---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “the Blind Eye” cc&d (v265) (the September/October 2016 issue, v265) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book After the Blues the cc&d July-Dec. 2016 collection book		get the 318 page July-Dec. 2016 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Blind Eye

Patrick Fealey

    The Blind Eye or DROWNING IN ARTISTRY, THE GRINNING EGOTIST TURNS A BLIND EYE FROM HIS SOUL SO THAT HE CAN PLAY VAPID WORD GAMES. America, your writer: Danny Anthony. He is five foot five inches and is a rational self-promoter. He wears a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. He has never ridden a motorcycle. His writing is a meticulous assembly of words at the expense of drift. He is logical and he thinks a lot. He really tries to take the man out of art. His triumph is hiding. He really puts effort into his one paragraph a day regimen. Danny really tries. Comparisons with Whitman are absurd, but one writer named Jocko made one. Whitman said, “The words of my book nothing, the drift everything.” Danny has no drift and I doubt Whitman ever abused a woman or anyone else.
    Buddha says “Our lives are thought, but our thoughts are not our lives.” He poses that we must break through thought to be fully alive. Vision lives beyond the tenacity of thought, a place where we become barely involved. Barely involved, light takes over, leaving one in the position of channel and observer. Bare. Art’s job is to capture and express that life which Buddha describes. It’s the realm of magic, chance, and quiet things, a journey to the other side, the invisible land, outside the perimeter, where we must surrender.
    It all started in San Francisco. My girlfriend Jess worked with a girl who’s boyfriend was a writer. The women hoped that uniting us would save them. Danny’s stories were published in several magazines, including the one his girlfriend Sheryl edited. This is how they had met. Jess brought home a copy so I could read Danny’s story. Another one of the editors was famous. Charlotte Dagwood. I avoided her books. She was renowned for ponderously obscurifying life.
    Danny read simple and definitive. He was very funny. He was a comic, an avoider. His sentences were spare and he heard his characters. I needed this in a writer. But there was no suggestion or mystery. He was an intellect asserting itself and so confined himself to a spider hole. There was no mystery between the lines. If he didn’t know it, it didn’t exist. There was no ex-foliation. The words were not more than the sum of their parts. There was nothing sublime about him because he didn’t allow life to reveal itself. He had a fatal blind spot, ego. There was craft and he was a technical master, but his ego ran across the page, chasing off the unknown and what he feared. I didn’t need this from anybody. The individual, the man, the living and suffering man behind the typewriter was nowhere to be seen. He was hiding behind artistry. The technician was everywhere. I was dazzled by the ice, but I was more interested in blood and humility than bright punctuation. Danny was thinking through things, out of things, putting himself above things, above pain and suffering. In saying “not me,” he was creating the biggest me.
    I imagined the girls at the office: “My boyfriend, or the guy I live with, is, or so he says he is, is a writer. He is something. He types.”
    “Does yours drink a lot?”
    I was expected to send a story his way. Problem was, I didn’t have a story. I had a first novel underway about a street musician, but it was still a jumbled collection of sketches. I had never written a true short story. So my first real short story was forced by two women at a water cooler. I typed on the floor for two mornings. The girls were waiting. I typed in the dark living room, loosened up by whiskey from the nights before. Out came this tale about jumping a train with my college roommate, high on Scotch in Humboldt. We made great efforts to find and jump this train and it wound up running for a mile, where we were caught. Jess couriered the pages to her girlfriend, Sheryl. That night the buzzer went off sometime after dinner. I went out and found a guy at the bottom of the steps, shaking the bars. I assumed I knew him, but who? And then Sheryl came into the light and said “Hi” like it was his idea to drop by. I’d met Sheryl at Jess’ office once, another sexy Jew. Never too many. The man smiling behind the bars was Danny.
    Jess had told me Sheryl’s stories about Danny. And the characters in his story had given me the idea of a big guy with an untucked shirt draped over a quarter keg and a shave he could converse with. But Danny was lean and clean, like his writing style. He had brown hair and was wearing a leather jacket and black Levi’s. He wore motorcycle boots and his feet stomped through the oriental rug in the living room. He was enthusiastic and talked. He was assertive, and he took the center, which was okay with me. But I was not into enthusiasm and I was wary of his positivism, which usually meant self-inflation and arid going. I was glad he liked my story, but I didn’t know if I was being invited to a birthday party or a suicide. Enthusiasts choose their pains. They construct myths which fall on other people’s heads. Enthusiasm is not warmth.
    I did not call him after this night, as the girls had hoped.
    Danny was ahead of me when it came to putting words together. I would learn from him. Our paths crossed thanks to the women and their parties and seminars. Danny and I drank free Scotch in Carmel and drove in silence to Henry Miller’s place in Big Sur. We began corresponding after Jess and I moved back East. We didn’t talk often. I saw Danny and Sheryl again in New York, where he was doing a reading on the lower east side. I was surprised by the mob. Danny had a following of friends and fans. I turned out to be one of them, but Danny and Sheryl didn’t make me feel like I was a part of the mob in New York. The three of us sat pretty on a lower east side curb. Bicycles chained to signposts starred. And Mars and Jupiter, jobless, lassoing cabs and kisses on the mouth. Sitting pretty on an east side curb, the night was a garden.
    After New York, Danny distanced himself. He wrote, but it was not the same. I was treated like a fan. His letters became generic. He’d write something personal at the top of the letter and ended it with a personal line. The middle read like a press release. I got the feeling he was writing form letters to many people. I should have accepted my unworthiness, but I typed him an impersonal letter, leaving the top and bottom blank. I scrawled updated, personalized parts in pencil at the top and bottom of the letter. I mailed it. The next letter to arrive was all personal in content. I wasn’t ready to give up on him because he had talent and someday something somewhere somehow was going to bust his ego down to dust. He would die to himself. He would surrender to life. Then he would become an artist. Ego is blindness. It’s a universe constructed in a corner. You find the same words again and again.
    A year later, in San Francisco, Danny and Sheryl let me sleep on their couch for two months. Danny and I talked very little during this time, but he seemed patient. I spent a lot of time with Sheryl and he said he was glad to get her off his back. Danny knew many people. The phone rang constantly and each afternoon he brought up a pile of mail. He told me all these friends brought him no joy.
    Danny is monstrously empathetic, like a priest. His empathy is both his trouble and his tool. Danny is an attractive personality who collects people because they make him feel bigger. The joylessness comes when he chooses the hell of other people over the unknown, over the road less traveled, over silence and solitude. I am not as fond of people who collect people as they are of themselves. He did not like being alone. Collecting friends is a cynic’s hobby. He was stretched and compromised. He wanted in because he thought he needed them for his career. He sometimes thought about getting away, but he couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t. He lived in the hell of other people because people made him feel bigger. He liked feeling big; who would not? The truth was people make a nice solvent. That is why it burned. If he got bigger, it was as a spreading vapor. The man was diffused. I observed this as a withdrawn part of his affliction. There was no joy in these friends because he was erasing himself. How did he look upon these people, who he used and disliked? Were they suckers? If the capacity for suffering indicated a capacity for love, there could be love someday. But his joylessness said he endured us because he needed to be needed, and because he wanted the pain, because he wanted the inflation pain caused. In many ways he was like a corrupt messiah who resented the flock. He needed the people to be the savior, but he didn’t love them or like them.
    On Danny’s website is a story from his hometown newspaper. A reporter calls him an “icon of the underground.” Years before, there were signs that he knew. Danny was wearing custom shirts which cost a lot of money. The characters he wrote about were broke and were lucky to own a clean t-shirt. Danny had one pricey shirt for each day of the week. They were very stylish, hip, hand-made on Haight Street. “I fear that I am becoming a character,” he said. Under seige by admirers, hurrying down the streets of San Francisco in motorcycle boots and a $200 shiny red shirt, Danny believes in cocaine and coverage. He burns a camel and slips behind the wheel: “I don’t know what I have made of myself, but I know what I’m going to show you.”
    The New Yorker arrives every week, looking for writers scared shitless of the abstract, willing to deny that man has never been more self-conscious. Danny is their man. At bottom, he is conservative.
    Danny is the type of person who must insist upon his position. Always catching up to the front, striving to lead. Very sane, courting pain, lacking humility. In contrast to a man upon whom genius is thrust, a man bowed by the weight. Danny’s bright dissolution and warm disguise are more human and beloved than the shadow of silent suffering.
    I stopped writing to Danny when I realized I could say nothing true. He was dedicated to preserving his constructs. He was an icon now, degrading himself to greater acclaim. He was amused by this. He gave us his hoax and acted like a fool. Privately, he laughed in superiority, proud to be described as “a souve fuck-you.” And he was no charlatan, he was too intelligent and thoughtful, premeditated. He might be saying “Watch me while I prostrate who you think I am before you.”
    It’s funny how egocentricity makes you want to be someone else. Danny was assembling this artist in whose shoes he wished to walk. That is his game. Image before the man. As long as he gets the image right, it doesn’t matter how much misery he causes himself. He is creating his own destiny, or the destiny of the man he is creating. It is against nature, an appetite for suicide. It is about rejecting and hiding, popular pastimes for the human race. The character Danny puts forward is like a walking press release and he is ready to deflect and neutralize anything that challenges it. It is the same conscious wrenchings one finds in his writing. It is the ego at work. Danny has gotten rid of Danny. Danny extends to us his creation, ultimately his emptiness. He has needed our help to remove himself. The consenting and unwitting are used once and used again. They helped cause it, they believe in it. They believe in his bright dissolution, one of the most disingenuous suicides imaginable.
    I lost Danny in the spread of doctors, lawyers, and salmon. He was around. My Scotch had turned to water, so I went to the bar, got us each a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks, doubles. I walked around, a drink in each hand. I didn’t see him. All I saw were medical insurance executives, more doctors, and more lawyers. We had followed our women to this party where I did not identify with anyone. I wandered back to the area of the bar. He was not at the bar. I turned and we stood face to face. In his hands were two Johnnie Walker Blacks, doubles. Then Sheryl appeared to say we were leaving to have dinner with a lawyer friend of hers. Get ready. We drank twice as much, twice as fast, leaving our glasses on tables on the way out of the hotel. I never noticed Danny drunk that night and I can say this because I never noticed myself drunk.
    I recently came across some notes written during my stay with Danny and Sheryl five years after I met them. A lot of disappointment scrawled on café napkins. He’d published his own novel and was enjoying the attention, but I’m not sure if it was the book or his life which had turned him into a loud, furious, megalomaniacal bore. He was drinking and snorting coke. He was very opinionated and contentious. He could back himself up with enthusiasm and eloquence and conviction. Like he was a jester. He was tough to walk with. I couldn’t walk beside Danny anywhere. He wouldn’t walk with me. It was a race. He walked in front. He always walked faster than me, though I walk faster than him. It made me smile, irritated. Danny could not be second. He had a neurotic need to be in front. The few times he could not be in front, it was as if he had retreated. I stayed with them for two months and more and more I realized I was in the presence of an absolute asshole whose redemption was a book shelf full of jokes. He wanted something out of those books and now he was getting it. A light snowfall atop the mountain he had climbed. Why should I give a fuck? If he’s slipped on his ass? I didn’t, but I did because I had envisioned him better. I knew if he had more balls, he’d keep to himself more. If he was less needy, he wouldn’t scream at his wife. If he had balls, he wouldn’t afflict himself on others and let them afflict themselves on him. He seemed like a joyless misanthrope who was acting out a performance his ego needed to see. He was very conscious of the need for drama in the life of the famous author he would be or was. You could witness him watching himself doing things, gauging what the effect might be and whether he could use it in a book or movie. He was not natural. There was always a con and camera running.
    He was very preoccupied with verbally beating up on his wife. His fear was the arrival of true beauty and nobility of soul and it came. It was tough, because I was living on the guy’s couch. During the day, we kept our distance and maintained ourselves with few words. I realized he was a self-elevated asshole, but I needed a bed. Once, he apologized for his distance, said “I have ethereal problems I cannot discuss, lest they become real.” At night, we raced the streets of San Francsico, Danny screaming drunk out cab windows on the way to score coke. This was the only time we got along. I found myself in the middle of a marriage disintegrating under Danny’s egomania and self-destruction. Whiskey, cocaine, screaming, every day. It was almost comic, but it was a bore. And his poor wife Sheryl was on the other end. It was hard to watch him wear her to the bone. She was much less sure of herself than she had been a couple years before. She was almost stuttering and unable to hold a line of thought. She was beaten down, or, in a more clinical term, abused to the limit. She had lost 30 pounds she didn’t have to spare.Danny wrecked her and wrecked himself, hung-over and in bed, missing work. Sheryl vacillated from nursing him to wanting a divorce. He used these self-induced nightmares as stamps on his claim to mental illness. His jealousy of my manic-depression was peculiar. If there is such a thing as sane, Danny is there; he was just a drug addict and alcoholic. He told me he felt no joy without coke. He felt no joy drinking. He felt no joy from all his friends. I asked, “Then why do it?” He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Danny couldn’t find joy anywhere he turned. Maybe it was in the turning.
    Sheryl told me a story. They were at her folks’ for dinner and her father disclosed that he had cancer and was dying. Danny’s first words when they got outside the house were, “Now I’ll never fucking get to New York!” It’s illustrative of how he thinks and of how he leads himself into guilty feelings later. Danny is self-centered, a thorn in his own present. When he writes, he treats his wrongs. He deals in wrongs which should have never happened. He says to me he is plagued by guilt. And he writes like it. The way I see it, his never-ending wallowing is a way to punish himself without confronting a true change in character. He has not changed. He creates and enjoys new guilt all the time. He acts in bad faith and uses the guilt. It is his intent to suffer, to make himself bigger. Average suffering is insufficient. He equates pain with size. The more pain, the bigger he is. The suffering he causes and guilts over is one more way to access pain. But it’s artificially created pain and it brings down others. There is only one way to act and everything else is a con. There is real pain available if he could be still. He is a man fixing problems he created to fix. And he is unable to fix them. There were moments while I was staying with him, maybe twice, when he broke down for a few seconds. He broke down into someone humble. But it was pathetic because it was against his will. He didn’t want to be humble. Something had gone wrong. He looked shattered and his eyes searched mine, wandering sickly. It was the same sickening egomaniac, crippled, looking to me like I had the answer. At times like this he would say that he was “jealous” and “envied” the simple and truthful way that I wrote and the ease with which it came to me. I played it down: “Yeah, well . . . you know . . . only you can be yourself . . .” And a few seconds later he would shift back to the guy who could not be quiet, the guy who could not stop posturing, the guy who said: “That short story of mine is the greatest story I’ve ever written. No, in fact, it’s the greatest story I’ve ever read.”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...