None of us at CBGBs were hippies, but some of us liked ice hockey.
Lat night the New York Islanders were knocked out of the Stanley playoffs by the Toronto Maple Leafs. Tomorrow the semi-finals of the Stanley Cup begin with the Bruins versus the Flyers and the fucking Habs against the Maple Leafs.
And I’m a Red Sox fan.
The Bosox are in second place.
Enough for the sporting news.
LATER
This morning Ann lays against my body in symbiotic symmetry. I don’t dare move to break the link of flesh to flesh. We are one and I want no one else.
Monogamy?
Is that what my friend Andy found in Therese?
When Ann woke I wanted to hide my feelings, but had to say, “I don’t want you to leave.”
It sounds soapy, but my alienation has cast me far from humanity. Ann comforts my madnesses, although it’s impossible to dispel them for more than a few hours. Ann looks at me and says, “I don’t have to leave. We still have an hour.”
“So winter is over?”
“Yes, and the days are getting longer.”
“Shit.” I liked long night as much as I hated long days.
“Shit, yes, but I’m a zombie too.”
“But you have aspirations for a better life.”
“And so do you.” Her hand touched my chest and waited for me to say something, but words stuck in my throat and she said, “Everyone is capable of greatness.”
“Even me?”
“Yes, even you.”
And by saying that Ann joined my mother, Sister Mary Osmond, my 5th Grade teacher, who awarded me honors, and my high school German instructor, Bruder Karl, who fairly failed me, “Schmidt, you have not prepared for your lesson und du sprechst Deustche wie ein aschloch.”
Asshole.
Bruder Karl chain-smoked in class. His Bavarian-accented voice sounded like a train dragged across rocks, but I heard the kindness in his words, despite my classic under-achievement in Hoch Schule.
Others saw my worth.
Chris Jansen, an MIT genius, hired me to work at a chemical plant in Salem.
I think the fat woman wanted to sleep with me.
Her husband gave the green light.
But I preferred to risk it all with Theresse’s seventeen year-old sister, Hilde.
The kids I taught at South Boston High School loved me.
I hated the racism of the Selma of the North.
Diana Graham saw something in me.
I think they are all blind.
I used all of them to subsist without working.
Survival.
But not an enemy. I only want to do good one day, even if that day is like Andy says, “You’ll make it after you’re dead, like Van Gogh.”
More a curse than a blessing.
How I lead my life doesn’t permit any retreat.
Anti-star.
Failure is easier to achieve than fame, but Ann asked, “You should become a movie star.”
“How?”
“By being you. Your friend Willem will be one. Is he better looking than you?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t you want to be famous?”
“No, I don’t want life sucked from me to become a big person on a silver screen.”
“I had a dream about you on the Johnny Carson Show, but he was washed up.”
“Johnny washed up?”
“It happens to everyone.”
“I don’t want fame. I want immortality.”
“Everyone dies.”
“Not me.”
LATER
Ann and I left for work.
At the St. Mark’s Theater I watched a movie about Caryl Chessman, the accused Red Light Bandit of LA. He sat on Old Sparky in 1960. I was eight, but I realized that his life had come to a point of departure governed by certainty of death.
And death always scares an immortal.
LATER
Most young people say that they are not concerned with age.
I know different.
Death is more welcome to anyone seeking eternal life over the aging of our flesh, especially as the life distances from our birth ever closer to death. I am frightened by new people. I can feel life slipping from them. Second by second. Grain of sand by sand. I avoid them. I avoid their death. I avoid their loss of youth. I never think of mine.
Art has no power over the speed of light tearing apart our flesh like vultures of time.
A couple of nights ago I asked a Rockefeller heir at CBGBs, “Where does power lie?”
“Power is money.”
His family controlled coal mines, oil fields, banks, countries, but they are merely exploiters of power. marx wrote that an economy was based on the balance between labor and capital. Now the rich only think about money, whose value is not real, but implied by the belief in money. It means nothing to nature other than Man rapes the world to get wealth. Pockets are not part of the human body, unless we count the asshole as a pocket to store our riches.
Shit.
A place to live.
Food.
Education.
Matter
Shit does not, unless it’s to grow food, although dogs sometimes eat shit by mistake and sometimes because shit tastes better than nothing. Money is slavery, chaining everyone to surrender.
I know nothing.
We humans have not abandoned prejudice, hatred, greed, or any of the Deadly Sins, despite America’s forefathers writing in the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal…”
Cultures, classed, castes, languages, religions separate our holy union destined to go to the stars.
LATER
South of Matzatlan
A traveler stands on a highway.
He stands on the hot asphalt.
His bag at his feet.
Parched by the sun-burnt Sonoran desert with Mexico a drug soothing his Gringo soul
But he wants more
Culiacan heroin
If he was a child he would be lost, but the road only goes north or south.
Matzatlan was north.
San Blas was south.
Black glass cars speed by
Buses roll by.
Faces stare out the windows.
In the desert only fools stand in the sun
The sun rose higher.
It was still winter in El Norte.
Here it was hot.
Where he is is where he is.
Two college girls from Arizona stop for him.
He gets in the Torino.
They are going to San Blas for the surf.
The AC felt good.
Being out of the sun felt better with San Blas only three hours away and America more distant with every passing every second.
Viva la Revolution.