Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 4)

Yeah, that’s right Steve, there’s a halo around the moon. Steve Earle there clawing away at you. And there’s a halo around here too, around whatever it is you might be thinking about right now. A halo to make you suddenly realize that you’ve got better things to do with your life than rot away in that shithole where you were, up until now, so gainfully employed. Walk on the phone lines like they’re high wires. Spit on a rat, and break a cop’s back. Become the mascot of a minor league team. Walk to the beach and sit in the sand watching the waves splash and crash around out there in the soupy, foam-filled, viridian sea. There are more somersaults to turn and more garbage cans to empty and there will always be one more dish in the sink. Futzing around can become a ritualized habit, an inveterate necessity in this world of things, and nothing stays clean forever. So don’t go scrunching up your mashed countenance, fretting over the thousands of insignificant movements you make every day of the week. Halo’s got you covered. Disco dancing is against the law. The nights keep starting earlier and earlier. I’m making my way haphazardly through an obstacle course of distractions, but I’m jumping and thumping along to my own internal rhythms, keeping my poise too, because like Walter Taylor says, I’ve been all around this whole round world and anywhere I hang my head is home sweet home to me. Whisky town is never more than a hop, skip, and a leap away. Come roll your bones with Halo. It’s going to be a long nights dudes and dudettes. But when it’s all over it’ll be just as long as last night was, and all the other nights before that one too. Somebody called up and said that I’m just a cheap motel with a burnt out sign. Not sure who. Hung up without giving their name. The sounds we make when we try to keep quiet. It’s all a cop-out folks. It’s all a forgery. It’s more plastic than protean, more of the same changes made for the same reasons leading back to the same changes that were already never going to really change in the first place. Roy Orbison says dreaming is the thing to do, you know, watch the smoke rings rise in the air and all that. Dream when the day is through, etcetera, etcetera. Dream. Dream. Dream. You know the drill. Line up. Put your back to the wall. Head up, chin out, eyes staring blankly straight ahead. Dream. But don’t go losing your head over it. How about playing a harmonica instead? Huh? How about teaching a thousand pigeons how to dance the polka? Never mind. Nothing that won’t keep you up all night. But, hey, you’re up all night anyway, right? Keep it on. Keep Halo blasting as loud as that radio of yours will go. Keep those demons at bay. Keep those nightmares away. Stay safe in the womb, in the rich, oil-slick timbre of my bellowing voice, this clarion call ringing in your ears to not give up, to not just lie down and let the world do with you what it will, because it will, it most surely will. There must be some fight left down in you somewhere. Maybe Halo can give you a hint as to where the map you might use to find it is. Sure, from the dirty old mess hall you still might march to the brick wall. But it’ll be a different wall every time. Here’s one from a guy who used to go by Zimmerman. He called it Walls of Red Wing, but you can call it whatever you want, whatever keeps you alive and free tonight, whatever you need…


Ah. That’s right. Don’t let those blues run the game. That was a few kids named Paul and Art sending out for room service to bring a little whisky and gin. Can’t say I don’t envy that. Morally and gracefully living that life of sin. Decadence and bravery. A little gained and a whole lot to lose. And those blues always, always on the gain. Oh. But there might be another way around the block than just this stumbling we’ve all been doing around here for so long. Mr. Van Zandt once told me that everything is not enough, and nothing is too much to bear; and that where you been is good and gone, all you keep is the getting there. Hope he’s still shaking the dust off his wings somewhere up there above us. As I sit here blabbering on and running my fingers over the Braille of my existence, well, who really knows what may be happening out there tonight. A pool sharp might be drunk in a bathroom stall wishing he were in the back of car with his girl again, off the highway under the stars, far away from the bright lights of the city. A bank teller might be up wandering the streets looking for a way to tell his wife that he no longer has a bank to go to every day. Lot’s of folks might be up and up to no good, like some kid rummaging through a garbage bin in search of a clarinet, or a cabbie honking his horn at a peanut vendor. But most people are trying to do something helpful, something good, trying to make an honest buck, looking out for each other, making the world spin around a little more smoothly. I sometimes even find myself scuttling around, scratching at my scruff with a mangy, nail-begrimed paw, checking out the dives that open up at 6 a.m.—nothing but cops and drunks and youngsters who’ve been up all night sucking up white powder through their nares. And the bartender is all surly and looks like a sleep-deprived Jackie Mason, and he’s got the last half of a week-old cigar sticking out from his blubbery lips like the thick, stubby tail of some mutated rodent that he’s just swallowed hole. Yeah, Halo sticks his head in joints like that sometimes. Sometimes I stay in places like that for days, listening to the jukebox kick music around and slowly getting drunk while the sun comes up, and the traffic going by sounds like a river, and the newspapers start walking around and selling themselves cheap to anybody with a couple of quarters they’re looking to get rid of, and the subway rumbles to life, and jackhammers come out to tear up the street making the ceiling fan kind of tremble, and the barstools all do a short rumba, and I’ve got to hold onto my glass to save it from tipping over and spilling somewhere that isn’t my mouth. Ah. To go outside to smoke a cigarette in that early morning hush, in that special way the sunrise has of blasting away the shadows and the fog, the way it streaks like golden lava and gets all over the buildings, painting them all highlighter-yellow and silvery. The way those thousands of windows in the skyscrapers downtown opalesce all together and reflect your delirious and misconstrued drunken misconceptions about the way it feels to be alive in this so precarious position that you find yourself holding up in. Holding on. Holding out. Getting older every day. Sometimes you’ve just got to plant yourself on that barstool for a little while and get some perspective, some real gen-you-wine self-reflection, and maybe do a little retrofitting of your soul there too while you’re at it. Ah. To de drunk in the afternoon. As that sorrowful sap Bow-Dee-Lar once put it, “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters.” Ah, to be drunk in the afternoon. To be surrounded by roseate hues and bottles glinting specks of sunlight, beholden to nothing, and to nobody. A beer stein holding your anticipation back like a dam. Waiting to flow free in a nut-brown river of nonattachment. A rising fist bringing drink to mouth. Life standing tall and good at last. A little generosity in the end. With just a beer-bottle lighter and a beer sweating by your side. With a cigarette smoldering on the sidewalk, the smoke curling up in long lazy circles like a caduceus, like an old friend come back to bring comfort. As I am wasted and wounded too. Just like you. Just like you. But for a moment there, just maybe, you can be free. Don’t worry about wearing a Mae West out into the world’s churning rapids tonight. You’ll stay afloat. Halo will keep your head above water. And so will this. Johnny Cash doing The Cocaine Blues. Feel free to scream along and run for your life…


Quick as a wink. Lingering like a bad case of hemorrhoids. And many suppositories later we have lift off. Breaker. Breaker. Come in. I am lost. I am far from home. Come in. Are you out there? Is anybody listening? So, it’s the movements of lesser-known symphonies written by a clown sitting in an outhouse. It’s handcuffed kids getting dragged through the streets by taser-wielding cops in riot gear. It’s crowds forming and dispersing. It is sweet sweetback’s baadasssss song. It’s a croissant going stale in a dumpster. It’s a rodeo of broken hearts. It’s the cacophony of a million butterflies caught in a circus tent-sized net. It’s that crushing low-down way you feel when you’ve been hacked away at for so long by the treacherous knives of the world that it just seems normal to go to bed bloody and sore. It’s grape jelly. It’s moon pies. It’s the ache in your gut and the pain in your head and the snap of the whip across your back. It’s just a passing fad. It’s a stertorous tussis caught deep down in some place at the back of your throat. It’s an itch you can’t scratch. It’s a pause, a rose, something on paper. It’s the shy trilling of a lark in a leafless tree. It’s a hydrogen bomb lost in the Wassaw Sound. It is H.R. Giger’s birthday. And now it is time to send you all off to bed, or off to wherever it is this early morning fog is taking you away to. So, it’s sayonara sucker and see you later alligator and bye bye birdie and adieu to you Mr. Magoo and fare thee well and arrivederci and au revoir and auf Wiedersehen and adios muchachos and that’s all folks and so long and goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, at long last, but not least, this is Halo Sims signing off and saying goodbye to you.