A Life Of Quiet Desperation

I want to tell you about something that happened to me many years ago, something that may or may not be relevant in discussing this so called “privilege of perception” issue. It might assist you in evaluating this internecine in-fighting that’s been going on between the lawnmowers and the landowners over in Gulliver’s Square, though I’m not sure if either side would listen to what I’m sure would be your most thoughtful and enlightened and well-meaning ideas on the subject. I’ll proceed anyway. It’s something to do besides the collecting of bugles and frog pillows and partially digested mints from the gummed-up and unmoving parts of AssembleLine machines. So, this event that I am about to describe to you, as best I can describe any one thing with words, is a thing that really did happen, an occurrence that was at once particular and corporeal and very lucidly trapped in the ever-happening prison walls of time, and yet was also eerie and surreal, more than just our common place occurrence, though it was a common thing, a thing seen and witnessed by yours truly who possesses all the ordinary tethers of sense which filter out much more than they take in and digest and are just as dull as anybody else’s. And it must be beared in mind that my particular faculty for making sense of what I observe, of putting those random accumulations of material brought brainward by my faulty organs of perception, as privileged as they may be, nonetheless are still only frayed and malfunctioning conduits that lose much more than they could ever transport untampered and pure into this dunder sopped and damaged jalopy of a head of mine. I cannot avoid biased and subjective observation. I cannot make any promises of these events being told to you in such a fashion that is not in some way clouded by my own personal makeshift, benighted, egoistic, figurative, muddled, cloudy, ill-conceived, boa constrictor like whim. That this story is true, that it sticks to the facts, doesn’t veer from the actuality of all that happened the way my brain remembers it happening (not, sadly, how I remember remembering it happening…for that would be something else all together for which I am quite unprepared and also unwilling to go into at this juncture, and anyway it would not assist you in this current situation, and so I shall not digress) is not important, though it is true, as any truth must have at least some hint of veracity. I can smell the corn oil cooking in the BellPot mechanical StoveStomachs and it is making me thirsty for BullyGrub and HastyMud. There is a certain temper in the air tonight. I will try not to let it invade my thoughts. So if I can be granted license to stray from the GrandMaster’s tempo for a moment, if I can let my heart swell with terrible things like memories and GunderFlies, if I can sew my SupperBeads a little prematurely, then I will attempt, in my feeble and mercurial way, to relate this tale to you from my past and give what I hope to be some differing sense of what it means to be a garden in these arid times. I was in a town that used to be called New Orleans back a few years before the turn of the century. My grandchildren will be sad to hear that the most exciting illicit substance that I partook of regularly was a cup of coffee at the old Coffee Shops that used to bloom all over the city like dandelions. I would walk the streets early in the morning, watching the sun start to spill all over things, splash on the French Quarter and drip down the walls of buildings, drinking my hot coffee from what they used to call Styrofoam cups. This was long before the ban. But this much is obvious. I was drinking caffeine for Obed’s Sake. But that’s not what we used to say. We used to say for Christ’s Sake. But those were much different times. Forgive me for the nostalgia. It is common to those of us who grew up during the first ClintonBush cycle. Those who came of age during the 2nd and 3rd cycles were much more inclined to think of the present as their everything. And now that the BushClinton dictatorship has evolved into it’s more hydra-headed, beastly, and all encompassing form, there really is no need for such sentimentality. The Now is The Only How. The Here Is Near. Keep Up Or Give Up. I know. I know. Such slogans are really very pleasant to such a euphony-loving old geezer as myself. The advertising industry retains a good ear for such things. Obed would be proud. But this was all long before the resurrection and BornAgainians and The Chaplainanots and so on and so on and all that jazz. Jazz. That was something we used to have. And New Orleans was filled with it. You could hear it coming out of windows, tearing up the floorboards beneath your feet, wafting through alleyways and pounding behind walls. I would go to a place called Preservation Hall and sit in a folding chair and watch a Dixieland jazz band play right there before my eyes. You could do such things then. Music wasn’t restricted by so many laws then, and people could assemble in places together to watch people play it. It was our right as citizens. Those were different times. People smoked cigarettes and drank bottles of beer and some even danced when the music played. It felt good to be there listening to that music, enjoying it with other people, feeling free and a little wild. It made you feel good to be alive. Oh, and at this my grandchildren’s eyes may widen and their lips may form giant rictuses, but it was in the evening of one of these days that I will begin this tale, and it will begin in a bar! Just think of it. A place where anybody over a certain age could go and drink all the alcohol they wanted. And you could get drunk. I know. It seems like some fairy tale, but I assure you, these places really did exist, and I was in one of them on this evening. An old acquaintance of mine was in town for a few days on business. This fellow wanted to get bibulous and to, as we used to say, let loose three sheets to the wind or tie one on, get soused or some ribald and equally unchivalrous thing. So we went to a local bar just off of Bourbon Street that was the habitué of many local dipsomaniacs: out-of-work mechanics, sleep-deprived janitors, ex-cons, dirty bohemians, surly cabbies with most of their teeth gone, under-tipped waiters, unwed mothers, minor league infielders, ten-dollar prostitutes, pilots, trumpet players, euro-trash, hooligan night watchmen, P.E. teachers, and other such stool pigeons and lunatics. We sat down at the bar. Everybody was smoking. The air was thick with gritty and toxic gray smoke, which smelled like PonTreks or GullingDates. Now behind the bar you have to realize there was a bar tender, or barkeep, a man who was authorized to serve alcoholic beverages to the patrons. This man was built like a question on a positional geometry exam, or as we used to say, a study of circles. He was wide as a movie screen, corpulent yet sturdy and stout, built like an old tank or a CrunchWail machine. His face was like tooled leather and his beard grew all the way up to his eyeballs. I had to shout my order to him. My progeny will again swell with pride when they hear that their grizzly, white-haired atavist made a request for two beers. Now, beer was not anything like the BoozePlus that so many of us swill down now. It was rich and deep and frothy and made you think of Oregon in the morning when the air is crisp and windlessly cool...Oregon in the morning when the year still has a number attached to it and it is the time before the wars, before the refashioning and reshaping of desires and the dulling of dreams and the complete restructuring of the world that you thought would always be, a world you thought you knew, and maybe even cared about, when one still could care about such things. The bartender took two pint glasses and filled them up from a spout or spigot which drew from a large wooden keg somewhere below. He plunked the glasses down in front of us on the bar top, a head of beautiful white foam on each one, and we paid him with paper money, with actual bills, greenish gray papers that were once called buckskins and greenbacks. These bills were tough and had a texture like dead leaves or a worn chamois rag, and long dead once famous men were on them, leaders that people had maybe voted for in an election, when they still had elections, when they still had people to vote for. The bartender took the money and my friend and I drank our beers. One of the most salient side effects of beer drinking is the need for micturation, and because of my smaller than average-sized bladder, which quickly became, shall we say, replete, I very soon had the urgent and pressing need to use the facilities. I bid my friend adieu for a moment and went on to find the bathroom. This was a place like a SeptiLounge, though much more base and frowzy and open. The public ones were especially grime laden and sordid. I found the bathroom in the back of the place behind a pool table. The table’s wooden rails were chipped and worn and its baize billiard cloth was badly ripped, kind of shredded with a lot of divots in it, and there were no nets in the pockets. Nobody was playing pool just then. I went in the bathroom. There was just one toilet, in the old fashion, white porcelain style with a flush tank, and this toilet was right in the middle of the room. There were no barriers, no stall walls that one of these toilets would usually have around it for privacy. It was just plopped down there right in the center of the room. A black midget was sitting on the toilet with his legs sticking straight out in front of him, extended at a perfect 45 degree angle from his body. (Such terms as “black” and “midget” may or may not have been acceptable at the time. It is sometimes hard for an old duffer like me to remember. Neither can I recollect what the correct term would be under current official guidelines, of which I am fully aware that I am flouting, so I will continue to use the anachronistic ones here.) This diminutive dark-skinned soul was squirming around a little on the toilet seat with his pants around his ankles, his black cowboy boots just hanging there in the air. He was smoking a giant cigar that was propped and sticking up out of his mouth, like what people do with toothpicks sometimes. His eyes were big and his arms were straight at his sides. He was straining. His fists were clenched. I looked right into his eyes and he looked right back at me. He just kept straining and pushing with his abdominal muscles and biting down hard on that big old cigar. He had a green hat on that was very long and conical, like a dunce cap that came to a point at the top where there was a gold bell. I just stood there staring at him and he just kept staring right back. The whole thing reminded me vaguely of a sequence in a cartoon, or maybe it was a comic strip, little boxes of lines and color and bubbles filled with words. Now that we live in more fastidiously controlled and manipulative times, amongst abjurations of free will and pleasure, in the structured confines of worship and mass conformity on a scale so vast and all encompassing that it seems tacitly eternal, it is hard to imagine such things, but let me tell you, they did exist. It was an extremely complex situation there in that bathroom, one of which I am almost at a loss to explain, as it was painstakingly difficult to grasp the dimensions and whirling patterns of time and conceptual space that were so lightly and indifferently and continuously happening and also not happening, that were ricocheting off of every last quark and lepton in little pinpricks of flashing momentum and also much hidden microscopic brilliance I’m sure, and were also scabbing and scarring empty space, leaving spindly gashes and willowy wens in the skein of now, a now that was impossible to categorize except to say that it was a moment that hadn’t yet happened, would never happen, and yet would always be happening and had always been happening. There was something odd gestating at a molecular level, some faint stirring of strings, the very low whiff of a thin breath on the reed of a fingernail-sized clarinet, a lisp only heard by grasshoppers. We are not good enough for such things. We are not built to interpret these puny gestures of life. We are monsters too enormous to see and too loud to be able to listen. I could only intuit this event or I might have just almost detected a lump in the rhythms of myself, discerned a pale and unthinkable luminosity, a brief levity of being that seized me with horror and awfulness. There was a sense of failure, a keening tryst with doom, a bowling over of my concrete conceptions of consciousness, a raft of newly awakened incisions in the thinning crust of my own hemispheres of sorrow. Things were not as they seemed. And this made me sad. Sad not in our manufactured way of being sad, but in the old way of being down and out and weary of the world. That black midget was staring at me and he was not a clown and he was not an angel and he was not an illusion or some manifestation of my own diseased fantasy and he was not a child nor a God and he sure as hell wasn’t a human being at all and we are all lonely for something real in this world of made up things we all are lost and drifting and don’t even know that we don’t know this and I am going to tell you something real now and I am going to make you feel something and that something is all that matters and that something is…