand, what’s up?
Sand’s neck stiffly turned and when he saw it was me, his eyes brightened and widened and he flashed me a toothless grin: Hey, man, how ya doing?
He shook my hand and feeling how sticky his hand was, I forbid my imagination to run away with the possibilities of what might be the cause of stickiness and told Sand: I’m doing good.
Sand is what I called him, but I’m pretty sure his name was something like Stan or Sam, as when we first became friendly about a year ago, after having deposited coins in his cup on a regular basis, he and I got to talking and he introduced himself—My name is Sand—and I wasn’t sure I heard him right so I said—Sand?—and he nodded—Yea, Sand—and I said—Hello Sand—and to this day I still think I misheard him, but it didn’t matter anymore, he was Sand to me.
I asked Sand how everything was and he said: Good, good, I can’t complain. The weather’s been nice and I got friends, good friends like you who stop and talk to me.
Sand often had the unsoiled gaze of a little boy, and when he said that, his littleboy look combined with the tender lilt in his voice, I felt very ashamed and for a long three seconds the state of the world As Is made me sick.
Sand slapped me on the shoulder: Hey, man, how’s school going?
Even though I had told Sand I didn’t go to school, he always asked me how it was, and after hearing his passionate lecture—why school was so important, why I had to get a degree—whenever he asked me about school I’d tell him it was good and throw in some miscellaneous details for good measure.
Which is what I did.
School’s good, Sand, I told him. I just finished an essay on Whitman for English Lit.
Ah, Whitman, Sand said, his eyes rolling skyward, as if he knew exactly where in heaven Whitman was sitting. I Sing the Body Electric.
Sand’s voice crackled with its own electricity, as he ripped off a few lines from the poem, then his expression shifted, as something came to him: Hey, oh man, I wish you were here the other day.
Oh yea, why’s that?
Because I got this other friend, a good friend like you, right, and she’s from France, she’s a French girl. You know what that means, right … ooh-la-la.
This expression cracked Sand up, as his mouth opened wide and he reveled in a long toothless laugh.
Smiling, I waited for his story to continue, which it did: Anyway, I told her I would be getting my own place soon, and I mentioned how I was a real good cook, and you know what she says to me—Oh, you have to invite me over for dinner. You know what that means, right?
I looked at Sand and nodded my head and he confirmed my unspoken knowing: Damn straight that’s what it means, and Sand laughed a coarse and flinty laugh.
Well, like I was saying, I wished you were here, see, cuz this girl, who by the way is a real cute thing, is in her early twenties and I could’ve set you up with her. I mean, what am I gonna do with her? I’m 103 years old, you know.
That was the other thing about Sand, he was always claiming different ages. One day he was 103, and the next time I saw him, the years had just melted away and he’d say he was 52.
I could safely guess that Sand’s age was somewhere between 52 and 103.

Venus Envy Guidelines

2010-06-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, potential submissives, Venus Envy guidelines:

Up to three poems (one-hundred line limit) or two works of prose (2,500 word limit) can be submitted per quarterly reading cycle. Visual art is also accepted and should be sent as a j-peg. Open to all styles, flavors and genres, quality being the key. Our Love-Goddess likes to flash her many facets and flaunt her myriad selves: on Tuesday, you might get the grace-slicked girl shapely in her flowing sea-green gown, and on Thursday, you've got a wild-eyed, loose-lipped Mae West spitting bawdy jokes and tippling gin. She is, dear lovers and dreamers, what we make of her and what she makes of us.

Submissions can be emailed to venusintaos@gmail.com, or snail-mailed to: Venus Envy, c/o Ned Dougherty, P.O. Box 120, Taos, NM 87571. Deadline for the fall issue has not yet been set, and we will start accepting the next wave of submissions after July 1st.

Until further notice, payment will be contributor's copies. If accepted, your work will appear in both print and online versions of Venus.

With love & the proper amount of squalor,

J.B.

Duce in Transit

2010-05-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had first seen Duce on the subway, about two years earlier. She had been sitting directly opposite me, absorbed in the magazine she was reading, Vanity Fair I think, and I was captivated by her hair: a pitch-black bushel of tightly wound gel-caked curls. Later, she’d explain that’s where her nickname had come from. One of her friends in college had said her curls reminded him of sinister black snakes, hence the nickname, Medusa, later shortened to Duce. At first, she said, she didn’t like name and its notorious implications, but eventually she got used to it.
I think it was the lullaby-sway of the train, combined with staring at, or into those ebony ringlets, which lulled me into a trance. The magnetic pull became too much to resist, and I got out of my seat and went over to lean against the doors, which were just right of her seat. She continued reading her magazine, and remained, as far as I could tell, oblivious to my presence.
She was seated in one of those two-seaters at the corner-end of the car, and since the seat next to her was unoccupied, I sat down next to her. She shifted slightly to give me room—and later would explain how she self-consciously regarded her ass as too big and would always shift a little when someone sat down next to her on the train—then I heard myself saying: You’ve got extraordinary hair.
She turned and gave me a slight nod underscored by a nervous, uncertain smile, then went back to her magazine. She had turned back to her magazine so quickly, I didn’t have a chance to flash my smile, which I always thought of as boyish and innocent and would have expressed, without words—hey, it’s okay, I’m no lunatic or stalker.
Yet the Kodak moment for proof of my benign character had passed, and I felt the burning in my cheeks. I figured I had two options: 1) Return to my original seat, which she may interpret as an admission of shame or defeat, and I hated unspoken admissions of that nature, or: 2) Get off at the next stop.
I opted for number two. An eternal half-minute later, the train lurched into the station, and I prepared to get up, but she beat me to it, rising and smoothing her tight-fitting skirt, which if I remember correctly was pewter-colored. Then I saw her scribbling something in her magazine, and next thing I know, she’s torn a subscription card from the magazine, and has handed it to me. She gave me a warm smile, not overdone, and exited the train.
I looked at the card: she had scribbled her phone # and her name above the number: Duce. The D enormously capital with a stylistic flourish.

Dreams in a Dung-heap

2010-05-26T12:25:00.000-07:00

“How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t
know what I am?
Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!
And there are so many who think of being the same thing
that we can’t all be it!
Genius? At this moment
A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me,
And it may be that history won’t remember even one,
All of their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.”

Fernando Pessoa, "The Tobacco Shop"

Duce

2010-05-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

Duce threw a tube of toothpaste—Aim Tartar-control to be specific—at me as I went to open the front door. The tube grazed the left side of my neck, then hit the door, and fell to the floor. It’s funny, Duce and I had had our fair share of arguments, and had said and done plenty of hurtful things to one another, yet this particular brand of assault—with toothpaste—sent me into a rage hotter and blinder than either one of us were accustomed to. I charged at Duce, screaming—toothpaste, toothpaste—like some hygienically bent lunatic.
Duce must have seen the crazy look in my eyes, because her eyes widened with fear, and she let out a single, five-alarm scream before turning tail and running. She jumped over the coffee table, like a caffeinated hurdler, and onto the bed. Then—being that our bed was pushed against the wall, flanking the living room window—Duce found herself cornered. She balled her hands into combat-ready fists, and her eyes lit with high-wattage mania, as she stood at the edge of the bed, awaiting my attack.
My bull-charge had slowed to a tentative creeping forward, and then I stopped altogether, continuing to stare at Duce, the swim of craziness in her eyes. That’s when it hit me and I broke down laughing.
What, what is it, Duce asked, and she relaxed her defensive posture. What is it, she demanded to know, the glare of wildness shifting to a slightly paranoid curiosity.
Duce is wild, Duce is wild, I started screaming, and was laughing so hard I could barely breathe.
Through the tears in my eyes, I saw that Duce was smiling, but still didn’t quite get the joke. She stepped down off the bed and said—Duce is wild—as if prompting me to to elaborate.
Once I caught my breath, between hiccups I explained how I had wanted to kill her, just wanted to strangle the shit out of her, then, when I saw her on the bed, looking like a madwoman, the line popped into my head—Duce is wild—and I lost my shit.
Duce started giggling that littlegirlish giggle of hers, and every ounce of rage, which had burned in me but a minute ago, was completely extinguished.
Duce said: You should have seen the look in your eyes. I really thought you were going to kill me.
I don’t know, something about being hit with toothpaste made me crazy, I told her.
Duce raised her eyes as if taking dictation from above and said: Super-important note to self. Never, under any circumstances, are you to attack Alex with toothpaste. Consider alternative weapons, such as a shoe, hairbrush, or lamp.
Duce giggled again, and I pulled her toward me and kissed her on the nose and lips.
Are we officially made up, I asked her.
Not officially, she said, and gave my genitals a suggestive squeeze.
Then she pulled me toward the bed, where the ghost of wild Duce still lingered.

Is This Seat Taken?

2010-05-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Stray Passages")

I was twenty-six and it was about a month after I had gotten back from the six weeks I had spent in Vancouver, B.C. I was living in the City with a girl named Jeannie. When I got back home I told Jeannie about the affair that I had had in Vancouver with a French-Canadian girl named Julie. She told me about the drunken threesome she had had with two guy friends she had gone to college with. She said she had assumed I wasn’t coming back. She also said she was thinking about me the whole time. I told her I didn’t know why she thought I wasn’t coming back, and I wished she hadn’t been thinking about me while fucking her friends. We both accepted that this is what had happened during our “summer vacation” apart and didn’t talk about it.
This might have been okay, except I really liked Julie and stayed in contact with her and agreed to take the bus to visit her in Montreal. Three weeks later, when I left, I told Jeannie I was going to visit my friend, Pierre, in Montreal. There was some truth twisted into my lie: I did have a friend, Pierre, who did live in Montreal, and I would see him while I was there, but Julie was the reason I was going and the person I’d be staying with.
During the bus ride I met an old-timer named Norman. Norman wore a light blue fisherman’s hat and glasses and beige overcoat. When we stopped in Albany to transfer buses, Norman said: Young man, would you mind helping me with my bags.
I helped Norman with his bags, one from the overhead and one of the suitcases which had been stored under the bus. We went into the station and sat down next to each other.
Norman asked me if I would be so kind as to get him a coffee and Danish and I could get myself whatever I wanted. I got Norman a coffee and Danish and myself a coffee.
As I sipped my coffee, Norma told me about his life. How he had grown up in New York and had worked in the Garment district as a merchant for over thirty years. His wife had died several years ago and he started visiting his younger brother, Pete, who lived in Montreal, more often. Pete was also a widow and said that he and Norman should shack up together: it would be like when they were kids.
Norman said: I don’t think it will be like when we’re kids, he’s fooling himself there, but I’m gonna move in with him anyway. That’s where I’m going now.
On the next bus we sat next to each other, and when Norman asked me why I was going to Montreal I told him to visit a girl.
She’s your girlfriend, he asked.
No, she’s this girl I met this summer in Vancouver. My girlfriend lives in New York.
Norman smiled, as if he and I were in on something together, and said: That’s fine, that’s okay, go and see a girl, you’re young. But one day . . . one day choose one to settle down with. Otherwise you might have a seat on this bus forever.
I didn’t know exactly what Norman meant, but his words somehow struck me as ominous. Like those sayings—It’s always later than you think—or—It’s 10pm: Do you know where your children are?

The Next Far Thing

2010-05-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

On days like these I think, or rather dream of all those things, so unreachable and far-away. These things do not have names and are barely pictures: more like fog-blurred imprints that you can sense, vaguely. It is like standing, mute and immovable, on the periphery, and knowing that there is something stirring, some sort of vital activity taking place in the center, the hub.
Sometimes when I dream really well, I can just about taste them, those things, but when I lose it—let’s say I open my mouth hoping to intensify the taste, nothing. Air. Air is good and necessary to breathe, but tasting it is a grave disappointment. Not always, because some air tastes fresh green or smoky or soft-on-the-eyes blue—air, when it tastes like one of those things does not gravely disappoint. Still it does not arouse in me the same feelings that the far-away and unreachable things do.

My friend Ana says I need a woman like that. A woman far-away and unreachable, like a strange ocean you dare to cross by foot.
Do they still make women like that, I ask her.
Ana nods and laughs then shakes her head and says—No, maybe not.
Her saying—no, maybe not—does not gravely disappoint, but it does set off a slight ache.
As if charting the turn of my inner movements, Ana says—But you like to ache like that, don’t you?
I smile and say nothing, because Ana knows me inside-out and knows I like to ache like that.
How long have you been sitting here, she asks me.
I was sitting outside Cuppa Joe’s, my favorite coffeeshop.
Coupla hours, I say.
Ana nods.
And you, I say, you coming from work?
Ana nods again then her features draw in tight, pinched and flushed, and she hisses—I hate that fucking hospital. Have I ever told you how much I hate that fucking hospital?
You’ve told me you hate it a lot but that was a long time ago. You probably hate it more than that now, right?
Yes, I hate it so much more.
Ana was an assistant tech in surgery. Her mother had died young, in a hospital, eaten alive by cancer. Even though Ana knew hospitals were corrupt and run crookedly, particularly the hospital where she worked, she wanted to be one of the difference-makers in a machine greased by big money. She genuinely wanted to help people, to ease suffering in whatever way she could, but the waves kept beating her back and I knew she had grown tired, perhaps dispirited.
Ana went on, a catch in her throat—The people that work in surgery are some of the nastiest fuckers you’ll ever meet.
I wanted to ask Ana nasty how, but she was already off on the next thing—Before I forget . . . we’re having a party next Friday. It’s Marty’s birthday.
Marty was Ana’s boyfriend. They had been together for nearly four years. Marty was Jewish and nervous and very very affable. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy shaking hands with people, almost like a politician out to get your vote, except he wasn’t trying to get elected for anything, he just shook hands with great vigor and enthusiasm. Despite Marty’s handshakes and affability, I knew he was wary of me. Wary because Ana and I had dated years back, and wary because our friendship, tight as it was, sometimes made him feel excluded, and wary because of how much I drank. Marty worried about how much I drank and I didn’t know if he was genuinely concerned about me, as a fellow human being, or if he was worried about me, as Ana’s friend who might try and put moves on her when drunk, or if it was both of these things and then some. Marty was a prolific stoner and wanted me to make the switch from alcohol to weed. It will create fewer problems in your life, he had said. I hated advice, it made me think of guidance counselors and people with spiritual and social aims, and I had told Marty, with just enough playful smirk—I want problems in my life. They keep me grounded. Marty had smiled that, shook my hand, and changed the subject.
How old is Marty gonna be, I asked.
40, Ana said.
40, I repeated, as if mentally trying that age on for size. I had just turned 34. 33 was my Jesus year, the age which he was crucified, and I had expected a hard year, which is what I got. But I had survived it and was now on the other side, of what exactly I wasn’t sure. Ana was turning 30 in a couple of months. She still had the hurdle of 33 to deal with, but there was never any shortage of hurdles, both before and after 33.
Are you going to sit down, I asked Ana. She had been standing since she had come.
She did a freaky little dance and gesticulated like a ghoul, saying—Why does it make you nervous when someone stands over you?
I laughed and said nothing. Ana knew very well how nervous that made me. I felt as if the person was on the verge of leaving, at any time, and I didn’t like that feeling.
Ana patted me on the head and said—For you, dear Alex, I’ll sit.
She sat down next to me. I sidled up against her and said—A, can you spot me ten still Sunday?
When I wanted to borrow money from Ana I called her A, and only then. Without saying a word, Ana reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and fished out a bill which she held up saying—All I’ve got is a twenty, so take that.
I can go inside and break it, if you want.
Here, she said, thrusting the bill forward. Take twenty and shut up.
I loved when Ana told me to shut up, it reminded me just how tight our friendship was, but instead of shutting up I said—Thank you, A. I adore you.
I know she said, in a breathy put-on voice, and giggled little-girlishly. The two instances in which Ana seemed like a little girl: when she giggled and when she cried. Times when I had been the cause of Ana’s tears, I felt torn-up inside and had wanted to flee. It was like hurting a five-year-old really badly and instantly regretting the hurt you had caused.
Now that I had money, there were options.

Mind Reading

2010-05-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

In the dream I was reading a comic book, except I was reading it with my eyes closed. I had had this dream before, where I can "see" with my eyes closed. It's like the shutting of my eyelids was not enough to black out words and pictures, or that my eyelids were thin veils and the brightness generated from behind my eyes, or from somewhere within me, was so strong that it was easy to see through the veils. Also, it's not like I'm reading or seeing in the regular sense. It's more that the images in the comic book would appear before me, and the images would be accompanied by words, there was no thinking involved, no straining to see or understand: all of it was readily accessible, there was an easy flow of continuity to the whole thing.

Then my ex-wife came into the room and saw me sitting on the bed, holding the comic in my hands, and asked me what I was doing.

I'm reading, I said.

How can you be reading with your eyes closed?

I don't know, but I am. I can see the pictures and the words.

So you're not really reading, you're making up the story as you go along.

No, I am reading, I said, gently contesting her logic.

Okay, she said, and left the room.

I went back to the comic book. I was utterly absorbed. I was inside of the scenes, inside of the words. Or I was behind the scenes, behind the words. I was immersed and because I was so immersed I felt the deep easy joy born of ultimate connection.

My ex-wife came back into the room and sat on the bed next to me.

Okay, she said, if you can read with your eyes closed, then tell me what's happening in the comic? Read the next part to me.

Okay, I said, feeling confident and relaxed that I'd be able to do it, but as soon as I tried, that seemed to be the jinx or the hex or whatever--the trying--and the flow of continuity was disrupted. I started to read a sentence, but the sentence felt forced and made-up, I wasn't "seeing" it, I was making it up, and in making it up it became unnecessarily elaborate and complex.

I felt sad, humiliated and stupid.

I can't do it, I told my ex-wife, you were right, I'm not reading.

The down-note in my voice struck a chord with her and I could sense that she felt terrible for asking me to "prove myself."

I'm so sorry, she said, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean anything by it.

Her tone was sincere and I knew that her intent was not to expose me as a fraud, and I told her it was okay. She apologized again and left the room. I sat, with the comic book in my hand, and thought: So that's what it's like. As soon as there's a little bit of pressure, as soon as you have to prove yourself, you lose that ability to "see" or to "mind-read." Then I looked at the comic book again, with eyes closed, and without anyone looking over my shoulder or questioning my method of reading,the words and images came to me: apparitions in a slide-show.

When I awoke that morning (I was staying at my ex-wife's, as I do every Saturday, when I go to visit my daughter), I realized that this is how writing, at its purest and clearest and deepest, has always been for me: eyes closed, and I'm somewhere else, and if I've gotten in good and deep, if I'm open enough, it's like I'm some sightseeing tourist doped-out on dreams.

Chinese Whispers

2010-05-11T16:05:00.000-07:00

It's interesting, I frequently receive comments in Chinese in relation to my blog, and while a part of me, the part that likes to speculate all fancy-like and footloose says--hey, you know what this is all about, doncha, you've gotten big in China, over there they really relate to you and dig what it is you're writing and how you're writing, they may not be onto you in a big way here in the States, but in China, oh boy, the places you'll go!--the other part of me (the part that once subjected one of the comments to the Google translator and basically the translated message was more fortune cookie then literary acclaim from overseas), knows that my status in China is not ballooning at some rapid and unforeseen rate. Still, as long as the comments in Chinese keep coming, and as long as I don't translate them, I can stay in the realm of fantasy and fiction, which is where I'm most comfortable anyway.

Again and Again

2010-05-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

I have gotten far away from writing, far away from the "feel" of it, and the other night told my girlfriend: I have lost interest. Or rather, I regain interest, but it doesn't seem to last, and since completing my collection of stories, I have been erratic and undisciplined.

Then there's the chicken or the egg thing: is my lack of interest and poverty of discipline due to excessive drinking and intake of various substances, or am I getting fucked up because I feel I have "lost" something, and am not performing at a quality level?

Molotov cocktails of Ritalin, Oxycontin, hard liquor and beer, have become all too customary, as have days avoiding "work": the work of getting inside myself to pull something out, and shape it and mold it and make stories and poems out of the mutable clay that we all are.

When I was a kid, I needed the stories, needed the forays into another realm to escape the violence of my household, and going "away" meant going to a warm and vital refuge ... and this refuge has remained with me for most of my life, that place and space of Other ... but now, why am I not going there with the same sense of devotion and worship? Does that place still possess the same value for me? These and other questions will not be answered, merely asked, again and again.

Forgive Us Our Trespasses?

2010-04-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

There's a certain type of writer or artist, a certain breed, that I think of as a trespasser. I am fascinated by and applause-ready when it comes to trespassers. Part of me is secretly and not-so-secretly rooting: go-go-go. I am invigorated by both consciously plotted artistic trespasses and impulsive and reckless encroachments into marked territories.

It is the Keep Off the Grass sign joyously disobeyed. There's the strict message, Keep Off the Grass, enforced by whatever barrier--ropes or chains or fence--is meant to keep you from standing, stepping or ass-sitting on the grass (typically: beautifully manicured blades of green that partner well with sunlight), and maybe you trespass because who the hell wants to be told by some Nowhere-to-Be-Seen force of grass-bureacracy: hey, Keep Off the Grass, because we say so ... maybe because it's childlikishly fun to trespass on the off-limits grass ... or maybe part of you understands and recognizes something utterly ridiculous and life-contrary in not being able to fully enjoy grass naturally sprouting from earth that can in no way--truly, truly--be claimed by anyone, whether or not they post a sign reading: Keep Off the Grass.
The artist as trespasser, the ones who happily invade and explore forbidden areas of grass, and other regions marked Do Not Enter ... to them I am grateful ... for their boundary-pushing extends the borders of my inner-self.

No Joy In Whoville

2010-04-21T14:40:00.001-07:00

(An Existential Riff in Nine Parts)

I.

“Je ust un autre” (I is somebody else)—Rimbaud

II.

An I-for-an-I
was the assignment
he had been given: my watchdog,
my stalker, my witness, my trusty
recording device.
The commitment, a lifetime,
and he took the assignment
very seriously (after all, no
job meant no existence, the very nature
of the task defined him),
yet how long
could I bear being followed?
I-for-an-I
and others as well,
numberless we arrive,
and They Call Us Legion

…………

and since he walked in
and over my footsteps:
no trace whatsoever
of the alleged stalker,
watchdog, witness, recording
demon.

Go on, play the fool,
tell the authorities
you’d like to have
your shadow arrested,
or threaten him
with a restraining order,
see what comes of it.

The only divorce here
is a crack-up . . . and even that
presents a new set of problems.
Shards of glass dancing around your feet,
multiplying the images,
one stalker hydra-head-reflected
as ten . . . and then what?

III.

Q: I don’t understand . . . how do you live with yourself?
A: I don’t. I live just outside myself.

IV.

(A timeless nursery rhyme chanted at births, weddings and wakes)

Something borrowed,
something blue,
the ghost you wear
eventually wears on you

V.

“As from a star, I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin. I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.”—Plath

VI.

Headline from an existential tabloid:

Fusion Breeds
Disparity Pulls Out
(see section A-4)

VII.

The Break-up

It’s not really me,
but more, well, I guess you:
Nothing personal.

VIII.

Costello: I’m asking you who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: That’s it.
Costello: That’s who.
Abbott: Yes.

IX.

Six-word epitaph:

fill in the blank
wuz
here.

Blue Cheese

2010-04-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Clown in the Moon

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

Dylan Thomas

Just the Three of Us

2010-04-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

My ex-wife, on the phone with her brother, says to him, while looking at me, playful accusation in her eyes: Yea, I know exactly what you're talking about. I lived with an alcoholic for years.

I smile and remind her: Hey, you weren't the only one, I had to live with him too.

Stopwatch

2010-04-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

Wise Man: You're running out of time, son.

Wise-ass: Really? I didn't even know I was running in time.

Existential Q & A

2010-04-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Q: How do you live with yourself?

A: I don't. I live just outside myself.

Biscello and Me

2010-04-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

One sunny autumn afternoon.....

7 yr. old daughter (exasperated): Daddy, come on, let's pretend.

Biscello (or, me): No I don't wanna pretend.

Daughter (perturbed): You never wanna pretend anymore.

Biscello (or, me): That's not true, kid. I pretend every day to be John Biscello.

My daughter didn't quite get it. Neither did I, for that matter. I expect that one day we'll both get it.
My attempt at "getting it" goes something like this: Nobody, living, can do a better job of pretending to be John Biscello than I can. It is, as some might say: the role that I was born to play.
I plagiarize him on a daily basis. I forge his signature on all sorts of documents, even the official ones that could get me in trouble with the government if I were ever "found out."
And that is one of my great fears, one that splinter-remains in my mind as a low-grade migraine, and in my psyche as a threatening undertow: What if I am found out? What if the public-at-large exposes me as a fraud and swindler, some poor man's mimic profiting from someone else's echo? Would I be tried for high treason or existential impersonation?
I do worry about this, but at the same time, I possess an inborn cockiness and strong sense of immunity against anyone ever really psychically defrocking me. I am simply too good at what I do. No one can play the role of Biscello the way that I can. And you want to hear something ironic: despite the fact that this is the role I'm playing 24/7, I'm not attached to it, or him, in the way that you might imagine. Or to put it another way: It is not an intimacy that has bred fusion. Which is why I can give them the best and the worst of Biscello and not give a shit either way. Biscello's life, and how people react to it, doesn't interest me all that much. The choices I make on his behalf, the choices I choose not to make: it's all the same to me, and Biscello's outcome, in the end, will not be a great surprise (hint-hint: it's Death).
So I'll do my thang and breathe life into this Biscello character, keep em all charged and animated, and when his time is up, I'll step aside, or slip away, and let the dude drop.
It's weird, though, doing something--let's say I write a story that someone admires, or I do a good deed--then having to hear Biscello get the credit for it.
I really am nothing more than a phantom battery-charge. Which is fine by me.
Better to walk through this world unseen, then to walk through it a visible marked target. I learned that a long long time ago. Where, when and how: don't ask.
Anyway, I'll sign off with a six-word memoirial that I'd like to inscribe on mine and Biscello's tombstone:

Fill in the blank
wuz
here.

If Kafka Had Been A Blogger

2010-04-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

Is anyone listening?
Of course they are: the ghosts in my head, doing their nightly tap-dance, the ghosts in my room and outside my locked windows, and now these ghosts in cyberspace, a new breed of phantom, banded with the ritual chorus.
I, too, am a ghost in this machine, I, too, a wriggling tentacle attached to the beast They Call Legion (except, really, I'm an amputated bit of tentacle that stays alive like the earthworm split in half).
My name, if once I had one, was violently displaced by the letter K., and over time that K. underwent changes: an ungodly fast thinning and shrinking the K. to lowercase, then too many crowds, too many voices, trying to seize and manipulate k. for their own needs and agendas, leaving "me," k., in a reduced state of whisper (whisper sounding like: whisperwhisperwhisper, vowels and consonants asleep in soft breath, just enough to make a listener curious, just enough to drive them crazy and make them question: what is it exactly k's saying?).

An insubstantial whisper, a dream behind door number blank, an eternally modern "no-man" in the sealed vacuum of cyberspace,

a here-i-am-man tapping out cyphers and inscribing glyphs on virtual cavewalls, things like:

I Am I Am
The Prehistory of Man
Moving at the Speed of Light,

or,

k.blogspot wuz here/
intercoursing with ghosts.

The Busted Nut

2010-04-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

"It's the nuts who, out of the blue like errant asteroids, pummel havoc upon society when their shells won't hold."

That's one thing my friend, Paul, wrote in response to my riff about Nut Checks.

Which got me to thinking, I need to write a memoir titled:

Busted Nut: The True Story of Being Broke, Lowdown and Crazy in America.

Or maybe, a political thriller:

Busted Nut: Sex, Money and Insanity in the Whore-sale Buying of America.

Ain't Nuttin But Funny Money

2010-04-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

My friend Paul has a friend, Sean, who is schizophrenic. Today, while sitting on the front-porch at Global Joe's, our coffee-shop haunt, soaking in the glorious sunrays, Paul mentioned Sean's steady supply of HG malt liquor (both Sean and Paul's drink of choice).

Where does Sean get his money, I asked Paul.

He gets a nut check, Paul said.

Is that what he calls it, I asked Paul.

Yea, Paul said.

How much does a nut check net ya, I said.

He gets about $600 month, Paul said.

Damn, I said, thinking about my present status as The Unemployed. I can live off that, I said.

Paul laughed and said, Yea you need to get a nut check.

I thought about times in the past when I would've officially qualified for a nut check, that brief stint in an institution when I was nineteen, the various therapists I've been to, and I'm sure at least one of them would've signed off on my mental instability.

I could've cashed in on my head problems ... back in the day, I told Paul.

Maybe you still can, he said. Then he went on: I'd say at least half the people I know on the Mesa get nut checks. Nut checks and veteran checks. Some get both.

I wasn't a veteran and would never pretend to be one. I wasn't a fully cracked nut either, but I might be able to withdraw dollars from the ATM of my fissures and chasms.

Back in Brooklyn, disability was the big scam in my neighborhood. My father, my two Uncles, the guy Hank who hung out alldaylong at OTB: each of them milked worker's comp, till the cash cow dried out, getting doctors to sign off on their respective "ailments" (usually back-related).

I could convert the tradition of a slipped or herniated disc into fractured marbles or busted brain-coils. And get a nut check for it.

The best part of all: I could piss off both liberals and republicans equally.

God bless America, land of bi-polar lies and quantifiable dysfunctions.

Narcissus & the Break-Up (Haiku-Style)

2010-04-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

It's not really me,
but more, well, I guess you:
nothing personal.

My Kind of Hero

2010-04-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Batman
unbelted & de-balled,

a eunuch crusader
dark castrati

doing battle
with the nefarious forces of evil:
so much braver,
don't you think,
then the camera-ready stud
with superpowers
and a dick made of iron
kicking labeled asses
and cleaning up crime--

all smiles, easy glory &
not a trace
of irony.

Blue Balls in the Charity Ward

2010-04-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from "Stray Passages")

My time in San Francisco lasted a little over a month and would have been even shorter if not for Diana. I arrived and decided to check into a hostel in North Beach. I picked North Beach probably because of the connection to Kerouac, I don’t remember. I stayed in a dorm-style room and one of my four roommates was a guy named Bill from Boston. He had a shock of frizzy hair and wore glasses that were taped in the middle. He reminded me of Dave Mustaine, the singer from Megadeth. We both liked to drink: I was an Olde English guy, and he went in for Mickey’s and Ballantines, so the two of us, and his traveling companion, Tracy, wound up doing a lot of drinking together. Bill would say he was a bum and a drunk and he planned on being those things as best and as long as he could. Tracy was in art school in Boston, but was taking a semester off.
One night she showed me some of her work, which had a dark and morbid feel, sort of like Tim Burton off his meds if Tim Burton were on meds which I don’t know if he is. I was kind of attracted to Tracy, who had long dark hair and an elfin face with bright open eyes, and since she had made it a point to inform me that she and Bill had been boyfriend and girlfriend but weren’t anymore, I thought something might happen between us but it never did. I could tell that Bill was still really hung up on her and there was this sweetness to Bill that made you never want to do anything that might hurt him.
Several days after I got to San Francisco it was Halloween, and Bill and Tracy made themselves up as car accident victims, complete with blood and gore, and I let several of the girls in the hostel dress me in drag and a bunch of us went to the Halloween parade in the Castro. Much of my memory from that night is fuzzy, but I do remember being perched on a mailbox, which is where me and Diana met.
Mail-order bride, she said, referring to both my outfit and the postal box beneath my ass.
Yes . . . lick a stamp, stick it on my forehead, and I’m all yours.
Diana was dressed as the ever-popular slave-bondage Princess Leia. She was short and busty with copper-skin and a full bushel of dark curly hair.
You make a very pretty girl, she said, then: Which way do you swing?
Depends on my options, I said, then quickly added: No, I’m straight.
Good, she said, and that was how things got started between me and Diana.

Diana started hanging out with me, Bill and Tracy. Bill had gone against his bumming principles and gotten a job as a barista at a coffeehouse. He hated the morning hours as he was always doing battle with epic hangovers. Tracy said she planned on finishing school then coming back to live, probably in Berkeley, where her friend Nicole was. I had applied for temp work, but as would happen throughout most of my travels during my life, I only put half-assed energy into finding work. I had no desire to work. It destroyed the dream-quality of the cities I was in and how I related to them. Still, I was running low on money and needed to do something. Except for the one day I put in as a temp doing clerical work in an office, which netted me around $50, I adopted Bill’s bumming principle, which he wasn’t living up to, and stopped looking for work. Three weeks in, I ran out of money and that’s when Diana came to my rescue. Even though she and I weren’t an item, we hadn’t even kissed, she took me in because: I was a writer and she believed in me. This was the first time in my life I had experienced this: the fact that I wrote, and that she liked or believed in what I wrote, was at least partially responsible for getting me free room and board.
She said I could stay with her in her dorm room in Mills College, an all-girls school in Oakland. Until I got on my feet. But her hospitality made me want to stay down. She would attend classes during the day and at night we would either go out to eat or cook in her room. She said we were both lucky, because her father, who was a heart surgeon, had given her a credit card with unlimited funds, so he was footing the bill for the two of us. Diana was Turkish and said that her father, who was a pretty traditional Muslim, would be pretty pissed if he found out she was paying the way for some unemployed Catholic-Italian writer. She seemed to enjoy the idea of this, so maybe she was trying to strike back at her father for reasons she never talked about.
Then came the Thanksgiving blow-out which ended everything. It actually started on the night before Thanksgiving, when her and I watched a film together and drank beer and champagne. We were both pretty drunk and sitting on her bed, facing one another, infected with a serious case of champagne giggles, which then turned sexual as she told me: We should have sex.
Diana was a virgin and said she was saving herself for the right moment, the right guy, and all that. Which I respected, especially since I didn’t think I was the right guy. I liked Diana, enjoyed her company and conversation, but wasn’t gutturally attracted to her. When she suggested sex, I reminded her about waiting for the right guy, the right moment, and she said: Fuck that. This is the right moment. You’re the right guy for this moment. Don’t you like me?
Yea, I like you, I said.
But you don’t want to go out with me?
We do go out, almost every night.
No, seriously. You’re not into me like that, right?
I knew this moment was coming and had tried, with the desperate strength of a coward, to push it out of my mind as often as I could.
I like you Diana, but you know….
No, I don’t. Tell me.
My alcohol high, and its power as a liberator, had met its match. I had to tell the truth.
You’re not really my type, I said. You’re just . . . not my type.
Diana nodded. Her eyes seemed heavy with hurt.
Well, she said, in a very serious tone, for tonight, if you want to have sex with me, just pretend that you like me.
I like you, Diana—
Pretend that you like me like that. Just while we’re hooking up.
I can’t do that, I said.
You can’t even do that, she practically shouted, her eyes getting big.
No, I mean I can do it, if you want me to….
Forget it, she said. Just forget the whole thing.
Okay, I said.
We sat quietly for a minute.
Then Diana said: You should probably go sleep in the other room.
The other room belonged to Gail, her roommate, who had gone back to D.C. to visit her family.
I nodded and went to the other room.
A half-hour later, I heard Diana sobbing, loudly. When I didn’t respond, either by asking her if she was okay or by going in the room to check on her, her sobbing got louder. Which pissed me off, as I now felt she was trying to manipulate me with her tears. If she cried long enough and loud enough I would be forced to go into the room to check on her. It was what any decent person would do. But I felt cold inside and the more she cried the colder I felt, receding deeper and deeper into myself. Fuck it, I thought: this is who you are—a bum, a freeloader, an ingrate, a cruel bastard. I didn’t necessarily want to be those things but part of me, the devilish part, got a kick out of being those things, or at least thinking of myself in those ways. Back then, I thought being a dick made me powerful and immune to all kinds of stuff, and didn’t realize it just made me a dick.
Anyway, Diana fell asleep crying, I fell asleep cold and silent. The next day, we still had the Thanksgiving dinner she had been planning, as she said she didn’t want the food to go to waste, and we both agreed I would leave as soon as possible. Two days later, a couple of friends from my neighborhood and a few family members, pooled together enough money for a bus ticket and wired it to me. Three more days on Greyhound and I was back in Bensonhurst.

Easter Island

2010-04-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

I am almost 36.
I have just spent Easter Sunday with my daughter and my ex-wife, in Santa Fe, and it was a very Easter-centric Easter Sunday, thanks to my daughter, who received a basket from the "Easter Bunny" and was jumping up-and-down excited, saying the Easter Bunny is so cool, and he sure knows how to make a girl happy (a line she got from Peppermint Patty of the Peanuts gang).
After sorting through the goodies in the basket, we hunted for the Easter eggs hidden around the house, and outside the house. Then we decorated Easter eggs and watched two Easter movies: Rankin and Bass's "The Easter Bunny is Coming to Town," and Peanuts "It's the Easter Beagle!"
Unlike the Easter Bunny, and the Easter Beagle, Jesus, and his resurrection, didn't factor into our celebration.
My daughter gave me a drawing, which I love and deeply admire for its pure unbridled fancy.
In the drawing, I am a clown, and I am being chased by my hat (I am screaming Aaaaaaa), and on top of the hat, is an egg, and out of the egg an Easter chickie is hatching. All of this is taking place onstage. Above the stage, clouds are suspended from rafters. There is also a sun in the far upper right corner, and a couple of rocks at the far end of the stage. There is an audience watching the action: they are heads, a sea of circles, there's over a hundred of them, and interspersed between the circle-heads, are various utterances and proclamations, such as: That clown ... hahahha ... funny ... cool .... awesome (and my personal favorite) .... why.
I am almost 36, and I look to my daughter, age 7, to remind me of the joy and playfulness that I want and need to experience in creation. I want to write, want to remember to write in the way my daughter creates her pictures. I want to be 36, going on 7, creatively.
The next day, I have a five-hour wait between buses, on my way back to Taos. My layover spot is the Oh-Kay Casino, which I believe is a part of the San Juan Pueblo. I have $30 left, and since I am presently unemployed, and am not sure how and when my next dollars will be coming, I have to be a bit mindful about the last of my money. In being mindful, I go to the gas station convenience store, and buy a 24 oz. can of Olde English, which is only $1.79, a more bang-for-your-buck alcohol option.
While attempting to use a payphone outside the convenience store (all three of them, like the two in the casino, aren't working), I see a young Hispanic kid bolt out of the convenience store, a six-pack cradled under each arm. The lady manager comes out five seconds later, and one of the customers, a guy, points at the blue car pulling away, and says, he's in there, as the blue car makes a quick getaway.
A minute later, while walking across a field, a lean brownish-tan jackrabbit with antenna-like ears shoots out from behind a sage-bush and rabbits away, zig-zaggy, high-speed. Then there's the tumbleweed, rolling across the field like a ball of static.
I find a spot, near some random stone structures, to sit down and drink my beer, and think: Everyone or thing is on the run today.
Sitting in the middle of a dry, brush-stubbled field, drinking Ol-E, $30 in my pocket, five hours between me and my bus "home" (which, at present, is my girlfriend's house, forever the stray guest am I), reflecting, with fierce self-recrimination, on where I am at as a writer, and where I thought I'd be (the word failure a popular refrain in my rampant head-swim on this day), I, like the jackrabbit and the tumbleweed and the beer thief, am on the run, from what I'm not exactly sure.
Gangster phantoms? Glaring insignificance? Bold predictions gone dim?
I am almost 36.
A clown running away from my own hat, screaming Aaaaaaa, while an audience watches and laughs and makes remarks like: cool and awesome and why.

notes on aviation

2010-04-01T16:58:00.001-07:00

birds, in flight,
darkening the slate-gray sky:
commas, dilating
and bending;
eyebrows, arching
and flatlining—

i am reminded
of her,

the soft hands
of rain,

running on,
unfinished.

Sole of Foot, Palm of Hand

2010-03-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

Her foot, small in his hand, made him think of a dimpled brown fruit with no-name that came from a faraway land.
This impressionistic riff pleased him, and her foot, reconfigured, became more cinematic, more storybook.
Trampolining on the riff, his mind turned like so: Her foot in my hand is an exotic no-name fruit, therefore my hand, by proxy, has become exotic and nameless. Now my fingers open and close like fans, now they breathe through gills, now they record touch with charged sensitivity.
Yes, her foot in my hand has made me supple and different. I am not brand-new, by no means am I brand-new, but I have undergone a subtle make-over: I am different than I was before her foot.
He considered the prehistory of her foot. How far back did it go? What hands, ancient and attentive, had touched and held it? What other bodies, before her own, had it known and been attached to? Had her foot, as a disembodied spelunker, explored the pitch-blackened recesses of caves? Had it glided low to the ground over the parched grasses of a savanna in search of tiny prey? What dances had it moved to? Waltzes, fox-trots, rumbas, tangos, huckle-bucks and hokey-pokeys? Had its big toe ever emerged from a hole in a sock like a snail-thick periscope?
He considered all of these things while massaging the sole of her foot. Other parts of her body responded, in turn: her fingers contracted, her eyes closed, her thighs tightened, her stomach butterflied, her mouth sucked air.
Her foot, being held, and stockinged in soft fuzzy lamplight, inspired an interrogation scene in his mind: Where were you the night of April 9th, approximately 12:26? Isn't it true you were wearing a pair of expensive shoes, mules I believe, and with malicious intent you repeatedly stepped on cracks so as to break your mother's back?
He studied her foot in the lamplight, angling it this way and that.
What, if any, crimes had this foot committed?
Trespassing, kicking innocent testicles, walking in someone else's footprints--with its sibling foot as an accomplice--and trying to pass the prints off as original?
There was much he did not know about this foot and its secret life.
He kept rubbing her foot, kept studying it.
The knuckle-ridged bone that rose, incrementally, from the base of her big toe to the halfway point of her foot. That part of her foot looked tough, like it could take care of itself and wouldn't break easily.
Then there was the buttony dollop of pink toe and its half-moon cuticle. This part looked tender and vulnerable, a newborn that needed protecting.
This foot has much to it. History, silence, character, dreams. It is a complex and profound foot, just as complex and profound as all the parts that went into the composition of her anatomy.
Pondering the greatness of this foot distracted him, and he stopped massaging it.
Her voice, speaking on behalf of her foot, came to him: Don't stop, please.
Okay, he said, and went back to massaging her foot.

Treat this foot with care, pay it tribute, and these sentiments will travel upward, to the ankle, and from there to the shin, then the knee, and on and on, leaving no part of her body untouched, and this will translate to love, and her body and her being will be thankful and will give gratitude, and you'll understand how it can all be traced back to the original source:

her foot,
a beautiful brown fruit,
small in the palm of your hand.

Cabin Fever

2010-03-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

The best analgesic for winter doldrums
and aches,
was lazy sex in the middle of the afternoon
on an unmade bed. It would be like
making love on a soft mess of rumpled sails,
and her man, not her man at all,
but her lover in a clandestine affair
torn from the back pages of a Hollywood tabloid,
circa 1923.

Yes, the affair would be vintage.

Black and white
and sealed in special plastic
that would keep the winter out,
keep everything from premature
deep-freeze.
The memories would stay fresh,
in season,
a warm bruise on new skin.
She would take her analgesic
in small measured doses,
and having set her mind to this prescription,
she looked across the room

at him,

smoke
rising in tight spirals
from the cigarette in her hand,
and let her smile
linger.

What,
he said,
and smiled back.

Nothing,
she said,
and placed the cigarette between her lips,
considering her next move.

march wedding

2010-03-22T15:08:00.000-07:00

a pinch of scarlet
rouging the albino cheek of the sky:
Winter, blushing, the nervous bridegroom
about to enter into matrimony
with its fated young lover,
Spring.

Chef on Ecstasy

2010-03-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

Three nights to go then our restaurant closes.

The restaurant, a Latin-French fusion joint owned by a man named Lucien, isn't fully closing, but Lucien has sold it to a couple of co-workers, and there will be no more dinners, as the restaurant will go back to being strictly breakfast-lunch. Lucien will go to Costa Rica for an extended period of time: a vacation from the vacation that his life has become over the past six months. Many of us have been on vacation with him: a Bermuda on the run, Tropic of cancellations and late-night strayings.

Three nights to go and we're all starting to get a little sentimental,and it's been manifesting in our giddy recklessness at work, a loosey-goosiness that's set off buzz-contagions for those coming into the restaurant. Last night, Lucien, started in on the white wine before we even opened, and he was in a cheery and cracked musical mood. I want to sing Prince. Lionel Richie. Let's all sing Bohemian Rhapsody.

This was one of the upside episodes to his manic swings. We're a moody bunch, that is, Lucien, me (the waiter), B.J. (the busser), Paul (our friend and resident counter-fly), and we roller-coaster with enough drama to rival Ibsen.

B.J., our resident chemical dispensary, said he had some X. I want some Lucien said. Lucien bought a hit. Should I take it now or wait?

Wait, I said, it's still light out.

Wait, B.J., said, stick with the wine for now.

Waiting was not one of Lucien's strengths, I don't think I've ever seen a drug of any kind go into his pocket. Once it was in his hand, it went down his throat or up his nose almost immediately. Which is why I was impressed that he only took half.

I called up Paul. Get over when you can, Lucien's cooking on X.
I'll be over soon, Paul said.

A half-hour later, Lucien mildly rolling, his eyes coated with a hazy wash, cooking and singing and occasionally shooting rubberbands at us.

You know, B.J. said, it's possible that Lucien is the only chef on earth right now cooking while on X.

I thought about that.

And if not, I said, he might be the only chef on earth cooking while on X and drinking Macon de Lugny Charmes.

The night coasts along, the customers that come enjoy what will likely be their last dinner at the restaurant, many of them sad to see us go--Lucien is a genius in the kitchen, the food is so good, we wish we would've found out about you guys sooner--the usual comments and compliments. Me and B.J. work the tables and drink wine. Lucien cooks and rides the waves of the X and drinks wine. Mackey, our friend and the night's entertainment, plays the blues and classic rock on his electric guitar.

Before continuing with this tale, an important item to note: last week in Taos was one of those, what I call, bitch-slap weeks. It might have been the March-inspired winds-of-change, maybe the prickly patch of an energetic shift, but whatever the source, it was one of those "phases" where a collective craziness comes over the town, manifesting in various forms: drug-n-drink binges, mental anguish, rabid restlessness, physical illness, etc. These "phases" are quite intense and magnified in Taos, a ferocious wave that ... well bitch-slaps the shit out of you.

The post-script to the bitch-slap occurred last night, an unscripted episode of shared joy. Mackey is playing the guitar. Three girls we know--Kim, Sonia, and Angelica, are sitting at a table, drinking wine, eating tapas. Sonia shouts across the room to a woman, whose name is Cassie: Cassie why don't you get up and sing.

Yea, get up and sing comes the chorus of voices. Cassie begins by singing from her chair. Her voice is like a well-sculpted anvil that you are happy to have dropped on your head. It hits us and hits us even harder when she rises from her chair, joins Mackey, and they break into a version of Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby Mcgee."

Suddenly, we are all playing a part in this impromptu show, Life: The Musical, as the customers and the staff are dancing and singing, drumming on the counter-top or in my case, a heavy copper pot. The difficulties and whiplash from last week dissolve in this spontaneous burst of expression. I go around the restaurant, pouring free glasses of white wine for the customers, and just then, Paul enters the scene, as if the ideal guest forming the perfect last link to complete the chain. He holds up the 16 oz. High Gravity malt liquor he came in with, his signature drink, and this serves as a hedonistic benediction.

Later on, I tell Mackey, who moved to Taos about four months ago, and has had a recent spell of tough luck: Remember this night, Mackey. This is what happens here, this is the amazing part about living in Taos. We're all in this together, brother.

The week before, the blues had taken hold of us, but on this night, we, as a unified group, took hold of the blues and played it with our mouths and feet and bodies, and converted the energy into childlike joy.

Two more nights and the restaurant closes.

Cutting the Cord

2010-03-08T15:32:00.000-08:00

the agent never responded
to the needs of the needy writer:
click, no dial-tone.

Deep-Six-Em

2010-03-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Show Will Begin
In _____ Minutes.

(An old weathered theater sign I saw in my friend's yard, and one whose message I have adopted as my latest epitaph slash six-word memoir.)

Six Word Memoir(ials)

2010-03-02T13:09:00.000-08:00

I.

Communications Breakdown...
Live, One Night Only!

II.

The Fix Being In,
He Played Anyway

III.

Forgiveness
and Mercy:
No Trespassers Allowed

IV.

Somewhere Under the Rainbow,
Steaming Dung

V.

Stray Tickings:
Inside a Housebroken Watch.

VI.

Fear, Trembling,
and rain in the forecast.

VII.

Last Night,
I Dreamed I Was....

VIII.

P.S.,
I Loved You Once,
X.

IX.

Skin, tissue,
soul, recognition:
You ready?

X.

Fill-in-the-blank
wuz
here.

True or False?

2010-03-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

"Realism is, in a sense, a bad word I think. I see no dividing line between imagination and reality. There is much reality in imagination."—Fellini.

One of my least favorite questions: Did that really happen? Is that true?
In the case of a story I'd say: It's been written, so of course it's true. There was no story, now there is a story. The story is true.
If someone were to ask me if it were factual, I might answer: It's a work of fiction. A true work of fiction.
In David Lynch's "Lost Highway," one of the detectives investigating the murder of Bill Pullman's (the actor playing the character) wife asks him a question, I can't remember exactly what (though it was somehow connected to videocameras and Pullman's objection to them), to which Pullman responds:” I like to remember things the way I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”
That could be Pullman speaking for Lynch himself, an obsessive recontextualizer (Mixmaster D. Lynch if you will) of facts, dreams, parallel worlds, etc. Life, and "what happened," processed through the Imagination comes out reconfigured. Fiction. But if you're true to the essence of the story, if that is captured and expressed, then I would never say: No, it's not a true story—because that minimizes the accomplishment, the thing itself. Dig it, cuz the opposite of True is False, and if you claim your work is False, that means you have not succeeded at capturing or expressing what makes it True.
Let's check in with Big Papa (Hem not Biggie): "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
When there was that debate raging about James Frey (the dude who wrote “A Million Little Pieces” and” My Friend Leonard” and had received a tap-tap blessing on the head from Oprah's magic wand coronating him Book Club Royalty), when they found out that parts of his memoir weren't true, that he had lied, people were outraged, they felt duped and deceived, their trust had been violated, and all I could think was—Are you fucking kidding me? You mean to tell me, a writer "lying" in his writing, distorting and exaggerating "facts," this is what people are getting hysterical about? You can validly argue the point that the book shouldn't have been billed as a memoir, fine, but then the issue also becomes one of semantics, an issue, might I add, that gives everybody involved (the publishers, promotional team, reading public, critics) an opportunity to philosophically re-examine our very idea of what a memoir is, or should be (one day I'd like to pen a memoir titled "Memoirial: One Man's Quest to Tell the Truth While Lying the Entire Time.") Any takers? Oprah, a coming out party?
Anyway, Frey wound up receiving a shitload of hatemail, was denigrated, and given the literary-scarlet-letter treatment, and at one point when he did re-appear on Oprah, the Queen finger-wag-confronted Frey with her ass suctioned to the Almighty High Horse, vindicating all the people, her people, who had been taken in by this scam-artist. I've never read Frey's work (except in bits and doses), but I'm 100% behind him, and when he fought his way through the hard times by writing another book, a large fiction novel, “Bright Shiny Morning,” I thought-way to blow, maestro!
This need for "reality" to be authenticated—that really happened, right, that's a true story y'know—is where the problem lies (if you even want to consider it as such.) Reality shows have become popular selling the idea of "reality," which is really a superficial facsimile from a low-grade template. These are real people really getting kicked off islands and really swapping their wife for another wife, and real dramas and friction are generated from these real people (we repeat, real people, like you and me, not actors.) It's a scam, a hustle, and a sham, but ain't nobody shoutin—we've been had, we're being duped—and why's that? Because the illusion and the mirage of it all remains intact. That's entertainment!, functioning as the new que sera sera. Frey was called out, exposed as a "fraud." The curtain was torn open and when they saw a man manipulating gizmos and pushing buttons to project a larger-than-life Wizard, they wanted to see the "Wizard" burned at the stake for pulling a fast one.
The way I look at it: anything I write about is filtered through my Imagination, and when it comes out the other side it is Fiction. People that read me can decide for themselves if it's true, real, unreal, if any of that even matters to them. I'll stay out of it. The one thing I won't do: write a book allegedly based on my life and call it a memoir. I want all my works, including any "memoir" I might write, to be found in the Fiction section of a bookstore or library.

Self-Interview

2010-02-02T13:41:00.001-08:00

(This self-interview was conducted, live, by I'm-Not-Sure-Who, at the Mapleton Public Library, Brooklyn, NY, Oct. 31st, 2008. For a transcript of this self-interview, disconnect your phone, dial zero, repeatedly, and once you realize that the transcript, along with o so many other things in your life ain't coming, hang up and don't forget to smile.)

What is art?
I don't know and don't want to pretend to know.

How would you define art?
I wouldn't.

Why write?
Why do anything? No, really, Interview Mystery Dude, I'm asking you, why do anything?
(Uhm, passion, love, habit, compulsion, fear, ambition. Those are some things.
(Then there, you've got a cabinet stocked with possibilities. There's really nothing I can, or care to add to that.)

Do you believe in Destiny?
I'd like to answer no, but every time I try to shake off this sense of Destiny as something childish and foolish and unwanted, it goes away, briefly, only to return and resume its place, as if rightfully so, in the halls of my mind.)

Do you think you'll ever be happy?
I'm not exactly sure what happy is or means, but regardless my answer would probably be no.

Is sadness a permanent condition?
As much as living is.

And when you die?
I wish I knew. Then again, I'm not sure I want to know.

Do you write to tell the truth?
Some truths.

Like?
Like we all get scared and are sad and scarred with sorrow, we all have wants and dreams and desires, whether we voice them or not. We're all lonely and reaching out to connect using all sorts of hands. I don't really care about other truths.

How do you measure success?
I lack the proper ruler to do such a thing.

And who possesses that ruler?
God. Or someone or thing like him/her/it.

And if there's no God?
Then there's nobody holding the ruler, and measuring success, or anything else for that matter, is irrelevant.

What gives you the most pleasure?
The idea of pleasure.

And when you're receiving pleasure, or giving it?
Half of me has usually moved on to something else. The other half of me hangs around and reports back to me later and tells me how it was, what it felt like. Sometimes we co-write about it.

Who, or what has been the greatest influence in your life?
I don't know, there's still plenty of people I haven't met, plenty of things I have yet to experience. When all is said and done though, I have a feeling, I'll hear myself answering, much to my surprise: Me.

Do you believe in angels, demons?
Only if they believe in me. I don't want to be co-dependent.

Do you have any advice for young writers?
Read and write as much as you can. Also, don't run up a bar tab, pay for your drinks one round at a time.

Do you think art is a luxury or necessity?
I think the answer to that question lies in the responses generated by art.

Do you think art can change the world?
More than an atom bomb and less than a kiss. Or is it the other way around?

Your favorite thing about writing is....?
Having written.

Your least favorite thing about writing is....?
Not having written.

If you had to describe yourself in one word, that word would be?
________________.

If there's one quote you'd like to be remembered by it would be?
"Even though he was betting against himself, knowing the fix was in, he beat the odds, soundly."--J. Biscello

A Minor In Journalism

2010-01-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from a work-in-progress)

It was winter, my senior year in high school, and I was seated in the office of my guidance counselor, Mr. Worshawski. It was stuffy in his office, as if summer had never gone from it, a thick stale heat that made me sleepy.
Half-listening to the whirring of the mini-fan which circulated a pathetic breeze, I saw that Worshawski was pink in the face and sweating profusely. He sip-slurped from his coffee mug in between asking me questions, which eventually led to the big one: What do you plan to do after you graduate, Alex?
Even though I knew this question was coming I felt caught off-guard. The heat in the office suddenly turned into the dead-on glare of an interrogation lamp, and Worshawski into a snub-nosed detective. My imagination, as usual, was getting the best of me, and against my better judgment I answered: I have no idea.
Worshawski slid his glasses up the sweat-slicked bridge of his nose and said, with evident dismay: You mean you haven’t given it any thought at all?
I felt as if I had been exposed and quickly tried to cover up: No, I’ve given it some thought, I’m just not sure. I guess I’ll enroll at Kingston.
Kingston was a local community college and a lot of students I knew planned on enrolling there.
I see, I see, Worshawski said, and began shuffling through a mess of papers on his desk. When he found the one he wanted, my transcript, he looked it over, then looked at me and said: You know, Alex, you’ve got good grades. You could enroll at a different school, a . . . well to put it bluntly . . . a better one, and I’m sure you’d get in.
I nodded. Worshawski wheezed a sigh through his nostrils and sat back in his chair, stomach bulging outward. I sensed that he had gauged my overall disinterest and was thinking about what to say next—something stimulating, something dynamic—something that would inspire me to become more involved in my own life.
Leaning forward, setting his pudgy hands, palms down, on the desk, he said: I am your guidance counselor, Alex, which means I will guide you and I will counsel you and together we’ll come up with some ideas for your future.
Worshawski smiled, revealing horse-sized yellow-stained teeth. I didn’t like his smile. It seemed forced, as if an insect had bitten his upper lip which had swelled into a position resembling a smile.
Okay, Alex, the future, he said like some two-bit fortune teller.
We discussed The Future, as if it were a ready-made suit I was meant to slip into, and after hearing how I had been writing stories since I was a kid and how I had received a creative writing award from my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Antonioni, Worshawski said, in a very official and final way: Journalism. That’s the career for you.
Again, the insect-bite smile, this time backlit by a glow of triumph.
I’m curious, though, Worshawski said, if you’re a writer why didn’t you ever take any journalism classes with Mr. Mazzone.
Mazzone, the journalism teacher and wrestling coach, was a brute gorilla of a man known for shooting steroids and giving lifts to young pretty female students in his Jaugar.
I don’t know, I said.
Well what’s not done is what’s not done, Worshawski said in an extra-loud voice, then told me how he would look into editorial internships and get back to me.
A week later I was scheduled to interview at Families First, a parenting magazine located in the city. Even though I still had no idea if I wanted to be a journalist, I liked the fact that an internship meant I could skip my last semester of school, and was intrigued by the idea of working in the city.
Looking inward, I quickly fell in love with a pleasing projection of myself: the young upstart writer from Brooklyn, an unsung southpaw prospect brimming with potential, taking the city then the nation by storm through torrents of curiously moving prose and, consequently, forcing my neighborhood, Bensonhurst, to pay homage to me by renaming our avenue—which was Cristoforo Columbo Boulevard—Alex Fillameno Way.
My swaggering sense of destiny was confirmed and reinforced when Families First hired me the following week. Big things were in store for me. I was sure of it.

Territorial Markings

2010-01-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from "Stray Passages")

XI.

When we first arrived at the bus station in L.A., Parker pointed out a baby-faced young man with long blonde dreds.
My god, she said, he’s beautiful.
I didn’t say anything. Was this a test, I thought. Was she hoping I’d react in the way that a jealous boyfriend would react?
He is beautiful, I said.
Tell me about it, she went on. Yummm.
I was surprised when several minutes later she asked me to hold her bag and she went up to the guy then came back ten minutes later, and held up a piece of paper.
Gabe, she said, referring to the name that went with the phone number she had gotten.
Congratulations, I told her and gave her bag to her.
I was jealous but at the same time my writer-mind, starved as it always seemed to be, fed on the Gabe incident. I was reading a lot of Henry Miller and thought: Good, Parker can become my June. I’ve been waiting for a June. Some femme fatale catalyst worthy of mud pies and poison architecture.
A couple of weeks later, when Parker went out with Gabe and didn’t come back to my godmother’s that night, I lay awake, burning from the inside-out, not at all cocky or confident that I could write my way past anything.

XII.

My godmother Debby said I was drinking too much. Which was true. I had been drinking pretty steady for the past five months and once we were settled in at Debby’s apartment, my drinking increased. Debbie knew my family history and said: What about your father? Your uncle? What are you doing to yourself?
Before I could answer, she went on: I’ll tell you what you’re doing. Catholic suicide. That’s what they call it. Catholic suicide is when you drink yourself to death.
I didn’t think it was as severe or dramatic as all that, but didn’t want to fight with my godmother who was being very generous and hospitable to both Parker and I.
Parker had been seeing Gabe. We never talked about it. Then one day she came home and I was sitting on the couch, reading a book, and she sat down next to me and said: Well, it’s over Boy.
Oh yea, what’s that?
Me and Gabe. The funny thing … it never started. We never even kissed.
I had no idea if Parker was telling the truth or not. I had noticed discrepancies or inconsistencies in other things she had told me and was very dubious about what she said.
Why didn’t it work out, I asked.
He’s so fucking dull, she said, emphasizing her exasperation.
She snuggled close to me and said in a toy-like voice: Me and you Boy, we’re pretty good together, aren’t we?
Sometimes I said.
Yea, sometimes.
You’re a good boy, Parker said, then kissed me on the cheek and left the room.
That night Parker and I had rough sex, leaving marks and bruises, almost as if both marking territory.
The next day she saw in the newspaper that we could book flights to Hawaii for $300 roundtrip, which we did impromptu.
That afternoon, while my godmother was at work, Parker and I made love on the living room couch with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” the background music. Then we lay together on the couch, drinking red wine and fantasizing about Hawaii, where neither of us had ever been. And never would be, as the day before we were going to take our flight, Parker came down with a severe flu. She was bedridden and miserable and was very much like a child when sick. I tended to her needs and she asked me if I was going to go to Hawaii without her. I told her I wouldn’t: it was supposed to be “our” thing. She seemed touched by the fact that I stayed behind and took care of her, and in those moments I might have qualified as slightly more than “useless” as a male.

If Sylvia Plath and L.L. Cool J. Had Gotten Down

2010-01-15T11:02:00.000-08:00

Don't call it a Comeback—
L.L. Cool J. wooing
Sylvia Plath in broad daylight
where they dance
and get crazy theatrical
doing the Lazarus
(and doing it and doing it well)
Sylvia telling L.:
You know, Cool J.,
I used to do it
so it felt like hell—
and L.L. laughed
and laughed: Damn,
all you white women
are crazy and so
melo
dramatic,
especially the poets—
then L.L. says: Queen,
L's gonna
teach you how to chill-ax
the oldskool way
—BOOM—
off comes L.L's
red leatherjacket and
white T-shirt, revealing
twin-humped pectorals--
and Plath, tossing aside
her thesaurus, aaaaahhs
and ooooohhhs

and never having been done
by a black dude before
she forgets all about
her old man
Teddy "Rough Rider" Hughes,
and L.L. hittin that shit
hard-as-hell, says: Who's
your Daddy now, Who--
and Plath's fever
climbing 101, 102, 103,
till squeeeeeeee,
the kettle ready,
she peaks
and screams: Daddy,
Daddy, you black bastard
I'm through.

Dreams, Sweat and Screams

2010-01-15T09:44:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from "Stray Passages")

On that trip I experienced some things that I would experience time and again on Greyhound, things very specific to the Greyhound experience. One was the nature of my dreams. I never really slept during my three days on the bus, I would just occasionally lapse into a state of semi-consciousness: I thought of myself as someone who had been drugged and abducted by nefarious characters who were transporting me across the country and would deliver me to other nefarious characters who wanted me. Who those people were and why they wanted me, I had no idea. I wasn’t worth a damn as collateral and didn’t imagine that I’d fetch much in an open market. Still, sometimes you wind up drugged and abducted for reasons beyond your ordinary comprehension. And that was the state I floated in and out of throughout the trip. Hallucinations, nightmares, half-lucid perceptions. In this respect, extended time on Greyhound was a very powerful drug.
Then there was the nature of my sweat. It wasn’t any old sweat. It became a filmy mask of acid and vinegar. Whenever some of this sweat got in my eyes, there was a sharp sting, the sort of sting I imagined I would experience if I repeatedly rubbed my fingers on a salt-and-vinegar potato chip then rubbed my fingers in my eyes. And by the third day, this sweat-mask had practically adhered itself to my face. I went into a restroom in one of the gas stations, saw the weird cellophaney sheen on my face reflected back to me in the mirror, and splashed water on it and scrubbed . . . to no avail. Once my face dried, I saw that the mask was still there and would remain there until it was properly dissolved in a long hot shower.
Another thing were the screams, which only seemed to happen when it was dark. The first time it was two or three in the morning and most of the passengers were either sleeping or attempting to sleep. Pretty much none of the overhead lights were on. Then came the bloodcurdling scream of a woman sitting several rows in front of me. I had been dozing off and the scream cut right into me with my heart jumping into my throat. It was the one scream followed by several low moans and that was it, show over. She must be having a bad dream, I thought, maybe she, too, imagined she had been drugged and abducted by nefarious characters. Do people clustered together in the same tight space, breathing and recycling the same oxygen, wind up having the same nightmares, I wondered. On future Greyhound trips, there would be other random night-screams, but none ever got to me the way that first one did. Something about that one hit home.

Portrait of the Artist as a Budding Stray

2010-01-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from "Stray Passages")

There are two things most responsible for my long-standing affair with the Hound. One, I can’t drive, and to this day have no desire to learn. Perhaps it was my mother’s fall from the horse, perhaps her car accident, or perhaps some mysterious karmic trauma is at the source of it all, but I won’t get behind the wheel of a car. I am quite content being a lifelong passenger, and after all, in a world full of Han Solos don’t we need more Chewbaccas (and yes I’m aware that Chewbacca did more than just sit beside Han Solo and stare out the window of the Millennium Falcon).
The second impetus: Jack Kerouac. I discovered Kerouac, by chance, when I was nineteen and as a wide-eyed babe greedily suckling Kerouac’s vision-engorged tit, that which he had eaten and swallowed, that which he loved and was made up of, was passed on to me.
I had been working as an editorial assistant at Families First, a parenting magazine located in the Village. One of my favorite things to do during my lunch breaks was to pop into the bookstores in the neighborhood—Strand, Shakespeare & Co., Barnes & Noble—or to browse the offerings of the book-sellers lining the sidewalks. On this day I had gone to Tower Records, and in the basement there was a section that carried a small sampling of literature and magazines. I saw the book, On the Road, picked it up, read the synopsis on the back cover, and decided to buy it. I had no idea who Jack Kerouac was, knew nothing about the Beat Generation. My reading selections up to that point, aside from that which had been assigned to me in school (and “assigned” reading material, no matter what it was, usually felt bereft of a certain joy, a certain curious warmth, that came to me when I picked or discovered the books on my own, outside of school) had been comic books, Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, The Hardy Boys, horror stories, crime novels, serial killer biographies. My house was not in the least bit a literary one, in that all my father read were local newspapers and the liner notes inside album sleeves, and my mother self-help books.
So I started reading On the Road during my train ride home back to Brooklyn, and as always happens with first love: its stamp was immediate and irrevocable. I zipped through the book in a couple of days and when I was done I was running a very high happy fever. I was hot and giddy with inspiration, I was in that woozy state, which I would experience again later on with books like Tropic of Cancer (Miller) and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Saroyan) in which I felt like my brain-breaths had been stopped in their tracks, or were in a state of exalted suspension. I hadn’t known writing could be like that: the musicality, the verve, the livingness of it. The language itself wasn’t just telling about things, it was the thing itself, it reflected and oozed and exuded the essence, and for me, who had spent a lot of time with Joe Hardy and Spider Man and Charles Manson, this Kerouac was something brand-new and different, yet also heartwarmingly familiar.
Thoughts of traveling, of hitting the road, had been ballooning inside me for several years, and Kerouac’s flood had broken me open. I felt ready to do it. While my job at the magazine was a good one—there were the free shows and events and all-expenses-paid press trips, the fact that my editor had become like a second mother to me, the access I had to resources such as the computer and printer and postage meter, all things that abetted me in my quest to “make it” as a writer—I had no desire to be a journalist, nor to climb the editorial ladder. I was obsessed with one thing: Experience. Experience, at the time, meant this magic abstract tangible, a golden grail that if you quested hard and long enough, with the proper context of vision, you could find and hold and have. So, in a nutshell, my goal was: Go and find Experience, as if accumulating pieces of gold, accumulate as much of it as you can, until you are filthy rich with material. Then, convert your currency into words, into writing, and its value will be recognized and appreciated by the World-at-Large.
Looking back at this twenty-year-old, his head throbbing with visions and a preordained sense of destiny, I have to laugh, but my laugh is a heart-gladdening one. I’d root for this kid, and kids like him everywhere, any day. The beauty in foolishness is something that remains very dear and warm to me, and I hope I’m still saying and feeling that when I’m seventy, when I’m ninety.

The Laughing Horse

2010-01-13T09:19:00.001-08:00

I am now into my third week of tenancy at the Laughing Horse, the 130-year-old adobe B & B, located on the north side of town (Taos, NM).

There is a small population of tall trees in the front yard, what kind I'm not sure, and presently, their branches, bare of leaves, look like spindly fingers or skeletal digits or mantis legs interlocking in a sky-dance.

In the south part of the yard, there is a low stone wall, and past the stone wall, the ground slopes downward, and there is the Sacred River (as it states in painted letters on weathered doors, two in all, that are part of the stone wall). Right now crystalline sheets and dense blocks of ice exist as a sort of upper crust to the river's surface. The other day my daughter spent a half-hour breaking off chunks of ice, using a thick nub of a branch like a hammer-claw, pounding and pounding. One piece she set off to the side, so we could look at it later, and the patterns in it were amazing: it looked like rhapsodic tiger-scratches etched into the skin of the ice, and the ice itself looked like it could have been the texture of gauze or thread-stitches. There is a picnic table and patio chairs down by the river, and I imagine in the warm weather, sitting down there, picnicking with my daughter and her friends, are drinking some beers with my friends.

When you enter the Horse: rustic wooden floors, and framed pictures and articles profiling the founder of Laughing Horse, the literary magazine, Spud Johnson, and this B & B was originally his home. Hook a quick right, and there is a corridor steeped in green--plant-lined, foliage-ceilinged, very atrium-esque--and my room, Speak Easy, is the third door down.

My room, which is modestly small (which I love, as I like the idea of tight dimensions, what I consider creatively-conducive claustrophobia), there is a book-shelf, the upper shelf filled with books that came with the room, the lower shelf with my books. The top of the shelf came adorned with a small picture of St. Francis, and he is one of my favorite saints--the gentle one with that benign light in his eyes--so I am happy St. Francis was the room's personal blesser. I have a bunkbed, the rungs of the wooden ladder leading to the top bunk very thick, almost log-like. When you get to the top, the ceiling is at a slant, so it feels like you are intimately fitted into a wedge of triangle. My daughter loves hanging out on the top bunk, it is like climbing to the top of a treehouse, or our own private clubhouse. Plus, there is a TV embedded into the ceiling, and we watch movies as if staring into a slightly elevated portal.

There is an old iron wood-stove in my room, looking sort of like the Tin Man's oil-can of a hat (except black). My walls are lavender with splotches of white worked in, and overall there is a cloudy swirling effect to the design.

Each room at the Horse is quite different, each part of the residence different, giving it the feel of different "neighborhoods," and the rooms, individuals with diverse characteristics.

That is a brief tour, more to come, as it comes to me.

Chino and Pino

2010-01-11T14:32:00.001-08:00

(A park bench. Two clowns: Tristano Astori, a.k.a., Chino—and—Pedrolino Giglio, a.k.a., Pino, seated there. Chino drinking a 40 oz. Ol-E.)

Chino
What if the world ended today?

Pino
The world’s not gonna end today.

Chino
You sure about dat, Nostradamus? You absolutely certain the world won’t end today. (pauses, swigs)
Just need to git some balls and ask her … fore it’s too late.

(Pinot shakes his head)

Chino
You wanna borrow my balls?
(takes em out, tries to juggle, they fall)
Can’t juggle for shit, but the balls are good.

Pino
I don’t want your balls. I just want you to drop it.

Chino
Why so you can sit dere and
(faux-poet-romantic-tone)
pine away for yer unattainable love. You’re a pussy, Pino, know dat? Whass even worse, yer a passive pussy.

Pino
Don’t call me dat.

Chino
What—passive or pussy?

Pino
Either. Both.
(pause)
Do you understand who her family is? The Flying Farinellis, the most famous trapeze family in the whole universe. And what am I, a clown. I’m a clown, Chino. Clowns and trapeze artists, especially trapeze artists that come from famous families, don’t go together.

Chino
You know what dat is right dere, thass the lips of a pussy talkin. So what you’re a clown, ahm a clown. And I get more ass than a toilet seat.

Pino
Yea, but you ain’t never been with no trapeze artists, now have ya?

Chino
Damn straight I have. Member dat time the circus rolled up in Springfield.

Pino
Her … the crack ho?

Chino
Ya didn’t say non-crack-smoking-trapeze-artists, now didja?

Pino
Damn, that lady missed the trapeze ring at least once every show.

(Chino and Pino share a laugh)

Chino
Yea she was like, OOPS, caught me some air.

(both clowns laughing harder)

Chino
Swig?

Pino
Nah.

Chino
Put hair on yer balls.

(Chino takes a swig)

Chino
Yo, Pino, I wasn’t gonna say nothing but … heard yer lady’s been with Marco.

Pino
Marco. Marco who?

Chino
Marco used to run with the Boomtown Circus.

Pino
The strongman?

Chino
Strongman mah ass, dude’s all roided out, but yea the strongman.

Pino
That’s bullshit.

Chino
Juss telling ya what I heard.

Pino
No way, a girl like her, a guy like him, no fucking way.

(Chino spits on the ground)

Chino
Yo, Pino.

Pino
Yea?

Chino
Ahm just clownin … bout the Marco thing. Never heard shit.

Pino
Why ya fuckin with me, homes?

Chino
Trying to prop ya up kid, git ya to make a move.

Pino
I don’t need no propping. Why don’t you make a move?

Chino
Not mah type.

Pino
What, no crack habit.

Chino
Fuck you, homes.
(pause)
Yo, but that shit she does with her body, getting all twisted and shit. Damn!

Pino
She’s an artist, Chino.

Chino
And?

Pino
And she’s really serious about her… work.

Chino
We’re not?

Pino
We’re clowns!

Chino
Don’t be playa-hatin on clowns, fool. Ahm as much a fuckin artist as she is. What cuz she’s so graceful and elegant and shit and she’s got dis famous family. Ah’ve had muthafuckas rollin in the aisles, pissin and shittin themselves ahm so fuckin funny. You too, homes, you’s a funny muthafucka .. juss got self-image problems and shit.
(pause, swigs)
Artsy fartsy bullshit. Roll em in the aisles till they’re cryin, thass some serious shit right dere.
(pause)
Wanna run through the routine?

Pino
Not now.

Chino
Whaddya mean not now. Showtime’s in a coupla hours.

Pino
Yea, yea I know.
(pause) Yo, Chino, you ever think we made a mistake running away from the circus?

Chino
No fucking way, homes, freelancin’s where it’s at. No ringmasta runnin us through hoops, no elephant shit to step in, no trapeze artists looking down on us. Why you askin dat?

Pino
Just curious.

Chino
Fuck just curious. Whass up?

Pino
Nothing.

(Chino stares at Pino)

Chino
Yow what ah think, Pino, ah think yer nothing is something and yer something is a girl.

Pino
No.

Chino
Yes, it’s always about a girl.

Pino
Not always. And I was just imagining.

Chino
Yea, I see the headlines now, frontpage bold: Pino runs away with circus. Ditches partner Chino for trapeze bitch.

Pino
Don’t call her a bitch, Chino.

Chino
Oh yea, the dude’s definitely been bit
(whiny voice)
don’t call her a bitch Chino.
(pause)
Ya know what, Pino, yer right she’s not the bitch: you are. You da little bitch wanting to break up our act for some ho in spangled leotards.

Pino
I told ya, Chino—

(Pinot takes off his white glove, slaps Chino three times)

Chino
You did not—

Pino
Yea ah did—

Chino
Did not—

Pino
But ah did—

(Chino spins Pino around, kicks him in the ass. Pino tries to do the same but Chino does a 360, catches Pino’s foot, spins him, kicks him in the ass. Pino tries again, same result.)

(staredown)

(Pino kicks Chino in the shin)

Chino
Muthafucka.

(Chino hops around, holding his shin)

Chino
You lil muthafucka

Pino
Wait, wait … before you bop me. You think we should include all this in our act?

(Chino gives Pino a serious look)

Chino
We still got an act?

Pino
Of course we do. Brother.

(Pino kisses Chino once on each cheek and slings his arm around Chino’s shoulder. Chino smiles.)

Chino
Okay … brother.
(pause)
May the Farce be with you!

Pino
And also with you!

(The clowns jam their knuckles together three times, embrace, and get down to rehearsing).

The Cut of a Gem

2010-01-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time in Taos, New Mexico, there was this girl. Let’s call her Jade. Or Topaz. Or Onyx. You get the point, she was a gem. One of those trauma-scarred, rough-cut gems that catches the light in a certain way. I’m thinking about her, because last night I had a dream and in the dream she was brutally attacked by a gang of men, and while I took on and mostly fucked up two of the men, three others kept at her, and later on, when I talked to someone about Topaz, they said: She’s not doing so great.
I thought he meant the attack, and the bruises she had suffered, but he (I can’t remember who He was, or what his position was), said: You know, she was also raped.
I thought of the three savages raping her, my precious gem, and she felt precious to me even though, outside the dream, back in reality, she had rejected me. Not caustically or vindictively or anything, but with that extra-fine sharp razor known as honesty: I fell in love with someone.
Our malformed courtship (malformed only because it never had any real chance to take shape, with her having two kids and working all the time and getting no help or support, or very little, from her deadbeat ex), lasted about a month, and I really felt for her. Why? Well, it was what I call the ol lightningstrike. You meet someone and you are instantly and powerfully struck by them on so many levels, some understood, some not. The residual aftermath of the bolt courses through your veins and bloodstream and you feel like singing (Life does become like an old-fashioned musical and you don’t feel cheesy or self-conscious, you really want to sing for no good reason at all, which is usually the best reason). Gold was struck and my blood was singing and my brain was fevered: the Jazz Singer meets Miles Muddafuckin Davis. Like that.
Alas, there’s nothing Miles nor Neil Diamond nor anyone can do to stop the force of love when it comes, and in this case, it came, just not to me, not between her and I. Fair enough. I wished her the best and meant it. I wished her good luck. I told her see ya around (it was a small town). And I went on my half-merry, half-melancholy way.
It’s been a couple of months, yet after last night’s dream, so vivid and charged (and yet again, as if a common refrain with me: not being able to save a girl from brutality) I’ve been thinking about her, and thought about stopping into the coffeeshop where she works, just to check on her, but said: nah, forget it.
Another thing about this particular gem: she is tall and sad and supple-gorgeous and there is a music in her that will not come out, except in fractured notes and runny clefs, and I think about the river from which she sprung, its gray-blue bubbling hisses and gurgles, think of the snakes in that river, the slick-skinned toads and the emaciated pussywillows and the fugitive scales of mermaids being played lightly against the current, scales long since torn from the mermaids music-strong bodies, and I want to know her origins intimately, I want to make of a gem a small, trembling poem.
And this, my friends, is how the blues begins and why it continues.

Venus Envy Guidelines

2010-01-07T08:40:00.000-08:00

Okay, potential submissives, Venus Envy guidelines:

Up to three poems (one-hundred line limit) or two works of prose (2,500 word limit) can be submitted per quarterly reading cycle. Visual art is also accepted and should be sent as a j-peg. Open to all styles, flavors and genres, quality being the key. Our Love-Goddess likes to flash her many facets and flaunt her myriad selves: on Tuesday, you might get the grace-slicked girl shapely in her flowing sea-green gown, and on Thursday, you've got a wild-eyed, loose-lipped Mae West spitting bawdy jokes and tippling gin. She is, dear lovers and dreamers, what we make of her and what she makes of us.

Submissions can be emailed to venusintaos@gmail.com, or snail-mailed to: Venus Envy, c/o Ned Dougherty, P.O. Box 120, Taos, NM 87571. Deadline for the spring issue is February 28th (anything received after this date will be considered for the next reading cycle).

Contributors will be paid $10 (check or Pay-pal). Accepted or rejected, you will be notified (if rejected, do not expect a detailed explanation as to WHY your piece was rejected . . . simply swallow hard, thicken your skin, and give it another shot next reading cycle. Or don't. Your voice, your choice). If your work is accepted, you will be asked to send us a short bio (good practice for synopsizing who-the-hell-you-are in a paragraph, a.k.a., epitaph for the living), and if you live in Taos, or can make it here, you will be invited to read your work at our publishing party.

With love & the proper amount of squalor,

J.B.

New Year's with a Bang

2010-01-04T17:47:00.000-08:00

It went like this: on New Year's, a bunch of compadres and compatriots came to my residence, the Laughing Horse, where we imbibed and interacted, then some of us, shifted over about a 100 yards, to the Love Apple, my friend Jenny's restaurant, where a masquerade ball was being held. Eye-concealing masks of all colors and styles and a battalion of legs and asses shaking and arms helicoptering and hips twisting to the DJ-juiced electronic music, as it came in waves and torrents, and the night was rich and buttery with goodtimes and goodvibes, and as we charged Pan-like into 2010, the night, or rather my night, took an interesting turn.

The liquid precursor had been vodka and sake and beer, followed by Ecstasy, and more Ecstasy, and soon enough, me and five other chemically-altered friends found ourselves across the street, at Gutiz, the restaurant where I work, and the owner and my friend, Lucien, had opened up so we all could have a late-night spot to hang and chill. This late-night hang led to me and my friend's (and co-worker) girlfriend, Samantha, going back to my room, where we proceeded to get somewhat intimately familiar. All three of us worked together, and her beau, Brady, had been the one dispensing the E, runway-greasing our glee, and our repayment was this . . . betrayal.

Bad choice, no doubt, a fucked up thing to do (Fact of the Day: people fucked up on drugs and drink will often do Fucked Up Things), and I knew and she knew and we both intended to tell him, which she did, and I had emailed him and said: If you want to punch me in the face, I understand, and will keep my hands behind my back while you do so.

That day came today. Brady came to visit, while I was in the middle of watching Smoke (quite an excellent film starring Harvey Keitel), and he came chanting, Beetlejuice-Beetlejuice-Beetlejuice (inside joke), and we went outside and we talked for a good along while and he was trembling and charged with lots of raw emotion, then it came to the Punch. He had hurt his right hand, his good hand, hitting the wall, so he had to hit me with his left. Fair enough. Since one of my front teeth is a crown and I don't have any medical coverage, I told him he couldn't hit me square in the mouth cuz I couldn't afford to replace my crown. He also said he wouldn't blacken my eye, because we both had to work the next night, and a waiter with a black eye is not necessarily the most appealing of waiters. Side of the head it was, and fueled by deepdown rage and hurt, his one punch turned into three. I think he was hoping I would go down, but I didn't, and told him: c'mon, B, I've still got pride.

After slugging me, he hugged me tight, kissed me near the lips and said: I love you man. All in all things were settled. Sometimes this primitive male-male way of doing things works out okay. After all emotions settled, we went to cash a $50 check I had, I paid him the $15 I owed him for the Ecstasy, and we picked up some beers and drank together in my room.

Tomorrow back to work: me the waiter, he my busser.

2010 started with a bang this year.

Envy on the Rise

2010-01-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

It seems that the ol' literary and artistic ghosts circulating here in my new abode, the Laughing Horse, combined with the ringing in of a new year and a new decade, has inspired me to resurrect an old flame: Venus Envy.

This was a magazine that myself and several others had founded in Taos, I believe about eight years ago, and we ran for one year, or five issues, before we ran out of steam and decided to lay our beloved lady to rest.

Now, armed with the salacious banner--The Bitch is Back--I have contacted one of the original V.E. cronies and co-conspirators, along with a breed of new blood, and we are to meet this Wednesday at the Horse to discuss the Bitch's potential re-kindling.

I have always been fascinated and motivated by the idea of artists, as a collective, taking control of their own destinies (and in this day and age, with the technology and media we have at our disposal, fate-taking into Our Own Hands is more possible then ever) and getting their Work out and Word (s) well-spread like silky butter on crunchy toast, or shapely parted legs revealing a liquidy clef mark.

While all is still in the pre-preliminary stages, if or when we do get this baby off the ground and running, submissions from round the country & globe are welcomed, and you can send it to me via my email: jpips17@hotmail.com. We hope to have both print and online editions, with the print edition more focused on writers and artists from this area.

And remember: Venus Rises while Envy Spreads.

The Doghouse

2010-01-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

She was the one who had suggested the doghouse but now that I was in there I kind of liked it. It felt like home.
She, was my ex, Lizzy, who had moved out to the suburbs with her five-year-old daughter, Jane. I had only been with Lizzy for nine months but since Jane didn’t know her father at all, and I had been Lizzy’s longest relationship since her ex-husband, Jane sort of looked at me as a father.
Lizzy and I had broken up but had remained on civil terms, calling each other from time to time to see how the other was doing. During our last conversation, I told Lizzy that I had been evicted and was staying on Mel’s couch until I found something.
You working, she asked.
Nope, I said.
So how you gonna get a place, she said.
I don’t know, I said.
I could imagine what Lizzy wanted to say to me—This is exactly why I left you, irresponsible shit like this—but what she said was: You could crash here for a little bit . . . if you want.
I was shocked by her offer. Yet the first wave of shock was quickly dwarfed by a second greater wave, generated by this comment: How would you feel about staying in the doghouse?
I took it as a joke and said: Yea, the doghouse would be homey—and Lizzy went on—No, Alex, I’m serious, hear me out.
Too shocked to say anything, and very very curious, I heard her out.
Listen, Lizzy said, Echo just died.
Echo was Lizzy and Jane’s German Shepherd.
And Jane isn’t taking it too well, Lizzy went on. This is the first pet she’s ever lost. I thought, well if you stayed in the doghouse, just for a short period of time, kind of take over for Echo, it might help Jane adjust.
I waited, choosing my words carefully: Lizzy, are you fucking nuts? Jane will adjust better if I play her dog for a while?
You don’t have to act like a dog if you don’t want to, she said. Just sleep in the doghouse at night, just so she knows someone, something living is in there. Plus you’re really good at making things up, so if you wanted to act like a dog . . . I know it sounds crazy but it just might work.
No thanks, Lizzy, I said, I’ll stick with the couch.
Okay if that’s what you want, she said. But if you did this, I’d let you come in at night sometimes . . . and sleep next to me. Echo used to do that and . . . well for the sake of preserving a ritual.
Lizzy’s tone was steak-thick and enticing. I could see grease-bubbles on the pink of her tongue, sizzling. Then I wondered: Was this some sort of role-play fetish Lizzy had been dreaming about for a while? A man-as-dog coming out of its doghouse at night and climbing into bed with her and humping her leg or fucking her doggie-style?
This scenario was starting to feel more appealing then Mel’s cold, broken-down couch.
I’ll think about, I told Lizzy.
Think like a dog, Lizzy said, and I understood what she meant.
I smiled and on the other end of the line I imagined Lizzy was smiling, too.
The next day I called and told her I was in.
And that was how I went from being a homeless stray to a loved domestic pet with a place to call home.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Cover Girl

2010-01-02T13:53:00.001-08:00

Elizabeth Wurtzel, I want to fuck you.
I wrote this line many many years ago while seated at a bar in Santa Fe. A baseball game was on, who was playing I can’t remember. I also don’t remember why I was in Santa Fe. The bar was okay, a little too well-groomed and proper for my tastes, but it was happy hour, and that was good enough for me. I drank. And had, a few days earlier, seen a photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel on the cover of her memoir, Prozac Nation. The photo had stayed with me.
I knew that Wurtzel was known to be, mostly by her own admission: fucked up, a drugstore urban cowgirl, literature’s It-girl: Clara Bow fused with Sylvia Plath. I liked that. I was susceptible to her allure and siren-like literary screeches, I was drawn to her fucked-up-edness. Something about women who write and are beautiful and fucked up works like a snake-charm on me. I rise ribbon-like and hypnotized from my basket, head arched, tongue flicking.
Even if it’s a myth, even if it’s self-consciously contrived (what isn’t?), even if it made me feel typical or clichéd, all definite terminology, all recriminations, both real and imagined, against my sexism went out the window, and you know why? Because my brain and my dick were in cahoots together and they formed an allegiance too powerful to be overcome by the rest of me.
It could be broken down this simple: there’s Liz Wurtzel looking sinewy-sexy and swimming-eyed-sultry in a photo, and my brain began conjuring: she writes, she’s screwed up, a defective model, and she’s a real looker, to which my dick would respond—serpent, sword, sychophant all wrapped into one—and then I’d launch myself into a fantasy realm where Liz lay spread-eagled on a clean-sheeted bed, naked, her body tattooed with ink-scribbles and lead-scratches—she herself, her body, the story—and on the bedside nightstand there were several bottles of prescription pills, a half-smoked roach in an ashtray, a copy of Plath’s The Bell Jar, and as Liz closed her large-lidded eyes and began tenderly massaging her clit, I thought: This is not a dream, not a fantasy, this is happening, just not in the world that you live in.
Reality, political correctness, watchdog feminism, compassion, whip-cracked backlashes, none of it mattered, none of it held any sway, none of it existed . . . in this realm where Elizabeth Wurtzel and I would engage in a heated tangle for two.
Let us set fire to the bedsheets, Lizzy, we’re the only two arsonists alive in this airtight chamber. My words resounded, echoed. No one would hear them.
Whenever I slipped “out” again, seeing the bartender, the glasses stacked in rows, the TV showing a baseball game, I would think of Sylvia Plath’s lines from one of her poems:

It is the theatrical comeback
In broad daylight

But I didn’t want to come back, didn’t want daylight, or even the dimmed lights of the bar I was in, I wanted night and two-for-one solitude, I wanted Elizabeth Wurtzel as the progeny of myth to survive in my mind, in that invented bedroom . . . for a while anyway.
So we fucked, though I don’t really remember it because I was very drunk. The next day, checking in my notebook, I couldn’t decipher most of my inebriated scribblings.
What most stuck in my mind: the cover photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel and the line which had started it all: Elizabeth Wurtzel, I want to fuck you.
But really, deep down, I knew it wasn’t her I wanted, not the real her, wherever that was, or even if that was, but the mythical fictionalized outline: it was like fucking a chalk-drawn outline on the street, and what is not there, the phantom occupying that space: that’s who I wanted to be inside.
Years later, I still have a crush on that photo, preserved in time, preserved in that outline, and I still, from time to time, long for an illicit and absurd affair with the Elizabeth Wurtzel who’s not there.

Crouching Tiger, Winter Dragon

2009-12-30T14:21:00.000-08:00

When I called in sick with Existential Malaise, I could see Jilly's eyebrows on the other end of the line leap, catlike, to the middle of her forehead.
Existential malaise, she repeated, as if wrestling with the meaning of a foreign word.
Yes, Jilly, I said, I can't make it.
You've got to be kidding, right, this is a joke. Tell me this is a joke Alex.
I wanted to tell Jilly it was a joke, and in a sense it was, that was the thing about Existential Malaise, it was like a cosmic gag that could both cripple and enlighten at the same time, but I knew that even with my humor intact and the absurdity-of-it-all not lost on me, I couldn't go in.
Sorry, Jinny, it's not a joke, I said.
Silence. More silence. Then the air of frustration being nostril-blown into the phone.
If you don't come in tonight Alex, she started, then let the threat implied in her unfinished sentence hang over my head like a sword suspended by the thinnest of strings.
Sorry Jinny, I said, and I did feel a bit sorry because I liked Jinny. She was the best boss I had ever had. She had, at times, bent over backwards to accommodate me, and once even bent over forward.
That was the night we both got really drunk at the Christmas party and screwed in the stall of the women's bathroom.
I knew the position I was putting her in: it was New Year's Eve, and the sports bar where I worked and which she managed, Nightframes, was gearing up for one of its biggest nights of the year. A popular flamenco band had been hired as the night's entertainment, champagne would be fizzing and glasses clinking at midnight, and we anticipated a maximum capacity crowd of 175 people.
Yet, the Existential Malaise, which had started several weeks ago, had grown in size and density, and I now felt fully possessed by it. No, not possessed so much as stuffed with it. I felt overstuffed, thick, dense, and the idea of hustling drinks and food for nine hours plus seemed impossible.
I had been working as a waiter at Nightframes for almost two years. I had never worked as waiter for more than six months in one place, ever, and how I had managed to stay at Nightframes was beyond me. But like a slow-working poison, the conglomeration of cheap tips and stiffs walking out on bills, the high maintenance demands and the sloppy belligerence, was maligning my insides, and if I stayed at Nightframe's any longer, something vital in me, something essential, would take a fall.
Nightframes wasn't solely responsible for my Existential Malaise (there was also the winter grayness, the back-rent owed, the see-saw battles with my ex-wife) but it was a primary cause.
Jinny waited for me to say something, her breathing heavy and I imagined hot on the other end of the line.
Jinny, I said, I don't mean to do this to you. You're the best boss I've ever had. Which is why I called and told you the truth. I was going to call and say, I can't come, I have the flu or the chicken pox, but I said, no, Jinny's cool and she's always treated you well, so tell her the truth. That's the truth. Existential Malaise. Everybody's got their own name for it, their own take on it ... well that's mine.
Fucking writers, Jinny said, and I could tell that she was smiling, even if she was still pissed. Then she said: You're not coming back at all then, are you?
No, Jinny, I can't. I don't want to start my new year as a waiter at Nightframes. That's why I have to cut ties right now. I want to start the year jobless, a slate dreaming itself clean, a blankety-blank.
You're crazy Alex, you know that, right, Jinny said.
I know, I said, and I was turned on by Jinny's insinuation of my mental imbalance. It made me feel close to her. Or she to me.
I pictured Jinny's platinum hair and big elm-brown eyes and proud ample bust and tick-tock hips and cream-whiteness of her skin and her self-assured presence. I thought of these things and I started throbbing bigtime downbelow and I saw this as an encouraging sign: there was life in me yet, there was a force, presently entombed in Existential Malaise that wanted and expected to break out.
Since I had not left my house in three days, everything felt unreal, and I considered asking Jilly to come and visit me after she got off work, but then the Voice of Reason kicked in: she's married, she is at age 45, twelve years older than you, she's a professional woman who's used to a certain style of living--which looking around my apartment and the state that it was in, I wasn't a model of--and on and on it went, as I continued to circle myself, and in the end ignored the Voice of Reason and said: You're welcome to pay me a visit after work tonight . . . if you'd like.
Jinny's response was sharp and surefire: Sorry, I don't do men with Existential Malaise. Have a good life Alex.
I'll see ya around Jinny.
Maybe, she said, and that was how our conversation ended.
My plan for the night was to order a pizza and two-liter of Coke, read the Bukowski biography I had gotten from the library, then drink the two bottles of red wine I had stashed in my cupboard, and watch all the Twilight Zones I had recorded on tape. I'm sure at some point during the night I'd masturbate to Jinny.
This was my plan, my way of managing my Existential Malaise, starting my new year a free man, running low so I'd stay close to the ground and maybe, if I got lucky, skim what might be my destiny.

Girls

2009-12-30T11:50:00.000-08:00

Going to sleep, I count them like sheep: sheep with shapely legs, their wool sheared, a pinkness beneath, steam rising from their bodies, and sheep-eyes--sad, doleful, almost dumb in their dreaminess.
A carousel of women like sheep, going round and round, and behind these women, a neon sign with red flashing letters that blinks: Girls Girls Girls.
It's enough to make a man crazy. And lose lots of sleep. The sign keeps me awake, the girls and their legs (a chorus-line of legs: alabaster, brown, plum-dark, sand-colored, all these legs like matchsticks about to flick and flare up a blue-in-the-middle orange-bodied flame).
Hair. Like seaweed and stars spitting fireflies, like tangles of marigold. These women grin and mock me, they adore me, they sleep next door to me, they are me, and I know the right hand for the job but it's not enough.
Tough. These girls are tough. One spits rum-colored tobacco juice. Another smokes a long cigarette in an even longer cigarette holder. Burn holes through my heart, I say. Burn my skin however you see fit. I can take it. I'm asking for it. You'll find my desire goes well beyond skin and supple limbs twisted this way and that. Burn through me, the sting like the pinch that reminds you that you are not dreaming, even when you are, even when you are counting women like sheep, keeping close tabs on them, a stray raiding the pasture after dark.

The Birth

2009-12-30T11:06:00.001-08:00

She had yet to give birth to her most beautiful self ... and I was waiting. I think she was waiting without waiting, a sort of expectancy that clawed inside her somewhere, but she hadn't named it or placed it. It was like a piece of shadow pinned to your backside.
I waited because I sensed it in her, I saw this beautiful self born and born and reborn and born again and living in my rooms in her house, in my places and aspects of her life. I wanted to be there the exact moment of her birth, wanted to see the mess and womb-goo and milk-gravy, the clotted cream and blood--all of it--my mind and eyes wanted to swim in all of it.
I don't know when this miracle-birth will take place (and what birth is not a miracle?), but it could be soon. The winds outside are charged and blowing hard. There is that charge and energy that stirs up unrest-- hinges on the axis of change--and so, one of these nights, a cold and wind-blowy March night, I'll hear moanings and grunts and groans from behind her closed bedroom door, and I'll knock once, twice--you ahrite?--and more groans and moanings and grunts, and I'll open the door, and half her body covered by a fuzzy blanket, I'll see light illuminating the thick softness of the blanket, I'll see a ball of light growing and expanding--ten fingers, then twenty, then tendrils outreaching--and her face will radiate pain, the anguish of the beautiful new self destroying an old mask, a tired state of living, and the blanket will start to burn and dissolve, thin hissing and plumes of smoke, and like acetate paper scorched by a brutal sun, dissolution, and from between her legs, slightly parted, will come great flaggings of light, the white so white as to burn the eyes, and I'll peek at her light, her emerging marigold self, through webbed sneak-a-peek fingers, and she won't remember that I was there, she won't remember any of it, except that she was immobile and in pain, and I will be her memory babe, her recorder, I, who was destined to be there all along (and here I thought I had given up on the idea of destiny), I would be the first to welcome and embrace the new beautiful she gave birth to--a most immaculate conception--perfect and imperfect all at once.

Ascending Angel

2009-12-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

"It was as though no note on the keyboard was to be left untouched, no facet of the self left unexposed, on the path toward realization. A marriage of light and shadow, of good and evil, a partnership of angel and demon, but with the angel in the acendancy. He fought off everything that was in conflict with his purpose with a selfishness which genius alone knows how to employ in striving for that ultimate unselfishness which will enrich each others."

Emil Schnellock on Henry Miller

night wedding

2009-12-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

a single wildflower
growing secretly in the dark,
conducting a private nuptial
with the bone-white moon,
a ghost-bride offering a thin wispy
ring of rose, and slipping it off and
on, the wildflower feels empowered,
its skin bristling against
the night air,
amazed how solid the air gets,
how quickly it stiffens,
when love, as a bond,
is more than suggested.

The Inn at the Beginning of the Road

2009-12-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

That's what it feels like to me, my new equestrian jester of an abode, the Laughing Horse, a potential corner-turning point in this thing called my life. I say that because when I first met Jean Scott and I told him my name, he said John Biscello, THE John Biscello, the director and playwright, and it felt real good to hear that because in the days previous, my namesake had been tied in with some imbibedly-inspired miscues, misspeaks, and verbal missile-launches (you're not THE John Biscello, the one that tells a girl she's cockblocking you ... you're not THE John Biscello who talks to a girl for two hours one night earlier then meets her the next night and asks-have we met before? ... you're not THE John Biscello, the dude who smashes a symphony of glasses against the wall of the restaurant where you work while taking time to twirl all the CDs through the air like frisbees) ... yes there are and there were those John Biscellos, whatever that means, but there was also the John Biscello being recognized and appreciated as an artist and I appreciated that and it made me feel good. Or at least better.

Yesterday, Jean gave me this book, an old dog-eared copy of Spud Johnson and the Laughing Horse. The Laughing Horse was a magazine started in the 20s by Johnson and a friend, originally in Berkeley, I think, then it became part of Taos, and its literary legacy, as Johnson became a mostly full-time resident here, and also became friends and creative allies with people such as Mabel Dodge Luhan, D.H. Lawrence, Witter Bynner, Georgie O' Keefe, etc. It was cool to see a photo of he and Thorton Wilder sitting at the Taos Inn, which has remained a central part of Taos night-life and a gathering ground for drinks, talk and merriment. Reading this book, lying in my bed, I started thinking how I'd like to start writing in my room (I've been a writer-in-residence, not by request but by choice, at the library, for the past six or eight months, and since my room is quite small, where would I put a desk?) There is a bit of open space left of my bed, I thought of a pop-out desk, or wall-desk, and talked to Jean today, told him I might start writing in my room, and he said a pop-out desk was a great idea and he would start working on it right away, as he thought I was meant to be a part of the history of this place and he wanted me to work on the premises.

Next time, I will take you on a tour of the place itself and the vibe that permeates the joint.

Horseplay

2009-12-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

On the cusp of homelessness yet again (yet that sounds so woe-is-me dramatic, so let's say, I was between places with nowhere to go, at least not in Taos), I was prepared to accept my ex-wife's offer of staying with her and my daughter in Santa Fe, when the Horse rode into my life.
Directly across the street from the restaurant where I work, is the Laughing Horse Inn, a 130 year old adobe building loaded with literary and artistic history (D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O' Keefe were two celebrated guests). A folk musician who had been staying there told me accomodations were reasonable, and he was paying $10 a night to sleep in the laundry room. A laundry room with creative ghosts to back up its cyclical history: I was intrigued.
I dropped in to chat with the inn-keeper, a man named Jean Scott, and while the laundry room wasn't offered as an accomodation, I could move into one of the rooms for $120 a week. All things considered, that wasn't bad. Free wireless and a free light breakfast, a room with a bunkbed, fireplace, TV, and mini-fridge, a literal hop-skip--and-a-jump and I would be at work, a yard with a river cutting through it like a gurgling bluegray serpentine artery, and various residents and transient guests sharing quarters allowing for intimate and creative possibilities of all sorts.
One of my dreams has always been to live in a hotel for an extended period of time. Methinks of Thomas Wolfe and Dylan Thomas doing time at the Chelsea, Dotty Parker and her Vicious Snip-n-Chat Circle at the Algonquin. I think writers and hotels are a perfect pairing, a tradition with instant nostalgia at its core (like loctomotives and the steam that shrouds and clouds em as they chug-a-lug out of a station for destinations varied). Jean Scott said he would love to have the Inn be entirely occupied by artists and creative folks, he would like for it to be a haven and breeding ground for creative doings & spewings.
As of today, I occupy the room known as the Speakeasy (which I thought was apropos, in that I feel a deep connection to the 1920s and 30s, plus I've recently been publishing in a new online zine, Caper, which calls itself a literary speakeasy, and is also devoted to the sensibility of bathtub gin, flapper-dom, swing-visions, and so forth). I will be reading up on the history of the place, participating in the living history of the place, and reporting more on my new home, The Laughing Horse.

Anna

2009-12-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

I miss seeing Anna today. Anna is this woman I know, a writer and former journalist, who has become my twin-scribbler: that is, when I am working at my usual desk at the library, she is also working, sitting across from me, and seeing her working is very reassuring. She used to work in a different part of the library and we would visit each other from time to time, but she started working in the same room as me, and there is a wooden divider between us, but hearing the rapid taps of her fingers on her laptop keys excites me. She types straight onto the computer, and I scribble longhand in a notebook. Her discipline in sitting, daily, and grinding away with a pickaxe at her novel and that Kafka-mentioned frozen lake within ... these things excite me as well.

Anna wrote and published a novel based on her years as a drunken journalist covering war and famine in Africa and other regions and some of what I know she has seen and experienced brings to mind the utterance croaked from Kurtz's lips: The horrors . . . the horrors.

Both Anna and I are drunks and both of us are Catholic-Italians (the Catholic part reinforced by a sense of guilt and not actual practice, at least on my part). We sin with a sense of deliciousness. We talk about wanting to be bad, to do bad things, to venture outside the margin and lose ourselves in creases and wrinkles, briefly, then to return with a sense of shame and a seeking-after of penitence.

A couple of weeks ago, after a four-month period of sobriety, I went on a binge and I did so with a sense of deliciousness and devilishness with a bit of shame and disappointment mixed in. Anna, who has been on and off sober for some time, decided to join me one afternoon for drinks at the Inn.

One beer, she said. Just one.
Okay, I said, and we went to the bar and when we got to the bar, I said: If we're only gonna have one round, we should at least pair up our beers with shots. This way they're not lonely. I liked the idea of three-of-a-kind in pairs: the beers, the shots, me and Anna.

We drank drafts and I had a shot of Jameson and Anna had a shot of Jim Beam. I told Anna when I wrote about this I would change her name to protect her guilt and innocence, but I wouldn't change the names of the shots. We really did drink Jim and Jameson. I had one more beer then we left the bar to pick up her daughter, who was at a horseback riding lesson, and as fate would have it, the restaurant where I worked was closed that night (the owner, a fellow drinking companion and moody Spanish-Frenchman, who, when his mood dictated it, would close the restaurant if he didn't feel like opening. It was all about feeling for him. Or not feeling. The erratic and unstable nature of the restaurant was one of the reasons I perversely enjoyed working there.)

So I went back to Anna's house with her and her daughter and her daughter's friend. We watched movies. The first one was Elizabeth. The girls, who are both nine, weren't interested and they went to play in Anna's daughter's bedroom. Anna and I toasted Cate Blanchett's fine performance by drinking a bottle of red wine. Anna got sleepy and a fuzzy look came into her eyes and her voice. By the time we put on the second movie, Anna was asleep and me and the two girls watched Scooby Doo and the Alien Invaders and were all touched and saddened and said--Aaaaaahhhhh--at the end when Shaggy and Scooby lost their respective soulmates, a couple of aliens (who had taken the forms of a girl and a dog, respectively) who had to return to their planet.

While watching the movie, Anna's leg and my leg were suctioned together. I felt like we were on a crowded subway car together and our legs had been forced into situational intimacy. Anna was wearing a black skirt and black stockings, two of her fashion trademarks. Anna has great legs and overall a great body, hard and tight, that's taken well to the treadmill and exercise bike and free weights at the gym. Anna said if she doesn't go to the gym she gets depressed. I also know that madness runs on her mother's side of the family and you can see it in Anna's eyes. They are dark and wild and they dance around in their sockets. Their is a fevered stage-play always running in or behind Anna's eyes: a kitchen-sink drama where dishes are smashed and glasses crashed and tables overturned. Like Chekhov on steroids. This wildness in Anna's eyes frightens and excites me. It reminds me of the look in my ex-girlfriend's Parker's eyes: I was always a little worried that Parker would cut my throat while I was asleep. When I told Parker that she would laugh and her laugh, like the look in her eyes, was charged with lunacy.

When my binge got really bad and my physical reality was starting to be compromised, Anna took me in for a day, while her daughter was at school, and let me sleep in the guest room and when I awoke she fed me soup and a bagel (which I dunked in the soup) and fizzy fruit water. She kept checking to see if I needed anything, she wanted to make sure I had eaten enough.

You're so fucking Italian, Anna, I said, and because Anna is older than I am and because she is Italian and because she is a writer and because she is sexy (and I imagine a rash of wildfire in bed) the needy littleboy in me felt pleased about the attention she was lavishing on me.

At my ebb, while driving in the car back to town, Anna tells me to get right again and finish my collection of stories and she will help me get an agent and everything will turn out good. Because Anna has published two books and because she writes every day, I believe her and when I get back to work on my stories, I let her words echo in my head as a soft and strong reminder, a motivation to work hard and leap every hurdle (no matter how many hurdles prior I have knocked down).

I haven't seen Anna the past two days and I wonder where she is. There is some dude sitting across from me, and while he seems like a nice enough fella, he is not Anna and I'm pretty sure he's not working on a book (and he's wearing faded blue jeans, not a black skirt and black stockings), yet, with or without Anna as a creative room-mate, I've got to do the work, here, in what is my church, the public library.

Pryor Commitment

2009-12-17T11:21:00.001-08:00

A fantastic quote that can be perfectly applied to the world of True Fiction:
"Some of the things I say are true, some are not, but it all happened."--Richard Pryor

Regarding Henry

2009-12-14T17:21:00.000-08:00

"I found out that what I desired all my life was not to live--if what others are doing is called living--but to express myself. I realized that I never had the least interest in living, but only this in which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests scarcely me at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel--that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this specter, enjoying nothing,desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie--everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life."--Henry Miller, "Tropic of Capricorn"

Boy Meets Girl

2009-12-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

(An excerpt from "Stray Passages")

I was armed with three credit cards and ready to travel the country. I was twenty-three and had gotten my job back at Families First. My steady income qualified me for a credit card, and after a half-year of responsible use of my card, other companies began offering me cards, and soon I had three. My collective limit was about $10,000, meaning my travel education would now be unwittingly supported by the folks at AMEX and VISA. I quit my job again, and my surrogate-mom-of-an-editor, joked: Are you leaving us again just to get another going-away party? Because if you’re back in a month….
I told her I had a lot more house money to play with this time and I’d definitely be gone longer than a month. I also had something of a plan in place. Finance my odyssey with the credit cards, go where I could go, do what I could do, then claim bankruptcy somewhere down the road. Back in those days it was much easier to claim bankruptcy and when I did, it only cost me $550. As for the bad credit rap for seven years, I could care less. I didn’t want good credit. I didn’t want to buy a house one day or anything like that. And if I did, I couldn’t imagine wanting it before I was thirty, which was when my record would clear. So I took to the road with a plan and a clear conscience.
Once again I chose the Hound as my means of transport. If $10,000 made me too good for the bus then I was not worthy of fleahood. I should be expelled as a traitor, a fake, a wanna-be flea. My thoughts might have gone something like that. Or it could have simply been that I felt connected to the Hound in the way that one feels connected to their burping, farting, blowhard uncle. He’s with you, not so much in your heart, as your liver or spleen, but he’s in there, enmeshed in a vital organ, and denying his presence would be like denying wet cement or rotten fruit.
I met Parker in New Orleans. We were both staying in the same hostel, near the Garden District. The hostel was a complex: I was in Building A., she was in Building C. The thing is, I had been in Building B. but they had moved all the B. tenants out because they had to do repairs or something. Yet I didn’t turn in my key and still had access to Building B.
Parker was from Sydney, Australia and she was traveling through the states for at least a year. She had a crazy look in her eyes, as if the glaze in her eyes had been shipped directly from Wonderland, and I’d soon find out that it was a glaze-craziness that could run very hot or very cold and very rarely a moderate temperature.
A group of us from the hostel were going out to Bourbon Street, a regular U.N. committee: me the Italian, Parker the Aussie, Chantel the Kiwi and her boyfriend Thomas another kiwi, David the Israeli Jew, and Greta the German. We drank before we left and drank some more as we strolled along Bourbon, pit-stopping at various places. It was about a week after Mardi Gras and there were still plenty of running-on-fumes “leftovers” going strong, aided by drink and drugs. It was one of those nights that gets into your bones: brisk and rainy with wet winds blowing the rain slant-wise. There was a three-piece jazz band set up outside, beneath a canopy, and we listened to them for a while, drinking our beers out of red plastic cups. Then we went across the street into a club that was playing bad disco, yet after the good jazz, it felt like the perfect counterpoint.
I has brought two hits of Ecstasy with me from Brooklyn and offered one to Parker, who joyously accepted. We all sat at a table and soon Thomas and Chantel were dancing beneath the frenetically blinking strobelights. I thought of my Uncle Rob who had epilepsy and imagined that staring into the strobelights would have sent him into a seizure. I was glad I didn’t have epilepsy and stared into the strobelights feeling confident that nothing would happen to me. I noticed David and Greta, who were seated next to me, making out and nudged Parker and said: It’s good to see the Jews and the Germans getting along, huh.
Parker looked at them and grinned then turned back to me and said: There’s hope for all of us, eh?
That special feeling of hope-for-all-of-us intensified when the Ecstasy kicked in a short while later. I looked at Parker, whose face was glowing, and her grin both scared and attracted me: she was the Cheshire Cat way too fucked up on catnip.
Parker, who was already super-charged in her talkativeness, amped it up several notches and in trying to stay with her flow I held both her hands really tight and squeezed them whenever a wave came over me. Five interesting things I learned about Parker during that conversation:

1. Her first memory was of her father pulling a knife on her mother.
2. Her mantra was: I’m not here for a long time, I’m here for a good time.
3. She decided to leave Sydney because things had gotten too “incestuous” among her group.
4. Courtney Love was one of her heroes.
5. Her pubic hair had been of the same baby-fine texture since she was a teenager (she was twenty-six at the time.)

Sparked by the nearby love revolution of the German and the Jew, Parker and I fell into kissing and got lost there for a while. When Chantel came back to the table, she was sweaty from dancing and by herself.
Where’s Thomas, Parker asked.
Thomas is an asshole, she said, and sipped her gin and tonic.
I expected Parker to inquire as to why Thomas was an asshole but instead she laughed, took Chantel’s hand and said: Come dance with me.
Chantel took another hit off her G & T and they both went to the dance floor.
Watching Parker and Chantel dancing while holding hands and changing colors beneath the strobelights felt like a dream.
I turned and saw that David and Greta had stopped kissing and were now holding each other’s hands and looking into one another’s eyes lovingly. Or perhaps my Ecstasy-laced vision saw it as lovingly, I don’t know.

Later, when we got back to the hostel, I told Parker that I had the key to Building B., which was vacant.
You mean, we have the whole building to ourselves, she said, beaming high-wattage.
I nodded.
You’re naughty, she said, and all of a sudden it felt like Christmas for adults on Ecstasy.
In the dark, in one of the dorm rooms, Parker’s naked body seemed to glow. Her body felt warm and was of this bone-white-blaze that made me think: she’s been covered from head to toe in moon-chalk. Even though I didn’t exactly know what this moon-chalk was I had a feeling for it—sort of like when I spoke San Francisco aloud, except this time the word was moon-chalk—and in its connection to Parker’s body, it gave me the tingles.
Even though there were four bunk-beds in the room we opted for the floor, with Parker’s thick fuzzy silver-and-black coat laid out like a rug. The most extraordinary thing: with my fingertips Ecstasy-juiced, Parker’s baby-fine pubic hair was a textural wonder to touch and twine.
It’s soft, Boy, isn’t it?
Parker had called me Boy after having known for me ten minutes and it wound up sticking as her pet name for me.
I told her it was the softest I had ever felt and she said: I told you.
Even though Parker had been telling the truth about her pubic hair, I would find out over the next six months, which was about how long Parker and I would travel together, that for her truth and fiction were interchangeable terms.

Six Degrees and Counting

2009-12-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

“Must I ever remain far behind—
listening, smoking,
scribbling down the next far thing?”

“This Room”— Raymond Carver

On days like these I think, or rather dream of all those things, so unreachable and far-away. These things do not have names and are barely pictures: more like fog-blurred imprints that you can sense, vaguely. It is like standing, mute and immovable, on the periphery, and knowing that there is something stirring, some sort of vital activity taking place in the center, the hub.
Sometimes when I dream really well, I can just about taste them, those things, but when I lose it—let’s say I open my mouth hoping to intensify the taste, nothing. Air. Air is good and necessary to breathe, but tasting it is a grave disappointment. Not always, because some air tastes fresh green or smoky or soft-on-the-eyes blue: air, when it tastes like one of those things, does not gravely disappoint. Still it does not arouse in me the same feelings that the far-away and unreachable things do.

My friend Ana says I need a woman like that. A woman far-away and unreachable, like a strange ocean you dare to cross by foot.
Do they still make women like that, I ask her.
Ana nods and laughs then shakes her head and says—No, maybe not.
Her saying—no, maybe not—does not gravely disappoint, but it does set off a slight ache.
As if charting the turn of my inner movements, Ana says—But you like to ache like that, don’t you?
I smile and say nothing, because Ana knows me inside-out and knows I like to ache like that.
How long have you been sitting here, she asks me.
I was sitting outside Cuppa Joe’s, my favorite coffeeshop.
Coupla hours, I say.
Ana nods.
And you, I say, you coming from work?
Ana nods again then her features draw in tight, pinched and flushed, and she hisses—I hate that fucking hospital. Have I ever told you how much I hate that fucking hospital?
You’ve told me you hate it a lot but that was a long time ago. You probably hate it more than that now, right?
Yes, I hate it so much more.
Ana was an assistant tech in surgery. Her mother had died young, in a hospital, eaten alive by cancer. Even though Ana knew hospitals were corrupt and run crookedly, particularly the hospital where she worked, she wanted to be one of the difference-makers in a machine greased by big money. She genuinely wanted to help people, to ease suffering in whatever way she could, but the waves kept beating her back and I knew she had grown tired, perhaps dispirited.
Ana went on, a catch in her throat—The people that work in surgery are some of the nastiest fuckers you’ll ever meet.
I wanted to ask Ana nasty how, but she was already off on the next thing—Before I forget . . . we’re having a party next Friday. It’s Marty’s birthday.
Marty was Ana’s boyfriend. They had been together for nearly four years. Marty was Jewish and nervous and very very affable. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy shaking hands with people, almost like a politician out to get your vote, except he wasn’t trying to get elected for anything, he just shook hands with great vigor and enthusiasm. Despite Marty’s handshakes and affability, I knew he was wary of me. Wary because Ana and I had dated years back, and wary because our friendship, tight as it was, sometimes made him feel excluded, and wary because of how much I drank. Marty worried about how much I drank and I didn’t know if he was genuinely concerned about me, as a fellow human being, or if he was worried about me, as Ana’s friend who might try and put moves on her when drunk, or if it was both of these things and then some. Marty was a prolific stoner and wanted me to make the switch from alcohol to weed. It will create fewer problems in your life, he had said. I hated advice, it made me think of guidance counselors and people with spiritual and social aims, and I had told Marty, with just enough playful smirk—I want problems in my life. They keep me grounded. Marty had smiled that, shook my hand, and changed the subject.
How old is Marty gonna be, I asked.
40, Ana said.
40, I repeated, as if mentally trying that age on for size. I had just turned 34. 33 was my Jesus year, the age which he was crucified, and I had expected a hard year, which is what I got. But I had survived it and was now on the other side, of what exactly I wasn’t sure. Ana was turning 30 in a couple of months. She still had the hurdle of 33 to deal with, but there was never any shortage of hurdles, both before and after 33.
Are you going to sit down, I asked Ana. She had been standing since she had come.
She did a freaky little dance and gesticulated like a ghoul, saying—Why does it make you nervous when someone stands over you?
I laughed and said nothing. Ana knew very well how nervous that made me. I felt as if the person was on the verge of leaving, at any time, and I didn’t like that feeling.
Ana patted me on the head and said—For you, dear Alex, I’ll sit.
She sat down next to me. I sidled up against her and said—A, can you spot me ten still Sunday?
When I wanted to borrow money from Ana I called her A, and only then. Without saying a word, Ana reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and fished out a bill which she held up saying—All I’ve got is a twenty, so take that.
I can go inside and break it, if you want.
Here, she said, thrusting the bill forward. Take twenty and shut up.
I loved when Ana told me to shut up, it reminded me just how tight our friendship was, but instead of shutting up I said—Thank you, A. I adore you.
I know she said, in a breathy put-on voice, and giggled little-girlishly. The two instances in which Ana seemed like a little girl: when she giggled and when she cried. Times when I had been the cause of Ana’s tears, I felt torn-up inside and had wanted to flee. It was like hurting a five-year-old really badly and instantly regretting the hurt you had caused.
Now that I had money, there were options.

Maskmaking with Jack

2009-12-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

"Throughout most of his life Kerouac played games with himself, giving himself new roles and identities, vanities as he called them in his last years. He was always fragmented, without coherence or direction for the pieces of the self that he was enclosed within. When he was a child, Lowell was the only place where all the fragments hung together.
Neal Cassady once imagined a mutual friend saying of Jack: 'Where is this guy, Kerouac, anyway?' Kerouac himself never knew. His essence lay in a romantic vision of himself. It lay in his fantasies: as a child, the fantasy of living with a saintly older brother Gerard; as an adolescent, of fighting evil alongside the mysterious Doctor Sax, of going with a football scholarship from a small town high school to an All-America fame at an Ivy League college; then as an adult, the fantasy of being the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare and James Joyce, and when that success didn't come, in desperation, successive fantasies of being a drifter, a railroad brakeman, a Zen mountaineer, a holy mystic living on simple foods cooked along lonely streams; and through everything returning again and again to the only fantasy that always held him, the vision of being a child permanently cut adrift in a darkening universe."--"Kerouac," Ann Charters

Flea Circus

2009-12-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

(The following is an excerpt from a longer piece titled: Stray Passages. Anyone interested in reading the piece in its entirety should contact the author, who will expediently oblige your desire to delve deeper into the world of fleas and strays and tailpipes.)

I.

Greyhound:
1. A sleek, streamlined, swift-as-the-wind breed of dog.
2. A coughing, sputtering, wheezing, smoke-blowing mutt, prone to flea infestation.

I spent a great deal of my twenties canned inside the dank sweaty armpit of travel Americana: Greyhound. It was an essential part of my informal education. Whether due to economics, compromised self-esteem, brain damage (my mother, when pregnant with me, fell off a horse AND got into a car accident, though not on the same day) or ingrown romanticism: I wanted to be a flea, wanted to be among the fleas. I thought a flea-sized perspective was an important one to have, a great way of seeing and experiencing America. And I had always felt more innately flea than butterfly or wasp or scarab beetle. Sometimes I dreamed of becoming a firefly, lantern-lighting my way through all the gardens in Brooklyn at night, but that was just a dream. No, the life of a flea was the life for me. When I became a regular on Greyhound, I started thinking of us—me and the other regulars—as a migrant flea circus or traveling harem of parasites. You could scratch and scratch with long daggered nails, scratch until your skin was bloody and raw, and we might crumble and fall like fetal bits of mucus, but we’d be back. We were fleas in league with our durable distant cousins, the cockroaches. Cans of Raid and a Bic lighter, roach motels, kamikaze housewife slippers, toxic pellets—we would take it all in and keep ticking. We were, as my Depression-era grandmother used to say: immune to extinction.