And all because I’d found a notebook. This 100-sheet, college-ruled, 1-Subject, spiral-bound notebook with a purple cover. So, well, all shelled to hell, here we go. I guess it starts like this: a bird chirped like a car alarm. Streaky skids of sky, and also that little rectangular cut of Market all the way down the hill, in the perceptually skewed distance where it seems the freeway is just above that cut of buildings south of the slot, a frame-of-film like thing, are what my attention’s grappling with at that particular moment. Well, that and cursing the stoplight under my breath. The fucking light there at the top of Mason, with the Cable Cars’ breaking-bones trundle and hack giving the red for way too long to us pedestrians, mostly fucking tourists and assholes of that ilk. I was fucking pissed off at some meager bullshit, probably, I don’t know, it’s foggy sometimes when I look back at my ire, but so I was distracted to all hell, and probably trying to skim over something in my head that wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s fucking bullshit the things I put up with in this life. Always a windstorm up there too. Shit. Gotta hold on tight to the lamppost or you’ll get sent shitter-over-Annapolis out onto the glinty shine of the Cable Car tracks there on California. It’s a fucking big deal, man. I don’t care what you hear. Put you in a bad mood three Tuesdays from hell, that’s sure for fur. You can pin the tail on the turkey, call me a shit sniffer, and sing Jingle Bells till the cows come home. I don’t give a quarter of a damn if you do. Or don’t. Just me. So, well, there’s a slight hint, maybe just a fucking brushy inkling at that, of jasmine in the air, and it makes me think of springtime things, puddlewonderful stuff and the likes, and I’m mushing through January still, at least with my gutter-soaked socks sloshing around in my much-less-than-stellar condition brown Oxfords, and so this is like a lotto ticket with 3 out of 5 winning numbers to my mood. Not quite good, but good enough for the time being. Me? Fuck. Well. I’m shit-heeling along, tugging at the sag in the wrinkling crease of things in general, and I don’t give a-fifth-of-a-shit about all these asinine smiley types who are all like giving serious credence to the phrase Mickey Moused And Unaroused. Nothing but cotton-candy souls stuffed into refrigerator bodies. I’d had more than I could handle of ‘em, and you know I got down on my knees and gave much and more thanks to the lord when the Disney store called it quits last year. Still, there’s things we’ve still got. We’ve still got the multipurpose-room big of the sky, the rustled cattle of the clouds like dishrags tossed in a pool of crème de cassis, or something relatively similar. We’ve got things, still, to get us, you know, through the day without losing what’s left of our fucked-in-the-ass minds in the honkings and congestion and heatless dryers and digitized ephemera of the world. I grow weary with ringtones. Mold gathers. I dust off the best suit of myself I can muster in the bleeps and blips of daily life, under the spell of non-ionizing radiation and microwaves counting down. I am a brand logo smoked on the sky. I am returned goods. But, whatever for the fuck of whatever, I keep shallowly cussing and making general vituperative noises in the hustling busload of what we keep for some fuck-nuttered reason calling civilization. California’s all jammed up with idling cars, like some deranged ragtag motorcade for a famous bank robber or something. Or should I say infamous. Or is there even a fucking difference, really? I don’t know. It’s just more of the changing that stays the same as far as this fucking bastard yours truly is concerned. While this yours truly, you know, stands there all alone and brooding on the street corner, dodging faces, cashing in on the meager blandishments others might happen to deck out for the likes of me, as I weep over the doddering steps of sad old men in suspenders, palsy stricken, no teeth, haunted by ghosts of long-dead loves, lettering their assumptions with inkless sweeps of pen, nodding off on benches, rugose rosaceous faces tilted sunward, arms stiffly crossed, all drowsy smiles and heavens-to-murgatroyd sadness. Oh man. Ah hell, shit some Hoffco and shine a shoe with it. It’s a fucked up world of woe, and I just do my part to keep myself living along in it. So there’s traffic, and I’m ignoring things, standing there with my hands shoved deep in my coat pockets, mumbling fucks shits dicks son-of-a-bitches motherfuckers like a sailor’s uncle, and nobody around there is noticing a damn thing anyway, well, because no fuck faces notice a damn thing anymore, and we all just yep at it and move on and over it all. Yep. Yup. Uh hu. And so I bandy around my sight’s receptivity, girls in raincoats, false modesty, a whore’s clean kitchen, the misinterpretations of Emily Dickinson and questions of her having been banged or not banged by some mysterious gentleman caller with an initial for a last name, and I gander up a few deets here and there in the moon-bought clearness of what I might just sooner than later be calling the crepuscular circumstances of the denouement of the day’s tale. A note of dog shit buoyed on the scruff of a treewell’s weeds. Hard-hatted hammering men on scaffolding high up on the Fairmount Hotel’s exterior. The sparkle of a bracelet. Moldish, rust-like, algae-green, possible fungus-type substance teeming about the caduceus swirl of the concrete laurel leaves of The Flood Mansion’s fence. A cat sunning in a window of the high-rise apartment complex on Sacramento. Splotches of ancient dried gum-spots polka-dotting the worn and pocked graying cement of the sidewalk, torn rubber lids of juice bottles, dead leaves, rubbished papery wrappings wadded up and waddling away with the breeze, a clogged up sewer drain, a manhole with the light still on underground where there was a ladder leading down into the concrete subterranean realms of urban alligators and rats with teeth like chainsaws and unimaginable rivers of human defecation. A man with slightly glistening hair still wet from the shower walking his wiener dog on an absurdly long leash, leaving the man behind to smoke his pipe and wave hello to strangers. A certain mushy sensation was calling bingo in my head, and I recall, almost absently now what with all this fucking time crammed and crinkled between me and what it was, the way it seemed a certain crush of clouds were, like some kind of creampuff monster, about to eat the just-risen moon in the east out towards the loop-roped span of the Bay Bridge, out there, down the steep hill, away, but, again the distorted depth of vision that comes from seeing things at a distance, a fucked-up perspective, you know, outside of things, so objects blend and merge and appear closer than their actual farness, well, that there motherfucking bridge seemed like it was close enough to just walk right over to and say what’s it to you bridge, huh? Luck assails me and I’m bad at it. Well, you know, just put a mail sack over it and beat it with a baseball bat. Well, you know, cream the corn and forget about the spinach. There are looks of love we’ll never get to know. But that’s low-balling culture. That’s tilling the tendentious gardens of staunch ambivalence, if you ask me. But nobody’s asking. So. Well. I’m coming around the mountain here, you know, that proverbial mountain that curries your favor with the promise of lazy, do-nothing, non-committal, zero-effort, contaminated luxury. You can graze on those hillsides for only so long, pastorally omniscient in the lassitude of your doings, what small-world-view patch of ground you hump your dreams on, there, sojourning bored and inefficacious, naysaying, sluggishly camping out with TV shows and armored-car cares and cured dissassociative disorders and off-the-shelf manners shipping themselves to the grunts and sighs of less-than-noble savages. I’m fucking indifferent. I don’t give a fuck. So, I’m shopping my eyes all over, and I like espy this fucking notebook lying next to a mailbox by the curb. I lollygag over and pick it up. It’s this fucking purple tattered notebook filled with ink-scribbling on college-rule lined paper. It’s ring binding is rusted, and there’s like a goiter and some blistering up on the cover, the tear and wear of the weather, being outside, exposed. It’s not in great shape. But it’s still held together, and the pages are all there, and the pages, well, they are fucking covered, completely packed to the gills with words. It’s un-fucking-believable. This tiny handwriting, this scrolled print, all these little letters dotting the white with black ink. No smears. It’s all perfect. I mean, not legibly perfect in that sense. It’s not like it’d win any fucking calligraphy contest or anything. But still, it’s like the print never varies, almost like a fucked-up typewriter or something. Scratchy and a bit sloppy, but always constantly so. And no smears. That’s the part that really fucking gets me. I mean, I don’t know about you but whenever I write with a pen, which is probably a lot fucking less than most, as I have like a god damn out-and-out repulsion to putting down words on paper, but whenever I do such stupid, meaningless things as forming words with ink, well, my fucking right hand gets all ink-stained, you know, on the side on that fatty edge of the palm, and the paper gets wet with my hand sweat and, well, you know, the words just fucking drip and bleed and smudge all over the place. But this stuff was like pristine, like somebody put a lot of fucking effort into it, into making it precise in this deranged sort of way. And the actual pages, when it comes to the condition of the paper, what with it being out in the fucking cold, hard world for lord knows how fucking long, being out in the elements and what have you, well, the damn paper’s in pretty tiptop shape. So I’m just corner standing, leaning on a mailbox, leafing through this raggish thing rather absently, you know, just kind of skimming and checking for pictures, which there weren’t any, and that pissed me off. I hate having to read something without any pictures. The way I like to read is like this: “Boring, boring, boring, oh wait! Pictures! Boring, boring….” You know. All those words. Who needs all those fucking words? It’s just a bunch of prolix hoity-toity hot air taking up my precious time, you know? Fuck that. Anyway, I’m starting to get rather more than a pinch interested in what all these almost-microscopic scribblings were trying to say. It seemed, I don’t know, fucking important for some fucking reason. I was compelled, fucking overwhelmed with a need to understand. Maybe it was some kind of fucking black magic or something, somebody casting a damn spell on me. I ain’t got me the foggiest. But nonetheless, for whatever inane shit-or-shinola reason, I nabbed the fucking vermillion-covered journal, pocketed it in my coat, and slunk off with it in tow. There wasn’t much farther than a block to go until I came to the cozy confines of Huntington Park, where the naked stone angels catch the slipping turtles on the fountain, and where every dog within a mile radius gets walked and shits all over the place, where people lie sunning on grass-laid beach towels, where tots swing and go down slides and monkey around on jungle gyms, where grizzled old men with no teeth in 40-year-old pressed suits lie fast asleep and snoring on benches, and where I, on rare occasions, like when I’m stumbling home drunk after a long night of debauchery at some femme fatales abode, have been known to drop trou and take a grand old whiz in that grand old fountain of the naked angels and the slipping turtles. I thought this’d be a nice place to try to piece together these neatly crazed and jumbled journalings. It turned out I was correct. Well, also, you see, at the time, I was trying to out-of-sight-out-of-mind this girl. She was like off seeing this other fucking guy, and I didn’t really like get a whole lot of fucking pleasure from cogitating this situation. It wasn’t something that’d make me glad and smiley and want to play a game of hoops on hot blacktop with prison rules, that’s for damn sure. Well, you know, you can crap in a urinal and spill your guts to a crossing guard, but you ain’t ever going to change things. Women will always wield this excessive amount of power over me, this take-charge controlling bullshit tendency to take my heart and just fucking jet with that crummy worthless piece of shit. Fuckin’ a, and b and c too for that matter. I just never feel like I’m important enough in their lives. You know, it was the same ol’ situation. Same ol’ ball and chain. She used to be mine and then she wasn’t and then she was his. Nothing I could do about it. It was fucking infuriating. What I wouldn’t’ve done for a distraction, and now I had one. This journal. Fuck. I needed something. She should’ve been paying me rent for all the time she spent in my mind. Every damn thought would just lead to thoughts of her, and it was gnawing the fuck out of my soul, making me dismal and loopy and lethargic, creeping around with no desire to do anything except sleep, which I couldn’t do because my head was such a fucking mess, all gooped and bored through with nags of should’ves and could’ves and god-fucking-damnits about the whole shameful dog’s breakfast. So, there I was, slump-backed on a bench, sun at my back, legs crossed at the shoes, creasing and folding over that sun-blotted purple cover of the notebook on those rusted little coils, holding the page up close to my face, so my nose’s almost scratching it, to try to decipher that devil-awful miniature handwriting. Well, beat an egg and call me Lassie, but this was my lot in life at the moment, at least that’s what I felt like at the time. So, my meaningful encounter with the written word had begun. Call grandpa a sissy boy and shit a pinecone. Yep. I was on to something at last. There was some kind of fucking chinaberry tree or something there by the bench, and as I was reading I stomped a shitload of berries that were spilled all over the ground. They made this crunchy, mashing-popping sound beneath my shoes, and I liked it, the way it sounded and felt smashing those fucking berries like that. I soaked up all those words. I crunched berries. It started out like this:
A siege of herons gumdrops like a feathered sigh from the frowsy blue as January fiddles its way towards fizzling out. Rows of weeping brick buildings smuggle smiles through the broadening of porous horizons, chimney-smoked, lurkish, lavender and maroon. A jogger stretching his calf muscles. I’ve grown accustomed to the accostings of strangers. With an eye patch grossly magnified beneath the thick lenses of coke-bottle glasses, a man leans on the service entrance door to a hotel kitchen and smokes, leering, two top shirt buttons gone, squinting his one good eye through the fog’s hubbub. Durability seizes calmer slouchings, gusty, in the felt of almost-weeping sky, hatless, just having some fun. From sleepy grays to blue-green hospitality beside white spatter and cuts of red-bricked hurt, glum and hard to swallow, chancy in the worn-out fists, staffed with sighs, and then the grumble of buses leaves you standing broken hearted at street corners waiting for the light to change. A nixed spell of boredom that’s dabbling in loneliness, and then I am shuffling thoughts, clefted to a standstill, holding doom hostage for curiosity’s sake because things that are damned mostly stay that way forever. So there go a few ctenoid strips of cloud, stranded, faintly famished, overly hinted grayings, and slack cables slung with lighted globes wrestle their way through like slips of a lost love, possibly mine. Something sings meek into my loomed bones. Weeks go by. Nothing is lost or gained.
The sun was delivering grape juice daydreams to lazy faces, and there I was, later than arriving, with a mood to match my socks: gray spotted with blue and black. Everybody there was of the picnic table variety. Things were checkered red and white. Hallway standing was par for the party’s course, and most of us were bleak enough to partake, though Reynolds Wrap covered jars and Tupperware containers-- also, rubber bands were used to keep the seal tight. Boats were parked on the sidewalk. People drank rum from hollowed out watermelons while reclining in comfortable deck chairs. Proximity to others was important. We took turns rubbing shoulders. Some people were wearing osnaburg. A computer croaked in a digitized, arrhythmic monotone, “Outside there is sky. Inside we only grow a crop of emptiness.” The sound of the fan in the bathroom was horrible, like an end-of-the-world sadness. It was a monotonous whir, a dull thudding that spoiled hope and destroyed joy. It curdled something inside of you, left you morose and unfit to go on. I wasn’t thinking about helicopters. I was thinking things like this: ‘a swoosh of quietude. wiry tree branches like needles pointed in the general direction of heaven. a steady, curled brush of wind. defeat stored up in packed silences. a stowed feeling you know you’ll need again one day. never rears its best fly-over shapes. all these windows are never high enough.’
I’m not going delve into all the sad reconnoitered bullshit crusting the edges of my perception of what was like giving off serious superficially sad vibes and making me murderously dull and fucking morbid a great deal of the time then. Let’s just hit the ditto button and let the machine crank away with the rest. Only, well, only, it was only, you see, only, a cup of crummy daylight in the abyss. And I mean only. Fuck. There it was, all smoke and grief, and there wasn’t a damn crap thing I could do about it. Perfume from a fucking dress making this motherfucker digress? Fuck that. Fuck it. Shit, even Montaigne knew that empathy neurons are affected by spatial proximity. We need to be physically close to people. Can’t just email or text your way around that. Polish off a Rueben and kick a mailman in the nuts. What good’s it going to do? I’ll tell you. Jack shit. That’s what it’ll do. Nothing lodges something so irredeemably in your god damn memory as trying your damnedest to forget it. Getting over things is better done when it’s not done on purpose. My interest was like fucking peeked though, with all this scribbling, and so I thought, ‘What the hell. I’ll keep reading.’ I didn’t have a whole lot going on. The pigeons were swarming breadcrumbs by the benches, and the fucking sound of their wings flapping all around was like a thrashing disaster to my eardrums. I tried to ignore everything around me. The pages wrinkled between my fingers as I read on:
I was on a train with a bunch of deaf people. Turpitude had its holster empty, and they were all forming sign language to each other with those graceful, quick, snapping gestures of the hand. There was a female specimen on the train who looked just like Ed Sullivan. Her face had a droopy quality that was hard to pinpoint at first. The lips were puffy. The mouth wide and long. I thought about the phrase, “long in the mouth,” and wondered if it would be applicable in this case. Sagging skin, wrinkles, the face had these things too. I was hardly enjoying myself enough. My indifference was just magnified laziness.
Being a human it is hard to tell, but I put on my elevator face and made the best of the situation, which is at best a qualitative judgment about the whereabouts of others’ inhibitions, or lack thereof. Steel on steel scraped and skidded below. A raspy hissing sound, high-pitched and scream-like, was slowly rising in the train car. I placed my two index fingers over my ear canal openings. It helped. Aural occurrences were muffled. Space seemed numb, vacant, and puffy. The baying relented a tad. A few crumpled index cards lay side by side on the seat across from me. They encouraged a morbidly astute attitude to emerge from my misled demeanor. I was a bun-less hamburger drenched in kerosene.
Radios play the part. They muscle music for ears to combat with plugs. Then you start to ramble in your head: “February freezing your breath and watering your eyes. Shoulders cold. Evenings drawn in parallel lines. Vanished and grim in the parlor’s lamplight. Cause a ruckus. Feel out a misdemeanor.” Some things come and others go away. The carpet is flattened, scabbed with gum, light gray spotted pink and blue, cut with cracked ragged lines skewing out in all directions. Friction on the soles of my shoes. Electric shocks. A man who speaks the language of old movies.
There were these fucking poems in the notebook too. The handwriting got better, like they were written slower, or the person was trying to take their time with them, or maybe copying them down from somewhere else. I don’t know. What I know about poetry is not much jack and even less shit, let me tell you. It’s all an amphigoric crock of shit to me. An imaginary chest bump for the egos of lonely assholes. But, anyway, these poems were there, so I read them. I figured, whatever the head-shoulders-knees-and-toes crap was going on, well, I might as well give it a go. I was, you know, like sucked into this notebook. It was unbelievable. Me. Reading poetry in a park. Shit. That’s the kind of stuff that’ll really ruin your rep. Anyway, I read a few.
geared up for the sun’s sometimes
if it were never’s shadows
or a wig to wear for a wish’s hair
plagued open to even the odds
ordinary gets weary too at
the corner of heartache and miss
or parking meters and windy hairstyles
leave with the territory
much as many does
with nobody’s nose caught between fingers
forcing a then to sleep with a when
on the nails of now
for as short as it takes
to more than matter
in the lost less
of gone’s long time
*
if I were a cowboy in
Paris
I’d do nothing but lie in the
shade
on sunny afternoons and dream of
home
I’d wish I were home
not in Paris
not in the shade
on a sunny afternoon
but in my bed at
home
maybe drunk
under my blankets
lying all alone in the dark at
home
without a dream in my head
but really
I’d just be a cowboy in Paris
lying in the shade
on a sunny afternoon
that’s all
*
Badly gave up and steamed Lonely
until Enough became
Not A Damn Thing
Hope feathered Reason with Far
Begin fell into Never
while Ruin spilled Over into Keep
and Jesse James shot a mouse
Better ran off with Sleepless
Could leaned a shoulder into Would
and Brazen screwed Lovely
for a song
*
i knew this girl
used to sing billie holiday songs with me
past the wee hours
and drink until the bottle was done
holding hands at midnight beneath the starry sky and all that
nice work if you can get it
you know the story
i knew this girl
in the best way you can know a girl
how she laughed in her sleep
how she dreamed in deep-sea colors
how she buried coke bottles filled with coins in her backyard
and we spent what we had before we knew we had it
all the time
both knowing
of course
that it couldn’t
wouldn’t
last
of course
but this didn’t matter
and shouldn’t’ve
anyway
you look at it
we both came out
grand
like this
though sadder for it
in ways that we’d never’ve known
if we hadn’t
clung to each other in this inept way we had
for however long
it lasted
*
subletting the lilies in my brain
goosed by the loneliest of the lates in nights
(drum roll)
got an economy-sized thought
giving boiled eggs to salad dressing dreams
brave and lettered in radio waves
funner than Massachusetts
flipping the f to an a with an m
tiptoe all you like
shut the jalousies of your tenseless future
render boredom obsolete
grousing in shades of topaz
with barrel-stave thoughts built shy-heavy with roses
like the grayed almost-lichen undersides of dead leaves
scrunched and brittle and broke
pushing 75 under brighter lights than this
in headier cuffs of ordealing with crazed car alarms
and hurtling towards a misplaced then
just because
sometime
is never going to be
now
It was mostly shit like this, and I got bored of it. It made me feel like a pansy. I closed the notebook and hawked a few luggies, cracked my neck, you know, made nice with the bench and the world around me. The shrubbery of some dangerous thoughts was slopped on my brain, and it was making me stink like cabbage, and I didn’t like feeling so groggy and danced-out and kind of playful too at the same time. The sky was clubbing clouds around like cottontails and drag-assing them through swirls of blood-colored mud. My eyes were being shifty. I couldn’t count on them like I used to could. Making amends for my less-than-true ways of pattering and scattering myself around through the slingshots of love wasn’t getting me anywhere except a here that I didn’t want to be involved with. I knew I was going to have to change my life. I just wasn’t sure how. I kept reading. That furiously scribbled script went on and on. I was fucking delirious. The berries crunched and crunched under my shoes.
The Green Street Mortuary Band was playing a very slow and somber rendition of Amazing Grace out on the street where people in black suits were crowding around, staring and bowing their heads, and I was leaning against a staple-ridden telephone pole across the street, feeling bad about things in general, but good about the scene, the way things were unfolding there with the music and the people and the cars with funeral stickers on their windshields and their headlights on, all lined up and ready to go. The day was lulling. It was fall. Everything was soft wind and the trickle of leaves.
My father was a mean indomitable little man with hunched shoulders who swore a lot and had a thicket of black curlicue hairs all over his cheeks. When he died they shoved him under the earth without much ado, just a few relatives stifling tears, probably more from being reminded of their own mortality than sad over his passing.
I didn’t want to walk away from the procession. I wanted to watch it occur. For the cars to slowly start to trail off down the avenue, for the band to lead the charge with their tubas and horns and drums. But I had to be on my way. There wasn’t time to just stand around contemplating such things.
I’m the first to admit that I am a misfit. I dawdle and stare too much. The streetlights hold more allure for me than television. But there are times when I find myself wishing that I were in the midst of things. Often it is in times of quiet contemplation that I suddenly find myself roused to do something—anything—normal. Though what that means I have little idea. If it means slumping my shoulders, looking all woebegone, and walking around in a downcast way, looking at trees and buildings and birds, well that I can do. In fact, my constitution is very suitable to that sullen demeanor. But I fear that this is not the case. Normal things are what normal people do. And I have no clue what it is that normal people do with their time. They drive cars I guess, watch movies, make dinner, have conversations with other normal people. I am really not at all sure.
Walking into a crowded diner by yourself is unnerving. I should know. I’m pretty much an expert when it comes to being unnerved. There are not too many situations in which I am at ease, comfortable in my own skin. It costs me much labor to move about in the world. Just crossing the street can be an adventure, a difficult exercise in willpower. There are not too many things out there in the world that do not intimidate me, make me skittish, rattled, and send me scampering away to lick my imaginary wounds.
When my father beat us it was always with a large wooden cane, which he called Thaddeus. He was a very tempestuous man, with a soft spot for pecan pie.
They are screaming on the street today. I can hear them. I know the world is out there. Whether I am waiting for it or it is waiting for me I cannot be sure.
I moved away carefully, some would say gingerly even, from the telephone pole. It was a graceful, languid movement, one of the things I do well, a slight peeling, like a shadow becoming unstuck, or something smooth, liquid even, a lithe tickle like something the sky might do to showoff. Violins were singing in my head. The curb was just something to fall off of, something to be stranded by too, to slip from and go pell-mell into the curve of the world. I thought about granite. I thought about macadam, storm drains, fire hydrants, gutters, mailboxes, the green tall bodies of traffic signals, manhole covers, and polka dot socks. I walked across the street, saved by the magic invisible walls of the crosswalk, and then began to saunter some. Not too much. Just enough to feel alright about myself.
Errant strides, a brush of wind, something lush possibly, a way to go that leads somewhere else, snuffling and cloud-bound, there are many emotions tied to a breath of fall. The park benches seem to bow and creak differently under one’s weight. The surface of things becomes irregular, like windows and candy wrappers and jewelry. Every slip that shadows its way through one’s perception is shaped by the blemishes of weather and clipped by airy thought. Bow ties hang a bit less snug from dew-heavy collars. Every wilt that is washed in the colors and slurry of the day becomes a whirling melt in the mind. Relaxing carefully in gentle calm like chartreuse on the horizon, the fading of lost is looking everywhere for a smile. Mussed hair. Left-handed scissors slicing out comic strip boxes. Hardware stores closing. A certain drooping in the sky. These are things that happen.
Upon seeing an elderly gentleman in blinding-white Nikes and a dented mesh hat scrounging around in a garbage can, I stopped walking. I watched him going through the motions of his life. His hair was scruffy and wild and matted underneath the stitched web of mesh netting, and I noticed a large bruise on his cheek, like a small ocean nestled there storming as he rigorously chomped away at nothing with his dentures. He was just scenery. I was taking it in. The way his hands moved inside grimy garden gloves was fluttering and erratic, jerky like a small bird trying to pick a Corn Nut out of a crack in the sidewalk. Not noticing me watching him at all, he expertly picked his way through food scraps and other excesses of everyday life, salvaging soda cans and rescuing glass bottles from a trip to the dump. The large yellow and green striped canvas bag he was placing his exhumed treasures into was almost full, and must have been heavy for him to heft up and carrying around from trashcan to trashcan as was his wont. It did not smell good. He did not smell so swell either. I watched him as he walked away, done with his doings for a moment, bent over, walking a bit crooked, tending to his wares, hunched and stinky, undeterred and clever, following the jagged lines of his underground trade, waddling a bit with the giant canvas bag of recyclables slung over his shoulder like Santa, just trying not to be noticed too much. It made me thankful in an odd way. Thankful for being able to walk around as I wished, free and easy, without having to lug anything around.
If the window is open air can get it. Baseball games in October can be tragic. The teakettle whistles when it is done. Pajamas should be the most comfortable thing in the world. As children my brothers and I would put books in our pajama bottoms to protect our backsides from the ire of our father and the sharp sting of his belt strap.
The kind of day when you can’t get a good shave. When the weather’s misbehaving like this. Something pluvial in the air, but not enough to bring about that rainy-day atmosphere that might lift the spirits into a lightening melancholia, something that rushes the gutters and splashes away from car tires in soothing waves. Even the way birds fly is different on these tenebrous graying days, when the wind picks them up randomly and tosses them about like newspapers or plastic bags, boomeranging their flight patterns, chasing their feathers, spinning the slight tilt of their sleekness. This was a day for moping around, clopping with heavy strides the unrelenting ponderous glut of the pavement. I can walk great distances on such days. I can span the entire length of the city without noticing. The stars come undone at night, unwinding furls of powdery light, and they blink at me like a constant shimmering reminder of my own temporariness. A quaking blast shudders me as the foghorn bursts and resounds and then fades mooing off into the night. It is comforting and sad and unsettling at the same time. It leaves my stomach a churning gulch of queasy unsatisfied loss.
Poorness must count for something. The quality of it. Not just the meager burp behind dead eyes that starves unnoticed. A value should be attached to it. Wrestling it to the ground would be something, but not enough. A place must be made for it in the failing trap of time’s wayward warp. Gliding from the steps, unguarded, mistaken, laughed at, or climbing disheveled and hurt towards the abyss of humanity’s forgotten, it makes its own mark in the echoes of the world.
The evenings grow to become a part of one’s mental state. Things that might have occupied a frenzied mind during daylight hours might become unimportant, tossed away like broken pretzels, and a preternatural calm may find itself settling in on the way one comes to see the things that one tends to see. The lights of the houses on the distant hills are like flashbulbs in scrub brush, beckoning curiosity with a calm forgiveness. An arc of glimmering speckled dust coils its way through a deepening indigo darkness, some galaxy probably long gone from the cartography of the universe, and it reminds me that I am nothing but a dot in the innumerable matrix of things. Shade vagues and dies and becomes all there is. Thoughts scamper and ululate and shed skin. A remote control glows. A contrived greatness of ideas might grow to some illicit fruition, a premature birth of a sort, and could convince one of the glory that is often overlooked or mistaken for the mundane, though this abundance of gumption should be sought after still, for it is the precursor to the possibility of transcending the dull short shrift of daily doings, a chance at a small abundance of good things. A cat mewls. A potato boils. The buses scream down one-way streets.
Some burly men were tarring a street downtown, with all their heavy machinery and their orange vests and white hats, and the smell of tar was intoxicating, clearing my head, exhuming the parts of me that had turned mossy and wilted, and I brushed them off and washed them out and gave them some glad-handing, welcoming them back to the fold. Something akin to hope ran a few laps around my head, leaving me dizzy and thoughtless. Careers in pavement, enchanting as they seemed, were not what I was aiming for, though I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at operating a steamroller, or digging a deep hole in the middle of the street with a pickaxe and a shovel. Who knows? A hardhat might suit me. The buildings were seesawing back and forth, going liquid in a blink, their windows rolling like waves, and the sun was melting like butter all over everything. A hairless doll with no arms lay in the dry gutter. Her dress was ripped. It seemed indecent. I picked up the tawdry thing and placed it in a garbage can, feeling that I’d done something prodigious and moral. The intensity of the way things were happening was buckling my better half, and some absurdist silage was cursing its way through my veins, leaving me enervated and malcontent, but also quiet and still, as if I had no power to even care about such things. I let myself down easy onto the curb. Knees bent, hands grabbing ankles, head down, I sat there and didn’t let one thought enter my head. I closed my eyes.
My father often chewed ice. The sound of it was grating, obscene, a crunching that wound my nerves around barbwire and made my soul bleed a little. We were not allowed to build forts out of pillows on rainy days, but we did anyway, losing ourselves in a maze of leather cushions and darkness.
Skies like salmon, layers of fading color before sunset like a jar of grease, thin strips of yellowing yolk, a wider swath of creamy bruised blue running into the darkening shades of vermillion hues, on into the polished sheen of the moon’s glow hanging up on the other side of the horizon like a shiny button stuck in black mud. These are the sights around here.
October raises its fists, then surrenders. I mosey on out among the fallen leaves that are like decomposing corpses littering the streets and sidewalks, clogging up the sewer drains and scattering in the wind. Soon nobody will remember them. The streetlights flicker. I succumb to a weary anxiousness, cough into my fist, and travel back inside my tiny cramped apartment. A moth weaves a diagonal path around the outskirts of my room. A coin plops and then rattles around in an otherwise empty mason jar. I behave myself. The slosh of car tires through the rain-wet streets is comforting and remote. Crackers are consumed. Extensities arise out of moldy air, and time withers a bit. The bathroom trashcan is full of crumpled tissues. My smile is a lopsided frown. Opening a can of sardines is enough exercise for the day.
In the morning the sunlight will fill the windows behind my closed blinds. The sky will be cloudless and bluer than the kind of blue that makes your skin tingle. The leaves will wave to me from the tree outside my window—the few that remain gone all goldenredyellowing and barely still going about their business of drooping. I dream of piano keys. Tinkling abounds. The chill in the sun-drenched air moves like a widow through a flower garden, and I keep pace with chimney smoke and the slight sniff of creosote wafting gingerly through half-remembered streets. A place to put one’s foot down. A view of a deserted room. I scrape the grout from between the shower’s mildewed tiles with a steak knife.
From atop the hill above my apartment building I can look out at the bay. The flushing foamy trails of skimming sailboats lather the cobalt blue water like wispy white beards, and the wind speaks in a ribald chant, acting as a curator to my senses, leaving me half caught in wonder and half in the midst of a humdrum yawn. Wherewithal is something that leaves before one comes to know it well, if at all, and I stand flat-footed and eager, waiting for nothing, nothing waiting for me, as the now turning steely blue water chops, as the wind sends screams from mouth to mouth, as birds peck and waddle and dive and dip and seem to also drown in the far off fern green and tidewater blue of whatever is passing for distance out there, somewhere deeper than a flower and wider than pants. People wander and loaf. Traffic stalls and retches and sputters onward. The stranded music of life pauses with a clipped caesura and heaves. We are not doors. We are doorknobs.
A man barrels along, steadily, with head bowed slightly and hands shoved deep in the front pockets of his hooded sweatshirt, lending him an almost holy aspect, something ascetic and unassuming. He walks along the sidewalk, weaving, in his barreling way, among holiday shoppers wrapped in overcoats. A parking lot attendant in a red jacket, smoking on his break, stands in front of a garage, leaning against the wall, posing languidly with his legs stretched out, as if pondering the way petals or leaves fall. There is a fluidity to him, a natural nonchalance that is at once complacent and purposeful without a hint of arrogance. The barreling man pays the insouciant parking lot attendant no mind. His movement are jerky, and he shifts his weight hurriedly as he walks, as if stalking some miscreant or elusive prey. They are both just two more strangers plowing their way through the world on separate courses, which might happen to cross at some elegant angle, but in the end, have nothing more than a hair’s breadth of meaning between them.
In the mornings my father would pound the walls of his bedroom. It was much more than your garden variety griping. He would scream calumny about god. They were absolute seizures of fury. Apoplexy at its most intense apex. The house would shake as his fists slammed away, as he wailed, and many things went crashing to the floor, breaking into pieces my mother would hide in a special drawer she had for such things—broken things without homes.
As I walk the streets, as I go gazing at buildings—their windows tempestuously sparring with the elements, their stories stacked around flights of stairs, their woebegone exteriors counterfeiting majestic elegance and integrity with grit and endurance—and sidewalks, and trees, and fire hydrants, and lichenous grates of sewer drains, and cement-encased trashcans, and billboards, and flashing digital clocks, and belfries, and the glass walls of delis, and graffiti, and crosswalks, and unlit neon signs, and sprawling shards of disaster awaiting around corners and down blind alleys and over the trusses of pedestrian bridges. I check my vitals. I am still alive. The world is swimming along limply with me. There is nowhere I have to be. The churning charge of the lunch crowd saps me of my mettle, and I sink like a railroad tie into the abyss of a gray-green muck some might call the swamp of my heart, but which for me is only a watery grave. I am defeated by their perfervid hunger to do unimportant things, to pass the time, to want nothing except to be entertained constantly, to never want to have to do anything meaningful or important with their lives. I am still alive, but what is the use? There is nothing I can do that would make a difference. All I can add is a little more grass to be thrown into the trough. I would rather sit still and watch things. I would rather not be noticed. I walk the streets, and I am hid from everything, and I pretend that I do not exist. I walk the streets, and I watch everything around me, and really, I do not exist. This meager way of faking my way through the days is the best I’ve got for now. I maintain attuned to its proffered uses, and I avail myself of them as much as I can, as I need the proclivities of their habits to get by.
A yeasty whiff of a Chinatown alley, a clubbed punch in the gut from the sewer’s blocked stench too, and I am walking with a limp—as is my wont at such times—trying to abandon my own regrets over circumstances beyond my control, and my dreams warp and slither around a lamppost. The blue of its green is darker than any deepness I’ve known; the paint is dwelling on itself, it concludes things and steeps the permanence of the tall slender steel in fortitude. The light at the top is impossibly far away. I cannot know it. Watching the lights blink on one by one in the skyscrapers, and the streetlights are coming on too, as the sun sets, as the nights settles in, as people wearily shuffle by, faces stuffed with the droll stuff of life at day’s end. Somehow a mood is determined by a TV set and an alarm clock, by fashion and industry, by dollars and a weatherless interior where time is spent, not had. I walk under the low beaks of dirty, torn awnings, passing by the stalls of warm vegetables and dead fish and unbelievable bustle—elbows sharper than swords lowered at my nether regions by accident, one supposes at least—of small moving things all astir with rabid, festering energy, a swirl that tosses and rends bits to pieces and then puts them back together again, and then again, and then again, only to start and end on the same note every time: nothing. The neon signs are sputtering and prickling to life, canopies are being taken apart and folded up, footsteps clatter resiliently, my mind strays. I watch wash lines hung with wet underwear through the Crisco-smeared windows of tiny 3rd story kitchens. I look to the fire escapes where men kneel and smoke. The cars back up along the narrow one-way streets; pedestrians crowd the corners waiting for the flashing green signal to give them permission to walk between the magic lines of crosswalks; the moon washes its pale face in the horizon’s spilled drink; a band of pigeons circles and swoops and fumbles around in the bleak distance—all together, all alone, all performing the same winged dance in unison, all lost to themselves, on the hunt for small snacks, diving down and bobbing their heads while scattering around, independently digging their beaks in the cracks between the street’s tar and the gutter, wrenching cheese puffs from each other, squabbling over a peanut shell. Everything is a mad game, nonsense, lusterless and cheap one-foot-in-front-of-the-other insanity. I walk by store windows of gewgaw-and-knickknack sadness, of relative mercy on the skids, of fake flowers and plaster-of-Paris statuettes and first-name license plates and souvenir-penny machines. The flush of low-priced fantasy fails to fill me, and I wilt, drown in my own undeniable desire to be away, gone, anywhere but in the midst of these things, but at the same time in love with the imitation of life surrounding me, in me too, and also, above all, a thing to be prized in the last warm draft of the dying afternoon air.
On good days my father would let us play outside. We would gather our toys. We would want to excel at all costs. We would throw footballs at the ivy-covered brick walls that surrounded our house. We would bury action figures in the dirt beneath the cypress trees. We would punch each other until blood splattered like confetti over the freshly mown grass. On good days we did such things.
A tangled mess of thin leafless tree branches, all gnarled, crooked, withered beyond belief, crackled and crunched underfoot, under-shoe really—a hard-soled thwacking of sudden snaps and brittle death. I danced upon it like an unlit pyre. The twigs cut into my ankles. I leapt and did a bit of soaring, not too high, and with a great deal of courage I let my shoelaces come undone, uncaring as to whether they’d snag a branch and stumble me to doom. It was the act, the unthinking act, that was important. The instance of me dancing there, cavorting around like a drunk out-of-work juggler, happy as a shell-less snail, on shore leave from my life. There was a singular buoyancy to things in general. The air was thick with a shuddering emptiness, a hollow cut into the void, into the skin of space, a watering down of joy and triumph that made me succumb to walking away empty handed. There was nothing more to do. Saint Vitus didn’t have anything on me. I leapt from the rubbish heap of sticks, and immediately began to run away down the sidewalk, dodging my way into oblivion.
I had a conversation with a blind man. He’d swatted me with his long silver cane after I’d accidentally ran headfirst into him, knocking him baffled to the sidewalk. I apologized profusely. I helped him back to his feet. He stunk vaguely of patchouli. We spoke of armored cars and smoke signals. The owner of a liquor store came outside and kissed the blind man on the cheek. This was very unusual behavior for one of the denizens in this guilt-wracked woebegone city of ours. I was at once touched and disgusted by this singular act of kindness. The blind man secured a weak smile on his face. People pushed by eagerly on the sidewalk, eager for something unreal, something they were most likely unaware of—some ambiguous lithe tickle in the pleasure centers of their misused brains. The blind man looked at nothing. He swiveled his head. He gaped. He spoke of the dead loves of his life, though he mentioned that his love—the capacity for it I assumed—wasn’t dead, yet. I told him my love had died in January, along with the canary down the hall from me, and the old lady who used to sell me almonds and pistachios at a small stand by union square. Now I only feigned love in spotty patches of infatuation. We both agreed that all good things wore off and grew cankerous with time; nothing worth staying ever did. We shook hands formally and parted ways. His cane clanked and banged away behind me. People parted for him like the red sea. I kept thinking, “Pray for rain. Pray for rain.” I have no idea how that thought got there, but I couldn’t get rid of it. It just kept repeating like that. After a while I began not to mind it so much. It made a little peace cut away into the anxiety-ridden nature of my pieced-together circumstantial ways of existing. It wasn’t bad. I put a spring in my step and skippingly fled.
The top of some ancient architecturally wondrous skyscraper, with its freshly rubbed concrete spandrels and fluted ornamental moldings, shooting up like an elaborate candle, its windows screaming sun, its baize sides like a coat of ingrained dust, antennas sprouting like weeds from its jutting tops, as I stand and waver there on the sidewalk looking up as high as I can look, as black-bottomed clouds bemoan and hang heavy, as I blink and try to keep my gaze from straying, nervously swaying, spilling my guts silently into the moodiness of being me. West of here something is stipulating concern for the somewhat marvelous mess I’ve crawled my bitter way into and out of and back towards again. The idea of champagne sipped from a rooftop garden, possibly clearing my throat from time to time, and spuming my gaze out over the cumulative meaning of what it means to be there, whatever “here” that “there” might be, and the streets cut up into blocks and crossing each other in a massive hilly grid and the churches and parks and rows of telephone poles and the dismissive hoot of car horns and a sprinkling of trees. My thoughts derail. Every purpose one can concoct is its own message of loss. Dignity falls from the curb and into the belittled curve of courage. I walk upon the glittering specks of dust in the sidewalk, looking everywhere to avoid looking somewhere. The font of a liquor store’s sign peters out in a corrosive mesh of hangnail-like scrawling. A helicopter whirls lazily above, humming softly, almost a purling, and it slips my head into a charmed somnolence, and I almost float with a stippled bounce, a dotting of round things, a levity of being alive that is like trampolining my soul upon some inflated cushion. Comfort abounds. The spans of cottony webs that thread my head together in this loopy nonchalant way are growing wild with helium dreams and the childish musterings of an esoteric patting. A man shoves a shopping cart into a parked car—a slamming metallic crash that kicks me from my safe redoubt and back into the clustered doings of the world. Fixated on the event, though also almost unwilling to give in to it, to its significance, its role upon what my life currently happens to be, I try to swindle myself back away with a leap that is almost churlish in its toboggan into some illusory now. The tides shift. A heinous cry rings out. Moorings come undone. The traffic light changes. I dream of sleep.
There was a shifty upswing draft minting the evening with a charged ebullience, an athetosis of being that came sweeping through a panoply of curious things, like clumps of broccoli or saxophones wailing from a crowded café. The lobsters were clawing the glass walls of their tank in a Chinese Restaurant. They were alive, but didn’t look too excited about it. Above the cash registers were these red and yellow paper lanterns that were swaying in the air conditioning like buoys bobbing on the water. I stood in the doorway watching things in there, toothpicking at my teeth, mumbling to myself, running a hand through what was left of my hair, listening to the constant chatter and clang of harried movement in close quarters. A short squat woman of an indeterminate age with long graying strands of wispy charcoal hair flanking her square face, went from wok to wok, stirring things around, jiggling the handles, wiping loads of sweat from her brow, and squawking at her coworkers in short tense spitting plosives the whole while. Nobody knew or cared who I was all gutted and re-stuffed with emptiness standing in their doorway looking pitiful and sad. The waiters ran around in their red bow ties and maroon three-piece suits, efficient and smiling, focused and restrained, carrying impossibly balanced trays of chow mein and fried rice and tea. The patrons sat at large round tables and chatted and clinked their silverware or snapped their chopsticks, mildly going about their masticating ways. It was all a sea, a swimming, an irreconcilable fleeting charge of feckless momentum, a thing composed of satiation and ribbed with small niceties that would do for the time being, but which would never be enough on their own to carry on to anything significant.
The world is sepia-soaked. An unusual coloring that swims in between storms. A bronzy bash of shoveled sun. A hankering of pink swirling in clouds like salmony afterthoughts dissipating and creeping towards ampersands and shapes of fluting. Openings stirring eddies of smoky, smudge-wracked, fleeting and forever going glimpses at things newer than “not yet” but older than “never was.” Streetlights are waking up from their bulbless dreams. Movies are showing.
Plunking raindrops shell the eaves. Plowings of car tires shush form the street. The city dons grays on rainy days like these, drapes itself in a foggy mist as buildings blink open their square yellow eyes and model the latest fall colors. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t do anything except cry. Outside the world is there. But I am not there. I am here. And there’s no escape. Red bulb light hankering in splotched, glazed moons around dark curtains like when we come to know things in our joint-account way, and have these fantasies that are tame by most usual standards. But, alas, there is no we. There is only I, alone here, pecking away at the patina of a stubborn grief that holds me captive in its careful arms. I smell cinnamon on the horizon.
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