Beer bottle. Empty. If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong with me. Something to worry about. If that piss-pungent, brown beer bottle was not drained, then I would not be slightly drunk, groggy, and asleep in the back seat of a ten year old American car. A car that purrs with a consistent death rattle. A car that devours a small Middle Eastern country’s reserves of oil. If it weren’t for this rolling hunk of decay and metal, I would probably be awake—and before 8 a.m. . I would probably be in some milky-colored Plexiglas corporate cubicle, typing away on something I could care less about. My vital life essence would be evaporating into a light green computer screen, instead of snoring away in the back seat of a car filled with enough empty beer bottles, old Converse sneakers (sniff; ick) an unfinished joint (I definitely know that smell) and a five hundred or more page manuscript that keeps getting longer and more de-structured like my auto-rambling drifting. Sweet.
So thank God or whoever is presently filling in for a higher power, that I can smell a vinegar sour beer bottle stuck between the seat or hedged against my back, making for a lousy sleep. The question before I open my eyes: where did I park my automobile based restlessness? The question that gets asked through my nose: do I smell more than a half smoked joint? Such as a small baggy of marijuana? Mmmm. I now have a reason to get up.
Though it still feels comfortable to remain a passed out waste. Unfortunately, the back seat of this V-8 behemoth is not comfortable enough to become a vinyl padded coffin. But it is close. The Europeans and the Japanese make better cars than the Americans, but only Detroit could make a vehicle with a back seat big enough to be a semi-employed poet in—or almost. I still cannot completely stretch out. I have to squeeze and then adjust my neck and also feet underneath the door’s leather armrest with the match book size pop open metal ashtrays, which—hmmm, might hold a roach or even a half smoked joint. Getting back to more practical matters, there supposedly is a fifteen or more year old American made monster with a vinyl bench long enough to become a well slept mobile hobo in. No one is quite definite about the make; some road squatters tell me that it is a Chrysler. Others say it is a Ford. Whatever the make or model, I have been determined to find it. Until now, that is. I will be going to New York, where I won’t need any kind of car. In New York, you have a wide range of choices when it comes to being a poet. My good friend Winston Galbraith—curator of the performing arts space, “Café Nico” (i.e., a derelict East Village loft that he managed to snag at an almost rent-control bargain) has promised me a no-time limit space on his couch. Looks like it’ll be a step up in the world.
But I am still going to miss the back seat of my ten—no, I think it is eleven year old American car.
No need to lament just yet. I still have a two hour drive ahead of me—maybe a little more. I should arrive in the city by the afternoon; at the latest—Happy Hour—when Winston is at his best for things like remembering his promises. Regardless of when I arrive, I’ve got a book to start pedaling. I just hope not too many pages got lost or burned by stray cigarettes and stuff like that. I should have put that manuscript in the trunk; in the round wheel well where there used to be a spare tire. That would have been a better place for my book; instead of the back seat with all the empty beer bottles and who knows what else that friends, runaways, hitchhikers, one night stands, serial killers and others have left back there.
Just a little bit more shuteye and “sniffing; to make sure I am in the back seat and not jail. If it is the latter it would help to know how I got there before waking up. But my nose sniffs only stale beer and other toxic smells. I’m safe. The only illegal thing I did in the last few hours was trespass in an abandoned Biblical theme park called Holy Land U.S.A.. The only people who trespass there are poets and pagans, and as a fellow poet said, “A poet is a fugitive that no one is looking for,” so I am definitely not in jail. As for the pagans? They ought to get arrested for being the posers that they are. I ought to get arrested for tagging along with them, thinking that something evil or Satanic would happen because of them. ‘Fraid it didn’t. The bonfire the so-called Head Wizard tried to light, wouldn’t take a spark or flame long enough to light. Every piece of wood in Holy Land and for that matter, five miles around, was too damp or deteriorating. It was probably the latter. This is a city that has not breathed too regularly since its factory smokestacks stopped blowing poisons into the sky. Except for a poet, some pagans, and a few others, does anyone know that this city is dying of alcohol poisoning or is in a coma? And how many other cities like it? Each one like a rusted or corroded wheel rim, half buried along the highway. Add all the rusted washers, refrigerators, kitchen sinks, and you have got a rusted moon. Living in one of those oxidized rims illuminated by the fast food, convenience store, or bail bondsman window neon, is also the subject of my present book, a 500 or more page manuscript titled, The Neon Coma Abyss. (Give or take a few dozen pages lost to excessive spills and along side of dirt roads or the gravel lots of seedy bars I parked this car in, or to vandalism by the above mentioned folk.)
Good thing I didn’t mention this tome to the pagans. They might have used it to start their bonfire. But after their failure to create a flame to worship Satan they just deteriorated into suburban teens and undergraduate Art students. The former did not stop drinking until they threw up; the latter could not drink enough because they were too busy being pretentious artists, which made me want to throw up.
Well, that was last night. This morning, I awake grabbing a page from my book, where someone wrote down their phone number and the words: “Call me if you are into some of the stuff you write.” Christ, that’s scary. Because my literary eroticism always gets checked by a self destructive sense of guilt; so that what was intended to be a page from Henry Miller, ends up being a torture scene from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
There seems to be scribble and scrawls from other people throughout the typescript. What the hell. Anyone who gets inside of this car is a refugee from the abyss. Might as well let them leave behind some of their experiences or psychosis.
My personal detritus is more bohemian with a strong blue collar flavor. For one, there are about a dozen empty beer bottles in this car. Rolling Rocks. Coors light. Bud. I only drink the best. What feels like the skin of a dead animal is my leather motorcycle jacket with a portrait of Baudelaire painted on the back. Let me just check the pockets to see—no, no marijuana.
On the floor a pair of old Doc Marten boots—and both of them match. In the same pile, a pair of red high top Converse sneakers (which means there should be some dirty socks around here, but—I don’t want to start digging around for those). Also, a pair of black jeans which means there must be a T-shirt or two around, and probably black. Hell, I’ve got enough clothes to go down to the City. Not with these lace black panties. No way they’re mine. But let’s see, a good sniff will tell—-ooooh! Which means they’re not recent! Same as my sex life. So either get laid or get rid of these panties because they are starting to make a very smelly trophy. Same with this toothbrush. You aren’t ever going to use it again.
Half filled bottle of water—ugh! Sour! But got rid of some of the dryness coating my beer dehydrated palate.
My back pack. With all the essentials in it that I need to survive, such as a notebook to write great Art in, and a triple A fold out map of New York City with all the different notes to get there from the tri-state area.
Can’t believe this is still here: my portable CD player that still has dead AA batteries. Once I do get some batteries, then I can listen to some of my favorite CDs that are not broken or melted, like Patti Smith’s “Horses”, Joy Division’s “Closer” John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” Braham’s “German Requiem” (highly recommended for long winter or dreary bad day rides) and the first Velvet Underground album—the CD that I am going to listen to on the way to New York City—well, first I am going to have to buy some batteries.
And finally, I am glad to see my old faithful is still here. The unabridged Penguin edition of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. I don’t know how I got a copy of it and I seem like the last person in the world to be reading anything from 18th century England, (Defoe though, is cool. Lots of pirates, whores, criminals). But any way, I am hooked into finishing what is probably the longest novel in the English language—fifteen hundred pages and I am already at five hundred or so pages—and the villain in the book—Lovelace (and who kidnaps the whiny Clarissa) is one of the most obsessive psychopaths I have ever come across—in fiction and in life. And now that everything seems to be in order in the back seat of my car, I can go out and take a piss.
Ooo—chill. It may be late April and this morning feels a little like late March—nevertheless, the slight icy chill in the air woke me—a-choo!
Also made me sneeze. Along with a leap through several layers of consciousness as I got out of my car with no jacket—just T-shirt—
—choo!
—Well, I may need a jacket soon. The important thing, I woke up without any artificial stimulant like coffee, or um, drugs. I should try this non-stimulant approach to waking up, more often. It would not hurt to apply this “natural” approach to other aspects of my life, such as in driving, trying to maintain a steady relationship, or substitute teaching.
Even though there was probably no one else around, I moved away from the car a bit and into the brush to do my business. I certainly felt more awake, but I was still sleepy enough to do something retarded, like piss on my car, and I don’t want to do that. (Well, at this point, that would almost be like pissing on my house.) Another reason for going into beer can littered saplings and half dead bushes was the raw, hearty feeling of it. Sorry ladies, but it’s a man thing—and maybe a troglodyte man thing, but a man thing nonetheless to take a good long whiz in the woods after a night of mind-numbing drinking. A good long whiz in the forest puts you back in touch with the primitive troglodyte you were a hundred thousand years ago; plus, well, there is just no other way to explain it than by saying it is just a guy thing when steam starts clouding up from the moss or tree roots and crushed Budweiser cans after giving them a good long sizzle. Maybe this is where we really are like dogs and a lot of guys, especially young guys, just have to “mark” the territory they are in.
Oh shit—guys may like to mark their own territory, but not when a woman hovers nearby and stares with a slight scowl as this one here is doing. Good thing I made a “mental check” of where I had been for the last twelve or so hours before doing my business. I might actually be spooked to see some eighteen or nineteen year old vampira. She was staring at me from ten feet away. She was partially camouflaged through half dead trees and scrub eaten away by acid rain and all the other pollutants that this town used to pump out when it had smokestacks to pump. Excuse me while I zip up and for also feeling a little embarrassed, ‘though if Ms. Dracula ain’t, I don’t see why the hell I should, but—
“Hi, what’s up,” I said. This was after I had zipped up, briskly brushed my hands on my pants, and tried to appear as nonchalant and cool as if I had just taken my last drag of a film noir cigarette that I had then thrown away.
“I heard you sneeze,” she said.
“I’m allergic to the morning,” I said. “You think people like employers and teachers would understand that.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Don’t talk to me about teachers.”
From the way she looked, she was at least costumed to be allergic to the day (or natural light). Aren’t vampires supposed to vaporize as soon as enough sun burns through the thick permanent haze of old smokestack pollution? Well, if you were one hundred percent vampire, yes, but she was not that—in spite of the good job of costuming that was now a bit rumpled. She wore a long black dress with fish net arms. The sides of her dress were slit to reveal legs in similar fishnet, which disappeared a little below the knee into black engineer motorcycle boots; with small gold locks snapped into and dangling from the boots’ side strap. Nice touch.
She had similar unique touches such as a simple leather necklace with some fake purple stone, but which was inside of a black metal frame shaped like a twisted web spun from some insane spider. The same spider whose crazy web of a ring was on her right index finger. Her fingernails, however, were not the black that you would expect to go with this outfit; they were purple. That color was highlighted in her other accessories such as her bracelets, (which had snake-like eyes) and her lipstick. She did not have the hardcore chrome accessories that some of the other pagans were wearing last night, and if I have so far refrained from pegging her to the Goth tribe, it was because of the several purple (and one pink) long silky scarves slung around her neck; they were so light and even filmy that they always appeared to be gently rustling or even breathing. She seemed less ready to bite someone on the neck and more likely to lay herself down in a casket—if it were not for her face, her skin, and even hair. Her long, thick, black shiny curly hair, olive skin, oval slightly plump face, slightly hook nose, and wide brown eyes, gave her away as one of the hundreds of second or third generation of Italian or Portugese Americans that came to this area. No spik-a-english to work in the no skills needed assembly line; to ripen two generations later into respectable, unimaginative, propaganda loving middle class –thus the allergy that this neo-homeless creature and recently turned thirty year old had toward work. As for this recent off spring rejecting the Dream Americana, she had a slightly miffed air about her; one that did not befit a member of the Undead or the semi permanent drop out like myself. Perhaps her slightly pinched frown was leftover disapproval of how last night’s pagan ritual turned into the same old outdoor keg party—where people drank until they could no longer remember—like me.
Hey, I did not come to this ritual last night expecting any sorcery.
I did not just come for the beer though.
“I don’t know, but I thought your friends would at least burn some kind of interesting effigy,” I said. I started walking to my car. “You know—something like the burning man—or maybe something that would get going in that direction—well, maybe not that far.”
“Some of those people I would not consider friends,” she snapped. She started to follow me.
“They took off forgetting to give ya a ride, ha?” I said.
I began clawing my hand through the junk in the front seat. If there was a fairly fresh half filled bottle of water, it would be in the front seat. Anything petrifying or not consumable (unless you were desperate) gets thrown in the back seat.
“Why not be even more blunt?” she said. “Why not say they dumped me?”
I stopped my rummaging.
“I wasn’t trying to be rude or anything,” I said. “People just do those things. Even friends.”
She crossed her arms and with them came a wiggle that rustled her scarves. She locked her hands in her fish netted elbows.
“Not my friends!” she insisted with almost a hiss. She then locked in her hands and ratcheted them into fish-netted elbows.
“Well, give ‘em time. They’re still young yet.”
I hit the roof of my car.
“Fuck!” I said. I started scratching my head.
“Gee, people must really flock to you because of your sensitivity and understanding,” she said.
“Unfortunately, they do, but I’ve got a bigger problem.”
“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine you with a ‘bigger’ problem.”
I now fully turned towards her.
“Yeah, well, there is,” I said, with a little anger, and also panic, because—
“The half bottle of water I thought I had in the front seat—well, it’s not. It’s in the back seat!”
“What is so wrong about that,” she said. Her tone was deliberately measured, as if she was speaking to someone about to cross over from eccentricity to insanity.
Now I was starting to get pissed. My life may be a wreck and my car may be a disaster but at least they are my wreck and my disaster. And for your information, Ms. Vampira, there is an order to all this debris. There is wreckage and disaster that can still be salvaged, and then there is disaster and wreckage for which nothing can be done about it—unless you want to study it like an archeologist and do something useless but aesthetic with it like an artist—and sometimes there might be something practical in all that waste, like a half-filled bottle of water, a half smoked joint, or a half finished novel. But she only saw me; she had no way of knowing how my car was divided in terms of debris, so I tried to gently explain it to her.
“What it means, is, the front seat is where you can still find stuff that is safe to eat and is less then a week old; whereas the back seat—“
I did not continue. Her mouth twisted as if I had just passed some mean gas.
“Ah, nevermind,” I said. “I can get some fresh water and even food when I get to the diner. In the meantime, you wouldn’t have anything to smoke—like—marijuana, would you?”
Her arms—which had loosened a moment ago, now—tchick! Tchick! Ratcheted themselves back up.
“I don’t do drugs,” she firmly said, and then added with a bit of sassiness: “For that matter, I don’t’ bite people in the neck.”
“Well, if you don’t do drugs, then you wouldn’t want my blood—but just what do you do? Everyone has got to have at least one vice.”
I then added in a more playful, pleading tone:
“Come on. You do have a vice. Don’t tell me you don’t have a vice.”
She lowered her eyes and made one of those Mmmm, secretive mysterioso movie smiles; then closed her eyes for a moment; then opened them to reveal:
“I frolic.”
‘No kidd—“I started to say and then asked her the same time I asked myself:
“Frolic? Is that like some French form of bondage? Something like that?”
She closed her eyes, giggled, then threw back her hair, from which her scarves flew and danced behind her.
“That’s what the scarves are for. I try to find a damp, dark, mysterious place to walk briskly in at night, and once I get a good rhythm going, the scarves start to trail back. It’s really neat. Especially in the right grave yard and with a phosphorescent scarf. I once frolicked about five miles—before I was done, I felt I was starting to change into—“
“Wait a minute,” I finally interrupted. “That’s not a vice. You’re not using those scarves to tie someone up! You’re—“
I stopped from saying the only word that could describe her: weird. It was too late though. She had already guessed what that word was. She probably had a lot of people call her that word. It does not take much to be ostracized by people, especially people who no longer merit ostracism themselves. That’s been my experience. The experience of living in a land of discount chain shopping malls and closed factory spaces, has taught me that no one likes being surplus. People will do anything to become a product again. I know; not about being a product. Hell, ever since I saw the new bang up! Flash ‘em! Wow gotta have it toy advertised on the Saturday morning cartoons commercials, I wanted to be a vandal.
That still did not stop a lot of people from calling me names like weird, freak, fag, loser, sicko, psycho, along with throwing sticks and stones at me that were not supposed to hurt. They hurt. Just like they hurt her, but not as much as the way I just did. She would not have revealed her eccentricity, her displacement, if I did not have a similar history along with a similar creative but defiant way of claiming it. That is why she was almost ready to cry and me too. Fuck. I felt like I had just deliberately stepped on and smashed some poor kid’s only toy.
“Hey, I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes, put her palm on her forehead, and then shook her head.
“What the fuck is wrong with me,” she said, but speaking to herself. “It’s all about beer. It’s always going to be about beer and stupidity and all the other high school bullshit that goes along with it. The people that were here last night may look and talk about how much they hate frats, the shopping mall, the suburbs, but they’re no fucking different, and neither are you!”
She turned and started to walk away.
“Well, come on now. Be fair. What you’re doing, that thing you’re doing there—“
She stopped and turned to me and sarcastically said:
“Frolicing?”
“Yeah, it’s really different.”
She shook her head and resumed walking.
“Wait a minute, where ya going. Don’t go that way.”
I started to pursue her.
“It’s—dangerous. There’s—fraternities, shopping malls—there’s even a Gap clothing store that way.”
She stopped and giggled.
“Come on, I can give you a ride down. I’m sure you’ve seen me around; heard me read my poetry at The Boiler Room. That’s how I hooked up with your friends.”
“Some nice images but too much that is long-winded and could be cut.”
“Whattiya talking about? My poetry doesn’t need to be cut. It’s fine the way it is.”
“Every writer says that,” she said.
“Well, sometime you have to graduate from reading comic books,” I murmered.
“What’s that?” she said; a bit mad too. For she did not like being teased or “one-upped.”
“Come on. Let’s explore a little bit of Holy Land first.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go to class.”
“What are you in high school?” I asked.
“College!”
“Freshman?”
“Why!”
“Because no one except a freshman goes to class on Friday mornings, and even freshmen stop going after the first few weeks of their fall semester.”
And this was spring. Late April. Second semester. She should know better. In the meantime, I gave myself a mental pat on the back for remembering something about college.
“It’s a class in my major, and my professor’s already pissed at me on account of my last project. He said my coffins fell flat in terms of dynamics and composition.”
“I hopeÉyou’re an art major?”
She look down and shyly said:
“Art, or Art EducationÉ”
To her parents, the latter; the only way you’re going to convince your folks to fund something that smacked to them of impracticality. If she went to the local state college, it would be the only way for her to study Art. The institutions in this area also reflected the same Bungalow-void view of professions or majors that did not quite fit into a cubicle; therefore, a study like Art required a practical appendage to it like “education”. That should not kill the study; if anything, it should enhance it, make it more exciting. Yeah, right—if in case you don’t catch the sarcasm. And now look at the lives of many of your great artists. They were some of the biggest degenerates and drug addicts going. Look at some of your art movements like Dada. Hugo Ball dressed like an Intergalatic clown and recited poetry that sounded like infantile Tourette’s Syndrome gibberish. (Okay, I believe he later became a devout Catholic; well, at least he prepared himself well with the earlier Dada gibberish.) Unfortunately, the local school boards have a Crayola crayon mentality when it comes to Art; some of the state’s upscale suburbs may fare better: they can finance class trips to see an impressionist show at a major museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Institutions like the Met become a sign of breeding class distinctions, like horseback riding. Well, pass me the can of Krylon metal flake spray paint. Or better yet, a crowbar, bat, or sharp or blunt object that would make a cool object to cause pretty serious vandalism and even damage on one of your more major corrupt institutions like a church or state college, specifically a teacher training college.
But making miniature coffins sounds like a nice idea for an art project.
“Your teacher sounds like a moron.”
“He’s really not,” she said. “When it came time to display my project for the stupid art show, my tiny coffins looked more like a town green nativity scene. But with Barbie and Ken dolls. That’s how I portrayed of the moribund American nuclear family.”
“Well, you can always look at it as a work in progress.”
“Yeah, I suppose. But my professor is still right. A lot of my work is too static. I need to be more organic. So even if I don’t go to class, I need to find several pieces of organic material to go into my end of semester project.”
“I can help you there,” I said. “I know where to find a lot of things that are decaying. Anything that rots has to be organic.”
Her arm were now unlocked. They also partially disappeared within the scarves and I suppose pockets of her dress. She slightly shrugged her shoulders and said with little commitment:
“I guess. We can at least look through Holy Land. There’s got to be something organic here, and I could use a ride back to school.”
I smiled.
“Whatever you say.”
She bit her lip, and looked at me with squinty eyes.
“What about you!” she said. “Don’t you have a job or something?”
“Well—sometimesÉ” I said.
She continued her glowering; demanding more of an answer.
“I’m a substitute teacher .”
Pause.
“But they did not call me today.”
Pause again. Her glower still burning.
“Well, how could they?”
I gestured with my chin towards the car.
“I have a cell phone—but it’s somewhere in the back seat.”
And when I’m not in my car, I’m on a couch in the basement of my old man’s house, or in a sleeping bag on the floor of my best friend’s house. The ranch that already has a pink flamingo in front. The house he bought after he cashed in his degree in English for an M.B.A. future, an M.B.A. wife, and now that they have a kid, probably an M.B.A. baby. Believe me, I get less flack from the old man.
Still that squinty pause.
“Besides, I’m going to New York. My friend—the one who did not sell out his English degree—well, that’s because he never finished it—well, he managed to get this big rent control loft in the East Village. His place is a performance space. It’s become a magnet for me and a bunch of other writers and artists. I suppose you could say our school of art is defined by coffins, decay, rehab. Hey, if your professor doesn’t like your coffins, you can always bring them to my friend’s loft. Besides, he’s going to let me stay on his couch rent free while I work on my book—and also until the school year begins. Then I can work as a substitute teacher in the New York City public school system.”
“That part about a book sounds like a plan,” she said.
“Yeah, I feel the same way too. But this is the first time that doing Art over a job seemed like the more logical and practical choice. So instead of doing something that makes sense, what do you say we go look for art project material while we explore Holy Land.”
And that was just a beer bottle’s throw away from the semi burned out cove where my half rusted out car was parked. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, I’m talking about the Holy Land on a hill above a mostly welfare-cased, formerly factory city in the Northeast U.S.A. A city close enough to make the drive to New York City, but in terms of tapping into New York’s culture, it was only able to tap into its crack and other hard street drugs. Thus some of the anonymous history behind Holy Land’s scars. Holy Land U.S.A., this gutted, battered, knee-high relic of Old and New Testament Jerusalem was a creation of a very religious Italian Catholic lawyer. He may have been able to hear legal briefs, but he still had enough Italian in him to slap a trowel full of wet cement down on rocky New England soil and build an extension of his backyard garden –but this one plastered over to look like an ancient crenellated city from some 1960s Hollywood sword and sandal epic. The “official” history of Holy Land has not yet been written, and with the way it has been left to deteriorate and remain as an open invitation for vandals (in my opinion, the wrong kind of vandalism) it will probably never be written. We have to rely then on local gossip and believe what you will.
From the late fifties until the early seventies, Holy Land was a hot destination for the holy roller circuit. Dozens of yellow school buses with names like “First Assembly of God Church” painted on the side, made the journey to this kitsch village. Back then, Holy Land was kept up. It was like a well painted miniature golf course, but with mangers and grottos instead of waterfalls and windmills. Even then, Holy Land was still considered a bit hokey, and you could see why in what ruins remained.
Picture a rocky soiled peak the size of an elementary school playground. The entrance was a knee length crenellated wall except for the center, which was an arch tall enough for an adult and wide enough for a 2.2. point American family to enter. On top of the arch were the painted plaster words: Welcome to the City of God. Which soon began to look like the reconstructed detritus of 20th century American blue collar culture.
An old basement oil heating tank was now a tower in one of ancient Jerusalem’s walls. Half of an old U-shaped ceramic bath tub with a prominent layering lip, now became the stable where Jesus was born; as for Jesus and company, he was a ceramic statue that you saw before the altar of your Catholic church. Nevertheless, Jesus was at least realistic if not slightly oversized to his lodgings. Mary, Joseph, the Magi, and the animals were mismatched and even an embarrassment. One of the Magi was an African American nineteen fifties lawn ornament whose re-painting did nothing to take away his wide Uncle Remus-like grin. The donkey that shared Jesus’ manger had a big open space on its back: perfect for your potted plant. At least the donkey managed to retain some dignity its non-obtrusive color. Not Jesus’ mother Mary. She would always remain hot neon pink because that was the color used in the mold that shaped her plastic. Such was the three dimensional “quilting” that made up Holy Land. Drain pipes, plaster, and chicken wire became ancient insula; the corrugated steel of old shipping containers topped off with repainted ceramic oval bird baths, became King Herod’s palace. Other important biblical institutions were made up from cut away oil drums. The more humble dwellings drew their material from clay flower pots, old coffee cans, torn apart and re-constructed chicken coops, and a wide variety of ceramic animals and figurines from the garden center at Sears. Nevertheless, such architectural incongruity evoked a sad, even pathetic presence after years of abandonment and decay. The donkey’s head was gone. Some of the figures in the manager were also decapitated. The vandalized folk art topography was now heavily littered with rusted empty beer cans or broken beer bottle glass. The old oil drum that was supposed to represent a citadel that could withstand an attack from the ancient Philistines, did not fare so well with their modern counterparts. This tower had been pulled down, kicked in, and soon filled with decades worth of trash and dried muck. What had once been an impregnable citadel, was now a twisted dried out sewer pipe. The most battered and disgraced of all, however, was not a piece. It was a figure and one its creator would not want us to feel sympathy for.
Satan.
You would not know he was the horned devil unless you grew up with fanatics who reminded you about him. Holy Land’s Lucifer was a three foot tall statue of a Victorian looking man with long-sideburns and a contemplative face. In fact, he had a slight resemblance to Emerson. Yet the transcendentalist never had a pair of dull shaped horns on his head. Neither do I recall a picture of him dressed in a long choir robe, or having two small wings extending from his shoulders. My guess is that this Satan was originally an ornament –if I dare say, angel—meant for some Victorian crypt; the creator of Holy Land must have found this unused marble seraphim at some auction or tag sale. The Polacks, Wops, and Micks of this city would have no idea that this demonic figure was really a Victorian gentleman; or maybe it was just some kind of cosmic irony. Yesterday’s aristocracy was perceived as today’s evil.
Well, at least this 19th century devil was given respect—but only so long as the rest of Holy Land was complete. So long as there were bus loads of religious pilgrims visiting this site, Mephistopheles—like the Virgin Mary, and Jesus—had no reason to fear being vandalized. Once Holy Land was abandoned, however, the no-vandalized rule was no longer observed.
But Satan was singled out for extra abuse.
What saved him from immediate destruction was his stature in Holy Land. He was placed on top of a six-foot high painted metal dome: not easy to kick or whack with a hammer unless you made a special climb. But eventually people did, and so much that folks who once had a connection with Holy Land—stepped in to try and preserve this one piece of sculpture which had already lost its wings. To preserve what was left of History’s first nihilist and rebel, they built a special chicken wire cage around him for his protection.
It still did not stop.
Some folks got at the statue through their pellet guns or even 22 caliber rifles.However, the morally outraged target practice soon got tiresome. Somebody had ripped off half of the cage and whacked off Satan’s head. Once his evil visage was decapitated, there was a pause in completing his final destruction. How could a headless basket case like that evoke anything but pity?
And so his half ripped away protection wire, soon beaded with rust, and the locals soon forgot about this mutilated Satan. I still felt obligated to perpetuate memories of his abuse for his brief time here in Rustville. Even though he was supposed to be an evil man, today he was not even a that.
“He looks pathetic, not dangerous,” said the latest visitor to Holy Land under my tutelage.
“I think it makes us look more pathetic,” I said. “It was only after our world got flushed down the toilet, that we went berserk on him. If anything, it makes Satan look like a scapegoat.”
“Well, it didn’t help,” she said. “The rest of this place looks just as bad. And I don’t mean just Holy Land.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, “and much as people here can be small minded, I feel sorry for them.”
She raised an eyebrow at me; the younger one surprised at the naivety of the older one.
“Yeah? Well, don’t feel too sorry,” she said. “You’re—“
She then paused, even though a word like “weird” “misfit” or “geek” almost popped out.
“Even though I haven’t known you that long,” she tried to explain, “you’re not like most people here.”
“You’re kidding?” I said.
“Don’t get smart,” she said. “There are people who would think that both of us represent the devil.”
“Too many people,” I sighed.
It was getting harder to condemn such people. I would always have a strong attachment to the soil that I shared with bowling alley philistines. And each day one more neon piece of that gritty and blue collar soil was disappearing.
“Come on,” I said, “this isn’t the end of Holy Land—almost—but not quite.”
She put one palm against the corroded metal dome that this cracked statue crookedly stood upon.
“Wait,” she said.
She gently scraped her hand against the bumpy metal surface; an artist feeling her material.
“I want to get up there,” she said.
“You want a closer look?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This might be the material I am looking for.”
“You want me to help you take down the statue?” I asked.
“Yes—no—I don’t know—“ she quickly said. “After all he went through, he belongs up there.”
I softly nodded, and then muttered:
“Damn.”
I then took a brief look to my right, and then to my left, and then looked up, which made her raise her eyebrows in wonder and confusion.
“Don’t worry, “ I said, “you’ve got plenty of ruins to sift through. Look around.”
“I have—I will,” she said. “But what was the—“
She paused as she mimicked my look up.
“—look up for?”
“Hell,” I said with a smile. “that was for Heaven. Because Heaven is now in ruins too.”
She shook her head.
“You’re nuts,” she said. “But now I know why you have your car like that. And in the back seat, a novel that looks like Holy Land.”
“No—I’m going to finish it,” I quickly said.
“Don’t,” she said. “At least not all of it. Leave some of it—in ruins.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I began to consider the idea. “Leave some of your movie? In ruins? Yes—or abandoned or criminally taken over—like a crack house.”
“Just remember that you promised.”
“Promised what?” I asked.
“To help me find my materials for my art project.”
“Hell, you should get what you need here. I gotta go to New York.”
She now crossed her arms.
“Bull shit! I still need to explore more!” she said. “I didn’t go to class on account of you!”
“Hey, don’t go putting that on me,” I said.
“Oh no? Well, didn’t you tell me that no one goes to class on Fridays, unless they’re some na•ve freshman?”
“Alright, let’s just look around; we’re wasting time here arguing.”
“You’re the one who’s arguing,” she said under her breath.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re looking for; that’s your prob—“ I started to say under my breath.
“What?” she said.
“We need to go that way,” I said. I pointed to a hilly path that led up through the crumbling knee-high grotto, temples, and inns of Holy Land.
Which had ended once we climbed up that little path. We now arrived at the top of this hill: an acre of raw, gray, undulating rock that seemed to be the peak of one giant boulder. Broken beer bottle glass and old cigarette butts now clogged up its crags. An old gray stalk that seemed half dead, popped through a hole in this slate-colored surface. Here and there was an inexplicable and odd fragment brought up from the broken world below. A rusted bicycle frame, a twisted piece of metal that could have been an old water pipe, a gray, rotted window frame. I picked up the latter with both hands and held it before me. My face stood in the center of the frame.
“Hello from the fourth dimension,” I called out. “What dimension are you in?”
Her own—which she was getting lost in Holy Land. She had discovered Holy Land’s Trinity. Three, tall gray metal crosses: the one in the middle had a lead or copper Christ hanging from it; this savior, however, was missing one arm. Yet he still held on. What made his one arm crucifixion less odd, was the pipe-like space left behind when he lost his arm or when someone yanked it off. This was not a garden center bought Christ, but one made to order. After the several pieces of his body were cast, they were put in place by being screwed together. Thus the curved grooves around the fitting that connected a crucified arm to a crucified shoulder. This particular Christ was more like a series of pipes or machinery parts; in a way, he was the first Jesus who seemed to fit this community. This was a Christ that came off the assembly line and because he was missing a piece and also showing rust, he also fit into the present.
Even more fitting was where this Trinity stood. For that steel industrial Christ, a patch of stony lead-colored surface that could have been the topography of the moon. Not too much damage could be done to Christ on the moon.
I gently put down the window frame. I did not what to break the reverie that this young artist was holding with thisÉ.piece of found art? Sacred object? Kitsch? All three?
All three. Had to be. That is the only way Art seemed to come to fruition here. Fine art, religion, kitsch—they were also the ingredients for becoming an artist. At least they were for me; determined to create beauty in a place where aesthetics are defined by velvet paintings of bullfights, and neon candy flake colors on the cars rebuilt by menacing teenage gear heads. I find the homely object more sincere than the well crafted but pretentious work of art. The slick Broadway bedroom farce—I’ll take an early sit come like “The Honeymooners” any day where fat Jackie Gleason is a bus driver named Ralph Kramden—someone trying to keep afloat in a very tacky series of flats that is supposed to be his railroad flat in Brooklyn. (The real beauty of those old shows ; where they were filmed live, and where sometimes you could catch some rich, lovable, human screw ups.) Yet the most important thing about art (and why I am compelled to write) is the way it lets you be the craft maker—there is no assembly line, no corporate enterprise, no mega spectacular Hollywood production committee. There is just you, and no more than a few tools before you. Just like it was with the work bench down the cellar, where you made everything from a baby’s crib to a backyard shed. Or the folding card table, where you made plastic flower armatures stuck on large blocks of Styrofoam, to knitting blankets which always turned out to be the most appreciated wedding gifts. The plastic flower arrangement may seem embarrassing, the back yard shed, functional and boring and now rotting.
But it was in one basement workbench, and it was from one back porch with a fold out card table, that a great work of art called Holy Land, was born.
“You could speak,” she said. “You’re not interrupting anything. But thanks for thinking of me anyways.”
I now joined her, looking up at this simple but stark steel arrangement and said:
“Industrial Christ—that’s what I call it.”
“Memorial for Western civilization,” she said, “is what I call it.”
I smiled and nodded.
“Nice,” I said.
I made a brief gesture to the right with my arm.
“Allow me to show where this civilization ends,” I said. “It’s just right this way through the wasteland.”
And then through a cove of dark green semi dead stalks incongruously sprouting from thick gray rock. And then beneath an archway and trestle made from a yanked out, but not quite pulled out fence. And then along a surface of what seemed like a spill of nails half melted together with metal shavings, (Thank God for the Doc Martens.) And then past the twisted mangled coat hanger like remains of a car chassis.
(All the way up here?) Finally, there was a steady rise of dirt speckled with gravel, glass, cans, a few trees, an overturned shopping cart and then a fenced off square cement platform that held up a hundred or more foot high cross. The same cross that motorists could see from a few miles in either direction on the interstate. It may not have been Holy Land’s intention, but Jesus’ crucifixion was there to spiritually inspire rush hour traffic leaving the suburbs, or if you were lucky, this state. In some ways, it was a waste of a good monument—whether sacred or kitsch or both. In another way, this giant cross at least let this part of the state have one memorable roadside attraction and a piece of art you would expect to find in the Bible Belt, not the Rust Belt. But perhaps because this plastic hunk of religion was in the latter, is why there were no large neon words like, “Jesus Saves” along side of the cross. In this neck of the tundra, religious drama tended to be left to the melodramatic cemetery angels or gory, grotesque religious statues in old Catholic churches. This New England soil was still a little too Puritan to accept any jumping, thumping, or testifying religion.
The cross seemed to reflect the austerity of the Puritans, the power of the former industrial age, and the cheesiness of the recent pop culture that melted down most of this land’s previous history.
The cross was made out of fiber glass panels that had a frosty surface. (Think of the frosted panel doors of your shower.) The panels were inserted within six inch metal frames which were held in by rivets. Like the industrial trinity, this giant cross above seemed to come off the assembly line. But only the local, tactless, blue collar culture could give it a lime green paint job; now streaked or weathered with the black from soot, acid ran, and bird shit. The thick metal on the iron base that this cross was hoisted upon, had a three-by- four feet padlocked door on the side.
“That’s where the troll lives,” I explained to The Young Artist. She was agog-eyed fascinated at this giant cross sitting on top of what was small mountain.
It didn’t take much—just a look up—and it felt like you were in the cockpit of a small plane taking off on a frosty runway. You could barely see the top of this cross, and with the way the clouds drifted by, it seemed as if this giant cross was slightly swaying in the wind. It was better to experience this cross at night; when the green illumination made it seem like you were looking up at a giant Popsicle. I always wondered about whose job it was to “turn on” this cross. No one seemed to know; hence, the mythical “crucifix keeper” became a troll, because only a troll could live in the base of this cross.
“Yeah, the troll takes care of the cross,” I explained, “and lights it up at night, sees that it is kept up.”
“I thought trolls were pagans,” she said.
She got me again.
“Oh, I mean leprechaun. It’s a leprechaun who lives in there, and they can’t be pagan because they’re Irish. They’re Catholic, so don’t use any foul language. Or else, he’ll come out and slap your hand with a ruler.”
She giggled and then pointed to the graffiti scrawled all over the metal base. Etched on it were the usual lovers’ names, but also the profanity that in a Catholic school would get you hit by a two by four.
“AhhhhÉ..” I intoned in mock sadness. “The leprechaun must have died.”
“But someone must light up this cross at night. I’ve seen it zillions of times.”
“I don’t know who does it,” I said. “But I think it would be a fun job. ‘Cross Keeper.’ I’d love to have that on my resume.”
“Under ‘duties’ you could put: ‘In charge of deciding what primary color to plug into this cross,’” noted The Young Artist.
“Other duties would include feeding the troll who lives in the base of the cross,” I added.
“You could also use that for any supervisory duties,” said The Young Artist. “Supervised one troll.”
“Don’t forget that word, utilized. A resume is not a resume until it has the word utilized. “
“Supervised one troll,” The Young Artist said in an official voice. “Utilized ‘special pagan skills to supervise troll.’”
“Well, shall we go see if he is in?”
I held my arm out and made a slight bow for her to go up the steps. After a nod, a smile, and a “thank you” she went up. I then followed and soon grabbed the rail on the platform. Something she had already done, along with visually drinking in the brick, clapboard, and smokestack valley that was below.
Because we were so high up, along with the morning still being cool, there was a slight wind. It was enough to make her scarves “frolic”, for which I could not help but laugh.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
There was a slight bite to her lips; she knew what sparked the laughter.
I shook my head with a faint trace of a smile.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said.
I swept my hand as far as it could go to my left.
“Look,” I said. “It’s not the Grand Canyon, or the Amazon, but from up here, there’s curves and colors and perspectives and all that neat picture making stuff.”
She giggled.
My grand gesture collapsed into a shrug.
“What the hell,” I apologetically said. “My only art course was Introduction to Art 110. ButÉ”
But down below was a landscape that a painter like Edward Hopper would appreciate. Fortunately, there was still a lot of the old industrial city left; homogenization in the form of strip malls and condo-plexes had only recently begun to bulldoze their presence, but most of the hilly streets were lined with big, wide, flat roofed clapboard shingled, three story houses. For each floor of them, there was a different color—one that did not contrast too much with the color above or below. One story might be green; the next one a pale lime, the top floor white. Each floor also had a porch with thick baseball bat shaped banisters –though most of the porches were empty. They did not have the lawn chairs and stuffy broken couches on them as they did when I was a kid, and when my grandmother was still alive and owned one of these three family tenements. Another quirk that they had were heavy mahogany doors with tall oval glass curtained windows; doors that reminded me of old haunted funeral homes. When I was a paperboy, I was always a bit afraid to ring the doorbells to such houses in order to collect money for the newspaper. I always imagined that a skeleton or ghoul was about to pull back just a slip of that curtain to see who was at the front door! Unfortunately, no ghosts ever came to greet me, only stooped, potato skinned old people who took forever digging butter colored bony fingers into a purse in order to pull out the right amount of pennies, nickels, and odd dime to pay me.
Some of the other blue collar institutions that held up this community were still there, liked the Roman Catholic church; this one named after some Slavic saint or martyr whose name I could never pronounce. Like the church I was looking at now. It had a girth similar to the clapboard houses and factories. It was a short and wide and brick A-framed; no fancy spires for St. Stashu’s. What this church did have were long wide steps. For the kids in the neighborhood back then, the steps were a cool place to hang out. If you were ballsy enough, you would light up a cigarette and smoke it in front of what was for you the whole damn world. For the most part, that included the priest and the cops: they were the ones always coming by to tell ya to “Beat it before you get arrested for loit’ring.” Recently, the steps have become a marketplace for dealers at nights. Each morning leaves a dew of crack vials on these steps.
There was hardly any other life that walked up that concrete. There had not been a marriage at St. Stashu’s for at least a generation; as for funerals, even they were becoming scarce. The last generation to faithfully attend church were just about depleted. St. Stashu’s should have been closed yesterday. What few, frail, veiled old women who still came during the day to pray, had less time to live than the number of beads on their rosaries.
The few brick turreted and cylinder’d factories should have also been knocked down a decade ago. Because they were not, is why the acid of Time started doing its job. Some of the bricks were loose and crumbling, and sections of a factory wall were now a buckled, uneven surface. Picture a pile of unevenly stacked shoe boxes. Most of these factories’ dark copper colored windows had been smashed: even the graffiti was faded and archaic. “Iron ButterÉ” was one of the tags you could make out. Iron Butterfly. A hard rock 60s group that had one great song: “In a Gadda- Da Vida,” before being sent to the scrap music metal heap. In the corner, a tin sign with an inverted pyramid of three small black upside down triangles against a yellow circle: the symbol for a fallout shelter. When the Russians dropped their atom bomb on this city, we would all run for safety to this factory basement. The only thing permanent—at least in the plant I was focusing on—was a black iron gate hinged before a bricked up arch doorway. The metal or wood “For Lease” sign placed across the bars now just said: “For”. The last word that would ever come from this structure. This factory would either fall completely down, someone would finally knock it down, or some kids would burn it down. Until then, it would just have to be a structure without any purpose.
At least I was not the only one driving a ten or more year old car that was about to fall apart. There was an over due mothballed fleet of such vehicles in this city. And from the top of Holy Land, you saw how they lined the streets like a tin, broken, old toy train. Even when they were no longer running, their owners still hung on to them, placing these tireless corroded hulks on cinder blocks in the backyard or behind a rotting shingle-less garage. How could their owners part with such craft? These old V-8 cars were more than just a means to get from Mall A to Mall B: these old cars were the pride of the country in the same way the old sailing ships were the pride of the British navy. How it must have hurt the old sailors who saw their ship being towed out to sea by the new practical steam ship, and once out to sea, the four masted warrior would be burned—just like the English painter Turner depicted it, but in this small city, it was hard for the old sailors to scuttle their no longer sea worthy grand vessels.
Let old retired Stashu hang on to his Pontiac Catalina or Buick Regal for as long as he wants: the post modern had already come to this city that was still wrestling with the modern. And the post modern came in these orange and white windowless and probably bomb proof and time proof, public self storage units. There was now a honeycomb-like labyrinth made up of them: a maze that began to intersect through this city. Why the need for so many of these spaces? Today, things were supposed to be obsolescent: if you were not “hip” to the new model, then you fell behind, became stuck; started to rot, like this old city. The answer to this post-modern puzzle might be better found in the horror that was discovered in one of these plastic boxes. Long after the lease on one expired, the manager opened it up. He discovered the bagged remains of several dismembered bodies that were never identified. Neither were the police ever able to trace the owner; who used a fictitious name along with credentials that could never be traced. No one seemed scared though about a serial killer being loose in Rustville. What need to feel danger “lurking” in these streets? You could have lived right next door to the space where this gruesome butchery was going on. But because you could not see it, or even smell it—and because the terror taking place was safely sealed within its own world, well then, you might as well have been living at the other end of the continent from this plastic box where human beings were becoming anonymous dismemberment.
I disdainfully shook my head.
Yes, it was my city, and I thought I knew it, just like I also thought it was mine to dispose of. Yet in spite of such smugness and arrogance, I also knew that I was the one being disposed of, and if so, I should count myself lucky.
The truth? I was not so much disposed of as I was, well, someone who could not let go—I wanted to embrace everything!
But most of what was now everything, was in decay. And that is why most of what I held and tried to bring to my soul was broken glass, rubble, rusted twisted steelÉno longer blinking and left behind words or images that would always seem dead.
“A penny for your thoughts?” I heard her say.
“That’s still too much,” I said.
“Well, you could give them away,” she said, “the same way that you do with your poetry that you photocopy onto small stapled books.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.
“Hey, the best stuff in life is either stolen or free,” she said. “And I bet you that church is.”
“What church?” I asked.
She pointed to a church, but different from the one I had been previously looking at.
“That one over there,” she said, pointing to the left of her.
The church she pointed at was gray, and had two flat-topped towers on both sides of a wide peaked front. Sort of like a cathedral but smaller. So what was the big deal? It was just one more church attended by a few, bony, black veiled old immigrant ladies.
She giggled.
“You don’t recognize it, do you,” she said.
“Actually, I do,” I said. “It’s where I made my First Communion, which is why I prefer to forget it.”
“That church where you made your First Communion,” she said with a trace of haughtiness, “I learned about in my Art History class.”
I turned to her and raised an eyebrow.
“That church is a replica of Notre Dame—the big medieval cathedral in Paris.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.”
Well, sort of. I knew about the cathedral from Victor Hugo’s novel—well, actually, from the cartoon movie made about the novel.
But now that I had seen the movie, I am definitely going to read the book.
“You’ve not been to Paris?”
“I don’t think my car will make it that far,” is how I gently explained my ‘challenged traveling experiences.’
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with embarrassment. “I just thought that since you were a writer and all, you—“
She stopped herself from “stepping” into more embarrassment. It was kind of cute and refreshing to see that things had not changed when I was a Freshman, and being a drinking, Paris-based writer like Hemingway is a cliché I would not mind living—at least the latter part. The drinking, well, a beer or two a day would be good enough. No need to do anymore, and I am sure Paris would be great (after all, it was where some of the greatest writers ever deteriorated in, like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and that literary serial killer, Lautreamont). But I would be happy just to have a futon or a couch in New York.
“If I’ve been there, it’s only because of a school trip,” she tried to explain.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to apologize,” I said.
“For me, the best part of that city was, wellÉ”
She giggled.
“Sort of what you have right here. A big hill where you could see the whole city. Only there, there’s a big fat basilica called Sacre Couer, or Sacred Heart.”
“And on top of this hill here is a work of art called Holy Land,” I said
She nodded in agreement.
“But Paris didn’t have anything like that old train yard,” she said.
I looked in the direction she was pointing. This yard was at the edge of town; in a shallow crater about half a mile wide, were a dozen or so bronze or rancid yellow freight cars. Some of them were sinking into the ground, some of them were standing crooked. At one end were two or three yellow cabooses; at the other end, two old red Pullman passenger cars that looked like a slice of an art deco skyscraper turned sideways and put on wheels. Part of this crater was surrounded by a half dead, leafless forest.
The other side was a small complex of several small, factory-like buildings.
“That’s not a railroad station,” I said. “That’s a scrap yard.”
“Oh,” she said, and in a tone of disappointment.
“But we can go there too,” I said, trying to be hopeful. “I’ve still got a few hours.”
“And then you become sober?” The Young Artist said.
“Funny,” I said, “but it’s because I ain’t drunk—I mean wild, screaming, dangerous drunk, that I’ve got to leave here. People on this toxic surface drink to live. But I want to drink for a reason, that at the very least, has no purpose whatever.”
She slowly nodded, as if she was being careful not to break the delusion of a mad man. Oh well, I would not harm her or snap in any way. I might insult her though. Go ahead. Push my buttons, and I’ll call you a Republican.
“Sounds like a plan,” she said. She mockingly rolled her eyes—there was a sign of playfulness in her mockery.
I smiled and in that smile, owned up to all the holes in the boat with which I was about leave land.
“It’s more than a plan,” I said. “It’s a vision. I’m going to New York City, where my friend has a loft above a drag queen bar in the East Village. And in this loft, there is at least one futon that is not broken. And if there isn’t, there’s a couch that I can sleep on.”
She slowly shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sounds like a’drink-to-live’ situtation to me.”
“It is not,” I quickly explained. “It’s an urgent need to create and perform because every other week this loft becomes a performing space called ‘Café Nico’”.
“Café Nico?”
“Yeah, named after this dead, fucked up junkie singer—and during some of these readings and performances—damn—you don’t need to drink or smoke anything with the way a poet or performer can suddenly make the room feel as if it had been sprinkled with midsummer’s night dust.”
“As in Shakespeare?” she asked, a bit confused.
“As in Puck—and all those animals and creatures in a dream within the dream—as in the imagination of a great artist called Shakespeare. But don’t worry. I’m also practical. Within a couple of days of living on my friend’s futon—“
“Or couch,” she interrupted.
“Let’s think positive here. Yes, after a couple of days, I’m going to go out and get a serious temp job as a waiter or word processor while I write about my own dreams under the influence or I mean inspiration of midsummer night’s dust. So whattiya think. Sound like a plan?”
She slightly “frowned” up her lips as if to say, maybe, maybe not, and then asked:
“What’s ‘midsummer night’s dust?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, because I had not thought of it before, but now that I had: “It’s whatever poison or sweetness inspires you. For me, part of it are things like Holy Land.”
“What about your car?” she asked. “You think it will make it to New York City?”
My front teeth made a quick bite of my lower lip.
“This car is still tough and has some bite, and things that are tough and have bite will at least make it to The Bronx. What about you? I know you’re tough, and if you don’t bite—well, the way you’re looking at me, you probably do. A-Hem!”
I quickly cleared my throat as a way to underscore the frown that was starting to burn across her face. Hey, it’s not often you can make a nice playful dig at a vampire.
“But you must have some of that midsummer’s night’s dust,” I continued. “Don’t tell me you don’t have any of that mid-summer night’s dust—all that frolicking stuff. I know you do. But have you got any impractical dreams?”
She nervously giggled and said in a slightly apologetic tone:
“I wouldn’t call what you’re doing impractical, but—I don’t know. Maybe I want to teach—don’t laugh—but to little kids—but not—with coffins.”
“You would not teach them how to make little coffins?”
“No!” she said, looking at me as if I was crazy, and then added:
“I don’t know—who knows—as it is, I’m missing class!”
“Don’t blame me,” I quickly said.
“But—now that I’ve gotten to see some of Holy Land, I’d like to build my own—well, maybe not Holy Land—but some crazy little world like this where people can come to and just, well, until we can come up with a better world.”
“Personally, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. And maybe I should write a book like that,” I said. “Or better yet, I write the book version of your sculpture land—or whatever it is you’re going to sculpt.”
“Hm—I like that. But what kind of world is this going to be?”
“Hmmm, that’s a lot to think about without having breakfast. I at least need a cup of coffee before I think about creating anything on an epic scale.”
Her mouth began to make an uneasy squish.
“I don’t know,” she uneasily said. “It all depends what breakfast is. For one thing, I’ve a vegan.”
Great, I thought to myself. A vegan vampire. I would love to bite you on the neck, but I am afraid if I do, it will mean that that I am eating meat. And I can’t do that, because I am a vegan. No wonder nobody could get a bona-fide evil pagan bonfire going. Ahh, don’t be so hard on her, just because her plans don’t include a couch—I mean, a futon like yours. Maybe she had the realistic idea. Forget vampires and lofts and for that matter, religion, politics, and all that other junk. At least in the way those things have always been. Create your own world and if possible, make it out of the junk. If I was convinced of anything (yet without still being able to fully articulate it) a world built on material that has been already been thrown away, was a world that was going to have more durability than the one most people on that interstate were guzzling their lives in such a hurry to get .
But first we had to get out of Holy Land and the neighborhood it was in.
Well, she would make it to the car. I felt confident about making a quarter mile walk to a destination without any coffee. My worry was the car itself: would it be able to go? Not just down this small mountain, but to the diner, a few other stops, and eventually New York City. In addition to all that, my vehicle had a new mission: it would be a craft used to help discover materials for a still un-defined art project.
The Young Artist was ready to embark. She was also intrigued by my car.
“Ut-uh,” I said to her. For as soon as we had gotten to the car, she smiled and even made a happy ‘squeak’ as she saw what potential treasures my car might yield. She frowned, but I still did not give in. My mess still had a method to it and I would have to know a woman for more than twenty minutes before she has the right to clean up that mess. Nevertheless, after she had settled into the front seat, she leaned over it and began rummaging through the back.
“You’re not using anything in my car as material for your art project.”
“Oh, come on,” she said.
“Because for one thing, my unfinished novel is back there, and that’s not junk—at least not yet.”
“Then why do all the pages have all this different writing—and none of the pages seem to be in order.”
“That’s because—“
I started the car and gave the pedal a heavy throttle—more to keep myself from hearing me swear than her.
“Everyone who hops on board decides to do a little editing or adding to the great American failure in progress.”
It was too late. She was already reading and was soon scribbling with a pencil she plucked from who knows where.
—well, she seemed intensely drawn in to whatever she was reading—or writing.
It was the latter from the way her pencil started furiously moving and then suddenly stopped. And then started. It was hard to tell while I was driving; hard to tell if she now had a small smile of embarrassment or delinquent delight; probably the latter; or that is what I hoped. At least for this manuscript. Who cared if it never had an obvious plagiarist’s chance of ever becoming the Great American Novel? If my literary chaos, degeneration, and forgery served as a narrative that invited vandalism, well then hell, I had accomplished something in the arts after all. Maybe it would inspire others to go and vandalize even better books than mine. Why not. They are all dead: books died a long time ago. The only difference is that the ones that are big, ugly, and INTIMIDATING monuments make everyone afraid to say Boo! Everyone walks lightly around the great classic or the popular book of the microsecond sold to you as a classic on the talk show. But as soon as someone pops open the laptop, so much for the great obelisk known as The Book.
The young artist had the right idea about vandalizing my manuscript (at least that is what I hoped she was doing). It is pretty hard to graffiti a work in progress that everybodyÉ.Who knows? Eventually such a mess might become a great work of ruins; sort of like Holy Land.
I don’t know if she was vandalizing my book, but it did seem inspiring. Whatever she and anybody else did to my five hundred plus pages in the back seat could only help it.
The same way the rust, decay, graffiti, and discarded syringes helped the Williamsburg Bridge connecting the lower part of Manhattan become a great piece of post industrial art.
But how could such a brilliant and adventurous mind like hers be in awe of Notre Dame cathedral? Well, there was still the rest of the morning to put some “bad” into her good taste.
Such anarchistic pedagogy, however, did little to help us find vitality and inspiration in my own streets. The neighborhood below Holy Land was stricken with architectural arthritis. The narrow streets curved and boomeranged like a twisted spine, and the tiny cheap beach front-cottage-like houses (two front window’d boxes with a pick up truck besides the porch) had shingles, TV antenna, flagpoles, and even mailboxes, gutters, and Venetian blinds that were buckled, gnarled, splintered, and spindled. Furthermore, with streets so skinny, pot holed, and lined with the debris of old carcass’d washing machines and refrigerators that never get trashed collected, you don’t need both sides lined with old Detroit battle-mobiles that are sometimes even longer than the houses. And why an American flag hung from a pole planted on the tar paper porched roof of every second house? Every guy (and these days, gal) who did not get fucked up on drugs, sent to prison or pregnant, enlisted in the Corps, (as in United States Marines). It was there on the bumper sticker of every other car: “Proud parent of a son (or daughter) in the United States Marines.” That’s what always gave me a little “stab” every time I drove through this neighborhood; that there was only one thing to be proud about: having a son or daughter who was a jarhead. Agh. Such a dreariness could sap the vandalism right out of you.
And then –sharply—a bit worriedly, interrupted
“What? What?” the young artist nervously asked.
I shook my head.
“Noth—“ I started to say, and then stopped.
“Just fell into your own little black hole there,” she said.
“While you were vandalizing my manuscript,” I said.
“Well, it could use some ripping apart,” she defensively said back.
“Ripping up, is more like it,” I said. “My new theory about art—and writing. Or maybe it’s not a theory at all. I have just discovered the beauty of painting the canvas with a switchblade.”
She seriously studied me for a moment, during which she most likely considered the following possibilities: a.) I was a serial killer. b.) I was an inmate from the asylum. c.) I was an extra-terrestrial posing in the skin of a human, or, d.) all three of them.
“You’re still taking me to the church that looks like Notre Dame cathedral, aren’t you?” she asked, and then cautiously added:
“Or maybe you shouldn’t.”
“We also have a house that has a ceramic lawn sculpture replica of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’.”
“Don’t get smart,” she said. “And you are taking me to that old freight yard.”
“I’m not smart,” I said, “just too financially stupid to be worth something in an age that trades the future on junk that was already worthless yesterday. And first we’re going to the diner.”
“You sure it’s open today? Have you noticed all the flags?” she commented about the passing landscape. “Is it Fourth of July? Some President die?”
“I can’t remember the name of the last President,” I said, “and only know the last name of this one.”
“Hey, if you ever need parts for your car, you know where to go,” she said, and then laughed.
“That’s cute,” I said.
“Hey, what’s that?”
She had pointed at a new shift in the waste-scape.
“The house I’ll probably be living in—I don’t know, maybe I won’t have to be embarrassed about my car—or the writing I produce.”
“I don’t know if you want to live there,” The Young Artist said, “because that building looks like an old prison.”
I finally noticed a piss-yellow factory-like building behind a rusted, diamond-patterned fence along side of a long deserted road. We had left the cliff side slum where some of the few, the proud, the many were annually recruited, and were now in a parcel of wastescape or tundra that every mile or few suddenly opened up into a patch of razed earth. Not for long though. What is toxic and cordoned off today, will tomorrow be an aspirin tablet white shopping mall: the poison does not get distilled. It just gets transformed.
The Young Artist told me to slow down. There was something she wanted to inspect. I had a good hunch what it was. On the fence was a metal sign reading: “Danger! Contamination. Keep out!” Ah, an object perfect for her art project.
“Good choice,” I said. “That sign would make great cover art for a magazine or book.”
“Ha? Oh, you meant for my art project—yeah, that would be neat,” she said. “But the building behind. That jaundiced colored brick tower. It looks like it might have once been the entrance to Alcatraz prison.”
Close enough. It used to be a TB hospital, and then a mental hospital. Then—I don’t know—but something still having to do with incurable debilitating disease, until such incurability finally ate out the guts of the building.
“Yeah, that’s an old hospital,” I said. I stopped the car.
“A hospitalÉ?” she said with growing interest.
“Yeah, I think they performed the first lobotomy in History there,” I said.
It was a wild guess, you never know.
Well, it sounded like the truth. This was a depressing enough area to cut out a piece of somebody’s brain.
“Forget that,” she said. “I want to get some medical waste. I know that organic material, stuff made out of shit, has already been used as media before. But no one ever before used poison—pull over.”
She was one step ahead of me. Poison, waste, dangerous chemicals or landfill—they all had the value of being worthless but also dangerous at the same time. It seemed that no matter what pure vision the artist or writer was trying to create, there was always some slick entrepreneur who called him or herself owner or critic and who would find a way to put a bar code on your work. Would someone be so eager to put a price tag on a glob of radioactive guk? Probably not, and I hope The Young Artist was not thinking about taking—asbestos—from that old hospital. Even my rattle trap of a car and a life had limits. She was still on the right track though. Poison was a material we could not overlook. And in addition to vandalizing language and literature, I would also have to find a way to poison them, and the sooner the better. The possibility to create something without it being Coca Cola was becoming harder and more desperate. Just take this abandoned hospital here. Right now it was left to be a source of inspiration, decay, and if you were lucky, a treasure trove of diseases and infection to infect and break down consumerism and commercialization. (Let’s hope it stays with that; the metaphorical . I am not picking up any used hypodermics, but if I see a bone—or better yet what I have trying to get my hands on for years, my very own skull, it’s coming home with me; the hell with being a gentleman and first offering it to her.) In a few months though—maybe even in a few weeks or less—this hospital will probably be torn down for another shopping mall. And I am almost at the point now where I would rather step on a used and discarded syringe than I would set foot into an upscale shopping center stocked with selling junk that is built to quickly break down. Forget about The Great American Novel. The shopping mall has become the great literary epic; the neon and concrete bunker is what you would get if you compiled all the novels endorsed by the Lobotomy Book of the Month Club. Of course, having an unpublished novel or few myself, might be some of the sour seasoning in my slightly bitter critique. But art that comes in a box so that it can go into a microwave to be easily digested (and just as easily crapped out) is just as dangerous to the spirit as a hard drug like heroin. The latter, eventually destroys you physically. Eventually it will become hard if not impossible to continue consuming its deadly poison.
That is not the case with the shopping mall epic, which is what makes it more dangerous and deadly. The loboto-literature may rot your brain and soul, but it leaves your body intact, which means that you are free to go on consuming, even though you are mentally and spiritually dead. What a deal, and only from the U.S.A of Rot Inc. Art that works on its audience like a neutron bomb. Spirit and psyche get wasted, but body and bladder remain to continue functioning and consuming.
But not when the art is poison, and art that corrupts, turns readers into criminals rather than consumers. Well, Word Criminals. Where you commit crimes through language, and against prisons made out of language. So I should give the mall a second chance. If I am going to be a criminal as well as a vandal, I am going to need a bloated and corrupt institution to ransack and vandalize.
“Another epiphany?” she asked in a slightly mocking tone.
“And one that Satan himself would be proud of,” I said.
“Maybe I oughtta leave you in the car,” she said.
“No way,” I said. “I want toxic waste too. I may not be an artist like you, but I can still find a way to put some globs of the stuff in my manuscript in the back seat.”
We got out of the car to face the not too daunting prospect of climbing over an aluminum diamond patterned fence; unless you were wearing a long black gothic dress.
“Fuck,” the young artist said as she just came to that realization herself.
I softly chuckled.
“After you,” I said.
“No way,” she said, “and did I see a pair of red high top Converse in the back seat? They looked new, too.”
“They are,” I said, “For when my other pair wear out. I was sort of saving them.”
Too late. Ka-chunk! As she dropped her last boot somewhere in the back seat of my car, and began changing into my red Converse high tops.
“Only two pairs of shoes and both of them sneakers?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
“Typical guy,” she said, and then reappeared with my red high tops on her feet, (which still fit in well with the rest of her outfit).
She kicked one leg against the aluminum fence, a kick which revealed a nice leg for admiration.
“Well, ready to do some trespassing?” she said.
She then half nudged, half balanced the round point of one Converse foot into one aluminum triangle on the fence, and as soon as she was able to hook her foot, she slither-climbed over the metal curtain, causing it to rattle, rattle, rattle as she did so; after which she landed with a hard sounding thud on the other side of it. Once she re-poised herself, she gave me a steely little smug smile that just couldn’t wait for me to climb over.
I did, and not as swiftly as her, and when I hit the ground—damn! It was like hitting concrete! The reddish brownish clay earth felt like it was frozen—even petrified—a fact she managed to conceal. Thus the cause of her present little snicker.
It was about a half a mile to the hospital. The pane-less window’d tower was all that stood of a once great complex. Partial skeletal remains of one wing were still there on this tower’s right.
This tower looked pretty gutted; there was too much light coming from behind its rusted glass-less windows; openings that were still “institutional”, for a few of these door size rectangles had mesh like fencing covering them: a pattern and material just like the one we crawled over. But there was still enough hospital to electrify our imagination. Yes, electric as in electro-shock-treatment.
“Brrr,” the young artist said in a playful shivering sound. “Hospital give me a nice creepy fright.”
“Yeah, hospitals can get pretty creepy,” I said. “And what was more spooky, was this medical book my parents had.”
“Your—parents are doctors?” The Young Artist said.
With a little surprise.
I smiled.
“Yeah, doctor of the assembly line, and doctor of the secretarial pool. Nahh, this book was a sort of a health care companion. But for parents to identify any health problems in their kids. The only problem, was that this book was about seventy five years old. It had the most horrible diseases with the most horrible pictures.”
“Do you still have it?” The Young Artist asked.
“It seems like it should be in the back seat of the car,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s not. I don’t know how it got lost, but before it did, I saw some pretty gory stuff. Rotted, tree-trunk size legs; faces ulcer-eaten by syphilis.”
“That was a big children’s disease, huh?” she said.
“I don’t know, but the man in this big iron lung with his head sticking out, was the first cyborg.”
“Want to know how to find instant Gothic art?” The Young Artist asked. “Just look at old technology.”
“Or the photographs of isolated sick people,” I added, “like the one I always turned to, the picture of this naked skeletal girl.”
“AnorexiaÉ” she tiredly said. “And no Mom, I don’t have itÉ”
“But what was scary about her was the way a black bar had been painted across her eyes, so that she would look more like—a specimen.”
“Ee-uu. That is creepy,” she said.
“Yeah. There were other pictures: of every disease affliction except mine.”
She stopped walking.
I tried to smile as I explained: “After seeing those creepy pictures for about a zillion times, my extra sensitive imagination got the better of me, and I was soon convinced that there was something wrong with me—well, wouldn’t it make sense to feel like everybody had something wrong with them?”
She laughed.
“Yeah, funny,” I said, “but at the time, I already had nightmares because I couldn’t figure out what my disease was and if it was one that that book would know how to cure.”
She now made a mock frown, and then a slight smerk: sympathy for my childhood distress, but also gentle upbraiding for letting something unnecessarily haunt me. Well, of course. All of our fears and terrors are just part of our imagination. She soon sensed my cynical displeasure, and as a way of apology, lightly took my hand and tried explain:
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay,” I said as I started walking. “And I don’t need to take your hand. I’m not five years old.”
“Oh—well, excuse me,” she said. “But I’ve been pretty traumatized too. My time as a volunteer in a hospital was pretty weird.”
I laughed.
“You mean you were a Candy Striper?”
“When I did it, and where I did it,” she said with teeth that barely opened, “we did not have to wear no striped uniform, or pass out flowers. We were allowed to be more sophisticated—put together patient charts—even put together confidential stuff on the computers—though we weren’t supposed to.”
I shook my head.
“That hospital was breaking labor laws,” I said.
“We were still restricted,” she said, trying to defend the hospital, as well as herself. “There were a lot of things I was not supposed to do or see, and somehow I had gotten hold of this file I should not have seen.”
“Was I in it?” I joked.
“I don’t think so,” she sharply said. “This file was for a patient in the burn unit ward; a girl my age, and she had burns that were over most—“
She stopped without saying the rest.
I gently touched her arm.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Thanks—and it’s alright,” she said, moving away.
“Though once I saw those pictures—call me a coward—but I quit,” she said. “But if I was afraid, it was more of the hospital. I know it was there to do good—but sooner or later all that sickness it was supposed to cure and all that death it never could—was going to have an effect on the institution itself. They had to. Just look at the shell you see before us.”
“It’s not just like that with hospitals,” I sighed.
She shook her head.
“I soon figured that out,” she said. “No thank you—I don’t want to be too involved with any institution. I like ‘em best when they’re like—this.”
And “this” was in a lousy and sad state. We were about fifteen feet away from what had once been the main wing of the hospital. What looked like a tower in the distance, in the foreground showed a crumbling grand half circle of brick steps leading to its entrance way. Where there had once been three or four tall arched doors, was now a wobbled piece of a riveted over aluminum panel. It had been spray painted so many times that it looked like it had been splashed with tomato, alphabet, and pea soup. Above one of the arches was a carved in stone inscription: “Mercy for thos—“ and that is all there was. The rest had been hammered, shot at, or weathered off. My poet’s sense about loss or broken words kicked in, and it led me to inspect the doors. I was right. On a nearby ground level block of stone, were the numbers, 1957. That was not yesterday, but neither was it ancient history. Yet probably three quarters of this building was already gone, and what remained looked like a relic from some medieval or Roman landscape. After another blink—this one triggering off the imagination—I could picture a graduation class of student nurses posing for a group portrait on those steps: young woman barely out of their teens, and in spite of their starched white de-sexualized uniforms and caps, still managing to smile like kids who have just graduated and were about to celebrate that in twenty minutes or as soon as they could rip off their oppressive clothes and get into something loose and comfortable and party-able—whoo!
In less than a blink, that graduating class was gone.
I now became aware of the rich, lush, rubber-coated like ivy creeping over much of this hospital’s butter colored brick. Also, there was a concrete trench that lined the front of the building. This stone ditch was once probably used for maintenance purposes. It was now partially flooded with gasoline-colored stagnating muck, and it was clogged up with some of the guts that was once inside this hospital: metal trays, gurney frames, a twisting large spoke wheel, a bed spring that was almost folded in half. There were bricked up windows above this trench and like the doors, they were tall and arched and must have allowed a lot of refreshing light into this building when these portals were filled with glass. The windows up above, however, were less inviting. No need to brick them up. The heavy diamond patterned cable fencing did just fine. I then felt a tug at the hem of my t-shirt. I turned to see The Young Artist. She was pointing at the several stories above where a dozen or more rusted glassless window frames curved with the tower’s semi-cylindrical U-shape. Some of these windows still had aluminum shudders attached to them, and there was an odd kind of beauty in the way some of these rusted rectangles peeled out like shredded wall paper. For at least one or two stories, you could see into the windows themselves: enough to see how the ceiling had small tufts of debris hanging from it. There was something liberating about the way this part of the building had deteriorated: the windows that had for so long locked the illness in, were finally forced open and forced to admit freshness, beauty, life.
Ah, but it had been too late. For how many had already died behind these windows.
“Come on,” The Young Artist said. “Medical waste, remember? You need some too; for your book.”
“Right,” I said, remembering, “rightÉ”
We started to walk towards what we figured to be the rear of this hospital: or some place where there would an opening for us to get inside.
The walk there took longer than expected. This tower seemed wider than it looked from the road. The ground was also hard and uneven: you would not know that it was practically summer in a dying New England factory town.
“The Berlin Wall,” the Young Artist muttered as we walked along. At this point, we accepted this tower as just that: a wall we were never going to get across.
“I knowÉ” I said. “But which side are we on?”
“I think it’s the same on either side,” she said.
“That sucks,” I said.
“You got some spray paint?” she asked. “In your car?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’d rather see if there’s a way to get into this place before going back to the car.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “You would need more than one can for what I have in mind. A giant H-bomb cloud going all the way up.”
“And floating on top of it,” I said, “a suburban family having a barbecue.”
Well, I not only got some ideas for a future poem, but also a valuable insight on what fuels the American Dream.
That was one way to look at it. Now that we came to what seemed like the rear of the hospital, we might discover another source of its fuel; along with finding some medical waste—and was medical waste part of its fuel? In order to find it, we still had to cross a landscape that seemed more like a petrified battlefield. First, we were stopped by pockets of small valleys; that seem to have been pock marked with artillery fire. At the back of the tower, most of it was ripped away; what seemed to be the result of a bombing raid. The tower’s upper stories had only concrete and wires for floors. As I looked away from the ruined tower, I thought I saw a similar ruin a half mile away. No, not a tower, but giant, twisted steel and concrete pillars. They seemed like supports for an elevated highway. If so, the highway never went beyond its skeletal foundation. Whatever its intended design, this abandoned industrial project now looked like the bones of extra terrestrial dinosaurs—or the legs of invading space pods in H.G. Wells’ novel, “The War of the Worlds.” (Well, at least that’s what they looked like in the movie version. But I am going to read the book.) To get to the closest killer pod would mean negotiating yards and yards of a frozen shell hole like earth—I don’t know.
“Fuck it,” said The Young Artist. “I say we skip the twisted chess pieces and try what’s left of the hospital.”
“Chess pieces, ha?” I said. “But there’s no King—Queen—Bish—they’re all just fractured pawns.”
“And no one big enough to play with them. Come on.”
Back to exactly where? The inside of this shell that had once been a hospital, seemed filled with dust, metal shavings, corroded steel; whatever it was, it made me start coughing. What had once been a hospital, was now a large train station where there is a big flimsy canopy overhead so that fresh air comes at you from two or more sides, only here the air was dirty and bitter tasting, as if it had been flavored with turpentine that had been sitting at a bottom of a can for about ten years—pah! As I tried to spit! Which only made me feel like I licked my tongue against a puff of tiny metal particles or shavings.
Further entrance was hindered by ripped out hunks of the building itself: twisted steel, concrete, fallen piping, along with bent, crushed or gnarled, hospital furnishings. I couldn’t go any further; allergic reaction aside, not to mention that I was a little scared. How embarrassing when The Young Artist just walked right in and quickly negotiated any hunk of debris or tetanus piece of shrapnel with ease. After seeing her do it, I had to follow, even if it meant covering my mouth and nearly stumbling after every other step. It was not a matter of being a man here—there were still some things men could do, like sleep in the back of a ten year old car and be ready to give everybody who was broke, bitter, bummed out, or bombed out, a ride to wherever their next destination was. No, what got me to follow, was the courage of a young artist; for this was where the fresh voices and visionaries now went: into the abyss and in the hope of finding some poison or waste because so much of the life that was between the pages of The New Yorker magazine and the pale white aspirin walls of the suburban shopping malls was one big deep freeze or the pale gray burned out light bulb of death. Excuse us for not exploring the unknown in some grant funded art project that will let philistines pretend they are anarchists. Only in the wreckage, and especially the wreckage of what was once the bright, hopeful, past, might there be some soil, clay, imagery, and perspective from which to create—
Might there?
Such possibility seemed temporarily suspended with the rusted, mangled, metal crib that was now in our path.
But it was a “hospital” crib. There were still flecks of pale white on the bars; paint that had been chipped off byÉ
How many generations of toddlers spent their first or maybe their last days in this crib? That seemed so much like the extension of this institution—the same way the hospital gurneys, wheelchairs, and invalids beds did. So even the children themselves probably began to feel like they like needed to be contained, observed, controlled. Well, if I did not want to say healed—it was better than what I had to say instead: defeated. Because that is how everything ended in this hospital; even the hospital itself, as The Young Artist noted.
But the hospital was not enough.
Disease and death needed to have this steel crib.
We slowly walked up to it; afraid we might disturb the sickly infant sleeping within? Ah, that infant had not slept here for a long time. What lay here instead: plaster-like chunks, a brick, an empty dried out beer bottle. Buried in this sediment, a decaying plastic pale blue bag that for a moment, looked like it might have been part of the infant’s pajamas or gown. I stepped back.
“What’s wrong?” The Young Artist asked.
“I don’t know,” I tried to explain. “For a moment that blue piece of plastic –I thought might be a dress—and then I started thinking that there was a baby there.”
The Young Artist turned away. She touched the top flat bar, then ran her finger across one side of the crib, and softly said:
“It seems like an awful place for a baby to still be.”
The more I stood before this mangled up piece of innocence, the more I began to see it as a skeleton of a small coffin. How much longer before I saw a pair of small ghostly hands grab the flat bar of the crib? Small, ghostly, gray eyes, looking out over it; arms that wanted arms that were still flesh and blood to pick them up?
I quickly turned away.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” I said.
She softly laughed, but there was sympathy in her laugh.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asked. There was no cruel or humiliating intent in her question.
“YeahÉ” I said, turning around. But more angry, and sadÉ”To be born into this place only to die in it a few days or weeks laterÉ”
“RelaxÉ” she firmly said. “You’re the anarchist. Shouldn’t you be glad to see an institution in ruins?”
“Yeah, but while it functioned, the arrogance.”
“It wasn’t always arrogance. Maybe there was also some good.”
“Naw, it was arrogance. Come on.”
“You’re afraid,” she said, “and it’s okay to beÉ”
Naw, it’s—arrogance, I wanted to say, but instead, I just started crying. I just—fuck! Oh, not that much. And nothing an artistic sensitive guy like me should feel bad about—hell, she even smiled, as if she thought it was sweet. But I was still a “guy” and she was not my sweetheart for her to see me like this (or something stupid like that). But it was more than just male vanity that got me to stop crying. It was an anger I now felt for this damn place. This hospital had a more complicit if not direct hand in the death or isolation of the infants in this crib. Why? Because this hospital was also an institution, with a capital I: which may not seem like a very good reason to get upset, and now pick up a hunk of concrete or rubble. But fuck, I was an anarchist and I just hated institutions and in any book that I write they are responsible for any damage or destruction caused to the human spirit, so there!
“Hey!” the Young Artist cried out as I winged the rock high above my head and into the emptied out guts of this hospital.
A moment after I did, there was muffled, “Ka-chunk, ka-chunk!” from the rock after it landed.
Good. I hit something. Even if it was only a shell. Maybe next time I would have enough courage to take a shot when there was a window. Better yet, the office of a place that some insect-like creature of authority issued seemingly harmless sounding memos—memos cutting the financial aid of a college student getting no support.
“Should I—um—be scared of you?” The Young Artist said. I was glad to see that she was more angry than sad, for I was embarrassed. Not about the crying. That was nothing; it was long overdue for everybody. A little crying for losses and tragedies that are not just personal, could maybe help us understand people who are in a terrible situation.
But suddenly getting nutty by picking up and throwing a rock? Well, that could be healthy too, just let the person you are with, know what you are about to do.
“I’m sorry, I just felt pissed at this great big—you know É.it’s great and big and it can do everything, just like God.”
“Yeah, well, let me know when you are able to hit God in the face with a rock.”
“Yeah, wellÉI’m gonna tryÉ” I said back.
“You’re still taking me to that church that looks like Notre Dame,” she warned. “And you’re not throwing any rock at it!”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I like that church. That’s where Quasimodo lived. He was like an anarchist you know.”
“I know. I saw the cartoon,” she said. “But did you see this?”
She went up to the crib. On the front bars of the crib was a bent metal frame the size of a post card. She gently brushed her fingers across it.. The frame—which was now empty—once held a card with the name and date of the infant who lay within.
“There used to be names in here, babies’ names,” she said. “So places like this aren’t all bad. Think of the parents—knowing their baby was in the hospital. Or maybe there weren’t any parentsÉand all this baby had, was this hospital.”
And after I did, I felt so tired—almost exhausted.
“Well, that’s why there’s artists,” she said.
I looked up at her and laughed.
“A lot of people think we’re just losers and dreamers and don’t want to get a real job,” she continued. “But it’s the artists who will take things like this—“
She pulled on the name plate, and gave it a quick hard yank, snapping it off.
“Things that seem to have no value,” she said, as she held the name plate before her.
“But we know that’s not true. We know that there were once a lot of names inside of this frame, and that some of those names never lived beyond this hunk of rust.”
She turned the metal frame and started to examine it forÉnames? Dates? A face?
And then she gently put it in her bag.
“Come on, I have what I need,” she said.
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Not here,” she said.
What about the waste? I wanted to ask. The medical waste that we came here for? I felt glad that she chose this name plate to incorporate into her work of art—also felt—surprised—at the way she showed a sense of compassion, even mercy. I was a bit shocked—even scared—when she announced that she was ready to leave without a glob of poisonous waste! For I had become accommodated to the waste. We all have—we, meaning the semi permanent refugees like myself; we like the writers and artists I was about to join in New York. At one time or another, we all handled poisons. Some of us went further and took as much poison as we could, just for the sheer pleasure. Not me, well not much. I still sought and admired what was wasted, decayed, disturbed. For me, those quests were not much better than the other philosophical positions; I also should add such as muted bitterness, gloating irony. I loved Warhol. But I was drawn to the gray, grimy, ashy industrial scrape paint, and who knows what other toxic substances used by the modern German painter Anselm Kiefer. I have seen no more than six of his massive paintings, but each time I did, I felt as if I were looking into the soul of the world that I was both attracted to and repulsed by.
And now this rusted name plate that could never be enough to fit even the name of one dead infant. There is no personal remembrance for a death like this. The death of a life that—oh! When it was alive, one fleeting touch could have brought it so much life!
And the permanent loss of that life touching you can bring you the greatest painÉ
Show us more, Young Artist, and show us in a way that will make everyone puzzle, admire, and complain about it.
After completing our first adventure, I could only conclude that our mission was accomplished. We had briefly come to the edge of the abyss and were able to come back with a scrap that had once been connected to a human being. Now, what I needed more than another adventure, was coffee. A big mug full of it. I needed some energy. I was already tapping into the old guk that has been clogging up my cells since I first became an addict—second semester freshman year at college. After I nearly flunked my first semester, I needed coffee the way frat boys needed beer. Of course there was a more disciplined approach to staying awake. I could have had a diet; no Dominoes Pizza every other night, along with other forms of self discipline. Naturally I chose the easier, corrupt approach. Also, the only corruption I had left to try was coffee. At least college left me with something else besides a taste for books that most people never read like Clarissa. Also one of the reasons why it is hard to take a job. Try reading at work—you won’t be there too long, unless you’re a substitute teacher, and only if you get an honors class with five students in it (dream on). Yet if you are cool about it you could smoke pot at work. Even if you get caught, there is still a possibility you could save yourself by pleading dysfunctionalism, and then going into a program or calling some hotline. There is no such program or understanding if you bring your art to the job. Get out, stay out, and you might as well drop out. With doing drugs, it shows that you are coping with a de-humanizing environment that you have not learned to give your mind and body to one hundred percent. (But with good counseling and a rehab program, you will). Come in with Friedrich Nietzsche on the job? Forget it. The idea of a job itself is too ludicrous to contemplate. Jobs are for machines. You’re a human being. And also a poet. You practically live out of your car—and in the next twenty four hours, on a futon or couch.
I wonder which direction she is going to go.
Well, if she could do without coffee, that’s not a bad idea. The java can also have a double edge; as another poet said at an open mic:
“Coffee is a drug that you take for your employer.”
That is why my job now has to be for poetry and reams of pages that are intentionally written by myself but are eventually scrawled over by everybody. But at least the coffee would be for me.
Fucking sky. Looks like the bottom of a smudged ashtray. No matter how much you scrape it, you are never going to get to the clear glass at the bottom. The only thing you can do is get a new ashtray. But when it is as big as the skyÉ
And it’s too big to break. But I am still not ready to give up being a cosmic delinquent and try.
And this old hospital, after it becomes smudged into this small panel of the horizon?
I closed my eyes—what I sometimes do when I try to see the future of something. No reason why, I just do it. But this time, I did not see anything. And when I opened my eyes a moment later, I saw—or thought I saw—a fleeting piece of white—a patient in a hospital gown—looking at me from one of the upper windows of that tower. You have to stay behind long enough so that two artists can write a poem about you or put your hospital bracelet in a painting. But you will still be nothing more than an abstraction of suffering and loss.
“Earth to space boy, come on! New York City is calling you!”
“What? New York?” I said as I began to swim my way out of a cotton ball mental fog.
The way The Young Artist now glared at me and crossed her arms, brought me back to the present, which snarled or winked back at me from my red Converse high top sneakers that were now on her feet.
“Well, you ready?” I said to her, as if I was the one who had been made to wait on account of her ephiphany-izing.
“Are you?” she sharply said back.
“Just be careful with those Converse, alright?” I said. “And remember where they came from.”
“Come to think of it, they fit rather nice,” she said, and then giggled.
Damn it, I thought, as I shook my head, and then started the car. They’re the cherry red colored ones—my favorite pair and the color that goes with everything black. Besides, they are the only style of foot wear that will let you get away with wearing red on your feet if you are a guy and still want to look to tough.
“Winking at yourself?” she said.
This was in wry response to the way I had just winked at myself in the rearview mirror.
“To let myself know how cool I am.”
“Oh, gimmie a fucking—“
“Now let’s go to the diner and eat some meat!”
“Not me.”
“Vegan vamp—“
“And don’t say ‘vegan vampire’” she said before I could finish saying it. “I get that all the time. From my friends; that, and how I sometimes like to smoke.”
By the time she said it, she already had a cigarette out and in her mouth. A moment later, she lit it with a plastic cigarette lighter.
“Just like you need coffee, I need cigarettes.”
Fortunately, we were now moving so that when she exhaled, the smoke was sucked right out of the window.
Pot smoke? It is harmless and sweet like baby’s breath.
Cigarettes? Poison from out of the factory smokestack.
“Funny about what you said before—how everybody needs one vice. I had a teacher who said that too,” she explained.
“Really? Your teacher told you that?”
“He was also a little psycho too, but—“
“And what was his vice? Did he ever say?”
“Yeah,” she said. After which she paused, shook her head, and then said: “Teaching.”
“Excellent!” I said. “Why couldn’t more teachers make their teaching their vice!”
The Young Artist stretched her arms behind her and declared:
“Art!”
“Art?”
“That’s going to be my vice!”
As in illegal? Narcotic? Criminal? Dangerous? I thought, and the only logical response I could come up with, was,
“Cool!”
If Art could become a vandal, why not a drug addict, a topless dancer, a porn star. Did that mean I was ready to take off my shirt and start dancing on top of a bar for money? Well, if somebody was going to pay me for it, (and considering how I had worked as a substitute teacher for which there was never enough compensation)É.Regardless of whether I ended up jobless or on a wanted poster for spray painting “No Sale” across a famous painting, I was now drawn to the further possibilities of Art. I doubt if I was going to take a crow bar and break into a museum in the near future, but did I even need to go the museum? Weren’t the two of us proving that there was art outside of the museum? Probably not great art, and maybe nothing more than an idea of art. From the literary angle, this delinquent direction was tapping into previous writers like Francois Villon and Jean Genet, but so what. This was how the two of us were spending our day: instead of going to work or school, we were driving around in search of material for our art, along with trying to discover an aesthetic, or a vision, that would enhance what we were trying to create. Were we going to get paid for this? Were we going to get graded for this? Well, could you afford to pay us for what we were now doing and discovering? The answer is no, and for the simple reason that we stole this morning for ourselves. We were artists, and artists need to do things like periodically drive around for what seems to be no purpose and to make periodic stops at places that seem to have no reason to be studied, much less visited, so there! Sure, a grant for this would help, but that is going to take time; from filling out all the paper work, to buying stamps to fit on the envelope; so in the meantime, you could help out artists like us by giving us some money for gas. Honestly, gas money is all you need, (that and money for coffee and a few other things.) The rest—we should be able to steal. We’d better be able to steal. If we can’t, then we’re not artists.
Well, we still needed to eat. Or at least I did. She seemed content to be smoking her cigarette. She was drawn to cigarettes the way I was to coffee: it was a religious and mystical experience. Okay, let her have her epiphany, her thoughts, or whatever private cigarette moment she was wrapped in as she ostensibly looked out the window and was more focused on some meditation within. We were almost at the diner now any way. We were back on a semi-main drag and one that had already been slowly dying—for the past twenty years and would have died were it not for the stores that still pumped some neon blood into this street with signs that said: “Checks Cashed” and “24-hour bail Bondsman.” A few other servicing establishments kept this street as alive as well, such as a Laundromat that was overseered by a small corps of refrigerator thick, kerchief headed Slavic women. Sometimes they folded clothes but most of the time (as they did now) they sat in fold out lounge chairs in front of the mat, and gabbed away in some language from the Steppes and peppered with woeful prophecy. Next to the laundry, was a smoke shop, an institution that had just about vanished: the only thing keeping this one going was a paneled off area in back that sold pornographic magazines, books, videos, and sex toys. The sign noted how you had to be 21 years old to enter and how there was a “15 minute time limit! No exceptions!” Yes, I went in, but only once: it was some pretty depressing pornography. The woman had fifties semi bee hive hair dos, or sixties mod go go boots and slimy silver G-string like space outfits. If I sometimes stopped in this store, it was for the ambience it evoked from a dying era for which there were few people left living to remember. The sign above the counter said “Sundries, notions, and novelties” and it was your guess what was a sundry, what was a notion, and what was a novelty. From my last stop in to buy one of the New York City tabloids (if nothing else for the ‘poetry’ of their headlines) the sundries were the pipe cleaners, rabbits foot key chains, and pipes named after a “Dr Grabow”; the notions were flashlight tipped pens, and elastic girdle like belts that let you strengthen and slim down your “tummy” muscles while sitting down at work, (and as the advertisement showed it, before an old manual typewriter). And the novelties were the hula skirted girl bobble head dolls, and the Virgin Mary shaped nite lights. I also had another reason for sometimes going to this smoke shop; the “bus station” was right next door. It was in a sliver of space next door to the shop, a space large enough to hold four, fixed, plastic seats; two chrome cylinder ash trays, and a wall that featured posters that no United States based Greyhound bus could ever get to, like “Krakovia Poland” and “San Juan, Puerto Rico.” The most interesting feature about this small station, was “the passenger”. She was an old, dowager-like woman (always wearing the same ratty once elegant fur coat, tarnished bracelets, and other pieces of jewelry that seemed to get bigger around her shrinking limbs). Ever since I had taken the bus, she was always in that little station. One day I finally asked her: “Did you just get off the bus?” to which she replied: “I got off the bus fifty years ago.”
And was she still there today?
“What are you looking for?” The Young Artist said. “The diner is on this corner.”
“Yeah, it is.”
But the old passenger was not sitting in the bus station.
The diner was still in an alley squeezed between two buildings. One building was an old bank whose stone corners were fluted and had the carved in reliefs of eagles with raised wings. The other building was a sandstone colored, stucco-textured apartment complex, a place that is not quite a single room only, but the last stop for transients, recovering addicts, and other live failures before becoming homeless.
The chrome steel ribbon with glass rectangles was squeezed into a space slightly smaller than one lane of a highway. Thus, also the reason why I always made a squinchy look when I pulled in to park in a lane that could take a vehicle entering or exiting in only one direction. On top of this silver diner was a metal flag pole and an oval shaped sign that had the red lettered words, “Diner”. It reminded me of the name tags sewn above the right side pockets of the shirts worn by gas station attendants.
After negotiating a lot of mini turns and then stops (with a lot of short pulls and stops in between; don’t drive to this diner when you’re drunk) I was finally able to park.
The diner itself looked like some elegant piece of silverware—a fancy fluted butter knife mounted on a slab of petrified rotting butter; after an old Pullman dining car was towed to this ally, it was hoisted on a concrete wedge that was fraught with hundreds of veins and fractures. Attached to the rear of the diner like a small caboose, was a red shack. Its screen door and windows were always open. Riffs of steam always wafted out from the mesh or through the tin pipe on top: the vapors from suds, grease, dead spirit. This small parcel of limbo was where the dishwasher slaved away: a figure that was always a stopped over; a shadow behind a gray window screen, regardless of what time of day or night it was.
The Young Artist was admiring this rare and dying piece of American architecture. I was glad to see that she was keen to our ugly originals: I’d like to see an alley like this in Paris. I don’t think so!
She paused at the old Pac Man game in the diner entrance way. It looked like one of the first damn video games ever to come out; where the pie mouthed circles moved across the screen like a marble being drawn through a pan thick with gravy. I was not just being poetical—I was hungry!
“Alright!” she playfully said back! “We’ll get your cup of coffee! But I have to play one game on the way out. This has gotta be one of the last operating Pac Man machines in the world.”
Which did not enter once you stepped into this diner proper. Oh, the last time the world came in to spruce things up a bit was probably nineteen seventy. That was what the era of this diner evoked in its chrome rimmed linoleum topped counter, lined with green swivel stools. Across from the counter were several mint green vinyl booths. Between the two, large bench-like seats was a chrome rimmed Formica-topped table. Best of all, each booth table had its own bubble-topped miniature juke box with about two dozen 45 rpm singles. Each song cost a quarter to play. From the way the Young Artist slid towards the machine while happily whispering: “Yes!” this cup of coffee was going to be fun.
We had claimed the middle booth. All the booths were empty except for the one at the end, towards the rest rooms. In it sat an old man with a knit stocking cap on his head . His pale face was covered with grizzly white stubble; his hands were slightly raised but folded before him: the fingers slowly gneading or wiggling in on each other. There was neither food nor silverware before him. His face was locked in profile and a stare that fixed itself at what seemed some old memory , now playing on the screen that had become this diner window. The two or three men sitting at the counter, seemed to be in a similar frozen state, although not enough to fail at noticing the oddly gothic beauty that just walked in. It was seldom that beauty in a more conventional wardrobe stepped inside. This was the first time that beauty dressed for a funeral, made its appearance.
The notion of time itself seemed to be loose, if non existent. Diners can have this strange sense of “non” or “off-time” about them. Breakfast can be five o clock in the evening—and a strong black cup of coffee—well, that could be anytime, which is what I liked about this diner.
For that matter, the “shadows” at the counter: the frizzy-haired Greek tooth pick chewing owner leaning with one hand behind the register, the pear shaped waitress half slumped against the large glass door of a cooler displaying bowls of rice pudding (best thing to go with black coffee), also seemed to be living in “diner time.” Or do you become lost in such a world? For this diner, it long ago derailed from the main engine that pulls most of us along. No, I was not trying to find a way to live in another dimension (which I tried: it is called LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. It did not work too well when the WALK/DON’T WALK traffic light turned into an angry blinking eye that froze the hell out of me for the next hour). But could I find a more healthier and saner way to leave the main engine? Was there a way to secede from a culture that was always coming up with a better way to re-package an idea or product that is made for a coffin? In spite of all the sophistication, wiring, and circuitry, I still had to be convinced that something of IMPORTANCE was moving through such a system. Say what you will about the diner; it may just be a lost, sad, hopeless, and pathetic world, but at least it serves great coffee and rice pudding.
“That’s it? That’s what you’re going to eat?” The Young Artist said in surprise after I gave the waitress my order.
“Honey, I’ve never known him to order anything else, and I’ve tried,” the waitress said.
Ugh, I thought as I momentarily dipped my head in embarrassment. Why? I then asked myself. It was just a waitress at the diner. I didn’t even know her name; the only time she spoke to me: if I ever wanted anything else besides rice pudding and coffee. If she was wearing a name tag, I never noticed it. Once again though, I sneaked a peak at her hands. I always did whenever she began to write down my order. I started doing it when I had first came to this diner—heck, I was just a kid! My old man would sometimes bring me here after work. I was so small, barely ale to sit in the booth; small enough to forget about—and also small enough to get away at impolitely staring at things, which for one, were these waitress’s hands. Ever since, I always looked at them; one of those things I could not shake from when I was a “kid.” And now, her hands were gnarled. Her fingers were so twisted that her pen almost pointed at the person whose order she was taking.
“I’ll have the same,” I heard The Young Artist say. They had been talking for a minute or two; maybe even laughing.
After the waitress left, The Young Artist slightly frowned at me.
“Rude,” she said to me.
“I—I—nevermind,” I finally said. The Young Artist mockingly smiled at me and said:
“You’re right. Never mind.”
What the fuck, I thought. I’ve been coming to this diner all these years, and this nineteen or twenty year old woman who I only met this morning, practically has a heart-to-heart talk with my diner waitress. If that ain’t a pisser.
“Neat,” she said. She had just picked up the paper place mat. She seemed to enjoy what was on it too.
I picked up my placement and looked at it.
“You’re right,” I said.
The place mat had a “fill in your own adventure” designed on it. Supposedly, little kids would have something to do while waiting for their food.
“See if you can answer all of Mrs. Maple’s quiz questions,” The Young Artist read from the placemat. “Answer all ten correctly and win a free dessert! Come on! We can get our rice pudding for free!”
“Aw, you don’t think they’re actually going to give us a free dessert, do you?”
“I don’t care—I want to play.”
“Here?” I asked, and then looked over my shoulder.
“What’s wrong with here? This is where you brought me—and you better play with me—“
“Wha—?” I started to say.
“You’ve been a real brat!”
“What!”
“And whoever finishes last has to pay for the other’s coffee and rice pudding!”
“The hell!” I said as I now put down the place mat and went to pick up—
“Damn it!” I said. “No pen!”
She giggled. She had one.
“Well, no fair!” I said. “If I don’t have a pen, I don’t have to buy you the rice pudd—“
She put up a finger for me to stop, then dug into her bag. She then gave me a—
“What? A crayon?” I said. A cherry red one too.
“I ain’t playing with no crayon!”
“I’ve already got number one,” she said.
“Goddam—“ I started to swear, but then stopped; knowing that I had the crayon in my hand made me self conscious of little kids being around; crayons always seemed to come before little kids; when this was the last place in the world to have little kids except maybe, her. She smiled and giggled and nodded her head when she came up with an answer for a riddle on the place mat. You would think that she was a precocious fourth or fifth grade brat who was always showing off how smart she was. Once she did, she would enquire about your progress, only to finish you off by saying something even more obnoxious and precious like: “Oh, do you need more time? Do you have special needs?” Well, I was not exactly a troglodyte, and I worked enough boring jobs for which I needed a lot of mental escape. And so when question #1 asked: “The planet earth has one satellite. What is it?” I knew right away that the answer was “The Pentagon,” because –trick question! There are a lot of satellites up there spying on us and the only place that could assemble them all together is The Pentagon, so there!
—Um, not quite; I think that placemat company meant “the moon”, but I was already preparing my creative answers ahead of time. And what the hell. I should get some nice steam blowing through the ears of the young woman who probably won every spelling bee in grammar school. But riddle number four or five was going to be next to impossible to answer; (what is the speed of light—hell, less than a few seconds if your light switch was working, but I don’t think that was the answer). Well, you had to have some tough questions, or else how were you going to keep the kids occupied until the food arrived and the grown ups from committing infanticide? That is why I sped ahead to number seven: she was already on eight or nine. From the way she now cutely bit her lower lip in as she paused over the problem. She had to be towards the end—where the harder questions were—but she would not be there for long. This kid most likely was a whiz at the college entrance tests like the SATS (and in spite of her being an Art major). She knew that you don’t spend too long on a hard question: you take an educated guess at it, and then go back to it, which she already seemed to be doing as she started penciling in an answer—yikes! Better get back to question number seven—or was it eight?
What city and year was the Declaration of Independence written in? You gotta be kidding me! Who the hell outside of a history professor is going to know the answer to a question like that? So to be safe, I’ll put down, ‘Fourth of July,’ and then ‘Washington DC’ because that’s where the government is, and the government wrote the Declaration of Independence—not the people. That’s the problem—ah ha! Thought you could trick me on question number ten: what is the oldest city in North America? Well, that’s simple, St. Augustine Florida. Why? Because that is one of the things that I remember learning from St. Augustine Grammar school before I got kicked out, and also it makes sense that it would be in Florida, because it is the retirement capital of North America.
Smack! As The Artist slapped the pencil down on the table and announced like a happy little brat:
“Finished!”
Smack! As I slapped down my crayon and um, uh—rather awkwardly announced:
“FinishedÉ”
“Did you break my crayon?”
“Well, you could glue it back togetherÉ”
She indignantly raised an index finger.
“Just remember, you’re paying for my rice pudding and coffee.”
“Oh yeah? Well you could be buying the rice pudding and coffee for me!”
She smirked and then said: “I doubt it!”
“Okay, what did you get for number one!”
“Duhhh! If you did not get ‘the moon’ then you’ve been smoking too much of that green stuff!”
“Well, have I got some new information for you!”
She slowly started to shake her head.
“I knew itÉa nice guy, but a real pot headÉ”
“Alright, let’s cut to the chase! Number ten! What did you get for number ten? Don’t shake your head at me like I’m some idiot! I want to know what the oldest city in North America is!”
“Alright, if you must know then it is Jamestown, Virginia!”
I smiled. Within the time it took me to do so, her haughty look started to melt into near tearful panic.
“’Fraid not,” I said, “it’s St. Augustine, Florida.”
“What do you mean? What are you talking about? It’s Jamestown where there was a lost colony—some think that they all died because of a bad winter crop. Others think that they might have joined up with one of the local native American tribes!”
I shook my head and smiled.
“’Fraid not,” I said as the waitress brought over our rice puddings along with an aluminum pot of coffee.
“Right?” I asked her.
“Depends what it is,” she said. “Not if it means picking men as husbands. I’ve always been wrong at that.”
“But about St. Augustine Florida being the oldest city in America?”
The waitress made a slight frown and spread her hands apart and said:
“It’s one of the few things I remember learning from St. Augustine Grammar School.”
I took me almost a minute to say the next two words:
“Hol-e-e-e-e shitÉÉ”
During which I failed to blink.
“Are you alright?” I heard The Young Artist finally say, (the same time I felt her tug my shoulder.)
“I can pay for my rice pudding,” she said.
“No, that’s okay. I can pay. Up until yesterday, I had a job.”
“Well then do you have a quarter? I want to play something on the juke box.”
“She must be about seventy,” I said as I dug into my pocket.
“Who?” she said as she began inspecting the selections on the jukebox.
I slapped down some change on the table.
“Damn, that’s like a cosmic coincidence,” I said.
“A what?” she asked as she continued to inspect the song titles on the juke box.
“Ahhh, but the coffee’s here,” I warmly noted.
I poured her a cup and then one for myself and then took a sip. A few seconds later the wattage went up behind my eyes.
“If only I could have had coffee in the first grade,” I delightfully imagined. “I would have written a lot more than ‘see Dick run.’”
“I can’t believe these songs,” she happily remarked.
I scooted down to the edge of the booth where the juke box was. I soon dragged my coffee and rice pudding. We were probably going to be here awhile. Her rice pudding and coffee were already at that end.
Looking through the song titles on this toaster oven size juke box was also one of the delights of this diner. These booth table jukeboxes were like museums for old songs, some which I had not heard for years, like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and some that I had not heard of at all, like “Little Shirley Beans”—no artist listed. There was just so much copy to choose from, as well as so many classics, but nothing classic from our era. No, REM, no Nirvana, no Public Enemy, Tupac, or even Madonna (Thank God for the latter). The latest song on this juke box was produced from the eighties—but from a singer from another era—Frank Sinatra’s “New York New York.”
“Look—your song,” The Young Artist pointed.
“Um, I don’t mean to be critical, but if you want to hear the real Frank Sinatra, you’ve got to go back a couple of decades before he sang this tune,” I said.
“Well, it’s that way for Elvis,” she said. “How often do you think of him singing a song called, ‘That’s Alright Mama’?”
It was not one of his Vegas tunes, I knew that much. And from what I know about Elvis, Vegas and those bad movies is what really killed him; the drugs, yeah, but an artist has to fear two deaths: the physical, like everyone else, and what he or she hopes is never the spiritual death. Oh, I don’t want to be elitist here; maybe others fear the same kind of death, but for me at least, unpublished writer that I am—I don’t ever want to be a sell out. If I have to die on a couch or a futon I am trying to get to, but as an unknown artist, well, at least let me be an artist who did not sell out; an artist who may not have been brilliant like Jacqueline Susann or profound like Kahil Gibran, but what the hell, I’ll be an artist who did not sell out in order to become a professor of creative writing at a university whose education hardly lives up to the school’s reputation. Elvis may have had a slow death after his move to the movies and Vegas, but hell, give him credit for finishing up as a well-paid but clownish Vegas act: he did not take the easy way out by—I don’t know—the equivalent of Elvis selling out as a creative writing professor would be as a permanent game show contestant or a late nite info-mercial host. If I ever do make it—which means I will have to take a fall (this is America—it loves to shoot its artists) well then, let me end my days as—let’s see, my equivalent of a slow dying Vegas act would be—writing for a sleazy, shameless, piss-yellow scandal-creating tabloid. For no other reason than to end my days as a low life, literary papparrazi, is why I hope to become famous.
Until then, well, there is so much great music to listen to! Hell, when you have great music to listen to, do you really need much of anything else? (A-hem, black coffee and rice pudding). Okay, but along with all that, along with a feisty young artist to drink and dine with, the music seems mighty fine, and this little table top juke box seemed to have the masterpieces of early Pop music. Paul Anka—“We Sing in the Sunshine.” The Ronettes: “Be my Baby”; there was even “Danke Schoen” by Wayne Newton—recorded when he was something like fifteen and sounded more like a girl. And of course, Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra, (you can never have enough of Sinatra) and also Nat King Cole. You can never have enough of him, either
“Wait a minute—wait a minute—“ I excitedly started to say as I made an important discovery.
“Excuse me,” The Young Artist said with some irritation. “But I have some choices to make too!”
“Yeah, I heard you,” I said, grunting.
“The Beatles,” she said.
“Ugh,” I said.
She put down her coffee cup, plunked her spoon into her half finished bowl of rice pudding and said:
“What’s wrong with The Beatles?”
“Nothing,” I said. I began to play with my half finished rice pudding by slowing stirring my spoon in it.
“But, ‘Please, Please Me,’?” I said; for that was the selection on this juke box. “ ‘Last night I said these words to my girl,’ “ I lamely sang.
“Oh-kayÉ” she said with patronizing patience. “How do you feel about, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by The Rolling Stones?”
“That’s on here? That’s one of my favorite songs!”
She smirked and then said:
“I figured it would.”
“Okay, you’re so smart,” I said, “let’s see if you can guess what the greatest love song is, because this machine has it!”
She was about to speak, but then stopped. The greatest love song? That’s not easy, but there is the all time great love song just the same, and this machine had it.
“Um—‘Something’ by The Beatles,” she quickly said, her mind still on the Fab Four.
“Okay, not bad,” I said. “It’s one of the better love songs, and certainly George Harrison’s best.”
“Well, I was just warming up,” she quickly said. “But I know what it is—well, I know the artist. I’ll get the song in a moment, but the artist is Whitney Huston.”
“Ha?” as I tried to think, only coming up with ‘I’m Every Woman.’
“I mean, Roberta Flack.”
“You mean the song that the Fuggees did?”
“That’s up there too, but not the greatest—the greatest love song is by Billie Holiday!”
“Excuse me—maybe the greatest heart break song—but the greatest love song—of all time—is by Nat King Cole.”
“Natalie Cole?” she asked, if not hearing what I said.
“That’s his daughter,” I said.
“I knew that!” she quickly said.
“She sings some good stuff too,” I said. “Though I don’t know off hand—but her father—I don’t know much of his stuff either. But this one song he sings—watch.”
I took a quarter out of my pocket.
“Because when he sings it—“ I tried to explain. The Young Artist stirred her spoon into her still unfinished bowl of rice pudding, Then she pushed it aside, rested her chin on both hands, and looked directly at me. Go ahead and explain, she seemed to say, at what I now found so hard to explain.
“A-a-nd, as he says it, it’s going to be forever.”
She began to squint, not quite understanding me. But also thinking that I just might notÉ.know what the greatest love song was.
“I mean,” I said as I looked down, “love is going to be forever—when you finally fall in love with that—well, the title is, ‘When I Fall in Love.’
But as soon as he sings ‘It will be forever—‘”
I’ve never seen more cruelty in a smile Why not? The more I tried to explain, the more I embarrassed myself.
There was only one thing to do. Look right up at her and tell her why the greatest love song, was the greatest love song.
I plunked my spoon into my now finished bowl of rice pudding, moved it to the side, and said:
“Because when you fall in love,” I paused, struggling to suppress a smile of embarrassment, “it will be forever.”
And the last I spoke in almost a whisper.
“Watch,” I now whispered.
My hand with the quarter slowly moved to the juke box . I paused for a moment with the coin before the slot, and then I slipped it in. The quarter went in with a soft “Click” and then ended as a raspy sigh. I pushed the buttons corresponding to the selection, and as soon as I did, I withdrew my hands, folded them, looked down and to my left. The ten or so seconds it took for the song to begin playing, seemed to take about ten minutes; an eternity, when one minute made me feel sweaty, nervous, excited, embarrassed.
And then the song began, starting with the violins? Or what was a rich lush string section that would introduce Nat’s honey coated voice; that gentle, reassuring , “When I fall in loveÉit will be foreverÉ” And what made it even more sincere was that when the song put that reassurance in a “restless” world. Restless, ha? If that’s not an understatement; if that part of the song did not always leave the wax grooves and grab me. But when he then mentioned, “Moonlight’s kisses,” well, I tried not to, but I still softly laughed just the same; a laugh that never seemed embarrassing when I listened to that song by myself—which was when I stole a look up, and saw that The Young Artist had slightly turned her face. She was no longer looking at me, and even though she appeared to be looking out of the window, oh, she was looking at something rich and recently discovered within!
OhÉ.before she could discover anymore, and before I could see this discovery breathe across her cheeks, blossom another shade of color in her eyes, the strings returned the same theme they began the song with; only now, the theme had a delicate, dying, fade.
And then that awkward pause—during which confusion, panic, regret, delight? Set in as I thought about the song I just played—was it just part of our artistic journey together, did she think it was something more—did I? I liked her—but did I like her? I mean it was just a hazy border—or a border melting away, for when a guy sees a woman as being less of a comrade, an acquaintance, a friend, and more—
“I’ll be right back,” The Young Artist said as she swiftly got up. She must have sensed what was going on. Women have a smell for that kind of thing; better than men: or men just have a lousy time of concealing it, and I had better stop thinking about that stuff because she just giggled. And it turned out to be for another reason as well.
“Here,” she said as she dug into her bag. “You can play with my Bad Girl while I’m gone.”
“Your what?”
“My Bad Girl,” she said. She put a three or four inch tall plastic figure of a snarling, red-spike haired punk girl down on the table.
“A friend got her for me in London,” she explained. “Just be careful. Sometimes she takes out her safety pins from her cheeks and sticks them into the people who play too rough with her.”
My thumb and forefinger that held the figure, froze. A moment, and then my hand created a gentle pocket that would not “squeeze” the figure. The Young Artist smiled, made what sounded like a little snicker and then turned her head with enough of a sweep to bounce her long black hair, and then walked off to I presume the Ladies room. Her exit was grand, if not showing a little bit of triumph, for her walk was swift and proud enough to rustle her scarves. I now noticed a chartreuse silk scarf that she was adjusting, so that one side would be unequally long, and get more prominence when it rustled behind her. I smiled, and put down the snarling, plastic punk before me on the table and said to her in a low voice:
“What do you think?” I said.
“Grrr, grrr,” I said for the plastic punkette.
“Yeah, well, give it time,” I said to the piece of snarling plastic. Someday, you’ll discover a great singer like Nat King Cole and maybe a great writer like Hemingway. (In spite of the way you may have been “misled” about him in high school). Certainly, a great poet like Emily Dickinson. You have to discover Emily. I don’t know if you will discover these artists in a cheap diner with a jukebox, but with luck, you will discover a great diner, and the great juke box may not be in the great diner, but it is just as important that you discover a great juke box. Because it is important to hear the great songs; still the under appreciated, underrated great art form of today.
And one of the things that great songs do better than other art forms, is show us that painful but inevitable silence that must always come when the record stops playing. It was that É.silence that now spread like a blanket of ether in this diner . Life in this diner had come to a late afternoon pause. There was little if any movement: the frizzy haired Greek owner ringing up the register, the waitress swooping up an empty silverware tray, the spinning coin or two thrown by a customer up at the counter as a tip, came to a quick end. The diner was now emptied out of the last customer. The owner and the waitress had finished their duties and could now sink into their private epiphanies; re-knit a few fragments of thoughts; try to find a face that could be framed with a name. What would there be for us to take, when we left the diner?
“I’m back.”
The Young Artist was already half way sliding into the booth when she announced her return.
“Did Bad Girl treat you alright?”
I gently “tapped” my index finger on the plastic figure as if it were a vibrant, flickering flame.
“Bad Girl is hot!” I exclaimed.
“Well, you can’t have her,” the Young Artist said as she swooped the figure away. “Now are we going to that church?”
“After I go to the bathroom,” I said, getting up.
“Wait—what are you going to leave me?”
“All my G.I. Joes are at home,” I said. “They’re the only plastic dolls I have—unless you want to count a couple of plastic dinosaurs on my car’s dashboard.”
“Ut-uh,” she said. “You have to leave me something from what you have on you.”
“Ohhh, fuckÉ” I softly said. I began to dig through my pockets, coming up with only lint, small change: and what I hoped was half of a smoked joint.
She still gave me a look that was not going to let me by until I put something of mine down on the table. So I reached for the inevitable—my wallet, for which she frowned, yeah, boring. I know I can give you my license, my credit card, (well, I’m not giving you that—even though it has a—I’m not going to tell you how small the credit limit is.)
But ahhh, there is something that she would never expect. I took from the inner sleeve of my wallet a matchbook size, folded over piece of cardboard. On one side was a medieval-looking knight on a horse. The horse was kicking up its legs: the knight held a lance triumphantly thrust up. Beneath the horse’s kicking hooves was a semi-curled, belly up, body of a slain dragon.
On the other side of this card was a red cross and a bunch of Arabic lettering. As you folded over the card, there was a taped over, heart-shaped piece ofÉwell, I never found out exactly what it was; the Egyptian Copt who gave it to me, was never able to say what this tiny heart was made of.
“Here,” I said, handing her the card. “Be a little careful. There is this little taped up heart inside.”
“Ha?” the Young Artist said, and then laughed.
“Well, it’s not a real heart, but that is what it is supposed to represent.”
The Young Artist gently took the card, examined it, and then opened it up like a small book.
“The writing looks—Arabic—“ she started to say.
“I got it from this Egyptian Copt,” I said.
“They’re like the Christians there, right?”
“Yeah, but they also have this custom where the guys tattoo their hands so they can recognize each other, just like this particular guy had who was one of the slaves on the same temp crew I was on; some warehouse in the industrial gulag. And when I saw his tattoo, I thought, this guy must be in some kind of neat metal band.”
We both laughed.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what the guy thought about Marilyn Manson but the way so many Americans must ignore foreign people and immigrants. This guy told me his entire life story; how he was here working to send money back to his family and all that. When it came time to break for lunch, and all he had was a cucumber—I swear to God, a cucumber! Well, I bought him lunch.”
I pointed in playful warning and said:
“And you’re not paying for lunch; you hear?”
She quickly nodded, mockingly saluted, and then said:
“Yes sir, Mr. Man.”
“And so by way of thanks, he gave me this—I guess it’s a medallion and the guy on the horse is supposed to be St. George and that tiny lizard on the ground is supposed to be the dragon, and that copper-colored looking piece of smudge that looks like a squashed head of a kitchen match stick, is supposed to be a heart.”
“You have a nice way of putting it.”
“Yeah, wellÉI consider it to be good luck. I hardly ever take it out of my wallet, and with some of the people I knowÉ”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” she said. “and not that you might have forgotten, but I appreciate things like cathedrals, hint hint?”
“Yeah, I’m going to take you that church, but just remember, I’m paying for the lunch.”
“Then I’m paying for the dessert,” she said.
“Fine,” I said as I left for the bathroom and about half way there, I sensed her smiling at me. A glance behind showed that she was. What the hell would you expect from somebody who goes “frolicking?”
Still, something about that smile, and before I stepped into the men’s room, I took another look: she seemed to be expecting me, that is why the immediate reassuring nod and hand that waived me to “Go ahead, go ahead, I’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone.”
When I turned back around—
—I found myself briefly lost; in what seemed a fog. I soon discovered it was steam, coming from the little red dishwashing shack; a few seconds, a few puffs of vapor vanish, and that is when I see a fragment of a light bronze and oil black eyes—eyes that are much too rich for this dismal swampy atmosphere—eyes looking directly at me. Then “sizing” me up. Then accusing me. When my eyes popped with confusion, with some fear, his eyes darted down—had you been spying on us from this greasy purgatory? Or maybe it was envy, perhaps anger, or it was just taking in people who perhaps seldom made it to your shack.
The dishwasher turned on the industrial sink hose at full blast. He must have also aimed it a steel basin filled with soapsuds. Within a few seconds, he disappeared within a full cloud of steam. I gave the bathroom door a gentle kick. As I stepped inside the rest room, I tried not to think of what it must be like having no sense of escape.
Inside, I must have pissed up a river, or enough to wear down half of the white urinal puck, well, at least they keep this place clean. I checked for a condom machine—what the hell. There was a female back there waiting for me, and even though I probably had a few condoms in the carÉhellÉnothing was probably safe in my car. Most of all, I hoped that applied to my novel. I did feel guilty preparing for sex with a girl who seemed sweet and friendly and who I just met. But hey, that’s just the way guys are, and damn, there was no condom machine. Just the same. I made it a point to wash my hands. What the hell. If it was a bunch of guy friends out there waiting for me, no. But a smart young lady, definitely.
When I got to the table she was already standing. The table had been cleared off.
“Here’s your medallion,” she said, handing it back to me. “Thanks a lot.”
“No problem,” I said. I put it back in my wallet. “But where’s the check.”
“I already took care of it,” she said.
“Didn’t I say that I would?”
“And didn’t I say that I would pay for dessert?” she said. “Well, what did we just have? Or is it that you just weren’t listening to me.”
“Oh Christ,” I mumbled.
“What was that?” she said.
“Come on, we gotta find that church.”
I knew what she wanted; just the same, it seemed a bit embarrassing for an anarchist with a dark side, (or trying to get one) to go looking for a “church.” Well, you had to look for the positives. Being that this would be an old parish Catholic church it would have at least one or two grotesque saints, if not a life size crucifix with a life size mutilated Christ nailed to it. We might even luck out with some good paintings on the ceiling, or some bloody images in the stained glass windows. It was such images, paintings, and statues that kept me partially awake when I had to go to church. One statue that always spooked me but kept my eyes riveted on it was a saint with these tentacle like sores. Attached to him was this faithful barking dog. The saint held several round loaves of bread. Whoever this holy man was, he probably walked through the valley of death. Yeah, you may walk through the valley of death, but I would rather walk through that valley than go through the infectious jungles that wasted half of this saint’s body.
The most startling image though, was in a stained glass window. It was nearly lost in one of the big arched windows of this church. This particular window depicted a crucifixion image; however, the entire frame was splattered with a halo made out of Christ’s blood. There must have been hundreds of individual tear-shaped pieces of glass radiating around Christ’s body, and when by chance the sun blazed on some Sunday mornings when I was at mass, that stained glass window of blood became a bright red sun or blossoming petal. These purple pieces of glass seemed to absorb more light than its fragile material was capable of sustaining. That is why after a few minutes of such illumination, it seemed as if this flower was about to catch fire, or possibly explode. It did neither; it just continued to sustain brilliance that its weak surface did not seem capable of sustaining. And it only released this brilliance once its sun stopped giving it. The Young Artist wanted to see a small replica of Notre Dame, but ahhh, I was going to show her more.
But I would see if she would discover this window for herself. That all depended on the sun, and right now, it seemed to be hiding behind a veil of haze.
Was it a permanent veil, or perhaps just the aura of a half dead organism seeping through its rotted body? Main street and thereabouts—half dead, yes, but still forced to cling like a nursing home resident hooked up to the oxygen tank. That is what the afternoon sky here was like. (Sometimes you could even see the “oxygen” tank in the tea-kettle shaped, steel plated boilers or pipes on top of the nearby old factories.) The copper brick store fronts that lined the main drag were like a ward of wheelchair bound residents. These were businesses whose only sense of growth depended on this city’s decline. These small stores had few customers, and what customers they did have, were from the generation that grew up with these stores, and the last duties of these shops were to die with their customers. Stores like the one that sold yarn—the word itself made you open up your ears. It was a product and name that also seemed in danger of disappearing. Who knitted? The last time I saw a pair of knitting needles, they were used as a killer’s weapons in a re run of some film noir movie. Nearby was the smoke shop and it too was ready to disappear as a small town institution in the era of the convenience store. The smoke shop sort of served the purpose of a convenience store before there 7-lls—though minus a lot of “the sundries, notions, and novelties.” The smoke shop had a hundred times more tobacco and newspapers than your Seven Eleven (and a hundred times less food). The smoke shop also had another purpose that could not be replaced. Every smoke shop was a front for a bookie joint, and every smoke shop owner was a book maker. This everybody knew, and this was part of the social fabric of a factory town Main Street. That is why the cops never closed down the smoke shops. A few stores down from the smoke shop was the state run Off Track Betting parlor—a near fluorescent lit vacuum of a space filled with men in their fifties and up—gouty, barrel gutted men trying to palm read their futures in scratch sheets which detailed the players of the day’s race. Regardless of who few won, the day always ended with dozens of these racing sheets littering the sidewalk in front of the OTB.
And where there is vice there must be virtue.
“Look—your church,” I said to The Young Artist.
She smiled, and ah, it was still not the one she wanted to see. Perhaps when she had begun to appreciate the paintings of Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton, for this church was an old store front. This “Iglesia Pentacostal” danced to and praised the Holy Spirit in Spanish. Next to the anonymous public storage spaces, and the convenience stores, the ethnically congregated store front churches were this town’s number three growth industry. If it were not for the Lord, lottery tickets, and individually sealed plastic vacuum units that sometimes contained the contents of a college student’s between semesters dorm room (or the remains of a serial killer’s victim) this city would be dead.
There were still some great ruins and monuments though, and while we had no trouble finding the former, we were not able to locate the latter.
Neither could her patience wait for the latter.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked in a mock nonchalant tone, which also had a tiny coating of acid.
I wistfully smiled.
“Come on,” I wryly pleaded. “I’ve been lucky in not knowing the answer to that question for maybe ten years, maybe more. But in terms of getting around the industrial tundra; in knowing my way around the wastescape, well, you just drive, and eventually you will come to some form of understanding.”
“Or an epitaph,” The Young Artist said.
“True,” I said as I slowly nodded. “True.”
“We can look for the church later,” The Young Artist said. “One of my friends in design class also wants to see it.”
“No, I want to find it too; you see, there’s this window—and if you catch it at the right time, it blossoms like a fire.”
“Look, if you start doing some weird drugs or just stuff that’s weird, I’m getting out.”
I softly laughed.
“It’s not like that,” I said. “In factÉ.I’m taking you to some place that you’ll only find here in this city—but something just as beautiful as anything you’ll see in Paris.
“Is this something like finding your ‘inner vision’”? she snidely said.
“Wise ass,” I said.
“What’s that? Didn’t quite hear you,” she said, when she obviously did.
“Negative Capability,” I said. “You want to find that cathedral? Enter through the hands of the neckless Wop or Polack who helped to build it on days off he could never afford to take with a family to feed and a third floor railroad flat rent to pay while his wife was trying to do the same. And why one of them made a stained glass window that looks like a flower about to burst into a fire? You have to see the last thing that that immigrant saw before he or she died—and don’t ask me what I’m talking about—because I’m a little fucking crazy.”
She just stared at me without expression, then closed her eyes, giggled, and quickly reached over and took one of my toys that I had on my dashboard.
“Hey!” I said. “That was my—“
I made a quick recounting of what was still on the dashboard. My rubber rat, my plastic snake, my silver zippo lighter (not because I smoked ((outside of the Whacki Tabaci)); I never used this palm size polished piece of chrome; it just looked cool in a macho, cowboy, fugitive, and outlaw sense, and every guy has to have one guy-thing about himself lying around in plain show off-y view.
So my rubber rat, my plastic snake, and my silver Zippo lighter were all there.
—But not my miniature, paper mache, hand-painted Mexican Day of the Dead skull.
“HeyÉyou took my Mexican Day of the Dead skullÉ!”
She giggled.
“That’s hand crafted! I want it back!”
She just shook her head no.
“What do you mean ‘no’? I want it back.”
She flicked her head away from me and looked out the window at the passing waste-scape. As if she could sense what I was thinking, she put the skull in her bag and then folded her arms. The hell, and what was worse, I was starting to admire her audacity too. Again that extra sensory perception of hers, because she crossed her arms and hunched towards the window, so that I could not take something loosely dangling from the Goth-ware on her bag. I also had to drive, and keep at least one eye on the road even if there was no one on it. There were few people outside these clapboard lined streets after the brick castle like grammar school a few blocks away began its day. The only people left behind in these houses, were a few single mothers caring for the pre school kids while doing telemarketing from their railroad flats, and some retired immigrant oldsters who got around with walkers, or did not get around at all. Where was the rest of the world? Especially the vital, the young, the creative? I was still trying to find that out myself, and was I sure that it was in New York? There you would always find some inspiration, but vitality? Sounds reactionary, revisionist, a betrayal; sorry, but my “Negative Capability” could never let me lose myself into a shallow mid-brow Broadway play and whatever its latest theme was. As for that fancy term, Negative Capability? A verbal hangover from undergraduate days. One of the few useful things I remember from my college education. Keats and his vale of soul making. Entering a room full of children—and becoming those children. Damn, that was a powerful letter. Must have read that one and a few others like it a dozen or more times. I read all of his letters. His, and Rilke’s—“The Letters to a Young Poet.” Dig deep into yourself. Ask yourself why you must write. I ask it every day, and everyday the same answer. A roomful of children. At least that is how I try to leave myself and enter into one of these three story porch fronted houses with a banged up Detroit battle-wagon like mine parked in front. And so I enter one of these railroad flat rooms, hoping to find creativity, curiosity, imagination. But when I find an oxygen tank, a disintegrating tabloid page turning Visiting Nurse, and a semi conscious bed ridden former factory worker born on the Steppes, and who has already begun his death rattle in the brick rust tundra, wellÉI have learned to find a lot of creativity and imagination in decay and death. At least there are no false illusions. Deterioration brings with it an ironic sense of growth.
It still does not make entering these time dead tenements easy. But this is what I am the poet of. This is my post. The artist on deathwatch. And so old Ivan, old Ivonova, do you want to tell a last fragment of your immigrant industrial narrative before your soul goes back to your old country soil? No? your soul cannot go back there? Is what your silence tells me.
But can your soul find harmony on your long adopted soil? That is now covered with neon-junk food franchises and anonymous bunker like public storage spaces.
So, are you ready to enter into one of the best vales of dead soul making I have to offer? A mock cathedral?
The thought was directed to The Young Artist. She would soon hear it and turn around. Like me, she was an artist—which meant that she was sensitive to the most weirdest shit. Which meant that she had “psychic” antenna always tuning into the weirdest signals. Which meant that besides being spiritual, psychical, and all that other fun stuff, she was also selfish, sarcastic, obnoxious and lost in her world. But only because it was a better world. I smiled the same time she turned around. She softly, shyly smiled back—the freshman in college, was now a freshman in high school, even younger.
“Hey—Goddamn it!”
The little thief just swiped my Zippo lighter from off of the dashboard.
“You’re not taking that!”
She flicked the top case back, and started flicking the tiny wheel that should have produced a yellow flicker kiss with a blue tongue in it.
“It’s out of fuel,” she said. “Not even that. It doesn’t even have a wick. You never used it before!”
She turned to me, demanding explanation.
“It doesn’t matter—now give it back!”
“Not until you tell me why you have it! You don’t smoke—outside of your drug addiction.”
“I’m not a drug addict,” I said. “I just need to escape from reality and to run away from my problems once in awhile. Now gimmie back my lighter.”
“No.”
She was not going to give it back, either. Until I told her why I kept it.
“I keep it because it looks mean on the dashboard.”
“Here, take it back, before someone sees me with it and I get really embarrassed.”
She threw it back on the dashboard.
“Just let me know before you go frolicking. I’d hate—“
“Ha, ha,” she mockingly interrupted. “As if I don’t get that all the time. But don’t worry. I’m really a good thief.”
“I know,” I said.
“I’m not kidding. Let me show ya.”
“In a few minutes, because first I want to show youÉ”
Something that she might enjoy. An isolated fenced off cemetery on a hill. ‘Though as you passed it from the street, you could not see a tomb: only a black arched gate with the welded on letters: “Old St. Mary’s” As you drove up the hill, an isolated, tilted Celtic cross gravestone made an eerie greeting. As you glanced to your right, similar crooked, isolated crosses began to appear. Hanging like bridge cables from their second and third story back porches were clotheslines that often had large sheet-size patches pinned from them. Day in, decade out, it seemed to be the same pale, platoon of shrouds wheeled out to a large steel pole in a fenced off backyard.
Once we got out of the car, behold a small blue collar valley columned by tenements with porches rising with each story. The streets that held these squat, wide shouldered, block like houses seemed to be pushing them along like a squad of marching construction workers. Cars were parked in front of lawns crowned with plastic statues of the Virgin Mary; statues sheltered by a cut away half bath tub. The cars were dented but still sturdy like old steel boxy lunch pails. And where this rising tin and clapboard valley peaked: a clay brown plateau. Planted firmly on top of it was a large brick factory-like orphanage or a stark power plant with tall arched windows.
Beyond that was a horizon that was always dull gray like some old samovar or heirloom, that if it could just get a little polishÉ
There was nothing special about these old tenements and cars that were in slightly better condition than my own. From this hilly cemetery, however, it was like looking at a pie shaped piece of blue collar America as Edward Hopper or some thirties W.P.A. muralist might have painted it; a perspective criss-crossed with clotheslines, inpasto’d with clapboard, framed by smoke stacks. And crowned with the gold onion dome of an Orthodox church. But the perspective was also slightly askew and deceiving, so that the tenements seemed to blur into each other like the beginning stages of a cubist painting. Or an image that was peeling, fading, vanishing.
After we parked under the tree, one thing was solid and clear: the gray, twin towered church that looked a lot like a famous one in Paris.
“Notre Dame!” the Young Artist excitedly said as she pointed to it.
“No, Sacred Heart,” I said, and smiled.
“It does look like the Cathedral in Paris—but smaller,” The Young Artist said. “And those old houses and streets down there—they look like they’re being squeezed through the neck of an hour glass. Look—towards the bottom of the hill, there’s only one house—actually, half a house, because the street cuts it off.”
“This is the last of that glass,” I said. “There is no more time left. Once all these houses go dark,”
I made a sudden sweeping motion with my hand.
“That’s it. Finished.”
“That’s rather selfish,” The Young Artist said. “What about if new people want to move in? Or haven’t you noticed?”
I softly smiled and nodded.
“I have. But I find more life in what I call, ‘the last Sun’. Come the end of the day, and comes the end of a vital and robust culture. But until then, there is the race, the intensity, the fever to capture as much of it as you can with words, with paint, with whatever is your medium.”
I suddenly turned to her, and without fully realizing it, grabbed her forearm.
“You should be up here when the sun goes down! Let’s come back. Before the sun dies! When everything is purple and blue like gasoline and oil sailing on a puddle! It’s like a flower! A flower in its last stages of dying!”
She burst out laughing while yanking her arm away, and then covered her mouth with her hand in an attempt to control her laughter.
“I’m sorry—I don’t mean to laugh—that’s really poetic—but the way you got so carried away.”
I looked down and muttered:
“I knowÉ”
“No, it’s really sweet—“
Ouch.
“It is, I want to come back here tonight—but right now, I can’t see your inspiration. I’m sorry.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, and started digging the ground with my foot.
“We’re artists,” I said with embarrassment. “We see things differently from everyone else.”
She gently touched my arm.
“I know,” she said. “We do see things differently.”
“Let me show what I mean,” I responded
I went to the tree, picked up a small rock, and started digging out a small area between two of this tree’s exposed, dried up, leathery roots.
“What are you doing.”
Without turning to her, and while continuing my dig, I explained:
“A friend and I—we earlier came up here. And—because of the great time we had, we each buried something special here, and we promised to leave them here until there was a special reason to dig them up, and now is one of those times.”
“May-be,” she said, “but I’m not digging up anything at a cemetery.”
“It’s okay. It’s just a little clay thing that we made at the diner—“
She now pinched my shoulder.
“Ouch,” I tried to playfully pass off.
“I bet you it was play-doh,” she said.
“How’d you know?”
She began to pull me forward by arm.
“Come on,” she said.
“Wait!” I said, and without quite knowing why, I suddenly pulled away, and walked quickly forward—walked quickly toward that—slice of blue collar America which made a sudden sensuous image—as if I was seventeen or twenty years old—out of school for the first time—or out of the service—whenever these streets had a sense of the wild, the reckless, the hell raising—and just as there was a church, a factory, a tenement, there was also a tavern with a long mahogany counter and candy colored GTOs or Cameros with the girls that you were about to make a little wild, reckless, and hell raising with! There was still time—wasn’t there? Yes! There was still youth, there was still promise, there was still imagination—oh! Blessed, blessed, blessed imagination!
I was not completely “lost”. Part of me was still in that previous dimension—the one where there was some one justifiably angry for the way I suddenly left and so I slowly turned around and tried to explain—but the only thing could say was:
“It’s so beautiful—it’s just so beautiful!”
She slowly shook her head yes the way you would someone who is slightly—never mind.
“There’s still time!” is how I next tried to explain it.
“Of course there is,” she said. “And maybe I should drive.”
I now noticed that she had been walking me to the car.
“No, I’ll be alright, I promise that I’ll stay in this dimension.”
“That’s—important,” she said . “But you have to take me to where I want to go—let me show you something.”
“No problem,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“The mall,” she said.
Pow! Right in my sensitive artistic nature! The mall? Asking me to take her there was like asking a dedicated alcoholic to take you to an AA meeting.
“Why the hell would you want to go to the mall?” I asked.
“To shoplift,” she said. “Now get in the car.”
I briefly hesitated. Well, if this was what she wanted to show me, okay. And so I got back into the car, but without taking a final look at what was left of a piece of landscape that began like a painting or story that spoke back to me. I was actually—in shock. What else could it be? Because—the mall? What the hell did the mall have to say? Well, actually, the mall had a lot of stuff to say. The mall had more to say about present day America than the poetry of a great poet like Walt Whitman (though I feel that Walt would have a lot to angrily declaim about the way democracy has shrunk between the aisles in J.C. Penny’s and Macy’s.) Yeah, the mall could be inspirational. But after any aborted reverie of the wild and raw beauty of taproom sawdust, soul’d America, I found it hard to make a spiritual transition to a giant refrigeration unit where Thorazine, Prozac, and other anti depressants were re-transfigured into a gaseous substance, and filtered out through the air ducts, unbeknown to the democratic consumer rabble.
“You’ve never shoplifted before, have you.”
Maybe if I have, I might have a different perspective on the mall.
“Have you ever been in—no, why would you be in jail, when you haven’t even gotten a parking ticket.”
“Hey, I have been in jail!”
“Oh, so you did have a parking ticket. And enough of them that you did not pay.”
“I—“
Better not, and I hope it was not too late.
“What? You went on a tour with your high school Scared Straight program? With one of the prisoners calling you a punk?”
Fuck it, you’ll only embarrass yourself now if you don’t forcefully say it.
“I went there to do a feature story for my college newspaper.”
“No! You’re kidding! Stop the car right now and let me out!”
She even grabbed the door handle too.
Too bad she had no intention of doing it.
“The same newspaper for which I got to fly in a small Cessna state Police traffic spotting plane,” I said, and then smiled.
“WowÉ” she said. But there was a trace of resentment in her voice.
“The same newspaper for which I got to do a feature story on an old carny freak show, which had a two-headed pig fetus and mummified baby in sealed glass jars.”
“Fuck you!” she said.
I knew that would get her.
“Do you want to go shoplifting or not?” she asked with a trace of resentment in her voice
“I—I don’t know now,” I said. “So go ahead and laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” she said.
She was not being mocking or sarcastic. Feeling a little more bold, I announced:
“I don’t want to get caught!”
“You won’t get caught,” she said. She sounded annoyed. “Shoplift, burglarize, kidnap, I’ve done it all except murder.”
“Well, glad to hear that you have not done the last—when it comes to taking a life, I philosophically weigh in like a Buddhist: I abhor the thought of even stepping on a worm. It’s still a life, and it’s a more noble life than many of the people in politics today, and no one is stepping on them, damn it. But—kidnapping?”
She sighed.
“Okay, I sorta exaggerated. It’s not what you think. It was more like a high school prank. Me and a bunch of friends forced this nerdy girl into the car and brought her to the woods, where we pretended we were going to sacrifice her to Satan.”
Nerdy girl, ha? No, you were not kidnapping her, just traumatizing her for life.
“Happen to you, ha?”
“No,” I quickly said.
“Come on,” she gently coaxed. “It’s okay. And I can tell your eyes are just like hers when we threatened to put her in the trunk.”
“You put her in the trunk?”
“No, because she stopped whining and got in the back seat like she was told.”
A pause, and then she asked:
“Did they threaten to put you in the back trunk?”
“Yes, but—I stopped whining like your friend.”
She giggled and then asked:
“And what was your little torture about?”
“My friends told me they were going to drop me off at a Gay bar unless I promised to enlist in the Marine Corps. Fuck that, I told ‘em. The Marines do push ups with spiked collars and leather zippered masks.”
“For which your friends must have really tortured you.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. I was not feeling comfortable but I finally had to admit it.
“Because I started acting so crazy, my friends dropped me off at what they said was a mental hospital. With all the windowless brick and humming power plant noise, it looked like a mental hospital too. It turned out to be the state college. The same state college I would go and graduate from.”
She smacked her lips.
“Life is full of ironies. That’s the same college I go to.”
“Did you think it was a mental institution when you first went there?” I asked.
“No, but I’m now ninety nine percent convinced that it’s a nursing home for professors with Alzheimer’s.”
“That sucks.”
“That’s why you have to do things like shoplift.”
“Wouldn’t it be more fruitful to parody that with Wanted Posters all over campus, alerting students about the faculty’s mediocrity?”
“For you maybe; for me, I play it less esoteric and more animalistic. I like to hunt.”
And to underscore this point, she softly growled.
I tried not to, but what the hell, I still laughed.
“You think I’m kidding, ha? Well, here’s my claw.”
She started to dig something from out of her bag. I squished up one side of my mouth and said,
“And here’s my vampire teeth. You’d never think so, but I bite the people on the neck.”
She closed her bag.
“Stop the car,” she said.
“We’re not there yet, and don’t worry, I won’t bite you.”
Smack! As she slapped palm down on the dashboard.
“I said stop the fucking car!”
Scre-e-e-ech! As I braked the old rattle wagon on a street that was half dead end and rusted aluminum fence playground.
Soon as the car had stopped, I put it in park, raised an index finger, closed my eyes and said without being angry, but not being happy:
“Don’t –do stuff like that—when I’m driving.”
I opened my eyes, and turned to her. I expected her to be a lot more angry. She just looked at me—with what seemed like an amused smile.
“OkayÉ? I said, more gently, reassuring; just in case she was pissed or afraid.
“Will you let me drive your car?” she said.
“What?” I suddenly said.
“Just until we get to the mall. It’s not that far.”
I started to shake my head and mentally scratch my brain.
“Wait a minute, first you want to hunt—then you want to drive my—“
She put her hand down on the seat space between me and her, inched herself forward and said:
“What’s the matter, are you afraid I’ll wreck your car or something?”
“No, I’m not afraid that you’ll wreck my car or something!”
She took another inch forward and when I took another inch back, my thigh was already against the car door.
“Then let me drive your car—or is this a boy thing?”
“No, it’s not a boy—”
This time, she had taken three inches forward (and not without a mean little smile) and I stupidly responded by—well, it just happened so fast—it was like automatic the way I put my hand on the door handle, opened it, and got out, and as soon as I did, she lost no time sliding over and taking the wheel of the car.
“Come on, get in,” she said.
“Wait—“ I feebly said. I was still going to try and plead with her to give me back my car.
“Come onÉ.” she sighed. “It’s not going to hurt your car. But if it’s really going to make you freak outÉ”
“It’s okay,” I gave in.
I walked around my car to get inside through the passenger’s door. As I did so, I could only look at the ground. I believed her when it came to her respecting my car—well, ninety percent or so. But even if I believed in her a full one hundred percent, it was still hard to give up my car to—well, a stranger? She was not quite that. A friend? A fellow artist—aw, hell, say it—a woman and I’m no backwards cave man type of guy, but—usually the woman who drives your car, is your wife or your girlfriend. Fuck—outside of that, just how often do you let anybody drive your own car? How often are you a passenger in it? Ah, what the hell. In around a couple of hours, I’ll be in New York, and I won’t even have this car—well, I’ll have it, but not for long. How I’ll get rid of it—I’ll think about when I get there. With luck, the engine would die right when I get to Avenue A; near Tompkins Square Park. I would not have to do anything but just leave the car where it died. By the next morning, my car would be a stripped, anonymous, wheel-less frame.
Back to the present, back in my car, but as a passenger. Is that why she had a slightly mocking smile?
I also noticed that she had an aluminum adhesive taped splint on her right index finger.
“Oh—“ I started to excuse myself.
I didn’t see that injury when she was sitting across from me drinking coffee. I’m not that much of a drug addict; something’s going on.
As if reading my mind, she thrust her finger a little too close to my face.
“You like it? This happens to be my ‘claw.’”
“Your claw?”
“Yeah, I know you can’t see it from where you’re at, but partially taped up inside of the splint, is a razor blade.”
“A razor blade?” I said, and then with growing fascination.
“Is there a special CD you’ve been wanting to buy? Well, it’s free today when this razor blade slices off the alarm tag off.”
She was about to put the car in drive but stopped when I said:
“That’s fucking brilliant!”
She put the car back in park.
“Now hold on,” she explained. “It’s not my idea. I got it from a book—a book called Crimethinc –but the author—or authors—whoever the fuck they are, would be pleased to know that their book is being put to good use by having people ripping off chain music stores.”
“No shit.”
“No shit,” she said, and then slyly asked:
“Did you ever read that book?”
“No,” I said with embarrassment.
“Hmmm,” she murmured with a touch of superiority.
“And did you ever read Clarissa ?” I said
“That big fucking book in the back of your car? No. But does it tell you how to shoplift CDs?”
“No,” I said, “but—the male anti-hero in the book kidnaps the heroine.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I can see how that book really relates.”
She put the car in drive, and gently glided the car back into the street. A few seconds after she did, I began to relax—even feel relieved—not to be in control of my car, even though this old battle ship carcass still had some value to me—hell, it held the manuscript of –what at this point, was becoming its own novel. With the way people added things, with the way pages were getting lost or mixed up; or the way its author still earnestly tried to put it together and nobly continued on with it (what else could such a colossal failure be but noble?) Well, this book was having a strong hand in writing itself. And if this car was there just for that one mess, well, give it some respect. Don’t bang her around too much. Hell, your work in progress isn’t the only mess she’s been carrying around for the past several months, and no more needs to be said. Time to foolishly escape from my problems by smoking a little marijuana.
“So that’s why you wanted me to drive,” she slyly asked.
“What gave you that idea,” I said.
“Well, I don’t feel like getting stoned, okay?”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
“I can still get a contact high.”
“Come onÉ” I laughed. “The windows are open.”
“You light up, you’re getting out of the car.”
I just laughed.
She flicked a harsh, slightly teeth baring look; just a little pearl showing like the handle of a weapon in its sheathed holster; it was a look I had not seen from her before. Neither did I hear her speak in such a sharp and defiant tone when she hissed:
“You think I’m kidding?”
Whoa, where did that come from, was my first thought. What the fuck is going on here, was my second thought. She must have felt similar unease mixed with tension, what I must have looked like to her. Ridiculously scared and stupidly angry. I just threw the joint out of the window, and muttered:
“Fuck it, this is—nevermindÉ
I threw up my hands and laughed.
“You can smoke if you really need to,” she said with a small whine.
“Naw. It’s not that, it’s just that I don’t like the mall. I know it sounds dumb, but it makes me feel uncomfortable.”
“It’s not dumb,” she said, and then in a more shy tone:
“I’ve always been a little nervous about driving.”
A beat passed before she then added; her eyes fixed on the road before:
“But not now.”
I smiled, settled back in my seat, moved my right knee against the dash.
“Drive as long as you like,” I said. “All the way to New York if you like. Hell, you bring me, you can keep the car. But you’re not taking my novel.”
“No way,” she said. “Just to the mall. And if you’ll let me take a few pages of your novel, I can use it for my art project.”
“What the hell, let’s get some flour, ‘cause I’ve got enough pages to make a paper mache pi–ata of a monster”
“Save the monster for the page, and I’ll save the pi–ata surprise for my art.”
“Mmm,” I warmly sighed, but then added:
“But that’s one of the things I hated about the mall. Every time I am inside one, I feel like I’m in a giant Tupperware container and a preserved piece of sandwich. That’s the trouble with the mall—there’s no rot!”
She giggled.
“It’s true!” I said. “Or almost. Hey, it’s not like I have a phobia, ya know? I worked at the mall. In one of the fast food chain bookstores while I was in high school.”
“You must have loved that,” she said in a deliberately dry tone.
“Especially when the Daughters of the American Revolution dowagers asked me where the latest schlocker was. Right in front of you lady. On the rack that’s just lit up like a big neon sign for Coca Cola. Well, part of my job was to take those same books once they were no longer best schlockers—usually about a few days or less after they arrived.”
“About as long as it takes Tupperware food to spoil.”
“That’s basically it, and part of my clerkly duties was to take this literary junk food down to the mall basement where the compacter was, and dump any books that could not be remaindered, into the big crusher.
Well, another week goes by, and this time the store gets in a hot shipment—but this one is the big BIG seller! You know, it’s going to be a movie, which means there will be action figures, T-shirts, a sound track album, toilet paperÉwhich means even less chance of escaping the monster; ignoring the romantic moron-o drama, soÉ”
She giggled, anticipating what I was about to reveal.
“By mistake I mixed up the wrong box of books,” I said. “I dumped the Best Schlocker into the crusher instead of the books not even good enough to be remaindered.”
She burst out laughing. Because we were at a stop light, she was able to clap. I turned to her to explain:
“You shoulda seen it! Customer after customer leaving the store in shock when they found out that we did not have the must have worthless junk!”
“Yes!” she shouted.
“It was like they were told there was going to be no more McDonald’s or Las Vegas or something!”
“Whoo-hoo!”
“Yeah, for one day, the mental television went out in this small part of America!”
“Ha-ley-loo-ya!”
“Yeah, and I got fired.”
“Yeah, but that’s also when you proved that you were ready to become an artist!”
“Damn right. And so, let’s go to the mall and commit—
—some art. “
We were just in time too. If we waited any longer, this mall would probably lose its one chain record store. This aspirin white place was geared for the town fueled by Geritol. We did not have too far to go before coming to the chain record store. This mall had a little class beyond a “low class.” That is why it had a store catering to “senior adult needs.” For which we brightly tried to pick out senior adult items like diapers, catheter bags, and other fun stuff. Yeah, it was not nice, but we felt like criminals, and in America, it is a crime to get old. The senior store was at least shabbily respectable next to the famous discount artist’s gallery. That store “screamed” at you with velvet paintings of stallions running in a Western landscape; where the sky was a neon and iodine like purple. Velvet paintings, the Young Artist noted, were a lost folk art; she wrote a paper about it for composition, for which used a critical theorist like Foucault to justify her thesis. Besides getting an “A” for it, the paper also won the English department prize for the school’s best student composition. Impressive. I sincerely told her to do more work in that area; in case she should ever go to graduate school. I spoke from the experience of someone who had only a semester and a half of grad school. It might have gone a little longer if I didn’t have to read more Derrida. But there is only so much time to read the great books in life, and Writing and Differance was not one of them. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson is.
The Young Artist agreed with my idea of what a good grad school plan in humanities should comprise. There should be more studies done on Velvet paintings, she noted, and less on the French Impressionists. What? I asked. I thought The French Impressionists were the velvet painters. That’s what they ended up becoming, she said, which is probably what grad school will do to all your prior education. She then noted that she was too much of an artist and also the criminal type of artist to deal with grad school. She would rather shoplift than become one of the unemployable book brains reading Foucault. I agreed with her, but still had one concern: I noticed how some of the velvet painting designs were showing up as photographic engravings on grave stones. Being a bit of a cemetery person herself, she noticed this as well, and cemeteries, well, cemeteries were one of the few places left where you could find true gothic art. She did not mind such “Velvet painting” of death, though she felt the water skiing design worked better than others than the homey winter hearth scene. Me, I was more of a traditionalist when it came to death. I felt there should be some dignity, even austerity. Today’s gravestone has a velvet painting design on it—and tomorrow’s marble has an advertisement for McHamburger. The Young Artist told me I was failing to keep up with “Progressiveness”. The creepy Victorian cemetery stuff I like today, was crude and vulgar twenty five or fifty years ago. That may be so, and if so, well, this was where there was a shift and maybe a divide: for me, death had to be escape from the Pop Culture.
At least we both agreed on the Hip Hop clothing store: we liked the wide legged XXX in your face slogans, and at this point, we also agreed that Hip Hop fashion is the polyester disco clothing of the new millennium.
Finally, the music store. Ugh, because for a devoted listener like myself (and a serious fanatical listener like herself) chain record music stores were like mental institutions for music. Music stores (like bookstores) are supposed to be independent, eccentric, chaotic, baroquely decorated and poster’d places and run by a frizzy haired sixty year old man or woman who knows about every obscure title published and every obscure record label that produced music. It was from such stores that you got your important education: the education your school or college could only partially give you, if that. It was from such stores that you learned which books and records were important to your life. The trouble was, the chains were catching on: the mass consumable was starting to pass itself off as the independent, as this store now did. Display a few books and zines with the CDs, line some shelves with quirky action figures, and you have an “independent record store.” This could present a dilemma, because if this was an independent and cool store, well, you couldn’t steal from it. You don’t steal from artists, but it is okay to steal from corporations. Well, there was only one way to tell if this record store was truly sincere: ask if it had a not so unreasonably obscure artist.
“Do you have any Cocteau Twins?” The Young Artist asked.
He was behind the register, punching something into what looked like a small adding machine. He was wearing a skinny black tie on a shiny purple shirt (as if to tell anyone who would care that hey, I may only be sixteen, but I go to clubs with 70s disco themes). His employee’s I.D. tag was pinned out at a slanted irreverent angle. “Pytor” was the name of this small town slag-boned kid with an attitude—my self ten years ago. Myself the way I would have also answered. Smugly, without looking at us, he smiled and slowly shook his head “No” back and forth as if to say: The what twins? Yeah, right. What the fuck do I look like? Some stoned out Hippie Girl?”
—which is what the Young Artist must have been sensing from the way she had suddenly narrowed her eyes: a small, snake-like tongue of sparkle flickering from within them. Before, we just wanted to rip off a corporation. Now, it was like, let’s fuck up this idiot—my response, and which she sensed as she quickly put her hand on the back of mine as a way to maintain calm and go with the original plan.
“Thank you,” she said in a rather harsh tone; the clerk—again, too cool to look up, only smirked in acknowledgement.
“That asshole,” I said as we left the register and headed for the bins. “Like who the fuck does he think he is? And dressed like it’s nineteen seventy four and he’s at Studio Fifty Four. I wonder if Stashu knows that The Village People were gay!”
“Shhh! Nevermind! I’ve got a better idea! We take what we want and then we pick on his music!”
It was a tactic I had never thought of before. The Philistines may attack and hate art, but they still have what passes for them, their own art and culture. They assume that you don’t know that—or maybe they just assume that theirs is the only culture? Well, don’t let their smugness fool you. A smug frown can quickly turn to outrage after kicking one of their sacred cows. Put a crucifix in a jar full of urine like Andres Serrano did. His interpretation may have not been to disrespect Christ; just the same, it put some real flame into the nostrils of the always swinish fundamentalists. (Look, there is no point in hiding my biases.) So, next time some small minded Christian attacks your homosexuality, respond by noting how Christ had homoerotic tendencies. Some red neck wants to kick the shit outta you? In those spangled, glittering, decorated cowboy boots that look like they first came off a drag queen impersonating –I don’t know, Dolly Parton. And excuse me, could you turn around and then in profile so that I can take a picture of what I thought was an extinct cultural relic known as “The Mullet.”? And Holy shit, because as soon as Stashu momentarily turned sideways, sure enough he had a mullet.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “I want to get one more CD.”
“We’ve already got two.”
“Three,” she said. “There was another Cocteau Twins CD that I didn’t have, and then this album:”
The music that probably represented the taste of our young philistine; the music that she made her last theft: the 80s hair band, Poison.
“That’s his music,” I said.
“They’re probably his idols. But it’s always good to play a cut from one of these albums at parties where—I don’t know—things are just getting too normal and predictable and what the hell, there’s nothing wrong with cheesy music so long as you don’t have to pay for it.”
“Yeah, but when you want to listen to it. I think he just put some version of that on right now.”
“And look, he’s even starting to ‘head bang’ to it.”
Just the music itself is enough for us to laugh into an “art attack.” But now that he started to put a little “rhythm” into his music, it was enough to make The Young Artist announce:
“Girls with big hair!”
After which I added:
“—predictable guitar solos”
Which might have seemed like examples of disorder and chaos to the old folks shopping at the Special Needs store. And maybe not just the old folks, but also the people who bought the plastic shoes they wore for special occasions like re-born baptisms where you let some self-taught minister dunk you in some clapboard church septic tank.
But not before you publicly renounce your past dangerous dalliances listenting to
“THE DEVIL’S MUSIC!”
—we both said at the same time, before we broke out laughing.
“Can I help you find something?” the clerk finally broke, with a nearly tomato-orange face.
“Um, do you have any Ratt, Poison, Night Ranger?” I asked as I started to leave.
“’Cause if you do, I know a couple of gas station attendants who listen to that music as well,” said The Young Artist
“And don’t forget warehouse forklift operators,” I added.
“And also how they still live at home.”
By now there were teeth in the tomato.
“Later dude,” I said, giving him the Satan metal fingers; i.e., thumb with two middle fingers folded in; index and pinky finger pronging out, as if the horns of Satan.
“And be careful you don’t throw out your neck and get a pinched nerve.”
“Kinda hard to take a headbanger seriously in a neck brace.”
Tonight there was going to be a pile of burning glam metal records in some three family house basement. Oh, it felt good to be an artist.
But it also felt bad—to start to become what you earlier criticized. No, we were not in danger of becoming Philistines and elitists. But wait—we were supposed to be so avant garde that there was not yet a word to describe who we wereÉand already our art made us correct and exclusive. Suddenly, it did not feel so good to be an artist.
Though a thief, yes
A thief who took—
“Five? You took five CDs?” I asked.
“Hey,” she said. “We were doing such a good job at tearing apart his music where he could not look up, that even you could have lifted a CD.”
“What do you mean, you?”
“You feel like getting something to eat?” she said as she started to put back her fake splint in her purse. “I’m hungry.”
“You don’t think I did some other illegal stuff besides smoking pot?”
“No,” she quickly answered.
“Well, well—“
“I feel like ice cream,” she said to me. “You turned me on to rice pudding, so I want to treat you to some ice cream. That’s if this mall has any.”
“I used to steal books,” I said. “When I was a substitute teacher in a classroom. I used to take books.”
The Young Artist stopped, turned to me with a slightly endearing and condescending look, and said:
“I once took a wallet from my teacher’s purse.”
—And more. She told me all about it as we sat at a plastic table underneath a plastic umbrella outside of the plastic kiosk that sold ice cream. Well, not plastic ice cream. At least that was real. And the kiosk was in the center of the mall, where we had a great view of all the elderly mall walkers hobbling by. That’s not being compassionate, but the day you come to terms with unnatural colors of polyester is the day you start settling for that ee-zee listening life with the sound track by Phil Collins, for no one really listens to Phil Collins. How can you, when it is all the same?
So the history of a young artistÉin this case, a history of a well to do bright kid slightly rebellious about her privilege. College was always one of her primary goals; in fact, she had the background and money to go to a better college than the one she was now in, which I soon learned was only temporary: she had been accepted into the big schools, and even though this one gave her almost free tuition (she was in a special honors program) she did not need the money. Her family was well off. How well off? Oh, her father had enough land not to see her neighbor’s house; not that big a deal, some might say, but there was also room for both her and her sister to have their own horse. (I had a dog, and as far as Fido’s chain could reach, was his to roam.) In the meantime, the honors-bound student was becoming a delinquent in a more creative sense: there was no such thing as pointless vandalism: vandalism had to have a point, which is why she and her little gang trashed out the suburban youth center when they were thirteen or fourteen. It was just getting to be too—
“Fuzzy,” as she explained it. “You know, like the fuzz on a stuffed animal? Did you ever have any stuffed animals?”
“I had a bunny,” I said. “But it was okay, I was only five—okay, eight.”
Well, it was worse than that, she explained. Her stuffed animals were on the endangered species list, which made them even more precious and sentimental. The weak, the noble; the crippled but courageous; it was also the motif and world view for everything about this youth center: from nearly extinct African animals giving you wise advice on safe sex pamphlets, to the selections of only progressive music to choose from at the center: choices your parents would have certainly approved of like Fleetwood Mac or K.D. Lang, and even if you liked them along with the Ani Di Franco, it was still music that was noble and courageous; therefore, the CDs along with the center had to be trashed.
However, she was not hell bent: she was content to live in paradise: she just took advantage of the opportunity to graffiti or trash it out once in awhile. That is why she stole the wallet from the purse of her favorite teacher, who happened to teach English: she even used her credit card to charge a few things, and when she was caught, she was given in-school suspension and a regimen for Prozac. Why? Because she had a horse, she was an honor student, she won a student creative writing contest. Yes, and also because she charged a heap of books ranging from great classics such as Carlos Castenada’s, “The Teachings of Don Juan,” to mere pulp like Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”. Unfortunately, after she apologized, served her time in in-school suspension and started to become a bit of a zombie once the Prozac settled in, her teacher let her keep the “David Copperfield.”
“That sucked,” I said.
“Are you kidding me? It was the worst thing about the whole experience.”
Which was when she no longer took the Prozac; in spite of the way her parents threatened to cut her off financially. (How could they do that while she was living at home? Cut her cable television? Her internet? Yet she knew that even liberal parents could become conservatives; so she re-channeled her delinquency into more creative acts of destruction.)
“I discovered that I could I still trash out the world through Art,” she proudly noted.
I softly nodded as I looked at her with great admiration, and also the awareness and sense of someone who was privileged and perhaps even possessed by genius. She sensed what I was thinking.
“I was also a normal kid,” she said.
“Yeah, right,” I laughed.
“But people in the scene we’re in, don’t want to hear that,” she added. “It’s supposed to be fucked up if you have normal parents or if you love animals. Well, that’s fucked up, and it’s supposed to be fucked up if you liked horses and had other kinds of pets. Well, I’d better never hear of you hurting an animal.”
I put up my hands.
“Not me,” I said. “I had a bunny, remember? Even though—it was stuffed.”
(Better not tell her about the dog. But what the hell, like any ambitious working class creature, he eventually found a way to get out of his chain and escape.)
“Let me tell you,” she said, “animals can be pretty smart. Sometimes they try to tell you things. For years, my dog was trying to tell me something. We would walk together in the woods near my house, and whenever we came to this uneven clump, he’d run around it, and then run ten feet away from it, bark, wag her tail, and wait for me. I would always look at what was there. Nothing but a clump with a lot of moss, rocks, ferns. And then one time I went for a walk after it had rained real hard, and this time, when my dog did the run-around thing, I noticed this dull butter-scotch surface—sort of like a ball or bowl, and when I went to pick it up, I pulled up a skull.”
WHAT!
—my eyes shocked open. She looked down and giggled.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t feel that way about it—“
She looked up to explain:
“I knew it was a skull, and knew that it was real. What I didn’t know, was why it was practically in our back yard. How come we never knew about this?”
“There was your dog,” I said, still in some shock over what she said.
“I told you animals are smart; I told you they talk to us. The problem is, we don’t listen. Even when it comes to each other. And so,
I ran right into the house.”
“With the skull?”
She nodded.
“It was right in my hand. My mother was in the kitchen. She was on the phone. As soon as she saw what I was holding, she screamed just like you were about to.”
We both laughed.
“I tried to tell her not to worry. This skull can’t hurt you. It’s dead or something like that, but she just grabbed it out of my hand, made me go to my room, and that’s the last I ever saw of that skull.”
“And that was it?”
She cleared her throat, and then innocently asked:
“Do you mean, were there more bodies in my backyard?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Sicko.”
I hunched in my shoulders in and cringed, trying to make a quick retreat. She folded her arms.
“No, I’m afraid there was only one body—actually, it was a skeleton. It had been there—for ten years, the police think. They were never really sure, and they were never able to identify this body.”
She squeezed her arms in. She screwed around her folded in arms until they had become a slightly crooked taut bar.
“And that’s what really started to bug me. The way no one could ever figure out who this person was. The police think it might have been a woman. They think!”
The latter of which was said like a cleaver chopping down a slab of beef.
“Whoa. I’m not the cops. Far from it. I couldn’t even maintain authority as a substitute teacher.”
“You couldn’t even control a Kindergarten class,” she sarcastically said.
I—I didn’t say anything, because, well, my sub for a half day kindergarten was one of my toughest assignments, as if she had just realized that.
“So it bothers you that no one was ever able to identify that skeleton.”
“Don’t change the subject,” she quickly said. “And yeah, it bothered me. I mean—just how the fuck could someone disappear? And no one ever knew about it? That’s what was so fucking scary; not that it was a bunch of bones in my backyard, because people die, and yes, they even die where they are not supposed to, like my backyard. But no one could tell who this person was, and worse—no one seemed to care. They were willing to forget about it. But I would ask.”
She now made a fist, and then made small thrusting punches with it as she said with quiet sharpness:
“And ask. And ask. And ask.
And that is when they sent me to get helped. That’s when they sent me to a psychiatristÉ”
I softly reached up with both of my hands and gently took one of her fists in mine. She unraveled her other fist and placed her hand against mine, and for the next few moments, we held each other like that: she looking like she was about to cry; me, looking down into a similar fog or tunnel for which there was no answer.
Finally, she pulled her hands away, sniffed, and said, “Thanks.”
“SureÉ” is all I said.
“YourselfÉ?” she asked. “No criminal past?”
“Not really,” I said. “I try though—at least with my poetry. For me, the horrible thing is when there are no words . I can’t think of anything more horrible. Even more horrible than my grandmother’s death; painful as that was for me. How she died—no one should die like that. Because words were hard for her to begin with—well, at least in English. Coming from the old country, whose language—I did not know.”
“That’s rough; not being able to be understood by someone you love,” she said.
“I could understand my grandmother okay,” I noted. “And one time she called me on the phone. I had just got out of class. I was still in high school. And right away, I could tell that her tone was off. She was rambling about the weatherÉwatching televisionÉnot feeling wellÉ.”
I paused as I once again noted how nobody in my family were ever completely sure how she died, but:
“She was dying. There was no more time, except to make one last phone call. At that moment, we both knew that, and God I tried to keep the conversation going as long as I could; God, how I fucking tried! And the weather never seemed more profound and insightfulÉ”
I softly laughed. I didn’t need to. She was not ashamed for what I had been saying. I had no need to be. ButÉ
“But it still had to come to an end,” I finally said. “We still had to say goodbye. Only for herÉit would be the last timeÉ
IÉ.I’ve always been trying to write that conversation—to remember what it was we exactly said—and even if I could, it would still fail, because neither of us were ever able to get at what this conversation was about. Because there is no way to say goodbye for the last time to someone you love. So in a way, words are a joke, the same time they are the most precious thing there is. I don’t knowÉI don’t knowÉ”
Except that the mall had now become a cold, quiet, almost empty bowl. If it was a container, then it was space that seemed to burn whatever was put inside of it. It was a vessel that was incapable of holding anything for long—junk as well as treasure.
And so we left to go to church—meaning that “cathedral” that The Young Artist wanted to see. Because it came out the other way—as in attending a religious service, we both laughed. There was nothing to be embarrassed about though. Almost no one went to the church that we were now going to: the bedrock institution for a new immigrant people unsure about America. These days, a church like that was being closed every other week. The old parishioners were dying off. Their descendents had either moved away or morphed into a modern generic American culture. I wondered if we might not be too late for this church. If it was still open, expect to enter the sick room of an old dying, distant relative. I was never religious, but the prominence that religion had for my ancestors was still strong enough for me to put on a face of proper mourning when such a church had to be closed. It was just odd and also sad that you did not know the name of this dying relative, and whoever he or she was, they were too sick or not conscious enough to tell you.
About half way to the car, The Young Artist slipped her arm in with mine. I managed to squeeze back and whisper “Thanks”. Before we separated to get into the car, we tightly, briefly, held and squeezed hands.
Once inside, she asked if I had a CD player. I laughed. If this car had anything, it should be an 8-track, and I barely have a radio, which I now turned on: a lot of squelchy, static wailing distortion and then a sharp click! As the Young Artist turned it off, I turned to offer some half joke, half apology. She had already slipped on the headphones from a portable CD player, and just like that, we were both alone.
Well, in a few hours I would be in the city. We’d not only be in contact, but she would soon be visiting. She would show all my hot, street sharp poetry friends a thing or two with a piece of this and a pried off piece of that and who knows what else! It would be nice to leave while there was still light out. Journeys should not be made in darkness, unless it is at the dark end of night’s abyss. So there was still plenty of time to make this journey, but what exactly was the time? I looked at my wrist, and my cheap-o, drug store bought watch was who knows where, and the clock built into the dashboard—forget about it, it stopped working after everything started to die—during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. That’s when this city seemed to be hit by the ripple of several economic earthquakes that were always starting someplace else, but were always felt their most devastating in small towns like this. As for any clocks outside, they all seemed to have disappeared. The only way to tell time was how the decline of the day left its pall on everything—like it did the small fronted store windows along main street: the yarn shop, the off track betting parlor, the Laundromat, they all seemed to have windows that were now like translucent slate gray chalk boards rather than the glimmering glass from a fresh bubbling aquarium. The gray dusty, chalk board meant that it was getting on to late afternoon. Two thirty, maybe even three. Close enough for that change in shifts to begin—from first to second, which is what the new crop of temporary laborers were waiting around for.
There were about a dozen and a half of them. Waiting on a small glass and paper littered oval shaped town green in the middle of this town’s Main street. If anyone were to notice, here were the latest immigrants on display. Short, square shouldered, bronze men with high cheek bones and silky black hair. They were from Mexico or Peru and ranging from ages eighteen to sixty. Some were in groups of three or four, others, by themselves. All of then resigned to the way the upcoming night would get rolled to them like a losing pair of dice. Maybe tonight’s temporary assignment would be in a warehouse, unloading trailers, or forklifting what would soon become junk that would go into the trash compacter. In the meantime, wait for vans to pick you up, and then bring you a couple of miles out to some large aluminum warehouse right off the interstate, which is where the American gulag was. What little time I did in it, made me a confirmed anarchist with a goal of working as little as possible. The shopping mall loading dock is one stop away from the anonymous rental space. One day you are a temporary laborer, the next, anonymous victim or killer: does it matter which one you are? Neither one has a distinct identity anymore.
And then this canal in the center of town. In all the time I have lived here, left, come back, and am now about to leave again, I still don’t know where this twenty foot wide concrete basin goes to after it disappears into a sharp right a half a mile from a bridge. Where I see a couple of kids now standing. It looks like they are throwing rocks or bottles or bricks from it. Their target is the overturned shopping cart and the few tires clogging the gasoline colored canal water. For a few moments, they should hold a cease fire, because in that toxic waste kids, you might be able to read your future. In that industrial poisonous brook, you might see a future as a high school drop out with a ‘come back’ as a jar head in the Marine Corps: about what it was for one quarter of the kids I started high school with. The remainder? One quarter in jail, public assistance, or early death; the other quarter, minimum wage slavery as a troglodyte; more with a trade, but still never enough money—and the final quarter, state college graduates like myself, only where did I fuck up, not getting a suburb-a-void job in the civil service or this state’s giant insurance industry?
Ohh, just thank God you were able to fuck up when you did, kid, because the medicine cabinets in those raised ranch houses have more drugs in them then on the corners back in the ‘hood. And what’s worse, is that those legal middle class prescribed drugs, keep you working, and anything that keeps you together in order to do a pointless job to make somebody you will never see a filthy load of profit, is nothing less than evil in its more pure form.
So thank God there is a church. No, not because of religion, but for the structure itself: at least with the old churches—and this is only going to get more biased: the old Catholic churches I was suffered into as a kid. I hated every moment of Mass, but I loved letting my budding Gothic imagination secretly smoke out of me and metamorpho-swirl around the life size statues of mutilated saints; where I made sure I briefly caressed gory wounds or limbs with bumpy leprous like sores. From there I would spread out along the naves of the church—is that what they are called? Well, the sides is what I called them, and the sides are where the stained, velvet curtained confessionals were, but if my spirit did not go to confess any sins, it did sinfully brush the crimson velvet curtain, making the priest waiting inside to hear your confession, fearfully ask: “Who’s there? Who’s there?” From there, I would ooze over to the ornate carvings on top of the confessional: wood working that were like the small spire-y tops of the church itself: little towers that hid small creatures ready to suck-strangle you in through tongues as soon as you got close enough to peep: but such entrapment was useless when you were a spirit that gently rolled across the inky blue glass of the church’s stained glass windows: only because you were now a spirit, (which meant that you also come with this indigenous form of magic) your movement across those images animated them to life. And that is where the crucifixion was being bloodily reenacted; while in another panel, the Angel Gabriel used a sword to battle a dragon-faced devil with a monster face in its belly—oh, there were so many windows to re-animate! Too many for the duration of one Mass, and even if there was enough time, the giant oval shaped ceiling of the church inevitably pulled me up: for it was there that you could get close to the great drama of a son breaking away from his father, or a father unwillingly letting go of his son: yes, the church I went to, shamelessly reproduced Michaelangelo’s famous scene of God giving life to Adam on the ceiling. Unfortunately, the reproduction left unconscious traces of its painter. That is why God had a heart-shaped Polish face and arms thick enough to do your plumbing while Adam looked like some tragic aristocratic cavalry officer valiantly fighting for Polish freedom. Regardless of the Slavic, anti-Communist interpretation, the reproduction still made a faithful rendition of that mystic space between the fingers of God and Adam: the space that my spirit would pause before and when it did, it was always small enough to fit in between those two hands: but somehow, never staying there; maybe it was because at that point, everyone in the church knew I was spacing out from the way my head craned backwards, looking up instead of straight ahead at the altar, and so I would look ahead of me, like I was supposed to, but what no one else knew, was that I escaped into the dozens of rose vase’d candles that led up to the altar; the candles that you paid a quarter to light in memory of someone’s spirit: only now, my spirit was in all those tiny flames, and all those tiny flames were coming into a life away from this imprisoning Mass.
“WowÉit’s beautiful!” The Young Artist said.
We were now at the church that was a replica of Notre Dame Cathedral.
Ah, but did Notre Dame have that stained glass window that—once the light hit it, its images of hundreds of drops of blood, blossomed into a beautiful rose? And if I was lucky, such light hit that window before the end of Mass I was forced to go to, and if it did, it was some mysterious benevolent spirit now absorbing me.
“WowÉ”
She was now “awake.” She had already pulled the headphones off, and had a hand on the door, ready to exit. The only problem, I wasn’t. Once again, an intense reflection of the old, would have to be put away, incomplete.
But isn’t that the way it always is?
“Sorry, if I—you know—when I get a new tape,” she tried to explain.
“That’s alright. I was listening to music too.”
“Ha?”
“What I meant—I want to see Notre Dame too.”
I had popped open the door.
“Well, it’s not quite as big, but it sure looks like a good small model of it,” she remarked.
A gray church with a flat topped spire on each side—hey, what did I know. I grew up around porch fronted three family clapboard shingled houses. Sure, I had an Intro to Art class in college, and I think I got an A minus in it. Just don’t ask me to do anything more than look at a work of art. The less I say anything about it, the less damage I will do to it. But show me an Anselm Kiefer mural of industrial waste—that’s a different story. I don’t know how the critics would describe it, but for me, it’s a familiar landscape, one that I can strongly feel a history for. At the same time, I am confused about what to make of the waste at present. Would I like to go to Paris and see the real Notre Dame? she asked as we walked up the steep steps, for which she noted, were not there for the real Notre Dame.
Sure, why not, I replied. I always wanted to see where Hemingway drank and wrote.
“Paris is more than about an American author,” she said in a slightly haughty tone.
I smiled.
“Paris is only Paris because of its writers, artists, and poets,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” is all she said, and then shook her head in agreement. I wanted to high five myself, because this kid was tough; for once, I was able to have the intellectual last word.
“But there was also an openness to Parisian culture that let so many writers, artists, and poets live there.”
I was wrong. She was always going to have the last word. What a brat. And making it so much worse, is that she’s a cute brat too.
“Yeah, Paris,” I said, like someone who just lost their taste for a food they were about to try, and now, probably never would.
Where though, was that city’s beauty and light inside of this replica? The inside of this church was like an old brownish bingo hall or auditorium that smelled like an old gym locker room. There was still a sense of this interior being a church, there were pews, statues, confessionals, all the things I had previously remembered from a church in my youth. But now it was strangely bleach-boned; bleached as the bones that have long ago dried out of their color; the fading that streaked these pews, statues, and even drapery. Color dissipated to a combination brown and gray. The church was like some of the old woman around here; who only wore one shapeless smock like garment. They had long stopped attending to themselves. There was no one to fix yourself up for, and there was no place to go to if you did. There was only the inevitable to expect—when it came, it came, no need to bother waiting for it. No need to fear it—that’s how exhausted you had become.
That is how exhausted the inside of this church was.
But where was our cultivation of the decay and the deteriorating? Not here in this church; or perhaps our artistic sensibility was not charmed to such exhaustion.
Or perhaps there was no way to make color out of such ash: to make poetry out of such a flatlined consciousness.
It seemed as if the interior of this church had too much of its spirit burned out to re-kindle one small prayer. The pews, the statues, the altar—even the Michaelangelo reproduction—especially that painting, for it was the most faded away object in this church, the space that might have significance, suggesting the spirit of creation between creation two hands, was now a space that signified permanent negation from the way the hand of God’s as well as Adam’s had been erased through years of neglect and damage. Adam now had only an elbow, and God, the stub of an upper arm, while the space between them was so badly cracked that no image could ever be painted on it again. So there was artistic mortality, and we were looking right up at it. There was always supposed to be a canvas to paint on, a palette of color to paint from. The same with words. There would always be a story to narrate, a language from which to create the narration. Now, the artist will die, but what about nature? Would it be there for the next generation of artists to capture or disrupt? Wasn’t Nature always supposed to be there for the next generation of artists?
“How could the inside—get so old?” The Young Artist asked.
“The worst part, it’s just so stale,” I said. ‘I feel like I’m breathing dead air. But I went to this church,” I said, “when God and Adam still had their hands.”
“It’s just too dead in here! I gotta go outside.”
“But there was a window, a window— “ I said, feeling as if I was running a losing race with a clock that was already hours ahead of me. But which window was it? Because all the windows had been sedimented with the same dry dust. Sure, I could detect pieces of imagery—the head of an animal here, a pair of angel-like wings in the next frame? But where was the window filled with blood? The window that when the light hit it—blossomed like a rose?
“What? Stop—that’s sweet—but I’m ticklish!” I said, for The Young Artist had just sweetly caressed the back of my neck and then my back with her hand. No sooner had I gently told her to stop, than she did it again, that sweet little brat.
“Hey, what did I—“
But by the time I turned round—and it had been just in time too, for the peak of this afternoon was already beginning its descent, and through a quickly dying blossoming of a rose that would soon be dull, clay colored glass. Yes, what had been a fragile piece of glass, was starting to catch a fire that could easily destroy its delicate surface.
“HeyÉ!” I started to call for—someone whose name I did not know. And someone who had already left, one heavy church door was slowly sighing to a close. But a quick look back—even if the blood failed to be petals and ended up as only dull copper pennies, it was still an image defying death. But when I turned back around to call her—
—who was probably in the car—and getting impatient—what would I say? There’s a painting you should see? I could not even say that, because when I turned back around, that painting was gone. What I thought might be it, was no different from any of the other images worn out like old coins.
“What the hell, were you praying or something?” The Young Artist said when I got back inside of the car.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, “a prayer for the dead.”
I started the car.
“I’m with you there,” The Young Artist said. She put on a pair of sunglasses and pushed her hair back.
“If anything needs praying for, it’s the dead,” I said.
“If anyone doesn’t need praying for, it’s God.”
“Why not God?” I asked.
“Because he never feels pain, he never feels lonely, and he’s never going to die,” she simply said.
“Well, pretty much,” I said, “but I bet you he feels lonely.”
“And kind of fucked up when you think about it,” she said. “That even someone like God should be all alone.”
I shrugged.
“What can you do?” I said. “It’s an epidemic. No one’s immune anymore.”
“I just wish I knew what we are all sick from.”
“Hell if I know.”
She laughed, but there was a bit of uneasiness in her laughter. Suddenly something that she was always sure about, was no longer there.
“That’s strange to hear, coming from you,” she said.
I made a feeble attempt at a smile and then shrugged.
She looked at me for a moment, and pulled her glasses down the bridge of her nose.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I am,” I said. I then added in what I hoped was a more reassuring tone:
“I really am.”
“Do you want to stop—maybe—smoke a joint?” she asked. She sounded a bit guilty and ashamed over what she had just asked.
Now it was my time to laugh.
“Do you want to stop and smoke a joint?” I asked.
“No,” she said, and with some anger.
“We’re almost there anyways,” I said.
“Where?” she asked, and then added: “I don’t know—what time is it? It’s getting late—maybe I should be getting back.”
“If you like,” I said.
We were both surprised. I was not even quite sure why I had suddenly just “given up” so easily. Come on, I told myself a few seconds later. Things come to an end; if that is what was bothering me. Well, it was. But it was not what I now wanted or needed.
“I want to show you more ghosts!” I tried to say with enthusiasm.
She tried to pass off what I just said with a laugh.
“You and these ghostsÉ” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh—but this is different,” I began to explain to her, and at the same time, myself: for I had begun to see this freight train graveyard for something more than just a cool, safe place to party at when I was younger.
“These are the ghosts—of an entire empire!”
“What? Are you crazy?”
If there was a slight trace of genuine fear in her voice, it might have been due to the sudden turn off I made. We had left behind streets of fading shingles and neon convenience store bunkers for a winding gravel filled road lined with hickory bushes and tall, knife blade-like swamp grass. We had left old working class urban for neo swamp land Appalachia ville rural. Soon, there were some reassuring touches of discarded life along the way: an overturned shopping cart, the ripped off fender of a car, a plastic doll in a noose hung from what seemed like a half dead apple tree.
“Look over there,” I said, pointing to the doll.
“Neat,” she said, “and all the way out here. That’s what I want my art project to be like: a symbol of hopelessness in so much waste.”
A statement which made The Young Artist feel refreshed. Most canvases, like their artists, were going to die: while they were being created, however, you could transcend yourself—you could transcend Time!
“But what about these ghostsÉ” she said.
This time, she was reassured: even eager.
“What about them, but that we should be a little cautious,” I said. I tried to pass off my comments as cautionary, mysterious.
“Some bad characters, ha?” she said with a smerk.
“Outlaws, desperadoes, fugitives,” I emphatically said.
She giggled.
“And even the law abiding ones have a little rawness to ‘em. The conductors, the brakemen, the engineers, the passengers, ah well, half of ‘em hiding bootleg liquor in their valises when they rode this train during the Prohibition.”
“Valises, ha? Must have been during Prohibition, because I don’t think people travel with valises anymore.”
“Oh, them were the bad old days when every varmint, rustler, gambler, and Pinkerton detective after them rode on the same train.”
“Should I be singing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my head’ from that movie—what’s its name—where they rob trains?”
I started to slow the car down to only a mile or two an hour. The road was getting more pitted, and we were almost at the abandoned train yard. I shook my head, still pretending to take it all seriously.
“You think it’s funny,” I said, “but these ghosts were part of the real McCoys.”
“And weren’t they part of a famous fued?”
I continued to shake my head.
“These ghosts were part of a time when outlaws or their kind could not be tamed.”
“We don’t have crime today, ha?”
“Crime,” I said, “but not legends.”
And we had now arrived at the legend: a shallow gully with about ten copper colored box cars, a couple of yellow cabooses, (sorry, no red ones) and two rust colored Pullman passenger cars—cars that still showed elegance; for when journey by train was still an elegant way to travel. That is why these two cars—separated from the others—had hand crafted wood frame windows, and a tapered, fluted, pearl colored roof.
The rest of the cars were crookedly lined together. In two jagged rows the line went for almost a half mile. About a mile from where we now parked, were the skeletal remains of a factory. It had two, large, arch like windows. Nearby was a large crane. It was a story or two higher than the factory. The vertical portion of the crane was slightly tilted. This steel bar was also missing pieces, so that it looked like a comb with snapped off teeth. The horizontal beam that was used for lifting, now sloped down to the ground like the neck of a brontosaurus nibbling on some prehistoric grass.
The factory closed a long time ago. While I was young, I remember this factory briefly being open. That meant that these old box cars and cabooses have been rusting here for over twenty years: though these cars were much older.
This factory used to dismantle them then sell the cut away steel for scrap. Almost none of the trains were from this area. How could they be? The Northeast was not what you would call train country. The Northeast was the land of assembly line and scrap yards. We made the junk that the trains took out West, and once the trains had taken away enough of our junk, we took the trains and broke them down and by the time we got to the last train—guess what? This part of the country was out of business itself. Well, could you imagine!
Imagination, however, is what this place had little of.
Imagination was also what this factory seemed to destroy. It was not just old individual cars that the crane hammered apart: it was an entire train line itself. Just like most of the cars rusting away here, most of them had the insignia of a mountain goat perched on a cliff, and beneath it the name of the train’s line: “The Great Pacific Northern.” But because the factory that destroyed the imagination was out of business, this extinct line would be safe. The boxcars would be spared from becoming refrigerators made in China or washing machines made in India. This dead line would have a more dignified and poetic end through the slow isolated decay that poets, young artists, runaways, and maybe fugitives could appreciate. The lines that rolled in here before this one though, forget it. Do we even know their names? They still might be written down in the factory’s records or account books—but those books are probably wasted away—half torn up, waterlogged: with ripped pages scattered across the floor of an office trashed out with empty beer cans, overturned furniture, a mutilated cornucopia of a pulled down venetian blind, and about a zillion cigarette butts. That is why I hated coming to this yard the same time I liked exploring it. I liked having these big refrigerator and box cars to explore, but I hated the way I was also walking on ground that swallowed up their souls. This yard did not just break apart old steel; this processing plant also took apart history and even a part of this country. With every Western train line that disappeared, also disappeared a piece of the American West. East of the Mississippi, the train carted away our baubles. West of the great river, the train was a hiding place for fugitives, hoboes, and all sorts of other outside of the law folks that my imagination fed on pulp TV could dream up. These trains went over mountains, under mountains, and through mountains, only to be crushed by a place that had no mountains. Oh, we had our hills, and on one particular peak, we had a place called Holy Land, but neither did that part of the landscape escape its fate. If it was not directly pulverized, then it was being pulverized in small pieces along with being chipped away through neglect. So here we were in a place that scrapped a more romantic era of history. But did it completely kill off the spirit of the individual who still longed for that romance?
The more I held onto that fading poetry the less I could appreciate the reality bunkered with convenience stores, fast food restaurants, and public storage rental spaces. I was still going to try and steal myself a ride on the train. Even if the train was now a ghost. I had no fear of making a journey that was haunted, a journey into the netherworld. What did scare me was that when I crossed over the blue collar river Hades, there would be no old warriors to greet me and tell me tales as well as prophecies. No Odysseus or Penelope to leave me with a little sly wisdom for a future that often seemed insurmountable—a future that was now like a collapsed and crippled giant. But could this monster be tricked with words and intelligence the way Odysseus tricked Polyphemus?
Before I finished relating the history of this abandoned train yard, The Young Artist and I had already started exploring it. We had stepped into one of the box cars: she entering first and then giggling as she put out her hand for me to take and help me in. Getting into this car did require a bit of a hop. What always impressed me about these old cars was how solid and heavy they were. The lip (or edge) along the car, (and which you stepped on to get into them) was a narrow but thick beam of copper colored iron or steel. The floor of the car was also solid and non pliable, and the corrugated panels had a lot of ridges like the steel of a shipping container. I always gave the panel a pat with my hand: just to feel something that heavy, massive, permanent. So much of the textures that we are surrounded with daily, seem weak, disposable, easily crushed. The floor of this particular car, however, was littered with the detritus of our disposable world: old newspapers, some rags, a ripped sleeping bag with part of its stuffing bleeding out, a white plastic bleach jug, probably used for water or maybe alcohol for cooking or drinking or both.
Hey, didn’t the old hoboes drink the same stuff they cooked with? Wasn’t that a true hobo test? To survive your own Sterno?
Well, the person who camped out here was probably a local; some of the dried out rags that were once clothes still had a faded Red Sox name and logo on it.
“Yuk,” I said, as I kicked at this dried out rag.
“What’s the matter?” the Young Artist said.
“That T-shirt says, ‘Red Sox.’” I said.
“So?”
“Red Sox suck; Yankees rule.”
The Young Artist shook her head.
“You’re such a fucking boy,” she said.
“Hey, everybody’s got to like at least one sport, even artists.”
“I didn’t say that I do not like sports,” she said.
“Then who do you like? The Mets? Well, at least they beat the Red Sox in the series.”
“Um—excuse me? Did I say anything about baseball? Did I?”
I slightly put up my hands; okay, so you don’t like baseball.
“I happen to like as well as play Lacrosse.”
I tried not to, but what the hell, smirked just the same.
“Shut up,” she said. “And this place,”
She meant the boxcar, and then sniffed.
“I feel like I should be wearing a gas mask.”
She had a point. There was a trace of oily-turpentine like smell. In all of these cars. Maybe the recessive oil from the leftover fumes from the toxic products it once carried, and certainly some less than captivating contribution from the transients who bedded down here. The old individual era may leave behind some interesting ruins, but it can also leave behind some nasty smells.
“Well, if you ever want to get a cheap whippet highÉ” I said, as I followed The Young Artist out of the box car.
The air between the rows of the boxcars was a bit more sweet smelling. A narrow street was made from the way the cars had been lined next to each other in two rows. Because the cars were fairly close to each other, there was always a little shadow along this short freight train avenue. The ground was a bit more damp too; consequently, the air felt less toxic and more cooler while we walked down the street that we dubbed, “The Great Rocky and Northern.” We often paused or stopped to admire the outside of a car, poke our heads into another, read the graffiti and then leave some of our own. Especially on an old refrigerator car that already had a decade’s worth of previous scrawling.
“Well, since you’re a poet, you get to leave a message first,” The Young Artist said. She handed me one of those art class crayons. They look like a short stubby ruler with a tapered edge. This one was yellow. Perfect for the copper color of the car.
“Wow, I feel put on the spot,” I said.
“Writer’s block?” she said. She then stated inspecting what seemed to be the wheels underneath this car. As for myself, I nervously tossed and turned the crayon in my hand. Then I started out scrawling over a piece of corrugated steel. Most of the previous graffiti consisted of pledges made by young lovers: Sammy and Yanira 4-ever&evah ya-all.” Some of the pledges were more personal, celebrating, or making an unashamed declaration: “Respect where you smoke, drink, or pee, because Melissa lost her virginity here!” And some of it, well, this car was not the romance that it was for the kids. ‘Fucking ‘Nam and dope brought me here.” And from me, it should have been so simple to leave a message. I had almost half a thousand pages of them back in my car, but all I could think of while I looked at this corrosive metal were much too soon uncelebrated, anonymous, wasted lives. So, the only thing I could think of when it came to write was: “In memory to a transient or dead America,” followed by today’s date and year. This place had to be more than just an isolated bitter end.
As for The Young Artist, it was supposed to be her turn to leave a message. When I turned to give her the crayon, she was already a car down from me, and hunched over and digging through what seemed like the wheels of a car. As I got closer, I saw her other hand holding what seemed like a small pocket full of rocks or hard clumps of earth.
“What are you holding?” I asked.
“Nebraska, Idaho, and Montana,” she replied, while continuing with her work.
I took a closer look at her hand. Still rocks and hard clumps.
“These rocks and pieces of earth stuck between these wheels—more like glued between them. That’s all the souvenirs left from a journey across those plains and mountains you were earlier talking about.”
“And how do you know which rock is Nebraska?” I asked.
“And how do you know it’s some great poet when he’s turned to bones and dust?” she said.
“Ouch,” I said.
“There’s nothing ‘Ouch’ about it,” she said. She straightened back up and put her handful of rocks in her bag. “Look at all the clothes and styles we go through in a year. Bones, they just stay the same.”
“And also anonymous,” I added.
“Then you’ve got to be more of an archeologist in your art.”
“I have a hard enough time just getting images to work,” I muttered.
“That’s not enough,” she said. “You have to be able to see more than just the images here.”
She put one rock into my hand.
“You want me to come up with an image for this rock?” I asked.
“I want you to come up with a story—if not the entire history—of the train that this rock came from.”
And why not the wagon train that rolled across this country before this diesel one, because twenty years worth of Connestogas probably rolled over this rock. What more could I say. I did know the rock was almost triangular, still covered with a rusty clay, and almost made a perfect fit in my palm. At some point probably, it got “hopped” on to an open zooming box car, and then lost between the rust and the wheels where this car came to its final stop—a thousand or more miles from its regular route. Regardless of where this rock came from, there was never going to be a seed or story that could “sprout.” It could only be a fragment, and one that for the most part would have to be false. This stone may have been mute and anonymous—but it was also durable—just like the brakemen, engineers, and hobos who rode this train: strong hard men who could never clean themselves of the earth and the dirt that they always traveled with. At the same time, they were men who never left behind any history, men who died without name, without date. The only thing they had to identify them, was the train that brought them all together—and that train was just about gone. How much longer before it would not even be around as a reminder?
“I can’t tell you what you want,” I finally said. “Because I would be telling the story about the people who lived and worked in this city; people who were tough, hardworking, and for the most part, hard drinking. But people who died without leaving any story behind or names for even people to remember them by.”
I threw the rock into the ‘tunnel’ of cars that still remained ahead of us.
“Why’d you do that!” she said, sounding hurt.
“You asked me to anthro-pologize, if that’s the word, and I did. And I could only see the journey of my background , and the only thing I can tell ya, is that I need to take a journey away from here.”
“No plains? No buffalo? No—“
“No wild Indians?” I said, finishing her line of thought.
“I wasn’t going to say that!” she defensively said. “I’m not racist.”
“No, but half of these guys riding on this train probably were and those same guys probably broke their last cigarette in half to share with the Black fugitive who just hopped into their car. Their journey must have been scary as well as exciting. I just wonder if it ended the way they imagined. Probably not. People who ride the trains are a lot like poets and artists: dreamers, but ending with a broken dream is better than ending with no dream.”
She then spoke “between her breath” but loud enough for me to hear:
“What happened to you? Get too many rejection letters?”
“Not enough to arrive as some half crazed artist with a lot of bull to tell in some loft in an old factory.”
“We’re being a little more positive now,” she sarcastically said.
“My rejection letters are the one thing that come in the mail with my name on it, and without asking me for money. I don’t mind rejection letters, just bills.”
“Which—you haven’t been paying.”
“Alright. Bankrupt. Not even middle age,” I said, with a great sense of fulfillment.
“Sounds like you’ve been on that train already,” she said.
“Hmmm—guess I am. How about another rock. I like this game.”
“No—I think you’ve had enough rocks. Maybe you’d like to smoke a joint.”
We both laughed.
“Besides,” she added, “we’ve come to the end. Here’s the caboose.”
“Not quite the end,” I said. “There’s those two passenger cars.”
The two oblong passenger trains suddenly seemed to have promise about the same way as two dying roses do in a field of dead, brownish, gray crabgrass. What the hell. What was this trip but a journey through a dead, failed paradise? So we might as well take a brief tour through yesterday’s tragic pieces of luxury. We still took a peek and short walk through a caboose—which was a rancid butter color—not the romantic fantasy red that both of us could have used right now. Inside was even less imaginative: it was like being in the office of a small hotel’s check in desk—a space of a short hallway; a space that still smelled like a decade’s worth of old stale cigar smoke. So quite a few card games must have been played by the conductor, the brakeman, the engineer on the desk in the corner; though I hope not all at the same time—somebody should be driving the train! And card games during those nights when the train had been rolling so long since it crossed the Mississippi that Kansas seemed like Nebraska and Nebraska seemed to go on forever until it was stopped by something rocky like Wyoming or Utah. Until then, deal me in Joe and put on a pot of coffee. It’s going to be an all nighter until we come to the next mountain range that breaks up America.
“You don’t think the conductor might have sometimes been alone? Writing letters—or telegramming little notes to his sweet heart?”
This was The Young Artist’s response in anticipation of my mobile-saloon type fantasy of the caboose.
“The trains had telegrams on them?” I asked.
“They had to have something so that the train people could let their own people know that they were okay,” she said.
“Because sometimes, late at night,” I said, “when outside this small window here looked like one big tumbleweed blowing graveyard—“
I then paused—but it was not of my own doing. There was nothing else to think of or imagine after the flat, dead landscape: a point where you wanted to get through as quickly as possible.
“The passenger cars? Remember?” she said, reminding me of where we were supposed to be going.
“Yeah, right,” I said. But now it felt hard to leave this caboose—as if there was still something unfinished; still something that needed to be said or written.
There was also nothing to be spoken on the way to the two cars—at least between the two of us. The Young Artist was walking slightly ahead of me. She was focusing on those cars. She seemed eager to get inside one the same way a risk free kid cannot wait to get on the most dangerous ride at the amusement park. Her sly squint and smile seemed to ask: are you getting on? Do you know what you are about to step into? Before I could answer, she had turned back around—and just as quickly, walked up the two or three steps that led to the car, disappearing into it.
“WaitÉ” I only managed to softly say. I wanted to speak louder, but –the sight of her entering into this arch-topped door of this car; her long black dress trailing behind her; her hair and scarves making a slight rustle: an elegantly dressed woman from another era, sneaking off to meet the man who earlier waited upon her and her soul-dead but brash husband; or maybe it was the ghost of such a woman, condemned to make an assignation that would never prove fruitful now that she was dead; the risk that she should have taken while she was alive. As The Young Artist passed into this car, she briefly turned to look at me: her face now a slightly bemused spirit, knowing that it had fatally charmed one of the foolishly living.
I grinned; scraped my Converse shod foot back in the dirt and then said: “So you want to play, ha?”
I ran the short distance to the car, and hopped up the three steps to the door way, and then paused as I beheld a decaying room of tarnished brass, rotting upholstery, yellowing black and white checkerboard tile, jaundiced glass, dulled faded chrome, graying mahogany. I was looking more at an elongated dining room than a sardine can with anonymous seats to sit in. Not in this car, where weary travelers had windows you could open and seats that were velour’d and elegantly mahogany-armed the same way they were in the balconies of old movie house palaces. The floor was a black and white checkerboard corridor: what you would expect on the patio dining area of a restaurant on the Rivera, and the concave ceiling above was exquisitely inlaid with ebony and lightly colored wood. In its day, this was a car where high tea must have been served and from men in ice cream white suits and gloves and softly pushing a linen draped cart with a glimmering silver and pewter setting. The purpose of this car was not to get from point A to point B; rather, it was the purpose of points A and B to serve as a frame for getting great enjoyment of life; thus the true purpose of this car. A purpose that was foreign to this land of bungalows and factories.
Ah, but it was such mundane and monotonous landscape that would eventually triumph over this once elegant life.
But where was The Young Artist?
Not on this car, I began to realize as I slowly walked down the aisle. I still took a brief, cautious look to the left and right of me. As if expecting to see a now shocked dowager looking up at me, and a pin striped, fedora’d ,tooth pick chewing gambler squintingly eyeing me. But the only ghosts were in my “Guys and Dolls” and “Agatha Christie” fed imagination. This car sadly—was empty.
There was still one more car, and I do not know why, but I had a hunch that I might not find it empty.
I entered this car more slowly; as if I was the spirit. I was so quiet, that I did not hear my own footsteps. I did not even hear or feel a rustle. Now it was my turn to surprise her, I mentally smiled. Yet my “ghostly” entrance was more than that. This was the first time that we had been separated; where she had run off to be alone. Yes, I think we were briefly separated before—but this time, it felt different. This time, the “props” in our journey were less comforting the same time they were more poignant. This time, the ruins showed more of a wreck or crash that took place in the heart, and after it did, permanently crippled it.
I stepped into the car.
It was empty; I still sensed she was inside it. We had been too close these past couple of hours for me not to feel her presence hiding and snug in one of the seats towards the opposite end of the car. And if I knew she was here without actually seeing her, she probably knew the same about me. There was no more need for stealth. Walk with steadiness. Walk with the confidence to meet any surprise. Walk as one who was now living; in spite of being in a present framed by a dead, once splendid past.
She was in the second to the last seat: the one by the window. She sat with her hands loosely folded on her lap. From the way she was sitting, she only had to turn her face an inch or two away before she would be looking out the window and lose the mediation that she was in before I had gently interrupted it, stopping at her row. She softly smiled to acknowledge me, but her eyes were still “half lidded”and had a filmy, dreamy gaze to them.
I softly smiled, and then said:
“Any of these seats taken?”
“Been empty since I got on,” she said.
“Nothing sadder than an empty train,” I said, sitting on the seat across from her.
She turned to look out the window.
“Well, the landscape outside,” she said.
I folded my hands and crossed my leg.
“It’ll get better,” I said.
“Think so?” she said.
It was a question I did not expect, but nevertheless, a question that had to be answered. And from what was a sweet—and also silly “game.”
Nonetheless, this easily thrown out comment seemed to have more power and more riding on it that than anything else we had previously talked about. Which is why there was only way to answer it: by softly, partially rising. And moving to the seat next to her, and once I was seated, take her hand and reassure her eyes that now seemed to think otherwise.
“YesÉ” after which I strongly whispered: “It will get better.”
And then both of us—at the same time—and from what felt like the same desperate need for reassurance, strongly embraced and hugged each other; rocked and rubbed each other for warmth and support; caressed what was shy and delicate; her ear, my cheek, the edges of her soft lips—
“No,” she quickly said as she gently pushed me away.
“It will only make it harder,” she continued, “and it was never—“
“Yeah, okay,” I said as I drew back.
“We’d been so disappointed with each other tomorrow,” she said.
“If you say so.”
She took my hand, and squeezed it hard enough so that I had to look at her.
“We’d both be lost together, when that’s not what we want. Do you know—“
She closed her eyes, softly laughed, and said with quiet embarrassment:
“Do you know what I earlier thought while you were walking towards me? When I didn’t even see you—yet knew you were coming—and I thought that was because you were my twin—a lost twin—but twins that could never be together. I’m sorry.”
She gently gave me back my hand and then turned to the window.
“For a moment—for a moment I thought—“ I hesitatingly said, “that I had imagined you.”
“It’s so dark here,” she said.
“It’s always dark here,” I said.
“I know, butÉ”
She now turned to me.
“It’s now past afternoon. It will only be light for a little while longer. I don’t want the day to end here.”
This time I took her hand, and said:
“I understand.”
“I know this is going to sound odd—especially from someone whose like a vampire—stop! Don’t laugh! Don’t! But—I’d like to see the sun set. I haven’t seen one, believe it or not. Do you know any cool places?”
“I do, but there’s just one thing.”
“What?”
“Just promise me that when the sun does go down, that you won’t bite me on the neck.”
“Oh, you’re lucky—Mmmm! Lucky that I’m in a good mood, because from where you’re now sitting—and I don’t even have to make my hand into a real hard fist—just a fist, see?”
She showed me her fist.
“I got ya,” I said, quickly moving away, and awkwardly crossing my legs as I did so. That was not fair though; vampires aren’t supposed to kick you in the crotch.
I was about to settle into another seat. But then I remembered, we had to watch the sun go down. Me too. I don’t think I even saw a sun go down—in spite of all the times I stayed up for sun rise and sun down without so much as getting in more than a brief nap. Today though, would be my first—well almost. I did not see the sun rise—but I felt it—and it was strong enough to wake me—and let me cross woods and share the road with an unexpected and delightful visitor. One I would end of the day with. But I would likely not see her in the morning. No, I would not see her in the morning.
We quickly walked back to the car and on the way, we talked about being late for “our sunset.” The real joke was in the way we both discovered (and shared) how the two of us missed a lot of so-called important dates or were late for them. I was surprised to hear that that she was like that—which is why she then confessed that:
“That art class I was supposed to go this morning?”
“YeahÉ”
“Well, like—I hadn’t been to it in like—two and a half weeks.”
Which she quickly justified by noting:
“I had been working on my art project for that class! I had been collecting material that can be used for this art project.”
After such candid admission, I could only offer one myself.
“That novel in the back seat?”
“Yeah?”
But with some suspicion in her voice.
“And, you know—the way I’ve been trying to get to New York.”
“Um—can we just go somewhere and try to see the sun go down?”
“What? You don’t think I’ll do it?” I said as I started the car. “You don’t think I’ll get to New York? Finish my novel?”
She giggled.
“Get a job?” she added.
“You got me there,” I said, after which we both laughed.
And now I began to pull out for what was probably going to be our final drive together, and to somewhere we could see a rancid, iodine centered sun dissolve.
Appropriately, the sun was more of a soft-colored rust. Less sickness, more decay—but the latter shading had more respectability about it. Was my world becoming an ancient ruin worthy of archeological study? Well, that was one way of putting it—or putting it off. There was still a lot of insignificance, or lost or unfulfilled lingering in the present; yet, there now seemed to be a temporary peace or truce made with such unfulfillment. The clapboard shingled streets were now quiet, more retiring. No one was outside on the streets that we drove past, yet front screened doors were opened and behind them, a small shaft or block of light coming from a kitchen or living room: someone was already home, resting, watching, preparing: someone who was expected would soon be home. No need to ring the bell or take out your key. The front door was open and unlocked, just as such doors had been for the past few generations when men but also women came home from a gray lighted shift in the factory. These houses, these streets, made up a simple beauty but a strong constant. For how much longer though. The rust was now turning to plum: the beginning of twilight; or that strange endless rich coloring overcast that hides the sun as it makes its exit. We would still be able to see the rust turn to asphalt: a color and image that was appropriate given our upcoming journeys. Could I still make it down to New York before this night was over? Well, if anything will get me there, it is a colossal unfinished manuscript. And the car that it also happens to be in.
And here we are: no New York, but the end of our journey. She did notice right away that I pulled the car over and stopped in front of a ten story tan brick apartment house. A few blocks away from a church that looks like a famous European cathedral. Perhaps she was thinking about her next journey: perhaps to Europe: or perhaps she is thinking about how she is going to finish her art project for the class she has not been going to in—ohhh, shut up and let her make her own mind up. Hopefully, her brief time spent with you would convince her of the need to skip more classes.
“What are we doing here?” she said. “Play a quick game of bingo?”
She noticed the several old people slumped in the fixed chairs, beneath a gray and white awning. There was also the damning designation “Senior Citizens” attached to the name of this apartment.
“Um—if you like, we can go to a casino—we’ve got a couple of ‘em. It’s the one thing this state has going for it.”
“No thanks,” she said as she followed me in to the apartment’s lobby. “But maybe while we’re here you can take out an application to be an orderly.”
“I would, but then I’d get some weird and twisted notion to wear a bedpan on my head like Don Quixote.”
“So this is what it’s all been about,” she said. Her voice seemed like it was in a long delayed answer to herself. “Attacking windmills.”
So what if it was, I thought. The scary thing was, they were not in my imagination. They were oppressively real, and they were called the Bank, the Government, and the Multi-national Corporation. She was also wrong about my attacking them. I tried that already, and to be honest, I do not think that I made much of an impression on The Paradise Casualty Insurance Company when I worked as a semi-permanent temp worker a few years back. It was so bad that they did not even fire me: I had to quit out of frustration.
Well, that was in the past. The present was now about running from windmills—and the immediate present, going to a Senior Citizen apartment complex in the downtown of a small rust belt city.
It was also a complex where I was somewhat known by one of the resident’s sitting in the lobby. He raised his hand when he saw me and called out in a raspy voice:
“Hey, Yankees fan!”
“He knows you,” the Young Artist sharply said. “Why.”
“Come on, I’ll explain when we get on the elevator,” I said.
I was hoping I could sneak in without being recognized, without having to explain what I could still not explain to myself; at least without awkwardness and embarrassment.
“This was where my grandmother livedÉ” I started to explain without looking at her. “I used to come here to visit herÉandÉ”
“How long ago was that?” she said. “Ten years ago?”
“Yeah, I knowÉbut about a month after she died, I automatically came here—forgetting that—you know—and the people in the lobby not only remembered me, but—I think they also forget that she died—and well, I knew I could not go to her apartment—because it was no longer her apartment—so I went up to the roof—where we’re going.”
Bing! The elevator chimed as the dull gray doors opened, and just in time to see our reflections as they settled into an elongated, smudgy faced distortion.
We said nothing on the way up; did not even look each other. For all the time we had been together, this elevator ride seemed like the beginning of our coming apart.
“Just wait ‘til we get there,” I tried to reassure her. “There’s a great view from the roof.”
“And all this time these old people think you’re visiting someone.”
She sounded a bit mad, as if I had been deceiving someone.
The elevator finally stopped at our floor. We walked down the hallway for a moment before I began speaking:
“Put it this way; I never really stopped comingÉand now that I’m leaving, I probably won’t be able to come back here again. I’ll be gone long enough—so that if I come back, they’ll think I’m a real stranger.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head, smiled, and then took my hand and asked:
“Is it that badÉ?”
Yes, because this was someone whose flesh I would always touch with love; whose flesh I would never be able to touch again. And how could your hands ever stop reaching—for a person that you love? How much time would you need to make your hands forget? Ah, but I could not ask that from someone I was about to lose. Someone who—no—no—no—I would never forget this young artist! Never!
“It’s a great view,” I said.
I gently opened the gray aluminum door with the red exit sign above. Light slowly poured in. I held the door open for the young lady to go through.
“It’s just up a few steps,” I said.
We both giggled, as if that is all it was to reach the top—just a few small steps! That is all it took to get to the highest point in this city—short of going to Holy Land, which we would be able to see from this roof. Though, short of that, the highest point was on top of an apartment building for people who would or could seldom make the walk up a few steps. I always vowed that I would make those few steps; no matter how old I got, I was always going to keep climbing!
And now behold. For the two of us; we may have missed the descent of the sun—yes, we did. But the sky was a light but rich ultramarine—that was also dark enough to bring out the flickering beauty of the thousands of lights coming from houses, streets, gas stations, small stores and tenements in the several valley folds that rolled forth below. We both went to the railing at the end of the bunker-like doorway we stepped out of. That is where the best view was—and as for the rest of the un-fenced off roof top, three plastic mold chairs—two of which were on their sides, and a fold out card table: now sitting crookedly from its weather twisted legs.
“Well, someone else has been up here,” The Young Artist said.
“But not for awhile,” I said. “Besides, whosever party it was—it was faced away from the better view—away from Holy Land.”
“Where?” The Young Artist quickly said as she started looking for it.
“Over—“
“Look! The cross—there’s the cross!”
“There,” I finished up.
And three miles or so from where we were standing, and on the only other piece of earth or structure higher than the one we were now on, was a tall hot white glowing cross.
“DamnÉ!” The Young Artist said, and then shook her head and smiled.
“WhatÉ” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It just seems—so long agoÉ”
She was right, and within the moment it took for me to agree with her, I saw this entire day flash before my eyes, starting from when I was woken up by an unsympathetic sun while I was trying to sleep off some beer and marijuana from the previous few hours; to the out–of-place, black dressed young woman that walked out from a small field of dead reeds while I was trying to take a piss!
—to the two of us getting in a ten or was it twelve year old junk-filled car—oh, we covered more of a journey within this one day than this car ever could from its one hundred eighty plus thousand miles!
Enough to junk this car. It had completed its journey. Someday, I would try to write a poem about it. The same way Turner made a masterpiece in that painting where a small steamer tows out an old sailing ship to sea to be burned—my poem would not be a masterpiece—but it would have heart. No reader would fail to see that.
“WellÉ” I said.
She raised one eyebrow at me; surprised that I should be the one to make our exit.
“It’s getting dark, and I think this building has security at night.”
“You mean you don’t know that?” she said.
“I try to keep clear of the law—even the rent-a-cops,” I said as we started to walk down the short flight of steps.
“Hmmm, if you can have rent-a-cops, I’m wondering if you can have the equivalent like –rent-a-crook.”
“Not for me,” I said. “When I break the law, it’s going to be for real.”
“Me too,” she said.
And so, to the best of our ability, we would both break the law—but as artists. I am glad that we both realized that about ourselves as well as each other before we left. But as we left the apartment, we were still walking together. We passed a few small stores of the 99 cents variety (everything in this store priced no higher than a dollar!). And sometimes you find some of the greatest treasures in such places, and if one was open now, we would have gone inside. But no, the store was closed.
Surprisingly enough, we were now coming to a cemetery, which could also be used as a short cut to the college I had gone to; the college The Young Artist was presently going to. Yes, the way she tried to hide our parting with an embarrassed though sad smile told me that she was going back to school at this moment.
Ah, but did she know that this cemetery was unique? (And that is quite a statement coming from a graveyard connoisseur like me). What made this cemetery special, were the dozen or so graves with no bodies beneath their tombstones. These stones were mostly from the early decades of the 19th century: back when this city was just getting its start as a factory town. Well, not for some of the lads—they would skip the murky brick workhouse and sign up as a deck hand on a clipper ship: they would know the freedom of the sea!
But only for a short time. Many of these young men who sailed out, were also lost at sea. Their graves were put up by their families; such as the marble of one stone which noted: “Ezekial Endicott presumably died on the year of our lord, 1821—lost at sea, but not in our hearts.”
“Sad how so many of them never got to come back,” she said.
“Sadder how so many of them never left,” I said back.
“I can now see where the college is. I know the way from here. It isn’t long.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I’ll be okay. It’s not over five minutes to campus—and I’ve got this mace, see”
After which she produced a small hairspray size can of such product attached to her key ring.
“Well now I know why you got in the car.”
“No, it’s not that. Even if I didn’t have this in my purse, I knew about you through your poetry. I saw you read it a couple of times at The Boiler Room. Nothing to worry about.”
“That—should make me feel good—but for some reasonÉ”
“Oh, be who you are!” she emphatically said.
“And what’s that?”
She just looked down and giggled. I shook my head and then quickly said:
“I feel like I should be going back to college.”
We both softly laughed.
“Listen, I would not expect you to give ‘em back, but you can keep the Converse.”
“Oh, I was going to.”
“Well, I still think you have your boots back—“
“Already on my feet,” she noted. “I put ‘em on while I was back in the car and you were in the church praying.”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said.
My Converse—or what were now her Converse, were tied together by the laces and slung across her shoulder. A smile and a giggle when she saw me looking at what used to be about half of all of my shoes.
And then with some embarrassment, she cleared her throat. She shyly walked up to me, her eyes looking down, and when she stood before me, she unraveled one of her scarves, and gently wrapped it around my neck. She quickly looked up, smiled with some embarrassment, but also fear—hoping that I would not explode or yell or rip the scarf off.
“Thanks,” I quietly said.
She wrapped the scarf into a “coil” around my neck.
“There. Now you look more like a cowboy,” she said.
“Or a biker,” I added.
We both laughed, and then, that moment.
“Well, IÉ” is all I was able to say.
And that is when we both noticed that we were five—maybe seven feet apart—much too far for us to embrace—much too awkward for either one of us to step forward and give each other a hug. She had to go to her school, and I had to go to New York.
“Okay, well, we’ll probably see each other around,” I said.
“Is that all?” she said, and then sadly laughed, adding:
“No, you’re probably right. Someday, I’ll turn around and there you’ll be—
—but in Paris or Venice or Berlin. But right now, let me give you a hug here!”
And within less than a second, we were both strongly hugging each other; oh, more than that, much more than that!
And then she pulled away because she had to go back to school, and I had to go to New York.
But she did not leave before she shook her head, “Yes,”; convinced that someday we would meet in Berlin, Venice, or Paris: she was sure that all of our dreams would happen, because that is what you believe when you are young, and you are an artist.
And then she turned and started walking, and after a few moments, she melted into a night that seemed rich with so much promise.
